Instead of declaring that Chiang’s mistakes was the main reason for the 1949

Revolution, I would say that compared to the KMT, CCP had several significant advantages
that allowed them to compete for and finally won the 1949 Revolution such as centralised
military command with harmonious atmosphere among soldiers, peasants’ or low-class
population support and Mao’s and other central leaders’ wise and influential decisions. The
advantages that CCP contained would be the main cause for the victory of the revolution.
To begin with, the first advantage that the CCP had was the huge support from
peasants and the low-class population in rural and remote areas. The help and resources
that the peasants provided played a significant role in supporting battles and soldiers. For
example, the Huaihai Campaign. Although the correct command of Mao or high morale of
CCP’s army might influence the battle a lot, the fundamental reason for the victory in this
battle was still the support from people, especially for peasants in the middle of China. As an
old saying goes “the victory of the Huaihai Campaign was pushed out by the people with a
small cart”, it demonstrates that labouring people really played an important role in the
victory of the Huaihai Campaign. To be more specific, in order to carry the replenishment
and resources to the army at the front line which was a hundred miles away from the rear of
the war, most supplies were relying on shoulders and poles. The migrant workers traversed
the mountains, pushing carts or carrying poles. During the day, women are in charge of
milling rice, pounding noodles, making military uniforms, shoes, and helmets. In addition to
the support from people during the Huaihai Campaign, people’s support was also shown
during the Long March. In May 1935, the first thing that the Red Army did after entering
Huize County in Yunnan Province was to open the granaries of the local tyrants' and
landlords' gentry and distribute rice to the people there. As a response from peasants, in just
four days, more than 1,500 young adults joined the Ninth Red Army. These young adults
included countless soldiers from the Yi-group, which is an ethnic minority group in China.
The fact that CCP also obtained ethnic minorities’ support was demonstrated through this
event. According to two examples mentioned above, we can discover that people from rural
and underdeveloped areas were strikingly passionate about CCP and they dedicated
themselves to the Communist Revolution. Since KMT has already gained a huge amount of
support in urban areas from middle-class businessmen or advanced scholars due to its
popular capitalism ideology, after being founded by Sun Yat-sen, CCP aimed at the
population in rural areas which were low-educated and easy to be incited to support them.
As the KMT had already become really powerful and dominant at that time, the rural
population was the only broad and firm base that CCP could rely on and incited.
Without the population’s support, the Red Army or CCP would just fail in the
Encirclement Campaign. Putting this into a wider context, the Japanese had already invaded
China. Only when the CCP won the support of rural people and united the KMT support
groups in the cities could it be possible to cooperate and use the power of the country to
resist Japan. As you know, peasants also influenced the War of Resistance against Japan in
their own way by using guerilla tactics and gathering information or intelligence about the
Japanese troops. The victory of resisting Japan indirectly enhanced the reputation of the
CCP in the rural areas, which contributed to the 1949 Revolution. As you can see, the broad
rural population support was a huge factor for defeating the KMT and winning the 1949
Communist Revolution.
Apart from the continuous support and abundant supply that the CCP received from
peasants, another imperative factor was that Mao and other crucial members in the CCP
made a lot of great decisions including effective economic or political policies and timely
adjustments of previous failures. Fabulous economic policies improved people’s living
standards and reduced starvation or hunger rates, while timely adjustments of mistakes
served as crucial turning points in CCP’s history. One of the most significant economic
policies that the CCP had posted during the 1949 Revolution, was the land reform in
Jinggang Mountain. This policy redistributed the wealth and land to poor peasants from
traditional landlords. The CCP mobilised and incited peasants to clean up the property of
landlords and kill them, burn land deeds and debt contracts, and distribute livestock and
houses to poor employers. The slogan for this reform campaign was “overthrow the local
despots and distribute land”. While taking a lot of actions for land reform, the Jinggang
Mountain Land Law was enacted by the CCP. This law stipulated that “all land confiscated
shall be owned by the CCP Government”, as well as “using population as the standard, the
land for men, women, old and young will be equally distributed”. By releasing these laws, the
Land Reform enabled the vast number of poor peasants and labourers to stand up politically,
receive land economically, and ensure their livelihood. As the land reform progressed deeper
and deeper, the new landowners realised that compared to the KMT and those warlords, the
CCP was really making a difference and treating them differently. Instead of exploiting and
squeezing peasants, CCP gave all the lands to peasants and assisted them to become
richer and richer, which earned CCP huge support from local poor people. In doing so, Mao
overthrew the long-standing landlord power structure in the villages and installed a new,
Chinese Communist Party-controlled peasant leadership. This was a huge change in the
land ownership system, which was from landlord land ownership to peasants land
ownership. The land reform in Jinggang Mountain not only boosted the local economy, but
also provided an example and firm base for the larger-scale land reform in the future for the
entire country.
However, even though these political leaders often made significant decisions on
politics or the economy, they sometimes made big mistakes. Another example of great
decisions made by CCP’s leaders was the timely adjustments of previous mistakes in the
anti-annihilation Campaign during the Zunyi Conference. Since Otto Braun made a strategic
mistake by attacking the KMT army in a straight line and directly facing them instead of using
the guerilla tactics, the CCP needed to flee out of the encirclement and started the Long
March to reach Shanxi Province with less KMT soldiers there. In order to reflect mistakes
made by the members in CCP and adjust the plan, CCP’s leaders had a conference in
Zunyi, which was known as Zunyi Conference. This meeting served as one of the most
imperative turning points in CCP’s history. During this meeting, Li De and Bo Gu admitted
their fundamental military mistakes for using tactics of pure defence, rather than initiating a
more mobile war. The reflection was supported by Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong. As a result
of this meeting, some positions were shifted. While Zhou remained in his position and now
shared military command with Zhu De, Bo and Braun were demoted. The most important
shift was that Mao was once again joining the Central Committee and becoming the central
leader of the party. Other critical changes included that the CCP should turn away from 28
Bolsheviks and towards Mao, which reduced the influence from the international communist
forces on CCP. Also, another impact of the conference is that, with the assistance of the
majority of peasants, the Red Army was able to rebuild its military power, withstand its siege
of Yan'an, and finally defeat the KMT through guerilla warfare and conventional combat. The
Red Army successfully kept its effective strength. As you can see, these timely adjustments
made by the CCP were really necessary and non-negligible for their developments. The
Zunyi Conference assisted the CCP to survive under such harsh political and military
conditions due to KMT’s repressive rule in the country.
No matter how practical economic policies or timely strategic adjustments were
made, they ultimately came from the extremely strong leadership of the CCP. Without the
central leadership, CCP or the Red Army would just be a headless chicken with a state of
disunity and was already annihilated during the Encirclement Campaign. Then the 1949
Revolution wouldn’t happen. Due to the leadership of Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Peng Dehuai
and other crucial members, many Chinese civilians and peasants gained confidence for
having a hopeful communist revolution and provided stronger support to CCP, and
eventually they succeeded.
According to statistics, the KMT had an obvious advantage at the outset of the
Chinese Civil War. Though the Nationalist administration was weakened during the Second
Sino-Japanese War, there were still 3 million Nationalist soldiers compared to 1 million
Communist soldiers. Also, in an effort to halt the development of communism, the United
States spent more than $1 billion on military assistance for the KMT between 1945 and
1948. Therefore, the military relative strength ratio between PLA and KMT in 1946 was 1:3.5
which was a huge difference. Surprisingly, under such a huge disparity in military strengths,
CCP still defeated KMT. In addition to people’s support and powerful leadership of CCP, the
third advantage that CCP had was the central military command which used fabulous
military strategies and high morale or harmonious atmosphere were vitally important as well.
For instance, one of the outstanding CCP’s military commanders was Peng Dehuai. His
most famous battle was the Hundred-Regiment Campaign against the Japanese Army which
was a large-scale operation for disrupting and destroying Japan's logistics network in
northern China. Under the significant impact of the guerilla tactics, Eighth Route Army
Headquarters statistics show that by December 5, 1940, the army units that took part in the
Hundred-Regiment Campaign had engaged in 1,824 battles, resulting in the deaths or
injuries of 20,645 Japanese troops, as well as the capture of 281 Japanese troops. This
battle not only dealt a heavy blow to the Japanese army, but also cut off many of Japan's
transportation lines, destroyed Japan's "cage" strategy, and also inspired the Chinese
people's confidence in the war of resistance. Even though the Hundred-Regiment Campaign
was a war against Japanese troops, it still helped CCP to gain more and more reputations in
the country, which could help CCP to win more support for the 1949 Revolution. Spectacular
military commands really helped the CCP a lot.
Another example demonstrated the harmonious atmosphere among soldiers and
officers that was beneficial to the unity of CCP’s armies. Compared to the soldiers in
Chiang's forces, Red Army’s officers showed greater respect for ordinary soldiers. According
to a text that I have read before, during the Long March, Mao gave his horse to a seriously
injured soldier even if he was the leader of the entire troop. Instead of riding a horse, he
walked on his feet for a long time just to take care of that injured soldier. This showed that
soldiers and officers were equal in the Red Army. The equality between soldiers and officials
was also one of the reasons why the Red Army could persist and fight with enemies for so
long until the revolution ended. Treating soldiers well could motivate really high morale, and
finally inspired the faith of soldiers or troops to fight till the end. This factor also contributed to
the victory of the 1949 Revolution. Compared to the CCP's soldiers, the KMT's army was a
lot worse. Hundreds of thousands of individual Nationalist soldiers defected to the
Communists, surrendered, or deserted during the Civil War since the conflict between
officials and soldiers in the KMT army was actually drastic and intensified that officials
beated soldiers up or bullied them very often and some officers also corrupted a lot of
soldiers’ salaries. This could cause the KMT’s troops to break down or collapse from inside.
Undoubtedly, some people might say that Chiang’s mistakes should be the main
cause for the 1949 Revolution. However, this view has several logical loopholes. The first
point is that it was very difficult to determine to what extent that Chiang’s personal decision
mistakes could affect the KMT in the Civil War. In other words, it was probably not only
Chiang’s mistakes, but also the whole KMT’s political and military systems’ failures. The
most obvious problem in the KMT’s system was corruption. This problem couldn’t be solved
only if all KMT’s officials were replaced or dismissed. But the dismissal of all KMT’s officers
was unachievable at that moment. Thus, it was not only Chiang’s personal mistakes, but
also the failures of the entire bureaucratic system. Additionally, if CCP didn’t have a powerful
leadership and united military forces with huge support from peasants, the KMT might just
easily overthrow the CCP and the CCP wouldn’t survive. Without those factors contributed to
CCP’s survival and prosperity, the huge advantages the KMT had compared to the CCP on
the amount of soldiers, weapons, military assistances from other countries, might just cover
Chiang’s mistakes since the difference between the KMT and the CCP was too large at that
time. As a result, Chiang’s personal mistakes couldn’t be seen as the main cause of the
1949 Revolution.
In conclusion, Chiang’s mistakes shouldn’t be the main cause of the 1949
Revolution. Since the CCP succeeded in the 1949 Revolution, several advantages the CCP
had was the main reason for the victory of the 1949 Revolution.