Sinobabble

In this episode we will be looking at the alliance made between Sun Yat-sen's Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in an effort to defeat the warlords and reunite China under the Republican banner. Despite the tension between the left within the KMT, which allied with the CCP minority, and the conservative faction, the party was able to hold together to win major victories until a fork in the road threatens to undo the fragile alliance.

This episode covers the re-building of Sun's weakened party, the preparations made by the Nationalists in their southern base in Canton, and the Northern Expedition which finally put an end to the reign of the warlords.

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On May 4th 1919 around 3,000 students from Beijing University and some 12 other universities in the capital gathered in Tiananmen square to voice their opposition to the events taking place at the Paris Peace Conference. What started as a peaceful march erupted into a violent protest, and then into a nationwide cultural and intellectual movement that was to last for three years. This movement is now known as the May 4th Movement, and is commonly cited as a decisive moment in China’s intellectual history, a short burst of vigor that is still examined, praised, and held up as a guiding example in China till this day.

On the surface, it seems as if this movement emerged primarily as a response to current events, particularly the injustice China suffered at the hands of the Japanese and West in the aftermath of the First World War. However, most historians see the May 4th movement less as a new, standalone campaign, and more as a continuation of the New Culture Movement that we began discussing in the previous episode. In fact, the May fourth movement has been described by many as simply a continuation of the reformist movement of 1898, which we talked about in episode 2. It’s sometimes called China’s ‘enlightenment’, though there are many that disagree with this statement. Whether the movement was able to usher in a new era or not will be explored in the rest of this episode, but what you should know is that May 4th is significant enough to warrant an episode entirely of its own. If it wasn’t the breaking point with China’s past, then it was certainly the ‘awakening’ point, the critical juncture at which a new intellectual class emerged to wake the Chinese people up and demand that they move with the times or risk remaining a backward global pariah. 

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In today's episode we're going to pick up where we left off, at the very beginning of the new Republic of China. We'll look at the rise of Yuan Shikai and the descent of China into a period of warlordism. We will explore the changing nature of China's politics and culture, right up until the next big event to hit the Chinese stage, the May 4th movement.

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The second episode of the '20th Century China' series. On October 9th 1911 an accidental explosion in a revolutionary base in Hubei province in central China triggered a revolution that would mark the end of China’s imperial past and usher in its modern future. While the series of events that followed seem to indicate a straightforward revolution on the surface, recent scholarship on the topic shows that the exact nature, objective, outcome, and legacy of the Republican movement is anything but uncontentious. In this episode we’ll be discussing the build up to the revolution and the events as they took place to understand who the main actors were and what objectives they had, if any. Finally, we’ll look at the different debates surrounding the truth about the Xinhai Revolution, including the notion that it wasn’t really a revolution at all.

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The second episode of the '20th Century China' series. In the last episode we explored the events that led to the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1912. In this episode, we look at the individuals who played an important role in these events, and who tried to shape China's future by preventing or facilitating dynastic failure. We will be covering the same events, but this time from the perspective of the intellectual sphere, introducing some notable actors who played key roles in the early 20th Century.

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