Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The Well Hung Warlord Who Tried to Conquer China

Episode Date: June 10, 2021

Mia Wong is joined again by Robert Evans to continue to discuss Zhang Zongchang.   Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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We're back, part two. The rise of the working class. We're back. We're back. We're back in warlords. It is hell. Fucking everybody got a dick the size of a bunch of coins. Just a just a rad war criminal. Yep. And now we're going to watch it all fall apart. Okay, good.

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On May 19th, 1925, a group of eight factory delegates representing striking workers at a Japanese controlled cotton plant in Shanghai met with their opposite number from the factory to discuss the workers' demands. A brawl broke out and a Japanese foreman murdered a well-established labor organizer and the resulting fight injured the other seven delegates. Now, this, you know, for very obvious reasons, pissed off Shanghai's unions and 10,000 workers, which was at that point one of the largest demonstrations of workers in Shanghai's history, showed up to his memorial

service on May 24th. Now, on May 30th, protesters marched on a police station that had arrested some of their comrades on the 24th. And when they got to the station, the British police opened fire into the crowd. When the slaughter was over, 10 Chinese men, women, and children lay dead on the streets of Shanghai. Another 50 were wounded. This moment on this crowded street in Shanghai changed everything.

Ba Jin, the great Chinese novelist and anarchist, wrote this description of a student's reaction to the slaughter in Shanghai. Quote, at the entrance to Yunnan Road, he saw the child who had been killed a short while before. He thought about half an hour ago, the crowd was marching peacefully towards the police station to ask the police to set free students who had been unjustly arrested. They thought the police were human beings endowed with reason and human sympathy

that human blood flowed in their veins. That's a mistake with cops. They thought that uniforms and weapons could not have destroyed their human nature, but reality proved they were bloodthirsty beasts. On the most crowded street of the city, they deliberately slaughtered unarmed people. For this, there was no precedent in Chinese history. Imperialist oppression that it endured for so many years ached like a deep wound in his heart.

He struggled inwardly. He felt the time for patience was over. He felt he wanted to spill his blood to sacrifice his young life that he might show that not all among his people were lambs that allowed themselves to be led without resistance to the slaughter. He looked again at the corpse of the murdered child. His eyes shone with fire. His whole body began to burn as though on fire.

His heart beat violently. Now, I think this is a feeling that all of us know now. Just the sheer breathtaking rage of seeing the police murder a child. Seeing a child's corpse lying dead on the pavement. Yeah, that is now a universal thing, for sure. Yeah, and I want to pause on that feeling for a second. I want to pause on the rage, on the grief, on the raw and mounting horror of the realization that the cops murder kids in the street.

And I want you to hold on to those emotions, because there's been an enormous effort to get Westerners to think that Chinese people are fundamentally different than they are, that Chinese people are inherently authoritarian, that we're all bound by a sort of traditional Confucian hierarchy that we all follow reflexively, that is baked into our culture, and even at the most extreme cases are genetics at a level that makes us fundamentally different than the quote-unquote

freedom-loving people of the West. And I want you to think about that student staring at a child's corpse in a bloody street in Shanghai. And I want you to think about how he felt the same despair, the same grief, the same rage that we do. And I want you to remember this single lesson, without which you cannot understand what is about to happen. They are like us, and they fought like hell.

Immediately after, 200,000 workers joined the larger general strike in Shanghai's history. The next day, the Communist Labour Organisers founded Shanghai's General Labour Union, or the GLU. 117 unions joined almost immediately. Every part of Shanghai society moves. Chinese business owners, so outraged at the imperialist murders that for a second their class abandoned them, contributed to the strike funds and took to the streets themselves.

So did Shanghai's incredibly powerful organized crime gangs, the green and red gangs. We're going to get into more of them in a bit. Zhang Zhongzhong and Zhang Zhuling sent troops to suppress the uprising, but even their troops couldn't hold the city against the power of the entirety of Chinese Shanghai. A new force had taken the stage of Chinese history, the Chinese working class.

It had driven all other classes into the streets and pitched them into open battle with the police and the warlords. It had, in a single day, transformed Shanghai from the playground of the British, French, Japanese imperialists into the capital of the Chinese working class. Now, yeah. Robert, I don't know if you've read anything about Shanghai or anything about any large city that was written by a British dude

before about 1945. They inevitably call any sort of large city in the east, the Paris of the Orient. Yeah. Now, Shanghai is one of the cities that's famously called this, and on May 30th, the meaning of those words changed completely. With this uprising, Shanghai did finally become the 20th century's Paris in that, after May 30th, it was to go on to full-scale armed revolt

five more times in the 20th century. Shanghai's working class, yeah. In every way, the equal, even the superiors of the Parisian mobs would single-handedly drive the warlords, the nationalists, and the communists alike from the city. Fuck yeah. Hell yeah, Shanghai. Yeah. It's incredibly impressive. Yeah. They just, I had no idea any of this had happened, actually.

Yeah, it's really, this is one of the lost stories of the 20th century, which is the story of Shanghai just, Shanghai becoming indisputably the world's great revolutionary city in the way that Paris was in the 1900s. And because it starts because a fucking cop kills a kid. Yep. And I think that's a, as an entry point, it's helpful, because there's a tendency to sort of, to turn this whole period into something that was like

inevitable by class forces or whatever, that this is some kind of weird historical object or that like the communists were behind all of this. And it's like, no, people go on strike, people are in the streets because they watch, they solve the physical bodies of children in the streets that had been killed by the police. Yeah, and these had all been people who had been dealing with

Jung and his bullshit and the other warlords and the violence and brutality that they carried out for a while, and it just, I guess, seeing a dead kid, you know, there is something about that that like, you're just like, well, this is too much. Like I've been pushed too far. We've all been pushed too far. It's time to fuck some shit up. Yeah. And the other thing about this that I think is really important

is that they're not killed by like Chinese police or Chinese soldiers. These are originally, it's a Japanese foreman, and then it's British police. Yeah. And that part of it just like it drives. Well, I mean, we can, you know, it starts this revolt that just spreads like wildfire. And, you know, within a couple of days,

there's a huge protest in another city near Shanghai and the British open fire into the crowds with machine guns. They killed another eight people. Jesus. And this, yeah, this brings more people in the street. Within three days, the revolt spreads to the north and there's 30,000 students and workers on strike in Beijing. In nearby Tungin, there's 200,000 people show up to protest.

And Tungin, this is the center of the power of the warlord armies. And it's there in August of 1925 that the movement sees its first real defeat. Zhang Shuling's armies working with British intelligence and this is another thing. So there's a complicated relationship between the imperialist powers and the various warlords. They'll sort of back factions.

Zhuling's very often accused of being a sort of like a stooge of the Japanese imperialist and it's not quite true. Like he is supported by them, but he just sort of like disobeys them. But the one thing that happens immediately is that any time one of these strikes happens, like all of the warlords and all of the sort of imperial power is just like a lockstep. And yeah, in August Zhuling's armies

and a certain group of white Russian mercenaries with whom we are now all familiar, retake the city and slaughter dozens of workers. But even this doesn't stop the revolt and it continues to spread into the south. In the nationalist heartland in Guangzhou, in the very far south, workers massed on the border with British-occupied Hong Kong. The workers of Hong Kong rushed to join them.

Now, Hong Kong is somewhat unique among Chinese cities in this period in that there have been general strikes going on in Hong Kong. I mean, since the 1800s. And just three years before this, there's something called, there's a massive semen strike. And I found this sort of, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was just gonna go past it. When I wrote that, I knew this was gonna happen.

Yeah. Yeah, I found this great description of it in Libcom, though, which I think is also useful to understand the effects of the later strikes. And so it goes, quote, disaster for the bosses. Not only rail workers and stevedores, but bakers, cooks, clerks, coolies, and servants joined the strike. The ruling class now had to cook its own food and queue to buy it. No clothes were washed, no shirts were ironed.

Ministers had to wander government buildings delivering their own messages, but there was no one to carry out their orders. The army was called out and commandeered food and vehicles. Workers were pressed into forced labor. With their workforce disappearing, the bosses banned anyone from leaving Hong Kong, which meant no one could visit the graves of their ancestors in China. A fearful thing. A freedom march against the ban led to confrontation, riot, and massacre.

With a colony descending into, dare we say it, anarchy, government crumbling and business losses mounting, merchants lost $500 million between the strike, a massive sum. The bosses capitulated. Now, that strike had had, I think, about 100,000 people in it, and it pales in comparison to what's going to happen now. This is the beginning of what's called the Canton Hong Kong Strike. On June 23, 1925, British police officers opened fire

into a crowd of 130,000. They killed 52 people. Yeah, including four children younger than 16. Yeah, this is surprise bastard imperialism. Yeah, I mean, it always finds its way in. Yep. Yeah, and that is a very British thing, just firing into a crowd of thousands of people.

Yep. Yeah, they did a lot of that. Yeah, okay, totally scans. Yep, and the workers in Hong Kong respond with the city's longest general strike. 250,000 workers just, they just leave the city for Guangzhou, which brings all of Hong Kong to a standstill because almost their entire labor force is just gone. Like, they just leave.

There's further, there's a boycott of... Yeah, yeah, and everything I do is there's this boycott of British goods that reduces British revenue in the city by 40 to 50%. And this lasts for 16 months, and the only reason Hong Kong survives is that basically the only thing the UK government is doing in this period is just shipping these massive bailout packages to Hong Kong. Now, I mentioned earlier that there was massive protests in Tianjin, and those are the first, that's the first movement to go down

after a sort of warlord troops move into suppress it. But what's interesting about what happens in the rest of the country is that for the most part, these strikes aren't put down by the warlords at all. And so to understand why we need to look at sort of the class composition of these movements, at the beginning of the May the 30th movement, which is what this whole wave of unrest comes to be known after the sort of May the 30th massacre, you have a really solid alliance of, you know, everyone in Chinese society. And I mean, like, everyone is pissed off about the British soldiers

just like slaughtering children in the street. And it produces this really unwieldy alliance of workers, business owners, and organized crime, all sort of like fighting imperialism together, but like, okay, that's not a coalition that has any shared interests other than sort of just hatred of the British. And, you know, okay, hatred of the perfidious Albion is a powerful force, but it's not enough to hold a political coalition together, and especially because, you know, this is the period where like the general strike

really enters into sort of the protest vocabulary of China's working class. And this starts to just absolutely freak out the bosses. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of things that are very scary if you're a boss in like Shanghai 1925. One of the other ones is the workers in Shanghai start organizing what's called the dog beating brigade, which is this this row of workers with axes who run around beating up scabs and people who don't support labor movements.

It rules. Yeah, that's pretty rad. Dude with axes is like, nope, nope, you better support the labor movement. If you want to keep a strike going, you're gonna need a couple hundred dudes with axes. Yeah. Yeah. That's a lesson people should be taking for the general strike we should have and I don't know, tomorrow or whenever.

Yeah. And I think, frankly, like the fact that we no longer have people have dog beating brigades with axes is like a real reason for the decline of the American, the sort of organized American working class. Well, bad pitch here, but we're gonna have to change the name because Americans are not going to get on board anything called the dog beating brigade. That's true. We call the rat beating brigade.

Absolutely. Yeah. I think we can get people back on board. Yeah. One of these dogs is angry about the dog beating brigade. Yeah. I mean, that's fair. It's a different culture.

Okay. Don't worry. They only beat people, not dogs. Yeah. They're not beating people. They're not like or they're not beating dogs. They're not like Hitler. Yeah.

They're beating people, which is also like Hitler. But in a good way. All right. I don't, I've lost the thread. Let's continue. Now, a big reason for the sort of level of militants and for the level of organization that the workers of Shanghai have is because both the communists and the Nationalist Party have allied with Shanghai's powerful Green Gang.

Now, the Green Gang is the single best organized political force in Shanghai by a very, a very significant margin. Most of what they're sort of famous for is the fact that they control Shanghai's opium trade. And, you know, that makes them a lot of money. But in terms of organizational strength, their real power lies in their control over the workplace. The Green Gang controls almost every shop floor in Shanghai.

And, you know, the ones that don't control tend to be controlled by other gangs. And, you know, when I say they control the shop floor, what I mean is that they're almost completely in control of the hiring and firing process to the point where to even come to Shanghai in the first place, right? And this is important because Shanghai is a city that's like 70 to 80 percent immigrants from other parts of China. So it's based almost entirely on migrant workers. And to even get into the city, you have to have someone who's in the gang to like vouch

for you. And, you know, once you have someone like a foreman to vouch for you, you have a friend to vouch for you with the foreman and they can hire you. But this whole process means that almost the entire working class in Shanghai is like affiliated with one of these gangs, particularly the Green Gang. And it's sort of interesting. You can see attempts to sort of like defame some of these workers that people will go be like, oh, they're affiliated with the gangs.

And it's like literally every worker in Shanghai is affiliated to some extent with a gang because that's the only way you can get a job. And this gives them an enormous amount of political power on top of the wealth they're able to extract from Chinese workers in the opium trade. And they're significant enough that a big part of communist organizing in Shanghai becomes like infiltrating these gangs. Because the communists, you know, very quickly figure out that if you're not like part of the gang, you can't get a job and you can't do any labor organizing.

So they turn into the strategy of like organizing the gang foreman because the gang foreman can just like boot everyone out of a shop and like start a strike. And this really kind of weirdly and surprisingly actually works. And the communists are able to win over like a good number of foremen. This is one of the sort of the basis of organized labor in the city, but this also means that even within the sort of communist unions, the gangs have like a decent level of influence because, you know, they're reliant on gang members to sort of bring people in. Now, at the beginning of the conflict, this works in organized labor's favor because,

you know, both the gangs and the communists and like the labor organizers are all pulling on the same side. And that means they could just like pull everyone out of work. But as the strikes go on, the largely communist-controlled general labor union grows more and more powerful. And the Green Gang looks at this and starts to get worried about like, you know, organized labor creating an independent base of power, which is a real threat to the control of the workplace. And they start looking for allies to put the strikes down. Now, Chinese business owners had initially like backed the protests, but, you know,

because they were pissed off that the British were shooting people. But they very quickly realized that letting workers have unions is extremely bad for them, even if those unions were temporarily targeting foreign owners. Yeah, so one of their major complaints is that there's this strike, you know, one of the strikes that's going on is at this like Japanese-owned power plant. But because the power plants, like they can't be wrong by scab workers, this cuts off businesses, this cuts off like power to Chinese businesses too. So the business owners get pissed off and they get together with the Green Gang,

they try to like start ending the strikes. The gang like storms the offices of the GLU with like knives and iron bars, just like beats the crap out of a whole bunch of the GLU organizers, and they're able to just like destroy the headquarters. And they also start to sort of like exert their influence over the workforce to like bring people back to work. And this eventually is able to do what the British government and the warlords couldn't, which is bring the strike to an end by forcing the GLU to sort of like settle with the Japanese government over compensation for like the original death of the labor organizer.

And a very similar process, although in Hong Kong, it's more Chinese business owners backing the British than it is organized crime, like just beating the crap out of people. But this a very similar thing plays out in Hong Kong. And after 16 months, the strike ends. And it's kind of a disaster because after this, the Brits just like later in Hong Kong into a fortress, almost all British social policy for the next really 100 years specifically designed to make sure that this kind of strike never happens again. Yeah, it seems like I could name some other governments that took a little bit of a leaf out of their book in that regard. Yep. And there's actually, there's a fun, well, fun, I say fun.

But there's an interesting thing about this where Shanghai. So Hong Kong is basically the place where like most riot tactics are produced or like police anti riot techniques are produced. So there's another bunch of riots in 1967. And what the British police does against those riots are like that that's where that's like the template for all riot police comes from. It's from the British police in Hong Kong in 67. And you see this with like waves with the earlier strikes too. I mean, they're fucking good at it. Yep.

I can, it's also, I'm going to guess where a lot of protestor tactics for dealing with. I mean, I can say that just in terms of like last year in Portland, people were using tactics they'd seen Hong Kong. Do first. Yeah. I had no idea it went back that fucking far. But yeah. And there's interesting stuff here too. Because so basically like the way the way these conflicts always work is it like both sides are constantly trading like tactics with their sort of like equivalent numbers.

So you have like the thin blue line international. But then you also have, you know, you have like the actual international in this period. So you have sort of which is the kind of left socialist international. Yeah. Well, by this, by this point, you're sort of in like the USSR, third international. Yeah. But even before that, you have a lot of people who were like workers in like, for example, like one of the labor movements in Egypt, for example, starts because a bunch of like Italian anarchists like show up and do a bunch of organizing. And this happens in Brazil too, where, you know, the general strike like just sort of spreads as workers move around the world.

Yeah. So you have these dynamics and they sort of clash here. And in Hong Kong, like the ruling clashes straight up wins. But in Shanghai, even though the strike collapses and like another ruler takes the city and executes a bunch of labor leaders. But it doesn't matter because May the 30th had already sort of changed everything about Chinese politics. And this, this is one of the biggest factors behind the rise of the next phase of sort of Chinese history, which is the rise of the nationalists. Now, the KMT of the Nationalist Party is it's one of the oldest political factions left in China at this point. But, you know, by the time you hit about 1920, they they're a complete mess that they've had a series of disasters, revolts like all their leaders keep fleeing the to Japan. And, you know, they're sort of clinging on to like a portion of Guangzhou province, like the far south.

And, you know, I mean, organizationally, it's a disaster. But they have they don't have meetings, like they don't have a party program. They don't have a constitution. They don't even have like a newspaper. They don't have a party publication. And the Soviets look at this and are like, this is a disaster. And so they send Michael Borden, who's like, he's an old Bolshevik organizer to to to meet and advise the KMT leaders on Yatsen. And this, Borden, Borden, basically tell Sun Yatsen like, OK, you need to reorganize this party on like Leninist lines. And Sun Yatsen is like, OK, so if I don't get Soviet AIDS, there's literally no way we can ever win this war.

So he he lets Borden carry out his reforms within like within a series of manner of months, it's just completely transformed. They they turn to this is really incredibly effective political organization. They suddenly they have branches all over the country, they have they're all holding meetings, they're spreading propaganda. And they're they're also sort of aided in this by the USSR. Yeah, the USSR is going to do a lot of things to help the KMT in this period. One of the one of the biggest ones is that they drag the Chinese Communist Party like literally kicking and screaming into an alliance with the KMT. The companies are just like hated the Nationalists for various doctrinal reasons. But the USSR is like, you're going to ally with them.

And this is called the First United Front. And notably, it's the First United Front because there's going to be more united friends because. Welcome to the United Unified. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, we'll see we'll see how this alliance turns out in a bit. But you know, in 1924, like every member of the Communist Party joins the Nationalist Party. And this gives them like a this makes the Nationalists like significantly more effective as a political organization. You know, the KMT on top of the Communist, they've always had a few other bases of support like there.

They have a bunch of backers and like the Chinese diaspora and like the U.S. and Indonesia. They have a lot of like they have a lot of banking support from people in Hong Kong and Guangzhou. And with the reforms of the party in 1923 and the May the 30th movement 1925, the KMT gets three new extremely powerful bases of support. They get the full military backing of the Soviets who are going to pump more money into the KMT than like any other international power is going to spend in this entire war. They get this one of the one of the things the Soviets do is they start helping to train this new officer corps for for the for this thing called the National Revolutionary Army that the KMT is sort of building up to go fight the warlords. And the third thing that they build up, especially after the giant political shifts of 1925 is they start gaining this huge base in the Chinese masses. And when I say the Chinese masses, I mean, they have the entire ideological spectrum in this organization. I mean, it's it's it's the kind of coalition that you look at it and it's like something has gone wrong in history.

Like there are too many people are agreed about the same thing. Yeah, like there's like proto fascists. There's like this right right wing like hardcore nationalists. There's these very like traditional sort of conservative confusions. Like there's there's these conservative Chinese business owners. There's a bunch of landlords. You have to have this sort of old revolutionary like Republicans. And then on the left, you have a bunch of socialist communists and anarchists and they're all in the same work. And this is, you know, you look at that coalition, it's like there's no way that like the fascists, the landlords and the communists are like all going to be on the same side of this body. And it makes me think a lot about some of what you saw in fume after World War One, where you've got these these anarchists and these communists and kind of every just like all of these different people.

And there's a similar like fume, which we talked about in our Gabriel Benanzio two-parter, which was like this city in Italy that was taken by this madman, artist, kind of proto fascist guy. But like a bunch of people on the left and the right kind of started engaged in this utopian project there for about a year. And it was a reaction to the chaos and the violence of World War One and the fact that like all of these powers in the region, these great militant powers had completely fucked society up. And I think you're seeing the same thing in China. These like the old government is gone. These warlords are not helping anybody but themselves. They're just like fucking and drinking and murdering tens of thousands of people. And so you get this pretty broad coalition of people who are all able to be like, well, fuck how things are going.

Yeah. And I think the other part of this is that the KMT built like cells like nationalists like sell themselves like as like the word of the revolutionary party. And it's like anyone who wants a revolution like left or right like doesn't doesn't matter. Just join up and you'll get the revolution that like over that overthrows the warlords and like restores the power of the nation. And after that, we can all fight over like, you know, rest of our political differences. And they sure did. Oh, yeah. You know who doesn't?

Overthrow Chinese civil society and start a period of mass bloodletting that will eventually lead to the deaths of millions. The products and services that support the show. They do not. None of them have yet done that. Maybe one day, maybe one day. I have a I have a good feeling about Blue Apron. I think they might go all the way. But we'll see.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, Hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock and I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say.

For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From I Heart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. All right, let's continue. So the Nationalists have one more powerful base of support. And this base is one of the few bases that goes from their origins in the early 1800s to after the government of Taiwan. And this base is organized crime. Now, a lot of historians don't really want to touch on this. And there's a good reason for that, because up until the 90s, it was genuinely extremely dangerous to write about the KMT's ties to organized crime. Like it's bad enough that there's a Taiwanese journalist named Henry Leo who writes an unauthorized biography of like Chiang Kai-shek's brother, who's like the president of Taiwan. He writes an unauthorized biography and he gets assassinated by the KMT in California in like 1982.

Oh, wow. They get around. Yeah. They have a whole international network. They have all this sort of opium and heroin distribution. We don't have enough time to do this whole story because it's a whole thing. But needless to say, one of the big ways that the KMT, especially the KMT's right wing, funds itself is that they're just like up to their asses in the opium and heroin trade. And they have, you know, they have really deep ties to organized crime in ways that are going to be very important in a second. Now, the KMT left also has ties to organized crime. Like we talked about like the communists and like the sort of left nationalists are affiliated with like the Green Gang and Chinese organized crime because they have to for labor organizing. The KMT right is just, they just are the opium trade.

Hell yeah, they are. Yeah. So if you remember back last episode, Zhong has a nationalist general named Chen assassinated. Yeah, that guy, that guy was the head of the Green Gang at the time. And a large part of why he thought he could just like go back to Shanghai and start a revolution was that he was, you know, he was in control of the Green Gang, which means that he had control of the Green Gang's opium, like, well, opium apparatus, but he had the, he had control of the Green Gang's like labor apparatus. And he was like, well, okay, I can like start a strike and then there'll be an on revolution that could take the city. And, you know, it doesn't work because Zhong like kills him. But, you know, this is the like the level of ties between the KMT right and organized crime. Like Shen Kai-shek pledges his loyalty to like a later Green Gang leader. And Shen Kai-shek, for those of you who don't know, Shen Kai-shek is by the end of this story, Shen Kai-shek is going to be the guy, the single person in control of the entire nationalist party.

And he has pledged loyalty to a member of the Green Gang and makes another Green Gang guy the head of Shen, like Shen Kai's director of opium suppression, which is extremely fun. I would disagree with that. I think opium should be allowed to thrive in the open marketplace. And most importantly, in my refrigerator, but please continue. Well, you know, I mean, Italy, so does Shen Kai-shek, which is what which is why Shen Kai-shek is what I'm learning. You know, we're we're both on on the same page about the only thing that matters. Opium. And heroin, too. So the heroin slide a bit later. Yeah, I mean, it's it's literally the opiate of the masses. Yeah, yeah. Well, no, because most people can't afford it. It's the opium of me, the opiate of me and Shen Kai-shek. It's our opiate. And yeah, all right. And it makes a lot of money.

Yeah, I mean, if you're not for some people, I I'm a purist, but, you know, you just in it for the love of the game. In it for the love of the opium, you know, why would you why would you you don't want to commodify something you love? You know, it's like if you make your hobby, your job and it ruins it. You don't want to you don't want to lose out on the love of the game, the game being opium. Makes sense. Now, yeah, the Green Gang I had like their their Green Gang is in it for the love of the money. And, you know, so they funnel all this into into like they funnel a bunch of their money into into the KMT and, you know, the KMT

with their best bases now solidified in their armies fueled by the power of Russia heroin money and the Chinese masses. They set out to conquer all of China. OK, that's a little bit pretty ambitious. But yeah, go off. Yeah. Yeah. Now, OK, before we fully get into what's become known as the northern expedition, there's one more person who we have to talk about who I believe, although I'm not 100 percent sure is showing up for the first time in bastard pod history as a character. And that is Mao Zedong. Oh, yeah, we talk a little bit during the the the the Lasenco episodes because of the, you know, the famine and during the Great Leap Forward.

Yeah, we really haven't. He's one he's one of the guys who's I always get to daunted by the sheer amount of shit to cover when you have to talk about that guy's life. Yeah, we obviously like we cannot really get into Mao here. But he does one thing that's extremely important in the story, which is that he in 1926 he he's organizing a peasant movement in Hunan province. And he's really good at this. The newly formed like Hunan Provincial Peasant Association quickly grows to five million members. And they start to seize land from wealthy landholders and, you know, they start to earn themselves in order to do this. And, you know, credit where credit is due Mao, good on land reform. He's OK, bad on sparrows, bad on workers, democracy, bad on famines. But, you know, land reform, he's pretty good.

And the peasants like the peasants agree with this. But unfortunately, the local elites are extremely unhappy that the peasants are taking over land. And so they start to form their own malicious assault, the peasants are taking more land. And pretty soon there's just another civil war going on in Hunan province through the peasants and the large landowners. Yeah, because, you know, we need more wars as you get one that you get a lot. Yep. And then they keep happening. It's great. Yeah. Now, now, sort of interestingly, the CCP is actually extremely pissed off at the peasants are taking over this land. Because, you know, as I said earlier, right, part of the KMT's base is landlords and those people not happy about the prospect of land reform.

And, you know, the CCP is still trying to hold the like the CCP KMT United Front together. And, you know, Robert, you might be thinking to yourself, what kind of brain geniuses would look at a coalition that includes a bunch of landlords and Mao and go, yeah, this is a basis for a stable working relationship. And I mean, yeah, he's not famed for his love of landlords. Yeah. Yeah. And the answer to that is bastard's pot alum Joseph Stalin and also Trotsky. Oh, yeah. There's my boys. There's my good boys. And so Joe Stahl looks J Stahl looks looks at Mao Zedong reads up on this guy's background and says, you know, who can we get along with landlords? The funny thing about this, right?

So OK, we'll get really fully into what like the brain trust in Moscow thinks about this later. But like, OK, so the fun part about what what's about to happen in China here is that so it's a complete fiasco. All the communists die. Stalin looks at this. It sounds like it sounds like a Stalin thing. To be honest, it gets worse. It gets worse. And this runs into my theory of every every critical moment in world history. You can find a decision that Stalin made that made it worse. And this one, it's not just this. Stalin also is like, so he the lesson that he takes from from this conflict. He takes a really weird lesson from it.

And he tries and he tries to force the the Communist Party in Palestine to like take a completely weird line based off of what happened in China. And that's like one of the reasons that like it completely fails and is like one of the reasons everything goes to shit in Palestine. So yeah, good, good job, Stalin. He's going to fuck everything up in China and then he's going to do it again in Palestine. And it's it's great. It's it's a good time. No, he's he's he's he really he I mean, he was good at staying in power. Yeah. He had he was less good at everything that was not directly related to staying in. Yep. But man, was he good at staying in power? You can't fault him on that.

All right. So Jay Stahl Jay Stahl fucks around and gets a whole lot of communist killed. Yeah. Well, we'll get we'll get we'll get to all of them dying in a bit. OK, you know, the problem at the moment is that once the peasants get a taste for land or form, they just start doing it themselves. And the CCP like tells him to stop. The peasants are like, no, we're going to take this land now. And, you know, as as as a scale, as this escalates into like a full scale civil war, this starts to crush to create this huge rift in this.

There's a few other things that are happening to in this period that start that like there starts to be sort of these huge battles between the CCP and like the KMT's left and the right wing of the KMT. And this all what everything Mao is doing is just sort of like escalating this. Now, the other reason I bring up Mao is that I think there's more similarities between Mao and Zhang and you'd expect, you know, they're both men who are born on sort of the outskirts of Chinese society or both. They're both sort of nobodies until they're swept up in the revel in the turmoil of early 20th century revolutionary politics. And basically by sheer chance, they go on to become extremely important historical figures. Now, most importantly, for our purposes, Mao and Zhang are probably the two most famous poets in China in this period.

And I don't think a lot of people know this about Mao, but by like an incredible quirk of history, Mao is one of the great Chinese classical poets. Like if you study Chinese poetry in university, like you read Mao, like he's that important figure. That that's that's also true of Stalin. Like he wasn't he didn't write nearly as many poems, but he was a very well regarded Georgian poet. And they're both leaders of the two big communist parties. Yeah. Like that that's that.

I mean, I don't know. Maybe maybe there's something about. Controlling of an all powerful party apparatus that also makes you good at meter. Actually, that does kind of make sense. OK. I can see it. I can see it. So we've developed the like let them go to art schools theory of fascist. Now we're developing the never let the poet. If you see somebody writing a poem, just start hitting them. You know, I do think Mao is like he's I think it's a really interesting example of this.

There's like a famous like Stephen Jay Gould quote that goes like, I'm somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain, the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields with sweatshops. And like Mao is one of those people who very easily could have died. Just like completely unknown peasants. And instead, you know, he becomes a world-renowned poet. It's and some other stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Just to say that he also wound up being Mao. Yeah.

He has he has a he does a couple of things in his life. Oh, Mao. Yeah. Now now. And this is important for our purposes. Zhong is also a famous Chinese poet. And I've OK. Robert, I want you to read this poem. Dict warrior poet is what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. I want you to read this poem that I've just put in the chat.

That's called poem about bastards. Oh, oh, fuck. Yeah. Okay. Is this the whole poem? This is the whole poem. You tell me to do this. He tells me to do that. You're all bastards. Go fuck your mother. That's a good poem. I assume it rhymes more in the original language.

I still like it. Here's the thing, right? So you would think that it sounds better in Chinese and no, it doesn't. Because that's I'm going to say it. Then that's not really a poem. That's that's that's a guy telling someone to go fuck his mother. Yeah, that's like a running theme for him. He's really into that.

He's really into the motherfucking stuff. No, OK, I mean, it's not bad. You know, I get it's the kind of thing if he were like, for example, an actual like revolutionary fighting for liberty, as opposed to a vicious warlord rapes women, this would have a little bit more bite because he's the one telling people to do things. Yeah. Nobody's told this guy what to do in quite a while at this point in the story.

No, no, he he writes a lot of poems. I'm going to do one more because it's great. And so this one this one has a story behind it. So in 1927, we've talked about this a bit. There's this big drought in Shandong. And so Zhong goes to basically he goes to like a local local temple of the dragon emperor. And he prays for rain and he writes this just spectacular poem about the ordeal. The dragon emperor is also named Zhong.

Why does he make life hard for me if it doesn't rain in three days? I'll demolish I'll demolish your temple and then I'll have cannons bombard your mom. Can't can't can bomb on your mom. Bombard your mom. I will shoot your mom is the gist I'm taking out of with a cannon. You know what? Or two solid flex. All right.

Well, you know, and here's here's here's the fun part about this. So so he writes this poem while he's waiting for three days for it to rain. It doesn't rain. So he goes back to the temple and he like he like there's like a mass of people praying to this idol of the of the dragon emperor. He's like walks up to the idol slaps it and yells fuck your sister. How dare you make Shangdong's people suffer by not giving us rain. And then he brings a bunch of cannons up to the temple and just start shooting them at

the sky to bombard the heavens in what I can only read as one of the earliest attempts to attack and to throne God. Now the next day it rained and I let you all make of that what you will. I mean, we're in the middle of a drought in Oregon here. So I may I may steal that one. I may steal a couple of things from this guy. I'm going to be entirely honest. I'm going to steal a number of things from this guy.

Hey, shoot cannons at the sky. It'll make it rain. I already do like shooting at this guy. I mean, there are some like there are some like I mean, that's something trying to this day, right? Like there's some attempts to kind of like see now it's not just shooting guns at but like to seed clouds in order to kind of bring rain on. Like that's a thing that gets done.

Yeah. And there's a theory. I don't buy it. Well, again, I'm not a chemist, but there's actually a theory that like because of like the residue on the gunpowder or something of the cannons that like this like replicated the effect of the cloud seeding stuff. And I mean, it says that I'm just looking at this up now. It says they they use silver iodide rockets and it looks like it looks like the actual

science on this is kind of not not settled. I don't I certainly don't know enough to say whether or not it is. But I could see how silver iodide could also be a byproduct of firing cannons in the sky. Yeah, I mean, yeah, things happen. I don't know. Sure. What I'm hearing is that to deal with this drought, Oregon needs me to start shooting

at the sky. Is it illegal to just like wheel cannons around? Like there's no law against cannons at all. Yeah. That I'm aware of. Yeah, I think most states they count as a curio and relic, which means they're unregulated. Oh, this is this. OK.

As long as the baldy fire does not itself explode, I'm fairly certain you could do anything you want with a cannon. Now, I'm having a I'm having a series of visions that involve you in a bunker. Oh, man. Me too. Me too. A bunch of cannons. Yeah, I'm starting to go fund me right now.

Yeah. And you'll fund me several cannons so that Oregon will have a rainy season again. Hey, Robert, you know who else will fund you? Wow. That was a good one. I mean, they absolutely do. That was a good one. I'm good job, Sophie.

Yeah. The products and services that support this podcast and they do. They have bought me a number of things that are similar in nature to cannons. Anyway, here's ads. Motherfuckers. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S.

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And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Uh, we're all just having a real zip bang. Wow. Hoosily doosily do of a time. So he shoots some clouds, which I think we've decided was a good decision. Uh, what's next? Yeah.

So, so, okay. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on whose side you're on, this is a shooting, shooting guns at clouds is not the only thing a nationalist has been doing in this period. And that's not the only thing the warlords have been doing in this period either. So the warlords like look south and are like, okay, this is a large army with a lot of Soviet support. We need to sort of, you know, we need to start getting ready to fight them. So in 1926, Zhang Zhiling and his allies formed something called the National Pacification Army, which is the best explanation that I can give is that it's like the United Front for warlords.

It's like, like all the warlords. So class solidarity for guys with armies. Yeah. Yeah. But you know, it's kind of remarkable because all of these people hate each other and I've just, what is this, this is 26 by now, so 10 years just like murdering each other over nothing. But you know, when, yeah, when their asses on the line, they come together and We have shared interests.

Yeah. Yeah. And so you get Zhang Zhiling, Zhang Zhongcheng and the Jade Marshal, Wu Peifu, who is back after somehow managing to pull together enough of his territory and his troops to like be a significant power again, but is now fighting on the side of his former rival and the man who sent him into exile because warlord period. And you know, they at first look like a pretty formidable army, but they're immediately weakened when Wu Peifu, who really like this man should honestly be called the Marshal of getting

owned by his own subordinates because so he goes to fight the Nationalists and then his army immediately collapses because he's betrayed by one of his generals again for the second time in two years. Yeah. Class solidarity only goes so far when your class is guys with armies and no conscience. Yeah. And you know, and this is the other thing like the single best strategy that you can possibly have in the warlord period is to defect.

Now, this, this leaves the warlords in a pretty bad position. And it's here with the National Passification Army just like completely unable to stop the Nationalist advance that Zhang makes the first of two mistakes that would cost them everything. So Zhang had been given two jobs by Zhuoling. One of them was to defend Shanghai. The other one was to confront Nationalist advance around Nianjing and to reinforce reinforce the troops of one of the sort of more unreliable warlords in the coalition. Now, that warlords troops had been doing OK against the Nationalists, but Zhang, like,

I think justifiably worried that this guy is going to defect for the fourth time in two years. He's like, OK, this guy does seem like the thing to do. It seems like everyone defects constantly. Yeah. Like he's gone trade at three times. Yeah. Yeah.

So Zhang is worried this guy is going to defect again. So he sends most of his army to reinforce like that guy. And by by reinforce, I mean, he wants to put an army next to him, so he doesn't defect. And but this this is a complete disaster. The part of his army that Zhang sends to defend Shanghai just gets completely destroyed. And the other warlords subordinates hate Zhang so much that like they defect to the KMT rather than like be on the same side as him. Yeah.

Yeah. It's bad. Sounds like he pissed off some people. Yeah. But it's funny because it's not like like the other warlords like the other warlord isn't good either. But like, man, Zhang Zhang Zhang is a tier above all of the rest of the warlords when it comes to just war boarding.

Yeah. I mean, Zhang like he wins the battle at Nanjing, but it doesn't it's it's the definition of a fear victory because in the middle of all of this sort of inconclusive fighting, the workers take Shanghai. Now. Yeah. That's exactly where you don't want the workers if you this guy. Nope.

So to understand what this means or how this happened, we need to go back a little bit. So so after the general strike in 1925 ends, the the general labor union and the communists, they start working on this plan to take the city. And they make their first attempt, which is called the first armed uprising in late 1926. This this doesn't work at all. It's a complete failure and here you get to see just that unbelievable brutality of the warlord governments. I'm going to read this passage from the delightfully named Hans J. van der Ven book called War

and Nationalism in China, which describes aftermath of the failed first armed uprising. A judge went about the streets accompanied by someone carrying a shield with the martial law text on it. Anyone suspected of revolutionary activity, even something like leafleting was executed on the spot by two broadsordered executioners, after which their heads were displayed on bamboo pikes. Smith recalls a story that one street hawker shouting by my cakes was stabbed by a soldier who thought he was crying, defeat the army.

Several hundred people were killed. I don't speak Mandarin or any other languages but English, which I also barely speak. In the language this guy was speaking, does by my cakes sound at all like a little bit the army? Okay, okay. It's kind of plausible that it's like it's kind of like it's not. I don't know. Like it's similar enough that like I can like I'm pretty sure this happened.

It's not. It's an oopsie doodles then. Yeah, but it's not similar enough that like anyone who's not just completely hyped up on murder is going to mistake them. Well, I mean, look, if you've never murdered anybody, it's a hoot. I don't know what I was going with there. It's very scary. Yeah.

What? Sophie, you know the motto of this podcast is ABM, always be murdering. No, it's cut what Robert says so I can keep it. That is the motto of the podcast. Thank you. Let's let's move right along. Now, you know, in the face of all this violence, it is a genuinely incredible testament to the raw capacity that are for like the raw power of our capacity for resistance that

this doesn't work. Like people people see their friends, their neighbors, their coworkers, their families decapitated in the street and impaled on pikes and the next month, they do it again. In February 1927, there's a second armed uprising, 300,000 workers undeterred by the possibility that they too could end up on a pike stage what was to that point, the largest strike in Shanghai's history. Now this too fails because the armed uprising, the strikes weren't coordinated enough. But the third armed uprising on March 21st, 1927 finally takes the city.

See guys, third time's a charm with armed uprising. Yeah. I mean, we did one and that's all I'm going to say on the matter. And what was barely armed? That was barely armed. Yeah. I mean, one side was very heavily armed. Yeah.

Now, 800,000 workers just blow the previous all previous records for the largest strike in Shanghai history out of the water. And that's a protest the size of the city I live in. Yeah. All our troops, like somewhat understandably just like flee rather than face them. Yeah, that makes sense. Again, I've seen cops do that. Yeah.

I imagine that felt pretty good. Yeah. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to the triumphant workers who were in the process of setting up an elected citizen's government to run the city, they had already been betrayed. Oh, well, yeah, that also scans. Yeah. As March turned to April, open battles between the left and right wing of the KMT were raging across China.

Yeah. Here we go. The right wing of the nationalists began to slaughter workers everywhere they found a union. But even as their nominal comrades fell to the machine guns, communists in left KMT leadership told the workers of Shanghai to let Chiang Kai-shek's army into the city. The workers greeted the nationalists with jubilation. Chiang, on the other hand, immediately went to go meet with the head of the Green Gang,

the guy you'd pledged allegiance to several years earlier. And with weapons provided by the French and intelligence provided by the British, the Green Gang and the nationalists' troops began to slaughter the striking workers. Now, the workers' armed pickets fought back, and 200,000 workers went back on strike even in the midst of the confusion of the sort of nationalists coming to split. But disorganized by the surprise attack, and with right wing nationalist troops already in the city, the workers were defeated and Chiang Kai-shek's first white terror had begun. And I say first here, that's very important because Chiang is going to do a second white

terror in Taiwan in the late 40s, but that's another story for another time. By the end of the purge, somewhere between 300,000 and a million people lay dead at the hands of men their leaders had told them the trust. The source of this disaster was Moscow, which, by the structure of the Leninist party and through the discipline of the Third International, maintained near total supremacy over the communist political line. It had been Moscow that had forced the communists into the alliance with the nationalists in the first place, Moscow and their handpicked leaders that had told the communists to stay

in the united front as it collapsed around them. And now, as the situation continued to worsen, the surviving communists waited with baited breath for the master stroke from Moscow that could save them from this disaster. What they got was Stalin and Trotsky bickering. Yeah, that also completely scans. Yeah, the order from Moscow, I'm going to read some of the provisions of it because it it's completely incoherent. So okay, so the order is, okay, you have to get you have to ask the peasants to start

doing land seizures, but also you must prevent them from taking any land from any soldier, which is like a lot of the land is owned by soldiers. And then also simultaneously, they're supposed to raise an army of 70,000 communist troops, but also like it's like an independent communist army, but also stay in the nationalist party and the United France. But then also while being in the nationalist party, opposed Chiang Kai-shek at the same time, it's the assembled leaders as Chiang Kai, as Elizabeth Perry described in Chiang Hai on strike, quote, didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

The head of the CCP described the telegram as quote, taking a bath in a toilet. Yeah, so Moscow in the final critical hour had delivered nothing but ruin in the years that followed almost the entire urban workers will be annihilated. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the folks, this is why I yeah, I don't don't have an organization who that that can

be entirely destroyed because Stalin and Trotsky were bickering bad organizational structure. As a general rule, one of the things we advise our listeners is don't don't don't trust Stalin. Bad idea. Don't don't rely on Stalin. I know a lot of our listenership are in 1919 Russia right now. Yeah. But it's not going to end well, guys.

Don't trust him. Don't try to out drink him, you know, in fairness to our listeners in 1919 Russia, pretty much no matter what you do, it's going to end badly. So just, I don't know, fully go to Ukraine, Ukraine seems like it's it's just going to be a solid, solid upward upward trajectory for for the next 100 years, famously, a country having a great time has no problems ever. Famously stable Ukraine. Yeah.

Okay. So. Yeah. So in the chaos of this, you know, the next Chinese civil war, you know, it's called the Chinese Civil War, but like, there's already so many civil wars. So the next Chinese civil war between the nationalists, the communists should have been a godsend to the warlords. And in the immediate aftermath of the suppression of the Shanghai uprising, warlord forces were

temporarily able to halt the nationalists advance, but then disaster struck. After one of his allies suffered a devastating defeat, Zhang was ordered to invade Henan province. And okay, I want to make clear here that what's about to happen isn't entirely Zhang's fault. Zhuoling like refuses to send him any reinforcements. And so Zhang is left to attack this whole province, like by himself with only one just like incredibly unreliable minor warlord as his ally. Now, his ally almost immediately proceeds to make just like a series of incredibly reckless

over reckless attacks, and it's just destroyed by nationalist kind of attack. And in response, Zhang makes the single largest tactical blunder of his entire career. He launches this massive full scale assault on Kai Feng, and it's just it's just completely destroyed by the nationalists. And the kind of attack nationalist kind of attack kills not just like his troops. This attack kills most like a pretty good portion of his senior commanders, which is extremely rare in battles in this period. You almost never like lose your senior commander, but he loses a bunch of them.

And he also loses four of his six beloved armored trains, several of them. Oh, yeah, I lose their trains and a bunch of the white Russians like get slaughtered when a bunch of Chinese, yeah, like pissed off Chinese people. Like they they they finally managed to cut off like the rail lines and they just like walk into the car and just like murder all the white Russians. I'm fine with that more or less. Yeah, you know, good, good, good on good, a good on the nationalists. One of the few times I'll ever say this, but good on them.

Yeah, I'm fine with that. The trains though. Yeah, do anything. Well, okay. But when I say heard a lot of people, but there were trains. Yeah. Yeah. But okay.

But okay. Yeah, they're all captured and because because armored trains, yeah, fine. Yeah. Trains are here. Who's who they're killing? Yeah, long as they get to kill like some of some of these trains are like on their seventh owner already. So yeah, they're going to the trains will be in service until they're destroyed by the

Japanese. And I can tell you what, yeah, they were the Toyotas of their day. Yeah. But unfortunately, yeah, without his trains, Jong is Jong is in a bad spot. He's able to sort of cobble together some of his army, but like this is not the army that like the baby squad had led in 1924. This is yeah, it's completely demoralized. And you know, without the trains, very important, the speed of the trains is what basically allows

them to counterattack. And a lot of Jong's success had been from just sort of like being able to out position and sort of out maneuver his opponents. But when he returns to Shandong in 1928, he can't do this anymore because you know, the trains are gone. And he's he instead digs this like giant series of trenches is like this is like, you know, he has this determination just like he's going to fight this out. And the nationalists just go around them.

Imagine know his yeah, the attack behind his armies routed again, and Jong attempts to flee to Manchuria with the remains of his army to continue the war. But Jong Joling, his armies are likewise in shambles after a series of defeats by the nationalists gets assassinated by the Japanese in late 1929 or sorry late 1928. And this is a problem for Jong because control of Manchuria passes to Joling's son, who very quickly looks at the map and is like the nationalists have taken literally all the country except from Manchuria, they're going to win this war. And so he starts preparing to flip sides.

And he so you know, because you prepare into like flip sides, he refuses to let Jong into Manchuria. And Jong like tries to fight his way in, but he can't do it. And so Jong as like he's busy like the like one of the last one like warlord standing makes this like heroic triumphant final stand with his back to the Great Wall of China. And his army is promptly completely destroyed by the nationalists after his white Russian mercenaries defect. And he flees to he's able to he turns like right before he loses the battle, he turns

the city over to the Japanese and then flees to another Japanese control part of China. So for you know, for like a few months, Jong's like kind of out of it. But in 1929, Jong apparently still very much believing that this was all temporary setback and that he was in fact still going to do this return. They'd all been temporary setbacks before. Yeah, you know, so you can't fault him is like, you know, whatever, if who pay fruit can come back like, yeah, maybe you can do it too. So you know, and he he he a bunch of these so okay, so when when the nationalists take

Shandong, they they do like basically a version of deep bathification, except they can they do the worst of both worlds where they put like Jong's subordinate in charge of the province as the warlord. But then also they fire all of his troops. So you have a warlord still ruling Shandong, who everyone hates. And then also all of these troops are just like doing the bath party thing where they've just been fired and have no jobs. And so in 1929, Jong like returns to Shandong province with two of his former allies and

some backing by the Japanese, although it's sketchy to what extent that exactly how much back he got from the Japanese is unclear, but he's usually gotten some backing. And he starts a rebellion with his former troops, tens of thousands of his ex soldiers flock to his banner. And he's eventually defeated and forced to flee like so many before him to Japan. Now Jong spends about four months living quietly in Japan until a cousin of the last Chinese emperor who seems to have pissed him off by sleeping with one of what are now being called Jong's wives, Jong just gets extremely mad at this guy.

And so one night he he sits he's sitting like next to the window of his hotel room when the guy walks into the garden below him. And I'm going to I'm going to read the description from time because it's one of the most incredible things that ever been printed. This is from time quote at that moment, a bonnet, a pistol with Marshall Jong happened to be holding happened to go off. The bullet happened to strike the prince in the back happened to kill him. This whole thing was an unfortunate accident happened to be chained in the prince.

This is like it's like the most it's the it's the single greatest example of they can't say she shot this guy that I've ever encountered in a media organization. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah. You know, the other incredible thing about this is that okay, so he has just clearly murdered a dude, he has told the police that he was sitting on a balcony and he fired a bullet and happened to go off and the Japanese police after again, murdering a dude or just like, yeah, whatever, just pay a hundred fifty dollar fine.

He really did just Cheney that guy, you know, like, you know, this is like, I don't know, this is some just like incredibly weird corrupt petty like petty police stuff to where it's like, yeah, you murdered this guy, but like hundred dollar fine, it's fine. Mm hmm. Yeah. Well, no, that's that's fair. Because like what is the hundred and fifty dollars was like, I don't know, worth a human life back then.

I mean, okay, to be to be fair, this guy is a cousin of Puyi, who's like one of the great world historical monsters, an arch trader to mankind's like enemy of all humanity. So you know, he's related to him. So yeah, hundred fifty dollars is fine. I mean, honestly, if we developed a system of murder penalties, where it was based on how shitty the person you shot was, yeah. Why not? Yeah.

So, you know, having having escaped this, Jung, you know, he lives a fairly uneventful life with his mom and his, quote, wives for a few more years until the Japanese invaded Manchuria in nineteen thirty one to destroy your precious armored trains. Now, Jung saw yet another opportunity to make a comeback and he travels to China in nineteen thirty two, touting his ability to lead the anti Japanese resistance. Unfortunately for him in a train station in his home province, the nephew of a nationalist officer that Jung had executed like some years before jumped out and shot him, Jung's final words were, quote, no good, which, you know, I think that's just kind of a closing remark

on Jung, as you can get. I mean, you can't argue with the man that that's a fair thing to say when you've just been murdered. Oh, no good. You know what? Not on board with this. That's kind of my favorite thing. This is cancel culture.

Oh, what a rad dude. No notes. Great life. No. A couple of notes. A couple of notes. A lot of notes, actually. But I like the trains.

And I like that his dick was the size of 86 pesos. No good. It's a lot of pesos for a dick. Yeah. No good. Well, Chris, this has been a wonderful journey into history that I did not know. And it has taught me, again, more about pesos than I knew. So I'm very pleased with how today is gone.

How are you feeling? Oh, I'm doing pretty good. You know, this is kind of like, you know, I wanted to say this is like the bad part of Chinese history, but like, no, every part of Chinese history is also the bad part of Chinese history. That is the fun thing about history. Every now and then you get a guy who, I don't know, invented sea monkeys in order to fund national socialism.

And we have a laugh, but there's a lot more, a lot more, I don't know, gangs of wives being forced against their will to be concubines and people being force fed soy pucks while they starve to death. More of that. Most of history. No. Yeah. Most of history.

Which is why no. Why this podcast exists. Yeah. And why you've all just finished listening to two and a half hours about a real. This podcast. Good. No. Kooky character.

I liked my joke. It was funny. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Well. Have any plugables, Chris? Hear it behind the bastards. Yeah, I am.

I am at it me CHR three on Twitter or the ice must be destroyed dude. I have I have a sub step. As you are known to. Yes. But. To your family. Yes. From a long and illustrious line of ice must be destroyed.

Actually predates ice by quite a bit. Baffling story. Yeah. Ice. No good. Yes. Also. Yes.

No good. Thank you for that. Well, yeah. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you at home for listening. That's going to do it for us here at behind the bastards for the week until next week. Grab an armored train, press gang, a bunch of people and force them into your militia.

Get dozens of concubines and, you know, eventually get shot to death. No good. Well, OK. You can do other things if you prefer. OK. Bye now. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests.

It involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

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my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.