The move to peasant Soviets was a public admission that by the end of 1930 the CCP’s adventurist course had converted it into an overwhelmingly peasant party with few roots in, and little or no influence among, the urban workers. These Soviets could exist only in areas where the central state authority was virtually non-existent, far removed from any military centre, isolated with few roads, no railways, and of little interest to the National government.
These Soviets were formed, at least initially, by the remnants of Communist military units, local CCP members, impoverished peasants who had fled their debts, mutinous NRA units and peasant organisers known to the secret police and on their death list. They were islands in the sea of Nationalist China and, of necessity, had to be as self-sufficient as possible. However, given the nature of China in the late 1920s and 1930s they could be large. Braun claims that the Jiangxi Soviet was a contiguous area which varied between 40,000 and 60,000 square km (15,000 to 20,000 square miles) with a population of up to four million peasants, significantly greater than that of Albania (in total throughout China up to 10 million people were in Soviets).[3]
The Communist International had published considerable material on the “invincible” Soviet revolution that was supposed to have been advancing across the whole of China as a result of Stalin’s policies.[4] It continued to present the events in China in this light. Communists outside the highest levels of the Comintern were denied accurate information on what was actually happening in China. The Communist International needed victories to continue to boost Stalin, so the Soviets in China – where it was almost impossible to confirm or contradict reports – were hailed as a great success. This means that the public record was overly positive about the achievements of, for example, the Jiangxi Soviet. The myth of glorious Soviets glamourised the reality and prettified those associated with them – particularly Mao Zedong.
The first Chinese Revolution of 1925-7 had been a genuine proletarian revolution but the isolated and backward areas in which Soviets would be formed were the traditional hunting grounds of bandits. In Jiangxi, attempts were made to incorporate many thousands of armed bandits into the revolutionary ranks. However, bandit gangs were not Robin Hood-like figures standing in opposition to the local power structure; more often the gangs were tied to the local landlords and judiciary who accepted bribes to turn a blind eye and even fenced the stolen goods.[5] Few of the gangs made the transition from bandits to Communists.
Thus, when Mao arrived in Jiangxi in 1929 and began concentrating local power into his own hands, he had to fight on three fronts: physically battling reactionary forces and local bandits, fending off the centralising efforts of national Party leaders in Shanghai, and overcoming the resistance of local CP leaders to his taking over their base area.[6] By the time of the founding of the Jiangxi Soviet, Zhu De and Mao Zedong were the leaders of probably the most powerful armed force in the Chinese Communist movement (Zhu was commander and Mao was political commissar), and articles praising them and their actions were appearing in the journals of the Communist International.[7]
The decision to form Soviets was taken while the Party was passing through its Third Period phase and that determined initial policies implemented within the Soviets. For example, enforced land confiscation and its re-distribution which greatly appealed to the poorest peasants.[8] Generally, the judicial and social measures taken were hugely progressive but it must be remembered that the most basic requirement for a Soviet was missing from their very inception; there was no real democracy. The Soviets were the artificial, bureaucratic creations of the CCP, and in all important matters decisions were determined in advance by the Party. With the Soviet Union as their example, this was seen as a quite natural and correct way of proceeding.
Everybody over the age of 16 was supposed to participate but there was neither experience nor understanding of the processes of democratic decision-making and administration was constantly hampered by the almost universal illiteracy of all but the rich peasants and landlords. The Soviet areas were not fertile and the peasants had a hard time feeding themselves so there was considerable pressure to maximise food production to feed the occupying Red Army and the high work load on most peasants left them too tired to participate in lengthy communal meetings.[9]
Nevertheless, the Jiangxi Soviet was an important testing ground for administrative structures and methods of governance, tax collecting, child care, judiciary, etc., which would serve as the foundations for later Soviet governments.
During the 1926-27 peasant upsurge, the real authority in much of the countryside resided with the peasant associations which maintained peace and order, settling disputes between peasants. In Hunan Province “people’s justice” made its appearance when the peasant associations adopted a series of measures to enforce land redistribution, reduce interest rates, abolish exorbitant levies, advance women’s rights, prohibit gambling and opium-smoking and eradicate corrupt officials and landlords.[10]
In the initial stages of the Soviets, the remnants of these peasant associations, many containing CCP cadres, provided important experience, and a number of radical measures were taken that gradually won for the Soviets the support of the great majority of the peasants. Land deeds were destroyed, taxes on poor peasants abolished, official corruption, foot-binding, child slavery and infanticide were made illegal. Much good work was done in bringing the peasant masses into action and the measures taken formed a natural basis for the legal codes introduced by the CCP. It was made plain that people’s justice was to be administered from a class viewpoint. Account had to be taken of the class of the offenders and their accomplices; counter-revolutionary elements with capitalist backgrounds, landlords and rich peasants were to be punished severely (including death), while all those from the ranks of workers, peasants and the toiling masses were to be treated relatively leniently.[11]
For fifteen hundred years, ever since the middle of the Tang Dynasty, peasant uprisings had been characterised by the determination of the insurgents to fight the landlords for the land.[12] Thus when, for example, in November 1927 the first Soviet was formed (the Hailufeng Soviet) under pressure from the peasant associations, particularly the poor and landless peasants, it immediately committed itself to the policy of land seizure. As many as 1,800 landlords were executed within a few months and the seized land distributed at village meetings.
The earliest land law promulgated by the Jiangxi soviet government was the Land Law of December 1928, prior to Mao’s arrival. This called for the seizure of all land and stated “all men and women, old and young, shall be entitled to equal redistribution” provided they were able-bodied and could work the land. An important element was a move towards communalisation, land ownership was turned over to the local Soviet government.[13] Later Mao would call these actions “left extremism.”[14]
However, the seizure and redistribution of the land was not welcomed by all peasants. Not only landlords and rich peasants lost land, some of the better-off middle peasants had also suffered and were worse off. After his arrival, Mao had the Land Law modified to give greater protection to rich and middle peasants, citing the Political Resolution adopted at the 6th Congress of the Party of not forcing the struggle against the rich peasants because to do so “would confuse the fundamental contradiction between the peasant and landlord class.”[15]
This fitted well with the need to feed the Soviet population, particularly the Red Army troops. Re-division of the land for the benefit of the poor peasants was effectively abandoned in order not to unsettle crop production, and the land of rich peasants was often left intact. By the end of 1931, confiscation of land without compensation was limited to public land, and the lands of the gentry, militarists and big private landowners. The lands seized were to be distributed equally irrespective of sex, but now the tenant, not the Soviet, was confirmed as owner of the land previously rented. Such a policy meant there was little land available to allocate to the semi-proletarian agricultural labourers and village craftsmen.[16]
Initially, the wives and children of the landlords were allocated land as individuals, but as the family remained the unit of production and because the richer peasants tended to have larger families, they benefited relative to the poor peasants. It was also true that the landlord’s wives shared the land they were allocated with their husbands so this aspect of re-allocation was soon curtailed and landlords’ wives, sons, daughters and daughters-in-law were formally denied any share of the seized lands.[17]
However, in many places the rich peasants adopted a radical face, speaking loudly about non-payment of rent and taxes, and in this way – with their experience of public speaking – became the village spokespersons. With their better education and ability to write they often became the office personnel in the very organs created to execute the land reforms and were often able to direct their efforts in ways that preserved much of their former positions, frequently acquiring the best land for themselves and retaining their farming implements and draft animals. This process was greatly helped by the composition of the Party in Jiangxi in early 1931, “from first to last intellectuals, and of these the children of rich peasants and landlords constitute an important component.”[18]
Isolated in purely rural and economically backward pockets, the Communists gradually became integrated into the rural hierarchy in the districts under Red Army control. Despite all its pious resolutions and exhortations to the contrary, the CCP had to lean upon the merchants whose contact with the external market was indispensable to the maintenance of even a minimal existence in the Soviet areas. In this way, the CCP leaders did largely succeed in keeping the base area economies functioning.[19]
Propaganda was made against the rich peasants but day-to-day the CCP leadership surrendered to their economic interests because they were the major producers of surplus food. Some rich peasants did lose land but retained as much land as they and their family could productively farm, and because they were allowed to keep their implements they were allocated relatively more land per person than the poor or middle peasants.
From 1931 the pattern of land reform, supported by rent and interest rate reductions and debt cancellation, was settled and remained in place in Communist-controlled areas until after 1945. Notwithstanding the Land Law of the Soviet Republic of November 1931 these reforms tended in practice to favour the middle peasants. These held some land to begin with, were often allocated additional land and, very importantly, were freed from debt.[20] It was the agricultural labourers who benefited least.[21] Despite its limitations, the policy was hugely popular with the vast mass of peasants.
This approach was due to the economic realities of rural life. The food surplus needed to feed the Red Army could not be disrupted so the CCP had to tread carefully around the most productive peasants (the rich and middle peasants). Collaboration with the merchants had to be maintained because anything manufactured had to be imported, from salt to kerosene, and only the merchants supplied these. The goal of the CCP was a democratic dictatorship (not a proletarian revolution) and for this to be achieved the rich peasants and the merchants had to be kept on-side. Already in western Fukian by 1930, the CCP had compromised with local merchants to resolve difficulties with the import and export of supplies. The merchants were exempted from taxation while the peasants paid a 15% land tax. Price rises by the merchant were ignored and sometimes the economic struggles of shop employees and workers were restrained.
Even after the experience of Wuhan, the theory of the democratic dictatorship which had been so thoroughly tested in 1925-1927 remained the CCP’s major ideological weapon. In 1925-7 this perspective had led them to dependence on the bourgeoisie with disastrous results. Now it provided justification for leading a purely peasant movement, relying, as before, on class interests which were separate from those of the proletariat.
To the peasantry with its internal divisions and conflicting interests, the Communist Party claimed that it brought proletarian leadership. It based its claims on the abstract proposition that because the Communist Party was, by definition, the ‘Party of the proletariat’ its presence guaranteed working-class hegemony in the peasant revolt. It strengthened this illusion by importing a trickle of workers from the cities and giving them positions in the Red Army and governmental committees that had been established. The net effect of its policies was to deprive the workers in the cities of their most advanced representatives. Removed from their factories, working within a Stalinised Party and in an overwhelmingly peasant milieu, these workers soon succumbed to petty-bourgeois ways of thinking and working. If KMT terror did not cut militants off from the labour movement, the CCP did.
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Braun, O. A Communist Agent in China 1932-1939, Hurst & Co., 1982, p15.
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International Press Correspondence 1 June 1932.
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Averill, S. Transition from Urban to Rural in the Chinese Revolution, The China Journal, No. 48, 2002, p87-121.
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Averill, Transition … Op. cit.
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Thornton, R. Comintern and the Chinese Communists 1928-31, Univ. of Washington Press, 1969, p130/131.
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Mao Zedong, Report of the Chingkanshan Front Committee to the Central Committee, Nov 1928, w.m.org.
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Guillermaz, J. A History of the Chinese Communist Party 1921-1949, Methuen, 1972, p208.
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Shao-Chuan Leng, Pre-1949 Development of the Communist Chinese System of Justice, The China Quarterly, No. 30, 1967, p93-114.
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Shao-Chuan Leng, Op. cit.
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Shao-Chuan Leng, Op. cit.
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Cheng, L. Women and Class Analysis in the Chinese Land Revolution, Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law and Justice, 2013, 4(1)62-93.
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Hinton, W. Fanshen, Pelican, 1972, p573.
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Saich, T. The Rise to Power of the CCP, Sharp, 1994, p355.
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Hinton, W. Fanshen, Pelican, 1972.
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Cheng, L. Op. cit.
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Averill, S. Party, Society, and Local Elite in the Jiangxi Communist Movement, Jnl. Asian Studies, 1987, 46(2)279-303.
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Averill, S. Party,… Op. cit.
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Saich, T. The Rise … Op. cit. p556.
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Tomlinson, B.R. The Chinese Revolution and the Peasantry, School of Oriental & African Studies, Univ. of London.