The peasants thereupon formed their own defense corps, drove out the reactionary landlords from the village governments, and established their own power in the villages. This is what the Revolution means in the villages.
In the Province of Hunan (30 million inhabitants) there are now five million members of the Peasant Union. There the peasants are proceeding to abolish rents altogether, confiscating the lands. It was this development which caused the officers of the Revolutionary Armies (Generals Chiang Kai Shek, Feng Yu-hsiang, Tang Shen-shi) who are closely connected with landlord families, to turn against the revolutionary people and begin to compromise with the foreign powers and the Northern militarists (Chang Tso-lin) in order to check the revolution. It was this break-up of the united front of the Kuomintang which has brought a temporary check in the development of the Chinese Revolution.
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