China in Revolution, 1911–1949 — the study guide

CHAPTER 1 · 1911–1912 · 1911

The Fall of the Qing

In 1911 the Qing empire appears on the map as a single blue expanse. Yet the legal claim to rule that expanse and the power to enforce it were already far apart. Britain had defeated the dynasty twice, and France and Japan had also defeated it. Foreign powers carved out spheres of influence, while customs revenue collected under foreign administration helped pay the Boxer indemnity. Even within Shanghai, foreign councils governed parts of the city (the ● of the International Settlement), and foreign residents there were exempt from Chinese law.

The pressure also surrounded the empire. The tan rim runs from British India and Burma through French Indochina to the Russian empire along China's northern arc. Japan, shown in charcoal, had annexed Taiwan in 1895 and Korea in 1910; it now watched Manchuria for an opening. The Qing still possessed sovereignty, a claim to the legal right to rule, but foreign governments could exercise power on Chinese territory. Recovering the ability to govern China would become a central concern of the movements in this atlas.

The event that brought the dynasty down began with an accident. On 10 October 1911 a bomb exploded prematurely in a revolutionary cell at Hankou, across the river from Wuchang (the ✕). Police seized membership lists, exposing New Army soldiers who had joined the conspiracy. Those soldiers mutinied that night rather than wait to be arrested and shot.

A local rising became a revolution because of decisions made elsewhere. Within six weeks fifteen provinces declared for a republic. The plotters had no means to conquer the empire themselves; the throne depended on provincial officers and elites choosing to defend it, and few did. On 12 February 1912 the child emperor Puyi abdicated.

The collapse reached beyond the provinces. Outer Mongolia declared independence under its Buddhist theocrat (the ● at Urga), and Tibet expelled the Qing garrison and governed itself. The parchment wedge in the southwest represents that change in practical power. The republic claimed the Qing territories, but a claim could not by itself restore control. The distance between the two would shape the next thirty-eight years.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Defeats that accumulated. Between the Opium War of 1839–42 and the Boxer Protocol of 1901, defeat brought repeated demands for ports, tariff concessions, legal privileges for foreigners, and indemnities. These losses constrained the response to later threats: customs revenue pledged to compensation could not also pay for a navy. The fleet built in the 1880s had itself been sunk by Japan in 1895. After seventy years, the dynasty's claim to protect the civilization it ruled had been challenged in public again and again.

Reform and its consequences. After 1901 the court tried to rebuild its authority through reform. It abolished the examination system in 1905, created New Armies on the German model, and promised a constitution. These measures changed the relationships on which the dynasty had relied. Scholars lost the examinations as a route to office, while students who went to Japan encountered revolutionaries. The provinces gained modern troops, some of whom turned against the throne at Wuchang. The old basis of rule was being taken apart before a new one had secured loyalty.

The railway dispute. Railway policy brought the conflict between court and provinces into the open. In May 1911 the court nationalized provincial railway companies and pledged the lines to foreign lenders, taking over investments held by gentry in Sichuan and Hunan. The Railway Protection movement put provincial elites in the streets before the Wuchang rising. Troops sent from Hubei to suppress protest in Sichuan weakened the garrison left behind. A plan to finance railway construction had estranged people whose support the dynasty needed, while the response to protest altered the military position in Hubei.

A revolutionary idea already in place. Sun Yat-sen's alliance had lost ten planned risings since 1895, but its influence extended beyond those failures. Student journals spread revolutionary ideas, overseas Chinese supplied remittances, and cells recruited within the New Army. These connections help explain why the discovery of a conspiracy could lead soldiers to mutiny. Few Chinese had electoral experience, so republicanism had shallow roots as a practiced form of government. Yet the throne had also lost much of the support on which it depended. As one revolutionary put it, the dynasty was not overthrown. It collapsed.

WHAT IT CHANGED

A republic needs an army. At Nanjing, Sun Yat-sen's provisional government could give the republic a president, a flag, and a calendar. It lacked an army capable of compelling the emperor to abdicate. Yuan Shikai commanded the Beiyang Army and could bargain with both sides. Within six weeks Sun surrendered the presidency to Yuan in exchange for abdication, placing the new republic's future in the hands of a general.

The empire's edges detach. Outer Mongolia declared independence in 1911; Tibet expelled Qing forces and governed itself in 1912–13. Chinese governments refused to accept those departures. Warlord, Nationalist, and Communist regimes each inherited the claim to the Qing territories, although the reach of their control remained a consequential question through 1951 and beyond.

Japan sees an opening. China's provincial divisions gave Japan opportunities to increase its influence. Japanese forces seized Germany's position in Shandong in 1914, and Japan presented the Twenty-One Demands in 1915. Over the following decades Japanese military power would continue to shape China's struggle over its territory and government.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Was 1911 a revolution, or primarily the collapse of the Qing dynasty?

Much supports calling it a collapse. Sun's planned risings failed, the crisis at Wuchang began by accident, and provincial elites and Beiyang generals retained much of the power that passed from the throne. The new flag did not immediately produce a new social order. Yet Joseph Esherick and other historians ask us to look at what had disappeared. Monarchy and its appeal to the Mandate of Heaven ended; the examination system and the Confucian elite it sustained had already been dismantled. Yuan's later attempt to restore monarchy met resistance and failed within months. On this account, 1911 was a political revolution with limited immediate social reach. It ended an imperial order and opened the way for the deeper changes associated with May Fourth, the party-states, and land revolution over the following decades.

AN INTERESTING FACT

When the Wuchang rising began, Sun Yat-sen was raising money among overseas Chinese in Denver, Colorado. He learned of it from a newspaper. He traveled home by way of London and Paris, seeking diplomatic recognition and an end to foreign loans to the Qing. After reaching Shanghai on 25 December 1911, he was elected provisional president four days later. Six weeks afterward he gave way to Yuan Shikai in the bargain for the emperor's abdication. The republic's best-known founder had been abroad during its decisive rising.

CHAPTER 2 · 1912–1916 · 1915

Yuan Shikai’s Republic

Yuan Shikai's republic appears on the map as one blue expanse. To understand how precarious that unity was, look at the force on which the president depended. Yuan (the ● at Peking) commanded the Beiyang Army, whose officers owed their positions and advancement largely to him. The republic needed the army, but its commander could use those personal loyalties against the institutions meant to restrain him.

The elections of 1912–13 offered another way to organize power. Sun Yat-sen's Nationalists won a parliamentary plurality, and their leader Song Jiaoren advocated government through a cabinet responsible to parliament. In March 1913 Song was shot at Shanghai station. Telegrams connected the conspiracy to Yuan's premier, although Yuan's own role remains disputed. When the Nationalists mounted an armed Second Revolution that summer, Yuan crushed it within weeks.

He then dissolved parliament and rewrote the constitution. By 1914 he held a presidency for life, with a legislature of appointees. Yuan had removed an organized political challenge and could enforce his decisions, but the settlement depended heavily on his own authority. What would hold it together when he could no longer command?

Meanwhile Japan was testing China's ability to resist pressure from abroad. After entering the First World War in 1914, Japan seized Germany's position at Tsingtao in Shandong (the coastal ●). In January 1915 it presented the Twenty-One Demands, seeking advantages in Manchuria, mining, and ports. A final group of ‘wishes’ sought Japanese advisers inside the Chinese government itself, raising the prospect of a protectorate.

Yuan publicized the demands abroad and gained sympathy. Japan withdrew the most intrusive group, but Yuan accepted a reduced settlement; its signature on 9 May became National Humiliation Day. Later that year he attempted to strengthen his position in another way, proclaiming a monarchy in December 1915. Instead, Yunnan's generals raised the National Protection Army against him (the ✕ at Kunming). Other provinces defected, and even his Beiyang officers withheld the support he needed.

Yuan abandoned the monarchy after 83 days and died in June 1916. The network he had built did not disappear with him. Its commanders remained, each with resources and relationships of his own, and they now competed for control of the government. The map's single color had concealed a form of unity that the president's death could not sustain.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The Beiyang network. Yuan built the Qing's modern Beiyang Army in the 1890s and 1900s. Its commanders' careers depended on his patronage: he promoted and paid them, and marriages and other connections joined them to his circle. These ties made the army a powerful instrument for the republic, but they did not give the constitution an independent hold over its officers. After Yuan's death, Beiyang commanders and provincial imitators could use their own military networks to pursue power.

A fragile constitutional settlement. The 1912 settlement had been negotiated among elites. About 40 million men were nominally enfranchised for the 1912–13 elections, but the representatives they chose lacked an effective means of enforcing constitutional rules against the army's commander. Song's murder and Yuan's dissolution of parliament showed how little protection those rules afforded. In 1915–16 provincial armies would show that they could resist him by force.

The opportunity for Japan. The European war gave Japan room to act in China. Britain needed the Japanese navy, Russia was absorbed by the war in Europe, and Germany was Japan's enemy. Japan seized the German position in Shandong and presented its demands while the European powers were preoccupied. Although the most intrusive clauses were withdrawn, Japan kept important advantages in Shandong. Another opportunity for Japanese expansion would arise in 1931.

The monarchy miscalculation. Some of Yuan's advisers believed a throne could give his government lasting legitimacy. The American constitutional scholar Frank Goodnow wrote a memorandum on monarchy that supporters quoted beyond its intended scope. But the Qing's fall had ended the old imperial claim to the Mandate of Heaven, and Yuan's own bid failed to secure the backing he needed. Provincial leaders and men in his military network opposed him, combining republican objections with concern for provincial power. Their resistance showed that regional commanders could check the center.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Military rivalry after Yuan. After Yuan's death, Duan Qirui, Feng Guozhang, and Cao Kun were among the commanders who inherited parts of his Beiyang network. They and their allies fought for the Peking government, whose international recognition and access to customs revenue made it a valuable prize. The grey-tan plates in the next snapshot show the division that followed.

A grievance carried forward. Japan's seizure of Shandong and its Twenty-One Demands gave Chinese nationalism a concrete grievance. The dispute continued after Yuan's death. In 1919 the Versailles settlement awarded Japan Germany's former rights in Shandong, prompting the student marches described in Chapter 3.

Sun seeks another route. Sun Yat-sen's defeat and exile sent him searching for support to build a political movement with military power behind it. Western governments did not provide what he sought. In 1923 he found a partner in Moscow, beginning an arrangement that would shape the party and army in Chapters 4 and 5.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Was Yuan Shikai the republic’s betrayer, or a leader overwhelmed by an impossible task?

Yuan faced formidable problems. The state was bankrupt, provinces had recently demonstrated that they could secede, and Japan was ready to exploit weakness. He had an instrument of national power, and his efforts to centralize revenue and administration addressed real needs. It is understandable that someone might have looked to him to hold the republic together. Yet the charge of betrayal also has force. Song Jiaoren was murdered, Yuan dissolved parliament, and he sought to become emperor. The difficulties he inherited explain the appeal of strong rule; they do not excuse the destruction of parliamentary opposition. Nor did his personal system solve succession. Yuan died of natural causes at fifty-six, leaving military leaders without a comparable authority to hold them together. His career shows both the attraction of a strongman's promise of order and the fragility of an order dependent on one man.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Yuan's intended reign was called Hongxian, “Constitutional Abundance.” Its official era ran for 83 days, from 1 January to 22 March 1916, and no coronation took place. Preparations had nevertheless produced the objects of a monarchy: coins were struck, stamps printed, and a porcelain works at Jingdezhen made wares bearing the Hongxian mark. The objects outlasted the empire and became collectors' items.

CHAPTER 3 · 1916–1925 · 1924

Warlords and May Fourth

The grey-tan plates on the map show what happened when Yuan’s central power dissolved. A warlord governed through an army, and that army supplied his income as well as his authority. Zhang Zuolin, a former bandit backed by Japanese patrons, held Manchuria and its arsenals. The Zhili clique controlled the Peking–Tianjin plain. Peking was a prize in itself: foreign governments recognized its rulers, and the customs surplus was paid to them. Holding the capital gave a regional commander the resources and standing of the government of China.

The ✕ at Shanhaiguan marks one of the largest struggles for that prize. Perhaps 450,000 men fought with artillery, aircraft and armored trains; betrayal finally decided the contest. Elsewhere Wu Peifu held the central Yangtze, Yan Xishan ruled Shanxi behind its mountains as a private model kingdom, and Sichuan had wars of its own. Sun Yat-sen’s blue patch at Canton stood apart: he was trying to build a state around a doctrine. Xinjiang and Tibet continued beyond the reach of the Peking government.

The challenge that outlasted the battles began at the ● in Peking. On 4 May 1919 about three thousand students marched against the Versailles settlement’s transfer of rights in Shandong to Japan. Strikes and boycotts spread to some two hundred cities, and merchants discovered that refusing to buy could be a political weapon. For many young people, the settlement raised a larger question: why had China’s government and inherited institutions left the country so vulnerable?

New Culture writers sought answers in a change of language and ideas. They promoted vernacular Chinese in place of classical writing; journals such as New Youth championed “Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy,” and Ibsen and Marx appeared in translation. In 1921 thirteen delegates met in a girls’ school in Shanghai’s French Concession and founded the Chinese Communist Party. One was Mao Zedong, a library assistant from Hunan. The party had about fifty members and no territory visible on the map. The tide chart begins at zero so we can follow how much would change.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Armies as capital, war as business. An army had to be paid, but it could also make its commander rich. Warlords taxed opium and salt, printed money, and mortgaged railways and mines to foreign lenders. They could enlarge their forces by taking defeated units into service. A rival’s soldiers were therefore assets worth acquiring. This helps explain the defections and indecisive wars: destroying an army could mean destroying something the victor wanted. Commanders could profit from an arrangement that impoverished the provinces supporting it.

The Peking government as prize. The Peking government could no longer command the whole country, yet the office remained valuable. Foreign powers recognized whoever held the capital, and the foreign-run Maritime Customs paid its surplus to that government. A commander who took Peking gained both a treasury and a claim to represent the republic. The Zhili–Fengtian wars of 1922 and 1924 were contests for these rewards. The appearance of one government survived partly because rival commanders wanted to capture it intact.

Versailles radicalizes a generation. China had joined the Allies and sent 140,000 laborers to the Western Front, hoping that Wilson’s promises would help it recover its rights. At Paris its representatives found that Britain and France had secretly conceded Japan’s claim to Shandong in 1917. The Peking government had itself signed loans acknowledging the arrangement. The outcome discredited the West as a model, the treaty system as a remedy, and the government claiming to represent China. Against that disappointment, the Bolshevik offer in 1919–20 to renounce Tsarist privileges in China addressed a powerful grievance.

A cultural crisis under the political one. For many May Fourth thinkers, the treaty exposed a failure deeper than diplomacy. They judged the Confucian family, classical language and examination-trained elite to have failed China in a Darwinian struggle for survival. That judgment was contestable, but it explains the scale of their ambitions. If the inherited culture had left China weak, replacing one ruling clique would not be enough. A party-state, national renewal and class revolution offered different answers to what Chinese society should become; better administration alone could seem too small.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Moscow finds its opening. The Comintern saw Chinese nationalism as a force the small CCP could join. In 1923 Moscow agreed to supply Sun’s Nationalists with arms, money and organizers, while Communists entered the KMT as individuals. Soviet support and Leninist methods shaped both parties. For the moment, the arrangement put future rivals to work in the same alliance.

The warlord system peaks and rots. During the 1924 Zhili–Fengtian war, Feng Yuxiang seized Peking before the campaign was over. His move showed how much depended on loyalties that could change in mid-war. Exhaustion with competing military governments later helped the Northern Expedition; the cliques’ inability to unite against it also made the advance easier.

A party of fifty waits. The CCP remained a junior partner for much of the decade, drawing largely on urban intellectuals while organizing railway and mill workers. Its members suffered a massacre during the 1923 Peking–Hankou railway strike and learned United Front work inside the KMT. None of this gave the party territory on the map. Its later importance would take much longer to become visible there.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

How far was the warlord era a laboratory for China’s state-building as well as an interruption of it?

The case for calling the era an interruption is strong. Armies drained provinces, famine spread, railways were mortgaged and central authority broke apart. Yet regional rulers built as well as consumed: Yan Xishan’s Shanxi and Zhang Zuolin’s Manchuria maintained schools, arsenals and railways. The wars trained officers who would fight later conflicts. The experience also made a disciplined party-army attractive to KMT and CCP leaders who associated political fragmentation with national weakness. Diana Lary and others draw attention to banditry, refugee flows and the militarization of rural life, conditions in which later revolutionaries organized. The constitutional experiment of the republic was weakened while the ground was prepared for authoritarian party-states. The era was a laboratory, but its institutions emerged from destruction and suffering.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Hu Shi’s 1917 essay in New Youth proposed writing in the vernacular. The change reached schools quickly: within three years the Ministry of Education under the warlord government ordered primary schools to teach it. By the mid-1920s newspapers, fiction and political debate had moved to vernacular writing. Classical Chinese had served as the empire’s written language for roughly two thousand years; it differed greatly from speech and required a difficult literary education. The rapid, peaceful reform transformed the written culture of later party manifestos and village literacy classes.

CHAPTER 4 · 1923–1927 · 1926

The United Front Marches North

Sun Yat-sen wanted to build a government strong enough to reunite China. The warlords had armies, but their soldiers served military employers whose alliances could change. Sun’s movement in the blue south was developing a different instrument: a party-army, joining military command to a political organization, a doctrine and discipline.

In 1923 Sun made a bargain with Moscow. Along with money and rifles came organizers led by Michael Borodin, who helped rebuild the Nationalist Party as a pyramid of cells and committees. Members of the small CCP entered as individuals. The allies founded an officer academy on an island below Canton, marked by the ● at Whampoa. Its cadets were to serve a party and a cause rather than a paymaster. Chiang Kai-shek was commandant; the Communist Zhou Enlai led the political department. Officers who later fought on both sides passed through Whampoa.

The movement also found a public beyond its army. In May 1925 British-officered police fired on a crowd in Shanghai, at the ◆ on the Bund. The strike wave that followed gave the Canton movement a mass public to lead. When the National Revolutionary Army marched north in July 1926, it could appeal to grievances already felt far beyond its southern base.

The expedition began with roughly 100,000 troops against warlord forces several times their number. The two blue arrows trace its advance, through Hunan toward Wuhan and up the coast toward Shanghai. Military columns were only part of the campaign. Propaganda teams and Communist organizers went ahead, encouraging peasant associations and strikes behind enemy lines. Railway workers striking against Wu Peifu helped weaken his southern front.

At Tingsi Bridge, the ✕ south of Wuhan, the Fourth Army stormed a fortified rail crossing. The force was known as “the Ironsides” and strengthened by Communists. Other warlord troops defected instead of continuing to fight, bringing their men into the National Revolutionary Army; it more than doubled in size as it advanced. By early 1927 the expedition controlled much of the territory south of the Yangtze, turning the grey-tan south blue in about six months.

The victory left its leaders with a dispute they had not resolved on the march. A left-wing government at Wuhan worked with the Communists, while Chiang’s headquarters moved toward Shanghai. Both had helped defeat the warlords. The next struggle would decide who controlled what they had won.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The Soviet package: party, army, mass line. Western powers had declined to support Sun, so he turned to Moscow. Soviet advisers brought money and rifles, but also a way to connect an army with a political movement: party cells, political commissars and organized agitation. Borodin was instructed to keep the revolution “national.” The Chinese parties learned techniques in this alliance that they would later use against each other during 1927–49.

Nationalism with an address. The shootings of May 30th, 1925 gave resentment of foreign privilege a focus in the treaty system and brought the Canton movement a larger public. The Hong Kong–Canton strike and boycott mobilized hundreds of thousands and lasted sixteen months. Keeping such a movement together took organization as well as anger. When the expedition called “down with the unequal treaties” and “down with the warlords,” it spoke to grievances people already knew.

The warlords could not combine. The warlord cliques had experience fighting one another and absorbing defeated soldiers. They had more difficulty joining forces against the expedition. Wu Peifu and Sun Chuanfang fought the National Revolutionary Army separately and fell separately, while Zhang Zuolin protected his position in Manchuria. Each defection weakened a warlord and added men to the advancing force. The habits of competing military employers served them poorly against an organized political movement.

Whampoa as the multiplier. Whampoa’s few thousand cadets could not conquer half a country alone. Their importance lay in what they brought to larger units: junior officers who led from the front and helped troops hold together under fire. Academy troops suffered exceptionally heavy casualties in the Eastern Expeditions and the northern march. Their training cultivated loyalty to the party, but also to Chiang, their commandant. That second attachment would matter when the alliance divided.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Two victors inside one victory. By spring 1927 the alliance had reached the Yangtze, but its victory contained two centers of power. Left Nationalists at Wuhan worked with the Communists. Chiang had his military base and would soon gain support from Shanghai bankers. The partners could agree on defeating warlords without agreeing on command of the movement or the shape of the government to follow.

The peasant association explosion. Peasant associations encouraged by the expedition claimed millions of members in Hunan. Before party leaders had settled land policy, some began settling scores with landlords. Mao’s 1927 “Hunan Report” defended their violence as a revolutionary force. Many Nationalist officers came from landowning families, and what Mao defended alarmed them. The dispute over class and land was pulling the front apart.

The powers pick a Chinese partner. In 1927 foreign gunboats at Nanking and barbed wire around Shanghai’s Settlement showed the treaty powers’ alarm. London and Washington were also beginning to regard a Chiang-led government as a possible source of order. As Chiang’s Nationalists divided from the revolutionary left, negotiation over treaty privileges would proceed gradually alongside that political division.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Could the First United Front have survived, or did its founding make a rupture inevitable?

The First United Front had serious reasons to split. Comintern instructions treated the KMT as a temporary vehicle the CCP would eventually capture, while Chiang’s faction sought to restrict Communist influence. The partners shared a campaign and an army without settling who would control them. Yet the course of events mattered. Sun’s death in March 1925 removed a leader respected across the movement. Chiang’s Zhongshan gunboat coup in March 1926 reduced Communist influence a year before the purge. Moscow, absorbed in the Stalin–Trotsky struggle, left the move unanswered; Stalin ordered the CCP to remain in an alliance he was unwilling to see fail. A Wuhan-led front might have lasted into 1928, or a purge might have preceded the expedition. A break was highly likely on this reading, but its timing, violence and victor were not settled at the founding.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Whampoa’s classrooms and staff brought together men who later served rival causes. Alongside Nationalist commanders, they included five of the ten Marshals of the People’s Liberation Army named in 1955: Xu Xiangqian from the first class, Lin Biao from the fourth, and Ye Jianying, Nie Rongzhen and Chen Yi from staff or political roles. They shared an institution under Chiang and Zhou before some helped defeat Chiang’s armies in 1948–49.

CHAPTER 5 · 1927–1931 · 1929

The Purge and the Nanjing Decade

The Nanjing Decade, the Nationalists’ main period of state-building from 1927 to 1937, began by destroying the alliance that had helped bring them to power. On 12 April 1927 Chiang Kai-shek’s forces turned on Communists and unionists in Shanghai (the ◆). National Revolutionary Army soldiers and Green Gang enforcers killed hundreds that morning; thousands more were killed across the south in the following weeks. The First United Front broke as the Northern Expedition approached victory.

In August, Communist-led regiments seized Nanchang (the ✕) and held it for three days. The rising failed, although the People’s Liberation Army still dates its founding from it. Survivors under Zhu De moved toward the hills. The party had lost the coastal cities in which it had begun, and the countryside offered a very different setting for the struggle that followed. After years of catastrophe, the Communists would find there a strategy that eventually brought them victory.

The Northern Expedition reached Peking in 1928, carrying the blue of the Nationalist map to its northern edge. Manchuria joined the new order in an unexpected way. Officers of Japan’s Kwantung Army dynamited the train of their own Manchurian client, Zhang Zuolin, outside Mukden at Huanggutun (the ●). They had preferred him dead to defeated, but his son Zhang Xueliang raised the Nationalist flag that December.

The flag did not give Nanjing control over every commander who flew it. Yan Xishan retained Shanxi, Feng Yuxiang the northwest, and the Guangxi generals the far south. In 1930 they fought Chiang in the Central Plains War (the ✕ at Zhengzhou), the era’s largest struggle, involving roughly a million men. Chiang won partly by paying to bring Zhang Xueliang’s army to his side.

Chiang’s strongest governing base lay in the lower Yangtze. There the government built a central bank, legal codes, universities and the beginnings of industry. It also relied on gangster finance, ran chronic deficits, spent heavily on the army and had removed the party’s own mobilizing wing. The state’s achievements were real, but its reach was narrow. Given twenty years, it might have built a durable state; Japan moved in 1931, four years after the decade began, and invaded on a much larger scale in 1937.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Class conflict within the alliance. The United Front joined a revolution to an army whose officers and supporters came in part from landlord and merchant families. Peasant associations and Shanghai unions acted against those same interests: they were doing the work of the alliance’s left wing. By spring 1927 Chiang chose to protect his army’s social allies against the Communist-led revolution. The Green Gang helped enforce that choice; its labor rackets had themselves been challenged by the unions.

Moscow and the failed risings. Stalin had committed himself to the Chinese alliance in his struggle with Trotsky. Moscow consequently told the CCP to remain in the United Front until the last moment. Once the alliance had broken, it called for insurrections at Nanchang, in the Autumn Harvest risings and in the Canton Commune of December 1927. All failed, and the party lost cadres it could scarcely spare. Moscow took defeats as reasons for further risings. Historians disagree about the relative weight of its decisions and Chinese conditions; the cost was borne in China. Mao’s later distrust of imported strategy grew from this experience and his work in the countryside.

Reunification by agreement. The 1928 settlement gave Nanjing national allegiance without requiring Yan, Feng or the Guangxi clique to surrender their provinces and armies. Zhang Xueliang’s decision also defied his father’s Japanese patrons. Such agreements extended Chiang’s authority, but left other commanders able to resist him. When Nanjing tried to demobilize regional armies at the 1929 conference, the dispute helped lead to the Central Plains War. Japan would test the resulting weakness in 1931.

The Kwantung Army and impunity. The officers who killed Zhang Zuolin at Huanggutun had acted against their own government’s client. Tokyo failed to punish the principal perpetrators effectively. An activist in the Kwantung Army could see that a completed action in Manchuria might escape civilian control without costing its authors their positions. In September 1931 the army acted there again, on a much larger scale.

WHAT IT CHANGED

The revolution goes rural. The survivors found refuge where provincial authority was weak: first in the mountains of Jinggangshan, then on the Jiangxi–Fujian border. Mao and Zhu De began to combine land revolution, guerrilla war and government in base areas. The next chapter follows their experiment.

A decade of real, brittle state-building. The government recovered tariff autonomy in 1928–30, built roads and a modern capital, and established a new currency. Its finances still depended on the Yangtze delta and rural tax-farming. Lloyd Eastman stresses faction, debt and repression; revisionists emphasize modernization achieved under severe pressure. Chapter 12 returns to the evidence for both accounts.

Manchuria becomes the fuse. By joining Nanjing, Zhang Xueliang placed Manchuria under a government pledged to recover treaty rights on which Japanese interests depended. The Kwantung Army had both a stake in the region and an example of officers escaping effective punishment. Its seizure of Manchuria follows in the next chapter.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Was the Nanjing decade a real modernization interrupted, or a weak state exposed by Japan?

Lloyd Eastman’s The Abortive Revolution finds the seeds of destruction in the purge of idealists, factional bargains, chronic deficits, tax authority that stopped at the county town and reunification purchased from warlords. Revisionists look instead at the Maritime Customs, the fabi reform, legal codes and universities. They argue that, despite civil war and Japanese pressure, no Chinese government since the 1830s had recovered so much sovereignty or built administrative machinery so quickly. Both accounts capture something essential. Modernization was real, particularly around Shanghai, but reached few of the villages where about four-fifths of Chinese lived. The CCP was building a rival state in those villages. Seen as a contest between two incomplete states, Nanjing was losing the countryside before it lost a city to Japan. Its achievement matters; so does the question of whom it reached.

AN INTERESTING FACT

In November 1935 Nanjing nationalized silver and introduced a managed paper currency, the fabi. For centuries Chinese money had been, in effect, weighed metal. The United States Silver Purchase Act of 1934 had driven up silver prices, drawn coin out of China and squeezed credit. With British advice, the government replaced it with notes that gained broad acceptance within months, while prices initially stabilized. A decade later, money printed to finance war contributed to the hyperinflation of 1947–49. The currency that helped solve one crisis became part of another.

CHAPTER 6 · 1931–1934 · 1934

The Soviet Republic and the Encirclements

On 18 September 1931 officers of Japan’s Kwantung Army blew up part of their own railway outside Mukden (the ●), blamed China and used the incident to begin a conquest. They acted against Tokyo’s instructions, but received widespread applause in Japan. Within about five months they had overrun Manchuria. In March 1932 they proclaimed “Manchukuo,” installing Puyi, the last Qing emperor, as its figurehead.

Japan annexed Jehol in 1933. The Tanggu Truce then established a demilitarized zone south of the Great Wall, shown by the dashed line. Chiang, who was fighting the Communists, pursued non-resistance and appealed to the League of Nations. Its commission investigated the seizure, but the League did not reverse it. The charcoal on the map shows territory taken despite the international system meant to protect states against aggression.

A second government opposed to Nanjing appeared in the southeast. The red patch at Ruijin (the ●) marks the Chinese Soviet Republic, proclaimed on 7 November 1931. It governed roughly three million people, issued currency, ran courts and schools, conscripted soldiers and took land from landlords for distribution to the poor. Land reform attracted support. Its record also included terror: the Futian purge of 1930 had killed thousands of its own soldiers as supposed enemies.

Chiang’s encirclement campaigns aimed to isolate this base, cut its supplies and destroy it from the outside inward. In the first four, Nationalist columns advanced into the hills only to meet an enemy willing to give ground. Red forces harassed the columns when they camped and concentrated against them when they were tired or exposed. The fifth campaign, in 1933–34, changed the problem.

On German advice, Nationalist forces built thousands of blockhouses in creeping rings. They advanced a few kilometers at a time, restricting trade and supplies of salt and grain instead of simply pursuing the Red Army into the hills. The two blue arrows show the final campaign’s direction. At Guangchang (the ✕) in April 1934, the Moscow-trained leadership ordered a fixed defense; it failed with about 5,500 casualties. By autumn the blockade was strangling the base. In October about 86,000 people broke out, beginning the Long March, and the tide chart falls to zero.

WHY IT HAPPENED

An army makes foreign policy. The conspirators around Ishiwara expected Tokyo to ratify a successful seizure, and it did. They had grounds for confidence: the murder of Zhang Zuolin at Huanggutun had gone effectively unpunished, while the Depression weakened the prestige of civilian government. Army planners called Manchuria, with its coal and iron, a “lifeline.” The army’s direct relationship to the throne also limited civilian ministers’ ability to control it. These conditions made an independent military initiative possible.

Chiang’s calculation. Chiang’s “first internal pacification, then external resistance” set an order for two threats. China had little naval or air strength, and he feared that immediate war with Japan would destroy his forces. Delay might allow time for German-assisted training, currency reform and road building. Yet delay had a price: territory was lost and critics of non-resistance gained support. At Xi’an in the next chapter, even Chiang’s own generals would press him to change course.

Land reform and rural government. Rent, debt and taxes could claim half or more of a poor rural family’s crop. By taking land from landlords and giving it to poorer peasants, the soviet addressed a burden that mattered directly to its subjects. Redistribution was violent, and recruitment drew on both loyalty and coercion. This was a change in the CCP’s work: it was governing rural communities against landlords, rather than organizing urban workers against employers.

Fixed defenses against blockhouses. The Moscow-backed “28 Bolsheviks” and Comintern adviser Otto Braun treated the soviet as a state whose borders regular forces should defend. Mao, associated with the mobile tactics that had defeated four campaigns, was sidelined in 1932–33. Fixed positions gave the advancing blockhouse system a costly contest of attrition, one the smaller Red Army was poorly placed to sustain. The dispute over these choices would reach Zunyi in the next chapter.

WHAT IT CHANGED

The breakout becomes the Long March. In October 1934 the Ruijin column took much of its government with it, carrying printing presses, archives and an arsenal on poles. The convoy suffered a devastating defeat at the Xiang River, losing roughly half its strength. Those losses discredited the leadership responsible for its manner of march and helped bring the strategic dispute to Zunyi. Guangchang lay at the beginning of that road.

Manchukuo industrializes for the next war. Japanese investment expanded railways, planned cities and the Shōwa steel works in Manchuria. This industrial base supported Japan’s war effort and its 1937 invasion of China proper. Soviet forces occupied the region in 1945, and its resources and equipment later helped the Communists during the civil war of 1946–48. Soviet removal of equipment makes the path to that later use more complicated than a simple transfer.

The League’s failure is filed for reference. Japan left the League in 1933 and retained Manchukuo; the other powers did not reverse the conquest. Mussolini and Hitler observed the result. The case exposes a difficulty in collective security: a judgment that aggression has occurred still needs states willing to bear the costs of stopping it.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Did land reform win peasant support for the Jiangxi Soviet, or did coercion hold it together? What evidence would help us decide?

Redistribution gives us reason to expect some peasants to support the soviet. Recruitment rose where land reform went furthest, and Nationalist restoration of landlords behind the advancing blockhouses could show villagers what they stood to lose. But support did not make coercion unnecessary. In the Futian purge, thousands of Red Army men accused of “AB League” membership were killed after confessions extracted by torture. Under blockade, grain levies and conscription became as heavy as a warlord’s, and more people fled as the ring closed. The sources themselves require care. Party memoirs can sanctify the soviet, Nationalist reports can demonize it, and its archives record what cadres chose to report. Chen Yung-fa and others have examined consent and coercion as instruments used together, with their proportions changing under military pressure. A person could welcome land reform and still be pressed to serve. Evidence from particular places and periods helps us see the choices people actually faced.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The Chinese Soviet Republic issued silver coins and banknotes, sold bonds and legislated. Mao’s economist Lin Boqu ran its “National Bank” from a courtyard with a staff counted on two hands. Its 1931 marriage regulations provided for mutual consent and divorce at either party’s request, and banned bride-prices. Enforcement was sufficient to draw complaints, including from soldiers’ families. In its short life the government gave the CCP experience with currency, taxation and family law before it governed a fifth of humanity.

CHAPTER 7 · 1934–1936 · 1935

The Long March

The three red arrows trace roughly 9,000 kilometers, but they can make the Long March look more purposeful than it was. The journey began with the collapse of the Jiangxi base in October 1934. Some 86,000 people broke out, carrying archives, treasury and machine tools with them: the institutions of a state were traveling with an army that had lost its home. Between October 1934 and October 1935, the Communist revolution held no territory at all.

A column burdened in this way was vulnerable to pursuit. At the Xiang River (the ✕), it spent four days crossing under fire; perhaps half were killed, drowned or deserted. The disaster raised a question for the surviving leaders: how had their military decisions brought them to this point? In January 1935 they met in an upstairs room of a merchant’s house at Zunyi (the ●) and challenged the Comintern-backed commanders. Mao Zedong, sidelined for two years, joined the military leadership. His rise was incomplete, but the campaign changed: feints, split columns and reversals of direction now helped evade pursuit, including four crossings of the Chishui.

The escape still depended on getting through formidable country. After traveling through Yunnan, the column turned north to the Dadu gorge. At Luding (the ✕), it crossed by chain bridge, avoiding the fate of the Taiping prince Shi Dakai, caught on the same river seventy-two years earlier. Beyond the Great Snowy Mountains came the Songpan Grasslands (the ●), a bog about 3,000 meters above sea level. Food failed; marchers boiled grass and leather, and some sat down and never rose.

Several thousand of those who had left Ruijin reached Shaanxi in October 1935. Survivors of other columns joined them, and a few tens of thousands gathered around Yan’an in poor yellow-earth country. The small red patch on the map became a headquarters, though the movement remained exposed. Its next opportunity came from a Nationalist commander. In December 1936 Zhang Xueliang, the Young Marshal, seized Chiang at Xi’an (the ●). Japan had taken Zhang’s Manchurian homeland, and Chiang had declined to fight for it. Zhang wanted resistance to Japan; Zhou Enlai negotiated, while Stalin urged Chiang’s survival. The settlement led toward a suspension of civil war and a united front against Japan, giving the CCP room to survive.

WHY IT HAPPENED

A destination found on the road. The Jiangxi base could no longer be held (Chapter 6), but escape did not dictate a single destination. The column went west along watersheds where pursuit and warlord armies were thinner, then turned north after Zunyi. The call to go “north to fight Japan” gave the retreat a nationalist purpose as well as a strategic direction. Shaanxi became its destination only late in the journey; the endpoint was found on the road.

Defeat changes the leadership. At Zunyi the leaders had the Xiang losses before them, and the existing military line had become hard to defend. The Comintern’s radio link was down, so Moscow could not veto their decisions. Mao had used methods that helped win earlier campaigns before the leadership abandoned them; he now entered a shared command. His supremacy required years more and the rectification campaigns. The change nevertheless showed that the party could reconsider command after failure, a point worth comparing with the Nationalists’ later wars.

A corridor through divided provinces. Chiang’s coalition gave the marchers openings. In Guizhou, Yunnan and the edges of Sichuan, provincial warlords feared the Communists, but they also feared that inviting Chiang’s pursuing armies in would leave them subject to central control. Some fought hard enough to usher the column out without welcoming that assistance. The divisions among the party’s enemies, seen in Chapter 3, helped create an escape corridor.

The survivors as a leadership group. The people who reached Shaanxi were a small fraction of those who had set out. Many were young cadres hardened by an experience they shared with few others. A striking share of the People’s Republic’s first leadership had marched, and survivors remained influential in the party and army for fifty years. The losses thus left a group whose shared endurance could become a source of loyalty and authority.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Yan’an becomes the laboratory. The small red zone around Yan’an remained a base through 1947. In its loess country the party developed practices it would extend after 1945: rent reduction rather than terror, village elections it could guide, army units that farmed, and the education and purging of cadres during rectification. Edgar Snow’s 1936 visit carried the survivors’ story abroad.

An uneasy united front. After Xi’an, civil war could be suspended so that the parties could face Japan. The Red Army was reorganized as the Eighth Route Army under nominal Nationalist command, yet neither side trusted the other; both prepared for a struggle after the war. Chiang was released and became a symbol of national resistance. Eight months later fighting at Marco Polo Bridge brought full-scale war.

The march becomes a founding story. The party began collecting accounts in the 1930s and presented the march as an epic of survival: the Red Army had endured, so the party could claim it could not be destroyed. That story helped recruit students in 1937 and lent authority to the leadership in 1949. Its exaggerations and the treatment of people who gave inconvenient versions are part of its history. To understand the story’s power, we can examine both what it accomplished and claims such as the distance marched.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

How did the Long March’s founding story contribute to its historical importance, and how should we assess it?

The march was a military catastrophe: roughly nine-tenths of the original force was lost. Its familiar account also enlarged some claims. The traditional 25,000 li (12,500 km) is roughly twice the distance measured by two British writers who walked the route in 2002–03; survivors’ accounts of the twenty-two heroes at Luding differ over the fire and the defenders. Yet the story itself had consequences. The claim that “the Red Army cannot be destroyed” attracted students in 1936–37, impressed war correspondents and shaped party memory. Mao called the march a manifesto and a seeding-machine, expressing what its survivors might still bring into being. They retained cadres and methods as well as a story, and all three helped the movement rebuild. Checking the story’s arithmetic tells us about its construction; its political uses explain why that construction mattered.

AN INTERESTING FACT

About thirty women made the First Front Army’s march from Jiangxi, chosen largely for political rank and endurance. Among them was Mao’s pregnant wife He Zizhen, who gave birth on the route and left the infant with a peasant family, as marchers’ children commonly were. Kang Keqing, Zhu De’s wife, carried a rifle as a soldier. She and several others later held senior rank in the People’s Republic. Many marchers were in their teens or twenties, and their leaders were barely past forty. The column carried printing presses, while families faced painful choices about children who could not travel with it.

CHAPTER 8 · 1937–1938 · 1938

The Japanese War Begins

The clash that opened full-scale war began during a Japanese night exercise on 7 July 1937. A soldier was missing at roll call, and shots were exchanged near Marco Polo Bridge southwest of Peking (the ✕). Local commanders nearly settled the incident, as they had others since 1931. This time Tokyo reinforced its troops. Chiang stood firm too: currency reform and German-trained divisions had improved his position, while the Xi’an settlement had tied his political standing to resistance. What might have remained a local clash became a test neither government would step back from.

The charcoal arrows from the Peking–Tianjin plain show Japan’s rapid advance along the railways into Hebei and Shanxi. Chiang chose another field of battle. In August he attacked the Japanese garrison at Shanghai (the ✕), drawing the main fighting toward the Yangtze. Rivers, cities and mud offered defenders advantages that the open north did not. At Shanghai, too, observers on the International Settlement’s rooftops could carry news of Chinese resistance to the world. The battle lasted three months, house by house. Casualties approached a quarter-million, and among the losses were junior officers whom Whampoa had spent a decade training. China had made the invasion costly and visible, but had spent much of its best army doing so.

Nanjing fell on 13 December. For weeks Japanese troops murdered prisoners and civilians and raped on a mass scale (the ◆). The postwar tribunal counted more than 200,000 dead; China’s official figure is 300,000. The estimates are contested, while the mass atrocity itself is established. The government continued the war, moving upriver to Wuhan and ultimately Chungking, with universities, arsenals and refugees traveling into the interior.

The strategy was called “space for time”: give up ground while preserving the government and forces needed to fight on. It did not mean that every battle was lost. In spring 1938 Li Zongren’s regional armies encircled and badly damaged two Japanese brigades at the canal town of Taierzhuang (the ✕). China’s first clear victory raised morale and showed that the invader could be beaten locally.

The effort to delay Japan also brought catastrophe to Chinese civilians. In June Nationalist engineers breached the Yellow River dikes at Huayuankou (the ◆), seeking time before the Japanese reached Wuhan. Villages downstream received no warning. The river swung south; hundreds of thousands drowned or starved, and millions fled. The flood bought months, yet Wuhan and Canton fell in October. By late 1938 Japan held much of the eastern urban and transport network, while the government retained the vast interior. Neither had forced a decision, and the war kept that broad shape for six years.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Escalation in Tokyo. Tokyo entered the crisis without a settled plan to conquer all China, but its government struggled to restrain field armies that created facts on the ground. The expectation that “one decisive blow will make Chiang submit” made another attack attractive each time the previous one failed. Domestic politics narrowed the room for restraint: assassinations and attempted coups in 1932–36 had made moderation dangerous. Decisions that promised quick results accumulated into a long war.

Why Chiang fought in 1937. The concessions in Manchuria, Jehol and at the Tanggu line gave Chiang time; the dashed concession line remains visible on the 1933–35 maps. He used those years to reform the currency as the fabi, develop roads and arsenals, and train divisions with German help. But Japanese pressure continued to erode the north, and after Xi’an further delay threatened his nationalist standing. Fighting at Shanghai was a choice to make resistance prolonged, expensive and visible, purchased with much of his best army.

Two strategies, one country. Japan’s army was equipped to defeat enemy armies quickly. Chiang’s announced doctrine of “space for time” sought to prevent that defeat from ending the war: China could yield cities, stretch the invader across the country and retain a government while awaiting the wider conflict he was certain would come. By December 1938 Japan had taken major eastern cities. The government still fought, so those gains had not delivered the decisive result Japan sought.

The conditions for atrocity. Calling Nanjing mere “chaos” leaves out the conditions in which the violence occurred. Japanese soldiers were subjected to systematic brutality within their own ranks and indoctrinated in contempt for Chinese combatants and civilians. Commanders permitted atrocities; the Tokyo tribunal later examined responsibility at command level. Treating a fallen capital as spoils belonged to a pattern of violence tolerated at Nanjing in 1937 and afterward.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Government in the interior. The move to Chungking kept a government in the war, but left much of the Yangtze delta’s industry, customs revenue and tax base behind. Poorer, agrarian Free China had to finance the fighting from what remained. Inflation, conscription and requisition strained both its people and the Nationalist state; Chapter 9 follows the resulting political damage.

Resistance behind Japanese lines. Holding a railway or city was different from controlling all the countryside between them. Japanese occupation displaced older local elites, and within months Eighth Route Army columns found openings to organize villages and resistance behind the lines. Chalmers Johnson later placed this process at the center of his explanation of Communist growth. Japan’s advances could create opportunities for its opponents as well as extend its own reach.

The wider world responds slowly. Americans encountered the war through Shanghai newsreels, reports from Nanjing and the sinking of the Panay. Opinion shifted, but policy took longer: loans came first, followed by the 1940–41 embargoes on scrap and oil that increased pressure on Japan before its choice at Pearl Harbor. China had hoped to endure until a wider war arrived. It did so after years of costs borne by Chinese society.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Was Chiang right to fight in 1937, six years after Manchuria and before China was fully prepared?

A judgment on Chiang’s choice needs a comparison with the alternatives he faced. War in 1931 would have begun without the reformed currency and German-trained divisions acquired later, and with warlord armies outside his command. China might have been defeated sooner, without the endurance it showed from 1937. Further concession in 1937, however, risked more of the north and Chiang’s nationalist standing after Xi’an, while a postponed war might have come on worse terms. The decision to fight also had terrible costs: China lost the coast, spent its best army at Shanghai and moved the government inland. Yet it remained in the war when the wider world war arrived and eventually stood among the victors. Hans van de Ven and Rana Mitter challenge the older portrait of simple Nationalist incompetence: endurance was a coherent strategy that partly achieved its purpose. Its costs fell on an already strained society. We should compare Chiang’s choice with the possibilities in 1931 and later, including 1941, rather than a peace he could simply command.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The Palace Museum began packing the Forbidden City’s imperial collections in 1933: porcelain, paintings, bronzes and dynastic archives. From 1937 nearly twenty thousand crates went inland by rail, truck, sampan and porters’ poles. They spent eight years in storage, including caves and temples in Sichuan and Guizhou. Remarkably little was lost or broken over some ten thousand kilometers of wartime evacuation. In 1948–49 a portion, some still unpacked, sailed to Taiwan. Chapter 12 follows their later division, which helps explain the Palace Museums in Beijing and Taipei.

CHAPTER 9 · 1938–1944 · 1944

Stalemate — Two Chinas at War

For six years after 1938, Japan occupied a network rather than the whole of China. Its garrisons held cities, railways and river valleys, but the countryside between these points and lines was much harder to govern. Communist base areas spread across the north, and government guerrillas held mountain districts. Even with about a million troops in China, Japan could guard the routes more securely than it could control the land around them.

The Nationalist government held out in the vast, poor interior known as Free China. At Chungking (the ◆ there), officials worked from tunnels under repeated bombing and refused to surrender. Changsha (the ◆ there) had been burned prematurely by its own garrison in 1938; it subsequently withstood three Japanese offensives. Survival depended on supplies reaching an inland government across immense distances. The blue arrow to Lashio (the ●) marks the 1,100-kilometer Burma Road. Japan cut it in 1942, as Hong Kong, Burma and the Philippines fell. Aircraft flying the Hump over the Himalaya replaced part of the traffic, at a cost of some 600 Allied aircraft. China was too large for Japan to conquer outright, yet that same geography left its defenders desperately short of supplies.

The siege also changed the balance between China’s rivals. Having lost the wealthy delta, the Nationalist government printed money and requisitioned grain to pay for the war. Prices in Chungking rose thousands-fold by 1945. In Henan (the ◆), famine killed perhaps two million people in 1942–43 while levies continued; in 1944 some peasants disarmed retreating government soldiers who had taxed them. The Communists, operating behind Japanese lines, reduced rents, taxed more lightly and built village governments. Their costly Hundred Regiments Offensive of 1940 encouraged them to conserve their forces, while destructive Japanese sweeps made local protection and organization urgent.

In 1944 Operation Ichigo broke the long stillness on the map. Half a million Japanese troops moved south from Henan toward Indochina, opening the long charcoal corridor. Hengyang (the ✕), a rail city, held out for 47 days against roughly six-to-one odds before falling. Ichigo severed Free China’s rail spine and captured the American airfields Japan had targeted. Japan would lose the wider war, but observers in China and Washington had seen how weak the Nationalist military state had become. Chiang survived Japan with a government less able to win the civil war that followed.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Why the front froze. By late 1938, each Japanese advance created another stretch of railway to protect. Guerrillas could cut the line between garrisons, while Chinese forces avoided the decisive battle Japan wanted. Tokyo tried to wear down resistance through blockade, puppet government and terror bombing of Chungking. Wang Jingwei’s defection gave Japan a collaborationist “National Government” at Nanjing in 1940. Yet China’s size and poverty made it difficult to strangle. Japan could hold the main routes without compelling surrender; China could continue fighting without expelling Japan. That predicament kept the front largely still for six years.

Two ways to finance a war. The Nationalists had a state and a conventional war to sustain after losing much of their tax base. Printing money and procuring supplies made resistance possible, but also brought inflation, corruption and resentment among those whose grain was taken. The Communists had a different undertaking: an insurgency sustained from occupied villages. Rent reduction, progressive levies and production drives paid for a cheaper war and helped win support. Different obligations and resources shaped the two approaches, and their consequences accumulated through 1949.

Occupation and recruitment. Japan’s “three alls” sweeps in north China—burn, kill, loot—devastated whole belts and badly reduced Communist bases in 1941–42. The attacks also gave villagers reason to value local protection. Communist organizers stayed and fought alongside them while the old order failed to protect them. Chalmers Johnson made this connection central to his peasant-nationalism thesis. Chapter 12 considers its weight; here the point is that occupation created an opportunity for Communist organization even as it inflicted terrible losses.

An uneasy alliance. China was promised a place among the Great Powers from 1942, but only limited supplies came over the Hump. Stilwell pressed Chiang to commit armies in Burma while Ichigo threatened his government. Allied officials judged a besieged state against expectations formed in their own unbombed, better supplied economies. In 1944 Roosevelt demanded an American commander for China’s armies, then dropped the demand. The Stilwell crisis revealed how far the allies had come apart and foreshadowed American planning for a postwar Asia less dependent on Chiang.

WHAT IT CHANGED

The starting positions of the next war. The armies Ichigo wrecked and displaced would be needed again after Japan surrendered. Some of the Nationalists’ best remaining forces were far away in the southwest and Burma; Communist base areas, untouched by the campaign, lay closer to much of the Japanese-held north and Manchuria. A Japanese operation thus helped determine where the two rivals began their race for territory and arms.

American policy divides. The 1944 Dixie Mission sent American officers to Yan’an, while other observers witnessed Ichigo’s damage. Some concluded that the Communists would win a civil war. Washington continued to back Chiang while trying to mediate between the rivals. The tension between those aims would trouble the Marshall Mission.

The reckoning for collaboration. Wang Jingwei’s regime and other puppet governments had armies numbering hundreds of thousands. Their territory and weapons became prizes for both Chinese parties in 1945, while each side’s claim to have resisted Japan became a source of legitimacy. In the occupied east, people expecting liberation encountered corrupt takeover officials instead. That experience shaped their judgment of Nationalist rule.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

How did the Nationalists and Communists fight Japan, and why did their different roles matter afterward?

The Nationalists bore the main burden of conventional battle. They fought at Shanghai and Wuhan, defended Changsha three times and faced Ichigo, suffering the overwhelming share of military casualties. One comparison counts 22 major Nationalist engagements against one large Communist offensive, the Hundred Regiments campaign of 1940. Yan’an then conserved its forces. That comparison leaves out another kind of fighting. Communist forces sabotaged and ambushed the occupiers, defended villages and endured brutal reprisals in the north. Their claim to have been the resistance exaggerates their part; the assertion that “they hid for eight years” erases it. Conventional war broke the Nationalists, while the Communists fought the occupation and built their organization. Both regimes later drew legitimacy from the war, and textbooks in Taipei and Beijing still disagree. Van de Ven, Mitter and Yang Kuisong have spent decades challenging official memories on both sides. The dispute itself has become part of the war’s history.

AN INTERESTING FACT

In 1937–38, as coastal universities fled inland, Peking, Tsinghua and Nankai combined in Kunming as the National Southwestern Associated University, or Lianda. For eight years teaching continued in tin-roofed sheds amid air raids; professors carried libraries inland by the basket. Its faculty and students included many founders of modern China’s intellectual life. Two students, Yang Chen-ning and Tsung-Dao Lee, shared the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics. Scholarship continued despite the pressures that were weakening the wartime state.

CHAPTER 10 · 1945–1947 · 1946

The Failed Peace and Manchuria

Japan’s surrender left a question that neither Chinese party could afford to leave to its rival: who would occupy the territory and receive the Japanese surrender? Manchuria was especially valuable. Its factories, ports and railways offered resources with which to fight a Chinese war, and the hatching on the map shows the region contested from the outset.

The two tan arrows from the north mark August Storm (the ● at Harbin). The Soviet Union entered the war on 9 August 1945 and overran Manchukuo in eleven days. Soviet forces removed industrial equipment that a reparations commission later valued at nearly $900 million. Captured Japanese arms meanwhile reached Communist columns arriving on foot and by junk from Shandong (the red arrow across the gulf). The blue coastal arrow shows the other contender: the United States moved roughly half a million Nationalist troops by sea and air to receive the surrender of a million Japanese in the north. Washington had made a vast commitment to Chiang’s government. Before the struggle for Manchuria’s cities was settled, Communist control was spreading in its countryside.

Peace was discussed even as each side sought an advantage. At Chungking (the ●), Mao and Chiang toasted the republic and signed a unity communiqué in October 1945. General Marshall arrived to mediate, and the parties agreed on a ceasefire and a joint army on paper. Each, however, feared entrusting its security to a state the other might control. Fighting resumed.

Chiang sent his best armies to take Manchuria’s cities against American advice. In spring 1946, at Siping (the ✕), Lin Biao met them in conventional battle, lost an estimated 40,000 men and withdrew north across the Sungari. The victory seemed decisive, but the positions afterward tell a more complicated story. Nationalist troops held cities and rail lines; Communist forces recruited and rebuilt in the countryside around them. The government had inherited the problem Japan had faced: holding points and routes did not secure the land between them.

In March 1947 Nationalist troops captured Yan’an (the ● in the loess hills), the Communist base shown in red since 1935. Its leaders had already evacuated. The photographs of Nationalist banners therefore recorded a symbolic success with little military value. This was the government’s high-water mark, but the cost of holding distant gains and the erosion of support made its position less secure than the map of its advances suggested.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Why Manchuria mattered. Manchuria offered the industrial complex, ports, railways and grain with which an army might sustain a long campaign, as well as a border with the Soviet Union. Mao sent his best cadres and about 100,000 troops from other theaters in autumn 1945 under the direction “develop the north, defend the south”. Chiang also had a powerful reason to recover the northeast: its loss in 1931 had damaged his legitimacy. Wedemeyer and Marshall warned that supplying his armies there would be difficult. Both leaders understood the prize; holding it would test the resources each could bring to the region.

Stalin's two policies. Stalin made a formal agreement with Chiang while leaving opportunities open to the Communists. The August 1945 friendship treaty secured concessions associated with Yalta concerning Port Arthur and the railways, as well as recognition of Mongolia’s independence. Soviet forces removed machinery, but as they withdrew in spring 1946 Communist troops gained access to Japanese stocks and positions near vacated cities. Moscow sought advantage in a weak, divided China and did not expect a Communist victory outright.

Why mediation was difficult. A coalition required the two parties to place their armies within a common state. For each, that meant risking the one protection it had against the other. The 1927 purge described in Chapter 5 had given both reason to remember what a broken alliance could mean. They used truces to reposition: Nationalist historians have argued that the 1946 ceasefires helped Lin Biao recover after Siping, while Chiang’s victories strengthened his belief in force. Marshall could obtain signatures and pause the fighting. He could not provide the security each side demanded before surrendering control of its army.

The return to the coast. The return to the coast gave the Nationalists an opportunity to turn victory into public support. Instead, corrupt takeover officials seized assets, currency conversion harmed people holding puppet-issued money, and former collaborationist industry went to favored hands. Hyperinflation added to urban hardship. In villages the government recovered, landlords returned with it. The manner of recovery weakened the support the state would need for the war ahead.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Land and the war in the countryside. From May 1946, Communist policy in northern base areas moved beyond wartime rent reduction to outright redistribution. The process was sweeping and often violent. It also gave millions of families land they had reason to fear losing if the Nationalists returned. Land reform helped mobilize recruits and support; at Huaihai in 1948 civilian porters pushed barrows to supply the armies whose victory mattered to the land they held.

An army rebuilt after Siping. Lin Biao’s retreat across the Sungari was not the end of his army. North of the river he rebuilt it as the Northeast Field Army, using Japanese equipment, absorbed puppet troops and conscripts from villages affected by land reform. Winter offensives wore down Nationalist garrisons. By 1948 the force outnumbered and outgunned the government’s best troops, an unprecedented material advantage for a Communist army in this period.

The end of Marshall's mission. Marshall left in January 1947 and blamed both parties for the failure of mediation. Aid to Nanjing continued: it tied Washington to the Nationalist cause without securing the government’s survival. Already, Americans were beginning to ask “who lost China”. That question assumes a power over China’s future that deserves examination.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

The “lost chance” debate: could the 1945–46 mediation have produced a coalition China, or was civil war inevitable?

The agreements themselves give the case for a lost chance some force. Both parties signed the October 1945 communiqué and the January 1946 ceasefire, and China was weary of war. An enforced standstill might have kept the Communists out of Manchuria’s cities and arguably limited their ambitions. The difficulty was deciding who could enforce such a settlement and reassure the parties that it would last. Archives opened since the 1990s, examined by Odd Arne Westad, Chen Jian and others, show Mao treating negotiation as a phase of struggle (“talk, talk, fight, fight”). Chiang’s diaries reveal corresponding distrust and reliance on force. Both Leninist party-armies remembered 1927 and feared disarmament under a state the other might control. Marshall could suspend the shooting, but he could not guarantee either side against its rival’s victory. The skeptical reading is more persuasive: both found coalition useful to discuss, yet neither accepted the security arrangements needed to sustain it. A signed agreement matters, and so does the means of enforcing it.

AN INTERESTING FACT

In 1946 the Pauley reparations mission toured Manchuria and estimated the value of Soviet removals—generators, machine tools, locomotives and whole factory lines—at roughly 858 million US dollars, or about 2 billion including deterioration. Moscow called the equipment “war booty” taken from Japan. Photographs of concrete floors bolted for machines that had vanished circulated worldwide. The region remained a prize, but its stripped factories made grain, recruits and porters all the more important to the armies competing for it.

CHAPTER 11 · 1948–1949 · 1948

The Three Campaigns

In the autumn of 1948 the Nationalist armies in Manchuria faced a choice about their escape route. The railway through Jinzhou (the ✕) connected the northeast with China proper. Communist commanders made that junction the object of the Liaoshen campaign, rather than attacking every opposing force in turn. Jinzhou fell in thirty-one hours in October, leaving roughly half a million government troops cut off. Within weeks the trapped armies surrendered or defected, and Manchuria, contested since 1945, turned red. Twenty-one years after Nanchang, the Communists had the larger and better-equipped army.

Victory in Manchuria carried a terrible cost at Changchun (the ◆). Communist forces besieged the city for five months and starved its Nationalist garrison into surrender. An estimated 150,000 civilians died. The marker preserves their suffering as a memorial. Direction for the wider war came by telegraph from Xibaipo (the ●), a farm courtyard in the Taihang foothills where Mao and Zhu De ran a million-man war. It was their last rural headquarters, only months before the party would govern China.

The winter campaign around Xuzhou (the ✕ at Huaihai) moved the decisive fighting onto the plains. About 600,000 Communist soldiers faced 550,000 Nationalists, while Deng Xiaoping coordinated the front committee. More than five million civilian laborers brought grain and other supplies on carrying poles and barrows; land reform in 1946–47 had helped make that mobilization possible. Government divisions defected with their maps and radios, and Communist forces destroyed the encircled army groups one pocket at a time.

The Manchurian field army could now move through the passes for the Pingjin campaign. Tianjin fell after a twenty-nine-hour assault; in January 1949 General Fu Zuoyi surrendered Beiping (the ●) without a shell, leaving its palaces and universities intact. The three campaigns removed roughly 1.5 million government troops and destroyed the strategic reserve north of the Yangtze. The river remained a barrier, but the government had lost the organized strength needed for a durable defense and was already moving its gold.

WHY IT HAPPENED

How encirclement worked. Lin Biao, Su Yu and Liu Bocheng had spent years fighting a stronger opponent. They learned to move their forces and choose where to fight. At Jinzhou, that experience served a larger design: take the transport gateway, isolate the armies behind it, and deal with garrisons and relief forces separately. This linking of battles to a common purpose is operational art. By 1948 the commanders had the resources to apply skills learned under constraint on a far larger scale.

Land reform and the supply line. An army on the plains needed food and ammunition brought forward continuously. The official Huaihai count lists 5.4 million civilian laborers helping to do that work. Villages that had received land had reason to fear a Nationalist victory and the return of landlords; they sent men, grain and barrows. Nationalist troops also drew on the countryside, sometimes requisitioning at gunpoint. The relationship each army had built with villagers mattered to its ability to sustain the campaign.

Command and withdrawal. Chiang directed operations by telephone from Nanjing and overrode theater commanders. In Manchuria, the delay in permitting withdrawal made escape increasingly difficult and left whole armies exposed. Communist fronts were assigned to committees that reviewed results. The command problem raised at Zunyi in Chapter 7 had acquired much greater consequences: decisions at the center could now trap army groups, while the opposing system could adjust its operations.

The decision to change sides. Nationalist soldiers and officers had reasons to doubt the government beyond the battlefield. Hyperinflation impoverished officers’ families, and the August 1948 gold-yuan reform took urban assets in exchange for notes that rapidly lost value. Communist forces put surrendered troops to use, offering units an alternative to fighting on. Fu Zuoyi’s daughter, a Communist agent, provided one connection across the lines during negotiations over Beiping. Her role belongs to a wider story of the government’s declining support.

WHAT IT CHANGED

The Yangtze line. The Yangtze remained between the Communist armies and the south, and troops and negotiations still stood in the way of a crossing. Yet the government had lost the strategic reserve needed for a durable defense. Chapter 12 follows the crossing.

Taking over the cities. Beiping’s negotiated surrender preserved its infrastructure, universities and administration. At Xibaipo, Communist cadres attended seminars to prepare for governing cities. A party that had once lost those cities was planning their administration, in contrast to practices associated with the Nationalist return in 1945.

The government moves east. During the winter of 1948–49, the government moved treasury bullion, Palace Museum crates, and naval and air assets toward Taiwan. These resources would help sustain it after its retreat. The island became the seat of the Republic of China after defeat on the mainland.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Did Communist skill or Nationalist collapse decide the three campaigns, and how far can we separate them?

Nationalist weakness is plain in the record. Inflation and the gold-yuan exchange damaged the government’s urban base, command interference exposed its armies, and defections transferred troops and American-made equipment to the PLA. But weakness in one army does not by itself explain how its opponent organized millions of porters or took Jinzhou in thirty-one hours. Communist commanders designed encirclements, mobilized supplies and incorporated surrendered forces. Each defection could weaken the government and strengthen its enemy at once. Odd Arne Westad gives weight both to the Nationalists’ political losses and to the military capacity of the force that defeated them. The two explanations identify different causes, yet the campaigns show them working together.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Huaihai’s official count records 5.43 million civilian laborers supporting 600,000 soldiers, roughly nine laborers for each soldier. In winter they hauled grain, carried wounded men and pushed supplies across the plains in wheelbarrows. Chen Yi, a campaign commander, later said the victory “was pushed across in wheelbarrows.” Chinese farmers had used the single-wheeled barrow for centuries; here it helped sustain an army on a vast scale despite Nationalist air power.

CHAPTER 12 · 1949 · 1949

The People’s Republic

The Yangtze was the Nationalists’ next line of defense, but the armies that might have held it had been broken in the three campaigns. After peace terms lapsed, roughly a million Communist troops crossed on junks and sampans along a front of some 500 kilometers. The crossing began on the night of 20–21 April 1949 (the ✕) and met little resistance. Nanjing fell on 23 April. Its government had left, and soldiers photographed one another sitting in the presidential chair.

The advance continued south and west. Shanghai fell in May, Changsha and Lanzhou in August, Canton in October and Chungking in November. Provincial forces changed sides in groups. In September Xinjiang’s garrison crossed over without a battle, turning red the grey-tan area that had occupied the map’s corner since 1912. On 1 October, from the Gate of Heavenly Peace (the ● at Peking), Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. Thirty-eight years had passed since the accidental bomb at Wuchang. A new government claimed the authority once held by the Qing and now controlled most of the mainland. The tide chart, almost empty through Ruijin, the Long March and the Japanese war, rose to the top of its scale.

The map also shows where that victory stopped. The blue arrow leads to Taiwan (the ● at Taipei), where the Nationalist government withdrew with naval and air assets, about two million soldiers and refugees, treasury gold and Palace Museum collections. It continued to call itself the Republic of China. The Qing had ceded Taiwan to Japan in 1895, and Japanese rule ended in 1945. Hainan remained outside Communist control until April 1950; the PLA entered Tibet in 1950–51. The strait still separates the two governments.

The outcome grew from the whole course of the struggle. The republic had weak institutions; the Nationalists built a modern state but relied on elites and centralized command. Japanese invasion damaged the government defending China and opened opportunities for its rival. Communist organizers spent years building support and fighting among peasants, while enduring purges, encirclements and a 9,000-kilometer retreat. These experiences help explain victory, but they are also part of its cost. The cost chart gives another account of what the era brought and deserves attention before a verdict is drawn.

WHY IT HAPPENED

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.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Why did Mao win and Chiang lose, and was Communist victory inevitable after Japan surrendered?

Japanese occupation generated nationalism that the CCP could organize, according to Chalmers Johnson. His argument helps explain north China, though it is less complete for areas less directly affected by occupation. Mark Selden and later scholars place greater weight on the “Yenan Way”: land policy, taxation and participatory institutions. Chen Yung-fa’s work adds an important qualification, showing that coercion also operated in the base areas. Lloyd Eastman and other historians emphasize the Nationalists’ inflation, factionalism and command failures. Those failures mattered, but they do not explain how Communist forces conquered Manchuria. Odd Arne Westad’s archival account brings decisions into view, including Soviet policy in Manchuria and Chiang’s 1946 choice to fight there. The Nationalists still had possibilities in 1945; by late 1948 their position had deteriorated dramatically. Victory was made through choices as well as conditions. For an essay on conditions, methods and consolidation, the Japanese invasion belongs among the conditions and years of institutional development among the methods. The Nationalists’ coalition with landed interests constrained their policies. Invasion and government weakness gave the Communists opportunities; their party still had to recruit, govern and win campaigns.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The new air force had only seventeen serviceable aircraft for the founding ceremony on 1 October 1949. Its captured or defected machines included P-51s, Mosquitos and trainers. To enlarge the display, nine leading fighters circled back over Tiananmen, producing twenty-six passes. Two flew armed: the war continued offshore, and Nationalist aircraft based at Zhoushan would bomb Shanghai the following February. The flypast displayed a confident new state whose air force was small and whose war was unfinished.