Chiang in Context: China in the Mid 1930s

As the leader of mainland China from 1928 to 1949, and the leader of Taiwan China from 1949 to 1975, Chiang Kai-shek experienced many ups and downs. Throughout his time in mainland China, he wrestled continuously against the communists, either in a state of outright war, or in an uneasy truce.

Mao, the leader of the communists, at times found it expedient to lavishly if insincerely praise Chiang. The communists would exploit times of ceasefire during the ongoing Chinese civil war to regroup and rebuild their strength, and then resume their attack.

The war inside mainland China lasted from 1927 to 1949, and so was largely coextensive with Chiang’s tenure as leader there.

Although the struggle was long, there were times at which things went well for the ‘Nationalists,’ as those who defended the Chinese against communism were called. Historian Jay Taylor writes about the year 1936:

Despite continuing civil wars, the depression, depredations by Japan, and preparation for a general war, the power and authority of the Chinese central government was greater than at any time since the Taiping Uprising. In the spring, displaying military, political, and covert action skills, Chiang had quickly put down another rebellion by the Guangxi Clique and the usual dissidents in Guangdong. The rebels had again charged Chiang with appeasement and dictatorship but essentially the rebellion reflected the ongoing power struggle between the warlords and the central government. In their own provinces, the warlords were more like dictators than Chiang Kai-shek was, and within two years their preferred national leader, Wang Jingwei — at the moment still in Europe — would defect to Japan. Chiang's generous treatment of the incorrigible southerners, even sending them three million central government yuan or fabi in emergency aid, was an act of enlightened self-interest, which is perhaps all one can expect of a national leader.

The Guangxi region has a long cultural history - predating and outlasting Chiang - of being fiercely independent, and not identifying with the rest of mainland China. Mao, then, was not the only headache which Chiang faced.

In the southernmost part of China, and bordering on Guangxi, was the Guangdong region, which likewise had a traditionally independent attitude. Therefore many of Chiang’s troubles came from the south.

Wang Jingwei was a competitor who wanted Chiang’s power, but Wang Jingwei would obtain significance only to the extent that he attached himself either to the communists or the Japanese. In 1932, Chiang and Wang Jingwei had reached a compromise in which Wang Jingwei assumed political leadership of the Nationalist party, while Chiang led the military and much of the government.

Although the communists would ultimately succeed in subjugating mainland China and ousting Chiang, his two decades of leadership were not an unmitigated tragedy. At many points, things seemed to be going well.

The Island Mentality

Geography influences culture. Societies on islands are profoundly affected by their boundaries: England, Sri Lanka, Hawaii, and Cuba. Four quite different places, yet all share this factor.

Residents of an island nation find that coming and going are clearly defined events. Leaving or returning to an island requires more planning, and is a more clearly defined event than leaving or returning to a continental nation.

Because such coming and going both represent the transversal of a significant geographical feature, and require more time, effort, and money, island nations develop a distinct self-concept of being set apart.

Going from one continental nation to another can be done with such great ease that people are sometimes not even aware that they’ve done it.

Island nations, then, whether they are sovereign states or parts of other political entities, develop according to certain patterns produced by their geography.

The Carrying Capacity of Planet Earth: Human Population

The term ‘carrying capacity’ is used to designate the maximum population that a certain habitat can support.

A square mile deciduous forest might maximally support a certain number of squirrels. An inland lake of a certain number of gallons might maximally maintain a certain number of carp. Those are examples of ‘carrying capacity,’ - the largest number of inhabitants which can be maintained without environmental degradation.

At one time, in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the popular press and news media carried stories of the Earth nearing its total carrying capacity in terms of human beings. These reports had a certain “scare effect,” and there was talk of striving for “zero population growth.”

Although they were mere sensationalism, these media events do raise a legitimate question: is there an upper limit to the number of human beings which the planet can support?

Any number put forward as an answer to this question will necessarily be an estimate, and a rough one at that. The staggering number of variables in play, and their highly complex relationships to each other, are compounded by the constantly changing technology which allows for increasing food production.

In a sustainable and renewable way, without environmental degradation, how much food, clean water, and clean air can be available? How many people can inhabit planet Earth?

Reasoned estimates point to some number greater than 100 billion. But how much greater, nobody’s really willing to guess.

These estimates factor in a “first world” standard of living for the population: telephone, television, running water and other indoor plumbing, HVAC, electricity, etc., and around 200 square feet of indoor living space per person.

This is quite a rosy scenario, and much brighter than the doom and gloom presented by those who thought that a “population bomb” would soon cause global misery. (The Population Bomb was actually the title of a 1968 book whose authors believed that the Earth was near the upper limit of its carrying capacity.)

If the planet is nowhere near maximum population, then why is there hunger and famine? Why are there regions without sufficient water? Why is there poverty?

Those conditions are the result of bad decisions by people: a few honest mistakes, but mostly a lot of greed and corruption.

If the Earth’s population were 1,000,000 - which is less than 1% of what it is now - there would still be someone without enough proper food, without clean water, and living in poverty.

Even with only a tiny fraction of its current population, the planet would still be home to malnutrition, unclean drinking water, and poverty.

Surprisingly, as the population has grown, the percentage of people living in poverty has decreased. A larger percentage of the Earth’s population lived in poverty 4,000 years than now.

A steadily growing population (as opposed to a rapidly growing or erratically growing one) is the best environment for economic growth.

Interestingly, a “zero growth” population, or a declining one, tends to be worse for the environment than other populations. A smaller supply of young people - young workers - nudges industry to choose options which are not friendly to the environment, even when such technology is available, because such measures are labor-intensive.

Human Sacrifice in Norse Mythology

Most, and probably all, civilizations in their earliest phases have practiced proto-religions which routinely included human sacrifice. From the Greeks and Romans to the Sumerians and Egyptians, myth and magic constituted these pre-religious varieties of polytheism.

Attempts to manipulate nature are termed ‘magic,’ and the mythologies of the Norse are no exception. One of the first authors to note this was Tacitus, the ethnographer whose chief work about northern Europe is titled Germania. Two scholars, E.O.G. Turville-Petre and Edgar Charles Polomé, write that:

In his Germania, Tacitus described the worship of a goddess, Nerthus, on an island, probably in the Baltic Sea. Whatever symbol represented her was kept hidden in a grove and taken around once a year in a covered chariot. During her pageant, there was rejoicing and peace, and all weapons were laid aside. Afterward, she was bathed in a lake and returned to her grove, but those who participated in her lustration were drowned in the lake as a sacrifice to thank her for her blessings.

By killing human beings as offerings to the Norse deities, the Norse hoped to gain some good fortune: a military victory, good weather, human fertility, or a bountiful harvest.

The Norse were not monolithic. Among them were many different tribes, each of which had its own variant of the foundational mythology. The Semnones occupied regions in southern Scandinavia and in what is now Germany.

Sacrifice often was conducted in the open or in groves and forests. The human sacrifice to the tribal god of the Semnones, described by Tacitus, took place in a sacred grove; other examples of sacred groves include the one in which Nerthus usually resides. Tacitus does, however, mention temples in Germany, though they were probably few. Old English laws mention fenced places around a stone, tree, or other object of worship. In Scandinavia, men brought sacrifice to groves and waterfalls.

Human sacrifice would continue to be common among not only among the Norse, but also among other European tribes, until roughly the era of Charlemagne. Made emperor in 800 A.D., he fostered education and culture, expanding his Frankish influence eastward and northward.

The Danish National Museum concludes that “archaeological finds from recent years show that human sacrifice was a reality in Viking Age Denmark.”

An Unlikely Bond: Henry Ford and Mohandas Gandhi

People like Henry Ford, a wealthy industrialist and a famous inventor, are more likely to receive fan letters than to write them, but Ford did write at least one. In July 1941, he wrote a letter to Mohandas Gandhi, expressing his admiration for Gandhi’s work.

The letter took two months to reach Gandhi. Mail from Detroit to India was slowed by WW2.

When Ford wrote the letter, the United States had not yet entered the war. By the time Gandhi received the letter, President Roosevelt was delivering a speech to Congress, and war was declared on December 8, 1941, the day Gandhi got Ford’s correspondence.

But Henry Ford hadn’t written about the war. He was merely expressing his admiration for Gandhi’s work.

One link between Ford and Gandhi was that both men had a thorough understanding of industrial processes and economics. Gandhi’s political work in India was carried out by the concrete process of forming thread on a spinning wheel and by the process of deriving table salt from evaporating seawater.

Both men understood the economic, social, and political impacts of such mechanical processes.

In response to Ford’s letter, Gandhi sent him a spinning wheel, which Ford displayed in his museum in Dearborn, Michigan. The spinning wheel is still there.

Social Class Structure in Mexico in the Early 19th Century

At the beginning of the 1800s, a system of social classes structured Mexican society, politics, and economics. At the top were the criollos, colonists born in Mexico to European parents. Along with the criollos were the European settlers themselves, who, however, by this time were few in number.

The fragmentation of Mexican society extended to subgroups within the major groups. The criollos, e.g., were divided among themselves regarding how far suffrage should extend.

Further down were the Indians, the Native Americans living in Mexico. The imperial government in Spain guaranteed them certain conditions, that they would have specified lands and be given a certain immunity from the colonial government.

The Spanish government didn’t do this out of the purest altruism: by stabilizing the Indians and giving them an at least minimal status, the imperial government in Spain hoped to create a roadblock to the increasing ambitions of the criollos, who wanted increasing influence in the colonial administration, and eventually independence.

The Spanish clergy worked toward the same goals as the Spanish imperial government, but with contrasting motives. As one history textbook, World History: Patterns of Interaction (McDougal-Littell, 2007), notes, “Spanish priests worked” in Mexico “for better treatment of Native Americans.”

Mexican society included a spectrum of other social classes, based on race, ethnicity, and culture: mestizos and zambos and about a half-dozen more.

But by the 1820s, the Mexicans succeeded in gaining independence from Spain. The social classes were now seen as classes of citizenship. Starting in Mexico City after the revolution, the right to vote was clearly defined and limited to certain demographic groups. As historian Irving Levinson writes,

By 1846, this pattern of exclusion applied to the entire nation. In that year, the federal government promulgated election regulations limiting suffrage to members of eight groups: land owners, mine owners and operators, military officers, clergy, magistrates, manufacturers, and members of learned professions. For some of these categories, such as that of landowner, the state also set minimum income requirements. By definition, owners of small farms and ranches, rural laborers, industrial workers, common tradespersons, and mine workers could not vote, let alone run for office.

The politics of Mexico, as a newly-independent nation, became the politics of class warfare.

As this class system asserted itself in the first two decades after Mexico gained its independence, it weakened Mexican society. Levinson continues:

In 1846, deep and violent disputes whose origins lay in the country’s colonial past divided Mexico. The first and most important of these chasms lay along lines of ethnicity and race.

Mexico’s internal social divisions would cause it to lose its first major war, and cause a major change among the political factions. The fissures in Mexican society prevented unified support for Mexico’s war efforts. The war is linked to a significant shift in Mexican partisan politics. The new postwar partisan trends led to an era known as “La Reforma” in Mexican history.

Exploring Sharia - Hadd and Hudud

As Islam continues to spread geographically, and to intensify itself in those regions it already occupies, an understanding of the intersection between Islamic culture and Islamic law explains events.

Sharia, as is known, is a distillation of legal principles from the ‘trilogy’ - the three texts which form the core of Islam: the Qur’an, the Hadith, and the Sira.

The foundation of Sharia is the Hadd. While there is room for debate and interpretation in much of Sharia, the Hadd is considered the non-negotiable bedrock of Islamic civil law.

Hudud is simply the plural form of Hadd, and both words are used in scholarship. A glossary published in Oxford Islamic Studies explains that Hadd is a

Limit or prohibition; pl. hudud. A punishment fixed in the Quran and hadith for crimes considered to be against the rights of God. The six crimes for which punishments are fixed are theft (amputation of the hand), illicit sexual relations (death by stoning or one hundred lashes), making unproven accusations of illicit sex (eighty lashes), drinking intoxicants (eighty lashes), apostasy (death or banishment), and highway robbery (death).

Islamic scholars find room for interpretation regarding any crime which doesn’t fit into one of the six categories listed above:

Punishment for all other crimes is left to the discretion of the court; these punishments are called tazir.

While the forms of Sharia vary from one nation to another, the core of Hadd is immutable, and forms a standard within Islam. Saudi Arabia has long enforced Hadd, and

recently fundamentalist ideologies have demanded the reintroduction of hudud, especially in Sudan, Iran, and Afghanistan.

Pakistan approved legislation in February 1979 which incorporated Hadd into its civil code, and subsequently stoning, whipping, and amputation of hands is considered a governmental function, not a religious one, within the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.