Striking contrast between the KMT and the CPC

In June 1947 Chiang Kai-shek said with complacency that after an overview of all the circumstances everything was under his control, and he could do whatever he liked. But in a speech in January 1948, he said that no revolutionary party had been as dispirited and corrupt as the KMT; nor had there ever been such a party with no spirit, no discipline, and no standard between right and wrong. Such a party should have been eliminated long before. What made Chiang Kai-shek do such an about-turn as regards the KMT? The reason was the KMT's defeat on the battlefield, which was related to the weakening of the KMT's leadership.

In fact, since 1927, when the first period of KMT-CPC cooperation broke down, the KMT had started to decline. In November 1928 George Siekierski pointed out that "extravagance and luxury" had become a way of life for KMT officials. By 1930 corruption among National Government officials at all levels had become comparatively widespread.

After the victory of the Anti-Japanese War in 1945, people in the enemy-occupied areas wanted the KMT Central Committee to send officials to govern them. However, the officials devoted themselves to plunder. Li Zongren (Li Tsung-jen), who was vice-president and acting president of the Republic of China, said in his memoirs that at that time people mocked those carpetbagging officials saying that they only knew how to plunder gold, houses, cars, bank notes and women. So it turned out to be that wherever KMT officials went, the situation there got worse.

Shao Yulin, a key economic official of the KMT, warned Chiang Kai-shek that although the KMT had regained its power over the country it could lose the support of the people. He predicted that in the victory celebrations a time bomb of failure had been concealed. This "time bomb" exploded during the Chinese Civil War, and resulted in the KMT's defeat on the battlefield. Withdrawing to Taiwan after his defeat, Chiang Kai-shek admitted that it was a self-inflicted defeat.

In contrast, Mao Zedong regarded the people as the decisive factor in all wars. Military and economic power had to be grasped by man, and the CPC always strengthened the Party's ties with the people. As Theodore H. White and Annalee Jacoby wrote:

Though their enemies denounced the Communists' beliefs and attributed to them every shameful excess they could imagine, no one could deny they had wrought a miracle in arms. In six years the Communists had thrown out from the barren hills a chain of bases that swept in an arc from Manchuria to the Yangtze Valley. Rarely in the history of modern war or politics has there been any political adventure to match this in imagination or epic grandeur. The job was done by men who worked with history as if it were a tool and with peasants as if they were raw material; they reached down into the darkness of each village and summoned from it with their will and their slogans such resources of power as neither the Kuomintang nor Japan imagined could exist.

The power came from the people—from the unleashing of the internal tensions that had so long paralyzed the countryside, from the intelligence of masses of men, from the dauntless, enduring courage of the peasant.

Summing up the reasons for the KMT's loss of the mainland, John Leighton Stuart also said:

On the whole, the party was able to give the impression, both to the Chinese masses, especially the peasantry, and to foreign observers in and out of China, that it was truly devoted to the cause of the people and was truly seeking to promote in China the cause of democracy and to win for China a position of real independence and strength in the family of nations.

Until they had gained nationwide (mainland) ascendency, the Communist authorities governed in areas that they controlled with little manifestation of totalitarian inclination; they seemed to be benevolently disposed, tolerant and friendly, on the principle: live, let live and help live. Their conduct as they moved in 1947, 1948, and 1949 to victory after victory and took control in region after region and city after city was indeed that of well-disposed liberators.

Its success was in large part due to the differential between the spirit of unselfish devotion to a cause which it managed to engender and the woeful lack of this among some Kuomintang members. 11

A Chinese saying goes, "Those who command popular support will gain state power." During the Chinese Civil War, the Communist Party rallied the overwhelming majority of the people and their resources to form the situation described by Mao Zedong: "In China we unite workers, peasants (including the newly rich), independent business people, small and medium capitalists oppressed and persecuted by the reactionary forces, students, teachers, professors, intellectuals in general, professionals, enlightened gentry, public servants and oppressed minorities and overseas Chinese to fight for state power and rule the country under the leadership (through the Communist Party) of the working class."

However, the KMT had lost all its popular support, and people even asked "Whom exactly does the Kuomintang represent?" Popular support finally decided the outcome of the war. On February 1, 1949, on the eve of defeat, Chiang Kai-shek admitted that during the two decades of his administration he had put too few efforts into political reform and social welfare. Furthermore, the educational personnel in party, government and military departments had not paid attention to the implementation of the Three Principles of the People (Nationalism, Democracy and People's Livelihood).

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7 Lloyd E. Eastman, Seeds of Destruction: Nationalist China in War and Revolution, 1937-1949, Stanford University Press, 1984, p.vii.

8 John Leighton Stuart, Fifty Years in China -- The Memoirs of John Leighton Stuart, Missionary and Ambassador, Random House, Inc., New York, 1954, pp.225-226.

9 John Leighton Stuart, Fifty Years in China -- The Memoirs of John Leighton Stuart, Missionary and Ambassador, Random House, Inc., New York, 1954, pp.188, 189.

10 Theodore H. White and Annalee Jacoby, Thunder Out of China, William Sloane Associates, 1946, p.201.

11 John Leighton Stuart, Fifty Years in China -- The Memoirs of John Leighton Stuart, Missionary and Ambassador, Random House, New York, 1954, pp.281, 282, 246.