The end of the Chinese Civil War (War and Peace in East Asia, Lecture 12)

After a brief blogging break (giving a talk, then giving an exam), Part II of the course got started today, where we set the stage for the rest of the narrative by examining the end of the Chinese Civil War.

In what was (sadly, if you ask me) be the last reading by Paine for the course (Chapter 8), we were treated to the puzzle of why the war ended when and how it did—that is, while the Nationalists could still muster substantial fighting forces and with a rapid Nationalist retreat to Taiwan. Paine identifies, yet explains separately, three events that are part of the puzzle:

1. Increasing defections of army units to the Communist side
2. A public rapidly shifting its support to the Communists
3. A hasty retreat to Taiwan before total military defeat

The task in class today was to see whether we couldn’t explain all three of these things with the same moving parts—and with fewer than Paine does. For the most part, I think we succeeded, because the key to understanding each of these events is, I think, the conversion of the Communists into a conventional military force and the related string of rapid and sizable battlefield victories. This, we concluded, revealed some important information about the likely outcome of a fight to the finish—in particular, that the Nationalist prospects in such a fight would be none too great.

As a result, we saw (a) more of the public being willing to side with the Communists, as individuals were more confident that others would be doing the same thing; (b) military units and their generals thinking along similar lines, hoping to preserve their authority and forces intact; and (c), finally, the Nationalist leadership realizing that cutting their losses and retreating to the relative safety of Taiwan was optimal.

In the end, we’ve got a story about battlefield outcomes revealing information that, in the case of the Nationalist retreat straightforwardly encourage an end to the fighting, but this is pretty conventional (see, inter alia, here, here, and here). What I found interesting was the apparent second-order effects of the same information—that is, raised estimates of the likelihood of ultimate communist victory—on the public and the military. In both cases, it seems there were those who could be swayed to defect, but only if they weren’t the only one to do so, and once such a clear public signal emerged of the relative strengths of the belligerents in the civil war, we saw large and massive—even unexpected, from some perspectives—defections that contributed to the rapid collapse Nationalist resistance and the end of the war.

I wonder if any other work has looked at these second order effects…