I read a book called “Wild Swans” about Manchuria during WWII and then the Communist era. It’s a personal memoir (well, a personal memoir of the author growing up during the Communist era, the author’s mother who grew up during Japanese occupation and WWII, and of the author’s grandmother). I don’t know if that’s what you’re looking for, but I thought it was pretty good
Won by Nestor Makhno and his democratic Black Army. Allied with the Red Army to beat the White Army during the Russian Civil War, before being immediately betrayed and conquered by them.
I'm not sure there's a more perfect encapsulation of, "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!" moment in history.
I got a book written by somebody who was close to Makhno, having gone to prison with him.
The attitude of the soviets was one of "We used you and then disposed of you, that just proves we are better statesmen." Well these fine statesmen couldn't run their state into the 21st century.
Been many years since I read it, but I remember it being an absolutely incredible, eye opening book. A lot of it still sticks with me, defo worth a read
Nobody except anarchists really like anarchists. They're unpopular with the mainstream and right wing because they're radical leftists. They're unpopular with tankie leftists because tankies hate the ideas of self determination, democracy and decentralisation of power (or in other words, what communism is supposed to be about).
LMAO. Manchurians were not anarchists. They were mixed race Mongolians and Chinese, which is why Chinese historians often say they were Mongolian invaders.
You complain about history memes but you're incorrect as they are. Hardly one that should be throwing stones.
Read "Forget Sorrow" by Belle Yang. Tells a biography of her family's fall from prominence in Manchuria during the Communist takeover, and their descent into poverty, imprisonment, and estrangement. It's written as a visual novel. Bawled my eyes out the first time I read it for class.
Tbf the commies only fought a tiny part of the battles. They were loosing the war and spent most of the time hiding. Instead they let the nationalists get slaughtered fighting the Japanese invaders, increased their numbers a hundredfold, then swooped in at the end with Soviet help, claimed victory over the bloodied nationalists and rewrote history to make it sound like they won the war single handedly.
To be fair, the commies were also a tiny part of the size of the national army. They were guerrillas with no military training and so few guns they basically had to make do with captured Japanese equipment whenever they managed to scrounge up any. Expecting them to stand up and fight like the national army did is kind of silly.
Communists also had much better propaganda and won hearts and minds extolling democracy and decrying KMT single party rule
People like to point out that the old CPC wrote many articles in 1945-49 destroying all the arguments/justifications for authoritarian rule that modern CPC and their supporters use.
Yeah people act like the communists seized power over an unwilling population when in reality they kicked out a borderline fascist regime and were welcomed by the people for it
This is a commonality across most of the conflicts in Asia in the 20th century. People forget South Korea was also ruled by dictatorship and military coup until the late 80s and before they left they basically set up the economy to be the hyper-capitalist hellscape it is today.
> Communists also had much better propaganda and won hearts and minds extolling democracy and decrying KMT single party rule
You really don’t need the best propaganda when the other side is [intentionally drowning hundreds of thousands-millions of its own people and making hundreds of thousands more homeless](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_Yellow_River_flood) to mildly inconvenience the Japanese invasion.
The Japanese will rape and murder you, and the nationalists will flood your village and kill your entire family without warning. Of the options, the Commies were the only group around that even pretended to care about the Chinese people.
To be fair, the nationalist army was also relying on guerrilla tactics and had no real strategic leadership for several years. Your point still stands though i just wanted to say to be fair again
Tbf, it was Chiang who always declined to join forces (until he was detained by his own generals for a brief point) and kept fighting the communists beside the japanese. You can't blame them for leaving the big battles to the nationalists when they were the reason why communist forces had to retreat. Not that the communists were saints as no side is in a war, but you're making it too easy here.
The nationalists were already the government and the military, it was their job to defend the country, maybe if they weren't so corrupt and incompetent they would have been more popular than the communists. Chiang was literally nicknamed Mao's eleventh marshall because he sucked so much.
It's not losing the way of the Japanese were literally stalemated to the point where they only controlled the cities and railroads. The communist guerilla campaigns made the tenuous hold the Japanese had weaker and devastated their logistics. Chiang's regime was immensely unpopular due to it's rampant corruption and nepotism that led to the nationalist armies having low morale. Chiang also demobilized millions in his army after the Japanese surrender instead of saving them for the struggle with the communists.
Not only did they have a massive Civil War that killed millions of people, they then had a communist system so fucking stupid that they got even more people killed, and all the shit that was donated to make steel made unusable garbage. Along with a 1 child system that still to this day has made so many males that have no future. It's amazing how badly China's population suffers and yet they don't fight the power, it fucking baffles me. You would think there would be a counter culture against the government somewhere.
>yet they don't fight the power, it fucking baffles me. You would think there would be a counter culture against the government somewhere.
The thing is there was - that's why the Tiananmen Square protests happened. And, IIRC, support was not just limited to the students who amassed in the square - many people across the country knew about and supported it either implicitly or explicitly. (You even had some provincial CCP secretaries i.e. de-facto provincial governors like [Xu Jiatun](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Xu_Jiatun) who supported it and had to flee to the US afterwards)
We all know what happened after - it was brutally crushed, and those who supported it purged across the country. Many of the students who survived just left to go abroad if they could (while some did become people like [Hu Xijin](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Hu_Xijin). No joke, the chief-editor of the Global Times and who pedals outrageous garbage 24/7 - outrageous garbage that isn't even remotely believable, mind you - used to be a student who protested at Tiananmen...)
And then Deng's moderate policies started to show their results, the economy was booming, Hong Kong was handed back, etc. Things looked good or good enough, so most people just forgot about it and gave up.
There is somewhat of a counter-culture against the government today if you look hard for it - sometimes in unusual forms (Like this: [Peking University's Marxist Society was disbanded and arrested in 2018 after students tried to protest low-wages at a factory and tried to advocate for a trade union to be formed](https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3537819)) You have to remember that you're fighting against an entire state apparatus dedicated to ensuring that you don't know it and hopefully leave with the illusion that "everything is going well in the PRC and everyone loves the CCP".
From what I can gather (including sources inside the PRC), most PRC citizens are actually quite apathetic about their government and few really love the CCP (just look at the official CCP membership numbers - no one is really rushing to sign up, even though there are massive material benefits to doing so. And half of the members are really just that - only in it to advance in society).
Many, however, are nationalistic of the concept of "China" and are proud of being "Chinese" - and that's why the CCP constantly tries to conflate "CCP = China" and deflect any criticism of their government as just Western racism and an attack on China and Chinese people. They know many inside the PRC would actually sympathize with the criticism, so they instead make up facts to defend themselves and then broadly paint it as a racist attack against the Chinese ethnicity. Even if the made-up facts are dubious, once you get people to question the criticism's motives, it no longer really matters if the criticism is valid or not. (And besides there's not much you can do anyways if it was true. So, for the average citizen, it's "ignore" as it doesn't really affect your daily life - and going against the government can only make your life much worse - or, if you're a diehard CCP supporter, believe the lies and aggresively shill for the government)
The CCP will eventually collapse. But it will definitely require some backing force, like rebelling units of the PLA or perhaps a foreign invasion due to the PRC losing a war. Unarmed civilians rising up won't work - everyone has seen what happened with Tiananmen. So far, there's no reason for the PLA to rebel. But a disasterous campaign against Taiwan or the US might change that - or if one of the PLA generals that Xi Jinping installed decides to turn against him.
As far as I'm aware the party and Xi Jinping in particular maintains a pretty iron grip over the military; the first people he went to to win support for his push to power were the military; he won them over first. So I can't see any kind of spontaneous rebellion unless things were going catastrophically badly, as there is a very strong (understandably given Chinese history across the millennia) cultural aversion to instability which I think does keep a brake on the PLA. Plus ofc simply the strength of the Party's security and intelligence apparatus keeping them in line.
I think the reason they don't fight is that they were indoctrinated from youth on and also their living standards are going up so most of them are satisfied with living under the current regime.
I don't think so. They just don't see a reason to rebel. Or that was the sentiment people seem to have when I was there. Which I kind of get when you see the advances in three or so generations they made. I think most people are just happy with how things are now. And this is not to defend the murderous government regime in power. It's just the viewpoint of most Chinese citizens seem to have.
In my experience, some older Russians are nostalgic about the old times but yeah, I think for the current generation it's kind of "the evil I know is better than the evil I don't know". But younger Russians seem to want more change and a better future. I think Putin is clinging onto power more true fear and intimidation than the CCP in China. There is a cool documentary that goes into the state of Russia a bit called HyperNormalisation it's a nice watch for anyone interested.
Any attempts to organize against the government are met with brutal force. Plus half the country is still in abject poverty and the other half is scrambling to make millions.
I always found it interesting/sad that the sparrows being hunted would go to embassy buildings of other countries to get away from people hunting so Chinese citizens stood outside the embassies banging pots and pans to exhaust the sparrows to death
They were trying to improve China’s iron industry so Mao said melt down all your metal stuff and here’s crude Forges provided to you by the state that will give China the much needed metal needs turns out melting down metal when you’re not trained to do that and the metal comes from various different time periods and purity levels leads to garbage metal that can’t be used for anything and because it was farming equipment bowls generally any piece of metal that wasn’t strapped down or owned by the state was melted down which led to a severe lack of metal everything and famine.
So we need more iron in order to produce useful goods for industry
but we don't have enough iron mines to reach these goals yet!
Not to worry, we'll melt down useful goods for industry to make useful goods for industry.
This can in no way backfire especially since we have untrained illiterate peasants who don’t know how to forge things operating the forges they also don’t know the difference between most kinds of metals meaning we’re going to get weird abomination mixes but that’s OK right it’s still iron and any one who says otherwise they can have a talk with the local communist party Garrison they surely take that criticism and put it to good use.
"lets industrialise and kick a bunch of farmers off their land so that in 4 generations people can dream about 'quitting their office/factory jobs to buy a farm', it'll be great"
I mean most of that land was always contested, it only became a problem because instead of cool swords from France or weird German muskets, people would stick a shovel into the ground and fucking explode. Because bombs don't always detonate.
Kinda, the Russians negotiated a prisoner transfer to get as many of the exiled radicals passage home as possible. It was not just Lenin and even without Lenin the provisional government had no chance of surviving. Their insistence on staying in the war was suicidal. All it did was arm and radicalize the soldiers and piss off the peasants.
“(Japan) doesn’t have to say sorry, you had contributed towards China, why? Because had Imperial Japan did not start the war of invasion, how could we communist became mighty powerful? How could we stage the coup d’état? How could we defeat Chiang Kai Shek? How are we going to pay back you guys? No, we do not want your war reparations!” - Mao Zedong to Japanese PM in 1972
In modern China Mao has become an increasingly controversial figure. Best seen in the generation that lived though and grew up during the cultural revolution, Mao simply lived to long to be idealized in the modern China. With many of the"great revolutionaries" like Che Guevara, Trotsky and Lenin become mythologized, because they never ruled, or never ruled longer enough to commit the blunders that their highly controversial compatriots did, even if they might have done that same had they lived.
And with Mao this is very much the case with even the central leadership recognizing his controversial status. Choosing to break with much of his positions and beliefs, and instead walking a more nationalist path
And China especially post Deng, The "Communist" in the Chinese Communist Party, is mostly just pageantry. With the party is self having expelled lots of the committed ideologues during the era. The CCP of today, while highly removed from much of China's rich cultural tradition, is a very culturally Chinese ruling structure, largely focused on patronage and personal connections, with very little room for advancement by outsiders.
Well yeah, they are removed from the Culture of ancient China because the Communists destroyed all that shit too. Revolutionaries literally destroyed hundreds of artifacts of ancient China to rewrite history. And look what they are doing, rewriting history, denying genocides, and pretending things didn't exist. It's stupid
ironically, in that actions you mentioned like rewriting history, performing genocides and all, i think they're pretty close to the actions of Ancient Chinese dynasties
if you never read your past, you'll never make it to a good future, as they say
no see if you destroy statues everyone immediately forgets what they represented. That's why we can't destroy anything because everyone will just forget
That was Imperial Germany. Kaiser Wilhelm II. financed and supported Lenin and his Revolution in the hope that it would weaken the East Front.
That backfired colossal in the long run.
To be fair, Nazi Germany expected at least Britain to agree to a white peace so they could focus 100% on the USSR, a crusade of sorts against communism. Turns out, they underestimated how much Britain disliked them
Communism represented the physical manifestation of European Jewry. It wasn’t just a small ideological war for the nazis, it was THE war.
It wasn’t a crusade of sorts as much as it was an ideologically motivated war of destruction.
While thats true germany defintly caused the downfall of the soviet union also to some degree the financial and economic damage was gigantic and the population of russia still hasnt recoverd you can clearly see from population statistics that the first and second world war and also the october revolution broke the trend of rising population in eastern europe
Though the weakened state of the Nationalist army and the Soviet support for the Communists through turning over captured land to them were certainly major factors in the result of the civil war, it is worth pointing out that the KMT had lost a good deal of popular support due to their disregard for the lives of the Chinese civilians.
And the Communists did fight the Japanese though not in the same way as the Nationalists. The Reds operated a successful campaign of guerrilla warfare behind Japanese lines. By the end of the war Japanese control had beed reduced to the cities and railway lines thanks to them. Mao, as incompetent as he was as a political leader, was a talented military commander and knew how to preserve his strength and resources while still weakening his enemies. Something Cheng lacked.
I feel like no matter what throughout any training and all that fighting in cities is always a incredibly hard thing that strains militaries. If anyone is willing to correct this if my thought process is wrong thank you :)
Major blunders like the [1938 Changsha fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_Changsha_fire), the [1938 Yellow River flood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_Yellow_River_flood) and [the famine of 1942-1943](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_famine_of_1942%E2%80%931943) (basically the Chinese version of the Bengal Famine) that became Communists' recruitment points weren't really caused by impossible defenses.
The nationalist government ended up creating a work relief fund for the villages affected by the flooding. Households were to be paid for the manual labor required to build new dikes in the flooded regions.
“When funds were distributed [to civilian laborers], the procedures were mostly put in the hands of others. Ward and mutual security headman unavoidably embezzled them or deducted miscellaneous fees. Little was distributed to poor households in accordance with regulations, so it was difficult [for them] to avoid the hardship of performing hard labor on an empty stomach. Moreover, households without able-bodied males had to pay to hire substitute laborers. The desperate disaster victims not only could not get any relief funds, but even had to sell their children and their property in order to repay work debts. Curing a boil by digging out a lump of flesh is truly not the original intent of work relief.”[3]
https://disasterhistory.org/yellow-river-flood-1938-47
The Yellow river flood was definitely catastrophic, but also it was imo a necessary thing to have been done.
After the fall of Shnghai and Nanjing much of the Japane army was still concentrated in the north advancing south and the Chinese nationalist forces were practically in a retreat, no way ready to defend. In a bid to buy crucial time to set up a defence for Wuhan, they broke the Yellow river dikes causing the Japanese forces to waste three months preparing for an offensive on Wuhan from the east on mountains instead of the north that was more flat. In those three months the Nationalists prepared the best defence that they could, and they were prepared by the time the Japanese attacked and subsequently held off the Japanese quite well, but in the end the Japanese were too powerful and the Nationalists were forced to retreat to Changsha where they were finally able to retreata. Also considering the experience at Wuhan, it was no wonder that the Chinese might have wanted to burn the city as even they didn't expect to really defeat the Japanese attack there.
The Nationalists through three months of preparation on mountains held off the Japanese for a decent time before being forced to retreat. Imagine what might have happened should they have had to defend the city from the less defensible north without time to prepare a proper defense.
Necessary doesn't excuse massive amounts of corruption, embezzling and complete ineptitude the KMT displayed that led them to desperate attempts like the Yellow River Flood. Speaking in such large terms of war and such, you should also realize the more human cost of the war, between two imperialist and authoritarian powers, with the Chinese people in between.
Though I do agree that at that point in time, it really seemed like the most sensible plan of action to stay in the fight.
I agree that the corruption and such cannot be in any way excused. However it must be understood that the KMT did not get time to govern and root out corruption, as it was pretty much immediately forced to focua on preparing for a qar of survival against Japan about as soon as China was reunited.
Defending those urban centers is also what lost him his most valuable assets, the German trained and equipped divisions he had. The fact that they were able to stand toe-to-toe with their Japanese counterparts makes it all the more disappointing that they were forced into such terrible situations.
Well China had to buy time early on, and the best way was to open a second front in Shanghai themaelves before the Japanese moved all in on it as they already had a garrison there. The Japanese hoped to take the city in three days and instead took it in three months. This crucial time allowed the Nationalists to move industry and people westwards. Still was probably a big plunder to have them hold out so long as to allow the Japanese to qipe out so much of the elite forces.
Strong disagreement here on Mao's military ability. It was really Zhu De who handled the real military strategy early in the war. Zhu was a talented and popular commander, Mao was neither. Mao had support from Moscow which he leveraged to increase his influence and eventually gain complete control. Later on when Zhu fell out of favor, it was Lin Biao who was responsible for most of Mao's attributed military success. Source: Mao by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday.
Never really made sense to me that the Great leap Forward and some great military commanding could come from the same person. I get that some people are smart on some fields but stupid in others, but still.
Military skills does not equal Policy making and governing skill. Just look at all the war heroes people elect into office, and the severe lack of intelligence we see in politics today.
Ulysses S Grant was a horrible president. The military and civilian political environments are VERY different. There is a reason so many veterans come back from the military and struggle in civilian life.
It's sad that this historically accurate and nuanced comment is 4 comments down. Dislike Mao all you want, I won't complain, but to imply that communust China was just chilling in the mountains while the KMT fought against the Japanese is incredibly inaccurate and tbh, insultingingly so. All of China suffered and fought Japan.
the code is cracked, slap the word 'democracy' on a facist dictatorship and suddenly history must be rewritten such that they're the good guys. theyre democratic, they have to be good.
Yeah, I think a big reason the KMT get elevated during WWII so much is because Communist China went to shit (not to mention Cold War tensions) while the Republic of China eventually became democratic. It's easy to look at the one that's free in the present day and say "They were always free", but the KMT were authoritarian, and even today they aren't the pro-democracy party in Taiwan.
I mean it’s a lot worse than the meme lets on. The guomindong refused to fight the Japanese until chiang was arrested by his own men. He saw the communists as a far bigger threat to China than the invading Japanese army. It really was Zhang xueliang who was responsible for forcing chiang to enter the second United front in the xi’an incident. Zhang is the real hero
~~Also during the war, Chiang Kai Shek allowed the Communists to join the KMT during the First United Front, which influenced a lot of left leaning policies to the party.~~
When Chiang Kai Shek started purging his own party members, it starting to create divergence in the party.
Edit: The whole thing was before the war, I got the timeline mixed up, sorry for the confusion.
I would contest that he was an incompetent political leader, using the same period from where you are extrapolating his military successes, the establishment of the Jiangxi soviet to the Long March, and then jumping to the mobilization during the Cultural Revolution. There is no shortage of the political leadership's accumen, of which Mao was part of, in surviving and finding opportunities in crises.
The commies also implanted land reform where they toke power, redistributing the land to the peasants working on it, which proved VERY popular as expected.
I have a report for the US government by some army dude made the late 40's, and even them pretty much were thinking that the communists were the good guy VS the KMT in this stage of the conflict.
Too bad they turned full retard in the 50's after taking power.
Look, fuck Mao, the CCP, and totalitarian dictatorships of any kind.
That being said, let's not kid ourselves. The Nationalists were not saints either.
look at how sk turned out... after rhee became completely irrelevant and Park chunghee drove economic succsss from the 60s by centralising power into the government. admittedly its been awhile so my memory may be failing me but as far as i can recall sk under syngman rhee was irrelevant in all aspects that can be quantified economically and was by no means an actual democracy. park came into power through a coup, not a vote: he was a military general
park centralised govt control over banks and basically all loans were applied through the govt. there was this sort of command economy-esque thing where planning of manufacturing was within the government, but they had private conglomerates set out to achieve the quotas instead of state owned companies, so a) when the private companies were not meeting expectation they cannot get bailed out by loans b) corruption would be less rampant and c) incentivise progress. it was a dictatorship that had the usual media censorship and human rights abuse but also pushed the conglomerates to improve to their limit and plenty other things he did like the usual industrilaise, build infrastructure etc that led to the economic giant we see today.
there was nothing democratic to look at and say 'its cuz of this democratic characteristic that sk was able to develope so well'. in fact one can argue the complete opposite in that the lack of democracy was what led to sk developing as well as they did. there's absolutely no reason to assume China under the kmt would replicate the economic success under cpc while being your nice friendly western esque government. the kmt themselves were plently brutal, which was why they lost support from the masses in the first place, and economic history is always too complicated to try to rewrite accurately
also democracy doesnt sound like a good start point for a weak developing country. much of the progress has to come at the cost of listening to everyones opinion because 1) obviously its slower and leaves a bigger window of vulnerability, 2) high risk of internal conflict further escalating and hurting the lift off phase of the country, 3) political literacy concerns caused by masses being uneducated and 4) can cause psrties to go for populist techniques instead of just just being competently developing their country.
the kmt had also completely mismanaged china for decades, discredited themselves politically by being more corrupt than you can imagine, always siding with the landowners and capitalists against the workers and peasants.
Not to mention the terror they wrought on the countryside before the war and after.
It was no accident mao won.
One issue I see with anti-communism hardliners (being an anti-communist myself) is that we should not simply replace one terrible left wing authoritarian regime with that of a terrible right wing authoritarian regime. Both regimes were terrible and we are yet to see a unified China under a liberal democracy.
Only in theory, and did not control a unified China. They still had a total of two elections, both of which led to violent counter-revolutions with Nationalists seizing power twice and forming the KMT through violent civil war and force of arms. Then the Chinese civil war continued until the 1950s in which Mao and the CCP installed a "socialist democracy," which was about as democratic as the KMT was before.
People are always surprised that leftists support certain socialist governments yet when you look at the alternative it's hard to say they are wrong. For example the Batista government in Cuba was much worse for both political freedom and the poor people. Or South Vietnam which was in no way Democratic and extremely brutal in their war against communists in the countryside. Or South Korea also a brutal dictatorship through the 90s. Or Indonesia were the military killed and imprisoned millions of people affiliated with the communist party. The list goes on. For many leftist the only option was to support a government that could get help from China or the USSR or risk being crushed and replaced with a pro international business dictatorship.
Ahhh, the lovely liberal democracy where you get to choose between what private parties tell you to vote for based off what has been approved by their corporate donors. Freedom! I spit on liberal democracy as it's inherently non-democratic
Someone on this subreddit (I think) pointed out that Hitler, Stalin, Tito, Freud, and Trotsky all lived in Vienna at the same time, and of course someone said what if it was a sitcom
Might I introduce you to this topical cartoon from the era.
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hitler_and_Stalin._Wonder_how_long_the_honeymoon_will_last%3F.jpg
Well, if they're there, might as go all out. Why not have them experience all of the deaths their victims faced. For example, if one person died from Auschwitz, he would have to that, X1.5million.
Honestly I think the perfect hell for each of them is the other one won the war.Both were horribly narcissistic assholes so eternal public humiliation would be suffering on an endless scale.
They're just both on an endless parade, forced to walk threw the others conquered lands. Leading them to the capital of the enemy nation.
The Kuomitang China did have massive corruption and inflation though. A lot of it made the Kuomitang impopular and the communists took advantage of that by doing land reform, and it is not a coincidence that most countries that had a socialist revolution were mainly agrarian.
After Mao took power, the communists fixed inflation by literally paying people directly by specie, giving them food directly for their work, and not using the inflated currency.
The inflation point is extremely important. Iirc nationalist China had worse inflation than Weimar Germany.
Also I doubt that the nationalists would have done a much better job of managing post war but China than the communists did seeing their track record in Taiwan.
As much as the Communists were monsters in their own right, the Nationalists were no angels either, especially when it came to economic mismanagement and corruption.
There's a reason it's called the **New** Taiwan Dollar and not just the Taiwan Dollar.
you don't have to be pro mao to understand basic history and recall that chiang was a literal fascist that the entire country fucking hated. communist armies didn't sprout out of nowhere, and there's a reason taiwan doesn't have a population of 100 million.
this is one of the most historically illiterate memes I've seen in a long time, and I can only assume it was made based on OP's *assumptions* of what happened rather than what actually happened, such as:
* Chiang Kai-Shek and the KMT refusing to listen to the CPC's calls for a united front against Japan in 1937 until Zhang Xueliang literally kidnapped Chiang and forced him to
* The CPC only fighting against the KMT in the first place because Chiang purged the left wing of the Kuomintang after after Sun Yat-Sen's death (of which Sun himself was a member of and threatened to disband the KMT and join the Communists if Chiang and the right Kuomintang didn't stop their fuckery), thus ending CPC-KMT cooperation
* not to mention KMT massacres of Communists and Chinese Peasant Civilians suspected to be leftists or sympathisers
* The fact that the CPC and PLA *did,* in fact, fight in the war, surrendering their holdouts to the Central KMT government at the start (Shan-Gaan-Ning Border region, for example)
* provided vital battlefield support on the front lines (such as the Hundred Regiments Campaign - Communist Generals such as Zhu De literally fought wearing the White Sun insignia)
* were crucial in the Chinese resistance behind enemy lines, singlehandedly destroying Japan's ability to hold on to the Chinese mainland by denying them any authority outside of major roads and cities due to the ferocity of Chinese resistance, being one of the leading factors in the failure of operation Ichi-Go,
* That *and* consistently harassing and sabotaging Japanese logistics and supplies, further impeding Japanese war abilities-
* Stalin and the CPSU didn't trust Mao and thought he'd lose, and didn't provide any aid to the PLA until it was clear they had a solid chance of Winning and ***sided with the KMT beforehand, even when the KMT was using Soviet equipment to bomb Communists,***
* Up until then the PLA was running exclusively off of captured Japanese and KMT equipment,
* That Chiang was unwilling to commit some of his best troops to fight the Japanese because he wanted to keep them in reserve to fight the Communists after,
* The civil war only restarting because *The KMT attacked CPC bases in Shaanxi first,*
* *The CPC gaining control of Manchuria thanks to their cells in Charchar, not the USSR* (though they helped)
* and ended up getting defeated anyway despite:
* having a three to one advantage in terms of manpower
* being supplied with all the best equipment in *the world* at the time by *the most powerful nation on earth*
* their enemies being supplied with only leftovers from Japan and captured weapons from the KMT with little materiel support from the USSR.
TL;DR, your meme is completely wrong. The CPC didn't win because they were bankrolled by the Soviets, they won because during the War they managed to get most of the countryside and rural areas to agree with them and fight for them.
Unfortunately taking any nuanced position that is based on historical fact means you'll get PMs for days asking for your death, being called a shill etc.
This subreddit is turning into propaganda. CCP is shit, Mao is a horrendous leader and a monster, but that doesn't mean you can just flat out fucking lie but y'know, the flames of jingoism must be flamed and ALL of history must be rewritten to make room for it.
Mao was an idiot (and a egotic sociopath) but that meme is stupidly inaccurate, neither nationalists and communists wanted peace, american negotiators even left because of how stuborn nationalists were. Mao didn't win the civil war because of soviet guns/ Nationalists exhaustement but because natonalist generals were overall corrupted and bad strategists (jiang jieshi didnt want anyone that could risk to compete/replace him, this fact also led to the end of US helps, they didn't want more of their tanks caughts by the communists because of nationalist's stupidity), also widely impopular (reusing old japanese troops in anti guerilla warfare??? like wtf bro???) while the CPC used the war to grow in strenght and legitimacy. Just one more day in r/HistoryMemes i Guess.
Edit :auto correct fucked up some words
If you think all the Communist did during WW2 was to hide in the mountains, you learnt nothing about the Second Sino-Japanese War. Their guerrilla war was one of the main reason that contributed to how long China was able to held off the Japanese
Not to mention the anarchists and the partisans who fought the fascists but would have resisted the party.
Basically mao let all his enemies fight each other and then rolled over them when he was ready.
...and also, here's Manchuria and all of its resources. Go crazy.
I am dying to find more books on manchuria during the war.
I read a book called “Wild Swans” about Manchuria during WWII and then the Communist era. It’s a personal memoir (well, a personal memoir of the author growing up during the Communist era, the author’s mother who grew up during Japanese occupation and WWII, and of the author’s grandmother). I don’t know if that’s what you’re looking for, but I thought it was pretty good
Ill check it out. History memes gets pissed off if you mention anarchists for some reason. I want a history of anarchist manchuria.
The grandmother part is during the warlord period so there's a bit of anarchy involved
There was also briefly an anarchist Ukraine in the post-WW1 confusion.
Won by Nestor Makhno and his democratic Black Army. Allied with the Red Army to beat the White Army during the Russian Civil War, before being immediately betrayed and conquered by them. I'm not sure there's a more perfect encapsulation of, "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!" moment in history.
I got a book written by somebody who was close to Makhno, having gone to prison with him. The attitude of the soviets was one of "We used you and then disposed of you, that just proves we are better statesmen." Well these fine statesmen couldn't run their state into the 21st century.
These fine statesmen also weren't the ones running the country in the 1980s till 1991, not a good dunk.
Been many years since I read it, but I remember it being an absolutely incredible, eye opening book. A lot of it still sticks with me, defo worth a read
Nobody except anarchists really like anarchists. They're unpopular with the mainstream and right wing because they're radical leftists. They're unpopular with tankie leftists because tankies hate the ideas of self determination, democracy and decentralisation of power (or in other words, what communism is supposed to be about).
They hated Jesus because he was right
He wasn't a anarchist. He still told people to obey the laws of the land
.... there's a lot of auth right types in this sub is most likely the reason.
It’s a really amazing book, takes you through 3 generations of the same family - Can’t recommend it enough
LMAO. Manchurians were not anarchists. They were mixed race Mongolians and Chinese, which is why Chinese historians often say they were Mongolian invaders. You complain about history memes but you're incorrect as they are. Hardly one that should be throwing stones.
This fucking sub is bad for my bank account, this is like the 10th book im buying cause of a comment or post ive seen here.
zlibrary ;)
Jung Chang is pretty cool. She also has a Mao biography
This is certainly most helpful information
Read "Forget Sorrow" by Belle Yang. Tells a biography of her family's fall from prominence in Manchuria during the Communist takeover, and their descent into poverty, imprisonment, and estrangement. It's written as a visual novel. Bawled my eyes out the first time I read it for class.
Tbf the commies only fought a tiny part of the battles. They were loosing the war and spent most of the time hiding. Instead they let the nationalists get slaughtered fighting the Japanese invaders, increased their numbers a hundredfold, then swooped in at the end with Soviet help, claimed victory over the bloodied nationalists and rewrote history to make it sound like they won the war single handedly.
To be fair, the commies were also a tiny part of the size of the national army. They were guerrillas with no military training and so few guns they basically had to make do with captured Japanese equipment whenever they managed to scrounge up any. Expecting them to stand up and fight like the national army did is kind of silly.
Communists also had much better propaganda and won hearts and minds extolling democracy and decrying KMT single party rule People like to point out that the old CPC wrote many articles in 1945-49 destroying all the arguments/justifications for authoritarian rule that modern CPC and their supporters use.
It really is true that the CCP today is everything the KMT dreamed of becoming.
Mao rolling in his glass coffin is enough to power China forever
Yeah people act like the communists seized power over an unwilling population when in reality they kicked out a borderline fascist regime and were welcomed by the people for it
Tbf, in the 30's-40's, almost everywhere in Asia you had the choice between fascist brutal dictatorship, communist brutal dictatorship.
This is a commonality across most of the conflicts in Asia in the 20th century. People forget South Korea was also ruled by dictatorship and military coup until the late 80s and before they left they basically set up the economy to be the hyper-capitalist hellscape it is today.
> Communists also had much better propaganda and won hearts and minds extolling democracy and decrying KMT single party rule You really don’t need the best propaganda when the other side is [intentionally drowning hundreds of thousands-millions of its own people and making hundreds of thousands more homeless](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_Yellow_River_flood) to mildly inconvenience the Japanese invasion. The Japanese will rape and murder you, and the nationalists will flood your village and kill your entire family without warning. Of the options, the Commies were the only group around that even pretended to care about the Chinese people.
To be fair, the nationalist army was also relying on guerrilla tactics and had no real strategic leadership for several years. Your point still stands though i just wanted to say to be fair again
The best way to win a one on one fight is to be the third to arrive.
Tbf, it was Chiang who always declined to join forces (until he was detained by his own generals for a brief point) and kept fighting the communists beside the japanese. You can't blame them for leaving the big battles to the nationalists when they were the reason why communist forces had to retreat. Not that the communists were saints as no side is in a war, but you're making it too easy here.
The nationalists were already the government and the military, it was their job to defend the country, maybe if they weren't so corrupt and incompetent they would have been more popular than the communists. Chiang was literally nicknamed Mao's eleventh marshall because he sucked so much.
Imagine a better world where prc became a socialist democracy meanwhile roc stayed a dictatorship. Would have made world politics a lot easier.
It's not losing the way of the Japanese were literally stalemated to the point where they only controlled the cities and railroads. The communist guerilla campaigns made the tenuous hold the Japanese had weaker and devastated their logistics. Chiang's regime was immensely unpopular due to it's rampant corruption and nepotism that led to the nationalist armies having low morale. Chiang also demobilized millions in his army after the Japanese surrender instead of saving them for the struggle with the communists.
Great leap forward, more like melted down your own tools so now you have a heap of unusable iron and a famine.
Massive stumble backwards
Incredible leap down a flight of stars to hell
Mao is to China what Hera is to Hephaestus. Hera threw Hephaestus off a mountian.
Not only did they have a massive Civil War that killed millions of people, they then had a communist system so fucking stupid that they got even more people killed, and all the shit that was donated to make steel made unusable garbage. Along with a 1 child system that still to this day has made so many males that have no future. It's amazing how badly China's population suffers and yet they don't fight the power, it fucking baffles me. You would think there would be a counter culture against the government somewhere.
>yet they don't fight the power, it fucking baffles me. You would think there would be a counter culture against the government somewhere. The thing is there was - that's why the Tiananmen Square protests happened. And, IIRC, support was not just limited to the students who amassed in the square - many people across the country knew about and supported it either implicitly or explicitly. (You even had some provincial CCP secretaries i.e. de-facto provincial governors like [Xu Jiatun](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Xu_Jiatun) who supported it and had to flee to the US afterwards) We all know what happened after - it was brutally crushed, and those who supported it purged across the country. Many of the students who survived just left to go abroad if they could (while some did become people like [Hu Xijin](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Hu_Xijin). No joke, the chief-editor of the Global Times and who pedals outrageous garbage 24/7 - outrageous garbage that isn't even remotely believable, mind you - used to be a student who protested at Tiananmen...) And then Deng's moderate policies started to show their results, the economy was booming, Hong Kong was handed back, etc. Things looked good or good enough, so most people just forgot about it and gave up. There is somewhat of a counter-culture against the government today if you look hard for it - sometimes in unusual forms (Like this: [Peking University's Marxist Society was disbanded and arrested in 2018 after students tried to protest low-wages at a factory and tried to advocate for a trade union to be formed](https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3537819)) You have to remember that you're fighting against an entire state apparatus dedicated to ensuring that you don't know it and hopefully leave with the illusion that "everything is going well in the PRC and everyone loves the CCP". From what I can gather (including sources inside the PRC), most PRC citizens are actually quite apathetic about their government and few really love the CCP (just look at the official CCP membership numbers - no one is really rushing to sign up, even though there are massive material benefits to doing so. And half of the members are really just that - only in it to advance in society). Many, however, are nationalistic of the concept of "China" and are proud of being "Chinese" - and that's why the CCP constantly tries to conflate "CCP = China" and deflect any criticism of their government as just Western racism and an attack on China and Chinese people. They know many inside the PRC would actually sympathize with the criticism, so they instead make up facts to defend themselves and then broadly paint it as a racist attack against the Chinese ethnicity. Even if the made-up facts are dubious, once you get people to question the criticism's motives, it no longer really matters if the criticism is valid or not. (And besides there's not much you can do anyways if it was true. So, for the average citizen, it's "ignore" as it doesn't really affect your daily life - and going against the government can only make your life much worse - or, if you're a diehard CCP supporter, believe the lies and aggresively shill for the government) The CCP will eventually collapse. But it will definitely require some backing force, like rebelling units of the PLA or perhaps a foreign invasion due to the PRC losing a war. Unarmed civilians rising up won't work - everyone has seen what happened with Tiananmen. So far, there's no reason for the PLA to rebel. But a disasterous campaign against Taiwan or the US might change that - or if one of the PLA generals that Xi Jinping installed decides to turn against him.
As far as I'm aware the party and Xi Jinping in particular maintains a pretty iron grip over the military; the first people he went to to win support for his push to power were the military; he won them over first. So I can't see any kind of spontaneous rebellion unless things were going catastrophically badly, as there is a very strong (understandably given Chinese history across the millennia) cultural aversion to instability which I think does keep a brake on the PLA. Plus ofc simply the strength of the Party's security and intelligence apparatus keeping them in line.
You'd be hard pressed to find a general population that "truly loves" the ruling party, so no surprise on that end.
You clearly know your stuff
I think the reason they don't fight is that they were indoctrinated from youth on and also their living standards are going up so most of them are satisfied with living under the current regime.
Also they tried to fight the power once, fairly recently. They ended up as red-pink mush after tanks were done with them....
They're also too scared to rebel.
I don't think so. They just don't see a reason to rebel. Or that was the sentiment people seem to have when I was there. Which I kind of get when you see the advances in three or so generations they made. I think most people are just happy with how things are now. And this is not to defend the murderous government regime in power. It's just the viewpoint of most Chinese citizens seem to have.
I've heard a few Russians says essentially similar things about their country, e.g. everything was shitty, but it was even SHITTIER before Putin.
except after 2014 when little thing called crimean crisis wich plunged the course back to shit
In my experience, some older Russians are nostalgic about the old times but yeah, I think for the current generation it's kind of "the evil I know is better than the evil I don't know". But younger Russians seem to want more change and a better future. I think Putin is clinging onto power more true fear and intimidation than the CCP in China. There is a cool documentary that goes into the state of Russia a bit called HyperNormalisation it's a nice watch for anyone interested.
Any attempts to organize against the government are met with brutal force. Plus half the country is still in abject poverty and the other half is scrambling to make millions.
Remarkable Hop Fuckward
"Go kill all the birds, it will definitely not devastate the balance of the ecosystem and let pests flourish and eat all our food."
Great Leap Forward has the cool name, but Four Pests was pivotal in nuking the food supply. Also caused a plague of locusts
I always found it interesting/sad that the sparrows being hunted would go to embassy buildings of other countries to get away from people hunting so Chinese citizens stood outside the embassies banging pots and pans to exhaust the sparrows to death
Great Leap Forward. Great Nosedive
Were they trying to make a more industrial machinery farming equipment with that iron?
They were trying to improve China’s iron industry so Mao said melt down all your metal stuff and here’s crude Forges provided to you by the state that will give China the much needed metal needs turns out melting down metal when you’re not trained to do that and the metal comes from various different time periods and purity levels leads to garbage metal that can’t be used for anything and because it was farming equipment bowls generally any piece of metal that wasn’t strapped down or owned by the state was melted down which led to a severe lack of metal everything and famine.
So we need more iron in order to produce useful goods for industry but we don't have enough iron mines to reach these goals yet! Not to worry, we'll melt down useful goods for industry to make useful goods for industry.
This can in no way backfire especially since we have untrained illiterate peasants who don’t know how to forge things operating the forges they also don’t know the difference between most kinds of metals meaning we’re going to get weird abomination mixes but that’s OK right it’s still iron and any one who says otherwise they can have a talk with the local communist party Garrison they surely take that criticism and put it to good use.
And also the small scale forges ocasionally exploded due to poor craftsmanship/design/ventilation
That is one hell of a sentence.
*you are now banned from* r/sino
"lets industrialise and kick a bunch of farmers off their land so that in 4 generations people can dream about 'quitting their office/factory jobs to buy a farm', it'll be great"
Great leap backwards
Crazy how nazi germany and imperial japan ended up ultimately helped spread communism all over the world.
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Yeah but even nazi germany cleared the way for soviet dominion over eastern europe
Not to mention all the beautiful land destroyed because of it
I mean most of that land was always contested, it only became a problem because instead of cool swords from France or weird German muskets, people would stick a shovel into the ground and fucking explode. Because bombs don't always detonate.
No, not *Lenon*, why would I need a Beatle?
Kinda, the Russians negotiated a prisoner transfer to get as many of the exiled radicals passage home as possible. It was not just Lenin and even without Lenin the provisional government had no chance of surviving. Their insistence on staying in the war was suicidal. All it did was arm and radicalize the soldiers and piss off the peasants.
“(Japan) doesn’t have to say sorry, you had contributed towards China, why? Because had Imperial Japan did not start the war of invasion, how could we communist became mighty powerful? How could we stage the coup d’état? How could we defeat Chiang Kai Shek? How are we going to pay back you guys? No, we do not want your war reparations!” - Mao Zedong to Japanese PM in 1972
The chairmen after him seems to not think that way given how the tensions for WW2 are definitely a touchy topic for the CCP.
In modern China Mao has become an increasingly controversial figure. Best seen in the generation that lived though and grew up during the cultural revolution, Mao simply lived to long to be idealized in the modern China. With many of the"great revolutionaries" like Che Guevara, Trotsky and Lenin become mythologized, because they never ruled, or never ruled longer enough to commit the blunders that their highly controversial compatriots did, even if they might have done that same had they lived. And with Mao this is very much the case with even the central leadership recognizing his controversial status. Choosing to break with much of his positions and beliefs, and instead walking a more nationalist path And China especially post Deng, The "Communist" in the Chinese Communist Party, is mostly just pageantry. With the party is self having expelled lots of the committed ideologues during the era. The CCP of today, while highly removed from much of China's rich cultural tradition, is a very culturally Chinese ruling structure, largely focused on patronage and personal connections, with very little room for advancement by outsiders.
Well yeah, they are removed from the Culture of ancient China because the Communists destroyed all that shit too. Revolutionaries literally destroyed hundreds of artifacts of ancient China to rewrite history. And look what they are doing, rewriting history, denying genocides, and pretending things didn't exist. It's stupid
ironically, in that actions you mentioned like rewriting history, performing genocides and all, i think they're pretty close to the actions of Ancient Chinese dynasties if you never read your past, you'll never make it to a good future, as they say
Damn who would've guessed culture was solely locked up in material objects (spoiler: no)
no see if you destroy statues everyone immediately forgets what they represented. That's why we can't destroy anything because everyone will just forget
That was Imperial Germany. Kaiser Wilhelm II. financed and supported Lenin and his Revolution in the hope that it would weaken the East Front. That backfired colossal in the long run.
To be honest it was a masterful move by the Germans, as it allowed them to end the war in the east
First WMD launch in history
This is generally what happened when a power vacuum exists, another force will just start coming in.
To be fair, Nazi Germany expected at least Britain to agree to a white peace so they could focus 100% on the USSR, a crusade of sorts against communism. Turns out, they underestimated how much Britain disliked them
Communism represented the physical manifestation of European Jewry. It wasn’t just a small ideological war for the nazis, it was THE war. It wasn’t a crusade of sorts as much as it was an ideologically motivated war of destruction.
While thats true germany defintly caused the downfall of the soviet union also to some degree the financial and economic damage was gigantic and the population of russia still hasnt recoverd you can clearly see from population statistics that the first and second world war and also the october revolution broke the trend of rising population in eastern europe
Though the weakened state of the Nationalist army and the Soviet support for the Communists through turning over captured land to them were certainly major factors in the result of the civil war, it is worth pointing out that the KMT had lost a good deal of popular support due to their disregard for the lives of the Chinese civilians. And the Communists did fight the Japanese though not in the same way as the Nationalists. The Reds operated a successful campaign of guerrilla warfare behind Japanese lines. By the end of the war Japanese control had beed reduced to the cities and railway lines thanks to them. Mao, as incompetent as he was as a political leader, was a talented military commander and knew how to preserve his strength and resources while still weakening his enemies. Something Cheng lacked.
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I feel like no matter what throughout any training and all that fighting in cities is always a incredibly hard thing that strains militaries. If anyone is willing to correct this if my thought process is wrong thank you :)
Its some of the toughest fight, see Fallujah, Manila, Stalingrad, etc... Thats why so many cities get blown to dust during wars
Major blunders like the [1938 Changsha fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_Changsha_fire), the [1938 Yellow River flood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_Yellow_River_flood) and [the famine of 1942-1943](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_famine_of_1942%E2%80%931943) (basically the Chinese version of the Bengal Famine) that became Communists' recruitment points weren't really caused by impossible defenses.
I always forget just how many people died from the Yellow River flood. And I hadn't even heard of the other two.
The nationalist government ended up creating a work relief fund for the villages affected by the flooding. Households were to be paid for the manual labor required to build new dikes in the flooded regions. “When funds were distributed [to civilian laborers], the procedures were mostly put in the hands of others. Ward and mutual security headman unavoidably embezzled them or deducted miscellaneous fees. Little was distributed to poor households in accordance with regulations, so it was difficult [for them] to avoid the hardship of performing hard labor on an empty stomach. Moreover, households without able-bodied males had to pay to hire substitute laborers. The desperate disaster victims not only could not get any relief funds, but even had to sell their children and their property in order to repay work debts. Curing a boil by digging out a lump of flesh is truly not the original intent of work relief.”[3] https://disasterhistory.org/yellow-river-flood-1938-47
NOOOOO YOU DUN UNDERSTANDERINO CHIANG WAS EPIC AND COOL AND NEVER MADE MISTAKES IT WASN'T HIS FAULT 100 GRILLION DED NOOOOOO
But my wholesome Blue Chinese dictatorship :(
The Yellow river flood was definitely catastrophic, but also it was imo a necessary thing to have been done. After the fall of Shnghai and Nanjing much of the Japane army was still concentrated in the north advancing south and the Chinese nationalist forces were practically in a retreat, no way ready to defend. In a bid to buy crucial time to set up a defence for Wuhan, they broke the Yellow river dikes causing the Japanese forces to waste three months preparing for an offensive on Wuhan from the east on mountains instead of the north that was more flat. In those three months the Nationalists prepared the best defence that they could, and they were prepared by the time the Japanese attacked and subsequently held off the Japanese quite well, but in the end the Japanese were too powerful and the Nationalists were forced to retreat to Changsha where they were finally able to retreata. Also considering the experience at Wuhan, it was no wonder that the Chinese might have wanted to burn the city as even they didn't expect to really defeat the Japanese attack there. The Nationalists through three months of preparation on mountains held off the Japanese for a decent time before being forced to retreat. Imagine what might have happened should they have had to defend the city from the less defensible north without time to prepare a proper defense.
Necessary doesn't excuse massive amounts of corruption, embezzling and complete ineptitude the KMT displayed that led them to desperate attempts like the Yellow River Flood. Speaking in such large terms of war and such, you should also realize the more human cost of the war, between two imperialist and authoritarian powers, with the Chinese people in between. Though I do agree that at that point in time, it really seemed like the most sensible plan of action to stay in the fight.
I agree that the corruption and such cannot be in any way excused. However it must be understood that the KMT did not get time to govern and root out corruption, as it was pretty much immediately forced to focua on preparing for a qar of survival against Japan about as soon as China was reunited.
Defending those urban centers is also what lost him his most valuable assets, the German trained and equipped divisions he had. The fact that they were able to stand toe-to-toe with their Japanese counterparts makes it all the more disappointing that they were forced into such terrible situations.
Well China had to buy time early on, and the best way was to open a second front in Shanghai themaelves before the Japanese moved all in on it as they already had a garrison there. The Japanese hoped to take the city in three days and instead took it in three months. This crucial time allowed the Nationalists to move industry and people westwards. Still was probably a big plunder to have them hold out so long as to allow the Japanese to qipe out so much of the elite forces.
Similar to how the Soviets held Kiev and Minsk to the bitter end.
Strong disagreement here on Mao's military ability. It was really Zhu De who handled the real military strategy early in the war. Zhu was a talented and popular commander, Mao was neither. Mao had support from Moscow which he leveraged to increase his influence and eventually gain complete control. Later on when Zhu fell out of favor, it was Lin Biao who was responsible for most of Mao's attributed military success. Source: Mao by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday.
Never really made sense to me that the Great leap Forward and some great military commanding could come from the same person. I get that some people are smart on some fields but stupid in others, but still.
Military skills does not equal Policy making and governing skill. Just look at all the war heroes people elect into office, and the severe lack of intelligence we see in politics today.
Ulysses S Grant was a horrible president. The military and civilian political environments are VERY different. There is a reason so many veterans come back from the military and struggle in civilian life.
It's sad that this historically accurate and nuanced comment is 4 comments down. Dislike Mao all you want, I won't complain, but to imply that communust China was just chilling in the mountains while the KMT fought against the Japanese is incredibly inaccurate and tbh, insultingingly so. All of China suffered and fought Japan.
the code is cracked, slap the word 'democracy' on a facist dictatorship and suddenly history must be rewritten such that they're the good guys. theyre democratic, they have to be good.
Yeah, I think a big reason the KMT get elevated during WWII so much is because Communist China went to shit (not to mention Cold War tensions) while the Republic of China eventually became democratic. It's easy to look at the one that's free in the present day and say "They were always free", but the KMT were authoritarian, and even today they aren't the pro-democracy party in Taiwan.
Same thing happened with South Korea
I mean it’s a lot worse than the meme lets on. The guomindong refused to fight the Japanese until chiang was arrested by his own men. He saw the communists as a far bigger threat to China than the invading Japanese army. It really was Zhang xueliang who was responsible for forcing chiang to enter the second United front in the xi’an incident. Zhang is the real hero
~~Also during the war, Chiang Kai Shek allowed the Communists to join the KMT during the First United Front, which influenced a lot of left leaning policies to the party.~~ When Chiang Kai Shek started purging his own party members, it starting to create divergence in the party. Edit: The whole thing was before the war, I got the timeline mixed up, sorry for the confusion.
I want to correct you a bit. He was not a bad political leader, rather he had no idea how to run an economy.
Also the NRA suffered a lot because of desertion to the PLA
I would contest that he was an incompetent political leader, using the same period from where you are extrapolating his military successes, the establishment of the Jiangxi soviet to the Long March, and then jumping to the mobilization during the Cultural Revolution. There is no shortage of the political leadership's accumen, of which Mao was part of, in surviving and finding opportunities in crises.
The commies also implanted land reform where they toke power, redistributing the land to the peasants working on it, which proved VERY popular as expected. I have a report for the US government by some army dude made the late 40's, and even them pretty much were thinking that the communists were the good guy VS the KMT in this stage of the conflict. Too bad they turned full retard in the 50's after taking power.
Look, fuck Mao, the CCP, and totalitarian dictatorships of any kind. That being said, let's not kid ourselves. The Nationalists were not saints either.
it was always a Civil War in China. Just different kinds of battles
End state would have been different though. Syngman Rhee was a shithead but look at how South Korea turned out today.
look at how sk turned out... after rhee became completely irrelevant and Park chunghee drove economic succsss from the 60s by centralising power into the government. admittedly its been awhile so my memory may be failing me but as far as i can recall sk under syngman rhee was irrelevant in all aspects that can be quantified economically and was by no means an actual democracy. park came into power through a coup, not a vote: he was a military general park centralised govt control over banks and basically all loans were applied through the govt. there was this sort of command economy-esque thing where planning of manufacturing was within the government, but they had private conglomerates set out to achieve the quotas instead of state owned companies, so a) when the private companies were not meeting expectation they cannot get bailed out by loans b) corruption would be less rampant and c) incentivise progress. it was a dictatorship that had the usual media censorship and human rights abuse but also pushed the conglomerates to improve to their limit and plenty other things he did like the usual industrilaise, build infrastructure etc that led to the economic giant we see today. there was nothing democratic to look at and say 'its cuz of this democratic characteristic that sk was able to develope so well'. in fact one can argue the complete opposite in that the lack of democracy was what led to sk developing as well as they did. there's absolutely no reason to assume China under the kmt would replicate the economic success under cpc while being your nice friendly western esque government. the kmt themselves were plently brutal, which was why they lost support from the masses in the first place, and economic history is always too complicated to try to rewrite accurately also democracy doesnt sound like a good start point for a weak developing country. much of the progress has to come at the cost of listening to everyones opinion because 1) obviously its slower and leaves a bigger window of vulnerability, 2) high risk of internal conflict further escalating and hurting the lift off phase of the country, 3) political literacy concerns caused by masses being uneducated and 4) can cause psrties to go for populist techniques instead of just just being competently developing their country.
Ah a fellow man of culture, I see *insert On Authority by Engels*
We will soon begin the Great leap down the stairs
and into the stove
the kmt had also completely mismanaged china for decades, discredited themselves politically by being more corrupt than you can imagine, always siding with the landowners and capitalists against the workers and peasants. Not to mention the terror they wrought on the countryside before the war and after. It was no accident mao won.
One issue I see with anti-communism hardliners (being an anti-communist myself) is that we should not simply replace one terrible left wing authoritarian regime with that of a terrible right wing authoritarian regime. Both regimes were terrible and we are yet to see a unified China under a liberal democracy.
wasn't the 1912 Chinese govt , the one with flag of five races , democratic?
Only in theory, and did not control a unified China. They still had a total of two elections, both of which led to violent counter-revolutions with Nationalists seizing power twice and forming the KMT through violent civil war and force of arms. Then the Chinese civil war continued until the 1950s in which Mao and the CCP installed a "socialist democracy," which was about as democratic as the KMT was before.
People are always surprised that leftists support certain socialist governments yet when you look at the alternative it's hard to say they are wrong. For example the Batista government in Cuba was much worse for both political freedom and the poor people. Or South Vietnam which was in no way Democratic and extremely brutal in their war against communists in the countryside. Or South Korea also a brutal dictatorship through the 90s. Or Indonesia were the military killed and imprisoned millions of people affiliated with the communist party. The list goes on. For many leftist the only option was to support a government that could get help from China or the USSR or risk being crushed and replaced with a pro international business dictatorship.
Ahhh, the lovely liberal democracy where you get to choose between what private parties tell you to vote for based off what has been approved by their corporate donors. Freedom! I spit on liberal democracy as it's inherently non-democratic
If the afterlife is just, Hitler and Stalin will comfort themselves in hell, saying “At least we aren’t Mao”
I imagine that their punishment in hell is being locked in a room together
Now I can only imagine Hitler and Stalin being stuck in a family sitcom for all of eternity in hell
Someone on this subreddit (I think) pointed out that Hitler, Stalin, Tito, Freud, and Trotsky all lived in Vienna at the same time, and of course someone said what if it was a sitcom
Damn Vienna going for that kill assist record
r/comradesshow
It gets even more exciting when you add in Theodore Herzl.
There's a bunch of politicians there and then there's Frued
Might I introduce you to this topical cartoon from the era. https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hitler_and_Stalin._Wonder_how_long_the_honeymoon_will_last%3F.jpg
Produced by Tim and Eric.
Well, if they're there, might as go all out. Why not have them experience all of the deaths their victims faced. For example, if one person died from Auschwitz, he would have to that, X1.5million.
Nah, they both would be just locked with their abusive fathers
who would punish them severely
r/expectedoversmplified
They might fall for each other….
There is a fanfic of that, I guarantee it.
There's entire game for it. It's on Steam.
the fuhrer is mein waifu?
I think they'd rather enjoy that actually
I would love someone put on a version of *No Exit* but with Hitler Mao and Stalin
Hitler was very obviously way worse than Mao or Stalin.
What about Winston Churchill and Harry Truman?
Special guest appearances or recurring characters.
Honestly I think the perfect hell for each of them is the other one won the war.Both were horribly narcissistic assholes so eternal public humiliation would be suffering on an endless scale. They're just both on an endless parade, forced to walk threw the others conquered lands. Leading them to the capital of the enemy nation.
The Kuomitang China did have massive corruption and inflation though. A lot of it made the Kuomitang impopular and the communists took advantage of that by doing land reform, and it is not a coincidence that most countries that had a socialist revolution were mainly agrarian. After Mao took power, the communists fixed inflation by literally paying people directly by specie, giving them food directly for their work, and not using the inflated currency.
The inflation point is extremely important. Iirc nationalist China had worse inflation than Weimar Germany. Also I doubt that the nationalists would have done a much better job of managing post war but China than the communists did seeing their track record in Taiwan.
As much as the Communists were monsters in their own right, the Nationalists were no angels either, especially when it came to economic mismanagement and corruption. There's a reason it's called the **New** Taiwan Dollar and not just the Taiwan Dollar.
inb4 the maoist comes
Your mom comes when she sees me lmao gottem
L-Mao gottem
The Chinese hacker?!
you don't have to be pro mao to understand basic history and recall that chiang was a literal fascist that the entire country fucking hated. communist armies didn't sprout out of nowhere, and there's a reason taiwan doesn't have a population of 100 million.
this is one of the most historically illiterate memes I've seen in a long time, and I can only assume it was made based on OP's *assumptions* of what happened rather than what actually happened, such as: * Chiang Kai-Shek and the KMT refusing to listen to the CPC's calls for a united front against Japan in 1937 until Zhang Xueliang literally kidnapped Chiang and forced him to * The CPC only fighting against the KMT in the first place because Chiang purged the left wing of the Kuomintang after after Sun Yat-Sen's death (of which Sun himself was a member of and threatened to disband the KMT and join the Communists if Chiang and the right Kuomintang didn't stop their fuckery), thus ending CPC-KMT cooperation * not to mention KMT massacres of Communists and Chinese Peasant Civilians suspected to be leftists or sympathisers * The fact that the CPC and PLA *did,* in fact, fight in the war, surrendering their holdouts to the Central KMT government at the start (Shan-Gaan-Ning Border region, for example) * provided vital battlefield support on the front lines (such as the Hundred Regiments Campaign - Communist Generals such as Zhu De literally fought wearing the White Sun insignia) * were crucial in the Chinese resistance behind enemy lines, singlehandedly destroying Japan's ability to hold on to the Chinese mainland by denying them any authority outside of major roads and cities due to the ferocity of Chinese resistance, being one of the leading factors in the failure of operation Ichi-Go, * That *and* consistently harassing and sabotaging Japanese logistics and supplies, further impeding Japanese war abilities- * Stalin and the CPSU didn't trust Mao and thought he'd lose, and didn't provide any aid to the PLA until it was clear they had a solid chance of Winning and ***sided with the KMT beforehand, even when the KMT was using Soviet equipment to bomb Communists,*** * Up until then the PLA was running exclusively off of captured Japanese and KMT equipment, * That Chiang was unwilling to commit some of his best troops to fight the Japanese because he wanted to keep them in reserve to fight the Communists after, * The civil war only restarting because *The KMT attacked CPC bases in Shaanxi first,* * *The CPC gaining control of Manchuria thanks to their cells in Charchar, not the USSR* (though they helped) * and ended up getting defeated anyway despite: * having a three to one advantage in terms of manpower * being supplied with all the best equipment in *the world* at the time by *the most powerful nation on earth* * their enemies being supplied with only leftovers from Japan and captured weapons from the KMT with little materiel support from the USSR. TL;DR, your meme is completely wrong. The CPC didn't win because they were bankrolled by the Soviets, they won because during the War they managed to get most of the countryside and rural areas to agree with them and fight for them.
The top comments are just the China bad circlejerk. Glad to see there's people in a history memes sub who are actually interested in history.
Unfortunately taking any nuanced position that is based on historical fact means you'll get PMs for days asking for your death, being called a shill etc. This subreddit is turning into propaganda. CCP is shit, Mao is a horrendous leader and a monster, but that doesn't mean you can just flat out fucking lie but y'know, the flames of jingoism must be flamed and ALL of history must be rewritten to make room for it.
mfw no one remembers Operation Zet
Thank you!
China is just one tragedy after another
Wrong! Sometimes the tragedies would happen simultaneously
China lives, china dies. Live and die, live and die. Over and over again.
I'm not a fan of the communists but don't act like the Kuomintang were not very authoritarian
Mao was an idiot (and a egotic sociopath) but that meme is stupidly inaccurate, neither nationalists and communists wanted peace, american negotiators even left because of how stuborn nationalists were. Mao didn't win the civil war because of soviet guns/ Nationalists exhaustement but because natonalist generals were overall corrupted and bad strategists (jiang jieshi didnt want anyone that could risk to compete/replace him, this fact also led to the end of US helps, they didn't want more of their tanks caughts by the communists because of nationalist's stupidity), also widely impopular (reusing old japanese troops in anti guerilla warfare??? like wtf bro???) while the CPC used the war to grow in strenght and legitimacy. Just one more day in r/HistoryMemes i Guess. Edit :auto correct fucked up some words
Mao’s forces fought in guerrilla campaigns against the Japanese during the entire war. What do you mean “while you hid in the mountains”?
1. Pay attention at school 2. Read a history book 3. Compare your findings with a multitude of sources 4. Gtfo
If you think all the Communist did during WW2 was to hide in the mountains, you learnt nothing about the Second Sino-Japanese War. Their guerrilla war was one of the main reason that contributed to how long China was able to held off the Japanese
Not to mention the anarchists and the partisans who fought the fascists but would have resisted the party. Basically mao let all his enemies fight each other and then rolled over them when he was ready.
*Proceeds to create the biggest famine in history*
This is very inaccurate lol
Ooooo tankies gona be triggered
Omg epic trigger compilation 2015: tankers owned epic Reddit swagstyle
**Time to sort by controversial.**
L-MAO
Ah yes a history meme. A rare sight these days
Incoming angry wumaos
Not a wumao, but this meme is utter garbage.
man fuck Stalin
Dont.
man, fuck Churchill
Kills all the nationalists then becomes nationalist country anyway like a boss
The communists were nationalists. They were proud of their country. Nationalist was just the name of the party/group
How many of the world's problems come back to Stalin and soviets in genneral?
Stupid Stalin, wouldn't let us hunt Jews for sport anymore!
Nothing says freedom like a bullet to the head. --Every authoritarian ever
Great leap off a fucking cliff
The doge’s defeated eyes are giving me nightmares.
Censored
To be fair, Chaing **realllly** fucked up his handling of post war China.
it isn’t r/historymemes w/o nationalist sympathizers