The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 13: Republican China 1912-1949, Part 2
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SPONTANEOUS PEASANT AGITATION 3OI
Characteristics
The spontaneous peasant movements analysed above show three main
characteristics.
77
The first is the weakness of class consciousness among
the peasantry, a weakness illustrated by the comparative rarity and
traditional nature of the social movements directed against the wealthy.
Tenants usually acted alone vis-a-vis their landlords, and in fact might do
so in competition with one another. Quite apart from the fact that the
landlord who has remained in the village can be relied on for small
services, the tenant-farmers depend upon him for their land. The competi-
tion between them to obtain or retain the plot which will enable their
family to subsist seems to be more keenly felt than any sentiment of
solidarity among the exploited. Refusals to pay land rent were seldom the
result of a collective decision taken together by the tenants of one or
several landlords. More often, they were individual actions dictated by
necessity. In cases where landlords or the administration denounced such
refusals, it would usually be more accurate to speak of an inability to pay
the rent
—
an inability illustrated by the many instances of tenants taking
to flight at the approach of the date when the rent fell due.
78
Seven of
the 197 cases involving tenants recorded by two Shanghai newspapers
between 1922 and 1931 (above, p. 278) consisted of tenants committing
suicide in desperation at not being able to pay the rent.
79
Some of those
seven suicides, like the suicides of debtors at the doors of their creditors,
may have been motivated by a desire to make a pitiless landlord or agent
lose face. But the fact remains that it was, to put it mildly, a roundabout
way of expressing aggression towards the exploiter.
Of the representatives of the elite, it was the official, not the landlord,
who was the most common target. The spontaneous orientation of peasant
anger suggests that the peasants of Republican China were more conscious
of state oppression than of class exploitation. In this respect they were,
perhaps, simply continuing a tradition that dated from the imperial age
80
further reinforced by the abuses perpetrated by the warlords. The state
77
1
retain three
of
the
six
characteristics
I
have distinguished
in a
former study: 'Les paysans
et
la revolution: Chine 1919—1949', Politiqite etrangire,
2
(1968) 124-9.
78
A
special prison
for
tenant-farmers, visited
by
Ch'iao Ch'i-ming
in
about 1925, held fifteen
prisoners, five of whom were women who had been arrested
in
place
of
their husbands who had
fled. Each prisoner owed
on
average rather less than ^oyuan in rent: Ch'iao Ch'i-ming, Cbiang-su
Kun-sban Nan-fmg An-bui Su-bsien
nung-tien
cbib-tu
cbib
pi-cbiao i-cbi kai-liang
nung-tien
wen-ft Mb
cbitn-i
(A comparison of the farm tenancy system of K'un-shan and Nan-t'ung in Kiangsu and
Su-hsien in Anhwei, and
a
proposal on the question of the reform of farm tenancy), cited in NTCC
1.109.
75
Ts'ai Shu-pang, 'Tien-nung feng-ch'ao', 31.
80
Cf. Kwang-Ching Liu,' World view and peasant rebellion: reflections on post-Mao historiography',
J'AS 40.2 (Feb. 1981) 311.
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3°2 PEASANT MOVEMENTS
embodies the world outside the village, a world that the villagers have
the impression of supporting in return for nothing
—
which is not at all
that far from the truth.
The second main characteristic of spontaneous peasant movements is
their parochialism. In default of class consciousness, there was a sense
of belonging to a local community, which overrode distinctions of class.
It was this socially heterogeneous community that villagers sought to
protect against attacks and threats from outside. The parochialism of
peasant actions is, needless to say, attested by the frequent incidence of
vertical movements. By reason of the quasi-unanimity of local hostility
displayed against neighbours or strangers, these movements resemble
wars between different peoples rather than social warfare. As in a national
war (as opposed to a civil war), the natural enemy is not the privileged
member in one's community but the foreigner, in other words the member
of a different community - or, indeed, that community as a whole.
Even when there is no vertical movement, the peasants only take up
arms to defend strictly local interests. The quickest way to pacify a canton
that has risen up against heavily repressive troops is to transfer the soldiers
to a neighbouring canton, where they can pursue their abusive ways to
the detriment of other villagers. The same sacred egoism dictates the
attitude of a village which, in time of famine, has managed to preserve
adequate stocks of rice but refuses to sell any to the neighbouring village
whose inhabitants are dying of hunger.
81
In the refugee camps set up
following the great flooding of the Yangtse in 1931, the peasants angrily
took issue with the charitable souls who were determined to feed people
already too weak to survive: why waste precious grain?
The need to limit themselves to survival strategies, which dictated these
attitudes, also explains the third characteristic of peasant agitation, namely
its almost invariably defensive nature. The transition to illegality is simply
the last resort. During the famine of the spring of 1937 an official, who
expressed surprise that a Szechwan peasant had become a bandit instead
of continuing to cultivate his field, was told by that peasant: 'You will
find the explanation in my stomach.' And, sure enough, the autopsy
carried out after his execution revealed a stomach full of nothing but
grass.
82
Others would limit themselves to committing petty larcenies in
the hope of being arrested and fed while in prison.
83
Elsewhere, and for
the same reason, the police who come to arrest those owing taxes are
implored by the neighbours to take them to prison too.
84
Even more
81
Hstti Wu-bsi (The new Wu-hsi),
4
June 1932, cited
in
NTCC
1.425.
82
Fan Ch'ang-chiang, 'Chi-o-hsien shang
ti
jen' (People
on
the line
of
hunger), Han-bsueb jueb-k'an
(Sweat and blood monthly) 9.4 (July 1937) 125.
*>
Ibid.
IJI.
««
NTCC
1.426.
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SPONTANEOUS PEASANT AGITATION 303
numerous (as in the case of forty to fifty peasants in two or three villages
of Lo-t'ien hsien, Hupei, in the spring of 1931) are those who beg district
officials to confiscate their land so that they will be delivered from the
obligation to pay a tax that is beyond their means.
85
The peasants may react vigorously to a new situation or an attack from
outside, but they never take the initiative. They are, so to speak, at the
disposal of their adversary. The external assailant may, at one time or
another or simultaneously, be represented by the authorities (increased
taxation, unpopular administrative measures), the landlord (insisting on
a pledge deposit or payment of rent following a bad harvest), the heavens
(a bad harvest or some other natural disaster), one's neighbour (vertical
movements), bandits - or the soldiers who come to repress the bandits.
The essential point is that the peasants themselves hardly ever take up
arms offensively with a view to improving their lot or, a fortiori, putting
an end to their exploitation. It is only when a situation has deteriorated
86
or when they feel threatened by some new measure (even if it is, in reality,
a reform) that the peasants rise up, with the sole aim of re-establishing
the former situation.
At the origin of every peasant riot or revolt there was nearly always
one particular innovation that was deemed intolerable. Far from attacking
the established order, of which the peasants were themselves the principal
victims, they would rise up in arms only to re-establish it, to right some
wrong or return to the pre-existing norm, which they were prone to
idealize. Unlike those who took part in large rebellions like those of the
Taipings or the ' masters' of certain secret societies, the peasants and the
leaders who organized the general run of revolts and riots in Republican
China (with the exception of the Communist Revolution, that is) do not
appear to have been inspired by any overall vision of society nor to have
questioned the bases of its organization.
The parochial and self-defensive nature of peasant disturbances are
complementary. To defend a local group (whose composition
is
more often
heterogeneous than homogeneous) and safeguard its precarious existence
are the aims of most peasant riots or revolts. In principle, such defence
85
Ch'en Teng-yuan, Cbtmg-kuo fien-fu sbib
(A
history
of
land
tax in
China),
17 and
TFTC 31.14
(16 July 1934)
no.
86
To
mention only
two
examples, remember
the
coincidence (noted
on p. 279)
between poor
harvests (which themselves reflect
the
meteorological situation)
and
heavy periods
of
agitation
amongst the tenant-farmers; exactly like the coincidence between agricultural crises and peasant
movements
in New
Spain
in the
eighteenth century
(cf.
Pierre Vilar, 'Mouvements paysans
en
Amerique latine',
in
Xllleme Congres international
des
Sciences Historiques: Enquite
sur Us
mouvements paysans Jans le
monde
contemporain, rapport gine'ral,
t2—f).
Second example: the frequency
of revolts against the army, which is much greater during the Sino-Japanese War than before
1937
(supra,
p. 193). It is the problem or scourge of the moment (not the desire or hope for
progress) that provokes the agitation.
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304 PEASANT MOVEMENTS
was no different from protecting the harvests against marauders or
defending oneself against raids by bandits. To stand up to the latter, the
villagers (or, to be more precise, the village landlords) were, given the
frequent inefficiency of the authorities, inevitably obliged to set up
self-defensive militia
{t^u-wei fuari)
or, when they were faced with larger
bands,
veritable village leagues
{lien-chuang
hut,
lien-ts'un
hut). The link
between self-defence and agitation, also discernible in the case of the Red
and Black Flags of eastern Kwangtung {supra, p. 297) is even more
evident when it is a matter of ' revolts of insecurity',
87
where resistance
to bandits precedes (and grows into) a riot or insurrection. As a general
rule,
the insurrection is organized by the same men (landowners or village
notables) who had earlier organized the self-defence.
This leads to three negative observations in conclusion:
1.
It is not the peasants themselves who organize the majority of
'peasant revolts'. Despite their diversity, most of these movements are
inspired and organized by the notables of the village, the canton
(hsiang)
or even the district (ch'u). What are generally referred to as peasant
disturbances should, strictly speaking, be called rural disturbances:
they often involve the rural community as a whole, not just the
peasants. The peasants who are involved provide most of the 'troops', in
other words, the masses to be manoeuvred by the organizers who, for
their part, seldom work the land with their own hands. Like the Fourth
Estate in France in 1789, the peasant rioters of Republican China are
dragged along in the wake of a different class.
2.
Whether 'peasant' or 'rural', these disturbances did not constitute
a movement. All that can be said is that a series of non-coordinated and
for the most part badly organized and ill-prepared local actions took place,
sudden flare-ups of anger or instances of ' fury', to borrow a term used
in connection with an earlier period.
88
These presented little threat to the
authorities. While the behaviour and weapons of the Chinese peasants of
the twentieth century remained close to those of their ancestors of the
seventeenth century, the central government had at its disposal the arms
and means of transport and communication of the twentieth century. The
rebellious peasants and the forces of order were to say the least unevenly
matched. The local riots so swiftly repressed do not represent the
87
I borrow the expression from the French historian Yves-Marie Berce, who analyses a similar
process in seventeenth-century France: 'the duty of the people of the low-land to unite in the
face of enemies, looting soldiers or bandits can easily change into a riot against the soldiers of
the king'
(Croquants
et
nu-pieds),
84-5. In relation to China, cf. Bianco, 'Peasant self-defence',
215-18 (and 222-4 f°r the implications of the defence of the group), and above all chapter 5 in
Elizabeth Perry's
Rebels,
which is entitled, precisely, ' Protectors turn rebels'.
88
Roland Mousnier, Fureurs pajsannes: Us pay sans dans Us revokes
du
XVlIeme siecU (France, Rjtssie,
Chine).
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PEASANTS AND COMMUNISTS 3OJ
equivalent of a 'peasant movement', then. Their multiplicity and their
recurrence suggest a discontent both widespread and persistent that is
often postulated but for which there is hardly any written evidence. It
was a discontent that the Communists were to express and exploit in their
own fashion.
3.
Finally, the typology that we have suggested with regard to the
targets of these peasant struggles would not have made much sense to
those who took part in them. Whether the peasants came to grips with
bandits, soldiers, or even tax-collectors, they felt that they were defending
themselves against an assailant, a foreign element that preyed as a parasite
upon the social body of the village. As we have noticed, the state often
symbolized such a parasite. If the Chinese peasantry did harbour a certain
revolutionary potential at the time when the Communists set about
leading it into the revolution, this potential consisted almost entirely in
the fact that the rural population was alienated from the state (and from
the society at large that was ruled by the towns). It lay in the confused
but deeply rooted and tenacious feeling that the state was alien to the
villagers, that what it embodied was, precisely, the external world which
exploited and oppressed the closed world of the village.
89
The Communists
achieved the tour
de force
of turning this potential (just one possibility
among many others) into action, in the process overcoming difficulties
that at first sight appeared insurmountable.
The difficulties were proportionate to the vast distance that separated
the way the peasants behaved (and, left to themselves, would have
continued to behave) from what the Communists in the end made them
achieve. Or, to put it another way: the distance between local self-defence
and revolutionary action, which implies an overall ambition and an
offensive strategy. To tell the truth, the Communists did not need to get
their peasant troops to cover the whole of that distance. The strategy
continued to be their concern alone. They used this peasant material to
create the rank and file of the revolution: no more, no less; but that was
in itself a considerable achievement.
PEASANTS AND COMMUNISTS: THE UNEQUAL ALLIANCE
'An utter fantasy' is one scholar's verdict on the famous Report on the
peasant movement
in
Hunan
which Mao wrote after carrying out an inquiry
in his native province during the winter of
1926—7.
90
At the moment when
*» Migdal has produced an excellent analysis of this feeling in connection with traditional peasantries
in general: Peasants, 47.
50
Hofheinz, Broken vase, 35.
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306 PEASANT MOVEMENTS
the CCP were preparing to tackle the rural reconversion of their
movement, Mao's wishful thinking predisposed him to a dynamic view
of the agitation that was provoked by the arrival in Hunan of the armies
of the Northern Expedition. His description of reality is inseparable from
his creator's vision of what a skilful revolutionary leader might make of
the peasant material. The fact remains that, in effect, the action of the
peasantry of Hunan in 1926—7 (or, to be more precise, the various and
divergent activities of a minority of peasants, some of whom continued
to be manipulated by their traditional masters) justified neither the
enthusiasm that Mao expressed in his
Report,
after the event, nor the hopes
he had entertained before it. The graduates of the Canton Peasant
Movement Training Institute that were sent into Hunan were not
successful in stirring up the masses before the arrival of the Northern
Expedition. On the contrary, the increase in numbers, membership and
activity of the peasant associations were a direct result of the progress
and victories of the military forces. Although duly lauded by Chinese
Communist historiography, the rare cases of effective peasant participation
in the fighting were, with very few exceptions, of no strategic importance
at all: 'these fights were peripheral to the main war'.
91
Subsequently, the
lamentable failure of the Autumn Harvest uprising in September 1927
confirmed the unprepared state and uncombativeness of the peasant
armies.
92
In March 1928, over 200,000 rebellious peasants were incapable
of seizing the town of P'ing-chiang in eastern Hunan.
93
Still later (August
1928),
Mao suffered a defeat in Ching-kang-shan, after the 29th regiment
of the 4th Red Army had completely disintegrated in the course of a battle.
The peasants who made up the regiment were homesick and decided to
return to their native I-chang in southern Hunan.
94
These few examples
suggest that on the eve and in the early days of their agrarian saga, the
Chinese Communists could place very little reliance upon the peasant
soldiers, thanks to whom, twenty years later, they were to conquer the
whole of China.
" Angus W. McDonald Jr. Tie
urban origins
of rural
revolution,
268. See also 269-70 and more
generally pages 264-80; Hofheinz, 'Peasant movement', ch. 6; and Donald A.Jordan, The
Northern Expedition 194—8, 203, 227—8.
52
Roy Hofheinz, 'The Autumn Harvest insurrection', CQ 32 (Oct.-Dec. 1967) 37-87; 'Peasant
movement', ch. 7.
53
Hsing-buo liao-yuan, 1.431-43, cited
by Hu
Chi-hsi, UArmie rouge
et
Vascension
de Mao,
126,
n.
16.
84
Hu Chi-hsi, UArmie
rouge,
12.
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PEASANTS AND COMMUNISTS 307
P'eng P'ai and
the
peasants of Hai-Lu-feng (1922-8)
The first encounter between professional revolutionaries and villagers was
led by the pioneer of the Communist peasant movement, P'eng P'ai, in
two counties of eastern Kwangtung.
95
His initial success was remarkable.
The peasant associations that he founded as early as 1922 developed
vigorously. A few years later he maintained soviet rule over the two
densely populated counties of Hai-feng and Lu-feng (together known as
Hai-Lu-feng) for a period of several months (November 1927
—
February
1928),
at a time when Mao Tse-tung was still trying to establish himself
in the sparsely populated Chingkang mountains. But the difficulties that
faced the Communists in the mobilization of the Hai-Lu-feng peasants
prefigured those they continued to come up against later on. And the
methods to which they resorted prefigured the methods that they
continued to refine later on from Kiangsi to north Shensi. To link the
test case of Hai-Lu-feng with the two decades of' peasant' revolution that
followed, let us now summarize this first experiment, distinguishing (in
Chinese fashion) ten features of it.
1.
Initial
suspicion.
P'eng P'ai's first attempts were discouraging, revealing
the abyss that separated the villagers from a revolutionary whom they
quite rightly regarded as a member of the elite.
96
Doors were shut in his
face,
dogs barked at the intruder and the villagers turned away in alarm.
They suspected this well-dressed gentleman of having come from the town
to collect taxes or to insist on the repayment of
debts.
When P'eng replied
that it was up to the landlords to repay the tenant-farmers whom they
were exploiting, he elicited at first incredulity ('not to owe anything to
anyone would be good enough in
itself;
how could anyone possibly
owe me anything?') and then alarm from his questioners, who excused
themselves hurriedly and made off. Fear and suspicion of the stranger was
the initial reaction of the villagers, who had learned from long experience.
The fact that this stranger was urging them to free themselves from their
55
P'eng P'ai had probably not yet joined the CCP when he launched the Hai-feng peasant movement
and created the first peasant associations; nevertheless, he was an intellectual revolutionary at
grips with the problem of mobilizing the peasant masses. Furthermore, he was a member of
the parent organization, the Socialist Youth Corps, long before he joined the CCP. On the date
of P'eng P'ai's membership of the CCP, see Fernando Galbiati,' P'eng P'ai, the leader of the first
soviet: Hai-lu-feng, Kwangtung, China (1896-1929)' (Oxford University, Ph.D. dissertation,
1981),
205—4. This monumental thesis is the most reliable and by far the most detailed of the
many that are devoted to P'eng P'ai.
06
P'eng P'ai, 'Hai-feng nung-min yun-tung' (The peasant movement of Hai-feng), reprinted in
Ti-i-t^'u hio-mi
ko-ming cban-cbeng sbib-eb'i
ti nung-min jun-tung (The peasant movement during
the first revolutionary civil war period), 52-5. English translation by Donald Holoch,
Seeds
of
peasant revolution: report on tie Haifeng peasant movement by P'eng P'ai, 20-3.
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308
PEASANT MOVEMENTS
•*-
9_
5~
• County boundaries
• Army
from
Nan-chang
= Road
^H
High ground
20
miles
'
'
30km
^^BH^\Hai-Ten^
*^
_^
—
^
^^^'
to
Hong Kong
HAI-LU-FENG^,
—Hi
^i•
~2r •
^JJLU7
(Shan-wei)
1 /^'
k Chigvshenf^^'
")
P'U-NING
-^r x
H|\V toSwiTSw
MAP
7. The Hai-Lu-feng region
chains made
no
difference
at
all
-
as
if
fate had not once and
for
all fixed
who should cultivate
the
land
and who
receive
the
rent!
If
P'eng
was
suggesting
the
impossible,
he
must
be out of
his mind,
as
indeed
the
rumour put about
by
his family had
it
and
as
many
of
the villagers were
inclined
to
believe.
2.
Adaptation
and practical
benefits.
P'eng very quickly adapted
to the
situation.
07
He changed his clothes and his way
of
speaking, had himself
introduced
by
one
of
the villagers, waited until the evening (when work
in the fields was over) before starting
to
harangue the peasants, and took
care
not to
attack their gods.
He
enticed
and
entertained them
as a
conjuror and magician, taught the children a song of his own composition,
had them listen
to a
gramophone
he had
brought along,
and put on a
puppet show.
98
The adults too began
to
enjoy the entertainment and,
at
the same time, swallowed the political potion P'eng
P'ai had
prepared.
Setting
up a
peasant association proved difficult
in
the early stages.
But
once
the
initial step
was
taken, members flocked
to
benefit from
the
"
P'eng
P'ai in
Ti-i-tz^u,
56-69-
Holoch,
25-40.
98
Compare
the
prestige
of
the
'
magician'
gipsy
Melquiades
in
Macondo
(Gabriel Garcia
Marquez,
One
hundred yean
of
solitude),
9-16
(of
the
French
edition).
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PEASANTS AND COMMUNISTS 309
services the association offered: free medical treatment, practical instruc-
tion, and arbitration to settle their quarrels. A pharmacy and a little clinic
managed by the association soon became so popular that it proved
necessary to check the membership cards, which were circulating from
hand to hand. The peasants learned how to write the names of their tools
and agricultural products and to check out the simple calculations hitherto
carried out unsupervised by the landlords and grain merchants. Not
content simply to settle disagreements relating to marriages, debts and
land ownership, the association also offered its members personal
protection, as a secret society would. The accidental drowning of a
child-fiancee living according to custom in the home of her future
father-in-law who was a member of the association, strengthened its
authority. P'eng and other members succeeded in intimidating and
turning back thirty or more assailants (relatives of the dead girl), who
had come to avenge the drowning.
To sum up this second phase: the revolutionary wins partisans to his
organization if not his cause by adapting himself to the world of the
peasants, sometimes at the cost of concessions, such as displaying tact with
regard to their superstitious beliefs, and by conferring upon a privileged
group (the members of the association) certain practical benefits which
answer their daily needs and preoccupations. A symbol of the practical
interest motivating the adhesion of the majority of those who allow
themselves to be won over could be the three dollars
{yuan)
which P'eng
P'ai lent to two of his earliest followers and which they then chinked in
the ears of their parents, who had been infuriated to see them leave their
work in the fields to follow a man of fine speeches.
3.
Fomenting class
struggle.
The sight of those three dollars mollified and
even delighted the mother of one of the earliest militants. But the fact
is that he and a handful of others followed P'eng P'ai because they believed
in him, not out of personal interest. It was the interest of their class (rather
than simply the interest of an individual or a group) that they wanted
to defend and promote by uniting around P'eng P'ai. He, for his part,
recognized this and forthwith addressed these first converts for social
reasons as 'comrades'. As for the mass of others, P'eng P'ai strove to
mobilize them with objectives that they would not spontaneously have
envisaged for themselves, and so drew the peasants into a veritable social
revolution.
The peasant association started by challenging the control of the
notables over commercial transactions; in the domain of practical benefits
referred to above, it set up its own scales in the public market-place in
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PEASANT MOVEMENTS
order to prevent the merchants from cheating when they weighed the
harvest. The association also won acquittal in a court of law for a tenant
who had refused to pay a rent increase and for five other farmers who had
declared solidarity with him. This solidarity, the first marker on the way
towards class consciousness, was actively encouraged, not to say provoked
by the association, which ended up by forbidding its members to rent any
field from which a tenant had been evicted by his landlord. It was a
disciplinary measure that reversed the normal situation of competition
between candidates for the tenancy of a field.
This solidarity and union were above all a means of pursuing an
offensive strategy with the aim of involving the peasants in new conflicts.
To this end the real state of class relations was deliberately blackened.
The association put about a simplistic chart which exaggerated the
landlords' exploitation of the peasants." The slightest conflict was seized
upon and deliberately exacerbated to bring into confrontation a minority
of exploiters and a mass of exploited peasants. The poverty and sufferings
of the peasants were described in apocalyptic terms. The devastation
occasioned by a typhoon in July 1923 was magnified so as to claim a 70
per cent reduction in land rents. Most of the tenant-farmers would have
been content to accept the traditional procedure: a rent reduction
proportionate to the damage suffered and the extent to which the harvest
had failed. Some landlords were equally prepared to negotiate, but the
tiny minority of intellectuals and peasants who controlled the peasant
association deliberately sought a confrontation.
I0
° A
hard core of landlords
had also concluded that the exorbitant claims of the peasant association
could no longer be tolerated. P'eng P'ai could congratulate himself upon
having divided the entire population of Hai-feng county into two classes:
on one side the peasants, on the other the landlords.
After the defeat of the peasant association, the changing fortunes of
war, punctuated by the two East River Expeditions in February and
October 1925, maintained the tension and eventually turned these two
classes into two enemy camps. Every swing of the pendulum brought
executions and sometimes a massacre that would subsequently have to be
avenged. In 1927 alone, two insurrections in April and September
prepared the way for the establishment of a soviet government in
November. Under this government, in effect a dictatorship, the question
of the peasants' commitment to the Communist cause was clearly no
longer in the same terms. Even if we allow for the element of constraint,
*» P'eng P'ai in Ti-i-t^u, 93-4. Holoch, 70.
100
Of the several opposed factions within the association, one at least favoured more flexible tactics.
The affair of the typhoon (see Galbiati, 311—14 and Hofheinz,
Broken
wave,
161-4) illustrates the
tactic of exploiting any circumstances to reach a new stage in the mobilization of the masses.
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