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Author of The Final Struggle, Ian Easton, sits down for a long chat with Eryk about the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It's remarkable how close to extinction the CPP came, not once, but thrice. This is a story of spies and counterspies, moles and defectors, violence, treachery and death. Listen to Ian Easton's case on how much we've underestimated the CCP, and how democratic governments, international institutions... and people of all freedom-loving societies, need to "wake up" to the reality of what the CCP is: an authoritarian near-superpower wedded to a fanatic Marxism/Leninism ideology that seeks a new world order, controlled, of course, by a modern emperor in Beijing.
Cover: The Great Hall of the People, Beijing, PRC.
Note: All images via Wikimedia Commons.
Books by IAN EASTON:
1. The first "purge." Communists are shown being rounded up in Shanghai, while one man is publicly executed by beheading (1927).
2. A picture of a young Gu Shunzhang 顧順章 an early communist leader, and spymaster. Gu was sent to the USSR to train in espionage, and then picked by Zhou Enlai to lead the CCP's first intelligence service, the Central Special Branch 中央特科; Zhōngyāng Tè Kē. Gu defected following his capture, and gave the KMT all he knew about Zhou Enlai's underground communist spy network earning him a reputation as "the most dangerous traitor in the history of the CCP." He was executed by the KMT in 1934.
3. China's "soviet zones." The Mao-led one is circled.
4. German military advisors to Chiang Kai-shek. Top: Alexander Ernst Alfred Hermann Freiherr von Falkenhausen (1878-1966) pictured as a general of the Wehrmacht in 1940, and Johannes "Hans" Friedrich Leopold von Seeckt (1886-1936). Both men helped craft a strategy that encircled Mao and his CPP, but the communists broke out, and in October 1934, the communists under Mao began what became called the Long March.
5. The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (Left to Right) Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong, and Zhu De during the Long March.
6. A collage of the Northern Expedition in 1926. Clockwise from top-left: Chiang (CKS) inspects soldiers of the National Revolutionary Army (NRA), an army born from the short, unhappy union between the communists and the KMT, as they march northwards; an NRA artillery unit engages in a battle with warlords; people show support for the NRA; peasants volunteer to join the expedition; NRA soldiers prepare to launch an attack.
7. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek stands defiant in 1933, a time when his Nationalists (KMT) seemed to have the upper hand against the CCP.
8. The man with the New World Order plan: Supreme CCP Leader Xi Jinping.
Check our very first episode, the story of a very white man who showed up in London in 1703... and claimed to be from Formosa. Or try a foodie episode from Season 3. Or, for those who want some harder-core history, hear the tale of the Lockheed U-2 pilot Wang Hsi-chueh 王錫爵, who became was famous for defecting to the PRC by hijacking China Airlines Flight 334 on May 3, 1986.
