was there anything wrong with china's goverment before mao?

Question

I'm an Asian, but I've wanted to know these: What was great and wrong with the government that Sun Yat-Sen had made for China? Also, what were the pros and cons about Chiang Kai-Shek as head of the Chinese governent until Mao took over the mainland, which made Chiang go to Taiwan and some smaller islands?

Answer 1

Sun was an idealist, but had excelllent ideas about government and building a stronger and more prosperous China. Unfortunately, he was never able to establish a government that ruled over the whole of China and generals and local warlords took over (some of whom actively considered trying to establish a new dynasty). The decline of the country continued till in he mid-1920s, Chiang Kai Shek, a general trained in Japan (who was helped by the Russians after the Soviet revolution) was able to establish a strong modern army and, witn the support of Communists (e.g., Chou En-Lai, who was a senior Commissar in Chiang's army) as well as capitalists (his brother-in-law was a leader of Chinese finance) established a government whose power rose.

Success led to a split between the Kuomintang (Chiang's party) and the Communists in the late 1920s. Mao emerged as the leader of the Communists in the early 1930s and led the remaining Communst forces on the Long March to distant Yenan province where they established a guerrilla government and held out agaisnt Chiang and also against the Japanese invaders.

Chiang fell because he was weakened by being forced by naionalist sentiment to fight the Japanese. Increasingly, his government became riddled by corruption, reformers within the nationalist movement were suppressed, and instead of improvement the peasantry, which constituted the bulk of the Chinese population, slipped increasingly into poverty and hard times. In the final years of the regime, from 1945 to 1949, open civil war broke out and the Communists were in the ascendant. Despite myths to the contrary, the U.S. tried to mediate in order to keep some sort of coalition headed by Chiang in being as a possible option, but none of the parties on the ground really was prepared to cooperate in this (a situation similar to what has been emerging in Iraq). Eventually, the Americans gave up and left Chiang to his fate, which was to escape with the remnants of his government and army to Taiwan. Meanwhile, the country was exhausted by war and rampant inflation. According to Soviet documents that were released after the end of the Cold War, Mao pleaded with Stalin to assure him that there would not be a war with the West for many years. so that China could recover from a generation of warfare. Stalin assured him that this would be so, but secretly plotted with Kim Il Jung, the North Korean dictator, to support an invasion of the South. Within a bit more than 9 months after the Declaration fo the People's Republic, the Korean War broke out.

Answer 2

and you think there is enough intelligence in the board to answer that...

So you ask can I prove them wrong? My honest answer would be I would have to research it.