Chinese civil war
People's Liberation Army soldiers attack Nationalist buildings in Shangtang
| date | 1927 to 1949 |
|---|---|
| place | China |
| output | Victory of the communists |
| consequences | Proclamation of the People's Republic of China by Mao ; the government of the Republic of China withdraws to Taiwan and continues the republic there. |
| Peace treaty | No |
| Parties to the conflict | ||
|---|---|---|
|
|
Supported by: Soviet Union |
|
| Commander | ||
|
Chiang Kai-shek |
Mao Zedong |
|
| Troop strength | ||
| 4,300,000 (July 1945) 3,650,000 (June 1948) 1,490,000 (June 1949) |
1,200,000 (July 1945) 2,800,000 (June 1948) 4,000,000 (June 1949) |
|
| losses | ||
|
1928–1936: ~ 2 million deaths 1945–1949: ~ 1–3 million deaths |
||
.svg){kind=small}
The Chinese Civil War was a military conflict from 1927 to 1949 over political leadership in the country. It broke out after the short, global era of bourgeois revolutions at the beginning of the 20th century, which in post-revolutionary China was characterized by a frequent succession of bourgeois governments from the Beiyang period and changing alliances of warlords . The civil war, which lasted a total of 22 years, was interrupted by pauses such as the standstill agreement 1937–1946 during the Japanese invasion (see Second Sino-Japanese War ) and did not end until the Cold War era .
The protagonists in this conflict were the right wing of the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek , who led the Republic of China , which had existed since 1912 as generalissimo, temporary president and prime minister, and the opposing Communist Party of China under Mao Zedong . These groups had previously cooperated in the so-called First United Front (1923 to 1927) and in the counter-government of Canton , but these alliances broke up for several reasons. The left wing of the Kuomintang under Wang Jingwei did not participate on Chiang's side.
While the communists succeeded in establishing the People's Republic of China as a new state system after more than two decades with their victory , the Kuomintang and the previous Chinese government had to withdraw to the island of Taiwan , formerly known as Formosa , and established the Republic of China on Taiwan , which continued until 1971 for several decades most states were considered legitimate representatives of China. The civil war was not only of importance at the national level. The Comintern and foreign powers (especially the Soviet Union and the USA ) supported the warring parties in order to secure their respective influence in China.
prehistory
After the National People's Party of China (Kuomintang) was founded in 1912 and the Communist Party of China in 1921 , they formed a coalition for the first time in 1924, the First United Front , and in 1925 they led the common cantonal counter-government. Both sides began the northern campaign against the warlords of the Beiyang government . The General Wars of the so-called Northern Generals ; of the Zhili (直系), Anhui (皖系), Fengtian (奉系), Ma (馬家軍) and Guominjun (Kuominchün, 西北 軍) factions to power in Beijing before the Northern Campaign were:
- 1920 Zhili Anhui War (Zhiwan): Zhili and Fengtian militarists defeat the Anhui clique.
- 1922 First Zhili Fengtian War (Zhifeng I): Zhili clique defeats Anhui and Fengtian militarists as well as Kuomintang.
- 1924 Second Zhili-Fengtian War (Zhifeng II): Zhili clique is defeated by Fengtian and Anhui militarists and Zhili apostates (Kuominchün).
- 1926 Fengtian-Kuominchün war: Fengtian clique and Zhili rests defeat Anhui rests and Kuominchün (northwest) army, however
- In 1926 the northern campaign begins: Kuomintang, communists and Kuominchün army, defeat Fengtian militarists and Zhili remnants.
With the death of the founding father Sun Yat-sen , a power struggle for leadership in the organization broke out within the Kuomintang, which until now had been a national reservoir for opponents of the Manchurian rule at the time. The left wing of the Kuomintang under Wang Jingwei and the communists formed another counter-government in Wuhan in 1927 , where the communists had a large following.
course
Until the war against Japan
The war began because Chiang was no longer willing to continue to cooperate with the communists after the successful joint campaign against the northern government . From August 1927 he put down the communist and trade unionists' uprisings in Nanchang and Canton. The extent to which he was directly involved in the suppression of the next uprising, the Shanghai strike of April 1927, through the Shanghai massacre , has not been proven, since another conflicting party in this uprising was the underground triad society .
Under the influence of the Comintern, the revolutionary idea was to be carried to the peasants in the country and the communist side tried to implement this with the autumn harvest uprising in September 1927. This led Mao Zedong for the first time , but, like the uprisings of the first half of 1927, this company also led to the defeat of the communists and the victory of the right-wing Kuomintang, as a result of which the communists withdrew to the mountains.
From 1927 the communists conquered fifteen areas in southern and central China ( Hunan , Fujian ) and established a Chinese Soviet republic in Jiangxi (from 1929) (1931). The communists were able to repel four major attacks by Kuomintang troops from 1930 to 1934, before the fifth they withdrew to northwest China in the “ Long March ” in 1934/35 and were thus able to save themselves from being broken up, whereupon Mao Zedong became Communist leader and in Yan 'at (Northern Shaanxi ) a new Soviet republic was born. For the time being, the Kuomintang had clearly gained the upper hand and were now outwardly the only relevant political force in the country.
During the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II
After the Soviet-Chinese border war , a power vacuum developed in Manchuria . The consequences of this conflict led to the Manchuria crisis in 1931 . As a result of the Mukden incident , Japanese troops occupied Manchuria and in March 1932 founded the puppet state of Manchukuo . The Japanese parliament viewed the proceedings critically, but since critics were murdered or their voices suppressed, no parliamentary countermeasures were taken. The forces of the Chinese Kuomintang government were insufficient to fight both the communists and the Japanese. In 1933 Chiang Kai-shek was forced to accept the Japanese occupation of Manchuria as a condition of an armistice.
At the beginning of the Japanese occupation, the Communists and the Kuomintang were irreconcilable. Chiang Kai-shek also proclaimed that the fight against communists should go forward. After the Xi'an incident (the kidnapping of Chiang by his own allies to force him to talk to the communists), in December 1936 he formed a mutually distrusting coalition between the Kuomintang and communists, which continued until the New Fourth Army Incident should continue in January 1941.
In 1937, after the incident at the Marco Polo Bridge, the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out. Japanese troops marched into northern China via Manchuria, captured Beijing and advanced towards Shanghai . The Kuomintang initially rejected the armistice offered on November 5, 1937, which, in addition to the recognition of Japanese supremacy over Manchuria and the suppression of anti-Japanese elements, also included the common struggle against communism; When the Chinese leadership wanted to accept the offer less than a month later, the military situation for the Japanese had improved so much as a result of the victory in the second battle for Shanghai that they no longer wanted to offer an armistice on the terms mentioned.
After the bloody conquest of Nanjing , the then capital of the Kuomintang government, the power center of the Kuomintang shifted to Chongqing . In Nanjing itself, an anti-communist collaboration government (the so-called Reorganized Government of the Republic of China ) was formed under the leadership of Wang Jingwei and other breakaway Kuomintang members. Wang, who belonged to the left wing of the Kuomintang, had already tried with the communists in 1927 to build an anti-government in Wuhan.
Despite everything, the alliance between the Kuomintang and the Communists continued, with military cooperation between the two sides being characterized by a lack of communication, open distrust and regular clashes. The alliance finally broke up in January 1941 in the so-called New Fourth Army Incident after Kuomintang forces attacked the Communist Forces New Fourth Army during the evacuation of Anhui and Jiangsu provinces . The communists lost around 7,000 soldiers.
The National Revolutionary Army was increasingly weakened by open struggle against the Japanese army as the war progressed.
After the end of the Second World War
After Japan surrendered, faced with the impending danger of an expanding ideologically motivated war in East Asia, the United States was quick to move both parties to negotiate a peaceful solution. Until 1947 there were several meetings between the leaders of both sides; also on August 28, 1945, two weeks after the Japanese surrender, between Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek in Chongqing . The American general and later Secretary of State George C. Marshall was entrusted with the role of negotiator until 1947 .
The main scene of the civil war, which soon flared up again, was initially Manchuria, which was occupied by Soviet troops after the Japanese surrender. The ceasefire between the United States and Japan contained the condition that the remaining Japanese troops had to surrender to the Chinese armed forces. A “race” between the communists and the Kuomintang quickly ensued over who the Japanese troops should surrender to. This race exacerbated the rivalry between the two parties as the Kuomintang saw itself as the only legitimate government. However, the Soviet occupying power had specifically worked to supply the Chinese communists with Japanese booty weapons and also promoted the training of communist troops for the (as was assumed by both sides) imminent civil war. The Chinese communists had de facto relocated their entire power base to Manchuria and, with Soviet help, began to set up a civil administration and a network of party offices. Chiang Kai-shek was a thorn in the side of this communist takeover of Manchuria with its industrial infrastructure, which was mainly created in the course of the Japanese occupation, and he therefore asked that the planned withdrawal of the Soviet occupation troops from Manchuria be delayed until too the Kuomintang had been given an opportunity to expand their influence in Manchuria. The Soviet government complied with this request and used the time gained to transport the Japanese industrial plants to the USSR.
With strong financial and military support from the USA, the Kuomintang finally began to fight for control of Manchuria in the fall of 1945. Under the command of Lin Biao, the communists fought a loss-making open field battle near Siping on the railway line to the north, which lasted for a month. Most recently, Lin Biao sent around 100,000 factory workers from Changchun into battle. However, as American pressure to enter into diplomatic talks increased, the Kuomintang agreed to the communists' demand for a ceasefire and also disarmed some 1.5 million troops.
Probably this decision to abandon the fighting, as the Americans demanded, in favor of a peaceful settlement with the Communists killed Chiang for victory. The communists took the opportunity to further strengthen their troops and surrounded the Kuomintang troops in their garrisons by cutting off supplies to the nationalist armed forces with their air defense. In addition, popular support for the Kuomintang troops and their general morale remained relatively low, also due to widening corruption problems and the high inflation rate as a result of the high debt the Kuomintang government accumulated in the course of the ongoing armed conflict.
While the struggle in Manchuria continued, the communists instigated smaller guerrilla wars in the rest of China in order to keep more nationalist troops out of Manchuria. In fact, their plan was successful: in 1948 the last Kuomintang troops in Manchuria surrendered. At this point in time, the real decision of the civil war had been made: after the massive reinforcement of their conventional armed forces, the communists quickly conquered northern China and moved south from there.
The decisive battle of the war took place at Huaihai in central China. Six hundred thousand CCP soldiers fought here against an outnumbered nationalist army. In this battle, which lasted over two months from November 1948, the nationalist troops were almost completely wiped out.
In 1949, Chiang Kai-shek finally had to surrender. He withdrew to Taiwan with his Kuomintang and around 2 million civilians , while the communist leader Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949 . Kuomintang remnants isolated in the south-west withdrew to northern Burma and northern Thailand and were partially evacuated to Taiwan. A considerable part of the remaining troops and their civilian supporters turned to the cultivation of opium here in the “ Golden Triangle ” . In May 1950 the island of Hainan was conquered by the communists. This ended the last major fighting of the Chinese Civil War, not necessarily this one as such.
Role of foreign powers
The course of the struggle for political leadership in China was to a large extent influenced and directed by foreign powers. The anti-communist empire Japan represented a catalytic factor as an external threat , which exposed the weak points of the Kuomintang regime in China and gave the communists the opportunity to expand their influence. Other great powers , in particular the United States and the Soviet Union , exercised great influence over the development of the Chinese civil war in accordance with their own interests. The United States had primarily a peaceful settlement of the conflict and the maintenance of the Kuomintang government in mind. The Soviets actively worked towards the establishment of a communist buffer state in Manchuria and the spread of communism in China.
Results and consequences
As a result of the civil war, two separate Chinese states have existed to this day. On the one hand the socialist People's Republic of China, which includes the entire mainland , and on the other hand the now democratic Republic of China of the then Kuomintang in Taiwan. Both states fundamentally did not recognize the sovereignty claims of their opponents and for decades regarded themselves as the sole representatives of China, which has led to many disputes between the states (the so-called Taiwan conflict ) to this day. With the democratization of Taiwan in the 1990s, however, (sovereignty) claims on the territory of Mongolia and the People's Republic of China were no longer raised by the Republic of China and the communist claim to sovereignty on the mainland, but not on Taiwan, was recognized. The People's Republic of China, on the other hand, maintains its claim to Taiwan as a “breakaway province” to this day with its “ one-China policy ”.
The Chinese civil war killed over a million people and led to devastation, famine , epidemics and refugee flows in mainland China.
literature
- Henry A. Kissinger : China: Between Tradition and Challenge , C. Bertelsmann Verlag, 2011.
- Jeffrey D. Sachs : The End of Poverty: An Economic Program for a Fairer World , Section China: Catching Up After Half a Millennium , Pantheon Verlag, 2010.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Joseph Cummins: The War Chronicles, From Flintlocks to Machine Guns: A Global Reference of All the Major Modern Conflicts . Fair Winds Press, Beverly, Massachusetts 2009, ISBN 978-1-59233-305-9 , pp. 282-299. (English)
- ^ A b Joseph Cummins: History's Greatest Wars: The Epic Conflicts that Shaped the Modern World . Fair Winds Press, Beverly, Massachusetts 2011, ISBN 978-1-59233-471-1 , pp. 232-243. (English)
- ↑ Publications from www.onewar.com: The Autumn Harvest Uprising in China 1927 (English). ( Page no longer available )
- ↑ Felix Patrikeeff: Russian Politics in Exile. The Northeast Asian. Balance of Power 1924-1931. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2002, p. 52 f (English).
- ↑ Chinese Civil War. www.geschichte-in-5.de, 2019, accessed on October 1, 2019 .