Zhang Guotao

Early Life and CPC Co-founding

Zhang Guotao was born on 26 November 1897 in Pingxiang, Jiangxi. He entered the preparatory science programme at Peking University in 1916 before transferring into its undergraduate programme; there he came to know and was strongly influenced by librarian Li Dazhao, and was one of the student leaders of the May Fourth Movement of 1919. In March 1920 he was a founding member of Peking University's Marxism Study Society. In August 1921 he became director of the China Labour Secretariat, overseeing the national labour movement; in July 1921 he was one of thirteen delegates at the First National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party held in Shanghai, making him a founding member of the CPC. During the 'February 7th' Beijing-Hankou Railway workers' strike of 1923, he was one of the leaders directing the action on the ground, and went underground under an assumed name after the strike was suppressed. Through the 1920s he rose to become one of the Party's most powerful figures, overseeing labour organising and military affairs.

The Fourth Front Army

During the Nationalist-Communist civil war, Zhang built an independent base in the border regions of Sichuan, Shaanxi, and Gansu. In November 1931 he became Vice Chairman of the Provisional Central Government of the Chinese Soviet Republic (with Mao Zedong as Chairman); from 1933 he concurrently chaired the base area's supreme military body, the Northwestern Revolutionary Military Council. He built his forces into the Fourth Front Army, the largest Red Army formation with roughly 80,000 soldiers, making him in material terms the most powerful military figure in the CPC. The internal purge campaigns ("sufan") conducted within the base area resulted in large numbers of executions of cadres, soldiers, and civilians; estimates of the death toll vary widely across different studies, ranging from the thousands to over ten thousand, and remain a matter of historical dispute.

The Split at Maogong and the Rival Central Committee

When the exhausted First Front Army arrived at Maogong in June 1935 with fewer than 10,000 men, Zhang demanded unified command over both armies. Mao's faction refused, and in early September 1935 moved north in secret. On 5 October 1935, at Zhuomuchuo in Li County, Sichuan, Zhang established a rival 'Provisional Central Committee,' naming himself its 'Provisional Chairman,' and expelled Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Bo Gu, and Zhang Wentian from the Party; he then led his forces south and west into the high-altitude plateaus of western Sichuan and Qinghai. The campaign proved catastrophic: his forces suffered devastating losses from cold, disease, and hostile terrain. In 1936, the surviving troops rejoined the main Red Army in northern Shaanxi; on 6 June that year, under pressure from the Comintern and figures including Zhu De, Zhang formally announced the dissolution of his 'Provisional Central Committee.'

Defection and Exile

In September 1937, the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region Government was established, and Zhang became Vice Chairman of its governing committee, at times acting as chairman and overseeing its day-to-day work. On 2 April 1938, he left Yan'an ostensibly to pay respects at the Yellow Emperor's tomb; after the joint memorial ceremony on 4 April, he broke away from his escort in Xi'an and did not return to Yan'an; on 7 April he travelled on to Wuhan; on 17 April he issued a statement in Wuhan formally announcing his break with the Chinese Communist Party, and the following day the CCP Central Committee ordered his expulsion. Coming from a Party co-founder and former commander of its largest field army, the defection was a severe blow to CCP prestige. He subsequently served as director of the Special Political Research Office under the Nationalist government's Bureau of Investigation and Statistics (with the rank of major general) and as a delegate to the National Political Council, though he never held real power on the Nationalist side and occupied largely research or advisory posts. He moved to Taipei in late 1948, then to Hong Kong in the winter of 1949, where he lived under the pseudonym 'Kaiyin' and supported himself writing for newspapers, mixing with 'third force' political circles; from 1965, Hong Kong's Ming Pao Monthly serialised his memoirs. In 1968 he and his family emigrated to Canada. A stroke left him paralysed from 1976 onward; he died on 3 December 1979 in a nursing home in Toronto, Canada, at the age of eighty-two. Some accounts describe his death as resulting from inadequate care during a cold spell, but this is not confirmed by reliable primary sources and remains disputed.

Historical Significance

Zhang left behind two volumes of memoirs, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party (University Press of Kansas, 1971-72), providing an unparalleled insider account of the CPC's early years, internal power struggles, and the Long March from the perspective of a participant who later broke with the Party. In PRC historiography, he is invariably cast as a traitor; outside mainland China, his memoirs are valued as a corrective to official narratives that suppress the factional conflicts of the Yan'an period. His wife, Yang Zilie (1902-1994), was also an early CCP member; the two married in 1924 and had three sons, Zhang Haiwei, Zhang Xiangchu, and Zhang Yuchuan. After Zhang's defection, Yang also left the Party and subsequently followed him to Hong Kong and Canada; in her later years she wrote her own memoir, Past Events Like Smoke (Hong Kong, 1970), an important corroborating source for Zhang's biography.