Emergence of Modern China (1910–1949)

The Qing dynasty, when the child emperor Puyi abdicated and the Republic of China was proclaimed.

Nationalism, democracy, and people's livelihood (economic fairness) — his ideology for a modern Chinese nation.

Yuan controlled the strongest military forces; Sun had no comparable army, so ceding power avoided civil war.

No strong central government replaced him — China fragmented into the warlord era, with regional military leaders fighting for territory.

A movement from around 1915 attacking Confucian tradition and promoting 'science and democracy' as the path to a modern China.

Vernacular, everyday written Chinese; reformers wanted it to replace classical Chinese so ordinary literate people could access new ideas.

A secret ultimatum demanding sweeping Japanese control over Chinese railways, mines, ports and government appointments; Beijing conceded most of them.

News that the Treaty of Versailles gave Germany's former territory in Shandong to Japan instead of returning it to China.

Both saw foreign powers grant Japan control over Chinese territory/rights; Versailles (1919) sparked much larger mass protest because China had expected an ally reward, not a betrayal.

About a dozen delegates, including Chen Duxiu and Mao Zedong, met secretly in Shanghai with Comintern (Soviet) support.

It shows the direct chain from Qing collapse, warlordism and New Culture ideas through WWI's betrayals to an organised revolutionary alternative.

Only partially — internal collapse and New Culture ideas built the foundation; WWI's Twenty-One Demands and Versailles betrayal ignited it into mass action.

Jiang Jieshi's military campaign, aided by the CCP, that defeated northern warlords and nominally unified China under GMD rule by 1928.

Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek), founding commandant of the Whampoa Military Academy.

1927–37 period of GMD one-party rule from Nanjing; brought partial modernisation (new currency, industry, New Life Movement) but left rural land ownership unreformed and relied on corrupt urban alliances.

A staged railway explosion the Japanese Kwantung Army blamed on Chinese saboteurs, used as the pretext to invade and conquer Manchuria.

The puppet state Japan created in Manchuria in 1932, with the deposed Qing emperor Puyi as a powerless figurehead ruler.

He judged China's army too weak to win, and saw the CCP as the greater internal threat — his policy was 'internal pacification first, external resistance later.'

Jiang Jieshi's forces, working with the Green Gang, killed thousands of CCP members and sympathisers in Shanghai, ending the First United Front.

The 1923–27 alliance between the GMD and CCP, formed with Soviet encouragement, which collapsed after the Shanghai Massacre.

A rural communist base area where Mao Zedong built peasant support through land redistribution, after the CCP was driven underground in 1927.

The CCP's roughly 9,000 km retreat from Jiangxi to Yan'an under GMD military pressure; forces fell from about 86,000 to under 10,000 survivors.

A meeting during the Long March where Mao Zedong won a power struggle within the CCP leadership, becoming its de facto leader.

Short-term: near-catastrophic losses and retreat from a productive base. Long-term: forged loyal leadership under Mao and secured the Yan'an base that enabled the CCP's eventual 1949 victory.

Jiang Jieshi's own general Zhang Xueliang kidnapped him at Xi'an to force him to stop fighting the CCP and instead resist Japan.

The fragile 1937-45 alliance between the GMD and CCP against Japan, agreed after the Xi'an Incident — cooperation on the surface, deep rivalry underneath.

The Marco Polo Bridge Incident (July 1937), a clash near Beijing that escalated into the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Japanese troops massacred an estimated 200,000-300,000 Chinese civilians and disarmed soldiers after capturing the GMD capital.

Japan's scorched-earth counter-insurgency policy in occupied northern China from around 1940: kill all, burn all, loot all — aimed at destroying support for communist guerrillas.

The CCP expanded its rural base and army fighting Japan behind enemy lines, gaining peasant trust. The GMD lost its best troops and its economic heartland, retreating to Chongqing and starting a slide into inflation.

Peasant support (won through land redistribution), Guomindang corruption and hyperinflation, and collapsing GMD morale (desertions and defections).

It gave the GMD military aid and loans and tried to broker a ceasefire (General Marshall's mission, 1946), but this could not fix the GMD's deeper internal weaknesses.

Soviet forces occupying Manchuria after defeating Japan handed captured Japanese weapons to the CCP, though Stalin's support was cautious and inconsistent.

A decisive series of battles in which CCP forces destroyed the GMD's best remaining armies, opening the path to final victory.

Mao Zedong proclaimed the PRC on 1 October 1949 in Beijing, after Jiang Jieshi's Guomindang government retreated to the island of Taiwan.

Xi'an Incident (1936) forces a truce -> Second United Front and full-scale war with Japan from 1937 -> Japan's brutal occupation (Three Alls) reshapes both parties' strength -> Japan surrenders (1945) -> civil war resumes (1946) -> CCP wins key campaigns (1948-49) -> PRC founded (1949).