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Abstract
Historians have explained the Communist victory in the Chinese civil war (1945-49) in terms of either "standard" or "guerrilla" warfare. Analysis of the Communist experience in Manchuria, 1945-47, demonstrates that the Communists initially adopted a conventional war strategy and doctrine. As the situation developed, the Party faced a contradiction between economic and political necessity on the one hand and strategic reality on the other that sometimes put Communist forces into indefensible positions. After setbacks, the Communists recovered and developed a decisive hybrid strategy and doctrine that enabled them to turn the tide of the civil war and to make a second, more successful transition from guerrilla to mobile and base warfare.
The Communists took power by making love to the people of China.
-Jack Belden, China Shakes the World (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949), 472.
ALTHOUGH few would put it in the explicitly romantic language of Jack Belden, it is safe to say that no serious scholar of the Chinese civil war (1945-49) would deny the significance of popular support in the victory of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) over Chiang Kai-shek. But while we acknowledge the importance of the masses, we must remember that what drove Chiang Kai-shek to defeat was not the will of the people expressed through the ballot box. It was the People's Liberation Army (PLA) that handed Chiang's Nationalist forces defeat after defeat and drove them off to the refuge of Taiwan. Northeastern China (Manchuria) was the scene of some the earliest and most decisive battles of the civil war period. The history of the civil war in Manchuria has been discussed in a relatively small number of monographs and articles published in the West since the 1940s. None of these works has engaged in intensive analysis of the development of Communist military doctrine and strategy and their application in the field. Thus, as Hans van de Ven states: "How the CCP was able to build up its forces and turn them into several disciplined army groups of nearly a million troops is not known, nor is it clear exactly how they defeated the KMT [Kuomintang or Guomintang, i.e. Nationalist Party] armies during the battles of the Civil War period."1
This essay will look closely at Communist...