Anti-Bolshevik League incident

Mao's political purge resulted in killings at Futian and elsewhere, and the trial and execution of Red Army officers and soldiers.

One account says that in December 1926, the Kuomintang in Jiangxi created a counter-intelligence organization, known as Anti-Bolshevik League, to deal with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and emergent state of civil war.

[citation needed] According to Agnes Smedley's 1934 account in China's Red Army Marches, another body called the "Social Democrats" was involved - allied to but separate from the alleged Anti-Bolshevik League.

In late June 1930, the Southwest Jiangxi Special Committee issued a further directive that resulted in the acceleration of the purge, including to upper-level organs of the Party.

It also saw the detention of Li Wenlin, a senior cadre who had assumed the post of Jiangxi Province Action Committee in August and was in charge of implementing the purge in many areas.

[1] The rebellion, known as the Futian incident, highlighted the friction that existed between factions of the Red Army during the early days of the Communist revolution.

The incident vindicated Mao's position as leader of the Red Army, with Generals Zhu De and Peng Dehuai giving their unequivocal support, despite their political differences.

As party of this conciliatory, Xiang encouraged the leaders of the Futian Incident to return to battle in fighting Nationalist troops in Jiangxi.

Shortly after Xiang's arrival the Communist Party's Central Committee changed course, influenced by a visit from Pavel Mif with the Comintern's Far Eastern Bureau, affirming that the Futian Incident was a "counterrevolutionary insurrection".

Instead of viewing the execution of the Futian mutineers as a signal that the AB-league had been eliminated, Mao instead insisted that it required an even greater attack on subversive elements.

[5] In 1988, President Yang Shangkun commissioned an investigation into the Futian incident, which recommended the rehabilitation of the victims, but it was never followed up due to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre.