People's History of Ideas Podcast
Oct 21, 2026 · 24 min · 8 segments
Mao moves to eliminate opposition to land reform among Jiangxi Communists. Further reading and listening: Stuart Schram, ed…
Matthew RothwellHost
In the respite from hard fighting that followed the victory, the Red Army dispersed its forces in order to spread across the countryside and conduct political work among the masses.
In his memoirs, the Fujianese communist Guo Huaruo, uh, who later became one of the communists' leading military thinkers during the Yan'an period and going forward from there, described how Mao would conduct himself during these periods of dispersal for political work, as opposed to the times when Mao and the army were fully consumed by immediate military threats.
"In each place he arrived at, Comrade Mao Zedong would try to find time to carry out social investigations so as to learn about the current situation, make policy decisions, or examine and improve the policies already laid down.
Wherever there was a party organization, he would look for local cadres, hold talks with them, give them guidance in summing up the experience of struggle, and point out the current tasks and work, with special emphasis on explaining the party's policies and tactics." End quote.
So there was this kind of in breath and out breath rhythm to the Communist Party's work in the Fourth Red Army, alternating between periods of intense military engagement and periods of social investigation and political work meant to win over the masses, mainly peasants, to the revolution and organizing the peasants to carry out land reform and do things like form militia units or to support the revolution in other ways, like by forming local Soviet governments.
As much of Jiangxi was suddenly opened up to the Red Army and the communists dispersed to rally the masses to the revolutionary banner, they had determined that the main focus of their efforts to mobilize the peasantry would be land reform.
Yet, as they carried out initial social investigations in order to make this happen, they quickly realized that there was a significant obstacle within their own ranks which would have to be dealt with if the land reform and the formation of local revolutionary base areas, which land reform was a vehicle for accomplishing, was going to happen.
To understand the opposition to carrying out a thoroughgoing land reform which arose within the ranks of the Communist Party in Jiangxi, it will be helpful to revisit some features of how the Communist Party had developed in Jiangxi province, which we've talked about before.
All the way back in episode number 66, when we were talking about the early revolutionary movement in the Jinggangshan, the movement that predated Mao's arrival in the area after the defeat of the Autumn Harvest Uprisings, we talked about how a section of the local elites had been attracted to communism.
And in episodes 109 and 110, when we were talking about the Donggu base area, we discussed how the leaders of the base area were drawn from this pro-communist section of the local elites.
The leading communists in the area were mainly local educated youth who had returned to their home area to carry out revolution.
They were for the most part from better off families, almost by definition this was the case for educated youth.
In Donggu in particular, they leaned on their elite status in mobilizing peasants, in some ways reproducing the patron-client relations between landlords and peasants even as they mobilized peasants to reform local social relations and fight against the most exploitative of the local landlords.
You might remember that Xiao Ke, one of the Fourth Red Army commanders, observed that the Donggu leaders had dressed in long cotton robes and that in his words they dressed, quote, "Like gentry, not like soldiers." End quote.
Although we've discussed it before, it bears repeating that it was common for communists to have been radicalized during their student years and students tended to have better off class backgrounds.
Mao himself after all was a rich peasant and the pioneer of communist peasant organizing, Peng Pai, as we discussed back in episode 37, was the son of a landlord who was radicalized while studying in Japan and then when he returned to China also leveraged his local influence to organize the peasants in his home territory.
But unlike Mao and other communists from relatively better off sections of the peasantry, they had organized a base area in the place that they were from.
While Mao's authority relied both on his status as a leading communist and most immediately as the leader of a large armed force, the authority of much of the local communist leadership in areas such as Donggu and nearby Yanfu still rested in large part on their status as educated members of local leading families.
This meant that carrying out a land reform which included better off local peasants and not just focusing on the most exploitative landlords would undermine these local communist leaders' own base of support in the community.
Now, you may be wondering, why would these local elites have joined the Communist Party to begin with? Didn't they know what they were getting into? And the answer to this question is that the whole meaning of the communist revolution was fluid and subject to contestation between the various people taking up the banner of communism.
For the local Jiangxi elites who became communists, as we discussed back in episodes 66 and 67, the Communist Party had seemed an appropriate vehicle for carrying out struggle against other less progressive elite groups.
The example of Soviet-style industrialization and modernization did not, to these provincial elites, seem to necessarily imply the total loss of their own personal local power.
There was nothing in the policies put forward by Chen Duxiu and Mikhail Borodin during the period of the United Front with the Kuomintang that these people could not live with and much that they supported.
In the respite from hard fighting that followed the victory, the Red Army dispersed its forces in order to spread across the countryside and conduct political work among the masses.
In his memoirs, the Fujianese communist Guo Huaruo, uh, who later became one of the communists' leading military thinkers during the Yan'an period and going forward from there, described how Mao would conduct himself during these periods of dispersal for political work, as opposed to the times when Mao and the army were fully consumed by immediate military threats.
"In each place he arrived at, Comrade Mao Zedong would try to find time to carry out social investigations so as to learn about the current situation, make policy decisions, or examine and improve the policies already laid down.
Wherever there was a party organization, he would look for local cadres, hold talks with them, give them guidance in summing up the experience of struggle, and point out the current tasks and work, with special emphasis on explaining the party's policies and tactics." End quote.
So there was this kind of in breath and out breath rhythm to the Communist Party's work in the Fourth Red Army, alternating between periods of intense military engagement and periods of social investigation and political work meant to win over the masses, mainly peasants, to the revolution and organizing the peasants to carry out land reform and do things like form militia units or to support the revolution in other ways, like by forming local Soviet governments.
As much of Jiangxi was suddenly opened up to the Red Army and the communists dispersed to rally the masses to the revolutionary banner, they had determined that the main focus of their efforts to mobilize the peasantry would be land reform.
Yet, as they carried out initial social investigations in order to make this happen, they quickly realized that there was a significant obstacle within their own ranks which would have to be dealt with if the land reform and the formation of local revolutionary base areas, which land reform was a vehicle for accomplishing, was going to happen.
To understand the opposition to carrying out a thoroughgoing land reform which arose within the ranks of the Communist Party in Jiangxi, it will be helpful to revisit some features of how the Communist Party had developed in Jiangxi province, which we've talked about before.
All the way back in episode number 66, when we were talking about the early revolutionary movement in the Jinggangshan, the movement that predated Mao's arrival in the area after the defeat of the Autumn Harvest Uprisings, we talked about how a section of the local elites had been attracted to communism.
And in episodes 109 and 110, when we were talking about the Donggu base area, we discussed how the leaders of the base area were drawn from this pro-communist section of the local elites.
The leading communists in the area were mainly local educated youth who had returned to their home area to carry out revolution.
They were for the most part from better off families, almost by definition this was the case for educated youth.
In Donggu in particular, they leaned on their elite status in mobilizing peasants, in some ways reproducing the patron-client relations between landlords and peasants even as they mobilized peasants to reform local social relations and fight against the most exploitative of the local landlords.
You might remember that Xiao Ke, one of the Fourth Red Army commanders, observed that the Donggu leaders had dressed in long cotton robes and that in his words they dressed, quote, "Like gentry, not like soldiers." End quote.
Although we've discussed it before, it bears repeating that it was common for communists to have been radicalized during their student years and students tended to have better off class backgrounds.
Mao himself after all was a rich peasant and the pioneer of communist peasant organizing, Peng Pai, as we discussed back in episode 37, was the son of a landlord who was radicalized while studying in Japan and then when he returned to China also leveraged his local influence to organize the peasants in his home territory.
But unlike Mao and other communists from relatively better off sections of the peasantry, they had organized a base area in the place that they were from.
While Mao's authority relied both on his status as a leading communist and most immediately as the leader of a large armed force, the authority of much of the local communist leadership in areas such as Donggu and nearby Yanfu still rested in large part on their status as educated members of local leading families.
This meant that carrying out a land reform which included better off local peasants and not just focusing on the most exploitative landlords would undermine these local communist leaders' own base of support in the community.
Now, you may be wondering, why would these local elites have joined the Communist Party to begin with? Didn't they know what they were getting into? And the answer to this question is that the whole meaning of the communist revolution was fluid and subject to contestation between the various people taking up the banner of communism.
For the local Jiangxi elites who became communists, as we discussed back in episodes 66 and 67, the Communist Party had seemed an appropriate vehicle for carrying out struggle against other less progressive elite groups.
The example of Soviet-style industrialization and modernization did not, to these provincial elites, seem to necessarily imply the total loss of their own personal local power.
There was nothing in the policies put forward by Chen Duxiu and Mikhail Borodin during the period of the United Front with the Kuomintang that these people could not live with and much that they supported.
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