I document the relentless intraparty power struggle within the KMT from 1925 to 1945 following the sudden death of its founder, Sun Yat-sen, and investigate the profound impact of elite conflicts on party- building efforts. Although Chiang Kai-shek at first ascended the KMT ranks by exploiting ideological conflicts between the KMT-Left and KMT-Right factions, he constantly faced challenges from his intraparty rivals, who coalesced around regional military strongmen. Similar to the rise of Mao, Chiang benefited from contingent events and finally eliminated threats from Hu Han-min and Wang Ching-wei. Chiang, however, was only a quasi-dominant party leader because regional strongmen remained defiant in the face of his reform efforts. Importantly, the KMT remained a party deeply entrenched in an elite mobilization infrastructure, heavily reliant on the cooperation of regional strongmen and local elites for policy implementation. The lack of infrastructure for mass mobilization capacity became an impediment later when the power of those elites was weakened during the Japanese invasion, as shown in its ineffectiveness in grain mobilization detailed in Chapter 4.

This chapter, together with the succeeding one, highlights the essential role that resource mobilization played in the rise and fall of the CCP and KMT from 1921 to 1945. Using a wide range of party and government archives during the Republican Era, I trace the scale and sources of financial revenues mobilized by these two parties. These novel data provide new insights on the financial undertakings of both parties throughout this era. I reveal that the KMT benefited from its elite mobilization infrastructure in urban and coastal China and consistently maintained a more robust fiscal foundation than the CCP prior to the Sino-Japanese War, hence establishing its dominance in China’s political landscape. On the contrary, the CCP relied on meagre financial support from the Comintern and ad hoc expropriation of rural elites, struggling to mobilize a consistent flow of financial resources.

This chapter lays out the central puzzle – the reversal of the fortunes of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Kuomintang (KMT) during the Republican Era. I contend that the emergence of a dominant leader aided the CCP’s ascension, whereas the contested leadership undermined the KMT. I first position the puzzling political development of the CCP and KMT within the framework of prevailing arguments in studies of authoritarian parties and Chinese politics, revealing that they are inadequate to explain the rise of the CCP and the demise of the KMT. I then succinctly recapitulate the key arguments of Domination and Mobilization, underscoring its unique contributions to three strands of scholarly discourse: the genesis of authoritarian parties, party-building by political organizations aims to seize power through nonelectoral means, and the rise of Communist movement in China. I conclude the chapter by outlining the plan for the book.

I present a theoretical framework underscoring the way the emergence of a dominant party leader shapes strategic interactions among party elites, which in turn lead to distinct party-building strategies and capacities for resource mobilization. The key insights of the theoretical framework are threefold. First, party ideology serves as a constraining device influencing the types of party mobilization infrastructure – elite-centric vis-à-vis mass-centric – that embody distinct comparative advantages. Second, domination by a party leader mitigates the collective action problem faced by party elites, leading to coherent party-building strategies that serve as the foundation for effective resource mobilization. In contrast, when party elites engage in contentious power struggles, the quality of mobilization infrastructure suffers because of conflicting party-building strategies. Finally, I integrate the concept of contingencies into the theoretical framework, positing that the balance of intraparty elite power and the state of mobilization infrastructure act as mediators through which these events influence party strength.

Mao Zedong’s return to the CCP leadership circle after the Zunyi Conference in January 1935 was indeed a pivotal event, after which the CCP changed its course on party-building strategies. Mao would not have been able to rise in CCP leadership rank without the help of contingent events undermining his main political rivals, Zhang Guotao and Wang Ming, who were weakened by a military debacle and the shift in Stalin’s support, respectively. By tracing CCP party-building strategies, I illustrate the CCP’s move away from previous conflictual and discriminatory party-building strategies after Mao consolidated his power and embrace the return of intellectuals and peasants into its mobilization infrastructure. By late 1938 the CCP had completely abandoned its previous discriminatory practice of emphasizing social origins as the primary criteria for the party-building strategies, resulting in a party mobilization infrastructure ripe for intensified fiscal extraction in rural areas starting in 1941.

Part II focuses on cases related to tobacco control. Law, rights talk, and litigation have become regular features of tobacco control movements and public health campaigns aimed at reducing tobacco consumption worldwide, including in Japan and Korea. But are they enough to overcome the resource and information disadvantages tobacco control activists face when taking on the industry? Chapter 6 provides historical background on the tobacco epidemic, the multifaceted reasons the tobacco industry remains politically influential in both countries, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, and recent tobacco control measures—including taxation and pricing, limits on advertising, and new responses to electronic nicotine delivery systems.