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An Army Rooted in Large-Scale Combat Operations

Part 2: The People’s Liberation Army’s Combat Experience in the Chinese Civil War, 1946–1949

 

Ian M. Sullivan

 

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Part one of this article covered the foundations of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) during the Chinese Civil War. It focused on the first two phases of the war and the build up to the ultimate phase, which involved the final transition to large-scale combat operations (LSCO) by the Chinese Communists. To improve on its uneven battlefield results, the now-named PLA Northeast Field Army under the redoubtable leadership of Lin Biao placed his entire army through what he termed the “Big Training” to prepare them for LSCO against the Nationalists. The Nationalists, under Jiang Jieshi’s (Chiang Kai-shek) leadership, had doubled down on winning in Manchuria but had culminated its offensive operations and were now attempting to hold the last three urban centers in the province along with the lines of communication that connected them. Lin, who was still smarting from his failure at the Third Battle of Siping, suddenly grew cautious and remained wary of hurling his forces against the well-defended cities. Between May and August 1948, Lin attempted to find alternative courses of action that would obviate the need to assault the cities. He had concerns about the very difficult logistical situation, if forces in Hebei Province could protect his flank while also engaged against the cities along the Beiping (now Beijing)-Shenyang—or Bei-Ning—rail line. This led to several months of relative inaction and included disagreements with his superiors, including Chairman Mao Zedong. Finally, on 9 August, Mao issued Lin a stern reprimand, and Lin was resigned to having to conduct a campaign against the three cities—Changchun, Jinzhou, and Shenyang. He submitted his initial plans for the Liaoxi-Shenyang, or Liao-Shen Campaign on 3 September 1948.¹

The Liao-Shen Campaign may have been the most complex of the “Big Three” (Liao-Shen, Huai-Hai, and Ping-Jin). It saw the PLA fight to secure three large, well-defended cities and, most importantly, to defeat in detail the Nationalist forces defending them. Lin focused first on Changchun, the northernmost bastion held by the Nationalists. Following an earlier Communist victory at Jilin, the battered Nationalist Sixtieth Army fell back on Changchun, which also was garrisoned by the New Seventh Army. In the spring of 1948, Lin directed two of his columns (corps) to seize Changchun Airport. The operation succeeded but at a heavy cost. Rather than directly assaulting the city, Lin invested it. The siege was brutal as the Communists completely ringed the city, making a conscious effort to starve the Nationalists into surrender.² The Nationalists tried to keep Changchun supplied by increasingly ineffective air drops. As the siege worsened, desperate refugees attempted to flee but were stopped from leaving by the Communists, who left them festering in a no-man’s land between the city and the siege lines.³ Tens of thousands perished in a space that was sometimes only five hundred yards wide.⁴ This was part of deliberate attempt by the Communists to use starvation as a weapon. Some of their planning documents noted that propaganda messaging should place the blame on the Nationalists for the starvation.⁵ A common propaganda refrain circulating the Communist siege lines, “Don’t give the enemy a single grain of food or a single blade of grass; starve Changchun’s Chiang army to death in the city!”⁶ The siege lasted through October, when the members of the Nationalist Sixtieth Army mutinied on 16 October and went over to the Communists, which then opened the door for the Northeast Field Army to secure the northern part of the city.⁷ By 20 October, the New Seventh Army surrendered, and the Communists secured the city. The five-month siege was devastating to the Changchun people. One Chinese author, Zhang Zheglong, whose work on the Manchuria campaign was widely read in China before being banned, made a comparison of the siege of Changchun to Hiroshima, noting, “The casualties were about the same. Hiroshima took nine seconds; Changchun took five months.”⁸

While Changchun suffered, Lin next focused on isolating and destroying the remainder of the Nationalist forces in Manchuria. His concept of operations focused first on controlling the critical Bei-Ning rail line. If it went well, the Communists would effectively “close the door and beat the dog,” meaning that if they could seize the critical railroad junction of Jinzhou they would sever the Nationalist’s lines of communication to Changchun and Shenyang and completely isolate Manchuria.⁹ This campaign fit well with Mao’s ideas of total victory, which he could foresee as early as 1951, assuming the PLA was able to continuously and consistently destroy Nationalist brigades. He envisioned operations along the Bei-Ning line to result in the destruction of at least eighteen enemy brigades before turning to the forces trapped north of Jinzhou.¹⁰ The notion of annihilation to the Communists meant more than simply wiping out enemy formations, although this result certainly sufficed, and included not only destroying an enemy unit but also breaking its will to fight.¹¹ This could be achieved by fostering desertions, causing surrender, or even affecting changes of sides. In all cases, this reduces the enemy’s strength while simultaneously increasing their own. This latter notion goes back to Mao’s earlier writings, where he said that “routing ten enemy divisions is not as effective as annihilating one.”¹²

The offensive along Bei-Ning kicked off in earnest on 12 September, and the Communists maneuvered to seize key positions along the line and to isolate Jinzhou for the next two weeks. A ring slowly drew around the city that included cutting its access to the port of Huludao to its southeast. As Lin’s forces moved closer to Jinzhou, they seized critical high ground to the north of the city that gave its artillery a commanding view from which to target key defensive positions. Jiang order reinforcements to Jinzhou and successfully airlanded some five thousand Nationalist troops.¹³ The Communists then focused on seizing the airport, which was finally taken by 29 September.¹⁴

The Nationalists attempted to relieve the embattled defenders of Jinzhou. They devised a plan to use the city to tie down Lin’s main body, converging on them from the east and the west. First, an East Advancing Army Corps would land by sea at the port of Huludao and then advance inland to strike at the Communist forces outside of Jinzhou. A West Advancing Army Corps would then do the same from the direction of Shenyang. The Nationalist effort presented Lin with a real dilemma. He remarked, “We prepared a feast for one table, but now we have two tables of guests—what are we to do?”¹⁵ After some hesitation, which included an exchange of several difficult communiques with Mao, Lin continued his efforts to take Jinzhou. Fortunately for him, the Nationalists failed to execute their plan. An American advisor to Jiang, Maj. Gen. David Barr, noted, “The plans made and order given were sound and had they been obeyed, the results probably would have been favorable.”¹⁶ Instead, the two forces failed to effectively coordinate their actions and gave Lin the opportunity to defeat both in detail.

The Nationalist East Advancing Army Corps faced a strong blocking position at Tashan, which the Communists defended with two columns and supporting forces. It was a narrow piece of terrain, only ten kilometers wide between a ridgeline and the sea that was also home to a small village.¹⁷ The Nationalists had to advance through the north of Huludao, in which the terrain had no real defensible features. The Communists had only three days to construct trench lines and bunkers, but the narrowness of the approaching terrain meant that they could devise multiple layers of defenses.¹⁸ Between 10 and 15 October, the Nationalists tried time and again to displace the Communist defenders, but they could not budge them, despite outnumbering the defenders and receiving support from naval gunfire, massed artillery, and eventually, air power.¹⁹ The losses were significant on both sides, particularly as the Nationalists relied on human wave tactics to try and break the defenses. The stand at Tashan enabled Lin to keep his focus on Jinzhou, with Tashan being held long enough for the city to eventually fall. Although the two forces remained locked in battle for another ten days, the Nationalists never pushed the Communists off their positions.²⁰

As the fighting continued in Tashan and the West Advancing Army was marshalling in Shenyang, Lin moved in for the kill at Jinzhou. The Communists had been steadily clearing outlying positions since mid-September, and they were preparing for their assault on the city by 11 October. Like many Chinese cities, Jinzhou was walled, and the Communists were relying on their artillery and engineers to create a breach for their armor and infantry to exploit. The assault began on 14 October. Some initial confusion meant that the Communist armored force moved into a breach earlier than planned and the infantry followed behind. This worked well for the Communists, who made quick progress into the city center.²¹ This rapid progress led to the collapse and eventual defection of the Nationalist Ninety-Third Army that held a key section of the defense line. The remainder of the Nationalist defenses imploded, and the city fell by the early evening hours of 15 October.²² The capture of Jinzhou was a significant victory for the Communists; nineteen thousand Nationalist defenders were killed and another eighty thousand had either surrendered or were captured.²³

The second phase of the campaign began on 18 October and ran through 28 October. Jiang, furious that his commanders were refusing his orders to advance on Jinzhou, finally compelled them to move, but it was a half-hearted effort.²⁴ The West Advancing Army Corps finally moved in the direction of Jinzhou on 19 October. Sensing opportunity, Lin changed his plans and moved in the other direction rather than striking at the East Advancing Army Corps still stuck at Tashan. The two sides met in the mountainous terrain between the villages of Heishan and Dahushan. Lin’s force won the race to the area, and his Tenth Column prepared a hasty defense with his very lightly equipped forces. Liao Yaoxiang, the Nationalist commander, was nonplussed. He believed his twelve American-equipped divisions were more than a match for the Communist defenders and that he would roll them over before moving on back to Shenyang.²⁵

What happened instead was a slugfest that played out over six days of absolutely brutal combat. The better-armed Nationalists relied on their firepower and numbers, while the Communists relied on their hasty defensive positions and better skills at close combat. During the battle’s first day, the Communists took six thousand casualties, but they stubbornly held their ground; much of the fighting was hand-to-hand.²⁶ By the evening of 22 October, Liao realized he was not going to break through to Jinzhou, and he began to retreat. This created utter chaos, and what began as a hasty defensive suddenly turned into a swirling battle of maneuver. Lin had started transferring additional forces from Jinzhou and even Changchun to the Heishan area when he decided to focus on the West Advancing Army. His intelligence staff did a wonderful job of monitoring Nationalist communications, and his operations benefited greatly from the decision-making advantage it gave him.²⁷ After several days, the meeting engagement became a mass envelopment, and much of the West Advancing Army Corps was trapped in an eighty-kilometer-wide pocket.²⁸ By 28 October, some thirty-eight thousand Nationalist forces were taken prisoner.²⁹ Lin had fought a highly successful battle of annihilation, and he opened the way to Shenyang.

This kicked off the third phase of the campaign, which was a race to complete an even larger battle of annihilation. Flush with victory, Lin launched a rapid attack in the direction of Shenyang, aiming to capture it quickly. The end came faster still. Lin’s leading formations approached Shenyang by 29 October, and by 31 October, he had three columns prepared to assault the city. Recognizing the shattered morale of the Nationalist defenders, Lin’s forces attacked on 1 November, and most of the defenders surrendered by the end of the day. One division held out until 2 November before being overrun, and the Communists had their prize.³⁰ Lin’s force did not stop, however; they drove hard south, and on 1 November, they also took Anshan and Liaoyang and, by 2 November, took Yingkou.³¹ The only blight on their performance was the evacuation of some 140,000 Nationalist soldiers who withdrew through Yingdou to Huludao. Du Yuming, perhaps the Nationalists’ best commander, was able to affect their withdrawal by sea.³² The scope of Lin’s victory was almost unfathomable. Between July and November, he soundly thrashed a massive Nationalist force, which included the bulk of its best formations that received training and arms from the United States, and secured the critical province of Manchuria for the Communists. The Nationalists, outmaneuvered and outthought at almost every turn by Lin and the Northeast Field Army, lost about one million soldiers as casualties, prisoners, or worse still, personnel who changed sides.³³

Simultaneous to the fighting in Manchuria, Communist forces in the south were fighting their own campaigns aimed at breaking the Nationalist hold in the Yellow River area. In September, Su Yu, the second in command of the Communist East China Field Army, was preparing for a massive operation to seize the city of Jinan, just south of the Yellow River in Shandong Province. Su believed the fight would be difficult, thinking it would take three weeks. His assault began on 14 September, and the city would be his in only ten days.³⁴ This victory meant that Shandong was now almost completely under Communist control. A month later, Liu Bocheng’s Central Plains Field Army rapidly seized the cities of Zhengzhou and Kaifeng in Hebei Province. This left the Communists with two large forces poised like twin daggers aimed at the critical railhead at Xuzhou that, if captured, could bring the Communists to the north bank of the Yangtze River.³⁵ Mao sensed this opportunity while planning the second of the “Big Three” campaigns, the utterly decisive Huai-Hai Campaign, writing that if the campaign went well, the Communists would be fighting to cross the Yangtze by the autumn of 1949.³⁶

The decisive Huai-Hai Campaign was fought in the alluvial plain between the Huai River and the Lung Hai railroad, but the truth is the battle did not have to be fought there at all. Poor decision-making and even worse command relationships among Jiang and senior Nationalist commanders presented the Communists with a golden opportunity for yet another decisive victory. Historically speaking, the key to holding an adversary north of the Yangtze River requires a defense of the Huai River, which lies about one hundred miles north of the Yangtze, or failing that, holding the rough terrain that intersected smaller rivers, creeks, and rolling hills to its immediate south to slow an enemy advance.³⁷ Some of Jiang’s best strategists argued for this course of action, with a defense centered around the city of Bengbu, just south of the Huai and in easy supply range to the capital of Nanjing. Jiang initially agreed with this course of action, and by the end of October, Nationalist formations in the area began withdrawing south toward the Huai. It was at this moment that key Nationalist operational commanders deployed in the area dissented with Jiang’s orders.³⁸ They believed that the defense should not move back to Huai but rather stay focused on Xuzhou, which was fortified and held significant military supplies. Jiang changed his mind after hearing this and decided to anchor the defense of the Yangtze at Xuzhou. This change of heart occurred while Nationalist formations were already on the move and left key Nationalist formations out of position and essentially out of time.³⁹

What followed was a massive series of swirling battles, dominated by Communist tempo and maneuver, that lasted between 6 November and 16 January. The Nationalists committed seven armies (the Second, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Twelfth, Thirteenth, and Sixteenth along with their power armored corps, commanded by Jiang’s son, Chiang Wego), consisting of more than fifty-one combat divisions.⁴⁰ The Communists committed two field armies—Chen Yi’s East China Field Army and Liu Bocheng’s Central Plains Field Army—with a total of twenty-seven columns (corps).⁴¹ In total, the Nationalists had the bulk of their total force, eight hundred thou-sand regulars engaged in this campaign, while the Communists deployed six hundred thousand regulars, with another five hundred thousand militia, irregular formations, and laborers who aided with logistics.⁴² The Huai-Hai truly was a massive campaign.

The first blow was struck on 6 November by Liu’s Central China Field Army to fix and hold the Nationalist Second Army to the northwest of Xuzhou.⁴³ Chen’s East China Field Army joined the fight two days later, striking at the Nationalist Seventh Army, which was strung out along the Lung-Hai Railroad. That same day, four Nationalist divisions positioned north of Xuzhou defected to the Communists and gave Chen an opportunity to exploit. He pressed forward into the gap with nine columns and quickly separated the Seventh Army from Xuzhou. These initial attacks immediately separated the Nationalist forces north of Xuzhou within forty-eight hours of the onset of the campaign. As the East China Field Army moved through the gap, it promptly encircled the Nationalist Seventh Army. This created another opportunity that the Communists deftly exploited. Liu was able to send eight columns on a sweeping maneuver southward to threaten the railroad junction at Suzhou, defeating several Nationalist divisions along the way, and routing the Nationalist Sixth Army back to the Huai River.⁴⁴ By 15 November, Liu’s forces linked up with Chen’s at Suzhou, and the Communists occupied the city. Within the first nine days of the fight, the Communists had completely isolated the battlespace, having pushed back two armies (Sixth and Eighth) to the Bengbu area and trapped the Second, Seventh, Thirteenth, and Sixteenth in the Xuzhou area.⁴⁵

In the meanwhile, the Nationalist Seventh Army, encircled within the first few days of the start of the campaign, finally succumbed on 22 November when Communist forces overran them in a fierce final urban stand at Nianzhuang.⁴⁶ Additionally, the Nationalist Twelfth Army, which included the last of the Nationalist divisions trained and equipped by the United States, completed a 240-mile road march from the Wuhan area to get to the Huai-Hai front.⁴⁷ The Nationalists hoped to use the Twelfth Army to break the Communist encirclement near Suzhou, but as they continued toward the front, they ran into a well-designed Communist blocking force at the town of Shuangduji, southwest of Suzhou, on 25 November that consisted of thirteen columns from the East China Field Army. The blocking force swallowed the exhausted and short-on-supply Twelfth Army, and the Communists had it encircled by 26 November.⁴⁸ As December began, one Nationalist army was destroyed, three were trapped in the Xuzhou pocket, and an-other was encircled near Suzhou.

With the situation becoming dire for the Nationalists, they tried a desperate breakout of the Xuzhou pocket. Led by the redoubtable Du Yuming, who had escaped Manchuria only to be in another losing battle, the plan was to take the three trapped armies and escape to the Huai. Jiang, however, intervened and told Du that the Communists were planning to withdraw from the Xuzhou area, and he should move to relieve the embattled Twelfth Army. The confusion led to delay, and Du’s move, which began on 1 December, was complicated by the more than one hundred thousand refugees who accompanied his force and slowed his advance to a crawl.⁴⁹ His force was completely surrounded by 4 December and compressed into a ten-by-eight kilometer box near Chenguanzhuang.⁵⁰ Du held out until 16 January 1949, when his forces finally were compelled to surrender. The Twelfth Army fared no better. Liu began his assault on the Twelfth on 28 November, in which he believed that the fight would last about a day. But for all its faults, the Twelfth died hard. Liu changed his assessment to ten days and that too proved optimistic. The conditions inside the pocket grew desperate as Nationalist troops sometimes fired on each other to gain control of the increasingly infrequent air drops of supplies.⁵¹ By 15 December, the Twelfth Army tried a final desperate breakout, and while small pockets of personnel (including its commander) managed to escape, the army was eliminated as a fighting force.⁵²

The Huai-Hai Campaign was a true masterpiece. The Communists fought a mobile, aggressive campaign in which they maneuvered boldly and rapidly across a large battlespace. In the span of sixty-five days, they fought multiple battles of encirclement, each of which became their own separate battle of annihilation. A US political officer who had the opportunity to fly over the battlespace, noted, “You could see exactly what [the Communists were] doing. This huge enveloping movement was broken up into literally hundreds, maybe thousands of smaller pincer movements. Each one moving in, pinching off one group of Nationalist troops after another. It was magnificent! ... At the same time it was horrible … And when it was over … there was no Nationalist Army left.”⁵³ Mao spoke of destroying enemy formations, and the Huai-Hai did just that. Chen and Liu destroyed five Nationalist armies, the armored corps, and various other formations, the equivalent of fifty-five full divisions.⁵⁴ It removed 550,000 Nationalist soldiers from the battlefield, 327,000 of whom were captured (and many who would subsequently join the Communist side).⁵⁵ This was the heart of the Nationalist army, and the loss of this capability suddenly opened the possibility of crossing the Yangtze and striking Nanjing itself.⁵⁶

There was still one act left to complete, the Ping-Jin Campaign. This was a target of opportunity born of the success that Lin’s forces had in Manchuria and the need to provide support to the ongoing Huai-Hai Campaign. It would require Lin, whose forces were still mopping up and reconstituting after the Liao-Shen Campaign to rapidly launch another offensive, this one on the North China Plain, with a focus on securing Zhangjiakou, Beiping (Beijing), and Tianjin. Mao was aware that the Nationalist leadership in this region was in disarray, namely as some of the commanders were former warlords whose loyalty to Jiang was dubious at best. He also was concerned that the 140,000 Nationalist troops who successfully evacuated Manchuria via Huludao could move to reinforce Tianjin or Beiping, and he wanted to move fast. Mao issued a hasty operations order for Lin to go on the offensive earlier than he anticipated.⁵⁷ The Nationalist commander in Beiping, Fu Zuoyi, had about five hundred thousand troops in about fifty divisions within the area, while Lin’s forces swelled to eight hundred thousand due to the large numbers of defected Nationalists, including entire divisions that were incorporated into his order of battle.⁵⁸ The Communists also had a significant intelligence card to play; Fu’s daughter was a Communist agent, and she worked tirelessly to convince her father to switch sides.⁵⁹

In assessing the operational problem he faced, Lin understood that Fu’s forces, centered on Beiping and its traditional downriver port, Tianjin, were the most important targets. He also realized that the Nationalist formations were the center of gravity. He was concerned that if they struck immediately for either Beiping or Tianjin, then Fu would be able to withdraw northwest to Zhangjiakou, which sat on much better defensive terrain. He would follow a similar operational concept that he carried out in the Liao-Shen Campaign; seize the key rail terminus at Zhangjiakou and then roll up Nationalist defenses, in this case, south and toward the sea.⁶⁰ He also would receive assistance from Nie Rongzhen’s Hubei Field Army, which had been fixing Nationalist forces in Shanxi Province, before marching rapidly to strike at Zhangjiakou. With Nie’s forces operating on the Communist right with some of Lin’s forces and the majority of Lin’s Northeast Field Army on the left, they simultaneously fought to pinch off Beiping.

Nie’s arrival compelled the Nationalists to string out in static defensive positions along the Zhangjiakou-Beiping Railroad, much like they did in Manchuria during the Liao-Shen Campaign. This allowed the Communists to fight a dizzying battle of maneuver, which pushed the surviving Nationalist formations back to Beiping. On 7–8 December, Nie’s formations fought a decisive battle against the Nationalist Thirty-Fifth Corps at Xinbao’an, a small walled town southeast of Zhangjiakou, which fixed and then encircled the Nationalists, who were overwhelmed despite heavy air support.⁶¹ A full division was destroyed, and the beleaguered survivors made their way back to Beiping. By 12 December, Nie’s forces had pushed most of the Nationalist forces back to Beiping, wrecking two more Nationalist corps in the process.⁶²

Lin’s forces on the left had a more difficult time. Nearly 130,000 Nationalist troops held Tianjan—its defenses were augmented by a series of marshes, streams, and canals—and Nationalist engineers had flooded much of the area to make an assault difficult. Lin amassed five columns to assault the city, which he surrounded by 12 December. It took almost a month of heavy fighting and engineer work to overcome some of the very difficult terrain and flood zones in what became a veritable slog. Lin ordered a general assault, however, on 14 January, and the fighting in the city was over by 17 January.⁶³

Fu was completely cut off and surrounded by Communist forces, yet he still retained more than 250,000 soldiers to defend Beiping.⁶⁴ Rather than engage in a costly assault on the dynastic capital, the Communists instead relied on a psychological assault on the Nationalist defenders, subjecting them to a relentless narrative warfare campaign. The bottom line of the messages was simple, “surrender or die.” On 21 January, after failing to get the international community to call for a peace conference, Jiang resigned from the presidency.⁶⁵ While all of this was ongoing, negotiations between Communist leadership and Fu that had begun well before the campaign began continued, with his daughter continuing to play a key role and finally bore fruit. Fu agreed to surrender Beiping and bring his 250,000 soldiers over to the Communist side in return for a position in the Communist government.⁶⁶ When the People’s Republic was proclaimed, he was named minister of water conservancy.⁶⁷ Fu handed over the city on 22 January.

The results of the “Big Three” campaigns are still startling to behold. The immense scale of the operations, compressed into a very short time window, demonstrate the mastery of the PLA in carrying out LSCO. In a span of 142 days, the PLA inflicted 1.54 million casualties on the Nationalists, including all their best trained and equipped formations. PLA battlefield successes also secured all of China’s northeast, most of its north, and the central areas north of Yangtze River for the Communists.⁶⁸ Writing in November 1948, Mao already had come to the realization that the war likely would be won sooner than he initially expected. Originally, Mao foresaw final victory in the summer of 1951. After the completion of the Liao-Shen Campaign and as Huai-Hai began, he changed his assessment to 1950.⁶⁹ Just a month later, as the Huai-Hai Campaign concluded and the Ping-Jin Campaign began closing in on Beiping, he changed his thinking again, believing that 1949 would be the year of decision, but there was still a ways to go.⁷⁰ The Yangtze needed to be crossed, Nanjing needed to be captured, and the great cities of southern China were still in Nationalist hands. But the PLA’s mastery of LSCO in north and central China had set the conditions that proved Mao as prescient, when the People’s Republic of China was declared on 1 October 1949.⁷¹

So, what does all this mean for the modern PLA? Like any armed force, the PLA is a product of its historical experience. There are definite threads that run from the battlefields of northern China in the late 1940s to today. As one delves deeper into the conduct of these three campaigns and then the final acts of the Chinese Civil War, one discovers a real dissonance between the popular perceptions that many hold regarding the PLA and what we should understand about its history and how it conceptualizes warfare today. When I ask a US Army audience what it generally thinks about the PLA, the response often is that they are a rigid, doctrinally locked force that depends on the sledgehammer of raw numbers to overcome its adversaries. The US experience with the Chinese Communist “volunteers” who participated in the Korean War involving bugles and costly human wave attacks is a long-standing perception that remains front and center in the minds of many. It is difficult to hold these perceptions, however, after looking at the strategic brilliance of Mao, the operational genius of Lin, and the tactical mastery that the PLA exhibited in north and central China in 1948 and 1949. Looking at the history of the Chinese Civil War through the lens of misperception can lead one to miss some salient points that reveal themselves in the PLA’s conduct of the three campaigns, which are still relevant today. These include a firm linkage of the strategic and operational echelons, the rapid mastery of transitions, the speed and pace of operations, mobile (maneuver) warfare designed to isolate its adversary, a focus on destroying the enemy’s warfighting capabilities (annihilation), the value of intelligence and information operations, civil-military fusion, and lastly, an ability when necessary to maximize the political impact of suffering. When we look at China’s contemporary approach to warfare, it is easy to see their eponymous roots in the battles that occurred during the civil war.

When one analyzes the key threads that run through its history, we see the genesis of the modern PLA’s approach to warfighting. The linkages between the strategic and operational echelons that were so prevalent in the civil war between Mao and his commanders are seen clearly today, with a continuum of strategies that link to operational approaches. For example, the strategy that underpins China’s active defense has a clear and precise linkage to its operationalization in systems warfare and multidomain precision warfare.⁷² A more fundamental question often reveals itself when China’s military modernization writ large is contemplated. Many US Army observers wonder if the PLA’s massive modernization effort, ongoing since 2017, can actually be implemented. It is indeed a daunting prospect, but the PLA has showed an upward trajectory in terms of implementing its grand transition over the last decade to its goal of becoming an “intelligentized” force.⁷³ Ten years seems unbelievably fast by many accounts to move from its block obsolescence in terms of people, approach to war, and materiel in the 2010s to one of the world’s leading militaries in 2026, but when one considers the very rapid transformation the PLA underwent between 1947 and 1948 as it transitioned under fire from an irregular guerrilla force to one capable of waging LSCO on a grand scale, perhaps the rapidity of the current modernization transition should not be such a surprise.

Maneuver, speed, and isolation remain key PLA operational concepts in terms of operational and tactical notions, as does combined arms (and now multidomain) integration. The PLA will move fast in the offensive, seeking to isolate its adversaries, fixing them and attritting them with fires or nonkinetic capabilities.⁷⁴ These roots are clearly seen in each of the “Big Three” campaigns, as the PLA effectively maneuvered and integrated combined arms capabilities to often isolate and annihilate enemy formations. The concept of annihilation, which was so central to Mao’s thinking and directives during the civil war, remains ensconced in the PLA’s approach to warfare today. Systems warfare is in effect a form of updated thinking on the concept. Where Mao wanted to focus on formations, the contemporary PLA focuses on collapsing, or annihilating, the adversary’s warfighting systems. In either case, the result is the same; the enemy lacks the combat power to resist. The importance of intelligence, cognitive warfare, and information was central to PLA operations in the civil war and remains so today. China would wage an information dominance campaign, which integrates intelligence, cyber warfare, and psychological operations, as an integral aspect of its joint warfighting.⁷⁵ The genesis was clearly found in the civil war, where Communist intelligence was a real combat multiplier in many key battles, while psychological/cognitive warfare were critical to key victories, as in the Communist capture of Beiping. These two articles did not focus enough on civil-military fusion, but the Communists clearly relied on their ability to mobilize the countryside as well as the key elements in urban centers to support their war effort. The Huai-Hai Campaign was an excellent example, where the six hundred thousand Communist regulars were supported by another five hundred thousand irregulars and civilian laborers/porters. Lastly, the notion of using suffering as a weapon, which was seen in Shenyang and especially in Changchun, must be considered as a possible stratagem that the PLA could consider as part of China’s contemporary strategic calculations over the reunification of Taiwan. Both a blockade and a blockade-by-fires in a Taiwan contingency could create a situation very much akin to the “Hiroshima over five months” that took place during the Siege of Changchun in the Liao-Shen Campaign.

The legacy of the civil war remains an important factor in understanding what the PLA has become today. Its approach to warfare, its traditions, and its intellectual underpinning all point back to those decisive days in the late 1940s. For a US Army professional who must contemplate a potential clash with the PLA, it is imperative that our consideration of this threat begins rooted in an understanding of who they are, and we cannot get there without understanding their history. LSCO is not new for the PLA; it is part of their heritage. While the US Army looks to its heroes—John Pershing, Omar Bradley, George Patton, or Douglas MacArthur—the PLA can look to Mao Zedong, Lin Biao, Nie Rongzhen, or Liu Bocheng. These individuals demonstrated that a force can rapidly transition, modernize, and master LSCO, even when outnumbered and outmatched in terms of capabilities. What they accomplished on the battlefields during the civil war was remarkable. But more importantly, it shows how they grappled with difficult strategic and operational problems, adapted, and rapidly transformed into a force capable of prevailing in LSCO. The next time one questions the ability of the PLA to excel at LSCO, I hope they consider that the PLA has mastered it in the past, far quicker, and far more decisively than any could have possibly imagined. To avoid a failure of imagination regarding the PLA in the future, it is imperative that we remember their past.

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. Harold M. Tanner, Where Chiang Kai-Shek Lost China: The Liao-Shen Campaign, 1948 (University of Indiana Press, 2015), 173–75.
2. Ronald H. Spector, A Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945–1955 (W. W. Norton, 2022), 91–92.
3. Tanner, Where Chiang Kai-Shek Lost China, 239.
4. Tanner, Where Chiang Kai-Shek Lost China, 240.
5. Tanner, Where Chiang Kai-Shek Lost China, 238.
6. Tanner, Where Chaing Kai-Shek Lost China, 233.
7. Tanner, Where Chiang Kai-Shek Lost China, 247.
8. Hans van de Ven, China at War: Triumph and Tragedy in the Emergence of the New China (Harvard University Press, 2017), 249.
9. Tanner, Where Chiang Kai-Shek Lost China, 201.
10. Mao Tse-Tung, “The Concept of Operations for the Liaoshi-Shenyang Campaign (September and October 1948),” in Selected Military Writings of Mao Tse-Tung (Foreign Language Press, 1963), 361–62.
11. Howard L. Boorman and Scott A. Boorman, “Chinese Communist Insurgent Warfare, 1935–1949,” Political Science Quarterly 81, no. 2 (1966): 177, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2147969.
12. Mao, “Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War (December 1936),” in Selected Military Writings, 144.
13. Tanner, Where Chiang Kai-Shek Lost China, 188.
14. Tanner, Where Chiang Kai-Shek Lost China, 187–89,
15. Van den Ven, China at War, 250–51.
16. Tanner, Where Chiang Kai-Shek Lost China, 195.
17. Tanner, Where Chiang Kai-Shek Lost China, 201–2.
18. Tanner, Where Chiang Kai-Shek Lost China, 202.
19. Tanner, Where Chiang Kai-Shek Lost China, 204–6.
20. Tanner, Where Chiang Kai-Shek Lost China, 204–6.
21. Tanner, Where Chiang Kai-Shek Lost China, 211–12.
22. Spector, A Continent Erupts, 91.
23. Tanner, Where Chiang Kai-Shek Lost China, 214.
24. Tanner, Where Chiang Kai-Shek Lost China, 255–56.
25. Tanner, Where Chiang Kai-Shek Lost China, 257.
26. 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), 59.
27. Tanner, Where Chiang Kai-Shek Lost China, 259.
28. Tanner, Where Chiang Kai-Shek Lost China, 260.
29. Wortzel, “The Beiping-Tianjin Campaign of 1948–1949,” 59.
30. Van den Ven, China at War, 252.
31. Van den Ven, China at War, 251–52.
32. Wortzel, “The Beiping-Tianjin Campaign of 1948–1949,” 59.
33. Van den Ven, China at War, 252; Wortzel, “The Beiping-Tianjin Campaign of 1948–1949,” 59–60.
34. Spector, A Continent Erupts, 125.
35. Spector, A Continent Erupts, 125.
36. Mao, “The Concept of Operations for Huai-Hai Campaign (October 11, 1948),” in Selected Military Writings, 369.
37. Spector, A Continent Erupts, 126.
38. Spector, A Continent Erupts, 127.
39. Spector, A Continent Erupts, 127; O. Edmund Clubb, “Chiang Kai-Shek’s Waterloo: The Battle of the Hwai-Hai,” Pacific Historical Review 25, no. 4 (November 1956): 391, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3636503.
40. Spector, A Continent Erupts, 129.
41. Clubb, “Chiang Kai-Shek’s Waterloo,” 391; Wortzel, “The Beiping-Tianjin Campaign of 1948–1949,” 62.
42. Spector, A Continent Erupts, 126.
43. Spector, A Continent Erupts, 128.
44. Clubb, “Chiang Kai-Shek’s Waterloo,” 393.
45. Clubb, “Chiang Kai-Shek’s Waterloo,” 393.
46. Wortzel, “The Beiping-Tianjin Campaign of 1948–1949,” 61.
47. Spector, A Continent Erupts, 130.
48. Spector, A Continent Erupts, 130; Clubb, “Chiang Kai-Shek’s Waterloo,” 394.
49. Spector, A Continent Erupts, 131.
50. Spector, A Continent Erupts, 132.
51. Spector, A Continent Erupts, 133.
52. Spector, A Continent Erupts, 133–34.
53. S. C. M. Paine, The Wars for Asia, 1911–1949 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 258.
54. Clubb, “Chiang Kai-Shek’s Waterloo,” 398.
55. Paine, The Wars for Asia, 258.
56. Clubb, “Chiang Kai-Shek’s Waterloo,” 398.
57. Wortzel, “The Beiping-Tianjin Campaign of 1948–1949,” 63.
58. Wortzel, “The Beiping-Tianjin Campaign of 1948–1949,” 62–63.
59. Paine, The Wars for Asia, 258; Spector, A Continent Erupts, 136–37.
60. Wortzel, “The Beiping-Tianjin Campaign of 1948–1949,” 63.
61. Wortzel, “The Beiping-Tianjin Campaign of 1948–1949,” 65–66.
62. Wortzel, “The Beiping-Tianjin Campaign of 1948–1949,” 65–66.
63. Spector, A Continent Erupts, 136–37; Wortzel, “The Beiping-Tianjin Campaign of 1948–1949,” 67.
64. Wortzel, “The Beiping-Tianjin Campaign of 1948–1949,” 67.
65. Paine, The Wars for Asia, 258.
66. Paine, The Wars for Asia, 291.
67. Paine, The Wars for Asia, 258; Wortzel, “The Beiping-Tianjin Campaign of 1948–1949,” 67.
68. Xiaobing Li, A History of the Modern Chinese Army (University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 75.
69. Mao, “The Momentous Change in China’s Military Situation (November 14, 1948),” in Selected Military Writings, 372.
70. Mao, “Carry the Revolution Through to the End (December 30, 1948),” in Selected Military Writings, 388.
71. Spector, A Continent Erupts, 150.
72. 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), 5–9, https://oe.t2com.army.mil/product/how-china-fights-in-large-scale-combat-operations/.
73. 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/.
74. T2COM G-2, How China Fights Against a U.S. Army Brigade Combat Team, OE Threat Assessment 1-1.1 (T2COM, 2 February 2026), 4, https://oe.t2com.army.mil/product/how-china-fights-against-a-u-s-army-brigade-combat-team/; T2COM G-2, How China Fights Against a U.S. Army Division, OE Threat Assessment 1-1.2 (T2COM, 30 March 2026), 5, https://oe.t2com.army.mil/product/how-china-fights-against-a-u-s-army-division/.
75. OE Threat Assessment 1-1, How China Fights in Large-Scale Combat Operations, 17.

 

 

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