Generational Dynamics World View

[Warren Dew]

We could argue about whether building a political infrastructure that would ensure the success of the revolution as a prerequisite to fighting the Japanese was really "prioritizing the fight against the Japanese over the civil war", but as your source points out, what's clear is that the Japanese invasion helped the rebels and hurt the preexisting government:

Quote:... resisting Japan gave Mao and the CCP their chance
to establish a new autocratic power in the countryside, excluding the
elements of a nascent urban civil society that were still developing
under the Nationalists. In conditions of wartime, the CCP was building a new
type of Chinese state geared for class warfare. In the twentieth
century, Chinese revolutionaries were thus preparing to assault and
reorder a class structure that went back at least 3,000 years.

Back in the 1930s, the Chinese Communist Party was fine with that, since they were the rebels.  In the 2020s, the prodemocracy movement, or whatever the southern Chinese cognate might be, would be the rebels who would be helped by an external war, and the Party, as the incumbent government, are the ones who would be hurt.  Being on the opposite side than before, it would not be in the Party's interests today to start an external war once a rebellion had started.