In December 1948, as Chinese Communist Party forces and Nationalist troops clashed in the decisive Huaihai Campaign, Mao Zedong personally drafted a surrender appeal to Du Yuming, the Nationalist commanding general. The message guaranteed the safety of all officers and soldiers who stopped fighting. The appeal worked. Deng Dongguo, the Nationalist garrison commander at Changchun, surrendered after his forces ran out of food and ammunition. Fu Zuoyi, the Nationalist general commanding the defense of Beijing, gave up the city after being deceived by his own daughter, a secret CCP intelligence operative. Across the country, Nationalist units followed suit, and Communist forces swept mainland China with minimal further resistance.
The campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries targeted surrendered Nationalist soldiers for execution
On Oct. 10, 1950, the CCP Central Committee issued a directive, personally driven by Mao Zedong, launching the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries. The order instructed local officials to abandon what it called “excessive leniency” and carry out mass executions of the very Nationalist military and government personnel who had surrendered, been captured, or returned to civilian life.
The victims fell into four groups. The two largest were, first, Nationalist officers and officials who had switched sides during the final phase of the Chinese Civil War. The CCP officially classified these people as having “risen in uprising” or “come over in good faith,” though in reality they had surrendered under explicit safety guarantees. This group also included prisoners of war who had been released and sent home. The second major group consisted of former Republic of China military and government personnel who had been living peacefully for years as farmers, merchants, teachers, or lawyers.
Two smaller categories rounded out the target list: guerrilla fighters captured while still resisting the CCP, and former Nationalist personnel who had fled to other regions under assumed names.
Among the senior figures the Party executed were 44th Corps commander Chen Chunlin, 5th Corps commander Xu Jingji, 99th Corps deputy commander Gan Qingchi, 8th Corps deputy commander Zeng Xiancheng, 90th Division commander Yin Zuogan of the 18th Corps, and Major General Ye Ganwu, a senior advisor to the Hexi Garrison Command, all of whom had accepted the CCP’s surrender terms in good faith.
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The CCP’s execution of surrendered officers has no parallel in modern military history
Sparing those who surrender is a universal norm in armed conflict, and the Chinese Communist Party’s mass execution of men who had laid down their weapons stands alone in the modern record. In the American Civil War, to take the most familiar Western example, the Union won but Americans afterward honored generals from both sides because they understood that regardless of outcome, all the soldiers were countrymen. The CCP’s approach resembled organized crime more than statecraft, built on a simple sequence of luring victims in with reassurances and killing them once they were defenseless.
The dead included decorated Nationalist officers who had fought Japan during World War II, among them Lieutenant General Zhou Zhi; Song Shitai, the commander of the 160th Division; and Chen Yingrong, deputy commander of the 2nd Corps and concurrent commander of the 9th Division. Veterans of the 1911 Revolution that overthrew China’s Qing Dynasty were also executed, including Deng Yulin, Xia Zhishi, He Haiqing, and Song Hegeng.
The Party killed these men because many were prominent local figures with deep community ties and personal authority, the kind of people who could, in the CCP’s estimation, rally future opposition. The CCP wanted no roots left alive, no possibility of anyone organizing resistance.
Mao Zedong timed the killing campaign to exploit the Korean War as political cover
Before launching the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, Mao Zedong explained his thinking to Luo Ruiqing, the regime’s public security chief. He said mass executions had been premature earlier because the CCP’s finances were unstable and relations with the capitalist business class were tense. Now the financial situation had been resolved and the Korean War had begun, providing both political cover and nationalist fervor. “Do not waste this opportunity,” Mao told him.
Mao then issued secret directives setting execution quotas by population, at a rate of one death per thousand residents, with half to be killed in the first wave. In early 1951, he criticized Hunan province for killing too few. He personally directed that Shanghai, with a population of 1.6 million, should execute at least 3,000 people that year, noting that only about 200 had been killed out of more than 20,000 arrested. He ordered more killings in Nanjing, the former Nationalist capital, calling the numbers too low for a city of 500,000. He cabled the CCP’s Southern China bureau praising Guangdong province for executing 3,700 and instructing them to kill another 3,000 to 4,000, setting a yearly target of 8,000 to 9,000.
Local officials, spurred by Mao’s direct encouragement, competed to meet and exceed the quotas. Actual killing rates far surpassed the one-per-thousand benchmark.
The CCP’s own records suggest Mao’s campaign killed millions of former Nationalist personnel
In 1954, Mao Zedong publicly claimed the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries had resulted in two to three million people killed, imprisoned, or placed under surveillance. By the end of 1952, the Party’s own public security apparatus had already announced the “elimination” of more than 2.4 million so-called counterrevolutionaries. Internal CCP sources put the actual number of former Nationalist military and government personnel killed at five million or more.
Roughly 200 senior Nationalist generals, holding the rank of commanding general or above, spent decades in CCP prisons. Starting in 1959, the Party began releasing them in small batches as propaganda tools aimed at Taiwan’s government, a tactic the Chinese Communist Party calls “united front work.” The last were freed in 1975, twenty-six years after the CCP took power. By then these men had spent most of their adult lives behind bars and emerged elderly and broken, paraded as props in the Party’s ongoing pressure campaign against Taiwan.
The CCP sent surrendered Nationalist soldiers to die in the Korean War
While the generals were executed, the rank and file were put to a different use. Once absorbed into the Communist military, ordinary Nationalist soldiers who had surrendered or been captured were pushed to the front lines of every subsequent engagement as expendable troops.
The most extreme case involved the forces of Fu Zuoyi, a senior Nationalist general and commander-in-chief of the North China Bandit Suppression Headquarters. Fu had handed over 600,000 troops without a fight. Within two years, the CCP shipped his best units to the Korean Peninsula as frontline assault forces in the Chinese “volunteer” army, and the losses nearly wiped them out. His engineering battalions were transferred into Beijing’s forced labor system, officially classified as “retained factory workers” engaged in “study and labor,” though in practice they were convict laborers serving the Party.
When the Korean War ended and prisoners were exchanged, more than 10,000 captured Chinese soldiers chose Taiwan over repatriation to the People’s Republic of China. Most were former Nationalist troops who had been forced into CCP military service and who, having seen the Party’s true nature firsthand, rejoined the Nationalist military in Taiwan. Those who returned to the People’s Republic spent the rest of their lives under suspicion, stigma, and discrimination.
How the CCP turned a Nationalist general’s daughter into his betrayer to capture Beijing
Beijing fell to the Chinese Communist Party in January 1949 without a shot fired. The key was an intelligence operation that turned General Fu Zuoyi’s own daughter against him. Fu Dongju had been recruited by the CCP’s underground organization before the siege, becoming a secret Party member and intelligence operative embedded in her father’s household.
In one operation, she used her five-year-old brother to steal a safe key from their father’s coat pocket, then photographed every classified military document inside. Mao Zedong and the CCP leadership called the resulting intelligence “the most important military information of the early Liberation War period.”
During secret negotiations, Mao used Fu Dongju as his back channel to her father. She supplied critical intelligence about Nationalist troop deployments in Beijing and reported her father’s private thoughts, intentions, and daily movements to the Communist side, giving the CCP total control over the negotiations. Fu Zuoyi did not learn his daughter’s true role until after he had surrendered the city. When he discovered the truth, he was consumed with regret. He reportedly cursed her as disloyal and treacherous, calling her a “slave serving two masters.”
The Party discarded the spy who delivered Beijing
Fu Dongju, the woman who delivered China’s capital to the Chinese Communist Party, received almost nothing in return. After 1949, the CCP leadership gave her no significant position. The Party organization refused to recognize her years of underground membership and demanded she resubmit her application and start over, leaving her humiliated and furious.
She was dispatched to Yunnan province in 1949 for a minor administrative posting. In 1951, she was transferred to Beijing as an ordinary reporter at People’s Daily, the CCP’s flagship propaganda newspaper. When the Cultural Revolution erupted, she was denounced as a “class alien element” and accused of being anti-Party and counterrevolutionary. Even her espionage work was questioned. She was subjected to brutal mass struggle sessions and lost her freedom.
After the Cultural Revolution, she was assigned to the Xinhua News Agency’s Hong Kong bureau. By the time she retired to Beijing in the 1990s, she was living in a shabby, undecorated room with cloth-covered furniture. Fu Zuoyi himself had donated all his properties to the CCP decades earlier, and his daughter now survived on a meager pension while Party officials around her lived in open luxury. She could not afford a subsidized government apartment, and the State Council’s administrative bureau repeatedly demanded payment she did not have.
In her final years, Fu Dongju could not afford medical care. Her pension barely covered medication. When her condition worsened, the hospital refused to admit her to a senior cadre ward, ruling that she did not qualify, despite contributions to the CCP that dwarfed those of any deputy minister. She was placed in a pay-per-use ward at 400 yuan per day, with nursing costs she could not sustain. Nurses quit in succession because she could not pay them.
She spent more than two years bedridden. The underground CCP operatives she had worked with, the people who had used her connections and built their careers on her intelligence work, had all risen to senior positions and accumulated fortunes, yet not one of them spoke up for her or came to see her in the hospital.
On July 2, 2007, Fu Dongju died alone and impoverished. Those close to her said she expressed deep regret in her final days about what she had done to her father. She told people around her that she had come to realize how little she had truly understood him, and that with every passing year she grasped his choices more clearly. She wanted to write a memoir about him, but illness prevented her from ever completing it.
