What was the chief reason for the defeat of the Chinese Nationalists in the civil war in the 1940s?

Answer 1

During the 40's it was Mao ZeDun against Chan Kaishi(NAtionalist). Chan Kaishi was supported by the Americans and Mao by the communist Soviet Union. However, Chan mad only one but Great error. He had almost entirely defeated the communist gorrilas when the Japaneses invaded China. Chan thought that the communist forces are two weak to attack him again and that the more immanent threat were the japaneses. He was right. But the communist general Mao Zedun did not loose any time and begun recruiting volunteers from the farm land ,dissatisfied with the current leadership. In a few years time Chan Kaishi was squeezed by both the japaneses and the communist and he had to flee to a small US-controlled island nearby Mainland China where he remained for the rest of his life. To sum it up, Chan kaishi was really a step away from the victory but his error will be used as a an example of an old prooven rule he violeted- "Destroy your enimies, do not let him reorganize".

The Nationalist Generalissimo's name was either Chang Kai Shek (Canton version) or Jiang Jieshi (Pinyin). i don't know which one yours came from.

It's a complicated question, a variety of factor played into this, China was ravaged during WW2, and inevitablly the post war era saw major economic problems as inflation was nearly uncontrolable. The Nationalist party was the generally acknowledged ruling party of the time and bore the blunt of the blame, not that all of it was undeserved, thus a lot of the people supported the CCP if only to get rid of the Nationalist Rule.

To further complicate matter, the Nationalists made a lot of comprimises during their efforts to end Warlord rule which plagued China after the fall of the Qing dynasty, in which most of the warlords at least nominally submited to the party rule but retained a significant amount of military independence. this would prove disastorous on both a political and military level as the warlord branchs often acted on their own accords yet the party would still borne the blame for the results, and militaraly many of them switched sides as soon as they think the wind changed, assuming that they would get the same deal from the CCP as from the Nationalist (they didn't)

A final issue was that the CCP won quite decisively in the intelligence war, later reports indicate that Mao basically knew all of the Nationalist's plans before the Nationalist's field officers even knew about it, so obviously on a tactical level it was like the CCP was playing with Map Hack on.