Vol. 2: The Fourteen Great Achievements in the "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan": What Can Ordinary People Learn?

If you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself. —Mao Zedong, "On Practice"

---

The "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan" is a long piece, thorough and detailed. Many people reading the Selected Works of Mao Zedong get stuck on this one essay, because it's so long and so detailed that they find it boring.

In it, Mao sums up fourteen great achievements of the peasant movement, listed in the table below:

No.	Achievement
1	Organizing the peasants into peasant associations
2	Hitting the landlords politically
3	Hitting the landlords economically
4	Overthrowing the feudal rule of the local tyrants and evil gentry
5	Overthrowing the armed forces of the landlords and establishing those of the peasants
6	Overthrowing the political power of the county magistrate and his bailiffs
7	Overthrowing the clan authority of the ancestral temples and clan elders, the religious authority of town and village gods, and the masculine authority of husbands
8	Spreading political propaganda
9	Peasant bans and prohibitions (cards, gambling, opium, guns, flower-drum shows, sedan chairs, distilling and sugar-making, pigs, chickens and ducks, feasts, oxen)
10	Eliminating banditry
11	Abolishing exorbitant levies
12	The movement for education
13	The co-operative movement
14	Building roads and repairing embankments

In this post, I'll start from these fourteen achievements and talk about what ordinary people can take from them.

Looking at Them by Category

Getting Organized

Let's start with the first achievement: "organizing the peasants into peasant associations." Step back and look at the big picture, and its importance is obvious. Only once the peasants were organized could the other thirteen things happen.

Why? Simple. In the last post, we quoted: "Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of the first importance for the revolution." Telling friend from foe matters. But once you've told them apart, whether you can unite your friends matters even more, because the first stays at the level of theory while the second has to rise to the level of practice.

Sorting friend from foe in theory has to be proved in practice.

The Report says that the peasant associations already had 1,367,727 registered members, and as the movement grew, that number had long since passed two million. And since each family registered only one name, a conservative estimate put the masses in the associations at more than ten million.

Only with those ten million united could the next dozen or so achievements happen. If the peasants had been left to go their own way, all of Hunan might have turned into a mess long before.

Why is "organizing the peasants into peasant associations" the greatest achievement of all? Because after the class analysis, it was the big step from theory to practice.

Many people say that the October Revolution led by Lenin and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were historic for the development of Marxism. But why? Because the October Revolution and the birth of the Soviet Union proved that Marxism was right and that a socialist state was possible.

Before the Soviet Union was born, Marxism was always just a theory. After it, the theory was proved by practice and became a reality. Marx himself spent his whole life without proving his theory right through practice. After he died, the Russians did it.

So "organizing the peasants into peasant associations" looks ordinary, but it was actually a milestone.

Bring this way of thinking into our own lives and it's hugely instructive. Too often our thinking stays at the level of thinking and imagining, and we rarely prove through real action whether our ideas are right.

For example, I've been working out recently. I don't have a personal trainer, so I can only learn from articles and videos online. Take chest training. Everyone online says the bench press is the king of chest exercises. That conclusion is backed by plenty of cases and experience, but I still need months of trying it to prove it before I can admit it's right.

Yes, the bench press really is the king of chest exercises. But then what? If you insist on an answer, actually training is the real king.

The End of Feudal Privilege

Items 2 through 8 need to be looked at together.

Once the peasants were organized, they achieved several big things: they hit the landlords, overthrew the local tyrants and evil gentry, overthrew the county magistrate's office, and overthrew the clan elders of the ancestral temples, the town and village gods, and the masculine authority of husbands.

Why did this happen? As I see it, all of it was bound to happen, because it followed the laws of how things develop.

Mao once said: in nature as in society, all new-born forces are by their very nature invincible, and all old forces, however huge their numbers, are always bound to be destroyed.

The force represented by the peasants in the associations had no wealth to speak of, but united, it was a force of real progress. The feudal force represented by the landlords sat on land, money, and power, but it was without a doubt a backward force, bound to be overthrown by the progressive one.

From these achievements, we can see a few things:

1. The old order is often a tightly built system

Whether it's hitting the landlords politically or economically, or going on to overthrow the local tyrants and evil gentry, the landlords' armed forces, and the county magistrate and his bailiffs, these individuals, families, and government offices with power and wealth were essentially a system of collusion that used interests and power as both its goal and its wall.

Pry open one crack and you can see what's wrong with the whole system. Once you've hit the landlords politically and economically, you have to follow the thread down and hit the feudal county officials closely tied to them, the landlords' armed forces, the clan elders, and so on.

Hit only the landlords and leave alone the people and organizations closely tied to them, and the action is incomplete. Give up, and it fails.

The logic is similar to how we form habits, because a habit is rarely an isolated behavior. It's held up by a whole system.

Take smoking. Many people want to quit and never manage it. Not because their resolve isn't strong enough, but because they can't fight the system beneath the smoking.

For example, there are the friends he used to smoke with. He can stop smoking, but he still has to spend time with those friends, and that's part of the system too, because smoking isn't just smoking. It's also a way of life.

Or maybe without smoking he can't relieve his stress and gloom. Many people smoke to numb the melancholy and pressure inside. But notice the word I used: "numb." That shows smoking isn't a way to resolve the contradiction. It's a way to escape it. Here, facing the stress and melancholy is also part of the system. What he really needs to do is face his stress and melancholy and find a way to make them go away.

That's the systemic problem behind a habit. To break free of one simple habit, you need a drastic movement to overthrow a huge supporting system.

So when we think about our own problems, it's worth spending more time asking: what kind of problem am I really facing?

If you can, start with one sentence and make yourself expand the problem into 1,000 words. If you can do that, in the end you should be able to see the whole of your problem.

2. The Gender Narrative

In today's society, the gender narrative is the most extreme it's ever been. Especially among young people online, men and women are at each other's throats. But I think this kind of problem is boring.

The Report specifically says that the peasant movement overthrew the masculine authority of husbands.

Following the logic above, that "the new is bound to overthrow the old," the so-called "masculine authority of husbands" is clearly part of the old.

In the Report's own words: in a word, the whole feudal-patriarchal system and ideology is tottering with the growth of the peasants' power.

"The masculine authority of husbands" belongs to that feudal-patriarchal system and ideology. But that's all the Report says.

It doesn't say what comes after the masculine authority of husbands is overthrown. What people argue about online now is nothing more than who exploits whom, who's weak and who's strong. They have to decide who's on top and who wins. To me that's a very boring thing to do, because the people arguing have sunk too deep into the gender narrative to see that the world is actually big, and men and women can stand side by side instead of one above and one below.

3. Political Propaganda

I've put "spreading political propaganda" in this section because they're inseparable.

We all know that poor peasants didn't have much education. Their values were often vague and simple. To unleash their revolutionary force, it wasn't enough to unite them. You also had to give them the right direction and keep them on the right road.

Why should the peasants hit the landlords? How? With what? The peasants needed not only to realize they had been exploited for generations, but to understand what that exploitation meant.

Why did the peasants need to take back the land? Why did they need to arm themselves? In a revolutionary movement, the masses must not only take part in the revolution. More importantly, they must understand why they're making it.

That's why political propaganda matters, and that's the problem it has to solve.

Political propaganda is different from cultural education. Education is long term, and we'll talk about it in its own section later. Propaganda is a direct, indispensable tool in the short-term revolutionary struggle. It can mobilize the peasant masses directly, unify their thinking, and unify their actions.

Only then can each person act knowing what they're doing, and feel steady about it.

So when we need to overcome a difficulty or a habit, maybe we can try giving ourselves some short-term "political propaganda." If you're quitting smoking, for instance, you have to give yourself a strong enough reason why. Once you've quit, you can drop it.

Cultural Education and Personal Habits

In achievements 9 through 14, we can see that things change again.

From the earlier ones, we can pull out a simple story: under the right political propaganda, the peasant associations organized tens of millions of peasants, and they overthrew many backward feudal forces.

Of the later achievements, items 10 and 11 belong here too, but I won't go into them. I'll focus mainly on items 9 and 12.

We just said that political propaganda and cultural education are different. Political propaganda focuses on the revolutionary tasks of a particular period. Cultural education is a completely different thing. Its aim is to raise the people's general level of knowledge and culture, skills, and political consciousness. It's a big undertaking with the long term in view.

I heard a story a long time ago.

In ancient times, if a peasant family wanted to raise one scholar, three generations had to scrimp and save before they had enough money to let one person stop working and study.

That's a true picture of the lower classes in feudal society. Reading and having an education were class privileges, not something just anyone could have.

The peasant movement smashed that reality outright and gave peasants a chance to get an education too. Who would dare say that isn't a big deal?

On top of that, the peasant masses were striking at feudal forces and traditions, getting an education, doing political propaganda, and restraining their own behavior, all at once.

What I find most astonishing is that when a group of peasants who had never had education or power suddenly gained them, along with status, they still made rules of their own accord and restrained their own behavior.

No cards, no gambling, no opium. Such self-discipline, such progress. A progressive organization carrying out a progressive revolution, organizing progressive political propaganda and spreading progressive education: how could it fail to achieve a progressive revolutionary success?

From this we can also see that progressive success is also systemic success. The peasants didn't just overthrow the old forces. At the same time they were doing political propaganda, spreading education, and restraining themselves. It was a revolution with a system behind it, and from that you can infer that its success was all but inevitable.

Systems, Once More

By now we've more or less taken apart all fourteen achievements, and we have to take a fresh look at how systems work.

We can see that neither the problems the Hunan peasant movement faced nor the movement's own development were isolated. Each had its own system holding it up.

Bring this logic into our own lives and it's easy to see that, often, what we think of as a simple habit also has a whole system behind it holding it up.

As I see it, there are at least two layers:

• The cognitive layer. You believe the thing makes sense. For example, some people find burning incense and praying to the Buddha boring, while others are devoted to it. That's a difference in cognition.
• The practical layer. Most of the time, a habit is a mechanical behavior you can repeat, and that behavior has usually been proved right through practice many times in the past.

So with this logic, if I want to overthrow an existing habit, how do I work on both layers?

• The cognitive layer. To change a belief, I first need a new idea. Say I want to quit smoking. I no longer think smoking solves my problem. So I need a new idea: why doesn't smoking solve my problem anymore? And if it can't, what can?
• The practical layer. Take that new idea and put it into practice. At first I wanted to relieve my stress by smoking. Now I think smoking can't relieve my stress. It only lets me escape the source of it. What I really need to do is deal with the source of the stress.
• If the source of my stress is money, then I should find a way to sort out my finances, draw a solution from the numbers, put it into practice, and finally solve my money problem.
• Once I've really dealt with the source of my stress through practice, I'll find that the old stress is gone. Then what reason do I have to smoke?
• What I've proved through practice can then be written back into my cognitive layer.
• My old belief: smoking relieves stress.
• My new belief: smoking is just running from the contradiction.
• And so, from cognition to practice and back to cognition, this three-step method changes my thinking and behavior at the root.

You can try this systematic way of building up a habit or overthrowing one too. The system comes from Mao's "On Practice," which this season of Life Lessons from Mao's Selected Works will take apart in depth. Consider this its first mention.

Why Mao Wrote Out These Fourteen Achievements

Mao wrote out these fourteen achievements in detail because he wanted strong data and evidence to refute the doubts and accusations everywhere inside and outside the Party at the time.

Back then, many people attacked the peasant movement as "a movement of the riffraff" and said "It's terrible!" Worse, some of the Party's own leaders doubted the peasant movement and worried that a radical agrarian revolution would wreck the united front.

Mao went to Hunan and investigated on the ground, and used facts to prove that the peasant movement was positive in nature, that it was "fine," and set the record straight.

Laying out the facts one by one like this looks plain, but it's actually rare and valuable.

Because a lot of the time, people like to judge things by experience. Whether the judgment is good or bad, ask them for the detailed reasons and most of them will hem and haw and come up empty.

So sometimes we shouldn't blindly follow our own experience. We should start from practice.

When you think something is good or bad, don't just say so. Lay out the facts one by one, and your thinking will get a lot clearer.

When we feel unclear about the nature of something, we can also clear up our thinking by "laying out the facts one by one."

---

That's all for this issue.

---