TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century

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<text> <title> (1940s) Communism In China </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1940s Highlights </history> <link 07791> <link 05933> <link 05829> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> Communism in China </hdr> <body> [China had suffered terribly during the eight years of war with Japan, twice as much as any other nation. But a large part of the reason for China's defeats lay in its social and political deterioration as a nation, which had helped spawn the Communist movement there. For a while during the war, Chiang's Nationalist armies and the Communists under Mao Tse-tung had maintained a ceasefire and turned their weapons against the Japanese. But even before the war was over, despite the vigorous efforts of American envoys trying to salvage something from years of effort and hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. aid, the Communists and Nationalists went for each other, as both tried to move into territory vacated by Japanese troops being repatriated. Some Western observers had a boundless faith in the ability of Chiang Kai-shek to reverse the deterioration and anarchy in China. But the problems of the country were so enormous, and ran so far beyond the mere military and political, that Chiang was unable to cope. The U.S., which had poured good money after bad over the years in China, watched with growing dismay, then began to distance itself from a regime that was patently incompetent. The slow-motion disintegration in the face of Communist pressure was chronicled in TIME with great detail and great despair.] (June 18, 1945) More & more Chinese Communist guerrillas were filtering through Japanese lines in Central China, fighting here & there with Central Government troops. Chungking's War Minister, General Chen Cheng, deplored the clashes, declared that Government troops had orders not to fight Communists unless first attacked. The advance from Yenan began about a year ago, while Chungking's armies were staggering under Japanese military blows. Last year the Communists claimed to dominate 80,000,000 people, to command 470,000 regular troops and over 2,000,000 guerrillas. Now they claim control of 95,500,000 people, 910,000 regulars and 2,200,000 guerrillas. (November 12, 1945) Civil war spread across North China. So far it was an undeclared and limited war--a military offshoot of the unity negotiations between the Central Government and the Communists. But at any time the war might become open and unlimited. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's armies, moving to restore Central Government authority above the Yellow River, had collided with Communist forces moving from their strongholds in the same region. The Communist aim: to control a belt of territory reaching roughly 500 miles from Soviet-occupied Manchuria. Success would give the Communists, long established in landlocked Yenan, an overland link with Russia and an outlet to the sea. It would also block the Central Government's chance to unify China. (July 28, 1947) U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall's policy of splendid isolation from the China civil war had led to a deadlock: neither the Government nor the Communists had enough strength for a knockout punch. As the opposing forces clinched wearily last week, China, bled white by the long struggle, took a new breath. The U.S.'s three-star General Albert C. Wedemeyer was on the way to see what could be done to retrieve the losses that followed from five-star General Marshall's indecisive decision. North of the Yellow River it was all the Government could do to protect the big cities and keep the main rail lines open. The Chinese Communists, who lacked the strength to take Peiping, Tientsin or Mukden, controlled the countryside of North China and Manchuria. They could, and did, tear up rail lines (sometimes within ten miles of Peiping). (October 25, 1948) Not since the worst years of the Japanese war had China faced a prospect so bitter. The Communist autumn offensive had overwhelmed the Nationalists in Manchuria; the vital North China corridor was under heavy attack. For the second time in a generation, a great Nationalist retreat was under way. Isolated outposts would now be evacuated and lines shortened to save men and materiel for a long war of attrition. One exception to the Nationalist strategy of evacuation was Mukden, site of the best arsenal in all China. Twice in the last fortnight Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek had flown north to confer with General Wei Li-huang, Mukden's commander, and stir him to a more active defense. As the garrison from starving Changchun hacked southward to join the Mukden forces, Wei's columns drove down to retake the port of Yingkow, reopening Mukden to direct sea supply. More of Wei's troops thrust west to relieve Chinhsien. (November 8, 1948) Mukden was lost. The Nationalist withdrawal had turned into a rout. As Communist troops took over the government's main Manchurian stronghold last week, Nanking received the radio message: "No more reports. Cannot get out of office. Goodbye." Nationalist planes began to bomb the city. (December 6, 1948) The Communists were overrunning China like lava. Mukden and all Manchuria were gone--and 60% of China's best troops had gone with them. In the great rust-red plain between Nanking and Suchow, the last government armies in Central China confronted an enemy that had beaten them before. U.S. military experts had given Nanking "ten days to three weeks." (December 27, 1948) Barring miracles, Chiang Kai-shek was beaten. Most (if not all) of China would soon be added to the eleven countries of parts of countries run by the Communists. Control of all China, together with the areas he already held, would place 40% of the world's population in Stalin's grasp. Last week Chiang still held (nominally) far more territory than he had in the worst years of the Japanese war. Then, however, most Chinese wanted him to keep on resisting the enemy. Now, it seemed, most Chinese wanted him to quit. The conviction of defeat was strongest among the educated, the influential, the rich. The peace-at-any-price tide welled right up to the door of Chiang's study. His indomitable will directed China to go on fighting, but in the absence of the people's confidence, one man's will was not a resistance. (January 31, 1949) Defeated and helpless, Chiang Kai-shek, for 22 years the dominant figure in China, stepped down last week. His retirement symbolized one of the great shifts in the 20th Century's turbulent history: some 460 million Chinese, a quarter of the human race, were passing under the domination of Communism. (May 2, 1949) It was a week of stunning, swift disaster in China. Nearly a million Communist troops along a 400-mile front poured across the broad Yangtze, Nationalist China's last great defensive barrier, and swept government positions aside like puny earthworks in a raging tide. The Communists moved in with impressive speed. In four days they took Nanking, cut off Shanghai, and captured half a dozen strategic Nationalist cities. They were driving hard for the rest of the free China not yet engulfed in the Red flood. (May 9, 1949) Slowly but inexorably, the armies of Communist General Chen Yi bore down across the flatlands of the Yangtze delta. In the second week of the South China offensive the Reds' pace had slowed down somewhat, but they triumphantly reported eight Nationalists armies crushed and trapped between the Yangtze and the coast. Hangchow, last coastal railroad gateway to the south, was deserted and lay open to the conquerors. Red armies also bore down on Shanghai. (October 3, 1949) After a quarter-century of conspiracy and struggle, the great day came at last for China's Red conquerors. In Peiping's crumbling Imperial Palace, under the golden tiles of bygone Mings and Chings, the Communists last week proclaimed their new dynasty. Cried Party Chairman Mao Tse-tung: "We have a feeling in common that our work will be written down in the history of mankind. It will say: the Chinese, forming one-quarter of humanity, have risen...We announce the establishment of the People's Republic of China...We must unite with all countries and peoples loving peace and freedom, first of all the Soviet Union...Let the reactionaries at home & abroad tremble." [Totally defeated, Chiang Kai-shek fled ignominiously to the offshore island of Taiwan in December 1949.] </body> </article> </text>