Chinese Revolution

The Chinese Political Environment c1945-50 🔫

Leaders:

• Mao v. Jiang

  • Mao was the leader of the CCP.
  • Jiang was the leader of the GMD.

• Jiang was supported by the American political establishment, and he was seen as the leader who would be able to defend China against an imperial communist expansion.

  • Jiang was the pro-capitalist, status-quo leader.

War Strategy:

• Jiang used a patronage-esque system wherein he promoted those who were loyal to him.

  • This resulted in a large amount of military strategy leakages, wherein those who were promoted because of their loyalty had no experience, and thus were more prone to being influenced by external forces (i.e. becoming moles).
  • From 1947, he didn’t even gain a single bit of territory, and he did not win a single conflict.
  • In formerly Japanese occupied zones, instead of working with locals, he used methods of coercion to gain control. This only led to occupied resistance, further weakening his leadership.
    • Consequently, this reduced the confidence in him from the military classes.

• Mao promoted former military warlords to his PLA, and he used a ‘wear-and-tear’ military strategy that was more flexible.

Corruption in the GMD:

• Jiang received military aid and general foreign aid from the United States.
  • Nevertheless, this was often not used to support military expenditure.
• Jiang nationalised private banks, increasing the money supply which thus led to high inflation; moreover, he increased taxes to record levels to fund military expenditure, which accounted for 80% of their GDP (military industrial complex)
  • This decreased his support amongst the poor, salaried classes, and the gentry.

Leadership of Mao; a Case Study of Success:

• Offered peasant licenses so that the local destitute classes could overthrow their unpopular and exploitative landlords.

  • Enabled him to get mass support amongst a majority of the population.
  • One million landlords were killed.
    • Made Mao seem like a totalitarian communist tyrant amongst the American political establishment.

• Nevertheless, in areas of dense upper class wealth, he was a moderate - thus, he built a ‘coalition’ of support.

  • Even his economic policy in these areas was moderate - i.e. no nationalisation, low tax, etc.

• Moreover, the PLA disrupted local infrastructure to delay the GMD’s advance.

  • He did this with the support of the peasant classes.

China White Paper, Feb. 1949:

• USA did not want to be an “imperial menace”
• Shifted blame - the loss of "our China" was the result of internal, domestic conflicts.

A* AO2 ✨

• Leadership legitimacy as the decisive variable:
  • The Mao-Jiang contrast highlights the victory in the Chinese Civil War was less about material capacity (even though the CCP got 700,000 rifles from the USSR and got training from them from 1948) and more about perceived political legitimacy. Mao’s authority was rooted in mass consent and ideological mobilisation, whereas Jiang’s rested on elite backing and foreign endorsement, which proved fragile in a civil conflict context.
• Structural weakness of externally dependent regimes:
  • Jiang’s reliance on US support illustrates a broader Cold War pattern: regimes sustained by external power but lacking internal legitimacy were inherently unstable. This exposed the limits of early American containment, demonstrating that anti-communism alone could not substitute for domestic political credibility.
• China White Paper:
  • Exposed the ideological limits of US containment by reframing Mao’s victory as an inevitable outcome of domestic Chinese conditions (like the resentment towards Jiang) rather than American policy, thereby shifting blame away from US decision makers whilst simultaneously revealing a strategic misreading of revolutionary nationalism -> this question of “who really lost China?”