Outbreak of Full-Scale Civil War

After victory in the War of Resistance, Chiang Kai-shek, backed by the United States, actively prepared for civil war. In June 1946 he openly tore up the Double Tenth Agreement and the Political Consultative Conference resolutions and attacked the Central Plains Liberated Area with 300,000 troops, starting full-scale civil war. At the time the Kuomintang army numbered 4.3 million, with large quantities of US-supplied weapons, and controlled about three quarters of the country along with the big cities and main lines of communication; the People's Liberation Army had only a little over 1.2 million poorly equipped men, and the liberated areas were mainly in the countryside. Facing the Kuomintang offensive, the Communist Party led soldiers and civilians in the liberated areas in a war of self-defense. Forces of the Central Plains Liberated Area under Li Xiannian and others broke out successfully. Mao Zedong set a policy of active defense, "with the destruction of the enemy's effective strength as the main objective, not the holding or seizing of territory," concentrating superior forces to destroy the enemy piece by piece. In the Battle of Central Jiangsu, Su Yu led the Central China Field Army to seven victories in seven battles, destroying over 50,000 enemy troops. In a conversation with the American journalist Anna Louise Strong, Mao also put forward his famous statement that "all reactionaries are paper tigers." After eight months of fighting the Liberation Army had wiped out 710,000 Kuomintang troops and crushed the general offensive. Meanwhile the Communist Party carried out land reform in the liberated areas, issuing the May Fourth Directive in May 1946 and promulgating the Outline Land Law of China in October 1947 to give land to the tillers, and peasants joined the army and supported the front eagerly. In Kuomintang areas the people also launched a patriotic democratic movement against hunger, civil war and persecution, forming a second front.