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Introduction Shortly after Chiang Kai-shek took command of the National Revolutionary Army, in 1926, Mao went to Hunan to stir up the peasants. The campaign he waged for land reform in his native province can be described as almost a one-man show. The fundamental requisite in China was then, as it had long been, to solve the land question. Reduced to elementary terms, the problem was how to get rid of the gentry landowners who fastened themselves to the peasants like leeches and whose exactions kept the people constantly impoverished. In the circumstances, there was only one way to accomplish this necessary reform: expropriation and redistribution of the land. Naturally, the Nationalists, eager to retain the support of the gentry (historically the stabilizing element in Chinese society), considered such a radical solution social dynamite. But in Mao's view, there could be no meaningful revolution unless and until the power of this class had been completely eliminated.

While Mao was making himself extremely unpopular with the landed gentry in Hunan, the revolutionary armies of the Kuomintang were marching north from Canton to Wuhan, on the Yangtze, where a Nationalist Government was established in December, 1926. These armies incorporated a number of Communist elements. But by the time the vanguard divisions of Chiang's army reached the outskirts of Shanghai, in March, 1927, the honeymoon was almost over. In April, Chiang's secret police captured and executed the radical labor leaders in Shanghai and began to purge the army of its Communist elements. In the