Mao Tse-tung and the Middle Peasants, 1925–1928

Abstract Against the background context of the First United Front between the Chinese Communist Party and the Guomindang, the main significance of Mao Zedong’s “Report on the Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan” was to affirm the place of mass movements in the countryside, which was a clearly different position from that of the leadership of the United Front. It was also different from the emphasis on cities of the Communist Party led at the time by Chen Duxiu. In the several years following, the core problem in Mao Zedong’s search for a strategy for rural social revolution was how at the same time to trigger the activism of the poor peasants and gain the support of the middle peasants. Mobilizing middle peasants would come to be the foundation of how he came to view mass movements. Over the long term, with the rise of Mao Zedong, mass movements would become the central theme of the revolution. The “mass line” of “from the masses, to the masses” would profoundly shape the Chinese Communist Party’s mode of organization and of epistemology.