Significance of the Chinese military contribution to World War 2 disputed.

lightspeed said:

people are always deceived by skillful propaganda, even in today’s world when there is an extensive range of information available.

the ordinary peasant and worker knew nothing or can’t understand Sun Yat-Sen’s San-min Doctrine or Mao Zedong’s China version of Marxism Leninism or New Democracy pre-1949. majority of the people were uneducated and illiterate. they can’t read the papers to know what was happening in China. the peasants lived and worked in the rural countrysides, cut off from rest of civilization. they were deprived of news. there was a total lack of information to inform and educate him. he was gullible and would be easily misled by skillful propaganda. that is one key reason why the KMT government delayed giving the people the votes and continued the political tutelage period. the KMT worked toward making the conditions right first till the people can be relied on to make the right choices for themselves.

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Brumby said:

The propaganda and the results that you painted is neither verifiable nor refutable and so I will not directly address them. However I will deal with the logic in your reasoning. You described the means to communicate in those days as archaic and the populace were generally illiterate. Considering the vast size of China and its population it would be more plausible to argue against rather than for the view that any propaganda would be effective. If you are familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of needs, all human looks for fulfilment at the most basic level and that is to do with food, shelter and safety. No amount of propaganda can overcome substance with form. People turn against their government when their most basic needs are not met. No amount of propaganda will turn bs into rice or water into wine. People know when their most basic needs are being met or not. Only politicians somehow think that bs can sustain itself indefinitely.

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lightspeed said:

you don’t know the US huge lend-lease aid to China, especially the military aid was greatly exaggerated. you ignored the CCP-Soviet secret cooperation even though I already gave one conclusive evidence in the Dairen war factories, and the source was the CCP Dairen officials’ memoirs. you ignored that completely. we discussed the CCP’s role in the anti-Japanese war sometimes ago. 1.2 million Communist troops at the end of ww2 ? show me the list of the units.

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lightspeed said:

the KMT government failed to look after the livelihood of the people, and that lost them the popular support. the CCP entered the picture, promised to look after the people well and won their support. but why the Nationalists failed in that ? the KMT was of course corrupted. but what is the origin of the rampant corruptness after ww2 ? you guys only looked at the end results and form the conclusions. I am exploring its origins for the reasons behind them. you can't know the full history's truth by just deriving from the end results and not exploring its origins.

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lightspeed said:

the KMT government failed to look after the livelihood of the people, and that lost them the popular support. the CCP entered the picture, promised to look after the people well and won their support. but why the Nationalists failed in that ? the KMT was of course corrupted. but what is the origin of the rampant corruptness after ww2 ? you guys only looked at the end results and form the conclusions. I am exploring its origins for the reasons behind them. you can't know the full history's truth by just deriving from the end results and not exploring its origins.

Dr. Lin Yutang had some excellent writings on his personal view of the official propaganda of the Nationalists, Communists and Americans during ww2 in his book "The Vigil of a Nation". i will post them here later.

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lightspeed said:

we weren’t comparing whether Nationalist or Communist China was better. you said the Communist's messages appealed to the people. i pointed out the false promises behind the messages. they deceived the people to win power.

you don’t know the US huge lend-lease aid to China, especially the military aid was greatly exaggerated. you ignored the CCP-Soviet secret cooperation even though I already gave one conclusive evidence in the Dairen war factories, and the source was the CCP Dairen officials’ memoirs. you ignored that completely. we discussed the CCP’s role in the anti-Japanese war sometimes ago. 1.2 million Communist troops at the end of ww2 ? show me the list of the units.

fact for fact. let’s straighten it out. no sidetracking.

imo you just can’t understand or choose to ignore the almost insuperable problems faced by the KMT government which ruled over an almost impossible to govern China then.

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Doombreed said:

Your argument is not logically sound. You can't compare different time periods like that. The real comparison should be Taiwan in the same time period. How does the GLF famines and CR compare with the development timeline of Taiwan during that same period. Given the choice, would you prefer the GLF + CR developement timeline under the CCP or would you prefer if ALL of China developed just like Taiwan during the same period.

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Again, different time periods and different priorities. Chiang Kai-shek famously mused that the Japanese is like a skin disease where as the communists are like a heart disease. The Japanese are foreigners. China culturally assimilated multiple "foreign" invaders from the Mongols to the Manchus in the past. I have no doubt that even if Japan successfully conquored China, in 150 years Chinese wouldn't be speaking Japanese, the Japanese would be speaking Chinese. And CKS was proven right in the end. It wasn't the Japanese that caused his downfall, it was the communist.

But alas, these are all moot points and musings. That time period was a time of change. Macro social forces are acting in such a way that the incumbent government was always going to lose to a fresh new movement.

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solarz said:

First, the Communists promised a better life for the people of China, and they delivered. That's the only thing that matters. Do you really think the Chinese rural folks supported the Communists because they promised democracy?

Second, you are simply trying to diminish the military accomplishments of the CCP by making contextually meaningless statements. Of course the CCP received Soviet help, but it was in the form of advisors and technicians, not materiel. The US aid to KMT also gave the KMT a clear advantage over the CCP in terms of firepower. Those are facts.

We first came on this tangent because you claimed that the CCP did almost no fighting against the Japanese, and that they signed a non-aggression pact with each other. If that was true, then how did the CCP go from a rag-tag peasant militia who hid from the Japanese most of the time (according to you), into a military force that triumphed over a numerically and technologically superior (in fact, dominating superior) KMT force? That would be a fairy tale!

Finally, it's funny that you claim China was almost ungovernable back then. How then, did the communists do it?

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delft said:

Definitely OT:
I read some sixty years ago a short story about a freighter evading interception by the NR navy to deliver weapons for CCP forces on the coast of China. I now suppose the ship came from Manchuria and delivered her cargo in a port in Shandong province and that it might have happened in 1948. Does anyone know how important sea transport was in this area?

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