Dwarkesh Patel: evaluation

Transcript context

…He’s a soldier. Whereas other people, even other nationalists, wanted to accommodate the Communists more, especially early on, and he has one quote that “the Japanese are a disease of the flesh, but the Communists are a disease of the soul”. So, what was the nature of his anti-communism? Because in retrospect, obviously the means we don't endorse, but he was right about that understanding of what would happen with the Communists in power. He was interested in communism, and he sent his son, Chiang Ching-kuo, to Russia to study. Actually, his son was a hostage up there. He married a Russian. That's one of the reasons you don't have a Chiang dynasty because these children are not 100% Han, right? Because their mom's Russian. However, as he learned more about it, because initially he's interested in that, he's interested in playing fascism as well, and how you organize society. He studied in Japan, knew a great deal about how the Japanese had done things. I think he had military education there as well. But then he starts realizing how dangerous they are. He was accurate. He did not want to fight the Japanese at all. And he was forced to by Chinese students, among others, and a lot of the urban elite that he depended on, who were horrified with what Japan was doing. But Chiang Kai-shek knew you only take on one enemy at a time. You'll become overwhelmed if you do, and he believed that really he needed to kind of accommodate or put the Japanese aside, fight the Communists, get rid of them, and then he's hoping the United States will get in or something that then he could deal with the Japanese separately. But he faced so much popular pressure that that's when the Xi'an incident takes place at the end of '36, where he agrees to form the second United Front. He realizes he'll be overthrown by popular hatred of the Japanese, thinking they have to fight the Japanese. So he didn't have his choices on military strategies at the end there.…

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