On the 12th of april in 1927, Nationalist forces led by Chiang Kai-Shek carried out the Shanghai Massacre, attacking and disarming workers' militias by force, resulting in more than 300 people being killed or wounded.
This incident marked the beginning of a campaign of violent suppression of Chinese communists by conservative factions in the Kuomintang, killing 300,000 people over the course of three years.
The Shanghai Massacre began before dawn, when nationalist troops began to attack district offices controlled by the union workers. Under an emergency decree, Chiang then ordered the 26th Army to disarm the workers' militias.
The union workers organized a mass meeting denouncing Chiang Kai-shek the next day, and thousands of workers and students went to the headquarters of the 2nd Division of the 26th Army to protest. Soldiers opened fire, killing 100 and wounding many more.
This incident marked the beginning of a prolonged purge of communists from the Wuhan province, and the ensuing violence killed over 300,000 people in less than three years. Stalin offered his support, sending a telegram to the Chinese communists on June 1st, urging them to organize militarily against the state.
The events of April 1927 prompted the Comintern in Moscow to break ties with the Guomindang. It also triggered in-fighting between communists and left-wing nationalists in Wuhan that contributed to the collapse of Wang Jingwei’s government there. By late summer 1927, right-wing nationalists were ascendant in the Guomindang and Chiang Kai-Shek had emerged as the dominant republican leader of China.
Thousands of communists were forced underground in the cities or dispersed to rural areas. Some attempted to fight back. In response to the Shanghai massacre, on August 1st, 1927, the Communist Party launched an uprising in Nanchang against the Nationalist Wuhan government, which had previously been sympathetic to the Communists. The conflict meant that the Wuhan government and Chiang were once again aligned to crush the CCP.
This period is also acknowledged to have seen the emergence of the CCP’s “Red Army,” comprised of armed peasants and former nationalist soldiers. Despite KMT efforts to suppress the CCP forces, the communists successfully established control over many areas in southern China after attacks on cities such as Changsha, Shantou, and Guangzhou. In September, the leader of the Wuhan government, Wang Jingwei, was forced into exile.
By this point, three capitals were in effect across China: internationally-recognized Beijing, the KMT regime in Nanjing, and CCP-held Wuhan. This marked the start of a decade-long struggle known as the Ten-Year Civil War.
A large group in southern China led by Mao Zedong established a base in the remote Jinggang Mountains. A Kuomintang counterinsurgency campaign forced Mao and his group to relocate once again, and they moved into the border region between Jiangxi and Fujian provinces.
In order to rebuild the party's strength, the 6th National Congress ordered these rural cadres to organize soviet governments. Mao's group founded the Jiangxi Soviet, which became the largest and best administered soviet thanks to the number of Communist cadres from across the country that took refuge there. Although the Central Committee of the Communist Party was still underground in Shanghai during this period, the center of political gravity had begun to shift to Mao in Jiangxi.
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Okay so I've just watched the first episode of the Fallout show. TLDR is that I have very positive feelings all around.
I fuckin loved it. Fallout has always seemed like such a slam dunk for a TV show setting, there are just so many small-scale stories and wacky characters that can exist in the world. I only really have two negatives for this episode, and those are that there was no rendition of the Fallout theme or any version of the "War never changes" speech.
First of all, the set design is fucking perfect. The Netflix adaptation of ATLA looked really cheap and obviously like a set, but in this, everything looks as grimy and funky as it should in Fallout. The Vault suits look great, as does the vault sets, the wastelander costumes are really good, the ghoul prosthetics are on point. Fallout also has such great sound design, its so satisfying to hear the Pip-Boy in action.
The performances are all pretty solid, except for one random guy with a mustache in the vault.
Spoilers for the first episode
spoiler
The show seems to be following three separate characters who I assume will converge into one plotline, regarding the Enclave survivor and Dogmeat having a big bounty on their head. I really like all of them. Lucy gets the most spotlight, and I guess she's the main character, and I really like her. She's weird in the way that being in a vault will make you weird, she's naive, she's optimistic. I think its hilarious that she admits to fucking her cousin in the first ten minutes and that's just a normal thing in the vault. Vaults 32 and 33 feel suitably unique, I was worried they would write a generic vault to capture new audiences without overwhelming them, but no, the vaults are a fucked up social experiment. The plot hook being "my dad was kidnapped from the vault" is pretty funny for how lame it is, like that's just the plot of Fallout 3 and 4 put together.
Maximus's story starts pretty slowly, but I really love how they portray the Brotherhood of Steel. Making them a borderline religious organisation with their weird medieval titles and rituals makes them look like the extremely powerful cringelord larpers that they are. I have high hopes for Maximus's plotline, that it will resolve either with him turning his back on the Brotherhood or deepening his faith and going full devoted fanatic. I just hope they don't try to make the Brotherhood into the cool power armour guys.
"The Ghoul", AKA Waltin Goggins, is such a treat. His story feels like something right out of New Vegas, like one of those random sidequests where you just do something absurd and meet a lot of weirdos. I love it when Fallout is wacky and weird, and Waltin Goggins is the wackiest weirdo in the show. Like he was just living in a coffin being dripfed IVs for years. Why? I dunno, he's a weirdo. His scene post-war is really goofy and I really like that. This episode feels like it captured the tone of Fallout so well and actually leant into it instead of being embarassed by it. Lucy represents the cheerful propaganda and fucked up mindset of the 1950s, Maximus is the overbearing military and warmongering America, and Goggins represents the Weird Wasteland. Fallout is a game where you'll go from seeing the devestating cataclysm of nuclear war one second, and finding a talking cow the next, so I feel like this episode captures the bizarre tone really well.
The show might not follow up perfectly, or maybe it will, but I know that I am more than satisfied with this first episode, if nothing else. Video game adaptations have slowly been getting better, and even if this won't be as good as Edgerunners, I am really happy with how its going. I'm a massive Fallout fan and really glad to see the positive direction.
It honestly made me remember how much I love fallout after not enjoying fallout 4 as much as I had hoped. I hope the rest of the episodes are as good but I think I'm already sold on a season 2 of this, especially if they go to the West Coast.