and this is Crash Course World History

and today we’re going to return— sadly for the last time on Crash Course—

to China.

By the way, Stan brought cupcakes.

That’s good.

I wish I could draw some parallel between this and China,

but I got nothing.

It’s just delicious.

I’ll sure miss you, piece of felt Danica cut out in the shape of China

using blue because we felt red would be cliché.

Mr. Green, Mr. Green, Mr Green!

You don’t get to talk until you shave the mustache, Me From The Past.

So the 20th century was pretty big for China because it saw

not one but two revolutions.

China’s 1911 revolution might be a bigger deal from a world historical perspective

than the more famous communist revolution of 1949,

but you wouldn’t know it because

1. china’s communism became a really big deal during the cold war,

and 2. Mao Zedong, the father of communist China,

was really good at self-promotion.

Like, you know his famous book of sayings?

Pretty much everyone in China just had to own it.

And I mean, HAD TO. [makes sense; staff only allowed to read John Green books]

[best]

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[ever]

So as you know doubt recall from past episodes of Crash Course,

China lost the Opium wars in the 19th century,

resulting in European domination, spheres of influence, et cetera,

all of which was deeply embarrassing to the Qing dynasty

and led to calls for reform.

One strand of reform that called for China to adopt

European military technology and education systems

was called self strengthening,

and it was probably would have been a great idea,

considering how well that worked for Japan.

But it never happened in China--

well, at least not until recently.

Instead,

China experienced the disastrous anti-Western Boxer Rebellion of 1900,

which helped spur some young liberals, including one named Sun Yat Sen,

to plot the overthrow of the dynasty.

Oh,

it’s already time for the Open Letter... [unscoffingly skids across unscoured set]

An open letter to Sun Yat Sen.

Oh, but first,

let’s see what’s in the secret compartment today.

Oh, more champagne poppers? [seriously, more champagne poppers?]

Stan, at this point aren’t we sort of belaboring the fact

that China invented fireworks?

Wow!

That is innovation at work right there.

We used to not be able to fire off one of these,

and now we can fire off six at a time if you count the two secret ones

from behind me. [strangest. job. ever.]

Dear Sun Yat Sen,

you were amazing!

I mean the Republic of China calls you the father of the nation,

the People’s Republic of China calls you

the forerunner of the democratic revolution.

You’re the only thing they can agree on.

You lived in China, Japan, the United States,

you converted to Christianity, you were a doctor, you were the godfather of

an important science fiction writer.

[not important enough to help "Cordwainer" catch on as a popular baby name, however]

But the infuriating thing is that

you never actually got much of a chance to rule China,

and you would have been great at it.

I mean,

your three principles of the people,

Nationalism, Democracy, and the People’s Livelihood,

are three really great principles.

I mean the problem, aside from you not living long enough

is that you just didn’t have a face for Warhol portraits.

[Warhol thought anyone who had $25k had a face for his portraits, but point taken]

Huh, it’s too bad.

Best wishes, John Green.

So the 1911 revolution that led to the end of the Qing started when a bomb

accidentally exploded, at which point the revolutionaries were like,

“we’re probably going to be outed, so we should just start the uprising now.”

The uprising probably would’ve been quelled like many before it except

this time the army joined the rebellion, because they wanted to become more modern.

The Qing emperor abdicated,

and the rebels chose a general, Yuan Shikai, as leader,

while Sun Yat Sen was declared president of a provisional republic on Jan 1, 1912.

A new government was created with a Senate and a Lower House,

and it was supposed to write a new constitution.

And after the first elections,

Sun Yat Sen’s party, the Guomindang

were the largest, but they weren’t the majority.

So Sun Yat Sen deferred to Yuan,

which turned out to be a huge mistake because he then outlawed the

Guomindang party and ruled as dictator.

But when Yuan Shikai died in 1916,

China’s first non-dynastic government in over 3000 years completely fell apart.

Localism reasserted itself with large-scale landlords

with small-scale armies ruling all the parts of China

that weren’t controlled by foreigners.

You might remember this phenomenon from earlier in Chinese history,

first during the Warring States period and then again for three hundred years

between the end of the Han and the rise of the Sui.

So the period in Chinese history between 1912 and 1949

is sometimes called the Chinese Republic,

although that gives the government a bit too much credit.

The leading group trying to re-form China into a nation state was the Guomindang,

but after 1920 the Chinese Communist Party was also in the mix.

And for the Guomindang to regain power from those big landlords and

reunify China, they needed some help from the CCP.

Now if an alliance between Communists and Nationalists

sounds like a match made in hell,

well, yes. It was.

That said,

the two did manage to patch things up for a while in the early 1920s,

you know, for the sake of the kids.

But then Sun Yat Sen died in 1925 and the alliance fell apart in 1927

when Guomindang leader Chaing Kai Shek got mad at the communists

for trying to foment socialist revolution, to which the communists were like,

“But that’s what we do, man. We’re communists.”

Anyway, this turned out to be a bad break up for a bunch of reasons,

but mainly because it started a civil war between

the Communists and the Nationalists.

We’re not going to get into exhausting detail on the civil war but Spoiler alert:

the Communists won.

But there are a few things to point out:

First, even though Mao [pronounced like Maori] emerged victorious,

he and the communists were almost wiped out in 1934

except that they made a miraculous and harrowing escape,

trekking from southern China to the mountains in the north

in what has become famously known as the Long March,

a great example of historians missing an opportunity

since it could easily have been called the Long Ass March,

as it featured donkeys.

Second,

for much of the time the Gomindang was trying to crush the CCP,

significant portions of China were being occupied and/or invaded by Japan.

Thirdly,

the Communists were just better at fighting the Japanese

than the Nationalists were.

In spite of the fact that Chiang Kai Shek had extensive support from the U.S.

And each time the Nationalists failed against the Japanese,

their prestige among their fellow Chinese diminished.

It wasn’t helped by Nationalist corruption,

or their collecting onerous taxes from Chinese peasants,

or stories about Nationalist troops putting on civilian clothes

and abandoning the city of Nanking during its awful destruction

by the Japanese army in 1937.

Meanwhile,

the Communists were winning over the peasants in their northwestern enclave

by making sure that troops didn’t pillage local land

and by giving peasants a greater say in local government.

Now, that isn’t to say everything was rosy under Mao’s communist leadership,

even at its earliest stages.

By the way,

That is an actual chalk illustration. Very impressed. [thanks, boss.]

In a preview of things to come, in 1942 Mao initiated a “rectification” program.

Which basically meant students and intellectuals were sent

down into the countryside to give them a taste of what “real China” was like

in an effort to re-educate them.

We try to be politically neutral here on Crash Course,

but we are always opposed to intellectuals doing hard labor. [lolzer]

But anyway,

within four years of the end of World War II the Communists routed

Chiang Kai Shek’s armies and sent them off to Taiwan.

and these military victories paved the way for Mao to declare

the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949.

so once in power,

Mao and the PRC were faced with the task of creating a new, socialist state.

And Mao declared early on that the working class in China

would be the leaders of a “people’s democratic dictatorship.”

Oh democratic dictatorships. You’re the BEST.

It’s all the best parts of democracy, and all the best parts of dictatorship.

You get to vote, but there’s only one choice.

It takes all the pesky thinking out it.

The PRC promised equal rights for women, rent reduction, land redistribution,

new heavy industry and lots of freedoms.

Including freedoms of

“thought, speech, publication, assembly, association, correspondence, person,

domicile, moving from one place to another, religious belief, and

the freedom to hold processions and demonstrations.”

Yeah, NO.

Even putting aside the PRC’s failure to protect any of those rights,

Mao’s China wasn’t much fun if you were

a landlord or even if you were a peasant who’d done well.

Land redistribution and reform meant destroying the power of landlords,

often violently.

But centralizing power and checking individual ambition

proved difficult for the government,

and it was made harder by China’s involvement in the Korean War,

which helped spur the first mass campaign of Mao’s democratic dictatorship.

Designed to encourage support for the War,

the campaign was called the

“Resist America and Aid Korea campaign,” [name's a bit clunky, innit?]

and it resulted in almost all foreigners leaving China.

A second campaign, against “counterrevolutionaries” was much worse.

People suspected of sympathizing with the Guomindang,

or anyone insufficiently communist, was subject to humiliation and violence.

Between October 1950 and August 1951

28,332 people accused of being spies or counterrevolutionaries

were executed in Guandong city alone.

A third mass campaign, the “Three Anti Campaign” w

as aimed at reforming the Communist party itself.

And the final mass campaign, the Five Anti Campaign

was an assault on all bourgeois capitalism,

which effectively killed private business in China.

Very few of the victims of this last campaign actually died,

but capitalism was weakened and state control bolstered.

OK, let’s go to the Thought Bubble.

Mao and the CCP set out to turn China into an industrial powerhouse by following the

Soviet model.

We haven’t really talked about this, but under the Soviet system,

Russia was able to accomplish massive industrialization--

not to mention tens of millions of deaths from starvation--

through centralized planning and collectivization of agriculture,

following what were known as Five Year Plans.

The Chinese adopted the model of Five Year Plans beginning in 1953

and the first one worked,

at least as far as industrialization was concerned.

In fact, the plan worked even better than expected,

with industry increasing 121% more than projected.

In order for this to work though,

the peasants had to grow lots of grain and sell it at extremely low prices.

This kept inflation in check, and saving was encouraged by the fact that...

...the Five Year Plan didn’t have many consumer goods,

so there was nothing to buy.

For urban workers,

living standards improved and China’s population grew to 646 million.

So far, Mao’s plan seemed to be working,

but there was no way that China could keep up that growth,

especially without some backsliding into capitalism.