Facing annihilation by the effective Nationalist offensive strategy, Mao and his 80,000 Communist followers were forced to make a breakout and escaped through a weakly defended section in the Nationalists’ encirclement. Mao and his followers then began their historic Long March, an 8,000-mile, year-long foot journey toward Yan-an in Shaanxi Province in northern China. Along the way, they endured pursuing Nationalist forces, hostile indigenous tribes, starvation and diseases, and natural barriers that included freezing, snow-covered mountains, raging rivers, and a vast expanse of swampland.
(Taken from Chinese Civil War – Wars of the 20th Century –Vol. 1)
Soon learning of the existence of Mao Zedong’s Chinese Soviet Republic, Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek sent his forces to attack Jiangxi and other Communist-held regions. However, Mao’s Communists in Jiangxi were well-entrenched in fortified positions, forcing the Nationalists to mount five military campaigns from 1929 to 1935. Three of these campaigns ended in failures while a fourth was abandoned when the Nationalist forces were redeployed following Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in northern China. In the fifth attempt, Chiang’s forces changed tactics from a costly frontal attack as in the previous campaigns to a slow, deliberate encirclement and constriction of the enemy positions.
Facing annihilation by the effective Nationalist offensive strategy, Mao and his 80,000 Communist followers were forced to make a breakout and escaped through a weakly defended section in the Nationalists’ encirclement. Mao and his followers then began their historic Long March, an 8,000-mile, year-long foot journey toward Yan-an in Shaanxi Province in northern China. Along the way, they endured pursuing Nationalist forces, hostile indigenous tribes, starvation and diseases, and natural barriers that included freezing, snow-covered mountains, raging rivers, and a vast expanse of swampland.
Only 6,000 of Mao’s followers survived the journey – less than a tenth of the original number that had set out. Other Communist forces, including two large armies, also escaped the Nationalists’ encirclement and embarked on their own journeys through different routes, with all making it to Yan’an. Mao had arrived there first, however, with the most survivors, and had established his authority over the Chinese Communists, which thereafter was not challenged.
On learning that the Communists had escaped to Yan’an, Chiang travelled to northern China in December 1936 to plan his attack against Mao’s forces. However, the Nationalist commanders in Yan’an were infuriated that the Japanese had invaded Manchuria and were annexing Chinese territories while fellow Chinese were fighting each other. At gunpoint, the Nationalist commanders forced Chiang to cancel his campaign against the Red Army and agree to a Nationalist-Communist alliance to fight the Japanese.
China’s provinces that were affected during the Chinese Civil War
On learning of the alliance, the Japanese forces launched a pre-emptive, full-scale invasion of China in July 1937. They easily captured the coastal cities of China’s eastern provinces; the Nationalist strongholds of Shanghai, Nanjing, and Wuhan also fell.
The events during the Japanese invasion turned the tide of the Chinese Civil War away from the Nationalists in favor of the Communists. The major Japanese offensives were conducted along China’s coastal, central, and later, with the outbreak of World War II in the Pacific, in the southern regions, all of which were Nationalist-held territories. These offensives inflicted great losses in men and material to the Nationalist forces. In the defense of Shanghai, for example, Chiang lost 200,000 soldiers and his best military commanders.
Chiang also committed major military blunders. At Nanjing, for instance, he allowed his forces to be trapped and then destroyed. Consequently, the Japanese killed 200,000 civilians and soldiers in the city. Then in a scorched earth strategy to delay the enemy’s advance, Chiang ordered the dams destroyed around Nanjing, which caused the Yellow River to flood and kill 500,000 people. Furthermore, as the Nationalist forces retreated westward, they set fire to Changsha to prevent the city’s capture by the Japanese, but this resulted in the deaths of 20,000 residents and the displacement of hundreds of thousands more, who were not told of the plan.
The Chinese people’s confidence in their government plummeted, as it seemed to them that the Nationalist Army was incapable of saving the country. At the same time, the Communists’ popularity soared because, unlike the Nationalists who used costly open warfare against the Japanese, the Red Army employed guerilla tactics with great success against the mostly lightly defended enemy outposts in remote areas.
Soon, Chiang realized the futility of resisting the vastly superior Japanese forces. He therefore preferred to retreat instead of committing large numbers of troops into battle. Furthermore, he wanted to conserve his forces for what he believed was the eventual continuation of the war with the Communists. The civilian population was infuriated, however, as they believed that the Japanese were the enemy to be fought and under whom they were undergoing so much suffering.
In reality, the Nationalist-Communist alliance was superficial, for although the two sides fought the Japanese in their respective areas of control, considerable tensions existed between the two rival Chinese forces that sometimes led to the outbreak of skirmishes for control of territories that had not yet fallen to the Japanese. In January 1941, the fragile alliance was broken when the Nationalist forces attacked the Red Army in Anhui and Jiangsu, killing thousands of Communist soldiers.