Editor's note: In 2021, the enterprising China embarks on a new journey, and the struggling Communist Party of China ushers in its centennial anniversary. A hundred years ago, in Kunming, Yunnan, the heroes gathered, and the early local party organization of the COMMUNIST Party in Yunnan was established here, and young communists set out from here to spread the seeds of revolution in the land of Yunling. Kunming has witnessed the great journey of the Chinese Communists in their arduous quest. As the traditional main urban area of Kunming, Panlong District is dotted with many revolutionary sites and many revolutionary stories that can be sung and wept. Palm Spring City and the Party History Research Office of the Panlong District Committee of the Communist Party of China launched a series of reports on the "Panlong Party History Class" to present gifts to the party, review the original intention, and not forget the mission.
Before and after the April 12 counter-revolutionary coup, the struggle for power and profit within the local warlord clique in Yunnan became fierce, forming a "power vacuum". After the fall of Tang Jiyao, the four town guards "jointly ruled" and set up a provincial affairs committee, chaired by Long Yun and Hu Ruoyu in turn, to maintain the political situation in Yunnan. Warlords of all factions wanted to monopolize power, and the repeated fierce battles between the warlord groups did not take into account the local organization of the CCP in Yunnan, which was ostensibly weak. On April 11, Long Yun relied on the power of Kunming's gentry to squeeze out Hu Ruoyu and made himself chairman of the Yunnan Provincial Affairs Committee. In the early morning of June 14, Hu Ruoyu joined forces with Zhang Ruji, Li Xuanting, Wang Jiexiu, and others to launch a coup d'état and imprison Long Yun, and Hu Ruoyu became the chairman of the Yunnan Provincial Affairs Committee. Long Yun's main general, Lu Han, fled to western Yunnan and joined forces with Longbu at Yuanmou to prepare for a counterattack. At the same time, Chiang Kai-shek had been following the struggle between the left and right factions of the Kuomintang in Yunnan, and he was deeply worried about the growing revolutionary movement in Yunnan. When he learned of Hu Ruoyu's initiation of the incident and the imprisonment of Long Yun, Chiang Kai-shek also appointed Long Yun as the commander of the Thirty-eighth Army, Hu Ruoyu as the commander of the Thirty-ninth Army, and Zhang Ruji as the commander of the independent Eighteenth Division, with the intention of making the powerful figures in Yunnan kill each other and be used by me. Chiang Kai-shek's appointment intensified the struggle between the various factions in Yunnan. In order to further control the situation in Yunnan, he sent his close associate Li Zonghuang (a native of Heqing, Yunnan) as a special envoy, as the representative of the central government in Yunnan, to rush to Yunnan on July 21 and sit in Kunming. Its specific tasks were to mediate the conflict between Hu and Long militarily, support the Yuantong faction (the right wing of the Kuomintang) and the closed left party department in party affairs, and politically win over the Military and Political Authorities in Yunnan to clean up the party and oppose communism, and suppress the Yunnan revolution. At the end of July, Longbu defeated Hu Ruoyu, and Long Yun returned to Kunming to regain power in Yunnan.
During this period, the Yunnan Party organization of the CPC took advantage of the gap between Hu and Long in the power struggle to continue to carry out revolutionary propaganda and organizational work on a large scale.
After Li Zonghuang arrived in Kunming, he openly proposed to close the Left Wing of the Kuomintang, dissolve various people's organizations, and order the arrest of revolutionaries. In order to expose Li Zonghuang's reactionary purpose of coming to Kunming, crack down on the Kuomintang rightists, the Yunnan underground party of the CPC, and the leftist party department of the Kuomintang, taking advantage of the situation in which Chiang Kai-shek was in the wilderness, Long Yun, and the Kuomintang Central Committee and the local authorities were in a state of dissociation, they created revolutionary public opinion, strengthened the work of the united front, mobilized student unions and mass organizations, and launched a huge campaign to expel Li Zonghuang.
Due to the complicated political situation in Yunnan, various contradictions between warlords, especially Long Yun and others, who were not satisfied with Chiang Kai-shek's policy toward Yunnan, made it difficult for Li Zonghuang's plan to be realized. First, in order to compete for the throne of the chairman of Yunnan Province, long Yun and Hu Ruoyu could not strike and make peace. Second, "unifying party affairs" is opposed not only by the left wing of the Kuomintang, but also by local powerful factions such as Longyun, and is therefore not interested in Li Zonghuang's anti-communist demands in Yunnan. At a time when the national revolutionary movement was seriously frustrated and at a low ebb, the Kuomintang reactionaries stepped up their anti-communist activities in Yunnan. Under the severe situation, the party organization correctly analyzed the complicated political situation and various contradictions, and took advantage of Long Yun, who regained the military and political power in Yunnan, not satisfied with Chiang Kai-shek's reconciliation, and was not enthusiastic about Chiang Kai-shek's anti-communist will. Long Yun's ambition to dominate Yunnan is concentrating his main energies on the opportunity to eliminate the Hu and Zhang cliques, and promptly mobilizing party members, league members, and progressive youth to propagate everywhere, exposing that Li Zonghuang's purpose in kunming was to urge the Yunnan provincial government to implement the anti-communist policy of cleaning up the party and suppressing the revolutionary struggle of the Yunnan people.
At 2 o'clock on November 3, 1927, Liang Yuanbin, a student of Chengde Middle School and a member of the Communist Youth League, and others gave a public speech to the masses in front of the Wumiao Temple on Wucheng Road (now Wucheng Primary School), exposing the conspiracy of Chiang Kai-shek and Li Zonghuang and the disaster caused by the warlord melee to the various ethnic groups in Yunnan.
The Liang Yuanbin incident shocked Kunming, and the vast number of students and the masses were extremely angry at the bloody massacre in broad daylight and demanded that the murderers be punished. The Yunnan underground party was not afraid of threats, seized the opportunity, and mobilized the masses from all walks of life to hold a protest meeting at 4 p.m. on November 3, 1927, at the Provincial Normal Square (formerly the Panlong District Anti-Japanese Victory Memorial Hall). The meeting was presided over by Huang Mingjun, chairman of the Provincial Federation of Students, and after the meeting, a demonstration was held and a petition was held at Wuhua Mountain to petition Long Yun, strongly demanding that the murderer be punished. Huang Mingjun organized and led the young students in Kunming to hold a memorial rally for the martyrs, and after the meeting, when the students of various schools were preparing to go out of the funeral procession, Li Zonghuang and his guards blocked the gate of the provincial parliament, holding guns to prevent the students from marching in the streets, and the gendarmerie headquarters also sent a platoon to stand guard outside the door and form a confrontation with the angry students. In order to avoid unnecessary sacrifices, the underground party organization sent Huang Mingjun and Ma Yifei to contact underground party members working in the army's political department, such as Li Xin and Zhao Sixiao, and to meet Lu Han at Wuhua Mountain through Lu Han's division chief of staff Li Zigu (a member of the Communist Party of China) to explain the situation and win support. Prompting Lu Han and Zhu Xu to immediately send troops to drive away Li Zonghuang and his guards and gendarmes, Li Zonghuang saw that the situation was not good, so he had to slip away. Thus ensuring the smooth progress of the coffin-carrying procession and the commemoration of the martyrs. Tens of thousands of students and people from all walks of life in Kunming carried martyrs' coffins and more than 3,000 elegy, elegy and eulogy pieces on the streets to demonstrate. "Down with Li Zonghuang!" "Shoot Li Boying (Li Zonghuang, Zi Boying)!" The slogan resounded through the streets and alleys, and the struggle of the masses of the people was victorious.
At this time, Long Yun, on the one hand, was not satisfied with Chiang Kai-shek's policy of reconciliation; on the other hand, the Hu Ruoyu clique was still preparing for action, and Long Yun needed to stabilize the hearts and minds of kunming and consolidate its ruling position, and adopted a tacit attitude toward the struggle launched by the Yunnan underground party to mourn Liang Yuanbin and protest against Li Zonghuang. Wang Desan and other leaders of the CPC's Yunnan local organizations took advantage of this opportunity to work through Ma Yifei, Huang Mingjun, and others to work against Long Yun's subordinate Lu Han and others to win their support.
On November 6, Li Zonghuang accused yunnan authorities of "raising carbuncles and conniving with the Communists" and threatening and intimidating them. On the 8th, after obtaining Long Yun's tacit approval and support from the Yunnan Provincial Special Committee of the CPC and the kunming local organization of the CPC, they led and mobilized the masses from all walks of life in Kunming to take advantage of the situation to hold the "Yunnan Agricultural, Industrial, Commercial, And Commercial Cadets joint rescue conference" at the South Campus of Baoshan Street, and more than 10,000 people from all walks of life attended the meeting.
Some officers and men of the two divisions of lu han and Zhu Xu in the Dian army were also mobilized to attend the meeting. The meeting adopted proposals: Send a telegram to Nanjing to condemn Li Zonghuang's "conspiracy to ravage Yunnan in an attempt to cause reactionary forces in the southwest"; unite the people of Guizhou to oppose the invasion of Yunnan by the Sichuan and Qian armies and jointly overthrow the reactionary warlords; organize the Yunnan Provincial Federation of Peasants, Industrial, Commercial, And Scholars to solve all political problems in Yunnan; organize propaganda teams to go to various counties to publicize the conspiracy of reactionary warlords; electrify the whole country to denounce Li Zonghuang's crime of shooting and killing Liang Yuanbin, ask the government to arrest him, punish the crime according to law, and treat and mourn the martyr Liang Yuanbin, and build a martyr's tomb. The meeting also issued a declaration: calling on the people of Yunnan to "walk on the blood of the Liang martyrs!" Proposed "Save yourself, liberate yourself"
After months of continuous struggle, Li Zonghuang was unable to gain a foothold in Yunnan, and quietly sneaked back to Nanjing in mid-December, saying before leaving: "The Communist Party in the whole country has gradually disappeared, and the Communist Party in this province is rising like the rising sun." He expressed his hatred and fear of the vigorous development of the revolutionary struggle in Yunnan. The Underground Party of Yunnan of the COMMUNIST Party achieved a major victory in resisting Chiang Kai-shek and driving away Li, which once again bankrupted the Kuomintang Central Ruling Clique's plan to instigate the Qing Dynasty in Yunnan.
Under the situation of reversing the national revolutionary situation and being at a low ebb, the Yunnan revolution is still vigorously developing, which fully embodies the fearless revolutionary spirit of the Yunnan underground party members. The victory in the struggle to expel Li Zonghuang greatly boosted the confidence of the people of Kunming in fighting the reactionaries and dealt a blow to the arrogance of the Kuomintang Chiang Kai-shek reactionaries in suppressing the revolution.
Source: Party History Research Office of the Panlong District Committee of the Communist Party of China
Editor-in-charge: Li Jiayi
Editor: Wu Chenping
Final Judge: Qian Hongbing
![He was the last Kuomintang general to be arrested after the founding of the People's Republic of China, and after being pardoned, he lived to be 102 years old[fig]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAP///wAAACwAAAAAAQABAAACAkQBADs=)