China after World War II - Essay Example

China After World War II World War II or the Second World War was a combative in the whole world, which abide from 1939 to 1945. It was the interfusion of two conflicts, one starting in Asia, 1937, as the Second Sino Japanese War and the other beginning in Eourope, 1939, with the encroachment of Poland. This global conflict bisect majority of world's nations into two rebelling camps: the Allies and the Axis. The Second World War resulted in the deaths of over 60 million people. World War II erased the distinction between civil and military resources and saw the complete activation of a nation's economic, industrial and scientific capabilities for the purposes of war effort; nearly two-thirds of those killed in the war were civilians. This period was the brunt period for the Chinese people. They agonized misery, separations and dislocations. There had been fret about food, clothes and about myriad things. No matter the story begins but it has an elated ending. But until it comes, the Chinese had the potential to smile in the face of hardships and to carry on--a spirit that had fostered them through the affliction of the seven years of this war as it sustained them through catastrophe of the past. The Chinese rose after each calamity, not only unbeaten but also stronger through the discipline of hardships, which, down the centuries, they have learned to endure and overcome. China was under the influence of civil war. Across the plains of Manchuria troops of Chiang Kai-shek's central government were combating for supremacy against the military forces of the Chinese Stalinists. With the generous help of American imperialism, Chiang Kai-shek was succeeded in capturing the strategic town of Szepingkai. Next, the Stalinists were expelled from Changchun, the Manchurian capital. Chiang's forces were being deployed for stabbing of Harbin, the last important Manchurian urban center in Stalinist hands. The Stalinists had endowed all these cities when they swept into Manchuria from North China in the wake of withdrawing Soviet troops. Despite the detriment of the predominant cities, Stalinists had corporeal dominant of Manchuria and retained at least three-quarters of this vast area with its 30 million population. Chiang's control scarcely extended beyond the railroad zones. This was the picture in Manchuria, north of the Great Wall. Meanwhile, fighting between Chiang's troops and Stalinist forces was also under way in the extra-mural province of Jehol, which the Stalinists took over by disarming Japanese forces at the time of Japan's surrender. There were half-a-dozen fighting fronts around; the great northern metropolis of Peeping and Tientsin. There had been battles in the neighboring seaboard province of Shantung. Sporadic skirmishing had been taking place in the central China domains of Kiangsu, Chekiang, Anhwei and Hupeh. This is an old struggle, which has been going on with different degrees of intensity for 18 years. The Stalinists had corroborated a double power in the inner region of China and had mobilized a great number of the peasantry to their flag. This amplification and broadening of the conflicts resulted into the imperialist war. In the early stages of the Sino-Japanese war the big coastal cities were lost to Japan after bombs and artillery fire had granulated their industries. This was a meticulous clout to the working class. At the end of 1937, after Shanghai had been withdrawn by Chinese troops, the number of factory workers in that city dropped by 90 per cent - from 300,000 to 30,000. The extent of economic restitution emerged under the Japanese occupation results into the drastic increase in the number of industrial workers and the number of industrial workers had risen to about 250,000. But from then on, as the China coast pointed to American encirclement, industry was short off the raw materials and foreign markets, power output was decreased, and the internal market dwindle hastily. The manpower of the industrial labor was again declined greatly. Shanghai was China's greatest industrial center. Its plunge in economy reflected other industrial centers such as Hankow and Tientsin. At the end of 1937, the military and political centers were removed from that zone and as a result the plunge in the industrial proletariat in these cities was countervailed by a growth of industrialization in the southwest. According to the Ministry of National Economy some 20,000 factories, each employing not fewer than 30 workers, were established during the eight years of war. Thus there are now at least 600,000 modern industrial workers in China's southwest. This discrimination of the rural interior by modern industry was the truth that proves of prodigious political consequences in the future. Before the war, Chinese industry was mainly limited to the narrow coastal region only. There was a clear demarcation between the working-class movement and the peasant movement in the hinterland. Today, a large component of the industrial economy is established deep in the core of the country. Japan's capitulation resulted in a fresh paralysis of Chinese industry. The great majority of the Shanghai factories shut down and many of the plants in the interior dangled their activities. This gave birth of another misfortune for the Chinese proletariat. Nevertheless, the end of the war fabricated circumstances that enabled the workers once more to take to the path of scramble. During the war, the workers were debacle with loyal and ethnocentrism allegations by the Kuomintang, in which, of course, the Stalinists joined. In the areas under Japanese occupation, the workers were genuflecting under the jackboot of the imperialist foray. But with the end of the war, the patriotic lays of the Kuomintang and the Stalinists suddenly futile their potentials. The workers declined any longer to endure the exploitation, hard work and dejections, which they had been experiencing for the past period. The Strike Wave In the five months, November 1945 through March 1946, in spite of the immense economic straits, more than 1,000 strikes took place in Shanghai alone. The strike activities prevailed to the most far and exotic areas and the most sternward divisions of the economy. During these strives the workers in nearly every trade and business had reconstitute their unions under the command of veritable proletarian militants, as compared to the pre-war conditions where the unions were totally in grip of "Special Service" emissary of the Kuomintang. The pressures of the quick recuperate proletariat was too high that even the fascist honcho of the former Kuomintang-controlled unions were forced to present themselves in more elemental disguise in their fatigue to repossess the hold of organized labor. Chu Hsieh-fan, Chinese delegate to the Paris International Labor Conference and outrageous in entire China as a "bosses' man" and strikebreaker, had planned a Labor Federation with a distinct anti-Kuomintang coloration, outwardly with the goal of tyrannizing the radicalized labor activities. The Stalinists, their activities as yet still limited to the rural interior, had not yet benefited hold of the resuming worker's movement. Thus far, the workers had not lifted up their heads politically. The strike battles were economic in nature. They were inclined around such questions as wages, conditions of labor, work and unemployment. Thus the struggle was in its first, basic phase. Once production was resumed and the currency rates were steady, one might expect an eminence of the struggle to the political phase. In this process of struggle the peasant struggles in the interior, the countrywide civil war, would play a major role In 1938, for the sake of an "Anti-Japanese United Front" with Chiang Kai-shek, the hangman of the Chinese revolution, the Stalinists announced their seditious pastoral program and promulgate themselves as the caretakers of personal property both in land and in industry. With conjunction to this policy, they criticized the confiscate of the big landlords and encumber the yokel struggle wherever they could. What the peasants need now, according to them, was not the land itself, but reduced rents, lower interest rates, better order in the village, more discipline in the army, an end to official corruption. This was intended to vindicate their comprehensive liberal and opportunist strategy, which were drastically against to the revolutionary strategy of the genuine Marxists. Marxists had never refused the significance of reforms and rehabilitations, but they never compensated reform for revolution, as the Stalinists did. The Chinese peasant indeed suffered from exploitation and violence in different forms, but his hunger for land showed the most basic and fundamental of his needs. In an endeavor to struggle with the Stalinist activities of terrestrial reorganization, the Kuomintang government had confessed its willingness to dispense land to demobilized soldiers. At the recent Plenum of the Central Committee of the Kuomintang the old Sun Yat-senist slogan of "The Land to the Tillers" was heard. All these pledges and enforcements were shameless deceptions. Nevertheless they were the evidence of the fact that that hunger for land was very real. As a result of the "army reconstruction" program of the Kuomintang, several million soldiers will return to the villages whence they came. These peasant youth, having erudite the utilization of forces in the agreement of problems, and leveraged by the strike activities in the cities, would play a significant role in the coming struggle for the land. When the terrestrial cataclysm gushes forward, it would definitely not erupt at the artificial degrees, which the Stalinists wanted to fix to it by their reformist land program. The peasant loathes the big landlord with an immutable antipathy. His abhorrence elongated to the Kuomintang regime, which was the political representative of his exploiters and oppressors. Already during the war, in secluded but ardent rebels against Kuomintang-landlord principles, the Chinese village disclosed the revolutionary steps it would take imperatively. The Stalinists separated the governing bourgeoisie into two analogous "antagonistic" divisions. One division they symbolized as "bureaucratic," the other as "national." The bureaucratic was adjudged as "feudal" and "reactionary," while the national was proclaimed as "democratic" and "progressive." This formulation of a fundamentally divided ruling class is widespread in China today also. The stratum, which the Stalinists marked as "bureaucratic", consists of the finance-capitalists who have close relations with the big landlords, on the one hand, and with Wall Street. They control the whole system of Chinese economy. Agreements between Chiang and the Stalinists resulted some months ago in a "truce agreement," governed by General Marshall. But before the ink was dry on this document fighting broke out again and it has been continuing erratically ever since. The continuing dissension, now spreading in waves of struggle across the whole country, is fair evidence of the truth that the social needs and aspirations of the Chinese community cannot be propitiated with the progression of the Kuomintang dictatorship and the management of capitalist-landlord violence, which it depicts. The fierce and spoil immoral Kuomintang government, dormant on the small minority of exploiters, is unable to make any serious social or political efforts to the community. It can neither mitigate the economic dilemma of the people nor grant them any democratic rights, for this would only open the gates of revolution. The Stalinists, on the other hand, could assent totally to Chiang only at the price of their own political extinction and perhaps their physical extermination as well. Some American friends of China had question in their mind that whether China was a democratic country or not. As this is a country, which was the first to enter into armed, struggle with the Axis, a country whose continuous opposition under far-fetched arduous contingencies has made it one of the Big Four of the United Nations. To exclaim that China is not a democratic country has appeared a painstaking aspersion to a sacred ally as well as contemplation on the reason for which the nations are struggling. It is difficult to agree that the government of Chiang Kai-shek at Chungking is a democratic one. No popular elections are held, public discussion of political and economic issues are not allowed, censorship is acute, and the country is in the hold of one-party, pre-constitutional rule. There are various explanations of this situation. Some quite compassionate to the government but these are the phenomenon that can barely be deprived. It is generally predicated that while China does not yet have political democracy, it has always been a social democracy -- perhaps in some respects more so than the United States. Political democracy hardly symbolizes the next stage of China's development. As proof of China's age-old democratic spirit reference is sometimes made to the philosopher Mencius, who asserted in the fourth century B.C.: "The people are the most important element in a nation." Or both Mencius and his great predecessor, Confucius, are quoted as declaring that a ruler must show virtue in his administration to merit popular support. It is also argued that the Imperial Government in pre-Republican China had very little to say about the life of the people, since to a great extent power resided in the villages. And it is pointed out that Imperial China was long ruled by a bureaucracy chosen under a civil service examination system, i.e. according to merit, not simply birth or property. Each of these statements is in it substantially correct. Sun Yat-sen, China's great nationalist leader, commented acutely: "China from the beginning of its history has never put democracy into practice . . . democratic ideas appeared . . . only in theoretical discourses and did not develop into reality." Confucius and Mencius, far from being democrats, were supporters of a feudal social order. Both desired an aristocratic type of government with clear distinctions between the rulers and the ruled, but realized that the feudal princes could hope to survive only if they reformed themselves. Undoubtedly Imperial China was decentralized, but decentralization reflected China's economic limitations, not its democracy. No matter how much the Emperor might have wished to direct affairs throughout the country, his ambition could not have been satisfied. China has remodeled itself from the world's tremendous rival of globalization and major violator of the global constitutions developed, into a committed member of those institutions and advocate of globalization. It is now a far more open economy than Japan and its policy of globalize its foundations up to a level not visible in a big country since Meiji Japan. Embracement of the rule of law, of covenant to challenges, of vast use of English, of foreign education, and of many foreign laws and institutions are revolutionizing Chinese civilization. All of the economic growth of china is related to liberalization and globalization, and each facet of globalization has delivered China additional achievements. Workers have markedly improved their standard of living. In consequence, China has efficaciously become an ally of U.S. and Southeast Asian promotion of freer trade and investment that is tolerable to Japan, India and Brazil. China's globalization achievements have sagacious impact on its neighbors. India has acquired the benefits of a more open economy from china. Asians schooled in abhorrence to foreign investment and Latin Americans with protectionist beliefs are going to have to be more open to foreign investment and less contingent on loans in order to grapple with China. This will covert third world policies of development and create wider global prospects for companies. China's recent growth erupt Japan's economy and rescued key neighbors from decline, possibly evading a hazardous global downturn. Chinese growth has opened a new market for American companies. The flow of profits from China to the U.S. is as disproportionate as the flow of goods. Cheap valued products have influentially enhanced the living norms of poorer Americans. Inexpensive Chinese goods and Chinese financing of our shortage have kept U.S. inflation and interest rates down and prolonged our economic booms. Chinese misappropriation of intellectual property creates losses for many companies. A manic construction and transportation boom has lead to the increase in global raw material prices, to the great benefit of producers and a great cost to consumers. China's success is one of the most important developments of modern history. Its economy faces world history's most ruthless combination of banking, urbanization and employment challenges, and by 2020 a demographic constrict that will have few workers supporting many dependents. The best outcome for us would be a China that is eventually like Japan, prosperous, winning in some sectors, losing in others. China's rapid growth over the last two decades has shaken the world drastically. Given the size of china and the success of its economy, there is no doubt that China will incrementally move from the engine room of globalization into the driver's compartment. Rapid growth in China would alleviate many problematic effects of its integration into the global economy. A growing China would absorb its own labor supply, thus driving up wages and leading to a real appreciation of its currency. Such a development would ease competitive pressure, in particular on other low wage countries, and increase demand for imports from the rest of the world, which in turn would create more employment opportunities there. Rising global demand for natural resources may be good news for their producers but it will sharpen the competition between importers who have to earn the money to buy raw materials by selling manufactured goods. Read More