On Mao Zedong’s Investigation Of The Peasant Movement In Hunan

This dissertation is divided into three main sections:the first focuses on the background in which Mao did the research and the motivation with which he produced Report on Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan in March 1927;the second section lays out some important details of his travels and research processes;the third section centers on the evolution of Mao’s political thoughts of the peasant movement and examines how it reflected in the communist revolution he led.Mao’s investigations were conducted at a time when the peasant movement was perceived by the public as too radical.The republic revolution in the 1920s unfurled the banner of anti-imperialism and anti-feudalism,and as it grew,the revolutionary discourse became more systematic and complicated.Not only did such terms as "local tyrants and evil gentry"(tuhao lieshen,土豪劣绅)come into being,but the mass in the wide rural areas were too awakened and found in the close neighborhood "enemies of revolution"(gemin diren,革命敌人),who were fiercely attacked as representatives of the old society in the peasant movement encouraged and accompanied by the successful Northern Expedition.Hunan was no exception to the wave of revolutionary fervor.As the rapidly expanded peasant movement went on,old societal contradictions came to the surface and peasants’ passion were ablaze,resulting in the drastic radicalization of the "wipe-out-the-local-tyrants-and-evil-gentry" campaign and the terrorization of both the rural and urban.As those traditional upper-class who had lose countered by upgrading their propaganda against the peasant movement,the overall society in Hunan fell into a chaos.Accordingly,opinions within the revolutionary camp became divided.Against this backdrop,the traditional gentry class launched their forceful counterattacks against the peasant movement,and with the right-wing faction within the Kuomintang becoming visibly restless,the national revolutionary force increasingly exhibited hostile tendencies toward the peasant movement.Not only was peasant movement in Hunan threatened to be snuffed out,but the leader of the movement as a whole—the Communist Party itself—faced a crisis of survival.Thinking ahead of his time and being determined to understand the socio-political space for the Communist Party’s further development,Mao went deep into rural Hunan to study peasant movement as a way to help promote revolution.Before 1927,Mao Zedong had carried out a lot of rural investigations.The republic revolution made him aware of the great potential of the peasants as a revolutionary force and reminded him of their critical importance in it.Thus was the personal experience and political rationale for undertaking this journal to study peasants.In fact,before his departure,Mao had already had rather careful research into preparation for the study tour,which had two major premises:1)the fate of the peasants was at the core of the revolution,2)without a feasible solution to rural problems,the revolution had no way of succeeding.He nonetheless had no profound understandings of some of the specific questions concerning rural China and its peasants.This dissertation,based on a large quantity of archives,documents,and open publications,presents the entire process of Mao’s rural investigative tour in a comprehensive,clear,and detailed manner.From January 4 to February 5,1927,Mao Zedong travelled a distance of up to 1,400 li(700 kilometers)across five counties—Xiangtan(湘潭),Xiangxiang(湘乡),Hengshan(衡山),Liling(醴陵)and Changsha(长沙)—in Hunan,where he convened roundtable talks,lectures,town-hall meetings as well as many intensive interviews.There he also predicted the cadres of lower party branches and Agricultural Association that sooner or later the rightest in Kuomintang would break up with the Communist Party and betray the revolutionary cause,and cautioned that Party members and local Party cells should prepare themselves for all types of emergency scenarios.In addition,he also gave many instructions,speeches and lectures on the Party’s organization,rural military reserve,and the crackdown on the tuhao lieshen,which greatly helped the further development of local peasant movement.Mao’s several speeches and reports to the Communist Party’s Hunan branch,Party Schools and Youth League Schools during and after the study tour directly contributed to the change of the policies of the Hunan Party branch regarding the peasant movement.The final report--Report on Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan—encouraged a further surge of peasant movement in Hunan.But the Party’s Central Committee under the leadership of Chen Duxiu(陈独秀)discouraged peasant movement,yielded to the Kuomintang rightists’ demands and compromised with them.The publication of Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan was once suppressed,and the Central Committee’s mouthpiece—Guidance(xiangdao,向导)—too was discontinued.Amidst this increasing sense of chaos and panic,Mao was adamant in his own belief and convictions.On the question of future direction of the Chinese revolution,his strategic vision gradually came into fruition on the basis of his study tour of peasant movement and the subsequent report,which in fact parted ways in its early days with the roadmaps of the Communist International and Stalin.Within the Party,his decisiveness and courage was in a stark contrast with the Chen Duxiu’s repeated concessions to the Kuomintang rightists:After the Ma Day Incident(Mari shibian,马日事变),for example,although Mao did not openly--within the Kuomintang Central Military Commission based in Wuhan(武汉)—call for physical force to solve the crisis,he nonetheless insisted upon counterattack—as the situation worsened off—whenever he was not pressed by senior leaders of both the Communist Party and the Kuomintang.In Hengshan and elsewhere in Hunan,he emphasized the importance of military preparation.And at the August 7th Confernece(baqi huiyi,八七会议),he publicly exposed Chen Duxiu’s passivism,and made the famous judgment that "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun".In the Autumn Harvest Uprising(qiushou qiyi,秋收起义)and the rural revolutionary activities thereafter in Jinggangshan(井冈山)area,Mao turned the direction and focal point of revolution from urban areas to the vast countryside where the anti-revolutionary forces were weaker.There he integrated the land reforms,military warfare,the construction of revolutionary base,and the Party’s own buildup in the rural environment,thus creating a new vision for Chinese revolution that highlighted the military preparedness and separation of the workers and peasants from the anti-revolutionary,and the strategy of encircling cities from rural areas.In analyzing and evaluating Mao’s peasant movements and his Report on Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan,this dissertation is not limited to Mao’s own words and discourse.Instead,it combines the characters of Hunan people,the rural cultural traditions as well as the concrete socio-economic circumstances since the late-Qing era in order to ferret out the fundamental problems in rural Hunan and assess the deeper reasons for the rise of the anti-tuhao-lieshen campaign.As a piece of very important work during Mao’s youth,Report on Investgation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan has many versions and revisions.This dissertation utilizes the original version published in Soldier Magazine(Zhanshi,《战士》)in 1927 and the version published in The Selected Works of Mao Zedong in 1951 that Mao himself edited with a sound and reasonable analysis on the relative modifications.