Early career In 1924, Zhang attended the First National Congress of the
Kuomintang (KMT) during the policy of alliance between the Communists and the Kuomintang and was elected as Substitute Commissioner of Central Executive Committee. This was despite the fact that Zhang had opposed the alliance with Kuomintang in the Third National Congress of the CCP and had been reprimanded. In 1925, in the
Fourth National Congress of the CCP, Zhang was elected Commissioner of
Central Committee of CCP and Director of Labor and Peasant Work Department. In 1926, Zhang was the General Secretary of
Hubei Division of CCP. In 1927, he became Commissioner of Interim Central Committee of the CCP after the failure of the
CCP uprising. Zhang with
Li Lisan and
Qu Qiubai were the acting leaders of the CCP. At that time, Mao only led a small number of troops in
Jiangxi and
Hunan. In 1928, Zhang went to Moscow for the second time. He opposed
Wang Ming and the rest of the "
28 Bolsheviks", a group of Chinese students in Moscow. Nonetheless, Zhang was elected as a member of the
politburo of the CCP in the
Sixth National Congress held in
Soviet Union, and then as a delegate of the CCP in
Comintern. Zhang and the 28 Bolsheviks were mostly reconciled by 1930, however, and Zhang returned to China.
Leader of the Eyuwan Soviet In Zhang's absence,
Li Lisan had become
de facto leader of the CCP. His "Li Lisan line" called for the rural soviets to launch immediate attacks on major cities, which had ended in disastrous failure. In the winter of 1930–1931, Zhang and the 28 Bolsheviks ousted Li from power and set about bringing the far-flung rural soviets under more centralized control. Zhang was sent to the
Eyuwan Soviet on the border of Hubei,
Henan, and
Anhui provinces. 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. Zhang's purges expanded during the second half of 1931. Thousands or tens of thousands of party members were arrested and accused of being part of the Reorganizationists, the
Anti-Bolshevik League, or the Third Party. In some counties, Zhang even set up secret police. Zhang's main justification for the purge was that the local party was too strongly intertwined with local gentry and the traditional rural power structure. He argued that this had prevented the party from carrying out land reform properly, and land reform under Zhang went much further than it had in previous years. Zhang appointed a Red Army officer named to chairman of the Eyuwan Soviet. Gao had a reputation for brutality against rich peasants and landlords. In order to "comb out" rich peasants, any Red army soldiers who were literate were dismissed. The purges led to opposition against Zhang from wide sections of the party and peasantry. They eventually came to an end during the latter half of 1932. Soldiers who had been purged for their literacy but had stayed with the Red Army were allowed to rejoin and in some instances promoted. The overall impact and scale of the purges are disputed. Reasonable estimates of the number arrested and killed range from the low thousands to 10,000. Historian William Rowe argues that this "meant... the near final extinction of the Party's base of indigenous supporters" in Eyuwan, but most other historians disagree. Benton points out that almost all of the purged cadres were replaced with other local supporters since there were very few non-native Communists in the region. Tony Saich argues that the Red Army's continued success showed that the purges had not affected the army's fighting capacity. In early 1932, the Fourth Red Army had helped defeat the Third Encirclement Campaign and reached 30,000 soldiers.
Retreat and the Long March In 1932, the Nationalists'
fourth encirclement campaign finally broke the Fourth Red Army and Zhang was forced to lead a retreat westwards. The main force lost half of its troops during the fighting and subsequent retreat, being reduced to 15,000 men. In the border region between
Shaanxi and
Sichuan provinces, he decided to set up a new base. Slowly he turned it into a prosperous autonomous region by way of land reform and enlisting the support of locals, establishing the
Northwest Chinese Soviet Federation. However, once the prosperity was in reach, Zhang launched another series of purges. As a result, he and the Red Army lost the popular support, and was driven from the Red base. In 1935 Zhang and his army of more than 80,000 reunited with Mao's 10,000 troops during the
Long March. ==End of CCP career and exile==