7 The 100 Most Influential World Leaders of All Time
7
soldiers, easily defeated large forces of inferior troops sent against it by Chiang Kai-shek. But it was unable to stand up against Chiang’s own elite units, and in October of 1934, the major part of the Red Army and Mao abandoned the base in Jiangxi and set out for the northwest of China. This event became known as the Long March. When some 8,000 troops who had survived the perils of the Long March arrived in Shaanxi Province in northwestern China in the autumn of 1935, events were already moving toward the third phase in Mao’s rural odyssey. The third phase was to be characterized by a renewed united front with the Nationalists against Japan and by the rise of Mao to unchallenged supremacy in the party. This phase is often called the Yan’an period (for the town in Shaanxi where the Communists were based). By the time the Japanese began their attempt to subjugate all of China in July 1937, the terms of a new united front between the Communists and the Nationalists had been virtually settled, and the formal agreement was announced in September 1937. In March of 1943, Mao became chairman of the Secretariat and of the Political Bureau. Shortly thereafter the Rectification Campaign took, for a time, the form of a harsh purge of elements not sufficiently loyal to Mao. Mao’s campaign in the countryside then moved into its fourth and last phase—that of civil war with the Nationalists. The People’s Liberation Army took Nanjing in April of 1949. Mao’s agrarian Marxism differed from the Soviet model, but, when the Communists succeeded in taking power in China in 1949, the Soviet Union agreed to provide the new state with technical assistance.
Great Leap Forward Mao’s Great Leap Forward, an industrialization campaign, was formally launched in May 1958. The peasants were to 244