China AOS1 Interpretations Flashcards
Fairbank
Re: Yuan’s interest in democracy
‘he had no vision for a new system.’
Lynch
Re: Yuan becoming emperor
‘aroused fiercer and more determined opposition’
Mitter
Re: New Culture Movement
‘intellectually and socially one of the most promising and exciting times in Chinese history.’
Terill
Re: New Youth magazine
‘a magazine that jabbed the rapier of modern Western ideas through the ribs of China’s rigid tradition.’
Mitter
Re: May Fourth Movement
‘The May Fourth period marked a unique combination of… sense of real and impending crisis; a combination of a plurality of competing ideas aimed at “saving the nation”, and an audience ready to receive, welcome, contest and adapt these ideas.’
Short
Re: Impact of May Fourth Movement
‘This unity of workers, students and intellectuals idicated the beginning of a credible and important nationalist movement, albeit an urban one. This yearning for a national renewal was one of the defining and most signifiacnt periods of modern Chinese history.’
Lynch
Re: Impact of May Fourth Movement
‘Most significant aspect of 4 May reaction was the response of Chinese students and intellectuals… turned even more eagerly to revolutionary theory to justify their resistance… gave a sense of direction to radicals and revolutionaries.’
Rebecca Karl
Re: May 30 incident
‘The May 30 Incident and its aftermath helped usher in a new hope for social mobilisation and revolutionary upsurge.’
Fenby
Re: role of the communists in Shanghai
‘This could be portrayed either as fifth column aid for the Nationalists or as a bid to set up a Soviet, or both. It was a major threat to Jiang to since the strikers would greatly outnumber his troops.’
Miesner
Re: Shanghai Massacre
‘a bloodbath that virtually destroyed both the CCP and workers’ movement in China’s largest city… it was an orgy of counter-revolutionary violence.’
Helmut
Re: Post expulsion of communists from FUF
GMD ‘remained a house divided against itself… its leaders had become rivals for power.’
Seagrave
Re: Jiang leaves GMD power struggle
‘This cleared the way for his rivals to tear at each other’s throats.’
Womack:
Re: Jiangxi Soviet
‘Necessity was the mother of the CCP’s reinvention.’
Davin
Re: Jiangxi Soviet
‘social laboratory’
Sun Shuyun
Re: Futain Purges
‘…Red Army was killing Red Army! Communists were killing Communists!… They kept their mouth shut like a grasshopper on a cold day.’
Shiping Zheng
Re: Jiangxi Soviet
‘The Jiangxi Soviet Republic afforded the Communists the first opportunity to test their ability to govern… counter-balance his opponents…’
Bianco
Re: Nanjing Decade
‘peace and order were relative, just as the unification achieved in this decade was more apparent than real.’
Kirby
Re: Modernisation
‘stunning accomplishments from a position of unenviable weakness.’
Gray
Re: Modernisation
‘there is no doubt that by 1937 in every respect China under the Nanjing government was solving her problems, at least on an experimentel scale.’
Disagree
Tawny
Re: limitations of Nanjing Govt.
common Chinese farmer was like ‘a man standing permanently up to his neck in water so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him.’
C.P. Fitzgerald
Re: Facism
‘the Chinese people groaned under a regime Facist in every quality except efficiency.’
Immanuel Hsu
Re: Nanjing Govt.
‘Beneath the Nationalist government’s veneer of progress lay fundamental problems of social and economic injustices.’
Lloyd Eastmen
Re: Jiang’s character
‘Some Chinese revered Jiang as a flawless national leader; others reviled him as a feudalistic militarist. Some foreginers lauded him as Christian defender of democracy; others denounced him as an outmoded Confucian and ruthless dictator.’
Lynch
Re: Long March
‘What began as a rout ended as a legend.’
Short
RE: Mao’s victories in the long march
Short: ‘Mao engaged in a dazzling, pyrotechnic display of mobile warfare, criss-crossing Guizhou and Yunnan, that left pursuing armies bemused, confounded Jiang Jieshi’s planners and perplexed even many of his own commanders’.
Snow
RE: Red army appearing in villages and towns
Snow: ‘the biggest armed propaganda tour in history…millions of peasants have now seen the Red Army and heard it speak and are **no longer afraid **of it’.
Snow
RE: Battle of Luding Bridge
Snow: ‘the most critical single incident of the Long March’.
Spence
RE: Dangers of long march
Spence: ‘The Long March, later presented as a** great achievement in Communist history**, was a nightmare of death and pain while it was in progress’.
Meisner
RE: Long march change in perceptions towards Mao
Meisner: ‘the experience ultimately contributed enormously to the perception of himself (Mao) as a man of destiny who would lead his followers to the completion of their revolutionary missions…for Mao was the prophet who had led survivors through the wilderness.
Chang and Halliday
RE: significance of long march
Chang and Halliday: ‘one of the biggest myths of the twentieth century’.
Jocelyn
Re: significance of long march
Jocelyn: a ‘true story exploited for propaganda purposes’.
Fairbank
RE: success of Nanjing government
Fairbank: ‘In an era of peace and order the Nanjing government might have ridden the crest of modernization, but its fate was determined almost from the first by the menace of Japanese militarism’.
Ryan
Re: Significance of the long march
Ryan: ‘The experience of the Long March and the Yan’an years would reinforce many of the ideals that became fundamental to the Chinese Communists’.
Fairbank
Re: Japanese Invasion of Manchuria
‘In an era of peace and order the Nanjing government might have ridden the crest of modernisation, but its fate was determined almost from the first by the menace of Japanese militarism.’
Meisner
Re: Yan’an
‘…Yan’an period… served to reinforce the Maoist belief in the primacy of moral over material forces, of men over machines… truly creative revolutionary forces reside more in the countryside…idealogical-moral solidarity is more important than artificial unity…’
Mitter
Re: Flooding Yellow River
‘Jiang’s government had committed one of the grossest acts of violence against its own people.’
Rooney
Re: Lend lease (2 S-J war)
Jiang ‘was double-dealing on a colossal scale.’
Moise
Re: CCP efforts in 2nd Sino-Japanese war
‘The Party was functioning very much as a nationalist organisation; indeed it was struggling for nationalist goals more vigorously and more competently than the GMD.’
Ryan
Re: Civil War
Nationalists seemed to ‘specialise in keeping land and losing men.’
Bianco
Re: Civil War
almost ‘every major area of the Nationalist military weakness was an area of Red Army strength.’
Bianco
Re: Civil War
‘Conscription, a tragedy in the government-controlled areas, was an honour in Liberated Areas.’
