Civil war often follows on inter-state warfare, when a state has been weakened and divided by wars with other states. In Russia the 1917 revolution and the civil war that followed were precipitated by Russia's poor performance in the First World War. In China the tremendous toll of the Resistance War on the central government, and the parallel success of the CCP, opened the way for civil war. At the beginning of the Resistance War, the CCP could never have challenged the GMD; after eight years of war, it could.

The Civil War lasted from 1946 to 1949. It determined the future of China. It was one of the most important stages in the world's descent into the Cold War. It was so brutal and so sad that it is hard for many of the people who lived through it to talk about it. It has been consigned to a dark corner of memory. In its historiography, the CCP draws a line at 1949. Everything “after Liberation” is good, socialist, and Red; everything before was bad, feudal, and black; the Civil War was the sweeping away of the evil old world. In Taiwan the Civil War was a disaster, but not a GMD one. Chiang Kai-shek blamed the GMD loss on the Soviet Union.