A Political and Economic History of China, Part 36: Prelude to Civil War (1936-1949)

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5 MIN READ - After a long hiatus the Cautious Optimism Correspondent for Economic Affairs resumes his History of China series, picking up at the end of World War II.

Photo: Special envoy General George C. Marshall fails to secure a lasting peace deal between Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong, in hindsight an impossible task.

L-to-R: Marshall, Chinese First Lady and translator Soong Mei-ling, and Chiang Kai-shek.

It’s been a while since the last China History article was posted, so before we get into the Chinese Civil War of 1946-1949 we’ll briefly revisit the situation at its opening stages.

WWII RESCUES THE COMMUNISTS

In 1936 the Chinese Communist Party was on the run from Chiang Kai-shek’s pursuing Nationalist troops. For nearly a year the CCP’s main army retreated 6,000 miles across China (the “Long March”), its strength dwindling to a mere 20,000 men by the time they found temporary respite in the remote Shaanxi province of northern China.

Chiang Kai-shek poised his army to surround and destroy the Communists in Shaanxi, but the morning after issuing his final orders he was kidnapped by one of his generals who demanded he join forces with the CCP and form a united Chinese front to fight the Japanese in Manchuria.

Chiang was forced to agree and his mutinous general effectively saved the Communists from annihilation, something he later regretted, although their numbers were still small compared to the Nationalist army’s roughly 1.7 million men.

In theory the Nationalist and Communists would cooperate, but in practice their methods and goals were so different that they operated independently.

Japan launched a full scale invasion of the Chinese mainland in 1937. The Nationalist army, fighting a conventional frontal war, was unable to resist the modernized and more disciplined forces of the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA). Suffering defeat after defeat, the Nationalists retreated inland from their southern capital of Nanking (pinyin: Nanjing), trading land for time in the hope that western powers would soon intervene. Eventually the Nationalist capital was relocated to the western city of Chungking (pinyin: Chongqing) in the remote basin of Sichuan province, surrounded by mountains on all sides.

The Japanese were unable to reach Sichuan due to the difficult terrain, so they settled for expanding in southern and eastern China while constantly bombing the capital including world history’s first civilian firebombing, a tactic that would be turned and amplified against them a few years later by American Army Air Force General Curtis LeMay’s B-29 bombers.

Meanwhile the Communists, lacking heavy equipment for a large army, resorted to guerilla tactics to harass the Japanese and destroy railroads and other supply lines. The Communists operated in the north, their smaller numbers combing easily through the countryside with the help of local Chinese, demonstrating a degree of dexterity that large Nationalist divisions couldn’t even if they hadn’t already retreated so far west. 

Although communist guerilla operations couldn’t deliver giant battlefield victories or turn the tide of the war, they did frustrate the Japanese and the Communists were able to rack up several small but highly publicized victories.

In the eyes of the average Chinese, the Communists were “doing something” (albeit something small) while Chiang Kai-shek was simply retreating or holed up in the Sichuan basin.

This public perception proved a propaganda bonanza for the Communists who looked like national heroes. Millions of Chinese, mostly young, idealistic, having no idea what communism actually was and lured by Mao’s message of democratic reforms, flocked from the cities to the north and joined the communist cause of anti-Japanese resistance.

By late 1945 the communist army, which was only 20,000 strong when Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped, had grown to 1.2 million men and women with another 2 million “People’s Militia” troops.

At war’s end China was split into major zones of control: the Nationalists controlling the Yangtze River region and everything to the south, and the Communists in the north, and the Soviet Red Army, which had invaded and occupied Manchuria in August 1945.

The Communist base of control was in the northern town of Yan’an while Chiang Kai-shek moved his Nationalist capital back to Nanking.

PRELUDE TO CIVIL WAR

In the final stages of the war the Allied powers moved quickly in China, intervening to preclude, from their viewpoint, undesirable consequences.

The British coalition government ordered the Royal Navy to make full speed to Hong Kong to accept Japanese surrender. Parliament wanted no chance the Chinese Nationalists might leverage the temporary power vacuum to break the terms of Britain’s 99-year lease and retake Hong Kong.

With the Japanese gone the U.S. government feared fighting might break out again between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communists. 

Meanwhile public opinion in the USA was actually divided between supporting the Nationalists, supporting the Communists, or nonintervention. It’s helpful to remember that in 1945 the Soviet Union had been praised for years by Washington as a valuable ally against Nazi Germany. There was little negative talk of communism or Stalin’s horrors: his gulag archipelago, his Great Purge, the mass crimes of Lavrentiy Beria’s NKVD, or the Holodomor genocide.

As the Correspondent noted in an earlier article, American journalist and communist sympathizer Edgar Snow introduced Mao Zedong to the world in 1937 with his book “Red Star Over China,” portraying the communist leader as a sincere reformer with no intentions of ruling China for himself.

U.S. State Department diplomat John Service had met the Communists and praised them, stating they were “democratic reformers” and more like European socialists than Soviet communists. Years later after the Communists seized control of China Service was hounded by accusations of communist sympathies by Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Frustrated with corruption in the Nationalist Party, several U.S. military officers including Generals Patrick Hurley and Joseph Stilwell recommended cutting off all aid to Chiang Kai-shek’s government. However Stilwell’s replacement and highest ranking U.S. military officer in China, General Albert Wedemeyer, believed supporting the Nationalist government over the Communists remained in the United States’ best interests.

Although the American public was not pro-communist, these combined factors led many to believe the Chinese communists “weren’t that bad” and perhaps even better than the corrupt Nationalist government. And after four years of world war, the American public was in no mood to get involved in a Chinese domestic conflict.

President Harry Truman sent George C. Marshall as special envoy to broker a ceasefire and democratic coalition government deal between Chiang and Mao, and the “Marshall Mission” carried on for a year. Even though fighting had begun with a Nationalist offensive in mid-1946, on-again, off-again negotiations between the Nationalists, Communists, and Marshall Mission carried on throughout.

To pressure Chiang into refraining from attacks Truman ordered an embargo on weapons and ammunition sales to the Nationalists until mid-1947. This severely weakened Chiang’s military position, especially when considering the Soviets were arming the Chinese Communists, first through their postwar occupation of Manchuria (more on that in an upcoming column) and later through North Korea.

By mid-1947 George C. Marshall was recalled to the United States, the Marshall Mission ending in failure and full civil war erupting in China.

In the next column we’ll go through a high-level chronology of the civil war followed later by a discussion of the major factors that led to Chiang Kai-shek’s defeat.