Labor unrest broke out in China after the Great War, as it did in many places, but in China it had a strong nationalist component. As the warlords fought each other to exhaustion, the United Front was ready to make its move to take control of the country.
But Sun Yat-sen’s death complicated the picture. Who would lead the Kuomintang? Candidates included party chair Wang Jingwei and KMT military commander Chiang Kai-shek, who had the added advantage of being Sun’s brother-in-law.
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Playlist:
Fanfare
Opening Theme
醉漁唱晚 (The Evening Song of the Drunken Fisherman)
Composed in 1876 by 天聞閣琴譜 (Tianwen Ge Qinpu). Public domain.
Performed by Charlie Huang. Used pursuant to a Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 license. Source.
二泉映月 (The Moon Reflected in the Second Spring)
Composed c. 1950 by 阿炳 (Abing). Public domain.
Performed by 张沛坚 (Zhang Peijian). Used pursuant to a Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Source.
Closing Theme
Except when otherwise indicated, the contents of this podcast are © and ℗ 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 by Mark Painter, all rights reserved. Some music and sound effects used by arrangement with Pond 5.
Afaik, the next program is on jazz. On that note, what about devoting a future program on Argentinian Tango? Tango is almost forgotten today, but it was as popular as jazz on its heyday..
Another great episode and looking forward to Jazz next time!
Just a thing I’m curious about: you’ve told multiple times now how communists would work with other groups like the nationalists in China or the Duma in Russia to accelerate the progress towards a communist revolution. How did the works they worked together with feel about this implied idea that after they had produced the result they wanted the communists would essentially turn on them down the road?
Given what happened I’d be surprised if today anyone would want to work with someone calling themselves “marxist” or similar, given this almost planned for backstabbing.
In regard to Sun Yat Sen’s final days, the podcast states: “He was treated with radium, a new and untested treatment at the time…”. Not really new or untested; radium was discovered in 1898, and had replaced surgery for certain cancers by 1920. The limiting factor in its use was its fantastic cost (well over $100,000/gram in the nineteen teens), but this was partly overcome by publicly financed radium institutes, and companies that rented radium for individual treatments.
Nope. Neither the date of discovery nor the cost of radium are relevant. The question is how common was its use to treat cancer in 1925 and how well understood were its effects at that time. The answer to both of those questions is “not very.” You’re talking about an era of radium toothpaste and radium cosmetics. Serious consideration of the use of radium to treat cancer only began in the early 1920s and it wasn’t until the mid 1930s that a protocol was developed that offered a reasonable chance of success. I stand by what I said in the podcast.