Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946-1950

Title: Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946-1950

By: Odd Arne Westad

This novel provides a comprehensive overview of the political, social, and cultural events that led to the incipience of The Chinese Civil War. Moreover, the novel is pays great attention to examining the events leading up to the war, inspecting how some of these actions may have set the foundation and precedences for the eventual civil war that erupted in 1946.  This novel is particularly useful because the author pays great attention to understanding why and how the Chinese Communist Party emerged victoriously. Specifically, what advantages did the CCP army have in comparison to the KMT party?

 

Westad outlines three main features of post-civil war China that he feels led to the outbreak of war and the eventual CCP victory: the accentuation of rural poverty, the crisis of massive collaboration, and the weakening of the KMT government. Moreover, Westad argues that all three of these features are inextricably linked to the effects of the WWII era Japanese attack, and that the “wartime dislocation” is what led to the weakening and corruption of the KMT party that the CCP needed.

 

Although Westad outlines the three salient features that he feels led to the CCP attack and victory, he makes it explicit that in 1946 the CCP was, by no means, a predestined winner of the war. In fact, in many ways, the KMT party had more advantages as the internationally  recognized government, with the ability to tax, appoint, and conscript. Moreover, the CCP had considerable disadvantages, one of which was the fact that the majority of CCP troops were concentrated in the periphery of China, away from the capital. Moreover, KMT troops vastly outnumbered CCP troops, and the CCP had failed to capture any significant territories after Japan’s downfall, and the Soviet Union had refused to provide the struggling CCP party with international support.

Westad’s novel thus takes a holistic look at the war and the ways in which the mistakes and judgements of each party led to the eventual CCP takeover of the Chinese government in 1950.

 

Westad, Odd Arne. Decisive encounters: the Chinese civil war, 1946-1950. Stanford University Press, 2003.