Hi I’m John Green, and this is Crash Course
World History and today we’re going to return — sadly for the last time on Crash Course
— to China. By the way, Stan brought cupcakes. That’s
good. I wish I could draw some parallel between this and China, but I got nothing. It’s
just delicious. I’ll sure miss you, piece of felt Danica
cut out in the shape of China using blue because we felt red would be cliché. Mr. Green, Mr. Green, Mr Green! You don’t get to talk until you shave the
mustache, Me From The Past. So the 20th century was pretty big for China
because it saw not one but two revolutions. China’s 1911 revolution might be a bigger
deal from a world historical perspective than the more famous communist revolution of 1949,
but you wouldn’t know it because: 1. China’s communism became a really big
deal during the Cold War, and 2. Mao Zedong, the father of Communist China,
was really good at self-promotion. Like, you know his famous book of sayings? Pretty
much everyone in China just had to own it. And I mean, had to. [theme music] So as you no doubt recall from past episodes
of Crash Course, China lost the Opium Wars in the 19th century, resulting in European
domination, spheres of influence, et cetera, all of which was deeply embarrassing to the
Qing dynasty and led to calls for reform. One strand of reform that called for China
to adopt European military technology and education systems was called self-strengthening,
and it was probably would have been a great idea, considering how well that worked for
Japan. But it never happened in China-- well, at least not until recently. Instead, China experienced the disastrous
anti-Western Boxer Rebellion of 1900, which helped spur some young liberals, including
one named Sun Yat Sen, to plot the overthrow of the dynasty. Oh, it’s already time for
the Open Letter… An open letter to Sun Yat Sen. Oh, but first, let’s see what’s in the
secret compartment today. Oh, more champagne poppers? Stan, at this
point aren’t we sort of belaboring the fact that China invented fireworks? Wow! That is
innovation at work right there. We used to not be able to fire off one of these, and
now we can fire off six at a time if you count the two secret ones from behind me. Dear Sun Yat Sen, You were amazing! I mean
the Republic of China calls you the father of the nation. The People’s Republic of
China calls you the forerunner of the democratic revolution. You’re the only thing they can
agree on! You lived in China, Japan, the United States, you converted to Christianity, you
were a doctor, you were the godfather of an important science fiction writer. But the infuriating thing is that you never
actually got much of a chance to rule China, and you would have been great at it. I mean,
your three principles of the people, Nationalism, Democracy, and the People’s Livelihood,
are three really great principles. I mean the problem, aside from you not living long
enough is that you just didn’t have a face for Warhol portraits. Huh, it’s too bad.
Best wishes, John Green So the 1911 revolution that led to the end
of the Qing dynasty started when a bomb accidentally exploded, at which point the revolutionaries
were like, “we’re probably going to be outed, so we should just start the uprising
now”. The uprising probably would’ve been quelled like many before it, except this time
the army joined the rebellion, because they wanted to become more modern. The Qing emperor abdicated, and the rebels
chose a general, Yuan Shikai, as leader, while Sun Yat Sen was declared president of a provisional
republic on Jan 1, 1912. A new government was created with a Senate and a Lower House,
and it was supposed to write a new constitution. And after the first elections, Sun Yat Sen’s
party, the Guomindang were the largest, but they weren’t the majority. So Sun Yat Sen
deferred to Yuan, which turned out to be a huge mistake because he then outlawed the
Guomindang party and ruled as dictator. But when Yuan Shikai died in 1916, China’s
first non-dynastic government in over 3000 years completely fell apart. Localism reasserted
itself with large-scale landlords with small-scale armies ruling all the parts of China that
weren’t controlled by foreigners. You might remember this phenomenon from earlier in Chinese
history, first during the Warring States period and then again for three hundred years between
the end of the Han and the rise of the Sui. So the period in Chinese history between 1912
and 1949 is sometimes called the Chinese Republic, although that gives the government a bit too
much credit. The leading group trying to re-form China into a nation state was the Guomindang,
but after 1920 the Chinese Communist Party was also in the mix. And for the Guomindang
to regain power from those big landlords and reunify China, they needed some help from
the CCP. Now if an alliance between Communists and
Nationalists sounds like a match made in hell, well, yes. It was. That said, the two did
manage to patch things up for a while in the early 1920s, you know, for the sake of the
kids. But then Sun Yat Sen died in 1925 and the
alliance fell apart in 1927 when Guomindang leader Chiang Kai-Shek got mad at the communists
for trying to foment socialist revolution, to which the communists were like, “But
that’s what we do, man. We’re communists.” Anyway, this turned out to be a bad break
up for a bunch of reasons, but mainly because it started a civil war between the Communists
and the Nationalists. We’re not going to get into exhausting detail on the civil war
but, spoiler alert: the Communists won. But there are a few things to point out. First, even though Mao emerged victorious,
he and the communists were almost wiped out in 1934 except that they made a miraculous
and harrowing escape, trekking from southern China to the mountains in the north in what
has become famously known as the Long March, a great example of historians missing an opportunity
since it could easily have been called the Long Ass March, as it featured donkeys. Second, for much of the time the Kuomintang
was trying to crush the CCP, significant portions of China were being occupied and/or invaded
by Japan. Thirdly, the Communists were just better at
fighting the Japanese than the Nationalists were. In spite of the fact that Chiang Kai-Shek
had extensive support from the U.S. And each time the Nationalists failed against the Japanese,
their prestige among their fellow Chinese diminished. It wasn’t helped by Nationalist
corruption, or their collecting onerous taxes from Chinese peasants, or stories about Nationalist
troops putting on civilian clothes and abandoning the city of Nanking during its awful destruction
by the Japanese army in 1937. Meanwhile, the Communists were winning over the peasants
in their northwestern enclave by making sure that troops didn’t pillage local land and by
giving peasants a greater say in local government. Now, that isn’t to say everything was rosy
under Mao’s communist leadership, even at its earliest stages. By the way, that is an
actual chalk illustration. Very impressed. In a preview of things to come, in 1942 Mao
initiated a “rectification” program, which basically meant students and intellectuals
were sent down into the countryside to give them a taste of what “real China” was
like in an effort to re-educate them. We try to be politically neutral here on Crash Course, but we
are always opposed to intellectuals doing hard labor. But anyway, within four years of the end of
World War II the Communists routed Chiang Kai-Shek’s armies and sent them off to Taiwan,
and these military victories paved the way for Mao to declare the People’s Republic
of China on October 1, 1949. So once in power, Mao and the PRC were faced
with the task of creating a new, socialist state. And Mao declared early on that the
working class in China would be the leaders of a “people’s democratic dictatorship.”
Oh democratic dictatorships. You’re the BEST. It’s all the best parts of democracy,
and all the best parts of dictatorship. You get to vote, but there’s only one choice.
It takes all the pesky thinking out it. The PRC promised equal rights for women, rent
reduction, land redistribution, new heavy industry and lots of freedoms, including freedoms
of “thought, speech, publication, assembly, association, correspondence, person, domicile,
moving from one place to another, religious belief, and the freedom to hold processions
and demonstrations.” Yeah, NO. Even putting aside the PRC’s failure to protect any of
those rights, Mao’s China wasn’t much fun if you were a landlord or even if you
were a peasant who’d done well. Land redistribution and reform meant destroying the power of landlords,
often violently. But centralizing power and checking individual
ambition proved difficult for the government, and it was made harder by China’s involvement
in the Korean War, which helped spur the first mass campaign of Mao’s democratic dictatorship.
Designed to encourage support for the War, the campaign was called the “Resist America
and Aid Korea campaign,” and it resulted in almost all foreigners leaving China. A second campaign, against “counterrevolutionaries”
was much worse. People suspected of sympathizing with the Guomindang, or anyone insufficiently
communist, was subject to humiliation and violence. Between October 1950 and August
1951, 28,332 people accused of being spies or counterrevolutionaries were executed in
Guandong city alone. A third mass campaign, the “Three Anti Campaign”
was aimed at reforming the Communist party itself. And the final mass campaign, the Five
Anti Campaign was an assault on all bourgeois capitalism, which effectively killed private
industry in China. Very few of the victims of this last campaign actually died, but capitalism
was weakened and state control bolstered. OK, let’s go to the Thought Bubble. Mao and the CCP set out to turn China into
an industrial powerhouse by following the Soviet model. We haven’t really talked about
this, but under the Soviet system, Russia was able to accomplish massive industrialization--
not to mention tens of millions of deaths from starvation-- through centralized planning
and collectivization of agriculture, following what were known as Five Year Plans. The Chinese adopted the model of Five Year
Plans beginning in 1953 and the first one worked, at least as far as industrialization
was concerned. In fact, the plan worked even better than expected, with industry increasing
121% more than projected. In order for this to work though, the peasants had to grow lots
of grain and sell it at extremely low prices. This kept inflation in check, and saving was
encouraged by the fact that the Five Year Plan didn’t have many consumer goods, so
there was nothing to buy. For urban workers, living standards improved and China’s population
grew to 646 million. So far, Mao’s plan seemed to be working,
but there was no way that China could keep up that growth, especially without some backsliding
into capitalism. So Mao came up with a terrible idea called the Great Leap Forward. Mao essentially
decided that the nation could be psyched up into more industrial productivity. Among many other bad ideas, he famously ordered
that individuals build small steel furnaces in their backyard to increase steel production.
This was not a good idea. First off, it didn’t actually increase steel production much. Secondly,
it turns out that people making steel in their backyard who know nothing about making steel…
make bad steel. But the worst idea was to pay for heavy machinery
from the USSR with exported grain. This meant there was less for peasants to eat — and
as a result, between 1959 and 1962, 20 million people died, probably half of whom were under
the age of 10. Jeez, Thought Bubble, that was sad. And then in happier news came the Cultural
Revolution! Just kidding, it sucked. By the middle of the sixties, Mao was afraid that
China’s revolution was running out of steam, and he didn’t want China to end up just
a bureaucratized police state like, you know, most of the Soviet bloc. And the Cultural
Revolution was an attempt to capture the glory days of the revolution and fire up the masses, and
what better way to do that than to empower the kids. Frustrated students who were unable find decent,
fulfilling jobs jumped at the chance to denounce their teachers, employers, and sometimes even
their parents and to tear down tradition, which often meant demolishing buildings and
art. The ranks of these “Red Guards” swelled and anyone representing the so-called “four
olds” — old culture, old habits, old ideas, and old customs — was subject to humiliation
and violence. Intellectuals were again sent to the countryside as they were in 1942; millions
were persecuted; and countless historical and religious artifacts were destroyed. But the real aim of the Cultural Revolution
was to consolidate Mao’s revolution, and while his image still looms large, it’s
hard to say that China these days is a socialist state. Many would argue that Mao’s revolution
was extremely short-lived, and that the real change in China happened in 1911. That’s
when the Chinese Republic ended 3,000 years of dynastic history and forever broke the
cyclical pattern the Chinese had used to understand their past. I mean at least in some senses, those
Nationalist revolutionaries literally put an end to history. That sense of living in a truly New World
has made many great and terrible things possible for China, but the legacy of China’s two
revolutions is mixed at best. China, for instance, made most of the camera we use to film this
video. And China made most of the computers we use to edit. But no one in the People’s
Republic of China will legally be able to watch this video, because the government blocks
YouTube. Thanks for watching. I’ll see you next week. Crash Course is produced and directed by Stan
Muller. Our script supervisor is Meredith Danko. Our associate producer is Danica Johnson.
The show is written by my high school history teacher Raoul Meyer and myself, and our graphics
team is Thought Bubble. Last week’s phrase of the week was "Disco
Golf Ball." If you want to guess at this week’s phrase of the week or suggest future ones,
you can do so in comments, where you can also ask questions about today's videos that will
be answered by our team of historians. If you like Crash Course, make sure you’ve
subscribed. Thanks for watching, and as we say in my hometown,
Don’t Forget To Be Awesome.
