In recent years, China’s rise has been one of the most important aspects of geopolitics. From various vantage points, observers have framed China as a more benign alternative to Western-style imperialism, or as a disruptive challenger to the post-World War II order, or as a hypocrite disguising its ambitions as benevolence, or as a clear-eyed practitioner of realpolitik, contrasting American moral paternalism. That list is neither nuanced nor exhaustive, of course, but in each case we see an acknowledgment that China is a dominant regional power and, at the very least, an important global player.

And as often as we use the phrase “China’s rise,” we don’t often make clear just what it is rising from. It’s a fool’s errand to find one single moment that represents China’s nadir in terms of global influence, but I’ll play the fool for this exercise and suggest April 17, 1895. On that day, events were underway that would see China reduced to a minor player in world affairs, and a subordinate power even in its own backyard. The Treaty of Shimonoseki would end the first Sino-Japanese War decisively in Japan’s favor, leaving the Qing empire defeated and dismembered.

The war had begun in the summer of 1894. Then, it was Japan, not China, that was the rising global power, seeking hegemony in East Asia and respect abroad. Japan’s quest for resources and strategic positioning collided in the Korean peninsula with Qing China’s claims to regional dominance. Both sides used disingenuous claims that they were supporting Korean autonomy — neither side was in truth interested in Korea serving as anything other than a vassal state or colony — to intervene on behalf of their proxies. Fighting took place first on the Korean peninsula and surrounding waters, and the Japanese advance was steady. Naval defeats all but destroyed the Qing Beiyang Fleet early in the war, and Japanese forces invaded China, advancing down the Liaodong peninsula. Port Arthur fell in November, 1894. Ten weeks later, Japanese marines captured the northern Shandong port of Weihaiwei and destroyed what was left of the Qing fleet in port, “ending Chinese naval power,” as historian Sarah Paine wrote, “for more than a century.”

On a map of the region, China’s predicament at this point is obvious. Port Arthur, on the north, and Weihaiwei, on the south, controlled the entry to the Bohai Sea and, therefore, the approaches to Beijing. The Qing court was left with little choice but to sue for peace.

On March 19, the Qing delegation arrived in Shimonoseki, at the southernmost tip of Japan’s main island of Honshu. Comprising some 100 bureaucrats and diplomats, the Chinese side was led by Li Hongzhang, one of the empire’s preeminent statesmen who had been in the halls of power for decades after his central role in winning the Taiping Civil War for the Qing. He was, both literally and figuratively, a towering figure, standing six feet tall (exceptional for the time), his height accentuated by the flowing traditional robes he wore. Li’s reputation for loyalty, integrity, and honesty matched his dignified demeanor, commanding respect from all around him.

Meanwhile his counterpart, Itō Hirobumi, cut a very different figure. He stood nearly a foot shorter than Li, short even by the standards of the day. His clothes were also a stark contrast, wearing a western-style military that was festooned with medals. “Chronically insecure,” writes historian Paine in her definitive history of the Sino-Japanese War, “he craved praise to his face and decorations on his chest.” Itō was also known to be disrespectful to subordinates and was late to cabinet meetings because he lingered at a geisha house.

But the two men’s personal integrity belied their positions as they began negotiations in the Shuntarō guesthouse. The hotel itself was familiar to Itō as it was his visit in 1888 that had made it the first place to legally serve Fugu, the pufferfish that can be fatal to eat if not prepared correctly. Itō had arrived there, as the hotel now tells it, during a storm that had left the fleet unable to fish. With nothing else on hand, the chef had been forced to serve Fugu, which although illegal had long been a local delicacy. After its chef demonstrated his ability to prepare the delicacy, Shuntarō became the first place in Japan licensed to offer the risky meal. (The original structure was destroyed in the second world war, but the rebuilt hotel still bears the same name and is open for business!). Whether they ate Fugu or not, the delegations began their negotiations in late March. They were conducted, it’s worth noting, entirely in English — Li speaking through an interpreter, while Itō spoke English fluently.

But in any language, Li had little leverage. The Qing forces had been all but annihilated and Japan’s navy was unchallenged in Chinese waters. Nothing stood in the way should Japan decide to take the capital, Beijing. Li’s only hope was to convince western powers to intervene on China’s behalf, a hope built on the proposition that the colonial powers would be loath to see Japan ascendant to the point that it could challenge their own ambitions in the region. As the talks went on, it became clear that Japan would press its advantage.

Ironically, Li’s position was improved in a turn of events that nearly took his life. As Li returned to his accommodations after the fifth day of negotiations, a would-be assassin shot him in the face at close range. Miraculously, the shot did not kill the Qing diplomat, but lodged in his face. As Paine describes it, “Li decided not to have the bullet removed. He preferred to get on with negotiations.

The bullet remained lodged deep under Li’s nose, a souvenir from his first trip abroad and a continuing source of discomfort.”

The Japanese were deeply embarrassed at their inability to keep a foreign diplomat safe on their own territory. Ultranationalists, like the one who had shot Li, had been a recurring problem for Japanese leaders: a Japanese policeman had scarred the future Tsar Nicholas with a sabre while the heir was on a goodwill tour in Japan four years earlier — and the attack on Li tempered the Japanese demands.

More modest they may have been, but the Japanese peace terms were humiliating for Qing China. In just a few clauses, China’s dominance in East Asia was erased and the Qing state flipped from colonizer to colony: Korea’s tributary relationship to China was terminated. The Liaodong peninsula, the Pescadores Islands, and Taiwan were all ceded to Japan, along with a substantial war indemnity. Chinese ports, on the coast and up its rivers, were opened to Japanese ports, and economic interests were conceded.

Barely had the ink on the treaty dried, though, when the European powers who had refused to intervene on the behalf of the Chinese found themselves uncomfortable with the new circumstances. Realizing that Japan was now a mainland Asian power, Russia, France, and Germany through a so-called “Triple Intervention” compelled Japan to give back the Liaodong peninsula in exchange for a greater indemnity.

The intervention was a mixed blessing for the Qing. It did preserve the territorial integrity of the empire (at least on the mainland) but the fact that the European powers were able to protect Chinese interests when the Chinese themselves were not illustrated the empire’s weakness. And the retrocession of the Liaodong peninsula provoked outrage in Japan, especially after the peninsula was leased to Russia. Ten years later, Russia and Japan would be at war with one another over Chinese territory.

Even mitigated by the Triple Intervention, the impact of the Treaty of Shimonoseki was enormous. Now China was clearly a second-rate regional power, far from the global actor it had been and even pretended to be just decades earlier. And the precedent that was established by Japan’s territorial acquisitions — even with the return of Liaodong, Japan acquired Taiwan and the Pescadores, as well as economic interests on the mainland — opened the door for other imperial powers. The insidious “most favored nation” clause in the treaty regime that began in the 19th century meant that every country with imperial ambitions toward China could bring with them the expectation that they too could claim pieces of the Qing empire. A scramble for concessions that would see pieces of China given to France, Britain, the United States, Germany, Russia, and others was underway.

Once commanding tribute and respect from its neighbors, China was now at the mercy of its much smaller neighbor, which was prying apart the Qing empire. Japan’s presence in China would increase steadily through 1945. It’s no exaggeration to point to Shimonoseki as a crucial inflection point in the relationship of Taiwan to the mainland, which today sits as the central tension between China and the United States.

In the several years of this column, it has occasionally touched on important episodes to do with China’s history that took place outside its borders. These have included overseas Chinese communities, such as the 1740 Batavia Massacre or the tragically similar 1871 Los Angeles Chinatown Massacre; China’s actions abroad, like the Battle of Chosin Reservoir, or events outside of China’s borders that impacted China’s future, like the sailing of the Empress of China and the start of U.S.-China trade. This week, though, might be the first instance describing events that took place within China but were primarily focused on the history of another country, in this case Korea.

Japan’s occupation of Korea began in the 1890s, when Japan defeated Qing China in war that was largely about influence over Korea. Another war — this time against Russia — solidified Japan’s position in 1905, and in 1910 Japan formalized the arrangement, making Korea a Japanese colony. For the next several years, a series of laws went into effect, each one aimed at appropriating Korean resources — land, timber, fish — for Japanese use and profit. More than that, Japanese policies sought to erase Korean culture altogether. The December 2019 issue of Korean Quarterly records the views of a Japanese official at the time, who noted (being clear that this was his personal opinion, not official policy) that “if you ask me as an individual what is to be the outcome of our policy I can only see one end…. The Korean people will be absorbed in the Japanese. They will talk our language, live our life, and be an integral part of us…. We will teach them our language, establish our institutions and make them one with us.”

Resistance, needless to say, was widespread. Two events in the winter of 1918-19 galvanized the movement against the occupation. The first was American President Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” speech, celebrating national self-determination and railing against the evils of colonialism. Many have questioned Wilson’s commitment to self-determination, and certainly — given his record at home — he was an unabashed racist. The idea that he supported democratic principles without regard to race was questionable, at best, but his rhetoric took hold around the world, including in Korea, where nationalists (many of whom were Christian and saw the United States as an ally) seized on Wilson’s supposed anti-colonialism for inspiration.

The second was the death of the former Korean emperor, who had been deposed by the Japanese and had worked for Korean independence during the preceding decade. Gojong had lived his last years under house arrest and had several times tried to escape to China, without success. Foul play was suspected in his death, with rumors

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I’ve written before in these pages about the An Lushan rebellion, the 8th-century uprising that fractured the Tang dynasty and ended one of China’s brightest Golden Ages. In that earlier column, I detailed more about An Lushan’s rebellion — one of the longest and deadliest in human history — that brought the Tang to the brink of collapse. I encourage you to return to that earlier chapter for an introduction to that cataclysm, but today I’ll focus on An Lushan’s own personal destruction.

An Lushan proclaimed his new Yan dynasty on February 5, 756 (as if either of those dates would have been meaningful to him, but never mind), shortly after capturing the Tang’s eastern capital, Luoyang. Plans to swiftly occupy the western capital, Chang’an, and depose the Tang emperor went awry, however, and it would be six months before Chang’an fell. The emperor and his entourage fled for the southwestern mountains, a flight immortalized in Bai Juyi’s poem, 長恨歌 Song of Everlasting Sorrow. An Lushan took his place on the throne, as emperor of China (at least one of them)

But as is often the case, ruling proved more difficult than conquest. Although the Tang court had fled, it survived, based in its mountain stronghold in Sichuan. Tang and Yan armies waged war against one another across central China. Rivalries within the rebellion consumed the court at Chang’an. An Lushan himself, afflicted by numerous ailments, became paranoid and lashed out at members of his entourage, seemingly without provocation.

At this point, it is important to note that our sources about An Lushan are far from neutral. One of the first tasks of any Chinese dynasty is to write the history of its predecessor. Wanting to ensure their legitimacy, each dynasty typically presents its forebears as worthy and noble…until they weren’t. The “dynastic cycle” becomes nearly clichéd, as the early rulers of each dynasty are almost universally portrayed as wise and strong, while the last emperors are depicted as dissipated and corrupt.

Alongside this, though, dynastic histories are quick to portray rebels as unworthy threats to the Mandate of Heaven. Had An Lushan’s Yan dynasty defeated the Tang entirely and taken its place as one of China’s official dynasties, he would have been portrayed as the valiant founder of a dynasty. This was not to be, though, and the histories of the Tang dynasty are unsympathetic, depicting An as erratic and power-hungry. Such depictions, for the reasons I have suggested, are best taken with a grain of salt. They are, though, what we have.

With this in mind, An Lushan is shown to be a violent and cruel emperor. His physical presence and thuggish temperament verged on the monstrous: he was said to have grown so obese that his weight crushed a horse he sat upon. Ulcers spread across his body, and his eyesight failed to the point of blindness. He lashed out even at his most trusted associates, including a eunuch who had served with him for decades, Li Zhuer 李猪儿. After first designating his son An Qingxu 安慶緒 his chief deputy and heir, he then switched his support to another son, sowing dissent and treachery within the court.

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When American forces removed Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela, it prompted international crises on numerous fronts. Many of them concerned the United States’s renewed “Monroe Doctrine,” as well as the challenge to — some would say destruction of — international law and principles of national sovereignty. In the hours after Maduro’s seizure, Trump and his representatives said repeatedly that Venezuela had become a staging ground for America’s “adversaries” to project power, acquire resources, and establish a presence in the region.

Just hours before the American operation began, Maduro received his last international visitor: China’s special envoy to Latin America Qiu Xiaoqi (Eric Olander described the visit in the China-Global South Newsletter). Whether it was coincidence that Chinese diplomats were the Maduros’s last visitors to the Miraflores palace or there was something more to it (did the Chinese have intelligence about what was about to go down?), the presence of PRC officials in Venezuela illustrates that when Trump talked about “adversaries” in Venezuela, he was referring, at least in part, to China.

The U.S.-China relationship has been the world’s most important bilateral relationship, at least since the end of the Cold War. Sometimes combative and sometimes collaborative, the United States and the People’s Republic have jointly defined much of the last century. It’s useful to go back to the beginning — even before the PRC was formally established — to January of 1947, when one of America’s most famous diplomats tried, and failed, to resolve the Civil War that would end with Mao as China’s head of state.

In the fall of 1945, George Marshall was one of the world’s most acclaimed military leaders. He had served as U.S. Army Chief of Staff and was the first American to be promoted to the rank of five-star general. Hailed by Winston Churchill as the architect of the victory, Marshall was not chosen to lead the D-Day invasion of Normandy in part because President Roosevelt did not want to part with Marshall as Chief of Staff.

The war won, Marshall looked forward to retirement, which began with a discharge ceremony in December 1945. As Daniel Kurtz-Phelan describes it in his book The China Mission: George Marshall’s Unfinished War, 1945-47, Marshall and his wife had barely been home an hour, in Leesburg, Virginia, when the phone rang. President Truman apologized for interrupting Marshall’s retirement, but he needed him for one more mission: to settle the conflict between China’s uneasy allies — and mortal enemies — the Nationalists and the Communists.

Mao Zedong’s Communist Party and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party had been united in a so-called Second United Front, fighting against Japan since 1937. The alliance had not been easy after the Nationalists nearly eliminated the Communists in April 1927. The Communists barely survived Chiang’s extermination campaigns, undertaking the Long March that left them — what remained of them — isolated in northwest China. Public pressure, and ultimately his kidnapping, would eventually compel Chiang Kai-shek to ally with the Communists against Japan, forming this Second United Front (the first having ended in the 1927 massacre).

The alliance was never much of one. The two armies coordinated only loosely, and more than once they did battle against each other, most notably in the New Fourth

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Students were fed up.

Frustrated by a government they perceived to be corrupt and unable — unwilling? — to make good on its promises, they organized, determined that a show of popular frustration could change policies. From universities around the city — which had been China’s capital for most of the preceding five centuries — they converged on the center of the city. Defying official orders to disperse and return to their campuses, soon students from more than a dozen universities had found their way to Zhongnanhai, the center of power in China. In support, protests broke out in dozens of cities across the country.

It was not the spring of 1989 in Tiananmen Square, though. It was the winter of 1935. Tiananmen was just a gate — not yet a square — and the city we know as Beijing was then officially “Beiping,” or Peiping. Though Zhongnanhai was a critical site for China’s ruling elite, it was not then the home of its leaders. And rather than rallying to call for democracy and an end to corruption, these students were looking for a government that would stand up to a foreign invader, urging the ruling Guomindang (KMT) to ally with the Communists and fight the Japanese who were menacing China’s frontiers. The movement would take its name from the date they arrived at Zhongnanhai: December 9th.

The roots of the December 9th movement went back at least as far as Japan’s imperial ambitions. Japanese aggression against China had begun in earnest in 1894, when Japanese forces sank the Chinese steamship Kowshing, precipitating the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5, which established Japan as a continental power by (effectively) colonizing Korea and seizing the Liaodong peninsula (although that occupation was rescinded under Western pressure). Japan then won another war in Manchuria — this time against Russia — to advance its interests there. Then, in 1931, elements in the Japanese army launched a false-flag operation near Shenyang — the so-called Mukden Incident — and invaded Manchuria, separating Northeast China from the rest of the Republic and installing the puppet regime of Manchukuo, with the last Qing emperor, Puyi, as its leader.

It was in many ways the response to the Mukden Incident and the invasion of Manchuria that led to December 9th. Chiang Kai-shek infamously ordered his military to retreat from the advancing Japanese, believing that China was not yet

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It was the 9th of October, 1813 — a date that would have been known as the 15th day of the 9th month of the 17th year of the Jiaqing reign. It’s been a while since I nodded to the conventions used for assigning and converting dates, but I wrote about it in more detail in a previous column on Yue Fei.

In any event, just as that day was dawning, two eunuchs in the employ of the imperial household left their quarters and slipped out of the Forbidden City, passing through the Donghua Gate in the southeastern corner of the palace complex. There, they joined Chen Shuang 陈爽, the leader of a group of about 60 men who were scattered across tea and wine shops in the area. Chen and the two eunuchs exchanged a few words, went over the details of some plans, and waited, sipping wine.

The hour was early for wine, but they could be forgiven under the circumstances: the plans they were reviewing were for nothing less than the overthrow of the Qing dynasty that had ruled China for more than 150 years. They were to be the culmination of the Eight Trigrams rebellion, an uprising that had been organizing for months an invasion of cities across north China, including Beijing, with the assault on the Forbidden City as its centerpiece. The men gathered near the Donghua gate were hiding banners and weapons while they breakfasted. On a signal from their leader at noon, they readied their weapons and made their way to the gate itself, its enormous doors open, tended by more than a dozen guards. Led by the two eunuchs, Liu Decai 刘得财 and Liu Jin, the would-be invaders began their attack.

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Broadly speaking, Chinese emperors — maybe most emperors — met their end in one of two ways. Most died peacefully of old age in a palace, surrounded by the splendor and privilege that accompanied being one of the most powerful men on earth. Others, beset by internal or external enemies, meet a violent end. Few, though, came to an end as horrifying as did Wang Mang. His armies defeated and his palace alight, Wang was killed by rebel soldiers — or perhaps his own people — who dismembered his body to prove they had played a role in his killing. He was beheaded so that his head could be hung from the city gate, but before it could get there, it became a soccer ball for bloodthirsty residents.

How did Wang Mang come to be so hated? In the official historiography, his name has become synonymous with “usurper”: a megalomaniac who plotted, extorted, and murdered his way to the throne of the Han dynasty, and then established his own regime. As emperor, he launched an unhinged quest to return China to a mythical past, seizing land, imposing heavy taxes, and targeting any family powerful enough to be a threat. Frivolous wars and gimmicky monetary policy drained the state treasury, compromising the regime’s ability to deliver disaster relief. Corruption, debauchery, and incompetence brought the pretend regime to a quick end; the dynasty’s only virtue was its brevity.

That’s the official version anyway.

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At ten minutes after midnight on September 9, 1976, Mao Zedong died. He had been among the founders of the Communist Party and had led that party for nearly four decades. Under his leadership, the Communist Red Army had helped defeat the Japanese in World War II. It went on to overthrow the Republic of China to establish the People’s Republic that he had himself announced, standing atop Tiananmen, in October 1949.

Mao was, to this point in time, the only head of state the PRC had known. Under his leadership, China had recovered with remarkable speed from the devastation of World War II and fought the American army to an unlikely stalemate on the Korean Peninsula. Emboldened by those successes, he had led a series of catastrophic domestic initiatives. His Great Leap Forward led to a famine that claimed tens of millions of lives and derailed Chinese industrial and agricultural production. The Cultural Revolution, built around his cult of personality, was a disaster of unspeakable violence, disrupting China’s infrastructure in almost every arena, from government to education to foreign policy.

Even though he died almost 50 years ago, Mao is one of the few world leaders who meaningfully define an era to which we still belong: “Post-Mao” China. The label may now be too broad and incomplete, but it is still relevant in the way that “post-war” can be applied to Japan, or “interwar” to Europe. Richard Gordon and Carma Hinton’s documentary about 1989 succinctly places Mao’s death as “between an earthquake and a solar eclipse,” and its impact was certainly momentous, even though it was in many ways slow coming.

Death is always both profound and banal. Everyone dies; the details are familiar and commonplace. Yet, a sense of mystery accompanies it. Appropriately, then, Mao’s death was both far-reaching in its consequences and mundane to the point of comedy in its details.

Mao had prided himself on his physical well-being. His swim in the Yangtze at the start of the Cultural Revolution — though exaggerated — was meant to illustrate that. But his health was clearly failing. Meetings with foreign dignitaries were increasingly few — his meeting with Richard Nixon four years earlier was among the last. In his memoir, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, Mao’s personal physician Li Zhisui describes an endless stream of panicked interventions through the early 70s as doctors tended to problems with the Chairman’s heart, lungs, stomach, circulation, and more. In 1974, he was diagnosed with ALS, known colloquially in the US as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and in the first nine months of 1976, Li reports, he suffered at least three heart attacks. Mao was blind in one eye, could not walk reliably, and was on a constant stream of medications to combat various infections and chronic diseases.

Despite this, no plans had been made for his death. Li Zhisui attributes this to the political infighting at the highest levels of the party-state, as well as the laughable excesses of Mao’s cult of personality. At a time when something as simple as wearing the wrong badge or singing the wrong song could have disastrous consequences, no one was willing to risk planning around Mao’s death for fear it would be perceived as disloyal. As a result, in the small hours of September 9, a macabre comedy played out in Zhongnanhai.

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Late in the summer of 1892, the village of Beitang, east of Tianjin on the Bohai Gulf, experienced a cholera outbreak. “The epidemic coincided with exceptionally hot weather,” as I wrote in Heart of Buddha, Heart of China, “and temperatures near 100 degrees Fahrenheit were blamed for the disease. Hundreds of people in the village became ill, and most died within a few days of the first symptoms. Coffins were stacked high along the side of the road, and everyone in Beitang worked constantly making coffins, burying the dead, and trying to keep the corpses from rotting in the stifling heat…”

In the midst of this suffering, Wang Futing prepared for his wedding, a juxtaposition of grief and joy made even more acute when his closest friend, Jin Desheng, contracted the disease and died. Like Wang, Jin was 17 years old, with everything seemingly stretching before him. Instead, his life was cut short. Wang Futing was left wondering what might have been, staring at his friend’s bloated corpse lying in a casket.

Wang Futing was married, the celebration muted by the scenes of death all around. Then, perhaps predictably, Wang Futing began to get sick. Just days after his wedding, he began feeling sharp abdominal pains and began running a fever. His thoughts went first to his mother. He was the eighth and last child she had brought into the world, but the only one who had lived long enough to get married — the previous seven had all died as children. It seemed impossibly cruel for him to die just as he was beginning the next generation. Not wanting to alarm his mother, he retired to his room to sleep, fitfully and wracked by dreams.

And then he died.

What happened next, by his own account, was a descent into the underworld. Ghostly guards escorted him to an office where he was interrogated and challenged. At each stage, Wang Futing disputed with anyone who would listen — bureaucrats, mostly — that he did not belong here. Could he be returned to the living and spare his mother additional grief? Eventually, he argued with the King of Hell himself that he was the only one who could care for her. Finally, he negotiated a five-year extension of his life, provided that he recited a designated number of Buddhist sutras every day and dedicated his life to alleviating suffering. Every five years, his case would be reevaluated.

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As July turned to August 1945, the Second World War was grinding to an inexorable end. Japan’s defeat had been a foregone conclusion for some time; the Allied invasion of the Japanese home islands was seen as both inevitable and months — perhaps many months — away. In the meantime, American firebombs devastated Japanese cities, and an “island-hopping” campaign brought American forces ever closer to Japan through some of the bloodiest encounters of the entire war. Soviet forces, freed of their European adversary, prepared for their own invasion of Japan’s mainland empire, massing on the border with Manchuria. Neither invasion, by sea of the home islands, nor by land into Manchuria, seemed imminent.

All that changed abruptly in early August, when American B-29s dropped two atomic bombs in swift succession, destroying two cities and killing tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands instantly. Faced with the prospect of total annihilation, Emperor Hirohito began directing his military leaders to move toward surrender. American planners had hoped to achieve victory within months; instead, hurried — maybe panicked — preparations for surrender were underway across Asia.

One of the orders given during this time was to shut down and destroy a cluster of buildings in the Heilongjiang village of Pingfang, today in the far outskirts of Harbin. This was Imperial Army Unit 731, comprising 80 major structures and an equal number of smaller ones, which housed a staff of 3,000 and approximately 600 prisoners, mostly Chinese but also Russian and Korean. In addition to dynamiting the structures of the camp, according to the website Pacific Atrocities Education, staff were ordered to kill any remaining prisoners and discard their cremated remains in the Songhua River.

Variously described as a water purification plant, a lumber mill, or an epidemic prevention facility, Unit 731 was in fact the center of Japan’s biological weapons research and testing facility, where gruesome experiments were carried out on prisoners to test and develop biological and other weapons systems. Over nearly 10

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The Grand Mosque of Shadian (Yunnan) today

One of the words most commonly applied to China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is “chaos.” “Ten years of chaos” — 十年动乱 — is one of the semi-official names for the period. The label can encourage laziness: any time events seem to defy easy understanding or confound attempts at analysis, “chaos” is a convenient explanation (without actually explaining anything). And how can we resist the label when confronted with some of the shocking violence that wracked China between 1966 and 1976, several examples of which this column has covered before.

Part of the reason “chaos” is so appealing is that the Cultural Revolution laid its own complex patterns and motivations onto existing ones. Explaining the Cultural Revolution through conventional terms — of class conflict, Mao’s cult of personality, political fractiousness within the Party, and attempts to eradicate tradition (to use just a few examples) — is hard enough. These are all complex dynamics. But the addition of those new forces didn’t erase what had been there before. Often, instead, those new forces made existing challenges even more confused and, often, violent. So it was in July 1975, in Yunnan province, in and around the town of Shadian.

On the night of July 29, 1975, some 10,000 PLA soldiers entered Shadian, south of Kunming and not far from the Vietnamese border. They had been kept at bay for almost a month while local militia resisted their entry, but they were now ordered to end the resistance once and for all. As recorded by historian Wang Xian in her 2023

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Anyone who has endured summertime in Nanjing will not forget it. The heat and humidity are relentless, such that even the smallest of movements — and sometimes not even that — sends sweat streaming down foreheads and backs. As a result, and especially before the advent of air-conditioning, the city in summer takes on an eerie stillness. On the afternoon of July 19, 1864, that stillness was literally blown apart as thousands of pounds of explosives tore through the city’s wall and allowed invading troops to stream in. This was the climax of a month-long campaign by Qing forces to recapture Nanjing from the Taiping forces that had occupied the city for a decade. Within days, the Taiping leaders had been captured and survivors had dispersed and fled. It marked in many ways the end of a bloody war that had reshaped China and caused unimaginable suffering.

The American Civil War is often held up alongside the Taiping War for reasons that make sense: they overlapped completely in time, and both were existential threats to their respective governments. But while the Civil War remains the deadliest in American history and its echoes remain loud in American politics and society, it was orders of magnitude less cataclysmic than the bloodletting in China. At least twenty — perhaps fifty — times more people died in the Taiping War, which lasted a decade longer than its American counterpart. I wrote about the early days of that war in one of my very first columns, but five years later, it seems worth revisiting, not least because its lessons desperately need to be learned.

“It is well that war is so terrible or we should grow too fond of it.” The traitorous general Robert E. Lee is said to have made this observation in 1862. To my reading, it sounds as though he is trying a little too hard to convince himself that, despite all its pageantry and play, war is not a good thing. (For a longer reflection on Lee’s quote, including its veracity, have a look at Kevin Levin’s post here.) But whatever Lee may have meant, I think it is undoubtedly true that a fascination with, even fetishization of, war has made the damnable practice hard to eradicate.

As evidence, look no further than the news (I first wrote “the nightly news,” before realizing that the concept is meaningless these days). The war that Russia launched against Ukraine has been ongoing for three years. War in Israel and Palestine for nearly two. There is war between Israel and Iran. It has been a generation since the end of the Cold War promised to deliver a “peace dividend.” While recognizing (as this column has often dwelt on) that the Cold War was only “cold” in Europe and North America, its end suggested to many that the world was going to be a safer and more peaceful place, free from the never-ending threat of nuclear annihilation.

But more than three decades after the Berlin Wall fell, it is clear that such hopes were naive.

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Yunnan, a province on China’s southwestern border, acquired a reputation in the late 20th century as a paradise of sorts. Western backpackers were one population that found the province’s mild climate, natural beauty, and unhurried lifestyle combined to their liking. If the place could be reduced to one word, it might be “peaceful.”

Such was not the case in 1856.

For three days, from May 19-21, hundreds of local thugs flowed through Kunming with impunity and with tacit — perhaps active — consent from the local government. By the end of the three days, at least 4,000 and perhaps more than 8,000 people were dead, almost all of them Hui, or Chinese Muslims.

Even within the striking cultural and geographical diversity of China, Yunnan stands out. As historian David Atwill has described, “numerous mountain ranges ripple across the province, often juxtaposing temperate valleys with towering alpine peaks.” The rugged terrain was often at the very limit of the imperial state, its “diversified topography and unique geographical position at the confluence of Tibetan, Chinese, and Southeast Asian cultures forged an ethnically disparate population singular in all of China.” While today 26 of China’s official 56 state-recognized ethnic groups are present in Yunnan, Atwill notes that in the 19th century, Qing officials described at least 140 different groups as calling Yunnan home, “demonstrating not only the province’s diversity but also the Qing state’s cognizance of its multiethnic subjects.”

With all this as context, it may not be surprising that what we might today describe as ethnic tensions were not unknown to Yunnan. In the mid-19th century, the region was difficult to govern and prone to local violence, a situation that intensified as the Qing government weakened amid foreign and domestic pressures. The focus of the tension was conflict among Han Chinese, Hui, or Chinese Muslims, and the state. Violence — often on a terrible scale — was not uncommon: in 1839, Han militia massacred some 1700 Muslims in the town of Mianning, near the border with Myanmar. The city of Baoshan was “cleansed” by local officials, supported by Han militia, in 1845. Eight thousand Muslims died.

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On the night of May 7-8, 1999, an American B-2 “stealth” bomber, part of NATO operations against Yugoslavia, launched bombs against targets in the Serbian capital, Belgrade. NATO forces were part of an effort to stop the ethnic cleansing being carried out in what was then the Kosovo region of Serbia, which NATO said was being perpetrated by Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian Serbs. The war was controversial, both in terms of its legitimacy and its effectiveness, and had begun just a month earlier.

According to official U.S. government sources, the bombs were targeting a Yugoslav military target. There is much controversy about what the target was, how it was arrived at, and who made those determinations, but the result was indisputable. Sometime after midnight, local time, five precision-guided bombs landed on and exploded in the compound of the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China, reducing the building to rubble. The attack killed three journalists and injured more than 20 Chinese nationals, and was immediately the center of an international diplomatic furore.

That the weapons in question were informally known as “smart bombs” was a bitter irony, because the attack could scarcely have been any less intelligent. American officials immediately expressed regret at what had happened, saying it had been a mistake: the bombs did hit their intended target, but U.S. intelligence claimed that an outdated map had been used. American officials had even checked, they asserted, the target against a list of “no strike” locations, including hospitals, churches, and, yes, foreign embassies, but because the Chinese embassy had recently — several years earlier — moved to a different address, it did not come up on the list. Moreover, although the United States was integrated into NATO operations, in some cases it maintained its own parallel command structure rather than submitting its forces to NATO orders. NATO was not authorized, for instance, to operate the B-2 bomber, which carried out the mission, and so the targeting process was done exclusively within American command and control processes. This meant both that the faulty intelligence on which the U.S. attack was based was not checked against European information and that approval for the strike rested solely within American authority.

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Listen to the audio narration by Kaiser in the embedded player above!

For three weeks in the spring of 1970, anyone with a radio tuned to the right frequency could hear a haunting melody being broadcast from the heavens. The song had been blaring ceaselessly from radios, loudspeakers, and televisions around China for a decade now — The East is Red, a succinct and audacious summary of a cult of personality. Based on a Shaanxi folk tune extolling the virtues of cabbage and sesame oil, the song’s new lyrics, written in the 1940s, celebrate Mao as “the people’s great savior” who will lead the masses to build a new China. Now its revolutionary and hagiographic message could be heard around the world as it was broadcast from China’s first satellite — itself named Dong Fang Hong — as it circled the Earth following its launch on April 24, 1970. That the satellite became an homage to Mao, repeating the Cultural Revolution’s anthem, was a bitter irony as Mao’s war on science and promotion of ideology over rational inquiry nearly stymied China’s attempts to join the ranks of space-going nations.

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The notion of China’s unity has been a subject of myth and legend for millennia. Notwithstanding that it is a work of fiction, or that the quotation at its start was not original to the novel, but written by later editors, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms opening carries the power of destiny for Chinese patriots: ”The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.” As I have written before — in the early days of this column — the idea of “China” (like any nation-state) is complicated. Its geographic, linguistic, cultural, and political boundaries varying over time, much more than an empire cyclically dividing and then reuniting. But, for nationalists, history is a tool, not an end in itself.

With that in mind, Chiang Kai-shek was certainly familiar with those opening lines, written in the Ming-Qing transition to describe the era following the Han dynasty. In the spring of 1927, Chiang may have had them on his mind as he implemented the Northern Expedition, the latest attempt to unite “the empire, long divided.” China had disintegrated following the failure of Yuan Shikai’s government, leaving a patchwork of fiefdoms and mini- and, in some cases, micro-states. While militarists fought for control of Beijing, Sun’s KMT reorganized in Canton. Everyone’s objective was to “reunify” the country — that is, to establish a Chinese-led state with the borders of the Qing dynasty — but who would be able to manage it?

When Sun died in the spring of 1925, he had developed the plans for a campaign that would defeat, or co-opt, the warlord armies and establish KMT control over a unified, centralized Chinese republic. But after his death, the party he had founded was just as divided as the country he aspired to lead. The party’s early history was dominated by a rift between its left wing — supported by the Soviet Union — and its right wing — tinged with fascism. Members of the Communist Party were automatically members of the KMT under terms of the United Front, but the contradictions were plain to see. (The pushme-pullyu nature of the party was symbolized by the Whampoa Military Academy, where men who would later face each other on battlefields and across negotiating tables lived and studied together.) Sun managed to keep the competing sides aligned despite the tensions, but once he was gone, a split seemed inevitable.

It was in this context that Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the KMT’s National Revolutionary Army (NRA), began consolidating power. He used the pretext of the 1926 “Canton Coup” to purge many Communist elements from the KMT while simultaneously appealing to the Soviet Union for support. This skillful maneuver made Chiang preeminent within the party, and also cleared the way for the Northern Expedition, which the purged Communists had opposed. The KMT forces launched out of their Guangzhou base in the summer of 1926, moving quickly to capture Changsha and other cities. Although the Northern Expedition — as its name suggests — was an attempt to unify China from North to South, it was not a systematic campaign. Regional alliances and the ebb and flow of military and political fortunes made for a rapidly shifting battlefield.

Nonetheless, after nine months of fighting, most of China south of the Yangtze had come under KMT control.

The fight for Shanghai was critical. China’s largest city was also its most industrial, and the birthplace of the Communist Party. Labor unions played a stronger political role there than in any other city in the country — there were nearly 500 unions in the city, with more than 800,000 members. Led by Zhou Enlai and Chen Duxiu, it was union workers, not soldiers, who seized control of Shanghai from the warlord forces holding it. By late March, 1927, Shanghai (outside the International Settlement) was in KMT hands.

Having the Unions and Communists hold the city freed NRA troops to fight elsewhere, but when Chiang arrived in the city, he was not happy. Once in control, the Communists led daily demonstrations denouncing imperialism and demanding that the International Settlement be returned to China. Sporadic labor strikes broke out, often targeting foreign-owned businesses. The KMT had been stung by the anti-foreignism when the Expedition had captured Nanjing — the so-called Nanking Incident — and was eager to assure would-be foreign allies that the KMT was a reliable Chinese partner.

So with the Northern Expedition paused at China’s longest river (there were no permanent spans over the Yangtze until the 1950s), Chiang and his allies resolved to rid themselves of these meddlesome communists. On April 6 — the day after KMT left leader Wang Jingwei left the city — Chiang met in Shanghai with the head of the Green Gang, an organized crime syndicate, to coordinate the purge of the Communists. The city’s foreign community gave its approval to the plan as well.

On April 12 — after a week of pressing the Unions to disarm and moderate their rhetoric, and transferring army units sympathetic to the Communists — Chiang enacted his plan. Before dawn, the Green Gang’s proxy paramilitary launched a series of attacks against union headquarters, and NRA soldiers were enlisted to carry the fight against the Communists, even though they were formally allies. Communists were rounded up and executed; hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed. The following day, when workers and party members gathered to protest, troops opened fire on protesters, killing more than one hundred. All across Shanghai, soldiers and thugs rooted out Communists and their supporters, shooting first and asking questions later. Soon, a “White Terror” was launched across China; its expressed aim was to purge the party of Communists, though it went much further. Historian Rebecca Karl writes that more than a million people were killed, most of them peasants.

The purge was grimly effective. Karl writes that of 60,000 Communist Party members, only 10,000 survived 1927, and all of those fled or went into hiding, many in remote rural areas.

Chiang achieved his immediate goal: his leadership was assured, the Northern Expedition could go forward, achieving its goal of unifying China under KMT rule. The “Nanjing Decade” began when Chiang established his capital there in the wake of the purge.

But the greater legacy of the Shanghai Massacre was its impact on the Communist Party, which would, against all expectations, reshape the history of not only China, but the world. Mao Zedong, who had been writing his “Report on the Peasant Movement in Hunan” at the time of the purge, was a mid-level cadre. His vision of a peasant revolution in China was at odds with the party leadership, and also with the Soviet advisers who guided CCP policy. Moreover, dozens, perhaps hundreds, of officials stood between Mao and the party leadership. But after 1927, the Marxist orthodoxy of the party was shattered: there was no longer a Communist presence among China’s urban proletariat. And the people who advocated the conventional approach to revolution were mostly dead or in exile; those who (like Mao) endorsed a peasant-led revolution could offer a suddenly more appealing option. Catapulted to the front of the queue by Chiang’s purge, Mao became a party leader.

It would be a few more years until, at the Zunyi Conference, Mao became the unquestioned leader of China’s Communist movement, but would it have happened at all without the 1927 Shanghai Massacre? Probably not, or at least not so soon.

Chiang Kai-shek may have seen himself as fulfilling his destiny to unite the divided empire, and he may have done so, but not in the way he intended. It would be another two decades of war and revolution before China recovered (for the most part) its Qing boundaries, but it would be Mao — enabled by the purge that eliminated his rivals for power — and not Chiang, who would preside over it.

Listen to Kaiser’s narration in the embedded player above!

The world order has been shaken lately. America’s president has suggested that economic, or even military, force could be used to expand American power overseas, eying Greenland, Panama, and even Gaza. Russian aggression against Ukraine has provoked widespread — but not universal — condemnation, and yet American leaders have suggested that it is “unrealistic” to expect Russia to return conquered Ukrainian territory. These, and other, actions suggest that the world’s leaders seem to be regaining their appetite for colonialism, or at least that those appetites are more acceptable than has been the case for some time.

These actions — though shocking in many cases — don’t constitute a return to the era of colonialism, but they might give us a moment to reflect that perhaps the anti-colonial mindset that has dominated the last century ought not be taken for granted. With that in mind, This Week in China’s History looks back to March 26, 1987, when Chinese and Portuguese diplomats concluded their talks and issued a Joint Declaration on the future of Macau: on December 20, 1999, Portugal’s formal presence in Macau would end, drawing the curtain on four centuries of European (and Japanese) colonialism in China.

The end of Portuguese rule over Macau is thus easy to pinpoint, but the same cannot be said of its origins. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to encounter China via sea during this era, reaching Lintin Island, in the Pearl River estuary, in 1513. These first Portuguese settlements on China’s southern coast were expelled after the 1521 Battle of Tunmen, but they returned and established a trading base at Shangchuan Island (上川岛, St John’s Island) in 1537, about 50 miles southwest of Macau. Shangchuan would come to be known as the site where St Francis Xavier, the prominent Spanish Jesuit, died. But even before that, the Portuguese had abandoned Shangchuan and relocated to Langbaiao, just a few miles from Macau. There, they conducted trade with Japan, but always with an eye toward the more favorable port of Macau. Portuguese sailors first went ashore in 1553, and in 1557 leased the territory from the Ming, but from the start the arrangement was less formal, and less confrontational, than most colonial ventures.

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There comes a time when the citizens of a nation deem their government unable or unwilling to effectively represent or lead them. In a stable democracy, this might lead to partisan action or electoral change: the sorts of democratic opportunity that many revolutionaries and activists in China sought in the early 20th century when they overthrew the ruling Qing dynasty. A hereditary monarchy — especially a non-Han Chinese one that had conquered the nation — could ignore the demands of the Chinese people, but a Republic, a Republic of China, would represent the best interests of the people and respond to their needs.

This might well have been the reasoning of Liu Hezhen 刘和珍 when she took to the streets in March of 1926.

It had been 14 years, almost exactly, since the last Qing emperor had abdicated, ushering in a republic that, in theory at least, would represent the will of the people. The theory, though, had been challenged from the very start. Women had been promised the vote in the new China, but that had been denied in the republic’s first months by the men who worked out the details of its structure. A 1913 “second revolution” that tried to thwart creeping autocracy failed. Song Jiaoren, the great hope for China’s future, was assassinated by an emboldened Yuan Shikai, who even declared himself emperor, but Yuan’s half-assed effort to restore the monarchy went comically, and tragically, awry. Leaderless and rudderless, the Republic devolved into China’s “warlord era,” with a revolving door of governments in Beijing and the country a patchwork of would-be states, fiefdoms, and battlefields.

Liu Hezhen, born in 1904, had been just a young girl when the Qing fell. She had grown in the turmoil of the Qing dynasty’s last decade and the fits and starts of republican revolution. Despite the chaos — maybe in part because of it? — she blazed a trail that would have scarcely been possible to earlier generations. She enrolled at the Beijing Women’s Normal College (now a part of Beijing Normal University), which had been founded just a few years earlier as the Imperial Women’s Normal School. According to historians Jiang Lijing and Wei Bin, this was the first institution founded by Chinese to provide higher education to women and also the first national institution of higher education for women in China.

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Listen to the audio narration of this column, read by Kaiser

One of the most eminent Western historians of early imperial China, Michael Loewe, passed away just two months ago — at the age of 102 — after a long career that included not only a PhD from SOAS and faculty positions at the Universities of London and Cambridge, but also a stint in the legendary cryptography center in Bletchley Park during World War II. Loewe was a key contributor to the effort to crack Japanese codes.

His work in the 1940s was essential to a pivotal era in human history, as the world tottered between fascism and democracy, but Loewe would come to be known more for his expertise on a far earlier, but no less significant era. Writing in the Cambridge History of China, Loewe asserted that “The Han dynasty bequeathed to China an ideal and a concept of empire that survived basically intact for two thousand years. Before Han, imperial government had been experimental and it had become discredited; after Han, it was accepted as the orthodox norm for organizing mankind.”

Loewe’s pronouncement is now decades old, and some would take issue with aspects of what he has written here (the word “basically,” for instance, is doing an awful lot of work in that first sentence). Nevertheless, the legacy of the Han dynasty, in both its actual impact and its symbolism, is enormous, and with that in mind it is worth suggesting that while Qin Shihuang is widely accepted as “the first emperor of China,” we might owe a bit more attention to the coronation of Liu Bang, who assumed the title of emperor on 28 February 202 BCE.

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The highest levels of power have usually been dominated by men. This is no less true of China than other countries. Like the United States, the People’s Republic of China sits on a list of countries that have never been led by a woman. Even before the PRC, no woman had led the Chinese state since Wu Zetian was monarch of the Tang dynasty in the 8th century; her daughter attempted to succeed her mother on the throne in a coup that failed, as I detailed in an earlier column. Since then, China’s leaders have been only men. Tsai Ying-wen, of course, served two terms as President of Taiwan — the Republic of China — from 2016 until 2024, but her presidency was not recognized on the mainland.

One common asterisk surrounding this assertion is the Dowager Empress Cixi. Cixi exercised real power starting in 1861 and was de facto ruler of the Qing dynasty from then until its fall in 1911. She was known to rule, literally, “from behind a screen”: a yellow silk screen hid her from view while she sat behind the throne, guiding the emperor’s conversation and steering the affairs of state, though not in her own name. Cixi was often vilified and caricatured as a “Dragon Lady,” but her role in Qing politics was complex. And what her role says about gender at the highest level of politics in China is ambiguous: does her very presence undermine the claim that power was inaccessible to women, or does the fact that she acted through or behind men like her husband or nephews make that point even more strongly?

There are good arguments to be made for both positions. But what is less widely known is that Cixi herself took stands to assert her own authority, independent of her emperor, in ways that challenge conventional understandings of what her rule meant and what “Confucian” cultures would tolerate.

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