REPORT ON AN INVESTIGATION OF THE PEASANT MOVEMENT IN HUNAN March 1927

REPORT ON AN INVESTIGATION OF THE PEASANT MOVEMENT IN HUNAN

March 1927

The Importance of the Peasant Problem
Get Organized!
Down with the Local Tyrants and Evil Gentry! All Power to the Peasant Associations!
"It's Terrible!" or "It's Fine!"
The Question of "Going Too Far"
The "Movement of the Riffraff"
Vanguards of the Revolution
Fourteen Great Achievements

·         Organizing the Peasants into Peasant Associations

·         Hitting the Landlords Politically

·         Hitting the Landlords Economically

·         Overthrowing the Feudal Rule of the Local Tyrants and Evil Gentry--Smashing the Tu and Tuan

·         Overthrowing the Armed Forces of the Landlords and Establishing Those of the Peasants

·         Overthrowing the Political Power of the County Magistrate and His Bailiffs

·         Overthrowing the Clan Authority of the Ancestral Temples and Clan Elders, the Religious Authority of Town and Village Gods, and the Masculine Authority of Husbands

·         Spreading Political Propaganda

·         Peasant Bans and Prohibitions

·         Eliminating Banditry

·         Abolishing Exorbitant Levies

·         The Movement for Education

·         The Co-operative Movement

·         Building Roads and Repairing Embankments

[This article was written as a reply to the carping criticisms both inside and outside the Party then being leveled at the peasants' revolutionary struggle. Comrade Mao Tse-tung spent thirty-two days in Hunan Province making an investigation and wrote this report in order to answer these criticisms. The Right opportunists in the Party, headed by Chen Tu-hsiu, would not accept his views and stuck to their own wrong ideas. Their chief error was that. frightened by the reactionary trend in the Kuomintang, they dared not support the great revolutionary struggles of the peasants which had erupted or were erupting. To appease the Kuomintang, they preferred to desert the peasantry, the chief ally in the revolution, and thus left the working class and the Communist Party isolated and without help. It was mainly because it was able to exploit this weakness within the Communist Party that the Kuomintang dared to betray the revolution, launch its "party purge" and make war on the people in the summer of 1917.]