6With the Nationalist government suing for peace in January 1949, the Communists were on a winning streak and, by March, Mao and Zhou, who together had endured more than two years of tough fighting and illness, entered Beijing.

My comments:

Winning streak is a common sports term for any period of time when a team wins all the games it plays. For example, if they played three games and won them all for the past week, they are on a three-game winning streak.

Likewise, teams can go on losing streak as well. If they lost three straight games last week, for instance, their losing streak is now three – if they cannot win their game next, their losing streak is going to hit four.

Put another way, that’s four losses in a row.

In our example, the Communists were winning battle after battle, campaign after campaign in the theatre of war. They’re not even dropping one battle for every two or three battles they won. They were winning them all.

In other words, they were dominating the Nationalists in 1949.

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Finishing touch

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Go to Zhang Xin's column

本文僅代表作者本人觀點(diǎn)，與本網(wǎng)立場(chǎng)無關(guān)。歡迎大家討論學(xué)術(shù)問題，尊重他人，禁止人身攻擊和發(fā)布一切違反國家現(xiàn)行法律法規(guī)的內(nèi)容。

About the author:

Zhang Xin（張欣） has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.