Chinese Communist Revolution

Abstract

The communist revolution of China was led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which was founded in 1921 in the wake of the May Fourth movement. The CCP began as a very small Marxist‐inspired left‐wing intellectual club, with little political influence prior to its alliance with the Chinese Nationalist Party (GMD) in 1924. The GMD were motivated to ally with the CCP in order to obtain support from the Soviet Union in their fight with the northern warlords. With the help of the CCP, the GMD was remodeled from a loose organization into a Leninist party, and the GMD also received financial and other support from the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the CCP also developed quickly by infiltrating the GMD‐controlled army and by expanding its organizations in the urban and rural areas of southern China. While the alliance between the GMD and CCP brought great success for both parties, tensions also grew as the parties pursued different agendas. After the initial military success against the warlords during the Northern Expedition, a growing number of the GMD's leaders and generals became very unhappy about the CCP's infiltration into the GMD‐controlled army as well as about the CCP's radical property redistribution policy, which was implemented in the territories recently occupied by the GMD's Northern Expedition army. As a result they no longer wanted to share power with the CCP. In early 1927, shortly after Northern Expedition troops occupied Shanghai, the GMD started to purge the CCP‐controlled organizations in the city and labeled the CCP an illegal organization. The purge soon spread, with hundreds of thousands of CCP members and their sympathizers arrested and killed. In response, the CCP staged several military uprisings in late 1927 in places where they had strong influence. While all these uprisings were easily suppressed by the GMD army, the surviving members of the CCP were able to retreat to mountain areas and conduct guerrilla warfare.