New Perspectives on the Chinese Communist Revolution brings together the work of a new, international generation of students of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) history. Exploiting new sources made available in China in the 1980s, some chapters in this book bring new events and areas into the study of the CCP. Other chapters provide detailed analyses on the basis of new evidence of long-standing problems in the history of the CCP, such as the rise of Mao Zedong. Yet others are significant because they offer new explanatory frameworks for understanding CCP history, such as the importance of Yanan as symbolic capital. New issues are brought up, such as the role of women, internal CCP terror, the use of opium sales to sustain the Yanan economy, and the great difficulty of controlling mass peasant movements once mobilized. The most important contribution of the volume is to show that the old explanations of the CCP's success - peasant support, organizational strength, the supply of administrative services - are incomplete and do not account for the diverse and heterogeneous nature of the CCP and the great difficulties it had in building up mass support. This volume makes clear that the question of the CCP's success remains one of the most elusive but also most important that historians of China face today.

These essays present fresh insights into the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), from its founding in 1920 to its assumption of state power in 1949. They draw upon considerable archival resources which have recently become available.

Scholars have long held that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was a centralized organization from its founding in 1921. In a departure from that view, "From Friend to Comrade" demonstrates how the CCP began as a group of study societies, only evolving into a mass Marxist-Leninist party by 1927.
Hans J. van de Ven's study is based on party documents of the 1920s that have only recently become available, as well as the writings of a wide range of Chinese communists. He analyzes the party's difficulty in building a cohesive organization firmly rooted in Chinese society. While past scholarship has emphasized the influence of Soviet communism on the CCP, van de Ven stresses the thinking and actions of Chinese communists themselves, placing their struggle in the context of China's political history and highly complex society.