continuously bolstered by indoctrination and effective propaganda. As they had during the war years, communist troops tried in many ways to win support of the masses. In newly occupied areas, social policy was at first reformist rather than revolutionary.

In Manchuria, Lin Biao was forging a formidable army of veteran cadres from northern China and natives of Manchuria, now well equipped with Japanese weapons. By 1947 the communists’ Northeast Democratic Allied Army controlled all of Manchuria north of the Sungari (Songhua) River, the east, and much of the countryside in the Nationalist stronghold in the south. There the Nationalists had most of their best-trained and bestequipped divisions, but the troops had been conscripted or recruited in China’s southwest, and they garrisoned cities and railways in a distant land. Beginning in January 1947, Lin Biao launched a series of small offensives. By July the Nationalists had lost half of their territory in Manchuria and much matériel; desertions and casualties, caused by indecisive Nationalist leadership and declining troop morale, reduced their forces by half. Lin Biao was not yet strong enough to take Manchuria, but he had the Nationalist armies hemmed up in a few major cities and with only a tenuous hold on the railways leading southward.

The Tide Begins to Shift

Although government forces overran Yan’an in March 1947, the strategic

initiative passed to the PLA during that year. In midsummer, troops under Liu Bocheng started moving toward the Yangtze; by late in the year the communists had concentrated strong forces in central China. Chen Yi operated on both sides of the Longhai railway, east of Kaifeng; Liu Bocheng was firmly established in the Dabie Mountains on the borders of Anhui, Henan, and Hubei, northeast of Hankou; and Chen Geng had another army in Henan west of the Beiping-Hankou railway. These groups cut Nationalist lines of communication, destroyed protecting outposts along the Longhai and Ping-Han lines, and isolated cities.

By the end of 1947 the government forces, according to U.S. military estimates, still numbered some 2,700,000 facing 1,150,000 communists, but the Nationalists were widely spread and on the defensive. In November, Mao Zedong established the communist headquarters at Shijiazhuang, a railway centre leading from the Beiping-Hankou line into Shanxi; this was a measure of how consolidated the communist position was in northern China. In a report to the CCP Central Committee in December, Mao exuded confidence:

The Chinese people’s revolutionary war has now reached a turning point . . . The main forces of the People’s Liberation Army have carried the fight into the Kuomintang Area . . . This is a turning point in history.

A Land Revolution

One reason for communist success was the social revolution in rural China. The CCP was now unrestrained by the multiclass alliance of the United Front period. In mid-1946, as civil war became more certain, the party leaders launched a land revolution. They saw land redistribution as an integral part of the larger struggle; by encouraging peasants to seize landlords’ fields and other property, the party apparently expected to weaken the government’s rural class base and strengthen its own support among the poor. This demanded a decisive attack on the traditional village social structure. The party leaders believed that to crack the age-old peasant fear of the local elite and overcome the traditional respect for property rights required unleashing the hatred of the oppressed. Teams of activists moved through the villages, organizing the poor in “speak bitterness” meetings to struggle against landlords and Nationalist supporters, to punish and often to kill them, and to distribute their land and property. The party tried to control the process in order not to alienate the broad middle ranks among the peasants, but land revolution had a dynamism of its own, and rural China went through a period of terror. Yet apparently the party gained from the revolutionary dynamism; morale was at fever pitch, and, for those who had benefited from land distribution, there was no turning back.

The Decisive Year, 1948

The year 1948 was the turning point in the civil war. In central China, communist armies of 500,000 troops proved their ability to fight major battles on the plains and to capture, though not always hold, important towns on the Longhai line such as Luoyang and Kaifeng. In northern China they encircled Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi; took most of Chahar and Jehol, provinces on Manchuria’s western flank; and recaptured Yan’an, which had been lost in March 1947. The decisive battles were fought in Shandong and Manchuria, where the forces of Chen Yi and Liu Bocheng and those under Lin Biao crushed the government’s best armies. For the government it was a year of military and economic disasters.

In Shandong, despite the departure of Chen Yi’s forces, communist guerrillas gradually reduced the government’s hold on the railway from Qingdao to Jinan; they penned up about 60,000 government troops in the latter city, an important railway junction. Instead of withdrawing that garrison southward to Suzhou, the government left it, for political reasons, to stand and fight. Then Chen Yi’s forces returned to Shandong and overwhelmed the dispirited Jinan garrison on September 24. This opened the way for a communist attack on Suzhou, the historic northern shield for Nanjing and a vital railway centre.

Beginning in December 1947, a communist offensive severed all railway connections into Mukden and isolated

the Nationalist garrisons in Manchuria. The government armies went on the defensive in besieged cities, partly out of fear that demoralized divisions would defect in the field. Instead of withdrawing from Manchuria before it was too late, the government tried unsuccessfully to reinforce its armies and to supply the garrisons by air. With the fall of Jinan, Lin Biao launched his final offensive. He now had an army of 600,000, nearly twice the Nationalist force in Manchuria. He first attacked Jinzhou, the government’s supply base on the railway between Jinan and Mukden; it fell on October 17. Changchun fell three days later. The great garrison at Mukden then tried to retake Jinzhou and Changchun and to open the railway line to the port of Yingkou on Liaodong Bay. In a series of battles, Lin Biao’s columns defeated this cream of the Nationalist forces. By early November the Nationalists had lost some 400,000 troops as casualties, captives, or defectors.

The government’s military operations in the first part of 1948 produced ever larger budget deficits through the loss of tax receipts, dislocation of transportation and productive facilities, and increased military expenditures. Inflation was out of control. In August the government introduced a new currency, the gold yuan, to replace the old notes at the rate of 3,000,000:1, promising drastic reforms to curtail expenditures and increase revenue. Domestic prices and foreign-exchange rates were pegged, with severe penalties threatened for

black market operations. The people were required to sell their gold, silver, and foreign currency to the government at the pegged rate; large numbers did so in a desperate effort to halt the inflation. In Shanghai and some other places, the government used draconian methods to enforce its decrees against speculators, but it apparently could not control its own expenditures or stop the printing presses. Furthermore, the government’s efforts to fix prices of food and commodities brought about an almost complete stagnation of economic activity, except for illicit buying and selling at prices far above the fixed levels. Some army officers and government officials were themselves engaged in smuggling, speculation, and other forms of corruption. Then came the loss of Jinan and the knowledge of the threat in Manchuria. During October the final effort to halt inflation collapsed, with shattering effect to morale in Nationalistheld cities. Prices started rocketing upward once more.

Communist Victory

Between early November 1948 and early January 1949, the two sides battled for control of Suzhou. Zhu De concentrated 600,000 troops under Chen Yi, Liu Bocheng, and Chen Geng near that strategic centre, which was defended by Nationalist forces of similar size. Both armies were well-equipped, but the Nationalists had a superiority in armour and were unopposed in the air. Yet poor

morale, inept command, and a defensive psychology brought another disaster to the Nationalist government. One after another, its armies were surrounded and defeated in the field. When the 65-day battle was over on January 10, the Nationalists had lost some 500,000 men and their equipment. The capital at Nanjing would soon lie exposed.

With Manchuria and most of the eastern region south to the Yangtze in communist hands, the fate of Tianjin and Beiping was sealed. The railway corridor between Tianjin and Zhangjiakou was hopelessly isolated. Tianjin fell on January 15 after a brief siege, and Beiping surrendered on the 23rd, allowing a peaceful turnover of China’s historic capital and centre of culture.

Thus, during the last half of 1948, the communist armies had gained control over Manchuria and northeastern China nearly to the Yangtze, except for pockets of resistance. They had a numerical superiority and had captured such huge stocks of rifles, artillery, and armour that they were better equipped than the Nationalists.

Great political shifts occurred in 1949. Chiang Kai-shek retired temporarily in January, turning over to the vice president, Gen. Li Tsung-jen (Li Zongren), the problem of holding the government together and trying to negotiate a peace with Mao Zedong. Li’s peace negotiations (February–April) proved hopeless. The Nationalists were not prepared to surrender; they still claimed to govern more than half of China and still had a

large army. General Li tried to secure U.S. support in the peace negotiations and in the military defense of southern China, but the U.S. government, attempting to extricate itself from its entanglement with the collapsing forces of the Nationalist government, pursued a policy of noninvolvement.

When peace negotiations broke down, communist armies crossed the Yangtze virtually unopposed; the Nationalist government abandoned its indefensible capital on April 23 and moved to Guangzhou. In succession, communist forces occupied Nanjing (April 24), Hankou (May 16–17), and Shanghai (May 25). The Nationalists’ last hope lay in the south and west, but Xi’an, a longtime Nationalist bastion and the gateway to the northwest, had fallen to Gen. Peng Dehuai on May 20. During the last half of 1949, powerful communist armies succeeded in taking the provinces of southern and western China. By the end of the year, only the islands of Hainan, Taiwan, and a few other offshore positions were still in Nationalist hands, and only scattered pockets of resistance remained on the mainland. The defeated Nationalist government reestablished itself on Taiwan, to which Chiang had withdrawn early in the year, taking most of the government’s gold reserves and the Nationalist air force and navy. On October 1, with most of the mainland held by the PLA, Mao proclaimed the establishment in Beijing of the government of the People’s Republic of China.

vision forged in the rural struggle would continue to guide the party.

In a series of speeches in 1949, Chairman Mao stated that his aim was to create a socialist society and, eventually, world communism. These objectives, he said, required transforming consumer cities into producer cities to set the basis on which “the people’s political power could be consolidated.” He advocated forming a four-class coalition of elements of the urban middle class—the petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie—with

workers and peasants, under the leadership of the CCP. The people’s state would exercise a dictatorship “for the oppression of antagonistic classes” made up of opponents of the regime.

The authoritative legal statement of this “people’s democratic dictatorship” was given in the 1949 Organic Law for the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, and at its first session the conference adopted a Common Program that formally sanctioned the organization of state power under the coalition.