He had access to modern industries and modern means of communication, which the People's Liberation Army lacked. In theory, he should have had an easy victory.
So how did Mao win? What the US imperialists and Chiang Kai-shek failed to realise was that the most effective weapon in the hands of the PLA was not guns and tanks, but propaganda. They promised the landless and starving peasants that by fighting for the PLA they would be able to take farmland from their landlords. In most cases, the surrounding countryside and small towns had come under the control of the PLA long before the cities.
This proved to be highly effective. This meant that despite suffering heavy casualties, the PLA was able to keep fighting, with a constant supply of fresh recruits. In theory, the Nationalists still had a big advantage over the PLA. On paper, they enjoyed a clear superiority in both numbers of men and weapons. They controlled a much larger territory and population than their adversaries, and enjoyed considerable international support from the USA and Western Europe.
But that was only in theory. The reality on the ground was very different. The Nationalist forces suffered from a lack of morale and rampant corruption that greatly reduced their ability to fight, and their civilian support had collapsed.
The demoralized and undisciplined Nationalist troops were melting away in the face of the irresistible forward march of the People's Liberation Army. They surrendered or fled, leaving their weapons behind.
The PLA was able to go onto the counteroffensive, forcing the Kuomintang to abandon its plan for a general offensive. The transformation of the military situation was really incredible. The PLA, which for years had been outnumbered, by July-December finally gained numerical superiority over the Kuomintang forces. Within a short space of time they were driving the disorganized and demoralized remnants of KMT forces southwards in southern China.
In the end, Chiang Kai-shek and approximately two million Nationalist Chinese - predominantly from the former government bureaucrats and businessmen - retreated from mainland China to the island of Taiwan then known as Formosa. Embed from Getty Images. Before the War, Trotsky had pointed out that the decisive question was what would happen when the Red Army entered the towns and cities.
It would encourage the self-organisation of the workers, with real trade unions, independent of the state. However, the revolution in China was carried out in Bonapartist fashion from the top. Instead of basing themselves on the working class to overthrow the bourgeois state, they formed a coalition government composed of various factions of the former Kuomintang government. Far from encouraging the independent movement of the masses, any manifestations of independent action on the part of the workers was repressed.
Mao initially began with a programme that did not go beyond the limits of capitalism. He balanced between the bourgeoisie and the workers and peasants in order to consolidate the new state and concentrate power into his hands.
Mao originally had the perspective of fifty or a hundred years of capitalism. Among its leaders one man stood out as the supreme representative of the China of this generation. That man was Chiang Kai-shek, who proved to be not only a soldier but a statesman who could balance all the different forces in both the old China and the new China, not merely by playing them off against each other, but by welding them into something new.
When Chiang Kai-shek came into power in he knew that sooner or later he would have to fight Japan, and all he asked was time to build up an army and to strengthen the nation. He was given only three years before Japan invaded Manchuria in , and only nine years before the storm broke in full fury in the summer of During the next ten years, as we have seen, Japan did all she could to interfere with the Nationalist movement.
In Japan the power of the militarists was growing and the writings and public utterances of their leaders were making it increasingly clear that they fanatically believed in their god-given mission to rule the world, the first step to which was the conquest of China. After the Nationalist government had two main lines of policy which it pushed with all possible speed: to strengthen and modernize the country and to bring it all under the administrative control of the central government.
Great advances were made in education, medicine and public health, in banking, mining and engineering, in communications, and in industry. Rapid extension of road and rail communications met both strategic and economic needs. The primary railway systems of China ran parallel with the coast and had been built with foreign loans and under foreign control in order to increase the trade of the treaty ports in the interests of foreign enterprise. The government now began to build lines directly opening up the hinterland, extending its hold over the country as a whole, and increasing trade without increasing foreign control.
Beyond and between the railways the network of motor roads was even more rapidly expanded; and still deeper in the interior air lines began to reach points to which even the motor roads had not yet penetrated.
In far inland China today there are actually millions of people who have seen airplanes but never an automobile, and many more who have seen cars and trucks but never a railway train.
When the remotest regions, where life has hardly changed for centuries, are reached first by the most advanced technological developments, there are startling effects.
Vast areas in China will move directly into the age of electric power, skipping almost entirely the age of steam power. In all kinds of enterprises which had once been carried on only under foreign management, the Chinese began to show more and more competence. Quantitatively, in numbers of factories or total of horsepower, the achievements of Chinese industry by were so small that they would hardly show on a comparative world chart.
Qualitatively, they were as important as yeast is to bread. He was the first Mongol to rule over China when he conquered the Song Dynasty of southern China in Kublai also spelled Kubla or Khubilai relegated his Chinese subjects Live TV. This Day In History.
History Vault. The Cultural Revolution Begins In the s, Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong came to feel that the current party leadership in China, as in the Soviet Union , was moving too far in a revisionist direction, with an emphasis on expertise rather than on ideological purity. Recommended for you. Mao Zedong. Really a Revolution? Lessons of the Revolution.
Native American Cultures. What was the Cultural Revolution? The unfinished nature of the revolution, leaving a broken and exiled but still vocal Nationalist Government and Army on Taiwan, only heightened the sense among U.
For more than twenty years after the Chinese revolution of , there were few contacts, limited trade and no diplomatic ties between the two countries.
Menu Menu. Home Milestones The Chinese Revolution of Milestones: — For more information, please see the full notice. Communists entering Beijing in
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