This dissertation examines the relationship between the city of Shanghai and the Communist New Fourth Army during the War of Resistance Against Japan. It is a multivocal exploration of wartime experiences that brings urban voices to the forefront of "rural revolution." Before 1980, Maoist state policy required that Shanghai's significance to the growth of wartime Chinese Communism be historically ignored, and western scholarship followed suit. This study uses memoir sources published in recent decades to recover this history, arguing that the Shanghai style of resistance was a planned and focused movement of urban resources to promote rural-based Communist revolution, while also nurturing the movement's growth within the city throughout the war.

This research reveals that agents of the New Fourth Army and Shanghai underground Party created clandestine trafficking lines between the city and the army's Central China Base Area to transfer human and economic resources to the countryside. Both gender and class shaped urban participation in the resistance, and the Communists competed with both the Chinese government and Japanese occupiers for limited resources. Personal contingencies like one's family situation or the need for income and wartime contingencies like the loss of one's home or job were as important as patriotism in recruiting people to the base area. Once there, the Party pragmatically converted urban recruits into Communist revolutionaries.

The Shanghai-New Fourth Army relationship presents a distinct model of base-building and Communist expansion. The city's links with the army are characterized by a reliance on social networks (guanxi). Backed by entrepreneurs, modern professionals, middle school graduates, workers from modern industries, social and economic elites, small-business managers, and white-collar employees, the development of Communist power in the lower Yangzi River region was supported by commercial interactions and particularistic connections. Communist resistance in the cultural, political, and economic heartland of China was not isolated from modern urban, intellectual, and commercial trends but instead purposefully incorporated them into the revolutionary process. Similar to the seeds of Communism planted in the 1920s that nourished the wartime movement, the Shanghai style of resistance reemerged decades later to change the course of the Chinese revolution.