Page 63 - SELECTED WORKS OF MAO TSE-TUNG Volume I.indd

INVESTIGATION OF PEASANT IN HUNAN 57

His remark in the text that “Proper limits have to be exceeded in order to right a
wrong, or else the wrong cannot be righted” meant that the mass revolutionary method,
and not the revisionist-reformist method, had to be taken to end the old feudal order.
6 Chiang Kai-shek had not yet been fully exposed as a counter-revolutionary in
the winter of 1926 and the spring of 1927 when the Northern Expeditionary Army
was marching into the Yangtse valley, and the peasant masses still thought that he
was for the revolution. The landlords and rich peasants disliked him and spread
the tumour that the Northern Expeditionary Army had suffered defeats and that
he had been wounded in the leg. Chiang Kai-shek came to be fully revealed as a
counter-revolutionary on April 12, 1927, when he staged his counter-revolutionary
coup d’état in Shanghai and elsewhere, massacring the workers, suppressing the
peasants and attacking the Communist Party. The landlords and rich peasants then
changed their attitude and began to support him.
7
Kwangtung was the first revolutionary base in the period of the First Revolu-
tionary Civil War (1924-27).
8
Wu Pei-fu was one of the best-known of the Northern warlords. Together
with Tsao Kun, who was notorious for his rigging of the presidential election in
1923 by bribing members of parliament, he belonged to the Chihli (Hopei) clique.
He supported Tsao as the leader and the two were generally referred to as
“Tsao-Wu”. In 1920 after defeating Tuan Chi-jui, warlord of the Anhwei clique,
Wu Pei-fu gained control of the Northern warlord government in Peking as an
agent of the Anglo-American imperialists; it was he who gave the orders for the
massacre, on February 7, 1923, of the workers on strike along the Peking-Hankow
Railway. In 1924 he was defeated in the war with Chang Tso-lin (commonly known
as the “war between the Chihli and Fengtien cliques”), and he was thereupon
ousted from the Peking regime. In 1926 he joined forces with Chang Tso-lin at the
instigation of the Japanese and British imperialists, and thus returned to power.
When the Northern Expeditionary Army drove northward from Kwangtung in 1926,
he was the first foe to be overthrown.
9
The Three People’s Principles were Sun Yat-sen’s principles and programme
for the bourgeois-democratic revolution in China on the questions of nationalism,
democracy and people’s livelihood. In 1924, in the Manifesto of the First National
Congress of the Kuomintang, Sun Yat-sen restated the Three People’s Principles,
interpreting nationalism as opposition to imperialism and expressing active support
for the movements of the workers and peasants. The old Three People’s Principles
thus developed into the new, consisting of the Three Great Policies, that is, alliance
with Russia, co-operation with the Communist Party, and assistance to the peasants
and workers. The new Three People’s Principles provided the political basis for
co-operation between the Communist Party of China and the Kuomintang during
the First Revolutionary Civil War period.
10
The Chinese term for “long live” is wansui, literally “ten thousand years”, and
was the traditional salute to the emperor; it had become a synonym for “emperor”.
11 Rich peasants should not have been allowed to join the peasant associations,
a point which the peasant masses did not yet understand in 1927.
12
Here the “utterly destitute” means the farm labourers (the rural proletariat)
and the rural lumpen-proletariat.
13 The “less destitute” means the rural semi-proletariat.
14 Yuan Tsu-ming was a warlord of Kweichow Province who controlled the
western part of Hunan.