The Rural Revolution. Part I || The Hunan Peasant Movement Its Urban Origins

The Hunan Peasant Movement Its Urban OriginsAuthor(s): Angus McDonaldSource: Modern China, Vol. 1, No. 2, The Rural Revolution. Part I (Apr., 1975), pp. 180-203Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/189040 .

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The Hunan Peasant Movement Its Urban Origins

ANGUS McDONALD University of Minnesota

February 18, 1927, Changsha, Hunan: "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 arise like a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back"

[Mao Tse-tung, 1927: 2061].

Why was he wrong? Less than a year after the Northern Expedition swept

through Hunan, the province was in the grip of a White Terror that left the execution grounds awash in blood. It was not a short time, but years-two decades-before the peasantry swept "all the imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials, local tyrants and evil gentry into their graves" (Mao, 1967: I, 23-24).

Surely only pedants would fault the 33-year-old Mao Tse-tung for having failed to foresee the bloody outcome and years of work that lay ahead. His "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan" was not a scholarly investigation by a nit-picking scholar, but a trumpet call to

AUTHOR'S NOTE: My thanks to Richard Kagan, Leigh Kagan, and Edward Farmer for their valuable suggestions on an earlier draft of this article.

MODERN CHINA, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1975 ? 1975 Sage Publications, Inc.

[1801



McDonald /HUNAN PEA SANTMO VEMENT /1811

action and a propaganda tool in an ongoing battle within the Left KMT-CCP alliance. He did not investigate the peasant movement throughout the province, but only in five of the most active counties, those nearest Changsha, the heart of agitation in Hunan. He was not there during the whole process of the peasant movement's development. He was a revolutionary, not an anthropologist. The peasant movement to which he has devoted the previous two years of his life was the most exciting development he had ever seen. Enthusiasm was the proper response.

Investigation of the Hunan peasant movement some half century after the fact fails to show that the facts on which Mao based his conclusion were wrong or that he did not report accurately on what he saw. But it does indicate that there was less to it than met the excited eye. The peasant movement in Hunan was not the independent phenomenon Mao suggests it was. It was not spontaneous. It did not owe its origins principally to the relative handful of young radicals trained in the Canton Peasant Movement Training Institute. The peasant movement was substantially a dependent phenomenon. It owed its existence to military and political events, events which were largely urban in origin, not rural.

This should not be surprising either to Marxists or to anthropologists. Marx long ago pointed out the low level of class consciousness among the French peasantry, their mutual isolation and parochial interests (Marx, 1969: I, 478). Anthro- pologists have discerned the crisscrossing cleavages of peasant life, the tyranny of the calendar, and the mutual competition and cooperation that serve at once to limit collective action and to cushion some of the impact of the conflict between agrarian and industrial societies (see Wolf, 1971; Luxemburg, 1968: Part III). Both anthropologists and Marxists agree on the difficulty of mobilizing particularly the lowest and poorest peasants to whom Mao, in his "Report," assigned the largest and most active role.' What lay behind this extraordinary peasant movement and the remarkable essay that celebrates its accom- plishments?



[ 1821 MODERN CHINA / APRIL 19 75

In this article I make an initial excursion into the setting, looking into the following questions: whence came the Northern Expeditionary Armies that swept across Hunan in the summer of 1926? What was the origin of the myth of the masses rising in a "veritable tidal wave," a myth that even today colors our perception of the 1925-1927 First Revolutionary Civil War period? (See for example, Isaacs, 1966: 1 1 1.) How are we to account for the explosive growth of the peasant movement during 1926? What were the principal urban cleavages and how were they reflected in the rural movement? I make no attempt to be exhaustive; there are, of course, severe documentary limitations to the inquiry, and some conclusions must be stated in the form of hypotheses.

A CAPSULEMILITAR Y-POLITICAL HISTORY OFHUNAN UNDER THE REPUBLIC, 1911-1926

During the latter half of the 191 Os, conflict in Hunan centered on localism versus integration into the evolving structure of North Chinese militarism. Hunan was on the border between North and South China and served as a battlefield in successive struggles between the localistic Southerners and ambitious Northerners. Among the most prominent actors on the Hunanese side were Tan Yan-kai (1879-1930), a civilian leader and four-time governor of the province, and his military right-arm, Zhao Heng-ti (1880-1971 ).2

The Beiyang civil war removed the yoke of the Northerners and enabled the Hunanese armed forces under Zhao and Tan to take power in the Xiang valley in July 1920 under the slogan of "Hunan for the Hunanese." Conflict between the two erstwhile allies over division of the spoils resulted in Tan's flight to Shanghai in December 1920. For two years he lived in exile, receiving a subsidy from Governor Zhao and plotting to regain power. In 1922 Tan aligned himself with Sun Yat-sen, who was himself temporarily out of power in Canton.

The next summer Tan Yan-kai led a motley, ragtag counter- attack from Kwangtung. Zhao Heng-ti and his subordinate militarists repulsed it only with the intervention of Wu Pei-fu's



McDonald / HUNAN PEASANTMO VEMENT [1831

Beiyang forces. Tan retreated to Kwangtung, his armies enlarged by a number of Zhao's own quondam subordinates who had picked the wrong man at the crucial moment. These forces survived to become the Second Army of the Northern Expedi- tionary forces in 1926. Tan Yan-kai became chairman of the Military Committee of the National Revolutionary Government, but after a defeat in Fukien in 1925 he appears to have turned increasingly to civil politics.

After the Zhao-Tan war of 1923, Zhao Heng-ti remained in power in Changsha. But he was seriously enfeebled. He retained his office by engaging in a complex game of factional politics-playing his remaining subordinates off against one another. His strongest subordinate was Tang Sheng-zhi, a Baoding Military Academy graduate and devout Buddhist who was posted in the southern part of the province. In the course of continuing struggles among Zhao's subordinates, Tang Sheng-zhi began exploring the possibilities of an alliance with the emergent power of the Kuomintang on his southern border. His emissaries appear to have worked through such Hunanese leaders in Canton as Mao Tse-tung, Xia Xi, and Lin Zu-han ("Bai-shan," 1934).

On March 8, 1926, Tang Sheng-zhi launched his attack on Changsha, announcing that "the price of rice in the South is too high." Zhao's allies were unable to come to his rescue, and after five and a half years in power, he resigned the governorship and fled. But to the north Wu Pei-fu had heard the rumors of Tang's contacts with the Canton government. Despite being occupied with another war, he sent a powerful army into Hunan, flying banners proclaiming that he was attacking the "Reds." For the next four months the battle wavered back and forth. Changsha was lost to the Northerners on May 2, 1926. There was heavy fighting all up and down the Xiang River basin, but in the face of the invaders Tang Sheng-zhi was driven steadily southward. The banners' prophecy became a reality as Tang Sheng-zhi con- solidated his alliance with the Southerners and sought their aid in the battle with ringing radical rhetoric. The armies of the Kuomintang were still in disarray and were reorganizing themselves for a Northern Expedition which was still in the planning stages. Chiang Kai-shek's March 20 coup yet rever-



[1841 MODERN CHINA /APRIL 1975

berated in Canton. Nevertheless, the Kuomintang clearly could not mount an attack on the Northerners without allies from among the militarists who ruled along the roads northward: the defeat of this new ally would have been a heavy blow to the dream of a Northern Expedition. In the dangerous passage, Tan Yan-kai, Chiang Kai-shek, and other members of the Military Committee chose to come to Tang Sheng-zhi's aid.

During May advance elements of the Seventh Northern Expeditionary Army advanced into Hunan from Guilin, securing Tang Sheng-zhi's flanks and boosting his soldiers' morale. As heavy fighting continued throughout May, other KMT forces marched to the rescue. On June 2, 1926, Tang formally announced that he had joined the National Revolution and accepted the redesignation of his army as the Eighth. In return he received battlefield command over two other armies, the Seventh and the Fourth. This gave Tang more military power than Chiang Kai-shek, who probably was named com- mander-in-chief of the Northern Expedition on- June 5 in exchange. A month passed before the Northern Expedition was formally launched, a month of intense factional conflict between Baoding graduates who urged Chiang Kai-shek to march rapidly into Kiangsi to relieve the embattled Hunanese, and Chiang Kai-shek and his Whampoa followers who sought to preserve their forces.

The Northern Expedition was not a vigorous attack from a strong base. It began as an intervention in a Hunanese civil war. It was a rescue operation, launched well before it was proclaimed. On July 8, the day before Chiang Kai-shek in Canton formally announced the commencement of the North- ern Expedition, Tang Sheng-zhi's armies took the town of Xiangxiang. On July 9 they took Liling, and the next day Xiangtan. On July 11 Eighth Army troops passed through Changsha on their way north. The battles that were fought- Jinlansi, Lantian, Lungjiawan, Lianshui, Isuho, Milo-were sharp but brief. The rapid career of the Southern armies and the equally dexterous retreat of Wu Pei-fu's forces suggests that once again Hunan was fllling the role of march in the Chinese civil war, a battlefield between two centers of power where the result turned on military considerations: which side had more



McDonald / HUNAN PEASANT MO VEMENT [1851

allies engaged, more ammunition, better morale, and so on. The Northern Expedition in Hunan was a war of warlords.

PEASANTS AND NA TIONAL SAL VA TION: IDEAS AND PRA CTICE

There was a reality behind the myth that the Northern Expedition was other than a military confrontation, that "the masses of ordinary people rose in a veritable tidal wave that swept the expeditionary armies to the banks of the Yangtze" (Isaacs, 1966: 111 ). But the reality was ideological and political. There was just enough demonstrable proof to keep the myth from being absurd.

Reunification of warlord-ridden China and a bearding of the imperialists were desiderata to which virtually all parties to the KMT's National Revolutionary Government coalition sub- scribed. According to "Rightists," these goals could be accomplished within the limitations of the old politics of coalition. Mobilization of the masses was neither necessary nor desirable. For members of this group, the principal enemies of reunification and national sovereignty were those warlords who could not be won over to assume subordinate positions in the emergent political order-and the Communists.

Yamada Tatsuo (1 974: 1) has suggested a useful way of thinking about the Left KMT. Wang Jing-wei and other parties to the Leftist coalition were civilians. They did not enjoy direct leadership of either the military or the mass movements, but they sought to use these two fonts of political power to balance one another: only by walking on these two legs could the civilians maintain their leadership in the revolutionary movement. Hence, for the Leftists, the enemy was not solely the warlords who would not bow to the emergent political order, but warlordism in general-and at times, certain aspects of the social order underlying warlordism. Leftist politicians in Canton in the months before the launching of the Northern Expedition spoke of the peasant movement in instrumental terms: national salvation required mobilization of the peasants, but this could not be accomplished without a "payoff' to those mobilized.

Among the "leftists" Tan Yan-kai apparently continued to enjoy considerable power and prestige throughout the Canton



[1861 MODERN CHINA /APRIL 1975

period. A Japanese intelligence agent described him as an "extreme leftist."3 He expressed his stance toward the peasant movement in this way (Tan, 1926: 709-7 10):

Our party's policy is to use the strength of the masses to unify the country.... Workers, peasants, merchants, students, and soldiers constitute the population of our nation, as we know, and by far the most numerous of these is the peasants. Hence the manifestos of our party congresses have spoken for the various interests of the peasants. However the worker and peasant masses still suffer seriously. Why? Simply put, it is because they are not organized. They are like scattered sand, and do not realize their own strength. Thus we must henceforth forge an alliance of peasants, workers and soldiers and work together to accomplish the business of the revolution. They will fight for their own interests. President Sun has said "the success or failure of the revolution depends entirely upon whether the masses can rise up in unity; if the masses can unify, then the revolution must be successful."

Chen Gong-bo (1926: 701), head of the political training department of the Military Council, emphasized the concrete results that had been achieved by peasants working on the side of the armies of the National Revolutionary Government:

For years in Kwangtung the power of the peasants was controlled by the officials and the bureaucrats because the peasants were not organized. Now, because the peasants have been organized, the officials and bureaucrats and warlords have no way to continue their evil ways. Last year [1925] when our troops were dispatched up the East River, had it not been for the assistance of the Chinese Kuomintang and the peasants, the revolutionary armies would not have been able to win such a rapid victory. When the Kwangtung peasants were organized, Kwangtung could be unified; if we want the national revolution to be successful and China to be unified, it can be accomplished only if the peasants organize and rise up. The peasantry constitutes more than 80o of China's population and produces 90o of its goods. Why is it that the peasantry does not have political power? Because they are not organized. When Sun Yat-sen organized the Tongmenghui years ago, he advocated equalization of land rights because he understood that it was absolutely necessary that the peasants rise up and join the revolution. The Chinese revolution, then, is a peasant revolution. If we desire the national revolution to be successful, then we must desire that the peasants all rise up and struggle.



McDonald / HUNANPEASANT MO VEMENT [1871

This instrumental orientation can, perhaps, be described as Sunist. Sun Yat-sen had spent his life seeking for allies in the underbelly of the Chinese polity-among the secret societies, workers, peasants, and so on. This seems to have been Mao Tse-tung's stance as well, but he put it this way (1972: I, 175-179):

If the peasants do not rise and join in support of national revolution, it will not be able to win success. If the peasant movement is not quickly accomplished, the peasant question cannot be settled. If the peasant question is not pretty much settled during this revolutionary period, then the peasants cannot support this revolution.

Like Chen Gong-bo and Tan Yan-kai, Mao Tse-tung (1972: 1, 175-179) points to the success of the Kwangtung peasant movement as a sign that the peasant movement nationally will be of major assistance to the progress of the larger goal of reunifying the country:

A year ago Chen Qiong-ming had Kwangtung and the Revolutionary Government did not. A year later, today, the realm of Kwangtung is evenly divided between the Revolutionary Government and Chen Qiong-ming, although Chen himself is not within the boundaries of the province. Soon, as the peasants from throughout Kwangtung gradually rise up, we can bring about the gradual elimination of Chen's power from every xian in the province.... From this we can understand that the Chinese revolution is not based upon imperial- ism and the warlords. It takes its basic strength from the peasants rising up against the grasping officials and corrupt bureaucrats, the local bullies and bad gentry. This is the only form for the Chinese revolution to take; there is no other. Every place in all of China must become like the Hai-Lu xians, then the national revolution will be successful. No other model is possible.

How can the oppressed end their oppression? How can the energies of the peasants be liberated for national salvation? The head of the Peasant Movement Training Institute stressed the role of the outsider, the students and comrades who "should quickly decide to go out and undertake the great work of peasant organizing" (Mao, 1972, I, 175-179):

From their pain and need, lead them to organize and rise up. Lead them against the local bully and bad gentry. Lead them in



[1881 MODERN CHINA /APRIL 1 975

cooperation with the students, and the middle and small merchants, to create a great united front. Lead them to join the anti-imperialist, antiwarlord peoples revolutionary movement.

The outsider was the key. The urbanite gone down to the village could lead the peasants in mobilizing their resources for national salvation.

This was the goal of the Peasant Movement Training Institute in Canton, headed for a time by Mao: to provide urban leadership for rural mobilization.

Did it work? Did the masses rise to aid the armies of the Northern Expedition?

While there are numerous reports of peasants and workers aiding the armies of Tang Sheng-zhi on his march through Hunan, most are very general. Contemporaries most frequently mentioned five instances of direct participation by the masses in the Hunan war (Renmin chubanshe, 1953: 293-297). However, (1) the "battle" of Sifenqiao (July 11) took place two days after the Northern forces had already been defeated in nearby Liling; (2) the battle of Xianzhong centered on a few stragglers looting the stores and homes of an area utterly without strategic importance; (3) the battle of Linxiang was a real one, but (a) the peasants were on the periphery and (b) they were led by the xian magistrate-no peasant movement organizers are mentioned; (4) peasants appear to have had a significant role in Pingjiang xian, but the major battle was fought to the west along the Milo River (August 19); peasants were fighting stragglers; (5) there was no "battle of Changsha" for the locals to participate in at all; the peace-keeping role of local notables and the workers was far from unprecedented in the history of warlord wars. What did not happen is also of interest. Shaoshan and Chuzhou peasant associations appear to have acted as bearers for soldiers, provided intelligence, and organized a "Dare to Die" corps for Tang Sheng-zhi-but that was in March. The war was not the Northern Expedition; it was Tang Sheng-zhi versus Ye Kai-jin and Wu Pei-fu. I have seen no detailed accounts of any peasant participation in the Northern Expedition in Xiangtan xian, probably the best organized xian in the province at the time (Renmin chubanshe, 1953: 293-297).



McDonald / HUNAN PEASANT MOVEMENT [1891

There is convincing evidence that after the passing of the battlefront, workers in Changsha-particularly from the rick- shaw pullers union organized under the direction of the Communist leader Xia Xi, and from the nightsoil dock workers' union probably organized under the direction of secret society leadership-together with Anyuan workers under Communist leadership, participated in support and actual battlefield activities (Renmin chubanshe, 1954: 3 19-328).

Cynicism at a distance is the easy refuge of the statistically inclined. The historian cannot deny the people their role in history, hard though it may be to plump to the full the undercurrents of the unlettered. But I suggest that the myth of the masses aiding the Northern Expedition is a positive hindrance to our understanding the ultimate failure of the peasant movement in Hunan. The reasons for the existence of the myth are well summarized by a contemporary writer, probably a Communist (Renmin chubanshe, 1953: 293-297):

Let us put aside whether the troop strength of this National Government's Northern Expedition is or is not sufficient to accomplish the goals of this Northern Expedition and eradicate the power of the warlords. If this kind of great national revolutionary war does not allow the people to participate directly, to show their concern, then we can say with certainty that this Northern Expedition will not be a success, or at least that it is not yet completed.

That the peasants remained relatively passive as this new military force passed before them should surprise no one, least of all Mao Tse-tung. In a speech delivered as late as May 30, 1926, while the battle raged in his native province, Mao listed the five provinces in which the peasant movements were the most active. Hunan was not among them (Zhongguo nongmin, 1926).4

THE BALLOONING PEA SANTMO VEMENT If the peasants of Hunan did not rise like a veritable tidal

wave at the merest suggestion of the coming of the Northern Expedition, how did they rise? What is basis for Mao's use of cataclysmic meteorological metaphors?



[1901 MODERN CHINA / APRIL 1 9 75

The best figures are probably these: in April 1926 there were peasant organizations in 29 xian with a total membership of 38,000. Most of the xian were along the Xiang River basin or in areas under the domination of Tang Sheng-zhi's pro-KMT armies (Fan, 1957: 106-119). After the passing of the Northern Expedition in July, it took only about eight weeks for the membership in peasant associations to reach three or four hundred thousand (Mao, 1967: I, 24). By the end of November a rough estimate yielded a figure of 1,071,137 members ("Xiang-nong," 1926). By mid-December the membership had reached 1,367,727 (Renmin chubanshe, 1953: 257, 262), and the figures continued to climb at a remarkable rate thereafter, topping three million before the counterrevolutionary coup in Changsha on May 21 punctured the balloon.

These figures may not be precise, but they cannot be denied-they must be accounted for.

One way in which we might be able to account for the explosive growth of the peasant movement in Hunan comes from a careful reading of the descriptions of what was going on before and after the summer of 1926 and the seemingly indiscriminate use of two terms for peasant organizations: nonghui (agricultural society) and nongmin xiehui (peasant association). The peasant associations were established by the Kuomintang according to certain rules laid down in 1924. But what were the agricultural societies?

The agricultural societies were established in the late Qing period as a part of the self-government reforms. They were originally intended to act as a kind of agricultural extension service cum tool of the landlords and "brokers" for maintaining their control over the small, landowner-tiller peasants. In many places the societies had fallen into disuse over the years, their buildings converted into schools or teahouses; but in many other areas irregular meetings had continued to be held, blending nicely with the social requirements of the local elite (Gan, 1927a: 15). Given the facts of warlord repression and the shortage of trained KMT peasant organizers, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that at least some of the peasants counted as members of the peasant associations were in fact members of agricultural societies led by members of the local elite.



McDonald / HUNAN PEASANT MO VEMENT [1911

Politics in Hunan did not suddenly depart from previous pattems with the advent of the Northern Expedition. Former and would-be clients of such powerful figures as Tang Sheng-zhi and Tan Yan-kai-and others among local elites who wished to cement relations with the new powers-moved to establish peasant associations or to convert their agricultural associations as an outward and visible sign of their spiritual conversion to the new cause. This was a conservative, political mobilization. Perhaps not so incidently, the establishment of elite-dominated peasant organizations would also serve to preempt more radical efforts by outsiders to mobilize the peasantry for social revolution. The hypothesis that there were certain sectors of the elite who supported the peasant movement during the summer and autumn of 1926 gains additional strength in light of the relative absence of conflict in the countryside during the summer. The officers of the Southern armies encouraged the peasant movement, and according to Li Rui (1957: 264), "it enjoyed a good reputation throughout society" during this time.

In this connection, the comments of the anti-Communist Kuomintang Peasant Bureau member Gan Nai-guang are of interest. In December 1926 he described the peasant movement in various provinces for the benefit of his followers in the rightist "Left Society." The peasant movements in Kiangsi and Kiangsu, he said, were remarkable for their lack of success. More than a hundred students had been sent out to work in each of these provinces, but they had not been able to enlist more than 6,000-7,000 during several months of effort. The problem, according to Gan, was not that they lacked fervor or determination, but that their leadership had been at fault: they had been sent out to do adult education work among the peasantry (Gan, 1927a: 14-15). In Hunan, too, adult education work had been the early undertaking of the peasant organizers, but meeting with little success they had changed their strategy. For six months they worked in this new (and undefined) way, but because they advocated avoiding conflict in the villages, their results were little different than before. It was only when they moved from the reformers' camp into that of the revolutionaries' that they achieved the outstanding results that



[1921 MODERN CHINA / APRIL 19 75

were evident in the summer and autumn of 1926. It may not be a bad guess that the second (undefined) way was cooperation with the old nonghui, while the "revolutionary" path meant beginning to wrestle with erstwhile elite supporters for real control.

If some of the old nonghui were controlled by members of the elite who aligned themselves on the side of patriotism and the KMT, while others were controlled by opponents of the revolution, we should expect to find evidence of selective efforts to save the "good" ones by converting them into more broadly based peasant associations, while abolishing the "bad" ones and erecting new organizations in their place.

Shortly after the passing of the Northern Expeditionary Armies on July 25th, the Hunan Minbao (an organ of the KMT) urged the new revolutionary government to abolish the old nonghui and to promulgate a new law on the organization of peasant societies and agricultural associations to prevent their being used by the "local bullies and bad gentry" in the various localities (Hunan shengzhi biacuan weiyuanhui, 1959: 506). During July and August the Xiangtan xian Peasant Association began absorbing some old agriculture societies and abolishing others. On September 15, the governmental Reconstruction Bureau issued a four-point law ordering that all peasant organizations be structured or restructured in accordance with the major provisions of the 1924 General Rules for Organizing Peasant Associations, which, inter alia, stipulated the duties and powers of peasant association members and called for open, democratic meetings. The buildings and other resources of the agricultural societies which were not so restructured were to be transferred to new peasant associations established by represen- tatives dispatched from Changsha (Hunan shengzhi biancuan weiyuanhui, 1959: 515).

I suggest that there were probably three different kinds of peasant associations in the Hunan peasant movement, distin- guished both by their origins and by their capacity to organize for significant social transformation in the countryside. (1) There were some which were direct conversions from the older, gentry-led agriculture societies; ceteris paribus, these may have had the lowest potential for bringing about radical change in



McDonald / HUNAN PEASANTMO VEMENT [1931

decisions about who gets what, when, and how. (2) There were some which were established de novo by local power holders using their dyadic ties and other traditional tools to bend the peasantry to their political will. (3) Finally, there were peasant associations which were established by students and other outside organizers, some of whom were imbued with the hope of transforming the social and economic relations of the countryside; these peasant associations were the ones which were most likely to seek social revolution.

If this hypothesis is correct, we should expect to see three phenomena emerging. First, we should anticipate finding peasant associations coming into conflict with one another as both outside organizers and local elites seek to expand and consolidate their leadership over the peasant movement. Second, we should expect to see previously unpoliticized peasants-people mobilized with the permission of their politically motivated patrons to participate in democratic meetings and to listen to radical speeches-gradually becoming increasingly politicized themselves and, over time, gradually coming into open conflict with their quondam social superiors. A politically motivated mobilization of the peasantry, although initially led from above, would tend to lead toward social revolution. Finally, we should expect to see this transformation strain the coalition between those Left Kuomintang members who remained committed to mass mobilization for limited political purposes only, and those Leftists and Communists who were prepared to accept-even encourage-social revolution.

A detailed report by the Xiangtan xian Peasant Association for the December 1926 Hunan Congress of Peasants (Hunan lishi cailiao, 1958) illustrates clearly the conflict among different kinds of peasant associations. For example, in the third Eastern district where the fifth qu association was located, there were 30 xiang-level associations with a total membership of 7,000. The "orthodox" peasant association organizers had succeeded in organizing the first through the fifth jia (the older term for xiang, administrative village). But in the sixth through the tenth jia, xiang associations are said to have been established by a number of "bad gentry" who united with elements from the third jia to begin to establish a special qu-level organization



11941 MODERN CHINA /APRIL 19 75

without relation to the existing one. The report says that these bad gentry "probably" had the backing of the xian government in their effort, but that after a long struggle the "illegal" associations were reorganized under the aegis of the established qu authorities. Similarly, in the seventh district association, a number of reactionary KMT gentrymen

illegally organized a peasant association, saying that the KMT is the right hand and the Peasant Associations are the left hand; the right hand can cut off the left but the left cannot cut off the right. People will join our right hand and will not join your left hand.

These reactionaries forced public contributions, arrested people for ransom, and fought with the orthodox leadership of the seventh qu association until the latter appealed to the government to arrest their enemies (Hunan shengzhi biancuan weiyuanhui, 1959: 519).

The December 1926 Xiangtan Peasant Association report is unique in giving us an intimate look at qu- and xiang-level conflict among peasant associations, but it is clear that the phenomenon was much more common than is the available data about it. For example, in Tan Yan-kai's native xian of Chaling and in neighboring Youxian (both in the mountainous eastern part of the province), "traitorous local bullies organized their own peasant associations" (Hunan shengzhi biancuan weiyuanhui, 1959: 514-515). In Hengyang unspecified "counterrevolu- tionaries" joined the peasant associations and joined in the demands for lowering rents back to the pre-1916 levels (Xiang dao, 1926). In Lieyang xian a "local bully" named Deng Yan-pin illicitly printed a petition to organize a xiang-level peasant association, while in Beixiang, another local bully bribed the peasants to transform a xiang-level peasant association into a larger qu-level one. Similar events in similarly shrouded language are reported in Iyang, Pingjiang, Linwu, and elsewhere (Renmin chubanshe, 1953: 333).

Was there the beginning of social revolution in Hunan? Did peasants in fact move from being rather passively mobilized for their superiors' political benefit into personally active partici- pants in the political process? There is every indication that it did happen-not as a wave, but in scattered places. Every report



McDonald /HUNANPEASANTMO VEMENT /1951

on the Hunan peasant movement I have seen remarks in more general terms on the activities of the peasant societies that Mao Tse-tung paints so vividly. But nowhere is it suggested that this was universal. The move from political mobilization to social mobilization was still in its early stages during the autumn and winter of 1926-1927. The urban leadership provided an institutional structure: inter alia in January, "special courts to try local bullies and bad gentry" were established, first in Changsha and then elsewhere. But the incident of the Left Society, the Zuo she, is perhaps the clearest evidence both of urban encouragement for the rising rural revolution and for the rising power of that revolution.

THE LEFT SOCIETY AND THE POLEMICAL PLACE OF MAO'S REPORT ON THE PEA SANTMO VEMENT

In late October or early November 1926 a certain Mr. Zeng founded a Left Society among members of the Kuomintang in Changsha. At the time it was rumored that members of this conservative Zuo she adhered to a strict discipline in their activities and public speech reminiscent of that required by Communist Party members (Enjinsha, 1927). Proceeding cau- tiously, the founders of the society professed their cooperation with the Communist Party, but they said that their objectives were to realize the true Three Principles of the People. This was suspicious to those who knew of the destructive activities of those claiming similar purposes in Canton during the previous winter. Most of the leaders of the city and provincial Party bureaus shared in the dominant sentiment that "there is no difference in spirit between the Kuomintang and the CCP." The Left Society temporarily dropped out of sight (Enjinsha, 1927).

Shortly after Zeng's organization of the Left Society in Changsha, Gan Nai-guang organized a society of the same name in Canton. While we cannot be certain that the Hunanese developments had an influence on Gan's Left Society, the ideological and political parallels between the two organizations are striking and enlightening, they justify turning attention to Canton. Gan Nai-guang was 41 years old, a graduate of the University of Chicago, and a member of the Central Executive



[196] MODERN CHINA /APRIL 19 75

Committee of the Kuomintang, who was installed as head of the party's Peasant Bureau in the wake of the Second National KMT Congress in 1926. Gan was considered a staunch Leftist, but after the March 20 (1926) Incident, in which Chiang Kai-shek had purged a number of leading Communists, a number of Leftists, including Gan, had wavered. In the months that followed, Gan began to develop a "Kuomintang" theory of limited peasant organization which was significantly different from that of the Communists. He advocated that the Kuomin- tang itself should move vigorously into peasant organization. The class basis of the Kuomintang was the peasantry, he said; the KMT should go to work in the villages. The peasants should not be handed over to other parties (meaning the CCP). During a period of sharp conflict between the peasants of Kwangtung and the landlords, Gan suggested that it was necessary to "alleviate conflicts" and "to send troops in case of need" (Vishnyakova-Akimova, 1971: 256).

Gan elaborated his thesis in two pamphlets (1927a, 1927b) published in January 1927. "The organization of the Kuomin- tang," he wrote, "is one that gathers together revolutionaries from every class; it is not a class organization" (Gan, 1927b: 6). By the same token, peasant associations should not be- organized according to class lines (Gan, 1 927a: 3-4):

The actual possible scope of the peasant associations is to organize those peasants whose various conditions of life are similar. In the present backward state of China's politics and economy, this is possible. In Russia and Japan it is not possible, for in these countries the development of capitalism has already reached out to the villages and the class divisions are very clear. China has not yet progressed that far, so that this kind of organization (the classless peasant association) can exist temporarily; if the national revolution is successful, political and economic development will occur and the divisions among classes will become clearer; then we will not again have organizations of this kind.

However, Gan (1927a: 7-8) went on to call for the abolition of the gentry:

Under the system of government obtaining since the Qin dynasty, the gentry has acted as go-between for the government and the people. No matter how good the government, how good its selection



McDonald / HUNAN PEASANT MO VEMENT /1 9 71

of men, so long as the go-between class, the gentry, did not change, neither did the government. For more than a thousand years it has been a gentry government. So long as that group endures we cannot realize our fervent hopes for changing the constitution and improving politics.

Gan's vision of mobilizing the masses to participate in the national revolution without engendering class conflict in the countryside was shared by Changsha's Left Society.

The establishment of special courts to try local bullies and bad gentry at the December Provincial Labor Congress threat- ened to legitimize and intensify class conflict even while it signified a revolutionary change in the conditions of legality. Within a week after the organization of these courts, three leading members of the Hunan Provincial Party Bureau traveled privately and without Executive Committee orders across the mountains to Nanchang; there they met the notorious Qiang Jing-qiang, chief civilian adviser to Chiang Kai-shek and a leading member of the Shanghai international business com- munity. The leader of this delegation was Liu Yue-zhi, acting head of the KMT Party Peasant Bureau and emergent head of the Left Society in Hunan.'

Upon their return from Nanchang, these leaders of the Left Society vigorously began to recruit new members both among members of the Kuomintang and among the ranks of landlords; most of the Society's funds were said to come from Xiangxiang and Hengshan landlord circles. Among the new recruits was the Chief of the Changsha KMT Propaganda Bureau, who joined to report on the Society's activities to the regular leadership of the Kuomintang (Enjinsha, 1927).

A substantial number of educators also joined. As a whole the educational establishment of Changsha had not joined wholeheartedly in the anti-Zhao Heng-ti struggles of the past. The rpajority, according to both Party reports and joumalistic accounts, had displayed a petty bourgeois attitude and lack of resolve (Shi Shan, 1923; Enjinsha, 1927). Hence, aside from a few outstanding leaders such as Zhu Jian-fan, most of the educational establishment was not considered in line for posts in the new government. The Left Society leaders promised to open a new road to political power for the prestigious and




jealous educators, one with which they could readily identify because one of their own leaders-Lei Shou-huan-assured them of inclusion in the soon-to-be-established Party School. The Left Society organized cells in several of the city's schools and in both the Hunan Da gong bao and a semi-official Party organ, the Changsha Minguo ribao, which was dominated by graduates from Peking University and the Peking Upper Normal School (Enjinsha, 1927).

The conflict between the Left Society and the more radical politicans-both Communist and non-Communist-developed rapidly on several levels. On the political level, Lei Shou-huan and Liu Yue-zhi attempted to gain a majority or a substantial minority on the Provincial Affairs Committee. Their campaign was stymied by Tang Sheng-zhi's return to Changsha on February 4 for consultations. By his support for members of his own clique-carried to the extent of snubbing a member of the Control Committee known to be a member of the Left Society-Tang let it be known that he had nothing to do with supporting the faction or the goals of Liu Yue-zhi (Enjinsha, 1 927).6

On the educational level, Lei Shou-huan was engaged in establishing a Hunan University and was a leading member of the committee to establish a joint government and Party political school. However, the fifteen-member committee for the establishment of the Party Political School produced an educational outline for the province which withdrew two key departments from the prospective Hunan University and provided for the separate establishment of a Party Political School, thus at a stroke decimating Lei's university and his plans for building on his constituency of educators. "This was a severe blow to the Left Society" (Enjinsha, 1927).

Factional fighting in the capital might have been overlooked in the interests of greater Party unity had not Liu Yue-zhi mobilized his forces to blunt the ongoing progress of mobilizing the peasants. On February 12, just three days before a scheduled meeting between Tang Sheng-zhi and leading members of the Hunan Party and government, Liu Yue-zhi published a "Plan for the Peasant Movement" in the Hunan Da gong bao, openly opposing democratization in the countryside and slan-



AMcDonald / HUNAN PEA SANT MO VEMENT /1991

dering the members of the peasant associations as "villains and scoundrels" (dipi liumang). Like Gan Nai-guang, Liu Yue-zhi advocated a "togetherness" between the landlords and the peasants which would allow the peasants to devote their full effort to "increasing production and improving the technology of agriculture." In private he was saying that the peasant associations were controlled by the Communist Party and that they intended to take away people's wealth and to equalize all wealth. But in public he dwelt on the question of political power. The countryside was still full of all kinds of unrest, he wrote, but the local bullies and bad gentry had already been done away with. It was only vile rascals who were engaged in disorderly activities. Every level of peasant association should be controlled by the Party, he wrote, and "if they do not abide by the rules, they should be reformed" by the Party from above (Renmin chubanshe, 1953: 286; see also Hunan shengzhi biancuan weiyuanhui, 1959: 525). For the next two or three weeks both the Hunan Da gong bao, and the Minguo ribao carried a drumbeat of editorials along this line.

At the same time Liu Yue-zhi was using his capacity as member of the Provincial Party Bureau and head of its Peasant Bureau to dispatch people to the countryside to work with and transform the rural movement under the pretext that those who had been sent out earlier were incompetent and needed further training. He proposed a plan by which the head of the Peasant Bureau (himself) could investigate and recall special agents from the peasant movement at any time without time-consuming committee discussions. Some fifty or sixty had already been sent out by the time the Left Society scandal broke (Enjinsha, 1927).

It was not long before the strong Leftists within the Party and government reacted to suppress this danger from within. The other semi-official organ of the Kuomintang in Changsha, the Hunan Min bao, began a censorious drumbeat against the Left Society and its organs, including its two chief competitors in the newspaper business. Under the direction of the chief editor, Xue Jue-zhai, the Min bao campaign soon inflamed the opinion of true Leftists within the provincial and city Party bureaus. Investigations revealed the full extent of the Left



/2001 MODERN CHINA /APRIL 1975

Society's plans and made compromise impossible. In late February there were several mass demonstrations led by Communist labor leaders calling for the overthrow of all enemies of the revolution whether within or without the Party (Renmin chubanshe, 1953: 286).

The first purge of the Kuomintang in Hunan in late February and early March saw eight leading members of the Left Society, including Liu Yue-zhi, stripped of their posts in Party and government and forbidden to hold Party membership ever again. The membership list of the Society was carefully scrutinized and lower-level members were given a variety of punishments by city and local party bureaus. The two or three schools that had been the bastions of the Society were closed down,7 and the Hunan Da gong bao and the Minguo ribao were suppressed by the government and the Party respectively. The scandal did not end there, nor did the Leftist "Cleaning of the Party Movement." Although Liu Yue-zhi had been overthrown, his "theory" of the proper role of the peasant associations- avoiding quarrels in the countryside by strict control and by concentration of peasants' work on peaceful construction-was widely influential in a number of xian where middle-of-the-road Kuomintang members had control of lower-level Party bureaus and strong influence over the nascent peasant associations. On March 5,8 the official Communist Party organ, Zhanshi zhoubao (The warrior weekly) expressed in "A Letter Not Sent to Liu Yue-zhi" the tone of the Cleaning of the Party campaign that was growing (quoted in Renmin chubanshe, 1953: 286).

You are the one who takes rents to eat, basically "an official while in the capital and a gentryman at home." Your kinsmen are mostly middle and small landlords. You joined the revolution just because Zhao Heng-ti chased you out, that is all. Now you live better than before, and your basic worry now is whether three hundred shi (baskets) of grain is enough to keep your family and develop its fortunes. Naturally you want to use your talents to preserve and extend your own and your family's special privileges.

Mao Tse-tung's "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan," was first published in the Communist Youth League's Shanghai organ Xiangdao zhoubao (The guide weekly), datelined February 18, and was expanded and sharp-



McDonald / HUNAN PEASANT MO VEMENT /201]

ened for publication in the Zhanshi zhoubao later in March. It was another document in the chorus of criticism against the Left Society and its vision of a limited mobilization of the peasantry.

CONCLUSION There was less to the peasant movement in Hunan than one

might suppose from reading Mao Tse-tung's "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan." In its early stages, the movement was substantially dependent on political developments centered in the cities. While the available evidence does not substantiate the thesis that all peasant associations were organized with the permission and/or active leadership of landlords and other traditional rural power holders, there is substantial evidence that many were. I have suggested that as the peasant movement developed, in some places and to varying degrees these elite sponsors of the movement began to lose control. Political mobilization was gradually transformed into social mobilization. Peasants organized originally under the rubric of national salvation began to reach out to grasp local power. A broadened polity challenged the traditional elite. This transformation appears to have occurred first and most intense- ly in the xians near Changsha, the areas most convenient for organizers who were sent out from the center of radical influence in the province. This was also the area to which Mao's investigation of the peasant movement was confined.

But the peasants had neither the political resources nor the hope of obtaining political resources in the short time they had available before the opponents of social revolution mobilized the militarists of Tang Sheng-zhi's armies to come to their rescue. The smoldering fires of social revolution in Hunan were quenched in a bath of blood. From the areas closest to the cities, the revolutionaries retreated, crippled, to the most remote areas available. Eventually Mao's vision was turned on its head. It was not the peasants as a hurricane, a swift force, but peasants as an army organized and led by urban men, that liberated China from the imperialists and the strong hand of the "local bullies and bad gentry."




NOTES

1. Wolf (1971) stresses that poor peasants or landless laborers are completely within the domain of their employers, without tactical power of their own. Mao (1967: I, 32) contrarily, stresses that "the poor peasants are not afraid of losing anything," and that 50% (the figure seems exaggerated) of the peasant association members "eat up more than they earn."

2. Principal sources for this section include Tao Ju-yin (1957 and n.d.), Tan Yan-kai's descendants (1964), and Hunan shengzhi biancuan weiyuanhui (1959).

3. This information appeared in a political summary chart of the Kuomintang leadership (n.d., but probably about 1925) in the Yokota Collection, Toyobunko, Tokyo.

4. The five provinces named were Kwangtung, Kiangsi, Hupei, Shantung, and Hopei.

5. Liu Yue-zhi was a member of Tan Yan-kai's clique in 1920 and director of the Office of Civilian Affairs in Tan's short-lived 1920 government. A second member of the delegation was Lei Shou-huan, who had been secretary to Tan Yan-kai in 1917; he was a member of the "danong" educational clique and of the Provincial Assembly which was elected in 1922. He had played a role as contact man in bringing Tan Sheng-zhi over to the side of the KMT in 1926. Liao Wei-fan, the third member of the delegation, was a Changsha educator and the son of the Hengshan landlord (McDonald, 1975).

,6. See also a clipping in the Yokota Collection of the Toyobunko, Tokyo, dated February 16, 1927, 'Tang Sheng-zhi koutou shang....

7. Renmin chubanshe (1953) and Hunan shengzhi biancuan weiyuanhui (1959) mention a third school, but it is not named in the more primary Enjinsha (1927) clipping.

8. The date March 5 comes from Hunan shengzhi biancuan weiyuanhui (1959: 525).

REFERENCES "BAI-SHAN" (1934) "Beifa yiqian di Tang Sheng-zhi" (Tang Sheng-zhi before the

Northern Expedition). Xiandai shiliao (Contemporary historical materials). Shanghai.

CHEN GONG-BO (1926) "Nongmin yundong zai Zhongguo guomin geming di diwei" (The place of the peasant movement in the Chinese national revolution). Zhongguo nongmin 6 and 7. Canton.

Enjinsha (1927) Clipping entitled "Hunan Shengdangbu suqing fandongpai zhi yenli" (Severe measures taken by the Hunan provincial party bureau to liquidate the counterrevolutionary clique). Changsha dispatch, n.d. (about March 4?) in the Enjinsha Collection of newspaper clippings, Keio University Rare Book Room.

FAN BAI-ZHUAN (1957) "Wu sa yundong hou beifa zhanzheng qianxi di nongmin yundong" (The peasant movement from the May 30th Movement to the eve of the Northern Expedition) in Lai Xin-she (ed.) Diyi ci guonei geming zhanzheng shilun ji (Collected historical discussions on the first revolutionary civil war). Wuhan.

GAN NAI-GUANG (1927a) "Nongmin yundong chubu" (Peasant movement primer). No publisher.



McDonald /H UNAN PEASANTMOVEMENT [2031

---(1927b) "Yi dang jian guo" (Build the country with the Party). No publisher. Hunan lishi cailiao (1958) (Historical materials on Hunan) No. 3. Changsha. Hunan shengzhi biancuan weiyuanhui (1959). Hunan jinbainian dashi jishu (Record

of major events in Hunan during the last hundred years). Changsha: Hunan renmin chubanshe.

ISAACS, H. (1966) The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution. New York: Antheneum. LI RUI (1957) Mao Ze-dong tongzhi di chuchi geming huodong (The early

revolutionary activities of Comrade Mao Tse-tung). Peking: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe.

LUXEMBURG, R. (1968) The Accumulation of Capital. New York: Modern Reader. (paperback edition)

McDONALD, A; (1975) "The urban origins of rural revolution: elites and the masses in Hunan, China, 1911-1927." Ph.D. dissertation. University of California, Berkeley.

MAO TSE-TUNG (1972) "Guomin geming yu nongmin yundong" (The National Revolution and the peasant movement) in Takeuchi Minoru (ed.) M- Takuto shii (Collected Works of Mao Tse-tung). Tokyo: Hokub5sha.

(1967) Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung. Peking: Foreign Language Press. (1927) "Hunan nongmin yundong kaocha baogao" (Report on an investigation

into the peasant movement in Hunan). Xiang dao (The guide weekly) 191 (March 12), Wuhan; reprinted in Zhanshi zhoubao (The warrior weekly, March 1927), Changsha.

MARX, K. (1969) 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Volume 1. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Renmin chubanshe [comp.] (1954) Diyi ci guonei geming zhanzheng shichi di gongren yundong (The labor movement during the period of the first revolutionary civil war). Peking: Renmin chubanshe.

---[comp.] (1953) Diyi ci guonei geming zhanzheng shichi di nongmin yundong (The peasant movement during the period of the first revolutionary civil war). Peking: Renmin chubanshe.

"SHI-SHAN" (1923) "Shengxian xia zhi Hunan" (Hunan under the provincial constitution). Xianfeng (The vanguard) 1, 1 (July 1). Shanghai

TAN YAN-KAI (1926) "Guomin zhengfu xianzhuang baogao" (Report on the present situation of the national government). Zhongguo nongmin 6 and 7. Canton: Ministry for the Peasantry.

Tan Yan-kai's descendants (1964) Tan Zi-an xiansheng nianpu (Chronological biography of Mr. Tan Yan-kai). Taipei: Zhongguo jiaotong jianshe xuehui.

TAO JU-YIN (1957) Beiyang junfa tongzhi shiqi shihua (Historical stories of the period of warlord rule in the North). Peking.

(n.d.) Dujun tuan zhuan (Accounts of the warlords). Taipei: Jindai Zhongguo shiliao congkan series, no. 67.

VISHNYAKOVA-AKIMOVA, V. V. (1971) Two Years in Revolutionary China, 1925-27 (Steven I. Levine, trans.). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.

WOLF, E. (1971) "Peasant rebellion and revolution," in N. Miller and R. Aya (eds.) National Liberation: Revolution in the Third World. New York: Free Press.

Xiang dao (1926) 181. "XIANG-NONG" (1926) "Hunan di nongmin" (Hunan peasants). Xiang dao 181. YAMADA TATSUO (1974) "A study of party power of the Kuomintang leftist

faction in the Wuhan government." Keio J. of Politics 1, 1. Zhongguo nongmin (1926) 6 and 7. Canton.



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