The Chinese Civil War (1946-1949)
was a titanic military struggle between two competing groups for control of the
Chinese government. The opponents were the Soviet-supported Chinese Communist
Party (CCP) led by Mao Zedong; and the western-supported Chinese Nationalist
Party (KMT) led by Gen.
Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek). There were two phases in this war—the first
phase, a period of predominate internal conflict, occurred between 1927 and
1936. The cause of the Civil War was that Chiang Kai-shek's KMT broke an
alliance of convenience with the Communists on its way to the establishment of
a new National government in 1927. The ideological divisions were also to
become the essential foundation of the conflict. In Shanghai, where the
Communist-led revolutionary workers’ organizations had prepared the way for the
national army, he (Chiang) suddenly suppressed the unions and all Communist or
leftist KMT elements in a bloody act of violence (Franke, 1970).
Mao led an uprising against the KMT called the Autumn Harvest Uprising.
The uprising failed, but the civil war had begun. By the eve of Japanese
invasion into China in 1937, the KMT had gained power and forced a Communist
retreat to a barren and remote base area in northwest China. By then, the Communist’s
Red Army force had been attired to a fraction of its former modest size. The Civil War experienced a “time-out period”
because of the Japanese War (1937-1945) and World War II (1939-1945). During this period, the two sides were forced
to form a temporary Second United Front in 1936 to resist the invasion of
Manchuria by Japan. After Japan's defeat in World War II by the Allies in August
1945, the CCP and the KMT were unable to establish a coalition Chinese
government, KMT wanted a democratic government while CCP wanted communist
government, and thus the full-scale civil war resumed in 1946.
The American people in 1860
believed that they were the happiest and luckiest people in all the world, however,
the Civil War that began in the spring of 1861 had its origins in the very
founding of the nation. The differences between north and south grew during the
1800s until, by the late 1850s, it appeared that an “irrepressible conflict”
was imminent. Political, economic, and social differences between the two
regions of the country were evident from the late 1700s. In the south,
adherents to the concept of states’ rights contended that the states served as
a vital constitutional check on abuses of power by the federal government. They
strongly supported the principles of the Tenth Amendment, designed to restrict
national power and delegate powers not specifically held by the federal
government to the states. Others, including many in the north, maintained that
the national government should stand supreme over the states and that it
possessed broad implied powers based on the “elastic clause” in Article I,
Section 8 of the Constitution. (Coles, 2010)
The North grew into a region with large cities, industries, and networks of
canals ad railroads. Its population also grew faster than the South’s. The
South’s economy depended on large plantations. These grew cotton, tobacco, and
rice. Enslaved people tended these crops. The institution of slavery, which had
existed in all regions during the colonial period, gradually ended in the
north, while in the south it remained a vital economic element. Together these
factors divided the two regions and drove the nation towards disunion. The war
aims of the two sides were very simple. The Confederacy would fight for
independence, the North for re-establishment of the Union (Catton, 1980).