In discussions of the outcome of the Chinese Civil War (1927-1949) much has been on the social, economic, and political factors as to why the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek ended up losing control of mainland China to the Chinese Communist Party forces in 1949.[1] That being said, these conclusions tend to overlook the importance of the fighting itself, and how it was waged, towards why the civil war had the outcome it did. After all, the fighting itself was more than just an expression of the political and social conflict over China and its people. What this essay will make clear to you, the reader, is how the transition from guerilla to conventional warfare was one of the more important factors in ending the conflict in a Chinese Communist Party victory over the Nationalist Party. This is made clear through a presentation of Mao Zedong’s own call for the People’s Liberation Army to shift away from guerilla tactics and strategies into more conventional warfare, which is best typified by the efforts of Lin Biao to build up a more conventional army in Northeast China.[1] Without this evolution, the civil war might have ended very differently.[2]
The letters and writing of Mao on guerilla tactics, as well as the importance he puts on the relationship between guerilla forces and the general population, has shaped to a large degree the outsider perspectives of the Chinese Civil War. Many have pointed to anecdotes of small Communist units independently operating in the Chinese countryside, blending in with the surrounding population while building up bases of support behind enemy lines, all the while waging hit-and-run attacks against the larger, and much stronger, Nationalist armies.[3] Yet to say the conflict was entirely shaped by this type of combat is a disservice to Mao and his supporters, and obscures part of the conflict in China entirely. Focusing on Mao only as a master of guerrilla warfare is not enough to understand the conflict, especially given the conventional engagements that occurred on a large scale during the Liao-Shen Campaign, which helped contribute to a final victory over the Nationalist forces. Mao himself would state that “…the outcome of the war depends mainly on regular warfare, especially in its mobile form . . . guerrilla warfare cannot shoulder the main responsibility in deciding the outcome.”[4] Mao himself would eventually imagine the role of Chinese Communist guerrilla fighters would shift to become more complementary, even outright supporting, to regular army forces on the Communist side, and that the guerrillas themselves would gradually become conventional fighters.[5]
To successfully transition to this point, however, Mao presented three stages that would need to be gradually progressed through to acquire experience, which at the time in 1938 were directed against the invading Japanese, as the Communists had reached an uneasy alliance with the Nationalists to drive these foreign invaders out of China. According to Mao, the first stage would be extensive deployment of guerrilla warfare against the Japanese behind enemy lines, as well as the gradual building up of bases to support these actions. The second stage to follow this would also continue to see guerrilla warfare, but would also see increasingly frequent mobile operations by regular army units to support them.[6] The last stage, according to Mao, would be one of counteroffensive to recover territories lost to the Japanese, in which the conventional forces would lead the way. According to Mao:
“. . . positional warfare will undoubtedly play a greater role, for then the enemy will be holding fast to his positions and we shall not be able to recover our lost territory unless we launch powerful positional attacks in support of mobile warfare. Nevertheless, in the third stage too, we must exert our every effort to make mobile warfare the primary form of warfare.”[7]
Indeed, Mao was simply recognizing here that the only, true way to win definitively against the Japanese would be to defeat them conventionally then drive them fully out of China.
While the fight against Japan never really went through each of these stages, Mao and his Communist forces would go on to prove the legitimacy of them in waging this same three-stage model against the Nationalists once the Japanese were defeated on the mainland. While cautious, Mao would pursue the resumption of the Chinese Civil War in a way that acknowledged what he had previously written back in 1938:
“We are for decisive engagement whenever circumstances are favorable . . . only through such decisive engagements can we achieve the objective of annihilating or depleting the enemy forces.”[8]
Only through conventional warfare would the goal of defeating in detail the Nationalist forces be possible. This would require not only annihilating the Nationalists on the field of battle, but also burdening them with wounded soldiers, and to eliminate their capacity to operate as complete units, to force surrenders, and even in some cases by bringing over whole units of the Nationalist armies to the side of the Communists.[9] To do this, Mao asserted that the Communist forces should:
“In every battle, concentrate an absolutely superior force (two, three, four and sometimes even five or six times the enemy’s), encircle the enemy’s forces completely, strive to wipe them out thoroughly, and do not let any escape from the net. In special circumstances, use the method of dealing the enemy crushing blows, that is, concentrate all our strength to make a frontal attack and also to attack on one or both of his flanks, with the aim of wiping out one part and routing another so that our army can swiftly move its troops to smash other enemy forces.”[10]
This quote by itself makes it clear that Mao was already well aware in 1947 that it was time to make a transition into emphasizing conventional forces to drive out the last enemy of the Communists in China. Yet how exactly was this transition achieved? Enter Lin Biao.
The Liao-Shen Campaign that occurred in Northeastern China would involve hundreds of thousands of men, hundreds of artillery pieces, and even some tanks and armored personnel carriers. There would be a three-month long siege of Changchin, an isolation of Nationalist army forces at Kinzhou, and even the wiping out of Nationalist army forces in western Liaoxi before Shenyang was captured.[11] After all these actions, the Chinese Communist forces would be well on their way to fielding effective conventional forces against the Nationalist armies. To arrive at this point, however, the People’s Liberation Army forces in this part of China would have to go through a very difficult period of learning during active operations in order to build up their experience, and to integrate conventional tactics and strategies.
Mao gave Lin the task of transitioning the forces under his command through the second stage of war into the third stage. Effectively doing so would allow these newly conventional forces the ability to engage in decisive battles that would destroy entire Nationalist armies as compared the few isolated united they had previously been able to defeat. Moreover, the transition led by Lin would need to see the building up of his forces by instilling greater professionalism, a difficult task while deployed in the field. Well aware of the complexity of this task and its impact on his command, Lin would analyze each battle in the Northeast after it occurred in order to better learn from the experience, that he might create lessons to be sent back to the Communist Party Center in Yan’an for guidance to be distributed to other Communist forces.[12]
While both Mao and Lin were well aware by this point in the conflict as to the importance of transitioning into fielding greater conventional forces against the Nationalists, that doesn’t mean everything suddenly started going their way in the Civil War. Lin’s army itself would experience a defeat in their first major combat in Machuria. In this incident, Mao had been considering sending Lin’s forces in a strategic advance deeper into the Northeast territories in June of 1945, with the aim to seize the area and solidify a firm foundation for the eventual victory of the Chinese Communists.[13] Unfortunately for the Mao, this is not exactly what happened. The United States Navy ended up bringing two Nationalist armies to the port of Qinhuangdao, just inside the Great Wall of China, to fend off the Communists. By November of that year, General Du Yuming would lead both of these armies to break through the Communist defenses around Shanaiguan, after which they advanced down the Liaoxi Corridor towards the strategic railway city of Jinzhou.[14] Aware that his forces were not only outnumbered but also out-trained and outgunned by the Nationalist armies, Lin would ignore Mao’s push for him to engage his forces against the advancing armies to halt their advance, as he knew that way lay disaster. Instead, Lin would opt to withdraw his forces from Jinzhou, surrendering it to the Nationalists. Not long afterwards, the Nationalist offensive would itself come to a halt, not as a result of Communist resistance but due to Chiang Kai0shek growing worried about their extended supply lines, which had yet to be secured against the occupation of the Soviets in Manchuria.[15]
Though this retreat would be a defeat for Lin’s forces, they would still go on to transition into more effective conventional forces. Indeed, Lin himself would not slow down in these efforts. In December of 1945, still fresh from this defeat, Lin would go on to hold a command level meeting of the Northeast Communist forces where he would present a protracted war strategy of retreat, the building up of bases of support, and the general avoidance of major battles with Nationalist forces.[16] To reclaim momentum, and to build up his forces experience and training, Lin called instead for engaging in smaller battle in order to experiment with tactics, with the aim to eventually apply the effective ones in larger battles. Quickly termed the “Six Principles”, Lin would go on to emphasize the concentration of overwhelming Communist forces against the weak points of Nationalist forces in order to break through them, to then destroy outright enemy units.
It is interesting to note here that Lin was echoing the tactics that Mao himself had so long championed in the struggle against the more numerous Nationalist forces, that victory might be achieved at the tactical level in combat of “ten against one” even if they continued to struggle at the strategic level in combat of “one against ten.”[17] It would be this experience, including the defeats and setbacks, that would be what it took for the Northeast Communist Forces to improve their combat skills and integrate the conventional tactics and principles necessary to defeat Nationalist armies in the field, such as what happened in the Battle of Jinzhou. Lin himself would make sure this learning and experience would be spread throughout the other Communist forces which he did through his passing along of critiques and feedback of battles. Without Lin’s efforts, an important part of the training systems and education transitioning Communist forces into more conventional armies would not have happened.
Based on this discussion above, and the work of other scholars, the Communist forces not only defeated the Nationalist armies of Chiang Kai-shek in countless small to medium engagements, but also in large ones like in the Liao-Shen, Huai-Hai, and Ping-Jin Campaigns.[18] Though it has to be recognized that there are recorded instances of Nationalist’s surrendering to the Communists, and even changing sides in some cases, the thousands of casualties on both sides during this stage of the Chinese Civil War makes a persuasive argument that the Nationalist forces did not simply disintegrate, but were defeated in detail on the field of battle by the Communists. Had Mao and Lin not recognized the importance of waging conventional warfare on the Nationalists for winning the Civil War, as well as committed years of resources and manpower towards integrating these strategies and tactics into their military operations, the Civil War would likely have dragged on still longer and, perhaps, ended in a different way.
[1] Fairbank, Reischauer, and Craig 1989, pp. 937-940; Spence 1999, pp. 469-473.
[2] Bjorge 2004; Cheng 2005, 2009; Lew 2009; Westad 2003.
[3] Tanner 2014.
[4] Mao 1938, p. 172.
[5] Mao 2000, p. 42.
[6] Mao 1938, pp. 138-139.
[7] Mao 1938, p. 174.
[8] Mao 1938, p. 182.
[9] Tanner 2014, p. 8.
[10] Mao 1947, p. 161.
[11] Tanner 2014.
[12] Tang 2010, p. 225.
[13] Yang 1992, p. 22.
[14] Tanner 2014, p. 11.
[15] Tanner 2014.
[16] Tanner 2014.
[17] Mao 1936, pp. 233-239.
[18] Tanner 2014.
[1] Eastman 1984; Pepper 1978; Tang 1963.
References
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Cheng, Victor Shiu Chiang. "Imagining China’s Madrid in Manchuria: The Communist Military Strategy at the Onset of the Chinese Civil War, 1945-1946." Modern China 31, no. 1 (2005): 72-114.
Cheng, Victor Shiu Chiang. "Modern War on an Ancient Battlefield: The Diffusion of American Military Technology and Ideas in the Chinese Civil War, 1946—1949." Modern China 35, no. 1 (2009): 38-64.
Eastman, Lloyd. Seeds of Destruction: Nationalist China in War and Revolution, 1947-1949. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984.
Fairbank, John King, Albert M. Craig, and Edwin O. Reischauer. East Asia: tradition and transformation. Houghton Miffhin, 1989.
Lew, Christopher R. The Third Chinese Revolutionary Civil War, 1945-49: An Analysis of Communist Strategy and Leadership. Routledge, 2009.
Mao Zedong. “Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War.” In Mao 1969, vol. 1 (1936): 179-254.
Mao Zedong. “On Protracted War.” In Mao 1969, vol. 2 (1938): 113-194.
Mao Zedong. “The Present Situation and Our Tasks.” In Mao 1969, vol. 4 (1947): 157-176.
Mao Zedong. On Guerrilla Warfare. Translated by Samuel B. Griffith II. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.
Pepper, Suzanne. Civil war in China: the political struggle 1945-1949. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.
Spence, Jonathan D. The search for modern China. New York: WW Norton & Company, 1999.
Tang, Tsou. America’s Failure in China, 1941-50. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963.
Tanner, Harold M. "Learning Through Practice: Lin Biao and the Transition to Conventional Combined Operations in China’s Northeast, 1946-1948." Journal of Chinese Military History 3, no. 1 (2014): 3-46.
Westad, Odd Arne. Decisive encounters: the Chinese civil war, 1946-1950. Stanford University Press, 2003.
Yang, Kuisong. "The Soviet Factor and the CCP’s Policy toward the United States in the 1940s." Chinese Historians 5, no. 1 (1992): 17-34.