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 By the 1970s China embarked on its own ship and engine building programs, and steamers have since been replaced by diesel tugs, freighters and ferry boats.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:
“My business is stanching blood and feeding fainting men; my post the open field between the bullet and the hospital. I sometimes discuss the application of a compress or a wisp of hay under a broken limb, but not the bearing and merits of a political movement. I make gruel—not speeches; I write letters home for wounded soldiers, not political addresses.”
—Clara Barton (1821–1912)
“Then down came the lid—the day was lost, for art, at Sarajevo. World-politics stepped in, and a war was started which has not ended yet: a “war to end war.” But it merely ended art. It did not end war.”
—Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)
“I don’t like to be idle; in fact, I often feel somewhat guilty unless there is some purpose to what I am doing. But spending a few hours—or a few days—in the woods, swamps or alongside a stream has never seemed to me a waste of time.... I derive special benefit from a period of solitude.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)