S09: Leaning to One Side

• 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?

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

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.

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

• 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 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.

• 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

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

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?

• 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

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.

• 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

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

• 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

• Battle for North China: Beijing and Tianjin (1937)
• Battle of Shanghai (1937)
• Nanjing Massacre (Dec 1937 - Jan 1938)
• Battle of Wuhan (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

China at war with itself:

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

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)

• Resistance as foolhardy, driving China toward extinction
• Collaboration was the only realistic means of ensuring the survival of the nation

• 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”

• 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

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

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

• “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

• 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

• End of unequal treaties
• China as one of the Big Four and founding member of the UN
• Beginning of decolonization in post-war world

• 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)

• 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)

• 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

• 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?

• 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

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

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

• 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?

• 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

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.

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?

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.