China

Communist victory

Between early November 1948 and early January 1949, the two sides battled for control of Suzhou. Zhu De concentrated 600,000 troops under Chen Yi, Liu Bocheng, and Chen Geng near that strategic centre, which was defended by Nationalist forces of similar size. Both armies were well-equipped, but the Nationalists had a superiority in armour and were unopposed in the air. Yet poor morale, inept command, and a defensive psychology brought another disaster to the Nationalist government. One after another, its armies were surrounded and defeated in the field. When the 65-day battle was over on January 10, the Nationalists had lost some 500,000 men and their equipment. The capital at Nanjing would soon lie exposed.

With Manchuria and most of the eastern region south to the Yangtze in communist hands, the fate of Tianjin and Beiping was sealed. The railway corridor between Tianjin and Zhangjiakou was hopelessly isolated. Tianjin fell on January 15 after a brief siege, and Beiping surrendered on the 23rd, allowing a peaceful turnover of China’s historic capital and centre of culture.

Thus, during the last half of 1948, the communist armies had gained control over Manchuria and northeastern China nearly to the Yangtze, except for pockets of resistance. They had a numerical superiority and had captured such huge stocks of rifles, artillery, and armour that they were better equipped than the Nationalists.

Great political shifts occurred in 1949. Chiang Kai-shek retired temporarily in January, turning over to the vice president, Gen. Li Tsung-jen (Li Zongren), the problem of holding the government together and trying to negotiate a peace with Mao Zedong. Li’s peace negotiations (February–April) proved hopeless. The Nationalists were not prepared to surrender; they still claimed to govern more than half of China and still had a large army. General Li tried to secure U.S. support in the peace negotiations and in the military defense of southern China, but the U.S. government, attempting to extricate itself from its entanglement with the collapsing forces of the Nationalist government, pursued a policy of noninvolvement.

When peace negotiations broke down, communist armies crossed the Yangtze virtually unopposed; the Nationalist government abandoned its indefensible capital on April 23 and moved to Guangzhou. In succession, communist forces occupied Nanjing (April 24), Hankou (May 16–17), and Shanghai (May 25). The Nationalists’ last hope lay in the south and west, but Xi’an, a longtime Nationalist bastion and the gateway to the northwest, had fallen to Gen. Peng Dehuai on May 20. During the last half of 1949, powerful communist armies succeeded in taking the provinces of southern and western China. By the end of the year, only the islands of Hainan, Taiwan, and a few other offshore positions were still in Nationalist hands, and only scattered pockets of resistance remained on the mainland. The defeated Nationalist government reestablished itself on Taiwan, to which Chiang had withdrawn early in the year, taking most of the government’s gold reserves and the Nationalist air force and navy. On October 1, with most of the mainland held by the PLA, Mao proclaimed the establishment in Beijing of the government of the People’s Republic of China. C. Martin Wilbur Ernest P. Young