as Mao Tse tung was promoting a course which would help lead to their expulsion from it (Rice, 1972, pp. 37-38).
Mao's conception of the peasantry as a political collective was in a broad sense carried from the 1920s into the 1940s and beyond. As Aubert, et al. note, the so called "production movement" of Mao's anti Japanese peasant guerrillas that began in 1943 and lasted through World War II was a movement of "cooperativization" which foreshadowed successive waves of "collectivization" of the peasantry after the 1949 revolution (Aubert, Cheng, & Leung, 1982, pp. 407-439). Mao's view of the role of the peasantry in China may be described as wholly revolutionary in character for the reason that it represented a radical break from traditional power structures prevailing until the Chinese War of Liberation in 1949. At its most revolutionary, for example, the Kuomintang's efforts on behalf of the peasants did not include the expectation that traditional property rights might be changed. For as Rice notes, most of the conservative members of the Kuo
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