If Gabrielsson was alive for a playlist, it would start with the hymns of her childhood and jump to the cabaret that gave her the nickname Coco. Next up, a bel canto aria played on her own grand piano. And, of course, the Beatles live in London with jazz and blues and Johnny Hallyday and Stravinsky in between.

The playlist would close with a song from Koko, the Broadway musical that starred Katharine Hepburn in the title role. Watch the film that explores this eclectic, refined musical journey on Inside Shanelle Dotcom.

Hello, everybody, welcome to Dance Knows History hit, I've got an absolutely brutal episode Friday and love it. It's the start of another week of home schooling here in the UK. My daughter, who you heard on this podcast before, is studying how Media Matters.

What were you writing today about Henry's appearance? What was it like when I was young? What was like when he was old?

So why was that? He was handsome and fit when he was young. Then he was fat and old when he was older. Yeah, that happens. And Zia. How can you be sure that these sources are unbiased? Well, you can't really, but and if they were written by a more powerful person than him and they were good comments, then they would probably be true, because if they were written by, like a person, you would be scared of Henry punishing them.

They would probably be false. That's the big question. Big questions here, it's all about bias anyway, everyone. Speaking of bias, this episode of Dan Snow's history, it is about 1949 as a turning point in 20th century history. It's the year that the Chinese Communist Party, Mao Tse tung, finally won the lengthy and gigantically costly Chinese civil war. It's a year that, therefore is decisive in China's relations with the rest of the world, the Cold War, not just within China itself.

And Graeme Hutchings is an associate at the University of Oxford China Center. He is an expert. He's lived in China for a long time. He spent some time we talking about 1949, about his new book, about the events of that fateful year.

There's also a little sting in the tail of his podcast when he says that war between China and Taiwan of some description is inevitable soon. So happy thoughts, everyone happy thought you can while away the time between you and a thermonuclear conflict by watching history hit TV, it is going to history hit TV shows like Netflix for History. We've released a new updated version of the app. So it's working and it's firing on all cylinders now. But a search function, better recommendation functions, all sorts of things going on.

Thanks, everyone, for getting in touch with feedback. You can go there, check out history, hit Dot TV and then you can watch all the history documentaries on there, for example, is excellent. Ron Ammeter documentary on there, talking about China in the Second World War that you'll enjoy. In the meantime, enjoy this thought provoking podcast with Graham Hutchings.

Graham, thank you so much for coming on the podcast is wonderful to have you. It's my pleasure that we all think instinctively of nineteen forty five being a great hinge, a great turning point of history. But wow, surely nineteen forty nine is just important and gets ever more so as we understand the extent of Chinese power and ambition in this century.

It is a massively important. Yeah. There's always something arbitrary isn't there, about historians choosing year history doesn't respect chronology in quite the way we scholars of history do, but it does, in the case of China, frame a series of events which were of fundamental importance for the country and its long term future, and had a fundamental importance on the political, the geopolitical indeed shape of the world talked about at the end of the Second World War in 1945.

So many people forget that China actually suffered the second highest number of casualties in the Second World War, brutal, gigantic fighting with the Japanese that had gone for years before the Iraq war even started for Western powers. What condition was China in?

Well, that war, as you rightly say, exacted a terrific toll, not just due to the barbarity of the invasion undertaken by Japan, but also because it began long before war in Europe. You'll be aware that Manchuria, northeast China, in many respects, the industrial heartland, was taken by the Japanese in the early 1930s, and they launched a full scale invasion of China proper in nineteen thirty seven. So long before trouble brewed in a very serious way in Europe, the Chinese under the government of Chiang Kai shek Jiang assure his nationalist government KMT government was fighting this vicious invasion and survived, though it was very close for a long time until August nineteen forty five.

But the fabric of China, the material fabric of the country, was very badly damaged. The psychological fabric of the people, some 500 million of them was very badly battered and there was an enormous yearning for peace, which the Chinese rightly expected would come their way after this conflict. But alas, and the lack, it gave way to a continuation of the equally bitter civil war between Mao Zedong's communists and Zhang's nationalists.

Were the Nationalists the favorites, or did the Communists enjoy great advances? They control key areas of the country or receive huge support from the neighboring Soviet Union, for example.

The latter was certainly true. The Communists benefited from the fact that the brunt of the Japanese invasion was fielded and taken by a Jenky shakes armies and they were very badly battered. The communists are small in number. They were in their central China heartland around the city that later became famous of Yunnan, which was their base. But when 1945 came, ah, they were disadvantaged by the fact that their troops were very much more in number than Chiang Kai shek.

Ah, they were very much worse equipped. And the United States in 1945 was still shoveling large amounts of military aid, including advisors, in the direction of Chiang Kai-Shek. So he was in a good position, as he thought himself at the time, to clear up the communist menace within a year or two and be the undisputed ruler of his country. But boy, it turned out very differently from that.

Why was this? Why I mean, was it a case of communist tenacity while in tactics or powerful and convincing messaging, or was it nationalist corruption, failures and incompetence? It was both.

And he said rather annoyingly, this is one of those major historical questions for which there is no definitive answer, certainly not at the moment. Maybe at some point when we can understand more fully what the communists were doing when the archives are open. The principal reason, I think, is Chiang Scheck's military ineptness is strategic failures and the fact that he was able to mobilize both the army is and more importantly, the people to support his government and the communists were good.

Remember, the Jiang Kai-Shek is ruling the country and the Communists are trying to topple him. The Chinese Communist Party, in its inception right until the present day, one might say, is cast as a fighting machine, a machine for waging struggle and overcoming enemies, and with especially the appeal to peasants and the promise of land, which Chiang Kai shek decided not to offer them, at least in the same way they could count on in the 1930s and nineteen.

It is a big reservoir of support. Now, they had Soviet aid, they had Soviet vice alongside that, which certainly helped them, and they also had the fact that James armies were warm already. But it was more than that. They were better rulers than Chiang Kai shek. They were better tacticians and better a strategy.

To what extent does ideology matter here? Are we just talking about the good old fashioned balance of steel, high explosive rifles, peasant conscript armies who can raise the most? Or did motivation matter? It was the communist message, this transformative message. Was it more attractive?

The armies on both sides were, broadly speaking, conscripted. But because Mao and the Communist Party made such a strong play with land reform and the promise of a much better future, they were able to recruit volunteer peasant armies as well. People who really felt even if they were not given much choice about whether to fight or not felt that they could have a reward. When the war was done, when Chiang Kai-Shek regime was toppled, they would get their land, they would have peace and they would have prosperity.

On the nationalist side, the armies were bigger. They were better equipped, but they were pretty well or conscripted. And moreover, the conditions on the front line, indeed behind the front line for soldiers on both sides, but especially the nationalists, was grim. And if you ask your nationalist soldier what he was fighting for, he would have much less clarity as far as an answer is concerned, much less conviction, much less personal stake compared with the communist counterpart.

I don't know if it was before talking to you, but you've made me realize that it might perhaps be useful to think about this war in the context of the later infamous, the oft lamented great counterinsurgencies of the Cold War in the second half, the 20th century, Vietnam, Malaya, elsewhere. Is this a case really of what we see in those countries as a conventional government force bled white by a powerful rural insurgent movement?

Well, there's something very much in what you say. In fact, the Maoist revolution was perhaps the largest example of this rural insurrection, the capturing of the countryside, the restructuring of the countryside in ways in which local people were given a real stake in a putative new order. And of course, one has to remember, in the case of China, what is still the case, despite enormous changes over the last thirty years, in particular, it's still a rural country.

The cities, the towns of China, the prosperous and numerous in the nineteen forties accounted for a very small part of the population. If you controlled the countryside and you control the arteries of communication between the cities, as the communists did, then you could bring the cities and any government based upon support in those areas to heal. And that was a model. It was a model adopted widely by revolutionaries in Southeast Asia. It was to some extent at work in the Malayan emergency.

It was certainly in the mind of Ho Chi Minh and the others as they sought to bring an end first to French authority in Indochina and then to American intervention. And it had its disciples, of course, in Latin America and Central America. So you could say that the insurrection, the rural revolt mounted by email and its victory in nineteen forty nine was a big inspiration.

There's a moment at the end of all these insurgencies when the guerrillas have to start fighting conventionally, symmetrically. I mean, it was North Vietnamese tanks that actually took Saigon. But there's a point at which these forces start having to capture cities. That's right.

I mean, the model of the communist revolution was the countryside surrounds the cities and that they achieved very successfully. But they had to make a switch. They had to make a switch from insurrection to being ruled, from being a rebel to being the administrator. Now, what the communists face is a major problem in the nineteen forties was that they didn't have much expertise in the form of people good at urban management. They didn't have a high quality cadre of people who were able to move in, for example, to Beijing or to Nanjing or to Shanghai and run those cities in ways in which they had run cities of complexity.

We are living standards, educational standards, cultural levels were high and Mao made much of this before he took over the major cities, saying to party members, we have got to learn rapidly to run cities. Remember also that these are Marxists. Now, they believe that in the vanguard of history, as the proletariat, the working class, not the peasantry of whom some things could be expected in terms of. Creating a new polity, but not everything, so it was critical, formal, having conquered the cities with his army, the play to run them successfully subsequently.

So in this moment of climax, how does the communist leadership transform itself into a government, not only government, the government of the most populous nation on earth, just diverse country? It is.

And it's attributable, I think, to two things in broad terms. One is the communist capacity for organization, planning and discipline. So, for example, before the Communists marched in to Shanghai in May 1949, a city they hold over, which has not been questioned or challenged seriously ever since they were at work with an underground movement in Shanghai, they were at work infiltrating the police and they were the second point, appealing to the spirit of nationalism, of renewal, of the widespread desire amongst the ranks of even Chiang Kai-Shek supporters to have a new China, a strong China, a China that could develop rapidly, that would never again be at the mercy of foreign powers in the way that it had been with Japan in the 30s and 40s and of course, with the Western powers in the 19th century.

These ran deep in the Chinese mind and the communists were skillful at playing on that and promising people a new deal was fascinating.

I naively thought the Chinese communist embrace of nationalism was quite a recent phenomenon, but actually it was present at the very beginning.

That's right. Early on in the Communist Party's experience. Remember, it was only founded in July nineteen twenty one. This is the year twenty twenty one of its centenary. It began as a rural insurrection movement. The nationalist element, the sense that we're rebuilding a new China in which all Chinese can be comfortable was something that they acquired in the course of making revolution in the thirties and forties, and it reached its apogee. So the offer that Mao was making to people outside the Communist Party membership outside the members of his own army was, look, you're Chinese.

We don't much mind whether you're communist or not at the moment. If you want to help us to build a new China, a China will never again be humiliated and that will rise to its proper status. Then come and join us.

You mentioned malware to the individuals we need to pay attention to in nineteen forty five. And do they matter in this story? Could things have been different if different people have been in charge?

They're massively important. The nature of the revolution, the conduct of it would be different were it not for the principal personalities involved. I don't foresee it wouldn't have happened, but it wouldn't have happened in the way it did. The principal protagonist rivals are Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-Shek. Men not separated much in terms of the age difference between them and not separated by much when it came to their true nationalist commitment to their country, but very different when it came to the way in which that should be achieved.

And of the goals for Mao, who was very largely in admiration of Stalin and the Soviet Union, he thought that China would need to join the global socialist camp, would need to emulate the Soviet Union in a host of respects. There would be elements that would be distinctly Chinese, as it were. He wasn't prepared to be slavish in his devotion, but he saw in the Soviet Union and its own remarkable survival under the Nazi assault as a model for the future of the New China.

Chiang Kai shek was more of a traditionalist, more conservative in outlook, not entirely indeed opposed to many modern ways, but felt that China would be better, broadly speaking, in a Democratic liberal camp, though tinged with authoritarianism. For him, there was a Chinese qua Chinese model as opposed to a Soviet model. He Jiang had studied briefly in the Soviet Union, and the Army aside, was not impressed by what he saw. You mentioned other characters.

It's worth mentioning to others who were bitter rivals. One was the leader of the Quazi Independent militaristic province of Gwang Xi down in southwest China by Chong Xi. He was a formidable general, perhaps Zhang's best, and he was pitted against Mao's best by circumstances which I think largely coincidental but interesting. And Mao's best was Lin Biao, a formidable commander who was the architect of victory. The communist victory in Manchuria took his fulfilled army down to the Yangzi and dealt by Chinese nationalist armies.

A terrific blow and indeed destroyed them and ended. Kishkes government problem with Chongyi as far as the nationalist cause was concerned, as he was at bitter odds with a Chiang Kai shek. So not only was Jiang on the back foot from the beginning of 1949, he was ruling over a house divided.

I've only listed to his history, we're talking to Graham Hutchings about China about 1949, more coming up after this. Talk to me about the decisive clashes of nineteen forty nine, what was the scale of the fighting in nineteen forty nine? Essentially the nature of the military conflict is the communists advancing from the north to the south of China and basically carrying all before them the situation immediately prior to that. The preface, if you like, to the year that I'm looking at was one of huge pitched battles between mass armies.

We spoke earlier in our conversation about rural insurrection and about the communists capturing the countryside and then moving on to the cities and speaking as if it were the civil war, largely a guerrilla contest. In fact, by the time you get to 1949 and in the early phase of nineteen forty nine, we see mass armies, we see artillery pitted against each other. We even see tanks in those circumstances where the terrain favoured it. The nationalists had a navy, the nationalists had an air force, the communists had neither.

The nationalists weren't able to deploy theirs to good effect. But once the communists get across the Yangzi, they are really moving south at the speed determined by the capacity of the nationalists to run. So there are large scale conflicts, but they are not those of pitched ferocious battle of the kind we saw in the months preceding the OK, you're very experienced, world renowned sinologist have a beautiful laugh at me, but it sounds a little bit like the collapse of the Southern Song and the advance of the UN, the Mongols.

Well, the historical resonances run deep. And what Chinese history does show is that unless Mao had been successful in dislodging Chiang Kai-Shek from South China, he would not be able to have survived in North China very long. He had to capture the Yangtse Valley and its rich riverine cities and towns and take the ground, the economic ground from under his opponents. Otherwise, he would be forever in a precarious position.

I think your work really emphasises for me the extent to which Chinese society become brutalised. China have been at war for over a decade and not just any gigantic industrial warfare which had bordered on genocide at times, but certainly enormous casualties, appalling war crimes committed. What effect did that have on the people that you've studied? That's right, and I think that holds the clue to quite a lot of what happened once the communists had gained control over the mainland and waged their own campaigns in pursuit of socialism, in pursuit of socialist perfection.

We might say if you think, for example, of the class struggles that were undertaken to eliminate first the landlords and then the bourgeois intellectuals and then the collectivization of the 1950s and the starvation that followed. And finally, what we hope finally the Cultural Revolution, when Chinese turned on each other again with terrific bestiality, although that wasn't formally a civil war, you're talking about degrees of behavior, inhumane behavior that must be related to this long experience of war that so scored and marked the Chinese mind and the fabric of society in the 30s and 40s.

What else to communist do in forty nine to build the foundations of a state that we might still recognize today? What decisions they.

Well, every country, every nation needs a founding myth. And as far as the People's Republic of China is concerned, first of October 1949 was that founding date and that has been preserved and worshipped and celebrated ever since and is a fundamental part of the liberation story, the development of China, a story now that's not just symbolically important, though. It certainly is that it's substantially important because what we see in 1949 is the creation of those institutions and methods of rule, which with changes survived to this very day.

It saw the creation of a political culture on a scale the Chinese have never known before. Politics entered into private spaces everyday life. Never have so many Chinese gone to so many meetings as they did in the nineteen forty nine period and into the nineteen fifties where they were rallied and mobilized in support of the new regime. If you take things like the media, for example, almost immediately the Chinese communist arrived in the cities. Media organizations were taken over and became essentially mouthpieces of the party.

If you take the legal system, the communists almost instantaneously completely abolished the nationalist legal code and replaced it with a system of peoples courts and revolutionary justice. Now, the effect of those policies, indeed, many of the very institutions, certainly the way of going about things in the political sphere, is very much a part of present day China. Indeed, President Xi Jinping, the current leader of the Chinese Communist Party, is very much to the fore, second to no one in his praise for Mao on that early period of the People's Republic of China.

So it has deep resonance in contemporary China this year of nineteen forty nine other outside powers, important foreigners.

I mean, I know that in the USA for years afterwards, a quote unquote loss of China was regarded as a disaster of the first magnitude.

How influential, how important were these outside powers, the three powers to think of in this connection, of course, the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the United States. The United States was the most invested in Zhang's government, as you pointed out, and there was a substantial lobby, domestic lobby, which was in support of Jiang. It had missionary elements. It had educational and overseas aid, what would now be called overseas aid aspects to it as well.

But Truman and Acheson and Marshall, the secretary of state, realized that you could pour billions into Chiang Kai-Shek s coffers and get nothing out of it. He Jiang was too weak to support. He was not in possession of the legitimacy that the Americans could feel happily associating themselves with, but critically, he was actually a little bit too important to completely abandon. So they weren't prepared to save him and allow him to keep his grip on the mainland. But when he had fled to Taiwan and when, importantly, Mao Zedong had begun this new China by launching a military assault into North Korea, the Americans realized that Jiang would have to be kept alive, although by now confined to the island of Taiwan.

Stalin, on the other hand, he liked what Mao was doing. Of course, he was in alliance with Mao informal until a treaty was signed in nineteen fifty. But Stalin was also wary of Mao. He didn't really understand Mao's line of thinking. He was. Concerned that unlike the situation in Eastern Europe, China could never be called a satellite. He was concerned, moreover, that Mao might challenge him eventually for leadership of the socialist world.

The final power, just to mention briefly of the three that I touched on, is that of Great Britain. It said we don't have a stake in the political outcome of this contest between the communist and the nationalists. But we're very keen on our investments in Shanghai and we're very keen on retaining Hong Kong. Well, they thought that a way to achieve both those objectives would be when circumstances allow to recognize the new regime, which they did in the early days of January nineteen fifty.

But it didn't save their investment in Shanghai. And it wasn't that that saved their hold on Hong Kong. What they were concerned about with Hong Kong was whether the communist would stop at the frontier. Would they just march straight through and take all of Hong Kong back? Remember to been in a large part of it, had been in British hands for a century, and that was the beginning of the century of humiliation. But Mao and the PLA decided they wouldn't do that.

They had enough on their plates having just taken control over the mainland. And the British moved in very significant military resources for the size of the territory, not because they imagined they could walk the play off or still less defeated, but just to show the play. But if they did cross the frontier, there would be some sort of price to pay and the communist relented. They didn't move south.

And the story of British Hong Kong is one which we're familiar with, lasting as it did until the 1st of July, nineteen ninety seven out of the Communists consolidating power after their victory in 1989 changed the lives of Chinese people.

It caught them up in a maelstrom of political mobilization and campaigns. It was a remarkable experience for ordinary Chinese, as it was for those who were more prominent in their society. They had really a choice between resistance, the price of which could be very heavy indeed, and not worth taking, many said, or compliance. I don't want, however, to convey the idea that there wasn't a bedrock of popular support for the revolutionary outcome of nineteen forty nine.

There was, especially amongst young people, especially among those who were dedicated to the future of their country and wanted to see it united and wanted to see it strong, and moreover were fed up with what they regarded as the incompetence of Chiang Kai shek and his nationalist followers. So there is a very strong element of compliance here. But with the passage of time, the costs of criticism, the costs of dissent increased very rapidly. And we saw with the fate of the landlords, with the fate of those intellectuals who dared to criticise the party when its policies have been implemented, ending up in labour camps at best in executions at worst, that there was a heavy price to pay for living in Mao Zedong's China.

You're often on a peace dividend. I mean, food shortages and hyperinflation of marked the previous decades. Did things improve in the short term? I mean, did the communists sort of deliver?

They delivered in certain important respects like issues of life expectancy, those general indices of literacy, of women's participation in society, of clearing out what Mao regarded some extent rightly, the legacies of feudalism and the inequalities. There were substantive improvements which cannot be denied. It really, however, requires one to think about how they were accomplished and what they were accompanied by these campaigns of pressure and criticism and punishment, psychological torment. In many cases, these benefits were real, but they came at a cost.

How is 1949 seen today in China? Is it unambiguously celebrated or is there any subtlety creeping into the messaging that we might get in the Soviet Union talking about Stalin?

I think the notion that the communists would be subtle about 1949 is not to be entertained too seriously. I think the answer to your question really is that the legacy of 1949 is one of the principal strategic features of the landscape in East Asia that we confront today, i.e. Taiwan that is not controlled by the mainland. Xi Jinping has promised that the Taiwan issue must be resolved and it must be resolved promptly. It cannot be left to linger. China is a global power now, yet unlike many global powers, it is not yet completed national reunification.

You'll recall in the case of Italy, in the case of Germany, in the case of other European powers, national unification was a way station on the road to national greatness and global power. So what we're dealing with is a legacy of 1949 in the form of perhaps the longest unfinished civil war. The Americans have a loose, unofficial, tentative alliance to preserve the status quo in Taiwan. What we're seeing in the shape of recent moves by Xi Jinping is a constant test of that and a very strong temptation, I think, on his part to resolve the legacy of 1949 to end the Chinese civil war and to establish Chinese Communist Party control over Taiwan.

Well, that's fascinating.

There's 1949 have lessons for us, whether it be a kind of massive, overwhelming military victory against fleeing nationalists, or will there be a kind of accommodation as there was perhaps, as you mentioned, with the kind of capitalist bourgeoisie of Shanghai?

What will it be? I rather suspect that the resolution of the civil war will reflect the current standards of warfare. It'll be very different from what we saw in 1949, though the outcome, I don't think is going to be in much doubt. It'll be waged by Gray's own warfare. It will be waged in the cyber sphere and it might not involve much in the way of conventional cannon shot. But I think the campaign will be equally deadly in the sense that it delivers to the Chinese Communist Party what they have sought over the past 70 odd years.

So you're in no doubt there is going to be war of some description and it's going to be soon. I would to say, no doubt. But on the balance of probabilities, it is looking like the Chinese civil war will not end peacefully.

Well, thank you. More reason to read your book and learn about that fateful year. Tell us what the book's called.

The book is called China. Nineteen forty nine year of Revolution. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you. Thank you, Dad. My pleasure.

Ivan, thanks for reaching the end of this podcast. Most of you probably asleep, so I'm talking to your snoring folks. But anyone who's awake, it would be great if you could do me a quick favor, head over to wherever you get your podcasts and rate it five stars and then leave a nice glowing review. It makes a huge difference for some reason to how these podcasts do. Martinus. I know, but them's the rules. Then we go farther up the charts, more people listen to us and everything will be awesome.

So thank you so much. I'll sleep well.

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