P’eng P’ai, one of the earliest members of the CCP, was the first Party leader of significance to devote himself to the organization of the peasantry. Working in his native province, he established a number of peasant organizations between 1923 and 1927. He was an important member of the KMT Peasants Department and the first director of the department's Peasant Movement Training Institute when it was established in 1924.
Background
P’eng P’ai was born on October 22, 1896, into a leading landlord family of Hai-feng hsien on the Kwangtung coast. His family controlled the livelihood of about 1,500 peasants, whose lot was made all the more arduous by the unproductive soil they tilled.
Education
Having begun a modern education he went to Tokyo in 1918 to spend the next three years as a student of political economy at Waseda University, where Li Ta-chao had also studied (1913-1916). Although PJeng came from a family of means, he apparently received some financial assistance from Ch’en Chiung-ming’s government, which was then actively promoting study abroad. During P’eng’s years at Waseda the school was a hotbed of Japanese Socialist groups, which took a profound interest in agrarian problems. He reportedly became a socialist under their influence; he was a member of one group, the Kensetsu-sha Domei (Reformers' alliance), and was a close associate of one of its leaders, Takatsu Masamichi. The influence of the Waseda socialists, who gave priority to organizing agricultural cooperatives and peasant unions over organizing urban workers, probably shaped P’eng’s subsequent career to a large extent.
Career
After graduating in July 1921, P’eng returned to China, and he probably first went to Canton where he joined the CCP. Kwangtung province, still ruled by Ch'en Chiung-ming, was in many ways a comfortable locale for advocates of the political left. For example, Ch’en Chiung-ming had induced Ch’en Tu-hsiu to become commissioner of education in Kwangtung in late 1920, and early in the next year the latter had transferred his famous journal, Hsin ch'iug-nien (New youth) to Canton. Moreover, Ch'en Tu-hsiu quickly proceeded to establish small groups for the CCP and the Socialist Youth League. Ch'en departed Canton for Shanghai in August 1921 to assume the leadership of the newly founded CCP, but he left behind a core of young activists-some of whom were to be associated with P’eng P’ai in the stormy years ahead.
Returning to Hai-feng, P’eng immediately showed his radicalism in an article “Appealing to My Countrymen, published in September 1921 in the first issue of Hsin Hai-feng (New Hai-feng), the organ of the Hai-feng Students’ Union, in which he called for the abolition of private property, law, government, and state. He rallied a group of outstanding student leaders in the district and formed the Society for the Study of Socialism, which may have been a cover for a unit of the Socialist Youth League.
P’eng soon became known to Governor Ch’en Chiung-ming, who on October 1 appointed him chief of the Bureau of Education in Hai-feng. Seizing this as an opportunity uto accomplish a social revolution through education, he directed his attention to organizing the students. On May 1, 1922, P'eng led the Hai-feng students in the district’s first May Day parade. The local gentry regarded this as a “Red scare” and succeeded in pressuring Ch’en Chiung-ming to dismiss P’eng. On May 9 P'eng resigned from the Education Bureau, and in the same month he embarked on the bolder venture of agitating among the peasants. Rural China being generally on the edge of revolt, P’eng found a quick response, and on January 1, 1923, he inaugurated the Hai-feng Peasants' Association, with a membership of 20,000. It developed a variety of community services in education, arbitration, medical aid, and agricultural information.
Peasant associations spread to more and more districts as in one case after another they succeeded in forcing the landlords to reduce rent, so that by May 1923 the Kwangtung Peasants1 Association was inaugurated, with P'eng P'ai as chairman of its Executive Committee. The local gentry and officials were uneasy, but they hesitated to suppress the movement because of the prestige of some of the leaders, many of whom came from fairly prominent families. However, in August 1923 the local gentry and officials struck at the peasant union in Hai-feng and arrested many of its leaders. P'eng then met with Ch'en Chiung-ming at Lao-lung in eastern Kwangtung to secure his support for rent reduction, the release of the arrested leaders, and the reorganization of the peasant union in Hai-feng. Ch'en, whose influence in Hai-feng was decisive although he had been expelled from Canton by Sun Yat-sen's allied forces, agreed to P’eng’s petition in principle, wishing to benefit from P’eng’s prestige among the Hai-feng peasants.
In March 1924 Ch'en Chiung-ming returned to Hai-feng, and was persuaded by local officials and the gentry to suppress the peasant union in view of its close relation to the Canton government of Sun Yat-sen, to which Ch'en himself was hostile. On March 17, 1924, Ch'en ordered the peasant union dissolved; P'eng P'i and others left Hai-feng for Canton, leaving a few leaders to operate underground in Hai-feng, including P'eng's elder brother, P'eng Han-yuan. It should be noted that P’eng’s activities in Hai-feng at that time appear to have been outside the main concern of the Party Center, and there is no evidence that he received assistance from the Party headquarters. The CCP was then focused chiefly on the labor movement, and it was not until later that intensive work was begun among the peasantry.
P'eng continued as the secretary of the KMT Peasants’ Department until about November 1924, when he was replaced by another young Communist, Lo Ch'i-yuan. (A few years later, after P’eng’s death in 1929, Lo succeeded P’eng as director of the CCP Peasants’ Committee.) However, P'eng remained a key member of the department, along with two other Communists, Juan Hsiao-hsien and T’an Chih-t’ang while the department was headed by Ch'en Kung-po. Among other duties in the 1924-25 period, P’eng traveled from place to place in Kwangtung to help organize peasant associations, to supervise the work of special delegates sent out by the department to various peasant associations, and to train these special delegates. These endeavors proved to be of use in February 1925 when the KMT took the first step to secure its Kwangtung revolutionary base by sending the First Eastern Expedition against Ch'en Chiung-ming in the East River area. From Canton P'eng carried on secret communications with his underground comrades in Hai-feng, who helped mobilize peasant support for the KMT forces. (Three months later in the course of a speech delivered in Canton, Chiang Kai-shek acknowledged the aid which P’eng’s peasants had given to his army) P’eng arrived in Hai-feng on March 9 after Ch’en Chiung-ming had been expelled and reassembled his friends to reorganize the peasant movement. The Hai-feng peasant association was re-established and its members put forward the demand for a 25 per cent rent reduction and organized a self-defense corps. The First Eastern Expedition was only partially successful in June 1925, when the Canton government was preoccupied with the revolts of the Yunnan and Kwangsi generals, Sun Yat-sen's erstwhile allies, the landowners in Hai-feng and neighboring hsien (alarmed by the government's Bolshevik tendencies) struck hack at the peasant unions, butchering more than 70 of their members. P'eng was probably busy there when the First Congress of the Kwangtung Peasants' Association opened in early May 1925, because there is no evidence of his being present at the congress.
In October 1925 the KMT launched the Second Eastern Expedition in the East River area. In mid- October they occupied Waichow (Hui-chou), Ch’en Chiung-ming’s stronghold, and by early November they had reached Swatow via Hai-feng and Lu-feng (known collectively as Hai-lu-feng), incorporating the entire region into the area of the revolutionary governments jurisdiction. The peasant underground once again aided the KMT armies. On October 25 a peasant conference was held at Hai-feng, P’eng called for vengeance for the 70 slain peasant leaders and for an unprecedented reduction of rent. He remained there for most of the next year, and in his capacity as secretary of the CCP Hai-lu-feng District Committee, he stimulated the radicalism of the peasant associations. In May 1926, he attended the Second Congress of the Kwangtung Peasants' Association and was named director of the association’s office in the East River area. Two months later, when the Northern Expedition began, P'eng remained behind in Kwangtung, being in charge of the entire peasant movement in the province as head of the KMT Kwangtung Peasants' Department. He was concurrently a member of the CCP organization in Kwangtung, then headed by Ch’en Yen-nien. However, toward the end of 1926 he led a few hundred peasants from Kwangtung to Hankow to join Ho Lung’s troops garrisoning the city.
P’eng and his colleagues in Hai-lu-feng were just in the process of gaining control in Hai-lu-feng when they received a request from Chang T’ai-lei to send troops to take part in the uprising in Canton. The Canton Commune was established on December 11 but was too short-lived (less than three days) for P'eng to render assistance. He was, however, elected in absentia to be commissar of Land. Immediately after the failure in Canton, the remnant troops there, led by Yang Yin, Hsu Hsiang-ch'ief, and others, reorganized their men into the Fourth Division of the Red Army and marched to Hai-lu-feng. The 1,200 men of the Fourth Division were thus added to the 800 men in the Second Division in Hai-lu-feng. However, these combined units were unable to withstand a major attack in late February 1928, led by General Yii Han-mou. The Second and Fourth Divisions were virtually wiped out during the ensuing weeks, and thus the Hai-lu-feng Soviet came to an effective end as a governmental unit. However, scattered bands in the area later joined together and, during the Sino-Japanese War, were known as the East River Column.
After the suppression of the Hai-lu-feng Soviet, P'eng and Yang Yin fled to Shanghai. In the summer of 1928 the CCP held its Sixth Congress in Moscow, and though it appears that neither of them were there, they were both elected members of the Central Committee. P'eng was also made a member of the Politburo, and Yang was made an alternate member. In addition, P’eng became head of the newly created Peasants, Committee in the CCP national organization. At the local level he was made a member of the Kiangsu Provincial Committee and the secretary of its Peasants' Department. He is purported to have made a secret visit to Hai-feng in early 1929, but most of his time during this period was spent in the Shanghai underground. On August 24, 1929, having been betrayed by Pai Hsin, a turncoat Communist, P'eng was arrested with Yang Yin, Yen Ch'eng-i, and several others. A week later he was executed.
Politics
While these events were taking place, the KMT and the CCP were moving toward a period of close cooperation. In the process of working out a reorganization of the KMT under the guidance of Soviet adviser Michael Borodin, Sun Yat-sen had agreed to the organization of the peasantry as one source of support for the national revolution. Accordingly, immediately after the First KMT Congress, held in Canton in January 1924, the Peasants' Department was set up (February) under the KMT Central Executive Committee. The department was initially headed by the prominent Communist Lin Po-ch’ii. When P’eng arrived a month later, he was made secretary of the department upon the recommendation of Lin. Writing many years later, Chiang Kai-shek asserted that despite many changes in the directorship of the department, it was P'eng who dominated it.
One of the first acts of the Peasants' Department was to recommend the establishment of the Peasant Movement Training Institute. This was approved by the KMT Central Executive Committee on June 30, 1924, and a few days later the institute opened under P’eng’s direction. From rather modest beginnings-P’eng’s first class (July 3-August 21) had only 33 graduates—the institute expanded to a graduation class of 318 in the sixth and final term (May-October 1926), when Mao Tse-tung was the director. In total, the institute turned out 771 graduates; during the first three terms the students all came from Kwangtung, but later there were many Hunanese (presumably because of MaoJs influence), and by the last term the institute was drawing students from all parts of China. The directorship of the institute passed from one Communist to another; from P’eng it went to Lo Ch’i-yuan, Juan Hsiao-hsien, T'an Chih-fang, Lo Ch'i-yuan (again), and finally to Mao. The faculty and guest lecturers read like a checklist of the early Communist elite and included Hsiao Ch'i-nii, Ch'e Chiu-pai, Lin Po-ch'ii, Chang T'ai-lei, Teng Chung-hsia, Chou En lai, Li Li-san, Wu Yu-chang, and Yun Tai-ying. Many of the graduates took part in the Northern Expedition as peasant organizers, and a number of them later became prominent members of the CCP, for example, Wang Shou-tao and Mao Tse-min (Mao Tse-tung’s younger brother). Mainly because of Mao's association with the Peasant Institute, orthodox Communist historians have written about it frequently. In doing so, however, they have normally inflated Mao's role and underplayed P’eng’s endeavors.
Membership
P’eng was present in Wuhan for the historic Fifth CCP Congress in April-May 1927 (see under Ch'en Tu-hsiu), where he joined with Mao Tse-tung and Lo Ch'i-yuan in arguing (unsuccessfully) for a rather extreme policy in terms of the confiscation of land. At this same time he also became a member of the Provisional Executive Committee of the newly founded All-China Peasants' Association, which included members of the left wing of the KMT as well as such prominent Communists as Mao Tse-tung. The congress and the formation of the peasant association followed by only a few days Chiang Kai-shek’s coup against the Communists on April 12. The Communists in Wuhan were able to maintain their alliance with the left-wing KMT, but by mid-July this tenuous arrangement collapsed thus setting the stage for the famous Nanchang Uprising on August 1 (see under Yeh T’ing). P’eng took part in planning the revolt, and immediately after its initial success he was named to the 25-member Revolutionary Committee, as well as a commissar of the Workers’ and Peasants' Committee (ostensibly a cabinet post under the Revolutionary Committee). However, the uprising was quickly crushed, and the Communist military units began a southward march into Kwangtung.