November 25, 1926

Jiangsu and Zhejiang are the two provinces in China where industry and commerce are particularly developed, so the status of workers and merchants is readily acknowledged. As for the peasants in these two provinces, however, few pay attention to their status, and many even assume that since these are peaceful and prosperous regions, the peasants there do not suffer much. Such views are, in fact, entirely superficial and betray a complete ignorance of the actual conditions in the rural areas of Jiangsu and Zhejiang. A brief examination of those conditions reveals that the reality is wholly at odds with such assumptions. The specific facts about various counties cited below represent only a very small fraction of the material we have gathered recently, yet they are already sufficient to demonstrate that the peasants of Jiangsu and Zhejiang are not the peaceful, prosperous, and relatively pain-free folk that most people imagine them to be.

*Chongming*
An island at the mouth of the Yangtze, the entire island forms Chongming County, built up from silt deposited by the river. Around the island, new sandbanks constantly emerge, so there is much sandy farmland and many tenant farmers. Take the locale of Shangsha as an example. Here the landlords exploit the tenant farmers very harshly; for every *qian bu* of land, a security deposit of fifty yuan is required. Such land is entirely newly formed sandy soil which the peasants gradually cultivate to maturity on behalf of the landlords. Once mature, the landlord holds the subsoil rights while the peasant holds the surface rights. Every year, the labor, fertilizer, tools, seeds, and other inputs for farming are all provided by the peasant. After the autumn harvest, for every *qian bu* of land, the peasant must pay a rent of five hundred catties of grain, and in some cases even more. When the landlord visits the peasant's home, the peasant must treat him to good food and wine, or else rent increases are hard to avoid. The scales used to weigh the rent grain are generally set to twenty taels or more. If the peasant shows the slightest resistance, he is promptly sent to the county for punishment. If a peasant owes five yuan in rent this year, he will be forced to repay ten or twenty yuan next year—yet he has no choice but to pay; consequently, peasant bankruptcies occur year after year. The peasants in this area staged an uprising in the eleventh year of the Republic, without any incitement from the Red Party or radical factions. They rose up of their own accord in groups, attacked and destroyed the police station, cut off the ear of a landlord named Tao, and stormed the county government office demanding rent reductions. Later, because their unity was not firm and their leaders were arrested, the uprising failed. This year Jiangsu suffered a widespread drought, and yields per mu have fallen drastically. In the Shangsha area, peasants harvested only three or four hundred catties of grain per *qian bu*, yet the landlords insisted on collecting the customary five hundred catties in rent. The landlords even used the resolution of the “Tenancy Maintenance Association” to deceive the peasants (the Tenancy Maintenance Association was an organization set up by the landlords in the eleventh year to deceive the peasants). As a result, the peasants’ hatred for the landlords has deepened, and another uprising seems about to break out.

*Jiangyin*
Traveling by steamer from Wuxi, one comes to a place called Gushan Town. This town lies at the junction of Jiangyin, Changshu, and Wuxi counties. All three counties have many large landlords who oppress the tenant farmers severely. Last autumn, a returned student from Japan, Zhou Shuiping of Gushan (Zhou had originally graduated from the Wuxi Provincial Normal School), returned to his hometown and, unable to bear what he saw, urged the tenant farmers to form an association called the “Tenant Self-Help Cooperative.” Zhou traveled from village to village, speaking of the peasants’ suffering with tears in his eyes and voice. A great many peasants in Gushan followed him, and farmers along the borders of Jiangyin, Changshu, and Wuxi were all stirred and rose up like clouds, opposing the heartlessly cruel bullies, the evil gentry and big landlords, and unanimously demanding rent reductions. However, before the peasants had fully united, the bully gentry and landlords had already banded together, and the gentry and landlords of all three counties—Jiangyin, Changshu, and Wuxi—moved simultaneously. Telegrams and letters poured in like clouds to Sun Chuanfang, and how could Sun Chuanfang not heed the words of the bully gentry and landlords? In November of last year, he dissolved the Tenant Self-Help Cooperative and captured Zhou Shuiping. In January of this year, he had Zhou executed by firing squad, and the rent-reduction movement was thus temporarily suppressed. When Zhou Shuiping’s coffin was brought back to Gushan and placed in his home, peasants came in groups day after day to kowtow before his coffin, saying, “Mr. Zhou died for us, and we must avenge him!” This year’s severe drought has brought a poor rice harvest, and the peasants are once more thinking of demanding rent reductions. This shows that they are not afraid to die. They know that only by uniting and struggling to reduce the exploitation of the greedy and violent landlords can they find a way out. In another location in eastern Jiangyin, a place called Shazhou, the peasants have also risen against the landlords. The oppressive practice there is collecting rent in advance—what people in Jiangsu call “paying in the *yin* year and planting in the *mao* year”—which causes great economic hardship to the peasants. Now the peasants are demanding that rent be paid only after the harvest, and they are currently struggling toward that goal.

*Danyang*
Here I shall recount two incidents in Lücheng Town of Danyang County (this town is in the eastern part of Danyang, close to the Shanghai-Nanjing Railway). One was resistance against a pawnshop that exploited and cheated the peasants. The incident took place this summer. A pawnshop in Lücheng Town was robbed one day by remnants of Ma Yuren’s forces, who had turned bandit in Mao Mountain west of the county; but not much was taken. The pawnshop owner promptly filed a loss report, falsely claiming that all the pawned clothing and other goods had been looted, while secretly moving those goods elsewhere under cover of night. The peasants from nearby villages who had pawned those items heard the news and intercepted the goods on the road, recovering part of the original items, but the portion that had already been hidden was not retrieved. The peasants whose goods had been pawned then organized a “Pawners’ Union” and demanded an accounting from the Lücheng pawnshop. In the end, the pawnshop compensated part of the loss—an amount equal to the pawn value for each person—totaling nine hundred yuan. This case proves that if the peasants unite, they can achieve victory. Without such unity this time, the crafty pawnshop merchant would have cheated them out of all their pawned goods. The other incident was opposition to bully gentry and rich peasants who forced the peasants to pay for the use of a mechanized water pump. This has been going on since the summer and autumn of this year and is still not settled. In the rivers of rural Jiangsu, a kind of mechanized water pump, called a *hushui jiqi*, is now widely used in place of the old manual or foot-pedal waterwheels. Several villages near Lücheng Town felt that they too should switch to using machines to pump water. But the local bully gentry and rich peasants seized the chance to profit, jumping in first to form a “Machine Water-Pumping Company,” pooling capital of fourteen hundred yuan to buy a machine and install it in the river. In the name of the company, they issued a notice demanding that peasants pay an annual fee per mu, and anyone who refused would not be allowed to draw water. When the peasants did their sums, they realized that the annual fees from all the fields in those villages would be enough to buy a machine themselves; by pooling their money to buy one, they would pay once and use it year after year. If they used the company’s machine, they would have to pay that large sum every year. So they fiercely opposed the bully gentry and rich peasants’ company. Several local primary school teachers gave considerable help to the peasants, aiding them in organizing a group called the “Peasants’ Advancement Association,” within which they formed a “Machine Water-Pumping Cooperative.” The method, too, was for peasants to contribute money per mu until they had raised fourteen hundred yuan on their own, with which they bought a water-pumping machine. Thus, there were now two machines in the river—one belonging to the company, the other to the cooperative. The company’s machine sat there completely ignored. The bully gentry were enraged and brought all sorts of false accusations before Sun Chuanfang. As a result, troops were dispatched to the countryside, carrying out large-scale searches for radical elements; four people were arrested, and warrants were issued for three more. It was proclaimed that anyone who refused to use the company’s machine would be severely punished. When the soldiers arrived, the able-bodied men of the villages hid in the grain stalks, leaving only the old, the weak, women, and children to face the soldiers.

These peasants charged with serious crimes sent over a thousand yuan as a “bribe to spare them from arrest” to the soldiers, not to mention what was looted and seized. This case has yet to be concluded. The good thing is that Sun Chuanfang is not exactly in his heyday now, so perhaps the bully gentry of Lücheng are beginning to sense that they cannot have everything their own way—or so one might guess.

*Wuxi*
In Xuxiang Town, fifteen *li* from the county seat of Wuxi, a small disturbance occurred not long ago. Rong Desheng, a big merchant and large landlord there, wanted to build a road through the countryside, demolishing houses in town and buying up farmland along the route at cheap prices. This directly harmed the peasants’ economic interests, so the peasants organized a “Peasants’ Club” to oppose Rong Desheng. In the end, Rong Desheng yielded, agreeing to pay two hundred yuan per mu for the land, ten cents for each newly planted mulberry sapling, and leaving the houses in town untouched.

*Qingpu*
In Qingpu County, which lies along the Shanghai-Hangzhou railway, an incident occurred last month in which the peasants opposed the sale of wasteland at high prices. Historically, when peasants paid to purchase wasteland in this county, the fixed price was three yuan per mu. This time, the bully gentry colluded with County Magistrate Lin Zhenyi to set up a company that acquired wasteland at three yuan per mu but then sold it to the peasants at twelve yuan per mu. The peasants organized a Land Reclamation Federation to resist, while the bully gentry and the official authorities resorted to various forms of intimidation. The struggle is still ongoing.

*Taixing*
In Wangjiazhuang in the eastern part of the county, the drought this year has reduced harvests, and the peasants demanded rent reductions, leading to a fierce struggle with the landlords. The landlords not only refused to lower the rent but also intensified their oppression. One peasant, driven to extreme hatred, attempted to kill a particularly vicious landlord. The landlord reported him to the county authorities, and thirty peasants were arrested and jailed.

*Tai County*
In Sensen Village in Tai County, the peasants started a movement this summer requesting rent reductions because of the drought. The landlords suppressed it, and several of the leaders were arrested.

*Xuzhou*
Among the peasants of Jiangsu, those in the area of Xuhai north of the Yangtze are the most miserable. The Red Spear Society and Village Leagues can be found everywhere, and rural struggles of all kinds are more numerous there than elsewhere—too many to recount fully. In areas such as the eastern and northern parts of Tongshan County, the land lies low, and last year almost all the crops were submerged and destroyed. Fortunately, barley wheat had already been planted, so the peasants still clung to the hope that “after a lean year comes a bumper year.” This autumn, however, the drenching rains continued without respite, leaving the seedlings in the fields soaking in water day after day, until they withered from yellowing to rot. After half a year of hard labor, the peasants are left empty-handed. Even now, the land remains covered in patches of standing water, with no date in sight for sowing barley wheat. Lamentation is everywhere, and nothing is to be seen but a scene of misery and sorrowful despair. On top of natural disasters, there are the exorbitant taxes and levies of warlords and corrupt officials, and the heavy rents and usurious interest of the bully gentry and landlords, who flay the peasants layer by layer. Because of this, many peasants have turned to banditry, and the Xuzhou region has thus become notorious as a bandit area.

*Cixi*
Cixi belongs to Zhejiang, lying to the west of Ningbo. Recently, a major uprising broke out in the Shanbei area of this county. The peasants of Shanbei have always been fiercely tough, and armed feuds occur frequently. Add to this the recent years of unreasonable oppression by officials and police and the doubly harsh exploitation by the bully gentry and landlords, and the peasants’ pent-up rage ran deep. To make matters worse, this year’s uneven rainfall meant that both rice and cotton crops failed, yet the landlords refused to reduce their rigid ironclad rents by even a fraction. The peasant uprising over the famine thus erupted. Once the uprising broke out, the lumpenproletarian elements in general joined in bravely. On the morning of September 13, over two thousand people gathered and marched to the police station to report the famine, clashing with the police. They burned down the police station and seized the police firearms. They then turned to the homes of village gentry and landlords to “eat from the rich.” After eating, out of fury at the brutality of the village gentry and landlords, they smashed their decorative screens, antiques, doors, windows, and wall ornaments to utter bits. This went on every day; they would not listen to much persuasion, simply venting their anger in this way.

A few days later, the village gentry fled to the county seat to lodge accusations, and military police were sent down in successive waves to comb the villages for peasants. Most of the peasant leaders had already scattered and fled. Propaganda about “committing crimes” and “breaking the law” had become widespread, and so the peasants grew timid, and the uprising was suppressed. The reason this uprising failed was that the masses were completely unorganized and lacked any guidance, so it remained a primitive revolt that ended in defeat.

*The Guide Weekly*, Issue No. 179
Guide Weekly Press
November 25, 1926