Mnangagwa soon left Tanganyika to train for ZANU's militant wing, the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA). Part of the first group of ZANLA fighters sent overseas for training, he and four others were sent to Beijing, China, where he spent the first two months studying at Peking University's School of Marxism, run by the Communist Party of China. He then spent three months in combat training in Nanjing and studied at a school for military engineering before returning to Tanzania in May 1964. There, he briefly stayed at ZANLA's Itumbi Reefs training camp near Chunya.