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We have seen in the previous pages with what a brave front the Central Committee of the Kuomintang began their campaign against Chiang Kai Shek. According to the logic of political struggle, it was necessary for the Wuhan Government to turn to the left, to base itself more squarely and consciously upon the labor and peasant movement in China and internationally. This it did—in words and gestures. But when the crucial test of action came, it hesitated, swung about in mid-air for a while, and then swerved sharply to the right, turning its guns against the mass movement of the people in a manner hardly to be distinguished from that of Chiang Kai Shek.

The crucial question was the land. In Hunan Province the peasants had organized five million strong. They controlled absolutely the village governments of most of central and southern Hunan. They therefore proceeded to the next step in the revolution, the solution of the land problem upon which their very lives depend. They abolished rents, drove out the resisting landlords, and divided the public lands among those who worked them.

In the Nationalist Armies, even as in those of the Northern militarists, the officers were recruited largely from the families of landlords or rich industrialists and merchants, connected with landholding or with exploitation of cheap labor in the cities. With the beginning of the expropriation of the landlords, a great cry went up from them to their relatives in the Army for help. The cry was not in vain. A majority of the officers of the Army turned against the peasant movement. In Changsha, center of the movement, they suddenly descended upon the trade unions and peasant unions, slaughtered the leaders and the armed defense corps, and closed their offices.