Why Did The Communist Mobilize The Chinese Revolution

Fanshen depicts the struggle of mobilization and organization of the peasants in the Chinese countryside. It illustrates the efforts of communist leaders and revolutionaries to encourage the peasants to “fanshen” or to turn around, in this case to turn away from the traditional feudal society and toward revolution. To do this, communist leaders needed to organization strategies that would be successful among the peasants to accomplish the party’s goals. Communist organization and activism in the countryside was successful because of its strategy of using land as a way to motivate and mobilize the peasant population, which helped to accomplish the main goal of the party, to reform the old, tired policies through the promotion of an agrarian

Although many peasants supported using violence to get rid of the old regime, its continued use for loot alone, as supported by community leaders, did not seem to resonate well with the peasants, which caused them to draw back from active participation in new campaigns (Hinton 224). Since the revolutionary leaders did not better assess how the peasants were feeling about the situation, and instead began to push them harder, a rift developed between the leaders and the rank and file peasants (Hinton 224). They did not take the time to listen and understand how the peasants felt, and instead just issued orders, without realizing how much support they had lost from those who had previously supported them wholeheartedly, resulting in the old abuses of power reemerging. Since many of these were militiamen and party members, it was up to the party to make sure these abuses of power stopped. The party’s solution was to bring those out of line before the branch executive committee, criticize them, and make them promise to correct their behavior, or they could not hope to have too much influence along party lines (Hinton 231). Although it may not have done much, the party was trying to correct mistakes that could prove detrimental to the goal of promoting “fanshen” and having

This was grounded in the three basic goals, “to accuse thoroughly, to struggle thoroughly, and to fanshen thoroughly,” (Hinton 202). These goals were accompanied by the four things that all should possess and the five problems to be resolved, which altogether help to illustrate the goal of promoting an agrarian revolution. In order to support the main goal of promotion of an agrarian revolution, and to follow the three basic goals, another side objective had to be how best to put the liberated wealth and resources of the country to work and how to best stimulate production, as everything the revolution hoped to accomplish could not be done without the success of the production movement (Hinton 209). Production was key to the promotion of an agrarian revolution, because production would help the transition from individual labor based on individual economy to collective labor based on collective economy, further the main goal of the communists (Hinton 212). Here the communists experienced organizing successes in the promotion of production through mutual aid and a new tax system, which were successful because they guaranteed subsistence, rewarded effort, and helped in the stimulation of the goal to raise production by improving and reclaiming land (Hinton 218).