Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Friday, October 02, 2009

If you're still paying attention to Chinese history, two

Andrew Jacobs, writing in the New York Times wants to balance the celebratory history of the PRC's 60th anniversary with a few of the sour notes from that history. Those of us who have studied a lot of history may take it for granted that there's unstated ugliness in anyone's past. However, our students' frames of reference might not include such breadth. Perhaps reminders like this are important for them.

China Is Wordless on Traumas of Communists’ Rise

Unlike in other cities taken by the People’s Liberation Army during China’s civil war, there were no crowds to greet the victors as they made their triumphant march through the streets of this industrial city in the heart of Manchuria.

Even if relieved to learn that hostilities with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Army had come to an end, most residents — the ones who had not died during the five-month siege — were simply too weak to go outdoors...

In what China’s history books hail as one of the war’s decisive victories, Mao’s troops starved out the formidable Nationalist garrison that occupied Changchun with nary a shot fired. What the official story line does not reveal is that at least 160,000 civilians also died during the siege of the northeastern city, which lasted from June to October of 1948...

“Changchun was like Hiroshima,” wrote Zhang Zhenglu, a lieutenant colonel in the People’s Liberation Army who documented the siege in White Snow, Red Blood, a book that was immediately banned after publication in 1989. “The casualties were about the same. Hiroshima took nine seconds; Changchun took five months.”...

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Labels: China, history, politics