In the autumn of 1955, in the box room west of the second floor of No. 80 Hongqi Road (Atomic Yin Road) in the old city of Honghuagang District, Zunyi City, Guizhou Province, a group of people gathered around a white wall and carefully used clean water to wash the wall. Slowly, as the ash of the wall gradually peeled off, a line of dark handwriting appeared below -- "The Communist Party is the only leader of the world revolution!" The crowd roared with joy.
Nowadays, if you come to the Zunyi Conference Memorial Hall in Zunyi City, Guizhou Province, you can see all kinds of Red Army slogans in the exhibition area of the Museum's Red Army slogans, and the General Political Department of the Red Army issued an order that "anyone who can write shall use charcoal, use a brush, use large characters, and use small characters." On the walls of the house and on the door panels, write at least one piece per person per day, and the cadres from the company to the regiment will lead by example, write by themselves, and write all over the camp." Therefore, the commanders and fighters of the Red Army write all the way and fight while sweeping up illiteracy, and many soldiers have to spend a week or even a few weeks to learn such simple and easy-to-understand slogans as "the Red Army is the workers and peasants' own army" and "support the Communist Party of China." When they wrote these slogans on the walls in a still childish font, they never thought that their "works" would become the best carrier for future generations to understand the spirit of the Red Army's Long March after many years.
/ Zunyi Conference Site, located in Ziyin Road, Zunyi City, Guizhou Province, with a plaque inscribed by Mao Zedong.
On January 7, 1935, the Central Red Army occupied Zunyi, and in order to solve the military command system and organizational problems that had always plagued the Red Army in the early days of the Long March, the Politburo of the CPC Central Committee held an enlarged meeting in Zunyi from January 15 to 17. The meeting focused on analyzing and summing up the lessons and lessons of the failure of the fifth anti-"encirclement and suppression" campaign, and comprehensively and profoundly criticized the "Left" dogmatic military mistakes made by Wang Ming, Bogu, Li De, and others. At the Zunyi Conference, Mao Zedong was re-elected as a member of the Standing Committee, and the work responsible for the Standing Committee was appropriately divided, and the original "three-man regiment" was abolished, and Zhu De and Zhou Enlai were put in charge of military command.
In accordance with the decision of the Zunyi Conference, the top leadership of the Party and the Red Army underwent a series of adjustments. After the Zunyi Meeting clearly defined the correct military principles for the Red Army's operations, under the correct leadership of the new PARTY Central Committee represented by Mao Zedong, the Central Red Army straddled the borders of the three provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan, maneuvered with the enemy, mobilized and attacked the enemy, and "crossed the Red River in four directions," crossed the Wujiang River in the south, and crossed the Jinsha River in a clever way, so that the Red Army changed from passive to active, from setbacks to victory, from danger to safety, from defeat to victory, and finally jumped out of the encirclement circle of hundreds of thousands of enemy troops to pursue and block, and realize the victory of the Red Army's strategic transfer of crossing the Yangtze River in the north. This meeting, at an extremely critical historical juncture, saved the Party, saved the Red Army, and saved the Chinese revolution, and was a turning point in the history of the Communist Party of China and the Red Army.
After the Zunyi Conference and the reorganization of Tashi, the Red Army was able to burst out on the Chishui River with unprecedented flexibility and speed since the Long March, crossing the Chishui River twice and quickly achieving two great victories in Loushan Pass and Erzhan Zunyi. For this miraculous reversal that made the prospects of the Red Army and the Long March shine brightly, every old Red Army who experienced it personally remembered it and could not forget it for a long time. In 1951, coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the birth of the Communist Party of China, the Ministry of internal affairs and the Ministry of Culture jointly issued a document calling for the construction of revolutionary deeds memorial halls in various regions along the Long March to protect revolutionary cultural relics, and promulgated the "Order on collecting revolutionary cultural relics". After a special meeting and study, the Zunyi Prefectural Party Committee and the Zunyi Prefectural Bureau decided to set up the "Zunyi Conference Commemorative Construction Preparatory Committee," and who would serve as the "main backbone" of this preparatory committee really made everyone think about it. In the end, everyone unanimously proposed that Kong Xianquan, the old Red Army who remained in Zunyi after the battle of Loushan Pass, should be responsible.
Kong Xianquan joined the Red Army in February 1930 and was introduced to the Party by Huang Kecheng in August 1932, he fought bravely, made many military achievements, and had grown from an ordinary soldier to a middle-level commander of the Red Army before the Long March. During the Long March, Kong Xianquan served as the operational staff officer of the division. During the battle of Loushan Pass, his crotch was shattered by a bullet, and he was disabled by his injuries, so he stayed in Zunyi to recuperate. Before 1949, Kong Xianquan made a living as a cargo man and mason in Zunyi, and the locals knew him as a Red Army. After 1950, Kong Xianquan, with the help of his elderly superiors Yang Yong, Su Zhenhua and Huang Kecheng, restored the party organization relationship, and was arranged to Fengxiang Town, which he was most familiar with, as the deputy district chief of the seventh district of the Zunyi Prefectural Committee, participating in the takeover and construction of the government, and also began to sort out the historical and cultural relics related to the Zunyi Conference.
In fact, Kong Xianquan himself was only a divisional combat staff officer in 1935, and it was impossible for him to know the Zunyi Conference held in the most confidential situation. In Zunyi, not many people knew the details of the far-reaching meeting. What to do? Kong Xianquan proposed that it is still necessary to take "seeking truth from facts" and "independence and self-determination" as the principles, and obtain first-hand information through interviewing historical witnesses.
In October 1952, the Zunyi Conference Memorial Hall Construction Preparatory Committee and the Zunyi People's Library sent staff to collect cultural relics of the Long March in Chishui and Renhuai counties under the jurisdiction of Zunyi Special District. The collection work lasted 55 days, except for some roads by car and boat, the rest of the staff mainly traveled along the Route of the Red Army's Long March that year, walking distance of more than 1,000 kilometers, and the cultural relics collected were mainly physical objects and slogans, including compasses, grenades, cross pickaxes, kettles, steel helmets, Red Army banknotes, raincoats, etc., a total of 127 pieces, more than 100 wooden board slogans, etc.
At the same time, Kong Xianquan, together with the comrades of the Preparatory Committee and the library, consulted all the records of the old Red Army on the Zunyi Conference that could be found at that time, and preliminarily judged that the site of the Zunyi Conference was in the Catholic Church. However, in January 1954, after investigation by the Preparatory Office of the Museum of the Chinese Revolution, the Zunyi Conference was "held in the residence of Bai Huizhang, a warlord (who was then a division commander) in the old city of Zunyi", and Kong Xianquan and others deduced that the Bai Mansion located on Ziyin Road in the old town of Honghuagang District of Zunyi City was most likely the site of the meeting, and quickly sealed and protected the main building of the mansion and the surrounding environment. Soon, Beijing received a map and photo gallery of relevant regional buildings drawn by the Zunyi Conference Commemorative Construction Preparatory Committee. In August 1954, Yang Shangkun, then director of the General Office of the CPC Central Committee, personally wrote to the Guizhou Provincial Government, recalling the Zunyi conference he had personally experienced, especially saying that "the Zunyi conference was held at the home of Qianjun Baihui Zhang." At this point, the site of the Zunyi conference was finalized.
The Zunyi Conference Memorial Hall became one of the first 21 revolutionary memorial halls to be prepared after the founding of the People's Republic of China. In February 1955, the Guizhou Provincial Bureau of Culture, after comprehensively considering the opinions of all parties, designated Kong Xianquan as the first director of the Zunyi Conference Memorial Hall, and clearly proposed that the Preparatory Office should "restore the original appearance as the principle" when "repairing the Zunyi Conference Building". The question before Kong Xianquan and others was how to restore and repair the Baihuizhang Mansion.
/Zunyi Conference Room restored.
The Guizhou Provincial Bureau of Culture has clearly instructed that when repairing the house, the Zunyi Conference Memorial Hall should not change the original architectural form, tone, decoration and all appendages, and can carry out repairs in terms of building warranty and leakage, and should not add changes or expansions;
As the "landlord" of the Zunyi Conference, the fate of Bai Huizhang represents the rise and fall of the warriors in the Republic of China period. In 1930, Bai Huizhang, who was the commander of the Qian Army, funded the construction of a large mansion in his hometown. The eldest brother in charge, Bai Jitao, later became a commercial leader in Zunyi, and he extensively referred to the new buildings in Shanghai and other places, and built a "Bai Mansion" that combined Chinese and Western styles at pipa bridge, and the entire project cost more than 30,000 silver yuan.
However, at that time, most of the relatives of the Bai family in Zunyi, and even the neighbors who knew the situation of the Bai Mansion, were reluctant to mention their connection with Bai Huizhang, and Kong Xianquan could only contact those who might know about it one by one, groping for the decoration style and details of the Bai Mansion at that time in various accurate and inaccurate memories. The principle put forward at that time was that most of the statements that were the same and in line with the general specifications of the house decoration should be affirmed for the time being, and the few statements that were the same or completely different should be retained for the time being, which would be carefully verified at a later date.
For example, the Relatives of the Bai family recalled that there was a room on the second floor of the box room with tables and chairs for meetings, and on the wall hung "portraits of bearded foreigners (presumably Marx at the time)", which provided clues for the final confirmation and furnishings of the conference room.
In the end, it was Yang Shangkun who set the clouds for Kong Xianquan and others. In 1955, Kong Xianquan briefed Yang Shangkun in Beijing on his previous visits. Yang Shangkun recalled, "The house where the meeting was held was upstairs, with windows against the patio, and I definitely remember it well." As a result, Kong Xianquan and others determined that the exact location of the Zunyi conference conference room was in the west wing on the second floor of the upper floor, and according to the information he provided, the conference room was restored: two square tables were placed side by side in the middle, 18 various chairs and stools were scattered around and rattan recliners specially prepared for Comrade Wang Jiaxiang, and the coffee table with inlaid porcelain flowers on the scene was also restored.
The rectangular conference table of the conference hall discovered at that time has now been designated as a national first-class cultural relic. In addition, among the revolutionary cultural relics collected by the Zunyi Conference Memorial Hall, there are 10 national first-class cultural relics and 30 national second- and third-class cultural relics. Because some people who entered the Bai Mansion after crossing the Chishui River recalled that there were slogans drawn by the Red Army on the walls of the mansion, Kong Xianquan and others mobilized local old workers in Zunyi to visit the zunyi conference site to find out the personnel who participated in the maintenance of the mansion after 1935. Among these people, Yu Haichen, a mudwater worker, recalled that when the Red Army entered Zunyi on the second time, he wrote a slogan on the wall of the Bai Mansion, and later the Bai family asked someone to cover it with white ash. In 1955, the museum sent people to clean the walls and successfully restored the revolutionary slogans on the walls.