December 7, 1949

Nanking No More: Or a Date Which Will Rent an Apartment in Infamy.

The new week begins with a historic date, a pivotal moment in the history of the United States. It was a lazy Sunday morning in 1941, at a time when most Americans were still more impressed by the bat-waving of Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams than the sword-rattling of Adolf Hitler and Hideki Tojo. Once the last Japanese planes vacated the skies above Pearl Harbor, America grew from sleepy, isolated giant into a world super power. The events of that day are well chronicled, so instead we here at Lies Agreed Upon turn our attention to an event that occurred seven years later, but was no less influential in shaping the 20th Century.

The Japanese war machine that attacked Pearl Harbor was in fact primarily engaged in mainland China in late 1941. For a decade prior to the invasion in 1937, the army of General Chiang Kai-shek's Republic of China had been hard at work suppressing a communist insurrection led by Mao Zedong. Once the Japanese landed, Chiang's main focus shifted to the foreign enemy, but the communists still harassed the fringes of his army for the duration of the Second World War. As soon as the Japanese were defeated, the two old enemies saw the internal conflict erupt into the Chinese Civil War.








Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.







With American backing, Chiang and the Kuomintang (KMT), or Chinese Nationalist Party, tried to fend off the communists from his war ravaged nation. Exhausted by their battles with the Japanese, KMT forces needed American troops and supplies to carry out the fight. Likewise, Mao's forces were being supplied by the Soviet Union, who maintained a large troop presence in Manchuria, to the north, even after World War II ended.

By the middle of 1946, the guerrilla attacks popularized by Mao before the Japanese invasion had evolved into a full scale conventional war. The KMT suffered setback after setback, and the communists supplied themselves with Nationalist stores following each victory. With Soviet backing in Manchuria, Mao's forces had a strong hold on Northern China by 1948, and began operations south of the Great Wall soon after. Nanking, Chaing's capital, fell in April, 1949, and later that year Mao founded the People's Republic of China with its capital in Beijing.

Chairman Mao Zedong declaring the foundation of the PRC in 1949.


On December 7, 1949, after escaping mainland China, Chiang's government fled to the island of Taiwan, and declared Tapei the new capital of the Republic of China. To this day, no formal agreement has been signed by either side to end the war, and for many years following his exile, Chiang planned on retaking the mainland. While relationships between the communist government and Tapei have improved recently, no president of the KMT has ever spoken with a chairman of the Chinese Communist Party.

While some may feel we did our audience a disservice by looking over the attack on Pearl Harbor, our editors felt this topic deserved some press as well. It was surely one of the first times of the Cold War where the U.S. and Soviet Union went at each other through satellite states. Furthermore, the conditions and borders affected by Chiang's flea to Taiwan still exist today. While it may now seem ludicrous for tiny Chinese Taipei to challenge mainland China, it was a mess that for many years consumed American foreign policy.