Chinese Civil War: A Visual History

The Chinese Civil War (1927-1949) was fought between the Kuomintang (Nationalist) government of Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao Zedong. It began when Chiang purged the Communists in Shanghai in April 1927; the Communists survived encirclement campaigns, the Long March of 1934-1935 and years in the caves of Yan'an, then grew enormously during the uneasy united front against Japan (1937-1945). Full-scale war resumed in 1946; Communist victories in Manchuria and the Huaihai campaign of 1948-1949 destroyed the Nationalist armies. Mao proclaimed the People's Republic on 1 October 1949 and Chiang withdrew to Taiwan, where the Republic of China survives; no peace treaty was ever signed.

When it was fought: the era ribbon

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Communist army strength

Timeline of the Chinese Civil War

1. 1927
   Shanghai massacre; war begins
2. 1934
   Long March begins
3. 1936
   Xi'an incidentUnited front against Japan.
4. 1937
   Sino-Japanese War
5. 1946
   Full-scale civil war resumes
6. 1948
   Manchuria falls; Huaihai campaign
7. 1949
   Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai taken; PRC proclaimed1 October.
8. 1950
   Hainan taken; Korean War freezes the strait

Purge, encirclement, Long March

The KMT and CCP had been allies in the Northern Expedition against the warlords; on 12 April 1927 Chiang's forces and Shanghai gangsters massacred Communists and unionists. Uprisings failed and the CCP retreated to rural soviets, notably Mao's base in Jiangxi. Chiang's fifth encirclement campaign of 1934, using German advisers and blockhouses, forced 86,000 Communists to break out on the Long March, a year-long retreat of 9,000 km to Shaanxi in which perhaps a tenth survived and Mao took the party leadership.

The Japanese war

Chiang was kidnapped by his own general at Xi'an in December 1936 and forced to accept a united front against Japan; the war of 1937-1945 devastated the Nationalist armies and cities while the Communists expanded guerrilla bases behind Japanese lines from 40,000 to over a million troops. Both sides positioned for the aftermath; the New Fourth Army incident of 1941 showed the alliance was hollow.

1946-1949

American mediation under General Marshall failed. The Soviets handed Manchuria's Japanese arms to the Communists; Lin Biao's armies took the region by November 1948, then the Huaihai campaign (November 1948-January 1949) destroyed 55 Nationalist divisions around Xuzhou and Beijing surrendered in January. The PLA crossed the Yangtze in April, took Nanjing and Shanghai and, by the end of 1949, all the mainland except Tibet. Chiang, with two million followers and the imperial art collection, established himself on Taiwan; the Korean War brought the US Seventh Fleet into the strait and froze the division.

Related empires and wars

Chosen automatically by overlap in time and geography, plus a few hand picked connections.

Empires of the same era and region

• Qing dynasty (1636 to 1912)
• Empire of Japan (1868 to 1947)
• Soviet Union (USSR) (1922 to 1991)
• United States (1776 to present)
• British Empire (1583 to 1997)
• Third Portuguese Empire (1822 to 1999)

Wars of the same era and region

• World War II (1939 to 1945)
• Korean War (1950 to 1953)
• Cold War (1947 to 1991)
• Taiping Rebellion (1850 to 1864)
• Russo-Japanese War (1904 to 1905)
• Third Indochina War (1978 to 1991)

8 surprising things about the Chinese Civil War

1. The Long March covered about 9,000 km in a year; of 86,000 who set out, some 8,000 arrived.
2. Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped by his own commander Zhang Xueliang in 1936 to force him to fight Japan; Zhang was kept under house arrest for 50 years.
3. The Huaihai campaign involved about 1.4 million troops and is one of the largest battles in history.
4. The Nationalists shipped 600,000 crates of the imperial art collection to Taiwan, now in the National Palace Museum in Taipei.
5. Hyperinflation under the Nationalists reached prices doubling every few days in 1948-1949.
6. The two sides never signed a peace treaty; the PRC and ROC still both claim to be China.
7. Mao's forces were sometimes armed with weapons captured from the Japanese via the Soviets in Manchuria.
8. Both Chiang and Mao had trained or served at the Whampoa Military Academy alliance in the 1920s.

Sources

• Chinese Civil War Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Chinese Civil War Wikipedia
• Long March Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Odd Arne Westad, Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War 1946-1950 (2003) Stanford University Press

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