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Mao Tse-tung and Secret Societies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Stuart R. Schram
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Extract

That Mao Tse-tung owes his rise to power to the support of the Chinese peasantry is an obvious and undisputed fact. The oldest controversy regarding his career concerns the degree of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy which can be attributed to such a peasant-based revolution in an agrarian country. Considerable attention has also been devoted to the guerrilla methods by which this revolution was carried out, and to the relative importance of the appeals of nationalism and of social justice in Tallying the peasants to Mao's banner. The fact that Mao himself has his roots among the Chinese peasantry has, of course, not been overlooked, but it has been considered primarily in the light of the advantages which Mao drew from this background in understanding and manipulating the peasantry. There is not the least doubt that Mao, who has been a Marxist revolutionary for some forty-five years, has endeavoured throughout his political career to exploit his knowledge of the Chinese masses in order to lead them towards goals lying partly outside their tradition-bound universe. But at the same time, he has, even yet, not totally transcended the inheritance of his youth although he is making a furious effort to do so through the current “cultural revolution.” When the patterns of his thought and action were taking shape, roughly in the decade 1926–36, he was still closer to his origins. It is therefore imperative to study not only what Mao Tse-tung has done with (or to) the Chinese peasantry, but what he owes to the fact that he was originally a part of it.

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Type
Research Article
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The China Quarterly , Volume 27 , September 1966, pp. 1 - 13
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1966

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References

1 Snow, Edgar, Red Star over China (London: Gollancz, 1937), p. 139Google Scholar.

2 Schram, Stuart, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung (London: Pall Mall, 1964), p. 225Google Scholar.

3 In particular, his report at the Second Soviet Congress in January 1934 and his report to the October 1938 plenum of the Central Committee entitled “On the New Stage.”

4 I date Mao's return to Canton in late October or early November 1925 for two reasons. On the one hand, he says in his autobiography that, having discovered the revolutionary potential of the peasants after the May 30 incident, he spent “a few months” organizing them before fleeing to Canton (Snow, p. 157). On the other hand, a source cited by Ch'en, Jerome in Mao and the Chinese Revolution (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 100Google Scholar, says that Mao arrived in Canton in November. Mao's arrival in Canton marks the beginning of a period of about a year for which the official Peking historiography grossly distorts the chronology of his activities to conceal the fact that he collaborated with Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang apparatus in Canton long after most other Communists in high-ranking positions had been eliminated following Chiang's March 1926 coup. For further details, see Schram, , Mao Tse-tung (London: Penguin, 1966), pp. 81–93Google Scholar.

5 See Shinkichi's, Eto articles in The China Quarterly, Nos. 8 and 9 (1961–1962)Google Scholar; the report on the Sixth Session from Chung-kuo Nung-min (The Chinese Peasant), No. 9, 1926Google Scholar, reprinted in Ti-i-tz'u Kuo-nei Ko-ming Chan-cheng Shih-ch'i ti Nungmin Yun-tung (The Peasant Movement during the First Revolutionary Civil War) (Peking: People's Publishing House, 1953), pp. 20–32. Mao's appointment as principal of the Sixth Session, on March 16, 1926, is reported in the minutes of the Kuomintang Peasant Committee, in Chung-kuo Nung-min, No. 4, 1926Google Scholar.

6 Tse-min's, name appears in the complete list of students of the Fifth Session published in Chung-kuo Nung-min, No. 2, 1926Google Scholar.

7 The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung, p. 176.

8 See Selected Works (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1964), I, p. 19Google Scholar.

9 Selected Works, I, p. 53. (Translation modified slightly to bring it into accord with the original Chinese text contained in the supplement to the 1947 edition of the Hsuan-chi (Selected Works), p. 36, which says that all, and not merely some, of the members of the secret societies have joined the peasant associations.)

10 The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung, pp. 196, 200.

11 Snow, p. 166.

12 Chung-yang Chün-shih T'ung-hsün (Central Military Correspondence), No. 1, 01 15, 1930Google Scholar.

13 Yü-chang, Wu, The Revolution of 1911 (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1962), p. 94Google Scholar.

14 Smedley, Agnes, The Great Road. The Life and Times of Chu Teh (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1956), passim, especially pp. 88–89Google Scholar.

15 The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung, p. 196.

16 Hsuan-chi, 1947 edition, supplement, pp. 98–99.

17 Chung-yang Cheng-chih T'ung-hsün (Central Political Correspondence), No. 16, pp. 81–89Google Scholar (letters dated December 21 and December 27, 1927).

18 Strategiya i taktika Komintema v natsional'no-kolonial'noy revolyutsii na primere Kitaya (Strategy and Tactics of the Comintern in the National and Colonial Revolution, according to the Chinese Example) (Moscow: 1934)Google Scholar.

19 Ibid. p. 242. This document reads in part: “Our tactics in the countryside should correspond to the work of the Party in winning over the urban proletariat in the process of its day-to-day economic struggles. It is not at all necessary to begin the peasant movement immediately with calls for carrying out an agrarian revolution, with guerrilla warfare and uprisings. On the contrary, the current situation in China dictates to the party the task of exploiting particular and minor conflicts.” See Schram, , Mao Tse-tung, p. 140Google Scholar.

20 See below the appendix containing a complete translation of Mao's “Appeal to the Ko-lao-hui.”

21 Snow, p. 224.

22 For references and further details, see Chap. VIII of Schram, Mao Tse-tung.

23 Snow, p. 138. The tu-tu, Chiao Ta-feng, was not, as claimed by Mao, a poor man, but the son of a large landed proprietor owning over 500 mou, who had broken with his family as a result of his revolutionary convictions. (This fact, reported by Tzu-yu, Feng, Ko-ming I-shih, II, p. 280Google Scholar, is accepted and elaborated upon by a Communist historian, Shih-yueh, Li, Hsin-hai Ko-ming Shih-ch'i Liang-Hu Ti-ch'ü ti Ko-ming Yun-tung (Revolutionary Activity in Hunan and Hupei at the Time of the 1911 Revolution) (Peking: San-lien Shu-tien, 1961), p. 97Google Scholar.) He had joined the T'ung-meng-hui while a student in Japan in 1906.

24 The commissar succeeded in “transforming” Wang's, regiment by organising an ambush to destroy the leader of the local min-t'uan: Hui-i Ching-kang-shan Ch'ü ti Tou-cheng (Recollections of the Struggle in the Ching kang shan Area) (Peking: Workers Publishing House, 1955), pp. 16–18Google Scholar.