Resumption of the Chinese Civil War
- Date
- 1946–1949
- Category
- Military & conflict
- Region
- East Asia (China)
- Era
- Contemporary
- Significance
Full-scale civil war between China's Nationalists and Communists resumed in 1946, when the fragile post-war truce brokered with American mediation collapsed amid mutual distrust and the scramble for territory left by the Soviet withdrawal from Manchuria.
The renewed conflict pitted Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang government, initially far better armed and internationally recognised, against Mao Zedong's Communists, whose radical land-reform program won mass peasant support in the countryside. Between August 1948 and October 1949, three decisive Communist campaigns—Liaoshen, Huaihai, and Pingjin—destroyed the Nationalist armies in the north and along the Yangtze. Nationalist morale crumbled under hyperinflation, corruption, and battlefield defeat. By late 1949 the Communists controlled virtually all of mainland China, and the defeated Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan, where the Republic of China survived. The war reshaped the global balance of the early Cold War, bringing the world's most populous country under communist rule and hardening the confrontation between the United States and the emerging communist bloc in Asia. The unresolved division across the Taiwan Strait remains one of the most consequential legacies of the conflict, shaping East Asian geopolitics into the twenty-first century.
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Empires active in 1946–1949
- Soviet Union1922 CE – 1991 CE
- Empire of Japan1868 CE – 1947 CE
- French Colonial Empire (Second)1830 CE – 1962 CE
- British Empire1583 CE – 1997 CE
- Spanish Empire1492 CE – 1976 CE
- Portuguese Empire1415 CE – 1999 CE
Related military & conflict events
- Creation of Israel and the 1948 Arab–Israeli War14 May 1948 (war May 1948 – July 1949)
- Korean War25 June 1950 – 27 July 1953
- Cuban Missile Crisis16–28 October 1962
- Fall of Saigon and reunification of Vietnam30 April 1975 (reunified 1976)
- Khmer Rouge Seize Cambodia and Declare Year Zero1975
- The Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi7 April – 19 July 1994
Further reading
The wider story
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan
Pulitzer-winning life of the emperor and his empire.
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