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| Autumn Harvest Uprising | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part ofChinese Civil War | |||||||
 Planned insurrection locations by the August Seventh Conference. | |||||||
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| Belligerents | |||||||
| Commanders and leaders | |||||||
 Mao ZedongLi Zhen | |||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||
| About 390,000 Hunanese civilians were killed[1] | |||||||
| Autumn Harvest Uprising | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | 秋收起义 | ||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 秋收起義 | ||||||||
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TheAutumn Harvest Uprising was aninsurrection that took place inHunan andJiangxi provinces ofChina, on September 7, 1927, led byMao Zedong, who established a short-livedHunan Soviet.
After initial success, the uprising was brutally put down by Kuomintang forces. Mao continued to believe in the rural strategy but concluded that it would be necessary to form a party army.[2]
FollowingChiang Kai-shek gaining control of theKuomintang (KMT) in April 1927, he ordered the extermination of all the communists and socialists withinShanghai. Commonly called theWhite Terror, this led to a massacre in Hunan in May, followed by a warrant for the arrest ofMao Zedong in 1927. The situation prompted local and scattered peasant resistance against landlords. Breaking relations between the KMT andChinese Communist Party, an attempt to takeNanking was made byZhou Enlai. Mao was therefore labelled a "red bandit", which led to him urging revolutionary support.[3]
In support of theNorthern Expedition, Mao was sent to survey peasant conditions in his home province of Hunan. HisReport on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan urged support for rural revolution.[4]
Initially, Mao struggled to garner forces for an uprising, butLi Zhen rallied the peasantry and members of her local[where?] communist troop to join.[5] Mao then led a small peasant army[where?] against theKuomintang and the landlords of Hunan, successfully establishing aSoviet government. The uprising was eventually defeated byKuomintang forces within two months after the Soviet was established. Mao and the others were forced to retreat to theJinggang Mountains on the border betweenHunan andJiangxi provinces, where he encountered an army ofminers which would help him in later battles.[citation needed]
Mao Zedong suffered from depression following his defeat in Hunan, prompting him to produce a poem aboutYellow Crane Tower on Tortoise Hill.[6]
The Autumn Harvest Uprising was one of the early armed uprisings by the Communists, marking a significant change in their strategy. Mao andRed Army founderZhu De went on to develop a rural-based strategy that centered onguerrilla tactics. This paved the way for theLong March of 1934.[citation needed]
The uprising shows the overwhelming importance of an organized military force to the success or failure of an insurrection, the failure reveals that the role and question of military force was given different emphasis by operatives of different levels in the communist party and came to be a topic of serious contention and disagreement which led to the disorganization. An obvious lack of appreciation for rudimentary pre-insurrectionary military organization hints that Mao was more "putschist" (to a point) than his Chinese or Russian superiors.[7]
Nationalistanti-communist mass killings were directed against all Hunanese civilians. About 80,000 Hunanese were killed in Hunan'sLiling and about 300,000 Hunanese were killed in Hunan'sChaling County,Leiyang,Liuyang andPingjiang.[1]
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