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An Army Rooted in Large-Scale Combat Operations

Part 1: The People’s Liberation Army’s Combat Experience in the Chinese Civil War, 1946–1949

 

Ian M. Sullivan

 

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Over the past eight years, I have had the chance to engage with audiences all around the US Army and joint force to discuss the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and how it fights. Throughout this eight-year window, the PLA has been considered our pacing threat; yet, what I routinely find is an Army that knows very little about our most formidable potential adversary. I have seen some improvement in understanding the PLA’s equipment, formations, and even its approach to warfare, but one thing that I rarely see is a deep understanding of the PLA itself, particularly in terms of its history and the story of its creation. This often leads to some fundamental misunderstandings of what the PLA is today and what it can be in the future.

In the rare cases when Army audiences with whom I interact have thought about the history of the PLA, it generally begins with a mental picture of a ragtag guerrilla army who first fought a nationwide insurgency against its Nationalist adversaries and then a wider irregular conflict against the Japanese during the Second World War. While all have heard of Mao Zedong, few understand his role in defining the PLA’s approach to warfare and his firm grasp of strategy that, in many ways, serves as the underpinnings of the PLA’s strategic culture today. Outside of Mao, few have heard of the other key military leaders like Lin Biao, who revolutionized the PLA’s fighting doctrine; or the coterie of talented and capable field commanders like Chen Yi, Liu Bocheng, Nie Rongzhen, or Su Yu, who mastered not only guerrilla warfare but also rapidly learned and executed a remarkable transition to large-scale combat operations (LSCO), which sealed the fate of Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) and the Chinese Nationalists. Finally, fewer still know about the “Big Three” campaigns that spanned September 1948 and January 1949 and led to the eventual Communist victory and establishment of the People’s Republic of China on the Chinese mainland.

The three campaigns—the Liaoxi-Shenyang Campaign (September to November 1948, known in China as the Liao-Shen Campaign), the Huai-Hai Campaign (fought between the Huai River and the Lunghai Railroad from November 1948 to January 1949), and the Ping-Jin Campaign (Beiping [Beijing] and Tianjin, fought from November 1948 to January 1949)—are as important to the PLA’s development, operational art, approach warfare, and identity as the Meuse-Argonne offensive, the Battle of the Bulge, or even Gettysburg are to the US Army. In fact, Mao himself referred to Huai-Hai as “China’s Gettysburg,” while the PLA Academy of Military Science calls it the “campaign that won China.”¹ This is an arguable point, and one could easily make the same case for the Liao-Shen Campaign. However, what is shocking to many Army audiences is that the PLA fought these three campaigns in a five-month period that were each approximately the size of the US Army’s largest campaign ever fought (the Meuse-Argonne in terms of personnel engaged), involved far more maneuver units than those engaged during the Battle of the Bulge, and whose results were at least as decisive as Gettysburg.² This is not the story of a ragtag guerrilla army but the story of an army that rapidly and ruthlessly mastered LSCO.

It is something of a miracle that the Chinese Communists were in a position at all to conduct three decisive campaigns during the fall and winter of 1948–1949. The Chinese Red Army forces had been engaged nonstop since 1927 in what eventually became a civil war that was then wrapped into a regional war before expanding into a global war built in increasingly complex layers upon each other, or in the words of S. C. M. Paine, a series of “nested wars.”³ These nested wars provided a shifting geopolitical landscape that Mao was able to effectively navigate, first to ensure survival and later to secure outright victory. During the first critical phase of the civil war, the Communists were able to survive but barely and likely only because they were saved by the next layer of conflict.

For example, in the fall of 1934, Nationalist forces were focused on eliminating the two hundred thousand Red Army members who were defending the critical Jiangxi Soviet in southern China. With one million soldiers, the Nationalists surrounded the Communists, building concentric rings of blockhouses that compelled the Red Army to attack fixed positions in ways that ran counter to its guerrilla identity.⁴ Half of the army was destroyed, while the remainder attempted a desperate breakout to preserve its force. The Communists retreated for a full year, moving west first and then north for more than six thousand miles while being pursued by hundreds of thousands of Nationalist troops.⁵ This was the famous Long March, hailed in Communist lore as a great victory and a referendum on the revolutionary spirit of the Red Army. In reality, it was an utter military disaster that should have spelled the end of the Communists as an effective fighting force. Of the eighty-five thousand soldiers who broke out of the Jiangxi encirclement, perhaps five thousand made it through the yearlong retreat, which led to the Communists securing sanctuary in the rough terrain of Shanxi Province and their key base area at Yan’an.⁶ More than 90 percent of the force was lost on the march to combat, starvation, illness, or desertion.⁷

Those who survived did so largely because Jiang was unable to concentrate his forces to root them out of Shanxi due to the encroaching threat from the Japanese. Japan had occupied Manchuria in 1931 and were preparing to expand their foothold deeper into China. Japan invaded China proper in 1937, and the civil war was now suddenly swallowed whole by a regional war, which led to an uneasy cooperation between the Nationalists and Communists to repel their common adversary. Four years later, as Japan struck against the United States and United Kingdom, China’s civil war became one part of an even broader global war.

It was during this time when Mao was engaged in a battle of survival—first with the Nationalists and then with the Japanese—that he laid out many of his ideas on warfare. These precepts were often intended to bolster morale and set a firm intellectual base for his revolutionary armed forces. In time, they would become the initial underpinnings of the PLA’s approach to warfare. For example, in a missive written in January 1930, Mao presented his concepts for guerrilla warfare that the Communist forces essentially followed from the difficult days of the Long March to the even greater challenges posed by the Japanese. He wrote, “The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass, the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue.”⁸ This statement sums up the approach to warfare that Mao followed as he took operational control of the Red Army in 1935 and throughout the war with Japan from 1937 to its conclusion in 1945 at the end of the Second World War. As time progressed, so too did Mao’s thinking. While sheltering in Yan’an and then engaging in a guerrilla conflict against the Japanese, Mao began thinking more broadly, putting together a strategic vision that was guided by campaign-level thinking on the course of a long, protracted war.⁹

Perhaps his most important thinking was revealed in his “On Protracted War,” a series of lectures given while operating out of Yan’an in May and June 1938. In these writings, he deftly presented the problem he faced: how to prevail in a conflict against a militarily superior Japan under conditions of disunity within China and global opinion that was ambivalent toward the plight of China at best. He compared the advantages and disadvantages that both Japan and China held in the conflict and concluded that China would prevail.¹⁰ He asserted that China could not win in a quick war but would prevail only in a protracted test of wills.¹¹ His analysis of the problem statement was matched with an approach to waging a protracted war that could be operationalized by China to secure victory. Namely, China would wage a three-stage protracted war that would compel Japan to overextend itself, allowing China to rely on a broad insurgency designed to attrite Japanese strength while building up its own capabilities to eventually launch a counteroffensive that would lead to final victory.

The first stage covered Japan’s strategic offensive and China’s strategic defense, while the second encompassed Japan’s strategic consolidation and China’s preparation for the counteroffensive. The final and decisive stage was China’s strategic counteroffensive and Japan’s strategic retreat. In the first phase—still ongoing during the time of Mao’s writing—Japan had begun advancing and seizing key areas of China; particularly, urban areas and critical connecting lines of communication.¹² Under these conditions, irregular operations along interior lines and secure bases in the countryside would overextend Japanese forces and open their rear areas to constant harassment. The Japanese offensive would culminate, and the second stage would begin under conditions of a stalemate. Japan would no longer be able to advance but would instead be focused on holding large swathes of the country and the connecting lines of communication. Irregular operations would continue but so too would mobile and even positional battles in some key areas. Mao was sanguine here; he recognized that this phase would be devastating, but if waged effectively, the correlation of forces eventually would shift in China’s favor. This would then necessitate the start of the third and final stage, where China would shift to the offensive. It would no longer merely operate on internal lines but would shift to external lines to reclaim lost territory and seal the ultimate defeat of the Japanese occupier. While irregular operations would continue, Mao understood that stage three required a fundamental shift to mobile, conventional warfare.¹³ In short, China would need to rapidly transition from irregular operations to LSCO to prevail over their adversary. History often has a cynical sense of humor, as the Communists largely remained in the second stage, while the Nationalists and the Western allies moved China into the final stage and eventual victory over Japan. However, Mao’s approach proved prescient when one looks at the course of the Chinese Civil War, which ran from 1946 to 1949, and his model almost precisely laid out the type of war that the Communists would fight.

The initial phase of the civil war began on 26 June 1946 and ran through February 1947. It kicked off when Jiang’s Nationalist forces launched an all-out offensive against the Communist forces in the quarter of the country that they had liberated during the Second World War.¹⁴ Jiang’s forces wielded significant advantages in numbers and armaments, with many of his most capable divisions being trained and equipped by the United States, and others taking advantage of the significant surplus of US equipment that arrived in China after the war.¹⁵ The Nationalists had hoped to drive the Communists out of their base areas and then use their superior firepower to destroy them. Jiang envisioned the campaign lasting three to six months.¹⁶ His concept of operations failed, however, largely due to a masterful execution of a defensive strategy based not on holding terrain but on remaining mobile in broad areas where the Communists retained significant popular support. Mao noted that to defeat this offensive, it would be necessary to fight a mobile war where the “abandonment of certain places or cities is not only unavoidable but also necessary.”¹⁷ As Nationalist forces moved to occupy key locations and then pressed into Communist base areas, the Communist forces remained mobile within the countryside, never giving the Nationalists a chance to fix and eliminate them. While mobile, the Communists would find ways to mass their own forces at times and places of their choosing against smaller portions of the now-overextended Nationalist formations, overwhelming them.¹⁸ The results were eminently frustrating for the Nationalists who sought terrain control to press their enemy.

In Mao’s concept of warfare, Nationalist combat power was the key center of gravity, not terrain. To endure phase one under his protracted war theory, he needed to reduce the enemy’s numerical advantages while also retaining his force’s ability to act. He called it “the principle of concentrating our forces to wipe out the enemy forces one by one,” and it slowly and painfully had an impact.¹⁹ With their broad strategy floundering, the Nationalists shifted to a more-focused plan to concentrate their forces on two critical areas—Shandong and Shanxi, which included Mao’s wartime “capital” at Yan’an.²⁰ Jiang’s spring 1947 offensive was the start of the war’s second phase, and it became his culmination point, as he deployed the bulk of his best formations for the task of defeating the Communists in the northeast and northwest. The Nationalists’ forces retained a three-to-one advantage and an even more significant edge in equipment.²¹ The Communists again fought an effective mobile, elastic defense. Although they lost territory, including Yan’an itself, the Communist forces remained largely intact. As the Nationalists’ pincers tried to close in, Mao’s forces again showed a remarkable ability to survive and counterpunch as the Nationalist offensive wound down due to overextension and a decrease in US support. When it finally came, the Communist counterpunch was a masterstroke and timed to perfection. First, Mao ordered Liu Bocheng and Deng Xiaoping, with their newly named Central Plains Field Army, to surge across the Yellow River and attack into the Nationalist rear.²² Kicking off on 30 June 1947, Liu and Deng rolled up the Nationalist defenses and immediately threatened key Nationalist-held territory. This was followed with a second offensive on the Nationalist’s other flank, as Chen Yi brought his forces to bear. In a month of fighting, the Nationalist offensive into Shandong stalled, and they were forced back to tenuously hold static positions in towns and cities, some of which the Communists were able to capture.²³ By the end of July, the Nationalists had lost eighty thousand soldiers (casualties, prisoners, and many who simply changed sides).²⁴ The offensive in Shandong tied down ninety of the 160 brigades that the Nationalists had deployed. Mao referred to this as the strategy of “wear and tear,” which was designed to draw down the enemy’s combat strength and exhaust his logistics and troops before wiping them out.²⁵ Suddenly, the Nationalists, who were now forced to deploy their formations to hold cities and to protect key lines of communication, had too few forces available to deploy to what would soon become the critical theater of the war—Manchuria.²⁶

Following the summer victories of 1947, Mao sensed the transition point had arrived. The Communist forces were renamed to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), and for the first time, he publicly stated the goal of the Communist war effort was to overthrow Jiang and form a democratic coalition government representing the Chinese people.²⁷ This was a real sea change in terms of the Communist theory of victory, which previously focused on survival and a return to negotiations with Jiang.²⁸ By December, Mao spoke of a “turning point” where the PLA would no longer be fighting to survive in its base areas but would instead take the fight directly and decisively to the areas controlled by the Nationalists.²⁹ Fighting in Manchuria continued even as the Shandong Campaign was raging. Arguably the most important factor was the ability of the Communist forces to rapidly learn, adapt, and critically institutionalize and scale a modernization effort to prepare Lin’s Northeast Democratic United Army to begin the decisive transition to phase three of the civil war and of Mao’s protracted war.³⁰

But first, the newly created PLA had to engage in a rapid transformation across doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, and facilities; and an even faster training effort aimed at preparing the PLA for LSCO. Mao wrote about the need for the Communist forces to value learning, noting that “to become both wise and courageous one must acquire a method, a method to be applied in learning as well as in applying what has been learned.”³¹ In preparation for an eventual transition to LSCO, the Communists instituted a professional military education effort. By 1945, the Communists had already formed an Artillery School at Yan’an and then a Signals School.³² They added an Engineer School in 1946; and by 1947, Lin formed a military college, whose mission was specifically aimed at researching and compiling the information necessary to affect the transition to LSCO.³³ The military college also trained company-level officers and platoon-level leaders in a seven-month training course. Several Communist officers had experience, education, and training with the Soviets, and they rapidly translated Soviet doctrine and regulations into Chinese and also implemented a system for staff work necessary to coordinate complex combined-arms operations.³⁴ For example, Lin studied at the Frunze Military Academy in Moscow, as did Liu Yalou, who was responsible for establishing the staff education program. Liu even held a Soviet Red Army commission and fought against the Germans.³⁵ Zhu Rui, who was the PLA’s artillery expert, studied at what was then the Mikhail Kalinin Artillery School in Saint Petersburg and brought his expertise to the PLA’s Yan’an Artillery School.³⁶

The PLA also needed to rapidly acquire and integrate new equipment so it would be capable of waging high-intensity combat operations. From the end of the Second World War to mid-1947, the Soviet Union provided significant support to the PLA. Where the Nationalists received significant supplies of arms from the United States (thirty-nine division sets of equipment by 1945 and then another $900 million of war surplus equipment), the Soviets transferred significant stocks of captured Japanese weapons and equipment; however, they did not start reaching the PLA in large quantities until 1947.³⁷ This included between three hundred thousand and seven hundred thousand rifles, three thousand heavy machine guns, nearly 1,500 artillery pieces, eleven thousand light mortars, three thousand trucks, and up to twenty million rounds of ammunition.³⁸ Additionally, the PLA also turned American arms it captured on the battlefield against the Nationalists. Some whole units were equipped with American arms, including a Special Arms Column in the PLA’s East China Field Force that was equipped in 1947 with captured US tanks, mechanized vehicles, and artillery.³⁹ As Lin prepared to initiate his decisive Manchuria offensive, the Soviets also began supplying better-quality Soviet and Czech light arms, as well as captured Japanese tanks and heavier artillery.⁴⁰ With some Soviet assistance, the Communists were able to begin their own indigenous production of armaments and munitions. Although the Soviets stripped Manchuria of much of its industrial potential during its own postwar occupation, some areas, particularly in the Lushun-Dalian area, began to restore their industrial capabilities.⁴¹ By 1948, these plants were producing two thousand artillery shells, five hundred thousand mortar rounds, 1.5 million hand grenades, and seventeen million rounds of small arms ammunition.⁴²

Lin, who may have been the PLA’s most introspective commander, always looked to learn from his experiences in battle and introduce rapid changes into his force. His early experiences, for example, showed that the PLA had little understanding of modern tactics, and when following Mao’s precepts to isolate and overwhelm an adversary, it generally relied on simplistic frontal assaults. As early as 1947, Lin devised his “Six Principles of Combat,” which appear to operationalize Mao’s guidelines. These included

• “one point, two flanks,” which focused on attacking one weak spot, while still operating on both enemy flanks with secondary assaults;
• the “3-3 system,” which focused on tactical formations;
• “four fast and one slow,” which called for rapid assaults but only after preparations that included developing a thorough understanding of the enemy’s position were made;
• “three types of situations; three types of combat,” which noted that different types of operations required different approaches to battle;
• “three ferocities,” which told troops to fight, attack, and pursue a broken enemy fiercely; and
• “four teams, one unit,” which focused on teams working in a wedge formation.⁴³

He tried to implement these ideas as the PLA began its transition from irregular operations to LSCO, and his first few efforts were disastrous. In February 1947, four of his divisions, equipped with artillery and armor, isolated a Nationalist brigade but was repulsed with heavy losses.⁴⁴ In a larger action, he committed one hundred thousand troops to seize the critical city of Siping, which had already been fought over twice before. This also ended in failure, largely due to Nationalist firepower that included very effective air support.⁴⁵

To counter this poor performance, Lin put his entire command through a three-month crash course to make them more proficient at the types of conventional military operations that proved so difficult at the Third Battle of Siping, especially for the types of combined arms assaults on urban centers that the third phase of Mao’s transitions would require. Known as the “Big Training,” this effort involved both political education (about 40 percent of the effort) and practical military training (the remaining 60 percent).⁴⁶ The political education/indoctrination effort focused on building a common cause within the Communist force that increasingly drew upon a heterogeneous mix of personnel, including committed Communists who were apolitical but looking for a better existence and former Nationalists who changed sides. All were encouraged to participate in what was termed “Speak Bitterness” meetings, where all discussed how they had suffered under Nationalist rule.⁴⁷ But at its heart, the “Big Training” was about getting ready for high-intensity LSCO. It covered every echelon within the now-named Northeast Field Army, from the column (corps) to the squad and focused on Lin’s six principles. It initially involved group learning efforts, which included lectures, discussions, and some practical exercises. The effort soon transitioned to more practical training, largely on the advice and guidance of Liu, whose own experiences with the Soviets demonstrated that there was a difference between learning and training.⁴⁸ Liu created a program that focused on everything from individual soldier tasks to small-unit exercises. What began with small and simple tasks increasingly grew in complexity—up through more complex staff work, liaison, and integration of combined arms forces, including artillery and even armor.⁴⁹

Over the second phase’s final year of the civil war, Communist forces increasingly went on the offensive. Lin’s efforts in Manchuria compelled the Nationalists to move reinforcements into northeast China.⁵⁰ This opened the door for Nie Rongzhen’s Northwest Field Army to win an important victory. Nie’s army isolated and defeated in detail the Nationalist Third Corps in October 1947, which was lured out of its defensive positions near the city of Shijiazhuang, a key railway hub supporting much of northern China in the Hebei Province.⁵¹ Nie then turned his attention to Shijazhuang itself, which was a stoutly defended urban area defended by a garrison of twenty-four thousand Nationalist soldiers, replete with trenches, barbed wire, and fortifications, including six thousand pillboxes and blockhouses.⁵² He conducted the first successful PLA combined arms assault on a fortified urban center, namely by his deft coordination of artillery, combat engineers, and infantry. The city fell on 13 November after about a week’s worth of fighting.⁵³

Lin then followed with his series of hammer blows. In October, he defeated the Nationalist Forty-Ninth Army and successfully cut the rail lines that connected the key Nationalist garrison cities with southern China.⁵⁴ Counting on the cold and severe weather to negate Nationalist air power, Lin launched an offensive beginning in December 1947 designed to isolate Nationalist formations inside key urban centers. He was aided greatly by Communist intelligence assets who had thoroughly infiltrated Nationalist headquarters and likely provided him with the Nationalist plan to defend Manchuria by controlling key urban centers and the railways connecting them.⁵⁵ This allowed Lin to focus not on the cities but on controlling the lines of communication that connected the garrisons through the countryside that the rail lines traversed. The Nationalists tried to break the impasse by launching four corps to meet Lin’s drive toward the critical bastion of Shenyang. Amid brutal weather in January 1948, the Nationalist Fifth Corps became separated from their main element, and in waist-deep snow, Lin was able to surround and annihilate them. He kept pressing and captured the cities of Liaoyang and Anshan, and Manchuria’s only port, Yingkou, which fell without a fight after the entire garrison defected.⁵⁶ The Winter Campaign concluded in March when Lin returned once more to Siping. Between 28 February and 8 March, before preparing for an assault, the PLA worked to eliminate outlying defenses and to invest in the city to prevent defenders from fleeing along the lines of communication north and south.⁵⁷ The attack began in the morning hours of 12 March, and the city had fallen by the next morning.⁵⁸

There are clear threads that connect the first two phases of the civil war and the contemporary PLA. The rapid modernization the PLA underwent between 1945 and 1947 is in many ways similar to the modernization they began in 2017; it focused not just on materiel but also on improving its people and its approach to warfare. We saw the PLA integrate new stocks of arms and ammunition as well as whole new classes of weapons such as tanks and heavy artillery during this time. But it also focused on people, finding hundreds of thousands of new recruits, oftentimes including former adversaries, to fill their ranks. The PLA did not stop with mere numbers, however, as it worked to improve training and education. The “Speak Bitterness” campaign was designed to create a common mindset and instill a common goal. The “Big Training” worked to improve all levels of training, from basic soldier skills to staff work at the division and column levels. This was matched with a change in doctrine and approach to war, as illustrated by Lin’s six principles of combat. This entire effort—focusing on people, materiel, and approach to warfare—was done in less than a year to transition from irregular warfare to a force capable of prevailing over the more numerous, better trained, and better equipped Nationalists in LSCO. Fast forward to the mid-2010s, and the PLA was grappling with another transition: how to build a force capable of engaging in modern, multidomain warfare. PLA leaders needed to understand how they move their force and overcome key shortfalls—the “two big gaps” and the “five incapables”—to build a force capable of fighting and winning against the US joint force in modern warfare. The PLA’s current modernization effort in some ways followed the blueprint laid out in 1947, a rapid effort to improve in all three areas. The improvement that we have seen in the past ten years has been stunning, as the PLA has transitioned from an obsolete force into a true peer competitor.⁵⁹ It has not just focused on introducing new equipment like hypersonic missiles, highly capable naval platforms, unmanned systems, and ground-based long-range fires, but it has also improved their people in terms of better training and professional military education, new formations, and an approach to warfare designed specifically to prevail against the US joint force.⁶⁰

As 1947 moved into 1948, the Communists were poised to fully launch into the third and decisive phase of the civil war. What would follow would be remarkable: three massive and completely decisive campaigns fought in a mere 142 days.⁶¹ These three campaigns—Liao-Shen, Huai-Hai, and Ping-Jin—are stories that most Americans have never heard. Yet, they demonstrate how rapidly the PLA was able to transform under fire, transition from irregular warfare to LSCO, and fight arguably three of the most decisive campaigns of the twentieth century. These campaigns laid the cornerstone of the modern PLA and its own transformation and modernization efforts.

The author wishes to extend special thanks to Dr. Susan Canedy, Mr. Charles Raymond, and Dr. Mica Hall, all from the US Army Transformation and Training Command, for their thoughtful and thorough edits, and to Mr. Ian Kersey for his assistance with the graphics.

 

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Notes

1. Ronald H. Spector, A Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945–1955 (W. W. Norton, 2022), 134; Larry M. Wortzel, “The Beiping-Tianjin Campaign of 1948–1949: The Strategic and Operational Thinking of the People’s Liberation Army,” in Chinese Warfighting: The PLA Experience Since 1949, ed. Mark A. Ryan et al. (Routledge 2015), 62.
2. As Harold M. Tanner does in his work, Where Chiang Kai-Shek Lost China: The Liao-Shen Campaign, 1948 (University of Indiana Press, 2015), 3.
3. S. C. M. Paine, The Wars for Asia, 1911–1949 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 107.
4. Hans van de Ven, China at War: Triumph and Tragedy in the Emergence of the New China (Harvard University Press, 2017), 138–39.
5. Paine, The Wars for Asia, 74–75.
6. Paine, The Wars for Asia, 75.
7. Karen Gernant, “Attrition Sustained by the First Front Army of the Chinese Red Army on the Long March, 1934–35,” Journal of Asian History 19, no. 2 (1985): 166–67, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41930584.
8. Mao Tse-Tung, “A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire (January 5, 1930),” in Selected Military Writings of Mao Tse-Tung (Foreign Language Press, 1963), 70.
9. Mao, “On Protracted War (May 1938),” in Selected Military Writings, 187–262; Mao, “Problems of Strategy in Guerilla War Against Japan (May 1938),” in Selected Military Writings, 151–86; Mao, “Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War (December 1936),” in Selected Military Writings, 75–150.
10. Mao, “On Protracted War,” 190–98.
11. Mao, “On Protracted War,” 187–200.
12. Mao, “Strategy in Guerilla War Against Japan,” 174–79.
13. Mao, “On Protracted War,” 210–14.
14. Xiaobing Li, A History of the Modern Chinese Army (University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 73.
15. Li, A History of the Modern Chinese Army, 73.
16. Li, A History of the Modern Chinese Army, 73.
17. Mao Zedong, “Smash Chiang Kai-Shek’s Offensive by a War of Self-Defence (July 20, 1946),” in The Complete Works of Mao Zedong, vol. 5, 1944–1948 (Iconoclast Publishing, 2021), 285.
18. Howard L. Boorman and Scott A. Boorman, “Chinese Communist Insurgent Warfare, 1935–49,” Political Science Quarterly 81, no. 2 (1966): 178–80, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2147969.
19. Mao, “Concentrate a Superior Force to Destroy Enemy Forces One by One (September 16, 1946),” in Selected Military Writings, 315.
20. Spector, A Continent Erupts, 81–82.
21. Spector, A Continent Erupts, 81.
22. Spector, A Continent Erupts, 83.
23. Van de Ven, China at War, 236.
24. Spector, A Continent Erupts, 83.
25. Mao, “The Concept of Operations for the Northwest War Theatre (15 April 1947),” in The Complete Works, 5:345.
26. Paine, The Wars for Asia, 254–55.
27. Mao, “Manifesto of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (October 1947),” in Selected Military Writings, 333.
28. Andrew Bingham Kennedy, “Can the Weak Defeat the Strong? Mao’s Evolving Approach to Asymmetric Warfare in Yan’an,” The China Quarterly, no. 196 (2008), 894, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20192272.
29. Mao, “The Present Situation and Our Tasks (December 25, 1947),” in Selected Military Writings, 343.
30. Tanner, Where Chiang Kai-Shek Lost China, 141.
31. Mao, “Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War (December 1936),” in Selected Military Writings, 83.
32. Tanner, Where Chiang Kai-Shek Lost China, 153.
33. Tanner, Where Chiang Kai-Shek Lost China, 153.
34. Tanner, Where Chiang Kai-Shek Lost China, 147–48, 152–53.
35. Tanner, Where Chiang Kai-Shek Lost China, 147, 153; Yang Sheng and Lin Xiaoyi, “Chinese Show Great Empathy to Russia Over World War II History While West Turns Hostile to Moscow,” Global Times, 9 May 2021, https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202105/1223001.shtml; “Former Chinese Air Force Commander Liu Yalou Was Shocked by the Dedication of the Red Army Soldiers During World War II,” Pravda, 23 April 2025, https://news-pravda.com/world/2025/04/23/1259405.html.
36. Van de Ven, China at War, 244–45.
37. Victor Shiu Chiang Cheng, “Modern War on an Ancient Battlefield: The Diffusion of American Military Technology and Ideas in the Chinese Civil War, 1946–1949,” Modern China 35, no. 1 (January 2009): 39, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27746905.
38. Paine, The Wars for Asia, 245; Tanner, Where Chiang Kai-Shek Lost China, 143–44.
39. Shiu Chiang Cheng, “Modern War on an Ancient Battlefield,” 50.
40. Paine, The Wars for Asia, 245.
41. Tanner, Where Chiang Kai-Shek Lost China, 145–47.
42. Van de Ven, China at War, 244.
43. Tanner, Where Chiang Kai-Shek Lost China, 60–61, 155–56, 300.
44. Van de Ven, China at War, 246–47.
45. Harold M. Tanner, The Battle for Manchuria and the Fate of China: Siping, 1946 (Indiana University Press, 2013), 202–4.
46. Tanner, Where Chiang Kai-Shek Lost China, 155.
47. Van de Ven, China at War, 247.
48. Harold M. Tanner, “Learning Through Practice: Lin Biao and the Transition to Conventional Combined Operations in China’s Northeast, 1946–1948,” Journal of Chinese Military History, no. 3 (2014): 34, https://doi.org/10.1163/22127453-12341259.
49. Tanner, “Learning Through Practice,” 34–36; Van de Ven, China at War, 247.
50. Spector, A Continent Erupts, 86–87.
51. Spector, A Continent Erupts, 86.
52. Spector, A Continent Erupts, 86.
53. Spector, A Continent Erupts, 86–87.
54. Spector, A Continent Erupts, 86.
55. Paine, The Wars for Asia, 255.
56. Spector, A Continent Erupts, 88.
57. Paine, The Wars for Asia, 255; Tanner, The Battle for Manchuria, 205.
58. Tanner, Where Chiang Kai-Shek Lost China, 118.
59. Ian M. Sullivan, “Three Dates, Three Windows, and All of DOTMLPF-P: How the People’s Liberation Army Poses an All-of-Army Challenge,” Military Review 104, no. 1 (January-February 2024): 15, https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/January-February-2024/Sullivan/.
60. Sullivan, “Three Dates, Three Windows,” 20–21; T2COM G-2, How China Fights in Large-Scale Combat Operations, OE Threat Assessment 1-1 (US Army Transformation and Training Command [T2COM], 30 April 2025), 16–17, https://oe.t2com.army.mil/product/how-china-fights-in-large-scale-combat-operations/.
61. Wortzel, “The Beiping-Tianjin Campaign of 1948–1949,” 57–63.

 

 

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