The roots of modern day attitudes toward Japan in China have roots dating back over a century, characterized by a mix of envy and antipathy.
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The roots of modern day attitudes toward Japan in China have roots dating back over a century, characterized by a mix of envy and antipathy. Another classic attempt to “explain and understand” China from the CIA/NSC archives, this one is like some sort of unholy mash-up of John King Fairbank, Max Weber, Henry Luce, Edward Said, and the KMT propaganda department…but there is some useful archival footage as well as interviews with seminal American “China watchers” such as Theodore White and Pearl Buck. Huge h/t to my fellow historian G.T. During the 1920s the CCP operated from within the KMT party apparatus. Part of this was the doings of the Comintern, but it also made sense from a party development point of view. The KMT gave the CCP cover to grow as a party, and many once and future CCP leaders — people with names like ‘Mao’ and ‘Zhou’ — cut their political teeth working for the KMT. When Chiang Kai-shek began his Northern Expedition to reunite the country, the CCP softened up the ground for him by entering cities along the route and spreading propaganda, organizing general strikes, and generally agitation in advance of the KMT army. It’s a story most people know. It was idyllic and peaceful on the outside. Kind of like Tiger and Elin. Like Tiger though, Chiang enjoyed occasionally sleazing it up. But instead of banging cocktail waitresses two at a time, Chiang liked to mix with his boys from the Shanghai underworld, a group that included the notorious criminal boss ‘Big Eared’ Du Yuesheng. Chiang was also about as a jumpy as a coked-up hamster in a bathtub full of cats. It wasn’t likely he was going to keep the Communists around even a In class two weeks ago we were watching the documentary series China From the Inside when one of my students asked, with some reason, that if there was so much hardship and discontent why does the CCP enjoy such broad support? It was a good question, and like all good questions it depends on whom you ask and how you phrase the question. A middle-class manager in a multi-national company in Beijing is likely to have a more favorable view of current policies than, say, a farmer living next door to a factory that blatantly ignores environmental regulations while making the products sold by the middle-class manager in Beijing. This stands to reason. But I think on a more fundamental level there is something which brings the farmer and the yuppie together: the question of what do you fear the most? In Western Europe and North American our dystopian nightmares, those of science fiction and political thrillers, as well as in our history books, involve tyrants who acquired too much power and used that power to brutalize people. Hitler. Stalin. Darth Vader. (Even) Mao. The United States was founded on a profound paranoia over anything that has a whiff of “tyranny” about it. And in the past few Today a user followed this query to the Granite Studio: “How do Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong continue to influence Taiwan and China today?” It’s obviously a complicated question, but it does recall a comment a Beijing acquaintance of mine made the first time we went to the old South Bar Street to take in the spectacle of a Sanlitun Saturday night: “This is what all of China would like if Chiang Kai-shek had won the war.” Ouch. Then I thought about it: Well, didn’t he? |
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