The Struggle in the Jinggang Mountains

This work was written as a report to the Central Committee of the CPC on November 25, 1928, when Mao Zedong served as the secretary of the front Committee of the Fourth Red Army of the CPC. Included in the Selected Works of Mao Zedong, Volume 1.

In his report, Mao Zedong further analyzed the conditions under which the armed independent regimes of workers and peasants could continue to emerge, survive and grow. He argued that their survival and growth require the following conditions: (1) A sound mass base; (2) A sound Party organization; (3) A fairly strong Red Army; (4) Terrain favourable for military operations; (5) Economic resources sufficient for sustenance.

Mao Zedong particularly stressed that " An independent regime must change its strategy against the encircling ruling classes, adopting one strategy when the ruling class regime is temporarily stable and another when it is split up." He pointed out that both the failure of the Hunan-Jiangxi Border in August 1928 and the failure of the Fourth Red Army in southern Hunan were due to the fact that some comrades in the Party did not clearly distinguish between the two different periods of the temporary stability and the fact of split among the ruling classes, in a period of temporary stability, some comrades advocated dividing our forces for an adventurous advance and even proposed leaving the defense of extensive areas to the Red Guards alone. In the report, Mao Zedong then made a systematic summary of the struggle in Jinggang Mountains in the past year in respect to the current situation, military issues, land issues, political power issues, party organization issues, the question of the character of Chinese revolution, and others. Mao Zedong pointed out that we should first clarify the nature of the Chinese revolution, China is still in the stage of "the bourgeois-democratic revolution".

The program for a thorough democratic revolution in China comprises, externally, the overthrow of imperialism so as to achieve complete national liberation, and, internally, the elimination of the power and influence of the comprador class in the cities, the completion of the agrarian revolution in order to abolish feudal relations in the villages, and the overthrow of the government of the warlords. We must go through such a democratic revolution before we can lay a real foundation for the transition to socialism. In view of the ideas of “Left” impatience in the revolutionary ranks, Mao Zedong made a sober analysis of the current revolutionary situation and pointed out that comrades in the Party should have a profound understanding of the protracted and arduousness of the current revolutionary struggle. He pointed that: “In the past year we have fought in many places and are keenly aware that the revolutionary tide is on the ebb in the country as a whole,” “wherever the Red Army goes, the masses are cold and aloof, and only after our publicity do they slowly move into action. Whatever enemy units we face, there are hardly any cases of mutiny or desertion to our side and we have to fight it out.”

Therefore, we still need to go through arduous struggle to promote the arrival of the climax of the national revolutionary movement and revolutionary upsurge in the country as a whole. However, no matter how complex the situation is and how arduous the struggle is, we must make it clear that "A special characteristic of the revolution in China, a country with a predominantly agricultural economy, is the use of military action to develop insurrection. We recommend that the Central Committee should devote great effort to military work.”

Mao Zedong suggested that the Central Committee should " devote great effort to military work”. The reason why armed struggle has become a feature of Chinese revolution is that in the semi-colonial and semi-feudal China, reactionary rulers rely on violence to maintain their rule. In China at that time, since there was no bourgeois democracy, the Communist Party could not educate the masses and accumulate strength through legal struggles. If the Party wanted to lead the masses to revolution, it would have to take up arms to fight. This article is an important document wherein Mao Zedong elaborated CPC’s thought on the revolutionary path of using the rural areas to encircle the cities and seizing power by armed struggle. Based on the reality of the revolutionary struggle led by the Communist Party of China at that time, this work further demonstrated the importance of adhering to armed struggle and turning the vast rural areas into the main strategic base for the victory of democratic revolution, which was a major development by the CPC in the Marxist-Leninist theory of seizing political power by armed struggle.