March 1927

The Importance of the Peasant Problem
Get Organized!
Down with the Local Tyrants and Evil Gentry! All Power to the
    Peasant Associations!
"It's Terrible!" or "It's Fine!"
The Question of "Going Too Far"
The "Movement of the Riffraff"
Vanguards of the Revolution
Fourteen Great Achievements


Organizing the Peasants into Peasant Associations

Hitting the Landlords Politically

Hitting the Landlords Economically

Overthrowing the Feudal Rule of the Local Tyrants and Evil
Gentry--Smashing the Tu and Tuan

Overthrowing the Armed Forces of the Landlords and Establishing
Those of the Peasants

Overthrowing the Political Power of the County Magistrate and
His Bailiffs

Overthrowing the Clan Authority of the Ancestral Temples and
Clan Elders, the Religious Authority of Town and Village Gods, and the Masculine
Authority of Husbands

Spreading Political Propaganda

Peasant Bans and Prohibitions

Eliminating Banditry

Abolishing Exorbitant Levies

The Movement for Education

The Co-operative Movement

Building Roads and Repairing Embankments

[This article was written as a reply to the carping criticisms both inside
and outside the Party then being leveled at the peasants' revolutionary struggle.
Comrade Mao Tse-tung spent thirty-two days in Hunan Province making an
investigation and wrote this report in order to answer these criticisms.
The Right opportunists in the Party, headed by Chen Tu-hsiu, would not accept
his views and stuck to their own wrong ideas. Their chief error was that.
frightened by the reactionary trend in the Kuomintang, they dared not support
the great revolutionary struggles of the peasants which had erupted or were
erupting. To appease the Kuomintang, they preferred to desert the peasantry,
the chief ally in the revolution, and thus left the working class and the
Communist Party isolated and without help. It was mainly because it was able
to exploit this weakness within the Communist Party that the Kuomintang dared
to betray the revolution, launch its "party purge" and make war on the people
in the summer of 1927.]


 THE IMPORTANCE OF THE PEASANT PROBLEM


During my recent visit to Hunan [1] I made a first-hand
investigation of conditions in the five counties of Hsiangtan, Hsianghsiang,
Hengshan, Liling and Changsha. In the thirty-two days from January 4 to February
5, I called together fact-finding conferences in villages and county towns,
which were attended by experienced peasants and by comrades working in the
peasant movement, and I listened attentively to their reports and collected
a great deal of material. Many of the hows and whys of the peasant movement
were the exact opposite of what the gentry in Hankow and Changsha are saying.
I saw and heard of many strange things of which I had hitherto been unaware.
I believe the same is true of many other places, too. All talk directed against
the peasant movement must be speedily set right. All the wrong measures taken
by the revolutionary authorities concerning the peasant movement must be
speedily changed. Only thus can the future of the revolution be benefited.
For the present upsurge of the peasant movement is a colossal event. In a
very short time, in China's central, southern and northern provinces, several
hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm, like a hurricane,
a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to
hold it back. They will smash all the trammels that bind them and rush forward
along the road to liberation. They will sweep all the imperialists, warlords,
corrupt officials, local tyrants and evil gentry into their graves. Every
revolutionary party and every revolutionary comrade will be put to the test,
to be accepted or rejected as they decide. There are three alternatives.
To march at their head and lead them? To trail behind them, gesticulating
and criticizing? Or to stand in their way and oppose them? Every Chinese
is free to choose, but events will force you to make the choice quickly.

GET ORGANIZED!


The development of the peasant movement in Hunan may be divided roughly into
two periods with respect to the counties in the province's central and southern
parts where the movement has already made much headway. The first, from January
to September of last year, was one of organization. In this period, January
to June was a time of underground activity, and July to September, when the
revolutionary army was driving out Chao Heng-ti, [2] one
of open activity. During this period, the membership of the peasant associations
did not exceed 300,000-400,000 the masses directly under their leadership
numbered little more than a million, there was as yet hardly any struggle
in the rural areas, and consequently there was very little criticism of the
associations in other circles. Since its members served as guides, scouts
and carriers of the Northern Expeditionary Army, even some of the officers
had a good word to say for the peasant associations. The second period, from
last October to January of this year, was one of revolutionary action. The
membership of the associations jumped to two million and the masses directly
under their leadership increased to ten million. Since the peasants generally
enter only one name for the whole family on joining a peasant association,
a membership of two million means a mass following of about ten million.
Almost half the peasants in Hunan are now organized. In counties like Hsiangtan,
Hsianghsiang, Liuyang, Changsha, Liling, Ninghsiang, Pingkiang, Hsiangyin,
Hengshan, Hengyang, Leiyang, Chenhsien and Anhua, nearly all the peasants
have combined in the peasant associations or have come under their leadership.
It was on the strength of their extensive organization that the peasants
went into action and within four months brought about a great revolution
in the countryside, a revolution without parallel in history.

DOWN WITH THE LOCAL TYRANTS AND EVIL GENTRY!
  ALL POWER TO THE PEASANT ASSOCIATIONS!


The main targets of attack by the peasants are the local tyrants, the evil
gentry and the lawless landlords, but in passing they also hit out against
patriarchal ideas and institutions, against the corrupt officials in the
cities and against bad practices and customs in the rural areas. In force
and momentum the attack is tempestuous; those who bow before it survive and
those who resist perish. As a result, the privileges which the feudal landlords
enjoyed for thousands of years are being shattered to pieces. Every bit of
the dignity and prestige built up by the landlords is being swept into the
dust. With the collapse of the power of the landlords, the peasant associations
have now become the sole organs of authority and the popular slogan "All
power to the peasant associations" has become a reality. Even bides such
as a quarrel between husband and wife are brought to the peasant association.
Nothing can be settled unless someone from the peasant association is present.
The association actually dictates all rural affairs, and, quite literally,
"whatever it says, goes". Those who are outside the associations can only
speak well of them and cannot say anything against them. The local tyrants,
evil gentry and lawless landlords have been deprived of all right to speak,
and none of them dares even mutter dissent. In the face of the peasant
associations' power and pressure, the top local tyrants and evil gentry have
fled to Shanghai, those of the second rank to Hankow, those of the third
to Changsha and those of the fourth to the county towns, while the fifth
rank and the still lesser fry surrender to the peasant associations in the
villages.

"Here's ten yuan. Please let me join the peasant association," one of the
smaller of the evil gentry will say.

"Ugh! Who wants your filthy money?" the peasants reply.

Many middle and small landlords and rich peasants and even some middle peasants,
who were all formerly opposed to the peasant associations, are now vainly
seeking admission. Visiting various places, I often came across such people
who pleaded with me, "Mr. Committeeman from the provincial capital, please
be my sponsor!"

In the Ching Dynasty, the household census compiled by the local authorities
consisted of a regular register and "the other" register, the former for
honest people and the latter for burglars, bandits and similar undesirables.
In some places the peasants now use this method to scare those who formerly
opposed the associations. They say, "Put their names down in the other register!"

Afraid of being entered in the other register, such people try various devices
to gain admission into the peasant associations, on which their minds are
so set that they do not feel safe until their names are entered. But more
often than not they are turned down flat, and so they are always on tenterhooks;
with the doors of the association barred to them, they are like tramps without
a home or, in rural parlance, "mere trash". In short, what was looked down
upon four months ago as a "gang of peasants" has now become a most honourable
institution. Those who formerly prostrated themselves before the power of
the gentry now bow before the power of the peasants. No matter what their
identity, all admit that the world since last October is a different one.

"IT'S TERRIBLE!" OR "IT'S FINE!"


The peasants' revolt disturbed the gentry's sweet dreams. When the news from
the countryside reached the cities, it caused immediate uproar among the
gentry. Soon after my arrival in Changsha, I met all sorts of people and
picked up a good deal of gossip. From the middle social strata upwards to
the Kuomintang right-wingers, there was not a single person who did not sum
up the whole business in the phrase, "It's terrible!" Under the impact of
the views of the "It's terrible!" school then flooding the city, even quite
revolutionary-minded people became down-hearted as they pictured the events
in the countryside in their mind's eye; and they were unable to deny the
word "terrible". Even quite progressive people said, "Though terrible, it
is inevitable in a revolution." In short, nobody could altogether deny the
word "terrible". But, as already mentioned, the fact is that the great peasant
masses have risen to fulfil their historic mission and that the forces of
rural democracy have risen to overthrow the forces of rural feudalism. The
patriarchal-feudal class of local tyrants, evil gentry and lawless landlords
has formed the basis of autocratic government for thousands of years and
is the cornerstone of imperialism, warlordism and corrupt officialdom. To
overthrow these feudal forces is the real objective of the national revolution.
In a few months the peasants have accomplished what Dr. Sun Yat-sen wanted,
but failed, to accomplish in the forty years he devoted to the national
revolution. This is a marvelous feat never before achieved, not just in forty,
but in thousands of years. It's fine. It is not "terrible" at all. It is
anything but "terrible". "It's terrible!" is obviously a theory for combating
the rise of the peasants in the interests of the landlords; it is obviously
a theory of the landlord class for preserving the old order of feudalism
and obstructing the establishment of the new order of democracy, it is obviously
a counterrevolutionary theory. No revolutionary comrade should echo this
nonsense. If your revolutionary viewpoint is firmly established and if you
have been to the villages and looked around, you will undoubtedly feel thrilled
as never before. Countless thousands of the enslaved--the peasants--are striking
down the enemies who battened on their flesh. What the peasants are doing
is absolutely right, what they are doing is fine! "It's fine!" is the theory
of the peasants and of all other revolutionaries. Every revolutionary comrade
should know that the national revolution requires a great change in the
countryside. The Revolution of 1911 [3] did not bring about
this change, hence its failure. This change is now taking place, and it is
an important factor for the completion of the revolution. Every revolutionary
comrade must support it, or he will be taking the stand of counter-revolution.

THE QUESTION OF "GOING TOO FAR"


Then there is another section of people who say, "Yes, peasant associations
are necessary, but they are going rather too far." This is the opinion of
the middle-of-the-roaders. But what is the actual situation? True, the peasants
are in a sense "unruly" in the countryside. Supreme in authority, the peasant
association allows the landlord no say and sweeps away his prestige. This
amounts to striking the landlord down to the dust and keeping him there.
The peasants threaten, "We will put you in the other register!" They fine
the local tyrants and evil gentry, they demand contributions from them, and
they smash their sedan-chairs. People swarm into the houses of local tyrants
and evil gentry who are against the peasant association, slaughter their
pigs and consume their grain. They even loll for a minute or two on the
ivory-inlaid beds belonging to the young ladies in the households of the
local tyrants and evil gentry. At the slightest provocation they make arrests,
crown the arrested with tall paper hats, and parade them through the villages,
saying, "You dirty landlords, now you know who we are!" Doing whatever they
like and turning everything upside down, they have created a kind of terror
in the countryside. This is what some people call "going too far", or "exceeding
the proper limits in righting a wrong", or "really too much". Such talk may
seem plausible, but in fact it is wrong. First, the local tyrants, evil gentry
and lawless landlords have themselves driven the peasants to this. For ages
they have used their power to tyrannize over the peasants and trample them
underfoot; that is why the peasants have reacted so strongly. The most violent
revolts and the most serious disorders have invariably occurred in places
where the local tyrants, evil gentry and lawless landlords perpetrated the
worst outrages. The peasants are clear-sighted. Who is bad and who is not,
who is the worst and who is not quite so vicious, who deserves severe punishment
and who deserves to be let off lightly--the peasants keep clear accounts,
and very seldom has the punishment exceeded the crime. Secondly, a revolution
is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing
embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate,
kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. [4] A revolution
is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.
A rural revolution is a revolution by which the peasantry overthrows the
power of the feudal landlord class. Without using the greatest force, the
peasants cannot possibly overthrow the deep-rooted authority of the landlords
which has lasted for thousands of years. The rural areas need a mighty
revolutionary upsurge, for it alone can rouse the people in their millions
to become a powerful force. All the actions mentioned here which have been
labeled as "going too far" flow from the power of the peasants, which has
been called forth by the mighty revolutionary upsurge in the countryside.
It was highly necessary for such things to be done in the second period of
the peasant movement, the period of revolutionary action. In this period
it was necessary to establish the absolute authority of the peasants. It
was necessary to forbid malicious criticism of the peasant associations.
It was necessary to overthrow the whole authority of the gentry, to strike
them to the ground and keep them there. There is revolutionary significance
in all the actions which were labeled as "going too far" in this period.
To put it bluntly, it is necessary to create terror for a while in every
rural area, or otherwise it would be impossible to suppress the activities
of the counter-revolutionaries in the countryside or overthrow the authority
of the gentry. Proper limits have to be exceeded in order to right a wrong,
or else the wrong cannot be righted. [5] Those who talk
about the peasants "going too far" seem at first sight to be different from
those who say "It's terrible!" as mentioned earlier, but in essence they
proceed from the same standpoint and likewise voice a landlord theory that
upholds the interests of the privileged classes. Since this theory impedes
the rise of the peasant movement and so disrupts the revolution, we must
firmly oppose it.

THE "MOVEMENT OF THE RIFFRAFF"


The right-wing of the Kuomintang says, "The peasant movement is a movement
of the riffraff, of the lazy peasants." This view is current in Changsha.
When I was in the countryside, I heard the gentry say, "It is all right to
set up peasant associations, but the people now running them are no good.
They ought to be replaced!" This opinion comes to the same thing as what
the right-wingers are saying; according to both it is all right to have a
peasant movement (the movement is already in being and no one dare say
otherwise), but they say that the people running it are no good and they
particularly hate those in charge of the associations at the lower levels,
calling them "riffraff". In short, all those whom the gentry had despised,
those whom they had trodden into the dirt, people with no place in society,
people with no right to speak, have now audaciously lifted up their heads.
They have not only lifted up their heads but taken power into their hands.
They are now running the township peasant associations (at the lowest level),
which they have turned into something fierce and formidable. They have raised
their rough, work-soiled hands and laid them on the gentry. They tether the
evil gentry with ropes, crown them with tall paper-hats and parade them through
the villages. (In Hsiangtan and Hsianghsiang they call this "parading through
the township" and in Liling "parading through the fields".) Not a day passes
but they drum some harsh, pitiless words of denunciation into these gentry's
ears. They are issuing orders and are running everything. Those who used
to rank lowest now rank above everybody else; and so this is called "turning
things upside down".

VANGUARDS OF THE REVOLUTION


Where there are two opposite approaches to things and people, two opposite
views emerge. "It's terrible!" and "It's fine!", "riffraff" and "vanguards
of the revolution"--here are apt examples.

We said above that the peasants have accomplished a revolutionary task which
had been left unaccomplished for many years and have done an important job
for the national revolution. But has this great revolutionary task, this
important revolutionary work, been performed by all the peasants? No. There
are three kinds of peasants, the rich, the middle and the poor peasants.
The three live in different circumstances and so have different views about
the revolution In the first period, what appealed to the rich peasants was
the talk about the Northern Expeditionary Army's sustaining a crushing defeat
in Kiangsi, about Chiang Kai-shek's being wounded in the leg
[6] and flying back to Kwangtung, [7]
and about Wu Pei-fu's [8] recapturing Yuehchow. The peasant
associations would certainly not last and the Three People's Principles
[9] could never prevail, because they had never been heard
of before. Thus an official of the township peasant association (generally
one of the "riffraff" type) would walk into the house of a rich peasant,
register in hand, and say, "Will you please join the peasant association?"
How would the rich peasant answer? A tolerably well-behaved one would say,
"Peasant association? I have lived here for decades, tilling my land. I never
heard of such a thing before, yet I've managed to live all right. I advise
you to give it up!" A really vicious rich peasant would say, "Peasant
association! Nonsense! Association for getting your head chopped off! Don't
get people into trouble!" Yet, surprisingly enough, the peasant associations
have now been established several months, and have even dared to stand up
to the gentry. The gentry of the neighbourhood who refused to surrender their
opium pipes were arrested by the associations and paraded through the villages.
In the county towns, moreover, some big landlords were put to death, like
Yen Jung-chiu of Hsiangtan and Yang Chih-tse of Ninghsiang. On the anniversary
of the October Revolution, at the time of the anti-British rally and of the
great celebrations of the victory of the Northern Expedition, tens of thousands
of peasants in every township, holding high their banners, big and small,
along with their carrying-poles and hoes, demonstrated in massive, streaming
columns. It was only then that the rich peasants began to get perplexed and
alarmed. During the great victory celebrations of the Northern Expedition,
they learned that Kiukiang had been taken, that Chiang Kai-shek had not been
wounded in the leg and that Wu Pei-fu had been defeated after all. What is
more, they saw such slogans as "Long live the Three People's Principles!"
"Long live the peasant associations!" and "Long live the peasants!" clearly
written on the "red and green proclamations". "What?" wondered the rich peasants,
greatly perplexed and alarmed, "'Long live the peasants!' Are these people
now to be regarded as emperors?' [10]' So the peasant
associations are putting on grand airs. People from the associations say
to the rich peasants, "We'll enter you in the other register," or, "In another
month, the admission fee will be ten yuan a head!" Only under the impact
of all this are the rich peasants tardily joining the associations,
[11] some paying fifty cents or a yuan for admission (the
regular fee being a mere ten coppers), some securing admission only after
asking other people to put in a good word for them. But there are quite a
number of die-hards who have not joined to this day. When the rich peasants
join the associations, they generally enter the name of some sixty or seventy
year-old member of the family, for they are in constant dread of "conscription".
After joining, the rich peasants are not keen on doing any work for the
associations. They remain inactive throughout.

How about the middle peasants? Theirs is a vacillating attitude.

They think that the revolution will not bring them much good. They have rice
cooking in their pots and no creditors knocking on their doors at midnight.
They, too, judging a thing by whether it ever existed before, knit their
brows and think to themselves, "Can the peasant association really last?"
"Can the Three People's Principles prevail?" Their conclusion is, "Afraid
not!" They imagine it all depends on the will of Heaven and think, "A peasant
association? Who knows if Heaven wills it or not?" In the first period, people
from the association would call on a middle peasant, register in hand, and
say, "Will you please join the peasant association?" The middle peasant would
reply, "There's no hurry!" It was not until the second period, when the peasant
associations were already exercising great power, that the middle peasants
came in. They show up better in the associations than the rich peasants but
are not as yet very enthusiastic, they still want to wait and see. It is
essential for the peasant associations to get the middle peasants to join
and to do a good deal more explanatory work among them.

The poor peasants have always been the main force in the bitter fight in
the countryside. They have fought militantly through the two periods of
underground work and of open activity. They are the most responsive to Communist
Party leadership. They are deadly enemies of the camp of the local tyrants
and evil gentry and attack it without the slightest hesitation. "We joined
the peasant association long ago," they say to the rich peasants, "why are
you still hesitating?'! The rich peasants answer mockingly, "What is there
to keep you from joining? You people have neither a tile over your heads
nor a speck of land under your feet!" It is true the poor peasants are not
afraid of losing anything. Many of them really have "neither a tile over
their heads nor a speck of land under their feet". What, indeed, is there
to keep them from joining the associations? According to the survey of Changsha
County, the poor peasants comprise 70 per cent, the middle peasants 20 per
cent, and the landlords and the rich peasants 10 per cent of the population
in the rural areas. The 70 per cent, the poor peasants, may be sub-divided
into two categories, the utterly destitute and the less destitute. The utterly
destitute, [12] comprising 20 per cent, are the completely
dispossessed, that is, people who have neither land nor money, are without
any means of livelihood, and are forced to leave home and become mercenaries
or hired labourers or wandering beggars. The less destitute,
[13] the other 50 per cent, are the partially dispossessed,
that is, people with just a little land or a little money who eat up more
than they earn and live in toil and distress the year round, such as the
handicraftsmen, the tenant-peasants (not including the rich tenant-peasants)
and the semi-owner-peasants. This great mass of poor peasants, or altogether
70 per cent of the rural population, are the backbone of the peasant
associations, the vanguard in the overthrow of the feudal forces and the
heroes who have performed the great revolutionary task which for long years
was left undone. Without the poor peasant class (the "riffraff", as the gentry
call them), it would have been impossible to bring about the present
revolutionary situation in the countryside, or to overthrow the local tyrants
and evil gentry and complete the democratic revolution. The poor peasants,
being the most revolutionary group, have gained the leadership of the peasant
associations. In both the first and second periods almost all the chairmen
and committee members in the peasant associations at the lowest level were
poor peasants (of the officials in the township associations in Hengshan
County the utterly destitute comprise 50 per cent, the less destitute 40
per cent, and poverty-stricken intellectuals 10 per cent). Leadership by
the poor peasants is absolutely necessary. Without the poor peasants there
would be no revolution. To deny their role is to deny the revolution. To
attack them is to attack the revolution. They have never been wrong on the
general direction of the revolution. They have discredited the local tyrants
and evil gentry. They have beaten down the local tyrants and evil gentry,
big and small, and kept them underfoot. Many of their deeds in the period
of revolutionary action, which were labeled as "going too far", were in fact
the very things the revolution required. Some county governments, county
headquarters of the Kuomintang and county peasant associations in Hunan have
already made a number of mistakes; some have even sent soldiers to arrest
officials of the lower level associations at the landlords' request. A good
many chairmen and committee members of township associations in Hengshan
and Hsianghsiang Counties have been thrown in jail. This mistake is very
serious and feeds the arrogance of the reactionaries. To judge whether or
not it is a mistake, you have only to see how joyful the lawless landlords
become and how reactionary sentiments grow, wherever the chairmen or committee
members of local peasant associations are arrested. We must combat the
counter-revolutionary talk of a "movement of riffraff" and a "movement of
lazy peasants" and must be especially careful not to commit the error of
helping the local tyrants and evil gentry in their attacks on the poor peasant
class. Though a few of the poor peasant leaders undoubtedly did have
shortcomings, most of them have changed by now. They themselves are energetically
prohibiting gambling and suppressing banditry. Where the peasant association
is powerful, gambling has stopped altogether and banditry has vanished. In
some places it is literally true that people do not take any articles left
by the wayside and that doors are not bolted at night. According to the Hengshan
survey 85 per cent of the poor peasant leaders have made great progress and
have proved themselves capable and hard-working. Only 15 per cent retain
some bad habits. The most one can call these is "an unhealthy minority",
and we must not echo the local tyrants and evil gentry in undiscriminatingly
condemning them as "riffraff". This problem of the "unhealthy minority" can
be tackled only under the peasant associations' own slogan of "strengthen
discipline", by carrying on propaganda among the masses, by educating the
"unhealthy minority", and by tightening the associations' discipline; in
no circumstances should soldiers be arbitrarily sent to make such arrests
as would damage the prestige of the poor peasants and feed the arrogance
of the local tyrants and evil gentry. This point requires particular attention.

FOURTEEN GREAT ACHIEVEMENTS


Most critics of the peasant associations allege that they have done a great
many bad things. I have already pointed out that the peasants' attack on
the local tyrants and evil gentry is entirely revolutionary behaviour and
in no way blameworthy. The peasants have done a great many things, and
in order to answer people's criticism we must closely examine
all their activities, one by one, to see what they have actually done. I
have classified and summed up their activities of the last few months; in
all, the peasants under the leadership of the peasant associations have the
following fourteen great achievements to their credit.

1. ORGANIZING THE PEASANTS INTO PEASANT ASSOCIATIONS


This is the first great achievement of the peasants. In counties like Hsiangtan,
Hsianghsiang and Hengshan, nearly all the peasants are organized and there
is hardly a remote corner where they are not on the move; these are the best
places. In some counties, like Yiyang and Huajung, the bulk of the peasants
are organized, with only a small section remaining unorganized; these places
are in the second grade. In other counties, like Chengpu and Lingling, while
a small section is organized, the bulk of the peasants remain unorganized;
these places are in the third grade. Western Hunan, which is under the control
of Yuan Tsu-ming, [14] has not yet been reached by the
associations' propaganda, and in many of its counties the peasants are completely
unorganized; these form a fourth grade. Roughly speaking, the counties in
central Hunan, with Changsha as the centre, are the most advanced, those
in southern Hunan come second, and western Hunan is only just beginning to
organize. According to the figures compiled by the provincial peasant association
last November, organizations with a total membership of 1,367,727 have been
set up in thirty-seven of the province's seventy-five counties. Of these
members about one million were organized during October and November when
the power of the associations rose high, while up to September the membership
had only been 300,000-400,000. Then came the two months of December and January,
and the peasant movement continued its brisk growth. By the end of January
the membership must have reached at least two million. As a family generally
enters only one name when joining and has an average of five members, the
mass following must be about ten million. This astonishing and accelerating
rate of expansion explains why the local tyrants, evil gentry and corrupt
officials have been isolated, why the public has been amazed at how completely
the world has changed since the peasant movement, and why a great revolution
has been wrought in the countryside. This is the first great achievement
of the peasants under the leadership of their associations.

2. HITTING THE LANDLORDS POLITICALLY


Once the peasants have their organization, the first thing they do is to
smash the political prestige and power of the landlord class, and especially
of the local tyrants and evil gentry, that is, to pull down landlord authority
and build up peasant authority in rural society. This is a most serious and
vital struggle. It is the pivotal struggle in the second period, the period
of revolutionary action. Without victory in this struggle, no victory is
possible in the economic struggle to reduce rent and interest, to secure
land and other means of production, and so on. In many places in Hunan like
Hsianghsiang, Hengshan and Hsiangtan Counties, this is of course no problem
since the authority of the landlords has been overturned and the peasants
constitute the sole authority. But in counties like Liling there are still
some places (such as Liling's western and southern districts) where the authority
of the landlords seems weaker than that of the peasants but, because the
political struggle has not been sharp, is in fact surreptitiously competing
with it. In such places it is still too early to say that the peasants have
gained political victory; they must wage the political struggle more vigorously
until the landlords' authority is completely smashed. All in all, the methods
used by the peasants to hit the landlords politically are as follows:

Checking the accounts. More often than not the local tyrants and
evil gentry have helped themselves to public money passing through their
hands, and their books are not in order. Now the peasants are using the checking
of accounts as an occasion to bring down a great many of the local tyrants
and evil gentry. In many places committees for checking accounts have been
established for the express purpose of settling financial scores with them,
and the first sign of such a committee makes them shudder. Campaigns of this
kind have been carried out in all the counties where the peasant movement
is active; they are important not so much for recovering money as for publicizing
the crimes of the local tyrants and evil gentry and for knocking them down
from their political and social positions.

Imposing fines. The peasants work out fines for such offences as
irregularities revealed by the checking of accounts, past outrages against
the peasants, current activities which undermine the peasant associations,
violations of the ban on gambling and refusal to surrender opium pipes. This
local tyrant must pay so much, that member of the evil gentry so much, the
sums ranging from tens to thousands of yuan Naturally, a man who has been
fined by the peasants completely loses face.

Levying contributions. The unscrupulous rich landlords are made
to contribute for poor relief, for the organization of co-operatives or peasant
credit societies, or for other purposes. Though milder than fines, these
contributions are also a form of punishment. To avoid trouble, quite a number
of landlords make voluntary contributions to the peasant associations.

Minor protests. When someone harms a peasant association by word
or deed and the offence is a minor one, the peasants collect in a crowd and
swarm into the offender's house to remonstrate with him. He is usually let
off after writing a pledge to "cease and desist", in which he explicitly
undertakes to stop defaming the peasant association in the future.

Major demonstrations. A big crowd is rallied to demonstrate against
a local tyrant or one of the evil gentry who is an enemy of the association.
The demonstrators eat at the offender's house, slaughtering his pigs and
consuming his grain as a matter of course. Quite a few such cases have occurred.
There was a case recently at Machiaho, Hsiangtan County, where a crowd of
fifteen thousand peasants went to the houses of six of the evil gentry and
demonstrated; the whole affair lasted four days during which more than 130
pigs were killed and eaten. After such demonstrations, the peasants usually
impose fines.

"Crowning" the landlords and parading them through the villages. This
sort of thing is very common. A tall paper-hat is stuck on the head of one
of the local tyrants or evil gentry, bearing the words "Local tyrant so-and-so"
or "So-and-so of the evil gentry". He is led by a rope and escorted with
big crowds in front and behind. Sometimes brass gongs are beaten and flags
waved to attract people's attention. This form of punishment more than any
other makes the local tyrants and evil gentry tremble. Anyone who has once
been crowned with a tall paper-hat loses face altogether and can never again
hold up his head. Hence many of the rich prefer being fined to wearing the
tall hat. But wear it they must, if the peasants insist. One ingenious township
peasant association arrested an obnoxious member of the gentry and announced
that he was to be crowned that very day. The man turned blue with fear. Then
the association decided not to crown him that day. They argued that if he
were crowned right away, he would become case-hardened and no longer afraid,
and that it would be better to let him go home and crown him some other day.
Not knowing when he would be crowned, the man was in daily suspense, unable
to sit down or sleep at ease.

Locking up the landlords in the county jail. This is a heavier
punishment than wearing the tall paper-hat. A local tyrant or one of the
evil gentry is arrested and sent to the county jail; he is locked up and
the county magistrate has to try him and punish him. Today the people who
are locked up are no longer the same. Formerly it was the gentry who sent
peasants to be locked up, now it is the other way round.

"Banishment". The peasants have no desire to banish the most notorious
criminals among the local tyrants and evil gentry, but would rather arrest
or execute them. Afraid of being arrested or executed, they run away. In
counties where the peasant movement is well developed, almost all the important
local tyrants and evil gentry have fled, and this amounts to banishment.
Among them, the top ones have fled to Shanghai, those of the second rank
to Hankow, those of the third to Changsha, and of the fourth to the county
towns. Of all the fugitive local tyrants and evil gentry, those who have
fled to Shanghai are the safest. Some of those who fled to Hankow, like the
three from Huajung, were eventually captured and brought back. Those who
fled to Changsha are in still greater danger of being seized at any moment
by students in the provincial capital who hail from their counties; I myself
saw two captured in Changsha. Those who have taken refuge in the county towns
are only of the fourth rank, and the peasantry, having many eyes and ears,
can easily track them down. The financial authorities once explained the
difficulties encountered by the Hunan Provincial Government in raising money
by the fact that the peasants were banishing the well-to-do, which gives
some idea of the extent to which the local tyrants and evil gentry are not
tolerated in their home villages.

Execution. This is confined to the worst local tyrants and evil
gentry and is carried out by the peasants jointly with other sections of
the people. For instance, Yang Chih-tse of Ninghsiang, Chou Chia-kan of Yuehyang
and Fu Tao-nan and Sun Po-chu of Huajung were shot by the government authorities
at the insistence of the peasants and other sections of the people. In the
case of Yen Jung-chiu of Hsiangtan, the peasants and other sections of the
people compelled the magistrate to agree to hand him over, and the peasants
themselves executed him. Liu Chao of Ninghsiang was killed by the peasants.
The execution of Peng Chih-fan of Liling and Chou Tien-chueh and Tsao Yun
of Yiyang is pending, subject to the decision of the "special tribunal for
trying local tyrants and evil gentry". The execution of one such big landlord
reverberates through a whole county and is very effective in eradicating
the remaining evils of feudalism. Every county has these major tyrants, some
as many as several dozen and others at least a few, and the only effective
way of suppressing the reactionaries is to execute at least a few in each
county who are guilty of the most heinous crimes. When the local tyrants
and evil gentry were at the height of their power, they literally slaughtered
peasants without batting an eyelid. Ho Maichuan, for ten years head of the
defence corps in the town of Hsinkang, Changsha County, was personally
responsible for killing almost a thousand poverty-stricken peasants, which
he euphemistically described as "executing bandits". In my native county
of Hsiangtan, Tang Chun-yen and Lo Shu-lin who headed the defence corps in
the town of Yintien have killed more than fifty people and buried four alive
in the fourteen years since 1913. Of the more than fifty they murdered, the
first two were perfectly innocent beggars. Tang Chunyen said, "Let me make
a start by killing a couple of beggars!" and so these two lives were snuffed
out. Such was the cruelty of the local tyrants and evil gentry in former
days, such was the White terror they created in the countryside, and now
that the peasants have risen and shot a few and created just a little terror
in suppressing the counter-revolutionaries, is there any reason for saying
they should not do so?

3. HITTING THE LANDLORDS ECONOMICALLY


Prohibition on sending grain out of the area, forcing up grain prices,
and hoarding and cornering. This is one of the great events of recent
months in the economic struggle of the Hunan peasants. Since last October
the poor peasants have prevented the outflow of the grain of the landlords
and rich peasants and have banned the forcing up of grain prices and hoarding
and cornering. As a result, the poor peasants have fully achieved their
objective; the ban on the outflow of grain is watertight, grain prices have
fallen considerably, and hoarding and cornering have disappeared.

Prohibition on increasing rents and deposits;
[15] agitation for reduced rents and deposits. Last
July and August, when the peasant associations were still weak, the landlords,
following their long-established practice of maximum exploitation, served
notice one after another on their tenants that rents and deposits would be
increased. But by October, when the peasant associations had grown considerably
in strength and had all come out against the raising of rents and deposits,
the landlords dared not breathe another word on the subject. From November
onwards, as the peasants have gained ascendancy over the landlords they have
taken the further step of agitating for reduced rents and deposits. What
a pity, they say, that the peasant associations were not strong enough when
rents were being paid last autumn, or we could have reduced them then. The
peasants are doing extensive propaganda for rent reduction in the coming
autumn, and the landlords are asking how the reductions are to be carried
out. As for the reduction of deposits, this is already under way in Hengshan
and other counties.

Prohibition on cancelling tenancies. In July and August of last
year there were still many instances of landlords cancelling tenancies and
re-letting the land. But after October nobody dared cancel a tenancy. Today,
the cancelling of tenancies and the re-letting of land are quite out of the
question; all that remains as something of a problem is whether a tenancy
can be cancelled if the landlord wants to cultivate the land himself. In
some places even this is not allowed by the peasants. In others the cancelling
of a tenancy may be permitted if the landlord wants to cultivate the land
himself, but then the problem of unemployment among the tenant-peasants arises.
There is as yet no uniform way of solving this problem.

Reduction of interest. Interest has been generally reduced in Anhua,
and there have been reductions in other counties, too. But wherever the peasant
associations are powerful, rural money-lending has virtually disappeared,
the landlords having completely "stopped lending" for fear that the money
will be "communized". What is currently called reduction of interest is confined
to old loans. Not only is the interest on such old loans reduced, but the
creditor is actually forbidden to press for the repayment of the principal.
The poor peasant replies, "Don't blame me. The year is nearly over. I'll
pay you back next year."

4. OVERTHROWING THE FEUDAL RULE OF THE LOCAL TYRANTS AND EVIL
  GENTRY --SMASHING THE TU AND TUAN
  [16].


The old organs of political power in the tu and tuan (i.e.,
the district and the township), and especially at the tu level,
just below the county level, used to be almost exclusively in the hands of
the local tyrants and evil gentry. The tu had jurisdiction over
a population of from ten to fifty or sixty thousand people, and had its own
armed forces such as the township defence corps, its own fiscal powers such
as the power to levy taxes per mou [17] of land, and its
own judicial powers such as the power to arrest, imprison, try and punish
the peasants at will. The evil gentry who ran these organs were virtual monarchs
of the countryside. Comparatively speaking, the peasants were not so much
concerned with the president of the Republic, the provincial military governor
[18] or the county magistrate; their real "bosses" were
these rural monarchs. A mere snort from these people, and the peasants knew
they had to watch their step. As a consequence of the present revolt in the
countryside the authority of the landlord class has generally been struck
down, and the organs of rural administration dominated by the local tyrants
and evil gentry have naturally collapsed in its wake. The heads of the tu
and the tuan all steer clear of the people, dare not show their
faces and push all local matters on to the peasant associations. They put
people off with the remark, "It is none of my business!"

Whenever their conversation turns to the heads of the tu and the
tuan, the peasants say angrily, "That bunch! They are finished!"

Yes, the term "finished" truly describes the state of the old organs of rural
administration wherever the storm of revolution has raged.

5. OVERTHROWING THE ARMED FORCES OF THE LANDLORDS AND ESTABLISHING
  THOSE OF THE PEASANTS


The armed forces of the landlord class were smaller in central Hunan than
in the western and southern parts of the province. An average of 600 rifles
for each county would make a total of 45,000 rifles for all the seventy-five
counties; there may, in fact, be more. In the southern and central parts
where the peasant movement is well developed, the landlord class cannot hold
its own because of the tremendous momentum with which the peasants have risen,
and its armed forces have largely capitulated to the peasant associations
and taken the side of the peasants; examples of this are to be found in such
counties as Ninghsiang, Pingkiang, Liuyang, Changsha, Liling, Hsiangtan,
Hsianghsiang, Anhua, Hengshan and Hengyang. In some counties such as Paoching,
a small number of the landlords' armed forces are taking a neutral stand,
though with a tendency to capitulate. Another small section are opposing
the peasant associations, but the peasants are attacking them and may wipe
them out before long, as, for example, in such counties as Yichang, Linwu
and Chiaho. The armed forces thus taken over from the reactionary landlords
are all being reorganized into a "standing household militia"
[19] and placed under the new organs of rural self-government,
which are organs of the political power of the peasantry. Taking over these
old armed forces is one way in which the peasants are building up their own
armed forces. A new way is through the setting up of spear corps under the
peasant associations. The spears have pointed, double-edged blades mounted
on long shafts, and there are now 100,000 of these weapons in the county
of Hsianghsiang alone. Other counties like Hsiangtan, Hengshan, Liling and
Changsha have 70,000-80,000, or 50,000-60.000. or 30,000-40,000 each. Every
county where there is a peasant movement has a rapidly growing spear corps.
These peasants thus armed form an "irregular household militia". This multitude
equipped with spears, which is larger than the old armed forces mentioned
above, is a new-born armed power the mere sight of which makes the local
tyrants and evil gentry tremble. The revolutionary authorities in Hunan should
see to it that it is built up on a really extensive scale among the more
than twenty million peasants in the seventy-five counties of the province,
that every peasant, whether young or in his prime, possesses a spear, and
that no restrictions are imposed as though a spear were something dreadful.
Anyone who is scared at the sight of the spear corps is indeed a weakling!
Only the local tyrants and evil gentry are frightened of them, but no
revolutionaries should take fright.

6. OVERTHROWING THE POLITICAL POWER OF THE COUNTY MAGISTRATE
  AND HIS BAILIFFS


That county government cannot be clean until the peasants rise up was proved
some time ago in Haifeng, Kwangtung Province. Now we have added proof,
particularly in Hunan. In a county where power is in the hands of the local
tyrants and evil gentry, the magistrate, whoever he may be, is almost invariably
a corrupt official. In a county where the peasants have risen there is clean
government, whoever the magistrate. In the counties I visited, the magistrates
had to consult the peasant associations on everything in advance. In counties
where the peasant power was very strong, the word of the peasant association
worked miracles. If it demanded the arrest of a local tyrant in the morning,
the magistrate dared not delay till noon; if it demanded arrest by noon,
he dared not delay till the afternoon. When the power of the peasants was
just beginning to make itself felt in the countryside, the magistrate worked
in league with the local tyrants and evil gentry against the peasants. When
the peasants' power grew till it matched that of the landlords, the magistrate
took the position of trying to accommodate both the landlords and the peasants,
accepting some of the peasant association's suggestions while rejecting others.
The remark that the word of the peasant association "works miracles" applies
only when the power of the landlords has been completely beaten down by that
of the peasants. At present the political situation in such counties as
Hsianghsiang, Hsiangtan, Liling and Hengshan is as follows:

(1) All decisions are made by a joint council consisting of the magistrate
and the representatives of the revolutionary mass organizations. The
council is convened by the magistrate and meets in his office. In some counties
it is called the "joint council of public bodies and the local government",
and in others the "council of county affairs". Besides the magistrate himself,
the people attending are the representatives of the county peasant association,
trade union council, merchant association, women's association, school staff
association, student association and Kuomintang headquarters.
[20] At such council meetings the magistrate is influenced
by the views of the public organizations and invariably does their bidding.
The adoption of a democratic committee system of county government should
not, therefore, present much of a problem in Hunan. The present county
governments are already quite democratic both in form and substance. This
situation has been brought about only in the last two or three months, that
is, since the peasants have risen all over the countryside and overthrown
the power of the local tyrants and evil gentry. It has now come about that
the magistrates, seeing their old props collapse and needing other props
to retain their posts, have begun to curry favour with the public organizations.

(2) The judicial assistant has scarcely any cases to handle. The
judicial system in Hunan remains one in which the county magistrate is
concurrently in charge of judicial affairs, with an assistant to help him
in handling cases. To get rich, the magistrate and his underlings used to
rely entirely on collecting taxes and levies, procuring men and provisions
for the armed forces, and extorting money in civil and criminal lawsuits
by confounding right and wrong, the last being the most regular and reliable
source of income. In the last few months, with the downfall of the local
tyrants and evil gentry, all the legal pettifoggers have disappeared. What
is more, the peasants' problems, big and small, are now all settled in the
peasant associations at the various levels. Thus the county judicial assistant
simply has nothing to do. The one in Hsianghsiang told me, "When there were
no peasant associations, an average of sixty civil or criminal suits were
brought to the county government each day; now it receives an average of
only four or five a day." So it is that the purses of the magistrates and
their underlings perforce remain empty.

(3) The armed guards, the police and the bailiffs all keep out of the
way and dare not go near the villages to practice their extortions. In
the past the villagers were afraid of the townspeople, but now the townspeople
are afraid of the villagers. In particular the vicious curs kept by the county
government--the police, the armed guards and the bailiffs--are afraid of
going to the villages, or if they do so, they no longer dare to practice
their extortions. They tremble at the sight of the peasants' spears.

7. OVERTHROWING THE CLAN AUTHORITY OF THE ANCESTRAL TEMPLES
  AND CLAN ELDERS, THE RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY OF TOWN AND VILLAGE GODS, AND THE
  MASCULINE AUTHORITY OF HUSBANDS


A man in China is usually subjected to the domination of three systems of
authority: (1) the state system (political authority), ranging from the national,
provincial and county government down to that of the township; (2) the den
system (clan authority), ranging from the central ancestral temple and its
branch temples down to the head of the household; and (3) the supernatural
system (religious authority), ranging from the King of Hell down to the town
and village gods belonging to the nether world, and from the Emperor of Heaven
down to all the various gods and spirits belonging to the celestial world.
As for women, in addition to being dominated by these three systems of authority,
they are also dominated by the men (the authority of the husband). These
four authorities--political, clan, religious and masculine--are the embodiment
of the whole feudal-patriarchal system and ideology, and are the four thick
ropes binding the Chinese people, particularly the peasants. How the peasants
have overthrown the political authority of the landlords in the countryside
has been described above. The political authority of the landlords is the
backbone of all the other systems of authority. With that overturned, the
clan authority, the religious authority and the authority of the husband
all begin to totter. Where the peasant association is powerful, the den elders
and administrators of temple funds no longer dare oppress those lower in
the clan hierarchy or embezzle clan funds. The worst clan elders and
administrators, being local tyrants, have been thrown out. No one any longer
dares to practice the cruel corporal and capital punishments that used to
be inflicted in the ancestral temples, such as flogging, drowning and burying
alive. The old rule barring women and poor people from the banquets in the
ancestral temples has also been broken. The women of Paikno in Hengshan County
gathered in force and swarmed into their ancestral temple, firmly planted
their backsides in the seats and joined in the eating and drinking, while
the venerable den bigwigs had willy-nilly to let them do as they pleased.
At another place, where poor peasants had been excluded from temple banquets,
a group of them flocked in and ate and drank their fill, while the local
tyrants and evil gentry and other long-gowned gentlemen all took to their
heels in fright. Everywhere religious authority totters as the peasant movement
develops. In many places the peasant associations have taken over the temples
of the gods as their offices. Everywhere they advocate the appropriation
of temple property in order to start peasant schools and to defray the expenses
of the associations, calling it "public revenue from superstition". In Liling
County, prohibiting superstitious practices and smashing idols have become
quite the vogue. In its northern districts the peasants have prohibited the
incense-burning processions to propitiate the god of pestilence. There were
many idols in the Taoist temple at Fupoling in Lukou, but when extra room
was needed for the district headquarters of the Kuomintang, they were all
piled up in a corner, big and small together, and no peasant raised any
objection. Since then, sacrifices to the gods, the performance of religious
rites and the offering of sacred lamps have rarely been practised when a
death occurs in a family. Because the initiative in this matter was taken
by the chairman of the peasant association, Sun Hsiao-shan, he is hated by
the local Taoist priests. In the Lungfeng Nunnery in the North Third District,
the peasants and primary school teachers chopped up the wooden idols and
actually used the wood to cook meat. More than thirty idols in the Tungfu
Monastery in the Southern District were burned by the students and peasants
together, and only two small images of Lord Pao [21] were
snatched up by an old peasant who said, "Don't commit a sin !" In places
where the power of the peasants is predominant, only the older peasants and
the women still believe in the gods, the younger peasants no longer doing
so. Since the latter control the associations, the overthrow of religious
authority and the eradication of superstition are going on everywhere. As
to the authority of the husband, this has always been weaker among the poor
peasants because, out of economic necessity, their womenfolk have to do more
manual labour than the women of the richer classes and therefore have more
say and greater power of decision in family matters. With the increasing
bankruptcy of the rural economy in recent years, the basis for men's domination
over women has already been weakened. With the rise of the peasant movement,
the women in many places have now begun to organize rural women's associations;
the opportunity has come for them to lift up their heads, and the authority
of the husband is getting shakier every day. In a word, the whole
feudal-patriarchal system and ideology is tottering with the growth of the
peasants' power. At the present time, however, the peasants are concentrating
on destroying the landlords' political authority. Wherever it has been wholly
destroyed, they are beginning to press their attack in the three other spheres
of the clan, the gods and male domination. But such attacks have only just
begun, and there can be no thorough overthrow of all three until the peasants
have won complete victory in the economic struggle. Therefore, our present
task is to lead the peasants to put their greatest efforts into the political
struggle, so that the landlords' authority is entirely overthrown. The economic
struggle should follow immediately, so that the land problem and the other
economic problems of the poor peasants may be fundamentally solved. As for
the den system, superstition, and inequality between men and women, their
abolition will follow as a natural consequence of victory in the political
and economic struggles. If too much of an effort is made, arbitrarily and
prematurely, to abolish these things, the local tyrants and evil gentry will
seize the pretext to put about such counter-revolutionary propaganda as "the
peasant association has no piety towards ancestors", "the peasant association
is blasphemous and is destroying religion" and "the peasant association stands
for the communization of wives", all for the purpose of undermining the peasant
movement. A case in point is the recent events at Hsianghsiang in Hunan and
Yanghsin in Hupeh, where the landlords exploited the opposition of some peasants
to smashing idols. It is the peasants who made the idols, and when the time
comes they will cast the idols aside with their own hands; there is no need
for anyone else to do it for them prematurely. The Communist Party's propaganda
policy in such matters should be, "Draw the bow without shooting, just indicate
the motions." [22] It is for the peasants themselves to
cast aside the idols, pull down the temples to the martyred virgins and the
arches to the chaste and faithful widows; it is wrong for anybody else to
do it for them.

While I was in the countryside, I did some propaganda against superstition
among the peasants. I said:

"If you believe in the Eight Characters, [23] you hope
for good luck; if you believe in geomancy, [24] you hope
to benefit from the location of your ancestral graves. This year within the
space of a few months the local tyrants, evil gentry and corrupt officials
have all toppled from their pedestals. Is it possible that until a few months
ago they all had good luck and enjoyed the benefit of well-sited ancestral
graves, while suddenly in the last few months their luck has turned and their
ancestral graves have ceased to exert a beneficial influence? The local tyrants
and evil gentry jeer at your peasant association and say, 'How odd! Today,
the world is a world of committeemen. Look, you can't even go to pass water
without bumping into a committeeman!' Quite true, the towns and the villages,
the trade unions and the peasant associations, the Kuomintang and the Communist
Party, all without exception have their executive committee members--it is
indeed a world of committeemen. But is this due to the Eight Characters and
the location of the ancestral graves? How strange! The Eight Characters of
all the poor wretches in the countryside have suddenly turned auspicious!
And their ancestral graves have suddenly started exerting beneficial influences!
The gods? Worship them by all means. But if you had only Lord Kuan
[25] and the Goddess of Mercy and no peasant association,
could you have overthrown the local tyrants and evil gentry? The gods and
goddesses are indeed miserable objects. You have worshipped them for centuries,
and they have not overthrown a single one of the local tyrants or evil gentry
for you! Now you want to have your rent reduced. Let me ask, how will you
go about it? Will you believe in the gods or in the peasant association?"

My words made the peasants roar with laughter.

8. SPREADING POLITICAL PROPAGANDA


Even if ten thousand schools of law and political science had been opened,
could they have brought as much political education to the people, men and
women, young and old, all the way into the remotest corners of the countryside,
as the peasant associations have done in so short a time? I don't think they
could. "Down with imperialism!" "Down with the warlords!" "Down with the
corrupt officials!" "Down with the local tyrants and evil gentry!"--these
political slogans have grown wings, they have found their way to the young,
the middle-aged and the old, to the women and children in countless villages,
they have penetrated into their minds and are on their lips. For instance,
watch a group of children at play. If one gets angry with another, if he
glares, stamps his foot and shakes his fist, you will then immediately hear
from the other the shrill cry of "Down with imperialism!"

In the Hsiangtan area, when the children who pasture the cattle get into
a fight, one will act as Tang Sheng-chih, and the other as Yeh Kai-hsin;
[26] when one is defeated and runs away, with the other
chasing him, it is the pursuer who is Tang Sheng-chih and the pursued Yeh
Kai-hsin. As to the song "Down with the Imperialist Powers!" of course almost
every child in the towns can sing it, and now many village children can sing
it too.

Some of the peasants can also recite Dr. Sun Yat-sen's Testament. They pick
out the terms "freedom", "equality", "the Three People's Principles" and
"unequal treaties" and apply them, if rather crudely, in their daily life.
When somebody who looks like one of the gentry encounters a peasant and stands
on his dignity, refusing to make way along a pathway, the peasant will say
angrily, "Hey, you local tyrant, don't you know the Three People's Principles?"
Formerly when the peasants from the vegetable farms on the outskirts of Changsha
entered the city to sell their produce, they used to be pushed around by
the police. Now they have found a weapon, which is none other than the Three
People's Principles. When a policeman strikes or swears at a peasant selling
vegetables, the peasant immediately answers back by invoking the Three People's
Principles and that shuts the policeman up. Once in Hsiangtan when a district
peasant association and a township peasant association could not see eye
to eye, the chairman of the township association declared, "Down with the
district peasant association's unequal treaties!"

The spread of political propaganda throughout the rural areas is entirely
an achievement of the Communist Party and the peasant associations. Simple
slogans, cartoons and speeches have produced such a widespread and speedy
effect among the peasants that every one of them seems to have been through
a political school. According to the reports of comrades engaged in rural
work, political propaganda was very extensive at the time of the three great
mass rallies, the anti-British demonstration, the celebration of the October
Revolution and the victory celebration for the Northern Expedition. On these
occasions, political propaganda was conducted extensively wherever there
were peasant associations, arousing the whole countryside with tremendous
effect. From now on care should be taken to use every opportunity gradually
to enrich the content and clarify the meaning of those simple slogans.

9. PEASANT BANS AND PROHIBITIONS


When the peasant associations, under Communist Party leadership, establish
their authority in the countryside, the peasants begin to prohibit or restrict
the things they dislike. Gaming, gambling and opium-smoking are the three
things that are most strictly forbidden.

Gaming. Where the peasant association is powerful, mahjong, dominoes
and card games are completely banned.

The peasant association in the 14th District of Hsianghsiang burned two
basketfuls of mahjong sets.

If you go to the countryside, you will find none of these games played; anyone
who violates the ban is promptly and strictly punished.

Gambling. Former hardened gamblers are now themselves suppressing
gambling; this abuse, too, has been swept away in places where the peasant
association is powerful.

Opium-smoking. The prohibition is extremely strict. When the peasant
association orders the surrender of opium pipes, no one dares to raise the
least objection. In Liling County one of the evil gentry who did not surrender
his pipes was arrested and paraded through the villages.

The peasants' campaign to "disarm the opium-smokers'! is no less impressive
than the disarming of the troops of Wu Pei-fu and Sun Chuan-fang
[27] by the Northern Expeditionary Army. Quite a number
of venerable fathers of officers in the revolutionary army, old men who were
opium-addicts and inseparable from their pipes, have been disarmed by the
"emperors" (as the peasants are called derisively by the evil gentry). The
"emperors" have banned not only the growing and smoking of opium, but also
trafficking in it. A great deal of the opium transported from Kweichow to
Kiangsi via the counties of Paoching, Hsianghsiang, Yuhsien and Liling has
been intercepted on the way and burned. This has affected government revenues.
As a result, out of consideration for the army's need for funds in the Northern
Expedition, the provincial peasant association ordered the associations at
the lower levels "temporarily to postpone the ban on opium traffic". This,
however, has upset and displeased the peasants.

There are many other things besides these three which the peasants have
prohibited or restricted, the following being some examples:

The flower drum. Vulgar performances are forbidden in many places.

Sedan-chairs In many counties, especially Hsianghsiang, there have
been cases of smashing sedan-chairs. The peasants, detesting the people who
use this conveyance, are always ready to smash the chairs, but the peasant
associations forbid them to do so. Association officials tell the peasants,
"If you smash the chairs, you only save the rich money and lose the carriers
their jobs. Will that not hurt our own people?" Seeing the point, the peasants
have worked out a new tactic--considerably to increase the fares charged
by the chair carriers so as to penalize the rich.

Distilling and sugar-making. The use of grain for distilling spirits
and making sugar is everywhere prohibited, and the distillers and sugar-refiners
are constantly complaining. Distilling is not banned in Futienpu, Hengshan
County, but prices are fixed very low, and the wine and spirits dealers,
seeing no prospect of profit, have had to stop it.

Pigs. The number of pigs a family can keep is limited, for pigs
consume grain.

Chickens and ducks. In Hsianghsiang County the raising of chickens
and ducks is prohibited, but the women object. In Hengshan County, each family
in Yangtang is allowed to keep only three, and in Futienpu five. In many
places the raising of ducks is completely banned, for ducks not only consume
grain but also ruin the rice plants and so are worse than chickens.

Feasts. Sumptuous feasts are generally forbidden. In Shaoshan, Hsiangtan
County, it has been decided that guests are to be served with only three
kinds of animal food, namely, chicken, fish and pork. It is also forbidden
to serve bamboo shoots, kelp and lentil noodles. In Hengshan County it has
been resolved that eight dishes and no more may be served at a banquet.
[28] Only five dishes are allowed in the East Third District
in Liling County, and only three meat and three vegetable dishes in the North
Second District, while in the West Third District New Year feasts are forbidden
entirely. In Hsianghsiang County, there is a ban on all "egg-cake feasts",
which are by no means sumptuous. When a family in the Second District of
Hsianghsiang gave an "egg-cake feast" at a son's wedding, the peasants, seeing
the ban violated, swarmed into the house and broke up the celebration. In
the town of Chiamo, Hsianghsiang County, the people have refrained from eating
expensive foods and use only fruit when offering ancestral sacrifices.

Oxen. Oxen are a treasured possession of the peasants. "Slaughter
an ox in this life and you will be an ox in the next" has become almost a
religious tenet; oxen must never be killed. Before the peasants had power,
they could only appeal to religious taboo in opposing the slaughter of cattle
and had no means of banning it. Since the rise of the peasant associations
their jurisdiction has extended even to the cattle, and they have prohibited
the slaughter of cattle in the towns. Of the six butcheries in the county
town of Hsiangtan, five are now closed and the remaining one slaughters only
enfeebled or disabled animals. The slaughter of cattle is totally prohibited
throughout the county of Hengshan. A peasant whose ox broke a leg consulted
the peasant association before he dared kill it. When the Chamber of Commerce
of Chuchow rashly slaughtered a cow, the peasants came into town and demanded
an explanation, and the chamber, besides paying a fine, had to let off
firecrackers by way of apology.

Tramps and vagabonds. A resolution passed in Liling County prohibited
the drumming of New Year greetings or the chanting of praises to the local
deities or the singing of lotus rhymes. Various other counties have similar
prohibitions, or these practices have disappeared of themselves, as no one
observes them any more. The "beggar-bullies" or "vagabonds" who used to be
extremely aggressive now have no alternative but to submit to the peasant
associations. In Shaoshan, Hsiangtan County, the vagabonds used to make the
temple of the Rain God their regular haunt and feared nobody, but since the
rise of the associations they have stolen away. The peasant association in
Huti Township in the same county caught three such tramps and made them carry
clay for the brick kilns. Resolutions have been passed prohibiting the wasteful
customs associated with New Year calls and gifts.

Besides these, many other minor prohibitions have been introduced in various
places, such as the Liling prohibitions on incense-burning processions to
propitiate the god of pestilence, on buying preserves and fruit for ritual
presents, burning ritual paper garments during the Festival of Spirits and
pasting up good-luck posters at the New Year At Kushui in Hsianghsiang County,
there is a prohibition even on smoking water-pipes. In the Second District,
letting off firecrackers and ceremonial guns is forbidden, with a fine of
1.20 yuan for the former and 2.40 yuan for the latter. Religious rites for
the dead are prohibited in the 7th and 20th Districts. In the 18th District,
it is forbidden to make funeral gifts of money. Things like these, which
defy enumeration, may be generally called peasant bans and prohibitions.

They are of great significance in two respects. First, they represent a revolt
against bad social customs, such as gaming, gambling opium-smoking. These
customs arose out of the rotten political environment of the landlord class
and are swept away once its authority is overthrown. Second, the prohibitions
are a form of self-defence against exploitation by city merchants; such are
the prohibitions on feasts and on buying preserves and fruit for ritual presents.
Manufactured goods are extremely dear and agricultural products are extremely
cheap, the peasants are impoverished and ruthlessly exploited by the merchants
and they must therefore encourage frugality to protect themselves. As for
the ban on sending grain out of the area, it is imposed to prevent the price
from rising because the poor peasants have not enough to feed themselves
and have to buy grain on the market. The reason for all this is the peasants'
poverty and the contradictions between town and country; it is not a matter
of their rejecting manufactured goods or trade between town and country in
order to uphold the so-called Doctrine of Oriental Culture.
[29] To protect themselves economically, the peasants
must organize consumers' co-operatives for the collective buying of goods.
It is also necessary for the government to help the peasant associations
establish credit (loan) co-operatives. If these things were done, the peasants
would naturally find it unnecessary to ban the outflow of grain as a method
of keeping down the price, nor would they have to prohibit the inflow of
certain manufactured goods in economic self-defence.

10. ELIMINATING BANDITRY


In my opinion, no ruler in any dynasty from Yu, Tang, Wen and Wu down to
the Ching emperors and the presidents of the Republic has ever shown as much
prowess in eliminating banditry as have the peasant associations today. Wherever
the peasant associations are powerful there is not a trace of banditry.
Surprisingly enough, in many places even the pilfering of vegetables has
disappeared. In other places there are still some pilferers. But in the counties
I visited, even including those that were formerly bandit-ridden, there was
no trace of bandits. The reasons are: First, the members of the peasant
associations are everywhere spread out over the hills and dales, spear or
cudgel in hand, ready to go into action in their hundreds, so that the bandits
have nowhere to hide. Second, since the rise of the peasant movement the
price of grain has dropped--it was six yuan a picul last spring but only
two yuan last winter--and the problem of food has become less serious for
the people. Third, members of the secret societies [30]
have joined the peasant associations, in which they can openly and legally
play the hero and vent their grievances, so that there is no further need
for the secret "mountain", "lodge", "shrine" and "river" forms of organization.
[31] In killing the pigs and shrine of the local tyrants
and evil gentry and imposing heavy levies and fines, they have adequate outlets
for their feelings against those who oppressed them. Fourth, the armies are
recruiting large numbers of soldiers and many of the "unruly" have joined
up. Thus the evil of banditry has ended with the rise of the peasant movement.
On this point, even the well-to-do approve of the peasant associations. Their
comment is, "The peasant associations? Well, to be fair, there is also something
to be said for them."

In prohibiting gaming, gambling and opium-smoking, and in eliminating banditry,
the peasant associations have won general approval.

11. ABOLISHING EXORBITANT LEVIES


As the country is not yet unified and the authority of the imperialists and
the warlords has not been overthrown, there is as yet no way of removing
the heavy burden of government taxes and levies on the peasants or, more
explicitly, of removing the burden of expenditure for the revolutionary army.
However, the exorbitant levies imposed on the peasants when the local tyrants
and evil gentry dominated rural administration, e.g., the surcharge on each
mou of land, have been abolished or at least reduced with the rise of the
peasant movement and the downfall of the local tyrants and evil gentry. This
too should be counted among the achievements of the peasant associations.

12. THE MOVEMENT FOR EDUCATION


In China education has always been the exclusive preserve of the landlords,
and the peasants have had no access to it. But the landlords' culture is
created by the peasants, for its sole source is the peasants' sweat and blood.
In China 90 per cent of the people have had no education, and of these the
overwhelming majority are peasants. The moment the power of the landlords
was overthrown in the rural areas, the peasants' movement for education began.
See how the peasants who hitherto detested the schools are today zealously
setting up evening classes! They always disliked the "foreign-style school".
In my student days, when I went back to the village and saw that the peasants
were against the "foreign-style school", I, too, used to identify myself
with the general run of "foreign-style students and teachers" and stand up
for it, feeling that the peasants were somehow wrong. It was not until 1925,
when I lived in the countryside for six months and was already a Communist
and had acquired the Marxist viewpoint, that I realized I had been wrong
and the peasants right. The texts used in the rural primary schools were
entirely about urban things and unsuited to rural needs. Besides, the attitude
of the primary school teachers towards the peasants was very bad and, far
from being helpful to the peasants, they became objects of dislike. Hence
the peasants preferred the old-style schools ("Chinese classes", as they
called them) to the modern schools (which they called "foreign classes")
and the old-style teachers to the ones in the primary schools. Now the peasants
are enthusiastically establishing evening classes, which they call peasant
schools. Some have already been opened, others are being organized, and on
the average there is one school per township. The peasants are very enthusiastic
about these schools, and regard them, and only them, as their own. The funds
for the evening schools come from the "public revenue from superstition",
from ancestral temple funds, and from other idle public funds or property.
The county education boards wanted to use this money to establish primary
schools, that is, "foreign-style schools" not suited to the needs of the
peasants, while the latter wanted to use it for peasant schools, and the
outcome of the dispute was that both got some of the money, though there
are places where the peasants got it all. The development of the peasant
movement has resulted in a rapid rise in their cultural level. Before long
tens of thousands of schools will have sprung up in the villages throughout
the province; this is quite different from the empty talk about "universal
education", which the intelligentsia and the so-called "educationalists"
have been bandying back and forth and which after all this time remains an
empty phrase.

13. THE CO-OPERATIVE MOVEMENT


The peasants really need co-operatives, and especially consumers', marketing
and credit co-operatives. When they buy goods, the merchants exploit them;
when they sell their farm produce, the merchants cheat them; when they borrow
money for rice, they are fleeced by the usurers; and they are eager to find
a solution to these three problems. During the fighting in the Yangtze valley
last winter, when trade routes were cut and the price of salt went up in
Hunan, many peasants organized co-operatives to purchase salt. When the landlords
deliberately stopped lending, there were many attempts by the peasants to
organize credit agencies, because they needed to borrow money. A major problem
is the absence of detailed, standard rules of organization. As these
spontaneously organized peasant co-operatives often fail to conform to
co-operative principles, the comrades working among the peasants are always
eagerly enquiring about "rules and regulations". Given proper guidance, the
co-operative movement can spread everywhere along with the growth of the
peasant associations.

14. BUILDING ROADS AND REPAIRING EMBANKMENTS


This, too, is one of the achievements of the peasant associations. Before
there were peasant associations the roads in the countryside were terrible.
Roads cannot be repaired without money, and as the wealthy were unwilling
to dip into their purses, the roads were left in a bad state. If there was
any road work done at all, it was done as an act of charity; a little money
was collected from families "wishing to gain merit in the next world", and
a few narrow, skimpily paved roads were built. With the rise of the peasant
associations orders have been given specifying the required width--three,
five, seven or ten feet, according to the requirements of the different
routes--and each landlord along a road has been ordered to build a section.
Once the order is given, who dares to disobey? In a short time many good
roads have appeared. This is no work of charity but the result of compulsion,
and a little compulsion of this kind is not at all a bad thing. The same
is true of the embankments. The ruthless landlords were always out to take
what they could from the tenant-peasants and would never spend even a few
coppers on embankment repairs; they would leave the ponds to dry up and the
tenant-peasants to starve, caring about nothing but the rent. Now that there
are peasant associations, the landlords can be bluntly ordered to repair
the embankments. When a landlord refuses, the association will tell him politely,
"Very well! If you won't do the repairs, you will contribute grain, a tou
for each work-day." As this is a bad bargain for the landlord, he hastens
to do the repairs. Consequently many defective embankments have been turned
into good ones.

All the fourteen deeds enumerated above have been accomplished by the peasants
under the leadership of the peasant associations. Would the reader please
think it over and say whether any of them is bad in its fundamental spirit
and revolutionary significance? Only the local tyrants and evil gentry, I
think, will call them bad. Curiously enough, it is reported from Nanchang
[32] that Chiang Kai-shek, Chang Ching-chiang
[33] and other such gentlemen do not altogether approve
of the activities of the Hunan peasants. This opinion is shared by Liu Yueh-chih
[34] and other right-wing leaders in Hunan, all of whom
say, "They have simply gone Red." But where would the national revolution
be without this bit of Red? To talk about "arousing the masses of the people"
day in and day out and then to be scared to death when the masses do rise--what
difference is there between this and Lord Sheh's love of dragons?
[35]

NOTES

1 Hunan Province was then the centre of the peasant movement
in China.
2 Chao Heng-ti, the ruler of Hunan at the time, was the
agent of the Northern warlords. He was overthrown by the Northern Expeditionary
Army in 1926.
3 The Revolution of 1911 overthrew the autocratic regime
of the Ching Dynasty. On October lo of that year, a section of the Ching
Dynasty's New Army staged an uprising in Wuchang, Hupeh Province, at the
urging of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois revolutionary societies. It was followed
by uprisings in other provinces, and very soon the rule of the Ching Dynasty
crumbled. On January 1, 1912, the Provisional Government of the Republic
of China was set up in Nanking, and Sun Yat-sen was elected Provisional
President. The revolution achieved victory through the alliance of the
bourgeoisie with the peasants, workers and urban petty bourgeoisie. But state
power fell into the hands of the Northern warlord Yuan Shih-kai, and the
revolution failed, because the group which led it was conciliationist in
nature, failed to give real benefits to the peasants and yielded to imperialist
and feudal pressure.
4 These were the virtues of Confucius, as described by one
of his disciples.
5 The old Chinese phrase, "exceeding the proper limits in
righting a wrong", was often quoted for the purpose of restricting people's
activities, reforms that remained within the framework of the established
order were to be permitted, but activities aiming at the complete destruction
of the old order were to be forbidden Actions within this framework were
regarded as "proper", but those that aimed at completely destroying the old
order were described as "exceeding the proper limits". It is a convenient
doctrine for reformists and opportunists in the revolutionary ranks. Comrade
Mao Tse-tung refuted this kind of reformist doctrine.
His remark in the text that "Proper limits have to be exceeded in order to
right a wrong, or else the wrong cannot be righted" meant that the mass
revolutionary method, and not the revisionist-reformist method, had to be
taken to end the old feudal order.
6 Chiang Kai-shek had not yet been fully exposed as a
counter-revolutionary in the winter of 1926 and the spring of 1927 when the
Northern Expeditionary Army was marching into the Yangtze valley, and the
peasant masses still thought that he was for the revolution. The landlords
and rich peasants disliked him and spread the rumour that the Northern
Expeditionary Army had suffered defeats and that he had been wounded in the
leg. Chiang Kai-shek came to be fully revealed as a counter-revolutionary
on April 12, 1927, when he staged his counter-revolutionary coup d'état
in Shanghai and elsewhere, massacring the workers, suppressing the peasants
and attacking the Communist Party. The landlords and rich peasants then changed
their attitude and began to support him.
7 Kwangtung was the first revolutionary base in the period
of the First Revolutionary Civil War (1924-27).
8 Wu Pei-fu was one of the best-known of the Northern warlords.
Together with Tsao Kun, who was notorious for his rigging of the presidential
election in 1923 by bribing members of parliament, he belonged to the Chihli
(Hopei) clique. He supported Tsao as the leader and the two were generally
referred to as "Tsao-Wu". In 1920 after defeating Tuan Chi-jui, warlord of
the Anhwei clique, Wu Pei-fu gained control of the Northern warlord government
in Peking as an agent of the Anglo-American imperialists; it was he who gave
the orders for the massacre, on February 7, 1923, of the workers on strike
along the Peking-Hankow Railway. In 1924 he was defeated in the war with
Chang Tso-lin (commonly known as the "war between the Chihli and Fengtien
cliques"), and he was thereupon ousted from the Peking regime. In 1926 he
joined forces with Chang Tso-lin at the instigation of the Japanese and British
imperialists, and thus returned to power. When the Northern Expeditionary
Army drove northward from Kwangtung in 1926, he was the first foe to be
overthrown.
9 The Three People's Principles were Sun Yat-sen's principles
and programme for the bourgeois-democratic revolution in China on the questions
of nationalism, democracy and people's livelihood. In 1924, in the Manifesto
of the First National Congress of the Kuomintang, Sun Yat-sen restated the
Three People's Principles, interpreting nationalism as opposition to imperialism
and expressing active support for the movements of the workers and peasants.
The old Three People's Principles thus developed into the new, consisting
of the Three Great Policies, that is, alliance with Russia, co-operation
with the Communist Party, and assistance to the peasants and workers. The
new Three People's Principles provided the political basis for co-operation
between the Communist Party of China and the Kuomintang during the First
Revolutionary Civil War period.
10 The Chinese term for "long live" is wansui,
literally "ten thousand years", and was the traditional salute to the emperor;
it had become a synonym for "emperor".
11 Rich peasants should not have been allowed to join the
peasant associations, a point which the peasant masses did not yet understand
in 1927.
12 Here the "utterly destitute" means the farm labourers
(the rural proletariat) and the rural lumpen-proletariat.
13 The "less destitute" means the rural semi-proletariat.
14 Yuan Tsu-ming was a warlord of Kweichow Province who
controlled the western part of Hunan.
15 A tenant generally gave his landlord, as a condition
of tenancy, a deposit in cash or kind, often amounting to a considerable
part of the value of the land. Though this was supposed to be a guarantee
for payment of rent, it actually represented a form of extra exploitation.
16 In Hunan, the tu corresponded to the district
and the tuan to the township The old administrations of the
tu and the tuan type were instruments of landlord rule.
17 The tax per mou was a surcharge on top of the regular
lent tax, ruthlessly imposed on the peasants by the landlord regime.
18 Under the regime of the Northern warlords, the military
head of a province was called "military governor". But he was the virtual
dictator of the province with administrative as well as military power gathered
in his hands. In league with the imperialists, he maintained a separatist
feudal-militarist regime in his locality.
19 The "standing household militia" was one of the various
kinds of armed forces in the countryside. The term "household" is used because
some member of almost every household had to join it. After the defeat of
the revolution in 1927 the landlords in many places seized control of the
militia ant turned them into armed counter-revolutionary bands.
20 At the time, many of the county headquarters of the
Kuomintang. under the leadership of the Kuomintang's Central Executive Committee
in Wuhan. pursued Dr. Sun Yat-sen's Three Great Policies of alliance with
Russia, co-operation with the Communist Party and assistance to the peasants
and workers. They constituted the revolutionary alliance of the Communists,
the left-wingers of the Kuomintang and other revolutionaries.
21 Lord Pao (Pao Cheng) was prefect of Kaifeng, capital
of the Northern Sung Dynasty (A.D. 960-1127). He was famous in popular legend
as an upright official and a fearless, impartial judge with a knack of passing
true verdicts in all the cases he tried.
22 This reference to archery is taken from Mencius.
It describes how the expert teacher of archery draws his bow with a
histrionic gesture but does not release the arrow. The point is that while
Communists should guide the peasants in attaining a full measure of political
consciousness, they should leave it to the peasants' own initiative to abolish
superstitious and other bad practices, and should not give them orders or
do it for them.
23 The Eight Characters were a method of fortune-telling
in China based on the examination of the two cyclic characters each for the
year, month, day and hour of a person's birth respectively.
24 Geomancy refers to the superstition that the location
of one's ancestors' graves influences one's fortune. The geomancers claim
to be able to tell whether a particular site and its surroundings are auspicious.
25 Lord Kuan (Kuan Yu, A.D. 160-219), a warrior in the
epoch of the Three Kingdoms, was widely worshipped by the Chinese as the
God of Loyalty and War.
26 Tang Sheng-chih was a general who sided with the revolution
in the Northern Expedition. Yeh Kai-hsin was a general on the side of the
Northern warlords who fought against the revolution.
27 Sun Chuan-fang was a warlord whose rule extended over
the five provinces of Kiangsu, Chekiang, Fukien, Kiangsi and Anhwei. He was
responsible for the bloody suppression of the insurrections of the Shanghai
workers. His main army was crushed in the winter of 1926 by the Northern
Expeditionary Army in Nanchang and Kiukiang, Kiangsi Province.
28 In China a dish is served in a bowl or a plate for the
whole table, and not individually.
29 "Oriental Culture" was a reactionary doctrine which
rejected modern scientific civilization and favoured the preservation of
the backward mode of agricultural production and the feudal culture of the
Orient.
30 For the secret societies, see "Analysis of the Classes
in Chinese Society", Note 18, p. 21 of this volume.
31 "Mountain", "lodge", "shrine" and "river" were names
used by primitive secret societies to denote some of their sects.
32 When Nanchang was captured by the Northern Expeditionary
Army in November 1926, Chiang Kai-shek seized the opportunity to establish
his general headquarters there. He gathered around himself the right-wing
members of the Kuomintang and a number of Northern warlord politicians and,
in collusion with the imperialists, hatched his counter-revolutionary plot
against Wuhan, the then revolutionary centre. Eventually, on April 12, 1927,
he staged his counter-revolutionary coup d'état which was marked by
tremendous massacres in Shanghai.
33 Chang Ching-chiang, a right-wing Kuomintang leader,
was a member of Chiang Kai-shek's brain trust.
34 Liu Yueh-chih was head of the "Left Society", an important
anti-Communist group in Hunan.
35 As told by Liu Hsiang (77-6 B.C.) in his Hsin Hsu,
Lord Sheh was so fond of dragons that he adorned his whole palace with
drawings and carvings of them. But when a real dragon heard of his infatuation
and paid him a visit, he was frightened out of his wits. Here Comrade Mao
Tse-tung uses this metaphor to show that though Chiang Kai-shek and his like
talked about revolution, they were afraid of revolution and against it.

Transcription by the Maoist Documentation Project.