Source-Based Questions

1. What is the message being conveyed by the woodcut on page 22?

-This is showing how the tax collectors basically took everything from the peasants, and left them to starve. It also conveys how the Guomindang people did nothing to help the peasants, but instead only made their lives worse.

2. What is the message being conveyed by the Chinese Communist Party Poster on page 23?

-This poster is showing how the Peasants were helping the Red Army in the war against Japan. This shows that the Red Army had gained the support of the peasants also, which is something that the Guomindang could not do.

3. With reference to origin and purpose, assess the value and limitations of Sourc-0e A on page 25 and the excerpt from Mao: The Unknown Story for historians studying why the Communists won the Chinese Civil War.

Source A:

The origin of this source is a journal entry from Chiang Kaishek written in 1947, with the purpose of revealing his true feelings regarding how upset he was that nobody cared for anyone else anymore. The origin of this provides us with a value, because it is personal from a journal entry. Therefore, it actually gives us the true feelings of Chiang Kaishek, because he has nobody to please in his journal. However, a limitation may be with the purpose. Because he is annoyed with the situation, he is writing for himself, and not for anyone else to read. Therefore, the things written may have been blown out of proportion to an extent, because he wasn't expecting anybody to read it.

Excerpt From Mao:

The origin of this source is written by Jung Chang, who was born in China in 1952. The purpose of this excerpt is to inform people of another viewpoint regarding the Chinese Civil War, which hasn't been seen in other sources. The origin of this source can be a strength and a limitation as well. It is a strength because it is written by a Chinese person, rather than a person of another nationality. This is a strength because it is not someone of a different culture trying to understand what was going on. However. the origin is a weakness because she wasn't born until 20 years after what was being written about happened. Therefore, it is not a firsthand account, and she may have based this off of other information that she had heard, rather than what was witnessed. The purpose of this also provides a strength and a weakness. It is a strength because it is trying to find new ideas about the practices of the Chinese Civil War, however this is also a limitation because the practices which are talked about may be exaggerated from the truth a bit , because it is trying to be a "new outlook on the practices."