Li Zhide (李志德)
In the first half of the twentieth century, China’s revolution mostly played out as a search for “proxies” among a few big “toughs.” At first, Sun Yat-sen (孙中山) and the Kuomintang (国民党, KMT) received backing from Moscow (莫斯科). After the 1927 “party purge” of the Communists, the Soviet Union (苏联) stopped betting on the KMT and shifted support toward Mao Zedong (毛泽东) and his rural forces. After the war against Japan, the United States wavered between the Nationalists and the Communists. In the end, it was unwilling to fully rescue the KMT and also afraid to decisively back the Chinese Communist Party. By hesitating, Washington missed its window.
If we pull back from the Northern Expedition to the Civil War, we see a continuous chain. External great powers were picking, testing, and discarding their Chinese proxies. Domestic politicians bargained with those powers. On the surface, this was a struggle of ideologies. Underneath, the logic looked a lot like turf wars among neighborhood gangs. Whoever could borrow a tougher “backer,” and then walk away at the critical moment, survived.
Why the Soviet Union Chose Sun Yat-sen
After World War I, Vladimir Lenin and the Comintern (共产国际) decided that the weakest link in the imperialist chain lay in the East. To shake the order that the great powers had built in the Far East, communist parties alone were not enough. They needed a nationalist party that could mobilize military forces on a national scale.
At that moment, the KMT was at its lowest point. The constitutional protection movement had failed. Its troops were scattered. Money was short. In the South it held only a small patch of territory. For the Soviet Union, this was a party that was both weak and desperate for help, with a clear “anti-imperialist” posture and thus easy to woo. Diplomatic archives and party-history studies show that after 1921, the Comintern gradually shifted toward supporting the KMT and instructed members of the newly formed Communist Party of China (中国共产党, CCP) to join the KMT as individuals, creating “cooperation within one party.”
Before the Northern Expedition, the KMT’s forces did not even rank in the top fifteen among Chinese armies. The Beiyang (北洋) factions had more money, more troops, and more territory. Yet between 1926 and 1928, the situation flipped. In just over a year, the Beiyang warlord structure collapsed. At the time, it felt as if the KMT had “turned on a cheat code.” It is hard to explain this dramatic reversal without bringing in one external factor: the Soviet Union.
After 1923, Soviet military advisers and funds arrived on a large scale. Sun Yat-sen accepted their advice and decided to “learn from Russia.” In Guangzhou he set up an officer academy, the now-famous Whampoa Military Academy (黄埔军校). Studies on Whampoa’s founding point out that its organization, curriculum, and political commissar system all clearly borrowed from the Red Army and its academies. Soviet advisers oversaw both military and political work, and among the students were key CCP cadres.
From that point on, the Beiyang armies no longer faced the same poor, cash-strapped little party. They now confronted a “new KMT” with Moscow behind it. During the Northern Expedition from the summer of 1926 to 1928, Soviet aid really did change the war. Officers trained at Whampoa quickly became the backbone of KMT forces. Political work and propaganda units marched with the troops. Compared with older armies, discipline and morale were usually higher. More importantly, Soviet weapons, instructors, and training programs helped create a corps of modern officers that the KMT had sorely lacked.
At the same time, the Beiyang system was already hollowed out from within. The Fengtian (奉系), Zhili (直系), and Anhui (皖系) cliques had been fighting one another for more than a decade. Their armies were deeply corrupt and had squeezed local finances dry. When faced with a new army marching under the banner of “national revolution,” plus the pressure of peasant and worker movements and of student protests, many warlords chose to switch sides. In most cases, they had little real choice.
So it is not unfair to say that the Soviet Union “chose Sun Yat-sen as a proxy.” But it is also clear that this was mutual exploitation. Moscow wanted to overturn the imperialist order. Sun Yat-sen wanted to use outside power to break the warlord system at home. The relationship between proxy and “patron” was a transactional one from the start.
1927: From Supporting Sun to Supporting the Communists
During the Northern Expedition, contradictions surfaced quickly. Within the Whampoa officer corps there were both KMT officers and political cadres sent by the CCP. At the grassroots, peasant and worker movements, encouraged by the Soviets, radicalized with speed. Land struggles and strikes hit landlords and urban capitalists hard and directly threatened the interests of right-wing Nationalists and local notables.
After the April 12 purge in Shanghai in 1927, the first United Front collapsed. Chiang Kai-shek (蒋介石) set up a rival central government in Nanjing and openly “purged the Communists.” Many communists were arrested and executed. With that blow, the united front that Moscow had cultivated for years was effectively destroyed. Inside the Soviet leadership, some denounced “Right-opportunist errors,” but they still had to reassess their choice of proxy in China.
In the following years, direct Soviet aid to the Nanjing government clearly cooled. Aid to the CCP grew instead, especially in the form of supplies and cadre training for the Jiangxi Soviet (江西苏区) and the Red Army (红军), though the scale was much smaller than the earlier round of support for the KMT in the 1920s.
Within the CCP, Mao Zedong’s status rose during this period. After the Zunyi Conference in 1935, he set the main military and political line. He began to handle Moscow’s directives more flexibly and used strategies of encircling the cities from the countryside and carrying out land revolution to turn what had been a marginal force into a nationwide one.
From the Soviet point of view, there had been a change of proxy. They moved away from a nationalist party they had hoped to reshape and toward a party with tighter organization and, at least in words, greater loyalty to communism.
In the 1930s, Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China. On the main fronts, it was KMT troops who bore the brunt. From the Battle of Shanghai to Taierzhuang and then Changsha, elite Nationalist units suffered heavy losses. The CCP, by contrast, opened guerrilla fronts behind enemy lines and built up base areas. Each side accused the other of “slacking off on resistance” and “saving strength for the civil war.” That argument was already alive at the time.
During these years, Soviet aid to China focused on air power and advisers. Because of Moscow’s own constraints, the overall scale was limited. After the signing of the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance (《中苏友好同盟条约》), aid still went mainly to the Nationalist government. The CCP’s support came more in the form of intelligence and small shipments of weapons. What really presented the CCP with a major opening was not any single external decision. It was the war itself, which wrecked the KMT’s finances and morale and tore huge holes in rural society.
After the Pacific War broke out, the United States finally folded China into its overall strategy. The Lend-Lease Act, the Flying Tigers, and the Burma Road all strengthened the KMT’s capacity to fight Japan. At the same time, they exposed the internal corruption, infighting, and inefficiency of the Nationalist regime.
Against this backdrop, the Dixie Mission of 1944, the U.S. Army’s observation group to Yan’an (延安), stood out. Based on later Central Intelligence Agency and academic studies, American officers in Yan’an saw CCP troops with strict discipline and frugal cadres. Compared with the luxurious lifestyles of many top KMT generals, this left a deep impression.
The observers’ reports described the CCP as a force “similar to European social democratic parties.” They judged that communist units performed better in mass work and in fighting the Japanese and that they deserved more supplies for the Eighth Route Army (八路军) and the New Fourth Army (新四军).
This judgment reflected both the CCP’s careful staging of “model zones” and the liberal inclinations of many American officers. To say that they were simply “fooled by Mao Zedong” is not accurate. It is closer to the truth to say that each side found strengths in the other that fit its own narrative, and both underestimated the highly centralized party-state machine that lay behind the CCP’s image.
Marshall’s Arms Embargo: How the U.S. “Kept Chiang on a Leash”
After victory in the war against Japan, the core goal of U.S. decision-makers was to prevent China from sliding into full-scale civil war. They hoped to broker a coalition government—non-communist, but able to accommodate different forces. George C. Marshall was sent to China to head the famous Marshall Mission.
One tool in this mediation was the 1946 suspension of arms sales to the KMT, meant to pressure Nanjing into making political concessions. This “arms embargo” was later magnified in “Who lost China” debates as if it were the key reason for KMT defeat, proof that America had “abandoned” Chiang Kai-shek.
Diplomatic records, however, show that the embargo was a temporary measure and was lifted in 1947. Even then, the KMT still held a clear advantage in equipment over the People’s Liberation Army (人民解放军, PLA). Its real problems lay in military discipline, popular support, and fiscal collapse. No amount of weapons could fix those. In the United States, patience for further commitment was also fading.
Later, McCarthyites and conservative politicians blamed everything on Marshall and on “China experts fooled by the Communists.” This was political rhetoric. Most historians agree that American hesitation weakened the KMT’s edge, but the decisive factors lay in the regime’s own crisis of legitimacy, land issues, and army corruption. Put another way, the United States did “loosen its grip” at a key moment, because it could not—and did not want to—pay the full price for propping up a government that had lost its base.
In August 1945, the Soviet Red Army declared war on Japan, quickly crushed the Kwantung Army (关东军), and seized large quantities of weapons, supplies, and military facilities. U.S. white papers and military studies note that the Soviets controlled weapons taken from hundreds of thousands of Japanese and Manchukuo troops. Over the next few years, a significant share of those arms—artillery, tanks, and small arms—found their way, through various channels, into areas controlled by the CCP.
At the same time, some Japanese officers and soldiers stayed in China and joined units under communist command or served as technical advisers. Recent studies estimate that these men numbered only in the low thousands, a tiny fraction of the PLA’s total strength. Even so, in artillery and engineering units they did play a role.
The Soviet Union never publicly declared that it was “integrating Japanese prisoners into the PLA.” It mostly allowed and sometimes encouraged these individual transfers. What truly mattered was the shift in heavy weaponry. It turned the northeast into the PLA’s most powerful theater in terms of firepower. That region then became the springboard for taking the whole country.
The Civil War: The Thugs Win
From the angle of external aid, we see Marshall’s arms suspension on one side and Moscow’s handover of the Kwantung Army’s legacy on the other. This “step back and step forward” did change the balance of forces. But to attribute victory and defeat entirely to this would be to miss differences in social foundations and political mobilization.
By 1946–1949, Chinese society had been exhausted by years of war, runaway inflation, and corrupt rule. Many studies point out two root causes of the KMT’s collapse: it lost the trust of small and medium capitalists in the cities, while CCP land reform won support in the countryside.
On the battlefield, the PLA excelled at mobile warfare and guerrilla tactics. It attacked the weak and avoided the strong. In the three decisive campaigns—Liaoshen, Huaihai, and Pingjin—it expanded its advantages to the limit. Behind those battles stood extensive mobilization networks, land policies, and propaganda systems. For many poor peasants, “striking down the local tyrants and dividing the land” was far more persuasive than the abstract Three Principles of the People (三民主义).
In political style, neither party was gentle. Sun Yat-sen’s early reliance on assassination and kidnapping, and the later White Terror, all carried a rough underworld flavor. Mao Zedong’s power struggles with Zhang Guotao (张国焘) and Wang Ming (王明), and the Yan’an Rectification Movement (延安整风运动), were even closer to gangster methods. It was, in effect, a contest of “who could sink lower.” The phrase “the thugs’ victory” captures a harsh truth about this competition. Whoever was more ruthless, more willing to mobilize violence and fear, had a better chance to crush rivals in a time of disorder. Whoever used dirtier tactics, whoever had fewer moral limits, was more likely to prevail.
Sun Yat-sen spoke of “liberty, equality, and fraternity” while at the same time “allying with Russia and cooperating with the Communists.” Under Chiang, the pendulum swung to purging the Communists. Mao, for his part, shifted allies with great flexibility. During the war against Japan, he courted the Soviet Union externally and “forced Chiang to resist Japan” internally. In the late phase of the Civil War, he released friendly signals toward the United States. After the founding of the People’s Republic, he quickly turned back toward the Soviet Union. After the Sino-Soviet split, the slogan changed again to “ally with America to check the Soviet Union.”
This logic can be summed up in one line. Treat the great powers as a card table and yourself as the player who dares to kick others under the table.
If we place modern Chinese history on this map, it becomes easier to see one very concrete bottom line in the Chinese revolution. Whoever could manipulate outside forces ended up with a chance to flip the game. We can understand the complex mutual exploitation between the Soviet Union, the United States, Japan, and the two Chinese parties by putting them all on the same chart.
At the time, a hardline faction in the U.S. Congress and among conservatives argued that Washington should stop “keeping Chiang Kai-shek on a leash” and instead “unleash Chiang.” They wanted to “let Chiang Kai-shek take the field” (unleash Chiang): send him out from Taiwan to attack the mainland and escalate the conflict into a full-scale war against Communist China. “Unleash Chiang” was an extreme hawkish slogan. It meant: stop holding back, play the most aggressive card we have, and, if need be, turn a regional conflict into a much larger war.
In American political language, “unleash Chiang” has become a metaphor for “using the harshest move and dropping all self-restraint.” If we look again at that sentence—“We will let Chiang Kai-shek take the field (unleash Chiang)”—it is like saying: we are going to take the brakes off and use overwhelming military force. We will hold nothing back.Unfortunately, that did nt happen.
The thugs’ victory rested on the collapse of an imperial order, on peasants being drawn—often deceived—into CCP land reform, and on the pressure of great-power rivalry. It was also the story of a country groping for a way out by trying one path after another. From Sun Yat-sen to Mao Zedong, from allying with Russia and the Communists to allying with America against the Soviets, every move looked like back-alley calculation in the moment. Seen across a century, each move was also the result of geopolitics and social structure pushing in the same direction. To grasp this may be the first step toward getting beyond the “proxy” frame and rethinking modern Chinese history.