in occupying vast swathes of China following the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese
War in 1937 (labelled by Chinese Communists as the ‘Anti-Japanese War’).
The second phase of people’s war began in 1945 as Communist armed forces
gained combat strength and developed conventional military power. In that year,
the CCP leadership decided that the PLAwas sufficiently strong to begin to switch
over to conventional military operations against their KMT adversaries (the only
previous large-scale conventional operation was the so-called ‘one hundred regi-
ments campaign’ conducted against the Japanese in the latter half of 1940). By the
time of the Japanese surrender in mid-1945, the PLA was a more potent and
battle-hardened force, albeit one lacking in conventional military campaign
experience. Nevertheless, in August 1945, the decision was made to transform
the core of the PLA ‘from a guerrilla force to an army capable of large-scale
mobile operations’. Thus, by the end of 1945, the best Communist troops had
been reorganized into armies and brigades. 16
Negotiations between the CCP and the KMT to end the Chinese Civil War,
brokered by successive US emissaries, failed to reconcile the two sides and the
conflict resumed in earnest. In June 1946, KMT forces launched wholesale attacks
against Communist-controlled areas. After initially absorbing these strikes, the
CCP began to mobilize the combined might of not just its military strength, but
its political and propaganda resources as well, to break the strategic stalemate and
take the war to KMT-controlled areas. The Communists continued to strengthen
their conventional military capabilities by measures including recruiting more
peasants into the ranks and arming its forces with more automatic weapons and
artillery pieces. The CCP also ramped up its propaganda effort to explain its
policies to the Chinese people, especially the agricultural reform programme. 17
The third phase of people’s war was under way by mid-1947 as the PLA
initiated a strategic offensive. This time, military manoeuvres were more of a
conventional nature instead of guerrilla warfare. Initially, offensive operations
were conducted in rural areas controlled by the KMT, but, by mid-1948, PLA
operations shifted to urban targets. Three large-scale operations—the Liao–Shen,
the Ping–Jin, and Huai–Hai campaigns—resulted in the defeat of all major KMT
military forces in northern China. 18 In less than five months, Communist forces
emerged victorious on the battlefield; the KMT had lost approximately 1.5
million men (killed, wounded, and captured) and all the major cities in northern
China, including Beiping (the city’s name before it became the capital of the PRC
and was renamed ‘Beijing’), Shanghai, and Tianjin. 19 The Huai–Hai campaign
(November 1948–January 1949) was the most decisive of the civil war involving
more than one million troops. The Communist forces were able to soundly defeat
their KMT adversaries in the field; moreover, they also prevented the withdrawal
of some half a million well-armed troops southward across the Yangtze River and
gained control of eastern China—including vital transportation routes (rivers
and railways) as well as key cities, including Shanghai and the KMT capital,
Nanjing (also transliterated as Nanking). 20 Thus, by April 1949, the CCP clearly
had gained the upper hand, taking control of all the north and central Chinese
heartland. By October 1949, the Communists felt sufficiently confident that
The Chinese Way of War 199