Eyuwan Soviet

The Eyuwan Soviet was a short-lived soviet government established in March 1930 by the Chinese Communist Party in the Dabie Mountains border region between Hubei, Henan, and Anhui provinces. At its height in 1931 and early 1932, the Eyuwan Soviet was the second-largest Chinese Soviet after the Central Soviet in Jiangxi. It improved the rights of women and redistributed land to poor and landless peasants. It was famously led by Zhang Guotao, a rival of Mao Zedong, who attempted to consolidate his control over Eyuwan with a series of purges. The Fourth Nationalist Encirclement Campaign defeated Eyuwan's Fourth Red Army in late 1932 and forced it to retreat westwards towards Sichuan and Shaanxi. The Soviet government ceased to function and the Communists retreated into the mountains. Despite several extermination campaigns intended to flush them out, the region remained a hotbed of Communist guerrilla activity until a truce was established in the Chinese Civil War.

The Eyuwan Soviet recruited a disproportionate number of officers and cadres for the Chinese Communists. Even in the early 1950s, over 70% of division-level commanders and higher in the People's Liberation Army were originally from this region. Nonetheless, the Soviet's association with Zhang Guotao—who left the Communist Party in 1938 and joined the Kuomintang—has damaged its historical reputation in China.

During the mid-1920s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Kuomintang (KMT or Nationalists) formed an alliance known as the First United Front. They launched a Northern Expedition in 1926 that would eventually re-unify the Republic of China and defeat the Beiyang Clique. One of the tactics the United Front used during the offensive was the creation of militant labor unions and peasant associations. These mass organizations gave the Northern Expedition strong popular support, but antagonized conservatives within the KMT who were often landowners and capital owners themselves. In 1927, the right-wing Generalissimo of the Nationalist army, Chiang Kai-shek, ordered a purge of Communists in the areas under his control. Chiang eventually took over the KMT and extended the purge to all areas under Nationalist control. The CCP went underground and many fled to isolated rural areas where Nationalist influence was weakest.

One popular destination for fleeing Communists was the Dabie Mountains, a border region between Hubei, Henan, and Anhui provinces (the "Eyuwan" region). Many Communists were in fact natives of this region and had been sent by their parents to study in the cities. By returning to their native region, they could count on family ties as a recruitment tool. But while the rugged terrain gave them shelter from the Nationalist armies, it provided the same benefit for bandit gangs. The highlands of Eyuwan had been plagued by roaming bandits for centuries, leading local communities to develop strong self-defense organizations known as Red Spear Societies. There was considerable local variation between different Red Spear Societies; in western Henan they were hardly distinguishable from bandits themselves, whereas in the east they were fiercely loyal to the local gentry. But in both cases, they were initially hostile to the Communists. Other difficulties included the fact that the Communists were operating north of the Yangtze river, which cut them off from the majority of Communist bases and strongholds to the south. They had to recruit most of their party members locally, unlike the Jiangxi-Fujian Soviet that received numerous Communist refugees from the cities. This in turn had benefits and drawbacks. Ties of solidarity between party members in Eyuwan were high, but they lacked an education in party principles or doctrine and the leaders often acted autocratically.

The first "peasants' government" in the Eyuwan region was founded in Huang'an County in November 1927. There, Xu Haidong also founded the Seventh Red Army with a handful of recruits. However, the Communists remained mobile, having to stay on the run from Nationalist armies. They slowly built up a following in the counties of Huang'an, Macheng, and Guangshan as the army passed through villages, organizing peasants as it went. They were helped by the fact that the Nationalists could not devote their full military strength to crushing the Communists. They were dealing with the Chiang-Gui War and the rebellion of a local officer in Macheng. In the summer of 1929, the consolidated their first permanent territory in Macheng near the mountain pass of Songziguan (松子关). From here, they were able to start land redistribution. The Nationalists under General Xia Douyin retook some of this territory from the Communists and massacred thousands of civilians, but were ultimately unable to stop the Communists' expansion. In mid-1929, Li Lisan became de facto leader of the Chinese Communist Party. His "Li Lisan line" called for immediate attacks on major cities. However, unlike other soviets Eyuwan was still considered too small to serve as a base for one of these attacks. Local Communists were instead instructed to start trying to govern territory and stockpile food in preparation for a future assault on the cities. The latter policy eroded popular support among some peasants, who were already hard-pressed economically. During this period, the Communists launched uprisings and established soviets to govern towns and villages across Eyuwan.

Starting in February 1930, the Communists started to consolidate these local soviets into a single base area. The Eyuwan Soviet was established in June, governing an area of over a million people. The army divisions were combined into the First Red Army under Xu Jishen, which grew from two thousand to five thousand men. The First Red Army successfully defeated the First and Second Encirclement Campaigns against the Eyuwan Soviet. In January 1931, the First Red Army was combined with the Fifteenth Red Army to form the Fourth Red Army, under the command of Xu Xiangqian. The Fourth Red Army numbered twenty thousand soldiers.

The Communist Party's factional disputes increasingly involved Eyuwan as the soviet grew larger and more important. The first of these followed the ousting of Li Lisan. Li's influence waned in the second half of 1930 after the plan to attack cities ended in costly failure. The first high-level party member appointed to lead Eyuwan, Zeng Zhongsheng [zh], arrived in September. He attempted to take a moderate position between Li and Li's critics. During his term the soviet fended off two Nationalist suppression campaigns and the Fourth Red Army grew to 15,000 men. In March, the Fourth Red Army won the Battle of Shuangqiaozhen and captured a Nationalist Major General Yue (a descendant of Song Dynasty general Yue Fei). By early 1931, however, Li had been completely ousted and his successors decided that Zeng was too closely associated with Li and needed to go. Wang Ming and the 28 Bolsheviks, the new faction in power, sent Zhang Guotao, Shen Zemin, and Chen Changhao to Eyuwan to take over.

Zhang came into immediate conflict with the leaders of the Fourth Red Army. Xu Jishen and the other commanders wanted to seize the breadbasket counties in eastern Hubei to fix Eyuwan's chronic food shortages. Zhang compared the plan to Li Lisan's "adventurism", and when they disobeyed his orders and took the land anyways, he got permission from the Central Committee to make Chen Changhao political commissar of the Fourth Red Army. Zhang and Chen accused the Fourth Red Army was acting like a "warlord-bandit" force, pillaging the countryside and rejecting proper discipline. Zhang and Chen then purged the army of hundreds of alleged traitors, including Xu.