IB History Role of Conflict Notes

The Role of Conflict: From the White Terror to Civil War Victory

The First United Front and the White Terror, 1924 to 1927

1. In 1924, the Guomindang and the Chinese Communist Party formed the First United Front, with the CCP accepting a subordinate position within the larger nationalist movement.
2. This alliance produced remarkable early growth for the CCP, whose membership rose from just 57 members in 1921 to around 58,000 by 1927.
3. Following the death of Sun Yatsen in 1925, Chiang Kaishek emerged from a brief power struggle to become the United Front's leader, a significant setback for the CCP given his deep suspicion of communism.
4. The Northern Expedition of 1926 to 1928, a military campaign of roughly 100,000 troops against China's regional warlords, initially strengthened the alliance through rapid joint GMD-CCP military success.
5. Growing communist activism among workers and peasants during this campaign increasingly alarmed Chiang, who feared it would undermine his own middle-class political support.
6. In spring 1927, Chiang used military force to violently purge communist organisations in Shanghai, an episode that became known as the White Terror.
7. This violence spread quickly to Wuhan and Hunan, where union members, communists, and rural worker associations came under sustained attack, with thousands killed.
8. The collapse of the United Front left the CCP's very survival in serious doubt, with its future now resting heavily on decisions made by Mao Zedong specifically.

The Jiangxi Soviet and Encirclement, 1927 to 1934

1. Mao survived the White Terror and retreated with surviving CCP forces to the mountainous Jiangxi province in south-eastern China.
2. Here he established the Jiangxi Soviet, a CCP-controlled territory with a population of around one million people, where the Red Army developed a genuine guerrilla fighting capability.
3. Mao's commitment to a rural, peasant-based revolution directly contradicted the position of the Comintern and pro-Moscow factions within the CCP, who insisted urban workers should lead any genuine revolution.
4. Mao repeatedly defied direct orders from Moscow instructing the CCP to concentrate its activities in cities rather than the countryside.
5. His 1928 Land Law formalised this rural strategy, redistributing land taken from landlords among the peasantry, with an even more radical policy targeting richer peasants implemented after 1931.
6. In 1934, Guomindang forces encircled the Jiangxi Soviet using a new blockhouse strategy, building defensive fortifications to methodically consolidate territory as they hunted down CCP forces.
7. This blockhouse campaign inflicted heavy defeats on the communists, leading Comintern military adviser Otto Braun to persuade CCP leadership to abandon guerrilla tactics in favour of conventional warfare, a change that further weakened their position.
8. Mao was demoted from Party leadership as these military setbacks mounted, even as the Guomindang continued to encroach further into CCP-held territory.

The Long March and the Zunyi Conference, 1934 to 1935

1. Facing annihilation in Jiangxi, around 80,000 CCP troops broke out of the Guomindang encirclement and began a retreat toward the north-western city of Yan'an in Shaanxi province.
2. This retreat, known as the Long March, covered nearly 9,000 kilometres and took more than a year to complete, becoming one of the most celebrated legends in CCP history.
3. One especially famous episode involved 22 soldiers crossing the exposed Luding Bridge over the Dadu River gorge while under sustained enemy fire.
4. The reality behind this inspiring legend was considerably bleaker than its later propaganda version, since only around 8,000 of the roughly 80,000 troops who began the march ultimately survived.
5. At the Zunyi Conference in January 1935, held during the march itself, Mao made a decisive political comeback by successfully arguing the CCP should return to guerrilla tactics.
6. Supported by Zhou Enlai, later the first premier of the People's Republic of China, Mao outmanoeuvred rivals including Otto Braun and other Comintern-aligned members to take direct military control of the First Front Army.
7. This change in leadership disappointed the Soviets, who argued the vote determining Mao's return to power had not been conducted fairly.
8. Even after Zunyi, Mao's eventual rise to undisputed CCP leadership remained genuinely uncertain rather than a foregone conclusion.

1. Zhou Enlai, who had supported Mao's return to leadership at Zunyi, went on to serve as the first premier and foreign minister of the People's Republic of China after 1949.
2. His diplomatic skill and comparatively moderate reputation, described further in the maintained rule article elsewhere in this unit, made him one of the few senior leaders to survive every major political upheaval of Mao's subsequent rule.

The Japanese Invasion and the Second United Front

1. The Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, and the full-scale Japanese invasion of China in 1937, added a further layer of conflict that directly shaped the CCP's fortunes.
2. Chiang Kaishek initially prioritised eliminating the communists over resisting Japan, famously arguing that the Japanese were a disease of the skin while the communists were a disease of the heart.
3. Popular Chinese anger at this prioritisation, especially after the 1936 Xi'an Incident in which Chiang was briefly kidnapped by his own generals, forced a Second United Front between the CCP and Guomindang against Japan in 1937.
4. This wartime alliance gave the CCP crucial breathing space to rebuild its forces and expand its territory while Guomindang armies bore the brunt of direct fighting against Japan.
5. The CCP used this period to expand behind Japanese lines through guerrilla warfare, building rural base areas and recruiting Chinese peasants angered by Japanese occupation.
6. By the war's end in 1945, the CCP had grown from a nearly destroyed remnant force into a large, battle-tested army controlling substantial rural territory across northern China.

Consolidation in Yan'an, 1935 to 1945

1. After settling in Yan'an, Mao worked to overcome three distinct challenges: rival leadership bids and Comintern interference, the need to rebuild popular and military support, and internal ideological struggle within the Party.
2. Mao won genuine peasant support in Yan'an through land redistribution, rent controls, anti-corruption campaigns, and literacy programmes targeted directly at the rural population.
3. His appeal extended beyond the peasantry to include the national bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, and industrial workers, reflecting the broad multi-class coalition described in the role of ideas article elsewhere in this unit.
4. The Red Army's Three Rules of Discipline and Eight Points for Attention required strict discipline toward civilians, including returning borrowed items, paying for anything broken, and treating rural communities with genuine respect.
5. As Japanese incursions into China intensified through the 1930s, Mao's clear nationalist stance against the invaders won him further popular support beyond his existing peasant base.
6. CCP membership grew dramatically during this period, rising from around 40,000 in 1937 to approximately 1.2 million by 1945, described further in the role of ideas article elsewhere in this unit.
7. This combination of land reform, disciplined conduct, and nationalist appeal against Japan gave Mao's movement a breadth of support that ultimately proved decisive in the following civil war.
8. Despite ostensibly restraining Mao, the Soviet Union's transfer of captured Japanese weapons in Manchuria, described in more detail later in this article, provided the CCP with a crucial and often underappreciated material advantage.
9. This combination of formal Soviet caution alongside informal material support illustrates the genuinely complicated nature of the Sino-Soviet relationship even before the CCP's eventual victory in 1949.

The Chinese Civil War Resumes, 1945 to 1948

1. When full-scale civil war resumed against the Guomindang in 1945, the odds initially favoured Chiang Kaishek dramatically, with Guomindang forces outnumbering the CCP by roughly four to one.
2. The Guomindang possessed an air force, superior conventional equipment, international recognition as China's legitimate government, and control of most major cities and the national railway network.
3. Even the Soviet Union initially urged restraint on Mao, providing aid to the CCP while formally recognising the Guomindang as China's legitimate government.
4. By 1948, however, the war's direction shifted decisively as CCP troops used their guerrilla expertise to consolidate control over northern China's rural areas.
5. Captured Japanese weapons, passed on by former Soviet occupation forces in Manchuria, significantly strengthened CCP military capacity during this critical period.
6. CCP forces secured northern China and pushed into contested cities despite Stalin's own advice that Soviet-aligned communists should leave China's cities to Guomindang control.
7. The United States provided limited aid to the Guomindang but withdrew this support by 1948 once American officials concluded the nationalist cause was effectively lost.

Popular Support and Communist Victory, 1948 to 1949

1. Popular support increasingly favoured the CCP as the Guomindang's reputation suffered from corruption, hyperinflation, and repression during this final phase of the war.
2. Mao's land redistribution programmes in CCP-controlled areas won broad rural support, while the Guomindang appeared increasingly to protect landlords and business elites at ordinary peasants' expense.
3. CCP troop discipline and effective party propaganda, described in more detail in the propaganda article covering Mao's maintained rule elsewhere in this unit, reinforced this growing popular support.
4. This appeal was not without genuine cost, and Mao's own son, Mao Anying, sent to the countryside to help suppress peasant resistance, later described CCP cadres in this period as thugs and the dregs of society.
5. Chiang Kaishek compounded the Guomindang's weakening position with serious strategic errors, including committing his best troops to Manchuria before fully securing northern and central China.
6. Poor communication between Guomindang generals and inadequate supply lines further undermined the nationalist war effort as the conflict progressed.
7. Military leader Lin Biao, later instrumental in creating the cult of Mao described elsewhere in this unit, proved crucial in transforming the Red Army into a genuinely formidable fighting force during this period.
8. By January 1949, the CCP controlled Beijing, and Guomindang defeat followed rapidly across southern and western China as Chiang's forces collapsed.

The Establishment of the People's Republic

1. Recognising that defeat was now unavoidable, Chiang Kaishek resigned the Guomindang presidency and began relocating his government to the island of Taiwan.
2. Mao and the Communist Party formally proclaimed victory and immediately turned their attention to the practical challenges of consolidating power across mainland China.
3. The People's Republic of China was formally established on 1 October 1949, marking the definitive conclusion of more than two decades of intermittent civil conflict.
4. Chiang continued to rule Taiwan as the Republic of China until his death in 1975, and until 1971 many Western nations and the United Nations continued recognising Taiwan as China's sole legitimate government.
5. This unresolved territorial and political division between mainland China and Taiwan remained a lasting consequence of the conflict examined throughout this article.
6. The extraordinary chain of conflict described in this article, White Terror to Jiangxi to the Long March to Yan'an to civil war victory, shows how deeply Mao's path to power was shaped by continuous, often near-fatal military struggle.

Historiographical Debate: Military Genius or Fortunate Circumstance?