Jeffrey Wasserstrom
speaker
385 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Jeffrey Wasserstrom’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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If all that wasn't complicated enough, Taiwan isn't just one place or one island. There are also islands that are closer to mainland Jinmen and their degrees of integration. But your comment about integration of trade and sort of being a check. There's a Chinese writer, fascinating guy, Han Han, who was a race car driver and a filmmaker and a bad boy novelist.
Anyway, in his heyday, he was an interesting kind of blogger who was testing the edges of things. And he had this blog post where he was talking about, this was in the early 2000s, He was talking about how China was building the massive Three Gorges Dam project. And he said, some people are saying building these dams, it could be so easy for the Americans to just...
You know, just bomb them and destroy our country because it would be a massive flood. And he said, but that's really silly. That's a really silly argument because Americans know that down river from there, what would be flooded out was the place where their iPhones are built. And they want their iPhones.
So this kind of notion he's making through a humorous point, the way in which interconnectedness can be a check. And interconnectedness can be in all kinds of ways. The flows of people between places and having people from one place living in another, traveling to another, studying in another. that can actually be something that helps to stabilize the world.
I think that's an important thing to keep in mind.
The road to Mao coming to power, we need to first say that China was under rule by emperors until 1911, overthrown by an upheaval that was partly by people who wanted to change China into a republic, but also some people who wanted to get rid of the last dynasty was a group of Manchu ruling families. So they saw them as ethnic outsiders.
So it was a strange combination of kind of ethnic nationalists who wanted China back under the control of Han Chinese, other people who thought the time for rule by emperors was over and wanted to establish a republic. And Sun Yat-sen became a first provisional president of this newly formed Republic of China. But then he got nudged out of power by a military strongman.
And then there was a period where the country was really divided. Republic of China didn't have a strong government, but there were Then two groups, one rallied around Sun Yat-sen, had founded something that became known as the Nationalist Party. And then there was a small group of people who formed a Communist Party. Mao was one of them. These were...
intellectuals who were part of the May 4th movement of 1919. They were inspired by Marxist ideas, but they were also just inspired by the Russian Revolution. Russia was nearby. It seemed good to think with. It had a largely rural population, and somehow it it seemed to be getting strong in the world. And there was this interest in sort of how China could do that.
And the newly formed Soviet Union did something very important. There were a group of foreign powers, including Tsarist Russia, that had gained big concessions out of China when, in 1900, the Boxer uprising had taken place and then been crushed by a consortium of foreign powers who had gotten privileges and indemnities out of that.
And the newly formed Soviet Union renounced those, said that was the old order, that was imperialism. Marx's ideas were attractive to some Chinese thinkers, but Lenin was very attractive because of his combination of anti-imperialism and his notion of a vanguard party leading a country forward. So there was a small communist party, a bigger nationalist party.
They were involved in these protests against warlords and against imperialists. And while Sun Yat-sen was alive, Sun Yat-sen got the two parties to work together because Sun Yat-sen wasn't a Marxist. He didn't believe in class struggle, but he admired Lenin and Leninism.
And so he said that actually the Communist Party and the Nationalist Party may have had different views of the path forward for China, but they agreed on who the enemies were. And the enemies were the warlords who were keeping China weak and too willing to compromise with Japan and foreign imperialism.
So China needed to get rid of the warlords and become a stronger country, and then they could sort it out of what road to take. Sun Yat-sen dies in 1925, and his successor, Chiang Kai-shek, initially keeps the alliance going with the Communist Party. But in 1927, he turns against the communists and tries to carry out a purge against the Communist Party members. He's the head of the nationalists.
He's the head of the nationalists. And he has some very different... He's a kind of culturally more conservative figure. But what's important in part about this is... There are some members of the Chinese Communist Party who accept the basic ideas of Marxism, of revolution comes from the cities.
But Mao has this idea that actually he loves this idea of peasant rebellions in China's past as driving history forward. And he starts writing about how, well, maybe in China's case, actually the peasantry, farmers can be a radical force. And so the Communist Party is on the run. It's being pushed around, but the nationalists are trying to exterminate them.
But eventually, the nationalists and the communists ally again after Japan invades China in the 1930s. They form what's called the Second United Front. But during this period, Mao is emerging as taking leadership in the Chinese Communist Party and and his idea of a different kind of vision of communist revolution that has the revolutionary vanguard somehow being the peasantry.
After World War II, after the two parties have brokered a truce and sort of worked together against japan there's a civil war between the nationalists and the communists and against all odds the communist party wins the communist party gets support from the soviet union the nationalists get support from the united states um
even though neither of them are quite doing things the way that their backer would like them to. But there also is a way in which the, and this is something I think the Communist Party leaders remember, there's a feeling that the Nationalist Party doesn't really believe its own rhetoric, that in fact all it cares about is having power and that it's internally corrupt.
Chiang Kai-shek himself isn't viewed as sort of personally corrupt, but family members. And there's an idea that there's just a small band of people that are benefiting. And there's a kind of disgust with the leader, with the nationalists. The nationalists end up in retreat in Taiwan. That's why Taiwan then becomes the Republic of China.
Showing 321–340 of 385 · page 17 of 20
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