It drew support from a pre-existing movement of Zhuang peasants led by Wei Baqun, and focused on land redistribution in the area it controlled.

After a brief but costly attempt to capture Guangxi's major cities, the soviet was suppressed and surviving soldiers made their way to Jiangxi.

Today, it is most famous for the role played by Deng Xiaoping, who was the CCP Central Committee's leading representative in Guangxi during the Uprising.

Deng was strongly criticized, both during the Cultural Revolution and by modern historians, for the uprising's swift defeat and his decision to abandon the retreating Seventh Red Army.

In the early 1900s, the Zhuang of the You and Zuo River valleys still retained an independent identity and frequently came into conflict with Han Chinese administrative officials.

He quickly reestablished contact with his supporters and they began the process of rebuilding the peasants' movement along the model of the organizations Wei had witnessed in Guangdong.

[5] The peasant associations made themselves popular with policies such as reduced taxes, banditry crackdowns, and especially the abolition of rent and debt collection.

[8] The same pattern repeated itself the following year when the right-wing of the KMT orchestrated a takeover of the entire party and a purge of the Communists (see below).

In the end, right-winger Chiang Kai-shek defeated Wang Jingwei's left-wing faction and commenced a bloody purge of the Communists.

Chiang managed to defeat the New Guangxi clique only by bribing two of their subordinate generals, Li Mingrui [zh] and Yu Zuobo, to betray and overthrow them.

Possibly unbeknownst to Chiang, Li and Yu were left-wing Nationalists, and after coming to power, they restored the policies of the United Front.

[17] In October 1929, Wang Jingwei convinced Li Mingrui and Yu Zuobo to launch an uprising against Chiang Kai-shek and restore the left-wing of the KMT to power.

The Communists in Guangxi strongly opposed this idea because it had little chance for success and put their own plans for local insurrection at risk.

Over the next few months, the Communists were able to tax Baise's large opium industry to pay for recruiting new soldiers and expanding the peasant movement across a number of neighboring counties.

Historians Alexander Pantsov and Steven Levine argue that this was because the Zhuang peasant movement had been motivated by ethnic hatred of the Han, and it took the Communists time to appeal to them on the basis of class.

[27][28] In the spring of 1930, Deng Xiaoping, Wei Baqun, Chen Haoren, and Lei Jingtian (another Guangxi peasant revolutionary) met in Donglan to write a new land law for the You River Soviet.

Director of the Propaganda Department Li Lisan had formulated an aggressive strategy of attacking cities to quick-start a nationwide revolution.

Applied to Guangxi, the "Li Lisan Line" meant that the Red Army had to abandon the You River Soviet and liberate the cities of south China, starting with Liuzhou.

[41] Deng admitted that leaving the army was one of the "worst mistakes of [his] life" and that "although this action was allowed by the party, it was politically horribly wrong.

"[44] Diana Lary places blame for the uprising's failure more broadly on the "ineptitude" of both the local leaders and the CCP Central Committee.