CHINA: 1937-1949  
It was the Japanese invasion in 1937 which provided the Communists with the opportunity for a breakthrough. In July a skirmish between Japanese and Chinese troops near the Marco Polo bridge on the outskirts of Beijing provided the pretext for a full-scale Japanese invasion. By early 1939 the Japanese occupied the whole of the Chinese coast, adding the island of Hainan to Taiwan, which it already controlled. The Nationalist government was forced to retreat and move its capital to Chongqing in Sichuan province.

Though the invasion was a disaster for China, it proved a golden opportunity for the Communists. They were able to expand their activities for two chief reasons.

The first was ideological. The Communists began to capitalize on their image as the most resolute Chinese patriots. Because the Nationalists had appeared reluctant to resist the Japanese wholeheartedly—they had not, for example, declared war on Japan themselves, despite Japanese encroachments—they lost support among the intelligentsia, students, and the middle classes. Because the Communists had appealed for patriotic national unity well before the Japanese invasion (admittedly, partly to deflect Nationalist pressure on them), they acquired the reputation of being more determined patriots. Intellectuals and students migrated to Yan’an to join the struggle. This image was enhanced by the Japanese who, as members of an anti-Bolshevik Axis, often reserved their strongest onslaughts for the Communist forces.

The second reason for Communist success was organizational. The very achievement of the Japanese in driving the Nationalist armies out of eastern China also drove out the administration which had kept down the Communists. Though the Japanese maintained an occupation army of well over one million in China throughout the war, this was far too small to maintain effective day-to-day control. The puppet governments which they installed lacked legitimacy. So the Japanese concentrated their strength in defending cities and railways. The countryside became an administrative vacuum into which the Communists were able to pour increasing numbers of seasoned guerrillas. They won support because of their frugal lifestyle, the medical supplies, education, and other assistance which they gave to the peasants, their advocacy of social justice in the form of land reform and reduced taxes for the poor, and their propaganda about the Japanese threat.

Not all Chinese peasants were responsive to these appeals. Up to a million troops served in the armies of the administrations under Japanese control. Nevertheless, the Japanese reinforced the Communists’ attractiveness as they tried to terrorize peasants into submission. They adopted a policy of "kill all, burn all, destroy all" when carrying out reprisals for guerrilla attacks on their forces. This did deter people in some places, but it encouraged peasants elsewhere to give shelter and support, especially in places where the Communists were able to operate long enough to get their message across.

From 1937 until 1941 the Communist armies were integrated into the Nationalist army as the Eighth Route Army in the north and the New Fourth Army, initially south of the Yangtze. By 1940 they numbered over half a million, and in that year the Nationalists agreed that the Red Army should have a largely free hand north of the Huang He (Yellow River).

Nevertheless, relations between the two sides began to deteriorate as the Communists regained their strength. In 1939 the Nationalists again began to blockade Yan’an, building up their forces there to over half a million. In January 1941 they attacked and destroyed the headquarters troops of the New Fourth Army further south. This ended the "United Front". The damage to the Communists was intensified by Japanese attacks upon the base areas in 1942-1943, which cut Red Army numbers there by a quarter and the territory they controlled on the plains by 90 per cent.

The Communists were therefore once more thrown back on their own resources. Though they were isolated in one of the most backward parts of China, cut off from Moscow except by occasional radio contact, they made backwardness into a virtue. They introduced "rectification" campaigns to ensure that the tide of new Party members properly appreciated what the Party stood for and could fight with conviction. Mao’s lectures to the Party school in Yan’an came to be interpreted as the basic Party orthodoxy. He developed doctrines of self-reliance and moderate land reform. Officials were "sent down to the grassroots" to spend time in physical labour and/or industrial production. Factories were built in the countryside.

All of these principles were later spread to the rest of the country before and after 1949, as part of a Yan’an model of Communism. Their calls for social justice and patriotism did appeal to increasing numbers of peasants as well as intellectuals, even though on occasion they may also have grown and sold opium as a way of making budgetary ends meet. Party members increasingly came from the peasantry. They were also the only organized political force which advocated a new social role for women. By 1945 the Communists controlled regions of some 90 million inhabitants. This was still only one fifth of the Chinese population, but it was a dramatic increase compared with 1936.

The Nationalists’ resistance to the Japanese was not very effective. Yet at least they would not surrender and they suffered over three million casualties. When Japan attacked the United States in December 1941, the Nationalists finally declared war upon Japan and Germany. After that they received significant amounts of military assistance, although American advisers became increasingly impressed by the more combative resistance of the Communists, and channelled some weapons to them too. Even in late 1944, however, the Japanese were able to mount one last major offensive in south-western China to try to force the Nationalists into surrender.

In the end the Japanese forces in China only surrendered following the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not because they had been defeated in battle. Yet the Nationalist government briefly emerged from the war with a new aura of success. During the war the Allies had agreed to treat China as an equal. The unequal treaties dating back to the 19th century had been finally rescinded, and Nationalist China was not merely a founding member of the United Nations, but one of the five permanent members of the Security Council. The Nationalist government for the first time was able to exercise authority over the whole of China, now that warlords had been suppressed. Paradoxically, therefore, though China had been ravaged by the war, both the Nationalists and the Communists emerged from it stronger than they had been at the outset. Both were emboldened by their success.

Briefly, General George Marshall attempted to broker a long-term truce between them. In 1945 they agreed to convene a national political consultative conference. Both sides, however, were also competing for land and support. In 1946 sporadic fighting broke out in Dongbei, where some Soviet troops were still located following their "liberation" of the region. The Nationalists outnumbered the Communists there, and sought to press home their advantage.

The Nationalists launched a series of attacks which cleared wide areas of northern China and in March 1947 captured Yan’an itself, Mao and other leaders escaping by a mere hair’s breadth. Gradually, however, the Nationalist armies overextended themselves and concentrated upon defending static positions, as the Japanese had done. They laid themselves open to hit-and-run attacks by experienced Communist guerrillas, and the latter’s success eroded Nationalist morale.

Equally importantly, the Nationalists began to lose support in the urban and coastal regions of China. Carpetbaggers greedily swept up assets of former pro-Japanese "collaborators". Nationalist armies revealed themselves as corrupt as before. Inflation escalated after 1947 to several thousand per cent per year, wiping out all savings. It seemed the Nationalist government had learnt nothing from its pre-war difficulties.

By contrast, Mao elaborated a doctrine of "new democracy", aimed at winning the hearts and minds of all patriotic Chinese, whatever their class background. Though the Communists pushed through land reform, they learnt from experience that they had to avoid antagonizing too many opponents by pressing for too radical social reforms. If the Party was not democratic in the Western sense, at least it appeared to listen to popular concerns and act upon them. The Nationalists appeared all too often indifferent.

The tide began to turn in the second half of 1947, and became a rout in 1948. As they gained strength, the Communists turned from guerrilla warfare to full-scale military combat. Under the leadership of Marshal Lin Biao, they broke the Nationalist armies in Dongbei and then drove southwards. By spring 1949, they had reached the Yangtze, and the United States vainly attempted to broker a ceasefire which would have divided China in two, leaving the Communists in control of the north and the Nationalists in control of the south. The Communists would have none of it, however, and they overcame almost all organized military opposition by the time that the People’s Republic was proclaimed.

This brought to an end the political revolution in China. It was nothing like a classic European revolution such as Karl Marx had envisaged, since it took place in a poor, overwhelmingly peasant society. Nor was it very similar to the Russian Revolution of October 1917. For one thing the civil war preceded the political revolution, whereas in Russia it had been the opposite (though both phases took place in both countries). Also, Communist power had flowed from the countryside to the cities, whereas in Russia again it had been the opposite. The Chinese Communist Party was much more instinctively pro-peasant than the Bolsheviks were, at least from the time that Mao took over the leadership. And because of the long civil war, the CCP leadership felt certain of the loyalty of their People’s Liberation Army, where Bolshevik leaders remained suspicious of their Red Army.

Yet there were similarities with the Russian Revolution too. For one thing, it was led by a Communist party whose organizational practices had in many respects been borrowed from the Bolsheviks. Both required from all their members "Partiness"—absolute dedication to the Party’s cause, to "democratic centralism", and to the central leadership—which distinguished them from all rivals. Both also built a cult of the charismatic leader (Lenin and Mao) who founded the new regimes.

For another thing, both were to a significant extent struggles of national liberation, motivated by a desire to throw off subservience to foreign imperialism (and in the case of China this subsequently included dependence upon the Soviet Union). Whatever the differences in national conditions, Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao all believed in the ideals of Marx’s writings on the Commune of Paris. They all looked forward to a new world order based upon world revolution—after 1949 the Chinese leadership set themselves up as models for revolution in the "Third World", especially in Asia, although ultimately their hopes were as much in vain as the Bolsheviks’ hopes for revolution in Europe. And once secured in power, both new Communist states ruthlessly crushed potential political and economic opposition and established a command economy based upon public ownership of the means of production, industrialization, and collectivization of agriculture.

As Mao put it on October 1, 1949, a new China had "stood up". For the Communist Party, however, the task of revolutionizing the whole of society was far from completed. After at least 40 years, and by some reckoning almost a century, of turmoil, the Chinese people were weary of war and its attendant ills and illnesses. In 1949 average life expectancy in China was still under 40 years of age. The Communists brought some stability and order. They had outlasted their opponents and had been particularly successful at winning over young people, but they had still to win the active support of the majority of the population. By 1949 the CCP had over 5 million members. This made it the largest Communist party in the world, but it still represented just 1 per cent of the total Chinese population. By Marxist standards, China in 1949 was far from socialism, let alone communism. Private property had to be abolished. Poverty had to be replaced by plenty. New socialist attitudes had to be developed. The threat from imperialists had to be overcome.

China’s new leaders were confident that all of this could be achieved—and rapidly—if only the right path could be found. They believed that the success of the Revolution showed that history was on their side. Their future, like their victory in revolution, was largely due to their own efforts. Because they had won power in the end far more rapidly than they had ever imagined possible, even in 1945, they kept returning to the events and the spirit of the Revolution for inspiration, hoping to find magic solutions which would enable more dramatic breakthroughs and "great leaps forward". This did bring some successes, but these "lessons of the revolution" also led to the enormous famine after the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s, where tens of millions of people died, and to the chaos and brutality of the Cultural Revolution. Though the tasks of war had been daunting, those of peacetime construction proved far more complex.