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Stewart Sixty years of repeated defeats had elicited Gradual decline of the The starting point for the
an incoherent and doomed protest in the Qing Dynasty planted the decline is often seen as
form of the Boxer Rising. seeds for new ideas to the Opium War 1839-42.
emerge on how best to The technological
deal with China’s backwardness of China
numerous problems. A was brutally exposed.
political vacuum was
Massive
created.
damages/reparations
were demanded which
provoked outraged
bitterness and
nationalism.

Lowe During the 1840s China moved into a

troubled period of foreign interference,
civil war and disintegration, which lasted
until the communist victory in 1949.

Lowe By 1905 China was clearly in a sorry state. The regime was on the China was dominated by
brink of collapse. foreign powers by this
stage having lost wars and
territory to Japan.

Weakened by the Taiping

rebellion and other
rebellions.

Seven abortive uprisings

took place from 1906 -
1908.

Lowe In the early years of the twentieth century

thousands of young Chinese travelled and
were educated abroad. They returned with
radical, revolutionary ideas of
overthrowing the Manchu dynasty and
westernising China.

Stewart Increasingly, many younger members of

the scholar-gentry class drew the
conclusion that China should take Japan’s
path of reform.
Ryan The Qing reforms fulfilled the hopes of
very few

Moise 'The Manchu ruling class had neither real

enthusiasm for the changes...nor great skill
at carrying them out...'
The government's initial steps towards
modernisation drastically 'increased the
number of people who expected rapid
progress and many of them turned against
the dynasty when their expectations could
not be met.'

Bianco 'a spur-of-the-moment coup, to which

everyone immediately rallied.'
'suggest a fairly widespread hostility to the
Qing.'

Almond Even though western imperialism and Argues that the social and
philosophies did play a major role in the economic conditions
breakdown of the Qing dynasty, dire under the Qing Dynasty
poverty, oppression and social instability precipitated its fall.
was the ultimate cause thereof.
Again, this created the
conditions for civil war to
emerge.
The vast majority of the
population were peasants.
The population in China
grew by 8% in the second
half of the nineteenth
century but the land
cultivated only increased
by 1%.

Famines became more

frequent.

Ryan 'a flowering of intellectual energy'

Mitter 'one of the most promising and exciting

times in Chinese history.'

Sheridan The disorder and disunity and disorder

they fostered provided rich opportunity for
intellectual diversity and iconoclasm to
flourish. The founding of the Communist
Party in 1921 and the reorganisation of the
Guomindang in 1924 stemmed partly from
this intellectual flowering.

Immanuel
C.Y. Hsu 'virtual dictatorship'

Fairbank 'He knew how to make the old system

work, but it turned out that... he had no
 vision of a new system.'

C.P
Fitzgerald 'from 1916 to 1925, conditions steadily
deteriorated.'

Han Suyin 'it was democracy on trial'

Rana
Mitter 'a sense of real and impeding crisis'

Rogers The significance of the May 4th movement In Shanghai in 1921, the
was that it was dedicated to change and CCP came into being.
the rebirth of China as a proud and
In the early stages the CCP
independent nation.
and GMD were not rivals
….Thus two groups - Communists inspired as they shared common
by Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and aims – defeat of China’s
Nationalists under the GMD – developed in internal and external
China at this time. enemies.

Meisner 'an orgy of counter-revolutionary violence'

Mao Chiang's tolerance of the CCP in the KMT

Zedong camp decreased as his power increased.

Rogers What had united the CCP and the GMD –

the fight against the warlords – was over,
and ideology divided the two parties.

The popular support for the Communists

was a key reason that Jiang decided he
could no longer tolerate them in the
GMD…. It seemed to Jiang that the CCP
needed to be crushed before China could
truly be unified under the GMD.
Spence The speed of victory over warlord forces
only highlighted the depth of disagreement
over social policy, and 1927 became a year
of disaster for the Communists as they
tried to outmaneuver their Nationalist
allies and change the direction of the new
state, only to see their movement all but
crushed in the attempt.

Spence

Fairbank In early 1927, the KMT-CCP rivalry led to a

split in the revolutionary ranks. The CCP
and the left wing of the KMT decided to
move the seat of the KMT government
from Guangzhou to Wuhan, where
communist influence was strong.

Mitter Chiang received an education which was

highly traditional in many ways, and
learned the values of the Confucian system
of thought, including ideas of propriety,
righteousness and shame. In addition he
would be China’s first leader to have
experience of the outside world: a youthful
visit to the newly formed Soviet Russia
shaped a lifetime of visceral hatred for
communism.

Odd Arne As his troops approached Shanghai, Chiang

Westad was becoming increasingly sceptical of the
aims of his communist allies. Already in
Guangzhou there had been bad blood
between them. Chiang believed that the
Communists were preparing to have him
killed. But it was the sudden success of the
march north that drove the alliance apart.
The CCP and the Soviets saw Chiang as a
potential military dictator, a Napoleon.
Chiang on his side, was becoming
increasingly worried that after the
liberation of China from western influence,
the CCP and the left wing of the
Guomindang would put the country under
Soviet control. In his diary, Chiang was
increasingly critical of his Soviet advisers: ‘I
treat then with sincerity, but they
reciprocate with deceit’. The Communists
were criticizing Chiang in public and
preparing to take control of Shanghai from
within before troops arrived. The clock was
ticking for a confrontation.