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date: 07 May 2019

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter examines the role of China in the Cold War. It describes the origins of Cold War in China and the participation of nationalist China in World War 2 and the Cold War, and suggests that China played a pivotal role as the third (albeit shorter) leg of a cold war tripod. The chapter contends that the Cold War era in China is inseparable from the political supremacy Mao Zedong, and highlights the impact of the split between China and the Soviet Union on the role of China in the Cold War. It also argues that the 1972 Sino-United States rapprochement contributed to the fading of China from the Cold War narrative.

Keywords: Cold War, China, political supremacy, Mao Zedong, Soviet Union, rapprochement

The cold war era in China is inseparable from the political supremacy of one man: Mao Zedong. "Mao's China" and "Cold War China" are interchangeable terms in the minds of many, and the chairman's long tenure in power from 1949 to 1976 had a major influence on the progression of the cold war in Asia and beyond.

Nevertheless, understanding Mao's role is not sufficient to understand the cold war's effect on China. After all, the cold war lasted for over a decade following Mao's death. No less crucially, during the critical period between the end of World War II and the triumph of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1949, real political alternatives for China were in conflict with one another. Just as 1945-50 was a turning point in the European cold war, so it was in China. And just as in Europe, China inherited the massive displacements of World War II.

China played a pivotal role as the third (albeit shorter) leg of a cold war tripod. If this suggests a certain unsteadiness, that is not inappropriate. The cold war was also the era of decolonization, and China managed to maintain a simultaneous narrative about itself that was highly convincing to many emerging non-Western states. It used the Bandung Conference in 1955 to argue that it was a new, cooperative force in what would become known as the Third World. However, it also proclaimed itself the savior of the revolutionary world, spearheading anti-imperialist liberation. In saying this, it contrasted itself implicitly, then after 1960, explicitly, with the Soviet Union.

The origins of cold war China: Nationalist China in world war and cold war

When the People's Republic of China (PRC) was officially declared on October 1, 1949, it was the child of a vicious civil war between the CCP and its predecessor, the Nationalists (Guomindang) under Chiang Kai-shek. That war was, in turn, the immediate successor to a devastating world war. In 1945 Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist leader, emerged victorious against the Japanese, although his victory was a pyrrhic one; the capacity of his state had been deeply compromised. The areas of communist control in China during the war had expanded rapidly, with some 100 million (of the total of 900 million) in broadly CCP-dominated areas by August 1945.

The war against Japan transformed China's future. In the 1920s and 1930s it had been riven by militarist violence. Although nominally united under the Nationalist government established by Chiang Kai-shek in 1928, China suffered from poverty, political corruption, human rights abuses, and repeated outbreaks of civil war. Nonetheless, the country progressed, with new railways, roads, and telecommunications established and international assistance from the League of Nations used to develop flood prevention and new crop varieties. By 1936 the CCP was on the run: the "Long March," which became part of the party's foundational myth, was actually a retreat by a party that had been shattered by Nationalist attacks.

The outbreak of war between China and Japan in the summer of 1937 destroyed the fitful modernization of the previous decade. The Nationalist government was forced to retreat to the inland city of Chongqing, while the Japanese occupied most of China's eastern heartland. In the north and east communist control expanded. The Nationalist government nearly collapsed under the strains of the war. By 1945 it was beset by corruption, and its military was profoundly dysfunctional. This breakdown resulted largely from four years of fighting almost alone against Japan, the difficulties of running a government under constant aerial bombardment, dealing with refugee displacement running into millions of people, and being forced into a geographical isolation from the sea. By 1945 the Nationalists were exhausted.

After 1945 mediators, including the American General George C. Marshall, attempted to broker a coalition government between the Nationalists and Communists. Marshall abandoned his effort when it became clear that neither side was willing to compromise. The civil war erupted in 1946 and raged until 1949. It became a deadly ideological conflict. Yet much of Chiang's motivation was similar to the underpinnings of foreign policy under the CCP after 1949. In particular, Chiang's actions portended a cold war phenomenon: decolonization and nation-building among non-European peoples. It was the Nationalists, not the Communists, who negotiated an end to the hated "unequal treaties" with the European imperial powers in the late 19th century. As a result, China emerged from war in 1945 as truly sovereign for the first time since the end of the Opium War in 1842. In addition, Nationalist China had been designated one of the "Four Policemen" by Franklin D. Roosevelt and given a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. The Nationalists and the CCP used significantly different methods in their relationship with the international community, but their aims were not that different, particularly on the question of territorial integrity and sovereignty.

The civil war took place in the middle of a rapidly changing global situation as the cold war took shape. Until 1948 the US and USSR predicated their policies for Asia on the idea that China would be united under the Nationalists. This would have generated a US-oriented East Asia, as Chiang's government would have oriented itself toward the US, and Japan would also have been an American satellite. Stalin was initially complicit with this assumption, and his relations with the CCP waxed hot and cold as he sought to calculate what side was more likely to win the civil war. Nonetheless, the hardening of the global cold war forced Chiang to choose sides; Stalin would not let him accept support from both the US and the USSR. Chiang chose the US as the lesser of two evils.

The CCP never forgot the way that Stalin had toyed with its loyalty. Their victory, largely a consequence of the collapse of the Nationalist administration, was not long in coming. Chiang's government was too compromised by its own flaws, which had been seriously aggravated by the experience of the war against Japan. Rebuilding state capacity when so much of the country had been destroyed would have been hard enough, but to engage in a major civil war almost immediately afterward was too much. Combined with human rights abuses, corruption, and an unwillingness to compromise on the control of political power, the Nationalists' brief experiment in sovereign government came to an end with the communist victory in autumn 1949.

Communist victory and the cold war

On October 1, 1949 the chairman of the CCP, Mao Zedong, stood at the Tiananmen Gate in the center of Beijing and announced that the People's Republic of China, the world's most populous state, was now a communist country.

The cold war was central to the shaping of the new state domestically as well as internationally. Militarism had become a major factor as the state atrophied from the late Qing dynasty onward, but the mass dislocations produced by the war against Japan altered society profoundly. Many of the competing regimes within China-the Nationalists in exile in the southwest, the Communists in the north, and Wang Jingwei's collaborationist Nationalists who claimed to have "reorganized" the true Nationalist party in Nanjing-demanded greater contributions from society and offered a wider social vision in return. Although the communist vision proved most compelling, most modern political actors in China saw the need for a wider vision of social reform, which was frequently linked to militarization. Mao's years in charge of the PRC were heavily militarized in many ways (the Cultural Revolution is a notorious example). Propaganda stressed this element of social control at all times.

The new divisions imposed by the cold war were visible in the PRC's most pressing domestic issue: the economy. There is much historical evidence that China's economy was improving until 1937. The eight years of war changed that: most of China's fledgling industrialization was in the eastern seaboard cities that Japan took over (with much of the plant destroyed by bombing). The war broke up traditional trade routes and economic networks.

A Nationalist-run China would have drawn on economic assistance from the US. The CCP's victory made that impossible. The United States refused to recognize the new government in Beijing, maintaining that Chiang's government in exile in Taipei was China's legitimate government (in the United Nations Security Council, the "China" seat was also retained by the Republic of China, which held it until 1971). Instead, the country became embedded in the emergent socialist world economy that Stalin's USSR promoted after 1945. Although China never joined Comecon, which controlled trade within the socialist bloc, its economy became highly integrated with the organization's members from 1953, when the PRC's first Five Year Plan began. A common cold war point of contrast was between the command economy of the Eastern bloc and free markets of the West, but in fact both bloc leaders sacrificed short-term economic advantage to strengthen the commitment of the parts of East Asia under their control. The US allowed members of its bloc to obtain an economic advantage in return for support by allowing the East Asian developmental states (Japan, Taiwan, South Korea) to maintain highly protected economies for decades. The USSR offered goods within its bloc at advantageous prices to cement the socialist community: for instance, one ton of Chinese frozen pork became enough to buy five tons of steel products. The importance of cementing bloc alliances also led to strategic trade: during the 1953 riots in East Berlin, China sent 50 million rubles worth of foodstuffs to help shore up the fledgling GDR government. From its origin, China was brought into the fold of the world socialist economy.

The Korean War

The newly established PRC was almost immediately plunged into another brutal conflict: the Korean War. The war confronted the rulers of the new state with a hard choice. On the one hand, the PRC desperately needed time for domestic consolidation: the regime had won a military victory but had not yet secured all China's territory. On the other, the commitment of the party and Mao Zedong in particular to anti-imperialist liberation was genuine. The war in Korea presented an opportunity for the new state to show its credentials and gain ideological influence.

Part of the Chinese motivation to enter the war in Korea came from frustration over their perception that their Soviet partners regarded them as supplicants. CCP Vice-Chairman Liu Shaoqi visited Stalin in the months before the Chinese Communist victory in 1949 to discuss a variety of issues. It became clear that Mao was unhappy with the patronizing flavor of Stalin's demands. The USSR wanted special rights to operate in the parts of China that bordered the USSR (the northeast and northwest). For Mao, Stalin's proposals implied new "unequal treaties."

So the emergence of a crisis on the Korean peninsula, on China's northeastern border, gave Mao a chance to demonstrate his revolutionary credentials. The emergence of new documentation since the early 1990s, however, shows Stalin and Mao were playing a complex game with each other. At stake were ideas about revolutionary anti-imperialism and the leadership of the communist world. The catalyst was the request in April 1950 by Kim Il-Sung, leader of the new communist North Korean state, for approval to invade the south. Stalin eventually acceded. He seems genuinely to have felt that the Western forces were in a position of weakness at that time, and the prospect of success was realistic. However, he was also conscious that he needed to maintain leadership within the communist bloc: having declined the chance to support communist movements in Greece and Indochina, his prestige could have further eroded had he turned his back on the revolution in Korea as well. Mao hesitated. The new People's Republic was deeply unstable in 1950, with pockets of resistance to the CCP still to be found in peripheral areas, and the country reeling from the effects of two major wars in quick succession. Nonetheless, Mao had a vision of spreading anti-imperialist communist revolution, and the opportunity opened up by Kim was hard for him to turn down. To undertake support for the Korean War would make a powerful statement of ideological intent.

Stalin proved an uncertain ally during the Korean War, failing to provide much-desired air cover for Chinese troops at a crucial moment in 1950. He had believed that the West would not force a confrontation over a North Korean invasion and was discomfited by the rapid success of UN forces in recapturing the south. Mao, however, having gambled by entering the war, insisted on sticking by Kim. Stalin ultimately provided support, if not actual Soviet troops, for the war effort. While Mao could not claim complete victory, by 1953 the stalemate allowed the new regime to argue that it had prevented the establishment of a hostile state on its borders.

Mao had also made his campaign of domestic consolidation dependent on mobilizing popular support for the war with the "Resist America, Aid Korea" campaign. This use of the Korean War to influence domestic politics reflected a dynamic that accompanied the CCP's rise to power in the years before 1949: the radicalizing and pragmatic trends in CCP thought were in conflict not only within the party but also within Mao himself. "Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong Thought" was often pragmatic, as shown by its turn toward the cross-class alliance of "New Democracy" during the war against Japan and the early PRC period. In 1940 Mao had defined the term "New Democracy" as a means of creating a unified society in which the Chinese Communist Party would be paramount, but also cooperate with other elements in society (such as capitalists and entrepreneurs). This adoption of temporary pragmatic politics by Mao, however, did not mean an abandonment of a radical view of the world and of China's future. Mao's vision revolved around class warfare at home and anti-imperialism abroad in the service of an ever-renewing revolutionary stance. This should have been no secret to those who had observed the Rectification ( Zhengfeng) movements that marked Mao's radicalization of politics and concentration of it in his own person in the years after 1941. The Korean War became the first test of that commitment in the PRC; by its end society was considerably more radicalized than it had been at the start.

Taiwan crisis, Bandung cooperation

Wider cold war tensions were reflected in confrontations between Mao and Chiang. After his defeat in 1949, Chiang retreated to the island of Taiwan, maintaining that he remained the legitimate ruler of the Republic of China. Mao, of course, regarded the continued irredentism of his great rival as an affront to his new state. In 1954-5 the PRC military shelled the island of Jinmen (Quemoy) and succeeded in capturing smaller Nationalist- held islands off the coast of Zhejiang province. Just three years later Taiwan's outlying islands once again came under fire from the PRC. This event had more to do with cold war tensions than any particular urgency caused by the situation within Taiwan itself. Mao's relations with Nikita Khrushchev had deteriorated further after 1956, and he was displeased by the Soviet leader's attempts to discredit Stalin, which he (correctly) thought were an oblique way to criticize Mao himself. Mao was also angry that Khrushchev was seeking to ratchet down tensions with the US without consulting him first. Therefore, Mao initiated the bombardment of the islands of Jinmen and Mazu in August 1958 as a means of heightening general tension rather than as a response to a particular political event. Throughout the crisis, as Khrushchev's memoirs attest, the Chinese kept the Soviets in the dark about their intentions. The crisis eventually subsided and was not repeated. However, for the inhabitants of Jinmen memories of the bombardment of their small fishing island, along with the militarization of everyday life, became central to their everyday existence. The offshore islands became a frontier in the cold war world and affected the lives of ordinary inhabitants in many ways, including the greater militarization of society and the development of a mentality that reflected a permanent state of crisis.

Despite the confrontations over Taiwan, China's international behavior during the 1950s also had a cooperative face, symbolized above all by the 1955 Bandung Conference. This was the first grouping of African and Asian countries which would become known as the Non-Aligned Movement. At Bandung, China projected itself as a leading voice of international engagement and development which was not required to follow the path of "modernization" defined by the American or Soviet bloc. During the conference, China's credentials were measured not only as a rival to Moscow or Washington, but also against the newly independent India. Jawaharlal Nehru was pursuing a program of parliamentary democratic socialism. China's ideological radicalism may have been as much a disadvantage as a benefit in this context, and Zhou Enlai's presence as an advocate of the "Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence" served as a message that the PRC was capable of compromise as well as confrontation. (Zhou used the occasion of his presence at Bandung to announce a halt in the offshore bombing of Taiwan in 1955.) Yet China's closeness to the USSR and radical politics made it an uneasy bedfellow for many of the newly emerging independent states.

The Sino-Soviet split

Even while it tried to carve out a new status for itself in postwar international society, the PRC remained highly dependent on its relationship with its patron, the USSR. Nevertheless, relations between the two giant communist states led to a split in the early 1960s, which was perhaps the most momentous internal event within the communist bloc during the entire cold war. Although the fissure had been brewing for years, it took many Western observers by surprise. The split was never total, but it was nearly three decades before it was overcome with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's visit to Beijing in 1989.

Mao and the CCP were wary of Soviet intervention in their revolution from the very earliest days of the PRC. All Chinese nationalists, whether communists or not, had long memories of the "century of humiliation," in which foreign imperialists (including Russia) had occupied large parts of China's territories. In addition, Stalin's demands for special rights in China's borderlands in 1949-50 had angered Mao greatly. The seeds were sown that would eventually lead to the split with the Soviets. On the one hand, Mao's government wanted to stress that its revolution was indigenous, that it had come to power through its own strategic choices, and that it was genuinely rooted in a popular revolution. On the other hand, for reasons of ideological commitment and economic and strategic need, it had to be close to the USSR.

The relationship between Mao and Stalin had always been marked by distrust as well as admiration: Mao believed that much of Stalin's advice to the CCP before 1949 had been mistaken, and Stalin disliked Mao's independence of thought. However, the two had sufficient respect for each other to maintain effective relations between their two countries. Mao had little respect for Stalin's ultimate successor, Nikita Khrushchev. Furthermore, Mao regarded Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin in the secret speech of 1956 as a coded attack on Mao's own cult of personality, which had been developing since the wartime Rectification movements.

The international and domestic tensions came together during 1956-9, in the wake of the Khrushchev thaw in the USSR. Despite China's involvement with the socialist international economic bloc, Mao was deeply suspicious of the Soviet proposal to intervene by military means in the Polish uprisings of 1956: at a Politburo meeting on October 20, 1956, he observed, "This is serious big-power chauvinism, which should not be allowed under any circumstances." Chinese representatives, including Liu Shaoqi, stressed to Khrushchev their uneasiness about Moscow's intervention in the decisions of other socialist countries. The Chinese position altered during the Hungarian crisis later that year, however. Although its initial response toward intervention was negative, the Chinese leadership became alarmed about the nature of the uprising, which they considered "anti-communist" rather than just "anti-Soviet."

The theoretical questions raised by the 1956 uprisings in Eastern Europe profoundly influenced the development of Chinese domestic policy. Mao took away the message that the Eastern European parties had not been strong enough to combat "reactionary" forces, and that Moscow had also been heavy-handed in its management of those crises.

The effect of this was a contradictory turn within domestic Chinese politics. In 1956-7 Mao supported the Hundred Flowers Movement, which actively called for constructive criticism of the Party from the wider population. He intended that the CCP should glean suggestions on how to reform itself. By 1957, however, Mao had become alarmed at the harsh level of criticism that had emerged through the Hundred Flowers; he launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign in which thousands of people who had criticized the party were arrested.

1956 saw the Chinese more enthused about their efforts to have Beijing replace Moscow as the ideological focal point of world communism. Yet the language that Moscow and Beijing used between themselves over the events of 1956 was shared: language, rhetoric, and political understandings genuinely linked the socialist countries and shaped their understanding of what bound them together against the Western bloc. This disparity, in which the PRC and the USSR shared goals while disagreeing on approaches, was another factor that would lead to their split.

Between 1956 and 1961 relations continued to deteriorate as Mao demanded more radicalism in the face of Soviet attempts to lessen tensions with the Western bloc. Khrushchev had become increasingly disillusioned by what he saw as both Mao's willingness to risk confrontation with the West and his establishment of a cult of personality. Khrushchev was also motivated by a racism that found it hard to take the Chinese seriously. The most symbolic moment was the withdrawal of all Soviet advisors from China in 1960: so sudden was their departure that they left the bridge under construction across the Yangtze at Nanjing half-built. By that stage, the alliance between the two sides was in tatters.

The split with the Soviets meant that China had a new freedom to exercise its influence as a revolutionary actor on the global stage. China projected itself as a role model at a moment when scores of Asian and African countries were decolonizing and seeking to shape their emerging nation-states. While China and the USSR remained allied for the first decade of the PRC's existence, it was clear that China had an authenticity about its rhetoric of anti-imperialist liberation that the Soviet Union lacked (as did the US). Eastern Europe was essentially a colony of Moscow. China's revolution, in contrast, was genuinely indigenous, even if it had received significant Soviet assistance. After the Sino-Soviet split of the early 1960s, China's rhetoric became much more explicitly anti-Soviet, haranguing Soviet "revisionism and social imperialism." In his 1965 declaration "Long Live the Victory of People's War," Lin Biao sneered at the "Khrushchev revisionists," whom he accused of collaborating with the US "imperialists" trying to sabotage the Chinese-led ideas of "people's war."

The Vietnam War

The worsening relationship between the PRC and the USSR was also reflected in the Chinese involvement in the war in Vietnam. China provided support for the Vietnamese in their struggle against French colonialism from its earliest days, and then for the North Vietnamese in their war to unify Vietnam under their control. From the early 1950s to the late 1960s, the CCP exploited their long ties with the Vietnamese Communist movement to offer them support. As with Korea, Chinese policy linked an ideological commitment to a more pragmatic mode of operation. The latter was particularly evident in the 1954 Geneva Accords, through which postcolonial Vietnam's borders were defined. These marked one of the major diplomatic successes of Zhou Enlai, China's foreign minister and prime minister. Nonetheless, the Accords did represent an ideological retreat, as Zhou (and the Soviets) pressured Ho Chi Minh not to press for an immediate unification of the two halves of Vietnam but to accept a "temporary" division of the country-something which Mao later came to regret. Chinese involvement in Vietnam would soon intensify significantly.

During much of the 1960s, the North Vietnamese found themselves in the curious position of accepting assistance from both the PRC and the USSR even while hostility between the latter two states increased. Some 320,000 Chinese troops were deployed across the border into North Vietnam between 1965 and 1968. The troops took part in fighting (operating gun positions) and also undertook significant construction work, thereby freeing up Vietnamese soldiers for the assault into South Vietnam. This involvement was never formally acknowledged, nor did the US seek to draw attention to it. Still, it is a marker of the seriousness with which China took its cold war mission. In assisting the North Vietnamese, the Chinese drew attention to their own path for anti-imperialist liberation, which combined allegiance to ideas of radical social change with a strong sense of non-European nationalism. On both these points the USSR was unable to trump China. By intervening in Vietnam, Beijing also made up for those occasions when it had had to draw back from involvement, such as the failure to conquer the south in the Korean War or the inability to prevent a right-wing coup in Indonesia in 1965 against a leadership that seemed to be orienting itself toward Beijing.

However, that nationalism also caused one of the major rifts between China and Vietnam, and illustrated a wider problem-that China continued to have a highly sinocentric attitude toward its neighbors. Mao's comments on the countries of East Asia that "we belong to the same family and support one another" strongly signaled that he considered China to be the "elder brother" in the relationship. Such attitudes and the continuing realization of the Vietnamese that they would have to choose between support from the USSR and from China led to the breakdown of relations between Vietnam and China and the final withdrawal of Chinese troops in 1970.

The opening to the US

The mid-1960s likewise witnessed the most convulsive social change in the whole of Mao's period in power, the Cultural Revolution, which eventually precipitated the biggest ideological shift in China's international behavior: the opening to the United States. The Cultural Revolution was Mao's revolt against his own party: fearing that he was being sidelined and that the PRC as a whole was losing revolutionary fervor, he launched a campaign in 1966 which exhorted China's population to rise up and "bombard the headquarters" of the CCP itself. The result was a massive radicalization of domestic policies for the next three years. However, as the most radical phase of the Cultural Revolution ended, prominent figures in the leadership began to feel China's lack of global allies keenly. By 1969 the relationship between Beijing and Moscow had become so bad that the two sides feared that war might break out over control of territories on China's northeastern border. There were significant reasons for China to reopen relations with its "most respected enemy," particularly as it became clear that the newly elected American president, Richard Nixon, held similar sentiments. As early as 1967 Nixon had written in an editorial, "[W]e simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations."

The reasons that Mao's government reversed its ideological strategy and invited the representatives of the greatest capitalist nation on earth to the heart of Beijing were domestic as well as international. The upheavals of the Cultural Revolution were exposing the contradictions in Mao's vision of modernity. After the departure of Soviet advisors in 1960, it no longer had the indigenous capacity to develop technology, particularly as the Cultural Revolution's initial phase was predicated on breaking down any pretensions to high technical knowledge or expertise. Although various areas of scientific endeavor, such as the Chinese atomic bomb program, remained protected from the Cultural Revolution, overall the movement was immensely destructive to the country's knowledge base. It was clear by the early 1970s that some source of external technical knowledge was needed to replace the Soviets.

Mao himself became a strong supporter of the opening to the US, having read and noted what he took as positive signals from Nixon. The latter's inaugural address had made it clear that he would not be bound simply by ideology in his decisions as to which countries to talk to. However, it seems that Mao's putative successor, Lin Biao, was not favorably inclined toward an opening toward the US. The situation changed with Lin's death in 1971. He appears to have been involved in an attempted coup against Mao, and his disappearance from the scene meant that the Chinese leadership became more unified toward the opening toward the US.

After a series of maneuvers and false starts, US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger arrived under conditions of top secrecy in Beijing in 1971. He was subjected to robust conversations by Zhou Enlai and other Chinese officials, and this helped to clear the way for the visit by Nixon. On February 21, 1972, Nixon arrived in Beijing. His visit was only a week long, but it was highly public (more so to the outside world than within China itself) and demonstrated clearly that the cold war structures had been reoriented. With the emergence of détente in Europe, the US became the only superpower to have active engagement with the other two major powers, the USSR and China.

The myth that "only Nixon could go to China" (that is, only a right-wing Republican could do so without accusations of going soft on communism) is now widely dismissed. Both Kennedy, and more so Johnson, had experimented with greater communication with the PRC. From 1966, however, these efforts were hampered by the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, which made it difficult to have any meaningful communications with the Beijing government. The rapprochement between the two countries had as much to do with changes in China as did the arrival of a new US president: even Mao realized that his beloved Cultural Revolution had run out of steam and that to continue it risked domestic collapse and even international conflict. Furthermore, Mao was disturbed by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and this may well have inclined him toward seeking an ally against a future attack by Moscow.

The odd alliance of convenience between the US and China would last for some two decades. When cold war crises emerged, China would side with the West: China attended the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics when they were boycotted by the USSR and most Eastern European countries, and the West and China both chose to support the Khmer Rouge in 1979 when the Soviet-backed Vietnamese ousted that genocidal regime. The neutralization of China enabled the US to concentrate on the European front of the cold war.

The other government that was most affected by the switch in US policy was the Republic of China on Taiwan, the rump state controlled by Chiang Kai-shek. For much of the high cold war, Taiwan was a major factor in right-wing US politics (in particular the so-called "China Lobby"), but Democratic as much as Republican presidents found it hard to abandon Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang's regime was clearly underpinned by US support; without the US Seventh Fleet in the Pacific, there would have been little to prevent the PRC retaking the island. Chiang had one overriding agenda, which he repeatedly pressed on his American backers: the recapture of the mainland. However, Taiwan under his rule also achieved certain domestic successes that Chiang had failed to gain on the mainland. The major social change that emerged under American pressure was land reform, the issue on which the Communists had won over much of the peasantry on the mainland. Thus Taiwan became a model of a cold war developmental state.

The political constraints of the cold war also allowed Taiwan to maintain a highly protected economy and currency in return for fealty to the US. This enabled it to build a powerful manufacturing base which enabled the island to become a major exporter from the 1970s onward. In political terms, the Republic of China was an authoritarian dictatorship. The Nationalist government committed many human rights abuses. The regime was particularly discriminatory against ethnic Chinese who had been born on the island as opposed to emigrating from the mainland after 1945 or 1949, as well as the island's aboriginal population. Yet it also followed the example of US-backed societies such as authoritarian South Korea and democratic Japan in using its economic policies to drive down income inequality. Chiang's death in 1975 brought his son Chiang Ching-kuo to power, and moves began to legalize the pro-democracy civil society groups, which had started to form on the island. As Taiwan became more diplomatically isolated, it began to use its democratic credentials rather than its anti-communist ones to justify its reluctance to reunify with the mainland.

The culture of cold war China

The language within which China expressed and understood the cold war was in large part a subset of the period's global linguistic environment: a dispute between two differing versions of the Enlightenment, in which the vocabulary of "freedom" and "democracy" became the terrain of contestation between the two blocs. In China, the local variation of this dispute was linked to two different historical streams. The first was the May Fourth Movement, a liberal and anti-traditional strain of Enlightenment thought which had embraced the ideas of "science and democracy" as the key to combating imperialism and renewing China's politics in the 1910s. The Chinese Communist Party, founded in 1921, was just one product of the period.

The second source was the legacy of the wartime period. China, more than perhaps any belligerent during World War II, had seen the "world war of values" fought on its own soil. The Nationalists and Communists had engaged in a deadly dispute, but they had both sought ownership of the language of democracy. Nationalist China had called itself "Free" China to the outside world, and Mao's major wartime theoretical innovation had been the concept of "New Democracy." During the cold war, Mao's regime continued to speak of itself as being "democratic." In doing so, it drew on the pre-1949 tradition of political reform without openly acknowledging that it was doing so.

China also used another commonplace term of the era, "modernization," to define its own distinctive path. Modernization theory is probably the social scientific phrase most associated with the cold war. It refers to the postwar idea, accepted in the USSR as well as in the West, that technological progress could come through a carefully mapped and defined pathway from "tradition" to "modernity."

China provided an alternative view of modernization that shared much of the desire for progress, as well as the goals of "modernization," but found different pathways to achieve it. For a start, because China remained a less developed and more agrarian country than either the US or USSR, its policies were tied to the countryside more than in the other two countries. Furthermore, Mao's engagement with modernity and progress was always tempered by his dislike of China's "intellectual" classes, which he regarded as insufficiently committed to the revolution and too linked to their Confucian predecessors. Therefore, there were strong elements that ran through the Chinese revolution that differentiated it from the Soviet view. The mobilization of the countryside was central to Mao's view of modernization in the Great Leap Forward of 1958-62.

The Leap was a disaster, leading to a massive famine that killed more than 20 million Chinese. Nonetheless, Mao remained enchanted by the idea of an alternative model of modernization in which the power of rural-dwellers could be unleashed. Other aspects of the Chinese experience did prove inspiring to radical groups and governments as far apart as India and East Africa, and in some cases were assisted by formal Chinese assistance. The TanZam railway, linking Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, to landlocked Zambia, was one of the most prominent projects to use Chinese assistance to construct infrastructure in decolonized Africa as an alternative to Western or Soviet assistance.

One element of China's discourse that was specifically tied to the cold war was the fetish that it made of the atomic bomb. The cold war globally was associated with a romantic view of technology and its possibilities. Of course, this was not unprecedented (Futurism was just one of the artistic trends in the early 20th century which was underpinned by an obsession with technology), but nuclear technology in particular is associated inextricably with the wider trajectory of the cold war. For smaller, post-imperial powers such as Britain and France, acquisition of atomic weapons became symbolic of national prowess. The US and USSR found themselves torn between stressing the power that atomic weaponry bestowed and reflecting on its destructiveness. Japan, in contrast, heavily tied its postwar self-image to having been a victim of the only atomic bombs dropped.

The PRC was unequivocal about stressing the search for an atomic weapon as a powerful symbol of national virility. Attitudes on this issue were shaped at the very top: Mao had shocked Khrushchev by declaring, as the two of them relaxed by a swimming pool in Beijing, that the atomic bomb was a "paper tiger." Lin Biao, China's defense minister, gave a pithy example of the metaphor's power when he spoke of Mao Zedong's thought as being "a spiritual atom bomb of infinite power." This was an image which could never have been used in Japan, or most of postwar Europe. In general, the PRC embraced the romanticism of technology wholeheartedly, and unashamedly combined it with politics.

A new world: from Nixon to the end of the cold war

China tends to fade from the global narrative of the cold war after the Sino-US rapprochement in 1972. After the traumas of the Cultural Revolution, it became clear that China had reversed its policy of international revolutionary intervention. The death of Mao and the arrest of the "Gang of Four," as the leaders of the Cultural Revolution Central Group became known, were further signs of the move away from radical policies. Nonetheless, Chinese policy had begun to change several years before Mao's death. In 1971 the PRC finally replaced Taiwan at the United Nations. This development was a first step toward socializing the country into the wider international community.

The opening to America had been preceded, not followed, by the opening of relations with Japan. This had happened partly as an act of pique; Prime Minister Satô Eisaku had been angered at the "Nixon Shocks" of 1971-2, when the US president had abandoned the Bretton Woods monetary system and opened channels to China without informing Tokyo in advance. Satô's successor, Tanaka Kakuei, visited Beijing in 1972 and signed the Zhou-Tanaka communiqué, which established the first sustained diplomatic relations between a sovereign Japan and the Chinese mainland since 1938. Another important area that showed a real shift by the PRC in the 1970s was its policy toward Southeast Asia. By the early 1970s China's relations with Vietnam had become frostier, as the latter tied its fortunes to the USSR. However, Beijing continued to maintain a stake in the success of the rival Khmer Rouge movement in neighboring Cambodia. Among the last conversations recorded between Mao and foreign leaders was a dialogue with Pol Pot, in which it is clear that Mao's ideological radicalism had remained undimmed. Beijing offered support for the Khmer Rouge during its four years in power, and in 1979, after the Vietnamese had ousted Pol Pot, Beijing allied with the Western powers in continuing to recognize the Khmer Rouge representative at the UN. In addition, in February 1979 China launched an invasion of northern Vietnam, ostensibly to counter discrimination against ethnic Chinese in the area, but also as a wider warning to Vietnam that they could not act against China and its allies with impunity. For Beijing, the war was a disaster; People's Liberation Army (PLA) troops were expelled fast. The Sino-Vietnamese War remains the last occasion that Chinese troops have been deployed in anger outside Chinese territory.

The late cold war also saw significant changes in the Chinese historical memory of the recent past. In 1949 the Mao regime had decreed that the Nationalist government that preceded it should be treated in public pronouncements and educational materials as villains and rogues: corrupt, in thrall to foreign powers, and worst of all, unwilling or unable to fight the Japanese while the CCP led the war effort. After the 1980s this viewpoint changed significantly. Within China there was widespread disillusionment at the chaos wrought by the Cultural Revolution, and it became clear to the post-Mao leadership that a new source of domestic legitimacy, drawing on nationalism, was needed to substitute for ideological radicalism. Then, the death of Chiang in 1975 and Mao in 1976 removed some of the personal venom from the ideological wars of the previous half-century.

In addition, the politics of the Mao years had stressed the danger from Chiang much more than it had paid attention to the memory of the many war crimes committed in China by the Japanese during the years 1937-45. The PRC had wished to detach Japan from the cold war embrace of the US, and this made it less politic to stress past atrocities. However, once the 1972 Shanghai communiqué had been signed, it became politically useful to remind the Japanese of their past record as a stimulant for domestic nationalism. The emphasis in modern history moved away from the Civil War and back to the War of Resistance against Japan (as the Sino-Japanese War was known in China). The new historiographical turn, which was supported at the highest level in government, saw new museums, books, and films appear. One of the most striking aspects was the remembering of Japanese war crimes, most notably the Nanjing Massacre ("Rape of Nanking") of 1937-8; a memorial museum was opened in 1985 on the site of one of the mass murders.

But equally notable was the stark, if unstated, shift in cold war historiography with regard to the Nationalist government's wartime role. The major museum in Beijing commemorating the War of Resistance (opened in 1987) stressed the importance of Nationalist victories such as the Battle of Taierzhuang in 1938, in which the CCP had played no part. The new history still emphasized the leading role of the CCP, but it no longer dismissed the Nationalists as useless or cowardly. Instead, the role of the Chiang regime in resisting the Japanese for eight years was given due seriousness. Even Chiang's old mansions in eastern China were rehabilitated as museums and his role given a respectful description: this would have been unthinkable in the era of Mao.

Uncertain endings

From China, the end of the cold war looks different from the view from the West. In the West, a very clear overarching narrative emerged. One side, the West, "won." Key figures-notably Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev but also Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl-gave a human face to the narrative. Most importantly, there was a clear shift of regimes from communist to non-communist governance.

This left Asia as a seeming anomaly. The continuing existence of North Korea, Vietnam, and most of all, the People's Republic of China as states still run by communist parties that had no intention of relinquishing power was made to seem like a global outlier. The killings of protestors in Tiananmen Square in Beijing on June 4, 1989, seemed to seal China's fate as a dinosaur of history: the emergent superpower of the early 21st century did not appear that way after the Beijing Spring of 1989 had ended. Yet it may be that the most important shifts that ended the cold war structure emerged first in Asia rather than Europe.

The Nixon visit of 1972 and the rapprochement with Japan marked a re-engagement by the PRC with the non-communist world, even while the Cultural Revolution continued and the cold war remained cold. But it is important not to read these events as they have been understood in retrospect-that is, with the knowledge that the USSR would collapse and that communism would end in Eastern Europe. For even in the last years of the cold war, its structures did not appear to be weakening. To many, the appearance of leaders such as Reagan, Thatcher, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko made the cold war still seem very chilly. It was in this context that China's reforms in the 1980s, leading up to 1989, need to be viewed. At the time, they were seen in Beijing not as a way of overcoming communism but of reinterpreting it for a new world in which the US and USSR would both play a role.

The 1980s, then, have some similarity with the years 1945-50 with which this chapter started. In both cases China's story seems in retrospect to be part of a clearly defined wider global narrative: in 1949, one that ended with the establishment of the PRC and the establishment of a cold war Asia, and in 1989, one that ended with the collapse of Eastern European communism and the discrediting of classic state socialism. Yet the major actors did not make decisions at the time with the knowledge of the end result. In 1945, neither the Nationalists nor Communists knew that the latter would win; in 1978, when the Chinese economic reforms started, nobody in Beijing believed that the Soviet Union had only a decade more of existence left. China's final cold war decade was shaped by an understanding that the world would remain under the influence of the superpowers that had dominated it for thirty years. In practice, it was the implosion of one of those superpowers that allowed China to become the power with the global reach that it had craved for decades. And at the start of the 21st century, the question that exercises at least some analysts in the West is whether the end of the old cold war with the USSR has paved the way for a new one with China instead. In the 1950s, there was real debate over whether the Soviet bloc provided an alternative model of modernization that, in Khrushchev's word, might "bury" the West. As the West is racked in the present day by economic crisis and political self-doubt, one of the key questions of the decades to come is whether a Chinese model may pose an equally important challenge, and whether that alternative may prove more lasting than the failed Soviet model.

Notes:

( 7.) Kirby, "China's Internationalization," 887.

(Peter Van Ness, 21.) Revolution and Chinese Foreign Policy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1970).

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China and the Cold War - Oxford Handbooks

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This chapter examines the role of China in the Cold War. It describes the origins of Cold War in China and the participation of nationalist China in World War 2 and the Cold War, and suggests that China played a pivotal role as the third (albeit shorter) leg of a cold war tripod.

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The long Chinese Civil War began in April of 1927 and was a conflict in China between the Chinese Communists and Chinese Nationalists. The force that was loyal to the Chinese government was called the Kuomintang (KMT), and they fought with the Communist Party of China (CPC). The war ended in 1950 and resulted in the establishment of the People's Republic of China in mainland China and the Republic of China in Taiwan. At that time, both sides claimed to be China's legitimate governing power.

This war was an ideological separation between the KMT and CPC. The Chinese Civil War carried on sporadically until late part of the 1937. Then, these two parties came together to form the Second United Front in order to battle the Japanese invasion. In 1946, the civil war started again just one year after the fighting with Japan had ended. Fighting finally ended four years later when the People's Republic of China (PRC) was founded to control mainland China. The Republic of China (ROC) ended up controlling Taiwan, Quemoy, Penghu, Matsu, and many other outlying islands.

Northern Expedition

One of the first military campaigns was the Northern Expedition and this was fought from 1926 to 1928. The objective of this campaign was to end the rule of the area's local warlords by defeating them so they could unify China. During this time, Chiang Kai-shek became the KMT's leader, and he is credited for winning the war's first round. As a result of this conflict ending in 1928, the Beiyang government collapsed. This led to the Northeast Flag Replacement, also known as the Chinese reunification. It is important to note that the achievements of the Northern Expedition were mostly due to the CPC and KMT working together militarily.

Shanghai Massacre

On April 7, 1927, many KMT leaders, which included Chiang, held a meeting to discuss communist activities that were occurring in their territories. Most of the leaders wanted to purge the communists from their party. On April 12th, fighting broke out between the CPC and KMT in Shanghai. The KMT arrested and executed hundreds of members of the CPC. This event in history is called the Shanghai Massacre. This purge resulted in a split between the KMT right and left wings and Chiang Kai-shek became the leader of the right wing in Nanjing.

This massacre increased the differences between the KMT's left wing leader Wang Jingwei and Chiang. The CPC made some efforts to take over cities like Guangzhou, Nanchang, Changsha, and Shantou. At this time, China had three capitals and the CPC had their internationally recognized capital in Beijing and the left-wing party of the KMT had their capital in Wuhan, while the right-wing party of the KMT had their capital in Nanjing for the next ten years.

The Capture of Beijing

The left-wing of the KMT removed the CPC from the government in Wuhan, and later they were removed by Chiang. The KMT once again resumed the battle against the warlords and in June 1928, they captured Beijing. Later on, nearly all of the eastern part of China was controlled by Nanjing's central government. The Nanjing government was seen internationally as China's legitimate government. The KMT used Khampa troops to fight the CPC Red Army and the local warlords that would not fight the CPC in order to preserve their own forces.

Chiang Kai-shek did not want to join forces with the CPC to fight the Japanese invasion because he believed the CPC was a greater threat. He wanted to unite China by removing the CPC and warlords forces first. Chiang thought that his forces were not strong enough and wanted more time to build up his military so he could launch an effective attack on the Japanese forces. So he ordered his KMT Generals Yang Hucheng and Zhang Xueliang to undertake the elimination of the CPC. His provincial forces sustained substantial casualties in their conflicts with the Red Army.

Overall, the CPC had won popular support because of their guerrilla war efforts in the Japanese-occupied regions. The KMT suffered greatly in their efforts to defend China from Japanese assaults. In 1944, the Japanese launched their final major offensive called Operation Ichi-Go, which was against the KMT and Chiang Kai-shek's forces were seriously weakened. In the end, the CPC benefited politically from the Sino-Japanese War.

After the Sino-Japanese War 1946-1950

In March of 1946, the Soviet Union delayed leaving Manchuria because Stalin wanted to make sure the leader of the CPC, Mao Zedong, would have control over northern Manchuria. This led to more fighting for the control of this area. Chiang Kai-shek moved his KMT troops to recently liberated regions to stop CPC forces from receiving Japan's surrender.

The CPC had more power when fighting resumed in the Chinese Civil War. Their main military force grew to over one million troops, and their militia had about two million soldiers. The CPC's "Liberated Zone" consisted of nineteen base areas, which included one-quarter of mainland China's territory (which had many important cities and towns) and nearly one-third of its population. In addition, the Soviet Union gave the CPC many captured Japanese weapons along with a large quantity of their own military supplies. The Soviet Union also gave them Northeastern China.

The End of the Chinese Civil War

The KMT's defeat happened for many reasons and the main one was corruption, which had become a root problem in the party. Also, the CPC told the poor peasants they would be given their former warlord's farmland and this made them very popular with the Chinese people at the end of the war.

No peace treaty or armistice was ever signed that officially ended the Chinese Civil War. Mao Zedong proclaimed on October 1, 1949, the capital for the PRC would be Beiping, later to be renamed Beijing. At this point, Chiang Kai-shek and around two million Nationalist Chinese left mainland China and went to Taiwan, which was still in Japan's control at the time.

Today, there are tensions about Taiwan's political status. The People's Republic of China claims that Taiwan is part of their territory and still threatens the Republic of China with military action if the Republic of China declares its independence. The Republic of China also claims mainland China belongs to them.

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The Chinese Civil War (April 1927 - May 1950) - Summary & Facts

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The long Chinese Civil War began in April of 1927 and was a conflict in China between the Chinese Communists and Chinese Nationalists. The force that was loyal to the Chinese government was called the Kuomintang (KMT), and they fought with the Communist Party of China (CPC).

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Chinese Civil War - New World Encyclopedia

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The Chinese Civil War (Traditional Chinese: 國共內戰; Simplified Chinese: 国共内战; pinyin: Guógòng Neìzhàn; literally " Nationalist-Communist Civil War") or (Chinese: 解放战争; pinyin: Jiefang Zhanzheng; literally " Revolutionary War"), which lasted from April 1927 to May 1950, was a war in China between the Kuomintang (KMT or Chinese Nationalist Party) and the Chinese Communist Party (CPC).

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The Chinese Civil War was a military struggle between Guomindang Nationalists and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for the singular control of China. It began with the collapse of the Second United Front after World War II, and ended with the flight of Jiang Jieshi to Taiwan, victory to Mao Zedong and the CCP and the formation of the People's Republic of China.

The Chinese Civil War started, in many respects, with the Shanghai Massacre and the collapse of the First United Front in 1927. The main phase of the Chinese Civil War, however, is generally regarded as the period spanning late 1945 to October 1949.

After the Japanese surrender in August 1945, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Nationalists agreed to peace talks and an abortive ceasefire. By the start of 1946, the two were again fighting for control of China.

The Chinese Civil War culminated in the CCP's capture of Beijing, where its leader Mao Zedong declared the formation of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Nationalist generalissimo Jiang Jieshi was forced to retreat to Taiwan, where he established an alternative government called the Republic of China (ROC).

The civil war inflicted major suffering on China's civilian population, already exhausted and economically ravaged by decades of revolution, warlordism and conflict with the Japanese. The war caused millions of casualties, collapsed the economy through hyperinflation and corruption, and displaced millions of refugees. The CCP secured victory in 1949 but like the Republicans of 1912, they inherited a divided, unstable and economically depleted nation.

Attempts to reconcile

When the Japanese surrendered in August 1945, most observers believed the CCP and Nationalists were destined to revive their civil war. In late 1945, foreign intermediaries, particularly the Americans, tried to broker peace talks between the two groups.

In late August 1945 Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai attended peace talks with Jiang Jieshi and other Nationalist leaders in Chongqing. Mao and Zhou attended at the urging of the Soviet Union and were accompanied by US diplomat Patrick Hurley.

These talks were notable for their civility and frequent shows of goodwill between Mao and Jiang Jieshi. At one function in Chongqing, Jiang raised a toast and declared that he hoped "we can now go back to the days of 1924". At another dinner, Mao even exclaimed: "Long live President Jiang Jieshi!". The two men were also photographed together smiling.

Beneath this polite veneer, the Chongqing talks were insincere and unproductive. Both sides were manoeuvring behind the scenes and buying time for their military forces to recover and regroup. The United States was promising to support a coalition government while increasing shipments of military supplies to the Nationalists.

Outbreak of hostilities

After three weeks of negotiating Mao and Jiang announced a bilateral pact, agreeing to suspend hostilities and form an all-party government. As expected, the pact did not last long. Fighting between the CCP and Nationalists soon flared up again in Manchuria, an area at this time controlled by the Soviet Red Army.

As Soviet leader Joseph Stalin played both the CCP and Guomindang to his own advantage, US general George Marshall forced Jiang's government to agree to a 15-day ceasefire, which gave the beleaguered CCP a lifeline.

Jiang had negotiated with Moscow to allow Soviet troops to occupy Manchuria until he could mass enough troops there to counter any threat from the CCP. The Soviets held to this agreement but offered the CCP's Red Army training, weapons and supplies before withdrawing. This support helped transform communist guerrilla fighters in Manchuria into a more conventional military force.

George Marshall continued to push Jiang for further negotiations but was frustrated by the generalissimo's attitude, so returned to the US in January 1947. American president Harry Truman later noted the "selfish interest of extremist elements, equally in the Guomindang as in the Communist Party, are hindering the aspirations of the Chinese people".

Impact on the people

The Civil War had a significant impact on the Chinese people. The historian Jonathan Fenby suggests that "hyperinflation [during the Chinese Civil War] undermined everyday lives and ruined tens of millions".

Hampered by a poor taxation base, increased military spending and widespread corruption, the Nationalist government's deficit skyrocketed. The Sino-Japanese War also caused government revenue to shrink, forcing the Guomindang to release large amounts of paper money not backed by financial reserves. The result was hyperinflation: a rapid rise in prices and a deterioration in the value of the currency.

Historian Michael Lynch writes that "in 1940, 100 yuan bought a pig, in 1943 a chicken, in 1945 a fish, in 1946 an egg, and in 1947 one third of a box of matches".

Hyperinflation

By 1949, hyperinflation was approaching the levels seen in Weimar Germany in 1923, with some Chinese observed hauling their money in carts. A thriving black market emerged and crime increased. Foreign aid supplies were hijacked and sold, reconstruction of industry was halted and unemployment rose.

The behaviour of the Nationalist army only increased dissatisfaction with the government. Nationalists troops, the majority of whom were poorly treated conscripts, mutinied or deserted in large numbers. Soldiers also engaged in rape, looting and other acts of brutality against the civilian population.

This unpopularity grew further when Jiang repeated a tactic he had previously used against the Japanese, ordering the diversion of the Yellow River to split enemy forces. The outcome was around 500 villages flooded and 400,000 people displaced.

The propaganda war

The CCP, on the other hand, was winning the propaganda war. While Nationalist forces were able to capture the communist soviet in Yan'an in March 1947, the CCP still controlled much of northern China.

By September 1947, the civil war was being fought on two fronts: the huge Manchurian theatre in the north and the triangle of Shandong, Anhui and Henan in east-central China.

In late 1947, the communists captured the cities of Shenyang and Changchun. The Red Army laid siege to Changchun for 150 days, a tactic designed to starve out GMD forces inside the city - but the siege caused 160,000 civilians to die of hunger, while another 30,000 died when they were trapped between the communist lines and the city walls.

In his book The Tragedy of Liberation, historian Frank Dikötter describes the casual attitude of both communists and Nationalists when it came to the civilian loss of life. "After decades of propaganda about the peaceful liberation of China," Dikötter writes, "few people remember the victims of the Communist Party's rise to power".

While statistics vary, it has been suggested that up to 2.5 million people died during the 1945-1949 phase of the Civil War. Several historians suggest the death toll for the entire Chinese Civil War period (1927-49) exceeded six million.

The Nationalist collapse

In late 1948, with CCP forces increasing their grip on China and closing in on Beijing, Jiang Jieshi called for the reopening of peace talks. Appealing to the United States and the Soviet Union for mediation, Jiang found little support and Mao refused his offers.

The climax of the war came in early 1949 when the Nationalist general Fu Zuoyi was forced to surrender Beijing. The Red Army was met by cheering crowds as they marched into the city, while at the Gate of Heavenly Peace, Jiang Jieshi's portrait was replaced by an image of Mao Zedong.

One after another, major Chinese cities continue to fall to the CCP. On October 10th 1949, the 55-year-old party leader addressed the nation from Tiananmen Square, declaring that "the Central People's Government of the People's Republic of China is founded today".

Jiang's flight to Taiwan

In the weeks after this momentous declaration, the Red Army chased Jiang across the country, from Guangzhou to Chongqing to Chengdu. Finally, on December 10th 1949, the generalissimo fled by aeroplane to Taiwan, his departure marking the end of the Nationalist era in China.

Jiang Jieshi left China with around 500,000 loyalist soldiers and two million civilian refugees. He was still unwilling to accept defeat.

In Taiwan, Jiang established the Republic of China (ROC). He remained president of this republic until his death in April 1975, his rule exceeding a quarter of a century.

Jiang's Taiwanese government was bankrolled by gold, silver and banknotes worth hundreds of millions of US dollars. Much of this was snatched from banks and government coffers as the Nationalists prepared to flee China. Millions of dollars worth of art and artefacts were also confiscated, from buildings like the Imperial Palace, and taken to Taiwan, where they remain today.

Jiang maintained his claim as the rightful ruler of China. He declared the ROC to be China's legitimate government in exile, further widening the political split between the mainland and Taiwan.

Many western nations refused to acknowledge the CCP as the rightful rulers of China for decades after 1949. No peace treaty was signed by the CCP and Guomindang, so technically the civil war continues today. Many Chinese believe that it is in a state of hiatus rather than concluded.

A historian's view:
"There is a sense in which the Chinese Civil War has not ended; no formal peace treaty or agreement has ever been made. The two Chinese states that emerged from the civil war, the PRC and Taiwan, have followed very different paths... but each side continues to claim that it alone is the legitimate government of all China. At the start of the second decade of the 21st century, the issues over which the civil war had been fought have still to be resolved."
Michael Lynch

1. The Civil War between the Chinese Communist Party and the Nationalists can be traced back to 1927, however, it usually refers to the struggle for China between the end of World War II and October 1949.

2. The Americans brought Mao Zedong and Jiang Jieshi together for peace talks in Chongqing in 1946 but their commitment to a unified China was short-lived and fighting quickly resumed.

3. Life during the Civil War was severely impacted by economic problems including hyperinflation, mass unemployment, inadequate reconstruction of industry and large numbers of refugees.

4. By early 1949 Beijing had fallen to the CCP and as other major cities across China fell, the CCP declared victory by proclaiming of the People's Republic of China in October 1949. The 'liberation' of China, however, resulted in millions of civilian causalities at the hands of both sides.

5. Jiang Jieshi fled to Taiwan and set up the Republic of China, maintaining that he was the legitimate leader of mainland China. His regime was bankrolled with riches taken from the mainland. He remained president of the ROC until his death in April 1975.

Citation information
Title: "The Chinese Civil War"
Authors: Rebecca Cairns, Jennifer Llewellyn
Publisher: Alpha History
URL: https://alphahistory.com/chineserevolution/chinese-civil-war/
Date published: September 20, 2019
Date updated: December 29, 2022
Date accessed: May 10, 2023
Copyright: The content on this page may not be republished without our express permission. For more information on usage, please refer to our Terms of Use.

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The Chinese Civil War was the struggle for control of China, fought by the Nationalists and communist Red Army, mainly between 1945 and 1949.

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Chinese Civil War, (1945-49), military struggle for control of China waged between the Nationalists (Kuomintang) under Chiang Kai-shek and the Communists under Mao Zedong.

The end of World War II and the collapse of the United Front

During the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), China was effectively divided into three regions-Nationalist China under control of the government, Communist China, and the areas occupied by Japan. Each was essentially pitted against the other two, although Chinese military forces were ostensibly allied under the banner of the United Front. By the time Japan accepted the surrender terms of the Potsdam Declaration on August 14, 1945, China had endured decades of Japanese occupation and eight years of brutal warfare. Millions had perished in combat, and many millions more had died as a result of starvation or disease. The end of World War II did not mark the end of conflict in China, however.

Japan's defeat set off a race between the Nationalists and Communists to control vital resources and population centres in northern China and Manchuria. Nationalist troops, using transportation facilities of the U.S. military, were able to take over key cities and most railway lines in East and North China. Communist troops occupied much of the hinterland in the north and in Manchuria. The United Front had always been precarious, and it had been tacitly understood by both the Nationalists and Communists that they would cooperate only until Japan had been defeated; until then, neither side could afford to seem to pursue internal aims at the cost of the national struggle. The growing wartime ineffectiveness and corruption of the Nationalists-who seemed, especially to the North Chinese, practically a government-in-exile in far-off Chongqing -left the Communists on a rising tide in 1945.

The Marshall Mission and early Nationalist successes (1945-46)

The stage was set for renewal of the civil war, but it initially appeared that a negotiated settlement between the Nationalists and the Communists might be possible. Even before the Japanese surrender had been finalized, Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek had issued a series of invitations to Communist leader Mao Zedong to meet with him in Chongqing to discuss reuniting and rebuilding the country. On August 28, 1945, Mao, accompanied by American ambassador Patrick Hurley, arrived in Chongqing. On October 10, 1945, the two parties announced that they had reached an agreement in principle to work for a united and democratic China. A pair of committees were to be convened to address the military and political issues that had not been resolved by the initial framework agreement, but serious fighting between government and Communist troops erupted before those bodies could meet.

U.S. Pres. Harry S. Truman responded to the outbreak of violence by dispatching George C. Marshall to China in December 1945. The Marshall Mission succeeded in bringing both sides back to the negotiating table, and on January 10, 1946, an armistice was concluded between the government and the Communists. On January 31 the Political Consultative Conference, a body composed of representatives from across the Chinese political spectrum, reached agreements on the following points: reorganization of the government and broadening its representation; convocation of a national assembly on May 5, 1946, to adopt a constitution; principles for political, economic, and social reform; and unification of military command. In late February Marshall brokered an agreement on military force integration and reduction-the Chinese army would consist of 108 divisions (90 government and 18 Communist) under the overall command of a national ministry of defense. Before any of these agreements could be put into practice, renewed fighting broke out in Manchuria. The withdrawal of Soviet occupation troops in March-April 1946 triggered a scramble; Nationalist troops occupied Mukden ( Shenyang) on March 12, while the Communists consolidated their hold throughout northern Manchuria. After government troops took Changchun on May 23, a 15-day truce was declared in Manchuria from June 6 to June 22. Fighting intensified elsewhere, however, as government and Communist troops clashed in Jehol ( Chengde), northern Kiangsu ( Jiangsu), northeastern Hopeh ( Hebei), and southeastern Shantung ( Shandong).

Marshall and John Leighton Stuart, the newly appointed U.S. ambassador, tried to bring the two sides together in late August to discuss a coalition government, but the effort was fruitless, as neither side wished to give up its military gains. In late September 1946 Nationalist troops laid siege to Kalgan, a major Communist base, and lead Communist negotiator Zhou Enlai responded by withdrawing from peace talks. Kalgan fell to the Nationalists on October 11, and on October 21, Zhou was persuaded to return to the restored Nationalist capital at Nanking ( Nanjing) for further negotiations. To induce the Communists and other parties to join the new National Assembly, Chiang issued a qualified cease-fire order on November 11 and postponed the opening of the assembly from November 12 to November 15. On November 20, Zhou flew from Nanking to the Communist stronghold at Yan'an. On December 4 Zhou wired Marshall that "if the Kuomintang would immediately dissolve the illegal National Assembly now in session, and restore the troop positions of January 13 [1946] the negotiations between the two parties may still make a fresh start."

On December 25, 1946, the National Assembly, without the Communists or the left wing of the centrist Democratic League, adopted a new constitution. Combining features of both presidential and parliamentary systems with Sun Yat-sen's Five-Power Constitutional democracy, it was to be put into effect on December 25, 1947. Until the new constitution was enacted and a new president elected, the Nationalists would continue to be the ruling party.

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Chinese Civil War | Summary, Causes, & Results

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History of the Chinese Civil War (1945-49), the military struggle waged between the Nationalists (Kuomintang) under Chiang Kai-shek and the communists under Mao Zedong. The conflict led to the establishment of the People's Republic of China. Read more about the Chinese Civil War here.