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Under the terms of the Japanese unconditional surrender dictated by the United States, Japanese troops were ordered to surrender to Chiang’s troops and not to the Communists in the occupied areas of Chin

The Americans had the ambition of making China a US sphere of influence (in effect a semi-colony) after the War

But after all the sufferings of the Second World War, the American people would not have been prepared to support a new war to subjugate China

More importantly, the American soldiers would not have been prepared to fight such a war. The inability of US imperialism to intervene against the Chinese Revolution was therefore an important element in the equation.

The United States assisted the KMT with hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of new surplus military supplies

civil war of 1946-9

This manoeuvre did not fool Mao for an instant. He agreed to participate in the negotiations, but continued to prepare for a renewal of hostilities

However, any of the arms sent by Washington were later used by the Vietnamese against the US army, since, almost all this military hardware was captured by Mao’s forces.

US imperialism supplied the Kuomintang with bombers, fighter planes, guns, tanks, rocket-launchers, automatic rifles, gasoline bombs, gas projectiles and other weapons for this purpose. In return, the Kuomintang handed over to US imperialism China's sovereign rights over her own territory, waters and air space, allowed it to seize inland navigation rights and special commercial privileges, and seize special privileges in China's domestic and foreign affairs. The US forces were guilty of many atrocities against Chinese people: killing people, beating them up, driving cars over them and raping women, all with impunity.

Clausewitz made the celebrated remark that war is the continuation of politics by other means

Although the Americans (as always) maintained the fiction that this was a war between “communism and democracy”, in fact, their Chinese puppet Chiang Kai-shek was a brutal dictator.

There were mass nationwide student protests against US imperialism.

Nationalists still had a big advantage over the PLA

The demoralized and undisciplined Nationalist troops were melting away in the face of the irresistible forward march of the People's Liberation Arm

The transformation of the military situation was really incredible. The PLA, which for years had been outnumbered, by July-December 1948 finally gained numerical superiority over the Kuomintang forces. These are the figures given by Mao at the time:

There is no reason not to believe that this estimate is substantially accurate. All the bourgeois historians accept that by this stage, Chiang’s forces were retreating in disarray and that the PLA was rapidly gaining in strength