ABSTRACT
Founded in 1921 under the guidance of the Comintern, the Chinese Communist party had as its goal a Marxist-Leninist revolution and world order. In practice, Communism would make common cause with the aspirations of the nationalist parties emerging in the colonial world and use them as allies in a strategy whose final Communist goal was left more or less unstated. The Communist strategy then changed from United Front to civil war and rural-based military organizations, with the Soviets again providing the formula. Communist power struggles, especially in Stalin's time, ended usually not only with the physical purge of any potential rival to the established leader, but also with the condemnation of the opponent as a "deviationist" from the right doctrinal line, which the leader claimed to possess.
