The Chinese Revolution Explained: How An Empire Collapsed, Mao Won And Modern China Was Born

From Emperor To Mao In 38 Years Of Chaos China did not become communist in a single uprising, and Mao Zedong did not suddenly seize a stable country in 1949. The revolution that created modern China was the culmination of almost four decades of collapsing imperial authority, failed republican government, foreign invasion, warlord rule, ideological conflict and one of the largest civil wars of the twentieth century. To understand what happened, it helps to think of the Chinese Revolution as a chain reaction rather than one event. The Qing dynasty fell in 1911, a republic replaced it in 1912, that republic fragmented, Nationalists and Communists fought for control, Japan invaded, civil war resumed after 1945, and finally Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic of China on 1 October 1949. Even the United States’ official historical account describes 1949 as completing a process of governmental upheaval that had begun with the revolution of 1911. The central question is therefore not simply why communism came to China. It is why repeated attempts to create a strong, legitimate Chinese state failed until the Communist Party built an organisation capable of combining nationalism, military power, rural mobilisation, ideology and ruthless political discipline. The result transformed far more than China. The Communist victory created one of the most important states of the Cold War, forced Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government to Taiwan, changed the strategic balance in Asia and produced a political division across the Taiwan Strait that remains unresolved more than seven decades later.