Play as · Cold War 1947 · L3 · Civil War

Republic of China - 1947

The Republic of China in 1947 is a great power abroad and a failing state at home. Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government sits among the victors of the Second World War - one of the Big Five, a permanent member of the brand-new United Nations Security Council with a veto equal to America's or Russia's - and it governs, on the map, the most populous country on earth. Yet the victory over Japan bought it only a pause. The truce with the Chinese Communists has collapsed, the civil war has resumed in earnest across the north, and the government that emerged from eight years of war against Japan is exhausted, corrupt and broke. Its currency is dissolving into hyperinflation, its armies are large but brittle, and the countryside where most Chinese live is slipping toward the Communists' promise of land. The strategic identity is the hollow colossus: a nation with a seat at the top table of the world and a foundation crumbling beneath it, spending the last of its foreign prestige and American goodwill on a war it is beginning to lose.

Starting position

The starting board is a country at war with itself. The Nationalists hold the cities, the railways, the coast and the apparatus of the recognised government; the Communists under Mao hold the rural north and are turning guerrilla strength into conventional armies. In 1947 the Nationalists still look stronger - they take the Communist capital of Yan'an in the spring - but the gains are hollow, over-extended garrisons in a countryside that feeds the other side. Manchuria, seized back from Japan and stripped by the departing Soviets, is the great prize and the great trap. The economy is the deepest wound: government spending on the war is met by printing money, and prices are running away into the millions. American patience is thinning - the Marshall mission to broker peace has failed and gone home, and Washington is weighing how much more to pour into a government it no longer trusts to reform. Abroad the Republic wields a UN veto; at home it cannot control its own price level.

What turns the campaign

What Chiang's government wants is to destroy the Communist armies before the rot in its own economy and administration destroys it first - to convert its numerical and material advantage, and its American backing, into a decisive victory while it still holds the cities and the recognition of the world. What the Communists offer is what the Nationalists cannot: land to the peasant, discipline against corruption, and a cause. The campaign turns on time and legitimacy. Every month of inflation, every corrupt garrison, every offensive that takes ground but not the enemy's strength, transfers the mandate a little further. The external lever is American aid - money, weapons and advice - but it comes with demands for reform the government cannot or will not meet, and it is never quite enough. The fear that shadows every decision is the one that will come true in 1949: that the recognised government of the world's largest nation could simply lose, and be driven from the mainland to a single island, its Security Council seat outliving its control of the country it claims.

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