The Peasant Movement of the 1920s: A Note on Sources

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. -9Footnotes I am grateful to Professor Barry Keenan for this invitation to sum up some of the themes in my Escape from Predicament: Neo-Confucianism and China's Evolving Political Culture (N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1977). This paper also refers to points. made in my "On the Problem of Transformative Thinking in Eighteenth-Century China" (paper prepared for the Early Ch' ing Thought Conference, Asilomar, 1977) , and my "T'ang Chiin-i and the Conditions of Transformative Thinking in Contemporary China" (paper prepared for the University Seminar on Modern East Asia - China, East Asian Institute, Columbia University, 1977). Don c. Price, Russia and the Roots of the Chinese Revolution - 1896-1911 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974). Lil Shih-ch'iang, Ju-chia ch'uan-t.'ung yil wei-hsin (1839-1911) (The Confucian tradition and late Ch'ing reformism [1839-1911]; Chiao-yil-pu she-hui chiao-yil-ssu, 1976). Wang Erh-min, Wan-Ch'ing cheng-chih ssu-hsiang shih-lun (Historical essays on late Ch'ing political thought; Taipei: Hua-shih ch'u-pan-she, 1976), and Chung-kuo chin-tai· ssu-hsiang shih-lun (Historical studies on modern Chinese thought; Taipei: Hua-shih ch'u-pan-she, 1977). T'ang Chiln-i, Jen-wen ching-shen-chih ch'ung-chien (The reconstruction of the humanistic spirit; Hong Kong: Hsin-ya yen-chiu-so, 1955), pp. 269, 273. For a summing up of de Bary's remarks on this, see Escape, p. 238. 7. Rhoads Murphey, The Outsiders (Ann Arbor: The·University of Michigan Press, 1977). 8. In Escape, p. 239 I unfortunately used the ambiguous word "echoes" in describing the relation to Solomon's theory of Lloyd E. Eastman's thesis in the latter's The Abortive Revolution. My point was only that Eastman's emphasis on dependency and authoritarianism supported Solomon's analysis, not that Eastman accepted Solomon's position as a whole. 9. Escape, pp. 203-204. * * THE PEASANT MOVEMENT OF THE' 1920s: }:_NOTE ON SOURCES Robert B. Marks* * The peasant movement of the 1920s is finally receiving the attention it so richly deserves. Roy Hofheinz Jr. 's recently published The Broken Wave and Angus McDonald's forthcoming The Urban Origins of Rural Revolution are sure to rekindle interest in old controversies and spark new debate on the revolutionary twenties. Analyses of the peasant movement can add to our understanding of the CCP-KMT alliance, relations between town and countryside during the "Great Revolution of 1925-27," the development of a "rural strategy" by the CCP, and the nature of Chinese p·easant society. Prior to the scholarly research of the 1930s on China's "agrarian problem," the documents generated by peasant movement activists in the KMT and CCP provide one of our earliest glimpses into China's peasant world. Fanning out from the KMT's revoluti9nary base in Kwangtung *Mr. Marks is a graduate student in history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. -10province , activists trained at the Canton Peasant Movement Training Institute were sent to the counties and provinces deem.ed militarily and politically strategic for the continuation of the National Revolution. Source materials for the peasant movement are thus most numerous for those provinces traversed or influenced by the Northern Expeditionary Armies--Kwangtung, Hunan, Hupei, Kiangsi, and Kiangsu. The published sources break down into collections of documents, reports, or other source materials, and contemporary periodicals. Many of these sources are readily available , but for those which are not, the_following abbreviations will be used to designate the libraries which report holding the source: HA for the Harvard-Yenching Library; HO for the Hoover Library; LC for the Library of Congress; HK for the University of Hong Kong; URI for the Union Research Institute in Hong Kong; and TB for the Toyo Bunko in Tokyo. A most useful introductory source book is Ti-i-tz'u kuo-nei ko-ming chan-cheng shihch 'i ti nung-min yiin-t~ng , _ ;x_ ~ ,:;q :f~ ft~ *.jB 6jJ~Jf._fp (The peasant movement during the first revolutionary civil war: Peking, 1953). This compilation of predominantly contemporary reports and articles written by peasant movement cadre, primarily CCP members...