Chinese Red Army

The Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army (traditional Chinese: 中國工農紅軍; simplified Chinese: 中国工农红军; pinyin: Zhōngguó Gōngnóng Hóngjūn), also known as the Chinese Red Army, or simply the Red Army, was the armed forces of the Communist Party of China. Under Mao Zedong and Zhu De, the number of its troops drastically increased from 5,000 in 1928 to 1,000,000 in 1945. Being totally land-based, the Communist forces had no naval or aerial branch. After World War II, the Red Army was renamed the People's Liberation Army.

The Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army was created on May 25, 1928, at the beginning of the Chinese Civil War. Between 1934 and 1935, the Red Army survived several campaigns against the Nationalist forces who were led by the Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and engaged in the Long March. By the time of 1934 Long March, numerous small units had been organized into three unified groups, the First Red Army (紅一方面軍), the Second Red Army (紅二方面軍) and the Fourth Red Army (紅四方面軍).When the anti-Japanese war broke out on July 7, 1937, the communist military forces were nominally integrated into the National Revolutionary Army of the Republic of China forming the Eighth Route Army and the New Fourth Army units. At the time of the Second Sino-Japanese War, it had 1 million armed men.

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