The Japanese are a disease of the skin. The communists are a disease of the skin.

The communists are a disease of the heart.

Jang Kai Shik

Welcome to the history of the 20th century.

The The

The Episode 368, the Second United Front.

We haven't talked about the war in China in a very long time, not since episode 349.

The war in Europe distracted us for a while, but now it's time to get caught up.

In episode 349, I took the story of the war between Japan and China up through the end of 1938.

After the Japanese took the Chinese capital of Nanjing, Changkaisek's government made

Wuhan its provisional capital. The Japanese took Wuhan after weeks of bloody combat, but the Chinese

were able to make an orderly withdrawal to the city of Chongqing in Sichuan province. The city lay deep

in the mountains amidst highly defensible terrain, which made it unlikely the Japanese would be taking

the city any time soon.

There were at this time essentially three Chinas, the Republic of China, ruled by Chang,

the communist Chinese ruled by Mount Zedong within their redoubt in the northwest,

and the so-called reorganized national

government of the Republic of China, which was supported by the Japanese, led by Wang

Jing Wei, and based in Nanjing. For all the Japanese government's propaganda about how

they meant to free their Asian brothers from Western rule

and reserve Asia for the Asians, their puppet government in China did nothing but what it was

permitted to do by its Japanese overlords, which was typical of the independent governments

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