24 replies to this topic

[blackriverdragon]

Just a thought...

Considering the brevity of the ROC government on the Mainland, would you think that the fate of the ROC parallels that of the Qin and Sui dynasties?

ROC united a fractured China, but the people war-exhausted country decided that it had enough and overthrew it. The succeeding PRC built on the foundations laid by the ROC of a united China, and in the last 30 years began establishing prosperity that looks like it will be going for quite a while.

Of course ROC differs majorly from Qin and Sui in that ROC seemed to be significantly weaker and never had total control over the "conquered" warlords, and that PRC prosperity only happened after 30 years of horrific centralized planning disasters.

Will historians 2,000 years from now put ROC in the same category as Qin and Sui as uniters that established the base for the prosperity of the succeeding dynasty?

[Topgun]

Someone said that the history is always extremely similar..I think so.

I think PRC is much like Han-Dynasty.
Mao(as Liu Bang) knocked down ROC(as Qin-Dynasty) and face the dangerous enemy :USA(as Huns).
Then, the country had a peace time---Deng,Jiang &Hu period.(as Wen & Jing emporor..)
So, as Han's history,an agressive emporor,Wu emporor, would step into the stage.
Next president ,Xi, will be an agressive leader?
Don't ask me.--I don't know.
The history is similar, but it is not same..


I think ROC is like Song-Dynasty which　ended the chaotic "5 dynasties & 10 kindoms（五代十国）" period.
ROC's millitary is very weak like Song-Dynasty.
And it alwasy faces a strong enemy country,Japan.(As Liao & Jin).
ROC took more attentions on the internal enemy than on outter enemy.
--This is also similar to Song-Dynasty.

After lost power ,Chiang ran away to the island,Taiwan.
--In history, Song's resistance force also ran to coutryside of china after the coutry was conqured by mongolians.

Edited by Topgun, 29 September 2011 - 07:38 AM.

[General_Zhaoyun]

Just a thought...

Considering the brevity of the ROC government on the Mainland, would you think that the fate of the ROC parallels that of the Qin and Sui dynasties?

ROC united a fractured China, but the people war-exhausted country decided that it had enough and overthrew it. The succeeding PRC built on the foundations laid by the ROC of a united China, and in the last 30 years began establishing prosperity that looks like it will be going for quite a while.

Of course ROC differs majorly from Qin and Sui in that ROC seemed to be significantly weaker and never had total control over the "conquered" warlords, and that PRC prosperity only happened after 30 years of horrific centralized planning disasters.

Will historians 2,000 years from now put ROC in the same category as Qin and Sui as uniters that established the base for the prosperity of the succeeding dynasty?

To say ROC is like Qin and Sui is an understatement-statement. It's like Qin in someway, as it opens up a Republican era in Chinese history and a new institution of ending of Monarch and Imperialism. But it's not like Qin, as it's not as "military-like" as Qin. ROC has not collapsed like Qin, as ROC government fled to Taiwan in 1949, causing a split in Chinese history of two Chinese regimes across cross-straits (ROC vs PRC).

ROC is like a fresh chapter in Chinese history in 1911, vulnerable as it hopes to improvise a western-style republican and democracy model onto mainland China, hoping to modernize, but too bad, the Chinese had been used to Imperialism for a long time, and such western model found it hard to be taken place in China for as the China was again torn by warlordism and aggression from Japanese. It was briefly unified by Chiang Kai Shek in 1928, but conflict broken out with KMT and CCP, then comes aggression from Japanese. All of these caused modernization such as industrialization, economic liberation and democracy to be delayed in China.

Currently, ROC is 100 years, but it's ruling territory is only limited to Taiwan. But Taiwan's society is much more advanced in terms of technology, economy and culture than mainland China (though it pails in terms of size in military). I would associate it more to be like Southern Song dynasty, where it's more culturally and economically advanced, but military wise, it's still reliant on an allied foreign power such as USA for military support.

[Optimus]

ROC, KMT and Chiang deserved a better legacy for their 38 years rule in China. gave them some credits for leading China during the 8 years long bitter war of resistance against Japan. PRC and the Chinese historians should acknowledge that fact and no more bullshits like Mao eight route army did all the fighting against the Japanese back then.

Edited by Optimus, 30 September 2011 - 10:41 AM.

[General_Zhaoyun]

Many western historians of ROC who refer only to PRC sources had ignored the fact about Chiang's credit in the Northern Expedition and his war campaign effort against the Japanese, without which the war would not have been won. Many PRC sources I read gives credit to Eight Route Army, while belittling the Revolutionary Nationalist Army, thus justifying themselves for the foundation of PRC.

Another important note is the discrepancy between PRC sources and ROC sources. In PRC sources, ROC ended in 1949. In ROC sources, ROC continues to exist in Taiwan today.

As the passing years of ROC 100 years (this year), I would suggest that historians of ROC should not just focus on 38 years of its history on mainland China, but also look at the next 62 years of its history in Taiwan. I would suggest one to read ROC sources as the more credible source.

In fact, the Taiwanese government has commissioned the scholars in Taiwan to write a 100 years history of ROC. When it's published, it would be translated into many languages and will be an important academic source for historians worldwide. If I'm not wrong, the National Chengchi University is commissioned to write a development history on ROC known as 《中華民國發展史》. It will be an important source.

Here are some seminars on the history-writing in the university:

[ahxiang]

I concur with Gen. Zhao Yun and Optimus.

I heard that PRC had just released a set of books on ROC, about 36 volumes, which purportedly treated the Chinese fall under communism and the struggle between KMT and CCP as a choice of people, which sounds like a 'progress' as it no longer demonize the KMT as it used to do. (Certainly, the 'choice' was imposed on China by the Soviet Russia.)

The collapse of the R.O.C. was very much a foreign intervention, similar to Kaddafi's Libya in the sense of intervention. In the R.O.C. case, the Soviets had provided financial (i.e., a Soviet China Aid Act of similar amount to the U.S. China Aid Act), military (Kwantung Army guns and the U.S. lend lease weapons from the August Storm supply) and human power (250,000 Korean mercenaries, Outer Mongolia cavalry and East European international brigades, plus Soviet railway army corps) to the communists, other than the aerial bombardment as the NATO did to Libya.

It is a pity that I won't be able to produce a book to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the ROC. However, I will continue to post some preview of what I wrote. At http://www.chinahist...resistance-war/ I had discussed the Soviet scheme. Hope some of those who crawled out of the great firewall would spend a moment to read what I wrote below as to the Soviet scheme which was imposed on China.

The Soviet Scheme to Communize China

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President Woodrow Wilson's call for the right of nations to self-determination, as iterated in the fourteen points, gave impetus to both the Chinese and the Koreans in the struggle against the Japanese. While there erupted the March First Movement in 1919 in Korea, which incurred a bloody crackdown in the hands of the Japanese, there was the May Fourth Student Movement in China against the Paris Peace Conference in regards to Japan’s inheriting the German lease of Qingdao and the railway on the Shandong Peninsula. Disappointed over the failure of Wilson's moral leadership, a large number of the Chinese and the Koreans threw themselves into the communist movement, and blind followed the path of the Bolshevik call for the national self-determination. Inside of the Soviet Union, Chinese like Ren Fuchen, and Koreans like. Yi Dong Whi and Hong Bom Do, fought on the side of the Soviet Red Army as military leaders of respective ethnic legions. In 1920, Yang Jingzai, one such Chinese expatriate, accompanied Gregory Voitinsky on a visit to China in search of high caliber Chinese communism activists and subsequently helped to launch the Communist Party of China (CCP). Before that, from 1918 onward, batches of Soviet agents were sent to Chinese cities for liaison with anarchists in propagating the Anarchist-Bolshevik theories. The Soviet diplomats in Peking, like Leo Karakhan, repeatedly suggested to the Republic of China to unilaterally revoke the unequal treaties for sake of provoking a direct confrontation between China and the powers. To stabilize the situation in the Pacific, the United States convened a Washington Conference in 1922-3, during which some resolutions were made as to “ensuring China’s integrity; strengthening her finances by agreeing to hold a conference to arrange for limited increase of tariff rates; a special commission was to study extraterritoriality.” The Soviets, however, were cunning enough to convene the congress of the Far East nationalities (i.e., the First Congress of the Toilers of the Far East) as a counter-blast to the initiatives of the Western powers”, to which 52 Koreans from various factions attended The notorious Lansing-Ishii Agreement, though theoretically abrogated in April 1923 and replaced by the Nine-Power Treaty, was to be tacitly taken for granted by the powers, and transformed into varieties such as the Amau Doctrine etc down the road.

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Whereas Japan was forced to withdraw from Siberia and give up Qingdao, the Soviets, adamant on the world revolution, set their eyes on the Chinese continent after setbacks in instigating the military uprisings in Germany and Hungary, giving guns to all the warring factions in China without regard for the ten-year arms embargo that was imposed by the powers since the end of WWI to stop the surplus WWI weapons from flooding and destabilizing the Chinese market. More, the powers, in October 1922 cancelled the international co-management over the Chinese Eastern Railway which effectively paved the way for the control of the railway to the Soviet Union from the Russian White Army. The Soviets, who in 1919 and 1920 hoodwinked the Chinese with two declarations of intent to transfer the Russian ownership of the railway to China free of compensation, took advantage of the schism between North China and South to strike an agreement with the northern government in Peking and the regional overlord in Manchuria in 1924, which allowed the Soviets to retain the co-management and co-ownership of the railway for 80 years and a shortened duration of 60 years, respectively.

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With Soviet guns, the Nationalist Party (KMT) launched a northern expedition war in 1926-8 to reunite China. The communists, who controlled the political departments of the northern expedition armies, almost succeeded in sovietizing China, and only failed in the plots when they impatiently pushed for the bloody land revolution and attempted to hijack the government and the armies. In the aftermath of the Soviet debacle in sovietizing the Chinese continent in 1927, the Soviets changed the objective for their operations in Manchuria to having the Chinese communist proxies incite the Chinese opposition to the Japanese plans to build additional railways in southern Manchuria and eastern Inner Mongolia. The Japanese, who had failed to force Zhang Zuolin to endorse the Group 2 clauses of the Twenty-one Demands concerning the extension of the lease term for the Southern Manchuria Railway and the rights of settlement and extraterritoriality etc., assassinated the overlord of Manchuria by blowing up the train carriages in June 1928. Zhang Xueliang, who initially had to pay special attention to the Japanese threat after succeeding his father’s post, loosened his guard after figuring out that the Japanese militarists’ response was subdued over his declaration in late 1928 that the northeastern Chinese provinces revert to the central government’s rule. Overwhelmed by an ambition to assert the national sovereignty over the railway in the frenzy of national unification and fed by poor intelligence about Stalin’s Soviet Russia that was rumored to have been weakened by the political purge movements, Zhang Xueliang, on the pretext that the Soviets and Chinese Communists were scheming to foment wars to disrupt China’s unification (e.g., Feng Yuxiang’s liaison with the Soviets in seeking the military aid for a rebellion), arrested Soviet railway manager Boris Emshanov, dismantled the Soviet organizations of unions, youth leagues, and scouts etc, and provoked the Soviets into launching the War of Chinese Eastern Railway in 1929. Unable to obtain assistance from the central government which just finished quelling the Guangxi Clique rebellion in spring 1929 and then faced with Feng Yuxiang’s rebellion, Zhang Xueliang fought against the Soviets on his own accord and lost the war. As Arthur Young commented, “in this Russian-Chinese clash may be found the seeds of World War II. The ink was then hardly dry on the Kellogg-Briand pact, signed by Russia, by which all parties agreed to settle disputes without using force. Russia’s getting away with force was carefully noted by the Japanese military, based in southern Manchuria.”

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In the midst of the War of the Chinese Eastern War, the Japanese Kwantung Army was rumored to be scheming for a military action to take advantage of the situation. Chinese Youth Party leader Zeng Qi promptly sent Li Huang to Manchuria and persuaded Zhang Xueliang into concluding the war with the Soviets. The Japanese, however, were given more reasons to invade Manchuria, other than the renewal of the 28-year lease of the railway and the Kwantung leasehold as stipulated by the Portsmouth Treaty. The various factions of the Korean Communists, under the Soviet order to dismantle their organizations and enroll in the Communist Party of China, issued an order to the thousands of members to prove their worthiness to join the CPC by taking the rampage of violent actions against the Japanese. From 1930 to 1931, the Korean Communists conducted unremitting rebellions, attacked the Japanese consulates and police posts and sabotaged the Japanese railway and storage facilities in southern Manchuria

Edited by ahxiang, 30 September 2011 - 12:32 PM.

[Optimus]

your website is very useful for my understanding of ROC history. appreciate that. why no Chinese version?

think it's politically impossible for PRC to do any objectively fair reviews on ROC in China while the latter still exists in Taiwan.

China leader Hu Jintao in 2005 said that 中国国民党和中国共产党领导的抗日军队，分别担负着正面战场和敌后战场的作战任务。read between the lines, it obviously tells us KMT was the main fighting force then. But after that, CCP through the People's Daily would revert to her decades old stance 中国战胜日本的最根本原因，是中共领导和推动抗战。 It's easier for them to lie than to deal with the truth.

I heard that PRC had just released a set of books on ROC, about 36 volumes, which purportedly treated the Chinese fall under communism and the struggle between KMT and CCP as a choice of people, which sounds like a 'progress' as it no longer demonize the KMT as it used to do. (Certainly, the 'choice' was imposed on China by the Soviet Russia.)

The collapse of the R.O.C. was very much a foreign intervention, similar to Kaddafi's Libya in the sense of intervention. In the R.O.C. case, the Soviets had provided financial (i.e., a Soviet China Aid Act of similar amount to the U.S. China Aid Act), military (Kwantung Army guns and the U.S. lend lease weapons from the August Storm supply) and human power (250,000 Korean mercenaries, Outer Mongolia cavalry and East European international brigades, plus Soviet railway army corps) to the communists, other than the aerial bombardment as the NATO did to Libya.

It is a pity that I won't be able to produce a book to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the ROC. However, I will continue to post some preview of what I wrote. At http://www.chinahist...resistance-war/ I had discussed the Soviet scheme. Hope some of those who crawled out of the great firewall would spend a moment to read what I wrote below as to the Soviet scheme which was imposed on China.

[mingsquared]

I don't think the ROC can be compared to the Qin or Sui. The Qin and Sui ended centuries of turmoil and warfare. Both had massive building projects that although bankrupted them, set the stage of China's future economic growth. What did the ROC do that contribute to China today? As far as I know, all the highways in China were built by the CCP. Yet most of the roads in the Han were built during the Qin. The Grand Canal was built during the Sui. The ROC legacy simply pales in comparison.

[blackriverdragon]

Actually, as a student of economics, ROC did lay a lot of economic growth in the Mainland that Mao tried to undo, only to have it bounce back with a vengeance during the Deng era. While historians would say that there is a clean break at 1949, economists would say that modern China's success would not be possible without the economic developments of the late Qing and Mainland ROC.

Before 1949, China developed light industry along the coastal cities, manufacturing mostly textiles, buttons, small but lucrative goods. China was taking the path that Taiwan and HK took to maturity (and which the Mainland is only reaching now, but heavily skewed toward heavy industry) because they didn't have the interruption of the Maoist era. The unfortunate thing about a lot of the foreign investment that allowed for this economic growth to happen was that they started with the foreign concessions and unequal treaties of the late Qing. But they also built the backbone of modern Chinese light industry and economic power. Keep in mind that SEZ are modeled after foreign concessions for FDI, the major difference being that SEZ are entirely under the sovereignty of the Chinese government. Deng knew what he was doing.

So what did the ROC do for Mainland economics? A LOT.

[mariusj]

Actually, as a student of economics, ROC did lay a lot of economic growth in the Mainland that Mao tried to undo, only to have it bounce back with a vengeance during the Deng era. While historians would say that there is a clean break at 1949, economists would say that modern China's success would not be possible without the economic developments of the late Qing and Mainland ROC.

Before 1949, China developed light industry along the coastal cities, manufacturing mostly textiles, buttons, small but lucrative goods. China was taking the path that Taiwan and HK took to maturity (and which the Mainland is only reaching now, but heavily skewed toward heavy industry) because they didn't have the interruption of the Maoist era. The unfortunate thing about a lot of the foreign investment that allowed for this economic growth to happen was that they started with the foreign concessions and unequal treaties of the late Qing. But they also built the backbone of modern Chinese light industry and economic power. Keep in mind that SEZ are modeled after foreign concessions for FDI, the major difference being that SEZ are entirely under the sovereignty of the Chinese government. Deng knew what he was doing.

So what did the ROC do for Mainland economics? A LOT.

Hyper inflation and man made flood.

Of course, that doesn't mean they didn't do anything good but lets not put roses on **** and pretend it doesn't smell.

[mingsquared]

mariusj is correct. Inflation was so bad during the ROC that even the United States lost faith in its economy. Chiang was simply unable to control it and his reforms didn't do much to help.

[ahxiang]

your website is very useful for my understanding of ROC history. appreciate that. why no Chinese version?

think it's politically impossible for PRC to do any objectively fair reviews on ROC in China while the latter still exists in Taiwan.

China leader Hu Jintao in 2005 said that 中国国民党和中国共产党领导的抗日军队，分别担负着正面战场和敌后战场的作战任务。read between the lines, it obviously tells us KMT was the main fighting force then. But after that, CCP through the People's Daily would revert to her decades old stance 中国战胜日本的最根本原因，是中共领导和推动抗战。 It's easier for them to lie than to deal with the truth.

Someday, I will have my English writings converted to Chinese. I had spent enormous hours working on transliteration in Russian, Japanese, Korean and Chinese, to make sure that no originals are to be lost in the conversion. One example will be my work on getting the proper pronunciation of the name of a Japanese doctor who treated Red Army general Chen Gen's wound in Shanghai and later participated in the "peace" talks of 1940s. I went back and forth, and finally figured out the proper "kana" via some Korean hangul.

Why I am writing in English? I think that the current Chinese generation is lost, and the next one might be lost as well, and I have to count on future generations to rectify China's problems. I said before that what we are doing now, on this Chinahistoryforum as well, is to keep Prometheus's fire burning, and this endeavor to rectify China's history will ultimately pass on to some Chinese of the future Chinese generation. (See http://www.chinahist...49/page__st__90 ) I read the history about the R.O.C. airforce, and found out that the famous war heroes had origin in the Cantonese airforce of early 1930s, and then learnt that it was the Cantonese link to overseas Chinatowns, in the U.S. and Canada, that saw batches of overseas Chinese boys sent to the Canton airforce which was absorbed into the ROC airforce in 1936. Similarly, the truck drivers on the Sino-Burmese Highway were mostly from Vietnam and Southeast Asia. Pretty sure that those truck drivers, who survived the resistance war, continued to serve the ROC in the civil war. An example would be the 80 trucks that went to Kalgan in 1945-1946, as found out by Raymond Jaegher http://www.chinahist...ost__p__5005222 Many years ago, when I searched into the history of the battles in Manchuria, I was amzed to learn that Fu Zuoyi had at one time sent his "mechanized" army to Manchuria to help fight against the communists, and I did not link up the episodes till recently. So to say the truck drivers, overseas Chinese, continued on to serve ROC in the civil war in Manchuria. In one word, I am counting on the Chinese sons and grandsons who are to grow up overseas to one day do similar things for China, and to have those Chinese sons and grandsons take up the task, we would need to provide them with solid writings to relay the knowledge about the ROC. What you and me doing here is the job of a relay, so that the Prometheus's fire will keep burning.

Some comments about what you cited as to what the CPC leadership and propaganda was saying. First you want to know that the CPC had two documents and archives' agency in North China and Shanghai. I don't know exactly what those documents were about, and they were not transported to Moscow for some practical reason, maybe like personnel management, and spy network etc. The political documents, I am sure, were all shipped to Moscow along the way. The related writing about the so-called archives in Shanghai pointed to a very tiny folder that the communists archivists were able to move about every few years without detection. What I am trying to say here is that in Yang Shangkun's Diaries, you could find Mao's instruction in early 1950s to have all the archives in Moscow moved back to China. In another word, if you go to Moscow, you may not find the CPC-related documents. Mao was cunning enough to have moved all his "criminal" evidence back to Peking from Moscow in 1950s. What would be an example of this kind of "criminal" evidence? I would give an example about the G.R.U. agent Zhang Kexia's activity. Zhang Kexia, under Liu Shaoqi's order, wrote an proposal to have Song Zheyuan's 29th Corps to proactively attack the Japanese in early 1937, termed, "Army exiting the Mountain and Sea Pass". This piece of work is an incredible evidence linking the CPC to the provocation of the Sino-Japanese War as something premeditated. Now, should the truth be that the Soviets and the CPC had actually provoked the war, what would they do today? Dare they acknowledge themselves to be committing the war crime? (At http://www.chinahist...resistance-war/ , I already discussed how the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria started.)

If you want to find a reason how the CPC led the resistance war against Japan, i.e., "中国战胜日本的最根本原因，是中共领导和推动抗战," you need not go further than digging up the root causes of the Sino-Japanese conflicts.

(As Chiang Kai-shek expounded in his speech to the 7^th KMT Congress in 1952, the Russian invasion in the Far East and ambition for Korea triggered Japan’s military ascension in East Asia and indirectly induced the First Sino-Japanese War over the control of Korea and the Liaodong Peninsula. In 1849, Nikolai Muraviev, who was conferred the governor post for Eastern Siberia two years earlier, sent a fleet to sail along the Amur River in violation of the Chinese sovereighty as stipulated in the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk and in the the summer of the next year, 1950, led a fleet in crossing the sea to take possession of the Sakhalin Island on behalf of the Czar. In 1857, Muraviev and the Cossacks intruded into the Amur River a fourth time, occupied Hailanpao [Blagoveschensk], and mounted guns at Aigun city. In the spring of 1858, Muraviev intruded into the Amor River a fifth time. Russia, taking advantage of the Second Opium War waged by the British/French against China, coerced the Manchu local officials into signing the Aigun Treaty, ceding to Russia the northern bank of the Amur River, about 600,000 square kilometers, and authorized a 'joint' possession of the land between the Ussuri River and the Japan sea, about 400,000 square kilometers of territory, for which the Protestant Church's archibishop Innocent arranged a 'thanksgiving' session for Muraviev's accomplishments the czar conferred the title of General-Governor Murav'ev-Amursky onto Muraviev. Russians, for sake of imposing their will on China, pretentiously agreed to allow 64 Chinese settlements to continue existence under their jurisdiction, but in 1900, during the boxer turmoil, Russian embarked on a rampage against the Chinese, wiping out the settlements in an ethnic cleaning. In May of 1860, taking advantage of theManchu debacle in the opium war, Nicholas Ignatiev forced China into signing a 'Special Tientsin Treaty' to enjoy the same privileges as granted to Britain/France, ratifying the Treaty of Aigun, giving Russia the Maritime Province and the Ussuri Province. The Russians gave their newly acquired territories the names of Miaojie [Nikolayevsk], Khabaroysk [Boli], Vladivostock [Haishenwei] and, Sakhalin Island [Kuyedao].)

As to "中国国民党和中国共产党领导的抗日军队，分别担负着正面战场和敌后战场的作战任务", that's a total B.S. The only battles acknowledged by the ROC to be fought by the CPC would be Lin Biao's Pingxingguan ambush battle in late 1937, and the southern Shanxi ambush battles in early 1938. (Certainly, there was a railway disruption campaign in the "Hundred Regiment Campaign") Other than those battles, the CPC had exerted all their efforts to fighting the government troops. I talked about "double gun madam Zhao" before, as well as hsi son Zhao Tong who was a youth party guerrilla fighter fighting against Japanese in Jehol and Manchuria since 1932. In 1938, foreigners, including the Spanish War Comintern agents, at Stalin's order, flocked to China to praise Chiang's war against Japan, and wrote extensively about the "double gun madam Zhao". Two years later, communist Eighth Route ambushed and killed off hundreds of guerrilla force led by Zhao Tong, together with his sister and dozens of women, who were en route to the Jehol border, from war time interim capital Chungking. Basically, the CPC cavalry ambushed and killed them off like animals, from the valley where the ambush was, to the villages along the path the guerrilla fighters retreated. Before they left Chungking, both Feng Yuxiang and CPC leaders pretentiously saw them farewell. Another example would be the communist killing of all 'Sicun" [preservation of four Confucius and Mencius virtues] Middle School students in Hebei Province, by thousands. Those high school students were graduates of Zhang Yinwu's training class since the early 1930s. Just incredible that the CPC, during the resistance war, would be so merciless. Not to mention how Northwestern Army generals, in 1942-43, defected to the Japanese side. Invariably, those government guerrilla forces came under the pincer-attacks of the Japanese and Communists, and had to seek asylum with Wang Ching-wei's government, hence beefing up the military ranks of the puppet army in the last two years of the war.

[General_Zhaoyun]

Hyper inflation and man made flood.

Of course, that doesn't mean they didn't do anything good but lets not put roses on **** and pretend it doesn't smell.

I believe that took place after 1947, hampered by hyperinflation. That economic disruption caused the loss of US faith on Chiang and allowed the Chinese communist to increase their propaganda influence against KMT. After 1949, Mao simply overturn all capitalist structure and change it to planned economy of the communist model. Deng merely unturned it in 1979 and slowly progress it towards market economy.

China was industrializing in the 1930s building railways, roads and factories only to be set back by the fight between KMT and CCP and then again against the Japanese. If you read KMT's history, this historical period of 1930s follows Sun Yat Sen's China nation building strategy 《建國大綱》 written in 1924, where it's known as 訓政時期 (political tutelage by KMT). ROC basically follows this step for China to progress towards a modern nation, it requires three steps: 軍政時期 (military conquest to unify China - basically took place from 1911- 1928 e.g. Northern expedition to unify China)，訓政時期 (political tutelage or dictatorship by KMT from 1928 onwards- that's why KMT led the punitive military action against CCP - only with dictatorship will the nation be able to concentrate on economic construction and unify the nationalist force to fight against the Japanese), 憲政時期 (Constitution period basically after 1947, where ROC constitution was laid down, in an attempt to progress towards true Republican and democracy model).

The military threat from the Chinese Communist in the north caused ROC to institutionalize the martial law " 動員戡亂時期臨時條款" in 1948. This setup back caused martial law to be imposed and delay the progress of democracy and republican nation building. It continued in Taiwan when ROC regime fled to Taiwan in 1949 and was only abolished in 1991 in Taiwan. In 2011, Sun Yat Sen's 3 people's principles and democratic republican model of a nation was realized in Taiwan.

[Optimus]

hyper inflation caused the Chinese currency collapse which led to the economic/financial collapse of the nationalist regime. the economic, social, political and military are tangible factors that influence and affect one another. a weakening in any of those factors will lead to a significant deterioration in the other factors.

Chen Lifu held Communist spies Chen Hansheng and Ji Chaodong primarily responsible for Kuomintang losing the mainland. Chen Hansheng destroyed ROC's international position via the United States. Ji Chaodong worked persistently to underline the nationalist government's financial position in Chonqqing period and was influential in the Bank of China failure to control inflation during the civil war years.

Edited by Optimus, 03 October 2011 - 11:23 PM.

[ahxiang]

hyper inflation caused the Chinese currency collapse which led to the economic/financial collapse of the nationalist regime. the economic, social, political and military are tangible factors that influence and affect one another. a weakening in any of those factors will lead to a significant deterioration in the other factors.

Chen Lifu held Communist spies Chen Hansheng and Ji Chaodong primarily responsible for Kuomintang losing the mainland. Chen Hansheng destroyed ROC's international position via the United States. Ji Chaodong worked persistently to underline the nationalist government's financial position in Chonqqing period and was influential in the Bank of China failure to control inflation during the civil war years.

For the communists, their survival would be what I called "jiu si yi sheng" - 九死一生. They almost killed themselves numerous times, but ultimately survived to create so much havoc to China, all because of the help from Stalin and the Soviets. Yan Xishan likened them to the legendary NINE-TAIL FOX (九尾狐) - which has nine lives. How true it was ! (For people who do not know Chinese Daoist myth, refer to the DVD at http://www.yesasia.c...-0-en/info.html )