The Ear to Asia podcast is made available on
the Jakarta Post platform under agreement between
the Jakarta Post and the University of Melbourne.
Hello, I'm Sami Shah. This is Ear to Asia. The
current platform of the Chinese Communist Party
is in many ways indistinguishable from the one
being advanced by Chiang Kai -shek. So one might
suggest that even though the communists won the
civil war, it was in a sense the ideology of
the nationalists that was ultimately victorious.
In this episode, the Chinese civil war's lingering
shadow over modern China. Ear to Asia is the
podcast from Asia Institute, the Asia research
specialists at the University of Melbourne. The
People's Republic of China has long maintained
the option of using military force to retake
Taiwan, a stance that is often interpreted as
a sign that the Chinese Civil War, which brought
the Chinese Communist Party or CCP to power on
the mainland, is not really over. The Chinese
Civil War fought between 1927 and 1949 was an
ideological struggle between two rival factions,
the Nationalist Party or KMT and the CCP. The
KMT championed national self -strengthening and
the restoration of China's dignity. while the
CCP promised a socialist revolution aimed at
dismantling class distinctions and eradicating
the remnants of feudalism. In addition to the
heavy toll on combatants, the war inflicted widespread
suffering on the civilian population, leaving
deep scars on Chinese society as families were
torn apart. It also led to significant changes
for women, many of whom assumed new roles and
responsibilities as traditional family structures
collapsed in the chaos. Despite China's remarkable
economic and military rise, the legacy of the
Chinese civil war continues to cast a long shadow
over the nation. This persists even with the
CCP's tight control over the historical narrative,
ensuring its version of events remains the prevailing
one. So why does the legacy of the Chinese civil
war still drive geopolitical tension between
the People's Republic and Taiwan decades after
its conclusion? How has the psychological trauma
of the war shaped modern Chinese society and
family dynamics? And in what ways does this legacy
influence China's approach to its role as a global
superpower today? Joining me to unravel the blood
-soaked tapestry of China's civil war is Dr.
Louis Mayo, an Asia historian from Asia Institute.
Welcome back to Air to Asia, Louis. Thanks, Sami.
So, Louis, let's start with a very basic contextual
question. Why does China's civil war matter to
our understanding of China today? So the Chinese
civil war matters because of its place in the
larger story of the Chinese revolution. And I
would argue that the Chinese revolution is the
biggest revolutionary transformation of any society
in modern human history. It's the most long -lasting
and it's the one whose effects are the most...
thoroughgoing because they extend to every area
of the life of Chinese people, from culture to
the economy to political institutions to the
structures of daily life. And this revolution,
I think, begins sometime in the 19th century,
if not earlier. And one of its first consequences
is the overthrow of the system of dynastic empire.
the system whose focus was a state with a royal
family, an imperial family, ruling over a large
and diverse imperial territory. And that system
was overthrown and replaced by modern nation
-state republics. And the contest over the shape
of those modern nation -state republics is the
source of the Civil War. And that in the 1920s,
this coalesced into conflict between, in a sense,
two visions from two different parties about
what modern China should look like. One of those
visions was the one associated with the older
party, the Chinese Nationalist Party, and that
emphasised, I suppose, a transformation of Chinese
society within the context of a single nation
state. The other vision... was a socialist one
associated with the Chinese Communist Party,
which was formed in 1921. And that affiliated
the revolution in China with a series of revolutionary
struggles going on around the world in which
working people were held to be battling against
the forces of economic inequality, economic inequalities
that might be found in traditional agriculture
-based economic systems. or economic and social
inequalities based on the emerging industrial
economy. And so the battle between those two
visions of what the Chinese national revolution
should be about, how it should be affiliated
to international struggles, is what really drives
the civil war. That does then provide us an opportunity
to get from you a beginner's guide to the Chinese
civil war, if you will, a potted history. Well,
I mean, the fact that the start... date is not
clear and the end date is not clear is itself
quite instructive. I suppose that the start date
is often seen at the point in the 1920s when
a coalition that had existed between the Chinese
Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communist Party
definitively broke down when the Chinese Nationalist
Forces, under the leadership of Chiang Kai -shek,
as he's known in Mandarin Chinese, took... violent
action against the communists, who they argued
were threatening to overthrow the nationalist
regime and essentially initiate a revolution
model on the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.
That conflict drives the communists away from
the cities and into the countryside. are able
to survive in the countryside, but many historians
argue that the period between 1927 and 1937 is
really one in which the communists don't make
a lot of headway in terms of expanding their
revolution. In 1937, the decisive event is that
Japan invades the Republic of China. It does
so for a complex of reasons. One of which, I
guess, is a sense that the long -term destiny
of Japan is to lead an East Asian structure,
that Japan's military will be the dominant force
within, and that this new Japanese -led order
in East Asia will be an alternative to that being
promoted by other competing powers in this period,
namely the Soviet Union. And the United States
of America, those are the other two rivals for
power in this structure. And then when the Japanese
invade in 1937, their military action and their
policies are so destructive of civilian life
and social institutions that the communists are
effectively able to capitalize upon that breakdown
in the authority structures of the KMT. and then
to go on to basically win a civil war that breaks
out again after World War II finishes in 1945.
Questions of why any side wins a war are matters
of endless debate. They're always unresolvable.
But a lot of historians would argue that the
communists were successful because they had very,
very strong organizational discipline. And they
were effectively able to take over military resources
and to mobilize, particularly the peasants in
the countryside, and to establish a new regime,
which the Chinese nationalists had been unable,
essentially, to do effectively. And so that's
what causes the communist victory in 1949 and
the establishment of the People's Republic of
China as the government that rules from Beijing.
and the Chinese nationalists who are defeated
retreat to the island of Taiwan. And just to
add, Taiwan had been a colony of Japan all through
the period that we've discussed up to the point
of World War II's conclusion, basically from
1895 to 1945, and in that sense is outside the
story of the Chinese Civil War up to that point.
How did the revolution against the Qing dynasty
in 1911, which is also known as the Xinhai Revolution,
affect the subsequent civil war? So the civil
war we can interpret at least as partly the consequence
of divisions within the revolutionary movement.
the revolutionary movement had emerged as an
attempt to replace the Chinese dynastic system,
which was a dynastic system under the control
of the Qing royal household, which was associated
with the Manchu ethnic group. This is a group
whose original language is unrelated to the Han
Chinese languages that took power through a conquest
of the territories of the Ming dynasty, which
had been the last, I suppose, ethnically Han
Chinese. We define that as a dynasty where the
ruling family was of Han ethnicity and spoke
Han Chinese languages. state, the Manchu state,
not only taken over the territory of the Ming
dynasty, it subsequently conquered Tibet, Mongolia,
the territories that we now call Xinjiang in
Chinese Turkestan. So that state, right, if you
think about it, has strong parallels in its structure
with the Ottoman Empire, which is another multi
-ethnic, multicultural land -based structure.
and the Mughal Empire in India. And I think we
could also argue the Spanish Empire that emerged
after the conquest of the Aztec and Inca Empires
in Latin America. So these are the kinds of large
states that dominate the world between the 16th
century, really, and the early 20th century.
Those states break up. through a series of revolutions,
of which the revolution against the Qing dynasty
is one. What kind of state will replace the Qing
empire is something that no one agrees about.
You also mentioned the Japanese invasion and
the subsequent war resistance. What effect did
this have on the outcome of the civil war? It's
here worth talking about some of the ways in
which historians from outside China have discussed
this question. The American political scientist,
Chalmers Johnson, in 1962, formed an argument
that it was the communists' successful mobilization
of rural people, peasants in particular, during
the anti -Japanese war. that gave the communists
a decisive advantage that they hadn't had prior
to the Japanese invasion. It's also been argued
that the civil war essentially smashed the traditional
rural economic structures. The old rural ruling
class was basically driven out. It escaped as
refugees. So the old social institutions in most
of rural China were overthrown. during the Japanese
invasion and after it, essentially you had a
kind of de facto social levelling as the old
elite classes lost a lot of their wealth. So
the power that an elite or a dominant class group
has to maintain control was substantially weakened
by the fact that it no longer had the kind of
economic authority that it had prior to the Japanese
invasion. The Japanese invasion impoverishes
and disrupts social life on an unbelievable scale.
It's exceptionally violent. The struggles are
very, very difficult for people used to thinking
about World War II in the context of Western
Europe to imagine or understand. It's much, much
more similar to the kind of destruction that
one sees when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.
tens of millions of deaths, many of them civilians.
Can we drill down a little now onto the two sides
of the civil war, the main arguments of the KMT
and the CCP? You've given us a bit of an overview,
but I'd like to know more about what each side
brought in terms of their philosophies, their
justifications. These days, it's kind of hard
to see. the ideological energies that drove the
oppositions in the Civil War. This is because
the contemporary Chinese Communist Party, essentially
over the last sort of three to even four decades,
remoulded itself as a party that claims authority
on the basis of its nationalism, and that it
is a protector of the Chinese nation. and that
it is engaged in the restoration of China's civilizational
and cultural dignity. That's a platform that
ironically is pretty much the one that the defeated
Chinese nationalists proclaimed. They said, we're
going to modernize China and we're going to create
a space in which the beauties, I guess you could
say it, of traditional Chinese culture will be
shown in a properly modern society. The communists
at the time, argued that this nationalism, like
other nationalisms, was a kind of disguise for
the power, essentially, of a local business and
landowning class, a business and landowning class
which the communists accused of being allied
to foreign imperialists. So the Chinese communists
said, we're more nationalistic. than the nationalists
because we are advocating radical social revolution
and an overthrow, essentially, of the institutions
that permit foreign domination of Chinese society
and Chinese people. At the same time, as Marxists,
they inherit the view that nationalism is basically
an instrument through which workers in particular
countries are deceived. into focusing their emotional
and political attentions on rivalry with other
countries rather than with fighting the inequalities
within their own system. So that's the point
of ideological difference between the two of
them. These days, I think that's much more unclear
because the Chinese Communist Party doesn't really
talk about its role as a leader of working class
revolution. It talks about its... role essentially
in producing a harmonious society in which the
tensions that you find in a society like the
United States purportedly don't exist, and a
society in which Chinese culture is accorded
true respect. At the same time, the Chinese Communist
Party continues to define itself as an anti -feudal
structure. Feudalism is a very ambiguous concept
in China, but what it generally refers to is
all forms of oppressive traditional social relationships.
So conservative attitudes within the family,
particularly in relationship to the position
of women, I guess local power at the expense
of central power, an agriculturally based power
structure rather than an industrially based power
structure. Those are the things that the Chinese
Communist Party continues to invoke. when it
describes its own history as the party that,
in a sense, brought feudalism to an end in China.
Let's focus now on the two charismatic leaders
of these two different sides of the conflict.
On one side with the KMT, you have Chiang Kai
-shek. On the other with the CCP, you have Mao
Zedong. What were the similarities and differences
then between Chiang Kai -shek and Mao Zedong?
They're both such polarizing figures. So the
Canadian historian Diana Lowry has described
them both as megalomaniac. That in other words,
they both came to be caught up in a cult of their
own personalities and to believe that they alone
had the recipe for the salvation of the Chinese
nation and the Chinese revolution. They're interesting
in terms of their personal histories. Chiang
Kai -shek was the... brother -in -law by marriage
of Sun Yat -sen, the founder of the Chinese revolution.
Sun Yat -sen's second wife, Sung Ching -ling,
who later became a supporter of the communists,
was the sister of Sung Mei -ling, the wife of
Chiang Kai -shek. So there was a complex family
dynamic in terms of the relationship of Chiang
to Sun. He was a military guy. Mao Zedong was
a person who, I never tire of repeating this,
was trained as a primary school teacher. He was
a person deeply concerned with the inadequacies
of the traditional education system. He was a
person who had hostile relations to his own family,
whereas Chiang Kai -shek is celebrated for his
filiality towards his mother in particular. I
think you can see them, I guess, on the one hand
as They're both military leaders. If you look
at pictures of them in their youth, particularly
as they're fighting the Civil War, their clothing
is a really interesting indication of the difference
between them. Chiang Kai -shek is always immaculately
attired. He's sharp military uniform. He looks
like a man of authority. He looks a lot like
many right -wing dictators of that period you
find in America and other places like that. like
Mussolini. Mao, in the images that were very
central to the period when the anti -Japanese
war is going on, is scruffy, frequently depicted
in bad clothes, with long hair, a person who
certainly projected to followers this great informality,
and those people who I guess are in rebellion
against what might be called conservative familial
values, found Mao, at least at this initial stage,
to be a kind of symbol of a kind of radical unconventionality.
That proves to be, at best, a partial reading
of what he was. And that if you look at a lot
of images of Mao, particularly after the revolution,
he's very much cleaned up. He looks much more
like a leader of a strong militarized republic,
a bit like Stalin. A lot of the iconography of
Mao is borrowed, essentially, from depictions
of Stalin in the Stalin cult. How did their respective
personalities then influence the strategies used
by each side during the Civil War? Well, that's
an interesting question. One can argue that Mao,
as a person of great charisma and indeed of personal
unpredictability, was willing to be more fluid
in the way that he approached military questions
to change his mind, to change his tactics and
to change his strategy and also to delegate responsibility.
Chiang is seen by many people as much more of
a kind of micromanager and therefore is having
eventually run into problems militarily because
he couldn't. either, I guess, build a solid core
of generals who were directly loyal to him and
trusted him or to, in a sense, pull back and
let those generals basically apply their own
strategies to military affairs. Earlier, you
mentioned how the Civil War had a profound impact
on the family structures, the family makeups
of China at the time and after. Does that mean
that there was a generational divide between
who aligned with whom in terms of politics? Or
what impact did this have? Can you explain that
a little bit more? Yeah, so the Civil War is
in many ways an extension of an earlier family
revolution. There's a good case for saying that,
in fact, the real focus of the revolutionary
intellectuals in the early period in which the
Chinese communist movement emerges is not so
much the problem of class, but the problem of
patriarchal authority in the family. And these
are a generation of people who... experienced
a radically different kind of education from
what had been found in China prior to the late
19th century in terms of gender segregation schooling.
And so what happens when you start to have co
-educational schooling, of course, is that boy
and girl students or male and female students
fall in love with each other. And that will often
challenge any system of arranged marriage. So
a kind of romanticism, which is a romanticism
about free choice in marriage, is one of the
features essentially of this period. That, of
course, is largely an issue for elite groups.
But for people in more impoverished parts of
the social structure, particularly for farmers,
I guess. One of the traditional kind of areas
of concern is how to reproduce family control
over property, and that was done through arranged
marriage. And that's particularly, of course,
of concern to land owners, that they have a stable
transmission of a property from generation to
generation. As the rural economy and rural social
system kind of fractures during the Civil War,
that authority, that patriarchal household heads
have over wives and daughters starts to fray.
And the communists are particularly assertive
in mobilising women in the revolutionary courts.
That is one of their power bases. For women who
are discontented with a conservative familial
order, who are from intellectual or wealthy families,
the communists have a deep attractiveness. And
I guess that's a common pattern for people with
feminist concerns to gravitate towards leftist
politics and towards Marxism. But at the rural
level, at the level of the villages, it's not
so much that discontent with the constraints
that traditional family structures impose on,
say, the creative life of women. or on their
self -expression, so much so as a set of questions
about how women are subordinated essentially
to the institutions of the patriarchal rural
family and the fracturing of the economy and
the social institutions, the disruptions caused
by people having to leave their homes. those
all produce quite important readjustments in
relationships between men and women that the
communists are very successful at capitalising
upon. You're listening to Ear to Asia from Asia
Institute at the University of Melbourne. Thank
you. You'll find articles by some of our regular
Air to Asia guests and by many others. Plus,
you can catch recent episodes of Air to Asia
at the Melbourne Asia Review website, which again
you can find at melbourneasiareview .edu .au.
I'm Sami Shah and I'm joined by Asia historian
Dr Lewis Mayo. We're talking about the ramifications
of China's civil war in the 20th century. Lewis,
we've talked now about the makeup of the Civil
War as well as the things that led to it and
the impact it had on families and society. But
one of the main things that comes up when we
discuss the Civil War in China is the human toll.
How many people were killed and just how brutal
was it? Well, death tolls in wars are always
controversial, but the scale of... death in the
Chinese Civil War and in the Japanese invasion,
which it is really a part of, is probably the
most substantial of any civil war struggle in
20th century history. So the scale of death is
vast. We're talking... 10, 20, 30 million at
least in the scale of our population, which is
smaller than the Chinese population is now. So,
you know, very, very large numbers of people
affected by this violence. And the impact on
society, the psychological trauma, the societal
disruption, is there a way to measure such a
thing? The importance of the civil war... underplayed
in many ways in contemporary china in part because
it was so horrible that in many ways people wanted
to move on from it and so rather than it being
a topic which is publicly discussed and publicly
engaged with it's kind of in the closet i personally
feel from just an anecdotal observation about
these things, that having been taught by individuals
who had experienced it and left China as refugees,
the impact that that had on them personally was
something that only revealed itself after long
-term exposure to those people's lives and their
characters. these were people who had lived through
terrible events. Like many people who lived through
terrible events, particularly in the middle of
the 20th century, they just didn't want to talk
about it. So it's very similar to the trauma
found amongst a lot of World War II veterans
in Japan and the United States and in other places
that they essentially kept to themselves. In
many cases, only now that some of those questions
are starting to be publicly discussed. For those
listeners who are interested, I strongly recommend
Diana Lowry's book on the Chinese Civil War,
that's L -A -R -Y, because it does strongly address
those issues of trauma and the concealment of
that trauma in the subsequent generations. Can
you say there were winners and losers in this
war? And if you do say that, who were they? That's
interesting because... One of the arguments that
one can make is that the official picture is
that the communists win the civil war, they defeat
the nationalists, and it's their ideology that
becomes the dominant one in China after 1949,
and the nationalists are essentially driven out.
But as I've said earlier, the current platform
of the Chinese Communist Party is... in many
ways, indistinguishable from the one being advanced
by Chiang Kai -shek. So one might suggest that
even though the communists won the civil war,
it was in a sense the ideology of the nationalists
that was ultimately victorious. So the idea of
a strong, one might say, conservative conception
of China's position in the world. one that doesn't
emphasize internal class struggles and doesn't
emphasize the rights, particularly of the working
class, which is what Chiang Kai -shek had advanced,
is the one that the government in Beijing now
puts forward. And those that support it, a fairly
substantial part of the Chinese population, at
least at the time of speaking, endorse and find
credible. So many of the tensions that one finds
between competing visions of what the Chinese
revolution should be, if you look through the
historical record, those tensions and those problems
are largely hidden in public discussion in China
in the present, when there's an enormous emphasis
on the solidarity and unity of the Chinese nation
as the defining feature of what Chinese people
are. Unlike the American Civil War, which has
been reasonably well documented, much less has
been said and written by the survivors of the
Chinese Civil War. Why is that? That's actually
an issue that's very dear to my heart. If you
look at what had happened in the discussion of
the American Civil War in the period roughly
60 to 70 years after it had broken out. What
you see in the United States is remarkably similar
to what we see in China now. And the two rival
sides and the tensions that I suppose had existed
between them were, I guess, able to conceal their
differences through a common commitment, for
example, to the idea of an American nation committed
to freedom. So the tension, I guess, between
that struggle over Civil War memory in the 1920s
or 1930s is one very much between what a South
which had successfully instituted structures
of racial segregation and a North which accepted
those institutions with only a small number of
white Northerners being. active in pursuing the
radical cause of the reconstruction of the South
after the 1860s surrender. Those clashes had
been downplayed, for example, in favor of an
idea that all Americans were committed to liberty
and freedom, and having, for example, the Ku
Klux Klan expanding into territories that had
historically been associated with the Union cause.
So, you know, you get Klansmen committing atrocities
in Oklahoma, other areas of the West, which basically
had been allied to the Union courts. So when
we look at the American Civil War and the public
discussion about it that we see now and compare
it with the Chinese Civil War situation, we have
to basically pay attention to the fact that the
Chinese Civil War happened much more recently.
I would argue that in an equivalent period in
American history, the actual ferocity of the
struggles, ideological, personal, in the Civil
War had been largely downplayed in the dominant
record. A very good example of that is the film
Gone with the Wind. So Gone with the Wind is
a 1939 film which was enormously popular with
white Americans, northern and southern. which
tells the civil war as a romantic story from
the southern viewpoint. Now, we haven't quite
got to that point in China where the Kuomintang
is, in a sense, fully recuperated. But one could
argue that the way in which the Chinese mainland
conceives of the civil war essentially now is
that it's a war over two competing visions of
what a unified China should be, rather than...
a massive and violent confrontation between rival
conceptions of what the social system in China
should be like. Is one of the reasons then the
wildly differing narratives of the war between
Taiwan and the CCP and does the victorious CCP
then shape and influence the narrative on mainland
China and in Taiwan is so different? Yeah, well,
I mean, what's very important about the Taiwan
situation is that the dominant viewpoint in Taiwan
now that's associated with the government that's
in power there argues that the Chinese civil
war is a Chinese event that occurs on the Chinese
mainland that Taiwan is really not part of. This
is an historical viewpoint associated with the
cause of Taiwan independence that treats Taiwan's
history as being separate from that of mainland
China, and that includes the story of the Civil
War. Now, the Chinese nationalists, when they
retreated to Taiwan in 1949, argued that what
they were doing was preparing a base for the
reunification of Taiwan with the mainland. And
that was the ideology that was imposed through
the schooling system. So the schooling was in
Mandarin, which was the Chinese language of national
unity for both nationalists and for communists,
rather than the local forms of Chinese that were
what was spoken at home by the people on Taiwan.
And that what you see in the process of what
we call Taiwan democratization is an internal
rejection by dissenting forces within Taiwan
of that Chinese nationalist ideology. So it's
not so much that modern Taiwan narratives of
the Chinese civil war are a kind of retained
version of the old Chinese nationalist idea about
what the communists were, but in fact a critique.
of the idea that Taiwan and the Chinese mainland
belong together. So that's where the shift has
occurred. So that, of course, means that there's
freedom to discuss the events of the Chinese
Civil War, in part because people on Taiwan say,
well, it's not our problem. But of course, Taiwan
is not a society in which the state censors public
discussion of historical issues. Whereas in the
Chinese mainland... The strong narrative is,
I guess, that any discussion of public issues
that raises questions about the unity of the
nation is extremely dangerous. So that if you
started to talk about the civil war and the rivalries
that it entailed, you might start a new one.
This idea of the civil war being a kind of hidden
but looming threat. That, I would argue, is the
thing that the Chinese Communist Party does with
the civil war narrative. It says if we slacken
our grip on public discussion, what will happen
is internal disorder and a repeat of civil war
structures. So even though I've argued earlier
that the civil war is a repressed memory in China,
it is invoked by the CCP. as what lies in store
for you if there's any kind of public discussion
of political differences between conceptions
of what China should be. And that includes public
discussions of the more painful parts of China's
modern history. How has the Chinese diaspora
then been affected? That's an extremely interesting
question because the Chinese diaspora is a term
that's used for many, many different kinds of
individuals and cultures. I mean, the term might
be applied to someone living in Indonesia who
was of Chinese descent, whose family has been
there for eight or nine generations, doesn't
speak anything Indonesian or another local language.
That person can be classified as part of a Chinese
diaspora. on the same terms as someone who has
emigrated to a city like Melbourne from northern
China in the last five years. The debates, I
guess, in the diasporic world are very much specific
to the particular context that you're talking
about. In Malaysia, for example, what you found
during the 1950s was a Chinese communist guerrilla
movement opposed to the Malaysian state. which
argued that Malaysia needed to follow China down
the revolutionary path of the communists. That
would contrast quite radically with the situation
in East Timor, where the education system for
the Chinese population that was living there
was dominated by the ideologies of the Chinese
nationalists. So in other words, if you thought
about East Timor and the Chinese communists in
Malaysia. as really representing rival conceptions
of what China's future should be, then it's basically
split upon civil war lines. Of course, much of
the energy in modern Chinese nationalism came
from what we call Chinese diasporic populations.
Sun Yat -sen himself wired much of his sense
of what... the future of China should be. He's
considered the father of the Chinese nationalist
revolution when he was living in Hawaii as a
young person. And so the space that existed outside
of control by the agents of the Qing government
in the 19th century permitted radical nationalists
and revolutionary conceptions of Chinese identity
to come into being. And so you get, I suppose,
shadow civil wars played out across the Pacific
and Southeast Asia in Chinese communities. But
you also get situations where people who are
of diasporic Chinese heritage say, that's nothing
to do with me. I'm Thai. I'm Thai of Chinese
background. And so those struggles are for other
people. Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution
in 1966, which ended when he died in 1976. Was
this Cultural Revolution a repeat of the Civil
War? I would argue that in many ways, it was
a successor to the Civil War. It was a revolution,
a struggle that broke out in the education system
at first. The argument, I suppose, that one can
make about the education system is that it was
one of the origin points of the Civil War and
of the revolution, because educational discontent,
as I mentioned, Mao Zedong was a primary school
teacher, was one of the forces that drove many
people down the radical and socialist path. So
you could say there was unfinished business about
education and how much revolution there should
be in education. A second part was that in the
large cities such as Beijing, where the Cultural
Revolution sort of exploded, you had schools
in which there were students who had family backgrounds
that were associated with the losing side of
the Civil War. And they are in classes with the
children of communist revolutionary cadets. And
the argument often became one between Those who
said we are carrying the revolution on because
the revolution is about who is the most committed
to radical class -based politics, regardless
of what our family background is, versus people
who said family background is decisive. Our families
made the revolution. Your families were on the
other side. You say you're in favor of radical
class politics. I think you're probably secretly
conspiring. with the forces of the Chinese nationalists
on Taiwan or other bourgeois liberals such as
the Americans. So civil war structures were shadows
in that sense. A second point, though, is that
if you're thinking about people who were teenagers
or in early adulthood during the Cultural Revolution,
they were people who were children when the civil
war was going on. One of the problems that they
faced was that their parents had been involved
in this massive struggle full of drama and heroism,
and they were just studying. So there's this
sense of how do we capture the drama that our
parents' lives were shaped by in our lives? And
when you think about people having watched, you
know, propaganda film after propaganda film about
the revolutionary struggle, one of the things
that it did was to dramatize violence as the
principal thing in any real revolution. This
is another thing that communists said, you can't
change the social order without violence. The
nationalists said, violence is corrosive to national
development. I just want to go back to the US
relationship with China. How has the civil war
in the US shaped its worldview and its response
to both the Chinese revolution in 1911 and the
Chinese civil war, you know, 1945 onwards? Well,
I think this is a very important and much understudied
question. This civil war split the United States
in the east, creating... incredible levels of
distrust. After the defeat of the South, one
of the things for dealing with the problems of
the South was to essentially let southerners
expand across the United States, filling up the
territories, you know, what we now think of as
the Midwest and the West. That reaches an end
point in the 1890s, and the U .S. has nowhere
to go except further east. And this kind of coincides
with the revolutionary outbreak in the 1890s
in China, the beginnings of it. And Sun Yat -sen
himself is a person who receives an essentially
American education in Hawaii. And Hawaii is annexed
by a coup by American forces, essentially, in
the 1890s and provides the... core of their infrastructure
for expansion across the Pacific. So American
empire, which is in some ways a solution to the
problems of the Civil War, runs up against the
Chinese Republic. That said, the Americans also
felt that, or some of them felt, that the Chinese
Republican movement was their child. They had
produced a Republican structure similar to their
own. Now, you remember that when the Chinese
Republic was established in 1911, almost everywhere
else in the region was in some kind of colonial
empire. And with the exception of France, those
colonial empires were monarchies. So the Americans
argued that essentially the Chinese Revolution
is a revolution that is succeeding. to the mantle
that we, I suppose, took upon ourselves when
we started our own revolution. Others argued
that the Chinese revolution was far more radical
than the American revolution and left to say
in the 1960s, well, you know, the American revolution
was... a slaveholder revolution. The Chinese
revolution is one in which the power of slaveholders
and landowners is being overthrown and that we
should learn from it. Xi Jinping is the son of
someone who fought in the civil war and is the
first paramount leader of the CCP and China who
was born in the post -civil war era. How has
the civil war affected him personally and in
how he leads the CCP and China? analysts of Xi
Jinping's career tend to focus on the idea that
he is someone who has inherited his position
as a result of wide trust on the part of the
old members of the Chinese Communist Party in
someone whose family is one of theirs. So if
you thought of the Chinese Communist Party as
having changed from being an organization put
together by people committed to a common cause,
to being something that's a bit more like a family
business. You could argue that Xi Jinping is
someone who is, you know, like an heir to a large
family -based corporation. And so, like other
people from his generation, He was shaped by
the conflicts in the elite schools in Beijing
between different factions of students fighting
over what they perceived to be the correct direction
of the Chinese Revolution. Xi Jinping spent some
of his youth in the impoverished areas that the
Chinese communists occupied during the 1930s
and during World War II. And so I guess he has
a very strong sense of his own life as being
moulded by the landscapes, cultural and physical,
of the Chinese Civil War and the Chinese Revolution.
His relationship to Chinese radicalism is complex.
He is a stability -oriented person who is active
in the repression of any... dissent from the
working classes in particular within China. But
at the same time, he believes he is a Marxist.
He asserts that his philosophy is guided by Marxism
and by what's called the positive aspects of
Chinese cultural tradition. And so he thinks
and states that he belongs within that matrix
ideologically of those two forces. You could
say that he represents a kind of civil war compromise
in some ways between the nationalist affiliated
ideologies based around Chinese tradition and
the official belief that Chinese communist policy
is guided by Marxism. So it's a kind of unholy
alliance when one looks at the intellectual traditions
of the Chinese Communist Party. a kind of coherent
approach if you see it from the point of view
of trying to reconcile the warring forces within
the civil war. Why is Taiwan so important to
the CCP? Will retaking it provide some closure?
I look at the Taiwan issue as one of a number
of cases that you find around the world where
you have nationalism that is focused on lost
territories and that you organize your domestic
self -representation around the idea that a bit
of your country has been cut off and you are
fighting to restore the wholeness of what you
might call the body of the nation by eventually
sewing the severed limb back onto the body from
which it was cut off. So, you know, examples,
one that I'm particularly fond of is that in
a war between Chile and Peru and Bolivia in the
19th century, territories that are now in northern
Chile that belong to Bolivia were taken over.
And Bolivian nationalism to this day discusses
this lost world. Hungarian nationalism has in
one of its more radical kind of formulations
an idea that there are parts of Hungary that
were lost as a result of the peace settlement
in World War I. This is a case that one finds
in context after context. Cambodian nationalists
argue that southern Vietnam was taken from them
by the Vietnamese. conjuring up the idea that
Taiwan is a territory that belongs to the Chinese
nation and must be restored to it is part of
a broader pattern. There are some interesting
ironies about that because, of course, Mongolia
was also part of the territory of the Qing dynasty,
but the Mongolians are a separate polity, largely
as a result of having emerged as the first socialist
state other than the Soviet Union in 1921. And
much of the territory of the Russian Far Eastern
Siberia, or some of it, is also part of the old
territories of the Qing dynasty. But that stuff
never gets discussed. So part of it is that kind
of cold -eyed view of this problem would be to
say that if you keep focusing on the idea that
Taiwan is cut off from us, you get... people
to divert their attention from contradictions
within the country. One final question then,
and it's slightly more philosophical, I suppose,
than all the other parts of our discussion, is
what will it take to heal the wounds of the Chinese
civil war? Well, I mean, I think it's a little
bit like the question of what will it take to
heal the wounds of the US civil war. We've seen
in American politics since the rise of the MAGA
movement, you know, intense disagreement over
the meaning of the American Civil War with people
saying, well, if you've got statues of Robert
E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia, you're basically
honoring a cause which was dedicated to the enslavement
of African -American people. And other people
saying. We, as Virginians, see Lee as part of
our past. And we acknowledge that our past is
there when we have that statue. In many ways,
I think the American Civil War struggles really
only came to the fore as a public problem in
my lifetime. I'm 60. And, you know, it's worth
remembering that when I was born, it was still
illegal for black and white people to marry each
other in a number of states in the US. An interesting
fact about Barack Obama is that Obama is president
of the United States because Hawaii was officially
incorporated into the United States just prior
to his birth. Segregationalists in the South
said, we can't. have Hawaii integrated into the
United States because that will open the way
for a mixed race person to become president.
And that's exactly what happened. The struggles
of the American Civil War were raging right up
until the time of Obama's life, and I think are
still raging now. In the case of the Chinese
Civil War, I think the wounds are very deep and
very recent. I don't see the resolution of the
contradictions in the Chinese civil war as being
able to be resolved at any point in the near
future. So I suspect that primarily they will
be passed over in silence. Lewis, thank you very
much. Thanks very much. That was a pleasure.
Our guest has been Dr. Lewis Mayo from Asia Institute.
Air to Asia is brought to you by Asia Institute
of the University of Melbourne, Australia You
can find more information about this and all
our other episodes at the Asia Institute website.
Be sure to keep up with every episode of Ear
to Asia by following us on the Apple Podcasts
app, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your
podcasts. If you like the show, please rate and
review it. Every positive review helps new listeners
find the show. And please help us by spreading
the word on your socials. This episode was recorded
on the 22nd of October 2024. Producers were Kelvin
Param and Eric Van Bemmel of Profactual .com.
Ear to Asia is licensed under Creative Commons,
copyright 2024, the University of Melbourne.
I'm Sami Shah. Thanks for your company.