Party, Society, and Local Elite in the Jiangxi Communist Movement
In Party, Society, and Local Elite in the Jiangxi Communist Movement, it talks about how a two-tiered local elite presided uneasily over the hill-country society. At the upper level was a relatively cultivated, town-dwelling group of ex-officials, large landlords, merchants, and their families.
By contrast, members of the elite's lower stratum were much less well educated, sophisticated, and urban. Most continued to live in villages and minor market towns and retained close contact with the peasantry, serving as small lineage heads, village elders, militia captains, traditional local schoolteachers, or dispute mediators. Some were small landlords, others rich peasants; almost all relied upon rural management or entrepreneurial skills such as dispute mediation or tax engrossment to provide at least part of their livelihood.
Many were also involved in secret societies, smuggling, extortion, opium growing, and other illegal activities. This behavior attracted the disapproval of both government officials and higher-level elites, and led to some of the lower elite being stigmatized as "local bullies and evil gentry."
Members of the hill-country elite feuded among themselves. Such struggles often expanded into group conflicts involving large numbers of peasants when elite protagonists appealed to kinship ties and local pride, invoked official status and institutional position, or simply disbursed large sums of money to mobilize mass followings. In this manner, the broader general society of the hill-country peasantry was linked to the specific imperatives of elite politics
In the early twentieth century the changes transforming the rest of Chinese society also crept gradually into the]iangxi hill country. The new schools that grew up in Chinese cities became centers for new ideas and for discussions of the political and cultural problems involved in China's transformation into a modern nation
Ultimately, these schools also became prime organizing sites for the various political parties that sprang up to transform the newly introduced ideas into political realities. Lower-level (county and subcounty) schools played similar roles on a local scale.
Equally important, the new schools were also arenas for elite factionalism and conflicts of very traditional sorts. For example, in Jiangxi during the 1920s, rival factions within the elite were commonly centered in different schools. Often such factional alignments began when disputes between school principals extended to encompass schools as a whole. Such struggles were long lasting, and succeeding generations of students perforce became involved in disputes not of their making, which did not necessarily involve their own interests.
The "modern" schools, then, were actually complicated mixtures of old and new, purposes. It was in such educational halfway houses that revolutionary leaders received their early exposure both to modern Chinese nationalism and to old-style local politics. Nationalism and an awareness of China's backwardness led students to demonstrate against local manifestations of the foreign presence in China and against particularly egregious examples of ignorance and conservatism in local society.
To illustrate the mixture of old and new in these first reform efforts the author examines the early political career of Fang Zhimin, a major leader of the Jiangxi Communist movement.
Fang was born into a lower elite family. After early schooling in his village, Fang moved to the nearby town of Lieqiao, where he lived and continued his education in the household of a large landlord named Zhang Nianzheng until his father was able to borrow money to enroll him in higher primary school in the county capital. In the city Fang was affected by the intellectual ferment of the New Culture movement, He and other students from northern Yiyang formed a cultural and political discussion group called the Ninth Qu Youth Society, which soon also began to lead anti-Japanese demonstrations, publish a muckraking journal, and press for political reforms. The main target of their reform efforts was Fang's erstwhile patron Zhang Nianzheng. When Zhang ran for the provincial assembly, the Youth Society journal denounced Zhang's open vote-buying efforts, and chastised Zhang for channeling public funds into private weapons purchases instead of into new schools. Fang soon left the county for further schooling. The confrontation between Fang and the Youth Society and Zhang and his allies illustrates many features of the numerous intra-elite political struggles that occurred in Jiangxi during the 1910s and 1920s. In these struggles idealistic scions of elite families thrown together in the modern schools mobilized on the basis of common institutional and ideological ties.
Even after Communist leaders realized the importance of rebuilding the revolution around nuclei of preexisting peasant organizations, they appealed more directly to bandit chiefs and secret-society heads than to their followers, and generally deviated little from methods long used by hill-country elites in search of armed followings. Such reliance upon long-established institutions and patterns of behavior, besides being psychologically congenial in many respects to Communist leaders who had been immersed in them since childhood, was also essential to the initial success of their efforts.
Later, following the defeats of 1927, the ability of Communist leaders to draw upon bandit gangs and upon traditions of local strongman behavior made it possible for them to mobilize armed followings at a time when their prestige and material resources were at very low ebb. Had the Communists immediately tried to appeal to the hill-country populace with Marxist slogans, tried to form complex, mass, political organizations, or tried to carry out fundamental land reform, their efforts would almost certainly have been doomed to failure. By enlisting existing armed groups into their followings and by approaching the populace through established religious or kinship or local place ties, the Communists were able to draw upon familiar and unthreatening appeals to gain adherents who would not otherwise have given their support.