Chinese Revolution quiz: 8 questions

The Beiyang Army’s loyalty ran to its paymaster. Yuan’s personal patronage held the officers together while he lived, but there was no institution to hold them together after his death. The warlords of the next decade inherited pieces of his power.

China had joined the Allies and sent 140,000 laborers to the Western Front. At Paris, its representatives learned that Shandong had been secretly promised to Japan. The decision discredited both the West as a model and the treaty system as a remedy; the generation radicalized by the betrayal later staffed both party-states.

For fifteen years warlord armies had been run as businesses, and their soldiers were treated as assets rather than believers. The National Revolutionary Army (NRA) combined its advance with propaganda and organizing, while absorbing defectors from those armies; it more than doubled in size. Tingsi Bridge showed what the new army could do in battle, while the defections exposed the weakness of the old forces.

In the first four campaigns, the Red Army had used mobile battles to destroy opposing forces battalion by battalion. German-advised blockhouse warfare denied it those opportunities. Concrete positions and a blockade defeated the soviet’s conventional counter-defense at Guangchang, leaving breakout as the remaining option. The Long March followed from that change in the fighting.

Zhang Xueliang wanted his homeland back and objected to using his army against Communists instead of Japan. Stalin urged Chiang’s release, because he saw a living Chiang as the only leader able to keep Japanese armies away from Soviet borders. Zhou Enlai negotiated the release. A mutiny the CCP had not started helped it survive 1936.

Japan’s mechanized war of lines was unstoppable on the open northern plains. Rivers and cities along the Yangtze slowed its advance, but the fighting cost China a quarter-million casualties and the Whampoa officer corps. The announced doctrine was to “Trade space for time”: China would stay in the war until the world war arrived. It did so at great cost.

Half a million Japanese troops cut the corridor shown on the map. Their success did nothing to avert Japan’s defeat, which was approaching from the Pacific. In China, however, the campaign discredited the Nationalist state: Washington stopped planning around Chiang’s army, and the public saw that after seven years of war the government could still lose a province in a season. The campaign’s true victor was in Yan’an, untouched by it.

In Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power (1962), Johnson placed the Japanese occupation at the center of his explanation. Selden and later scholars argued that the “Yenan Way” of land policy, taxation and institutions built support that invasion alone cannot explain. Chen Yung-fa documented coercion intertwined with both. Their debate gives us competing ways to weigh structural and political explanations of “why did Mao win?”