The China Files is a four-part series that covers the history of China from the late Qing Dynasty to the fall of the Manchus and the rise of Mao Zedong. This series is brought to you by Human Events.
00:03:10.100Hong Kong was established as a colony for the British.
00:03:13.200Shanghai was opened up to the British and the French.
00:03:16.080Later on, the Boxer Rebellion was an anti-foreigner rebellion that was covertly funded by the Qing Dynasty.
00:03:21.680But that was itself defeated by the eight-nation army, which included troops from the United States, Germany, France, the U.K., and even Japan.
00:03:34.000And they came in and occupied Beijing.
00:03:36.060So the Qing Dynasty, it was viewed by many as having lost what's called the Mandate of Heaven.
00:03:42.720And the Mandate of Heaven, it's similar to the European Divine Right of Kings, but the Mandate of Heaven can be lost.
00:03:50.060It can be lost if a ruler becomes oppressive, incompetent, neglectful, or failed to govern responsibly.
00:03:57.560Famine, pestilence, disease, these are all harbingers of losing the Mandate of Heaven.
00:04:03.180And so a rebellion took place by the people.
00:04:09.080And initially, something called the Republic of China was born.
00:04:15.900And this was led by Sun Yat-sen, and later led by a man by the name of Jiang Yashir, or better known in English as Chiang Kai-shek.
00:04:27.040However, Sun Yat-sen gets overthrown by a warlord, Yuan Shikai.
00:04:31.200And there are many warlords all over northern China, particularly northern China, but you also see them in the west and other areas.
00:04:38.740And so China almost becomes up for grabs because this new Republic of China is not able to fully take over all of the land of China.
00:04:49.180It's seen in many areas, like the west, as bandit country, no man's land, lawlessness, warlords taking over in the north, in the south, parts of the coast, gangs rising up, taking over places in Hong Kong, city streets.
00:05:07.180And the Soviet Union, to the north of China, realized that they too had an opportunity in this new China with no dynasty.
00:05:18.660And so the Soviet Union worked with a group of scholars and a group of radicals all the way back in 1921 to hold a meeting in Shanghai, the first meeting of the Chinese Communist Party.
00:05:35.920Mao Zedong was not the originator of this meeting, but he did attend it.
00:05:43.060It's a small building in a Shurkuman stone, two-story building, still there in Shanghai.
00:06:33.280But what Mao did learn from growing up in Hunan province was the power of thugs, the power of banditry, the power of martial force and brutal violence.
00:06:47.120And these, in a way that might seem strange to so many people, these tactics that would cause so many of us to recoil, brutal tactics, burning villages, torture,
00:07:42.660And as the Chinese Communist Party grew in the West, and then later came into conflict with the Republic of China,
00:07:52.580Mao continued to use those tactics and his army, which later became known as the Red Army.
00:07:59.720Use those same tactics on any peasant, any leader, any merchant that got in their way, brutally tortured, executed in public.
00:08:13.220Because Mao believed that all of these things should be done in public.
00:08:18.000So that the peasantry would understand who was now in power.
00:08:25.040And I know I'm skipping around a lot, but we've got a couple more segments on this.
00:08:28.500But I want you to understand, before we go to break here,
00:08:32.420that it was through these brutal tactics that Mao was able to establish his reign of terror
00:08:39.360throughout the entire countryside of Western China, while financed and funded by the Soviet Union.
00:08:46.600So throughout the 1920s, this clash between the nationalists and the communists continued.
00:08:55.740In fact, in the city of Shanghai, there was an event at one point, April 1927, known as the Shanghai Massacre.
00:09:03.000And that's when the nationalists joined with a hei shei hui, or, you know, a black society, what we might call a triad, called the Green Gang.
00:09:14.440And the Green Gang went in to do the dirty work of the nationalists.
00:28:43.700Many of which were pushed to suicide or persecuted to the point where they decided to take their own lives rather than live through continued persecution at the hands of the authorities and at the hands of the party.
00:28:58.260Hundreds of thousands of leaders, leading intellectuals, professors were targeted in what was called, and you're going to love this, it was called the anti-right-wing movement.
00:29:12.520Because any criticism of the party was seen as right-wing extremism.
00:29:18.560And you're going to hear that phrase over and over as we talk more about this, because right-wing extremism, according to Chairman Mao, was the enemy of the revolution.
00:29:30.760And anyone who opposed him was a right-wing extremist.
00:29:35.000In fact, the historian Jun Chang wrote,
00:29:38.280It was a year before the intellectuals gained courage to respond to Mao's call.
00:29:43.180But in terms of the education system, there were bitter complaints about copying the Soviet Union,
00:29:47.420the fact that Marxist-Leminism was held up as orthodox doctrine to be accepted without question,
00:29:52.440wider social criticism focused on the authoritarian role,
00:29:55.720and various abuses of privilege of the new political elites.
00:29:59.900Because the new elites were simply the people that Mao put into power.
00:32:53.980And so, Mao came up with a new policy, a new plan, that he called the Great Leap Forward.
00:33:06.320The Great Leap Forward had two objectives.
00:33:08.560The first was to industrialize the society, industrialize the economy in order to catch up with the West.
00:33:13.180The second was to transform China into a collectivized society, where full socialism would be achieved.
00:33:21.060This was done through collective communes, where those massive farms that we talked about earlier would no longer be owned by any one individual.
00:35:25.360In China, they decided to have backyard furnaces.
00:35:28.800So all farmers and anyone in China who owned iron, you were then ordered by Chairman Mao to go into your backyard with your hammers, your sights, your equipment, and to smelt all of it down in your backyard furnaces.
00:35:44.820All farm equipment in China was melted.
00:36:23.000Because unfortunately for us, the same way that this was tried under Trofim Lysenko, the founder of Lysenkoism, complete pseudoscience in the Soviet Union, this led to the greatest mass humanitarian crisis in world history.
00:36:47.440Tens of millions of people starved to death.
00:36:53.000Some estimates say it was as high as 47 million.
00:36:55.460Some estimates say it's as high as 60 million.
00:36:58.220There's an incredible book called Hungry Ghosts that I urge you to read, but I don't urge you to read it on an empty stomach.
00:37:05.220Excuse me, I do urge you to read it on an empty stomach.
00:37:09.180Because it shows the abject horror that the people of China, the Lao Baixing, had to live through under the Great Leap Forward.