Strategic War Making and the Chinese Civil War in Manchuria, 1946–1947

• In Event: Peace, War, and Social Conflict Panel Session: War

Abstract

War has always been the subject of social analysis. Arguably, the most influential paradigm on war is what scholars have called the bellicist, or the fiscal-military model. According to such a model, war-making and state-making are mutually constitutive. Analytically, the bellicist model treats the state as an actor of resource extraction in the context of war. As such, there are room for theorizing different kinds of states because there are different ways in which resources are extracted, but rarely discussed is how wars differ. Curiously, then, the bellicist model largely treats war-making as a black box. In this paper, I use the case of the Four Linjiang Campaigns (January–April 1947) in the Chinese Civil War (1946–1949) in Manchuria to theorize the state actors’ military-strategic thinking as a critical aspect of war-making. The empirical puzzle is the reversal of military balance of power in the Four Linjiang Campaigns between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese Nationalist Party (GMD). Through the Four Linjiang Campaigns, the CCP in Liaodong went from being militarily defeated to the brink of collapse in December 1946, to successfully enduring the GMD’s continued military offensives, and to being able to launch counterattacks in April 1947. My argument is that the CCP was able to reverse the military balance of power because they strategically combined guerrilla and mobile warfare. In so doing, the CCP was able to turn a defensive campaign into offensive battles, and in these battles, achieve attrition, which would otherwise be impossible, with the GMD forces that had much better equipment and training.

Author

• Zikui Wei, University of Chicago