the founding of the CCP in Shanghai in 1921 and organized the Hunan branch.
Two parties developed in the 1920s, the CCP and the KNT (Kuomintang). The KMT-CCP United Front had formed first and then divided into the two separate units. Mao had encouraged peasant activities against landlords, and this had hastened the split. The KIT was allied with the warlords and was thus stronger militarily than the CCP, leaving the CCP struggling in the rural areas. This was one of the reasons for Mao's development of a rural strategy for the Chinese revolution. This involved more than surrounding the cities from the countryside; instead it became a complex and interdependent synthesis of military, political, and economic elements, utilizing techniques of guerrilla warfare. One measure of the effectiveness of Mao's thought is the degree to which it served to resolve the intellectual conflict underlying it:
The importance of the May Fourth Movement should by now be apparent. Intellectually, the Chinese Revolution originated in the challenging of China's cultural heritage by Western civilization. May Fourth was the culmination of that challenge: the brutal, wholesale repudiation of Confucianism, the symbol of Chinese culture and Chinese history (Bianco, 1967, 28).
There were both military and political components of the Chinese revolution and the actions of the CCP. The rural strategy included the confiscation of the land of landlords and rich peasants, and the distrib
...