Mao’s Reports and Their Cry for a Rural Revolution

From 1927 onwards, Mao strongly advocated a rural-based revolution predicated upon investigations he
conducted in the countryside. In his words, “without the poor peasants there would be no revolution. To deny their
role is to deny the revolution.”10 Although urban-based intellectuals played leadership roles in the revolution, it can
forcibly be said that the revolution in China was led by the peasantry. ‘Maoism’ is unique to any other form of
socialism; it defies the basic Marxist-Leninist assumption that capitalism is a prerequisite for socialism. This
deviation developed because China saw capitalism as a symptom of foreign imperialism and because of the absence

of competing socialist theories. This raises the question of the appropriateness of applying Western theories to a

significantly different environment. China was agrarian-based and therefore the urban proletariat, which was

supposed to be the class with the most revolutionary potential, made up only a minute amount of the population. In

his Investigation of Peasant Movement in Hunan in March 1927, Mao proclaims:

…several hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm, like a hurricane, a force so swift and

violent that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back. They will smash all the trammels

that bind them and rush forward along the road to liberation.11

Although this claim was denounced as “an utter fantasy”12 by an unnamed Western scholar, this immense faith in

the peasantry’s potential was partly due to the view that urban centers were dominated by imperialist forces and

were ‘alien influences.’ Mao also suggested that rural education was superior to urban education, and noted that

their “cultural level has risen rapidly.”13 In the same report, Mao attributed seventy percent of revolutionary

achievements to the peasants, reiterating their revolutionary potential. These differences between Chinese cities and

the countryside made a rural-based revolution more appropriate.

Although the Investigation of Peasant Movement in Hunan is by far Mao’s most famous report, the Report

from Xunwu is equally important in terms of Mao’s attempts to adapt Marxist theory to Chinese reality. Instead of

attending a major conference in Shanghai attended by the Party Central of the CCP in May 1930, Mao journeyed to

Xunwu County where he crystallized his method of inquiry -- the ‘investigation meeting’ (diao cha hui) -- which

was to become the key element in the ‘mass line’ movement.14 At the time, Mao was accused of being a “mere

empiricist,”15 and yet the investigations led to the important connection between theory and practice, which Mao

referred to as ‘seeking truth from facts’ (shishi quishi)16 in his essay On New Democracy written in 1940. The

reports were written despite attacks by Wang Ming, Li Lisan, the other members of the twenty-eight Bolsheviks, and

the Central Committee of the CCP, which at the time followed the Russian model of dictatorship of the proletariat in

alliance with the intellectuals. Criticism did not sway Mao, who strongly believed that “without investigation one

has no right to make pronouncements.”17 This is reflected in his essay On Practice, written in July 1932 in order to

persuade Party members against dogmatism and empiricism and to illustrate his theory of knowledge.18 Likewise,

Lenin acknowledged that “Practice is higher than [theoretical] knowledge, for it has not only the dignity of

universality, but also of immediate actuality.”19 It was due to these investigations that Mao was able to advance his

revolution by transforming the disasters of 192720 into the implementation of a revolutionary base in Jiangxi. Mao

recognized the error of applying the Russian model to China through his investigations and thus adapted Marxist

• theory to suit the Chinese revolution.