The following is a supporting document from China From the 1911 Revolution to Liberation by Jean Chesneaux, Françoise Le Barbier, and Marie-Claire Bergère. The original source was Red Dust: Autobiographies of Chinese Communists as told to Nym Wales by Helen Foster Snow (Nym Wales, pseud.)

“The author was born in 1909 and was the son of a peasant who died fighting while part of a Communist band of guerillas. Wang Cheng was a railway employee and was active in the trade-union movement around 1925 to 1927. Founder of the union in the district of Liuyang in Hunan, he returned there in 1929 after the failure of the revolution in the cities.”

“As soon as I arrived, I went out into the villages and organized secret Red Peasants’ and Workers’ unions and local branches of the C.P. In the winter of 1929 the C.P. was well organized in the villages near by, and in the north suburb of Liuyang xian city, I organized a very good peasants’ union.

One day a peasant told me that a local landlord in Xiajiasan had four guns in his house. The C.P. branch decided to send him a letter demanding that he surrender these guns to us. It was signed in the name of the Communist Party! We went to his home that very night and took the four guns. He ‘gave’ us five thousand dollars at the same time, but we did not confiscate anything else and did no harm to the landlord himself. At that time the C.P. had the slogan of confiscating the landlords’ property, but we hadn’t begun to realize it then. Our political program for the moment was merely to arm ourselves- the confiscation of land would come later. We had several thousand peasants armed with agricultural implements but only our four guns.

At the time of the old-style Chinese New Year, when debts and taxes had to be paid, the C.P. branch led the peasants to oppose the collection of taxes, always unbearably oppressive. At the same time the tailors and carpenters got only one dollar for ten days’ work. The workers’ union demanded one dollar for five days’ labor, and the peasants and workers united for action. The workers’ union had four or five thousand members and the C.P. had several hundred. That New Year the tuhao¹ and the other landlords dared not collect any taxes and the workers’ wages were increased thirty percent. It was the happiest New Year the people had ever had! The party expanded rapidly, and out of these original economic demands new political consciousness arose.

At that time Peng De-huai² was active in Hunan. His work had been phenomenally successful. By the beginning of 1930 the countryside was full of revolutionary agitation. In all the near-by xian C.P. branches were established and interconnections made. We still had only four guns- but our political influence was enormous. I was secretary of the Communist party of the district.

In the spring of 1930 we organized our own armed Red Vanguards of twenty or thirty partisans in this way: Four thousand peasants and workers attacked the estate of a big landlord in the north suburb of Liuyang city. His name was Po Sheng-chen. This landlord had about two hundred min tuan³ organized, with one hundred twenty guns. We brandished our four guns at the head of the big column when we went to the attack. The landlord imagined that we were well armed, and so didn’t put up much resistance. We defeated the min tuan and captured many of them, together with twenty precious guns. None of the min tuan were killed and only one of our peasants died. I had led the C.P. work of the uprising, and the open leader was Xu Hing, a paper worker.

In the spring all peasants are very poor and hungry because the crops have not been planted, and so they are in desperate need. Part of our reason for attacking Po Sheng-chen’s estate was to get salt and grain to distribute to the people- as well as guns for the partisans- as he had many rich granaries. Everyone jubilantly carried a sackful of food home to his starving children after our foray on this landlord. Our Red Vanguards then increased to fifty or sixty.”

¹ Feudal Landowner

² Born in 1898, he was a Nationalist army officer who went over to the Communists in 1928. Later he became one of the main leaders of the Red Army. He resigned as chief of staff in 1959 following disagreements over the ‘great leap forward.’

³ Private militia of landowners.

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