Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health by Dave Jaffe - Part Eight, Section One

The Poet As Ruler


    Mao Zedong, China's new leader had a message for the Chinese and the world on October 1st, 1949. "China has stood up," he said in Beijing. He proclaimed China as the now communist-ruled People's Republic of China.
    Mao's victory came after 100 years of humiliation for China and war and chaos that ravaged the country. It all started in the 1830's when British ship showed up on Chinese shores. The British forced the Chinese to consume opium grown in India.
    When the Chinese emperor of the day protested, British warships and British soldiers battered the government into submission. The Chinese had looked down in condescension at the so-called 'Barbarians' who they thought were inferior to the Chinese. Yet now the emperor looked on helplessly as one other country after another siezed coastal land from China. Germany, France, the United States, Russia and of course, Great Britain, set up ports and governments on Chinese soil.
    "No dogs or Chinese here," said British signs at its foreign-ruled areas.
     Two massive rebellions failed to dislodge the foreigners. In 1911 the Chinese emperor resigned as China dissolved into chaos. Sun Yat Sen, the head of the nationalist party known as the Kuomintang, became the new supposed head of China. Yet he had little power. Worse was to come. At the end of World War One, the Japanese at the Treaty of Versailles got even more concessions from China.
    A powerful May 4th movement emerged in China to protest the treaty but it failed to stop Japan on this issue.
    Then the Great Depression hit the world in the 1930's. In 1937 Japan invaded China. "Kill all, burn all, destroy all," the Japanese High Command told its soldiers. The Japanese army killed somewhere between seven and 15 million Chinese.
    A deadly three-cornered struggle broke out in China. In the north lay the communists who had survived the legendary 8,000 mile or near 13,000 kilometre journey called 'The Long March'. Then there was the Kuomintang, now the party of Chiang Kai-Shek, a ruthless free enterprise general who'd killed many communists in the 1930's and 1920's.
    And then there were the Japaneses invaders who claimed to be building an East Asian 'Co-Prosperity' sphere.By the early 1940's, Japanese troops had already conquered large parts of East Asia. All across Europe and parts of east Asia, the Second World War was now in process. Over 55 million died as a result.
    In 1945 two U.S. atom bombs put paid to Japan. It surrendered to the Americans and World War Two was over. Yet in China the civil war just went on. The United States threw its support behind the Kuomintang, giving it millions of dollars in aid.
    Yet the communists led by Mao Zedong were helped by many poor people who wanted peace and social justice. The Communists won and Chiang Kai-Shek fled to the offshore island of Taiwan. Mao Zedong, a part-time poet and a full time communist, now ruled all of China.