The Army versus the Party: Encounter of the First and Fourth Front Armies

The period June to September 1935 witnessed first the happy union and then the acrimonious split of two major Communist forces—the First Front or Central Red Army (CRA) and the Fourth Front Army (FFA)—in the highlands of western China. A densely populated basin located on the southwest highlands and secluded from China Proper, Sichuan is known as the &s;State of Heaven&s; in Chinese history. In Zhang Guotao&s;s memoirs, he stresses that when the Fourth Front Army came into Sichuan, he was determined to abandon the dogmatic pattern of the Soviet and to instead proclaim a new policy of people&s;s government. In early 1933, the Party Center had just assumed leadership in the Jiangxi Soviet and the Central Red Army had just begun its victorious Fourth Campaign. The warfare in Sichuan ended quite differently from that in Jiangxi. The Fourth Front Army broke across the Jialing River in late March 1935.