The Zunyi Conference

Background: The Debate after the Xiang River

In October 1934 the Central Red Army left the Central Soviet Area and began the Long March. By the time it had crossed the Xiang River on 1 December, its strength had fallen from more than 80,000 at the start to just over 30,000. The CCP leadership then argued over where to go next. At the Tongdao meeting on 12 December, Mao Zedong proposed abandoning the plan to join the 2nd and 6th Army Groups in western Hunan and heading instead for Guizhou, where enemy forces were weaker; Bo Gu and the Comintern military adviser Li De (Otto Braun) firmly opposed him. The Liping meeting of 18 December adopted the plan to move west and build a base on the Sichuan–Guizhou border, and decided to review the military lessons of the fifth anti-encirclement campaign once Zunyi was taken. The Houchang meeting of 1 January 1935 ruled that "on operational policy and the choice of time and place of battle, the Military Commission must report to a Politburo meeting", curbing Li De's sole control of military affairs. On 7 January the Red Army took Zunyi.

The Meeting

From 15 to 17 January the CCP Politburo held an enlarged meeting in Zunyi. According to the official count, 20 people attended: Politburo members Mao Zedong, Zhang Wentian, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, Chen Yun and Bo Gu; alternate members Wang Jiaxiang, Liu Shaoqi, Deng Fa and He Kequan (Kai Feng); Red Army headquarters and army-group leaders Liu Bocheng, Li Fuchun, Lin Biao, Nie Rongzhen, Peng Dehuai, Yang Shangkun and Li Zhuoran; Deng Xiaoping as secretary-general of the Central Committee; and, as observers, Li De and his interpreter Wu Xiuquan.

Bo Gu delivered the report summing up the fifth anti-encirclement campaign, attributing its failure mainly to objective factors such as the enemy's superior strength. Mao Zedong spoke at length, arguing that the failure was chiefly the result of errors in military command, strategy and tactics, and criticising Bo Gu and Li De for "replacing decisive defence with a line of pure defence, and mobile warfare with positional and blockhouse warfare". Most participants supported him; Kai Feng opposed him, and Li De, saying he had been only an adviser, did not accept the criticism.

The Decisions

The meeting elected Mao Zedong to the Politburo Standing Committee; entrusted Zhang Wentian with drafting the "Resolution of the Central Committee summing up the campaign against the enemy's fifth encirclement"; called for a new division of labour in the Standing Committee; and abolished the three-man group formed before the Long March, stripping Bo Gu and Li De of supreme military command. Zhu De and Zhou Enlai remained in charge of military affairs, with Zhou "the person entrusted by the Party with the final decision in military command". The meeting also replaced the Liping plan for a base on the Sichuan–Guizhou border with a plan to cross the Yangtze northwards and build a base southwest or northwest of Chengdu.

The reshuffle that followed took several steps. In early February, as the army reached the area where Sichuan, Yunnan and Guizhou meet, the Standing Committee decided that Zhang Wentian would replace Bo Gu in overall charge of the Party, with Mao as Zhou Enlai's assistant in military command; on 8 February the Secretariat issued an outline resolution summing up the lessons of the fifth campaign, which Mao, Zhang Wentian, Chen Yun and others relayed to the army groups. Shortly after the later Gouba meeting, a new three-man group of Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong and Wang Jiaxiang was formed with full authority over military operations.

Assessment

The CCP's official view is that the Zunyi Conference "in fact established Comrade Mao Zedong's leading position in the Party Centre and the Red Army, and began to establish the leading position in the Party Centre of the correct Marxist line represented chiefly by Comrade Mao Zedong", "opening a new stage in which the Party independently solved the practical problems of the Chinese revolution". The meeting itself did not give Mao the top posts, however: after it Zhang Wentian held overall charge and Zhou Enlai made the final military decisions, while Mao was a Standing Committee member and Zhou's assistant. Deng Xiaoping, who attended, later recalled that although Mao was not nominally general secretary or chairman of the Military Commission, his command of the army and his decisions on major issues were in practice acknowledged by the other leaders.

Sources and Controversies

No complete record of the Zunyi Conference survives. In 1959 the Central Archives told the Zunyi Conference Memorial that "on the question of who attended the Zunyi Conference, we have found no formal, reliable document in the central archives"; only an unsigned paper listed the participants, later identified as the outline Chen Yun wrote to relay the conference's decisions. That outline does not mention Deng Xiaoping, Li De or Wu Xiuquan; the official account later listed Deng as a participant on the basis of his own recollection and those of Wu Xiuquan and others. The scholar Benjamin Yang has questioned this, suggesting that Deng might have been present as a record-keeper but "could hardly have been selected as a participant".