Resistance and Revolution in China: The Communists and the Second United Front

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) secured victory by reframing its strategy and relationship to urban politics and international conflict, challenging its own official history. The book argues that peasant mobilization through land reform was vital, but only possible under foreign invasion, which neutralized the KMT and gave the Communists space to expand. Japans occupation, along with the involvement of the United States, Britain, Germany, and the Soviet Union, provided the international contradictions that made the united front viable. Chinas cities remained central to the trajectory of revolution, shaping both the KMTs mandate and the CCPs strategic recalibrations.

Format: Hardback
Length: 342 pages
Publication date: 27 May 2022
Publisher: University of California Press

Resistance and Revolution in China: The Communists and the Second United Front explores how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) achieved victory by redefining both its strategy and its relationship to China's urban politics and international conflict. The study spans the years 1934 to 1943 and challenges the CCP's official history, which portrays Mao's rural "peasant war" strategy as continuous and uninterrupted from the Kiangsi period through Japan's defeat. Instead, the book contends that the Party's earlier defeats exposed the limitations of an exclusively countryside orientation and that Mao's eventual success lay in forging the second united front with the Kuomintang (KMT) and embedding the revolution within the broader war of resistance against Japan. Drawing on internal CCP documents and Western interpretations, the book demonstrates how peasant mobilization through land reform was crucial, but only possible under the protection of prolonged foreign invasion, which neutralized the KMT and provided the Communists with space to expand. Japans occupation, along with the involvement of the United States, Britain, Germany, and the Soviet Union, created the international contradictions that made the united front viable. At the same time, the analysis emphasizes that China's cities—modern, nationalist, and connected to global currents—remained central to the trajectory of revolution, shaping both the KMT's mandate and the CCP's strategic recalibrations. By situating urban and rural China within a single semi-colonial, semi-feudal framework, the book offers a corrective to rural-only paradigms of Communist success, revealing how factional struggles within the CCP, foreign intervention, and the interplay of nationalism and class revolution combined to produce one of the twentieth century's most consequential upheavals. .

Weight: 680g
Dimension: 234 x 156 x 23 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780520362956