THE REVOLUTION MOVES TO THE CITY

When the People's Liberation Army captured China's major cities in 1948 and 1949, the Chinese Communist Party encountered a host of new problems peculiar to urban environments. The tasks of administration, reconstruction, and revolutionary transformation provided a challenge to the Communists unlike those they had faced in winning state power. Recognizing the difficulty of these tasks, the Communists approached them warily.

The Party's official attitude toward the cities of China was mixed, reflecting mixed recollections of its previous urban activities. After initial success in the cities, especially in organizing workers, the Party suffered a crippling blow in Chiang Kai-shek's coup of April 1927.Within a few years, the Party leadership was driven from the cities, eventually to seize power primarily through a peasant based rural revolution. Throughout twenty years of struggle in the countryside, however, the Party maintained links with its underground organizations in urban areas. It never abandoned the goal of returning to the cities. In a report delivered in March 1949 at the Seventh Plenary Session of the Party Central Committee, Mao Tse-tung identified urban work as the Party's main task: