Agnes Smedley was an American journalist, writer, and activist who supported the Indian Independence Movement and the Chinese Communist Revolution. Raised in a poverty-stricken miner's family in Missouri and Colorado, she dramatized the formation of her feminist and socialist consciousness in the autobiographical novel Daughter of Earth (1929).

The Chinese Communist Revolution was a social and political revolution that culminated in the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. For the preceding century, China had faced escalating social, economic, and political problems as a result of Western imperialism, Japanese imperialism, and the decline of the Qing dynasty. Cyclical famines and an oppressive landlord system kept the large mass of rural peasantry poor and politically disenfranchised. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was formed in 1921 by young urban intellectuals inspired by European socialist ideas and the success of the October Revolution in Russia. The CCP originally allied itself with the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) party against the warlords and foreign imperialist forces, but the 1927 massacre of Communists in Shanghai ordered by Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek forced them into the Chinese Civil War, which would last more than two decades.