Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
The turning point in the CCP-GMD civil war was the Battle of Huai Hai (November 1948-January 1949). "PLA troops surrounded 500,000 GMD soldiers, decimating them in three stages." Abbreviations: GMD (Guomindang or Nationalist Party); CCP (Chinese Communist Party); PLA (People's Liberation Army, the army of the People's Republic of China; [Fall and Rise of China, Glossary]