7 The 100 Most Influential World Leaders of All Time 7soldiers, 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 northwest-
ern 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