Why did Mao win the Chinese Civil War?

0:00 In 1949, after years of bitter fighting,

0:02 Maoadong declared the creation of the People's Republic of China.

0:05 And just under a year later, his new government had finished mopping

0:08 up most of the opposing nationalist forces, leaving only Taiwan in their hands.

0:12 But as many of you will know, as of 1945,

0:14 Mao's communists were only in control of this territory,

0:17 whereas the nationalists had the rest,

0:19 including all of China's industrial centers.

0:21 They also had financial and material support from the United States,

0:24 as well as having a larger army and population base to work with.

0:27 This raises an obvious question.

0:29 How on earth did the communists win when they started at such a disadvantage?

0:32 Why was Mao victorious in the Chinese Civil War?

0:35 Now, it's important to note that whilst the Chinese Civil War is

0:37 often seen as something occurring in the wake of World War II,

0:40 it had actually been ongoing since either the early

0:42 1920s or 5 seconds after the fall of theQing dynasty,

0:45 depending on how you count it.

0:46 As you'll all know, China had been ruled by emperor since basically forever.

0:50 And this continued up until 1911 when revolution after a ceasefire.

0:54 Yuan Shakai, the new prime minister,

0:55 managed to convince the emperor to abdicate and he then became president.

0:59 Not sufficiently happy with his new title, Shakai had a thought.

1:02 Being in charge is okay, but how can I do it in a robe?

1:04 Which is when he had the brilliant idea of making himself emperor in late 1915.

1:08 This went down about as well as you'd expect and within a few

1:11 months there was another civil war followed

1:12 by his swift abdication and then death.

1:14 For the next decade,

1:15 China wasn't really a unified political entity with different warlords

1:18 claiming sovereignty over their own territories and clicks and the one

1:21 in control of Beijing was given the support of the international

1:23 powers and so could claim to be the legitimate rulers of China.

1:26 But honestly, it was all just a mess.

1:28 During this period in the south of the country,

1:29 the nationalists who wanted the restoration

1:31 of the 1912 Republican constitution formed

1:33 an alliance with the communists to fight against the ruling clique in the north.

1:36 By 1927, the nationalists and the communists were on the cusp of victory

1:39 when the nationalist leader Chang Kaishek decided

1:42 that he didn't need the communists anymore.

1:43 And so it was time for a violent purge.

1:45 He offered all of the communists that he

1:47 could reach and the rest fled into the countryside.

1:49 The next year, Chang overthrew the government and made

1:51 himself the head of the new nationalist Chinese state.

1:53 He now had two problems, though.

1:55 The first was the ever more aggressive Japanese government next door,

1:57 who in 1931 made their full intentions clear when they took control of Manuria

2:01 and placed it under the rule of the lasting emperor as their puppet state.

2:04 The second problem was the ongoing

2:05 communist insurgency throughout the Chinese countryside.

2:08 There were numerous communist strongholds throughout the country,

2:10 which the nationalists would surround and crush one by one.

2:13 The most notable of which was here in the mountains of Yang Xi.

2:15 The nationalists moved in for the kill in 1934,

2:18 but the communists were able to escape

2:19 and begin what is now called the Long March, where over the course of a year,

2:22 communist forces marched across all of China before ending up here in Yan,

2:26 having lost only 90% of their soldiers.

2:28 You'd think that this would be a deaf to communist ambitions, but fun fact, no.

2:32 Instead, they reconstituted their forces and began another insurgency.

2:35 After some good old-fashioned communist infighting,

2:37 Mao Zadong appeared as the leader of the communists and he

2:40 decided to focus on the rural peasantry instead of urban workers,

2:43 which gave him access to more

2:44 soldiers who appreciated his anti-landowner policies.

2:47 Chiang Kai-shek was determined to crush them,

2:48 but his advisers and generals pushed him to instead negotiate.

2:51 The reason for this was that it was obvious to them

2:53 that Japan would soon invade and try to subjugate China as a whole.

2:56 And so, they wanted the government's full attention focused on repelling them.

2:59 As such, the two sides started to negotiate,

3:01 but Chang was only using it as a diversion,

3:03 leading his generals to do the only thing

3:05 that they could think of to convince him,

3:06 kidnap him, which they did in late 1936.

3:09 They negotiated with the communists,

3:10 who were now no longer interested in making an accord,

3:12 but instead in getting rid of Chang permanently.

3:15 This didn't happen because the Soviet

3:16 government threatened to withhold military aid

3:18 if Chang was harmed because Moscow

3:19 wanted a stronger China to counterbalance Japan,

3:21 who had both of them in their sides.

3:23 Chang reluctantly agreed and was then promptly released,

3:26 after which he then publicly declared that he never meant any of it.

3:28 The next year, the Japanese began the second CenoJapanese war,

3:31 or World War II, depending on how you look at it,

3:33 and the nationalists and the communists soon came to an accord

3:36 because they both agreed that those guys were worse.

3:38 Now, the war didn't start well for the nationalists, and by 1939,

3:41 the Japanese were able to push them all the way back to here,

3:43 whereas the communists resorted to guerrilla warfare and were able

3:46 to damage the Japanese war effort from behind their lines.

3:48 The united front between the nationalists

3:50 and the communists was never very strong.

3:52 And when the communists were able to incorporate more

3:53 civilians into their forces and they sense nationalist weakness,

3:56 the two soon started fighting again.

3:57 Part of this was that the nationalist army was obviously

4:00 too busy to reallocate enough forces to suppress the communists.

4:02 But the communists were easily able to find allies and recruits during the war,

4:06 mostly because of the conduct and the competence of the nationalists.

4:09 Said army and government was incredibly corrupt and would often

4:11 rob Chinese civilians and openly steal tax revenue for themselves.

4:14 And throughout the war and the preceding civil war,

4:16 the nationalists had a reputation for brutal

4:17 reprisals against anyone who stood against them or anyone who they thought had

4:21 collaborated with the Japanese or the communists.

4:23 This combined with their inability to stop

4:24 the Japanese advance and the desperate measures

4:26 that they undertook to delay them meant

4:27 that the Chinese people saw them as useless brutes.

4:30 Whereas the communists had been quick

4:31 to release any prisoners of war that didn't want to join them and had strictly

4:33 forbidden their soldiers from stealing from local populations.

4:36 Also, the fact that they were the smaller force and also weren't often

4:38 directly engaging the Japanese meant that they

4:40 could paint themselves as far more successful.

4:42 So, in 1941, Japan decided that fighting China alone was boring

4:46 and so invited America and the British Empire to fight too.

4:48 As you'll all be aware, this was the start of the end of the Japanese Empire.

4:52 After a couple of American bombs and a Soviet invasion of Manuria,

4:54 the Japanese surrendered, World War II was over,

4:56 and the Chinese now had to look to rebuilding their country.

4:58 With the nationalists in control of this, the Communists

5:01 this, and the Soviets occupying Manuria,

5:03 which they agreed to give back as soon as they were done looting its industry.

5:06 Communist guerrillas had spent most

5:07 of the war building up strongholds across China.

5:09 And the loyal local populations weren't

5:11 going to suddenly side with the nationalists,

5:13 especially given the fact that Shanghai's

5:14 government was quick to restore the Chinese

5:16 landlords who had lost all of their land to the Japanese or communists,

5:18 which was obviously not very popular with the peasantry.

5:21 Another issue for the restored nationalist government was

5:23 that it needed foreign help to even return to power.

5:25 Chang couldn't get his troops back

5:26 to the cities to receive the Japanese surrender.

5:28 As such, his troops had to be taken there by the United States,

5:31 and some of this took so long that the surrendered Japanese forces rushed

5:34 to garrison cities to prevent the increasingly

5:36 popular communists from taking them over.

5:37 And so, needing the help of their former

5:39 brutal enemy was extremely damaging to Chang's legitimacy.

5:42 Soon after the war ended,

5:43 the economy fell apart and the government couldn't pay its soldiers,

5:45 many of whom defected to Mao.

5:46 Now, even though Mao was more powerful than he'd ever been before,

5:49 he still had a difficult task ahead of him.

5:51 But he would soon get a major boon.

5:52 As the Soviet Union was withdrawing from Manuria,

5:55 it was sure to hand the Japanese weapons

5:56 and equipment it had captured to the communists.

5:58 Now, Moscow had agreed to hand Manuria over to Chang's government.

6:01 And so, to help Mao, they invited communist troops into the territory

6:04 and help them to build strongholds

6:05 to fight from, whilst letting nationalist forces

6:07 into the cities to technically fulfill their agreement.

6:09 Briefly, Chang and Mao tried to negotiate forming a government together,

6:12 but this was obviously stupid and so civil war broke out again.

6:15 The communists resorted yet again to guerrilla

6:17 tactics and wore the nationalist armies down.

6:19 The Americans initially supported the nationalists with a lot of arms and money.

6:22 But slowly their support began to wne.

6:24 You see, the US military wasn't all too impressed by Chang

6:26 and his corrupt generals who throughout the civil conflicts in the war.

6:29 The Japanese had refused to undertake any offensives or lend their troops

6:31 to others because it was the basis of their personal power.

6:34 And as such, they didn't want to lose it.

6:36 Soon many American politicians believed that Chang's time was up

6:38 and that supporting him was just a waste of resources.

6:40 when Chang refused to allow democratic elections and also

6:42 openly supported Harry Truman's opponent in the 1948 presidential election,

6:46 the US decided to concentrate on other

6:48 things and leave the nationalists to their fate.

6:50 Now, it won't surprise you to learn

6:51 that in the wake of the withdrawal of American support,

6:53 the nationalist position weakened.

6:54 In the year following, Chang and his allies were forced to flee south,

6:57 and it looked like there would be no foreign intervention to help them.

7:00 Except there very briefly was.

7:02 This wasn't the US returning or the British or French getting involved.

7:04 This time, it was Joseph Stalin who asked Mao to stop his advance down south.

7:08 Stalin tried to convince Mao that advancing further south

7:10 would stretch his forces out too thin and would force

7:12 the western allies to intervene because obviously they wouldn't allow

7:15 a member of the brand new UN Security Council to fall, especially to communists.

7:18 But as you'll all know, they very clearly could.

7:21 In fact, this attempted intervention was mostly because Stalin

7:23 saw a divided China similar to a divided Germany.

7:25 If Ma's China only controlled this, then it would

7:27 need the USSR for its security against a permanent enemy.

7:30 Whereas, if he held all of China,

7:31 eventually he would be able to act independently.

7:34 If you've ever seen China on a map, you'll know that Mao refused.

7:36 And within a few months of this, the nationalist

7:38 government had collapsed and its remnants had fled to Taiwan.

7:40 Mao then proclaimed the birth of the People's Republic of China,

7:43 which marked the first time that the country had

7:45 been politically unified since the last days of theQing dynasty.

7:48 I hope you enjoyed this episode

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