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Conversation Between Kanzler and Somewhere_
Showing Visitor Messages 1 to 15 of 22
  1. Kanzler
    September 28th, 2016 5:20 PM
    Kanzler
    I'm not sure, tbh. They give the US an international military capability like no other country. I don't think that's a bad thing. They're not strictly speaking necessary to keep the US safe, but I believe that they are necessary to keep the world order as it is. Imagine how tricky North Korea would be without troops and missiles in South Korea and Japan. Imagine how much more assertive Russia could be without the bases surrounding it in Germany, Bulgaria, and Turkey. It'd be a very different world without the US bases, and it might be even less peaceful.

    What's your opinion on them?
  2. Somewhere_
    September 28th, 2016 4:53 PM
    Somewhere_
    yes! thats what it was called! Right I remember all about it now. It wasnt a particularly important thing to know, so I didnt remember much.

    Oh I see xD

    At least Woodrow Wilson wasnt president then XD He would have definitely tried to institute some sort of democratic state in China, like he tried to do (most of the democracies failed) post WWI.

    Ya im not a fan of US military bases abroad xD What is your opinion on the matter?
  3. Kanzler
    September 28th, 2016 4:41 PM
    Kanzler
    I'm sure you've heard of Warhammer or Games Workshop :O I don't play either of those cuz tabletop games are really expensive to get into.

    haha the "coalition" called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere with the Japanese as the dominant race in Asia? Imagine combining the racial motivation for Lebensraum with the classical exploitation of African and Asian colonies of European countries, and that's basically what Japan wanted for its corner of the world. They tried to make it sound nice, but the leadership were explicitly racist about their intentions, and all it would have done was violently exchange European colonialism with Japanese colonialism.

    LOL i didn't mean to say that they funded the Communists purposefully! Just that the Nationalists (which the US did fund) bled resources and equipment to the Communists over the course of the war. The Communists also benefited from capturing equipment from the Japanese as well.

    Another reason they didn't want to intervene too much in the local politics is that they wanted a united China as an ally against the Soviet Union. It wouldn't have been a big deal to the US if China was a bit communist or socialist, because no matter what ideology China has, it would be 100% in tension with the Soviet Union. So Chinese unity was more important to the US than having democratic, capitalist ideology.

    Yeah you guys still do. I don't think they're going away anytime soon, what with North Korea being unpredictable and China's gains in the South China Sea.
  4. Somewhere_
    September 28th, 2016 3:33 PM
    Somewhere_
    Dang you are making me feel bad for literally not knowing any game xD

    Of course the US would be opposed to Japanese invasion in China. I know Japan was trying to set up a coalition of sorts with a lot of the Asian countries, but I forget the name. But to fund the communists and not only the nationalists sort of surprises me.

    Im also not surprised it seems like the US didnt help the nationalists too much during the civil war considering they would then have to face Russia, but i dont know enough about the dates and situation because the US had no issue intervening everywhere else lol.

    The US stationed a lot of the troops in a lot of places. Im pretty sure we still have military bases in Japan.
  5. Kanzler
    September 28th, 2016 3:10 PM
    Kanzler
    Have you heard of wargaming? It's kind of like table-top games, but it's on a computer and can be a lot more complex.
  6. Kanzler
    September 28th, 2016 3:09 PM
    Kanzler
    The US was quite involved in China during the 30's and 40's. Predominantly, their objective there was to roll back Japan. Which worked, just like how the Soviets bled out the Germans on the Eastern Front, the Chinese bled out the Japanese on their homeland. They were perennially pissed at Chiang and his government for fighting the Communists instead of the Japanese and general incompetence. They funded the Nationalist Army with a lot of equipment, but obviously not troops since, well, the Chinese could never really run out of troops haha. Indirectly they funded the Communists as well, since there were quite a few mass retreats where US-aided weapons would be captured, as well as because of guerrilla tactics that necessitated that enemy equipment be captured, since the Communists at that time had very little industrial capability. It's the same thing we see happening in Syria - you arm your side, and when they surrender to ISIS, they take all the weapons you've donated. IIRC the US was interested in peace in China, and so pressured the Nationalists to form a coalition government with the Communists after the Japanese were defeated. I'm surprised that the US wasn't actually even more interventionist - like how they divided Germany and Korea - but then again I don't think they were looking forwards to get bogged down in China, which in 1945 was still a fifth of the world's population.

    so tl;dr not really involved in the Civil War per se, mostly there to help China fight the Japanese, obviously supported the Nationalists but otherwise stayed out of the internal politics as much as they could though.

    I just researched after and found that the US stationed over 150,000 troops in China. It sounds like a lot, but keep in mind that this is just post WWII and I'm sure a lot of those troops were transferred from the Pacific front.
  7. Somewhere_
    September 28th, 2016 2:41 PM
    Somewhere_
    wow lol. I know the US was involved fighting with the Whites in the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia... was the US involved with the civil war in China? Funding or providing troops for the Nationalist Party?

    Anarchism is traditionally communist, so Im not surprised that it was a rising ideology as you said. Its only recently that anarchism has split into many different camps. Specifically Anarcho-Capitalism with Gustave de Molinari and Lysander Spooner in the 19th century, but without any sort of backing or even name until Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell in the mid-late 20th century.

    I played Lego Star Wars a lot as a kid and now I found i can get it online, so i think ill buy it. I used to play a lot of lego games. I was a lego kid... arguably still am lol. I was on a lego robotics team in middle school and just recently built a lego car to hatch eggs on Pokemon Go cause i was bored.

    Im not very familiar with Paradox Interactive or any historical games to be honest.
  8. Kanzler
    September 28th, 2016 1:41 PM
    Kanzler
    I had to verify some of the dates, but yeah essentially off the top of my head. I've taken courses concerning ideologies and social movements in modern China, as well as having studied contemporary Chinese governance (how their government actually works). Most people don't know all that much about Chinese history, so I'm always happy to explain it. Forgot to mention this by the way, but the leader of the Nationalist Party Chiang Kai Shek (and first President of Taiwan) was pretty irritating to the US leadership that had the pleasure of liaising with him. General Marshall, I believe, once asked if they could have him assassinated.

    Now that I think of it, anarchism was a rising ideology during the fall of the Empire, and preceded communism, but it wasn't organized nor did it advocate for the kind of social change that appealed to a vast majority of the population. Honestly though, I think the most important ideological factor during that period was nationalism - China had been ruled by a foreign people for almost four hundred years and recently had suffered from colonialism and capitalist exploitation from Western powers - so none of the ideological forces - anarchism, communism, fascism, democracy - were truly pure.

    I've never played lego star wars, but I've heard it's a pretty good series. Have you heard of Paradox Interactive? They make a lot of history games and that drives a lot of my interest in history.
  9. Somewhere_
    September 28th, 2016 12:44 PM
    Somewhere_
    I dont think I have much to add, which is why I asked the question lol. Thanks for responding... it probably took a while. The only thing is that as far as I know, the Boxer Rebellion probably added to the previous chaos before the civil war.

    Is this all from the top of your head?

    I have a strong urge to buy the lego star wars game for some reason.
  10. Kanzler
    September 27th, 2016 7:40 PM
    Kanzler
    Haha quite true. Many reasons.

    1) China was dying for social change. The aristocratic and capitalist class was extremely exploitative at that time. Although there was a small proletariat population in cities (mostly small because of China's underdevelopment), there was a massive underclass of poor rural farmers. Many of them had lost their land and livelihoods. Basically people with nothing to offer but their labour, in exchange for meagre wages.

    2) Political instability. This partially caused the atmosphere under which the masses could be exploited. Basically the monarchy fell to revolution 1912 I believe, and IIRC the first elected president traded his position to this army general in order to get the emperor to actually abdicate. This general then declared himself a new emperor. Everybody hated it, political chaos ensued, and even his closest allies started to defect. He was only emperor for 83 days, and by that time his generals had started parcelling China off into private military governments. As you can imagine, the situation of the working class makes quite the turn for the worst in this absence of law and order. Also political turmoil lends itself to extreme ideologies.

    3) The Nationalist Party. The Nationalist Party eventually became the main force that would try to reunify China, and they certainly make a heroic effort to do so, but it takes them over a decade to do so. It's important to keep in mind that all this time the Nationalist government is very weak, these generals that are now called warlords are doing their own thing in like 80% of the country so in this relative vacuum of power a full-fledged Communist movement could form. IIRC no country in Europe experienced the same degree of fragmentation for anything close to the amount of time China experienced. The Nationalists actually allied with the Communists for a while to reclaim the rest of China - this was called the First United Front. But then the Nationalists try to violently purge the Communists in 1927 when their reconquest was still taking place. At this point the Nationalists have put a lot of effort into a military reconquest, but the standard of living for the average Chinese farmer has not improved. Since the Nationalists and the Communists are now enemies, the Communists look a lot more like a credible alternative.

    4) The Japanese. The civil war rages for about 10 years or so until the Communists appear on the verge of defeat, but the Japanese invade China. Both parties form a pact - the Second United Front - to defeat the Japanese, but you wouldn't be surprised to hear that there was a lot of infighting. At this point, the Communists start to look much better than the Nationalists. At this moment, both the Chinese people and the Chinese country as a whole are poor. So when the Nationalist army marches into the villages and demand food and billeting(as soldiers are want to do when they're stressed, defeated, underpaid, and undisciplined), they gain a lot of animosity. The Communist army, on the other hand, is disciplined and indoctrinated and are able to cooperate with the citizens they're fighting for more than competing with them for resources. So when the Communists and Nationalists clash while nominally fighting the Japanese together, it's the Nationalists who look like the traitors. Also, the Communists probably would have lost the civil war had the Japanese not invaded, so quite ironically the Japanese contributed significantly to the rise of Communism.

    5) Soviet assistance during this time is very significant. During the Chinese civil war and WWII, the Japanese developed heavy industry in Manchuria in the north. When the Soviets invaded Manchuria, they handed over that territory to the Communists. I'm not sure if the Communists would have won the war without that industrial boost.

    6) Also Mao's guerrilla tactics that become replicated all over the third world during the Cold War. They were technologically at a disadvantage, but they had much better recruitment, logistics, and long-term strategy. They had a credible ideology, the support of the people, the ability to fight effectively without being limited by infrastructure, better morale, and chose their fights well to avoid losses.

    7) Conventional Communist theory would suggest that the revolution should begin with the urban proletariat, but the ideology was adapted to China's situation of focusing on the countryside instead as the Communists repeatedly and fought and lost to the Nationalists early in the civil war.

    tl;dr - the Nationalist party was out of touch with the lives and will of 99% of the Chinese people. Their conventional way of fighting, compared to the Communists was very resource-intensive and proved highly traumatic to a very traumatised people who have endured decades of political unrest, foreign invasion and corrupt, ineffectual governance. The Communists were credible in making lives better for every day people. While the ideology was borrowed from the Soviets, it was adapted to Chinese conditions and was ultimately successful. I think on a human level, the Communists provided hope and that's just something that the Nationalist government did not project for two whole decades.

    There's a lot more detail, but this is all I can say about the topic at the moment. It's a very fascinating topic imo :P
  11. Somewhere_
    September 27th, 2016 6:39 PM
    Somewhere_
    Just subbed. Thanks for telling me about the channel!

    Why was their a communist revolution in China? I think its more obvious in Europe- people tired of war, hierarchal institutions, imperialism, "exploitation," etc. (I'm really not a fan of communism). And Russia was extremely weak from WWI.
  12. Kanzler
    September 27th, 2016 4:57 PM
    Kanzler
    By the way, have you heard of Jabzy? I love his history channel. He's got snippets of history from all over.
  13. Kanzler
    September 27th, 2016 4:52 PM
    Kanzler
    Oh boy. Play as Western Roman Empire. It's a very tough challenge. Normally I play as AI and I think the game is rather challenging, really conveys the desperation of that era very well.

    China took a lot of inspiration for its early modernization from Japan, actually. Then there was a lot of ideology shopping and then the Communists took over. I believe they organized the party-state initially along the Soviet line, but then it developed into a more indigenous form.
  14. Somewhere_
    September 27th, 2016 4:38 PM
    Somewhere_
    wow thats pretty cool. Are the sides evenly matched? Are you playing against AI?

    Yes of course the scientific revolution! It undermined the Catholic Church's power similar to Protestantism, without war. And in turn, catholic monarchies. More cultural (which protestantism had as well).

    Very interesting. Its also interesting how Chinese politics has not been very influenced by Europe, despite all of its encounters with Europe. Even Japan was heavily westernized after WWII.
  15. Kanzler
    September 27th, 2016 3:44 PM
    Kanzler
    Absolutely, that's part of the appeal :P I've played as the Saxons, Eastern Romans, Persians, some of the Viking tribes, as well as the White Huns. They get elephants.

    Yeah by Louis XIV the French were starting to get there, and Frederick the Great represents the heights of absolutism. Although they were still monarchies, the European kingdoms of the 18th and 19th century were well on their way to developing modern administrative structures. When I said ancien regime I meant a more medieval, less rational form of government regardless of how the head of state is selected. Protestantism and liberalism were of course major forces, but the scientific revolution and the application of that to society were also very important.

    Well, I feel like the Chinese government of today is very much interested in managing the entire scope of its resources much like the Imperial governments of yore. Economic and social policy is very much about developing the country towards prosperity and national power. Political power is to a great extent still centralized with the Communist party and the state being parallel but intertwined structures. This is honestly pretty fascinating to me - essentially there is a party equivalent to every state position, for example every Governor of a province in China has an equivalent Party Secretary. Imagine if the Governor of every state had a Democratic or Republican Party Secretary that was responsible for setting the policy agenda. So the party directs the state (the Party Secretary is responsible for policy, and the Governor is responsible for implementing it, essentially) at every level, and the party can be controlled from the top - the central leadership. I hope that gives you a better idea of how political power flows in the Chinese government, and I think it's definitely reminiscent of Imperial efforts to maintain top-down control.

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