[I never knew anything about the Chinese until I read the biography of General Stillwell, ‘Vinegar Joe’
Along with everything else, he was a Chinese ‘scholar’ knew the culture and spoke many of the dialects.
I remember reading about his astonishment at Chang Kai Chek and Madam Chang ‘Cash My Check’ as she was called.
A more unscrupulous duo you have never heard of. When General Stillwell needed 4000 soldiers, Chang agreed to send them. He emptied the jails, hospitals etc., and sent Joe the worst possible ‘soldiers’ you could think of.
Chang sent 4000, alright… men without weapons, training, experience, in poor health, near dead and starving. When Vinegar Joe challenged that, Chang said ‘We have a saying in China...”Would you use your best steel to make nails?”
To Chang-soldiering was not an honorable profession and he wasn’t going to help the US defeat Japan. Chang stockpiled all the US materiel FDR gave him. He was hoarding it for his inevitable scrap with Mao, once WE drove the Japanese out of China FOR HIM]
Almost all (not just most) of the major Sino-Japanese battles were fought by Chiang’s men. At the end of WWII, many of Chiang’s formations existed in name only - they had died in such numbers fighting the Japanese. Whereas Mao’s men were rested and fresh. You know how at near the end of WWI, the French had large-scale mutinies that almost toppled the government? By the end of WWII, Chiang was near the end of his rope.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Sino-Japanese_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1917_French_Army_mutinies
Many of his men surrendered to Mao rather than continue fighting. Their reward (just or not) was to be sent to Korea where they died like flies (UN/US estimates were about 800,000 Chinese dead). Many presumably understood that they were being killed off to ward off the future threat of a counter-revolution against Communist rule, such that 2/3 of Chinese POW’s captured by UN forces in Korea defected to Taiwan.
“Many of his men surrendered to Mao rather than continue fighting. Their reward (just or not) was to be sent to Korea where they died like flies (UN/US estimates were about 800,000 Chinese dead). Many presumably understood that they were being killed off to ward off the future threat of a counter-revolution against Communist rule, such that 2/3 of Chinese POW’s captured by UN forces in Korea defected to Taiwan.”
This was a great post of the state of the minds of the CCP. If anyone here thinks they wont sacrifice large numbers of people to survive they are simply ignorant. China is ruled by one of if not the most ruthless regimes in modern history. The West continues to do business with them.
Here comes a virus with very sketchy beginnings and we are told it was a species jumper. Not likely is what experts are now saying. This was a weapon and now its lose. Isn’t Communism grand.