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Course: World History Project - Origins to the Present > Unit 7
Lesson 5: End of Empires and Cold War | 7.4- READ: Devastation of Old Markets
- READ: Connecting Decolonization and the Cold War
- BEFORE YOU WATCH: USA vs USSR Fight! The Cold War
- WATCH: USA vs USSR Fight! The Cold War
- READ: Cold War — An Overview
- READ: The Cold War Around the World
- READ: And Then Gandhi Came — Nationalism, Revolution, and Sovereignty
- BEFORE YOU WATCH: Decolonization and Nationalism Triumphant
- WATCH: Decolonization and Nationalism Triumphant
- BEFORE YOU WATCH: Chinese Communist Revolution
- WATCH: Chinese Communist Revolution
- BEFORE YOU WATCH: Conflict in Israel and Palestine
- WATCH: Conflict in Israel and Palestine
- READ: Decolonizing Women
- End of Empires and Cold War
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WATCH: Chinese Communist Revolution
In the first half of the twentieth century, the great power of China lay wounded. Its peasants were impoverished, its armies humiliated, and its lands increasingly captured by enemies. After World War II, however, one of the greatest revolutions of world history brought the Communist Party to power in China. The result would be both hardship and glory, but certainly it laid the groundwork for a resurgent China. In this video, we look at the Chinese Communist Revolution as a transformational event in both Chinese history and the global history of revolutions, with the help of Dr. Prasenjit Duara.
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Want to join the conversation?
- Isn't China is still under communist rule?(3 votes)
- China is governed as a one-party state. The single party that governs China is called the Communist party. The extent to which that party reflects the ideology on communism (rather than just the ideology of one-party control of a nation) is debatable. The economy of China seems to operate on hyper-capitalist lines.(5 votes)
- How does the reintegration of Hong Kong play into the decolonization?(1 vote)
Video transcript
By the time you get to the 1940s
in your study of world history, you will have encountered a lot of revolutions.
Some of these were mainly liberal revolutions meant to establish political rights for a middle
class under the republic as a form of government. The American War of Independence is a
good example of this type of revolution. You have also seen social revolutions. They're
still about liberation, but these revolutionaries took an even deeper dive and sought to overturn
the existing class systems and economic structures that oppress them. An early example is the Haitian
Revolution. Many revolutions fell somewhere in between, with some political and some social
and economic change. By the early 20th century, transformations like the Mexican Revolution
usually split the revolutionaries into two groups, some who just wanted political rights for a middle
class of people and others, usually socialists or communists, who are fighting for better lives and
livelihoods for poor workers and peasants. Hello, I'm Francesca Hodges, and today we are going to
look at another revolution that saw this split between political liberals and communists and
which ended up fundamentally transforming not just one country but the entire world, the
Chinese Communist Revolution of 1945-1949. China, at the beginning of the 20th century,
had been racked by civil war, invaded by outside powers, and had almost
collapsed under the weight of the Boxer Rebellion. During this period, nobody suffered
more from this chaos than the Chinese peasants, many of whom experienced famine, theft,
and exploitation on an enormous scale. In October 1911, revolutionaries in
the central Chinese city of Wuchang rebelled against the authorities. Their rebellion
spread, and in 1912 the Chinese Republic was born. This group of revolutionaries were mainly
army officers and members of the middle class, and their revolution really only aimed to
change the political structure of China not to transform the poverty of the peasants, and
it wasn't even a successful political revolution. By 1916, China had broken apart into many regions
ruled by local warlords, while the central government had only limited authority. Meanwhile,
outside powers still tried to take bites of this vast country. The worst was Japan, which expanded
its territory in China in the 1920s and 1930s. So now, there were two groups trying to reunite
China and push back against the Japanese invasion. The first was a group of Chinese nationalists
who formed a party known as the Guomindang. The Guomindang fought to strengthen the democratic
republic, but they didn't want economic change. In 1925, a leader named Chiang Kai-shek
took control of this party and became the official leader of the Republic of China. The
second group was the Chinese Communist Party. They didn't just want political change. They
wanted a social and economic revolution to help peasants escape from poverty. This party had many
leaders, but the one we will get to know best is Mao Zedong. At times, the Guomindang nationalists
and the Chinese Communist Party work together. Both fought against the Japanese for example
before and during the Second World War. At the end of that war in 1945, Japan was
defeated by the Allied Forces, including China alongside the United States, Britain, France, and
the Soviet Union. The Japanese invasion was over, but China still had two competing factions,
the Guomindang government under Chiang Kai-shek and the Communist Party led by Mao Zedong. These
two forces now turned on each other in what we know as the Chinese Communist Revolution. It's
a lot of plot twists, right. And with the start of the Chinese Communist Revolution, it can
be even harder to follow, both in terms of the history of China and as part of a history
of global revolutions. That's why I decided I needed the help of an expert, so I reached out
to Professor Prasenjit Duara at Duke University. So starting off with our first question then.
What was the Chinese Communist Revolution? The Chinese Communist Revolution was
essentially a massive assault to massively overhaul Chinese society as a first step
in their ideology, in the ideology of the communists to overhaul global society
so that there would be social justice and that the people at the bottom of the rung in
peasant societies, in urban societies in China would have a greater share both in the economic
and political dimensions of life and have a better life in general. So why did the Chinese Communist
Revolution happen? It happened because firstly China has had a long tradition of peasant
rebellions. This is one that has happened before the Christian era. You've had enormous
Chinese peasant rebellions where they rose up, and the Chinese communists themselves believe
that they drew on this tradition, but of course they gave it a modern twist. They gave it a modern
ideology to look for more modern institutions and ideas of equality and justice and the
removal of exploiters of these people, and so they drew on that and for that of course
they drew upon what were globally circulating ideas of a revolution that came from the
Soviet Revolution and other areas of the world. Speaking to the revolution itself, why
did the communists win? The Japanese occupation helped the Chinese Communist Party to a great extent because the Guomindang, while it was also opposed to Japanese occupation, was not able to persuade or convince the people to support them against the Japanese because they were not able
to penetrate into society and show that they could bring about a better society than either
was there before or under Japanese occupation. Whereas, the Chinese communists had the mobilizing
power. They had the organization to be able to penetrate deep into rural society and even
appeal to the nationalism of the people against the Japanese occupiers who were very
violent in many cases in China, in occupied China, and they also engaged in various kinds of reforms
like giving land and giving dignity to the poor, the rural poor in particular. In 1949, the Chinese
communists were able to seize power from the Guomindang who fled to the island of Taiwan. Mao
Zedong ruled a unified communist state, the People's Republic of China on the mainland.
Not only was China an independent country, it now had a role to play in two episodes
of global significance, in the post-war era, decolonization and the Cold War. I wanted
to ask Professor Duara more about this role. What role did the People's Republic of China play
in decolonization after the revolution? China did provide support for socialist, anti-colonial
movements, and it provided material support in terms of arms, in terms of expert advice, in terms
of money to anti-colonial, socialist movements, and one of the best examples of that is perhaps
Vietnam where it turned out, by the end of the Vietnam War, to have been the greatest supporter.
Can we then see the Chinese Communist Revolution as part of the Cold War struggle? Yes, I think
we can if we also recognize that the Chinese Communist Revolution generally supported
decolonization movements but actively supported decolonization movements that
were socialistically oriented. I ended my conversation with Dr. Duara by asking about
the successes and failures of the revolution. What did the revolution achieve? The Chinese Communist Revolution I think achieved a great deal. Once it was able to get through to the rural populace and implement their policies, they were able to achieve what we now consider human development indicators so that they were able to improve the health of the people by bringing sort of basic health services, by providing basic education to vast numbers of illiterate
people. They were able to create job skills, and they also created ideas of equality. So women
for instance were given very important roles in society that they did not have before,
and this gave also a tremendous amount, and they were able to give some property to the
poor who did not have, so this was also able to give some kind of measure of self-respect to
people in society, to the lower classes of society. To counter that question then, what were some of
the failures of the revolution? Well, I think that the principal failure is the cost of revolution, the cost of revolution in terms of human lives, which you know over a million people were probably
killed during the land reforms which took away land from a lot of people and also killed a lot
of people who were considered traitors or who had other religious beliefs and so on. Within the
long history of revolutions in the modern age, few were as transformative as the Chinese
Revolution. Building on a tradition of peasant uprisings within China and inspired
by revolutions elsewhere, the Chinese Communist Party took power and overturned
the lives of the wealthy and the poor alike. Seventy years later, the Communist Party still
governs China. In another video, we will explore its policies and their effects on the Chinese
people in the era of intense globalization.