Founded in 1939, the CPB initially fought against British colonial forces before joining them in a temporary alliance to expel the invading Imperial Japanese Army from Myanmar during World War II.

In the final years of the war, the CPB helped establish a leftist political and military coalition called the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League (AFPFL).

[1] An armed wing was formed shortly afterwards which fought against British colonial rule and then the invading Imperial Japanese Army upon the start of the Burma campaign of World War II.

This was against the prevailing opinion of the nationalist We Burmans Association (Dobama Asiayone or the "Thakins"), including Aung San, who had secretly left Burma in 1940 with a group of young intellectuals, later known as the Thirty Comrades, to receive military training from the Japanese.

[7] Amidst widespread strikes starting with the Rangoon Police and mass rallies, the new British governor Hubert Rance offered Aung San and the others seats in the Executive Council.

[7] Browder argued that armed revolution would no longer be necessary to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat, as world fascism and imperialism had been weakened, making constitutional methods a real option to achieve "national liberation".

The CPB was finally expelled from the AFPFL on 2 November 1946 after the communists accused Aung San and the socialists of "kneeling before imperialism", selling out by joining the Executive Council, and calling off the general strike.

[13] U Nu called for a new coalition between communists and socialists on 8 November 1947, urging negotiations between the CPB, the PSP, and the People's Volunteer Organisation (PVO), an association of World War II veterans which served as Aung San's private army.

Yèbaw Ba Tin, the CPB's Burma-born Bengali theoretician, released a thesis in December 1947 titled, On the Present Political Situation and Our Tasks which set out a revolutionary strategy reviving the slogan "final seizure of power" from the previous January, and called for a "national rising to tear up the treaty of slavery", nationalisation of all British and foreign assets, the abolition of all forms of landlordism and debt, the dismantling of the state bureaucracy and its replacement with a people's government, and alliances and trade agreements with "democratic China, fighting Vietnam and Indonesia" and other democratic countries resisting "Anglo-American imperialist domination".

[14] A twofold strategy would be followed: an escalating campaign of strikes by workers and government employees in Rangoon and other cities, and the establishment of "liberated" areas in the countryside to be defended by Red Guards consisting of PVOs trained in guerrilla warfare.

Thakin Soe's red flag communists had already started a rebellion, as had the Arakanese nationalists led by the veteran monk U Seinda and the Muslim mujahideen in Arakan.

[21] The CPB's appraisal of Burma as a "semi-colonial and semi-feudal" state led to the Maoist line of establishing guerrilla bases among the peasants in the countryside as opposed to mobilising the urban proletariat,[1][23] although it continued to support above-ground leftist opposition parties such as the Burma Workers and Peasants Party (BWPP) led by trade union leaders Thakins Lwin and Chit Maung, and dubbed "crypto-communists" or "red socialists" by the Rangoon press.

They tried unsuccessfully to bring the communists back into mainstream politics, and in 1956 formed an alliance called the National United Front to contest the election on a "peace ticket" winning 35 per cent of the vote though only a small number of seats.

The headquarters of the CPB remained on the move mostly in the forests and hills along the Sittang River valley, Pyinmana – Yamethin area in central Burma, sometimes north into the "Three M triangle" (Mandalay–Meiktila–Myingyan).

He also estimated that 22,000 civilians had been killed in the violence during the same period, but Western analysts argued it was an intentional underestimation and gave a much larger figure of 60,000 dead and 2 million displaced.

[33] The communist military offensive began to lose traction in the early 1950s; Burmese authorities outlawed the party in October 1953,[34] and the CPB put forward the "peace and unity" proposal in 1955.

[42] Three CPB teams led by Bo Zeya, Yebaw Aung Gyi, Thakins Pu, and Ba Thein Tin arrived in July and September by air from China.

These "Beijing returnees" were allowed to travel to the party's jungle headquarters in the Pegu Yoma near Paukkaung, where the leadership, reunited after 15 years, held a historic meeting of the central committee.

Talks began on 2 September after the CPB delegation headed by the general secretary Yebaw Htay and the People's Army's chief of staff Bo Zeya arrived on 28 August.

Although at first the CPB and NDUF had misinterpreted Ne Win's peace offensive as a sign of weakness desperate for a solution, once they arrived in Rangoon they realised it was going to be a mainly cosmetic exercise.

[47] They did so for several reasons, including the failure of the 1963 peace talks, the government's intensification of its campaign of political repression and military offensives, and most importantly Ne Win's founding of the Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) with the help of former communists.

The majority faction was reinforced by the Beijing returnees led by Yèbaw Aung Gyi, a former Rangoon University Student Union (RUSU) leader whose detailed analysis of the party's history up until that point was adopted as the "1964 line" at a central committee meeting near Nattalin, Bago Region, from 9 September to 14 October 1964.

Drawing on the practices of China's Red Guards, they established youth teams and handpicked the university and high school students who would lead the party's majority faction in purging their opponents.

Thakin Than Tun and the remaining politburo passed a resolution on 15 December 1967 to adopt the "intraparty revolutionary line" and ordered party cadres across the country to carry out their own purges.

[62] Anticipating a major Tatmadaw offensive, the leaders of the three ethnic minorities sought to unite under one organisation; the CPB was a favourable target for co-opting due to the then recent demise of its Bamar leadership.

[63] Shortly after Burma resigned from the Non-Aligned Movement in protest against Soviet and Vietnamese "manipulation" at the September 1979 Havana Conference, the Chinese Foreign Minister Huang Hua paid a visit to Rangoon.

The first meeting took place in Beijing in October between the teams led by Ba Thein Tin and Ne Win who paid a surprise visit to China leaving the Kachin delegation in the middle of the talks in Rangoon.

Both sides now faced another challenge in the rising strength of the NDF formed in 1976, pointedly excluding the Bamar, by the ethnic insurgencies uniting the Karen, Mon, Kachin, Shan, Pa-O, Karenni, Kayan, Wa and Lahu, particularly with the return of the KIO in 1983 after its separate peace talks with the BSPP failed.

The students' calls for the military to create an interim government and to hold multiparty elections fell on deaf ears, and the failure of U Nu and Aung San Suu Kyi to achieve a united opposition sealed the fate of the uprising.

[60] On the morning of 1 February 2021, the Tatmadaw deposed the democratically elected members of Myanmar's civilian government in a military coup d'état, and installed a junta known as the State Administration Council (SAC).