The biotapestry ranks as surely one of the most famous pieces of medieval artwork. Yet it's not actually a tapestry and it probably wasn't made in bio. It tells the story of the Norman conquest but misses out some crucial details including two of the three big battles fought in England in 1066. It features sex and violence, myths and fables and even has the hand of God. We don't know how it ends but we do know that it's supposed to be coming to the UK on loan from Normandy at some point in the next few years. So now is the time to really get to grips with the tapestry story in our new history extra podcast series, unraveling the biotapestry. Join me, David Musgrove, tapestry expert, Professor Michael Lewis and a panel of other leading historians including Michael Woods and Janina Ramirez for our exclusive five-part series. Available to listen to now at historyextra.com forward slash tapestry pod.
Hello and welcome to the history extra podcast from BBC History magazine, Britain's best-selling history magazine. I'm Ellie Corporn.
大家好,欢迎收听BBC History magazine的历史extra播客节目。作为英国最畅销的历史杂志,我们非常荣幸能够为您呈现这一节目。我是Ellie Corporn。
1949 was a pivotal year in Chinese and global history. The nationalist government of Zhang Kai-shek was overthrown by Mao Zitong's Communist forces, creating the regime that still rules China today. The story of 1949 is told in a new book by the historian and journalist Graham Hutchings. And he spoke to BBC History magazine at Rob Atta, about the reasons for Mao's victory and why its legacy is so important today.
At the start of the year you cover 1949, what is the general situation in China and with the civil war that's raging there? It's the start of year three of the civil war. It's conventionally thought to run between the middle of 1946 to 1949, but in fact it is an issue that has been long running in Chinese history dating from the later 1920s when Mao Zitong's communists, he wasn't in full charge then, but we might call them that for this purpose. And Zhang Kai-shek's nationalists fell out over how to rule China and waged war against each other or be it on a relatively small scale. And that reached a culmination after the defeat of Japan in the second world war when both sides fell upon each other on a large scale.
Now the first two years or thereabouts of that large-shell conflict had taken place by the start of 1949 and Zhang Kai-shek's nationalist government, the recognized government of the Republic of China was on its uppers. It had lost Manchuria, the industrial heartland of northeast China. It was on the point of losing nearly all north China north of the Yangtzey. So Zhang Kai-shek in his capital of Nanjing at the start of January 1949 is in a real fix.
And so why have things gone so wrong for the nationalist up to this point? Because they had a lot of western aid, they were the government of China. Why was it everything going against them? It's a complex issue this one. We can isolate some factors and we ought to start perhaps at the top with Zhang Kai-shek's somewhat inept strategic leadership both on the political fronts and especially on the military fronts. He was fighting an insurgency but not fighting it how an insurgency should be fought. He was holding the lines of communications, he was holding the major cities, he was not making forays out into the countryside that would denude Mao Zedong's Communist Party of their military and political support. On the political front he had failed to galvanize the Chinese nation. To be sure he'd done that to some extent with his victory in so far as it was his over Japan, celebrated famously in August 1945. But he'd squander that by mismanaging his cause, failing to rally the people and a third element that we shouldn't neglect. His mismanagement or his governments mismanagement of the economy. It had been racked by inflation. Savings had all but disappeared. Assets were extremely vulnerable. The core support of China's educated urban people on which he might be expected to rely wasn't there.
Now we've placed a lot of emphasis on Zhang Kai-shek and his errors and shortcomings. We all not to forget that there is a positive side of the story for Mao's communists. I suppose we ought to focus immediately on the first big thing which Mao promised to the peasants and had done so pretty well from this period of split that we referred to earlier in the late 1920s and that was land. If you sign up to the communist revolution Mao and his senior comrades said you'll get land.
In land-hungry China, that was a promise to be taken very seriously. If you just think about the armies of the two sides, both of them inevitably formed very largely from country boys. Those who fought for the communists knew that when the war was over, they'd get land. Those who fought for the nationalists weren't sure what they'd get. For the nationalist soldiers, they made us return to the status quo, whereas Mao was promising something new and potentially better. They had what you might say three disadvantages or lack of motivations of which certainly the one you mentioned was important. Alongside that, there was no real cause that they were fighting for a political cause that could inspire them.
Unlike those generally speaking on the red side of the equation, on the communist side, they were badly treated whilst in the army. Paulie paid, Paulie fed, badly treated by their officers, so there wasn't really much skin in the game for them. And then so when your book opens at the start of 1949, to what extent do you feel the outcome of the war is already decided? There were many observers who thought so and it would really be asking for a lot if one expected Jankai Shek to reverse his fortunes at this stage.
But we ought not to move from that premise to the conclusion that it was all done and dusted and that the shape of China at the end of 1949, beginning of 1950, was predetermined. Because Jankai Shek, in January 1949, realizing how weak and vulnerable his position was, essentially decided he'd have to step down and sue for peace. He thought if he sued for peace with the communist, he would gain time. He'd gain time to strengthen the defenses in the south. He'd gain time perhaps of the kind that might persuade the Americans under Truman to bankroll him and provide him with fresh military supplies. He'd gain time more over to perhaps form a coalition government with the Chinese Communist of the kind that left a role, if not for him personally, but for the nationalists as a cause.
And therefore it was worth playing for. It was inconceivable, I think, probably even to him that he could recover lost ground, but he could, if not, stop the rot, at least slow it. But on the other side, how prepared were Mao and the other Chinese leaders to accept some kind of compromise, some kind of divided China? They were unprepared to do so, and they realized that they would have to topple Jankai Shek's government, they would have to defeat it, they would have to drive it off the mainland. They had commitment, they had determination, they had a vision, all those things that we've said the nationalist government under Jank did not have.
Remember that they were certainly the leadership and particularly Mao inspired by the Soviet vision of the future. Mao had not yet met Stalin. Stalin had actually turned down requests by Mao to come and visit him. Stalin, the Soviet leader, wanted Mao to concentrate on the revolution at home and not show too much fealty and alliance with the Soviet unit at this delicate stage of the Cold War. But Mao and his senior comrades were in no doubt about their vision for a socialist, a revolutionary, a united China. And they had the armies and they had the generals who were shown over the last year in particular that they could deliver that and they had no intention of stopping as it were halfway at stopping at the North Shore or the North Bank of the ANGSE.
And then in 1949, what were the key moments on the military side that led to the communist taking over essentially all of mainland China? The big thing, symbolic rather than substantive because they had been besieged for quite a while was the fall of the former imperial capital, now the present-day capital of China Beijing, then known as Beijing for reasons that need not detain us. And the fall of its associated port city of Tianjin. Remember Manchuria had gone and with these two cities which fell in January then all of North China essentially was lost.
The next big event was the one that Zhang and his allies hoped to prevent and that was the mass crossing of the ANGSE in April 1949. The purpose of peace negotiations was to get the PLA to stand still, to stop them preparing for the great assault across that enormous river that essentially divides China north from south.
And so what's going on at this point with the leadership of the nationalist because I believe Zhang talked about standing down, how far was he actually in control of that side? He realized that a condition for opening peace talks with the communists was that he would have to absent himself from the scheme of things for a while. So he stopped stepped down as president and he handed over to his vice president which wasn't a great idea from his point of view in one respect because his vice president, a man called Leeds on Ren, was a part of the Guangmung University that had been odds with Zhang for many many years.
And so was the man called Bai Chong Shi also from Guangxi in southwest China who in fact commanded the best troops on the nationalist side and was sitting in the middle of China and the middle of the ANGSE preparing to ward off a communist attack. So Zhang's house was not only as we've discussed not well-motivated, not well-organized, not well disciplined, it was also a house divided. Zhang, however, was not a man without resource and certainly not a man without guile.
He used the period as soon as he stepped down to prepare where he might face his last stand where he might find a place that was impregnable and from which he could ward off the communist threat. Now we know that to be Taiwan but it wasn't always clear throughout 1949 that he'd always set his heart indefinitely on that place but that was one of his principal calculations as he stepped down and handed over the conduct of affairs and especially the peace negotiations to his so-called allies but really rivals within the nationalist camp.
And then so why were the nationalist unable to create some kind of negotiation? Was it just the communist in Transigence? Very largely. The idea of the nationalists as they flew to Beijing in April, ironically I suppose on April the first, for what they believed to be negotiations. They were soon disabused of this because the communist side made it plain that what the nationalists had come north for was not to negotiate but to surrender and it was the terms of surrender, the terms of the dissolution of the nationalist government that the communists were interested in and certainly not a ceasefire, certainly not a co-illusion government in which there was a significant role for Zhang and his allies and so it ran up against a wall of negotiating tactics if one can call them that that many many other people foreigners in particular would come up against once China was firmly under the grip of the Chinese communists.
And how did Western powers react to what was going on in China? How concerned were they by the imminent communist takeover? All were concerned for different reasons. The United States was concerned of course because we've got the Cold War taking dramatic shape in Eastern Europe and now apparently if Mao was to sweep the country before him spreading to Asia. The Soviet camp if you like would capture the world's most popular nation. That was a matter of grave concern to Washington. There was also another strand in their thinking stemming from the long-standing missionary cultural educational medical commitment and moral commitment to China over many many years.
That of course reached something of a fulfillment and culmination in US support for Zhang during the war against Japan. The trouble they had with him was that he was not strong enough to defeat communism. He was not legitimate enough to be worth supporting but critically he was too important to quite abandon at least in the full sense.
If one moves from Washington to Moscow there you see a different perspective as you'd expect. Stalin overall is pleased about the conduct of the Chinese revolution into the red camp of the world is coming this vast nation but Stalin has his reservations on the tactical front they are concerning the extent to which the US would really abandon Zhang.
What if in the last minute during the course of 1949 US troops would arrive in South China and try and stop the communists. More long-term Stalin was concerned about the reliability the ideological orthodoxy of Mao Zedong. What kind of man was this Mao? What kind of Marxist was he? Since the Chinese revolution and the entry as it looked that China's into the into this global camp of socialism would largely be a Chinese made affair unlike the situation in Eastern Europe where the people's democratic states as we came to know them were essentially creatures and creations of the Soviet Union.
China was independent. Might Mao seek to bid for leadership of the global socialist camp was one of those fears that also stalk Stalin's mind. He was a man as we well know of some neuralgia and of great fear about his own position.
In London the concern was slightly different. Not best pleased about the prospect of Mao's conquest. London in the late 1940s was no friend of communism but there were more material considerations.
At least the were in Shanghai China's great global city where British business was prominent where hundreds of millions of dollars were invested where thousands of British subjects were living and working. If you looked further south they had another concern and that was not so much profit but prestige the colony of Hong Kong.
This had been taken from China a hundred years earlier just over to be precise and the British didn't want to give it up but could they hold it if the PLA was sweeping south at the pace they were throughout in 1949 might they stop at the border might they not seek to reverse a national humiliation and not only liberate the whole of China but kick the foreigners out from Hong Kong as well so that was one of London's concerns.
Three different perspectives from the capitals at that time. And alluding to what you said earlier when you were talking about the Americans was there ever any prospect that the US might throw its formality weight behind Zhang and try to prevent the communist takeover? There wasn't.
There was no serious consideration given to that. It was rather a matter of what kind of demise what kind of decline what kind of withdrawal it would be. Well the communists were determined to do though there was some hesitation in certain parts of the state department for a while was not to recognize Mao Zedong.
That would be conceived as too much of an encouragement to a revolutionary regime too favorable towards the Soviet Union so best to keep Mao at arms length and best to retain diplomatic recognition with the Republican government and to Shanghai Shake in particular. So not completely to let him go not to support him but not to entirely cut him loose.
And then on the subject of Hong Kong as we know the communist regime didn't then go and try and overrun Hong Kong. Why do you think that was? Were they trying at this early stage to maintain reasonable relations with other global powers? I think there might have been an element of that.
There might have been an element of caution about causing too much of a diplomatic rift particularly as they were at odds with the United States the communists. But I think there were two other considerations one much more important than the other. And that is that they had a terrific amount on their plate.
They had just conquered the country. Remember at this stage the Chinese communist army is really a creature of North China and has been operating in North China for a long time they suddenly in a matter of little more than a few weeks find themselves in possession of all of South China or where they are coming across a language, a cuisine, a culture of where of life that they are broadly unfamiliar with.
They've just taken over a huge country they have enormous problems on their hands and moving South for all that it has a certain amount of appeal across the border into Hong Kong is regarded as too risky. The other dimension not to be entirely discounted though I don't think decisive is that the British because they were concerned that the PLA Mao's army might want to have a go they had significantly reinforced the colony.
They'd moved lots of army in, they'd lose fighter planes in and they'd had a carrier force very close to Hong Kong with the view of raising the bar of acting as a deterrent.
Still to come on the history extra podcast you can think of it as a refugee island at the end of 1949 who status or was very questionable because Mao just as he'd been determined to cross the Yangtze was determined to cross the Taiwan Straits and complete his conquest.
Now in October 1949 the Communist Party declared the founding of their Republic to what extent did they control all of mainland China at that point? They hadn't completed the conquest of the country by the first of October.
I suppose this shows that they were all devious. I suppose more realistically it shows that while they hadn't got control it was only a matter of time before they did. There was certainly no going back so they were able on that occasion and the weeks surrounding it to lay out the foundations of the people's Republic in an institutional one might say also a constitutional scent but also a cultural sense because during that period they put together what many of the features of contemporary China still strike us.
That is to say a political mobilization that is to say an insistence that the Chinese Communist Party is the supreme arbiter in national life, in political life, in personal life that is to say the tearing up of the old legal codes and the creation of new ones that gave formidable power to the executive and generally to the sense of frenzy one might almost call it, certainly mass participation in politics where the Chinese Communist Party and its leaders set the tone.
Looking at the level of the ordinary people, what was it like to be a regular Chinese person in 1949? How much were these big events affecting life on the ground? One has to think I suppose in answering that, first of all in the cautionary respect, one is talking about between five and six hundred million people and there might not have been five and six hundred million different varieties of opinion but there were certainly many. So let's approach it from the point of view of three perspectives.
There were those who were inspired, let's use that word, by the revolutionary enthusiasm and the communist cause. This I suppose had a lot of impact especially amongst young people, patriotic people, people who were fed up with the weakness, the division, the poverty of their country and the way in which they saw it had been pushed around by a foreign was mostly recently the Japanese. The idea that that could never happen again and that the country might be set on a new course, a new China as Mao called it, youth for in its revolutionary enthusiasm was very very attractive so many people were inspired by that.
There were those of course who did not like communism, didn't know much about it, didn't like it, knew quite a bit about it and still didn't like it, people who had something to lose, something to fear, assets that they had been able to build up and those in the cities who treasured intellectual freedom for all the Jankai-Shek's government was repressive and authoritarian, it wasn't very good even at being a dictatorship and so the press, the academic world, even areas of law there were spaces for freedoms to operate of the kind that seemed very unlikely to flourish once the communist took over, those people had much to fear.
There were those who were neither pro communist nor necessarily pro-Gwomendang but who were caught up in the fighting and who wanted to preserve their family and such assets as they had and of course it was many of those people hundreds thousands of them indeed who took to the roads, the railways, the ships and if they could get seats on such aircraft as were available and the planes to escape wherever they could, always moving south, always moving to the ports many of them ending up in Taiwan, many in Hong Kong, many further afield, this is another aspect of 1949, alongside the movement of troops from north to south we see the movement of millions of people to escape the fighting displacement as you always see in a civil war is a very marked feature of the conflict in China.
How much of a hunger was there within China just for peace after so many years of war with Japan and now civil war, was there an element of people just wanting all to be over? Absolutely, it was a very strong cry reflected in all sorts of ways among the populists. That reminds us I think since that cry was really not adhered to by the protagonists on either side the determination of the leadership, both the nationalist, the woman, Dong and the communists to fight to the end.
It reflected in the personalities of Zhang and Mao but there must have been other factors at work. These men felt that compromise was worse than peace. Let me put another way, compromise was worse than fighting to the end. They would rather do that. And so the determination of these two men plunged their countrymen and country women into this desperate gruesome civil conflict until it reached a critical outcome with the flight of Zhang to Taiwan and the collapse of his government.
Now Taiwan's come up quite a few times in this conversation already. And so as we know that Zhang's regime ended up that was their last stronghold in Taiwan. What was it like for the people already living in Taiwan to suddenly have this Chinese government decamping there and essentially taking over the island? It was very problematic. Taiwan had not been part of the Chinese world in a sense between 1895 and the defeat of Japan after the Second World War in 1945. It was a Japanese colony.
Curiously, many of the Chinese in Taiwan rather liked what the Japanese had done in the sense that they built infrastructure, raised living standards, increased educational levels and such like. And when with the defeat of Japan, they were re-incorporated into Zhang's Republican administered part of China, it wasn't a happy occurrence. What came after was even worse for them because they were subject to a massive ingress of soldiery, of desperate civilians and were preparing indeed for the attack that they believed would eventually come from the communists as Mao and his men got control of maritime China.
On the other hand, there was another sense at work because what Zhang could not do in the mainland, he seemed better able to do in Taiwan. For example, they introduced the new currency. For example, they controlled the rate of inflation and amongst the poor, the distressed, the battle weary and indeed the defeated among the XRs were people of talent, of educational accomplishment from the mainland. So here were the ingredients, not apparent necessarily by 1949, of the recreation of Taiwan, henceforth to be the base of the Republic of China still uses that name today to rise as a Chinese tiger or Chinese dragon economy, which it did, of course, several years later. That was in the future, but you can think of it as a refugee island at the end of 1949, whose status was very questionable because Mao, just as he'd been determined to cross the Yangtze, was determined to cross the Taiwan Straits and complete his conquest.
And am I right to say it was actually really the Korean War that in the end led to Taiwan surviving? That's absolutely right. Mao Zedong had many promises for his people as he created the People's Republic of China. In fact, nearly the first thing he did was to take them to war in Korea in November 1950 because of fears about US-led UN forces having moved through Seoul up north towards the Chinese border and presenting a threat to his infant regime. It was when the Americans saw Mao do that and realized that this was a potentially disastrous outcome, the loss of Korea, and potentially the loss of Taiwan in terms of the broader Cold War that they decided at last that they would rescue Jankai Sheph. Not restore him, they didn't want him to return to the mainland, but they were determined now that Taiwan should not be part of the People's Republic of China. They moved in June 1950, the seventh fleet into the Taiwan strait and made it clear that Mao's advances in that area would have to stop. So it was events outside China as you say that rescued Taiwan. For Jank who would always believe the Americans would eventually come to his aid, it came too late. He'd lost the mainland, but it did mean he could retain Taiwan.
And how long did the nationalist regime in Taiwan retain realistic aspirations to return to the mainland? Well, they never gave it up because it was a key part of their legitimacy. The idea was that we are in Taiwan due to a particular set of circumstances, largely our own failures, they were prepared to admit, but reforms in the military and in political life were all conducted with some rigor and some success with a view to taking back the mainland at some point. And there were crises, the Taiwan straits crises in the 1950s over the island of Kumoi, quite close to the mainland, very close indeed, which the nationalist also retained, though it was merely a garrison, not a human settlement in the conventional sense. So the woman Dung had never given up the idea of returning, but never at any time were they in a position to accomplish it. And the Americans anxious to preserve the status quo were always dissuading them from having a go and curbing their adventurism.
Now how much do you think the legacy of 1949 still shapes China in the region today? I think it does in a host of respects. The institutions, the political patterns of behavior, the apparatus set up in 1949, has of course over the years been subject to changes, but the way in which China is controlled, domestically and run as a country, has its origins in what was unfolded in those weeks surrounding the foundation of the People's Republic in October 1949.
The other dimension, of course, and a very significant one, is that 1949 not only changed China, it gave us two Chinas, because Zhang in Taiwan insisted that that was the seat of the Republic of China, that it was the legitimate government of the whole of China, and many countries around the world, not including Britain, but certainly including America and many other Western allies, recognized Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, as the seat of the Chinese government. So that conflict between the two Chinas not only persisted and at times, as the Taiwan Straits Crisis suggested, looked like resuming in a significant way on the military front, that remains the situation today.
China's civil war is, I think, the longest running, unfinished conflict of its kind, and it so happens that the issue has been brought to renewed salience by the present Chinese ruler Xi Jinping, who has warned on more than one occasion that this problem of China's national unification cannot be left indefinitely, and we've seen in, as recently as the last few weeks, increasing maritime and aerial incursions into Taiwan, threats that the island must bend its knee and accept some sort of arrangement whereby it loses its independent status and returns to what the mainlanders regard as the motherland.
So the legacy of 1949 is not only very apparent from a glance at the current international news headlines, there is a strong sense in which it might re-emerge as a major issue, not just in Chinese politics, but in international relations, because the Americans are still interested in the status of Taiwan. Japan is as well, and the last thing many Asian countries and indeed countries further afield want is an extension of Chinese political, economic, and military influence of the kind that would come if they were able to overcome Taiwan.
And actually, in Taiwan itself, what is a popular view there? Do people want to be part of China? Do they still have aspirations to be the legitimate China or do they see themselves as a separate independent country? There's a wide diversity of opinion in Taiwan, as you'd expect, given that it's a vigorous democracy. I think I'm right in saying that the overall view, the overriding view, is that the status quo should be preserved, that there is not a yearning in any realistic sense for unification with China.
If it means Chinese Communist Party influence and perhaps even control, so you might say that the Taiwanese would like to be left to get on with their lives, they would like a set of arrangements to be in place which gave them breathing room, not only at the personal level, but allowed their state to function as an international actor in some way without being excluded from every diplomatic fora and prevented from having diplomatic relations with third parties. That prevention being largely the work of the government in Beijing.
And seven decades on from the Communist Revolution, how would you evaluate the successes and failures of that regime? It's an enormous topic and one has to consider so many factors. I suppose I would look at it this way. On the one hand, you have bystanders of individual wealth, individual health, longevity, gender equality, and many other measures, quite considerable progress. The situation of China in 1949 was poor, was weak, life was precarious, and for the majority rather unpleasant.
You have to, though, consider that in the context of the costs, the communists have wreaked revolution in China, indeed, clinging close to destroying much of life in the country. Whether you look back at what happened immediately after 1949 with the elimination of the landlords, or you turn to the denuding of intellectual life in the mid-1950s, or the collectivization of land in the Great Leap Forward and the famine, or the all-custrated destruction of cultural and intellectual life right across the country and the cultural revolution.
You have to ask yourself this question, okay, China has achieved successes in a number of measures, was it ever really necessary to reach those achievements by those memes? I think the answer has to be no, it wasn't necessary. That was Graham Hutchings. China 1949, Year of Revolution, is out now published by Blooms Reacademic. Thanks for listening.