How would you explain the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists (GMD or MGT) and the victory of Mao Zedong and the Chinse Communist Party (CCP) in China?At the end of World War Two, and following the end of the Japanese occupation, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) engaged in a civil war with the Nationalist Party, commonly called the Kuomintang. Some four years later, the triumph of the CCP resulted in the configuration of the People's Republic of China, the world's most populous communist country. Arguably, this outcome was unexpected: the Nationalists had been in power since 1911, had by far the bigger army and had some support from Western nations, particularly the United States, who were themselves increasingly engaged in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Why, then, did the Communists win the civil war? This essay argues that this outcome is attributable to a mixture of financial mismanagement, poor leadership and incompetence on the part of the Kuomintang, allied to the superior military strategy of the CCP as well as its implementation of a range of socio-political programs.
President Nixon meets with China's Communist Party...
English: Location_of_the_First_Congress_of_the_Chi...
Pictured here is former Chinese Chairman Mao Zedon...The essay now discusses these influences in some detail.
The undermining of the Chinese financial system in the late 1940s was a significant factor in the fall of the Nationalists. In essence, the Kuomintang government, in pursuit of its policy of industrial expansion and of supporting the war against the Communists, resorted to simply printing banknotes to fund its expenses. Thus, by 1948, government expenses had been augmented by a factor of 30 times more than the 1940 figure and the amount of money notes in circulation had been amplified by a factor of 22 . Both the level of inflation and the government deficit increased considerably. For some time, this rising inflation rate did not entirely devastate...