The Post War Period
After the Japanese surrender, the Communists and the Nationalists continued their civil war. The Americans and British tried to re-instate their presence as it had been before the war, but to little avail. Nationalist China signed an agreement with the Allies in 1943 making China an Equal Partner, and thus abrogated the Unequal Treaties of a century previous.
On April 21, 1949, Communist forces crossed the Yangtze River, capturing the Capital Nanking. And with the Communist takeover of Peking in late 1949, the European exploitation of China was over, though steamers continued to work the river. The SS Shenking of the Butterfield and Swire Line made an epic rescue of stranded civilians from Shanghai, running them across the China Sea to Keelung, Formosa.
One steamer sank in 1947, drowning 400 people. Mao and the Chinese Communist Party journeyed upriver by steamer in 1959 to Lushan to the Lushan Conference to discuss the Great Leap Forward. However, little is known in the west about this period, as China became a closed country. Many retired North American steamers were sent to Japan or Taiwan for scrapping. Some were pressed into mainland china service. By the 1970s China embarked on its own ship and engine building programs, and steamers have since been replaced by diesel tugs, freighters and ferry boats.
Read more about this topic: Steamboats On The Yangtze River
Famous quotes containing the words post, war and/or period:
“A demanding stranger arrived one morning in a small town and asked a boy on the sidewalk of the main street, “Boy, where’s the post office?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, then, where might the drugstore be?”
“I don’t know.”
“How about a good cheap hotel?”
“I don’t know.”
“Say, boy, you don’t know much, do you?”
“No, sir, I sure don’t. But I ain’t lost.””
—William Harmon (b. 1938)
“Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“Finally she grew quiet, and after that, coherent thought. With this, stalked through her a cold, bloody rage. Hours of this, a period of introspection, a space of retrospection, then a mixture of both. Out of this an awful calm.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)