ABSTRACT
The War of Resistance against Japan witnessed the massive expansion of Communist power in North China. Shortly after the Japanese military invasion had swept most of the indigenous armies and governments out of the area, small units of the Communist Party's Eighth Route Army spread out into rural hinterlands behind Japanese lines. Their aim was to spark a popular guerrilla-style resistance, to implement a series of socioeconomic and political reforms vital both to securing peasant support and to supplying the war effort, and to establish territorial base areas serving as nuclei for political, economic, and military expansion. By 1945 these base areas controlled the better part of North China's territory and population; they were essential foundations for the postwar struggle with the Guomindang forces of Chiang Kai-shek (see map 4.1).
