Chinese red army and long March

The Chinese Civil War (traditional Chinese: 國共内戰; simplified Chinese: 国共内战; pinyin: guógòng neìzhàn; literally "Nationalist-Communist Civil War"), which lasted from April 1927 to May 1950, was a civil war in China between the Kuomintang (KMT or Nationalist Party) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The war began in 1927, after the Northern Expedition, when the right-wing faction of the KMT, led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, purged the Communists and KMT leftists from a KMT-CCP alliance. The war represented an ideological split between the Western-supported nationalist KMT, and the Soviet-Communist supported CCP.
The civil war carried on intermittently until the looming Second Sino-Japanese War interrupted it, resulting in an organized and temporary Chinese resistance to the Japanese invasion. The Japanese assault and occupation was an opportunistic attack made possible by China's own state of internal turmoil. Japan's campaign was defeated in August, 1945 by the Allies, marking the end of WWII, and China's full-scale civil war resumed in 1946. Hostilities ended after 23 years in 1950, with an unofficial cessation of major hostilities, with the Communists controlling mainland China (including Hainan Island) and the Nationalists restricted to their remaining territories of Taiwan, Pescadores, and the several outlying Fujianese islands. To this day, no official armistice has ever been signed, although the two sides have close economic ties.





Contents

1 Background
2 Northern Expedition (1926–1928) and KMT-CCP split
3 Anti-Communist campaigns (1927–1937)
4 Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945)
5 Immediate post-war clashes (1945–1946)
6 Post-war power struggle (1946–1947)
7 Fighting on mainland China (1946–1950)
8 Relationship between the two sides since 1950
9 Commanders during the Civil War

9.1 Chinese Nationalist Party
9.2 Communist Party of China
9.3 Warlords
10 Notes
11 See also
12 External links



Background
The collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, left China under the control of several major and lesser warlords, is what is referred to as the Warlord era. To defeat the warlords who had seized control of much of Northern China since the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, the anti-monarchist and national unificationist Kuomintang party and its leader Sun Yat-sen sought the help of foreign powers. His efforts to obtain aid from the Western democracies were ignored, however, and in 1921 he turned to the Soviet Union. For political expediency, the Soviet leadership initiated a dual policy of support for both Sun and the newly established Communist Party of China. The Soviets hoped for Communist consolidation, but were prepared for either side to emerge victorious. Thus the struggle for power in China began between the Nationalists and the Communists.
In 1923, a joint statement by Sun and Soviet representative Adolph Joffe in Shanghai pledged Soviet assistance for China's national unification, and issued the Sun-Joffe Manifesto, calling for a unified and independent China, and arranged an alliance between the KMT and CCP. Soviet advisers, the most prominent of whom was an agent of the Comintern, Mikhail Borodin, began to arrive in China in 1923 to aid in the reorganization and consolidation of the KMT along the lines of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The CCP was under Comintern instructions to cooperate with the KMT, and its members were encouraged to join the KMT while maintaining their CCP party identities, forming the First United Front between the two parties.