Dec. 26, 2022 - Human Events Daily - Jack Posobiec
24:12
EPISODE 351: THE CHINA FILES - WARLORDS OF THE REVOLUTION
In Part One of The China Files - Warlords of the Revolution - Jack Posobiec’s expertise is on full display as he discusses the rise of communism on the heels of the Chinese Civil War through the end of WW2. If you want to know how to stop communism, you must understand how and why it began, Poso give you the inside information, no static on this very special, can’t miss edition of Human Events Daily!Here’s your Daily dose of Human Events with @JackPosobiec Save up to 65% on MyPillo...
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard for a very special four part series that welcome aboard for a very special four part series that we've decided to put together for you this Christmas week.
It's called The China Files.
And for a long time, I've wanted to sit down and talk to you a lot about the history of China.
I remember this time last year, we did a history of Taiwan episode that did really well.
And I said, you know what?
I want to get into this.
Even Charlie had reached out to me the other day and said, Jack, you got to talk about Maoism more.
You have to talk Maoism more.
So I said, all right, let's do it.
We're going to do a four-part series.
And so let me say to you, Welcome to the China Files, Part 1, Warlords of the Revolution.
Thank you.
So let's go all the way back to the late Qing Dynasty, the 1800s, late 1800s in China.
You have to understand what kind of country, what kind of land we're dealing with.
This is the land of foot binding.
This is the land of all adult males being forced to shave their heads except for one long braid in the back.
The Manchus required that.
The Manchus were seen as a foreign leadership, and these were the ones that ruled the Qing dynasty.
But what even are dynasties?
It's a dynasty.
We don't have those in the U.S.
We don't have those in the West anymore.
We had kings at one point.
Well, the dynasty, for about 3,500 years in ancient and medieval China, they were ruled by these dynasties, by these royal families, the Han, the Tang, the Ming, the Qing, the Song, so many of them.
Thank you.
And yet, the Qing dynasty towards the end, they were seen as corrupted.
They were always seen as foreign, but they had been just defeated by the British in the Opium Wars.
Fueled by the rise of opium and the increase of the illegal drug inside China.
They were then defeated.
Hong Kong was established as a colony for the British.
Shanghai was opened up to the British and the French.
Later on, the Boxer Rebellion was an anti-foreigner rebellion that was covertly funded by the Qing Dynasty.
But that was itself defeated by the eight-nation army, which included troops from the United States, Germany, France, the UK, and even Japan.
And they came in and occupied Beijing.
So the Qing dynasty, it was viewed by many as having lost what's called the mandate of heaven.
And the mandate of heaven, it's similar to the European divine right of kings, but the mandate of heaven can be lost.
It can be lost if a ruler becomes oppressive, incompetent, neglectful, or failed to govern responsibly.
Famine, pestilence, disease, these are all harbingers of losing the mandate of heaven.
Thank you.
And so a rebellion took place by the people, and initially something called the Republic of China was born.
The Republic of China.
And this was led by Sun Yat-sen, and later led by a man by the name of Jiang Yishou, or better known in English as Chiang Kai-shek.
However, Sun Yat-sen gets overthrown By a warlord, Yuan Shikai, and there are many warlords all over Northern China, particularly Northern China, but you also see them in the West and other areas.
And so China almost becomes up for grabs because this new Republic of China is not able to fully take over all of the land of China.
It's seen in many areas like the West as bandit country, no man's land, lawlessness, warlords taking over in the north, in the south, parts of the coast, gangs rising up, taking over places in Hong Kong, city streets.
And the Soviet Union to the north of China realized that they too had an opportunity in this new China with no dynasty.
And so the Soviet Union worked with a group of scholars and a group of radicals all the way back in 1921 to hold a meeting in Shanghai.
The first meeting of the Chinese Communist Party.
Mao Zedong was not the originator of this meeting, but he did attend it.
It's a small building in a Shurkumen stone two-story building.
Still there in Shanghai.
I've been there.
And you can go and see where the Chinese Communist Party began.
And in fact, several members of that initial meeting We're also part of the KGB.
They were members of Soviet intelligence forces.
So from the very start, the CCP was a foreign-funded, foreign-financed organization.
But very early on, Chairman Mao, even before he was chairman, growing up the son of a peasant, he didn't want to work in the fields.
His father also became a grain merchant, started to get a little bit of money.
But Mao didn't want to follow in his footsteps.
Mao wanted something else.
Mao wanted revolution.
But what Mao did learn from growing up in Hunan province was the power of thugs, the power of banditry, the power of martial force and brutal violence.
And these, in a way that might seem strange to so many people, These tactics that would cause so many of us to recoil, brutal tactics, burning villages, torture, they seemed to excite Chairman Mao.
He seemed almost to derive pleasure from this.
And so his brand of Marxism, which would later become known as Mao Zui, Maoism, was so more brutal.
Than any type of communism that's ever been seen prior or even since.
Because he viewed purification of the country as only to be able to come through pain.
Purification through pain.
And as the Chinese Communist Party grew in the West and then later came into conflict with the Republic of China.
Mao continued to use those tactics and his army, which later became known as the Red Army, used those same tactics on any peasant, any leader, any merchant that got in their way.
Brutally tortured, executed in public, because Mao believed that all of these things should be done in public so that The peasantry would understand who was now in power.
And I know I'm skipping around a lot, but we've got a couple more segments on this.
But I want you to understand, before we go to break here, that it was through these brutal tactics that Mao was able to establish his reign of terror throughout the entire countryside of Western China, while financed and funded by the Soviet Union.
So throughout the 1920s, this clash between the nationalists and the communists continued.
In fact, in the city of Shanghai, there was an event at one point, April 1927, known as the Shanghai Massacre.
And that's when the nationalists joined with a 黑社会, or, you know, a black society, what we might call a triad, called the Green Gang.
And the Green Gang went in to do the dirty work of the nationalists.
And what did they do?
They systematically purged and assassinated every single communist they could find that night in Shanghai.
Because they went through at the orders of the nationalists to get rid of these guys and kick them out.
This continued and continued all the way up and up through the early 1930s.
And through the early 1930s, there were two, actually two major conflicts going on in China.
Number one was this continuing and ever expanding civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists.
But number two, starting in 1931, you saw an invasion of China by Japan.
Now, at first, it was a limited engagement, limited invasion, just in the area of Manchuria, which the Japanese later formed as a puppet-controlled state called Manchukuo.
And they found, you remember that Qing Dynasty?
They found the last son of the Qing Dynasty, who was himself Manchurian, and created this sort of puppet emperor for him up in, there's a great movie about this called The Last Emperor, you can go watch, his name was Pu Yi.
And they fashioned that up In China's northeast.
So just across from where you would see the Korean Peninsula now.
And China and Japan had fallen over the Korean Peninsula at this point.
By the way, Japan also controlled Taiwan because the Treaty of Shimonoseki in, I believe, 1894 and the fallout of the former Sino-Japanese War.
So Japan's got their foothold in China.
Then in 1931, that increases with this Manchukuo invasion.
So the nationalists are fighting a two-front war.
Because they're fighting the Communists to the West, and now they're fighting the Japanese to the Northeast.
So what happens?
The continued fighting and the continued defeats of the Communists at the hands of Chiang Kai-shek drive the Red Army and the CCP to essentially be encircled.
They're completely encircled by Chiang Kai-shek's armies, and they're pushed out Of Eastern China.
Eastern China is that coastal region.
They're pushed out completely.
And so Mao decides that the only thing left is a retreat.
He's got no vehicles at this point.
He's barely got any horses.
All he's got are his feet and the feet of his army.
And so he begins the most massive retreat in CCP history.
It's called the Long March.
Late in 1934.
He marches all the way out to rural Yan'an province.
As far as possible as he can go into that bandit country that we were talking about before.
Loses 90% of the Red Army on the way.
Either to desertion, disease, injury, infection.
Things look bleak.
But then, something happens that falls right into Chairman Mao's hands.
Right into his lap.
The increased invasion of Japan and the outbreak of World War II in the Pacific, this is 1937, creates a huge problem for the nationalists.
Because now the nationalists are faced with an even more powerful Japanese empire that's attacking them in Beijing, in Shanghai, across all of their power centers.
People know, I believe, about the rape of Nanjing that happens during this period.
The absolute destruction that was rained down on the Japanese, by the Japanese.
And so, at one point later, one of the warlords, because there's still warlords in this period, actually takes Chiang Kai-shek, takes him and kidnaps him.
Kidnaps him.
And this is called the Xi'an Incident.
We're here in 1936.
He gets arrested by warlord Zhang Shui-liang.
And this warlord says, in order to deal with Japanese aggression, in order to fight back against Japan, you must form an alliance with the CCP.
You see, what Chiang Kai-shek didn't know was that this warlord had already cut a deal with Chairman Mao.
Chairman Mao realized what happened with that Green Gang back in Shanghai during the purges, and he said, fine.
If that's the way to work, I'm going to get there before them.
So Mao starts making deals with the triads, with the black societies, with every warlord that he can.
And here's what he says to them.
He says, in the future, when I'm in charge of the country, you'll be given everything.
And so Mao does enter this alliance.
The CCP, the communists, form an alliance with the nationalists.
And they say, here's what we're going to do.
We'll start a second united front.
And we'll fight Japan together.
But of course, what does Mao really do?
Because remember, Mao's forces now are mostly in the West, whereas the Nationalist forces and the Japanese are mostly in the East.
So the Communists commit to some limited engagements against the Japanese.
But what really happens?
Instead of Mao fighting the Japanese, he works with the peasants He works with the Red Army.
He keeps them mostly in the West.
He lets the Nationalists fight Japan.
And Mao even joked about this later.
He said, I would have been crushed if I didn't have Japan invade and create a distraction that the Nationalists would have to face so he could increase his armies, increase his forces in the West.
Let the Nationalists take it on the chin.
Let themselves become weakened.
And then grow the CCP and grow the Red Army ever more powerful than he could.
If Japan had never invaded, it's more than likely that the communists would have been stamped out in the 1930s after this long march.
But, history is what it is.
And so, because of that invasion of Japan, not only were the people of China subjugated to the horrors of Imperial Japan, the rape of Nanjing, but later it set forward the conditions for the CCP to come back. but later it set forward the conditions for the CCP
And after Japan was knocked out of the war, after the war ended, thanks to the nuclear bombs, the atomic bombs by the United States, Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945, it set the stage for Mao to make his comeback.
Because immediately after World War II ended, The United States at first said, oh, we hope you guys can coexist peacefully.
But even as far back as FDR, even, and then certainly under Truman, the communists that had completely infiltrated the United States State Department and the United States government at this point, they wanted the communists to win.
They wanted China to fall.
They saw what Mao was doing.
They knew what Mao was doing.
And in 1946, that civil war, Went hot again, and the CCP was poised to come back and win.
The Communists won the Chinese Civil War.
The Nationalists, the Republic of China, were forced to flee the country.
And they later fled to the island that we now know today as Taiwan, and established the Republic of China.
On the way out, they hit the treasury, hit the museums of Beijing.
They took many, many things with them, Chiang Kai-shek and his regime, as the communists were going to come in and destroy everything, smash all of Chinese historical culture along with them.
This was another part of Maoism, because not only did the communist revolution murder, torture, and execute anyone who stood in their way, they also viewed history itself as their enemy.
Now, two years after this happened, there was a speech given by Senator Joseph McCarthy.
And he talked about the failed mission to prevent the Chinese civil war from taking place in the communist revolution from winning in China.
That mission had been headed by General George Marshall, famous George Marshall, on the Nobel Peace Prize.
What did McCarthy have to say about that?
McCarthy said the only way to explain why the U.S.
fell from our position as the most powerful nation on earth at the end of World War II to a position of declared weakness by our leadership was because of a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.
And specifically argued that General Wiedemeyer had prepared a plan that would have kept China a valued ally but had been sabotaged, quote, only in treason can we find why evil genius thwarted and frustrated it.
Specifically, that when Marshall was sent to China with secret State Department orders, State Department orders, the communists at that time were bottled up in two areas and were fighting a losing battle.
But that because of those orders, the situation was radically changed in favor of the communists.
Under those orders, as we now know, Marshall embargoed all arms and ammunition to our allies in China.
He forced the opening of the Nationalist-held mountains into Manchuria to the end that the Chinese communists gained access to the mountains of captured Japanese equipment.
Remember, the Japanese stronghold was in Northeast China in Manchuria.
No need to tell the country how Marshall tried to force Shanghai Shek to form a partnership government with the communists.
And so, were the communists allowed to win?
Was Chairman Mao allowed to take China?
Was this part of a deal that many have alleged took place between the highest levels of the United States government That actually started with FDR and then later was carried out by Truman and elements of the State Department.
And you say, why?
Why?
What's in this for the United States?
Well, it's not that it's in it for the United States.
There's nothing in it for the United States.
But what if there were a group of people that wanted to create a one world government?
And what if there were a group of people that knew that in order to do that, you would have to create a deal.
With the other superpower of the world at the time.
And who was that?
The Soviet Union.
And the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, were our allies in World War II.
But let's say you want to join with them.
And let's say you want to create a one world government.
You might call it something like, I don't know, the United Nations.
But how would you get the Soviets to agree To take part in this program when they wouldn't have to.
What could possibly be the dowry for such a dark marriage?
Well, it's simple.
You give them China.
You give them a billion people to fall to communism.
And then you get their acquiescence.
And we've seen many of this.
We've seen much of this in declassified text, telegrams, declassified cables that have come out.
Discussing these plans all the way back to FDR.
Because there were many Americans that wanted communism to succeed, not just in China, but also across Europe.
There's a reason that the U.S.
government funded and industrialized the Soviet Union for years and years prior to World War II, even prior to American involvement in World War II.
And I'm just talking about Len Lease, but Len Lease of course goes on to be the funding That enables the Soviets to continue their fight.
And so, going back to those days of the late 1940s, World War II ends.
The Nationalists are left to dry.
They're left to wither and rot on the vine by the United States and by the Allies.
Meanwhile, the Communists, Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party, Continue fighting closer and closer.
Millions of people are killed in this fighting.
Over 2.5 million.
Hundreds of thousands of people are starved out.
Because remember, Chairman Mao once famously said, a revolution is not a dinner party.
He didn't care how many people died.
He gave orders for torture, execution, laid siege to cities where hundreds of thousands of people starved.
And that was only A paltry sum compared to the millions that would later starve under Mao's rule.
Because Mao wanted more than anything else, absolute power within China.
And it didn't matter to him how many of his own people had to die so that he could get it.
So under this situation, with the Communists being completely funded by the Soviet Union, the Nationalists getting no support whatsoever, the Japanese They've been destroyed, they've been defeated.
What happens?
October 1949.
Beijing falls.
Chairman Mao climbs atop the Tiananmen Square Gate and declares to the people of China and declares to the world the establishment of the People's Republic of China.
The same government
That's about it for episode one, but I want you to stay tuned because tomorrow in part two, we are going to talk all about the massacres that happened under Chairman Mao's rule, the purges, the recruitment of children, turning them against their own parents,
Radicalizing them against their own families, their own schools, that culminated in mass suicide, murders, rapes, starvations.
All of this taking place, not in wartime, but in peacetime.
