A great celebration for the 120th anniversary of the birth of a military commander and ideologist who played a key role in the bloody Yan’an Rectification Campaign.
by Massimo Introvigne
![Ren Bishi, left (1904–1950, credits), and Cai Qi, right (credits).](https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BITTER-WINTER-9.jpg)
![Ren Bishi, left (1904–1950, credits), and Cai Qi, right (credits).](https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BITTER-WINTER-9.jpg)
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) likes historical celebrations, but the one honoring the 120th anniversary of the birth of Ren Bishi, an early Maoist leader who was born on April 30, 1904, and died on October 27, 1950, was especially solemn. A symposium in Beijing was presided on April 28 by Cai Qi, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CCP Central Committee and the first-ranked Secretary of the Secretariat of the same CCP Central Committee. Cai is regarded as one of Xi Jinping’s chief advisors and ideologists. The symposium was attended by several senior Party leaders. A commemorative book was also published.
Ren Bishi was a gifted ideologist and military commander, who might have emerged as the CCP’s second-in-command had he not criticized some of Chairman Mao’s military choices and suffered from health problems that led to his premature death at age 46.
Honoring Ren Bishi today, including by promoting pilgrimages to his birthplace in rural Miluo, Hunan, is connected with Xi Jinping’s emphasis on the Yan’an Rectification Campaign of 1942–44. In 2022, Xi led the Standing Committee to Yan’an where he hailed what Mao did there in the 1940s.
While the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was headquartered, after the long March, at Yan’an, Shaanxi, Mao decided to destroy any possible challenge to his absolute authority by inventing a non-existing “Trotskyist” dissent, and arresting, torturing, and executing CCP members perceived as “weak” or “at risk.” Scholars believe that at least 30,000 were purged, and some 10,000 executed, in a campaign that shaped the CCP as we know it today.
![Ren Bishi during the Long March. Credits.](https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/ren2.jpg)
![Ren Bishi during the Long March. Credits.](https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/ren2.jpg)
Yan’an is synonym of crushing dissent, real or invented, by torturing and killing. As Cai Qi reminded the audience at the April 28 symposium, the Yan’an Rectification Campaign was plotted by Mao, but its main organizer was Ren Bishi.
Ren, Cai said, aimed at establishing absolute and unquestioning obedience to the CCP and the Central Committee. “Ren argued that ensuring the Party’s absolute leadership has special significance and the need for unity within the Party and the establishment of an absolutely unified and centralized leadership is extremely urgent. He profoundly stated that only by adhering to the centralized and unified leadership of the CCP Central Committee can the Party become a solid whole capable of undertaking great historical tasks. He explicitly upheld Comrade Mao Zedong’s central leadership position, calling on the entire Party to particularly study the Marxism-Leninism adapted to Chinese conditions, learn from Comrade Mao Zedong’s writings and the Party’s decisions, and consciously apply them in their work. These insights played a crucial role in establishing and maintaining the central leadership position of Comrade Mao Zedong, and in achieving new unity under the leadership of the Party’s Central Committee centered around Comrade Mao Zedong.” By substituting Comrade Mao Zedong with Comrade Xi Jinping, this is exactly what is taught today.
Or else. Historians of the Yan’an Rectification Movement have emphasized Ren Bishi’s role in aptly playing those closer and those more independent from Stalin’s Soviet Union in the CCP against each other and in submitting dissidents to torture, sleep deprivation, and intense indoctrination called “thought reform.” Ironically, Ren’s thought reform would give to the CIA in the United States the opportunity to invent the word “brainwashing,” used to attack the CCP and Stalin and later applied to religion.
Lionizing Ren Bishi is exactly what it seems to be—a threat to those who believe that dissent in 2024 would be dealt with more leniently than in 1944. Commemorating Ren Bishi reminds us that this will not be the case.