the Kuomintang, which in the mid 1920s was principal arm of the political opposition and of which Mao was a left wing member. It was in this period that China was in the midst of division and civil war; the Kuomintang sought to unify the provinces under its authority by means of a military operation known as the Northern Expedition. One aspect of this was the Kuomintang's Peasant Movement Training Institute: "When the [Kuomintang's] National Revolutionary Army reached the areas in which the party cadres worked, they were to mobilize the peasants to serve the army in supporting roles such as spies, guides, and porters" (Rice, 1972, p. 32). Mao's conception of and pattern of working with peasants as a political unit appears to have gone beyond not only the Kuomintang's immediate demands of political insurgency but also the objections of the communist party's comintern, from which communists in all nations were to take instruction. In sum, Mao appears to have recognized the long term revolutionary political power that could be derived from the effective mobilization and organization of the peasantry. Rice continues,
[A]t the beginning of 1927 he spent a little over a month investigating the peasant movement in five counties of central Hunan. According to the report which Mao prepared at the conclusion of his investigation, the movement was being conducted under the leadership of the poor peasants, and particularly the poorest ones, and was releasing human energies on a scale sufficient to carry the revolution to early victory. . . . The peasant movement also endangered the [Kuomintang's] Wuhan regime, for its immediate security depended on the loyalty of T'ang Sheng chih's Hunanese army, and Hunan was probably the province in which the storm of the peasant movement raged most fiercely. Finally, the peasant movement threatened to split the Communist Party . . . which had ordered the Communists to stay in the Kuomintang, where...