NOTES
1 Hunan Province was then the
centre of the peasant movement in China.
2 Chao Heng-ti, the ruler of Hunan at the time, was the
agent of the Northern warlords. He was overthrown by the Northern Expeditionary
Army in 1926.
3 The Revolution of 1911 overthrew the autocratic regime
of the Ching Dynasty. On October lo of that year, a section of the Ching
Dynasty's New Army staged an uprising in Wuchang, Hupeh Province, at the urging
of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois revolutionary societies. It was followed by
uprisings in other provinces, and very soon the rule of the Ching Dynasty
crumbled. On January 1, 1912, the Provisional Government of the Republic of
China was set up in Nanking, and Sun Yat-sen was elected Provisional President.
The revolution achieved victory through the alliance of the bourgeoisie with
the peasants, workers and urban petty bourgeoisie. But state power fell into
the hands of the Northern warlord Yuan Shih-kai, and the revolution failed,
because the group which led it was conciliationist in nature, failed to give
real benefits to the peasants and yielded to imperialist and feudal pressure.
5 The old Chinese phrase, "exceeding the proper
limits in righting a wrong", was often quoted for the purpose of
restricting people's activities, reforms that remained within the framework of
the established order were to be permitted, but activities aiming at the
complete destruction of the old order were to be forbidden Actions within this
framework were regarded as "proper", but those that aimed at
completely destroying the old order were described as "exceeding the
proper limits". It is a convenient doctrine for reformists and
opportunists in the revolutionary ranks. Comrade Mao Tse-tung refuted this kind
of reformist doctrine.
His remark in the text that "Proper limits have to be
exceeded in order to right a wrong, or else the wrong cannot be righted"
meant that the mass revolutionary method, and not the revisionist-reformist
method, had to be taken to end the old feudal order.
6 Chiang Kai-shek had not yet been fully exposed as a
counter-revolutionary in the winter of 1926 and the spring of 1927 when the
Northern Expeditionary Army was marching into the Yangtze valley, and the
peasant masses still thought that he was for the revolution. The landlords and
rich peasants disliked him and spread the rumour that the Northern
Expeditionary Army had suffered defeats and that he had been wounded in the
leg. Chiang Kai-shek came to be fully revealed as a counter-revolutionary on
April 12, 1927, when he staged his counter-revolutionary coup d'état in
Shanghai and elsewhere, massacring the workers, suppressing the peasants and
attacking the Communist Party. The landlords and rich peasants then changed
their attitude and began to support him.
7 Kwangtung was the first revolutionary base in the
period of the First Revolutionary Civil War (1924-27).
8 Wu Pei-fu was one of the best-known of the Northern
warlords. Together with Tsao Kun, who was notorious for his rigging of the
presidential election in 1923 by bribing members of parliament, he belonged to
the Chihli (Hopei) clique. He supported Tsao as the leader and the two were
generally referred to as "Tsao-Wu". In 1920 after defeating Tuan
Chi-jui, warlord of the Anhwei clique, Wu Pei-fu gained control of the Northern
warlord government in Peking as an agent of the Anglo-American imperialists; it
was he who gave the orders for the massacre, on February 7, 1923, of the
workers on strike along the Peking-Hankow Railway. In 1924 he was defeated in
the war with Chang Tso-lin (commonly known as the "war between the Chihli
and Fengtien cliques"), and he was thereupon ousted from the Peking
regime. In 1926 he joined forces with Chang Tso-lin at the instigation of the
Japanese and British imperialists, and thus returned to power. When the
Northern Expeditionary Army drove northward from Kwangtung in 1926, he was the
first foe to be overthrown.
9 The Three People's Principles were Sun Yat-sen's
principles and programme for the bourgeois-democratic revolution in China on
the questions of nationalism, democracy and people's livelihood. In 1924, in
the Manifesto of the First National Congress of the Kuomintang, Sun Yat-sen
restated the Three People's Principles, interpreting nationalism as opposition
to imperialism and expressing active support for the movements of the workers
and peasants. The old Three People's Principles thus developed into the new,
consisting of the Three Great Policies, that is, alliance with Russia,
co-operation with the Communist Party, and assistance to the peasants and
workers. The new Three People's Principles provided the political basis for
co-operation between the Communist Party of China and the Kuomintang during the
First Revolutionary Civil War period.
10 The Chinese term for "long live" is wansui, literally
"ten thousand years", and was the traditional salute to the emperor;
it had become a synonym for "emperor".
11 Rich peasants should not have been allowed to join the
peasant associations, a point which the peasant masses did not yet understand
in 1927.
12 Here the "utterly destitute" means the farm
labourers (the rural proletariat) and the rural lumpen-proletariat.
15 A tenant generally gave his landlord, as a condition
of tenancy, a deposit in cash or kind, often amounting to a considerable part
of the value of the land. Though this was supposed to be a guarantee for
payment of rent, it actually represented a form of extra exploitation.
16 In Hunan, the tu corresponded to the
district and the tuan to the township The old administrations
of the tu and the tuan type were instruments
of landlord rule.
17 The tax per mou was a surcharge on top of the regular
lent tax, ruthlessly imposed on the peasants by the landlord regime.
18 Under the regime of the Northern warlords, the
military head of a province was called "military governor". But he
was the virtual dictator of the province with administrative as well as
military power gathered in his hands. In league with the imperialists, he
maintained a separatist feudal-militarist regime in his locality.
19 The "standing household militia" was one of
the various kinds of armed forces in the countryside. The term
"household" is used because some member of almost every household had
to join it. After the defeat of the revolution in 1927 the landlords in many
places seized control of the militia ant turned them into armed
counter-revolutionary bands.
20 At the time, many of the county headquarters of the
Kuomintang. under the leadership of the Kuomintang's Central Executive
Committee in Wuhan. pursued Dr. Sun Yat-sen's Three Great Policies of alliance
with Russia, co-operation with the Communist Party and assistance to the
peasants and workers. They constituted the revolutionary alliance of the
Communists, the left-wingers of the Kuomintang and other revolutionaries.
21 Lord Pao (Pao Cheng) was prefect of Kaifeng, capital
of the Northern Sung Dynasty (A.D. 960-1127). He was famous in popular legend
as an upright official and a fearless, impartial judge with a knack of passing
true verdicts in all the cases he tried.
22 This reference to archery is taken from Mencius. It
describes how the expert teacher of archery draws his bow with a histrionic
gesture but does not release the arrow. The point is that while Communists
should guide the peasants in attaining a full measure of political
consciousness, they should leave it to the peasants' own initiative to abolish
superstitious and other bad practices, and should not give them orders or do it
for them.
23 The Eight Characters were a method of fortune-telling
in China based on the examination of the two cyclic characters each for the
year, month, day and hour of a person's birth respectively.
24 Geomancy refers to the superstition that the location
of one's ancestors' graves influences one's fortune. The geomancers claim to be
able to tell whether a particular site and its surroundings are auspicious.
25 Lord Kuan (Kuan Yu, A.D. 160-219), a warrior in the
epoch of the Three Kingdoms, was widely worshipped by the Chinese as the God of
Loyalty and War.
26 Tang Sheng-chih was a general who sided with the
revolution in the Northern Expedition. Yeh Kai-hsin was a general on the side
of the Northern warlords who fought against the revolution.
27 Sun Chuan-fang was a warlord whose rule extended over
the five provinces of Kiangsu, Chekiang, Fukien, Kiangsi and Anhwei. He was
responsible for the bloody suppression of the insurrections of the Shanghai
workers. His main army was crushed in the winter of 1926 by the Northern
Expeditionary Army in Nanchang and Kiukiang, Kiangsi Province.
29 "Oriental Culture" was a reactionary
doctrine which rejected modern scientific civilization and favoured the
preservation of the backward mode of agricultural production and the feudal
culture of the Orient.
30 For the secret societies, see "Analysis of the
Classes in Chinese Society", Note 18, p. 21 of this volume.
31 "Mountain", "lodge",
"shrine" and "river" were names used by primitive secret
societies to denote some of their sects.
32 When Nanchang was captured by the Northern
Expeditionary Army in November 1926, Chiang Kai-shek seized the opportunity to
establish his general headquarters there. He gathered around himself the
right-wing members of the Kuomintang and a number of Northern warlord
politicians and, in collusion with the imperialists, hatched his
counter-revolutionary plot against Wuhan, the then revolutionary centre.
Eventually, on April 12, 1927, he staged his counter-revolutionary coup d'état
which was marked by tremendous massacres in Shanghai.
33 Chang Ching-chiang, a right-wing Kuomintang leader,
was a member of Chiang Kai-shek's brain trust.
35 As told by Liu Hsiang (77-6 B.C.) in his Hsin
Hsu, Lord Sheh was so fond of dragons that he adorned his whole palace
with drawings and carvings of them. But when a real dragon heard of his
infatuation and paid him a visit, he was frightened out of his wits. Here
Comrade Mao Tse-tung uses this metaphor to show that though Chiang Kai-shek and
his like talked about revolution, they were afraid of revolution and against
it.
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