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It was around this time that Mao Zedong rose in prominence, first as commander-in-chief of the Red Army (later christened as People’s Liberation Army or PLA), and then as the CCP’s chairman in 1945. That juncture led to the great Long March, which was actually a long military tactical retreat to the countryside during 1934-35. At one point, the CCP and its Red Army were on the brink of annihilation during the Chinese civil war. The two decades until 1949 had been quite bloody and thousands of CCP members lost their lives. The KMT was finally defeated in 1949, partly due to internal dissension and rampant corruption, and was driven to Taiwan. In between, the two parties were also allies in their joint war against Japan’s imperialist invasion. Between 19, the KMT and the CCP fought an intermittent civil war for control and power to rule over all of China. In its first 28 years, the struggling CCP was engaged in wars against two adversaries: Japanese imperialists, who sought to colonize China, and the Kuomintang (KMT), the ruling political party founded in 1919 by Sun Yat Sen. The party was actively assisted by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which was then engaged in the export of the Soviet socialist revolution to all parts of the world. Its founders were two intellectuals, Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, who were inspired by the ideas of Marx and Lenin, and the Bolshevik revolution. At its founding in 1921, it had only a handful of members. In terms of membership, with 91 million, it is the world’s second largest political party, behind the Bharatiya Janata Party of India. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is 100 years old today.