Communism and Ethnic Revolt: Some Notes on the Chuang Peasant Movement in Kwangsi 1921–31

Abstract

Of all the soviets established in China in the late 1920s, none have received less attention than the Right and Left River Soviets in Kwangsi. Their brief lives, their minor local impact and their relative unimportance in the development of the CCP explains this neglect. But there are two aspects of these two soviets, especially of the Right River Soviet (Yu Chiang Su-wei-ai), which are of interest. The first is the ethnic composition of much of the soviet membership; the second is the way in which these soviets related to the Party Centre, and how they reflected, and suffered from, the shifts in Li Li-san's policies towards soviets in general. The question of relations between Li and the major soviets, and between Li and the Comintern, has been discussed at length (notably by Richard Thornton, in The Comintern and the Chinese Communists, and by Hsiao Tso-liang, in Power Relations within the Chinese Communist Movement, 1930–1934) and needs no further comment here. The aim of this article is to describe the relations between Han Chinese and minority peoples within the soviet movement, and to show how the Centre at Shanghai behaved towards a soviet over which it had a far greater degree of authority than was the case with most of those established in the late 1920s.