Mao Zedong became the paramount Chinese Communist Party leader and one of the most important theorists and strategists in Chinese military history.

He began his military career by organizing rural-centered, armed revolts in his home province in 1927 and establishing the first Communist base in Jinggangshan in 1928. In this remote mountainous region in South China, he became the first political commissar of the Chinese Red Army and the chairman of the Chinese Soviet Republic in 1931