August 7 Conference and Jinggangshan Base

After the Great Revolution failed, the Communist Party faced a grave test of survival. On 7 August 1927 the Central Committee held an emergency meeting in Hankou, the “August 7 Conference”. It corrected Chen Duxiu's Right opportunist errors, removed him from leadership, set the general policy of land revolution and armed resistance to the Kuomintang reactionaries, and decided to launch Autumn Harvest Uprisings in Hunan, Hubei, Guangdong and Jiangxi. At the meeting Mao Zedong put forward the famous thesis that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”. Afterwards Mao returned to Hunan as the Central Committee's special envoy to lead the Autumn Harvest Uprising on the Hunan–Jiangxi border. It broke out on 9 September, the troops raising the banner of the “Workers' and Peasants' Revolutionary Army”. After setbacks on the way to attack Changsha, Mao decisively changed the plan and led the troops toward the countryside, where enemy control was weak. At the end of September the force reached Sanwan Village in Yongxin, Jiangxi, and was reorganized in the “Sanwan Reorganization”, which established the principles of “building Party branches at company level” and “the Party commands the gun”. In October Mao led the troops to Maoping in Ninggang, in the Jinggangshan area, where they waged guerrilla war, mobilized the masses to attack local despots and divide the land, and set up workers' and peasants' political power, creating China's first rural revolutionary base, the Jinggangshan base. Its creation opened a new path for the Chinese revolution: encircling the cities from the countryside and seizing power by armed force.