The Chinese Civil War

The moment of surrender: who takes over?

On 10 August 1945 Zhu De ordered the Eighth Route Army to take over Japanese-held areas; Chiang told the Communists to “stay where you are” and the Japanese to surrender only to Nationalist forces. American aircraft and ships moved 500,000 Nationalist troops to the coastal cities and north China, while the Communists sent 100,000 troops and 20,000 cadres from Shandong and Hebei into Manchuria, the largest industrial region Japan had left, then under Soviet occupation. Source 1 · Source 2

In August 1945 Stalin signed a treaty of friendship with the Nationalist government that gave the Soviets rights at Port Arthur, Dalian and on the Manchurian railways in exchange for recognising Chiang as China’s sole government, and he urged Mao to go to Chongqing. On 28 August Mao flew there under US ambassador Hurley’s guarantee and negotiated with Chiang for forty-three days. The Double Tenth Agreement of 10 October promised a political consultative conference and “peaceful nation-building” but left the liberated-area governments and the armies unsettled. Source 3 · Source 4

Marshall’s mission and its failure

In December 1945 Truman sent General George Marshall to broker a coalition government and the integration of the armies. The ceasefire of January 1946 and the political consultative conference agreed on constitutional revision and the end of one-party rule, and a plan to merge the armies was signed in February. But Kuomintang hardliners overturned the conference decisions, and in Manchuria, as the Soviets withdrew, the two armies clashed at once. Source 5 · Source 6

At Siping in April–May 1946 Lin Biao, on Mao’s orders, fought a defensive battle for the city, lost and fell back north of the Songhua; the June truce that Marshall pressed on the Nationalists halted their pursuit and gave the Communists breathing space. Full civil war began at the end of June when Nationalist forces attacked the Central Plains liberated area. Marshall left in January 1947 denouncing “extremists” on both sides, and the United States continued aid to the Nationalists while avoiding direct intervention. Source 7 · Source 8

The Nationalist offensive and its limits

In 1946 the Nationalists, with 4.3 million troops and American equipment, took most of the towns in the liberated areas and in March 1947 Yan’an itself. But the captured cities dispersed their forces, and units tied to defending railway lines lost mobility. The Communists withdrew on the principle of “give up cities, preserve forces” and destroyed isolated units one by one, while Mao directed the war from a succession of small villages in northern Shaanxi. Source 1 · Source 2

Behind the lines the Nationalist state was disintegrating. The corruption of the takeover officials (“takeover” became “plunder-over”), hyperinflation from the printing presses, the violence of Taiwan’s rule exposed in the 28 February incident of 1947 and the repression of student protests turned the urban middle classes away. The gold yuan reform of August 1948 failed within months, and Shanghai prices reached millions of times their 1937 level. Source 1 · Source 9

Land reform: binding the peasants to the war

With the “May Fourth Directive” of 1946 the Communists moved from the wartime rent reductions to confiscating landlord land, and the Outline Land Law of October 1947 ordered equal division village by village. At “speak bitterness” meetings peasants denounced landlords, and their stake in keeping the land they received became the basis of conscription and supply mobilisation; the figure of five million peasants hauling supplies by handcart in the Huaihai campaign shows the scale. Source 10) · Source 11

Land reform was violent. In the radical phase of 1947 rich and middle peasants too became targets of “struggle”, and hundreds of thousands of landlords were executed or beaten to death. In early 1948 Mao and Ren Bishi ordered the “leftist” excesses corrected and returned to protecting middle peasants. This experience — mass mobilisation, excess and correction — became the template for land reform after 1949. Source 10) · Source 12

The three campaigns: autumn 1948 to winter 1949

In autumn 1948 the balance turned. In the Liaoshen campaign of September–November Lin Biao’s Northeast Field Army first took Jinzhou to seal the exit from Manchuria, starved Changchun into surrender (tens of thousands or more civilians died in the five-month siege) and destroyed the Nationalist armies at Shenyang, gaining all Manchuria and 470,000 troops. Manchuria’s industry and the Japanese weapons the Soviets had handed over fell to the PLA. Source 13 · Source 14

In the Huaihai campaign that began around Xuzhou in early November, the East China and Central Plains Field Armies of Chen Yi, Liu Bocheng, Deng Xiaoping and Su Yu, 600,000 strong, encircled and destroyed 550,000 Nationalists in sixty-five days; confusion in the Nationalist command and the isolation of Du Yuming’s army group were decisive. In the simultaneous Pingjin campaign the Northeast Field Army entered north China and took Tianjin, and Fu Zuoyi surrendered Beiping without a fight on 31 January 1949. In the three campaigns the Nationalists lost 1.5 million men. Source 11 · Source 15

Crossing the Yangtze and the retreat to Taiwan

In January 1949 Chiang “retired” and Li Zongren as acting president sought peace, but the Communists’ eight conditions amounted to a demand for surrender. When talks collapsed on 20 April, a million PLA troops crossed the Yangtze the next day and took Nanjing on the 23rd; the shelling of the British frigate Amethyst on the river signalled that the age of the powers was over. Shanghai fell in May, Changsha in August, Guangzhou in October and Chongqing in November. Source 16 · Source 1

Throughout 1949 Chiang moved gold, his best troops and the Palace Museum treasures to Taiwan, and on 10 December he flew from Chengdu to Taipei; 600,000 troops and a million refugees gathered on the island. Hainan and the Zhoushan islands fell in 1950, but when the Korean War broke out in June 1950 Truman sent the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait and the Communist plan to attack Taiwan was postponed indefinitely. The standoff between the two governments was thus frozen. Source 9 · Source 17

Why the Communists won

The State Department’s China White Paper of August 1949 concluded that the Nationalist defeat lay “beyond the control of the United States”, and Mao mocked it in “Farewell, Leighton Stuart!”. In America the question of “who lost China” fed McCarthyism. Stalin advised as late as early 1949 that the Communists stop at the Yangtze; Mao ignored him and later recalled that Moscow “did not trust us”. Source 18 · Source 1

Historians locate the causes of victory on several levels: rural mobilisation and land reform, a disciplined army under unified command, Nationalist corruption, inflation and strategic blunders, Manchuria as a logistical base, and the asymmetry of forces created by the war with Japan. Whether the Communist victory is read as a “peasant revolution” or a “military conquest” feeds the later debate over the nature of the People’s Republic. Source 19 · Source 2