And that notion "KMT failures "makes up the largest faction within the debate over how the CCP came to power. So let us start with those authors who looked at the missteps that helped explain the CCP's rise to power.
In answering many who have taken wildly different interpretations of the CCP's victory, UCLA professor Philip C. Huang argues that, in the end, the class struggle was .
That said, there is a significant amount of evidence to suggest that the internal conditions of the country and the KMT lent themselves to a class struggle. Economically, pre-1949 China was in many ways a rentier state. Its industry lagged behind its potential and most of it was captured anyway by the Japanese. Farmers were poor, not represented, and subjected to harassment and humiliation by KMT or government officials. Joseph W. Esherick offers more than one explanation for the revolution. His "traditional- explanation suggests that the revolution was "fueled by the efforts of millions of Chinese actors to escape some form of oppression . . ."". In the countryside especially, Esherick notes that as early as 1971 Mark Seldon had identified a demand for "fairness- (gongdao) among the peasants. The party made tremendous efforts to combat favoritism, corruption, and bribery. Idlers and paupers were forced off farms they had squatted on without working. Given that their lives were so bad before, many Chinese were more than willing to accept the stability offered to them by the Communists, even if it offered little or no more democratization than that under the KMT.
Kenneth Pomeranz (1993) makes the case that Chinese modernization further execrated the problems of the peasantry. Modernization was largely isolated to the coasts, leaving the peripheries out and vulnerable to Communist exploitation. Because the state was weak, the government was unable to bring the benefits of modernization to the "backwards- areas of rural China, according to Esherick.