chinese revolution it was the transformation of China into a socialist nation from 1949 onwards. This event took place when the communists managed to defeat the nationalists in the civil war that lasted from 1927 to 1949. This revolution gave rise to the China Popular Republic and made Mao Tse-Tung become the ruler of that country.
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Background: The 1911 Revolution
The 20th century has been extremely eventful in Chinese history, and to understand the entire path that led China to become a socialist nation, one has to start with 1911. This year, the 1911 revolution, also known as RevolutionXinhai. This movement was responsible for overthrowing the millenary Qing dynasty and establishing the republic in the country.
With this revolution, the Republic of China was established, which came to be governed by a provisional government, occupied primarily by Sun Yat-sen and then by YuanShikai. The situation in China, however, remained chaotic, and politically the country was unstable, governability did not exist, and civil wars raged across the territory.
The war spread inside the Chinese territory, especially from 1916, when Yuan Shikai died and the power of the country was fragmented among the warlords, great military leaders who existed and who came to control lands. The unification of Chinese territory took place as part of a major effort by the nationalist party, O Kuomintang (KMT).
It was in this context of struggle against the warlords who dominated part of the Chinese territory that the Communist PartyChinese (CCP), in July 1921. The emergence ofCCP was the result of the influence of the victory of the bolsheviks in Russia and also of social and nationalist movements that emerged in the country in the late 1910s.
In 1923, the CCP and KMT acted together in the fight against the warlords and in defense of the political reunification of China. This cooperation was the result of an agreement between the KMT and the Soviet Union. The agreement between nationalists and communists continued in full until 1925, but the death of Sun Yat-sen, leader of the KMT, changed everything.
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Chinese Civil War
After Sun Yat-sen died, the leadership of the Kuomintang was handed over to Chiang Kai-shek. The new KMT leader had studied military tactics in the Soviet Union, but when he took over the party command, fearing the growth of communists in its ranks, began to pursue them in the China.
In 1927, when Chinese reunification was underway and the warlords were being defeated, Chiang Kai-shek officially pursued the Communists. In April of that year, he disarmed workers' militias and started a massive purge of Communists in major Chinese cities. In Shanghai, for example, thousands of communists were killed.
Other attacks against communists by nationalist forces took place in different regions of China, such as Wuhan, Canton, xiamen, Ink and Changsha. In response to the persecution imposed by the KMT, the communists organized a Red Army and rebelled against the nationalists from Nanchang. With that, the Chinese Civil War.
The first phase of the Chinese Civil War extended to 10 years, and in it the KMT organized several offensives against the Communist forces scattered throughout the interior of Chinese territory. The communists, expelled from the big cities, were forced to install bases in the countryside, in places inhabited by peasants.
When the Communists found a soviet in Jiangxi, led by Mao, the KMT started a great offensive that forced them to flee and march 10,000 kilometers for a year to achieve survive. This event was called Great March, or longmarch, and made Mao the great name of the CCP.
After the Great March, the communists settled in Yan’an, and there developed the base that housed their strength throughout the 1930s and 1940s. However, from 1931 onwards, a new character appeared and made the Chinese context considerably more tense: the japanese.
At first, Chiang Kai-shek “ignored” the Japanese presence and even made a deal with them in the fight against the Communists. As the Japanese demonstrated their hostility to the Chinese, Chiang Kai-shek became held down, by members of the KMT itself, to ally to the communists and fight them against the Japanese.
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Second Sino-Japanese War
When the Japanese declare war on the Chinese after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek needed to revise his position of not joining the communists. An agreement was eventually reached between the KMT and the CCP, so that both would break off the fight between them and could concentrate on fighting the Japanese invaders.
The war against Japan started in 1937 and lasted until 1945, and during that period, communists and nationalists never stopped fighting each other, despite the focus of both being the fight against the Japanese. The communists led the efforts against the Japanese, and this resulted in their advance into Chinese territory.
Historian Osvaldo Coggiola points out that the advance of the communists in China meant that, in 1944, they had conquered 19 regions that previously were in the hands of nationalists or Japanese, and possessed an army that encompassed the total of 2.2 million soldiers|1|.
Return of the Civil War
The Japanese ended up being defeated in the Second World War, largely through an effort by the United States, but it is also important to count on Chinese resistance against the Japanese invasion. When the Japanese were defeated, the Chinese Civil War was restarted, but now the communists were much more powerful than before.
The KMT gained massive financial and military support from the United States, and the main objective it was to recover Manchuria, a region invaded by the USSR in August 1945 and occupied by the CCP posteriorly. With that, Chiang Kai-shek went on the attack with the aim of destroying the communists once and for all.
The CCP Red Army was renamed to People's Liberation Army (EPL), and, after the KMT's attack started, the communist forces tried to defend themselves. The CCP's presence in the interior of China brought it much sympathy from a group that formed the bulk of the country's population: the peasants.
From 1946 onwards, the situation of Chinese economy deteriorated considerably, and this left the KMT extremely unpopular with the Chinese population. THE inflation of the country was rampant. Atwar, the KMT armies, despite being supported by the US, were being defeated by the EPL forces.
The interior of Chinese territory came to be dominated by the CCP, and in cities under the KMT's domination, they exploded strikes and demonstrations in support of communists. Weakened, the KMT was eventually defeated. The Communists entered Beijing victorious in January 1949, and Chiang Kai-shek ran away to Taiwan (now Taiwan).
On October 1, 1949, it was proclaimed the People's Republic of China. Mao Tse-Tung, leader of the CCP, became the country's president and initiated numerous transformations that made China's transition from a capitalist nation to a socialist nation. Mao was directly or indirectly in power in China from 1949 to 1976, the year of his death.
Note
|1| COGGIOLA, Osvaldo. Chinese Revolution. To access, click on here.
Image credit
[1] wen mingming and Shutterstock
