MICHIGAN STATE UNIVE SITY UBRARIES . IIIfI/I/Ijflla/f/Iflljlij/IIn;mil/Ii I This is to certify that the dissertation entitled A MOVEMENT WITHOUT VITALITY: COMMUNIST REVOLUTION IN FUJIAN, 1921l-1931I presented by Bixin Huang has been accepted towards fulfillment of the requirements for Ph-D- degree in History 3L1, In a; l/IWM IMajor professor Date 10/6/91} MS U is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution 0-12771 LIERARY Michigan State Unlverslty PLACE ll RETURN aoxmmmmbmum mm. TOAVOID FlNESrctunonorbdoroddoduo. DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE MSU lommmw Opporhmhylmwon mm: in; A MOVEMENT WITHOUT VITALITY: COMMUNIST REVOLUTION IN FUJIAN, 1924-1934 Volume I BY Bixin Huang A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of History 1994 CCI‘E This co hnese Con: between 1924 nuts to cha eccnomic be: {1335 about IEthods. Previor minFltion “it: the I remit mass 312%. Part} $593311? as Wins are file in the T113 study I 3». rt? 1 - I 0l‘ltlonai ‘43' HOrQOVE IEIQ net ent ABSTRACT A MOVEMENT WITHOUT VITALITY: COMMUNIST REVOLUTION IN FUJIAN, 1924-1934 BY Bixin Huang This comprehensive study of the activities of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in China’s Fujian Province between 1924-1934 uses newly-published contemporary docu- ments to challenge some previous assessments of the socio- economic background of the Chinese Revolution and assump- tions about the effectiveness of the CCP's politico-military methods. Previous works have suggested that the CCP used some combination of ideological appeals, organizational skill and/or the prospect of fundamental socioeconomic reforms to recruit masses of discontented Chinese peasants to their cause. Party historians and Western scholars have also generally agreed that the rural base-building strategy whose origins are attributed to Mao Zedong played a significant role in the long-term success of the revolutionary movement. This study suggests that these explanations for revolution- ary success need reevaluation and modification. The pre- revolutionary Fujian rural economy was not sharply declin- ing; some important sectors may actually have been expand- ing. Moreover, many aspects of the revolutionary movement were not entirely new, but rather represented continuations aeijor re'eorkir action, rural I :‘ejian peasant: divergence bet :eant that the tional as it w bated organiz Stan hitherto heist base-b», bility of var and/or reworkings of established patterns of collective action, rural militarization and intra-elite conflict. Also, Fujian peasants were far from being dependable CCP allies; divergence between the perceived interests of both sides meant that the CCP-peasant relationship was as confronta- tional as it was cooperative, and that the CCP’s much-cele- brated organizational mobilization was much less effective than hitherto believed. In addition to these problems, the Maoist base-building strategy was undercut by the incompati- bility of various demands and interests of local and region- al/central authorities. This diss out the assist only provided lent, all of u generously let his own studie iratetul for h wuscript, I HOUld 5 their help ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would never have been possible with- out the assistance of Professor Stephen Averill, who not only provided me with advice, inspiration, and encourage- ment, all of which I needed to accomplish my work, but also generously let me use materials he collected over years in his own studies of Chinese revolutionary history. I am also grateful for his patient and arduous efforts in editing my manuscript. I would also like to thank all the other professors for their help. iv HERCUL'CTION. . . . EKER I. THE SUDDEN The Ori in i “Rebel! The Key Trekkii Summarj H. mm BER "The R The Th Landlo Social Sunzar TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION.......... .................. . ............ 1 CHAPTER I. THE SUDDEN RED TIDE IN THE "LAND OF MIN"........15 The Origin of Communist Activities in Rural Fujian.. ............ ... ....... ..19 "Rebel! Rebelt"... .......................... 27 The Heyday of the Soviet........ ............ 37 Trekking to Failure ......................... 42 Summary ..... . .......... . ................... .51 II. FUJIAN BEFORE THE COMING OF COMMUNISM.... ....... 54 "The Remote land at the End of Sea".........55 The Thriving Economy............. ..... . ..... 62 Landlords and Peasants............... ..... ..77 Social Unrest and Collective Violence.......87 summarYOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO ....... O. ........ .0105 III. THE GENTRY AND INTELLECTUALS IN THE EDDY ....... 111 The Old Elite as a Dominant Force..........114 New Schools Created by the Old Elite.......123 The Genesis of the New Elite...............130 Clashing with the Old......................147 New Elite and the Revolution...............161 Summary........................ ......... ...175 IV. ANUNflSYALLIANCEOOOOOOOOIOOOOOOOOOOO. ...... .0179 "Go Get Rich!".............................183 The Water Which Could Capsize the Boat.....197 Land Redistribution as Ultimate Weapon.....218 Summary238 V. COMMUNIST ORGANIZATIONS IN SOCIAL CONTEXT......244 Eating "Ready Meals"............... .......248 The Party and Secret Societies.............268 "Peasant Consciousness" as a Specter.......273 The Performance of Other Communist V .0 Ham .....szmm».w m5. 4% :4 m _E _as “3m 3’).) .ZOHmvb—iup)’ O o mum ll— 255%.. ‘0' xmgwonn." vi Organizations ......................... ..279 summary.......IOOOOOOOOOOOOOO 00000000000 0.0287 VI - THE FINAL COLLAPSE OF THE MOVEMENT ........... . .291 The Insoluble Problems............. ........ 293 The Purge of the Third Party and the Social-Democratic Party.................300 Not a Glorious Ending......... ..... . ....... 318 The Aftermath of the Revolution............326 summarYOOOO......OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO ....... 0.0.332 CONCLUSION........... ................... . ........... 334 NOTE5351 ABBREVIATIONS........... ....... ...... . ....... ..404 BIBLIOGRAPHY........... ................... .........405 GIll-(assamrem Tap 1. Fujian PI lap 2. The Minx: List of Maps Map 1. Fujian Province.................. ........... 17 Map 2 . The Minxi Revolutionary Base ................ 18 vii subject for hi linese Cczzun tapered to th itere Conuni the way in v.11; iii-‘91 the Cc 515918 act of a‘ v- . e *5 natlonal pc {1;’ L“‘"Y stra: than ‘t . I & SELf. II I “it ' Aged Since INTRODUCTI ON The Communist revolution in China has been an important subject for historians in the West since 1949 when the Chinese Communist Party (the CCP) took national power. Compared to the cases in Russia and many other countries where Communist regimes were set up after the World War II, the way in which the CCP came to national power was rather unique: the Communist takeover did not happen through a sa‘leagle act of armed insurrection (as in the case of Russia) ‘:’3=? with help from foreign Communist powers (as in the cases ‘:’:E? Eastern Europe and North Korea). The CCP fought its way 1::‘=> national power independently with protracted, arduous I"iii-Zlitary struggles against enemies that seemed much stronger than itself. This is probably why studies on the revolution hQVe revolved around the basic question of how and why the QQP succeeded, although the focus and approaches have changed since the 19505. The CCP itself attributes its ‘Tflji~4<:tory to Mao Zedong's "rural strategy." The strategy eTant‘lsahasized that rural China was where the revolutionary It‘Qflluentum was and where the anti-revolutionary strength was the weakest. Therefore, the CCP should establish revolution- fiby bases in the countryside through armed struggle, encir- § . la the cities with those bases, and finally occupy the Cit- 1 Q3. The gist c 'hase-buildin ' building" basic certain areas 1 Conunist govei soviet, in the CCPoezbership all kinds of o] asses"; and f. 3319 base. "1 'land revoluti: 5:“We": the 2°21:de Suc- :U‘Ough the la revolutionary aridexpand; on hoses. there C enduring pepu; ”30's ad\ 2 The gist of the strategy was the idea of so-called 0- base-building" (genju di jianshe). In practice, "base- building" basically meant first of all to take control of certain areas through armed struggle; then to establish a Communist government regime, which was usually called a soviet, in the area; carry out land redistribution, expand CCP membership and the Communist-led armed forces; establish a 11 kinds of organizations as a means to "mobilize the masses"; and finally, if possible, to "develop the economy" in the base. "Base-building" was heavily interdependent with T. land revolution" (featuring land redistribution) and "armed s'tl’uggle": the strategy assumed that the revolution in China Q91nd only succeed through revolutionary wars, and that only through the land revolution would the peasants support the t~e‘volutionary wars so that the bases could be consolidated and expand; on the other hand, without setting up secure be! ses, there could be no land revolution and consequently no enduring popular support for the revolutionary war. Mao’s advocacy of "base—building" was based on his bQ lief in the "historical conditions" which made it possible SQ): the rural bases to exist, and in the "necessity" for the bfi~ses to be set up. The "historical conditions" were the .. brotracted splits and wars among white [i. e., anti-Commu- h 1st] political powers" which were encouraged by China's .- local, agricultural economy" [in contrast to a "unified §§pitalist economy"], and by the imperialist powers' policy EQ "disunite and exploit China" by, among other things, dividing t sity was t atelief i just like create a c es, shaki: splits.“ l aied In". great rev: often sta‘ tion Cong I"'l"w":1'ker. 159 only mid 8113: areas and ticnary p' lid mere 15313th And :«iiha 'I'as agents 0f tionship . he CCP'S fie peaSa. Etlored ; In. , period a I . I 3 cagjgwriding the country into "spheres of influence." The neces- s ity was that only setting up the rural bases could "create an. twelief for the revolutionary masses in the whole country 3’ 1151: like the Soviet Union has done for the whole world, create a considerable difficulty for the reactionary class- es , shaking their ruling foundation and promoting their splits." Besides, only "base-building" could "really create E!» Ized,Army which will serve as the main tool in the future great revolution."' Thus, as official-scholars in China c>15ten state, armed struggle, base-building, and land revolu- tion constituted Mao' s concept of "armed occupation of areas l:*§?’ workers and peasants" (gongnong wuzhuang geju) which was the only correct path through which the revolution in China could succeed.2 Through establishing armed control of rural a*JE‘eas and expanding them gradually, the CCP and the "revolu- ticnary people" under its leadership could accumulate more 'ETJ‘EI<3 more strength, and the cities in the country would be i Qelated and finally captured. Another characteristic of the Communist revolution in <==1tfil;ina was that the Chinese peasants constituted the main a‘Q’ents of the revolution. Naturally, the CCP-peasant rela- ‘t:’:i~Jl:e than ten provinces, leading a Red Army with about 1 O o, 000 soldiers.‘ However, the tide changed its direction in the follow- ;lerfilsg years. By 1934, all the major revolutionary bases in 3QInthern and central China had been crushed by the National- :i‘=55=it government's military suppressions and the main force of ‘:;-r3lIr example, the Communist-led peasant movement which oc- ‘:=‘Jllrred in the Hai-lu-feng area, Guangdong province, in the late 1920s has become the subject of at least three mono- g:C’aphs in the West.‘5 The so-called Jiangxi (Kiangsi) soviet period has also ern one major interest of many scholars in the field of the IC:‘:>0nnmunist revolution in China, although the period is para- deically also still said by some scholars to be "one of the “Q at obscure" in the CCP’s history.7 In 1931, Chinese Commu- l1‘:i~-='s=ts headed by Mao Zedong set up the Soviet Republic of <=Jb3lli.na (often referred to in Western literature as the Jiang- )tiji~ Soviet Republic) in an area straddling Jiangxi and Fujian ETIE=T<=>vinces in south-central China. From 1931 to late 1934, the CCP called this area the Central Revolutionary Base. The th‘m meant that it was the most important revolutionary bfise, one which played a leading role in the CCP-led agrari- al‘j . . . . revolution. It is logical that the revolution in the area a Esq mamas” swim” as gm 6 has attracted much scholarly attention, considering the prominent position of the revolution in the history of the Communist movement in China. Large amounts of literature have been generated on the period.8 However, as Philip Huang noted in 1978, studies of the Jiangxi soviet period up to that time had concentrated mainly on top-level power strug- gles and line disputes.9 This is understandable. Since the period is "obscure," the first thing historians need to do is to find out "what happened." Therefore, many works have been devoted to understanding issues such as Mao's role in the party power structure, the Communist governmental and administrative structure, the process of the development of the CCP’s organizational concepts and behavioral patterns, and the growth of its organizational techniques of "mass 1 ime" politics which are often believed to have been the J‘Q‘Ierage Mao used to secure the support of the peasants for the revolution.‘0 Nevertheless, many aspects of the history or the Communist revolution during this period and especial- ly information about the relationship between the revolu- t icnary movement and its social environment remained unex- D 3siained by these historians. Beginning from the late 19703 and the early 19803, the .‘ Qfiocial history" approach has been applied to the China ‘3 ield by Western historians." More recently, as Stephen l\\’erill points out, in the studies of CCP history and Chi- l§‘§se Communist revolutionary history, a considerable number 8 scholars have begun to shift their attention away from 2e fccu nature a 13:13:51". f”? mm wt 9.: tetaeen cf the C refle:ti general, m: new ;e:iod )1 .33 ten $2.58! pel 3551513: 3‘“ Cent: E! Year; In . usually ‘ 451%}: 25° 1°C. the Cant. ‘ the focus on peasants and their conditions to explore the nature and significance of the complex, multi-sided interre- 7 lationships that existed among peasants, elites, and local CCP organizations.l2 Averill’s own studies on the relations between the stratification of the local elite and the rise of the Communist movement in Jiangxi’s hill country is one reflection of this new trend. However, it is a fact that in general, despite these new trends and the availability of much new documentary information, the study of the Jiangxi period has not attracted much scholarly attention in the last ten or more years, as scholars have concentrated on o‘Cher periods and areas--most notably on the Anti-Japanese Iiesistance War period (1937-1945) and the areas of northern and central China where the CCP was most active during the war years. In addition, past studies of the Jiangxi period have Iaanally dealt mainly with what happened in Jiangxi and have 1basically omitted what happened in those portions of the base located in the adjacent province of Fujian. Actually the Central Revolutionary Base was composed of two major a‘:-=‘eas: the southern part of Jiangxi and the western part of F‘ljian. Although the political center of the base was locat- QQ in the Jiangxi part, and the Jiangxi part was relatively :Lfirger in terms of area (in 1932, the area controlled by the QQP in western Fujian accounted for two-fifths of the Cen- ht‘al Revolutionary Base centered in Ruij in, and nearly one "QJf of its population), the Communist movement in the mm wk ‘ me mm “is I Chinese as ties with activitie Cczzunist :azzunis: Soe'iet Go the SOVie 39': lutio: eventual} PIECeded 5 39. Its c :E‘TIUtior studies 0' In a film to ‘ .1310“ i] 8 Fujian part should not have been omitted in the studies of the Central Revolutionary Base. This part of western Fujian, usually referred to in Chinese as the Minxi area, consisted mainly of twelve coun- ties with a population of 2,500,000 at that time. Communist activities began in the area as early as 1926, and the first Communist regime was set up there in 1928, followed by a communist land redistribution. In March 1930, the Minxi Soviet Government was founded. Not until September 1930 was the soviet area in Minxi incorporated into the Central Revolutionary Base. As Gregor Benton says, although Minxi eventually became one part of the Central Base, its soviets preceded southern Jiangxi's, as did its CCP Special Commit- tee. Its Communist movement probably started out with more local cadres than southern Jiangxi, and it began land revo- lution sooner.l3 Therefore, the experience of Communist revolution in the Minxi is too important to be ignored in studies of the Central Revolutionary Base. In addition to the weight the Minxi area bore in rela- tion to the Central Revolutionary Base, the Communist revo- lution in that area itself can serve as an excellent case for the study of many general issues concerning the Commu- nist revolution in China, issues such as the social momentum of the revolution and how the CCP mobilized the peasants, and the reasons why the Communist revolution ebbed and flowed. Fujian's natural and social conditions were quite was: a as EOE any 38. gm... as? as s as was“; r :53 9 “uses? “assay mags H ”v.53 unmumnnc 383% was 5 9 different from those in the provinces where important Commu- nist revolutionary bases were once set up and lasted, and which have, to a much greater extent (compared to Fujian) been studied by historians. Unlike those inland provinces such as Jiangxi, Hunan and Shaanxi where agriculture was the dominant form of economy, Fujian was a coastal province with a highly developed commercial economy before the advent of Communism. Commerce prospered even in Fujian's mountainous, inaccessible western and northern parts, while all the elements looked at by scholars in their studies of the Communist revolution in China--peasants, elites, Communist intellectuals, clans and lineages, secret societies, peasant collective actions, imperialist economic invasion--were also active in the province. In addition, the development of a commercial economy since the Ming dynasty (beginning in 1368) influenced Fujian's social structure and relations to develop their own characteristics. Communist revolution also took place in some other parts of the proVince. The Communist movement in Fujian from 1926 to 1934 went through the "full" process any movement may have: to originate, develop, and decline. All of these features suggest that studying the Communist revolution in Fujian will certainly provide new insight into the under- standing of Communist revolution in China as whole. A large quantity of newly-published documentary materi- al and reminiscences in mainland China in the last ten years or more have made possible a closer and more intensive probe into the ' fine to th< party’s h tent in t1 able ""- Jiangxi p. pesed of 1 ate: Gem 3356 'I'as l 531138 of 11331 1:35 col 3 materials 35:19 the 'intErnall 315 haI-‘IJe: 4113110. 10 into the Communist revolution in Fujian. Before the 19805, due to the CCP’s strict control over materials about the party’s history, the studies of the Chinese Communist move- ment in the West had to rely heavily upon materials avail- able from the Nationalists in Taiwan. For the studies of the Jiangxi period, the Ch’en Ch’eng Collection, which is com- posed of CCP documents seized by the Nationalist troops under General Ch'en Ch'eng when the Central Revolutionary Base was crushed in late 1934, became the most important source of materials in the studies of the Jiangxi period. Unhappily, a considerable amount of the items in this pre- cious collection are CCP propaganda materials and "public" materials such as newspapers which were openly circulated inside the soviet areas. Only a portion are the sorts of "internal" party documents which are most revealing of what was happening inside the party and government organs. The limitations of these available materials formerly made it quite difficult to study certain interesting aspects of the revolutionary movement, and hindered the studies of the Jiangxi period, as well as of the Communist agrarian revolu- tion in China as a whole. The situation has changed since the end of the 19703. With the adoption of relatively liberal and flexible politi- cal and economic policies by the CCP leaders after Mao's death, the party loosened its restrictions on publishing materials on its history. One of the results of this new course has been the publication of large quantities of his- "an: h ...g was any as £33 ...)L 1) R011 0 :I. .3an as )):.o’ 4 ) ((f‘a».( F... a " ”mums s x..." sta ”may." “.53 n... a) . Urban”. ...mm .9 11 torical party documents which had been confidential. Among the most useful of them, as far as studies of the Jiangxi period are concerned, are the three-volume selection of "revolutionary documents" of the Central Revolutionary Base and the twenty-volume collection of documents of the same kind concerning Fujian province. These formerly-unpublished party documents, many of which are reports, instructions and communications among party organizations, reveal a great many facts concerning the revolution as experienced by this part of the CCP. A scrutiny of the documents immediately challenges images of the revolution as shaped by the exist- ing literature produced both in the West and in China. Mainly based on these newly-published materials, this dissertation will study the Communist revolution in Fujian during the period from 1924 to 1934. The paper has two main purposes: first, to present an accurate account of the Communist revolution in Fujian in the period in question, for no such work has been done in the West so far; and second, to explore issues such as the momentum of the revo- lution, the CCP-peasant relationship, the interactions between the existing social institutions and the Communist organizations, the conflict between the CCP’s ideology and social reality, and the reasons for the regional revolu- tion’s collapse. It will find that the existing social condition of rural Fujian was one of the factors shaping the revolution. Since the Communist movement in the Minxi area was the most prominent one in Fujian in terms of its scale, a . . “H. .99. as. ...w ”...ng »‘.rh tourwb n ’DAo)4 *. A. A MI.LOLTA 12 duration and influence, this paper will mainly focus on this area, while secondarily examining the movement in the rest of the province. This study will also explore the interaction between the local elite in Fujian and the Communist revolution. Much has been written on the role of the Chinese local elite in a changing society during the late Imperial period. Schol- arship on the role of the Chinese local elite in the 1911 Revolution has also been generated.“ However, extending the study of the Chinese local elite into the twentieth century revolutionary movement has scarcely been done, although Averill has broken new ground with his studies on the rela- tionship between the economic stratification within the local elite and the emergence of Communist intellectuals in the hill country in Jiangxi.” Local elites in Fujian had been a dominant social force in pre-Communist times. It would certainly be of academic interest to find out what the local elites experienced, and how they helped or hindered the Communist rural revolution in the case of Fujian. As we shall see, the CCP’s radical policy toward the local elite was to cause serious problems for the revolution. Using the Communist agrarian revolution in Fujian as a case study, this work will also explore two more basic issues about the Communist revolution in China: to what extent the CCP were successful in mobilizing the peasants and to what extent "base-building" was in fact a successful strategy for agrarian revolution, as the CCP has claimed and ...mmumnu Spa a... gunman mass H" u n 3.3% “was: . D 1.":j .. 21.5.5 5 25 U ”$33 “USS” nuns an .5 5 ”aim am as £35m 13 Western scholars have never doubted. It should be noted here that the CCP’s assertion that "base-building" was the only correct strategy leading the CCP to victory has been taken for granted by Western scholars, despite the fact that all the bases in middle and southern China met great difficul- ties shortly after their establishment, and finally col- lapsed in 1934. (The base in northwest China area was in serious trouble too at that time, as CCP documents admit).l6 It is time to re-examine this established concept, and the revolutionary bases in Fujian provide us with a very good window through which we can probe into the reality of these Communist rural base-building efforts. As will become clear in the following pages, beginning from mid-1930, the base in western Fujian met great problems which seemed to be insur- mountable to the CCP, and which sapped the vitality of the Communist regimes there. This examination of the Communist agrarian revolution in Fujian will be organized by topics. However, in order to provide a relatively complete picture of the unfolding of the revolution, and the context of the events which will be examined in the topical chapters, the first chapter will be devoted to giving a summary of the history of the Fujian revolution. The second chapter will explore aspects of Fujian's economic and social background, against which the revolution took place. The local elites and the peasants were the two most important social groups involved in the revolution. Therefore, the third and the fourth chapters of ' T J Res mun8. “0...."(.1 I)ha...) .0.8... .Ci I..r.(( will), J. L( 3- J) n SE»... 71:)03- V 14 the dissertation will discuss their respective roles in the revolution. Their relation with the CCP will of course also be one important issue in these two chapters. The last two chapters will focus on exploring the internal causes of the regional revolution's final failure and the elimination of Communist regimes in the province, although the vitality of the CCP revolutionary bases in Fujian is also a theme going through the whole dissertation. The interaction between the existing social institution and the Communist ideology will also be a theme going through the whole paper. late a... ‘Ull‘!’ Fray” :14 I ' ‘ bk: “*6 C0376 actin late C'i'n E Etta: (18?. .0 H U ' ) I ( “.4 ..‘E EA” ‘Uve: N»: y CHAPTER 1 THE SUDDEN RED TIDE IN THE "LAND OF KIN" The Communist movement in Fujian developed relatively late in comparison with some other parts of China. Guang- dong, a neighboring province of Fujian, was one of the few provinces in which "Communist groups" had been set up before the First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (the CCP) convened in Shanghai in early July, 1921. But no Communist activist was in action in Fujian at that time.1 Until as late as early 1927, the CCP in Fujian still did not have its own provincial committee. The party members there were attached at first to the provincial committee of Jiangsu, then to the provincial committee of Guangdong, and finally to the Southern Bureau; by contrast, in Guangdong an inde- pendent party committee was set up to lead the Communist movement in the province as early as in 1921, and the Third National Congress of the CCP was held in Guangzhou in 1923.2 The late arrival of Communism, however, does not mean that the Fujian Communist movement was insignificant in the history of the Chinese Communist revolution. During the period from the late 19205 to the early 19303, quite abrupt- ly, communist storms swept over the countryside in many areas of the province. In western (including the southern tip), northern and a coastal strip of eastern Fujian, Commu- nist-led peasant insurrections were staged and Communist— 15 controlled "rec conspicuous one western area be Guangdong on th- em part of Mir: twelve counties 19205. The twel Fang, Yongding, :uihua, Ninghua 5359 gained morc nist revolution ”13“?“ Province 3f the CCP’s Cer The Communi 16 controlled "red areas" surfaced. Among these areas the most conspicuous one was the Minxi Revolutionary Base in the western area bordering Jiangxi province on the west and Guangdong on the south. The word Minxi, literally the "west- ern part of Min", is a geographic expression referring to twelve counties with a population of over 2,500,000 in the 19205. The twelve counties were Longyan, Zhangping, Ning- yang, Yongding, Shanghang, Changting, Liancheng, Wuping, Guihua, Ninghua, Qingliu, and Pinghef’In November 1931, the base gained more significance in the history of the Commu- nist revolution in China by joining the base in southern Jiangxi province and thus becoming one of the two components of the CCP’s Central Revolutionary Base. The Communist upsurge in rural Fujian, however, ebbed (as quickly as it rose. From 1932, the Communist movement in the province began an irreversible decline. After the main .ftirce of the Red Army left Fujian to start the Long March in October 1934, the once tempestuous red tide in Fujian quick- -14}7 dwindled, becoming nothing but sporadic guerrilla strug- 9!11.£es in the following three years. To better discuss the mechanism of the Communist agrar- liar-1 revolution in Fujian, it is first necessary to gain some flIZTIiJJarity with the overall narrative history of the revo- lut ion in the province. The remainder of this chapter is de‘-r<:>‘t:ed to providing such a narrative overriew. Map 1. Fuj ian JIANGZ 17 Map 1. Fujian Province ‘s ( ( JIANGXI ,’ ’\ j ZI—IEJIANG .r' 1 . I .r‘/.‘ r o ,g? Chonganr \’ \.‘ \' /0’\’ Ag " K i. 2 5/. _ .“l. 0 ”la-7.16129 R o Fuzhou A u .’ S, S ./ o , ‘ —\ } TAIWAN .r S Changtingrfi,\\ *2; . g I I; i ‘ Lono an h (o 91’ .o Huian N Xiamefin \ S an (\,/g-\ g\Yongding?n an '. ' ( “.0 m m FANGDONGD 511313 to” NA :3 PU tq b h. H. 7/“ Kapz. The Minx Revolutionary 1928-1934 (ad the nap in HS 18 Map 2 . The Minxi K. . RYA\ Revolutionary Base, I (<3§5\\J”“KPU\ 1928-1934 (adapted from* K: ‘\ \\\\ the map in MS, p.270.)J u.— ‘ '\ (' \\T ' \ 5N \ . *4 0 3° MHZ .31EPUNI3){I <>§§> QPiFSQfifg °2$ihua °Hucun \\\\ , \ r \ e, \ \\ \ \ . 3.33\\.\ Jiaoling‘ \\\;’ ~'\ \ \\\i (l\\ . «' JRQ$§t駧§$§:::\\\\ _' OYongana awake \\\\\h\.\\ 7} -'.<\<:h\a\§gting\ Gzan‘qian ‘ \ eng Lianc .\\\\\ '1 .. or district - . . fi-The CentralGovernment of the ' Soviet RePUbliC ' " 1n. 0:191“ °f 1 Although it al areas of Fuji tion of the worl :ajcr cities S‘JC provincial capit nist movement in instead of peasa The burgeon with the Nationa lazional Conqres Guangzhou. Sone tral Executive zfibers joined C t :has marking the Front . and the c ' Ian 9°51”! imperi - 1 The Origin of Communist Activities in Rural Fujian Although it was the Communist movement in the peripher- al areas of Fujian that brought the province to the atten- tion of the world, the cradle of communism in Fujian was in major cities such as Xiamen, a port city, and Fuzhou, the provincial capital. And in its very first stage, the Commu- nist movement in the province was one of intellectuals instead of peasants. The burgeoning of Communist activities in Fujian began with the Nationalist Revolution. In January 1924, the First National Congress of the GNU under Sun Yat-sen was held in Guangzhou. Some CCP leaders became members of the GNU Cen- tral Executive Committee at the convention, and many CCP :members joined the GNU organizations at different levels, thus marking the beginning of the First CCP-GMD United Ifiront, and the GMD-led Nationalist Revolution which took "opposing imperialism and feudalism" as its aim.4 Luo Ming, El. young man born in Dabu, a Guangdong county neighboring the l"linxi area, in 1921 went to the Jimei School in Xiamen, ‘h’llich was to become a hotbed for Communism and all other -1<:Jllids of radical thinking in the early years of the 19205. gsg‘fiaxreral years later, Luo became a pro-communist student '— eader there. Taking instructions from the Guangdong Dis- t:J‘:‘:l<::t Committee of the CCP, which was in charge of the 19 party's affairs and even Honq K hundred radical the instruction rain task was t tions, and he 1 lords, and the . dent movement. "5 At the $qu mlttee of the Ch directed that a school. This was a‘lCtlon, the Gila 20 party’s affairs in Guangdong, Guangxi, southeastern Fujian, and even Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, Luo led more than one hundred radical students in the Jimei School. According to the instructions of the CCP leadership in Guangdong, Luo's main task was to recruit leftist students into GMD organiza- tions, and he led the students to "oppose imperialism, war- lords, and the school authorities which suppressed the stu- dent movement."5 At the suggestion of Luo, the Guangdong District Com— mittee of the Chinese Communist Youth League (the CYL) directed that a branch of the League should be set up in the school. This was done in June 1925. Again with Luo’s intro- duction, the Guangdong District Committee admitted a member of the Jimei School CYL to the party. In February 1926, the first party branch was set up in Xiamen University with three party members. In several months, the number of party .branches in Xiamen had increased to seven.6 Luo was dispatched to Xiamen in February 1926 by the IPeasant Bureau of the GMD Central Committee to recruit estudents for the Whampoa Peasant Movement Institute (PMI), then presided over by Mao Zedong (then a CCP cadre and a zalternative member of the GNU Central Executive Committee) 4i»?! Guangzhou. Luo helped set up many GMD district branches g53":Eaffed with CCP members and leftist nationalists who actu— ‘El-JLSLy controlled the newly-established GMD Provincial Commit- tee of Fujian.7 Although the Jimei School in Xiamen was a school to enroll students over two-thirds iron the Hinxi a the next chapter was these local brought the Corr; The first ‘ do in their horn county. The fir: :ounty in April returned intell. set “P in the c. all in the Minx 21 enroll students from the whole province and its vicinity, over two-thirds of the one-hundred-odd leftist students were from the Minxi area, for reasons which will be explored in the next chapter.8 What needs to be noted here is that it was these local young students returning from Xiamen who brought the Communist seeds to the remote countryside. The first thing those returning intellectuals wanted to do in their hometowns was to set up party branches in each county. The first CCP branch in Minxi was set up in Yongding county in April 1926 by Lin Xinyao and a group of other returned intellectuals. By early 1927, party branches were set up in the counties of Shanghang, Longyan, and Pinghe, all in the Minxi area.9 There was another source of the seeds of Communism in Minxi. When Luo came to Minxi to look for students for the PMI, he found nine recruits, all of whom joined the CCP in (Suangzhou when they were being trained in the Institute.‘0 In September 1926, the forces of the Northern Expedi- 1:ion, launched from Guangdong by the National Revolutionary Government under the GMD, marched towards Fujian. All the Minxi students in the PMI were ordered to follow the Expedi- tion forces so as to provide help and to push the revolution 5‘9?! their hometowns. The expedition forces defeated the Northern Warlords' army in Fujian without difficulty, and thus brought the whole province into the domain of the GNU. t'lle Minxi area was "liberated" in October and GMD party l7"“'~-11:-eaus were set up in each county occupied." However, tn activists were a folloving the ar inlinxi: GED cc local national r pro-Communist 1e all of then.12 I Now the rev seened not too r: ll‘hough the CCP seize the leader basic lines of t folloved, or at m wanted its ] Mple t0 SUPPOX ”mot officiaj 96.“. try; To full 22 However, the swiftest foot arrived first: the CCP activists were already there. Joined by those Communists following the army, the act performed in Xiamen was repeated in Minxi: GMD county bureaus were set up openly to lead the local national revolution in Minxi, but CCP members and the pro-Communist leftist Nationalists simply took control of all of them.12 Now the revolution was ready to begin. However, there seemed not too much the Communists could do at this stage. Although the CCP center instructed its party members to seize the leadership of the revolution, in the meantime the basic lines of the GMD's national revolution had to be followed, or at least not ignored too much. The things the GMD wanted its local bureaus to do were to "appeal to the people to support the Northern Expedition," to "wipe out the corrupt officials" and to "oppose the local tyrants and evil gentry." To fulfill the tasks, what the GMD bureau did in JLongyan county was to detain a former congressman of the liorthern Warlord government and "parade him through the estmeet and expose him to the public": a traditional way to humiliate someone in China.” But the Communists wanted to do more than that. The graduates from the PMI applied themselves to peasant move- Itierxts, since this was what they had been trained for. It was ‘5‘ JLsso generally required by the resolution of the Fourth I~qr«‘El‘tzional Congress of the CCP to set up peasant unions, to n"chilize the peasants to oppose local tyrants and evil gentry, and t0 peasants 1‘ devices such as efforts had bee Institute, by t fever than ten taxes abolished reduction of re: ple's congress l were local elite the control burs lirai. After fie passed in the 0 five percent re 6!, these reso‘. land, the head led some revo‘ titres (:3 “fig miles. This QIESS'Nanger Perhaps in this perj 23 gentry, and to resist exorbitant taxes and levies.l4 Peasants in Minxi showed only apathy to newfangled devices such as peasant unions. In Longyan, although great efforts had been made by graduates of the Peasant Movement Institute, by the end of 1926 peasant unions were set up in fewer than ten villages. Except for getting some exorbitant taxes abolished, the unions achieved nothing, not even the reduction of rent. In March of the following year, a peo- ple's congress of Longyan county (most of the congressmen were local elites) was convened by the GMD county bureau and the control bureau supervised work in three counties in Minxi. After fierce argument, the Communists finally got passed in the congress their motions advocating a twenty- five percent reduction of rent and a ban on polygamy. Howev- er, these resolutions were never implemented. On the other hand, the head of the Control Bureau, a leftist Nationalist, led some revolutionary-fanatic youth and student representa- 1:ives to "do away with superstitions" by smashing idols in 1:emples. This action--the only practical move of the con- gress--angered the peasants greatly." Perhaps the most significant CCP achievement in Minxi .jL11 this period was the establishment of the Institute of s<>c:ial Workers in Ting's Bight Counties (The Tingshu Baxian ‘Eszlleahui Renyuan Yangchengsuo; "Ting" was another name for the Western part of Fuj ian) . The establishment of the school to :ra in revolutionary cadres was a decision made by a joint ltleating of the people's congress and the GMD county bureaus of some of idea of the 'southern ; Cozzunist a The school hang count: instructor: cc? or on. CCP county role in th These by Student Ed among 1 aC‘Z‘miflish had done u of student PQESants a lUtion in 24 of some of the counties in Minxi, but actually it was an idea of the CCP Special Committee of Minnan (literally "southern part of Fujian"), which was set up to lead the Communist activities in Minxi and Minnan in February 1926. The school was opened in a former Catholic church in Shang- hang county in March 1926. It was dominated by Communist instructors and teachers. All the 160 students were young CCP or CYL members and pro-Communist activists picked out by CCP county branches. These students would play an important role in the later Communist upsurge.16 These activities plus some gatherings participated in by students, and the publication of some magazines circulat- ed among intellectuals, were almost all the Communists accomplished in this period. It can be said that what they had done was basically verbal, and was limited to the circle of students and intellectuals. Although there were some peasants among the newly-recruited party members, the revo- lution in Minxi was not yet really a rural one. Communist activities germinated in the Minbei area (the northern part of Fujian) in exactly the same way as in Minxi. Minbei was another center-to-be of the Communist rural revolution in Fujian, although compared to Minxi the Communist upsurge to come there was much less significant and on a much smaller scale. A person by the name of Chen Geng, who went to school in the city of Fuzhou, participated in radical student unrest and joined the CCP. In 1927 he went back to his home county Chongan to recruit party mem- hers and set up feminist activ Many fewer than to other a comunism cane of the province ‘he arrival and which stayed in ion-tbs, The rev ETC-Tl strOng an organizatiOns t coup in the Spr BS 50 invisibl forces had not COmmUnist ”at“! Center- Fujian, develoP attivity began revolting“ take Set Up until 19 HoveVer' a i ianonal ReVOlu 25 bers and set up a party branch, marking the beginning of the Communist activities in this remote area.”- Many fewer Communist intellectuals came back to Minbei than to other areas of Fujian. Besides, it is evident that communism came to Minbei even later than it did to the rest of the province. The National Revolution came and went with the arrival and departure of the Northern Expedition forces, which stayed in that mountainous area for only several months. The revolution subsided quickly before communism had grown strong enough to make use of it. Ironically, the CCPts organizations there remained intact after Jiang Jieshi's coup in the spring of 1927, for the Communist activity there was so invisible that the Nationalists and other opposing forces had not even paid attention to it.18 Communist activities in the eastern coastal region, another center-to-be of the Communist rural revolution in Fujian, developed even later. The earliest CCP underground activity began in 1927, and not until 1931 did the Communist revolution take shape in that area. Soviet regimes were not set up until 1934.19 However, although the Communists in rural Fujian in the National Revolution had dominated the movement in Minxi, and although they had not done anything which could really be identified with a "revolution," when Jiang Jieshi, the conservative Commander—in-chief of the National Revolution- ary Army, launched his anti-Communist coup on 12 April 1927, the CCP in Minxi suffered its first great setback. After the in mm to "p follovers in Le trate, organize no resented th. peasants encirc offices of the the three couna Jiang “tested fled became vat not unions Wer In Shangh encircled and Mean! the CO Peasant union! leftist Organ: arrested and e met cOunties 26 After the coup in Shanghai, Jiang ordered his followers in Fujian to "purge" the GMD. On the fifteenth, Jiang’s followers in Longyan county, including the county magis- trate, organized a parade participated in mainly by peasants who resented the CCP's destruction of the idols. The fierce peasants encircled and smashed the Communist-controlled offices of the GMD county bureau and the control bureau for the three counties. On the following day, troops loyal to Jiang arrested many CCP and leftist GMD members. Those who fled became wanted men. Labor unions in the towns and peas- ant unions were disbanded.20 In Shanghang county, things were even worse. Troops encircled and stormed the offices of the GMD local control bureau, the county party bureau, the office of the county peasant union, and the Institute of Social Workers and other leftist organizations. Communist activists were either arrested and executed, or fled. Similar things happened to other counties in Minxi such as Changting and Yongding.2l Thus ended the first bit of the Communist revolution in rural Fujian. The hubbub raised by the Communists quieted easily and quickly. Communist organizations crumbled. Their activists disappeared from the scene. To "arouse the masses" was emphasized by the CCP from the beginning. Unfortunately, the only case in which the masses had been aroused in rural Fujian had not been what the CCP wanted to see: a angry mob storming the revolutionary apparatus. On the other hand, however, it is not fair to say that the onsuni established tire care 1 to start fr activists a a1 Revoluti Social Work, later, the 1 192:5 was 1, ”in?! as or which had he The fix Wt really 2 tion. becaug me“ under and it basic als, Ho"ever still alive totally CNS 'o sel’fi‘ "ution < 2 am.“ i l .ed ‘ LroOpS F Tue ‘5 was the «aiiw «ire Of t 27 the Communists had achieved nothing. Party branches had been established. Although they collapsed at this point, when the time came later it would be much easier to restore them than to start from nothing. A certain number of devoted Communist activists and party cadres were nurtured through the Nation- al Revolution Movement, particularly by the Institute of Social Workers In Ding’s Eight Counties. Half a century later, the Communist domination of the institute in the 19205 was lamented by a native Nationalist of Yongding county as one of the most deplorable and regretable things which had happened in that period.22 The first stage of the Communist movement in Fujian was not really a part of the upcoming Communist agrarian revolu- tion, because the Communists’ activities at this stage were taken under the name of the GMD-led Nationalist revolution, and it basically involved only a small group of intellectu- als. However, many of the Communist intellectuals were still alive although the organizations they had set up were totally crushed. When the time came, they would start the revolution over and in a new pattern. 2 "Rebel! Rebel l " The real Communist agrarian revolution began when CCP- led troops passed through Minxi on their way to Guangdong. This was the unit retreating from Jiangxi province after the failure of the Nanchang Mutiny staged on 1 August 1927, ahich marked a 9196931”St the The force fugitive leader ling, as veil é tees, gathered including 2110” Battle Front Cc extent the part August, the CC? tion in Wuhan, irsurrections a convention's de instructed the lie and land re trocos left abc But the fc lid then never the ideal part] 28 which marked the beginning of the Communist-led armed strug- gle against the GMD. The force arrived at Shanghang in early September. The fugitive leader of the CCP Special Committee of Minnan, Luo Ming, as well as some other heads of former county commit- tees, gathered at Shanghang to meet their party superiors, including Zhou Enlai, who was then the head of the CCP Battle Front Committee. With the help of the troops, to some extent the party organization was restored in Minxi. On 7 August, the CCP Central Committee held an emergency conven- tion in Wuhan, Hubei province, which decided to launch armed insurrections and stage "land revolution." According to the convention's decision, the party leaders of the troops instructed the party members in Minxi to stage "armed strug- gle and land revolution." To encourage such activities, the troops left about fifty rifles for the local party.23 But the force stayed in Minxi for only ten days or so, and then moved to Guangdong, where it was routed. Although the local party in Minxi had fifty rifles now, staging an "armed struggle" was still too daunting a task for them. Armed struggle, however, was now a must. The CCP Southern Bureau ordered the Special Committee of Minnan to organize peasant insurrection also.“ In November, the CCP Central Committee sent an instruction to the Special Committee in west and south Fujian, asking it to "organize the peasants to revolt," and to "seize political power through armed insurrections." Also, the instruction said, the local party should "re to reduce to overthr confiscate Being the tire a Fijian, th instigate tart taxes gradually PICVEd 'y'cr xteSt fea ‘ Liflhéd by r: ““5 be: lent:- a I 2‘. EScal iting 29 should "resolutely, actively lead the peasants in struggles to reduce rent, to resist the collection of rent and taxes, to overthrow the local tyrants and evil gentry, and to confiscate the land of larger landlords."” Being urged by its superiors, but understanding that the time was not right for armed insurrection in rural Fujian, the local party in Minxi and Minnan decided to instigate the peasants to "peacefully" resist paying exorbi- tant taxes and levies, and to demand a reduction of rent, in the hope that in so doing the peasants would be ushered gradually onto the road of armed insurrection. The strategy proved workable. During the later part of 1927, peasant unrest featuring anti-rent and anti-taxes struggles was fanned by the Communists in many counties in Minxi. Con- flicts between the peasants and the local tyrants and evil gentry, and warlords who demanded unreasonable taxes, were escalating. Peasant unions were restored or expanded. Actu- ally in Changle village, Pinghe county, the peasant unions had driven away the guards of the county government, de- tained gentry, and even bought machine guns with their own money. In Yongding, a ZOO-man armed peasant force called the "League of Iron and Blood" had been formed, and exchanges of fire between the peasant armed force and Nationalist army had taken place. The peasants in Minxi were warmed up for a further attempt.26 The same strategy was adopted by the local party in Minbei. Influenced by the peasant insurrections occurring in the souther Provincial stirred up arned force 1928. In Hu efforts of unions had they vere r fie guidanc in Guangzho ofhinnan, I the Corps a: litre Suppre: Beginn. Period Of Cl Him “Ea ‘ ic“519nm :thiES Of In Long Peasant unic Emil March, Peasant “he he landlord Spread to th ieeds Vere 3 ‘nc' e.‘ to ‘lVe Was Enf dale la' 30 the southern part of Jiangxi province, and ordered by the Provincial Committee of Fujian, the local party in Minbei stirred up peasant unrest and formed underground peasant armed forces called the "Populace Association" in early 1928. In Huian, a county on the eastern coast, owing to the efforts of those returning Communist students, some peasant unions had been formed during the National Revolution. Now they were recovering from the coup of Jiang Jieshi. Under the guidance of two cadets of the Whampoa Military Academy in Guangzhou, who were dispatched by the Special Committee of Minnan, peasant self-defence corps were formed. However, the corps and peasant union as well as party organizations were suppressed again at the end of 1927.27 Beginning from March 1928, rural Fujian entered a period of Communist-led peasant armed insurrection. The Minxi area was engulfed in a surge of peasant riots. The most significant peasant insurrections took place in the counties of Longyan, Pinghe, Shanghang and Yongding. In Longyan, a dispute over debt between a village peasant union and a landlord developed into violence in early March. The local CCP decided to push the affair into a peasant armed revolt. The peasants were mobilized to attack the landlord's armed force, seizing its guns. Riot quickly spread to the villages nearby. Well-to-do families' land deeds were seized and burned. A Communist-called "red cur- few" was enforced in the area where the revolt was staged. Five days later, a regiment of the Nationalist army arrived to restore peasants 1 the peasaz re-organi: In P zany bran sarroundi organized couty se Preservat 9‘9 guard CG‘Jnty pr Cffices O reau, as Wound. H °f hours, fled fro: later. ti? Villdge, iv) 31 to restore order. The Communists led about one hundred armed peasants to resist, but were routed quickly. The remnants of the peasant forces fled to the neighboring county and were re-organized into the first guerrilla force in Minxi.28 In Pinghe county, in early 1928 the party had formed many branches and peasant unions, most of them in the areas surrounding the county seat. On 8 March, armed peasants organized or abetted by the Communists stormed the walled county seat. The town weakly guarded by less than 200 peace preservation corps members was given up to the peasants, and the guards and rich people escaped from the south gate. The county prison was broken into and inmates were released. The offices of the county government and county education bu- reau, as well as some gentry houses, were burned to the ground. However, the enemy army rolled back in just a couple of hours, while the peasants were busy looting. The peasants fled from the town through the north gate. Several days later, the Nationalist army chased the peasants to Changle village, from where most of the peasants had started to attack the town, and devastated the village and its vicini- ty.29 The insurrection in Shanghang began in a slightly different way. Before the so-called revolt, under the lead- ership of Fu Baicui, a local elite who joined the CCP during the National Revolution, the power of the peasant union in Fu's home village, Jiaoyang, had expanded to the extent that a area centered on Jiaoyang and inhabited by 20,000 people had actually b the rule of th and levies to alists vere pl :ial Committee and realize the resisted by Fu and land re-dis the Nationalisn the enClave Wi' his Peasant 59 Strong Peasant hr amY- It w Jiaoyang area MSant army 1' tilla foxcefi The IEVol 19 5 ~89 . 32 had actually become an independent Communist enclave defying the rule of the official authorities, surrendering no tax and levies to the Nationalist government. While the Nation- alists were planning a crackdown by force, the CCP Provin- cial Committee was urging Fu to stage an armed insurrection and realize the land revolution. The urge was continuously resisted by Fu on the ground that an isolated armed revolt and land re-distribution could not succeed. However, when the Nationalist army finally launched an offensive against the enclave with 1,000 soldiers on 26 August, Fu had to lead his peasant self-defense army to resist. But the 2,000 strong peasant army turned out to be no match for the regu- lar army. It was routed in less than half an hour, and the Jiaoyang area was occupied by the enemy. The remnant of the peasant army retreated to the mountains and became a guer- rilla force.30 The revolt in Yongding was led by Zhang Dingcheng, a native of Jinsha village in the same county. In late June, 1928, a plan of operation was made by the CCP county commit- tee. The main goal of the insurrection was to capture the county seat, but they started the revolt in the suburbs to lure the enemy forces out of the town. The trick worked. 0n the thirtieth, Zhang led a peasant force of 1,000 to march towards the county seat from Jinsha. The town was stormed and its defence was broken. However, as in Pinghe, the peasants were driven out of the town when the enemy forces launched a counterattack several hours later.31 Thu comande from Yon Longyan of Longy and the another the unit attack p with hea tade to Barked t It CCP Prov establis Hiui S: 33 Thus all four major insurrections failed. 0n 6 August, commanded by Fu Baicui, the remnants of the armed peasants from Yongding and Shanghang joined their counterparts in Longyan to make another attempt to capture the county seat of Longyan. But the offensive lasted for only half an hour and the peasant army retreated with losses. Two days later, another attempt to capture a town in Yongding was made by the united force. This time it was even more ill-fated. The attack proved to be disorganized and the force was repelled with heavy casualties. Morale dropped, no more attempts was made to capture towns thereafter,32 and this last failure marked the end of the armed insurrection upsurge in Minxi. It was during the period of the insurrections that the CCP Provisional Provincial Committee of Fujian, which was established in December 1927, decided to set up the CCP Minxi Special Committee. While the tide of peasant insurrection was subsiding in Minxi, in the Minbei area it was just developing. A plan was worked out by the CCP County Committee of Chongan in April 1928, and a village called Shangmei was chosen as the first site to stage an insurrection. But the plan was delayed in execution until the end of September. Since Shangmei was merely a village and had no target other than a timber mill whose boss had been at odds with local peasants, when the revolt happened, Chen Lujun, the secretary of the county committee, led about twenty armed peasants to destroy the office of the mill, and to commandeer some granaries of landlord "People‘ Chen to er, the dam on nered. 3’ 34 landlords. The revolt spread to the nearby villages and a "People's Bureau" (Minzhong Ju) was declared established by Chen to exercise political power in the revolt area. Howev- er, the local garrison and the local corps quickly cracked down on the revolts. Chen shot himself when he was cor- nered.33 But momentum gathered again by the end of the year. After drinking liquor mixed with rooster blood, the newly- appointed party secretary led heads of armed peasant forces to launch the insurrection for the second time, in the same place, by capturing and killing "local tyrants". Again the insurrection spread to many villages. In April 1929 the scattered armed peasant forces were reformed into the Inde- pendent Regiment of the Red Army in Minbei, although this "regiment" had only BOO-odd men and loo-odd rifles. Chongan county was developed into a guerrilla warfare zone, and some of its villages even set up their soviets and re-distributed the land. In the meantime, the CCP center ordered the local party in Minbei to be under the leadership of the Special Committee of Northeast Jiangxi, and the Independent Regiment to join the Red Army in Northeast Jiangxi headed by Fang Zhimin. After this, the Communist movement in Minbei was more connected to northeast Jiangxi than to Fujian.” Some other sporadic peasant revolts were also organized in counties like Zhangping to the east of the Minxi area, and Huian, in the middle of the province's coastline. But they were on a much lesser scale and of less significance. In Huian, t Except la forces i for the co: heavy losse peasant act was estiaat 120,300 'faa Villages in pillaged ch 1‘16 loss of insurrectio, Zhang Dingcj Village, 31] exerting po ”palatial-y , was eyen pr; ‘ilitary pr. Sent the; r . iefl'ihg the In Huian, the revolt did not come until late 1930.35 35 Except for helping the Communists to form some guerril- la forces in the mountains, the insurrections gained nothing for the communists and the peasants. Instead, they incurred heavy losses and terrible suffering. Many CCP cadres and peasant activists were killed. In the case of Longyan, it was estimated that the loss of peasants' property was over 100,000 yuan owing to the reprisals from the enemy army. Villages involved in the revolts were usually burned and pillaged when the nemesis came. Yet the heaviest loss was the loss of faith. In Yongding, after the failure of the insurrection, the peasants were thrown into great panic.36 Zhang Dingcheng and his comrades retreated to his home village, Jinsha, and set up a district soviet in Minnan exerting political power over more than ten villages with a population of several tens of thousands. Land redistribution was even practiced in the district. However, facing the military pressure from the Nationalist troops, the peasants sent their representatives to sue the enemy for peace, defying the CCP's threat with execution. Seeing that even assassination of the peasants could not deter their resolu- tion to capitulate to the Nationalist authorities, the lCommunists finally had to face reality, abandon the soviets, .and move the Communist activities underground.37 Meanwhile, 'the peasants everywhere in Longyan were demoralized after the failure of the insurrection, and they were so fearful of tire enemy that it became very difficult to mobilize them again.38 36 The party county committees and branches which had just recovered from Jiang’s purge collapsed again. This was true in all the counties where major insurrections were staged, both in Minbei and Minxi.39 An extreme case was provided by Chongan county, where the peasants blamed the party for the failure of the revolt and the losses of life and property they suffered. Sensing the fierce resentment of the peas- ants, and feeling guilty for the failure, the chief of the local party committed suicide and most of the party cadres dispersed.‘o The armed insurrections in Fujian, as were those in other provinces in the same period, were the outcomes of the CCP’s August Seventh Emergency Convention which resolved that the "general policy of the party at present" was to "prepare and organize armed insurrections in those provinces which have been the center of the peasant movement.“l Fujia- n had not been the "center of the peasant movement" in the previous stage. However, owing to the effort of the local CCP cadres, peasant armed insurrections were realized. The insurrections usually followed the same pattern: the CCP activists got the peasants into some kind of organizations while inciting peasant-landlord confrontations or anti-tax unrests, and finally led them to "revolt." Without excep- tion, all the armed insurrections failed. Open armed revolt ‘was both the peak and the end of the first stage of the Communist agrarian revolution in Fujian. w H. .) 0‘. ham" or [or 13. 'Ir-c 3 The Heyday of the Soviet From the end of the four major insurrections to March 1929, the Communist activities in Fujian were at a low ebb between two peaks. The second peak came with the arrival of the Fourth Red Army led by Mao Zedong and Zhu De. Mao was then the secretary of the CCP Battle Front Committee of the army, and Zhu was the army commander. On 11 March, for strategic reasons, Mao Zedong and Zhu De led the Fourth Army of the Red Army into Changting county from Jiangxi. This 4,000-strong army was the most battle- tested regular force among the Red Army units then existing in China. It entered the Minxi area quite abruptly. Local garrisons in Minxi, which were re-organized with bandits and local peace preservation corps, were not a match for it. Therefore, the Red Army occupied Changting without much difficulty.‘2 It is said that during his short stay in Minxi, Mao came up with the idea that the CCP should first turn the eastern and southern parts of Jiangxi and the whole province of Fujian into Communistedominated areas before the Commu- nist "land revolution" could succeed in the whole country. To serve this purpose, guerrilla warfare should be staged by the Fourth Army and other units in the twenty-odd counties in the southern Jiangxi-Minxi areas, the populace should be mobilized, and then a soviet regime should be set up. This 37 was the i< Central Ra Ruijin in middle of tion of th local part Havir in Minxi t Conunist Nanjing 9C Zengren’ t Zhll’s for: Fulian. F1 regimGrits iSCIuding Created a and Long? 3 Jim 9X1 38 was the idea which finally led to the establishment of the Central Revolutionary Base. The Red Army left Minxi for Ruijin in Jiangxi for military reasons on 1 April. In the middle of May, it marched into Minxi again, at the invita- tion of the CCP Special Committee of Minxi, to help the local party establish a red regime in the area.43 Having come to Minxi for that purpose, the Fourth Army in Minxi took eliminating the enemy force and propping up Communist regimes as its main task. The war between Jiang’s Nanjing government and the Guangxi Clique headed by Li Zongren, then ongoing in southern China, helped Mao and Zhu's force greatly by weakening the Nationalist defence in Fujian. From March to July, the Fourth Army routed two regiments of the Nationalist garrison, occupied many towns including the county seats of Changting and Longyan, and created a zone of guerrilla warfare. Centering at Shanghang and Longyan, the so-called Minxi Revolutionary Base came into existence. In the meantime, backed by the Red Army, "revolutionary committees" or soviets were set up in most of the townships and districts in each county of Minxi. In terms of its membership, the local party expanded in an explosive way. In early May, the total number of local party members in the Minxi region had reached 1,400. By September 1929, the county of Longyan alone had 1,000 party members, as compared with merely a dozen or so in late 1928.“ Starting from June, land redistribution was carried out in areas under Communist control, and was basically finished by the shares in each 39 by the end of August. About 80,000 peasants gained their shares of land confiscated from landlords. Guerrilla forces in each county were reorganized into the Fourth Column of the Fourth Army, while Red Guards were formed in each coun- ty. In the single county of Yongding, there were twenty-four Red Guard brigades totalling 2,000 men. By the middle of September, combining forces from all counties, the local armed forces in Minxi, including the Fourth Column, had 3,650 rifles and loo-odd pistols, a sharp increase compared to 700 they had had before March.” From June 1929 to January 1930, more significant mili- tary victories were achieved by the Red Army. During the period Jiang Jieshi, with Nationalist armies from Fujian, Jiangxi and Guangdong, organized two "joint suppressions" against the Minxi area. Mainly owing to the civil strife among the factions of the Nationalist armies and the Red Army’s mobile tactics, the two offensives collapsed. In August 1929, with the aid of the local Communist forces, the Fourth Army also captured the county seat of Shanghang, which had been known as "iron Shanghang" because of its extremely high and strong city walls built on a hill diffi- cult to access. Historically peasant rebellion forces, including the Taiping Army in the 18603, had never succeeded in capturing it. Now the Red Army finally did so. This victory sharply boosted the morale of the Communists.‘6 After the second "joint suppression" was defeated, the First Workers-Peasants-Soldiers Congress of Minxi was held in Longyan in rent was foun it controlled ding, Shangha and Liancheng acre than one July, the nu: accounting f o Embers in Fu Connunis Red Guards in in“ I'eqdlar tCtalling 3’0 adults and Ch t1”mite Pio The First Bra 5“ “P in Hi n All kind Wed! inclu (both ope” an 40 in Longyan in March 1930, at which the Minxi Soviet Govern- ment was founded. Around the time it was founded, the area it controlled included the whole counties of Longyan, Yong- ding, Shanghang and Changting, and parts of Pinghe, Wuping and Liancheng, with a population of 850,000, accounting for more than one half of the total population of Minxi. By July, the number of party members increased to 10,000, accounting for ninety percent of the total number of party members in Fujian.47 Communist armed forces expanded rapidly, too. While the Red Guards in each county were concentrated and reformed into regular Red Army units, three local Red Army forces totalling 8,000 men were recruited. Hundreds of thousands of adults and children were organized into the Red Guards and the Young Pioneers, armed basically with spears and sticks. The First Branch of the Red Army Military Academy was also set up in Minxi.“ All kinds of "mass organizations" were formed or ex- panded, including the Communist Youth League, peasant unions (both open and--in guerrilla zones--underground), and even "labor unions,” although no local people could be identified as "workers" in the Marxist definition. Actually all poor peasants were organized into the peasant unions, and many handicraftsmen and shop assistants in villages and towns were organized into "labor unions."49 In Chongan, Minbei area, the CCP-led guerrilla force was re-formed into the Minbei Independent Regiment of the Red Army, with 300-plus men and Jiangxi, where it Array exp was unde supporte Thus Cozunis E‘dident ' in the p; last Sta; lishzent manila: lcde gene tion": TE first, t‘: RdSants This chm “callizat d‘.sc;u$%< 41 men and loo-plus guns. Learning from the CCP in eastern Jiangxi, the independent regiment set up soviet regimes where it was possible. More soviets were set up and the Red Army expanded there in early 1930 because the warlords' war was underway and the Communist activities in Minbei were supported by their comrades in the eastern Jiangxi area.50 Thus the first half of 1930 became the heyday of the Communist agrarian revolution in Minxi and Minbei. It is evident that the revival and rapid growth of the revolution in the province was brought by the Fourth Red Army. In the last stage, in the case of the Xinan district, the estab- lishment of the soviet regime followed the mode of "peasant organization--insurrection--soviet." But in this stage, the mode generally became "Red Army--soviet--peasant organiza- tion." That is, the Red Army’s military occupation came first, then a Communist regime was set up, and then the peasants were organized into all kinds of organizations. This change of mode should be noted in studying the CCP's mobilization of peasants. The meaning of the change will be discussed in later chapters. 4 Trekkin Althc bases in F thrived fr Soviet Re; the genera tion in FL: during thi in Fujian. 4 Trekking to Failure Although, looking at the surface, the revolutionary bases in Fujian managed to survive and even sometimes thrived from late 1930 to the final collapse of the Chinese Soviet Republic in late 1934, at a more fundamental level the general CCP's political, military, and economic situa- tion in Fujian, as well as in Jiangxi, was in fact declining during this last stage of the Communist agrarian revolution in Fujian. While it is correct to say that the burgeoning of Communist revolution in Fujian around 1930 was brought about by the military triumph of the Red Army, it is also correct to say that the triumph of the Red Army in Fujian was to a great extent enabled by the internal strife in the National- ist camp. As mentioned before, in the spring of 1929 the Jiang-Gui war was rumbling over southern China. Towards the end of the year, wars between Jiang and the warlord Feng Yuxiang erupted, while the Jiang-Gui war resumed. From April to November 1930, Jiang, then the commander-in-chief of the National Revolutionary Army, was bogged down in a greater war with warlords Feng Yuxiang and Yan Xishan. Although the war (which involved more than one million soldiers and caused 30,000 casualties) was fought mainly in Henan and Shandong in North China, it attracted many Nationalist troops from the south. The rampant "Communist bandits" in 42 Fujian and Jiang. Hoe. it was cle areas" of i really the” in October clement a: the “Cent: area and 1 0n t: hate the ; Cmtribut to 1930, ; 43 Fujian and in Jiangxi had to be ignored for a while by Jiang. However, as soon as he was released from the strife, it was clear to all that he would try to wipe the "red areas" off of his map without mercy. And this was what he really did right after he won the war against Feng and Yan in October. Between then and 1934, five well-known "Encir- clement and Suppression" Campaigns were organized against the "Central Revolutionary Base" in the southern Jiangxi area and Minxi. On the other hand, some CCP leaders did not underesti- mate the role of the conflict in the opposite camp as a contributor to the Communist successes in Fujian from 1929 to 1930. Mao emphasized on many occasions that one of the reasons enabling the Minxi base to consolidate and expand was the "enemy’s internal contradictions.“l The "Political Resolution" of the CCP First Congress of Minxi held in June 1929 also admitted that the ruling classes’ internal con- flicts, "disorder, disunity and lack of means" provided a great opportunity for the revolutionary forces to develop.52 Opportunity would not last forever, and it must not be missed. The Communist leaders knew they should make the most out of the opportunity in consolidating and expanding their Minxi base. The attempt to wipe out the red area in Minxi and the red area's attempt to survive and expand clashed head-on in the period from late 1930 to late 1934. Although the trial of strength was a seesaw, and in the four-year period the situation can be described as a stalemate, the sources of culminatir in rural I At f 1' period toc also a tri The Cornur year proce true as early 2 Fujian Prc oanunist Viewed by Cmuunist the CCP be Coming, ar mph in Hl liEfs' the 44 sources of strength for the Communist side were drying up, culminating in the total collapse of the Communist movement in rural Fujian. At first sight, the clash of the two sides during the period took the form of military struggle. In fact, it was also a trial of politics, economics, and popular support. The Communists lost gradually in every aspect in the four- year process. Actually the first strategic military mistake was made as early as the spring of 1930 by the CCP Center and its Fujian Provincial Committee. The temporary ascendancy of Communist revolution in Minxi and some other areas was viewed by the provincial committee as the prelude to a Communist upsurge in the whole province, while the chiefs of the CCP believed that a nationwide revolutionary upsurge was coming, and that the Communist revolution would first tri- umph in Hubei and Guangdong provinces. Based on their be- liefs, the Twelfth Army of the Red Army, which was reorga- nized with the Red Guards of each county in Minxi, was ordered to advance towards the East River area in Guangdong. Joining the Communist armed forces there, the CCP leaders believed, they would occupy Guangzhou and realize the goal of the "first Communist triumph in Guangdong.“3 But the ineffective Twelfth Army, 3,000 strong, was quickly routed as soon as it stepped out of the province, and its remnants fled back to Minxi in June.“ To fill in the blank left while the Twelfth Army was in Guanqdo Guards ' inef f eC' occupie: ! n 1 ’ D ( ! n l 1' Q . egvlet . Star. a Daign 45 Guangdong, the Twenty-first Army was formed with local Red Guards to defend the Minxi base. This army was even more ineffective in doing its job. Many parts of the base were occupied by the local corps loyal to the Nationalist govern- ment.” Fortunately the Fourth Army came back to Minxi from Jiangxi province, and the declining situation was reversed to some extent. However, it and the reformed Twelfth Army were ordered to attack the provincial capital of Jiangxi, Nanchang, in early July, while the also-reorganized Twenty- first Army was also ordered to advance to the East River area. It suffered a defeat worse than that of the Twelfth Army. When it retreated to Minxi in mid-September, morale was so poor that even the commanders and the political commissars of its regiments wanted to desert. This defeated army was ordered to attack the Shanghang county seat in spite of its poor condition. This time it was almost annihi- lated and even its commander-in-chief wanted to desert.‘6 As a result of this series of military defeats, the "revolutionary base" shrank and the situation continued to deteriorate. By the time Jiang Jeshi’s second "Encirclement and Suppression" Campaign ended in the spring of 1931, the Minxi base shrank further. Chased by the enemy, the Minxi Soviet Government could not even find a safe place to stay.’7 During the third "Encirclement and Suppression" Cam- paign, the local Red Army in Minxi did a little better. Although Army gain area, and two bases The ‘ dent and the succe the south Jiang's c Jiang and military "inghua a land red i HOOPS re hOpe t0 t in the wh 46 Although more land was lost in Longyan and Yongding, the Red Army gained some new areas on the northern edge of the Minxi area, and this new gain made it possible to link closely the two bases in southern Jiangxi and Minxi.’8 The Minxi base's survival of the first three "Encircle- ment and Suppression" campaigns was due to a great extent to the successful operations of Zhu-Mao’s troops in defending the southern Jiangxi base, which was the main battlefield of Jiang's campaigns, and again, to the internal strife among Jiang and other Nationalist cliques. With the Red Army’s military occupation of northern counties like Qingliu, Ninghua and Guihua, soviet regimes were set up there, and land redistributions were staged in the fall of 1931. Mao’s troops re-entered Minxi in spring 1932. This brought new hope to the Minxi base, as well as to the Communist movement in the whole province. The force commanded by Mao and Zhu was now called the "Central Red Army," because the "Soviet Republic of China" was declared to be established in Ruijin, Jiangxi province in November 1931, with Mao as the chairman of its provisional central government. Mao’s force recap- tured much lost land, and even once occupied Zhengzhou, a highly commercialized city in the eastern part of Fujian. As it had done before, Mao's force set up soviet regimes and conducted land re-distributions wherever it occupied.59 By the eve of the Jiang's Fourth "Encirclement and Suppression" campaign, the Minxi Revolutionary Base, includ- ing its northern and southern extensions, accounted for two- fifths o and near "Soviet with Zha NO the one fortune Central Suppress 47 fifths of the Central Revolutionary Base centered in Ruijin, and nearly one half of its population. In March 1932, The "Soviet Government of Fujian" was established in Changting with Zhang Dingcheng as its chairman.60 Now the communist revolution in Fujian, particularly the one in Minxi, was tied more closely than before to the fortune of the Central Base, and to the performance of the Central Red Army. The result of the Fourth "Encirclement and Suppression" campaign was a stalemate again in the middle of 1933, and the Minxi base survived without significant change in terms of its territory. However, this three-year-long seesaw was about to end. The development of Communist rural revolution in Fujian was unbalanced. While it had passed its peak and was losing its momentum in the Minxi and Minbei areas, in the Mindong (eastern Fujian) area by 1933 it was still growing. Peasant movements in the area had not begun until the winter of 1929. Then the CCP Provincial Committee of Fujian sent Deng Zihui to Mindong to work with the local party members, who were all returned students and had not thought of organizing the peasants. Deng copied the experience in Minxi. Peasant unions were set up, anti-tax struggles were promoted, peas- ant armed forces were formed, and even scattered Communist- led guerrilla attacks were carried out. However, until late 1933 there had been only isolated armed peasant revolts. No Communist regime was set up there. The so-called Communist- led guerrilla force in each county had only thirty to forty 48 men.“ As for the other parts of Fujian, the Communist move- ment seemed to have missed them so far. While local CCP forces were being tired out by wars against the Nationalists, crises began to surface and devel- op irreversibly. The red areas in Fujian were plagued by financial and economic difficulties. Since 1930, owing to the Communists’ unreasonable economic policies, the economy in the base declined constantly: grain output declined dramatically, production of traditional export goods such as paper, tobacco and timber almost completely stopped, and many mills and shops in towns went bankrupt.62 The economic blockade against the red area by the Nationalists deepened the difficulties, causing a so-called "price scissors." Food supply for the local Red Army became a serious headache.63 Facing serious financial problems, the CCP leaders had no choice but to extort money and grain from the general public in the areas under the CCP’s control, and in so doing alien- ated the party from the general public, most of whom were peasants. Entering 1930, recruiting soldiers for the army became an increasing problem too. Deception, threats, drawing lots, and kidnapping were used more and more commonly to "expand the Red Army."“ The loss of popular support for "revolu- tionary warfare" was of course one reason for the difficulty in recruitment. As a result of the coercive recruiting, in 1930, ten percent of the soldiers in the Twelveth Red Army in Minxi were children. Party members took the lead in deserting party for La) zations a soviet oi 'perfunct 1933, on; 49 deserting, and they were happy to be dismissed from the party for this crime.65 Laxity and corruption quickly spread in party organi- zations and local government institutions. The provincial soviet of Fujian had been accused of being "passive" and "perfunctory" in doing most of its jobs in the early part of 1933, while defection had become a serious problem.66 For example, at the time the Minxi base was suffering from economic difficulties in late 1930, most of the party members in Longyan county liked to wear golden rings and fancy clothes to distinguish themselves from the populace. "fearing death, fearing bitterness, and seeking pleasure" (pasi, paku, zhuiqiu xiangle,) became a common phenomenon among the party members in the local Red Army, while the cadres in lower-level soviets did almost nothing except for picking up their daily stipends.“7 Attempts had been made by party leaders to crack down on these "bad phenomena" from time to time, but the cure had never been found. Internal strife occurred at all levels of the party organizations. Fights among cliques in the local party intensified whenever the situation got better. This was recognized by the party as one thing hindering the revolu- tion from further development.68 Another factor that aggravated the developing crises in the period from 1930 to 1933 was the campaign of sufan, "elimination of counter-revolutionaries inside the camp." In Minxi it took the form of sushedang, the "campaign to elimi- nate the 1931, 121 end of 1 been exe which a; key loca soldiers Paign tu °r9aniza 3w lean I th 1e 50 nate the Social-democratic Party". Beginning in January 1931, this campaign lasted for about eighteen months. At the end of the campaign 6,352 local party members in Minxi had been executed as members of the Social-democratic Party, which apparently did not in fact really exist as a signifi- cant force in Minxi at that time. Among those executed were key local party leaders, Red Army commanders and ordinary soldiers, and leaders of the soviet governments. The cam- paign turned the Minxi base into a disaster area. Party organizations were paralyzed, morale plunged, Red Army units lost their fighting capability, and the average people became so fearful of the CCP that they wanted to keep as far away as possible from the party and the Red Army.69 Similar things happened to other CCP-controlled areas in Fujian. In the Min-Zhe-Wan-Gan (Fujian-Zhejiang-Jiangsu- Jiangxi) Soviet Area, to which the Minbei base was now attached, several thousand cadres and members, even average people who were not involved in party organizations, were executed as counter-revolutionaries. Some units of the armed forces were executed collectively.70 All of these problems added together to sap the energy and vitality of the Communist movement in rural Fujian, and during the three-year process there was no sign that things would get better. On the contrary, all the problems were increasing. Although after the Fourth "Encirclement and Suppression" campaign the red areas still remained in Fu- jian, the Communist mansion had rotted from inside and its 51 final collapse in front of a wind gust was only a matter of time. And the time finally came. In September 1933, Jiang Jieshi began his Fifth "Encirclement and Suppression" cam- paign against the CCP Central Revolutionary Base. From the beginning of the campaign the Central Red Army found that this was not the campaign it had encountered and won before. The military situation turned worse and worse for the Red Army and the CCP top leaders in Ruijin had to abandon the Central Base and retreat westward in October 1934, marking the collapse of the Central Base (which included part of the Minxi and Minbei areas). The CCP Provincial Committee of Fujian was destroyed by the Nationalist army soon after the main force of the Red Army left the base, marking the end of the Communist agrarian revolution in Fujian. The remnant Red Army units in Fujian were routed quickly and CCP activities in Fujian from the end of 1934 to the formation of the Second CCP-GMD United Front in 1937 consisted solely of sporadic guerrilla warfare. Summary By and large the Communist agrarian revolution in Fujian can be divided into two phases: the insurrection phase and the Soviet phase. The latter can be further divid- ed into two stages: the ascendant stage up to early 1930 and the de nist a! coup c; 0: phases to the the art the pa: both 11 social 52 the descendant stage beginning from later 1930. The Commu- nist activities in the rural areas before Jiang Jieshi's coup can be viewed as a prelude of the agrarian revolution. One of the most significant differences between the two phases was that the CCP changed from a party in opposition to the existing political authorities to a power holder in the areas it ruled. Accompanying this change was a change in the party’s relation to the peasants: in the first phase both it and the peasants were in subordinate political and social positions; but in the second phase the party became the ruler while the peasants remained the ruled. The modes of establishing soviets, as pointed out earlier, were dif- ferent in the two phases too. Keeping these differences and changes in mind will help one to understand better the issues in the revolution which will be further examined in the later chapters. The Communist rural revolution in Fujian from 1924 to 1937 showed a sharp regional imbalance. All three Communist revolutionary bases were established in the peripheral areas around the border of the province. The wave of communism never reached central Fujian (which was by no means the core area). The developments of the Communist movement in the three Communist revolutionary bases-~Minxi, Minbei, and Mindong--were not synchronous either. While the Communist movements in the first two areas had begun their decline, in the last area it was just about to reach its peak. The development of the agrarian revolution in Fujian 53 was to a great extent indebted to the CCP military force from outside the province, namely the Fourth Red Army led by Zhu De and (most of the time) Mao Zedong. The army played a key role in promoting the Communist movement in Minxi. The flourishing of revolution in Minxi in turn encouraged Commu- nist activities elsewhere in the province. The history of the Communist movement in Minxi clearly shows that the visits to that area by the Northern Expedition Force, the troops that participated in the Nanchang mutiny, and the Fourth Red Army, all brought breakthroughs to the Communist movement in the area. It is not a coincidence that the scale and depth of the Communist movement in Mindong and Minbei, where the Fourth Red Army had engaged in many fewer opera- tions, fell far behind Minxi. The energy of revolution exploded in the first phase, and then the momentum of the revolution seemed to exhaust itself during the second phase. From the final military crackdown by the Nationalists to the eve of the Second CCP- GMD United Front, Communist forces in all three areas could just keep surviving. The reasons for this pattern of the revolution in Fujian will be explored in the next chapters. CHAPTER 2 FUJIAN BEFORE THE COMING OF COMMUNIBM The natural and social setting of a locality is always a subject in studies of historical events, particularly rebellions and revolutions. Associations between the social, political, and economic conditions of a locality on one hand, and the eruption of a rebellion or revolution on the other, are often identified by scholars. For example, in his study of the Communist-led peasant movement in the Hai-lu- feng area of Guangdong province in the late 19203, Robert Marks examines the land system and peasant-landlord rela- tions in the light of imperialist economic invasion and finds an intensified class conflict between the peasants and landlords of the area. It was this intensified class con- flict, Marks believes, that led to the eruption of the Communist-led peasant movement in that part of China.1 Some scholars even contend that local ecological condi- tions could be a factor shaping the pattern of peasant collective action. E. Perry’s book, Rebels and Revolutionar- ies in North China, 1845-1945, is a representative example of this argument. Due to the region's ecology, Perry be- lieves that the peasants in the Huaipei [Huaibei] area were indolent and resigned to the dictates of nature, lacking initiative, and reluctant to tamper with the natural envi- ronment, while they were much less passive in social inter- 54 there of ti of tl conir the n 11'888‘ 55 action. They were "fierce and truculent" in nature, and quick to fight for the slightest material advantage. There- fore, the unfavorable geographical conditions in the region are directly responsible for the historical peasant unrest there.2 To understand the causes, the course, and the outcome of the Communist agrarian in Fujian, a comprehensive study of the province’s natural and social conditions before the coming of the revolution is of course necessary. It is all the more necessary because the interaction between the Communist ideology and the established social institutions is one of the foci of this study, and because there has been no such study conducted in the West. Besides, in China, Marxist historians and the veterans of the revolutions in Fujian always emphasize the deteriorating economy and the increase of tenant peasants in Fujian as the factors prompt- ing the Communist revolution. The accuracy of these state- ments needs to be clarified too. 1 "The Remote Land at the End of See" As a province on the southeastern coast of China, Republican-era Fujian had an area of 28,738.2 square kilome- ters. According to Nationalist government statistics, in the middle of the 19308 the population of the province was 11,888,287 people, composing 1,999,211 families.3 As has .U‘ d the: 56 been mentioned before, Fujian was bordered by Zhejiang in the north, Jiangxi in the west, and Guangdong in the south. The eastern side of the province, which was very long, was a section of the western rim of the Pacific ocean, separated from the island of Taiwan by 146 sea miles. In very ancient times, the area under the jurisdiction of today’s Fujian province, located on the southeastern coast of China, was called mindi, "the land of Min". (Until today, "Min" is still the nickname of the province.) Not until the late Yuan dynasty, about six hundred years ago, was the title of "province" bestowed on it for the first time. Before that point, this "land of Min" was attached to either the province of Zhejiang or the province of Jiangsu. The area was divided by the central government of the Song dynasty, about one thousand years ago, into eight districts called fu or zhou, or in some cases, jun. By the Yuan dynas- ty, the eight districts were called In (literally "routes") by their Mongolian rulersJ‘In later times, the province was often referred to by degree holders of the imperial examina- tions, local gentry, and even by Communist intellectuals trying to show their erudition as Min or Bamin, literally the eight mine. This "land of Min" was famous for its mountainousness. It was believed to be the most hilly province in southeast China.'Mountain area accounted for seventy-five percent of the total area of the province. Except for the narrow strip along the coast in the east, the whole province was occupied ' 1 ( o J . ‘ n I ! — 0 J ( ” I 57 by mountains and rapid streams, leaving very limited land to be tilled and making overland transportation extraordinarily difficult. In the north, the Xianxia mountains, about 3,000 meters high, isolated Fujian from the province of Zhejiang and the world further north. The Wuyi mountain chain, ex- tending from the south to the north along the western bor- der, separated the province from Jiangxdns Only the border between Fujian and Guangdong was easier to pass. Although the Shenshan Mountains lay in between, the two provinces were connected by the Tingjiang River which originated in the Minxi area and ran into the eastern part of Guangdong, finally joining the Pacific via the Chaoshan plain. Because of the river, the Minxi area and the very eastern part of Guangdong had relatively close economic and cultural con- nections.6 Mountains not only separated the province from the outside world, but also isolated regions and counties in the province from each other. The Minxi, Minnan and Minbei areas were divided by mountains too. The geological disunity of Fujian was considered by some people as one of the main reasons for the province’s economic and political disunity. "The bandit bands, big and small, have divided Fujian into bits and pieces, creating a disintegrated jurisdiction. Nobody can rule Fujian as a whole. This is really because of the geographical features of the province," a CCP leader remarked in 1928.7 In addition to the Tingjiang river system, there were 58 also the Minjiang River in the north-eastern part, and the Jiulongjiang river system in the south-eastern part of the province. Although the three river systems covered a vast area, owing to the rapidity of their streams and the abun- dance of dangerous shoals, the rivers did not help trans-' portation in the province very much. Only their very lower streams were navigable. The other parts of the rivers were only good for rafts. The difficulty in transportation had earned for Fujian the title of "a remote place at the end of the sea." Even today, overland transportation is still a problem.8 If the province had a "core" area, then it was the narrow coastal strip. All the major cities appeared in this strip, or rather, at the very mouths of the three rivers. Fuzhou at the mouth of the Minjiang River and Xiamen at the mouth of the Jiulongjiang River were the only two "cities" defined by the Nationalist government in 1945, although Quanzhou and Zhangzhou on the Jiulongjiang River were also well-commercialized cities. Beyond the coastal strip, there had developed county seats but not cities. It is believed that the mountain area at the northern end of the province was the first region to be populated and cultivated, since Neolithic sites have been found in the area. But until the early Tang dynasty (in the eighth centu- ry), Fujian was still a sparsely cultivated land compared to other parts of China, as was reflected by the density of population: there were only 90,000-p1us households with 59 410,000 people in Fujian--only slightly more than the popu- lation of the city of Hangzhou in Zhejiang province.9 During the Tang, owing to the influx of immigrants from central China, Fujian’s mountain area speeded up its econom- ic development. The population boom came during the Northern and the Southern Song dynasties. During the period, popula- tion in Zhengzhou ("the prefecture of Zhang", an area east of Minxi) increased 418.5 percent, while in Tingzhou ("the prefecture of Ting", basically the Minxi area in later days,) it increased 339 percent. The population of Fujian in 1223 was 1123 percent of the population in 806.10 Unlike other parts of China, where people increased their numbers mainly by local propagation, the population growth in Fujian was mainly caused by migrations from the central or northern parts of China. The population swelled each time major wars or chaos occurred in inner China. The influx of people certainly promoted the cultivation of Fujian. However, the rapid growth of population also created the problem of the shortage of arable land. In the reign of Yuanfeng, Northern Song dynasty (1076-1085), the average amount of land owned by each family in Fujian was only one half of the amount in Zhejiang, and less than one third of the amount in Jiangsu.” According to statistics compiled in the late 1930s, the area of arable land in Fujian accounted for merely 13.5 percent of the total area of the province. On average each person could have 2.22 mu of arable land.12 The shortage of land was to be one of the key factors shap- ing historical events in modern Fujian. 6O Contrasting sharply with the extreme difficulties of transportation in most parts of the province, the coastal area enjoyed exceptional advantages in sea-borne traffic. Foreign trade in Fujian can be traced down to as early as the Eastern Han dynasty, in the first century A.D. During the Sui and the Tang dynasties, Yuegang port and Quanzhou city became two of the most important port cities. Ships departing from these two ports sailed on the Indian Ocean.13 After the First Opium War which ended in 1842, Xiamen and Fuzhou eclipsed Yuegang and Quanzhou and became the most important port cities in Fujian. Traffic of goods with other provinces such as Zhejiang and Guangdong was also carried out by sea. The long history of overseas trade also encour— aged Fujianese to go abroad as merchants or laborers. The coastal port cities had long been valves releasing the population pressure of the province, making Fujian the province which had the highest proportion of overseas Chi- nese in its population.14 It is believed by Chinese scholars that Fujian was the region where the Chinese traditional clan and lineage system was most prevalent and developed.” From the later Ming to the end of the 19405, clans and lineages were prominent organizations in the social structure of Fujian. Entire villages were often occupied by the members of a single lineage. Strict, written lineage rules were the best-known laws guiding the lives of the members. Headed by a group 61 composed of the most senior members of the lineage and the elite (who in most cases were intellectuals drawn from the lineage members), a lineage became a closed, blood-based, and to a great extent autonomous social unit fighting for the common benefits of its members, regardless of their economic status. A lineage might become an economic entity engaging in a certain kind of business. In Minxi, there were markets set up and managed by a single lineage. Rules governing trading of goods were set up and commercial activities in those markets were well administered. Or a lineage could form a bandit gang. When the members of a lineage came home with their booty from collective looting, they were cheered by their neighbors.‘6 A lineage was also a military unit. Its armed forces, usually in the form of mintuan (local corps), fought against bandits, other lineages, or any invaders from outside the lineage. Lineages were also organizations that defended the members’ interests against infringement from the government, or more often, helped the members to evade the government land tax by reporting the'amount of common and individual land as much less than it really was.‘7 The prominent role of lineages in Fujian was closely linked to the demographic characteristics of the province. As has just been mentioned, Fujian was a province of immi- gration. Historically there had been three surges of migra- tion to Fujian, occurring in the Yongjia period (307-312) of the Western Jin dynasty, the Gaozong reign (650-683) in the 62 Tang dynasty, and the Five Dynasties period (907-960) re- spectively. Until the last surge of migration, the clan and lineage system was still prevalent in central China. There- fore, lineages were a common organizational form when people immigrated to Fujian. After they arrived in the new territo- ries, in their struggle against all natural and social adversities, the function of clans and lineages as forms of people’s cooperation was strengthened over time, while it was declining in central China. Beginning from the middle of the Ming, due to factors such as the decline of state power, the development of a commercial economy, and the rampancy of banditry in the mountain areas and piracy along the coast- line, the society of Fujian experienced more turmoil than before and the function of lineages as organizations for the civilians became more important.18 The influence of the prevailing lineage system on the Communist revolution will be discussed further in the coming chapters. 2 The Thriving Economy It would require a tremendous effort to study and make tan iron-clad conclusions about the many aspects of a pro- virnce’s rural economy in a given period. Such a study is not the task of this dissertation, owing to time limits and the 130k: of historical records. However, based on the statistics avaiilable, although incomplete, a useful sketch of the rural 63 economy in Fujian in the decades right before Communist upsurges can be attempted. The intention of the following study is not to draw firm conclusions about the details of the economy, but to indicate the broad trends of the provin- ce’s economy. Such a sketch will challenge the black-and- white picture of rural oppression and peasant desperation which some people still assume to have been a vital factor in explaining CCP success. After the Sino-Japanese war which ended in 1895, fore- igners began to set up all kinds of modern mills in Fujian, making ships, machines, paper, tea and even opium. During the Self-Strengthening Movement in the later nineteenth century, the Qing government also established shipyards and factories. After the outbreak of the First World War, Chi- nese entrepreneurs became the most active force in develop- ing modern industries and businesses in Fujian. The enter- prises they engaged in included mining, printing, machine- manufacturing, textiles and food processing. However, all these did not change the economic pattern of Fujian. Almost all the modern factories and mills were concentrated in Fuzhou and Xiamen. In the 19205, the rest of Fujian was still a traditional agrarian society inherited from the Ming and Qing dynasties, without modern industry. In the whole Minxi area, nothing could be considered as "modern industry" em-‘-ept for a small power station. There was not even animal- Powered transportation, let alone automobiles.l9 Rice was the staple grain grown in Fujian. It was grown 64 mainly in the mountain valleys in the Minxi and Minbei areas, and in the lowermost valleys of the three major rivers. The way it was grown was basically the same as it had been in the Ming and the Qing dynasties, except that now the peasants knew that some kinds of "white powders" (i.e., chemical fertilizers) imported from foreign countries could increase the output. The first tractor used in Fujian did not appear until 1946. It was bought from the United States by a Chinese engineer, and was a walking tractor. In the 19205, the average annual yield of rice per mu (approximate- ly one-sixth acre) was only about 150 kilograms. It was even lower in the Minxi and Minbei areas--only seventy-five kilo- grams, as compared to 200 in the lower Jiulongjiang val- ley.20 One thing which made Fujian distinctive was that many of its peasants grew large quantities of yams and used them as their main food. It is believed by Chinese historians that yams were first introduced into China from the Philip- pines by Fujienese as early as the sixteenth century. Most of the poor peasants in Fujian had yams as their main food all the year round. According to statistics compiled by the Republican government, there were five counties in which yams were the main food, in another thirteen counties they were as important as rice; and in the rest, yams were still auxiliary food. Yams can only grow in warm weather, and they provide much less nutrition and fewer calories than rice does. The Chinese people would take yams as their food only 65 if they could not find enough rice or other better kinds of grain. What should be noted here is that neither Minxi nor Minbei were among the "yam" areas. Only the Mindong area contained some half-yam-half-rice counties.21 In short, agricultural efficiency in Fujian appears to have been relatively stagnant in the period from the Ming dynasty to the 19305. Owing to the reduction of farm land and the increase of population entering modern times, the shortage of grain in the province became worse. During the Republican period, counties in the Minxi area like Shang- hang, Yongding and Changting were on the list of grain shortage areas, while some other counties in the Minbei area, like Chongan (the future center of the Minbei revolu- tionary base) had a grain surplus. But overall, the gap between grain supply and demand was more than 2,500,000 den (125,000 tons). As a solution, a large quantity of grain was imported from other provinces like Taiwan, Guangdong and Zhejiang, and even from foreign countries. During the Repub- lican period, more than 500,000 dan (one dan was equal to fifty kilograms) of rice plus an even larger amount of flour were imported from abroad each year.22 To exchange for grain, the Fujianese produced a variety of money crops, of which tea was on the top of the list. Following the lifting of the ban on civilian sea-borne trade in the late Qing, export of tea to foreign countries stimu- lated the production of tea leaves in Fujian. Large areas on hills and slopes in the mountain regions were cultivated to 66 grow tea bushes. Many fields growing grain were also shifted to tea-growing. However, owing to the backward farming and processing technology, Fujian’s teas had begun to lose in the competition for international markets by the very late Qing. Nevertheless, according to an investigation conducted in the Republican era, ninety-five percent of the peasant households still grew tea as a sideline, while the rest (five percent) were specialized in producing tea leaves. Several counties in Minbei and Mindong were important in tea production. Chongan in Minbei was one of Fujian’s most famous "tea counties" producing some popular tea varieties. However, except for Pinghe county, Minxi was not prominent in Fujian’s tea production.23 At any rate, tea-growing was still profitable until the 19303. Actually, tea exports from Fuj ian regained their strength in the first decades of the twentieth century. According to customs statistics,24 the value of tea exports in 1905 was 8,194,000 yuan. (The quan- tity in that year was 254,000 dan.) It increased steadily and reached 11,088,000 yuan (276,000 dan) in 1915. In 1920 the figure dropped to 6,012,000 yuan. However, after that P°int, it grew fast and reached as high as 20,085,000 yuan in 1929. Tea exports from Fujian began to decline after 1930 majJily due tothe world economic recession. But still, the am"llal value remained above 15,000,000 yuan.” This was why as sOon as the Communist-led peasant unions were set up in Minxi. in an effort to do something good for the peasants they encouraged the peasants to grow tea.“S 67 Another money crop which was of equal importance with tea was tobacco. Like yams, it was first introduced into China via Fujian in the Ming dynasty. The profit a peasant could gain from growing one mu of tobacco was ten times as much as growing grain, although growing tobacco required more labor and fertilizer. It was believed by the Chinese that smoking tobacco could expel miasma, and it was also enjoyable. Tobacco consuming quickly became a fashion in Fujian and throughout China, and more and more land was used to grow it. By the Qing dynasty, Minxi, particularly Shang- hang and Yongding counties, became a most famous tobacco- producing region. About forty percent of their population engaged in tobacco-planting, and the best quality tobacco produced in China was from Minxi. Shanghang, Yongding and Pinghe, three counties in Minxi, produced high-quality tobacco. Many former rice fields were now growing things to be knarned and inhaled. Chongan in Minbei also became famous for Imroducing a large amount of high-quality tobacco.27 JEntering the early decades of the twentieth century, tc’bac=v::o-growing further prospered while tea-growing was in decline. Tea-growing fields were now used for tobacco. In 1914ar 92,000 mu of land in the province were used to grow t‘Dba'txm. By 1934, the amount doubled. From then on, it revC>31ved around 150,000 mu. Minxi remained the leading regicn in tobacco-growing. Tobacco produced in Yongding Com”I'tiy’became the most popular brand in the country.28 Export of tobacco from the province increased from the 68 first year of the Republic to 1928. In 1912, the total value of export was 984,396 yuan. The amount reached 2,490,021 in 1928. The peak was in 1921 (2,918,116). In 1930, it was 2,577,417. Only after 1930 did exports of tobacco began to decline.29 Timber was also an important product of Fujian. In the early decades of the century the province was listed with Hunen and Northeast China as the nation’s three chief tim- ber-producing regions. Most of the counties in Minxi and .Minbei were main producers of timber. As in the case of tobacco, the export of timber from Fujian increased dramati- cally'in,the period from 1912 to 1929, jumping from 2,736,293 yuan to 22,475,229 yuan in value. Again, the prcxduction and export of timber declined after 1930.30 Black mushrooms were another speciality of Fujian. Export of black mushrooms tripled during the period from 1912 'to 1929. The value of exports in 1912 and 1929 were 200,608 yuan and 768,468 yuan, respectively." (One other speciality produced in Fujian was opium. unlike tea and tobacco, poppy-growing did not prevail very earlyr in Fujian, but by the turn of the century, it began to compete with other crops for space. Poppy-growing was popu- lar :1n the whole province since it could bring a good profit t° tale peasants. At the end of the first decade of the centnary, the total area of poppy-growing fields in Fujian was 337,500 mu. Longyan in Minxi was one of the counties prontlnent in poppy-growing. Because of the ban of poppy- 69 growing near the end of the Qing, the growing area reduced dramatically, but in the first two decades of the Republican period poppy-growing revived and poppy flowers blossomed everywhere in Fujian.32 Evidently growing poppy was quite profitable to the peasants. In 1902 and 1903, the government in Putian county decided to forbid opium smoking and grow- ing, but the order was defied by the peasants. At last the government sent soldiers to the countryside to destroy poppies in the field and incurred violent resistance from the peasants.33 Of course, things were often complicated. Futile opium-growing was generally profitable to the peas- ants, it might not be so in certain areas or at certain tiJnes, or under some specific situations (for example, if it was over-taxed) . This was probably why during the early Republican years some warlords in Fujian tried to force the Peasants to grow poppy and the peasants refused to do it. While opium-growing could bring great profit to the one who grey; poppy and the one who taxed it, the rampancy of opium PrOduction and consumption in Fujian was one of the sources °f‘t11e social turmoil in the later period. Besides tea, tobacco, timber, black mushrooms and °Pitum, the Fujianese also grew other money crops, ranging from“ fruits to Chinese medical herbs, bamboo shoots and even 1510Wers like narcissus. Production of all of these products kept doing well until the early 19303.34 In the coastal area, fishery and salt-making were well developed too. Although fishing techniques were not devel- 7O oped compared to the Qing period, production did increase in the early decades of the Republican period.” Accompanying the development of money crops, handicraft industry had prospered in Fujian, particularly in the mountain areas, since as early as the Ming dynasty. The most prominent industry was paper-making. It was at first engaged in by family-based mills. When the production expanded, the family might hire people from outside the family or even outside the province. Shanghang and Changting were well-known paper-producing counties from the Ming on. During the Ming dynasty, in Shanghang alone there were more than 10,000 mills making paper. In some cases, the mills developed on a huge scale, some of them hiring more than 11(300 people, most of whom were fugitives or laborers from other provinces.”6 Instead of using wood, paper produced in Fujian was made of bamboo. The processing was labor-intensive and time- consuming. Although water power was used in some cases, most 01’ the work was manual. The over-supply of labor due to the shortage of farm land made necessary and possible the labor- intelusive handicraft industries, such as paper-making. From Ming through the Qing, paper-making in Fujian was a con- staritly growing industry. Entering the twentieth century, the development accelerated.” Almost all the counties in Minbei and Minxi were paper-exporting counties in the early de‘Jades of the century. Statistics show that the production Of Paper in the province was also increasing from 1910 to 71 1926, jumping from 8,910,000 yuan in value to 13,135,000 yuan. After 1926 it began to decline, but not significantly until 1930. In that year the amount was still as high as 12,225,000 yuan. Paper-making industry in Fujian declined dramatically only after the Japanese invasion of China in the early 19305, for its market in Northeast China was closed by the Japanese. Civil wars fought between the CCP and the GMD, as well as among the GMD factions, also affect- ed the production negatively.38 Tea-processing was also a traditional business in Fuj ian, but entering modern times it did not have as good luck as paper-making did. The turmoil in southern China caused by the Taiping Rebellion in the early 18505 helped the export ports for tea shift from Guangzhou to Fuzhou, which gave tea production in Fuj ian a big boost. However, by the late 18805, Chinese teas confronted strong competition by Indian teas in the international market, and the produc- tion began to decline. More blows came in the first decades 01’ the twentieth century when the United States banned colored teas from importation and the London tea market Closed. In the meantime, however, Fuj ian tea mixed with flowers was gaining popularity in China as well as in the w”1‘16, and this development offset the negative factors in the international market to a great extent, as indicated by the figures shown above. Particularly after 1925, owing to the resumption of Sino-Russian trade and the opening up of the market in North Africa, tea production in Fuj ian exceed- 72 ed the level of 1900. The industry mainly concentrated in Mindong and Minbei during the Republican period.39 There were some other traditional handicraft indus- tries, but they were of less importance and were concentrat- ed only in coastal areas. Among these products were tex- tiles, iron, lacquerware, paper umbrellas, sugar, and porce- lain. Although confronted with the strong competition of foreign goods, production of most of these items increased in the period from the late Qing to the end of the 19205. For example, the family-based weaving industry reached its peak in the early years of the Republican period, when large amounts of foreign cotton yarns were imported to Fujian. Exportation of paper umbrellas reached its peak in 1926.“0 Since these industries were concentrated only in the coastal area, particularly in cities like Fuzhou and Zhangzhou, their ebb and flow did not significantly affect life in the vast hinterland of Fujian. Products of handicraft industry were mainly for ex- Change for other necessities, and that required development Of a commercial system. Actually, although owing to the mountainous landscape transportation in Fujian was diffi- cult. an extensive marketing network had developed in the province during the Ming-Qing period. As has been indicated above, Fujian needed grain while pr"Nil-Icing huge amounts of tea, timber, tobacco, opium, and fruits. At the same time, surrounding provinces such as Guangclong, Jiangxi, Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Hunan were rich in 73 grain, silk, and cotton. Therefore, busy commercial interac- tion between Fujian and its neighbors was inevitable. Since the Song period, Fujianese had been stereotypically regarded as more "profit-oriented" than people in other provinces. One reason for this was the economic situation in Fujian. Another reason was that immigrants to Fujian during the Ming and Qing were not peasants but mostly merchants and artisans from Guangdong, Jiangxi and Zhejiang. These people took the lead in promoting the entrepreneurial ethos in Fujian.“l As a result, the traditional Confucian contempt for merchants *was not observed very much in Fujian during and after the Ming-Qing period. Many imperial examination degree-holders abandoned their scholarly careers and applied themselves to bus iness.42 It was not uncommon either that some bureaucrats and landlords encouraged their children to seek money by engaging in commercial activities. Commercialization was not balanced in Fujian. Seaborne transportation was much more convenient than overland trans- Portation. As a result, some coastal cities developed into entriapots for international and domestic trade, even before the liing. Fuzhou was the central market for the entire regidan of Mindong and Minnan (south Fujian), and for part of the Minxi area. At the peak of its development, Fuzhou had 1500000 individual businesses. Between 1934 and 1937, there were 9,328 businesses in the city, while there were 5,202 in Xiamen and 1,963 in Chuanzhou.” From 1919 to 1929, the vaJJJe of commodities exported from those port cities each 74 year tended to increase. In 1929 it was 29.22 million yuan, about three times as much as it had been in 1919. At the same time, imports also increased greatly. In 1931, the value of imports was 61.13 million yuan, also three times as much as it had been in 1919.44 The top export commodities were tea, paper and timber, exports of all of which increas— ed in the 19205. Detailed information such as what percent- age of imports/exports went in/out through other ports, and what percentage of imported goods were transported to other ‘provinces via Fujian, are not available. However, the sharp increase of foreign trade indicates the economic boom in qujian in the same period, although the trade deficit might ixuiicate that the economy was not healthy in the long run. One of the side-effects of the seaborne trade was the exodus of Fujianese to foreign countries. According to statistics from the early 19305, there were 2,830,000 Fujia- nese! living in foreign countries, accounting for thirty-four Percent of the total number of overseas Chinese. Most of then. lived in Southeast Asia, particularly Singapore.“ Among; those overseas Fujianese were rich merchants and poor meer peasants who had gone abroad to seek a better for- tune. The relatively easy access to the sea and the lack of arakile land in the province encouraged the people to go a“’I‘Oad, and chuyang, going abroad, became a tradition. The tradition even lasts today: most of the Chinese illegal immigrants coming to the United States nowadays are Fujia- UQSe . 75 Regional trade inside the province had also been highly prosperous in the Ming-Qing period. Markets mushroomed in rural Fujian. For example, although there was only one market in Shanghang county in the Hongzhi period of the Ming dynasty (the late 14805), by the Qianlong period of the Qing dynasty (the mid-late eighteenth century) the number had jumped to twenty-nine. In that period the county had 429 natural villages with 4,826 households. Therefore, on aver- age every fifteen villages and 160 households shared one market. This was a high ratio in the country.46 Minxi during that period had become one of the places which generated a host of merchants, and Longyan was the county producing the most. Merchants from the county were active all over the country. While the Fujian Guilds estab- lished all over China was one of the most important among China's merchant organizations in the nineteenth century, Longyan as well as Shanghang merchants also established their own guilds in many cities such as Shanghai, Wuhan, Guangzhou, and Foshan (in Guangdong).47 In the early decades of the twentieth century, the commodity economy in Fujian accelerated its development. .According to statistics compiled in Lianjiang, a county on 'the eastern coast, in the period from 1921 to 1925, 64.5 percent of the agricultural products were marketed. The 3purchasing power of the peasants also expanded to a great extent. To cater to their power, new markets were estab- lished, and in some cases fair days of those periodic mar- 76 kets were increased. For example, in some counties in Minxi, the fair days in many markets were doubled. All of the county seats shifted from periodic fair sites to typical modern (i.e., everyday) markets, and stores mushroomed in both Mindong, Minbei, and Minxi areas. Statistics compiled in 1933 show that in some counties there were over 1,000 businesses. There were 200 stores in the county seat of Yongan, Minxi area. In Longyan 400 of the county's stores were in the county seat. In Ningde, Mindong area, there were more than 1,900 businesses, among which more than 600 were in the county seat. Even insurance companies appeared in that county in the early 19205.48 Trading in local markets was usually busy and hectic. Longmen in Longyan county was one of these places. In the early decades of the twentieth century, there were eighty- plus stores there. Every date ending with the number one or six in the Chinese calendar was a fair day when peasants and peddlers came by foot from as far as twenty kilometers away. Merchants from other counties and Jiangxi and Guangdong provinces also came. The shop owners and employees could usually speak several southern Chinese dialects. Products from Changting and Shanghang, mainly paper, were shipped to Longmen on the shoulders of jiaoli (por- ‘ters), and then transferred eastward to Xiamen and the East ‘River area in Guangdong, also by porters; while clothes, salt, seafood and imported goods like kerosene were shipped on the reverse course. Usually about 300 porters were hired 77 each fair day to carry paper. Wholesale businesses and inns were prosperous in Longmen, with specialties like liquor and refreshments attractions to all kinds of people. Some prod- ucts such as roasted peanuts were even sold to Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. There were twenty periodic markets like Longmen in Longyan during that period.49 People living in highly commercialized regions such as Longyan seemed to have a relatively good life, at least by comparison with many other parts of China. In 1927 the value of goods exported to foreign countries from Longyan was 1,915,000 yuan, while imports totaled 3,355,000 yuan.so The ability to afford a 1,440,000 yuan deficit was a plausible indication of the county's relative wealth (although there is no way of knowing how this deficit was financed, how long it had existed, or how long it would continue). Actually, most of the women in Minxi had gold or silver jewelry before the establishment of the Communist regime.’1 Yet Longyan was not the richest county in the Minxi area; Yongding, Shang- hang and Liancheng held that honor, while Changting was listed as the county next to the top three ones.’2 3 Landlords and Peasants All the memoirs by the former leaders of the Communist movement in Fuj ian assert that one of the main factors «iriving the peasants to revolt was the concentration of land ija the hand of landlords. Most of the peasants did not have 78 land, they say, and this was why a "land revolution" was fervently supported by the peasants. Deng Zihui, for exam- ple, recalls in his memoir that when he was a child in Longyan, owner-peasants were still a majority in the peas- antry. But by the time he became an adult, "large numbers of farmhands and poor-peasants had appeared.“3 "The Resolution of the First Congress of the CCP in Minxi" in July 1929 also asserted that in the area, "eighty-five to ninety percent of land is owned by landlords, the land the peasants have is less than fifteen percent," and "on average, more than eighty percent of the peasants in six counties in Minxi are farmhands and poor-peasants." However, other statistics do not support these allega- tions. According to the figures compiled in 1935 by the Nationalist government, 75.8 percent of the households in Fujian were peasants. Among them owner-peasants accounted for twenty-seven percent, thirty-two percent were semi- owner-peasants, and only forty-one percent were tenants. More importantly, among the tenants, 20.7 percent were "permanent tenants." In some counties, the percentage of permanent tenants was as high as eighty percent.“ During the Ming-Qing period, land in Fujian could be divided into two categories: guantian and mintian. The .former meant land owned by the state and managed by prefec- ‘ture (zhou) or county governments; the latter meant land owned by people, or in other words, private land. The purpose of guantian was to create income to support 79 the governmental staff, army, or education and disaster relief. The land was usually rented out to poor people or tunjun (garrison troops) who could inherit the right of tenancy generation after generation. According to statistics compiled in the Ming dynasty, Fujian’s guantian accounted for 8.35 percent of the total land area. Compared to the situation in other southern provinces of China, this ratio between guantian and mintian was pretty low. During the Qing, the amount of guantian declined. After the 1911 Revo- lution, part of the remaining guantian became mintian.55 Therefore, this category of land in Fujian was insignificant in the study of the Communist agrarian revolution. Mintian accounted for more than ninety percent of the total area of arable land in Fujian. It could be further divided into two types: sitian (private land) and gongtian (common land). Common land could be owned collectively by a lineage, a village, a Buddhist temple, or a charitable association, but land owned by lineages and villages was the dominant form of common land. It is said that during the Ming and the Qing dynasties all the lineages which had members living in the same vil- lage had their common land. Land owned by a lineage was usually donated or purchased by the members of the lineage. In Minbei area, it had been a custom among the landlords ‘that each time a landlord family split its properties among :its members, a certain amount of land would be retained as the common asset of the lineage. As a result, the amount of 80 common land increased steadily over time. By the late Qing, all the lineages in Minbei had their common land, with amounts ranging from several hundred to several thousand dan of rent (in rice) per year.56 Most of the common lands were rented out. The sub-divisions of the lineage would take turns to collect the rent, which was to be used on ancestor- worship, philanthropy, education and the maintenance of roads and bridges. The rent would also be used to pay for the lineage’s expenses on lawsuits and xiedou (armed feuds among lineages or villages), and so on.’7 Although usually it was the head of the lineage who would be elected to manage the common land, no individual of the lineage had the right to sell it, unless an agreement was reached among the members or the households of the lineage. In 1927, a Commu- nist activist organized peasants in his home village into a semi-underground association called the "Iron and Blood League," and instigated the peasants to sell their lineage land for guns. Although a few persons who were in charge of the management of the common land opposed the plan, the land was finally sold because most of the members of the lineage wanted to.” Similar to common land of the clans or lineages, common land of villages was kept for the purpose of supporting education, ritual ceremonies, philanthropy, and the mainte- :nance of roads, bridges and irrigation works. The difference was that common land of villages served the need of the ‘villages but not the lineages. Also like the common land of 81 lineages, common land of villages came mainly from the donations of the local landlord-gentry class. Unfortunately, it seems that no statistics on the amount of common land in Fujian in the Ming-Qing period and the Republican period were ever compiled. As is pointed out by a Chinese scholar, the data about the amount of the common land was too scattered and incomplete to be counted up.‘9 In 1950, as a preparation for the land redistribution, the Communist Fujian Provincial Government investigated the distribution of common land in some villages all over the province, and found that the amount varied greatly with villages, ranging from 75.8 to 7.98 percent. Generally speaking, the percentage was higher in the western and northern parts than in the coastal areas. For example, in the Minxi area, the percentage was over fifty. The investi- gation also found that most of the common land belonged to lineages. It was hard to find any other province in which common land of lineages accounted for such a high percentage of the total land area.60 After the 1911 Revolution, mintian's structure of land ownership remained basically the same.61 When the land redis- tribution began in the revolution, although the CCP land (policy changed frequently, common land was always ordered to .be confiscated. In the reminiscences of revolutionary veterans, common land is said to have been one of the sources of class ten- sion between the landlords and the peasants. When the 82 Communist movement began in Fujian, some Communists tried to encourage "class struggle" by instigating the peasants to check the records of their common land, which was usually managed by the heads of the lineages or local elites. Howev- er, there is no record showing that the ordinary peasants had found significant fraudulent practices or that the encouragement to investigate had been successful.62 Even Chinese historians argue in their recent works that common land was more a means to pacify class conflict than a source of conflict. As an article points out, common land to some extent impeded the concentration of land by individuals, and provided funds for common undertakings, thus helping to mitigate class antagonism.63 It is wrong to consider that the right of management of, and the income from, the common land were always the privileges of the upper tiers of the society, another scholar contends. The'distribution of the profit from the lineage common land was reasonable and equal, and this was correspondent with the purpose for setting up the common land: to strengthen the centripetal force of the lineage, but not to weaken it. To guarantee that this purpose of the land would be served, in almost all of the cases in Fujian, each lineage had concrete written rules stipulating the management of the land and its income, and a well-developed managerial system featured by a board of trustees. All these rules and systems which had been 4developed over several centuries made very difficult any abuse of the managerial right, and infringement of the common interests.64 83 Landlord-tenant relations in Fujian in pre-Communist times seemed to be peaceful too. According to statistics compiled in the mid-19305, landlords in the whole province owned 30.62 percent of the total amount of land, and the peasants owned the rest (there is no clue suggesting in what way the common land was treated in the statistics. Probably it was included in the amount of land owned by the peas- ants). There is no reason to think that the Communist agrar- ian revolution had affected the situation of land ownership in Fujian significantly, because first, the Communist land redistribution was carried out only in a limited area and part of the result of the land redistribution was reversed after the Communist revolution failed; and second, the figures presented by the statistics collected in the late 19305 were basically identical to those presented by statis- tics collected in 1920 by the Republican government in Beijing.“ Although sometimes disputes between tenants and land- lords occurred for various reasons, no anti-rent riot re- cords are found in modern historical documents. Not even the reminiscences written by local Communist veterans cite any instance of anti-rent riot to vindicate the inevitability of the Communist agrarian revolution, although they usually claim that "about sixty to eighty percent of the land was in ‘the hands of the landlords" and that the landlords’ exploi- ‘tation of the peasants was "extremely cruel."66 84 Rather than an intensification of conflict in landlord- peasant relations, the relations were actually eased by some new trends in land ownership in Fujian. One of them was that since the Qing land trading had become more common and active. Land ownership was transferred frequently in those regions where the commodity economy was well developed. Accompanying the development of land trading was the devel- opment of folk laws and customs governing the procedures for land trading. As a result, land purchase became more and more the sole means through which people acquired their land, while dishonorable and illegal means such as acquiring land with political privilege or violence became more and more unpopular. Through land-purchase, many owner-peasants expanded their land.67 A trend toward a permanent tenancy system also devel- oped in Fujian in modern times. Under this system, the amount of rent was fixed, and the tenant had the right to use the land forever, provided the rent was paid on time. The system germinated in the mid-Ming dynasty, and kept growing from then until the Republican period. As is pointed out by some Chinese scholars, the development was enabled only by the prevalence of a commodity economy and rent in money. There were many ways in which a peasant could obtain permanent tenancy. One of them was to open up waste land for a landlord. Once the land was cultivated into fertile soil, the peasant could become a permanent tenant. If a peasant family rented land for generations and was 85 never behind in the rent, it could also be granted permanent tenancy. A tenant could purchase the right with money, too. In some cases, landlords offered the right to their tenants on their own initiative, because this was a better way to secure a stable income without worrying about the ownership of the land. The final way to achieve the right was by force. Some peasants refused to give up their rented land and thus became permanent tenants. But this could only happen during social turmoil such as the period of the Tai- ping Rebellion.68 The permanent tenancy system meant less strained rela- tions between the landlords and the tenants. More important- ly, a tenant in the system could sub-rent the land to anoth- er person and hence become a "secondary landlord." Some owner-peasants also sold the ownership of their lands at a low price, and made themselves tenants. More interestingly, gentry, merchants and government officials, when they had the money, also sometimes bought the permanent tenancy of lands instead of ownership, as this category of people would do in many other parts of traditional China.69 In this way, the prevalence of permanent tenancy blurred the boundary between "landlords" who were regarded by the CCP as the targets of the revolution, and "tenants" who were the agents of the revolution. The system also provided the tenants freedom to leave the land, creating a mobile human resource. Together with other developments in Fujian such as commer— cialization and immigration, the permanent tenancy system 86 helped to make the province a more dynamic society. More importantly, the development of the system, which separated the ownership and the use of land completely, made the ownership of land a less important issue for the peasants in Fujian. The statistics show no linkage between the effect of the Communist movement and the percentage of permanent tenancy. Among the counties in the Minxi area which were engulfed by the Communist blaze, Longyan had sixty percent of tenants who became "permanent," while Yongding had thir- teen percent and Shanghang had only five percent. Zhenghe, a county in the north which was basically aloof from the Communist movement, had eighty-three percent, while Qingliu, to which the Minxi Revolutionary Base once expanded, had only one percent.70 Another characteristic of Fujian’s land-ownership was that the amount of land possessed by each landlord was relatively even. This had also been the case during the Ming-Qing period. There were very few "super rich" people. In Minxi, "even the rich people have not many good fields and spacious houses." In the coastal area, very few people had more than fifty mu of land.71 According to an investiga- tion conducted in the mid-19305, this was still the case. There were only 150 landlord families in the whole province which owned more than 100 mu of land. On average each land- lord family owned twenty mu of land while each peasant family owned an average of six mu--the gap was not very 87 wide.72 A CCP leader also reported in 1928 that in Yongding county, there were not many landlords. Among those landlords only a few collected yearly more than 1,000 shi (1 shi equals about 111 kilograms) of grain as rent, and all of them were either overseas Chinese or tobacco merchants. This was also the case in the coastal area around Xiamen.73 4 Social Unrest and Collective Violence Although the economy in Fujian had been thriving since the Ming Dynasty through the early decades of the century, the peasant-landlord relationship was stable, and public education was developing at an unusual speed beginning from the late Qing (as we will see in later chapters), it should be noted that life in Fujian’s rural society in the early decades of the century was militant, violent, and volatile. It seemed that the people in rural Fujian had distinct characteristics. The peasants in the province were often de- scribed in historical documents, even in CCP documents in the period in question, as people with "outrageous and intrepid" (xionghan) characteristics. The people in Wuping, a report by a CCP leader said in 1928, were "brave and militant," and the peasants "vied with one another to join the bandits and army." Once a division of Chen Jiongming, a famous warlord of Guangdong, entered the county to suppress the bandits. But the force failed to confiscate even one of 88 the more than 10,000 guns possessed by the peasants there. Instead, when the force tried to retreat from the county, it was disarmed by the bandits. When Zhu De led his Red Army into the county in 1927, he suffered heavy losses too.74 One factor nurturing the militant characteristics of the peasants in Fujian was the feuding among clans and lineages which, as has been mentioned above, was an impor- tant part of the lives of the Fujian people. When Deng Zihui, one of the most prominent CCP local leaders in Fuj- ian, was sent to the Zhengzhou area to organize guerrilla warfare there, he chose a mountainous district in which to establish a base because, among other things, people there had a history of armed feuds, and had "intrepid and tough characteristics. "” So did the peasants in Hui’an. They were either members of the "Forty-eight Society" (Sishiba Hui) or the "Fifty-three Society" (Wushisan Hui), which together were known as the "Father and Mother Societies" (Fumu Hui). Armed feuds between the two societies were routine, and many peasants had their guns.76 When armed feuds occurred, they were brutal and barba- rous. Jinjiang was one of the counties famous for the tradi- tion of xiedou. In 1903, the Liu lineage in Tatao village built an ancestral hall. The construction incurred a dispute over geomancy between the lineage and the Cai lineage in the neighboring village. The dispute triggered an armed feud which involved tens of townships and lasted for as long as six years, resulting in more than 300 casualties and many 89 idle lands.77 In 1910, an armed feud broke out in Putian county when 300-odd men from Donghua village armed with primitive and modern weapons rushed into Longhua village and began to kill people indiscriminately. More than thirty people including several children were killed in the vil- lage. The ensuing armed feud involved many villages and resulted in large numbers of deaths.78 The Minxi area was notorious for armed feuds also. A town called Wushi in Yongding county was divided by the Lai and Huang lineages. Both lineages had more than 100 guns and even their own factories for repairing arms. Fights and killings between the two sides were constant and people of the two sides were always in combat-readiness. When the town was occupied by Communist forces, the CCP made use of the feud and became a friend of the two rivals. Therefore, the Communists could go back and forth freely in the areas dominated by both lineages.79 In addition to killing, looting was another major part of armed feuds. Once a village was occupied by its rivals, looting was inevitable. Although land-purchasing had become the usual means through which individuals acquired their land, armed feuds were still common ways for lineages or villages to settle their land disputes. This was particular- ly the case in claiming the newly-formed alluvial lands which often appeared in the lower valley of the Min River. This violent way to acquire land for the lineages was still used by the 19405. In 1943, a piece of silt-deposited sand- 90 bar of Yixu village disappeared after a flood. Some time later, when two new sandbars appeared several miles down the stream, Yuxu village claimed the lands as its lost land and thereby started an armed feud with the villages which were located closer to the new lands.80 The intrepid and militant characteristics of the peas- ants in Fujian were also reflected in their tradition of anti-government rebellions. During modern times, peasants in the province had rebelled against the authorities spontane- ously, or sometimes when organized by local gentry or bandit chiefs. An upsurge of peasant rebellion broke out in the middle of the nineteenth century when the Taiping Rebellion in central China was declining. A person named Chen Tianmi led about 1,000 people in Yongding to rebel against the local government. They killed officials and gentry, and opened granaries. Later, peasant unrest known as the "Flower Flag Army" (Hua Qi Jun) rebellion swept over the counties of Shanghang, Yongding and Wuping. The forces of the rebellion even attacked and occupied the county seat of Ninghua. Another upsurge of peasant rebellion took place in Longyan in the first decade of the century, and the unrest spread to Yongding and Shanghang.81 Entering the Republican period, violent anti-tax peas- ant upheavals happened frequently, and most of them were led by local gentry. There was a local warlord named Lu whose exorbitant taxes and levies were resented by the peasants in 91 Chongan. The peasants simply rose spontaneously to resist the taxation by attacking Lu’s soldiers who went to the villages to collect taxes. Sensing the strong resistance from the peasants, Lu finally decided to avoid further confrontation with the fierce peasants by giving up his attempted tax collection. Similar things happened in other counties too. In Zhangping county neighboring Longyan, nearly 10,000 peasants encircled and blockaded the county seat for seven days, demanding tax exemption. The local warlord living in the town finally made a compromise with the peasants.82 Villages often involved in armed feuds could also run into confrontation with the government. There were some big villages in Pinghe county, each with over 10,000 peasants. Under the leadership of local gentry, fierce armed feuds occurred in these villages frequently. Reports stated that peasants in these villages, particularly in the one called Guanbuo, "are intrepid, and not afraid of governmental troops. Fighting against troops, resisting tax-collection and levy-collection are their daily activities." Like armed feuds, these anti-government struggles were also led by local gentry.83 Another case of well-organized anti-government collec- tive action organized by local gentry was provided by peas- ants in Huian. In the eastern part of the county, Zhang, Wu, and Wang were the three most powerful lineages, each of which had strong armed forces composed of their lineage 92 members. When armed feuds between the Zhang lineage and the Wu lineage occurred, the Zhang lineage drew its men from sixty villages. The commander of the Zhang force was a one- time company commander of the regular army of the National- ist government. Relying upon their powerful armed forces, all three lineages defied the authority of the government, and became antagonistic to the local corps, which were also led by local elites but had a closer relation with the government.84 It seems that the peasants in Yongding county dared to defy any authority. In the early part of 1928, in a small village near the county seat, a peasant's wife had a quarrel with the son of a "tyrant gentry" over a trifle. The quarrel developed into a fight. When five soldiers of the peace preservation corps came from the town to settle the dispute, they were disarmed by the gathered peasants. The armed peasants even exchanged fire with a battalion of regular troops sent by the commander of the county garrison to suppress the unrest, although the peasants were not a match for the garrison and were routed quickly.” Another indication of the violent lives in rural Fujian was the activities of the armed secret societies. One of the most famous secret societies in the southern provinces of China around the turn of the century was the Triads, which had originated in Fujian and still existed there in the early decades of the century.86 The most important deriva- tion of the Triads in Fujian was the "White Fan Society" 93 (Bai Shan Hui), which had been one of the participants in the revolution overthrowing the Qing Dynasty.87 There were some other secret societies in Fujian in the period in question, which were more local but also more military in nature, while like those major secret societies in China, they were characterized by their superstitious activities. It seems that in Mindong area this kind of society was more developed than in other parts of Fujian. In Mindong area, rampant banditry surfaced in 1928. The largest bandit gang in the area had 2,000 men. The response of the society to the rampant banditry was the establishment of local corps led by local elites and the establishment of superstitious military societies set up by the populace.88 They were generally known as the "Big Sword Society" (Dadao Hui). Usually one or several villages had a tan (altar); each tan had its own name, such as the "Nine Immortals Society" (Jiuxian Hui), the "Yellow Ancestor Society" (Huangzu Hui), and the "One Heart Society (Yixin Hui)." Each of them had its own god, incantations, and spell, and its own martial arts master hired from its own village(s) or from another locality. Before going to battle, the members would worship their gods, recite the incantations, and drink liquor mixed with cinnabar. Believing they were guarded by the gods and that their bodies were impenetrable to swords and bullets, the members were extremely brave and violent in battles.89 Nonetheless, the most prominent indication of the 94 violent lives of rural Fujian was the rampancy of banditry. As in many other parts of China, banditry had a long history in Fujian, and its origin is difficult to trace. However, as has been mentioned before, the rampancy of banditry began from the mid-Ming dynasty. In the early decades of the century, there appeared another upsurge of banditry in the province. A Chinese saying goes that "poverty generates banditry and theft." This must be true throughout the world. Poor living conditions for many inhabitants in rural Fujian must be the basic explanation for the banditry there. But poverty alone can not explain why banditry in Fujian was worse than in many other parts of China, and why there was a upsurge of such outlawed, predatory violence in the early decades of the century. The mountainous landscape was one favorable condition for such a predatory activity, while the development of a commodity economy which provided numerous vulnerable trade routes and large flows of cash, the float- ing, volatile population, and particularly the anarchical political situation in Fujian right after the 1911 Revolu- tion, were almost certainly also factors that helped the spread and savagery of the banditry. The distinct feature of the banditry in Fujian was that many of the bandit bands were organized on the basis of lineage, while others were organized on geographical bases such as villages or townships. While at the turn of the century many local gentry were fanatical in raising educa- tion and advocating gentility, some others were ardent in 95 encouraging banditry. This role the local gentry played was closely linked to their role in the lineage feuds which were notorious in southern China, particularly in Fujian and Guangdong.(The role of the local gentry will be further discussed in later chapters.) A smaller, weaker lineage was usually suppressed and bullied by a bigger, stronger one. The same thing happened among sub-lineages inside a lineage in which every family shared the same surmane. Allying with other lineages was a common strategy to resist a stronger foe. If the two parties in a feud were equally strong, then armed feuds, meaning a bloody fight with weapons between lineages, would often occur. Local gentry always took the lead in this kind of vendetta, and banditry and lineage feuds were frequently interwoven: a band of bandits of a certain lineage would rob its rival lineage; and an armed feud would assume the form of fight between two groups of bandits.90 Another feature of banditry in Fujian was its ubiquity and popularity. It was rampant all over the province, al- though moving from the northwestern part to the southeastern part of the province, the rampancy lessened. The only county in the Mindong area where there was little or no banditry was Lianjiang. In Minbei, commerce developed rapidly and bandits "rose in swarms" after the First World War.91 Minxi was notorious for the rampancy of banditry also. Every village or township in the area had its bandit band. In the counties of Yongding, Wuping and Liancheng, "almost all the 96 men were hooligans or bandits, and all the ordinary intel- lectuals were planning how to be chiefs of the bandits." There were 30,000 to 40,000 people in the Kanshi and Wuxi districts in Yongding county, and among them most were bandits. In Wuxi, "there was nothing except bandits, land was deserted because there were no people to till it."92 Oxen became good targets of banditry. Consequently peasants in Yongding and Wuping counties dared not to raise oxen and had to allow land to become untilled. It was not uncommon in Minxi that peasants sold their land to buy guns, because once a peasant had a gun, he could become a bandit on his own or become a member of a band. Arms were very expensive. One mu of good land at that time cost about twenty yuan, and a mu of poor land cost only fourteen, while 100 rounds of cartridges cost sixteen. Three pistols and a few cartridges cost 500 yuan. However, peasants still wanted to acquire arms.93 Bandits from these two districts liked to loot their neighboring counties--Longyan and Nanjing. However, bandits in Fujian usually preyed on their own localities--the same districts of their own geographic origins. This characteris- tic distinguished them from the Nian in central and northern China during the mid-nineteenth century, which always looted villages far from their own.94 Also unlike bandits in north— ern China during the early Republican period such as the gang led by Bai Lang (the "White Wolf") who acted like Robin Hood and always preyed on rich people and helped the poor,95 97 bandits in Fujian attacked people indiscriminately. They killed anyone who they did not like, kidnapped people for money, burned houses or even whole villages, and took away property including oxen. Bandit bands expanded in favorable times by recruiting more people and buying more arms, or even made rifles by themselves. When facing suppression by an overwhelming official force, they could retreat to remote mountains and bide their time: a strategy which would be inherited by the Communists later. Banditry was very rampant even in the area which came under Communist control later. In 1930, in Yanshi area, Longyan county, in order to squeeze money the chief of a Chen lineage's bandit band in a village brutally killed the chief of the same lineage.96 Peasants composed the bulk of the bandits. In some counties in Minxi, males in a peasant family did not work in the fields. Farming, wood-chopping and all the hard work were done by women, while the men stayed home and did light chores. This was a tradition of some Hakka people, who accounted for the main part of the population in Minxi.97 Entering modern times, the booming commercial activities and banditry absorbed this idling human resource. A report from a Communist local leader even went so far as to say that in Yongding most of the males became bandits or hooligans, engaged in commercial activities, or went to Southeast Asia. "Generally speaking, males, particularly those who had guns, were all oppressors and exploiters. Only the women were real peasants!"98 98 Even some merchants turned themselves into bandits. In a "world of bandits," transferring commodities from place to place was very risky. For self-defence, merchants shipping their goods had to arm themselves and traveled in groups. Paradoxically, this measure to prevent banditry also encour- aged banditry: if the merchants lost money, they could loot other people with the guns already on hand.99 No matter how favorable other conditions were, banditry could not have run wild in Fujian if the province had had an effective government. And such a government was what the province lacked after the 1911 Revolution. Having defeated the "Second Revolution" led by Sun Yat- sen and some warlords in South China, Yuan Shikai, the President of the Republic of China, backed up by his Bei- yangjun (The Northern Ocean Army), extended his rule to the provinces in the south. At the end of 1913, Yuan sent his governor with an elite division of his Beiyangjun to rule Fujian, thus starting the fourteen-year domination of the province by the Beiyangjunfa, the "Northern Warlords". After Yuan’s death in 1915, the Beiyangjun split into three factions: the Zhili, the Wan, and the Fengtien. Power struggles and contention among the three factions had strong effects on Fujian. The real powerholders of the province changed four times; a predecessor was always overthrown by his successor by force or political maneuver. Yet that was not the worst. During the fourteen-year period, Fujian was devastated by wars. 99 In 1918, a war broke out between the Northern Warlords and the warlords of South China, and Fujian became the battlefield. The war lasted into late 1922 and became a melee among the warlord of Guangdong and the factions of the Northern Warlords. The next year, a another war between the factions of the Northern Warlords broke out in the province. The Beiyangjun troops stationed in Fujian belonged to dif- ferent factions. To expand their strength and spheres of influence, they vied to recruit local troops and even bandit bands from other provinces, and waged wars against each other. From 1922 to 1925, more than thirty wars occurred between the warlord factions in Fujian.100 In the early 19205, Fujian was divided by rival war- lords. The governor of Fujian, with his three divisions and some other reformed local bandit bands and mintuan (local corps), could only exert his power in the region around Fuzhou city. Longyan and the area west of it was the domain of commander Zhang of the First Infantry Division of the Beiyangjun, while the area west of Longyan (basically the Minxi area except Longyan), was an independent kingdom under General Li, commander of the Third Infantry Division.”‘ None of them knew how much longer they were going to remain in power over the areas they controlled. The best thing for them to do, of course, was to extort as much money as they could from the people in their domain, both for war expendi- tures and for their own pockets. There were many ways to collect money. One of them was 100 looting. From July 1923 to August 1924, Longyan was sacked twice by warlord troops which were going through the county. On the first occasion, every store in the county seat was looted.102 A more usual method was to levy exorbitant taxes. Local people, including merchants and landlords, had to pay taxes and levies for almost everything. In the area ruled by Commander Zhang, there were levies for "richness," "obliga- tion", houses, livestock--in short, for everything they could think of. Since growing poppy was highly profitable and it could be a good source of tax, the warlords forced the peasants to grow it. The bulk of the money collected was from the land tax. All the warlords collected the land tax in advance. In Longyan, Commander Zhang in 1925 had collect- ed the land tax of 1931, while in Minxi, Commander Li had collected the tax five years in advance.103 Each region divided by the larger Northern Warlords was re-divided by local warlords who attached themselves to the former respec- tively, and these local warlords collected their own taxes and levies too. Selling governmental bonds and issuing paper currency were convenient sources of income too. Three of the four governors issued huge amounts of bonds and securities in different names. These bonds and securities were actually not secure and there was no likelihood that the buyers would get back their capital, but people were forced to purchase them. The first Beiyangjun ruler of Fujian also set up a 101 bank and issued currency in the amount of several billions of yuan. When the governor's government was overthrown in 1922, the bank went bankrupt and all the currency it had issued became scrap paper.l04 Other disreputable means to raise money included sell- ing governmental positions and encouraging prostitution and gambling. Among the positions to be sold were those of county magistrates, heads of districts, commanders of army brigades, and chiefs of police. The prices for each position were announced openly. In Minxi, the price for a position of magistrate ranged from 3,000 to 10,000 yuan, and the same position would be sold again every several months. Of course, those who bought the positions would make the best out of the position by extorting from the people. As a result, each time a new county magistrate took over, new taxes would be levied again.”5 To open up new sources of taxation, prostitution and gambling were legalized, although they had long been in fashion in Fujian. In Longyan, casinos were set up as early as in 1890, and a type of gambling organization called "flower societies" had existed in the county ever since 1870. By the 19205, an unprecedented number of casinos were set up, and the whole population of the county became "flow- er society maniacs."106 In the casinos, pornography was one important activity. The income of the casinos had to be shared with the local authorities. About forty percent of the profits were used to bribe the local warlords, and 102 twenty percent went to the county magistrate and his col- leagues as dividends.w7 Seeing the warlords from outside the province extorting money from Fujian unrestrainedly and ruthlessly, local elites in the province once appealed for "a Fujian ruled by Fujianese," and published an open telegram to the whole nation, declaring that the province "refuses any aid by outside armies." However, that demand was never met and in 1924 the movement collapsed.‘08 One of the consequences brought about by the negative developments happening to the society of Fujian in the early decades of the century--including the wars, the irresponsi- ble rule of the warlords, the banditry, and a distracted populace--was the militarization of the society. Facing attack from the bandits, local elites took the lead in organizing local corps to defend their own villages. In the Mindong area, where the Communist upsurge came later than other areas in Fujian, the rampancy of banditry also came late: banditry "swarmed up" in 1928. In a county called .Shouning, some of the bandit bands had as many as 2,000 men. Unlike the bandits in Minxi, which usually preyed within their own localities, the bandits in Shouning robbed the udnole Mindong area and even counties in southern Zhejiang 'province. Of course, their own county was their most conve- nient target. On three occasions they had even attacked and occupied the county seat.“)9 The response of the society to this dreadful threat of 103 powerful organized bandits was the mushrooming of local corps, all organized by landlords and gentry who had the power and money to play that role, and the building of bock- houses in villages. In villages where for various reasons gentry-led local corps were not formed, popular societies were organized instead. These societies adopted different names such as the "Nine Immortals" (Jiuxian hui), the "Yel- low Ancestor" (Huangzu hui), the "White Crane" (Baihe hui) and the "Big Sword" (Dadao hui): all these names reflected their military and superstitious characters. Either in the local corps or in the popular societies, landlords and poor Peasants joined hands to protect their interests.“° This was also the case in Minxi. Taking Longyan as an example, before 1923, affairs in the countryside were coor- dinated by "shezhang," the "heads of the community," who were elected by heads of families and lineages, and did not heVe any office and received no pay for their work. To adapt to a new situation under which peoples' lives and property were menaced by frequent bandit activities, this tradition was put to an end and standing "defense corps" were formed in each "gu" (district) .“‘ In 1928, before the CCP launched their insurrections, people in Yongding county possessed more than 50,000 guns. One half of the guns were in the hands of the bandits, three-tenths belonged to the gentry and the armed forces controlled by them, and the rest were owned by individual peasants. In Wuping county, "bandits are as lnany as in Yongding, and the people have an extraordinary 104 amount of guns: there should be no less than 10,000."112 It is evident that the extent of militarization in Minxi was very high. The over-sized Northern Warlord armies, the troops of local warlords, local corps, bandit bands, armed popular societies and armed individuals, all joined together to cause the growing militarization of Fujian society. The Province, particularly some of its regions in the early decades of the century, had been torn apart by wars and conflicts between the factions of warlords, different bandit gangs, bandits and local corps, and the tradition of armed Conflicts between and lineages. All the evidence, as cited above, suggests that the Peasants in Fujian had a penchant for violent action, and had a tradition of rebelling against the authorities. The frequent wars caused by the warlords, the wanton bandit activities, the bloody fights among lineages and villages, the armed rebellions against the government or any other tax cellectors: made the society a hubbub in which all the s°cial groups clashed with each other, and social groups of the same kind clashed with each other too: warlords killed warlords, gentry fought against gentry, and peasants looted peaSants. For their own economic interests, the peasants in Fuj ian had already engaged in collective, violent actions, no matter who led these actions: warlords, bandit chiefs, or 1°cal gentry. Surrounded by such a violent environment, even those who were reluctant to join robbery, fights and kill- ings would take this violence for granted. 105 Summary Fujian’s political, economic and social situation in the pre-Communist era was a complex one. There were two main currents of change running in opposite courses: the economy was developing while politically the province was thrown into anarchism and the social order was deteriorating. Due to its peculiar geographical conditions, the prov- ince had benefited from a commodity economy. Production of money crops had long since taken root in the province. At the turn of the century, although grain yields were stag- nant' exports of all the staple money crops increased re- mall‘kably. The increase of exports suggests the increase of the yields of the crops. Exports of all the main products of traditional handicraft industries were in a state of expan- sion too. To justify the necessity and inevitability of the c:c’tt‘lllunist movement, reminiscences by Communist veterans always claim that due to the economic invasion of world capitalism, the exportation of tea, paper, and tobacco from Fuj ian declined sharply in the eve of the Communist move- ment, and that it was the decline which created job-loss to many peasants and prompted the upsurge of the revolution. This is not true. The "economic invasion of capitalism 106 against China," as Marxist historians like to put it, begin- ning from the mid-nineteenth century, had greatly benefited the economy in the province by promoting foreign trade, as well as the development of a commodity economy, although commercialization had long been underway in Fujian despite the extraordinary difficulty of traffic in most parts of the Province. The real decline of export came only after the end of the 19205. Although due to the lack of materials, at this Point we cannot conclude that the overall rural economy was PrOSpering in Fujian, at least we know that the endemic (Ira in shortage was overcome by importation, and that there was no famine or starvation recorded in the historical documents. More importantly, the dramatic increase of volume in foreign trade in the early decades of the century was a clear indication of the vigor of the economy in the prov- ince . The case of Fujian supports the argument of some historians that Western economic influence on China after the end of the Opium War had played a role of catalyst in prefiloting the modernization of China’s economy. In Fujian, it at least was not a factor causing widespread peasant pc"'erty and promoting a social revolution.113 Being affected by the development of commerce, the traditional land system, which was characterized by tenancy, began to transform itself. With permanent tenancy growing uhtier the traditional land system, the tension between the 1a“tilords and the peasants, which has always been the focus 107 when historians try to look for the reasons why peasants rebel, relaxed. In a society with a well-developed commodity economy, even the gentry-scholar class had abandoned the traditional Confucian belief that farming and land were the essentials of a family or a state while commerce and money were the nonessentials. This evolution of ideology, cOmbined with the separation of the ownership of land and the right to use the land permanently, made people's demands for land ownership much less strong than seems to have been the case in other parts of the country where commercial activities were not as prosperous as in Fuj ian. In short, land owner- Ship was no longer a major bone of contention in Fujian. There was no sign of intensification of antagonism between the landlord and the peasant class in the pre-Communist era. Furthermore, the boundary between a landlord and a "Peasant" became much less clear-cut with the separation of land ownership and the right to use the land. Many peasants beeame so-called "secondary landlords" after they had achieved permanent tenancy and sub-leased the land to other pe(epile. The phenomenon that some landlords would rather sell the ownership of their land and became permanent tenants thell'tselves was an indication that being a "landlord" or a "peasant" had to some extent become nominal. This interwoven Status of landlord and tenant made confrontation between the two classes less likely to happen. There was more. Sharp conflicts between clans and liheages in the province had brought the landlord-gentry 108 class and the ordinary peasants together to fight for their common interests. The interests of the two classes had more in common in a turbulent situation in which warlords and bandits had become a serious, constant menace to the lives and property of villagers, both poor and rich. The enhanced role of local corps and popular societies was an indication Of their class cooperation. Therefore, it is safe to say that "class conflict," if that means conflict between the land lords and the tenants, does not work in explaining the cause of the Communist insurrections in the late 19205 in 1“liftemn in which peasants were the main participants. In his StUdy on the Communist peasant movement in the Hai-lu-feng area in Guangdong province, Marks contends that after the 1911 Revolution, lineages and "flags" (a kind of semi-mili- tary organization led by local elites as combat parties in armed feuds) began to disintegrate and class struggles replaced struggles between lineages or "flags" to become the dominant forms of social conflicts.“ If this was the case in Hai-lu-feng (which is itself debatable), it was not true in Fujian. Of course, a developing economy and relatively relaxed, peaeeful tenant-landlord relations did not necessarily mean that the ordinary peasants in Fuj ian were satisfied with their lives and were demanding no social change. Although the exports were increasing, the profits from the exports, and wealth generally, were almost certainly not equally distributed. Although there was no major famine, which had 109 often triggered peasants rebellions through the Chinese history, the living conditions of many ordinary peasants in the countryside were still poor. Many of them might just be surwrisving marginally. Besides, entering the twentieth centu- ry, the peasants in Fujian had something new to complain about. One thing the peasants resented was the political turuncoil happening in the province after the 1911 Revolution. Frequent wars and the irresponsible rule by warlords from outside the province left Fuj ian in a state of anarchy. The Consequence of this situation was rapid militarization of Fuj ian rural society and the rampancy of banditry. Unfortu- nately, the rampancy of banditry in turn inspired a vicious Circle: as a response to the menace of banditry local gentry and peasants formed local corps and armed societies which might themselves turn into predatory organizations or be assimilated into the troops of the local warlords, thus intensifying the acute confrontation among the social grendlps, and generating a growing sense of insecurity among the people. Another thing the peasants deeply resented was the ecel'lomic extortions from the warlords. It is, however, notioeable that the negative developments in Fuj ian such as the; jplague of wars, banditry, and extortions victimized not mly the ordinary peasants but also most strata of society, ir"eluding scholars, landlords and merchants. The convergence of the social, political and economic 110 changes, negative and positive, created a turbulent, vola- tile and violent situation in Fujian. Social dislocations happened to many kinds of people, who were eagerly looking for new social positions and opportunities. Young people with new-style educations committed themselves to changing their hometowns where everything seemed to be in sharp contrast with the ideals they had just learned in schools. The gentry stratum was undergoing a reshuffle, and most of the local elites had to make a choice in the roles they would play in a changing world. As for the peasants, partic- UIarly the male peasants in Minxi, an anarchical, violent situation seemed to be more pleasant to them: joining the bandit bands or the troops was certainly a more exciting life than staying at home or idling about. All of these developments could, to different extent, be traced to the ecclogical environment in Fujian. Actually, the peasants in Fujian had been rebelling before the coming of the Communist revolution. Any open, Violent collective action defying official authority and laws should be regarded as a "rebellion." Banditry and armed feuds were just this kind of peasant collective action. The Communist-led armed insurrections performed largely by peeeants developed under just these circumstances. And it was a new stratum of the local elite who inspired and orga- nized the peasants into this new form of collective action. CHAPTER 3 THE GBNTRY AND INTELLECTUALS IN THE EDDY As Joseph Esherick and Mary Rankin have commented, it is taken for granted that a society should have an elite.1 The role of the Chinese elite in the society and historical development has long been one of the foci of studies in the c211ina field. The Chinese elite has been viewed as the pillar of the traditional Chinese state. Recently, many aspects of the elite in late Imperial and Republican China have been explored, such as the span of elite activity, local elite resources, and the change of elites over time. Frequently, the role of the elite in modern China is discussed by schol- ars from the perspective of state-societal relations. Argu- ment has often revolved around issues such as "was the power s"=J=‘1.1ggle between the local elite and the state during the late Qing a zero-sum game or not?"2 "Elite" is a concept that is broadly defined by histo- r iahs. Max Weber used it to include bureaucrats and retired and future officials. Esherick, Rankin and some other histo- rians use the concept of "local elite" to encompass many Sorts of people--gentry, merchants, militarists, community lee<3ers. In other words, any individuals or families that ee'tellz-cised dominance within a local arena were "local e1I'L‘tes."3 It is this segment of the Chinese elite who re- ce ive most of the scholarly attention. The change of local 111 112 (elites when the Chinese society was experiencing militariza- 1:ion, commercialization, and social revolution is well studied by scholars. The role of local elites in the Communist revolution is 23150 discussed by some scholars. In 1986, in his study on how the CCP won the support of the Chinese peasants during ‘t:11e Anti-Japanese war (1937 to 1045), Chen Yung-fa once «eascamined the association between the CCP's success and its ;g><31icy towards local elites, finding that through adopting a policy of "tolerance with strength" towards the local elites on one hand, and increasing the peasants’ power on the other, the CCP made the elites unable to resort to violent Protests such as blocking government’s centralized tax 00 :l. lection.‘ More recently, S. Averill has contributed to the study ‘313 1the issue with his path-breaking inquiry into the rela— tions between the genesis of local Communists and the frag- mentation of the local elites in the hill country of Jiangxi 1" ‘tzhe 19205. As Averill points out, owing to the social change happening in the early decades of the century, the st1€3ftzus of individual elite families was insecure, although trteei elite stratum as a whole was still a dominant social force. Children of declining elite families went to schools 11" ‘tzhe core areas and were exposed to radical ideologies. It was these children of declining elite families who often be‘teame the first Communists in their hometowns.s However, it should be pointed out that scholarship on 113 the role of local elites in the Communist revolution is quite meager. Except for the works just mentioned, scholar- ship covering the issue can be hardly found. Averill’s studies reveal the connection between "change" in the elite and the rise of the Communist revolu- tion in a locality. A similar pattern in the origin of the local Communists can be found in Fujian. But the entangle- ment between the local elites and the Communist revolution did not only happen in the early period of the revolution. Local elites had become a most active force in Fujian at the turn of the century, and they remained active throughout the whole process of the Communist agrarian revolution. The mechanism and many characteristics of the Communist rural reVQlution in Fuj ian cannot be well understood without Studying the activism of the local elite in Fujian during the period in question. The local elite was a factor of no less importance than the peasantry in deciding the nature and process of the Communist rural revolution in Fujian. The phrase "local elite" in the following discussion is def ined to include big merchants, degree holders of the Qihg’s imperial examination system, retired officials, the students trained by the new-style schools (all of the above cateegories were usually considered by the general public as "gentry” , and those persons who occupied a higher social status or played a leading role in certain aspects of social life in the localities, such as landlords, heads of clans and lineages, and militarists (who could be officers in the 114 local army, or chiefs of the local corps or bandit gangs). In some cases, these people were also degree holders. In a sense, it can be said that the Communist upsurge could be traced to the local elite’s activism in Fujian. 1 The Old Elite as a Dominant Force As has been mentioned in Chapter One, clans and lineag- eess were dominant elements in Fujian’s social structure in pre-Communist times. It was natural that the clans or lin- eages were led by the local elites. The leadership of a 1.jL11eage functioned like a small government. Sometimes it even had to handle negotiations with the real governments. on 1y persons who had higher social status and intellect could play roles like these. Therefore, the social function of the local elites was in conjunction with their leadership ‘111 «clans and lineages as social organizations. Tubao was one of the pecular things in Fujian. A tubao was a castle-like, huge building in which people belonging to a same lineage lived. As early as in the Ming dynasty, many tubao had been set up in Fujian. A tubao functioned like a small kingdom and the elite presided like kings over the affairs in all aspects. Sometimes several lineages might u.‘r‘j'L‘itze to form a bigger tubao and it would be governed by the heacisr. of the lineages jointly.6 After the 1911 Revolution, with the decline of the 115 influence from the central government in Beijing and the rise of warlord forces in Fuj ian, the whole province entered into a state of anarchy. Abuse of political power, irrespon- sible economic extraction, wars, and bandit activities tore the society apart. Against these adversities clans and lin- eages as organizations to safeguard the interests of their members became more important and so did the role of the local elite who had committed themselves to the leadership of the lineages and to the maintenance of the social and ethical orders of the local communities. The most basic role of the local elites was the imple- mentation of the lineage rules. Although the lineages usual- 1y called their written rules "guiyue" (terms and agree- ments) , virtually always the "rules and agreements" had more authority and practical use than government laws. The rules of a lineage could also in practics override the laws of the State if there was a conflict between the two. For example, an)? ing the Ming and the Qing dynasties, the state had spe- cia II. laws giving local gentry the privilege of certain tax e"(eruptions at the expense of the interests of the other meIllkaers in the lineage. To maintain the principle of equali- ty inside the lineage and to prevent conflict among the meulkaers, many lineage rules in Fujian had clauses specifying that such state laws would never be implemented in the lirieages. It was a customary law that in handling affairs ins ide the lineages, the rules of the lineages were the f 11‘81: to be consulted, and then the laws of the local and 116 central governments. There were some lineages, such as the Shao lineage in Yongding county, which simply stipulated in their written rules that whenever a dispute occurred inside the lineages, it should be submitted to the lineage leader- ship for adjudication or the interested parties would be punished severely.7 Lineage rules covered almost every aspect of the mem- bers’ lives, from the method with which the lineage leader- sslnip was chosen to penalties for gambling and smoking ciga- rettes. In the Tongbo district, the rules of a lineage stipulated that if a male baby was born to a family, the family was obligated to plant 100 trees on the mountain belonging to the lineage. By contrast, the Huang and the Wu 1 ineages required their member families who gave birth to ma 1e babies to treat the senior members of the lineages with feasts at the next Spring Festival. Nobody dared to violate the regulations.8 Some lineages had laws regarding the pun- iSlilsulent of members who committed theft or banditry, or sold the ir children, or idled around and did no decent work. Although the chiefs of a lineage could have the power to p‘11'1ish lineage members even with the death penalty, this power was checked by the lineage rules and the other insti- t‘1"::Lons of the lineage, so that abuse of power happened rare 1y} From the lineages the local elites stepped into the who 1e rural society. Although there was an official judicia- ry in the county seats, peasants living in the villages 117 ‘usually turned to the local gentry to adjudicate their disputes. One good example of this is provided by Kang Buyan, a xaative of Changting county. Born in 1861, Kang became a yjinshi (the successful candidate for the highest degree in tzhe Imperial Examinations) in 1892 and was appointed to the ‘Iposition of neige zhongshu (Secretary in the Cabinet) in the Qing court. Having no interest in being a bureaucrat, he .zreesigned from the post and returned to his hometown and .aalpplied himself to educating the people. When the Qing court .i_r) 1905 declared the abolition of the Imperial examinations and the introduction of a Western-style school system into China, Kang went to Japan to study its educational system.10 When he came home from Japan, he was invited by both the magistrates of Tingzhou prefecture and Chaozhou prefec- ‘tlaszrte (in Guangdong province) to set up new-style schools. He first set up a middle school for Tingzhou, his hometown, and then the Hanshan Normal School for Chaozhou district, which later became very prestigious normal school in Guangdong and is still functioning today.“ During the last few years of the Qing dynasty, he was first elected a member of the Consultative Committee (ziyi- Yuan) of Fujian province, and then a member of the National consultative Committee. But soon the 1911 Revolution came and he went back to his hometown, resolving not to partici- Date in political affairs any more. But being determined not to get involved in politics 118 did not mean he would retire from public affairs. He contin- ued to be active in promoting education, managing social organizations, and developing commerce to solve the problem of material scarcity in his hometown. More significantly, he became a de facto arbitrator in the eight counties belonging to Ting prefecture. When people had litigation, they usually turned to Mister Kang for judgement instead of going to the official court. It was said that Kang handled all the cases with integrity and justice without asking a penny in fees. He became so popular among the people that his house was crowded with people every day. He died of illness in Chao- zhou in 1916. When his coffin arrived at Tingzhou, thousands 0f people went to the suburbs to pay their homage to him.12 It was a tradition for the people to turn to local elites to resolve their disputes. Zhang Dingcheng, the Prominent Communist leader in Fuj ian, also played the role Of de facto arbitrator in his hometown before he became a Com“‘Lll'nist activist. After he graduated from a senior grade schOO J in the county seat, Zhang stayed in his home village for Several years. During the stay, people asked him to arbiTit-rate family disputes, quarrels over property, feuds between lineages, and so on. Whenever he resolved a case Smacessfully, he set off firecrackers to celebrate.13 While the ajudication of lineage disputes was based on lineage rules, the ajudication of village or community af- fairs was also based on folk laws. These regulations and 1 avg I written or unwritten, covered many aspects of the 119 villagers' lives, ranging from the management of common property to the implementation of ethical norms. These folk laws were usually observed. In Tongbo village, Longyan county, to prevent soil erosion there was an unwritten village regulation stipulating that on the northern side of the mountain which was situated south of the village, there should be no lumbering. Even choppers and kindling materials were not allowed to be brought into that area. Any people who violated the regulation would be punished without mercy. The livestock of the violator, including pigs and oxen, would be commandeered and killed for the whole village to share. Due to the existence of the regulation, the mountain was well preserved.“ The village also had regulations to protect its bridg- es. It was forbidden for oxen to be led to walk on the bridges. The reason was that at that time most of the bridg- es Were wooden, and they might not be strong enough to bear the weight of an ox.” Yet lineage and village rules were not the only lever- age which the local elites could use to run the local commu- nity . Their ruling power was also wielded through various p°pu1er organizations. \ Popular organizations were almost ubiquitous in Fuj ian, covering almost every aspect of the villagers' lives. Taking the 1“anyang township in Changting as an example, it had all kinds of those organizations administering district affairs 3 “ch as the defence of the village, education, social wel- 120 fare, maintenance of roads, worship of Confucius, and the preservation of an ideal ethical code.16 On the top of the list of the organizations was the Yukouhui (Anti-bandit Association). Its predecessor, the Niuganghui (Oxen Management Society), was an association to protect the villagers’ oxen from being stolen. The Niugang- hui was a trans-village organization. A fee in the form of rice was required to become a member of the association. A person "of high reputation" was elected as the head. When a member’s ox was found stolen, the head would activate the watch network in the whole district to check the roads and stop any suspect. A search for the ox would also be carried out by the mobilized members.l7 When banditry ran rampant in the beginning of the century, the Niuganghui was reorganized into the Yukouhui and its function was expanded from protecting oxen to peo- ple. If a robbery or theft was reported in the township, the association would help to solve the case. If a bandit way- laying occurred, the head of the association would summon the able-bodied males from all the villages, with arms, to intercept and fight the bandits. In so doing, the Yukouhui was functioning as a combination of a local corps and the department of public security.‘8 The Yicangshe, the "Righteous Granary Association," was set up with funds donated by local gentry. Positions of a dizmector and managers were created to administer the funds, whilch were used to purchase land; the harvest from the land 121 was used as relief for people who came to the township from disaster areas, or sold at low cost to the villagers at times when temporary shortage of grain occurred. Each year the heads of the association would be re-elected and the accounts would be checked.19 There were several associations for the purpose of promoting education. The role of the local elites in promot- ing public education will be discussed in more detail later. Briefly speaking, the funding of associations of this kind partly came from the income of the common lands of lineages or lineages, and partly from donations from local gentry. Compared with the Yukouhui, this kind of association was more a business of the gentry: ordinary peasants were not very much involved in the activities except when their sons received subsidies for going to schools from the associa- tions. They were governed by the gentry. At the meetings of the gentry the regulations of the associations were made or revised, and the executive personnel were elected.20 Other popular organizations in the township included associations to provide tea for people passing on the road, to regulate the raising of ducks and the growing of tea bushes, and to maintain the bridges. Several associations had long been set up for the purpose of commemorating Confu- <11us and Zhu Xi, the great educator and philosopher of the Southern Song dynasty. There was also an association called F111 unshe, the "Association to Promote Ethics." Any Vil.lager's infringement of the Confucian ethical principles 122 might be reported to the association and the violator would be punished. There was even a Jinduhui, the "Gambling Prohi- bition Association." It was set up after the 1911 Revolution as a response to the rampant gambling activity. Through a well-designed program, the association helped gamblers to quit their bad habit.21 All of the facts mentioned above indicate clearly that before the coming of the Communist movement, local elites in rural Fujian played a leading role in the social lives in Fujian’s rural society. It was the local elites who ran the villages, while the official governments had almost been forgotten by the people except in moments when taxation was involved. The elite was in charge of the villages’ legal jurisdiction, public security, public transportation, educa- tion, social welfare, and the maintenance of moral and ethical standards. The activism of the local elite had made the countryside of Fujian an almost autonomous society. The overwhelming general influence of the local elite on life in rural society would strongly affect the characteristics and processes of the Communist movement to come. However, one Specific aspect of the elite's activism which became the midwife of the Communist movement in Fujian was the elite's ‘unusual efforts to initiate public education. 2 New School: Created by the Old Elite The coming of the Communist revolution in rural Fujian was closely associated with the effort of young intellectu- als. Those young intellectuals were a product of the boom in Western-style schools in Fujian during the late Qing period. And to a great extent, it was the development of commerce in the province that facilitated public education. The extraordinary development of the commodity economy and foreign trade created a huge number of rich local and overseas Fujianese merchants. The traditional Imperial examination system was abolished in 1905. But before that point Western-style education had been advocated by liberal intellectuals and accepted by the Qing court. During this transitional period, Fujianese merchants in and out of the country showed their great enthusiasm for establishing schools in their hometowns. The most prominent overseas Fujianese merchant who promoted modern education in Fujian was Chen Jiageng. Born in Xiamen in 1874, he became a big entrepreneur in Singapore engaging in the rubber business. In 1913 he set up an ele- mentary school in his hometown, Jimei, a township near (Xiamen. Five years later he set up a normal school training 'teachers for middle schools. In 1921, the normal school was formally renamed the Jimei School, which now included many di‘liSiOflS such as normal, elementary, middle, business and 123 124 aquatic product industry. In the same year, Chen established Xiamen University, the first university in the province. Four years later he set up an agriculture and forestry school also.22 Yet Chen's goal was not only to promote education in the township where he was born. An "Education Promotion Bureau" (jiaoyu tuiguan bu) was formed when he set up the schools in Jimei. Seeing that there was no elementary school in the countryside of Tongan county, to which Jimei township belonged, Chen resolved to change the situation. The purpose of the bureau was to promote and subsidize the establishment of schools in the county. Through the efforts of the bureau, several years later elementary schools were set up in each township or village in the county, all financed entirely or partially by the bureau, or rather, by Chen. Before long, schools sponsored by Chen were also set up in each county in the Minnan area.23 The quality of the facilities and teachers of the schools in Jimei were among the finest in China at that time. To encourage more people to go to school, in the first years after the schools were opened, students received everything free of charge, including room and board. A monthly allowance was given to every student. Those who came :flrom poor families were even allowed to work in their spare tiJne. Chen's achievement in promoting education was so re- marrkable that by 1923 the region surrounding Jimei was 125 praised by people as the "Jimei School Village" and the reputation of the township attracted contemporary national and even international celebrities to visit and give lec- tures. Among those visitors were Lu Xun, Lin Yutang (a Western-trained famous Chinese journalist), and the American thinker John Dewey and his British colleague Bertrand Rus- sell.24 Even in the remote mountain areas like Changting in Minxi, education developed at an unusual speed, and started early. As in the coastal area, overseas merchants were ardent advocates of education. For example, two merchants returned to a remote village in Longyan from Southeast Asia and set up an elementary school with their money in 1919.” Interestingly, however, the people who set up the first group of Western-style schools in the hinterland of Fujian were often those well-to-do families and degree-holders of the Imperial examination system in the localities. In Long- yan county, a elementary school was set up in a resort by local intellectuals and gentry in 1910. The school was named Kaiming (illumination), because its founders wanted to "enlighten people's intelligence and illuminate the ratio- nale." What they did not expect was that later many of the graduates of the school would join the Communist revolution ‘there. The most outstanding one was Guo Diren, who set up the first CCP branch in Longyan. There were also many gradu- atees'who became high-ranking CCP officials after 1949. For exaample, Chao Juru became the General Director of the 126 Chinese People’s Bank. One graduate by the name of Guo Binkuan achieved his Ph. D. in ophthalmology in Vienna, and became the most distinguished ophthalmologist in China.26 In Changting county, the people who made a great con- tribution to the development of education included five juren, the successful candidates of the provincial level of the examination system, and three jinshi, the successful candidates of the highest level.27 The fact that the county had so many high-level degree-holders is an indication that the county had long had the custom of encouraging education. The first new-style elementary school was set up in 1877 in the county seat of Changting. By 1927, the number of schools reached eleven, among which nine were run by the county or local governments, and two by foreign churches. In the countryside, the first school was set up by local gentry in the richest village of the county in 1909. By the early years of the Republican period, twenty senior elementary schools were set up in the countryside of the county. Adding the elementary schools in the county seat, the total number was forty-three. It is believed that in the whole nation in that period, there were fewer than twenty counties which had as many elementary schools as Changting did.28 From the very end of the Qing to the early 19208, nine liigh and middle schools, including three normal and two business schools, were also established in the county. Most Of’ the schools were founded and run by the provincial and Coulnty governments. Two were founded by foreign 127 missionaries, and a couple of them were founded by local gentry and returned students from overseas. There were even two women’s schools, one of which was established by a local Qing juren. It had BOO-plus female students in 1927. In the high school run by the provincial government, teachers were returned college graduates either from France, Taiwan (under Japanese jurisdiction) or from Beijing, Shanghai, and Wuhan. This meant that the quality of the teaching in the schools was very high.29 Even two private colleges were set up in the county. One was a political science and law school established by a returned graduate from Japan in 1875; the other was a medi- cal school set up by British Presbyterians.30 By contrast, in Haifeng county in Guangdong, where a Communist peasant movement also broke out in the 1920s, there were only two middle schools and no college in that period. The public schools in the county were mainly supported by the county's salt business. During the Qing salt as a commodity was monopolized by the government. During the Guangxu reign (1875-1908), the county government's revenue gained from the salt business was divided into ten shares: nine of these were used to finance education in the county seat area, and the rest was for schools in the countryside. (Df course the schools in the countryside could not survive can one-tenth of the revenue (totalling 68.3 taels of silver Per year). To raise money for schools in their locality, gentry in the villages organized a xiangshuci (temple of 128 village school donors). Every local donor for schools would have a memorial tablet in the temple and would be worshipped twice a year by all the local degree holders of the Imperial examination system and the graduates of elementary and middle schools. In this way a large amount of money was raised and land was purchased, which in turn benefited education when it was rented.31 After the end of the Qing, the xiangshuci actually developed into a committee coordinating education in the county’s countryside. It sponsored composition competitions, academic symposiums, and set up village libraries. Besides purchasing books, including famous Chinese and foreign novels, the libraries in the villages also subscribed to periodicals from Shanghai and Beijing, promoting the spread of new thinking and scholarship.” The other sources of funding for education in the countryside included donations from individuals and gong- chang (public estates of clans, lineages, or villages). Personal donations from local gentry were often raised when there was a need to set up new schools or new facilities, while funding from gongchang provided a regular and stable income for the schools’ daily operation.33 The sufficient financial support enabled the unusual development of public education in Changting county. Advo- cated by local gentry, projects to send students to study abroad were also carried out with subsidies from the county treasury. The pathbreaker for studying abroad was Kang Yong, 129 a Changting native. Being a jinshi of the late Qing, he abandoned his high-ranking government position and went to inspect the northern Chinese border areas and Japan. Right after the Imperial examination system was abolished in 1905, he went back to his hometown and set up four schools in Changting and the Chaoshan area in Guangdong. He also became an ardent advocate for sending local students to study abroad so that they could benefit their hometowns when they came back. The local gentry and officials agreed with his idea and three groups totalling thirty-one students were sent to Japan, Europe and Taiwan from the end of the Qing to 1919.34 Longyan county also had students going to Japan and France to study.” Some schools were set up purely by clans to serve their members. In Huyang, a huge village in Longyan county, be- sides a public senior elementary school open to the whole village, the four dominant lineages in the village also set up junior elementary schools for their own people. It was the Guo lineage which set up its school first. The school took the temple of the lineage, which could contain more than one hundred students, as the site. All the children of the lineage could go to the school for free, and the funding came solely from the income received from public property such as land.36 The quality of teaching in the school was so high that in a mathematics competition participated in by all fifteen schools in the district, students from the Guo lineage school monopolized the ten top prizes. In May 1928, 130 female students of the school won the group track and field championship in a meet of three counties.37 Besides those regular new-style schools, sishu, the old-style private schools, were still functioning in the countryside. Local gentry also set up many adult schools to help people. In Yongding county, public education was also well developed. Even many peasants had rudimentary literacy- -a rare phenomenon in China at that time.38 The unusual development of education in Fujian was one of the factors directly leading to the outburst of the Communist movement in the rural areas of the province. 3 The Genesis of the New Elite The public schools in urban and coastal Fujian areas such as Jimei-Xiamen, where transportation was much more developed than in mountain areas, had easier access to radical thinking introduced into China by contemporary Chi- nese thinkers living in big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. But radical thinking spread to the remote Minxi area too, because Minxi and Jimei were culturally bridged when a "Jimei craze" surged among the youth in Minxi in the 19208. There was no highway connecting the two places at that time. Students who wanted to go to Jimei to take an entrance 131 examination had to walk for four days, climbing high moun- tains and risking being robbed by bandits. However, the hardship on the road did not offset the attraction of the Jimei schools’ high-quality education and cheap cost. Large numbers of young people in Minxi went to the Jimei schools and Xiamen University. Taking Longyan as an example, from 1918 to 1929 more than 100 people became students of the Jimei schools.39 The coastal Jimei schools provided a window for these uninformed youth to observe a rapidly-changing outside world. The early decades of the century was a time when China opened its door to welcome Western ideas to flood the long-parched land of the Chinese intellectual world. The Jimei schools gave their students access to those new ideas and values by providing them with journals and periodicals, as well as with faculty members who were "people with revo- lutionary thinking." Graduates of the schools usually went back to their home villages to teach. Among the more than 100 students from Longyan, except for a small group who either transferred to other schools or quit to became pro- fessional revolutionaries, all went back to their mountain- ous hometowns to teach in local schools after their gradua- tion.40 In this way they spread the new thinking to the hinterlands, creating more new intellectuals like them- selves. The large number of new intellectuals brought about by the boom in the schools in Minxi provided the market for the national radical journals as well as the ideas they 132 spread. Before long, journals such as New Youth, edited by Chen Duxiu, the founding father of the CCP, and Xiangdao (the Guide), the organ of the newly-established CCP, began to circulate in Minxi.“ Inspired by the radical periodicals in the libraries, such as Xin qingnian (the New Youth), which spread Marx’s theory of class struggle, these new intellectuals committed themselves to a fundamental change in the social system of China. The first thing they wanted to do was to get rid of all the evil things in their hometowns, things such as what they believed to be the "crimes of the warlords and imperi- alism"--the political oppression of and economic extraction from the "toiling masses." Taking the emancipation of the "toiling masses" in their hometowns as their first concern, these new intellec- tuals began their actions toward this goal by organizing associations and publishing journals. The proud Longyan students in Jimei formed the Jimei School Alumni Association (Jimei xuexiao tongxue hui) in Longyan. Each time the asso- ciation convened there were more than seventy participants. When Deng Zihui organized a reading club, the "Strange Mountain Reading Club" (01 shan shushe), in Dongxiao, Long- yan county in 1921, he found more than 200 supporters among the educated youth.42 Now it was time for those new intellectuals to air their ideas about social change. Pioneered by Dushulu and Tongshen, both published by Deng’s reading club, Minxi saw a 133 boom in local journals in the period from 1922 to 1927. Periodicals addressing the social problems in the county were published by these enthusiastic youth with a self-defined historical mission. Those "evil things" most disgusting to them were the irresponsible deeds of the warlords, bureaucrats, and "tyrant gentry," such as economic extractions, and "ugly social phenomena" such as "feudalis- tic superstitions," gambling, premature marriage and repro- duction, and arranged marriage.43 The most active counties in Minxi in publishing periodicals were Longyan, Changting, Yongding and Shanghang--the four most prominent counties in the Minxi revolution later. In Longyan, from 1922 to 1926, at least six journals had been published and circulated, including the leading one-~Yansbengbao (the Voice of Longyan). Edited by Deng Zihui, the Voice of Longyan printed more than 700 copies each issue and circulated far beyond the county, reaching to Guangdong, Jiangxi, and Hubei provinces and major cities such as Shanghai, Nanjing and Beijing. There were even more 1:han 200 copies of each issue which were sent to subscribers :i11 locations such as Singapore, Luzon, and Rangoon. All the Zi<3urnals were run by Longyan students in Jimei schools.“ Besides going to the Jimei-Xiamen area, some other I§?"c>uth from the remote mountainous areas also went to major ‘:=;i_ties such as Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing. These stu- dents too were deeply concerned with affairs in their home- tOWns and published journals addressing problems in their 134 birthplaces. Students from Changting published the Dragon Mountain (Longshan) and circulated back to the county in 1919. Yet the most influential journal published by Minxi students outside of Fujian was Tinglei (the Thunder over Tingzhou). Its thirty editors were all from the eight coun- ties formerly belonging to Ting prefecture in Minxi, as were its contributors. This monthly began to come out in March 1926, and stopped publishing in December of the same year when its editors and contributors followed the Northern Expedition troops to their hometowns.“ Although the new generation of Minxi intellectuals had a seething enthusiasm for changing the "dark" society of their hometown into a "bright new world," as reflected by the contents of the journals they were still far from being sure about the concrete means for the changes they desired. Imperialists, warlords, "capitalists," "local tyrants and evil gentry," and hooligans were defined as their arch enemies. But when it came to the question of how to deal ‘with these enemies, the new intellectuals were not decided, iilthough they generally agreed that the enemies’ evils Should be "revealed." Some of them seemed to be influenced 1351 the nineteenth-century Russian Populists, advocating "sgoing among the people" to study and reveal their suffer- -lengs and to educate them, to "explore the way of changing ‘tllae old worlds."“ Of course, there were intellectuals influenced by Marxist-Leninist theories such as class struggle and armed 135 revolution. One of the intellectuals of this kind was Deng Zihui, who in an article published in the Voice of Longyan advocated that "we" should pick up arms and snatch the political power from the hands of the "troops, capitalists, and gentry."47 At any rate, after Sun Yat-sen started his "National Revolution" in 1924, the policies advocated in all of the journals were generally in tune with Sun’s revolu- tionary ideas, and support for the Northern Expedition became a common theme in the journals.48 The mushrooming of the journals run by the new intel- lectuals of Minxi indicated both their acute desire to change the world of Fujian and their great energy. This energy, generated by the clash between the radical ideas the new intellectuals had just learned and the "dark" realities of society in Fujian, would soon find an outlet and exhaust itself. As has been shown above, the new generation of intel- lectuals in Fujian had strong social connections with the (old.generation of local elites: the former was a direct lgroduct of the efforts made by the latter to promote modern education. There were many students who were from poor families. Those young people would have had no chance to ltbwecame literate had not the local gentry set up schools and Itlaade public education affordable to those poor families. One l;>1:ominent example was Guo Diren, who later became the secre- ‘tléiry of the CCP Minxi Special Committee. Guo’s father was a tenant and butcher. Due to the 136 economic hardship of his family, all of his sons and daughters died young. Guo and his young brother were the only two who survived. However, he was able to go to a grade school in his village in Longyan with the children of well— to-do families. After he graduated from the school, he was able to go to the normal school in Jimei set up by Chen Jiageng because the school offered free board and room for poor students. It was there that Guo became influenced by radical thinking and began to act as a social agitator.49 However, it should be noted that unlike Guo, most of these new intellectuals had close social connections with the old elite by virtue of being the offspring of old gentry families. It is difficult at this point to write a collective biography of those graduates of the new-style schools in Fujian. However, available materials show that most of the famous local leaders of the Communist revolution in Fujian ‘who were former students were from families in the upper .layer of rural society, including landlords, merchants, (degree holders and retired bureaucrats. Deng Zihui, one of the key founders of the Minxi Revolutionary Base, was an example. His father, although he could not be viewed as a ilfflich man, was a xiucai, a holder of the lowest degree in the Zlirnperial examination system. His real occupation was a ‘ver."93 However, expanding the soviets first of all re- quired the expansion of the Red Army, while it was very difficult to expand the Red Army if the soviet areas did not expand, otherwise recruiting too many men into the Red Army "c>‘11&i aggravate the economic difficulty by increasing the p eaSants’ burdens and reducing the already-inadequate labor force. The revolution thus bogged down in an insoluble interaction. This was the dilemma the CCP faced. Yet it was only one of the many dilemmas the CCP faced in Fujian, and 332 333 probably also in all the other revolutionary bases in China during the period in question. It was those dilemmas that made the vitality of the CCP’s revolutionary bases question- able. This subject will be discussed further in the final conclusion of the dissertation. CONCLUSION There have been many attempts to analyze and explain in global terms the causes of the development of the Chinese Communist revolution as a whole. The class conflict school, for example, has argued that an intensification of class struggle was the crucial cause of the revolution’s success.l Other scholars, among them most notably Chalmers Johnson, have downplayed the effect of class struggle as a political environment for the Communist success by stressing other factors such as peasant’s nationalism aroused by the Japa- nese invasion in 1937 which, according to Johnson, underlay peasants’ support for the revolution, and hence accounts for the success of the CCP during the wartime period.2 Still other scholars feel that the best explanation for the growth of the various local revolutionary movements in various parts of China lies in the nature and extent of the Commu- nists’ organizational activities and mass mobilizational policies.3 Although one or another of these hypotheses may work 'well when applied to certain specific cases, none of them has proven completely satisfactory in interpreting the Chinese revolution as a whole.‘ In retrospect, this is not slurprising. China is a vast country whose socioeconomic and Political circumstances vary widely from place to place, and 334 335 from time to time. In addition, the revolution was not a single, well-defined phenomenon, but rather the sum of the results of multiple clusters of complex and fluid processes interacting over a period of many years. Given these facts, it is both more feasible and one hopes more productive to chose a limited geographical area and a relatively short time period to examine in detail con- ditions which might have helped or hindered the development of a specific part of this lengthy and diverse revolutionary process. It is for this reason that I have chosen Fujian between 1924 and 1934 as the focus for this study. Based upon new materials,’ this study has reexamined in the context of this local area the roles and relative impor- tance of socioeconomic factors and politico-military strate- gy in the development of the revolution. As will be ex- plained below, my investigation has confirmed the inter- pretative usefulness of some aspects of existing theories, while it has also demonstrated the need to modify signifi- cantly many arguments that have been advanced by previous scholars. Socioeconomic Factors Although it is among the most well-known and persistent 01?— the socioeconomic explanations for the Chinese revolu- tixon, the class conflict thesis seems not to be very appli- 331318 in explaining why the Communist revolution occurred in 'Tuziian. In the existing scholarship, intensification of 336 class struggle has often been regarded as a consequence of economic deterioration, or of changes in socioeconomic structure incurred by factors such as imperialist economic invasion.“ In the two to three decades prior to the Commu- nist movement in Fujian, there is no evidence showing such a deterioration in the province. On the contrary, statistics cited in Chapter Two strongly suggest that at least in some important sectors the economy was expanding. There is no evidence showing a worsening landlord-tenant relationship either. Actually, "class cooperation" (to borrow a Communist cliche) was developing among ordinary peasants and local gentry in rural areas. The strongest resentment of peasants (as well as the gentry) seems to have been against the excessive taxes and levies from the warlord governments. But when the Communist-led insurrections occurred, it was the local gentry who bore their brunt. This fact can be under- stood as the effect of the CCP’s program of agrarian revolu- tion, not as an indication of the intensification of class conflict before the revolution. Then what enabled the Communist-led insurrections? It seems that the local politics theory, represented by Perry, has more interpretative power in this case than other exist- .ing theories. The theory, as Perry implements it, traces the Pattern of peasants’ collective action to the local ecolog- i<=al conditions which shaped the characteristics of the local people . 7 337 There had been significant social unrest and violence in Fujian before the Communist revolution, such as large- scale banditry, armed feuds between lineages, and other kinds of collective predatory actions.8 It is evident that there was a close connection between the mountainous land- scape and the economic mode on the one hand, and the mili- tant, lawless characteristic of the local people on the other (Benton notes that the Fujian people were stereotypi- cally felt to be a "bold and lawless raceMU, although it should be added that social factors such as immigration patterns of the Fujian people were also important elements in shaping the social unrest. It was this social unrest and violence that provided favorable conditions for the CCP activists to launch the revolution, which can be seen in one important sense as having simply channeled the social unrest and violence in a new direction. In other words, the Communist-led insurrec- tions can be regarded as a new form of the existing social unrest and violence. Social unrest and violence were often connected to soc- ial militarization, as Philip Kuhn’s study of rural militias in late imperial China usefully reveals.lo Like the situa- ‘tion in nineteenth-century southern China that Kuhn ana- llyzed, rural Fujian on the eve of the Communist movement was ltighly militarized, and the ubiquitous and often well-orga- niLzed armed forces in Fujian by and large matched the multi- tiLered structural pattern of nineteenth-century militariza- 338 tion that Kuhn described. The CCP-led military struggle was a new expression of this on-going militarization process, which had quickened after the 1911 Revolution. When looked at in long-term perspective, therefore, the military strug- gle between the Communist and anti-Communist forces appears to have been a variant manifestation of well-established processes of militarization that had begun well before Marxism arrived in China. If the Communist movement in Fujian can thus be consid- ered in some respects to have been a continuation of exist- ing social unrest, violence, and militarization, then to what extent did the peasants take the new form of collective violence as a ”revolution" as defined by the CCP? In other words, to what extent can the peasants’ involvement in the Communist movement be regarded as a reflection of the con- tinuation of purely local endemic tensions and feuds as opposed to evidence of their support of the revolution? In the existing literature, although no clear conclusions have been reached on how the CCP won support from the peasants, it nonetheless seems that the debates have operated under the presumption that the CCP did in fact win such support. Facts in the Communist agrarian revolution in Fujian chal- lenge this presumption." As I have shown in Chapter Four, large numbers of peas- alrts did participate in the CCP-led armed insurrections in tile first phase of the "agrarian revolution." But partic- iF>ation, even on voluntary terms, did not necessarily mean 339 "support for the revolution." The peasants could join the violence for their own purposes. As has been shown in the case of insurrections in Minxi, many peasants showed by their actions and words that they did not feel that they were participating in the Communist revolution.12 Actions led by the Communist activists such as datuhao and attacking towns were perceived by the peasants as revivals of forms of violent collective action which had prevailed before the Communist revolution began. In this first phase of the revolution, peasants in Fujian are better described as "fellow travelers" than as supporters of the revolution. One thing that should be noted here is that while Perry in her study of peasant unrest in the Huaibei area consid- ered that the peasants’ rebellions and banditry were best treated as "survival strategies,"l3 Fujian peasants’ preda- tory actions such as banditry and rebellions had more com- plicated social rationales than simply "survival." While it is likely that there were some people who suffered from hunger in rural Fujian (even in today’s developed countries there is hunger), and it was a fact that the life of the peasants in Fujian was by no mean happy and enjoyable, there is no historical record showing that in the decades prior to 'the eruption of the Communist surge there had appeared economic factors such as famine or deep recession which had thten inspired peasant rebellions in China’s history. If it is true that the peasants were not participating it) the revolution consciously, then what was the relation- 340 ship between the CCP and the peasants? There were two main social groups among the constituents of the revolution: the young intellectuals who believed in Communism and became the incarnation of the party in the local movement, and the peasants who mostly knew nothing about Communism. Although the purposes of the two groups in action were different, the young intellectuals, as discussed in Chapter Four, formed a kind of alliance with the peasants in the first phase of the revolution, that is, the phase of insurrection. But the alliance was precarious and short-lived. As soon as the peasants found that joining the CCP-led violence would bring them more harm than good, they resigned or even turned against the CCP. Entering the second phase of the revolution, that is, after the establishment of the soviet regimes, the relation- ship between the CCP and the peasants became a little more complicated. On the one hand, the original characteristics of the alliance lasted to some extent: it was said that the peasants were still willing to join CCP-led guerrilla forces and the Red Guards, while they were generally reluctant to join the Red Army. The reason was simple: the nature and :function of the first two organizations were closer to the C>ld forms of social organization such as bandit gangs and local corps, and they did not require travelling to strange areas far from home. On the other hand, the CCP-peasant relationship was sJLiding into confrontation. Political control and autonomy, 341 economic extraction and resistance to it, became themes in the relationship between the two sides. The various "mass organizations" are better understood as tools to control the masses rather than (as scholars such as Ilpyong Kim believe) as vehicles to "mobilize" the masses.“ Control of the peasants became vitally important when it proved impossible to win their support by giving them material benefits such as land, while at the same time the increasing military and economic pressure on the CCP made it essential that the party obtain more and more peasant "sup- port." As a result, to collect human and material resources the CCP had to adopt expedient, forceful measures toward the peasants. As soon as these measures were implemented, "peas- ant support" for the revolution became all the more diffi- cult to identify, as I have shown in the discussion of land redistribution in Chapter Four. At least in the case of Fu- jian, it is therefore clear that the CCP-peasant relation- ship was dominated more by confrontation than by coopera- tion. It can also be observed that these findings are con- sistent with those of Chalmers Johnson in north China where ,he contends that the CCP had also been unsuccessful in mobi- .lizing the peasants until the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese “her in 1937.” It is also apparent that in the final analysis the lilnfluence of existing social conditions proved more harmful ‘tlman helpful to the revolution, despite the fact that the eJtisting social unrest and violence did provide the CCP with 342 favorable conditions for launching its insurrections. While the Communists were trying first to take advantage of and then to wipe out the old social structure and institutions, society was assimilating the revolution into its old pat- terns. The "class struggle" desired by the CCP could turn into feuds between lineages, CCP-led guerrilla forces could degenerate into bandit gangs, and upright party activists could become corrupt local powerholders. In the battle , against social inertia, the CCP was on the losing side. The argument that the existing social conditions did more harm than good to the revolution becomes even stronger when one considers the role of the local elite.“ Although some recent scholarship has at least begun to note connec- tions between the social structure and activities of local elites and the development of local revolutionary movements, evidence from the Fujian case suggests that local elites played a much more significant and far-reaching role in the Communist revolution than scholars have so far acknowled- ged.l7 Local elites had dominated most aspects of rural soci- ety in pre-Communist times. The power of established local elites was such an important factor supporting the existing Socioeconomic order that it could not be ignored if the Clistribution of power and resources in rural Fujian was ever to be fundamentally changed. At the same time, the vast Inasjority of early CCP members were also themselves of elite Origin, and had begun to participate in the revolutionary 343 movement while attending or teaching in modern schools and other elite-run institutions. The fact that both the dominant rural powerholders and their leading revolutionary challengers were local elites clearly indicates that--like the peasantry--the Fujian rural elite was not a single homogeneous social category, but rather a complex and conflict-ridden group whose members varied in their resources, status and attitudes. Of particu- lar relevance to the history of the Fujian revolution was the distinction between what I have called in Chapter Three the ”old” and ”new" elites: the former generally older, more traditionally-educated and rurally-oriented people, and the latter typically young, urban-oriented graduates of modern schools. In somewhat the same way that the patterns of con- flict and violence characteristic of rural Fujian society as a whole resulted from long-term processes, the existence of these two broad sub-groups of the elite also resulted from ongoing processes of change and fragmentation within the traditional Chinese gentry. Looked at from this point of view, the conflicts between the rural landlords and tuhao on the one hand and young CCP intellectuals on the other can be ‘understood in part as a manifestation of growing competition between segments of a diversifying elite to inherit or to assume the power previously held by the imperial-era gentry. Even if bitter conflict between young CCP challengers and threatened rural powerholders was doubtless inevitable, 1‘: appears in retrospect that CCP leaders still had at least 344 some choice in the tactical policies they might have adopted to deal with their powerful elite enemies. For instance, if the CCP had adopted a relatively moderate policy toward the old local elite, as it did later in the Anti-Japanese War period,18 the local Communists might have met less hostility from the old elite and hence had a better chance to succeed. Unfortunately, they did not do so during this period. Due to its ideology and its program of radical agrarian revolution, the CCP publicly identified the old local elite as its major enemy from the very beginning of the agrarian revolution. As a result, the revolution featured from the beginning a rivalry between the old gentry and the Communist intellectu- als who had derived from the local elite stratum. Communist intellectuals assumed the locomotive role in the local revolutionary movement.19 Unfortunately, the histo- ry of the Communist movement in Fujian proved that they were too weak a force to fulfill the revolutionary program of the CCP during the period in question. On the one hand, they had the difficult task of mobilizing the peasants, who as we have seen were mostly passive toward the revolution; on the other hand, these Communist new elites had to fight an all- out war against old local elites such as degree holders and llineage heads who had powerful influence in the countryside aand had organized the local corps which were the arch-ene- nnies of the Communist local armed forces. The local elite’s Eltrong resistance to the revolution was one of the main factors shaping the process of the revolution, and contrib- uting to its final failure in 1934. 345 Political Policies and Military Strategy If, as this work has suggested, socioeconomic factors in rural Fujian were at best ambiguous and at worst unfavor- able to the revolution, the CCP’s political policies and military strategy were arguably more important and effective instruments for winning the revolutionary struggle. Even in this area, however, the CCP in Fujian faced many more prob- lems and achieved much more ambiguous results than party members at the time had expected or than scholars have so far recognized.20 The first issue which needs to be discussed in this regard is the adequacy of the CCP’s overall rural strategy, or rather, the viability of the Communist rural bases. The CCP’s rural-centered strategy was the anti-thesis of the urban-centered strategy used by the party earlier. Drawing on both the experience of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the ideological assumptions of Marxist-Leninist theory, the CCP in its early years had taken it for granted that the center of the Communist revolution was in the cities, and 'that urban workers were the main force of the revolution.zl lifter the collapse of the First CCP-GMD United Front, how- eever, the August Seventh Emergency Conference of the CCP Central Committee in 1927 resolved that the "fundamental Content of the Chinese revolution is land revolution," thus Inaarking the beginning of the Communist "land revolution” or 346 "agrarian revolution." The conference also decided that the party’s "general policy" should be "to prepare and organize armed insurrections in those provinces which have become the centers of peasant movements." However, the decisions of this conference were only precursors to the rural strategy featuring base-building. When the conference ordered armed insurrections to be staged, its participants still aimed to use these to achieve the immediate occupation of big cities such as Changsha in Human province and Guangzhou in Guangdong. This urban-cen- tered strategy was still attractive to many top CCP leaders such as Li Lisan and Wang Ming during the agrarian revolu- tion period. As we have seen in Chapters One and Five, these leaders ordered the Red Army to attack major cities again and again. By contrast, it was Mao Zedong who because of his practice of building revolutionary bases in the Jinggang Mountains and in southern Jiangxi province, and his theori- zation of the practice during the period from 1928 to 1930, became recognized as the architect of the rural strategy. Mao as a party cadre had been particularly interested in organizing peasant movements since the early days of the ,First CCP-GMD United Front. After the August Seventh confer- ence, he was ordered by the party center to organize the so- <:alled ”Autumn Harvest Uprising" in Hunan aiming at the (occupation of Changsha, the provincial capital. Predicting 't:hat there was no hope of victory if his forces attacked Changsha, Mao led the remnant of the rebellious soldiers to 347 the Jinggang Mountains and set up a base there, thus begin- ning the practice of the rural strategy. It is true that the CCP-led armed forces could survive better in rural bases than in the cities, at least for a while, as was proven by the failure of the Nanchang Mutiny in August 1927 and other CCP-led uprisings in the cities, and by the temporary success achieved in setting up bases in the Jinggang Mountains and some other areas of China. But seeing that many of these bases, including Mao’s base in the Jinggang Mountains, had difficulty surviving and expanding after they were established, many national party cadres continued to doubt the role and future of base-area-centered rural strategy.22 It was through his arguments against such skeptical cadres that Mac consolidated his reputation as the architect of the rural strategy. In his articles published during the 1928-30 period, Mao argued for the correctness of the base- building strategy and for the vitality of rural bases and ‘the Red Army. Mao contended that base-building was the sole correct revolutionary strategy for a "semi-feudal, semi-col- T $53 7*! Hill?- Fri/i Chen J iongming fifm afi Chen Rongguang W‘* *3 Chen Tianmi mi 52 Chen Zukang nee/F4 Chongan 1%? chongfeng yundong mess: chuyang fl 5% Dadaohui 7‘{ /7 1+: dan éfli datuhao W I. 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Zhangchao ribao fiyfifi B a mi- 71kg 7'6 427 Zhang Chinan Zhang Dingcheng Zhangping Zhang Zhen Zhangzhou Zhejiang Zhenghe Zhong Shaokui Zhonghua geming dang Zhou Enlai Zhu De Zhu Xi zuzhi guannian ziyiyuan s / | \ a 1, I71 HICHI GEN STRTE UNIV. LIBRRRIES WI WI lllH NI HI I‘ll WIIWIIHI H 312 3010 53 1(5 5656