Chinese Civil War: Causes of War Notes

Key Questions

1. What were the long term and short term causes of the Chinese Civil War?
2. How can these be categorized into economic, political, ideological, and territorial causes?

Long Term Causes

1. Socio-Economic Factors

1. At the start of the 20th century, China was still ruled by the Manchu (Qing) dynasty, but its society and economy were under great strain.
   1. Peasant hardship: The overwhelming majority of Chinese people were peasants who lived at subsistence level.
   2. They worked small plots of land, often renting from landlords who demanded up to 80% of their harvest. During floods, droughts, or poor harvests, many peasants faced starvation.
   3. Population growth vs. limited land: Between 1850 and 1900, China’s population grew by about 8%, while cultivated land increased by only 1%. This imbalance led to mounting food shortages and recurring famines.
   4. Taxation: Peasants bore the burden of high taxation, which supported the extravagant imperial court but provided little relief to ordinary people.
   5. Urban pressures: Many impoverished peasants migrated to the cities in search of work. However, urban unemployment was already high because modern machinery and cheap Western imports were undermining traditional industries.
2. This widespread poverty and inequality created a volatile social base that made China increasingly unstable.

2. Political Weakness and the Impact of Foreign Powers

1. China’s political system under the Qing dynasty was weakened both from within and by foreign intervention.
   1. Defeat by Western powers: In the 19th century, China suffered a series of humiliating defeats in the Opium Wars against Britain, which forced China into unequal treaties.
   2. These treaties gave Western powers control over trade, territory, and even their own courts in Chinese cities, undermining Chinese sovereignty.
   3. Loss of sovereignty: Foreigners were not subject to Chinese law, missionaries flooded the country, and foreign businesses dominated trade.
   4. China was effectively carved into “spheres of influence” controlled by Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and later Japan.
   5. Corruption and inefficiency: Local officials pocketed much of the tax revenue, leaving the central government weak and financially unstable.
   6. Rebellions: Internal uprisings reflected the anger of the people. The Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), a mix of religious and political revolt, caused millions of deaths and exposed the inability of the Qing to control the country.
   7. The Boxer Rebellion (1899–1900) showed deep anti-foreign resentment but was brutally crushed by Western and Japanese forces.
2. China’s defeats and foreign domination deepened the sense of national humiliation, which later became a driving force for both nationalist (GMD) and communist (CCP) movements.

3. The Overthrow of the Qing Dynasty (1911 Revolution)

1. By the early 20th century, China’s ruling dynasty was widely seen as incapable of reform.
2. Weak leadership: After the death of the Guangxu Emperor in 1908, a 2-year-old boy, Pu Yi, inherited the throne. His father, Prince Chun, ruled as regent but lacked the vision and ability to introduce meaningful reform.
3. Growing discontent: Intellectuals, business elites, and radicals all criticized the dynasty. Prince Chun’s decision to raise taxes while failing to modernize deepened resentment.
4. The 1911 Double Tenth Revolution: Sparked in Wuchang by mutinous soldiers, the revolution spread rapidly across the provinces. Within weeks, most declared independence from Beijing.
5. Sun Yixian’s return: From exile in the USA, Dr. Sun Yixian was invited to become the first president of the new Republic of China, founded in Nanjing.
6. On 12 February 1912, Emperor Pu Yi abdicated, ending over 2,000 years of imperial rule. However, the revolution was incomplete:
   1. Democracy was not established.
   2. The middle classes played little role.
   3. Many imperial officials kept their positions.

4. The Rule of Yuan Shikai (1912–1916)

1. The new Republic soon fell under the control of Yuan Shikai, a former Qing general, who became president in 1912.
2. Military dictatorship: Yuan ruled as a strongman rather than building a democratic republic. He relied heavily on the army to maintain power.
3. Failure of democracy: Sun Yixian’s Guomindang (GMD), formed in 1912 as a parliamentary party, lacked the strength to challenge Yuan. When Sun attempted a “Second Revolution” in 1913, it failed, forcing him into exile in Japan.
4. Centralization attempts: Yuan abolished regional assemblies and tried to strengthen central government control of tax revenues, angering provincial leaders.
5. Final mistake: In 1915, Yuan declared himself emperor. This alienated almost everyone, including the military, and he was forced to step down. He died in 1916.
6. Yuan’s death left China without strong central leadership, ushering in the Warlord Era, where regional military leaders carved the country into rival fiefdoms.
   1. This fragmentation directly contributed to the eventual outbreak of the Chinese Civil War.

Short Term Causes

1. Political weakness: regionalism – the warlords 1916–1928

1. A key cause of the civil war in China was the increasing lack of unity in the country by the second decade of the 20th century.
   1. Regionalism or provincialism was to play a significant role not only in causing the war, but also in its course and outcome.
   2. With the abdication and death of Yuan, China lost the only figure that had maintained some degree of unity.
2. China broke up into small states and provinces, each controlled by a warlord and his private army.
   1. These warlords ran their territories independently, organizing and taxing the people in their domains.
   2. They had their own laws and even their own currencies.
   3. As warlords extended their power and wealth by expanding their territories, it was the peasants who suffered in their continuous wars.
   4. None of the warlords was willing to relinquish his armies or power to the central government.
   5. The warlord period increased the sense of humiliation felt by many Chinese and, coupled with their desire to get rid of foreign influence, led to an increase in nationalism during the decade of warlord rule.
3. China had all but ceased to exist, it was in a state of internal anarchy.
4. If the warlords remained, China would remain divided.

2. The May Fourth Movement

1. During this period, two political movements developed in response to both the warlords and foreign influence in China.
2. The May Fourth Movement began in 1919.
   1. Students led a mass demonstration in Beijing against the warlords, traditional Chinese culture, and the Japanese.
3. The hostility had been ignited by the Versailles settlement, in which Japan had been given Germany’s former concessions in Shandong province.
   1. China, it seemed, had joined the Allies in the war only to be humiliated by them.
4. The significance of the May Fourth Movement was that it was dedicated to change and the rebirth of China as a proud and independent nation.
   1. Some intellectuals and students were inspired by revolutionary ideology in order to achieve these goals.
   2. The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, led by Marxists, provided a practical example.
   3. The new Bolshevik government aimed to set up a socialist state and had also denounced the imperialists saying that all contested border claims would be dropped.
5. Imperialism was perceived by many as the main cause of China’s problems.
6. Other Chinese were inspired by the GMD Nationalist party, which had grown much stronger during the warlord period.
7. Thus two groups – Communists inspired by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, and Nationalists under the GMD – developed in China at this time.
8. They were to come together in an alliance in 1922.

3. Communists and Nationalists

1. By the time Sun died in 1925, the GMD had made little progress towards fulfilling the ‘Three Principles’.
2. The party had been limited by lack of influence beyond the south, and the fact it had to rely on alliances with warlords due to the weakness of its military power.
3. After the death of Sun, General Jiang Jieshi, a committed Nationalist and enthusiastic GMD member, took over leadership of the GMD.
   1. He had received military training before World War One in Japan, and then in the new Communist state of the USSR.
4. The Soviet leadership of the USSR had begun to invest in the GMD, providing aid and assistance to the party.
5. The Soviets believed they could foster good relations with a Nationalist China.
6. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was officially set up in 1921; initially, its membership was mainly intellectuals, and it had no real military strength.
   1. It was due to this weakness, and some shared aims, that the CCP agreed to work with the GMD.
   2. It was also consistently encouraged to cooperate with the Nationalists by the new Soviet state, the USSR.

4. Attempt to unify China: the First United Front

1. Both the GMD and the CCP wanted a unified China.
   1. They agreed that the first step to this was to get rid of the warlords, and in 1922 they formed the First United Front.
   2. Both parties also agreed that China needed to be free of the foreign imperialist powers.
   3. The Third Principle of Sun Yixian, ‘the People’s Livelihood’, was often called ‘socialism’, which convinced the Comintern that this was a party they could back.
2. In addition, Jiang had studied in Moscow in 1923, and then ran the Whampoa Military Academy, which was set up and funded by the USSR to train GMD officers.
3. Despite his Soviet links, however, Jiang was not a Communist.
   1. He became increasingly anti-Communist, and began his leadership of the GMD by removing Communists from key positions in the party.
   2. He stopped short of breaking off the alliance with the Communists, as he knew that he must first take out his primary obstacle to a unified China – the warlords.
4. Jiang now determined to act on the first of the Three Principles and attempt to unify China by putting an end to the warlords’ power.
5. Together with the Communists, the GMD set out on the ‘Northern Expedition’ in 1926 to crush the warlords of central and northern China.
   1. This operation was a great success; by 1927, the GMD and the Communists had captured Hangzhou, Shanghai, and Nanjing.
   2. They took Beijing in 1928.
6. Within two years, the United Front of the GMD and the CCP had destroyed the power of the warlords.
   1. The GMD announced that it was the legitimate government of China and the new capital and seat of government would be Nanjing.

5. End of the First United Front: the GMD attacks the CCP

1. Despite the results of the Northern Expedition, China was not now unified.
   1. The United Front was only a friendship of convenience.
   2. What had united the CCP and the GMD – the fight against the warlords – was over, and ideology divided the two parties.
2. The success of the Northern Expedition had been not only due to Nationalist ambitions.
   1. It was also because of the Communist promise of land to the peasants; this commitment had given them local peasant support.
   2. The Communists also had support from the industrial workers: for example, Zhou Enlai, a Communist member of the GMD, had organized the workers rising in Shanghai.
   3. The popular support for the Communists was a key reason that Jiang decided he could no longer tolerate them in the GMD.
   4. There could be no more cooperation.
3. Jiang was sympathetic to landlords and the middle classes, and was far more to the right than Sun had been.
4. Areas under Communist control had seen peasants attack landlords and seize land – this could not be tolerated.
5. It seemed to Jiang that the CCP needed to be crushed before China could truly be unified under the GMD.
   1. Jiang now expelled all Communists from the GMD, and his attacks on them reached a peak in Shanghai in the ‘White Terror’ of April 1927.
   2. A powerful ‘workers’ army’ under Zhou Enlai had proved very effective during the Northern Expedition and Jiang turned on them, using informants from the underworld of triads and gangsters. 5,000 Communists were shot.
   3. The GMD carried out similar attacks in other cities, in what became known as the ‘purification movement’: ‘purification’ meant the massacre of thousands of Communists, trade unionists, and peasant leaders.
   4. About a quarter of a million people were killed.
6. Despite attempts to resist (Mao’s Autumn Harvest Rising failed), the CCP was very nearly crushed by the end of 1927.
7. Ignoring the orders of the Comintern to retain the United Front, the CCP decided that its only hope of survival was for its members to flee into the mountains of Jiangsi.
8. The GMD pursued them, determined to destroy the Communists.
9. The civil war had begun.