Part Two: The Well Hung Warlord Who Tried to Conquer China

Mia Wong is joined again by Robert Evans to continue to discuss Zhang Zongchang.

 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
M what's starving my refugee population with zoid product. Jesus, Jesus,
what a mess. Oh my god, Fuck Chris, you gotta
you gotta pull me out of this tails. Then we're

(00:20):
on a starting on a terrible, terrible note. Here. Yeah,
we're it's okay, We're we're, We're We're back, Part two,
Part two, The Rise of the Working Class. We're we're back,
and we're back. We're back in warlords with hell fucking
everybody gotta dick the size of a bunch of coins,

(00:40):
just just a radi war criminal. And now we're gonna
watch an awful part. Okay, good god, he does have
it coming. He does have it. I like his I
like his hotspah. But yeah, he's got it coming. Thrilled
to hear that we are going to fuck him up.
Let's go out, let's have his upants come first, We're

(01:04):
gonna first. We're gonna sunk up a lot of other people.
So yeah. On May nineteenth, a group of eight factory
delegates representing striking workers at a Japanese controlled cotton plant
in Shanghai met with their opposite number from the factory
to discussed the workers demands. A brawl broke out in
a Japanese foreman murdered a well established labor organizer, and

(01:27):
the resulting fight injured the other seven delegates. Now this
you know, for very obvious reasons, Piste off Shanghai's unions,
and ten thousand workers, which was at that point one
of the largest demonstrations of workers in Shanghai's history, showed
up to his memorial service. On Now, protesters marched on
a police station that had arrested some of their comrades

(01:49):
in and when they got to the station, the British
police opened fire into the crowd. When the slaughter was over,
ten Chinese men, women, and children lay dead on the
street to Shanghai. Another fifty were wounded. This moment, on
this crowded street in Shanghai changed everything. Budgin, the great
Chinese novelist and anarchist, wrote this description of a student's

(02:13):
reaction to the slaughter in Shanghai. Quote at the entrance
to Yunon Road, he saw the child who had been
killed a short while before, he thought about half an
hour ago. The crowd was marching peacefully towards the police
station to ask the police to set free students who
have been unjustly arrested. They thought the police were human
beings endowed with reason and human sympathy, that human blood

(02:36):
flood in their veins. They thought that uniforms and weapons
could not have destroyed their human nature. But reality proved
they were bloodthirsty beasts. On the most crowded street of
the city, they deliberately slaughtered on armed people. For this,
there was no precedent in Chinese history. The imperialist depression
that had endured for so many years ached like a

(02:57):
deep wound in his heart. He's gold Inwardly, he felt
the time for patience was over. He felt he wanted
to spill his blood, to sacrifice his young life, that
he might show then not all among his people were
lambs that allowed themselves to be led without resistance to
the slaughter. He looked again at the corpse of the
murdered child. His eyes shone with fire. His whole body

(03:19):
began to burn, as though on fire. His heart beat violently. Now,
I think this is a feeling that all of us
know now, just the sheer, breathtaking rage of seeing the
police murder a child, seeing a child's corpse lying dead
on the pavement, And that is that is now a
universal thing for sure, and I want to pause on

(03:42):
that feeling for a second. I want to pause on
the rage, on the grief, on the sort of the
raw and mounting horror of the realization at the copsmer
kids in the street. And I want you to hold
onto those emotions because there's been an enormous effort to
get Westerners to think that Chinese people are fundamentally different
than they are, That Chinese people are inherently authoritarian, that

(04:03):
we're all bound by a sort of traditional Confucian hierarchy
that we all follow reflectively, that that it's baked into
our culture, and even at the most extreme cases, are
genetics at a level that makes us fundamentally different than
the quote unquote freedom loving people of the West. And
I want you to think about that student staring at
a child's corpse in a bloody street in Shanghai, and

(04:25):
I want you to think about how he felt the
same despair, the same grief, the same rage that we do.
And I want you to remember this single lesson without
which you cannot understands what is about to happen. They're
like us, and they fought like hell immediately after two
hundred thousand workers joined the larger general strike in Shanghai's history.

(04:49):
The next day, the communist labor organizers founded Shanghai's General
Labor Union, or the g l U. Hundred and seventeen
unions join. Almost immediately, every part of Shanghai society moves.
Chinese business owners so outraged at the imperialist murders that
for a second the class abandoned them, contributed to the
strike funds, and took those streets themselves. So did Shanghai
is incredibly powerful organized crime gangs, the Green and Red gangs.

(05:14):
We're we're going to get into more of them. A
bit um. Chong Jung Chong and Chong Ju Ling sent
troops to suppress the uprising, but even their troops couldn't
hold the city against the power of the entirety of
Chinese Shanghai. A new force had taken the stage of
Chinese history, the Chinese working class, and had driven all
other classes into the streets and pitched them into open
battle with the police and the warlords. It had in

(05:37):
a single day, transformed Shanghai from the playground of the British, French,
Japanese imperialist into the capital of the Chinese working class. Now, yeah, Robert,
I don't I don't know if you if you've read
anything about Shanghai, there's anything about any large city that
was written by a British dude before about They inevitably

(05:59):
call any sort of large city in the East that
the Paris of the Orient. Now Shanghai is one of
the cities that's famously called this and on mat the
meeting of those words changed completely. This uprising Shanghai, you know,
did finally become the twentieth centuries Paris in that after

(06:19):
made the thirtieth it was to go into full scale
armed revolt five more times. The twentieth century. Shanghai's working class, Yeah,
in every way, the equal, even the superiors of the
Parisian mobs would single handedly drive the warlords and nationalists
and the communist alike from the city. Yeah, yeah, there,
it is incredibly impressive. Yeah, they just had no idea

(06:40):
any of this had happened. Actually, yeah, it's it's it's
really this is one of like sort of the lost
stories of the twentieth century, which is which is the
story of Shanghai. Just Shanghai becoming indisputedly the world's great
revolutionary city in the way that sort of Paris was
in the ninetdreds. And this is because it starts because
of fucking pop kills a kid, yep. And and I

(07:01):
think and I think that's a as an entry point.
It is helpful because you know, there there there's a
tendency to sort of to to turn this whole period
into something that was like inevitable by class forces or
whatever that you know, this is some kind of weird
historical object or that like the communists from behind all
of this, and it's like no people, people, people go
on strike, people in the streets because they watched, like

(07:24):
they sold the physical bodies of children in the streets
that have been killed by the police. Yeah, and these
had all been people who had been dealing with um
Jung and his bullshit and the other warlords and the
violence and brutality that they carried out for a while.
And it just I guess seeing a dead kid, you know,
there is something like that that like you're just like, well,

(07:44):
this is too much, Like I've been putted too far,
We've all been pushed too far. It's time to fux
some ship up. Yeah. And the other thing about this
that I think is really important is that the they're
not killed by like Chinese police or Chinese soldiers. These
are originally it's a Japanese foreman and then it's it's
British police, and that part of it just like it

(08:08):
drives well, I mean, what we can you know, it
starts this revolt that just spreads like wildfire. And you know,
within a couple of days there's a huge protest another
city near Shanghai, and the British open fire into the
crowds with machine guns. They kill another eight people Jesus
and this, yeah, this brings more people in the street
with with it wasin three days, the revolt spreads to

(08:31):
the north and there's thirty thousand students and workers on
strike and Beijing. In nearby Tungin, there's two hundred thousand
people show up to a protest and Tungeon this is
the center of the power of the warlord armies and
it's there in August that the movement sees his first
real defeat uncture lyings armies working with British intelligence. And

(08:52):
this is this is another thing. So so there's a
complicated relationship between the imperialist powers and the various warlords
they'll they'll sort of back factions. Dru Lings very often
accused of being a sort of like a stooge of
the Japanese imperialists, and it's not quite true, like he
is supported by them, but he just sort of like
disobeys them. But the one thing that happens immediately is

(09:14):
at any time one of these strikes happens, like all
of the warlords and all of the sort of imperial
powers just like a lock step. And yeah, in August,
du Ling's armies and a certain group of white Russian
mercenaries with whom we are now all familiar, retake the
city and slaughter dozens of workers. But even this doesn't
stop the revolt, and it continues to spread into the south.

(09:37):
Um in the nationalist heartland and Guangzhou in the very
far south, were workers massed on the border with British
occupied Hong Kong. The workers of Hong Kong rush to
join them. Now, now Hong Kong is somewhat unique among
Chinese cities in this period in that it's it's there.
There have been general strikes going on in Hong Kong,
I mean since the eighteen hundreds UM, and just three

(10:00):
years before this there's something called there's there's a massive
seamen strike, and I found this sort of yeah, yeah, yeah,
I was, I was just I was just gonna go
past it. What I wrote that I knew was gonna happen. Yeah, yeah.
I found this this great description of it lipcom Thow,
which which I think is also useful to to understand
the effects of the later strikes. And so it goes

(10:24):
disaster for the bosses. Not only rail workers and Stevedor's,
but baker's, cooks, clerks, coolies and servants joined the strike.
The ruling class now had to cook its own food
and que to buy it. No clothes were washed, no
shirts were ironed. Ministers had to wander government buildings delivering
their own messages, but there was no one to carry
out their orders. The army was called out and commandeered

(10:46):
food and vehicles. Workers were pressed into forced labor. Was
their workforce disappearing. The boss has banned anyone from leaving
Hong Kong, which meant no one could visit the graves
of their ancestors in China, a fearful thing. A freedom
march against the band led to confrontation right and massacre
with a colony descending into dare we say it, anarchy,

(11:07):
government crumbling, and business losses mounting. Merchants lost five hundred
million dollars between the strike, a massive sum. The boss
is capitulated. Now that strike had had I think about
a hundred thousand people in it, and it pales in
comparison to what's going to happen now. Um on, this

(11:29):
is this is the beginning of what's called the Canton
Hong Kong strike. On June, British police officers open fire
into a crowd of a hundred and thirty thousands. They
killed fifty two people, Yeah, including four children younger than sixteen. Yeah,
this is this is this is surprise bastard imperialism. Yeah,
I mean yeah, it always finds its way in yep. Yeah,

(11:53):
And that is a very British thing, just firing into
a crowd of thousands of people with yep. Yeah, they
did a lot of that. Um yeah, okay, totally scans yep.
And the workers in Hong Kong respond with the city's
longest general strike. Two fifty thou workers just they just

(12:13):
leave the city for guang Sho, which you know brings
all of Hong Kong ko a stand still. Because almost
their entire labor force it's just gone, like they did
just leave. Um, there's further there's there's a kind of
yeah yeah, And the everything to do is there's this
board kott of British goods that reduces British revenue in
the city by forty and this last for sixteen months,

(12:35):
and the only reason Hong Kong survives is that, like
basically the only thing the UK government is doing in
this period is just shipping these massive bailout packages to
Hong Kong. Now, I know I mentioned earlier that there
was massive protests in Tungjin, and those are the first,
that's the first movement to go down after sort of
warlord truth movement to suppress it. But what's interesting about
what happens in the rest of the country is that

(12:57):
for the most part, these strikes aren't put down by
the warlords at all. And so to understand why, we
to look at sort of the class composition of these movements. UM,
at the beginning of of the May thirtie movement, which
is what this whole wave of unrest comes to be
known after the thirty massacre, you have a really solid
alliance of you know, everyone in Chinese society, and I mean,

(13:19):
like everyone is piste off about the British soldiers just
like slaughtering children in the street, and it produces this
really unwieldly alliance of workers, business owners, and organized crime
all sort of like fighting imperialism together. But like, okay,
that's not a coalition that has any shared interest other
than sort of just hatred of the British and you know, okay,

(13:39):
hatred of hatred of the perfidious albion is a powerful force,
but it's not enough to hold the political coalition together.
And especially because you know this this is the period
where like the general strike really enters into sort of
like the protest vocabulary of China's working class, and this

(14:00):
to just absolutely freak out the bosses. And then there's
a lot of there's a lot of things that are
very scary if if you're a boss in like Shanghai.
One of the other ones is the workers in Shanghai
start organizing what's called the dog Beating Brigade, which is
this is this row of workers with axes who run
around beating up scabs and people who don't what labor
movements it rules. Yes, that's that's pretty rad. Dude with axes.

(14:27):
It's like, no, nope, you better suppote the labor movement.
If you want to keep a strike going, you're gonna
need a couple hundred dudes with axes. Yeah. Yeah, that's
that's a lesson people should be taking for the general
strike we should have and I don't know tomorrow or whatever. Yeah,
And I think, frankly, like the fact that we no
longer have people have have a dog beating brigades with

(14:49):
with axes is like a real reason for the decline
of the American of the sort of organized American working class. Well,
bad pitch here, but we're gonna have to change the
name because Americans are not going to get on board
anything called the dog beating brigade. And that's true. We
called the bat absolutely, Yeah, I think we I think
you can get people back on the door. Yeah, but

(15:10):
you know, is dogs is angry about the dog beating brigade.
I mean that's fair. It's a different culture. Okay, don't worry.
They only beat people, not dogs. Yeah, they're not beating people.
They're not like or they're not beating dogs. They're not
like Hitler. They're beating people, which is also like hitler um,

(15:31):
but in a good way, all right, I don't, I've
I've I've lost the thread. Now. Now, a big reason
for the sort of level of militants and for the
level of organization that the workers of Shanghai have is
because both the Communists and the Nationalist Party have allied
with Shanghai's powerful Green Gang. Now, the Green Gang is

(15:52):
the single best organized political force in Shanghai by a
very significant margin. Um. Most of what they're sort of
fame is four is the fact that they control Shangha
has opium trade. And you know, that makes them a
lot of money. But in terms of organizational strength, the
real power lies in their control over the workplace. The
Greek Gang controls almost every shop floor in Shanghai, and

(16:14):
you know the ones that don't control tend to be
controlled by other gangs. And you know when when when
I say they control the shop floor, what I mean
is that they're almost completely in control of the hiring
and firing process to the point where did you even
come to Shanghai in the first place? Right, And this
is important because Shanghai is the city that's like sev
immigrants from other parts of China. So it's it's it's

(16:35):
based almost entirely on migrant workers. And to even get
into the city, you have to have someone who's in
the gang to like vouch for you. And you know,
once once, once you have someone that like a foeman
to vouch for you, you have you have you have
a friend vouch for you with the foreman, and they
can hire you. But but this, this whole process means
that almost the entire working class in Shanghai is like

(16:55):
affiliated with one of these gangs, particularly the Green Gang.
And it's sort of interesting. You can see attempts to
sort of like defame some of these workers that that
people will go be like, oh, they're they're affiliated with
the gangs. And it's like literally every worker in Shanghai
is affiliated something stept with a gang because that's the
only way you can get a job, and this gives

(17:16):
them an enormous amount of political power on top of show.
Now the wealth reabled extract from Chinese workers in the
opium trade, and they're significant enough that a big part
of communist organizing and Shanghai becomes like infiltrating these gangs
because the communists, you know, very quickly figure out that
if you can't part of it. If you're not like
part of the gangs, you can't get a job and
you can't do any labor organizing. So so they turned

(17:37):
into the strategy of like organizing the gang foreman, because
the gang foreman can just like boot everyone out of
a shop and like start a strike. And this this
really kind of weirdly and surprisingly actually works and the
communists are able to win over like a good number
of four men. And this is this is one of
the sort of the basis of organized labor in the city.

(17:59):
But but this also means that even within the sort
of communist unions, the gangs have like a decent level
of influence because you know, the reliant on gang members
to sort of bring people in. Now, at the beginning
of the conflict, this works in organized labor's favor because
you know, both both the gangs and the and the
communists and like the labor organizers are all pulling on
the same side, and that means they could just like

(18:19):
pull everyone out of work. But as as the stricks
go on, the largely communist control general labor union grows
more and more powerful, and the Green Gang looks at
this it starts to get worried about like you know,
organized labor creating an independent base of power, which is
a real threat to the control of the workplace, and
they start looking for allies that put the strikes down. Now,

(18:43):
Chinese business owners had initially like backed the protests, but
you know, because they were piste off that the British
were shooting people. But they very quickly realized that letting
letting workers have unions is extremely bad for them, even
if those unions were temporarily targeting foreign owners. Yeah. So
so one one of their major complaints is that there's

(19:04):
there's a strike. You know, one of the strikes is
going on is at this like Japanese own power plants,
but because the power plants, they like they can't be
run by scab workers. This cuts off businesses. This cuts
off like power to Chinese businesses too. The business owners
get piste off and they get together with the Green Gang.
They're trying to like start ending the strikes. Um The
gang like storms the offices of the g l U

(19:26):
with like knives and iron bars and just like beats
the crap out of a whole bunch of the GILU organizers.
And they're able to just like destroy the headquarters, and
they also start to sort of like exert their influence
over the workforce to like bring people back to work.
And this eventually is able to do what the British
government in the warlords couldn't, which is bring the strike
to an end by forcing the GLU to sort of

(19:47):
like settle with the Japanese government over conversation for like
the original death of the labor organizer and a very
similar process, although in Hong Kong it's more Chinese business
owners acting the British then it is organized crime, like
just beating the crap out of people. But there's a
very similar thing plays out in Hong Kong. And after

(20:08):
sixteen months to strike ends, and it's kind of a
disaster because after this the Brits just like later in
Hong Kong to a fortress, almost all British social policy
for the next really hundred years specifically designed to make
sure that this this kind of strike never happens again. Yeah,
it seems like um I could name some other governments

(20:30):
that took a little bit of a leaf out of
their book in that regard, yep. And there's actually there's
a fun a lot of fun I say fun but
there there's an interesting thing about this where Shanghai, Hong
Kong is basically the place where like most riot tactics
are produced, are like like police anti riot techniques are produced.
So there there's another bunch of riots in n seven
and what the British police does against those riots are

(20:53):
like that. That's where that's like the template for all
riot police comes from is from the British police in
Hong Kong sixty seven. And you see this with like
waves of this with the earlier strikes too. I mean,
they're fucking good at it. I can It's also I'm
gonna guess where a lot of protester tactics for dealing

(21:14):
with I mean, I can say that just in terms
of like last year in Portland, people were using tactics
they'd seen in Hong Kong. Uh do first, Um, yeah
dude that I I had no idea it went back
that fucking far. But yeah, and there's interesting stuff here too,
because so basically, like the way the way this conflict
always works at like both sides are constantly trading like

(21:35):
tactics with they're sort of like equivalent numbers. So you
have like the thin blue line international but then you
also have you know, you have like the actual international
in in this period, so you have sort of which
is the kind of left socialist international. Yeah. Well by
by this by this point you're sort of in like
the the USSR Third International. But even before that, you

(21:56):
have a lot of people who were like worker is
in uh like for example, like the like one of
one of the labor yins in Egypt, for example, starts
because a bunch of like like Italian anarchists like show
up and do a bunch of organizing. And this happens
in Brazil to where you know, the general strike like
just sort of spreads as workers move around the world. Yeah.

(22:17):
So so you have these dynamics and they sort of
clash here and in Hong Kong, like the ruling classes
trade up wins. But in Shanghai, even though the strike
collapses and like another Wollard takes the city and executes
a bunch of the labor leaders, but it doesn't matter,
because maybe the thirty had already sort of had changed
everything about Chinese politics. And this this is one of

(22:42):
the biggest factors behind the rise of the next phase
of Chinese history, which is the rise of the nationalists.
Now the KMT of the Nationalist Party is it's one
of the oldest political factions left in China at this point.
But you know, by time you hit about ninety, they
they're a complete mess that they've had a series of disasters, revolts,

(23:03):
like all their leaders keep fleeing the Japan and you
know that they're sort of clinging on too, like a
portion of Gloctial province, like the Far South, and you know,
I mean, organizationally, it's a disaster. I mean they have
they don't they don't have meetings, like, they don't have
a party program, they don't have a constitution that they like,
they don't even have like a newspaper, the party publication.
And the Soviets look at this and are like this

(23:27):
is a disaster. And so they send Michael Borden, who's
like he's an old Bolshevik organizer, to to meet and
advise the KMTS leader of Sony at Sin and this
board in board and basically tell sny Aten like, Okay,
you need to reorganize this party on like Latin his lines,
and Snya send is like okay, so if I don't

(23:47):
get Soviet aids, there's literally no way we can ever
win this war. So he lets board In carry out
as reforms within like within a series of matter of months.
It's just completely transformed. They turned to this this really
incredibly effective political organization that they suddenly they have branches
all over the country. They have they're all holding meetings,
they're spreading propaganda, and they're they're also sort of aided

(24:11):
in this by the USSR. Wow. Yeah, the USR is
gonna do a lot of things to help that. The
CAMT in this period one of the one of the
biggest ones that they dragged the Chinese Communist Party like
literally kicking and screaming into an alliance with the KMT.
The companies are just like hated the Nationalists for various
doctronic reasons, and the uss are just like, you're gonna
alley with them. And this is called the First United Front,

(24:34):
and notably is the first United Front because there's going
to be more United fronts because yeah, yeah, yeah, well
we'll we'll we'll, we'll see, we'll see how this alliance
turns out in a bit. But you know, like every
member of the Communist Party joins the Nationalist Party and
this gives them like a that this makes the nationalist
like significantly more effective as a political organization. Um, you

(24:57):
know in the KMT on top of the communists that
they've always had a few other basis of support, like
they're they have a bunch of backers in like the
Chinese diasporain, like the U S and Indonesia, they have
a lot of like they have a lot of banking
support from people in Hong Kong and Guangzho. And with
the reforms of the party nine three and they made

(25:19):
the thirtieth movement, the CAMT gets three new extremely powerful
basis support. They get the full military backing of the Soviets,
who are going to pump more money into the CAMT
than like any other international power is going to spend
on this entire war. They get this one one of
the one of the things that Soviets do is they
they start helping to train this new officer corps for

(25:42):
for for the for this the thing called the National
Revolutionary Army that the canties sort of building up to
go fight the warlords. And the third thing they build up,
especially after the giant political shifts of of is they
start gaining this huge base in the Chinese masses and
when I say the Chinese masses, I mean they have
the entire ideological spectrum in this organization. I mean it's

(26:04):
it's it's the kind of coalition that you look at
it and it's like something has gone wrong in history.
There are too many people are agreed about the same things. Yeah,
Like there's like proto fascists, there's like this right right
wing like hardcore nationalists. There's these very like traditional sort
of conservative Confucians, Like there's there's these conservative Chinese business owners.

(26:26):
There's a bunch of landlords, you have to have the
sort of old revolutionary like republicans. And on the left
you have a bunch of socialist communists and anarchists and
they're all in this able work. And this is you know,
you look at the coalition, it's like there's no way
that like the fascist, the landlords and the communists are
like all gonna be on the same side of this.

(26:47):
It makes me think a lot about some of what
you saw in Fume after World War One, where you've
got these these anarchists and these communists and kind of
every just like all of these different people and and
and there's a similar are like Fume, which we talked
about in our Gabrielle Benunzio two partner, which was like
the city in Italy that was taken by this um

(27:07):
madman uh artists kind of proto fascist guy, but like
a bunch of people on the left and the right
kind of started engaged in this utopian project there for
about of year, and it was a reaction to the
chaos and the violence of World War One and the
fact that like all of these powers in the region,
these great militant powers, had completely fucked society up. And

(27:30):
I think you're seeing the same thing in China. These
like the old government has gone, these warlords are not
helping anybody but themselves. Um, they're just like fucking and
drinking and murdering tens of thousands of people. And so
you get this pretty broad coalition of people who are
all able to be like, well, funk, how things are going? Yeah.

(27:50):
And I think the other part of this is that
the KMT built like cells like nationalists like sell themselves
like as as like the word of the Revolutionary Party,
and it's like anyone who wants to revel lution like
left or right, like doesn't doesn't matter, just join up
and you'll you'll you'll get the revolution that like over
that overthrows the wildlords and like restores the power of
the nation, and that after that we can all fight

(28:10):
over like you know, restaurant political differences. And they sure
did you know who doesn't overthrow Chinese civil society and
start a period of mass blood letting that will eventually
lead to the deaths of millions. The products and services

(28:32):
that support the show, they do not, none of them.
None of them have yet done that. Um, maybe one day,
maybe one day. I have a I have a good
feeling about Blue Apron. I think they might go all
the way. But we'll see. Ah, and we're back, all right,

(28:52):
let's let's continue. So the nationalists have one more powerful
basis support. And this base is one of the few
bases that's going to that goes from like their origins
in the early d late eighteen hundreds to like after
they're the government of Taiwan. And this base is organized crime. Now,
a lot of historians don't really want to touch on this,

(29:14):
and there's a good reason for that because up until
the nineties, it was genuinely extremely dangerous to write about
the k M T S. Tigest organized crime like it
like it's bad enough that So there's a Taiwanese journalist
named Henry Leo who who writes an unauthorized biography of
like Chenkai Check's brother who's like the president of Taiwan.
He's writing unauthorized biography and he gets assassinated by the

(29:36):
KMT in California and like next two yeah, yeah, and
they like they're they had they have a whole international network,
they have all this sort of opium and heroin distribution.
It's yeah, it's sadly we don't have enough time to
do this whole story because it's it's a whole thing.
But needless to say, one of the big ways that

(29:56):
the KMT, especially the camp's right wing funds itself, is
that they're there. They're just like up to their asses
and the opium and the heroin trade and they have,
you know, they have really deep ties to organized crime
in ways they're gonna be very important in a second. Now,
the KMT left also has tighest organized crime, like we
talked about like the communists and like the sort of
left nationalists are affiliated with like the Green Gang and

(30:17):
Chinese organized crime because they have to for labor organizing
the KMT right is just there there. They just are
the opium trade. Um. Yeah. So if if you remember
back last episode, Joeng has a Nationalist general named Chan assassinated. Yeah,
that guy. That guy was the head of the Green
Gang at the time, and a large part of why

(30:39):
he thought he could just like go back to Shanghai
and started revolution was that he was you know, he
was in control of the Green Gang, which means that
he had control of the Green games opium like now
well opium mapras, but he had he had control of
the Green Gangs like labor apparatus. And so he was like, well, okay,
I can start a strike and then they'll be an
on revolution. I could take the city. And you know
it doesn't work because John like kills him. But you know,
this is the like the level of ties between the

(31:00):
cant right and organized crime. Like Shankai Check pledges his
loyalty to like a later Green Gang leader in Shanghai,
a Schenkai Check for those of you don't know, Check
Check is bye. By the end of this story, Chanka
Check is going to be the guy, the single person
in control of the entire Nationalist Party, and he has
pledged loyalty to a member of the Green Gang and

(31:22):
makes another Green Gang guy the head of shank like
Shanghai's director of opium suppression, which is extremely fun. I
would disagree with that. I think opium should be allowed
to thrive um in the open marketplace, and most importantly,
uh in in my refrigerator. But please continue. Well, you know,
I mean Italy, so does Shankai check which is what?

(31:43):
Which is? Which is why? Senka is what I'm learning.
We're we're both on on the same page about the
only thing that matters. Opium and heroin too. The heroin's
a bit later. Yeah, I mean it's it's literally the
opiate of the masses. Yeah, yeah, well no, because most
people can't afford it. It's the opium of me, the

(32:04):
opiate of me. In shang Kai scheck, it's our opiate
and and yeah, all right, and it makes a lot
of money. Yeah, I mean, if you're not a for
some people, I I'm a purist. But you know, just
in it for the love of the game, in it
for the love of the opium. You know, why would you?
Why would you? You don't want to com modify something

(32:26):
you love. You know, It's like if you make your
hobby your job and it ruins it, um, you don't
want to you don't want to lose out on the
love of the game. The game being opium makes sense. Now, Yeah,
the Green Gang in their hand, like they're they're they're
they're Green Gang in it for the love of the money,
and you know that that so they funnel all of
this into into like they funnel a bunch of their

(32:48):
money into into the CAMT and you know, the KMT.
With their best bases now solidifying their armies. Fueled by
the power of Russia, heroin money and the Chinese masses,
they set out the conquer all of China. Okay, that's
a little bit pretty ambitious, but go off. Yeah yeah, now, okay,
but before we fully get into what's become known as
the Northern Expedition, there's one more person who we have

(33:09):
to talk about who I believe am Sure is showing
up for the first time ambassadors pot history as a character,
and that is mause A Doung. Oh. Yeah, we talk
a little bit during the the Lisanko episodes because of
the you know, the famine and yeah, doing the great
leap forward. But yeah, we really have and he's one.
He's one of the guys who's I. I always get

(33:32):
to um um uh, daunted by the sheer amount of
ship to cover when you have to talk about that
guy's life. Yeah, we yeah, obviously, like we cannot really
get into Mao here. But he does one thing that's
extremely important in this story, which is that he he's
organizing a peasant movement in Kudan Province, and he's really

(33:54):
good at this. The newly formed like Judan Provincial Peasant
Association quickly grows to five million members and they start
to seize land from wealthy landholders, and you know, they
start to arm themselves in order to do this, and
you know, credit where credit is due now grew on
land reform. He's okay. Bad on sparrows, bad and workers democracy,

(34:15):
bad on famines, but you know, land reform, he's pretty good.
And the peasants, like the peasants, agree with this. But unfortunately,
the local elites are extremely unhappy that the peasants are
taking other land, and so they start to form their
own malicious is not The peasants were taking more land,
and pretty soon there's just another civil war going on.
In non problems, the peasants and the large landowners. Yeah,

(34:38):
because you know that we need to sords. Is you
get one that you get a lot yep, and then
they keep happening. It's great now, no sort of Interestingly,
the CCP is actually extremely piste off that the peasants
are taking all this land because you know, as I
said earlier, right, part of the canties bases landlords, and
these people not happy about the prospect of land reforhim.

(35:01):
And you know this e CP is still trying to
hold the like the CCP Camp United friend together And
you know, Robert, you might be thinking to yourself, what
kind of brain genius does look at a coalition that
includes a bunch of landlords and mao and go, yeah,
this is a basis for a stable working relationship. And
I mean, yeah, he's not famed for his love of landlords.

(35:23):
Yeah yeah. And and and the answer to that is
a bastard's pot of lum Joseph Stalin and also Trotsky. Yeah,
there's my boys, there's my good boys. Looks j stall looks,
looks at mause Dung, reads up on this guy's background
and says, you know, who can we get along with landlords?

(35:46):
The funny thing about this, right, So, so okay, we'll
get really fully into what like the brain trust in
Moscow thinks about this later, but like, okay, so the
fun part about what what's about to happen in China
here is that so it's a complete fiasco all the
communist Stalin looks at this and he sounds like, yeah,
it gets worse, it gets worse. And this this runs

(36:07):
into my theory of every every critical moment in world history,
you can find a decision that Stalin made that made
it worse, and this one. It's not just this. Stalin
also is like, so he the lesson that he takes
from from this conflict, he's he takes much a really
weird lesson from and he tried and he tries to
force the Communist party in Palestine to like take a

(36:31):
completely weird line based off of what happened in China,
and that's like one of the reasons that like it
completely fails and is like one of the reasons everything
goes as ship in Palestine. So yeah, good good job Stalin.
He's gonna sunk everything up in China and then he's
gonna do it again in Palestine. And it's it's great,
it's it's a good time. He's he's he's he really he.

(36:52):
I mean he was good at staying in power he had.
He was less good at everything that was not directly
related to staying and it up. But man was he
good at staying And you can't fault him on that,
all right? So J Stall J Stall focks around and
gets a whole lot of Communist skilled. Yeah, well we'll we'll, we'll,

(37:14):
we'll get we'll get to all of them dying in
a bit. But you know the problem at the moment
is that once the peasants gonna taste for lander form,
they just start doing it themselves. And the CCP like
tells him to stop the passenger like no, like we're
gonna take this land now. And you know, as as
as a skill as this escalatortion to like a full
scales sip war, this this starts to it's crush to

(37:35):
create this huge rift. There's a few other things that
are happening to in this period that's started that like
there there starts to be sort of these huge battles
between the CCP and like the cants left and the
right wing of the CAMT and this what everything Mao
is doing is sort of like escalating this now. The
other reason I bring up Mao is that I think
there's more similarities between Mao and Jong than you'd expect.

(37:58):
You know, they're they're they're both men who were born
sort of the outskirts of Chinese society, who are both you,
and they're most sort of nobodies until they swept up
in the revelu and the tumult of early century revolutionary politics,
and basically, by sheer chance, they go on to become
extremely important historical figures. Now most importantly for our purposes,
Mao and Jong are probably the two most famous poets

(38:19):
in China in this period. And I don't think a
lot of people know this about Mao, but by like
an incredible quirk of history, Mao is one of the
great Chinese classical poets. Like if he studied Chinese poetry
in university, like you read Mao's that that's that's also
true of Stalin, like he wasn't he didn't write nearly

(38:40):
as many poems, but he was a very well regarded
Georgian poet. And they're both leaders of the two big
communist parties like that, that's that's I mean, I don't know.
Maybe maybe there's something about controlling of an all powerful
party apparatus that also makes you good at meter. Actually,

(39:01):
that does kind of make sense. Okay, I can see
I can see it. We're so we we we've developed
the like let them go to art schools theory of fascists.
Now we're developing the never let the poem to somebody
writing a poem, just start hitting them. You know. I
do think Mao is like he's I think it's a

(39:21):
really interesting example of this. There's like, that's a famous
like Stephen J. Gould quote that goes like, I'm somehow
less interested in the weight in convolutions of Einstein's brain
than near certainty that people of equal talents have lived
and died in cotton fields with sweatshops, and like ma
Mao is one of those people who very easily could
have died just like completely unknown peasants, and instead, you know,
he becomes a world redound poet. It's and some other stuff. Yeah, yeah,

(39:45):
just a shame that he also wound up being Mao. Yeah,
he has, he has, He does a couple of things
in his life. Yeah. Now, now, and this is important
for our purposes. Jong is also a famous Chinese poet,
and I've okay, Robert, I want you to read this poem.
War poet is Yeah, I want you to read this

(40:08):
poem that I've just put in the chat that's called
poem about bastards. Oh oh fuck yeah, Okay, is this
the whole poem? This is the whole poem. You tell
me to do this, he tells me to do that.
You're all bastards, Go fuck your mother. That's a good poem.
I assume that. I assume it rhymes more in the
original language. Here's the thing, right, so you would think

(40:31):
that it sounds better in Chinese, And no it doesn't,
because that's I'm gonna say it. Then that's not really
a poem. That's that's that's a guy telling someone to
go fuck his mother. Yeah, that's like a running theme
for him. He's really into that. He's really into the
motherfucking stuff. Okay, I mean it's not bad, you know,

(40:54):
I I get it's the kind of thing. If he were, like,
for example, an actual like revolutionary fighting for liberty as
opposed to a vicious warlord um rapes women, this would
have a little bit more bite because he's the one
telling people to do things, like nobody's told this guy
what to do in quite a while at this point

(41:16):
in the story. No, no, he he writes a lot
of poems. I'm going to do one more because it's
great and this one, this one has a story behind it.
So we've talked about this a bit. There's there's this
big drought in Shandong, and so John goes to basically
he goes to like a local local temple of the
Dragon Emperor, and he prays for rain, and he writes

(41:38):
this just spectacular poem about the ordeal. The dragon Emperor
is also named Jong. Why does he make life hard
from me? If it doesn't rain in three days, I'll demolish.
I'll demolish your temple, and then I'll have cannons bombard
your mom. Can't can't cannon, I will shoot your mom.

(42:04):
Is the gist I'm taking out of you know, too
solid flex all right, well, you know, and here's here's
here's the phone part about this. So so he writes
this poem while he's waiting for three days for it
to rain. It doesn't rain. So he goes back to
the temple and he like he like, there's like a
massive people praying to this idol of the of the

(42:24):
Dragon network. He's like walks up to the idol, slaps
it and yells, fuck your sister, how dare you make
Shan Young's people suffer by not giving us rain? And
then he brings a bunch of cannons up to the
temple and just start shooting them at the sky to
bombard the heavens. In what I can only read is
one of the earliest attempts to attack and to thrown God. Now,

(42:47):
the next day it rains, and I will let you
all make of that what you will. I mean, we're
in the middle of a drought in Oregon here, so
I may I may steal that one I may steal.
Look the things from this guy. I'm gonna be entirely honest.
I'm going to steal a number of things from this guy. Hey,
shoot cannons at this guy will make it rain. I

(43:07):
I already do like shooting at this guy. I mean
there are some like, there are some like I mean
that that's something China is today, right, Like there's some
attempts to kind of like see now it's not just
shooting guns it but like to seed clouds in order
to kind of bring rain on, like that's the thing
that gets done. Yeah, and there's a theory I don't
buy it. Well, again, I'm not a chemist, but there's

(43:28):
actually a theory that like, because of like the residue
on the gunpowder something of the cannons that like this
like replicated the effect of the cloud seating stuff. And yeah,
I mean it says that I'm just looking at this
up now, it says they they use silver iodide rockets,
and it looks like, um, it looks like the actual
science on this is kind of um not not settled.

(43:52):
I don't I certainly don't know enough to say whether
or not it is. But I could see how silver
iodide could also be a byproduct of firing cannons in
this guy. Yeah, I mean things happen. I don't know
sure what I'm hearing is that to deal with this drought, Um,

(44:12):
Oregon needs me to shart start shooting at the sky.
Isn't it legal to just like wheel cannons around? Like
there's no law against cannons at all that I'm aware of.
Most states stay count as a curio in relic, which
means they're unregulated. Oh, this is this is okay, as
long as the ball they fire does not itself explode.
I'm fairly certain you can do anything you want with

(44:34):
a cannon. Now I'm having I'm having a series of
visions that involve you in a bunkers. Yeah, I'm starting
to go fund me right now, and they'll fund me
several cannons so that Oregon will have a rainy season again. There, Robert,

(44:56):
you know who else will fund you? Wow, I was
a good one. I mean, they absolutely do, Sophie. Yeah,
the products and services that support this podcast, and they do.
They have bought me a number of things that are
similar in nature to cannons. Anyway, here's ads, motherfucker's we're back. Uh,

(45:26):
we're all just having a real zip bang wow hoosily
doosily do of a time. So he shoots some clouds,
which I think we've decided was a good decision. What's next? Yeah,
So so okay, unfortunately or unfortunately, depending on whose side
you're on. Uh, this is shooting shooting guns at clouds

(45:48):
is not the only thing in nationalist I've been doing
in this period, and that's not the only thing the
world lords have been doing in this period either. So
the warlords like look south and are like, Okay, this
is a large army with a lot of Soviet support.
We need we need to sort of you know, we
need to start getting ready to fight them. So in
Jung Chilling and his allies form something called the National

(46:10):
Pacification Army, Which is the best explanation of that I
can give is it's like the United Frind for warlords.
It's like like a all the warlord solidarity for guys
with armies. Yeah. Yeah, But you know, it's kind of
remarkable because all of these people hate each other and
I've spent the last what is this is twenty six
by now, so ten years just like murdering each other

(46:31):
over nothing. But you know, when when, yeah, when when
when they're asses on the line, they come together and
yeah yeah. And so you get Junk Chilling, Jung Jung
Chong and the Jade Marshall who pay Fo who is
back after somehow managing to pull together enough of his
territory and his troops to like be a kind of

(46:51):
significant power again, but is now fighting on the side
of his former rival and the man who sent him
into exile because warlord period. And you know, they at
first looked like a pretty forbidable army, but they're immediately
weakened when we'll pay for who who really like this
man should honestly be called the marshal of getting owned

(47:13):
by his own subordinates because so she goes to fight
the nationalists and then his army immediately collapses because he's
betrayed by one of his generals again for the second
time in two years. Yeah, class solidarity only goes so
far when your classes guys with armies, uh and no conscience. Yeah,
and you know, and this is this is the other

(47:34):
thing like this, The single best strategy that you can
possibly have in the Willard period is to defect m hm.
Now this this leaves the world lords in a pretty
bad position. And it's here with the national passification army
just like completely unable to stop the Nationalist advance that
John makes the first of two mistakes that would cost

(47:56):
him everything. So John had been given two jobs by Drilling.
One of them was to defend Shanghai. The the other
one was to confronts nationalist advance around Nanjing and to
reforce reinforce the troops of one of the sort of
more unreliable worlords in the coalition. Now that Worlord's troops
have been doing okay against the nationalists. But Jong, like

(48:16):
I think justifiably worried that this guy is going to
defect for the fourth time in two years. He's like, okay,
this this guy, this guy seems like the thing to do.
It seems like everyone defects, Like he's gone traded three times. Yeah. Yeah,
So so Jong is as strong is worried this guy
is gonna effect again. So so he sends most of
his army to reinforce like that guy. By by reinforced,

(48:39):
I mean he wants to put an army next to
him he doesn't affect. And but this this is a
complete disaster um. The part of his army that John
sends to defend Shanghai just gets completely destroyed. And the
other warlord subordinates hate Jong so much that like they
defect to the KMT rather than like be on the
same side as him. Yeah, it's pet It sounds like

(49:03):
he piste off some people. Yeah, but it's funny because
it's not like like the other warlords. Like the other
warlord isn't good either, but like man John John, John
is a tier above all of the rest of the
war lords when it comes to just war word ng mhm, yeah,
Joan like he wins the Battle of Nunjan. But it doesn't.
It's it's it's the definition of a feric victory because

(49:26):
in the middle of all of this sort of inconclusive fighting,
the workers take Shanghai, now exactly where you don't want
the workers if you're this guy. Nope. So so to
understand what this means or of how this happened, we
need to go back a little bit. So. So after
the General's record ends, the General Labor Union and the

(49:47):
communists they started working on this plan to take the city,
and they make their first attempt, which is called the
First Armed Uprising in late n This this doesn't work
at all. It's it's a complete failure. And here you
get to see just the unbelievable brutality of the warlord governments.
I'm going to read this passage from the delightfully named

(50:08):
Hans J. Van der Ven this book called War and
Nationalism in China, which describes aftermath of the failed First
Armed Uprising. Okay, a judge went about the streets accompanied
by someone carrying a shield with the martial law text
on it. Anyone suspected of revolutionary activity, even something like leafletting,

(50:29):
was executed on the spot by two broadswordered executioners, after
which their heads were just played on bamboo pikes. Smith
recalls a story that one street hawker shouting by my
Cakes was stabbed by a soldier who thought he was
crying defeat the army. Several hundred people were killed. I
don't speak Mandarin or um any other languages but English,

(50:52):
which I also barely speak. In the language this guy
was speaking, does buy my Cakes sound at all like
a literally Okay, okay, it's kind of like it's kind
it's not I don't know, like it's similar enough that
that like I can like I'm pretty sure this's happened,
it's not. Yeah, but but it's not similar enough that

(51:15):
like anyone who's not just completely hyped up on murder
is going to mistake them. Well, I mean, look, if
you've never murdered anybody, it it's who. I don't know
where I was going with their continue it's very scary.
What So you know, the motto of this podcast is

(51:36):
a B M always be murderer. No, it's cut what
Robert says, so I can keep Yeah. That that is
the motto of the podcast. Thank you, Let's let's move
right along. Now, you know, in the face of all
this violence, it is a genuinely incredible testament to the
raw capacity that are for like the raw power of

(51:58):
our capacity for resistance. That this doesn't work. Like people,
people see their friends, their neighbors, their coworkers, their families
decapitated in the street and impaled on pikes. And the
next month they do it again. In February, there's a
second armed uprising, three hundred thousand workers, undeterred by the

(52:21):
possibility that they too could end up on a pike.
Stage what was to that point the largest striking Chang
High history. Now this too fails because the armed uprising,
the strikes weren't coordinated enough. But the third armed up
rising on March finally takes the city. See guys, third
times to charm with armed uprising? Were we We did

(52:43):
one and that's all I'm going to say on the matter.
And well, and that one that what was barely armed,
that was barely armed, one side was very heavily armed. Yeah. Now,
eight hundred thousand workers just blow the previous, all previous
records for the largest strike and sang history out of
the water. And that's a protest the size of the

(53:06):
city I live in. Yeah. And and the Woolard troops
like somewhat understandably, just like flee rather than face them.
Yeah that makes sense. Again, I've I've seen cops do that. Yeah,
that was pretty good. Yeah. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to the triumphant workers,
who were in the process of setting up an elected
citizens government to run the city, they had already been betrayed.

(53:30):
Oh well, yeah, that's yeah. As March turned to April,
open battles between the left and right wing of the
KMT were raging across China. Yeah. The right wing of
the Nationalists began to slaughter workers everywhere they found a union.
But even as their nominal comrades fell to the machine guns,
communists and left KMT leadership told the workers of Shanghai

(53:50):
to let Changai Check's army into the city. The workers
greeted the nationalists with jubilation. Chang, on the other hand,
immediately went to go meet with the head of the
Green Gang, the guy, the guy you'd freads a legiance
to several years earlier, and with weapons provided by the
French and intelligence provided by the British. The Green Gang
and the nationalist troops began to slaughter the striking workers.
Now the workers aren't pickets fought back, and two hundred

(54:13):
thousand workers went back on strike, even in the midst
of the confusion of the sort of nationalist communist split,
but disorganized by the surprise attack and with with right
wing nationalist troops already in the city, the workers were
defeated in Shanghai, check's white terror. At first white terror
had begun, and I say first year. That's very important
because uh chain is going to do a second white
terror in Taiwan in the late forties. But that that

(54:34):
that's another story for another time. By by the end,
like a nice guy, yeah, hope boy. But by the
end of the purgase, somewhere between three hundred thousand and
a million people lay dead in the dirt, at the
hands of men their leaders had told them the trust.
The source of this disaster was Moscow, which, by the
structure of the Leninist Party and through the discipline of

(54:55):
the Third International, maintained near total supremacy over the communist
political line. It had been Moscow that had forced the
Communists into the alliance with the Nationalists in the first place,
Moscow and their handpicked leaders that had told the Communists
to stay in the United Front as it collapsed around them,
and now as a situation continued to worsen, the surviving
Communists waited with bated breath for the master stroke from
Moscow I could save them from this disaster. What they

(55:19):
got was that one and trotzy bickering. Yeah, that also
completely scans. Yeah, the order from Moscow, I'm going to
reason the provisions of it because it it's completely incoherent.
So okay, So the order is, okay, you have to
get you have to ask the peasants to start doing
land seizures, but also you must prevent them from taking

(55:41):
any land from any soldier, which is like a lot
of the land is owned by soldiers. And then also
simultaneously they're they're supposed to raise an army of seventy
communist troops, but also like that's like an independent communist army,
but also stay in the Nationalist Party and the United Friends.
But then also while being in the Nationalist Party opposed
Shankai check. At the same time, it's the assembled leaders

(56:05):
as Shanghai, as as Elizabeth Perry described in Shanghan strike
quote didn't know whether the laugh or cry. The head
of the CCP described the telegram as quote taking a
bath and a toilet. Yeah, Moscow in the final critical
hour had delivered nothing but ruined in the years that followed,
almost the entire urban workers who will be annihilated. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

(56:32):
the folks. This is why. Yeah, don't don't have an
organization who that that can be entirely destroyed because Stalin
and Trotsky were bickering. Bad organizational structure. As a general rule,
one of the things we advise our listeners is don't
don't don't trust Stalina, don't don't rely on Stalin. Um.

(56:55):
I know a lot of our listenership are in nineteen
nineteen Russia right now. Um, but it's not going to
end well. Guys, don't find out drink him, you know.
In fairness to our listeners in nineteen nineteen Russia, pretty much,
no matter what you do, it's going to end badly.
So just um, I don't know. We go to Ukraine.

(57:18):
Ukraine seems like it's it's just gonna be a solid, solid, upward,
upward trajectory for for the next years. Famous, famously a
country having a great time, has no problems ever, famously
stable Ukraine. Yeah, okay, so yeah, So so in the
chaos of this, you know, the next Chinese Civil war,

(57:41):
you know, it's called the Chinese Civil War. But like,
there's already so many civil wars. So the next Chinese
Civil war between the Nationalists the Communists should have been
a godsend to the warlords. And in the immediate aftermath
is supression of Shanghai Uprising. Worldlord forces were temporarily able
to halt the Nationalist advance, but then disaster struck. After
one his allies suffered a devastating defeat, Chong was ordered

(58:03):
to invade Hanan Province, and and okay, I want to
make clear here that what's about to happen isn't entirely
Jong's fault. Dueling like refused to send him any reinforcements,
and so Jong is left to attack this whole province
like by himself with only one just like incredibly unreliable
minor warlord as his ally. Now his ally almost immediately

(58:26):
proceeds to make just like a series of incredibly reckless,
over reckless attacks, and it's just destroyed by Nationals kind
of attack, and in response, Jong makes the single largest
tactical blunder of his entire career. He he launches this massive,
full scale assaulid on Kaifeng, and it's just it's just

(58:47):
completely destroyed by the Nationalists. And the kind of attack
national kind of attack kills not just like his troops,
this attack kills most like a pretty good portion of
his senior commanders, which is extremely rare in battles in
this period. You almost never like lose your scene commandit.
But he loses a bunch of them, and he also

(59:07):
loses four of his six beloved armored trains, several of them. Yeah,
it loses there with trains and a bunch of the
white Russians like get slaughtered when a bunch of Chinese, yeah,
like piste off Chinese people like they met they finally
managed to cut off the rail lines and they just
like walk into the car and just like murder all
the white Russians. Yeah, fine with that more or less. Yeah,

(59:28):
you know, good, good, good on good and good on
the Nationalists. One of the few times I'll ever say this,
but good on them. Yeah, I'm fine with that. The trains, though,
do anything well okay, but what I say, a lot
of people, but there were trains, yeah, yeah, but okay,
but okay, but here's the thing. When I say lost,
I mean they were like they're all captured and because
because of armored trains, ye train, who's who they're killing

(59:50):
as long as they get to kill, Like some of
some of these trains are like on their seventh owner already,
So yeah, they're gonna the trains will be in service
until the destroyed. But the Japanese neck and Tarty one,
yeah they were the Toyotas of their day. But unfortunately, yeah,
without his trains, Jong is Jong is in a bad spot. Um,

(01:00:13):
He's able to sort of cobbled together some of his army,
but like this is not the army that like the
baby squad had led. This is yeah, it's it's completely demoralized.
And you know, without the trains very important. The speed
of the trains just what basically allows him to counter attack.
And a lot of Jong success have been from just
sort of like being able to outposition and sort of

(01:00:35):
out maneuverous opponents. But when he returns to Shendong, he
can't do this anymore because you know, the trains are gone,
and because he instead digs this like giant series of trenches,
is like this, this is like, you know, he has
a determination, just like he's gonna fight this out, and
the Nationalists just go around them. Yeah, they attack of

(01:00:57):
him behind his armies routed again. Um Jong attempts to
flee to Manchuria with the remains of his army to
continue the war, but Jong dueling his armies are likewise
and shambles after a series of defeats. But the Nationalists
gets assassinated by the Japanese in late sorry late and
this is a problem for Jong because control of materia

(01:01:18):
passes to Jo Ling's son, who very quickly looks at
the map and it is like the Nationalists have taken
literally all the countries that from Manchuria. They're going to
win this war. And so he starts preparing to flip sides,
and he so you know, but because he's preparing to
like flip sides, he refuses to let Jong into Manchuria.
And John like tries to fight his way, but he

(01:01:39):
can't do it. And so Jong as like he's basically
like the like one of the last moments, like Woodlord
standing makes this like heroic triumphant final stand with his
back to the Great Wall of China, and his army
is promptly completely destroyed by the Nationalists after his white
Russian mercenaries defect and he flees to he's able to
he turns right before he loses the battle. He turns

(01:02:01):
the city over the Japanese and then flees to another
Japanese control part of China. And so for for for
you know, for like a few months, Jongs like kind
of out of it. But in Jong apparently still very
much believing that this was all a temporary setback and
that he was in fact still going to do this.
They've all been temporary setbacks before, you know, so you

(01:02:25):
can't fall to him. It's like, you know, whatever, if whope,
fruit can come back, like yeah, maybe you can do
it too, so you know, and he a bunch of
the fift so okay. So so when when the Nationalists
take Shandong, they they do like basically a version of
deep pathification, except they can they do the worst of

(01:02:46):
both worlds where they put like Jong subordinate in charge
of the province as the warlord. But then also they
fire all of his troops. So you have a warlord
still ruling Shendung who everyone hates. And then also all
of these troops are just like doing the bath party
thing where they've just been fired and have no jobs.

(01:03:07):
And so in Jong like returns to Shendong Province with
two of his former allies and some backing by the Japanese,
WITHO what sketchy to what has sent that. Exactly how
much back he got from the Japanese is unclear, but
he's usually gotten some backing, and he starts rebellion with
his former troops. Tens of thousands of his ex soldiers
flocked to his banner, but he's eventually defeated and forced

(01:03:27):
to flee, like so many before him. The japan now
Joon spends about four months living quietly in Japan until
a cousin of the last Chinese emperor who seems to
have pisted him off by sleeping with one of what
are now being called Jong's wives. John is consideredly mad
at this guy, and so one night he sits He's

(01:03:49):
sitting like next to the window of his hotel room
when the guy walks into the garden below him and
I'm gonna I'm gonna read the description from Time because
it's one of the most incredible things that ever been printed.
This is from Time quote. At that moment, a bonut,
a pistol with Marshall Jong happened to be holding, happened

(01:04:10):
to go off, the bullet happened to strike the prince
in the back, happened to kill him. John claimed this
whole thing was an unfortunate accident happened. This is like,
it's it's it's like the most it's the it's the
single greatest example of they can't say he shot this

(01:04:32):
guy that I've ever encountered in a media organization. Yeah,
that's amazing. Yeah, And you know the other incredible thing
about this is that, Okay, so she has just clearly
murdered a dude. She has told the police that he
was staying on a balcony and he fired a bullet
and happened to go off, And the Japanese police, after
again murdering a dude, are just like, yeah, whatever, just

(01:04:54):
paying a hund fifty dollar fine. That's amazing. He really
did just chaney that guy. And then like, you know,
this is like I don't know this, this this is
some just like incredibly weird, corrupt petty like petty police
stuff too, where it's like, yeah, you murdered this guy,

(01:05:15):
but like how do you deal? Are fine? It's fine?
M hm oh no, that's that's fair because like what
the hundred and fifty dollars was, like, I don't know
worth a human life back then. I mean, okay, to
be to be fair, this guy is a cousin of Pooyee,
who's like one of the great world historical monsters, our

(01:05:37):
arch trader demand kinds like enemy of all humanity, so
you know he's related to him. So yeah, hundred it's fine.
I mean, honestly, if if we developed a system of
murder penalties where it was based on how shitty the
person you shot was, um, why not? Yeah. So, you know,
having having escaped this Jong, you know, he lives a

(01:06:00):
fairly uneventful life with his mom and his quote wives
for a few more years until the Japanese invaded Macharian
one to destroy your precious armored trains. Now, Jong Soul
yet another opportunity to make a comeback, and he travels
to China touting his ability to lead the anti Japanese resistance.
Unfortunately for him, in a train station at his home province,

(01:06:23):
the nephew of a nationalist officer that John had executed
like some years before, jumped out and shot him. Jong's
final words were quote, no good, which you know, I
think that's as good of a closing room work on
John as you can get. I mean, you can't argue
with the man that that's a fair thing. Been murdered. Oh,

(01:06:45):
no good? You know what? Not on board with this.
It's kind of my favorite thing. This is cancel culture.
Oh what a rat dude? Um, No notes, great life,
A couple of notes, A couple of notes, A lot

(01:07:06):
of notes actually, But I like the trains, um And
I like that his dick was the size of eight
six paces. It's a lot of paceos for a dick. Well, Chris,
this has been a wonderful journey um into history that
I did not know, um, and it has taught me

(01:07:28):
against more about paceos than I knew. So I'm I'm
very pleased with how today has gone. How are you feeling, Oh,
I'm doing pretty good. You know this this is kind
of like you know, I wanted to say, this is
like this is like the bad part of Chinese history,
but like, no, every part of Chinese history is also
the bad part of Trainese history. So the thing about history.

(01:07:53):
Every now and then you get a guy who I
don't know invented sea monkeys in order to fund national
socialism and we have a laugh. But at there is
a lot more, a lot more I don't know, uh,
gangs of vibes being forced against their will to be
concubines and um people being force fed uh soy pucks

(01:08:14):
while they starve to death. More of that most of history. Good, Yeah,
which is why why why this podcast exists and why
you've all just finished listening to two and a half
hours a real this podcast. Good koukie character. I liked
my joke, Thank you so well. Have any plug as

(01:08:40):
here it behind the bastards? Yeah, I am, I am
at it me c hr three on Twitter or the
isms be destroyed? Dude, Um, I have I have a
substatis are known? Yes to your family? Yes, from from
from from along an illustrious line of vice must be destroyed.
Actually pre dates Ice by quite a bit um baffling

(01:09:02):
story when you really get into it. Yeah nice, no
good yes? Also yes, no good? Thank you well yeah,
thank you thank you at home for listening. Um, that's
going to do it. For us here behind the bastards
for the week until next week. Grab an armored train

(01:09:23):
press getting a bunch of people, enforced them into your militia. Uh,
get dozens of concubines and you know, eventually get shot
to death. No good. Well, okay, you could do other
things if you prefer. Okay, by now,