Analyses the power struggles within the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party between 1931, when several Party leaders left Shanghai and entered the Jiangxi Soviet, and 1945, by which time Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai had emerged as senior CCP leaders. In 1949 they established the People's Republic of China and ruled it for several decades.

Based on new Chinese sources, this study challenges long-established views that Mao Zedong became CCP leader during the Long March (1934-35) and that by 1935 the CCP was independent of the Comintern in Moscow. The result is a critique not only of official Chinese historiography but also of Western (especially US) scholarship that all future histories of the rise of the CCP and power struggles within the PRC will need to take into account.