Elites and the Origins of Revolution

In 1921 the young teacher, He Zizhen, formed a Guangdong Schools Alumni Association (Liu Yue xueyou hui) in Xunwu to organize the many local youths who, like himself, had studied there.^[45] Gu Bo, once He's student in elementary school, joined the group later while attending middle school in Guangdong, where he also became a Communist. In the mid-1920s Gu and other young radicals split with the alumni association to form a separate organization that eventually emerged as the core of the county's revolutionary movement. This group, rather misleadingly named the Xunwu Common People's Cooperative Society (Xunwu pingmin hezuo she), recruited more than one hundred followers in Xunwu's educational circles, founded the Zhongshan (i.e., Sun Yat-sen) School, and began mass movement activity. In response, He Zizhen and several conservative associates formed a rival body known as the Young Revolutionary Comrades Association (Qingnian geming tongzhi hui) and founded the Xinxun (New Xunwu) School to compete with the Zhongshan School. People referred to these groups as the Cooperative Society Clique (sometimes called the Zhongshan clique) and the New Xunwu Clique.

These groups were formed during the 1923-27 Guomindang-Communist Party United Front that culminated in the Northern Expedition and the nominal unification of China under the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek. Events in the hill country unfolded against the backdrop of this national revolutionary upsurge and the accompanying conflict within the United Front that led in 1927 to the GMD's break with the CCP and the suppression of radical elements.

Competition between the two groups heated up as the alliance between the CCP and GMD gradually deteriorated. By mid-1927 the conservative New Xunwu Clique appeared to have the edge, aided by the spreading "white terror" that had violently suppressed mass movements and purged radical leaders across the province. Nevertheless, the Cooperative Society

Clique retained control of the Zhongshan School, and its members for a time operated relatively openly as they sought to make the transition to a more rural stage of the revolution.

As part of the transition, the radicals established several rural branches of the Zhongshan school, which they used to propagandize among the peasantry and contact a local Triad sworn brotherhood known as the Three Dots Society (Sandian hui). After Gu Bo and other CCP leaders themselves entered the brotherhood, its lodges around the country joined the schools as centers of secret preparation for an armed uprising that occurred in March 1928; students and brotherhood forces coordinated attacks on the Xunwu School and the government yamen in the county capital, and other Communist-led forces attacked elites in the southern part of the county where Gu Bo's family lived. Although initially successful, the uprising was soon crushed by government troops and forces of a local bandit working in collusion with threatened local elites.

Despite its failure, the attack clearly marked the transition of the struggle between conservative and revolutionary elites in the county from a conflict waged largely by factional groups based in the mainstream elite educational institutions to a violent civil war with widespread peasant participation. Following their defeat, Communist forces retreated, reorganized, and built a base in the southern part of the county. By the time Mao visited in 1930, most of the county was in Communist hands, land redistribution and other radical reforms were well underway, and the stage was set for the eventual incorporation of the region into the emerging central soviet.

Even this brief account of events in Xunwu sufficiently reveals the close but complex relationships between the emerging revolutionary movement and several enduring institutions and processes—the educational system, bandit and sworn brotherhood gangs, factional strife—important to local elites. To explore these relationships more fully, however, it is necessary to move for a time beyond Xunwu to discuss these and other aspects of elite society in the context of the revolutionary movement in the hill country as a whole.

A distinct Communist-led revolutionary movement in Jiangxi first appeared during the mid-1920s in the province's elite-dominated school system, following and building upon the earlier use of local educational circles for disseminating radical ideas and forming new political organizations. After the May Fourth incident of 1919, students throughout Jiangxi had formed study groups and associations to further both their understanding of the "new culture" and their ability to exert local political influence. Later, as vague radical sensibilities were channeled into formal party affiliations, many early CCP leaders returned as teachers to organize party branches in the local schools from which they had graduated or in new schools established in small towns and villages. Evening classes at some of these same

schools provided opportunities for early efforts to organize the peasantry. Eventually after the collapse of the GMD-CCP alliance in 1927, schools also functioned as way stations for Communist cadres seeking to reenter hill-country society, centers for propaganda and recruitment, and headquarters for armed uprisings.^[46]

If the elite-dominated school system thus nurtured the revolutionary movement, then the pervasive factionalism afflicting hill-country elite society also simultaneously shaped it. In the 1920s, factionalism in education generally took the form of school-centered struggles between young and liberal "new cliques" (xinpai ) and "old cliques" (jiupai ) dominated by more conservative and elderly educators. During these struggles, smaller factional groups similar to the Cooperation Society often formed within the larger ill-defined cliques, coalescing on the basis of hometown, kinship, or school ties, common ideological interests, or patron-client connections to a particular leader. Over time such groups became both the scaffolding within which even smaller party branches could be organized and the institutional vehicles for some early assaults on the established power structure.^[47]

At this point, communist attacks on elite powerholders were still well within accepted parameters of elite activity and still largely indistinguishable from the background clutter of local-elite factionalism. But factional tactics were not merely calculated ploys used by the Communists to disguise their intentions and cover their tracks. They were also expressions of a deeper and less conscious style of elite political behavior absorbed from the environment in which the young CCP leaders had grown up, and as such continued to manifest themselves from time to time throughout the early history of the revolutionary movement. The CCP leaders' temporary alliances with armed local powerholders after 1927, the continued influence of distinctions like urban/rural or large lineage/small lineage on the development of base areas, and the numerous internal disputes that plagued the communist leadership, all reflected the revolutionary movement's persistent tendency to both expand and fracture according to patterns of political interaction typical of hill-country elites.^[48]

Other institutions important to the conduct of elite politics—bandit gangs, sworn brotherhoods, and lineages—also became involved in similarly complex ways in the emerging revolutionary movement. In its initial stages gangs and brotherhoods that had habitually colluded with established elite power holders frequently continued to support their erstwhile patrons by helping to attack Communist party branches and mass movement organs. Especially after 1927, however, the dynamics of the situation changed: conservative elites relied more on government troops and personally raised militias, and communist leaders found alliances with gangs among the few available alternatives to the now-disbanded peasant associations.^[49]

Communists recognized that in addition to military striking power the

gangs also provided useful and familiar routes for contacting the peasantry and ready-made organizational nuclei around which peasants could be mobilized. Many CCP cadres, therefore, went beyond simply negotiating alliances with gang leaders—a method that produced quick but often impermanent results—and sought to win over gang members from within. They became initiated into gangs and brotherhoods themselves and assigned CCP political agents to the gangs to help "reorganize" them. In this way cadres both established close ties with potential peasant recruits and helped mitigate the dangers of intrigues and mutinies by gang leaders. Eventually most gangs were fully incorporated into the rapidly expanding Red Army, with their original leaders either firmly committed to the Communist cause or (more frequently) replaced by people who were.^[50] CCP leaders also tried persistently, though with only moderate success, to curb the power of lineages. Generally larger, more cohesive, and more permanent than gangs, lineages were also solidly rooted and widely ramified institutions of elite dominance. Any revolutionary restructuring of Jiangxi rural society required destroying, or at least neutralizing, these centers of elite power. That Communist cadres made some progress toward this difficult goal is clear, but the scarce available sources do not clearly reveal their methods.

It is reasonably certain, however, that CCP cadres initially sought whenever possible to accommodate and take advantage of lineage ties rather than force any immediate confrontation. Thus cadres sometimes commanded attention, obtained protection, or appealed for support on the basis of their prominent surnames. They might also use their status as scions of elite families with major lineage branches, or, conversely, arouse relatives to redress wrongs done to their own poor lineage by some nearby giant oppressor. This latter practice was apparently particularly effective. Cadres united numerous small lineages to oppose, under the banner of the revolution, the largest and most dominating lineages and their elite leaderships.^[51]

Because hill-country elites played such a prominent role in the early stages of the revolution, we must ask where, within the highly stratified local elite, support for the revolution was strongest and where resistance to it was most determined. The answer to these complicated and different questions appears essentially the same: the lower stratum of the hill-country elite.

We have seen that members of different elite strata differed markedly in their access to public bodies and bureaucratic officials, their connections with bandit gangs and brotherhoods, and their attitudes toward education. We might, therefore, assume that many lower elites would also support at least some measure of political challenge to an upper-elite power structure from which they derived relatively little profit. Mao supports and elaborates on this hypothesis in his "Xunwu Investigation," asserting that elite attitudes toward the pace of political change in hill-country society paralleled their attitudes toward the new education. Those with substantial wealth and considerable security were basically conservative, though most would accept or

even promote some change if it worked to their own advantage. Lower-level elites just emerging from the peasantry had little time for politics but clung like bulldogs to every shred of economic and social advantage they had accrued within the existing system. And declining lower-elite families were most anxious to see changes, political or otherwise, that would arrest their downward social slide.^[52]

Mao's assertions receive empirical support from both the evidence he provides on the differing memberships of the New Xunwu and the Cooperative Society cliques in Xunwu and biographical information collected on other Jiangxi revolutionaries. Mao confirms that members of the Cooperative Society were predominantly scions of declining families from the local elite's lower stratum, leavened with a few progressive middle or upper elites.^[53] Less detailed biographical data on other Jiangxi revolutionaries generally supports this picture of a revolutionary leadership drawn mainly from the lower-elite stratum, especially its "declining households."^[54]

If the declining households provided much early elite support for the revolution, the newly emerging households of the lower elite appear later to have become its most stubborn and effective opponents. The revolutionary movement originated in the intellectual ferment and factional strife of the Jiangxi educational system, an arena that lay, both by choice and circumstance, largely beyond the purview of the newly emergent elite households. This situation changed, however, once the revolutionary movement percolated into the countryside. With their hard-won and tenuously held positions now directly threatened, and lacking the resources that made flight a viable option for higher-level elites, the newly emergent elites had little choice but to fight, and their resistance was widespread and tenacious.^[55]

In sum, the lowest of all the elite strata was simultaneously the most open and most resistant to change: most open because its many declining households were willing to tamper with a status quo that offered them little prospect but further decline; most resistant because its newly emerging households were unwilling to jeopardize the smallest morsel of their hard-won gains. The dual nature of the lower elite—both facilitators of and obstacles to change—made dealing with this group one of the most delicate and exasperating problems facing the Jiangxi revolutionary leaders.