Historians have yet to do justice to the GMD-CCP competition for hearts and minds in Jiangxi during the 1930s. The GMD government's rural reconstruction program there was clearly inspired by communist success in exploiting the widely perceived “agrarian crisis” to create CCP-led enclaves in Jiangxi and in many other provinces as well. Observers also concluded that the GMD's failure was the obverse of the CCP's success in overturning the status quo. Dispossessed local elites returning after the communist retreat in 1934 were more interested in restoring the old order than implementing idealistic schemes for rural regeneration. Yet the CCP was evidently not all that successful either. And if we accept at face value the implications of Mao's contemporary “rich-peasant line,” at least one reason for the mixed record was disruption caused by excesses in overturning the status quo!

The CCP nevertheless did begin to reverse the “natural” order of communist revolution after Chiang Kai-shek ended his marriage of convenience with the communists in 1927 and destroyed their urban organization. Largest and most stable of the CCP's new rural base areas was that created by Mao and others in southern Jiangxi. But Mao's power eroded after national Party leaders began taking refuge in the region, about the same time a Chinese Soviet Republic was proclaimed there in 1931. Chiang Kai-shek's successive “bandit suppression campaigns” finally drove the communists from this base area in 1934.

During the Soviet Republic's brief existence, agrarian revolution or land reform and military survival were the main preoccupations. Civilian administration in general and education in particular were not high on the list of priorities.