EPISODE 351： THE CHINA FILES - WARLORDS OF THE REVOLUTION
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
136.40105
Summary
A four-part series on the history of Mao Zedong and the Chinese revolution, starting with the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and covering the rise and fall of China's leaders.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard for a very special four-part series that we've decided to
00:00:19.400
put together for you this Christmas week. It's called The China Files. And for a long time,
00:00:28.060
I've wanted to sit down and talk to you a lot about the history of China. I remember this time last
00:00:33.880
year, we did a history of Taiwan episode that did really well. And I said, you know what,
00:00:38.460
I want to get into this. Even Charlie had reached out to me the other day and said, Jack, you got
00:00:42.860
to talk about Maoism more. You have to talk Maoism more. So I said, all right, let's do it. We're
00:00:48.860
going to do a four-part series. And so let me say to you, welcome to The China Files, part one,
00:01:07.740
Warlords of the Revolution. So let's go all the way back to the late Qing dynasty,
00:01:14.780
the 1800s, late 1800s in China. You have to understand what kind of country, what kind of
00:01:21.140
land we're dealing with. This is the land of footbinding. This is the land of all adult males
00:01:28.100
being forced to shave their heads except for one long braid in the back. The Manchus required that.
00:01:34.220
The Manchus were seen as a foreign leadership. And these were the ones that ruled the Qing dynasty.
00:01:40.360
But what even are dynasties? It's a dynasty. We don't have those in the U.S. We don't have
00:01:46.840
those in the West anymore. We had kings at one point. Well, the dynasty, for about 3,500 years
00:01:54.980
in ancient and medieval China, they were ruled by these dynasties, by these royal families,
00:02:00.100
the Han, the Tang, the Ming, the Qing, the Song, so many of them. And yet the Qing dynasty towards the end,
00:02:07.380
they were seen as corrupted. They were always seen as foreign. But they had been just defeated
00:02:15.120
by the British in the opium wars. Wars fueled by the rise of opium and the increase of the illegal
00:02:23.940
drug inside China. They were then defeated. Hong Kong was established as a colony for the British.
00:02:31.080
Shanghai was opened up to the British and the French. Later on, the Boxer Rebellion was an
00:02:36.360
anti-foreigner rebellion that was covertly funded by the Qing dynasty. But that was itself defeated
00:02:42.680
by the eight-nation army, which included troops from the United States, Germany, France, the UK,
00:02:51.360
and even Japan. And they came in and occupied Beijing. So the Qing dynasty, it was viewed by many
00:02:57.920
as having lost what's called the mandate of heaven. And the mandate of heaven, it's similar to the
00:03:03.300
European divine right of kings, but the mandate of heaven can be lost. It can be lost if a ruler
00:03:10.180
becomes oppressive, incompetent, neglectful, or failed to govern responsibly. Famine, pestilence,
00:03:17.380
disease, these are all harbingers of losing the mandate of heaven. And so a rebellion took place
00:03:25.700
by the people. And initially, something called the Republic of China was born. The Republic of China.
00:03:34.580
And this was led by Sun Yat-sen, and later led by a man by the name of Jiang Ye-shir,
00:03:45.660
However, Sun Yat-sen gets overthrown by a warlord, Yuan Shikai. And there are many warlords all over
00:03:52.240
Northern China, particularly Northern China, but you also see them in the West and other areas.
00:03:57.260
And so China almost becomes up for grabs because this new Republic of China is not able to fully
00:04:04.960
take over all of the land of China. It's seen in many areas like the West as bandit country,
00:04:13.100
no man's land, lawlessness, warlords taking over in the North, in the South,
00:04:18.900
parts of the coast, gangs rising up, taking over places in Hong Kong, city streets.
00:04:26.820
And the Soviet Union to the North of China realized that they too had an opportunity in this new
00:04:34.820
China with no dynasty. And so the Soviet Union worked with a group of scholars and a group of radicals
00:04:43.540
all the way back in 1921 to hold a meeting in Shanghai, the first meeting of the Chinese
00:04:53.600
Communist Party. Mao Zedong was not the originator of this meeting, but he did attend it. It's a small
00:05:02.120
building in a shirkuman stone, two-story building, still there in Shanghai. I've been there.
00:05:09.260
And you can go and see where the Chinese Communist Party began. And in fact, several members of that
00:05:16.820
initial meeting were also part of the KGB. They were members of Soviet intelligence forces.
00:05:25.540
So from the very start, the CCP was a foreign funded, foreign financed organization.
00:05:31.360
But very early on, Chairman Mao, even before he was chairman, grown up the son of a peasant.
00:05:41.620
He didn't want to work in the fields. His father also became a grain merchant, started to get a
00:05:46.820
little bit of money. But Mao didn't want to follow in his footsteps. Mao wanted something else. Mao wanted
00:05:55.560
revolution. But what Mao did learn from growing up in Hunan province was the power of thugs, the power
00:06:04.840
of banditry, the power of martial force and brutal violence. And these, in a way that might seem strange
00:06:15.920
to so many people, these tactics that would cause so many of us to recoil, brutal tactics, burning villages,
00:06:25.260
torture, they seemed to excite Chairman Mao. He seemed almost to derive pleasure from this.
00:06:33.320
And so his brand of Marxism, which would later become known as Mao-Jui, Maoism,
00:06:43.200
was so more brutal than any type of communism that's ever been seen prior or even since.
00:06:54.480
Because he viewed purification of the country as only to be able to come through pain.
00:07:07.260
And as the Chinese Communist Party grew in the West, and then later came into conflict with the Republic of
00:07:15.700
China, Mao continued to use those tactics and his army, which later became known as the Red Army,
00:07:24.480
used those same tactics on any peasant, any leader, any merchant that got in their way,
00:07:33.760
brutally tortured, executed in public. Because Mao believed that all of these things should be done
00:07:41.960
in public so that the peasantry would understand who was now in power. And I know I'm skipping around
00:07:50.560
a lot, but we've got a couple more segments on this. But I want you to understand, before we go to break
00:07:56.220
here, that it was through these brutal tactics that Mao was able to establish his reign of terror
00:08:03.960
throughout the entire countryside of Western China, while financed and funded by the Soviet Union.
00:08:11.220
So throughout the 1920s, this clash between the nationalists and the communists continued. In fact,
00:08:24.380
in the city of Shanghai, there was an event at one point, April 1927, known as the Shanghai Massacre. And that's
00:08:32.060
when the nationalists joined with a geisha or, you know, a black society, what we might call a triad
00:08:40.460
called the Green Gang. And the Green Gang went in to do the dirty work of the nationalists. And what did
00:08:47.360
they do? They systematically purged and assassinated every single communist they could find that night in
00:08:55.200
Shanghai, because they went through at the orders of the nationalists to get rid of these guys and kick them
00:09:02.700
out. This continued and continued all the way up and up through the early 1930s. And through the early 1930s, there
00:09:13.940
were two, actually two major conflicts going on in China. Number one, was this continuing and ever expanding
00:09:21.720
civil war between the nationalists and the communists. But number two, starting in 1931, you saw an invasion of China by
00:09:32.860
Japan. Now, first, it was a limited engagement, limited invasion, just in the area of Manchuria, which the Japanese
00:09:40.260
later formed as a puppet controlled state called Manchukuo. And they found, remember that Qing dynasty? They found the last
00:09:48.400
son of the Qing dynasty, who was himself Manchurian, and created this sort of puppet emperor for him up in this
00:09:57.220
great movie about this called The Last Emperor. You can go watch. His name was Pu Yi. And they fashioned that up in China's
00:10:04.620
northeast. So just across from where you would see the Korean Peninsula now. And China and Japan had fought over the
00:10:10.400
Korean Peninsula at this point. By the way, Japan also controlled Taiwan, because the Treaty of Shimonoseki in, I believe,
00:10:16.960
of 1894, and the fallout of the former Sino-Japanese War. So Japan's got their foothold in China. Then in 1931, that increases with
00:10:27.560
this Manchukuo invasion. So the nationalists are fighting a two-front war, because they're fighting the communists to the west, and now
00:10:35.680
they're fighting the Japanese to the northeast. So what happens? The continued fighting and the continued defeats of the communists at the
00:10:46.340
hands of Chiang Kai-shek drive the Red Army and the CCP to essentially be encircled. They're completely
00:10:56.340
encircled by Chiang Kai-shek's armies. And they're pushed out of eastern China. Eastern China is that coastal region. They're pushed
00:11:03.960
out completely. And so Mao decides that the only thing left is a retreat. He's got no vehicles at this point.
00:11:12.360
He's barely got any horses. All he's got are his feet and the feet of his army. And so he begins the most
00:11:20.120
massive retreat in CCP history. It's called the Long March. Late in 1934, he marches all the way out to
00:11:30.340
rural Yan'an province, as far as possible as he can go into that bandit country that we were talking about
00:11:37.320
before, loses 90% of the Red Army on the way, either to desertion, disease, injury, infection. Things look
00:11:48.620
bleak. But then something happens that falls right into Chairman Mao's hands, right into his lap.
00:11:56.780
The increased invasion of Japan and the outbreak of World War II in the Pacific, this is 1937, creates a huge problem for
00:12:09.040
the nationalists. Because now the nationalists are faced with an even more powerful Japanese empire that's attacking
00:12:17.560
them in Beijing and Shanghai, across all of their power centers. People know, I believe, about the rape of Nanjing that
00:12:25.400
happens during this period, the absolute destruction that was rained down on the Japanese, by the Japanese.
00:12:33.380
And so at one point later, one of the warlords, because there's still warlords in this period,
00:12:39.620
actually takes Chiang Kai-shek, takes him and kidnaps him, kidnaps him. And this is called the Xi'an
00:12:49.860
incident. We're here in 1936. He gets arrested by warlord Zhang Shui Liang. And this warlord says,
00:12:57.840
in order to deal with Japanese aggression, in order to fight back against Japan, you must form an alliance
00:13:07.300
with the CCP. You see, what Chiang Kai-shek didn't know was that this warlord had already cut a deal
00:13:13.700
with Chairman Mao. Chairman Mao realized what happened with that Green Gang back in Shanghai
00:13:18.180
during the purges. And he said, fine, if that's the way to work, I'm going to get there before then.
00:13:23.380
So Mao starts making deals with the triads, with the black societies, with every warlord that he can.
00:13:29.460
And here's what he says to them. He says, in the future, when I'm in charge of the country,
00:13:35.320
you'll be given everything. And so Mao does enter this alliance. The CCP, the communists form an
00:13:45.700
alliance with the nationalists. And they say, here's what we're going to do. We'll start a
00:13:49.180
second united front and we'll fight Japan together. But of course, what does Mao really do? Because
00:13:55.640
remember, Mao's forces now are mostly in the West, whereas the nationalist forces and the Japanese
00:14:02.920
are mostly in the East. So the communists commit to some limited engagements against the Japanese.
00:14:11.140
But what really happens? Instead of Mao fighting the Japanese, he works with the peasants. He works
00:14:18.300
with the Red Army. He keeps them mostly in the West. He lets the nationalists fight Japan. And Mao even
00:14:24.920
joked about this later. He said, I would have been crushed if I didn't have Japan invade and create a
00:14:32.620
distraction that the nationalists would have to face so he could increase his armies, increase his
00:14:38.620
forces in the West. Let the nationalists take it on the chin, let themselves become weakened and then
00:14:45.160
grow the CCP and grow the Red Army ever more powerful than he could. If Japan had never invaded, it's more
00:14:55.360
than likely that the communists would have been would have been stamped out in the 1930s after this long
00:14:59.540
march. But history is what it is. And so because of that invasion of Japan, not only were the people
00:15:09.960
of China subjugated to the horrors of Imperial Japan, the rape of Nanjing, but later it set forward
00:15:18.480
the conditions for the CCP to come back. And after Japan was knocked out of the war, after the war ended,
00:15:26.360
thanks to the nuclear bombs, the atomic bombs by the United States, Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945, it set the
00:15:35.760
stage for Mao to make his comeback. Because immediately after World War Two ended, the United States at first
00:15:43.240
said, Oh, we hope you guys can coexist peacefully. But even as far back as FDR, even and then certainly under
00:15:51.820
Truman, the communists that had completely infiltrated the United States State Department
00:15:56.600
and the United States government at this point, they wanted the communists to win. They wanted China
00:16:02.980
to fall. They saw what Mao was doing. They knew what Mao was doing. And in 1946, that civil war
00:16:11.240
went hot again. And the CCP was poised to come back and win.
00:16:19.060
The communists won the Chinese civil war. The nationalists, the Republic of China were forced to
00:16:25.480
flee the country. And they later fled to the island that we now know today as Taiwan and established the
00:16:32.060
Republic of China. On the way out, they hit the treasury, hit the museums of Beijing. They took many,
00:16:39.380
many things with them, Chiang Kai-shek and his regime, as the communists were going to come in
00:16:44.240
and destroy everything, smash all of Chinese historical culture with along with them. This
00:16:50.380
was another part of Maoism, because not only did the communist revolution murder, torture and execute
00:16:57.520
anyone who stood in their way, they also viewed history itself as their enemy. Now, two years after this
00:17:06.780
happened, there was a speech given by Senator Joseph McCarthy. And he talked about the failed
00:17:16.920
mission to prevent the Chinese civil war from taking place in the communist revolution from winning in
00:17:21.580
China. That mission had been headed by General George Marshall, famous George Marshall on the Nobel
00:17:28.640
Peace Prize. What did McCarthy have to say about that? McCarthy said the only way to explain why the U.S.
00:17:35.960
fell from our position as the most powerful nation on earth at the end of World War II to a position of
00:17:41.920
declared weakness by our leadership was because of a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black
00:17:48.700
as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. And specifically argued that General
00:17:56.080
Wiedemeyer had prepared a plan that would have kept China a valued ally, but had been sabotaged,
00:18:02.420
quote, only in treason can we find why evil genius thwarted and frustrated it. Specifically, that when Marshall
00:18:11.320
was sent to China with secret State Department orders, State Department orders, the communists at that time
00:18:17.540
were bottled up in two areas and were fighting a losing battle. But that because of those orders, the
00:18:23.340
situation was radically changed in favor of the communists. Under those orders, as we now know, Marshall embargoed
00:18:30.600
all arms and ammunition to our allies in China. He forced the opening of the nationalist held mountains
00:18:37.600
into Manchuria to the end that the Chinese communists gained access to the mountains of captured Japanese
00:18:44.320
equipment. Remember, the Japanese stronghold was in northeast China in Manchuria. No need to tell the
00:18:51.960
country how Marshall tried to force Chiang Kai-shek to form a partnership government with the communists.
00:18:59.200
And so, were the communists allowed to win? Was Chairman Mao allowed to take China? Was this part of a deal
00:19:13.820
that many have alleged took place between the highest levels of the United States government
00:19:19.360
that actually started with FDR and then later was carried out by Truman and elements of the State
00:19:26.820
Department? And you say, why? Why? What's in this for the United States? Well, it's not that it's in it
00:19:33.100
for the United States. There's nothing in it for the United States. But what if there were a group of
00:19:39.420
people that wanted to create a one world government? And what if there were a group of people that knew
00:19:45.120
that in order to do that, you would have to create a deal with the other superpower of the world at the
00:19:51.520
time? And who was that? It's the Soviet Union. And the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, were our allies in
00:19:58.540
World War II. But let's say you want to join with them. And let's say you want to create a one world
00:20:06.680
government. You might call it something like, I don't know, the United Nations.
00:20:16.020
to take part in this program when they wouldn't have to? What could possibly be the dowry for such
00:20:24.460
a dark marriage? Well, it's simple. You give them China. You give them a billion people to fall to
00:20:33.700
communism, and then you get their acquiescence. And we've seen many of this. We've seen much of this
00:20:40.780
in declassified text, telegrams, declassified cables that have come out, discussing these plans
00:20:48.440
all the way back to FDR. Because there were many Americans that wanted communism to succeed,
00:20:55.780
not just in China, but also across Europe. There's a reason that the US government funded
00:21:02.780
and industrialized the Soviet Union for years and years prior to World War II, even prior to American
00:21:10.880
involvement in World War II. And I'm just talking about Lend-Lease. But Lend-Lease, of course,
00:21:14.440
goes on to be the funding that enables the Soviets to continue their fight.
00:21:21.120
And so going back to those days of the late 1940s, World War II ends. The nationalists
00:21:31.120
are left to dry. They're left to wither and rot on the vine by the United States and by the allies.
00:21:39.580
Meanwhile, the communists, Mao Zedong, and the Chinese Communist Party continue fighting closer
00:21:46.540
and closer. Millions of people are killed in this fighting. Over 2.5 million. Hundreds of thousands
00:21:53.200
of people are starved out. Because remember, Chairman Mao once famously said, a revolution
00:22:00.560
is not a dinner party. He didn't care how many people died. He gave orders for torture, execution,
00:22:08.980
laid siege to cities where hundreds of thousands of people starved. And that was only
00:22:14.560
a paltry sum compared to the millions that would later starve under Mao's rule.
00:22:21.980
Because Mao wanted more than anything else, absolute power within China. And it didn't matter to him
00:22:29.960
how many of his own people had to die so that he could get it.
00:22:34.140
So under this situation, with the communists being completely funded by the Soviet Union,
00:22:41.920
the nationalists getting no support whatsoever, the Japanese, they've been destroyed, they've been
00:22:47.540
defeated. What happens? October 1949, Beijing falls. Chairman Mao climbs atop the Tiananmen Square gate.
00:23:04.140
And declares to the people of China, and declares to the world, the establishment of the People's
00:23:10.640
Republic of China. The same government that still rules China to this very day.
00:23:23.800
But I want you to stay tuned. Because tomorrow, in part two, we are going to talk all about
00:23:31.860
the massacres that happened under Chairman Mao's rule. The purges. The recruitment of children.
00:23:41.080
Turning them against their own parents. Radicalizing them against their own families. Their own schools.
00:23:47.300
That culminated in mass suicide, murders, rapes, starvations. All of this taking place, not in
00:23:55.600
wartime, but in peacetime. Because this is the legacy of Chairman Mao. As his mind descended into
00:24:08.500
degeneracy, so too did China descend into chaos under heaven.