Was the USA wrong to let the Communist Chinese win the civil war?

[icedt729]

Was it wrong for the British empire to let the north win the US civil war? Was it wrong for the French to let Cromwell win the English Civil war? Was it wrong for Jabba the Hutt to let the republic win the galactic civil war? Was it wrong for Marvel to release captain America civil war?

Was it any of their damn business to influence the natural course of a foreign people's decision?

I see where you're going with this, but that's too reductionistic. Until 1911 China was ruled by the descendants of a clan of foreign conquerors. It was overthrown in large part by Chinese educated in Japan or America, with funding from overseas Chinese communities, political guidance from the Soviets, and military expertise from German veterans. By that time Japan and various western powers had already held colonial stakes in China for decades, even centuries in a few cases, and then you've got the Second Sino-Japanese War being rolled into World War 2 from 1941 on. I mean, at what point does this all become China's 'natural course?'

 

[krieger11b]

I think that keeping the Nationalist from losing in the Civil War after ChiComs got Manchuria Soviet support was next to impossible. The Nationalist were deeply unpopular and had an absolute crippling amount of corruption. The US had a hard time dealing with corrupt officials when fighting Japan. A great example of how bad their officials were would be the US paying some official to build an airfield in China, the official would take all the money and basically enslave the local population to build a large airfield with primitive hand tools.

The communist had a bad level of corruption too, but wouldn't abuse it as bad when a genocidal enemy is invading their country. They didn't care, lots of aid money before 1941 went right to some corrupt government or military leader and then would just leave the country with it and leave the locals to mercy of the Japanese Army, of which had none.

 

[Admiral Piett]

Bearing the burden of resistance against the Japanese effectively destroyed the KMT. Their army was destroyed twice (once in 1937 and again in 1944), the CCP methodically expanded its power throughout the War of Resistance (ironically exactly what the KMT was accused of doing) at the expense of Chiang, and was able to take advantage of the power vacuum created by Ichigo and expand spectacularly. Chiang didn't handle the final campaigns of the civil war well, but all that was left for the CCP to do was push over a corpse by that point. Short of the US just dumping hundreds of thousands of troops into China in direct combat, they weren't going to be able to render enough assistance.

 

[LordTempest]

Was it any of their damn business to influence the natural course of a foreign people's decision?

Because it's not as if Mao was already recieving any aid or assistance from any foreign power, no sir.

The problem with lazy generalisations is that conflicts do not run according to the whims of lazy generalisations. The latter-half of the CCW was a very different conflict to the first-half, let alone the ACW, for instance -- and not just because it wasn't fought over slavery or with springfield rifles and ironclads. WWII left both the Soviets and the US with a considerable stake in China, and not juust in terms of economic or geopolitical interests; in the Soviet's case, they literally occupied all of Manchuria. Whatever Stalin chose to do with Manchuria, it would have been somehow an intervention in the conflict: had he given it to Chiang instead of Mao it would have been an intervention, had he given it to nobody it would still have been an intervention. (It would have been a propaganda coup for the KMT, for instance.)

The idea that the CCW was, or even could have been in any way the natural course of a foreign people's decision is a total fiction. The realities of post-WWII occupation made some degree of foreign intervention inevitable.

 

[Dracolithfiend]

2 wrongs do not make a right. Just because another nation is interfering does not mean that the US has too.

You might want to look at the historical context as well. Post WWII the US was the only nation on earth with nuclear capabilities until the 1950's. Want to take a guess if the US would have used them if there was no risk of retaliation? Just look at all the times the US used this threat against the USSR. What you are advocating for is millions more killed to prevent an authoritarian communist state from taking over and instead ending up with what in all likelihood would have been an authoritarian state anyways. You are saying that the US should have done an early Korean war with massively more death and destruction and all the costs of doing so for..... democracy. Nation building. Containment of communism. I am sorry but I disagree.

 

[Ming]

Bearing the burden of resistance against the Japanese effectively destroyed the KMT. Their army was destroyed twice (once in 1937 and again in 1944), the CCP methodically expanded its power throughout the War of Resistance (ironically exactly what the KMT was accused of doing) at the expense of Chiang, and was able to take advantage of the power vacuum created by Ichigo and expand spectacularly. Chiang didn't handle the final campaigns of the civil war well, but all that was left for the CCP to do was push over a corpse by that point. Short of the US just dumping hundreds of thousands of troops into China in direct combat, they weren't going to be able to render enough assistance.

Hold up, are you implying that it if ichi-go was not undertaken the civil war may hav ended up differently, even if the communists still inherited Manchuria?

Ichi-go was really an unnecessary campaign from the Japanese viewpoint. It couldn't defeat china and it didn't keep the bombers away.

 

[Admiral Piett]

Hold up, are you implying that it if ichi-go was not undertaken the civil war may hav ended up differently, even if the communists still inherited Manchuria?

Ichi-go was really an unnecessary campaign from the Japanese viewpoint. It couldn't defeat china and it didn't keep the bombers away.

I typically don't dabble in counterfactual history, but it is widely argued, and I agree, that the only real winner to come out of Ichigo was the CCP. It destroyed what forces Chiang had managed to reconstruct after 1937, and exhausted and overstretched the Japanese forces in China. Vast swaths of territory then flipped over to the CCP. Indeed, when you look at the CCP base areas post-Ichigo you can see where they had taken advantage of the power vacuum. As to whether this was decisive, it is impossible to know, but it certainly helped the CCP a lot. Of course there were so many other issues outside military concerns that had crippled the KMT. Their economy was in tatters, their legitimacy was gone, their internal unity destroyed, their party badly infiltrated by CCP spies and sympathizers, etc. The CCP likes to make the case that they were the scrappy underdogs to the end, but after the War of Resistance ended, the KMT was a spent institution. It took years for Chiang to rebuild, fix, and clean up what was left after he had been booted to Taiwan.

 

[icedt729]

2 wrongs do not make a right. Just because another nation is interfering does not mean that the US has too.

You might want to look at the historical context as well. Post WWII the US was the only nation on earth with nuclear capabilities until the 1950's. Want to take a guess if the US would have used them if there was no risk of retaliation? Just look at all the times the US used this threat against the USSR. What you are advocating for is millions more killed to prevent an authoritarian communist state from taking over and instead ending up with what in all likelihood would have been an authoritarian state anyways. You are saying that the US should have done an early Korean war with massively more death and destruction and all the costs of doing so for..... democracy. Nation building. Containment of communism. I am sorry but I disagree.

Wow! Look how far those goalposts moved!

 

[SeekTruthFromFx]

Because it's not as if Mao was already recieving any aid or assistance from any foreign power, no sir.

The problem with lazy generalisations is that conflicts do not run according to the whims of lazy generalisations. The latter-half of the CCW was a very different conflict to the first-half, let alone the ACW, for instance -- and not just because it wasn't fought over slavery or with springfield rifles and ironclads. WWII left both the Soviets and the US with a considerable stake in China, and not juust in terms of economic or geopolitical interests; in the Soviet's case, they literally occupied all of Manchuria. Whatever Stalin chose to do with Manchuria, it would have been somehow an intervention in the conflict: had he given it to Chiang instead of Mao it would have been an intervention, had he given it to nobody it would still have been an intervention. (It would have been a propaganda coup for the KMT, for instance.)

The idea that the CCW was, or even could have been in any way the natural course of a foreign people's decision is a total fiction. The realities of post-WWII occupation made some degree of foreign intervention inevitable.

I share your discomfort with the "natural course" language, and your acknowledgement that there were foreign actors at play, but I hope you would agree with @Dracolithfiend that the CCP's victory was a genuine choice by the Chinese people, not something imposed from outside. If you read Chinese literature and journalism from the period, there's an overwhelming sense that the existing order was corrupt and that a radical change, a revolution, was needed. Chinese schoolkids hate reading Lu Xun, but the questions he asked ("Why is China in a mess? Why do we let Japan treat us like this?") still set the agenda for this period and the KMT had not delivered a satisfactory answer. Even instinctively conservative figures like Yan Xishan and Marcus Cheng Chonggui were very attracted to what the CCP was offering and largely bought their analysis.

 

[keynes2.0]

the CCP's victory was a genuine choice by the Chinese people, not something imposed from outside.

You can't say that 1946-1950 represented a choice when the exact opposite had happened 1932-1936. Without the Japanese invasion, the commies were toast. Or to put it your way, the peasants of china made a "genuine choice" against the corrupt communist warlords that showed up in villages to steal their food like a swarm of locusts before going to prey on another town.

 

[SeekTruthFromFx]

You can't say that 1946-1950 represented a choice when the exact opposite had happened 1932-1936. Without the Japanese invasion, the commies were toast.

I think you're saying the Chinese people chose the KMT in 1932-36, presumably because the KMT had some success in attacking the CCP in those years, but the Japanese changed things. I'd more or less agree with that, but I'd place it earlier, in the late 20s.

There's a saying in British politics that "oppositions don't win elections, governments lose them." I think we can adapt that. In the 'Nanking decade' (1928-37), a lot of people had faith in the KMT. China was in a mess now, but given time Chiang and Wang would sort it all out. The war years destroyed that hope. As the only credible opposition, the CCP was well-placed to benefit.

I mean, after 1944-45, how could things possibly get worse? The terrible tragedy, of course, is that the CCP proved that they could make things even worse, without outside interference.

Or to put it your way, the peasants of china made a "genuine choice" against the corrupt communist warlords that showed up in villages to steal their food like a swarm of locusts before going to prey on another town.

The Red Army lived off the land and I'm sure there were many individual units that were little more than protection rackets. But what surprised people at the time was the extent to which the Red Army did pay for things. The account by Alfred Bosshardt is especially interesting: he was a Swiss missionary who was brutally held hostage by a Red Army unit in an effort to extort money his family didn't have. As you can imagine, he was not a fan of the Communists. But he reported that the Red Army were a cut above the typical warlord army of the day, paid for things, and got respect from local people. Given that the only possible options were the KMT (often just a longstanding warlord waving a White-Blue-Red flag) or the CCP, many peasants thought the CCP was by far the better option.

 

[keynes2.0]

I think you're saying the Chinese people chose the KMT in 1932-36

I dont think anyone should say that because I consider the whole notion silly and misleading.

 

[SeekTruthFromFx]

I dont think anyone should say that because I consider the whole notion silly and misleading.

Sorry I misunderstood. If you've explained why you think it's silly and misleading to say the great majority of mainland Chinese people preferred a CCP government in 1949, then I've missed it. This isn't Twitter, so feel free to restate your point more than 140 characters.

 

[Arilou]

The US wasn't really in a position to "let" anyone do anything. The Chinese Civil war was decided by the chinese.

 

[LordTempest]

I share your discomfort with the "natural course" language, and your acknowledgement that there were foreign actors at play, but I hope you would agree with @Dracolithfiend that the CCP's victory was a genuine choice by the Chinese people, not something imposed from outside. If you read Chinese literature and journalism from the period, there's an overwhelming sense that the existing order was corrupt and that a radical change, a revolution, was needed. Chinese schoolkids hate reading Lu Xun, but the questions he asked ("Why is China in a mess? Why do we let Japan treat us like this?") still set the agenda for this period and the KMT had not delivered a satisfactory answer. Even instinctively conservative figures like Yan Xishan and Marcus Cheng Chonggui were very attracted to what the CCP was offering and largely bought their analysis.

Certainly not. I think it spurious in the extreme to argue that writers and intellectuals (even those who lack an overt leftist bias, unlike Lu Xun) are ever representative of anything approaching the popular will, as opposed to being representative of the particular class of writers and intellectuals to which they belong. If for no other reason, let's not forget that mass literacy doesn't take off in China until well after 1945 - your average Chinese peasant would be unlikely to know who Lu Xun was, what he did, or what he wrote about. The people who Lu Xun could influence were by definition unrepresentative of the population at large because they could read.

I'd also make the broader point that if writers and intellectuals were in any way representative of the popular will, then Brexit would not have happened, Trump would not have been elected, the PAP would not have dominated Singaporean politics to the extent they have over the past sixty years and the pro-Beijing camp would receive considerably fewer votes in HK elections than they consistently do.

 

[alxeu]

I suppose another question is what would've happened had Chiang not invaded Manchuria in 1946. Would the CCP attack instead, or would they be content building power for a time, only for such an attempt to backfire and give the KMT time to rebuild as well, leading to a divided China?

Also one thing scholars like debating is whether Marshall's ceasefire doomed the KMT, preventing them from capitalizing on their early surprise and successes.

As it stands, Marshall's calling a ceasefire killed any last hope for the KMT outside massive foreign intervention from basically every major power.

 

[SeekTruthFromFx]

Certainly not. I think it spurious in the extreme to argue that writers and intellectuals (even those who lack an overt leftist bias, unlike Lu Xun) are ever representative of anything approaching the popular will, as opposed to being representative of the particular class of writers and intellectuals to which they belong. If for no other reason, let's not forget that mass literacy doesn't take off in China until well after 1945 - your average Chinese peasant would be unlikely to know who Lu Xun was, what he did, or what he wrote about. The people who Lu Xun could influence were by definition unrepresentative of the population at large because they could read.

I'd also make the broader point that if writers and intellectuals were in any way representative of the popular will, then Brexit would not have happened, Trump would not have been elected, the PAP would not have dominated Singaporean politics to the extent they have over the past sixty years and the pro-Beijing camp would receive considerably fewer votes in HK elections than they consistently do.

Apologies for the slow reply, but your main point here is very good and has given me much to think about.

To begin with, I hope we are in agreement that Chinese intellectuals as a class preferred CCP rule in the mid-/late-1940s. You seem to want to rule Lu Xun out as having a leftist bias. This could be caricatured as saying 'all swans are white if we exclude the dark ones"! Lu Xun was hardly a party hack: he never joined the CCP, he worked for the Beiyang Government, and he wore a traditional scholar's gown, not the revolutionaries' Mao suit (中山装). And my point was not that the deceased Lu Xun backed the CCP in the Forties, but that almost all intellectuals worked within the framework he and other New Culture Movement writers created, and I cited conservatives to show that.

However, you were quite right to question whether intellectuals can be taken as representative of the Chinese people as a whole and your counter-examples are extremely apt. I think my assumption here was perhaps typical of Chinese writers of the time. This week I happened to come across a 1944 definition of intellectuals by the conservative politician Zuo Shunsheng: those who were politically active, knew about China & the world, and would direct China's people & leaders. Well, he would say that, wouldn't he! The scholar Xiao Chen says this reflected "the common belief that intellectuals were obliged to lead" political reform. I have been quite tempted to accept this self-serving understanding of who can speak for China, given that China has a very long tradition of allowing the literati to speak for the people. Couldn't we assume that peasants brought up under a Confucian heritage would be satisfied to let the scholars speak for them? After all, if these intellectuals' beliefs had been wholly out of line with wider opinion, wouldn't they have lost their place in society sooner or later? But then again in China, they did lose their place, both geographically in 1949, and socially in 1966-74. And as a democrat, the peasants' views do matter just as much as theirs.

Do you think there's any way to ascertain the peasants' choice in the Civil War era? Obviously that there are no reliable direct measures, such as opinion polls or election results. The evidence is limited, but there are two indications that would seem to support the proposition that the Chinese peasantry generally preferred the CCP to the KMT. The first is the remarkable lack of opposition to CCP rule. Yes, millions of people fled to Taiwan and Hong Kong, and particularly in the latter case many of them were peasants, rather than the KMT elite. And yes, the CCP had and has a ferocious apparatus of totalitarian control. But, given how grim things were for most of the first thirty years of the People's Republic, given that China has a long history of peasant revolts, and given that there was some access to weaponry in the late 40s, the remarkable thing is that there was no armed resistance in Han areas. AFAIK there were no mass risings during the terrible famines of the Great Leap Forward. Sometimes the dog that does not bark is what's important, and I think that's the case here. The second is the mass rallies of the Cultural Revolution and the Mao cult. Yes, they were terribly misguided and the people involved were being manipulated by the propaganda apparatus. But they drew in millions of people from all levels of society. For all the stage-management, you can't organize a mass movement on that scale without some level of popular support. The CCP's claim to be a dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry was true (though by the contingencies of Chinese history, not some iron law of Marxism).

And to be honest, I'd find it very hard to imagine why significant numbers of Chinese peasants would want to support the KMT by the late 1940s. Diary of a Madman, the first story by my beloved Lu Xun, is in the voice of a character who comes to believe that all around him are cannibals and that.... I'd better not give away the end. He thought that Chinese society was eating itself and pleaded with the nation to "save the children". By 1943, his metaphor had become terrible, horrific reality: in the terrible famine that hit the KMT-ruled areas of Henan, there are independent accounts of Chinese peasants eatiing their neighbours and children.

That is rock bottom.

There is no lower level to which human life can sink.

If I was a Henanese peasant who'd survived 1943, I would be up for supporting any alternative to KMT rule. The message of the disciplined and outwardly modern millenial cult of the CCP would have been like nectar to a bee.

 

[Tyon]

Really the KMT had their chance to destroy the CCP in 1936, just before the outbreak of hostilities with Japan. From that point on they were much more constrained by both the realities of war and diplomatic pressure from the US than the CCP was.

This is why I always immediately go for them in HoI4.

 

[Eusebio]

Apologies for the slow reply, but your main point here is very good and has given me much to think about.

To begin with, I hope we are in agreement that Chinese intellectuals as a class preferred CCP rule in the mid-/late-1940s. You seem to want to rule Lu Xun out as having a leftist bias. This could be caricatured as saying 'all swans are white if we exclude the dark ones"! Lu Xun was hardly a party hack: he never joined the CCP, he worked for the Beiyang Government, and he wore a traditional scholar's gown, not the revolutionaries' Mao suit (中山装). And my point was not that the deceased Lu Xun backed the CCP in the Forties, but that almost all intellectuals worked within the framework he and other New Culture Movement writers created, and I cited conservatives to show that.

However, you were quite right to question whether intellectuals can be taken as representative of the Chinese people as a whole and your counter-examples are extremely apt. I think my assumption here was perhaps typical of Chinese writers of the time. This week I happened to come across a 1944 definition of intellectuals by the conservative politician Zuo Shunsheng: those who were politically active, knew about China & the world, and would direct China's people & leaders. Well, he would say that, wouldn't he! The scholar Xiao Chen says this reflected "the common belief that intellectuals were obliged to lead" political reform. I have been quite tempted to accept this self-serving understanding of who can speak for China, given that China has a very long tradition of allowing the literati to speak for the people. Couldn't we assume that peasants brought up under a Confucian heritage would be satisfied to let the scholars speak for them? After all, if these intellectuals' beliefs had been wholly out of line with wider opinion, wouldn't they have lost their place in society sooner or later? But then again in China, they did lose their place, both geographically in 1949, and socially in 1966-74. And as a democrat, the peasants' views do matter just as much as theirs.

Do you think there's any way to ascertain the peasants' choice in the Civil War era? Obviously that there are no reliable direct measures, such as opinion polls or election results. The evidence is limited, but there are two indications that would seem to support the proposition that the Chinese peasantry generally preferred the CCP to the KMT. The first is the remarkable lack of opposition to CCP rule. Yes, millions of people fled to Taiwan and Hong Kong, and particularly in the latter case many of them were peasants, rather than the KMT elite. And yes, the CCP had and has a ferocious apparatus of totalitarian control. But, given how grim things were for most of the first thirty years of the People's Republic, given that China has a long history of peasant revolts, and given that there was some access to weaponry in the late 40s, the remarkable thing is that there was no armed resistance in Han areas. AFAIK there were no mass risings during the terrible famines of the Great Leap Forward. Sometimes the dog that does not bark is what's important, and I think that's the case here. The second is the mass rallies of the Cultural Revolution and the Mao cult. Yes, they were terribly misguided and the people involved were being manipulated by the propaganda apparatus. But they drew in millions of people from all levels of society. For all the stage-management, you can't organize a mass movement on that scale without some level of popular support. The CCP's claim to be a dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry was true (though by the contingencies of Chinese history, not some iron law of Marxism).

And to be honest, I'd find it very hard to imagine why significant numbers of Chinese peasants would want to support the KMT by the late 1940s. Diary of a Madman, the first story by my beloved Lu Xun, is in the voice of a character who comes to believe that all around him are cannibals and that.... I'd better not give away the end. He thought that Chinese society was eating itself and pleaded with the nation to "save the children". By 1943, his metaphor had become terrible, horrific reality: in the terrible famine that hit the KMT-ruled areas of Henan, there are independent accounts of Chinese peasants eatiing their neighbours and children.

That is rock bottom.

There is no lower level to which human life can sink.

If I was a Henanese peasant who'd survived 1943, I would be up for supporting any alternative to KMT rule. The message of the disciplined and outwardly modern millenial cult of the CCP would have been like nectar to a bee.

Excellent post. And thank you for the Lu Xun recommendation: it's always helpful to know what to read from Chinese literature, daunting as it is for a European to approach.

 

[DarthJF]

Excellent post. And thank you for the Lu Xun recommendation: it's always helpful to know what to read from Chinese literature, daunting as it is for a European to approach.

Penguin Classics has published a collection with all of Lu Xun's fiction stories. Highly recommended. Xiao Hong is another notable writer from the same period.

From more recent writers Mo Yan, who won Nobel Prize for literature, is also worth checking out.