Yongxue Xu (Shangqiu, Henan)
Mao Zedong was broad-minded throughout his life, adhered to principles, and was magnificent. In his heart, there are no selfish interests, no sectarian and personal grievances, only the party's cause and the interests of the state and the nation.
In 1928, after the Zhu Mao Red Army met in Jinggangshan, Mao Zedong and Zhu De had major differences over how to exercise command and leadership over the army, which led to Mao Zedong's defeat as secretary of the General Front Committee and forced him to leave the Red Army and go to Sujiapo to recuperate for half a year. And when the Central Committee's "September Letter" distinguished right from wrong, Mao Zedong and Zhu De, as revolutionary comrades-in-arms, cooperated with each other for 50 years and were intimate.
At the Ningdu Conference in December 1932, Mao Zedong was excluded from Wang Ming's "leftist" line of "active offensive" because of his operational policy of luring the enemy into depth. When the meeting decided to deal with Mao Zedong by vote, Liu Bocheng voted against Mao Zedong without knowing that the votes were equal to those against Mao Zedong, and Mao Zedong was removed from his post as general political commissar of the Red Army and left the leadership of the Red Army for more than two years. After Mao Zedong grasped the leadership of the army at the Zunyi Conference, not only did he not retaliate against Liu Bocheng, on the contrary, whether it was during the Long March, or later in the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression and the War of Liberation, Mao Zedong showed great trust in Liu Bocheng and gave full play to his outstanding military talent.
In June 1935, the First Front Army of the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army and the Red Fourth Front Army led by Zhang Guotao met in Maogong. Mao Zedong, on the other hand, walked several miles to meet the unity of the party and the Red Army. Then, Zhang Guotao refused to implement the policy of the Central Committee going north, led the team to the south to set up a second "Central Committee", and faced the danger of the Red Army's imminent split, Mao Zedong decisively made the major decision that "the Red Army will not fight the Red Army". He also dealt with intra-party issues at the Russian meeting. After Zhang Guotao suffered a crushing defeat in the south and had to go north to northern Shaanxi, the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China issued the "Decision on Comrade Zhang Guotao's Mistakes" on March 31, 1937, which still gave Zhang Guotao a full opportunity to correct his mistakes and assigned him to the post of vice chairman of the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningbo Border Region Government.
In April 1938, Zhang Guotao betrayed the revolution and went to Wuhan to join the Kuomintang. Mao Zedong saw that Zhang Guotao had made contributions to the party, wrote a letter in person, and sent Zhou Enlai and Ye Jianying to Wuhan to persuade him to change his mind, but he insisted on going his own way, did not repent, and left the party on April 17, 1938. As a last resort, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China issued the "Decision on Expelling Zhang Guotao from the Party" on April 18.
During the Yan'an period, there was a special "Xu Shiyou counterrevolutionary clique case". At that time, due to the problem of dealing with Zhang Guotao's mistakes, the troops, organs, and schools in Yan'an launched a struggle to criticize Zhang Guotao, resulting in the phenomenon that some personnel of the Red Fourth Front Army were impacted. In addition, Xu Shiyou has a straightforward personality and is easy to be impulsive, and during this period, there were major incidents of insulting Mao Zedong and "" defection.
At this time, someone proposed to shoot Xu Shiyou immediately, but Mao Zedong vetoed this idea. When Xu Shiyou was sentenced to prison, when Mao Zedong personally visited Xu Shiyou in prison, Xu Shiyou not only did not recognize his mistake, but took advantage of others to punch Mao Zedong. Even so, Mao Zedong did not let Xu Shiyou die, on the contrary, allowed Xu Shiyou to bring a gun and talk with him twice all night. Mao Zedong said: "You are not a counter-revolutionary, you are not a defector, you can't figure it out for a while, the Central Committee believes you, and I, Mao Zedong, believe you." In the end, the misunderstanding was cleared up and Xu Shiyou's life was saved. Since then, Xu Shiyou's lifelong loyalty to Mao Zedong has been exchanged. In Xu Shiyou's words: He only knelt two people in his life, "kneeling Chairman Mao and kneeling old mother".
During the Jinggangshan Struggle, the warlord of Hunan Province, He Jian, was angry at the threat posed to him by the Autumn Harvest Uprising on the Hunan and Jiangxi borders organized by Mao Zedong and the establishment of the Jinggangshan Revolutionary Base Area, and with the support of Chiang Kai-shek, he twice sent people to find and dig up the ancestral grave of Mao Zedong's family. In 1949, with the victory of the Liberation War in the whole country, Chiang Kai-shek was defeated and retreated to Taiwan. After he was defeated, what he was most concerned about and couldn't let go of was his former home and the requiem of his parents and ancestors. Mao Zedong, on the other hand, was in the interests of the nation, and deliberately instructed the troops not to destroy every brick and tile of Chiang Kai-shek's residence, ancestral hall and other buildings when they occupied Fenghua before the liberation of Xikou. Not only did they seal the room and valuables and keep them, but they also sealed the cemetery of Jiang's mother and the former residence of Song Meiling to protect it, which fully reflected the high demeanor of the people's leaders and the strict discipline of the people's army.
(Author's recent photo)
Xu Yongxue, a native of Sui County, Henan Province, is a member of the Henan Writers Association, an executive director of the Henan Poetry Society, and the president of the Shangqiu Poetry Society.
Editor: Li Huimin/Li Xunxiu Editorial Department of Qingyanwei Literature