China’s
Civil War is the first book of its kind to offer a social
history in English of the Civil War in
1945-1949. The aim of it is to give voices to some of those who lived
through the cataclysm of the Civil War.
This seems the right time (2015) to do it. Whatever the memories, of triumph at
victory on the CCP side, or of the pride of survival, or of the sadness of
loss, the people who remember the events of the Civil War directly are now old.
Over the past two or three decades, they have begun to express themselves, to
write down their memories. There has been a recent spate of memoirs published
in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, written
by elderly people who don’t want the past to die with them. . only one major
source is missing – accounts of the war in fiction and poetry, the traditional
vehicles for carrying the sad and tragic parts of Chinese history. The Civil
War provided very little in the way of literature or myth. It was so awful that
It seems to have silenced China’s writers. The only literary expression of
those caught up in the war was the quotation of Tang poems.
Zhanluan
The chaos of war
The chaos of war is a visitation that China has endured many times, chaos created either by the invasion of outsiders or, even worse, by civil war. Between 1945 and 1949 one of the most bitter civil wars in China’s long history was fought across the country. The outcome, the victory of the Chinese Communist Party, changed China forever. The incoming state was determined on revolution, on complete transformation of the state and society. The arrival of the CCP also created a huge upheaval in global politics; communism was established in the world’s most populous country.
The Civil War is still not formally over. The two sides in the war remain technically at war. The People’s Republic of China government rules over all mainland China, but the Republic of China, now in its 103rd year, is still firmly in existence in Taiwan. The PRC government calls Taiwan a ‘renegade province’, but that rather threatening term does not alter the reality of two separate Chinese polities, two polities still firmly tied together by their common history and culture, and by the legacies of the tragedies of modern history. The most difficult and painful part of the common history is the history of the Civil War.
Civil war is the most horrible form of war. It has a hideous intimacy to it that inter-state wars do not. Those who are killed, ruined or exiled during a civil war are the victims of their own compatriots,. People connected to each other by history and nationality turn against each other, driven by divisions that transcend their attachment to the nation. The basis for these divisions varies. In the Russian Civil War (1917-1922) the divides were class and ideology, between those who opposed tsarist autocracy and those who were loyal to it. In the Rwandan Civil War (1990-1994) the division was ethnicity, between the Tutu and Tutsi, two distinct groups who were manipulated into murderous hostility. The divide may be religion, as it was in the long-standing conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. Civil war may be the outcome of recurrent struggles between political factions, breaking out when one or other of equally matched factions take their turn in a ‘regular massacre of compatriots, as has happened with dismal regularity in the history of Colombia.
Civil war often follows on the heels of an inter-state war that has weakened the existing regime. In Russia, the Civil War started in the chaos of the last year of the First World War, when soldiers of the tsarist armies were no longer willing to risk their lives for the regime, and ‘voted with their feet’- i.e. left the battle fronts and precipitated a civil war that had been brewing for some time. In Vietnam, the communist Vietcong’s fight against France first and then the USA was a civil war embedded in an international war, in which parts of Vietnamese society fought with foreign powers.
China has her own particular pattern of civil war, a very long one. The war between Xiang Yu and Liu Bang in the third century BCE (206-202) came only 15 years after the Chinese state was unified by Qin Shuhuang. The war was one of the most celebrated conflicts in all of Chinese history, a war in which the brutal, crude Liu Bang, from north China, defeated a man of culture and refinement, Xiang Yu, from the south. Liu’s victory brought about the establishment of one of China’s most glorious dynasties, the Han. Liu Bang made himself the first emperor, Han Gaozu.
Over China’s history there have been a sickening sense of the inevitability to civil war, as an unavoidable stage in the dynastic cycle, the path followed by many of the imperial dynasties. Civil wars were triggered as a dynasty went into decline, nearing the end of the cycle. The start of civil war, often a peasant rising, was a sign that the ruling dynasty had lost the mandate of heaven, and was no longer able to hold the state together, or to keep control of the divisive elements within the vast state. A recent civil war between the Confucian order and new political forces was the Taiping Rising (1850-1864), in which a huge movement under the banner of a Chinese form of Christianity took over much of southern and Central China. The Qing Dynasty managed to quell the rising, with great savagery, but the dynasty was critically weakened and its days were numbered. It fell less than 50 years later, in 1911.
During the two decades after the establishment of the Republic in 1912, China was divided into a patchwork of military satraps, under an assortment of military figures known collectively as the warlords. This was a form of disseminated militarism rather than a full-sale civil war. Some parts of China were fought over frequently, others were untouched. There was no question of ideology, only of control. In 1928 a powerful nationalist movement, the Guomindang (GMD), unified the country. It set up its capital in Nanjing, the southern capital, to distinguish the new government from the old imperial regime whose capital was in Beijing, the northern capital. The unification was only partial: there were still large areas under the control of militarists – and there was a small but tenacious communist movement, named by the GMD as an insurgency led by the CCP, which did see itself as involved in a civil war , a fight for a socialist China.
Chinese civil wars have two critical elements . The first element is the regional divide, between the north and the south. The conquests that accompanied dynastic change in China usually showed a marked distinction between the north and south. In civil war the two sides often distilled out along the regional divide. In the Taiping Rising the movement moved rapidly from south to north, as Liu Bang had triumphed over Xiang Yu. The second common element to civil wars in China is the urban/rural divide. Many dynastic changes in China’s history were sparked by peasant rebellions. The CCP conquered China by, in its own words, ‘surrounding the cities with countryside’; the party was brought to power by peasants and peasant armies.
The long Civil War
Zhanluan
The chaos of war
The chaos of war is a visitation that China has endured many times, chaos created either by the invasion of outsiders or, even worse, by civil war. Between 1945 and 1949 one of the most bitter civil wars in China’s long history was fought across the country. The outcome, the victory of the Chinese Communist Party, changed China forever. The incoming state was determined on revolution, on complete transformation of the state and society. The arrival of the CCP also created a huge upheaval in global politics; communism was established in the world’s most populous country.
The Civil War is still not formally over. The two sides in the war remain technically at war. The People’s Republic of China government rules over all mainland China, but the Republic of China, now in its 103rd year, is still firmly in existence in Taiwan. The PRC government calls Taiwan a ‘renegade province’, but that rather threatening term does not alter the reality of two separate Chinese polities, two polities still firmly tied together by their common history and culture, and by the legacies of the tragedies of modern history. The most difficult and painful part of the common history is the history of the Civil War.
Civil war is the most horrible form of war. It has a hideous intimacy to it that inter-state wars do not. Those who are killed, ruined or exiled during a civil war are the victims of their own compatriots,. People connected to each other by history and nationality turn against each other, driven by divisions that transcend their attachment to the nation. The basis for these divisions varies. In the Russian Civil War (1917-1922) the divides were class and ideology, between those who opposed tsarist autocracy and those who were loyal to it. In the Rwandan Civil War (1990-1994) the division was ethnicity, between the Tutu and Tutsi, two distinct groups who were manipulated into murderous hostility. The divide may be religion, as it was in the long-standing conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. Civil war may be the outcome of recurrent struggles between political factions, breaking out when one or other of equally matched factions take their turn in a ‘regular massacre of compatriots, as has happened with dismal regularity in the history of Colombia.
Civil war often follows on the heels of an inter-state war that has weakened the existing regime. In Russia, the Civil War started in the chaos of the last year of the First World War, when soldiers of the tsarist armies were no longer willing to risk their lives for the regime, and ‘voted with their feet’- i.e. left the battle fronts and precipitated a civil war that had been brewing for some time. In Vietnam, the communist Vietcong’s fight against France first and then the USA was a civil war embedded in an international war, in which parts of Vietnamese society fought with foreign powers.
China has her own particular pattern of civil war, a very long one. The war between Xiang Yu and Liu Bang in the third century BCE (206-202) came only 15 years after the Chinese state was unified by Qin Shuhuang. The war was one of the most celebrated conflicts in all of Chinese history, a war in which the brutal, crude Liu Bang, from north China, defeated a man of culture and refinement, Xiang Yu, from the south. Liu’s victory brought about the establishment of one of China’s most glorious dynasties, the Han. Liu Bang made himself the first emperor, Han Gaozu.
Over China’s history there have been a sickening sense of the inevitability to civil war, as an unavoidable stage in the dynastic cycle, the path followed by many of the imperial dynasties. Civil wars were triggered as a dynasty went into decline, nearing the end of the cycle. The start of civil war, often a peasant rising, was a sign that the ruling dynasty had lost the mandate of heaven, and was no longer able to hold the state together, or to keep control of the divisive elements within the vast state. A recent civil war between the Confucian order and new political forces was the Taiping Rising (1850-1864), in which a huge movement under the banner of a Chinese form of Christianity took over much of southern and Central China. The Qing Dynasty managed to quell the rising, with great savagery, but the dynasty was critically weakened and its days were numbered. It fell less than 50 years later, in 1911.
During the two decades after the establishment of the Republic in 1912, China was divided into a patchwork of military satraps, under an assortment of military figures known collectively as the warlords. This was a form of disseminated militarism rather than a full-sale civil war. Some parts of China were fought over frequently, others were untouched. There was no question of ideology, only of control. In 1928 a powerful nationalist movement, the Guomindang (GMD), unified the country. It set up its capital in Nanjing, the southern capital, to distinguish the new government from the old imperial regime whose capital was in Beijing, the northern capital. The unification was only partial: there were still large areas under the control of militarists – and there was a small but tenacious communist movement, named by the GMD as an insurgency led by the CCP, which did see itself as involved in a civil war , a fight for a socialist China.
Chinese civil wars have two critical elements . The first element is the regional divide, between the north and the south. The conquests that accompanied dynastic change in China usually showed a marked distinction between the north and south. In civil war the two sides often distilled out along the regional divide. In the Taiping Rising the movement moved rapidly from south to north, as Liu Bang had triumphed over Xiang Yu. The second common element to civil wars in China is the urban/rural divide. Many dynastic changes in China’s history were sparked by peasant rebellions. The CCP conquered China by, in its own words, ‘surrounding the cities with countryside’; the party was brought to power by peasants and peasant armies.
The long Civil War
The 1945-1949 Civil War was the last stage of a conflict that had been going
on for almost two decades, between the GMD and the CCP. The start of the long
Civil War can be dated precisely to April
1927. In the early 1920s the GMD and the CCP were closely linked by a
formal alliance, the First United Front, and through the personal ties between
the youthful leaders, who had trained together in Guangdong. Both parties
considered themselves to be revolutionary, both shared the goal of uniting then
transforming China. The major difference between them was ideology. The GMD’s
ideology was the rather general Sanmin
zhuyi ( Three Principles of the
People), the thinking of the revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen, which was
designed to encompass as many people as
possible, and would now be called ‘big-tent’ thinking. The CCP ascribed to a
tougher, universalist and highly evolved political theory, Marxism-Leninism,
which was based on the conviction that the victory of socialism was inevitable,
and that ‘all revolutionary wars are just’.
The two parties fought the first half of the Northern Expedition together (1926-1928), with the shared aim to put an end to warlordism and re-establish China’s international status.. Then, in April 1927 came what the GMD called the ‘great cleansing’ (gingdang), what the CCP called the ‘counter-revolution’. The much more powerful partner in the United Front, the GMD launched a sudden and deadly attack on the CCP, intent on eradicating the party and its members. The White Terror in the late spring and early summer of 1927 took the lives of thousands of communists; only a handful managed to escape. The extermination campaign was run by a man who foreigners had labelled until then as a ‘Red’, Chiang Ka-shek.
The 1927 purge virtually destroyed the CCP, a literal decimation. It left lasting personal bitterness and a total distrust of the GMD that could never be altered. The tiny rump of communists who survived withdrew into a few bases across the country, all in remote fastness in the border regions between provinces. These survivors were condemned to isolation, completely cut off from their previous lives and families. There was no going back to their previous lives; only death awaited them. They had to live with the knowledge that their family members were in danger because of them, hunted down and often killed. Mao Zedong’s second wife, Yang Kaihui, was killed in 1930.
The purge seemed to be the end of communism in China. It was not. The CCP survived, although always under the threat of destruction. In the early 1930s its bases were battered and almost destroyed in a series of encirclement campaigns that the GMD government launched against them. In 1934 the Central Soviet base in Jiangxi was abandoned and the CCP was forced on to the Long March, an epic withdrawal that took the CCP to safety in the remote northwest- and also created a potent myth of survival.
A far greater threat to China than the CCP was on the horizon. Japan took advantage of China’s internal struggles to encroach on Chinese territory. The Japanese threat became so severe that one of Chiang Kai-shek’s own military allies, Zhang Xueliang, kidnapped him in late 1936, in the ancient capital of Xi’an, to force him to take a stand against Japan. To get his release, Chiang agreed to a Second United Front with the CCP, to resist Japan. Chiang could not forgive the humiliation of being kidnapped (in his nightshirt). He kept his kidnapper Zhang Xueliang under house arrest for the rest of his on life. Zhang was released only after Chiang’s death in 1975.
See the death of Chiang Kai Shek:
https://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2010/02/end-of-chiang-kai-shek-by-jay-taylor.html
The full-scale Japanese invasion of China in July 1937 triggered the Resistance War, which lasted for eight long years. At the beginning of the war there seemed to be some rapprochement between the GMD and CCP, but it was not a happy alliance. The CCP hated and distrusted the GMD, while the GMD, much more powerful than the CCP, was deeply hostile to a party it had been fighting so long. By the middle of the war it was clear that the rapprochement had been only a hiatus in the unchanged hostility. By 1945, after the Japanese surrender, the hostility flared back up in its full virulence. There was a major rider: the balance between the two parties had shifted dramatically.
The course of the eight-year Resistance War, which damaged the GMD far more than the CCP, meant that at its end the CCP was strong enough to take on the GMD. In 1972 Mao Zedong thanked the then Japanese prime minister Tanaka Kakui for helping the CCP to power. Japan had fought the war under the pretext of containing communism. Instead, the brutal treatment of much of the population of the occupied areas pushed people, especially peasants, into the arms of a party committed to resistance to Japan – the CCP and its guerilla fighters. Chalmers Johnson argues persuasively that the alliance between the Party and peasantry in resistance to Japan brought nationalism to the villages, taught peasants to understand how oppressed they were under the old order and gave them a sense of belonging to a nation. The wartime mobilization of the peasants was the beginning of the process of ‘surrounding the cities (the GMD) with the countryside (the CCP).
The four-year Civil War, 1945-1949
The acute, four-year Civil War started at the end of a long global war in which, already, at least 20 million Chinese had perished. Asia in chaos. Colonialism was dying. Countries were suddenly liberated from Japanese colonialism (Korea, Taiwan) or occupation (China, Southeast Asia) Some countries were still technically colonies but the colonial masters, the British, French and Dutch, were incapable of resuming their old colonial rule given the ravages of the war in Europe. [ most colonies were a ‘luxury’, they cost home country regimes more than the revenues gained from them]. The USA was the new superpower, in charge of the occupation of Japan, and involved in other places, including China, in preventing nascent conflicts from flaring up [ for a brief time the US deployed surrendered Japanese forces and quislings to maintain order- Korea- but that quickly proved untenable]. The USSR had suffered greater damage from the Second World War than any other state, and was in recovery, but flexing its muscle in a mood of revenge and of promoting the spread of communism.
The Civil War that started before the Resistance War was over was, in a formal sense, an ideological was, fought between two radically different world views, each seeing themselves as representing the true China. Each side called the the other ‘bandit’ (guefei). Neither called the war a civil war. For the CCP the war was fought for socialism and revolution and so was called the War of Liberation. For the GMD the war was fought against communism and the spread of Soviet influence; it was a war of counter-insurgency. For the GMD the war brought either ‘strategic withdrawal’, or the ‘occupation by the enemy of Mainland China'. The war was a foreign-directed catastrophe; Soviet Russian in China was the title of Chiang Kai-shek’s later apologia (1957).
The GMD fought the Civil War in a a state of ideological confusion and decline, no longer certain about its own beliefs after the terrible losses of the Resistance war. Its leaders were fearful of the future, anguished and bitter about what might have been –the society believed they were on the road to creating before 1937. The CCP fought the war detesting the past and longing for a new world, their ideological hatred of the old society coupled with the bitterness of their own failures and humiliation between 1927 and 1937. In the Civil War the CCP conveyed a strong sense of renewal and redemption that was profoundly moving especially to young people who had grown up during China’s darkest days and saw around them older people who were defeated, cynical and corrupt.
There is an irony to the ideological conflict. The outcome of the war was decided not in an ideological struggle, but by soldiers on the battlefield, where the CCP’s army, the People’s Liberation Army, won. Neither side has ever formerly recognized that ideological issues were actually less important in the course of the war than were military ones. Ideology still had a key role, but it was less the victory of formal ideology, Marxism-Leninism, than it was the was winning over of popular support, winning the hearts and minds of the Chinese peasants , and military prowess.
The CCP’s use of the strategy of siege warfare was particularly effective way of both defeating the enemy and winning over the civilian population. During a siege civilians come to hate the defending military that has brought the siege upon them- and which get first call on dwindling supplies of food and fuel. Civilians have to watch the weaker members of their families – the elderly and children- dying. When a siege is lifted, the physical damage to the city seems very limited, The besieges city appears intact; citizens are not bitter towards the incomers, as they might be in a city that has been bombed, but grateful to the people who bring them food and other supplies. The besieger are given praise for having spared the city, for not destroying it. A harsh but brilliant way of winning the hearts of civilians.
Both the GMD and the CCP had their own internecine quarrels to deal with as they fought each other. Chiang Kai-shek distrusted most of the GMD’s senior military figures and spurned many political figures. The only people he trusted belonged to a small coterie with tight personal connections to himself, men who had studied under him, at the Whampoa Military Academy. In the CCP Mao’s harshness in dealing with his political opponents during the Yan’an period had succeeded in entrenching his tight control over the party. His harshness was slightly less in evidence in dealing with his generals, in whom he seems to have had enough confidence to allow them to argue with him with relative impunity.[thus, in might be said, Mao operated with British military traditions, Chiang with German traditions].
Between those Chinese loyal to the GMD and those supporting the CCP was a vast space. At the start of the Civil War the two sides together commanded the loyalty of only a small proportion of Chinese; the mass of people were caught in the space between the two sides. Those who were aware of what was happening in the war looked on in anxiety, tinged by hope and fear, of what was to come. Older people thought with nostalgia for the past that seemed to be lost forever. Most people simply longed for stability, even a harsh one.
The polarization between the GMD and the CCP can be seen as a willful failure to find a peaceful solution to their mutual animosity. This was General Marshal’s view, as he presided over negotiations to prevent civil war. The insanity of starting a civil war after eight years invasion was hard for outsiders to grasp but, even though both sides to part in negotiations to stop the war, both sides actually wanted war. The two leaders were implacably determined to fight.
Some of the savagery and extremism of the Civil War can be attributed to the huge egos of the leaders on either side. Both Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong showed megalomaniac tendencies, in the long Chinese tradition of powerful, ruthless leaders, bawang, dictators or autocrats. The most famous of the bawang was Qin Shihuang, the first emperor of China, the ruthless man who burned books and killed scholars – but still united the state. With two such individuals at the top of the opposing parties, the room for mediation or for compromise was next to nothing. Part of the tragedy of the Civil War is that it was fought under the leadership of two men whose personal ambitions drove them to seek victory at all costs –regardless of the havoc and death that would come in the process . . .
The social effects of the Civil War
In the Resistance War, Chinese society had been subjected to eight years of continuous stress and to forces that led to social disintegration. The Resistance War stretched the old order to breaking point, creating a fragmented society full of confusion and uncertainty, no longer sure of what its social values were, or how they connected to the past, to values such as conformity, obedience, respect for elders and subordination of women. The processes of moderate change, often associated with the term ‘modernization’, had started in the 1920s and 1930s; it was derailed in the turbulence of war. There was no relief after the Japanese defeat, the process of social disintegration was intensified. The war was everywhere, unavoidable. There was no place for vast mass of people who hated war, or had simply had enough of war after eight years. War stalked the whole nation.
One of the most profound social effects of the Civil War was family separation. Innumerable families were divided in the chaos of war. For some, division meant losing touch with family members; the painful term shizong (literally ‘lost footprint’) carried the meaning that families had no idea if embers were dead or alive. Other separations occurred when members of a family fled into exile while other stayed behind; these separations seemed at the outset to be short term but often lasted for decades. The concept of family separation as inevitably painful is deeply embedded in Chinese culture. As the ethnographer Charles Stafford puts it, in his vivid descriptions of the rituals of parting, separation and reunion, the ‘many practices and cultural objects –festivals, greetings, leave-takings, religious rituals, funerals and newspaper articles- which suggest, when taken together, that separation is a common theme, even an obsession in Chinese culture.
Family division was political as well as physical. The ascendancy of a evolutionary ideology, communism, was a huge shock to the social system. It went against the widespread belief than an egalitarian, class-based ideology could not transcend the Chinese attachment to family and locality. This turned out to be wrong. The young were far less committed to the old order than were their seniors. Young people tuned towards the CCP during the war, either openly or covertly. They put their ideological beliefs first, their family ties- the bedrock of traditional society- second.
The divides within small communities, specifically villages,, were different than those within families. They were less spontaneous, and relied on direct CCP involvement. In much of north China, even while the Civil War was still raging, attacks on the rural elite were a critical part of rural reform and class warfare. The old elites had been critically weakened during the Resistance War and did not recover their status at the start of the Civil War, which saw first of all a settling of accounts from the Resistance War in the once-occupied areas, and then the start of the rural revolution.
The Civil War undermined the economic life of innumerable families. Economic chaos and hyperinflation brought huge changes in family economies, especially in the cities and towns. Inflation was, for most Chinese urban populations, how the war was experienced from day to day. It caused generalized, acute anxiety. Incomes never kept pace with prices. The tension created by the inability of a husband’s earning a salary or a wage to support his dependents was enormous. Families were forced to be hardhearted, in terms of how many members a single unit could support; in times of chronic insecurity, the number of mouths eligible for support had to be reduced. The key question was who was going to be given priority. The answer was often cutting out members of the extended family, including siblings and the elderly, in favor of the immediate, nuclear family, parents and children.
The two parties fought the first half of the Northern Expedition together (1926-1928), with the shared aim to put an end to warlordism and re-establish China’s international status.. Then, in April 1927 came what the GMD called the ‘great cleansing’ (gingdang), what the CCP called the ‘counter-revolution’. The much more powerful partner in the United Front, the GMD launched a sudden and deadly attack on the CCP, intent on eradicating the party and its members. The White Terror in the late spring and early summer of 1927 took the lives of thousands of communists; only a handful managed to escape. The extermination campaign was run by a man who foreigners had labelled until then as a ‘Red’, Chiang Ka-shek.
The 1927 purge virtually destroyed the CCP, a literal decimation. It left lasting personal bitterness and a total distrust of the GMD that could never be altered. The tiny rump of communists who survived withdrew into a few bases across the country, all in remote fastness in the border regions between provinces. These survivors were condemned to isolation, completely cut off from their previous lives and families. There was no going back to their previous lives; only death awaited them. They had to live with the knowledge that their family members were in danger because of them, hunted down and often killed. Mao Zedong’s second wife, Yang Kaihui, was killed in 1930.
The purge seemed to be the end of communism in China. It was not. The CCP survived, although always under the threat of destruction. In the early 1930s its bases were battered and almost destroyed in a series of encirclement campaigns that the GMD government launched against them. In 1934 the Central Soviet base in Jiangxi was abandoned and the CCP was forced on to the Long March, an epic withdrawal that took the CCP to safety in the remote northwest- and also created a potent myth of survival.
A far greater threat to China than the CCP was on the horizon. Japan took advantage of China’s internal struggles to encroach on Chinese territory. The Japanese threat became so severe that one of Chiang Kai-shek’s own military allies, Zhang Xueliang, kidnapped him in late 1936, in the ancient capital of Xi’an, to force him to take a stand against Japan. To get his release, Chiang agreed to a Second United Front with the CCP, to resist Japan. Chiang could not forgive the humiliation of being kidnapped (in his nightshirt). He kept his kidnapper Zhang Xueliang under house arrest for the rest of his on life. Zhang was released only after Chiang’s death in 1975.
See the death of Chiang Kai Shek:
https://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2010/02/end-of-chiang-kai-shek-by-jay-taylor.html
The full-scale Japanese invasion of China in July 1937 triggered the Resistance War, which lasted for eight long years. At the beginning of the war there seemed to be some rapprochement between the GMD and CCP, but it was not a happy alliance. The CCP hated and distrusted the GMD, while the GMD, much more powerful than the CCP, was deeply hostile to a party it had been fighting so long. By the middle of the war it was clear that the rapprochement had been only a hiatus in the unchanged hostility. By 1945, after the Japanese surrender, the hostility flared back up in its full virulence. There was a major rider: the balance between the two parties had shifted dramatically.
The course of the eight-year Resistance War, which damaged the GMD far more than the CCP, meant that at its end the CCP was strong enough to take on the GMD. In 1972 Mao Zedong thanked the then Japanese prime minister Tanaka Kakui for helping the CCP to power. Japan had fought the war under the pretext of containing communism. Instead, the brutal treatment of much of the population of the occupied areas pushed people, especially peasants, into the arms of a party committed to resistance to Japan – the CCP and its guerilla fighters. Chalmers Johnson argues persuasively that the alliance between the Party and peasantry in resistance to Japan brought nationalism to the villages, taught peasants to understand how oppressed they were under the old order and gave them a sense of belonging to a nation. The wartime mobilization of the peasants was the beginning of the process of ‘surrounding the cities (the GMD) with the countryside (the CCP).
The four-year Civil War, 1945-1949
The acute, four-year Civil War started at the end of a long global war in which, already, at least 20 million Chinese had perished. Asia in chaos. Colonialism was dying. Countries were suddenly liberated from Japanese colonialism (Korea, Taiwan) or occupation (China, Southeast Asia) Some countries were still technically colonies but the colonial masters, the British, French and Dutch, were incapable of resuming their old colonial rule given the ravages of the war in Europe. [ most colonies were a ‘luxury’, they cost home country regimes more than the revenues gained from them]. The USA was the new superpower, in charge of the occupation of Japan, and involved in other places, including China, in preventing nascent conflicts from flaring up [ for a brief time the US deployed surrendered Japanese forces and quislings to maintain order- Korea- but that quickly proved untenable]. The USSR had suffered greater damage from the Second World War than any other state, and was in recovery, but flexing its muscle in a mood of revenge and of promoting the spread of communism.
The Civil War that started before the Resistance War was over was, in a formal sense, an ideological was, fought between two radically different world views, each seeing themselves as representing the true China. Each side called the the other ‘bandit’ (guefei). Neither called the war a civil war. For the CCP the war was fought for socialism and revolution and so was called the War of Liberation. For the GMD the war was fought against communism and the spread of Soviet influence; it was a war of counter-insurgency. For the GMD the war brought either ‘strategic withdrawal’, or the ‘occupation by the enemy of Mainland China'. The war was a foreign-directed catastrophe; Soviet Russian in China was the title of Chiang Kai-shek’s later apologia (1957).
The GMD fought the Civil War in a a state of ideological confusion and decline, no longer certain about its own beliefs after the terrible losses of the Resistance war. Its leaders were fearful of the future, anguished and bitter about what might have been –the society believed they were on the road to creating before 1937. The CCP fought the war detesting the past and longing for a new world, their ideological hatred of the old society coupled with the bitterness of their own failures and humiliation between 1927 and 1937. In the Civil War the CCP conveyed a strong sense of renewal and redemption that was profoundly moving especially to young people who had grown up during China’s darkest days and saw around them older people who were defeated, cynical and corrupt.
There is an irony to the ideological conflict. The outcome of the war was decided not in an ideological struggle, but by soldiers on the battlefield, where the CCP’s army, the People’s Liberation Army, won. Neither side has ever formerly recognized that ideological issues were actually less important in the course of the war than were military ones. Ideology still had a key role, but it was less the victory of formal ideology, Marxism-Leninism, than it was the was winning over of popular support, winning the hearts and minds of the Chinese peasants , and military prowess.
The CCP’s use of the strategy of siege warfare was particularly effective way of both defeating the enemy and winning over the civilian population. During a siege civilians come to hate the defending military that has brought the siege upon them- and which get first call on dwindling supplies of food and fuel. Civilians have to watch the weaker members of their families – the elderly and children- dying. When a siege is lifted, the physical damage to the city seems very limited, The besieges city appears intact; citizens are not bitter towards the incomers, as they might be in a city that has been bombed, but grateful to the people who bring them food and other supplies. The besieger are given praise for having spared the city, for not destroying it. A harsh but brilliant way of winning the hearts of civilians.
Both the GMD and the CCP had their own internecine quarrels to deal with as they fought each other. Chiang Kai-shek distrusted most of the GMD’s senior military figures and spurned many political figures. The only people he trusted belonged to a small coterie with tight personal connections to himself, men who had studied under him, at the Whampoa Military Academy. In the CCP Mao’s harshness in dealing with his political opponents during the Yan’an period had succeeded in entrenching his tight control over the party. His harshness was slightly less in evidence in dealing with his generals, in whom he seems to have had enough confidence to allow them to argue with him with relative impunity.[thus, in might be said, Mao operated with British military traditions, Chiang with German traditions].
Between those Chinese loyal to the GMD and those supporting the CCP was a vast space. At the start of the Civil War the two sides together commanded the loyalty of only a small proportion of Chinese; the mass of people were caught in the space between the two sides. Those who were aware of what was happening in the war looked on in anxiety, tinged by hope and fear, of what was to come. Older people thought with nostalgia for the past that seemed to be lost forever. Most people simply longed for stability, even a harsh one.
The polarization between the GMD and the CCP can be seen as a willful failure to find a peaceful solution to their mutual animosity. This was General Marshal’s view, as he presided over negotiations to prevent civil war. The insanity of starting a civil war after eight years invasion was hard for outsiders to grasp but, even though both sides to part in negotiations to stop the war, both sides actually wanted war. The two leaders were implacably determined to fight.
Some of the savagery and extremism of the Civil War can be attributed to the huge egos of the leaders on either side. Both Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong showed megalomaniac tendencies, in the long Chinese tradition of powerful, ruthless leaders, bawang, dictators or autocrats. The most famous of the bawang was Qin Shihuang, the first emperor of China, the ruthless man who burned books and killed scholars – but still united the state. With two such individuals at the top of the opposing parties, the room for mediation or for compromise was next to nothing. Part of the tragedy of the Civil War is that it was fought under the leadership of two men whose personal ambitions drove them to seek victory at all costs –regardless of the havoc and death that would come in the process . . .
The social effects of the Civil War
In the Resistance War, Chinese society had been subjected to eight years of continuous stress and to forces that led to social disintegration. The Resistance War stretched the old order to breaking point, creating a fragmented society full of confusion and uncertainty, no longer sure of what its social values were, or how they connected to the past, to values such as conformity, obedience, respect for elders and subordination of women. The processes of moderate change, often associated with the term ‘modernization’, had started in the 1920s and 1930s; it was derailed in the turbulence of war. There was no relief after the Japanese defeat, the process of social disintegration was intensified. The war was everywhere, unavoidable. There was no place for vast mass of people who hated war, or had simply had enough of war after eight years. War stalked the whole nation.
One of the most profound social effects of the Civil War was family separation. Innumerable families were divided in the chaos of war. For some, division meant losing touch with family members; the painful term shizong (literally ‘lost footprint’) carried the meaning that families had no idea if embers were dead or alive. Other separations occurred when members of a family fled into exile while other stayed behind; these separations seemed at the outset to be short term but often lasted for decades. The concept of family separation as inevitably painful is deeply embedded in Chinese culture. As the ethnographer Charles Stafford puts it, in his vivid descriptions of the rituals of parting, separation and reunion, the ‘many practices and cultural objects –festivals, greetings, leave-takings, religious rituals, funerals and newspaper articles- which suggest, when taken together, that separation is a common theme, even an obsession in Chinese culture.
Family division was political as well as physical. The ascendancy of a evolutionary ideology, communism, was a huge shock to the social system. It went against the widespread belief than an egalitarian, class-based ideology could not transcend the Chinese attachment to family and locality. This turned out to be wrong. The young were far less committed to the old order than were their seniors. Young people tuned towards the CCP during the war, either openly or covertly. They put their ideological beliefs first, their family ties- the bedrock of traditional society- second.
The divides within small communities, specifically villages,, were different than those within families. They were less spontaneous, and relied on direct CCP involvement. In much of north China, even while the Civil War was still raging, attacks on the rural elite were a critical part of rural reform and class warfare. The old elites had been critically weakened during the Resistance War and did not recover their status at the start of the Civil War, which saw first of all a settling of accounts from the Resistance War in the once-occupied areas, and then the start of the rural revolution.
The Civil War undermined the economic life of innumerable families. Economic chaos and hyperinflation brought huge changes in family economies, especially in the cities and towns. Inflation was, for most Chinese urban populations, how the war was experienced from day to day. It caused generalized, acute anxiety. Incomes never kept pace with prices. The tension created by the inability of a husband’s earning a salary or a wage to support his dependents was enormous. Families were forced to be hardhearted, in terms of how many members a single unit could support; in times of chronic insecurity, the number of mouths eligible for support had to be reduced. The key question was who was going to be given priority. The answer was often cutting out members of the extended family, including siblings and the elderly, in favor of the immediate, nuclear family, parents and children.
The status of women, which shifted during the
Resistance War as women had had to take
greater family responsibilities,
continued to change during the Civil War,. The deaths of soldiers and the loss
of men taken away as forced labor or as military conscripts deprived families
of their income, and forced more women to work outside the family. This might be
industrial work in the big cities or entrepreneurship. For many women the wars brought
a form of emancipation, which, although not always voluntary, was real. They
had to make decisions for themselves, to look out for their own opportunities,
even to abandon a husband in favor of a man who was better able to support them
[or make do as a widow or single woman].
Neither side in the war had a strong handle on the chaotic process of social change under way in the Civil War. There was nothing in the GMD’s policies that spoke to social issues. And though social revolution was very much part of the CCP’s long-term vision of revolution, many of the wartime changes were beyond its plans. . . .
What can be said about the Civil War is that it brought out, to its utmost, the capacity for endurance of the Chinese people. It forced them to demonstrate their courage and resilience. Battered by the waves of upheaval and destruction that the Civil War brought, the Chinese people showed an extraordinary ability to transcend the trauma of war. Nevertheless the war left deep anguish, often unspoken. Resilience is often achieved by not facing the past but by burying it and ignoring the agonies of the past. In China’s modern history there are two periods in the lives of individuals and families that are often passed over in silence: the Civil War and the Cultural Revolution.
Neither side in the war had a strong handle on the chaotic process of social change under way in the Civil War. There was nothing in the GMD’s policies that spoke to social issues. And though social revolution was very much part of the CCP’s long-term vision of revolution, many of the wartime changes were beyond its plans. . . .
What can be said about the Civil War is that it brought out, to its utmost, the capacity for endurance of the Chinese people. It forced them to demonstrate their courage and resilience. Battered by the waves of upheaval and destruction that the Civil War brought, the Chinese people showed an extraordinary ability to transcend the trauma of war. Nevertheless the war left deep anguish, often unspoken. Resilience is often achieved by not facing the past but by burying it and ignoring the agonies of the past. In China’s modern history there are two periods in the lives of individuals and families that are often passed over in silence: the Civil War and the Cultural Revolution.
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