The CCP’s Unrestricted Warfare Strategy: Using People as Expendable Resources

Commentary

This series, “The CCP’s Unrestricted Warfare Strategy,” examines the Chinese Communist Party’s strategy for destroying its adversaries across all domains of society. Read part one here.

Using Civilians as Human Shields in War

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) employed forms of unrestricted warfare in its efforts to overthrow the Republic of China (ROC), led by Chiang Kai-shek from 1928 to 1949.

The Nationalist government of the ROC, after losing the Chinese Civil War, retreated in 1949 to Taiwan, where it remains today as the governing body of the island nation.

Some sources claim that during the civil war in the 1940s, the CCP repeatedly forced unarmed civilians—often large groups of elderly peasants—to march ahead of its troops as human shields. This cruel tactic placed the Nationalist forces, the official army of the ROC, in impossible moral dilemmas. Unwilling to shoot their fellow citizens, Nationalist troops often hesitated or refused to return fire, allowing the CCP to gain the upper hand on the battlefield easily.

These harrowing events are vividly depicted in works such as “Big River, Big Sea: Untold Stories of 1949” by acclaimed Taiwanese writer Lung Ying-tai and “My Three Liberations,” a personal essay by the late Ma Sen, a distinguished literary critic and author who spent his later years in Canada.

Gen. Hu Lien of the Nationalist forces had witnessed such atrocities. He shared a chilling account with his friend, He Jiahua, who wrote about it in the Hong Kong-based journal Ming Pao Monthly in 1989.

Hu said, as quoted by He: “Back then, when I was fighting the Communist forces in the Yimeng Mountains, I saw with my own eyes how they forced civilians to charge ahead, clutching two grenades.

“Our troops opened fire with machine guns, but the ones being killed were all civilians. Naturally, we couldn’t bear to keep shooting. … We would rather accept defeat.”

U.S.-based historian Xin Haonian shared a similar account during a lecture tour to more than 20 cities in 2005. He recounted the testimony of a retired officer from the Jinan Military Region of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), who revealed what he called the truth behind the CCP’s victory over the elite 74th Division of the Nationalist Army during the Battle of Menglianggu.

According to the retired officer, the CCP’s initial assault on the Menglianggu position—located on a hillside—was met with heavy gunfire from the Nationalist forces. But to the soldiers’ shock, the front ranks of the advancing column consisted of elderly civilians, both men and women. The Nationalist troops immediately ceased fire.

In the second wave, children led the charge. Again, the Nationalists lowered their weapons. Seizing on this moment of hesitation, CCP forces advanced but were ultimately pushed back.

Then came the third wave: Those at the front lines carried white bedsheets. Just as the Nationalist troops prepared to fire, the sheets were thrown aside, revealing a group of naked young women. The soldiers dropped their rifles again.

According to the retired officer’s account, the elderly civilians used in the first wave were those labeled by the CCP as landlords, rich peasants, and counterrevolutionaries. Branded as so-called class enemies, their lives were considered expendable. The second wave consisted of underage boys and girls who were the children or grandchildren of these class enemies. The third group, the young women, were daughters and daughters-in-law from such families.

The entire 74th Division was ultimately destroyed. Its commander, Gen. Zhang Lingfu, was a decorated hero of the war against Japan. The Nationalist Army said he took his own life, claiming that he left a suicide note, whereas the CCP said PLA soldiers killed him.

Several prominent writers—including Lung, Ma, and He—and political figures such as Liang Su-yung, former president of Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan, have documented the CCP’s widespread use of civilians as cannon fodder in their writings. Their accounts help demonstrate that these tactics were not isolated acts carried out by a few ruthless commanders, but rather a calculated and broadly employed strategy within the PLA.

In 1948, during the CCP’s siege of Changchun, a key city in northeastern China, this same logic of sacrificing lives for victory was put into brutal practice. To exhaust the city’s food supplies and force the surrender of the Nationalist garrison, the communist forces completely surrounded Changchun, sealing it so tightly that no civilians could escape.

After five months of blockade, the Nationalist defenders finally surrendered. Changchun, once a thriving city, had been reduced to a lifeless shell. Of the original 500,000 to 800,000 residents, only 170,000 survived—a stark figure documented in “Big River, Big Sea.”

Communist Specter

What has been described so far is merely a tiny fraction of the CCP’s doctrine and practice of unrestricted warfare.

Since seizing power, the CCP has elevated this concept to a governing principle—deploying it to suppress political opponents, persecute its own citizens, and dismantle traditional beliefs, ethics, and moral values at home.

Internationally, the CCP has employed unrestricted warfare to spread its ideological influence and narrative through political subversion, espionage, cyberattacks, and campaigns of psychological, economic, technological, and biological warfare.

Every significant activity of the CCP bears the mark of unrestricted warfare.

The 1999 book “Unrestricted Warfare” echoes, almost verbatim, the radical purpose proclaimed in “The Communist Manifesto”: “The Communists disdain to conceal their aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.”

This means that the foundational pillars of human society—morality, ethics, the rule of law, economic systems, and healthy social relationships—are all viewed by the CCP as targets for elimination. In pursuing this goal, the Party employs every possible means, unbound by law, ethics, or conscience.

Unrestricted warfare is not merely a tactic for the CCP; it is embedded in its ideological DNA—a deep-seated hostility toward the moral and civilizational order of humanity.

In this light, the CCP resembles a war machine, with its political system, industrial apparatus, and cultural mechanisms operating in wartime mode at all times.

Following the Cold War, the West prematurely concluded that communism had failed, and many believed that communist China was reforming and integrating into the free market system. Ideological confrontation was no longer viewed as central to global politics. But this strategic miscalculation has come at great cost, as the CCP has since begun to assert its strength openly and no longer hides its hostility.

We must draw an important lesson from this situation. The CCP’s rule is no ordinary dictatorship—it is a regime that is warped and driven by the communist specter, unleashing forces that are anti-faith and anti-human through its absolute control over Chinese society.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.