Communist movements in China were forced to go underground. In the early 1930s, there were up to fifteen Communist rural bases in south central China, but their links with the central committee of the CCP in Shanghai were shattered because of the purge. The CCP, whose leadership was dominated by a group of Moscow-trained Chinese students known as the Twenty-Eight Bolsheviks, came to rely all the more on Russia's support. In 1931, the central committee relocated from Shanghai to the Jiangxi Province (northern China) and the Chinese Communists declared the local government a soviet. Mao's influence in the Jiangxi Soviet was overshadowed by that of the Moscow-trained Chinese leaders, many of whom were adherents of the Soviet orthodoxy of revolution by urban workers. (Mao, by contrast, held that the revolution could be achieved by relying on the peasants who made up the bulk of China's population.) By redistributing and expropriating land in these soviet regions, Communist leaders enlisted support from the Chinese lower class and increased the popularity of the CCP in these regions.
Between 1930 and 1934, the Nationalists had launched a series of military encirclement campaigns against the Communists in an attempt to annihilate their bases.
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