Zhu De versus Chiang Kai-shek: A Military Clash That Created New China

In his epic duel with the Chinese Communists, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek proved to be a cruel, reactionary and incompetent dictator who trusted no one, placed little value in the lives of his compatriots, and preferred fighting his Communist opponents to confronting the Japanese invaders. As a tactical commander, he had a definitely mixed record. While he showed some battlefield prowess in routing the powerful Northern warlords and putting the Red Army on the defensive to the point of almost wiping out his Communist adversaries during their Long March retreat, his early military successes were followed by crushing and humiliating defeats at the hands of the invading Japanese armies and, more fatefully, at the hands of the Communist troops led by Zhu De. As a military strategist, he had an equally poor record, lacking an understanding of the deep tectonic forces which the 1911 Nationalist Revolution had unleashed in Chinese society, especially among the vast masses of the impoverished peasantry--the overwhelming part of the population. He relied instead on his successful but interrupted policies of modernizing an increasingly united China in the 1930's, as well as on his personal control of the money and supplies generously provided from abroad to his anti-Communist regime. Though well-supplied, better-armed and huge on paper, his Nationalist army proved less than effective in meeting the recurrent military and political challenges from his main rival, the smaller but highly motivated and better-led Communist forces.

Still, in spite of Chiang's failures as a military leader, the victory of the Communists in the last phase of China's protracted civil war was anything but inevitable. Since the government forces of Chiang Kai-shek were numerically superior and far better armed and supplied by their U.S. ally than the Moscow-backed revolutionary troops of Mao Zedong, the final Communist triumph was due more to subjective factors like high troop morale and motivation and superior military leadership than to objective conditions like the protective sea of the Chinese peasantry or strong Soviet support. To a very large extent, it was a direct result of the military genius of Mao's top general and creator of the Red Army, legendary field commander Zhu De, and his adroit strategic use of innovative guerrilla tactics and other asymmetric warfare methods in defeating his Nationalist opponent. Dubbed "China's Napoleon," Zhu routed an opponent who was several times stronger militarily and should have easily prevailed on the battlefield, according to standard military norms, precepts and expectations.

Sycophantic Maoist historiography later gave the "Great Helmsman" much of the credit for Zhu's dazzling military achievements in outfoxing and subduing Chiang's significantly larger forces. But it was Zhu De, promoted to marshal in 1955, who created and led what was probably the best infantry force in modern times (apart perhaps from North Vietnamese military commander Vo Nguyen Giap's Communist forces). In fact, Zhu's extraordinary military record rivals that of any other successful general in history, including even Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Soviet Marshal Georgi Zhukov, or Vo Nguyen Giap. In the final analysis, it was his superior generalship --sometimes using conventional tactics in his military campaigns but more often resorting to large-scale guerrilla warfare--that most contributed to the Communist success in defeating the U.S.-backed Nationalists on the battlefield until finally seizing control of all mainland China and turning it into a bastion of Asian communism and the world's second--and still surviving to this day--Communist superpower.

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