Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946-1950 (review)

When great revolutions were a major focus of interdisciplinary theorizing, the Chinese Communist revolution attracted its share of attention. Revolution is now out of fashion (having been displaced by modernity), and post-Mao China's economic success has helped to turn the Chinese revolution into a forgotten field of historical inquiry. In place of large theories of revolutionary power growing from nationalism, class conflict, fractured elites, or mobilized peasants, recent scholarship has focused on contingent factors to account for the seizure of power by the Chinese Communist Party. Westad's study of the Chinese civil war is a solid, well-researched, useful survey of the conflict that brought the Communists to power.

Although the introduction makes passing reference to theories of state weakness (in this case the failing Guomindang [GMD] state), peasant consciousness, and charismatic authority (Mao), none of these themes is systematically developed in the chapters that follow. Instead, Westad offers a detailed narrative of the military conflict, political competition, and diplomatic maneuvering that led to the founding of the People's Republic of China. Much of this ground was covered by Suzanne Pepper in Civil War in China: The Political Struggle, 1945–1949 (Lanham, MD., 1999; orig. pub. Berkeley, 1978). Both books begin with the important premise that Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) and his National (Guomindang) Party had significant military and political advantages over the Communists at the end of World War II. Thus, as Westad puts it, despite the Communists' rapid victory and the Guomindang's stunning collapse, the outcome of the civil war was "in no way predetermined in 1945" (7). What Westad adds to Pepper's focus on the political struggle is a careful, and closely mapped, analysis of the main military campaigns and a concise account of the international diplomacy, made possible by archival sources from the former Soviet Union and memoirs from key participants on the Chinese side.

Decisive Encounters is particularly successful in describing the critical battles in Manchuria and the aid (mostly captured Japanese weapons) that the Communists received from the Soviet Union. Newly available Chinese sources also allow Westad to document the useful service of Communist spies in key Guomindang army commands, which eliminated most opportunities for surprise attacks and seriously compromised GMD commanders' bargaining power as the end game drew near. On the diplomatic front, the skill with which Mao and his relatively untutored lieutenants handled the difficult relationship with Stalin is striking in contrast to Jiang Jieshi's repeated irritation of his American allies and progressively diminished ability to garner military aid. Westad is less convincing in disputing the conventional wisdom that land reform bought support for the Communists among poor peasants, who were then mobilized to support the war effort. He opens by arguing that land reform "probably did as much harm as good" (10), but later states that the Communists received critical logistical support for the main battles (the largest of which involved 1.8 million soldiers) because peasants were willing to volunteer to protect "land reform and the political changes that accompanied it" (114).

Quibbles like this one aside, this book now stands as the best military-political account of the Chinese civil war, with a deft analysis of its domestic and international dimensions.