Early Peasant Movement in Zhejiang and Guangdong

China was a large agrarian country in which peasants were the great majority of the population. After the Communist Party was founded, while concentrating on the labor movement it also began organizing peasant associations and leading peasant movements. In September 1921, through the efforts of Communists such as Shen Dingyi, the Yanqian Peasant Association was founded in Yanqian Village, Xiaoshan, Zhejiang, the first new-style peasant organization under Communist leadership. It led a rent-reduction struggle that peasants in more than 80 nearby villages joined, but was soon suppressed. In 1922 the Communist Peng Pai began a peasant movement in his home county of Haifeng, Guangdong. Peng Pai (1896–1929), from a landlord family, studied in Japan in his youth and on returning publicly burned the land deeds he had inherited and went to live in the countryside. In July 1922 he founded the first secret peasant association in Haifeng, which grew into the Haifeng County General Peasant Association with over 100,000 members, leading struggles for rent reduction and against exorbitant taxes. After the First Kuomintang–Communist Cooperation began in 1924, a Peasant Movement Training Institute was opened in Guangzhou, headed in turn by Peng Pai, Mao Zedong and others, training many peasant-movement cadres. During the Northern Expedition peasant movements flourished in Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi and elsewhere. The early peasant movement led the Party to see peasants as the main force of the Chinese revolution and built experience for the later land revolution. Mao Zedong called Peng Pai the “King of the Peasant Movement”; in 1927 he led the Hai-Lufeng Uprising, which set up China's first county-level soviet government, and he was killed in Shanghai in 1929.