The Hunan Report's emphasis on the peasantry, including their violent struggle against the landlord class, gradually become the dominant strategy in the Communist Party's land reform on its road to victory in 1949.

When the Communists joined the Nationalists in the First United Front, Peng headed the Peasant Movement Training Institute, of which Mao became co-leader.

[4] The Nationalists, with communist and Soviet support, launched the Northern Expedition in 1925 to unite the country and oust the imperialists, setting off mass demonstrations in the cities and uprisings of peasant associations in the countryside.

Chen Duxiu, the communist leader, believed that consistent with an orthodox Marxist view, the base of the party should be urban workers, with peasants merely adjacent to this strategy.

Mao, recognized by both parties as an expert on peasants, was sent to Hunan to investigate local conditions in areas through which Northern Expedition troops had just passed.

[6] In this report, Mao Zedong details the actions and achievements of the Chinese peasants in Hunan in an attempt to sway his fellow revolutionaries' opinions on the capabilities of peasantry to communist revolution in China.

[2][9] Mao had spent thirty-two days in Hunan Province making an investigation and wrote this report in order to answer to the criticisms of the leadership of the CCP towards the peasantry.

Mao from that point on rejected the idea of peaceful land reform, arguing that peasants could not achieve true liberation unless they participated in the violent overthrow of the landlords.

[12]The main targets of attack by the peasants were the "local tyrants, the evil gentry and the lawless landlords, but in passing they also hit out against patriarchal ideas and institutions, against the corrupt officials in the cities and against bad practices and customs in the rural areas."

is obviously a theory for combatting the rise of the peasants in the interests of the landlords; it is obviously a theory of the landlord class for preserving the old feudal order and obstructing the establishment of the new democratic order; it is obviously a counterrevolutionary theory.In this context, Mao also coined his famous saying that revolution is not a dinner party: Revolution is not a dinner party, nor an essay, nor a painting, nor a piece of embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous.

"[14] In the report, Mao described how peasants experienced a triple subordination: (1) to the dominance of clan authority, (2) to landowners, and (3) to "spirits.

Roy Hofheinz, Jr. writes that Mao's contribution at the time was not policy, since he skirts the issues of land confiscation or ownership, but criticizing leaders for not taking a "revolutionary" attitude.

The "single spark" strategy await the painful and slow development of capitalism or the bourgeois stage of history to prepare for the eventual revolution in the future.

Meisner notes the irony: had not the White Terror nearly destroyed the fledgling Party and driven it from the cities, Mao's heresies might have cut short his career as a Communist.

"[21] Zhou Libo's 1948 novel The Hurricane and William Hinton's Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (1966) were both works on the general time and place, which, in their dramatized form, had suggested moral legitimacy to events around those described in the report.