Chinese Communist Revolution

The Chinese Communist Revolution was the long transformation through which the Chinese Communist Party grew from a handful of urban intellectuals into the ruler of the world's most populous country. It is usually dated from the party's founding in 1921, or from its break with the Nationalists in 1927, to Mao Zedong's proclamation of the People's Republic of China on 1 October 1949. The battles of the Chinese Civil War decided its outcome, but the revolution was also a social upheaval that remade the Chinese countryside and inspired communist movements across the world.

By the early twentieth century China had endured decades of rebellion, foreign intervention and unequal treaties, a period later called the "century of humiliation". The fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912 brought a republic that soon splintered among warlords. In the countryside, landlords and richer peasants owned most farmland, while perhaps half or more of peasants had little or none and had to rent, often paying 40 to 60 per cent of the harvest. Historians still debate how far exploitation by landlords, rather than poverty in general, drove peasants towards revolution, but famines were frequent and rural resentment was deep.

In May 1919, anger at the Versailles peace conference's decision to hand German rights in Shandong to Japan sparked the May Fourth Movement, mass protests that drew in students and townspeople alike. Many young radicals admired the October Revolution in Russia and saw in Lenin's model of a disciplined revolutionary party a way to rescue China. Marxist study groups formed around Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu, and on 23 July 1921 about a dozen delegates founded the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai. It still had only about 200 members a year later.

On Soviet advice, the Communists joined Sun Yat-sen's much larger Nationalist Party in a "First United Front" against the warlords. Membership grew rapidly amid strikes and the anti-foreign protests of 1925, and peasant associations sprang up in the south. In 1927, after the Nationalist army under Chiang Kai-shek had advanced into the Yangtze valley, Chiang turned on his allies in the Shanghai massacre, and the alliance collapsed.

Driven out of the cities, Communist leaders began to experiment with rural bases, land redistribution and peasant armies. Mao, whose 1927 report on Hunan had argued that the peasantry could lead a revolution, built a "state within a state" in Jiangxi. After its defeat, the survivors' Long March to the north-west made Mao the party's undisputed leader, and in Yan'an he imposed ideological unity around his peasant-based strategy.

The Second Sino-Japanese War transformed the party's prospects. Chiang had long put fighting the Communists ahead of resisting Japan; the Communists, by contrast, called for national unity and, after a Second United Front was formed in 1937, organised resistance behind Japanese lines. Moderate land reform and patient village organising won wide peasant support. During the eight years of war, party membership rose from about 40,000 to 1.2 million.

After 1945, Nationalist rule was undermined by corruption, hyperinflation and urban unemployment, and growing numbers of conscripted peasants defected to Communist forces promised land and better treatment. The renamed People's Liberation Army won the decisive campaigns of 1948–49, took the Nationalist capital Nanjing in April 1949, and on 1 October Mao proclaimed the People's Republic in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. Chiang's government withdrew to Taiwan in December, followed by some 600,000 troops and around two million refugees. Fighting continued on Hainan into 1950, and no formal peace has ever been made.

The revolution made China the largest socialist state by population and, after the Sino-Soviet split, a third force in the Cold War. It supported communist movements elsewhere, inspired Maoist parties around the world, and fed American fears that drove interventions in Korea and South-East Asia. The Chinese Communist Party still governs mainland China.

Our 1938 map shows the Republic of China during the Japanese invasion, and our 1960 map shows the People's Republic, labelled China, ruling the mainland.