Views Expressed at the First Meeting of
the Hunan Provincial Committee of the
Chinese Communist Party

(August 18, 1927)

I. The Peasant Question (the land question)

(A) Zedong’s views:
(1) There must be targets for land confiscation. In China there are only a few
big landlords, but quite a number of smaller landlords. If we confiscate only the
big landlords’ land, few landlords will be affected, and the amount of land
confiscated will be extremely small. The number of poor peasants demanding
land is very great, and if we confiscate the land of the big landlords alone, we
cannot satisfy the demands and needs of the peasants. If we want to win over all
the peasants, we must confiscate the land of [all] the landlords and distribute it
among the peasants.
(2) The method of land confiscation should be that the revolutionary committee (our Party) lays down a land policy, and the whole procedure is carried out
by the peasant unions or by the revolutionary committees.
(3) This land confiscation policy must include suitable arrangements for
the landlords whose land has been confiscated. I therefore propose that those
landlords who are unable to work, or whose labor power is deficient, that is
to say, those who are old and weak, should be provided by the peasant unions
with equal rations of agricultural produce from the proceeds of the agricultural tax.
(4) We should proclaim the abolition of all the unreasonably heavy taxes for
the peasants; an agricultural tax should be levied.

[passage omitted]

This summary of views put forward on August 18 is an excerpt from Peng Gongda’s
report of October 8, 1927, on the course of the uprising. (For an almost complete English
version of the whole report, see Saich, Rise to Power, Doc. C.8, pp. 322–31.) Our source
for the extracts translated here is Mao Zedong ji, Bujuan, Vol. 2, pp. 299–300, which has
taken them from Vol. 3 of Zhonggong dangshi cankao ziliao (Reference Materials on the
History of the Chinese Communist Party). The Soviet consul, Meyer, mentioned above in
the text of August 9, also spoke on this occasion, and presented a summary of the decisions taken at the second meeting of the new Politburo.
II. The Question of the Uprising

(A) Zedong's and Lirong's¹ views:
(1) The development of the Autumn Harvest Uprising in Hunan will solve
the land problem for the peasants. Nobody can deny this. But if we wish to create
and unleash this uprising, it will not do to rely on the power of the peasants
alone. There must be military support. With the help of one or two regiments, the
uprising can take place; otherwise, it will fail in the end.
(2) The development of the uprising must lead to the seizure of political
power. If you want to seize political power, to try to do it without the support of
military forces would be sheer self-deception. Our Party's mistake in the past has
been that it neglected military affairs. Now we should concentrate 60 percent of
our energies on the military movement. We must carry out the principle of
seizing and establishing political power on the barrel of a gun.²

[balance omitted]

¹ 1. Lirong is Yi Lirong (1898– ), Mao's longtime friend and comrade from the New
People's Study Society, who is still living today in Beijing. For details, see the note to
Mao's letter to him dated November 1920, in Volume I of this edition, p. 611.
² 2. Here Mao has put the idea he had first enunciated on August 7 in different words:
“. . . zai qiangganzi shang duoqu zhengquan, jianshe zhengquan.”