Mao Zedond’s Xunwu Country Report of 1930: A Long-lost Document from a Critical Year in Jiangxi Reappears

Mao Zedong's Xunwu County Report of 1930: A Long-lost Document from a Critical Year in Jiangxi Reappears Roger Thompson Mao Zedong's investigation of social, political, and economic conditions in the southern Jiangxi county of Xunwu, although written in May 1930, was published for the first time in 1982.[1] Produced just before the period of the Jiangxi Soviet (1931-35), this extensive report is Mao's assessment of a remote county, near the Jiangxi-Guangdong-Fujian border, based on a series of meetings with eleven Xunwu natives or residents over a period of almost two weeks. Unlike Mao's passionate report on the peasant movement in Hunan, published in 1927, this sober investigation of the county seat of Xunwu and its surrounding countryside bears the marks of an internal party document meant to be used by party members in their debates on land poli~y. the military situation, and counterrevolutionary threats. This investigation provides a glimpse o! rural China in 1930 in all its bewildering complexity.In May 1930 Mao Zedong paused in Xunwu County while the Red Army pursued organizing efforts in Xunwu, Anyuan, and Pingyuan counties. Having ignored an order by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party to attend the Conference of Delegates from the Soviet Areas being held in Shanghai, Mao turned his attention to writing an essay entitled •oppose Bookism,• in which he argued for the absolute importance of grounding revolutionary theory in the cold hard ground of empirical reality.[2] During his short stay in Xunwu Mao heeded his own injunction: cadres should pay close attention to local history and local condition before attempting to implement central policy directives. Relying on the connections and introductions provided by Gu Bo, the Xunwu County Party secretary, Mao gathered together a recipient of a Qing civil service examination degree, a former president of the local chamber of commerce, and ex-bureaucrat who had been responsible for county government finances, some peasants and merchants, and several cadres. Mao encouraged the participation of these eleven people, whose ages ranged from 26 to 61, in a series of investigation meetings. These informants provided personal knowledge on a variety of topics and also contributed documents to the investigation effort (pp. 41-42).[3] While Mao served as chairman and secretary for the meetings, it appears that a Xunwu native, perhaps the Party secretary Gu Bo, collaborated with Mao in producing a draft report, for numerous Jiangxi or Xunwu colloquialisms in the report are accompanied by parenthetical explanations. Mao produced a document of approximately 70,000 characters that covered diverse subjects: administration, commerce, transportation, communication, education, land tenure, taxation, religion, and social 52 l f l I t ! i practices. These categories of information could be found in the traditional genre of local gazetteers that had been compiled for centuries in China, Xunwu elites had last published a gazetteer in 1901.[4] Although some of Mao's collaborators--the degree holder, the ex-president of the chamber of commerce, the former bureaucrat-represented the types of people relied upon in compiling gazetteers, the participation of peasants and small merchants in the investigation marked a departure from past practices in the compilation of local histories. These peasants and merchants provided detailed information on a variety of subjects. For example, almost a third of the Xunwu Report deals with trade and commerce in Xunwu's county seat. Confessing his ignorance of such matters, Mao likened himself to an elementary school student as he learned the inner workings of the business world from his two merchant informants (p. 56). Twenty-one sections on various trades, commodities, and services, complete with price information, names of businesses, capitalization, and historical background, constitute the largest part of this section on the Xunwu county seat (pp. 57-97). Peasants, on the other hand, may have provided information on methods of exploitation in the rural economy as well as interesting insight into the ways in which rural society operated. For example, in a section on the nature of public land (gongtian), which included land held by lineages, temples, and educ&tional trusts, decisionmaking procedures in rural society are described. Associations (!h!) ostensibly defined in religious terms existed...