![]() Cover art of the 1963 English edition. | |
Author | Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) |
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Original title | 湖南农民运动考察报告 Húnán Nóngmín Yùndòng Kǎochá Bàogào |
Translator | Central Compilation and Translation Bureau |
Language | Chinese |
Published | 1927 |
Publication place | China |
Part of a series on |
Maoism |
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Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan or Inquiry into the Peasant Movement of Hunan of March 1927, often called the Hunan Report, is one of Mao Zedong's most famous and influential essays. The Report is based on a several month visit to his home countryside around Changsha, capital of Hunan in early 1927. The Report endorses the violence that had broken out spontaneously in the wake of the Northern Expedition, makes a class analysis of the struggle, and enthusiastically reports the "Fourteen Great Achievements" of the peasant associations (农民协会). [1] [2] [3]
At a time when the strategy of the Chinese Communist Party was based on urban workers, Mao advocated a revolution based on the peasantry, especially poor peasants. He emphasized that violent and ritualistic struggle was the most effective method of striking against class enemies. The Hunan Report's emphasis on the peasantry, including their violent struggle against the landlord class, gradually become the dominant strategy in the Communist Party's land reform on its road to victory in 1949.
The rhetoric of the Hunan Report was taken up by radicals in the Chinese Cultural Revolution and by radical groups around the world, such as the Naxalites in India and the Shining Path in Peru, to follow Mao's example to "surround the cities from the countryside" by building power in the villages with violence.
Mao left his home village in Hunan to graduate from Hunan Normal University, then become a teacher and labor organizer after joining the Communist Party. He was impressed by the Guangdong communist leader, Peng Pai. a radical intellectual who would organize the peasants of his home districts into Hailufeng Soviet, which redistributed land and promoted social change. When the Communists joined the Nationalists in the First United Front, Peng headed the Peasant Movement Training Institute, of which Mao became co-leader. [4]
The Nationalists, with communist and Soviet support, launched the Northern Expedition in 1925 to unite the country and oust the imperialists, setting off mass demonstrations in the cities and uprisings of peasant associations in the countryside. Communists went out to peasant organizations in advance of the army to assist the peasants in opposing the warlords and their landlord allies. [5] Weakened by the peasants and communists, the warlords and their social base were more easily defeated by the soldiers of the Northern Expedition. [5] This combined peasant organization and military force was the highwater mark of Nationalist and Communist Cooperation. [5]
However, leadership of both parties questioned whether the peasant associations should be encouraged in their violence and attacks on landlords. Chen Duxiu, the communist leader, believed that consistent with an orthodox Marxist view, the base of the party should be urban workers, with peasants merely adjacent to this strategy. [5] Reports from the countryside were scattered and unreliable. Mao, recognized by both parties as an expert on peasants, was sent to Hunan to investigate local conditions in areas through which Northern Expedition troops had just passed. He published his report in Zhongyang Fukan (Central Committee Periodical) 28 March 1927. [6]
In this report, Mao Zedong details the actions and achievements of the Chinese peasants in Hunan in an attempt to sway his fellow revolutionaries' opinions on the capabilities of peasantry to communist revolution in China. [7] [8] This article was written as a reply to the criticisms both inside and outside the Party then being leveled at the Chinese Peasantry. [2] [9] Mao had spent thirty-two days in Hunan Province making an investigation and wrote this report in order to answer to the criticisms of the leadership of the CCP towards the peasantry. [2] Throughout the report, advocated a then heretical strategy of mobilizing poor peasants to carry out "struggle" (douzheng). Mao from that point on rejected the idea of peaceful land reform, arguing that peasants could not achieve true liberation unless they participated in the violent overthrow of the landlords. [10] In Mao's view, the significance of the peasant organizations was that they had spontaneously organized themselves despite centuries of oppression in which they had been told that their social position was fated by Heaven. [11] He described the peasants as having the historic mission to overthrow the landlords and work with the urban proletariat to jointly liberate China from its oppressors. [11]
The Report is divided into eight chapters: [2]
The Report concludes by describing "Fourteen Great Achievements":
The first section, "The Importance of the Peasant Problem" reported that he had spent thirty-two days gathering information and found that "many of the hows and whys of the peasant movement were the exact opposite of what the gentry in Hankou and Changsha were saying." He saw violent and spontaneous peasant uprising
In a very short time, in China's central, southern and northern provinces, several hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm, like a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back. They will smash all the trammels that bind them and rush forward along the road to liberation. They will sweep all the imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials, local tyrants and evil gentry into their graves. Every revolutionary party and every revolutionary comrade will be put to the test, to be accepted or rejected as they decide. There are three alternatives. To march at their head and lead them. To trail behind them, gesticulating and criticizing. Or to stand in their way and oppose them. Every Chinese is free to choose, but events will force you to make the choice quickly. [12]
The main targets of attack by the peasants were the "local tyrants, the evil gentry and the lawless landlords, but in passing they also hit out against patriarchal ideas and institutions, against the corrupt officials in the cities and against bad practices and customs in the rural areas." The poorest peasants were the "most revolutionary group" and would be the most reliable in the overthrow of the "patriarchal-feudal class."
Mao's report directly addressed those in the party who objected to the peasants using violence in their liberation: [11]
It is fine. It is not "terrible" at all. It is anything but "terrible." ... "It's terrible!" is obviously a theory for combatting the rise of the peasants in the interests of the landlords; it is obviously a theory of the landlord class for preserving the old feudal order and obstructing the establishment of the new democratic order; it is obviously a counterrevolutionary theory.
In this context, Mao also coined his famous saying that revolution is not a dinner party:
Revolution is not a dinner party, nor an essay, nor a painting, nor a piece of embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.... Without using the greatest force, the peasants cannot possibly overthrow the deep-rooted authority of the landlords which has lasted for thousands of years. [13]
The poor peasants, Mao continued, "have always been the main force in the bitter fight in the countryside. They have fought militantly through the two periods of underground work and of open activity. They are the most responsive to Communist Party leadership. They are deadly enemies of the camp of the local tyrants and evil gentry and attack it without the slightest hesitation." [14]
In the report, Mao described how peasants experienced a triple subordination: (1) to the dominance of clan authority, (2) to landowners, and (3) to "spirits." [15] Mao also noted that peasant women experienced a fourth form of subordination, subordination to the marital authority of their husbands. [15]
The peasant strategy did not immediately lead to success, since neither local peasant associations nor the Party could stand up to the guns and organization of the local power holders or Chiang Kai-shek's armies. Following the Shanghai Massacre and subsequent White Terror conducted by the Nationalists, the Communists were almost wiped out and forced from their urban base. Mao summarized the lesson he learned in another famous slogan, "power grows from the barrel of a gun." He and Zhu De then organized the Chinese Red Army and established an independent rural base. [16] He replied to critics in 1930, "A single spark can start a prairie fire." [17]
But the Hunan Report marked a decisive turning point in the revolutionary strategy that eventually brought the Party to power in 1949. Roy Hofheinz, Jr. writes that Mao's contribution at the time was not policy, since he skirts the issues of land confiscation or ownership, but criticizing leaders for not taking a "revolutionary" attitude. His innovation was the insistence that only the poorest, the poor peasants were able to turn things upside down. The ruling class must be destroyed, for a "revolution is an "act of violence whereby one class overthrows another". Only the landless peasants and "riff-raff" could be relied on, because the middle-peasants would pander to the ruling class either knowingly or without realizing it. Mao attacked Nationalist and Communist leaders who looked down on these peasants and deplored violence, for violence was to be celebrated. [18]
Maurice Meisner points out that the report contained two "heresies" from the point of view of the orthodox position of the Party in its time. First and most generally, Mao bypassed the urban proletariat and second, relied to some extent on the initiative of the peasantry, not the Communist Party or the Comintern. The word "hurricane" showed Mao did not see the need for extensive organizing or deep preparation. The "single spark" strategy await the painful and slow development of capitalism or the bourgeois stage of history to prepare for the eventual revolution in the future. Meisner notes the irony: had not the White Terror nearly destroyed the fledgling Party and driven it from the cities, Mao's heresies might have cut short his career as a Communist. [19]
Elizabeth Perry adds that the Report set the standard for understanding public emotions, for Mao's principle of "without investigation, no one has the right to speak," and the mass line, which needed organizers to understand the target audience to be mobilized. [20]
Another feature that was to some extent less common for the time was the special attention to women. The Report argued that while men were oppressed by political authority, clan authority, and religious authority, women were "also dominated by men." [21]
Zhou Libo's 1948 novel The Hurricane and William Hinton's Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (1966) were both works on the general time and place, which, in their dramatized form, had suggested moral legitimacy to events around those described in the report. [22]
During the Cultural Revolution, the Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Little Red Book) spread slogans taken from the Report widely [23] and Mao's secretary and ideological advisor Chen Boda published a pamphlet analyzing its message and importance. [24] The Report furnished inspiration for various Maoist groups around the world, in particular the most relevant being the Naxalites in India, Sendero Luminosa in Peru. Also it was to some degree influential with the Black Panthers in the United States. [25]
Mao Zedong, also known as Chairman Mao, was a Chinese politician, Marxist theorist, military strategist, poet, and revolutionary who was the founder of the People's Republic of China (PRC). He led the country from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976, while also serving as the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party during that time. His theories, military strategies and policies are known as Maoism.
Maoism, also known as Mao Zedong Thought, is a variety of Marxism–Leninism that Mao Zedong developed while trying to realize a socialist revolution in the agricultural, pre-industrial society of the Republic of China and later the People's Republic of China. A difference between Maoism and traditional Marxism–Leninism is that a united front of progressive forces in class society would lead the revolutionary vanguard in pre-industrial societies rather than communist revolutionaries alone. This theory, in which revolutionary praxis is primary and ideological orthodoxy is secondary, represents urban Marxism–Leninism adapted to pre-industrial China. Later theoreticians expanded on the idea that Mao had adapted Marxism–Leninism to Chinese conditions, arguing that he had in fact updated it fundamentally and that Maoism could be applied universally throughout the world. This ideology is often referred to as Marxism–Leninism–Maoism to distinguish it from the original ideas of Mao.
The Chinese Soviet Republic (CSR) was a state within China, proclaimed on 7 November 1931 by Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders Mao Zedong and Zhu De in the early stages of the Chinese Civil War. The discontiguous territories of the CSR included 18 provinces and 4 counties under the Communists' control. The CSR's government was located in its largest component territory, the Jiangxi Soviet. Due to the importance of the Jiangxi Soviet in the CSR's early history, the name "Jiangxi Soviet" is sometimes used to refer to the CSR as a whole. Other component territories of the CSR included the Northeastern Jiangxi, Hunan-Jiangxi, Hunan-Hubei-Jiangxi, Hunan-Western Hubei, Hunan-Hubei-Sichuan-Guizhou, Eyuwan, Shaanxi-Gansu, Sichuan-Shanxi, and Haifeng-Lufeng Soviets.
People's war or protracted people's war is a Maoist military strategy. First developed by the Chinese communist revolutionary leader Mao Zedong (1893–1976), the basic concept behind people's war is to maintain the support of the population and draw the enemy deep into the countryside where the population will bleed them dry through guerrilla warfare and eventually build up to mobile warfare. It was used by the Chinese communists against the Imperial Japanese Army in World War II, and by the Chinese Soviet Republic in the Chinese Civil War.
The Autumn Harvest Uprising was an insurrection that took place in Hunan and Jiangxi provinces of China, on September 7, 1927, led by Mao Zedong, who established a short-lived Hunan Soviet.
Zhang Guotao, or Chang Kuo-tao, was a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and rival to Mao Zedong. During the 1920s he studied in the Soviet Union and became a key contact with the Comintern, organizing the CCP labor movement in the United Front with the Kuomintang. From 1931 to 1932, after the Party had been driven from the cities, Zhang was placed in charge of the Eyuwan Soviet. When his armies were driven from the region, he joined the Long March but lost a contentious struggle for party leadership to Mao Zedong. Zhang's armies then took a different route from Mao's and were badly beaten by local Muslim Ma clique forces in Gansu. When his depleted forces finally arrived to join Mao in Yan'an, Zhang continued his losing challenge to Mao, and left the party in 1938. Zhang eventually retired to Canada, in 1968. He became a Christian shortly before his death in Scarborough, Ontario, in 1979. His memoirs provide valuable and vivid information on his life and party history.
Yáng Kāihuì was the second wife of Mao Zedong, whom he married in 1920. She had three children with Mao Zedong: Mao Anying, Mao Anqing, and Mao Anlong. Her father was Yang Changji, the head of the Hunan First Normal School and one of Mao's favorite teachers.
The Red Guards were a mass, student-led, paramilitary social movement mobilized by Chairman Mao Zedong in 1966 until their abolishment in 1968, during the first phase of the Cultural Revolution, which he had instituted.
New Democracy, or the New Democratic Revolution, is a type of democracy in Marxism, based on Mao Zedong's Bloc of Four Social Classes theory in post-revolutionary China which argued originally that democracy in China would take a path that was decisively distinct from that in any other country. He also said every colonial or semi-colonial country would have its own unique path to democracy, given that particular country's own social and material conditions. Mao labeled representative democracy in the Western nations as Old Democracy, characterizing parliamentarianism as just an instrument to promote the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie/land-owning class through manufacturing consent. He also found his concept of New Democracy not in contrast with the Soviet-style dictatorship of the proletariat which he assumed would be the dominant political structure of a post-capitalist world. Mao spoke about how he wanted to create a New China, a country freed from the feudal and semi-feudal aspects of its old culture as well as Japanese imperialism.
The mass line is a political, organizational, and leadership methodology developed by Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the Chinese Communist Revolution. Who used the term first is disputed, with some crediting Li Lisan and others Zhou Enlai. In mass line methodology, leadership formulates policy based on theory, implements it based on the people's real world conditions, revises the theory and policy based on actual practice, and uses that revised theory as the guide to future practice. This process is summarized as leadership "from the masses, to the masses", repeated indefinitely.
Peng Pai was a pioneer of the Chinese agrarian movement and a leading revolutionary in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during its early years. He was born in Haifeng, Guangdong Province, China. Peng Pai was one of the few Chinese intellectuals who were aware in the early 1920s that peasantry and land issues caused the most critical problems for Chinese society. He believed that the success of any revolution in China must depend on the peasants as its base foundation. After his death, Peng was praised by Mao Zedong as "the king of peasant movement".
The Northeastern Jiangxi Soviet, first known as the Xin River Soviet and later as the Minzhegan Soviet, was a soviet governed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that existed between 1928 and 1934 as part of the Chinese Soviet Republic. The core of the Soviet included the counties of Chong'an in Fujian, Kaihua in Zhejiang, Wuyuan in Anhui, and Yiyang and Hengfeng in Jiangxi. It was founded and led for much of its existence by Fang Zhimin and was the base of the Tenth Red Army.
The Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art was a May 1942 forum held in the Yan'an Soviet and a significant event in the Yan'an Rectification Movement. It is most notable for the speeches given by Mao Zedong, later edited and published as Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art which dealt with the role of literature and art in the country. The two main points were that (1) all art should reflect the life of the working class and consider them as an audience, and (2) that art should serve politics, and specifically the advancement of socialism. The excesses of the latter point during the Cultural Revolution led to current Chinese Communist Party policy rejecting that point, but retaining Mao's encouragement of peasant-focused art and literature.
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Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun is a phrase which was coined by Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong. The phrase was originally used by Mao during an emergency meeting of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on 7 August 1927, at the beginning of the Chinese Civil War.
The Chinese Communist Revolution was a social and political revolution that culminated in the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. For the preceding century, China had faced escalating social, economic, and political problems as a result of Western imperialism, Japanese imperialism, and the decline of the Qing dynasty. Cyclical famines and an oppressive landlord system kept the large mass of rural peasantry poor and politically disenfranchised. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was formed in 1921 by young urban intellectuals inspired by European socialist ideas and the success of the October Revolution in Russia. The CCP originally allied itself with the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) party against the warlords and foreign imperialist forces, but the 1927 massacre of Communists in Shanghai ordered by Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek forced them into the Chinese Civil War, which would last more than three decades.
The Land Reform Movement, also known by the Chinese abbreviation Tǔgǎi (土改), was a mass movement led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Mao Zedong during the late phase of the Chinese Civil War after the Second Sino-Japanese War ended in 1945 and in the early People's Republic of China, which achieved land redistribution to the peasantry. Landlords – whose status was theoretically defined through the percentage of income derived from exploitation as opposed to labor – had their land confiscated and they were subjected to mass killing by the CCP and former tenants, with the estimated death toll ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions. The campaign resulted in hundreds of millions of peasants receiving a plot of land for the first time.
The Chinese National Peasants' Association, otherwise known as the Chinese Peasants' Association, was a peasant organization created in 1927 with the specific aim of transforming the peasantry via Socialism. It was led by the Chinese Communist Party until its dissolution in 1964. Its successor was the Chinese National Poor and Lower-Middle Peasants' Association, created in 1964 and dissolved de facto in 1986.
Mao Zedong's cult of personality was a prominent part of Chairman Mao Zedong's rule over the People's Republic of China from the state's founding in 1949 until his death in 1976. Mass media, propaganda and a series of other techniques were used by the state to elevate Mao Zedong's status to that of an infallible heroic leader, who could stand up against the West, and guide China to become a beacon of communism.
Revolution is not a dinner party, or making revolution is not inviting people over for dinner, is a phrase coined by Mao Zedong. It is taken from Mao's essay titled Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan written in 1927 during the Land Revolution. It means that a revolution should not be gentle and soft, but determined and thorough, and it is a violent and bloody action of one class overthrowing another class.
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