Here Is China 1944 United China Relief; WWII; Clifton Fadiman

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• published: 25 Sep 2014
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more at http://news.quickfound.net/intl/china_news.html Good description of the home front in China during the fight against the Japanese as of 1944 (World War II in China was the Second Sino-Japanese War). Shows southern rice farmers, northern horsemen, western camel caravans, sampans... Public domain film from the Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied. The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_China_(1912–49) The Republic of China (traditional Chinese: 中華民國; simplified Chinese: 中华民国; pinyin: Zhōnghuá Mínguó) was an East Asian state that occupied the present-day territories of China and Taiwan at differing times between 1912 and 1949. As an era of Chinese history, it was preceded by the last imperial dynasty of China, the Qing dynasty and followed by the People's Republic of China. It ended with the Chinese Civil War, as the Republic's Kuomintang leaders retreated to the island of Taiwan to found the modern Republic of China, while the Communist Party of China founded the People's Republic of China on the mainland. The Republic's first president, Sun Yat-sen, served only briefly. His party, then led by Song Jiaoren, won a parliamentary election held in December 1912. However, army leaders of the Beiyang clique, led by President Yuan Shikai, retained control of the central government. After Yuan's death in 1916, local military leaders, or warlords, asserted autonomy. In 1925, the Kuomintang established a rival government, the Nationalist Government, in the southern city of Guangzhou. The economy of the North, overtaxed to support warlord adventurism, collapsed in 1927–28. In 1928, Chiang Kai-shek, who became Kuomintang leader after Sun's death, defeated the warlord armies in the Northern Expedition. Chiang's National Revolutionary Army was armed by the Soviet Union and was advised by Mikhail Borodin. The Beiyang army was backed by Japan. Once Chiang established a unified central government in Nanjing, he cut his ties with the communists and expelled them from the Kuomintang... Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) Few Chinese had any illusions about Japanese desires on China. Hungry for raw materials and pressed by a growing population, Japan initiated the seizure of Manchuria in September 1931 and established ex-Qing emperor Puyi as head of the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1932. The loss of Manchuria, and its vast potential for industrial development and war industries, was a blow to the Kuomintang economy. The League of Nations, established at the end of World War I, was unable to act in the face of the Japanese defiance. The Japanese began to push from south of the Great Wall into northern China and the coastal provinces. Chinese fury against Japan was predictable, but anger was also directed against Chiang and the Nanking government, which at the time was more preoccupied with anti-Communist extermination campaigns than with resisting the Japanese invaders. The importance of "internal unity before external danger" was forcefully brought home in December 1936, when Chiang Kai-shek, in an event now known as the Xi'an Incident, was kidnapped by Zhang Xueliang and forced to ally with the Communists against the Japanese in the Second Kuomintang-CCP United Front against Japan. The Chinese resistance stiffened after 7 July 1937, when a clash occurred between Chinese and Japanese troops outside Beijing (then named Beiping) near the Marco Polo Bridge. This skirmish led to open, though undeclared, warfare between China and Japan. Shanghai fell after a three-month battle during which Japan suffered extensive casualties, both in its army and navy. The capital of Nanjing fell in December 1937. It was followed by an orgy of mass murders and rapes known as the Nanjing Massacre. The national capital was briefly at Wuhan, then removed in an epic retreat to Chongqing, the seat of government until 1945... In 1945 the Republic of China emerged from the war nominally a great military power but actually a nation economically prostrate and on the verge of all-out civil war. The economy deteriorated, sapped by the military demands of foreign war and internal strife, by spiraling inflation and by Nationalist profiteering, speculation and hoarding. Starvation came in the wake of the war, and millions were rendered homeless by floods and the unsettled conditions in many parts of the country...