The Chinese Revolution and Communism Spreading

Marx expected revolution to come from industrial workers, which is why the Soviet model centered on cities and factories. China in the 1920s and 1930s had almost no industrial working class; it had hundreds of millions of poor tenant farmers. Mao Zedong built the Chinese Communist Party's strength there instead, promising to break up landlord estates and give land to the peasants who worked it. That promise bought loyalty and soldiers. After Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists nearly destroyed the Communists in 1934, survivors made the Long March, a grueling 6,000-mile retreat to the northwest that let Mao consolidate control over the party. Civil war resumed after Japan's defeat in 1945, and by 1949 Communist forces, backed by peasant support and land reform in territories they held, pushed the Nationalists off the mainland to Taiwan, and Mao founded the People's Republic of China.

Once in power, Mao tried to industrialize fast with the Great Leap Forward starting in 1958, setting ambitious steel and grain targets and forcing peasants into collective communes. Local officials, pressured to report success, inflated harvest numbers while grain was actually shrinking and farm labor was diverted to backyard steel furnaces. The result was a catastrophic famine that killed tens of millions between 1959 and 1961, showing how badly Soviet-style central planning fit Chinese conditions.

This is why Chinese communism cannot be read as the Soviet model scaled up: different social base, different path to power, different economic disasters. Those differences widened into open hostility by the 1960s, as China and the Soviet Union competed over ideology and influence. Their split fractured what had looked like one communist bloc, forcing other nations and movements to choose sides and turning the Cold War into a contest with more than two players.