Chinese Civil War begins

On April 12, 1927, Nationalist troops and allied gangs in Shanghai turned on their Communist partners, arresting and killing union leaders and party members in a purge that took hundreds to thousands of lives. Chiang Kai-shek, commander of the Nationalist Northern Expedition, had just brought most of southern China under Kuomintang control. The massacre ended the First United Front and began the Chinese Civil War.³

Both sides were products of the collapse of the Qing and the 1911 Revolution, which left warlords, weak governments and foreign concessions. Sun Yat-sen's Nationalists had allied with the young Communist Party, founded in 1921, with Soviet advice and money. After Sun died in 1925, Chiang moved against the left to protect the landlord, banker and merchant interests behind him. The Communists, nearly wiped out in the cities, rebuilt in the countryside, where Mao Zedong organized peasants in Jiangxi.³

The war came in phases. The Nationalists drove the Communists out of Jiangxi in 1934, launching the Long March of thousands of kilometers to Shaanxi, in which only about 8,000 to 10,000 of the perhaps 80,000 to 90,000 who set out arrived. In 1937 the two sides paused to fight Japan, though they kept watching each other. Open war resumed in 1946. The Nationalists had more men and US weapons, but inflation, corruption and defections wore them down, and the People's Liberation Army won Manchuria, then north China, then the south. The Communists proclaimed the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949.¹²