S09: Leaning to One Side

Nationalism and Revolution in Modern China

April 29, 2025

Paul Robeson: March of the Volunteers

Key questions

Mao Zedong, Chiang Kai-shek, and US Ambassador Patrick Hurley in Chongqing, 1945
  • Road to war: Was there a third way?
  • Why did the GMD fail? Why did the CCP succeed?
  • How did the Chinese Civil War shape the global Cold War?

Your Librarians

Yeajin Park Min

Subject Librarian forAsian Societies, Cultures, and Languages

Yeajin.Park.Min@dartmouth.edu

Morgan R. Swan

Special Collections Librarian for Teaching and Scholarly Engagement Rauner Special Collections Library Morgan.R.Swan@dartmouth.edu

Announcement

This week:

  • Thursday, May 1: Meet in the Hood Museum of Art.
  • Friday, May 2: Optional X-Hour (3:30-4:20) mid-term review session in Carson 061.

Mid-term:

  • Sample mid-term available; scoring guideline to be released on Friday.
  • Full exam will be available from May 7 to May 11.

Event: Taiwan and Beyond

Taiwan and Beyond: Navigating US-China Relations in Trump’s Second Term

Randall Schriver: Former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs

Wed, April 30, 4:30 pm
Haldeman 401

A new kind of empire: Autonomous Imperialism

First anniversary of Manchukuo
  • Ideological divergence between nationalism and imperialism after WWI
  • Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points: Promise of “self-determination” for oppressed minorities, and a world organization that would provide a system of collective security for all nations
  • New ideological expressions: promise of emancipation and development, identity representation, supranational brotherhood

“Manchuria for Manchurians” and “Asia for Asians”

Kwantung army in 1940
  • Manchuria was “liberated” from China by a movement for independence
  • “Asia for the Asiatics”: Manchuria as prototype for collaborationist regimes in occupied China and beyond
  • Joint ventures with local capital: as mask for Japanese control, as cover for economic appropriation, as means of cultivating collaborative elites
  • Inter-related imperialism: What happened in central China affected Manchuria, just as events in Manchuria influenced Taiwan.

Asianism and Japanese imperialism

Kwantung army soldiers
  • Leaving or leading Asia: Should Japan become a Western nation, or should it, as the most developed nation in the East, lead Asian nations to counter Western imperialism?
  • “Same script, same race” argument as basis for equality and unity

Asianism: Race War or Clash of Civilizations?

Racial solidarity:

  • “Yellow Peril”: Race-based World View as Basis of Asian Solidarity
  • Western imperialism as attack by “white people” on “yellow race”

Civilizational similarity:

  • Ills of Western civilization after WWI: Perception of dichotomy of East and West
  • Asia to provide an alternative to ruthless capitalism offered by Western modernity
  • Sino-centric East civilization as anti-imperialist – unlike Japan’s militant Asianism

Asianism: Ambivalent meanings

Hegemonic or anti-hegemonic?

  • Constructing a pan-Asian identity to challenge the West’s claim to modernity and civilization
  • Tool of oppression: Legitimation for Japanese military expansionism

Nationalist or internationalist?

  • Nationalism and Asianism as fused: Asianism as a logical movement to unite with other suffering under Western imperialism
  • At the same time, tension between hierarchical and egalitarian visions of Asian: China/Japan as the center of a racial or civilizational East?

Manchukuo as model colony

A street in Xinjing (New Capital, today Changchun, Jilin)
  • Manchuria as the means to rejuvenate domestic economy
  • Self-sufficient trade zone protected from the uncertainties of the global marketplace
  • Between 1932 and 1941: 5.86 billion yen were injected into Manchukuo – more than investments in the entire overseas empire, China, Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, Karafuto, and Nan’ya by 1930

Manchuria as bloc economy

A street in Xinjing (New Capital, today Changchun, Jilin)

Manchukuo as a laboratory for testing two new ideas of economic governance in the industrialized world:

  • State-managed economic development, borrowed from the Soviet model for the command economy.
  • Self-sufficient production sphere, or bloc economy, drew on economic analyses of military production in World War I.

Command economy

A street in Xinjing (New Capital, today Changchun, Jilin)
  • Coordinated industrialization of Japan and Manchukuo aimed at military self-sufficiency
  • 26 new companies, one company per industry in such fields as aviation, gasoline, shipping, and automobiles
  • Five-year plans were instituted beginning in 1937, with focus on heavy industrialization

What Nation? Anthem of Manchukuo

Discuss: Was there a Manchukuo identity?

Manchukuo flag

Children flying kites

A Japanese soldier and Chinese children

When did the war begin?

Map of China, 1934-1945
  • 1928-06-04: Assassination of Zhang Zuolin, warlord of Manchuria
  • 1931-09-18: Mukden Incident
  • 1932-01-28: Shanghai Incident
  • 1932-02-16: Founding of Manchukuo
  • 1937-07-07: Marco Polo Bridge Incident

How to fight back?

Chiang Kai-shek inspecting troops

How could China, a poor and underdeveloped country, defend itself from one of the most militarized and technologically sophisticated countries in the world?

Strength in unity

Chiang Kai-shek in 1937
  • Chiang Kai-shek: “First internal pacification, then external resistance”
  • Logic: Building up China’s strength while hoping for int’l assistance
  • Criticized for putting party interests ahead of nation’s

Xi’an Incident

Zhang Xueliang (1901-2001), left, with Chiang Kai-shek
  • Mutiny of Zhang Xueliang in Dec 1936
  • Chiang Kai-shek held hostage for two weeks
  • Led to the second United Front between Nationalists and Communists
  • Mobilizing all of China’s military forces to repel Japanese advance
  • Marked Soviet Union’s rising power and clout in China: Stalin
  • Nationalism as potent force for political mobilization
  • Zhang Xueliang arrested and under arrest until 1991

Almost defeat?

Communist Movement and the War with Japan
  • Battle for North China: Beijing and Tianjin (1937)
  • Battle of Shanghai (1937)
  • Nanjing Massacre (Dec 1937 - Jan 1938)
  • Battle of Wuhan (1938)

“Burn all, kill all, rob all”: Symbols of atrocities

Bloody Saturday”: a crying Chinese baby amid the bombed-out ruins of Shanghai’s South Railway Station, Saturday, August 28, 1937

Bodies of victims along Qinhuai River out of Nanjing’s west gate during Nanjing Massacre.

Haldore Hanson: One family stands in front their property after the town was burned down by Japapese army attack, Carleton College

Scored earth strategy

Breaching of Yellow River, 1938
  • Breaching of dam on Yellow River in 1938
  • “Use water instead of soldiers” to buy time for retreat from Wuhan
  • Based on what he feared, but not what Japan did
  • Loss of farmland to infertile sediment
  • Drought of 1942-1943: 2 million deaths and 2 million refugees

Divided China

Map of China, 1934-1945

China at war with itself:

  • Nationalist: Free China
  • Communist: Base areas
  • Collaboration: Occupied China

Free China

Wartime Chongqing, capital of ROC
  • Capitals on the move: Wuhan, then Chongqing
  • Doubling of population in Chongqing: From 0.5 million in 1937 to 1+ million in 1944
  • Nearly daily Japanese air raid, designed to destroy morale
  • Establishment of the People’s Political Council (PPC)
  • 60% of China’s population, only 5% of its industry
  • Galloping inflation: Printing currency to pay growing deficits

Communist base areas

Map of China, 1934-1945

Four major border areas:

  • 1937-09: Shaan-Gan-Ning (Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia)
  • 1938-01: Jin-Cha-Ji (Shanxi-Mongolia-Hebei)
  • 1941-07: Jin-Ji-Lu-Yu (Shanxi-Hebei-Shandong-Henan)
  • 1942: Jin-Sui (Shanxi-Mongolia)

Justifying collaboration

Wang Jingwei, president of collaboration regime, Reorganized Government of the Republic of China, founded in 1940
  • Resistance as foolhardy, driving China toward extinction
  • Collaboration was the only realistic means of ensuring the survival of the nation

Wang Jingwei

Wang Jingwei in 1941
  • Collaboration regime: Reorganized Government of the Republic of China, founded in 1940
  • Wang Jingwei doctrine: combining pan-Asianism and Chinese nationalism
  • Occupied China as part of “the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere”

Wang Jingwei: Justifying Collaboration

Wang Jingwei in 1941
  • Mounting war costs and exhausted population
  • Peaceful resolution to military conflict with Japan
  • Nationalist state under Chiang unwilling or unable to protect the people during war

Who were the collaborators? Hanjian

Still from Tunnel Warfare
  • More than “collaboration”
  • “Traitor of Han race”: Connotations of moral and ethnic transgressions

Discuss: Story of Puyi, continued

  • What happened to his wife Wanrong?
  • What did the CCP do with Puyi and other prisoners of war?
  • What happened to Puyi after 1949?

Discuss: The Last Emperor

Ambiguous meanings of collaboration

Puyi
  • “Living with” occupation or active collaboration
  • Local elites with mundane problems: supplying food, organizing transportation
  • Complex motivations: personal ambition, material benefits, ideological concerns, sheer survival, fear of mass terror, and avoidance of losses and destruction

From lone war to global war

Chiang Kai Shek and wife with Lieutenant General Stilwell
  • Pearl harbor (Dec 1941) internationalized China’s war of resistance
  • Conflicts among allies:
    • “Asia first” vs. “Europe first”
    • Personal antagonism between Joseph Stilwell and Chiang Kai-shek

China as great power

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Chiang Kai-shek, and Winston Churchill at the Cairo Conference, 1943.
  • End of unequal treaties
  • China as one of the Big Four and founding member of the UN
  • Beginning of decolonization in post-war world

From national war to civil war

Map of Operation Ichigo
  • Ichigo campaign of 1944: Japan’s largest land operation to create overland link between Korea and Vietnam via China
  • Opportunity to CCP in north and central China vacated by Nationalists and Japanese
  • Doubling of CCP forces and in control of North China (1/4 of China’s population)

Legacies of war

Chinese 19th Route Army in defensive position in the Battle of Shanghai (1932)
  • End of unequal treaties and restoration of sovereignty
  • One of the four great Allies (with US, UK, Russia), and founding member of the UN
  • Single party-state: More militarized and bureaucratized
  • Fall of two empires (British and Japanese) and rise two new empires (US and Soviet)

Legacies of war, continued

Map of Chinese Civil War
  • Chiang Kai-shek: Won the war, but lost the country
  • Rise of the CCP: From underground party to a ruling regime
    • 100 million people under party governance
    • Independent army of a million men
  • Dawn of the Chinese Civil War and the Cold War

Discuss: China’s Good War?

Chiang Kai-shek, Song Meiling, and Joseph Stilwell
  • What makes WWII China’s Good War?
  • What did China choose to remember about WWII? How have these memories changed overtime?
  • Do collective memories help explain Chinese nationalism? What explains the competing national memories of World War II today?

Traditional depiction

After 1940, the CCP dug tunnels in the vast plains in northern China and used them for guerrilla activities, which posed a serious threat to the Japanese.
  • Idealized depiction of popular resistance
  • Emphasis on CCP strategies: building base areas and practicing guerrilla warfare
  • WWII as “the people’s war” and China’s victory the result of “Mao Zedong thought” and the mass line

WWII: China’s Good War?

Tunnel Warfare film poster

China’s changing understanding of WWII:

  • Return of the Nationalists to war narratives
  • Focus on trauma: Jappanse war crimes, Nanjing Massacre, Chongqing bombing
  • China as a victim, China as part of the global anti-fascist alliance and contributor to int’l security
  • WWII helped China assert normative and moral leadership today

Never forget national humiliation

September 18th Historical Museum in Shenyang, Liaoning

Yuhuatai Memorial Park of Revolutionary Martyrs

Open wounds

Yasukuni shrine

Four Korean comfort women after they were liberated by US-China Allied Forces outside Songshan, Yunnan Province, China on September 7, 1944. Photo by Charles H. Hatfield, US 164th Signal Photo Company. National Archives

Powerful patriots

Anti-Japanese protests in China, 2012

Anti-Japan Protests in China on Anniversary of Manchurian Incident

Remembering V-Day

Chinese Liberation Army at V-Day parade in Moscow

Xi attends Russia’s V-Day parade, marking shared victory with Putin

The long civil war

When did it start?

  • 1927-04: White Terror
  • 1936: Xi’an Incident led to temporary truce
  • 1941-01: New Fourth Army Incident; Collapse of Second United Front
  • 1945-08: End of WWII

Has it really ended?

  • A war that hasn’t ended: Taiwan as “renegade province”
  • “Who lost China” debate and Red Scare

Yan’an

Yangge Opera Performance at Yan’an

Production scenes at Yan’an

Discuss: Mao on new democracy

Yangge opera in northern Shaanxi province, a cultural symbol of the CCP revolution
  • What is “New Democracy”? What is new about it?
  • Explain its meanings for Chinese politics, economy, and culture.
  • Why is Mao writing? Who is the intended audience? How effective is his messaging?

Dixie Mission

Mao Zedong meeting with Patrick Hurley, 1945
  • The CCP proposed the idea of a coalition government that included the CCP and other democratic parties.
  • The party also decided to pursue a closer relationship with the US: to reduce suspicion of Communists, and to use its influence to check Jiang’s power.
  • Result: Dixie Mission in July 1944, first direct contact between the US gov and the CCP

Red Star Over China

Mao Zedong speaking with Harrison Forman, part of Dixie Mission, in 1944

Mao Zedong and Zhu De at Ceremony for David Barrett

Double Disappointments with the US: The Nationalist Party

Chiang Kai-shek, Song Mei-ling, and Joseph Stilwell

Nationalist Party:

  • September 1944: Tensions arose between Jiang and U.S. Chief of Staff Joseph Stilwell.
  • President Roosevelt requested Jiang to give Stilwell full military command in China.
  • Patrick Hurley was sent to mediate between Jiang and the CCP.

Patrick Hurley in China: Role Play

Three teams:

  • United States Policy in China
  • Chinese Communist Party Policy
  • Nationalist Government

Within each team:

  • Write down 3-5 bullet points of your basic positions for negotiation.
  • For the negotiation, what is the most likely outcome, best outcome, and best alternative? Why?
  • How would you prepare for all eventualities?
  • What would be your strategy?

Discuss: Simulation vs. Reality

Document Reference
United States Policy in China ML-93_B02_F41
Communist Five Points ML-93_B02_F21
Nationalist Government Three Points ML-93_B02_F21

Discuss: Ellis Briggs Paper

Source Reference
Drew Pearson: “Cowboy Ambassador Pat Hurley is Having Trouble with the State Department”, May 20, 1945, The Daily Merry column ML-93_B02_F22
Ellis Briggs to Spruille Braden, April 20, 1945 ML-93_B02_F23
Wilma Fairbank: The Cultural Program, July 15, 1945 ML-93_B02_F32
Ellis Briggs to Spruille Braden, July 18, 1945 ML-93_B02_F23

Discuss: Ellis Briggs Paper

  • What I notice about the source: Who, what, why, when, how
  • What question could this source answer?
  • Questions / concerns I might have
  • The very next primary source I might want to find
  • Broader subjects and/or genres of questions that might be related to my problem

Primary Source Paper

Original task:

  • Write a biography of Briggs OR the Sent-down Youth in Yunnan

New task:

  • Write ANY paper on Briggs OR the Sent-down Youth in Yunnan:
  • Open genre: standard essay, source analysis, etc.
  • Does not have to be a profile; pick any angle that interests you.
  • Primary Source Requirement: use at least TWO documents from the collection.