1. The Land Problem Is the Main Content of
the Chinese Revolution at Present
The present democratic stage of the revolution consists mainly in opposition to
the feudal forces. The land revolution thoroughly destroys the economic basis of
feudalism. We must make the land revolution penetrate deeply, for only thus will
it be possible to eliminate the domination of the warlord system and of imperialism, only thus can the broad masses of the bitterly poor peasantry be liberated,
only thus will the proletariat be able to draw the hundreds of millions of bitterly
poor peasant masses into a solid alliance, and win victory for the Chinese revolution. The Red Army was born from the struggles of the land revolution, and it
will assuredly assume responsibility for the whole of the proletarian revolution,
but if at present it becomes divorced from the land revolution, to the point of neglecting the correct implementation of the land revolution, it will no longer be
the Red Army, and it will be even more difficult to enlarge the Red Army and to
create a Red Army of steel. It is only the liquidationists who, lacking a basic
understanding of the antifeudal forces, would want to discard the land revolution.
2. The Crisis in Revolutionary Work
The present soviet districts include many places where the insurrections are not
yet complete or which can only be occupied temporarily by guerrilla actions. In
southeastern Hubei, even today, we do not have a single xian town, and the
phenomenon of opposing White and Red forces is a serious situation everywhere. Not only is this true, but there are even many Red districts in which the
masses are revolutionary today and defect tomorrow. In the soviet district of
eastern Hubei, the Reorganization Clique has developed in a big way, and has
put down the uprising. In southwestern Jiangxi, the AB Corps has filled the
special committees of both the Party and Youth League, to the point that twothirds of the personnel of the leading organs of the southwestern Jiangxi soviet
government and of the technical workers are AB Corps elements. All levels of
the Party and Youth League and soviets, and even the Red Army schools, the
Red Guards, and the Red postal service, are filled with the organizations of the
AB Corps, carrying out assassinations, preparing to make contact with the army
of Deng Ying, and plotting a revolt to eliminate the soviets and the various
revolutionary organizations these problems have become so serious that they
merit the close scrutiny of every one of our comrades. We must analyze the
origins of these crises and resolutely overcome them. The major causes of these
crises are the rich peasant line and opportunism within the land revolution.
3. The Rich Peasant Line and Opportunism Within the Land Revolution
A. Dividing the Land and Not Dividing the Land
The facts have taught us that wherever the land is really divided equally, it is
possible to arouse the broad popular masses and firmly establish a revolutionary
base. In most cases, it is possible to complete the local uprisings, as in western
Fujian and in such xian as Yongxin and Xingguo (the second time was more
thorough). Whenever the mistake is made of following the rich peasant line and
not dividing the land, not only are the local uprisings not completed but it is even
impossible to eliminate the opposition between White and Red. In Guangji, in
eastern Hubei, the land has not been divided, and the Communist Party and local
bullies peacefully coexist in the revolutionary district, with the result that as soon
as the White terror arrives, the defections are really terrible. In Anfu, rich peasant elements saw to it that the land was not divided, with the result that most
people defected, bringing about a grave betrayal of the revolution. In only two
districts, District One and District Three, which were close to and influenced by
the land division at Yongxin and did divide the land, did the peasants stoutly
resist the counterrevolutionary attacks. In those places in Yongxin and Xiajiang
xian where the land was completely divided, there are very few from the AB
Corps. In Taihe, Xingguo, Jishui, and even in Dayi and Yangxin of the Longxian
district of eastern Hubei, wherever the land was not divided completely, if it
didn't give rise to a serious AB Corps, then the Reorganization Clique emerged;
wherever the land was divided completely, large Red Armies were formed, as in
Yongxin, otherwise they could not be mobilized. Why is it that not completely
dividing the land equally is so serious? Because the main policy of the antifeudal
forces is the land revolution. At present the land revolution must divide the land,
and divide it equally and quickly. Only in the struggle to divide the land truly
equally can the feudal forces be completely eliminated, and a revolutionary base
be established. But how is our land revolution carried out? Brandishing the Red
flag, and not dividing the land for three years, for one year, for half a year, is a
more or less universal phenomenon in the Red districts of southwestern Jiangxi,
of the East River area, of eastern Hubei, of western Hubei, of western Hunan,
and even of Jiangsu and Zhejiang. A large number of Red Army and guerrilla
units have not paid attention to this problem. This is not just opportunism, it is
quite simply the landlord line. By not standing on the side of the poor suffering
peasants and representing their desire to divide the land, such failure to divide
the land in reality preserves the landlord system. They even go so far as to use
the excuses that there must be a detailed investigation with full statistics, that the
land that has been planted with young rice plants cannot be divided, and that if it
is divided, then the peasant who originally planted it should receive two-thirds of
the grain, and the poor peasant who has been given the field should receive
one-third, the two and one split (as in Daye). Or they just allocate a bit of the
land any old way (in part of Yangxin), or carry out only drawing on the plentiful
to make up for the scarce, but not drawing on the fat to make up for the lean.
Wherever such rich peasant lines as these exist, they are an obstacle to the
progress of the land revolution. Thus, not only can the broad masses of the
impoverished peasants not be mobilized to complete the local uprising but also,
when the land revolution makes the despotic gentry and landlords run away,
eliminates high rents and heavy interest rates, and does away with harsh fees and
miscellaneous taxes, if the land is not completely redistributed, in reality those
who profit the most are just the rich peasants. Consequently, it is impossible to
promote class confrontation between the broad masses of the bitterly poor peasants and the rich peasants, and impossible to establish the revolutionary authority
of the poor suffering peasant masses, recognize the true face of the vicious plots
of the rich peasants, and suppress the reactionary actions of the rich peasants. On
the contrary, the right to lead the land revolution is taken over by the rich
peasants. The rich peasants take over the soviets, the Red Guards, and the Party,
and use them for the interests of the rich peasant class, to oppress the poor peasants, and then go on to organize the AB Corps, the Reorganization Clique, and
the Third Party, to put down the uprisings and betray the revolution. This is precisely
the main root cause for not dividing the land equally and resolutely opposing the rich
peasants, thus leaving behind a foundation for the activities of the counterrevolutionaries, and of the serious crises that have occurred in the soviet districts.
B. The Opportunist Line
Formulations of the rich peasant line mentioned above, such as the "land allocation method" or the "two and one split," are clearly and obviously proposals of
the rich peasants for obstructing the land revolution, and could have been rejected. But because the Party itself fell prey to the formulas of the opportunist
line and rationalized them—a very subtle rich peasant line—it not only could not
reject these rich peasant proposals but, on the contrary, lent its assistance to
developing the proposals of the rich peasants. What kind of opportunist line is
this? It makes use of the argument that dividing the land corresponds to peasant
consciousness to oppose dividing the land equally. Dividing the land [they
argue] is a capitalist fantasy that goes against the socialist future. If you divide
the land, this will contribute to the concept of private ownership among the
peasantry and is incompatible with the objectives of communism. Therefore, do
not put forward the proposal to divide the land or listen to peasant self-determination. Using developing production as their argument, they oppose dividing
equally according to population and propose using the criterion of labor power in
distributing the land. Using the principle of the democratic stage of the revolution, they oppose all confiscation, because any confiscation would threaten the
middle peasant. If these arguments do not come from those who consciously
stand on the right (the rich peasant elements in the villages who use the excuse
that the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party criticized equal distribution as a
petty bourgeois fantasy to oppose equal distribution), then they are empty theoretical speculations that ignore reality. These empty unrealistic speculations seem
on the surface to be an ultraleftist defense of socialism, but in reality, being rationalizations for the rich peasants, they constitute the ultrarightist rich peasant line.
C. The Roots of the Errors of This Line
They lie in not understanding that, in China, with its backward semifeudal agricultural economy, the land revolution must go through the process of redistribution, that the Chinese agricultural economy is mainly a small peasant economy,
and that whether farmed by tenant farmers or by those who own the land themselves, it is cut up into extremely small economic units and tilled by peasant
masses of several hundred millions using Chinese plows. There is virtually no
(European-style) landlord economy, and capitalist-type farms are few indeed. It
is for this reason that the land revolution does not immediately join all these very
small economic units together to carry out socialist collective farm production.
Economic conditions do not allow this, and consequently it must be recognized
that when the land revolution begins, the small peasant economy will still be the
main form of production, and that the land must be redistributed to the peasants.
Furthermore, because those among the peasant masses who have no land or very
little land everywhere constitute the vast majority in the countryside, in the south
over 70 percent, when the movement for land revolution begins, this kind of
redistribution must start with complete confiscation and equal redistribution.
Only this will satisfy the needs of the masses. Therefore, the last congress²
already pointed out that in those places where there were a lot of unemployed
and poor suffering peasants, it was necessary to have a movement to "divide the land
equally," and that when this slogan was supported by the majority of the peasant
masses, the Communist Party should defend it, because this is a slogan for thoroughly eliminating all vestiges of feudalism, and also directly undermines private
ownership. All this was resolved theoretically long ago. The Chinese land revolution
has already been in progress for two or three years, and we should make further use
of the actual lessons of these two or three years to understand this problem.
In fact, so long as the peasants do not rise up and divide the land, things can
remain like this, but when they do rise up they will everywhere demand that it
be divided equally.
In fact, it is not enough just to confiscate the land of the landlords, it is
essential to confiscate all the land even of the rich peasants, because the amount
of land they hold, in the various southern provinces, is barely less than that of the
landlords, and furthermore, most of it is very fertile land. If it is not totally
confiscated it is not possible to satisfy the demands of the broad masses of
bitterly poor peasants. Thus, in the Northern Route area of Xiajiang and Ji'an, the
land was divided several times, but it was only when, finally, all the rich peasant
lands had been confiscated and there was an equal distribution that it could be
considered completed. In fact, it is a characteristic of the Chinese rich peasant
that he engages in severe semifeudal exploitation, no different from the landlord
class. From their first cunning tricks until their betrayal is crushed, from beginning to end, they are counterrevolutionary. Unless the land is divided equally, it
is impossible from the very beginning to separate a village along a class line of
fire in which the impoverished peasant masses are opposed to the rich peasant
class, and there is no way to set up a leadership of farm laborers to suppress the
reaction of the rich peasants. Any so-called firm opposition to the rich peasants
that does not confiscate their land is just empty talk. The fact is that the masses
are already marching forward, and that they want everything to be confiscated,
while the Party is still mired in the principle of the democratic stage, confiscating
only the land of the landlord class, not daring to suggest confiscating everything.
But the masses are already confiscating everything, so the Party also says that
when the masses demand that everything be confiscated, the Party should not oppose it. How liquidationist this is, not even grasping the tail, just letting the
rich peasants lead without fighting for the more than 70 percent constituted by
the impoverished peasant masses. In fact, not only will complete confiscation not
upset the middle peasants but most of the middle peasants will, on the contrary,
receive a share of the land to be divided, as was the case in the Xingguo Tenth
District. Although in some places a small number of the middle peasants will
inevitably have to give up a little bit, in the face of the revolutionary prestige of
the broad masses of the bitterly poor peasants who want to confiscate everything,
the middle peasants will feel that all oppressive exploitation has already been
eliminated, that the rich peasants can do nothing, much less the landlords, that
everyone is equal, and that giving up a little bit is right (as with the middle
peasants of Jinjiang in Yangxin xian). In other words, it is only the great authority possessed by the impoverished peasant masses that can lay hold of the middle
peasants under the conditions of mounting a fierce attack on the landlords, and it
is only dividing the land equally that is the best technique for doing so. If the
bitterly poor peasant masses are still eking out a living under the rich peasants,
and the rich peasants can still exercise power over them, you cannot even think
of forming or consolidating an alliance with the middle peasants.
In fact, there are at least two kinds of so-called peasant consciousness: rich
peasant consciousness and poor peasant consciousness. Rich peasant consciousness advocates not dividing, while the poor peasants demand dividing equally.
To say that dividing the land equally corresponds to peasant consciousness, and
that if you want to oppose peasant consciousness, just don't divide the land, is
precisely to oppose poor peasant consciousness and to represent rich peasant
consciousness. Dividing the land equally is, of course, not socialist consciousness, but at present it truly plays a great revolutionary role and is historically
significant in shattering the feudal system and in moving toward socialism. In the
past, the Russian Mensheviks criticized Lenin for advocating equal land distribution, saying that this went against socialism. Lenin replied, "Equal distribution
has an historical revolutionary role to play that the Mensheviks do not understand." The Sixth Congress pointed out that equal distribution is a petty bourgeois fantasy of socialism that must be criticized by the Party, but it definitely
did not reject equal distribution, or oppose it. The Sixth Congress put it very
clearly: "We should support the slogan of equal distribution of land but should
also criticize it . . . in order to make the peasants understand fully that under the
present capitalist system true peace is absolutely impossible. Only after the victory of the proletariat will true socialist reconstruction be possible."3 This means
that the job of equal distribution must be done, while at the same time it is
necessary to do the job of criticism. The opportunist gentlemen just sit there
wasting their breath criticizing. Since they have not yet carried out equal distribution, what are they are criticizing? As for the opposition to expanding the Red
Army, the opposition to expanding outward, and the failure to concentrate military forces, all these are the rich peasant ideology. It is the poor peasants who are
thoroughly toppling the feudal forces, who are actively expanding outward. At
present, to smash conservative ideas, we must concentrate on "opposing rich
peasant consciousness"; we definitely cannot sweepingly oppose peasant consciousness and suppress that part of the consciousness of the poor peasants that is
very revolutionary (dividing the land equally and opposing the rich peasants). Of
course, the Communist Party must establish the leadership of proletarian consciousness (such as criticizing equal distribution) and cannot become bogged
down in poor peasant ideology.
In fact, using the so-called development of production and labor power as the
criteria for distributing the land is precisely the demand of the rich peasants. The
rich peasants count farm implements, fertilizer, seed, and ox power as labor
power, and it is only the rich peasants who have the most labor power, who have
the best conditions for developing production. The rich peasants say that the poor
peasants don't have anything, that if they are given more fields they will lie idle,
and therefore the rich peasants use the revolutionary placard of developing production best to obtain a lot of land, while the poor peasants, who are most
urgently in need of land, are still unable to solve the problem of a shortage of
land. Furthermore, using labor power as a criterion permits not counting capital,
but the elderly, the young, and women, having little or no labor power, would be
given little of the land distributed. But they certainly do not consume less, and at
times they even have to hire peasants to till the fields, and even though they
don't have enough to eat they have to pay the wages. How are they to maintain
their livelihoods? In the present struggle developing production is not the main
thing; only winning over the popular masses is an urgent necessity. It is only by
arousing the broad poor peasant masses, thoroughly overthrowing the feudal
forces, and winning victory for the revolution nationwide that we can talk about
developing production. In reality, the poor peasants divide the land in order to
eat. When the entire labor power of a family, male and female, young and old, is
used on the land, not only does the land not lie idle but its productivity is already
increased as proved by the harvest this year in western Fujian, which was 20
percent higher than before the revolution.
In fact, when concrete proposals for confiscating and distributing the land are
not put forward, in accordance with what is called letting the masses decide,
the result usually is that they are manipulated by the rich peasants, and not
only is the land not divided equally, it is not even divided at all. This was the
case in Anfu. What is called letting the masses decide means to accept the
correct demands of the masses. Everywhere the masses have already de-

Notes

Our source for this document is Mao Zedong ji. Bujuan, Vol. 9, pp. 333–45, where the text
is reproduced from a documentary collection published in China in 1981. It also appears in
Jiangxi dangshi ziliao, Vol. 6, pp. 174–84.
1. In the Mao Zedong ji. Bujuan, this text is dated October 19; in the Jiangxi dangshi
ziliao, it is dated simply October. The "joint conference" mentioned in the title took place
from October 25 to November 1, 1930. (See the note to the text of October 26, 1930.) It
was preceded by a conference of the Front Committee alone, convened by Mao on October
17. This gathering adopted resolutions on several of the same topics discussed at the joint
conference, and a chronology in Jiangxi dangshi ziliao, Vol. 6, p. 292, indicates that the
line taken on the peasant question was entirely in harmony with the text translated here. A
plausible explanation for the problem of the date is therefore that the present text was
adopted on October 17, issued on October 19, and then laid before the joint conference the
following week in the same or very similar form. In any case, one of Mao's primary
concerns in October 1930 was to justify his own line regarding the land problem. This
accounts for the very sharp attacks on the Party organs in southwestern Jiangxi, which
were dominated by Li Lisan's supporters. The statement, in section 2 of this resolution,
that two-thirds of their leading personnel are members of the AB or Anti-Bolshevik Corps
marks a further escalation of the conflict. (On the AB Corps and the political context in
general see above, the Introduction to this volume.)

--- Notes

Your letter of September has been received today at Xiajiang.¹ In all, we have
received three letters from you dated prior to September. We made a general
reply on the 15th, and hope that you will have received that letter.2
Your September letter says that the Central Committee, the provincial committee, and the Yangzi Bureau all sent us letters which were delivered to us. But
we have not received them to date, and do not know where they were sent from
and went astray. We are most concerned. If you have kept copies, we hope you
will copy them again and send them to us as soon as possible.
As for the problem of new soldiers, it would be best if you could send five
thousand by the end of this month. We hope that you will step up your efforts at
propaganda and agitation, so as to recruit this number of new soldiers or even
more. As regards the method of transportation, you should also correspond with
the office of the Revolutionary Committee of the Workers and Peasants in Ji'an.
We have set up an office in Ji'an, with Mao Zetan as the director and Wan as his
deputy. Internally, a Committee of the Rear has been established with Mao Zetan
as secretary. The task of the Committee of the Rear is to recruit and transfer new

# Resolution on the Land Problem of the Joint Conference of the General Front Committee and the Jiangxi Provincial Action Committee
# Date: 1930-10-19
# Source: en:MRP


2. I.e., the Sixth Congress of June 1928.

3. This is a quotation from the "Resolution on the Peasant Question" adopted by the
Sixth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party on July 9, 1928. For a nearly complete
translation of this document, see Saich, Rise to Power, Doc. C.12, pp. 369-76. Mao's
citation is accurate, except that equality (pingdeng) has been replaced by peace (heping) in
the statement "... under the present capitalist system true equality is absolutely impossible." This must be a copyist's error.