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- Thread starter bd popeye
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Stalin might have wanted that, but he did nothing to enforce it. Also, yeah, the territories lost were bad but not as bad as if Japan/British controlled China.
Also, UK is arguably the worst since Opium caused so many deaths and economic ruin.
The West was all about global warming 24/7 for the past 20 years, just forcing it down our throats. I'm certain they wanted to be the green tech supplier to the rest of the world. But once China dominated the field and showed that the collective West simply cannot compete, all the harping about global warming just suddenly vanished.
No idea.
Maybe more brutal. There was a lot of ethnic cleansing in the conquered territories. For example, the Circassian people of the Caucasuses, the entirety of them were shipped (by the Russian Empire) to the Ottoman Empire. The Balkars were entirely shipped to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Chechens and Ingush were not spared the brutality. But later Russian allowed resettlement. The irony is, Stalin was from the Caucasuses.
I think the moral of the story here is that in a world where nations only have interests rather than friends, weak nations such as what China was in the 19th and early 20th centuries are only presented with two options. Which is either to be straight up oppressed or to serve someone else's interests for better or worse, with the better part rarely coming from altruism.
You want your nation's destiny to be more than than the sum of either of those two outcomes? Then make your nation strong. The rest is history.
In light of discussions on the matter of loyalty recently, I will say that its not really a case of acknowledging your heritage but more so simply, knowing right from wrong. When it comes to heritage, there is no two ways about it, all ABCs are going to be caught between two sides. Hated as "ch-nks" by the whites, yes. But be that as it may, they all grew up as Americans their whole lives. However hard they try to study Chinese culture, their knowledge of it will only be watered down versions of it compared to those who memorized thousands of Tang poems against their will. However good their Chinese gets, their accents will be off and their knowledge of slang terms commonplace to every Mainlander will be lacking. Heritage, roots, these are not exactly terms to apply to a people perpetually stuck in limbo whether they like it or not.
However, they still have the capacity to make choices. And with respect to the right or wrong choice here, its not a philosophical question in the slightest. It really boils down to, which do you think would give your children or descendants who look like you, a better future? The imperialist monster who wants to keep its boot heel on every nation populated by people who look like you? Where the public opinion is moving from boot heel to straight up extermination? Where whatever comforts you enjoy are from expedience rather than altruism? Or the nation that through thick and thin can finally usher in a world where people who look like you can stand tall? Perhaps you missed the bus through no fault of your own and can't do anything to change it, since that's just life sometimes. But that doesn't mean you can't do your part to make sure generations following you get on that damn bus and never look back.
"Whooping cough"?
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FriedRiceNSpice
Major
Exactly. The reason the British/Japanese/Russians inflicted the most harm on China is not because they were inherently more evil or imperialist than the other imperial powers at the time - but rather because they were the first 3 nations to develop the means to do so. The British, being the first to develop global naval power and establish colonies in Asia, were the first Europeans to have the means to project power into China. Prior to the British, Spain/Portugal/the Netherlands all tried to some degree, but were crushed by the Ming. The Russians, completed their eastward expansion, established a shared land border which allowed them to directly project power overland into the Northeast. The Japanese, being geographically close by, were the 2nd power to be able to project naval power into China. The French tried as well (they wanted to annex Yunnan and Guangxi), but their armies were stopped by the Black Flag Army in Vietnam.
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I can attest to this after speaking with the elders in my family about the Japanese occupation in Manzhouguo/Manchuria. The Japanese didn't want to get their hands dirty in order to maintain their image so they used the Koreans as the enforcement force. It is unfair to categorize all Koreans as being brutal as they faced oppression from the Japanese themselves and also had resistance fighters, but the Koreans who were used as part of the Japanese ruling apparatus did have a reputation of being more brutal than the Japanese military during that time amongst the local Dongbei population. Their brutal conduct earned them the nickname 朝鲜棒子, translating to "Korean sticks" referring to their use of sticks to beat the locals. The Japanese military typically avoided interactions with the locals directly and preferred to enforce using proxies like Koreans and local landlords. Mind you I am talking about pre-1937 (before start of 2nd Sino-Japanese war) when the Japanese were still intending on "peacefully" integrating parts of China into the Japanese empire and trying to build goodwill with the locals.
The Japanese poured massive investments into Dongbei and moved in colonists, intending on turning it into the main base of production for the Japanese empire due to its abundance of agricultural land and raw materials. Even today, Dongbei is the industrial backbone for much of China's military industrial supply chain. Japanese geologists speculated at the time that there would be oil in Daqing and started drilling there but weren't able to find the speculated oil fields. When PRC was established, Chinese tried in the same area and found the oil field to be slightly deeper than what the Japanese reached. Some speculate that had the Japanese had a bit more patience and the time to drill deeper in Daqing, they would have struck oil and not have started the campaign in South East Asia after the oil embargo. Within some circles in the Japanese Kwantung army, there was intention on turning Manchuria into the center of the Japanese empire. They established large industrial cities with modern city planning (for the 1930s) and even named modern day Changchun as "新京" meaning "New Capital". It follows a similar capital naming convention in China and Japan, like Beijing (Northern Capital), Nanjing (Southern Capital), Tokyo (Eastern Capital). Puyi, the last emperor of the Qing dynasty was placed as its puppet head of state and it's quite possible that the Aisin-Gioro royal family would be intermarried with the Japanese royal house so they could eventually claim legitimacy over the entirety of China, like what they did with the Korean royals. Ultimately that project failed and left behind tens of thousands of Japanese in Dongbei, especially orphans and women. Locals treated treated them quite well considering the circumstances.
Didn't hear of personal stories of brutality from the Soviets against the people of Dongbei but after they drove the Japanese away, the Soviets took all the useful machinery they could find back to the USSR. Angang Steel plant in Anshan was a prime example (which was called Showa Steel during Japanese rule) where the Soviets took the heavy machinery required for steel production. Angang needed extensive rebuilding after PRC was established and the Soviets eventually helped to rebuild production capacity during the Soviet industrial aid projects to China starting in the 1950s.