On the afternoon of 12 April 1927, in the International Settlement of Shanghai, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces and their allies from the Green Gang — one of the city’s most powerful criminal organisations, whose capacity for organised violence made it a useful instrument of political terror — began systematically hunting down members of the Chinese Communist Party. Workers who had been arming themselves in the expectation of a radical transformation of Shanghai’s labour relations found their weapons confiscated and their leaders shot. In the following days and weeks, the violence spread outward from Shanghai to other cities under Nationalist control. The scope of the massacre is still disputed; estimates range from several hundred in Shanghai itself to several thousand across the country in the subsequent months of what the Communists would call the White Terror. What is not in dispute is that the First United Front — the alliance between the Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Communist Party of China (CCP), brokered by the Soviet Union in 1923 and formalised in 1924 — was, after April 1927, effectively over.
The Shanghai Massacre did not come without warning. The Soviet advisers who had helped construct the United Front had been watching for months as the political temperature inside the KMT rose. Chiang Kai-shek, who had consolidated his position as the dominant military figure in the Nationalist movement, was under increasing pressure from the Shanghai business community and from conservative KMT factions who feared that the CCP’s organisation of urban labour was threatening to produce a social revolution that the Nationalists had never intended to sponsor. The labour unions the Communists had built in Shanghai and other cities were growing rapidly in membership and militancy. The peasant associations that the CCP was simultaneously organising in the countryside were, in the words of Mao Zedong’s famous 1927 report on the Hunan peasant movement, a “tornado” that no political force could afford to ignore and no conservative force could afford to permit.
Chiang made his calculation with the efficiency of a man who had decided that sentiment was a luxury he could not afford. The massacre was not merely a political act but a statement about what kind of revolution the Nationalist movement would permit: one that served the interests of the coastal commercial classes and the urban middle strata, not one that redistributed power to workers and peasants. That calculation set the terms of Chinese politics for the next twenty-two years, and ultimately guaranteed its own defeat.
The Long March and the Making of a Revolutionary Movement
The years between 1927 and 1937 were, for the CCP, a sustained encounter with near-annihilation that became, paradoxically, the foundation of its eventual victory. Driven from the cities, the party’s survivors retreated to the countryside and attempted to establish rural base areas in the mountains of Jiangxi and elsewhere. The KMT, applying military pressure in a series of encirclement campaigns, progressively reduced the party’s territorial base. By 1934, the largest surviving Communist enclave in Jiangxi Province was under military pressure that its defenders could no longer withstand. The decision was made to break out and relocate.
What followed was the Long March: a strategic retreat of roughly 9,000 kilometres, undertaken between October 1934 and October 1935 by the main body of the Red Army under conditions of extraordinary hardship. The forces that set out numbered somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000; estimates of those who completed the march to Yan’an in northern Shaanxi Province range from 7,000 to 10,000. By any objective military measure, the Long March was a catastrophic defeat. But the Long March’s transformation into a founding myth of the People’s Republic is one of the most instructive examples in modern political history of how military defeat can be converted into political capital. Mao Zedong, who consolidated his leadership of the party during the march — most decisively at the Zunyi Conference of January 1935 — understood that the value lay not in the territory lost but in the demonstration of political will. The survivors who arrived at Yan’an were proof that the revolution could not be killed.
In Yan’an, where the party spent the decade between 1935 and 1945 rebuilding its strength, the CCP did something that no Chinese political organisation had previously accomplished on the same scale: it rooted itself in the lives of the rural poor. Land reform — the redistribution of land from landlords to peasants — was the policy, but the mechanism was more subtle than any simple economic calculation can capture. CCP cadres moved into villages, lived alongside farmers, learned their concerns, adjudicated their disputes, and built, gradually and imperfectly, a relationship of trust and mutual obligation. The historian Odd Arne Westad, in his detailed account of the civil war’s decisive phase, has shown how this organisational presence in the countryside gave the Communists, by 1945, a political infrastructure that the KMT had never come close to matching and that American military advisers consistently underestimated.
The Japanese Invasion and Its Consequences
The full-scale Japanese invasion of China that began in July 1937 — following the Marco Polo Bridge incident near Beijing, and after years of incremental Japanese encroachment — transformed the political balance between the KMT and the CCP in ways that neither party entirely anticipated. A Second United Front was negotiated under Soviet pressure, nominally committing both parties to the common struggle against Japan. In practice the alliance was always tenuous, periodically erupting into open military clashes — most notably in the New Fourth Army Incident of January 1941, when KMT forces attacked and largely destroyed a major Communist military unit in central China. Both parties spent the war years simultaneously fighting the Japanese and positioning themselves for the civil conflict that most leaders on both sides regarded as inevitable.
The war’s consequences for the KMT were ruinous. The Nationalist government, bearing the brunt of major conventional engagements against a technologically superior Japanese military, suffered catastrophic losses in the first years of the war. The fall of Nanjing in December 1937 — accompanied by the massacre of at least 100,000 Chinese civilians and prisoners of war, with some credible scholarly accounts suggesting figures several times higher — was both a military disaster and a profound blow to the government’s prestige. The retreat to Chongqing preserved the KMT’s existence at the cost of its connection to the coastal and urban bases of its political economy. The war years in Chongqing were characterised by hyperinflation, institutional corruption, and a progressive loosening of the KMT’s grip on its own administrative apparatus. American advisers, most famously General Joseph Stilwell, whose acerbic cables about “the Peanut” — his habitual term of contempt for Chiang Kai-shek — eventually brought about his own recall, observed the deterioration with mounting despair.
The historian Rana Mitter, in his important study of China’s experience of the Second World War, has argued that the Nationalist government’s genuine, costly resistance to Japan has been systematically understated in historical memory. The point is well taken: China lost three to four million military dead in the fight against Japan, a sacrifice that the postwar narrative — both Western and CCP — has tended to obscure. But the equally well-documented finding stands: the war years transformed the CCP from a decimated rump of perhaps 40,000 members in 1937 to a party of 1.2 million with a military force of nearly one million regular troops by 1945. The war gave the Communists the time, the space, and the conditions to build the mass movement that the KMT’s suppression had prevented them from constructing in the cities.
The Marshall Mission: The Last Attempt at Settlement
In December 1945, President Truman sent General George Marshall to China with an extraordinary mandate: to mediate between the KMT and the CCP and, if possible, bring about the formation of a coalition government that would end the civil war before it fully resumed. Marshall was perhaps the most respected American of his generation — the architect of the Allied victory in Europe, the man whose name would eventually be attached to the European recovery programme. For a period of several months in early 1946, it genuinely seemed possible that he might succeed. A ceasefire was negotiated in January. A Political Consultative Conference agreed in February on a framework for coalition government. Those present later described a moment of real, if fragile, possibility.
It was not to be. The ceasefire broke down repeatedly in Manchuria, where both sides were racing to occupy territory and incorporate surrendered Japanese units. KMT conservatives used their control of the party’s central apparatus to undermine the concessions that KMT moderates had made at the Political Consultative Conference. The CCP, watching Nationalist forces occupy major cities in Manchuria with American logistical support, concluded that the coalition framework was being used to buy time for military repositioning rather than as a genuine path to settlement. Marshall left China in January 1947, his mission a failure. His final statement blamed extremists on both sides — a judgement that was diplomatically balanced but historically imprecise. The weight of the evidence suggests that the KMT’s conservative wing and Chiang Kai-shek’s own military ambitions were the more decisive obstacles. The failure of the Marshall Mission effectively ended the period in which American leverage could have influenced the outcome.
The Campaigns That Decided the War
The military history of the civil war’s decisive phase confounded the expectations of almost every informed observer. The conventional assessment in 1946 was that the KMT, with its larger army, American equipment, and control of all major cities, would prevail within a year or two. By the autumn of 1948, the Nationalist military position had collapsed with a speed that astonished contemporaries. The Liaoshen campaign, fought between September and November 1948, resulted in the destruction of Nationalist forces in Manchuria — roughly 470,000 troops captured or killed — and gave the People’s Liberation Army control of China’s most industrially developed region. The Huai-Hai campaign, fought across central China between November 1948 and January 1949, was one of the largest land battles of the twentieth century: over a million soldiers on both sides were engaged over seventy-two days, at the end of which some 550,000 Nationalist troops had been captured or killed. The Pingjin campaign, conducted simultaneously in north China, took Beijing without a battle. These three campaigns, concluded within five months, effectively ended the war.
The reasons for the collapse were multiple and mutually reinforcing. KMT military leadership was characterised by rivalry, poor coordination, and a command culture that prioritised the preservation of unit strength over effective combined operations. Hyperinflation, accelerating through 1947 and 1948, destroyed the confidence of the urban middle class in the government’s basic competence. The gold yuan reform of August 1948, which attempted to stabilise the currency by decree, collapsed within weeks, wiping out savings and eliminating whatever residual loyalty the urban population had retained. When an army surrenders or defects in those numbers and at that speed, the explanation is not primarily military. It is political, social, and ultimately moral.
1 October 1949 and the Question of Why
On the afternoon of 1 October 1949, Mao Zedong stood on the rostrum above Tiananmen Gate in Beijing and proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China. “The Chinese people have stood up,” he declared. The century of humiliation — the phrase used to describe China’s subjugation to foreign powers since the Opium War of 1839 — was declared over. In Washington, the Communist victory produced a political crisis that outlasted the event itself. The “loss of China” debate accused the Truman administration of having failed to prevent the outcome through insufficient support for Chiang’s government. The phrase itself — the “loss” of China — encoded a revealing assumption: that China was something America could possess or lose, rather than a country of half a billion people whose political fate was ultimately their own to determine.
What emerges from the best recent scholarship — Westad’s Decisive Encounters, Jay Taylor’s biography of Chiang Kai-shek, Suzanne Pepper’s work on civil war politics — is less a story of Communist triumph than of Nationalist collapse, compound and mutually reinforcing. The CCP won in part because it was more disciplined, more deeply organised, and more responsive to the concerns of the populations in its territory. But it also won because the Nationalist government, under the accumulated pressures of eight years of devastating war against Japan followed immediately by full civil war, proved unable to hold together the social coalition on which its power had rested. The People’s Republic that emerged from this process carried within it, from its first day, both the extraordinary achievement of national unification and the specific characteristics of the revolutionary organisation that had made the victory possible: its Leninist discipline, its hierarchical command culture, its conviction that the party was the vanguard of a historical process it had a unique mandate to direct. The achievements of the early PRC were real and significant. So were the catastrophes — the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution — that followed from the same institutional logic and the same concentration of unaccountable power. China’s twentieth century cannot be understood without the twenty-two-year struggle that made it.
Listen Further
If you enjoyed this essay, these episodes from the Explaining History archive explore related themes:
- Mao and China’s Peasants — on the CCP’s rural strategy and the violent reshaping of the Chinese countryside after 1949
- The Maoist Takeover of China 1949 — on how the Communist Party seized the levers of state power following the civil war’s conclusion
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