communist enemy. Military professionals preferred to fight a total war, incapacitate the enemy's ability to fight, but this inevitably conflicted with the interest of another faction of strong supporters of the nationalist government: the landowners and businessmen, who joined bandits to oppose such tactic. The reason was that landowners and businessmen supporting and joining the nationalist guerrilla firmly believed that the nationalists would be able to retake mainland China within several years and they would be able to regain their lost lands, businesses, and other properties that were confiscated and redistributed to the poor by the communists. As the nationalist military professionals in the guerrilla suggested and destroyed the production facilities and businesses as part of the total war, the landowners and businessmen would not be able to regain any valuable properties after the return of the nationalist government because those properties had been destroyed. The bandits agreed with the businessmen and landowners to oppose the idea of total war for a different reason: when the properties were destroyed and productivity dropped, they would not be able to loot enough supply to survive. As a result, despite the animosities between the bandits and landowners and businessmen, they were united together in the opposition to the military professional faction of the nationalists. Communist strategies In contrast to the nationalists, the Communists had much simpler and more effective strategy aided by their lack of the same order of problems as the Nationalists: the Communist forces simply needed to eradicate bandits. The Communist forces exploited Nationalist error to their advantage. As with all other bandit eradication campaigns, the Communist strategy sought to mobilize the victim populations to against the bandits. Furthermore, the Communists were in position to custom tailor specific strategies to combat bandits in specific localities. Campaign Southwestern China had been long plagued by bandits that had continuously existed for centuries. By the time the Nationalist government had lost control in the region in the face of the advancing Communist army, there were over half a million bandits active in the region. In Sichuan alone, there were over three hundred bands of bandits. In Yunnan, there were a hundred forty–eight bands of bandits. In Guizhou, there were five hundred forty–one bands of bandits. In addition large numbers of bandits were also active in Xikang. The number of bandits soon would more than double to more than a million, encouraged by the Nationalist