Rural Teachers: Rural Revolution Broadcast Fire,

This thesis explores the CCP's early party-building in Anhui, to discover the transformation of the party's urban strategy to a rural one. It first discusses the party's early understanding of the revolution and the young students who constituted the main body of the party in its early stage. The bulk of the thesis is an empirical study of early party-building in rural Anhui. First, it tries to reconstruct the party-building process in each county of Anhui to uncover the avenues through which the party organization penetrated into rural areas. Secondly, through a quantitative analysis of party cells established before 1931, it tries to find out who played the major role in early party-building. The main discovery of this thesis is that rural teachers played the key role in the transformation of party's strategy from urban to rural China, and who were the torchbearers of rural revolution.