"The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957" (Frank Dikötter)
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- čas přidán 30. 06. 2024
- Full event:
www.cato.org/events/tragedy-li...
Featuring the author Frank Dikötter, Chair Professor of Humanities, University of Hong Kong; with comments by Harry Wu, Founder, Laogai Research Foundation; moderated by Marian L. Tupy, Policy Analyst, Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, Cato Institute.
Purchase Book Following a bloody civil war and the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek in 1949, Mao Zedong hoisted the red flag over Beijing's Forbidden City. Due to the secrecy surrounding the country's records, little has been known about the early years of the communist rule. Drawing on previously classified documents, secret police reports, and eyewitness accounts, Dikötter bears witness to a shocking, largely untold history. People of all walks of life were brutalized, imprisoned, and executed. Others were forced to write confessions and denounce their friends. "The Chinese Communist party refers to its victory in 1949 as 'liberation,'" Dikötter writes. "In China the story of liberation and the revolution that followed is not one of peace, liberty, and justice. It is first and foremost a story of calculated terror and systematic violence." Harry Wu, a human rights advocate who saw the communist takeover and later spent 19 years in various Chinese forced-labor camps, will comment on the book and life under Mao's tyrannical regime.
Video produced by Blair Gwaltney.
You know you’re bad news when Stalin is telling you to pump the breaks on collectivization. Thank you for making this event possible and for sharing the video with the web! Frank Dikötter is a great historian.
😂😂😂
Great work. Thank you🙏
While watching China Rising on Hulu and I was blown away that the Americans supported the Communist Chinese during WW2 supposedly because they were more organized. This explains the rest of that story. Thank you.
Rosevelt was enamored with Adolf Hitler and the NY Times was also in support.
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What do you mean?
Okay, you're serious. How does your assertion explain Mao's denunciation of the "Four Olds"?
Interesting. I've never looked into how much the US spend to help out the Nationalist regime. That's correct. The support was to help fight against Japan at the time. I'm not sure squandered is the correct word but I understand what you mean. Ironically, China leadership is the richest in the world. Eventually that will change.
State education, protectionism, and state worship are all part and parcel of statist regimes of any stripe. As such I don't think we can use those programs to delineate "conservatism", per se.
The nationalists built the welfare state and social reforms for the same reason Bismarck and others had done before; to undermine popular support for socialist movements.
None of the nationalists supported total land and property redistribution as Mao did, nor Marxism outright.
Can't tell if trolling or using different definition of conservative...
Your response doesn't seem to connect to mine. Don't get me wrong, I don't identify with conservatism; I just don't understand how you are justifying your claim.
Even if this is true, this support would have paled in comparison to the billions of dollars of aid squandered on the Nationalist regime. The CCP's organizational effectiveness carried over into military operations against both the Nationalist government and, more importantly, the Imperial Japanese Army. Consequently, because the primary and sole adversary of the US in the Pacific theater of WW2 was Japan, it wouldnt be surprising if the US did offer limited support to the CCP at this time.
When the Dynastic Imperial were overthrown in 1911, the head of Nationalist, Sun Yat San inherited a young republic that exist in name only. The central authority had long eroded and virtually parts of China were governed by provincial warlords and gangsters and Communist gangs are one of them. The country was virtually paralyzed, political protest erupted in addition to European power scheming to carve up China. You can now see the country is virtually ungovernable and it is quite easy to blame the Nationalist as corrupt!
To answer the second part of your statement...History sources has shown that CCP has never fought a single war against the Japanese. This is confirmed in the Japanese war records. All fighting were carried out by the Nationalist. However, when the USSR invaded Manchuria in 1945, they stayed on and assist the CCP both in arms, training and infrastructure as well as air support against the Nationalist. Stalin made sure that CCP remains the sole power of China just as in East Europe.
and now for a lecture on the genocides committed in the name of colonialism and imperialism?
Which every civilization always did.
I like that he critiques power and how we allow it to take hold but he fails to realise that we support unjustified power also such as cheering the combing of Vietnam, Cambodia, North Korea, Iraq, Lybia, execution cruel harsh sanctions and so on. As for the deaths constantly quoted under Mao, the exaggerate claims of deaths from starvation were not increased but decreased from the deaths *before* Mao’s reforms owing to Western imperialist interference with China prior to 1950. Look up life expectancy data from 1950 to 1970, and multiply that through the large population. Mao brought live expectancy from 45 to 70 over his career, literacy from 10% to 80%. I sympathize with you as I used to have similar notion but after a lot of work realized I was completely brainwashed within Australia. Upon a lot of research it turns out that Mao did exceedingly more for the people of China than he caused problems and without Mao and their liberation of China from capitalists in the early 1950s, the whole county of China would have followed a path similar to India or Indonesia which both had a similar (even slightly better) initial conditions. Now China has eliminated poverty and has far better health care, higher literacy, economic mobility and business than India or Indonesia and is even catching up to the West which it was exceedingly behind in 1950s when Britain was still bribing and calling the shots over there.
Just wrong ! Western imperialism did not cause deaths it was the war against Japan and of course the life expectancy figures in peacetime will be better than those during a war. Also life expectancy is a poor measure as famines kill disproportionately the old who would die anyway in a few years and the very young. A better indicator is the decline in the birth rate. Also a famine which kills 40 million still represents less than 5% of the population.