From Thanh Niên to the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) and the Việt Minh

2021 ◽  
pp. 256-287
Author(s):  
John T. Sidel

This chapter starts with the introduction of Thanh Niên dissolution as a coherent organization, leaving in its wake a welter of new groupings: an Indochinese Communist Party (ICP), a rival Annamese Communist Party in Cochinchina, and the Annam-based Tân Việt (New Việtnam). The chapter demonstrates the onset, unfolding, and ultimate outcomes of the Việtnamese Revolution, which were shaped by World War II, successive seismic shifts in neighboring China, from the overthrow of the Qing and the warlord era to the rise and fall of the KMT (Kuomintang)-CCP (Chinese Communist Party) United Front, the Japanese invasion and occupation, the civil war, and the establishment of the People's Republic of China. The chapter also highlights the establishment of an armed united front effectively under ICP control but aimed to encompass — or overshadow — a broader array of groups active in southern China, the Việt Nam Độc Lập Đồng Minh (Việtnam Independence League, or Việt Minh). Ultimately, the chapter exemplifies the broader importance of China's role in enabling Việtnamese revolutionary mobilization, from the heyday of Phan Bội Châu through Thanh Niên, and the ICP and the Việt Minh.

1987 ◽  
Vol 110 ◽  
pp. 256-275
Author(s):  
Jon W. Huebner

On 1 October 1949 the People's Republic of China was formally established in Beijing. On 7 December Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi), who had earlier moved to Taiwan to secure a final base of resistance in the civil war, ordered the Kuomintang (KMT) regime to withdraw to the island from Chengdu, Sichuan, its last seat on the mainland. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) declared its commitment to the goal of unifying the nation under the People's Republic, and thus called for the “liberation” of Taiwan. Although Taiwan represented the final phase of the still unfinished civil war, it was the strategic significance of the island that became of paramount concern to the CCP, the KMT and the United States.


2006 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 15-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael M. Sheng

In October 1950 the Chinese leader Mao Zedong embarked on a two-front war. He sent troops to Korea and invaded Tibet at a time when the People's Republic of China was burdened with many domestic problems. The logic behind Mao's risky policy has baffled historians ever since. By drawing on newly available Chinese and Western documents and memoirs, this article explains what happened in October 1950 and why Mao acted as he did. The release of key documents such as telegrams between Mao and his subordinates enables scholars to understand Chinese policymaking vis-à-vis Tibet much more fully than in the past. The article shows that Mao skillfully used the conflicts for his own purposes and consolidated his hold over the Chinese Communist Party.


2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
AMY KING

AbstractThe Chinese Communist Party was confronted with the pressing challenge of ‘reconstructing’ China's industrial economy when it came to power in 1949. Drawing on recently declassified Chinese Foreign Ministry archives, this article argues that the Party met this challenge by drawing on the expertise of Japanese technicians left behind in Northeast China at the end of the Second World War. Between 1949 and 1953, when they were eventually repatriated, thousands of Japanese technicians were used by the Chinese Communist Party to develop new technology and industrial techniques, train less skilled Chinese workers, and rebuild factories, mines, railways, and other industrial sites in the Northeast. These first four years of the People's Republic of China represent an important moment of both continuity and change in China's history. Like the Chinese Nationalist government before them, the Chinese Communist Party continued to draw on the technological and industrial legacy of the Japanese empire in Asia to rebuild China's war-torn economy. But this four-year period was also a moment of profound change. As the Cold War erupted in Asia, the Chinese Communist Party began a long-term reconceptualization of how national power was intimately connected to technology and industrial capability, and viewed Japanese technicians as a vital element in the transformation of China into a modern and powerful nation.


Author(s):  
George W. Breslauer

Mao’s formula for coming to power differed from the Bolshevik pathway. It entailed a peasant-based guerrilla war that helped to defeat Japanese occupation and that went on to defeat the Nationalist forces, led by Chiang Kai-shek, in conventional warfare after World War II was over. There were many differences between the Maoist and Soviet models of revolution, but there were also many similarities in the willingness to attempt a “socialist” revolution in a peasant society, in the glorification of revolutionary violence, in the determination to ensure that the communist party monopolizes power and politics after winning the civil war, in the determination to build socialism thereafter, and in the commitment to anti-imperialist struggle within a world communist movement led by Moscow.


1998 ◽  
Vol 7 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 157-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xixiao Guo

AbstractAmong the many U.S. servicemen stationed in China after World War II were the marines of the U.S. Third Amphibious Corps (IIIAC), sailors from the U.S. Seventh Fleet, and U.S. army personnel.1 Transported to the seaports of coastal China like Shanghai, as well as placed on the main communication lines between the major cities of the interior, these Americans encountered Chinese of all kinds—students, soldiers, merchants, bandits, politicians, and prostitutes. But whereas the Americans were done with their fighting in 1945, China was quickly convulsed into civil war between the Nationalist government of the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The fighting between the two dated to the 1920s. There was a brief period of uneasy unity before fighting erupted again, leading to Kuomintang successes and the Communists’ Long March of 1934–36. Japan’s brutal aggression after 1937 put an end to most of the fighting between the KMT and CCP, but once it became clear after 1941 that the United States would defeat Japan, it was only a question of time before the two started at each other. Given the longevity, magnitude, intensity, and complexity of the Chinese Civil War, the interaction between American soldiers and the Chinese people during this critical period in history was bound to be calamatous for all those involved.


2005 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 3-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
John O. Iatrides

At the end of World War II the Greek Communist party (KKE) claimed that it would seek an accommodation with its domestic opponents, but the party soon launched a full-scale insurrection on its own initiative in the expectation of receiving decisive support from the Soviet Union.With civil war under way, the head of the KKE, Nikos Zahariadis, repeatedly told Soviet of ficials that victory was certain if the Greek Communists could obtain funding, weapons, and other equipment from the USSR and its allies.Although Soviet leaders were concerned that the KKE's aggressiveness would provoke a U.S. reaction, they permitted the clandestine shipment of large quantities of supplies that delayed but could not avert the insurgents'defeat.U.S.of ficials at the time largely misperceived the causes of the insurrection, but they correctly sensed that the KKE's dependence on Soviet-bloc assistance would ensure that a Communist victory would bring Greece into Moscow's orbit.


Asian Survey ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 484-503 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wen-Hsuan Tsai ◽  
Peng-Hsiang Kao

Abstract This research takes the case of Public Nomination and Direct Election, currently being rolled out in the People's Republic of China, to explain the function of elections in China. We believe that the goal of implementing this election system is to increase the governing ability of the Chinese Communist Party, thus sustaining the survival of the party-state system.


1968 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 66-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth E. Shewmaker

Much nonsense has been written about the “agrarian reformer” myth. A retired American diplomat maintains that the agrarian reformer slogan was a clever artifice devised by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to mask its intentions and affiliations. Allen Dulles, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, has gone a step further. He contends that One of the most successful long-range political deceptions of the Communists convinced gullible people in the West before and during World War II that the Chinese people's movement was not Communistic, but a social and “agrarian” reform movement. This fiction was planted through Communist-influenced journalists in the Far East and penetrated organisations in the West.


1953 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-33
Author(s):  
Ling Nai-jui

On October 1, 1949, the Chinese Communist Party, having conquered the major portion of the Chinese mainland by the force of its “People's Army of Liberation,” established, in the old imperial city of Peiping, a new regime called the “Central People's Government” of the “People's Republic of China.” For more than three years, ninety-eight per cent of the Chinese people have lived under this Communist dictatorship represented as a “People's Democracy.” Nor at the moment are there any visible signs that their condition may soon be altered. On the contrary, the Chinese Communists have proved themselves the adept disciples of their Russian mentors, capable of consolidating their rule with Soviet determination, thoroughness, and severity.


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