# Chinese Civil War The **Chinese Civil War** (August 1, 1927 – December 1949) was the contest between [[Chiang Kai-shek]]'s [[Kuomintang]] and [[Mao Zedong]]'s [[Chinese Communist Party]] for control of China. It ran in two phases with an interlude: the first (1927–37) from the Nationalists' Shanghai massacre of their communist allies through the [[Long March (China)]]; a suspension for the Second United Front against Japan (1937–45), during which both sides hoarded strength for the resumption; and the second (1945–49), in which the communists went from a guerrilla force to masters of the mainland in four years. It ended with the [[Founding of the People's Republic of China]] on October 1, 1949 and the Nationalist retreat to [[Taiwan]] on December 7 — a division that has never been closed by treaty and that remains the live fault line of the Pacific. ## The war in brief - **First phase.** The KMT–CCP First United Front, built with Soviet money and advisers to defeat the warlords, broke when Chiang turned on the communists in April 1927. The party retreated to rural soviets in Jiangxi; five Nationalist encirclement campaigns drove it out on the Long March (October 1934–October 1935), 6,000 miles to Yan'an, from which Mao emerged as the undisputed leader. - **Interlude.** The Xi'an Incident (December 1936) forced Chiang into the Second United Front. The Japanese war bled the Nationalists; the communists expanded behind Japanese lines, growing from a few tens of thousands to a million regulars by 1945. - **The Marshall Mission.** President Truman sent George C. Marshall (December 20, 1945 – January 1947) to broker a coalition government. A January 1946 ceasefire collapsed within months; the United States suspended arms sales to the Nationalists from July 1946 to May 1947 to pressure a settlement; Marshall left blaming extremists on both sides and became Secretary of State. - **Second phase.** Manchuria fell in the Liaoshen campaign (autumn 1948); the Huaihai and Pingjin campaigns (November 1948–January 1949) destroyed the Nationalist field armies and took Beijing; the PLA crossed the Yangtze in April 1949 and took Nanjing on April 23. Corruption, hyperinflation and the loss of the countryside had hollowed the Nationalist state before the battles were fought. Roughly 2.5 million died in the second phase alone. ## The "loss of China" The war's outcome detonated American politics. The State Department's August 1949 *China White Paper* argued that the result was beyond American power to alter; the Republican right answered that China had been *lost* — betrayed by the "China Hands" (John Service, John Paton Davies, Owen Lattimore) whose wartime reports had called the communists agrarian reformers, and by the men who ran the policy. On June 14, 1951, with American and Chinese armies deadlocked in Korea, Senator [[Joseph McCarthy]] told the Senate that Marshall's mission was part of "a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man." The China Hands were purged; the [[McCarthyism]] machine had its founding grievance; the China Lobby around Chiang and Henry Luce held American policy to Taipei for two decades. That narrative — China's rise as the fruit of American elite betrayal — is the template the [[Chinese History Hub]] tracks into the present: the engagement consensus of the 1990s is now condemned in the same terms, and for the same reason, as the diplomats of the 1940s. ## See Also - [[Chiang Kai-shek]] · [[Mao Zedong]] · [[Kuomintang]] · [[Chinese Communist Party]] · [[Deng Xiaoping]] - [[Long March (China)]] · [[Founding of the People's Republic of China]] · [[Taiwan]] · [[China]] - [[McCarthyism]] · [[Joseph McCarthy]] · [[Chinese History Hub]]