Was the triumph of the communist revolution in China during the early twentieth century a foregone conclusion? The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) certainly believes it was: In a fiercely held narrative, the CCP maintains that the social, economic, and political conditions of the time destined it to be the one chosen by the Chinese people, once and for all. Nonetheless, the CCP in 1935 bore little resemblance to the dominant political party it is today; its membership had dwindled to 40,000, and its remaining military forces were besieged by the Kuomintang’s (KMT) troops in Shaanxi. Few could have foreseen the CCP’s swift victory over the KMT in the 1946–1949 Civil War, and even the CCP leaders were surprised by the rapid collapse of the KMT.Footnote 1
The reversal of fortune between the CCP and the KMT was arguably among the most astonishing developments in the history of revolutionary movements. Throughout much of the Republican Era, most domestic and international observers anticipated the KMT’s domination as China’s ruling party. Their judgment seemed indisputable because KMT membership consistently outpaced that of the CCP in the Republican Era (Figure 1.1); in fact, the KMT drove the CCP to the brink of extinction twice – in 1927 and 1935.Footnote 2 The Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) was widely considered a critical juncture that gave rise to communism in China (Johnson Reference Johnson1962; Koss Reference Koss2018). Although the CCP membership grew from 40,000 in 1937 to 1.2 million in 1945, the growth of KMT membership dwarfed CCP achievement, increasing from 1.5 million to 6.8 million during the same period. Even the Soviet Union placed its bets on the KMT, not once but twice, supplying greater financial and military support to the KMT than to the CCP during the First United Front (1924–1927) and the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945).Footnote 3
Figure 1.1 Membership of the CCP and the KMT (1921–1949)
Note: Author’s data. See Appendix A for detailed data and their sources. The shaded area indicates the period of the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945).
The reversal of fortune of the CCP and the KMT serves as a reminder that outcomes are far from certain for those living through revolutionary movements; most of which involve violent repression that brings them to their knees. The revolutionary movements in Algeria, Eritrea, and Bolivia were beset with internal factional division amid external repression, and existential threats failed to unify party elites and engender a resilient political party. The revolutionary movement in Vietnam was all but dead from 1930 to 1941, when the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) repeatedly fell victim to external repression. Most revolutionary movements were born weak, and even the successful ones often caught both domestic and international observers off guard (Levitsky and Way Reference Levitsky and Way2022).
Earlier scholarship on revolutions highlights broader political, societal, and international contexts as well as historical, preexisting social ties and organizations;Footnote 4 but little is dedicated to understanding the organizational development of revolutionary entities amid violent struggles.Footnote 5 Although the collapse of old regimes and foreign intervention are crucial for creating political openings for revolutionary movements, not all such organizations manage to seize the opportunity: Behind every successful revolution lie countless failed insurrections. Anarchy and failed states are the more common outcomes following regime collapse. If the outcomes of revolutions are at the mercy of the agents involved, one cannot fully grasp the dynamics of revolutions without understanding the sources of the organizational strength of these entities. Indeed, the Chinese communist revolution would not have succeeded without the CCP’s transformation from a frail and marginalized party into a disciplined and effective one, an observation shared even by Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the KMT, in his own reflections (Eastman Reference Eastman1981).
Upon closer examination, the organizational changes occurring within the CCP and the KMT appear paradoxical because they contradict the conventional wisdoms surrounding authoritarian politics and revolutions. A prominent view of authoritarian politics emphasizes power sharing through institutions such as political parties and legislatures as the cornerstone of regime resilience. Key to this line of reasoning is that power sharing among political elites allows them to access the spoils of office and engenders elite cohesion.Footnote 6 Nonetheless, the downfall of the KMT followed closely on the heels of repeatedly faltering power-sharing arrangements and elite cooptation. Furthermore, the revival of the CCP was preceded by Mao Zedong’s emergence as a dominant party leader, a marked contrast to the earlier period when the CCP experienced contested leadership and fragile party organization. In fact, the emergence of strong authoritarian regimes, such as China, Cuba, Eritrea, and Vietnam, has frequently been characterized by a strong political party with a dominant leader.
How can we explain the reversal of fortune of the CCP and the KMT, where a dominant leader led to successful transformation of the CCP’s organization while power sharing among party elites resulted in an ineffective party organization and eventually undermined the KMT’s dominance? More generally, why do some political parties succeed in overcoming adversity and transforming into robust political organizations that seize state power while others fail? These are the central inquiries that I aim to answer by examining through the lens of the organizational transformation of the CCP and the KMT in China’s Republican Era.
1.1 Argument in Brief
My central argument is that domination and mobilization are pivotal for the triumph of revolutionary parties. To become dominant, revolutionary parties must develop the infrastructure to mobilize not only committed individuals but also financial resources; and to mobilize effectively, the party must have a dominant leader who resolves intraparty elite conflict and facilitates building party mobilization infrastructure.
The theoretical framework centers on three claims. First, power consolidation by a party leader rather than power sharing among party elites strengthens party organization. In weak institutional environments, the emergence of a dominant party leader alleviates conflicts stemming from contested party leadership. Second, the success of a revolutionary party lies in its ability to mobilize crucial financial resources, not merely its ability to recruit committed activists. Resource mobilization plays a foundational yet often overlooked role in party strength during a protracted violent struggle. Finally, contingent events could shift the balance of power among party elites and alter the comparative advantage of party mobilization infrastructure, which in turn disrupt the equilibria of elite conflict and party strength. Viewed through this lens, the rise of the CCP and the downfall of the KMT were not preordained; instead, the reversal of fortune of these two parties arose from evolving dynamics in intraparty elite power struggles and the shifting comparative advantage of their respective mobilization infrastructures, both shaped by contingent events and unforeseen circumstances.
Figure 1.2 encapsulates the essence of my argument. In what follows, I first define the primary subject of interest in this book and then elaborate on the logic behind this theoretical framework.
Figure 1.2 The origins of revolutionary party strength
1.1.1 Definition of Revolutionary Party
The primary interest of this book revolves around political entities seeking to capture state power through protracted, violent struggle, rather than through electoral competition. Such entities often operate in environments where traditional political processes are either absent or ineffective. Understanding the strategies and structures these groups employ reveal the dynamics of power acquisition and state formation in contexts where conventional electoral mechanisms are not the primary means of political engagement. For the sake of simplicity, I call them revolutionary parties throughout this bookFootnote 7 and adopt the following general definition based on earlier studies of revolutions and social movements: Political entities organizing formal and informal mobilization intended to overthrow a political regime through noninstitutional means, including demonstration, protest, and violence (Goldstone Reference Goldstone2001: 142; Goodwin Reference Goodwin2001: 9).
This minimalist definition offers two advantages by avoiding the selection of the dependent variable – investigating successful revolutions exclusively or only certain types of revolutions could result in incomplete or even misleading conclusions. Specifically, this definition embraces a wide spectrum of revolutionary entities, whose organizational forms are shaped by the strategic decisions of those driving the movement. Skocpol (1978) has distinguished two types of revolutions, suggesting that in social revolution “basic changes in social structure and in political structure occur together in a mutually reinforcing fashion, [whereas] political revolutions transform state structures but not social structures” (4–5). Social and political revolutions are, however, often intertwined. Some political revolutions originated as social revolutions, but political entities later adopted an accommodationist path without significantly restructuring the society (Levitsky and Way Reference Levitsky and Way2022). The exclusive focus on either social or political revolutions overlooks the strategic decisions on revolutionary strategies by political actors over the course of the political and social movements.
Second, this broad definition includes political organizations that instigate “revolutions from above” led by elites who directly control the mobilization movement and who may not always pursue radical social transformation (Trimberger Reference Trimberger1978). The process of revolutions rarely follows a blueprint or a script fulfilling a specific purpose. Instead, revolutionary parties improvise distinct strategies when facing opportunities and constraints at various points in time. Skocpol (Reference Skocpol1979) maintained that “a purposive image is just as misleading about the processes and outcomes of historical revolutions as it is about their causes” (17). Depicted in this book, the evolution of the organizational structure of revolutionary parties arises from strategic calculations improvised by party leaders in response to internal and external pressures. These considerations change the course of party-building strategies targeting certain segments of the population for the development of their mobilization infrastructure.
1.1.2 Argument 1: The Curse of Power Sharing and the Blessing of a Dominant Party Leader
When does a revolutionary party succeed in building an effective mobilization infrastructure? I argue that power consolidation by a dominant party leader, but not power sharing among a group of party elites under contested leadership, strengthens party building. At the heart of my argument lies the notion that party elites are constantly confronted with three concerns stemming from any party-building endeavor: a free-rider problem, distributional conflict, and ex ante uncertainty about party-building outcomes. Consequently, party elites under contested party leadership often pursue strategies benefiting their own power even if the party faces existential threats. The emergence of a dominant party leader, however, mitigates these concerns, thereby facilitating intraparty elite cohesion that strengthens party mobilization infrastructure.
My argument roots in two premises. First, party elites inherently yearn to reach the pinnacle of party hierarchy. Their desire is not only driven by personal ambition, but also by the belief that power accumulation is necessary to advance their preferred policies. This is true even for revolutionaries motivated by ideological orientation rather than personal ambition. Second, party elites are endowed with a variety of sources of power, which manifest in their de facto power within the party. For instance, some party elites’ endowed source of power originates from their ability to raise financial resources; for others, it stems from their roles as power brokers to mobilize groups of actors through their personal networks and prestige. Some party elites even command the coercive apparatus that bolsters their de facto power.
Any party-building endeavors generating distinct benefits to each individual party elite in turn shape the elite’s incentive to adopt specific party-building strategies. First, the total benefit of any party-building strategy – a stronger party – creates a free-rider problem, as party elites prefer to benefit from a stronger party without bearing personal costs. Thus, party elites would rather see others commit their vital resources to engage in labor-intensive party-building endeavors. Second, some party elites may disproportionately obtain more benefits from a party-building strategy than others, therefore altering the balance of power among party elites. Hence distributive conflict emerges because party elites become acutely sensitive to any potential power shifts resulted from a specific party-building strategy. Last, the party-building outcomes are often uncertain ex ante, undermining party elites’ commitment to pursue party-building strategies, given that they operate in a rapidly changing revolutionary movement.
With these characteristics, the relative balance of power among party elites shapes their preferences for party-building strategies. On the one hand, party elites under contested party leadership are motivated to pursue party-building strategies that strengthen their individual source of power. That is, they prefer a party-building strategy expanding their share of benefit over a strategy that benefits the whole because the distributional conflict overshadows the free-rider problem. Such dynamics frequently culminate in conflicting and inconsistent party-building strategies, thereby compromising the integrity and quality of party mobilization infrastructure. On the other hand, the rise of a dominant party leader alleviates the distributional conflict and free-rider problem, resulting in a coherent set of party-building strategies that strengthen the overall party mobilization infrastructure.
1.1.3 Argument 2: The Primacy of Resource Mobilization as Party Strength
Irrespective of which party-building strategy is chosen, the goal is to enhance the party mobilization infrastructure that is essential for party strength. Building on studies of social movementFootnote 8 and state capacity,Footnote 9 I define party mobilization infrastructure as collective vehicles that enable a revolutionary party to project its power onto the political system. The party mobilization infrastructure extends beyond merely soliciting political support from key sectors of society; rather, assistance from party members is sought to leverage their formal and informal networks to ensure policy compliance from the targeted population, willingly or unwillingly. Simply put, party members act as conduits to achieve the party’s objectives under an effective party mobilization infrastructure.
What then is the primary objective of a revolutionary party’s mobilization efforts? Earlier scholars have examined mobilization of human resources, that is, attracting and recruiting committed activists and fighters willing to make personal sacrifices and undertake risky actions when facing repression from existing power holders. Few, however, have emphasized the mobilization of financial resources despite their pivotal role in funding the operation of revolutionary parties. The need to secure stable financial resources is particularly crucial during protracted violent and nonviolent struggle against the state. Scholars have recently turned their attention to rebel taxation and governanceFootnote 10 as key aspects of civil conflict beyond the greed and grievance framework developed by Collier and Hoeffler (Reference Collier and Hoeffler2004).
How can party mobilization infrastructure facilitate resource mobilization? For the sake of simplicity, I conceptualize two ideal types of party mobilization infrastructure for resource mobilization. The first type entails a mass mobilization infrastructure aiming to overthrow existing elites and state apparatus. This is a common type of revolutionary party, in which the establishment of grassroots organizations is prioritized, and the core party members are the powerless masses occupying the lower strata of the socioeconomic hierarchy in the society (e.g., teachers, blue-collar workers, and farmers). Communist parties in Russia, China, Cuba, and Vietnam are examples of revolutionary parties with a mass mobilization infrastructure.
The second type is an elite-centric mobilization infrastructure, in which cooperation is solicited from progressive political and economic elites who serve as power brokers on behalf of the party. Revolutionary parties with an elite mobilization infrastructure prioritize building party organizations to coopt existing national and local elites, positioning them the core party members. This type of revolutionary party often manifests in revolutions from above but it could also emerge from mass social movements when party elites recalibrate their revolutionary strategies. Many of these parties originate from independence and nationalist movements, seeking liberation from the old regime occupied or sponsored by imperial powers. The KMT, the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR) in Bolivia, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in Nicaragua, and the Congress Party in India share many characteristics of a revolutionary party with an elite mobilization infrastructure.
Notably, elite mobilization and mass mobilization infrastructures are characterized by distinct comparative advantages and trade-offs. On one hand, building an elite mobilization infrastructure is often a pragmatic strategy because the party can quickly access financial resources with the help of existing elites serving as conduits. Nonetheless, party elites face potential rebellion risks from those elites who facilitate the party’s resource mobilization: The assimilation of strong economic and political elites into a party inevitably increases the difficulty in maintaining elite cohesion. Parties with elite mobilization infrastructure under contested leadership, therefore, often exhibit a mixed capacity in resource mobilization. Although they excel in extracting resources from economic elites, this approach tends to be a leaky bucket when it comes to contributing to overall party strength. Consequently, dominant leaders rarely emerge in elite-mobilization parties with coherent party-building strategies sustained over long periods.
On the other hand, building a mass mobilization infrastructure mitigates the risk of intraparty elite rebellion, but it is a labor- and resource-intensive endeavor, requiring unwavering commitment and tremendous effort by party elites. Although the initial cost of building a mass mobilization infrastructure is staggeringly high, it allows the party to better penetrate society with grassroots organizations and to replace the power structure occupied by existing elites. Nonetheless, contested leadership exacerbates the start-up challenges in the mass mobilization infrastructure, resulting in a much weaker capacity for resource mobilization than elite parties under similar circumstances.
Although the strategic calculation of party leaders may steer the direction of party-building strategies, the type of party mobilization is bound by party ideologies and external political environments. Traditionally, party ideology is viewed as a signaling device that shapes the belief system for revolutionaries and promotes multigroup and cross-class coalitions.Footnote 11 Another important function of party ideology, I contend, is serving as a constraining device that ties the hands of party elites. The interparty competition from the external political environment implies that once a revolutionary party commits to a specific type of mobilization infrastructure, it falls into a state of self-reinforcing equilibrium. Any deviation from their adopted mobilization infrastructure dilutes the party brand and identity, undermining its credibility to the core constituency and generating more harm than benefit. To this end, revolutionary parties cannot pursue mixed strategies to build a broad coalition because such efforts engender internal conflict and factionalism, resulting in incoherent party-building strategies and weak mobilization infrastructure.
Table 1.1 illustrates the implications of intraparty elite conflict and diverging mobilization infrastructure for revolutionary parties’ resource mobilization capacity, along with some comparative examples. Specifically, contested leadership engenders conflictual party-building strategies, crippling the party’s mobilization capacity for human and financial resources, regardless of the type of mobilization infrastructure. As illustrated in Chapter 7, the KMT’s apparent domination over the CCP from 1928 to 1945 cannot conceal the relentless intraparty conflicts among its elites, resulting in a party flush with some strength in elite resource mobilization but weak penetration into the society. The revolutionary movement of the National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria consisted of political elites with diverse preferences, their coalition weakly linked by a nationalistic sentiment. The party was constantly mired in conflict among these elites over party-building strategies, and its attempt to implement a collegial leadership between interior and exterior broke down (Jackson Reference Jackson1977).
Table 1.1 Equilibria of elite conflict and party building
| Mobilization infrastructure | Intraparty elite conflict | Party-building strategy | Resource mobilization capacity | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Elite-centric | Contested leadership | Conflictual party-building strategy | Mixed resource mobilization capacity | KMT (1928–1945) FLN in Algeria |
| Dominant leadership | Coherent party-building strategy | Strong resource mobilization capacity | ||
| Mass-centric | Contested leadership | Conflictual party-building strategy | Weak resource mobilization capacity | CCP (1927–1935) MNR in Bolivia ELF in Eritrea ICP in Vietnam |
| Dominant leadership | Coherent party-building strategy | Strong resource mobilization capacity | CCP (1938–1945) EPLF in Eritrea Viet Minh in Vietnam |
Note: As discussed earlier, few dominant leaders emerged in parties with an elite mobilization infrastructure.
For revolutionary parties with a mass mobilization infrastructure, persistent intraparty conflict is a luxury they cannot afford. Before the seizure of state power, mass-mobilization parties lack the direct access to state and societal resources that parties with elite mobilization infrastructures enjoy. Although the fragility of these political organizations, such as the CCP from 1927 to 1935, the MNR in Bolivia, the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) in Eritrea, and the ICP in Vietnam, can be attributed to a variety of domestic and international factors, the failure to resolve intraparty elite conflicts was a hallmark common to all these parties.
Once a dominant leader emerges, however, these political organizations often experience a transformation leading to resilient parties. As shown in Chapter 6, Mao Zedong’s power ascendancy from 1935 to 1938 fundamentally shifted the CCP away from earlier discriminatory and self-defeating party-building strategies. This crucial transformation into a peasant-centric mobilization infrastructure became a timely preparation for the CCP’s expansion in grain extraction after 1941 during the Sino-Japanese War. Meanwhile, the EPLF in Eritrea broke away from the ELF in 1977, ending the earlier efforts of the ELF to divide its mass organizations on the basis of class status. The rise of Isaias Afwerki as a dominant leader turned the party into an effective mass mobilization organization that later dominated the Eritrean political system after achieving independence in 1991 (Pool Reference Pool2001; Plaut Reference Plaut2016). Similarly, Nguyen Ai Quoc (i.e., Ho Chi Minh) has been credited for holding the Vietnamese communist movement together (Huỳnh Reference Huỳnh1982).
1.1.4 Argument 3: Contingencies as Equilibrium Disruptor
Importantly, Figure 1.2 highlights that dominant and contested party leadership must be recognized as self-perpetuating equilibria, resulting in divergent paths for party-building strategies and ultimately impacting party strength. Contested leadership breeds conflictual party-building strategies in which elites seek to bolster their own power sources while undermining their intraparty rivals, only further intensifying intraparty elite conflicts. Conversely, dominant leadership mitigates elite conflict and paves the way for the development of mobilization infrastructure that solidifies the party leader’s power base.
The equilibrium outcome is not destined, however. Despite the best efforts of party elites, the fortunes of revolutionary parties could be subject to the changing winds of external political and economic environments. Specifically, I conceptualize contingent events as external shocks that disrupt the equilibria of intraparty elite politics and comparative advantage of party mobilization infrastructure. First, although the equilibria of the power dynamics among party elites and party-building strategies are self-enforcing, the balance of power among party elites could be upset by external contingent events, leading to a departure from the state of equilibrium. For instance, counterrevolutionary repression by France generated significant discontinuity in leadership within revolutionary organizations in Algeria and in Vietnam, reshaping factional dynamics within these two revolutionary parties.Footnote 12 Stalin initially faced stiff resistance to his power consolidation after Lenin’s death. The assassination of Sergei Kirov in 1934, a member of the Bolshevik faction and friend of Stalin, became a pretext for Stalin to initiate the Great Purge that facilitated his ascent to dominant leader (Kotkin Reference Kotkin2017; Levitsky and Way Reference Levitsky and Way2022). For the equilibrium of dominant leadership, the sudden departure of a dominant leader can trigger fierce power struggles among a group of equally powered party elites. This occurs because the leader had insufficient time to groom a strong successor.Footnote 13
Second, contingent events may alter broader social, political, and economic environments, reshaping the comparative (dis)advantage of party mobilization infrastructure. Ultimately, the comparative advantage of elite-mobilization infrastructure rests on the strength of the very elites whom the party relies on. Exogenous shocks such as interstate wars, foreign invasions, and natural and economic crises could significantly weaken the de facto power of existing elites in the society and, by extension cripple those political entities relying on an elite mobilization infrastructure. Scholars have presented evidence that colonization challenged – if not dismantled – the de facto power of local elites (Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson Reference Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson2002; Mahoney 2010). Meanwhile, economic shocks and the depletion of natural resources rattle the very foundation that dominant parties monopolize in the current political system (Greene Reference Greene2007; Pepinsky Reference Pepinsky2009). Fundamentally, the success of revolutions in many societies follows on the heels of the decline of existing elites and the weakening of the old regime suffering from political and economic shocks not of their own making.Footnote 14 The weakening of existing elites creates a political vacuum that parties with mass-mobilization infrastructure could fill.
1.2 Why Study China in the Republican Era?
The proposed theoretical framework is most applicable within a specific type of revolutionary party: Those that face intense competition to seize state power but not those that have already seized and consolidated power. In addition, electoral institutions are not the primary arena for political competition. To this end, studying the power struggle between the CCP and the KMT in China during the Republican Era, particularly the period of 1921–1945, is ideal for evaluating the theoretical arguments.
China was embroiled in wars and revolutions in the early twentieth century. The 1911 Chinese Revolution, orchestrated by the forerunners of the KMT, toppled the Qing Dynasty, ushering in the Republican Era. Subsequently, the CCP triumphed in the Chinese Communist Revolution, culminating in the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Despite being a case for scholarly inquiry of revolutions, a notable lack of comparative studies on the organizational development of the CCP and the KMT during this crucial period is apparent.
Importantly, the reversal of fortune experienced by the CCP and the KMT during China’s Republican Era serves as an exemplary case for examining the intricate consequences resulting from intraparty elite power struggle, mobilization infrastructure, and unforeseen contingencies. In the remainder of this section, I first discuss the research design, detailing the ways I employ process tracing and statistical analysis to assess the principal arguments in a historical examination of the CCP and KMT spanning 1921–1945. I then summarize the key insights stemming from my case study, offering a fresh perspective on the monumental political evolution in early twentieth-century China.
1.2.1 Research Design
Case Selection. The organizational evolution of both the CCP and the KMT during the Republican Era illustrates vital variations in the explanatory and outcome variables within and between these two parties. To start, the CCP and the KMT were steered by distinct ideological orientations, resulting in the adoption of different types of mobilization infrastructures. The party ideologies were not merely theoretical guides but also actively shaped the paths that each party pursued. In addition, both parties encountered intense intraparty conflicts throughout this period, often marked by violent conflicts among party elites. The outcomes of these intraparty power struggles led to radical shifts in party-building strategies within these two parties. Finally, this tumultuous era saw various contingent events sparked by both domestic and international sources, significantly shaping the balance of power among party elites and the comparative advantage of party mobilization infrastructure within and between these two parties.
Noting that the fates of the CCP and KMT were intertwined throughout this period is crucial. This distinctive feature of the within-country research design provides a holistic approach to studying the evolution of revolutionary parties, emphasizing that both internal dynamics and interactions with political adversaries within the same country are consequential drivers behind party strength. After all, the success or failure of revolutionary parties and that of their political rivals are two sides of the same coin. Examining the intra and interparty struggles between the CCP and KMT offers a holistic understanding of the drivers and outcomes of party-building strategies pursued by revolutionary parties.
A Mixed-Methods Approach. I integrate both qualitative and quantitative evidence drawn from a historical examination of the CCP and the KMT from 1921 to 1945. Specifically, I employ process tracing at critical junctures during which exogenous events shift the balance of power among party elites, resulting in radical departures in party-building strategies. I also explore the effects of exogenous shocks stemming from two types of warfare, that is, domestic conflicts vis-à-vis interstate conflicts, on the comparative advantage of party mobilization infrastructure held by the CCP and KMT, respectively. To complement the qualitative evidence, I offer quantitative analysis derived from a novel dataset constructed from party and government archives. This dataset comprises party membership size, the socioeconomic background of party members, grassroots party organizations, and importantly, both the sources and levels of financial resources mobilized by these two parties over time. The quantitative evidence underscores the pivotal role of party mobilization infrastructure in resource mobilization, particularly within the context of party-building strategies and wartime conditions.
Observable Indicators of Key Variables. To operationalize the key variables of interest, I adopt several approaches to identify the observable indicators for both explanatory and outcome variables. Some concepts present challenges in pinpointing these indicators because of their multifaceted nature and varying contexts, difficulties compounded by the scarcity of data available for this turbulent historical period. Consequently, I rely on several sets of observable indicators to measure important concepts in the theoretical framework. Table 1.2 summarizes the important indicators for these crucial concepts in the theoretical framework: intraparty elite balance of power, party-building strategy, party mobilization infrastructure, and finally, and resource mobilization.
Table 1.2 Observable indicators of key concepts
| Intraparty elite balance of power | Party-building strategy | Mobilization infrastructure | Resource mobilization capacity |
|---|---|---|---|
| (1) Party leadership turnover (2) The composition of members serving on party committees (3) Opinions adopted in party decision-making | (1) Types of individuals that the party prioritizes in recruiting and holding leadership positions (2) Priority in building organizations for elite power sharing or grassroots mobilization | (1) Number of party members (2) Attributes of party members (3) Strength of grassroots organizations | (1) Sources of resource mobilization (2) Levels of resource mobilization |
1.2.1.1 Intraparty Elite Balance of Power
Measuring the degree of power possessed by a political actor poses an acute challenge. Not only are interpersonal power dynamics difficult to observe, but they are also fluid, changing over time. This issue is particularly pronounced in non-democracies, where electoral support and public opinion fail to reflect the genuine degree of power. To overcome these challenges, I employ three observable indicators to evaluate the degree of intraparty elite balance of power between dominant leadership vis-à-vis contested leadership.
Following the studies of institutional analysis, where formal structures and rules define political power in any given position, I rely on changes in party leadership to evaluate intraparty elite balance of power. Specifically, a party experiencing contested leadership is characterized by frequent turnover in leadership and a relatively equal share of factions in party committees. Conversely, a party under dominant leadership exhibits stable leadership and a dominant faction aligning with the leader within the committees. Meanwhile, I gauge the de facto power of party elites by examining the extent to which their preferences are reflected in decisions and policies and the allocation of resources. Specifically, I scrutinize the connection between the opinions voiced by specific party elites and the content articulated in party policy documents.
1.2.1.2 Party-Building Strategy
To measure the shifts in party-building strategies, I focus on the timing and content of party resolutions, announcements, and internal communications on party recruitment, internal promotion, and organizational reforms issued by both the Party Center and local party organizations. For instance, internal party documents, particularly CCP sources, contain rich information on CCP party resolutions mandating which groups of individuals the Party should recruit or exclude and who should hold leadership positions. The KMT archives reveal the important debates among party elites on the abolition of mass mobilization strategies after the purge of the CCP.
1.2.1.3 Mobilization Infrastructure
I use three indicators to capture the characteristics of party mobilization infrastructure: (1) size of party membership, (2) attributes of party members, and (3) strength of grassroots organizations. The size of party membership reflects a raw measure of party strength; however, the quantity of party membership does not always match the quality. Hence, I employ the second indicator – the attributes of party members – that reflects the very nature of party mobilization infrastructure. For instance, tracing the attributes of CCP party members reveals a tension in recruiting intellectuals, workers, and peasants, reflecting an urban-centric mass mobilization infrastructure vis-à-vis a rural one. The attributes of KMT members, by contrast, demonstrate the elite nature of its mobilization infrastructure despite a mass membership; moreover, the characteristics of party members reveal the nuanced strategies of party elites, each leveraging their unique sources of power with aims to bolster their influence while undercutting their adversaries. Finally, the strength of grassroots party organization, manifested in the total number of members and organizational effectiveness, is a key indicator of party grassroots mobilization capacity.
1.2.1.4 Resource Mobilization Capacity
For resource mobilization capacity, not only do I evaluate the level of financial resources mobilized by the party and its governing bodies, but I also investigate the methods and sources of revenue mobilization that reflect the very nature of mobilization infrastructure. An elite-mobilization infrastructure, for example, depends on the collaboration of economic elites, who make financial contributions through donation and taxation. A mass-mobilization infrastructure, however, relies on grassroots organizations and party members to address the complexities of taxation and fiscal extraction, ensuring widespread participation and compliance.
Data Sources. Garnering evidence on elite conflicts and party building in China during the Republican Era is challenging because violent warfare and radical party reforms undermined systematic record-keeping for both parties. Thus, I assembled the empirical evidence from scattered primary and secondary archives of party and government records. For the CCP, I rely on a wide range of compendiums containing archived political and economic records for central and local CCP activities during the period before 1949, especially in those revolutionary base areas before and during the Sino-Japanese War. As for the KMT, I rely on both internal government and party records as well as secondary sources. Specifically, the compendiums of KMT organization archives, produced by both Chinese and Taiwanese scholars, offer critical information on party building by the KMT during the Republican Era. Appendix A–C highlight the sources of CCP and KMT party and government archives used in my empirical investigation.
Some maintain that party archives may not reliably portray reality because they tend to paint an optimistic picture of party affairs without mentioning challenges and internal turmoil. This sentiment rings true for many authoritarian regimes. Nevertheless, party archives also reveal critical insights about party elite dynamics and party-building efforts, portraying surprisingly vivid information about the challenges and setbacks confronted by the CCP and the KMT. If anything, challenges and setbacks depicted in party archives are only the tip of iceberg in terms of the harsh reality both parties faced.
1.2.2 A Fresh Lens: Understanding the Reversal of Fortune of the CCP and KMT
The investigation of intraparty elite competition, resource mobilization, and contingent events shed new light on the puzzling reversal of fortune between the CCP and KMT during the Republican Era. These new perspectives bridge an important gap between the fragility of the CCP prior to 1935 and its transformation during the Sino-Japanese War. Together, these fresh perspectives call into question conventional wisdom about the ascent of the CCP and the decline of the KMT.
Power Consolidation of Party Leadership and Party Building. Although external repressive circumstances hindered the CCP’s efforts to expand its mass mobilization infrastructure from 1921 to 1935, the presence of contested leadership and lack of a dominant leader were equally pivotal in exacerbating its vulnerability in the early days. The intense intraparty power struggle generated conflictual party-building strategies (Chapter 5). The CCP was, therefore, far from the disciplined Leninist party that it claimed to be,Footnote 15 suffering from leadership defection and self-defeating party-building strategies. Although the CCP achieved significant expansion during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), this achievement is inextricably linked to Mao’s resurgence and power consolidation from 1935 to 1938 (Chapter 6). The transformation of the CCP organization would not have happened had Mao not become a dominant party leader. Importantly, the resurgence of the CCP was driven more by the resolution of contested leadership than by his vision and tactics alone.
Figure 1.3 vividly illustrates the evolving balance of power among CCP elites, revealing two radically different pictures under contested leadership and dominant leadership from 1921 to 1945. Using data from different cohorts of CCP Central Committee (中央委员会), I trace the shares of Central Committee (CC) members stemming from different social backgrounds, a proxy for the balance of power among party elites. Under contested leadership, we observe frequent and pronounced changes in the social backgrounds of CC members from the first CC in 1921 to the Sixth CC in 1928 (Figure 1.3a), subsequently leading to radical shifts in party-building strategies. By contrast, Mao’s return to the CCP’s highest leadership circle after 1935 led to a striking stability in the social-class composition of the Central Committee. Mao’s power consolidation accompanied a gradual but steady rise of CC members from the peasant class and the decline of members from the worker class from 1935 onward in the Sixth CC (Figure 1.3b). Mao’s power consolidation put an end to the self-inflicted damage caused by the CCP’s discriminatory practices in recruiting and promoting party membership and facilitated building the foundation for a robust rural mass mobilization infrastructure during wartime.
Figure 1.3 CCP Central Committee class backgrounds (1921–1945)
Note: The data derive from the author’s database, which includes both full and alternate members of CCP Central Committee (CC). The social class of CCP CC members was coded based on family background. See Appendix B for more details on the coding rule.
In contrast, the unrelenting elite conflicts within the KMT crippled its party building, rendering an elite mobilization infrastructure with mixed quality (Chapter 7). The intraparty elite power struggle had been a constant theme in party politics, which significantly intensified after the death of Sun Yat-sen in 1925. The succession battle was fought mainly among Chiang Kai-shek, Wang Ching-wei (KMT Left Faction), and Hu Han-min (KMT Right Faction). For the purpose of comparison with the CCP, I use the faction classification of the KMT Central Committee (中央执行委员会) members to illustrate the evolution of power struggles among KMT elites (Figure 1.4). As shown, the evolution of the power struggle among KMT elites led to the radical changes in faction composition of the KMT Central Committee. Chiang’s opportunistic alliance with the KMT-Left and the KMT-Right throughout this period reveals the fragile nature of any formal and informal power-sharing arrangement under contested leadership. Although the balance of power gradually shifted in favor of Chiang, he continually faced challenges from elder KMT party elites and regional military strongmen. Elite power struggles persisted even within Chiang’s inner circle.Footnote 16 Consequently, the subsequent KMT Central Committees (1935–1945) primarily consisted of a quasi-dominant Chiang faction and a large number of smaller factions (KMT-Other) that were unable to unite and challenge Chiang.
Figure 1.4 KMT Central Committee factions (1924–1945)
Note: The data derive from the author’s database, which includes both full and alternate members of the KMT Central Committee. The coding of factions was based on these individuals’ biographies, which indicate the political factions to which they belonged when they were elected to the KMT Central Committee. See Appendix B for more details on the coding rule.
Resource Mobilization and Party Strength. Tracing the level and source of fiscal extraction by both parties, I demonstrate that resource mobilization is a genuine source of party strength. As demonstrated below, this alternative perspective reflects party strength better than the size of the membership of the CCP and the KMT depicted in Figure 1.1.
First, the KMT’s early domination over the CCP was rooted in its superior resource mobilization capacity (Chapter 3). Before the CCP fully developed its mass mobilization infrastructure, the fragility of the CCP from 1921 to 1935 can be exhibited in its weak capacity for resource mobilization. At its inception the CCP largely relied on windfall revenue, that is, financial assistance from the Comintern and the Soviet Union, which was hardly sufficient for party expansion. When the CCP was forced to instigate urban and rural insurgencies after 1927, the establishment of Soviet revolutionary bases offered a new revenue source – expropriation of rural elites – which replaced meager Comintern aid as a major source of revenue for the CCP. Despite the success of the CCP in expanding its military strength manifested in the Red Army, resource mobilization through coercion and expropriation was not a sustainable strategy. The CCP finally lost its Jiangxi Soviet base to the KMT’s Fifth Encirclement military campaign in 1935 after exhausting the human and financial resources in its base.
By contrast, the KMT’s early domination over the CCP was linked to its success relying on its elite mobilization infrastructure, which allowed the KMT to assimilate existing elites into the party and build fiscal institutions targeting business elites prior to the Sino-Japanese War. Hence, the KMT achieved remarkable success in building fiscal capacity through indirect taxation of urban business activities. The KMT’s robust capacity in resource mobilization played a pivotal role in its dominance over the CCP despite constant internal elite conflicts.
Nonetheless, extant studies have insufficiently emphasized the devastating impact of the Sino-Japanese War on the KMT’s extractive capacity.Footnote 17 The Sino-Japanese War exposed the weakness of the KMT’s urban-centric elite mobilization structure concentrated in coastal and northern China, turning its comparative advantage into disadvantage. When both parties were forced to extract grain from rural China to finance the war, the CCP’s rural mobilization infrastructure began to shine (Chapter 4). In contrast to conventional wisdom, internal party archives reveal that the CCP imposed a more onerous fiscal burden on the peasantry than the KMT central government did during the Sino-Japanese War. On the one hand, the CCP was able to levy grain from approximately 70–90 percent of rural households in their base areas, and its progressive grain levies extracted from 10 to 20 percent of local grain output across major base areas from 1941 to 1945. Relying on its mass mobilization infrastructure, the CCP employed a technique I call “mobilized compliance,” the essence of which is twofold: (1) mobilize ordinary citizens to become the eyes and ears of the party and (2) reshape the focal point of conflicts stemming from grain extraction. The CCP was, therefore, able to secure compliance in grain extraction from rural China without stirring mass resentment. Notably, the CCP’s success in employing mobilized compliance through its grassroots organizations after 1941 was preceded by Mao’s power consolidation from 1935 to 1938, which enabled the CCP to build an effective mass mobilization infrastructure in rural China. This transformation stood in stark contrast to the earlier period of contested leadership when the CCP failed to build an effective mass mobilization infrastructure.
On the other hand, the KMT suffered a deadly revenue shock because the invading Japanese seized control of a significant portion of northern and coastal provinces, which contributed to nearly 75 percent of the KMT’s prewar revenue. Facing twin crises in fiscal revenue and spending, the KMT intensified its tax reform, including the expansion of direct taxation, but to no avail. When the KMT centralized the land tax through the grain levy in kind in 1941, its regressive grain extraction strategies led to inefficient and inequitable fiscal extraction in rural China because of the KMT’s reliance on local elites for assessment and compliance. On average, the KMT central government was able to extract only 6.62 percent from local grain production, far less than the degree of grain extraction by the CCP during the same period. Furthermore, the KMT’s inability to effectively control ad hoc grain extraction by both military and local governments is a clear manifestation of the failure to achieve fiscal centralization, a hallmark of its weak fiscal capacity. The failures of KMT fiscal extraction in turn gave rise to reliance on monetary expansion to finance the war, which planted the seeds of the KMT’s later downfall.
The Role of Contingent Events. As much as the CCP may have wanted to emphasize its predestinated triumph, one must recognize the significant influence of contingent events in shaping both its internal party-building endeavors and the dynamics of interparty competition. Specifically, contingent events shifted the balance of power among party elites, leading to a major departure in party-building strategies. For instance, although some attribute the rise of Mao to his strategic maneuvers, specifically during the 1942–1944 Yan’an Rectification Campaign (Gao Reference Gao2000), he would have been unable to launch this campaign had his main political rivals – Zhang Guotao and Wang Ming – not been weakened by a disastrous military debacle and a shift in Stalin’s support, respectively.
By the same token, the sudden death in 1925 of Sun Yat-sen, the preeminent KMT leader, generated constant factional struggle within the KMT in the ensuing succession battle. A fierce power struggle among party elites resulted in Chiang Kai-shek’s 1927 anti-Communist purge, marking the collapse of the First United Front and the end of Sun’s aspirations to integrate Leninist principles into the KMT organization. In his quest for power consolidation, Chiang encountered formidable opposition from KMT elites and regional powerholders. Chiang finally neutralized major intraparty rivals Hu Han-min and Wang Ching-wei, who eventually succumbed to health issues and assassination, respectively, in 1935.
The reversal of fortune of the CCP and the KMT during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) captures another critical role played by contingencies in shaping external political and economic environments. By the time the CCP’s First Red Army reached northern Shaanxi in 1935, it was an exhausted and demoralized group of men and women. They were immediately besieged by the Northwestern Army under General Yang Hucheng and the Northeastern Army under General Zhang Xueliang. As Chiang Kai-shek arrived in Xi’an to personally orchestrate the final assault, Yang and Zhang staged the shocking Xi’an incident on December 12, 1936, putting Chiang on house arrest, and forced him to end the civil war against the CCP. The Xi’an incident single-handedly altered the course of history, affording the CCP the crucial breathing room needed to recuperate and revive.
Furthermore, the war’s most consequential impact was the decimation of the KMT’s elite mobilization infrastructure. The outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War dealt a serious blow to the comparative advantage of KMT’s elite-mobilization infrastructure in urban China. The Japanese invasion in coastal and northern regions of China forced major business elites and the KMT central government to retreat. Because the KMT was unable to “tax the rich” as a war mobilization strategy, it turned to local elites as power brokers for grain extraction, thus generating vast inequity and resentment. By contrast, the rural mobilization infrastructure developed by the CCP from 1937 to 1940 became a comparative advantage, allowing the CCP to intensify its rural extraction without generating mass resentment after 1941. Ultimately, the Sino-Japanese War propelled the rise of the CCP, but its impact centered on weakening the elite mobilization infrastructure of the KMT while bolstering the strength of the CCP’s mass mobilization infrastructure.
1.3 What’s New?
This book offers three unique perspectives contributing to major scholarly debates about authoritarian politics, political parties, and Chinese politics. At the outset, I join recent scholar in examining the origins of authoritarian parties; however, I diverge from the current emphasis concerning the violent origins of political parties in enhancing regime durability after they seized state power. Instead, I delve into the turbulent moments before revolutionary parties seize state power, examining why and how they make pivotal decisions concerning organizational development in their struggles with their political rivals. I challenge the established narrative of power sharing, calling attention to the surprising role of dominant party leadership in facilitating successful organizational transformation of revolutionary parties. One major takeaway from this new insight is that the mechanisms sustaining the durability of authoritarian parties are not the same as those allowing them to conquer the state in the first place.
In addition, I address a crucial omission in the scholarship on political parties. Prominent research on political parties primarily centers on mobilizing voters as the chief function of political parties and explains the ways institutional rule and societal cleavages shape the development of political parties. Focusing on revolutionary parties, I emphasize that the value of their mobilization infrastructure extends beyond rallying dedicated supporters; instead, party mobilization infrastructure plays a pivotal role in aiding the parties to implement difficult and sometimes unpopular policies. Crucially, I view the organizational form of revolutionary parties as an outcome shaped by intraparty elite conflicts but not predetermined by initial structural factors such as social ties and resource endowment.
Finally, this book offers a unified framework to explain both the ascent of the CCP and the decline of the KMT during China’s Republican Era. I fill an important gap in existing studies that inadequately explain the miraculous resurgence of the CCP from a fragile and marginalized organization prior to 1935 into a strong party after 1945. My answer lies in pivotal rise of Mao in CCP leadership circle from 1935 to 1938. In addition, I concur with existing scholarship that the Sino-Japanese War was truly a catalyst for the rise of the CCP, but not for the reason that conventional wisdom suggests. The most consequential effect of the war was the devastation of KMT’s elite mobilization infrastructure; otherwise, the CCP’s rural mobilization infrastructure would not have succeeded.
1.3.1 Party Building amid Violent Struggle: The Blessing of Power Consolidation and the Perils of Power Sharing
Extant studies of authoritarian parties center on their role in managing elite conflict and controlling the masses, two fundamental challenges facing any authoritarian regime (Svolik Reference Svolik2012). Nonetheless, few focus on the vital organizational development of revolutionary organizations before they seize state power. This oversight may obscure the complex dynamics underpinning leadership dynamics, party cohesion, and party strength during the revolutionary movement. After all, not all authoritarian parties were created by the ruling elites for the purpose of maintaining regime stability; in fact, less than 40 percent of authoritarian ruling parties were established by autocratic leaders.Footnote 18 Importantly, not all authoritarian parties succeeded in seizing state power. If parties created by dictators and the military juntas are excluded, only 19 percent of authoritarian ruling parties seized power during the first two years; and the average year of power seizure is sixteen years.Footnote 19
Although some scholars have recently turned their attention to the origins of authoritarian parties, the predominant focus remains on the long-term impact of violent struggles experienced by these parties on regime longevity.Footnote 20 The conjecture underlying this research enterprise is that violent struggles during political parties’ inceptions prolong regime resilience because they foster partisan identities, territorial organizations, and elite cohesion.Footnote 21 Regarding the fateful decisions concerning the revolutionary strategies and the organizational development of these political entities prior to the seizure of state power, scholars fall short in elucidating reasons why some revolutionary parties triumph in their quest for power while others falter. Instead, scholars posit a host of idiosyncratic factors, such as leadership traits, ideological commitment, foreign support, size of the country, and powerful neighbors (Levitsky and Way Reference Levitsky and Way2022). If the origins of authoritarian parties play a crucial role in their durability, both those parties that survived and deceased require study because the legacies of revolutionary struggle – successes and failures – have a profound impact on their later resilience and governing style (Schenoni Reference Schenoni2021).
This book marks a significant departure from conventional wisdom by focusing on the early period of revolutionary parties prior to their seizure of state power. In this context, I challenge the primacy of the power-sharing arguments by emphasizing the link between dominant leadership and party strength. This alternative explanation illuminates reasons that some political parties but not others managed to bolster their organizational prowess and ultimately clinch state power. During the critical moments when these political parties fought for survival, I demonstrate that the function of political parties is not necessarily a constraining device for political elites but serve as vehicles for resource mobilization. I show that power sharing among party elites weakens party mobilization infrastructure more than power consolidation because the former undermines party elites’ commitment in party building and weakens the party’s capacity to extract financial resources. By contrast, power consolidation by a party leader mitigates the collective action problem and engenders coherent party-building strategies. Crucially, my arguments do not center on the impact of leadership traits on political movements and revolutions (Aminzade et al. Reference Aminzade, Goldstone, McAdam, Perry, Sewell, Tarrow and Tilley2001; Robnett Reference Robnett1997; Selbin Reference Selbin1993; Tavits Reference Tavits2013); instead I underscore how balance of power among party elites alters their strategic approaches to party-building.
This perspective on the costs of power-sharing resulted from intraparty competition reinforces the insights of thinkers like James Madison and V. O. Key.Footnote 22 Specifically, factionalism and intraparty conflict generate distorted and biased information undermining party decision-making, leading to policymaking divorced from reality. Although some scholars have suggested that factional politics and intraparty democracy could benefit the party at the aggregate because they facilitate information flow for better policymaking and broaden the appeal to voters, their studies primarily situate the argument in functioning democracies.Footnote 23 Revolutionary parties, nevertheless, aim to mobilize committed agents and financial resources instead of voters. Thus, broadening the appeal to voters is irrelevant.
1.3.2 The Emergence of Dominant Parties: Resource Mobilization Is as Important as Human Mobilization
The canonical models of political parties aim to explain the mobilization techniques through which parties compete to garner support from voters (see Cox Reference Cox2015 for a review). Scholars often regard political parties that seize power through nonelectoral means, such as revolutionary parties, as outliers or nonparty organizations.Footnote 24 Many political parties, including revolutionary parties, independence parties, and even rebel organizations, engage in intense power struggles outside the electoral arena. This book fills an important void in the studies of these political organizations by offering a new theoretical account to elucidate why some of them succeed in accumulating power outside electoral institutions but not others.
This book departs from recent scholarship on party building in Africa (Lebas Reference Lebas2011; Riedl Reference Riedl2014), Europe (Grzymala-Busse Reference Grzymala-Busse2002; Kernell 2024; Reuter Reference Reuter2017; Tavits Reference Tavits2013; Ziblatt Reference Ziblatt2017), and Latin America (Lupu Reference Lupu2016). Notably, Ziblatt (Reference Ziblatt2017) differentiates conservative political parties into “hierarchical mass parties” and “contracting-out parties,” and Riedl (Reference Riedl2014) introduces the concept of “incorporation” versus “state substitution” as a power accumulation strategy by authoritarian leaders in her study of party systems in Africa. These conceptualizations bear some resemblance to the ideas about elite and mass mobilization infrastructures set forth in this book. Nonetheless, these studies situate party building in environments where vote mobilization serves as the ultimate objective of the parties.
In contrast, I highlight the crucial role of resource mobilization in the construct of party-building by political parties that operate in an environment where resource mobilization – but not just vote mobilization – is the principal goal for their survival.Footnote 25 One key distinction between democratic and revolutionary parties is that the mobilization infrastructure of the former aims to maximize votes, but the goal of the latter is to maximize crucial resources for party power. This distinction means that revolutionary parties do not necessarily pursue the pivotal “median voter,” but instead radical and committed individuals who are critical to revolutionary parties’ resource mobilization. To this end, the success of building party mobilization infrastructure resembles state building to a large extent, requiring strong commitment from party elites to build infrastructural power that penetrates civil society and logistically implements political decisions (Mann Reference Mann1984).
Notably, this book departs from the prevailing notion that the sources of organizational development by revolutionary parties and rebel organizations stem from preexisting social networks and natural resource endowment.Footnote 26 This book emphasize the role of agency, demonstrating the ways intraparty elite conflicts shape party mobilization infrastructure as well as the trials and errors that occur in seeking alternative revenue when political parties experienced exogenous shocks to their revenue intake and spending.
1.3.3 The Rise of Communism and the Demise of the KMT during the Republican Era
How did the CCP, which ran on an exclusive platform emphasizing conflicts among social classes, transform itself from a fragile and marginalized party into a ruling party with strong mobilization capacity? Why did the KMT, which seemed to embody a more inclusive ideology aiming to liberate China from imperialism, once dominated China’s political system, and consistently had a larger party membership than the CCP, collapse so quickly after the Sino-Japanese War? The stark contrast in the strength of these two parties before and after the Sino-Japanese War is perhaps one of the most enduring puzzles in the twentieth century.
Studies of the KMT have largely attributed its collapse to factional politics and mismanagement of economic policies after 1945Footnote 27 despite some recent historical revisionist accounts highlighting a hostile economic environment and its war efforts.Footnote 28 Importantly, scholars investigated factional politics within the CCP and the KMT in insolation,Footnote 29 but they have yet to compare the elite politics of the CCP and the KMT. Why the KMT was prone to factional politics and why elite power struggle did not plunge the CCP into fragility remain unexplained.
Specifically, existing scholarship on the CCP tends either primarily to emphasize its fragility from 1921 to 1935 or to examine its rise during the period from 1937 to 1945. For instance, scholars have attributed the rise of the CCP to nationalism, political ideology, party discipline, land inequality, cadre training, and class representation.Footnote 30 The regional variation in party expansion during the Sino-Japanese War that paved the way for the CCP to penetrate the society during the post-1949 era has also been emphasized (Koss Reference Koss2018). Nonetheless, these accounts cannot explain why the CCP was so fragile prior to the Sino-Japanese War if it embodied superior party ideology and popular support. Indeed, scholars have documented the earlier struggle by the CCP to attract popular support from the working class and peasantry (Huang Reference Huang2011; Saich Reference Saich2021; Van de Ven Reference Van de Ven1992). These struggles persisted even in CCP base areas during the Sino-Japanese War.Footnote 31 This striking struggle reveals that the CCP did not embody intrinsic ideological appeal to peasants, nor did the War naturally push peasants into the arms of the CCP. Moreover, the internal party archives of the CCP disclose many incidents of graft, embezzlement, and extortion committed by local CCP cadres and armed forces, suggesting that the CCP was not so disciplined as it claimed to be.Footnote 32
Other strands of recent scholarship have turned attention to the role of local actors and contingent events. The contention in one such strand is that the CCP organization was largely dismantled after the purge by the KMT in 1927, saved only by local activists and educated youth, who leverage their social networks to revive the communist movement, setting the stage for the later establishment of CCP base areas (Fewsmith Reference Fewsmith2022). Another strand traces the development of the Shaan-Gan-Ning base area, which later became the refuge of the CCP revival, and proposes that peasant mobilization was hardly inevitable, that multiple contingent events shaped the fates of the CCP and the KMT, and that very little was predestined (Esherick Reference Esherick2022). Indeed, a long line of scholars suggests that socioeconomic inequality varied vastly across China prior to the rise of communism; therefore, China was hardly a hotbed ripe for peasant revolt (Averill Reference Averill2006; Bianco Reference Bianco2001; Galbiati Reference Galbiati1985; Hofheinz Reference Hofheinz1977; Perry Reference Perry1980). The bottom-up approach in this scholarship, however, cannot explain why the CCP turned into a disciplined and effective party organization during the Sino-Japanese War.
I offer a unified framework, shedding new light on the reversal of fortune of the two parties. First, the CCP was not immune to factional politics, so much so that it crippled its party organization, similar to what happened in the KMT. The intense intraparty elite power struggle occurring from 1927 to 1934 helps explain the weakness of the CCP. Mao’s ascent to CCP leadership and the weakening of his main rivals prior to the Sino-Japanese War were key to the CCP’s transformation but not to the War as a transforming event by itself.
Second, resource mobilization is a crucial currency for the strength of the CCP and the KMT. As demonstrated in this book, the weakness of the CCP during the early stages of party formation could be attributed to its inadequate resource mobilization, which relied largely on foreign assistance and expropriation. Meanwhile, the KMT was a stronger party because its elite mobilization infrastructure allowed it to tap into state resources. Unfortunately, the foundation of KMT extractive capacity crumbled during the Japanese invasion in areas populated by the very economic elites upon whom it had relied.Footnote 33 Hence, wars matter, but not the way that existing bellicist theories suggest.Footnote 34 The impact of the Sino-Japanese War is more about its detrimental impact on the fiscal foundation of the KMT than about its beneficial impacts on that of the CCP.
1.4 Looking Ahead
The remainder of this manuscript is organized as follows. I detail a theoretical framework in Chapter 2, underscoring the way strategic interactions among party elites shape the party’s strategies to develop its mobilization infrastructure, which in turn facilitates resource mobilization. The key insights of the theoretical framework are threefold. First, party ideology serves as a constraining device determining the types of party mobilization infrastructure – elite-centric vis-à-vis mass-centric – which embody distinct comparative advantages. Second, domination by a party leader mitigates the collective action problem faced by party elites, leading to the implementation of coherent party-building strategies that improve the effectiveness of mobilization infrastructure. In contrast, when party elites engage in contentious leadership struggles, the quality of mobilization infrastructure suffers because of conflicting party-building strategies. Finally, I integrate the concept of contingent events into the theoretical framework, positing that the balance of intraparty elite power and the comparative advantage of mobilization infrastructure act as mediators through which these events influence party strength. Specifically, I illustrate the function of such contingencies as exogenous shocks disrupting the equilibrium of party-building strategies and the comparative advantages of various forms of mobilization infrastructure. The disruptions in turn have a profound and often transformative impact on the robustness and resilience of the party.
Following Chapter 2’s theoretical framework, Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate the crucial role of resource mobilization for the CCP and the KMT from 1921 to 1945. Using a diverse range of party and government archives, I constructed a novel dataset tracking the scale and sources of financial revenues mobilized by these two parties. These novel data provide a comprehensive fiscal portrait of the financial undertakings of both parties throughout this epoch.
I reveal in Chapter 3 that the KMT benefited from its elite mobilization infrastructure and consistently maintained a more robust resource mobilization than the CCP in the early days, thus establishing dominance in China’s political landscape prior to the Sino-Japanese War. On the contrary, the CCP relied on meager financial support from the Comintern and ad hoc expropriation of rural elites, struggling to develop a consistent flow of financial resources.
Chapter 4 illustrates that the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War fundamentally shifted the comparative advantages of party mobilization infrastructures of the CCP and the KMT. Specifically, the Japanese occupation in coastal and northern China significantly weakened the KMT by undermining the economic elites upon whom its elite mobilization infrastructure relied. Meanwhile, the CCP was able to take advantage of its mass mobilization infrastructure to respond to fiscal shocks from the war. At the point when both parties were forced to extract grains-in-kind after 1941 as a remedy to rising fiscal demand, my novel dataset uncovers a surprising pattern: The CCP developed a significantly stronger fiscal capacity for grain extraction than the KMT. I further demonstrate that the CCP used its grassroots party organization to mobilize compliance in the peasantry. Alongside progressive grain extraction, the party was able to maintain popular support even in the face of a significantly higher degree of extraction. The KMT, by contrast, employed a form of indirect rule relying on local elites for grain extraction, which generated regressive taxation and corruption, stirring mass resentment despite a lower grain burden. Using grain extraction as a point of illustration and data from a wide range of party and government archives, I present qualitative and quantitative evidence to shed light on the source of the party strength of the CCP and the KMT.
Chapters 5, 6, and 7 offer detailed process tracing of the organizational evolution of the CCP and the KMT, pinpointing the cascades from intraparty elite power struggles to party-building strategies and subsequently, the development of party mobilization infrastructure. In these case studies I pay close attention to contingencies, showing that they shifted the balance of power among party elites and generated a ripple effect on party-building strategies and party mobilization infrastructure. Specifically, Chapter 5 documents the intense intraparty power struggle occurring within the CCP after the sudden downfall of CCP leader Chen Duxiu in 1927 following intervention by the Comintern and the Soviet Union. From 1927 to 1934, the intense elite contestation under the shadow of the Comintern led CCP elites to follow Leninist doctrine, strictly pursuing radical urban insurgencies and worker-centric party-building strategies despite China’s predominance as an agrarian society.
Chapter 6 shows that Mao Zedong’s return to the CCP highest leadership circle after the Zunyi Conference in January 1935 was indeed a pivotal event, after which the CCP changed its party-building strategies. Mao would not have been able to consolidate his power without the help of contingent events undermining his main political rivals, Zhang Guotao and Wang Ming, who were weakened by a military debacle and the shift in Stalin’s support, respectively. By tracing CCP party-building strategies, I illustrate that the CCP’s departure away from conflictual and discriminatory party-building strategies and the embrace of intellectuals and peasants into its mobilization infrastructure after Mao consolidated his power. By late 1938 the CCP had completely abandoned its previous discriminatory practice of emphasizing social classes as the primary criteria for the party-building strategies, resulting in a party mobilization infrastructure ripe for rural fiscal extraction starting in 1941.
Chapter 7 traces the unrelenting intraparty power struggle within the KMT from 1921 to 1945. After the sudden death of Sun Yat-sen, the party founder, Chiang Kai-shek quickly ascended the KMT ranks by exploiting ideological conflicts between the KMT-Left and KMT-Right factions, but he constantly faced challenges from his intraparty rivals, who coalesced around regional military strongmen. Similar to the rise of Mao, Chiang benefited from contingent events and finally eliminated threats from Hu Han-min and Wang Ching-wei, two main rivals who suffered from medical problems. Chiang, however, was only a quasi-dominant party leader, and regional strongmen remained defiant in the face of his reform efforts. Importantly, the KMT remained a party deeply entrenched in an elite mobilization infrastructure, heavily reliant on the cooperation of regional strongmen and local elites for policy implementation. The lack of infrastructure for mass mobilization became an impediment later when the power of those elites upon which the KMT relied was weakened during the Japanese invasion, as shown in its failures in grain extraction detailed in Chapter 4.
In Chapter 8 I briefly discuss the legacies of the revolutionary struggle for both the CCP and the KMT after 1949. I then offer some concluding reflections as well as major takeaways beyond China for understanding how political parties operate in a weak institutional environment and seek to accumulate power outside of the electoral institutions. Specifically, I show that the party-building experience of the CCP and the KMT during their revolutionary struggles cast a long shadow on political development in mainland China and Taiwan after 1949, respectively. I illustrate the enduring emphasis on leadership dominance for party unity and mobilized compliance for policy implementation in the CCP’s post-1949 governance style. Conversely, KMT leaders recognized the superior organization of the CCP as a decisive factor in its downfall. As a result, the KMT shifted its focus toward fostering elite cohesion and grassroots party structures in Taiwan. Although this strategy initially bore fruit for the KMT’s power consolidation in Taiwan, the party still relied on elite mobilization infrastructure for societal penetration. The KMT’s clientelistic machine eventually broke down when Taiwan democratized, losing its monopoly to the Democratic Progressive Party. Finally, I revisit the puzzling reversal of fortune among the CCP and the KMT, highlighting both leadership domination and resource mobilization as the key foundations of powerful revolutionary parties. I further underscore the significance of contingencies in comprehending the evolution of revolutionary parties.
