340. Chairman Mao: World War II, Japanese Invasion, & Massacre in Nanjing (Ep 3)

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of MPa a chat community discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter. Sign up to MPa Club at www.mpaPoduk.com In this episode of MPa the long march is over and Ma Zidong is now the rising star of the Communist Party but the battle for control of China has only just begun. So this is a story of brutal occupation, untold atrocities and a very bitter civil war. Join us as we explain how the survivors of 1935 are transformed into the conquerors of 1949. Hello and welcome to MPa with me, Anita Arnand. And me, William Durantpool. And we are absolutely delighted to welcome back a great friend of the show Professor Rana Mitter from Harvard Kennedy School is with us. Rana is one of the world's leading historians of modern China. He's written extensively about the region, your book Forgotten Al I really transformed everybody's understanding of China's role in World War II. So I mean we're so happy that you've damed to come back and speak to us and not to traumatise from the last two times. But put off by the first two episodes. Yeah, I know because it can happen. We're a lot, Rana. You couldn't have kept me away. I think I was more me kind of crawling back and being to be allowed back into the Empire, Empire Mother Ship. I should also add for listeners who are watching as well on on video. I'm currently in my office where I'm using a slightly different form of equipment. So if it looks as if I'm basically reenacting the plot of Apollo 13 with my kind of interplanetary communications device, do not be distracted. That's just how it is at Harvard these days, exactly. It's just we've been interested in interplanetary relations at Harvard for a very long time. That's how we communicate with Yale. Rana, before we dive into the meet of today's episode, we need to set the scene. Last time we left Mao in 1935, having just survived this incredibly harrowing Long March, which the Communist Party has long presented as a sort of brilliant, strategic move. But you rather sort of rewrote the picture presented as a catastrophe and a kind of last chance survival mechanism. Absolutely. The Long March, which is now used symbolically, even today, in China, as an example of a kind of huge burdensome, arduous, but ultimately successful quest, was actually nothing of the sort at the time. It was a retreat, one that was forced upon the Communist because they were essentially being encircled by their nationalist rivals. So in 1935, it's not quite raggedaggle, but certainly a pretty bedruggled, final 10% of the troops who set out the beginning of the Long March and the year earlier. They finally get to Baon in Shanshi province and then move on into course to Yanan, the place which becomes almost kind of legendary. In today, it's a site of what in China, they call red tourism where you go and pay your respects to sites in the Communist Revolution. And Yanan is essentially where Mao becomes over the years and over time the Mao that we think of today, this kind of all-powerful ruler. Rana, one of the surprises, certainly for me in what you were saying last time, was that while the Long March was a catastrophe for many, many people and most didn't make it. I mean, what, two thirds, four fifths didn't make it. 90% I think actually, it's really a very, very high level of drop off. Yeah, I mean, it's a really catastrophic moment. Yet the one clear winner is someone who's fairly junior at the beginning of it and becomes very central or certainly rising to power by the end of it, which is Mao himself. That's right. So one of the things that we keep a sort of a tracker on as it were is how the Long March changes the fate of Mao. If you look at the official version that's promocated, I mean, it's probably even today in China, they point to an event that happens, you know, a few months into the March, which is the Zunyi conference, which is where supposedly Mao has, you even get kind of oil paintings done of it, you know, as a sort of showdown moment where Mao is kind of standing up almost and waving their finger and, you know, telling the CCP leaders where they gone wrong with their urban strategy and it's time to turn to the countryside. From what we know, it wasn't quite like that. Nor was Otto Brown, the, uh, Comintern agent sort of lurking at the back, looking kind of, you know, dart-faced at the, uh, timing quite, quite that way. But at this moment where Mao's association with the strategy of peasant revolution, and that's something I think we'll keep coming back to, he's not the inventor of it, but you might say he's one who really kind of takes it and runs with it. And just to set the background to that, uh, for those that are not, uh, where classic Marxist theory says it's the urban predatory at the Do the Revolution, it still workers coal miners and that sort of stuff. But in China, it's clearly the peasants who are leading the vanguard of the revolution. Well, yes, except you say clearly, of course, one of the problems was that the theory said, you know, it's one of those things like, oh, it works in practice, but will it work in theory? And so the theory said, no, you have to have an urban predatory at and China didn't have much of one. So the attempt to create urban revolution in Shanghai, Guangzhou in 1926, 27, went horribly wrong with essentially the nationalist turning on their former communist partners and killing many of them. So the countryside became, you know, the only option that was left. And then even that was much of an option because the parts of the countryside in Jiangxi province where the other communist faction was based, um, basically alienated themselves from the locals and started kind of, you know, committing a blood bath on each other in factional battles. So by the time you, they all have to flee the nationalists and get up to Shanxi province, they're in a pretty, as I say, kind of, you know, frazzled state one way or, or another. And you know, have to sit there in 1935 in Yanan and regroup and rethink, you know, is there any chance that we can succeed? What are we going to do? Who's going to follow us? And I have to say when you're looking at it from 1935, from the point of view of people like Mao, but also other people who become known as long-march veterans, um, which I'm all, you know, Shanxi, must look pretty bleak. I mean, you know, they couldn't see the future. They couldn't see how it was going to work out. They didn't know this was the great master's trade. This just felt they lost 90% of their number, yeah. Yeah, you know, they're out in this very, very hard-scrable part of China. It has a kind of soil that's known as Lois, L-O-E-S-S, which is sort of, yeah, it's supposed to be the phrase yellow earth is used for that kind of very, very hard soil, you know, it's not the most agriculturally rich, the peasants who live out there are not amongst them as prosperous of the rural dwellers in China. And basically, they're on a retreat where they've got stuck. So, you know, this is a real cliffhanger moment. What are they going to do next? So, Rannat, give us a description of the way people are living in Shanxi. I mean, some are even sort of troglidized living in caves, is this right? Well, technically that's true. I mean, if you want to, you know, give a celebrity endorsement, the late Plato would have been very keen, because he was always writing about people living in caves and not being able to see the light. So, had he been transported to, in a half thousand years to 1930s rural China, he'd been delighted, because one of the things that's most distinctive about this particular part of Shanxi province in China, I mean, then rather than now, is that significant numbers of dwellings were carved caves carved into the rock, and you would basically live inside those sorts of cave dwellings. I would use this as a term, I think, Yadong, you know, cave dwellings. And yes, you know, the meals would be served there, you'd sort of move from one to one on social visits. There would be large caves, which would be for their privileged leaders. It's a sort of Marxist flidstones, is that right, all? Yes, it's going to be a little bit of something that I'm not about to think about in some ways. Yes, exactly. There are a piece certainly right out of history, but it was also a product of the fact that they had ended up in this rather unexpected place, and clearly had to blend into the local circumstances as much as possible. So basically, pretty much all of the major leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, as they came together to plot the future, would do so on the, you know, the floor of these tall, you know, somewhat dark caves that made for, you know, everyday life there. I mean, it sounds awful. It sounds awful, actually, frankly. It's not an upgrade, though. No, I mean, it must have been strategically useful, because I mean, otherwise, why establish yourself there, or why have a base there? Let me give a bit more of a description of how life was there, and I should say that we do have a lot of memoirs from people who actually lived through that time and gave an account of it. The first thing is that it was chosen, as much as it was chosen, they sort of, in some extent, stumbled on it, but it wasn't a completely, you know, blank territory, because in fact, there had been a small, a communist encampment in the area, and essentially it was then kind of built up with the arrival of these marches, the long marches, who had come from the, from the south. So they were, they were building on what was there already. It also provided the capacity for certain things that were turned out to be very useful. For instance, it was very hard to attack by land. So in other words, if you need to have somewhere that is going to be essentially protected from outside attack, that was one of the advantage. Remember, they'd left day-to-day life, which we have quite well documented, was pretty austere in many ways. First of all, it was a very male environment. Far more men than women went there at some points, depending which, you know, you're talking about, you could talk about it being like an eight to one proportion of men to, to women. This meant that, you know, elite men in particular, communist party leaders, could essentially, you know, they wanted to get married, they wanted to have relationships. And there's a certain amount of, you know, quite significant and, you know, pretty strong political coercion in getting these younger women to basically take up senior leaders as, as husbands. So it didn't always work out well. Apparently, someone who was brought into, to, you know, be betrothed, Lin Yao, who would go on to become China's foreign minister, was a kind of paranoid photo-phobe. He hated the light, so quite like a vampire. The caves were perfect for him. Well, they were perfect for him. Not so perfect for his intended bride, kind of, I mean, are you sort of suggesting that they were kind of carried off a little bit against their will sometimes or not? Not carried off. No, it's more complex than that and it comes when we'll talk at the next episode about certain called rectification movement. No, it's more that there was huge amounts of pressure, political pressure on them. You know, you should do this for the party. You should basically, you know, do your revolutionary duty by, you know, providing comfort and partnership for these incredibly important men who are running the revolution. As I said, this young woman who went into, was sent into Lin Yao, kind of a panic was seen shortly afterwards, some running at high speed out of the cave, shouting, I won't do it. I won't do it. So she obviously wasn't in charge of it. But others, you know, did find them, said it was said actually for a lot of older communist men that they loved Yanan because they managed to create a lifestyle where they were powerful, but they had a lot of influence and respect and found their life partners. For lots of younger women, their memories were of lice, shaved heads, endless sexual harassment because there were so few of them and so many younger men around. I mean, there was one line which in a book about Chinese book about the Tao Wichai translated for one of my books for forgot my language by book on, on, well, we're two in China, where one of the memories of a woman who had lived there for a long time, she just said, very dryly, Yanan was really not a sexy town. And I think that summed it up for many. But also one thing that you haven't perhaps mentioned we should is that it was actually quite near the Soviet border. I mean, the way you described it as being, it's, it means that you might be able to get support should you need it and should the Soviets feel like giving it to you. Yes, I mean, China's border areas, this is true of the northwest as well, were pretty porous in their borders with the Soviet Union, although officially speaking, Stalin had diplomatic relations with Shanghai Shex National's government. There's now plenty of evidence that there's support in arms and advice and so forth going to the communist. We also know now that actually they were always in touch the Soviets and the Chinese Communist by radio. Radio transmitters were really important in terms of keeping up links order suggestions. But having said bad, it's not as simple as some people, I will say, some people have said this meant the Soviets were controlling what the communist did. No, first of all, of course, they heavily influenced them, they're providing finance and advice and you know, there aren't that many other communist mentors to turn to in the world at this point. But also the Soviets were never really able to get to grips with the reality that on a day-to-day basis, it was the Chinese Communist, you know, in this very hard-scrabble part of China who had to make decisions on the hoof day by day and getting some crackly message from Moscow wouldn't really cut it when it came to making those sorts of decisions. So there was autonomy too in many decisions for the Chinese Communist, but there was no doubt that Moscow's influence was real, continued and significant. And yes, being relatively close to the Soviet border, you know, not bang next door, but not not too far away, was certainly important in that way. And, runner, you make the point that things were very hierarchical that the not only were the the old guard and the senior members of the party getting access to younger women and so on, but they're also getting sort of treats that they've got heating and all sorts of other things that the ordinary rank and file simply do not get access to. Oh yeah, no, it's very, very regulated. So just take one example, meals. You mentioned heating, let's take meals. Your meal assessments, in other words, your food rations would be very much assigned on the basis, first of all, seniority. And they also kept really close tabs on who was being served what, so you couldn't like save a bit of your food and give it to someone else. It had to be for you. And if you didn't have it, it went back, but you couldn't sort of pass it on to other members of the family. There were allowances made pregnant women, for instance, such as, you know, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, well, that's nice of them. So kind. Yeah, well, I think we, you know, we could at some point address the question of how far the Chinese Communist Revolution was a feminist revolution. I would just say at this moment, one of China's greatest feminist writers of the 20th century, Ding Ling, who we mentioned briefly in a previous episode, but yes, you know, she wrote very explicitly about, you know, the female sexual feelings and the way that, you know, nobody had really done in that way before. By the 19, by this period, she's in Ye Nan, she's absolutely there. She's, you know, she has a hugely harrowing revolutionary life in which her husband, who he had been, is a communist also, who is shot by the nationalist. She is imprisoned, but not shot escapes, makes her way to Ye Nan. So she's made really sacrifices. And yet by 1943, it's a bit, you know, head of where we're going. She's, she's really complaining to Mao that actually the Chinese revolution is not taking account of feminist concerns. So that is a running thread, you know, for the moment, they arrive in 1935. So during all this time, what is Chankar Shek doing, the nationalist leader that we talked about? I mean, you know, we last left him obsessed with destroying the communists. I mean, even taking his eye off the Japanese thread and just being consumed with, we must smash the communist. So what is he doing? Sure. Well, let me, let me come a little bit to Chankar Shek's defense at this moment. Not a centred server thought I'd hear myself saying. First of all, just to be clear, because it'll come up, Chankar Shek was definitely not ignoring the Japanese thread. What he was trying to work out was how far, I'll be like, Neville Chain was sent in in Britain. How far do you go for rearmament, discreetly or not to discreetly while appeasing, knowing that there will be a conflict at some point, but maybe not right now. And you know, the appeasement debate on, on the, in the West and World goes on even today. There's a similar one in, in China. Just to give one example, he was already planning by this, if you ask him what Chankar Shek's doing. On the Japanese front, he's already planning for something that will happen shortly afterwards, which is the moving of China's capital from Nanjing to the interior Chongqing, just in case there's a Japanese invasion, which takes the Eastern Seymour and, you know, do, do cause there in fact was. So that preparation turned out to be very, very useful. But you're not wrong. He was absolutely still obsessed with the communists being, you know, eliminated. I mean, as I said before, if you run a campaign against someone called an extermination campaign, it's pretty clear what your worldview is on, on this sort of, sort of thing. So it was definitely a pause, but by no means a halt in terms of what he called the disease of the heart. He said the Japanese are a disease of the skin, the communists are as a disease of the heart. And, you know, that meant that it was much more fundamental. What else is he doing? Also in 934-35 at the time of the long march, Changkoshet launches an alternative ideological movement that's supposed to push back against communism. It's called the new life movement, Shingsheng. If it has a slightly sort of Christian phrasing to it, that's not accidental. He was married to a Methodist. He was a Methodist himself. He basically turned it as a Confucian Methodist. If you look at his diaries, he talks about Christ and Jesus and the Psalms all the time, it's absolutely genuine. Anyway, so yes, there is definitely a Christian to English to what he's doing, but basically this is a a new life campaign in which you're supposed to basically sort of be, the Chinese people are supposed to learn discipline. It's got some fascist influences to stand up straight. One of my favorite precepts within it is saying, because you only give people a hard time about stuff that you know they're going to do. So one of the precepts of the new life movement is, do not urinate other than in a toilet, which suggests that there's a great deal of worry about where other than toilets, this is actually actually going on. You've just reminded me of the the motel area sign I've ever seen in my life, which was in India. I think it was, I won't say where it was, but it was, please do not defecate on the road. And I just thought, if anyone can read that, they're probably not doing that. Please do not defecate on the road. Anyway, so I mean, did you sort of, may I say, melee-mouthed defense of China? But you tried, which is great. But actually, 1937 shows that he has taken his eye off the ball. And you know, whatever the strategy was, because Japan is ready to launch its full-scale invasion of China by 1937. Now this is really your, I mean, you've shown the world a lot about this. How did this wall begin? So I think the way to understand the outbreak of war between China and Japan, and let's be clear, this is the beginning of World War II. Yeah. But nice it's soles may say that World War II began in Poland in September 1939, or even if you're an American of a certain sort, Pearl Harbor, 1941. Next, it begins on the 7th of July, 1937, just outside Beijing. Does that rather good second-world war in color that also takes this view and begins in 1937 I'd also recommend available on YouTube and other streaming services. China's forgotten war, which is exactly about this particular period. Who did China's forgotten war, rather than it's a... Not as diverbids. It looked a lot like you, Rowna. Well, you know, he was younger then, I think, in those days, that boat. But the way to understand it, I think, as a comparison with Europe, which a lot of business, maybe perhaps more familiar with, is not to think of it actually like what we think was a traditional start of World War II in Poland, IA provocation by Nazi Germany, which basically triggers off a war that the British, the French, Germans kind of know is coming. This is more like World War I in that if the Archduke hadn't been shot, if you take another turning in Sarajevo that day, maybe something would have said it off, but it wouldn't have been the Archduke being shot, but it was the Archduke being shot. So the equivalent of the Archduke, he also involved shooting, but weirdly allowed shooting, which nobody gets killed, which is perhaps one of the tragic things. So basically, Japanese troops who are stationed under treaty in large parts of North China, and Japanese troops are drilling in this place called One Ping, a little village, which is right next to a bridge, which is recorded actually in the travels of Marco Polo. He talks very positively about this bridge. Yes, well, of course, it wasn't covered in Japanese soldiers at the time that he saw it in the 14th century. So, anyway, so these exercises are going on, and obviously there are local Chinese troops who are not so happy about the Japanese drilling. So they're drilling along. And anyway, something happens on the night of 7th of July, and two of the Japanese soldiers disappear, and the Japanese commander accuses the Chinese of having kidnapped them, shot them, murdered them, whatever it might be, and escalate. Now, I don't want to make this entire episode of Empire entirely focused on urination, but it turns out that at least in one telling, these two Soviet-Japanese soldiers were not kidnapped or murdered, they popped off for a pee, and they realized they had missed roll call, and they were kind of skulking because they couldn't come back, and they were going to get punished by their common dead. But by the time they managed to sneak back, presuming the next morning in Dabarek's having entered their bladders. The second world war broke in hell. Yes, it was a broken house. So this is the, this is the Hakanaburi Eurodacious beginning of global conflict. The thing is, by that stage, and this is again the Sarajevo point, what was the trivial incident between two sets of garrison troops had then escalated up into, well, actually this is not just about these local troops, this is about China and Japan. Japan and the government in Japan uses this as an opportunity, never let a crisis go to waste to say, well, you're oppressing our soldiers, so we need to have control of the entire railway junction in northern China, which is based near Beijing. Chankha Shek is then in his cabinet thinking, right, what do we do? And he holds this cabinet meeting, he considers some length what to do, should we go now, do we appease a bit more, and finally says no, this is the moment for decide, and we're going to fight back. And that's how the war between China and Japan begins in July 1937, which becomes although they didn't know it then, the beginning of the Second World War. What is the Japanese narrative that they're just expanding in empire, or do they have some sort of quasi-historic claim on sort of seizing China? What's there? What would they have done to justify their aggression in Nanjing? Oh, they've got a huge great case that they make. Essentially, I would summarize in one sentence, the kind of clash that leads to this over the previous, you know, 50-60 years as being the clash of two great ideological forces on the rise. Chinese nationalism, which we talked about previously talking about the May 4th movement in the earlier episode, and Japanese imperialism. These are the two forces that are essentially, you know, incompatible with each other ultimately, because China, particularly its elites, its political class, wants to create a sovereign state, which is no longer subject to being pushed around by other countries ever since it has been since the opium wars of the 1830s. Japan, in return, wants to sit at the top table of diplomatic interaction. It looks at Britain with the biggest empire in the world, but you know, this is the 1930s. Rising ever since the Russo-Japanese War in 1895. Yeah, but you know, if only I had two kind of longstanding experts in the British Empire here, but you know, am I right in thinking that the 1930s is a pretty much a peak period for the amount of territory of the Brits. 1921, some people say, is the year that it reaches it? Yeah, okay, but you know, 1935, it's still pretty, you know, 1931 is still pretty good, pretty good, 37 is pretty good going. And then, you know, the French have got a lot of stuff going, Germans lost theirs in 1914, but you know, so you asked your question, what do they say? They say, look, why is it a problem that we want as the newly-emergent industrializing rich strong power to do all the things that the British and the French were doing 50 years ago and do them now, we too want to have our own autarkic imperial block. We too believe we have a civilizing mission to take backward people and turn them into forward people, whatever the alternative would be. We believe that by, and a much of the rhetoric used towards China exactly this time was, you don't understand how lucky you are to have us to be mentors to you. And if we have to basically use violence and coercion to bring you forward into the modern world, that's what we're going to do. It's very much a typical combination of a modernizing impulse, industrialized, you know, capitalism basically providing the need to go and seize resources, and a very strong ideological element that says, look, look at the example of Shedi, you know, even you admire, you the Chinese admire us the Japanese, so why won't you let us basically lead you forward to where you need to be, and the Chinese answer, because we want to do it ourselves. Because we are Chinese. Look, it's a good place to take a break because, you know, what will happen is that the Japanese forces will sweep south, whatever the Chinese are saying. We are going to talk after the break about something that is notorious in the annals of history, something known as the rape of Nanjing. Join us then. Hi, this is Hannah and Michael from GoHangers, the Rest is Science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. Radiotherapy is over a century old, but it is still changing. Cancer Research UK helped lay the foundations of radiotherapy in the early 20th century and has driven progress ever since. Radiotherapy remains one of the cornerstones of cancer treatment today. Every year, millions of people worldwide benefit from cancer research UK's work to make it more precise. Scientists are still refining how radiotherapy is delivered, and one example is an experimental treatment called flash radiotherapy, which delivers radiation in fractions of a second, up to a thousand times faster than standard radiotherapy. And early studies suggest that speed could make a real difference. Flash radiotherapy may cause up to 50% less damage to healthy cells, but scientists don't yet know why healthy cells seem to be spared, so cancer research UK are working to answer that. Understanding it could be key to reducing side effects in the future. For more information about cancer research UK, their research and breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash The Rest is Science. Welcome back. So, Rana, the rape of Nanjing is just a horrific chapter in the history of China. Can you, and I know some people are going to find this very disturbing, but tell us what happens and how this begins. I will, but I should actually warn by saying that this is genuine, very harrowing, so be aware that for the next minute or so, it is the detail is necessary, but it is also deeply disturbing. This was essentially the unprovoked murder or and also violent rape and sexual assault of unarmed civilians in the Chinese capital of Nanjing, which fell in December 1937. It was basically the capital city was undefended, because Nanjing, which as you remember of course was the capital of China under the nationalist government, was not defensible in the face of the Japanese assault on eastern China. And therefore, in careful planning, which Changkachek and his government had done sometime before, the government was moved first, well the military headquarters moved first in Lan Tu, Wuhan, and then they were the kind of political capital and then ultimately the military headquarters to Chongqing in the southwest of China, where it remained until 1946. But Nanjing was obviously still there as a city. Changkachek actually gave his commanding general there, Tang Chongjue orders that he should defend Nanjing to the death. Tang Chongjue did not do this. He basically slipped out onto the river, the Yangtze in a boat, the night before the Japanese arrived and disappeared. He reappeared elsewhere later on, but he was not around to defend the city. Were the nationalists in any position to resist the Japanese and was it completely unequal struggle? Or could they have done more than it is? I think in Nanjing they really could not have done. The point of Changkachek's command was that they should make a brave stand to signal to the rest of the world that China would resist, easily for him to say in that sense because he'd already legged it to Wuhan, I guess at that point. I think it's also fair to say that very few people who were looking at it objectively could have doubted China's determination by that stage, because although we passed over it quickly and I won't go into details, there had been a three four-month battle for the control of Shanghai upriver from Nanjing between August and November of 1937 in which hundreds of thousands of the top trained Chinese soldiers, German trained were killed in trenches. They fought extremely hard, extremely well. There's actually a pretty good Chinese film called The 800 about one of the last stands, maybe one of those groups of soldiers in Shanghai. I think Chang probably had the hope that just as in Shanghai there'd been a last stand before the necessary retreat, the same thing might happen in Nanjing, but Nanjing was not strategically important in the way that Shanghai was, the major port, it was politically important and therefore holding it had a rather different implication. It was the capital. It was the capital. Just I mean I don't want to skirt over what happened in Nanjing, I think we sort of owe it to particularly the women who suffered, because that happens too often in history. We're talking about the rape, the horrific sexual degradation of around, some people say 20,000 women. It's fair to say there's still haunts, cyanog Japanese relations to this day, doesn't it, the way that the women were treated? Yes, it does. The historical memory of this particular atrocity is still something that there's never been a great ground between China and Japan about it. I think no observer in good faith denies that a horrific atrocity took place in the underfunded city of Nanjing, the murder of many many civilians, male and female, the rape of many women during that time. We're talking about thousands, tens of thousands, very large numbers. Nobody was keeping statistics at the time for obvious reasons. One of the reasons, first of all, that we have objective evidence, which we've taken seriously, and people can find it quite easily through online archives and so forth, is that I haste that you would fortunately about anything to do with this, but perhaps in big quirk marks fortunately, there were third party observers there, particularly American missionaries, educators, and they kept day-to-day diaries. A woman called Minivotron, who was a teacher at the Gineling College, which is now part of Nanjing University, kept meticulous and horrific records of young women, girls, in some cases just being dragged away and raped Japanese soldiers, turning up the door, demanding to have young women, provided to them exactly. There is no reason whatsoever why someone like Minivotron would decide to write this as fiction. Even if she had, which she did not, we have records of lots of other people, John McGee, a missionary, the most extraordinary one, and one who's perhaps come famous because of the irony of his own life, is a man called John who was the head of the Siemens, the Siemens electronics company, the German electronics company, in Nanjing, who was actually in November of the Nazi party, which of course, you know, professionally was something people did in Germany at that point. He, I mean, it seems almost unbelievable. He was so outraged by what he saw and he kept records of it, he wrote to Hitler to get him to contact the Japanese, to stop it, he said, you know, Fira, you must stop them, obviously Hitler wasn't going to do anything about it, but all of these witnesses stand as, bear witness to the absolute horror that took place at that time. And I would say that there's one of the best and most in some ways kind of sophisticated and subtle cinematic portrayals. This is a great film by the Chinese director, Lil Trun, which is called, in Chinese it's called Nanjing Nanjing, but it's translated in English in the title, City of Life and Death, I think you get it on streaming, and suddenly black and white, and it's done with brilliant devastating subtly, so much so that it was nearly banned in China, films like that, don't get reocce, they're not propaganda, but it gives some idea of, you know, how this kind of atrocity could have come about. And you asked about the Japanese apologies. It's a really complex question, it's not our subject because we're still in the spirit of mouth, we'll get back to that, but one thing I would say is worth noting, amongst the groups of people who were first responsible for bringing the horrors of the rape of Nanjing to public attention in Japan, were left when Japanese journalists, in the 1970s, people like Honakatsuichi of the Asahi Shunwen, one of the great Japanese newspapers, who went to mainland China in the early 70s, when it still wasn't very easy to do that, interviewed people there and brought back the stories and put them in the Japanese newspapers. So the idea that this, you know, nobody was willing to acknowledge or talk about it really isn't the case, but there is no doubt that the political and historical controversy, which has largely been about political identity, you know, what does it mean to be Japanese Chinese, you know, would we ever do this sort of thing, still royals the relationship between the two countries even today. So you've got 200 million Chinese living now under Japanese occupation in very horrific circumstances, where is Mao in the middle of all this, and what's he got to do with the resistance to the Japanese? That's right. So, you know, the rape of Nanjing, the and the name of Nanjing, the Nanjing massacre, six weeks of horror, but it ends in early January 1938, and then Nanjing as a city under occupation, which it remains until 1945. Much of eastern China is under Japanese occupation, including many of the great cities of its cultural, eastern heartland, Nanjing, Shanghai, Beijing, all under Japanese occupation. And China is essentially divided into three at this point, not three neat parts, they're not like Caesar dividing all into three, but three broad zones of control with very fuzzy lines between them. Broadly in the east, it's occupied by the Japanese, and in the end they don't get to advance much further beyond the, it's basically very broad and rich area of the eastern seaboard. In the southwest and some other areas you have the area that is controlled by the nationalists, the Chancachek government, who move their capital to Chongqing, and defend it actually in the end until 1945. And then in various parts of the country, including the northwest in Yanan, the communists are in charge, and that of course is where Mao is at this point. So he is part of that long march, which ends up in northwest China. And I mentioned before that Yanan, the city, city, small town, where they're based, is chosen in part because it's defensible against a possible nationalist assault. Now a nationalist assault becomes a much less of a worry in 1937, because essentially after a whole bunch of negotiations, good faith, bad faith, skullduggery, the second United Front is formed in which the nationalists and communists with a strong encouragement, or orders really of Stalin and the Soviets, agree to bury the hatchet between each other for a while to concentrate on fighting the Japanese. So at that point the people in Yanan, Mao and the communists are not so worried about being attacked by the nationalists, but they are of course worried about being attacked by the Japanese, and again Yanan is also defensible against Japan as it was against the nationalists. A really political hot potato with historians about what did Mao and the communists do, and some even putting sort of percentage numbers on what Mao was trying to do, how much was he putting into expanding his influence, how much was he doing to fight the nationalists, how much was he doing to actually resist the Japanese and protect the people? What is your view on this? I think the view that either the communists did absolutely nothing to sort of lurk behind the front lines, or the view that you get in the People's Republic today, which is really the communists were almost entirely in charge of the whole resistance effort, both of these take it too far. Instead what we need to look at is what the communists were actually doing. Now first of all, in defense of the idea that the nationalists are bearing the brunt of the battles, I think that is entirely defensible. When we talk about battles and the kind of sense in which we understand them in World War II in China, Taira Dwarong, Shanghai, Changshan, Huoyang, these are not names that necessarily well known in the West, but they're big set-piece battles. Those are all fought by the nationalists. The only one that is a major battle, significantly leveried by the communists by Punggau Huai, one of the great generals, is the 1940-hundred Regiments campaign. But what the communists do is to develop a form of warfare that becomes so influential that it's used by guerrilla movements throughout the whole Cold War, and that's guerrilla warfare. They don't invent it. The nationalists have their own former guerrilla warfare too, but it is the case that going out into the countryside and harassing the enemy so that they're off-balance the whole time is something the communists are very, very good at. When the enemy advances, we retreat. When the enemy retreats, we attack. This is the idea that you have to keep them off-balance. The Vietnamese, the Viet Cong do this against the French and the Americans. But you avoid set-piece battles. You avoid set-piece battles. The Redision Bush war in Africa. So Mao's advice at this time. Again, he's still not the dominant leader. He's very important. He does a lot of military strategy, but there are other people involved as well. Punggau Huai mentioned, who, because very important after 1949, Drude and others, are thinking about how they can best strategize. This is perfectly reasonable. Why? First of all, because the parts of China, whether communists are based, are mostly rural. They have very, very rough terrain. Guerrilla warfare is the most sensible sort of way of harassing the enemy. Remember the term guerrilla, which will get ia, which is Spanish, comes to the peninsula war, where again you have exactly that sort of idea that the best way to harass the Napoleonic, the Harassan Napoleonic armies, is to use that kind of tactic as well. Secondly, all sides, and this is true of the nationalists, with their set-piece battles, and the communists with their guerrilla warfare, know that neither side is going to win against the Japanese without the third factor, which is a big foreign power coming in to sort it out. It could be the Soviet Union. Even Shanghai Shirt would have been happy with that in terms of defeating the Japanese. He'd lived with that. Actually, it wasn't the Soviet Union. It turned out to be the United States, but without the US, you don't get that final decisive factor that makes the argument about set-piece battles versus guerrilla battles, more moot. But, Rana, bearing in mind that there is still this argument about how much the communists actually did, how much they engaged the Japanese and at what scale, and bearing in mind everything that you've said about guerrilla warfare. Certainly, the people seem to be thinking the communist party is a good thing, because you see an explosion of party membership at this time. I think it's just from 40,000 members in 1937 to 1.2 million by 1945. That's quite something. Although I'm getting Chairman Mao soon to be Chairman Mao, Mao is not satisfied with that. He will want more and more influence. Total ideological conformity is what he would like. Yes, that's absolutely right, Anita. I think the tide turns in 1940, without going into huge detail, that's the moment at which effect, or 1941, let's say, that's the moment I think, which effectively, the second United Front, the Nationalists and the Communist Works, together against Japanese, really begins to break down. Basically, there's something called the New Fourth Army incident where both sides accuse the other one of attacking each other, and it creates a huge kind of rift between the two sides. It's also the case that in Yanan, Mao and the other communists are now much more isolated from the rest of China, both from the Nationalists and for the Japanese. That becomes significant in terms of Mao's rise, because many, many people over time were flocking to Yanan to join the communist movement there. It's seen as a nationalist resistance movement against the Japanese. Many more people also are being included in what the communist term, their liberated areas, in other words, areas under the control. There's a lot of things happening to try and embed that. There's new forms of local government, new council set up, which have some communist members and non-communist members to try and bring in people who are not part of that particular movement. Mao writes a very influential essay called On New Democracy, published in 1940, in which he talks about the need to bring in people who aren't necessarily core to the communist movement. So, the idea is both you boost party membership, but you also bring in other people who are inclined towards it to grow the size of the movement. But that isn't enough. When you ask this sort of the key question, we're asking it all through the podcast episodes, when does Mao become Mao? In other words, the kind of supreme leader who Brooks Snow argument. I think this is the moment. And it comes during a set of political campaigns that are still remembered. Xi Jinping has named check them and he's named check them positively. So it tells you something about how they're regarded. Zhong Feng, the rectification movements, even that name has quite a sort of style in this field to it. It's about ideological conformity. It's taking people who want to join the communist party and putting them through an education program that means that they will see the communist revolution in the right way, which means Mao's way. How is Mao in a position to do this? Well, first of all, a little bit earlier, he's managed to sort of purge, not violently actually in this case, but just in terms of little control, get rid of the other major faction, led by Mao Nian Wang Ming, who had been in Moscow in a way that there was some Kudos attached to Kudos attached to Wang Ming because he had actually seen the Soviet Union up close and Mao, of course, had never been overseas in his life. But essentially, Mao and his faction do manage to sideline Wang Ming and what became, and as the return to Bolshevik students' faction. So he's rising already at that point. But then he also does something. Again, this speaks to one of the reasons why Mao as an ideologue was and became so important and powerful. He wrote a lot. Mao as an auto-diad, we talked about in the first episode. He read a lot and he brought it together in some very, very creative ways in terms of creating that sort of ideological conformity. So basically, if you were going to be in the party at that point, you would go through a process in which you had to, you know, not quite memorize, but certainly know very, very closely, 22 key texts. And all those 22 texts, 18, were by Mao. So that was an indication of who's thinking was on top and who's was not. It's just all well, you know, the big brother, this is what big brother says, this is what you must learn, this is what you must par it. I mean, it's exactly that. It's all well in another way because we now have a lot of records of what happens with party members who, you know, don't, I mean, I'm not talking here about kind of ideological deviants. I'll talk people who maybe don't kind of get what's in in the text. They get put into a sort of circle, at least in this one tactic, they get put in a circle. Nobody touches them, not necessarily at this point. They don't get beaten up or hit. But these people are surrounding them for hours and hours and hours, you know, you're wrong. We need to help you. I mean, they're cults work in this way. And, you know, people come out of them. There's things that maybe the problem is that you're a spy for the Japanese. Is that the issue? Have you been kind of supposed to let, no, I haven't even seen a Japanese person. And it keeps going, I remember there's one letter from the wife, a very prominent communist official who actually writes in, it's either a letter or a diary. I almost wish I was a Japanese spy so I could tell the party that I was and confess, but I'm not, you know, this is really high pressure psychological tactics. So that high pressure psychological tactics, the use of mouse writings as the kind of core canon of what's being learned. And the sweet charming attention to a man named Kangsheng, the barrier or Yezhov, he learned from, you know, the worst, I was going to say from the best, but actually it's from the worst. He's the kind of barrier of the Chinese, yeah. He had been to Moscow, he'd learned directly from the KGB actually, in those days, it was the checker, I guess, or the augpu, sorry, the augpu at that stage, becomes the KGB later on and brings those terror tactics to Yenan. He literally, and you know, this is the symbolism is extraordinary. Mao would write around at times on a white horse, Kangsheng dressed all in levels, you know, think of that, writes around a black horse. How about that? So, you know, there's a lot to basically, you know, shape people's thinking in Yenan, it's time during rectification. So before we kind of close this period of the war, is it fair to say that the nationalists are doing all basically all of the fighting of the Japanese defending the homeland? Well, Mao is busy as certain personal control and crushing dissent. That's the rar, isn't it, Rana? I mean, that's what people, I mean, you know, you know, there's still arguments. Well, the arguments amongst historians are not really about that. So I think most people who actually look at the historical detail will say that the argument is about to what proportion should you attribute the military tactics of the nationalists, the guerrilla tactics of the communists, the importance I mentioned before, of the American intervention, lend lease, air cover, just saying it was yes or no, isn't really the way in which historians I think analyzed these, these questions. Without the very sustained nationalist war effort, certainly the first three or four or five years of the war, China would have collapsed, and then it would have been a Japanese colony, and the history of the world would be different. Communist guerrilla warfare was immensely effective in keeping the Japanese on the backfoot in large parts of central China. They never really conquered those parts, and that was in large part because in those areas of communist guerrilla control. But neither communist nor the nationalists could have outright won against Japan without foreign military assistance. I say there's two events that basically hasten the end of the war. One is the atomic bombings. The other of course is the final entry of the Soviets into the war in Asia. After a short period, you know, may the war in Europe is finally done, Hitler is dead, you know, the Europe is finally liberated. And then Stalin, you know, ticks the box on his promise that he would turn to Asia once Europe had been completed, and he sends the troops, the tanks across the border into Manchuria. And that Soviet intervention, along with the atomic bombings, come together to create a crisis point for the Japanese Empire, which you know has to ultimately surrender. And that Soviet intervention in Manchuria largely has the blessing of the Americans. I mean, we did this in the Yalta conference season that we did, that you know, they were meeting behind closed doors, not even allowing Churchill in to hear this. But this was a quid pro quo. You help us when we need it. And what we'll do is we'll just turn a blind eye to our ally, Chiang Kai-shek, and all the things we promised him, and you can just take what you need. And they do. And that's what happens. Yeah, I think that's pretty much the case. I mean, Chiang Kai-shek also, of course, was not invited to any of the Le Potzdown and other meetings, which involved the future Asia being decided. You know, he was, yeah, pretty cheesed off by the fact that he was excluded from the room. But nonetheless, the war ends, and it ends in Asia much more suddenly than anyone would have realized, and suddenly we're in the post-war world for China, and Mao, Zhang, and others have to make their next move. So then in 1949, a couple years later, the nationalist government begins to implode from within. Yes, essentially, 1949 is the end game for the nationalist government on the mainland. In the years intervening 1945 to 1949, a lot had happened. There were attempts to try and negotiate a coalition government between the nationalists and the communists, and which Mao, by now the undisputed leader of the party, goes to six weeks of negotiations with Chiang Kai-shek and the city of Chongqing. That was the last time they ever met, in fact, that set of meetings. Even with the help of General George Marshall, the great American state-span and soldier who was sent in for a year in 1946 to try and sort out the dispute between the two, it didn't work out, and China descended into civil war by mid-1946. And essentially, the tide turned fairly quickly against the nationalist, a combination of economic crisis, morale beginning to fall apart, and essentially just better military tactics in the end on the part of the communists who are ruthless. They get military assistance from the Soviets after a period, and they also manage a very clever tactic of consolidating in the northeast in Manchuria and then striking into China across the Great Wall into the northern part of the country. And then finally, as the nationalist armies begin to collapse at various points across the map, you get the final conquest of the south. And Mao, once again, is crucial to that, I just mentioned one campaign, now, in 1947, the Dhabi-Ashang campaign, where he basically does a very daring thrust with troops into the center of China. If that had failed, actually the communist war effort might have been put back, you know, on the back foot very, very significantly. But Mao was always a risk-taker. And in this case, he decided I'll do this sort of very big bold move, see if we can really steal a march on the nationalist. It worked. And that was one of the turning points on which the ultimate military victory of the communists rested. So the nationalists are kind of smashed to pieces. What happens next is that in 49, the nationalist decide, right, we've got to get out of here. And you have Chang-Ka-Sheng, you know, going to pay his respects to his mother's tomb and then pegging it with the whole sort of senior cadre of the nationalist movement. And half the national music? Also, well, I mean, you know, all these works of art, the aviation, you know, aviation fleet. The gold, don't forget the gold, and back up to it's name China. 110 tons of gold. And they head, now this is important. They go to Taiwan with all of this booty and their freedom. Now, is that the point at which, you know, so to Taiwan becomes this, as it's been described to me, this weeping saw in the Chinese psyche? The moment to which Taiwan becomes essentially a problem that is very, very hard to resolve leading up to present day is probably not 1949 when Chang-Ka-Sheng leaves the mainland, but about a year or so later when the Korean War breaks out. Because up to that point, our sense is that the American government at the time, the administration of Harry Truman was so dissolutioned, angry with the nationalists that if Mao had tried to conquer Taiwan, I don't know that they would have stepped in actually to save Chang. But once things flip in some in 1950 to the Korean War where the North Koreans, the Chinese with Stalin's assistance, are driving into trying to capture the south of Korea, which was supposed to be divided under a UN mandate. This then turns Taiwan from being this kind of renegade state of losers who've run away to being a Cold War bullwark, which the United States has to protect. And as a result, Chang-Ka-Sheng gets, you know, a whole bunch of protection over the next few years for Taiwan, which then means that it becomes much, much more difficult for the mainland to actually recapture the island. And after about 9058, they really don't try through most of the rest of Mao's period in power. But in a single decade, runner, the communists have come from very much on the back foot, with losing 90% of their troops and their members, ending up in the back end of China with Ha-Soh living in caves, to being masters of this huge area of the earth. And having seen off, Chang-Ka-Sheng, I mean, a completely unimaginable turnaround in a very short period of time. How much of that is Mao's own doing? You're right that, you know, it's an extraordinary trajectory in a short time. 9035, they're at the end of the long march on the run. In 1949, they're in control of the entire country, you know, 14 years is long, but it's not that long for such a transformation. Mao is very crucial to that rise to the top, but he was not its only author, you might say. Amongst the people who came along, so you could see that Mao has his hand in his mind in each of the factors that leads to the ultimate revolution, but he's not the only other actor. So when it comes to ideology, he writes some of these essays, things like on New Democracy, that think about how the communists are going to bring in other groups to work with them. But it does that alongside Lushachee, Chambordan, other people who are very involved in the ideological world. On the military front, you know, as I mentioned before, he undertakes some kind of very kind of nifty moves on the military front that, you know, show his combination of calculus and risk-taking. But you also don't get the military victory without the other great generals of the communist movement, Lin Biao, Pung Dhe Huai, Liohua Chiang, who becomes actually the father of the Chinese Navy after after 1940-49, or beyond that, in kind of economic terms. It's not very clear, I mean Mao doesn't understand anything very much about, you know, economic Soviet or otherwise. And so figures like Lushachee have to be around to try and actually explain how the country is going to run its economy, of course, under huge advice from the Soviet Union at that point. So all the things that go up to make a regime that's, you know, as it turns out, is pretty long-lasting. Have Mao in their DNA somewhere, but he's never the only person who is actually responsible for that particular aspect. Rana, we're going to pick up this story in the next episode. There's just so much to talk about. Thank you again. It's wonderful history. It's so exciting. Such a phenomenal story. And the speed it which this happens. If you want to hear the next episode right now, just join Empire Club at empipodduk.com. That's empipodduk.com. Cheap at the price of a point, a month, or a very posh coffee, and you get an early access to ad free shows, weekly newsletter, and you get a book discount on Rana's excellent books. So do join the club. Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anisa Arden. Goodbye from me, William Duriple.