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Thank you for replying - it's nice to have a Taiwanese perspective on this. What do you think about the political polarization of him in Taiwan?
I can definitely agree with all your points. Chiang was excellent at geopolitics, and while a tinpot military dictator (never President, that was just a title) from the get-go, he was very resilient. It's unique that he died in his bed than as a stain against a wall or in prison as an old man. He enjoyed being a Chessmaster, backstabbing and political intrigue. So did Mao, although the Chessmaster part is debatable in the Chairman's case.
Well, German aid was officially withdrawn in 1938. But Soviet aid did continue to some extent after the USSR's Neutrality Pact with Japan, although on a much smaller scale than US aid. Chiang also had a surprisingly good level of foresight that some Allied leaders may have lacked. Peter Harmsen, author of Shanghai 1937, mentions that Chiang predicted correctly
that the Nazis would break their pact with Stalin and attack in 1941, which nobody saw coming (except for Soviet spies).
Indeed, it is ironic for a Chinese nationalist to be pretty bad at domestic policy for the most part. While he did do some well-meaning things and even considered trying out a social welfare policy (according to Rana Mitter), it was never fully implemented and his decisions rarely produced fruitful results. His greatest failing is widely agreed to be improving the lives of the peasants. It's true that many before Communist indoctrination regarded him as their rightful ruler, but the Communists did more to help the peasants than the KMT ever did.
His decisions in wartime definitely resulted in plenty of his own dying. He completely bungled the defense of Nanjing and his attack at Shanghai was a costly failure despite the success of Sihang warehouse.
The flood was definitely one especially with the famine it caused, but then there's the burning of Changsha in 1938. Not only was it ultimately pointless, with Changsha holding out until 1944, it was one of the factors that drove Wang Jingwei and his supporters to defect.
As for the gold, yeah, it helped, but then the hyperinflation was one of the biggest reasons the KMT lost. H.H Kung could be responsible too for making the exchange rate so high.
CKS wasn't a complete trainwreck as a general, in my opinion. He knew the weaknesses of his army well enough, his defensive strategy helped place Japan in a stalemate, he ultimately smashed the warlords and his encirclement campaigns against Mao were very effective. But his performance in the civil war was godawful, his micromanagement stopped his generals from working effectively and ordering repeated attacks against the IJA in the early years of the Sino-Japanese war lead to a ton of good men being wiped out very fast.
As for Mao's regime, they did have a good domestic policy to some extent, but nowadays it's been discovered they could be more vicious at times in crushing dissent. Before the Great Leap Forward, grain requisition lead to cadres beating up and torturing children and the elderly, many who were killed in the process (source: Frank Dikotter). And yes, their foreign policy was pitiful - the main feature is the Sino-Soviet split and hosting various foreign leaders, which didn't really achieve much except for good PR. Mao certainly didn't want another war barely a year after he'd taken power, but if he didn't China wouldn't have gotten the level of Soviet aid it did pre-split.
TBH, the civil war simply sped up the KMT's collapse - after 8 years, they were smashed beyond repair, thinly glued back together by US aid, and their economy was a disaster. If they'd received aid like the US provided to postwar Germany, maybe they could have survived longer, but by then Chiang had alienated the Truman administration.
edited 13th Oct '17 9:56:07 AM by TheWildWestPyro
Do a barrel roll!
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
That depends on how you choose to define their groups. Pliny the Elder broadly called several Germanic peoples Vandal/Vandilli(spelling?) which included the Goth's. Others consider the Vandals and Goths to be separate tribal groups from the same region. Current historians generally consider them to be separate tribes. As I understand it the Germanic tribes were broadly related peoples but had distinct tribal groups.
Who watches the watchmen?
Don't want to leave but cannot pretend
Damn it all, why is it so hard to find out how people lived in a normal day during the Rashidun Caliphate?
Am I looking in the wrong places?
Can somebody point me to the right places?
edited 15th Oct '17 11:07:32 AM by fredhot16
Trans rights are human rights. TV Tropes is not a place for bigotry, cruelty, or dickishness, no matter who or their position.
Do a barrel roll!
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Potatoes are fine as long as you don't eat sprouting potatoes or try and ingest the leaves or stems.
Who watches the watchmen?
Professional Writer & Amateur Scholar
Or shoot them at people.
I'm a (socialist) professional writer serializing a WWII alternate history webnovel.
Eating raw ones is bad too.
The law in the night
Fermenting them and making Vodka with them and then drinking too much potato derived alcohol is also bad.
Inter arma enim silent leges
The Wanderer
Crossposting from the RIP thread:
Marian Cannon Schlesinger, Author and Eyewitness to History, Dies at 105
Her death was confirmed by her son Stephen.
A lifelong Cantabrigian who had lived in the same clapboard house on Irving Street, a few blocks from Harvard Yard, since 1947, who once cooked gnocchi for her neighbor Julia Child, and who played tennis regularly until she was 85, Mrs. Schlesinger hailed from an accomplished family. Her father was a Harvard professor, her mother a novelist and an early advocate for Planned Parenthood.
Marian was 8 when the 19th Amendment enfranchised women, and she canvassed with her mother for a female mayoral candidate.
The filidh that cam frae Skye
Today is the 100th anniversary of the final Canadian assault on Passchendaele.
The law in the night
Obligatory.
Today is the 500th anniversary of that time Martin Luther nailed 95 theocrats to a church door. note
Destroyer of Worlds
Anyone been reading the newly released JFK files. Turns out 3 ex-Mexican presidents were CIA agents.
According to Terra, the documents were published in the book Our Man in Mexico, about the CIA operation Winston Scott, who was the CIA's chief of operations in Mexico between 1956 and 1969.
Scott not only had Lopez Mateos, Díaz Ordaz and Echeverría as collaborators, but also the three would have been on the CIA payroll, to the extent that López Mateos collaborated with the failed invasion of the Bay of Pigs, providing fuel for the boats that would participate in the invasion against the government of Fidel Castro.
Other activities of the Mexican presidents in the service of the CIA was to spy on former president Lázaro Cárdenas del Río, who was on the left, since the CIA wanted to ensure that it had no links with international communism.
It was in 1958 when Scott contacted López Mateos, as there was fear of a new revolution in Mexico and the same thing happened in Cuba.
In 1961, Scott met with Lopez Mateos to agree on a collaboration to invade the Bay of Pigs. The PRI government would participate with 50 thousand gallons of oil for the CIA ships.
As a result of this "collaboration" between the PRI and the CIA, the telephone calls and other communications of General Lázaro Cárdenas were intervened.
In fact, Scott had key names for the Mexican presidents and officials who worked for him as his spies. A Díaz Ordaz called it "Litempo 2"; Fernando Guiérrez Barrios, former director of the former Directorate General of Security, called it "Litempo 4", and Luis Echeverría, whom the Mexican right qualifies as "left", called it "Litempo 8".
The book reveals that the idea of the Tlatelolco massacre at the hands of the army was the brainchild of Díaz Ordaz and that he had the full support of the CIA.
However, when Scott did not inform the White House about the massacre, a year later he was removed from office as an operative of the CIA in Mexico.
The author of the book, Jefferson Morely, obtained several of Scott's documents after six years of claims against the CIA to be made public. Now the documents are published.
edited 31st Oct '17 1:12:31 PM by MadSkillz
"You can't change the world without getting your hands dirty."
Do a barrel roll!
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Define "readable". One of the oldest writings is a clay tablet called "Instructions of Shuruppak". What remains has readable parts. Other wise I think it is a piece called "The Gold Book".
Who watches the watchmen?
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
IFLScience article on the possibility of finding another Chamber in the Great Pyramid of Giza. If it turns out to be accurate enough the chamber could be rather large.
The various historical tear downs and rebuttals to John Kelly's brain dead rant on the Civil War lacking any attempt at compromise are worth a read. The non-slave states did the exact opposite with Lincoln being one of the key players for this approach. It even got through the house and senate. However before anything could be properly amended by the states the South showed their real intent regardless of efforts of compromise and preserve the Union.
edited 2nd Nov '17 4:47:08 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?
Rock on, Gold Dust Woman
Ya know I'd already kinda figured the US had a lot of involvement in Mexico during the Cold War but I still feel really disgusted reading that.
Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?
In case you were unaware, today marks the 100 year anniversary of the October Revolution.
Still not embarrassing enough to stan billionaires or tech companies.
Finished the Redux version of Apocalypse Now, and I have this to ask: Were there cases of not only rich Frenchmen staying in Vietnam after the country declared its independence from France but also contingents of the French Army staying with the rich Frenchmen?
Do a barrel roll!
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
They were beginning to stretch themselves thin by the time they conquered the chunk of Britannia they held. The region was also prone to regular rebellions and incursions from other tribal groups. Basically it was a hostile frontier that they never fully controlled and at first paired back their reach and dug in. However when the Empire suffered the string of crises including the incursion across the Danube they effectively stripped most of their military presence from the region before effectively withdrawing it entirely.
edited 15th Nov '17 2:03:57 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?
The filidh that cam frae Skye
The most Sabaton battle in history.
edited 4th Dec '17 6:09:04 PM by SantosLHalper
Halper's Law: as the length of an online discussion of minority groups increases, the probability of "SJW" or variations being used = 1.
I'd describe Chiang as being defined entirely by being The Chessmaster and a ruthless strategist, as one can't help but admit that he was one of the most resilient tinpot dictators of the 20th century and lived long enough to die of old age instead of at the end of a gun barrel.
The fact that at one point during the Second Sino Japanese War, the KMT was receiving Soviet, German, and US aid at the same time attests to his skills as a foreign policy extraordinare.
As a ruler however, he was an absolute train wreck, precisely because he was such a brilliant geopolitical strategist that learning the actual art of governing and winning hearts and minds became dull and below him.
In fact, Chiang's most successful tactics often came at the cost of the lives of those under his rule, such as the destruction of the Yellow River dikes that stopped the Japanese army with flooding for two months but drowned thousands of peasants in the process (said peasants became understandably enraged with grief and joined the Communists), or outlawing the private possession of gold to stock up his own coffers as part of a contingency plan to keep his regime financially afloat should an evacuation to Taiwan become necessary, which it did.
Thus, Chiang and the KMT survived World War II through strategic cunning at foreign policy that was simultaneously sociopathic to their citizens, while Mao and the CCP were able to overthrow them due to playing a better hearts and minds game domestically in spite of having also a poor foreign policy one abroad; Mao was actually hesitant about committing the newly communist China into the Korean War, and had to be coaxed into doing so by Stalin.
edited 13th Oct '17 7:30:43 AM by FluffyMcChicken