Zhang Guotao

Zhang Guotao (born Nov. 26, 1897, Pingxiang, Jiangxi province, China—died Dec. 3, 1979, near Toronto, Can.) was a founding member and leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the late 1920s and ’30s. After briefly contesting the leadership of the party with Mao Zedong in 1935 (the last time Mao’s leadership was contested), Zhang fell from power and in 1938 defected to the Chinese Nationalists.

Zhang gained prominence as a student leader of the antigovernment May Fourth Movement, the political and cultural upheaval that began with a series of demonstrations on May 4, 1919. Originally an anarchist, he was influenced by Marxism and took part in the meeting in July 1921 that marked the official founding of the CCP. He then directed many of the initial communist attempts to organize the small Chinese urban proletariat, leading the Beijing-Hankou (Peking-Hankow) Railroad strike that was crushed by the warlord Wu Peifu on Feb. 7, 1923.

After the formation of the first alliance between the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang [Pinyin: Guomindang]) of the Nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen and the CCP, Zhang became a Nationalist official. When this alliance collapsed, he participated in the Aug. 1, 1927, communist-led uprising at Nanchang, considered the official founding of the Chinese Red Army. Zhang then went to the Soviet Union, where he remained until 1931, when he was dispatched to assume control of a small communist enclave in the north-central Chinese province of Hubei.

Under pressure from Nationalist troops, Zhang shifted his base several times, and finally in June 1935 he rendezvoused with the communist forces of Mao Zedong, which were on their Long March to northwestern China. A short time before, Mao had been elected head of the CCP—of which Zhang was a senior member, as well as being head of an independent communist enclave. Hence Zhang represented a challenge to Mao’s power. Their quarrel over where to establish the new communist base split the party; the majority followed Mao into Shaanxi province, and another faction went with Zhang into extreme southwestern China, almost on the Tibetan border. As Mao had predicted, Zhang was unable to find support in that desolate region, and he was eventually forced to rejoin Mao in Gansu in the autumn of 1936.

Although Zhang remained an active member of the party’s ruling Political Bureau, his influence had slipped greatly. In April 1938 he took advantage of an appointment as a delegate to a conference between the communists and the Nationalists to defect to the latter. He lived in the Nationalist capital at Chongqing throughout World War II but was given little political power. Zhang left China for Taiwan in November 1948 and moved to the British colony of Hong Kong in 1949. He emigrated to Canada in 1968.