The rise of the Chinese Communist Party

In the 1930s and 40s the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) clawed its way back from near obliteration to become the dominant party in China. It is now the second largest political party in the world. But how did it do it?

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), second in size only to the Indian People’s Party, has shaped modern politics. Whether seen as a challenge to Western democracy or as a mechanism to rejuvenate the world order, there is no denying it has established itself as a dominant global power.

But it wasn’t always this way.

In the mid-1930s, the CCP was fighting for survival as the smaller of two political parties in China. What happened to turn the fate of the party around?

At the Crafts Lecture 2023, James Kai-Sing Kung (University of Hong Kong) shared his findings on the dramatic fall and rise of the party in the 1930s and 40s. His data, collected with co-author Ting Chen, tells a story of violent circumstance and the rise of nationalism.

The tussle for power in 1930s China

The CCP started out as an urban movement. Strongly influenced by the Communism of the Soviets, its leaders sought to attract membership from labour unions and industrial workers.

But competition for the hearts and minds of these groups was fierce. While the CCP managed to gain some new members, especially from student audiences, it couldn’t match the strength of the dominant political party of the era, the Kuomintang, or KMT.

The KMT was, however, unsettled enough by the rising membership of the CCP to seek to silence it. From 1927 an intermittent civil war between the KMT-led government and the CCP broke out, driving the CCP first out of urban areas into rural towns and villages, then much further across the country.

The CCP’s retreat to rural areas forced it to re-evaluate its approach. In terms of numbers, the opportunity for expansion was good. While there were 2 million workers in urban areas, there were around 200 million peasants in the countryside. And as the CCP worked to establish itself in rural areas – ‘encircling the city with the countryside’ – it came to realise their importance for the cause.

It was after connecting with rural civilians that Mao Zedong, who had started to rise to prominence in the CCP, began to understand the complex ‘agrarian problem’: Most rural peasants were poor, but their landlords were not wealthy, so redistribution (to meet the ideals of communism) would not be simple. Mao also realised that hurting rich peasants could easily backfire, and that poor peasants would not invest in land they did not own.

The effort to understand the plight of rural peasants had some success. Between 1927 and 1934 CCP membership grew from around 40,000 to 400,000 members.

But success was short lived. In 1934, the KMT pushed the CCP back further still, forcing the famous Long March – a retreat of over 9000km across China.

CCP membership plummeted by 90%. The future of the party looked bleak.

Yet, in 1937, another bloody change of circumstance unexpectedly altered the fate of the CCP. Japan’s invasion of China (triggering the Second Sino-Japanese War) changed the balance of power between the KMT and the CCP, and set up the context for a meteoric rise in CCP membership.

Figure 1: Membership of the CCP grew rapidly at the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War

Japanese invasion, 1938

The invasion of Japan was fierce and bloody. Around 7.5 million civilians were killed (1.4% of the total population in 1934) and 2.2 million women were raped by Japanese forces.

The Japanese met government-led KMT forces head on, swiftly taking territory in the North of China and pushing the KMT south. The CCP on the other hand, already diminished from confrontation with the KMT, was not directly confronted by the Japanese. From locations dotted across the country it led guerrilla resistance. As the Japanese advanced, many CCP strongholds were enveloped inside Japanese occupied territory.

Kung and Chen show that this unique position behind the enemy lines made a big difference to membership of the CCP. They analyse three measures to understand the growth in CCP membership in the period 1937–45: the density of CCP middle to upper rank officials, the density of CCP martyr soldiers and the number of soldiers living in a CCP guerrilla base in 1940.

They find membership of the CCP grew incredibly quickly in the first three years of the Sino–Japanese war, from 40,000 to 800,000 members. But this growth was particularly concentrated in areas inside occupied territory.

Figure 2: The boundary of Japanese occupied territory and the location of KMT and CCP groups

Nationalism and the rise of the CCP

Kung and Chen suggest that the location of CCP forces in occupied territory created the context through which the CCP could win the support of the peasantry: by appealing to ideals of nationalism.

Nationalism had already gained interest among Chinese intellectuals after China’s defeat by the Japanese in 1894–5. It was an ideal Mao Zedong adopted throughout his political career. But before 1934, rural civilians were less engaged. For many poor peasants, day-to-day life was a more pressing concern than ideals of nationhood.

The Second Sino-Japanese war changed that. The shock of the invasion, and the fierce treatment of Chinese civilians by invading forces put rural civilians under new pressure. The situation made it easier for the CCP to promote Mao Zedong’s vision of nationalism: that the fate of the individual was bound up with the fate of the nation.

Kung and Chen’s data supports this theory. They find that the CCP gained strength in areas occupied by Japanese forces, which were suffering particularly from the effects of war. Significantly, war suffering (rape cases and deaths) had no effect on the rise of the CCP outside Japanese territory. This suggests that the presence of external Japanese forces made the CCP’s ideals of nationhood more appealing.

The effect of CCP local party building was stronger in Japanese-held territory too. The CCP has been characterised by many scholars as a group that was able to mobilise the people to support its anti-Japan cause. Kung and Chen’s data on the development of party groups, branches and committees shows that they were much more successful at mobilising the people within occupied territory.

The CCP also grew faster in areas governed by puppet troops. Having acquired a large territory in the North of China, the Japanese struggled to govern it effectively. They made use of 600,000 puppet troops (made up of KMT captive soldiers and remnants of local warlords) to maintain control. In occupied areas governed by these troops – where the invading army had a less forceful presence – the CCP grew rapidly. Interestingly, CCP growth was compromised in areas where the KMT was still present. It was the combination of invading forces and a dearth of other national parties that allowed the CCP to grow.

The persistence of Chinese nationalism

The results strongly suggest that the Japanese invasion of China offered the opportunity for the CCP to rise to power. The CCP’s nationalist sentiment and its ability to work within rural areas appealed to an embattled peasantry in occupied areas.

As a final test, Kung and Chen also consider the persistent effects of nationalism today. Taking data from six different attitude surveys collected across China, they find that nationalistic attitudes remain strongest in areas previously occupied by Japan during the Second Sino-Japanese war.

Figure 3: Nationalistic sentiment remains stronger in areas of China previously occupied by Japan

KMT

The Kuomintang (KMT) is a Chinese political party that ruled mainland China from 1927 to 1949 prior to its relocation to Taiwan as a result of the Chinese Civil War. The name of the party translates as “China’s National People’s Party” and was historically referred to as the Chinese Nationalists. The Party was initially founded on 23 August 1912, by Sun Yat-sen but dissolved in November 1913. It reformed on October 10, 1919, again led by Sun Yat-sen, and became the ruling party in China. After Sun’s death, the party was dominated from 1927 to 1975 by Chiang Kai-shek. After the KMT lost the civil war with the Chinese Communist Party in 1949, the party retreated to Taiwan and remains a major political party of the Republic of China based in Taiwan.

Founded in 1912 by Sun Yat-sen, the KMT helped topple the Qing dynasty and promoted modernization along Western lines. The party played a significant part in the first Chinese first National Assembly where it was the majority party. However the KMT failed to achieve complete control. The post of president was given to Yuan Shikai (1859–1916) as reward for his part in the revolution. Yuan Shikai abused his powers, overriding the constitution and creating strong tensions between himself and the other parties. In July 1913, the KMT staged a ‘Second Revolution’ to depose Yuan. This failed and the following crack down by Yuan led to the dissolution of the KMT and the exile of its leadership, mostly to Japan. Subsequently, Yuan Shikai had himself made Emperor of China.

In exile, Sun Yat-sen and other former KMT members founded several revolutionary parties under various names but with little success. These parties were united by Sun in 1919 under the title “The Kuomintang of China”. The new party returned to Guangzhou in China in 1920 where it set up a government but failed to achieve control of all of China. After the death of Yuan Shikai in 1916, China fractured into many regions controlled by warlords. To strengthen the party’s position, it accepted aid and support from the Soviet Union and its Comintern. The fledgling Chinese Communist Party was encouraged to join the KMT and thus formed the First United Front. The KMT gradually increased its sphere of influence from its Guangzhou base. Sun Yat-sen died in 1925 and Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975) became the KMT strong man. In 1926 Chiang led a military operation known as the Northern Expedition against the warlords that controlled much of the country. In 1927, Chiang instigated the April 12 Incident in Shanghai in which the Chinese Communist Party and Communist elements of the KMT were purged. The Northern Expedition proved successful and the KMT party came to power throughout China (except Manchuria) in 1927 under the leadership of Chiang. The capital of China was moved to Nanjing in order to be closer to the party’s strong base in southern China.

The party was always concerned with strengthening Chinese identity at the same time it was discarding old traditions in the name of modernity. In 1929, the KMT government suppressed the textbook Modern Chinese History, widely used in secondary education. The Nationalists were concerned that, by not admitting the existence of the earliest emperors in ancient Chinese history, the book would weaken the foundation of the state. The case of the Modern Chinese History textbook reflects the symptoms of the period: banning the textbook strengthened the Nationalists’ ideological control but also revealed their fear of the New Culture Movement and its more liberal ideological implications. The KMT tried to destroy the Communist party of Mao Zedong, but was unable to stop the invasion by Japan, which controlled most of the coastline and major cities, 1937–1945. Chiang Kai-shek secured massive military and economic aid from the United States, and in 1945 became one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, with a veto. The KMT governed most of China until it was defeated in the civil war by the Communists in 1949.

The leadership, the remaining army, and hundreds of thousands of businessmen and other supporters, two million in all, fled to Taiwan. They continued to operate there as the “Republic of China” and dreamed of invading and reconquering what they called “mainland China”. The United States, however, set up a naval cordon after 1950 that has since prevented an invasion in either direction. The KMT kept the island under martial law for 38 years under rule by Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-kuo (1910–1988). As the original leadership died off, it made a peaceful transition to democracy, with full election of parliament in the early 1990s and first direct presidential election in 1996. After a defeat by the Democratic Progressive Party in 2000, the KMT returned to power in the elections of 2008 and 2012.

Early years

The Kuomintang traces its roots to the Revive China Society, which was founded in 1895 and merged with several other anti-monarchist societies as the Revolutionary Alliance in 1905. After the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty in the 1911 Xinhai Revolution and the founding of the Republic of China, the Kuomintang was formally established on 25 August 1912 at the Huguang Guild Hall in Beijing where the Revolutionary Alliance and several smaller revolutionary groups joined to contest the first National Assembly elections. Sun Yat-sen, who had just stepped down as provisional president of the Republic of China, was chosen as its overall leader under the title of premier, and Huang Xing was chosen as Sun’s deputy. However, the most influential member of the party was the third ranking Song Jiaoren, who mobilized mass support from gentry and merchants for the KMT on a platform of promoting constitutional parliamentary democracy. Though the party had an overwhelming majority in the first National Assembly, President Yuan Shikai started ignoring the parliamentary body in making presidential decisions, counter to the Constitution, and assassinated its parliamentary leader Song Jiaoren in Shanghai in 1913. Members of the KMT led by Sun Yat-sen staged the Second Revolution in July 1913, a poorly planned and ill-supported armed rising to overthrow Yuan, and failed.

Yuan dissolved the KMT in November (whose members had largely fled into exile in Japan) and dismissed the parliament early in 1914. Yuan Shikai proclaimed himself emperor in December 1915. While exiled in Japan in 1914, Sun established the Chinese Revolutionary Party, but many of his old revolutionary comrades, including Huang Xing, Wang Jingwei, Hu Hanmin and Chen Jiongming, refused to join him or support his efforts in inciting armed uprising against Yuan Shikai. In order to join the Chinese Revolutionary Party, members must take an oath of personal loyalty to Sun, which many old revolutionaries regarded as undemocratic and contrary to the spirit of the revolution. Thus, many old revolutionaries did not join Sun’s new organization, and he was largely sidelined within the Republican movement during this period. Sun returned to China in 1917 to establish a rival government in Guangzhou, but was soon forced out of office and exiled to Shanghai. There, with renewed support, he resurrected the KMT on 10 October 1919, but under the name of the Chinese Kuomintang, as the old party had simply been called the Kuomintang. In 1920, Sun and the KMT were restored in Guangdong. In 1923, the KMT and its government accepted aid from the Soviet Union after being denied recognition by the western powers. Soviet advisers – the most prominent of whom was Mikhail Borodin, an agent of the Comintern – began to arrive in China in 1923 to aid in the reorganization and consolidation of the KMT along the lines of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, establishing a Leninist party structure that lasted into the 1990s. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was under Comintern instructions to cooperate with the KMT, and its members were encouraged to join while maintaining their separate party identities, forming the First United Front between the two parties.

Soviet advisers also helped the Nationalists set up a political institute to train propagandists in mass mobilization techniques, and in 1923 Chiang Kai-shek, one of Sun’s lieutenants from the Tongmenghui days, was sent to Moscow for several months’ military and political study. At the first party congress in 1924, which included non-KMT delegates such as members of the CCP, they adopted Sun’s political theory, which included the Three Principles of the People – nationalism, democracy, and people’s livelihood.

War with communists

Following the death of Sun Yat-sen, General Chiang Kai-shek emerged as the KMT leader and launched the Northern Expedition in 1926 to defeat the northern warlords and unite China under the party. He halted briefly in Shanghai in 1927 to purge the Communists who had been allied with the KMT, which sparked the Chinese Civil War. When Kuomintang forces took Beijing, as the city was the de jure internationally recognized capital, though previously controlled by the feuding warlords, this event allowed the Kuomintang to receive widespread diplomatic recognition in the same year. The capital was moved from Beijing to Nanjing, the original capital of the Ming Dynasty, and thus a symbolic purge of the final Qing elements. This period of KMT rule in China between 1927 and 1937 became known as the Nanjing decade.

In sum, the KMT began as a heterogeneous group advocating American-inspired federalism and provincial independence. However, after its reorganization along Soviet lines, the party aimed to establish a centralized one-party state with one ideology – Three Principles of the People. This was even more evident following Sun’s elevation into a cult figure after his death. The control by one single party began the period of “political tutelage,” whereby the party was to control the government while instructing the people on how to participate in a democratic system. After several military campaigns and with the help of German military advisors (German planned fifth “extermination campaign”), the Communists were forced to withdraw from their bases in southern and central China into the mountains in a massive military retreat known famously as the Long March, an undertaking which would eventually increase their reputation among the peasants. Out of the 86,000 Communist soldiers that broke out of the pocket, only 20,000 would make the 10,000 km march to Shaanxi province. The Kuomintang continued to attack the Communists. This was in line with Chiang’s policy of solving internal conflicts (warlords and communists) before fighting external invasions (Japan). However, Zhang Xueliang, who believed that the Japanese invasion constituted the greater prevailing threat, took Chiang hostage during the Xi’an Incident in 1937 and forced Chiang to agree to an alliance with the Communists in the total war against the Japanese. The Second Sino-Japanese War had officially started, and would last until the Japanese surrender in 1945. However, in many situations the alliance was in name only; after a brief period of cooperation, the armies began to fight the Japanese separately, rather than as coordinated allies. Conflicts between KMT and communists were still common during the war, and documented claims of Communist attacks upon the KMT forces, and vice versa, abound.

In these incidents, the KMT armies typically utilized more traditional tactics while the Communists chose guerilla tactics, leading to KMT claims that the Communists often refused to support the KMT troops, choosing to withdraw and let the KMT troops take the brunt of Japanese attacks. These same guerilla tactics, honed against the Japanese forces, were used to great success later during open civil war, as well as the Allied forces in the Korean War and the U.S. forces in the Vietnam War.

1945–49

Full-scale civil war between the Communists and KMT resumed after the defeat of Japan. The Communist armies, previously a minor faction, grew rapidly in influence and power due to several errors on the KMT’s part: first, the KMT reduced troop levels precipitously after the Japanese surrender, leaving large numbers of able-bodied, trained fighting men who became unemployed and disgruntled with the KMT as prime recruits for the Communists.

Second, the collapse of the KMT regime can in part be attributed to the government’s economic policies, which triggered capital flight among the businessmen who had been the KMT’s strongest supporters. The cotton textile industry was the leading sector of Chinese industry, but in 1948, shortages of raw cotton plunged the industry into dire straits. The KMT government responded with an aggressive control policy that directly procured cotton from producers to ensure a sufficient supply and established a price freeze on cotton thread and textiles. This policy failed because of resistance from cotton textile industrialists, who relocated textile facilities and capital to Hong Kong or Taiwan around the end of 1948 and early 1949 when prices soared and inflation spiraled out of control. Their withdrawal of support was a shattering blow to the morale of the KMT.

Among the most despised and ineffective efforts it undertook to contain inflation was the conversion to the gold standard for the national treasury and the Gold Standard Script in August 1948, outlawing private ownership of gold, silver, and foreign exchange, collecting all such precious metals and foreign exchange from the people and issuing the Gold Standard Script in exchange. The new script became worthless in only ten months and greatly reinforced the nationwide perception of KMT as a corrupt or at best inept entity. Third, Chiang Kai-shek ordered his forces to defend the urbanized cities. This decision gave the Communists a chance to move freely through the countryside. At first, the KMT had the edge with the aid of weapons and ammunition from the United States. However, with hyperinflation and other economic ills, widespread corruption, the KMT continued to lose popular support. At the same time, the suspension of American aid and tens of thousands of deserted or decommissioned soldiers being recruited to the Communist cause tipped the balance of power quickly to the Communist side, and the overwhelming popular support for the Communists in most of the country made it all but impossible for the KMT forces to carry out successful assaults against the Communists. By the end of 1949, the Communists controlled almost all of mainland China, as the KMT retreated to Taiwan with a significant amount of China’s national treasures and 2 million people, including military forces and refugees. Some party members stayed in the mainland and broke away from the main KMT to found the Revolutionary Committee of the Kuomintang, which still currently exists as one of the eight minor registered parties in the People’s Republic of China.

After 1949

In the early 1950s, defeated KMT forces entered Burma, retreating into the hills of the Wa region. Communist forces pursued them. With support from the United States, the Nationalist forces reorganized and from 1950 to 1952, launched unsuccessful attacks into Yunnan, China. In 1953, Burma’s government raised this violation of its sovereignty by the Chinese Nationalists to the United Nations.

After the KMT guerillas treated into the Kokang region, the Burmese government obtained the assistance of Olive Yang and the Kokang Kakweye to force the guerillas out of Kokang. Yang and the Kokang Kakweye succeeded in 1953, but then collaborated with the Kuomintang in trafficking opium to Thailand throughout the 1950s; the KMT continued to use these opium routes for decades.

The First United Front (a.k.a. the KMT–CPC Alliance) of the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Communist Party of China (CPC) was formed in 1922 as an alliance to end warlordism in China. Together, they formed the National Revolutionary Army and set out in 1926 on the Northern Expedition. The CPC joined the KMT as individuals, making use of KMT’s superiority in numbers to help spread communism. The KMT, on the other hand, wanted to control the communists from within. Both parties had their own aims and the Front was unsustainable. In 1927, Nationalist Field Marshal (Generalissimo) Chiang Kai-shek purged the Communists from the Front while the Northern Expedition was still half-complete. This initiated a civil war between the two parties which lasted until the Second United Front was formed in 1936 to prepare for the coming Second Sino-Japanese War.

The resurrection of Kuomintang

During the time of warlords Sun Yat-sen kept the idea of a united Chinese republic alive. Sun’s goal was to establish a rival government in Guangzhou, southern China, and go from there to fight against the warlords in the North and their Beiyang government. Upon his return from exile in 1917, Sun revived his banned nationalist party, the Kuomintang, but this time he gave it the new name, the Kuomintang of China. His plan was that after defeating the warlords the party would guide China until the country would be ready to move to democracy. The rival government led by Sun, however, was at a disadvantage against the warlords from a military point of view. Despite his requests for aid from the West, the badly needed financial and arm support never arrived in the country. In the 1920s the Kuomintang eventually received helped from a surprising source: the Russian Bolsheviks. Material aid from Russia was good enough for Sun, who had previously shown flexibility when the question was about the promotion of the republic. He had neither sympathy towards Marxism, nor did he see communism as a solution to China’s problems. In Sun’s view China was not of the rich and the poor, rather, it was the country of the poor and the poorer. The guidelines of the Kuomintang were based on Sun’s “three principles of the people”: nationalism, democracy and public welfare.

The Kuomintang gradually became a powerful and disciplined party under Russian guidance. The decisive factor was the Bolshevik assistance to the Kuomintang in the formation of its own army, the National Revolutionary Army. In order to train the army the Whampoa Military Academy was established near Guangzhou. As its director, Sun appointed his loyal supporter, Chiang Kai-shek, who received his military and political education in Moscow. Financially the Whampoa Military Academy operated with the support of the Soviet Union. The quality of education was guaranteed by regularly visiting Russian officers. Many of the leaders of both the Kuomintang and the Chinese communist party graduated from the academy. Also, the chief commander of the People’s Liberation Army, Lin Biao graduated from Whampoa. Zhou Enlai, who later became prime minister had worked for the academy as well.

Together against the warlords and imperialists

The Soviet Union had its own interests in supporting the Kuomintang. The Bolsheviks, in exchange for the help, demanded the Kuomintang to form an alliance with the Chinese communists. Moscow was not convinced that the communist party alone would be able to complete the revolution in the country, which was thought to be ready for communism right after the bourgeoisie felled the old Chinese dynastic system. China’s newly founded communist party had only a few hundred members at the beginning of the 1920s, whereas the Kuomintang had over fifty thousand. The idea was, that the communists would gain broader support by joining the common front with the nationalists, after which they would eventually take over from the Kuomintang. At the request of the Russians, the Chinese communists – among them Mao Zedong – became the members of the Kuomintang, and thus the first coalition of the two parties was born.

With the help of the Soviet Union the Kuomintang did succeed in gaining more support and with renewed vehemence it continued to vigorously pursue its goal, the foundation of the republic. Securing its strong hold on Southern China, the Kuomintang was ready to unite the country by launching a military campaign against the North. The coalition with the communists, however, was a forced union, held together only by their common enemies – the warlords and imperialism. After the death of Sun Yatsen in 1925 the cooperation began to weaken, and the right wing of the Kuomintang soon put an end to the brotherhood with the Soviet Union and the Chinese communists.

Fall

The First United Front was formed so the KMT and the CCP could join together to help China. The initial aim was to help defeat the warlord threat (through the northern expedition, 1926–28), but both parties actually had ulterior motives with this alliance. The CCP formed it mainly so they could spread Communism through the KMT’s numbers, whilst Chiang’s aim for this formation was to help control the Communist party from the inside. Having said that, Chiang was also the main reason the relationship fell apart due to his desire to control the Communist party, ultimately leading to the disintegration of the United Front. All of this was further by Chiang’s decision to kill a large amount of Communist forces in mid-1927, which is aptly called the Shanghai massacre. The Shanghai massacre was considered a purge initiated by Chiang, which was also halfway through the Northern Expedition. Chiang wanted to control all of China, controlling the Communist party would make this a lot easier for him. Also, note that this United Front was first formed when Sun Yat-sen was still alive, in 1923 (died March 1925). Sun mainly agreed to this so he could receive aid from the Soviet Union. But Chiang ultimately ruined this by purging the communists, which resulted in a civil war that ended when they formed the Second United Front to combat the Japanese.

Chinese military and political leader Chiang Kai-shek joined the Chinese Nationalist Party (known as the Kuomintang, or KMT) in 1918. Succeeding party founder Sun Yat-sen as KMT leader in 1925, he expelled Chinese communists from the party and led a successful unification of China. Despite a professed focus on reform, Chiang’s government concentrated on battling Communism within China as well as confronting Japanese aggression. When the Allies declared war on Japan in 1941, China took its place among the Big Four. Civil war broke out in 1946, ending in a victory by Mao Zedong’s Communist forces and the creation of the People’s Republic of China. From 1949 until his death, Chiang led the KMT government in exile in Taiwan, which many countries continued to recognize as China’s legitimate government.

Chiang Kai-shek’s Early Life and Career

Born in the coastal province of Chekiang on October 31, 1887, Chiang ran away from home after his father died and joined the provincial army. He received formal military training at the Paoting Military Academy in northern China, and later in Japan. When uprisings against the ruling Qing (Manchu) dynasty broke out in China in 1911, Chiang returned home and joined the struggle, which ended in the overthrow of the Manchus and the formation of a Chinese republic. In 1918, he joined the Nationalist Party (known as the Kuomintang, or KMT), founded by Sun Yat-sen.

With Sun’s support, Chiang founded a military academy at Whampoa, near Canton, in 1924. He began to build up the Nationalist army, based on methods Chiang observed during a visit to the Soviet Union. During this same time, Chinese Communists were admitted into the KMT; after Sun’s death in 1925, they began to clash with more conservative party elements. As Sun’s successor, Chiang led a successful military campaign against local warlords in northern China and consolidated control within his own party by expelling the Communists in a brutal coup in 1927. In 1928, he formed a new central government out of Nanking, with himself as head of state.

Chiang Kai-Shek: Internal and External Conflict in China

Chiang sought to institute a modest program of reforms, including financial and educational reforms, infrastructure improvements and a revival of Confucianism, supported by the “New Life Movement” campaign. The bulk of his government’s energies and resources, however, were focused on threats to its own stability from within and outside of China. The Communists were operating their own opposition government from rural strongholds, while war with Japan–which seized Manchuria in 1931–seemed imminent. Chiang initially focused on the communist threat rather than confront Japan directly, a choice that angered many of his supporters. In the Sian (Xian) Incident of December 1936, one of his generals seized Chiang and held him captive for two weeks until he agreed to ally with Mao Zedong’s Communist forces against Japan.

Japan invaded China the following year, sparking the Sino-Japanese War. China fought Japan on its own for more than four years, until the Allies (with the exception of the Soviet Union) declared war on Japan in 1941. For its efforts, China earned inclusion among the Big Four powers, and Chiang’s international reputation skyrocketed. In 1943, his Western-educated wife, Soong Mei-ling, became the first Chinese and only the second woman to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress, when she asked for increased U.S. aid for China in the Sino-Japanese War. At the same time, however, Chiang’s government was losing a good deal of support within the country itself, thanks to his relative passivity toward Japan and increasingly conservative policies that favored landowners and mercantile interests and alienated peasants (who made up nearly 90 percent of the Chinese population).

Chiang Kai-Shek: Civil War and Government in Exile

In 1946, a year after Japan’s surrender, civil war broke out in China between KMT and Communist forces. With the Communist victory in mainland China in 1949, Mao declared the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. Upon his defeat, Chiang fled with the remnants of his Nationalist government to Taiwan, which had been turned over to the Nationalist government after the defeat of Japan according to terms agreed upon in Cairo in 1943. Backed by American aid, Chiang launched Taiwan on the path of economic modernization, and in 1955 the United States signed an agreement guaranteeing Taiwan’s defense. Many countries continued to recognize Chiang’s government in exile as the legitimate Chinese government, and it would control China’s seat in the United Nations until Chiang’s death.

From 1972 onward, however, Taiwan’s preferred status (especially in relation to the United States) was threatened by improving U.S.-China relations. In 1979, four years after Chiang died, the United States broke off diplomatic relations with Taiwan and established full relations with the People’s Republic of China.

The Nanjing Decade refers to a period of relatively stable government in China between 1928 and 1937. During this time China was reunified, at least in name, and most of the nation was governed by Jiang Jieshi and the Guomindang. Jiang’s government attempted to construct and consolidate a second Chinese republic, with a more durable political system and policies to facilitate national development. But the Nationalist government faced several challenges, some of them exceedingly difficult. The first years of its rule were marred by continued internecine violence, as Jiang struggled to subdue hostile warlords. Attempts to create a modern state were hindered by the government’s continued lack of authority and control in many parts of China. Because of this, Jiang’s program of state-building, political tutelage and economic reform achieved only patchy results, while both the government and the Guomindang became increasingly militaristic. To outsiders in the West, the dapper and well-spoken Jiang Jieshi and his party seemed to embody the new China: civilised, progressive and willing to embrace modern political and economic values. But beneath the facade and outside the Guomindang-controlled cities, there was only limited change.

Though the National Revolutionary Army is often credited with unifying China in 1928, this unity was relative rather than absolute. The Northern Expedition was hailed by Guomindang propaganda as an unmitigated success. In some regions, however, the government’s influence ranged from patchy to almost non-existent. In the northern provinces, the Nationalist government relied on alliances Jiang had forged with warlords like Feng Yuxiang (Zhili) and Zhang Xueliang (Manchuria). But within a year Feng, Zhang and other warlords were bickering with Jiang over issues of political control and military organisation. By early 1930 several warlords had formed a clique that demanded Jiang’s resignation as president of China. In May 1930 these tensions led to the outbreak of the Central Plains War. Jiang’s 600,000-strong Nationalist army, equipped with Western-supplied aircraft and artillery, marched into central and northern China. Outnumbered and outgunned, the warlord coalition was defeated in less than six months. The Central Plains War was a victory for Jiang but it took a toll on his government, draining it of money and resources. It also distracted Jiang from taking more decisive action against the communist Soviet taking shape in Jiangxi. The Central Plains War exposed the fragility of Chinese unification and Guomindang authority. Another side effect of Jiang’s victory was that warlord armies in Manchuria were weakened or dispersed, removing an obstacle to Japanese infiltration and invasion there during the mid-1930s.

China’s political development under the Guomindang was to follow a model outlined by Sun Yixian in the early 1920s. According to Sun, the new republic would transition through three distinct stages. In the first stage, republican government would require several years of military rule to suppress warlordism, consolidate national unity and strengthen authority. The second phase, called political tutelage, would be a period of one-party rule under the Guomindang. During this period the party would govern autocratically while educating and preparing the people for participation in democratic elections and self-government. Sun believed the program of political tutelage would take approximately six years to complete, after which China would become a constitutional democracy, its third and final stage.

The Guomindang announced the formal commencement of political tutelage in 1929, however, this program was never fully completed. Continued opposition from hostile warlords, from communists and later from the Japanese prolonged military rule into the late 1930s. Both the Guomindang party structure and the government itself became increasingly militarised, a culture shift not helped by Jiang Jieshi’s own fascination with militarism and fascism. In 1934 the Guomindang government introduced censorship of the press, books and films; at least two newspaper editors were murdered for criticising Jiang’s government. Under the auspices of political tutelage, the Nationalists frequently trammelled on freedom of expression and other civil liberties. Guomindang ideologues tried to justify this by arguing that Chinese history, unlike the West, had no precedent or tradition of human rights. The rights of individuals, they claimed, were subordinate to the development of the nation.

The Nanjing Decade was also marked by attempts to facilitate economic development and modernisation. The Nationalists introduced policies to stimulate economic growth, industrialisation and private investment. In most cases, however, the government lacked the resources, authority and political will to achieve signification economic reforms. Some more successful changes included the formation of a reserve bank, the Central Bank of China, established in 1928. The government also moved to standardise currency values by issuing a national currency, based on paper banknotes rather than silver coins. In some regions, the government spent heavily on infrastructure, including highways, railways, public buildings, electrification, sewers, water storages and conduits and street lighting. But Nanjing’s refusal to impose a Western-style taxation system and levy corporate or income taxes meant it was chronically short of cash. By the mid-1930s, government revenue was barely three per cent of the gross national product – and a good portion of this revenue was derived from duties on opium sales. Approximately 47 per cent of revenue collected by the Guomindang was used to fund and supply the military, purchase foreign weapons or pay off warlord allies. In contrast, less than five per cent was spent on education programs and almost nothing on social welfare. Corruption was rife in all levels of the Nanjing government and its bureaucracy. There were thousands of accounts of bribery, extortion and ‘skimming’.

Jiang Jieshi attempted to support his political, military and economic policies by manipulating social and cultural attitudes. In early 1934 Jiang, supported by his wife Soong Mei-Ling, initiated Xinshenghuo Yundong, or the New Life Movement. He called for the “social regeneration” of the nation to combat the “twin evils” of communism and corruption. The new republic would flourish, said Jiang, if its citizens adhered to conservative values that emphasised individual morality, responsibility, propriety, righteousness and honesty. In essence, the New Life Movement was an attempt to revive traditional Confucian values and give them some legitimacy in a modern context. It also reflected Jiang’s interest in European fascism and militarism (some later dubbed it ‘Confucian fascism’). Like European fascism, the New Life Movement sought to reinforce Jiang’s authority by fostering loyalty and obedience to a single leader. During 1934-35 the New Life Movement was integrated into government policy and propaganda. The Guomindang pushed the movement and its values extensively in printed material, public rallies and parades and changes to school curricula. But despite this government backing, the New Life Movement failed to gain widespread public support. Within government-controlled regions many recognised the New Life Movement for what it was; outside these regions, it was mostly ignored.

“During the Nanjing Decade, building a modern state seemed impossible, as the government was trapped in practices that had characterised the warlord years and, before that, the imperial government. Militarism and its control over finances were hard to overcome. At the same time, the relationship between state and private economy appeared to be following patterns developed in the late Qing Self-Strengthening period, when reforms had been implemented by informal networks of officials and private entrepreneurs.”
Margherita Zanasi, historian

Another enduring problem during the Nanjing Decade was the revival of the opium trade. During the Warlord Era the weak Beiyang government declared a token ban on the narcotic, however, opium was far too lucrative for powerful warlords to ignore, so its manufacture and trade flourished. By the mid-1920s, China was the world’s largest source of opium, producing more than 80 per cent of the world’s supply. Both Sun Yixian and Jiang Jieshi condemned the opium trade, describing it as a national economic addiction on top of a social-physiological addition. The Nationalist government backed anti-opium movements and rallies and in 1929 launched the Six-Year Opium Suppression Campaign. Jiang later became head of this campaign, while his New Life Movement also preached against opium use.

But while Jiang and the Nationalists were free with their condemnations of opium, behind the scenes many Nationalists encouraged, supported and benefited from the opium trade. Nanjing itself was too addicted to opium-derived revenue. Unofficial estimates suggest the opium trade yielded as much as $US100 million in government income each year. The Nationalist government did conduct numerous raids and crackdowns on opium farming and selling – but most of these campaigns targeted opium growers and traders operating outside government control. In other words, they were carried out to eliminate opposition and enforce a state monopoly on the opium trade, not to halt it altogether. During the Nanjing Decade, widespread opium production continued in the remote south-western provinces of Sichuan, Guizhou and Yunnan, with some high growth pockets in Manchuria, Fujian, Shaanxi and western Hunan.

1. The Nanjing Decade describes a period of relative unity and government stability, under Jiang Jieshi and the Guomindang, between 1928 and 1937.

2. After the success of the Northern Expedition, Jiang’s military campaign to reunify China, Jiang and the Nationalists established a national government with a capital in Nanjing.

3. In line with the writings of Sun Yixian, the Nanjing Decade was considered a period of transition, beginning with military dictatorship followed by a period of political tutelage.

4. The Nationalist government attempted reforms to facilitate industrial growth and economic modernisation. These were only partly successful.

5. The Nanjing government was hindered by a lack of government authority across China, resource shortages and internal problems such as widespread corruption and opium trading.

Mao Zedong (Dec. 26, 1893–Sept. 9, 1976), the father of modern China, is not only remembered for his impact on Chinese society and culture but for his global influence, including on political revolutionaries in the United States and the Western world in the 1960s and 1970s. He is widely considered one of the most prominent communist theoreticians. He was also known as a great poet.

Fast Facts: Mao Zedong

Early Life

On Dec. 26, 1893, a son was born to the Mao family, wealthy farmers in Shaoshan, Hunan Province, China. They named the boy Mao Zedong.

The child studied Confucian classics at the village school for five years but left at the age of 13 to help out full-time on the farm. Rebellious and probably spoiled, young Mao had been expelled from several schools and even ran away from home for several days.

In 1907, Mao’s father arranged a marriage for his 14-year-old son. Mao refused to acknowledge his 20-year-old bride, even after she moved into the family home.

Education and Introduction to Marxism

Mao moved to Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, to continue his education. He spent six months in 1911 and 1912 as a soldier in the barracks at Changsha, during the revolution that overthrew the Qing Dynasty. Mao called for Sun Yatsen to be president and cut off his long braid of hair (queue), a sign of anti-Manchu revolt.

Between 1913 and 1918, Mao studied at the Teachers’ Training School, where he began to embrace ever more revolutionary ideas. He was fascinated by the 1917 Russian Revolution, and by the 4th century BCE Chinese philosophy called Legalism.

After graduation, Mao followed his professor Yang Changji to Beijing, where he took a job at the Beijing University library. His supervisor, Li Dazhao, was a co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party and greatly influenced Mao’s developing revolutionary ideas.

Gathering Power

In 1920 Mao married Yang Kaihui, the daughter of his professor, despite his earlier marriage. He read a translation of The Communist Manifesto that year and became a committed Marxist.

Six years later, the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, under Chiang Kai-shek massacred at least 5,000 communists in Shanghai. This was the start of China’s Civil War. That fall, Mao led the Autumn Harvest Uprising in Changsha against the Kuomintang (KMT). The KMT crushed Mao’s peasant army, killing 90% of them and forcing the survivors out into the countryside, where they rallied more peasants to their cause.

In June 1928, the KMT took Beijing and was recognized as the official government of China by foreign powers. Mao and the Communists continued to set up peasant Soviets in the southern Hunan and Jiangxi Provinces, however. He was laying the foundations of Maoism.

The Chinese Civil War

A local warlord in Changsha captured Mao’s wife, Yang Kaihui, and one of their sons in October 1930. She refused to denounce communism, so the warlord had her beheaded in front of her 8-year-old son. Mao had married a third wife, He Zizhen, in May of that year.

In 1931, Mao was elected chairman of the Soviet Republic of China, in Jiangxi Province. Mao ordered a reign of terror against landlords; perhaps more than 200,000 were tortured and killed. His Red Army, made up mostly of poorly armed but fanatical peasants, numbered 45,000.

Under increasing KMT pressure, Mao was demoted from his leadership role. Chiang Kai-shek’s troops surrounded the Red Army in the mountains of Jiangxi, forcing them to make a desperate escape in 1934.

The Long March and Japanese Occupation

About 85,000 Red Army troops and followers retreated from Jiangxi and started walking the 6,000-kilometer arc to the northern province of Shaanxi. Beset by freezing weather, dangerous mountain paths, unbridged rivers, and attacks by warlords and the KMT, only 7,000 of the communists made it to Shaanxi in 1936.

This Long March cemented Mao Zedong’s position as leader of the Chinese communists. He was able to rally the troops despite their dire situation.

In 1937, Japan invaded China. The Chinese Communists and the KMT halted their civil war to meet this new threat, which lasted through Japan’s 1945 defeat in World War II.

Japan captured Beijing and the Chinese coast, but never occupied the interior. Both of China’s armies fought on; the communists’ guerrilla tactics were particularly effective. Meanwhile, in 1938, Mao divorced He Zizhen and married the actress Jiang Qing, later known as “Madame Mao.”

Civil War Resumes and the Founding of the PRC

Even as he led the fight against the Japanese, Mao was planning to seize power from his erstwhile allies, the KMT. Mao codified his ideas in a number of pamphlets, including On Guerrilla Warfare and On Protracted War. In 1944, the United States sent the Dixie Mission to meet Mao and the communists; the Americans found the communists better organized and less corrupt than the KMT, which had been receiving western support.

After World War II ended, the Chinese armies started to fight again in earnest. The turning point was the 1948 Siege of Changchun, in which the Red Army, now called the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), defeated the Kuomintang’s army in Changchun, Jilin Province.

By October 1, 1949, Mao felt confident enough to declare the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. On December 10, the PLA besieged the final KMT stronghold at Chengdu, Sichuan. On that day, Chiang Kai-shek and other KMT officials fled the mainland for Taiwan.

Five Year Plan and the Great Leap Forward

From his new home next to the Forbidden City, Mao directed radical reforms in China. Landlords were executed, perhaps as many as 2-5 million across the country, and their land was redistributed to poor peasants. Mao’s “Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries” claimed at least 800,000 additional lives, mostly former KMT members, intellectuals, and businessmen.

In the Three-Anti/Five-Anti Campaigns of 1951-52, Mao directed the targeting of wealthy people and suspected capitalists, who were subjected to public “struggle sessions.” Many who survived the initial beatings and humiliation later committed suicide.

Between 1953 and 1958, Mao launched the First Five-Year Plan, intending to make China an industrial power. Buoyed by his initial success, Chairman Mao launched the Second Five-Year Plan, called the “Great Leap Forward,” in January 1958. He urged farmers to smelt iron in their yards, rather than tending the crops. The results were disastrous; an estimated 30-40 million Chinese starved in the Great Famine of 1958-60.

Foreign Policies

Shortly after Mao took power in China, he sent the “People’s Volunteer Army” into the Korean War to fight alongside the North Koreans against the South Koreans and United Nations forces. The PVA saved Kim Il-Sung’s army from being overrun, resulting in a stalemate that continues to this day.

In 1951, Mao also sent the PLA into Tibet to “liberate” it from the Dalai Lama’s rule.

By 1959, China’s relationship with the Soviet Union had deteriorated markedly. The two communist powers disagreed on the wisdom of the Great Leap Forward, China’s nuclear ambitions, and the brewing Sino-Indian War (1962). By 1962, China and the USSR had cut off relations with one another in the Sino-Soviet Split.

Fall From Grace

In January 1962, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) held a “Conference of the Seven Thousand” in Beijing. Conference chair Liu Shaoqi harshly criticized the Great Leap Forward, and by implication, Mao Zedong. Mao was pushed aside within the internal power structure of the CCP; moderate pragmatists Liu and Deng Xiaoping freed the peasants from communes and imported wheat from Australia and Canada to feed the famine survivors.

For several years, Mao served only as a figurehead in the Chinese government. He spent that time plotting a return to power and revenge on Liu and Deng.

Mao would use the specter of capitalist tendencies among the powerful, as well as the might and credulity of young people, to take power once again.

The Cultural Revolution

In August 1966, the 73-year-old Mao made a speech at the Plenum of the Communist Central Committee. He called for the youth of the country to take back the revolution from the rightists. These young “Red Guards” would do the dirty work in Mao’s Cultural Revolution, destroying the “Four Olds”—old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. Even a tea-room owner like President Hu Jintao’s father could be targeted as a “capitalist.”

While the nation’s students were busily destroying ancient artwork and texts, burning temples and beating intellectuals to death, Mao managed to purge both Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping from the party’s leadership. Liu died under horrific circumstances in prison; Deng was exiled to work in a rural tractor factory, and his son was thrown from a fourth-story window and paralyzed by Red Guards.

In 1969, Mao declared the Cultural Revolution complete, although it continued through his death in 1976. Later phases were directed by Jiang Qing (Madame Mao) and her cronies, known as the “Gang of Four.”

Failing Health and Death

Throughout the 1970s, Mao’s health steadily deteriorated. He may have been suffering from Parkinson’s disease or ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), in addition to heart and lung trouble brought on by a lifetime of smoking.

By July 1976 when the country was in crisis due to the Great Tangshan Earthquake, the 82-year-old Mao was confined to a hospital bed in Beijing. He suffered two major heart attacks early in September, and died September 9, 1976, after being removed from life support.

Legacy

After Mao’s death, the moderate pragmatist branch of the Chinese Communist Party took power and ousted the leftist revolutionaries. Deng Xiaoping, now thoroughly rehabilitated, led the country toward an economic policy of capitalist-style growth and export wealth. Madame Mao and the other Gang of Four members were arrested and tried, essentially for all of the crimes associated with the Cultural Revolution.

Mao’s legacy today is a complicated one. He is known as the “Founding Father of Modern China,” and serves to inspire 21st-century rebellions like the Nepali and Indian Maoist movements. On the other hand, his leadership caused more deaths among his own people than that of Joseph Stalin or Adolph Hitler.

Within the Chinese Communist Party under Deng, Mao was declared to be “70% correct” in his policies. However, Deng also said that the Great Famine was “30% natural disaster, 70% human error.” Nonetheless, Mao Thought continues to guide policies to this day.

The year of 1927

On August 1, 1927, the Communist Party of China (CPC) launched an armed uprising in Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi Province. The Nanchang Uprising led by Zhou Enlai, He Long, Ye Ting, Zhu De and Liu Bocheng gave birth to the armed forces of the CPC and marked the beginning of CPC’s independent leadership over armed struggles.

On August 7, 1927, the CPC Central Committee convened a meeting on August 7 in Wuhan. At the meeting, the general principle of carrying out Agrarian Revolution and armed resistance against Kuomintang reactionaries was made.

On September 9, 1927, under the leadership of Mao Zedong, the peasants living in the Hunan-Jiangxi border area launched the Autumn Harvest Uprising.

On September 29, 1927, Mao Zedong carried out experiment to “establish branches of the CPC at the level of companies” in the Autumn Harvest Uprising troops during the Sanwan Reorganization, which symbolized the beginning of an army of the Chinese people under the leadership of the CPC.

In October 1927, the Autumn Harvest Uprising troops led by Mao Zedong arrived in the Jinggang Mountain area and created the first countryside revolutionary base area there.

On December 11, 1927, under the leadership of Zhang Tailei, Ye Ting, Yun Daiying and Ye Jianying, the armed workers and some troops commanded by the CPC launched an uprising in Guangzhou to fight against the Kuomintang rightists’ slaughter of members of the CPC and its supporters.

The year of 1928

In April 1928, led by Zhu De and Chen Yi, the workers’ and peasants’ revolutionary army composed of the remained troops of the Nanchang Uprising and the armed peasants from southern Hunan Province joined forces in the Jinggang Mountain with the workers’ and peasants’ revolutionary army established by Mao Zedong after the Autumn Harvest Uprising in the Hunan-Jiangxi border area.

In October 1928, the Central Military Department of the Communist Party of China (CPC) was set up.

On December 28 and 29, 1929, the 9th Party Congress of the Fourth Army of the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army was held in Gutian Village, Shanghang County of Fujian Province, which was later called the Gutian Meeting. At the meeting, the fundamental principles of building the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army were established and the questions on how to build an army mainly composed of peasants into a new-type army of Chinese people under the absolute leadership of the CPC were answered. The Gutian Meeting is a milestone in the history of the building of the Communist Party of China and the army.

The year of 1930

In March 1930, the Central Military Department of the CPC was renamed the Central Military Commission of the CPC.

On August 23, 1930, the First Front Army of the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army was formed in Liuyang County, Hunan Province.

The year of 1931

On November 7, 1931, the Fourth Front Army of the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army came into being in Huang’an County, Hubei Province.

On November 25, 1931, the Central Revolutionary Military Commission of the Soviet Republic of China was established in Ruijin, Jiangxi Province.

The year of 1932-1933

In December 1932, the Fourth Front Army of the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army marched to the northern Sichuan Province and started to create the Sichuan-Shaanxi Border Base Area.

On May 8, 1933, the general headquarters of the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army was set up.

On July 11, 1933, the Provisional Central Government of the Chinese Soviet Republic of China made a decision to set the August 1，the date of the Nanchang Uprising, as the anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army. Since then, the August 1 each year has become the Army Day of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.

The year of 1934

In October 1934, the First Front Army of the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army withdrew from the Central Base Area in Jiangxi Province and embarked on the Long March.

On November 16, 1934, the 25th Army of the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army abandoned the Hubei-Henan-Anhui Border Base Area and started its Long March.

The year of 1935

From January 15 to 17, 1935, the Zunyi Meeting, an enlarged meeting of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, was held at Zunyi, Guizhou Province during the Long March. The Zunyi Meeting organizationally ended the domination of Wang Ming’s “Left” adventurism in the CPC Central Committee, established the correct leadership of the new Central Committee represented by Mao Zedong,thus saving the Red Army and the CPC from destruction at a most critical juncture.

In March 1935, the Fourth Front Army of the Red Army launched the Jialin River Campaign and then evacuated the Sichuan-Shannxi Border Base Area to start the Long March.

On September 16, 1935, the 25th Army of the Red Army ended its Long March by joining force with the Red Army troops in northwest China at the Yongping Town of Yanchuna County of northern Shaanxi Province.

On October 19, 1935, the main force of the First Front Army of the Red Army led by the CPC Central Committee arrived at the Wuqi Town in northern Shaanxi Province, which was the terminal of the Long March.

From December 17 to 25, 1935, the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee held an enlarged meeting to make the policy and strategic guide line of the Anti-Japanese National United Front.

The year of 1936

On February 20, 1936, the anti-Japanese forces in different places in northeast China were reorganized into the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Forces.

On July 5, 1936, the 2nd and 6th Corps and the 32nd Army of the Red Army merged to form the Red Army’s Second Front Army in the Long March.

In July 1936, the 1st Route Army of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Forces was established.

In October 1936, the First , Second and the Fourth Front Armies of the Red Army jointed forces in the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Area.

The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45) had a significant impact on the course of the Chinese Revolution. Known in China as the ‘War of Chinese People’s Resistance Against Japanese Aggression’, it was a catastrophic conflict for the Chinese people, causing up to 20 million casualties. It also had serious political repercussions for the nationalist Guomindang and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Japan’s invasion of China in the early 1930s and the war that followed capped off decades of antagonism between the two nations. The political and economic development of Japan stood in stark contrast to that of China. The Meiji Restoration of the late 19th century had propelled Japan into the modern world. The Japanese had tapped into Western knowledge to develop an industrialised economy. Japan’s military, once a barefoot army of samurai, was now a well trained Westernised armed force, equipped with modern weapons. Its government was dominated by militarists and expansionists who hoped to make Japan an Asian imperial power.

The First Sino-Japanese War erupted in August 1894 over control of the Korean peninsula. This war ended with a Japanese victory in a little over eight months, despite Japanese forces being greatly outnumbered by the Qing armies. The Treaty of Shimonoseki, signed in April 1895, saw China surrender control of the Liaodong peninsula, west of Korea, and the island of Taiwan. Six years later, following the disastrous Boxer Rebellion, Japan won the right to station troops in eastern Manchuria, giving them a military stronghold on the Chinese mainland. The collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 allowed Japan to further expand its sphere of influence in China. In 1915 the Japanese government issued Chinese president Yuan Shikai with a set of 21 territorial and concessional demands, which Shikai had no choice but to accept. An incident in Mukden, Manchuria in September 1931 provided the Japanese with the pretext for a full military invasion of Manchuria. Once established there, the Japanese set up the puppet state of Manchukuo and installed the last Qing emperor, Puyi, as its ineffectual head of state. In May 1933 the Nationalist president Jiang Jieshi, who was more concerned with fighting the communists than Japanese imperialists, signed the Tanggu Truce, effectively recognising the legitimacy of the Manchukuo puppet state.

Full-scale war between China and Japan began in July 1937, following an incident near the Marco Polo Bridge in Wanping, near Beijing. After Japanese troops opened fire on local soldiers a brief ceasefire was negotiated, however, both sides increased military numbers in the region. When the Japanese launched an invasion in late July, the Nationalists and CCP were seven months into a shaky alliance, dubbed the Second United Front. The Nationalist armies attempted to resist the invasion but were quickly overcome by the technological supremacy and preparedness of the Japanese. China’s underdeveloped industries were incapable of supplying munitions or engineering quickly or in sufficient quantities. Unlike the Japanese, the Chinese military had no tanks and only a few aircraft. The first phase of the war was a blitzkrieg of Japanese victories as their forces moved swiftly along China’s east coast. Almost a half million Japanese troops moved against Shanghai, Nanjing and other locations in mainland China, while Japanese military planes bombarded regions where their foot soldiers could not penetrate. In late 1937 the Nationalist government was forced to retreat from its capital, Nanjing, to Chongqing in western China.

Japanese troops were notorious for their brutal treatment of civilians and military prisoners. The Japanese occupation of Nanjing from December 1937, often referred to as the ‘Rape of Nanjing’, is the most infamous example of Japanese brutality in China. Estimates suggest that the Japanese massacred 300,000 people in and around the city, many of them civilians. Historian Jonathan Fenby describes the Rape of Nanjing as a uniquely “urban atrocity” because of “the way the Japanese went about their killing, the wanton individual cruelty, the reduction of the city’s inhabitants to the status of sub-humans who could be murdered, tortured and raped at will”. Thousands of civilians were buried alive, machine-gunned or used for bayonet practice. Females were taken and forced into labour as “comfort women” (sex slaves for Japanese officers and soldiers). The Japanese also conducted human experimentation in secret bases in China. Unit 731 in the country’s northeast was the largest biological and chemical warfare testing facility. Prisoners there were injected with diseases like anthrax, smallpox, cholera, dysentery and typhoid. Other experiments studied the effects of food deprivation and extreme cold; amputation without anaesthesia; and the effects of chemical weapons and flamethrowers. The Japanese also air-bombed cities like Ningbo and Changde with fleas carrying bubonic plague. Vast swathes of China were decimated by Japan’s ‘scorched earth’ warfare, epitomised by the slogan “kill all, loot all, destroy all”.

While Jiang Jieshi had some early assistance from Soviet Russian leader Joseph Stalin, the Nationalists had little support from foreign powers. In June 1938 Jiang ordered the dykes of the Yellow River dam to be blown, a desperate attempt to slow the advance of the Japanese invasion. While this ploy worked, it also caused a devastating flood that killed between 500,000 to one million Chinese civilians, rendered up to ten million homeless and ruined millions of acres of important farmland. The resulting food shortages, famine and human suffering only contributed to rising peasant hatred of Jiang Jieshi and the Nationalist regime. Other problems confronting Jiang and the Guomindang government were widespread corruption, rising inflation and high desertion rates caused by poor treatment of Nationalist soldiers, most of whom were unwilling conscripts.

Beyond 1938 the Sino-Japanese war reached a virtual stalemate. China’s geographical size, her lack of infrastructure and scattered pockets of resistance all helped to slow the Japanese advance. By 1940 the Japanese controlled the entire north-eastern coast and areas up to 400 miles inland. They installed a puppet government in Nanjing under Wang Jingwei, a former Guomindang leader and political rival to Jiang Jieshi. Foreign assistance for the Chinese finally came after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour in December 1941. As the United States was drawn into World War II, China became an important theatre in the war against the Japanese. In 1942 US general Joseph Stillwell was sent to China to assist with training, reorganisation and equipment. Jiang’s authoritarianism, however, hampered their collaboration. Jiang’s wife Soong Meiling, dubbed “Madame Chiang” by the Western press, proved a more skilled diplomat than her husband; she was instrumental in securing some foreign assistance.

“The Nationalist government, which bore the major brunt of the fighting, was so depleted physically and spiritually that it was manifestly incapable of coping with the new challenges of the postwar era.”
Immanuel Hsu, historian

During its war with the Japanese, the CCP continued to consolidate its base in Yan’an, while the Red Army – later reorganised into the Eighth Route Army and the New Fourth Army – defended the inland areas of the northwest. The Japanese had no desire to occupy rural areas in the interior, which created a misleading perception that the communists were successful defenders. Favourable reports from foreign visitors also came out of the Yan’an Soviet during the war period, such as praise from the American Dixie Mission of 1944 and from US president Franklin Roosevelt’s special emissary, Patrick Hurley. Zhou Enlai also became well respected among diplomats and foreign journalists. These factors were exploited by CCP propaganda, which helped generate support for the party and allowed it to present as an alternative national government to the Guomindang. By 1942 CCP membership had grown to 800,000, a twentyfold growth from the beginning of the war five years earlier. Scholars like David Goodman suggest the CCP’s tactics during this period were an essential element of the party’s eventual rise to power

The Second Sino-Japanese War came to an end in August 1945, after the United States detonated nuclear weapons over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Russian troops invaded from the north and suppressed Japanese forces in Manchuria, while Japanese forces in China were ordered to surrender to Jiang Jieshi and the Nationalists. In assessing the impact of the war, historian Jonathan Fenby describes it as “an extended body blow for a regime already shot through with weaknesses. The length, scale and nature of the conflict had debilitated China and the Nationalists”. China emerged from the war politically unsettled, economically exhausted and scarred by an enormous amount of human suffering. With the CCP growing in size, popularity and prestige, and the Guomindang government grossly unpopular, the Chinese stage was now cleared for a civil war between the Nationalists and the communists.

1. The Second Sino-Japanese War had its roots in decades of tension between the two nations. In contrast to the modernised and highly militarised Japanese, Chinese republican forces lacked training, equipment and a strong industrial base.

2. Already with a foothold in northern China, and armed with superior military technologies, the Japanese invaded in July 1937. They rapidly occupied the east coast of China in 1938-39.

3. The Japanese used inhumane and sadistic methods during their occupation of China, typified by events like the Nanjing Massacre and their use of human experimentation.

4. Jiang Jieshi was widely criticised for his wartime leadership, for placing more importance on the struggle against the communists than the Japanese. He also led a corrupt government plagued by economic issues and failed to work effectively with China’s foreign allies.

5. The war left the Nationalist government in a vulnerable position, while the CCP managed to consolidate and expand their support, placing them in a more favourable position as China moved towards civil war.

Communist China

In October 1949, communist revolutionaries led by Mao Zedong seized control of China. The Chinese Community Party (CCP) was a relatively young group, formed in 1921 and inspired by the success of the Russian Revolution. Political and economic turmoil in China during the 1930s, coupled with Japan’s invasion of northern China, allowed Mao and the CCP to build support and work towards revolution. The CCP victory in China heralded a significant shift in global affairs. With a population of more than 540 million people, China was the most populous nation on Earth – and it was now in communist hands. In its first years the Cold War had focused on western Europe generally and the divided city of Berlin specifically. The Chinese Revolution opened up a new Cold War front in Asia. The communist victory in China also brought profound changes for the Chinese people. Communist China underwent modernisation and rapid industrial growth – but they were accompanied by authoritarian leadership, rigid social control and economic experiments culminating in mass starvation.

The seeds of the Chinese Revolution were nationalist rather than communist. Long regarded as the ‘sleeping dragon’ of the East, China had been a fertile prize for foreign imperialists. During the 18th and 19th centuries Europeans from several nations arrived in China. European merchants traded extensively with the Chinese, while Christian missionaries spread their religious beliefs and converted thousands of locals. By the late 1800s the British, French, Russians, Germans and Japanese had established spheres of influence (in effect, internal colonies) inside China. This foreign imperialism brought benefits for some Chinese but for the majority it produced only exploitation and misery. In their quest for profit and control, foreign imperialists subverted local rulers and undermined China’s social structures. The British defied a ban by Chinese rulers and introduced opium, an addictive narcotic, into the region. Opium production and trade grew in China, filling the pockets of British companies and turning thousands of Chinese into listless drug addicts.

The exploitation of China by foreigners fuelled an emerging nationalism. Many Chinese believed their people should fight for independence and liberation from foreign control. In 1899 a group calling itself the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists began attacking Europeans, Christians and foreign property in China. Western newspapers referred to these rebels as “Boxers”, a reference to their use of martial arts. Their anti-Western violence became known as the Boxer Rebellion; it lasted for two years before being suppressed by a coalition of eight Western nations. In 1911 a nationalist revolution overthrew China’s royal dynasty, the Qing. China began an optimistic but brief flirtation with republican democracy. The new government was weak, however, and failed to attract much support. By 1916 it had collapsed and China dissolved into a patchwork of regions, controlled by powerful warlords and their private armies.

The early 1920s saw the emergence of two new political parties: the nationalist Guomindang and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Both dreamed of a free and independent nation, ruled by the Chinese with no foreign political involvement, but the similarities in their aims ended there. The Guomindang was pro-capitalist and supported by conservatives, the middle-classes, business interests and the West, particularly the United States. The CCP represented China’s industrial working-class and peasant farmers, who comprised more than 90 percent of the population. In its first years, the CCP was both inspired and directed by the Soviet regime in Moscow. In 1927 the Guomindang and its military reined in the nation’s warlords, reunifying large areas of China and restoring national government. The Guomindang leader Jiang Jieshi (or Chiang Kai-shek), a vehement anti-communist, then turned his attention on the CCP, initiating a massacre of communists in their urban base in Shanghai. Thousands of communists were forced to take refuge in remote areas, where they regrouped by forming soviets (communist collectives).

With military aid from both the United States and Nazi Germany, Chiang attempted to encircle and destroy the communists. In 1934 thousands of communists fled their largest soviet, Jiangxi, and began a daunting 8,000-mile trek to Shaanxi in northern China. This Long March, as it was later known, became a turning point for communists in China. It allowed the CCP to avoid defeat and annihilation – but it also heralded the arrival of a new leader: Mao Zedong. In 1937, as the CCP was reforming and building a new Soviet in Shaanxi, China was invaded by Japan. Hostilities between the Guomindang and the CCP eased, as the two groups formed a fragile union to fight against Japanese occupation. But after Japan surrendered and withdrew from China in 1945, the two rival groups resumed their conflict. Years of corruption, mistreatment and pro-capitalist policies had made Jiang Jieshi’s government unpopular, particularly with China’s 400 million peasants. In contrast, support for the CCP and its promises of land reform and respect for the peasantry soared. The communists steadily gained ground and, in 1949, Jiang Jieshi and his cohort were forced to flee to the island province of Taiwan. In October that year, thousands rallied in Tiananmen Square, Beijing to hear Mao Zedong proclaim the birth of a new communist state: the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

“Mao Zedong announced in the summer of 1949 that ‘there could be no third road’ and that China must lean to one side, to the communist camp, in the Cold War. In the circumstances there was no alternative for the new and unconsolidated Chinese regime, although Mao was careful not to exclude the possibility of loans ‘on terms of mutual benefit in the future’ from the capitalist powers… Mao may well have supposed that the Cold War pressures for unity in the communist bloc would be used to forge a durable working agreement between China and the USSR, in which China would not be a mere satellite…”
Alan Lawrance, historian

The United States government already had its hands full with Soviet expansion in Europe, so the communist victory in China was deeply concerning. American agents had worked with Mao Zedong and his group during the 1930s when both were at war with the Japanese. Now the US refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of Mao Zedong and his CCP government. Washington instead chose to deal with Jiang Jieshi and the Guomindang in Taiwan, viewing them as the government-in-exile of mainland China. The US began to pay closer attention to south-east Asia. The successful revolution in China had opened up an ‘eastern front’ in the Cold War. Communism could now spread south through Asia, taking root in politically vulnerable states like Korea, Vietnam, Malaya and Indonesia. If these countries fell to communist movements, important US allies like the Philippines, post-war Japan and Australia would be isolated and at risk. Washington believed that China’s communists were largely controlled by Moscow. In reality, Mao Zedong was charting his own course and his relationship with Joseph Stalin was difficult.

During the early 1950s, the People’s Republic of China embraced policies similar to those of Stalinist Russia in the 1930s. All businesses were nationalised and private ownership of capital was prohibited. Beijing embarked on a land reform program, seizing property from landlords and redistributing it to peasants; the landlords were tried and vilified before village meetings and many of them executed. The new government’s main priority was to haul China out of medieval agrarianism through industrialisation and modern technology. Beijing fuelled this industrial rebirth with raw materials, machinery and thousands of technical experts from Soviet Russia. In 1953 the CCP government initiated its first Five Year Plan, an economic program that set ambitious goals for industrial and technological growth in China. This program was generally successful, producing dramatic increases in iron and steel production, electrification, coal mining, infrastructure and building projects. China’s military strength increased in line with its industrial capabilities. China’s development was so rapid that in late 1964 it test-fired its first nuclear weapon and joined the US, USSR, Britain and France as a member of the ‘nuclear club’.

But as in Soviet Russia, China’s rush into modernity came at an enormous human cost. The government’s second Five Year Plan (1958-62) – dubbed the ‘Great Leap Forward’ by Mao Zedong – was disastrous by any measure. After the economic advances of the mid-1950s, Mao became even more ambitious. Labour and resources were redirected into industrial production so that China might “catch up to the West” in just a few years. The Great Leap Forward set near-impossible production targets and quotas. This placed pressure on managers and workers, who submitted exaggerated or falsified production figures. The diversion of workers from farming to the industrial sector caused food production to decline, a problem exacerbated by a number of severe weather events and natural disasters. China’s industrial growth was consequently over-reported, while parts of the country were struck by severe food shortages. This led to a devastating famine that killed at least 10 million and possibly as many as 30 million Chinese, most of them peasant farmers.

The failure of the Great Leap Forward led to the CCP sidelining Mao Zedong from policy decisions. Mao retained his titular positions in the party and, more importantly, his prestige with the Chinese people. He returned to the spotlight in 1966 by organising a campaign against so-called ‘rightists’ (counter-revolutionaries) in the party, government and universities. This campaign evolved into the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a mass movement dominated by young students. Utterly loyal to Mao and his ideas, these militant students formed uniformed brigades called the Red Guards. They rallied in support of Mao and formed gangs to denounce, intimidate and terrorise his perceived enemies. Among those targeted by the Red Guards were Mao’s political rivals, liberal-minded teachers and lecturers, government bureaucrats and foreign diplomats and embassies. Some Red Guards went as far as denouncing and betraying their own parents for being critical of Mao. The Cultural Revolution not only restored Mao’s authority and control of China, it created years of political authoritarianism, social disruption and economic paralysis.

1. Until the early 1900s, China was a weakly governed empire, dominated and exploited by Western powers. From 1927 China was ruled by the nationalist Guomindang, led by Jiang Jieshi.

2. The Chinese Communist Party was formed in 1921. After years of struggle and civil war, the communists eventually gained control of China in October 1949.

3. The communist victory in China created a radical shift in the Cold War. Previously focused on Europe, the US and the West now began to fear the spread of communism throughout south-east Asia.

4. Meanwhile, the communist regime in China embraced major economic reforms, seeking to transform their nation from a backward agricultural economy to an industrial and military power.

5. This process succeeded but came at an enormous human cost. Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward (1958-62) triggered a deadly famine that killed up to 30 million people. Later, his Cultural Revolution (1966) paralysed and terrified the nation.