The Gutian Congress or Gutian Conference (古田会议) was the 9th meeting of the Chinese Communist Party and the first after the Nanchang Uprising

Nanchang Uprising

The Nanchang Uprising was the first major Kuomintang-Communist engagement of the Chinese Civil War, in order to counter the anti-communist purges by the Nationalist Party of China....

 and subsequent southward flight of the insurrectionist troops. It was convened in December, 1929, at Gutian

Gutian (town)

Gutian is one of the ten towns in Shanghang County, Longyan, Fujian province. It is famous as the site of the 1929 Gutian Congress where Mao Zedong affirmed his leadership of the Zhu-Mao 4th Army and stamped out democratic tendencies among the troops. The town and site may be reached by...

 in Shanghang County

Shanghang County

Shanghang is a populous county of Longyan Municipality in Fujian Province.-Transportation:Part of Shanghang County is accessed by National Route 319, coming west from Xinluo , the municipal seat...

, then in Tingzhou Prefecture (now for the most part Longyan

Longyan

Longyan is a prefecture-level city in southwestern Fujian province, China.-Geography:It is situated in the upper reaches of the Jiulong and Tingjiang rivers...

 Municipality) in western Fujian

Fujian

' , formerly romanised as Fukien or Huguing or Foukien, is a province on the southeast coast of mainland China. Fujian is bordered by Zhejiang to the north, Jiangxi to the west, and Guangdong to the south. Taiwan lies to the east, across the Taiwan Strait...

 Province.

Most of the delegates to this congress were army men (the insurrectionists having been renamed the 4th Army of the Chinese Workers' & Peasants' Red Army). Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...

 (毛泽东), voted out six months earlier but moving from his success at the little-known Jiaoyang Congress (also in Shanghang), addressed the Zhu-Mao 4th Army (朱毛四军) as its Comintern

Comintern

The Communist International, abbreviated as Comintern, also known as the Third International, was an international communist organization initiated in Moscow during March 1919...

-anointed political commissar and chaired the congress.

The Gutian Congress Resolution (古田会议决议), also titled On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party, has its ostensive source here. One of the selections from this significant text later included in Lin Biao

Lin Biao

Lin Biao was a major Chinese Communist military leader who was pivotal in the communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, especially in Northeastern China...

's Little Red Book is as follows:

In the sphere of theory, destroy the roots of ultra-democracy. First, it should be pointed out that the danger of ultra-democracy lies in the fact that it damages or even completely wrecks the Party organisation and weakens or even completely undermines the Party's fighting capacity, rendering the Party incapable of fulfilling its fighting tasks and thereby causing the defeat of the revolution. Next it should be pointed out that the source of ultra-democracy consists in the petty bourgeoisie

Petite bourgeoisie

Petit-bourgeois or petty bourgeois is a term that originally referred to the members of the lower middle social classes in the 18th and early 19th centuries...

's individualistic aversion to discipline. When this characteristic is brought into the Party, it develops into ultra-democratic ideas politically and organisationally. These ideas are utterly incompatible with the fighting tasks of the proletariat.

It was thus that Mao greatly diminished the likelihood of further voting in the Red Army.