Page 127 - Communism in Ambush

After reading Darwin, Mao became He inherited Darwinist ideology
an ardent Communist. from Sun Yat-sen.

As a young organizer for the communists in Hunan in the early 1920s, Mao
supported Sun, who was the patriarch of the Kuomintang (KMT). Sun cre-
ated a temporary alliance between his nationalist party and the commu-
nists, and, in 1926, Mao was even briefly given control of the KMT's
propaganda department. 80
Brainwashed by the ideas of Darwin and Marx, Mao became an ac-
tive, passionate Communist from 1920 onward. With eleven friends who
thought as he did, he founded the Communist Party in Shanghai in 1921.
Afterward, he strengthened the Communist Party by various alliances,
skirmishes, guerilla battles and propaganda. For a while, the
Communists under Mao cooperated with the Nationalist Party, but in
the second half of the 1920s, each side became hostile to the other. Mao
relocated his militants in Jiangxi province in southern China and there
formed a "liberated zone" outside the central authority.
The struggle between the two sides lasted for years. After World
War II, the Communist "liberated zone" continued to grow, to the point
that it encompassed almost all of China. In 1949, Mao and his
Communists entered Beijing and proclaimed the "People's Republic of
China." With this, the world witnessed the second Communist
Revolution after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917—a second revolution
at least as bloody as the first.