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The Roots of the Political Struggles in the
West Fujian (Minxi) Base Area
presented by

YIN, Nai-hsin

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cmmut

THE ROOTS OF THE POLITICAL STRUGGLES
IN THE WESTERN FUJIAN (MINXI) BASE AREA

By

NAI -H SIN YIN

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ART

Department of History

1992

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ABSTRACT

THE ROOTS OF THE POLITICAL STRUGGLES
IN THE WESTERN FUJIAN (MINXI) BASE AREA

By

NA! -H SIN YIN

Using materials newly available, this thesis reviews two political struggles of the
Chinese Communist Party(the Purge of the Social Democratic Party and the Anti-Luo-
Ming Line Movement) taln'ng place during the Soviet period. 1929-1934, in the base area
in western Fujian, known as the Minxi base area. Because study on Communist movement
inMinxiisstill scarce,themainpurposeofthisthesisistotrytouseMinxibaseareaasa
case study to discover a comprehensive explanation of the CCP’s intra-party struggle, and
ftn'therrnore to question some opinions represented by previous scholarship, who focus on
one side of history. ' _‘

The roots of CCP’s political struggles should be traced not only to the aspects of
leadership, organization and ideology, but also to the aspects of ecological setting and
local complication. Additionally, the function of each aspect changes with CCP’s various
aims. In terms of power struggle, this study ﬁnds that the interpretation of the principle of
’democratic centralism’ plays a critical role in the political struggle in the soviet period,
which constructs a unseen, most of time confusing, link between CCP’s upper and lower

levels; policy-making and local requirement. The conception of democratic centralisrn is

so ﬂexible that it could serve as a leverage of power operation. In the end, this study locates

the social-organizational roots of two political struggles in minxi and builds a link between
the history form the bottom up and from the top on the question of CCP’s intra-party
struggle. I

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 1
I. ECOLOGICAL SETTING AND THE ORIGIN OF THE COMMUNIST _
MOVEMENT 6
1 Socioeconomic Situation ......................... 7
2 Structme of Political Power and Complex of Local Leaders ........ ll
3 Educational Circles and the Origin of Communist Thought ........ l9
4 Concluding Remarks ................ a ........... 2 4
II. THE COMMUNIST UPRISING AND THE FAILURE OF THE XI’NAN
DISTRICT SOVIET 27
1 Beginning of the Communist Movement .................. 28
2 Communist Uprisings and Case Studies of Local Power Struggle ..... 32
3 Concluding Remarks ........................... 58
III. THE ROOTS OF POLITICAL STRUGGLES 61
1 Establishment of the Minxi Soviet ..................... 67
2 The Purge of the Social Democratic Party and The Struggle of the
Anti-Luo-Min g Line ........................... 84
3 Concluding Remarks ............. _ ............... ‘ 94
CONCLUSION 97
NOTES 102
BIBLIOGRAPHY ’ . 117

INTRODUCTION

The Western Fujian (Minxi) base area was one of the CCP’s famous revolutionary base
areas during the Soviet period, from 1929 to 1934. Dining this period. the base area went
through several stages; the origin of the Communist movement, local uprisings and the
establishment of a short-lived district soviet, the arrival of the Zhu-Mao Red Army and
their help in building the Minxi base area, the establishment of the Minxi Soviet and its
inclusion in the Central Soviet, and ﬁnally the loss of the base area.

What happened during the rise and fall of this base area? Essentially, according to the
CCP’s reasoning, what caused the Minxi Party’s downfall were the political miscalculations
of the left-oriented Party Central (the Li Lisan Line and Wang Ming Line), which caused
a catastrophic political oppression known as the Purge of the Social-Democratic Party,
and a mistaken line struggle, the Movement of the Anti-Luo-Ming Line. However, the
purpose of this study is to try to discover other roots of the political struggles in Minxi
as well. In addition to the high-level power struggle, the inherent ecological setting, the
dialectic relationship between ideology and organization, and the confrontations among
state-building, party construction and revolutionary work, all also contributed to political
interaction in the Minxi base area.

Being in the mountainous border area between Guangdong, Fujian and Jiangxi, the
Minxi base area had characteristics similar to other border base areas, such as the
weakness of the anti-Communist authorities and economic backwardness. According to
my observation, unique characteristics the Minxi base area had were: 1) the differences

in the development of its core and peripheral areas were rather clear cut, so that we can

1

perceive the weakness of CCP control in the peripheral area; 2) left-wing organizations in
the core area were prevalent before 1927, which offered the future local Communist leaders
solid and complicated bonds to aid their development; 3) and no leader was really involved
in high level power struggles, because of which it is less necessary to explore the tapic
of high-level power struggle in this study. Therefore, in this study I will emphasize the
ecological setting, ideological interpretation and organizational evolution and try to explain
the roots of the political struggle in Minxi from the bottom (the social aspect) and middle
(the organizational aspect) angles, rather than from the top, although decisions made at the
top were also critical to the development of lower-level organizations and local red areas
as a whole. .

In the ﬁrst chapter, “Ecological Setting and the Origin of the Communist Movement,”
I would like to adopt Professor Elizabeth J. Perry’s conceptions of “protective strategy”
and “predatory strategy” to analyze the interaction between local power structure and
ecological setting. To be sure, when Perry evolved her framework of “predatory-protective
dichotomy,” her case study was Huai-pei (Huaibei) and her time period covered over one
century.l To study peasant revolution in light of the conditions of endemic uncertainty in
Huai-pei and peasants’ “profit maximization,” Perry tinds that:

the composition of local society played a critical role in determining the
form of peasant unrest...In emphasizing the mediation of social structure, we
have dispensed with any notion of a uniform peasant mentality capable of
explaining rural rebellion. Some peasants are likely to operate by a calculus
of risk minimization, but others will move more boldly to enhance their own
positions. The variation is attributable in part to natural environment, in part
to socio-economic position, and part of course to personality differences.2

By smdying the cases of the Nien and of the Red Spears, she stated that “the ﬁrst method

of survival, termed the predatory strategy, entailed illegally expanding the resources of

' some members of the community at the expense of others, while the reaction against such
assaults primarily adapted by ecologically more secure villages, the protective strategy,

was an effort to preserve one’s belongings in the face of predatory threat.”3 Her study

demonstrates that neither the communities adopting the protective strategy nor the predatory
strategy necessarily had positive tendencies toward revolution. However, the common
point of the local leaders in adopting either strategy was not only to survive but also to
preserve their own power without interference from outside. In the end, she concluded

that:

The point, of course, is that there was no single legacy of traditional Chinese
rebellion, but many such legacies, each adapted to the particular ecological
exigencies under which it evolved and each differing perhaps in its suitability
to theservice of modern revolution.‘

Although Minxi had a different ecological setting from Huai-pei, in terms of collective
violence Perry’s predatory- protective dichotomy is also appropriate to categorize two types
of local leaders in Minxi, who I will call “protective elites” and “predatory elites.” The
study will show that the local leaders of peripheral areas, such as Wuping and Liancheng,
had a tendency to adopt protective or predatory strategies to protect their power base, which
made their territory inhospitable to the CCP.

In Chapter One and especially in Chapter Two, Professor Stephen Averill ’s argument is
very helpful in examining the characteristics of local leaders, especially local Communist
leaders. Averill has convincingly divided hill-country elites into three layers: the upper
level, middle level and lowest level of the local elites. He focuses on the interaction between
the local elites and the socio-economic setting in which they operated their networks of
inﬂuence. The main observation he makes is that because of limited resources each
stratum of local elites had its own span of inﬂuence, and they “differed markedly in their
access to ‘public bodies’ and bureaucratic officials, their connections with bandit gangs
and brotherhoods, and their attitudes toward education.” Furthermore, believing that the
lowest level of the local elites were the ones who had closest contact with the peasants,
Averill explored the revolutionary tendency of this lower stratum of the hill-country elite.

He tentatively concluded that:

Less detailed biographical data on other Jiangxi revolutionaries generally

supports this picture of a revolutionary leadership drawn mainly from the
lower elite stratum, and especially its “declining households”(poluo ha). If the
“declining households” (descendants of large landlord families then reduced in
wealth and status as a result of the division of the family estates) provided much
of the early elite support for the revolution, the “newly-emerging hOuseholds”
(xingfa hu: aggressive and hard-nosed families just risen from the ranks of the
peasantry or small merchants) of the lower elite appear later to have become
its most stubborn and effective opponents... In sum, of all the elite strata the
lower elite was simultaneously the most open and most resistant to change:
most open because its many “declining households” were willing to tamper
with a status quo that offered them little prospect but further decline, and
most resistant because its “newly-emerging househol ” were unwilling to
jeopardize the smallest morsel of their hard-own gains. The dual nature of the
lower elite as both facilitators of and obstacles to change made the question of
how to deal with this group one of the most delicate and exasperating problems
facing the Jiangxi revolutionary leaders.‘

Based on Mao Zedong’s “Xunwu Investigation,” Averill’s analysis of the Jiangxi hill
country fits the situation in Minxi quite well. (Xunwu county borders Fujian, and Mao
said that social conditions there were typical of the tri-province border region.) Multi-
faceted functions of local elites and their variable access to resources did make Minxi’s
local Communist leaders diverse and did inﬂuence their approaches to mass mobilization
as well. One other notable aspect of the situation is the degree to which Communist
intellectuals were concentrated in a few places. Before 1927, most of the left- wing
organizations concentrated in the county seats of Shanghang, Longyan and Yongding,
which formed the core area of the Communist movement in Minxi, and this drew many
intellectuals to work in these capitals. Therefore most of the local Communist leaders in
the core counties had ties with capitals, which helped them stage uprisings and afterwards
develop strong political control.

Finally, in Chapter Three I will use Professor Arif Dirlik’s hypothesis of “the dialectic
relationship between ideology and organization” to explore the principle of the system
of democratic centralism and the conﬂict among revolution, party construction and state-
building. From the documentary materials provided by multi-layered organizations, I

attempt to show that, even before the formation of the Party Central’s leftist policy.

ecological setting, local power structure and the complicated relationship among multi-
layered elites had caused many problems of CCP’s control and this provided the background
for the implementation of leftist policy. A further point I try to make is that, taking all
into account, the forms of political struggles in Minxi escalating from social purge to
ideological struggle were inevitable because of the local situation and the ambiguity of the
interpretation of the principle of democratic centralism.

Nevertheless, this study tries to investigate the roots of political struggle in Minxi from
the lower and middle angles, and to ﬁnd a logical explanation for the CCP’s intra-party
struggle. The problems in the Minxi base area were not only exacerbated by wrong policies *
and the regions own local complexities, but also by ambiguous principles of control and
confusing efforts in revolution and state-building, especially during the Soviet period. The
roots of political struggle stem from all of these aspects.

 

I. ECOLOGICAL SETTING AND THE ORIGIN OF THE
COMMUNIST MOVEMENT

The importance of ecological setting to the development of Chinese Communist movement
has been noticed by many scholars. For example, Elizabeth Perry’s analysis of “protective-
predatory activity,” Roy Hofeinz’s categories of the “radical hotbed counties, border area
base counties and great rear area,” and Stephen Averill ’s observation of the multiplicity
of the local elites in hill country, all try to adopt some kind of framework to explain the
interaction between the ecological setting, social structure and revolutionary movements.
At any rate, their accomplishments offer subsequent scholars of the Chinese revolution a
more structured ways to look into this topic.

Based on a case study of the western Fujian area (or Minxi, as it was generally
abbreviated), I try to explore the complex development of the Communist movement.
Because it is normally seen simply as a peripheral part of the Central Soviet area, the
CCP base area in western Fujian has been neglected by scholars. Actually, although
western Fujian base was similar in some ways to other base areas, the development cf
the Communist movement in this area also had its own uniqueness that deserves more
attention. Because of the limitation of materials at hand, I can only undertake a tentative
examination of the base area. Hopefully the study will not be blemished to an intolerable
extent by these limitations.

Because of its isolated geographical location, with the Wuyi Mountains on its western
edge marking the provincial border with Jiangxi and the Bopingling on its southeastern
edge segregating it from southern Fujian, the region of western Fujian is an administratively

and naturally separate area.’ From the Ming Dynasty to the end of Qing Dynasty the region

6

7

i was included administratively in Dingzhou Pu (Ding prefecture), which included eight
counties: Changding, Ninghua, Shanghang, Wuping, Qingliu, Liancheng, Guihua and
Yongding. The so-called Ding shu baxian(eight counties belonging to Ding Prefecture)
encompassed most of the main area of Minxi we are dealing with in this study, which also
included four other counties: Longyan, Pinghe, Zhangping and Ningyang.8 Therefore the
area was composed of twelve counties, making up twenty-three per cent of Fujian’s area
and with a population of 2.5 million people, according to a CCP report of July 9, 1930.9
‘ Such a spacious and populous terrain was not easily mobilized What ecological conditions
could the CCP use to build a lasting revolutionary base area there for years, and to make
it to an integral part of “Central Soviet Area” as well? I will seek to trace the ecological
history of the revolution in this area and then, based on the limited sources available to
me, to discover how the CCP mobilized people in various counties with various degrees of

‘ success.

1 Socio-economic Situation

Being a part of the Jiangxi-Fujian-Guangdong border region, the Minxi area possessed
ecological 'characteristics typical of the CCP’s revolutionary base areas in south-central
China dining the early stages of the Chinese revolution. It was mountainous, generally
inaccessible and reputed to be weakly controlled by counter-revolutionary authority. This
area had been considered a military stronghold since the Tang Dynasty because of its
strategic signiﬁcance, but it was relatively backward, both economically and culturally,
compared with neighboring regions. During peaceful times, governments could control
this area with ofﬁcial armies, but during periods of turmoil it was overrun with bandits.
.BeSides, most of western Fujian’s inhabitants, as in nearbyliangxi and Guangdong, were
. Hakka. (There were also minority ethnic groups living in the mountain areas, like the
Yao People who lived in the Bopingling.)lo lineage organizations were powerful and

struggles for land and irrigation drainage among them were common, even escalating into
armed affrays (xiedou). Their special dialect, customs and conception of solidarity all
intensiﬁed the Hakkas’ suspicion and hostility toward outsiders. The people living there
were described as militant. After the massive Taiping Rebellion, which disturbed this area
at least three times, the phenomenon of local militarization became prevalent in the western
Fujian area." Militia led by local elites, secret societies such as the Big Sword Society
(Dadao Hui), and bandits were prevalent through this area.12 By the Republican period
western Fujian was known as a “bandit world.”‘3

The area is located deep in the ranges between the Wuyi Mountains and the Bopingling,
drained by the Ding River ﬂowing from north to south into the Han River Basin in
Guangdong province, the Gong River (a branch of Jiangxi’s Gan River system) ﬂowing
from east to west, and the Jiulong River and Sha River flowing cast to the sea in southern
and eastern Fujian.“ As we can see, the western Fujian area has a foot in each of three
macroregions as deﬁned by G. William Skinner: its southern parts drain into the Lingnan
region, its western parts drain ultimately into the Middle Yangtze region, while streams in
its eastern half feed into the Southeast Coast region. ‘5 Consequently, although there are
no major cities in the area, the economic evolution and literati circles of western Fujian
were profoundly inﬂuenced by neighboring urban areas, such as Guangzhou, Chaozhou
and Shantou in Guangdong province, Xiamen and Fuzhou in eastern Fujian, and Nanchang
and Ruijin in Jiangxi province.

According to a CCP report, in western Fujian, eighty per cent of the population engaged
in agriculture and only little more than ten per cent were workers. Among these who
engaged in agriculture, landlords and rich peasants made up less than ﬁve per cent, middle
peasants sevenwen per cent, and poor peasants seventy-ﬁve per cent. At any rate, the
average proportion of agricultural laborers, viewed by the CCP as the most revolutionary
component among peasants, was less than ﬁve per cent. Fmtherrnore, less than one per
cent of the population in Changding county were agricultural workers, while there were

none in Xi’nan district of Yongding county, which was the ﬁrst experimental locale of the
CCP’s land reform in western Fujian.“

This area was mountainous and the agricultural land was limited, but the population
density was high, though variable. Twenty-two mu (one mu is approximately 1/6 acre)
of agricultural land is the minimum for the average peasant household to support itself.
However, the research of the Nationalist government in 1941 showed that if the agricultural
land of Fujian province was distributed equally, each peasant household would own fourteen
mu of land, which was still not enough to maintain their livelihood. ‘7 What made it worse
was the unequal distribution of agricultural land; a CCP report noted that sixty-ﬁve per cent
was owned by a small number of private individuals, twenty per cent (the so-called “public
agricultlnal lan ” or gong tian) belonged to lineages and associations, and only ﬁfteen per
cent was owned by other peasants."

Despite the likely exaggeration of CCP reports, the stratiﬁcation of peasantry and the
maldistribution of agricultural land at least illustrates what was a common situation in South
China, namely that wealthy people and powerful lineages possessed most of the natural
resources, while most peasants had at least a little land. but few had enough to support
themselves fully, so that tenancy was also prevalent in this area. Most poor peasants had
to engage in the manufacture or growth of a variety of handicrafts and mountain products
to make a living. Doubtless the overlap between poor peasants and handicraft workers was
substantial.

As for urbanization in Minxi, its economic characteristics make Skinner’s framework
of macroregions relevant. Before the development of sea transportation, the Ding
River was the main route for travelers between eastern Guangdong and north China.
After sea transport developed. the demand for passenger service was reduced, while the
transportation of commodities became much more prosperous. Imports from Guangdong
and Jiangxi included salt, coal oil, marine products, foreign goods and grass cloth. Exports.
such as tobacco, paper, timber and tea, were conveyed to Shantou and Chaozhou in

 

10

Guangdong.l9 The most prosperous handicrafts in Minxi were paper, tobacco, timber and
cloth. Consequently, the workers in these four kinds of handicrafts made up the main part
of the worker stratum.20

Because of being transit points for trade in the tri-province area, quite a few market
towns emerged along riverine trade routes, such as the county seats of Longyan and
Changding, and Xiabei town in Wuping county. The close economic inter-dependency
among these three provinces can be well illustrated by the situation in Changding. Besides
native merchants, there were four groups of merchants controlling the trade in Changding
county: the Jiangxi group, the Guangdong group, the Longyan group and the Shanghang
group." Because of the mountainous terrain and poor land transportation, there was an
enormous demand for porters and boatrnen to transpat goods. The porters in this area were
not only natives butalso outsiders from Jiangxi and Guangdong provinces. For example,
in Xiabei town, most of the porters were from Jiangxi. As for the boatrnen, most of them
also engaged in farming.22 To summarize, we can see that the workers in this area were
a complicated blend of handicraftsmen, porters and boatrnen, many of whom were still
part-time peasants. There was no modern industry in Minxi dlning this period, nor was
there a genuine proletarian class.

Although production methods were backward in this area, the inﬂuence of the world
market still had a profound impact. After the Opium War in the 1840’s, imports of foreign
cloth, paper and tobacco ruined the most proﬁtable local trades. Bankruptcy of handicrafts
resulted in tens of thousands of jobless workers. Fluctuation of world market prices
devastated small pcasants’ agriculture. After the opening of trade ports such as Xiamen and
Shantou, and the dumping of foreign goods, the demand for the old Changding-Longyan
riverine trade route declined, which caused the unemployment of at least ten thousand
porters. All the changes precipitated the social and economic deterioration of this area.
The proportion in the population of the so-called “lumpen proletariat” (youmin) rose to

twenty-ﬁve per cent, which provided a substantial resource for the recruiting of warlord

11

armies, bandit groups and even the CCP."3
In sum, then, local militarization, economic bankruptcy. social miseries and a rising

jobless population all contributed to the complicated political situation in this area.

2 Structure of Political Power and Complex of Local Leaders

The structure of political power in the western Fujian area should be examined at two
levels: the provincial and the local. Political power at the provincial level I deﬁne as any
kind of authority beyond the county level. Considering the CCP’s base area from 1930 to
1934, I will try to show that political power at the local level was more critical to the CCP’s
control than their dealing withthe provincial level.

During the 1920’s and 1930’s, most political power at the provincial level was held
by warlords. Although the area was too destitute to support nationally powerful warlords,
it was occupied by several small warlords who belonged to and switched among various
factions under the Nationalist regime. In western Fujian, most of the warlords were natives
and former bandits. While retaining their bandit disposition, they nominally accepted
ofﬁcial military titles from the Nationalist government, but fought for power and spheres
of inﬂuence constantly and violently. Mutual suspicion kept the warlords divided and
cautiously watchful of each other. Additionally, their power was complicated by the
wars between leading warlords, such as Jiang Jieshi, Li Zongren and Yan Xishan. It
was the opening caused by the power struggle among warlords that the CCP sought to
take advantage of. At the end of 1926, the army of the Northern Expedition conquered
Fujian. The Nanjing government appointed Yang Shuzhuang, the Secretary of the Navy,
to serve concurrently as the governor of the province. To maintain social order and to
keep momentary peace in this area, Yang allowed local warlords to take charge of their
own original power spheres. The main allocation of warlords’ power areas in Minxi

was as follows: Guo Fengming held the so-called Ding shu ba xian (eight counties of

12

Dingzhou), Cheng Guohui held the counties of Longyan and Zhangping, Lan Yutien held
Shanghang, Zhang Zhen held Pinghe, and Lu Xingbang held the counties of Qingliu,
Liancheng and Ninghua.24 There were still other small warlords who occupied some places
without interference from any kind of authority. '

Clearly, warlord power in Minxi was scattered and unstable. One important aspect
that deserves more attention is the interdependence and mutual resistance between the
provincial and local political power. I will explore theis subject later in this study.

Political power at the local level in Minxi was even more menacing and complicated to
manipulate for the communists, because the Communists’ challenge was more direct and
compelling to the established order. I deﬁne the local level of political power as the power
wielded by local elites. Despite the continuity or the discontinuity of its characteristics, the
signiﬁcance of the role the elite has played in Chinese society has been observed by many
scholars. As Professor Averill notes, the attitudes and actions “ of the lowest, largest, and
most volatile stratum of the local elite,... were of crucial importance to all who sought
to change the contours of Chinese rural society.“ No matter whether they selected the
revolutionary or the counter- revolutionary side, local elites tended to maintain or cultivate ~
their political power in reference to the environment around them.

As I mentioned in the introduction, to analyze the local political structure thoroughly,
I will try to employ Elizabeth Perry’s and Stephen Averill ’s conceptions of the “protective
gentry,” the “predatory gentry” and “multi-tiered local elites” to look into the characteristics
of local elites in the peripheral area of Minxi. Additionally, as Professor Roy Hofheinz
presumes, one possible explanation of Chinese Communist success is ‘the behavior of the
Chinese Communists themselves.”‘ Likewise, I assume the strategy adopted by a local
leader, whether he was a communist or not, affecwd the local revolutionary movement
signiﬁcantly. Following this point of view, Perry’s framework seems to be really valuable,
if we try to analyze the interaction between ecology and the strategy the local leaders

adopted in their power bases to resist the interference from outside. I try to clarify my

l3

reasoning with the following examples of several local leaders with various backgrounds
and fates, whose main concerns were how to preserve their power. Areas of such local
leaders proved to be uncontrollable for the CCP.

Minxi contains twelve counties. Although the general regional socio-economic setting
has been mentioned above, circumstances varied somewhat in each section. With the cases
I examine, I intend to make the point that the interaction between socioeconomic setting
and characteristics of local leaders is complicated.

In Minxi, there were quite a few local leaders who belonged to the category of
“protective gentry.” Most of the areas which tended to adopt protective strategies were
economically richer but socially more backward than neighbaing areas, with powerful
lineage organizations and far from county seats and strategic market towns. In other
words, these areas were closed and self-sufﬁcient, in Perry’s words, “more secure.” The
domination of powerful lineages was complete and the social position of elementary and
middle school teachers was respectable, for they controlled a major path to the outside
world. Accordingly, rural elites and school teachers in such areas could exert inﬂuence on
peasants with little challenge.

A typical example of such an area was Wubei district (northern part of Wuping county),
which was in the peripheral area. It contained four villages: Yongping, Dahe, Touxi and
Xiangdian.” In the 1930s, because of long-standing complicated socio-political struggles
among bandits, ofﬁcials and lineages, there were two factions in the Wubei district, that
of Lan Qiguan in Dahe village and that of Deng Liwen in Xiangdian village. Armed
feuds between these two factions were common. Although brutal lights among leaders
were serious, they also consistently and forcefully resiswd any kind of authority that tried
to penetrate their local strongholds, no matter whether it was the Nationalist government
or the Cornmunistarmy. Although their own area was highly militarized, the people in
the Wubei district never tried to invade other areas.” There were some characteristics of

Wubei society during l9203-1940s that deserve more attention. First, there were many

14

intellectuals; as was common in China at that time, some of them got college degrees
from prestigious universities in other provinces and some went overseas, but most of
them graduated from local middle schools. After completing their studies, most of these
intellectuals did not stay in prosperous urban areas; instead they went home and enjoyed
the privilege of being intellectuals in a backward area. Because most of these intellectuals
were scions of elite families, it was easy for them to get jobs as school teachers, to live at
home without jobs, or even to became local leaders. The second characteristic of Wubei
society was that every village owned its own arms, especially various kinds of modern
guns and bullets. Although the number of guns differed from village to village, the fact that
so many arms existed in villages was a reﬂection of how wealthy and powerful lineages
were in this area. A third characteristic was that social order was relatively stable and
outside bandits hardly disturbed this area. However, the Nationalist government could also
not collect any kind of tax here, nor did the CCP achieve substandal control.29 The Wubei
district remained essentially a self-govemed area until the establishment of the PRC in
1949.

The situation in Gutian village of Liancheng county was similar to that of Wubei
district. Liangcheng was one of the counties that the CCP could not have substantial
control. A landlord and merchant from Gutian named Hua Yangqiao led a militia with
more than seven hundred guns and thousands of followers. Hua’s power base never
expanded beyond his hometown, nor was he controlled by any kind of outside authority. Of
course, out of necessity, this kind of local leader would cooperate with warlord armies to
repress the Communist uprisings.30 Anti-communism was their common interest and they
also were strongly determined to preserve the existing socio-political structure. Clearly,
such protective local leaders were deﬁnitely counter-revolutionary.

In contrast to this “protective strategy,” some areas adopting a “predatory strategy”
were formerly prosperous but small market towns that became bankrupt after the abolition
of the old trade routes. These areas were nannally poor. During prosperous times, they

15

were targets of bandit attack, while later the social situation in these areas was exacerbated
by the long-term occupation of bandits, or bandits who were nominally renamed militias,
a phenomenon called bing fer“ yi jia (soldiers and bandits are one family). Therefore the
characteristic of local leaders in these areas was more bandit- oriented; some were the '
so-called “social bandits,” some were really predatory bandits.

The model example of this kind of area was the Wunan area (the southern part of
Wuping county). This area, located on the Jiangxi-Fujian—Guangdong border, consisted
of nine townships. For example, Xiabei town, the seat of Xiabei township, had been an
important commercial town along the Xiabei river since the Ming dynasty. Salt, rice,
sundries and paper businesses had thrived and thousands of porters (most of them from
Jiangxi province) and boatrnen had been centered there. When social order deteriorated
and imperialist commercial invasion intensiﬁed, Xiabei and other market towns in Wunan
declined economically. A huge number of people in the area became jobless and were
forced to become bandits or soldiers to make a living.”

Zhong Shaokui was a militia leader and former bandit chief in Wunan. Zhong’s father,
Zhong Youyue, was a Qing xiucai(the lowest examination degree at the county level), and
owned a pawnshop. Although Zhong was not well-educawd, he was still involved in elite
circles. Beginning during an armed feud between the Zhong and Zeng lineages, Zhong
started his bandit career by gathering a group of native followers and seizing guns from
militias. In 1928, he joined the troops of Lan Yutian, one of the small warlords in Minxi
who dominated Shangyang county and claimed leadership of Wunan. 3’

In 1929, a Communist named Li Changrning became Zlong’s sworn brother in hopes
of being able to use Zhong’s force to build a soviet area. .This method seemed to work
at ﬁrst. Zhong followed Li’s plan to conﬁscate a landlord’s guns and property, and then
prepared to establish apersonal military force. Although this cooperation was somewhat
like a trade- off, it is fair to assume that Zhong’s acceptance of Li’s opinion was more due

to his disposition of being a “social bandit” and his loyalty to friendship than to any real

16

appreciation of Communism. However, when his father ’s good friend. Liu Xiangting (also
a Qing lower-degree holder), tried to persuade him to kill Li, Zhong allowed Li to escape
from the town and then cut connections with the Communists.33

Afterwards, Zhong kept augmenting his power base by ﬁghting with provincial-level
warlords and the Red Army. With his power getting stronger, Zhong changed his force’s
name from the Save Wuping Corps (Wuping jiuxiang man) to the Save Ding Prefecture
Armed Corps (Ding shu wuzhong jiwa'ang tuan). Although he seemed to stand with the
counter-revolutionary side to suppress the Communist movement, actually Zhong did not
have a clear-cut political stance. On the one hand, he attacked both warlord and Communist
troops to increase his personal force, and on the other be implemented the policy of twenty-
ﬁve percent rent reduction and restrained the rapaciousness of lineages to protect the poor
in his base area.” Taking all of this into account, Zhong ﬁts into the category of “predatory
social bandit.” When Zhong was killed by a Nationalist ofﬁcial, his followers retaliated
and killed that ofﬁcial.”

Besides such social bandits as Zhong, there were more bandits and soldiers who
changed their allegiance back and forth betweem Red Army and warlord troops, such as
Liu Liebo .in Yanshi town in Longyan, Peng Shunrong in Shangfeng village in Wuping,
and Zheng Seng in Xingqiao township in Changding.“ They used their forces as leverage
to bargain with various authorites and in taking advantage of chaotic situations. They not
only lacked a ﬁrm political standpoint but also banned local people as well. This kind of
local leader caused what the CCP called tlgfei wand and liumang ward (the problems of
bandits and hooligans). Most of them were execuwd by the Nationalist 19th Route Army
after the CCP’s Long March in 1934.

. The local leader with the most complex characteristics may have been Fu‘Bocui. Fu
was a member of the Nationalist Party before 1927, then joined the CCP and led a local
Communist uprising, and became one of the leaders in establishing the CCP’s base area.
But at the end of 1929 he left his CCP position, stayed in his power base and resisted

17

the CCP’s orders, due to a disagreement about the policy of land revolution. After being
expelled from the CCP, Fu accepted several positions as militia leader from the Nationalist
government. When the Minxi base area initiated a purge of the Social Democratic Pary, Fu
became the target of the purge. Despite this attack, Fu retained his local force until 1949
and then switched back to the CCP side. Because Fu’s political stance is a complicated one,
I would like to examine his characteristics from a social perspective and try to describe .a
more comprehensive picture of the origin of the CCP Minxi base area.

Fu was from a big landlord, although not the largest one, in the Jiaoyang village of
Bel Si Qu (the fornth district of northern Shanghang county). 37 In the Republican period,
Shanghang country was divided into more than twenty districts. The Bei Si Qu included
twenty natural villages, and Jiaoyang village was one of them. Jiaoyang village was the
political, cultural and geographical center of ulBei Si Qu, with ﬁve hundred housholds
and a population of two thousand people. It was richer than neighboring villages and
was dominated by Fu’s lineage.” This provided the basic socio-economic condition for
adopting protective activity.

Belonging to the enlightened upper layer of the local elite, Fu pursued the western
“new learning” and was very concerned about China’s critical situation. In 1914, he went
to Japan to study law and joined the Chinese Revolutionary Party organized by Sun Yatsen
to overthrow the government of the northern warlords. The next year, he participated
in the student movement to protest the Japanese government’s infamous 21 Demands.
When he went back in 1917, Fu organind an association for legal study, faxue she, in the
county seat of Shanghang to ﬁght the corrupt bmeaucracy and gained the title “emperor
of the students,” which implied that he was inﬂuential among students. During the period
of GMD-CCP cooperation, Fu was a left-wing member of the GMD and had a good
relationship with Communist members. When the “white terror’ started in 1927, Fu ﬂed to
his hometown and continued anti-right-wing GMD activities underground. In September
of 1927, when the CCP’s Nangchang Uprising army passed through Minxi, Fu became a

18

Communist Party member with the recommendation of Lao Ming, a CCP commissioner of
Fujian province.”

Details of Fu’s work in leading ulBei Si Qu’s Communist movement will be described
later; here I will focus on the general relation between Fu’s local orientation and the
CCP’s orders. When the development of the peasant movement in Jiaoyang village was
booming, one of the leaders of the Minxi base area, Deng Zihui, came to oversee the whole
movement. Observing that conditions in Jiaoyang village were ripe for land revolution,
Deng suggested Fu organize a mass uprising and conﬁscate landlords’ lands to distribute to
poor peasants. Fu refused Deng’s advice. He did not agree that the stage of mass uprising
had come, and he prefened the system of “land collection” rather than land revolution.
Eventually, Deng left without any agreement.”

Similar situations occurred again in later years. For example, when Guo Boping, the
party secretary of Shanghang county, ordered Fu to desert ulBei Si Qu to help other areas’
movements in 1928, he refused again and stayed to preserve his followers and power
base.‘1 Although the armed force of ulBei Si Qu had been renamed the Fourth Column of
the Fourth Red Army, it seemed that it was hard for the CCP to have effective control over
this armed force. Most of the time the armed faces of ulBei Si Qu planned to stay in their
home area rather than follow the Fourth Red Army’s adventuresorne battles. ‘2 Therefore
the split between Fu and the CCP seems unsurprising. What is sm'prising was that although
Fu was dismissed as a party member at the end of 1930 and was attacked by the Red Army,
he still regarded himself as a Communist and cooperated with the Nationalist government
and CCP guerrillas during the Anti-Japanese War period. He appears to have retained his
position as local leader without any impediment. When the Communist victory came in
1949, he led his armed force back to the CCP side. Fu Bocui’s example seems to show us
‘ that no matter what political stance he adopted, he would do what he could to protect his
local autonomy, in terms of the collective good. I would like to assign Fu into the category

of “protective Communist gentry.”

19

The cases I have mentioned above focus on the inﬂuence between local leaders’
characteristics and their own power bases. Clearly, the characteristics of local leaders were
shaped by the original socio-economic setting. Prerequisite for the dominant inﬂuence of
local leaders, as shown by the examples I have raised, was the condition of their power
bases. In the peripheral areas, the socially conservative and self- sufﬁcient ones produced
local leaders inclined to adopt “protective activity,” because the traditional ties of social
structure in these areas were stronger. On the other hand, declining, poorer and minor
market towns were easily occupied by predatory bandits and soldiers, because the old
social structure had been disrupted by economic decay before the coming of outsiders.

To sum up, the areas far from major political conﬂict were easily controlled by existing
local leaders. Although lots of effort had been made by Communists to penetrate the local
power structure, the extent of success was still questionable during the Soviet period, since
there were still some places untouched, which I have called the peripheral area. Although
Perry’s study focuses on north China, Fu’s example, I think, undermines her argument
about the CCP’s land revolution making the compulsion of local people to adopt certain
kind of strategic activity unnecessary. After all, as Perry is aware, the interaction between
ecological setting and local activity is more subtle than can be expressed by any kind of
simple framework.

3 Educational Circles and the Origin of Communist Thought

The function of educational circles as arenas of political struggle, which Averill has
suggested, was more developed in the relatively advanced areas in Minxi, which I term “the
core area,” such as the county capitals and the vicinity of the seats of counties, than in the
peripheral areas I disscussed above. In such advanced areas, the established social structure
was more in ﬂux and open to outside inﬂuence, and interpersonal relationships were more

complicated. The confrontation among elites and power struggles between local elites and

 

20

warlords were acute. No powerful individual or organization could control this kind of
area completely. Of course, another important reason was that the best and highest level of
schools was there. The upper layer of the local elites had strong networks of connection
with major cities, and the middle and lowest layers of the local elites could establish '
personal relations with higher levels of power through educational circles in the major
cities. According to Averill’s observation, the “declining households” of the lowest layer
of local elites was the main group making up the Communist leaders in Jiangxi. Although
their most critical attribute was their close relationship with the peasants, which facilitated
mass agitation, they were also involved in the social structure as a whole.43 Besides, as
we know, before the bloody suppression in 1927 most Communist intellectuals worked in
the county capitals under the cover of GMD organizations and personal relations, most of
which had been established earlier when they were studying in those cities. Therefore, to
investigate the relationship between “educational circles” and the origin of the Communist
movement is important not only for understanding the backgrounds of Communist leaders,
but also for more deeply scrutinizing the political struggle of local elites in the major cities
of Minxi.

As everywhere in China, changes from the end of the Qing dynasty had signiﬁcantly
affected the whole of Minxi. Since the abolition of the imperial examinations, the legitimacy
of elite status had changed from success in competition for degrees to involvement in the
new, Western-style educational system. Accordingly, educational degrees from the new-
style schools became one kind of political capital. Except for a few vocational schools,
the highest level of schools in Minxi were middle schools. Most schools were adapted
from local or regional academies (shuyuan) and supported by Qing degree- holders, the
so-called “enlightened upper-level elites.” For example, the Provincial Seventh Middle
School in the Changding. county seat was adapted from the old Longshang Shuyuan, and
its ﬁrst principal was Kang Yong, who had received the jinshi (the highest exam degree) in
1892.“

21

The power continuity of the old elite was strong, but it could not entirely overcome
the solidarity of the rising power of young intellectuals. One reason was that, as Averill
notes, the management and certiﬁcation of education had changed, so that “...educational
control was now much more ﬁrmly in the hands of school leaders themselves.”45 The
other reason was that good elementary and middle schools were few. In general, most
distinguished intellectuals in the same county were also alumni of the same elementary and
middle schools. This kind of alumni relationship was as close as that between imperial
degree-holders who had passed the examination in the same year, the so—called tongnian
relationship. For example, most of the Communist intellectuals in Longyang county were
alumni of the Kaiming Elementary School and of the Provincial Ninth Middle School.“
Such a close alumni relationship helped them a lot when they were sent back to countryside
to carry on the Communist movement and to ﬁght with other local elites, but it also
complicated the relationship between the young elites and the old ones, for the latter were
frequently the teachers or the principals of the former.

Although the ﬂood of the May Fourth Movement overwhelmed Minxi’s young
intellectuals, the backwardness of the area blocked their anxiety in searching for ways to
save China. As a matter of fact, there was no example of what Roy Hofheinz terms a
“radical hotbed” in the entire region." Instead, the origin of Minxi’s Communist movement
was strongly inﬂuenced by neighboring urban areas such as Guangzhou and Xiarnen. For
lack of high-level schools, most ambitious intellectuals in Minxi had to go to other places
to pursue further study, and it was in these urban areas that they learned of Marxism.

The earliest Communist organization in Xiamen was established by Li Jueming in
1926. Li was from Yongding county and studied in the Jirnei Normal School (Jimei shifan
xuexiao) in Xiamen. He attended the CCP’s Second National Congress in Guangzhou,
became a Communist member, and was sent back to Xiamen to develop the Communist
movement there.“ The Jirnei Normal School attracted many Minxi intellectuals because

it was tuition-free. In Longyan county, there was a so-called “Jirnei fever” in the 1910s

22

and 19208, indicating how popular this school was.” Although relevant evidence is scarce,
it is probably safe to assume that most of the intellectuals interested in the Jimei Normal
School were from the families of middle and lower-level local elites, though a few may
have been from wealthy families. At any rate, many Communist local leaders in Minxi
were graduates of the Jimei Normal School.’0 .

The other hotbed in which the Minxi communists were nourished was the Canton
Peasant Movement Training Institute (Guangzhou nongrnin yundong jiangxi suo). The
Canton Peasant Institute was a product of GMD-CCP cooperation and was controlled by
Communist members. The ﬁfth and sixth classes of the Institute were most inﬂuential in
developing Communist members, because Peng Pai was in charge of the former and Mao
Zedong was in charge of the latter. Besides, during that period the CCP’s Fourth National
Congress, held in Shanghai in January of 1925, resolved to establish party organizations in
industrial areas and big cities which had no Communist organizations yet. Therefore, the
cities of Fuzhou and Xiamen became the points of emphasis in Fujian province. Under this
direction, although Minxi was not a major target area, the intellectuals from Minxi were
also profoundly affected." .

Besides the Canton Peasant Institute, there were many students from Minxi scattered
around Guangzhou. Minxi students at Guangdong University organized the Ding Lei
She (the Association of Ding Lei) and issued a monthly paper entitled Ding Lei (literally,
the thunder of Ding prefecture), from March 25 to December 15, 1926. Basically the
purpose of Ding Lei was in tune with the Northern Expedition. It called for the people
in Minxi to learn the ”Three People’s Principles,’ and to stand up to ﬁght the warlords.
Because the leaders of the Ding Lei Association were Communists, the paper conveyed
the ideas of Communism, although in a diluted populist form. It focused on awakening the
consciousness of peasants. When the Nationalist troops marched into Minxi, the members
of the Ding Lei Association decided to go back to their hometowns to join the revolutionary

movement.52

"' ‘5‘

23

Of course, many other intellectuals and students in Minxi also tried to inﬂuence people’s
thought by using the forms of study associations and papers. Deng Zihui, one of the major
leaders of the Minxi base area, organized the Qishen Shu She (the Qishen Study Society) in
Longyan county in the spring of 1921 and issued the monthly paper You Sheng (the voice
of Longyan). The members of the Qishen Study Society were progressive teachers and
students, and Yan Sheng was the most inﬂuential and widely-read revolutionary paper in
Minxi. Deng joined the CCP at the end of 1926 in Chongyi county in Jiangxi province.’3
Others, such as Lao Dahua and Guo Shangping, organized a study association in Shanghang
county and printed the periodical Huan Deng (literally, changing light)“

The connection between the educational circles and the origins of the Communist
movement was close not only at the start but also dining later stages. When the Communist
intellectuals came home, they used their old relations in educational circles to begin their
work, using techniques such as organizing alumni associations, becoming school teachers,
or founding night schools and civilian schools to consolidate their relations and educate
peasants.

I would like to stop here brieﬂy to examine what kind of Communism the Minxi
intellectuals perceived at this moment. It is clear that the spread of Communism in Minxi
was later than in neighboring urban areas and was strongly inﬂuenced by those areas.
There is little doubt that the teaching of Peng Pai and Mao Zedong at the Canton Peasant
Institute had an important inﬂuence on their acceptance of Communism. That is, the
essence of Communism (or more precisely Peng’s or Mao’s interpretaion of Communism)
had been adapted to Chinese reality. For someone who had never been directly affected by
Peng’s or Mao’s thought, we can take Deng Zihui’s experience as an example. Ill search
of ways to make China rich and strong, Deng had gone through several phases of thought
' transformation, frOm reforrnism to anarchism to Communism. For him, Communism
was more like an effective revolutionary guidance than a pure theoretical structure. He

perceived that the revolutionary populace included the whole suppressed masses rather

 

24

than simply the proletarian class, which was weak'in Minxi. In order to build a new
and powerful China, he decided to devote himself to the revolutionary party to save '
the suppressed mass from misery.” Since the essence of Communism was to launch a
successful revolution, he felt that the interpretation of ideology should ﬁt the reality, or in
other words that the ideology should be relatively ﬂexible. Therefore, at the beginning, the
Communist leaders ill Minxi had little conﬂict between ideology and reality, as Peng Pai
had in Hai-Lu Fen g counties. But as the revolutionary movement in Minxi developed and
the CCP wanted to control the whole movement, real problems arose. One concerned the
principle of organization, the so- called “system of democratic centralism” and the tension
among organization, ideology and reality that developed later in the soviet period. Another
problem was conﬂict between state- building and revolution. I will discuss these problems

in the latter part of this study.

4 Concluding Remarks

There is no certain relationship between ecological setting and revolutionary tendency,
although the possibility of a relationship always exists. As Hofheinz observed, “...border
area bases tended...to rank relatively high on scales of grievance potential, such as that of
tenancy)“ After examining all the ecological materials he could ﬁnd. Hofheinz could only
conclude that the best possible explanation of Chinese Communist success was the behavior
of the Chinese Communists themselves. His argument is very tempting if we inspect the
Minxi area as a whole. But I would like to point out that a revolutionary movement is
too complicated to be explained by any single reason. All factors intertwine with each
other. Although tenancy and banditry were prevalent in Minxi, some places where the land
maldistribution was highest, such as Gutian township and the Wubei area, and some places
where the bandit power was strongest, such as the Wunan area and Yangshi village, proved

to be unproductive soil for the Communist movement. These cases show the strength

 

25

of local village structure, and of a parochialism that was against every kind of external
force, regardless of whether it was revolutionary or counter-revolutionary. Fu Bocui was
another case. He was both a protective gentry and a Communist. He used Communism
to improve peasants’ conditions, while still preserving his position as a local leader. His '
case shows that the compound interactions among natural ecology, village structure and
the characteristics of local leaders are hard to categorize. Likewise, in the places to which
the Communist members had access, the type of strategy Communist intellectuals used to
break through the established social structure was critical to the success of revolutioanry
development.

The extent of urban inﬂuence from Guangzhou, Xiamen and Fuzhou had signiﬁcant
impact on the evolution of socio- economic and literati circles in Minxi. Economic
ﬂuctuation affected people’s lives in general. Peasants were bankrupt, workers were
jobless, and mobility of the elite stratum was accelerawd. In Minxi. the class line between
the peasant and the worker was blurred. Some workers had land to cultivate, such as
boatrnen and handicraft workers, who had ties with land. Economic deterioration caused
the growth of numerous ‘lumpen proletarians’ who were the members recruited by bath
Red Army and anti-Communist troops. Therefore, the composition of “oppressed people”
in Minxi was not easily clariﬁed, as the CCP always wanted to do. There were no
industrial workers. Like other places in China, the early Communist movement was led by
young intellectuals. Because there was no radical hotbed county in Minxi, the thought of
Communism was basically brought to the region by returned intellectuals from Guangzhou
and Xiarnen. The confrontation between the old elite and the new elite was entangled with
endemic factionalism and the new ideology and organization. In my opinion, the origin of
the Communist movement was greatly shaped by the droughts of Mao Zedong and Peng
Pai. This feature profoundly affected the development of Communist movement and the
CCP’s political struggle in Minxi.

All in all, in this portion of the study, I have tried to show the complexity of social

26

structure in Minxi. The dynamics of peasant mentality, variety of local leaders, multiplicity
of elite strata and method of accepting Communism, all together make up what I call the
social roots of CCP political struggle in the Minxi base area. These social roots deeply
inﬂuenced the development of the Communist movement, which I will discuss in the. next
part of the study.

II. THE COMMUNIST UPRISING AND THE FAILURE OF THE
XI’NAN DISTRICT SOVIET

Those Communist uprisings occurring before the coming of the Zhu-Mao Red Army were
essentially planned autonomously by local Communist leaders, although they had received
the resolution of the August Seventh Meeting which gave basic directions about how to
stage an armed uprising. The most important uprising was led by Zhang Dingcheng in
Jinsha village of Yongding county in June 1928. The Yongding-J’msha uprising succeeded
in creating an army-occupied area, the Xi’nan District, in which the CCP experimented
with the ﬁrst land revolution in Minxi.

This chapter primarily investigates how the established social structure was exploited
by the Communist revolutionary movement, and in particular how CCP members
mobilized the masses to ﬁght with local elites. In addition this chapter also tries
to show that the organizational roots of political struggle in Minxi chieﬂy stemmed
from the need Of the CCP organizations to grow to match the development of the
movement. During this organizational transformation, leadership layers were somewhat
. indeﬁnite and personal relations among the leaders also overshadowed organizational
structure, which caused misunderstandings among various levels of organization. Some
scholars explain the transformation of the CCP’s organizations simply from the perspective
of political— ideological struggle, but in this presentation organization and politics are
dialectically interrelated. Ideological and political struggles inﬂuenced the development of
organizations, but the latter also helped the CCP intra-party power struggles.

Owing both to the deﬁciencies of the material at hand and the variable signiﬁcance of
uprisings, the descriptions of each uprising below vary considerably in length. Hopefully the

27

28

purpose of this study, which is to interrelate the local ecological setting, the characteristics
of local Communist leaders and the function of CCP organization, will still be achieved.

1 Beginning of the Communist Movement

The beginning Of the Communist movement in Minxi will be separated into two phases.
The ﬁrst phase was under the wing of GMD leftists and the purpose, at least on the
surface, was to help the Nationalist Govemment’s Northern Expedition. Recruited by
GMD or CCP, real Communists thus mixed with GMD leftists. Usually these revolutionary
young men cooperated with the local enlightened elites to ﬁght with bad gentry and local
bullies. That is, in the beginning of the Communist movement, because the identity of
Communists was vague, not only did some potential Communists not yet view themselves
as Communists, but also no genuine split between the young revolutionary intellectuals
and the circle of the local upper elites occurred. Decisive separation occurred only at the
start of the second phase of the early Communist movement, when the local upper elites
perceived that the newly-rising force of young intellectuals threatened their social prestige
even after the victory Of the Nationalist army in 1926. Many local upper enlightened elites
then turned to the GMD rightists for help in suppressing the leftists. Also, it was at this
stage that the “white terror” forced many young revolutionary intellectuals to the CCP side;
some changed sides out of political frustration, while some were exposed. Nonetheless,
the whole procedure was not at all clear cut, because of the extremely intertwined local
relations.

Dining the ﬁrst stage, these young revolutionaries worked in county capitals, and the
most important relations for them to hold were horizontal relations to other young peOple.
During the second stage, on the other hand, they ﬂed to their home villages and had to deal
with vertical networks of multilayered local elites and the masses. But, i Of course, when

they were looking for refuge in the countryside and working on peasant movements, it did

29

not mean that they our relations with urban areas. because most upper elites in cities had ties
with the countryside. A benign and relatively close relationship with upper elites in cities
was helpful for the Communists in their efforts to construct a successful rural movement.
According to the case Studies, the most important relations for the Communist leaders to
deal with were those with multi- layered rural elites. However, the whole situation was
diverse and complicated. A more critical concern if we are to Obtain more comprehensive
knowledge about the CCP’s political struggle in the Minxi base area is to investigate how
the Communists manipulated their constant interactions with local structure.

At the beginning of the GMD-CCP cooperation in the spring of 1924 to subvert local
warlord governments in Fujian, the GMD dispatched Jiang Dongqirl, a GMD leftist from
Yongding county, to establish a GMD organization in the province. Jiang recruited many
party members in Xiamen; over one hundred of them were students of the Jimei Normal
School, and more than half of them came from Minxi. As mentioned before, it was
fashionable in Longyan county to study at the Jimei Normal School in the 1920s. When
these Longyan young men went home as GMD leftists, they worked as teachers, organized
a Jimei Alumni Association (J irnei Tongxuehui), and issued revolutionary propaganda.”
Students also came back from the Canton Peasant Institute. They focused on peasant
movements and set up peasant associations in cities and countryside as well. The advanced
students in Changding county initiated the Uniwd Association of Students in the county
capital.” In each county seat, there were various kinds Of associations set up by yOung
students and intellectuals to Oppose power holders and promote anti-warlord ideas.

After the Nationalist army entered Fujian, the GMD leftists and CCP members jointly
initiated several inﬂuential organizations to operate their power and cultivate activists,
such as the Yan-Ping-Ning POlitical Inspection Ofﬁce (Yanpingning Zhengzhi Jiancha Shu)
in the Longyan capital, and the Ding Prefecture Political Ofﬁce (including the so-called
Ding Shu eight counties: Changding, Shanghang, Yongding, Liancheng, Ninghua, Qingliu
and Guihua) in the Changding county seat. Under orders from the CCP’s Min’nan

30

Special Committee (the origin of which will be mentioned later), both organizations held
meetings with the GMD branches of every county and resolved to establish the Yan-Ping-
N ing Institute for Cultivating Propaganda Members (Yanpingning Xuanchuan Renyuan
Yangchengsuo) in the Longyan capital and the Ding Prefecture Eight-County Institute ’
for Cultivating Social Movement Members (Dingshu Baxian Shehui Yundong Renyuan
Yangchengsuo) in the county seat of Shanghang in March of 1927.59 These two institutes
were controlled by Communist members and their curricula resembled the Canton Peasant
Institute.60

The effect of these organizations was profound. They not only consolidated young
revolutionaries from various counties but also cultivated and recruited many activists.
Many Communists involved in later uprisings either had experience cooperating with each
other in those organizations or were cultivated by those institutes. At any rate, relations
among the young revolutionaries in Minxi were complicated by overlapping educational
links and working bonds.

The development of CCP organization in this period was important to the contemporary
movement and to the later uprisings as well. Dming the period of the Great Revolution,
the CCP also grew along with the expansion of the GMD membership. The early CCP
movement in Fujian was controlled by two agencies: Party Central connolled the region
of northern and central Fujian centered on Fuzhou city, while the Guangdong Regional
Committee supervised the region of southern and western Fujian centered on Wen
city.“ Therefore, at the beginning, the Communist movement in Minxi was directed by the
Guangdong Regional Committee. In June 1925, that Committee dispatched Lan Yuye to
Xiamen to recruit. Lan focused on the hotbed of Communism, the Jimei Normal School,
where he established the Xiamen branch of the Communist Youth League (CYL).62 In
March 1926, the Guangdong Committee sent Luo Ming, who later became the secretary
of the Fujian Provincial Committee and the chief target of a political purge, as a special
commissioner to Xiamen to separate CYL and party. In April 1926, the Xiamen CCP

31

organization was formally established, with eighteen members and Ruan Shari, a native of
Yongding county, as secretary. The Minxi Communist movement was under the control
of the Guangdong Regional Committee until the establishment of the Min’nan Special
Committee.63 . A i

To meet with victory in the Northern Expedition, in January of 1927 the Guangdong
Committee decided to establish the Min’nan Special Commime at the Zhangzhou county
seat to consolidate control over Xiamen, Zhangzhou and Minxi. Luo Ming was appointed
as seeretary of this new organization. Under the Min’nan Special Committee were founded
the Xiamen City Committee and party branches in Minxi counties.“

The position of the Min’nan Special Committee was ambiguous. It was nominally
guided by the Party Central but actually it had close relations with the Guangdong
Committee and had a certain autonomy of its own. For example, in the spring of 1927,
when Party Central sent Wang Hebo to Fuzhou to prepare for the establishment of the
Fujian Provincial Committee, this plan was resisted by the Secretary of the Min’nan Special
Committee, Luo Ming, and the members of the Fuzhou Special Committee. The reasons
why they disagreed with the ideas of Party Central were not very clear. The ostensible
reason was because the whole environment in Fujian was not safe yet, for the power
of GMD rightists was still strong. But the Provisional Fujian Committee was ﬁnally
established in December 1927 in an atmosphere of “white terror,” with'Chen Ming as its
secretary. (Chen was a native of Longyan and one of the founders of You Sheng.)‘5

One reason for the disagreement probably really was related to the wishes of a local
organization to be ﬁ'ee of the orders of the Party Central. However, the development
of Communist movement and organization went hand in hand. The problems we are
concerned with here are how the movement was direcwd by .the organization and to what
extent the lower organization was controlled by the higher ones. Besides, the effects of
direction on different layers of organization are various. It is inappropriate to view the

CCP organization as a whole, for this blinds us to some aspects of the confrontation among

32

multi-layered organizations which is important to the investigation of the CCP’S inns-party

disputes, at least during the Soviet period.

2 Communist Uprisings and Case Studies of Local Power Struggle

Before the Zhu-Mao Red Army arrived in January 1929, four main uprisings occurred in
Minxi. They were the Longyan- Houtien uprising, the Shanghang-Jiaoyang uprising, the
Yongding-Jinsha uprising and the Pinghe-Changle uprising. The ﬁrst three will be used as
case studies to examine the local power structure and how local CCP leaders capitalized
on it with their own resources.“

For example, compared with other areas, revolutionary development in Longyan was
more active, and resulted in the ﬁrst Communist uprising in Minxi. It would be proper to
view Longyan as a relative “hotbed” in Minxi. But by what measure can the prevalence of
Communist inﬂuence in Longyan be analyzed?

One measrne is education. Of the two counties which possessed the most prosperous
education environment in Minxi, Changding county did not have any Communist uprising
until the Zhu-Mao Red Army came, but Longyan did. If, from another educational
perspective, power struggles in educational arenas are critical to the Communist movement
' in the hill country, as Professor Averill suggests, why Longyan became a “hotbed”
of Communist movement rather than Changding is another question demanding more
systematic explanation.

If the way to evaluate the inﬂuence of the Communist movement is by the length of
the uprising, Yongding should have been the “hotbed” in Minxi. But the short-lived Soviet
of Xi’nan district, established after the Yongding-Jinsha uprising, is also a credible hotbed
not only due to the uniqueness of the local ecological setting but also due to its leaders’
characteristics and the Operation of its CCP organization. On the other hand, the failure

of the Xi’nan District Soviet revealed some other problems. It demonstrawd not only the

33

weakness of the military force of the local CCP but also the weakness of peasant revolution.
Deﬁnition of the peasant mentality is somewhat uncertain. However, by using Perry’s
predatory-protective dichotomy, 1 would like to assume that the main concem of any
peasant community is to survive and to achieve proﬁt maximization calculatedly. Peasants,
therefore, are realistic and are limited by what they can see is good for them. It is this kind
of peasant mentality that causes genuine contradiction of the CCP’S revolution from the
bottom up or from the top which questions the usefulness of “organization weapon” during
the Soviet period when the CCP felt obligated to educate the masses rather than listen to
them under the principle of the system of democracy and control.

Before the four Communist uprisings are examined separately, we must recognize that
there were certain “peasant grievances” which prevailed in Minxi, such as heavy land
rent, miscellaneous taxes and exploitation by bad gentry and local bullies. But, again,
Professor Hofheinz’s argument that no speciﬁc ecological theory can predict the success of
the Communist movement applies also to Minxi. For instance, Changding and Liancheng
had the highest land rent rates, seventy per cent and eighty per cent of the harvest, but
they had no dominant. Communist inﬂuence.“ However, the following cases will Show
that the initial steps toward success of local Communist movements depended on how
the Communist leaders used their own political resom'ces to penetrate the established
social structtue, although that the particularity of various local structure also considerably
restricted their approaches. 1
(l). The Longyan-Houtian Uprising

The chief Communist leaders of the Longyan-Heutien uprising were Deng Zihui and
Guo Diren. Deng was born into a “declining household” and Guo was a son of a tenant
farmer. Their personal backgrounds and characters were critical to the development of the
Communist movement in Longyan, but to more completely understand their approaches
to mobilizing the masses it is also important to be aware of the particularity of local

circumstances, for both the local power structure and the social positions of the Communist

34

leaders signiﬁcantly affected what approaches they tended to use.

According to the local gazetteer, Longyan was a mountainous county with only 22.56
percent of its land below 500 meters. Although agricultural land was limited and difﬁcult
to farm, Sixty percent of the population were peasants. Among other occupations, twenty
percent were merchants, ﬁfteen percent were mountain-dwelling timber- cutters and paper-
makers and ﬁve percent were intellectuals and self-employed people.“ Of cornse, some
people were involved in more than one occupation. The county’s population density was
very high, averaging 187.06 persons per square Ii (250,000 square meters). Figuring
on the basis of peasant population and cultivable land, each person had 2.19 mu.69 One
source shows that a tenant household must have 24 mu of agricultural land to sustain living
because of heavy land rent, and 12 mu were the minimum for an owner-farmer household.
But peasant househOlds cultivating only ten mu of land (either renwd or owned) made up
seventy percent of the tOtal.7° Because the county was unable to support all its residents,
many local people sought their fortunes outside. Therefore, though the county was difﬁcult
of communication, it was still not out of touch with the outside world. The county had
no large landlords; 40-50 percent of the land was in the hands of private families; the rest
was public, such as lineage halls, bridges, roads and schools." Because of this, educational
enterprises wereprosperous.

Although according to rough observation from the materials at hand, the public funds
of Longyan were not so rich as those of Changding, there still were many intellectuals after
the end of the Qing dynasty, for most upper enlightened elites supported the development of
western-style education. For example, the most famous elementary school, the “Kairning
School” (literally, the enlightening school), located in Huyang village, was built in 1910
by an eminent gentry, Zheng Bishan. Many young revolutionaries such as Guo Diren .
graduated from this school and were offered teaching positions later when they tried to ﬁnd
hiding places in the countryside. Local people always said Longyan teachers were from
Huyang village and Tongbo village."2 These words proved how inﬂuential the Kaiming

35

school was.

Speaking of customs, although there were 110 lineages in Longyan county and the
larger ones had their own areas of dominance, no armed feuds happened among lineages.
Xiang Gui (village regulations) played an effective role in harmonizing relations among
lineages and restricting residents’ behavior. 73 Although basically class confrontation in
Longyan was not very acute, local militarization still existed as a result of late Qing
peasant rebellions and bandit raids. According to Deng Zihui’s memoir, the old system
of non-paid community leaders selecwd by lineage elders was abolished after 1923 when
bandit activities became more and more violent. Also, a new type of militia organization
called a protection corps (baowei tuan) was established, whose members were hired and
controlled by the local elites.

From 1918 on, the faction in power in the Longyan capital was the gang of Du Lianru.
Du was the county magistrate and had a personal power organization, the Gengshen Club
(gengshen means the year 1920 in the Chinese lunar calendar), branches of which were
scattered around the whole county. Unfortunately, because of the scarcity of material, Du’s
background is unknown. The only thing we can be sure of is that the Dus were not a large
lineage in the county. Maybe that is why he built a modem-style club to consolidate his
power net rather than using traditional village social structure. At any rate, he seemed
not to be involved in any kind of educational activity; instead, he monopolized lawsuits,
gambling, prostitution and the opium trade.“ Du was a so-called “bad gentry.” Against
Du ’s dominant power, even in the countryside, the Communists in Longyan county tended
to cooperate with other elites to break down his control. The following will show how Guo
‘ Diren and Deng Zihui used their personal social relation and organization in the prevailing
local ecological setting to mobilize a mass mOvement.

Guo Diren’s case is a typical example of how notably Minxi’s young men were
inﬂuenced by surrounding urban areas. Born into a tenant family, Guo, as did many

young men in Minxi, went to the Jimei Normal School in Xiamen and then attended the

36

V ﬁfth class of the Canton Peasant Institute in the spring of_1926. In addition to learning
of Marxism-Leninism and military discipline, students there went to observe the peasant
movement led by Peng Pai in Hai-Lufeng. The whole learning experience impressed Guo
so deeply that he studiedeverything earnestly and joined the CCP in June 1926.75 ‘

Consequently, when he was dispatched to Minxi with the title of special commissioner
of the GMD’S Central PeaSant Department, Guo worked with other young revolutionaries
and organized various kinds of associations to develop their power and to recruit among
intellectuals. As mentioned before, one Of the most inﬂuential organizations they set up
was the Yan- Ping-Ning Institute for Cultivating Propaganda Members, established in the
Longyan county seat in March 1927. In January 1927- a Longyan Communist Party Branch
was set up and Guo Diren was its organizational committee head. Although Guo and his
friends devoted themselves to both intellectual work and the peasant movement during
1926 and 1927, their ties with the masses were not strong enough, for they focused on work
in the county seat more than in the countryside. When the “white terror” came, almost all
of the peasant associations were quickly destroyed. .

As to the peasant movement during the period of the First Revolution in Longyan,
Deng Zihui made some valuable comments. He said:

according to comrade Mao’s direction, the CCP members in Longyan focused
on the peasant movement from the beginning (but) peasants attending the
peasant association did not gain any substantial beneﬁt except to attend
an organization which could not tightly consolidate the peasants to the
revolutionary cause."

Deng’s words, although ambiguous, meant that the Communists then were not concerned
with the peasants’ beneﬁt and did not have close ties with the masses, which was pretty
accurate about Minxi’s peasant movement before 1927. However, not until Jiang Jieshi
launched his April 12th Incident and Longyan’s gentry headed by Du Lianru cooperated
with the GMD rightists to suppress the leftists did Guo ﬂee to his home village and
commit himself totally to the rural peasant movement. From 1927 . on, Guo Diren and

37

Deng Zihui cooperated with each other to organize the ﬁrst CCP uprising in Minxi, the
Longyan-Houtian Uprising.

, Deng Zihui is an important ﬁgure in the Minxi Communist movement; be drafted the
ﬁrst document of Minxi’s land revolution policy and he was a theoretician, too. Therefore
Deng’s experience deserves more study here. He was born in 1896 in Quanjing township,
a small village in the vicinity of the Longyan county seat. The Dengs were the dominant
lineage in this village with hundreds of households. Deng Zihui’s ancestors had once been
a notable family in this village, but the family had declined, and his father, Deng Hongbi, a
late Qing lower degree-holder (lingsheng), only owned one mu of agricultural land and had
to work as a doctor to support his family." No matter how poor he was, Deng Hongbistill
was viewed as a local gentry. He accepwd an Offer to become a principal of the Tonggang _
Elementary School and had a very good friendship with Zheng Bishan. the founder of the
Kaiming School." During Deng Zihui’s childhood and adolescence he suffered from his
mother’s death and his father’s departure to Guangdong province after losing a lawsuit.
With his grandmother’s and step-mother’s help, Deng had gained a good education; after
graduating from the Tonggang Elementary School, he passed the examination to the only
middle school in Longyan county, the Provincial Ninth Middle School, and then went to
Japan for further study in 1917 by being awarded public funds from the county. Deng did
not ﬁnish overseas study both because of his own sickness and poverty, and also because
of his ﬁustration with imperialism. He responded to the movement of student strikes and
went home in May, 1918. As many lower elites could expect, Deng got a job as a teacher
at Tongang Elementary School right after he went home. But his teaching position did not
last long and he had to set off to work in his cousin’s sundry store for ﬁnancial reasons. 7’

Before going any further, for brevity’s sake, I would like to divide Deng’s later
experiences into two aspects; the ideological aspect and the practical aspect. From these
two aspects, 1 will Show that sometimes the practical aspect of what a Chinese Communist
does can actually reﬂect the ideological aspect of what a Chinese Communist thinks.

38

although he claims himself to be a believer of Marxism.

Working in his cousin’s store was a turning point of Deng Zihui’s life. There he had
his ﬁrst contact with Communist ideology and then became a CCP member. The store was
in Jiebei Xu (a periodic market-town) of Chongyi county in southern Jiangxi province, the
so-called Gannan area. Although in general this area was as inaccessible as Minxi, Jiebei
Xu was open to the inﬂuence of big cities in Jiangxi, such as Ganzhou, Nanchang and
Jiujiang, for it was located on a branch of the Gan river.“o Deng Zihui stayed in Chongyi
county off and on for more than six years between 1918 and 1927. From this we can see
that before the Longyan-Houtian uprising Deng spent most of his time outside of Longyan.
The point I am trying to make is how calculated Deng was in taking advantage of his
personal relationship with local people from various classes, including multi-layered elites
and peasants, to mobilize mass movements in Longyan.

There were several phases in Deng Zihui’s thought formation. Before he associated
himself with the ideology of Marxism-Leninisrn, he had gone through confusing stages
of thought. When the May Fourth Movement happened in Beijing in 1919, there was no
similar reaction in he Chongyi county, but the variety of new thoughts still inspired young
intellectuals in the counu'yside. Deng subscribed to so many papers, magazines and books
that his collection attracted many young men around his cousin’s stae, and they called it a
small library.

As he recalled in his memoir:

I only had one pure thought of patriotism ...but I could not ﬁnd an effective
way to show my love for country...My thought was confused. I had
believed in various kinds of thought for saving my country, like Kang-Liang’s
constitutionalism, Zhang Jian’ s industrialism, Huang Yanpei’ s cducationalism
and Sun Yat-san’ s revolutionism. Only after the ’May Fourth Movement’ in
1919 did my thought lmprove. 3‘ .

Like many intellectuals in the 1920s in China, anarchism had occupied Deng’s mind
for a while. He said:

39

...I believed in anarchism in 1920. Under the past historical circumstances,
Chongyi county was hardly inﬂuenced by new thoughts. Marxism-Leninism
had not come until very late because of its poor communication. Although
under such conditions having thoughts such as anarchism is also an advanced
expression of patriotism, it is useless to hold a craving to save the country
without a realistic method.82

Since he read debates among the Communists and the anarchists in the periodicals New
Youth (Xin Qingnien) and The Communist Party (Gongchandaug), Deng had pondered
on both ideologies, anarchism and Communism, from the end of 1920 to 1921, and he
decided to accept Marxism, the so-called scientiﬁc socialism, as his theoretical and practical
direction. At the critical moment when Deng was making up his mind he was inﬂuenced
by a young man, Chen Zanyong, who introduced him to the “Communist Manifesto” at
the end of 1920. Chen, a native of Chongyi county, was very poor and had dropped out
of school to be a cashier in the timber-workers’ union; he was the ﬁrst CCP member in
Chongyi county."3 Unfortunately, material about Chen’s background and his relation with
Communist members is lacking, but it seems likely that he had been inﬂuenced by the
CCP’s union work. At any rate, it was Chen who not only introduced Deng Zihui to read
the “Communist Manifesto,” but also approved Deng to be a Communist Party member in
December of 1926. In this ﬁrst period, then, Deng Zihui became a preliminary Marxist.

Because of the enlightenment he experienced in Chongyi county, when Deng went
back brieﬂy in the spring of 1921 to be a teacher in the Tonggang Elementary School, he
was not a pure patriotic intellectual who did not know what to do any more; instead. his
thought was armed with Marxism. From then on he tried to combine his ideology with
practice. As an elementary school teacher, the ﬁrst practical maneuver he made to confront
the ﬂawed society was to organize a study association, the Qishan Shushe. (Qishan is a
shortened name of a mountain, Qimai Shan.) Most of the members of the Qishan Shushe
were Deng’s friends, alumni of the Provincial Ninth Middle School, and colleagues of the
Tonggang Elementary School. They collected lots of books and papers and had frequent

discussion meetings. Owing to his reading of sociology works in Chongyi, Deng. was

4o

able to inﬂuence his associates to favor revolutionary Marxism. In August 1923 this study
association decided to issue a paper, You Sheng, to announce their ideas and to wake up the
masses. (You Sheng means the voice of Longyan county.) Deng Zihui was the chief editor
and writer.“

As mentioned before, since Chen Jiongrning, a big warlord, occupied southern and
western Fujian, a group of bad gentry led by Du Lianru manipulated the county’s affairs,
using the Gengshen Club to streamline their power. Besides this native force, Lai
Shihuang, a small Jiangxi warlord belonging to Chen Jiongming’s bloc, actually took
charge of Longyan until the arrival of the Northern Expedition Army. Like most warlords,
Lai Shihuang exploited local people by extortionate levies and miscellaneous taxes. For
example, he forced local people to plant Opium and then taxed the seeds they used, which
was ﬁercely resisted by Guo Diren and his friends. In 1923, Lai Shihuang even collected
three years of taxes in advance under the name of “borrowing grain?”

Besides trying to introduce new ideas into this county, the main purpose of Yan Sheng
was to ﬁght the warlord government’s oppressive policies, especially the absurd taxes.
According to Deng’s memoir, Yan Shcng was inﬂuential and popular compared with other
student papers. From September of 1923 to November of 1926, the paper published
forty-four issues, with a circulation of more than six hundred and a market that included
various provinces such as Jiangxi, Guangdong and Hubei, and even overseas areas.“

Through this paper, Deng not only established his reputation in young intellectual circles,
but also unveiled his talent at stimulating writing, which was one of the primary conditions
for becoming a mass movement leader. During the period of Yan Sheng’s publication from
1923 to 1926, Deng was not actually involved m any such mass movement activity, for he
was living rn Chongyi for most of that period, but he was still on the wanted list issued
in 1927’s “white terror.” This was partly because his writings annoyed the persons in
power, and partly because of a letter he wrote to a leading GMD leftist in Longyan when
he was in Chongyi. In that letter he suggested that Longyan’s revolutionaries ally with

41

Zheng Bishan’s faction to oppose the Du Lianru faction." Zheng was a good friend of
Deng Zihui’s father and had a reputation as an enlightened upper gentry. From this we can
perceive that Deng’s strategy was ﬂexible.

To sort out the interaction between ideology and practice in molding Deng’s mind, it
is necessary to talk more about his ideological aspect. When he went to Jiebei to help
his cousin again at the end of 1923, he reread the “Communist Manifesto” and used the
principle of capitalism to analyze the social situation. He published an article titled “The
Horrible Life” in You Sheng in March 1924 to portray the miserable cycle of the poor
living ina capitalist system. Here he tried to point out the causes of social illness. On
December 15, 1925, Deng wrote another article, "The Current Situation and the Future
of the SuppresSed Class in Longyan County” to call fOr the suppressed people to arm
themselves and to take authority from the enemies, soldiers, capitalists and elites."8 Now
we can see that Deng Zihui had independently developed a theory similar to Mao’s out
of his own thinking and experience. He seems to have viewed the suppressed class as
a whole, which could be testiﬁed to by his later experience. However, theoretically and
practically Deng’s road toward becoming a real Communist was not smooth at all.

With his friend’s recommendation, Deng joined the GMD in Longyan and helped recruit
the GMD leftists among his friends in the Qishan Shushe in 1925. When he went to Jiebei,
he kept develOping secret GMD memberships among his friends. When the Northern
Expedition Army recovered southern Jiangxi, the GMD established a party headquarters in
Chongyi in the winter of 1926, with Chen Zanyong on its standing committee and Deng
Zihui on its executive committee. They used the GMD’s name as a cover for operating an
underground mass movement.89 Deng’s ﬁrst contact with the labor movement was at this
time, when he went to Ganzhou to purchase goods. In Ganzhou, he witnessed the force
’of the working class, attended various meetings of labor unions and got a chance to know
the Communist labor leader, Chen Zanxian. After he went back to Jiebei, he initiated

various kinds of peasant associations, traders’ associations and shop clerks’ unions. From

42

this practical demonstration, we can perceive that Deng tried to consolidate every possible
force to ﬁght the main enemy. In the meantime, Chen Zanyong asked him if he wanted to
participate in the CCP. At last he became a Communist in December 1926.“0

In July 1927 Deng had to ﬂee to his home town for refuge from pursuit by the police
of both Chongyi and Longyan. Though he was safe in the countryside and kept his
teaching job, he did not stop his work. He tried to resume contact with the CCP. Through
the report of the Longyan Party branch, Deng’s petition was approved by Luo Ming, the
Secretary of the Min’nan Special Committee at that time, who was inspecting the work
in Longyan county. Deng was ordered to take charge of the peasant movement." From
then on, Deng cooperated with Guo Diren to foster the peasant movement and they took
the Tonggang Elementary School as their operational base. Usually Guo organized secret
peasant associations and arranged meetings, while Deng went to the meetings and lectured
to the peasants. As we know, relationships among village residents were harmonious.
Besides, what the leftists had done in the countryside did not get full appreciation from the
peasants, for they tried to destroy a temple of a local god, which irritawd local people very
much. T’o intensify class confrontation on the one hand and to avoid estrangement from
the masses on the other, Deng and Guo decided to start with the slogan of “reducing rent,
reducing interest,” which really gained the support of the poor and middle peasants}?

While most places were still suffering from the “white terror,” the political situation
was quite exceptional in Longyan, owing to the power struggle among the local gentry.
At the beginning of the counter-revolutionary brutality in 1927, Du Lianru, as the county
magistrate, was willing to cooperate with the GMD rightists to suppress the leftists, but
after that he refused to reopen the GMD organization. In August 1927, a commissioner
of the GMD’s Fujian headquarters, Zhan Diaoyuan, who was a big landlord in eastern
Longyan and had conﬂicts with Du’s faction, recommended a young leftist named Su
Qingyun to lead the GMD organization there.” To strive for more breathing space, the CCP

decided simultaneously to cooperate with Su and to continue fostering peasant movements.

1 A u '1'. 'I.ﬂ_1 V

43

Therefore Deng Zihui became the new GMD organization’s secretary and Guo Diren its
organization committee member.94
The CCP’s strategy seemed successful. From August to November 1927, they used the

GMD’s Open organizations to mobilize peasants to implement rent and interest reduction
and to set up peasant associations all over the county. As Deng recalled:

...the development of peasant associations has been rapid. From September to

November, peasant associations in all urban and suburban areas except Xikou,

Yanshi and Baisha, have executed rent and interest reduction ...Alrnost one

hundred thousand peasants have joined the peasant associations. This is a new

apex of the peasant movement in Longyan county."s

In his memoir Deng mentioned several features of the peasant movements during

this period. He thought the active peasants cultivated from secret peasant associations
were more determined and stable than those from open organizations, because in order
to establish secret peasant associations the Communists had to ﬁnd out the peasants who
were possible to be recruited by themselves and then enlarged the membership by personal
relationships. He believed that in this way a strong core leadership was established. 0n
the other hand, the openly established peasant associations under the cover of the GMD
attracted many middle and rich peasants who supported the rent and interest reduction
but tended to be shaky when the struggle was intensiﬁed to the point of land revolution.
Besides, these kinds of open peasant associations were easily controlled by opportunists
who thought only of their own interests and did not have solid relations with the masses.“
Therefore, although the development of the peasant movement seemed overwhelming, the
degree of consolidation in each place was various. When Longyan’s “second white terror”
came in November 1927, most peasant associations were destroyed completely, and only
those in Baitu District were preserved.” After the second white terror, the CCP lost its
base in the capital. They only could operate an armed uprising in the countryside. Houtian
township of Baitu District therefore emerged as their only choice.

Houtian township was eleven kilometers from the capital with mountains on three sides,

44

t0pography which made it an important strategic position. There were 181 households
in this village, eleven of them landlords and rich peasants." Because Deng’s home town,
Quanjing village, was close to Houtian village, he and Guo Diren had done solid work on
the peasants here. In other words, both of them had close relationships with the peasants.
While the peasant associations were ruined in most places in Longyan, the Houtian Peasant
Association was still able to keep so powerful that the local government could not interfere
even after the second white terror.” At the end of 1927, the Longyan Party branch was
reorganized into the Longyan County Committee, with its headquarters at Houtian village.
The Secretary of the Longyan County Committee was Luo Huaisheng, who was dispatched
by the Fujian Committee. Deng Zihui was the minister of the propaganda department and
Guo Diren was the minister of the organization department. ‘°°

Later the direction of the August Seventh Meeting was delivered there by a representative
of the Fujian Committee, Chen Zukang, a Yongding native. The main points of the August
Seventh Meeting were: to gain popular support, to prepare for armed uprising, to fulﬁll
land revolution and to establish soviets. To follow these directions the Longyan County
Committee ﬁrst prepared an armed force. Because he had worked with bandits in Yongding
county, Chen suggested that he should move a bandit army from Yongding to Longyan
to help the Houtian peasants attack the county seat. Probably owing to the unhappy
experience about asking help from outside armies or to lack of trust in bandits, the Longyan
County Committee did not agree with Chen’s suggestion. Chen Zukang did not give up his
idea until the bandit force in Yongding refused to follow his orders. Disappointed, Chen
left Longyan.101 This event reveals the conﬂict between orders from the supervisory level
and the autonomy of local organizations during the revolutionary period.

To develop their own armed force, the Longyan County Committee established a
Chinese boxing institute for young men, the Qingnian Guoshu Guan, to cultivate military
discipline in selected members from the secret peasant associations. To counteract the

young revolutionaries, Houtian’s landlords and gentry organiud an Old Men’s Association

45

(Laoren Hui) and a martial arts institute for old men, the Laoren Quanshu Hui, to consolidate
their power. rm It seemed that the Houtian Peasant Association could implement rent and
interest reduction without cruel resistance not only because of its power but also because
it acted in harmony with local customs. However, the class confrontation was inevitably
intensiﬁed. After the 1928 new year’s festival, rice prices soared and the peasant association
decided to limit the price of rice and forbid rice exports. This decision infuriawd the
landlord class so much that they murdered the chairman of the peasant association. With
this incident, the Longyan County Committee and the Houtian Party branch felt that
conditions for uprising were ripe and they decided to arise on March Fourth. “’3

The Fourth of March was a superstitious holiday dedicated to the god of General
Guan Yu, the so-called Guandi. Under the festival atmosphere, the Houtian Party branch
led the members of Qingrrian Guoshu Guan to attack the Laoren Quanshu Guan and
killed the murderer. The momentary victory came so fast that the Longyan County
Committee decided to enlarge the uprising to other villages. Although they did announce
the distribution of landlords’ land to the poor peasants, the LOngyan County Committee
did not really implement it, for they were busy in heavy military activity. On the ﬁfth
day of the uprising, the Longyan warlord Chen Guohui led ﬁve hundred troops to besiege
Houtian village and the uprising was soon suppressed. To preserve the revolutionary forces,
the Houtian peasant army ﬂed to a mountain area and was reorganized as the Longyan
worker-peasant guerrilla force to keep working on suppressing counter-revolutionaries. In
April 1928, Deng Zihui was transferred by the Fujian Committee to a new post as head
of the Shanghang County Committee propaganda department.“ He accepted this new
position and began to supervise mass movement work in other areas.
(2). The Shanghang-Jiaoyang Uprising

The development of the revolutionary movement in Shanghang county was vital during
the period of GMD-CCP cooperation. Several features about Shanghang were somewhat

different from other counties. Because the trunk line of Minxi’s main riverine route,

46

the Ding river, ﬂows through it, the county attracbd many boatrnen and had the only
hydraulic power plant in Minxi. “’5 Thus, the county had relatively more industry than other
places. The Shanghang Party branch was established in December 1926 by the returned
young men from the Canton Peasant Institute. ‘°‘ Since the initiation of the Ding Prefecture
Eight—County Institute for Cultivating Social Movement Members in January 1927, the
Shanghang capital had attracted not only native young revolutionaries but also those from
neighboring areas. At the same time, the Shanghang Party branch was expanded and an
outsider, Lin Xinyao, became its secretary, which was not a common situation. (Lin was
one of the founders of the Institute) Nonetheless the main CCP leaders in Shanghang county
were Lin Xinyao and Xie Bingqiong, neither of whom were natives. “’7 No matter how
inﬂuential the CCP’s activity had been in the county capital. when the white terror came,
Lin Xingyao was ﬁlled, Xie Bingqiong ﬂed back to his home in Wuping, and the local
peasant movements had to be handled by the native Communists. The most successful
peasant movement was operated by Fu Bocui in Jiaoyang township.

The ecological setting of Jiaoyang township and background of Fu Bocui have been
brieﬂy mentioned in the preceding chapter. I categorized Fu as a protective Communist
gentry as aresult of my analysis of the interaction between the ecological setting and his
personality. Now I am going to focus on what advantage Fu’s personal social position had
on mobilizing the masses.

As I mentioned before, Fu had worked in the Shanghang county seat as a lawyer after he
came back from Japan, and had gained the title of student emperor, showing his inﬂuence
among students. Because he was one of the founders of the “Ding Prefecture Eight-County
Institute for Cultivating Movement Members” and had taken charge of general affairs of
the institute, inevitably Fu’s name was on the wanted list in 1927, although he was not a
Communist then. He started, however, to engage in the peasant movement when he ﬂed to
his home town and joined the CCP at the end of 1921“"

Jiaoyang township was a mountain village located deep in the border counu-y where

‘r

_ A'JIHK1

.-
j.

47

Longyan, Shanghang and Liancheng counties met. It is equally one hundred hua Ii away
from each county seat. The whole natural setting made it a perfect place as a revolutionary
base. As Fu recalled in his memoir, most of the residents in the Bei Si Qu (the four
districts in the northern part of the county) were peasants and ninety percent of them were
tenants and semi-self-cultivators. Agricultural workers and self-cultivators were few. ‘09
The heaviest burden for the people here, therefore, was land rent.

To foster a rent reduction movement, Fu ﬁrst recruited a few aggressive members from
the peasant associations as Communist members and formed a Jiaoyang Party branch.
Then through the activities of the Communist party members, the peasant associations
proposed slogans such as rent reduction, interest reduction and rent remission. Because
the autumn harvest season had passed and rent had been submitted to the landlords, Fu
Bocui suggested the landlords return In of the rent to the tenants and. because his family
was one of the landlords, he set a pioneering example which compelled other landlords to
follow his case. Using his prestigious position in the village as a son of a landlord family,
an intellectual, and a leader of the peasant associations, Fu allied with other enlightened
landlords and led the peasants to liquidate lineages’ assets and to resist paying taxes to the
government."° I

With these visible proﬁts, both the peasant associations and the CCP organization grew
rapidly, even extending to neighboring villages; there were more than one hundred party
members in the Bei Si Qu by the spring of 1928. The Bei Si District Committee was
established in March, 1928. In the meantime, representatives of the Provincial Committee
and the Shanghang County Committee, such as Ling Yizhu and Lan Hongxiang, were
secretly dispatched to Jiaoyan g township to conduct political and military education."‘

After the establishment of the District Committee, recalled Fu, a series of political and
economic struggles were launched; they aimed at liquidating the public property managed
by bad gentry and local bullies, usurping the leadership of the heads of the lineages, reducing

the price of rice, prohibiting the smuggling of rice, and resisting the payment of tax or

48

money to the local government and army. As for land problems, Fu preferred the system
of “land collective,” which indicated that agricultural land conﬁscated from landlords and
self- cultivators was farmed collectively by peasants without being distributed to the hands
of peasants. Such a method. although destroying the form of private ownership, let each
peasant have the same living standard no matter what ﬁnd of background he had.112 This
ﬁnd of land policy was viewed by the CCP as a policy generous to counter-revolutionaries,
for it did not give poor and hired peasants special beneﬁts. In fact, Fu did not ﬁll any local
gentry to activize the masses, as most CCP members did; instead. he was harsh on the
problem of bandits. The CCP later criticind Fu fa not dealing with the bandit problem
properly due to his revolutionary limitation.“3

Because the CCP’s strategy of mobilizing the masses escalamd step by step, from rent
reduction to land conﬁscation, in the end most landlords could not stand the situation and
ﬂed from the village to ask help from the warlord Guo Fengming in the Shanghang county
seat. To protect his base, Fu Bocui seind ﬁrearms from the local militia and organized a
peasant army, but he did not plan to go outside of his base, at least in the beginning. When
Deng Zihui came to Jiaoyang village in April of 1928 as a representative of the Provincial
Committee to conduct the peasant movement after the failure of the Longyan-Houtien
uprising, he urged Fu to incite an uprising and to intensify land revolution, as direcwd by
the August Seventh Meeting)“ But Fu refused Deng’s advice and Deng left without any
success, which also demonstrated how limited the force of the CCP’s organization was
during the local uprising period.

Although Fu did not accept Deng Zihui’s opinion about arousing an uprising in the ﬁrst
place, however, he was forced to lead the Shanghang-Jiaoyang uprising on June 25, 1928,
as Guo Fengrning’s army with other local militias jointly attacked Bei Si District. Although
this uprising was suppressed in a short time, Fu was still able to assemble the remnants
of the defeated peasant army and formed a personal force to disturb local government
by guerrilla warfare and to help the uprisings in Yongding and Longyan.” The political

49

resolution of the Minxi First Party Congress criticized the Shanghang-Jiaoyang uprising
because the Party did not lead the masses to ﬁll local gentry, to distribute agricultural land,
and to intensify land revolution as the mass struggle mounted to a peak“.
(3). The Yongding-Jinsha Uprising and the failure of the Xi’nan District Soviet

The Yongding-Jinsha uprising was the last one before the coming of the Red Fourth
Army, and it achieved signiﬁcant success. What made this uprising so successful that
the CCP could establish a Soviet? The reason should be trawd back to the uniqueness
of the uprising location, Jinsha township, and to the characteristics of its leader, Zhang
Dingcheng. However, compared with the other three uprisings, the most important question
about the Yongding-Jinsha uprising is why the Xi’nan District Soviet failed. This study will
show that the failure of the Soviet occtu'red not only because of military weakness, but also
because of a peasant mentality which questioned the limited usefulness of organization.

Yongding is located in the border area between Fujian and Guangdong, with the
Boping Mountains on its east side and the Yongding and Ding rivers ﬂowing in parallel
through it from northeast to southwest. Though the county was mountainous and generally
inaccessible, these rivers made it open to Guangdong. Like most areas in Minxi, because
of the lack of agricultural land and relative backwardness, the county had many inhabitants
looﬁng for living and education outside.” In terms of customs, people here were militant
and armed affrays among lineages were ferocious. The local government had to intervene
to mediate the disputes when armed affrays got out of control.m From 1923 to the end
of 1925, the county had been occupied by several small warlords. The btuden of tax,
surcharge and military service was extraordinarily heavy on the people in general, and
J insha township was one of the places which had been most intensely exploiwdm

J insha township was in the vicinity of the Yongding county seat, which was a convenient
area for the warlords to seize people for military service and to levy ﬁscal extortion. In this
village, most of the agricultural land belonged to the so-called “absenwe—landlords” who
lived in the county ’capital and had agricultural land in the countryside. These landlords

50

not only asked the tenants to pay seventy percent of the harveSt as rent no matter whether
the harvest was good or bad (the so- called iron rent) but they also cooperated with local
bullies in Jinsha village to monopolize tax. Besides taxes and rents, the interest on loans
was high in the township, especially in years of bad crops)” These peasant grievances
opened the door for the Communist movement.

During the CCP-GMD cooperation period, there were vital Communist organizations
and movements in Yon gdin g, although most of those concentrated in the county seat. The
ﬁrst CCP party branch in Minxi was established in this county. As in other counties, young
intellectuals in You gdin g were inﬂuenced by the neighboring urban areas and most of
the revolutionaries were returnees from the Jimei Normal School and the Canton Peasant
Institute, such as Ruan Shan, Lin Xinyao and Lu Zaoxi. They established a Party branch in
Shanghu township (the Yongding county seat then), the ﬁrst Party organization in Minxi,
and set up the Ding Prefecture Eight-County Institute for Cultivating Social Movement
Members in the county seat. In addition to the intellectual and peasant movement, the
Yongding Party branch also focused its work on boatrnen, for the Ding and the Yongding
rivers ﬂowing through the county Were the main riverine routes in Minxi. By establishing
the Yongding River Boatrnen’s Union, the CCP attracted almost all of the Yongding
boatrnen, about one thousand persons, to its side.‘21 As mentioned in Chapter One, the
composition of boatrnen in Minxi was a blend; most of them were also part-time peasants
or the owner of boats. The heterogeneous natrue of boatrnen later caused criticism from
upper Party levels.

No matter how successful the Yongding Parry Branch was, when the suppression came
in 1927, the CCP leaders ﬂed to the countryside; Ruan Shan to Hulei village, Lu Zaoxi to
Chendong township and Chen Zhen to Xiayang township.m Without any doubt, the most
successful peasant movement was fostered by Zhang Dingcheng in Jinsha township.

Zhang Dingcheng was born in a poor peasant family in Jinsha’s Xihu Zhai in December,
1898. (Zhai means a stockaded village) In addition to farming, Zhang’s father had to work

51

as a tobacco worker and a bricklayer as well to support his family. Because of poverty,
Zhang Dingcheng could not continue education after graduating hour the Yuzhi Xuetang, a
junior primary school, until his maternal grandfather Fan Chunjiu retumed to his hometown
in Gumudu village. Although there is no speciﬁc evidence, Fan Chunjiu may have been a
declining local gentry, for he had been the founder of the Yuzhi Xuetang. For study’s sake,
Zhang moved in with his grandfather and studied ancient books with him, mostly teachings
of Confucius. Touched by his hard work, Zhang’s parents and relatives tried every way
they could to allow him to resume study in 1913. In 1916, again for lack of money,
Zhang returned home to help farm after graduating from upper primary school. Many poor
families experienced insults by bullies and corrupt ofﬁcials, and Zhang’s family also went
through such situation due to debt and lawsuits when Zhang was thirteen years old. This
made him perceive poor people’s distress and fostered his urge to improve society. ‘3

In 1920, Zhang got a chance to assume a voluntary teaching job at an elementary
school in the Shanghang county seat. Although he read lots of progressive books and
met with many new ideas in the county seat, Zhang had not escaped from the Confucian
stereotype yet. In 1924 the Jinsha villagers asked him to return to accept the job of principal
at an elementary school, the Jinsha Public School. Zhang used the Confucian teaching
to cultivate himself and to educate students as well, a style which attracted many poor
children from neighboring areas. Because of his achievements and moral charisma, he was
even elected as a xiangzhang (the head of Jinsha village) in 1925. By virtue of his moral
strength, Zhang led villagers to ﬁght local bullies and to reform bad customs, by which he
gained lots of support and built up a substantial personal reputation. However, his effort
annoyed the person in power and he was discharged after a year.

Because of a series of frustrations, Zhang also quit the principal’s position and
pessirnistically planned to retire from public life. Although not living in real seclusion,
Zhang started to learn how to be a Chinese herb doctor and tried to save his countryfolk
by medical practice, as many traditional intellectuals did during times of anarchy. ‘2‘ Up

52

i to this point, Zhang’s ideology was still limited to reformist thought In spite of his
disappointments, Zhang Dingcheng was such a hot-blooded young man that he could not
restrain his patriotism. When the tide of the Northern Expedition ﬂooded Minxi in 1926,
Zhang decided to go to Canton to look fbr a way to save the country. At ﬁrst he wanted
to take the entrance examination to the Whampoa Military Academy established by the
GMD, but he missed the test date. Disappointed, he found a job as a voluntary teacher
at an elementary school in Dapu county in Guangdong, which was adjacent to his home
town. In Dapu, Zhang made a new friend, Yao Longguang, who was the Secretary of
the CCP’s Dapu County Committee. Yao introduced him to progressive magazines and
books about Communism. Under Yao’s inﬂuence, Zhang’s thought gradually inclined to
accept Marxism and revolution.‘25 Zhang not only adjusted what he believed, but also put
the teaching into action right away. By day he taught in the school, and’in the evening
he went back to Jinsha to foster the peasant movement. In the winter of 1926 when the
Northern Expedition Army arrived in Yongding, the new Nationalist ofﬁcial imposed a
forty thousand yuan levy on the Jinsha villagers. Zhang led hundreds of students and
peasants to demonstrate in front of the county government ofﬁce and forced the ofﬁcial to
cancel the absurd levy. From then on, because of his personal endeavors to help people,
Zhang was successful in organizing peasant associations all over Jinsha township and
surrounding villages, which then engaged in a ﬂurry of anti-imperialist, anti-feudal protests
and demands for reduction of rent and interest. When the GMD headquarters appointed
him to the position of committee member and director of the peasant movement, Zhang
refused, for he felt indignant about the behavior of the GMD ofﬁcials and he admired the
CCP’s proposals although he was not yet a CCP member.

Both the rightists’ brutality in 1927’s white terror and the CCP’s determination in
switching the focus of mass movement work from city to rural areas as massacre came
conﬁrmed ﬂlang’s belief in Communism. In May, 1927, Zhang led some members of the

Jinsha peasant association to participate in the Guangdong-Dapu uprising conducted by the

53

Dapu County Committee. This help was because his relationship with Yao Longguang. In
June of the same year, Zhang joined the CCP party with Yao’s recommendation and was
dispatched to his home town to mobilize the masses)“ From then on, Zhang Dingcheng
started to lead the revolutionary struggle in Xi’nan District with the Jinsha Public School
as the basis.

Xi’nan District refers to the suburbs around the Yongding county seat, which included
over ten villages and more than twenty thousand people. Most residents were peasants and
handicraftsmen. By the time of the uprising, due to Zlang Dingcheng’s inﬂuence, most
of the teachers in elementary schools were Communist party members or members of the
Communist Youth League. When Zhang returned from Dapu, he established the Xi’nan
Party branch, with himself as secretary.121

Zhang’s appeal to the masses was very subtle. Like Deng Zihui, he did not divide
the people according to their background at the beginning: instead. he consolidated as
many people as possible to ﬁght speciﬁc targets. That is, he did not judge revolutionary
inclination of people by background but by their attitude and behavior which made him able
to cooperate with various ﬁnds of people, even elites. To implant the root of organization
among peasants, Zhang not only secretly restored and developed the former peasant
associations » but also openly initiated a pingmt'n school (a school for common people) to
organize and to educate peasants. Besides organizational methods, Zhang appealed to the
masses from a social persective. He proposed the slogan of “harmonizing local community
and pacifying lineages” (he xiangdang mu zongzu) to resolve the armed affrays among the
lineages, and slogans of “no prostitution, no gambling, no opium” (bu piao, bu du, bu xi
ya pian) to improve the local customs. These feudal-style slogans were welcomed by the
local people and built up the CCP’s reputation as well.

Because these proposals matched local people’s needs, peasant association membership
escalated swiftly to a ﬁgure of 4000-50“). From them, Zhang Dingcheng selected more
determined peasants to form a secret army force, the “Iron and Blood Corps.” (Tie Xue

54

Tuan) The Iron and Blood Corps adopted the form of a traditional secret society; every
participant had to drink blood wine and take an oath. ‘33 On September 16, 1927, Zhang led
members of the Iron and Blood Corps to help the Guangdong-Dapu uprising and brought
guns from Dapu. Besides the ﬁrearms from Dapu, the main way to get military equipment
for the Iron and Blood Corps was to raise funds from various types of local people on the.
pretext of guarding against bandits. Through such means, Zhang openly formed a personal
army force with the support of the local gentry.

In October 1927, Luo Ming inspected the development of local movement in Minxi
and delivered news of the August Seventh Meeting. When he came to Yongding, Luo
discovered that the best conditions were in Jinsha township and he suggeswd that the
uprising in Yongding should be centered in Xi’rran District with help from the surrounding
villages of Hulei, Chengdong and Xiayang, where the movements were led by Ruan
Shan, Lu Zaoxi and Chen Zhen. The aim of the uprising was to besiege the county seat.
Under Luo Ming’s direction, the Yongding County Committee was established in Jinsha
township in November, 19273” Thereafter Zhang Dingcheng began maneuvering step by
step toward an uprising.

The ﬁrst time Zhang got to manage a mass movement was at the 1928 new year’s
festival and the target he chose to ﬁght was the miscellaneous tax on marriages, funerals
and livestock slaughter, which was a most detestable tax for people dming the festival
period. Zhang deliberately persuaded gentry to present the petition to the local government.
When the petition was refused and one of the most celebrated gentry was arrested, Zhang
convinced the gentry, especially the enlightened gentry, to join the anti-tax struggle and
to lead thousands of people to demonstrate in the county seat. In the end, local ofﬁcials
compromised, which boosted the CCP’s prestige ambug the people still more. The Party
members increased from four hundred to seven hundred, and the members of the peasant
associations from ﬁve thousand to seven thousand.

The CCP’s strategy of mobilizing people escalamd step by step. With the ﬁrst victory

55

and expansion of organization, Zhang planned to go further. In March when the spring
dearth came (spring dearth is the period when former harvested grain is gone and new grain
has not yet ripened), the Party organizationally mobilized the poor peasants to borrow grain
from the landlords. In April, the struggle was intensiﬁed to the point of distributing the
landlords’ grain to the poor peasants (fen liang chi da hit). The peasant victory in Xi’nan
District inspired neighboring villages to launch the same movements. However, the power
of the peasant movement really terriﬁed the landlord class in Yongding. They organized
a committee to pacify the rural area (Qing xiang wei yuan hui) and suddenly seized six
membersof the Xi’nan District Committee on June 1, 1928. This provided the direct
reason for the uprising.

On June 29, 1928, the Yongding County Committee started the uprising as previously
planned. Zhang Dingcheng was the general commander and Ruan Shan and Lu Zaoxi were
the vice- commanders. The uprising began in the villages of Huleiyang, Chendong and
Xiayang led by Ruan Shan and Lu Zauxi, but this was only a trick to lure the army from
the county seat. It was the so-called device of diao hu Ii shan (to induce the tiger out of
the mountain). As the counter-revolutionary army went to suppress the uprising in those
villages, Zhang Dingzheng led four thousand Xi’nan armed peasants, most of whom were
the members of the Iron and Blood Corps, to besiege the county seat and then breached the
enemy defense to enter it on July 1, 1928. Although the enemy army returned quickly and
got the capital back, the countryside surrounding the county seat was under the uprising
masses’ control. I

When information about the Yongding-Jinsha uprising was conveyed to Shanghang, the
Shanghang County Committee sent Deng Zihui to observe the whole situtation. According
to his own knowledge of the Longyang-Houtian and Shanghang-Jiaoyang uprisings, Deng
suggested to the secretary of the Yongding County Commime that they stop besieging the
county seat and start the land revolution. Agreeing to Deng’s suggestion, the Yongding
County Commitme gathered the whole uprising army together and organized them into a

56

battalion of the Red Army with Zhang Dingcheng as its battalion commander and Deng
Zihui as its Party Representative. This battalion of the Red Army was the ﬁrst Red Army
in Minxi. Its task was to suppress counter-revolutionaries, to seize militia ﬁrearms and to
mobilize the masses to conﬁscate landlords’ grain, clothing and livestock on the one hand,
_ and to ﬁght with the enemy army on the other hand. no

At the same time, receiving the report from the Yongding County Committee, the
Fujian Provisional Committee convened a meeting of general commissioners and resolved
to establish the Minxi Special Committee to conduct the struggle in Minxi, so that the
revolutionary movement in Minxi might develop into a new phase. On July 15, 1928,
the Minxi Provisional Special Committee was established at Jinsha township with Guo
Boping as its Secretary (Guo was a native of Dapu county in Guangdong and the secretary
of Shanghang County Committee), Zhang Dingcheng as the head of the organization
department and Deng Zihui as the head of the propaganda department.131

In the directive of July 25, the Fujian Provincial Committee ordered the Minxi Special
Committee and the Yongding County Committee to establish Communist authority. ‘32
Therefore Zhan g Dingcheng and Deng Zihui held a mass meeting to elect workers, peasants
and soldiers as delegates to establish soviets in every village. In a short time, ten village
soviets were established. In August of 1928 the Xi’nan District Soviet was established and
promulgated many laws, such as a land law, a law purging counter-revolutionaries and a
marriage law.

' The central mission for the Xi’nan District Soviet was to implement the land revolution.
Because there was then no speciﬁc land policy from the Party Central or from the Provincial
Committee, Deng Zihui and Zhang Dingcheng had to initiate a land policy based on the
local reality. They got old peasants together to have discussions. They wanted to design
a functional land policy listening to the old peasants, for the old peasants understood the
land situtation in every village. The peasants Deng summoned included tenants, poor
peasants, middle peasants and rich peasants. After systematic analysis, they understood

57

that in the Xi’nan Disuict the tenants and hired agricultural workers were the majority of
the population. Therefore the principles of the land policy they set up were based on the
interests of tenants and hired agricultural workers while uying to ally with middle peasants
in order to attract as many people as possible. The main points of the land policy were as

follows:

1. Conﬁscate the land belonging to landlords, rich peasants and the public
while letting middle peasants keep their self-cultivated land.

2. Distribute the conﬁscated land to tenants and hired agricultural workers
while allowing landlords and rich peasants also to gain some of it to make a
living.

3. The unit to distribute land is the ’village.’ Each village’s land is alloted by
its own villagers and original land boundaries cannot be changed

4. The new amount of land received by each household is not even, but is in
accordance with how many persons it has; land may be added from another
household with too much, or may be subtracted from the amount the household
owned before (chou duo bu shao).133

.At ﬁrst, Zhang Dingcheng and Deng Zihui chose Jinsha township as the so—called
“experimental point” (shi diau) in which to try the land policy. After its success there, in
ten days the land policy was executed all over Xi’nan District; each one of twenty thousand
poor peasants gained an average three or four dan (a unit of weight of grain, equal to ﬁfty
ﬁlograms) of agricultural land.134 Although the tentative land policy had many defects
and needed improvements, it suceeded relatively well in its aim of conﬁrming the people’s
revolutionary determination. Under a very difﬁcult situation, the Xi’nan District Soviet
had lasted for almost half a year.

Because of severe enemy attacks and its isolated situation, the the Xi’nan District Soviet
started to become unstable after November 1928. At ﬁrst, according to Zhang’s memoir, it
was the so-called “intermediate elements” (Zhong jianfcn 21') who asked to stop ﬁghting and
to make an agreement with the enemy. To prevent such compromising mentality among
people from going any further, the Party made a slogan: ﬁll the person who advocates
compromise. But it did not work. When the proposal to make a cease-ﬁre became stronger
and stronger, the Party had to accept it as the wish of people. People said to the Party:

 

58

“We all know that the land revolution of the Soviet is good for us and all
of us advocate the Communist Party and the Soviet government. But now
ourbaseareaistoosrnall andtooisolated. Itwillbethebettermethodto
preserve revolutionary force for the time being if we compromise with the
counterrevolution and cover our red heart with white sﬁn [the so-called bai
pi hong xin] until you [the CCP] expand your work elsewhere.” [Red heart
means the CCP and white sﬁn means the GMDJ‘”

At last, the CCP sent a representative of the people to negotiate with the Nationalist
army and started to plan a retreat Although at the end of 1928, the Xi’nan District
Soviet was abolished, the CCP still controlled the main army force, the Iron and Blood
Corps, restored the secret peasant associations and engaged in guerrilla warfare to suppress

counter-revolutionaries and to save the gains of land revolution.

3 Concluding Remarks

From 1926 to the end of 1928, the CCP’s development in Minxi was very signiﬁcant to the
future evolution, for Minxi’s Communists prepared a new world to wait for the Red Fourth
Army’s arrival. As an investigation report on Pinghe county said:
From the end of 1927 to the end of 1928, during a series of anti-rent struggles,
Changle peasants had gone through four armed struggles. The peasants here
have a deep understanding of the land revolution and the classiﬁcation is
clear...Although they did not implement land distribution, the peasants do not
pay rents and taxes after the anti-rent, anti-tax armed struggles, which has the
same effect as the land distribution.
Pinghe county could have such change after a short uprising, not to mention the other
areas which had gone through serious uprisings.
Each phase of the Communist movement had various impacts on both social structure
and CCP organization. In the ﬁrst phase, during the CCP-GMD cooperation period, the
Communists came back from outside, mostly of them from Canton and Xiamen, to work in

the county cities. They learned how to establish institutes and to work with each other on

workers’ and peasant movements to ﬁght local government and bad gentry. Because the

59

county seat was the political and economic spotlight, it was natural for the Communists to
work there to accumulate more political capital, such as intellectuals, students and public
attention. Although Minxi’s Communist movement was affected deeply by the teachings
of Mao Zedong and Peng Pai, their work on the peasants was not totally successful at the
beginning, for they focused on the city rather than the countryside. Although worﬁng
in the cities had offered the young Communists ﬁrst experience of communicating with
the masses, the real beginning of learning how to stage a mass uprising was when they
looked for a refuge in the countryside. However, it seems that the more success they got
in worﬁng in the cities the more prosperous they would be in mobilizing the masses in
the countryside, for the horizontal relationships they built and the experience they got in '
cities helped their future cooperation and strategy-maﬁng a lot. That is why the most
animated development of Communist inﬂuence in the ﬁrst phase was in the county seats of
Longyan, Shanghang and Yongding, as were the uprisings; the Longyan-Houtian uprising,
the Shanghang-Jiaoyang uprising and the Yon gding-Jinsha uprising. Furthermore the active
areas (Longyan,Shanghang and Yongding counties) could be viewed as the Minxi Party’s
core area, where the CCP could have relatively effective control, while other counties
belonged to the peripheral area, where the disturbance of bandits and counter-revolutionary
power were strong. Formation of the core area was not only due to the ecological setting,
but also to the characteristics of local leaders. From the case studies provided above, we
can perceive how inﬂuential the characteristics of the local leaders were in staging mass
uprisings. _

The examples of Deng Zihui and Zhang Dingcheng demonstrate that revolutionary
work had to be done' according to the local reality. The theory of Marxism and directions
from supervisory level organizations could only provide guidance rather than workable
tactics. Due to the peasant mentality and conception of localism then preVailing in Minxi,
the local Communists needed ﬂexibility to map out their uprisings, as they did to deal with

the masses’ requirements after uprisings. Therefore examples of local Communists going

60

against the suggestion of supervisors were not uncommon. Besides they not only demanded
ﬂexibility in interpreting the theory of Communism to ﬁt the situation in the countryside,
but also required the ﬂexibility in operating organization. Thus Deng Zihui’s analysis
on establishing peasant associations stressed that a strong core leadership could only be
founded with personal relationships. Therefore they depended on personal relationships to
manage party affairs rather than on organization, which caused problems later criticized by
the upper level of organization as, “the manipulation of Party members” and “non-division
of Party organization and Soviet.”

The abolition of the Xi’nan Soviet was an extreme example of the ﬂexibility of policy-
maﬁng to respond to the masses’ requirements. From another point of view, we can say
this was a complete compromise of ideal to reality. However, to take all into account, the
theoretical and organizational confrontations were not acute until the establishment of the
Minxi Soviet, for the pressure of state-building from upper- level organizations made less
room for ﬂexibility, as I will describe in the next chapter.

III. THE ROOTS OF POLITICAL STRUGGLES

The intra-party struggles have attracted many scholars’ attention. Most of them such as
Benjamin 1. Schwartz and John E. Rue have explained the roots of the political struggle from
the perspective of power struggle. 13‘ However, in recent years, more and more scholars have
noticed the roles local social structure and organization play in political struggles. That
is, they have uied to understand a political event from a more comprehensive viewpoint.
For example, Professor Stephen C. Averill has investigated the background of the “Futian
Incident” from the angle of local complexity in his article “The Origins of the Futian
Incident.” (The so-called “Futian Incident” happened in the Jiangxi Soviet in December
1930, when Mao and the other Communist leaders contrived to attack a local Red Army.
The incident resulted in a bloody catastrophe; many leaders opposed to Mao were ﬁlled.)

Nor do the facts presented in this essay support the simple contention that the

Futian Incident was primarily caused by intra-party feuding between supporters

of Mao and Li Lisan, and that it is thus best understood as another step in

Mao’s gradual climb into power within the national Communist movement. As

indicated, serious intra-party strife did occur in the region, supporters of Mao

and Li were deeply involved in it, and the animosities thus generated did much

to build up stress along the fault lines within the revolutionary movement that

were to supture so violently during the Futian Incident itself. Yet the main

lines of ﬁssure within the movement were already apparent well before the

tumultuous struggles of 1930, and they were incised far more deeply into the

bedrock of socioeconomic structure and process in the region than the personal
power struggles of ambitious individuals could obscme or transform. ‘37

Such a point of view’is doubtless essential to the so- called “China-cente ” approach,

and is one of my main concerns in looﬁng at the political struggles in Minxi as well.‘”

61

62

In addition, another illuminating analysis is raised by Arif Dirlik, who convincingly
establishes a dialectical relationship between ideology and organization in his well known
book, The Origins of Chinese Communism. From the examination of the origins of Chinese
Communism, he noticed a consistent tension between theory and practice of Marxism in
China, rooted in anarchist thinﬁng. He observed that:

The tension between ideology and organization persiswd throughout the 1920s,
and came to a head when the revolutionary movement ran into severe obstacles
in 1927....The radicals who founded the Party became Communists before
they were Marxists, and once they. had done so, an organizationally deﬁned
ideology became for them a substitute for theoretical analysis:...Only after
1927, in other words, did they acquire a genuine familiarity with Marxism,
and begin to apply it to the analysis of Chinese society in order to discover a
revolutionary strategy appropriate to the social situation. ‘39

Dirlik’s reasoning provides a very important insight into the relationship between
CCP ideology and organization Because his study focused on the origins of Chinese
Communism, primarily on theoretical perspectives and on the early period of party history,
Dirlik could only give tentative suggestions about the Party’s development after 1927. It
seems to him that the inﬂuence of anarchism sometimes was dormant but sometimes was
active, depending on how stressful the environment was. To supplement early analyses, I
will raise the point that the tension between ideology and organization, no matter whether
it is termed anarchism or populism (as it was labeled by Professor Meisnerm), has been
consistent through the whole period of CCP’s revolutionary movement.

Dirlik also noticed the question of democracy, “both within the Party and in the Party’s
relationship to society in the process of revolution.” He said:

The CCP, when it was established in 1920-1921 on Bolshevik premises,
represenmd a political organization whose dictatorial nature conﬂicted with the

democratic aspirations that had motivated May Fourth radicals, and could be
clear in terms of coping with an oppressive political environment. “"

In fact, the tension among Marxism-Leninism, the dictatorial name of political organization
and an oppressive political environment existed not only during the early period of CCP

63

development when the legacy of the May Fourth Movement was strong. but also in the later
Soviet period when the revolutionary movement confronted the work of state-building.
To take all into account, in this study I shall narrow Dirlik’s theoretical premises down
to more practical dimensions to investigate how the CCP dealt with the tension among
ideology, organization and reality, consciously or unconsciously. By doing this, I attempt
to prove that the ambiguous functions of ideology and organization considerably shaped
the intra-party political struggle in Minxi. In other words, the line between ideology and
practice is hard to draw since there is no universally accepwd interpretation of Marxism,
and so is the principle of operating an organization, the so-called “democratic centralism.”
As Zhu De said: ‘practice which deviates from ideology is blind, while ideology which
deviates from practice is hollow.’ m

The line between ideology and practice was so blurry that disapproval from upper levels
of organization could result in serious criticism among the CCP members at lower levels,
for every member saw things from a different point of view. Accordingly, the only way
to prove their legitimacy was by favorable results. That is why the CCP members had to
follow therule thatonlytheresultofpracticecouldcertifythetruth, forthey hardlyhadan
undisputed standard. The same vagueness can be found in the explanation of the principle
of democratic centralism. The line between democracy and centralism was blurred, too.
When should the Party listen to the lower level organizations and the masses, and when
should it enforce the policy without dealing with disagreement from lower levels? Both
the interpretations of Marxism and the principle of democratic centralism became central
issues in power struggles.

Another way to investigate the CCP’s political struggle during the Soviet period is from
the angle that the CCP’s effort in establishing the Soviet was an effort to proceed with the
work of state-building during the revolutionary period. which caused an inevitable conﬂict
between founding a bureaucracy at the top and responding to the masses’ needs at the

bottom. The function of organization therefore was caught in between. To mobilize the

64

masses, the organization had to respond to changing situations ﬂexibly; but to undertake
the work of state-building, it had to take the responsibility of educating the masses and
enact the orders from the top. It is interesting to notice that the CCP tried to resolve this
confrontation by a special method, the principle of democratic centralism.

Just as Deng Zihui commented that personal relationships could guaranme the reliability
of leadership, as mentioned in the preceding chapter, the CCP local level organizations
inclined to focus on personal relationships with the masses. Organization was the form,
while personal relationship was the core. Consequently the pace of the development of
local CCP organization always exceeded the development of local soviets; partly this was
because the masses were not capable enough to build their own authority, partly because
the CCP leaders were used to the old way of establishing their power. The main function
of local CCP organization was to launch revolution and the purpose of the Soviet was to
fulﬁll the work of state-building; both of these tasks were supposed to reciprocate and
complement each other. However, the inefﬁciency of the Soviets caused suspicion and
criticism from the upper level organizations.

Knowledge of how the roles of ideology, organization and personal relationship
interacted in the CCP movement is very critical for understanding intra-party political
struggle. This will help us to explain why every CCP purge tends to end up with ruthless
and often uncontrolled political struggle, for various. ideological interpretations, different
levels of organizations and complicated personal relations all become intertwined.

During 1929-34, the Minxi revolutionary base area had experienced a dramatic
decline, which was not only because of the military weakness but also because of the
natural restriction of an isolated base area and the CCP’s intra-party struggles. As the
preceding chapters have shown, the Minxi area was generally inaccessible, suffering
from agricultural bankruptcy and with weak counter-revolutionary force, especially the
provincial-level warlords, which left room for local Communists to organize uprisings.
Ironically, the reasons that made the success of the Minxi Communist movement possible

65

also became the reasons that made the CCP intra-party struggle and instability inevitable.
For example, the local Communists used their social positions to inﬁltrate the local power
structure to mobilize the masses; but later, the latter caused major problems to the CCP’s
control during the Soviet period. Likewise, Minxi’s geographic setting close to the coastal
urban macroregional cores let Minxi natives receive teachings of Mao and others from the
Canton Peasant Institute , but the inﬂuence of Maoism later provoked the line struggles on
the other hand.

For analysis sake, this chapter will be divided into three parts: establishment of the
Minxi Soviet. the “Purge of the Social-Democratic Party” and the incident of “Anti—Luo
Ming Line.” From June 1929 to March 1930, during the ﬁrst phase, there were multi-
leveled organizations which were supposed to take the responsibility of conducting the
revolutionary development in Minxi; the county commimes, the Minxi Special Committee,
the Front Committee of the Red Foruth Army and the Fujian Committee. Among them,
the Front Comnrittee of the Red Fourth Army, led by Mao Zedong and Zhu De was the
most inﬂuential, not only because of its military force and Mao’s theoretical guidance, but
also because of its authority in the CCP organizational system during the revolutionary
period, parallel with the provincial level of organization and directly responsible to the
Party Central.

The Front Committee was so independent and powerful that it frequently interfered
with the regular work of county committees, which was a subject of complaint by the Fujian
Committee. Additionally, since the Minxi Communists were inspired by Mao’s thought
signiﬁcantly before the uprisings, it is predictable that Mao could enrich his thought, the
so- called “Maoism,” in Minxi. As a result, some occasions which were critical to Mao’s
rise to a prominent position in the CCP occurred in Minxi duringthis period. such as the
holding of the “Gutian Meeting” and conﬂicts over the proper land policy. However, not
until the establishment of the Minxi Soviet and the implementation of the so-called “ Li

Lisan Line” in 1930 did the confrontation among mold-level organizations (or. as some

66

scholars believe, power struggles between Mao and Li) became so intense that they caused
the tragedy of the “Purge of the Social-Democratic Party.” I hope to demonstrate that the
political struggle was only a result, a form, whose roots must be traced to the complicated
evolution of local society and organization and to the Conﬂict between revolution and state
building, instead of only focusing on the power struggle among leaders. Power struggles
were important, but I believe that certain other factors were impatant as well.

As to the two political struggles in Minxi, I try to differentiate their characteristics.
The purpose of the CCP in launching the “Purge of the Social-Democratic Party” was to
pacify the counter-revolutionaries in the Minxi area. Although it was a unique campaign in
Minxi, there was a similar incident in the Gannan base area, the “Futian Incident”, where
the target was the AB Clique rather than the Social-Democratic Party. If we ask ourselves
why the political struggle took such forms as the “Purge of the Social-Democratic Party” in
Minxi, and why the whole campaign went out of control, we can only conclude that there
must have been something else at work besides the high-level power struggles.

The incident of the “Anti-Luo-Ming Line” was a wide- ranging campaign. Party
Central, headed by Wang Ming, commanded each base area to suppress the Luo Ming-
Iiners and. therefore, it was more like a line struggle and a power struggle within the
party than the “Purge of the Social-Democratic Party” was. I also believe that the
Movement of the Anti-Luo-Ming Line can be viewed as an escalation of struggle against
the Social-Democratic Party’s ideology, organization and reality.

Because some ﬁrst-hand materials are available, it is possible to make a close
investigation into the correspondence among diﬁ'erent levels of organizations from March .
of 1929 to June of 1930. Although the period is short, it is still valuable, for it offers a
picture of communication among the Minxi Special Committee, the Front Commitwe of thr
Red Fourth Army and the Fujian Committee before the oflicial formation of the Li Lisan
Line. With an understanding of the communication among multi—level organizations, we
can see that before the occurrence of the political struggles, many problems had already

67

emerged in Minxi affecting both upper and lower levels of organization. This provides a
background for an examination of the leftist policy because it emphasizes the reciprocal
interaction of revolution and state-building. From this standpoint, I will try to analyze the

dilemma of revolution and state-building'in Minxi later.

1 Establishment of the Minxi Soviet

The ﬁrst supra-county organization to conduct the revolutionary movement in Minxi was the
Minxi Provisional Special Committee, established on July 15, 1928 with its headquarters
in Jinsha village. After the abolition of the Xi’nan District Soviet, the Committee’s
headquarters was forced to move to Shanghang and its Secretary, Guo B0ping, ﬂed and
then betrayed the CCP. With the temporary failure of uprisings, the Fujian Committee,
which was formally established in August 1928, commanded the Minxi revolutionary
troops to go underground and employ guerrilla strategy to preserve their forces. “3

The ﬁrst arrival of the Zhu-Mao Red Army in Minxi occurred somewhat by chance.
To distract the government’s major attack on Jinggangshan, the Zhu-Mao Red Army ﬂed
to Gannan, fought in one place after another and then traveled over the Wuyi Mountains
to come to‘Changding on March 11, 1929. As soon as they arrived, the Zhu-Mao Red
Army found out that Changding was a rich county with weak counter-revolutionary forces.
When they stayed at Poxi village, thirty miles from the county seat, the secretary of the
Provisional County Committee, Duan Fenfu, came to meet Mao and Zhu and to report the
situation in Minxi and in Changding. This was the ﬁrst time that Mao got any information
about Minxi’s revolutionary development.

Learning how weak Guo Fengrnin’s troops were, the Zhu-Mao forces decided to attack
Guo’s garrisons and to take over the Changding county seat. Without much resistance, the
Zhu-Mao Red Army entered the county seat and ﬁlled Guo, which was a sweeping victory
and encouraged the Minxi Communists a great deal. When they occupied the county

68

seat, the Red Fourth Army started to attack local bullies, procure money, and increase
labor unions and peasant associations. Besides the work of social mobilization, the Front
Committee of the Red Fourth Army also reorganized the Changding Provisional County
Committee into a formal County Committee. Then, based on the cooperation between the
Front Committee and the County Committee, the Changding Revolutionary Committee
was established as the ﬁrst county level red regime in Minxi.” As mentioned in Chapter
One, Changding had Communist movements before the arrival of the Red Fourth Army,
’ but they had not carried out uprisings. The inﬂuence of the Red Fourth Army on the local
Communist movement was therefore powerful, although it could be seen either an aid or
a hindrance to the local Communist movement by higher-level authorities. Although .the
Changding warlords were shocked by the Zhu-Mao Red Army’s take-over of the Changding
county seat and Guo Fengrnin’s death, they could not c00perate with each other, which
left plenty of room for the CCP’s guerrilla strategy. At the same time, the Communists in
the other counties became revitalized by the new circumstances. In the report to the Party
Central on April ﬁfth, 1929, Mao proposed his idea about ﬁghting for both Jiangxi and
Minxi.” However, the Zhu-Mao Red Army did not take the Minxi area seriously until
Deng Zihui, then Secretary of the Minxi Provisional Special Committee, wrote a report to
the Front Committee and asked the Red Fourth Army to come to Minxi.

On May 20th, 1929, the Zhu-Mao Red Army reached Minxi again. This time they
achieved remarkable success, leading to the establishment of the Minxi Soviet on March
18th, 1930. The Red Fourth Army took Longyan and Yongding and reformed the Minxi
local military force into the Fourth Column, with Fu Bocui as commanding ofﬁcer. They
also helped establish the Longyan Revolutionary Committee and Yongding Revolutionary
Committee, with Deng Zihui and Zhang Dingcheng as the chairmen. In the meantime,
the Zhu-Mao Red Army led the Minxi local forces with the strategy of “ mobilizing the
masses by dividing troops and attacﬁng the enemy by uniﬁed power” (fenbing yi fadong
qunzhong, jizhong yi dueifu diren) to twice defeat Jiang Jieshi’s attack from three provinces.

 

69

By such efforts, the Minxi base area was preliminarily formed. centered around Longyan,
Yongding, Shanghang, and also including Liancheng, Changding and Wuping.” T‘o pacify
the newly-occupied area, the Red Fourth Army launched the so-called “July division of
troops” (qiyue fenbl‘ng) to help the local Communists destroy militia and enforce land
revolution. In a short time, Minxi’s revolutionary situation had been swiftly enhanwd;
party branches increased to more than 180, party members to 1450, and millions of mu of
land were redistributed. "7

Although everything seemed to move smoothly during this expansion period, con-
frontations between the leadership of the Red Fourth Army and higher administrative levels
were emerging. Most scholars consider such confrontations only as part of Mao’s power
struggle with various levels of party leadership, but a more comprehensive explanation is
desirable. For example, the reason Mao had been deprived of the position of Secretary of
the Front Committee from June to October of 1929 was not only due to his conﬂict with the
leader of the Provisional Military Commitme, but also due to the unclear functions of the
Front Commitwe and Provisional Military Committee, which left room for power struggles.
The Front Committee focused on the work of political guidance, especially worﬁng to
ensure party leadership in the Red Army, while the Provisional Military Committee was
responsible for military operation. Both should help each other to develop the Communist
revolution. To improve ﬂexibility in a changing revolutionary situation, Mao tried to
combine both ﬁnds of work into one organization to make the function of the Front
Committee more comprehensive. This led to resistance. The form was a power struggle,
but there were deeper underlying reasons.

As a result, Mao lost his position as the Secretary of the 2Front Committee at the
Seventh Party Delegates’ Meeting of the Red Fourth Army on June 22, 1929, and Chen Yi
took his place. It seemed that Chen was only a Compromise choice. After the meeting, at
the end of July, Chen and Deng Zihui went to the headquarters of the Fujian Committee

to report the situation in Minxi and then Chen, representing the Front Committee, went

70

to Shanghai to attend a Party Central meeting on military affairs. His other purpose,
obviously, was to seek Party Central ’s direction to resolve the confrontation in the Red
Fourth Army.

Many scholars have emphasized the signiﬁcance of Zhou Enlai’s “September letter” and
the Gutian Conference in conﬁrming Mao’s power. Here I would like to focus on how Zhou
and Mao explained the principle of “democratic centralism”, interpretations of which were
so ﬂexible that they could be used as an excuse for power struggle. In the “Party Central’s
directive to the Front Committee of the Red Fourth Army”, the so-called “September
Letter”, Zhou emphasized the principle of the system of “democratic centralism”. To settle
the confrontation between the Provisional Military Committee and the Front Committee,
Zhou said we should:

insist on the absolute leadership of the Party; ...Therefore to clarify the relation
between the party leadership and the military leadership is very important
Every authority of the Party should be attributed to the Front Committee, which
is correct and can’t be dismrbed. The term ’pauiarchal system’ should not be
abused to deny the authority of supervise organization and to cover the defect
of undue democracy...“a

Zhou’s words provided a preliminary interpretation of the principle of the system of
democratic centralism, which conﬁrmed the power of the Front Committee. With this
afﬁrmation from the top, Mao could develop his theory about how to create a proletarian
foundation from peasants using eduCational methods. He said: i

The origin of the incorrect thought in the Red Fourth Army Party is because
most of the Party are composed of peasants and small bourgeoisie. But the
leadership of the Party did not decisively struggle with these wrong ideas and
lacked conect educational methods, which let these wrong ideas exist and
evolve.

He also claimed that the Red Army was not only an army which should organize people
and educate people, but also should subordinate itself to the leadership of proletarian
thought and to people’s revolution. “9 Though such dialectical thinﬁng Mao suggested the

71

Party should both lead people and listen to people, which illustrates the ambiguity of the
principle of the democratic-centralist system. When should the Party listen to the masses?
When should the Party lead the masses? These uncertainties helped cause line struggles
and intra-party struggles. I
Although Mao lost his position as the Secretary of the Front Committee, by means of his

personal charisma and the initial impact of Communist thought on Minxi’s intellectuals, he
could doubtless exert strong inﬂuence on and manipulate Minxi’s Communist leaders. At
Mao’s advice, Deng Zihui decided to convene Minxi’s First Party Delegate’s Conference
to map out a worﬁng agenda. On June 27, Deng, as the Secretary of the Minxi Provisional
Special Committee, notiﬁed the county committees to‘select delegates to attend the meeting
at Jiaoyang village in Shanghang. The meeting was held on July 20th, which was delayed
a week at Mao’s suggestion, and Mao and other representatives of the Front Committee
were present in a supervisory capacity. After listening to reports from every county, Mao
pointed out that Minxi had six helpful conditions which made a base area possible: 1) there
were eight hundred thousand people who had experienced uprisings and land revolution;
2) the CCP organizations here were concrete and inﬂuential; 3) the relationship between
CCP and people was close; 4) people’s armed forces had been established; 5) Minxi’s
geographical setting was good for the CCP’S ﬁght against enemy; 6) the clashes among
the enemy could be exploited. Then he continued to articulate tluee basic principles for
consolidating the Minxi base area:

1. To implement land revolution thoroughly.

2. To exterminate militia completely, to develop worker-peasant armed forces,

and to expend outwardly gradually.

3. To develop party organization, to establish political authority, and to

eliminate counterrevolutionaries.

At the end of the meeting, July 25 1929, the Minxi’s First Party Congress approved

many important resolutions on politics, soviet government, and land problems. Deng Zihui
was elected as the Secretary of the Minxi Special Committee. All of the resolutions were

72

drafted by Deng, corrected by Mao and then accepted by the Congress.

Among these resolutions, the most important ones were the resolutions on politics and
land problems, which made up the main points of Mao’s tlwory of “New Democracy”.
According to Mao’s analysis, the chief goal of the current revolution was land revolution,
which could resolve the problem of people’s livelihood, open up a road to agricultural
capitalism, and therefore accomplish the ﬁrst step of the Chinese proletarian revolution
— the democratic revolution, which was a transitional stage to the ideal society of
socialism.‘5° The result of Mao’s theory was to help adjust Marxism-Leninism to the needs
of the revolution which had been practically enacted by Minxi Communists, especially
Deng Zihui and Zhang Dingcheng.

However, in spite of Mao’s theory, the resolution on land problems was actually a
combination of the “Jinggangshan Land Law” and the Xi’nan experience. The points of
emphasis of the resolution were: to depend on the poor peasants and agricultural workers,
to consolidate the middle peasants, to protect the stores, not to attack the rich peasants
brutally, and to concentrate every effort on attacﬁng the landlords. ‘5‘ The intent of this
resolution, apparently, was similar to the purpose of the land policy of the Xi’nan District
Soviet; to appeal to the masses to support the revolution. The resolution also adopted some
aspects of the Xi’nan land policy, such as “chou duo bu shao” and using the “village” as
the unit of distributing land.

Before the interruption of the “Li Lisan Line” and the “Wang Ming Line”, Minxi’s land
law was basically formed until April of 1931. The “Nanyang Conference” was held by the
Front Committee and the Minxi Special Committee on May of 1930 to resolve conﬂicts
over fertile and barren land. In addition to the principle of chou dou bu shao, they decided
to add the principle of chou fei bu shou, which meant that a household receiving too much
barren land could gain fertile land from the household having too much fertile land “The
Resolution of the Land Committee” issued by the Minxi Soviet on April 20th of 1931
decmd that peasants could have ownership of the land they received."2 The changability

73

of the land law demonstrated how ﬂexible Mao and Minxi’s leaders were in adjusting
policies to people’s needs.

» Following the resolutions of the Minxi First Party Congress, every county started to
implement land revolution, and then established county soviets. In a few months, the
land of more than six hundred villages was redistributed and eight hundred thousand poor
peasants gained land. By March of 1930, Deng believed that economic and political
conditions were favorable enough that the time to build the Minxi Soviet had come. On
March 18th 1930 the Minxi First Worker-Peasant- Soldier Congress was held (Deng was
elected as the Chairman), and the Minxi base area was formally established. ‘53

In spite of the phenomenal growth, many problems were appearing during this period,
not only the confrontation among the leadership of the Red Fourth Army, but also the
discrepancy between the goals of state-building and revolution. Because some internal
party material is available now, we can have a closer look into the communication
arnon g multi-level party organizations which reﬂects the various opinions on policy-
maﬁng and execution. From the correspondence among the multi-leveled organizations,
we can perceive that the subdivisions were complex and help explain why questions
of communication among them were sensitive. For example, the position of the Front
Committee and of the Fujian Committee were parallel; the latter could only give letters
to the former rather than directives, but the Fujian Committee reported the action of the
Red Fourth Army in Minxi to Party Cental all the time. Another illuminating point from
investigating the materials is that because most of the materials are from March 1929 to
March 1930, we can understand that many problems emerged dining that period before
the ofﬁcial formation in June 1930 of the leftist policy known as the Li Lisan Line. This
demonstrates that although a mistaken political line could greatly affect the local situation,
its roots were more complicated than they appeared.

I would like to summarize the major problems which were disscused in the materials: (1)
the inﬂuence of the Red Fourth Army; (2) the problems of bandits, counter-revolutionaries

74

and peasant mentality; (3) the defects of the Party organization; (4) the work of state-
building; (5) economic difﬁculties — the “scissors’ cirsis”. Most of these turned out to be
the problems the Li Lisan Line tried to resolve.

(l) The influence of the Red Fourth Army

In the report of April 20th 1929 to Party Central, the Fujian Committee mentioned
how helpful the Zlu-Mao Red Army was; in mobilizing the masses and expanding the
party membership, although the Committee was also concerned that the local party was too
dependent on military force to carry out ordinary work. ‘5‘ In a May report, the Committee
emphasized the negative inﬂuence of the Red Fourth Army. They complained that the
masses expected too much ﬁ'om the Red Fourth Army, so that when the Army left they felt
disappointed.” _

In a letter to the lower organizations and the Front Committee on August 7th 1929, the
Fujian Committee criticized the organization of the Minxi Special Commime as unhealthy,
especially after the coming of the Red Fourth Army, as also were the county committees.

...The Fujian Committee thinks that you [the Minxi Special Committee and the
Yongding Committee] assign too many cadres to the Red Army and neglect
the party and soviet. leaving incapable members to take charge of party and
soviet work is not a good method, for the party should lead every thing...Since
the Red Army has come to Minxi again, the organization of the Minxi Special
Committee is not healthy even without routine work...“
Accordingly they asked the Minxi Party to distribute cadres properly and to establish close
relationships between lower and higher levels of organization to carry on ordinary work
during struggle.

In the report of the inspector Xie Yunkang to the Fujian Committee on October 25th, Xie
talked about the situation of the Fourth Column. The Fourth Column was reorganized from
Shanghang and Yongding armed forces by the Red Fourth Army, with Zhang Dingcheng as
the party representative and Tan Zhenlin as the chairman of the political department. (Tan,
a native of Hunan province, was dispatched from the Red Fourth Army) Some of the cadres

75

of the Fourth Column were from the Fourth Red Army and some were promoted from the
natives. Xie commented that the ﬁghting power of the Fourth Column had been improved
and he also noticed that, although it was subjected to the Minxi Special Committee, it had
close relations with the Front Committee. ‘57

In an overall report to the Fujian Commime on November 6th, the Minxi Special
Committee reported at great length on the problems in the Fomth Column.

First of all, owing to the way the Fourth Column had been formed (some
ofﬁcers and soldiers were transferred from the Red Fourth Army, while some
were reorganized from local forces and peasant leaders), discipline was poor...
The soldiers from the local forces could not stand strict military training,
and the ofﬁcers of peasant background were against the methods of scolding
and beating the soldiers that the ofﬁcers from the Red Fourth Army used.
...These confrontations caused more and more deserters from military service.
Although the situation improved after the Fourth Column Party delegates’
Conference, the split was still there.”'

In addition, the Minxi Special Committee also complained that the inﬂuence of the party
organization in the Fourth Column was weak.
(2) The Problems of bandits, counter-revolutionaries and the peasant mentality

The Fujian Committee reported to Party Central on April 20th that because the number
of bandits in Minxi was more than elsewhere, the bandit problem had not been dealt with
effectively. Additionally, in this report, the Fujian Committee notiwd various circumstances
in the counties. For instance, Longyan’s counter-revolutionary power was strong and. the
Third Party (Disan dang) was inﬂuential there, too. The masses in Shanghang lacked
proletarian class consciousness because the living standard of tenants was better than in the
other counties. Because of the brutal armed uprising before, the peasants in Yongding were
more violent, which should be controlled. '5’ In a May report, the Committee mentioned the
active work of the “Reorganization Clique” (Gaizu pot) in big cities and the strong GMD
counter-revolutionary propaganda. “0

The Yongding Committee’s report on July sixth 1929 talked about how strong the

counter-revolutionary power (militia, white army and bandits) was in Fu city and the

76

villages of Fengtian and Xia Hulei, etc. Not until help arrived from the Red Fourth Red
Army could the Party control those areas, but the enemy would counter-attack whenever
the Red Army was gone. Because peasants made up ﬁfty percent of party membership
(tenants were 32.5 percent, semi-tenants were 66 percent and semi-self-cultivator were
7.5 percent), many ﬁnds of feudal conceptions among comrades were common, such as
money-orientation, localism, individualism and skepticism to the Party. “’ All of these
aspects of peasant mentality impeded the effect of party education.

The Longyan Committee’s report on July 9th also mentioned the work of purging
counter-revolutionaries and bandits. The Longyan Committee ﬁlled three hundred local
bullies and reorganized a bandit army in Yanshi township, led by Liu Leibo, into a guerrilla
unit, with Lin Yizhu as the party representative. “2 (Liu changed sides between the CCP
and the Nationalist Government constantly.)

In the letter of October 6th, the Fujian Committee agreed with the opinion of the Party
Central that the Zhu-MaoRed Army should march to the East River to help the people
struggle in Guangdon g province. Additionally, to overcome localism and to appeal to the
masses to attend the Red Army, the Fujian Committee suggested the Red Fourth Army
shouldtakepartoftheMinxiarmedfa'cesmthebattleareaandtheyalsoinsistedthatthe
Minxi Party should focus on the workers’ movement, for they believed that workers were
not so localistic as peasants were.“53

In the report to the Fujian Committee on November 6th. the Minxi Special Committee
mentioned that the bandit problem had become serious in Minxi.

Most party members had no knowledge of bandits, and there were no methods
or appropriate personnel to work with them...Although there were ﬁfty or
sixty bandits who joined peasant associations in Wuping, and eighty of Liu
Leibo’s bandit gang were absorbed into guerrilas without further guidance.
Nonetheless the CCP’s inﬂuence on bandits was insigniﬁcant!“

With little doubt, every level of organization perceived the seriousness of the problems
of bandits, counterrevolutionaries and prevalent peasant mentality which signiﬁcantly

77

I hindered the CCP control in the area. The methods to overcome these problems were
to purge counterrevolutionaries, to deepen the workers’ movement and to improve the
education of the masses. None of this work was easy to achieve, because of the inherent
problems of socio—ecological system and‘the defects of the party organizations.

(3) The Defects of the Party Organizations

WithregardtothedireCtionofthelocalparty,inthereports toPartyCentralin April
and May, the Fujian Committee complained that urban work had not been improved, the
quality of membership was low (peasants had been recruited without any qualiﬁcation),
and because of lack of personnel, they could not despatch enough cadres to supervise the
work in the local area‘“

The Yongding Committee’s report in July complained that the quality of cadres was not
good enough, the inspecting work had not been executed well and although peasants and
workers comprised the bulk of the membership (55% were peasants, 30% were workers and
15.8% were intellectuals), they did not dominate leadership; there were four intellectuals,
two peasants and one worker on the Committee. The Yongding Committee also complained
about theinability of party members’ leadership of the masses. ‘“

In the letter of October 6th, the Fujian Committee pointed out two things that the Minxi
Party should do to improve the work of organization. One was to establish the branch life
style, the other was to improve local party organization. They said: “According to the
report, only the local party organization in Longyan is in good condition, while others are
in bad shape”.“7

In the report to the Fujian Committee on November 6th, the Minxi Special Committee
complained of the defects of the Wuping Committee. I

With the tendency toward opportunism, the Wuping Committee could not
respond to the masses’ requirement and could not follow directions, either,
which gave the opportunity of robbery and disturbance to Zhong Shaokui’s
bandit army...However the Wuping Party was dead.

In line with the variable party control in the counties, the Minxi Special Committee planned

78

Shanghang-Yongding-longyan as the core area.”
In the report of December 12th, the Minxi Special Committee talked about the problems
of Party work in detail. They mentioned eleven faults that the Minxi Party had:

1. Everything was not led by the Party but by personal relations.

2. The life style of party branches has not been formed at the direction of the
proletarian class. The party organizations of each county were not healthy,
leadership was weak and the work of party branches was neglected. (The party
organization of Yon gding was better.)

3. The Minxi Party ignored the creation of a proletarian foundation; it gave
no priority to central work. and had no patience with city work. The city
work in Changdin g, Shanghang and Yongding was poor. Additionally, the bad
members in the party had not been expelled.

4. The cultivation of cadres had not been increased with the enlargement of
the red area, which caused a lack of cadres and a pileup of work.

5. Education work had been neglected, the political standard of party members
was poor, and the activity ability of comrades was inferior.

6. The work of party, corps and mass organizations was not divided well;
instead the work was manipulated by a few comrades.

7. Regular directives from supervisory levels of organizations (such as the
county committee) were few, reports from party branches were not frequent,
nor were the horizontal relationships among party organizations.

8. Discussion of political problems had not been apparent. For example,
among the county committees, only the Longyan and Yongding committees
had discussed once in a while. The worst one was the Shanghang committee.
9. Investigatory work had not been executed The main problem was that the
party organization below the county level did not dispatch inspectors to the
lower level. In the meantime, the direction of words was not speciﬁc enough,
nor were the answers to the lower level of organization fast enough. Therefore,
without speciﬁc directions and strict supervision, decisions of the upper level
could not be made and work of the lower level, especially the party branch,
could not be established.

10. The relationships among comrades of lower and upper levels of
organizations only depended on pure friendship, and lacked the spirit of
collaboration. Especially there was no spirit of mutual-criticism and mutual-
supervision among party branches. Such conditions were prevalent in Minxi.
11. Since breaking. away from the period of “vi/hite terror,” because the party
organization had not been tight, many comrades became corrupt and neglectful.
Such conditions were most serious in Longyan.”9

(4) The Work of State-Building
The deﬁnition of state-building was not clear during the Soviet period. I would like to

79

deﬁne the aim of state-building work during the soviet period as establishing the soviets and
consolidating the soviets. To establish a soviet by the people, the Party emphasized that the
work of the Party and the Soviet should be divided clearly to avoid “party monopolization”
and the masses should be led by the worker-peasant-soldier government. Likewise the
work between the Party and the Corps should also he divided properly. (“‘Corps” meant
all kinds of associations set up by the CCP , such as the Communist Youth League and
the Children’s Corps. These organizations should be managed by the people themselves
rather than the party.) As for consolidating the red regime, the Party stressed the work of
purging counter-revolutionaries and expanding the red area. As a result, conservative and
defeatist mentalities were seen as dangers to the work of state-building, so was neglect of
the workers’ movement.
In the letter of August 7 th, the Fujian Committee emphasized that:
Although the attack from counter-revolutionaries was hard. the only way to

break through such a siege was to enlarge the Communist inﬂuence aggressively
rather than to defend conservatively."°

In the letter of August 8th, the committee clearly insisted on this attitude :

“At any rate, the power of the counter-revolution around Minxi is weak, only
if we can mobilize the masses to struggle, can we defeat the enemy...Never
commit the mistake of defeatism and conservatism.”m
Although the Committee believed that military victory was based on the support of
the masses, the masses should be led by peasants, workers and soldiers. Therefore they
considered how far the success the Soviet could achieve was important to the success of
Communist revolution. In other words, they thought the work of state-building could help
the work of revolution. In the same letter, the Fujian Committee kept telling the Minxi
Party that no matterhow hard it was the soviets had to implement the land policy, educate
the masses, and increase the masses’ class consciousness, otherwise the masses would not

support the soviets. 'The Committee also asked the Minxi Party to ﬁx the phenomenon that

CS!

80

there were no intellectuals in village soviets, while there were few workers and peasants in
the soviets beyond the village level. It warned the Minxi Party that if the situation was not
improved quickly, the Party would lose contact with the people. m

Another thing they noticed was the work of purging counter-revolutionaries. The
Committee said that to consolidate the Soviet they had to suppress the counterrevolutionaries
ruthlessly. “Although many rich peasants and small landlords will surrender to us when
our government exists, most of them are opportunists...we have to treat them brutally”. m
Additionally, the Committee complained the Minxi Party’s purge work was not severe
enough.

As to the problem of the division of Party and Corps work, the Committee advised:
“Party members should not monopolize all kinds of work. Some work should be left to the
Corps”. In a letter to the lower level organizations and the Front Commitwe, the Fujian
Committee mentioned that according to CY comrade Deng’s report (probably by Deng
Zihui), the work deployment of the Minxi Party was too conservative and neglected the
workers’ movement in cities and the peasant movement around the county seats. ‘7‘

With regard to Soviet work, comrade Deng reported that in Shanghang’s Beisi District
Soviet, rich peasants and small landlords fought for leadership. Therefore, in the letter
of September 6th, the Fujian Committee emphasized that Soviet leadership should be
maintained in the hands of poor peasants and agricultural workers, and that the Party should
not monopolize Soviet work. The Party should let the masses control their own business. "5
In other words, the function of Party and Soviet should be differentiated.

As to the development of the workers’ movement, the Committee said: “The workers’
movement is the only central work. The Minxi party has not established a workers’
movement yet, for only Lon gyan’s workers movement is good, while the workers’
movements in the others are poor... The land revolution must be led by workers... The
track of land revolution will not be correct unless the work of the workers’ movement is

established.” f Because the majority of workers in Minxi were boatrnen, the Committee

81

designated Shanghang as the center of the workers’ movement. ‘7‘ But according to
inspector Xie’s report on October 25th, although quite a few of the labor unions and
workers’ forces had been established, the workers’ movement in Shanghang was still
insubstantial. “Small merchants and poor people were not well mobilized and suspicious
of their own authority”.m
Another thing that hindered the work of state-building was the peasant associations. In
the report to the Fujian Committee on November 6th, the Minxi Special Committee talked
about the negative inﬂuence of the peasant associations in the red area. There were two
kinds of peasant associations: open and secret. The Minxi Special Committee said:
In the red area, every peasant joined the peasant associations, hence, as it turned
out, the peasant associations seemed to be the real regime in the counu'yside.
In the white area, peasant associations operated secretly. But even the soviet
area had secret peasant associations, which caused the problem of the division
of the Party and the Corps.‘”

(5) Economic Difﬁculty — the “Scissor’s Crisis”

Because he was dispatched by the Fujian Commitwe, inspector Xie Kangyun’s
observations appear to be exemplary of the point of view of the supervisory level.
In his report on October 25th, Xie focused on Minxi’s conditions, especially the beginning
of declining economic conditions, the so-called “scissors’ crisis”. Xie explained that the
occurrence of the “scissors’ crisis” in the red area was inevitable because of the blockade
between the whiteareaandredarea, whichcausedthepriceofgoodsinredareastodrop
dramatically (especially the price of rice), while the price of the goods from the white
area soared (especially the price of industrial products). This price disparity, called the
“scissors”, made it difﬁcult for the people living in the red area to support themselves. Xie
said:

The red area in the countryside must cause this kind of deteriorating result.
That is why building sovereignty in the countryside will not succeed. We have

to employ correct policies to save the situation, but the essential method is to
try to enlarge the led area as much as possible."’

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To repond to the report of inspector Xie, the Fujian Commime issued a directive on
November 1 1th on how to resolve the economic crisis in the red area, and it asserted that the
Minxi Party had committed a mistaken rich peasant line in trying to resolve the crisis. The
Fujian Committee agreed with the inspector’s opinion about how to resolve the “scisSors’
crisis”, and said: i

The occurrence of the phenomenon [the scissors’ crisis] is not coincidental. It
is an inevitable result of the partial occupation and enemy’s blockade... The

ﬁrst step to resolve this difﬁculty is to expand the red area into the white area...
You [the Minxi Party] must correct the defeatism of the peasant’s mentality. m

Furthermore, the Committee also mentioned that establishing a sizable Red Army was
the primary method to encourage the coming of a revolutionary peak. They asked the
Minxi Party to recruit 3000 people into the Fourth Column in three months.

From the selective correspondence above, we can perceive that all of the advantageous
or disadvantageous features of Minxi’s ecological setting were exposed during the period
of growth, including the predominant peasant mentality, the lack of a real proletarian
class, bandit disturbances and multi-layered local elites. What made the whole situation
more complicated was the previous experience of the local Communist leaders in plotting
uprisings. The local Communists tended to believe that personal relations were the core
of organizational activity. Additionally, the dialectical relationship between ideology and
organization also contributed to the dilemma. The extent to which the local party was
willing to follow orders from the supervisory level was certainly not absolute during the
uprising period; the extent to which the upper level party organization was willing to let
the local party have some autonomy was also decreasing during the Soviet period. This
was also the dilemma of the principle of democratic centralism. The function of the
soviet, corps and mass organizations was to make the masses learn how to manage their
own business, which was to achieve the aim of democracy. By doing this, the Party was
supposed to know what the masses wanted and to make policy, and then in return to educate
and guide the masses, which was the purpose of centralism. When the Committee said

83

in the letter of August 7th that to consolidate the Soviet regime they had to pacify the
counterrevolutionaries ruthlessly, the problem of “rich peasants” became critical, for the
rich peasants were not the main target in the uprising period, while during the Soviet period
the rich peasants became political and economic victims. But because the characteristics
of rich and middle peasants were hard to deﬁne, and some Communist leaders such as
Wang Yangyan and Fu Bocui were from rich peasant families , the problem of rich peasants
became the core of political struggle.

Although the “Li Lisan Line” had not yet come to dominate the Party, the Fujian
Committee’s letter to the Minxi Special Committee and the Front Committee on January
8th of 1930 criticized the Minxi Party’s strategy on the problem of rich peasants. They
thought the Minxi Party followed a mistaken “rich peasant line.” From the perspective of

consolidating the soviet regime they said:

The Communist Party is the proletarian party, which does not allow two classes
blending in the Party. Because the rich peasants belong to the exploiting class,
all the rich peasants have to be excluded from the party organization. In other
words, we have to eliminate the line and thought of the rich peasant in the
Party. In the organizations, we must never allow rich peasants to mix in. As to
the rich peasants who have become party members, we should exclude them
through a line struggle Of course, those rich peasants who sacriﬁce their
beneﬁts and become decisive members are not the examples.1m

But actually the real situation was more complicated. In addition, from the economic
aspect, they complained: .

As for the rich peasant problem, you [the Minxi Special Committee]
intentionally committed the strategic mistake of ‘rich peasant line’. Although
you said you have to expand the red area to resolve the ‘scissors’ crisis’,
you have not offered speciﬁc methods, instead you spent lots of energy on
making policy to save the economic situation, most of which turned out to be
conservative methods... The most conservative trait is demonstrated by your
approach to the anti-debt problem; to repay the debts of this year rather than
of last year, to repay the debts of small merchants rather than of the landlords,
and to repay the debts of the workers and peasants rather than of the gentry.
Actually to repay the debts to the peasants and the small merchants is to repay
the debts to the rich peasants. That is why the masses have not approved your
decision.”2

84

Besides the rich peasant problem, the Committee strongly commanded the Minxi Party
to enlarge the Red Army and to establish the Soviet as the highest authority in red area
rather than the Party. They said:

All authority has to be attributed to the Soviet. The Soviet is the people’s
highest directive organization. The discussion and execution of all kinds of
work, including struggle strategy, regulation of policy, action of the Red Army,
and ﬁnancial income, has to be done under the direction of the Soviet. The
Party can only direct the Soviet work through the Corps. That is, decisions
of the Party have to be brought by the Corps to the Soviet to be passed and
implemented. No manipulation of the Party or person can be allowed. "'3

However, from the stronger and stronger tone the Fujian Committee used, we can
perceive that an organizational confrontation had developed. From the point of view
of upper level organization, to consolidate the Soviet, the Minxi Party had to deal with
the rich peasants and to divide the work of party organization and mass organizations
properly, while from the point of view of lower level organization, appealing to more
people (including rich peasants) was the best way to achieve revolutionary aims. When
upper level organizations determined to execute the policy they thought was necessary to
secure the red area, a massive tragedy ensued in Minxi, the “purge of the Social—Democratic
Party”. Such organizational confrontation certainly helped shape the ideological struggle,
especially when the situation in Minxi was getting worse. The Commissioner of the Fujian

Committee, Luo Ming, then started to resist the policies of Party Central, which caused a
line struggle in the Soviet area, known as the “Struggle of the Anti-Luo-Ming Line”.

2 The Purge of the Social Democratic Party and The Struggle of the
Anti-Luo-Ming Line

Before describing these two incidents in Minxi, 1 would like to make it clear that, of

course, the inﬂuence of the Third Communist International and the Soviet Union cannot

be neglected. As analyzed above, many problems had emerged before the leftist policies

85

of the “Li Lisan Line” and the “Wang Ming Line” became dominant. Unsuccessful
policies exacerbated the endemic problems in the red area. Actually the formation of
leftist policy was inﬂuenced not only by the Third International, the theory of the “third
period of capitalism” and the anti-rightist struggle, but also by new developments in
China, including the new expansion of the red area and the warlord battles in North China
beginning in May of 1930, which left the CCP with opportunities to exploit. 134 That is why
the Fujian Committee and the Minxi Party were ﬁrst convinwd to implement the leftist
policies, although Deng Zihui and Zhang Dingcheng did express different opinions. Not
until a tragedy occurred in Minxi did Luo Ming, then the provisional secretary of Fujian
Committee, start to argue against the policy from the top. However, due to the ambiguity
between ideology and reality, the interpretation of theory was a matter of judgement.

The Minxi Soviet was formally established at the Minxi ﬁrst Worker-Peasant-Soldier
Congress at the Longyan county seat on March 18th, 1930. Although the situation in Minxi
seemed to move ahead, the inﬂuence of Li Lisan in the Party Central had started to affect
theMinxiPartysince March. OnApril 10th,theMinxiarmedforceswerereorganized
into the Red 12th Army, controlled by Party Central, which was a sign of interference from
the top. Until June 11th, Party Central, headed by Li, approved the resolution of “the new
revolutionary climax and victory ﬁrst in one or several provinces”, which symbolized the
formation of the Li Lisan Line. Later, Li decided to stage a national uprising, centering
around Wuhan in Hubei, and to concentrate the red armies to attack central cities. The new
Red 12th Army was dispatched northward."5 The inﬂuence of the Li Lisan Line in Minxi
was profound on both organization and society.

The Minxi Second Party Congress was held on July 8th to convey Li’s policy; to
concentrate all power to expand struggle to Guangdong and ﬁrst of all to seize power
in Fujian-Guangdong-Guangxi, and then to ﬁght for revolutionary victory in the whole
country. During the conference, although Deng Zihui and Zhang Dingcheng insisted that
the most important thing should be to consolidate the Minxi base area, they were criticimd

86

as the “new rightists” and after the conference Deng was discharged from positions as the
chairman of the Minxi Soviet and the political commissioner of the Red 21th Army. (The
Red 21th Army was established in June 1930, by combining the Fourth Column of the Red
Fourth Army and the First Column of the Red 12th Army, both of which were original
Minxi armed forces.) Furthermore, the conference not only approved Li’s policy, but also
emphasized the struggle with rich peasants, under the slogan of “anti-rich-peasant line”.
The new secretary of the Minxi Special Committee was Guo Diren, and the new chairman
of the Minxi Soviet was Zhang Dingcheng. Deng Zihui was assigned as the inspector of
the Fujian Commitwe to central and southern Fujian.”

To control the local party organizations more effectively, the Party Central commanded
the Minxi Party to combine Party and Corps organizations and to form a “general action
committee”. In September 1930 the Minxi General Action Committee was established. The
Minxi Second Worker-Peasant-Soldier Congress was held in September. It also conﬁrmed
Li’s policy and decided to deepen the anti-rich-peasant strugglem To be sure, although the
Minxi General Action Committee took over executive work, the Minxi Special Committee
and the Minxi Soviet were still nominally the highest party organization and government
authority.

As a result of Li’s policy, the situation in Minxi was getting worse. Military defeat
and continuous expansion of troops made thousands of soldiers desert. which left room
for bandit disturbances. For example, the Red 12th Army was defeated in Guangdong,
and when they came back the Longyan county seat was lost to militia from Yanshi, where
counter- revolutionary activity was revitalizing. By October 1931, the size of the Red 12th
Army declined from 4,000 to 6%.”

The combination of Party and Corps work into the Minxi General Action Commitwe
paralyzed much routine. work. That is, the corps organizations were inactive, and all the
work was undertaken only by the Party and the Soviet. Owing to the abolition of the Corps

organizations and the need for mass mobilization, the recruitment system of party members

87

was crippled and the secrecy of party organization was also ruined. As a CCP document
said:
“...the decided policies of ﬁnance and land could not be enacted completely. ,
The work of leading the masses and government is neglected... Organization
is loosening and discipline is almost bankrupt.”“"

In addition, to reform peasant mentality the Minxi General Action Committee mobilized
the Communist Youth League and the Children’s Corps to demolish superstition, which
upset the peasants, handicraftsmen and small merchants very much and disturbed the social
order!” At the same time, the Party Central continuously dispatched representatives to
Minxi to supervise policy implementation, which of course was a clear sign of interference
from the top. 8

As for the anti-rich-peasant effort, interestingly, it did not signiﬁcantly inﬂuence Minxi’s
land distribution. Although Li suggested that depending on the speciﬁc conditions the
village soviets should use either the methods of distributing land by number of persons and
by labor power, or the method of collective farms, the Minxi Special Committee resisted
the command on the basis of local necessity and the resolution on “the problem of rich
peasants” approved by the land policy that formed in the Nanyang Meeting. ‘9' This kind of
opposition demonstrated that the lower level organizations tried their best to preserve their
own autonomy.

In early October, Party Central dispatched Shi Jian to Minxi. On the 7th, the United
Meeting of the Minxi General Action Committee, the Military Commissioners of the Red
12th Army and of the Minxi Red Army School was held. Owing to the serious situation
in Minxi and prevailing dissatisfaction among the masses and cadres, the meeting decided
the Red 12th Army should halt its march to the Dong River, and instead should march to
southern Fujian, and that the Red 21th Army and Red 20th Army should be reorganized
into the New Red 12th Army, with Shi Jian as its political commissioner. Later Party

Central assigned two other persons to become military and political commissioners, while

88

Shi J ian became the Chairman of the Worker-Peasant Revolutionary Committee, which
was a new organization established by high-level decisiomm Although the Li Lisan Line
had been lightly restrained by demands from lower organizations and local reality, pressure
from the top in a leftist direction still existed.

In September 1930, Party Central held the Third Plenum of the Sixth Party Congress
(Sixth-Third Plenum) at Shanghai, which resolved to correct the policy of the Li Lisan
Line; it stopped the national uprising and the concentrationof the Red Army to attack
central cities, and instead restored the work of the Party and Corps organizations. ‘93 The Li
Lisan Line had been stopped by a power struggle at the top, but the aggressive approach to
achieve revolutionary victory had not been given up.

According to the organizational resolution of the Sixth-Third Plenum, the Party decided
to establish the Central Bureau in the central Soviet area, at Ruijin city in Jiangxi, to
conduct the work of the party in the Soviet area. In addition, the resolution decided to
combine both the Minxi Special Committee and the 'Dong River Special Committee into
the Min-Yue-Gan Special Committee, with Deng Fa, the representative of Party Central,
as secretary and chairman of the military committee. Hence the Min-Yue-Gan Special
Committee took over the function of the Minxi Special Committee in guiding revolutionary
and state-building work in Minxi. The new Committee was incorporawd into the Central
Bureau on January 15th 1931, as a result of which the Min-Yue-Gan border areas ofﬁcially
belonged to the Central base area . It is clear that the organizational change resulted from
the changing situation and the intensifying pressure of control from the top. At the same
time, with the changing organizational situation and the abolition of the Li Lisan Line,
another leftist policy was forming, the Wang Ming line. It was the “Wang Ming Line” that
sharpened the political confrOntation in Minxi. _

At the end of 1930, J iang Jieshi launched the ﬁrst “encirclement carnpaign”(weijiao).
On December 15th, the Longyan county seat was lost to the enemy. The headquarters of the
Minxi Special Committee and the Minxi Soviet moved to Hugang township in Yongding.

89

Minxi was in a critical situation. At the same time, after the abolition of the Li Lisan Line,
the Wang Ming Line started to dominate the Party. In January 1931, the Fourth Plenum of
the Sixth Party Congress (Sixth-Fourth Plenum) was held. Wang Ming, one of the returning
28 Bolsheviks, with the support of the Third International and the effort of suppressing
the Li Lisan Line, seized the leadership of Party Central at the meeting. He believed that
the major danger in the Party was rightist tendencies and the only way to counteract this
mistake was to reform the leadership of every level 'of party organizations, which was a
typical measure according to the principle of democratic centralism. Therefore the Party
Central kept dispatching representatives and new cadres to the Central base area. At the
beginning of 1933 losses in the white areas forced the Party Central to move from Shanghai
to Ruijin.“ From then on, the Wang Ming Line could be forcefully enacted in the Central
Base Area.

Besides massive conscription for soldiers and serious interference with the operation of
local organizations, the most destructive aspect of the Wang Ming Line was its land policy.
In the name of Party Central, Wang Ming published a land law in the Red Flag Monthly
(Hongqi Yuekan) on March 5th 1931. The land law was completely against Mao Zedong’s
principles of land revolution, which were to depend on poor peasants and agricultural
workers, to consolidate middle peasants, and to offer rich peasants living expenses. Like
Li Lisan, the emphasis of Wang Ming’s land law was anti-rich-peasant; it provided no land
for landlords and bad land for rich peasants. Because the deﬁnition of rich peasant was
vague in China’s countryside, the result of implementing Wang’s land law was that it not
only complicated the classiﬁcation in villages but also eroded middle peasants’ beneﬁt,
which created an anti-middle-peasant environment. In addition, because it emphasized
the leadership of agricultural workers in the village, labor unions of agricultural workers
were established, which produced confrontations between agricultural Workers and poor
peasants.195

The movement for land investigation made the situation in villages even worse. On

90

August 8th 1932, during the period of Jiang Jieshi’s fourth encirclement campaign the
Central Bureau resolved that to complete the land investigation and then to resolve the land
problem was one way to counteract the enemy’s attack. In the beginning the Minxi Party
did not follow the order enthusiastically because of the anti-Luo-Ming Line, and Mao tried
to drag the movement into the right track, but under pressure from the top, the Minxi Party
ﬁnally executed it. Because carrying out the land investigation involved redistributing
land and reclassifying the masses, the Minxi base area fell into total chaos. Some former
rich peasants, although they had participated in revolutionary work, were persecuted again,
while others were forced to join bandit gangs. ‘9‘ Although many efforts had been made by
leaders of lower level organizations to change the Wang Ming Line, the leftist policy was
not modiﬁed until the Long March in 1934.

With little doubt, from 1931 to 1934 lots of damage in Minxi was caused by these
policies. Once again I will demonstrate that the reasons ftr this were profound. and
involved various factors, such as ecological settings, characteristics of local leaders and
the dialectical relations among ideology, organizationand reality; these factors also helped
explain the Purge of the Social Democratic Party.

(1) The Purge of the Social-Democratic Party

As mentioned above, the Li Lisan Line caused lots of problems, such as military
defeats, many military desertions and the revitalization of counter-revolutionary power.
More important, these problems intensiﬁed the inherent difﬁculties in Minxi: the control
of multi-layered local gentry, the prevalent peasant mentality and the emerging economic
crisis. That was why, when the situation was getting worse and the Party Central believed
that the reason was because counterrevolutionaries were hiding in the revolutionary ranks,
the Minxi Party became convinced that the only way to consolidate the red area was to purge
counter-revolutionaries, as the Fujian Commitwe had advised before. In September 1930,
according to directions from the Fujian Committee that “to consolidate the Soviet area

we must purge the counter-revolutionaries”, the Minxi Soviet established the Committee

 

91

for Purging Counter-Revolutionaries (rtg'an weiyuanhut'), with Lin Yizhu as chairman.
Although Lin was the chairman of the Purge Committee, I believe the whole situation was
still under the control of Deng Fa, a representative of Party Central, then the secretary of
the Min-Yue-Gan Special Committee. At ﬁrst the purge movement was inﬂuenced by the
similar movement in Gan’nan, the purge of the AB Clique. Any person who had a defeatist
mentality, did not work hard enough or ran away from military service, was in danger of
being seen as a counter-revolutionary. Therefore a distrustful atmosphere was prevalent
and rumors were rampant in Minxi, such as that the activity of the Reorganizational Clique
was strong in Yongding, that the inﬂuence of the Third Party in Shanghang and Yongding
was powerful, and so on!” However, the purge movement started to go out of control
when it focused on Fu Bocui. This was also the beginning of the purge of the Social-
Democratic Party.

The Social-Democratic Party (SD Party) was a party established by the Second
International, which was criticized as revisionist by Lenin’s Third International. To
respond to directions from the Third International to intensify the struggle with the Social-
Democratic Party in May 1929, the Party Central issued an order to every party organization
to be aware of the inﬂuence of reformism in China on misleading revolutionary recognition
in the Party, and to see the Third Party as the most dangerous enemy. Therefore in
China, the SD Party was related to the Third Party, while in Minxi the Party perceived
persons who betrayed the CCP as members of the Third Party. ‘9‘ Such distortion shifted the
counter-revolutionary targets from outside to inside the party, and made Fu Bocui become
the victim of the purge.

’ As analyzed in the ﬁrst chapter, Fu was a “protective gentry” with revolutionary
tendencies. In terms of localism, he retained great autonomy even under the CCP regime.
After the First Minxi Party Congress I on the 29th of July, 1929, Fu left his position as
the commander of the Fourth Column, went back to his home town and cut contact

with CCP, for his behavior had been criticized. At the end of 1930 the Min-Yue-Gan

was t
cadre
SD P
Sovk
whOII
seek

Hulk

Conn
Red
Com
Lu 2
Chrp
darna

92

' Special Committee expelled him from the party. The reason of starting the purge was
somewhat vague and evidence was lacking. In January 1931, in a memorial ceremony
to the vanguards of Communist movement, some soldiers yelled the slogans of “support
the Second International” and “long live the Social-Democratic Party” by mistake. These
soldiers were arrested under the charge of being members of the SD Party. Under torture,
they admitted that Fu was 'the secretary of the so Party and some other cadres also held
important positions in the SD Party. ‘99 Therefore a tragedy was instigated.

On the ﬁrst of March 1931, the Minxi Soviet held a purge meeting in Hugang, which
was called the “Hugang Meeting”. In this meeting, the Minxi Soviet sentenced seventeen
cadres toideath. On the sixth, the Minxi Soviet proclaimed that Fu was the leader of the
SD Party and that the Gutian-Jiaoyang area was a nest of the SD Party. Then the Minxi
Soviet sent the Red Army to attack Fu’s base area without any success. However, the
whole situation was getting serious and many suspects ﬂed to the Gutian-Jiaoyang area to
seek protection.200 Under the control of Wang Ming, a directive from the Party Central on
the fourth of April 1931 said:

The enemy attacks the Soviet area from all sides and the white terror prevails.
They try to penetrate our organizations and the Red Army to carry out
destructive work. Minxi’s so—called Social-Democratic Party, Jiangxi’s AB
Clique and the Reorganization Clique in other places, from Jiang Jieshi to
Fu Bocui, all have complete connection and strategy...[we] must exterminate
counterrevolutionaries inside the Red Army, inside the government, and inside
the party organization, with brutal methods on the side of proletarian class.

The damage the purge had done in Minxi was serious. Thirty-ﬁve executive
commissioners in the Minxi Soviet government were dead. Half of g the cadres in the
Red Army were victimized. Thousands of people had been killed, including the local
Communist leaders who had led uprisings, such as Changding’s Wang Yangyan, Yongding’s
Lu Zaoxi and Chen Zhen, Longyan’s Chen Jinghui,‘ etc. Organizations of the Party and
Corps were shaken, and the reputation of the Party among the masses was reduced. The

damage was so critical that many cities in the central area, such as Longyan-Yongding-

i: .
'—

93

Shanghang, were taken by the Nationalist army. In July 1931, Hugang was lost and the
headquarters of the Min-Yue-Gan Special Committee and the Minxi Soviet moved to Baisha
village in Shanghang. Even Zhang Dingcheng, the chairman of the Minxi Soviet and Luo
Ming, the commissioner of the Min-Yue-Gan Provincial Committee, were suspected.“
However the whole situation was so destructive that the Party Central noticed it.

With the victory against Jiang Jieshi’s third encirclement campaign and Party
Central’s demand to correct the purge movement, although it still believed purging of
counterrevolutionaries was necessary, the surviving local leaders got a chance to ﬁght back.
Taking advantage of Deng Fa’s absence and in the name of the people, Zhang Dingcheng,
Guo Diren and Luo Ming sentenced the ex-chairman of the Purge Committee, Lin Yizhu,
and other people who had taken charge of the purge movement to death under the charge of
being members of the SD Party.” Although this eased the purge of the SD Party somewhat,
the purge movement did not entirely stop until the Long March.

(2) The Movement of the Anti-Luo-Ming Line

I believe that the Anti-Luo-Ming Line movement was an inevitable result of intensifying
from social-political struggle to ideological struggle. Additionally the intensiﬁed pressure
of state-building from the top and Mao Zedong’s profound inﬂuence in Minxi can not
be neglected. either. After the Party Central moved to Ruijin in 1933, the policy of the
Wang Ming Line could be enacted forcefully. Under the additional pressure of Jiang’s
fourth encirlement campaign and the destructive consequences of the land investigation
movement in the countryside, Luo Ming ﬁnally fought with the Party Central. When
Mao arrived in Changding to rest in October 1932, he was dismissed from the position
of political commissioner of the First Corps of the Red Army. Although he did not have
dominant power in Party Central, Mao could use hispersonal relations with other leaders
to manipulate his power network. When Luo Ming visited Mao, Mao suggested how to
overcome Jiang’s attack. Luo accepted Mao’s opinions. Luo held a conference of the

Fujian Committee, conveyed Mao’s directions and gained approval. Luo was assigned as

94

a general representative to Longyan-Yongding-Shanghang to conduct guerrilla warfare.

However, victory over J iang’s fourth encirlement campaign was achieved by somewhat
automatic operation of lower level organization. When one of the main leaders of the Party
Central, Gu Bo, came to Ruijin and asked the Fujian Committee to adopt the method of
aggressive attack, Luo Ming wrote a report asking the Party Central to revise its policy. In
this report, Luo emphasized several points: military pewer should be concentrated in Minxi
to consolidate the base area, proper local autonomy should be preserved, and the Party
should not take over the work of government. Consequently, his opinions were criticized as
showing “disappointment with the revolution, opportunism, and conservative defeatism”.
The Party Central concluded: “The formation of the Luo Ming Line is not accidental. It
has historical and social roots”. Therefore it decided to launch an anti-Luo-Ming Line
struggle among organizations.203

The anti-Luo-Min g Line struggle spread from top to bottom, from the Fujian Committee
to the village soviets. Any person who had different opinions was attacked. From its
launching in February 1933 to the start of the Long March in 1934, many higher-level and
experienced cadres such as Zhang Dingcheng and Guo Diren were criticized, as were the
leading cadres of lower level organizations. In Jiangxi, many cadres were punished as
so-called “Jiangxi Loo-Ming Liners”. After all, this struggle was a struggle between the
Wang Ming Line and the Mao Zedong Line. The result of this movement was the loss of
the Soviet area.” But in the end, it turned out to be a contribution to the conﬁrmation of

Maoism.

3 Concluding Remarks

To take all into account, the factors of ecological setting, the characteristics of the local
leaders, confrontation between state-building and revolution and the dialectical relation
between ideology and organization, all contributed to the CCP’s intra-party struggle

95

during the Soviet period, as demonstrated by the correspondence among the multi-level
organizations.

_ Actually the words with which Li Lisan criticized the work of a special committee
in Jiangxi showed that the Party Central understood the problems in the soviet area and
had the same opinion as the provincial committee on how to resolve the problems in the
red area, such as exterminating the counterrevolutionaries, expanding the red area and
strengthening the leadership of the Party. Li said: “ [the special committee] lacks a
correct theoretical political base. It was surrounded by peasants’ conservatism and wrong
political theory...now only the method of changing the conservatism of peasant mentality
can eliminate landlords and overcome the opportunist of the rich peasants?” But the
problem was that when the Party Central tried to force the local party organization to
fulﬁll its policy, the ﬂexibility the local party needed to respond to local situations was
quietly lost, which can be seen as a confrontation between state-building and revolution.
Furthermore the principle of the system of democratic centralism legitimized the Party
Central’s right to impose its idea on the party cadres and the masses rather than to listen to
them.

To contrast the results of the pressure from the top and the declining autonomy of the
local party, the abolition of the Xi’nan District Soviet provided an example of how peasant
mentality and local complexity could bring an authority down during a revolutionary period,
a situation which could not be tolerated timing the state-building era. Besides, personal
orientation of organizational activities was not appropriate to the task of bureaucracy-
building from the top, either. However the reciprocal help between state-building and
revolution that the CCP hoped for was hard to achieve. Most expedient methods to stage
an uprising became obstacles for state-building work during the Soviet period. When the
intellectual backgrounds of the so-called petty bourgeoisie helped the local Communist
leaders to penetrate local power structure from 1927-29, the same backgrounds made them
vulnerable later. In the end, the purge of the Social-Democratic Party and the Anti-Luo—

96

Ming Line struggle seemed inevitable and many local leaders were killed or punished for
their intellectual backgrounds and different opinions. '

fro:
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line
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of t
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of ti
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orga

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inter:

andc

CONCLUSION

When the focus of scholarly studies of the Chinese Communist revolution changed
from looking for a general explanatory pattern to studying local context, the roles of
peasants. party, state, rural elite, and various manifestations of international forces had
to be taken into account in local situations, and the development of the revolutionary
processes there traced. In doing that. most such studies suggested that “...the boundary
lines between appeals and organization, domestic and international factors, structures and
motivations, break down”.206 That is why Perry also believes that “ there is no single legacy
of traditional Chinese rebellion, but many such legacies, each adapwd to the particular
ecological exigencies under which it evolved and each differing perhaps in its suitability to
the service of modern revolution?” Although she did not look for a general explanation
fm the success of the Chinese Communist Revolution, Perry did discover the importance
of the mediation of local social structure. Likewise, Stephen Averill noted the function of
multi-tiered local elites was critical to the CCP’s revolutionary work. This study tries to
rebqu linkage between generalization and local uniqueness, between history from the top
and from the bottom, by noticing how the dialectical relationship between ideology and
organization, and the ambiguous principle of democratic centralism, interact with the local
ecological setting.

In chapters one and two, I have shown how the characteristics of loCal leaders
interacted with aspects of Minxi’s ecological setting, such as local militarization, economic
bankruptcy, widespread peasant grievances, and the differential development of peripheral
and core areas. In the peripheral area, where the villages were backward, self-sufﬁcient,

97

98

and relatively centrally-located, lineages were strong and local elites had determination and
power to resist any interference from outside. Such villages tended to adopt “protective
strategies”. Examples of such places were the Wubei area and Changding’s Liancheng
township. When the small market towns in these areas declined, and their local social
structure began to be destroyed by outside inﬂuences, they tended to produce “predatory
gentry”, such as happened in Wu’nan area and in Longyan’s Yanshi township. Although
the peripheral area generally proved to be the unproductive territory for the Communist
revolution, the case of Fu Bocui in Shanghang’s Jiaoyang village revealed how thoroughly
revolutionary tendencies and protective characteristics could could be combined in a single
local leader.

The Minxi Communist movement originawd anddeveloped in the core area, Shanghang-
Yongding-Longyan. Before 1927’s massacre, in the county seats the returned revolutionary
intellectuals from Guangdong and Xiamen, most of them belonging to the lower layer
of local elites, worked together and cultivawd power networks by initiating left-win g
organizations, cooperating with enlightened upper elites and ﬁghting warlords. Although
under the inﬂuence of Mao Zedong’s and Peng Pai’s teachings the Minxi revolutionaries
focused on the peasant movement from the beginning, they did not have real contact with
the peasants until 1927. when the “white terror” came, the alliance between upper and
lower elites broke and the revolutionary young men ﬂed to the countryside. It was in
the countryside of the core area that the young Communist revolutionaries learned how
to mobilize the masses. However, working in the county seats allowed the Communist
intellectuals to accumulate political capital and to develop solid relations with other lower
level elites, which substantially affected later uprisings. The local uprisings staged by
' Deng Zihui and Zhang Dingcheng demonstrated the sorts of strategies lower elites could
’ adopt to mobilize the masses according to the resources at hand. Deng Zihui was an elite
from a “declining household”, while Zhang Dingcheng rose from a poor peasant family.
but no matter what background they had, they tried to appeal to as many people as possible

 

99

and gained help from organizations and other young revolutionaries, who also took refuge
in the countryside. Therefore to stage fruitful uprisings, Deng and Zhang followed the
orders of the Party on the one hand, and developed their own functional strategies on the
other. By doing this, they kept local autonomy. The abolition of the Xi’nan District Soviet
illustrated how much ﬂexibility a local party nwded to respond to the requirements of the
people. That is, during the period of local uprisings, local autonomy was allowed and the
name of dictatorial political organization was restrained. But after the Minxi base area
was established, the whole situation was different.

The linkage between local structure and CCP policy was how the party interpreted
the principle of democratic centralism and how they dealt with the dialectical relationship
between ideology and organization. From the CCP’s internal documents, we can perceive
that before the formation of the leftist Party Central many problems in the red area had
emerged already, such as prevalent peasant mentality, counter-revolutionary activities,
economic crises, inadequate Soviet work and weakness of party leadership. By then
even the leftist Party Central understood the situation in Minxi quite well. The difﬁcult
issue here was how to deal with: the situation properly. From the higher-level point
of view, the only way to solve these problems was to expand the red area. to pacify
counter-revolutionaries ruthlessly and to reﬁne the party organization, that is, to proceed
with the work of state-building and revolution. From the local party’s point of view, the
situation was more delicate to handle. Therefore when the Party Central used the principle
of democratic centralism to ask the lower-level party to enact the left-line policy more
forcefully and the latter did not do so satisfactorily, higher-level criticism of conservatism
intensiﬁed. and so did suspicion. Consequently, the pressure from the top became stronger
and stronger.

i Because the problems in Minxi were perceived both by the lower and upper levels
of organizations, the beginning of left-line formation was not resisted by the local party;

instead, the local party assented to the policy and tried to implement it properly. Besides

100

the inﬂuence from the Third International, the distortion of terminology and the local
complications made the whole development in Minxi get out of control. At the beginning
of the campaign to purge counterrevolutionaries, targets were deserting soldiers and
pessimistic party members. When the target turned to Fu Bocui and the Social Democratic
Party, the tragedy started. Primarily, the catastrophe of the Purge of the Social Democratic
Party was a result of aggressive policies and intertwined local complexities, and I believe,
the latter was more at the core of the issue, for even the orders from the top could not stop
it.

As to. the Anti-Luo-Min g Line Movement, it was an escalation of struggle from the
social-political aspect to the ideological aspect. Owing to the principle of democratic
centralism, Luo Ming felt it legitimate to report hisidifferent opinions to the Party Central
Likewise, the Party Central was legitimate to correct the wrong thinking among the lower-
level organizations by the principle of democratic centralism. Not until the loss of the
Central base area would the Wang Ming Line be abandoned and Maoism form, which was
also an evidence of lack of universally accepted interpretation of Communism. As a result,
the outcome of practice became the only menace to judge the legitimacy of ideological
interpretation. However the factors of ideology, organization and reality all interacted
complexly to contribute to the CCP’s intra-party political struggle.

To sum up, the social roots of the political struggle in Minxi should be traced back to its
ecological setting and characteristics of local leaders, including both counter-revolutionaries
and revolutionaries. Its organizational roots were the various degrees of autonomy the
upper level of organizations could tolerate, and the confusing explanation of the principle of ‘
democratic centralism. Social roots were different in different areas, while organizational
roots could be found in all of the CCP’s Soviet areas. That was why the Purge of the
Social Democratic Party was unique in Minxi, while the Anti-Luo-Ming Line Movement
prevailed in the whole Central base area. Such an interaction constructed the linkage
between local society and CCP’s organization and signiﬁcantly modiﬁed the form and the

 

101

content of the political struggles in Minxi.

 

10.

ll.

12.

13.

NOTES

. Elizabeth J. Perry, Rebels and Revolutionaries in North China 1845-1945, Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1980, R253

Ibid., p.250

. Ibid., p.4

Ibid., p.257

. Stephen C. Averill, “Local Elites and Communist Revolution in the Jiangxi Hill

Country,” in Chinese Local Elites and Structures of Dominance, edited by Joseph
esherick and Mary Rankin, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990, p.44

Ibid. pp.45-46

. minxi geming genjudi shi (The History of the Minxi Base Area), beijing: Huaxia

chubanshe, 1987, p.1

. Hu'shidu, Changding feiluan shi (The History of the Bandit Chaos in Changding),

Taizhong, Taiwan: Renwen chubanshe, 1973, p.7
Minxi geming genjudi... p.1
Hu Shidu, Changdingfeiluan... p.12

Hu Shidu, “Xiantong nianjian taipingjun cuanrao Dingzhou zhi jingguo” (The
Episode of the Taiping Army Harassing ding Prefecture During the years of the
Emperors of Xianfeng and Tongzhi), in Changding wenxian, Vol.1 1974, p.37

Hu Shidu, Changding feiluan... pp. 79-80

'“Zhonggong fujian shengwei guangyu Minxi zhengzhi jingji zhuangkuang yujinhou

gongzuo fangzhen de jueding, 3/8/1929” (The Decision of the Fujian Committee
on the Work direction of the Minxi Pokitics and Economy, March 8, 1929), in
Hongsijun ru Min he gutian huiyi wenxian ziliao (xubian), (The Continued Edition

102

 

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.
19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

25.

103

of Material of the Red Fourth Army Entering Fujian Province and the Gutian
Meeting), edited by Research Institution of Fujian Provincial CCP Committee for
Party History and Party School, Fuzhou: Fujian rennrin chubanshe, 1980, p.2

Hu Shidu, Changdingfeiluan... p.9

G. William Skinner, “Regional Urbanization in Nineteenth- Century China,” in
his The city in Late Imperial China, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977,
pp.211-49

“Zhonggong Minxi di yi ci daibiao dahui zhi zhengzhi jueyl an, 07/10/1929” (The
Political Resolution of the Minxi First Party Congress, July 10, 1929), in Hongsijun
ru Min he Gutian huiyi wenxian ziliao, edited by Research Institution of Fujian
Provincial CCP Committee for Party History and party School, Fuzhou: Fujian
renmin chubanshe, 1979, pp. 69-70

“Minxi tudi wenti niaokan” (An Aerial View of the Problem of Minxi Land),
in Fujian sheng nongcun jingii cankao ziliao huibian (The Reference Material
Collection on the Fujian Rural Economy), edited by Fu J ialin, Fuzhou: Economic
research jinstitution of Fujian Bank, 1941, p.173

“Zhongong Minxi di yi ci daibiao dahui...”p.69

Chen Maogong, “Dingjiang: Minxi Yuedong zhi da dongrnai” (The Artery between
Minxi and Eastern Guangdong: the Ding River), in Changding Wenxian Vol. 3,
1977. p.33

Minl‘ti geming... p.3
Hu shidu, Changding'feiluan... p.85

Wang Pingbin g, “Minxi muchuan gonglen yundong de huiyi lu” (The Memoir of the
Boatrnan Movement in Minxi), in Minxi wencong, 1982:4, p.49; Wang Zengneng,
“Dang nian Wuping de shangye zhongzheng-Xiabei” (The Chief Industrial Town
in Wuping in Those Years-Xiabei), in Wuping. wenshi ziliao, Vol.5, 1985, p.7

“Zhonggong Minxi di yi ci daibiao dahui...” p. 72

. Minxi geming... p. 34

Averill, “Local Elites...”p.48

 

26.

27.

28.
29.
30.
31.

32.

33.
34.
35.
36.

37.

38.

39.

41.

104

Roy Hoﬂleinz, Jr., “The Ecology of Chinese Communist Success: Rural Inﬂuence
Patterns,” in Chinese Communist Politics in Action, edited by A. doak Barnett,
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969, p.77

Jie Yuan, “Wubei fengjian geju qingkuang zuitan” (Review on the Situation of the
Feudal Occupation in Wubei District), in Wuping wenshi ziliao, Vol.5, 1985, p.56

Ibid., pp.57-59

ibid., pp.59-63

Hu Shidu, Changding feiluan... p.78

Wang Zengneng, “Dang nian Wuping de...” pp.3-10

Shi Qinglan, “Zhong Shaokui fuchenlu” The History of Zlong Shaokui’s Rising
and Falling), in Wuping wenshi ziliao, vol.6, 1985, pp.1-3

Ibid., p.3
Ibid., p. 1 1
Ibid., PP.8-9

Shi Zheng, “J iefan g qian Yanshi zhengzhi gaikuang” (The general Political Situation
in Yanshi Township Before the Liberation), in Longyan wenshi ziliao, Vol.11, 1985,
pp.55-56; Yu Bo and Shall Nong, “wu e bnu zuo de Pen Shunrong: (The bully
Committing Every Kind of crime, Pen Shunrong), in Wuping wenshi ziliao, Vol.6,
1985, pp.18- 32; Hu Shidu, Changdingfeiluan... p.79

chen Saiwen, “Fu bocui yu Jiaoyang baodong” (Fu Bocui and the Jiaoyang
Uprising), in Fujian dangshi yuekan (Fujian party history monthly), 1988:8, p.41

Fu Bacui, “Tudi geming chuqi Shanghang bei si qu nongrnin wuzhuang douzheng:
(The Peasant Armed Struggle in Bei si On in Shanghang during the Beginning of
the Land Revolution), in F ujian wenshi ziliao, Vol.7, 1983, p.1

Chen Saiwen, “fu bocui yu Jiaoyang baodong...” p.41

Jiang Boying, Deng Zihui zhuan‘ (The biography of Deng Zihui), Shanghai renmin
chubanshe, 1986, pp.68-70

Fu Bocui, “Tudi gemin chuqi...” p.7

 

42.

43.

45.

46.

47.

48.

49.

50.
51.
52.

53.

105

Fu Bocui, “Mao zhuxi shuailing hongsijun jinru Minxi” (Chairman Mao Leading the
Red Fourth Army Entering Minxi), in Fujian wenshi ziliao, vol.7, 1983, pp.19-29

Averill, “Local Elites...” pp.12-l4

. Hu Shidu, Changdingfeiluan... p.47

Averill, “Local Elites...” p.29

guo Jie, “Kaiming xuexiao shi” (The History of the Kaiming Elementary School),
in Longyan wenshi ziliao, Vol.11, 1985, pp.88-90

Hofheinz, “The Ecology of Chinese communist Success...” pp.72-75. Hofheinz
observes that the Communist inﬂuence could be classiﬁed by three quite different
types of relationship with the countryside: the radical hotbed type of county, the
border area base county and the great rear area. As to the “radical hot ” type
of county, it includes areas where the movement obtainsthe intense commitment
of a signiﬁcant minority. “The converts were often younger intellectuals, such as
schoolteachers, or native peasent leaders.” These radical hotbeds produce more
than their share of future leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, such as Hunan,
Haifeng and parts of guangdong or Shanxi.

Lin J in, “Fujian zaoqi jiandang shihua” (The History of the Party Establishment in
Fujian in Early Period), in Minxi wencong, l982:l, p.76; “Di yi ci guonei geming
zhanzheng shiqi Fujian dang de zuzhijigou, lingdao renyuan biandong qingkuangji
qi zhuyao huodong” (The Organizations, changing Leadership and Main Activities
of Fujian Party in the Period of the First Revolution), in Zhonggong dangshi ziliao,
vol.l7, 1986, pp.243-4 '

Chen Dashan, “yanren (ershi niandai) qiaoxue jimei gaikuang” (The General
Situation of the Longyan People Studying in Jimei Namal school), in Longyan
wenshi ziliao, vol.11, 1985, pp.100-4

Minxi geming... p. 12‘
Ibid., Pull-17

Jian Cheng and Guo Tien, “Dingshu qingnien cai Guangzhou chuangban de ding
lei” (The Newspaper of Ding Lei, Published by the Changding Young men in
Guangzhou), in Dangshi ziliao yu yanjiu, l986:4, pp.54»56

Jiang boying, Deng Zihui zhuan... pp.28-42

106

54. Minxi geming... pp.8-9

55. Jiang Boying, DengZihui zhuan... pp.23-28

56. Hofheinz, “The Ecology of Chinese Communist Success...” p.75
57. Minxio geming... p. 17 '

58. Ibid., pp.17-18

59. Ibid., pp.21-25

60. Ibid. p.24

 

61. “di yi ci guonei geming zhanzheng...” p.241

62. Lin Jin, “Fujian caoqi jiandang...” p.78

63. “Di yi ci guonei geming zhanzheng...” p.244 -

64. Ibid., p.245

65. Lin Jin, “Fujian caoqi jiandang...” p.84 Minxi geming... p.236

66. Minxi geming... pp.46-70; Lai Jian’an, “Luelun Pinghe baodong de ji ge wenti”
(Several Comments on the Problems of the Pinghe Uprising), in Fujian dangshi
yuekan, 1988.8, pp.44-6. Changle village was located far from the county seat
and the uprising was basically managed by the Communist member, Zhu Jilei,
who was a native of Jiufeng village in Pinghe. In contrast to the comment on
the Jiaoyang uprising, the directive of May 7, 1928 from the Party Central to the
Fujian Committee criticized that the Pinghe-Changle uprising “was only a drama
of burning and robbery performed by eight hundred people...which committed a
serious mistake of adventurism.” The criticism indicated that the whole procedure
of Pinghe uprising was not managed as delicately as the Longyan- Houtian and
Shanghang-Jiaoyang uprisings were.

Zhu Jilei entered the Jimei Normal School in the fall of 1923 and was
dismissed because he participated in a student strike. In March 1926, introduced by
Luo Ming, Zhu attended the ﬁfth class of the Canton Peasant Institute and joined
the CCP in June of the same year. It seemed that ﬂlu did not have such working
experience with another revolutionaries in city as the Longyan and Shanghang
Communists did, for he went back to home town right after graduation from the
Canton Peasant Institute. From his educational record, it was appropriate to assume

67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.

74.

75.

107

that Zhu was born in a poor and was not involved in any speciﬁc gentry circle.
Another presumption is that Jiufeng and Changle townships might be poor and
only had a few of intellectuals. However Zhu looked for comrades among poor
intellectuals and then focused on the peasant work. At the end of 1926, Zhu
established the Pinghe Party Branch in jiufeng township and assumed the position
as a secretary. In September of 1927, the Pinghe County Peasant Association was
established with Zhu as its chairman. The development of peasant movement in
Pinghe county mounted to a peak when the peasants violently resisted to pay rents
and taxes, and to serve military assignment. By the time of uprising, there were less
than eithty Party members in Pinghe county.

The uprising was aroused on March 8, 1928, after the government seized
peasant representatives on the way to the peasant congress. being infuriated, the
masses asked for uprising. To respond the mass requirement, the Pinghe County
Branch set up an uprising committee with Zhu as the gheneral commander. Besides
the Changle peasant army, Zhu asked the peasant armies of Yongding county
and Dapu and Yaoping counties in Guangdong for help. Because of imperfect
communication and poor discipline of peasant armies, the besiege of the county
seat was destroyed by the warlord army in three hours.

Minxi geming... p.2

Longyan xianzhi (Longyan Gazetteer), Chapter 2, p.12, and Chapter 4, p.75
Ibid., Chapter 17, p.26

“Minxi tudi wenti...” p. 173

Longyan xianzhi... Chapter 7, p.1

Guo Jie, “Kaiming xueshiao...” pp.85-93

Longyan xianzhi... Chapter 6, p.2; Guo Yi,an, “Tongbopian fengwu Shiling” (The
Trivia of the customs in the Tongbo Village), in Longyan wenshi ziliao, Vol.11,
1985.6, p.14

Deng Zihui, “Longyan renmin geming dozheng huiyi lu” (The Memoir of the
Longyan People’s Struggle), in Fujian dangshi zilizo, Vol.2, 1983, p.2 ‘

Zheng Xueqiu, Cheng Xianhai, Zhang Zhaosheng and Guo Xiang, “Guo diren,”
in Zhonggong dangshi renwu zhuan Vol. 15. (The Biographies of the History of
the Chinese communist Party), Zhonggong dangshi renwu yanjiuhui (ed.), Xi’an:
Shanxi renmin chubanshe, 1988, pp. 357-60

 

76.
77.

78.

79.
80.
81.
82.
83.
84.
85.
86.
87.
88.
89.

91.
92.
93.

108

Deng Zuhui, “Longyan renming geming...” pp.2-4
Jiang Boying, Deng Zihui zhuan... pp.1-3

“Deng Zihui gei Zheng Fengrrien (Bishan0 de xin: (The Letter of Deng Zihui to
Zheng Bishan), in Longyan wenshi ziliao, Vol.11, 1985.6, pp.21-22

Jiang Boying, Deng Zihui zhuan... pp.3-22
Ibid., p.22

Ibid., p.24

Ibid., p.25

Ibid., pp.26-27

Ibid., pp.28-29

Ibid., pp.29-34

Ibid., p.34

Deng Zihui, “Longyan renmin...” p.4
Ibid., pp.37-9

Ibid., pp.40—43

Ibid., pp.41-43

Ibid., p.52

Ibid., pp.53-57

Deng Zihui, “Longyan remin...” p.9; Lian Shaopeng,”Yi xinyan tongzhi she he
Su Qingyun” (To Memorize the Association of New Longyan comrades and Su
Qingyun), in Longyan wenshi ziliao, Vol.11, 1985, pp.4l-45. Su was a native of
Longyan, and had been one of the founders of Xinyan tongzhi she (the Association
of the New Longyan Comrades) in Xiamen city in 1926 when he worked as an
editor in a newspaper company. As many Longyan young med tlid, Su went back to
the county to engage in reform work. Althrough he was not a Communist, Su was
forced to leave for Xiamen for refuge in 1927. With Zhan Diaoyuan’s support, Su
got a chance to return and to reestablish GMD work in the county in 1927.

 

94.
95.
96.

97.

98.

100.
101.
102.
103.
104.

105.

106.
107.

108.

109

Jiang Boying, Deng Zihui zhuan... p.59
Deng Zihui, “Longyan renmin geming dozheng...” p.11
Ibid.. PP.9-10.

Ibid., P.12. The second white terror was caused by a minor uprising in Longyan
capital. According to the direction from the Min’nan Special Committee, the
Longyan Party branch looked for a chance to organize an armed uprising to match
with the tide of the Nanchang Uprising. Owing to the lack of its own armed force,
the Longyan Party branch planned to welcome a passing army to the county seat
to help the uprising, which was a battalion of army divided from the Nanchang
Uprising and led by Jiang Guangnai and Cai Guohui, led his army ﬂeeing out
of the capital. During the absency, Guo Diren led thousands of people to repress
counter- revolutionaries. But the Jiang-Cai army only stayed for two days, then
Chen Guohui’s army came back and executed a ruthless suppression, the so-called
“second white terror” in Longyan county.

Minxi geming genjudi... p.43; Jiang Boying, Deng Zihui zhuan... pp.62-3
Deng Zihui, “Longyan renmin geming dozheng...” p.13

Ibid., P.14

Deng Zihui, “Lon gyan renmin geming dozheng...” p.14

Jiang Boying, Deng Zihui zhuan... p.64

Ibid., p.65

Ibid., pp.65-8

Wang pingbing, “Minxi muchuan gongren yundong de htriyi” (The memoir of the
Boatrnen’s Movement in Minxi), in Minxi wencong, 1982:4, pp.48-9; Fujian sheng
dituce (The Fujian map), Fuzhou: Fujiansheng ditu chubanshe, 1982, pp.7l-2

Minxi geming genjudi... p.14
Ibid., pp.14-24

Chen Saiwen, “Fu bocui yu Jiaoyang baodong” (Fu Bocui and the Jiaoyang
Uprising), in Fujian dangshi yuekan, 1988.8, p.41

109.

110.
111.
112.

113.

114.
115.
116.
117.
118.

119.

120.
121.

122.

123.

124.
125.

126.

110

Fu Bocui, “Tudi geming chuqi Shanghang bei si qu nongmin wuzhuang dozheng”
(The Peasant Armed Struggle in the Bei Si Qu of Shanghang timing the Beginning
of the Land Revolution), in Fujian wenshi ziliao, Vol.7, 1983, p.1

Chen Saiwen, “Fu Bocui yu Jiaoyang...” p.42

Fu bocui, “Tudi geming chuqi...” p.2

Jiang Boying, Deng Zihui zhuan... p.69

“Zhonggong Minxi di yi ci daibiao dahui zhi zhengzhi jueyi’an” (The Political
Resolution of the Minxi ﬁrst Party Congress), in Honsijun ru Min he Gutian huiyi
wenxian ziliao (The Material of the Red Fourth Army Entering Fujian and the Gutian

meeting), edited by Research Institution of Fujian Provincial CCP Committee for
Party History and Party School, Fuzhou: Fujian renmin cubanshe, 1979, p.79

Jiang Boying, Deng Zihui zhuan... p.69

Chen Saiwen, “Fu Bocui yu Jiaoyang...” p.43
“Zhonggong Minxi di yi ci daibiao dahui...” p.79
Fujian sheng dituce... p.69-70

Shishi xinbao (Current Affair Newspaper), 1935-07

Fan Yuanhui, “Jinsha Baodong” (The Jinsha Uprising), in Yongding wenshi ziliao,
Vol.1, 1982, p.28

Ibid.. PP.27-9
Wang Pingbing, “Minxi muchuan gongren...” p.49-50

Chen Zhen and Zhu Jing, “Yongding baodong yu Zhang Dingcheng tongzhi” (The
Yongding UPrising and Comrade Zhang Dingcheng), in Fujian luntan (The Fujian
Forum), 1982:], p.6

“Zhang Dingchen g”, in The Biographies of the Chinese Communists, vol.36, 1988,
pp,177-8

Ibid. pp.178-9
Ibid. pp.179-180
Ibid., p.180

127.

128.

129.
130.

131.

132.
133.
134.

135.
136.

137.
138.

139.
140.

141.

111

Zhang Dingchen g, Zhongguo gongchandang chuangjian Minxi geming genjudi
(The Chinese Communist Party Establish Minxi Revolutionary Base Area), Fuzhou:
Fujian renmin chubanshe, 1982, p.6; “Zhang Dingcheng...” p.180-181

Chen Zhen and Zhu Jin, “YOngding baodong...” p.6; Fan Yuanhui, “Jinsha
baodong...” pp.30-31; “Zhang dingcheng...” pp.181-183

Chen Zhen and Zhu Jin, “Yongding baodong yu...” pp.6-7
Ibid.. DIM-8

Jiang Boying, Minxi geming genjudi shi (The History of the minxi Revolutionary
Base Area), Fuzhou: fujian renmin chubanshe, 1988, p.345; Lian Yin, “Mianhuai
Zhang dingcheng tongzhi zai Fujian geming dozheng zhong de gongji” (To
Memorize Zhan g Dingcheng’s Accomplishment in the Revolutionary Struggle
in Fujian), in F ujian luntan (The Fujian Forum), 1982:2, pp.3l-32

Jiang boying, Minxi geming genju... p.345
Jiang boying, Deng Zihui zhuan... pp.71-73

Kong Yongsong and Qiu Songqing, Minxi geming genjudi dc jinji jianshe (The
Economic Construction in Minxi Revolutionary Base Area), Fuzhou: Fujian
renmin chubanshe, 1981, pp.12-21

Zhang dingcheng, Zhongguo gongchandang chuanjian... pp.19-20

Benjamin 1. Schwartz, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao, Cambridge:
Harvard University press, 1951, pp.127-204; John E. Rue, Mao Tse-tung in
Opposition 1927-1935, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966, pp.157-237

Stephen C. Averill, “The Origin of the Futian incident...” pp.66-67

Paul A Cohen, Discovering History in China, New York: Columbia University
press, 1984, pp.196

Arif Dirlik, The Origins of Chinese Communion, Oxford: Oxford University press,
1989. PP.267-69

maulice Meisner, Li Ta-chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism, Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1967, pp.197-209

Ibid., p.271

142.

143.
144.
145.
146.
147.
148.
149.
150.
151.

152.

153.
154.

155.

112

Zhongyang geming genjudi shiyao (The Excerpts of the History of the Central
Revolutionary Base Area), edited by Kong Yongsong, Lin Tianyi and Dai J insheng,
Nanchang: Jianxi renmin chubanshe, 1985, pp.314

Minxi geming genjudi... p.56; Jiang Boying, Minxi geming genjudi... p.346
Minxi geming genjudi... pp.58-65

Ibid., p.67

Ibid. pp.68-77

Ibid. pp.77-81

Zhongyang geming genjudi shiyao... pp.80-81

Minxi geming genjudi... pp.94-96

ibid., pp. 106-1 13

Ibid., p. l 13

Kong Yongson g and Qiu Qngsong, Minxi geming genjudi dejingiijianshe, Fuzhou:
Fujian renmin chubanshe, 1981, pp. 14-16

Minxi geming genjudi... p. 120

“Zhonggong Fujian shengwei baogao — Minxi zuijin qingkuang ji shengwei dui
Minxi douzheng de guliang yu zhishi (4/20/1929)’ (The Report of the CCP Fujian
Committee on April 20th 1929, the Current Situation in Minxi and the Estimation
and Direction on Minxi’s Struggle), in Hongsijun ru Min he Gutian huiyi wenxian
ziliao, (The material of the Red Fourth Army Entering Fujian and the Gutian
meeting), edited by the Research Institution of Fujian Provincal CCP Committee
for Party History and Party School, Fuzhou: Fujian renmin chubanshe, 197 8,
pp.6-l3

“Zhonggong fujian shengwei gei zhongyang de gaogao — junshi, dangwu yu
difang gongzuo qingkuang (5/1929)” (The Report of the Fujian Committee to Party
Central on May 1929, the Situations of Military, Party Affairs and Local Work), in
Hongsijun ru min he Gutian huiyi wenxian zliao (ruban), (The Contnued Edition
of the material of the Red Fourth Army Entering Fujian Province and the Gutian
Meeting), edited by the Research Instituton of Fujian Provincial CCP Committee for
Party History and Party School, FuzzhouzFujian renmin chubanshe, 1980, pp.19-20

156.

157.

158.

159.

160.
161.

162.

163.

164.

113

“Xunshiyuan Xie Yunkang gei Yongdng xianwei bing zhuan Minxi tewei, sijun
qanwei de sn (8/07/1929)” (The Letter of the Fujian Commime on August 7th 1929
to the Yongding Committee, minxi Special Committee and the Front Committee),
in the em Hongsijun ru Min... (the continued edition), pp.70-71

“Xunshiyuan Xie Yunkang gei zhonggong Fujian shengwei de baogao — guang
yu Jin Dinghan ru Min yu women dc yingfu fangce deng qingkuang he wenti
(10/25/1929)” (The Report of the Inspector, Xie Yunkang, to the Fujian committee
on October 25th 1929 — Concerning the situations and problems of Jin Dinghan’s
troops entering Fujian Province and Our counterplans), in Hongsijun ru Min... (the
continued edition), p.137

“Zhonggong Minxi tewei baogao — Mnxi baodong ji zhengquan, wuzhuang,
qunzhong zuzhi qingkuang (ll/06/l929)” (The Report of the Minxi Special
committee on November 6th 1929 — the Stuations of Minxi Uprisings, Political
Power, Armed Forces and People Organizations), in Hongsijun ru Min... p.173

“Zhonggong Fujian shengwei baogao — Minxi zuijin qingkuang ji shengwe du
Minx douxheng de guliang yu shishi (4120/1929)...”pp.15- 16

Ibid. pp.2021

“Zhonggong Yon gdin g xanwei baogao — zhengzhiwuzhuang douzheng, zuzhi,
xuanchuan gongzuo, ji kuodahui jueyi an (7/06/1929)” (The Report of the Yongding
Committee on July 6th 1929-Politics, Armed Struggles, Organizations, the Work
of Propaganda and the Resolutions of An Enlarged Meeting), in Hongsiju ru Min...
(the continued edition), pp.49-54

“Zhonggong Lon gyan xianwei ge Fujian shengwei de baogao — Hongsijun sanci ru
Yan hou, dang zuzhi yu wuzhuang de fazhan qingkuang ji dangqian gongzuo jihua
(7/09/1929)” (The Report of the Longyan Commttee to the Fujian Committee on
July 9th 1929 — The Developmental Situatons of Party Organizations and Armed
Forces after the Third Time Arrival of the Red Fourth Army in Longyan, and the
anent Working Plans), 11 Hongsijun ru Min...(the continued editition), p.60

“Zhonggong Fujan shengwei ge Minxi tewei, sijun qianwei de xin — guangyu
Minxi dang de gongzuo renwu (IO/0611929)” (The letter of the Fujan Committee
to the Minxi Special commttee and the Front committee on October 6th 1929 —
Concerning the Tasks of the Minxi Party), in Hongsijun ru Min... pp.120—122

“Zhonggong Minx tewei baogao — Minxi baodong ji zhengquan, wuzhuang,
qunzhong zuzhi qngkuang (1 1/06/ 1929)”... pp. 169-170

165.

166.

167.

168.

169.

170.

171.

172.

173.

174.

175.

114

“Zhonggong Fujan shengwei baogao Minxi zuijin qingkuang ji shengwei dui
Minxi douzheng de guliang yu zhishi (4/20/ 1929)”... pp. 12-14; “Zhonggong Fujian
shengwei gei zhongyang de baogao—junshi, dangwu yu difang gongzuo qingkuang
(5/1929)”... p.22

“Zhonggong Yongding sianwei baogao — zhengzhi, wuzhuang douzheng, zuzhi,
xuanchuan gongzxuo, ji kuodahui jueyi an (7/06/1929)”... pp.52-55

“Zhonggong Fujian shengwei gei Mnxi tewei, sijun qianwei de xin — guangyu
minxi dang de gongzuo renwu (10/06/ 1929)”... pp.121-122

“Zhonggong Minxi tewei baogao — Minxi baodong ji zhengchuan, wuzhuang,
qunzhong zuzhi qingkuang (11/06/1929)”... pp.159-161

“Zhonggong Minxi tewei gei shengwei de gbaogao — guangyu dangwu wenti
(12/12/ 1929)” (The Report of the Minxi Special Committee to the Fujian Committee
on December 12th 1929 — Concerning- the Problems of Party Work), in Hongsijun
ru Min... pp.175-177

“Zhonggong fujian shengwei gei Yongdng xianwei bing zhuan Minxi tewei, sijun
qianwei de xin (SIM/1929)”... pp.69-70

“Zhonggong Fujian shengwei gei Minxi tewei, Yanwei ji hongsijun qianwei xin —
Mn Yue'Gan san sheng fandongjunfa hujiaode singshi be women dedouzheng celue
(8/08/1929)” (The Letter of the Fujian committee to the Minxi Special committee,
Longyan committee and the Front committee“ on August 8th 1929 — the Situaton
of the Min-Yue-Gan Warlords’ Attack and our Strategy of Struggle), in Hongsijun
ru Min... (the continued edition), p.82 I

Ibid., p.83

“Zhonggong Fujian shengwei gei Yongding xianwei bing zhuan Minxi tewei, sijun
ganwei de xn (8/07/1929)”... p.72

“Zhonggong Fujan shengwei zhi Minxi tewei ji sijun qianwe xin — muqian
zhengju yu hongjun fan san sheng huijiao’went (9/06/1929)” (The Letter of the
fujan committee to the Minxi Special Committee and the Front Commttee on
September 6th 1929 — the Problem 0f the Current Politcal situation and the
red Army’s Counter-T‘ri-Provincial Attack), in Hongsijun ru Min... (the continued
edition), pp.92-93

Ibid.. pp.94e95

176.

177.

178.

179.

180.

181.

182.
183.
184.
185.
186.
187.
188.
189.

115

“Zhonggong Fujian shengwei ge Minxi t4ewe, sijun qianwei de xin — guangyu
Mnxi dang de gongzuo renwu (IO/06/1929)”... pp.121-122

“Xunshiyuan xie Yunkang gei Fujian Shengwei de baogao — guanyu Jin Dinghan
ru Min yu women de yingfu fangce deng qingkuang he wenti (10/25/1929)” (The
report of the Inspector, Xie yunkang, to the Fujian committee on October 25th
1929 — concerning the Strategy we have to face Jin Dinghan’s Army and other
Problems), in Hongsijun ru Min... (the continued edition), p. 132

“Zhonggong Mnxi tewei baogao — Minxi baodong j zhengchuan, wuzhuang,
qunzhong zuzhi qngkuang (1 1/06/ 1920)”... pp.169-169

“Xunshiyuan Xie Yunkang gei zhonggong Fujian shengwei de baogoa — guangyu
Jin Dinghan ru Min yu women de yingfu fangce deng qingkuang he wenti
00/25/1929)”... pp. 138-140

“Zhonggong Fujian shengwei gei Minxi xunshiyuan ji Minxi tewei de zhishi —
Minxi zhengzhi fenxi yu jinhou gongzuo renwu (11l10/1929)” (The Directive of
the Fujian committee to the Minxi Inspector and the Minxi Special Commttee on
November 11th 1920 The Analyses of the Minx’s Political Situation and the T‘Ask
from Now on), in Hongsijun ru Min... (the continued edition), p. 147

“Zhonggong fujian shengwei gei Minx tewei ji hongsijun qianwei xin — zhengzhi
xingshi, Minxi dang de guoqu ji jinhou gongzuo (1/08/1930)” (The Letter of the
Fujian Committee to the Minxi Special Committee and the Front Committee on
January 8th 1930 — the Political Situation and the Previous and Subsequent Work
of the Minxi Party), in Hongsijun ru Min... (the continued edition), pp.150-151

Ibid.,p.153

Ibd., p.156

Zhongyang geming genjud shiyao... pp. 149-151

Minxi geming genjudi shi..., p.132-133

Ibid., pp.134-135

Ibid., pp.137

Deng Zihui, “Longyan renmin geming dozheng...” p.31
Ibid., pp.137

190.
191.
192.
' 193.
194.
195.
196.

197.

198.
199.
200.
201.
202.
203.
204.
205.
206.

207.

116

Deng Zihui, “Longyan renmin gearing dozheng...” pp.31-32

Kong Yongson, Qiu Songqiing, Minxi geming. genjudi de jingii... pp.24,110
Ibid., p.138

Ibid., p. 138

Ibid., p.202

Ibid., pp.209-210

Ibid., pp.211-215

Jiang Boying, “Minxi suqu de suqing minzhu shehui dang shijian pingshu” (The
Comment on the Purge of the Social-Democratic Party in Minxi Soviet), in Minxi
wencong, 1982:], pp.90-91

Zhongyang geming genjudi shiyao... p.213

Minxi geming genjudi shi... p.143

Jiang Boying, Minxi geming genjudi shi... pp.187, 353

Minxi geming genjudi shi... p.146

Minxi geming genjud shi... p.146; Jiang boying, Minxi geming genjudu shi... p.356
Minxi geming genjudi shi... pp.202-206

Ibid., pp.206-208

Zhongyang geming genjudi shiyao... p. 189

Kathleen Hartford and Steven M. Goldstein, “Introduction: Perspectives on the
Chinese Communist Revoluton,” in their Single Sparks: Chnese Rural Revolutions,
Armonk, New Youk: M. E. Sharpe, 1989, p.33

Perry, Rebels and Revolutionaries... p.257

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“inn“th