Chiang Kai-shek's Waterloo: The Battle of the Hwai-Hai

Abstract

PARTISAN FEUDING AND ALIEN INFLUENCES have frequently combined to distort the picture Americans get of events in Asia. In recent years, some currency has been given to the extraordinary suggestion that the outcome of the Chinese civil war was determined not so much by Chinese as American that responsibility lay with the pitifully small corps of American Far Eastern experts or with the U.S. State Department. The United States can of course exert some influence beyond its borders, but any such thesis truly discards all rules of proportion: the 1911 Revolution that overturned the Manchu Dynasty, the revolutionary resurgence that brought the Kuomintang (Nationalist party) and Chiang Kai-shek to power in 1927, and the pent-up popular forces that exploded in China at the end of World War II, were all alike of such magnitudes as to be beyond American command. The end of the Nationalist regime in China, as its revolutionary birth, was not only violent, but tremendous in scale and prodigious in aspect. The National Government met final defeat in the greatest battle Asia has seen in this century. At the end of June, 1946, the uneasy wartime truce between the Nationalists and the Chinese Communists had collapsed, and the armed struggle begun between them in 1927 had resumed. The Nationalist armies won much territory in the first year of the war; the National Government at Nanking in July, 1947, declared the Communists to be in open rebellion, and soon afterwards proceeded to outlaw the middleof-the-road Democratic League. These victories were followed by serious setbacks, especially in Manchuria. Chiang Kai-shek, speaking to the National Assembly on April 9, 1948, nevertheless minimized the Nationalist defeats: they were due, he said, to psychological instead of physical factors, and the Communists couldn't win the war even in 6o years. Chiang thus discounted, by implication, the importance of the factor of popular support. But Clausewitz had found that one of the three principal war objectives is the winning of opinion, and that public