Simon Boyi Chen Profile picture
Aug 25, 2020 8 tweets 2 min read Read on X
“Do you people love capitalist buildings more than soldiers of the property-less proletariat?”
Battle of Shanghai in 1949 in Chinese Civil War was, for communists, neither a cakewalk nor a savage Stalingrad-esque showdown as that faced by Imperial Japanese Army in 1937. While /1
intense fighting occurred outside of urban Shanghai between commander Su Yu’s communist forces of rural Northern Chinese, versus defending Republic of China Army units (whose senior officer resorted to terror tactics to goad men to fight, including battlefield execution of /2
>10 field officers ranked major and below, for cowardice), Su Yu issued a direct and strict order forbidding use of heavy weapons once communists entered urban Shanghai proper, particularly Pudong District.
This caused tremendous anger and disobedience among communist troops /3
of all ranks, and they couldn’t believe they were restricted only to rifles, machine guns, and hand grenades, in their vain and bloodbathed efforts to go up against ROC Army defenders entrenched within large, sturdy European-style buildings of concrete and stone. Outside of /4
Shanghai city, artillery unit commanders outright defied Su Yu’s order, wheeling in heavy artillery pieces and aiming them straight at Pudong District and Shanghai’s glitzy urban sights.
Perhaps much of it, from a fundamental psychological point of view, plain revenge, or /5
perhaps some of it could’ve simply been due to ignorance of what urban combat in densely-built, European-style cities actually entailed. After all, most of these men, recruited from rural Northern China, had never seen trams, theaters, electronic appliances that any /6
Shanghainese urbanite took for granted in 1949. After all, communist political commissars had to train these men on how to use toilets, as most of them had never even used toilets ever in their lives.
One of those commanders angrily asked, “does [Su Yu] care more about these /7
capitalist buildings, than about the lives of the wuchanjieji (property-less proletariat) soldiers?”
Ultimately, much of urban Shanghai was left intact. But things could’ve turned out very different—for famous sights today such as the Bund—had not it been for a direct order. /e

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More from @simonbchen

Feb 25
One of most important adages in the East Asian communist revolutionary movement in 20th century is, "Who are our friends? Who are our enemies? That is the most important question of the revolution." One important and implicit corollary of this quote is that, in a revolutionary
framework, this consideration actually applies to both revolutionaries overthrowing a regime, and to the incumbent government regime, that is, developing an accurate intelligence picture of who are friends and who are enemies is of utmost importance to both revolutionaries and
government. In turn, this means that many revolutionary operators must actually stay concealed, and their true allegiance and beliefs carefully hidden, so as to deny their opponents (the government) an accurate intelligence picture of the situation. The strategic stupidity of the
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Feb 21
When an undercover revolutionary operative is captured by the counterintelligence or police forces of the governing regime, the most critical hours are the first few days or so after capture, since that's when his (or her) comrades would still be residing in their temporary safe-
houses of which the imprisoned operative knows of the addresses and locations. If the operative breaks down under interrogation, even the most brutal interrogation, during these golden critical hours, and discloses secrets, then he can put his revolutionary comrades in severe
jeopardy, and likewise the Party's retribution against that imprisoned revolutionary operative's associates or family members for operative's "crime" of leaking secrets may also be accordingly severe. After those critical hours have passed, the secrets harbored in the operative's
Read 9 tweets
Aug 2, 2023
1/ Before Xi Jinping took power 10 years ago, corruption in China's military occurred on such a massive scale, it would have made Fat Leonard look like a priest. Interest and motivation of many Chinese military officers >10 years ago primarily revolved around making $. Their mode Image
2/ of operations generally went along lines of: siphon off $ from military contracts and/or use military property and resources to conduct profitable commercial side businesses (which were pervasive back then, but historical background of that deserves its own discussion), use $
3/ to buy promotion in military rank ($ were essentially required for career advancement at all levels, from platoon leader up to commanding general or admiral), pocket remainder of $ (which often amounted to thousands to millions of USD$) for personal use, maybe ultimately using
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Jun 24, 2023
1/ In studying history of Chinese Civil War of 1927-50 and probing how Nationalists were forced into exile on Taiwan, some historians have observed that whereas Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists actually behaved with restraint, communists did not behave with restraint. Whatever
2/ Nationalists thought were simply too crazy to do, communists did them—to win. Some historians have also observed that revolutions that topple autocratic regimes occur whenever that autocratic regime showed shred of self-restraint as weakness. Late Qing imperial dynasty became
3/ mellower and more pacific after demise of all-controlling de facto empress Cixi, and thus Qing empire's own professionally-trained New Army rebelled and caused collapse of Qing imperial rule in late 1911-early 1912. More than three decades later, Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists
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Jun 15, 2023
1/ Stereotyping South Vietnamese generals as complete buffons (including Lam Quang Thi, who is not a complete buffoon and wrote two erudite works on Vietnam War in postwar exile in US) remains common among US and Western historians in 21st century, but the reality is far more
2/ complicated and nuanced. South Vietnamese generals, like Nationalist Chinese generals in Civil War, were spread broadly on a spectrum of competency, from grossly incompetent to highly competent. Battle of Xuan Loc, last major battle in South Vietnam before its final collapse
3/ in April 1975, for example remains one of most astonishing defensive actions by any standing professional army in modern 20th century military history. Whether the casual dismissal of East Asian non-communist generals prevalent among US and Western
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Jun 13, 2023
1/ In handling history, there is a tight rope to walk in accurately carrying out an objective and forensic examination of historical figures, without using positive adjectives to describe them. This is the crux of distinguishing between a historical figure's moral value from
2/ their technical competence. Many people have fallen into the trap of attributing to a historical figure a favorable judgment on basis of their technical competence, despite the deeply problematic nature of their moral value. Many people have also fallen into the trap of wholly
3/ dismissing someone's technical competence from serious examination (and objective lessons that could be learned from that, from a wholly technical and forensic point of view) because of their moral value. In the case of German military history in World War 2, many figures in
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