The Collapse Of Nationalist China

Ground-breaking new interpretation of the collapse of Chiang Kai-shek's government addressing why the Nationalists lost China's civil war in 1949.

The question "Who lost China?" has provoked political vituperation and academic controversy ever since the Chinese Communists drove the Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek off the mainland in 1949. In this study based on a wide array of hitherto unused documentary sources, the author delves deeply into the inner workings of the Nationalist regime and concludes that the Nationalists collapsed largely as a result of their own failings. Most strikingly, he uses the records and memoirs of the Nationalists themselves to document the weaknesses of the Nationalist rule. For even Chiang Kai-shek said of the Kuomintang on the eve of its final defeat in 1949, "This kind of party should long ago have been destroyed and swept away!" To illuminate the factors that contributed to its ultimate defeat, the author examines the Nationalist government during the period 1937-1949 from several different perspectives. He carefully scrutinizes the relationship between the central and provincial governments, the plight of the tax-burdened peasantry in the Nationalist-held areas, the intraparty politics of the regime as expressed in the Youth Corps and the reformist Ko-hsin Movement, the deficiencies of the army during the wars against Japan and the Communists, the failure of the Gold Yüan currency reform of late 1948, and finally, Chiang Kai-shek's own assessment of his army and the civilian branches of his regime during the final phases of the war.

This lively history of China's Nationalist revolution tells the story of a small group of Chinese patriots headed by Sun Yat-sen until his death in 1925. They mobilised men, money, and propaganda to create a provincial base from which they launched a revolutionary military campaign to unify the country, end imperialist privilege, and bring the Kuomintang to power. Soviet Russia induced the fledgling Chinese Communist Party to join the effort, and sent money, arms, military and political experts to guide the revolution. But there was a fatal flaw in this co-operation, and when the fighting was over, the remnant Communist Party had been driven underground, the Russian experts had been expelled, and a faction-riven Nationalist Party led by Chiang Kai-shek could claim to be China's new government. This study of a key period in China's history, reprinted from Volume 12 of The Cambridge History of China, is solidly based in Chinese, Russian, and Western languages sources.

In recent years historians of China have focused increased attention on the critical decades of National rule on the mainland. This recent scholarship has substantially modified our understanding of the political events of this momentous period, shedding light on the character of Nationalist rule and on the sources of the Communist victory in 1949. Yet no existing textbook on modern China presents the events of the period according to these new findings. The five essays in this volume were written by leading authorities on the period, and they synthesize the new research. Drawn from Volume 13 of The Cambridge History of China, they represent the most complete and stimulating political history of the period available in the literature. The essays selected deal with Nationalist rule during the Nanking decade, the Communist movement from 1927 to 1937, Nationalist rule during the Sino-Japanese War, the Communist movement during the Sino-Japanese war, and the Kuomintang-Communist struggle from 1945 to 1949.

A revisionist study of General He Yingqin, one of the most important, yet misunderstood, figures in China's Nationalist period.

Following his acclaimed studies of the state of modern France and how Hong Kong has changed since the 1997 handover, Jonathan Fenby now turns his attention to one of the most interesting yet under-reported figures of twentieth-century history. Chiang Kai-shek was the man who lost China to the Communists. As leader of the nationalist movement, the Kuomintang, Chiang established himself as head of the government in Nanking in 1928. Yet although he laid claim to power throughout the 1930s and was the only Chinese figure of sufficient stature to attend a conference with Churchill and Roosevelt during the Second World War, his desire for unity was always thwarted by threats on two fronts. Between them, the Japanese and the Communists succeeded in undermining Chiang's power-plays, and after Hiroshima it was Mao Zedong who ended up victorious. Brilliantly re-creating pre-Communist China in all its colour, danger and complexity, Jonathan Fenby's magisterial survey of this brave but unfulfilled life is destined to become the definitive account in the English language.