way the party resolved this problem was provided by making a connection with the potential of the Chinese peasantry. After the 1927 disaster, "the stragegy of Mao and his colleagues took shape: Let the peasants, instead of the workers, act as the revolutionary vanguard, and proceed by 'encircling the cities from the countryside.' The heretical vision worked" (Landers, 1982, pp. 37 8).
Over the years, propaganda connected Mao with the peasants who could provide mass support for social revolution. Rice cites Mao's activities as propagandist and head of the Peasant Movement Training Institute of the Kuomintang, which in the mid 1920s was principal arm of the political opposition and of which Mao was a left wing member. Later, Mao split away from the Kuomintang, but from 1924 27, China was in one civil war, with the trying 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
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