---
title: Propaganda of the Chinese Civil War, 1945-1949:land reform, surrender leaflets and the fall of the mainland
url: https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/chinese-civil-war-propaganda-1945-1949/
description: between Japan's surrender in August 1945 and Mao Zedong's proclamation of the People's Republic on 1 October 1949, the Chinese Communist Party mobilised…
section: Case studies
---

![Illustration: a Second World War naval-intelligence collage of a Pacific theatre map, aerial reconnaissance photographs and radar plots.](https://propagandaarchive.org/static/generated/detail/hero-wwii-pacific.jpg)

[Case studies](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/)

# Propaganda of the Chinese Civil War, 1945-1949:land reform, surrender leaflets and the fall of the mainland

At a glance

Between Japan's surrender in August 1945 and Mao Zedong's proclamation of the People's Republic on 1 October 1949…

- **When:** August 15, 1945
- **Actor:** Chinese Communist Party…
- **Target:** Peasants in newly contested and 'liberated' areas…
- **Source:** Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
- **Confidence:** **documented** Primary documents, court records, official disclosures
- **Techniques:** [Scapegoating](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/scapegoating/) [Name-calling](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/name-calling/) [Fear appeal](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/fear-appeal/) [Glittering generalities](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/glittering-generalities/) [Transfer](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/transfer/) [Testimonial](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/testimonial/) [Card stacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/card-stacking/) [Euphemism / doublespeak](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/euphemism/) [Bandwagon](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/bandwagon/) [Manufactured consensus](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/manufactured-consensus/)
- **Regime:** [People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong](https://propagandaarchive.org/regimes/peoples-republic-of-china-mao/)

Full details

- **Actor:** Chinese Communist Party (Central Propaganda Department, Xinhua News Agency, People's Liberation Army General Political Department) and the Nationalist government (Guomindang Central Propaganda Department, Ministry of National Defense Political Department, Central Daily News)
- **Target:** Peasants in newly contested and 'liberated' areas; Nationalist officers and soldiers; the urban Chinese public; the American public and Congress

On this page

- [What happened](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/chinese-civil-war-propaganda-1945-1949/#what-happened)
- [How it works](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/chinese-civil-war-propaganda-1945-1949/#how-it-works)
- [Then and now](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/chinese-civil-war-propaganda-1945-1949/#then-and-now)
- [Positions on the record](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/chinese-civil-war-propaganda-1945-1949/#positions-on-the-record)
- [Same-method test](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/chinese-civil-war-propaganda-1945-1949/#same-method-test)
- [How to spot it](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/chinese-civil-war-propaganda-1945-1949/#how-to-spot-it)
- [Images](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/chinese-civil-war-propaganda-1945-1949/#images)
- [Sources](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/chinese-civil-war-propaganda-1945-1949/#sources)

On this page

> **Content note.** This page quotes wartime slogans that name the enemy as "bandits" and "running dogs", surrender leaflets that pair a threat of death with a promise of mercy, and Guomindang press language calling Communist forces a criminal insurgency. The labels are quoted as evidence of method, not as this archive's description of anyone.

**In one line:** between Japan's surrender in August 1945 and Mao Zedong's proclamation of the People's Republic on 1 October 1949, the Chinese Communist Party mobilised peasants for land and land reform to fill its armies while its "lenient treatment" leaflets talked Guomindang units into surrendering rather than fighting, and its bulletins turned three decisive campaigns into a story of inevitable popular victory; the Guomindang, for its part, ran its own anti-communist press campaign calling the CCP a "bandit" insurgency, framed its 1947 constitution and 1948 currency reform as proof of reform and resolve, and afterwards explained its defeat chiefly by Soviet aid to the Communists and inadequate American support rather than by the corruption and hyperinflation its critics named.

![Diagram: the CCP's land-reform and surrender-leaflet pipeline feeding recruits and defectors into the Huaihai, Liaoshen and Pingjin campaigns and the 1 October 1949 founding broadcast, set against the Guomindang's anti-bandit press line, its 1947 constitution and 1948 gold-yuan reform, and its own postwar account of the defeat](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/chinese-civil-war-propaganda-1945-1949-diagram.svg)

## What happened

**Scale and context.** Japan surrendered on 15 August 1945 (the formal instrument was signed 2 September). Both the Guomindang, whose seat of government returned to Nanjing, and the Chinese Communist Party, whose main base remained Yan'an until it fell to Nationalist forces in March 1947, raced to take the surrender of Japanese-held territory, above all Manchuria, where Soviet forces occupying the region under the terms of Yalta handed captured Japanese stockpiles and, in many accounts, base areas to Communist forces rather than to the Nationalists (Westad, *Decisive Encounters*, 2003; Levine, *Anvil of Victory*, 1987; Pepper, *Civil War in China*, 1978). U.S. General George Marshall mediated a failed truce and coalition-government negotiation from December 1945 to January 1947. Full-scale civil war followed until the Communist victory in 1949; estimated military and civilian deaths across the war commonly range from roughly 1 to 2.5 million, with no single agreed figure (Westad 2003; Lary, *China's Civil War*, 2015). This page covers propaganda made inside that war, picking up from [Chinese wartime propaganda, 1937-1945: Chongqing, Yan'an and Wang Jingwei's Nanjing](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/china-wartime-propaganda/) (1937-45).

![Chinese New Year door-god style poster: an American airman with a submachine gun stands on a blue-faced Japanese soldier in front of the U.S. flag](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/images/american-airman-chinas-skies-1945.jpg)

*[This American Airman Drives the Jap from China's Skies: Give Him Your Help! (Chinese New Year poster)](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/american-airman-chinas-skies-1945/). U.S. Office of War Information poster in Chinese for distribution in China, dated February 1945, just before the period this page covers: the U.S. side of wartime messaging in China. Library of Congress, public domain.*

**The Communist side.**

- **4 May 1946: the May Fourth Directive.** The party's Central Committee ordered land reform in the base areas, moving from the wartime policy of reduced rent to outright confiscation and redistribution of landlords' land. Cadres and "work teams" organised village "speak bitterness" (*suku*) meetings at which poor peasants denounced landlords before land and property were divided; some meetings turned into "settling accounts" struggle sessions in which landlords were beaten or killed (Pepper 1978; Hinton, *Fanshen*, 1966, an eyewitness account of one village's land reform). This mass-mobilisation method, and the violence that sometimes followed it, is the subject of the sibling page [Land reform and the struggle session: how the CCP's class labels decided who kept their land, 1946-1952](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/land-reform-struggle-sessions-1946-1952/); here it is noted only as the CCP's principal recruitment engine.
- **October 1947: the Outline Land Law.** A further directive made confiscation and equal division the formal national policy, with propaganda teams sent to explain it village by village. Land-reform meetings doubled as recruitment drives: new landholders were asked to send a son to the People's Liberation Army to defend the land they had just received, and army service was tied to land title in explicit exchange, which historians treat as decisive to the PLA's wartime manpower growth from roughly 1.2 million in 1945 to about 4 million by 1949 (Levine 1987; Pepper 1978; Westad 2003).
- **"缴枪不杀" (jiao qiang bu sha, "surrender your weapon and you will not be killed") and "宽待俘虏" (kuandai fulu, "lenient treatment of captives").** Leaflets and loudspeaker broadcasts aimed at Guomindang soldiers, a continuation of a policy the party had used against Japanese troops in the anti-Japanese war, combined a threat with a promise: resistance meant death, but soldiers who laid down arms, deserted or defected would not be killed, would be fed, and could join the PLA or go home. Captured or surrendering officers were sometimes paraded and interviewed as evidence the policy was kept, and released prisoners were sent back through the lines carrying word of good treatment (Westad 2003; Pepper 1978, on wartime psychological-warfare units attached to PLA field armies). Mass Guomindang surrenders and defections, notably Fu Zuoyi's negotiated handover of Beiping in January 1949 (below), were treated in Communist propaganda as proof the policy worked at scale.
- **September-November 1948: the Liaoshen (Liao-Shen) Campaign.** PLA forces under Lin Biao took Manchuria, encircling and destroying Nationalist armies at Jinzhou, Changchun and Shenyang; roughly 470,000 Nationalist troops were killed, wounded or captured. Xinhua and army bulletins presented the campaign as the definitive loss of the Nationalists' best-equipped, U.S.-trained armies and as proof the tide had turned.
- **November 1948-January 1949: the Huaihai Campaign.** Fought around Xuzhou in east-central China, this was the war's largest and most decisive battle; roughly 550,000 Nationalist troops were killed, wounded or captured. Communist accounts made the campaign's civilian logistics, hundreds of thousands of peasant labourers pushing handcarts of grain and ammunition to the front under local Communist organisation, a central propaganda image of "the people" winning the war; a line later attributed to Marshal Chen Yi, that Huaihai "was won by the peasants with their wheelbarrows" (推小车推出来的), is widely quoted in party historiography as the campaign's popular summary (Westad 2003; Lary 2015).
- **November 1948-January 1949: the Pingjin Campaign.** PLA forces surrounded Beiping (Beijing) and Tianjin. Tianjin was taken by assault on 15 January 1949. Facing encirclement, Nationalist general **Fu Zuoyi** negotiated the peaceful surrender of Beiping, and PLA forces entered the former capital on 31 January 1949 without a battle for the city itself. Communist propaganda framed the outcome as "和平解放" (heping jiefang, "peaceful liberation"), a term still used in PRC historiography; it describes a negotiated capitulation reached under military encirclement, not, as the phrase can suggest on its own, an unforced political choice.
- **21-23 April 1949: crossing the Yangtze and the fall of Nanjing.** PLA forces crossed the Yangtze River on the night of 20-21 April, and Nanjing, the Nationalist capital, fell on 23 April. Mao's poem "Seven Rules: The People's Liberation Army Captures Nanjing" (人民解放军占领南京), written that spring, cast the event in classical verse as the sweeping-away of a doomed old order.
- **1 October 1949: the founding of the People's Republic.** Mao Zedong proclaimed the Central People's Government of the People's Republic of China from the Tiananmen rostrum in Beijing, before a crowd organised by the new government and broadcast nationally; period photographs and Xinhua's coverage built the ceremony, flag-raising and military parade into the founding image of the new state. This page treats 1 October 1949 as its endpoint; the propaganda of the PRC's consolidation in the years after is the subject of other case studies, including [The Great Leap Forward's 'sputnik' harvests and the famine that followed](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/great-leap-forward-yield-claims/) and [Big-character posters: how the opening labels of China's Cultural Revolution did the work of charges (1966-68)](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/cultural-revolution-big-character-posters/).

![Map of eastern China marking Yan'an, Xibaipo, Changchun, Shenyang, Beijing, Tianjin, Xuzhou and Taipei](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/chinese-civil-war-propaganda-1945-1949-map.svg)

*Map of the places the page names: the Communist headquarters at Yan'an and Xibaipo; the Liaoshen (Changchun, Shenyang), Pingjin (Beijing, Tianjin) and Huaihai (Xuzhou) campaigns of 1948-49; and Taipei, where the Nationalist government relocated in December 1949. Drawn for FRAME from Natural Earth data (`make_cs7_maps.py`).*

**The Guomindang side (extending the Nationalist propaganda system already described in [Chinese wartime propaganda, 1937-1945: Chongqing, Yan'an and Wang Jingwei's Nanjing](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/china-wartime-propaganda/)).**

- **1945-1949: the "bandit suppression" press line.** The Guomindang's Central Propaganda Department and its flagship paper, the ***Central Daily News*** (中央日报), together with the Ministry of National Defense's political-warfare apparatus, consistently referred to Communist forces in print as "共匪" (gongfei, "Communist bandits") and to the fighting as "剿匪" (jiaofei, "bandit suppression" or "bandit extermination"), a term with roots in Chiang Kai-shek's anti-Communist "Encirclement Campaigns" of the 1930s. The framing denied the CCP standing as a rival government or army and cast the civil war as an internal-security operation rather than a war between two organised belligerents, even as Nationalist forces fought the PLA in division- and army-scale battles.
- **25 December 1946 / 25 December 1947: the Constitution of the Republic of China.** The National Assembly, boycotted by the Communist Party and by the third-party Democratic League, adopted a constitution on 25 December 1946 that took effect a year later. Nanjing's press presented the document and the National Assembly and Legislative Yuan elections that followed in 1947-48 as proof of the government's commitment to constitutional, multi-party government even as the civil war intensified and as opposition parties were excluded or suppressed; the CCP and Democratic League called the process a one-party exercise staged without them.
- **May-June 1947: student protests and their framing.** University students in Nanjing, Shanghai, Beijing and elsewhere marched under the slogan "反饥饿、反内战、反迫害" ("against hunger, against civil war, against persecution") over inflation, conscription and the war itself; the "20 May Movement" protests were suppressed and some student leaders arrested. Government statements described the demonstrations as Communist-instigated agitation rather than as an independent response to economic conditions; historians (Eastman 1984; Pepper 1978) treat them as both, noting CCP underground organisers were active in some student unions while economic grievances were real and widely shared.
- **19 August 1948: the gold yuan reform.** Facing hyperinflation that had made the existing *fabi* currency nearly worthless, the government under Chiang Ching-kuo (deployed to Shanghai to enforce the policy) introduced a new currency, the gold yuan, fixed prices, and launched a publicised "anti-corruption, anti-speculation" campaign, popularly called "打老虎" ("tiger hunting"), against hoarders and profiteers, including a prominent prosecution connected to the Yangtze Development Corporation. The reform was presented in government media as decisive action against the black market and inflation; it collapsed within months as price controls failed and the currency itself became worthless by October-November 1948, discrediting the campaign's claims (Eastman 1984; Chou, *The Chinese Inflation, 1937-1949*, 1963).
- **August 1949: the U.S. State Department's China White Paper.** After the Nationalist collapse on the mainland was effectively complete, the United States published *United States Relations with China, with Special Reference to the Period 1944-1949* (the "China White Paper"), which attributed the Nationalist defeat substantially to corruption, poor leadership and loss of popular support rather than to insufficient U.S. aid. The Nationalist government and its supporters in the United States (the "China Lobby") rejected this account; Chiang Kai-shek's own later statement of the causes, discussed below, differs sharply from it.
- **December 1949: retreat to Taiwan.** The Nationalist government relocated to Taipei; Chiang Kai-shek resumed the presidency there in March 1950. Its subsequent propaganda framed the move as temporary and the mainland as territory to be recovered ("反攻大陆", "counter-attack the mainland"), a slogan and self-conception that continued for decades and lies beyond this page's 1945-49 scope.

## How it works

- [Scapegoating](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/scapegoating/): Communist propaganda blamed hyperinflation and wartime hardship on "官僚资本" (bureaucrat-capitalists) and the "四大家族" ("Four Families" of Chiang, Soong, Kung and Chen), a term popularised by the party theorist Chen Boda's 1946 pamphlet *China's Four Big Families*, which placed systemic economic collapse on named individuals and their circles. Guomindang propaganda in turn placed the war itself on "Communist bandits" rather than describing a political and military struggle between two organised belligerents.
- [Name-calling](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/name-calling/): "共匪" (Communist bandits) and "剿匪" (bandit suppression) on the Nationalist side named the enemy as criminals before any specific charge; Communist wartime and postwar rhetoric answered in kind, calling Nationalist forces "蒋匪" (Chiang-bandit) and, especially after 1949, "美帝国主义的走狗" ("running dogs of American imperialism"). Each side's label did the work of denying the other any claim to be a legitimate government or army.
- [Fear appeal](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/fear-appeal/): the "surrender your weapon and you will not be killed" leaflets opened with the threat that resistance meant death, which is the fear component that made the accompanying promise of lenient treatment meaningful; Nationalist "bandit suppression" reporting likewise dwelt on Communist-perpetrated killings in land reform and captured towns to deter defection and desertion in the other direction.
- [Glittering generalities](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/glittering-generalities/): "解放" (liberation), "人民" (the people) and "新民主主义" (New Democracy) recurred across CCP land-reform and victory propaganda without a fixed content beyond "on our side"; the Guomindang's 1946-48 constitutional process was framed with equally undefined civic virtue words, "宪政" (constitutional government) and "民主" (democracy), while the CCP and Democratic League that boycotted it were excluded from it.
- [Transfer](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/transfer/): the "peaceful liberation" (和平解放) framing of Fu Zuoyi's negotiated surrender of Beiping carried the positive associations of a voluntary, bloodless political choice onto what the military record shows was a capitulation reached under encirclement; conversely, "tiger hunting" against currency speculators transferred the imagery of hunting a dangerous predator onto financial enforcement, associating the government with vigour and public protection.
- [Testimonial](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/testimonial/): surrendered or captured Nationalist officers, and later Fu Zuoyi himself (who went on to hold office in the PRC), were presented in Communist media as living proof that the lenient-treatment policy was real and that resistance was pointless; released prisoners carrying that message back through the lines functioned the same way at lower rank.
- [Card stacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/card-stacking/): Communist land-reform meetings selected landlord-abuse stories for public "speak bitterness" sessions while the scale of the violence that sometimes followed selection is a matter this page does not adjudicate (see [Land reform and the struggle session: how the CCP's class labels decided who kept their land, 1946-1952](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/land-reform-struggle-sessions-1946-1952/)); Guomindang coverage of land reform selected the violent cases and omitted the land transfers and recruitment the same campaigns achieved. Each side's own casualty and desertion figures from Huaihai, Liaoshen and Pingjin also selected the numbers that favoured it.
- [Euphemism / doublespeak](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/euphemism/): "和平解放" ("peaceful liberation") for a negotiated capitulation under siege, and "剿匪" ("bandit suppression") for a multi-million-man civil war, are both cases of a mechanism, not a description, renamed as something milder or more legitimate than the events it covers.
- [Bandwagon](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/bandwagon/): as Liaoshen, Huaihai and Pingjin fell in quick succession over the winter of 1948-49, Communist bulletins and leaflets to Nationalist units stressed how many armies had already surrendered or been destroyed, using the accumulating scale of defeat to invite the next unit's surrender; the 1 October 1949 founding ceremony, with its organised crowd and national broadcast, presented the new state's arrival as already an accomplished, widely embraced fact.
- [Manufactured consensus](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/manufactured-consensus/): the Huaihai "wheelbarrow" story and similar accounts of hundreds of thousands of peasants spontaneously supporting the PLA's logistics folded a mobilisation organised by local Communist cadres and the party's wartime requisition system into an image of unanimous popular will; the December 1946 National Assembly, convened without the CCP and the Democratic League, was in turn presented by Nanjing as proof of broad support for the Nationalist constitutional order.

## Then and now

The CCP's "surrender your weapon and you will not be killed" leaflet campaign against Guomindang units is the same technique, and largely the same doctrinal lineage (the PLA's own wartime psychological-warfare units traced their methods partly back to the CCP's earlier work with, and later against, Japanese forces), as the U.S. and South Vietnamese government's **Chieu Hoi** ("Open Arms") program of the 1960s-70s, which broadcast and leafleted a promise of amnesty and resettlement to Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers who defected (see [Chieu Hoi and Radio Hanoi: both sides' propaganda aimed at the other side's soldiers in Vietnam](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/vietnam-chieu-hoi-and-radio-hanoi/)). Both pair a credible threat with a credible, publicised promise of good treatment, and both used surrendered fighters as living testimonials. The scale and political stakes differ: the 1945-49 leaflets targeted armies of several million in a war for control of the Chinese state, while Chieu Hoi operated within a limited insurgency under active U.S. military sponsorship and produced defection numbers in the low hundreds of thousands over a decade. The later Cold War contest between the two Chinese governments over the same audience, loudspeakers and leaflets fired across the Taiwan Strait, is a direct continuation and is covered in [The loudspeaker war: propaganda across the Taiwan Strait, 1949-1987](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/taiwan-strait-loudspeaker-war/).

## Positions on the record

- **The Chinese Communist Party's stated rationale.** Land reform was presented as justice for peasants exploited under a semi-feudal landholding system, and army recruitment as peasants voluntarily defending land they had just received; the lenient-treatment policy toward prisoners was presented as both humane and strategically sound, in the party's own account converting enemy soldiers into an asset rather than treating them only as casualties. Mao's April 1945 report *On Coalition Government* and later 1948-49 directives framed the campaigns as a "people's war of liberation" against a Nationalist government the party held to be dependent on American backing and a landlord-bureaucrat elite.
- **The Guomindang's stated rationale, at the time.** The government presented the war as suppression of an armed insurgency that had broken the postwar peace, the constitutional process as proof of a transition to multi-party government interrupted by that insurgency, and the 1948 currency reform as decisive action against speculators responsible for inflation.
- **The Guomindang's stated rationale, afterward.** Chiang Kai-shek's own account, most fully set out in *Soviet Russia in China* (1957), attributes the loss of the mainland chiefly to the Soviet Union's conduct in Manchuria after 1945 (which he presented as a breach of the August 1945 Sino-Soviet Treaty), to the resulting transfer of Japanese arms and territory to Communist forces, and to Communist infiltration and psychological warfare that undermined Nationalist army morale and discipline; it also criticises the United States, particularly the 1946-47 arms embargo during the Marshall mission, for withdrawing support at a decisive moment. This is a different, and substantially narrower, account of the causes than the corruption- and inflation-centred explanation below; it does not present internal Nationalist corruption or misgovernment as the primary cause, though the party's own 1950 reorganisation in Taiwan did acknowledge organisational weakness and the need for disciplinary reform (Taylor, *The Generalissimo*, 2009).
- **Critics' and historians' explanation.** The August 1949 U.S. China White Paper, contemporary journalists such as Theodore White, and later historians (Eastman 1984; Pepper 1978; Westad 2003) point to hyperinflation, the failed gold yuan reform, corruption and profiteering documented at multiple levels of the Nationalist state and army, harsh or corrupt conscription practices, and a loss of confidence among urban elites, students and much of the peasantry, alongside genuine Communist organisational strength and, in Manchuria, Soviet assistance. The phrase "loss of the mandate of heaven", drawn from classical Chinese political theory in which a ruler's fall is read as proof that popular and cosmic sanction for rule had already been withdrawn, is used by some later writers and popular commentators as a shorthand for this collapse of legitimacy; it is not language the Guomindang itself used to describe its own defeat, and this page treats it as a critics'/commentators' framing rather than the Nationalist government's own position.
- **What is documented.** The dates, campaigns, directives and casualty figures above; the "四大家族" pamphlet and its authorship; the "缴枪不杀" and lenient-treatment leaflet campaigns and Fu Zuoyi's negotiated surrender of Beiping; the 1946-47 constitutional process and its CCP/Democratic League boycott; the gold yuan reform and its collapse; the China White Paper's publication and content.
- **What is contested.** The precise weight to give Soviet assistance in Manchuria versus Communist organisational and propaganda strength versus Nationalist self-inflicted failures in explaining the outcome; the exact death toll of the war as a whole; the balance of coercion and voluntary support behind land reform's recruitment success, which the sibling page [Land reform and the struggle session: how the CCP's class labels decided who kept their land, 1946-1952](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/land-reform-struggle-sessions-1946-1952/) addresses directly.
- **Not ruled on here.** Whether Chinese Communist rule after 1949 vindicated or betrayed the promises made in this propaganda, and the broader political legitimacy of either government's claim to represent China. This page scores how each side's wartime propaganda was built and used, not which side was right to win.

## Same-method test

- **The United States: Chieu Hoi (1963-1975).** [Chieu Hoi and Radio Hanoi: both sides' propaganda aimed at the other side's soldiers in Vietnam](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/vietnam-chieu-hoi-and-radio-hanoi/) documents a program run by the South Vietnamese and U.S. governments that leafleted and broadcast a promise of amnesty, resettlement and reward to Viet Cong and North Vietnamese personnel who defected under the "Open Arms" ([Fear appeal](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/fear-appeal/) paired with a lenient-treatment promise) banner, the same pairing scored here for the CCP's 1945-49 leaflets. Defectors were likewise used publicly as testimonials to the program's good faith.
- **The Guomindang's own earlier "Encirclement Campaigns" (1930-1934).** The "剿匪" (bandit-suppression) language the Nationalist government used against the CCP in 1945-49 is a direct continuation of the same label used against the Jiangxi Soviet in the early 1930s; the same [Name-calling](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/name-calling/) mechanism, denying the opponent standing as a government or army, recurs across both periods.
- **The Korean War: germ-warfare allegations (1952).** [The Korean War germ-warfare charges: commissions, confessions and the 1953 recall](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/korean-war-germ-warfare-allegations/) documents a later CCP-era propaganda campaign that, like the Four Families pamphlet, placed a systemic problem on a named enemy actor; the same [Scapegoating](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/scapegoating/) mechanism is scored there under different evidentiary standards, since the germ-warfare claims are documented to have been unsubstantiated, while the corruption the Four Families pamphlet pointed to is independently documented by non-Communist sources including the U.S. China White Paper.
- **Where they differ.** Chieu Hoi ran inside a limited insurgency backed by a global superpower's logistics and had no prospect of itself deciding who governed the whole of Vietnam; the CCP's 1945-49 leaflet and land-reform campaigns ran inside, and materially helped decide, a war for control of the entire Chinese state, with army-scale surrenders (Fu Zuoyi's roughly 200,000-plus troops at Beiping) with no equivalent in the Vietnam case. The 1930s and 1945-49 "bandit suppression" campaigns differ enormously in scale: the former was a series of encirclement operations against a regional base area, the latter a nationwide war of several million combatants.

## How to spot it

- **Read the label before the charge.** "Bandit," "running dog" and similar labels arrive before any specific accusation and are designed to deny the other side standing as a legitimate government or army; ask what act, if any, backs the label.
- **Check what a "peaceful" outcome followed.** "Peaceful liberation" and similar phrases can describe a negotiated capitulation reached under military encirclement as easily as a genuinely voluntary choice; ask what forces surrounded the negotiating table.
- **Ask who convened the constitutional process, and who was missing from it.** A constitution or assembly presented as proof of consensus is only as representative as its participant list; check who boycotted or was excluded, and why.
- **Follow the currency reform to its actual end.** A publicised "anti-corruption" or price-control campaign should be checked against what the currency and prices did in the following months, not just the campaign's own announcement.
- **Compare each side's own casualty and desertion figures for the same battle.** When both sides claim decisive victory from the same campaign, check for independent tallies (foreign observers, later archival research) rather than either side's wartime bulletin.

## Images

| Image | Source | Licence |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Mechanism diagram (above) | Drawn for FRAME from this page's sourced facts (`make_diagrams_rtp_civilwar.py`) | CC BY 4.0, FRAME |
| U.S. OWI poster for China, 1945 | FRAME gallery, [This American Airman Drives the Jap from China's Skies: Give Him Your Help! (Chinese New Year poster)](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/american-airman-chinas-skies-1945/) | Public domain (U.S. government work) |
| Locator map of places named on this page | Drawn for FRAME from Natural Earth data (`make_cs7_maps.py`) | Public domain data; drawing CC BY 4.0, FRAME |

### Image gaps

- **The U.S. Army "Dixie Mission" photograph of Colonel Barrett with Mao (Yan'an, 1944).** Hosted earlier and removed: Commons credits Barrett, who appears in the picture, so the photographer and its status as a U.S. government work could not be verified.
- **CCP land-reform and "speak bitterness" meeting photographs, and lenient-treatment/surrender leaflets.** Wikimedia Commons and other archives hold period photographs and reproductions of these leaflets, but this build environment can reach only commons.wikimedia.org and loc.gov, and a search of both from here did not surface a clearly PD or CC-licensed, correctly attributed file for this specific 1945-49 material at the time of writing. Most PRC-origin photographs from this period also carry unresolved URAA (U.S. copyright-restoration) status unless the photographer or agency is separately documented as pre-1996 public domain in the U.S., as discussed on [Big-character posters: how the opening labels of China's Cultural Revolution did the work of charges (1966-68)](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/cultural-revolution-big-character-posters/) and [Chinese wartime propaganda, 1937-1945: Chongqing, Yan'an and Wang Jingwei's Nanjing](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/china-wartime-propaganda/) for the same reason. **Fillable** with a Commons file that carries a clear PD-China/PD-ROC-exempt tag plus a stated U.S. rationale, or a Republic-of-China (Taiwan) government photograph release.
- **Guomindang "Central Daily News" front pages, National Assembly and gold-yuan-reform photographs.** Same URAA and sourcing constraints as above; not hosted.
- **Photographs of the Huaihai, Liaoshen or Pingjin campaigns, and of the 1 October 1949 founding ceremony.** Widely reproduced in PRC media but, as with the Cultural Revolution page's image gaps, their U.S. public-domain status is not established from what this environment could verify; not hosted rather than hosted on an assumption.
- **U.S. State Department China White Paper (1949) cover or pages.** A U.S. government publication and very likely public domain as a U.S. federal government work, but a Commons search in this pass found no scan of it. **Fillable** if a Library of Congress or National Archives scan is located.
- **Marshall Mission (1945-47) photographs.** Commons searches for the Committee of Three and the Marshall Mission returned no photograph file; not hosted.
- **Communist and Nationalist troop photographs of the period.** Commons copies of Xinhua and PLA-collection photographs (for example the Siping and Menglianggu images) carry a China-only public-domain tag and an explicit warning that U.S. status must be shown separately; not hosted.

## Sources

- O. A. Westad, [*Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946-1950*](https://www.sup.org/books/asian-studies/decisive-encounters), Stanford University Press 2003.
- S. Pepper, *Civil War in China: The Political Struggle, 1945-1949*, University of California Press 1978 (2nd ed. Rowman & Littlefield 1999).
- S. I. Levine, [*Anvil of Victory: The Communist Revolution in Manchuria, 1945-1948*](https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7ztbq2), Columbia University Press 1987.
- D. Lary, [*China's Civil War: A Social History, 1945-1949*](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/chinas-civil-war/), Cambridge University Press 2015.
- L. E. Eastman, *Seeds of Destruction: Nationalist China in War and Revolution, 1937-1949*, Stanford University Press 1984.
- W. Hinton, *Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village*, Monthly Review Press 1966 (eyewitness account of land reform in Long Bow village, Shanxi).
- Chen Boda, *China's Four Big Families* (中国四大家族), 1946/1947 pamphlet; discussed in Eastman 1984 and Pepper 1978.
- Chiang Kai-shek, *Soviet Russia in China: A Summing-Up at Seventy*, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy 1957 (English edition; Chinese original 苏俄在中国, 1956).
- J. D. Taylor, [*The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China*](https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674033382), Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2009.
- S.-H. Chou, *The Chinese Inflation, 1937-1949*, Columbia University Press 1963.
- T. H. White and A. Jacoby, *Thunder Out of China*, William Sloane 1946.
- U.S. Department of State, [*United States Relations with China, with Special Reference to the Period 1944-1949*](https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1949v08) (the "China White Paper"), Department of State Publication 3573, August 1949.
- Mao Zedong, ["On Coalition Government"](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv3_25.htm) (24 April 1945) and ["Seven Rules: The People's Liberation Army Captures Nanjing"](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/poems/poems24.htm) (April 1949), in *Selected Works*, Foreign Languages Press.
- Xinhua News Agency archival record of the 1 October 1949 founding ceremony broadcast, as summarised in standard PRC-historiography accounts, e.g. Westad 2003, ch. 9.
- This archive's predecessor page, [Chinese wartime propaganda, 1937-1945: Chongqing, Yan'an and Wang Jingwei's Nanjing](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/china-wartime-propaganda/), for the 1937-45 Nationalist, Communist and Wang Jingwei propaganda systems this page continues.