Warning: super long post The Taiwan conflict is heading towards hot war so I thought I should provide some background which is that this is part of the long Chinese Civil War (1915 - present). 1915: Only 3 years after the fall of the Qing dynasty, the Chinese Civil War breaks out in response to Chinese President Yuan Shikai declaring himself Emperor and renaming the Republic of China to the Empire of China. This first civil war was named the National Protection War. 1916: National Protection War ends with the death of Yuan Shikai and the reversion of the Empire of China back to the Republic of China. The national government of China at this time was nominally democratic but unable to control the generals under Yuan Shikai who become the Beiyang Warlords. As warlord factions fight each other in numerous intense conflicts, China descends into the Warlord Era (1916 - 1928). China’s national government was known as the Beiyang government. 1917: Pro-Qing Warlord Zhang Xun captures Beijing and briefly restores the Qing dynasty and its last emperor to the throne. This was the most successful royalist uprising during the Warlord Era and it represented the fact a substantial number of Chinese preferred the Qing dynasty and monarchy over a republic. Opposition was even stronger though and other warlords soon defeated Zhang Xun’s forces. The brief Qing restoration received no international recognition. 1919: Patriotic radical Chinese students upset with the state of the country and the WWI Allies handing Shandong province from Germany to Japan launch the May Fourth Movement to strengthen and modernize China. The crackdown on the movement led some students to turn to Marxism which was being spread by patriotic radical professors. 1920: Sun Yatsen of the KMT considers Bolshevik offers of financial support for the KMT’s revolution to reunify China under KMT rule. Initially a revolutionary for democracy, Sun who was briefly the first president of the Republic of China in 1912, was at this point out of power and sheltered by a warlord in southern China. Separately the disgruntled patriotic student radicals from the May Fourth Movement start forming the first socialist and communist groups in China. 1921: Early communist groups band together in Shanghai to form the CCP with Comintern funding. 1923: Sun Yat-sen accepts Comintern/Soviet help and reorganizes the KMT into a Leninist single party dictatorship that espouses socialism, democracy, and nationalism. Sun argues that China needs a dictatorship first to establish democracy later. Comintern funds the reorganized KMT, establishes the KMT army, trains its officers in a new military academy, and creates plans for a KMT military campaign to take over China. In exchange, the KMT forms the First United Front with the nascent CCP to conquer the warlords and overthrow the ineffective but internationally recognized Beiyang government. 1925-1927: The Comintern-backed KMT-CCP alliance launches the Northern Expedition also known as the Great Revolution. This campaign was very successful because it combined Soviet training, Soviet equipment, Soviet tactics, and Soviet advisers with a grassroots program of socialist revolution to win over the masses. While the KMT army fought the warlords, CCP and KMT leftists organized labor unions that went on strike to paralyze warlord forces. In the countryside, CCP organized peasant associations that seized land from landlords and redistributed it among poor peasants. The Soviet Union and the Comintern saw this as a successful communist revolution in the making after a decade of failed communist revolutions in Europe. However, the KMT and CCP distrusted each other because the leaders of both wanted all the power once the revolution succeeded. April 12, 1927: the KMT struck first against the CCP setting off the KMT-CCP Civil War within the Northern Expedition which itself was a revolution against the Beiyang government as part of the Chinese Civil War. Turning on its CCP allies, the KMT launch the Shanghai Massacre where 5000 CCP members and worker militia were killed in cold blood. In only a few months, the KMT would kill 80% of all CCP members (50k people). August 1, 1927: the CCP creates its first army, the Red Army, and launches armed struggle against the KMT. The CCP is on the run and struggling to survive the persecution of its former KMT ally. Soviet-KMT relations fall apart and the Comintern only backs the CCP now. 1928: the Northern Expedition concludes with the KMT overthrowing the Beiyang government and establishing the Nationalist government which gains international recognition and nominal acceptance by warlords in most of China. Accordingly, the KMT changes China’s national flag from the striped Five Races Under One Union Flag to the KMT-affiliated Blue Sky White Sun Red Earth Flag. Unlike the somewhat democratic Beiyang government, the Nationalist government was openly a single party Leninist military dictatorship. KMT’s actual control of the country was limited to just southern China. Meanwhile the KMT had to continue conquering remaining warlords and the CCP. 1930: KMT defeats some major warlords in northern China in the Central Plains War, strengthening the KMT’s image but also weakening its military leading Japanese leaders to take note. Around this time, China’s economy in KMT controlled zones booms. 1931: CCP coalesces its rural bases into the Chinese Soviet Republic which is financially supported by the Comintern just like the KMT once was. The CCP’s urban labor activism declines due to intense KMT repression but its rural land redistribution program advocated by Mao Zedong grows as the CCP transforms from an urban intellectual and workers party into a peasant guerrilla movement. Around the same time, Japan seizes northeast China from the local warlord and creates the puppet state of Manchukuo by bringing back the last emperor of the Qing dynasty as its head of state. The KMT focuses on conquering warlords and the CCP to expand its control over China. 1933: the rise of the Nazis in Germany leads to intense cooperation between the KMT and the Nazis. KMT provides the Nazis with the Chinese market and raw materials in exchange for German military assistance, training, and advisers to help the KMT in the Chinese Civil War. 1934 -1936: German military assistance pays off for the KMT as a German general assigned to China devises a successful campaign to conquer the CCP-led Chinese Soviet Republic. This forces the CCP and its Red Army on to the Long March as the party and army fled from southern China into northern China for survival. Mao Zedong becomes the chairman of the CCP at this time and his and many other CCP member’s resentment towards the Soviet/Comintern disasterous advice leads to a partial break whereas the CCP became independent of the Comintern but also lost any further funding from them. Late 1936: incensed at the KMT neglecting to defend China and focusing on fighting the CCP and warlords, patriotic warlord Zhang Xueliang launches the Xi’an Incident where he kidnaps KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek to force him to fight Japan and call a truce with the CCP. At gunpoint and with the Soviet Union playing intermediary, Chiang agrees to form the Second United Front with the CCP and all other Chinese patriotic factions to resist Japanese invasion. Chiang jails Zhang who would remain in jail until 1988. This gave the much depleted CCP a crucial respite to recover as the KMT repression eased off. The Soviet Union restores ties to the KMT as it needs China to hold off Japan in order to stave off Japanese invasion of the Soviet Far East. 1937: As Japan began its full scale invasion of China, China was divided into KMT controlled provinces, CCP bases, multiple warlords, Tibetan controlled regions, Mongol controlled areas, Japanese occupied provinces, and a separate pro-Soviet warlord in Xinjiang who sheltered the CCP but also had nominal allegiance to the KMT. 1937-1941: China fought nearly alone against Japan. In desperate battles, the KMT army took huge losses and lost its best German trained and equipped divisions. Due to the outbreak of full scale war, Japan pressured Germany to cut off all aid to China. The Soviet Union would send its Air Force to China to help combat Japanese air power but the effect was limited. China would lose nearly all of its wealthier and semi-industrialized regions but the KMT and CCP refused to surrender. Japan successfully exploited China’s internal divisions to convince millions of Chinese to become collaborators. More Chinese would fight for Japan than Japanese themselves. 1942-1945: After the American entry into WWII, US aid to the KMT exploded and a close relationship between the KMT and the U.S. was born. During this period, all Chinese forces preferred to just hold the line against Japan so that America can beat Japan for them and then they can resume the Chinese Civil War. As corruption and mismanagement piled up in addition to massive casualties and military collapses in the KMT army, the Chinese population grew war-weary. Japanese occupied China offered better lives than Chinese governed areas. The KMT’s number two leader Wang Jingwei defected to the Japanese side and led one of several collaborationist governments. Before morale totally collapsed, the USA and the Soviet Union achieved victory over the Axis. This led to the expulsion of Japan from all of occupied China AND crucially the return of Taiwan which Japan had conquered from China in 1895. Taiwan Province was reestablished by the KMT on October 25, 1945 in accordance with the Instrument of Surrender signed by Japan and the Allies. 1945: after Japan’s surrender, a brief euphoria swept across China and the KMT. Hopes were high that China would finally have peace and a chance to modernize. The KMT’s control of China reached its peak as it now controlled all of China except for CCP bases, western Tibet, Mongolia, and Tuva. All warlords had now been eliminated or were folded into the KMT. The U.S. now hoped to make KMT-led China its primary ally in East Asia and to accomplish that it needed a stable China. Chinese loved America at this time including the CCP which praised the U.S. and its democracy. The Soviets also accepted that China would be a pro-American country though it would also be friendly to the Soviet Union. America flooded the KMT with weapons, supplies, and money to prop it up against its domestic rivals but American leaders advised the KMT to create a coalition government with the CCP because it recognized the underlying issues that plagued the KMT. But distrust between the CCP and the KMT made that impossible due to the previous two decades of bad blood. The CCP refused to give up its army until it was given some political power while the KMT refused to share any political power until the CCP relinquished its army. 1946-1947: the KMT, confident in its huge material advantages over the CCP, launched a new military campaign against the CCP bases in the northeast using its American equipment. Hoping that the KMT would win, America generously supplied the KMT army and government while also seeking to bolster China’s standing in the world. Not only did the U.S. make China a permanent member of the UN Security Council but it also backed China’s claims in the South China Sea and over Mongolia. Despite initial success in battle, the KMT withered in the court of popular opinion. War-weary Chinese held the KMT responsible for continuing an unpopular civil war. Corruption and mismanagement continued to erode KMT popularity. Brutal political repression by the KMT further lost support. To attract urban intellectual support, the CCP called for multiparty democracy which the KMT flat out rejected. In the countryside, CCP land redistribution gained massive peasant support. KMT and CCP political terror both ensured that the war was brutal and the rank and file on each side who had blood on their hands would stay intensely loyal to the party because their life depended on it. 1948-1949: CCP successfully used Mao Zedong’s strategy of guerrilla warfare and mobile warfare to isolate the KMT army in big cities in the northeast and destroying them. Victory in the northeast for the CCP led to a cascading KMT military collapse across the rest of China. At the same time, China suffered hyperinflation which wiped out the savings of many wealthy and middle class Chinese who would have opposed communism. Now that nearly everyone was poor or starving, discontent with the KMT in the cities was overwhelming. KMT repression remained as brutal as ever but it could not save the party from losing all of mainland China. Before retreating to Taiwan, KMT forces on the mainland executed nearly all the political prisoners that they could not move to Taiwan. For a while in 1949, the USA and the CCP considered continuing Sino-American relations as under the KMT, but anti-communist politics in the USA and a series of friction between CCP forces and USA forces in China torpedoed that. The CCP overthrow of the KMT on the mainland was mostly complete by September 1949 and on October 1, 1949, the CCP established the People’s government (communist government) and changed China’s official name from Republic of China to People’s Republuc of China. The Blue Sky White Sun Red Earth flag was replaced with the Five Starred Red flag. The CCP chose to align with the Soviet Union. At this time, Taiwan, Hainan, and large pockets in southwestern China remained under the control of up to a million third-rate KMT remnant forces, minor warlords, or bandits. KMT-backed Muslim insurgents also roamed freely in northwestern China including parts of Xinjiang. Western Tibet was under the control of a Tibetan separatist government led by the Dalai Lama despite Tibet being internationally recognized as part of China. 1950: With China now under the control of a Soviet aligned government, the U.S. strategy in East Asia needed a reboot. While the U.S. openly was obsessed with bringing the KMT back into power in China, it also prepared for a long term CCP rule by switching to Japan as its long term East Asian partner. Whereas in January 1950, the USA declared that Taiwan was part of China and it would not interfere with the Chinese Civil War, by May 1950, this had changed and by June 1950 with the outbreak of the Korean War, the U.S. began to plot taking Taiwan away from China to keep the KMT alive. In May 1950, the CCP liberated Hainan from the KMT but before the CCP could liberate Taiwan, the U.S. military occupied the province and sent its navy into the Taiwan Strait. The CCP lacked the technology to liberate Taiwan and could only watch as the U.S. sought to make Taiwan into a second Manchukuo as the Japanese had done from 1932-1945 only this time using the KMT. 1950 - 1958: the Chinese Civil War continued at lower intensity as the CCP seized a number of islands off shore near the mainland that were under KMT. By 1958, the CCP was mostly done with clearing out KMT remnants on the mainland. The KMT in Taiwan remained recognized by most countries as the official government for China. During this time, the U.S. pressured Chiang Kai-shek to make Taiwan an independent country, but Chiang was a true Chinese patriot and refused. The U.S. then hatched a coup to use KMT general Sun Liren to overthrow Chiang and declare Taiwanese independence as a U.S. puppet but Chiang foiled the plot and had Sun Liren jailed for life starting in 1955. Meanwhile, the CCP fails to carry out the multiparty democracy that it had promised during the late 1940s. 1958: Unable to fight the U.S. navy in the Taiwan Strait, the CCP sought Soviet help in fighting America to liberate Taiwan but the Soviets had no interest in taking such a risk. Feeling betrayed, Mao Zedong added this as a last straw to his long list of grievances against the Soviets (backing separatism in Mongolia, Tuva, and Xinjiang, Czarist annexations of Chinese land, poor Comintern advice during the revolution, inadequate Soviet commitment during the Korean War, and Soviet arrogance towards China) and this would contribute greatly to the Sino-Soviet split. 1958-1978: the CCP and the KMT would fight a largely symbolic Kinmen Artillery Battle for twenty years in order to prevent the U.S. from pushing Taiwan towards independence. 1971: the UN votes to hand China’s UN seat from Taiwan to the Mainland. Shortly after most countries would switch their recognition of China from Taipei to Beijing. In this same year, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger secretly visited Beijing to seek rapprochement in order to help America against the Soviets. 1972: Nixon visits China leading to a thaw in relations between the U.S. and the CCP. The CCP manages to convince the US to stop supporting Tibetan separatists and to eventually withdraw troops from Taiwan province but fail to convince the U.S. to formally recognize China’s sovereignty over Taiwan province. The U.S. refuses to honor the international treaty (Instrument of Surrender) that it signed in 1945 that returned Taiwan to China. 1979: The US switches its recognition of China from Taipei to Beijing and withdraws troops from Taiwan. The CCP announces a policy of peaceful unification with Taiwan under One Country Two Systems which would allow the KMT to retain power. The Chinese Civil War becomes a frozen conflict. CCP recovering from the Mao Zedong dictatorship and the previous three decades of political chaos and persecution launched Reform and Opening Up. Under Deng Xiaoping, the CCP made plans to finally implement the democracy that it had promised in the late 1940s and which Sun Yat-sen had espoused at the start of the century. 1980s: the CCP during this period of the Sino-American honeymoon tries a few more times but fails to get America to honor the 1945 treaty that gave China sovereignty over Taiwan. At the same time, CCP-KMT negotiations for a Third United Front fail due to lingering mistrust of the CCP by the KMT. Taiwan at this point is led by Chiang Kai-sheik’s eldest son, Chiang Ching-kuo who saw that with the CCP reforming towards democracy and economic development, the days for the Chiang family dynasty and the KMT Leninist single party dictatorship were numbered. He began democratization efforts in Taiwan. 1988-1989: Taiwan and the mainland’s democratization diverged. The Democracy Movement in Mainland China spooked CCP leaders leading to a reversal of the commitment to democracy whereas the lack of mass protests in Taiwan allowed the transition to democracy to continue. 1993: Under the leadership of a pro-independence Lee Teng-hui, Taiwan began changing its textbooks to de-emphasize China. This was the start of a move to teach Taiwanese kids to not identify as Chinese. 1996: Taiwan holds its first presidential election. Lee Teng-hui calls for Taiwan independence leading to a mainland response for armed reunification. The PLA prepared to fight but the U.S. navy interfered preventing the campaign from going ahead. From here on out, the CCP would focus on upgrading its military so that it can liberate Taiwan even with full American interference. 2000: Taiwan elects a pro-independence president Chen Shui-bian who further modifies the educational curriculum of Taiwan to indoctrinate kids in thinking that Taiwan is a country. 2005: KMT in Taiwan continue to want to reunify China. Losing to the DPP, it was now willing to be friendly to its long time rival the CCP. This year, KMT leaders returned to the mainland for the first time since 1949. 2008: KMT candidate Ma Ying-jeou is ejected president in Taiwan leading to a thaw in cross strait relations but reunification is still rejected by Taiwan. 2016-2024: Taiwan gets a pro-independence president Tsai Ing-wen and she is serious about independence. Prodded on by the U.S. which now seeks to deteriorate its relations with mainland China, she gets around the issue of the unfinished Chinese Civil War and China’s sovereignty over Taiwan by claiming falsely that Taiwan is already independent and has been independent since the establishment of the Republic of China in 1912. This theory rests on the false idea that in 1949, the CCP established not only a government but a new separatist country. This is blatantly false and a rewrite of history. Present day: the Chinese Civil War has been going on since 1915. The people and factions involved have varied and the issues have changed many times. It is a complex multi-sided conflict with loads of foreign interference and involvement. But the civil war is not over. The CCP has waited 74 years to finish the civil war. It has tried for 45 years to reunify peacefully. But it has not worked because foreign countries that violate China’s sovereignty have no respect for the Westphalian principles of international law. The CCP has run out of patience and is taking hybrid military action to complete the final campaign of the century-old Chinese Civil War: the Taiwan Campaign.
You forgot to add your TC
sir, this is a wendy's
Wow thanks for your summary
Hope Taiwan can hold.
Hopefully Taiwan will join the rest of China and China will finally be unified.
You understand that you are hoping for mass murder and destruction?
Not when China is under CCP. CCP is evil.
So who wrote this post? ChatGPT or Llama
Either that or you are Ray Dalio
I am a sucker for wikipedia type posts. Have never read this history from this POV before. Interesting!
Holy long post
Hopefully the ccp will fall and taiwan can reunite with a free and democratic china.
I'm going to be honest. Not reading all that. I'm happy for you though. Or sorry that happened.
I think we’ll mostly be sorry that happened