Modern China — total war and the Communist victory (History (2028+) HL)

By the mid-1930s, China was being torn in two directions at once. Jiang Jieshi's Guomindang (GMD) government was fighting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in a brutal civil war — but Japan had already seized Manchuria in 1931 and was pushing further into northern China.

Jiang's strategy was blunt: crush the communists first, deal with Japan later. He famously said the Japanese were 'a disease of the skin' but the communists were 'a disease of the heart'. Many Chinese, watching Japanese troops advance, disagreed furiously.

Concept link — perspectives: This is a genuine historical debate, not just background. Was Jiang right to prioritise destroying the CCP, a mortal threat to his own rule? Or was he badly misreading what mattered most to the Chinese people, who wanted resistance to Japan first?

The crisis came to a head in December 1936. Jiang travelled to Xi'an to press his general, Zhang Xueliang, to keep attacking the communists based nearby in Yan'an. Zhang's own troops were mostly Manchurian exiles who had lost their homeland to Japan — they wanted to fight the real enemy, not each other.

The Xi'an Incident: In December 1936, Zhang Xueliang and his officers arrested Jiang Jieshi at Xi'an and held him for two weeks, refusing to release him until he agreed to stop the civil war and join a united front against Japan. It was a stunning moment: a general kidnapping his own commander-in-chief to force a change of national strategy.

The Xi'an Incident Xi'an Incident was a turning point precisely because it forced two enemies who wanted to destroy each other into an uneasy truce. It did not create trust — both sides kept their own armies, territory, and long-term goals.

The truce was tested almost immediately. On 7 July 1937, Japanese and Chinese troops clashed near the Marco Polo Bridge outside Beijing. What began as a small skirmish over a missing soldier escalated within weeks into full-scale war, as Japan poured in reinforcements and seized Beijing, then Shanghai, then the capital Nanjing by December 1937.

Why the Marco Polo Bridge incident escalated: Unlike earlier clashes (which Japan had used to grab territory without full war), this one spiralled out of control because Jiang, now under huge domestic pressure to resist, refused to back down with concessions as he had in the past. Both sides also may have wanted a decisive showdown rather than endless skirmishing.

This is the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), which would kill millions of Chinese civilians and soldiers and reshape the balance of power between the GMD and CCP for the rest of the civil war.

Once full-scale war began in 1937, Japan's advance was fast and devastating. Nanjing, the GMD capital, fell in December 1937 — followed by one of the war's most notorious atrocities.

The Nanjing Massacre, December 1937: Japanese troops occupying Nanjing killed an estimated 200,000-300,000 Chinese civilians and disarmed soldiers over about six weeks, alongside mass sexual violence. It became a defining symbol of the war's brutality and still shapes China-Japan relations today.

Jiang's government retreated deep inland, eventually basing itself at Chongqing in the mountainous southwest, out of easy reach of Japanese forces — but also cut off from China's richest, most populated eastern regions.

As Japan struggled to fully control the vast Chinese countryside, especially areas where communist guerrillas were active, it adopted an increasingly ruthless counter-insurgency policy in northern China from around 1940.

The 'Three Alls' policy {{Three Alls|sanguang: kill all, burn all, loot all — Japan's scorched-earth policy}}: Historians estimate the Three Alls campaigns killed hundreds of thousands to over a million Chinese civilians in north China alone. The goal was to drain the 'water' (the population) that communist guerrilla 'fish' swam in — but its horror often had the opposite effect, driving desperate peasants toward the CCP rather than away from it.

This is where the war's effect on the two Chinese parties diverged sharply — and this divergence matters enormously for explaining who won the civil war afterward.

Concept link — cause and consequence: The Second Sino-Japanese War is the hinge of this whole story. Whichever side you think 'won' the war years — and most historians argue the CCP gained relatively more than the GMD — sets up almost everything that happens in the civil war of 1946-49.

Japan's surrender in August 1945, following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet declaration of war on Japan, ended eight years of occupation — but it also removed the one thing that had held the fragile Second United Front together: a common enemy.

With Japan defeated, the truce between the GMD and CCP collapsed almost immediately. Both sides raced to occupy former Japanese-held territory, especially in the industrially valuable region of Manchuria, and by 1946 full civil war had resumed.

On paper, Jiang's GMD looked far stronger: it had more troops (around 3 million versus the CCP's roughly 1 million in 1946), controlled the major cities, and received American weapons and money. Yet within three years it had lost mainland China completely. Explaining this reversal is a classic Paper 3 essay question.

Reason 1 — peasant support: In territory it controlled, the CCP carried out land redistribution, taking land from wealthy landlords and giving it to poor peasants — the vast majority of China's population. This won the CCP loyal recruits and, crucially, the food and labour needed to supply an army (the same rural support base it had been building since the war against Japan).

Reason 2 — Guomindang corruption: GMD-controlled cities suffered from hyperinflation, profiteering by officials and army officers, and a currency that became almost worthless. Ordinary people and even the urban middle class — traditionally the GMD's own base — grew disgusted with a government seen as serving itself rather than the nation.

Reason 3 — morale: GMD soldiers, often poorly paid, poorly fed, and press-ganged into service, deserted in huge numbers or defected to the CCP, sometimes bringing entire American-supplied units and their equipment with them. CCP troops, by contrast, were more disciplined, better motivated by land reform and nationalist appeals, and treated captured GMD soldiers well enough to encourage further defections.

Foreign powers also shaped the outcome, though less decisively than these internal factors.

Concept link — significance, weighing the reasons: A strong essay ranks these causes rather than just listing them. Most historians see peasant support, GMD corruption, and collapsing GMD morale as the deepest, most decisive factors — foreign aid (US or Soviet) mattered, but neither side's foreign backer could overturn a war that was fundamentally being decided by which government Chinese people trusted.

By 1948-49, CCP forces (renamed the People's Liberation Army) won a string of huge, decisive battles — including the Huai-Hai Campaign — that destroyed the GMD's best remaining armies. Jiang's government collapsed with startling speed, and by late 1949 it had retreated to the island of Taiwan, where it continued to claim to be the legitimate government of China.