History of China/Chapter 18

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Chapter 18: The Nanjing Decade, Long March, and War Against Japan (1928–1945)

1. Introduction: Between Revolution and Invasion

The seventeen years from the establishment of the Nationalist government at Nanjing in 1928 to the end of the Second World War in 1945 constituted the most devastating period in China's modern history. These years encompassed the ambitious but deeply flawed "Nanjing Decade" of Guomindang rule (1928–1937), the epic survival march of the Chinese Communist Party through some of the most inhospitable terrain on earth, and the catastrophe of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) — the largest theater of the Second World War in Asia, which killed an estimated fifteen to twenty million Chinese and devastated the country on a scale unmatched since the Taiping Rebellion.

Yet this era of unprecedented destruction was also a period of profound political transformation. The war against Japan discredited the Nationalist government, which bore the brunt of conventional warfare against a technologically superior enemy, while providing the Chinese Communist Party with the opportunity to expand its base, refine its strategy of peasant mobilization and guerrilla warfare, and emerge from the war as a powerful rival to the Nationalists for control of China. The outcome of the war — in which the Nationalists won the battle but were fatally weakened in the process, while the Communists lost many battles but gained the countryside — set the stage for the civil war that would determine China's fate.

2. The Nanjing Decade: Achievements and Contradictions (1928–1937)

The establishment of the National Government (国民政府, Guomin Zhengfu) at Nanjing in 1928 marked the beginning of the first period of relative political stability that China had experienced since the fall of the Qing dynasty. The Guomindang government, led by Chiang Kai-shek as chairman of the National Government and commander-in-chief of the armed forces, claimed to represent the fulfillment of Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary program and the beginning of the "period of political tutelage" (训政, xunzheng) — an extended phase of one-party rule during which the Guomindang would educate the Chinese people in the practice of democracy before transitioning to constitutional government.

The achievements of the Nanjing Decade were genuine, if unevenly distributed. The government established a modern administrative structure, reformed the legal and judicial system, built thousands of kilometers of roads and railways, expanded the educational system, promoted public health, standardized weights and measures, reformed the currency (replacing the silver tael with a new paper currency, the fabi 法币), and regained partial tariff autonomy from the foreign powers — the first significant rollback of the unequal treaty system. The government also fostered industrial development, particularly in the lower Yangtze region, where light industry — textile mills, food processing, and consumer goods manufacturing — expanded rapidly. Shanghai became the commercial and financial capital of Asia, with a vibrant modern economy, a sophisticated banking system, and a cosmopolitan culture that earned it the nickname "Paris of the East."

Yet the Nanjing Decade was also characterized by profound contradictions and failures. The government's authority was largely confined to the lower Yangtze valley and parts of the southeast coast; much of the interior remained under the effective control of semi-autonomous warlords who acknowledged Nanjing's nominal authority but retained their own armies, taxed their own territories, and pursued their own policies. The government's fiscal base was narrow — dependent primarily on customs revenues, the salt tax, and taxes on the modern commercial sector — and inadequate for the immense tasks of national development. Corruption was endemic at all levels of government, and the Guomindang itself degenerated from a revolutionary party into a patronage machine dominated by conservative military officers, Shanghai financiers, and landed elites.

Most critically, the Nationalist government failed to address the fundamental problem of rural China. The vast majority of the Chinese population — over 80 percent — were peasants living in the countryside, where conditions had deteriorated steadily since the late Qing. Tenant farming was widespread, rents were crushing, debt was endemic, and the traditional social safety nets of the clan and the village community were disintegrating under the pressures of commercialization and population growth. The Guomindang's rhetoric included promises of land reform and rural development, but in practice the government was allied with the landlord class and had neither the will nor the capacity to implement meaningful agrarian reform. This failure to address the grievances of the peasant majority would prove to be the Nationalists' most consequential error, for it was precisely this population that the Chinese Communist Party would mobilize in its drive to power.

3. The New Life Movement and Guomindang Ideology

Chiang Kai-shek's vision for China was a distinctive blend of Confucian moralism, authoritarian nationalism, and selective modernization. His ideology was most clearly expressed in the New Life Movement (新生活运动, Xin Shenghuo Yundong), launched in 1934, which called for the moral regeneration of the Chinese people through the revival of the traditional Confucian virtues of propriety (礼, li), righteousness (义, yi), integrity (廉, lian), and shame (耻, chi). The movement promoted personal hygiene, orderly behavior, martial discipline, and obedience to authority — a program that combined Confucian moralism with elements of European fascism and Christian puritanism (Chiang and his wife, Song Meiling 宋美龄, were both Methodists).

The New Life Movement was widely ridiculed by Chinese intellectuals and foreign observers for its superficiality — its emphasis on buttoning one's jacket and standing up straight seemed absurdly inadequate to the challenges facing China. But it reflected a serious, if deeply flawed, attempt to create a national ideology that could unite the Chinese people, instill discipline and patriotism, and provide a counterweight to Communist ideology. Chiang admired the organizational discipline of European fascist movements and sought to replicate it within the Guomindang — most notably through the Blue Shirts Society (蓝衣社, Lanyishe), a secret organization of young military officers devoted to Chiang that employed fascist-style ideology, organization, and methods, including political surveillance, intimidation, and assassination.

The Guomindang's failure to develop a compelling popular ideology — one that could address the real grievances of the Chinese population and offer a credible vision of a better future — was one of its most consequential weaknesses. The Three Principles of the People remained the party's official doctrine, but they were too vague and too closely associated with the elite interests of the party leadership to generate genuine popular enthusiasm. The contrast with the Communist Party, whose ideology offered a clear analysis of China's problems and a revolutionary program for solving them, would become increasingly stark as the years went by.

4. The Encirclement Campaigns and the Rise of Mao Zedong

After the catastrophe of 1927, the surviving remnants of the Chinese Communist Party faced the task of rebuilding their movement from near-annihilation. The party's urban base had been destroyed, and conventional Marxist-Leninist theory offered no clear guidance for a revolution in a predominantly agrarian country with a tiny industrial proletariat. It was in this context that Mao Zedong (毛泽东, 1893–1976) developed the revolutionary strategy that would ultimately carry the CCP to power.

Mao's crucial insight — developed through his experience organizing peasant associations in Hunan in 1926–1927 — was that the Chinese revolution must be based not on the urban working class (as orthodox Marxism prescribed) but on the vast peasant population of the countryside. In his famous "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan" (湖南农民运动考察报告, Hunan Nongmin Yundong Kaocha Baogao) of March 1927, Mao described the revolutionary potential of the peasantry in vivid, almost ecstatic terms, declaring that "the force of the peasantry is like that of the raging winds and driving rain" and that "no force can stand in its way."

Following the collapse of the united front, Mao led a ragged band of survivors to the Jinggang Mountains (井冈山, Jinggang Shan) on the Hunan-Jiangxi border, where he established a rural base area and began developing the techniques of guerrilla warfare, land reform, and peasant mobilization that would become the hallmarks of the Chinese Communist revolution. In 1931, the CCP established the Chinese Soviet Republic (中华苏维埃共和国, Zhonghua Su'weiai Gongheguo) in the mountainous border region of Jiangxi, with Mao as chairman. The Jiangxi Soviet, as it came to be known, governed a population of approximately three million people, implemented land reform (confiscating landlord property and redistributing it to poor peasants), established schools and health clinics, promoted women's rights, and created a rudimentary governmental structure.

The Nationalist government recognized the Communist base areas as a mortal threat and launched a series of "encirclement and suppression campaigns" (围剿, weijiao) to destroy them. The first four campaigns (1930–1933) were defeated by the Red Army using Mao's guerrilla tactics — "the enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue" (敌进我退，敌驻我扰，敌疲我打，敌退我追). But in the Fifth Encirclement Campaign (1933–1934), Chiang Kai-shek employed a new strategy — a systematic blockade using a network of concrete blockhouses that slowly constricted the Soviet area — while the CCP leadership, now dominated by Moscow-trained cadres who had sidelined Mao, abandoned guerrilla tactics in favor of conventional positional warfare. The result was a catastrophic defeat that nearly destroyed the Communist movement.

5. The Long March (1934–1935)

In October 1934, approximately 86,000 Communist soldiers and cadres broke through the Nationalist blockade and began one of the most extraordinary military retreats in history — the Long March (长征, Changzheng). Over the next year, the remnants of the Red Army marched approximately 9,000 kilometers (some sources cite up to 12,500 kilometers) through some of the most rugged and inhospitable terrain in China — crossing raging rivers, climbing snow-covered mountain passes over 4,000 meters high, traversing the deadly grasslands (草地, caodi) of the Tibetan plateau where hundreds died of exposure and starvation, and fighting almost continuous rearguard actions against pursuing Nationalist forces and hostile local militias.

The casualties were appalling. Of the approximately 86,000 who set out from Jiangxi, fewer than 8,000 completed the march to Shaanxi province in northern China — a survival rate of less than ten percent. Tens of thousands were killed in battle, died of disease, starvation, or exposure, or deserted along the way. Other Communist forces that undertook parallel marches suffered similar losses. The Long March was, by any conventional military measure, a catastrophic defeat.

Yet the Long March was also a transformative event that shaped the Communist movement in fundamental ways. Most importantly, it established Mao Zedong's leadership of the CCP. At the Zunyi Conference (遵义会议, Zunyi Huiyi) in January 1935 — held in the Guizhou city of Zunyi during a pause in the march — Mao successfully challenged the authority of the Moscow-trained leadership and was elected to a position of de facto military command. The Zunyi Conference is conventionally regarded as the moment when Mao assumed the leadership of the Chinese Communist movement — a leadership he would retain until his death in 1976. It also marked the beginning of the CCP's independence from Soviet control and the development of a distinctively Chinese form of Communism that would become known as "Mao Zedong Thought" (毛泽东思想, Mao Zedong Sixiang).

The Long March also created the founding myth of the Communist revolution. The shared experience of extraordinary suffering, danger, and survival forged an unbreakable bond among the surviving veterans — the "Long March generation" — who would constitute the core leadership of the CCP for the next half-century. The march's epic narrative — of a small band of revolutionaries who endured impossible hardships, overcame overwhelming odds, and emerged victorious through courage, determination, and correct ideology — became the central myth of the Communist revolution, endlessly retold, celebrated, and mythologized in Communist propaganda, literature, and education.

In October 1935, the survivors of the Long March reached Yan'an (延安) in the remote, impoverished loess plateau region of northern Shaanxi, where a small Communist base area had been established by local guerrilla forces. Yan'an would serve as the CCP's headquarters for the next twelve years, and it was there that Mao would develop the institutions, the ideology, and the strategy that would carry the Communists to national power.

6. The Xi'an Incident and the Turn Toward War (1936)

By the mid-1930s, the most urgent question in Chinese politics was whether the Nationalist government would continue to prioritize the suppression of the Communists or redirect its forces against the growing Japanese threat. Japan had seized Manchuria in 1931, establishing the puppet state of Manchukuo (满洲国, Manzhouguo), and was steadily extending its military presence into northern China. Chinese public opinion was overwhelmingly in favor of resisting Japan, and the CCP — recognizing both the strategic opportunity and the genuine patriotic sentiment — had called for a "united front" against Japan since 1935.

Chiang Kai-shek, however, was determined to destroy the Communists before confronting Japan — a strategy he summarized in the formula "first internal pacification, then external resistance" (攘外必先安内, rang wai bi xian an nei). This policy was deeply unpopular, particularly among the troops of Zhang Xueliang (张学良, 1901–2001), the "Young Marshal" whose Manchurian forces had been driven from their homeland by the Japanese invasion and who bitterly resented being ordered to fight Chinese Communists while the Japanese occupied their land.

On December 12, 1936, Zhang Xueliang and his ally Yang Hucheng (杨虎城, 1893–1949) took the extraordinary step of kidnapping Chiang Kai-shek at the Huaqing Hot Springs (华清池, Huaqing Chi) near Xi'an (西安). The "Xi'an Incident" (西安事变, Xi'an Shibian) threw the country into crisis. Zhang demanded that Chiang end the civil war against the Communists and form a united front against Japan. For two weeks, intense negotiations took place, with Zhou Enlai — sent by the CCP from Yan'an — playing a crucial mediating role. The CCP leadership, overruling those who wanted Chiang executed, recognized that Chiang was the only figure capable of leading a national resistance against Japan, and they worked to secure his release in exchange for his agreement to halt the anti-Communist campaigns and form a Second United Front (第二次国共合作, Di-er ci Guogong Hezuo).

Chiang was released on December 25, 1936. The exact terms of the agreement were never publicly disclosed, but the practical result was the end of the civil war and the beginning of Nationalist-Communist cooperation against Japan. The Xi'an Incident was a turning point of the first order: it saved the CCP from potential destruction, created the framework for national resistance against Japan, and set in motion the chain of events that would lead to the Second Sino-Japanese War — and ultimately to the Communist victory in 1949.

7. The Second Sino-Japanese War: The Opening Catastrophe (1937–1938)

The Second Sino-Japanese War (抗日战争, Kangri Zhanzheng, "War of Resistance Against Japan") began on July 7, 1937, when Japanese and Chinese forces clashed at the Marco Polo Bridge (卢沟桥, Lugouqiao) near Beijing. What began as a local incident rapidly escalated into a full-scale war as both sides mobilized their forces. The Japanese, who had been planning for a war of conquest in China, deployed overwhelming military force — modern aircraft, tanks, artillery, and well-trained infantry — against Chinese forces that were brave but poorly equipped, inadequately trained, and lacking in modern weaponry.

The opening months of the war were a catastrophe for China. Beijing and Tianjin fell in late July. The Battle of Shanghai (淞沪会战, Songhu Huizhan, August–November 1937) was one of the largest and bloodiest battles of the entire war: Chiang Kai-shek committed his best German-trained divisions to the defense of Shanghai in an attempt to demonstrate China's determination to resist and to attract international sympathy and intervention. The three-month battle cost China an estimated 250,000 casualties — including the cream of the Nationalist army's officer corps and trained soldiers — before the Chinese lines collapsed and the Japanese advanced on Nanjing.

The fall of Nanjing in December 1937 was followed by one of the worst atrocities in the history of modern warfare. During a period of approximately six weeks, Japanese forces committed the Nanjing Massacre (南京大屠杀, Nanjing Datusha) — a rampage of mass murder, rape, torture, and destruction that killed an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 Chinese civilians and prisoners of war. Women were raped in staggering numbers — contemporary estimates ranged from 20,000 to 80,000 — and the city was subjected to systematic looting and arson. The Nanjing Massacre, documented by foreign eyewitnesses including the German businessman John Rabe (who organized a safety zone that sheltered approximately 200,000 Chinese civilians) and the American missionary Minnie Vautrin, remains one of the defining events of modern Chinese memory and a persistent source of tension in Sino-Japanese relations.

In the face of the Japanese onslaught, the Nationalist government retreated westward — first to Wuhan, then, after Wuhan's fall in October 1938, to Chongqing (重庆) in Sichuan province, deep in the interior beyond the Yangtze gorges. The retreat was accompanied by extraordinary measures: entire factories were dismantled, shipped upstream on barges, and reassembled in the interior; universities relocated to improvised campuses in remote provinces; and millions of refugees — government officials, soldiers, students, businessmen, and ordinary citizens — made the arduous journey westward, creating one of the largest mass migrations in history.

8. Wartime Chongqing: The Nationalist Ordeal

From its wartime capital at Chongqing, the Nationalist government waged a desperate struggle for survival against a vastly superior enemy. The city, shrouded in fog for much of the year, was subjected to devastating Japanese bombing raids — the "Chongqing bombings" (重庆大轰炸, Chongqing Da Hongzha) of 1938–1943, which killed thousands of civilians and destroyed much of the city, constituting one of the first sustained strategic bombing campaigns against a civilian population in history.

The Nationalist war effort was heroic but deeply problematic. The Chinese army — which fielded over four million soldiers at its peak — fought numerous major battles against the Japanese, including the defense of Changsha (长沙保卫战, defended successfully three times before falling in 1944), the Battle of Taierzhuang (台儿庄战役, March 1938, the first major Chinese victory of the war), and the campaigns in Burma alongside British and American forces. But the army was crippled by poor leadership, corruption, inadequate equipment, and a replacement system that treated soldiers as expendable. Conscription was brutal and often indistinguishable from kidnapping — young men were seized by press gangs, roped together, and marched to their units, with many dying of starvation, disease, or abuse before they ever reached the front. The contrast between the suffering of ordinary soldiers and the comfort of senior officers contributed to the demoralization that would plague the Nationalist military in the civil war that followed.

The Nationalist government's relationship with its principal ally, the United States, was complex and fraught with tension. The United States provided substantial military and economic aid — particularly after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 brought America into the war — including the construction of the Burma Road and later the "Hump" airlift over the Himalayas, which supplied the Chinese war effort from India. But the relationship between Chiang Kai-shek and the American military commander, General Joseph Stilwell (known by his nickname "Vinegar Joe"), was poisonous. Stilwell regarded Chiang as incompetent and corrupt, and he was contemptuous of the Nationalist army's performance; Chiang regarded Stilwell as arrogant, disrespectful, and ignorant of Chinese political realities. The Stilwell affair, which ended with Stilwell's recall in October 1944, poisoned Sino-American relations and contributed to the American disillusionment with the Nationalist government that would have consequences in the postwar period.

The war devastated China's economy and society. Inflation — caused by the loss of the government's tax base in the occupied areas and the reliance on printing money to finance the war — spiraled out of control, destroying the savings of the middle class and impoverishing government officials, teachers, and soldiers on fixed incomes. Corruption flourished as officials used their positions to profit from the black market, smuggling, and the diversion of American aid. The government's increasingly authoritarian practices — censorship, surveillance, the suppression of dissent — alienated intellectuals and students who had initially supported the war effort. By the end of the war, the Nationalist government had been fatally weakened — militarily, economically, morally, and politically.

9. Yan'an and the Communist Alternative

While the Nationalist government struggled in Chongqing, the Chinese Communist Party was building an alternative model of governance in its base areas behind Japanese lines. The CCP's wartime headquarters at Yan'an (延安), a cave-dwelling town in the arid loess plateau of northern Shaanxi, became the laboratory for the revolutionary strategies and institutions that would carry the party to national power.

The Yan'an period (1937–1947) was the formative era of Chinese Communism. It was during these years that Mao Zedong consolidated his ideological and organizational control over the party through the "Rectification Movement" (整风运动, Zhengfeng Yundong) of 1942–1944 — a campaign of ideological education, self-criticism, and political purification that established "Mao Zedong Thought" as the party's guiding ideology and eliminated potential rivals to Mao's authority. The rectification campaign developed techniques of mass mobilization, ideological indoctrination, and political control — including "struggle sessions" (批斗会, pidou hui), public confessions, and the punishment of dissidents — that would become hallmarks of Communist political practice.

The CCP's wartime strategy combined guerrilla warfare against the Japanese with political mobilization of the peasantry. In the vast areas of northern and central China behind Japanese lines, the Communists established "base areas" (根据地, genjudi) — liberated zones governed by Communist-led administrations that implemented land reform (initially limited to rent and interest reduction to maintain the broadest possible anti-Japanese coalition), established village-level democratic governance, promoted literacy and public health, and organized the peasant population for both production and military defense. The "mass line" (群众路线, qunzhong luxian) — the principle that the party must learn from the people, synthesize their ideas, and then lead them in implementing policies that serve their interests — was developed as the guiding methodology of Communist governance.

The contrast between Yan'an and Chongqing was striking and consequential. Where the Nationalist government was increasingly corrupt, inefficient, and disconnected from the population, the Communist administration in Yan'an cultivated an image of austerity, dedication, and closeness to the common people. CCP leaders lived in caves, wore the same cotton-padded uniforms as ordinary soldiers, and worked alongside peasants in the fields. The "Yan'an spirit" (延安精神, Yan'an Jingshen) — self-reliance, frugality, egalitarianism, and service to the people — became the founding ethos of the Communist movement and a powerful source of legitimacy that contrasted sharply with the conspicuous corruption of the Nationalist elite.

Foreign visitors to Yan'an — including the American journalist Edgar Snow, whose Red Star Over China (1937) introduced the Communist movement to the Western world, and the American diplomatic observers who visited Yan'an in 1944 as part of the "Dixie Mission" — were generally impressed by the energy, discipline, and apparent idealism of the Communist movement. Their reports contributed to the growing perception, both in China and abroad, that the Communists represented a viable and perhaps preferable alternative to the Nationalists — a perception that would influence American policy in the critical postwar period.

10. The End of the War and the Shape of the Postwar World

Japan's surrender on August 15, 1945, following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet declaration of war, ended eight years of devastating conflict but did not bring peace to China. The war had killed an estimated fifteen to twenty million Chinese — the vast majority of them civilians — and had displaced over 95 million people. Entire regions of China had been devastated; major cities lay in ruins; the economy was shattered; and the social fabric of the nation had been torn to shreds.

The war had also fundamentally altered the balance of power between the Nationalists and the Communists. The Nationalist government, which had borne the primary burden of conventional resistance against Japan, emerged from the war exhausted, demoralized, and deeply unpopular. Its army, despite its enormous size, was plagued by poor morale, incompetent leadership, and the accumulated grievances of years of abuse and neglect. The government's fiscal resources were depleted by years of deficit spending and ruinous inflation. And the moral authority that the Nationalists had once enjoyed as the standard-bearers of Chinese nationalism had been severely compromised by corruption, authoritarianism, and the perception — however unfair — that they had not fought the Japanese as effectively as the Communists.

The Chinese Communist Party, by contrast, emerged from the war enormously strengthened. Its membership had grown from approximately 40,000 in 1937 to over 1.2 million by 1945. The People's Liberation Army (人民解放军, Renmin Jiefangjun, as the Red Army was renamed) had expanded from a few tens of thousands to approximately 900,000 regular soldiers and over 2 million militia. The party controlled base areas in northern and central China with a combined population of approximately 100 million people. And the CCP's wartime record of resistance, reform, and relatively honest governance had won it the loyalty — or at least the acquiescence — of millions of peasants who had experienced Communist rule firsthand.

The stage was set for the final confrontation between the two parties that claimed to represent the future of China — a confrontation that would be decided not by diplomacy or negotiation but by civil war.