Chinese Communist Revolution

• 1. Introduction

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  At 3:00 pm on the 1st of October 1949, Chairman Mao Zedong stood at Tiananmen Square in Beijing and proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of China. A 21-gun salute rang out as the Five-starred Red Flag was raised for the first time. Around 16,000 officers and personnel marched past in a military parade organized in the Soviet format, the first large-scale public review of troops the country had ever seen. Few moments in modern history compressed so much history into a single afternoon. What had brought China to that square on that October day? The answer runs through a century of humiliation, a fractured republic, peasant rebellions, a devastating war with Japan, and a civil war that reshuffled the entire global order. The questions worth sitting with are these: how did a party of fifty members in 1921 come to govern the world's most populous nation by 1949? And why did a revolution that was supposed to be led by city workers end up being won by the countryside?

• 2. The Land and Its Discontents

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  Between 50 and 65 percent of Chinese peasants owned little or no land before the revolution, forcing them to rent from landlords. In Guangdong, more than half the rural population owned no land at all. Poor peasants averaged only 0.87 mu of land, roughly 0.14 acres, and spent most of their time working fields they did not own. In much of Shanxi, landlords owned all agricultural capital and collected 80 percent of the harvest as rent. Even where rates were lower, shares of 40, 50, and 60 percent were common across north China. Between 1900 and the end of World War Two, China experienced no fewer than six major famines, costing tens of millions of lives. Landlords did not rely on rent alone. Author William H. Hinton observed that the land held by landlords, while ample, served primarily as a foundation for other forms of exploitation including usury, corruption, and theft of public funds. On holidays and funerals, tenants could be required to act as personal servants. Agnes Smedley reported that even within a short distance from Shanghai, rural landlords operated essentially as feudal lords, financing private armies and dominating local politics. Agricultural economist John Lossing Buck dissented, arguing that landlords' returns on investment were not especially high compared to standard interest rates in China. But the gap between his assessment and the lived experience of the peasantry would eventually become one of the central fault lines of the revolution. The fixed rent in most areas averaged about four dollars a year per mu, a figure that sounds modest but sat atop a base of near-total poverty.

• 3. Intellectuals Turn Radical

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  In the first decade of the twentieth century, scholars like Ma Junwu, Liang Qichao, and Zhao Bizhen were the first to translate Marxist and socialist texts into Chinese, though their reach was small. The 1911 Revolution overthrew the Qing dynasty but failed to modernize the country or improve daily life, pushing scholars further toward Western radical ideas. Chen Duxiu began publishing the journal New Youth in Shanghai in 1915, and it quickly became the most widely distributed periodical among the intelligentsia. Then, in May 1919, news arrived that the Versailles Peace Conference had awarded the German-occupied province of Shandong to Japan rather than returning it to China. The May Fourth Movement followed: large protests erupted in cities across the country, and for the first time, mass participation extended beyond the traditional intellectual and cultural elites. Mao Zedong later identified the movement as the moment when workers, students, and a new national bourgeoisie entered the revolutionary stage together. The October Revolution in Russia proved compelling to many of these organizers. Historian Tony Saich wrote that the early Chinese Communists were "Bolsheviks before they were Marxists." Students formed study groups, including one at Peking University led by Li Dazhao, whose members included Chen Duxiu. By 1920, both Li and Chen had fully converted to Marxism. Li founded the Peking Socialist Youth Corps in Beijing; Chen moved back to Shanghai and formed a small Communist group there. Chen also used New Youth to publish a series of Marxist articles, including an entire issue devoted to the subject in 1919. Other future leaders who caught the Communist current at this moment included Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai.

• 4. The United Front and Its Collapse

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  The Chinese Communist Party was founded on the 23rd of July 1921 in Shanghai at the 1st National Congress of the CCP. Twelve delegates attended. The party had 50 members at the start of 1921, grew to 200 by 1922, and reached 2,428 by 1925. The Kuomintang, by contrast, already counted 50,000 members in 1923. To close that gap, the CCP entered into the First United Front with the KMT, effectively becoming its left wing. Soviet military advisers Mikhail Borodin and Vasily Blyukher arrived in May 1924 to help build the Whampoa Military Academy, financed with Soviet funds. Chiang Kai-shek, who had spent three months in the Soviet Union the prior year, was appointed commandant of the new National Revolutionary Army. On the 30th of May 1925, British-operated Shanghai Municipal Police opened fire on Chinese student demonstrators. The outrage that followed, culminating in the Canton-Hong Kong strike beginning on the 18th of June, supercharged CCP recruitment: membership surged to over 20,000, nearly ten times what it had been earlier in the year. Mao Zedong was dispatched to Hunan to investigate peasant uprisings that were alarming senior KMT figures. His report, published in March 1927, argued that a peasant-led revolution was not only justified but practically inevitable: he predicted that several hundred million peasants would rise like a hurricane and sweep imperialists, warlords, and corrupt officials before them. The KMT leadership was unmoved. On the 12th of April 1927, Chiang Kai-shek ordered the massacre of Communists in Shanghai. The White Terror spread nationwide. In Beijing alone, 19 leading Communists were killed by Zhang Zuolin. That May, tens of thousands of suspected Communists were killed across the country, and the CCP lost approximately two-thirds of its membership.

• 5. Long March and Mao's Rise

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  After the Shanghai Massacre, the CCP attempted a series of uprisings in Guangzhou, Nanchang, and Hunan. All failed under pressure from the Nationalist army. During the retreat from Nanchang, the party founded the Chinese Red Army. Party leadership fractured through the late 1920s and early 1930s, with figures like Li Lisan and Wang Ming successively gaining and losing Moscow's backing. Meanwhile, Mao Zedong had been building the Jiangxi Soviet, which by November 1931 had expanded CCP membership to over 300,000 and supported 100,000 Red Army soldiers. His guerrilla tactics repulsed three successive KMT encirclement campaigns. When the party leadership arrived from Shanghai, they replaced his tactics with conventional military strategy on the advice of Soviet adviser Otto Braun. The fourth encirclement campaign was a disaster. The CCP was forced to begin the Long March, a 9,000 kilometer retreat to northern China. In January 1935, the party paused at Zunyi for a conference at which Mao denounced the leadership's dogmatic attachment to urban revolution. With Zhou Enlai's support, Mao defeated the 28 Bolsheviks and Otto Braun, becoming chairman of the Politburo and the party's de facto leader. The march had cost the party approximately 90 percent of its membership. The Yan'an Soviet, the communists' new base in northwest China, was on the brink of collapse when Japan's escalating aggression gave them an unexpected reprieve.

• 6. War With Japan Changes Everything

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  Japan had seized Manchuria in 1931 while Chiang Kai-shek pursued his policy of "first internal pacification, then external resistance." In 1936, two of Chiang's own generals arrested him in Xi'an and forced him to negotiate a ceasefire with the CCP. The Second United Front was finalized the following year when Japan launched a full-scale invasion. The war transformed the CCP's position. French historian Lucien Bianco argued that before the war, the peasantry had not been ready for revolution, and that economic grievances alone were not enough to mobilize them. The war changed that: nationalism did what class consciousness had not. The CCP's willingness to frame its fight as national resistance against imperialism, compared with Chiang's original reluctance to confront Japan, gave the Communists a decisive moral advantage. Operating behind Japanese lines with their guerrilla experience, Communist cadres organized village after village, simultaneously spreading their ideology and improving local administration. They also undertook moderate land reform that made them deeply popular among poorer peasants. Over the eight years of war, CCP membership rose from 40,000 to 1,200,000. According to historian Chalmers Johnson, by war's end the CCP had won the support of perhaps 100 million peasants in the regions where they had operated. In January 1941, before the war ended, the alliance cracked again: Nationalist forces ambushed and destroyed the CCP's New Fourth Army. Any substantive cooperation between the two sides was finished, even as both continued nominally fighting Japan.

• 7. Civil War and Communist Victory

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  By the time Japan surrendered in August 1945, China had lost an estimated 20 to 25 million people to fighting, massacres, and disaster. Industry operated at 20 percent of pre-war capacity. Retail prices in 1945 stood at 3,000 percent of their 1937 levels. The KMT government, which had taken over more than 70 percent of Chinese industry during the war, was widely seen as corrupt. In the city of Shanghai alone, unemployment rose dramatically to 37.5 percent. The Communists' Liberated Zone, by contrast, covered one-quarter of the country's territory and one-third of its population, organized into 19 base areas mostly in north China. The KMT received $4.43 billion in mostly military aid from the United States in the two years after the Sino-Japanese War. The Soviet Union transferred captured Japanese weapons to the CCP. Peace talks dragged on through 1945 and into 1946, but General George Marshall, who arrived on the 20th of December 1945, could reach no significant agreements. When the Civil War resumed in earnest, the People's Liberation Army adopted a passive defense strategy, avoiding KMT strongpoints and trading territory for time. After a year, the Communists had wiped out 1.12 million KMT troops while their own strength grew to roughly two million men. During the Huaihai Campaign alone, the CCP mobilized 5,430,000 peasants to support PLA operations against the Nationalists. The decisive Pingjin Campaign, running 64 days from the 21st of November 1948 to the 31st of January 1949, brought northern China fully under Communist control. On the 21st of April 1949, Mao rejected Stalin's counsel to stop at the Yangtze and ordered the Yangtze River Crossing Campaign. On the 23rd of April, Communist forces captured Nanjing, the KMT capital. Chiang Kai-shek and roughly 600,000 Nationalist troops, along with about two million refugees, retreated to Taiwan, where Chiang proclaimed Taipei the temporary capital of the Republic in December 1949.

• 8. A Revolution Without End

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  The CCP's victory reordered the Cold War. China became the largest socialist state by population and, following the 1956 Sino-Soviet split, a third force in world politics independent of both Washington and Moscow. Shock at the Communist success and the logic of the geopolitical domino theory drove the United States into successive military interventions in Korea and Southeast Asia against Chinese-backed forces. The People's Republic offered direct and indirect support to communist movements worldwide and inspired the growth of Maoist parties in a number of countries. On the mainland, resistance continued longer than the October 1 proclamation suggests. The Kuomintang Islamic insurgency persisted until as late as 1958 in the provinces of Gansu, Qinghai, Ningxia, Xinjiang, and Yunnan. ROC soldiers who fled into Burma and Thailand worked with the CIA and the KMT to finance anti-Communist activities through drug trafficking well into the 1980s. No formal peace between the Republic of China and the People's Republic of China has ever been negotiated. The CCP remains in government in mainland China today and is the second-largest political party in the world, a direct institutional line running back to those twelve delegates who gathered in Shanghai on the 23rd of July 1921.