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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard for a very special four-part series that we've decided to put together for you this Christmas week.

It's called the China Files. And for a long time, I've wanted to sit down and talk to you a lot about the history of China.

I remember this time last year we did a history of Taiwan episode that did really well. And I said, you know what? I want to get into this.

Even Charlie had reached out to me the other day and said, Jackie, you got to talk about Maoism more. You have to talk Maoism more. So I said, all right, let's do it. We're going to do a four-part series.

And so let me say to you, welcome to the China Files, part one, warlords of the revolution.

So let's go all the way back to the late Qing Dynasty, the 1800s, late 1800s in China. You have to understand what kind of country we'll kind of land we're dealing with. This is the land of foot binding. This is the land of all adult males being forced to shave their heads except for one long braid in the back.

The man choose required that.

The man choose were seen as a foreign leadership. And these are the ones that ruled the Qing Dynasty. But what even are dynasties? It's a dynasty. We don't have those in the US. We don't have those.

We don't have those in the West anymore. We had kings at one point. Well, the dynasty for about 3500 years in ancient and medieval China, they were ruled by these dynasties by these real families, the Han, the Tang, the Ming, the Qing, the Song, so many of them.

And yet the Qing Dynasty towards the end. They were seen as corrupted. They were always seen as foreign. But they had been just defeated by the British and the opium wars.

Wars fueled by the rise of opium and the increase of the illegal drug inside China. They were then defeated. Hong Kong was established as a colony for the British.

Shanghai was opened up to the British and the French. Later on the Boxer rebellion was an anti-Fariner rebellion that was covertly funded by the Qing Dynasty. But that was itself defeated by the eight nation army, which included troops from the United States, Germany, France, the UK, and even Japan.

And they came in and occupied Beijing. So the Qing Dynasty was viewed by many as having lost what's called the mandate of heaven. And the mandate of heaven, it's similar to the European divine right of kings, but the mandate of heaven can be lost.

Can be lost if a ruler becomes oppressive and competent neglectful or failed to govern responsibly. Famine pestilence disease, these are all harbingers of losing the mandate of heaven.

And so a rebellion took place by the people. And initially something called the Republic of China was born, the Republic of China.

And this was led by Sun Yat Sen. And later led by a man by the name of Jiang Yi-Shi, or better known in English as Shanghai Shek.

However, Sun Yat Sen gets overthrown by a warlord, the ancient Kai. And there are many warlords all over northern China, particularly northern China, but you also see them in the west and other areas.

And so China almost becomes up for grabs because this new Republic of China is not able to fully take over all of the land of China.

It's seen in many areas like the west as bandit country, nomans land, lawlessness, warlords taking over in the north, in the south, parts of the coast, gangs rising up, taking over places in Hong Kong, city streets,

and the Soviet Union to the north of China realized that they too had an opportunity in this new China with no dynasty.

And so the Soviet Union worked with a group of scholars and a group of radicals all the way back in 1921 to hold a meeting in Shanghai, the first meeting of the Chinese Communist Party.

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