Official PRC historians collectively describe Mao Zedong, Peng Pai and Wei Baqun as “the three great early peasant movement leaders” of the CCP. The choice of the third one may surprise foreign historians, more inclined to select among others the early Shen Dingyi or Fang Zhimin. Besides the fact that he shared a violent death with his two competitors (Wei was assassinated four years after Shen's assassination in 1928, and three years before Fang's execution in 1935), who was Wei Baqun (1894–1932)? Han Xiaorong provides the answer.

Born in a village in Donglan county (western Guangxi), this first son and first grandson of the wealthiest local landlords shocked the family by leaving home aged 20 in late 1914. Except for a brief visit in late 1915 to early 1916, he did not return until the end of 1921. During those seven years he acquired a sense of the gap between his frontier county and the coastal areas, and the vastness and diversity of China. More importantly, he entered national politics by becoming a rebel against Yuan Shikai. He sold family properties and recruited more than 100 local villagers to fight for the anti-Yuan army. He then entered the Guizhou Military Academy in 1917, and graduated in 1919, at about the age Mao reached when he graduated from Henan First Normal School. As a staff officer in a Guizhou army unit stationed in Chongqing, Wei became a fervent reader of New Youth. He secretly left the army, before the military came to arrest him for supposedly clandestine activities.

Back home he promptly embarked on his first peasant revolt (1921–24), followed by two others (1925–29 and 1929–32). Defeated in 1924, he made a second decisive journey, to seek support for his movement in Guangzhou. He did not obtain much support but learned new ideas and methods, and became converted to communism. The remoteness of Donglan county, much more isolated than Haifeng and Lufeng, helps explain Wei's first distant, then uneasy relationship with the CCP. Travellers from Donglan would often choose to pass through Vietnam in order to reach Hong Kong and Guangzhou; so did Wei in 1924. The remoteness was associated with backwardness and poverty. None of the 570 jinshi produced by Guangxi province during the Qing dynasty was from Donglan. There was no modern industry in Donglan in the 1920s, not a single car, no paved road – the first ones, built in 1927 with the help of Wei's peasant associations, were good for horse carts only. Tenants had to submit between three-fifths and two-thirds of their yields to the landlords, a rate much higher than the national average. Nearly 43 per cent of Donglan area is mountainous and hilly, and most of the Yao people living in the mountains were destitute. While the mountains did not provide much arable land (many female members of Wei's family starved to death during the third revolt), they at least provided natural shelters and hideouts, traditionally used by bandits and rebels. Wei's peasant movement was heir to a multi-secular local culture of violence. He became a famous Robin Hood type folk hero, eager to change his local community, long before becoming a Communist (he was formally approved as a CCP member only in 1929). The CCP was slow in taking notice of Wei's peasant movement, and when it began to cooperate with him in 1926 during his second revolt it saw him as a peasant leader with serious flaws: one who attached too much importance to building up military power, but too little importance to political work.

Wei nevertheless learnt much from his contacts with Communists and Left-wing Nationalists. When launching his second revolt, he changed the Citizen's Assemblies he had established as a reformer and a private citizen during his first revolt into class-based peasant associations modelled on similar organizations in Guangdong. He established a peasant movement institute that trained more students than the class he had himself briefly attended as the Guangzhou peasant movement institute. Wei's third and last revolt was not merely his own, as it was integrated with the national communist revolution. Wei's peasant movement was one of the factors prompting the CCP to launch the December 1929 Baise uprising in the Left River and Right River region, to which Donglan belonged. Wei played host to outside Communist leaders, including Deng Xiaoping. The great benefits Wei earned from such integration turned into disaster once the Seventh Red Army left the Right River basin in October 1930. It was ordered to attack cities it could not conquer – local Communists did not know that the Li Lisan line was by then abandoned– and later reached the Jiangxi central base area. Three successive exterminations campaigns conducted by the New Guangxi clique in 1931 and 1932 doomed Wei's revolution. The lesson had been obvious from the outset: Wei's local revolution could easily defeat its local enemies but was no match for outside enemies coming to the rescue of local bosses. The support of Nanning or Guangzhou revolutionaries was likewise essential.

Who then was Wei? One of the many militarists of the era, who styled himself Baqun, “To stand above the crowd”? A polygamist who fought traditionalism, he himself killed one of his wives, and had another one executed (pp. 201–02). He was nevertheless first of all a rebel from the frontier, who detested the way the world was run, as suggested by his other pseudonym “Fenbuping” (“Detest inequality”). He was strong-willed, did not fear authority, and had a deep sense of justice and mission. He was more a practitioner than a theorist, did not write much, except some folk songs, as did Peng Pai, who wrote more substantial pieces as well. Two years older than Peng, six weeks younger than Mao, Wei remained unnoticed for much longer. By contrast, he was revered on local scene. Just as Haifeng peasants began to worship Peng while he was still alive, Donglan villagers told stories about Wei's godly features long before his death. Stories became a cult after his death, an official cult after the founding of the PRC, when Red God became the perfect Communist, the greatest Zhuang revolutionary, who links forever the Zhuang minority to Communism and the Chinese nation. The Party prefers to ignore the fact that Wei considered himself both a Zhuang and a Han.

The necessary chapter on Red God could have been a bit shorter. Information concerning the social stratification of the rural society is rather succinct, but this is not the author's fault. He has done an excellent job confronting and criticizing contradictory sources. Solid arguments repeatedly demonstrate the unreliability of certain sources and stories, and when in doubt the author convincingly explains his own assumptions. Stimulating reflections on ecology, culture and revolution (pp. 202–221) enable readers to figure out how the same author who painstakingly evaluated sources relating to a so far neglected local episode of the revolutionary saga could have masterfully surveyed the writings of Chinese intellectuals about peasants (Xiaorong Han, Chinese Discourses on the Peasant, 1900–1949, SUNY Press, 2005).