Countryside-Centered Thinking

The Chinese Communists with Mao Zedong as their main representative, proceeding from the specific reality of the Chinese revolution, combined the Marxist-Leninist theory of seizing power by armed forces with the reality of the Chinese revolutionary struggle, and gradually formed in the long-term practice of the revolutionary struggle, and the core idea of the revolutionary path was the theory of encircling the cities from the countryside and seizing power by armed forces. The basic contents included: China's rural population accounted for the vast majority of the country's population, peasants were the main force of the Chinese revolution and solving peasants’ land problems had always been the fundamental problem of the Chinese revolution.

The reactionary forces supported by the imperialists had occupied the cities for a long time, and the countryside was the weak link of their rule. Therefore, China's democratic revolution must have first been carried out in the countryside where the enemy's ruling power was relatively weak, and it was necessary to mobilize peasant armed riots, establish people's army, carry out rural guerrilla war and agrarian revolution, establish rural revolutionary base areas, and take the revolutionary countryside as a base, so as to accumulate and develop revolutionary forces in the political, economic, military and cultural aspects, to change the situation in which the enemy was strong and we were weak, and the enemy was big and we were small, and then to capture the central cities and win the national power and the victory of national revolution.

Based on the characteristics of the Chinese revolution, the idea of taking the countryside as the center was established in the collective struggle of the Party and the people. After the failure of the Great Revolution in 1927, the severe situation forced the Chinese Communists to seek a new path of the Chinese revolution. From the three famous armed uprisings of Nanchang Uprising, Autumn Harvest Uprising and Guangzhou Uprising as well as the setbacks of more than 100 uprisings in various places, the Chinese Communists began to realize that the road of seizing power by armed forces in the central cities was impossible in China, and that without a consolidated revolutionary base in the countryside, the uprising could not be consolidated even after the victory.

Mao Zedong first put the foothold of the armed struggle in the countryside, creatively solved a series of fundamental problems that must have been solved in order to adhere to and develop the rural base areas, and made a penetrating exposition of the problem of China's revolutionary path in theory.

In May and October 1928, Mao Zedong first put forward the concept of "armed independent regime of workers and peasants " at the first and second congresses of the Party on the border of Hunan and Jiangxi and demonstrated the reasons for the existence and development of small independent Red Regimes in rural areas of China.

From 1929 to 1930, guerrilla warfare in the countryside had been widely carried out, while the struggle in the urban White areas was always in a difficult situation, and Mao Zedong explored and summarized the experience of the struggle, and further put forward the idea of taking the countryside as the center.

In January 1930, Mao Zedong profoundly discussed the great significance of establishing a Red Regime in China in his letter “A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire”, and he proposed that in semi-colonial China, the establishment and development of the Red Army, guerrillas and Red Areas were the highest forms of peasant struggle under the leadership of the proletariat and the most important factor in promoting the climax of the national revolution, and he also put forward the general concept of the organic combination of peasants' agrarian revolution, armed struggle and revolutionary base areas to develop the revolution, and formed the idea of encircling the city with the countryside and finally seizing the city.

The idea of countryside as the center was an important development of Marxist-Leninist theory of armed seizure of power under the conditions of China.