In Pa Ching's The Family, Chueh-hui resolutely left home to search for a new life on his own. Thousands of Chinese young men and women did something similar in the 1910s and 1920s. They left home to escape from an arranged marriage and in search of a new life that was not dictated by the old values. Many of these people came to embrace various strands of thought from the West. They imbibed the ideas of humanism, individual values, science and democracy from the West. Many of them also came to accept Marxism, especially after the October 1917 Russian revolution because of all the Western countries in the world, the Soviet Union announced it would give up all the Chinese territories under its control back to China. The Chinese thought Marxism offered a solution for them to get out of their semi-colonial status and regain national independence. The Soviet Union, a Marxist state, indicated their independence to other Western powers and seemed to treat China more as an equal than other powers.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP, 1921-now), was therefore formed in the wake of the Russian revolution. More specifically, it was the product of the May Fourth Movement of 1919, a movement that sought changes in Chinese values and inspired Pa Ching's The Family, which is an indictment of traditional Chinese values as "cannibalistic" in a figurative sense. The early founders of the Communist Party, such as Mao Tse-tung, were inspired by Western science and democracy and, like the characters in The Family, avidly imbibed journals such as New Youth and New Tide that spread Western ideas of democracy, gender equality, and other social values. They came to accept Marxism and socialism, eventually Communism mostly because of a sense of indignation against social injustice, which they felt could be addressed by a Communist system emphasizing egalitarianism.

While the majority of the early Communist leaders were the so-called May Fourth youth like Chueh-hui, educated youth from middle class background, the majority of their followers, in the 1920s, came from a rural background. Especially by the 1930s, when the Communist movement went underground and survived through guerrilla warfare in the southeastern Chinese mountains, the farmers became the backbone of the Communist Party. The situation lasted well into the 1940s when, during the war against Japan (1937-45), the Communist Party mobilized the support of the peasants through land redistribution in the regions they recovered from the Japanese. Popular support from the farmers eventually helped the Communists to win the civil war (1945-49) and led to the Communist regime in 1949.

The Communist reliance on farmers' support was an innovation of Marxism, as Marx had called on the industrial working class to take leadership of the Communist revolution. In China, however, the industrial working class and the industrial middle class remained small because Chinese national industry was no competition against imported foreign goods. Therefore the Communists decided to rely on the support of the majority of the Chinese population, the peasantry. The peasants were suffering from deep grievances of extremely heavy taxation, in some regions reaching 40-60 per cent of their income in the 1930s to 1940s. Many of them were tenant farmers. The Communist policy of land redistribution and reduction of taxes, therefore, were of enormous appeal to them. This policy was first championed by Mao Tse-tung, who eventually rose to top leadership in 1935. Through an investigation of the peasants' land redistribution and rent reduction movement in his native province of Hunan in 1926, Mao concluded the poor peasants should be the Communists' best supporters. His view, however, was initially ignored by top Communist leaders who had largely studied in Moscow and followed Stalin's policy on organizing industrial workers' strikes in the cities. These strikes were quickly and brutally suppressed by the police and troops of the Chinese government. It was after many failures of strikes in the cities that the Communist Party finally adopted Mao's view, allied with the peasants, and moved their bases to the countryside.

The archenemy of the Communists, paradoxically, was a modern political party that came about under the Western ideas of nationalism and democracy. The Nationalist Party (Kuomingtang, KMT, or Guomingdang, GMD) was founded by Sun Yat-sen, based on his Three Principles of the People, in 1912. It was to a great extent a renaming of an existent organization, the Tongmenghui, founded in 1905 to battle against the Imperial (Manchu) Qing government. Sun Yatsen the revolutionary believed drastic political and social changes would make China strong, but they would take place only after the overthrow of the Manchus who were foreigners that conquered China in 1644 and whose rule in China over the majority of Chinese the Han Nationality was a disgrace and hindered concerted Chinese response to Western threat. Therefore to Sun, the Manchu government must be overthrown, replaced by a republican government in the hands of the Han nationality.

In 1911, while Sun was sojourning in Colorado to escape the arrest by the Manchu government, he read the news that a revolution had broken out in China, and the provinces rebelled against the Manchu government. Sun returned to China to assume the position of the first president of the Republic of China, founded in 1912. But he soon stepped down to give the presidency to Yuan Shikai, a former Han nationality member of the imperial government because Yuan was in a better position to mediate between the emperor and the revolutionaries and to persuade the emperor to abdicate the throne. As soon as he became the president, Yuan assassinated a leading member of the Nationalist Party to intimidate the Nationalist Party members who constituted the majority in the parliament. Yuan then disbanded the parliament and eventually, he inaugurated himself as a new emperor and a new dynasty began in 1915. The restoration of emperor, however, only lasted for 100 days. There was overwhelming opposition to Yuan's imperial rule from everywhere in the country and Yuan had to abdicate. He died of a broken heart.

During the time when Yuan was president and emperor, Sun Yatsen's Nationalist Party members were on the wanted list for Yuan's government. Sun retreated to Canton, and "rented" his base from a local warlord called Chen Jiongming whose goal was to establish the autonomy of Canton from the Beijing government. When Chen eventually found that Sun did not agree with him, Chen would attack Sun in 1922. But before then, Canton became the Nationalists' base. In his weak position, Sun championed a policy of uniting with the Communists and the Soviet Union in 1923. Sun died in 1925 and his successor, a man called Chiang Kai-shek, continued the alliance with the Chinese Communists.

After the death of Yuan Shi-kai, China fell into greater disunity. The country was in the actual control of regional warlords, most of whom did not obey the Beijing government. Even the Beijing government itself became the center of contention between various regional warlords and whoever had stronger power could become the president of China. Therefore the Beijing government changed hands often from 1916-1927. In Pa Ching's The Family, several chapters were on a civil war in Sichuan Province between the governor's troops and a general's troops, which ended with the governor's retreat and the general's takeover. This was characteristic of local and national government changes in this period of time.

In 1926, the Nationalists and the Communists were determined to end warlord rule and reunify China through a northward (or Northern) expedition from Canton. After they reached Shanghai, about half way through China, they parted ways. Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Nationalist Party, took the Communists by surprise on April 12, 1927 when thousands of Communists or Communist suspects were executed in Shanghai by the Nationalist troops. This was followed by a nation-wide hunt down for Communists by the Nationalists. From then on, the Communist movement, never very big from the start, went underground and turned to guerrilla warfare in the mountains of southeastern China. In 1928, The Nationalist Party declared China reunified and a new government, based in Nanjing (because Beijing was surrounded by too many suspect former warlords although they now pledged allegiance to the Nationalist government) and with the incorporation of only the Nationalist Party, was formed, appropriately called the Nationalist government.

Although the Nationalists and the Communists were influenced by the Western political party system, they were not influenced by the Western idea of democratic pluralism. Therefore they were mutually exclusive, and made up temporary alliances only when they were most weak, such as between 1923-27, and again during the war against Japanese invasion (1936-45). As soon as immediate external danger subsided, they would try to slash each other's throats. Both modern political parties treated their leaders similar to the way emperors were treated in history. Personal rule, rather than rule by law, characterized both parties. The mutual exclusion of the two parties led to the Nationalists' incessant hunt-downs of the Communists from 1927-1935, forcing the Communists eventually to abandon their base in the mountains of southeastern China and retreat for 6,000 miles across half of China in 1934-35, via Tibet, crossing marshlands and snow capped mountains, to Yenan in Shaanxi Province in northwestern China, where the Nationalists' defense was relatively weak. This event was called the Long March. In Yenan and later on, the Communists relied on the peasants and conducted land redistribution and rent reduction to amass greater support among the local population.

Meanwhile, the Nationalist Party government, bolstered by American support and relying on middle class/professionals/landlords in China, slowly conducted modern reforms in education, hygiene, and some more or less insignificant areas. In Nationalist controlled regions, the government favored the landlords and so the peasants were loaded with high rents and taxes. The Chinese war against Japanese invasion (Sino-Japanese war, 1937-45) shifted the balance between the Communists, who rapidly expanded their territories and recovered from their losses from 1935 by 1945, and the Nationalists, who suffered great losses through the regular warfare they conducted with the Japanese. After Japanese surrender in 1945, civil war erupted between the KMT and the CCP, and the CCP's land redistribution program won the hearts of the peasants, who comprised 90 per cent of the Chinese population. After CCP takeover of China, the Nationalists fled to Taiwan and established the Republic of China there, vowing to recover mainland China soon. The Communists established their one-party government in Beijing, called the People's Republic of China, and vowed to recover Taiwan Province from the Nationalists. Their confrontations in recent years have somewhat been abated by the extensive trade developed between them in the past 20 years, but tension still exists.