At the turn of the last century, the Qing dynasty had ruled China for nearly four hundred years, but the old ways were coming to an end. New forces competed to replace the old: republicanism, warlordism, nationalism, and communism struggled for supremacy through revolution and a 22 year civil war between an ambitious Generalissimo and a guerrilla revolutionary. China’s 20th century began with war, social instability, and political upheaval. The Western Powers and Japan defeated China in two wars in 1895 and 1900, and forced the Emperor to accept political, economic, and territorial concessions . These defeats and internal dissatisfaction with Imperial rule and traditional culture led to revolution in 1911. Revolutionaries led by Sun Yat-sen founded a republic under what they called the “Three Principles of the People”: nationalism, democracy and the livelihood of the people. But three months later, the republicans handed power to militarist leaders. Soon afterwards, the government and the country became fragmented into regions controlled by warlords, leaving much China outside the control of the central Beiyang government . In 1917, China officially joined the Allies in the First World War to improve its international standing and get European support against Japanese imperialism , but the Versailles peace settlement gave former German possessions in China to Japan. On May 4, 1919, student protesters took to the streets in Beijing, a movement that soon spread to other cities and other groups . The May 4th Movement was also anti-traditionalist and caused some intellectuals to adopt Marxist thinking. In 1921, Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao founded the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP. By that time, the republic was all but dead. The country had fully entered the warlord era where local strongmen ruled their own provinces, allied in ever-shifting cliques, and waged constant war against each other. Sun Yat-sen split with the nominal central government in Beijing to create his own government based around Canton. From there, he reformed the KMT - the Kuomintang or Nationalist Party - and called for a great military campaign to destroy the warlords and reunify China. He hoped for support from Western nations, but when none came he turned to the USSR for military and political help. Soviet advisor Mikhail BorodIn urged the KMT to join with the CCP to boost its appeal and resources. Sun agreed, and the two parties formed the First United Front in 1924. But by March 1925, Sun Yat-sen had died of cancer, and Chiang Kai-shek replaced him as military leader of the Canton Government. Chiang had studied military theory in Moscow but was worried about the left-right split within the KMT. In March 1926, Chiang’s fears of a possible communist takeover led him to partially suppress the CCP . But the KMT and CCP also continued to cooperate and in 1926 Chiang launched the Northern Expedition against the warlords. His National Revolutionary Army, or NRA, defeated warlord after warlord, but success increased tensions with the CCP, which set up communist labor unions in the wake of the NRA advance. CCP strongholds in Wuhan and strikes in Shanghai worried Chiang’s middle-class and wealthier supporters. Chiang was also worried: “The communists have now reached the zenith of their power and arrogance; if their activities are not checked, they will bring disaster upon the Kuomintang… I am not opposed to the communists, I appreciate their support and sympathy, but I advise them not to take advantage of their influence in the Party to oppress the moderate elements of the Kuomintang. If a break were to come about, the revolution would inevitably be weakened.” (Gay 47) In April 1927, Chiang’s fears for party unity and perhaps his own position caused him to order violent repression of Shanghai communists by Nationalist troops and loyal gangs. They killed about 5000 communists, and the United Front was unofficially over. Communist leaders, encouraged by the Soviets, responded with attempted uprisings in August, but they fell short of expectations . Without the support of the majority of workers, the communists could not stand up to the Nationalist Army. And neither could the warlords. In June 1928 the NRA captured Beijing, and in December the last warlord Young Marshal Zhang Xueliang, cut a peace deal with Chiang. Chiang announced national unification after the Northern Expedition, but this was a mirage. The next ten years, known as the Nanjing Decade, are usually considered a time of peace in China, but internal divisions and external threats remained. After unification, Chiang stayed in military control as “Generalissimo” – a semi-dictator with broad support amongst the intellectual and business elite. His government also enacted some economic, educational, military and legal reforms, but the country was still divided. Landowners mostly supported Chiang but prevented him from enacting land reform, and warlords who had made deals with Chiang to avoid being defeated now limited his authority in their regions – a few in the west were even independent. Imperial Japan continued to intervene in China as well, and expanded its territorial control in Shandong province during the Northern Expedition. Chiang declared that to resist the Japanese, China must first complete internal unification – and by this he generally meant the remaining Chinese Communists . After their defeat, the CCP fled to the deep countryside to lick their wounds and hash out their own divisions. One branch, led by Li Li-san, felt revolution could only come from the urbanised, working masses - as per Karl Marx’s theories. However, another branch, increasingly led by Mao Zedong advocated for a rural revolution of China’s much larger peasant class. Mao had organised the Autumn Harvest Uprisings in 1927, and although they failed, he was impressed by the willingness of peasants to rise up: “For the present upsurge of the peasant movement is a colossal event. In a very short time, several hundred million peasants in China’s central, southern, and northern provinces will rise like a fierce wind or tempest, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to suppress it.” (Fewsmith 72) Chinese peasants had not benefitted from Chiang’s reforms, and were still controlled by the old landowning class. In the late 20s they also suffered from poor harvests, roaming bandits, ruthless moneylenders and the effects of the Great Depression. The poorest 68% of the peasants owned just 22% of the land, and deaths due to malnutrition were common. American missionary couple Georgina and Edward Perkins reported a tragic case: “Another desperate case that we treated for [free was] that of a young man who looked like a skeleton. One would have said there was nothing but skin on his bones… His family was so poor that they had been obliged to sell him… He was accordingly sent… to a family that had no sons. When, six years later, a son was finally born, his new family simply threw him out.” (Bianco 88) These problems were not all the fault of the landowners, but they did little to ease the pain for peasants and often did not even live on their estates. Mao saw the potential for revolution. He teamed up with former warlord Zhu De and formed a tiny Chinese Red Army, and with these forces communist groups set up soviets in mountainous or border regions far from Chiang’s influence. Mao and Zhu set up their headquarters in the mountains of Jiangxi province. Still, the split between Li Li-san’s urban and Mao’s rural revolutionaries in the CCP remained. In the USSR, Stalin supported Li, as did most of the party. Communist forces tried to capture the cities of Changsha and Nanchang in summer 1930, but failed, ending Li’s bid for influence. Mao was elected Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the newly established Soviet Republic of China in Jiangxi, even though he still wasn’t as powerful as head of the Red Army Zhou Enlai. So the Kuomintang ruled most of the country while in the remote regions, the Communists held on. The communist uprisings had failed again, but they convinced Chiang that he had to eliminate the CCP threat to his rule once and for all. While Chiang’s forces put down Communist revolts, he also had to face rebellions by his former warlord allies. By 1930, these had escalated into the Central Plains War, which the Nationalists managed to win thanks to warlord Zhang Xueliang remaining loyal. With the warlords out of the picture, Chiang turned to the Communists. In December 1930, the Nationalists launched the First Encirclement Campaign, also known as the Extermination Campaign. The NRA planned to blockade the CCP soviet s and destroy them. 50,000 Nationalist troops surrounded the CCP stronghold in Jiangxi, but the poorly armed Red Army put up stiff resistance. Zhou used conventional tactics to fight the NRA, but Mao preferred guerrilla tactics. Despite the fact that the NRA was well trained, it didn’t do well in remote areas – when the Red Army annihilated two Nationalist divisions, Chiang called off the campaign. The NRA tried again with a second campaign in April 1931, this time with 200,000 men. Nationalist commander He Yingqin advanced cautiously, to counter guerrilla tactics, but this just exposed his men to more attacks and the NRA retreated. In July, Chiang assumed personal command of the third campaign. Three NRA columns would force the Red Army out of its home territory and into a conventional battle. The Nationalists used all-round defensive tactics as they advanced, and made better progress. By mid-September, they took most of the Jiangxi mountains and threatened Mao’s headquarters. But then, on the 18th, Japanese forces invaded Manchuria, which diverted NRA resources north and forced an end to the third extermination campaign against the CCP. The NRA began the fourth anti-communist campaign in summer 1932, this time with a quarter of a million troops. They defeated the Red Army in the initial battles, but the Red Army retreated without being destroyed. In 1933, communist guerrilla tactics began to wear down the overextended NRA – and in April, the Japanese again advanced further into China and demanded the demilitarization of Hubei province. Chiang wanted to deal with the communists first, so he agreed to the Japanese demands. But the distraction gave the communists time to prepare a counterattack and grind the fourth campaign to a halt. So Red Army tactics and Japanese intervention saved the bulk of Communist forces in the early 1930s. Mao saw irregular war as the way of the future for the Red Army, and he wrote some of the foundational texts of modern guerrilla warfare. Written in 1936 and 37, Mao Zedong’s “Strategic Problems of China’s Revolutionary War” and “On Guerrilla Warfare” are a reflection on the communist fighting practice and strategy in the 1930s. Part strategic texts, part political manifestos and part denunciation of his critics , Mao laid out the importance of guerrilla tactics in China’s civil war: “...guerrilla operations must not be considered as an independent form of warfare. They are but one step in the total war, one aspect of the revolutionary struggle. They are the inevitable result of the clash between oppressor and oppressed when the latter reach the limits of their endurance.” (Gay 58/59) He insisted that this kind of war was necessary for victory: “...we must honestly admit the guerrilla character of the Red Army rather than repudiate guerrilla-ism wholesale. It is useless to feel ashamed on this score. On the contrary, this guerrilla campaign is precisely our distinguishing feature, our forte, the means for us to defeat the enemy. ” (Mao, Strategic Problems 117) Mao drew heavily on classical Chinese works like the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, in particular Sun’s concepts of flexibility, deception, and so-called “unity of opposites”. Mao used the unity of opposites, which draws on the Chinese idea of yin and yang, to argue that the Communists’ apparent weakness was actually strength, and the Nationalists’ apparent strength was weakness. The NRA might have more men and weapons, but that meant they were slower and couldn’t hide their movements, while the Red Army was swift and stealthy. Mao paraphrased the ideas of Western thinkers like Prussian theorist Carl von Clausewitz, and his concept that war is politics by other means. The future Chinese leader also urged a Prussian-style concentration of force at one point: “To wound all the ten fingers of a man is not so effective as to chop one of them off; to rout ten of the enemy’s divisions is not so effective as to annihilate one of them. ” (Mao, Strategic Problems 131) To these ideas Mao added an emphasis on discipline, training and intelligence to make sure the Red Army maintained good relations with the population and could draw on their resources: “It is only undisciplined troops who make the people their enemies and who, like the fish out of its native element, cannot live.” (Mao/Waldron 113) This work well with locally raised units, but locals were often still suspicious of Red Army troops from other regions. So Mao was developing his political and military thinking after the Communists’ escape from defeat at the hands of Chiang’s Nationalists. Soon enough, Mao and his comrades would be put to their sternest test yet: the Long March. In his writings on warfare, Mao also wrote about the value of a strategic retreat to live to fight another day: “We all know that when two strong men fight, the wise one usually yields a step, while his stupid opponent, charging furiously, puts forth all his might and skill at the first onset, with the result that he is often floored by the man who yields.” (Mao, Strategic Problems 63) By the end of 1933, Chiang had signed a treaty with the Japanese and was planning a fifth campaign against the Jiangxi Soviet. He also got some military advice from abroad – and welcomed a military delegation from Nazi Germany led by General Hans von Seeckt. The Germans encouraged the NRA to advance steadily against the Communist areas, building trenches and blockhouses and evacuating civilians as they went. The tips were German, but the overall strategy was Chiang’s: “There was no need to seek out the main force of the bandits. We only have to occupy strategic places where the bandits must come out and fight.” (Ch’en 207) When the NRA began its fifth attack on the CCP with 900,000 men, the new concept worked and there were few targets for the Red Army to ambush. The USSR’s advisor to the CCP, Otto Braun, urged the Red Army to attack with all its might, which led to a decisive Communist defeat in April 1934. Mao and Zhu De now called for a strategic retreat to the southwest, where Nationalist forces were weakest. Once out of the pocket, the spread out Communist forces could link up. Some Communist leaders opposed the idea, but it was approved, and on September 30, 1934 90,000 soldiers of the First Front Army and 20,000 civilians left the Jiangxi Soviet on foot . They ended up on an epic 13-month March across the entire country. The first 10 weeks saw constant fighting against pursuing NRA troops, which cost the Communist two-thirds of their forces. The Red Army ditched most of its supplies and broke free of the NRA, but couldn’t link up with the Second Front Army as planned. In the ensuing debate, Mao got his way and the group headed through Yunan to reach Sechuan and the Fourth Front Army . As the Red Army captured towns on its path, Communist leaders debated their predicament. Members criticized Braun and praised Mao’s strategic ideas, and they elected Mao first of a three-man leadership team – making him de facto leader of the CCP. When the First Front Army joined up with the Fourth on July 12, 1935, Fourth Front commander Zhang Guotao opposed Mao and demanded the Red Army stay in Sichuan near his own power base. Mao demanded they march to Shensi, and the armies split up. Zhang’s column soon got into trouble from cold weather, local warlords, and local Muslim tribes. Mao’s group finally reached Wayaobu in October 1935. Of the original 90,000 troops, only 25,000 remained. Shortly after his arrival, the Second Front Army started its own march, following much of Mao’s route. Since then, the Long March has gained almost a mythic reputation in Chinese Communist historiography, but there is debate about the details. Officially, the CCP claims the march covered a distance of 12,500 km and featured lots of battles, like at Dadu Bridge. Other historians argue these are exaggerations, and that there were just a few skirmishes and the total distance might have only been 3700km . The Red Army may have also blackmailed and kidnapped locals along their route to fill out their ranks, a topic avoided by the CCP. However pyrrhic and controversial the Long March was, it did mean that the CCP lived to fight another day. Now, Mao had the chance to do some thinking about the future of the Party. One of Mao’s central principles was his Three Stages of Insurgency Warfare. In the first stage, the Communists’ priority would be to avoid destruction at the hands of the stronger government army and gain the support of the masses. The second stage would be more violent. With new and ideologically motivated reinforcements, the Red Army could conduct raids and ambushes while avoiding conventional battles. In the third phase, the guerrilla forces would have enough men, experience, and weapons to fight pitched battles to exhaust the government and the national army, after which the Communists could launch a counterattack. While holed up in Shensi after the Long March, Mao reckoned the war was moving into stage two. But Mao soon began to change his tune, in public at least, to focus on Japan as the primary enemy. Many Chinese were unhappy with the Nationalist government’s appeasement of Japan after initial resistance. Chiang signed the treaty with the Japanese , since he felt China was not ready to take on its regional rival, but when the treaty brought the end of a popular boycott on Japanese goods, criticism of Chiang increased. Mao reasoned that many Chinese were more eager to fight Japan than each other, and even prior to the Long March, the CCP had declared war on Japan. In reality, this amounted more to propaganda statements than actual fighting, but it was a sign. In Nationalist-controlled China, some groups also wanted to end the civil war. The National Salvation Association, for example, established by Sun Yat-sen’s influential widow in 1936, called for the creation of a new united front between the KMT and CCP. So the CCP appeared ready to fight Japan, but Chiang and the KMT saw the Communists as the most pressing existentialist threat. He ordered new attacks against the Shensi soviet in mid-1936, but they would not go as planned. In mid-1936, Chiang told loyal warlord Zhang Xueliang to start an offensive against the CCP. But the Young Marshal was tired of the Civil War and had his own axe to grind against Japan. The Young Marshal was the son of Zhang Zoulin, a Manchurian warlord and former Japanese ally. Although Zhang senior fought against the KMT during the Northern Expedition, the Japanese assassinated him when he’d outlived his usefulness. Then they expelled the younger Zhang from Manchuria altogether . Many of the Young Marshal’s men disproved of KMT suppression of anti-Japanese student riots, and some joined the Society of Comrades for Resistance Against Japan. The younger Zhang probably even met with CCP officials in summer 1934 to talk about resisting Japan. When the anti-CCP offensive began in 1936, Chiang complained that Zhang’s troops were moving too slowly against the CCP, so Zhang invited him to Sian to see things for himself. On December 12, a mutiny broke out in the Nationalist camp: Zhang’s men attacked the Generalissimo’s tent, killing his bodyguards and eventually capturing an injured Chiang. The Young Marshal insisted Chiang’s arrest was designed only to awaken him to the Japanese threat – he still called Chiang “Your Excellency, the Generalissimo” while Chiang was being held hostage. Chiang was not impressed: “You still call me Generalissimo? If you still recognize me as your superior, you should release me. If you are a rebel, you had better shoot me dead! There is nothing more to say!” (Dupuy 50) The mutinous officers demanded Chiang end the fighting against the CCP and create a new United Front against the Japanese. Chiang refused to discuss anything until he was freed. The exact details of the so-called Sian Incident are still shrouded in mystery. Some suggest CCP leaders were present, others that Chiang only narrowly avoided execution by the intervention of the USSR as Stalin believed only Chiang stood a chance of effectively resisting Japanese aggression. Mao later sent a letter to Chiang suggesting communist mediation saved his life. Eventually, following public and international pressure, Zhang released Chiang on December 22, without any official promises. Nationalist officials arrested the Young Marshal soon afterwards and kept him under, a rather luxurious, house arrest. Shortly after that though, Chiang announced a stop to operations against the CCP and the creation of a new Second United Front. The Chinese Civil War came to a halt in December 1936, and the next 6 months were relatively peaceful. Although the Nationalists and Communists didn’t like each other, the Second Front held and Chiang continued his military and economic reforms. At first, there was also quiet on the Japanese front, but Japan interpreted the Second United Front as a breach of a 1935 treaty in which the Nationalists promised no anti-Japanese activities. And the Japanese generals were eager for action. The Manchurian-based Kwantung Army, supported by the puppet Manchukuo Army, was mostly independent of central control from Tokyo. Japanese generals, some intoxicated by success, consistently violated the ceasefire, confident they could beat China if war broke out. On July 7th 1937, the situation came to a head near Beijing at the Marco Polo Bridge, which was an unofficial demarcation between Japanese and Chinese territory. A skirmish broke out when Japanese troops were on a night time exercise, which escalated to Japanese shelling of Wangping fortress. Chiang had decided that this time they would resist Japanese aggression. The NRA incorporated Red Army units into ranks under commander Zhu De, the beginning of an uneasy alliance between the KMT and the CCP – and the start of the 2nd Sino-Japanese War. The Nationalists and Communists had buried the hatchet in the face of a common Japanese threat, but it wouldn’t stay that way for long. What would be called the 2nd Sino-Japanese War only ended in 1945 with Japan’s surrender after the drop of the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And while the alliance between the CCP and the KMT collapsed again, the world entered into the Cold War and a nuclear arms race. Stalin in particular accelerated the Soviet Nuclear program to achieve “Nuclear Powered Communism” and also develop nuclear weapons. If you want to learn more about this topic, in our new series Red Atoms we explore the origins of the first Soviet atom bomb all the way to the Chernobyl disaster and beyond. And where can you watch Red Atoms? 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If you are watching this on Patreon or Nebula, thank you so much for the support, we couldn’t do this without you. I’m Jesse Alexander and this is a production of Real Time History, the only history channel that wants you to know the Young Marshal was addicted to opium, changed his name to Peter, slept with Mussolini’s daughter, and lived to the ripe old age of 100.