What follows is a commentary between Matt (a personal friend) and myself on a three-part PBS documentary on modern Chinese history that I've recommended fairly recently. (I have his permission to disclose his remarks on the subject.) My aim in re-posting these here is to put the material more in context and fill in some details that the documentary, as good as it overall, neglects to include. You will find part one of the documentary at the link below. Our commentary on part one follows.
CHINA: A CENTURY OF REVOLUTION
12:12 PM me: First of all, can I get your overall impression of this whole revolutionary process? Then we can look at more specifics.
12:13 PM Matthew: Seemed hard fought, that's for sure.
12:14 PM me: No question about that!
12:16 PM So okay then...
Let's start off with the general and get more specific as we go...
12:17 PM What opinions might you have developed of the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party)?
(And no, you don't have to give me a "right answer" or what have you. Just whatever you genuinely felt.)
12:19 PM Matthew: Seemed like it started with noble intentions of unifying the country, but got progressively more paranoid about communists taking over and became increasingly more corrupt.
me: I'd largely agree with that.
12:20 PM Here's something they didn't mention in the documentary about the Kuomintang that you might find of interest:
12:21 PM Sun Yat-Sen, the party founder and the guy who launched the 1911 military revolt (thus founding the formal-but-soon-non-existent 'republic') developed three guiding principles for the party.
1) Nationalism, 2) democracy, and 3) socialism.
12:22 PM Matthew: Ah, interesting.
12:23 PM me: It was thus originally conceived of as a sort of democratic socialist party, at least in theory. It was for that reason that the Comintern approved of the Communists uniting with them. (Comintern parties were discouraged from uniting with non-socialist parties, even tactically.) Now of course that was Sun Yat-Sen NOT Chiang Kai-Shek. You may have guessed that the two were rather different people.
12:25 PM Chiang was obviously more anti-communist. He indeed strikes me as simply having been less dedicated to all of Sun Yat-Sen's founding principles. He never did much to develop a socialist section of the economy, he never held elections, and he preferred to attack fellow Chinese (the Communists) rather than the Japanese enemy, even after the invasion.
12:26 PM Would you agree with that summation, or did you have a different take?
12:28 PM Matthew: Nah, I'd say you got it. It said Chiang was a professional soldier at the beginning, he probably wasn't prepared at all for significant power.
12:29 PM me: That's another good point that you raise.
12:30 PM Because even long after they had lost mainland China and retreated to the island of Taiwan (known as Formosa at the time), even in Taiwan, Chiang and the Kuomintang continued to rule by martial law until 1987, and did not allow competing parties until 1989.
12:31 PM Matthew: Wow.
12:32 PM me: Same time frame as the Tiananmen Square democracy demonstrations on the mainland. There was no difference in terms of which (the mainland or Taiwan) was more democratic during and even for some time after the Mao era. Right the 1980s, Taiwan was also a one-party state.
We simply supported Taiwan because it was less socialist.
Not because it was more democratic.
12:33 PM But with the area-wide democracy movement of the late '80s, mainland China and Taiwan responded in different ways. Taiwan opened up democratically. China (clearly) did not.
12:34 PM Matthew: Ah.
me: Mainland China, for all intents and purposes, has never been democratic yet.
Despite being called a "republic" for a century now.
12:35 PM And so now we come to the Communists. What was your general impression of their role in all of this?
12:38 PM Matthew: Seemed like decent people, generally trying to make things better for their fellow countrymen.
12:40 PM me: Not surprisingly, I agree. :P
12:41 PM They actually did agree in early 1946 to form a coalition government with the Kuomintang and even to merge the two armies, but that was before a dispute over Manchuria arose.
12:43 PM Matthew: Ahh.
me: It was very understandable in my mind why things reverted to civil war after the close of WW2. I mean look at how it ended: the Communists had fought hard with the people to win an estimated 35% of the country in the course of the war, and then at the end the Kuomintang just swoops in and asserts control over all the territories the Communists had fought for. (At least they fought the Japanese enemy and not their fellow Chinese!)
12:44 PM There is something deeply wrong about that.
12:45 PM (I refer, of course, to the American airlift of the KMT representatives to take the Japanese surrender in the north, despite the fact that the Communists had done the fighting in the north.)
12:46 PM Matthew: By then, it seems like the Kuomintang was too far gone to have any good intentions anymore.
12:48 PM me: You can sense that in how the urban dwellers (that would be basically people in the KMT-controlled areas) responded to the advance of the People's Liberation Army.
12:49 PM After a certain point, they all just started switching sides.
12:50 PM Matthew: Makes sense to.
me: Well that would probably have a lot to do with the whole history under the KMT on a certain level, but also specifically the war effort against the Communists and their PLA (People's Liberation Army). Funding the war effort drove the cities bankrupt, resulting in runaway inflation.
I think the documentary even touched on that a little.
If for no other reason, the urbanites did NOT support the civil war, especially after WW2.
12:51 PM They wanted to make peace with the Communists.
Not many people shed a tear when the PLA finally rolled in.
12:52 PM Another thing the documentary didn't mention is that the KMT government in the civil war was buoyed by 150,000 American troops.
12:55 PM Matthew: Really? They mentioned aid, but not troops.
me: Oh yes, there were ground troops.
12:58 PM Okay, now let's maybe get to some specific peeps on the commie side, shall we?
(Unless you're typing, in which case finish.)
1:00 PM Matthew: Nope, go on.
me: Let's start with the obvious: Mao. What was your overall of him 1) as a person, and 2) as a strategist and tactician?
1:02 PM Matthew: Seemed like a guy with good intentions. And his strategies seemed a lot smarter than the nationalists.
1:04 PM me: I'll go further: to me, they also seemed a lot smarter than those of the Soviet-dominated Communist International (Comintern).
1:05 PM I don't think the Comintern had much of a good role at all in China. They basically just insisted that the Chinese Communists apply the Soviet approach to making revolution. The events of the Northern Expedition and the fact that the Long March happened at all tell me that, had they followed the Comintern's approach, the Chinese Communists would have been wiped out.
1:06 PM Matthew: Probably, yeah.
me: It's very arrogant IMO for foreigners to insist that they know Chinese conditions better than those who live in them.
1:07 PM They HAD to do some original thinking, and Mao was just the guy to offer some.
Matthew: Remove the word Chinese and it could be true for pretty much any country.
1:09 PM me: Stalin, by the way, strongly disagreed with Mao's approach all the way through. He believed that the Chinese Communists under Mao had shifted their party's base fundamentally from being the wage-working classes to instead the rural peasantry, which THEY believed had very different interests. Well I think to a substantial degree, it is true that they changed their base, but like I've explained before, my current definition of the proletariat is based on poverty. I don't believe the peasants were any less revolutionary than the urban workers.
(I agree with your last statement.)
1:13 PM Matthew: Yeah, Stalin doesn't make much sense there.
1:14 PM me: Okay, so a different name now: Zhou Enlai.
He was mentioned at various points.
And that name will be a recurring one in part 2 as well.
So it's best to remember who Zhou was.
1:15 PM Matthew: Who was that again?
1:16 PM me: Zhou, as part one mentions, was the guy who led the Red Guards in initially taking Shanghai during the Northern Expedition before they were betrayed by the KMT troops. He was also a prominent figure in the Long March whose decision to side with Mao's line against Otto Braun's was crucial in changing the party's leadership (shifting it to Mao.) He likewise was the guy who negotiated the united front the KMT against Japan in late 1936.
1:17 PM (His name is pronounced like a "ch" in English, as though it were "Chou Enlai".)
1:18 PM Matthew: Ahh.
me: Coming back to you now?
1:19 PM Matthew: A little bit.
1:20 PM me: Zhou is one of those pragmatic characters whom I like throughout.
Matthew: What part does he play in the next one? Or are you gonna leave me to find out?
1:21 PM me: lol, well you'll find out.
Matthew: Thought so.
me: Speaking of which, this worked out nicely today. Wanna try something similar on Friday?
Concerning part two?
1:22 PM Matthew: Sure!
me: Alrighty, we'll plan on that.
Okay, patriotism.
1:23 PM Matthew: Okay.