In part one, I used America’s 1823 Monroe Doctrine to show that similar reasoning was behind Mao’s decision to send the People’s Liberation Army (PLO) into Korea to fight the United States and UN.
I want to point out that China has never been a military threat to the United States, but America, Japan, Russia, Germany, Britain, France, and other countries have attacked China in the past two centuries and the cost in Chinese lives may have been as high as 100 million or more.
The embedded video says that soon after US troops entered Korea to fight the North’s invading army that if support didn’t arrive soon, the war would be short.
It was obvious that the United Nations was losing the race against time as North Korean troops put pressure on the small area behind the Naktong River near Pusan that US and United Nations troops held.
By August of 1950, the US 8th army was spread too thin. The situation looked bad.
General Walton H. Walker was the field commander of the US 8th army. During World War II, he had been one of General George S. Patton’s Army Corps commanders and was a no nonsense Texan. On July 29, he told his subordinates if I ever see you back here again it had better be in a coffin.
The only advantage the US 8th Army had was firepower. The battle raged for weeks over hills that changed hands often. After two weeks of brutal fighting, US troops managed to hold and strengthen the line.
This provided time for the United Nations to send in troops, which arrived in the port of Pusan from countries such as France, Turkey, Thailand, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Ethiopia.
Most of the new troops were young and were not seasoned veterans.
Then on December 1, 1950, the North Korean Army launched a final assault. However, the North Koreans were exhausted and could not sustain the fight.
General Douglas MacArthur, commander of all UN forces, decided to land an invasion force behind the North Korean lines at Inchon.
Seoul, the captured South Korean Capital was twenty-five miles from Inchon. It was a risky venture but MacArthur was confident of success.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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While searching Google for a Monroe Doctrine link, I stumbled onPCMS Social Studies and a post that appeared January 20, 2011.
Quote: “The Monroe Doctrine was put in place on December 2, 1823 by (President) James Monroe…. He did not want European Countries coming back and taking over the United States…. I know that I would definitely not want someone telling me I have to change the way I believe.”
China’s reaction was the same in 1950 when the People’s Liberation Army entered the Korean War.
Because Korea sat precariously between China, Russia and Japan, Korea had always been at the mercy of its bigger neighbors. For centuries, those nations had fought each other in Korea.
As World War II was ending, in July 1945, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin used his troops in coordination with the US to force the Japanese out of Korea. The Soviet and US armies met at the 38th parallel and agreed to divide Korea along that line.
The Soviets would control the northern half of Korea and the US the south.
While Soviet Russia and America were dividing the spoils of war in Europe and Asia, China was involved in a bloody civil war between the Communist and Nationalist Parties that would last until 1949
Prior to Japan occupying Korea in 1900, Korea had been a tributary state of China for centuries. However, China was in no shape to protest what Russia and the US was doing in Korea.
Two years later, the super powers left Korea leaving behind a Communist state in the north and a capitalist republic in the south ruled by a Korean authoritarian dictator educated at America’s Princeton University.
On June 5, 1950 at 4:00 AM, the Korean War started when North Korea declared war and invaded South Korea by land and sea.
Since the US had deprived South Korea of weapons and ammunition in fear that the south might invade the north and start a war, the North Korean army met little resistance.
The US strategy of restraint had backfired. South Korea had no weapons to defend itself. In two days, Seoul, the capital of South Korea fell to the invading army.
North Korea counted on America doing nothing. However, the majority of Americans in the US was outraged and demanded action, which caused President Truman to send in the United States air force while the US Navy bombarded Korea from the sea.
On July 19, 1950, President Truman called on the United Nations to act quickly and stop the aggression of Communist North Korea.
In the beginning, the US army was weak and far from Korea mostly in Europe. The huge American army that won World War II in 1945 had been disbanded resulting in a much smaller force.
In early July, 1950, an American brigade entered Korea and fought North Korean troops thirty miles south of South Korea’s captured capital of Seoul. The first battle didn’t go well for the US.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
The headline of the Global edition of Xinhuaon February 11, 2011 said, “Met celebrates Nixon in China.”
Xinhua said, “John Adams’ musical masterpiece has made its long-awaited debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, and a prominent feature of it is the revolutionary ballet The Red Detachment of Women.”
A scene from Red Detachment of Women where the lead character has been rescued by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) from an evil landlord that raped her and ordered that she be killed. In fact, the PLA was support by China’s peasants due to harsh treatment from the ruling class. After the Communists won the Civil War, almost a million landowners were executed for crimes against the people.
Nixon arrived in Beijing on February 21, 1972.
On February 27, he left China with a pledge from both nations to normalize relations and that neither should seek hegemony in the Asia Pacific region while opposing the efforts of any other country that attempted such an action.
Thirty-nine years later, on February 12, I sat in an audience in California and watched the opera televised in a local, stuffy theater. The house was not packed but it was crowded.
During a break between acts, director Peter Sellars said the play had been restaged and rewritten since more is now known of what happened in China before and after the historic meeting between Nixon, Kissinger, Mao and Zhou Enlai.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Adams, said, “The meeting of Nixon and Mao is a mythological moment in world history, particularly American history.”
Nixon’s visit to China lasted less than a week but the opera covers years.
The demon in the opera is Mao’s wife. Soon after she appears on stage, it is clear she is responsible for the horrors of the Cultural Revolution. Several times, the Nixon character casts suspicious glances at her as if she is crazy.
At the time of Nixon’s visit, Mao’s wife was grooming herself to become China’s leader after Mao died and to continue the horrors of the Cultural Revolution.
Mao believed that to save China he had to erase China’s ancient culture and reinvent the country.
To reinforce this fact, there is a scene where Mao denounces Confucius.
Mao blamed Confucianism for making China weak and the victim of Western Imperialism and Japan between 1839 when the British and French started the Opium Wars until the end of World War II after Japan was defeated. During that time, almost a hundred million Chinese would die due to famines, rebellions, wars, and civil war.
Little did Mao’s wife know at the time of Nixon’s visit that a few years later fate had something else in store for her when Deng Xiaoping appears from the shadows and has her arrested for crimes against the people.
In fact, at her trial after Mao’s death, which wasn’t covered in the opera, she shouted, “I was Mao’s dog. When Mao told me to bite, I bit.”
Sellars or Adams should have mentioned the revelations that run through the play covering years of Chinese history revealing the role of each major Chinese character.
Near the end while Zhou Enlai is in pain and slowly dying from pancreatic cancer, it is obvious that the people loved him. There is a moment where it appears he has died and his bed is surrounded with flowers and a communist flag is carefully draped over him.
In fact, near the end of the Cultural Revolution, Zhou Enlai protested the horrors that were happening in China and protected many Chinese from Mao’s teenage Red Guard responsible for much of the crimes that took place during the last decade of Mao’s life.
For this risky act, the people of China honored and loved Zhou Enlai. Almost every other Chinese leader that spoke out against Mao died or went to prison. Few escaped Mao’s wrath. Even Deng Xiaoping had his son tossed off a three-story building to survive but be paralyzed from the neck down.
Meanwhile, in another bed, Mao is having a tryst with his wife soon after having his crotch fondled by one of the women that cares for him.
When Mao rests on a bed at the end, the Communist flag is dropped over him without much ceremony and there were no flowers.
Zhou Enlai would die eight months before Mao in 1976.
The world premiere of Nixon in China took place at the Houston Grand Opera in 1987. I have embedded a seventeen-part series discovered on You Tube of the original. If interested, scroll down and enjoy.
Nixon in China -– Part 1/17
Nixon in China – Part 2/17
Nixon in China – Part 3/17
Nixon in China – Part 4/17
Nixon in China – Part 5/17
Nixon in China – Part 6/17
Nixon in China – Part 7/17
Nixon in China – Part 8/17
Nixon in China – Part 9/17
Nixon in China – Part 10/17
Nixon in China – Part 11/17
Nixon in China – Part 12/17
Nixon in China – Part 13/17
Nixon in China – Part 14/17
Nixon in China – Part 15/17
Nixon in China – Part 16/17
Nixon in China – Part 17/17
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
On December 9, 2010, a CNN Go Asia headline said, “Shanghai has the world’s smartest teens”.
If you heard the news of Shanghai students beating out 65 countries in student scholastic performance tests in three key categories of ability, the Al Jazeera English video embedded with this post may provide part of the answer of how that happened.
While many American students are applying makeup, drinking sodas, eating candy and french fries in class while texting friends and ignoring teachers let alone reading or doing homework, Al Jazeera reports of twelve year olds in Shenyang, China learning how to be stock brokers.
These students buy and sell and learn how to get the latest information on global stocks.
One Student, Ding Chuan, was asked how his investment portfolio (a class assignment where the students don’t actually buy stocks) was doing, and he replied that last year his investments hit 10,000. Now, his portfolio is at 20,000. He wants to be a millionaire when he grows up.
This Al Jazeera English news segment aired June 23, 2007.
Xiu Shu Jun, the headmistress for the school, says, “We decided to do it because we wanted to give the children a more realistic and practical financial education.”
Tony Cheng, the Al Jazeera reporter, says, “It is ironic that the largest Communist nation in the world has become obsessed with this capitalist pastime.”
Cheng says, “Stock trading goes against about every principal Chairman Mao stood for, and he would be pretty horrified to learn that there are now more registered (stock) traders in China than there are members of the Communist Party.”
Mao’s statue in Shenyang is surrounded by banks. After all, Tony Cheng says, today to be rich in China is glorious.
I say, What Tony Cheng doesn’t tell us is when Deng Xiaoping came to power by arresting those that would have continued the Cultural Revolution, China’s central government repudiated revolutionary Maoism and launched a Chinese style of socialist-capitalism.
Meanwhile, outside school, China’s citizens are buying stocks hoping to get rich quick.
However, some Chinese are learning the hard way that what goes up also goes down. Investing in a capitalist stock market is like riding a roller coaster and life savings may vanish in a day if the investor isn’t cautious.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
While in China, President Nixon gave a speech in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.
This was the first time a U.S. president had visited the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and China was considered one of America’s greatest enemies.
While in China, Nixon would meet with Zhou Enlai, who was the first Premier of the PRC. Zhou Enlai (along with Deng Xiaoping) played an important role in the future development of the Chinese economy and restructuring Chinese society leading to the China of today.
In fact, Zhou Enlai not only avoided the purges of high-level Chinese Communist Party officials during the Cultural Revolution, but he also attempted to contain the damage caused by the teenage Red Guard and to protect others from them. This made him very popular with the people near the end of the Cultural Revolution.
Zhou Enlai supported peaceful coexistence with the West. He would die eight months before Mao.
It is ironic that one of the main reasons Richard Nixon became the vice-president of President Eisenhower was due to his strong anti-communist stance.
If you listen to Nixon’s speech in Beijing carefully, you will hear how he managed to slip in a veiled criticism of the fact that the media was free to report what they wanted in the US.
Nixon says of his visit to the Great Wall, “As I walked along the Wall, I saw the sacrifices that went into building it. I saw what is showed about the determination of the Chinese people to retain their independence throughout their long history. I thought about the fact that the Wall tells us that China has a great history and that the people who built this wonder of the world also have a great future.”
I wonder if Nixon realized how true his statement was.
The embedded video then shows Nixon and Zhou Enlai in Hangchow, China, which is southwest of Shanghai.
Could it be possible that Nixon’s trip to China provided Deng Xiaoping the support needed to reject revolutionary Maoism and launch China’s capitalist revolution a few years later?
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
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