Peasant Mobilization in North China and the Origins of Yenan Communism

Abstract

The outbreak of war in North China during the summer of 1937 was the watershed in the growth of the revolutionary movement in China. Seemingly overnight the Communist Party made rapid new gains in strength and territory. From a small, isolated soviet in the desolation of North-west China on the Shensi-Kansu border, the Party enlarged its territories, and by the end of the war communist-backed resistance governments ruled huge portions of North and Central China. In the same period Party membership grew from a little over 20,000 members in 1936 to nearly 1,250,000 members at the Seventh Party Congress in April 1945, and the Red Army, which had dwindled to a mere 30,000 men in the course of the Long March, swelled to over one million men by the war's end. This new political and military framework formed the structural backbone which enabled the Communists to come to power four years later.