Like all revolutionary movements that succeed in taking power, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was faced with immense challenges in 1949. The more obvious and immediate of these challenges were external: how to take power, quash lingering resistance, restore social order, resettle refugees, and begin the process of restoring a war-ravaged economy. The last of these involved conundrums that the Guomindang had failed miserably at: taming hyperinflation, reopening factories, and ensuring that cities that could not feed themselves had sufficient grain. The internal challenges facing the CCP were no less severe, if not quite as visible; how the CCP was to transform itself from what was, in the words of Kenneth Jowitt, a “party of a new type – a combat party” that had quite literally been engaged in actual combat in the course of a lengthy civil war into a civilian party-state, albeit a still revolutionary one with a mission to fundamentally remake society into a revolutionarily pure one.1 The objective circumstances that the CCP had to work with were at best difficult: thin coverage of an enormous and varied territory, primitive communications, and an indifferent-to-hostile population in much of central and southern China.