Conditions for the Chinese Authoritarian State's Emergence

5.01 Authoritarian States

Impact of War

1839-1842, 1856-1860 Opium Wars

1839-1842, 1856-1860 Opium Wars

1839-1842, 1856-1860 Opium Wars

• the first in 1839-1842, the second in 1856-1860
• losses of both wars resulted in China signing treaties with exploitative and borderline embarrassing terms (similar to the 1919 Treaty of Versailles) – including land, special trade, status, extra-judiciary power
  • China forcibly opened up to foreign trade
  • concessions = formation of foreign areas like Beijing’s French or American concession
  • extra-judiciary power = foreigners tried by their own country’s laws instead of Chinese law
    • this enraged nationalist Chinese, who would later to go Versailles to ask for equal status
• by the 1900s, many Chinese people were not only addicted, but also dependent → making it increasingly difficult to shut off trade or foreign imports
  • drugs and money flowed from India to Britain to China

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1914-1918 World War I

Further Reading

🔗 [The Surprisingly Important Role China Played in WW(https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/surprisingly-important-role-china-played-world-war-i-180964532/)

• the Qing dynasty, under Sun Yat-Sen, collapsed in 1911 (Xinhan/Double Ten Revolution)
• the republican government under Yuan Shikai, President of China and former Qing general, entered the war and marked China’s entrance onto the world stage
  • the Chinese entered the conflict hoping to earn a seat at Versailles, with Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Point offering the Chinese nationalists hope
    • chief among them, was the Point for “self-determination”
• Shandong/Shantung was a place of confusion as well as the birthplace of Confucius, changing hands from Chinese to German to Japanese
  • it was a symbol of China’s national humiliation, and part of the Japanese Empire’s 21 Demands
    • the 21 Demands: set of secret demands that would greatly increase Japanese influence and control of China
  • restoration of national sovereignty was a key demand
• 1921: Establishment of the Chinese Communist Party
• the West’s refusal to recognise or properly compensate China for wartime labor sent the country back into a period of warlordism, splitting China up as they ‘did their own thing’
• in response, lots of politicians and ideologies pushed for China’s reunification as one country
• Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communists form an uneasy alliance to unify China, forming the ==First United Front==
• 1921-1930: The First United Front sweeps across China, killing and effectively waging war against warlords
  • extermination campaigns were run, including The White Terror – the Nationalists sought to wipe out the Communists
• TODO – how did the civil war end?

1937-1945 Second Sino-Japanese War

1937-1945 Second Sino-Japan War

1937-1945 Second Sino-Japan War

• the CCP and Nationalists form the Second United Front
• caused economic problems – high cost of living + hardship

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1939-1945 World War II

• the CCP and Nationalists form the Second United Front
• everyone is painfully aware that another civil war is on the horizon after this, with the Nationalists ready to wipe out the Communists and vice versa
• Mao begins to court the peasants, offering land, security and patriotism, manipulating the situation to curry favour for the CCP
• the U.S. intervenes in favour of the Nationalists, allowing them to begin dominating and establishing a government
  • the Nationalists work slowly toward wiping out the CCP

1945-1949 Chinese Civil War

• 1945 August: Japan surrenders
• 1946 July: Fights begin to break out
• the USSR chooses not to get involved, allowing the CCP and Nationalists to fight it out among themselves
• the peasants loved Mao, thanks to his actions during WWII
  • Chiang Kai-Shek, for all his talk of ‘liberation’, was suppressing the peasants equally as the last administration
  • Mao Zedong, for his violent behaviour, walked the talk – if he killed a bunch of people to clear land, he turned around and gave it to the peasants
    • Chiang Kai-Shek would talk about equalisation, documents, etc. - making him unpopular with the common people

Ideology & Propaganda

Ideology & Propaganda must be considered together

Actions that Mao takes to spread his ideology can be seen as Propaganda; it cannot be separated fully.

• [] [Conditions for the Chinese Authoritarian State’s Establishment#Ideology (Maoism)|Maoist though] resonated with the peasants
• [] [#Kuomintang Financial Mismanagemen] boosted Mao’s ideology
  • ideologically, communism appealed to the masses more after seeing the mess the KMT made of capitalism and their money
• capitalism and communism both emerged as answers to liberal democracy’s failures post-WWI
  • since capitalism was clearly failing to provide for the people, communism would definitely work! (right?)
• preyed upon Weakness of Political System
• links to Propaganda – the image of the leader is as important as The Role of Leader

Flawed Economic (Class) System

• China was so economically worse-off than any European country that many major economic disasters of the 1900s – the 1929-1943 Great Depression, 1920s American economy boom and resulting bust – skipped right over them
• the two factors below – Rural Poverty and Urban Poverty – had a far wider effect upon China
• a flawed class system implies an issue with economic structure – the rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer
  • disequilibrium
  • poverty was so deeply entrenched that it required a whole revolution to throw out the system and start anew
• Marxism championed a strong middle class – in China, the upper/elite class had privileges beyond imagination, as well as vast swathes of land, and lower-class peasants were very common
  • in short, there was no middle class – 5-10% of China was made up of the middle class
  • whatever little middle class did exist likely played a role in exploiting peasants or were foreign collaborators

Kuomintang Financial Mismanagement

• overprinted money → hyperinflation
  • 1937-1945: prices rose 6000x
• 1948: attempted to introduce new gold yuan standard
• 1949: monetary system collapsed (direct result of the introduction of a new gold yuan standard) → many lost savings
• 📉 Production fell
  • industrial ↓ 50%
  • food ↓ 25%
• China’s most industrialised region, Manchuria, also occupied by the Japanese

Rural Poverty

• only 10% of China’s land was arable & suffered from a lot of natural disasters (e.g. flooding)
• 120m in 1812-440, in 1900 made for growing land hunger + custom of dividing land among all sons
• devastating local famines were frequent
• landlords & prosperous peasants, 10% of population, held 70% of land that was rented out
• China was very rural – the 1800 Industrial Revolution completely skipped over it
  • 85% of China consisted of rural farmland
• peasants were economically disempowered and didn’t actually own the land they farmed
  • landowners would rent out farmland and take a cut of crops
  • preying upon the desperation of millions of disempowered peasants, exploitative landlords took advantage and committed atrocities
  • peasants could be expected to give up to 70% of their income to their landlords
  • they were an exploited class

Urban Poverty

• tons of peasants were transferring in and out of cities; injured workers would move back home, and impoverished peasants would come in looking for industrial factory work
• foreign investment restricted their income
  • as a result of China’s defeat in the Opium Wars, they were forced to open up to the West
  • Western countries promptly set up concessions – e.g. the French Concession in Beijing
    • taking land away from Chinese people
    • economically, foreigners tended not to hire Chinese people for anything much outside manual labour – taking away opportunities for economic and social growth

Social Divisions

Define

What was happening around the country that created an ideal environment for Mao and the CCP to seize control.

Inf

Social divisions as they existed for most of China’s existence and how Mao weaponized them are two different things and should be considered as such when coming up with factors for the Chinese State’s emergence.

• peasants v. landlords (class struggle)
  • keeping peasants poor as a means of control got old fast, resulting in warlords
• foreigners v. locals
  • paying the government and cities large sums to practically colonize areas (e.g. French Concession in Beijing)
• peasants essentially lived always under crackdown, with someone manipulating money or the situation → they were very suppressed → resulting in the massive armies warlords were known for
  • warlords even paid the peasants to fight, which was very welcome

Warlordism

• the presence of warlords
• China was run by government officials, warlords, local officials, rich landowners, and the rich merchant class
• they essentially functioned as private armies
• how do you bring unity to a fragmented nation? – by Modelling the Way and giving them a cause to fight for
  • Mao did exactly that and, through the Red Army’s actions, managed to gain support

Weakness of Political Systems

Political Fragmentation of China

• 1911-1912: Major fragmentation occurred, as people and political opponents began to realize the Manchurian Empire/Qing Dynasty wasn’t able to hold their ground
• 1912-1916: Educated Chinese began to realize that the Qing Dynasty was going to end
  • people were grasping to ideologies in the wave of questioning that swept the country, essentially rejecting the dynastic system and accepting nearly anything else
• 1923-1927: Warlords took control and divided China, essentially fragmenting it into several states/countries
  • every warlord had different rules and goals
  • there was no centralization or standard
  • some areas had power vacuums, which wannabe dictators capitalized upon to seize power in their homelands
• this drove the formation of the First United Front, where Communists and Nationalists teamed up to unify China
  • no one could defend a fragmented China; if the Europeans so pleased, they could sweep in and invade swathes of land
  • strategically, China was pressed against India, French Indochina, the USSR and Korea – all countries that could invade
• 1935: Japan invades China; the Nationalists consolidate China under his rule
  • Chiang Kai-Shek manipulated the situation to seize power of China and hold it tight
    • his policies were essentially akin to that of warlords; they cracked down severely, with some of the harshest policies to ever exist, in order to keep China out of Japanese hands
  • BUT! Mao slowly lures the populace Chiang Kai-Shek was holding so tightly to his ideology
    • Chiang didn’t realize it, but the more he tried to democratize China through harsh rule, the more he pushed Chinese people into Mao’s arms
    • a civil war was imminent the second Japan was out of China
• 1937-1941: The Second United Front is formed to oppose Japan yet again
  • the nation has steadily been building resentment against the Nationalists
  • by allowing Communists into his government to defend the country, Chiang compromised his own government
    • at one point, harsh violence (especially on peasants) felt like the only way to control the country – and it drove the populace away from the Nationalists again

Nationalists in Government

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