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It's weird that Mao, Sun Yat Sen, and Chiang Kai Shek, were all part of the same pro-democracy party early on in China's civil war.
Mao won the war, Sun Yat Sen got out of there, Chiang Kai Shek was pushed out and became dictator of Taiwan.
China is weird.
Also weird is that one guy caused most of the deaths from famine in both the USSR and China: A conman named Trofim Lysenko, who was lying about having a new science of agriculture... He was bury seeds way further than they could handle then faking his results to keep his job.... Killed like, 30 million people who were ordered to take up his techniques.
About China, you know what they say, it's easier to be the opposition than to actually govern. Many of those who govern end up being corrupt or incompetent or both.
Who knows if mainland China under ROC would have been better. People say that will be the case when we look at Taiwan. But Taiwan suffered from thirty years of so-called White Terror and Taiwan eventually democratising is arguably pure luck due to a man whose name escapes me.
The trajectory of history is never predictable. There are far too many factors to consider; factors which are themselves caused by chain reactions of previous factors and events, which themselves are influenced by other previous events.
Lee Teng-Hui is the man that helped Taiwan transition into a democracy.
Chiang Kai Shek already oversaw a China beset with hyperinflation, pervasive corruption, and famine. That, too, is history.
It's why the Maoists were able to launch a popular revolution in the first place. Chinese people had literally nothing to lose but their chains.
Chiang had to work with various warlords and bore most of the fight against the Japanese, while Mao gathered strength and let ROC to bleed itself. Even if ROC won and the CCP got destroyed, we don't know if factionalism and warlord-ism will emerge since ROC had been weakened severely. Or, in another alternative time, Chiang and KMT had somehow pulled a miracle, and somehow made the entirety of China industrialised as quickly as post-war Japan and never had to resort to dictatorship and hence had always been democratic after World War 2.
If I remember it correctly, in China Mao ordered sparrow to be killed en masse because they supposedly ate the grain: turns out that what they ate were the pests that attacked the plants.
95% correct, the sparrows were also eating the grain, but removing the natural predator to the far worse pests resulted in far worse famine due to an explosion in population of pests. This was one of the factors that resulted in Mao losing influence in the party over time.
China is weird
Is it? There are plenty of examples of smaller factions joining forces to overthrow a common enemy, who later battled it out amongst themselves.
This is bidens fault
/S cause lemmy