Before the CCP Founded the PRC: Why Chinese People Turned to Communism
Discussing this topic requires avoiding the misconception that “turning to communism” was a uniform, nationwide choice. China’s society in the first half of the twentieth century was extremely fractured: urban intellectuals, rural peasants, workers, soldiers, merchants, local gentry, and overseas Chinese faced different pressures and visible paths. Some actively embraced communism, some merely supported certain revolutionary promises, and some were drawn into a new political order through war, poverty, and organizational mobilization. A more accurate question is: why, before the CCP founded the PRC, could communism develop from a theoretical resource for a few intellectuals into a social force capable of changing China’s political landscape.
Modern China long existed in a state of national crisis. After the collapse of the imperial system, the new republican regime did not quickly establish stable order. Warlord fragmentation, fiscal distress, local violence, foreign pressure, and social poverty made many lose patience with moderate reform. For young students and urban intellectuals, communism was attractive not merely because it came from an external revolutionary theory, but because it provided what seemed a coherent explanation: why the nation was weak, why society was unequal, why the old system could not repair itself, and how to rebuild the state through organized action. In an era when the old order had lost trust, a theory that simultaneously explained national crisis and social injustice naturally drew more attention.
The rural question is another key thread. The CCP’s early strength did not mainly come from a mature industrial society, but from seeking political foundations across China’s vast countryside. Many peasants were not facing abstract ideology, but land, debt, tenancy, conscription, security, and local power structures. When communist discourse entered the countryside, it was often translated into more direct language: who has land, who bears the burden, who can participate in distribution, who represents the interests of the poor. This support did not necessarily mean peasants fully understood Marxist theory, but that under real survival pressures, they responded to promises of changing existing power relations.
The Anti-Japanese War further changed the environment of political competition. War weakened many existing governance structures and forced different political forces to prove their organizational capacity at the grassroots level. The CCP built political connections in some base areas through discipline, propaganda, mass organization, rent and interest reduction, education, and grassroots mobilization. For local people, political judgment was often formed not through abstract institutional comparison, but through concrete experience: who could maintain order, who could explain suffering, who could provide a sense of participation, who could reduce certain direct burdens. Such experiences did not necessarily equal free choice, nor should they be romanticized, but they did help communism transform from a book concept into a perceptible political practice.
The Nationalist government’s own difficulties also created space for CCP expansion. The Nanjing National Government played an important role in state-building, diplomacy, and the Anti-Japanese War, but it also faced severe fiscal, corruption, inflation, conscription, local control, and social trust problems. For some people and intellectuals, the modern state program represented by the Nationalists did not deliver order, justice, and dignity. The Communists, through stronger grassroots organization, a clearer enemy-self narrative, and a stricter image of discipline, shaped expectations of “new politics.” Whether these expectations were later fulfilled is another question requiring serious examination; but before the founding of the PRC, they did constitute mobilizable resources.
The international environment cannot be ignored either. The Russian Revolution, socialist thought, anti-colonial movements, the world economic crisis, and the anti-fascist war shaped the era’s imagination of many Chinese intellectuals. Liberalism, nationalism, anarchism, social democracy, and communism all entered Chinese public discourse. Communism’s eventual advantage did not mean other ideas never existed, but that under conditions of war and revolution, it was better at organization, discipline, sacrifice narratives, and grassroots penetration. Ideas need organization to carry them; without organizational capacity, theory rarely becomes regime competitiveness.
Therefore, China’s turn toward communism before the CCP founded the PRC cannot be simply reduced to “being deceived” or “inevitably correct.” It is more like a historical result叠加 of multiple failures, crises, and choices: the old order lost trust, rural society needed redistribution promises, national war expanded grassroots mobilization space, Nationalist governance difficulties weakened alternatives, and the CCP combined theory, organization, and mass work into a continuously expanding political machine. Understanding this process is not to excuse later political violence and institutional problems, nor to deny the genuine desire for change many people had at the time, but to see clearly: when a society long lacks credible reform paths, why radical solutions appear attractive.
For today’s Chinese readers, the most cautionary aspect of this history is precisely the complex relationship between ideals, suffering, and power. That an idea can mobilize the suffering does not automatically prove it will respect the suffering; that an organization can overthrow an old order does not automatically guarantee it will establish an accountable new order. Looking back at communism’s pre-founding attractiveness requires simultaneously acknowledging the reality of social crisis at the time and retaining skepticism toward political promises. Only in this way can historical discussion stay beyond slogan-level praise or simple denial, and help people understand the conditions, costs, and blind spots behind institutional choices.