Chinese Civil War Mini Essay

The Communists won because they made fewer military mistakes than the government and because Chiang (Jiang) Jieshi – in his search for a powerful, centralized post-war state – antagonized too many interest groups in the country. As a party, the GMD was weakened by the drubbing it had gotten during the war against Japan. Meanwhile, the Communists became masters of telling different groups of Chinese exactly what they wanted to hear and of cloaking themselves in Chinese nationalism. Only they themselves, they insisted, were the bearers of the fate of the nation. Chiang was lampooned as a stooge of imperialism.

What finally undermined the Nationalist government was not war or politics but economics. The military and political success of the Communists under Mao Zedong certainly played a vital part in determining their takeover in 1949, but it is arguable that the single most powerful reason for the failure of the GMD government was inflation…By 1949 China’s monetary system had collapsed, the government was discredited, and the people of Nationalist China were demoralized. Even had the Nationalists not been defeated in the civil war and driven from the mainland it is difficult to see how Jiang Jieshi and the GMD could have continued to hold power in China.

The most important near cause of the downfall of the Nationalists was the eight-year Japanese war, which completely exhausted the government militarily, financially, and spiritually. Had there been no Japanese war, the situation in China would have been very different… Many of the disastrous repercussions of the war … continued to plague the Nationalists during their struggle with the Communists. The price the Nationalists paid to win the Japanese war was also the first installment toward its eventual downfall. 

In Yan’an in 1942-1943, Mao had built an efficient instrument by terrorizing his power base, the members of the Communist Party. Now, by the start of 1948, he was terrorizing his economic and cannon-fodder (military) base, the peasantry, in order to bring about total, unquestioning conformity. The result was that the peasants put up little resistance to Mao’s requisitioning (forceful taking) of soldiers, laborers, food, and anything else he wanted for his goals. 
Mao regarded this process of terrorization as indispensable for winning the war … Although people in the White (non-Communist) areas knew quite a lot about the brutality of the land reform, not least through the hundreds of thousands who escaped, they often attributed it to passing excesses by the oppressed. In any case, they had no way of doing anything to stop Mao’s advance, and having no great affection for the existing regime, often willed themselves to give Mao the benefit of the doubt.