Not only did Mao make important political alliances with the rural peasant classes, but that these members of Chinese rural regions were to be trained in the art of war. This application of Marxist principles defines the militarization process of the rural working poor, which was only consolidated under the opposition to Japan’s occupation of the country. Mao’s approach, therefore, was to train the traditionally impoverished and powerless rural classes to become militant under the banner of Marxist principles. Lieberthal (1995) defines the dual role in the political and militaristic propaganda of the rural producer and the military styled image that it represented: “Its distinctive character is in large measure a product of the particular rural, militaristic path to power it pursued” (p.39). In this approach, Mao was able to consolidate the militancy he formulated in the early development of the CPC in the late 1920s and early 1930s into a far more powerful military force than was expected by the KMT. Of course, the CPC and the KMT needed lots of soldiers for resist the Japanese, but this was, by far, much easier to do for Mao’s rural peasant armies in contrast to the smaller forces of the KMT’s urban military. After the Japanese were removed from China, Mao began to build larger military units throughout the 1940s as a result of …show more content…
During the late 1920s and early 1930, the increasing political power of Mao Zedong’s CPC was a critical change in the development of primarily capitalistic modernist movements led by the KMT in urban Chinese cities. Mao’s policy of recruiting and training landless and poor peasants in rural areas was decisive strategy that harnessed the power of the “majority” to follow communist principles through Marxist politics. However, Mao utilized a unique method of rural Marxist s development that educated and militarized the Chinese rural populations, instead of a focus on urban centers. In contrast to the Soviet Union, Mao chose a form of “Asian Marxism” that eventually led to larger organizational power and military influence amongst the great masses of rural peasantry in the countryside. The Second United Front during the Second Sino-Japanese war was also a crucial development in the success of Mao’s militarization of the rural peasantry, which galvanized massive populations to fight against the Japanese alongside the KMT. Also, the continued militarization of the CPC under Mao provided a platform in which guerrilla armies would soon turn into full-scale armies that could counter the better trained, but less numerous KMT forces during the 1940s. These are