Chinese Revolution

The effect of this type of imperial interaction was to create expectations in the nationalisms they produced which would be very difficult to fulfil. The colonial boundaries were of course sacralised as the correct boundaries for anti-imperial nationalism. But in Burma, Burman ethnie nationalism became fatally entangled with state nationalism after independence, with a constant state of unwinnable war against minority ethnie nationalisms. Vietnam was very fortunate that the anti-imperial nationalism of the Indo-Chinese communist party was unable to take control of the whole colony in 1945, and eventually renamed itself the Vietnamese Workers Party in 1951. The French were able to steer Laos and Cambodia to a fragile independence in 1954 (Goscha 1999). The wars of Indo-China up until 1980 were nevertheless bedevilled by Vietnamese attempts to lead the anti-imperial nationalisms of Laos and Cambodia in the Indo-Chinese Revolution of which they had dreamed since 1930, and problems remain between these variants of nationalism. 

Stemmed from the belief that Vietnam was an ideal test case for Mao s revolutionary ideology. But Chinese sources suggest that from 1964 to 1965, increased U.S. intervention in Vietnam also seriously heightened the Chinese leadership s paranoia because it proved that Mao s previous belief that the United States was a vacillating power was wrong. This in turn had domestic implications, because the sense of external threat led Mao to his attempt to secure the Chinese revolution sufficiently that China could better counter a large-scale U.S. campaign in Southeast Asia. ... 

MacFarquhar, Roderick, and John King Fairbank, eds. The Cambridge History of China Volume ly. The People s Republic Part 2 Revolutions within the Chinese Revolution 1966-1982. Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1991. 

John King Fairbank, The Great Chinese Revolution 1800-1985, Harper Row, NY, 1986, p 36. 

Following the successful formation of the People s Republic of China, the government of China carried out the first, second and third five-year programs and achieved considerable success. Through the Great Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966, and the Ninth National Convention of the Chinese Communist Party, the nation s economy was steered onto a path toward stabilization. 

Following the 1911 revolution, the Ministry of Health of the nationalist government sought to curtail or eliminate traditional Chinese medicine. However, after the communist revolution of 1949, the new government reversed the ban on traditional medicine, establishing a number of traditional medical colleges and institutes whose role is to train physicians and further investigate the uses of herbs. Even in Western hospitals in China, apothecaries are available to dispense herbs upon request. 

For an account of how an even more extreme version of regional specialization was imposed on the Chinese countryside, in violation of local soil and climatological conditions, see Ralph Thaxton, Salt of the Earth The Political Origins of Peasant Protest and Communist Revolution in China (Berkeley University of California Press, forthcoming). 

The official Chinese news agency, located in the city of xinhua, estimates that there are ten million guitar players in their country today, an amazing number considering that the instrument had been banned during the cultural revolution that lasted 10 years, from nineteen sixty-six to nineteen seventy-six. 

The crops responded, and China experienced the same green revolution that had swept across parts of India and Pakistan a few years earlier. As elsewhere, this revolution was ignited by plant breeding, but powered by fertilizer. An acre of Chinese rice paddy now brings forth twice as much grain as it did in 1973. Yields of wheat have tripled over the same period. 

Although - apart from Vietnam - Beijing apparently did not provide much concrete support for these movements. See Peter Van Ness, Revolution and Chinese Foreign Policy Peking s Support for Wars of National Liberation (Berkeley, 1970). 

---