Why do East Asians still hold grudges against Japan?

[st_swithin]

Originally posted by Ted Striker
The pictures from the Rape of Nanjing are some of the most nauseating I've ever seen.

You got those newspapers in Japan too, huh?

The pics from the contests between high-ranking officers where they see how many women they can rape in a day are nauseating.

The ones where they're counting how many Chinese civilians they can decapitate in one hour are really, really SICK - I mean, they started with the old men and young male children FIRST!!

Sick - really, really sick.

[Drake Tungsten]

On a side note, how bad would it suck to shoot yourself in the chest, survive, be nursed back to health and then be executed anyway?

[GePap]

He should have remembered: sword to the chest, gun to the head!

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Tingkai

Given that the Chinese used mass wave attacks which were suicidal, there is likely some truth to your statement, but I never heard of former nationalists being forced into that situation. But I could be wrong.

Any sources?

I've seen this mainly in books dealing with the Korean War, specifically prisoner issues. Max Hastings book Korea might be a good source. I have about 5 books on the Korean War in general, and can't remember which ones mention the Nationalist POW situation in particular detail, but IIRC Hastings book was one of the better ones.

The issue is usually mentioned as having a large impact upon the peace negotiations, as many Chinese prisoners refused to be returned to China, instead insisting that they be sent to Taiwan. They went so far as tatooing themselves with Nationalist symbols and slogans. They had to be seperated from Communist prisoners because there was so much violence between the groups in the prison camps. The prisoner issue drew out the peace negotiations significantly (as you can imagine, the Communists weren't about to let their people escape without a fight), which in turn drew out the war as well.

Originally posted by Tingkai

Mao was a brilliant military leader and thanks to him, a civil war that essentially lasted 100 years and cost the lives of more than 40 million people came to an end. Mao was able to bring peace to China and that was one hell of an accomplishment.

But Mao and the other party leaders were criminally incompetent when it came to running a government.

They implement policies that destroyed the farming system. With agriculture destroyed, there was no way to feed people, so millions died of starvation. There was no way to import food because China was politically isolated at the time and Mao and the gang were too proud to ask for aid anyways.

And when there is no food, people die quite easily.

First degree murder is consider murder with intent and planning. There is no indication that Mao and his buddies deliberately planned the famine.

Manslaughter is when you do something that you should reasonably know will kill someone, or when you fail to prevent someone from dying. Mao and his gang are definitely guilty of manslaughter, but not first degree murder. That's different from people like Hitler or Stalin, and on a lesser scale Nixon and Kissinger. They all knew that they were killing innocent civilians and they planned and carried out the killings.

So you think Nixon and Kissinger have more blood on their hands than Mao and company for trying to prevent communists from taking over all of South East Asia by force, even with the track record of communism next door in China? Meanwhile Mao let people starve to death because of personal pride, but that's OK? That seems to be depraved indifference at best. Even the good thing that Mao did (unification of China) was exactly the same goal that his rival Chiang Kai Shek had, and which he prevented by resisting the Nationalists. So for Mao, unification was fine as long as it occurred under him. That's hardly altruistic, given that the same goal must have occured to the most depraved warlords in China during the civil war . Nixon and Kissinger were no less trying to fight an ideological war than Mao was, but IMO they had the right side of the idealogical debate, and far less blood on their hands.

[mindseye]

Meanwhile Mao let people starve to death because of personal pride, but that's OK?

According to Dr. Li Zhisui, Mao's doctor, Mao really was kept unaware of the true scale of the situation for a quite a while. Apparently most of those who reported to him feared the repercussions of explaining to him how disastrous his agricultural (and other) policies were.

According to Li's biography (he spent twenty-two years as Mao's trusted personal medical advisor before immigrating to the west after Mao's death), at some point the charade became impossible to support. At that time even Mao's personal bodyguards (usually drawn from the countryside) were receiving letters from relatives back home, describing the mass starvation taking place in the rural parts of the nation.

Li says that when Mao finally started to understand the real situation, he went into a kind of denial, becoming very depressed and reclusive. At this point, the Party bureaucracy seized the opportunity to take control, and began taking measures to address the crisis (e.g. ordering emergency distributions of the grain which was being withheld in support of wildly unrealistic production quotas).

Mao was politically marginalized for years after the Great Leap. He eventually unleashed the Cultural Revolution as a bid to regain his pre-Leap staus.

It seems to me that the most villianous of those responsible for the mass starvation were the lowest level officials in the villages. These local officials, under pressure from above, reported imaginary harvests of great abundance, even in areas where the harvests were down due to Mao's crazy agricultural schemes. When Beijing made requests for food shipments to the cities based on these inflated reports, officials had to oblige or risk exposure of their fraudulent accounting. Jasper Becker (in "Hungry Ghosts") recounts witnesses' descriptions of villagers dropping dead while local graineries stood loaded with food. Besides the local officials, others higher up became aware of the scale of the crisis, yet failed to take any action out of fear of losing their position or suffering Mao's wrath.

The famine which resulted from the Great Leap was a product of several factors, including a flawed political system which rewarded fantasy statistics while punishing bringers of bad news. It was (and remains) a political system in which unaccountable local officials (especially in rural areas) may wield enormous power, often operating outside of the knowledge (and to some degree control) of Beijing.

Even though he did not intentionally design a policy to starve millions, Mao bears ultimate reponsibility for creating such a system and the deaths that resulted.

[Spiffor]

Very interesting post, Mindseye

[PLATO]

An excellent example of why centralized controls (i.e. dictatorship) is a bad idea. When ego becomes more important than people, the capacity for human suffering becomes astronomical.

[st_swithin]

Depends on whose ego...

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by PLATO
An excellent example of why centralized controls (i.e. dictatorship) is a bad idea. When ego becomes more important than people, the capacity for human suffering becomes astronomical.

But famine can also happen in a parliamentary democracy, in war and at peace:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s19040.htm

http://www.prima.net/bowbrick/Refute/Intro.htm

http://www.dsharma.org/hunger/famine.htm

https://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/famine/

[st_swithin]

Famine is the pits when you're hungry.

During the Cultural Revolution, Christian missionaries offered free bags of rice to the hungry Chinese who were willing to convert to Christianity in order to feed their families.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by mindseye
According to Dr. Li Zhisui, Mao's doctor, Mao really was kept unaware of the true scale of the situation for a quite a while.

The problem is Li's credentials could not be verified. You have to bear that in mind.

[Tingkai]

Originally posted by Sikander
I've seen this mainly in books dealing with the Korean War, specifically prisoner issues. Max Hastings book Korea might be a good source.

Sounds interesting. I'll have to see if the local library has his book.

Originally posted by Sikander
So you think Nixon and Kissinger have more blood on their hands than Mao and company for trying to prevent communists from taking over all of South East Asia by force, even with the track record of communism next door in China? Meanwhile Mao let people starve to death because of personal pride, but that's OK?

Again, there is a question of intent. Nixon and Kissinger deliberately and secretly bombed and invaded countries (Cambodia and Laos). They encouraged and supported the repressive government who killed 100,000s of people(Indonesia, Chile, Argentina, Iran, etc.). These were deliberate policy decisions.

Originally posted by Sikander
Even the good thing that Mao did (unification of China) was exactly the same goal that his rival Chiang Kai Shek had, and which he prevented by resisting the Nationalists. So for Mao, unification was fine as long as it occurred under him.

You're completely wrong here. Chiang was a thug who was only concerned about building his power base and lining his pockets.

When the Japanese attacked China, Chiang did nothing. He only wanted to kill the communists and anyone else who might threaten his hold on power.

When the Japanese first invaded Shanghai in 1932, Gen. Cai Tingkai and the 19th Route Army held the Japanese off for weeks, but Chiang refused to provide any support because Cai had become an instant national hero.

The Communists repeatedly tried to create a united front to fight the Japanese, but Chiang refused. Chiang only started fighting the Japanese invaders when he was kidnapped by other warlords and forced to fight against the Japanese.

During the war, the Communists were the most active in trying to defeat the Japanese. American officials in China recognized that the KMT was completely corrupt and, for the most part, a useless military force while the Communists were highly effective in attacks against the Japanese.

When the Japanese were defeated, Chiang quickly went back to attacking the Communists. Thankfully, he lost and peace finally returned to China.

[Drake Tungsten]

Chinese hypocrisy knows no bounds...

http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/asiapcf/east/08/31/china.japan/index.html

[Dinner]

Originally posted by st_swithin
Famine is the pits when you're hungry.

During the Cultural Revolution, Christian missionaries offered free bags of rice to the hungry Chinese who were willing to convert to Christianity in order to feed their families.

That's more then the government did for many.

[mindseye]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
The problem is Li's credentials could not be verified.

Really? I've never heard any serious writers challenge his credentials. Do you know of any?

Seems that prominent western sinologists (e.g. Maurice Meisner) accept his "credentials". His book includes photos of him and Mao together taken over a span of many years. At least one of the photos (going on memory here) shows him with other members of Mao's medical staff.

Li's book is quite well-known, if he really wasn't who he said he was, I should think it would be easy to prove otherwise.