Chinese Communist Party | Political Party, China - Britannica

Founding, early years, and civil war (1921–49)

The CCP was founded as both a political party and a revolutionary movement in 1921 by revolutionaries such as Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu. Those two men and others had come out of the May Fourth Movement (1919) and had turned to Marxism after the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Revolution of 1917. In the turmoil of 1920s China CCP members such as Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, and Li Lisan began organizing labor unions in the cities. The CCP joined with the Nationalist Party in 1924, and the alliance proved enormously successful at first. However, in 1927, after the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) turned violently against the communists and ousted them from Shanghai, the CCP was driven underground.

Many CCP cadres, including Mao, then abandoned their revolutionary activities among China’s urban proletariat and went to the countryside, where they were so successful in winning peasant support that in 1931 the Chinese Soviet Republic, with a population of some nine million, was set up in southern China. That entity was soon destroyed by the military campaigns of the Nationalists, however, and Mao and the remnants of his forces escaped in the Long March (1934–35) to Yan’an in northern China. It was during the march that Mao achieved the leadership position in the CCP that he held until his death in 1976. Other important leaders who supported him in that period were Zhou Enlai and Zhu De.

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In 1936 in the Xi’an (Sian) Incident, Chiang was forced to call off his military campaigns against the CCP and instead enter into a United Front with it against increasing Japanese military aggression in China. While Chiang’s Nationalist forces, operating from their base in Chongqing, primarily utilized conventional military tactics and attempted to defend major cities, the CCP focused on guerrilla warfare and mobilizing support in rural areas. As a result, the Nationalists depleted their resources, while the CCP emerged from the struggle against Japan with greater strength and numbers. By the end of the war (1945), the party controlled base areas of some 100 million people and had an experienced army and a workable political program of alliance between peasants, workers, the middle class, and small capitalists.

The civil war recommenced in 1946, and the CCP’s land-reform program increased its peasant support. Meanwhile, the Nationalists’ ineptitude and demoralization cost them what little support they had, leading to their final defeat.