[211] Richard L. Walker, China under Communism (New Haven, 1954), 111–112; Order of Battle Branch, Office of the AC/S G-2, HQ Eighth United States Army (Fwd), CCF Army Histories (hereafter CCF Army Histories), 1.
The infant PLA managed with difficulty to survive the first four “bandit suppression campaigns” waged by Chiang Kai-shek. When he launched his fifth in 1933, the Chinese Reds planned the celebrated “Long March” which has become one of their most cherished traditions. Breaking out of Chiang’s encirclement in October, 1934, they took a circuitous, 6000-mile route to avoid Nationalist armies. Of the 90,000 who started, only 20,000 were left a year later when the PLA reached Yenan in Shensi Province.[212]
[212] U. S. Relations with China, 43–44, 207, 323.
This destination in northwest China gave the Communists a refuge with Mongolia and Soviet Russia at their backs. There Mao Tse-tung and his colleagues alternately fought and negotiated with the Government. Finally, in 1941, the Communists and Nationalists agreed to cease fighting one another in order to make common cause against the Japanese invaders.
The Communists took advantage of their membership in the People’s Political Council—a Nationalist-sponsored organization which theoretically united all factions in China against the Japanese—to continue their “boring-from-within” tactics. Chiang’s estimate of his troublesome allies was summed up in a quotation attributed to him in 1941:
You think it is important that I have kept the Japanese from expanding.... I tell you it is more important that I have kept the Communists from spreading. The Japanese are a disease of the skin; the Communists are a disease of the heart.[213]
[213] Quoted in George Moorad, Lost Peace in China (New York, 1949), 33.
Communist Victory in Civil War
In late 1945, with the Japanese no longer a menace, the grapple for mastery began anew. Chiang Kai-shek held the material and moral advantage as a result of the arms and other assistance supplied by the United States.
The Nationalists controlled all the important centers of population and industry and the major lines of communication. The Communists, with their backs to the wall, eagerly accepted the United States proposal for a cease fire in January 1946. General George C. Marshall, as personal representative of President Truman, flew out to Nanking in December, 1945, and tried for 12 months to arrange a workable compromise between two irreconcilable ideologies. Meanwhile, the Reds retrained and reequipped their forces with the vast supply of weapons which had fallen into their hands as a result of the collapse of the Japanese Army in Manchuria in August, 1945. By the spring of 1947, they were ready again for war. They denounced the truce and recommenced military operations. From that time the balance of power swung steadily in their favor.[214]