China Actually.
真相
History as it happened.
China Actually
History as it happened.
Lead essays & audio editions · 2
essay · Episode 4The Hunger Nobody Could Name: Granaries Full and Roadsides Littered with the DeadState granaries filled to the rafters, padlocks guarded by bayonets, and grain ships departing for foreign ports while thirty-six million peasants starved in silence.▶ Listenessay · Episode 11Steel from Cooking Pots: Backyard Furnaces and the Ruin of the HarvestIn the autumn of 1958, ninety million peasants were pulled from the fields to melt their woks, door hinges, and plows in mud-brick furnaces. How a political war against thermodynamics burned China's forests and left the bumper harvest to rot.▶ ListenThe Northern Expedition beginsIn July 1926, Commander-in-Chief Chiang Kai-shek launched the Northern Expedition from Guangzhou, leading the National Revolutionary Army northward to destroy the warlords and unify China, accompanied by communist political agitators whose radical peasant and labor mobilization swept through Hunan and Hubei like a prairie fire.Read →The Shanghai purgeAt dawn on 12 April 1927, Chiang Kai-shek's troops and Green Gang gangsters launched a coordinated surprise massacre against communist-led trade unions and worker pickets across Shanghai, dismembering the labor movement, purging tens of thousands of suspected radicals nationwide, and drowning the First United Front in blood.Read →The Nanchang UprisingIn the early morning hours of 1 August 1927, twenty thousand mutinous troops led by Zhou Enlai, He Long, and Ye Ting seized the Jiangxi provincial capital of Nanchang, raising the first independent armed rebellion of the Chinese Communist Party and firing the opening shots that created the Red Army.Read →The Autumn Harvest UprisingIn September 1927, Mao Zedong led several thousand miners, peasants, and mutinous soldiers in the Autumn Harvest Uprising along the Hunan-Jiangxi border, unfurling the first hammer-and-sickle red army flag and leading the battered remnants of his force into the rugged Jinggangshan mountains to establish China's first rural revolutionary base.Read →The encirclement campaignsBetween 1930 and 1934, Chiang Kai-shek launched five massive Encirclement Campaigns deploying up to one million Nationalist troops to annihilate the Central Soviet in Jiangxi, forcing the Red Army to develop its famous sixteen-character guerrilla doctrine to lure the enemy deep until German-designed blockhouse warfare finally crushed the base.Read →The Long MarchIn October 1934, over eighty-six thousand Red Army soldiers and staff evacuated the encircled Jiangxi Soviet to begin the Long March, fighting their way across six thousand miles of raging rivers, snow-capped peaks, and treacherous wetlands over an epic year that transformed a catastrophic military retreat into the supreme founding myth of Chinese communism.Read →The Xi'an IncidentOn 12 December 1936, Nationalist generals Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng arrested Chiang Kai-shek at Huaqing Hot Springs in Xi'an, forcing the Generalissimo to halt his civil war against the Red Army and unite with the Communists to resist Japanese aggression.Read →The Battle of ShanghaiFrom August to November 1937, Chiang Kai-shek committed over seventy divisions, including his elite German-trained Central Army, to a bloody three-month urban meat-grinder in Shanghai, shattering Japan's boast of conquering China in three months while consuming the very core divisions the Nationalists would later need to fight the communists.Read →PingxingguanOn 25 September 1937, Lin Biao's 115th Division of the Eighth Route Army ambushed the elite Japanese 5th Division in a steep Shanxi mountain gorge at Pingxingguan, killing over a thousand enemy troops in the first major Chinese victory of the war and electrifying a dispirited nation.Read →Wuhan falls; the government withdraws to ChongqingIn October 1938, after four months of grueling battles along the Yangtze River involving over one million Chinese troops, the Nationalist government evacuated the burning metropolis of Wuhan to establish its wartime capital in remote Chongqing, bringing the war of rapid maneuver to an end and inaugurating a grinding seven-year stalemate that favored Mao's rural guerrillas.Read →The Japanese Three Alls campaign in north ChinaBetween 1940 and 1942, in brutal response to the Hundred Regiments Offensive, the Japanese Imperial Army unleashed the Three Alls policy—kill all, burn all, loot all—across North China, systematically depopulating rural regions, slaughtering hundreds of thousands of peasants, and shrinking Communist base areas by half.Read →The Hundred Regiments OffensiveIn August 1940, Peng Dehuai launched the Hundred Regiments Offensive across North China, mobilizing over four hundred thousand Eighth Route Army troops to sabotage hundreds of miles of Japanese railway lines and coal mines, shattering Nationalist accusations of communist passivity but exposing guerrilla strength to ferocious Japanese retaliation.Read →The New Fourth Army IncidentIn January 1941, eighty thousand Nationalist troops ambushed and annihilated the nine-thousand-man headquarters column of the Communist New Fourth Army in southern Anhui, imprisoning commander Ye Ting, killing deputy commander Xiang Ying, and shattering the fragile illusion of the Second United Front.Read →The Great Production Campaign in Yan'anFaced with a suffocating Nationalist economic blockade and devastating Japanese raids, Mao launched the Great Production Campaign in 1942, ordering soldiers, cadres, and leaders across the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region to achieve economic self-reliance with hoes and spinning wheels, famously transforming the wasteland of Nanniwan into the fertile江南 of northern Shaanxi.Read →Operation IchigoIn the spring and summer of 1944, Imperial Japan launched Operation Ichigo, throwing five hundred thousand troops into its largest overland offensive of the Pacific War, shattering five hundred thousand Nationalist troops across Henan, Hunan, and Guangxi, capturing American forward airfields, and decisively humiliating Chiang Kai-shek's regime in the eyes of Washington.Read →Soviet forces hand Manchuria and captured Japanese arms to communist unitsThroughout late 1945, as Nationalist forces struggled to reach the north, the Soviet Red Army in Manchuria selectively opened depots and rural territories to incoming communist units under Lin Biao. By handing over captured Japanese arsenals and blocking Nationalist troop landings, Soviet commanders gave the CCP the material foundation for its regular field armies.Read →Full civil war resumesIn June 1946, the fragile ceasefire negotiated by American envoy George Marshall collapsed as Nationalist armies launched an all-out offensive against communist base areas in central China. The breakdown ended any prospect of a coalition government, plunging China into three years of catastrophic civil war that cost millions of lives and ended in the total destruction of the Republic of China on the mainland.Read →The Northeast becomes the decisive theatreBy 1947, the vast plains and industrial cities of the Northeast had emerged as the decisive cockpit of the Chinese civil war. Backed by Soviet logistics, secure border sanctuaries, and Gao Gang's mobilization apparatus, Lin Biao's Northeast Field Army isolated Chiang Kai-shek's elite American-equipped divisions in besieged garrison strongholds.Read →The Liaoshen, Huaihai and Pingjin campaignsBetween September 1948 and January 1949, three massive conventional campaigns, Liaoshen, Huaihai, and Pingjin, broke the back of the Nationalist military on the mainland. In just 142 days of catastrophic combat, Chiang Kai-shek lost over 1.5 million veteran soldiers and the entire industrial heartland of northern China, leaving the Yangtze River unprotected.Read →
The crossing of the Yangtze; Nanjing fallsOn the night of 20 April 1949, after peace talks in Beiping collapsed, over one million communist troops surged across the Yangtze River along a 500-mile front. Within forty-eight hours the natural defensive barrier of southern China was shattered, and on 23 April communist soldiers raised their flag over the Presidential Palace in Nanjing, marking the formal downfall of the Republic of China on the mainland.Read →The Marriage LawPromulgated on 1 May 1950, the Marriage Law of the People's Republic of China was the first major legislative act of the new government, outlawing arranged marriages, concubinage, bride prices, and bigamy. Designed to shatter the traditional patriarchal clan system, the law triggered a surge of hundreds of thousands of divorces across the country, accompanied by violent domestic resistance and thousands of female suicides.Read →Chinese forces enter KoreaOn the night of 19 October 1950, over 250,000 Chinese soldiers organized as the 'Chinese People's Volunteers' slipped quietly across the Yalu River in the autumn dark. General Douglas MacArthur's advance to the border had triggered China's military entry, thrusting Beijing into direct conventional warfare against United States forces and bringing catastrophic casualties to both sides.Read →Forces enter TibetOn 6 October 1950, units of the People's Liberation Army crossed the Jinsha River, invading Chamdo and overwhelming the Tibetan regional army in two weeks of high-altitude mountain combat. The operation broke Lhasa's military resistance, forcing the fourteenth Dalai Lama's government to sign the Seventeen-Point Agreement that recognized Beijing's sovereignty over Tibet.Read →The private sector extinguished by the five-anti campaignBy the summer of 1952, the climax of the Five-Anti campaign had broken the financial and legal autonomy of China's urban bourgeoisie. Hit with ruinous back-tax assessments, confiscatory fines, and workplace surveillance by communist union cadres, hundreds of business owners were driven to suicide, leaving the private sector completely dependent on state contracts and credit.Read →Socialist transformation of industry and agricultureIn 1953, the Party leadership unveiled the 'General Line for the Transition Period', abandoning earlier promises of long-term mixed economy under New Democracy in favor of accelerated socialist transformation. The program mandated the rapid collectivization of hundreds of millions of peasant smallholders into agricultural cooperatives and the systematic absorption of private commerce into joint state-private enterprise.Read →The 156 Soviet-aided industrial projectsIn 1953, the Soviet Union and China finalized agreements for the 156 Projects, an unprecedented technology transfer program that built China's modern heavy industrial base from scratch. Covering metallurgy, machine-building, power generation, and military weaponry, these Soviet-designed turn-key enterprises transformed inland cities and established the technological backbone of the planned socialist economy.Read →The First Five-Year PlanIn 1953, China launched its First Five-Year Plan, adopting the Stalinist command-economy model of state planning, bureaucratic resource allocation, and overwhelming investment in heavy industry. Financed by grain extracted from the countryside at low fixed prices and guided by thousands of Soviet technical advisors, the plan laid the foundations of China's state-owned industrial complex at the expense of light industry and rural living standards.Read →The hukou household registration system takes shapeIn June 1955, the PRC State Council established the institutional framework of the hukou household registration system, permanently dividing China's population into urban and rural castes. Designed to stop millions of impoverished peasants from fleeing rural hardship into overcrowded industrial centers, the system tied food rations, housing, and social welfare to one's registered place of birth, locking hundreds of millions of farmers to the land.Read →The socialist high tide in agricultureOn 31 July 1955, Mao Zedong shattered the Party leadership's consensus on gradual rural transformation with his explosive speech 'On the Question of Agricultural Cooperation'. Denouncing veteran rural leaders for lagging behind the masses, Mao bypassed the state economic bureaucracy and spurred provincial secretaries into a competitive race to herd 110 million peasant families into collective farms ahead of schedule.Read →Joint state-private ownership completed in the citiesIn January 1956, the Chinese Communist Party completed the socialist transformation of urban commerce through the nationwide campaign for 'Joint State-Private Ownership'. Amidst orchestrated parades with firecrackers and brass bands, tens of thousands of private merchants, factory bosses, and family shop owners formally surrendered management of their enterprises to the state, ending private enterprise in urban China.Read →