China in 1945: A Country at the Crossroads
A Country in Ruins
When Japan surrendered in August 1945, China was not at peace. Eight years of Japanese invasion had killed an estimated 14–20 million Chinese people, displaced tens of millions more and gutted the cities the Guomindang government depended on. Inflation was rampant, the railways were broken and a generation of young men had been conscripted, killed or scattered. Behind that ruin stood a longer crisis: since the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, China had been fractured by warlord armies, foreign concessions and a republican government that never fully controlled its own territory.
By 1945 China had endured 34 years of upheaval — warlord rule from 1916 and full Japanese invasion from 1937. The country that emerged from the Sino-Japanese War was exhausted, divided and ready for civil war.
The Guomindang in 1945: Strong on Paper, Weak in Reality
Chiang Kai-shek led the Guomindang (GMD) and the Republic of China government from his wartime capital of Chongqing. On the surface, the GMD looked unbeatable. It commanded a regular army of around 4.3 million soldiers, controlled the major cities, held a seat on the new United Nations Security Council, and received steady American aid — eventually about $3 billion between 1945 and 1949. American transport planes and ships moved GMD troops into former Japanese-held territory faster than the communists could reach it.
Beneath this surface, however, the GMD was hollow. Wartime hyperinflation was wiping out salaries and savings — by 1948 it took a wheelbarrow of banknotes to buy a sack of rice. Officials were widely seen as corrupt, hoarding US aid for personal enrichment. Conscription was brutal: peasant villages were ordered to supply soldiers, and recruits were often roped together to stop them deserting. The Guomindang relied on the cities, but the cities were where inflation hurt most.
It is tempting to treat August 1945 as a clean reset — Japan goes home, the civil war begins. The reality is messier. Japanese troops in northern China were ordered by the Allies to surrender to the GMD, but Soviet forces in Manchuria handed captured Japanese weapons to the CCP’s Eighth Route Army instead. Refugees, conscript soldiers and stranded Japanese civilians clogged the roads. Most of the country that the GMD now claimed to rule had been governed by puppet regimes, warlords or communist guerrillas for years. The civil war did not start on a blank slate.
The CCP in 1945: Yan’an, Land Reform and the Long March Story
Mao Zedong led the Chinese Communist Party from the dusty cave town of Yan’an in the north-west, where the party had retreated after the Long March of 1934–35. The CCP’s army — the Eighth Route Army and the New Fourth Army, later renamed the People’s Liberation Army — numbered roughly one million troops. On every measurable count of equipment and air power, the GMD was stronger. But the CCP had built two assets the GMD could not match.
First, the CCP had used the Sino-Japanese War to build a peasant base. In areas it controlled, the party reduced rents, redistributed land from absentee landlords and ran literacy classes. Soldiers in the Red Army were under orders not to steal from villages or harm civilians — a code known as the ‘Three Rules of Discipline and Eight Points of Attention’. The contrast with looting GMD conscripts was stark, and recruiters for the communists turned the difference into propaganda. Second, Mao had used Yan’an to consolidate his own leadership. The Rectification Campaign of 1942–44 purged rivals such as Wang Ming, while the legend of the Long March was carefully shaped after the fact to present Mao as the indispensable leader.
The Long March is the founding myth of the CCP — a year-long retreat over 5,600 miles, crossing rivers and snow-capped passes. The numbers are humbling: around 86,000 set out from Jiangxi in October 1934 and roughly 8,000 reached Yan’an in October 1935. But the historian Sun Shuyun stresses that the heroic narrative was built afterwards. During the March itself Mao manoeuvred against rival communist leaders, especially Zhang Guotao, and the propaganda value of the March only grew with retelling. Strong answers acknowledge the March mattered for survival and for Mao’s personal authority — but treat the ‘heroic origin’ story as constructed, not given.
The Marshall Mediation, 1945–46
In August 1945 Mao flew to Chongqing to negotiate with Chiang Kai-shek under American pressure. The talks produced a fragile truce. President Truman then sent General George C. Marshall to broker a coalition government and a unified army. For most of 1946, Marshall shuttled between the two sides. Zhou Enlai, Mao’s chief negotiator, played for time. Chiang doubted Marshall’s promises of further aid and used the lull to position GMD divisions in Manchuria. Local fighting never really stopped, and by January 1947 Marshall returned to Washington and declared his mission a failure. The full-scale civil war that followed was therefore not a sudden outbreak but a return to the path that Japan’s surrender had only briefly interrupted.
The GMD entered 1945 with 4.3 million soldiers, the cities, the UN seat and US aid — but with hyperinflation, corruption, brutal conscription and a hollowed-out countryside. The CCP had a smaller army of around 1 million but a tested rural base, disciplined troops and a unified leadership under Mao at Yan’an.