Angry Planet - How Modern China Got That Way

Episode Date: January 29, 2018

Xi Jinping’s China tends to look at itself as a historical victim, an underdog fighting to roll back indignities of the past and prove its strength. Author and journalist Paul French has been chronicling China’s rise since the 1980s, but has also focused on understanding the development of the country since the Opium Wars of the 19th century.In this episode, French offers his view of how China’s past is informing its aggressive foreign policy now.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. You can reach us on our new Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. There are multiple things going on. There are historical grievances around, say, the South China Sea and the Pacific Ocean, but there is also Chinese expansionism going on and a great Chinese nationalist rhetoric going on. You're listening to War College, a weekly.

podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt and Jason Fields. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Jason Fields, and Matthew Galt is on assignment to an undisclosed location. China had a rough 20th century. It began with a monarchy in collapse and vast popular unrest. Western governments and companies had forced open ports and used armed Marines to protect their interests. china was battered by the japanese in two world wars and a civil war that eventually put Mao and his communists in power. Millions died in the wars. Many millions more died in the great leap forward. But that's a long time ago. Now China has the world's second largest economy and a premier military. So how does China's past shape what it wants now? Paul French joins us to explore exactly that. He's a writer and journalist who spent many years studying China and is the author of a number of books, including the Edgar Award winner, Midnight in Beijing. Thanks for being here. Thanks a lot for inviting me.

Can we start off by just talking about how China sees its place in the world? I mean, at one point it called itself the Middle Kingdom. So where does it think it stands now? Well, I think China now, under President Xi, with the Belt and Road Initiative and so on, wants to put itself back in. that middle position, seeing itself as that trading conduit, manufacturing conduit as well now in the middle there, and to resume some sort of position that it perceives itself to have had. It has, as you said in your introduction, been a very difficult century, a century and a half, really, and I think that, as ever with history, lots of sides make different uses of it.

So we see a lot at the moment, particularly with the anniversary of the foundation of the Communist Party coming up, the 70th anniversary of the People's Republic of China coming up. And we've just had, of course, the anniversary of the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War, or the Second Sino-Japanese War, if you're thinking of it in Chinese eyes. And I think also another anniversary for me, which was completely ignored in China, was the fact that last August was 100 years since China declared war on Germany in the First World War, the Great War, as an allied nation. And I think all of these things are very important to sort of consider as well as thinking of how the Communist Party prefers, what they prefer to sort of upplay and what they also prefer to downplay in their historical analysis.

Well, so can we talk about some of those historical events? China at one point long, long ago, was the most, the richest country in the world and largest population, which I guess it still has. Did things go wrong for China at some point? Well, yes. I mean, you know, I study modern China or, you know, sort of 19-20th-century China, and you'd have to go back a little bit further to look at where things went wrong. Certainly, I think that there was a notion of moving away from being in a mercantile economy,

what people remember, you know, with the treasure ships and Admiral Junger and so on and a sort of outbound policy towards sort of becoming very closed in and looking in upon themselves. and so therefore sort of progress sort of halting and their trade sort of halting that also meant that they fell behind in terms of their army modernization and so on and that of course began to show itself when the European powers turned up Britain of course but not just Britain we need to look at the others when when we talk about the opium wars it is the British that rather get it in the neck for that but we should remember the Americans dealt quite a bit of opium over there as well but Britain was the one that of course and France got into the other. to the war, the opium wars, which led to the creation of the treaty ports, this kind of semi-colonial arrangement that was reached in what the Chinese were called the unequal treaties. And that, of course, led to treaty ports like, most famously, I suppose, Shanghai, but also Tianjin and many others, and of course, the British crown colony of Hong Kong. So that was the first blow. And then the next blow was really when China went up against Japan and lost

very badly. And of course, shortly after that, Russia went up against Japan and lost very badly as well the first time that an Asian country had defeated a European country in a war. And that, of course, led to a great sort of rethinking in China of this retreat that had occurred before under the earlier Qing dynasty and what was called the self-strengthening movement and so on, a lot of admiration for Japan at that time. We often forget, given the last sort of 70 years or 100 years, almost of Sino-Japanese relations, that there was a very strong relationship there before in terms of the intellectuals and the military going there to see how they had managed to strengthen themselves greatly. So that's where we kind of find ourselves when we get towards the end of the 19th century

and really the last sort of days of the Qing dynasty. When did the Opium Wars take place? Well, the Opium Wars, there's two rounds of Opium Wars. They're basically in the 1840s and then again in the 1860s. They are, of course, ostensibly to open up China, to force China to open up to sales of opium. Now, we could do a whole other program on Why Britain and other countries wanted, particularly to sell opium to China and the way that they saw that, as well as replacing the silver trade.

But there are interesting things, I think, in the opium war, which are not talked about so often, but are probably relevant to what we're talking about today. And one of those is that the opium wars, of course, are about. forcing trade upon China and a pernicious trade in the form of opium. It was also because the British and others wanted tea. We should always remember that of course everyone associates once again the British with drinking tea, which we do drink rather a lot of, but so did the Americans at the time. And don't forget that that tea that you rather disrespectfully dumped in Boston Harbor was actually Chinese tea during your rather rebellious phase then.

So that's quite important to remember. I think it's also important to remember that because of the opium was we arrived at these treaties. As I say, the Chinese, and I think we can agree with them on this, really, were unequal treaties that led to the creation of Hong Kong that led to all the treaty ports, which were mostly around sort of tea and trade areas. Britain very much wanted Shanghai because that was the gateway to the Yanksy. But we also wanted places that we don't think about so much nowadays in Fujo and Ningboa and so on because these were ports, but also because. they were really the access ports for the tea trade. And so I think that's a very important thing to think about. And one thing that I would say, because you don't hear it said very often, people don't really seem to think about it, is why go for treaty ports and why not do what the British had done

with the East India company and take over the whole of India and run it as a large colony, effectively, you know, the Raj. And we didn't do that. We did it through a series of treaty ports, semi-colonial treaty ports. And it's quite interesting because there is documentation from sort of clive of India, who many will know, asking the British War Ministry for permission to conquer China, because there was so much in China that they may have wanted tea, as well as opium and other products. And clive of India actually did suggest that, and later on, even into the 1930s and 40s, there were people in the British establishment who suggested that we got it the wrong way round.

What we should have done was treaty ports in India. Then we could, of course, use the local Maharajas and everything to sort of control the local population. So we would have just operated out of Calcutta, Bombay and a couple of other places. And we should have conquered China. But, of course, we didn't do it that way. And that has led to, that's one of the sort of massive what ifs of history. What if the British government had given Clive of India, the go ahead to go and conquer all of China. Could he have done it?

And secondly, you know, would we have had a sort of Chinese Raj in effect? Well, it certainly would have changed history. I'm not sure the Chinese would have enjoyed that a lot more, though. Well, no, I'm sure nobody enjoys being colonized. But I think that, you know, it led to this unique system of, well, not unique. They did happen elsewhere in parts of Turkey and Yokohama, of course, but the system of treaty ports, which is fundamentally different to what the British would call a crown colony, Hong Kong, Singapore, type of variety, or something as extensive as the Raj in India.

Also, the sort of more, perhaps looser organizations that the French had in Indochina or an even more loose organizations such as the, let's say once again, when we talk about imperial powers, let's not forget America, as such as the Americans had in the Philippines. So probably China, China wasn't very happy about those ports. Nobody likes to have anybody living on your territory and especially not under your law. No, well, officially no. They didn't like it. And that's why they call them. the unequal treaties, although of course, you know, they were treaties that had to be signed by China in defeat. The problem, though, is slightly more complicated than that, because, of course, China was not an overly stable country in the second half of the 19th century. So, for instance, if you think of Shanghai, where many foreigners went to trade at the base of the Yanksi and so on, very popular, became very rich and grew very fast, at the time of the Taiping rebellion,

which is effectively a civil war within China in the 1870s that led to maybe as many as 50 million deaths. When that war raged around Shanghai, many, many Chinese came into Shanghai, into the safety of the foreign concessions. The foreign concessions, of course, were able to raise an army, both of, as I say, from their home countries, but also volunteer forces that were able to defend the city. And many, many Chinese came inside the city. And I think it's interesting that, you know, occasionally we see, for instance, newspapers of magazines, Chinese newspapers and magazines basing themselves in places like Shanghai because they are freer from censorship by the nationalist government, the Qing Dynasty, but then later really the nationalist government. Similarly, you should remember that the Communist Party of China in 1921 is actually formed and has its opening Congress in Shanghai in the French concession of Shanghai. So there were many ways in which Chinese, of a more modern bent, or revolutionary bent, could use the concessions to their own devices, as well as those concessions, particularly Shanghai again, being really entry routes for modernism. So if you think of everything in Shanghai, you know, this is where we see the most cars, this is where we first see airplane services, this is where we see neon light, it's where we see jazz, it's where we see cocktails, it's where we see all of that, that whole image of Shanghai.

and this is really how new and modern ideas are filtering into China in quite a big way. To move forward in time, and because you've mentioned that it's also incredibly important into forming today's China, what was Japan's role at this time? Was Japan taking advantage of a week in China as well? Japan started to think of itself as being in some ways tied with the West, I believe. Yeah, I think Japan saw itself very much as a country that wanted to be very modern in a way that the Qing dynasty had resisted that. And so we see the rise of a modern navy, army, police force and so on in Japan. The country becomes quite strong. It looks towards China as somewhere that it can expand.

This is a time, of course, of the catch-up of countries that weren't in the first wave of imperialist powers, the Britain and France and Holland and so on. This is a time when places, people like Italy, when people like Germany start to look for colonies and ways to expand, and Japan is the same in that way. In 1914, of course, the First World War breaks out. Now, we all think of the First World War as being a war that was fought in France and Belgium. The trenches is a horror of it all, and it'll be over by Christmas, but it's not. It goes on for four years and so on. And we all know that, particularly here in the UK and everywhere, the last four years have been a constant litany of radio and television programs. and magazine articles about that 100th anniversary of that war.

But what we should also remember is that the Germans had concession in the city of Qingdao in Shandong province in northern China. And almost immediately when war is declared in Europe, Japan comes across and captures the German concession in Qingdao with British help because Japan was an allied nation in the First World War. China at the time is a neutral nation. I mean, China has so many people. problems just after it's only a few years into the new republic governments are at odds with each other

it really isn't going to get involved in a in a war in europe and japan takes over the shandong peninsula at which point the european powers don't really pay any attention to anything because they're too busy slaughtering each other back in europe and japan makes what were called the 21 demands upon china and these were really very serious demands that would have if got agreed in full almost turned China into a colony of Japan. Anyway, as we get on into the First World War, of course, the other great nation that remained neutral was the United States. But things were getting tougher and tougher for them to remain neutral,

sinking of civilian ships, submarine warfare and so on, effect in America, and an idea by Woodrow Wilson that this was a big fight. Wilson himself is putting a lot of pressure on the Chinese to come into the war. And in August 1917, both America and China declare war on Germany and come into the war. America, of course, sends troops to Europe. China doesn't send troops, but it does send what we call the Chinese Labor Corps, which were known as the Kuli Corps at the time in the First World War. 150,000 men come from China to Europe, recruited by the British and the French,

to clear the battlefield, move armaments around, do logistics work. I mean, one of the great, really, I think, untold stories of World War I. And so China is an Allied nation in that sense. And at the end of the war, of course, it expects to be treated like an allied nation. And the number one issue for them is that Japan remains in occupation of Shandong. How does that affect things as they went forward? Because, of course, World War I was basically there was a time of peace that all it really does is separate the two wars. And Japan was at war in China well before Germany invaded Poland or the Anschluss in Austria.

Can you tell us a little bit about what the West thinks of as the interwar period? Okay. So the very first important thing is what happens at the Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles in 1990. And this is where China is betrayed by the United States and by the Western powers. China is not very surprised at being betrayed by Britain and France. it's dealt with those countries for a long time. It is very disappointed at his betrayal by the United States. Effectively what happens is that China goes to the Treaty of Versailles wanting a number of grievances resolved, but primarily it wants the grievance resolved of Japanese occupation of Shandong.

They should go. They should not be there. The war is over. Everyone should retreat. Woodrow Wilson has promised small nations a fair crack at the whip. He wants to set up the League of Nations, which he intends to do that. He encourages China in its belief that America will support it. Britain and France desert China very soon. They have secret agreements that no one knew about with Japan, and they, of course, honor those, and they betray China very quickly.

Woodrow Wilson wishes to stay with China, but Japan plays a very clever one, which is if Woodrow Wilson wants to set up the League of Nations, he has to have agreement with everyone. Japan wants to put a clause in that, which many countries support, which is any country that has any form of segregation, within it cannot be a member of the League of Nations. This would be a fundamental, what we would now call human rights abuse taking place in a country. So they could not join. And Japan forces this. Many countries, of course, agree with this. Wilson knows that he cannot agree to this because

America, of course, has segregation between black and white, and it's unthinkable for him to just abolish that at that time. So Wilson betrays China. And China, of course, does not sign the Treaty of Versailles because it cannot agree to this. It is betrayed. This was a major letdown for the Chinese by the Americans and of course the Europeans. And it led to massive demonstrations in Peking and cities all across the country by students, by workers, and really a rise in radicalism and radical thinking, which became known as the May 4th movement. And this is really when we start seeing a serious awakening of consciousness, not just, as a threat from Japan, but to the notion that China, if China is to take its place in the world,

it must do so on its own account and it must do so through building its own strength. And this is really a sea change that happens after the Treaty of Versailles in 1990, that then takes us into the 1920s. But it's still hampered because most of the 1920s is spent in what's called the warlord era, where there really is only a modicum of effective government in China. And the question is not so much how will China modernize and how will China be become strong. But will China even remain a united, a unitary nation through the 1920s? And of course, that's where Shankly Shek and the nationalist movement and the northern expedition of the later 1920s to eradicate the warlords and unify the country becomes really important. And at the same time,

the Japanese weren't keeping still, right? I mean, they weren't leaving the Chinese alone. Well, the Japanese were still interfering wherever they could. They backed many warlords to be pro-Japanese, particularly in the north of China. They stirred up trouble in, Mongolia. They stirred up trouble in the far west of China. But essentially, China's in enough of a mess by itself that Japan doesn't really do anything at the time. Where Japan does become involved, of course, is in the late 1920s and the early 1930s, when effectively, and through collaboration with warlords as well, it effectively annexes Manchuria and renames it Manchuqua. This is an enormous part of northeast China. I mean, absolutely gigantic piece of China, but it

annexes to itself. Some people that I've spoken to when you talk to students sometimes, they think, well, Manchuria, that was just, you know, a wasteland up there really. But of course, it wasn't. It was quite well developed with railways, industry and agriculture up there, right over to the Korean border. And of course, the Japanese had Korea as a colony at the time. So all the way from all of the Korean Peninsula across to all of Manchuria was by 1932, completely under Japanese control. And that puts them not that far from Peking, modern day, Beijing, which was the major city in China. Of course, after 1927, the capital of China was Nanjing. But still, Peking was home to many of the religions of China,

but also scholarly base for China. And also many of the foreign diplomats and legations and embassies, even though the capital had technically moved to Nanjing, retained their embassies in Peking. So by 1932, the situation was quite fraught. If you could, I know it's asking a lot, but could you take us through World War II? I mean, mostly what we're really talking about is, I mean, how this affected the psychology of China. Yes. Well, I mean, as ever, there's not just one thing going on. So the rest of the 1930s is really about two things. It's about Japan continuing to encroach on China. and threaten areas and to involve itself both within the treaty ports and in the whole of China

to increase its influence. On the other hand, of course, we have the nationalist government, the Guameng Dang under Chang'a Shek in effective open civil war with the burgeoning in Communist Party, which during this period, of course, does its famous Long March, is based in the caves at Yanan, and is also setting up Soviets and also becoming more and more influential. Moving through quickly to jump ahead, of course, we come to 1937. And in the summer of 1937, Japan makes its move. And it moves down from Manchuria. First of all, in July, occupies Peking and the treaty port of Tianjin,

showing that Japan will not necessarily recognize treaty ports. And then it keeps on moving. So in August, 1937, we see war in Shanghai. What happened in Shanghai was that the Japanese attack the Chinese portions of the city on the outskirts. They stayed out of the foreign concessions. To have directly attacked the foreign concessions would have been to effectively go to war with Britain, France, America and so on. And in 1937, Japan did not want to do that. But it conquered, it forced the Chinese army out of the Chinese portions of Shanghai. Then it rolled on.

And of course, by September we have the horrific, which I'm sure many people have read about, rape of Nanjing by the Japanese army. And the Chinese government, the nationalist government under Shanghai Shek, relocating from Nanjing all the way up the Yangtie to the sort of fortress city of Chongqing, which is where they spend the rest of the war. China continues to, Japan, sorry, continues to encroach all across China, taking over as much as possible, those areas where it isn't, where the nationalist army still holds sway with some support from communist guerrillas. The nationalists and the communists called a truce between themselves during the war with Japan. It remains as free China.

Things go from bad to worse, obviously, with the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. moments after that attack is launched, Japanese troops move into the foreign concessions of Shanghai and take over the whole of Shanghai. And this is when we see foreigners being interned in civilian internment camps. And then, of course, you know, I mean, everyone knows that history, right? It rolls on the fall of Hong Kong, the fall of Singapore, fall of the British Empire and the French Empire in Asia, which leaves the Pacific with Japan on one side and America on the other. and well, they go at it.

And eventually hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives later, the United States defeats Japan, drops a couple of atomic bombs, and I assume that every last Japanese person is expelled from China at that point. Yes, well, I mean, at the end of the, eventually, of course, China liberates large parts of the country itself. The Americans liberate large parts of the country as well. well, including Shanghai in August 1945, and the Russians, the Soviet Red Army

also liberates various parts of northeastern China, including the port city of Dalian, which was very crucial at the time. But for the Chinese, I think, with the end of the Japanese, two things are left, two things become important, apart from the end of the Japanese occupation of China, and for a while at least, one assumes the end of a threat from Japan.

The first of these things is really that the foreign imperialists, the foreign great powers are no longer important in China in an official sense. Treaty port end in 1943 as an agreement between the Allied nations and the Chinese government. So at the end of the war, there is no resumption of the treaty port of Shanghai or elsewhere. Simply the Chinese take over the running of those for a while in conjunction with the American army and the United Nations, what is then formed as the EU. United Nations. So that's one very important thing. The sort of menace of imperialism, if you like, is sort of lifted for a while and shown to be weak. I mean, Britain and France and so on are in enough of a mess that they really aren't going to be doing very much in Asia for a while. But the other thing that happens is, of course, almost as soon as the war with Japan is over and the

occupation of China is ended, and the Japanese go back to Japan, the war between the nationalists and the communists gets going again. Now, during what is basically from 1937 to 1945, the nationalists have done most of the fighting. Now, this is a very controversial point with the Communist Party today and the way that they see history. But the war was essentially fought by the nationalists with some action by the communists.

But basically, and there's this famous quote that you're never allowed to put in a documentary if it's shown on Chinese TV, as I found out recently, that Chairman Mao made a quote saying that, in a sense, the Japanese, to words to the effect of, the Japanese did me a favor, right? Because they fought the nationalists for so long that they almost fought them into the ground. So we can make all sorts of arguments about how possibly corrupt the nationalist government was and so on, although, of course, in the light of how the communists have run the country, corruption clearly isn't just a part of the nationalist program.

And that certainly was true to an extent. But also, these armies were exhausted. I mean, fighting, you know, for that length of time. The communists had to an extent kept their powder dry during the Second World War, and so we were able to come out somewhat fresher and start building momentum in the chaos that was seen by many Chinese people as obviously being the chaos of being run by the nationalist, but it was really the chaos that was caused by the Japanese occupation. Anyway, what eventually happens, of course, is that we get to 1949

in the eventual defeat of the nationalists and the retreat to the island of Taiwan by Changkaiset. And on October, 1949, of course, the speech by Mao Zittung in the once again capital of Beijing to the effect that the People's Republic of China is formed. And as he said it, the Chinese people have stood up. Now China is operating under a communist government, communist at least in name, if not economic philosophy. And how does it see itself? How did the events that you've taken us through influence how China wants to behave in the world? Well, I think that the way China understands that period of history we've been talking about. And of course, as ever with any period of history, there'll be people who say, you know, a guy doesn't know what he's talking about.

He's completely wrong about that bit or he's completely wrong about this bit. So obviously, everyone's notion of history changes. Our circumstances change to an extent. This has certainly been true in China. If you look, for instance, at the position of Chiang Kai Shack, who of course went on to remain the leader of the Republic of China on Taiwan for many years, handed over to his son, a country that was effectively a military dictatorship when he went there, eventually evolved into a thriving and argumentative democracy as it is today. But in an odd position in the world. When I first went to China, late 1980s, Chianghai Shik was a complete rebel. You couldn't mention his name. a traitor. He was the most awful thing to have ever happened to China. That has changed over the

years. And I think that I'm not sure what the current formulation is, but it's something like Chiang Kai Shek was a misguided patriot. So, of course, you know, he did fight on the right side in World War II. He just didn't do it very well and for the people. Interestingly, in the West, the criticism you get of Chiang Kai Shek in the nationalist regime is the corruption. You know, the Americans, of referred to Chiang Kai Sheg as cash my check, right? You know, because he took so much money and it disappeared into the, into the Sung family and the Chang family and so on. However, that you don't hear played so much in China, certainly these days, because of course, if you're going to say that your right to overthrow a regime that has a large amount of corruption in it, that would put

the Chinese Communist Party in a rather self-defeating position, I think, given, I mean, of course, you know, and of course they would say they're fighting corruption, but Chang-Ka-Shek would say he was fighting corruption. So that's a bit of a problem. It's also been a bit of a problem for the regime now as to what exactly was the role of the Communist Party during the war. Certainly, when we had the large military parade a while back to commemorate the end of the war, there was a little bit of criticism voiced in China by some brave people, but outside a lot, saying, you know, that there wasn't really any due respect paid to the nationalist army and the nationals. nationalist soldiers and that the Communist Party's role was slightly overplayed.

So history is a constantly evolving thing and it's constantly talked about in different ways. And the one great example now, of course, is this notion of the century of humiliation and the fact that it was all about foreign powers. This, I don't think, was such a big thing. Initially, it's certainly become the most major thing that everyone talks about this, that the Communist Party talks about, this notion of reclaiming China's role. which was usurped by the foreign powers. And so President Xi Jinping now wants to do exactly that, is that right?

Well, I don't know if he wants to do that, but it's been interesting in sort of my adult lifetime, working, living, studying China to see what happens. If you go to Shanghai, there's a museum to the history of the Communist Party, and it's well worth a visit, and it's always been interesting to me. The Communist Party was found in 1921, ideally, obviously, on the principles of Marxism, Leninism, which is sort of amusing when we've seen Xi Jinping recently saying that he wishes to remove Western ideas and thought from the university syllabus in China, by which he means Western notions of democracy, apparently, and not the Western idea of Marxism and Leninism.

But it's, I think that when you go to that museum, the thing that you see is a sort of, it really starts, not with the foundation of the Communist Party in 1921, but with the opium wars. The opium wars are the start of the exhibition as you walk through it. So this is, you know, there was this sort of time of a unitary China that was then ended by the foreign powers coming. And when you get to the end of the exhibition, after you've gone through the whole thing of the rise of the Communist Party, the Jiafung, the liberation in 1949, the wonderful things the Communist Party has done, the complete downplaying of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, of course, which if it's mentioned anywhere will be mentioned as this kind of erroneous ten years of madness that you don't need to think about very much, you know, don't worry about it. There is this diorama, which is pictures taken from the handback of Hong Kong and Macau, and it is the return of Taiwan to the motherland. And it's almost as if, you know, this is the Communist Party's mission.

The Communist Party's mission is not what you would think a Marxist-Leninist Party should do, which is to take hold of the means of production, give it to the hands of the working classes, and then create a wonderful socialist paradise. us. It is to avenge the wrongs of the foreign powers to take back land that was lost, which in 1997 it did in Hong Kong. A couple years later, it did in Macau from Portugal. And what is the end of this process? The return of Taiwan to the motherland. Now, it's arguable whether or not Taiwan is really part of the motherland, but it is the return of Taiwan. And this, I think, is a very important thing. And I have jokingly, of course, said that means that the Chinese will never attack

Taiwan because what if the Taiwan did return to the motherland, then Chinese people would be able to say, but we went to your museum and that's it, right? Once that job's done, that's game over. It's like if you are a communist party, once you delivered communism, you're not needed anymore, this nationalism, which is really what now drives that party, has become the driving thing. So when we look at the initial years of now and so on, and we might talk about socialism, Marxism, Leninism, what they learned from Soviet Union, what their role was in the non-aligned movement, and what their role was in the Korean War and so on. What we're looking at now, of course, is none of that.

We're just looking at a party that drives itself on nationalism. And that's so crucial to Xi Jinping and to what he's doing at the moment. And that means reviving the historical relationship and the historical involvement with Japan into something that was also part of this defense that needs to be maintained by the Communist Party, not to advance Marxist thought, but to defend the borders of a nationalist China. Paul, thank you so much for taking us through this. That was fantastic. Well, it's a bit tricky with China because there's so much stuff, and it's a question of trying to pull out the different strands.

And, of course, as with everything in history, there's never one answer, right? There's always these multiple things going on. And I think when you look at the relationship now between Japan and China and Japan and China and the rest of the world, there are multiple things going on. There are historical grievances around, say, the South China Sea and the Pacific Ocean, but there is also Chinese expansionism going on and a great Chinese nationalist rhetoric going on. And I think the Communist Party is probably as aware of the fact that when Marxism, Leninism, is a force that's released in the way it was in the cultural revolution, it doesn't end particularly well. But that can be true for nationalism as

well. And China understands the history of the rest of the world quite well. And that's why when we've seen anti-Japanese demonstrations, they get to a certain level and then they have to be rained in because if you follow it through, it would ultimately be very damaging to China. Many, many people in China work for Japanese companies. There's lots of Japanese investment across China. There's lots of trade bilaterally with Japan and the rest of the world. So a lot of this rhetoric has to be sort of pumped up to keep people on side, but then rained in in in order to. not to screw up China's trade relationships. So whenever anyone tells you it's not about the money, it's about the money.

It is most definitely about the money. It's not that I think China probably still has a slight feeling, or some people within China still have a slight feeling that they're being encircled, that they're being insulted in somewhere. And I think encirclement is something that you do here talked about quite a lot, that there is a plot to try and encircle China, to keep China down. to do exactly what the British were doing in the opium was to ensure that China didn't become a false, at least not anything that wasn't the way that Britain would like it to become a false in terms of supplying it with tea and taking its goods and things like that. And I think that there's still a great feeling of that, which leads to a great distrust on a number of levels between China and the rest of the world. And as we've seen, I think it has to be said with, and I won't just say between the current American president and China, although that is a very troublesome relationship. But we also see it in the European Union's concerns over China dumping and trade relations and so on.

But there is still this unease of how we deal with something like China and also how China rises up. This is really one of the most fundamental challenges for all of us. That was fantastic. Well, yes, I hope so. It was great. Condensing Chinese history is an absolute minefield, really. Well, you know, the good thing is it's your view, not mine. So if people hate it, they'll hate you, not me.

Yeah, well, nothing new there, so that's okay. Thanks for listening to this week's show. We really hope you enjoyed it. If you did, it would be terrific if you left us a review like this one. on iTunes. This is one of my favorite podcasts. I don't always agree with everything that I hear, but it educates me and challenges me,

and those are the signs of a great podcast. I look forward to every new War College podcast. Thanks, JMAD, Nick. We really do love hearing from our listeners. It's a big part of what keeps us going. War College is me, Jason Fields, and Matthew Galt. We'll be back next week

for another exciting episode of War College.