WEBVTT 00:00:00.240 --> 00:00:03.000 The Ear to Asia podcast is made available on 00:00:03.000 --> 00:00:05.480 the Jakarta Post platform under agreement between 00:00:05.480 --> 00:00:07.599 the Jakarta Post and the University of Melbourne. 00:00:08.640 --> 00:00:16.579 Hello, I'm Sami Shah. This is Ear to Asia. The 00:00:16.579 --> 00:00:20.280 current platform of the Chinese Communist Party 00:00:20.280 --> 00:00:24.379 is in many ways indistinguishable from the one 00:00:24.379 --> 00:00:27.339 being advanced by Chiang Kai -shek. So one might 00:00:27.339 --> 00:00:30.519 suggest that even though the communists won the 00:00:30.519 --> 00:00:33.780 civil war, it was in a sense the ideology of 00:00:33.780 --> 00:00:36.200 the nationalists that was ultimately victorious. 00:00:38.000 --> 00:00:42.240 In this episode, the Chinese civil war's lingering 00:00:42.240 --> 00:00:48.810 shadow over modern China. Ear to Asia is the 00:00:48.810 --> 00:00:51.570 podcast from Asia Institute, the Asia research 00:00:51.570 --> 00:01:00.740 specialists at the University of Melbourne. The 00:01:00.740 --> 00:01:03.299 People's Republic of China has long maintained 00:01:03.299 --> 00:01:06.659 the option of using military force to retake 00:01:06.659 --> 00:01:10.019 Taiwan, a stance that is often interpreted as 00:01:10.019 --> 00:01:12.980 a sign that the Chinese Civil War, which brought 00:01:12.980 --> 00:01:16.420 the Chinese Communist Party or CCP to power on 00:01:16.420 --> 00:01:20.140 the mainland, is not really over. The Chinese 00:01:20.140 --> 00:01:24.959 Civil War fought between 1927 and 1949 was an 00:01:24.959 --> 00:01:28.239 ideological struggle between two rival factions, 00:01:28.640 --> 00:01:33.920 the Nationalist Party or KMT and the CCP. The 00:01:33.920 --> 00:01:37.400 KMT championed national self -strengthening and 00:01:37.400 --> 00:01:40.870 the restoration of China's dignity. while the 00:01:40.870 --> 00:01:44.590 CCP promised a socialist revolution aimed at 00:01:44.590 --> 00:01:47.530 dismantling class distinctions and eradicating 00:01:47.530 --> 00:01:51.150 the remnants of feudalism. In addition to the 00:01:51.150 --> 00:01:55.109 heavy toll on combatants, the war inflicted widespread 00:01:55.109 --> 00:01:58.150 suffering on the civilian population, leaving 00:01:58.150 --> 00:02:01.450 deep scars on Chinese society as families were 00:02:01.450 --> 00:02:05.250 torn apart. It also led to significant changes 00:02:05.250 --> 00:02:08.669 for women, many of whom assumed new roles and 00:02:08.669 --> 00:02:11.370 responsibilities as traditional family structures 00:02:11.370 --> 00:02:15.389 collapsed in the chaos. Despite China's remarkable 00:02:15.389 --> 00:02:18.990 economic and military rise, the legacy of the 00:02:18.990 --> 00:02:22.389 Chinese civil war continues to cast a long shadow 00:02:22.389 --> 00:02:26.310 over the nation. This persists even with the 00:02:26.310 --> 00:02:29.469 CCP's tight control over the historical narrative, 00:02:29.849 --> 00:02:33.689 ensuring its version of events remains the prevailing 00:02:33.689 --> 00:02:37.370 one. So why does the legacy of the Chinese civil 00:02:37.370 --> 00:02:40.629 war still drive geopolitical tension between 00:02:40.629 --> 00:02:43.949 the People's Republic and Taiwan decades after 00:02:43.949 --> 00:02:47.370 its conclusion? How has the psychological trauma 00:02:47.370 --> 00:02:50.449 of the war shaped modern Chinese society and 00:02:50.449 --> 00:02:54.439 family dynamics? And in what ways does this legacy 00:02:54.439 --> 00:02:58.099 influence China's approach to its role as a global 00:02:58.099 --> 00:03:02.039 superpower today? Joining me to unravel the blood 00:03:02.039 --> 00:03:05.300 -soaked tapestry of China's civil war is Dr. 00:03:05.500 --> 00:03:08.900 Louis Mayo, an Asia historian from Asia Institute. 00:03:09.340 --> 00:03:12.659 Welcome back to Air to Asia, Louis. Thanks, Sami. 00:03:13.020 --> 00:03:16.259 So, Louis, let's start with a very basic contextual 00:03:16.259 --> 00:03:20.530 question. Why does China's civil war matter to 00:03:20.530 --> 00:03:25.030 our understanding of China today? So the Chinese 00:03:25.030 --> 00:03:27.870 civil war matters because of its place in the 00:03:27.870 --> 00:03:30.789 larger story of the Chinese revolution. And I 00:03:30.789 --> 00:03:33.069 would argue that the Chinese revolution is the 00:03:33.069 --> 00:03:36.550 biggest revolutionary transformation of any society 00:03:36.550 --> 00:03:40.250 in modern human history. It's the most long -lasting 00:03:40.250 --> 00:03:43.430 and it's the one whose effects are the most... 00:03:43.659 --> 00:03:47.020 thoroughgoing because they extend to every area 00:03:47.020 --> 00:03:50.759 of the life of Chinese people, from culture to 00:03:50.759 --> 00:03:54.740 the economy to political institutions to the 00:03:54.740 --> 00:03:57.659 structures of daily life. And this revolution, 00:03:57.659 --> 00:04:01.620 I think, begins sometime in the 19th century, 00:04:01.719 --> 00:04:05.900 if not earlier. And one of its first consequences 00:04:05.900 --> 00:04:09.560 is the overthrow of the system of dynastic empire. 00:04:10.169 --> 00:04:14.669 the system whose focus was a state with a royal 00:04:14.669 --> 00:04:18.410 family, an imperial family, ruling over a large 00:04:18.410 --> 00:04:22.029 and diverse imperial territory. And that system 00:04:22.029 --> 00:04:25.610 was overthrown and replaced by modern nation 00:04:25.610 --> 00:04:30.269 -state republics. And the contest over the shape 00:04:30.269 --> 00:04:33.949 of those modern nation -state republics is the 00:04:33.949 --> 00:04:38.250 source of the Civil War. And that in the 1920s, 00:04:38.250 --> 00:04:41.689 this coalesced into conflict between, in a sense, 00:04:41.709 --> 00:04:45.550 two visions from two different parties about 00:04:45.550 --> 00:04:49.410 what modern China should look like. One of those 00:04:49.410 --> 00:04:52.050 visions was the one associated with the older 00:04:52.050 --> 00:04:55.410 party, the Chinese Nationalist Party, and that 00:04:55.410 --> 00:04:59.170 emphasised, I suppose, a transformation of Chinese 00:04:59.170 --> 00:05:02.810 society within the context of a single nation 00:05:02.810 --> 00:05:06.949 state. The other vision... was a socialist one 00:05:06.949 --> 00:05:09.430 associated with the Chinese Communist Party, 00:05:09.529 --> 00:05:12.430 which was formed in 1921. And that affiliated 00:05:12.430 --> 00:05:16.970 the revolution in China with a series of revolutionary 00:05:16.970 --> 00:05:20.290 struggles going on around the world in which 00:05:20.290 --> 00:05:23.930 working people were held to be battling against 00:05:23.930 --> 00:05:28.310 the forces of economic inequality, economic inequalities 00:05:28.310 --> 00:05:31.430 that might be found in traditional agriculture 00:05:31.430 --> 00:05:35.300 -based economic systems. or economic and social 00:05:35.300 --> 00:05:37.660 inequalities based on the emerging industrial 00:05:37.660 --> 00:05:41.240 economy. And so the battle between those two 00:05:41.240 --> 00:05:43.839 visions of what the Chinese national revolution 00:05:43.839 --> 00:05:46.240 should be about, how it should be affiliated 00:05:46.240 --> 00:05:49.420 to international struggles, is what really drives 00:05:49.420 --> 00:05:53.199 the civil war. That does then provide us an opportunity 00:05:53.199 --> 00:05:57.240 to get from you a beginner's guide to the Chinese 00:05:57.240 --> 00:06:00.500 civil war, if you will, a potted history. Well, 00:06:00.540 --> 00:06:03.740 I mean, the fact that the start... date is not 00:06:03.740 --> 00:06:07.079 clear and the end date is not clear is itself 00:06:07.079 --> 00:06:11.579 quite instructive. I suppose that the start date 00:06:11.579 --> 00:06:15.759 is often seen at the point in the 1920s when 00:06:15.759 --> 00:06:18.660 a coalition that had existed between the Chinese 00:06:18.660 --> 00:06:21.480 Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communist Party 00:06:21.480 --> 00:06:25.079 definitively broke down when the Chinese Nationalist 00:06:25.079 --> 00:06:27.699 Forces, under the leadership of Chiang Kai -shek, 00:06:27.819 --> 00:06:32.079 as he's known in Mandarin Chinese, took... violent 00:06:32.079 --> 00:06:35.420 action against the communists, who they argued 00:06:35.420 --> 00:06:39.199 were threatening to overthrow the nationalist 00:06:39.199 --> 00:06:43.120 regime and essentially initiate a revolution 00:06:43.120 --> 00:06:45.839 model on the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. 00:06:46.100 --> 00:06:49.100 That conflict drives the communists away from 00:06:49.100 --> 00:06:53.620 the cities and into the countryside. are able 00:06:53.620 --> 00:06:56.560 to survive in the countryside, but many historians 00:06:56.560 --> 00:07:01.560 argue that the period between 1927 and 1937 is 00:07:01.560 --> 00:07:04.379 really one in which the communists don't make 00:07:04.379 --> 00:07:07.699 a lot of headway in terms of expanding their 00:07:07.699 --> 00:07:12.779 revolution. In 1937, the decisive event is that 00:07:12.779 --> 00:07:16.560 Japan invades the Republic of China. It does 00:07:16.560 --> 00:07:21.040 so for a complex of reasons. One of which, I 00:07:21.040 --> 00:07:23.860 guess, is a sense that the long -term destiny 00:07:23.860 --> 00:07:28.100 of Japan is to lead an East Asian structure, 00:07:28.360 --> 00:07:33.860 that Japan's military will be the dominant force 00:07:33.860 --> 00:07:37.579 within, and that this new Japanese -led order 00:07:37.579 --> 00:07:40.740 in East Asia will be an alternative to that being 00:07:40.740 --> 00:07:43.879 promoted by other competing powers in this period, 00:07:43.939 --> 00:07:47.310 namely the Soviet Union. And the United States 00:07:47.310 --> 00:07:49.550 of America, those are the other two rivals for 00:07:49.550 --> 00:07:52.389 power in this structure. And then when the Japanese 00:07:52.389 --> 00:07:57.910 invade in 1937, their military action and their 00:07:57.910 --> 00:08:03.389 policies are so destructive of civilian life 00:08:03.389 --> 00:08:06.550 and social institutions that the communists are 00:08:06.550 --> 00:08:10.550 effectively able to capitalize upon that breakdown 00:08:10.550 --> 00:08:14.769 in the authority structures of the KMT. and then 00:08:14.769 --> 00:08:20.569 to go on to basically win a civil war that breaks 00:08:20.569 --> 00:08:24.050 out again after World War II finishes in 1945. 00:08:24.709 --> 00:08:28.410 Questions of why any side wins a war are matters 00:08:28.410 --> 00:08:31.589 of endless debate. They're always unresolvable. 00:08:31.730 --> 00:08:34.470 But a lot of historians would argue that the 00:08:34.470 --> 00:08:38.629 communists were successful because they had very, 00:08:38.710 --> 00:08:41.519 very strong organizational discipline. And they 00:08:41.519 --> 00:08:45.559 were effectively able to take over military resources 00:08:45.559 --> 00:08:49.100 and to mobilize, particularly the peasants in 00:08:49.100 --> 00:08:52.200 the countryside, and to establish a new regime, 00:08:52.340 --> 00:08:55.840 which the Chinese nationalists had been unable, 00:08:56.179 --> 00:08:59.240 essentially, to do effectively. And so that's 00:08:59.240 --> 00:09:03.120 what causes the communist victory in 1949 and 00:09:03.120 --> 00:09:05.320 the establishment of the People's Republic of 00:09:05.320 --> 00:09:08.320 China as the government that rules from Beijing. 00:09:09.070 --> 00:09:11.570 and the Chinese nationalists who are defeated 00:09:11.570 --> 00:09:15.149 retreat to the island of Taiwan. And just to 00:09:15.149 --> 00:09:19.169 add, Taiwan had been a colony of Japan all through 00:09:19.169 --> 00:09:21.350 the period that we've discussed up to the point 00:09:21.350 --> 00:09:24.730 of World War II's conclusion, basically from 00:09:24.730 --> 00:09:29.389 1895 to 1945, and in that sense is outside the 00:09:29.389 --> 00:09:31.929 story of the Chinese Civil War up to that point. 00:09:32.509 --> 00:09:35.509 How did the revolution against the Qing dynasty 00:09:35.509 --> 00:09:40.149 in 1911, which is also known as the Xinhai Revolution, 00:09:40.490 --> 00:09:44.549 affect the subsequent civil war? So the civil 00:09:44.549 --> 00:09:48.889 war we can interpret at least as partly the consequence 00:09:48.889 --> 00:09:51.950 of divisions within the revolutionary movement. 00:09:52.779 --> 00:09:56.019 the revolutionary movement had emerged as an 00:09:56.019 --> 00:09:59.659 attempt to replace the Chinese dynastic system, 00:09:59.740 --> 00:10:02.740 which was a dynastic system under the control 00:10:02.740 --> 00:10:07.539 of the Qing royal household, which was associated 00:10:07.539 --> 00:10:10.830 with the Manchu ethnic group. This is a group 00:10:10.830 --> 00:10:14.629 whose original language is unrelated to the Han 00:10:14.629 --> 00:10:18.289 Chinese languages that took power through a conquest 00:10:18.289 --> 00:10:22.389 of the territories of the Ming dynasty, which 00:10:22.389 --> 00:10:25.929 had been the last, I suppose, ethnically Han 00:10:25.929 --> 00:10:28.830 Chinese. We define that as a dynasty where the 00:10:28.830 --> 00:10:32.210 ruling family was of Han ethnicity and spoke 00:10:32.210 --> 00:10:36.600 Han Chinese languages. state, the Manchu state, 00:10:36.700 --> 00:10:40.240 not only taken over the territory of the Ming 00:10:40.240 --> 00:10:44.120 dynasty, it subsequently conquered Tibet, Mongolia, 00:10:44.299 --> 00:10:48.120 the territories that we now call Xinjiang in 00:10:48.120 --> 00:10:50.480 Chinese Turkestan. So that state, right, if you 00:10:50.480 --> 00:10:53.759 think about it, has strong parallels in its structure 00:10:53.759 --> 00:10:58.200 with the Ottoman Empire, which is another multi 00:10:58.200 --> 00:11:02.039 -ethnic, multicultural land -based structure. 00:11:02.679 --> 00:11:06.179 and the Mughal Empire in India. And I think we 00:11:06.179 --> 00:11:09.679 could also argue the Spanish Empire that emerged 00:11:09.679 --> 00:11:12.820 after the conquest of the Aztec and Inca Empires 00:11:12.820 --> 00:11:17.159 in Latin America. So these are the kinds of large 00:11:17.159 --> 00:11:22.580 states that dominate the world between the 16th 00:11:22.580 --> 00:11:25.039 century, really, and the early 20th century. 00:11:25.480 --> 00:11:30.019 Those states break up. through a series of revolutions, 00:11:30.059 --> 00:11:32.960 of which the revolution against the Qing dynasty 00:11:32.960 --> 00:11:38.080 is one. What kind of state will replace the Qing 00:11:38.080 --> 00:11:41.559 empire is something that no one agrees about. 00:11:42.240 --> 00:11:45.679 You also mentioned the Japanese invasion and 00:11:45.679 --> 00:11:48.500 the subsequent war resistance. What effect did 00:11:48.500 --> 00:11:52.360 this have on the outcome of the civil war? It's 00:11:52.360 --> 00:11:55.200 here worth talking about some of the ways in 00:11:55.200 --> 00:11:58.039 which historians from outside China have discussed 00:11:58.039 --> 00:12:02.740 this question. The American political scientist, 00:12:03.159 --> 00:12:07.600 Chalmers Johnson, in 1962, formed an argument 00:12:07.600 --> 00:12:13.200 that it was the communists' successful mobilization 00:12:13.200 --> 00:12:18.019 of rural people, peasants in particular, during 00:12:18.019 --> 00:12:22.169 the anti -Japanese war. that gave the communists 00:12:22.169 --> 00:12:25.730 a decisive advantage that they hadn't had prior 00:12:25.730 --> 00:12:28.789 to the Japanese invasion. It's also been argued 00:12:28.789 --> 00:12:34.129 that the civil war essentially smashed the traditional 00:12:34.129 --> 00:12:39.350 rural economic structures. The old rural ruling 00:12:39.350 --> 00:12:42.590 class was basically driven out. It escaped as 00:12:42.590 --> 00:12:46.610 refugees. So the old social institutions in most 00:12:46.610 --> 00:12:50.129 of rural China were overthrown. during the Japanese 00:12:50.129 --> 00:12:53.470 invasion and after it, essentially you had a 00:12:53.470 --> 00:12:58.090 kind of de facto social levelling as the old 00:12:58.090 --> 00:13:01.230 elite classes lost a lot of their wealth. So 00:13:01.230 --> 00:13:05.649 the power that an elite or a dominant class group 00:13:05.649 --> 00:13:09.690 has to maintain control was substantially weakened 00:13:09.690 --> 00:13:12.830 by the fact that it no longer had the kind of 00:13:12.830 --> 00:13:16.429 economic authority that it had prior to the Japanese 00:13:16.429 --> 00:13:19.500 invasion. The Japanese invasion impoverishes 00:13:19.500 --> 00:13:25.120 and disrupts social life on an unbelievable scale. 00:13:25.419 --> 00:13:28.899 It's exceptionally violent. The struggles are 00:13:28.899 --> 00:13:33.340 very, very difficult for people used to thinking 00:13:33.340 --> 00:13:36.299 about World War II in the context of Western 00:13:36.299 --> 00:13:39.659 Europe to imagine or understand. It's much, much 00:13:39.659 --> 00:13:42.179 more similar to the kind of destruction that 00:13:42.179 --> 00:13:44.740 one sees when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. 00:13:46.279 --> 00:13:49.759 tens of millions of deaths, many of them civilians. 00:13:50.720 --> 00:13:54.539 Can we drill down a little now onto the two sides 00:13:54.539 --> 00:13:58.279 of the civil war, the main arguments of the KMT 00:13:58.279 --> 00:14:00.980 and the CCP? You've given us a bit of an overview, 00:14:01.139 --> 00:14:03.960 but I'd like to know more about what each side 00:14:03.960 --> 00:14:06.799 brought in terms of their philosophies, their 00:14:06.799 --> 00:14:11.460 justifications. These days, it's kind of hard 00:14:11.460 --> 00:14:16.980 to see. the ideological energies that drove the 00:14:16.980 --> 00:14:19.779 oppositions in the Civil War. This is because 00:14:19.779 --> 00:14:23.600 the contemporary Chinese Communist Party, essentially 00:14:23.600 --> 00:14:27.419 over the last sort of three to even four decades, 00:14:27.840 --> 00:14:32.120 remoulded itself as a party that claims authority 00:14:32.120 --> 00:14:36.519 on the basis of its nationalism, and that it 00:14:36.519 --> 00:14:40.480 is a protector of the Chinese nation. and that 00:14:40.480 --> 00:14:44.299 it is engaged in the restoration of China's civilizational 00:14:44.299 --> 00:14:48.460 and cultural dignity. That's a platform that 00:14:48.460 --> 00:14:51.700 ironically is pretty much the one that the defeated 00:14:51.700 --> 00:14:55.059 Chinese nationalists proclaimed. They said, we're 00:14:55.059 --> 00:14:58.200 going to modernize China and we're going to create 00:14:58.200 --> 00:15:01.360 a space in which the beauties, I guess you could 00:15:01.360 --> 00:15:04.000 say it, of traditional Chinese culture will be 00:15:04.000 --> 00:15:07.940 shown in a properly modern society. The communists 00:15:07.940 --> 00:15:13.629 at the time, argued that this nationalism, like 00:15:13.629 --> 00:15:19.029 other nationalisms, was a kind of disguise for 00:15:19.029 --> 00:15:23.750 the power, essentially, of a local business and 00:15:23.750 --> 00:15:27.129 landowning class, a business and landowning class 00:15:27.129 --> 00:15:30.230 which the communists accused of being allied 00:15:30.230 --> 00:15:34.649 to foreign imperialists. So the Chinese communists 00:15:34.649 --> 00:15:38.830 said, we're more nationalistic. than the nationalists 00:15:38.830 --> 00:15:42.649 because we are advocating radical social revolution 00:15:42.649 --> 00:15:46.710 and an overthrow, essentially, of the institutions 00:15:46.710 --> 00:15:50.149 that permit foreign domination of Chinese society 00:15:50.149 --> 00:15:54.769 and Chinese people. At the same time, as Marxists, 00:15:54.870 --> 00:15:58.529 they inherit the view that nationalism is basically 00:15:58.529 --> 00:16:02.730 an instrument through which workers in particular 00:16:02.730 --> 00:16:09.279 countries are deceived. into focusing their emotional 00:16:09.279 --> 00:16:12.980 and political attentions on rivalry with other 00:16:12.980 --> 00:16:15.940 countries rather than with fighting the inequalities 00:16:15.940 --> 00:16:19.059 within their own system. So that's the point 00:16:19.059 --> 00:16:21.419 of ideological difference between the two of 00:16:21.419 --> 00:16:25.279 them. These days, I think that's much more unclear 00:16:25.279 --> 00:16:27.740 because the Chinese Communist Party doesn't really 00:16:27.740 --> 00:16:31.159 talk about its role as a leader of working class 00:16:31.159 --> 00:16:35.379 revolution. It talks about its... role essentially 00:16:35.379 --> 00:16:40.120 in producing a harmonious society in which the 00:16:40.120 --> 00:16:42.320 tensions that you find in a society like the 00:16:42.320 --> 00:16:45.720 United States purportedly don't exist, and a 00:16:45.720 --> 00:16:48.659 society in which Chinese culture is accorded 00:16:48.659 --> 00:16:52.820 true respect. At the same time, the Chinese Communist 00:16:52.820 --> 00:16:57.120 Party continues to define itself as an anti -feudal 00:16:57.120 --> 00:17:00.539 structure. Feudalism is a very ambiguous concept 00:17:00.539 --> 00:17:04.390 in China, but what it generally refers to is 00:17:04.390 --> 00:17:08.849 all forms of oppressive traditional social relationships. 00:17:09.150 --> 00:17:12.910 So conservative attitudes within the family, 00:17:13.069 --> 00:17:15.049 particularly in relationship to the position 00:17:15.049 --> 00:17:19.650 of women, I guess local power at the expense 00:17:19.650 --> 00:17:23.349 of central power, an agriculturally based power 00:17:23.349 --> 00:17:27.609 structure rather than an industrially based power 00:17:27.609 --> 00:17:30.230 structure. Those are the things that the Chinese 00:17:30.230 --> 00:17:34.019 Communist Party continues to invoke. when it 00:17:34.019 --> 00:17:37.380 describes its own history as the party that, 00:17:37.440 --> 00:17:40.180 in a sense, brought feudalism to an end in China. 00:17:41.160 --> 00:17:44.359 Let's focus now on the two charismatic leaders 00:17:44.359 --> 00:17:47.900 of these two different sides of the conflict. 00:17:48.119 --> 00:17:50.880 On one side with the KMT, you have Chiang Kai 00:17:50.880 --> 00:17:53.039 -shek. On the other with the CCP, you have Mao 00:17:53.039 --> 00:17:55.839 Zedong. What were the similarities and differences 00:17:55.839 --> 00:17:59.380 then between Chiang Kai -shek and Mao Zedong? 00:17:59.599 --> 00:18:02.519 They're both such polarizing figures. So the 00:18:02.519 --> 00:18:06.000 Canadian historian Diana Lowry has described 00:18:06.000 --> 00:18:09.119 them both as megalomaniac. That in other words, 00:18:09.140 --> 00:18:12.680 they both came to be caught up in a cult of their 00:18:12.680 --> 00:18:16.960 own personalities and to believe that they alone 00:18:16.960 --> 00:18:21.180 had the recipe for the salvation of the Chinese 00:18:21.180 --> 00:18:23.660 nation and the Chinese revolution. They're interesting 00:18:23.660 --> 00:18:27.079 in terms of their personal histories. Chiang 00:18:27.079 --> 00:18:31.259 Kai -shek was the... brother -in -law by marriage 00:18:31.259 --> 00:18:34.240 of Sun Yat -sen, the founder of the Chinese revolution. 00:18:34.700 --> 00:18:38.519 Sun Yat -sen's second wife, Sung Ching -ling, 00:18:38.619 --> 00:18:40.880 who later became a supporter of the communists, 00:18:41.000 --> 00:18:44.480 was the sister of Sung Mei -ling, the wife of 00:18:44.480 --> 00:18:47.539 Chiang Kai -shek. So there was a complex family 00:18:47.539 --> 00:18:50.960 dynamic in terms of the relationship of Chiang 00:18:50.960 --> 00:18:56.309 to Sun. He was a military guy. Mao Zedong was 00:18:56.309 --> 00:18:59.509 a person who, I never tire of repeating this, 00:18:59.650 --> 00:19:02.970 was trained as a primary school teacher. He was 00:19:02.970 --> 00:19:06.630 a person deeply concerned with the inadequacies 00:19:06.630 --> 00:19:09.349 of the traditional education system. He was a 00:19:09.349 --> 00:19:13.910 person who had hostile relations to his own family, 00:19:14.109 --> 00:19:17.970 whereas Chiang Kai -shek is celebrated for his 00:19:17.970 --> 00:19:21.309 filiality towards his mother in particular. I 00:19:21.309 --> 00:19:24.170 think you can see them, I guess, on the one hand 00:19:24.170 --> 00:19:27.500 as They're both military leaders. If you look 00:19:27.500 --> 00:19:30.079 at pictures of them in their youth, particularly 00:19:30.079 --> 00:19:33.259 as they're fighting the Civil War, their clothing 00:19:33.259 --> 00:19:35.440 is a really interesting indication of the difference 00:19:35.440 --> 00:19:39.079 between them. Chiang Kai -shek is always immaculately 00:19:39.079 --> 00:19:43.559 attired. He's sharp military uniform. He looks 00:19:43.559 --> 00:19:47.200 like a man of authority. He looks a lot like 00:19:47.200 --> 00:19:50.440 many right -wing dictators of that period you 00:19:50.440 --> 00:19:53.279 find in America and other places like that. like 00:19:53.279 --> 00:19:57.119 Mussolini. Mao, in the images that were very 00:19:57.119 --> 00:20:00.700 central to the period when the anti -Japanese 00:20:00.700 --> 00:20:04.579 war is going on, is scruffy, frequently depicted 00:20:04.579 --> 00:20:08.980 in bad clothes, with long hair, a person who 00:20:08.980 --> 00:20:12.660 certainly projected to followers this great informality, 00:20:12.740 --> 00:20:18.079 and those people who I guess are in rebellion 00:20:18.079 --> 00:20:22.069 against what might be called conservative familial 00:20:22.069 --> 00:20:25.210 values, found Mao, at least at this initial stage, 00:20:25.390 --> 00:20:29.450 to be a kind of symbol of a kind of radical unconventionality. 00:20:29.910 --> 00:20:34.750 That proves to be, at best, a partial reading 00:20:34.750 --> 00:20:37.630 of what he was. And that if you look at a lot 00:20:37.630 --> 00:20:40.349 of images of Mao, particularly after the revolution, 00:20:40.769 --> 00:20:45.509 he's very much cleaned up. He looks much more 00:20:45.509 --> 00:20:51.680 like a leader of a strong militarized republic, 00:20:52.140 --> 00:20:55.980 a bit like Stalin. A lot of the iconography of 00:20:55.980 --> 00:20:59.740 Mao is borrowed, essentially, from depictions 00:20:59.740 --> 00:21:03.380 of Stalin in the Stalin cult. How did their respective 00:21:03.380 --> 00:21:06.720 personalities then influence the strategies used 00:21:06.720 --> 00:21:10.500 by each side during the Civil War? Well, that's 00:21:10.500 --> 00:21:14.140 an interesting question. One can argue that Mao, 00:21:14.440 --> 00:21:19.650 as a person of great charisma and indeed of personal 00:21:19.650 --> 00:21:24.130 unpredictability, was willing to be more fluid 00:21:24.130 --> 00:21:26.849 in the way that he approached military questions 00:21:26.849 --> 00:21:30.910 to change his mind, to change his tactics and 00:21:30.910 --> 00:21:33.589 to change his strategy and also to delegate responsibility. 00:21:34.710 --> 00:21:37.769 Chiang is seen by many people as much more of 00:21:37.769 --> 00:21:40.769 a kind of micromanager and therefore is having 00:21:40.769 --> 00:21:44.730 eventually run into problems militarily because 00:21:44.730 --> 00:21:49.960 he couldn't. either, I guess, build a solid core 00:21:49.960 --> 00:21:54.500 of generals who were directly loyal to him and 00:21:54.500 --> 00:21:58.660 trusted him or to, in a sense, pull back and 00:21:58.660 --> 00:22:00.980 let those generals basically apply their own 00:22:00.980 --> 00:22:04.680 strategies to military affairs. Earlier, you 00:22:04.680 --> 00:22:08.240 mentioned how the Civil War had a profound impact 00:22:08.240 --> 00:22:11.599 on the family structures, the family makeups 00:22:11.599 --> 00:22:15.519 of China at the time and after. Does that mean 00:22:15.519 --> 00:22:17.720 that there was a generational divide between 00:22:17.720 --> 00:22:21.559 who aligned with whom in terms of politics? Or 00:22:21.559 --> 00:22:24.059 what impact did this have? Can you explain that 00:22:24.059 --> 00:22:28.480 a little bit more? Yeah, so the Civil War is 00:22:28.480 --> 00:22:32.119 in many ways an extension of an earlier family 00:22:32.119 --> 00:22:36.039 revolution. There's a good case for saying that, 00:22:36.079 --> 00:22:40.539 in fact, the real focus of the revolutionary 00:22:40.539 --> 00:22:44.400 intellectuals in the early period in which the 00:22:44.400 --> 00:22:48.039 Chinese communist movement emerges is not so 00:22:48.039 --> 00:22:51.819 much the problem of class, but the problem of 00:22:51.819 --> 00:22:55.640 patriarchal authority in the family. And these 00:22:55.640 --> 00:22:59.680 are a generation of people who... experienced 00:22:59.680 --> 00:23:02.920 a radically different kind of education from 00:23:02.920 --> 00:23:06.400 what had been found in China prior to the late 00:23:06.400 --> 00:23:10.880 19th century in terms of gender segregation schooling. 00:23:11.279 --> 00:23:15.900 And so what happens when you start to have co 00:23:15.900 --> 00:23:18.920 -educational schooling, of course, is that boy 00:23:18.920 --> 00:23:21.259 and girl students or male and female students 00:23:21.259 --> 00:23:25.509 fall in love with each other. And that will often 00:23:25.509 --> 00:23:29.329 challenge any system of arranged marriage. So 00:23:29.329 --> 00:23:32.069 a kind of romanticism, which is a romanticism 00:23:32.069 --> 00:23:34.890 about free choice in marriage, is one of the 00:23:34.890 --> 00:23:37.750 features essentially of this period. That, of 00:23:37.750 --> 00:23:40.910 course, is largely an issue for elite groups. 00:23:41.250 --> 00:23:45.890 But for people in more impoverished parts of 00:23:45.890 --> 00:23:50.190 the social structure, particularly for farmers, 00:23:50.390 --> 00:23:53.650 I guess. One of the traditional kind of areas 00:23:53.650 --> 00:23:57.710 of concern is how to reproduce family control 00:23:57.710 --> 00:23:59.630 over property, and that was done through arranged 00:23:59.630 --> 00:24:02.349 marriage. And that's particularly, of course, 00:24:02.369 --> 00:24:06.670 of concern to land owners, that they have a stable 00:24:06.670 --> 00:24:09.190 transmission of a property from generation to 00:24:09.190 --> 00:24:13.250 generation. As the rural economy and rural social 00:24:13.250 --> 00:24:16.309 system kind of fractures during the Civil War, 00:24:16.589 --> 00:24:21.529 that authority, that patriarchal household heads 00:24:21.529 --> 00:24:25.269 have over wives and daughters starts to fray. 00:24:25.329 --> 00:24:30.089 And the communists are particularly assertive 00:24:30.089 --> 00:24:33.690 in mobilising women in the revolutionary courts. 00:24:33.970 --> 00:24:38.089 That is one of their power bases. For women who 00:24:38.089 --> 00:24:42.089 are discontented with a conservative familial 00:24:42.089 --> 00:24:45.289 order, who are from intellectual or wealthy families, 00:24:45.970 --> 00:24:49.849 the communists have a deep attractiveness. And 00:24:49.849 --> 00:24:54.250 I guess that's a common pattern for people with 00:24:54.250 --> 00:24:58.509 feminist concerns to gravitate towards leftist 00:24:58.509 --> 00:25:02.609 politics and towards Marxism. But at the rural 00:25:02.609 --> 00:25:05.750 level, at the level of the villages, it's not 00:25:05.750 --> 00:25:09.609 so much that discontent with the constraints 00:25:09.609 --> 00:25:12.289 that traditional family structures impose on, 00:25:12.369 --> 00:25:15.519 say, the creative life of women. or on their 00:25:15.519 --> 00:25:19.440 self -expression, so much so as a set of questions 00:25:19.440 --> 00:25:22.279 about how women are subordinated essentially 00:25:22.279 --> 00:25:26.279 to the institutions of the patriarchal rural 00:25:26.279 --> 00:25:31.200 family and the fracturing of the economy and 00:25:31.200 --> 00:25:35.119 the social institutions, the disruptions caused 00:25:35.119 --> 00:25:38.319 by people having to leave their homes. those 00:25:38.319 --> 00:25:42.039 all produce quite important readjustments in 00:25:42.039 --> 00:25:44.559 relationships between men and women that the 00:25:44.559 --> 00:25:47.019 communists are very successful at capitalising 00:25:47.019 --> 00:25:50.839 upon. You're listening to Ear to Asia from Asia 00:25:50.839 --> 00:25:53.779 Institute at the University of Melbourne. Thank 00:25:53.779 --> 00:26:12.170 you. You'll find articles by some of our regular 00:26:12.170 --> 00:26:15.009 Air to Asia guests and by many others. Plus, 00:26:15.089 --> 00:26:17.490 you can catch recent episodes of Air to Asia 00:26:17.490 --> 00:26:20.349 at the Melbourne Asia Review website, which again 00:26:20.349 --> 00:26:24.210 you can find at melbourneasiareview .edu .au. 00:26:25.009 --> 00:26:27.809 I'm Sami Shah and I'm joined by Asia historian 00:26:27.809 --> 00:26:31.349 Dr Lewis Mayo. We're talking about the ramifications 00:26:31.349 --> 00:26:36.200 of China's civil war in the 20th century. Lewis, 00:26:36.319 --> 00:26:39.420 we've talked now about the makeup of the Civil 00:26:39.420 --> 00:26:42.859 War as well as the things that led to it and 00:26:42.859 --> 00:26:46.140 the impact it had on families and society. But 00:26:46.140 --> 00:26:48.599 one of the main things that comes up when we 00:26:48.599 --> 00:26:52.460 discuss the Civil War in China is the human toll. 00:26:52.759 --> 00:26:56.740 How many people were killed and just how brutal 00:26:56.740 --> 00:27:02.079 was it? Well, death tolls in wars are always 00:27:02.079 --> 00:27:06.299 controversial, but the scale of... death in the 00:27:06.299 --> 00:27:10.200 Chinese Civil War and in the Japanese invasion, 00:27:10.380 --> 00:27:15.720 which it is really a part of, is probably the 00:27:15.720 --> 00:27:20.299 most substantial of any civil war struggle in 00:27:20.299 --> 00:27:23.920 20th century history. So the scale of death is 00:27:23.920 --> 00:27:27.720 vast. We're talking... 10, 20, 30 million at 00:27:27.720 --> 00:27:31.180 least in the scale of our population, which is 00:27:31.180 --> 00:27:34.039 smaller than the Chinese population is now. So, 00:27:34.059 --> 00:27:36.619 you know, very, very large numbers of people 00:27:36.619 --> 00:27:40.420 affected by this violence. And the impact on 00:27:40.420 --> 00:27:43.500 society, the psychological trauma, the societal 00:27:43.500 --> 00:27:45.980 disruption, is there a way to measure such a 00:27:45.980 --> 00:27:50.690 thing? The importance of the civil war... underplayed 00:27:50.690 --> 00:27:54.349 in many ways in contemporary china in part because 00:27:54.349 --> 00:27:57.309 it was so horrible that in many ways people wanted 00:27:57.309 --> 00:28:02.289 to move on from it and so rather than it being 00:28:02.289 --> 00:28:07.730 a topic which is publicly discussed and publicly 00:28:07.730 --> 00:28:13.650 engaged with it's kind of in the closet i personally 00:28:13.650 --> 00:28:18.779 feel from just an anecdotal observation about 00:28:18.779 --> 00:28:23.440 these things, that having been taught by individuals 00:28:23.440 --> 00:28:30.740 who had experienced it and left China as refugees, 00:28:31.519 --> 00:28:37.460 the impact that that had on them personally was 00:28:37.460 --> 00:28:42.440 something that only revealed itself after long 00:28:42.440 --> 00:28:46.200 -term exposure to those people's lives and their 00:28:46.200 --> 00:28:48.849 characters. these were people who had lived through 00:28:48.849 --> 00:28:51.849 terrible events. Like many people who lived through 00:28:51.849 --> 00:28:54.049 terrible events, particularly in the middle of 00:28:54.049 --> 00:28:57.029 the 20th century, they just didn't want to talk 00:28:57.029 --> 00:29:00.849 about it. So it's very similar to the trauma 00:29:00.849 --> 00:29:05.109 found amongst a lot of World War II veterans 00:29:05.109 --> 00:29:08.430 in Japan and the United States and in other places 00:29:08.430 --> 00:29:11.309 that they essentially kept to themselves. In 00:29:11.309 --> 00:29:14.730 many cases, only now that some of those questions 00:29:14.730 --> 00:29:17.269 are starting to be publicly discussed. For those 00:29:17.269 --> 00:29:20.150 listeners who are interested, I strongly recommend 00:29:20.150 --> 00:29:23.549 Diana Lowry's book on the Chinese Civil War, 00:29:23.630 --> 00:29:27.670 that's L -A -R -Y, because it does strongly address 00:29:27.670 --> 00:29:31.490 those issues of trauma and the concealment of 00:29:31.490 --> 00:29:36.009 that trauma in the subsequent generations. Can 00:29:36.009 --> 00:29:38.589 you say there were winners and losers in this 00:29:38.589 --> 00:29:42.410 war? And if you do say that, who were they? That's 00:29:42.410 --> 00:29:45.490 interesting because... One of the arguments that 00:29:45.490 --> 00:29:49.309 one can make is that the official picture is 00:29:49.309 --> 00:29:52.890 that the communists win the civil war, they defeat 00:29:52.890 --> 00:29:56.549 the nationalists, and it's their ideology that 00:29:56.549 --> 00:29:59.990 becomes the dominant one in China after 1949, 00:30:00.250 --> 00:30:02.529 and the nationalists are essentially driven out. 00:30:02.710 --> 00:30:06.670 But as I've said earlier, the current platform 00:30:06.670 --> 00:30:11.569 of the Chinese Communist Party is... in many 00:30:11.569 --> 00:30:14.509 ways, indistinguishable from the one being advanced 00:30:14.509 --> 00:30:18.630 by Chiang Kai -shek. So one might suggest that 00:30:18.630 --> 00:30:21.490 even though the communists won the civil war, 00:30:21.710 --> 00:30:25.150 it was in a sense the ideology of the nationalists 00:30:25.150 --> 00:30:28.349 that was ultimately victorious. So the idea of 00:30:28.349 --> 00:30:32.309 a strong, one might say, conservative conception 00:30:32.309 --> 00:30:38.519 of China's position in the world. one that doesn't 00:30:38.519 --> 00:30:41.779 emphasize internal class struggles and doesn't 00:30:41.779 --> 00:30:44.019 emphasize the rights, particularly of the working 00:30:44.019 --> 00:30:47.259 class, which is what Chiang Kai -shek had advanced, 00:30:47.619 --> 00:30:51.380 is the one that the government in Beijing now 00:30:51.380 --> 00:30:56.720 puts forward. And those that support it, a fairly 00:30:56.720 --> 00:31:00.019 substantial part of the Chinese population, at 00:31:00.019 --> 00:31:03.420 least at the time of speaking, endorse and find 00:31:03.420 --> 00:31:08.220 credible. So many of the tensions that one finds 00:31:08.220 --> 00:31:11.240 between competing visions of what the Chinese 00:31:11.240 --> 00:31:15.140 revolution should be, if you look through the 00:31:15.140 --> 00:31:19.720 historical record, those tensions and those problems 00:31:19.720 --> 00:31:24.839 are largely hidden in public discussion in China 00:31:24.839 --> 00:31:26.940 in the present, when there's an enormous emphasis 00:31:26.940 --> 00:31:32.299 on the solidarity and unity of the Chinese nation 00:31:32.299 --> 00:31:35.420 as the defining feature of what Chinese people 00:31:35.420 --> 00:31:38.940 are. Unlike the American Civil War, which has 00:31:38.940 --> 00:31:42.440 been reasonably well documented, much less has 00:31:42.440 --> 00:31:45.180 been said and written by the survivors of the 00:31:45.180 --> 00:31:49.299 Chinese Civil War. Why is that? That's actually 00:31:49.299 --> 00:31:52.119 an issue that's very dear to my heart. If you 00:31:52.119 --> 00:31:55.799 look at what had happened in the discussion of 00:31:55.799 --> 00:32:00.099 the American Civil War in the period roughly 00:32:00.099 --> 00:32:04.700 60 to 70 years after it had broken out. What 00:32:04.700 --> 00:32:08.420 you see in the United States is remarkably similar 00:32:08.420 --> 00:32:12.599 to what we see in China now. And the two rival 00:32:12.599 --> 00:32:16.779 sides and the tensions that I suppose had existed 00:32:16.779 --> 00:32:22.859 between them were, I guess, able to conceal their 00:32:22.859 --> 00:32:27.759 differences through a common commitment, for 00:32:27.759 --> 00:32:32.819 example, to the idea of an American nation committed 00:32:32.819 --> 00:32:36.819 to freedom. So the tension, I guess, between 00:32:36.819 --> 00:32:41.799 that struggle over Civil War memory in the 1920s 00:32:41.799 --> 00:32:48.420 or 1930s is one very much between what a South 00:32:48.420 --> 00:32:51.819 which had successfully instituted structures 00:32:51.819 --> 00:32:56.299 of racial segregation and a North which accepted 00:32:56.299 --> 00:33:00.039 those institutions with only a small number of 00:33:00.039 --> 00:33:04.480 white Northerners being. active in pursuing the 00:33:04.480 --> 00:33:07.099 radical cause of the reconstruction of the South 00:33:07.099 --> 00:33:11.859 after the 1860s surrender. Those clashes had 00:33:11.859 --> 00:33:14.980 been downplayed, for example, in favor of an 00:33:14.980 --> 00:33:17.019 idea that all Americans were committed to liberty 00:33:17.019 --> 00:33:20.279 and freedom, and having, for example, the Ku 00:33:20.279 --> 00:33:24.119 Klux Klan expanding into territories that had 00:33:24.119 --> 00:33:26.619 historically been associated with the Union cause. 00:33:27.309 --> 00:33:30.230 So, you know, you get Klansmen committing atrocities 00:33:30.230 --> 00:33:33.950 in Oklahoma, other areas of the West, which basically 00:33:33.950 --> 00:33:38.269 had been allied to the Union courts. So when 00:33:38.269 --> 00:33:41.410 we look at the American Civil War and the public 00:33:41.410 --> 00:33:45.589 discussion about it that we see now and compare 00:33:45.589 --> 00:33:48.890 it with the Chinese Civil War situation, we have 00:33:48.890 --> 00:33:51.829 to basically pay attention to the fact that the 00:33:51.829 --> 00:33:54.109 Chinese Civil War happened much more recently. 00:33:56.009 --> 00:33:58.690 I would argue that in an equivalent period in 00:33:58.690 --> 00:34:03.170 American history, the actual ferocity of the 00:34:03.170 --> 00:34:06.950 struggles, ideological, personal, in the Civil 00:34:06.950 --> 00:34:10.730 War had been largely downplayed in the dominant 00:34:10.730 --> 00:34:13.530 record. A very good example of that is the film 00:34:13.530 --> 00:34:16.610 Gone with the Wind. So Gone with the Wind is 00:34:16.610 --> 00:34:22.269 a 1939 film which was enormously popular with 00:34:22.269 --> 00:34:25.739 white Americans, northern and southern. which 00:34:25.739 --> 00:34:28.639 tells the civil war as a romantic story from 00:34:28.639 --> 00:34:30.800 the southern viewpoint. Now, we haven't quite 00:34:30.800 --> 00:34:34.280 got to that point in China where the Kuomintang 00:34:34.280 --> 00:34:38.460 is, in a sense, fully recuperated. But one could 00:34:38.460 --> 00:34:41.960 argue that the way in which the Chinese mainland 00:34:41.960 --> 00:34:45.280 conceives of the civil war essentially now is 00:34:45.280 --> 00:34:50.139 that it's a war over two competing visions of 00:34:50.139 --> 00:34:54.420 what a unified China should be, rather than... 00:34:54.670 --> 00:34:59.829 a massive and violent confrontation between rival 00:34:59.829 --> 00:35:03.789 conceptions of what the social system in China 00:35:03.789 --> 00:35:07.789 should be like. Is one of the reasons then the 00:35:07.789 --> 00:35:12.210 wildly differing narratives of the war between 00:35:12.210 --> 00:35:17.130 Taiwan and the CCP and does the victorious CCP 00:35:17.130 --> 00:35:20.710 then shape and influence the narrative on mainland 00:35:20.710 --> 00:35:24.679 China and in Taiwan is so different? Yeah, well, 00:35:24.820 --> 00:35:27.980 I mean, what's very important about the Taiwan 00:35:27.980 --> 00:35:34.000 situation is that the dominant viewpoint in Taiwan 00:35:34.000 --> 00:35:37.239 now that's associated with the government that's 00:35:37.239 --> 00:35:40.440 in power there argues that the Chinese civil 00:35:40.440 --> 00:35:45.519 war is a Chinese event that occurs on the Chinese 00:35:45.519 --> 00:35:51.500 mainland that Taiwan is really not part of. This 00:35:51.500 --> 00:35:54.900 is an historical viewpoint associated with the 00:35:54.900 --> 00:35:58.760 cause of Taiwan independence that treats Taiwan's 00:35:58.760 --> 00:36:02.780 history as being separate from that of mainland 00:36:02.780 --> 00:36:06.179 China, and that includes the story of the Civil 00:36:06.179 --> 00:36:09.079 War. Now, the Chinese nationalists, when they 00:36:09.079 --> 00:36:14.360 retreated to Taiwan in 1949, argued that what 00:36:14.360 --> 00:36:17.019 they were doing was preparing a base for the 00:36:17.019 --> 00:36:21.269 reunification of Taiwan with the mainland. And 00:36:21.269 --> 00:36:25.670 that was the ideology that was imposed through 00:36:25.670 --> 00:36:29.010 the schooling system. So the schooling was in 00:36:29.010 --> 00:36:32.369 Mandarin, which was the Chinese language of national 00:36:32.369 --> 00:36:35.449 unity for both nationalists and for communists, 00:36:35.510 --> 00:36:38.409 rather than the local forms of Chinese that were 00:36:38.409 --> 00:36:42.010 what was spoken at home by the people on Taiwan. 00:36:42.250 --> 00:36:46.650 And that what you see in the process of what 00:36:46.650 --> 00:36:50.489 we call Taiwan democratization is an internal 00:36:50.489 --> 00:36:55.170 rejection by dissenting forces within Taiwan 00:36:55.170 --> 00:36:59.389 of that Chinese nationalist ideology. So it's 00:36:59.389 --> 00:37:03.230 not so much that modern Taiwan narratives of 00:37:03.230 --> 00:37:07.969 the Chinese civil war are a kind of retained 00:37:07.969 --> 00:37:12.210 version of the old Chinese nationalist idea about 00:37:12.210 --> 00:37:15.130 what the communists were, but in fact a critique. 00:37:15.670 --> 00:37:19.130 of the idea that Taiwan and the Chinese mainland 00:37:19.130 --> 00:37:21.809 belong together. So that's where the shift has 00:37:21.809 --> 00:37:24.869 occurred. So that, of course, means that there's 00:37:24.869 --> 00:37:27.289 freedom to discuss the events of the Chinese 00:37:27.289 --> 00:37:30.909 Civil War, in part because people on Taiwan say, 00:37:31.090 --> 00:37:34.389 well, it's not our problem. But of course, Taiwan 00:37:34.389 --> 00:37:40.150 is not a society in which the state censors public 00:37:40.150 --> 00:37:43.630 discussion of historical issues. Whereas in the 00:37:43.630 --> 00:37:46.420 Chinese mainland... The strong narrative is, 00:37:46.500 --> 00:37:50.300 I guess, that any discussion of public issues 00:37:50.300 --> 00:37:53.559 that raises questions about the unity of the 00:37:53.559 --> 00:37:57.539 nation is extremely dangerous. So that if you 00:37:57.539 --> 00:38:01.340 started to talk about the civil war and the rivalries 00:38:01.340 --> 00:38:03.920 that it entailed, you might start a new one. 00:38:04.199 --> 00:38:10.099 This idea of the civil war being a kind of hidden 00:38:10.099 --> 00:38:14.559 but looming threat. That, I would argue, is the 00:38:14.559 --> 00:38:18.179 thing that the Chinese Communist Party does with 00:38:18.179 --> 00:38:23.360 the civil war narrative. It says if we slacken 00:38:23.360 --> 00:38:27.480 our grip on public discussion, what will happen 00:38:27.480 --> 00:38:31.219 is internal disorder and a repeat of civil war 00:38:31.219 --> 00:38:34.079 structures. So even though I've argued earlier 00:38:34.079 --> 00:38:36.880 that the civil war is a repressed memory in China, 00:38:36.980 --> 00:38:42.639 it is invoked by the CCP. as what lies in store 00:38:42.639 --> 00:38:46.739 for you if there's any kind of public discussion 00:38:46.739 --> 00:38:51.079 of political differences between conceptions 00:38:51.079 --> 00:38:54.820 of what China should be. And that includes public 00:38:54.820 --> 00:38:58.159 discussions of the more painful parts of China's 00:38:58.159 --> 00:39:02.019 modern history. How has the Chinese diaspora 00:39:02.019 --> 00:39:05.280 then been affected? That's an extremely interesting 00:39:05.280 --> 00:39:09.599 question because the Chinese diaspora is a term 00:39:09.599 --> 00:39:12.980 that's used for many, many different kinds of 00:39:12.980 --> 00:39:16.199 individuals and cultures. I mean, the term might 00:39:16.199 --> 00:39:19.400 be applied to someone living in Indonesia who 00:39:19.400 --> 00:39:21.519 was of Chinese descent, whose family has been 00:39:21.519 --> 00:39:24.480 there for eight or nine generations, doesn't 00:39:24.480 --> 00:39:29.300 speak anything Indonesian or another local language. 00:39:29.360 --> 00:39:32.559 That person can be classified as part of a Chinese 00:39:32.559 --> 00:39:36.530 diaspora. on the same terms as someone who has 00:39:36.530 --> 00:39:40.010 emigrated to a city like Melbourne from northern 00:39:40.010 --> 00:39:44.550 China in the last five years. The debates, I 00:39:44.550 --> 00:39:48.969 guess, in the diasporic world are very much specific 00:39:48.969 --> 00:39:51.349 to the particular context that you're talking 00:39:51.349 --> 00:39:55.829 about. In Malaysia, for example, what you found 00:39:55.829 --> 00:40:00.829 during the 1950s was a Chinese communist guerrilla 00:40:00.829 --> 00:40:03.679 movement opposed to the Malaysian state. which 00:40:03.679 --> 00:40:08.280 argued that Malaysia needed to follow China down 00:40:08.280 --> 00:40:12.559 the revolutionary path of the communists. That 00:40:12.559 --> 00:40:15.539 would contrast quite radically with the situation 00:40:15.539 --> 00:40:19.719 in East Timor, where the education system for 00:40:19.719 --> 00:40:22.079 the Chinese population that was living there 00:40:22.079 --> 00:40:25.139 was dominated by the ideologies of the Chinese 00:40:25.139 --> 00:40:27.619 nationalists. So in other words, if you thought 00:40:27.619 --> 00:40:29.780 about East Timor and the Chinese communists in 00:40:29.780 --> 00:40:33.639 Malaysia. as really representing rival conceptions 00:40:33.639 --> 00:40:37.500 of what China's future should be, then it's basically 00:40:37.500 --> 00:40:41.719 split upon civil war lines. Of course, much of 00:40:41.719 --> 00:40:45.440 the energy in modern Chinese nationalism came 00:40:45.440 --> 00:40:48.539 from what we call Chinese diasporic populations. 00:40:49.320 --> 00:40:53.440 Sun Yat -sen himself wired much of his sense 00:40:53.440 --> 00:40:56.420 of what... the future of China should be. He's 00:40:56.420 --> 00:40:59.460 considered the father of the Chinese nationalist 00:40:59.460 --> 00:41:03.400 revolution when he was living in Hawaii as a 00:41:03.400 --> 00:41:09.019 young person. And so the space that existed outside 00:41:09.019 --> 00:41:13.619 of control by the agents of the Qing government 00:41:13.619 --> 00:41:18.679 in the 19th century permitted radical nationalists 00:41:18.679 --> 00:41:21.760 and revolutionary conceptions of Chinese identity 00:41:21.760 --> 00:41:26.489 to come into being. And so you get, I suppose, 00:41:26.650 --> 00:41:31.250 shadow civil wars played out across the Pacific 00:41:31.250 --> 00:41:34.489 and Southeast Asia in Chinese communities. But 00:41:34.489 --> 00:41:38.329 you also get situations where people who are 00:41:38.329 --> 00:41:42.989 of diasporic Chinese heritage say, that's nothing 00:41:42.989 --> 00:41:46.130 to do with me. I'm Thai. I'm Thai of Chinese 00:41:46.130 --> 00:41:49.170 background. And so those struggles are for other 00:41:49.170 --> 00:41:53.730 people. Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution 00:41:53.730 --> 00:41:59.010 in 1966, which ended when he died in 1976. Was 00:41:59.010 --> 00:42:01.730 this Cultural Revolution a repeat of the Civil 00:42:01.730 --> 00:42:06.090 War? I would argue that in many ways, it was 00:42:06.090 --> 00:42:09.309 a successor to the Civil War. It was a revolution, 00:42:09.570 --> 00:42:13.269 a struggle that broke out in the education system 00:42:13.269 --> 00:42:17.699 at first. The argument, I suppose, that one can 00:42:17.699 --> 00:42:20.639 make about the education system is that it was 00:42:20.639 --> 00:42:25.079 one of the origin points of the Civil War and 00:42:25.079 --> 00:42:27.760 of the revolution, because educational discontent, 00:42:27.760 --> 00:42:30.539 as I mentioned, Mao Zedong was a primary school 00:42:30.539 --> 00:42:33.599 teacher, was one of the forces that drove many 00:42:33.599 --> 00:42:37.340 people down the radical and socialist path. So 00:42:37.340 --> 00:42:39.980 you could say there was unfinished business about 00:42:39.980 --> 00:42:43.000 education and how much revolution there should 00:42:43.000 --> 00:42:46.940 be in education. A second part was that in the 00:42:46.940 --> 00:42:49.360 large cities such as Beijing, where the Cultural 00:42:49.360 --> 00:42:52.739 Revolution sort of exploded, you had schools 00:42:52.739 --> 00:42:57.099 in which there were students who had family backgrounds 00:42:57.099 --> 00:42:59.599 that were associated with the losing side of 00:42:59.599 --> 00:43:04.059 the Civil War. And they are in classes with the 00:43:04.059 --> 00:43:08.179 children of communist revolutionary cadets. And 00:43:08.179 --> 00:43:13.630 the argument often became one between Those who 00:43:13.630 --> 00:43:18.730 said we are carrying the revolution on because 00:43:18.730 --> 00:43:22.130 the revolution is about who is the most committed 00:43:22.130 --> 00:43:26.289 to radical class -based politics, regardless 00:43:26.289 --> 00:43:29.190 of what our family background is, versus people 00:43:29.190 --> 00:43:33.289 who said family background is decisive. Our families 00:43:33.289 --> 00:43:35.929 made the revolution. Your families were on the 00:43:35.929 --> 00:43:38.329 other side. You say you're in favor of radical 00:43:38.329 --> 00:43:41.429 class politics. I think you're probably secretly 00:43:41.429 --> 00:43:45.099 conspiring. with the forces of the Chinese nationalists 00:43:45.099 --> 00:43:49.400 on Taiwan or other bourgeois liberals such as 00:43:49.400 --> 00:43:55.199 the Americans. So civil war structures were shadows 00:43:55.199 --> 00:43:58.159 in that sense. A second point, though, is that 00:43:58.159 --> 00:44:01.099 if you're thinking about people who were teenagers 00:44:01.099 --> 00:44:04.340 or in early adulthood during the Cultural Revolution, 00:44:04.719 --> 00:44:07.780 they were people who were children when the civil 00:44:07.780 --> 00:44:11.019 war was going on. One of the problems that they 00:44:11.019 --> 00:44:13.800 faced was that their parents had been involved 00:44:13.800 --> 00:44:19.619 in this massive struggle full of drama and heroism, 00:44:19.619 --> 00:44:22.940 and they were just studying. So there's this 00:44:22.940 --> 00:44:28.199 sense of how do we capture the drama that our 00:44:28.199 --> 00:44:34.579 parents' lives were shaped by in our lives? And 00:44:34.579 --> 00:44:37.039 when you think about people having watched, you 00:44:37.039 --> 00:44:39.780 know, propaganda film after propaganda film about 00:44:39.780 --> 00:44:42.739 the revolutionary struggle, one of the things 00:44:42.739 --> 00:44:46.460 that it did was to dramatize violence as the 00:44:46.460 --> 00:44:50.079 principal thing in any real revolution. This 00:44:50.079 --> 00:44:52.619 is another thing that communists said, you can't 00:44:52.619 --> 00:44:55.579 change the social order without violence. The 00:44:55.579 --> 00:45:00.199 nationalists said, violence is corrosive to national 00:45:00.199 --> 00:45:03.840 development. I just want to go back to the US 00:45:03.840 --> 00:45:08.280 relationship with China. How has the civil war 00:45:08.280 --> 00:45:11.960 in the US shaped its worldview and its response 00:45:11.960 --> 00:45:15.599 to both the Chinese revolution in 1911 and the 00:45:15.599 --> 00:45:20.119 Chinese civil war, you know, 1945 onwards? Well, 00:45:20.199 --> 00:45:23.199 I think this is a very important and much understudied 00:45:23.199 --> 00:45:27.719 question. This civil war split the United States 00:45:27.719 --> 00:45:32.269 in the east, creating... incredible levels of 00:45:32.269 --> 00:45:37.489 distrust. After the defeat of the South, one 00:45:37.489 --> 00:45:40.389 of the things for dealing with the problems of 00:45:40.389 --> 00:45:43.389 the South was to essentially let southerners 00:45:43.389 --> 00:45:47.889 expand across the United States, filling up the 00:45:47.889 --> 00:45:50.610 territories, you know, what we now think of as 00:45:50.610 --> 00:45:54.250 the Midwest and the West. That reaches an end 00:45:54.250 --> 00:46:00.630 point in the 1890s, and the U .S. has nowhere 00:46:00.630 --> 00:46:06.389 to go except further east. And this kind of coincides 00:46:06.389 --> 00:46:09.929 with the revolutionary outbreak in the 1890s 00:46:09.929 --> 00:46:11.949 in China, the beginnings of it. And Sun Yat -sen 00:46:11.949 --> 00:46:14.329 himself is a person who receives an essentially 00:46:14.329 --> 00:46:18.710 American education in Hawaii. And Hawaii is annexed 00:46:18.710 --> 00:46:22.889 by a coup by American forces, essentially, in 00:46:22.889 --> 00:46:27.019 the 1890s and provides the... core of their infrastructure 00:46:27.019 --> 00:46:30.599 for expansion across the Pacific. So American 00:46:30.599 --> 00:46:33.699 empire, which is in some ways a solution to the 00:46:33.699 --> 00:46:36.420 problems of the Civil War, runs up against the 00:46:36.420 --> 00:46:40.059 Chinese Republic. That said, the Americans also 00:46:40.059 --> 00:46:43.300 felt that, or some of them felt, that the Chinese 00:46:43.300 --> 00:46:46.199 Republican movement was their child. They had 00:46:46.199 --> 00:46:50.940 produced a Republican structure similar to their 00:46:50.940 --> 00:46:53.659 own. Now, you remember that when the Chinese 00:46:53.659 --> 00:46:57.699 Republic was established in 1911, almost everywhere 00:46:57.699 --> 00:47:03.960 else in the region was in some kind of colonial 00:47:03.960 --> 00:47:08.780 empire. And with the exception of France, those 00:47:08.780 --> 00:47:12.519 colonial empires were monarchies. So the Americans 00:47:12.519 --> 00:47:14.860 argued that essentially the Chinese Revolution 00:47:14.860 --> 00:47:21.239 is a revolution that is succeeding. to the mantle 00:47:21.239 --> 00:47:27.699 that we, I suppose, took upon ourselves when 00:47:27.699 --> 00:47:31.099 we started our own revolution. Others argued 00:47:31.099 --> 00:47:34.159 that the Chinese revolution was far more radical 00:47:34.159 --> 00:47:37.300 than the American revolution and left to say 00:47:37.300 --> 00:47:40.380 in the 1960s, well, you know, the American revolution 00:47:40.380 --> 00:47:43.619 was... a slaveholder revolution. The Chinese 00:47:43.619 --> 00:47:47.199 revolution is one in which the power of slaveholders 00:47:47.199 --> 00:47:51.000 and landowners is being overthrown and that we 00:47:51.000 --> 00:47:55.280 should learn from it. Xi Jinping is the son of 00:47:55.280 --> 00:47:57.380 someone who fought in the civil war and is the 00:47:57.380 --> 00:48:00.460 first paramount leader of the CCP and China who 00:48:00.460 --> 00:48:03.920 was born in the post -civil war era. How has 00:48:03.920 --> 00:48:06.079 the civil war affected him personally and in 00:48:06.079 --> 00:48:09.630 how he leads the CCP and China? analysts of Xi 00:48:09.630 --> 00:48:14.670 Jinping's career tend to focus on the idea that 00:48:14.670 --> 00:48:18.230 he is someone who has inherited his position 00:48:18.230 --> 00:48:24.170 as a result of wide trust on the part of the 00:48:24.170 --> 00:48:28.309 old members of the Chinese Communist Party in 00:48:28.309 --> 00:48:33.110 someone whose family is one of theirs. So if 00:48:33.110 --> 00:48:35.349 you thought of the Chinese Communist Party as 00:48:35.349 --> 00:48:39.880 having changed from being an organization put 00:48:39.880 --> 00:48:42.940 together by people committed to a common cause, 00:48:43.019 --> 00:48:46.760 to being something that's a bit more like a family 00:48:46.760 --> 00:48:50.260 business. You could argue that Xi Jinping is 00:48:50.260 --> 00:48:56.659 someone who is, you know, like an heir to a large 00:48:56.659 --> 00:49:01.599 family -based corporation. And so, like other 00:49:01.599 --> 00:49:05.690 people from his generation, He was shaped by 00:49:05.690 --> 00:49:08.989 the conflicts in the elite schools in Beijing 00:49:08.989 --> 00:49:15.150 between different factions of students fighting 00:49:15.150 --> 00:49:18.710 over what they perceived to be the correct direction 00:49:18.710 --> 00:49:23.170 of the Chinese Revolution. Xi Jinping spent some 00:49:23.170 --> 00:49:26.849 of his youth in the impoverished areas that the 00:49:26.849 --> 00:49:31.150 Chinese communists occupied during the 1930s 00:49:31.150 --> 00:49:34.679 and during World War II. And so I guess he has 00:49:34.679 --> 00:49:38.539 a very strong sense of his own life as being 00:49:38.539 --> 00:49:43.280 moulded by the landscapes, cultural and physical, 00:49:43.460 --> 00:49:46.139 of the Chinese Civil War and the Chinese Revolution. 00:49:46.679 --> 00:49:53.179 His relationship to Chinese radicalism is complex. 00:49:53.679 --> 00:49:58.840 He is a stability -oriented person who is active 00:49:58.840 --> 00:50:02.239 in the repression of any... dissent from the 00:50:02.239 --> 00:50:05.320 working classes in particular within China. But 00:50:05.320 --> 00:50:09.639 at the same time, he believes he is a Marxist. 00:50:09.820 --> 00:50:14.679 He asserts that his philosophy is guided by Marxism 00:50:14.679 --> 00:50:18.920 and by what's called the positive aspects of 00:50:18.920 --> 00:50:22.000 Chinese cultural tradition. And so he thinks 00:50:22.000 --> 00:50:26.039 and states that he belongs within that matrix 00:50:26.039 --> 00:50:31.429 ideologically of those two forces. You could 00:50:31.429 --> 00:50:35.570 say that he represents a kind of civil war compromise 00:50:35.570 --> 00:50:39.010 in some ways between the nationalist affiliated 00:50:39.010 --> 00:50:42.489 ideologies based around Chinese tradition and 00:50:42.489 --> 00:50:47.170 the official belief that Chinese communist policy 00:50:47.170 --> 00:50:53.050 is guided by Marxism. So it's a kind of unholy 00:50:53.050 --> 00:50:56.530 alliance when one looks at the intellectual traditions 00:50:56.530 --> 00:51:00.639 of the Chinese Communist Party. a kind of coherent 00:51:00.639 --> 00:51:04.179 approach if you see it from the point of view 00:51:04.179 --> 00:51:09.260 of trying to reconcile the warring forces within 00:51:09.260 --> 00:51:13.260 the civil war. Why is Taiwan so important to 00:51:13.260 --> 00:51:16.639 the CCP? Will retaking it provide some closure? 00:51:17.199 --> 00:51:24.250 I look at the Taiwan issue as one of a number 00:51:24.250 --> 00:51:27.449 of cases that you find around the world where 00:51:27.449 --> 00:51:30.170 you have nationalism that is focused on lost 00:51:30.170 --> 00:51:34.730 territories and that you organize your domestic 00:51:34.730 --> 00:51:38.590 self -representation around the idea that a bit 00:51:38.590 --> 00:51:42.530 of your country has been cut off and you are 00:51:42.530 --> 00:51:47.289 fighting to restore the wholeness of what you 00:51:47.289 --> 00:51:50.989 might call the body of the nation by eventually 00:51:50.989 --> 00:51:55.190 sewing the severed limb back onto the body from 00:51:55.190 --> 00:51:57.250 which it was cut off. So, you know, examples, 00:51:57.369 --> 00:52:01.349 one that I'm particularly fond of is that in 00:52:01.349 --> 00:52:06.869 a war between Chile and Peru and Bolivia in the 00:52:06.869 --> 00:52:10.610 19th century, territories that are now in northern 00:52:10.610 --> 00:52:13.969 Chile that belong to Bolivia were taken over. 00:52:14.150 --> 00:52:18.429 And Bolivian nationalism to this day discusses 00:52:18.429 --> 00:52:23.619 this lost world. Hungarian nationalism has in 00:52:23.619 --> 00:52:26.079 one of its more radical kind of formulations 00:52:26.079 --> 00:52:29.420 an idea that there are parts of Hungary that 00:52:29.420 --> 00:52:31.559 were lost as a result of the peace settlement 00:52:31.559 --> 00:52:34.920 in World War I. This is a case that one finds 00:52:34.920 --> 00:52:38.960 in context after context. Cambodian nationalists 00:52:38.960 --> 00:52:41.659 argue that southern Vietnam was taken from them 00:52:41.659 --> 00:52:46.000 by the Vietnamese. conjuring up the idea that 00:52:46.000 --> 00:52:50.559 Taiwan is a territory that belongs to the Chinese 00:52:50.559 --> 00:52:54.440 nation and must be restored to it is part of 00:52:54.440 --> 00:52:56.380 a broader pattern. There are some interesting 00:52:56.380 --> 00:52:58.840 ironies about that because, of course, Mongolia 00:52:58.840 --> 00:53:01.760 was also part of the territory of the Qing dynasty, 00:53:01.880 --> 00:53:07.119 but the Mongolians are a separate polity, largely 00:53:07.119 --> 00:53:10.860 as a result of having emerged as the first socialist 00:53:10.860 --> 00:53:15.280 state other than the Soviet Union in 1921. And 00:53:15.280 --> 00:53:18.579 much of the territory of the Russian Far Eastern 00:53:18.579 --> 00:53:22.599 Siberia, or some of it, is also part of the old 00:53:22.599 --> 00:53:25.260 territories of the Qing dynasty. But that stuff 00:53:25.260 --> 00:53:28.719 never gets discussed. So part of it is that kind 00:53:28.719 --> 00:53:31.820 of cold -eyed view of this problem would be to 00:53:31.820 --> 00:53:34.639 say that if you keep focusing on the idea that 00:53:34.639 --> 00:53:39.710 Taiwan is cut off from us, you get... people 00:53:39.710 --> 00:53:43.690 to divert their attention from contradictions 00:53:43.690 --> 00:53:47.369 within the country. One final question then, 00:53:47.510 --> 00:53:50.210 and it's slightly more philosophical, I suppose, 00:53:50.329 --> 00:53:53.070 than all the other parts of our discussion, is 00:53:53.070 --> 00:53:56.909 what will it take to heal the wounds of the Chinese 00:53:56.909 --> 00:54:00.809 civil war? Well, I mean, I think it's a little 00:54:00.809 --> 00:54:03.210 bit like the question of what will it take to 00:54:03.210 --> 00:54:07.699 heal the wounds of the US civil war. We've seen 00:54:07.699 --> 00:54:11.420 in American politics since the rise of the MAGA 00:54:11.420 --> 00:54:15.199 movement, you know, intense disagreement over 00:54:15.199 --> 00:54:18.940 the meaning of the American Civil War with people 00:54:18.940 --> 00:54:21.199 saying, well, if you've got statues of Robert 00:54:21.199 --> 00:54:25.320 E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia, you're basically 00:54:25.320 --> 00:54:31.480 honoring a cause which was dedicated to the enslavement 00:54:31.480 --> 00:54:34.400 of African -American people. And other people 00:54:34.400 --> 00:54:41.969 saying. We, as Virginians, see Lee as part of 00:54:41.969 --> 00:54:48.369 our past. And we acknowledge that our past is 00:54:48.369 --> 00:54:53.730 there when we have that statue. In many ways, 00:54:53.750 --> 00:54:57.929 I think the American Civil War struggles really 00:54:57.929 --> 00:55:02.130 only came to the fore as a public problem in 00:55:02.130 --> 00:55:06.340 my lifetime. I'm 60. And, you know, it's worth 00:55:06.340 --> 00:55:10.239 remembering that when I was born, it was still 00:55:10.239 --> 00:55:13.619 illegal for black and white people to marry each 00:55:13.619 --> 00:55:17.340 other in a number of states in the US. An interesting 00:55:17.340 --> 00:55:21.019 fact about Barack Obama is that Obama is president 00:55:21.019 --> 00:55:24.519 of the United States because Hawaii was officially 00:55:24.519 --> 00:55:27.739 incorporated into the United States just prior 00:55:27.739 --> 00:55:30.780 to his birth. Segregationalists in the South 00:55:30.780 --> 00:55:37.170 said, we can't. have Hawaii integrated into the 00:55:37.170 --> 00:55:40.989 United States because that will open the way 00:55:40.989 --> 00:55:43.190 for a mixed race person to become president. 00:55:43.449 --> 00:55:46.309 And that's exactly what happened. The struggles 00:55:46.309 --> 00:55:49.789 of the American Civil War were raging right up 00:55:49.789 --> 00:55:53.489 until the time of Obama's life, and I think are 00:55:53.489 --> 00:55:56.329 still raging now. In the case of the Chinese 00:55:56.329 --> 00:56:00.190 Civil War, I think the wounds are very deep and 00:56:00.190 --> 00:56:03.840 very recent. I don't see the resolution of the 00:56:03.840 --> 00:56:07.579 contradictions in the Chinese civil war as being 00:56:07.579 --> 00:56:13.500 able to be resolved at any point in the near 00:56:13.500 --> 00:56:17.539 future. So I suspect that primarily they will 00:56:17.539 --> 00:56:21.139 be passed over in silence. Lewis, thank you very 00:56:21.139 --> 00:56:23.579 much. Thanks very much. That was a pleasure. 00:56:24.300 --> 00:56:28.380 Our guest has been Dr. Lewis Mayo from Asia Institute. 00:56:29.740 --> 00:56:32.760 Air to Asia is brought to you by Asia Institute 00:56:32.760 --> 00:56:35.719 of the University of Melbourne, Australia You 00:56:35.719 --> 00:56:38.260 can find more information about this and all 00:56:38.260 --> 00:56:41.179 our other episodes at the Asia Institute website. 00:56:41.679 --> 00:56:44.659 Be sure to keep up with every episode of Ear 00:56:44.659 --> 00:56:47.420 to Asia by following us on the Apple Podcasts 00:56:47.420 --> 00:56:50.760 app, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your 00:56:50.760 --> 00:56:53.679 podcasts. If you like the show, please rate and 00:56:53.679 --> 00:56:56.659 review it. Every positive review helps new listeners 00:56:56.659 --> 00:56:59.539 find the show. And please help us by spreading 00:56:59.539 --> 00:57:03.199 the word on your socials. This episode was recorded 00:57:03.199 --> 00:57:07.440 on the 22nd of October 2024. Producers were Kelvin 00:57:07.440 --> 00:57:10.820 Param and Eric Van Bemmel of Profactual .com. 00:57:11.059 --> 00:57:13.920 Ear to Asia is licensed under Creative Commons, 00:57:14.179 --> 00:57:16.679 copyright 2024, the University of Melbourne. 00:57:16.880 --> 00:57:19.639 I'm Sami Shah. Thanks for your company.