Sun Yat-sen’s Last Days – Part 1/3

October 25, 2010

In October 1911, a revolution in China overthrew the Qing Dynasty and ended more than two thousand years of imperial monarchy.

After the revolution, the Republic of China was founded but warlords still controlled much of China.

The leader of this revolution was Dr. Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), and he served as the first president of the Republic of China.

The Chinese Communist Party persuaded Sun that if his Nationalist Party formed an alliance with the Communists, Sun would gain support from China’s peasants and industrial workers to help end the anarchy in China. Source: Time Asia

In 1924, Sun Yat-sen’s health was not good. He was so sick he had turned command of the Nationalist navy and army over to Hu Hanmin, who would later be a rival with Chiang Kai-shek for control of the Nationalists (Kuomintang) in the late 1920s. 

The reason that Sun Yat-sen gave command of the navy and army to Hu Hanmin was because he wanted to go to the Baiyun Mountains of Guangzhou to recover from his illness.

However, Sun Yat-sen was invited to Beijing instead — the reason was to meet the warlord that controlled Beijing.

At the time, The Nationalists only held power in Southern China.

When he arrived by train, about 20 thousand people met him at the station. 

The warlord had invited Sun Yat-sen to Beijing to talk about how to end the chaos and anarchy that still raged throughout much of China.

Continued in Sun Yat-sen’s Last Days – Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Growing Cautiously Into a Modern Republic – Part 1/7

October 23, 2010

The China Law Blog challenged an opinion I wrote about China becoming a republic with more freedom for the people.

I wrote, “The Economist wants India to win this race, because it is called a democracy as is the U.S., but what isn’t mentioned is that China is becoming a republic with a Chinese twist, which is what Dr. Sun Yat-sen wanted.… Once you read the two pieces in The Economist, you may understand why India’s democracy cannot beat China’s evolving republic.” Source: Comparing India and China’s Economic Engines

The China Law Blog criticized this post saying, “In other words, iLook takes what he sees as China’s aspirations and assumes (without a shred of factual support or even argument) that China will very shortly fully achieve those aspirations.”

I don’t recall writing “very shortly“.

In fact, the freedoms the world’s democracies are urging China’s government to implement ASAP may not materialize for decades and some freedoms found in the West may never appear.

To understand why China may be moving toward more freedom slowly, the best place to start is with Dr. Sun Yat-sen (1866 – 1925)

Sun is known as the father of China’s Republic.

To achieve this dream, Sun started by unifying the Communists and Nationalists into a two-party republic in southern China in the early 20th century. Both parties respected Sun, and he made it work.

Unfortunately, Sun died in 1924 at a time when China was in ruins and torn by anarchy and violence between competing warlords.

Then, Chiang Kai-shek, who was a member of the ruling class and a man who hated the Communists, went on a rampage slaughtering Communists and igniting a civil war that would rage even after Japan invaded during World War II. 

Chiang’s first move against the Communists was in the south. His next was in Shanghai to break the labor unions the Communists had been organizing to improve the lives of sweatshop labor working in foreign owned factories. 

Chiang Kai-shek’s goal was to exterminate the labor unions and the Communists, and he had support from the foreign factory owners.

The Communists that survived had no choice but to defend themselves. Surrender wasn’t an option.

Decades later, in 1949, the Communist Party won the revolution under Mao’s leadership and with the support of China’s peasants.

Chiang Kai-shek would flee to Taiwan and protected by the US, he would rule that island under martial law as a brutal dictator for twenty-six years. Taiwan would not become a democracy until years after Chiang and Mao’s deaths.

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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.

2 Comments | America, China, Chinese history, Communism, cultural differences, politics | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Brutal Dictator and an American Ally – Chiang Kai-shek

October 21, 2010

Casey DuBose wrote a comment wanting proof for the claim that 30,000 were killed during the 2/28 massacre in Taiwan. Here is the proof and more.

Arts & Humanities listed Chiang Kai-shek with other dictators responsible for horrible atrocities and claimed he is responsible for at last one million deaths.

The Taipei Times published a piece on the front page of the paper on Tuesday, February 27, 2007, and said, Former dictator Chiang Kai-shek was a murderer and President Chen Shui-bian said Taiwan’s former authoritarian regime and its leaders were responsible for the massacre of tens of thousands of civilians slain in 1947.

On a site that lists the death tolls for the major wars and atrocities of the twentieth century, Chiang Kai-shek was given credit for 10,214,000 democides from 1921 to 1948.

In another post about Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, enotes.com says, “From 1927 to 1949, Chiang’s troops used murder, torture and other brutal tactics to wipe out the communists.”

Then Scaruffi.com lists a century of genocides from 1900-2000 and Chiang Kai-shek was credited with the deaths of 30 thousand in a popular uprising in Taiwan in 1947.

I read at the Boston Examiner that several thousand protesters marched in Taipei on February 28, 1947 against the brutality (that took place the day before) but were met with bullets. Martial law was declared and even though things had settled down by the time the Nationalist soldiers arrived the massacre began almost immediately.

East Asia posted an Austrian Perspective by Christian Schafferer, who said the infamous 1947 “2-28 Incident” resulted in ten to thirty thousand civilians killed and Taiwan’s governor executed.

I discovered a book on the topic, Representing Atrocity in Taiwan, The 2.28 Incident and the White Terror by Sylvia Li-Chun, who is the Notre Dame Assistant Professor of Chinese at the University of Notre Dame.

The most powerful evidence comes from the monument in Taiwan to the incident, which says, “Within a few months, the number of deaths, injured and missing persons amounted to tens of thousands.  Keelung, Taipei, Chiayi and Kaohsiung suffered the highest number of casualties. It was called the February 28 Incident.”

Then from the Asia Times, “They slaughtered civilians at random to terrorize the Taiwanese into submission, and carried out a targeted campaign to wipe out the Taiwanese elite – local leaders and intellectuals – who represented the biggest threat to KMT rule. To this date the numbers killed are uncertain, but historians estimate 30,000.”

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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.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Crackdown on Ignorance

October 10, 2010

Today, Yahoo News posted an Associated Press piece by Gillian Wong.

The lead paragraph says, “An imprisoned Chinese dissident who won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize was allowed to meet Sunday with his wife and told her in tears that he was dedicating the award to the victims of a 1989 military crackdown on pro-democracy protesters…”

When I wrote about part seven of a BBC documentary of China’s Capitalist Revolution, I said, “The protesters were not demanding Western style politics or an end to Communist Party rule as many in the West believe. They wanted the government to listen to their opinions about reforms and corruption.”

The banners the protesters carried said, “We support the Great Glorious Communist Party of China.”

There was no pro-democracy movement. The protest happened impulsively and got out of control like so many things young people do.

Since when has any country allowed hormone driven college students decide the course of a nation? 

The reason those students became heroes in the West was because the Western media made them heroes and turned the fiction of a pro-democracy movement into a fact believed by hundreds of millions.

It seems that Liu Xiaobo believes that fiction too.

If Liu Xiaobo wants to dedicate his Noble Peace Prize to anyone, it should be to the victims of the 2/28 Massacre in Taiwan where almost 30 thousand were killed by Chiang Kai-shek’s troops.

However, the reason few in the West know of this massacre was that Chiang Kai-shek was not only a brutal dictator but a converted Christian and an American ally.

It is regrettable that hundreds of misguided college students lost their lives during the Tiananmen Square Incident, but that doesn’t compare to what happened in Taiwan decades earlier.

In fact, what those unorganized students in Tiananmen Square accomplished in 1989 almost stopped Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms from succeeding. Source: Chinese Pod

See Nobel Peace Prize goes to Liu Xiaobo

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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.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Revising History Belongs to the Victor

September 8, 2010

The Economist has a Blog called Asia view that reported the Chinese Communist Party is planning to celebrate the 90th anniversary of its founding in 2011.

It seems that John Woo, the director of Mission Impossible II will be involved in shooting a film called The Great Exploit of Building the Party.

I am sure that surviving Chiang Kai-shek’s purges will be there along with The Long March and Deng Xiaoping’s Getting Rich is Glorious.

However, China’s Sexual Revolution will be absent.


American Revisionism – Who will win?

The Economist mentions that thousands are working on a book, the publication of the second volume of A History of The Chinese Communist Party. Since the victor always writes history, I wonder if China’s George Washington chopped down a fictional cherry tree too.

What’s interesting is that Communist officials say they will propagandize the valuable experiences the party has accumulated through a long struggle, etc. etc. 

Asia view says, “Nothing new there,” but doesn’t bother to explain that it isn’t very Chinese to act like an American and share the dirt while going to therapy so he or she may learn to forgive his or her parents for being human.

I’ve written before that most Chinese do not like to share embarrassing news with strangers.  This has nothing to do with Communists and everything to do with being Chinese. When history is revised in China, it is Saving Face.

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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. 

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