3 - The Establishment of the Yan'an Round Table

Summary

MAO ZEDONG STRIVES TO ACHIEVE THE PARTY LEADERSHIP

Mao's Command over the CCP Forces

Mao pointed out that “the Chinese revolution was made by many mountaintops”. These mountaintops, however, were barely a unified force when the Long Marchers settled down in northern Shaanxi in 1937. They had been isolated from each other since their establishment, and, moreover, a political hierarchy among their leaders was yet to be established. What kept them together were their shared ideological faith and strong enemies. Those who assumed the CCP leadership before Mao Zedong – Chen Duxiu, Qu Qiubai, Li Lisan, and Wang Ming – were the messengers who knew how best to explain the ideology, rather than the organizers who had developed these mountaintops. Thus, whenever the CCP suffered a setback, a new messenger would emerge to reexplain the ideology, and then take over the leadership. The dramatic rise of the Wang Ming faction, formed by the Moscow-trained Chinese students, at the Fourth Plenum of the Sixth Party Congress (PC) in January 19312 demonstrated the CCP's incoherence as an organization and adolescence as a communist party.

Furthermore, each time the leadership changed hands, a top-down purge would follow. A typical example was the large-scale purge after the Wang Ming faction seized the Central Committee (CC) leadership.