1On April 20th, 949, the Kuomintang government refused to sign the "Domestic Peace Agreement" drawn up by the Kuomintang delegation. The next day, Mao Zedong and Zhu De issued the order to March across the country. The second and third field armies of the People's Liberation Army and the troops of the East China and Central Plains Military Regions, with a total of about one million people, launched the river-crossing campaign under the command of Deng Xiaoping, Liu Bocheng and Chen Yi. On the front line from Jiangyin, Jiangsu Province in the east to Hukou, Jiangxi Province in the west, the soldiers crossed the river in three ways. On April 23rd, the People's Liberation Army occupied Nanking, the center of Kuomintang rule, and declared the demise of Kuomintang reactionaries' rule in Chinese mainland. Then the People's Liberation Army occupied Wuhan and Nanchang and conquered Shanghai. By June of 1 year, Chongming Island was liberated and the battle of crossing the river was over. This campaign wiped out more than 430,000 Kuomintang troops and created favorable conditions for marching into South China and Southwest China.

The battle of crossing the river lasted 42 days. The People's Liberation Army used wooden sailboats as the main means of navigation, and broke through the Kuomintang army's Yangtze River defense line in one fell swoop, combining mobile warfare with urban warfare to encircle and annihilate its heavily armed groups. In this campaign, the People's Liberation Army suffered more than 60,000 casualties, wiped out more than 430,000 Kuomintang troops 1 1 military headquarters and 46 divisions, liberated Nanjing, Shanghai, Wuhan and other big cities, as well as the whole Jiangsu and Anhui provinces, most of Zhejiang provinces and one of Jiangxi, Hubei and Fujian provinces, creating important conditions for liberating the whole of East China and marching into South China and Southwest China.