Wang Ming was a senior leader of the early Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the mastermind of the famous 28 Bolsheviks group. Wang was also a major political rival of Mao Zedong during the 1930s, opposing what he saw as Mao's nationalist deviation from the Comintern and orthodox Marxist–Leninist lines. According to Mao on the other hand, Wang epitomized the intellectualism and foreign dogmatism Mao criticized in his essays "On Practice" and "On Contradiction". The competition between Wang and Mao was a reflection of the power struggle between the Soviet Union, through the vehicle of the Comintern, and the CCP to control both the direction and future of the Chinese Communist Revolution.

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.