ABSTRACT

The coastal province of Shandong was a springboard for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to take over China 1949. When Japan surrendered in August 1945, most of the CCP Army in Shandong raced into Manchuria where they became the seed of the new Communist armies. In the fall of 1948, the CCP Army in Manchuria overwhelmed the half-million American-trained Nationalist soldiers in the region. Immediately after this victory, the CCP Army in East China, based in Shandong, launched a strategic offensive and annihilated the Nationalist forces totaling another half-million in the Yangzi Valley. When the CCP Army won these decisive battles, 27 percent of the CCP soldiers were Shandong natives. The CCP’s influence in province prior to the Japanese invasion in 1937, however, was zero. The theme of the chapter is the CCP’s growth in Shandong. It analyzes Shandong’s divergent strategic values in the respective military strategies of Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong. It investigates how Mao guided his comrades in Shandong in their efforts to turn their nascent party network into a full-fledged military-fiscal party-state.