Crash Course China
Hi, I’m John Green,
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and this is Crash Course World History
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and today we’re going to return— sadly for the last time on Crash Course—
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to China.
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By the way, Stan brought cupcakes.
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That’s good.
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I wish I could draw some parallel between this and China,
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but I got nothing.
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It’s just delicious.
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I’ll sure miss you, piece of felt Danica cut out in the shape of China
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using blue because we felt red would be cliché.
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Mr. Green, Mr. Green, Mr Green!
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You don’t get to talk until you shave the mustache, Me From The Past.
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So the 20th century was pretty big for China because it saw
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not one but two revolutions.
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China’s 1911 revolution might be a bigger deal from a world historical perspective
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than the more famous communist revolution of 1949,
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but you wouldn’t know it because
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1. china’s communism became a really big deal during the cold war,
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and 2. Mao Zedong, the father of communist China,
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was really good at self-promotion.
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Like, you know his famous book of sayings?
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Pretty much everyone in China just had to own it.
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And I mean, HAD TO. [makes sense; staff only allowed to read John Green books]
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[best]
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[intro music]
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[intro music]
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[intro music]
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[intro music]
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[intro music]
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[ever]
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So as you know doubt recall from past episodes of Crash Course,
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China lost the Opium wars in the 19th century,
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resulting in European domination, spheres of influence, et cetera,
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all of which was deeply embarrassing to the Qing dynasty
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and led to calls for reform.
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One strand of reform that called for China to adopt
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European military technology and education systems
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was called self strengthening,
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and it was probably would have been a great idea,
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considering how well that worked for Japan.
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But it never happened in China-1:21
well, at least not until recently.
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Instead,
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China experienced the disastrous anti-Western Boxer Rebellion of 1900,
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which helped spur some young liberals, including one named Sun Yat Sen,
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to plot the overthrow of the dynasty.
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Oh,
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it’s already time for the Open Letter... [unscoffingly skids across unscoured set]
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An open letter to Sun Yat Sen.
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Oh, but first,
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let’s see what’s in the secret compartment today.
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Oh, more champagne poppers? [seriously, more champagne poppers?]
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Stan, at this point aren’t we sort of belaboring the fact
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that China invented fireworks?
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Wow!
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That is innovation at work right there.
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We used to not be able to fire off one of these,
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and now we can fire off six at a time if you count the two secret ones
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from behind me. [strangest. job. ever.]
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Dear Sun Yat Sen,
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you were amazing!
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I mean the Republic of China calls you the father of the nation,
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the People’s Republic of China calls you
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the forerunner of the democratic revolution.
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You’re the only thing they can agree on.
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You lived in China, Japan, the United States,
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you converted to Christianity, you were a doctor, you were the godfather of
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an important science fiction writer.
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[not important enough to help "Cordwainer" catch on as a popular baby name, however]
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But the infuriating thing is that
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you never actually got much of a chance to rule China,
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and you would have been great at it.
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I mean,
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your three principles of the people,
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Nationalism, Democracy, and the People’s Livelihood,
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are three really great principles.
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I mean the problem, aside from you not living long enough
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is that you just didn’t have a face for Warhol portraits.
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[Warhol thought anyone who had $25k had a face for his portraits, but point taken]
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Huh, it’s too bad.
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Best wishes, John Green.
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So the 1911 revolution that led to the end of the Qing started when a bomb
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accidentally exploded, at which point the revolutionaries were like,
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“we’re probably going to be outed, so we should just start the uprising now.”
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The uprising probably would’ve been quelled like many before it except
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this time the army joined the rebellion, because they wanted to become more modern.
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The Qing emperor abdicated,
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and the rebels chose a general, Yuan Shikai, as leader,
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while Sun Yat Sen was declared president of a provisional republic on Jan 1, 1912.
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A new government was created with a Senate and a Lower House,
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and it was supposed to write a new constitution.
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And after the first elections,
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Sun Yat Sen’s party, the Guomindang
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were the largest, but they weren’t the majority.
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So Sun Yat Sen deferred to Yuan,
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which turned out to be a huge mistake because he then outlawed the
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Guomindang party and ruled as dictator.
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But when Yuan Shikai died in 1916,
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China’s first non-dynastic government in over 3000 years completely fell apart.
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Localism reasserted itself with large-scale landlords
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with small-scale armies ruling all the parts of China
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that weren’t controlled by foreigners.
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You might remember this phenomenon from earlier in Chinese history,
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first during the Warring States period and then again for three hundred years
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between the end of the Han and the rise of the Sui.
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So the period in Chinese history between 1912 and 1949
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is sometimes called the Chinese Republic,
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although that gives the government a bit too much credit.
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The leading group trying to re-form China into a nation state was the Guomindang,
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but after 1920 the Chinese Communist Party was also in the mix.
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And for the Guomindang to regain power from those big landlords and
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reunify China, they needed some help from the CCP.
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Now if an alliance between Communists and Nationalists
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sounds like a match made in hell,
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well, yes. It was.
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That said,
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the two did manage to patch things up for a while in the early 1920s,
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you know, for the sake of the kids.
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But then Sun Yat Sen died in 1925 and the alliance fell apart in 1927
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when Guomindang leader Chaing Kai Shek got mad at the communists
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for trying to foment socialist revolution, to which the communists were like,
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“But that’s what we do, man. We’re communists.”
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Anyway, this turned out to be a bad break up for a bunch of reasons,
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but mainly because it started a civil war between
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the Communists and the Nationalists.
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We’re not going to get into exhausting detail on the civil war but Spoiler alert:
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the Communists won.
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But there are a few things to point out:
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First, even though Mao [pronounced like Maori] emerged victorious,
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he and the communists were almost wiped out in 1934
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except that they made a miraculous and harrowing escape,
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trekking from southern China to the mountains in the north
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in what has become famously known as the Long March,
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a great example of historians missing an opportunity
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since it could easily have been called the Long Ass March,
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as it featured donkeys.
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Second,
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for much of the time the Gomindang was trying to crush the CCP,
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significant portions of China were being occupied and/or invaded by Japan.
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Thirdly,
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the Communists were just better at fighting the Japanese
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than the Nationalists were.
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In spite of the fact that Chiang Kai Shek had extensive support from the U.S.
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And each time the Nationalists failed against the Japanese,
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their prestige among their fellow Chinese diminished.
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It wasn’t helped by Nationalist corruption,
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or their collecting onerous taxes from Chinese peasants,
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or stories about Nationalist troops putting on civilian clothes
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and abandoning the city of Nanking during its awful destruction
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by the Japanese army in 1937.
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Meanwhile,
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the Communists were winning over the peasants in their northwestern enclave
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by making sure that troops didn’t pillage local land
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and by giving peasants a greater say in local government.
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Now, that isn’t to say everything was rosy under Mao’s communist leadership,
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even at its earliest stages.
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By the way,
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That is an actual chalk illustration. Very impressed. [thanks, boss.]
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In a preview of things to come, in 1942 Mao initiated a “rectification” program.
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Which basically meant students and intellectuals were sent
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down into the countryside to give them a taste of what “real China” was like
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in an effort to re-educate them.
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We try to be politically neutral here on Crash Course,
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but we are always opposed to intellectuals doing hard labor. [lolzer]
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But anyway,
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within four years of the end of World War II the Communists routed
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Chiang Kai Shek’s armies and sent them off to Taiwan.
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and these military victories paved the way for Mao to declare
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the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949.
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so once in power,
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Mao and the PRC were faced with the task of creating a new, socialist state.
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And Mao declared early on that the working class in China
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would be the leaders of a “people’s democratic dictatorship.”
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Oh democratic dictatorships. You’re the BEST.
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It’s all the best parts of democracy, and all the best parts of dictatorship.
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You get to vote, but there’s only one choice.
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It takes all the pesky thinking out it.
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The PRC promised equal rights for women, rent reduction, land redistribution,
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new heavy industry and lots of freedoms.
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Including freedoms of
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“thought, speech, publication, assembly, association, correspondence, person,
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domicile, moving from one place to another, religious belief, and
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the freedom to hold processions and demonstrations.”
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Yeah, NO.
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Even putting aside the PRC’s failure to protect any of those rights,
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Mao’s China wasn’t much fun if you were
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a landlord or even if you were a peasant who’d done well.
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Land redistribution and reform meant destroying the power of landlords,
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often violently.
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But centralizing power and checking individual ambition
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proved difficult for the government,
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and it was made harder by China’s involvement in the Korean War,
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which helped spur the first mass campaign of Mao’s democratic dictatorship.
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Designed to encourage support for the War,
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the campaign was called the
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“Resist America and Aid Korea campaign,” [name's a bit clunky, innit?]
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and it resulted in almost all foreigners leaving China.
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A second campaign, against “counterrevolutionaries” was much worse.
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People suspected of sympathizing with the Guomindang,
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or anyone insufficiently communist, was subject to humiliation and violence.
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Between October 1950 and August 1951
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28,332 people accused of being spies or counterrevolutionaries
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were executed in Guandong city alone.
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A third mass campaign, the “Three Anti Campaign” w
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as aimed at reforming the Communist party itself.
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And the final mass campaign, the Five Anti Campaign
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was an assault on all bourgeois capitalism,
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which effectively killed private business in China.
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Very few of the victims of this last campaign actually died,
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but capitalism was weakened and state control bolstered.
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OK, let’s go to the Thought Bubble.
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Mao and the CCP set out to turn China into an industrial powerhouse by following the
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Soviet model.
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We haven’t really talked about this, but under the Soviet system,
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Russia was able to accomplish massive industrialization-8:22
not to mention tens of millions of deaths from starvation-8:24
through centralized planning and collectivization of agriculture,
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following what were known as Five Year Plans.
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The Chinese adopted the model of Five Year Plans beginning in 1953
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and the first one worked,
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at least as far as industrialization was concerned.
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In fact, the plan worked even better than expected,
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with industry increasing 121% more than projected.
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In order for this to work though,
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the peasants had to grow lots of grain and sell it at extremely low prices.
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This kept inflation in check, and saving was encouraged by the fact that...
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...the Five Year Plan didn’t have many consumer goods,
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so there was nothing to buy.
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For urban workers,
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living standards improved and China’s population grew to 646 million.
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So far, Mao’s plan seemed to be working,
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but there was no way that China could keep up that growth,
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especially without some backsliding into capitalism.
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So Mao came up with a terrible idea called the Great Leap Forward.
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Mao essentially decided that
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the nation could be psyched up into more industrial productivity.
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Among many other bad ideas,
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he famously ordered that individuals build small steel furnaces
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in their backyard to increase steel production.
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This was not a good idea.
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First off, it didn’t actually increase steel production much.
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Secondly, it turns out that people making steel in their backyard
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who know nothing about making steel… Make Bad Steel.
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But the worst idea was
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to pay for heavy machinery from the USSR with exported grain.
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This meant there was less for peasants to eat—
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and as a result, between 1959 and 1962, 20 million people died,
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probably half of whom were under the age of 10.
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Jeez,Thought Bubble, that was sad.
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And then in happier news came the Cultural Revolution!
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Just kidding, it sucked.
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By the middle of the sixties,
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Mao was afraid that China’s revolution was running out of steam,
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and he didn’t want China to end up just a bureaucratized police state like,
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you know, most of the Soviet bloc.
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and The Cultural Revolution
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was an attempt to capture the glory days of the revolution and fire up the masses,
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and what better way to do that than to empower the kids.
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Frustrated students who were unable find decent, fulfilling jobs
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jumped at the chance to denounce their teachers, employers,
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and sometimes even their parents and to tear down tradition,
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which often meant demolishing buildings and art.
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The ranks of these “Red Guards” swelled
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and anyone representing the so-called “four olds”
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—old culture, old habits, old ideas, and old customs—
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was subject to humiliation and violence.
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Intellectuals were again sent to the countryside as they were in 1942;
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millions were persecuted;
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and countless historical and religious artifacts were destroyed.
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But the real aim of the Cultural Revolution was
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to consolidate Mao’s revolution,
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and while his image still looms large,
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it’s hard to say that China these days is a socialist state.
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Many would argue that Mao’s revolution was extremely short-lived,
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and that the real change in China happened in 1911.
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That’s when the Chinese Republic ended 3,000 years of dynastic history
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and forever broke the cyclical pattern the Chinese had used to understand their past.
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I mean at least in some senses,
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those Nationalist revolutionaries literally put an end to history.
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That sense of living in a truly New World
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has made many great and terrible things possible for China
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but the legacy of China’s two revolutions is mixed at best.
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China, for instance, made most of the camera we use to film this video.
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And
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China made most of the computers we use to edit. [i see what you did there, Stanny]
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But no one in
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the People’s Republic of China will legally be able to watch this video,
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because the government blocks YouTube.
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Thanks for watching.
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I’ll see you next week.
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Crash Course is
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produced and directed by Stan Muller.
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Our script supervisor is Meredith Danko.
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Our associate producer is Danica Johnson.
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The show is written by my high school history teacher
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Raoul Meyer and myself,
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and our graphics team is [not Secretly Canadian] Thought Bubble.
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Last week’s phrase of the week was
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"Disco Golf Ball."
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If you want to guess at this week’s phrase of the week or suggest future ones,
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you can do so in comments,
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where you can also ask questions about today's videos
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that will be answered by our team of historians.
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If you like Crash Course, make sure you’ve subscribed.
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Thanks for watching,
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and as we say in my hometown,
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Don’tForget The easiest time to add insult to injury is when signing somebody's cast.