Explanations at the Third Meeting of the
Wuhan Land Committee

(April 22, 1927)¹

What has been decided now is political confiscation of land owned, for example,
by local bullies, bad gentry, warlords, and so on. This is the first step. The next
step is the confiscation of all land that the owners do not till but rent out to
others; this is economic confiscation. Economic confiscation is no longer a problem in Hunan. There the peasants themselves have already divided up the land.
Fiscally speaking, there is no solution or way out if the land problem is not
solved. The warlords in Hunan exploit the peasants. The national government,
after establishing itself in Hunan, has also been unable to eliminate this exploitation completely. Because of the war, the old fiscal policy has to be continued.
This situation is in contradiction with today's revolution. If no way out can be
found, the revolution will certainly end in defeat. If under the present fiscal
régime even the registration tax cannot be collected, and there are many cases in
which land tax goes unpaid, the various sorts of exorbitant taxes and levies are
even more impossible to collect. It is in the interest of the revolution as a whole
to solve the land problem. If the current fiscal policy is continued in Hunan,
annual revenue will amount to only slightly more than 10 million. (In 1925 it
was between 15 and 20 million.) If the land problem were solved, a rate of 10
percent would bring in 56 million, and moreover, the rate could even be increased to 15 percent. Thus the financial difficulties could be immediately

We have translated this text from Mao Zedong ji. Bujuan, Vol. 9, 233-34, where it is
reproduced from Jiang Yongjing, Baoluoting yu Wuhan zhengquan. The same text is
excerpted and paraphrased in Nianpu, Vol. 1, pp. 195-96. Although Jiang Yongjing had
full access to the Guomindang archives, there is reason to believe that this passage is far
from complete, but it conveys something of the tenor of Mao's remarks.
1. On this occasion, the draft resolution regarding the land question elaborated by the
five members of the Land Committee was presented for discussion by those attending.
According to Nianpu, Vol. 1, pp. 195-96, it was Deng Yanda who gave the initial report
on behalf of the committee as a whole. The present text is an extract from the supplementary explanations Mao put forward in the course of the meeting. Not surprisingly, in the
light of Mao's call for expropriating rich peasants, even if they constituted half the
population, Wang Jingwei observed that this might be political confiscation in theory, but
that it was in reality economic confiscation. The upshot was that the resolution was
handed over for revision to a Committee of Enquiry of fifteen members, including Wang,
Tan Yankai, and other senior leaders, as well as Mao and the original five.

solved. Therefore, without making a decision on the land problem, there is no
way out of the financial difficulties. The land of owner-peasants and middle
peasants is not subject to confiscation; the land of rich peasants is. For example,
if five out of ten households are rich peasants, we must redistribute the land of
the rich peasants to the other five households. The peasants in Hunan are now
redistributing the land themselves. They have meetings to redistribute the land.
Therefore, with special reference to the situation in Hunan, it is not enough to
rely on the mode of political confiscation. But generally speaking, only political
confiscation can be used. That is why the national government should explicitly
promulgate such regulations (generic types), while at the same time issuing
specific ones (such as those applying to Hunan). Hubei cannot be compared to
Hunan; Henan cannot be compared to Hubei, either. The solution [of the land
problem there] is, of course, different. Therefore, to complete economic confiscation in one step is often incompatible with objective conditions. . . .² You may
read the Survey of Land Distribution in China;³ this table is relatively accurate
and may be used for reference.

2. Suspension points in the original text.
3. The reference is not to the voluminous survey by Volin and Yolk (see above, the
note to the text of April 19, 1927), but to a brief document providing an overview of the
question in the whole country. This text clearly emanated from the work of the Land
Committee, but its precise authorship is uncertain. Jiang Yongjing states that Mao was
"one of the drafters." (Jiang, Baoluoting yu Wuhan zhengquan, p. 289.) Hofheinz concludes that it was mainly the work of the Russian expert Tarkhanov. (See Roy Hofheinz
Jr., The Broken Wave. The Chinese Communist Peasant Movement 1922-1928, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977, p. 37.) (For a biographical sketch of Oskar
Sergeevich Tarkhanov see V.I. Nikiforov, Sovetskie istoriki o problemakh Kitaya [Soviet
Historians on the Problems of China], Moscow, Izdatel'stvo "Nauka," 1970, p. 139.)
Tarkhanov, who had been studying land distribution in Guangxi while Volin and Yolk
were working on Guangdong, did indeed speak at a meeting on April 23 regarding the
differences in patterns of landholding across China, but he may not have written the
document cited by Mao.