The Chinese Communist Party was on the verge of collapse twice. Then she won the civil war against the nationalists. Looking back at a forgotten piece of history.
Mao Zedong on horseback during the 1947 civil war in northern China.
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75 years ago, Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Mao Zedong climbed the stairs to the balcony of the Gate of Heavenly Peace. There he surveyed the crowd in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Then he shouted a statement into the loudspeakers that would make world history: “Dear compatriots. The Central Government of the People’s Republic of China was established today.” The speech in front of such a large audience visibly strained Mao; he had to pause after three words.
Over the next 75 years, under the leadership of the Communist Party, the new China would rise to become a superpower, an economic miracle and the main rival of the USA. But what was China actually before it became communist?
From the fall of the emperor into chaos
Before modernity took hold in China, the country experienced a period of experimentation with new political ideas, but also great instability and wars. From 1912 to 1949, China officially called itself a “republic,” but in reality it was a broken empire. After the last emperor abdicated in 1911, local warlords, separatists, the nationalist People’s Party and the communists fought each other.
The doctor and Christian Sun Yat-sen was partly responsible for the overthrow of the emperor, then a six-year-old boy. He wanted to create a modern, independent China in which the material basis of life but also the rights of the people should be secured. And he wanted to reunite China.
Today, Sun Yat-sen is still revered as the father of modern China. On the mainland, people tend to ignore the fact that Sun Yat-sen was the founder of the party that managed to almost completely defeat the communists twice: the Chinese nationalist People’s Party, Kuomintang (KMT).
Sun Yat-sen, (1866-1925), the father of modern China in 1923 on the balcony of his house in Guangzhou.
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Massacre of the communists
The communists and the KMT did not fight each other right from the start. There were even two long periods of tactical cooperation. The Communist Party was founded in Shanghai in 1921, at a time when the KMT was already enjoying widespread support. Mao Zedong was one of the young founding fathers. Growing up in the countryside himself, he recognized early on the revolutionary potential of the farmers, which connected him to the left wing of the KMT. In his own party, however, this attitude made him an outsider; they preferred to concentrate on the proletariat in the cities following the Soviet model.
In 1925 Sun Yat-sen died. He had made an agreement with the Soviet Union and received weapons, money and advisors from the Russians on the condition that he cooperated with the small communist party.
But Sun Yat-sen’s successor, Chiang Kai-shek, saw the communists as a threat to his power. With the help of the Chinese mafia in Shanghai, he organized a bloody massacre of communists and trade unionists. There were also mass executions in other cities, and thousands of rebellious farmers were murdered in the countryside. Over a million people died in this “white terror”.
The Communist Party was greatly weakened by this persecution. Only a sixth – about 10,000 of 60,000 party members – survived, mainly those who had hidden in the countryside. Like Mao Zedong. In 1927 he was appointed commander-in-chief of the Red Army. The communists had founded the force to defend themselves against the KMT, which ruled China from Nanjing. The Chinese Civil War had begun.
Soldiers of the national government under Chiang Kai-shek fighting with communist units in northern China.
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The Long March
The Red Army’s “Long March” to the north of the country is the episode of the Chinese civil war that is most exploited for propaganda purposes. There is a simple reason for this: During the Long March, Mao Zedong proved himself to be a leader. This marked the beginning of his unstoppable rise in the party. With his tactics of guerrilla warfare, he achieved some successes against the KMT army, which had more soldiers and was better equipped.
However, the Long March was not a brilliant strategic maneuver, but a retreat. In 1934, the Red Army, consisting of around 90,000 men, had no choice but to flee under increasing pressure from the nationalists. On their first stage to Zunyi they lost over half of the soldiers in fighting and some deserted. It took the Red Army over a year to arrive, exhausted, at its new base in Yanan at the end of 1935. Only 8,000 to 9,000 soldiers reached their destination. Those who had not previously died in the fighting had died of disease or starvation.
There were only a few women on the Long March. One of them was Mao Zedong’s third wife, He Zizhen. She was a talented partisan and an excellent marksman, so much so that she was called the “general with two pistols”. After Mao Zedong married her in 1928, she became his personal secretary. She was pregnant most of the time during her marriage to Mao and gave birth to six children, only one of whom survived. She also gave birth to a baby girl during the Long March and left the newborn with local farmers. It is said that she struggled with severe depression after the Long March. In 1937 she left Mao after he had an affair. Mao married actress Jiang Qing in 1939.
He Zizhen (1910-1984) was married to Mao from 1928 to 1939.
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Aid from the Soviet Union
The civil war was interrupted because the Japanese invaded China in 1937. After some hesitation, the communists and the KMT decided to fight the Japanese invaders with a joint army. Japan only withdrew from China in 1945 after the Americans dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The KMT army and government emerged weakened from the war against the Japanese. The country was struggling with hyperinflation, the KMT government was corrupt and could no longer pay its soldiers. Popular support dwindled. This enabled the communists to continually expand their sphere of power – even though the Red Army continued to be inferior to the nationalist forces.
The decisive factor in the communists’ victory was the Soviet Union, which finally came to their aid – after years of supporting the KMT. After the Soviets withdrew from Manchuria in 1946, they left the Red Army the northern terrain as well as weapons, ammunition, aircraft and tanks that they had captured from the Japanese. They also trained generals of the Red Army – which was renamed the “People’s Liberation Army” in 1948.
Stalin only openly acknowledged support for China’s communists when their military victory in the civil war was already certain. Confident thanks to the great role model’s expression of friendship, Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949. The battles against the KMT army were not yet fully fought at that time. In December, the last city, Chengdu, fell, and Chiang Kai-Shek fled to Taiwan along with two million soldiers and a million civilians. China has been communist ever since.
For many years, Stalin was Mao’s great role model. Here are the two communist dictators in Beijing in 1949.
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