COMMUNIST CHINA AND THE COMINTERN

The Chinese leaders had no radio or other contact with the Comintern during the Long March, so that Otto Braun commanded very little credibility or authority. By 1936, when the chinese Communists arrived in Shaanxi province in the north of china, Mao had withstood another challenge for the Party leadership from Zhang Guotao, whose subsequent defection to the guomindang further weakened the possibility of Stalin's imposing a "unity" figurehead over two warring Communist factions. But then "united front from below" policy, which the Chinese had been following since 1930, was replaced by a "united front above" policy. this was because Japanese infiltration into China had become a national issue, by identifying themselves with the anti-Japanese struggle, the Communists were able to play the nationalism card against their Guomindang allies. When officers of the young Marshal Zhang Xueliang, the Manchurian warlord, took Jiang Jieshi prisoner, the Guomindang were compelled, as the price of his release, to establish a joint United Front against the Japanese. That gave the communists time to regroup their forces. The policy coincided with the United Front policy of the Comintern, which find its infamous expression in the non-aggression pact between Stalin and Hitler in 1939.
Laigueglia's scholar CASALINO PIERLUIGI (1949).