Chinese Civil War

The causes

After the fall of the empire in 1912, China was split among rival warlords. The Kuomintang, a party founded by Sun Yat-sen, tried to reunify the country with the help of Soviet advisers, while the young Chinese Communist Party first allied with it. These tensions led to the split of 1927, after the Shanghai massacre.

The May Fourth Movement of 1919, born of anger at the Treaty of Versailles, which ceded to Japan the German rights in Shandong, fuelled a nationalism and a critique of traditions that both parties inherited. Rural society, in which many peasants rented their land, bore poorly the taxes and requisitions of the warlords. In 1926, the Kuomintang launched from Canton the Northern Expedition to subdue these generals and reunify the country. The Communists mobilised peasants and urban workers, which alarmed the business circles of Shanghai and part of the Kuomintang's military leaders. When the expedition reached Shanghai, in spring 1927, the rupture between the two parties became inevitable.

The course of the war

From 1927 to 1934, Chiang Kai-shek's troops carried out encirclement campaigns against the communists, who had taken refuge in the southeast of the country. To escape them, the communists undertook the Long March in 1934, a retreat of about a year to the northwest. When Japan invaded China in 1937, the two parties formed a United Front against the aggressor, without ever ceasing to distrust each other.

After Japan's defeat in 1945, negotiations between the two sides failed and the war resumed in 1946. The United States backed Chiang Kai-shek with military and financial aid, but his government suffered from inflation and corruption. The communists won the support of the peasants, took Beijing, then Nanjing, the Nationalist capital. On October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic of China; in December, Chiang Kai-shek moved the Nationalist government to the island of Taiwan.

In 1931, the Communists proclaimed the Chinese Soviet Republic at Ruijin, in Jiangxi. Japan occupied Manchuria in September 1931, but Chiang Kai-shek first gave priority to eliminating the Communists. In December 1936, at Xi'an, Marshal Zhang Xueliang, who demanded fighting Japan rather than the Communists, kidnapped Chiang Kai-shek and forced him to accept a united front.

In July 1937, an incident at the Marco Polo Bridge, near Beijing, marked the start of full-scale war against Japan. The Nationalists retreated inland, and Chongqing, in Sichuan, became the wartime capital. In December 1937, the Japanese army's capture of Nanjing was followed by massacres of civilians that left a lasting mark. In occupied areas, the Communists organised guerrilla warfare and in 1940 launched the so-called Hundred Regiments Offensive, which strengthened their bases in the north.

In August 1945, the Soviet Union entered the war against Japan and occupied Manchuria, where it handed over to the Communists part of the Japanese equipment it had seized. Between 1946 and 1947, the American general George Marshall tried in vain to negotiate a coalition between the two camps. In 1948, the Liaoshen Campaign allowed the Communists to take control of Manchuria, and the Battle of Huaihai, from November 1948 to January 1949, destroyed a large part of the Nationalist forces in the centre of the country.

The consequences

Two Chinese states have coexisted since then: the People's Republic of China on the mainland and the Republic of China on Taiwan. The two governments still dispute the legitimacy of representing China. The communist regime installed in Beijing profoundly transformed the country, while Taiwan followed a separate political path.

The Taiwan question remains at the heart of international relations. The Taiwan Strait crises, in 1954-1955 and then in 1958 around the Kinmen islands, show that the conflict could resume at any moment. In Taiwan, the repression of the uprising of 28 February 1947 was long passed over in silence under martial law, lifted in 1987. The island then democratised, with a first direct presidential election in 1996. On the mainland, official memory emphasises the struggle against Japan and the victory of 1949, while historians study the war using sources that were long difficult to access.

Timeline

1. 1927Break between the Kuomintang and the communists, after the Shanghai massacre
2. 1934Start of the communists' Long March
3. 1946Civil war resumes after the failure of negotiations
4. 1949Mao Zedong proclaims the People's Republic of China, on October 1
5. 1949Chiang Kai-shek moves the Nationalist government to Taiwan, in December

Key figures

• Chiang Kai-shek, head of the Kuomintang and of the Republic of China, which retreated to Taiwan
• Mao Zedong, head of the Chinese Communist Party, founder of the People's Republic
• Zhou Enlai, communist leader, future premier of the People's Republic
• Zhu De, commander in chief of the Chinese Red Army during the Long March