Sources of Chinese Tradition, Volume 2

by Wm. Theodore de Bary

  2. Peasants comprise the majority of China’s people. A peasant revolution would constitute a revolution of the majority of the people of the whole nation. Results would quickly be obtained from the resistance of the majority to a minority.

  3. The land tax comprises the main part of the revenue of the Chinese government. If the peasants refuse to pay taxes, the government would lose the main part of its annual income, it would certainly be unable to maintain itself, and the collapse of the government would be easy to bring about.

  4. The basis of a communitarian property system must begin with the sharing of land. Since most of the land is farms, if the peasants just put a system of sharing the land into effect, then it will be easy to institute a communist system of property.

  The above points are in truth easy to understand; further comments are not necessary to explain them. However, opponents of these theories think that Chinese peasants lack the predisposition to form groups or the strength to resist, and even that peasants cannot understand anarcho-communism. They conclude that peasants do not have the wherewithal to make revolution. However, we can refute this influential attitude:

  1. Peasants are prone to forming groups. The associations of the Chinese upper classes are all organized formalistically, while the associations of peasants are more natural. Look at the villages in any province. The number of households ranges from thousands to a few dozen. They treat each other as friends, and they help each other on occasions of trouble, just as in former times. If a family has an emergency, the whole village will come to help; if something unfair happens to one family, the whole village will make plans to help it. Moreover, the various jobs like dredging ponds and building roads are all managed through cooperative labor; people come together spontaneously. Even questions over whether to invite teachers in or to stage operas to thank the gods are settled by people assembling in public places (such as temples) to determine the general sentiment. If a thief comes to bother a family, everyone hurries to help when they beat the gong. When people are resisting the government’s runners, they also get universal and instant assistance. When several villages are close together, people from the various villages join together to help each other; some form cooperative groups (the baojia falls into this category). These associations all stem from the attitude of sharing benefits and injuries.

  Let us look at the urban population. Few people in a neighborhood may be well known to each other, but villagers live in the same place, and they overflow with love and concern for each other. It is therefore clear that of all the social classes in China, the one that is richest in the capacity for unification is the peasantry.

  2. The peasantry includes anarchists. Peasants are people who have no faith in government, who think that rulership can be abolished. According to an ancient proverb, “We go to work when the sun rises, and we rest when the sun sets. We dig wells to drink, and we tend our fields to eat: what does the emperor have to do with us?” This demonstrates the traditional view of the peasants. Tao Qian’s “Peach Blossom Spring” imagines the happiness of a people in a village beyond rulership. Liu Zongyuan’s account “Hunchback Guo Plants a Tree” also warns against interfering with peasants.

  This all proves that peasants detest being bothered. A common saying of peasants today has it that “good commoners will not see the faces of officials” and “without fear of officials, without fear of officiousness.” Thus, aside from escaping rulership, the ideal shared by all peasants is to have nothing to do with the state. A proverb of Guizhou peasants goes: “Barking dogs will not rest when the government agent comes.” The peasants of the Huainan region have a saying “When government agents arrive in the village, the commoners meet the king.” Agents are the claws and fangs of government bureaus. As the people hate agents, they do not wish to fall under government supervision. In all of China’s counties only rarely is even one portion of one field measured correctly, and many fields are kept off the tax rolls altogether. This shows how peasants escape from rulership. Moreover, in all the villages of the provinces of north China, countless people escape the census registration. There are several rural districts in the eastern parts of Fengtai and Shouzhou in Anhui province that have never paid their taxes. Officials from the highest to the lowest do not dare to enter this area. This represents the practice of anarchism. Therefore the peasants are the weakest element in the political thought of nationalism. Anarchism is equivalent to second nature for the peasants, and it is built out of ordinary customs.

  3. The peasantry sustains a communist system. Although peasants possess land privately, aside from land, all of their other systems resemble communism. We have observed that in various villages in the Huainan region, people unite in order to dredge irrigation ponds. Then the ponds belong to everyone. . . . Aside from this, sometimes several families will share ownership of a cow. When we examine other provinces, most are like this. Moreover, when old cripples and childless couples live in a village, the villagers all give them help. In northern villages when a traveler spends the night, everyone offers him food and drink, which does not have to be repaid. In the provinces of the north and the southwest, in bad years the people without food divide up the grain stored by rich families. . . . In the past most people supported the poor. Surely this resembles a communist system being anciently practiced in the villages. . . .

  4. The peasantry possesses the capacity for resistance. Let us examine Chinese history. Chen She led agricultural workers in revolt, Liu Xiu led peasants, and in the beginning of the Tang, Liu Heita, all of whose followers were peasants, revolted in Chang’an. This is clearly the case. Aside from this, during the Western Qin, refugees who made trouble were also all starving peasants. During the Ming, Deng Maoqi led a force of bond-servants in Fujian. During the disturbances at the end of the Ming, there was also an enormous number of starving peasants. More recently, the Nian bandits spread into all the northern provinces. However, all the memorials of Zeng Guofan and such men call them “bandit rebels” (fei) when they are assembled together and “farmer peasants” (nong) when they are scattered. This is another proof that revolutionaries emerge out of the peasantry. . . . All around China few of the attacks on officials and other big cases come at the hands of urbanites. It should be abundantly clear that the powers of resistance of the peasants vastly outweigh those of urbanites. . . .

  If the revolution occurs, then it will tend to progress from small organizations to larger organizations, from minimal resistance to great resistance, and from primitive anarcho-communism to a high level of anarcho-communism. Since the peasants display a rich capacity for forming organizations, it is clear that their small organizations may easily become larger organizations. Since the peasants display the courage to resist the government, it is clear that their minor resistance movements may easily become major rebellions. Since anarcho-communism is already practiced in the villages, it is clear that anarcho-communism is most suitable for peasants. The beginning of this peasant revolution lies in the anarchist revolution. The methods of peasant revolution are:

  a. Tax resistance. Peasants everywhere have banded together and sworn not to pay taxes. When tenant farmers get their own land, they no longer regard the fields as the landlord’s. When the landlord demands the rent, they refuse. If he brings them up on charges, then when the government agents come to take them, they unite to resist them. Farmers who own their own fields also swear not to pay taxes. If the tax collectors come, they beat them; village heads and the like who demand payment are expelled. . . .

  b. Grain theft. Vast quantities of grain are collected by major landlords in the villages [and] they wait to sell it in bad years to gain great profits. At this point the peasants break into their storehouses to divide up the grain.

  When these methods are practiced, officials will inevitably send troops to suppress the peasants. But this is nothing to worry about. Why is this? The power of workers is concentrated, while the power of peasants is diffuse. Workers are assembled in a single ci
ty and a single factory, but since soldiers are concentrated in cities also, the bosses can easily bring in troops to suppress strikes. Peasants, however, are dispersed in their villages, and since there is nowhere to concentrate soldiers, the troops will always arrive late. . . . Even if several thousand soldiers are dispatched, they will have to be scattered among several districts, amounting to no more than ten soldiers per village. Moreover, the government offices and rich people in the cities will need military protection, thus further decreasing the military power that can be deployed against the peasants. . . .

  Most soldiers today are recruited from the peasantry, and some of them maintain their community ties with the peasants. Who would be willing to fight his own people?

  All this conclusively proves that the peasants can be victorious. . . . The result of the peasant revolution will therefore inevitably end in an anarchist world. As for what happens after the revolution, there are still two questions regarding the peasantry:

  a. Communal ownership of land. When the revolution begins, tenants will escape from the shackles of the landlords, while those who farm their own land will escape from the fetters of the government. This is completely a system of individual ownership. Thus once the revolution is complete, then they will extend the system of primitive communism to the point where no one owns their own land but rather land is communal and finally labor is shared to produce commodities that will be shared equally. Please consult Kropotkin’s “The Conquest of Bread” for a detailed description.

  b. Agrarian reform. The agricultural methods used in China are extremely labor-intensive. Only by using scientific methods can labor be minimized and output maximized, greatly benefiting humankind. These methods can also be found in Kropotkin’s “The Conquest of Bread.” Please consult his “The creation of fields into factories” for a detailed explanation. (“If agriculture were reformed now, it would benefit only the capitalists, but if it is reformed in the future, the benefits will flow to the people.")

  According to this essay, all our hope for the peasants is that they may rise up. “Sow seed—but let no tyrant reap the harvest!”—Shelley.

  [Hengbao, in Ge et al., Wuzhengfu, pp. 158–162—PZ]

  LI DAZHAO: THE VICTORY OF BOLSHEVISM

  Li Dazhao (1888–1927) was a Beijing University professor and librarian who joined in the intellectual ferment that found expression in Chen Duxiu’s New Youth magazine. He exerted an especially profound influence on his student and library assistant, the youthful Mao Zedong. Marxism had attracted comparatively little attention among Chinese, until the success of the October revolution inspired Li to hail it enthusiastically in this article for the November 15 issue of New Youth in 1918. Thereafter he launched a Marxist study club, from which recruits were drawn for the founding of the Communist Party in 1921. One of the cofounders of the party, along with Chen Duxiu, Li later was captured in a raid on the Soviet Embassy compound in Beijing and executed. Since Chen, the original chairman of the party, was subsequently expelled and disowned by it, Li came to be honored in his place and to be revered posthumously as the party’s founding father.

  Although not yet a convinced Marxist at this time, in this article Li bespeaks a widespread feeling of hope and expectation aroused by the Bolshevik revolution among Chinese bitterly disappointed with the outcome of the revolution of 1911. Note how he specifically acclaims it as a potent new religion offering messianic hope for the future.

  “Victory! Victory! The Allies have been victorious! Surrender! Surrender! Germany has surrendered!” These words are on the national flags bedecking every doorway, they can be seen in color and can be distinctly heard in the intonation of every voice. . . .

  But let us think carefully as small citizens of the world, to whom exactly does the present victory belong? Who has really surrendered? Whose is the achievement this time? And for whom do we celebrate? . . .

  For the real cause of the ending of the war was not the vanquishing of the German military power by the Allied military power but the vanquishing of German militarism by German socialism. . . . The victory over German militarism does not belong to the Allied nations; even less does it belong to our factious military men who used participation in the war only as an excuse [for engaging in civil war], or to our opportunistic, cunningly manipulative politicians. It is the victory of humanitarianism, of pacifism; it is the victory of justice and liberty; it is the victory of democracy; it is the victory of socialism; it is the victory of Bolshevism [Chinese text inserts “Hohenzollern” by error]; it is the victory of the red flag; it is the victory of the labor class of the world; and it is the victory of the twentieth century’s new tide. Rather than give Wilson and others the credit for this achievement, we should give the credit to Lenin [these names appear in romanization], Trotsky, Collontay [Alexandra Kollontai], to Liebknecht, Scheidemann, and to Marx. . . .

  Bolshevism is the ideology of the Russian Bolsheviki. What kind of ideology is it? It is very difficult to explain it clearly in one sentence. If we look for the origin of the word, we see that it means “majority.” An English reporter once asked Collontay, a heroine in that [Bolshevik] party, what the meaning of “Bolsheviki” was. The heroine answered . . . “Its meaning will be clear only if one looks at what they are doing.” According to the explanation given by this heroine, then, “Bolsheviki means only what they are doing.” But from the fact that this heroine had called herself a Revolutionary Socialist in western Europe, and a Bolshevika in eastern Europe, and from the things they have done, it is clear that their ideology is revolutionary socialism; their party is a revolutionary socialist party; and they follow the German socialist economist Marx as the founder of their doctrine. Their aim is to destroy the national boundaries that are obstacles to socialism at present and to destroy the system of production in which profit is monopolized by the capitalist. Indeed, the real cause of this war was also the destruction of national boundaries. Since the present national boundaries cannot contain the expansion of the system of production brought about by capitalism, and since the resources within each nation are inadequate for the expansion of its productive power, the capitalist nations all began depending on war to break down these boundaries, hoping to make of all parts of the globe one single, coordinated economic organ.

  So far as the breaking down of national boundaries is concerned, the socialists are of the same opinion with them. But the purpose of the capitalist governments in this matter is to enable the middle class in their countries to gain benefits; they rely on world economic development by one class in the victor nations and not on mutual cooperation among humanitarian, reasonable organizations of the producers of the world. This war will cause such a victor nation to advance from the position of a great power to that of a world empire. The Bolsheviki saw through this point; therefore they vigorously protested and proclaimed that the present war is a war of the tsar, of the kaiser, of kings and emperors, that it is a war of capitalist governments, but it is not their war. Theirs is the war of classes, a war of all the world’s proletariat and common people against the capitalists of the world. While they are opposed to war itself, they are at the same time not afraid of it. They hold that all men and women should work. All those who work should join a union, and there should be a central administrative soviet in each union. Such soviets then should organize all the governments of the world. There will be no congress, no parliament, no president, no prime minister, no cabinet, no legislature, and no rule. There will be only the joint soviets of labor, which will decide all matters. All enterprises will belong to those who work therein, and aside from this no other possessions will be allowed. They will unite the proletariat of the world, and create global freedom with their greatest, strongest power of resistance: first they will create a federation of European democracies, to serve as the foundation of a world federation. This is the ideology of the Bolsheviki. This is the new doctrine of the twentieth-century revolution.

  In a report by Harold Williams in the London Times
, Bolshevism is considered a mass movement. He compares it with early Christianity and finds two points of similarity: one is enthusiastic partisanship, the other is a tendency to revelation. He says, “Bolshevism is really a kind of mass movement, with characteristics of religion.” . . . Not only the Russia of today but the whole world of the twentieth century probably cannot avoid being controlled by such religious power and swayed by such a mass movement. . . .

  Whenever a disturbance in this worldwide social force occurs among the people, it will produce repercussions all over the earth, like storm clouds gathering before the wind and valleys echoing the mountains. In the course of such a world mass movement, all those dregs of history that can impede the progress of the new movement—such as emperors, nobles, warlords, bureaucrats, militarism, capitalism—will certainly be destroyed as though struck by a thunderbolt. Encountering this irresistible tide, these things will be swept away one by one. . . . Henceforth, all that one sees around him will be the triumphant banner of Bolshevism, and all that one hears around him will be Bolshevism’s song of victory. The bell is rung for humanitarianism! The dawn of freedom has arrived! See the world of tomorrow; it assuredly will belong to the red flag! . . . The revolution in Russia is but the first fallen leaf warning the world of the approach of autumn. Although the word Bolshevism was created by the Russians, the spirit it embodies can be regarded as that of a common awakening in the heart of each individual among mankind of the twentieth century.

  [Teng and Fairbank, China’s Response to the West, pp. 246–249]

  MAO’S REVOLUTIONARY DOCTRINE