Ep. 318 | The History of Taiwan (Part 9)
The China History Podcast
Laszlo Montgomery
4.8 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 22 January 2023
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We finished last time with the 228 Incident. In Part 9 Chiang Kai-shek has to not only mop up from this PR disaster but get the island all prepped and ready for his later arrival, along with more than a million others feeling the communists. With the three victorious campaigns of 1948-49, the Nationalists are cornered and The Great Retreat steps into high gear. Everything that Chiang will need to keep his regime going is moved to Taiwan. This included soldiers, government officials, and KMT members, gold, and cultural treasures from the past few thousand years of Chinese history. Once everything is settled on Taiwan Chiang carries out a purge and puts Chen Cheng in place to whip Taiwan into shape. If Chiang was going to take back the Mainland he needed to get his house in order first.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back again, all you CHP listeners, |
| 0:02.7 | Lauslem Montgomery here with another China History Podcast episode, |
| 0:06.8 | the ninth in this series where we're flying higher than an SR-71 to get a nice |
| 0:13.5 | general overview of the history of Taiwan. We ended abruptly last time with your humble narrator, |
| 0:19.6 | reading excerpts from three eyewitness accounts of those two months in Taiwan's history that were so |
| 0:27.0 | terrible. They got swept under the rug, and for decades to come anyone attempting to lift |
| 0:32.4 | up a corner of their rug and mention these events from February and March 1947 were made to wish |
| 0:39.2 | they hadn't. So let's continue on with the history. We saw how following the end of World War 2 and |
| 0:47.4 | the defeat of Japan, the people living on the island of Taiwan, just as it had been following the |
| 0:53.7 | treaty of Shimonoseki were left with no option except to go along with events beyond their control. |
| 1:00.5 | What ultimately ended up happening was, although Taiwan was technically never part of the Republic |
| 1:07.3 | of China, when all the treaties were being signed, Taiwan ended up the way it did, part of the |
| 1:13.1 | ROC. And we closed the last episode with the 228 incident that was preceded by a little over a year |
| 1:21.7 | of outrageous one after the other that in the eyes of the locals would lead to a seething enmity that |
| 1:30.3 | for many Taiwanese even continues on into our very own day. And right around here people began to |
| 1:37.6 | choose sides near sympathy and loyalties either resided with the KMT or they didn't. And the events |
| 1:46.4 | in between retro session day to the 228 incident and what followed provided plenty of oxygen for |
| 1:53.9 | the scorching hot revulsion directed against this political party founded by Sun Yatsun so many years |
| 2:01.3 | ago. So Ambassador John Layton Stewart and reporters Tillman Durden and Peggy Durden, all their words |
| 2:09.4 | got out into the public prints at once and not just in the United States of course. So all freedom |
| 2:15.9 | loving liberal democracies all looked a scant at Junkai Shack and oh man did he ever have a public |
| 2:22.4 | relations disaster on his hands. Chun Yi and all the spin doctors went all out in order to |
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