October 21, 2026
by Cedar James Monroe
Red Star Over China is an account of American journalist Edgar Snow, who visited the Chinese Red Army throughout 1936, just before the war with Japan. [1] In 1935, Mao reached out to trusted contacts, asking for an impartial foreign journalist to visit. Snow was recommended and travelled with an American doctor to Bao’an (today’s Zhidan County of Yan’an City, Shaanxi Province), the capital of the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia revolutionary base. Mao and Zhou Enlai had drawn up an itinerary for the visit and Snow conducted numerous interviews with Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and others such as Peng Dehuai and Xu Teli.
This summary is less a book review and more a series of lessons that I believe we can take from this early development. If Carlos Martinez is correct and the Chinese Communist Party “is the leading force for the development and enhancement of Marxism in the 21st century” (p xix), then what lessons can we learn from the CPC’s early years? What lessons might be useful for organizers today who want to see socialist development in the United States?
Strategy
At the time of Snow’s writing, China was a semi-feudal state. It had just had a nationalist revolution, overthrowing the Qing Dynasty in 1911, but was largely ruled by local warlords. Most people were incredibly poor.
Snow illustrates how bad conditions were, having visited China’s northwest during its famine in 1929, where Snow estimates 3-6 million people died. He reported how shocking it was that the landlord class, during that time, stored large amounts of grain under armed guard as millions starved. They then bought up all the land they could from the starving peasants and used American funds to build a canal for a profitable agricultural production. The local militias formed to defend the landlords had “degenerated into a gang living at the cost of the countryside.”
After the Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1921, it allied itself with the ruling Chinese nationalist party, the Kuomintang led by Chiang Kai-Shek. In 1927, Communist members were massacred and purged from the Kuomintang, leading to civil war.
Mao Zedong and others focused on a rural strategy and established the Jiangxi Soviet in southeast China and consolidated the Red Army. Mao argued that Chinese revolutionaries should focus on rural areas, organizing the peasants, versus focusing on the developing urban working class. He argued that they could not easily take over the large cities, but that they could gain control of the less populated countryside. He proved to be right.
The Jiangxi Soviet resisted the Kuomintang for some time, but the communist revolutionaries were eventually forced to retreat 6,000 miles northwest, in the Long March, in 1934-35. They settled in the northwest and organized the Ya’nan Soviet.
As the CPC formed their soviets and took over rural areas, they faced constant threat from nationalist forces. Strategy proved important.
Uniting the people against a common enemy
First, they worked to unite the peasants behind them. When Snow was travelling to the Northwest soviets, he asked some of his guides if people feared “the Reds.” One person responded; “The rich men fear them, and the landlords, and the officials and tax collectors, yes. But the peasants do not fear them.” Another very young soldier shared that he wanted to “fight the masters who starved their apprentices and to fight the landlords who robbed his parents.”
The CPC focused on uniting people against their common enemies: the landlord class, who were their most direct oppressors, and the Japanese, who were already moving in to try and occupy parts of the northwest. The CPC recognized that it was incredibly important to “to win the support and participation of the peasant masses,” as the famous Chinese military leader Peng Dehuai told Snow. They saw themselves as beholden to the people and their interests.
But they did not just unite people to fight against a common enemy. They built a vision for a different China that captured people’s imagination. Snow frames this as “a new vision in rural China—to fight for a life of justice, equality, freedom and human dignity.” He comments that, as the Red Army fought the nationalists during the end of the civil war, “it was so often the only side in a battle that believed it was fighting for something.”
Changing Material Conditions
The CPC did not just talk about the conditions they wanted to change. They implemented those changes wherever they established a base, to the extent they were able. Snow writes about the Jiangxi Soviet: “Land was redistributed and taxes were lightened… Unemployment, opium, prostitution, child slavery, and compulsory marriage were reported to be eliminated, and the living conditions of the workers and poor peasants in the peaceful areas greatly improved. Mass education made much progress in the stabilized soviets.”
Of course, this did not last forever, they only kept control of that region for a few years before they were forced to retreat. But even on the Long March, they engaged with the rural peasants all along the way and worked to empower them. They distributed anything they seized from the landlords back to the poor: “land deeds were destroyed, taxes abolished and the poor peasantry armed.” The peasantry saw them as a “poor man’s army.”
In the Ya’nan soviet, where they settled in the northwest, they did the same as before: confiscated all the land “not cultivated by the owners themselves,” dispossessing landlords and rich peasants and leaving them only with what they could till themselves. Importantly, they also helped the “middle peasants” by abolishing taxes and recruiting them to the anti-imperial struggle against Japan. They created rural soviets where everyone could vote in their village for representation in the Soviet congress. Each district had committees for education, cooperatives, military and political training, land tilling, and more. Snow was struck, that even when people complained about the government, they called it “our government.” Snow said he never saw a beggar in the soviets.
Peng Dehuai, considered in modern China as one of its greatest military commanders, is quoted by Snow as saying; “Because the masses are interested only in the practical solution of their problems of livelihood, it is possible to develop partisan warfare only by the immediate satisfaction of their most urgent demands …” While the early soviets could only partly satisfy the needs of rural peasants, they prioritized meeting material needs as central to their strategy to gain the support of rural China.
Tactics
They used a variety of tactics to build out this support.
Recruiting enemy forces
First, they recruited heavily, from everywhere they could. Mao, in an interview, noted that some elements in the CPC said that he was a ‘reformist’ because he refused to raid and kill landlords and included “bandits” in their ranks, inviting them to join the Red Army. Mao demanded “generous treatment of captured enemy troops” and, in some places Snow visited, a third of the commanders were former Kuomintang soldiers. Peng Dehuai argued that the opposing army “must, if at all possible, be won over politically on the side of the masses.” One soldier told Snow in his translation: “We don’t kill captured [soldiers]. We educate them.”
Only fighting battles they could win
Snow records many Red Army slogans, including: “When the enemy advances, we retreat!” “When the enemy seeks to avoid battle, we attack!” There was an emphasis on only fighting battles that they could win and retreating when they must. Other military commanders wanted to focus on large cities, and protracted military fights, but Mao always advocated for rural advance and “the consolidation under thorough soviet power of such areas as already had fallen to the Red Army.”
Peng Dehuai, in his interview, said the CPC “must not fight any losing battles. Unless there are strong indications of success, they should refuse any engagement.” Surprise and retreat were the main tactics.
Organizing across difference
China was and remains a vast country with many different ethnic and minority groups, many of whom had been in long conflict with the Chinese government. There was a great deal of ethnic tension and hatred between the majority Han Chinese and other ethnic groups, especially in the west. During the Long March, the Red Army marched through the territory of the Yi people, a Chinese Indigenous group, and built alliances with them. The CPC were able to free Indigenous hostages of local warlords and help arm them to maintain their independence. Some joined the Red Army. Mao’s army also promised they would help them create autonomous regions and self-rule (which they did after the creation of the People’s Republic of China and these regions remain autonomous to this day).
Muslims in the northwest, in Ningxia and Gunsu, were also recruited into the Red Army, who promised to cancel the heavy debt most of the population found themselves in, to abolish surtaxes, to protect Muslim culture and religious freedom, and to form an autonomous Muslim government armed against Japanese imperialism. They created a training regiment, recruiting from local warlord armies. They trained Muslim educators in party schools to provide education; they created their own materials, newspapers, plays, and held their own meetings. There was a longstanding and deep ethnic antagonism between Hui Muslims and the Han Chinese. The Red Army created rules for their Han troops to use respectful language and practice toward the Hui people.
The CPC strategy was to both meet demands and create respectful dialogue–and frame a common enemy: “Our common enemy are the landlords, the capitalists… our common aim is revolution.” Peng Dehuai, talking about the Hui, said in a speech recorded by Snow: “These people are also brothers, and will respond to the same treatment as other human beings. We must not miss a single opportunity to convince a white [Kuomintang] soldier or a Mohammedan [Hui Muslim] peasant… Remember that they have heretofore had no political consciousness except racial hatred.”
Addressing inequality
The CPC believed that addressing social inequality was vital to furthering their vision. Women were given full suffrage and equal pay in the soviets and women’s organizations were formed in every village to further organise their interests and education. Snow noted; “The aim of soviet organization obviously was to make every man, woman, and child a member of something, with definite work assigned to him to perform.”
The soviets also outlawed practices like foot binding and polygamy, as well as buying wives or arranging marriages. The legal age of consent was raised to 18 for women (20 for men), all children were legitimate, and marriage was mandated to be by mutual consent. Divorce was legalized. Education was universal.
Knowing when to compromise
Mao’s army was also able to compromise. By 1936, they saw the future fight against Japan as the single most important next stage of their fight.
To take on that fight, they worked toward a reunion of Chinese forces, Communist and Kuomintang, in order to resist Japan. Mao “made a formal declaration… to cease civil war” in late 1936. Chiang Kai-Shek resisted and wanted to first eliminate what he saw as the communist threat, but in the end, he was forced to agree.
Mao argued they needed internal peace to fight an external war: “For a people being deprived of its national freedom, the revolutionary task is not immediate socialism, but the struggle for independence. We cannot even discuss communism if we are robbed of a country in which to practice it.” Concessions were made to do this, although the terms still left the Communists in charge of their own army, Party, and Soviets. The economic blockade was lifted and trade was established, and they were finally able to get trucks, equipment, open a library in Ya’nan, and enrolled over 2,000 students in the Red University (renamed “Anti-Japanese University”). By this time, people attending were from all over China, including Muslims, Tibetans, and several Indigenous groups.
Building Cadre through Political Education
Throughout all these strategies and tactics, there was a common thread: building cadre, both within the Red Army itself and within the larger peasant population. The CPC needed grassroots leaders. Today, the CPC has 5.25 million grassroots cadre organizations that help create the policy of the party. Peng Dehuai was quoted by Snow as saying: “Political training must accompany every phase of struggle and local leaders must be developed from every new group added to the revolution.”
Snow seemed surprised by how well educated Red Army leadership was. Interviewing Mao, he mentioned how much he knew about world politics, and how closely he had studied the struggle of Black and Indigenous Americans. The Red Army University, Snow reports, was probably the only institute of higher learning “whose classrooms were bombproof caves, with chairs and desks of stone and brick.” Recruits were given military training but were also educated in regional and world politics and Marxist theory, as well as the current state of the Chinese revolution. They had a waiting list of 2,000 students from all over China when Snow was there.
Many of their founding members were educated in France, or in Russia, in revolutionary schools set up to train other countries in socialist development. Snow observes that many studied communism in Russia; “Scores of Chinese Red leaders, who had attended Sun Yat-sen University, or the Red Academy, or some other school for international cadres of communism, and had returned as teachers of their own people.”
They then started their own schools, often recruiting top professors from China’s universities like Xu Teli. Every member of the Red Army was offered education—basic literacy, military training, but also political theory that was relevant to their everyday lives. They published newspapers and distributed leaflets and trained their members to recruit others. They also formed theater troupes as means of both education and entertainment, acting out their message in support of the peasant and working classes. They would learn folk music from peasants as they traveled and used singing extensively. They wrote their own plays and songs. They had “living newspapers” acting out the latest world news. About 60 theatrical troupes had been trained when Snow visited.
A Century Later
We live in a very different world than Snow encountered in 1936. China was struggling to modernize and end feudal control; now it is building some of the most technologically advanced cities in the world. Here in the U.S., we have no peasant population to organize and the U.S. state, with the support of cadre like those from the Council of Foreign Relations has extensive experience in suppressing socialist developments in an increasingly divided and struggling U.S. population. In the US, we have no external enemy to fight, nor any path to establishing rural soviets.
It is hard to tell, in 2026, what will come next and what might be possible next. But it is clear that things are rapidly changing. I think this is why it can be useful to glean what lessons we can from past struggles, to see what might be useful today.
We still need to find a unifying message for our time and place, one that both honors different struggles, circumstances and demands, while uniting us against the common enemy of a capitalist state. We also have to find ways to meet people’s material needs in our organizing, in big and small ways. And we need to think through how to strategically choose our political battles, retreat when necessary, and compromise when needed.
Most importantly, we need to build educational pathways and cadre for this struggle. Here at University of the Poor, we are asking how best to do that.
Cedar James Monroe has organized around housing, healthcare, and poverty for nearly two decades. He co-founded Chaplains on the Harbor and Harbor Roots Farm, located in Grays Harbor County, WA, where he served as chaplain, organizer, and pastor to people experiencing homelessness. He is now a PhD student at University College Cork and author of Trash: A Poor White Journey. He serves on the University of the Poor China Think Tank and on the editorial team for the journal.
[1] To note, Snow’s language and spelling is dated, since he was writing before Chinese to English translation was standardized. I have, as often as I could, updated the English spelling of Chinese place names and historical figures to correspond to current ones, to help in your google searches.
References
Martinez, Carlos (2023). The East is Still Red: Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century. London: Praxis Press.
Snow, Edgar (1968). Red Star Over China. New York: Grove Press.
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