IN his ground-breaking 1927 report on the Hunan peasantry, Mao Zedong gleefully recorded how the poor farmers of his home province were rising up to overthrow the feudal clan organisations which had traditionally dominated the Chinese countryside.
The 34-year-old radical communist noted how peasants were forming their own committees and establishing their own rules in defiance of the clan elders.
These were spontaneous acts of rebellion which Mao himself would later nurture into a full-scale national revolution.
Women in particular, repressed for centuries by patriarchal clan societies, were taking matters into their own hands, he said.
''The women of Baiguo in Hengshan County swarmed en masse into the ancestral temple [from which they were traditionally banned] planted their backsides down and joined in the feasting,'' Mao wrote.
''The venerable clan elders could do nothing but let them do as they pleased.'' In many villages, clan elders were toppled from power and new, more democratic systems of local government set up.
When the Communist Party finally came to power in 1949, it set about establishing a formidable centralised power structure.