Gutian Conference

The Ninth Congress of the Fourth Red Army, held on December 28, 1929, in Gutian, Shanghang County, Fujian Province, was attended by more than 100 delegates. The Congress was presided over by Chen Yi. The main task of this meeting was to overcome the various non-proletarian ideas that had emerged due to the organizational composition of the Fourth Red Army and its long history of being in a difficult fighting environment, and to strengthen the Party's leadership of the army. During the Conference, Mao Zedong gave a political report and made several speeches; Zhu De gave a military report; Chen Yi conveyed a letter from the Central Committee in September and made a report against the shooting of deserters. According to the spirit of the September letter from the Central Committee, the Congress seriously summarized the experience of the Fourth Red Army since its founding, criticized various erroneous ideas, and insisted on the principle of building a people's army with proletarian ideas.

The Conference elected Mao Zedong, Zhu De, Chen Yi and other 11 members of the CPC Fourth Red Army front committee, and also Mao Zedong re-elected as the secretary of the front committee.

The Gutian Conference adopted the "Resolution of the Ninth Congress of the Fourth Red Army of the Communist Party of China" (also known as the Gutian Conference Resolution), which emphasized the importance of strengthening ideological and political construction, building the Party and the army with proletarian ideas, building the Party as a vanguard of the proletariat, and building the army as a new type of proletarian-led people's army. Besides that, the "Resolution on Correcting Erroneous Ideas in the Party" was the core part of the Gutian Conference Resolution, which profoundly criticized the existence of such erroneous tendencies as purely military views, extreme democratization, non-organizational views, absolute egalitarianism, subjectivism, individualism, rogue ideology and remnants of blind activism in the Fourth Red Army, and listed the root causes and concrete manifestations of various erroneous tendencies, and proposed ways to correct them.

The Gutian Conference summarized the lessons learned in army construction since the founding of the Fourth Red Army, established the basic principles of building the people's army, defined the nature, purpose and tasks of the Red Army, and reaffirmed the principle of absolute leadership of the Communist Party over the Red Army and the need to make the Communist Party the strong leader and unifying core of the army.

The Gutian Conference creatively answered and solved a series of problems of arming the proletarian party with advanced ideology and theory, opening up the successful path of building the Party ideologically; answered and solved a series of basic problems of army construction such as "the Party commands the gun", opening up the successful path of politically building a new type of people's army; proposed a series of guidelines, principles, systems and methods of political work, laying the fundamental foundation of political work of the people's army.