Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun

In April 1927, Chiang Kai-shek broke the First United Front with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), beginning the White Terror. The Nationalist forces arrested, jailed, tortured, and executed tens of thousands of people. Mao employed the phrase a second time on 6 November 1938, during his concluding speech at the 6th Plenary Session of the CCP's 6th Central Committee. The speech was concerned with both the Civil War and the Second Sino-Japanese War, which had commenced the previous year. In 1960, a portion of the 1938 speech was excerpted and included in Mao's Selected Works, with the title "Problems of War and Strategy". However, the central phrase was popularized largely as a result of its prominence in Mao's Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (1964). ==Sixth plenary session==

The 1938 paragraph containing the phrase is reproduced below; the central phrase (in bold), cited as deriving from the 1938 speech via the Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung: ==See also==