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Why you didnt get a uniform GS?Since you have come out of the woodwork to toss insults,I must reply in kind.So,let me guess.You were in Canada dodging the draft?You were so stoned that you flunked the psysical?I know,you were busy reading The Little Red Book and memorizing The Thoughts of Chairman Mao,the Great Helmsman.
Why are you still writing? Earlier you said that it was "Case closed."
Then why do you keep trying to stick marshmallows in liberals?
Thank you, by the way, for the honor of capitalizing "liberals", but we are not God and do not deserve it. Liberals, when capitalized, only refers to members of a political party that is named the Liberal party, and no such party exists in the USA.
li-ber-al
–noun
14. a person of liberal principles or views, esp. in politics or religion.
15. (often initial capital letter) a member of a liberal party in politics, esp. of the Liberal party in Great Britain.
Because you and 88 opened it again.Besides,it is fun to stick barbs in Liberals.
And the reason that you believe that I must be a liberal is.....?
My objections to your post are congruent with the mentality displayed above. You are overly simplistic. I get the impression that things for you are right/wrong, black/white, and that the possibility of things actually being grey, is the sort of thing that you would find annoyingly complex, thus, not even considered.
I object to this mindset whenever I encounter it, whether it comes from the left or the right of the political spectrum.
And of course I already know why you decided that I must be a liberal....there seems to be no room for disagreeing with your simplistic ideology without you having to conceive of that person as a member of some enemy camp.
If I am wrong, you may easily prove it by presenting posts indicative of thoughtfulness rather than what you have presented so far. If you are uncertain of what I am referencing, you might start by losing the use of phrases such as "case closed." Tell me, if I disagreed with a position that you have taken, posted a reply which said I hate whatever it was that you admired, and ended it with " 'nuff said"...would you respect that reply? Would you behave as though enough had indeed been said and abstain from a reply?
And if you didn't feel that "nuff said" was sufficient for me to "win" the debate, why would you think any of us are going to be impressed in any manner by your "case closed" approach?
Also, the fact that you did service time in the military does absolutely nothing for you in terms of establishing you as having a command of the history of the era being discussed. You wish to be able to draw that like a gun, as though anyone who has ever been in military service automatically knows more about communism, or anything else, than someone who has dedicated years to studying the history of the Cold War.
No, if it hadn't been for the United States, Mao probably would've ended up on the wrong end of a Japanese bayonet. That's not jingoistic bragging, because I think it was a terrible American strategic blunder to enter the war. But don't attribute China's independence to Mao. Anyone in Mao's position who had half their enemies nuked for them could've done the same thing.
The Soviet Union and the United States both supported Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalist Party. The Japanese openly declared during the Sino-Japanese war, which later became part of the Asian theater of WW2, that their objective was to "annihilate the National government" of China.
The Chinese Communist Party won the Civil War in part because of its treatment of the people, whereas the KMT was notorious for its corruption and its terrible treatment of the average Chinese civilian. In some towns, the peasants actually took up arms to fight off the KMT and welcomed the JAPANESE as liberators.
Add to that the Chinese communists' adaption of guerrilla warfare, demoralized KMT units defecting to the Communist side, and you have a Chinese communist victory.
The Soviet Union and the United States both supported Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalist Party. The Japanese openly declared during the Sino-Japanese war, which later became part of the Asian theater of WW2, that their objective was to "annihilate the National government" of China.
The Chinese Communist Party won the Civil War in part because of its treatment of the people, whereas the KMT was notorious for its corruption and its terrible treatment of the average Chinese civilian. In some towns, the peasants actually took up arms to fight off the KMT and welcomed the JAPANESE as liberators.
Add to that the Chinese communists' adaption of guerrilla warfare, demoralized KMT units defecting to the Communist side, and you have a Chinese communist victory.
It's not about the treatment of the people, it's about efficient organising, highly effective tapping into grass-root support and a unified and disciplined political and military leadership. Most of all, a clear understanding of what the majority of Chinese people at that time wanted:[SIZE=2][SIZE=-1][/SIZE]
Mao was the only major Chinese political figure at that time who understood the key to win China was not how many troop you had, nor was it what kind of ideology you preach. China back was an overwhelmingly agrarian society with peasants dominating the population. Yet the rural economy was dominated by landowners, which left the majority of Chinese population deprived of their own land, pissed, angry and ready to accept and fight for a new political order that promised to redistribute means of production for them (land). Communist orthodoxy called for industrial workers to lead the revolution and the revolution should focus on the urban centers. Chinese Communist leaders preceding Mao sticked to this orthodoxy, while they caused lots of trouble for the nationalist government, their attempt at revolution failed to gain significant traction. Mao understood the need for any revolution, just like to need for any successful political campaign, was to satisfy the political and economic aspiration of the majority. In China, the majority was landless peasant, and the biggest political [/SIZE]guerrilla warfare[SIZE=2]and economic aspiration of theirs was to have their own land. They didn't care about communism, they didn't care about all the theories proposed by Karl Marx. But they wanted their land, and Mao, a guy who,despite his voracious appetite for reading, didn't receive formal higher education and had never left China, understood it (the majority of Chinese dynasty changes throughout Chinese history happened after the peasants were pushed to the brink. )Chiang and other communist and nationalist leaders, for all their shiny education credentials and world traveling experience (maybe because of their rather elite education, they could not get out of their bubble and see what's really going on outside. The same thing is happening to a lot of the US-supported regimes, namely, the person supported by the US, western-educated, speaking fluent English, can give a very charming and articulate interview on CNN, nevertheless, can't stand on his own feet without significant support from the US against usually dirty uneducated leaders of opposition who usually command support on the street.), didn't get it. One side note, about the recent Taliban incursion into the heartland of Pakistan, most American commentators only look at it as an fight between central government/military and religious fundamentalists while remained totally oblivious to the promise Taliban made to landless peasants who had long suffered on the stranglehold of big landowners: support us, we'll get rid of the landowners and give you your own land. If America continued to view the rise of Islamic fundamentalism thorough a "good vs evil" or "democracy vs theocracy" angle. I'm afraid it's just a matter of time before America lost the entire Muslim world just like she did back in 1949. [/SIZE]
[SIZE=2]On the other hand, Mao's success was also a reflection of failure of the nationalist government, which was corrupt and incompetent to its very core, not to mention thoroughly infiltrated by the Communist, an official at the ministry of defense whom Chiang himself had regular working dinner with turned out to be a dedicated Communist intelligence agent. Chiang himself had a habit of sticking his nose into every detail of planning and execution of every worth-mentioning military campaign, yet he was also said to fly to Shanghai to deal with family feud (his son bumped head with his nephew when his son was tasked by him to stabilize the economy while his nephew was one of the biggest currency speculator at that time) when close to half a million of his best troop was surrounded by Communist forces and facing total annihilation. Truman was blasted for losing China, yet people blasting him forgot to mention Truman decided to pull the plug on Chiang after finding out American aid to Chiang's government was diverted/stolen to invest back in US market. (Chiang himself was probably relatively clean, but that guy had some major problems managing his extended families in term of corruption, and that guy always made the stupid mistake of giving too much power to incompetent while messing too much with people who actually did their jobs. It was no coincidence two of his brother in law were crowned as the richest men in China, and it was also no coincidence many high-level military and political official, including his sister in law who was also wife of his mentor, who happened to be the founder of Chinese republic, of Chiang's government ended up jumping ship and offered their support to the Communist)[/SIZE]. The nationalistic party was also fraught with internal division and suffering from extremely weak grass-root position organisionally. (The Communist can organize every county, every village on their area to support the war effort while the nationalists, in comparison, had very little grass-root presence. The nationalistic government may look stronger on paper, but the mechanism to tap into their theoretical superior economic and demographic strenght simply didn't exist.)
The Communist didn't win China by practicing guerrilla warfare, indeed, many battles in Chinese civil war involved the amassing of tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of conventional forces on both sides. (at least 500,000 nationalistic forces were annhiliated in each of the three biggest battles.) Soviet Union hedged her bet until the very last moment, to the extreme annoyance of Mao himself. (Stalin was urging Mao to accept a deal that would divide China even in 1949 when support, on the ground military situation, economic environment as well as the moral of the nationalist government showed clear sign of collapsing.) the biggest support Chinese Communist got from Soviet Union was the fact that the Communist forces were allowed into Manchuria after WWII. Due to extreme tenuous control of Manchuria by the natinalist government, indeed, 1945 was the first time the central governemnt, nationalist or otherwise, had any influence inside Manchuria in half a century. The Communist forces were able to rapidly expand and take over territories. Long before the overall situdation tilted in favor of the Communist, except for a few major cities, the whole of Manchuria, along with all the heavy industry on it, had already been under de facto control of the Communist. Communist forces from Manchuria were the best equipped and biggest numerically among all the major Communist battle groups. Control of the most industralized region of China also undoubtedly helped the Communist enormously with regard to economy.
In sum, the victory of Communist stemmed from clear understanding of political and economic aspiration of the masses, superior execution enabled by highly efficient organizational skills from the very top down to the lowest level as well as acquiring of solid sized area of control during and after WWII. The nationalists, at least the nationalists between 1945 and 1949, really had no chance, no matter how much financial and military support the US was willing to provide.
I googled /mao burn bible/ and could not find a single hit from a source that seemed authoritative to confirm that. About the best I could find was a transcript of a radio program on one of the bible radio networks, of two people talking off the cuff and one of them said he burned anti-communist books, including the bible.. That speaker called him "Zedong", as if that were his last name.
I have no doubt that there were instances where books that were inconsisent with Communist thought were gathered and destroyed, but I seriously doubt that there was any kind of anti-Christian effort to do so.
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Reasons
