historical+perspectives

__**Edgar Snow**__


He provides an account of the Chinese Communist Party in his book "Red Star over China" He was an eye-witness to many events, spending a months with the Chinese Red Army in 1936.
 * He was highly critical of Chiang Kai-shek and the GMD, believing that they could neither reform China, nor defned against Japanese agression.
 * He looked to Mao and the communists sympathetically, as an alternative.

//"Chinese Communists could indeed provide that nationalist leadership needed for effective anti-Japanese resistance"

"Without the Communist Party, there would have been no New China". //

__**Immanuel Hsü -**__ born in Shanghai 1923-2005, was a sinologist (the study of China and things relating to China by an outsider), a scholar of modern Chinese intellectual and diplomatic history, and a professor of history at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His major piece of work is the book: "The Rise of Modern China" written in 1975.

Quotes from his book: //“Socialism was appealing because it provided a practical philosophy with which to reject ‘both the traditions of the Chinese past and the Western domination of the present’”//

// “In an economically backward and semi-colonial China, the peasantry constitutes more than 90% of the population; among the whole population they occupy the principle position, and agriculture is still the basis of the national economy. Therefore when we estimate the forces of the revolution, we must emphasis that the peasantry is the important part” //  // “The KMT-CCP collaboration was an uneasy marriage of convenience, each needing but distrusting the other…In this tenuous relationship, cooperation lasted as long as it was in the interest of both; each hoped to emerge the victor when the other had outlived his usefulness.” //  //<span style="FONT-FAMILY: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="FONT-FAMILY: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> “The Chinese government became fiercely determined to fight for its survival to the bitter end” // <span style="FONT-FAMILY: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> //“the second Sino-Japanese war, in less than half a century produced serious and far-reaching repercussions in both countries; it led to the defeat of Japan for the first time in her modern history and thoroughly exhausted the Nationalist government in China, while giving the Communists a chance to expand their army and party in preparation for the ultimate seizure of power”.//