China's Road to Revolution: Warlords, Civil War, and the Rise of the CCP

Since the fall of the imperial system in 1912, China had fragmented into a patchwork of competing regional warlords. Into this vacuum stepped the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party), founded under Sun Yat-sen and later led by Chiang Kai-shek, which aimed to reunify the country. In July 1921, a much smaller rival movement, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), was founded in Shanghai with barely fifty members, directly inspired by the 1917 Russian Revolution and organized with Comintern support; among the delegates at its First Congress was a young Hunan delegate named Mao Zedong. Chen Duxiu, an intellectual of the May Fourth Movement, served as the CCP's first general secretary, and the fledgling party initially followed classical Marxist doctrine centered on the urban proletariat.