My trip to China, part 3: I learn about 20th-century Chinese history

Over the past century, China has experienced some tumultuous history, and the city of Shanghai has been at the center of much of it. Yesterday, I went and visited some important sites in the history of Shanghai in order to learn more about modern Chinese history.

Before 1911, China was an empire ruled by an emperor in Beijing. The country was very weak. Its economy was terrible, most of the people got no education at all, and the country lost a lot of wars. Many people thought that the only way to make China strong again was to overthrow the empire. One such man was Sun Yat-sen.

Sun was born in southern China. He got a good education, mostly in Hawaii, and became a doctor. He also converted to Christianity. But Sun was not content to practice medicine, because he was deeply committed to modernizing China. He founded a series of societies dedicated to reform, and eventually he was one of the leaders of the revolution that overthrew the Qing Dynasty in 1911. Sun briefly became the president of the Republic of China, but he soon had to step down. For the rest of his life, most of his political ambitions were frustrated. After his death, his protege succeeded in uniting China under one modernizing, nationalist government. Today, Sun is renowned as the father of modern China.

Between 1918 and 1925, Sun and his wife lived in Shanghai. Many of Sun's most influential books were written here. Today, his house in Shanghai is a museum of his life. In addition to a lot of books, letters, and photographs, I got to see Sun's set of wooden croquet mallets.

This is the house where Sun Yat-sen lived in Shanghai.

The government Sun founded was led by a party called the Guomindang, which means "Nationalist Party." The Nationalists worked closely with the American government. They were opposed by another party, which had a very different vision for how the new China should be built. This party was called the Communist Party. The Communists believed that people should own property in common, and they resented the rich landowners and factory owners who supported the Nationalists.

The Chinese Communist Party was founded in the summer of 1921 at the First Party Congress, which was held in Shanghai. Most of the leaders of the new party were intellectuals. The Congress was attended by one young man from the countryside, who was not especially well educated and who would have seemed out of place in the city. That man was Mao Zedong. Many years later, Mao rose to power within the Communist Party, and eventually he became the leader of all of China once the Communists triumphed in a civil war against the Nationalists. At the First Party Congress, Mao just sat in the back and listened. But the Chinese government has rewritten history; in their museum dedicated to the First Party Congress, a wax figure of Mao sits at the head of the table, while the other delegates listen to him in rapt admiration.

This is the building where the First Party Congress of the Chinese Communist Party took place in 1921.

At various points, the Communists and the Nationalists tried to get along in order to work together. One such period was in late 1945 and early 1946. During those years, a top Communist leader named Zhou Enlai came to live in Shanghai. Zhou ran the Communists' operations in Shanghai out of his house. The Nationalists set up an observation post across the street, from which their spies watched everybody who came in or out of Zhou's house. Not surprisingly, this climate of mistrust gave way to open hostility once again, and pretty soon the final conflict between the Communists and the Nationalists began. In 1949, the Communists won the Chinese Civil War and set up their own national government in Beijing.

This is a photo of me in front of the house where Zhou Enlai lived in Shanghai.

You have to be very careful when you visit historical sites in China. Much of the time, the signs you read in the museums don't tell you the truth. Instead, they were written to present a version of history that makes the Communist Party look good. When you travel, you always need to be careful not to believe everything you are told!

--Benny