Carlos V: o maior imperador da Terra - Geoffrey Parker (Delanceyplace)

 Emperor: A New Life of Charles V by Geoffrey Parker.For most of the years after Spain reached the New World, America was part of the dominion of Emperor Charles V (1500-1558), and it was in this period that the first major extractions of gold and silver from the New World occurred, and were used by Charles to finance his wars of empire. His European dominion included areas roughly similar to what we now call the Netherlands, Spain, Germany and Austria-Hungary. Charles held more than 60 royal and princely titles, including Holy Roman Emperor, King of Castile and Aragon, and Archduke of Austria. His was the largest territory ever ruled by a European royal, and he was a Hapsburg, a family whose ruling dynasty dates from 1246 when the family took control of Austria. The throne of the Holy Roman Empire was continuously occupied by the Habsburgs from 1438 until their extinction in the male line in 1740 and after the death of Francis I from 1765 until 1806 with the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. It was succeeded by a house of distant relatives that styled itself as the House of Habsburg-Lorraine and which ruled the Austrian Empire and Austria-Hungary until the dissolution of the monarchy in 1918.

The expansion of the Hapsburg dominion under Charles V would not have been possible without the gold and silver of the New World, and one line of thinking holds that much of the wide and long-lasting dominion of the family is owed to those New World riches. Another line of thinking is that those riches were squandered:

"In the dedication to his triumphalist Hispania Victrix (Spain victorious) of 1553, Francisco López de Gómara informed Charles that 'The greatest event since the creation of the world, apart from the birth and death of its creator, is the discovery of America'; and, he added, 'no nation has spread its customs, language and arms, or travelled as far by land and sea, as the Spaniards', especially in such a short time.  The truth -- the second part of Gómara's claim is easily demonstrated. When Charles first set foot on Spanish soil, Castile's transatlantic possessions were confined to a few outposts on the isthmus of Panama and a few islands in the Caribbean, with a total area of some 250,000 square kilometres (about half the size of Spain) and a population of perhaps two million indigenous inhabitants, 5,000 Europeans and a few hundred African slaves. When the emperor abdicated forty years later, his possessions included not only the Caribbean islands but also two million square kilometres on the American mainland (four times the size of Spain), inhabited by perhaps ten million indigenous inhabitants and 50,000 Europeans, all of them incorporated into the Crown of Castile and treated (at least in theory) 'like vassals of our Crown of Castile, because that is what they are' as well as several thousand African slaves.

Map of America Diego Gutiérrez, active 1554-1569

"Government activity also increased rapidly. In the 1540s the viceroy of Mexico issued over 500 orders (mandamientos) each year to officials and individuals, half of them Spaniards, and in the 1550s the annual total approached 800.The church structure of the New World expanded in step from four bishops at Charles's accession, all reporting to the archbishop of Seville, to two independent ecclesiastical provinces at his abdication, with three archbishops and twenty-one suffragans, all of them appointed directly by the Crown, and informal outposts of the Inquisition, reporting to the inquisitor-general in Spain.

"As the Latin American historian Horst Pietschmann observed: 'The construction of a government structure in America proved perhaps the most successful venture that Charles ever undertook: Admittedly, as Pietschmann also noted, 'The emperor's copious correspondence with members of his family and his closest councillors scarcely contain any detailed references to America'; but there were three major exceptions. First came money. A few months after his proclamation as king in 1516, Charles ordered his regent in Castile to send 45,000 ducats 'from the money received from America' to Italy 'so that it can pay for our affairs of state there'; and throughout his reign he used gold and silver from America to pay for his imperial designs, especially expensive ventures such as the Tunis campaign in 1535 and the siege of Parma in 1551-2 (both of them funded in large part by treasure from Peru). A few weeks before his abdication in 1555, Charles's fiscal priorities remained undiminished: he ordered his regent in Castile to ensure that all the gold and silver available in Mexico should be embarked immediately and shipped to Spain to pay for his war against France.

"Charles also displayed a lifelong interest in exotic flora and fauna, perhaps stimulated by those he had seen while growing up in the Netherlands. Thus in 1518, from Valladolid, he thanked the officials of the House of Trade (the Casa de la Contratacion in Seville: the body that supervised all commerce with America) for 'the dispatch of two American turkeys and a parrot that belonged to King Ferdinand, which we have enjoyed', and requested that 'you should send me the birds and similar things that may come from America which, because they are exotic, I will enjoy'. Almost forty years later, from his retirement home in Extremadura, Charles raved about 'two bedspreads lined with feathers' from America sent to keep him warm, and ordered 'dressing gowns and sheets for his bedroom made of the same material'.

"Charles's third abiding interest in America concerned its population. In 1518 he signed a warrant granting one of his Burgundian councillors an eight-year monopoly 'to ship to America 4,000 Black slaves, both male and female, from Guinea or any other part of Africa'. A decade later he signed another contract, granting agents of the Welser company of Augsburg a similar monopoly to send another 4,000 African slaves to America over a period of four years in return for a payment of 20,000 ducats to the imperial treasury in lieu of import and customs duties. The contract specified that the slaves would work in gold mines -- indeed it instructed the Welsers to 'bring fifty German master miners from Germany' -- and the company vigorously prosecuted in the royal courts those who infringed their monopoly. Charles would grant many more licences to ship African slaves to America, in return for cash payments: the total number embarked rose from under 400 in the quinquennium 1511-15 to almost 4,000 in the quinquennium 1516-20, and the total shipped in the course of his reign exceeded 30,000.

"Ironically, this increase in the African slave trade reflected Charles's concern for America's indigenous inhabitants. Three months after arriving in Spain in 1517, he presided over a committee of leading advisers to consider (among other matters) an 'instruction for the well-being of the American Indians' written by Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, who boasted extensive experience of the transatlantic colonies first as a settler and then as a missionary. The friar denounced in graphic terms the ruthless exploitation of the New World by those entrusted with its care, and called for major policy changes (including the decision to start shipping slaves from Africa, on the grounds that each one would save a native American from exploitation). He later claimed that his arguments had convinced Charles 'to see to the ordering of certain matters that redounded to the service of Our Lord and Ourselves, and the good of America and its inhabitants.'"

author: Geoffrey Parker
title: Emperor: A New Life of Charles V
publisher: Yale University Press
date: Copyright 2019 Geoffrey Parker
page(s): 342-344

A historia da China até 1800 - Valerie Hansen (extrato)

Today's selection -- from The Open Empire by Valerie Hansen.

The three centuries of China's Golden Age -- the Tang dynasty: Delanceyplace, May 7, 2019 "In 589 the Sui dynasty reunified China and ruled for three decades. The Sui rulers were succeeded by the Tang, who governed for nearly three centuries. These were the years of China's Golden Age, the peak of Chi­na's cultural glory. Even today, the word for Chinese in Cantonese means 'people of the Tang,' and Chinatowns all over the world are called Tang­-people-streets (Tangrenjie). The empire flourished during this time when its populace was more open to and more enthusiastic about foreign in­fluence than it would ever be again. Many Chinese of high and low social status intermarried with non-Chinese, often Turkic, people. Anything Indian or Central Asian was all the rage. Learned monks traveled through Central Asia to reach Indian teachers, merchants accompanying them brought back exotic trade goods, and even the Chinese who stayed home wore non-Chinese fashions as they composed poems set to the latest for­eign tunes. "The Tang was an age not just of cultural openness but of political strength. The central government had more power over its inhabitants, who numbered some sixty million, than did any other premodern dy­nasty. The Tang issued a law code so influential that it was later adopted in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam by rulers who sought to emulate the Tang. Local officials closely monitored the population of the empire, regularly redistributed land, and strictly supervised markets. We can see the gov­ernment's reach in the central capital of Chang'an, where it built a planned city with walled subdivisions. The commercial markets were strictly separated from the rest of the city, and market officials set prices for basic commodities every ten days. The government's reach extended as well to the distant desert oasis of Turfan in modern Xinjiang, in the northwest of China. There the Tang state established a complex system of household registration and land redistribution, enforcing it every three years."

A 17th-century Chinese depiction of Wu, from Empress Wu of the Zhou, published c.1690. No contemporary image of the empress exists.

"The Tang was also, unusually, an age of prominent women. Some ruled through their husbands or sons, while one, Emperor Wu, became the only woman in Chinese history to become emperor in her own name. Short stories and paintings of the time allow glimpses of the lives of more typical women as well. Historians have traditionally held a woman -- an imperial concubine famed for her beauty -- responsible for the end of China's Golden Age because her affair with a Central Asian general triggered one of the most destructive rebellions in Chinese history."

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The Open Empire Author: Valerie Hansen Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Copyright 2015, 2000 by W.W. Norton & Company Pages: 173-174 If you wish to read further:  Click for Purchase Options

William Blake, o poeta romantico por excelencia - Stephen F. Eisenman (book excerpt)

William Blake and the Age of Aquarius
By Stephen F. Eisenman

excerpts Delanceyplace

Though not widely known for his poetry and paintings during his lifetime, and considered somewhat mad because of his mystical and highly expressive work, William Blake (1757-1827) was a well-regarded artist of the Romantic age. His influence on the world of art and literature in the 1950s and 1960s vaulted his reputation to the highest levels, where it remains. He had particularly strong influence on children's authors such as Maurice Sendak:

"Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience was written partly for children. The poems employ simple concrete language, repetition, rhymes and near rhymes, and a constant number of beats per line, ensuring melodic regularity. (Irregular line lengths and an extra accented syllable at the end of some lines ensured variety.) But whereas most Enlightenment thinkers, such as Locke, saw children as blank slates, Blake described them as possessed from the beginning of fear, anger, and love -- treasures implanted by God. We are all, as Hendrix would say, 'experienced' from the start. "And unlike most artists and writers or his time, for example his friend Mary Wollstonecraft, who saw childhood as a life stage uncontaminated by corruption, Blake saw it is a period of untamed desire, turmoil, and loss. Children are lost and found, born into slavery and oppression, and forced to work as chimney sweeps. Though the 'Ecchoing Green' from Songs of Innocence (fig. 54a/b) is a place of 'sunrise,' 'happy skies,' and 'bells cheerful sounds,' it is also a place where 'the sun does descend' and 'sports no more seen on the darkening green.' The words and images of this song describe a single day of childish play followed by return home for rest, but they also suggest the passage from youth to maturity, even hinting -- with the word darkening­ -- at death and corruption. The word ecchoing, with its archaic spelling, suggests an earlier time when people and the land heard each other's voices and even protected each other. In the time of darkening those echoes are silenced. "Blake's Songs were obviously not written only for children, and many writers and artists of the late 1950s and 1960s explored their basic dialectic of innocence and experience. Pediatrician (and later antiwar activist) Benjamin Spock, child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, and children's book authors E. B. White and Maurice Sendak, among others, reconsidered the psychological and emotional lives of children, diagnosing terrors, violence, ultra-aggressive urges, and dangers as much as joy and love. Sendak, who called Blake 'from the first, my great and abiding love ... my teacher in all things,' is crucial in this lineage -- and in the exhibition Blake and the Age of Aquarius -- because he not only borrowed from Blake but also deeply understood him. In Where the Wild Things Are (1963), the little boy Max, like the child in Blake's 'Little Boy Lost' and 'Little Boy Found,' is shown to possess two opposing mental states. He imaginatively indulges his most exuberant desires (experience) for mastery of the beastly 'Wild Things' before returning at the end of the story to the safety of home and family (innocence)."

"A Little Boy Lost" Nought loves another as itself, Nor venerates another so, Nor is it possible to thought A greater than itself to know. 'And, father, how can I love you Or any of my brothers more? I love you like the little bird That picks up crumbs around the door.' The Priest sat by and heard the child; In trembling zeal he seized his hair, He led him by his little coat, And all admired the priestly care. And standing on the altar high, 'Lo, what a fiend is here! said he: 'One who sets reason up for judge Of our most holy mystery.' The weeping child could not be heard, The weeping parents wept in vain: They stripped him to his little shirt, And bound him in an iron chain, And burned him in a holy place Where many had been burned before; The weeping parents wept in vain. Are such thing done on Albion's shore? "The Little Boy Found" The little boy lost in the lonely fen, Led by the wandering light, Began to cry, but God, ever nigh, Appeared like his father, in white. He kissed the child, and by the hand led, And to his mother brought, Who in sorrow pale, through the lonely dale, The little boy weeping sought.

William Blake and the Age of Aquarius Author: Stephen F. Eisenman Publisher: Princeton University Press Copyright 2017 by Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art Pages: 69 - 71

Presidente Hoover: mal afamado pela Depressao, mas um grande benfeitor humanitario

Delanceyplace.com End of Year Selections: Terrible Presidents Today's encore selection -- from One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson. Herbert Hoover went from a spectacular career in mining to international acclaim and celebrity in a war relief effort to derision and blame for the Great Depression: "Fortunately, America had a figure of rocklike calm -- a kind of super­man, a term that he was not embarrassed to apply to himself in private correspondence -- to whom it could turn in times of crisis such as [the Mississippi flood of 1927]. His name was Herbert Hoover. Soon he would be the most derided presi­dent of his time -- quite an achievement for someone elected in the same decade as Warren G. Harding -- but in the spring of 1927 he was, and by a very wide margin, the world's most trusted man. He was also, curiously, perhaps the least likable hero America has ever produced. The summer of 1927 would make him a little more of both. "Herbert Clark Hoover was born in 1874 thirty miles west of the Missis­sippi (he would be the first president from west of that symbolically weighty boundary) in the hamlet of West Branch, Iowa, in a tiny white cottage, which still stands. His parents, devout Quakers, died tragically early -- his father of rheumatic fever when little Bert was just six, his mother of typhoid fever three years later -- and he was sent to live with an uncle and aunt in Oregon. ... "Though he never finished high school -- his uncle, disregarding his brightness, sent him to work as an office boy in Salem, Oregon, instead­ -- Hoover nurtured a fierce ambition to better himself. In 1891, at age sev­enteen, he passed the entrance examinations for the brand-new Leland Stanford Junior University (or just Stanford as we now know it), which then was a free school. As a member of Stanford's first-ever class, he studied geology and also met there his future wife, Lou Henry, who by chance was also from Iowa. (They would marry in 1899.) Upon graduat­ing, Hoover took the only job he could find, in a gold mine in Nevada City, California, loading and pushing an ore cart ten hours a day seven days a week for 20 cents an hour -- a meager salary even then. That this was the permanent lot for his fellow miners seems never to have troubled him. Hoover was a great believer in -- and a living embodiment of -- the notion of personal responsibility. In 1897, still in his early twenties, Hoover was hired by a large and venerable British mining company, Bewick, Moreing and Co., and for the next decade traveled the world ceaselessly as its chief engineer and troubleshooter -- to Burma, China, Australia, India, Egypt, and wher­ever else the company's mineralogical interests demanded. ... After a decade in the field, Hoover was brought back to London and made a partner in Bewick, Moreing. ... "He would very probably have passed his life in wealthy anonymity but for a sudden change in circumstances that thrust him unexpectedly into the limelight. When war broke out in 1914, Hoover, as a prominent American, was called on to help evacuate other Americans stranded in Europe -- there were, remarkably, over 120,000 of them --and he per­formed that duty with such efficiency and distinction that he was asked to take on the much greater challenge of heading the new Commission for Relief in Belgium. Hoover walks with Polish children "Belgium was overwhelmed by war, its farms destroyed, its factories shut, its foodstocks seized by the Germans. Eight million Belgians were in real peril of starving. Hoover managed to find and distribute $1.8 million worth of food a week, every week, for two and a half years -- 2.5 million tons of it altogether -- and to deliver it to people who would otherwise have gone unfed. The achievement can hardly be overstated. It was the greatest relief effort ever undertaken on earth, and it made him, deserv­edly, an international hero. By 1917, it was reckoned that Hoover had saved more lives than any other person in history. One enthusiast called him 'the greatest humanitarian since Jesus Christ,' which of course is about as generous as a compliment can get. The label stuck. He became to the world the Great Humanitarian. "Two things accounted for Hoover's glorious reputation: he executed his duties with tireless efficiency and dispatch, and he made sure that no one anywhere was ever unaware of his accomplishments. Myron Her­rick, America's avuncular ambassador in Paris, performed similar heroic feats in occupied France without receiving any thanks from posterity, but only because he didn't seek them. Hoover by contrast was meticu­lous in ensuring that every positive act associated with him was inflated to maximum importance and covered with a press release." To subscribe, please click here or text "nonfiction" to 22828.

One Summer: America, 1927 Author: Bill Bryson  Publisher: Doubleday, a division of Random House Copyright 2013 by Bill Bryson Pages: 53-56 If you wish to read further:  Click for Purchase Options

E por falar em dia das bruxas... o que houve na historia? - Delanceyplace

Today's selection -- from Haunted by Leo Braudy. In James I's England, the witch became a powerful symbol of those hated forces that opposed the king. During the English Civil War, this notion persisted, with the self- described "Witchfinder General," Matthew Hopkins. He was responsible for the hanging deaths of more than 300 women between 1644 and 1646, roughly 40 percent of all witches ever executed in England: "Maleficium, the usual Latin word for witchcraft, was what witches were accused of, literally 'doing evil,' which often included copulating with the devil, kissing his ass, and other combinations of the diabolic and the sexual that are characteristic of the charge of trafficking with demons. ... "During the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, scattered previous references to groups of witches called covens and a conclave of witches called the witches sabbath became much more widespread, with detail upon detail being added to the description of satanic orgies and conspiracy plans that supposedly happened there. When it was objected that otherwise poor old women scattered around the countryside had no way of getting to their infer­nal meetings, these theorists of witchcraft found it necessary to supply flying broomsticks as a ready transportation device. ... Witches by Hans Baldung. Woodcut, 1508 "James I of England ... linked religious subversion with po­litical subversion, usurpation, and the attack on monarchical divine right au­thority in his book Daemonologie (1597). ...  In News from Scotland, published by James in 1591 and reprinted as part of Daemonologie, he details the confessions of some Danish witches that they tried to assassi­nate him first by poison and then by summoning up a storm to sink the ship in which he was returning to the British Isles from Denmark with his Danish­ born queen, Anne. ...  "James was a patron of Shakespeare's acting company, and in Macbeth the playwright pays due deference to James's views with the tale of an erstwhile political usurper who dabbles in the black arts to gain his way. That the play was prob­ably written in the wake of the Witchcraft Act of 1604, which broadened earlier laws to include the penalty of death, as well as around the time of the thwarted Gunpowder Plot of Guy Fawkes to blow up Parliament (1605), suggests that on this occasion (and for the rest of the century) the diabolic forces are to be identified specifically with the Catholic threat to Protestant England. "The pressures of war, along with the paranoia about one's enemies, created a fertile ground for witch-hunting to flourish. ... In England, for example, during the civil war conflicts in the 1640s between the king and Parliament, a young man in his twenties named Matthew Hopkins, calling himself the Witchfinder General, blazed through the east of England in strongly Puritan areas, accusing supposed witches of a pact with the devil even without evidence of maleficium. By the time he died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-seven in 1647 he was responsible for hanging upward of three hundred women, according to some estimates more than the total of the previous century and a half -- around 40 percent of all the witches ever executed in England.  Frontispiece from Matthew Hopkins: The Discovery of Witches (1647) showing witches identifying their familiar spirits "In the year of his death, his Discovery of Witches was published, a book that became very influential in the New England witch trials that lasted from the late 1640s to the early 1690s [including the Salem witch trials]. ... "The whole process [of witch hunts] resembles a kind of social pathology, a safety valve to compensate for fears of the unconventional sexuality of older, no longer fertile women who were without any defined social role and so occupied the bottom reaches of the gender hierarchy. Some of this sense of potential social upheaval lies behind the expanded usage of 'witch hunt' in the twentieth century to mean the search for any who criticize established authority." To subscribe, please click here or text "nonfiction" to 22828.

Haunted: On Ghosts, Witches, Vampires, Zombies, and Other Monsters of the Natural and Supernatural Worlds Author: Leo Braudy Publisher: Yale University Press Copyright 2016 by Leo Braudy Pages: 44-47 If you wish to read further:  Click to Buy Now

O saque de Roma (1527): uma barbaridade historica - Christopher Hibbert

Today's selection -- from   Rome: The Biography of a City by Christopher Hibbert.     After Rome fell to the barbarians in 476 CE, it went from a city of more than a million people to only a few hundred thousand -- still large by the standards of the middle ages but nowhere near its former glory -- and at its lowest point, as few as 20,000 people. Through this period, Rome was sustained because it was the seat of the pope, and it had all the Church's landholdings and power to collect offerings and sell offices. Places like Florence, Venice and Milan became the important population and economic centers on the Italian peninsula during these centuries. It wasn't until Italy was united as a single country under Vittorio Emmanuel in the 1860s with Rome as its capital that Rome again grew to become one of Europe's largest cities. Perhaps the lowest moment in Rome's history came in 1527 CE, when Pope Clement VII, pursuant to an unsuccessful attempt to limit the power of Charles V (who soon became Holy Roman Emperor), was invaded by his troops, and those troops, after defeating the pope's forces, mercilessly sacked Rome in months of unbridled horror. It was the era of England's King Henry VIII, Martin Luther and Michelangelo. Rome was forever changed: "Rome was ... at the mercy of the [victorious] imperialist troops. Gian d'Urbina, the cruel and arrogant commander of the Spanish infantry, infuriated by a pike wound in the face inflicted by a Swiss Guard, rampaged through the Borgo, followed by his men, killing everyone they came across. 'All were cut to pieces, even if unarmed,' wrote an eyewitness, 'even in those places that Attila and Genseric, although the most cruel of men, had in former times treated with religious respect.' The Hospital of S. Spirito was broken into, and nearly all those who were cared for there were slaughtered or thrown into the Tiber alive. The orphans of the Pieta were also killed. Convicts from the prisons were set free to join in the massacre, mutilation and pillage. Sack of Rome, by Francisco Javier Amérigo Aparicio, 1884. "The imperialists stormed over the Ponte Sisto and continued their savagery in the heart of the city. The doors of churches and convenes, of palaces, monasteries and workshops were smashed open and the contents hurled into the streets. Tombs were broken open, including that of Julius II, and the corpses stripped of jewels and vestments. ... "Men were tortured to reveal the hiding-places of their possessions or to pay ransoms for the sparing of their lives, one merchant being tied to a tree and having a fingernail wrenched out each day because he could not pay the money demanded. Many were suspended for hours by the arms [wrote Francesco Guicciardini's brother, Luigi]; many were cruelly bound by the genitals; many were suspended by the feet high above the road or over the river, while their tormentors threatened to cut the cord. Some were half buried in the cellars; others were nailed up in casks or villainously beaten and wounded; not a few were branded all over their persons with red-hot irons. Some were tortured by extreme thirst, others by insupportable noise and many were cruelly tortured by having their teeth brutally drawn. Others again were forced to eat their own ears, or nose, or their roasted testicles and yet more were subjected to strange, unheard-of martyrdoms that move me too much even to think of, much less describe. ... "Those who professed to support the imperial cause suffered with the rest, and none was safe from capture and demands for ransom. ... Over two thousand people, more than half of them women, who had been given refuge in the Palazzo dei SS. Apostoli, were made to pay ransom. Most officers had little authority over their men and stood by helpless when they did not condone, encourage or even participate in the atrocities: one German commander boasted his intention of eviscerating the Pope once he had laid his hands on him. "Some priests were, indeed, eviscerated. Others were stripped naked and forced to utter blasphemies on pain of death or to take part in profane travesties of the Mass. One priest was murdered by Lutherans when he refused to administer Holy Communion to an ass. Cardinal Cajetan was dragged through the streets in chains, insulted and tortured; Cardinal Ponzetti, who was over eighty years old, shared his sufferings and, having parted with 20,000 ducats, died from the injuries inflicted upon him. Nuns, like other women, were violated, sold in the streets at auction and used as counters in games of chance. Mothers and fathers were forced to watch and even to assist at the multiple rape of their daughters. Convents became brothels into which women of the upper classes were dragged and stripped. 'Marchionesses, countesses and baronesses,' wrote the Sieur de Brantôme, 'served the unruly troops, and for long afterwards the patrician women of the city were known as "the relics of the Sack of Rome".' " To subscribe, please click here or text "nonfiction" to 22828.

Rome: The Biography of a City Author: Christopher Hibbert Publisher: Penguin Copyright Christopher Hibbert 1985 Pages: 144-146 If you wish to read further: Buy Now

A hiperinflacao de Chiang Kai-Shek levou a China ao comunismo - Jonathan Fenby book

Mao Tse-tung parece ter sido mais vitorioso por causa da inflação do que pela potência de suas tropas:

Today's selection -- from Chiang Kai-Shek by Jonathan Fenby. In 1947, it looked certain that Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists would triumph over Mao Zedong and the Communists in the battle for China, but mismanagement of the economy and crippling hyperinflation destroyed his chances: "On 7 August 1947, Chiang Kai-shek flew over the loess country of northern Shaanxi to the town [of Yan'an] where Mao had found his haven at the end of the [now legendary] Long March. The Generalissimo walked briskly through Yan'an, accompanied by a triumphant group of generals led by General Hu Zongnan, the 'Eagle of the North-West' who had ring-fenced the base area during the war with Japan. China's Wartime Finance and Inflation: 1937 -- 1945, 1965 "[Hu] had taken Yan'an without a fight -- the Communist leadership had already trekked out. The place was of no importance in itself, and the bleak countryside of northern Shaanxi offered no benefits for the Nationalists. But that meant little beside the symbolism of having forced Mao and his colleagues to flee once more, the Communist leader on a horse while his troops marched round him. Chiang went to see Mao's house and the long tunnel connecting it to Zhu De's headquarters as Nationalist photographers took snaps of poppies and the 'Local Product Company' building to show that the Communists had been dealing in opium. "A combination of huge forces, American supplies and transport, plus some good generalship in the north had put Chiang in what looked like an unassailable position in the first eighteen months after the end of the war with Japan. Mercenary armies came back under the Nationalist flag. He had the active support of the China Lobby in the United States, combining politicians in Washington, a network of businessmen round T. V. Soong and H. H. Kung, and the influence of [Time magazine and the other Henry] Luce magazines. The Republican, Thomas Dewey, seemed well placed to beat Truman in the 1948 presidential election -- after a visit to America, Chen Lifu told a Shanghai newspaper that this would mean 'extraordinary measures' to send military aid to China. But, as so often, Chiang's position was more hollow than it appeared. By the time he walked through Yan'an, his military fortunes had peaked, and the disintegration of areas under Nationalist control was racing ahead. 1950 propaganda cartoon (via ChinaSmack). The caption in the right panel reads, Now currency has stable rates, gold and greenbacks are disgraced, Renminbi are widely trusted, speculators have been busted. "Hyperinflation was destroying the middle classes and honest officials; wholesale prices in Shanghai rose by 45 per cent in a single month. The mother of the author of Wild Swans, Jung Chang, had to hire a rickshaw to carry the huge pile of notes needed to pay her school fees in the Manchurian city of Jinzhou where beggars tried to sell their children for food. Labour unrest grew -- there were 4,200 strikes in Shanghai in 1946-47. In some universities, police agents masquerading as students patrolled the campuses with guns under their gowns searching for subversives. In [Beijing], troops fired on a protest by 3,000 students, killing several. In Kunming, five dissidents were shot by police, and more than 1,000 were held in a jail, pulled out of the cells at midnight to kneel in the gravel yard while soldiers waved bayonets at them and told them to confess to being Communists -- the American journalist Jack Belden added that more than thirty were buried alive. The protests were encouraged by the Communists, but were, above all, a sign of war-weariness and alienation from a regime that had nothing more to offer. "Not that support for the Communists was as widespread and automatic as subsequent propaganda would assert. The party demonstrated great skill in organising the peasantry, but its revolution was often imposed rather than being the result of spontaneous popular uprising." To subscribe, please click here or text "nonfiction" to 22828.

Chiang Kai-Shek: China's Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost Author: Jonathan Fenby Publisher: Carroll & Graf Publishers Copyright 2003 by Jonathan Fenby Pages: 473-475 If you wish to read further: Buy Now