This isn't including the Cultural Revolution, the Maoist Purges, the Great Leap Forward, the Warlord Era, Western Imperialism, Russian Imperialism, Soviet Imperialism, the Boxer Rebellion, the Xinhai Revolution, famines, flooding, drug trafficking, and the Chinese Civil War.
by Iron_Cavalry
15 Comments
>The hundred soldiers herded the thirty-eight people and surrounded them. There were two young women, one seventeen, and the other pregnant. Both were taken to separate houses and raped by one “devil” after another, an ordeal that left them too weak to stand. The soldiers rammed a broom into the vagina of the younger woman and stabbed her with a bayonet. They cut open the belly of the pregnant woman and gouged out the fetus.
>A two-year-old boy was bawling loudly in reaction to the noise. A soldier grabbed him from his mother’s arms and threw him into the flames. They bayoneted the hysterically sobbing mother and threw her into the creek. The remaining thirty-one people were made to kneel. The soldiers stabbed them from behind with their bayonets, twisting the blades to disembowel them, and threw them into the water.
* Honda Katsuichi, on one of the common atrocities by Imperial Japan’s armies
>General Lin Biao’s men isolated Changchun. Lin Biao ordered the encirclement to be tightened to prevent Nationalists from getting the crops in the fields. Its residents began to starve. Thousands of people crammed into a no-man’s land between Nationalist and Communist lines. Communist sentries ignored “the pleas of mothers holding aloft starving children on the other side of the barbed-wire barricades.”
>“The starving people kneel in front of our soldiers begging to be let through. Some of them leave their babies and children and run away. Some bring rope and hang themselves in front of our sentries.” The siege was not lifted. The Communists requisitioned all grain within a 20-30-kilometer radius. “The majority of people are living on grass and bark, cases of cannibalism are frequent.” Today, the death toll of the siege of Changchun is reckoned to lie between 120,000 and 330,000.
* Hans Van de Ven, on the siege of Changchun during the Chinese Civil War
20th Century China, like 19th Century China, had it extremely rough.
Even before the Nationalists seized power in the 1920s, Republican China was plagued by famines, warlordism, floods, foreign imperialism and small-scale civil wars. The Nationalists waged a brutal war against the Communists whilst also fighting warlords, Russian incursions, and increasingly the Japanese. Millions died even before the infamous Japanese invasion.
The worst era was the Imperial Japanese invasion. Japan had been colonizing Chinese territory since 1931, but the 1937 invasion brought eight years of genocide, forced starvation, terror bombings, economic collapse, plagues, mass rape and slavery. Like the Nazis against the Slavs, Imperial Japan weaponized famines and genocidal policies to kill civilians by the millions. Some 15M or 16M Chinese died in the Japanese invasion, of which 2M were soldiers and 6M famine victims. A quarter of the total number were children.
Then came Mao’s Revolution. After finishing the bloody civil war, Mao Zedong proved his People’s Republic to be no better than the Nationalists. He purged millions, enslaved people into *laogai* Gulags, and ruled the nation as an ideological totalitarian. The worst years were 1958-1961, when his Great Leap Forward unsurprisingly destroyed the Chinese economy and killed over 30M people by famine.
And then Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, causing more chaos and gutting the CCP itself.
it is impressive how chinese history can go from a minor disagreement to eighty million dead in like three weeks.
Chinese history is so fucked that history is not kind to modern China but also not kind to China during the century of humiliation where it was constantly exploited by the western powers. And both the kmt and the communist are equally terrible.
They are genociding uyghur people currently btw.
Modern China history is like child play compared to what they did to their people and other nations in the past.
It’s like rhymes
Mao: I fucking hate you and I hope you die.
Sparrow *chirp*
Has any sentence generated more deaths than “the emperor has lost the Mandate of Heaven”
You forgot Japanese imperialism.
Not to go to far into politics but when the Clintonites thought capitalism and free trade would make China democratic I thought to myself, “Guess they decided to ignore the ’century of humiliation’ in that equation”.
EDIT: I truly want to know what clown downvoted the very factual statement about Japanese imperialism. This is a history meme sub right?
And people wonder why Chinese grandparents don’t like wasting food.
Don’t forget Taiping Rebellion
Pretty crazy how when my grandfather was born, china was a feudal backwater in a state of civil war and now it’s a superpower, history changes quick
>This isn’t including […] The Great Leap Forward
I’m sorry, what? Then what’s the third panel of the comic about??
Chinese history: external wars, internal civil wars, booms and bursts, and purges.
Shouldn’t have cut out the “You die” part in the first panel. White terror in China under Chiang Kai-Shek was insane