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

Summary

Empire: World History

Episode 340: Chairman Mao: World War II, Japanese Invasion, & Massacre in Nanjing (Ep 3)
Release Date: March 10, 2026
Hosts: William Dalrymple & Anita Anand
Guest: Professor Rana Mitter (Harvard Kennedy School)

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Episode Overview

In this third installment of their Mao Zedong series, William Dalrymple and Anita Anand, alongside eminent China historian Rana Mitter, trace the Chinese Communist Party's journey from the bleak aftermath of the Long March to its triumph in 1949. The episode examines the CCP’s consolidation under Mao, the brutal Japanese invasion, the horrors of the Nanjing Massacre, the dynamics of World War II in East Asia, and the ultimate civil war between Nationalists and Communists. The hosts critically discuss myths and realities about this transformative period, highlighting both atrocity and political maneuvering.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Aftermath of the Long March & CCP Survival

[03:32–08:22]

• The Long March (1934–35) devastated the Communist ranks, with only 10% surviving, contradicting the common heroic narrative. Mao, initially junior, emerged as the main winner, ascending within the Party.
• Mitter: “The Long March ... was a retreat, one that was forced upon the Communists ... The final 10% of the troops who set out ... finally get to Shanxi Province ... and then move on in due course to Yenan, the place which becomes almost kind of legendary. ... Mao becomes ... the Mao that we think of today.” [03:55]

Life in Yan’an: Strategy and Hardship

[08:22–15:11]

• Refugees clustered in Yan’an, living in cave dwellings (“yaodong”) and enduring primitive conditions. Cave life, though grim, offered strategic protection.
• Gender imbalance was stark (“8 to 1” men to women), leading to systemic sexual harassment and intense pressure on women, with hierarchy dictating rations and privilege.
• Memorable quote: “Yanan was really not a sexy town.” – Woman’s memoir, recounted by Mitter [12:01]
• Dingling, a leading feminist writer, critiqued the Party’s failure to address women’s issues [15:41].
• Soviet influence was present but did not override Chinese autonomy; radio links were crucial, and geography provided insulation from both Nationalists and invaders [13:27].

2. Nationalist Policies & Looming War with Japan

[16:33–19:56]

• Chiang Kai-Shek saw the Communists as a “disease of the heart,” more dangerous than Japanese occupation (“a disease of the skin”).
• Began the “New Life Movement”—a confusing mix of Confucian, Methodist, and fascist ideals aimed at national moral reform.
• “Do not urinate other than in a toilet” – an official precept, revealing the micromanagement and anxieties of the time. [18:30]
• Meanwhile, Chiang covertly prepared for the Japanese onslaught by moving the capital inland.

3. Outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War

[19:56–23:29]

• The “Marco Polo Bridge Incident” in July 1937 marks the true start of WWII in Asia, with a trivial scuffle providing Japan the pretext to invade.
• Mitter pushes back on Eurocentric narratives: “Benighted souls may say that World War II began in Poland ... No, it begins on the 7th of July 1937 just outside Beijing.” [20:03]

4. Japanese Imperialism vs Chinese Nationalism

[23:29–26:33]

• The clash is rooted in incompatible ideologies—Japanese imperial ambitions versus Chinese national self-determination.
• Japanese justified aggression as a civilizing mission, echoing Western colonial rhetoric: “You don’t understand how lucky you are to have us to be mentors to you.” [24:51]

5. The Rape of Nanjing – Description and Impact

[27:06–34:07]

• The fall of Nanjing (Dec 1937) led to an orgy of violence: murder, rape, and pillage by Japanese soldiers. Civilian women (possibly 20,000) targeted for mass sexual violence.
• Eyewitness records from foreign observers like Minnie Vautrin, John McGee, and even German Nazi John Rabe were crucial in documenting the horror.
  • “He [John Rabe] wrote to Hitler to get him to contact the Japanese to stop it. ... All of these witnesses stand ... to the absolute horror that took place at that time.” [31:40]
• The massacre continues to haunt Sino-Japanese relations.
  • “This still haunts Sino-Japanese relations to this day, doesn’t it?” – Anand [30:38]
  • “There’s never been agreed ground between China and Japan about it.” – Mitter [30:38]
• Japanese leftwing journalists brought attention to the massacre in the 1970s, showing ongoing internal debate in Japan.

6. Wartime China: Three Authorities and Mao’s Position

[34:07–36:38]

• By 1938–45, China split into three: Japanese-occupied east, Nationalist-controlled southwest, Communist northwest.
• The Nationalists bore the brunt of set-piece battles; Communists pioneered guerrilla warfare, a tactic later emulated worldwide.
  • “When the enemy advances, we retreat. When the enemy retreats, we attack.” [37:46]

7. Communist Growth & The Rectification Movement

[39:38–45:44]

• CCP membership skyrocketed, from 40,000 (1937) to 1.2 million by 1945—a key indicator of their growing appeal and power.
• Mao consolidates party control through “rectification,” building ideological conformity around his texts (18 of 22 prescribed readings).
  • “If you were going to be in the Party at that point, ... you had to ... know very, very closely 22 key texts. And of those 22 texts, 18 were by Mao.” [42:53]
• Psychological pressure was the norm: group sessions, confessions, and suspicion of spies, laying the groundwork for later totalitarianism.
  • “It’s just Orwell ... this is what Big Brother says. This is what you must learn, this is what you must parrot.” – Anand [43:48]
  • “I almost wish I was a Japanese spy so I could tell the Party that I was and confess. But I’m not.” – Mitter, quoting a Communist’s wife [44:03]
• Mao’s enforcer, Kang Sheng, introduced Soviet-style secret police and intimidation to party life—“Mao would ride around at times on a white horse. Kangsheng, dressed all in leathers ... rides around on a black horse. How about that?” [45:09]

8. War’s End and the Civil War Escalates

[46:00–50:37]

• With American and Soviet intervention—the atomic bomb and Soviet invasion in Manchuria—Japan collapses.
• The Nationalists, weakened by war and beset by internal crises, lose ground fast when full civil war resumes (1946–49). Mao and his generals deploy bold offensives to seize the country.
  • “1947, the Dabiishan Campaign ... if that had failed, the Communist war effort might have been put back ... Mao was always a risk taker ... It worked and that was one of the turning points.” [49:10]

9. The Nationalist Exodus and the Taiwan Question

[50:37–53:05]

• As defeat looms, Chiang Kai-Shek flees with the gold reserves, the Nationalist elite, and much of China’s art to Taiwan.
  • “110 tons of gold and they head ... to Taiwan with all this booty and their freedom.” [51:04]
• The U.S. shift in Cold War geopolitics (post–Korean War) cements the Taiwan issue, as American protection prevents PRC invasion.

10. Mao’s Role in the Communist Triumph

[53:05–54:48]

• Dalrymple and Mitter stress that while Mao was central—an ideologue, strategist, and risk-taking leader—the victory was shared with influential Communist generals, political minds, and Soviet advisors.
  • “Mao is very crucial to that rise to the top, but he was not its only author ... he does that alongside Liu Shaqi, Chen Bouda and other people ... all the things that go up to make a regime that ... is pretty long lasting have Mao in their DNA somewhere, but he’s never the only person ... responsible.” – Mitter [53:05]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Long March’s Reality:
  “It was a retreat ... pretty bedraggled ... they couldn’t see the future. They couldn’t see how it was gonna work out.” – Mitter [03:55]
• Life in Yan’an:
  “It's a sort of Marxist Flintstones.” – Dalrymple [09:20]
• On Communist Gender Politics:
  “Yanan was really not a sexy town.” – Quoted by Mitter [12:01]
• Chiang’s Dilemma:
  “The Japanese are a disease of the skin. The Communists are a disease of the heart.” – Quoted by Mitter [16:54]
• Japanese Ideology:
  “You don’t understand how lucky you are to have us to be mentors to you ... If we have to use violence and coercion ... so be it.” – Mitter imitating Japanese justification [25:00]
• The Reality of the Nanjing Atrocity:
  “Fuhrer, you must stop them.” – John Rabe, Nazi manager, writing to Hitler about Japanese atrocities [31:33]
• On Party Loyalty in Yan’an:
  “If you were going to be in the Party ... you had to ... know 22 key texts ... 18 were by Mao.” – Mitter [42:53]
• Totalitarian Tactics:
  “It's just Orwell ... this is what Big Brother says.” – Anand [43:48]

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• Long March recap and Mao’s ascendancy: [03:32–08:22]
• Life in Yan’an: [08:22–15:11]
• Nationalist response & New Life Movement: [16:33–19:56]
• Japanese invasion & Marco Polo Bridge Incident: [19:56–23:29]
• Imperial ideology clash (Japan vs China): [23:29–26:33]
• Rape of Nanjing: [27:06–34:07]
• Map of wartime China & resistance tactics: [34:07–39:38]
• Communist growth & rectification campaigns: [39:38–45:44]
• Final years of the war, Civil War, and CCP victory: [46:00–54:48]

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Flow, Tone & Closing

Throughout the episode, Dalrymple and Anand’s tone is probing, occasionally wry, but deeply respectful of their guest’s scholarship and the tragic magnitude of the subject. They balance analytical history with wit and empathy, bringing clarity to complex events. The episode dispels myths, foregrounds marginalized voices (notably women), and links these twentieth-century struggles to ongoing geopolitical issues (especially regarding Taiwan).

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For Next Time

The story continues with Mao in power—his imposition of ideological control, the transformation of Chinese society, and the path toward later convulsions like the Cultural Revolution. Rana Mitter promises more insight into the Party-state’s consolidation and legacy.

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Transcript

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[A]

In this episode of Empire, the long march is over, and Mao Zedong is now the rising star of the Communist Party. But the battle for control of China has only just begun.

[B]

So this is a story of brutal occupation, untold atrocities, and a very bitter civil war.

[A]

Join us as we explain how the survivors of 1935 are transformed into the conquerors of 1949.

[B]

Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand.

[A]

And me, William Durimple.

[B]

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 Ally really transformed everybody's understanding of China's role in World War II. So, I mean, we're so happy that you deign to come back and speak to us and not too traumatized from the last two times, but put off

[A]

by the first two episodes.

[B]

Yeah, I know. Because it can happen. We're a lot Rano.

[C]

You couldn't have kept me away. I think it was more me kind of crawling back and begging to be allowed back into the Empire mothership. I should also add for listeners who are watching as well 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.

[A]

That's how it is at Harvard these days. Exactly.

[C]

We've been interested in interplanetary relations at Harvard for a very long time. That's how we communicate with Yale.

[A]

Rana, before we dive into the meat 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 and present it as a catastrophe and a kind of last chance survival mechanism.

[C]

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 Communists because they were essentially being encircled by their nationalist rivals. So 1935 is the perhaps not quite raggle taggle, but certainly pretty bedraggled. Final 10% of the troops who set out at the beginning of the Long March and a year earlier, they finally get to in Shanxi Province and then move on in due course to Yenan, the place which becomes almost kind of legendary. I mean, today it's the site of what in China they call red tourism, where you go and pay your respects to sites in the Communist revolution. And Yenan is essentially where Mao becomes over the years and over time, the Mao that we think of today, this kind of all powerful ruler.

[A]

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, 2/3, 4/5 didn't make it?

[C]

90%? I think actually it's really a very, very high level of drop off.

[A]

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 suddenly rising to power by the end of it, which is Mao himself.

[C]

That's right. So one of the things that we keep a sort of a tracker were is how the Long March changes the fate of Mao. If you look at the official version that's promulgated even promulgated even today in China, they point to an event that happens a few months into the march, which is the Xunyi Conference, which is where supposedly Mao has. You even get kind of oil paintings done of it as a sort of showdown moment where Mao's standing up almost and waving their finger and telling the CCP leaders where they'd 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 Comintern agent, sort of lurking at the back, looking kind of, you know, dark faced at the time in quite, quite that way. But it is a 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.

[A]

And just to set the background to that, for those that are not aware, classic Marxist theory says it's the urban proletariat that do the revolution. It's steel workers, coal miners and that sort of stuff. But in China it's clearly the peasants who are leading the vanguard of the revolution.

[C]

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 proletariat. 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 Nationalists turning on their former Communist partners and killing many of them. So the countryside became, you know, almost the only option. That, and then even that wasn't much of an option because the parts of the countryside in Jiangxi Province where the other Communist faction was based basically alienated themselves from the locals and started kind of, you know, committing a bloodbath on each other in factional battles. So by the time they all have to flee the Nationalists and get up to Shanxi Province, they're in a pretty, pretty, as I say, kind of, you know, frazzled state one way or another. And you have to sit there in 1935 in Yan' an and regroup and rethink. You know, is there any chance that we can succeed? What are we gonna do? Who's gonna 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, Wu Jia Mu, Liu Shaqi must have looked pretty bleak. I mean, you know, they couldn't see the future. They couldn't see how it was gonna work out.

[A]

They didn't know this was the great masterstroke. This just felt they'd lost 90% of their number.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. You know, they're at this very, very hardscrabble part of China. It has a kind that's known as loess L O E S S, which is sort of. Sometimes 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 the most 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 on earth are they going to do next?

[A]

So, Rana, give us a description of the way people are living in Shaanxi. I mean, some are even sort of troglodytes living in ca. Is this right?

[C]

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 two and a half thousand years to 1930s rural China, he'd have 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 term, I think, Yaldong, you know, cave dwellings. And, yes, you know, 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.

[A]

It's a sort of Marxist Flintstones. Is that right, or.

[C]

Yes. Not a bad way to think about it in some ways. Yes, exactly. A piece certainly ran 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 everyday life there.

[B]

I mean, it sounds awful. It just sounds awful, actually.

[A]

Frankly, it's not an upgrade, though.

[B]

No, I mean, it must have been strategically useful because, I mean, otherwise why establish yourself there or why have a base there?

[C]

Let me give a bit more 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 to some extent, stumbled on it. But it wasn't a completely blank territory because in fact, there had been a small Communist encampment in the area. And essentially it was then kind of built up with the arrival of these marchers, the long marchers who had come from the south. So they were building on what was there already. It also provided the capacity for certain things that would turn 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 advantages. 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 year you're talking about. You could talk about it being like an 8 to 1 proportion of men to women. This meant that elite men, in particular Communist Party leaders, could essentially, they wanted to get married, they wanted to have relationships, and there was 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 husbands or it didn't always work out well. Apparently someone who was brought in to, you know, be betrothed to Lin Biao, who would go on to become China's foreign minister and was a kind of paranoid photophobe, he hated the light, quite like a vampire.

[A]

The caves were perfect for him.

[C]

Well, they were perfect for him. Not so perfect for his intended bride,

[B]

who kind of ran in. Are you sort of suggesting that they were kind of carried off a little bit against their will sometimes, or fair

[C]

enough, no, it's more complex than that. And it comes when we'll talk in the next episode about something called the 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 Biao kind of apparently was seen shortly afterwards running at high speed out of the cave shouting, I won't do it, I won't do it. So she obviously wasn't enchanted. But others, you know, did find themselves, it was said actually for a lot of older Communist men that they loved Yenan 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 a Chinese book about the time, which I translated for one of my books for Forgotten Ally, which is my book on World War II in China, where one of the memories of a woman who had lived there for a long time, she just said very dryly, yan' an was really not a sexy town. And I think that summed it up for many.

[B]

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 means that you might be able to get support should you need it and should the Soviets feel like giving it to you.

[C]

Yes, I mean, China's border areas, this is true. The northwest as well, were pretty porous in their borders with the Soviet Union. Although, though officially speaking, Stalin had diplomatic relations with Chiang Kai Shek's Nationalist government, there's now plenty of evidence that there's support in, you know, arms and advice and so forth going to the Communists. We also know now that actually they were always in touch the Soviets and the Chinese Communists by radio. Radio transmitters were really important in terms of keeping up links, orders and suggestions. But having said that, it's not as simple as some people, I will say some people have said this meant the Soviets were controlling what the Communists 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 Communists, you know, in this very hardscrabble 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 their sorts of decisions. So there was autonomy too, in many decisions for the Chinese Communists, but there was no doubt that Moscow's influence was real, continued and significant. And yes, being relatively close to the Soviet border, not bang next door, but not too far away, was certainly important in that way.

[A]

And, Rana, you make the point that things were very hierarchical, that not only were 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.

[C]

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 on to other members of the. Of the family. There were allowances made, pregnant women, for instance, such as, you know, those who were there.

[B]

Well, that's nice of him.

[C]

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, Dingling, who we mentioned briefly in a previous episode. But yes, you know, she wrote very explicitly about, you know, the female sexual feelings in a way that, you know, nobody had really done in that way before. By the 19, by this period, she's in Yenan. She's absolutely there. She has this hugely harrowing revolutionary life in which her husband, Hu Yepin, is communist also, who is shot by the Nationalists. She is imprisoned, but not shot, escapes, makes her way to Yan'. An. So she's made many sacrifices, and yet by 1943, it's a bit ahead of where we're going. She's really complaining to Mao that actually the Chinese revolution is not taking account of feminist concerns. So that is a running thread from the moment they arrive in 1935.

[B]

So during all this time, what is Chiang Kai? 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 Communists. So what is he doing?

[C]

Sure. Well, let me cover a little bit to Chiang Kai Shek's defense at this moment. Not a sentence ever thought I'd hear myself saying. First of all, just to be clear, because it'll come up. Chiang Kai Shek was definitely not ignoring the Japanese threat. What he was trying to work out was how far. A bit like Neville Chamberlain in Britain, how far do you go for rearmament? Discreetly or not so discreetly, while appeasing, knowing that there will be a conflict at some point, but maybe not right now. And you know, the appeasement debate in the Western world goes on even today. There's a similar one in China, just to give one example. He was already planning by this. You're asking what Chiang Kai 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 at Chongqing, just in case there's a Japanese invasion which takes the Eastern seaboard. And you know, in due course 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 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 dise of the skin. The Communists are a disease of the heart. And that meant that it was much more fundamental. What else is he doing? Also in 1934-35, at the time of the Long March, Chiang Kai Shek launches an alternative ideological movement that's supposed to push back against Communism. It's called the New Life Movement, Xin Shang. If it has a slightly sort of Christian phrasing to it, that's not accidental.

[A]

He was married to a Methodist.

[B]

Methodist.

[C]

He was a Methodist himself. He basically it turned to as a Confucian Methodist. If you read 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 tinge to what he's. 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. You know, it's got some fascist influences too. You're supposed to stand up straight. One of my favorite precepts within it is saying because you only, you only give people a hard time about stuff that you know they're going to do. So one of the precepts the New Life movement is, 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.

[B]

You've just reminded me of the most hilarious 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 you did your sort of, may I say, mealy mouthed defense of chunkal. She tried, which is great. But actually 1937 shows that he has taken his eye off the ball and 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 war begin?

[C]

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.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Benighted souls 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. No, it begins on the 7th of July 1937 just outside Beijing.

[A]

There's that rather good Second World War in color that also takes this view and begins in 1937 with this.

[C]

I'd also recommend, available on YouTube and other streaming services, China's Forgotten War, which is exactly about this particular period.

[A]

Who did China's Forgotten War? Rana Mitter.

[C]

Modesty forbids.

[B]

He looked a lot like you, Rana.

[C]

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 listeners may be perhaps more familiar with, is not to think of it actually like what we think of as traditional start of World War II in Poland that is a provocation by Nazi Germany, which basically triggers off a war that the British, the French, the Germans kind of know is coming. This is more like World War I. In that if the Archduke hadn't been shot, if he'd taken another turning in Sarajevo that day, maybe something would have set 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 involves shooting, but weirdly enough, shooting in 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 Wanping, a little village which is right next to a bridge, which is recorded actually in the Travels of Marco Polo.

[A]

So he talks very positively about this bridge.

[C]

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 a lot 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 escalates. 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, sir, Japanese soldiers were not kidnapped or murdered. They popped off for a peek and they realised they'd missed roll call and they were kind of skulking because they couldn't go back and they're going to get punished by their commandant. But by the time they managed to sneak back, presumably the next morning into barracks, having emptied their bladders, the Second

[A]

World War had broken out.

[C]

Yeah, the Second World War had broken out. So this is the Eurodaceous beginning of global conflict. The thing is, by that stage, and this is again the Sarajevo point, what was almost a 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. Chiang Kai Shek is then in his cabinet thinking, right, what do we do? And he holds this Cabinet meeting. He considers at some length what to do. Should we go now? Do we appease a bit more and finally says, no, no, this is the moment for decide and we're gonna 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.

[A]

Rana, what is the Japanese narrative? That they're just expanding an empire? Or do they have some sort of quasi historical claim on sort of seizing China? What would they have done to justify their aggression in Nanjing?

[C]

They've got a huge great case that they'd make. Essentially, I would summarize in one sentence the kind of clash that leads to this over the previous 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 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, bearing my, you know, this is the 1930s, rising ever

[A]

since the, the Russo Japanese war in what, 1895?

[C]

Yeah, but you know, if only I had two kind of long standing experts in the British Empire here. But you know, am I right in thinking that the 1930s is pretty much a peak period for the amount of territory the Brits.

[A]

1921, some people say is the year that it reaches its okay, but you

[C]

know, 1935, it's still pretty, you know, 1931 is still pretty, pretty good going. 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 in answer to your question, what do they say? They say, look, why is it a problem that we want as a 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 bloc. 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 much of the rhetoric used towards China at 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 we've shown you. 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 are. Because we want to do it ourselves.

[B]

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.

[C]

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[B]

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[C]

New friends, Gary the Snake and your last name the Snake Dream team and new habitat. Zootopia has a secret reptile population. You can watch the record breaking phenomenon at home. Disney Zootopia 2. Streaming March 11th on Disney Plus. Rated PG. And right now you can get Disney plus and Hulu for just 4.99amonth for three months with a special limited time offer. Ends March 24th. After three months, Plan Auto renews at $12.99 a month term supply.

[B]

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.

[C]

I will, but I should actually warn by saying that this is genuine, very harrowing. So, you know, be aware that for the next minute or so, you know, it is. The detail is necessary, but it is also deeply disturbing. This was essentially the unprovoked murder and also, you know, 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 Chiang Kai Shek and his government had done some time before. The government was moved first. Well, the military headquarters moved first inland to Wuhan and then the kind of political capital and then ultimately military headquarters to Chongqing in the southwest of China remained until 1946. But Nanjing was obviously still there as a city. Chiang Kai Shek actually gave his commanding general there, Tang Shangzhi, orders that he should defend Nanjing to the death. Tang Sanzhi did not do this. He Basically slipped out onto the river of 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.

[A]

Were the Nationalists in any position to resist the Japanese? And was there, you know, was it a completely unequal struggle or could they have done more than they did?

[C]

I think in Nanjing they really could not have done. The point of Chiang Kai Shek's command was that they should make a brave stand to signal to the rest of the world that China would resist. Easy 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, 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 made by one of those groups of soldiers in Shanghai. So I think Chiang 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.

[A]

It was the capital.

[C]

Go to the capital.

[B]

Yeah, but I mean, 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 and we're talking about the rape, the horrific sexual degradation of Iran, some people say 20,000 women. And this, I mean, it's fair to say this still haunts Sino Japanese relations to this day, doesn't it? The way that the women were treated?

[C]

Yes, it does. The historical memory of this particular atrocity is still something that, that there's never been agreed ground between China and Japan about it. I think no observer in good faith denies that a horrific atrocity took place in the undefended 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 actually quite EAS through online archives and so forth, is that I hesitate to use the word fortunately about anything to do with this, but perhaps in big quirk months, fortunately, there were third party observers there, particularly American missionaries, educators, and they kept day to day diaries. A woman called Minnie Vautrin, who was a teacher at the Jinling 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 at the door demanding, you know, you know, to have young women was provided to them. Exactly. And you know, there is no reason, no reason whatsoever why someone like Minnie Vautrin would decide to kind of, you know, write this as fiction. And even if she had, which she did not, we have records from lots of other people. John McGee, a missionary, the most extraordinary one, and one who's perhaps come famous because of the irony in his own life, is a man called John Rabe, who was the head of the Siemens, the Siemens Electronics Company, the German electronics company in Nanjing, who was actually a member of the Nazi party, which of course 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 that he wrote to Hitler to get him to contact the Japanese to stop it. He said, you know, Fuhrer, you must stop them. Obviously Hitler wasn't going to do anything about it. But all of these witnesses stand, as you know, bear witness to the absolute horror that took place at that time. And I would say that there's, you know, one of the best and most in some ways kind of sophisticated and subtle cinematic portrayals of this is a great film by the Chinese director Lu Chuan, 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. It's done in black and white and it's done with brilliant, devastating subtlety. So much so that it was nearly banned in China. Films like that don't Gabriel, because 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 apology. It's a really complex question. It's not our subject because we still consider it to Mao. 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 wing Japanese journalists in the 1970s. People like Honda Katsuichi of the Asahi Shimon, 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. So the idea that this 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 to do about political identity, what does it mean to be Japanese Chinese? Would we ever do this sort of thing? Still roils the relationship between the two countries even today.

[A]

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 result? Resistance to the Japanese.

[C]

That's right. So you know, the rape of Nanking, the neighborhood 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 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. Three at this point, not three neat parts, they're not like Caesar dividing Gaul 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 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 Chiang Kai Shek government, who moved their capital to Chongqing and defended actually in the end until 1945. And then in various parts of the country, including the northwest, in Yenan, 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 Yenan, 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, eventually, after a whole bunch of negotiations, good faith, bad faith, skulduggery, 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 Yenan, 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, Yan' an is also defensible against Japan, Japan as it was against the Nationalists.

[B]

I mean, the thing is, this is a really, it's a political hot potato with historians about, you know, what did Mao and the Communists do? And some even putting sort of percentage numbers on what Mao was trying to do. You know, 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? I mean, what is your view on, on this?

[C]

I think the view that either the Communists did absolutely nothing, just 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 defence of the idea that the Nationalists are bearing the brunt of the battles. I think that is entirely defensible when we talk about battles in the kind of sense in which we understand them in World War II in China. Taizhuang, Shanghai, Changsha, Hengyang, these are not names that are 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 led by the Communists by Peng Dehuai, one of the great Generals, is the 19400 regiments can 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 form of 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. And they talk about 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

[A]

you avoid set piece battles.

[C]

You avoid set piece battles. The Rhodesian Bush War in Africa. So Mao's advice at this time and 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. Peng De Huai, as I mentioned, who becomes very important after 1949. Zhu De and others are thinking about how they can can best strategize, and this is perfectly reasonable. Why? First of all, because the parts of China where the 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, or guerilla, which is Spanish, comes from Peninsular War, where again, you have exactly that sort of idea that the best way to harass the Napoleonic, harass the Napoleonic armies, is to use that kind of tactic as well. And secondly, all sides, and this is true, the Nationalists with their set peace 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 Chiang Kai Shek would have been happy with that. In terms of defeating the Japanese, he'd live 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, you know, more moot.

[B]

But Rana, you know, 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, and I think it's just sort of from 40,000 members in 1937 to 1.2 million by 1945. So, I mean, you know, that's quite something. Although I'm guessing Chairman Mao, not or soon to be Chairman Mao, Mao is not satisfied with that. I mean, he will want more and more influence. You know, total ideological conformity is what he would like.

[C]

Yes, that's absolutely right, Anita. So basically, I think the tide turns in 1940. Again, without going into huge details, that's the moment at which effect, or in 1941, let's say. That's the moment, I think, at which effectively, the Second United Front, the Nationalists and the Communists working together against the 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 Yenan Mao and the other Communists are now much more isolated from the rest of China, both from the Nationalists and from the Japanese. And that becomes significant in terms of Mao's rise because many, many people over time were flocking to Yenan to sort of join the communist movement there. It's seen as a nationalist resistance movement against the Japanese. Many more people also are being sort of included in what the Communists term their liberated areas, in other words, areas under their control. And there's a lot of things happening to try and embed that. There's new forms of local government, new councils 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, of the movement. But that isn't enough. When you ask sort of the key question we were asking it all through the, you know, the podcast episodes. When does Mao become Mao? In other words, the kind of supreme leader who brooks no other argument? I think this is the moment, and it comes during a set of political campaigns that are still remembered. Xi Jinping has name checked them, and he's name checked them positively. So it tells you something about how they're regarded. Zhengfeng, the rectification movements, even that name has quite a sort of Stalinist feel 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 political control, get rid of the other major faction, led by a man named Wang Ming, who had been in Moscow in a way that, you know, 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, eventually, Mao and his faction do manage to sideline Wang Ming and what became known as the returned 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 was an autodidact. We talked about that in the first episode. He read a lot. And he brought it together in some very, very creative ways in terms of. 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 not quite memorize, but certainly know very, very closely 22 key texts. And of those 22 texts, 18 were by Mao. So that was an indication of whose thinking was on top and whose was not.

[B]

It's just Orwell, you know, Big Brother, this is what Big Brother says. This is what you must learn, this is what you must parrot. I mean, it's exactly that.

[C]

It's all well in another way, because we now have 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'm talking people who maybe don't kind of get what's in. In the text. They get put into a sort of circle. At least this is 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, their cults work in this way and, you know, people come out of them, they things that. Maybe the problem is that you're a spy for the Japanese. Is that the issue? Have you been kind of subvers? Like, no, I haven't even seen a Japanese person. And he keeps going. I remember there's one letter from the wife of a very prominent Communist official who actually writes in her letter or her 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. That. High pressure psychological tactics, the use of Mao's writings as the kind of core canon of what's being learned, and the sweet, charming attentions of 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.

[A]

He's the kind of barrier of the. Of the Chinese.

[C]

Yeah, he'd been to Moscow. He'd learned directly from the kgb. Actually, in those days it was the Cheka, I guess, or the Ogpu, sorry, the Ogpu. At the that stage, he becomes the KGB later on. And brings those terror tactics to Yenan. He literally. And you know, this is. There's this. The symbolism is extraordinary. Mao would ride around at times on a white horse. Kangsheng, dressed all in leathers, you know, think of that. Rides around on a black horse. How about that? So, you know, there's a lot to basically, you know, shape people's thinking in Yenan at this time during rectification.

[A]

So before we. We kind of close this period of the war, is it fair to say that the Nationalists are doing basically all of the fighting of the Japanese defending the homeland, while Mao is busy asserting personal control and crushing dissent?

[B]

That's the row, isn't it, Rana? I mean, that's what people.

[C]

I mean, yeah, there's still arguments. Well, the arguments amongst historians are not really about that because 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 military historians, I think, analyze these questions. Without the very sustained Nationalist war effort, certainly the first four or five years of the war, China would collapsed, and then it would have been a Japanese colony, and the history of the world will be different. Communist guerrilla warfare was immensely effective in keeping the Japanese on the back foot 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 the Communists nor the Nationalists could have outright won against Japan without foreign military assistance. I see. 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 Soviet Soviets into the war in Asia. After a short period, May, the war in Europe is finally done. Hitler is dead, Europe is finally liberated, and then Stalin 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 intelligence intervention, along with the atomic bombings, come together to create a crisis point for the Japanese Empire which, you know, has to ultimately surrender.

[B]

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, you need and they do and that's what happens.

[C]

Yeah, I think that's pretty much the case. I mean, Chiang Kai Shek also of course was not invited to any of the Potsdam and other meetings which involved the future of Asia being decided. He was 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.

[A]

So then in 1949, a couple of years later, the Nationalist government begins to implode from within.

[C]

Yes, essentially 1949 is the end game for the Nationalist government on the mainland. In the years intervening 1945-49, a lot had happened. There were attempts to try and negotiate a coalition government between the Nationalists and the Communists in which Mao, by now the undisputed leader of the party, goes to six weeks of negotiations with Chiang Kai Shek in the city of Chongqing. That was the last time they ever met, in fact, at that set of meetings, even with the help of General George Marshall, the great American statesman 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 Nationalists. 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 kind of clever tactic of consolidating in the northeast in Manchuria, and then striking into China across the Great Wall, into the sort of the northern part of the country. And then finally as the Nationalist armies begin to collapse at various points across the map, you the final conquest of the south. And Mao once again is crucial to that. I just mentioned one campaign, 1947, the Dabiishan 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 on the back foot very, very significantly. But Mao was always a risk taker and in this case he decided, I'll do this on a very big bowl, bold move, see if we can really steal a march on the Nationalists. It worked and that was one of the turning points on which the ultimate military victory of the Communists rested.

[B]

So the Nationalists are kind of smashed to pieces. What happens next is that in 49, the nationalists decide, right, we gotta get out of here, and you have Chiang Kai Shek going to pay his respects to his mother's tomb and then pegging it with the whole sort of senior cadre of the Nationalist and half the National Museum also. Well, I mean, you know, all these works of art, the aviation, the, you

[C]

know, aviation fleet, the gold, don't forget the gold in the back of China.

[B]

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, sort of Taiwan becomes this, as it's been described to me, this weeping sore in the. In the Chinese sun, The moment at

[C]

which Taiwan becomes essentially a problem that is very, very hard to resolve. Leading up to the present day is probably not 1949, when Chiang Kai Shek 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 disillusioned, 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 Zhang. But once things flip in summer 1950 to the Korean War, where the North Koreans, the Chinese, with Stalin's assistance, are driving in to try and 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 bulwark which the United States has to protect. And as a result, Chiang Kai Shek gets a whole of bunch, 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 1958, they really don't try through most of the rest of Mao's period in power, but in a

[A]

single decade, Rana, the Communists have come from very much on the back foot with losing 90% of their trip and their members ending up in the back end of China with harsh soil, living in caves, to being masters of this huge area of the earth. And having seen off Chiang Kai Shek, I mean, a completely unimaginable turnaround in a very short period of time. How much of that is Mao zone doing?

[C]

You're right that it's an extraordinary trajectory In a short time, 1935, 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 and 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 all 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 he does that alongside Liu Shaqi, Chen Bouda and other people who are very involved in the ideological world. On the military front, as I mentioned before, he undertakes some kind of, very kind of nifty moves on the military front that show his combination of calculus and risk taking. But you also don't get a military victory without the other great generals of the Communist movement, Lin Biao Peng degrees, who becomes actually the father of the Chinese Navy after 1949 or beyond that. In kind of economic terms, it's not very clear. I mean, Mao doesn't understand anything very much about economic, Soviet or otherwise. And so figures like Liu Shaqi 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, 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.

[B]

Rana. We're going to pick up this story in the next episode. There's just so much to talk about. Thank you again.

[A]

It's wonderful history. It's so exciting.

[B]

Such a phenomenal story and the speed at which this happens. If you want to hear the next episode right now, just join Empire [e-mail] that's empirepod uk.com cheaper than a price of a pint a month or a very posh coffee. And you get early access to ad free shows, a 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, Anita Arnhem, and goodbye

[A]

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