When Japan invaded China in 1937, they started a chain of events leading to their defeat at the end of the second world war. Between circa 1925 and circa 1950 the Chinese communist party took hold of China sparking nationalism and anti-japanese stances, bringing the people new opportunities, and advocating social and gender equality.
The Chinese people felt a loss of pride when Japan invaded them, but with the rising of the communist party they felt a new sense of nationalism and pride in their country. When looking at the conversation between a teenager and his grandfather, we get a wider picture at what life was like before the communist party rose to power. They now have the power to hear what was going on around the world with the radio,
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He knows how powerful they are, and relates the peasants to natural forces of power such as the Hurricane, due to the fact he knows that when millions of people get together, they can be unstoppable. Mao Zedong believes in the peasants and their ability to overthrow people that have been holding them down for so long. Being the leader of the Communist Party is is far more confident with what he is saying, because Zedong believes that he is correct in every aspect of this topic. With an increase of nationalism, the peasants banded together and started forming army-civilian integration units, along with taking up guerrilla warfare. The Japanese found it, “extraordinarily difficult to separate the Communist bandits from the peasants” (Doc 3). This shows us that the peasants felt like they owed something to the party for giving them so much more than what they originally had, and wanted to give back by fighting in their armies. This was extremely inconvenient for the Japanese because they couldn’t tell which group was …show more content…
They came to the conclusion to “Reduce feudal exploitation by the landlords, support civil liberties, political rights, and economic rights of the peasants in order to improve their living condition and enhance their enthusiasm for the Anti-Japanese War” (Doc 5). This would further the popularity of the Communist Party along with bringing equality for peasants. A reaction to this would be the sense of equality that peasants got and they were put in, “a position to challenge the landlords and moneylenders in the countryside,” (Doc 6) in hopes of receiving what they deserve. Along with having an increase in equality for peasants, women were given more rights than they had ever had before. The Marriage Law of 1950 in China gave women the opportunity for a relatively easy divorce, ended concubines and child marriages, gave widows permission to remarry, equal property rights for men and women, and, “was based on the free choice of partners, on monogamy, on equal rights for both sexes, and on the protection of the lawful interests of women and children” (Doc 7). With these laws, women and peasants were able to rise up in the society and made the economy all around better, with more people buying and selling of goods. If we had an additional document on how the different men felt about the new