Political Power Grows out of the Barrel of a Gun

Mao Zedong's symbolic expression of the thought of seizing power by armed forces. At the Party's August 7th meeting in 1927, Mao Zedong summed up the lessons of the failure of the great revolution and put forward to the whole Party for the first time: "Political Power Grows out of the Barrel of a Gun.”

In November 1928, he pointed out in his article "The Struggle in the Jinggang Mountains”: "A special characteristic of the revolution in China, a country with a predominantly agricultural economy, is the use of military action to develop insurrection.”

After the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War, he emphasized again in his "Problems of War and Strategy” and other articles that without armed struggle the proletariat and the Communist Party would have no standing at all in China, and it would be impossible to accomplish any revolutionary task, which is commonly described as “Political Power Grows out of the Barrel of a Gun”.

This assertion holds that China was not independent in external relations and democratic internally but semi-colonial and semi-feudal, was under feudal oppression and that in her external relations she had no national independence but was oppressed by imperialism, and imperialism and its running dog feudal forces in China, relying on their armed forces, exercised autocratic and terrorist rule over the people, and China's proletariat and its political party had no parliament to take advantage of and had no legal rights to organize workers to strike. Therefore, in China, war was the main form of struggle, and the army was the main form of organization. The main task of the Party of the Chinese proletariat was then to unite with as many allies as possible to organize against armed counterrevolution.

All members of the CPC must have contended for the military power of the Party, the people and the nation in the national struggle, so as to grasp the weapon for the victory of the revolution. These conclusions were of great importance for the CPC in attaching importance to armed struggle, and the struggle for the leadership of the revolution.