I find it regretable that China has become a communist country.
China is a wonderful nation, perhaps the greatest of all. It has an extremely rich culture, in the forms of literature, poetry, arts, architecture, philosophy, religion, inventions, science, technology, mathematics, music, dance, cuisine, festivals and even the language itself. It has an unprecedented history too.
I wish the nationalists had won the Civil War rather than the communists. China could have turned into a constitutional monarchy instead, with the Emperor as the divine head of state, and China would have released Manchuria and Xijiang as sovereing territories. A nationalist China would have meant a fully unified Korea, and, since it would be alligned with the USA, it could end up forming some sort of bloc or even an alliance with neighboring Asian nations such as Korea, Japan, Manchuria, Mongolia, Thailand, Vietnam, etc.
Unfortunately, this is not reality. The true China has been utterly, irrecoverably destroyed. Its culture is burried and today China is nothing but a fake shadow of its former glory. The only aspect that it has inherented from its true form is its economic relevance in the world. The China you see on world maps is a fake, just like the goods they produce.
Owen James
ching chong
Benjamin King
>China could have turned into a constitutional monarchy instead proofs? It would have been a dictatorship either way, they were never truly democratic
Cameron Ramirez
[spoiler]the (((banks))) wanted Mao to win because Chiang Kai Shek was a threat to them[/spoiler]
Dominic Ross
>simplified characters in thread title Nice WEWUZ idealist theorycrafting, maybe next thread you can talk about how cool you think the Crusades were, or how the Vietnam War was actually an imperialist victory
Charles Mitchell
You sound buttdevasted.
Joshua White
What a load of bullcrap There is a reason why Imperial China was invaded by Japan : it was WEAK, both it's bureaucracy and it's economy was WEAK. "Communist" China led the reforms that has modernized it.
Andrew Scott
>I wish the nationalists had won the Civil War rather than the communists. China could have turned into a constitutional monarchy instead, with the Emperor as the divine head of state,
You would have to go back to 1912 for that, the Qing dynasty was defeated by republicans decades before the communists beat the Nationalists in the Civil War.
Elijah Richardson
the nationalists were cruel and petty you are a bad man if you confuse your chinese romanticism with them
that is no different than confusing germanic folk myth with nazism
pls for the sake of the imperative do not do it
Robert White
to add the nationalists do not represent those things about china
they were the strongest force during the 20 years of civil unrest, they had given up the old just as the ccp did
Caleb Brooks
Kinda wishful thinking, as the ineptness of the Nationalists since their very inception has foretold their downfall. And it is not that the "culture" was actually any better under them, with those women binding their feets and warlords reigning supreme.
Truth. Communist China, like it or not, is what propelled that country into modernity.
Jordan Flores
This, everyone after the Qing dynasty tried to "modernise" China.
>Communist China, like it or not, is what propelled that country into modernity.
Only after the 80s, it would have happened sooner if the communists had not existed at all since (unlike the communists before Deng's reforms) the Nationalists had economic policies that weren't completely retarded. It's just that between the Warlord Era, communists, the Japanese, the Great Depression, WW2, etc. Republican China didn't have much of a chance.
Austin Ramirez
Say anything you want about Mao, but he was the one who actually achieved the dream Sun Yatsen had about uniting that fractured mess, that handful of lose sand, into a coherent nation that can stand on its own.
And modernizing the country and introducing gender-equality, on top of that.
>Only after the 80s, it would have happened sooner if the communists had not existed at all since (unlike the communists before Deng's reforms) the Nationalists had economic policies that weren't completely retarded. It's just that between the Warlord Era, communists, the Japanese, the Great Depression, WW2, etc. Republican China didn't have much of a chance.
Modernization doesnt necessary mean economic growth (China actually had decent growth during the 50s, or else they wouldnt be able to finance the Korean War and their atomic bomb), but it simply means that a country, that was semi-feudal before with no working bureaucracy that could even raise taxes in their provinces (Qing-Dynasty failed even that) or ban the binding of feets (a failure of the KMT), now is being ruled by a unified bureaucracy of a party-state that could push their policies and reforms (and dumb shit like backyard furnances) even down to the deepest mountain village with nigh 100% certainty. Of course, the pre-Deng communists misused their perfectly crafted system of governance for a lot of really dumb crap, but this is only possible, because they had crafted that system in the first place.
If the KMT wanted to do some sort of Great Leap Forward, they wouldnt have been able to relay their orders just 20km outside of Nanjing.
Mason Hall
Implying Chiang Kai Shek isn't even more brutal than Mao. L2history
Kevin Perry
...
Cameron Brooks
Cruelty is a characteristic of that time and people, modern Taiwan fruit of the ROC seems like a better and happier society then Mainland China fruit of Mao.
Justin Diaz
It seems to be but it is literally the same as far as psychology goes
They also took the learned and middle class and Mao got peasants, billion of them
Jonathan Perry
comparing a shitty island nation of 20 million that had the full backing of the US government to help it finance its modernization with a country of 1.4 billion people.
Say whatever you want about MAO but he accomplished the goal of unifying China into ONE nation that the KMT & other countless governments failed to do for centuries. And without China today in 2017, as proven with Japan & Taiwan today who as just puppets of the US government, there would have been nothing to stop Western influence into Asia. The power of a unified China today is literally shifting the power of world to the eastward instead of westward.
Imagine how the world would look today if China wasnt powerful or its economy wasnt soaring - total Western hegemony in Asia.
Caleb Clark
I dont expect them to change the psychology innate to them as they are not westeners with slanted eyes and different cuktural aethethics.
Mao got plenty of middleclass as well, but he killed them when they started to write opinions deviating from the norm.
Mason Scott
they didn't write deviations from the norm per se mao had this thing called one hundred flowers, he asked for criticisms soon after he banned them all
which is somewhat unrelated to the cultural revolution that destroyed the landowning class and had virtually silenced the educational institution for a decade
so no opinions did not directly cause their death
Jackson Morris
I agree that Mao did great uniting them and I generally respect the right of the stronger one in such matters. What came afterwards was regretable as it kept them in a stasis of poverty. This was not necessary and makes you wonder if an india-tier de westernisation wouldnt have been less harmful to them. India pushed out britain with demographic might alone and billions of chinks not starving but reproducing seems like something you can hardly put a lid on even as american hegemon.
But yeah, would have, should have, could have-life is getting better there and they put together the shards of what they smashed back then.
Jace Kelly
Its been some time that I read about this. Didnt the tone got harsher and harsher with learned writers finding themselves accused for stuff they wrote when it was allowed as internal communist dialoge?
Blake Gonzalez
The Nationalists were never really much better. They would have probably caused a similarily high casualty from poor policies.
I do think they might have ended up preserving the more traditional culture, but China as a global power would have been severely stunted.
Samuel Cruz
harsher but not in the form of violence they just were allowed to write less and less
but the cultural revolution came and all the learned stop doing it all together, higher learning was closed down totally
and with the poverty thing, there were early proponents of liberalization in the 70s but due to political maneuvering and reactionary movements mao decided to favor only a very specific doctrine
and the great leaps were just massive projects that is characteristic of any totalitarian regime, instead of building the autobahn they melted pots, they also built dams and had massive irrigation projects but most westerners remember the genocide of sparrows
Jace Sullivan
The Qing Empire was illegitimate Manchurian conquest of China. The last true Chinese emperors were the Ming.
Adam Kelly
The nationalists were even shittier than the communists at the time though. Both Mao and Chiang Kai Shek should've died immediately after the commies' victory, then china would've been perfect.
Ryan Evans
han* chinese is the national identity manchu and han are the ethnic identity china the polity was always multiethnic, ming song tang all had minorities within military and the bureaucracy and were also the cause of major dynastic ending rebellions
china's ethnic ebbs are not comparable to the european ideology
Robert Peterson
Most modernization of China was completed by the 1920s actually and Mao did nothing except reduce the country to ruins every time he got his way.
Christian Robinson
daaamn, huehue! back at it again with the retarded shitposts
Blake Bell
>The Qing Empire was illegitimate Manchurian conquest of China >Manchurian conquest of China >illegitimate
It was perfectly legitimate, but I don't really care. The Qing Empire was the last time China was properly Chinese.
Isaiah Gray
>they didn't write deviations from the norm per se >mao had this thing called one hundred flowers, he asked for criticisms soon after he banned them all
The Hundred Flowers Campaign happened because Mao disliked the burgeoning state bureaucracy and wanted to encourage more populism among the masses, instead what happened was that people started criticizing the rule of the CCP and praising democracy and capitalism. So he purged all of those critics and most would not be rehabilitated until after his death.
Kayden Lopez
Taiwan up until the 1980s was not a lot better than the mainland; it was also a party dictatorship with a cult of personality around Chiang Kai-Shek and similar warped propaganda. However, the KMT didn't pursue a planned economy and did allow private enterprise. They also conducted a land reform in Taiwan by encouraging the landlords to invest in industry instead. Ironically, land reform was a goal set out way back in Sun Yat-sen's time, but he never controlled most of the country. Later on, the KMT relied heavily on landlords for its support base, which nixed any chance of land reform in China.
Christopher Sullivan
China isn't communist in anything but name you obtuse fucking Kraut
Jordan Perez
CKS was a colossally corrupt, incompetent idiot by any definition. He was captured by the communists in 1935 and released apparently because Mao reasoned that he was the one KMT leader that they could beat. After being exiled to Taiwan, he spent 25 years in a fantasy of retaking the mainland. He wouldn't accept his defeat, and partially because of his stupidity he ended up creating the current mess over Taiwan's political situation. The smart thing to do would have been to declare Taiwanese independence in the 50s under US protection.
Henry Davis
Now what happened after the Hundred Flowers Campaign of course was the Great Leap Forward which was a disaster that killed millions. After this, Mao released a self-criticism and retired, leaving a triumvirate of Deng Xiaoping, Zhou Enlai, and Liu Shaoqui to run the country. But then Mao became fearful of becoming completely irrelevant, so he started the Cultural Revolution to destroy his enemies. When it was over, not only had Mao not broken the state bureaucracy, they'd accommodated themselves quite readily to the new situation. Although they were now fanatically loyal to him, he couldn't quite sleep at night and talked of how a new Cultural Revolution was necessary down the road.
Deng Xiaoping survived because he had powerful friends in the party and the PLA; Mao couldn't really get rid of him the way he destroyed Liu Shaoqui.
Christopher Nguyen
You modernization of China was done after Mao was gone.
Logan Wilson
That's simply not true. Shanghai might have been modernized under Colonial rule but the rest of the country was poor and agrarian
Hunter Cox
And bazango. Seventy years later and absolutely nothing has changed.
Christopher Taylor
TAIWAN NUMBER WAN#1
Jordan Miller
The Chinese mindset takes a bit of thinking to understand, especially its peculiar xenophobia. Certain Western individuals like Henry Kissinger and French designer Pierre Cardin are considered cultural emissaries and "valued friends" of the Chinese people. Pierre Cardin actually complained about and succeeded in getting the CCP to crack down on bootleg copies of his fashions.