Battle of Dazhongji

The Battle of Dazhongji (大中集战斗) was fought between the nationalists and the communists during the Chinese Civil War in the immediate post-World War II era in Jiangsu, China and resulted in the communist victory. Like other similar clashes immediately after the end of World War II between the communists and the nationalists in China, this conflict was due to the fact that Chiang Kai-shek had realized that his nationalist regime simply had neither the sufficient troops nor enough transportation assets to deploy into the Japanese-occupied regions of China. Unwilling to let the communists, who had already dominated most of the rural regions in China to further expand their territories by accepting the Japanese surrender and thus would consequently control the Japanese occupied regions, Chiang Kai-shek ordered the Japanese and their turncoat Chinese puppet regime not to surrender to the communists. They were to “maintain order” in the Japanese occupied regions by fighting off the communists as necessary, until the final arrival and completion of the deployment of the nationalist troops. As a result, most members of the Japanese puppet regimes and their military forces rejoined the nationalists. However, most of these former nationalists turned Japanese puppet regime forces were not from Chiang Kai-shek’s own clique, but instead consisted mainly of warlords troops who were only nominally under the Chiang Kai-shek’s before World War II, considering they were nationalists in name only and mostly maintained their independent and semi-independent status. These warlords were only interested in keeping their own power and defected to the Japanese side when Japanese invaders offered to let them keep their power in exchange for their collaborations. After World War II, these forces of former Japanese puppet regimes once again returned to the nationalist camp for the same reason they defected to the Japanese invaders. Obviously, it was difficult for Chiang to immediately eliminate these warlords once they surrendered and rejoined the nationalists.