Mao Zedong
- After ge fled he began to rebuild the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
- Mao build party on the peasantry (no urban workers to deal with)
- Chiang fought hard to rid the CCP from their stronghold even as the Japanese began to invade Manchuria
- CCP fought guerrilla warfare
Summary
Chinese Communist Party (CCP), also called Communist Party of China (CPC), Pinyin Zhongguo Gongchan Dang, Wade-Giles romanization Chung-kuo Kung-ch’an Tang, political party and revolutionary movement that was founded in 1921 by revolutionaries, such as Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu, who came out of the May Fourth Movement and who turned to Marxism after the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution (1917) in Russia. In the turmoil of 1920s China, CCP members such as Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, and Li Lisan began organizing labour unions in the cities. The CCP joined with the Nationalist Party in 1924, and the alliance proved enormously successful at first. But after liberating Shanghai, the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) turned violently on the CCP and drove it underground in 1927.Many of the CCP cadres, such as Mao, then abandoned their revolutionary activities among China’s urban proletariat and went to the countryside, where they were so successful in winning peasant support that in 1931 the Chinese Soviet Republic was set up in southern China with a population of 10 million. But this was destroyed by the military campaigns of the Nationalists, and Mao and the remnants of his forces escaped in the Long March (1934–35) to Yan’an in northern China. It was during this march that Mao achieved the leadership position in the CCP that he held until his death in 1976.