CHINA: 1921-1936  
During this period the CCP was forced to evolve from a predominantly urban to a predominantly rural organization. It began as a party dominated by the Soviet Union and the Communist International (Comintern). At that time, the basic line of the Comintern for Communist parties in developing nations was that they should seek patriotic support from all sections of the population who resented colonial domination, while building the core of their support among the class of the future, that is, urban workers.

During the early 1920s the leader of the Chinese Nationalists, Sun Yat-sen, formed a close relationship with Vladimir Ilich Lenin. As the likelihood of world revolution spreading from the West faded, Lenin began to look eastwards for alternative strategies to undermine world capitalism. He was attracted by the revolutionary potential of China. In turn, for Sun, like the early members of the CCP, the Soviet Union exemplified the possibility of a nation throwing off the imperialist yoke. The Nationalist Party was reformed along Bolshevik lines, and the CCP became the junior partner in an alliance.

For a few years, members of the one party could also be members of the other. Both grew rapidly, the CCP especially in the coastal cities of southern China. By early 1926 the KMT had over 200,000 members. By April 1927 the CCP had over 57,000 members. Since both the KMT and the CCP were committed to the reunification of China, they also formed a military academy in Whampoa, just outside Guangzhou, to train officers for a new joint army funded from Moscow. In 1926 this army began the Northern Expedition, aimed at bringing increasing stretches of Chinese territory under central government control. It achieved a great deal of success over the next two years.

In 1925, however, Sun Yat-sen had died and the KMT came to be split between more radical elements, which wanted social reform as a vital element of the national revolution, and more conservative ones, which were more preoccupied by national divisions. The CCP became one of the chief bones of contention between them, and the balance of power shifted in favour of the conservatives, led by General Chiang Kai-shek.

In April 1927 matters came to a head in Shanghai, where both Communists and conservative Kuomintang were strong. As the Northern Expedition won control of the city, Chiang Kai-shek arranged with local gangsters to arrest and assassinate Communists. Hundreds were executed. Further massacres followed in other cities.

For the rest of the revolution, the CCP was kept out of the cities of China as an organized force. Though the leadership continued vain attempts for years to break back in there, the Nationalists were able to hold on to all the major cities until 1948-1949, except for the years of Japanese occupation.

From then on the CCP was driven into the countryside. Even before that some party members, including Mao Zedong, had attempted to reach out for peasant support. Although this conflicted with Comintern orthodoxy, which gave priority to the industrial proletariat, they found it easier to regard poor and even middle-class peasants as "proletarians", since the term for the proletariat was translated into Chinese as "property-less class". Nevertheless, their first attempt at uprisings in the autumn of 1927 in Hunan also came to nought.

The bulk of the Party was driven into an outlying region on the borders of Jiangxi and Hunan provinces, south-west of Shanghai. It was poor and relatively peripheral. Survivors from party debacles elsewhere gradually trickled in to swell the numbers, and in February 1930 the local party leadership under Mao founded the Jiangxi Soviet. At its peak it controlled a region of around nine million inhabitants, with overlapping soviet areas. Here the party first formulated a "mass line" to win support among peasants. Key elements were moderate land reform, and the election of deputies to collectivizations of workers and peasants. The party’s soldiers necessarily began to learn how to operate as guerrillas.

The Nationalist armies, however, would not leave them in peace. From late 1930 they launched a series of encirclement campaigns. Though from 1931 Japanese advances in Dongbei diverted some Nationalist attention, as did campaigns against various warlords, the Communists were gradually worn down. Finally, towards the end of 1934, the pressure became overwhelming and the party’s leaders decided to break out with nearly 100,000 of their followers. They embarked upon the Long March, which turned into the defining epic adventure of the CCP’s path to power. The remainder were scattered and brutally crushed.

The marchers left with hazy notions of heading for another Communist base area in the north in Shaanxi province, nearer to the Soviet Union, but they could not make for there directly. Instead they struck out westwards before turning north via Tibet on an odyssey that lasted over one year and covered roughly 9,600 km (6,000 mi). Often they had to march for days with no food or water, virtually no medical supplies, and over entirely unfamiliar terrain, constantly prey to ambushes by local soldiers or hostile mountain tribes. On the way, numerous units became separated. Survivors straggled in up to a year later. All the way they were pursued by the Nationalists, who took advantage of the chase to try to extend the authority of the central government over previously recalcitrant warlords. Those who survived the Long March, as well as the subsequent Chinese Civil War, formed the core of the CCP’s leadership of China from 1949 until the 1980s. On the way Mao had pushed aside the Moscow-supported leaders of the party at the Central Committee plenum at Zunyi in January 1935. The Long March provided the psychological bond that linked Mao and the rest of the party until the Cultural Revolution.

It was a triumph that any Communists reached Bao’an in Shaanxi. Yet they only numbered around 8,000, less than 10 per cent of those who had started out. Though they joined several thousand other supporters in Shaanxi, the Nationalists massed afresh over 300,000 troops for the final assault against them.

The Communists were saved by an unexpected event—the Xi’an incident. In December 1936 Chiang Kai-shek was suddenly "arrested" in his new military headquarters of Xi’an by one of his chief military commanders, General Zhang Xueliang, the son of the warlord of Dongbei who had been assassinated on the orders of the Japanese in 1928. Zhang acted because of the growing Japanese encroachment on Chinese territory. Protests were growing in various parts of China, especially in the cities of the east, demanding an end to the civil war and a united front against the Japanese. Zhang insisted upon this as the price of Chiang’s freedom.

After fairly protracted negotiations, both Chiang and Mao were cajoled into accepting. This provided the initial breathing space for the Communists. The Nationalists recognized the Communist administration of the region on the borders of Shaanxi, Gansu, and Ningxia provinces, with its new capital at Yan’an, as well as providing a subsidy of some 100,000 Chinese dollars per month, though this was only paid for about three years.