Chinese History for White People - The CCP

It's difficult to give the proper context of this era of Chinese history, and without that context much of modern China appears outright zany. What you need to understand is that between 1949 and 1999, China went through the European equivalent of 800 years¹ of technological progress in a single lifetime. These people were illiterate medieval subsistence farmers—some of whom didn't know the Qing dynasty had even come to an end—who plunged headfirst into an industrial war. Afterwards they were caught up in an ideological proxy war between nations they never knew existed, attempting a political experiment that hadn't even been fully tested in the countries in which it originated. When people signed up to work in factories, their first task was to go to an open field and dig a hole in the mud to live in with their bare hands because they didn't have shovels. The second task was to start forming mud bricks by hand for months until a building that could generously be called a factory existed in which they could work. Then trade opened up, and people would save up money for years to buy their first CRT-TV that became obsolete by flatscreens the very next month. Ambitious entrepreneurship in the spirit of an 80's American hustle became the new zeitgeist. In less than a decade they had affordable internet and cell phones when the oldest generation still hadn't learned how to read, but fortunately video-call apps were only a few short years behind to help them keep in touch with great grandchildren who at every opportunity left for the very same foreign nations you spent your adult life supposedly fighting against. Today young Chinese tech billionaires innovate new ways to steal and deploy AI in internet censorship and policing tasks.

And what you need to understand here is that nobody understands what the fuck is going on. The laws and customs that work for medieval farming are not what works for an developing nation (which isn't the same as an effectively colonized industrial nation)—all of which is completely different from 20th century modern entrepreneurship—which is not the same as a digitally connected world—and those probably won't work in the Machine Intelligence era. The legal system is riddled with holes and oversights and obsolete incentives that were once essential and are now perverse. Even if the Celestial Bureaucracy itself could keep up, the people couldn't remain up to date on the changes. Laws are changing before people even become aware the law was passed a decade ago. Whatever career strategies that worked for your parents was completely irrelevant to your generation, and you have no idea how to relate to the struggles your children are going through.

All of this gives context to my second point: the kind of lies you can tell illiterate subsistence farmers are not the same lies you can tell to every generation that followed. Almost all Chinese people born after 1960 know the CCP lies and the news is scripted², but the propaganda is nonetheless effective by creating too much noise for any truth to circulate effectively³. Their worldview and epistemology is based on guesswork in a low information environment—which leads to some curious blindspots⁴ that I'll try to cover before going into a detailed history.

So the CCP's own history is that Mao is the greatest military genius in Chinese history. Greater than Qin Shihuang, Han Xin, Huo Qubing, Li Shimin, Yue Fei, and Zhu Di. He took an unfunded volunteer militia with pipe rifles and managed to drive out the entire (American-funded) Meiji Empire without any foreign assistance, while simultaneously fighting a civil war against the (American-funded) Nationalists, only to immediately challenge America directly in Korea and prevail. Soviet and American allied⁵ roles in these conflicts is flatly omitted.

The CCP admits there was a famine and it was pretty bad, but it was caused by natural disasters and it happens sometimes. There was a thing called the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution that won't be on the test so don't waste any time looking into it. The American-funded genocide of three million Chinese in 1960's Indonesia will be on the test⁶. There won't be any discussion about what Communism is, exactly, aside from some empty platitudes about welfare services⁷. The CCP happily takes credit for the prosperity of free trade and free markets, but with emphasis on the continued danger it presents of western colonialism (even if they don't plant their flag on your soil). There will be mandatory school seminars on how the average American gets shot three times a week, and Americans hate and shoot Chinese people specifically (see every news clipping in the past 15 years in which a Chinese person has been assaulted). Americans are also extremely racist and put non-whites in ghettos that look like war zones (see pictures of Detroit) and Chinese people will basically work as slaves if they go there (see laundromats grad students). In closing, please please do not leave China the moment you graduate from University.

So that's the CCP's version of modern history. Going back to 1949, here's my version.

Manchuria is now back in the hands of China. There were a lot of ethnic Koreans living there during Japanese occupation, who naturally joined the Red Army to fight the Japanese. After the war, they went back home to Korea, which until now had been under Japanese rule and hadn't finished forming a state, much less a military. They sought to take Korea back from the Imperialists dogs occupying it, and the entire peninsula fell to them in three days. The UN voted—and the Soviet delegate who could have vetoed it⁸ was sick that day. Europe was still a smoldering crater, so America overwhelmingly provided the bulk of the UN peacekeeping force.

That prompted the CCP to join the war, fearing a land invasion by America. The idea sounds laughable to us, because we operate primarily through naval power and air superiority—but a lot of peole don’t know that the only functional industrial base left in China was in Manchuria. Yes, the Soviets had dismantled a lot of it, but it was still more substantial than what was left in Shanghai after the Japanese were done with it. If America did bomb Manchuria, China would never industrialize again without foreign assistance. And history had taught China that foreign assistance always comes with humiliating concessions⁹.

The Red Army had fought the Nationalists. They had fought the Japanese. They thought themselves veterans. Everything they knew proved useless when fighting Americans, a foe with seemingly infinite money. We don't fight like any other power on earth—perhaps in history. Every single American squadron had their own radio. China had 38 radios for the entire five million infantry force. And to Chinese astonishment, if so much as three American soldiers were pinned down in a firefight, we'd send air support to firebomb a protective ring around them, then airdrop them whatever supplies they needed so they could wait for ground reinforcements to rescue them. We'd do that for just three men. Because their lives mattered. Japan did not do this. The Soviets did not do this. Who in history would do this for three grunts? And so the Chinese learned it did not matter if you had surrounded three Americans with 20,000 infantry. If they had a radio, you would lose 20,000 men. The only way to fight this war at all was stealth. If you were spotted at all, your whole unit would surely die.

When Japan's air force bombed the Red Army, they learned to hide in caves. When Americans bomb the Red Army, we would dive straight at the cave kamikaze-style, then swoop up at the very last second while releasing the bomb so that inertia carried it straight into the cave¹⁰. Apparently American pilots actually trained for this. China did not expect us to be that much more skilled than the Japanese. And China only had 18 anti-air guns for their entire military, which were obviously priority targets for American airmen.

So how did the genius Mao do in this war? To this day the CCP makes movies celebrating their “accomplishments” in the Korean War. They talk about how disciplined their soldiers were for a whole platoon of them to freeze to death rather than abandon their ambush position because they weren't given winter coats. They celebrate about how after a bridge got bombed, they had men fill the river with their own living bodies so that military supplies could be dragged across their corpses. This isn't censored because—in jarhead mentality—they think dying pointlessly in shit circumstances is proof of your bravery. No really—this is core to the identity of the CCP. Not fighting because you cannot win without mass casualties¹¹ was the ideology of the KMT Nationalists. But the CCP will not surrender to the foreign imperialists or their humiliating demands no matter what the cost in human life they have to pay. And they let their citizens know—in their national anthem and everything—exactly what the program is.

In this, we see the heart of the dysfunction of the CCP. The reason they won over the Nationalists was because they won the heart of the people with lies. They said they were responsible for liberating China—not the foreign power allied with the Nationalists. They promoted people for fake achievements when they reported overinflated numbers of Japanese soldiers they killed. When these people became governors, they naturally continued faking their statistics to look good; they were even encouraged to do so to show the prosperity and glory of the Communist state compared to the state it replaced. When harvest yields for a province were poor, they'd report a high number anyway, get taxed based on that high number, fill bags with dirt and top them with rice to pass inspection, then turn in 90% of the rice when they were only supposed to be taxed a fraction of it.

There were officials who were honest, but they were a great minority—their performance was so much worse than what the rest of the country reported that Mao reasonably assumed they were either incompetent or embezzling. And he punished them accordingly, unaware the chilling effect that would have on the rest. Anyone who wasn't faking their numbers before made absolutely certain to do so now, and a sophisticated industry of fooling the capital developed¹². Honest people were quickly framed for corruption to prevent them from ever gathering enough evidence to expose actual corruption—as honesty was defecting against the cartel of subordinate elites.

It was in this environment that Mao tried to implement a series of centrally planned economic policies known as the Great Leap Forward in 1958. Private farming was prohibited and enforced with “struggle sessions”, in which the community would collectively humiliate and/or beat “counter-revolutionaries” to death. Cooking at home was also forbidden, and everyone had to eat at a public canteen. Communal agricultural infrastructure projects weren't significantly different from corvee labor, except that the state refused to acknowledge it as such, and they were conducted without the assistance of some bourgeoisie project director or even an engineer. Tens of thousands died with every project, either from mismanaged food rationing or construction accidents—some provinces refer to these events as “killing fields”.

Meanwhile, a central point of the Great Leap was to prevent industry from centralizing in urban areas. Therefore rural areas were also required to double their steel production every year—primarily through backyard furnaces. Farmers met their steel quotas by turning their own farm tools and kitchen utensils into scrap iron in order to avoid the wrath of the provincial authorities. The unskilled labor produced largely pig iron¹³, but Mao had a deep distrust of bourgeoisie academics and western educated intellectuals who pointed this out. China was going to rely on Soviet engineers to train a generation of Chinese, but in 1959 Khrushchev demanded China “lend” them the formerly German port of Qingdao. Mao flatly refused—under absolutely no circumstances would China cede territory to a western power—even an ally. Khrushchev responded by punitively withdrawing all Soviet support and expertise—and the two countries would remain enemies thereafter¹⁴.

When Mao first received reports of the Great Chinese Famine in 1959, he was baffled. It came out of nowhere. He had no warning—no indication his policies were failing catastrophically. There were still 22 million tons of grain in the granaries that weren't being distributed because nobody would admit to the problem. Someone suggested sparrows were eating the seeds, so the CCP advised peasants to diligently scare off the birds—only for this to result in an overpopulation of locusts the birds were eating. This worsened the famines, and when the policies of the Great Leap Forward were abandoned, and the famine ended promptly the following year.

We're not sure how many died in the famine. But depending on whether you want to believe the CCP¹⁵ estimate or the CIA¹⁶ estimate, it's either 15 or 55 million. For comparison, the entirety of WWII deaths on all sides including both Nazi and Japanese genocides was 57 million. One western academic speculates 6-8% of these deaths were due to enforcement¹⁷ of the Great Leap Forward. Exiled journalists who survived the period recall people being beaten to death (fatalities from beatings are higher when you're starving) when they refused to turn over the last bit of food they had left to officials desperately trying to meet their inflated quotas.

Following this catastrophe, Mao had to resign as President of China, though he remained Chairman as well as Commander in Chief. Liu Shaoqi became the new President, and along with Premier Zhou Enlai and Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping they began the economic reconstruction of China. Yet Mao became increasingly paranoid that subversive elements were undermining his Communist vision¹⁸, and with the help of fabricated newspaper scandals and other political allies, started purging various officials and replacing them with those loyal to Mao and Mao alone.

In 1966, Mao began the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution—in which he called on young people—men and women both—to rise up in paramilitary rebellion¹⁹ against the bourgeois infiltrators²⁰ in the Communist Party. Those who attempted to quell the fervor—like teachers and University officials—were accused of sinisterly upholding revisionist Communism—and consequently became a major focus for the student's murderous frustrations. Foreign embassies and mid-level public officials also suffered the same fate²¹. The anti-intellectual movement not only destroyed almost all of China's educational and medical infrastructure—but also targeted anything feudal and traditionalist; Red Guards vandalized the monuments, tombs and bodies of Ming Emperors and the graveyard of the Confucian family²², even hanging the exhumed corpses from trees. Temples, monasteries, mosques, and churches were razed, clergy arrested and sent to work camps. Historical artifacts were smashed, paintings destroyed, and books burned—many of these artifacts were millennia old. Dynastic customs such as weddings, funerals, and festivals were considered wastes of communal resources, and local markets were banned along with them.

With the public endorsement of Mao, government funding for travel expenses, and a CCP order for police to not interfere with Red Guard activities, this mob quickly descended into violence and crimes comparable to the Japanese occupation. The largest of several notable massacres—the Guangxi massacre—resulted in 150,000 deaths, including rapes, maltreatment resulting in suicide, beheadings, disembowelments, boilings, live burials, and cannibalism. Unlike the Japanese, there would later be a considerable (albeit imperfect) effort to arrest and hold the perpetrators accountable for these crimes. By 1968 even Mao himself would try and disassemble the Red Guard. Many sources suggest more people were killed in the arrest and direct military supression²³ of the Red Guard than by the Red Guard themselves. Nobody agrees on the total²⁴ number of deaths, with estimates ranging from 400,000 to 7.7 million if you include the roughly 6 million deaths in penal labour camps over a 10 year period.

Throughout the Cultural Revolution, students and teachers and anyone who had ambiguous “western ties” forcibly relocated²⁵ to rural areas, as a general promotion of returning to agriculture and suppressing education. Many of them were explicitly sentenced to unproductive, repetitive labour such as building a wall and tearing it down again just to rebuild it again. Or digging holes and filling them back up. Even in destitute rural villages, they were forced to live in worse housing, eat worse food, and wear worse clothing than their fellow villagers, who were not allowed to have any friendly interactions with them. Many of the greatest minds of China died or were driven mad in this period.

Nonetheless, Mao had succeeded in seizing power through the popular movement. President Liu, Vice Premier Deng, and their entire families²⁶ were denounced as traitors, with Premier Zhou reading the verdict himself. Liu would die of diabetes²⁷ later that year. The allies Mao had used to restore himself to absolute power—known as The Gang of Four²⁸—would now control the country. The Red Guard was neutralized, but the policies of the Cultural Revolution would carry on for another decade. And Mao would consider the “success” of the policy one of his greatest achievements.

Sour relations with the Soviet Union would come to a peak in 1969 with the only hot war between nuclear²⁹ powers in world history. China ordered Soviets to vacate islands in the Heilongjiang (known in Russian as the Amur) River, which by the convention in international law for river boundaries rightfully belonged to China³⁰. Soviet and Chinese accounts greatly contradict³¹ each other, but there weren't more than a few hundred casualties on either side. Nonetheless, China managed to capture a state of the art Soviet Tank by burying a landmine in a white towel on the frozen river, and the Soviet General was sufficiently embarrassed that he demanded Premier Kosygin carry out a 1000 warhead nuclear strike on China before they could escalate into a full-scale land invasion of the Soviet border.

Kosygin tried to phone Mao for a ceasefire, but the 19 year old girl manning the switchboard called him a revisionist traitor who should go fuck himself, and hung up on him³². Zhou Enlai—whose duties primarily concerned foreign relations—was incensed, and frantically tried to unfuck the situation without losing face in a game of nuclear deterrence. The conflict continued from March to September, ending only when Kosygin was able to meet with Zhou Enlai at Ho Chi Min's Funeral—resulting in a ceasefire. At the same funeral, the Romanian Prime Minister passed Zhou a note from US President Nixon³³ indicating a desire to normalize relations between the two.

Mao's Vice Chairman and presumed successor would attempt a failed coup in 1971, then die with his family in a plane crash³⁴ while fleeing to the Soviet Union. Naturally, one of the Gang of Four became Mao's presumed successor as Chairman, and it seemed their power over the CCP would soon be absolute. But when Zhou got bladder cancer in 1973, he convinced Mao to let Deng Xiaoping return to politics as Zhou's chosen successor. Deng got back to work fixing the Chinese economy—especially in light of potential American relations. The Gang of Four saw Deng as a threat, and in late 1975 accused him of being insufficiently Communist—preferring instead the office of Premier go to their pick in Hua Guofeng.

In January of 76, Zhou succumbed to his cancer. Deng gave his eulogy. Both Mao and the Gang of Four forbid mourning Zhou³⁵, as support for Zhou had become synonymous with support for his preferred successor Deng. Yet in April, on the Qingming Festival honoring the dead, over two million people spontaneously and without coordination came to Tiananmen square to honor Zhou Enlai. Some were even so bold as to leave slogans denouncing the Gang of Four, the Cultural Revolution, and even Mao. When police removed the monument to Zhou, a riot ensued—which was dealt with in the usual brutal fashion. But many similar demonstrations in honor of Zhou occurred in cities throughout the country. As a response to the “Tiananmen Incident”, Deng was once again unpersoned and exiled from the CCP.

Mao himself would have three heart attacks and pass in September the same year. The Gang of Four got on the media and announced their intent to continue Mao’s legacy and his policies—and for urban militias to be in a heightened state of readiness. Premier and presumptive Chairman Hua attacked the radical announcement in a Politiburo meeting, and in response Mao's widow and Gang of Four Leader Jiang Qing insisted she take the office of Chairman instead. The Gang's newspaper then announced that any revisionist who interfered with Mao's principles would “come to no good end.”

The Gang overestimated their influence. The military sided with Hua, and at his command sent out a notice for an emergency Politiburo meeting to resolve the crisis, where, upon arrival, the Gang of Four and their coalition were promptly arrested. That night the Gang's propagandists in Universities and Newspapers were also taken into custody. Finally, they sent out a message for the Gang's supporters to “come to a meeting”, where they were rounded up. There were celebrations in the streets when their arrests were announced. They were tried for their crimes in orchestrating the Red Guard and those killed by the Cultural Revolution, receiving sentences of death (commuted to life in prison) or 20 years. By CCP law, you cannot hold any government job whatsoever if anyone within three generations of you committed a crime—so this eliminated their families from political influence as well.

Hua restored Deng as Vice Chairman and Chief of Staff for the Army, and in 1978 the first thing Deng did was something nobody else in 20th century China seemed capable of. He admitted things were awful. In a policy known as “Correcting Chaos, Restoring Order”, Deng pardoned those blacklisted by crimes alleged against them by the Cultural Revolution (including those imprisoned at the Tiananmen Incident), salvaged and restored the higher education system, and admitted the things that happened were terrible in no uncertain terms. He called the cultural revolution, "a domestic havoc launched mistakenly by the leader and taken advantage of by the counter-revolutionary gangs... responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the country, and the people since the founding of the People's Republic".

Hua came to power by arresting the Gang of Four. He couldn't contradict this indictment, but it also repudiated the Cultural Revolution's focus on Communist Class Struggle. Hua still supported Mao's vision and policies, while Deng wanted to have a “socialist market economy”. But Deng's policies were too well received—too popular—where Hua was not. By 1980—with popular support within the party—Deng ousted Hua from his offices and proceeded to systematically revise the entire constitution³⁶. But Deng did not persecute Hua, who remained a party member and even continued to advocate for Mao's policies. Furthermore, Deng never sat as head of state himself—giving the office to his proteges who believed in his economic reforms.

But in case you didn't notice—what just happened was a fucking coup. The military was very concerned about the stability of the country at the time, so they don't want to admit there was a coup. Nor did Deng want to completely challenge the entrenched power of the middle-government cartel³⁷. But functionally speaking, this was the end of another era. The CCP of the 1980s and onwards would take a much different philosophy and approach than the CCP of the 1940s to 1980s.

Back to Republic of China

Next to the PRC

1. Yes, the Qing Dynasty had actively reduced technology and standard of living well below what was available in the Dynasties that came before it.

2. Literally, you can watch the eyes of the people they’re interviewing “impromptu” move back and forth as they obviously read a script out loud.

3. A very brief generation of Millenials had open access to the world wide web before the Great Firewall went up. The same generation is skilled in VPN use. But Google is a very disatant concept to both Boomer and Zoomers.

4. On the other hand, they’re generally more savvy and perceptive to spotting propaganda than westerners.

5. America actually gave Mao an armed escort to meet with Nationalist Party leaders to form a two-party democracy, but the CCP had been there, done that with Jiang and his purges already, so it didn’t take. When the CCP took Nanjing, the Americans actually did try to establish diplomatic relations—but the Red Army viewed them as foreign Imperialists and tore the flag down from the American Embassy.

6. The Chinese-funded genocide of two million people (including 300,000 Chinese people) in Pol Pot’s Cambodia will not be on the test.

7. Which only exist for government employees.

8. The UN was meant to prevent foreign invasion, but the North Koreans weren’t exactly invading so much as establishing their own Communist military dictatorship. They had fought and traiend alongside the Chinese Red Army, but this wasn’t an official CCP-backed action.

9. You know, like when President LBJ made India forcibly sterilise over eight million Indian men out of scientifically unfounded fears of Malthusian overpopulation. India had to comply because they were dependent on US aid, which would be withheld unless they obeyed.

10. Mao’s son would die in a cave exactly from such a bombing.

11. Despite the horrific losses, the CCP did achieve their strategic objective of creating an allied buffer state. To this day, North Korea is a popular tourist destination for Chinese people, as it’s relatively inexpensive, it has a lot of silly Potemkin villages, and it makes Chinese people feel better about how much better their lives looked in comparison. Interestingly, North Korea was actually a relatively decent place to live until the collapse of the Soviet Union. The USSR had agreed to give them unlimited at-cost petrol in return for using their ports, which gave people a remarkable standard of living, which endeared people with a genuine sense of loyalty to the Kim family. Once the Soviet Union collapsed and they were cut off, however, their economy collapsed not unlike—if not significantly worse than—Venezuela’s.

12. And I do mean there’s a literal fully developed industry around this. When Chairman Hu came to visit my wife’s village in the late 1990s, they evacuated every single villager along his pre-approved security route and replaced them all with policemen and actors. Every farmer that waved to the motorcade, every driver on the road, every pedestrian in the background, every patron at the restaurants, every waitress—all of them actors. My wife only got to meet Chairman Hu because she was the baby he was going to hold for a photoshoot, and uh, there’s no point in baby actors, I suppose.

13. Which was, of course, utterly useless in being processed into much else of use. Most of the time, they were too low-quality to be turned back into the very farming tools they were made from.

14. For all the propaganda against America, China held a special hostility for Russia that you can only have for a friend who betrayed you. Any sympathy they give to Russia today is solely because if Russia falls, America would surely focus its attention on China next.

15. The people who caused this by making up completely fake numbers.

16. The people who were working hard on developing biological weapons against crops at the time, according to declassified data from MKNAOMI.

17. Another death toll hidden somewhere in this is the 1959 Tibetan Uprising, resulting in the 14th Dalai Llama forming the Tibentan Government in Exile. The CCP annexed Tibet in 1950, granting it some regional autonomy in the “17 Point Agreement”—though the Dalai Llama disputes this. The TGIE claims the CCP killed 85,000 people in the conflict, although their source for this is disputed and rather dubious. Yet, given how many Chinese people were dying everywhere else, it’s hard to tell what was deliberate action against enemy combatants and what was confused corrupt enforcement of delusional domestic policy.

18. Claiming that it’s ideology and not ego that motivated Mao is being unrealistically charitable. Determining the truth—if it’s even possible—is certainly beyond my abilities, but a professor I trust once said of Stalin that he was at least sincere in his ideological purges. Complicating matters was the fact that Krushchev was broadcasting into China encouraging “true communists” to overthrow Mao’s misguided course. Mao responded that Krushchev’s denouncement of Stalin was corrupt and revisionist. Perhaps Mao feared his successor would denounce him just the same.

19. Called the Red Guard; not to be confused with the Red Army. Aside from direct outreach to high schools and universities, the Red Guard circulated Mao’s Little Red Book to recruit for their campaign.

20. In fairness to Mao, his government was insanely corrupt nad lying to him at every turn-and of course, he didn’t know the extent or comprehend the reason for this deception. And both the CIA and KGB were actively trying to infiltrate and destabilise his government.

21. This didn’t actually do anything to address the cartel of corruption. Rather, it just made them more diligent in saying the party line and making ostentatious displays of being a good Communist—such as by persecuting more counter-revolutionaries than their peers.

22. The descendants of Confucius claim to have carefully tracked their lineage since the Zhou dynasty, and every founding Emperor throughout Chinese history sought their blessing to add to their legitimacy, and the CCP was no exception. In the day and age of communal farms, the Confucian family was still allowed massive lands and thousands of serfs.

23. With mass crimes like this, it wasn’t as though there would be much evidence besides “someone said you did something illegal”, so undoubtedly many innocent people were rounded up in the suppression efforts.

24. Keep in mind the universal fabrication of reports in this regime.

25. The policy would continue until 1979. Somewhere between 16-18 million youths were relocated—roughly 10% of China’s urban population. Many of them wound up being a delinquent burden ont he villages forced to house them, and an unambiguous number died in poverty and starvation.

26. Deng’s oldest son was tortured and “jumped” out of a fourth-story window, becoming paraplegic. Deng himself became a worker in a rural village tractor factory.

27. His physician insists vehemently that it wasn’t an assassination, dude was just old and sick, okay? If they state wanted him dead, they didn’t need to go about covering it up.

28. Specifically Yao Wenyuan, Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao, and Jiang Qing—the lattermost of which was Mao’s last wife, a film actress 20 years younger than him who had gotten divorced for cheating on her director husband with her college boyfriend. Mao had remarried after his first wife was killed by the KMT, but abandoned his second wife to a soviet mental institute to be with Jiang—which was a scandal even among the CCP. Because of the scandal, she agreed to stay out of the public eye for 20 years, after which she became extremely involved in orchestrating the Cultural Revolution.

29. China managed to complete its nuclear warhead program in 1964, which is incredibly considering five years earlier, they were literally making pig iron in their backywards. Yet compared to the Soviets, their nuclear arsenal was pathetic, and their deterrence policy actually hinged on their massive population foring a land invasion into the long land border that the Soviets could not reasonably defend, but was still strategically vital with the Trans-Siberian railroad. Moscow was so genuinely threatened by this that some advocated for the development of nuclear landmines.

30. The Soviet claim to the islands was basically squatters’ rights. Russia conceded the islands rightfully belonged to China in 1991, and signed a treaty to that effect, keeping just one island that was largely Russian-settled already.

31. We know the CCP custom is to lie your ass off in offcial reports to make yourself look good. I don’t know anything about how reliable Soviet records are.

32. Her supervisor reportedly passed out, and once he awoke, he transferred the overzealous little Red Guard to some factory work.

33. We often give Kissinger and Nixon credit for opening relations with China, but the reality was that China opening up was inevitable. They couldn’t afford to be enemies with two superpowers, and while China was still very uncomfortable with American involvement in Vietnam, the USSR was now undoubtedly the greater threat.

34. The CCP says it ran out of fuel and definitely wasn’t sabotaged or anything. The soviets say the pilot was flying dangerously low to avoid radar detection and crashed.

35. With this, Mao had officially betrayed every friend he ever had. Zhou Enlai had been by his side since the Long March; not one of his comrades from those days made it to old age without persecution from Mao.

36. Revised once more in 1982, Deng removed autocratic power from the Office of the General Secretary, emphasised the improtance of separation of powers, equality of vote among senior party members, the civil rights of Chinese nationals, as well as term limits—the last of which was removed by Xi Jinping in 2018.

37. Deng also organised the Sino-Vietnamese war in 1970. Vietnam invaded and destroyed Cambodia’s Khmer-Rouge, and signed an alliance with the USSR. China launched a punitive (and deliberately temporary) invasion of Vietnam with 200,000 men to retaliate on behalf of their ally, but also to prevent Soviets from gaining a foothold on their southern border. The vast majority of China’s 1.5 million men army was stationed on the Soviet border as deterrent to call their bluff on the alliance, and it worked, embarrassing the Soviets, who were forced to limit themselves to material support that they struggled to deliver through American-allied waters. Thailand and Singapore worked to improve relations with China after seeing their willingness to intervene with Vietnam’s aggression, and while Vietnam still maintainted its presence in Cambodia, they now had to stretch their forces thin manning the Chinese border. Deng was able to use the resulting casualties and lack of success in Vietnam to pressure the military to support his economic reforms to improve their own strength.