Red Army
In early 1930, he joined the Nationalists' Northwest Army under the command of Yang Hucheng and in March 1932, launched a coup within that army. Subsequently, he joined Communist guerillas north of the Wei River. In March 1933, he joined Liu Zhidan and others in founding the Shaanxi-Gansu Border (Shaan-Gan Border) Region Soviet Area, and became the chairman of the Soviet area government while leading guerillas in resisting Nationalist incursions and expanding the Soviet area. In early 1935, the Shaan-Gan Border and Northern Shaanxi Soviet Areas merged to form the Revolutionary Base Area of the Northwest and Xi became one of the leaders of the base area. But in September 1935, he along with Liu Zhidan and Gao Gang were jailed during a Leftist rectification campaign within the party. By his own account, he was within four days of being executed when Mao Zedong arrived on the scene and ordered Xi and his comrades released. Xi's guerilla base in the Northwest gave refuge to Mao Zedong and the party center, and allowed them to end the Long March. It is said that Xi's "Revolutionary Base Area of the Northwest saved the Party Center and the Party Center saved the revolutionaries of the Northwest." The base area eventually became the Yanan Soviet, the headquarters of the Chinese Communist movement until 1947.
Read more about this topic: Xi Zhongxun
Famous quotes containing the words red and/or army:
“Her breasts under her gown
are cold,
for a flower has grown,
murex-red
on the red gown.”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)