Hacker News Reader

Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Anyone know what parts specifically of the KMT’s story are “left out” in the version of history promulgated by the PRC, such that a full accounting would be risky?

My first guess: the strong affiliation between Sun Yat-sen and the party, since the CCP still seems to respect Sun and his Three Principles and use (their interpretations of) them to justify CCP tentpoles.

View on HN

From what I hear, the CCP is displayed as bearing the brunt of the Japanese assault in Chinese textbooks, with the KMT only playing a minor role. I guess they want to avoid the KMT looking like war heroes whose weakness after the war was abused by the CCP to seize power.

EDIT: For anyone interested in the Second Sino-Japanese War and the civil war that followed it, HistoryLapse (by HN user domnuprofesor) ran an interesting series of articles, starting with this one: https://en.historylapse.org/japanese-invasion-of-china-durin...

The question of which fource contributed the most in a war is actually not that easy.

For example, the answer of who defeated Nazi changed significantly in the last 70 years in Europe [0].

[0]: https://www.vox.com/2014/6/16/5814270/the-successful-70-year...

This is interesting. I wish there were more data points, they only show opinion in France in 1945, 1994 and 2004.

The USSR may have saved Europe from Germany, but the USA saved Western Europe from the USSR. The French in 1945 were likely aware of this.

The French in 1945 voted the communists into power - so I'm not sure they generally had the same views on the USSR as modern people do.

That is true. That said, the French Communist Party and Stalin aren't exactly the same thing.

The party line of the French Communist Party in the 1940s was Stalinist. It wasn't until the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising in the following decade that French Communism saw a schism between pro-Soviet and anti-Soviet sides.

The Communist Party was very influential but the government after the war was center-left and Republican (in the French sense of the word), and the political program agreed upon by all the political currents that formed the Resistance was a compromise across the entire spectrum (the Resistance started on the very right and integrated Communist elements after the USSR went to war with Germany). While it pains people to acknowledge it, the Vichy government itself passed a lot of social reforms prior to 1945.

They were a social and ideological force to be reckoned with but they never really went into power, De Gaulle saw to that.

In postwar France the PCF had a large swathe of support after the war due to the Communist role in the resistance (among other reasons). At this time the PCF was a very pro-Soviet party and this support for the Soviets may have translated into the result that you see in the referenced poll.

Support for the PCF waned after de-Stalinization, the Hungarian Uprising and finally the Prague Spring; I'd wager that if one were to look at levels of support for the PCF over the years one could map the switch in perception as to which country contributed most to winning the war.

As someone who was educated in China for 11 years, I would argue the part of KMT that CCP left out in my history book was mostly covering up the corruption and incompetence of KMT.

For example, little did I know that KMT deliberately destroyed a dam to "stop" Japanese army that killed almost 1 million instantly and later caused a famine in Henan that caused between 288,006 and 1,484,983 deaths right at my hometown[0][1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_Yellow_River_flood

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_famine_of_1942%E2%80%9...

Edit: changed to English wikipedia pages from Chinese

Why would they want to leave that out

Perhaps because my history book was a textbook first, the CCP touches were extra. Not the other way around.

I would fairly shocked if the CCP didn’t issue guidelines for history textbooks in addition to a post-publication review for approval.

English articles:

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_Yellow_River_flood

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_famine_of_1942%E2%80%9...

I was going to link your [0] and my [0] as translations on Wikipedia, but then I noticed my [0] already has a different Chinese article assigned as its translation.

thanks for the links, updated.

Wow, your significant figures are way off here

Sorry which ones?

I quoted from the Chinese wikipedia page and there might be some discrepancies there...

They mean that a range with error-bars as wide as (288,006 - 1,484,983) should look more like (0.3 - 1.5 million), since that sort of discrepancy between the estimates implies that neither measurement could have possibly been accurate down to the individual person.

Ah that makes sense. Thanks for the clarification.

They don't and can't deny the affiliation between Sun Yat-Sen and the KMT since it's clear Sun founded the KMT. Rather, they place most of the blame on Chiang Kai Shek for starting anti-Communist campaigns in the 1920s such as the Shanghai Massacre[1]. Indeed communist members dominated the left wing of the KMT before Sun died.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_massacre

Reply on news.ycombinator.com