Why did Mao win and Chiang lose the Chinese Civil War?

The short answer

• The war against Japan. In 1937 the CCP had about 40,000 survivors in the loess hills. By 1945 it claimed a million troops and some 90 million people under some form of administration. Japanese occupation had damaged the Nationalist army, tax base and urban legitimacy, while leaving space in which Communist organizers could work. Historians disagree over what made that opportunity fruitful. Chalmers Johnson emphasized nationalism, Mark Selden social policy, and others the organization that connected the two.
• Land and the army. Land policy gave peasants a stake in the struggle. The party moved from rent reduction toward redistribution, and at Huaihai the barrows showed what rural mobilization could supply to an army. Redistribution also involved coercion. The Nationalists, tied to landed and urban elites, had not effectively implemented their 1930 land-reform law on the mainland. After 1949 the KMT carried out sweeping reform on Taiwan under different political conditions. The comparison shows how a change in relationships and circumstances allowed the same party to pursue a different policy.
• Money and confidence. Wartime decline of the fabi gave way to postwar hyperinflation. The 1948 gold-yuan exchange then took citizens’ assets for notes that quickly lost value. Officials, officers, teachers and shopkeepers were among those who suffered. The government needed these people to administer the country and sustain its forces; the destruction of their savings weakened confidence before the defeats and defections of 1948–49.
• Rival party-states. Chapter 4 describes the Leninist organizations both contenders built. Each sought authority over China, while neither offered much institutional room for a loyal opposition. That shared structure made a durable settlement harder, though it cannot account for every military decision. The People’s Republic and the government on Taiwan carried this inheritance into different subsequent histories.

What it changed

Governing after victory. After victory came the work of governing. In the following years the new state unified currency, suppressed inflation and pursued land reform on a large scale. Violence against landlords accompanied reform, and estimates of the dead remain disputed. China also fought United Nations forces in Korea until the armistice. Administrative capacities developed in base areas now operated across a much larger population, with coercion as well as organization.

Two governments endure. The Taipei government retained China’s United Nations seat until 1971 and its American alliance beyond that date. The strait became an enduring Cold War frontier. Crises in 1954, 1958 and 1996 were among the later consequences of the unresolved dispute.

Revolutionary methods abroad. Other revolutionary movements drew on the Chinese experience of peasant warfare, base areas, united fronts and close ties between party and army. Vietnam was especially important: its war against France was already under way as this chapter closes. These methods traveled across continents, where movements adapted them to their own conditions.