Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese People by Roger Howard

Author:Roger Howard [Howard, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9780429802010
Google: KUNvDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-09-18T04:46:42+00:00

7 Filling the Holes and Levelling the Tops

The Third Revolutionary Civil War (the War of Liberation), 1945–1949

The reactionary, backward, decaying classes retained [their] dual nature even in their last life-and-death struggles against the people. On the one hand, they were real tigers; they ate people, ate people by the millions and tens of millions. The cause of the people’s struggle went through a period of difficulties and hardships, and along the path there were many twists and turns. To destroy the rule of imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism in China took the Chinese people more than a hundred years and cost them tens of millions of lives before victory in 1949. Look! Were these not living, tigers, iron tigers, real tigers? But in the end they changed into paper tigers, dead tigers, bean-curd tigers.

Mao Tse-tung,

from a speech made on 1 December 1958

The Russian armies cleared the Japanese from China’s northeastern provinces in August 1945. Stalin signed a treaty of friendship and alliance with Chiang Kai-shek while Chiang tried to deny the CCP armies the right to accept the surrender of the Japanese forces in the areas they controlled. Mao went to Chungking and negotiated with Chiang for forty-three days. He secured an agreement that preserved most of the liberated areas as a solid nucleus of people’s power.

Scarcely had the provisional agreement between the CCP and the KMT been signed on 10 October 1945 than Chiang resumed fierce attacks on these areas. The United States provided transport to move the KMT armies into the north-east to take power after the Russians withdrew, forestalling takeover by the local CCP units in many places. Mao responded by calling, for the establishment of rural base areas there, independent of the cities the KMT held.

American marines numbering 90,000 landed in China’s northern ports and guarded communications for the KMT. American advisers trained KMT personnel and equipped forty-five of Chiang’s divisions with modern weapons and vehicles. United States aid paid for more than half the KMT’s expenditures. By mid-1946, despite further partial truces, the Third Revolutionary Civil War had begun.

Thus aided, the enemy seemed strong. But ‘all reactionaries are paper tigers’, said Mao in August 1946. ‘From a long-term point of view, it is not the reactionaries but the people who are really powerful.’ Faced by an enemy whose military supplier possessed the atom bomb, the people’s army should take full account of him tactically but despise him strategically, since the outcome of a revolutionary war is finally decided not by the weapons of the ruling class but by the strength of the people. This thesis of Mao’s did much to give the people confidence and turn a negative, defensive civil war into a positive, offensive war of liberation.

Re-organised and renamed the People’s liberation Army (PLA), the communist armies used the method of fighting, set forth by Mao, ‘concentrating a superior force to destroy the enemy forces one by one’. Despite the KMT’s seizure of big cities, the PL A had within seven months turned the war situation in a direction favourable to the people.

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