Resistance and Revolution in China: The Communists and the Second United Front examines how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) secured victory by reframing both its strategy and its relationship to China’s urban politics and to international conflict. Covering the years 1934 to 1943, the study challenges the CCP’s own official history, which portrays Mao’s rural “peasant war” strategy as continuous and unbroken from the Kiangsi period through Japan’s defeat. Instead, the book argues that the Party’s earlier defeats revealed the limits 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 shows how peasant mobilization through land reform was vital, but only possible under the protection of prolonged foreign invasion, which neutralized the KMT and gave the Communists space to expand. Japan’s 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. At the same time, the analysis insists that China’s cities—modern, nationalist, and tied to global currents—remained central to the trajectory of revolution, shaping both the KMT’s mandate and the CCP’s strategic recalibrations. By placing urban and rural China within a single semi-colonial, semi-feudal framework, the book offers a corrective to rural-only paradigms of Communist success, exposing 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.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.