Eleven
Local Elites and Communist Revolution in the Jiangxi Hill Country

Stephen C. Averill

In May 1930 Mao Zedong accompanied the Red Army on one of its sweeps through the hill country of southern Jiangxi. While the army carried out mass mobilization activity in the countryside, Mao remained around the capital of Xunwu (formerly Changning) county for nearly two weeks gathering information on conditions there through conversations with revolutionary cadres, local merchants, and peasants. Mao's long survey report of what he considered a typical part of the Jiangxi-Fujian-Guangdong border region constitutes by far the richest and most detailed contemporary description available of the economy and society of this area during the early stages of the Chinese revolution.^[1]

By this time Mao had already begun to familiarize himself with the life of the hill-county peasantry, and he now wished to learn more about the elites and market towns that mediated peasant access to the outside world. His "Xunwu Investigation" therefore devoted only one section to the conditions of the local peasantry, and barely mentioned the bandits, sworn brotherhoods, and feuds that were an important part of the hill-country social scene. Instead, it provided a rare and painstakingly thorough delineation of the county's trade routes and marketing conditions, and of its mercantile and landlord elite community.

By combining Mao's account with information from other sources, it is possible to obtain a revealing picture of conditions in a peripheral region quite different from the prosperous and sophisticated Yangzi valley areas that have figured so prominently in scholarship on modern Chinese society. In the following pages I examine the local elites of the region during the early stages of the Chinese revolution. More specifically, I trace the transmission of the electrifying impulses of radical political change from their urban ori-

gins to their ultimate point of discharge in the Jiangxi hill-country hinterland and explicate how these impulses affected and were affected by the complex and highly stratified local-elite society through which they passed.

Xunwu County and the Jiangxi Hill Country

Xunwu is located deep in the Nanling mountain ranges of southernmost Jiangxi, astride the administrative and economic divide separating the Gan Yangzi macroregion to the north from the Lingnan macroregion to the south. The county, in fact, has a foot in each region: its northern parts drain into the Gan River, while streams in its southern half feed into Guangdong's East River system and flow into the South China Sea. At some point, merchants (probably outsiders) had taken advantage of these divergent waterways to establish a trade route through Xunwu linking the major regional city of Ganzhou in Jiangxi with cities of the Guangdong coast. In the late nineteenth century the county's modest mercantile community still depended heavily on this route.^[2]

Most of Xunwu's inhabitants were Hakka (guest people) peasants whose ancestors had settled in the region several centuries earlier, and their customs, dialect, and life-styles were similar to Hakka elsewhere in the Jiangxi hill country. Most supported themselves through terraced paddy rice cultivation along valleys and in mountain basins or by the manufacture or growth of a variety of handicrafts and mountain products such as timber, tea oil, and grass cloth. The little agricultural land available in this mountain region was widely but inequitably held: most peasants had at least a little land, but few had enough to support themselves fully, and the bulk of the land was owned by a few individuals, lineages, and associations. Probably most of these wealthy people and groups were from the major market towns of the county that were strung along the river valley trade route. Certainly this was the common pattern elsewhere in southern Jiangxi, where long-established valley communities used their wealth, locational centrality, and historical headstart to dominate more peripheral and recently settled mountain hinterlands.

Lineages were as common in the Jiangxi hill country as they were in nearby Fujian and Guangdong, and they appear to have had the same organization and activities that scholars (including Rubie Watson in this volume) have found in the coastal provinces. Massive, multisegmented lineages with thousands of members and extensive corporate property were common throughout the hill country, especially in established local (bendi ) communities and among Hakka living in the triprovince border region (including Xunwu) known as the Hakka heartland. Coexisting uneasily and often servilely alongside these behemoths were many smaller and weaker lineages.

Deep in the mountains, a few Hakkas and non-Han minority peoples lived scattered in small multisurname hamlets with little or no apparent lineage organization.^[3]

The assorted pressures of living in this difficult environment, the legacy of conflicts engendered by earlier migrations, and the area's general inaccessibility had long combined to make Xunwu and the rest of southern Jiangxi an extremely violent and anarchic region. Bandit gangs, Triad sworn brotherhoods, gambling societies, and sectarian groups were endemic to the area, and massive lineage feuds frequently mobilized thousands of people against each other for years at a time. Traditions of resistance to governmental authority were so deeply ingrained that yamen runners, feared as oppressive "tigers" in many parts of China, were frequently beaten and killed in this area. Even county magistrates dared not venture into the countryside.^[4]

Into this hard, wild country had begun to creep by the early twentieth century, a variety of institutions, products, styles, habits, and inclinations—largely Western in origin or inspiration—that, for lack of a better term, we may call "modern" and that in various ways were altering the lives and attitudes of the region's people. We will discuss a few of these changes, such as a new school system, but most we must pass over, though Mao took obvious delight in discussing the changes at great length, including such minutiae as the introduction of new shoe styles and haircut fashions.^[5] Both trivial and significant changes notwithstanding, by the early 1920s the main structures and processes of Jiangxi hill-country society—particularly rural society—remained essentially intact, and life for most people went on much as it had for centuries.

Stratification of Hill-Country Elites

Presiding over this conflict-ridden society was a remarkably multilayered, many-faceted, and socially volatile group of local elites, whose diversity and rapacity reflected their environment.^[6] These elites were themselves stratified over a rather broad continuum, with members varying substantially in power, prestige, and sophistication. Before examining elite involvement in arenas of particular relevance to the growth of the Jiangxi revolutionary movement, let us first subdivide the elite continuum into several broad strata, each crudely, but for our purposes sufficiently, defined by the locus and range of activity of its members.^[7]

At the upper level of the local elite in a given county stood a small group of "great households" (wanhu ) whose influence or reputation extended throughout the area and sometimes beyond. At least in very rural areas such as Xunwu, these households almost by definition were large landowners, defined by Mao as those having land producing more than five hundred shi (about 45,000 kilograms) of grain per year,^[8] but they also engaged in such a

range of other activities that perhaps they are better viewed as small-scale conglomerates rather than simply landlords. In Xunwu almost all heads of the twenty great households resided in the county, though it is difficult to determine precisely where. Presumably most lived in or near the county capital or largest market towns, though they also typically maintained a strong presence (complete with fortified dwelling) on their respective rural "turfs."^[9]

The Xunwu family of Pan Mingzheng indicates the contours of this group and illustrates the range and extent of its members' influence. Pan himself was by far the largest landlord in the county; his yearly ten thousand shi (900,000 kg.) of grain production ranked him well above the other great households of the county. In addition to his paddy landholdings, Pan also controlled mountain and forest lands, houses and several stores in the nearby market town of Jitan (the county's commercial center). All told, his assets were said to have totaled nearly three hundred thousand yuan (dollars). Moreover, Pan's individual holdings were only part of those controlled by the important lineage to which he belonged: at least six other households in the lineage had individual holdings greater than one hundred mu (one mu equals about one-sixth of an acre), and numerous others had lesser amounts. The lineage had formed an association known as the Rongyang Hall (tang ) to handle its affairs, and Pan's family almost certainly played a major role in administering its corporate property.

Beyond controlling these immediate economic resources, Pan and his relatives wielded influence in other aspects of local life. Though an elderly and stubbornly conservative man himself, Pan had personally run one of the several middle schools that functioned briefly in Xunwu after 1911. One of his sons ran another school, and several of his grandchildren went outside the county, or even the country, to study "the new learning." Two of his sons (one of them a Qing lower-degree holder) also at different times headed the office of financial administration within the county government, and one of them later successively headed the county militia force, joined the Guomin-dang (GMD) county committee, and in 1930 acted as county magistrate. Various members of the family were also connected through marriage to other important figures within the county's upper elite.^[10]

In the multiplicity of his interests and the range of his contacts, Pan was typical of the upper layer of the local elite. This stratum of great households included the largest landlords and merchants and leaders of the most powerful and prosperous lineages. Even when, as in Pan's case, their initial power probably stemmed from landholding and lineage leadership on a rural "turf," almost all the upper layer of the local elite also established a presence in county capitals or strategically located market towns where they developed extensive and varied networks of influence. From these bases they moved to build up ties with elites from other parts of the county and some-

times extended their influence to still higher levels of the central-place hierarchy.^[11] Often, of course, the main attributes of elite status suggested by these examples—wealth, family pedigree, official position, educational accomplishment, and military strength—were interlocking, overlapping, and mutually reinforcing. Wealthy landlords might simultaneously be important lineage leaders and merchants, their sons prominent educators or local administrators, and their daughters wives of other important elite figures.

Often connected in various ways with the "great families" of this upper elite, but considerably more limited in their resources and connections, was a much larger stratum of middling elite individuals and their families. This stratum included medium-sized landlords, defined by Mao as those with lands producing two hundred to five hundred shi (18,000 to 45,000 kg.) of grain per year, merchants, principals, and teachers of Western-style upper-elementary or middle schools, many members of the county bureaucracy, and some militia and police leaders. Although members of this stratum of the local elite had much less impressive reputations than leaders of the "great families," they were often well-known and important individuals within more limited arenas.

One such Xunwu elite figure about whom we have some information is He Zizhen. He's father had begun in humble circumstances, as a clerk in the county yamen's punishment office and later as a geomancer. Then he reaped a minor bonanza by somehow (probably through his old yamen contacts) being awarded local tax-farming rights for the cattle tax. The income from this license was sufficient for He's father to buy paddy land that produced "several tens" of shi in rent.

These resources were sufficient to send He Zizhen to middle school in nearby Pingyuan, Guangdong province, and then to a mining school in Henan. Following his education, He taught school in Xunwu for eight years, during which time he also organized a night school for adults and an association for Xunwu students who had studied in Guangdong. Later he served for a time as county police chief and used the proceeds of his work to buy land of his own. His wealth grew further after he followed his father's lead and in 1927 took up tax farming, in this case obtaining a license to control the sale of beans in the county seat. By this time he had also become a member of the GMD's county committee. Thus, He's family had worked its way to a position of considerable influence.^[12]

In other cases we can see clusters of related middle-elite families that mark the fission products of the breakup of great households. Such, for example, was the case with many relatives of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Gu Bo, from Tangbei village in the southwestern part of Xunwu. Gu's great-grandfather was apparently already wealthy, though sources provide no details. At any rate, his grandfather was wealthy enough to give land pro-

ducing one hundred shi (9,000 kg.) of grain to help provide an educational endowment for the county and to marry into a large landlord family. An amazing total of twelve men in Gu's father's generation attained the rank of shengyuan (lowest degree) before the imperial examinations were abolished; in 1930 eleven of them were still alive (out of a total of about four hundred shengyuan in the entire county), giving this village of approximately a hundred families by far the highest concentration of such degree recipients in Xunwu.^[13]

Whether degree holders or not, in the late 1920s several direct descendants of Gu's great-grandfather were well-established members of the middle elite. For example, Gu Lesan and his unnamed older brother together owned land producing three hundred shi (27,000 kg.). The brother was a shengyuan who had twice served as a member of the provincial assembly, while Gu Lesan had formerly served with a warlord officer of Jiangxi origin and had been a local official in Guangdong. Among their relatives, Gu Guangrui was an upper-elementary school graduate with land producing more than two hundred shi (18,000 kg.) and a son who had graduated from middle school in nearby Meixian county. Other family members were small landlords or, like Gu Bo's own father, local school teachers. Although this cluster of families (actually probably a branch of a larger Gu lineage) could clearly not match the much more extensive and powerful networks of a great household like Pan Mingzheng's, they were nonetheless a comfortable, respectable community with considerable aggregate resources that doubtless exerted substantial local influence.^[14]

As these examples indicate, the middle stratum of the local elite engaged in diverse occupations and activities but on a somewhat more limited scale than the upper elite. The examples of He Zizhen and Ge Lesan's brother show that members of the middle elite could be well traveled and well educated and could tap into extensive and significant networks of power and influence at the county level or beyond. The other Gus, however, are perhaps more typical of this group in their predominantly rural power base and localistic orientation. Although they were often connected through clientelistic ties with upper-elite local power holders, the primary locus of activity of mid-elite figures was the local market town and its hinterland, and their power was based primarily on local land ownership, kinship ties, and government service.

Coexisting with the middle stratum of the local elite in the countryside, and often even more confined in their sphere of activities, was yet another, much larger, group of local elites. The members of this lowest layer of the elite resided largely in villages and small market towns in close contact with the peasantry. In this rural setting they held various leadership roles: heads of small or branch lineages, militia captains, traditional local school teachers, or village elders. Economically this stratum was quite diverse but generally

much less secure than their counterparts in the upper-elite strata. Many of this group were small landlords, though as was true of the middle-elite figures cited above, such small landlord households could have quite different origins. Mao took pains to divide Xunwu small landlords into two major groups. The first was the "declining households" (poluo hu ), descendants of large landlord families now reduced in wealth and status after dividing family estates. This group (nearly one-third of all landlords) Mao further subdivided into three segments: families that still had a surplus beyond their needs; families that were occasionally forced to sell or Mortgage property to survive; and families that were en route to real destitution. The second landlord group was the "newly emerging households" (xinfa hu ), aggressive and hard-nosed families just risen from the ranks of the peasantry or small merchants. Many members of this group, too, were not well off; indeed, some Communist cadre preferred not to consider them true landlords at all but rather a special subgroup of rich peasants they awkwardly termed "rich peasants of semilandlord character" (ban dizhu xing de funong ). Whatever their precise character, Mao estimated that the newly emerging households comprised almost half the entire landlord stratum.^[15]

Whether small landlords or rich peasants, almost all members of this elite stratum necessarily relied upon activities other than landowning to provide at least part of their livelihood. Around 10 percent of the small landlords in Xunwu, for example, also managed small businesses in local market towns, and the "newly emerging" households were notorious for the rapacity of their money-lending operations. Other lower elites either made money by participating in governmental or quasi-governmental activities such as dispute mediation or proxy tax-remittance (baolan ) or served as collection agents for larger landlords. Some also colluded with bandits and sworn brotherhoods, set up gambling houses, grew opium, or engaged in other illegalities.^[16]

Although the resources of the "great households" were far greater and their reputations far broader than those of lower-elite households, the latter arguably had the greatest cumulative impact on the mass of the population. Certainly in peripheral counties like Xunwu, where great households were fewer and poorer than their counterparts in core regions, lower elites were in much closer contact with the peasantry, and their actions and attitudes were more influential in shaping popular perceptions of elite culture.

The very nature of the lower elites' position on the ambiguous and shifting boundary between the elite and the mass of the population, as well as the limited extent of their power and prestige, has meant that little detailed information has survived about their lives and careers. As one brief example from the upper echelons of this stratum, however, one might cite Yan Guoxing, a small landlord-cum-merchant in southwestern Xunwu who had land producing about one hundred shi (9,000 kg.) of grain, ran a small drygoods

store in the market town of Gongping, and acted as a minor paper merchant. Yan obviously had considerable influence in the local merchant community, for he persuaded them to loan him several thousand yuan for an abortive electoral campaign for the provincial assembly; in 1930 he was still mired in debt.^[17] Another example might be Gu Bo's father, Gu Guangming, a "bankrupt small landlord" who taught at the local village school (sishu ) and had to rely on wealthier relatives to finance his son's middle-school education.^[18] Many other members of this lower-elite stratum, lacking the business or familial connections of Yan or Gu, were forced to rely much more upon their own meager resources.

How large was the local elite in a county such as Xunwu? The question is complicated by gaps and inconsistencies in Mao's data and the lack of population estimates for the county, but by extrapolating from the available information, I have roughly estimated the elite at about 3.5 to 4.0 percent of the population. This figure is probably at the low end of the scale for southern Jiangxi counties.^[19]

In sum, local elites in Xunwu (and by extension, the entire Jiangxi hill country) were a small, diverse, three-tiered collection of families combining considerable access to the outside world with an emphatically localistic orientation, strong emphasis on landowning with substantial commercial activity, and commanding collective dominance with remarkably insecure individual tenure. If in the 1920s some elites sought election to the provincial assembly, sent their children out of the county or the country for "modern" educations, and (as we shall see) joined national political movements, plenty of others were still ignorant of the outside world—men disparaged as "old mountain rats" (shan laoshu ) by impatient Xunwu youths.^[20] Although local elites had hopelessly blurred the traditional distinction between landlord and merchant, they were still in far closer contact with the countryside and its peasant inhabitants than many of the Jiangnan elites on whose lifestyles so many stereotypes about Chinese elites are based. And if the elite as a whole controlled a grossly disproportionate amount of land and other resources in the hill country, that was little consolation to the nearly one-third of all landlords who made up the "declining households," as they plunged through the lower layers of elite society toward reentry into the peasantry.

Elite Power and Conflict

As the foregoing description of elite stratification indirectly indicates, local elites in the Jiangxi hill country maintained social dominance through intertwined webs of power whose important strands included educational achievement; wealth earned through land, commerce, and usury; access to state authority and resources; and private control of the means of coercion. Elite dominance was likewise typically exercised through a variety of institutions,

many of which had a long history in the region. All these various sources and expressions of elite dominance constituted limited resources to which elites had differential access, and keen competition over them often led to violent conflict. It is impossible to discuss here all the ramifications of elite power. Nevertheless it is important to highlight certain aspects of the structures and uses of elite power and of the strife they generated, for it was amid these entrenched institutions and nagging insecurities that the revolutionary movement eventually emerged.

The Maintenance and Exercise of Elite Power . Lineage ties constantly entered into social calculations, and lineages are one of the first arenas to consider when examining how elites maintained dominance. Lineages in Jiangxi, like those elsewhere in southern China, often served as the institutional focus for many activities other than defining and perpetuating kinship relations. Thus lineages commonly owned and managed collective property, ran local schools, helped finance higher education for worthy members, established and enforced codes of social behavior, mobilized armed forces, and sometimes helped the state collect taxes, spread its ideology, and maintain local order.^[21]

Although these functions were carried out in the name of the collective good, elites within the lineage frequently gained disproportionately from them. Most lineage land and other collective property, for example, was managed by elites, who, habitually used their positions to profit financially in various, mostly illicit, ways. Elites likewise appear to have received disproportionate benefit from lineage-run schools and scholarship funds because their children were more likely than peasant youths both to attend school and to seek advanced education outside the community. Lineage codes of conduct generally expressed sentiments congenial to, and were interpreted and enforced by, lineage elders who were usually also local elites; they also mobilized and directed (often for their own purposes) armed lineage forces and served as intermediaries between lineage members and the state. Controlling the means of coercion and opportunities for mediation further enhanced the power and prestige of local elites.^[22]

Whether in lineages or other arenas, elites differed among themselves in how and why they exercised power. Money lending provides a clear example of these differences. Hill-country elites of all strata made loans, but their ways and purposes differed. The few upper and numerous middle elites who made loans wanted either safe investments or (in the event of default) the chance to acquire property used as collateral. Therefore, they loaned relatively large amounts at moderate interest rates, mostly to lower-level elites rather than directly to peasants. Lower-level elites, particularly the aggressively entrepreneurial "newly emerging households," sometimes sought such loans as capital for small-scale commercial enterprises. More often, however, they sought interest income and so reloaned the money at moderate interest

rates to other lower elites or in small amounts at high rates to peasants. Lower elites who controlled small lineage trusts or other collective property also often loaned part of the resources they managed to peasants, expropriating part or all of the proceeds. The variable amounts and interest rates in this elite loan "industry" were doubtless based primarily on relative investment security, but they probably also helped strengthen patron-client links among elites of different strata; they certainly helped perpetuate overall elite economic domination of the peasantry.^[23]

Similarly differentiated patterns of elite activity almost certainly existed in other institutional contexts—such as management of different public bodies (gonghui or gongtang ) or relationships to the state—though it is difficult to determine their precise extent. Merchants and landlord/merchant hybrids, for example, often dominated the management of temple associations and other organizations in market towns. Members of the middle and upper elite probably managed most large lineage and social welfare associations, and small branch-lineage associations appear frequently to have been dominated by lower-level elites.^[24] Likewise, upper-stratum or urban-oriented elites doubtless had much better access to benefits provided by the state (and may therefore have reciprocated with greater support) than did the more rural lower-stratum elites.

How does this pictures of elite structure and power relate to recent scholarly emphasis on the long-term stability and continuity of the local elite?^[25] According to this scholarship, elite power and status were more frequently and reliably attained and maintained via landholding, lineage development, and other localistic methods than through the rewarding but unpredictable route of examination success and high bureaucratic office. Lending support to this view we see in Xunwu (and doubtless other southern Jiangxi counties as well) that some surname groups persisted for centuries in the elite-centered historical record despite the county's poor overall record in the examinations and despite the underrepresentation in the degree-holder lists of some of the county's most powerful and well-known surnames.^[26]

However accurate the general argument for continuity may be, the frequent references to "former great households" now fallen in wealth and status that fleck Mao's accounts of the Xunwu middle elite, and the large number of "declining households" he found in the county's lower elite, suggest that we must be wary of viewing the complex question of elite continuity too simplistically. Most analyses of elite mobility have studied imperial rather than twentieth-century elites and dealt with lengthy time spans. They have also focused on prosperous core regions, and their authors have been forced by the nature of their sources to give more exclusive coverage than does this essay to the great-household stratum of the local elite. Mao's comments remind us that in more peaceful times and more prosperous areas, some rise and fall of elite households must have occurred, even within the

most dominant and enduring lineages or patrilines. In troubled times and out-of-the-way places, and among the volatile lower elites whose lives are so much less well-documented, both the actual occurrence and (equally important as a factor in elite behavior) the subjective fear of downward mobility must have been a constant fact of life.

Intra-elite Factional Conflict . As one might expect given the complex classification of hill-country elites and the intense pressures to obtain scarce resources and avoid the disastrous consequences of family fragmentation, elite relationships were often characterized by competition and strife. Although information on it is limited, this intra-elite conflict is important to our understanding of political behavior in the hill country and demands at least a few remarks.

Let me again begin with some examples. In Chongyi county, in southwestern Jiangxi, two major elite cliques struggled with one another during the 1920s. Adherents of one clique lived in the vicinity of the county capital and the market town of Yangmei. According to the Communist reminiscence that is our main source on the subject, this group had long "colluded" with county magistrates and had a firm grip on all "public property." The other clique was based in a group of market towns on branches of a river system separated from the county capital by a range of hills. In the mid-1920s this clique, considered more progressive than its rival, supported the local GMD organization.^[27]

In Yudu county north of Xunwu there were also two cliques, the Changcun and the Yushui factions, named after the middle schools that served as their headquarters. According to another CCP leader, the Changcun faction was based in parts of the county—largely in the east and north—where lineages were large arid strong, and its adherents were the large landlords and "local despots" (tuhao ) who controlled these lineages. The Yushui faction had its strength in the county capital and in the western and southern sections of the county, where lineages were relatively weak. This faction included many middle and small landlords who were also engaged in commerce. Around these cores, each faction gathered various "poor intellectuals" and students, presumably recruited from their respective middle schools. Both cliques competed for influence within the county government and access to profits from proxy remittance and pettifogging.^[28]

In Xingguo county just north of Yudu, factional conflict also revolved around different middle schools. Here a coalition of elites from around the county capital controlled the county's public middle school, while rural elites, organized into a body called the Federated Township Self-Government Assembly (Lian xiang zizhi huiyi) controlled a nearby private middle school. The city elites had better access to successive county magistrates and with their support obtained a larger share of local spoils and

forced the rural elites to pay a disproportionate share of local government costs. As in Yudu, students in the local schools became involved in the factional struggle started by their eiders.^[29]

Several points emerge from these examples. First, elite conflict focused on the county capital and government, most obviously because the magistrate's yamen and the center for such government functions as public security, tax collection, and education were in the capital. Elites interested in obtaining government office, profiting from tax collection or litigation, or protecting their private activities from government functionaries or other local elites had good reason to compete for influence with the county bureaucrats. For their part, officials also inevitably became more involved in local elite politics. Because Qing magistrates could not be regularly appointed to serve in their own provinces, magistrates serving in Jiangxi were unfamiliar with local conditions and perforce relied upon local elites to help them govern. After the fall of the Qing, people often served in their own provinces, but magistrates in Jiangxi were rarely assigned to their home counties and still required local advice. Magistrates lived and worked in the yamen, so they were naturally most likely to come in contact with members of the elite who lived nearby, a fact that gave such elites definite advantages in local factional struggles.^[30]

Second, economic and social centrality of the county capitals and their immediate surroundings also made them the focus of factional strife. Although some county seats in Jiangxi, including Xunwu, were not the largest commercial centers in their counties, the majority were. Virtually all were well located along transportation routes, surrounded by fertile and densely populated lowland paddy lands. By contrast, much of the remaining hill-county territory consisted of rugged mountain country, with difficult access, low productivity, and sparse population. Moreover, the county capital was generally the site of the region's largest temples and lineage halls and its most prestigious schools. The vicinity of the county capital was thus likely to be both a base of important elite interest groups and a prize to be competed for. In many Jiangxi hill counties, elite conflicts also replicated and intensified general and long-standing divisions between urban and rural or between established communities and later-arriving "guest people" (Hakka) immigrants.

The Yudu county example also indicates another type of intra-elite competition, namely interlineage factionalism and feuding. That such feuds were often really disputes between the respective lineage leaderships rather than the mass of lineage members is underlined by a conflict in Ruijin county, where in 1923-24 two upper elites quarreled over whether to establish new local transit-tax stations and eventually mobilized more than a thousand men from each lineage to settle the issue through armed conflict.^[31] At least as common as open fighting between leaders of large lineages, however, were

situations similar to the Yudu case: one or more large lineages and their leaders seeking to dominate surrounding areas inhabited by many small lineages.^[32]

The Yudu case is particularly intriguing because social and economic attitudes seem linked to elite type, with large lineage leaders representing older, more "feudal," landlord attitudes and the small landlords-cum-merchants opposing them embodying more modern "bourgeois" sensibilities. Agriculture and handicrafts in the Jiangxi highlands had been highly commercialized well before the twentieth century, and elites at all levels were substantially involved in trade; thus, we must be careful not to overdraw such distinctions. Nevertheless, as we shall see shortly, elite attitudes toward revolution were often affected by their economic and social circumstances, and it is plausible that some such factors influenced earlier elite factionalism as well.

Networks of Influence for Elite Revolutionaries

Although elite factionalism was surely influenced by socioeconomic distinctions between urban and rural elites, or landed versus commercial wealth, it is notable that education was a key arena for political conflict in both Yudu and Xingguo. This politicization of conflict in education was quite natural. Education and scholarship had long been linked to elite status and political activity in China. Moreover, in the modern era, most early CCP members were intellectuals from elite families, politicized during the student activism of the May Fourth era. Back in the hill country, these revolutionaries exploited connections within the factionalized elite "educational circles." But they also came to rely upon quite different networks of influence—hill-country bandit bands and sworn brotherhoods. With these connections in mind, let us first investigate the role of elites in hill-country education and then discuss elite ties to bandits and brotherhoods.

Hill-country Education . Although Jiangxi hill counties produced few successful candidates in the imperial examinations, traditional education there had many of the same social effects as in other parts of China. Mastery of the Confucian classics, measured by success in the imperial examinations, was for centuries a major criterion of elite status, and a large, ramified, and conservative institutional apparatus had grown up at all levels of society to support the quest for examination achievement. Moreover, education in imperial China, as in most other societies, provided young people with opportunities to expand their intellectual and social horizons. Aspiring students had to travel periodically to county, prefectural, and provincial capitals for examinations, and most spent some time in local or regional academies (shuyuan ). Both gathering for examinations and attending academies normally involved boarding away from home in company with other wealthy and/or

bright young men from different localities, and the experience frequently led to lifelong friendships and student-teacher ties.

Abolishing the examinations in 1905 and developing a new Western-style educational system significantly affected existing elites. With a few strokes of the bureaucratic brush, the Qing leadership abandoned the entire formal process by which many of its own members had been selected and threatened to negate the educational efforts of millions of younger Chinese currently involved in the system. Within a few years, Western-style schools became disseminators of new ideas and incubators of political agitation instead of guardians of intellectual orthodoxy.^[33]

The important new impact of the Western-style schools, however, should not blind us to the many institutional and attitudinal links they maintained with the past. Many of the first new schools were simply renamed academies, located on the grounds and inheriting the endowments of their predecessors. Like the academies, the most successful and prestigious of the new schools remained clustered in the largest administrative centers. After the imperial examinations ended, teaching in the new schools was one of the few remaining respectable job opportunities for many Qing degree-holders, and some of them remained influential in local educational establishments well into the 1920s.^[34]

Moreover, although the avowed aim of education changed from preparing students for the examinations to teaching them the skills that had made the West strong, the main concern for most people continued to be education's role as a route to individual and family—not national—wealth, power, and prestige. Possession of a modern school degree still brought special community respect; and modern schooling was either an important passport out of the hill country or a route to acquiring important jobs in one's own county bureaucracy or educational establishment. Moreover, a school degree, unlike land, was a portable resource that could be used in different places and arenas of elite interaction. It might well be that in the twentieth century school degrees became more easily renewable from generation to generation than were landholdings, enhancing the effectiveness of education as an elite strategy to help ameliorate the effects of partible inheritance.

Management and certification of education had, however, changed. No longer did the government set tight quotas on the number of students per province who could receive, say, a middle-school degree or determine the subject matter to be studied. Although there was still some governmental regulation of education (particularly of provincially run middle schools) and many schools still had entrance examinations, now school leaders themselves much more firmly controlled education.^[35] Greater local control over access to a still-important educational process appears to have been at least as significant as the prestige of a scholarly vocation in explaining the continuing power of educators in local-elite affairs during the 1920s.

Control over educational access was aided by well-developed networks

based on school experience and student-teacher ties. Ties of this sort had been important under the imperial examination system, but their influence was perhaps even greater during the Republican period. Local educators who had graduated from prestigious urban middle schools facilitated their brightest protegés' entrance into the same schools and then frequently hired them for county and subcounty schools after they graduated. Even when students pursued different occupations they often maintained contact with their old teachers. Through these networks of contacts both within and without the educational system, local educators could exert influence on, or call for aid from, people in a wide variety of places and occupations.^[36]

The value of education as a route for career advancement, the position of local educators as brothers controlling access to influential networks of personal connections, and the important role played by schools and scholars in the political discourse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century together made educational circles a prime arena for the widespread elite contention and factional struggle previously noted.^[37]

By the 1920s, then, local schools throughout Jiangxi were ambiguously modern institutions in which new concern for Western culture and the abhorrence of Western imperialism coexisted with older conceptions of the function of education in the social order and the role of educators in local politics. In the southern Jiangxi hill country these diverse currents were accentuated by problems of peripherality: the region's distance from better-developed centers of culture and communication enhanced the importance of local schools as one of the few sources of information about new ideas and trends and one of the few routes out of the hill country for ambitious young people seeking rewarding personal careers and new resources to maintain elite status.

Ironically, the deficiencies of the hill-country schools themselves enhanced their importance as links to the outside world. The overall poverty of the hill country meant that it was difficult to find funds to build and maintain schools, especially higher-level, Western-style schools. The density and quality of such schools in a given area was therefore generally low, and students were forced either to use them as stepping-stones to further training elsewhere or to bypass them entirely. Most children still began their education in old-style village or lineage schools (sishu ), often taught by aging Qing lower-degree holders; education beyond this level was mostly confined to children of local-elite families. Only a few counties in the Jiangxi hill country were able to maintain local middle schools during the 1910s. In Xunwu, for example, four middle schools had opened before 1930, but all had closed quickly (three within a year of opening), and most students seeking a middle-school education either went to Ganzhou or crossed the border to Meixian or Pingyuan in Guangdong.^[38]

According to Mao's research, elite attitudes toward the new schools

varied somewhat depending on age, geographical location, and position on the continuum of elite wealth and status. Most patriarchs in upper- and middle-elite families were willing to manage new schools, serve as county educational officials, and send their children away to middle schools, but they were motivated more by desire of personal power and profit than by enthusiasm for the new education. Those upper elites who lived close to major market towns or near the riverine trade route connecting the county with Guangdong, Mao found less conservative—as were the children and grandchildren of conservative stalwarts like Pan Mingzheng. Given the substantial resources of most upper- and middle-elite families and the length of time they could afford to wait before receiving benefits from their children's education, it is not suprising that three-fourths of the county's university graduates and two-thirds of those who studied abroad had this sort of background.^[39]

Mao also found that attitudes toward education varied within the lower stratum of the elite, depending on whether a familiy was "declining" or "newly emerging." Declining lower-elite households embraced the new education almost desperately. Sometimes they were following family traditions: the bulk of the county's surviving lower-degree holders were apparently small landlords and/or village schoolteachers. Often, however, creating an educated "man of talent" was viewed as a last chance to revive sagging family fortunes. A high percentage of children from such families therefore attended upper-elementary and middle schools. If the declining families looked fearfully to the future, newly emerging elite households anxiously recalled their recent past; they tended to retain the aggressive, single-minded pursuit of short-term profit that had just enabled them to scrabble a bit above their former fellows, and they saw more immediate and certain return on their hard-earned capital from today's usury than from tomorrow's middle-school graduate. Children from this group were thus educationally underrepresented in the county.^[40]

As we shall see shortly, these differing elite attitudes toward education paralleled their differing stances toward revolution. Before we can properly discuss the interaction between education and revolution, however, we must consider briefly a very different arena of elite concern, equally important for the eventual growth of a revolutionary movement: the world of "the brothers of the greenwood," the bandit gangs and sworn brotherhoods endemic in the hill country.

Bandits and Brotherhoods . For all that the schools of the Jiangxi highlands suffered by comparison to their counterparts in higher-level urban centers, they were still indisputably part of the respectable mainstream of hill-country elite life. The bandit and sworn brotherhood gangs that swarmed through the hill country, on the other hand, seemed clearly and unambiguously to belong to the world of the peasants, and to its most disreputable

segment at that. After all, the gangs were primarily composed of peasants. To the desperately poor, banditry offered a last chance to make a new life or prolong a miserable existence. To the able and ambitious, banditry constituted one of the few routes for social mobility open to those starting without wealth and family connections. And to peasants exasperated and discontented with the arbitrary injustice so prevalent in their lives, banditry provided an opportunity, however limited, to strike back at their oppressors. In each function, banditry remained apart from, and potentially antagonistic to, the elite political system.

Yet there were connections as well. Hill-country bandits and brotherhoods by no means totally divorced themselves from local society, including its elites. Economically, hill-country bandits supplied their everyday needs, fenced their plunder, and spent their profits in local market places. Socially, they remained in close contact with family and friends in their home communities, even while they (or at least their leaders) acquired the wealth and power that set them apart from the populace. And politically, the gangs organized armed forces that intervened in factional disputes and occasionally vied for control of local government.^[41]

In all these areas the gangs interacted with the elite power structure. Indeed, southern Jiangxi elites sometimes had such close and symbiotic ties with the region's bandit and brotherhood organizations that officials found the two groups difficult to distinguish. Some elites established sworn-brotherhood or patron-client relationships with bandit leaders, covered for sworn-brotherhood gambling operations, sold goods to and fenced booty from gangs, enlisted gangs to browbeat the local populace or intimidate rival elites, or recommended gang leaders for bureaucratic appointment.^[42]

As with other aspects of elite behavior, relationships among elites and gangs varied according to the situation and the self-interests of the elite members involved. Upper and middle local elites—wealthier, further removed from the countryside, and more sympathetic to official concerns than the lower elites—tended to be more antagonistic toward "heterodox" groups. Their persons and their property were, after all, prime bandit targets. Lower elites, on the other hand, were often much closer to bandit leaders in sympathies, activities, and origins. Both lower elites and bandit leaders were often recently, and only barely, removed from the peasantry; both were, to use Eric Hobsbawm's phrase, "men who made themselves respected."^[43] Lower elites themselves sometimes became bandit leaders, while particularly effective bandit leaders might be rewarded with militia commands and other perquisites of elite life.^[44]

Nevertheless, despite the attempts by local groups to draw gangs into their orbit and under their control, to coopt gang leaders and profit from their activities, bandit and brotherhood activity in the Jiangxi hills remained at least partially distinct from the elite-dominated political and economic

system. It is precisely this ambiguous quality of gang activity, simultaneously associated with and yet separate from elite life, that compels our attention here. Just as educational circles addressing both long-standing needs and new concerns served an important transitional function that facilitated a nascent revolutionary movement's entry into local elite society, so the hill-country "bandit world" later played a corresponding role in facilitating the revolution's movement out of elite society and into the wider peasant world. As powerful peasant-based armed bodies outside the mainstream of elite life, yet tantalizingly susceptible to elite manipulation, bandits and brotherhoods were logical objects of attention by Communist cadres of elite background seeking to enter and transform rural society.

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.

Conclusion

Most studies of the Chinese revolution have given little systematic attention to the role of local elites, dismissing as a minor irony the fact that numerous Communists came from prosperous families and treating elites almost exclusively as targets of the revolution.^[56] As we have seen, however, elites in southern Jiangxi instigated as well as obstructed social change: revolution was disseminated via elite-dominated schools, structured in elite-run organizations, shaped by elite-centered patterns of factional politics, and aided by

elite-influenced bandits and brotherhoods. Of course, few elites fully supported the revolution throughout its course; some resisted from the start, and many others joined the opposition as the movement's challenge to the established order deepened. Nonetheless, the growth of the revolution in rural Jiangxi—and elsewhere in China—depended far more and far longer than commonly realized on a support structure provided by local-elite society.

In contrast to many China experts, scholars of comparative revolution have long recognized the importance of elite action, but they have generally discussed elites only in macrosocietal terms, as abstract, largely undifferentiated groups acting on national or even international stages.^[57] This essay, however, has looked at revolution in a local context and emphasized elite diversity rather than uniformity. Elites in southern Jiangxi were far from the unitary social category still often implied in discussions of "the local elite." They were, in fact, a diverse, multitiered collection of people who varied considerably from one another in resources, attitudes, and roles in the established power structure. Recognizing these differentiated layers allows us to appreciate more clearly the nature of the interlocking, highly articulated elasticity of local-elite society that for so long absorbed the shocks and transferred the energy of contacts between the peasantry and the outside world.

Understanding local-elite differentiation in Jiangxi also invites closer attention to the pivotal role played by Chinese elites occupying the liminal social terrain near the imprecise boundary separating elite from peasant. In the 1920s and 1930s, Communists looking at Chinese society from the bottom up frequently spoke of "rich peasants of semilandlord character"; officials viewing the same scene from the top down talked of "local bullies and rotten gentry" (tuhao lieshen ); this essay has described both "declining" and "newly emergent" elites. Although these various terms are imprecise and by no means synonymous, there is certainly much overlap in the groups they represent; their zone of convergence largely encompasses those members of the lowest, largest, and most volatile stratum of the local elite, whose attitudes and actions were crucially important to all who sought to change the contours of Chinese rural society.

Mao Zedong was just such an individual; and more than the simple curiosity of an admittedly avid observer and analyst of Chinese life, the pressing, practical worries about revolutionary policy doubtless motivated his inquiries in Xunwu in May 1930. Nonetheless, his concern then was, on one level, much the same as ours is now: comprehending the rumbustious society of the Jiangxi hill country, and most particularly the jostling, arguing local elites who wrapped the region in such strong but anxious embrace. The "Xunwu Investigation" is testament to the significant progress he made in this effort, and it remains today a vivid and valuable record of a vanished way of life.