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Void prohibited must be 18 plus pay responsibly visit legends.com for full details. - Get in the game now and score a 100% match on your first purchase only at legendswithaz.com. ♪ Crown coins to see home ♪ - Hello, and welcome to Western Civ. In today's bonus author interview, I am sitting down with historian and author, Hans Vendevin. And we're actually gonna be talking about his most recent book, Blood Dawn, World War II, and the Making of Modern Asia. So I'm very interested in works that shift the paradigm or shift our narrative a little bit. As we'll talk about during the interview, I think it's totally understandable for nations to frame conflicts from their perspective. So it makes sense that if you're in the United States, the focus of World War II is really on the defeat of the Axis powers, because that is the way that that conflict shaped American life. But I think we have to be careful with that narrative, because again, it is one perspective, and there's similarly a unique perspective, whether you're Russian, part of the former Soviet Union, whether you're British, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, all of these perspectives are different. Even though they're looking at the same events, and that's what I love about books like this. So in Blood Dawn, Professor Vendevin is essentially arguing, an argument that I agree with, by the way, that the conflict in Asia is not so much about the defeat of Imperial Japan, which of course it is in part, but primarily it's a story of transformation. It's a story of how really beginning at probably your 1800s, so the start of the 19th century, Asia undergoes a protracted period of intense transformation, something that had not been seen before, that Imperial China, and I'm putting air quotes around China, because that phrase wouldn't have been used in a historical designation at this point, it would have said the dynasty of the Qing, as we'll get into, because dynasties, Imperial dynasties, had ruled China for millennia at this point successfully so. And that's about to get wiped away in the span, really, if you wanna start at the 19th century, span of about a decade, and that's crazy. And similar things are gonna happen throughout Asia, and the Second World War happens to be a catalyst, which falls in the middle of this, that accelerates this process of transformation and nationalist growth. And all of those things matter. And Professor van de Ven does a phenomenal job of laying out his argument throughout the book. Now, as always, in these discussions, we're not gonna have time to get into every single nuance of this book, I think we talk maybe about issues that he raises in about 30 pages, of the 300 plus that are in the book, but that's the way interviews go, 'cause we can't talk about everything. So if you are a fan or you know of a fan of World War II, what's a different perspective on particularly the Asian theater? This is an excellent book to pick up, and I highly recommend it. And so we're gonna jump right into the interview today with all the usual caveats that you don't it's an interview, I can't control the audio quality of every single thing that happens, but this one turned out pretty good. And I think you'll enjoy it, and I know you'll enjoy the book, if you pick it up, you can click the link in the show notes. If you wanna get it that way or get it from your local book or there, if you aren't listening to this, it is available right now. And so without further ado, here is the interview with Professor Hans Fendiven, as we talk about Blood Dawn, World War II, and the making of modern Asia. (upbeat music) - Winning never sounded so good. - Hi, this is Michael from Georgia, I 140K, and finally renovated my home. Visit crowncoins.com, sign up in seconds, intercode crown, and get a free lucky wheel bonus. You may win at the 10,000 sweeps coins. No purchase needed. Code valid for new users only. 18 plus terms and conditions applied. (upbeat music) - All right, and welcome back, as I mentioned in the introduction, just a moment ago I'm sitting down today with historian Hans Fendiven, and we're gonna be talking about his most recent book, Blood Dawn World War II, and the making of modern Asia. Well, I guess as the title of the book kind of suggests, we're gonna ship the paradigm a little bit here on World War II today. As World War II, at least, is taught in a lot of American schools, where a lot of you guys are listening. It starts on September the 1st, 1939, but there's a lot of good reasons to suggest that that is actually not true in the least, and we're gonna try to change that around. And in fact, I think actually the first sentence of the book is very insightful. When you write, as taught in schools, exhibited museums and enacted in films, World War II is commonly portrayed in the West as a struggle in which the allies, through immense sacrifice, triumphed over unbridled German and Japanese aggression. That's a narrative, right? That's a narrative that we're sold and we buy into. So I'm wondering if you could try it. - Absolutely, yes. - Exactly, so could you explain to the listeners, well, why is that framing not necessarily the way that we should be approaching the topic, maybe elucidated a little bit for us? - Let me try. I think it was a good case to say that the Second World War began in July, 1937, when China decided to take on Japan, and out of that emerged the Second World War that ends up being a battle between China, the UK, and of course, especially United States and Japan. So from that kind of, that war, from which initially the UK and United States really didn't want to get involved with various reasons, but it expanded to engulf the major powers of the area. And I think once you shift your attention to Asia and the kinds of effects the Second World War had, you get a sense of how deep the transformation was there. I mean, until 1937, imperialism remained strong, not just in China, of course, when the Second World War began, but also in India, and Vietnam, and Indonesia, Japan is trying to build its own empire, trying to house the Western empires. It's a real dissent of action, I think you can say, is there. And then the Second World War ends up with the feeding the Japanese alternative to Western imperialism, which was imperialism of kind. But it creates this new Asia of all these new nation states that we now know of China, of Korea, of Vietnam, of India, of Pakistan, of Indonesia, all as large unified countries. And none of that had existed before. It's a huge transformation. And I think in that way you can almost compare the depth of the impact the Second World War in Asia to the depth of the First World War in European politics, when, because in Europe, it leads to the disintegration of three empires, the Ottomans, the Russians, the Hungary, Austria. And out of that comes a new kind of Europe, especially in Eastern Europe, of new nation states, new arrangements in the Middle East, and so on. So huge geopolitical transformation. I think until 1937 in Asia, it is still the Western powers that really call the shots. And you have all these existing configurations in various states of upheaval that really lack agency, lack power, and that completely changes. And so I think the Asian world, with which we live now, of increasingly powerful, increasingly prosperous nation states, really emerged in this period. And the great heroes of the struggles in China, in India, in Vietnam, in all those other places, they remain celebrated today as the fathers of the new nation states that emerged out of this. And I think it's just different in Europe, where-- yes, of course, the defeat of Germany was very, very. important and, you know, the sacrifices made for that, we continue to be deeply grateful for the generations that have done that, but on the ground, geopolitically, it doesn't change that much. And I think Asia is different. And if we want to understand the Asia of today, then we need to understand this history, the emergence of the nation states. And also in the emergence of these nations states, the divisions that emerged within them as this struggled to establish control over their own futures. So the time of straight crisis, the divided career, the horrible relations between India and Pakistan, the bad relations between China and India itself, all these can be traced back to the Second World War in Asia. And I think it doesn't mean more awareness of that, of how Asians look at the Second World War, even to understand and come to grips with the problems we face today. I hope that makes sense. It's a lot to unpack there, but we'll get to that, I'm sure. It is, it is a lot. And I think we'll get to it. But I also think that it's critically important, you know, the problem with the narrative oftentimes as it's portrayed in the United States is when you're talking about the Asian theater in the Second World War. Oftentimes, textbooks or teachers as presented as a narrative that it goes from Pearl Harbor, and then maybe you talk about the Battle of Midway, and then it jumps straight to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you know, as though there aren't a million different subplots going on in there. And then there's really no discussion whatsoever about the transformation that happens. You know, it is, it is kind of well, the, the Japanese are defeated, and the narrative becomes almost like, well, everything went back to the way I was before, but that's not even remotely true. That's not true. No, no, no, no. Yeah, and it's interesting because in so many ways, the Second World War is the World War that World War I is kind of, I'd call it World War Light. You know, it's like, yes, there are some combat operations in a few, little in Africa, little, little in Asia. But I mean, not even remotely close to what you're going to get in the Second World War, you know. No, that's, you know, you're absolutely right. And it's, I think it's not, it's completely understandable that Americans focus on the American side of the story. Of course, they do. As did a British, as did a Dutch, as did a French. But I think we are in this, in an age now where we might want to see a bit more broadly, because we are now generations away from that particular period. And I think one of the things I really want to emphasize in the book is the enormous suffering in Asia. I mean, Asia may not have been, you know, China's mobilization, I think you can make a bigger case for India's mobilization. Indian Army was obviously very important both in Europe and in Asia. But they were not, you know, it's the UK and USA that defeat Germany into China. And everybody needs to accept that and China is a problem with that, but they should overcome those. At the same time, that doesn't mean that the enormous suffering you see in Asia is a result of the fact that you have very poor countries, agricultural countries being forced to wage highly complicated, industrialized, modern warfare. And trying to draw the energy, you know, the food, the people out of that ravaged countryside to wage this shoot was the enormous famine that take place in China and India and Indonesia. They get full of recognition of what that area of the world has gone through, did go through in the Second World War. I think it's important it's on right. But as I, you know, as I keep saying when I, you know, I teach fighter time in China, but you know, and especially in a day when we seem to be drifting towards a renewed war, you know, the cost of warfare of modern warfare is just so huge and it's tens of millions of people who literally starve to death, let alone the people who are just desperately hungry all the trauma. I think it's a side, a human side, the Second World War. But it doesn't matter if you're Japanese or Chinese or German, you know, it is just so horrible. And I think to, to remind us of the cost of war remains important. It just does. Well, I think that's critical. And I mean, we could, I mean, we could probably spend the entire podcast talking about that, you know, and the reality that, you know, we talk about, you know, war right now is in like, well, there's, there's a war in Iran, certainly there's a war in Ukraine, but there's a huge difference between that sort of conflict and a war that requires complete and total mobilization of society. There's, there's a war between a war and a conflict that's fought, at least in the United States, by what is essentially, you know, a volunteer army versus something that's going to require mass conscription that's going to require a mass transformation of society. Those are the sorts of things that I think we do forget a little bit about today. And I really don't want to remember to be blunt, like I don't want to go through another existential crisis that requires those sorts of things. But let me ask you about another sentence that you write that I really thought was powerful because you write, from this perspective, the defining theme of Asia's World War II was not the defeat of the Axis powers, but the transformation of a region long dominated by European empires into one made up by Asian state, excuse me, nation states. That, to me, I think, would be something, and you're right, it's totally understandable that I would probably get pushback from, from an American audience because they would say, no, no, the purpose of the Second World War was to defeat Nazi Germany and imperialist Japan. That was the purpose of the war. But so I'm going to ask you to defend that thesis and explain me, no, why is the transformation more important? Let me first of all say that the defeat of Japan and Germany, and of course Italy, which we tend not to talk about too much, these were critically important, and I shudder at the thought of the kinds of worlds we would now live in if either Germany or Japan had, this is absolutely, so that's all, let's state that for it, and we should be very, very grateful for the sacrifices, and a will to fight, and we'll put Britain and the United States, states that were more slowly, Britain were, but in the end, you know, the Allies came together around that purpose and that was very important. I think in Asia, though, that opportunity, the Second World War, became an opportunity for a range of movements to say, well, okay, all that's right, and we don't want that kind of world, but we also don't want a world which is dominated by European imperialism or Japanese imperialism, and you have people in India, especially Indonesia, as Yukarno comes to mind, who say, actually, the Japanese offensive, the ID, Prohor, gives us opportunities to mobilize against imperial overlordship, and from that perspective, you know, when in the end, by 1945, when there is this debate in India, there's a court case in India where people have to discuss, well, so what is the difference of Indians collaborating with the Japanese or Indians collaborating with the British? Actually, they are both dominant forces who have exploited our societies whose rule is not just whose rule is, and we want freedom, democracy, self-determination, the determination, as was promised by the Allies, to decide our own futures, and have very different views about those futures, and we can talk about those and the kinds of rivalries and discontentances come out of that, but for them, you know, Japanese imperialism is an awful variety of imperialism, you don't have to tell Chinese about that, but the kinds of things that were done by European imperialists, the structure of the countryside, mobilization of forces, the economic distress, social pressure, not all, and definitely not always just, it's a difference of not necessarily of kind and more of a degree, so to speak, and for them, there is an opportunity to say, we want a better world, that doesn't always work out in practice, of course it doesn't, you know, idealism can only take you so far, but for them it's an opportunity to say, okay, we want a new future, we want to determine our own affairs, we don't want the Europeans to continue to talk to us, and Europeans who have failed to defend us from Japanese imperialism, we want to be masters of our own house and decide our own affairs, and they want that opportunity to rebuild our countries, put them on a new course, in some cases, like India, a very democratic one, but in other cases, more communist, Islam becomes important for the same source of reasons, so much more complex, so I think there's a lot of contingency in the stories, but I don't find it, when the American story of, yes, we defeated the Japanese adaption. It was absolutely true, and it was a great contribution, but I don't find that that strange to think, to have sympathy for the views of the leaders of Asian nationalist movements to say, well, we also don't want a future that is simply determined by, or that it sees a revival of European imperialism as was proposed in 1945, including by the American. And I think there is maybe to even make it even more understandable when Roosevelt drew up the Atlantic Charo. It was a promise of self-determination. And that had great traction across Asia, but Roosevelt makes in 1942 when he is confronted with an Indian uprising against British. He has to make that very difficult decision, often, do I support British Empire? Or do I stick with the Atlantic Charo? And I think entirely understandable pragmatic reasons decided, well, we need British Empire British power to win the war against Germany. Japan, I think, is very much second in its mind. And so he makes that pragmatic decision, and I think from that, when Asians are confronted with that kind of, what do we say, that it's pragmatic, it's understandable, but for them, it's a betrayal of the promises that Roosevelt has made. And then in 1945, when Japan surrenders, Americans, again, throw their way behind the restoration of European imperialism, not because they support European imperialism, far from it. One of the reasons that the Americans are slow in joining the Second World War is because they see it as a repeat of the First World War, which leads to an intensification of European imperialism. But it's a pragmatic decision believing that there will be peace in Asia only if we restore these pre-war orders, and hope is that over time, Asia will develop and become an European imperialism will, but that kind of over time in the long run, eventually, and so on, that kind of promise doesn't cut it. They, the leaders in Asia say, no, we've been there before, and we know your promises, and we want it now. Moreover, these forces have grown huge in the Second World War. They have created these new leaderships who are hugely experienced. Some have real military power. They know how to use the modern media, and they say, no, we're not going to make some content for some pragmatic arrangements. Our chance is now, and if we do not act now, we might be stuck with the continuing European dominance of Asia. So they move. Two days after the Japanese surrendered, Tsukarna declares Indonesia independent. As does Ho Chi Minh very soon after in Vietnam, and you know, these things play out in more complex ways, in India, in China, but the same sorts of calculations, I think, are happening at all sites. Move now. This is our opportunity. Winning never sounded so good. At Crown Coins Casino, real people win real prices every single day. Hi, this is Michael from Georgia, I won 40K, and finally renovated my home. Visit crowncoins.com, sign up in seconds, enter code crown, and get a free lucky wheel bonus. You may win up to 10,000 sweepscoins, crowncoins.com, that's C-R-O-W-N coins.com, no purchase needed. And only void were prohibited by law, 18 plus terms and conditions apply. It's always been amazing to me that Europeans and the Americans, in this case, because of course, listeners of the show will remember, you know, these similar promises were made to peoples of the world at the end of the first world war through Wilson's 14 points, and then they came to nothing. Now in that case, to an extent, they came to nothing because the United States essentially turned its back and said, "Well, we're going to turn inward," you know, that the treaty was never ratified, that the United States never joined the League of Nations, which has seen as a betrayal to Europe in a lot of ways, but it counts in Asia, too. So these sorts of things, it's like they haven't heard this story before, you know. So it's so haughty, I guess, for us to assume that, like, well, we'll just tell them to keep waiting, especially from a people that famously did not wait to declare its independence. But let's take a step back because you talk really the first chapter of this book, because we've kind of been focusing on the introduction so far. Really the first chapter is about the reordering of Asia between roughly 181930-ish, okay? I want to give listeners a sense of the change that Asia is experiencing during this period, and I think it makes the most sense, if you wouldn't mind, to start with the Qing with China, you know. And, of course, it's not necessarily the right one, but let's talk about that, and just try to explain to the listeners the amount of change, you know, the Qing dynasty, which is going to collapse, and then ultimately transition into the Republic, and how big of a deal that was. It is a huge deal. It's the Qing dynasty, let's say, in the late 18th century, 1787-1990s, it's a very flourishing enterprise, it's dominated by dimensions, of course. If you take Asia's economy as a whole, Asia's trading networks, it's, you know, living standards are as high as in the richest parts of Europe. The richest parts of China are as high as the rest of Europe. It's the same as true for a certain point of Bengal in India. You know, it's the center of the world still. And by a century later, these countries are very poor. They do not matter economically. There's been no very little industrialization, and all the really houses that have dominated, the dominated Asia in the late 1830-19th century, they're all gone. The Qing dynasty is the last one to go in 1912, but you have the Joseans in Korea, you have the Tokugawa's in Japan, the Mughal Emperor. So all these ancient ruling houses that have secured a sort of flourishing of Asian societies, Asian economies, Asian cultures from about 1600-1800, they're all gone. Instead, you have a world in which, first the British, and then they're doing it by the Dutch and they're by the French, who have created these territorial colonies in which it are the Westerners who really are calling the shots. They have arranged an economic order in which, let's put it most simply, the economies that Asia deliver, the primary products that allow textile industry and real industries to emerge, especially cotton, of course, initially. And they grow wealthy out of that and build up enormous amounts of wealth. And they sell these products so that they destroy not only the sort of the agricultural economy, but also the handicraft economies. So people economically worse than worse up, there's real decline. I think that's an economic story, but there's also a cultural story. Now around 1780, 1818, 10, the grades, scholars, the grades, cultural leaders, the moral leaders, the religious leaders, still had enormous standing reputation, power in their own world. But then you come in with industrialization, with liberalism, with science, with all those enormous progress of Western knowledgees, in all kinds of areas, and they completely lose their self-confidence. The poverty of their own society is combined with the intellectual, scientific, industrial, technical achievements. We are losing this. And that leads to a crisis of our civilization simply going to disappear. Do we simply have to change our civilizations in line with what the West is teaching us? And of course, Christianity comes in as well as a kind of new religious truth, a new moral truth to complete lots of confidence. I think that begins to change really in the late 19th century and then really rapidly after the First World War. When you get these kinds of liberal ideas and self-determination, if socialism begins to take hold among a few elite intellectual leaders, many of whom have studied by that time in the West, and they begin to believe that we are two can be nation states. And after the First World War, as you said earlier, very correctly, the to promises of Wilson and then the realities of God. continued imperialism brings out huge demonstrations in 1919, first in Korea, then in China, and in India, and then in Egypt. And that, I think, begins to show the 1920s is a decade of enormous mass movements that are inspired by many Western ideas, but liberalism, communism, socialism. And you get the discovery of political leaders, of the enormous power they can derive from mass protests in cities. And of course, in these cities that have emerged since the 1850s or so, you have modern universities, modern schools, spread of education, spread of new media, journals, newspapers, and all of that. And you get really powerful expressions of, yes, we do want this new future. So you get real mass priorities beginning to emerge. They kind of suppressed both in India, China, Korea, Vietnam, and so on, by a still very powerful imperialist order through intelligence, through police agencies, and so on. But so I think when then the Second World War breaks out, when China decides to really stand up to Japan, they say, these are new opportunities. And you have the ideas, you have the beginnings of the social political organization, sometimes the armed forces, as in this time, we really can take control over our own histories. So I think that's the long-term framing in which I see the emergence of these independent movements, anti-European movements, anti-European, not necessarily anti-American, I think it's important to understand. The drives this rejection of a new imperial order after Japan surrendered in 1945. - Well, just kind of going back to the Qing for a moment. You know, the Qing dynasty is not a pushover. You know, this isn't a small territory. You know, so, you know, I guess I'll pause the thesis that I think we're always told as to why Asia is reoriented, why it falls under imperial domination, starting in really the 19th century is, basically, well, the West got the Industrial Revolution, the East didn't, and that's it. But I'm curious, particularly in the case of the Qing and China, like, is that true? And why couldn't such a powerful state stand up to, you know, what in some cases seems like a relatively limited attack? - Well, it's a great question, and part of the answer is that a Qing dynasty is ruled by the mentors, which are non-han people. And so from that perspective, in the late 19th century, you have these intellectual leaders, Han Chinese intellectual leaders, who explain China's weakness by that time as saying, well, it's because the mentors are a ruling clique that wants to keep us and Chinese weak and cowardly. Now, that's a very ideological explanation and it doesn't explain very much at all. I mean, it explains a lot, I think, but it's not the whole explanation, but it's the economic disintegration is very important. That's a very important part of it. People are becoming poorer. It's also a population of expanding rapidly that creates enormous stresses. I think the opium trade also has a lot to do, and I think you're probably driving at that. In the end, British imperialism in the Indians of Content can only be made to work because of the opium trade. So what the British do is they control the cultivation of opium in India. They sell it off to private traders, traders, who then take it to China, and they sell it there for the silver that they need in order to purchase Chinese tea. That tea is then exported back to Britain where the East India Company earns the money and to make the whole system, it's a triangular trade that is necessary to make the system work. But the opium trade, in some ways, British imperialism is narco imperialism. And looking at South America, we know what that does. And I think that is certainly part of the story of to explain China's decline. China's, there's a lot of silver outflow, so that makes China a lot poorer. I think there is, let me elaborate that a little bit. So as the outflow of silver creates physical stresses within the Qing bureaucracy that sets region again for region and center against region. So that's an important reason why the system comes under such stress as it cannot cope. And then, from 1850 to 1864, in a Qing dynasty, we have the massive, massive typing rebellion which destroys the fiscal infrastructure of the Qing dynasty even further. It's a massive rebellion. It's the largest probably in history. 50 to 60 million people may have died. One of the reasons that this, well, in some ways, it was a Christian rebellion, the leader of the typing rebellion, called himself the second son of God and had a direct line of communication with God. And because of, I think, Chinese culture, shamanism, particular, many Chinese, except that, and to create this Christian faith, very even gelical, aggressive kind of Chinese Christianity allowed him to mobilize much of South and Central China against these mentions. He declared to be the great demons that God had ordered him to destroy. So that debt convulsion pulled apart China precisely at the moment that Western imperialism, as it is at its most aggressive. Physically, I think it is hugely important because the fiscal infrastructure of the Qing dynasty collapsed. Beijing had no money. The money was all in provincial treasuries. And so the center becomes dependent on what the provinces are able to give. There is some attempt from 1860, about 1880, to create a stronger central state, to industrialize, to purchase Western navies and so on. But then debt gets done in by a great financial crisis that actually rips through the whole world in the 1870s. So this may be more than you wanted to hear, but it's a number of structural problems, financial problems, opium trade, the impact of Christianity, and then sometimes bad luck. You get a financial crisis, a real sort of capitalist financial crisis in capital markets. That leads to this agricultural crisis around the world from which the Qing simply doesn't have the power to recover. And then when these nationalists begin to articulate a more nationalist vision in the 1880s and the 1890s, it becomes very easy to say that the mentors are the aliens who keep China weak and suppressed and the only way to get beyond that is to have the revolution. That happens under senior century leadership in 1912. And it is the last of the great Asian ruling houses that collapses, which in some ways also is an illustration of actually a mentor's strength to the last. Yeah, it's so interesting. I'm always a fan of what I'm teaching of telling kids, particularly sophisticated states. You can go back to Rome if you want to or the Russian Empire or anything. They can usually survive one or two shocks. It's when they all, and it's just bad luck to an extent. When they all start overlapping, when you get a war coupled with a bad leader at the time, weak leadership in the federal state when you happen to get, sometimes it's a plague, sometimes an economic crisis. You can't, you get a huge smallpox epidemic that rips through the legions and it's a lot harder to defend the Danube, all of a sudden. You know, things sort of change when these things get on top of each other. That's when states, even modern states, struggle to respond to multiple crises at the exact same time. And that is where you tend to see these problems and you see the collapse of structures that have existed for a long period of time. I actually, I think that the, that the chain did pretty well to try to change at the end. They just couldn't keep up. I think that's right. I know, I'm truly sympathetic to what you're saying. That's probably not the standard historyography, but so the standard historyography is, you have this rising west, you have the weak China, it never could respond. Actually, it did respond quite well until late. And it was constantly innovating, constantly trying to do things. And I think in some ways, yeah, I mean, it's a contingent moment and there's a lot of things go wrong and then it really did. And that's, you know, then you get a whole thing falls apart and nobody is able to put it back together for a long time in the Chinese case until the Chinese Communist rise to power in 1949. Crown coins casino, real people win real prices every single day. 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Nationwide based on sports book predictions and/or free-to-play sports contest availability. Varys by state turns at dkng.co/offer. Right, and we only take note also to be fair to the Qing and to other dynasties. We only take note because it collapsed. There's been a number of times throughout history when empires and states have been on the brink, but have made it through. And then we don't fault them at that moment, even though they came right up to the edge. Right, and they almost got there. But okay, let's jump ahead a little bit. I want to make sure we at least kind of start about. Start talking about the second world war. Let's get to chapter three. Let's go on to chapter three. I'm going to jump a little bit ahead. There's a lot of great stuff in the book. You guys should buy it. It's awesome. But we're going to move ahead. And I'm going to pause it with the argument that World War II begins in Asia in 1937 at a place called the Marco Polo. And I'm going to ask you to support or refute that and expand upon it for the listeners. And we should probably explain what the Marco Polo bridge is and where it is in the first place and why it's called that. So a Marco Polo bridge is a beautiful bridge just at the time, just outside Beijing. It's now a part of Beijing because it's become this huge city, obviously. It's been there for ages and there was a Japanese, Japanese troops were on night exercise. They have been training for new kinds of combat doctrines and so on. There will be little night exercises. A Japanese soldier goes missing. There's a roll call and they find out that Japanese soldiers are missing. They don't demand entrance into a nearby town and the Chinese say, "No, that's going to be far to disruptive. Wait until the next morning." The Japanese local commanders find that offensive and they decide now they get ready and then they take the town. Now all that was the kind of thing that happened from early 1930s. They could be dealt with locally. So this is the sort of 7 July. The Chinese historians will tell you that's when it all began and I think there's a real argument for saying, "Well, actually, no. It begins when Donkashik decides to throw his best forces against Japanese forces in Shanghai in the middle of August." Donkashik could have said, "Well, yeah, sorry. We're weak. Those guys are strong. Sorry, we're going to, and a lot of people in China including his supporters. This is not the time. It's far too risky. But Donkashik is, you know, he said, "No, this is, you used the word earlier. It is quite right. This is an existential battle. Beijing is part of the center of our culture, of our civilization. We must defend it. It's far better to die than to walk away." Even if we die, the fact that we have given our lives for our country might, it doesn't say this, but I think that's the implication. Might allow future generations, even if the Japanese occupiers now, to stand up and continue this thing. So the act of sacrifice is the key. So I think that's, it really begins in August 1937, and very quickly you have, and he's become massive campaigns, right? These are 700 Chinese, 700,000 Chinese soldiers fighting 250,000 Japanese. And it's not just the Shanghai. In the next year and a half, you have similar fights across North and North China, playing in Suzhou, and then in Tungzhou, and then finally in Wuhan, the city where I no longer have to explain where Wuhan is. It's if COVID has produced one good thing. It's that, but it's way up the Yanzer River. And the nationalists use all of these battles and then decide to go back to retreat all the way to Chongqing and the far west of China. And by that time, there is a, there is on the Chinese side, there is a Wang Jingwei, the number two at the time. I said, well, this is just two or four, the sacrifice has been made. But by this time, tens of millions of people have already died, and Wang Jingwei and the number two, let me begin a piece of campaign to see if we can find some sort of compromise. And by this time, even those who had opposed Junkai's action in standing up, that actually too much blood has been spilled, we cannot go back. And so in the end, Wang Jingwei, the piece of campaign completely disintegrates. And therefore, you get this battle, this China that is resisting Japan, it becomes lauded in the United States, as well as in Europe, as a very plucky nation, a weak nation that very bravely stands up to this dastardly Japanese military dictatorship, that by now has bombed Chinese cities, and of course, bombing scares everybody at this time. It has, you know, it has hacked off heads with their swords. It's been the massacres and famously an indictment in many other places. So Japan has become seeing this most awful country, and China is this. And that China continues, in fact, far more with the help of the Soviet Union and Stalin, than with that of America or the UK. They continue to resist for the next four years, until Pearl Harbor, or as I call it, strikes south in the book. So there's four years of China, really, opposing Japanese militaryism alone. And by 1941, many people in America, Wendell Wilkie, is a famous figure in this, who become guilty. You know, we have been supplying oil to the Japanese Navy for four years, made a lot of money, but China is doing all the dirty work. So I think that's why 1937, to connect between 1937, and then Pearl Harbor, and one of the reasons that Japan goes for Pearl Harbor, is because it is stuck in a China. It needs to find a way out, and at first, it goes into Vietnam, and then ultimately, they don't occupy Indonesia, but are all oily posits that it can use when there's these. So there's a clear connection between those developments, Pearl Harbor, Japan's America's world is Japan, and so on. There is some debate, I think I should say, too. Among British historians, interestingly, who now want to trace the beginning of the Second World War to 1931, which is the date when Japan occupied Manchuria, or the northeast of China. And that's the first major move on the Japanese side to expand their empire. So there's a good case to be made. Chinese historians, or let me say, the Chinese government wants to date the beginning of the Second World War to the same 1931, largely for political reasons, because then can argue that it fought Japan for 14 years. You know, well, none of the European powers did anything similar. I have my doubts, I think many of my Chinese colleagues that I meet in China also say, "No, that's not really the beginning of the Second World War." That was still a kind of, you know, a small conflict that was sustainable. It's like Iran, or Ukraine, that is not yet the Great World War, which hopefully we won't get to, but maybe 50 years if we do get to a new Great World War, then places like Iran and Ukraine can be seen as precursors. But I think these are precursor battles, not the real beginning yet. But that's a historographical debate, but we can have good arguments on both sides. But my own view is that 37, when Donketshek says, "No, this is an existential conflict about Chinese civilization, it's about the future of us, and ultimately about Asia." That's when I think that's a really good date to say that's when it really blows up, and there is no retreat. Well, it's interesting, because, you know, we're talking about China resisting Japan. But I want to ask one final question, because we're coming up on time here. But the question is, were the Japanese fighting a unified China or not? I found a really interesting point in the book, and I actually didn't know this. I think the, and I'm not clear as to whether he was ambassador or what his role was, but this gentleman Wang Ming kind of comes, goes to the Soviet Union, his interactions, comes back and then is critical of Mao, because Mao is a Donketshek, of course, not helping Chiang Kai Shek at that time in the nationalist fight against the Japanese. And he's, I found interesting, very critical of him for this. I think he wrote in the book, by not fully supporting Chiang Kai Shek's nationalists. They, and we're talking about now, the communists, were in fact aiding the Japanese, right? So, how, like, how does it go then from a point where, okay, the Japanese are fighting Chiang Kai Shek and the nationalists to, oh, now you're fighting actually the two groups together. Now, you're not only are you fighting Chiang Kai Shek, but you're also fighting Mao Zedong and the communists. How does that transition happen? So, it's a theme in the book that all these movements or campaigns of wars in Asian countries are internally divided. It's not a real United Front. So, the Chinese Communist, Mao's Communist, and Chiang Kai Shek's nationalists have been fighting each other since the late 1920s. Confronted with the Japanese attack, there is declaration of a United Front. But there's a lot of blood, blood, blood between Mao's communists and the nationalists. They've been killing each other. But Stalin, and it's one reason to say that 1937 is a good date for saying this is a World War already. Because what Stalin doesn't want is to fight Germany and Japan at the same time. So, Stalin makes the calculation that to avoid war with Japan, it is Chiang Kai Shek's nationalists not the communists who we need to support. He sends a thousand planes, lots of money, lots of weapons to China to help him do that. He also forces Mao to join this United Front, but Mao doesn't want to do this. He thinks this is fine. Let the Japanese kill the nationalists. So, yes, we will, for propaganda purposes, say we are joining this United Front, but we kind of go slow. Understandably, he doesn't have many troops at this point, in 1937-1938, maybe 10,000 or so, some say 30,000, but that's nothing. There is no industry, there is no weapons. Mao would be stupid to go fight the Japanese on the best armed forces, one of the best armed forces in the world at the time. So, but Stalin is not happy with that, especially late 1938, when you have all these big battles that Chiang Kai Shek has lost. And it might seem that Chiang Kai Shek might, you have this peace campaign, and Chiang Kai Shek might decide to make a compromise with the Japanese. So, there is one guy in Moscow, who was leading the Chinese delegation to Moscow, and they had this meeting in the Kremlin, and Stalin, they say, well, actually, you can't still win. And he sent back this guy, one mean, to China with ordered to force a more enthusiastic commitment to joining the fight against the Japanese by the Chinese Communist by Mao. And Mao is forced to criticize himself, which is a big thing in Chinese Communism. It's a very big thing. And so, there is this united front that does become a reality in China from late 1938 through 1939. At the same time, of course, that Stalin is supporting similar popular fronts in Spain and in France. It's part of the similar strategy for Stalin. Ultimately, it's the failure of these battles that give Mao the upper hand, and allows him to say, look, the best thing that we can do is not so much to fight the Japanese at the front lines. Because we're going to be killed. But what we can do is fight the Japanese through guerrilla warfare in hills behind Japanese lines. Because there, there are no nationalists, nor Japanese. So, we avoid conflict with the nationalists, which otherwise will definitely happen. And the Japanese will concentrate on fighting the nationalists. There, we can grow new bases. Large bases, we can mobilize the population, we can organize them, we can educate them, we can give them weapons, we give them police forces, we give them medical care. And so, the usual strategy, right of guerrilla forces, and that allows him to build up this huge bases. If he begins the second world of 1937, with maybe 30,000 troops, by the end of 1945, there's an army of at least a standing army of 1,000,000 people, and many more sort of local militia. He's become huge. He controls much of North China. And of course, I think it begins to explain why these movements become so divided internally. And I think one of the points I really want to drive home in the book is that 1945, yes, is the defeat of Japan and Germany. It is not the end of war. Not in Asia. It goes on, actually. And the kinds of warfare is that much more deadly because it is civil war. It is very nasty, in very poor areas that have just gone through total war. And nobody can prove this, I think. But whenever I say to colleagues in China or elsewhere in India, it is very likely that many more people died after 1945 than before 1945, I think that's right. We're not going to have the statistics to prove that. But I think to drive home that idea that yes, it was the surrender of Japan and Germany, surrender of Japan especially is a declaration of hope that peace will return. It's not the reality. War continues. So in my reading, you can say the second world will really go on. It is not aftershocks. This is a continuation of processes that get long histories that accelerate it by the Japanese strikes south. But then they go, they don't really end until the Korean War, probably until they sort of end with Bandung for that reason. Even so, you could say Asian societies don't really calm down, so to speak, become much less internally divided and tense until the 1970s. And again, that's just probably a problem of the framing and the narrative that when you put the framing on the European theater that that's where the end looks like. Of course, it's an immediate transition there into the Cold War as well. So it's not, again, it's just really hard to draw neat lines when it comes to history because history is an organic thing. It doesn't operate like that. But all right, well, I think we've, I think we talked about maybe through, oh god, I mean, we didn't get into this. We talked through, I don't know, maybe like 2% of this book. But listen, if you're listening to this, it's a phenomenal book. No, that we didn't get through all of it. But I just want to say thank you so much for coming on the show. It was a wonderful conversation. And I'm glad we were able to get you in before you head to China. And I hope that that all goes extremely well. So good luck in the future. And thank you again. Thank you. And thank you very much. Delight to talk actually is really good. Thank you very much. And so there you have it. I want to thank professor of end event again for coming back on to the show. I was a wonderful interview. I certainly learned a tremendous amount. And I'm sure that you did as well. And if you'd like to learn even more, you can head out and pick up a copy of the book. It is available right now. I can tell you we barely scratched the surface folks. So you can click the link in the show notes or if you'd prefer go order it from whatever local bookseller you've got. So until next time, here's Western Civ looking out for more history. (dramatic music) - Crown coins for signal. - Winning never sounded so good. - Hi, this is Michael from Georgia, I won 40K and finally renovated my home. Code valve for new users on Void, we're prohibited by law. 18 plus terms, and get to show supply. - Crown coins for signal. - Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing. 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