Revolutionary Rural Politics

The Micro Case of Haifeng, 1922–1923

Among the records on the 1920s peasant movement, Peng Pai’s report on the Haifeng peasant movement stands out as probably the most detailed (Peng, 1926). Peng carefully recorded the details of critical events in the course of the movement, the functions of the peasant association, and how its key decisions were made. He also recorded the reactions of other county and subcounty political forces to the peasant movement, as well as the details of the conflicts between them and the peasant association. The evidence from Haifeng clearly reveals the basic characteristics of the revolutionary rural politics, including the rise of the peasant association as a critical power holder, the reorientation of rural governance toward the urgent concerns of peasants, the politicization of class contradictions, and the impact of organized peasants on county politics. In this section we will summarize the practice of the peasant movement in Haifeng from 1922 to 1923, and point out its connections with our conceptual framework.

In the spring of 1922, Peng Pai entered the villages in Chishan yue in Haifeng, ⁵ guided by a simple notion: he focused on rent relations, trying to persuade the peasants to organize an association of their own, telling them that they could resist unreasonable tenancy contracts and reduce rents by using the organizational power of the association. Although the peasants were receptive to the idea of reducing the rent they paid, they dared not join the association. A month passed, and only 30 odd peasants joined. Peng later recalled that at the time “there was nothing more difficult than persuading the peasants to join the association” (Peng, 1926: 125).

At this difficult time, an accident that had no connection with the landlord-tenant contradiction unpredictably advanced Peng’s enterprise. The peasant association successfully settled a dispute between an association member and his child bride’s relatives. The child bride, a six-year-old girl, had accidentally fallen in a latrine and drowned. Her relatives, seeking revenge, demanded a life for a life. All the members of the association assembled and finally calmed the whole thing down. Meanwhile, a local quasi-official (yuezheng) of Chishan yue heard of this event and came over. He threatened to punish the peasants, probably wanting to extort some money. The association members drove him off. The successful settlement of this dispute impressed nearby peasants, showing that the association members “are loyal to and can help each other,” which was consistent with community values (Peng, 1926: 126). Seizing the opportunity, Peng and his colleagues began to use this event as a concrete example to show how the association could make a real contribution to peasants and rural communities. This new strategy of publicity proved effective, and the association began to grow. This early episode in the Haifeng peasant movement showed how community values played a pivotal role in motivating peasants, as argued by the moral economy theory, and how a new strategy of publicity advanced the movement at a particular juncture, in line with rational choice theory.

After that, the association successfully handled three public issues that had long troubled local peasants, thus gaining still more support. First of all, at the time, landlords often raised rents and evicted tenants who could not afford higher rents, thus putting them into the disadvantageous position of having to compete with other peasants for land. As a consequence, there were many disputes among peasants over tenancy. In responding to this, the association established a rule that any member who competed for land that had been rented by another member without the latter’s permission and the association’s approval would be punished. Moreover, the association would see to it that the evicted member would make a living by tilling land that was provided by other members, and that all members would refuse to rent and cultivate the land of the landlords who were especially unjust. After these regulations were carried out, the landlords’ practice of replacing tenants ceased and competition and disputes among association members disappeared (Peng, 1926: 126). In the handling of this issue, a new mechanism of dispute mediation in fact emerged in Haifeng: mediation relied on the peasant association and its regulations, rather than on local elites and quasi-officials as in traditional semiformal governance. Here the guiding principle was to protect the class interests of tenants, rather than simply achieve the traditional ideal of compromise. In addition, this sort of mediation had a higher degree of institutionalization, with clear aims and procedures. Thus, it embodied both the continuity of the Chinese tradition of rural mediation that sought to settle disputes within the community rather than to resort to county courts, as well as modern notions and innovations introduced through revolutionary rural politics, namely that peasant organizations and a class standpoint were to play a pivotal role in rural life.

The second issued involved peasants using boats to transport fertilizer on the river near Haifeng city. These peasants, according to Peng, were forced by “urban bullies” to pay unreasonable dock charges. To rectify this situation, the association charged these bullies tolls when they passed through the countryside, leading in the end to the dock charges being abolished (Peng, 1926: 126). This was in fact a revolutionary strategy that was meant to meet the private interests of peasants.

The third issued involved the way peasants handled disputes among themselves. It was common that they would turn to the gentry and local bullies for help in resolving such disputes. The problem was that these intermediaries urged peasants to take these disputes to court, which involved crushing extortion and high legal costs. The peasant association thus formulated a rule that all disputes among its members must first be reported to the association, which would then mediate. Members who turned to gentry and so-called local tyrants to settle a dispute would not only be kicked out of the association, but the association would help their opponents. Disputes between members and nonmembers were also required to be brought to the association for mediation (Peng, 1926: 127). This again embodied the revolutionary attempt to form a new mechanism of dispute mediation in which the peasant association played a central role.

Impressed by the peasant association’s success in handling these three issues, Haifeng’s peasants began to support the association enthusiastically. By January 1923, twenty thousand households covering about a hundred thousand peasants had joined the association. To deal with the wide variety of public issues in the countryside, the association set up nine departments, respectively in charge of clerical work, agricultural improvement, publicity, mediation, finance, social relations, rural education, medical care, and management of routine affairs. The association was financially supported by membership fees (twenty silver cents per member), as well as by income from managing the sweet potato market in Haifeng city—the association had simply seized control of the market from gentry and local tyrants.

Let us consider three examples of services provided by the peasant association: education, mediation, and medical care. First, concerning rural education, peasants’ children were rarely included in the urban-inclined “new education” (xinxue) advocated by the Haifeng Education Bureau, but their families nonetheless were taxed to fund the new education. Consequently, peasants complained that “they were afraid of the new education even more than tigers.” To deal with this problem, the peasant association hired its own teachers and set up peasant schools, teaching arithmetic, writing, using the abacus, and other practical knowledge. The villages where the schools were located provided land to support the schools. The peasant association bought seeds and fertilizer, and the fathers and elder brothers of the students did the farmwork. The harvest, after the deduction of rents, was given to the teachers in lieu of a monetary salary. This practice was very much welcomed by the peasants, and in fact ten schools, with more than five hundred students, were founded in one month (Peng, 1926: 128).

The association’s mediation department focused on settling disputes in rural communities, most of which were over marriage (30% of all disputes), and concerned such matters as divorce, marital conflict, rape, abduction of women, and so on. Apart from marriage, many disputes were over debt (20%), property (15%), and landlord-tenant relations (15%) (Peng, 1926: 129).

With respect to medical care, the association set up a clinic where association members did not have to pay for the doctor’s services and only had to pay half of the cost for medicine. The clinic also delivered babies for free (Peng, 1926: 128).

Thus, by early 1923, a revolutionary rural politics had clearly emerged in Haifeng. The peasant association was playing a pivotal role in the major spheres of rural governance, including dispute mediation, rural education, and medical care, all important concerns of grassroots rural communities. The power and authority of the gentry and local tyrants, who had once been critical figures in rural governance, were reduced, their traditional spheres of influence in such areas as dispute mediation and market administration taken over by the peasant association. Class contradictions between landlords and tenant peasants were highlighted by the peasant association as a key political topic; regulations were issued to protect tenants from losing their land and to prevent landlords from arbitrarily raising rents. All of this reflected the emergence of a new rural politics.

The following case concerning a dispute between a landlord and his tenants provides a more concrete example of how class contradictions were politicized and dealt with. In March 1923, landlord Zhu Mo told six of his tenants in Huangnitang village that he was raising their rent. The fields they rented from Zhu were in fact protected by a particular kind of tenancy arrangement that by custom gave them cultivation rights in perpetuity, as long as the rent was paid on time. According to community customs, landlords had no right to raise rents or evict tenants under this kind of contract. Thus, the six tenant peasants considered Zhu’s demand to be ridiculous and ignored it. This irritated Zhu, and he sent his servants to make trouble for the six peasants. The peasants could not bear the harassment, so they reported the matter to the peasant association and said they could no longer be Zhu’s tenants. However, after they had returned the land to Zhu, he filed a complaint against them with the county court, accusing them of not having returned all the land they had rented. The judge, Zhang Zepu, sent three bailiffs with a summons to the six peasants. When they arrived at Huangnitang, the villagers, who feared officials from the county government, all fled. Seeing how fearful the villagers were, the bailiffs became arrogant. They finally caught the six tenant peasants and tried to extort six silver dollars from each of them. Finding they had no money, the bailiffs forced them to pawn the clothes they were wearing. The next day the six peasants went to Haifeng city and reported the whole thing to the peasant association. They were told that, if the bailiffs tried again to extort money from them, they should just tell the bailiffs that the money was in the association’s office and they could go there to get it. This tough stand protected the peasants from further extortion. At the hearing, judge Zhang, finding no evidence that the peasants illegally occupied Zhu’s fields, scolded Zhu and dismissed the case. The six peasants, at the behest of the peasant association, told the judge that if the court wanted to cite peasants again, it could issue the summonses to the peasant association, instead of sending bailiffs to the countryside. The judge accepted this request (Peng, 1926: 130).

Zhu was deeply embarrassed by the outcome. He told other landlords that since the peasant association could influence even the county court, it would be a huge threat to the landlords, for “no landlord had ever lost a case when suing peasants.” The landlords in Haifeng city, especially the ones with political influence, assembled and formed an organization called the Society for Maintaining the Grain Business (Liangye weichi hui), to deal with the peasant association. Then they went together to press judge Zhang to rehear Zhu Mo’s case. The judge was so intimidated by their threats that he immediately agreed. Thus, the six tenants were again summoned to court. The peasant association believed that since the case involved a civil dispute, the peasants, according to law, could not be detained before adjudication. Thus it did not made any preparations and just let the six peasants go to court. However, this time, the judge, under the pressure of the seventy or eighty powerful landlords who came to the hearing, did not try the case at all but simply directed the bailiffs to detain the tenants and put them in shackles. Hearing this, the peasant association immediately decided to stage a demonstration, notifying its members that the county court had gone so far as to pervert the law, and that this must be rectified by the masses. The next morning, more than 6,000 association members assembled and marched toward the courthouse. The military guard sent by the county government to protect the courthouse was driven off by the peasant crowd. After Peng Pai negotiated with the judge, the six peasants were released (Peng, 1926: 131–32).

This case vividly illustrates how a class contradiction in the economic sphere—a dispute between a landlord and his tenants over rents—was handled by the peasant association as an issue of governance. Before the rise of the peasant association, this kind of class contradiction was unlikely to gain attention from traditional rural governance and the county court system. If a landlord-tenant dispute was indeed taken to court, the court would probably rule in favor of the landlord, disregarding the tenants’ rightful claims. Yet, in this case, the peasant association, as an intermediary between the county authorities and the peasants, actively exerted its influence to protect the interests of the tenants. In doing so, it prevented the court from perverting justice. Institutionally speaking, what distinguished the peasant association in this case from the Qing quasi-officials was that the former gained its influence from mobilizing and organizing peasants, whereas the latter only passively transmitted the will of the county court to rural communities. Furthermore, though this case obviously involved class contradictions, we cannot simply label it as an instance of “class struggle,” for such a grandiose characterization would draw our attention away from many crucial details. More accurately, this case in fact shows how the peasant association strategically used the disjuncture between the county court system and the landlords to protect the tenants’ interests, and did so by exerting its influence in the sphere connecting the county authorities and grassroots rural communities.

After the demonstration and the successful rescue of the six tenant peasants, the peasant association’s power in the countryside expanded. More and more peasants asked to join the association, knowing that it would protect their interests. Even the local bandits did not dare to harass villages where most of the peasants had joined the peasant association. The powerful landlords of Haifeng were frightened by the 6,000-peasant-strong demonstration. The Society for Maintaining the Grain Business collapsed, with its head resigning and fleeing to Hong Kong. With this momentum, the peasant association then got involved in the competition for the magistracy. At the time, the old magistrate had just resigned and his successor, Qiu Jingyun, was opposed by both the peasant association and the “education circles” (xuejie) of Haifeng. Thus, the two forces prepared to convene a citizen assembly, aiming to build up public opinion to unseat Qiu. The peasant association nominated the head of its education department, Ma Huanxin, who was acceptable to the education circles and was also related to some gentry members in Haifeng city. However, just a few days before the citizen assembly was to meet, Chen Jiongming, the powerful Haifeng-born warlord, intervened and appointed Wang Zuoxin (deputy head of the Society for Maintaining the Grain Business), a stubborn opponent to the peasant association, as the new magistrate. This appointment split the union between the peasant association and the education circles, since the latter were frightened by Chen’s intervention and decided to quit the assembly. Though the assembly, which mainly consisted of peasant representatives, was finally convened, the plan to nominate a magistrate friendly to the peasant association failed (Peng, 1926: 132). All this shows that the association not only had become a center of power and authority in rural Haifeng, but also tried to influence county politics of Haifeng through the power it had gained from exercising rural governance.

The rent reduction movement carried out by the peasant association from July to August 1923 differed from the landlord-tenant dispute mentioned above, since that case involved only a few tenants whereas the rent reduction movement involved policies to protect the interests of the whole tenant peasant class. It was a typical case of the politicization of class contradictions, something hard to imagine in earlier county and subcounty politics. Its emergence in the 1920s peasant movement was related both to Marxist class theory—the guiding principle for revolutionary actions and decisions—which regarded society as consisting of antagonistic classes, and to the objective reality of class differentiation and contradictions in the South China countryside. Aside from class contradictions, the Haifeng rent reduction movement was also closely connected with the peasants’ claim to the right to subsistence, emphasized by moral economy theory. Rent reduction was put forward when Haifeng had just suffered from a huge typhoon, with the grain crop nearly destroyed. If required to pay rents as usual, many tenant peasants would not have been able to meet their subsistence needs. However, in his theory of moral economy, James Scott highlights the right to subsistence of the whole community, while in the Haifeng case, what really mattered was the subsistence of the tenant peasant class. Thus, the Haifeng rent reduction movement in fact saw the coexistence of the two dimensions of class contradictions and peasants’ claim to the right to subsistence. In addition to these two dimensions, another key factor in the practice of rent reduction was the rural governance dominated by the peasant association. Without that, the implementation of concrete policies and regulations concerning rent reduction would have been impossible. Only through revolutionary rural politics could the three elements of class contradictions, the right to subsistence, and rural governance dominated by the peasant association be combined.

The immediate background to the rent reduction movement was a tremendous typhoon that hit Haifeng on July 26, 1923, and caused a huge flood. The rice crop was severely affected, for that was just the time of harvest (Cai et al., 1986: 68–69). In some areas, nearly 90% of the crop was destroyed. The peasant association quickly began to take action, rescuing peasants and fighting the flood, and in fact the association was the only effective force in Haifeng to respond to the disaster. In this situation, peasants suffering from the typhoon were particularly concerned about whether rents would be reduced or not. Responding to their concern, three proposals emerged inside the peasant association. The first considered that the peasants should negotiate individually with the landlords on rent reduction, with the association providing backup; the second argued that the association should issue a policy that the rents of all peasants should be reduced by 70%; the third argued that no rents at all should be paid. To decide among the three proposals, the peasant association called an assembly, consisting of more than a hundred peasant representatives from all over Haifeng, to take a vote. The proposal to reduce rents by 70% gained the support of the majority, and was made a formal resolution. In the discussion, the proposal of individual negotiations between peasants and landlords was demolished by a common fact: though many peasants had indeed pleaded with the landlords to go to the fields to check the damage to the crop, and then to negotiate a rent reduction, the landlords usually adopted delaying tactics and held off going to check the damage. Fearing sprouting in the paddy, which would ruin the entire harvest, the peasants had to reap the crop without it being checked by the landlords. However, once the crop was harvested, the landlords immediately denied that there had been any damage to the crop at all, and demanded the peasants pay the usual rent. Thus, individually negotiating rent reductions could not work (Peng, 1926: 136–37). Here we can see that the issue of rent reductions was connected with both class contradictions revolving around rent relations and tenants’ claim to the right to subsistence. The issue of rent reductions could thus be interpreted as a manifestation of class struggle against the landlords and as a fight for the right to subsistence in the face of a natural disaster. These two elements mutually supported and strengthened each other, leading to the consolidation of the legitimacy of demands for rent reduction.

The peasant association took a set of measures to implement its rent reduction policy that included, first, sending many staff members to the countryside to publicize the resolution and to serve as pickets to maintain order during the processes of rent collection, and, second, notifying the police in all the districts of Haifeng that rent disputes between peasants and landlords were civil disputes, and thus the police could only mediate between the two parties and had no right to arrest peasants without cause. In addition, the association published an open telegram to the whole country asking for support from all kinds of social groups and organizations, and it informed Chen Jiongming of the suffering caused by the typhoon in an attempt to keep him from intervening (Peng, 1926: 138). After all these measures, the majority of landlords, except for a few “bullies,” reduced rent payments by 70%. Peng recorded two cases where landlords refused to reduce rents. In the first case, landlord Ma Douhui, who was also an elementary school teacher, threatened his tenants and demanded that they pay the rent in full, with no reduction at all. Hearing the news, the peasant association sent pickets to warn Ma and demand a reduction. In the end, Ma apologized and accepted 30% of the usual rent. In the other case, a peasant paid his landlord 50% of the rent rather than 30%. After the pickets found this out, the association punished the peasant for disobeying the 70% rent reduction policy (Peng, 1926: 139; Hofheinz, 1977: 165). From these cases, we see that the peasant association at the time was in fact playing the key role in maintaining political order in the countryside. Indeed, the association was virtually an informal government.

The relationship between the peasant association and the county authorities, however, was subtle. The peasant association probably hoped to achieve its goal of reducing rents without challenging the authority of the county administration. This is apparent in a rent dispute that ended up in court. The dispute arose between a rent contractor who collected rents for the county Education Bureau and the peasants who rented the bureau’s land. The contractor told the tenants that the bureau’s rents were “official rents” and thus could not be reduced, but the peasants did not buy it. The dispute led to a physical altercation in which the contractor was injured. The contractor, whose uncle, Lin Douwen, was the head of the local militia and a powerful figure in Haifeng city, reported the case directly to magistrate Wang Zuoxin. Wang at once sent the county government’s military guard to the village where the contractor was injured and arrested three peasants who were involved in the fight. Peng Pai and his colleagues discussed the case and considered that, as fights were to some extent inevitable in the disputes over rent reduction, it was to be expected that some peasants would be arrested. Thus they decided not to escalate the issue, and just make arrangements to raise money to support the families of the arrested peasants and to bribe the bailiffs to keep the peasants from being mistreated in prison (Peng, 1926: 139–40). In this instance, the peasant association did not launch a large demonstration to rescue the arrested peasants, possibly because after all they were not falsely charged since they had in fact wounded the contractor. Hence, the peasant association at this time still acknowledged the legitimacy of the legal system and the county administration once the rent dispute was taken to court. Revolutionary rural politics in Haifeng at this point, in other words, had not developed into a movement to overthrow the county authorities, though the peasant association indeed tried to influence and reform county politics, as shown in the previously mentioned cases of overturning the unjust court ruling and of nominating a progressive candidate for the magistracy. Whether the peasant association would have eventually moved toward overthrowing the county government we cannot say since in August 1923 the Haifeng peasant movement was unexpectedly suppressed by the county authorities and the gentry elites acting together.

On August 15, 1923, the peasant association convened a county peasant assembly to discuss carrying out rent reduction. This meeting was not in any way intended as a challenge to the county authorities, but focused only on issues within the association (Cai et al., 1986: 72). However, when the 4,000 to 5,000 peasant representatives entered Haifeng city, the policemen and the military guard panicked and fled. Magistrate Wang Zuoxin hid out and repeated asked Zhong Jingtang, a division commander in Chen Jiongming’s army, for help. Zhong was also wary of the peasants’ strength, and the hundred or so soldiers he sent to rescue Wang did not dare enter Haifeng city. Peng and his colleagues thought Wang Zuoxin was just making a fuss about the assembly; thus they did not prepare for Wang’s following move at all. The night that all the peasant representatives left the city, Huang Qinxuan, head of the county council, came to the office of the peasant association to check whether the peasants had gone or not, on the pretext of visiting an acquaintance. He went back and told the situation to magistrate Wang. Wang at once called the core gentry members in Haifeng city to discuss how to deal with the peasant association, and finally decided to seize the chance to destroy it once and for all. They assembled a total of around 300 armed men, consisting of policemen, members of local militias, and Zhong’s soldiers, and attacked the office of the peasant association. More than twenty staff members were arrested by Wang’s men. But Peng Pai and nine of his colleagues managed to evade capture. This incident dealt a heavy blow to the Haifeng peasant movement (Peng, 1926: 140–41). Here we can see that the county authorities and the gentry elites simply suppressed the peasant association, disregarding the possibility of peacefully accommodating the association by accepting its participation in county politics. This setback clearly illuminated the particular difficulty the revolutionaries faced in trying to establish a bottom-up, non-violent mass politics in a political environment marked by the absence of an effective electoral and legal system and by the persistence of the tradition of local militarization that regarded military force as the most important source of power.

In analyzing the main contours of the Haifeng peasant movement from 1922 to 1923, if one resorts simply to the conceptual frameworks we have discussed— moral economy theory, Marxist theory, and rational choice theory—the result will be three seemingly unconnected, separate baskets of practices, so to speak. If, on the other hand, one uses the concept of revolutionary rural politics to cover all these various practices, what emerges is a unity. In this new kind of rural politics, a peasant mass organization—the peasant association—rose to be an influential power holder in the Haifeng countryside, taking on the major functions of rural governance; defining the urgent needs of the peasants rather than the top-down demands from the county authorities as the key public issues; politicizing class contradictions revolving around the landlord-tenant relationship; turning the peasants from a passive into an active force that impacted the county authorities from the bottom up. Peasants’ claim to the right to subsistence, rural class contradictions, and revolutionary strategies to motivate peasant participation all coexisted in the Haifeng peasant movement and can only be comprehensively understood through the concept of revolutionary rural politics. Furthermore, revolutionary rural politics in Haifeng was not marked by heated conflicts between the peasant association and landlords, the gentry, and the local militia. Instead, the strategy of the Haifeng revolutionaries was more inclined toward coexistence with local power holders and patiently consolidating their own power and authority, rather than provoking antagonism. In the next section we turn to the peasant movement in Guangdong as a whole in 1924–1926. During these years, revolutionary rural politics emerged on a much larger scale than in Haifeng. The major characteristics discussed above persisted at the same time that new features, absent from Haifeng in 1922–1923, emerged. In particular, in many other regions of Guangdong, confrontations between the peasant associations and landlords, gentry, and local militia were more heated than in Haifeng. Armed conflicts became increasingly common, leading the peasant associations to begin to build their own military forces.

The Peasant Movement in Guangdong, 1924–1926

By 1924, the Communist Party had started to collaborate with the Guomindang. At the time, the Guomindang had established a revolutionary government in Guangzhou and thus revolutionaries from both parties could to some extent act openly and legally, though the Guangzhou government did not yet have control over all the administrative and military affairs in the whole province. In early 1924, the Guangzhou government decided to advance the peasant movement throughout Guangdong province, to set an example of implementing the Guomindang’s new policy of supporting workers and peasants, as well as to undermine the local political forces that were still beyond its control. While the Guomindang focused on issuing policies and showing official support, the peasant movement at the grassroots was mainly carried out by the Communists (Liang, 2004: 8). The Guomindang Central Peasant Department was set up as the leading body of the peasant movement, with Lin Zuhan and Peng Pai, both of whom were Communists, as the department head and secretary, respectively. In July 1924, the Guangzhou Peasant Movement Training Institute was founded, aiming to train cadres to organize and lead the peasant movement. From July 1924 to September 1926, the institute held six terms of study and graduated a total of nearly 800 students. All the directors of the six terms were Communists (Zeng, 1996: 84–6). In a word, after 1924, the peasant movement in Guangdong was no longer a spontaneous experiment initiated by individual revolutionaries as in Haifeng, but rather it was now an enterprise supported officially by the Guangzhou government and led by trained Communist cadres following systematic guidelines.

In this new political atmosphere, revolutionary rural politics spread into other regions of Guangdong. Most of the Haifeng experience had been summarized and absorbed as guidelines for advancing the peasant movement in Guangdong from 1924 to 1926. As early as September 1923, Peng Pai already reported on the main policies and organizational experience of the Haifeng peasant association to the Socialist Youth League (SYL) leadership, which at the time was in charge of the peasant movement in the Communist camp (Peng, 1923). In June of the following year, the SYL adopted a resolution based mainly on the experience gained in Haifeng. Many of the resolution’s articles concerning concrete revolutionary activities in the countryside completely matched the practices of the peasant movement in Haifeng. For example, on landlord-tenant contradictions the resolution stated that

a member of the peasant association must first report to the association if he is evicted by a landlord or asked to pay increased rent, and no other members shall contend for his tenure without his permission and the approval of the association

and that “the association shall help tenant peasants in landlord-tenant confrontations.” With regard to dispute mediation in rural communities, it stated that “in disputes between association members, the association must try to mediate and prevent the members from taking disputes to court.” With respect to rural education,

the peasant association shall found [regular] peasant schools, as well as night schools and winter schools. The villages where the schools are located should provide farmland [to support the schools]. The students’ fathers and elder brothers should farm the school land, with the harvest providing the funds to support the schools.

The lesson of the Haifeng peasant association being crushed by reactionary armed forces was also summarized and highlighted, and the resolution proposed organizing armed forces within peasant associations: “Under the Guomindang Guangzhou government, peasant associations shall quickly organize peasant self-defense forces, whether with or without firearms” (Tuan Yue quwei, 1924: 6–7). In addition, Peng Pai had become a key figure in the Guomindang Central Peasant Department and had traveled to many counties such as Guangning, Puning, and Huaxian to help organize the peasant movement. He was also the director of the Guangzhou Peasant Movement Training Institute during its first (July–August 1924) and fifth (September–December 1925) terms. His The Report on the Haifeng Peasant Movement, ⁶ based on the details of the movement in Haifeng, was used as a key textbook in training cadres for rural revolution (Cai et al., 1986: 136, 142). Thus, the Haifeng experience, through Peng’s book and his activities, was widely disseminated among the revolutionaries who went down to grassroots rural communities as a model for the peasant movement throughout Guangdong.

With the Haifeng experience absorbed and distilled into guiding principles for the peasant movement, key characteristics of revolutionary rural politics—the rise of peasant associations as critical power holders, the reshaping of rural governance, the politicization of class contradictions, and rural society’s bottom-up impact on county politics—emerged in other areas of Guangdong. This can be seen first of all in a summary report of the Guangdong Provincial Peasant Association on the peasant movement at its high tide, issued in May 1926 at the Second Guangdong Peasants’ Provincial Congress. The report listed the activities of local peasant associations in nine major categories: rent reduction, resisting informal taxes imposed by local militias, resisting usury, maintaining local security, resisting exorbitant and multifarious taxes and levies imposed by local governments, fighting against “local tyrants and evil gentry,” prohibiting gambling, building roads in the countryside, and operating peasant schools (Guangdongsheng dierci nongmin daibiao dahui, 1926: 346–48). The range of activities of local peasant associations can also be seen from the nature of the conflicts in which they were involved. According to statistics of the Provincial Peasant Association, 164 conflicts, classified into a total of 21 categories, were reported from January to March 1926. Foremost among them were conflicts with local militia (26 cases) and with “local tyrants and evil gentry” (22 cases), followed by disputes over reorganizing the peasant associations (18), conflicts with bandits (16), landlord-tenant disputes (16), “contradictions” with local officials (12), and disputes over funding and operating peasant schools (12). Categories with fewer than 10 cases included disputes over informal taxes, land, debt, membership fees, marriage, road building, gambling, and so on (Guangdongsheng dierci nongmin daibiao dahui, 1926: 350–51). These data reveal two dimensions of revolutionary rural politics in Guangdong, aside from the obvious dimension of the rise of peasant associations as influential power holders: the reconstruction of rural governance (in the forms of resisting informal taxes, prohibiting gambling, building roads, and operating peasant schools) and the politicization of class contradictions (in the form of rent reduction and settling landlord-tenant disputes). Resisting unreasonable taxes imposed by local governments showed that the peasant associations had a real impact on politics in counties and above. In short, the revolutionary rural politics embodied in the Haifeng movement had become a province-wide phenomenon in Guangdong by May 1926.

The activities of the peasant associations summarized above were responses to public issues that were of the greatest concern to local peasants. This can be seen in another report issued by the Guangdong Provincial Peasant Association, in August 1926, just three months after the Second Guangdong Peasants’ Provincial Congress. The report gave a full account of the urgent needs of peasants in seven major regions of Guangdong, which included: preventing landlords from raising rents and replacing tenants, abolishing the unfair provisions in tenancy contracts, suppressing bandits, abolishing the informal taxes imposed by local militias, advancing rural education, giving peasants the right to investigate disputes, protecting peasants by law, reforming taxation, and so forth. (Sange yue lai huiwu baogao, 1926: 460–62). All of these constituted the main activities of the local peasant associations. This implies that the philosophy of revolutionary rural politics was essentially populist rather than elitist. This new kind of rural politics cared more about the views and concerns of peasants at the bottom of society than the views of local elites such as gentry and landlords and derived its legitimacy from the support of the peasant masses rather than of local elites.

From the materials discussed above, we can also see that the revolutionary rural politics of 1924 to 1926 revealed some new features that were absent from Haifeng in 1922–1923. In particular, large-scale conflicts between peasant associations and traditional power holders such as the gentry, landlords, and local militia were rare in Haifeng, and the militarization of the peasant association was also not a key political topic. However, heated conflicts between peasant associations and landlords, the gentry, and local militia became common in 1924–1926. Peasant associations also began to organize their own armed force—usually called “peasant self-defense armies” (nongmin ziweijun). Two factors probably accounted for these new features. First, in 1924–1926, the revolutionaries were inclined to adopt radical strategies rather than the moderate ones in the Haifeng of 1922–1923, since the Guangzhou government under the Guomindang-Communist united front was at the time officially and actively supporting revolutionary activities in the countryside. Second, the reactionary forces arrayed against the peasant movement were obviously stronger in many other regions of Guangdong than in Haifeng—a factor that was to some extent related to the particularities of regional sociopolitical environment. According to a 1926 analysis of the Guangdong Regional Committee of the Communist Party, the connections between landlords and local militia were not very close in Haifeng, while in some other counties, such as Chaoyang, Puning, Jieyang, and others, landlords, the gentry, and local militia were tightly united into a concentrated force opposing the peasant associations (Guangdong nongmin yundong baogao, 1926: 42). This latter kind of environment would be more likely to see sharp conflicts between peasant associations and their powerful opponents. Those conflicts usually took the form of armed violence largely because of the long tradition of local militarization in Guangdong since the late Qing—in such a militarized local political environment that had no effective electoral, legal, and administrative systems, military force was the main weapon for the powerful to secure their influence and to suppress their opponents.

The peasant movement in Guangning, one of the best-known peasant movements after that of Haifeng, faced an escalating confrontation between the peasant associations and reactionary forces. In early 1924, Communists Zhou Qijian and Hu Chao went to Guangning to organize a peasant association. However, as soon as they arrived, they immediately found that the county magistrate, local gentry, and landlords were all strongly opposed to their activities. Magistrate Li Jiyuan brushed aside Zhou’s request to register the peasant association at the county government as a legal organization, though this request had already been approved by the Guomindang Party Central Committee and the Guangdong Provincial Government, in the form of official letters addressed to Li. A group of local gentry from the three townships of Fuxi, Jiangtun, and Tanbu met on June 7 and 8 and worked out a plan to suppress the peasant movement. Two large landlords, Jiang Yaonan and Feng Yueting, from Fuxi and Jiangtun respectively, each contributed 300 silver dollars to fund armed resistance. On June 10, the local militia bureaus of Fuxi and Jiangtun sent altogether 50 militiamen who attacked and destroyed the offices of the peasant association in Jiangtun and Tanbu. Thus, the Guangning peasant movement suffered a setback at the very beginning (Zhou, 1926: 14–15). As we see, the gentry and landlords in Guangning were much more on guard than their counterparts in Haifeng, and they had quickly organized strong opposition to the peasant association. According to Zhou Qijian’s later report, the revolutionaries drew two lessons from this setback. First, it was premature to propose the slogans of attacking the gentry and landlords when the peasant association had not yet consolidated itself. Second, the gentry and landlords in Guangning had been particularly powerful for the past twenty years, and thus they could easily suppress the peasant association, which had yet to find its footing (Zhou, 1926: 19).

However, this setback did not undermine the determination of the revolutionaries to push forward with the peasant movement in Guangning. On June 4, the provincial government officially announced the dismissal of Li Jiyuan. Li and his gentry supporters tried to mobilized the local militias loyal to them to resist the dismissal order. The officers of the garrison of Guangning and some members of the gentry, nonetheless, were determined to unseat Li, because they had long been dissatisfied with the way he governed the county. The peasant association joined the anti-Li camp, and seized the chance to expand its influence in the countryside (Zhou, 1926: 25–26). However, the reactionary forces of the gentry, landlords, and local militias in Jiangtun and Tanbu at the time were still too strong for the peasants to challenge, and thus Zhou Qijian and his colleagues decided to try to build up the peasant movement in other areas of Guangning. That strategy worked. By October, branches of the peasant association had been established in 19 districts and 57 townships of Guangning, and more than 10,000 peasant households had joined the association. On October 6, a congress of peasant representatives from all over Guangning was held in the county seat and adopted two resolutions, one on organizing a peasant self-defense army and the other calling for rent reductions (Yuan, 1979: 68). Thus the politicization of class contradictions and the militarization of the peasant association were linked together—this was a phenomenon that had been absent from the movement in Haifeng.

In fact, the foundation of the Guangning peasant association at the time was not yet consolidated. The association was far less influential in the countryside than the Haifeng peasant association had been in 1923, when it had already become a dominant figure in rural politics. Thus, for the Guangning peasant association to immediately issue a resolution calling for rent reductions hardly seemed a sound strategy. Zhou’s later report also implied that the time was not yet ripe to launch a rent reduction campaign, and that the resolution was in fact made “under the pressure of the peasants’ urgent requests” (Zhou, 1926: 32). Hearing of the peasant association’s plan to campaign for reduced rents, the gentry, landlords, and leaders of local militia began to purchase firearms and recruit new militiamen. The militia fought the peasant self-defense army for several brutal months. The peasant self-defense army was obviously weaker than the local militia, and the peasant association had to ask the Guangzhou government and the Guomindang Central Peasant Department for help. Liao Zhongkai, leader of the Guomindang left, decided to send regular army units to support the peasants. With their help, the local militia was finally defeated and the aim of rent reduction achieved. However, the costs were heavy. More than thirty members of the peasant association had been killed (Liang, 2004: 142). The Guangdong Committee of the Communist Party concluded that the rent reduction campaign “was initiated too early in Guangning, and though we finally succeeded after four months of fighting, it was mainly due to luck” (Guangdong nongmin yundong baogao, 1926: 76).

From 1924 to 1926, all of Guangdong seemed to be gripped by a revolutionary euphoria. The peasant movement followed a radical strategy, resulting in violent conflicts between the peasant associations and powerful reactionary forces. The Communists took note and admitted in 1926:

Many peasant associations have been driven by the motive to take over control of the village government, . . . and quickly got involved in conflicts with local militia, disregarding the fact that their foundation had not yet been consolidated. If this continues to be the case, our sacrifice will be large.

“According to the current situation,” the party instructed, “the peasant associations should focus on constructive work that can further the peasants’ interests” (Guangdong nongmin yundong baogao, 1926: 63). The Communists were thus considering moving the practice of the peasant movement from the radical pole of Guangning to the moderate pole of Haifeng. This would involve the peasant associations first taking on more functions of rural governance to gain the support of the peasants and avoiding provoking conflicts with their opponents. However, the attempts to reshape rural governance, such as by abolishing informal taxes, protecting tenant peasants in landlord-tenant disputes, and operating peasant schools, would inevitably affect the interests and power of the gentry, landlords, and local militia. Thus, even if the peasant associations did not immediately attack the gentry, landlords, and local militia, confrontations between the two camps and the militarization of the peasant associations in responding to armed conflicts were inevitable in the long run.

The Communists and the Guomindang left believed a new rural politics centering on the peasant association would finally replace the old politics dominated by the gentry, landlords, and local militia. This they considered the yardstick for measuring the success of the “national revolution” (guomin geming) and of securing “people’s rights” (minquan) in grassroots rural communities (Deng, 1926; Chen, 1926). However, though many peasant associations indeed rose to be critical power holders in the countryside and impacted the dominance of the gentry, landlords, and local militia in many communities, they never completely replaced their opponents in Guangdong in the 1920s. One important reason for this was the Guomindang right wing, a persistent and influential force in the Guangzhou government that opposed the peasant associations and supported their opponents. Especially after the beginning of the Northern Expedition in the summer of 1926, the center of gravity of the revolution gradually moved north, toward Hunan and Hubei, leaving the Guangzhou government in the clutches of the Guomindang right wing. The opponents of the peasant movement soon began to receive more and more support from the top down, and gradually gained the upper hand. After the anti-Communist coup in Guangzhou on April 15, 1927, they bloodily suppressed the peasant associations, in the name of “purging the Communists,” with the open support of the Guomindang right wing (Liang, 2004: 494, 869–70, 880–84). Hence the Communists’ and Guomindang leftists’ hope of reconstructing rural politics through the peasant movement crumbled to dust.

To sum up, the revolutionary rural politics that originated in Haifeng in 1922–1923 expanded to many other areas of Guangdong in 1924–1926. As in Haifeng, these areas also saw the rise of peasant associations as pivotal power holders in the countryside, the reform or reconstruction of rural governance centering on peasants’ urgent needs, the politicization of class contradictions, and rural society’s impact on county politics. What changed was the increasing antagonism between the peasant associations and the gentry, landlords, and local militia, as well as the organizing of peasant self-defense armies in response to armed clashes. These new trends reflected the inevitable impact of revolutionary rural politics on traditional power holders. They also implied that the antagonisms between the new and old political forces, in a sociopolitical environment marked by semiformal governance and local militarization—which meant an absence of effective electoral, legal, and administrative systems—would inevitably lead to armed violence.

Conclusion

In the revolutionary rural politics that emerged in the peasant movement first in Haifeng in 1922–1923 and then in many other areas in Guangdong in 1924–1926, grassroots peasant organizations rose to be influential power holders, first to take on the functions of rural governance; second, to satisfy the urgent needs of peasants rather than just meeting the top-down demands of the bureaucracy and local elites; third, to politicize rural class contradictions in the economic sphere; and, finally, to turn rural society from passivity into an active force that impacted county politics from the bottom up.

The emergence and shaping of this revolutionary rural politics were closely connected with the political tradition of semiformal governance under the Qing, its degeneration in the early Republican years, and the trend of local militarization started in the mid-nineteenth century. Under the Qing dynasty, the formal bureaucratic system only reached down to the county level, leaving the functions of subcounty governance to unsalaried quasi-officials nominated by rural communities and confirmed by the county authorities. To perform their tasks, these quasi-officials had to win the support of local elites, who might be gentry members with academic degrees or powerful commoners with wealth and influence. This mode of rural governance, originally designed to keep the bureaucracy as small as possible while firmly controlling the vast countryside, saw a significant degeneration in the politically unstable early years of the Republic. Local elites in many communities degenerated into “local tyrants and evil gentry,” who cared only about extracting resources from rural society while paying no attention to satisfying the pressing needs of the peasants. Local militias were their major tool for securing power and suppressing their opponents. Such a sociopolitical environment was conducive to the rise of peasant associations, especially since there was no local power in firm control. It also drew peasant associations into brutal conflicts with reactionary forces, for there was no effective administrative and legal system to deter the powerful from violence and abuse.

We call this new kind of rural politics “revolutionary” because it departed significantly from the major trend of China’s political change of the 1850s–1920s, which was characterized by the devolution of power from the bureaucracy to local elites, with the peasants being regarded as only subjects of domination and excluded from political participation. However, in revolutionary rural politics it was the long-neglected peasants who were turned into an active force that reshaped rural governance and impacted county politics; and it was their concerns and needs rather those of the bureaucracy or elite that were turned into pivotal political issues. In this sense, the rise of revolutionary rural politics was a critical juncture in modern Chinese history, and demands more attention from scholars today.