Survival of the Ccp

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How far was the leadership of the CCP responsible for survival of the party between 1927 and 1937? After the united front ended, the CCP were seriously close to extinction, so it was much of a surprise that by 1935 Mao Zedong would become the leader of the party and they would control all of China by 1949. This was mainly down to exceptionally strong leadership shown by Mao during the Nanjing decade. However, there were other reasons for the survival of the CCP: there were other leaders involved in the CCP like Zhu De and challenges from Wang Ming and Bo Gu; the failure of the GMD was also influential to the continuity of the CCP. It is evident that Mao Zedong's abilities to control the party and to know how to improve its stranglehold on China, was the main reason for the CCP's survival. After the White Terror, where about 5,000 communists had been killed, the CCP were in disarray and mainly due to Mao's abilities in turning the situation into a positive, were the CCP able to survive. Mao used the White Terror to signal a way forward for the CCP; he used propaganda to make the peasants feel sympathetic towards the CCP and so would support them. This tactic meant that the support for the CCP started to rise again. This was pivotal to the survival of the CCP as they needed to increase their numbers. Furthermore, one of the only reasons the CCP managed to survive the GMD's encirclement campaigns was because Mao decided to ignore Comintern orders and flee to the mountains of Jiangxi at the end of 1927. This shows how determined Mao was and how he strained to achieve CCP's survival. Without Mao's independent thinking, the CCP would almost certainly have been in chaos and would have been wiped out. Moreover, Mao Zedong's ability to understand the Chinese people - especially the peasants who accounted for 440 million people out of the 500 million people living in
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