Chinas best dynastic military?

Thanks golden Panda, Crobato, for your excellent and enlightening
infos. Especially with regards to the southern frame of mind in China.
I spent most of my times way up north and just had brief stayovers in
Shanghai, Hangzhou, Xiamen, and Guangzhou. But your articles are very
informative and educational.
Took the Mongols and Manchus more than 50 years to complete conquest
of the south.
By contrast, the CCP, took only 2 years !
r's
Clive

PLA is probably one of the last armed forces in the world to have a formal cavalry, made up of northern horseriders. I don't know if they still do today.

Few people seemed to remember that Mao Zedong was also an able military commander, when Kuomingtang was incompetent. He had quite an understanding of warfare as a total strategy, the union of the Army and the People for example, their invincibility when their goals are one. When you review some of the stuff he wrote, its still amazing how much it remains relevant. And how much people forget, to their own consequence.



"We in the West usually think of power in terms of the number and capabilities of weapons, the number and skill of the men who employ them, and the economic resources available to support the weapons and men. In other words, we tend to define power primarily in terms of material things; man is involved, but only secondarily. Mao declared that this view of power was too narrow. He based his wider view of power on three arguments.

First, he argued that there was a broader set of resources available on which to build power--the most important of them being the morale and will power of man, continually reinforced by political mobilization. He put it this way:

Weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive factor; it is people, not things, that are decisive. The contest of strength is not only a contest of military and economic power, but also a contest of human power and morale. Military and economic power is necessarily wielded by people.6

In short, Mao concluded that man, who is spiritual, can defeat weapons, which are simply material. That is why he believed man's morale and will power to be such an important source of power. Next, Mao said that material resources could be transferred from one side to the other; this is the meaning behind his statement that the enemy was the Communist transport corps.7 Last, Mao asserted that one could increase his power in certain ways that had not been fully exploited in the past, the most effective of them being proper definition of a situation. He said that one could begin with an overall inferior situation and, by properly defining it, identify certain parts within which he was superior--that is, one could find superior subsituations; then, by acting within one of these superior subsituations and by continually moving from one superior subsituation to another, one would eventually transform his overall inferior situation into an overall superior one. This was Mao's idea of maintaining the initiative--never losing a battle, always being on the offense even within defense. 8 In sum, power, in Mao's View, was defined primarily in spiritual terms and only secondarily in material terms."

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KMT neglected northern China. When food was low, the KMT hoarded food to feed people in the south and its armies, leaving much on the north to starve. Northerners didn't forget that and CCP got their support base from that. When KMT undertook retribution against IJA soldiers and Chinese collaborators, many IJA soldiers and collaborators fled north and even joined CCP. These soldiers led the CCP to valuable arms caches hidden by the IJA. Those arms greatly helped the CCP cause.

I often wondered about the view KMT were just incompetent. They did semi-unite a severely messy China, then held out 8 years against industrialized Japan. Instead of irritating every great power like the Qing before them, they managed to obtain support first from Germany, than from USA. Instead of acting with arrogance, they won the world's sympathy. With the end of WWII they also arrived at the height of their achievement, becoming one of five veto holding powers in the new United Nations.

I have visited a former KMT facility in Chongqing. During WWII it housed U.S. intelligence agents. When the war was over they used it as a prison for captured communist underground. On display were their torture rooms and variety of torture instruments. On the walls there were these writings in traditional Chinese style, painted in beautiful GMT blue. They exalted the values of loyalty, honor, and country in a classy prose. Further down was a monument dedicated to the victims of this prison. I will post some photos if I can find them.

The KMT understood the west and looked up to it. Yet they couldn't communicate with the vast majority of Chinese people. They were caught in the impossible tangle of tradition, democracy, and fascism. They failed China, renovated themselves, and eventually made a pretty good showing in Taiwan.

KMT has always been seen to have weak support in the countryside which made its loss to the CCP not much of a surprise given the vast majority of Chinese were in the countryside in those days. Even now, KMT has weak support in the south of Taiwan where most of the farming communities are.

Among the accusations against KMT is that they could have done a much better job against the Japanese in WW2 had they not been so obsessed with crushing the CCP at the same time, sometimes even more so than they did against the invading Japanese.

As for better relations with the west than the Qing, it was merely that they were stronger. The Qing was so weak that they were unable to have any semblance of equal relations with any modern powers in those days.
I think UK in particular had bad relations with KMT for taking away many of their privileges from the 'unequal treaties'. UK was seriously considering siding with Japan in the 30s hoping to bargain for their interests in China.

Hi Folks
I had a long talk with my father in law once about why and how the guomindang lost northern china so quickly his reasons were:
1. In 1945-7 , there was a big famine in northern china, Chiang Kai Shek
forbade the UN from delivering food and medicine to northern China. Saying
that ALL northern chinese are communists and a reduction of their population
would serve china's main interest.
2. Chiang Kai Shek was only concerned about Nanjing/Shanghai/Hangzhou
area,he had an extreme Han centrist mentality. Mongols like my father inlaw
called this "DA HAN ZHU YI", Chiang almost never visited the areas north of
Beijing, never visited Inner Mongolia nor Manchuria.
3. When Marshal Zhang Xue Liang wanted to fight the Japs, Chiang told
him that he could afford to loss Manchuria , to gain more sympathy from
the West and eventually have them punish Japan.
4. Chiang , despite signing a treaty of cooperation with Mao to fight the
Japs, NEVER treated Mao as an equal, he kept referring to Mao and the
8th Route army as an army of bandits and cuthroats.
5. Chiang NEVER understood what People's War meant.
Chiang's mentality was quite similar to many Han Centric emperors in China's
past. Particulalry the Ming emperor Ying Zhong, who was captured by
Esen Hongtaiji at Tumu.
r's
Clive

What your father in law says sound reasonable.
I think Sun, the founder of KMT, was from the south.
Chiang had trained in Japan & had been said by some to have illusions abt ties with Japan eventhough hostilities have started leading to indecisiveness in the initial stages of the war.
And of course, not only his reluctance to cooperate with CCP, but also his diversion of resources to fight them did not help the war against Japan.

Sun Yat Sen is from the Shanghai-Ningbo area, same as Chiang Kai Sek and his son. Sun (Song?) is a family name whose clan had great predominance in this region even if you look back to ancient Chinese history (Sun Quan of the 3 Kingdoms period, Sun Tze of the Warring States period, both of the Wu kingdom).

In his foreword to one of the English editions of Sun Tze Art of War, famous British strategist Basil Liddell Hart wrote about his surprise why the KMT officers ignored the study of Sun Tze, saying its "obsolete" in view of their Westernized training (Clauswitzian concepts of warfare). Obviously they learned the hard way. Mao's own military doctrines and thoughts often reflect that of the Art of War, modernized and given a Communist-revolutionary color.

***

Sun Yat Sen and all these Shanghainese like Chiang Kai Sek, are all born from urban, highly educated roots with a silver spoon in the mouth. Thus there is a cultural, urban-rural, and educational divide between them and the rest of the people. No offense to Shanghainese, but the fact that they're also Shanghainese adds to that divide, since they can talk among themselves in a dialect that no other mainlander Chinese group can understand. This creates a nation within a nation mentality, sometimes laced with a persecuted minority chip-in-the-shoulder complex, something I've also observed with Fujienese, Cantonese and Hakka.

With this kind of mentality, this gives them a sort of urban east coast Chinese city kind of concentration, neglecting the inner China rurals, as well as to the north.

Ironically, the Chinese Communist Party was born in a restaurant in Shanghai. The restaurant is still there, and there is a plaque to commemorate the event. Great ideas may came from a meeting of minds over dimsum.

Back to the present. After Deng Xiao Ping left power, Jiang Zhe Min and his infamous "Shanghai clique" takes power, consolidating their hold on the CCP which began even during the Deng years. You can see the results of the early development---heavy concentration on development of cities in the east coast, creating pockets of prosperity and modernization in the east and the south, while the countryside to the west and to the north languished. One of the social criticisms leveled against the JZM era is this growing divide between rural and urban, between peasant and businessman.

It changes now with Hu Jin Tao. HJT hails from the Gansu region, which is the north and the west, west even of Xian and along the Silk Route. Traditionally. Gansu is a crossroad of minorities from Tibetan to Mongol to Turkish people. The Xi Xia Dynasty used to be there too before being annihilated by Genghiz Khan, and the last Khan of the Mongols died in Gansu centuries later. Before that, Gansu is the homeland of an indo european minority called the Yuezhi, before they were driven out by the Huns and migrated to the Hindu Kush. Today, many minorities live in Gansu, one of the poorest provinces in China, from the Moslems like the Hui and Turkish related groups, to Mongolians. Hu family name, like Ma, is one associated with northwestern Han peoples, with Islamic influence. Some theorize its really short of Hussein, just as Ma is short for Mohammed.

I believe a person's background will influence the way he thinks, and HJT may be one to restore the balance of development from being heavily centered in the south and the east, to the north and the west.

Talking abt Shanghai, it has been said that KMT took unnecessarily large losses in defending Shanghai against Japan in WW2. This was a military mistake which had serious repercussions in the overall war against Japan.
KMT leaders' ties with Shanghai is a possible explanation why that happened.

i prefer the Han dynasty, but.......

incisive reply in #105

Chiang lost his people finally he lost his country, but rest taiwan.