Chinese Civil War

• 1. Introduction

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  The Chinese Civil War began on the 1st of August 1927 with a Communist uprising in the city of Nanchang and did not end until the 10th of December 1949, when the last organized Nationalist resistance on mainland China collapsed. By then, the conflict had swallowed more than two decades, reshaped a nation of hundreds of millions, and split China into two governments that each claimed to be the only legitimate heir to the Republic. What made this war extraordinary was not simply its length or its casualties. It was the way it kept stopping and restarting, forcing sworn enemies to fight side by side against Japan, then turning on each other again the moment the foreign threat receded. The questions the story raises are still alive today. How did a small Communist study group of 300 members in 1922 end up defeating a government backed by the United States with more than four billion dollars in aid? What drove a KMT-allied general to kidnap his own commander-in-chief? And why, more than seventy years after the guns fell silent, has no peace treaty ever been signed?

• 2. Two Parties, One Revolution

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  Sun Yat-sen turned to the Soviet Union in 1923 after Western countries ignored his requests for help unifying China. That year, in Shanghai, Sun and Soviet representative Adolph Joffe signed the Sun-Joffe Manifesto, a declaration of cooperation linking the Comintern, the Kuomintang, and the Chinese Communist Party. Comintern agent Mikhail Borodin arrived to reorganize both parties along the lines of the Soviet Communist Party. The CCP at that point was tiny: 300 members in 1922, rising to 1,500 by 1925. The KMT dwarfed it with 50,000 members as of 1923. Sun sent his lieutenant Chiang Kai-shek to Moscow for several months of military and political study. On his return, Chiang became head of the Whampoa Military Academy, where the Soviets supplied equipment, teaching material, and techniques for mass mobilization. Zhou Enlai served there as a political instructor, and CCP members were permitted to join the KMT individually. For a few years the alliance worked. In 1926 and 1927, the combined Northern Expedition swept through central China, breaking the hold of regional warlords and capturing Beijing by June 1928. But Sun died in 1925, and after his death the KMT fractured along left and right lines. KMT members grew convinced that the Soviets were using the CCP to hollow out their party from within. When the left wing rejected Chiang's demand to purge Communist influence, the alliance that had seemed so powerful collapsed almost overnight.

• 3. Purge, Uprising, Retreat

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  On the 12th of April 1927, General Bai Chongxi oversaw mass arrests and executions of Communists within the KMT in Shanghai, an event the CCP named the Shanghai massacre and the start of the White Terror. The widening rift between Chiang Kai-shek and Wang Jingwei, who led the KMT's left wing, left China with three competing capitals: a recognized republican capital in Beijing, a CCP-aligned government at Wuhan, and Chiang's right-wing KMT regime at Nanjing. The CCP responded on the 1st of August 1927 by launching the Nanchang Uprising. From that mutiny emerged what would become the Red Army. By the 11th of December, Communist forces attempted to establish a Soviet in Guangzhou, but lost the city within two days to a counterattack ordered by General Zhang Fakui. Wang Jingwei fled to France on the 16th of December. Over the following years, Chiang launched five encirclement campaigns designed to destroy the Communist base areas in the south. The first two failed. The third was abandoned after the Mukden Incident in Manchuria. The fourth, from 1932 to 1933, scored early gains but Chiang's armies suffered serious losses when they pushed into the heart of Mao's Soviet Chinese Republic. For the fifth and most methodical campaign, Chiang hired Nazi advisors who devised a blockhouse strategy: a ring of fortified positions, each separated by roughly five miles, slowly tightening around the Jiangxi Soviet while cutting off food and supplies. It was the most effective KMT strategy yet, and it pushed the Communists to the breaking point.

• 4. The Long March

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  In October 1934, the CCP broke through gaps in the blockhouse ring, exploiting the fact that a warlord ally's troops, rather than regular KMT forces, were manning that section of the perimeter. Those warlord soldiers had little appetite for pursuing the Communists. The resulting retreat lasted a full year and covered what Mao estimated as 12,500 kilometers across some of the most difficult terrain in western China. The First Front Army set out in serious danger: its initial military commission was inexperienced and Chiang's forces nearly annihilated the column. Under Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, the survivors circled west and then north toward Shaanxi in a route that reportedly traversed over 9,000 km over 370 days. In November 1935, shortly after the survivors settled in northern Shaanxi, Mao formally took over Zhou Enlai's leading role in the Red Army. He became chairman of the Military Commission, with Zhou and Deng Xiaoping as vice-chairmen. Zhang Guotao's Red 4th Front Army took a different route through northwest China and was largely destroyed by Chiang's forces and his Chinese Muslim Ma clique allies. Of the 90,000 to 100,000 people who had left the Jiangxi Soviet, only around 7,000 to 8,000 reached Shaanxi. Zhang himself survived, but with his army gone and his authority spent, he never challenged Mao again. The march also served a political purpose: as the column moved through the countryside it confiscated weapons from landlords, recruited poor peasants, and built a reputation among common people. KMT forces, meanwhile, enlisted 300 Khampa fighters into its Consolatory Commission in Sichuan to battle the Red Army, but that force was defeated when its religious leader was captured by the Communists. The march ended with Mao as the unchallenged head of the CCP.

• 5. The Xi'an Kidnapping

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  Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, but the threat initially did not halt the civil war. Chiang Kai-shek privately described the Communists as a disease of the heart and the Japanese as a disease of the skin, and ordered his Manchurian commander not to resist the Japanese advance. His policy was summed up as "first internal pacification, then external resistance." The CCP reacted with contempt, calling Chiang a Japanese pawn and demanding simultaneous resistance to Japan and opposition to Chiang. Pressure from Moscow shifted the equation. The Soviet Union, alarmed by Hitler's rise in Europe, pushed Communist parties worldwide to form united fronts with moderate forces. The 7th World Congress of the Comintern formalized this in the summer of 1935. The CCP was cut off from radio contact with Moscow during the Long March and only learned of the new policy in November 1935. That December, at a conference in Wayaobu, they published a manifesto calling for the broadest possible national united front, while privately planning to expand the Red Army to one million men. Separately, the CCP signed secret ceasefire agreements with two of Chiang's own generals: Zhang Xueliang, commander of the Northeastern Army, and Yang Hucheng, of the Northwestern Army. Both were furious that Chiang kept prioritizing the civil war over resisting Japan. On the 12th of December 1936, Zhang and Yang kidnapped Chiang Kai-shek in what became known as the Xi'an Incident. To protect their own position, both sides suspended fighting and formed the Second United Front. The ten-year armed struggle the CCP called the Second Revolutionary Civil War was over, and a new and even more complicated phase was about to begin.

• 6. War Within a War

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  When Japan launched its full-scale invasion in 1937, the Second United Front between the KMT and CCP was cooperation in name far more than in practice. KMT forces bore the brunt of conventional fighting as the legal government of China, while Communist troops waged guerrilla warfare in occupied areas, returning land to peasants and building local militias. By spring 1945, nineteen Communist-governed areas existed in China, housing 95 million people. In fall 1945, Communist armies numbered 1.27 million fighters, supported by 2.68 million militia members. The New Fourth Army incident of early 1941 exposed how thin the alliance really was. Chiang demanded in December 1940 that the Communist New Fourth Army evacuate Anhui and Jiangsu provinces. The army complied, and was then ambushed by KMT forces during its withdrawal, resulting in several thousand deaths. This effectively ended the Second United Front. US special envoy Lauchlin Currie was sent by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to warn that only Japan would benefit from a Chinese civil war. The Soviet Union sent an imperative telegram to Mao in 1941 with the same warning. Japan's 1944 Operation Ichi-Go dealt the KMT severe losses and greatly strained relations between Chiang and the United States, which had pressed for reorganization of Chinese forces and greater operational authority through General Joseph Stilwell. Chiang wrote on the 16th of July 1944 that American pressure had reached levels he could never have anticipated even in his worst expectations. The US simultaneously opened contact with the CCP through the Dixie Mission, signaling that Washington was reassessing its options in China. In Chiang's 1943 propaganda piece China's Destiny, he publicly questioned what role the CCP would have after the war.

• 7. The Decisive Campaigns

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  Peace negotiations between Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong opened in Chongqing on the 28th of August 1945, with American ambassador Patrick J. Hurley accompanying Mao partly as a personal safety guarantee. The talks produced the Double Tenth Agreement, but no concrete mechanisms for enforcement. Full-scale war resumed on the 26th of June 1946. On the 20th of July, Chiang launched a large-scale assault on Communist-held territory in North China using 113 brigades totaling 1.6 million troops. The CCP, outnumbered and outgunned, adopted a passive defense: yield territory, preserve forces, wear the KMT down. After one year of this strategy, the CCP had eliminated 1.12 million KMT troops while growing its own forces to roughly two million men. The Soviet Union had also handed over captured Japanese weapons and Manchurian industrial assets to the Communists; the Manchurian industrial base alone had been valued at up to two billion dollars before Soviet dismantling and removal. The three campaigns of late 1948 through early 1949 proved decisive. The Liaoshen Campaign, launched on the 12th of September 1948 and led by Lin Biao, captured Jinzhou in a 24-hour assault on the 14th of October and concluded with the fall of Shenyang on the 1st of November. The Huaihai Campaign over east-central China was the largest military operation of the entire war, with the CCP mobilizing 5,430,000 peasants in support. The Pingjin Campaign lasted 64 days, from the 21st of November 1948 to the 31st of January 1949, with 40,000 CCP casualties at Zhangjiakou alone. Across the three campaigns combined, the CCP destroyed 144 regular and 29 irregular KMT divisions, including 1.54 million veteran KMT troops. Beiping changed hands on the 31st of January 1949 through negotiation, without a shot, when Nationalist commander Fu Zuoyi surrendered the city.

• 8. Aftermath and Open Wound

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  On the 1st of October 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic of China with its capital at Beijing. Chiang Kai-shek and approximately two million soldiers, officials, teachers, and civilians retreated to Taiwan in December after the fall of Chengdu on the 10th of December 1949. In January 1950, US President Harry S. Truman announced that the United States would not intervene if the PRC attacked Taiwan. That changed abruptly with the Korean War in June 1950. Truman ordered the Seventh Fleet to the Taiwan Strait, and the US eventually formalized its military commitment through the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty of 1954. The ROC, before that formal relationship was secured, had enlisted a secret Japanese military advisory group called the White Group, led by former Imperial Japanese Army General Yasuji Okamura, to help rebuild its military on Taiwan. By the late 1950s, with US aid, the ROC Armed Forces had grown to approximately 600,000 troops. On the 1st of April 1961, Chiang formally established Project National Glory, a classified multi-phase invasion plan targeting Xiamen, with air campaigns planned for Fujian and Guangdong. The office running this planning was abolished on the 20th of July 1972, as Chiang's health declined. Approximately 3,000 KMT troops under General Li Mi had retreated into Burma rather than surrender, continuing guerrilla raids into Yunnan through the early 1950s with CIA support; following Burmese appeals to the United Nations in 1953, approximately 6,000 soldiers were evacuated to Taiwan by end of 1954, though thousands remained and ROC resupply continued for decades. On Taiwan, the PRC's 1954 shelling of Kinmen triggered the First Taiwan Strait Crisis. The Second Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1958 brought intense artillery exchanges. After the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis, both sides tacitly ceased open conflict in 1979. A fourth crisis began in August 2022, when US Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan triggered seven days of unprecedented PRC live-fire military drills in six zones encircling the island. No armistice has ever been signed.