At the outbreak of the War of Liberation in June 1946, the Nationalist government had 4.3 million regular troops and advanced weapons aided by the United States, and controlled almost all of the country's major cities; compared with the 1.2 million troops under the communist leadership, and the area and population under communist control were less than one-third of the nationalist government. The gap in armament between the two sides has been described as a millet plus rifle vs American equipment, but in fact, the term "millet plus rifle" seems to be more appropriate to describe the workers' and peasants' Red Army during the Second Civil Revolutionary War.
It is true that the People's Liberation Army during the Liberation War was inferior to the Kuomintang army in terms of equipment, but the equipment gap between the People's Liberation Army and the Kuomintang army was in fact no longer as large as the gap between the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army and the Kuomintang army at the beginning. During the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the Eighth Route Army and the New Fourth Army under the leadership of the Communist Party captured some of the more advanced weapons and equipment from the Japanese army, and at the same time, a number of arsenals under the control of the Communist Party were also established in Yan'an and other revolutionary base areas. During the Liberation War, the Communist Party had in fact developed a certain independent military industrial system.
At the beginning, when the Red Army was in a state of absolute inferiority in weapons and equipment, it could still persist in dealing with the Kuomintang army, so the People's Liberation Army, which was already able to produce some weapons and equipment on its own, was more capable of confronting the Kuomintang army. In the early morning of August 9, 1945, a million Soviet Red Army crossed the Sino-Soviet and Sino-Mongolian borders to launch a fierce attack on the Japanese Kwantung Army. By this time the United States had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. At this time, both the Kuomintang and the Communist Party were aware that Japan was about to surrender, and after Japan's surrender, northeast China would become the top priority affecting the overall situation of the whole country.
The northeast region is bordered by the Soviet Union in the north, Korea in the east, and Mongolia in the west, with the largest heavy industrial base in China at that time, and the fertile black land in the northeast has rich crops and various forests and mineral resources... Whoever occupies the northeast first is likely to gain a foothold there and even the whole country. The Seventh National Congress of the Communist Party of China once described the importance of the northeast as follows: "If we lose all the existing base areas, as long as we have the northeast, we will have a solid foundation." Of course, if the other base areas have not been lost, and we have the northeast, then the foundation of the Chinese revolution will be further consolidated."
From August 10, 1945, a large number of CCP troops and cadres flocked to the northeast. At the same time, the military and people of the Liberated Areas resolutely counterattacked the Kuomintang's military offensive. The people's army annihilated more than 100,000 enemy troops in the three battles of Handan, Pingsui, and Jinpu, thus successfully blocking the Kuomintang army's deep penetration into northern China and into the northeast. By the time the large-scale civil war broke out in June 1946, the Communists had successfully taken control of the vast rural areas of northeast and northern China. The land reform policy carried out by the Communist Party in the base areas has successfully won the support of the local people.
At that time, China was a large agricultural country with 80% of the population as farmers. During the War of Liberation, the soldiers of the Kuomintang and the Communists were mainly drawn from peasants. The Communist Party's land reform policy enabled the broad masses of peasants to end their oppression for thousands of years, so they volunteered to join the army to defend the fruits of the victory of land reform. In contrast, the most prominent contradiction within the Kuomintang army is the contradiction between the high-ranking officials in the upper echelons of the army and the low-level soldiers from the peasant class. The Kuomintang troops, which had been recruited in the form of capturing Zhuangding, were completely unaware of why they were fighting.
In the late period of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, US military observers had already discovered that chongqing, the capital at that time, always had problems that were difficult to overcome the shortage of commodities and the rise in prices. In contrast, Shandong, as a liberated area, has stable prices and active commodity circulation. On August 19, 1948, the Central Political Conference convened by the Kuomintang adopted the monetary reform plan proposed by Weng Wenhao and Wang Yunwu. There are two main elements of the currency reform plan: the prohibition of private holding of gold, silver and foreign exchange, and the number of holders is limited to the exchange of gold coupons by September 30; and the national price freeze is at the level of August 19.
This monetary reform program is designed to stabilize currency values and prices and thus stabilize people's minds. After the currency reform plan was passed, Chiang Ching-kuo led a group of backbone cadres of the Young Zhuang faction to Shanghai to carry out economic control. Under the threat of confiscation, most of the urban petty bourgeoisie obeyed the decree to exchange their savings of gold and silver into gold coupons. At the same time, the Nationalist government decreed that merchants supply goods at prices before August 19, prohibiting merchants from raising prices or hoarding them. Despite their reluctance, the capitalists were forced to convert some of their assets into gold coupons under pressure from the government.
In order to show his determination to resolutely exercise economic control, Chiang Ching-kuo even explicitly stated: "Only fight tigers, not shoot flies." Du Weiping, the son of Shanghai beach tycoon Du Yuesheng, was imprisoned for hoarding in the course of economic control. Chiang Ching-kuo's harsh "crackdown on tigers" in Shanghai once stabilized the people's hearts and minds slightly, but the result of the forced price freeze by administrative means was that there was no market in the market. Merchants try their best to keep the goods in the face of loss-making transactions, and then wait for a favorable opportunity to sell, so that the transactions in the market are greatly reduced, and most of the transactions are transferred to the black market.
Chiang Ching-kuo's "tiger fighting" campaign even more infringed upon the vital interests of the big bureaucratic bourgeoisie: a company seized by Chiang Ching-kuo was owned by Kong Lingkan, the son of Kong Xiangxi. Kong Xiangxi was both Song Meiling's brother-in-law and a representative of the Jiangsu and Zhejiang chaebols who supported Chiang Kai-shek's regime. If such a figure were to be moved, it would inevitably cause turmoil within chiang kai-shek's regime, so Chiang Kai-shek had no choice but to ask Chiang Ching-kuo to stop "fighting tigers." The Kuomintang's economic control measures thus ended in failure. By May 1949, the price of one stone of rice had risen to more than 400 million gold coupons.
When the economy was in disarray, the power struggle within the Kuomintang regime intensified: from the day of its birth, there was always a sharp internal factional struggle, and the local warlords were alienated from the central government headed by Chiang Kai-shek. After the end of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, most of the warlord forces had disappeared, but several powerful local warlord factions, such as the Gui clan led by Li Zongren and Bai Chongxi, and the Jin clan, led by Yan Xishan, still existed. The factional tilt within the Kuomintang is in stark contrast to the unity of the Communist Party.
China from 1945 to 1949 was in a state of in the ascendant: on the one hand a new society was being born; on the other hand, the old system was dying. On the side of the revolutionary camp there was a vigorous atmosphere everywhere: from the guerrillas to the regular army, from the peasant associations to the local governments, from the credit cooperatives to the national bank. On the counter-revolutionary camp, it was a twilight scene: political factional struggles, soaring prices in the economy, low morale militarily. At this time, the strength, ideals and enthusiasm of the broad masses of the people have been fully mobilized.
In the face of such a force, anyone who wants to block it can only be a mantis arm as a car. Why is it said that the victory in the Battle of Huaihai was pushed out by the masses of the people with a cart? On the surface, the People's Liberation Army did not have the superiority in strength and equipment in the Huaihai Campaign, but in fact the PLA really mobilized more manpower than the Kuomintang army: although the People's Liberation Army was less numerous than the Kuomintang army in the number of front-line regular troops, if the people who provided logistical supplies for the troops were counted, they had a larger manpower base than the Kuomintang army.
In fact, this is only a microcosm of the War of Liberation: in fact, the Kuomintang army, which was ostensibly in a state of superiority in military strength throughout the War of Liberation, has always been trapped in the ocean of people's war, not to mention the sharp and complex internal factional struggles within the Kuomintang regime. After the Nationalist army was reduced to 3.73 million in June 1947 and the communist army increased to 1.9 million after the communist army turned into an offensive in the northeast, the war situation had in fact begun to move in favor of the Communists. The three major campaigns, fought from September 1948 to January of the following year, played a decisive role in the entire Liberation War.
After the Battle of Liaoshen, the strength of the Nationalist army plummeted to 2.9 million, while the strength of the communist army was roughly comparable to this. After the Battle of Huaihai, the People's Liberation Army had taken control of the north of the Huai River, and the final outcome of the liberation war had been basically locked. After the Battle of Pingjin, Tianjin was captured and Peiping was peacefully liberated, and the north of the Yangtze River was completely controlled by the People's Liberation Army under the leadership of the Communist Party. By this time, the Nationalist government had lost up to 1.54 million troops, while the Communists had gradually changed from small to large, from weak to strong.
In this process, in addition to the above-mentioned differences in the political, economic, military and other fields between the two sides, Chiang Kai-shek's personal mistakes in specific tactical command also exacerbated the development of this trend: in the spring of 1948, the US military advisory group suggested that Chiang Kai-shek's troops all withdraw from the northeast, but Chiang Kai-shek hesitated to implement it for fear of "obstructing international viewing", resulting in more than 500,000 elites being sealed north of Shanhaiguan and completely annihilated by Lin Biao. In August of that year, Wang Yaowu submitted a request to abandon the isolated city of Jinan, which Chiang Kai-shek believed would "affect morale and people's hearts" and resolutely refused to allow it, resulting in the loss of 110,000 people.
There are many such things throughout the Liberation War. Chiang Kai-shek was essentially a figure who controlled the political situation through the manipulation of power, and was not good at specific tactical command, but throughout the Liberation War, Chiang Kai-shek was always keen on overstepping command. The conceited Chiang Kai-shek tolerated no criticism and never trusted anyone. Subordinates could only promise in front of him, and no one dared to tell him the truth. In the end, Chiang Kai-shek not only broke away from the masses of the people, but even separated himself from the people within his own regime.
In contrast, the military guiding principle of the Communist Party is "not to fight for the gain or loss of one city and one place, and to concentrate forces to fight a war of annihilation." Communist armies in inferior positions often concentrated their superior forces in mobile operations to strike at one point against the enemy. The Communist army does not take the scramble for one city and one place as its highest goal, because the Communist Party understands that "there are people who have lost land, people and land have two existences, there are lost people, and people and land have lost two." As long as they preserve their own strength and destroy the enemy's living forces, they can recover the lost land, which is in stark contrast to the Kuomintang army that blindly sticks to the city and consumes troops.