This groundbreaking volume draws on newly available documentary sources to explore key facets of the move to power of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the War of Resistance to Japan from 1937 to 1945. Leading scholars from China and the West compare the varied experiences of the CCP-and its interactions with local society-in all the border regions and base areas of resistance to the Japanese invasion on the North China battlefront. Eschewing grand theory, the authors develop a social ecology of revolutionO that traces the relationship between local conditions and patterns of social and political change.