The Chinese Communist Revolution was a social and political revolution in mainland China that began in 1927 and culminated with the proclamation of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. The revolution was led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which afterwards became the ruling party of China. The political revolution resulted in major social changes within China and has been looked at as a model by revolutionary communist movements in other countries.
During the preceding century, termed the century of humiliation, the decline of the Qing dynasty and the rise of foreign imperialism caused escalating social, economic, and political problems in China. The Qing collapsed in 1912 and were replaced with the Republic of China, which had itself fallen into warring factions by 1917. A small group of urban intellectuals, inspired by the October Revolution and European socialist ideas, founded the CCP in 1921. They created an alliance known as the First United Front with the much larger Kuomintang (KMT), having the shared goal of overthrowing the warlords governing China. During this period the CCP rapidly expanded its membership, organized a militant labor movement in several of China's major cities, and established rudimentary peasant associations in rural areas. Nonetheless, and despite the First United Front's military successes, KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek ended the alliance in 1927 by initiating the Shanghai massacre.
The Chinese Civil War between the CCP and Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists fundamentally changed the course of the Chinese Communist Revolution. Forced to flee into the remote countryside, semi-isolated CCP cadres began to experiment with land reform and other ways of appealing to the peasantry. One of the most successful local leaders was Mao Zedong, who turned the Jiangxi Soviet into a "state within a state". In 1935, the Communists were handed a major military defeat, and the survivors made the Long March to a new base in northwest China. During the Long March, Mao rose from a regional leader to undisputed leader of the entire CCP. After settling in their new base, the Communists undertook a campaign of ideological self-purification to solidify their allegiance to Mao and their new peasant-based strategy.
Meanwhile, Japan had taken advantage of China's disunity to seize Manchuria and other Chinese territories. Chiang Kai-shek, prioritizing "first internal pacification, then external resistance", avoided confronting Japan. The Communists argued that the CCP and KMT should cooperate to fight the Japanese, an appeal to patriotism that won them broad sympathy. In 1936, Nationalist troops who had become sympathetic to the Communists kidnapped Chiang Kai-shek and forced him to begin ceasefire negotiations. The Second United Front was finalized when the Japanese launched a full-scale invasion of China the following year. The renewed alliance allowed the CCP to once again expand their areas of influence by waging a guerrilla war behind Japanese lines.
Following the Japanese surrender in 1945, China became a battlefield in the Cold War. The Nationalists received military support from the United States and the CCP from the Soviet Union. Although the Nationalists at first held most of the country, sympathy for the Communists grew in urban areas suffering from high unemployment, runaway inflation, and rampant government corruption. The presence of United States Marines in Chinese cities further inflamed anti-imperialist sentiment, especially among students. When peace talks between the two Chinese sides floundered, the Civil War resumed. The Communists' newly-formed People's Liberation Army launched a successful series of campaigns that defeated the Nationalists and forced them to retreat to Taiwan in 1949.
The Communist victory had a major impact on the global balance of power: China became the largest socialist state by population, as well as a third force in the Cold War following the 1956 Sino-Soviet split. The People's Republic offered direct and indirect support to communist movements around the world, and inspired the growth of Maoist parties in a number of countries. Shock at the CCP's success, and the emerging geopolitical domino theory postulating communism's spread across East Asia, led the United States to stage successive military interventions against Chinese-backed forces in Korea and Southeast Asia. The CCP remains in government in mainland China and is the second-largest political party in the world.
Start and end dates Many historians agree with the Chinese Communist Party official history that the Chinese Communist Revolution dates to the founding of the party in 1921. A few consider it to be the latter part of the Chinese Civil War, since it was only after the Second Sino-Japanese War that the tide turned decisively in favour of the CCP. That said, it is not entirely clear when the second half of the civil war began. The earliest possible date would be the end of the Second United Front in January 1941, when Nationalist forces ambushed and destroyed the New Fourth Army. Another possible date is the surrender of Japan on August 10, 1945, which began a scramble by CCP and Nationalist forces to seize the equipment and territory left behind by the Japanese. However, full-scale warfare between the two sides did not truly recommence until June 26, 1946, when Chiang Kai-shek launched a major offensive against CCP bases in Manchuria. This article is focused on the political and social developments that contributed to the Revolution, rather than the military events of the Civil War, so it begins with the founding of the CCP.
The most common date used for the end of the Revolution is the Proclamation of the People's Republic of China on 1 October 1949. Nonetheless, the Nationalist Government had not evacuated to Taiwan until December, and significant fighting (such as the conquest of Hainan) continued well into 1950 and the takeover of Tibet in 1951. While never posing a serious threat to the People's Republic, the Kuomintang Islamic insurgency continued until as late as 1958 in the provinces of Gansu, Qinghai, Ningxia, Xinjiang, and Yunnan. ROC soldiers who had fled into the mountains of Burma and Thailand worked with the CIA and KMT to finance anti-Communist activities with drug trafficking well into the 1980s. No formal peace between the ROC and the PRC has ever been negotiated.
Origins During the final years of the Qianlong Emperor's reign, China began a long period of decline popularly known as the "century of humiliation". Successive administrations within the imperial administration of the Qing dynasty failed to address the mounting problems of economic stagnation, official corruption, and military weakness. Massive peasant rebellions, most notably the Taiping Rebellion, cost millions of lives and ravaged the countryside. Japan and the Western powers forced China to accept unequal treaties that gave them territorial concessions and allowed them to exploit the Chinese economy. China had been turned into a "semi-colony" by the time of the Boxer Rebellion.
The landlord system Prior to the revolution, the majority of agricultural land in rural China was owned by a class of landlords and wealthy peasants, with between 50 and 65 percent of peasants owning little or no land and thus needing to rent additional land from landlords. This disparity in land ownership differed by region, and was more extreme in southern China where the commercialization of agriculture was more developed. For example, in Guangdong more than half the rural population owned no land at all. Poor peasants owned an average of only 0.87 mu (about 0.14 acres) and so spent most of their time working rented land. Even in north China, where most peasants owned at least some land, the plots they owned were so small and infertile that they remained on the edge of starvation. Periodic famines were common during both the Qing dynasty and the later Republic of China. Between 1900 and the end of WWII, China experienced no less than six major famines, costing tens of millions of lives.
Depending on the system of tenancy, peasants renting land might have been expected to pay in kind or in cash, either as a fixed amount or as a proportion of the harvest. Where a share of the harvest was paid, as in much of north China, rates of 40%, 50%, and 60% were common. A system of sharecropping prevailed in much of Shanxi, where landlords owned all agricultural capital and expected 80% of the harvest as rent. The amount of fixed rents varied, but in most areas averaged about $4 a year per mu. Proponents of peasant exploitation as a cause of the Chinese Communist Revolution argue that these rents were often exorbitant and contributed to the extreme poverty of the peasantry. Agricultural economist John Lossing Buck disagreed, arguing that landlords' return on investment was not especially high in comparison to the standard rates of interest in China at the time.
Other forms of rural exploitation According to William H. Hinton, author of a case study on how the Revolution impacted a village in north China: The land held by the landlords and rich peasants, while ample, was not enough in itself to make them the dominant group in the village. It served primarily as a solid foundation for other forms of open and concealed exploitation which taken together raised a handful of families far above the rest of the inhabitants economically and hence politically and socially as well. Landlords utilized forms of exploitation such as usury, corruption, and the theft of public funds to enrich themselves and their families. They ran side businesses with the profits from farming to shore up their finances and isolate themselves from the effects of bad harvests. On holidays, funerals, and other important events, landlords had the right to demand their tenants act as servants, reinforcing the social divide and engendering resentment from the peasants. Agnes Smedley observed how even within a short distance from Shanghai, rural landlords operated essentially as feudal lords, paying for private armies, dominating local politics, and keeping numerous concubines.
Radicalization of urban intellectuals
In the first decade of the twentieth century, young Chinese intellectuals such as Ma Junwu, Liang Qichao, and Zhao Bizhen were the first to translate and summarize socialist and Marxist ideas into Chinese. However, this happened on a very small scale, and had no immediate impacts. This would change following the 1911 Revolution, which saw military and popular revolts overthrow the Qing Dynasty.Reilly, Thomas. (1997). Science and Football III, Volume 3. Taylor & Francis publishing. . pp. 105–106, 277–278. The failure of the new Chinese Republic to improve social conditions or modernize the country led scholars to take a greater interest in Western ideas such as socialism.Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China, W.W.Norton, 1999, pp. 290–313. The New Culture Movement was especially strong in cities like Shanghai, where Chen Duxiu began to publish the left-leaning journal New Youth in 1915. New Youth quickly became the most popular and widely distributed journal amongst the intelligentsia during this period.