Osprey Men-at-Arms 306 : Chinese Civil War Armies 1911-1949

The Chinese army up to 1911 was a mixture of old and new, with some parts of the army dressed in the Western style and using the latest weaponry and other units looking like something out of the Middle Ages. With the defeat of the Chinese army in the Sin-Japanese war of 1894 and the Boxer Rebellion in 1901, many Chinese militarists realised that the army had to modernise quickly or face further defeats and humiliations. Individual commanders were given permission to set up modern armies, and these varied greatly since there was no central control over their development. The fall of the Manchu Empire in 1911 ended thousands of years of Imperial rule and ushered in almost 40 years of strife and conflict in China. From the abdication on Pu-Yi, the last emperor, the invasion of Manchuria by the Japanese, and the 'long march', to the birth of the People's Republic of China in 1949, this book looks at the fighting men, and women, who fought for the communists, imperialists, republicans, nationalists, warlords and the puppet armies in detail. The result is a comprehensive and illuminating work covering a large and complex series of combatants and conflicts. Text by Philio Jowett with illustrations by Stephen Andrew.

Contents

• Introduction
• Chronology
• The Imperial Army
• The Republican Army
• The Warlords
• Organisation
• The Nationalist Army
• The Communist Army
• Puppet Armies
• The Civil War 1945-49
• Further Reading
• The Plates