The winter of 1946–47 proved pivotal to the civil war in China and the broader Cold War. As fighting intensified between Chiang and Mao’s forces, Washington and Moscow drifted toward greater involvement. Even as the Cold War took shape in Central Europe, fighting along the eastern reaches of Asia began to transform the superpower confrontation.
Frontline Nationalist soldiers in Manchuria battled the Communists and the bitter cold amid a landscape of frozen brown earth broken by the occasional grove of trees or earthen hut. At the village of Halahai, north of Changchun, troops huddled in an ancient moat and in trenches dug behind barbed wire. Enlisted men wore thick quilted coats, wrapped leggings, and canvas sneakers. Their breath hung in swirling clouds in the frosty air. GMD forces tied cotton blankets lined with dog fur to the hoods of their vehicles in an attempt to keep the motors from freezing. The fighting, one commander told American reporter Henry Lieberman, was “hit and run”: “We are having a difficult time holding them off. They have the initiative of attack. . . . They travel light, strike across country, and often come at night. They never try to stand up to us, but retire swiftly and content themselves mainly with railway and other demolitions.”1
It was a difficult type of war to describe. As Lieberman explained, “There are hundreds of thousands of troops in the field but no large-scale battles, and it is virtually impossible to draw lines on a military map.” While government troops garrisoned major cities, patrolled roads, and defended rail lines, Communist guerrillas stole through the countryside. From hidden bases, they launched raids against ramshackle government fortifications before retreating into the hinterland.2
With the Marshall Mission’s failure, Chiang and Mao prepared for all-out war. Mao’s forces now had the chance to test his theories of guerrilla revolution on a massive scale in the world’s most populous nation. The trickle of arms and support from Moscow had slowly increased while, at the same time, it appeared that Washington was unwilling to intervene in force on the Guomindang’s side. Likewise, Marshall’s inability to achieve a diplomatic solution hinted at the limits of American power in Asia. The United States might have had the world’s largest economy and a monopoly on atomic weapons, but its leaders could do little to change realities on the ground in China. As Mao and his commanders began racking up victories, they presented the superpowers with a fait accompli: whether Washington and Moscow liked it or not, the Cold War had entered the Third World. The time had come to choose sides.
THE FIRST STAGE: DEFENSIVE OPERATIONS AND GUERRILLA WAR
In the closing days of 1946, few signs of the war were apparent in the metropolises in the GMD-controlled areas south of the Great Wall. The American community in Beijing celebrated the Christmas holiday, one American journalist wrote, beneath the “clear, cold skies of winter in North China.” Streetcarts stacked with food steamed in the frigid air as shoppers shuffled past the windows of stores packed with wares. As expatriates celebrated inside the city, Communist forces used the cover of a thick snowstorm to attack a garrison at the town of Luchungstun, five miles north of the Beijing defensive perimeter. In Shanghai, a city of four million, pedestrians battled with swarms of street vendors, rickshaws, and money changers on the crowded sidewalks. Neon signs fed by intermittent currents of electricity lit the entrances of cabarets filled with Russian dancers. Smugglers ran a lucrative trade while the black market continued to thrive amid the chaotic financial scene.3
For the time being, Chiang still appeared to have the upper hand. The Nationalists fielded greater numbers of men and more firepower than their CCP counterparts and used both to crushing effect against Communist-controlled cities. Chiang’s strategy aimed at retaking Manchuria’s major cities and establishing control over the region’s rail lines. The surrounding countryside could be dealt with later. Recognizing that he was outgunned, Mao ordered his troops to retreat, abandoning all the major cities in Manchuria except for Harbin. As the Communists melted away before the GMD advance, Chiang and his commanders predicted a quick victory. In reality, Mao had concluded that his armies must assume a defensive posture in this first stage of the war. The Communists sought to avoid pitched battles, choosing to confront government troops only when they were assured of enveloping and destroying the forces they encountered. Mao insisted that his commanders must only engage government forces when the Communists enjoyed overwhelming superiority and were able to annihilate entire units. “When we wipe out one regiment,” he explained, “[the enemy] will have one regiment less. When we wipe out one brigade, he will have one brigade less. . . . Using this method we shall win. Acting counter to it we shall lose.” Government troops who surrendered, furthermore, were incorporated into the Communist armies. Following this strategy, the Communists would destroy some fifty Nationalist brigades in early 1947. In lieu of a set-piece battle with Chiang’s forces (which he knew he would lose), Mao pursued a punishing strategy of attrition. These tactics of envelopment, isolation, and annihilation were designed to create massive casualties and sap the enemy’s will to fight. They would prove brutally effective.4 U.S. officials noted that Mao’s forces enjoyed a number of advantages: “[T]hey have had long experience in guerilla warfare and have almost unlimited room in which to maneuver. Consequently, while they cannot risk a decisive engagement with the National Govt forces, the latter have never been able to fix the former into position and administer an annihilating blow.”5
Indeed, late 1946 marked the high tide of Nationalist power in Manchuria. Despite its victories on paper, the GMD was unable to dislodge the CCP from Northeast China. All the while, Chiang’s army was forced to maintain a costly occupation of Manchurian cities under increasingly complacent commanders who avoided risky operations. Rank-and-file soldiers fell into the “fleshpots of the cities” while their officers speculated on the local commodity markets. Communist cadres, meanwhile, continued a guerrilla campaign and propaganda operations that targeted government forces. Any illusions that the government had control of the situation were shattered in the first half of 1947 when Communist general Lin Biao launched a series of five offensives across the Songhua River. Lin’s goals were to present a credible challenge to the government presence in Manchuria and to capture Nationalist weapons and supplies. With 400,000 troops, Lin struck at government-held territory, capturing dozens of towns before laying siege to the city of Siping. There, GMD forces halted the Communist offensive, inflicting some 40,000 casualties, but the campaign had accomplished its strategic objectives. The Communists claimed to have seized large stores of government arms and supplies, annihilated some 82,000 government troops, and liberated nearly half of Nationalist-held Manchuria along with the 10 million people who lived in it. Most important, wrote historian Steven Levine, the campaign “demonstrated that the strategic initiative [in Manchuria] now lay with the” Communists.6
As the slaughter in Manchuria intensified, the Marshall Mission teetered on the brink of collapse. The American diplomat was exasperated with what he viewed as Chiang’s insistence on seeking military victory against the CCP and his refusal to enact political and economic reforms in his own regime. Marshall was convinced, first, that the Communists could not be defeated through military force and, second, that corruption and political rot were eating away at the GMD regime from within. Chiang had decided, Marshall complained in a message to President Truman, “in the midst of a deplorable currency and financial situation, [to use his] capital resources for the conduct of the present fighting” against the CCP.7 Chiang’s campaign in Manchuria was threatening to bankrupt his government. Marshall warned the Generalissimo that hostilities in Manchuria would quickly spread to the rest of the country, opening the door to Soviet-backed Communist subversion throughout China. The Nationalist regime, Marshall explained in August 1946, “had little, if any, prospect of gain by pursuing hostilities at the present time and a very definite prospect of a great loss with the possible collapse of the government and the almost certain collapse of its economy.” The Manchurian campaign would draw the GMD into a prolonged war with an experienced guerrilla army and stretch Nationalist lines of supply and communication over untenable distances. Marshall insisted that a military confrontation with the CCP under these circumstances was “ruinous.” The only other option was for Chiang to “swallow the Communist Party—which was too large and powerful to ignore.”8
Ultimately, Marshall worried that American aid served to encourage Chiang’s disastrous course of action and discourage the leader from making necessary political changes. The regime was still marked by corruption and inefficiency. Ambassador John Leighton Stuart noted:
Perhaps the most serious feature is what is usually spoken of as the widespread corruption and inefficiency of the Government. This is even worse than the references in print which have come to my notice. It includes misrule, exploitation, graft, favoritism, incompetence and callous indifference to the welfare of the masses. There is also much ruthless and irresponsible repression, savoring strongly of fascist methods, and inspiring fear and resentment quite generally among intellectuals. The great majority of those in positions of authority are military rather than civilian officials.9
A CIVILIAN ADVISOR, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY’S NATHANIEL Peffer, warned the U.S. ambassador to China that “the United States is causing civil war, since without U.S. assistance, the Government could not continue its military operations.” Continued aid to the GMD, he argued, was the equivalent of “[p]umping blood into a corpse.”10 Worse still, the continued American presence in China might provoke Stalin to increase Soviet influence in the region, risking a superpower proxy war in East Asia. For all these reasons, Marshall concluded that U.S. involvement in China should be reduced. This view was not universal in the U.S. government, however. Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal disagreed with Marshall’s assessment, insisting that Moscow still had designs on the region. The U.S. Army concurred, predicting that an American withdrawal would allow the region and its industrial potential to fall under the influence of the USSR. “The United States and the world might then be faced . . . with a Soviet power analogous to that of the Japanese in 1941, but with the difference that the Soviets could be perhaps overwhelmingly strong in Europe and the Middle East as well.” Meanwhile, State Department officials echoed Marshall’s assessment. If American aid could be used as a lever to induce Chiang to reform his government, the risk of pushing the CCP into Stalin’s arms would diminish. What was needed in China, they argued, was not a military approach, which risked provoking Soviet intervention and was not likely to work, in any case, but a flexible political program that would address the roots of the CCP-GMD dispute.11
Yet Chiang rejected this advice. Relations between Marshall and the Generalissimo continued to deteriorate as the Nationalist offensive dragged into autumn. Marshall remained focused on brokering a political settlement and was deeply skeptical of the idea that the GMD could defeat the CCP with military force. Conversely, Chiang was bolstered by a string of Nationalist victories in Manchuria and adamant that Mao and the Communists would never accept a political settlement that left the GMD in control. In early October, a furious Marshall threatened to return to the United States as Chiang continued his campaign in the north. The Generalissimo received further encouragement in November, when midterm elections in the United States returned control of Congress to the Republican Party, which the Generalissimo expected to be more sympathetic to his Nationalist government. Marshall continued to press Chiang for reforms, however, warning that the GMD could not expect Washington to continue “to pour money into the vacuum being created by the military leaders in their determination to settle matters by force.” The Nationalists would bankrupt themselves long before they defeated the Communists, he warned the stubborn Generalissimo. Chiang shrugged off the warning, however, insisting that military force was the only solution to the struggle with the CCP. On January 7, 1947, the White House announced that General Marshall would be returning to the United States. Diplomacy had failed.12
Immediately following his departure, Marshall (who would become secretary of state on January 21, 1947) published a statement insisting that the “greatest obstacle to peace has been the complete, almost overwhelming suspicion with which [the CCP and GMD] regard each other.” While each party contained honorable members with genuine interest in China’s future, both were overrun with extremists. “On the side of the National Government,” Marshall said, “which is in effect the Kuomintang, there is a dominant group of reactionaries who have been opposed, in my opinion, to almost every effort I have made to influence the formation of a genuine coalition government.” The Communists, for their part, had undermined negotiations through the dissemination of “vicious” propaganda that, beyond being entirely false, held “a determined purpose to mislead the Chinese people and the world and to arouse a bitter hatred of the Americans.” Both sides had refused to make genuine political concessions. The GMD, intent on “their own feudal control of China” and dominated by the military, was utterly resistant to reform and seemingly convinced that American aid would continue “regardless of their actions.” On the other hand, the Communists were now “counting on an economic collapse to bring about the fall of the Government, accelerated by extensive guerilla action . . . regardless of the cost in suffering to the Chinese people.” The government’s only hope for salvation, Marshall concluded, lay in the adoption of political reforms and the shift away from one-party rule. Marshall’s condemnation of both sides hinted at the hopelessness of the situation in China and the general’s doubt as to whether any amount of American support could influence the ultimate outcome.13
The final collapse of Marshall’s negotiations came as no surprise to Communist leaders. Responding to Marshall’s statement on January 10, Zhou Enlai delivered an address on Yan’an radio, explaining that the American diplomat “admitted that there is a reactionary group in the Kuomintang which constitutes a dominant one in the Kuomintang government. . . . They oppose a coalition government, have no confidence in internal cooperation, but believe in the settlement of problems by armed force.” Zhou added, however, that it was Chiang himself who sat at the head of this reactionary clique and was intent on waging full-scale war against his challengers from the CCP. Meanwhile, the CCP’s information chief, Lu Ting-yi, published a memorandum in Yan’an’s Emancipation Daily laying out the Communist view of the postwar international system. Citing Mao, Lu explained that the great war against fascism (World War II) had been won, but he pointed to a coming clash between the democratic, antifascist peoples of the world and the antidemocratic forces and remnants of fascism. While the USSR fought on the side of the democratic forces, “the American imperialists took the place of the Fascist Germany, Italy and Japan [following World War II] becoming a fortress of the world reactionary forces.” Allied with China’s Chiang Kai-shek, Britain’s Winston Churchill, and France’s Charles de Gaulle, the United States was intent on “enslaving the American people and [seeking] world domination.” The democratic forces of the world should take heart, however, as the “international position of the most progressive nation in the world, the U.S.S.R. has greatly improved.” “It can be categorically predicted,” Lu concluded, “that within three to five years at the most, the face of China and the world will be completely changed.”14
On the global stage, it was clear that the wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union had come unraveled. An atmosphere of mutual suspicion now pervaded superpower relations as diplomats such as George Kennan and Soviet ambassador to the United States Nikolai Novikov warned of a coming rivalry between Washington and Moscow. In light of the emerging Cold War, the struggle for China took on a new importance. If Truman’s containment strategy was to be a global doctrine, the China theater would be critical. The soon-to-be-created Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) would warn that Soviet moves in China were in keeping with their larger strategy of extending “control and influence . . . wherever and whenever possible by all means short of war, and [reducing] the control and influence of other major powers.” Chinese victories in Manchuria brought resources, industries, and a “vital strategic link with Korea” into the Soviet orbit. The CCP represented “the most effective instrument of Soviet policy toward China.” As long as the civil war continued, the CCP would remain aligned with Moscow. Therefore, ongoing civil war and instability ultimately favored Soviet policy in East Asia.15 Stalin and his comrades in Moscow had indeed come to recognize the potential importance of the CCP. In June, Stalin, writing under the pseudonym “Fyodor Kuznetsov” (a former Red Army commander), had written to the Kremlin’s agent in Yan’an with instructions to arrange a meeting with Mao. Stalin offered to send a plane to Harbin to bring the Chinese leader to Moscow.16
All but the most hopeful parties now recognized that diplomacy had failed; the struggle for China would be settled on the battlefield. In Manchuria, Lin Biao’s army continued its campaign against the GMD, and even Chiang was becoming aware of the dangers of a protracted war against the Communists. Eager to deal a decisive blow to his adversaries, the Generalissimo signed off on a plan to attack the Communist capital itself at Yan’an. In March 1947, Gen. Hu Zongnan was given 150,000 men and 75 aircraft and charged with taking the enemy capital. By March 16, government troops were close enough to observe the panic in the city through binoculars. With the GMD army closing in, the CCP was forced to abandon its capital. On May 19, Hu took the city along with 10,000 prisoners. Back in Nanjing, Chiang celebrated the news, predicting that the fall of Yan’an signaled the beginning of the end of the war with the Communists. In fact, the apparent defeat of the CCP was far from decisive. General Hu’s personal secretary, a Communist spy, had informed the CCP of the government offensive, giving Mao time to prepare. Although he was reluctant to abandon Yan’an, Mao refused to divert forces from the campaign in northern China to defend it. As Chiang and Hu finalized their preparations for the attack, the Communists began their evacuation. The party leadership retreated from Yan’an, moving to the north and east and regrouping in the village of Zaolin’gou, in Shaanxi. With Hu in pursuit of the Communist leadership, Mao launched a counteroffensive consisting of guerrilla attacks, ambushes, and strategic retreats designed to isolate and destroy sections of the Nationalist army. As an American reporter wrote, “Yanan was worse than worthless to the [GMD]. It sucked one of their crack army groups into a desolate, semidesert country where there were no rations, ammunition, or supplies to replenish their stocks, and where the people were bitterly hostile.” This cat-and-mouse game pulled GMD forces deeper into Communist-controlled territory and served as a further drain on government resources.17
Indeed, Chiang’s triumph in capturing Yan’an proved to be a Pyrrhic victory. Even as the government hurled its best troops at the abandoned CCP capital, the Communists continued their defense of Manchuria, which was developing into a “strategic trap” for government troops as Chiang poured divisions into the region. Communist forces staged a series of feints that drew the Nationalist armies deeper into Manchuria, stretching out tenuous lines of supply and draining Nanjing’s reserves. Relying on guerrilla tactics and spurning large engagements, Communist commanders followed a strategy designed to bleed the numerically superior government forces slowly through attrition. “The capture of the town of Houma,” noted a French observer, “cost the Reds two hundred killed and wounded, but brought them eighteen hundred prisoners, including a brigadier general. The capture of the town of Sinkiang cost them four wounded, and they took six hundred prisoners from the seven hundred militia who tried to defend the place. The capture of Kuwo, defended by two Nationalist regiments and attacked by three Red regiments, yielded the Communists two thousand prisoners—the entire garrison.”
While the Communists enjoyed high morale and were able to launch coordinated, well-executed attacks, the “lack of fighting spirit shown by the common [government] soldier demonstrates the degree to which the Nationalist army has disintegrated.” Thereafter, the prisoners that the Communists took were given “indoctrination and political instruction” and incorporated, along with captured weapons, into the CCP armies. As a result, the ongoing attacks against government forces in North China became “paying propositions” for the Communists. Mao’s strategy was working, depleting the Nationalist armies and increasing the numerical and material strength of CCP forces.18
THE SECOND STAGE: LIMITED COUNTEROFFENSIVE
By mid-1947, Mao and his generals were ready to abandon the defensive stage of the war, which had relied on strategic retreat and guerrilla operations, and to launch a new phase of limited offensives in the struggle against the GMD. That summer, Mao sent his general Liu Bocheng to stage an offensive against Nationalist forces in the Central Plains, a region stretching from Hebai, across the Yellow River, to the ocean at Shandong. In the spring of 1947, the GMD, working with American engineers, had redirected the flow of the Yellow River into a new bed, flooding some five hundred villages and forcing over one hundred thousand people to relocate. While the diversion of the river was a technical success, it multiplied the hardships of the already suffering population, sowing the seeds for widespread unrest. Communist forces discovered just how soft GMD positions were in the area during a series of attacks in the spring that led Mao to decide that the Central Plains represented the “underbelly” of the government’s position. Liu’s army would cross the river with the objective of surprising government forces and inflicting as many casualties as possible. After the crossing, Communist forces found a peasantry that was eager to support the assault against the GMD. With the help of thousands of locals, Liu’s troops cut into Chiang’s Second and Fourth Armies, killing nearly eighty thousand. As panic swept through the Nationalist forces, Liu’s troops continued their assault, turning the Central Plains into a bloodbath before staging a retreat in which they were forced to abandon many of their heavy weapons. Nevertheless, in late July, Mao heralded the campaign as the turning point of the war and announced that Chiang would be defeated in the space of five years.19
Meanwhile, in Manchuria, Lin Biao launched two major offensives against the Nationalist-controlled cities of Changchun, Kirin, and Shenyang. Lin’s strategy aimed at isolating the cities and cutting off the GMD garrisons. After conducting sustained sabotage operations against the railway that connected Beijing and Shenyang, which served as the lifeline for Nationalist troops in much of Northeast China, Lin’s troops captured the line, severing the GMD’s supply chain in September. Communist armies continued their offensive through October, surrounding Changchun, Kirin, and Shenyang and besieging the government forces within. The Nationalists were able to reestablish a supply route to Shenyang and Kirin, but Communist generals now held the initiative. As 1947 came to an end, the CCP’s growth, coupled with and fed by the attrition of the GMD’s armies, was fast erasing the government’s numerical and material advantages. On the heels of these successful campaigns in Manchuria and the Central Plains, the Communists stood poised to stage a new round of offensives against the GMD regime. Some U.S. officials still held out hope, however, even if it meant downplaying the threat. “[F]rom [a] purely military viewpoint at least,” the vice consul at Changchun reported, Mao’s forces were “still essentially guerrillas.”20
Even as the military tide began to turn through the second half of 1947, the GMD regime found itself beset by deteriorating economic conditions. Since the end of World War II, Chiang’s government had been battling a mounting economic crisis. The GMD badly mismanaged the transition from the economic situation during World War II, in which much of the country sat under Japanese occupation and the control of puppet businesses, to the post-1945 system. Shortages in currency prompted Chiang’s government to begin printing more money, which touched off a dramatic rise in inflation. By early 1947, wholesale prices in Shanghai had risen thirtyfold. Further, unemployment was on the rise throughout the country. This dangerous economic situation, in turn, generated labor unrest in the form of more than 1,700 strikes in 1946 alone. The presence of Communist infiltrators in many labor organizations exacerbated the GMD’s problems. Chiang’s determination to continue his military campaigns in Manchuria sapped GMD resources and shifted the regime’s attention away from addressing its worsening economic situation at home.21
In late 1947, American and GMD leaders confronted a series of setbacks that had taken place over the previous year. Communist forces had taken the offensive in Manchuria, and government control of the key cities of Changchun, Kirin, and Shenyang was in jeopardy. Ambassador Stuart warned that CCP divisions appeared to be in a position to “take either [Changchun or Kirin] at will.” The Communists threatened to cut off Shenyang and Changchun, leaving the garrisons there with no more than six months of supplies. The civilian population of Shenyang had a month’s supply of food, by the most optimistic estimates: reports of starvation among the population had already started to surface. American diplomats and GMD commanders concluded that the most recent Communist offensive had been a complete success. The CCP had cut strategic communications and transportation links between Shenyang, Changchun, and Kirin and seized government supplies. Government commanders concluded that the “Communists have permanently established themselves” south of the Songhua River and were now gearing up for a seventh offensive. The GMD admitted to some twenty-eight thousand casualties in the latest offensive, but American observers warned that this was a low estimate. At the same time, supply shortages undermined the effectiveness of government troops that remained in Manchuria. The CCP was in a strategically stronger position heading into 1948, having consolidated control over 95 percent of Northeast China.22
In mid-December, Lin Biao sent his troops across the frozen Sungari River to attack Chiang’s Fifth Army south of Shenyang. Hampered by a shortage of supplies and ammunition, government forces were pushed to the breaking point. On Christmas Day 1947, Mao forecast the imminent collapse of Chiang’s regime, “America’s running dog,” and announced that the strength of “the world anti-imperialist camp had now surpassed that of the imperialist camp.” The Communist leader outlined his strategy of revolution, including a program of agrarian reform that aimed to give China’s peasants a stake in the revolution and establish state control over the economy. On the battlefield, Mao called again for a phased struggle that would build strength over time. The revolutionaries must engage government forces only when they are assured of victory, fighting a “war of movement” that used tactical retreats to avoid battles of attrition and aimed to secure weapons and supplies from enemy forces. At the same time, Mao lashed out at “American imperialism” and its support for Chiang’s regime and called for solidarity with the forces of global communism. “[A]ll anti-imperialist forces of the various Eastern countries should also unite,” Mao insisted, “taking as the objective of their struggle the liberation of the more than 1,000,000,000 oppressed people of the East.” Chiang’s generals responded with their own announcement that the Manchurian crisis was now over, ignoring the fact that the Nationalists controlled no more than 3 percent of Northeast China.23
While CCP and GMD leaders hurled rhetorical attacks at one another, the Communists’ Winter Campaign continued. Communist forces had surrounded Changchun and were on the verge of encircling Shenyang, further straining government efforts to supply its garrisons. Nationalist troops in Shenyang braced themselves for a frontal assault as Communist forces fought their way into the western suburbs of the city. The defenders had raised brick-and-concrete pillboxes, created ice redoubts, and set up barbed-wire barricades in preparation for a vicious battle on the city streets. The government garrison was on the brink of being cut off, and the situation, according to military analysts, “was rapidly approaching the hopeless stage.”24
Meanwhile, civil and labor unrest gripped the country. “The people are losing confidence everywhere,” Chiang wrote. The Far Eastern Economic Review marveled at the growing support for the CCP. Even businessmen, the magazine noted, “feel now that life under the relatively honest totalitarianism of the Communists could not be worse than it is under the corrupt inefficiency of the Kuomintang.” Over $400 million in promised aid from the United States was approved too late to reverse the tide of the war in Manchuria, and the CCP’s military offensive continued. By March 1948, the government controlled less than 1 percent of Manchuria. The government’s “military position [is] gravely critical,” U.S. ambassador John Leighton Stuart explained, “with general military collapse in [the] north becoming increasingly possible.” Kirin and Ssupinkai had fallen; Shenyang and Tsinan were threatened; the losses of Luoyang and Xi’an were likely; Shanxi faced famine. Chiang had virtually no reserves. “In most areas material shortages further weaken Government capabilities. . . . Troop attrition proceeds at rapid rate.” New recruits, when available, arrived “virtually untrained.” Perhaps worse of all, Stuart warned, the “present Government leadership has apparently no overall plan to organize and commit its few remaining resources in any effective manner.” Having lost their faith in an American rescue, a growing number of GMD leaders were coming to see the loss of the civil war as “probably inevitable.” In short, the ambassador concluded, the “deterioration of the Government’s military position is accelerating and . . . the time when any assistance can be effective is rapidly running out.”25
Meanwhile, over the winter and spring of 1948, Communist forces continued their offensive, retaking Yan’an in April. The following month, Mao predicted victory by mid-1951. CCP troops enjoyed considerable advantages on the battlefield. In one battle after another, GMD units proved inferior to their Communist counterparts. “Our troops . . . became soft and concerned only with pleasure,” one government commander lamented. “[They] lacked combat spirit and there was no willingness to sacrifice.” American military officials blamed the incompetence of the officer corps. Moreover, while a brutally efficient counterintelligence operation kept GMD spies out of Communist units, CCP spies were able to penetrate much of the Nationalist leadership. Nationalist morale continued to deteriorate, and the government began forcing men into service. Many conscripts died of disease or starvation before ever reaching their units. Desertion was rampant.26
Mao had already begun planning for a new, postrevolutionary China. The previous November, the guerrilla leader sent a message to Moscow asking advice for how to handle opposition parties after the CCP’s victory. That it took nearly six months for the Kremlin to reply was perhaps an indication of Stalin’s continuing reluctance to commit to the Chinese revolutionaries. Though he applauded Mao’s zeal, Stalin encouraged him to allow opposition groups to remain as representatives of the “middle strata of the Chinese population,” provided that they opposed the GMD. But Moscow was now moving toward more substantial support for the CCP. In May, Soviet military commanders ordered their officers to begin drawing up a list of supplies needed by the People’s Liberation Army. “It is clear,” they explained, “that without the extensive material assistance of America, the resistance against those who fight for the real liberation of China would have already been compelled to cease long ago.” Moreover, “the success of the Chinese reactionaries would greatly enhance the position of American imperialists in East Asia.” Soviet leaders had decided to increase assistance to CCP forces, sending armor, motorized artillery, and Chinese crews trained in the USSR. “To us,” the message concluded, “China is an old neighbor, with whom we wish to maintain friendly relations, but to the Americans, it is a base for advancing opposition to the Soviet Union.” The time had come to “give to the Chinese people the feeling that after thousands of years of unscrupulous exploitation and slavery, a new era has come to them and their destiny is now at last in their own hands.”27
Not all those who experienced liberation found cause to rejoice. As the Communist offensive swept into the cities, it took a horrific toll on the civilians caught inside. In May, the PLA began a five-month siege of Changchun designed, in Lin’s words, to “[t]urn Changchun into a city of death.” The Communist strategy displayed the full brutality of the civil war: aware that Changchun’s defenders had only enough food to last through July, Lin blocked civilians from evacuating the city. Lin’s troops planned, in the words of two historians, to “starve the city into surrender.” Sentries were ordered to turn refugees back into the starving city. By late summer, Lin reported that a “grave famine” had broken out. “The civilian inhabitants are mainly living on tree leaves and grass, many have died of starvation.” Refugees who managed to escape the CCP’s “starvation blockade” gave macabre descriptions of the situation. Bodies littered the streets of the once-beautiful capital. Trees were torn down and houses pulled apart as survivors scoured the city for any remaining sources of firewood. The going price for a pound of millet had topped fifty dollars. By the time Changchun finally fell in October, the city’s population “had dropped from half a million to 170,000.” According to one Communist general, these siege tactics were used on other GMD-held cities as well. The war for China had begun to shift from the countryside to the cities.28
STAGE THREE: FINAL OFFENSIVE
In the fall of 1948, Mao and his commanders decided that the time had come to launch the third and final stage of their revolutionary war, a full offensive against government forces. This would take the form of two major thrusts, the Liaoshen and Huaihai campaigns. The Liaoshen campaign began in September, when Lin Biao sent some 700,000 troops to attack the approximately 450,000 government troops in the Manchurian cities of Jinzhou, Shenyang, and Changchun. Rail lines to the Nationalist garrisons had been cut off by CCP attacks, and Nanjing was forced to airlift supplies to the nearly half a million government forces inside the three cities. Communist leaders hoped the campaign would deal a decisive blow to Chiang’s attempt to retake Manchuria.29
Dire reports flowed in from the U.S. consulates in Northeast China. Officers in Beijing warned that the GMD’s position in the area was “untenable.” Changchun was about to fall. “It is already well past [the] eleventh hour in North China. But if North China stands at this date on [the] brink of disaster it is due in large part to Nanking’s consistent selfish suspicious neglect in [the] past.”30 The following day, officers in Shenyang reported “[b]ewilderment and slight hysteria” in the wake of the fall of Jinzhou and Changchun. The population believed that the “end [of] Government tenure [in] China [was] rapidly approaching, if not already in sight.”31 Ambassador Stuart warned that Manchuria was on the brink of falling to the Communists. Government forces lost twenty-six divisions with the fall of Jinzhou and Changchun. “Together with [government] losses suffered south of [the] Great Wall since [the] People’s Liberation Army launched its autumn offensive, [GMD] losses to date total 450,000 or almost half [a] million men.” The Communists now had almost total command of Manchuria.32
The rapid collapse of Chiang’s forces in Manchuria convinced Mao and his generals to gamble and extend their offensive in a bid to seize all of China north of the Yangtze River and destroy the Nationalist armies they encountered. The result would be the Huaihai campaign, the largest military operation since the end of World War II. At its height, Huaihai involved nearly two million soldiers spread across a twelve-hundred-mile front line. Much of the fighting would focus on the city of Xuzhou, which Chiang had transformed into a regional headquarters. After the Communist successes in September and October, Xuzhou stood exposed as a salient jutting north into CCP-controlled territory. One American journalist described the city: “We found [Xuzhou], an ugly old market town of rutted roads and dilapidated two-story buildings, overrun with refugees, the hospitals jammed with untended wounded, the airfield crowded with panicky civilians battling each other and attempting to bribe their way into the outgoing transports which had brought in supplies.”
The city formed the “pivot” upon which “the fate of Nanking and Shanghai would turn.” Mao and his generals chose to send units commanded by Deng Xiaoping south of the city, cutting off the Nationalist line of retreat from Xuzhou. Chiang’s commander in Xuzhou recognized this danger and suggested an attack against Deng’s smaller force in the south, but the Generalissimo refused, insisting on an assault against the CCP’s main forces to the north. By mid-November, Deng’s operation was successful: the massive GMD garrison in Xuzhou was isolated. The CCP’s news agency announced that the balance of military forces in China had tilted: “The PLA, long superior in quality, has become superior in numbers as well. This is a sign that the victory of the Chinese revolution and the realization of peace in China are at hand.” Communist commanders used their troops to encircle and isolate government units. Once they had cut off a body of GMD troops, the Communists launched a wave of poorly trained militiamen against their foes. After this first wave had taken the brunt of the GMD’s defensive fire, a second wave of seasoned regular soldiers attacked their lines.33
As the fighting drew closer, despair gripped Nanjing. The government’s desperate attempts to regain control of the economy by setting price controls sparked massive buying sprees followed by a precipitous drop in purchases. In the space of a month, shopkeepers had gone from hiding their goods to complaining about the lack of customers. Meanwhile, the more affluent citizens of the capital prepared to evacuate to havens in Hong Kong and Shanghai in the likely event of a Communist victory in the war. A second exodus of foreign nationals had created a glut in the housing market. An American correspondent described the mood in Nanjing as “eerie.” Power blackouts were commonplace. Policemen with fixed bayonets patrolled the streets, enforcing martial law and a government curfew of 11:00 p.m. Most residents were headed for home by the time the sun began to set at 5:30 p.m. Indeed, the only apparent scenes of activity were the cinemas, which remained crowded with Chinese eager to escape the tumultuous reality that surrounded them.34
Government troops in Beijing also braced for a Communist assault. As the sound of mortar fire rumbled in the distance, GMD soldiers prepared defensive lines on the outskirts of the encircled city. Demolition crews razed shops along the approaches to the city to prevent them from falling into enemy hands. Meanwhile, Nationalist officers stopped groups of refugees outside the city gates to search their ranks for CCP infiltrators. Inside the city walls, life ground to a halt. Along with electricity cutoffs, an 8:00 p.m. curfew cleared the darkened streets. Beijing’s grand hotels stood mostly empty, and trolley service had been suspended. Still, residents could be grateful that supplies of food remained plentiful and water still ran through the taps.35
In a cable to Stalin written at the end of 1948, a confident Mao reported impressive gains. The CCP commanded some 900,000 soldiers along with 400,000 support personnel in a massive campaign aimed at encircling 33 GMD divisions and taking control of Beijing, Tianjin, and the Tanggu seaport. From there, Communist forces would be in a position to launch a full-scale assault on Chiang’s strongholds in the south. Nationalist rule was crumbling, he wrote, as the masses defected to the Communists. Meanwhile, he told Stalin, the “blatantly aggressive policy of the US government has already bankrupted itself.” In light of these successes, Mao predicted victory within three and a half years. His assessment would prove too pessimistic.36 By the end of January 1949, the CCP controlled an area with a population of 210 million people in comparison with the 260 million in GMD-controlled territory. Mao’s armies comprised some 2.2 million soldiers—twice as many as the GMD. As he told a Soviet official in January 1949, “the military stage of the Chinese Revolution must be considered complete.” Despite reaching the brink of victory in a twenty-year struggle, Mao remained humble—at least when speaking to the Kremlin’s representatives. Nevertheless, Soviet officials had come to see the value of the CCP’s contributions. “The Chinese Revolution has its own road,” they explained, “which gives to it the look of an anti-imperialist revolution.” The Chinese Revolution, they concluded, was sure to carry “a theoretical value for the revolutionary movement of the countries of Asia.”37
Mao now turned his attention to attacking the GMD’s Twelfth Army, which was marching north in a bid to reestablish links with the besieged garrison in Xuzhou. CCP forces laid a trap for the Nationalists along the banks of the Huai River and managed to corner the GMD force between the river and the hills to the north and east. GMD commanders now realized the impending danger of their situation and ordered their forces to stage a retreat. Nationalist troops pulled out of the city before dawn on December 1, 1948. On December 15, after fierce fighting, the PLA forced the surrender of the Twelfth Army, eliminating a force of 120,000 Nationalist soldiers. On January 6, 1949, CCP commanders began their final assault on the Xuzhou garrison, forcing the surrender of some 200,000 government troops four days later. The decisive Communist victory in the Huaihai campaign arrived with startling speed. Mao and his commanders were “overjoyed,” but they now faced the dual challenge of ruling over the massive territory they had conquered and moving their revolution from its origins in the countryside to its future in the cities.38
As news of the defeats in the northeast made its way to Chiang in Nanjing, the Generalissimo came to realize the scale of the disaster he now faced. “Reports of lost battles swirl in like falling snow,” he lamented. “North China and the below-the-wall region are on the brink of collapse.” Chiang now began to consider two drastic actions: moving his government from Nanjing to Taiwan and tendering his own resignation. There was little standing between Mao’s forces and Chiang’s capital. The island of Taiwan, some 112 miles off the coast of mainland China, would be Chiang’s final fortress. His last resort, politically, would be his resignation. By stepping down, Chiang wrote, he might be able to “shake up the inept party, military, and government machines; break up the stalemate in politics, and be ready to regroup for a new start from zero.” The first weeks of 1949 witnessed the growing exodus of Nationalist resources and officials from China’s ports. “Government officials, merchants, businessmen, and their families crowded aboard freighters, ferries, tugboats, and any other type of vessel available for the trip across the Taiwan Strait,” explained one of Chiang’s biographers. “Huge army units with their weapons crowded the docks as well.”39
Even as Mao’s commanders delivered a crushing blow to Chiang’s armies with the Huaihai campaign, Lin Biao continued his offensive in the north. The last pocket of Nationalist control to the north of the Yangtze consisted of the great cities of Tianjin and Beijing, held by Gen. Fu Zuoyi and some of the best remaining GMD forces. Both Fu and Lin recognized that, following the crushing government defeat to the south, the fall of the two cities was inevitable. The Communists had no desire to destroy the industrial infrastructure of the two cities, and Fu was reluctant to subject the ancient capital of Beijing to the ravages of battle. Fu therefore began negotiations with the CCP for an honorable surrender. On January 15, 1949, Tianjin fell to Communist forces. Six days later, Fu accepted a “compromise” with Lin that gave Beijing to the Communists virtually untouched. Fu’s army was incorporated into the PLA, and the general himself became a CCP commander.40 In Nanjing, Ambassador Stuart reported that Communist forces could likely take that city in a week, if they chose to do so. The Communists were on the verge of moving south, and it appeared as if nothing could stop them, Stuart explained.41
With the Communists in firm control of the North China Plain, Chiang had few cards left to play. He could try to maintain a regime in southern China, using the Yangtze as a line of northern defense; he could retreat to the southwest and stage a resistance against Mao’s regime; or he could flee to Taiwan. Although the Generalissimo issued valiant proclamations about his decision to defend Nanjing, the regime’s flight to Taiwan was already well under way. Since the end of World War II, the GMD had been consolidating control over the former colony. Beginning in February 1947, in response to anti-GMD riots, Chiang’s forces staged a brutal crackdown on Taiwanese protestors, purging the island of thousands of intellectuals and community leaders. By the beginning of 1949, Chiang had transformed the island into his last redoubt. Meanwhile, the mainland had been ravaged by war. Henry Lieberman described a landscape of utter devastation: “Smoking villages, pounded by artillery, with primitive mud-and-thatch houses deserted and fields untilled. The dead uniformed illiterates on the battlefields of Kiangsu, Anhwei and Honan, whose twisted corpses left one wondering whether they knew what they had been fighting for. The wounded, crawling and hobbling back to their lines, lying uncared for in long rows on the cold bare floors of schoolhouses commandeered by the army, or begging in the streets of Tientsin and Shanghai.”
After regrouping in the north, the CCP began a series of strained negotiations with Chiang’s short-lived presidential successor, Li Zongren. Chiang had resigned the presidency on January 1, 1949. On April 15, the Communists gave Li a list of ultimatums; five days later, he rejected them, and Mao’s commanders prepared to resume their drive toward the Nationalist capital.42
The greatest remaining obstacle to Communist forces was the Yangtze River, a nearly four-thousand-mile-long waterway that drained one-fifth of China’s total landmass. Mao’s troops held the northern banks. On the southern banks sat Chiang’s capital of Nanjing. On April 20, Mao ordered his armies to cross the river and take the city. Communist troops, wrote an American reporter, “jammed aboard thousands of junks, sampans and motor launches,” breached the Yangtze line along a front that was 325 miles long. The nearly 325,000 Nationalist soldiers in the area put up a token resistance, but CCP commanders accomplished the crossing with minimal losses. Western journalists in Nanjing awoke to the sound of gunfire on the morning of April 23. The Nationalist garrison had abandoned Nanjing. The city’s northern gates stood open and unguarded as looters swept through the GMD’s capital. City policemen stripped off their uniforms and melted into the crowds, sparking chaos on the streets. As local leaders scrambled to restore order until authority could be handed off to the Communists, fires set by retreating Nationalist troops burned in ruined buildings. Explosions shook the shoreline of the Yangtze as GMD commanders destroyed ammunition and fuel dumps. Meanwhile, the last remaining Nationalist officials scrambled to board planes bound for Shanghai, with valuables, luxury furniture, and even a piano in tow. The U.S. ambassador complained that the “[r]idiculously easy Communist crossing of [the] Yangtze [had been] made possible by defections at key points, disagreements in High Command and [the] failure [of the] airforce [to] give effective support.”43
The PLA offensive continued, taking Hangzhou on May 3 and closing in on the commercial metropolis of Shanghai. Chiang’s commanders in Shanghai announced their intention to turn the city into “a second Stalingrad,” digging ditches and erecting a ten-foot-high palisade. Demolition teams leveled a half-mile strip of territory in Shahghai’s suburbs containing “some of the finest estates in China,” according to an American journalist. The Nationalists, in their effort to create a “Maginot Line” of fortifications, razed pagodas, mansions, greenhouses, bridges, and gardens along with peasant villages. Still, the majority of Nationalist units in the city were more concerned with evacuation than resistance. On May 25, the CCP marched into Shanghai, seizing more than a hundred thousand prisoners. Nationalist defensive positions at police stations and pillboxes put up white flags. As red flashes spread across the night sky—the result of gasoline fires raging at the abandoned airport—workers at the American consulate watched the last skirmishes along the banks of Suzhou Creek. In the roughly four weeks since crossing the Yangtze, the PLA had captured a combined territory larger than the total area of France.44
Three weeks later, Mao cabled Stalin to report the military progress of his forces. In three years of fighting, he boasted, the PLA had killed “5 million 590 thousand people.” Mao estimated that no more than 500,000 GMD forces remained. “These are insignificant remnants of the Guomindang forces,” he wrote. “It will not take too much time to destroy them.”45 CIA officials more or less agreed. A report written in April 1949 warned that Moscow was seeking to bring China into the Soviet orbit as part of its quest for “world domination.” The Kremlin, the report continued, hoped to use “China as an advance base to facilitate Soviet penetration of Southeast Asia . . . the outflanking of India-Pakistan and the strategically important areas of the Middle and Near East; and eventually control of the entire Asiatic continent and Western Pacific.”46
The Nationalist defenses had collapsed. With government forces fleeing to the southwest and to Chiang’s Taiwan base, Mao and the Communists faced four new challenges. The first concerned the task of moving what had been a primarily rural revolution into China’s great cities. Mao and his commanders feared that their troops might be corrupted in this new urban environment, facing an array of new, insidious dangers. The CCP leadership also worried that U.S. intervention in the war might be imminent: the crossing of the Yangtze, the fall of Shanghai, and the collapse of GMD power might push American leaders into the fray in a last-ditch effort to “save” China from the Communists. Furthermore, Mao was convinced that he could not simply abandon the southern and western reaches of the country to the remnants of Chiang’s regime. Doing so raised the risk of Chiang or other Nationalists creating independent regimes on China’s periphery, which would represent a constant threat to Mao’s revolution. The hunt for Chiang’s forces would not be bloodless, however. In June, a CCP expedition to Shaanxi was nearly annihilated, losing fifteen thousand soldiers. Finally, a final assault on Chiang’s fortress of Taiwan (which was compounded by the CCP’s failure to take the island of Quemoy in 1949) presented a daunting challenge for Mao and the PLA. Nevertheless, it was clear to even the most ardent of Chiang’s supporters that the war was lost. Mao and the CCP had achieved victory.47
FROM YAN’AN TO THE WORLD
On October 1, 1949, an audience of one hundred thousand packed into the square before Beijing’s Forbidden City to listen to Mao, the victorious guerrilla commander, announce the victory of the Communist revolution. As the afternoon sun streamed down over the crowd, Mao proclaimed, “We, the 475 million Chinese people, have stood up and our future is infinitely bright.” The assembled crowd watched as the PLA staged a military parade, with shouts of “Long live Chairman Mao.” Later, after night came to the city, fireworks sparkled in the sky in celebration of the birth of a new China. The following day, the Soviet Union recognized the People’s Republic of China, and congratulations began to filter in from Communist parties around the world.48 All told, more than two million people had died in this last phase of the Chinese Civil War after 1945, but the revolution was not yet secure. Mao worried that the PRC represented the weakest front in the Communist world, and the most likely target of Western intervention. Chiang, too, forecast a coming clash between the superpowers. Telling his lieutenants to take heart, the Generalissimo promised that World War III, which was imminent, would liberate China from the grips of the CCP. Both Mao and Chiang, then, recognized that the stakes in the civil war were greater than the political fate of China itself. Indeed, the fate of China was of concern to the entire international system.49
Mao’s forces had demonstrated that small, well-organized cadres of committed revolutionaries could challenge numerically superior government forces with access to far greater resources. Even so, the CCP’s victory was dependent largely on the inefficiency and incompetence of Chiang’s regime, but the message to aspiring revolutionaries around the world seemed clear: the tides of history were moving in favor of national liberation. Translated into the context of the nascent Cold War struggle, the Chinese Civil War appeared to signal a clear victory for international communism. As Mao laid plans for the PRC’s role in international affairs, he envisioned a partnership between Moscow and Beijing: while the former remained the center of the international Communist movement, the latter took responsibility for spreading communism throughout East Asia. China, in Mao’s mind, assumed the lead in spreading socialist revolution in places such as Japan, Korea, Burma, and the Philippines. At the top of Mao’s list sat Indochina and the sixty-year-old leader of the Vietnamese Communist Party, Ho Chi Minh.50 In January 1950, the CIA warned of indications that the Chinese Communists had accepted Moscow’s encouragement to “activate immediately their revolutionary program for Southeast Asia.”51 The CCP’s victory had changed the dynamics of the Cold War not only in China but also in the wider world.
Superpower intervention in China’s civil war was both limited and reluctant. Neither Truman nor Stalin sought extensive involvement in the civil war; nor did they want to scrap the provisions of the Yalta Agreement that treated China as one of the world’s four policemen. Indeed, as of 1946, Washington and Moscow were allied with the GMD, at least on paper. Both governments, moreover, were wary of taking any action that would provoke their rival into greater involvement in China. In the early years of the Cold War, it was not certain that the superpower rivalry would spread into corners of the world such as China. In this sense, it was Mao and Chiang, rather than Truman and Stalin, who put the Third World in play in the Cold War struggle. Both Chinese leaders sought to gain and maintain the patronage of the superpowers, bending them to the will of their respective parties. Although crises had broken out in Iran and Turkey, China was the first truly decisive battle of the Cold War in the postcolonial world, and local actors played a pivotal role in drawing the U.S.-Soviet rivalry into new regions of the globe.
Though local players held the initiative in the civil war, the conflict carried dramatic repercussions for both superpowers. The collapse of Chiang’s regime sent shock waves through the American political system, generating accusations that the Truman administration and the Democratic Party had “lost” China. Prominent Republicans in Washington such as Richard Nixon (and, later, Joseph McCarthy) exploited the situation for domestic political gain, in the process generating a Red Scare in the United States. This atmosphere of paranoia would have the long-term impact of purging a significant number of regional experts from the State Department, hampering future American diplomacy in Asia. It also helped to create a political environment in Washington that placed added pressure on the Truman administration to take an increasingly confrontational posture with regard to communism in East Asia and to the Soviet Union in general. While a large-scale military intervention in China had been all but unthinkable in 1948, the United States would be ready to launch just such an action in Korea by 1950.
The victory of the Chinese Communists surprised Moscow as well. While Soviet leaders could not but applaud the turn of events in the East, Mao’s triumph appeared to turn Marxist theory on its head. China was not a heavily industrialized nation, and its revolution had not been proletarian. Moreover, the CCP did not function as the Chinese wing of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Mao’s revolutionaries operated independently of Moscow, a fact that troubled Stalin and gave hope to some U.S. officials. As the U.S. consul general in Shanghai argued,
Chinese Communists are not 100% subservient to [the] Kremlin. . . . [T]heir party is not monolithic in basic thinking on such vital points as relations with [the] west and . . . [the] Soviets themselves are not too pleased with Chinese Communist successes. . . . Viewing [the] situation in historical perspective it seems to me inherently improbable that [the] Soviets can indefinitely exert control over China through [the] Chinese Communists[,] who have risen to power largely through [their] own efforts and can scarcely be brought to heel by force. Vital question is whether break will come in 2 years or 200. Our own policies may profoundly influence this.52
It would take another two decades for U.S. leaders to exploit this rift between Beijing and Moscow. For the time being, the CCP’s victory compelled Moscow to extend its protection and support to Beijing, thereby expanding the defensive perimeters of the communist bloc. In the coming years, China would emerge as a powerful player on the world stage in its own right, commanding a formidable army of several million soldiers.
ULTIMATELY, THE CCP’S JOURNEY FROM YAN’AN TO BEIJING carried a global significance. Mao brought the Cold War to the Third World. In doing so, the CCP-GMD clash, one historian explains, made “East Asia the main battlefield of the Cold War.” Mao’s triumph marked the first great turning point. The resurgence of the Chinese Revolution after 1945 helped ignite the first major front in the Cold War’s killing fields, which appeared, to the Western powers, as a general Communist offensive in East Asia. Just as important, the CCP’s revolution linked the Cold War to the global struggle for decolonization. Mao’s version of socialist revolution became a weapon for those struggling against colonial oppression. In Mao’s formulation, calls for decolonization and national liberation replaced the rhetoric of class struggle.53
In the wake of the CCP’s triumph, anticolonial revolutionaries in Korea, French Indochina, Algeria, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America all turned to Mao’s model of guerrilla war as a source of inspiration for their own armed struggles. The CCP’s victory rang out around the Cold War international system, signaling the rise of Beijing as a major player and heralding the appearance of a new mode of socialist revolution tailored for the developing world. The string of postcolonial liberation wars that would arc through the southern rim of Asia began with the CCP’s victories in China. From their humble beginnings in Yan’an, Mao’s revolutionary forces had unleashed a movement that was now set to transform the world.