Why did the Communists win the Chinese Civil War?

I doubt Chinese docs says the number. More likely those western sources used their own interpretation & heavy dose of wishful thinking to arrive at the number.

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So what is the deathtoll of the Great Leap Forward according to Chinese academics? How many Chinese were tortured and executed? How many committed suicide? I presume you mean academics at mainland universities, not Chinese academics at foreign universities. By the way, Frank Dikotter was using Chinese government documents.

The 1938 Yellow River Flood was horrible but incomparable to the Great Leap Forward. The dikes were blown during a desperate attempt to stop the brutal Japanese invasion that was slaughtering Chinese. The Rape of Nanjing had already occurred and there was reason for the KMT to fear its repeat. I think the immense human and economic costs, and low military benefit still make it inexcusable.

The Great Leap Forward, however, came out of nowhere. There was no war or no economic crisis. Mao's ego demanded that he prove Khrushchev who the real leader of the Communist world was. Mao's ego prevented him from accepting international food ego,

One of the many lessons from history is the great military leaders often make for terrible peacetime governments, and the Chinese Civil War represents that. The KMT which proved to be so inept in fight the Communists from 1930 proved to be rather skilled in running the Taiwanese economy. It wasn't just American aid or favorite terms of trade. Small countries often face a lot of trouble in international trade because they have orient their whole economy for export rather domestic consumption. Small countries have to be more sensitive to foreign markets demands than big countries. Taiwanese companies had to make products that foreign customers wanted, and they had to compete with many local competitors in those markets. The U.S. government aided Taiwan but that didn't mean American companies were going to refuse to compete with Taiwanese companies, or that American consumers had a huge pro-Taiwan bias.

The KMT until the 1970s remained ruthless autocrats who arrested and executed suspected leftists, and that tyranny cannot be forgiven by their economic success. It's remarkable that the KMT system and Taiwanese society was open enough to allow a pro-democracy movement to emerge, and for civil liberties to grow. Modern Taiwan is a liberal democracy with civil liberties, the rule of law, a mostly independent judiciary, freedom of speech, assembly, and political association, competitive elections, and a strong economy at the same time.

I credit the CCP with showing sufficient ideological flexibility that it can implicitly admit Maoism and Marxism are bad economic systems, although I wish they had come to that conclusion in the 1920s! Maybe there would have been no civil war in the CCP had agreed that private ownership of property and free trade is the best economic policy. That would have been to the right of Chiang Kai-shek!

Geographer said:

So what is the deathtoll of the Great Leap Forward according to Chinese academics? How many Chinese were tortured and executed? How many committed suicide? I presume you mean academics at mainland universities, not Chinese academics at foreign universities. By the way, Frank Dikotter was using Chinese government documents.

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Don't ask others to do your homework, you're the one obsessed with GLF. I'm just pointing out your 'research' of looking only at one side won't even get a pass as a high school history project.
Yes, I realize Frank said he used Chinese docs but did he provide the source & raw data for his claims to be verified or just his interpretation of Chinese numbers ?

Official Government claims are 15million which is low. 2013 Hayek Award winner Yang Jisheng author of Tombstone counts 36million plus another 40 Million in lost population growth.

TerraN_EmpirE said:

Official Government claims are 15million which is low. 2013 Hayek Award winner Yang Jisheng author of Tombstone counts 36million plus another 40 Million in lost population growth.

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Seriously, lost population growth? Any guy who can say that with a straight face has no credibility on this issue.

xywdx said:

I don't deny he had his own interests and ambitions, but what was the alternative?
Focus all his energy to fighting the Japanese and have the CCP grow and undermine his power base, and eventually take over.

If it's a choice between self interest or removing himself from office, then there isn't much for any politician to think about.
I'm just not seeing anything else he could have done that was better for himself and for China.

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Simply put, purging the CCP was part of Jiang's road to power. The KMT at the time was led by Wang Jingwei, who cooperated with the CCP as instructed by Sun Zhongshan. The initial success of the Northern Expedition intensified the power struggled between the left- and right-wing factions of the KMT. Jiang was a prominent member of the right-wing faction, and the CCP became an obstacle in his path to ascension.

Jiang personally organized the Shanghai Massacre of communists, an act which positioned him irrevocably as the enemy of communism. Jiang organized the massacre because he, among other KMT leaders, became alarmed at the influence of the CCP among Shanghai's labour unions (led by none other than Zhou Enlai).

At the time of the Shanghai Massacre, the CCP were not interested in undermining the Nationalist government. They were still led by a group of idealist intellectuals who were fighting for workers' rights and national integrity. It was the KMT leadership, with Jiang only one among many, who began to fear the rise of the CCP.

You said that Jiang had to focus all his energy to fight the Japanese and could not risk the CCP undermining his power base. That is precisely what a warlord would think. We have to remember that the CCP was first founded in the heady days of the first Chinese Republic, and they were only a political movement, not a military force.

Jiang feared losing political influence to the CCP, so he resorted to military means to destroy his opponent. That decision basically destroyed any hope of a real Chinese democracy, and the CCP was forced to militarize in order to survive. In that process of militarization, militant-minded leaders like Mao and Zhu De emerged. So really, Jiang sowed his own seeds of destruction.

Don't ask others to do your homework, you're the one obsessed with GLF. I'm just pointing out your 'research' of looking only at one side won't even get a pass as a high school history project.

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Are you saying you don't care? Or that the death toll is irrelevant to the moral standing of the CCP in the 1960s? Can we at least agree that "a lot" of Chinese people not only starved to death but were beaten, tortured, and executed during the Great Leap Forward?

Isn't it sad that the CCP eventually adopted the same economic policy at the KMT, 52 years after the civil war started? What if the CCP had realized that capitalism, private property, and free trade weren't so evil early on? It's sad that it took the CCP so long to realize that capitalism is more effective at developing the economy than communism.

Sol, that was my phrasing. The 40 million is his estimate of the number of people who as a result of the so called great leap forward who were never born. That's 40million people who never participated in the Chinese economy, 40million who never had a chance at helping making china a great power, 40 million who right now would be needed to help keep the Chinese population drop.
I mention his numbers as the author of that estimate is a mainland Chinese journalist of some report.

Geographer said:

Are you saying you don't care? Or that the death toll is irrelevant to the moral standing of the CCP in the 1960s? Can we at least agree that "a lot" of Chinese people not only starved to death but were beaten, tortured, and executed during the Great Leap Forward?

Isn't it sad that the CCP eventually adopted the same economic policy at the KMT, 52 years after the civil war started? What if the CCP had realized that capitalism, private property, and free trade weren't so evil? It's sad that it took the CCP so long to realize that capitalism is more effective at developing the economy than communism. How many lives would have been saved if Deng Xiaoping had been the leader of the CCP in 1926 rather than Mao Zedong?

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Oh come on, this is absurd. The KMT were not capitalists, they were Chinese Nationalists. They did not espouse capitalism, private property and free trade, they were juggling the traditional values of Chinese society with modern economic and military realities.

To compare the success of Chinese society today with the economic policy of the KMT is like comparing modern London with a Dickensian London. Deng's reforms were an extremely gradual process, and even then it created the economic turmoil that spawned the June 4th protests, so the idea that they could have been implemented in 1926 is ridiculous.

TerraN_EmpirE said:

Sol, that was my phrasing. The 40 million is his estimate of the number of people who as a result of the so called great leap forward who were never born. That's 40million people who never participated in the Chinese economy, 40million who never had a chance at helping making china a great power, 40 million who right now would be needed to help keep the Chinese population drop.
I mention his numbers as the author of that estimate is a mainland Chinese journalist of some report.

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It's also 40 million people that didn't need to be fed or employed. What's the value of calculating lost population growth? Why should it ever be inserted into a discussion about famine tragedies, except to conflate the issue for propaganda purposes?

Sol, a event like the great leap famine is a warning and something to be learned from. It was also a case study of history repeating its self. That 40million is a great deal of potential lost. You say well so what? But economic and political power comes from demographics. You say its only a mark of propaganda. I say its 40 million of your parents sol, fourth million of your family, added to thirty six million who lost their lives for a event that never need have happened.
" The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million a statistic."

TerraN_EmpirE said:

Sol, a event like the great leap famine is a warning and something to be learned from. It was also a case study of history repeating its self. That 40million is a great deal of potential lost. You say well so what? But economic and political power comes from demographics. You say its only a mark of propaganda. I say its 40 million of your parents sol, fourth million of your family, added to thirty six million who lost their lives for a event that never need have happened.
" The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million a statistic."

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No, lost population growth means nothing, otherwise you can argue that women's rights is the greatest tragedy in the history of mankind.