In October 1927 Mao led a small group of Hunan peasants to the mountains of Jiangxi Province, where he and other party members created a soviet-style government and began to build a guerrilla army. They gained peasant support in part by redistributing land. It was in Jiangxi the fledgling Red Army developed the tactics that would defeat the Nationalists 22 years later -- establish a peasant base of support in the countryside, encircle the cities and choke off the Nationalist garrisons one by one. In three years the Jiangxi soviet controlled several million people in the countryside, and the Red Army had grown to 200,000 men.
For awhile the Red Army held its own, but in 1934 Chiang unleashed best-trained units against the Jiangxi enclave, and the Communists were forced to flee. So began the legendary Long March, a 6,000-mile fighting retreat from Jiangxi to the mountain town of Yan'an in remote northern Shaanxi Province. Only a tenth of the 80,000 guerrilla fighters who began the march survived. From this point forward Mao was the undisputed Chinese Communist leader, even through military setbacks and internal political purges. Yan'an was the Communists' stronghold for the next decade. Some true believers cut caves into the cliffs around the town to make primitive living quarters. Following a 1936 visit, American journalist Edgar Snow described them as egalitarian social reformers living simply with peasants.