Winning Hearts and Minds
Tristan Goodbody
During the Chinese civil war, the CCP or Chinese Communist Party had a very strong weapon against the KMT. This weapon that they used throughout the war was not one that inflicted physical damage, on the contrary. This weapon was able to gain the party support and in the end of the war complete control over China.
The CCP leader Mao Zedong introduced the strategy of “winning hearts and minds”. By this, Mao meant that if the CCP were able to gain the trust and overall loyalty of society, then they would win the now rampant civil war. The second Sino-Japanese War began in 1937 with the Japanese invasion of northern China. This gave Mao his opportunity to begin to use his hearts and minds theory. Before long, Mao had gained a tremendous amount of support. This however, was not solely due to the CCP. By this time, the KMT or Kuomintang had already been stricken by corruption. The KMT were also focusing more on eliminating the CCP as in 1941 the KMT attacked the CCP’s army instead of helping toe expel the Japanese invaders. The CCP’s main focus at the time of Japanese invasion was to aid rural Chinese regions from the oppression the Japanese were inflicting. The image of priority that Mao had placed on saving and helping the people of china gained him immense support. The CCP’s popularity had grown from an 300,000 in 1933 to an estimated 1.2 million in 1945. From the overall support that the CCP gained from Mao’s concept of winning hearts and minds, more guerrilla operations began to take place and over time there were less and less Japanese for the party to fight.
