Mao Zedong attended the first National Congress of the Communist Party of China in summer of 1921 in Shanghai, on which the CPC was founded.

During the first Domestic Revolutionary War (1924-1927), Mao Zedong served at the Peasant Movement Training Institute, as principal of the sixth training course. And in 1924, he led the Anyuan miner's grand strike.

Mao Zedong tempered and nurtured the army in protracted revolutionary wars. He led the Autumn Harvest Uprising in 1927, founded the first Workers' and Peasants' Red Army and set up the first rural revolutionary base area in the Jinggangshan Mountains in eastern Jiangxi Province, and embarked on a new type of revolutionary warfare that the Red Army carried out the strategy to encircle the cities from the countryside and thus defeat Chiang Kai-shek and gain control the political power.

Mao Zedong and Zhu De successfully developed the tactics of guerrilla warfare from base areas in Jinggangshan Mountain. In November 1931, the Chinese Soviet Republic was founded in southeast Jiangxi and southwest Fujian Provinces, with Mao Zedong as chairman. Mao Zedong led the Red Army in smashing the ensuing four campaigns of encirclement and suppression launched by the Kuomintang (KMT) to annihilate the Red Army.

En route the Long March starting in October 1934, Mao Zedong regained his commanding over the Red Army at the Zunyi Meeting in January 1935, thus rescued the Red Army from being annihilated and arrived in the north Shaanxi in the autumn of 1935.

During the years 1936-1940, Mao Zedong devoted himself to reflection and writing. It was then that he read in translation a certain number of Soviet writings on philosophy and produced his own account of dialectical materialism, of which the best known are "On Practice" and "On Contradiction", and produced the major works which synthesized his own experience of revolutionary struggle and his vision of how the revolution should be carried forward in the context of the United Front. On military matters, there was first Strategic Problem of China's Revolutionary War, written in December 1936 to sum up the lessons of the Red Army period and also to justify the correctness of his own military line at the time, and then On Protracted War and other writings of 1938 on the tactics of the Anti-Japanese War.

Mao Zedong has been the supreme leader and commander playing the decisive role in both Policy and War matters in defeating Japanese, and in wiping out eight million troops of the KMT regime.