Chinese History for White People - Republic of China

A thousand years from now, this era of China's history will be viewed as an interregnum, much like the mess of the 5 Dynasties era. But given its relevance to today's politics, I'll do my best to cover it in some detail. The propaganda here also gets very intense—not just from the CCP, but also from Cold War America and Taiwan.

For the most part, the Republican Government was screwed from the start. Most of the country expected a restoration of Dynastic rule under Han leadership, and restructuring Confucian society into a western republic was viewed as selling out by the populace behind the Boxer Rebellion. Meanwhile the upper class Chinese had been seeking education in western countries and desperately wanted China to follow the same path to success through westernization that had worked for Meiji Japan. Worsening the tension, the Qing Emperor's peaceful abdication was predicated on the compromise that Sun Zhongshan step down as President and turn the role over to Yuan Shikai—a general and friend of the royal court.

Yuan Shikai brought his 80,000 man army straight into parliament, called the Beiyang Government. Opposition leader Song Jiaoren of the Nationalist Party¹ called for limiting Presidential power in the not-yet-written constitution, and he was promptly assassinated—along with everyone under investigation for the crime. Yuan labeled the nationalist party as a seditious organization, and Sun Zhongshan fled to Japan, where he continued to organize resistance. In 1915² the representative assembly then unanimously voted that Yuan Shikai crown himself Emperor—with heavy support from the British. He never saw his coronation, his reign only lasting 83 days. He stepped down and promptly died of illness after immense protests and open condemnation from the Japanese.

Thus began the Warlord Era, in which the Beiyang Army officers Yuan had stacked his assembly with fell to military infighting over who would rule. Sun Zhongshan reestablished the Nationalist party in Guangzhou and was elected Grand Marshal of the armed forces, and set about reunifying China before it exploded into catastrophic civil war. To do this he needed allies, and found it via the Chinese Communist Party and their connections with the Soviet Union³. With their material and tactical support, the reunification of China was completed in 1928⁴. However Sun died in 1925 from cancer, after abandoning his radium treatments in favor of Chinese medicine. It was Nationalist party Commandant Jiang Jieshi⁵ who completed the reunified China. Nonetheless, Sun Zhongshan's is considered a national hero by both the Republic and the CCP.

Things were too chaotic for a peaceful election; the two candidates to succeed Sun were Jiang Jieshi and Wang Jingwei—the latter of which had the support of the CCP. In 1926, Jiang placed several members of the CCP and Soviets under arrest for undermining the chain of command and Chinese sovereignity⁶—an incident known as the Canton Coup. A year later, zealous communist labor and student unions attacked and looted foreign enclaves, which gave Jiang the excuse he needed to violently purge Communists in the Shanghai massacre⁷. This began the Chinese Civil War—a year before the reunification was even complete. One of history's many “White Terror” episodes, the ensuing purges throughout the nation killed an estimated 1 million civilians and 80% of CCP members. Nationalists specifically targeted, publicly mutilated, and executed any woman with short hair whose feet were not bound, as the feminist movement was deeply tied with the Communist movement. Wang denounced the CCP and fled the country⁸, and Sun Zhongshan's widow denounced Jiang as a traitor—to no effect.

What can be said of Jiang's rule? Although he's often compared to fascists, he vehemently criticized fascists abroad. The CCP paints him as a capitalist, but Jiang frequently seized the assets of capitalists in Shanghai for the war effort, and the Nationalist platform was anti-foreign, anti-imperialist. The regime was laughably corrupt—embezzling between 2/3rds to 3/4ths of the national revenue—which Jiang tolerated to avoid infighting, but never engaged in himself and made efforts to combat it where he could. Rebuilding literacy and education was a priority—including the education of women, despite the persecution of feminists⁹. Most notably they began teaching the standardization of Mandarin Chinese¹⁰. Fiat currency was established, and they invested in railroad infrastructure. Diplomacy was used to moderate some of the unfair advantages western powers had obtained in the Century of Humiliation. A strong campaign to eradicate opium was implemented¹¹. But the reality is that China was mostly a lawless war-torn hellscape, and nothing significant could get done until the conflict was resolved. In addition to fighting a civil war, the Soviets invaded Xinjiang¹², the Dalai Llama invaded Qinghai¹³, and the Japanese seized Manchuria¹⁴.

When the CCP was exiled from government, communist sympathizers in the Nationalist Army combined with a peasant militia known as the Red Army, led by Mao Zedong¹⁵. The war was a messy insurgency, and went poorly. In 1934 the Red Army was pushed into an infamous 12,500km retreat¹⁶ known as “The Long March”, in which 78,000 of the 86,000 Red Army perished. Mao's rank in the CCP rose to Chairman of the Military, and was effectively its undisputed leader even though he did not yet hold the highest office of Party Chairman.

Meanwhile, the Japanese continued to seize territory in Northern China, and the Nationalists continued to sign appeasement treaties without significant opposition. For this, the CCP and modern Chinese remember them as cowards repeating the mistake of Song Dynasty—in naive hope that the Japanese would be satisfied with just a little more land. However, it's not clear where the Nationalists were supposed to draw their forces from. North China was still largely occupied by Beiyang warlords who only nominally accepted Nationalist authority—something the Japanese were keen to exploit. Jiang didn't think he could avoid war with Japan, but that China stood no chance in its current state and needed time to prepare—which it couldn't do with the disruptions of a Communist insurgency. Nonetheless, in 1937 Jiang wound up kidnapped by the warlord who used to control Manchuria before the Japanese ousted him, and he forced Jiang to agree to a truce with the CCP¹⁷ to fight the Japanese.

Now at total war with Japan¹⁸, Shanghai was captured in 3 months¹⁹, and the Nationalists abandoned their capital in Nanjing as they knew they were unable to defend it. The six weeks of violence committed by the Japanese army in Nanjing—under the command of Prince Yasuhiko Asaka²⁰—is among the worst atrocities of WW2. An estimated 200,000 civilians were murdered, and 20k-80k women, children, and elderly were systematically raped door-to-door. Families were forced to commit incest at gunpoint; pregnant women were specifically targeted for disembowelment; most infamously there was a contest between two soldiers to see who could kill 100 civilians first using only a sword. So extreme was the occupation, that Nazi Party Member John Rabe used his diplomatic privilege to establish the Nanking Safety Zone—saving approximately 250,000 Chinese²¹ by cramming them in a 3.4sq mile refugee camp with a handful of American doctors who chose to join him. To this day, Rabe²² and Nazis in general²³ are thought of as heroes by the Chinese people.

Concerned about foreign opinion, the Japanese hoped to make the problem less visible by establishing brothels of over 200,000 sex slaves known as “comfort women,” taken from every territory the Japanese occupied²⁴. Yet the casual robbery, rape, and murder of civilians remained pretty standard throughout the entire Japanese Empire, and intensified as the Chinese invasion dragged on with the “Kill All, Loot All, Burn All” policy. However the most elaborate of their war crimes had been occurring in Manchuria, under Unit 731—the human medical experimentation unit²⁵—every bit as comparable to the Nazi war crimes of Josef Mengele. In total, after 3-4million Chinese military casualties, as many as 8 million Chinese civilians were directly killed by Japan, with another 5-10 million dying of wartime famine. This does not include 500k Korean civilians and roughly 1 million various Southeast Asians killed by the Japanese army.

While some Japanese officers were executed for their crimes postwar, many soldiers were not—and much of what we know comes from their own diaries and testimonies. Like holocaust denial, some Japanese holding positions in universities deny these crimes occurred at all²⁶. These crimes have not generally been included in Japanese history textbooks²⁷. Japan avoided giving any apology for decades²⁸, and the Yasukuni Shrine honoring Japan's WW2 veterans to this day claims Japan brought peace and safety to Nanjing. Hatred and resentment throughout all of East Asia remains strong even as memories fade into anime.

As for the remainder of the war, China still had no industrial base with which to counter the Japanese. Jiang Jieshi opted for a scorched earth war of attrition, slowing and draining the Japanese at every opportunity while buying time to build up resources²⁹ at the new capital of Chongqing. The CCP conducted sabotage raids in north China, and the Soviets continued to provide the bulk of material support³⁰. And the Japanese puppet governments had no authority or respect due to all the war crimes. However without external intervention—either directly by the Soviet Union³¹ or, ultimately, by the United States³², Japanese victory would have been inevitable. As part of the Japanese surrender, MacArthur commanded the Japanese in China to surrender to Jiang—thus repatriating Manchuria, Taiwan, and other territories to China and not the Soviet Union³³. In retaliation, the USSR dismantled the entire Manchurian Industrial base and took it with them when they withdrew, and Stalin ordered all captured Japanese weapons be given to the CCP—who occupied much of North China and had won the hearts³⁴ of the people with their insurgency actions there. With manpower and weapons, the CCP was in a far greater position that it had been prior to the Japanese invasion.

The Nationalists received roughly $4.43 billlion from the US in military aid and surplus, including airlifts and 50,000 troops on the ground. With these advantages, the Nationalists still outclassed the CCP; however the US would not develop its containment doctrine with respect to Communism until the Korean War³⁵. The corruption within the Nationalists became difficult for the US government to stomach³⁶, and as they faced consecutive defeats³⁷ by the CCP, the US began to withdraw its support. The Civil war would continue for three more years with around 2.5 million casualties between both sides, and in 1949, around 2 million Nationalists would retreat to Taiwan³⁸ where they would maintain they were still the legitimate rulers of China until they became a democracy in the 1990s.

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1. In Wade-Giles transliteration, called Kuomintang, which you may see abbreviated as KMT; though in pinyin, it would be Guomindang.

2. China actually joined WWI just so it could negotiate its concessions and treaties to Germany and Austria during the Boxer Protocols, as well as giving them an excuse to expand the army in an attempt to unify Beiyang Government without actually being able to deploy anywhere in Europe. As a result of this expansion, a lot of Japanese experts and equipment was introduced into the Chinese military, which set the stage for the later Second Sino-Japanese war.

3. As it happens, Lenin knew a thing or two about winning a 23-front clusterfuck of a civil war.

4. They call it complete, but Beiyang warlords who submitted to the Nationalists would later rebel. The Central Plains War of 1929 involved over a million soldiers, half of which perished.

5. You know him as Chiang Kai-shek, since American Newspapers at the time used Wade-Giles, which the Chinese criticised for being written by two British linguists who did not actually speak Chinese. I’ve been keeping with Mandarin pinyin, and I’m not about to stop now.

6. It’s hard to say whether this was bullshit. As we’ll see later, the Soviet Union did fully intend for China to join them full stop—which explicitly violated Sun’s tenants for the Nationalist Party. On the other hand, this allowed him to seize power from a more popular rival.

7. Depending on whose propaganda you want to believe, death tolls range from 300 to 10,000. What we do know is that Jiang relied on organised crime to get the job done.

8. He would later return, advocatingfor appeasing the Japanese, who would place him in charge of Nanjing after its occupation. His name is synonymous with “traitor” to modern Chinese people.

9. They granted women the right to inheritance, bank accounts, divorce, and banned forced marriage. They also granted women suffrage, though the constitution wouldn’t be implemented until 1947, after the government’s exile to Taiwan.

10. The simplification of characters, however, was a CCP invention, and should be considered sincerely as one of the CCP’s most brilliant achievements.

11. While foreign powers had largely lost interest in the opium trade, the widespread addiction remained, supplyed by domestic production.

12. This was following an Uyghur revolt, and resulted in the USSR taking territory that would later become Kyrgyzstan, I think? The CCP was trying to rendezvous with them but were intercepted by Jiang forces and largely wiped out.

13. Specifically to get more corvee slave labour. Tibet was a brutal dictatorship that used a pyramid of human skulls to intimidate peasants into mining more offerings of gold. The British—through India—provided weapons and training to Tibetan forces and pressured the Nationalist government into a ceasefire once they started winning.

14. The invasion was naked aggression on the pretext of an embarrasingly obvious false flag: the Mukden incident. However, the Nationalists were not remotely stable enough to deal with Japan. They appealed to the League of Nations for help, which served only to prove how useless an organisation it was.

15. Mao’s wife, Yang Kaihui, was herself a combatant, and would soon be captured and tortured to death by the Nationalists, refusing to denounce her husband or the CCP until her last breath. Her children would be orphans until he could relocate them after the war. His sister suffered the same fate. His brother would die in the Long March. And his son would later die in the Korean War.

16. The CCP does not refer to this in their history textbooks as a retreat, but rather a strategic relocation to launch further attacks. They do reference heavy losses, but usually avoid any actual numbers.

17. Both sides were fully aware the civil war would resume as soon as the Japanese invasion ended. Both sides were perfectly happy to manoeuvre their forces such that the other side took as many losses as posible (and the CCP had already been nearly completely wiped out). This was not an alliance by any stretch of the imagination—merely a ceasefire.

18. Despite the hostilities, an official declaration of war wouldn’t be made until America joined the war in 1941. Jiang was still immensely reluctant to fight the apanese. Prior to this, America claimed to support China and wagged its finger at Japan, but continued to sell the Japanese oil and machinery until they invaded French colonies a few months before the Peark Harbour attacks. Only then did America offer the Nationalists any financial aid.

19. The Japanese thought they could take Shanghai in 3 days, and the entirety of China in 3 months—so holding out this long was considered a considerable victory of morale for China. The frustrations the Japanese faced with Shanghai is largely credited to why they went on such a massacre in Nanjing.

20. Who was granted immunity as part of Japan’s “unconditional" surrender to the Americans.

21. Japanese soldiers would still occasionally enter the camp and carry off women by the hundreds, but the violence was definitely directed away from the zone.

22. John Rabe would die in poverty after going bankrupt in legal fees in the postwar tribunals, and being forbidden to work as a Nazi. Grateful survivors of Nanjing would scrape together a meager $2000 to help his family eat something other than foraged seeds—which was in fact a very alrge sum for starving Communists.

23. China doesn’t teach any history besides its own (it’s got too much history already, so most Chinese people know nothing about the European theatre of WWII, just as most American’s don’t know much about the Second Sino-Japanese War. I’ve met Chinese people who praise Jews and Nazis as hardworking, respectable people in the same breath, completely unaware of the history those two groups have with each other. It isn’t censorship, however, the information is freely available to anyone who bothers to look into it. But it’s only really in the past couple of decades that the average Chinese people have become aware of what went down with the Nazis, with the proliferation of the internet.

24. Surprisingly, this included Japanese women as well.

25. Aside from chemical and biological weapons testing and bleedout data, almost all of organ transplant surgery was developed on kidnapped Chinese and Koreans, for whom the expense of anaesthesia was not afforded. The US received this data after the Japanese surrender and had to decide whether to keep it or destroy it.

26. It seems they faced a lawsuit in Japan in 2009, over 70 years later. Better late than never, I guess.

27. Starting in the 2000’s, there was a movement in Japan to whitewash wartime history.

28. Some Chinese have expressed the opinion that Japan wouldn’t have given any apology at all if America wasn’t also allied with Korean victims. It is pretty clear American went out of its way to let Japan save face in the post-war climate.

29. Shanghai was practically the only industrial base in all of China. Resistant fighters were firing unrifled pipe guns, with only three rounds of ammunition per man on average. With no navy, no air support, no tanks, the CCP was often stuck sending waves of unarmed men at machine gun nests until the enemy ran out of bullets, something they’re proud enough to make a part of their national anthem today. This is why Jiang thought fighting Japan in their current state was madness.

30. The Nazis had not yet broken the non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, so they were not yet in a desperate war of survival themselves.

31. Although the Japanese were brought to the point of surrender by the US, it was in fact the Soviet invasion of Manchuria that ended the war, not the atomic bombs. Japan had lost more citizens in the conventional bombing of Tokyo alone than both atomic bombs combined, much less every other city bombed. And Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not even major cities at the time. The reports of the atomic bombs didn’t even disrupt parliament. However, once the Soviets invaded, Japan realised if they didn’t surrender immediately to the Americans, then the Soviets would make demands in how the surrender played out (which ended poorly for Berlin).

32. Notably, modern China does not teach America’s role in defeating the Japanese at all. They claim Mao is an unprecedented military genius even greater than Li Shimin, who defeated the entire Japanese Empire on his own. Most Chinese people are completely unaware of the naval battles in the Pacific theatre, and are only vaguely aware of the bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

33. The Soviets did demand Outer Mongolia maintain its “independence”, even though they had been extensively subject to Stalin’s purges throughout the 1920s. The Soviets did repel the Japanese invasion of Mongolia in 1939, however.

34. Wikipedia claims their promise of land reform had also proven immensely popular with subsistence farmers who had been living under landlords backed by military warlods. But the subsistence farmers I’ve spoken with took the policy for granted, as land is always split after a catastrophic war due to population loss. They supported the CCP because they visibly fought the Japanese.

35. In fact, President Truman openly announced he would not contest Taiwan as rightfully part of CCCP China. Yet the same year, the Korean War broke out, and US doctrine decided to check the advance of communism globally, thus ensuring US protection of Taiwan that lasts to this day.

36. A direct quote from President Truman: “They stole $750 million out of the billions that we sent to Chiang. They stole it, and it’s invested in real estate down in Sao Paolo and some right here in New York.” I’ll note that anyone of capitalist sensibilities fled China as the CCP won the civil war, with Brazil being a popular destination for any Chinese that learned Portuguese from their dealings with Macau (which remained a holding of Portugal until 1999).

37. To some extent, the CCP did just genuinely display some strategic and tactical superiority over the KMT. This was likely due to their experience fighting aggresssively against the Japanese, as opposed to the KMT’s defensive attrition.

38. And they took with them every treasure in the Forbidden City—miraculously escorting hundreds of thousands of ancient artefacts through a war zone and across the sea. The only thing that got damaged was the antenna of a jade cricket. The collection is still in Taipei and they are quite excited to tell you all about it should you be keen to visit!