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The Zunyi Conference () was a meeting of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in January 1935 during the Long March. This meeting involved a power struggle between the leadership of Qin Bangxian and Otto Braun and the opposition led by Mao Zedong. The result was that Mao left the meeting in position to take over military command and become the leader of the Communist Party. The conference was completely unacknowledged until the 1950s and still no detailed descriptions were available until the fiftieth anniversary in 1985.
Initially the First Red Army, with its baggage of top communist officials, records, currency reserves and other trapping of the exiled Chinese Soviet Republic, fought through several lightly defended Kuomintang checkpoints, crossing the Xinfeng River and through the province of Guangdong, south of Hunan and into Guangxi. At the Xiang river, Chiang Kai-shek had reinforced the KMT defenses. In two days of bloody fighting, 30 November to 1 December 1934, the Red Army lost more than 40,000 troops and all of the civilian porters, and there were strongly defended Nationalist defensive lines ahead. Personnel and material losses after the battle of the Xiang river affected the morale of the troops and desertions began. By a 12 December 1934 meeting of Party leaders in Tongdao, discontent with Bo Gu and Otto Braun appeared. Under these conditions, the Communists met in Zunyi to reshuffle the Party politburo.
The names and numbers of participants in the conference have always been disputed. These details are of importance to the largely Soviet view that elected members of the party were outvoted by non-members. Those who are most strongly agreed to have attended by all are Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, Chen Yun, Liu Shaoqi, Zhang Wentian, Bo Gu, Liu Bocheng, Li Fuchun, Lin Biao, and Peng Dehuai. Chinese sources which show that non-members could not have outvoted members have the following participants:
Various scholars dispute the attendance of Chen Yun, Liu Shaoqi, Wang Jiaxiang, He Kequan, Deng Fa, Nie Rongzhen, and Deng Xiaoping. On the other hand, Liang Botai, Wu Liangping, Teng Daiyuan, Li Weihan, Wang Shoudao, and Yang Shangkun are also held to have attended by some sources.
Mao insisted that Bo Gu and Otto Braun had made fundamental military mistakes by using tactics of pure defense, rather than initiating a more mobile war. Mao's supporters gained momentum during the meeting and Zhou Enlai eventually moved to back Mao. Under the principle of democracy for majority, the secretariat of the Central Committee and Central Revolution & Military Committee of CCP were reelected. Bo and Braun were demoted while Zhou maintained his position now sharing military command with Zhu De. Zhang Wentian took Bo's previous position, and Mao once again joined the Central Committee.
The Zunyi Conference confirmed that the CCP should turn away from the 28 Bolsheviks and towards Mao. The Red Army regained its military power, survived in Yan'an and ultimately defeated the KMT using a guerrilla strategy, and later through conventional warfare as it gained mass peasant support. It could be seen as a victory for those old CCP members who had their roots in China and, on the contrary, was a great loss for those CCP members such as the 28 Bolsheviks who had studied in Moscow and had been trained by the Comintern and the Soviet Union and could be regarded as protégés or agents of Comintern accordingly. After the Zunyi Conference, the influence and involvement of the Comintern in CCP affairs was greatly reduced.
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