The history of China's civil war is complex, and its time span varies, which can be divided into several stages.
First of all, after the Xinhai Revolution, China entered the Beiyang ** period from 1911, when China was actually in a state of warlord secession, and warlords everywhere were fighting endlessly, and this situation lasted until 1927. During this period, although there were various nominal ***, in fact the regime was not unified, and the civil war continued almost for many years.
Then, from 1927 to 1937, the Kuomintang and the Communist Party fought the first civil war. This stage was mainly a conflict between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, and the Communist Party of China launched armed struggles in various places in order to resist the Kuomintang's ** policy, and established revolutionary base areas in some areas.
The period from 1937 to 1945 was the period of China's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, during which the Kuomintang and the Communist Party cooperated for the second time to jointly resist foreign aggression. But shortly after the end of the Sino-Japanese War, from 1946 to 1949, a second civil war broke out between the two parties, also known as the War of Liberation. This time the civil war ended in the victory of the Chinese Communist Party, and the Kuomintang ** retreated to Taiwan.
To sum up, if we count from the Xinhai Revolution, the civil war in China lasted for about 38 years. If you count from 1927, there are 22 years. And the War of Liberation (1946-1949) was an important stage of the civil war, which lasted for 3 years.