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um well happy new year my name is steve sand i'm the director of the source china institute for a particularly important year lies 2021 when we can expect it not to be too different from 2020 at least to begin with we are going to have a presentation and discussions on another very important year in history a year that was particularly important for china and that was of course the year of 1949 the year of revolutions as our speaker graham hutchins calls it now what is interesting of course is that in 1949 the communist party of china won and became the government of china and for all intents and purposes most people will see that as the winner what might be an interesting question for once to reflect on is after 1949 who really were the winners i think a lot of that will depends on whether we're looking at governments or we're looking at people ironically the people who lost the people who were kicked out of china and took refuge in taiwan might not have done so badly at least for a very long time now whether you want to take a view like that or you stick to the more authentic orthodox views that in 1949 china had its revolutions and it marked the beginning of the plc or as chairman mao would like to call it new china it's a matter for you to decide but this is a subject which i think our speaker is eminently well qualified to discuss with us on the basis of his new book which will be released by bloomsbury later this month and the speaker is of course graham hutchings who is an associate at the oxford university china center as well as an honorary professor at the university of nottingham he had previously served as the managing editor at oxford analytica and also as the china correspondent for the daily telegraph and he had spent a long time working and living in beijing and hong kong and it all he also is the author of modern china accompanied to a rising power with that i'll hand over to you graham and then we will have discussions oh sorry uh graham before i hand over just let me remind everybody that we are recording today's seminar and um i will try not to we will try not to review your identity but when you raise questions and answers using the q and a box if you could include some form of identification of who you are it will enable me to moderate because i would like always to give priorities to students and i would also like to involve people from different backgrounds and different locations as much as i can i would not without your name if you ask your name not to be reviewed now thank you and with that i really hand over to you graham thank you steve very much for that generous introduction and my warm thanks to to the many people who have joined this session it really is a pleasure to be in such distinguished company i know that among those are a number of friends who have contributed wise advice and counsel while i've been working on the year 1949 project and i'm not going to embarrass anybody by naming them but i do want to use this opportunity to publicly thank them for their support and for their enthusiasm well i wonder if the like me although we are only 11 days into it i'm pretty well fed up with 2021 already if you are in that category i have some good news for you because i am able to offer you 40 minutes or so in a different year in a different place in a different context it would certainly be a stretch of the imagination to describe 1949 rather for the reasons that steve earlier hinted at as a happy year it depends where you stood it depends whose side you were on it was certainly a tumultuous year it was certainly a dramatic year and it is certainly a year about which one wants to form opinions but not i hope before one has considered the evidence the events the key episodes of that year beforehand please don't take it just from me that 1949 was a special year despite appearances i wasn't very active myself in that year 1949 and we have good authorities on whom to rely when seeking for some judgment about that year let me as exhibit a as it were bring to your attention the remarks of britain's assistant military attache who in early 1950 was asked to reflect on the year 1949 for the benefit of his masters in london he said as i have shown on this slide ahead of the great gathering of october the first of the founding of the prc that 1949 will go down to posterity as a memorable year in chinese and world history now the military attache lieutenant colonel jew jury to give him his full name was a military man obviously and he focused on the military dimensions of the year on which he was reporting 1949 is memorable particularly in the military sphere he wrote never before has a civil war been waged with so many troops over so vast an area over five million nationalist and communist soldiers have been engaged while the victorious armies i.e the communists in many cases have finished up well over a thousand miles from where they started and have crushed all organized resistance by nationalist forces on the mainland with the exception of a few armies scattered over west china those few armies were the dying members of nationalist military and political presence on the mainland they lasted until the early months of 1950 but not much more he lieutenant colonel jewel druid was certainly correct but he didn't tell the whole story and perhaps that reflected the fact that he was a man in uniform staggered rightly so by the dimensions of what had been going on in the field of combat but 1949 was an important year for a series of other reasons it was an inflection point in china's history and i say that because it brought to power a revolutionary movement that was determined to uproot the country's political social and economic order and replace it with a new one namely new china it was a critical year in the history of the soviet-led international communist movement about which for understandable reasons one hears rather little these days but which was a vital force in its time what mao's victory in the civil war uh did was to bring the cold war firmly into asia it placed the world's most populous country firmly in the soviet camp broadly speaking and one has to speak in such general generalities china we could say had been in the western orbit with the exception perhaps of the sino-japanese war a big exception ever since the opening of china so-called with the opium wars in the 1840s that century of movement in the western orbit came to an end in 1949 since that year china has never been despite the dreams of certain western leaders in the western orbit neither does it look like it ever will be 1949 of course was the final year in one sense at least of a bitter civil war that raged across swathes of the country and this is another reason why it is so important it tore families apart it sundered friendships it ruined millions of lives and forced hundreds of thousands into exile for others of course it realized revolutionary promise a chance at last to change china to shake up the country and regain some of the strength which he had experienced in earlier generations in 1949 human triumph and human tragedy existed on a colossal scale coexisted indeed on a heart rending scale if we were looking for yet further evidence of how important this year is of course we have the fact that it created two chinas both of them still with us both of them posing a risk to the peace and development of china but also east asia and beyond and so we find when we reflect on china at the present day a country of enormous global standing indeed a global power that it has yet to experience what most global powers in history went through before they became great national unification it has yet to achieve that goal and that is a remarkable feature of this year and the legacy that ensues from that civil war in china is as yet unfinished it might drag third parties yet into a conflict that is now more than 70 years old so those are the initial thoughts that i wanted to lay out before you as far as the worthiness of our little excursion into 1949 is concerned i want us to think of this year for the purpose of this exercise as a tapestry or perhaps better as a chinese scroll full of figures full of action full of dramatic scenes and i propose to unfold that scroll in the next half an hour or so stopping to focus on selective events and episodes to illustrate the richness the drama and the significance of the year in the course of this of course we will come across some familiar faces and we must spend a few moments with them but i hope also to encounter some less well-known figures and people whose experience whether good or ill sheds light on this particular year we will encounter personal struggles and rivalries privations on a truly uh remarkable scale and we will encounter revolutionary commitment and enthusiasm our first scene requires us to spend a little time with two familiar faces these men had been by the time of 1949 locked in mortal struggle with each other for the best part of a quarter of a century they were people with similar traits in terms of personality and character iron will discipline though one might say sure jan kaishek more disciplined in his personal life than chinese communist leader mao zedong but of their commitment of their determination of their ruthlessness there could be little doubt how do we find these two protagonists at the end of 1948 and 1949 what is their mood where are they operating what are their primary considerations let's start with the president of the republic of china chiang kai-shek is 62 he is in nanjing the capital of his country a city subject to a good deal of modernization in the late 20s and 1930s a city associated very much with his name and with his regime but at the start of 1949 it is a city engulfed in fear it is a city full of refugees as 1948 gave way to 1949 chiang kai-shek summoned his leading civilian officials to a soiree in his residence in the heart of nanjing there were fireworks above the premises there was fancy food on the tables but no one was in the mood for celebration how could it indeed have been otherwise 1948 was a year of colossal disasters for jiang for his allies for his government he had lost manchuria china's industrial heartland he has almost lost north china at the beginning of 1949 the mopping up was required still on the part of pla before the whole of north china north of the yangtze was in communist hands and zhang's centrally controlled armies were defeated indeed by the time of this soiree gunfire artillery can be heard on the north bank of the yangtze zhang's wife had left in november or thereabouts on a desperate mission to get more aid from the united states president truman treated her with respect but gave a little more than tea and sympathy there was no more money there was no more munitions for the time being for jang's cause at this soiree surrounded by 50 or so of his civilian colleagues he dropped a bombshell he had been under pressure sometimes openly in the media but certainly from confidence to resign to step down to open peace talks with the communists he had resisted this and anybody who knows anything at all about chiang kai-shek and that includes many of you taking part in this session are not surprised by that turn of events indeed so worried and distressed by what was going on was he that he had reliably reported to have forsaken his methodist discipline and taken a glass of whiskey every evening to help him sleep he would step down he would hand over power to leeds on ren as for my own position he said in a speech which deeply shocked those present i have no concerns at all as long as peace is secured i will follow the will of the people and there was a yearning for peace for understandable reasons as far as the government of chiang kai-shek was concerned there was a calculus of work he jang was playing for time time to rebuild the defenses south of the yangtze to replenish the army time perhaps he hoped for the united states to come to the aid of his embattled regime time to form a coalition government if the communists would play ball that might preserve some elements of the guam and regime and maybe even some position of influence for himself if not for him personally at least for his allies and time lastly but by no means least to transfer financial military and cultural assets to a safe place well into the south he chose taiwan early in 1949 as the destination for those assets though it seems to be very much a moot point whether or not he had at this stage decided that that would be the island fortress than it later became let us switch then from jan kaishek to the mood and the modus operandi of his great rival mao zedong mao is in his 56th year whereas chang is in the relatively modern well architecturally styled city of nanjing mao and his comrades are in a village in the taihang mountain range about 200 miles southwest of bay ping as it was called then but we'll call it beijing for the sake of convenience we're referring to what would later become the capital uh under mao as it was in imperial times mao and his comrades are in yellow baked mudwalled cottages judea is there the architect overall with mao of military victory so is joan lai the suave diplomat the external face of the communist government as far as the outside world was concerned concerned and so is leo xiao qi mao's great organizer a man very adept at organizing labor unions and as he would soon prove running cities mao's third or fourth wife is there jang ching the communists are basing their headquarters in shibaibor and it's from there over they are ruling something like one quarter of the country on one third of its population they're doing so under a unified uh north china a government that formed the prototype for what would soon be the central government mao said shortly after the night 1949 had started that his army the people's liberation army had close to numerical superiority over the government forces mao's army had three million jiang's at this point 2.2.9 million but mao was though often described accurately as an impetuous man full of revolutionary fervor yet also tinged with caution the war was going to end much more quickly than had earlier been anticipated the cusp of victory was here complete victory was still some time off and whereas chiang kai-shek in january announced to the public the first of january to be precise that he would step down and that he would expect the communists to be sincere in negotiating peace mao zedong in his carry the revolution through to the end castigated the nationalist leaders they were gangs of bandits they were venomous snakes the chinese people should show them no mercy and the revolution should certainly not be abandoned halfway because as mal but it the enemy will not perish of its own accord so here we see these two great art rivals in the struggle for mastery of control but let's move away from nanjing and from shibai poor to the capitals of the world those of the great powers in particular and see their perspective on the struggle as it unfolds in 1949 and let's begin first of all uh with the united states and the view from washington how might we attempt the very ambitious task of describing in a few words this complex relationship between the united states and china well at this stage i think we could do worse than use the phrase fatal attachment the united states cause of preserving a vision a version of china was uh almost close to complete defeat chiang kai-shek was too weak to win the civil war he was not strong enough in terms of having popularity and the legitimacy to be worth supporting but he was too powerful too important i should say to be abandoned the americans were in a extremely difficult position as far as their backing for this man was concerned there were those in the state department many of them working in china who argued that the united states should perhaps recognize realities and open the hand of friendship towards the communist regime there were those indeed who said perhaps mao will be like tito of yugoslavia and we needn't worry too much about a rock solid alliance with the soviet union and there were those who said just a second it might be possible for chiang kai-shek to hold on somewhere anywhere and we certainly shouldn't be over keen to recognize what will soon be read china we find a different calculus naturally enough at work in the kremlin under stalin as far as stalin is concerned the progress of mao's revolution is very gratifying but the soviet leader has some concerns of his own and they're expressed here in this question that he asked of one of the interlocutors between stalin and mao mao had been asking to go to moscow and visit a leader who he greatly admired for many months in 1948 and stalin had always kept him at bay they had corresponded directly and via intermediaries stalin's concern is that mao is reckless if he advances through the country too rapidly surely stalin said he will force the americans to come in and intervene on behalf of on behalf of jang and if he does that then the soviet union would inevitably be involved as well he has enough on his plate stalin in eastern europe and elsewhere and is not a poor king on a involvement in china the soviet union nonetheless is on the brink of welcoming a new member a huge new member and one whose weight in the scheme of things is such that it could tip the balance in the cold war decisively in favor of the soviet camp that again is on the positive side of the ledger on the other hand to go back to stalin's concerns about the personality of now this is a revolution though aided by soviet advice soviet money and often soviet weapons nonetheless is largely made in china might not now stalin wonders turn out to be a bit of a handful might he not want to assert leadership of his own as far as the soviet and socialist camp is concerned what is going on in china in 1949 in some as far as the soviet union is concerned is a mixed blessing let's look at it from the perspective of london before we return in country to 1949 in china britain is neutral as far as taking sides is concerned it has its own desires and wishes but it doesn't have any natural sympathy of the kind that the americans had for uh chiang kai-shek and has absolutely no interest in the advance of communism in china still less the capture of china by communism but it has some very important desires of its own it has a very extensive commercial stake in the city of shanghai that it wants to retain for as long as it can that is why in the words of ernest bevin and in a famous memorandum uh that uses this term as its title britain wanted to keep a foot in the door this setting train a series of thoughts that culminated in the controversial decision of the united kingdom government to recognize mao's regime in january 1950 about which more in a moment key british considerations are the future of hong kong and alongside that there is absolutely no british interest in the triumph of communism in china when one considers how many overseas chinese there were in britain's southeast asia empire particularly of course singapore and malaysia the recognition that i referred to of london or by london of the uh mao government in 1950 was the first real occasion by the way in which the otherwise solid alliance between washington and london since the second world war had some real strains let's return to china and to high politics in nanjing for a moment or two zhang's problem is a military problem but it's a political problem as well it's a problem of having within his own camp people on whom he can't rely here we see the two main leaders of the guangxi faction of the guam and one she had since the late 1920s charted its own course and challenged chiang kai-shek as a fake one might almost say follower of sanyat sen compared with their own endeavors and their own principles and reforms as implemented in their profits they produced fine fighting men during the war against japan the guangxi leaders were reconciled with jang in the great struggle against the foe and they were on his side in the bitter struggle against mao about they were often at odds with him in april 1948 leeds on reign much to the fury of zhang kai-shek had been elected vice president by the national assembly let me just add a couple of sentences to that point if i may and uh reflect on the fact that this was a genuine election uh conducted by the national assembly in nanjing of a kind that we haven't seen in china since was it free of sharp practice uh was it free of corruption almost certainly not but was it an open contest for a key position in the chinese state the answer is yes the problem chiang kai-shek faces now is that in stepping down lee zong wren becomes acting president and since zhang's armies have suffered such an enormous defeat in north china the most formidable forces are those under the control of bai chung shi they are sitting in the mid yangtze region a few miles north of the embankment but in depth and strength on the south side of the river around the city of wuhan zhang finds himself precariously dangerously in the hands of people with whom he has been at odds for decades and his great anxiety is that the guangxi leaders very keen to open peace talks with the communists might strike a deal that suits them and not jang kai shek that is not an enviable position for zhang and the future of the warming government to be in and yet moving from higher politics to the battlefield the guangxi leaders themselves and bai chong xi in particular weren't in the greatest of positions great antagonist in the civil war and indeed uh beforehand was the man shown on the left of him in this slide lin biel bai chong shi has about hundred thousand troops at his disposal the best of them his own guangxi troops lin biao is in charge of the four filled army which has close to a million troops it is better prepared it is better supplied it is better led than by its forces and for the last few months it has been doing nothing but advance where by has been retreating lynn he's 41 42 at this stage he's self-assured he's affable on the surface but in fact rather nervous and highly strong he's a man who has dedicated his entire life to the revolution showing much more interest in politics when he was at school than academic study a commit committed communist from the time he was 18 he played an important role in almost every stage of the party's march to power and beyond bai chung shi is a good deal older he's 56 to 57 he is no less committed to his cause in fact by chongxie as little more than a teenager marches out of his hometown in 1911 the time of the rebellion against the qing dynasty uh to join the the youth army his father pleads with him outside the city gates of guilin to desist and to stay at home but he pays him no attention marches on and begins a military career that makes places him amongst the very best of jang's generals lin biao by chongshi they have met in a bloody encounter before 1949 in 1946 their forces were arranged against each other for uh the battle of manchuria at serpinger a junction railway junction on the borders of what is now liaoning and provinces this was a hard fought campaign and lin's beau's forces were forced out uh by by and they were pursued very quickly bai was then minister of defense and wanted to capitalize by moving north and seek to destroy libya's armies but zhang was under pressure from the united states to impose a seal ceasefire tells us that this was a lost opportunity that his father regretted to the end of his life well lynn extracted terrible revenge on by chongshi during the course of 1949. they are at the beginning of the year up until april facing off against each other in the central china wuhan area but within a matter of weeks lynn is forcing by ever further south at the end of the year the last we see of by is that his headquarters of the central china command are located in the former catholic church in haikou the capital of hainan island his army's cut to pieces in guangxi his reputation badly damaged his political career ended he moved to taipei in early 1950 he died there a saddened diminished man in 1966 whereas lynn as of course is well known went on from strength to strength and great things in the prc until he died in very controversial circumstances a plane crash in mongolia of 1991. we ought to move away from these uh diplomatic players from these key figures uh the political elite and the military elite in this contest and spend a little time in our next scene with the sorrow of war war has a sorrow of its own as we all know and civil war is that most beastly and ghastly form of war of all the american national who was head of the china maritimes customs had an entry in his diary which i found striking you can see it at the bottom of this slide it is i suppose something with an element of truth in it but with almost bearing down with the fear of communism on the path of some sitting alongside the enthusiasm admittedly for it on the path of the others what could the chinese people do about flea what could they do but flee to protect their families and such few assets as they could take with them moreover the author of these particular remarks was himself on the move constantly he worked for zhang's government and he fled from shanghai to guangzhou the time he was writing his diary and he fled from guangzhou ultimately to hong kong so i suppose he had some personal experience of what he was writing about on this matter of personal experience let me just share a couple of stories with you about two individuals that gives us some idea of the torment and the tumult and the sadness of leaving of departure of moving away from one's family and one's home county or village in some cases many indeed never to see it again the lady on the left of this picture left her village uh at the age of 24 the village was trunan in jergen her husband was a military policeman with jiang kai shek's army and she felt she had to leave strapped on her back as she walked out of her village in january 1949 was her firstborn she told her mother that she would be back soon but she never turned to look at her as she walked out of the village on the start of what was a 15-month journey backwards and forwards across china she headed first for changeo where her husband was serving she took a crowded train perhaps of the kind that you can see illustrated in this picture she did so against the background of the roads being clogged the trains being full and the ships and boats that were used to travel around south china in particular being close to capsizing because they were full of so many soldiers and passengers magen made it down to guangzhou but not before she had left yin yang with her mother-in-law in a remote village in hunan she was in guangzhou for a few months and saw the war coming yet closer to the city refugees pouring in in their hundreds and their thousands she could not bear the thought of leaving yin yang there anymore and so she managed to get a train to go north from guangzhou up to the heng yang region of very much against the flow of traffic the uh crack had in places been blown up and she and others had to walk along the side of the track she described to her daughter a heart-rending scene when having linked up again with her yin-yang and decided to get the train back south found it was absolutely crowded and uh on her mother-in-law's advice decided that she would have to leave the baby there after all the person she was with uh seized the occasion to thrust mae jun on the train as if she was a peter freight as she described it in her recollection by march 1950 mae jun is in hainan where by chongshi had been and she in common with many hundreds and thousands of others was trying to evacuate she recalled the scene as people tried to embark on the few boats that had been allocated for the transfer of civilian and military personnel to taiwan people called themselves up ladders to get over ship's rails and into the boats like so many spiders she said many couldn't make it and fell into the water cries of help went up but few paid any attention cotton shoes popped up and down in the harbour wounded soldiers who had protected the retreat lay on the dockside crying in pain those on board the ships of whom she was one could only look back helplessly abandoning them to their fate she arrived eventually in gaoshang in southern taiwan some 15 mark some 15 months after she had set out my second little scene as far as this theme of fear and flight is concerned is that dealing with the experience of the man who later became and is still a well-known poet in taiwan yashyan or he hailed from hernan a school boy there the war came to hernan the southern part of the province in particular in the autumn of 1948 his parents and the teachers decided they couldn't let the children in this province in the city of nanyang in particular but also elsewhere in the province be subjected to the risk that was unfolding they would have to be on the move so the teachers gathered the students or school children together uh told them to prepare what they could and to march south in search of safety that they would try and educate them on the way we students recalled cheyenne recorded uh yashyan didn't really understand what was going on it seemed like fun at the time his mother baked some bing or cakes for him to take on the journey and accompanied him until the group reached the outside of the city walls where they lived yashien again did not look back at his mother but simply kept walking at the time i had no idea what goodbye meant my grandmother also he came to see me off but i didn't i acknowledge him that was the last contact i ever had with my family later in the year yashien is in yongjuong in hunan on the xiang river he is with hundreds of other students in a temple complex where their teachers are still trying to educate them and it's there that he sees posted on the walls an appeal for young men to join a new army being raised in taiwan being raised by the rather able taiwan general sunli ren i call him a taiwan general because he escaped there and made his later career there he had of course built a very successful career in the war uh against japan on the mainland yashien and a few of his other chums decide to break away from the students that they're with and to move down to guangzhou in august 1949 he and his pals embark on a boat and end up serving in the nationalist communication corps as very young recruits we must now return to the battlefield to uh understand something of a key uh turn of events in 1949 and that is the crossing of the yangtze which you can see depicted here on this map mao zedong had determined to cross the yangtze irrespective of the outcome of the peace talks these began fittingly enough so said those of a sarcastic disposition on april the 1st and they concluded on april 20th in beijing without any results the delegation from the jain kaiser government was treated in a way in which other parties involved in negotiating with the chinese communists would come to experience when they left nanjing it was with high hopes they were given a terrific send-off from the nationalist held airport in the capital city when they arrived in beijing there was hardly anyone there to greet them a few jeeps and trucks turned up and ferried them to one of the capitals it would soon become finest hotels they were there it was made plain by their communist hosts to negotiate a surrender not to negotiate a peace fire it was three weeks of a rather depressing experience as far as those nationalist delegates are concerned but a triumphant one for mao the crossing of the yangtze was an extraordinary accomplishment in terms of logistics requiring sailors requiring vessels on a very uh very large order it was said to the american ambassador leighton stewart that the yangtze was such a formidable banner barrier for an army moving north to south but it was worth 300 000 soldiers well i'm afraid that is testimony to the weakness of the nationalist defense within 48 hours not much more of midnight april the 20th something like half a million three-quarters of a million pla troops had crossed the yangtze and pushed more than a hundred miles south the crossing began in the area i'm illustrating with my cursor here in the woohoo area with the aim of moving as far west of bighorn east as possible and cutting off nanjing from which further retreat would be expected thai magazine which is a good record of reportage as far as key aspects of the civil war in china is concerned told its worldwide readers shortly after the crossing of a stunning swift disaster nearly a million communist troops along a 400 mile front poured across the broad yangtze nationalist china's last great defensive barrier swept the government positions aside like puny earthworks in a raging tide the communists moved with impressive speed in four days they took nanjing and cut off shanghai and captured a dozen strategic nationalist cities of course the army was only one part of a one-two punch as far as this aspect of the communist campaign was concerned soldiers could accomplish much they could topple the government but they couldn't run it those charged with running the new government were the southbound carders the nansha gamble these were men and women mostly young recruited in those areas where the communists had been established for some years and recruited moreover from universities where many young people rallied to the cause of new china their task was to move in behind the army to take over urban management to move out into the countryside when circumstances allowed and undertake and extend that work which had done so much to cement peasant support for mao zedong and to keep for the largely peasant ranks of the pla a loyalty to the communist cause when they put their guns down and returned home they would have land no such promise was made to the woman armies of zhang jia shi taking the cities is worth a moment or two of our time as we move towards the final stages of this journey through 1949 the list of the cities that fell in that year uh is not ex exclusive but it gives you a flavor of the size of them and it enables us to make a number of observations about this key phase in the year we're looking at remember that the communists until 1949 i had hardly run any cities this was a rural insurrection in which famously the peasants surrounded the cities from late 1948 perhaps the autumn right through 1949 we see a conscious organized propaganda an educative campaign launched by the communists saying we have to change our modus operandi we are moving into the cities we have to run them well we have to change from rural insurrection to urban management if we fail in running the cities well then we will not be able to hang on to them what is remarkable about the cities and therefore is that in no major city was there a civilian uprising against the ruling nationalist party and in favor of the communists certainly there was a communist underground often quite extensive in the case of shanghai working for what they called liberation but the masses of people were not demanding a changeover a turnover though they were certainly hoping for much better administration than they got from zhang kai-shek's regime there were skirmishes uh in the suburbs of shanghai the picture on the right of your screen is of a poor soldier involved in the great exodus of zhang's troops from the wu song thoughts area of shanghai in may 1949 but the skirmishes were in the suburbs and with the exception of shanghai they were not particularly protracted or bloody with one exception and that was taiyuan the capital city of shanxi here the fighting lasted months or the siege did and the fighting was exceptionally bloody and here the extraordinary thing was that taiyuan though firmly as it were in the nationalist camp was not a city directly controlled by chiang kai-shek and the central government armies but rather by yanshi shan uh accused by his critics he wouldn't use the term himself of being a warlord and i think for the purposes of this exercise we can let him keep that epithet um but someone who retained a deep loyalty amongst the people he had been ruling in that part of china for a long time to come you can imagine of course familiar as i'm sure you are with the commercial importance of shanghai that the advance of communism and the communist armies on that remarkable city caused a great deal of anxiety in the business community we might just spend a moment or two with lil hong shan who was one of the city's the big hitters as far as the commercial side of the city was concerned he had very early on been interested in a move to taiwan he knew zhang was building that up he sent a couple of his sons there to explore the area and to make some investments but he also saw close at hand the chaos that had arisen through the guamindang's mismanagement of the economy the inflation the issue of a new currency and the compulsory exchange of gold and other assets into that new currency taiwan is not going to be the place for us liu hong shan told his business associates he then moved to hong kong he spent six months there whilst the communists moved in shanghai he took assets with him and he built up business there his family once the communist taken over the city in may 1949 beseeched him to return things were not as bad as he feared there was business to be done in that city certainly more than in hong kong which in commercial terms was uh but a shadow of shanghai at that time what seems to have tipped the balance as far as liu hong shang is concerned is not so much his family or appeals from his wife or indeed from his mistress all of which were strong and doubtless heartfelt but it was joe and ly who reached out to liu hongshan and said he would be safe if he returned he could do business if he returned he would be patriotic if he returned and so lil hong chang did arrangements were made for a clandestine departure from hong kong to avoid interference by nationalist agents on the 2nd of november he boarded a steamer bound for tianjin he had an audience with joe and leia and in january he was back in shanghai a supporter in public of the new regime but a man who three or four years later may have come to regret it since his extensive companies and enterprises were nationalized and the old world as far as he was concerned was a thing of the past let's just reflect momentarily on this new world that mal had created and that remarkable gathering on the 1st of october 1949. this was the first large-scale public outing for mao zedong the press were rather small in number the soviet camp had a number of media representatives there as did one or two east europeans but it was certainly a public occasion and as with all public occasions since there is a great need on the part of the communist party to ensure that spontaneity is kept under control and that enthusiasm is martial so one of those uh recorded uh the pleasure as a young man of being in the crowd in the audience for the first of october um celebrations to commemorate the founding of the prc but having had to be there by 5 am being given the appropriate slogans and to shout and placards to carry but let's not dwell too much on the theater but focus just momentarily on the substance china acquired what i call the furniture of its politics in 1949 the people's democratic dictatorship a term which if one is to be pernickety about it seems uh illogical but is very much uh over peace with the way in which the party looks at things because the party determines who the people are and to them vouch safes democracy those who are not the people who curiously enough are those who oppose the party or have certain views about it are subject to dictatorship what we see also beginning in 1949 is popular participation and mobilization on a hitherto unprecedented scale never have so many chinese people gone to so many meetings as was the case beginning with the foundation of the prc the attempt the concern the urgency the desire was to reshape minds to reshape mentalities this was the year also this was the moment to be more precise when mao announced that china would shift global allegiance it would lean to one side it would lean to the soviet camp it would be the time when the institutions and the language were put in place that have dominated the life institutional and political of china ever since there's been reforms there's been changes in nomenclature and other measures but the essentials were laid down uh in this period a period of genuine enthusiasm about also of acute psychological pressure to conform penultimately in our odyssey in 1949 i want to spend a moment or two in the periphery notably in hong kong you do not have to be very familiar with the sources to imagine that what was going on on the mainland was a matter of great concern to the governor of hong kong the government of hong kong and of course the government in london london was neutral but london was very interested throughout 1949 the colony had been on edge there were a number of comforting signs coming from communist sources that the pla would stop at the frontier but once the pla had crossed the yangtze or more particularly whilst they were doing so something occurred which made london very alarmed indeed and i'm referring here to the hms amethyst the sloop um of the royal navy that was fired upon if you believe the british account by pla guns because it had strayed into the war zone this was a humiliation of the kind of the british team uniquely skilled at serving up uh delicious moments in certain combats uh in hong kong the humiliation the loss of life of uk sailors put a different complexion on things and the government under ackley was determined to show that the pla would have to pay a heavy price if they wanted to move across the frontier into hong kong and take back what after all had been a matter of shame as far as the chinese were concerned in losing the territory a hundred years earlier for a period in 1949 there were military almost everywhere british military a carrier fleet was ready aircraft were sent in artillery and tanks were sent to the colony you couldn't quite describe describe it as an armed camp but you could certainly describe it as on a serious defense footing but that was only one strand of what was going on here this territory ill-prepared under-resourced few assets to its name was inundated with refugees not so much military although there were soldiers there who dropped their uniforms uh on entry into the colony or shortly after uh but they were there on a massive scale and the british were genuinely worried whether the communists would stop when they got to the frontier we know that they did but we did not when we consider a year like this or to assume that those who lived through it had the advantage of our hindsight and our knowledge and here we see a rather striking contrast between a pla irregular meeting what i assume is a british national in customary royal hong kong police shorts at the frontier that divides what was then just communist china and hong kong and we well know uh that hong kong retained its status as a british colony that the relationship between the new masters in beijing now the capital and hong kong was tested was problematic but it survived it wasn't much improved by britain's recognition of the prc in january but a modus vivendi was established that lasted despite the changes of policy over the years on the mainland right through until 1997 essentially in which hong kong changed hands of course and indeed for about 20 years beyond that until very recently when china decided it would take hong kong in hand and so in this journey from north to south um in which we've sought to illuminate various aspects of this year and the conflict at the heart of it we end up here in taiwan taipei the capital was declared the capital of the republic of china and the seat of jiang's government on december the ninth he had been hoping to hold out in southwest china but it proved impossible to do so the military forces ranged against him were far superior were much better led and there was no public support for his regime of the kind that would give him any kind of base and so he moved as we know to taiwan it had only a matter of months prior to this been a sleepy relatively under populated place over the course of 1949 it had become a military camp it had become the repository of many of china's cultural treasures it had become the custodian of most of its foreign exchange and gold and silver holdings but could it be expected to survive could it be expected to be a last redoubt for very long not very many people thought so despite the fact that 100 miles of ocean separated the mainland from the island and the chinese pla had got across the yangtze about getting across this stretch of water was a completely different category of amphibious warfare we know of course that what saved jian khaishek what saved the republic of china was nothing that happened really in 1949 but rather the adventurism of the middle of 1950 when the civil war or rather the korean war began and mao zedong moved troops across the border once it looked as though the north korean regime was in difficulty the americans moved in creating that defense parameter and perimeter that you'll see shown in the map there and so began the long juray of china's civil war and so continues the long shadow of 1949 in china an unfinished civil war perhaps the world's longest running civil war one that hasn't seen an exchange of shots uh in anger in recent times mercifully but which seems to be edging closer the shadow of 1949 is lengthening it is deepening and it is something if we're to understand i submit we need to be familiar more familiar than perhaps often we are about the great drama of 1949 i'm going to stop there thank you for your attention and return us not only to steve but to the year 2021 well thank you very much graham for this fantastic personalistic uh that to the force of what happens with 1949 we already have a uh about four or five questions from the q a box let me just remind everybody that if you would like to ask a question and you are using the zoom platform please write your questions in the q a box and if you would like your name not to be mentioned please say so but it will be helpful to give me some background about yourself and if you're using the um facebook feed then please put put your question in and aki will transfer this to the chat box and i will pick that up as well before i go to the question from the audience can i start by asking you graeme a question about the military side of 1949 because you start off telling us about the balance of military power at least in numeric terms at the beginning of 1949 and then in your overall outline it was quite clear that given the physical size of china after the main battles in manchuria and north china namely in the beijing tension area as well as in the shandong shujo area were finished it was really a matter of as far as the people's liberation army could march by the beginning of 1949 with manchuria where the best of chiang kai-shex forces were being lost and it was clear that beijing and tension could not be held and it was just a matter of what would then happen happens to the enormous force and under who joined his command in beijing and when that go when that went was it not already clear that the pla in fact had overwhelming military advantage and given that it was a victory in the civil war it really was just a matter of how long it would take for them to get hold of the mainland of china or indeed the whole of china i mean what's your sense of whether it would be appropriate to see that as primarily a military victory or whether it was a revolutionary victory thank you for that very pertinent question there are a couple of things to say about this one is that there's quite a lot of testimony from the time that very much supports the view that jiang's fences have been broken and that recovery was impossible there also however are the views not least of those of jang and others not to a man or to a woman but nonetheless there that a fight could still be made in 1949 importantly not to recover lost ground not to get beijing tianjin north china still less manchuria back but to put a powerful argument forward at the negotiating table that would allow zhang and the roc to survive in some form now that could be a north-south split hardly desirable from jang's point of view and certainly not from mao's point of view but a possibility also that the united states might yet come in in some significant way because although one must re remember that the battlefield victories were sweeping as far as the pla was concerned there is a bigger picture going on in the global campaign of the cold war and a recognition that despite the fact for example shortly uh before 1949 if my memory is correct the berlin blockade crisis was ended nonetheless um there was still a great deal of tension around the civil war and it might be uh that the united states decided that we cannot actually let china completely go over to the communists so we have the prescient view we have the hindsight view we also have the view that something can be done not to recover but to hold on somewhere and to your other point about a military victory i think it's been well established that the civil war was a war not so much of ideas not so much of policy though land reform and a new china counted for much but a war of huge armies often mechanized often involving artillery and a pitched battles that gave the mainland to the communists let's move on to the questions that we have received the first question i would like to push to you is from rory mcleod who asked you to ask you about this stephen colkins is now working on the final volume of his life of stalin he has argued that stalin has no deep response support for mao and that the united states could have persuaded stalin to drop logical support for mao recorded it was was not until may 1949 that the soviet union acquired its nuclear deterrence did the united states miss a trick would withdrawal of civic support have made a big difference to the outcome in china that's a a an intriguing question i'd like um and i do so with some trepidation since i know the originator of this question just to point out that i think it was actually august 1949 that the soviet acquired its nuclear uh deterrence but that's a minor point i think hopkin has written um and spoken interestingly on this topic the opportunity that the americans had if they had one was much earlier than in 1949 it was then far too late had shortly after the allied victory in the second world war such an appeal been made to stalin and some provision granted to him such that his interests in manchuria and access to the pacific uh could be guaranteed he might have been willing it occurs to me to um not drop but at least not be so vested in mal's victory over the entire country right the next question i would like to pick is a question from a china scholar based in germany his question is how come dutch china scholar franked dakota claims that the story of the liberations that followed 1949 was actually first and foremost a history of calculated terror and systematic violence how can a professional researcher make such a bold statement isn't it misleading serious students of chinese history i think that's a question that might be better brought to dr dakota rather than me it's not my job to defend an argument that i haven't made at least on this occasion however having said that and myself being a fairly close student of frank decotta's work i think he's referring to the consequences of what we touched on when we were making our journey together through 1949 about campaigns about changing mentalities about mobilizing the population which as we've said had a good degree of enthusiasm and voluntary participation in it but also had a good deal of coercion in it and in a revolution by definition one might say there are going to be the suppressed and therefore i suppose that the dr dakota has the suppressed in mind when he used the descriptive descriptions attributed to him by the questioner okay next questions come from barbara do you feel as i do that china will have fragmented further and never be united under chiang kai-shek had the nationalists prevailed over the pla one of those questions that is the occasion for all sorts of interesting excursions and hopefully insight for the discussion we know don't we from a consideration of his performance and role during the time that he was in china and president of the country that there were huge parts of sovereign china and leaving aside the issue xinjiang and tibet whether you think that's china or not they'd certainly be in the areas outside his control where he wasn't able to wield the country in a way in which the communists did as a unified force however i would say this i suppose that because the communists did it and i think i'm right in saying those i've mentioned in connection with dr frank de cotter i don't want to argue and pretend i'm somebody else i'm not chinese but i know like many of us have many chinese friends who are very satisfied uh and pleased at what they regard as china's national unification though we've said uh the story of 1949 is that that national unification is not complete and that 1949 i don't want to regard as quite a decisive year i want to regard it as a critical year because the communists have unified china other than taiwan in the way that they have doesn't mean that there weren't other ways of doing it that we might say were broadly speaking more participatory more consultative and perhaps involved less in the way of the military component next questions from ruben i have heard it said by a historian of china that the entire period from 1911 to 1976 can be characterized as one of constant revolutions to me this would lessen the impact of the events of 1949 would you like to would you agree with this characterization or would you like to comment on the revolutionary elements of 1949 thank you for that question and it is one that i've thought about i think there are a number of other contenders apart from 1949 for a year of singular importance in chinese history 1911 might well be one of them um the completion of the northern expedition and the unification such as it was of china under chiang kai-shek in 1927-28 might be another and then moving into the communist period the cultural revolution perhaps the great leap forward before it might also be contenders you will however forgive me if i remain partial to 1949 for the reasons that i tried to explain and just briefly the fact that it created the state that we still have and laid down patterns of institutional cultural political behavior that remain evident more than evident dominant in the china of today despite the vicissitudes that have occurred between 1949 and if you have a little bit of doubt about that this is not a clinching argument but is worth a moment's thought the present government in china regards 1949 as the creation myth every state has one we're told by the political and social scientists it is the creation myth of contemporary china that moment when power was seized when china changed in a way that is fundamental uh and in a way that cannot be challenged those other revolutions particularly those that have occurred since 1949 be it the great leap forward be the cultural revolution have been challenged often by the chinese communist party itself and indeed uh renounced so i think though you won't be surprised to hear me say it the case for 1949 is strong but i'm not saying it's the only important year by any manner of means okay the next question comes from a um chinese person uh ray hong song lee jong run and by sunshi were never members of chiang kai-shek's camp they had been challenging his power since all the way back to the establishment of the nationalist party their struggle with khanjang's regime and accelerated his collapse and then ultimate partition of the guanxi click between nijongran and baishongshi became the determinating factor of their failure in politics what is the reason for these internal partitions within the nationalist party which were never settled becoming such a severe problem that they could not stop even in the last days of the regime on china the questioner has put his finger on a fundamental matter a perplexing matter and i'm very grateful that uh that's the case i i can't give of course in the space allocated to me a comprehensive answer and indeed i don't have one um what i can say and it goes back to one of the earlier questions about national reunification or rather the lack of it we are dealing in jiang's era in the republic of china an extraordinarily strong sense of provincial identity each province had its leaders had its characteristics still does of course but they were woven into the fabric of chinese society in a way that was not the case after 1949. indeed one of the reasons one might say the sole biggest reason for the communist success was their eradication of provincial identity you'll recall what i referred to the nansha gamble the southern harders who spread out all over china and ran provinces so guanxi for example after it was liberated if you take the pro-communist view or it fell to the communists if you take the nationalist view was run very largely by the four filled army generals who came from manchuria there was room for some guangxi people in running the province after 1949 but they were determined that the distinct sense of identity and separation and basis for rivalry had to be eradicated now i think bai chong shi and lee zong wren knew that their number was up when it came down to it at the very last minute their power depended on zhang kai-shek and they had to side with him but by then it was too late there was no room for them in the new communist policy they were fiercely anti-communist because they weren't ideologically uh well disposed towards marxism but they knew that in the new national state there was going to be no room for people of their stamp and their independent power base so there is the uh abbreviated answer to a very uh complicated and profound question thank you this will have to be the last questions and i pack package two into one it started off with um gregory leslie asking you whether the british recognition of the prc was an act of real politic or a combination of real politic with a concern to avoid antagonizing mao because of the fate of hong kong was hanging in the balance and this is supplemented by a question by emilia how one of these our students phd students asking you whether you believe that the uk's policy towards china in 1949 would have been different if there had been a different prime minister in the uk i.e actually was not prime minister thank you for those two interesting questions with regard to the first certainly a desire to protect very considerable financial and commercial assets in shanghai was an important factor in recognizing the new government in beijing and the hope also that it would allow some conversations to take place and some cooperation if you like even if only um to blunt potential antagonism on the part of the government towards hong kong britain wanted to preserve remember that britain is weak britain is poor at this juncture and yet britain is determined to hang on if it can i think that goes to the second question about the labor government elected in 1945 the labour government as you'd expect of people of that political stamp was anti-imperialist but it rather liked the empire that was an important part of britain's post-war prestige and it was a matter that the americans were taking interest in in the context of the global cold war it was an asset in the battle against communism whether the recognition of the prc was a success is something i'm a little bit hesitant to answer not least because steve has addressed this matter in his published work now over several years it didn't achieve uh anything much at all in the way of protecting british assets in shanghai and the chinese communists in a very early but important display of their determination to rub the british noses in it insisted despite recognition on the 6th of january that from then for the next three or four years recognition was only about establishing formal diplomatic relations the charged affair appointed to the new government in beijing was a negotiating agent he and it was a he wasn't a diplomat in the true sense of the world and there would be many chinese at the time and i think since who would draw a great deal of pleasure from seeing britain haughty proud uh once important in china cut down to size so dramatically thank you very much grahamed i'm afraid that i have been again defeated by the clock i have to draw this to a close with apologies to at least a dozen people who have raised very good questions on the q a box i simply cannot fit them all in i really tried to spread out as many different aspects of the questions that i could gather and with that if we could all thank graham hutchings and then i hope to see some of you again next week thank you very much graham my pleasure thank you very much goodbye