Talk:Shanghai massacre

Shanghai Massacre?

I was under the impression that scholars still referred to the April 12 Incident as the "Shanghai Massacre". Why is there no mention of this usage in the article at all? Oh, right, I need to be brave... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.105.32.88 (talk) 14:14, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

its chinese??!? --195.181.25.121 07:34, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Language

The English of this article needs further improving... AnonMoos 10:22, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

I did a complete rewrite, trying to preserve the content, as much as I could understand. - Ryanjo 03:34, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

Re-naming

I propose to re-name this article from April 12 incident to Shanghai massacre of 1927. The latter term is now most commonly used in Google searches (Google News Archive) for the incident, and is more descriptive. However, I have a concern that it is discouraged by Wikipedia established norms, in the use of "massacre" (see: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (events), Conventions section, #2). Of course, a disambiguation page would re-direct a search for the old title April 12 incident correctly. Please comment -- Ryanjo (talk) 16:15, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

I am ok with the massacre name for this particular article. Reason being, historically people admit this was an incident with the intent to "massacre". Unlike other events like Tiananmen square massacre etc, which does not have a consensus all the way across. Benjwong (talk) 04:09, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

I re-named it -- Ryanjo (talk) 01:29, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

Reference from Mao: The Untold Story

I removed the "It should be noted" (see WP:AWW) in the recent addition on Communist graduates of the KMT military academy, and created a more standard footnote. I have also added a caution in the footnote about references from the book Mao: The Untold Story, because many have commented that this work has weak scholarship, and is selective with citations to support the anti-Mao tone of the book. Please see many critical comments in the Discussion Pages of Long march, Great Leap Forward, and of course, Mao: The Unknown Story, raising these issues. I am not in any way detracting from the value of this edit, but IMHO the reader should be provided some insight into controversy when references are cited. Also, would the contributor of this edit please add the page and/or chapter in the book? Ryanjo (talk) 01:41, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Edit by 72.224.48.109

I reverted the edits made by anonymous IP user 72.224.48.109. These edits contained misspellings, poor grammar and IMHO changed the tone of the narrative unfavorably. In addition, several sentences that were transitional to following paragraphs were omitted.

Since there were several good-faith edits by Benjwong, Djkhalil1, RP459 and DCTT, would these contributors look through the corrected text and repeat their edits, in case they were reverted (unintentionally). Ryanjo (talk) 20:09, 31 July 2010 (UTC)

The entire article has been cleaned up, with additional citations added. More editors are welcomed to add referenced materials to this article. DCTT (talk) 15:34, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Merger proposal

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

The result of this discussion was to merge White Terror (mainland China) into "Shanghai massacre of 1927" Ferox Seneca (talk) 00:21, 5 June 2011 (UTC)

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I propose that our White Terror (mainland China) article be merged into our "Shanghai massacre of 1927" article. The events of 1927 are commonly referred to as simply the "White Terror", to the degree that I have actually never heard of the events of 1927 called anything else before I stumbled across the "Shanghai Massacre of 1927" page. Because the "White Terror (mainland China)" article itself is a new article that mostly just discusses the events of 1927, with a single sentence stating that some persecution of Communists continued to occur after this event, the present "White Terror (mainland China)" article does not contribute anything to any subject that is different from the events already covered in the "Shanghai Massacre of 1927" article, or which could reasonably be covered in this article.

I believe that any information in the "White Terror (mainland China)" article that does not already exist in the "Shanghai Massacre of 1927" article should be added to it. Because it is essentially a copy of an older and more complete page, the "White Terror (mainland China)" article that presently exists should be deleted, with a redirect from "White Terror (mainland China)" leading to the "Shanghai Massacre of 1927" article. Ferox Seneca (talk) 07:42, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

Agree: I agree with your plan to merge White Terror (mainland China) into this article.

I suggest that the first sentence of that article's "lead paragraph" follow the first sentence of this article, i.e.:

"The Shanghai massacre of 1927, also known as the April 12 Incident, was a large-scale purge of Communists from the Kuomintang (KMT) in Shanghai, ordered by Chiang Kai-shek on 12 April 1927, during the Northern Expedition against the warlords. In modern Chinese history, White Terror (Chinese: 白色恐怖; pinyin: Báisè Kǒngbù) describes a period of political suppression enacted by the Kuomintang party under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek."

Perhaps the second reference (Meisner) from that article could be added to the "Further reading" section that follows the body of the article, since it links to text that deals with Mao, rather than just the purge. The first reference (Mayhew) is only a book listing, and therefore not a reference link; I wouldn't include it, unless actual text can be accessed.

If there are no opposing posts from other editors in the next few days, in my opinion, go ahead with the edits & redirect. Regards, Ryanjo (talk) 23:32, 29 May 2011 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Rewrite needed

This article is so confused that a rewrite is probably the best solution. Here are a few comments on the confusion.

First, the article conflates the April 12 "coup" in Shanghai, with the KMT purge of Communists which lasted for most of April-July 1927, extending to every area under KMT control. The coup was merely a preliminary to the purge, which reached its climax with the Wuhan regime's expulsion of all Communist party members holding dual KMT membership on July 15 1927, and the KMT request for the withdrawal of Borodin and the Russian advisory group from China. The Shanghai incident is clearly not the place to discuss this much larger movement. Second, the article identifies the term "White Terror" with the April 12 coup and vaguely with part of the purge later on. In fact the term "White Terror" in this period was generally used to describe KMT repression of the Chinese Communist Party and sympathizers up until the formation of the second united front in 1937, an even bigger and vaguer topic of which April 12 is not particularly representative.

Other reasons for a rewrite include the article's narrative, which is vague and confused, so that the immediate Shanghai background of the incident (the three "armed worker uprisings) is not mentioned and instead a vague summary of often quite distant events is offered. Particularly odd is how the April 6 raid on the Russian embassy in Peking is added, as if there were a connection with the Shanghai coup.

In general, the article has many inaccuracies, and the sources used to compile it are inadequate for such a well known topic. Rewrite from basic sources is the best solution. I'll look for any responses here.

As a final note, the choice of the entry title "Shanghai massacre" is inappropriate. Throughout the scholarly literature I have read, I have not seen this description used, except for the one book cited in a footnote to the beginning of the article, which itself gives no source for this term. The appeal to google timeline in the discussion above is also not convincing, since this is by no means a list of scholarly resources: "sources" cited there include student papers, blogs, google book scans and so on. April 12 coup or April 12 incident are much more appropriate. These are almost universally used in the scholarly literature and most of the popular references as well, Chinese, Communist, and otherwise. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rgr09 (talk • contribs) 20:48, 26 August 2011 (UTC)

Most of these are good suggestions. If you have good sources and wish to rewrite portions of the article based on those sources, please do so. It's true that this has become the main article for discussing the broader topic of the White Terror, though its title may not reflect this. If you feel strongly that the topic's title does not reflect its content, you may want to de-merge this article with the White Terror (mainland China) article and split the article's data between them. I also had never heard of the term "Shanghai massacre" before I found this page, but I have since looked for, and found, the term in the indexes of several books since then. The term "Shanghai massacre" definitely exists among academics.Ferox Seneca (talk) 22:09, 26 August 2011 (UTC)

There is always room for a good rewrite. I think the name of the article is a minor issue, given that the other terms are explained in the lead. Go for it. Ryanjo (talk) 22:47, 26 August 2011 (UTC)

Peasant Association members = Communists?

Near the bottom of this article, it says that 10,000 Communists were killed in multiple regions. But in Philip Short's book "Mao: A Life", published by the BBC, page 187 says these 10,000 were "suspected Communists", and the chapter really makes it sound like most the 300,000 Peasant Association members who were killed in relation to this incident were not Communists at all --Shaco77 (talk) 19:52, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

Questionable Validity of Citations

After checking out citation 1, I see the reference has no relevance to the fact cited. The page referenced only regards internal economic turmoil and the exodus of foreign business. There are no references to 'violent suppressions ... in cities such as Guangzhou and Changsha.' — Preceding unsigned comment added by 121.99.189.127 (talk) 04:46, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

Requested move 7 December 2016

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: Move. There appears to be no coverage of other topics called "Shanghai massacre", making the disambiguation unnecessary. WP:PRIMARYTOPIC holds the most weight here, especially as there don't appear to be any other ambiguous topics on Wikipedia. Cúchullain ^t/c 22:27, 19 December 2016 (UTC)

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Shanghai massacre of 1927 → Shanghai massacre – WP:CONCISE, no other well-known massacre in Shanghai. Timmyshin (talk) 16:48, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

• Oppose Although the proposed title sufficiently distinguishes the event from all others, the inclusion of the year better identifies the topic, which is also a requirement of naming. Pincrete (talk) 00:14, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

• Virtually no other article on a massacre has the year in its title; see List of events named massacres. Timmyshin (talk) 07:33, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

• Support for the reasons cited by Timmyshin. Phlar (talk) 16:24, 8 December 2016 (UTC)
• Support - per Timmyshin. Unless there were other notable massacres at Shanghai, the "of 1927" is unnecessary in the title.--MarshalN20 ^Talk 21:47, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

• Oppose - Contrary to the claim made by the nominator, there does exist another notable "Shanghai massacre" that occurred in 1925. However, I would support a move to "Shanghai massacre (1927)" and the making of "Shanghai massacre" into a redirect.--MarshalN20 ^Talk 16:30, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

• Tentatively Oppose The 1925 May 30th incident in Shanghai is also referred to as the May 30th Massacre (e.g. Jubin Hu, Projecting A Nation: Chinese National Cinema Before 1949); in some ways this was an even more famous episode than the April 12th incident. As I've noted before, the use of Massacre is not common in writing on this subject either. It is more commonly referred to as the April 12th Incident or Coup. Rgr09 (talk) 14:18, 11 December 2016 (UTC)
• Strong Support per WP:PRIMARYTOPIC - although some editors above have correctly pointed out that a few other events are sometimes also called the "Shanghai massacre", the 1927 massacre is by far the bloodiest, which caused the breakup of the alliance of the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party, leading to the Chinese Civil War and eventually the establishment of the People's Republic on mainland China and the Republic of China on Taiwan. This is a seminal event of modern Chinese history and doubtless the primary topic. -Zanhe (talk) 23:57, 15 December 2016 (UTC)

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The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

If people have time...

We have this article, but it includes almost no mention of the martyr status of the fallen. We still don't have an article on the Longhua Martyrs' Memorial apparently, nothing for Martyr (Communist) beyond the poor treatment at Martyr (politics), and an utterly incomplete→heavily biased treatment at Martyrdom in Chinese culture that treats it as an almost entirely KMT phenomenon. Could definitely use work. — LlywelynII 12:37, 27 July 2019 (UTC)

Rebecca Karl, Mao Zedong and China, pg 33

@Gavereevoocorvee please stop with the baseless deletions. Please get your copy of the Karl book or borrow it again:

"The White Terror led to the near extinction of CCP membership. And, in a strangely grisly outcome of anti-revolutionary fury, short-haired women with natural-sized feet, presumed to be radicals because of their untraditional hairstyles and unbound feet, became specific targets of the terror. Their shorn heads and mutilated bodies -- with breasts cut off -- became favored public displays among local GMD officials who now wished to warn a cowed populace against further mobilization or opposition." JArthur1984 (talk) 21:08, 24 November 2022 (UTC)

Minimal?

why is it considered minimal that 5000-10000 people were killed simply because they were associated with the communists? 156.57.30.3 (talk) 03:13, 24 June 2023 (UTC)

“Minimal” does not refer to the number of victims.

Its in the row and column for the number of casualties of the KMT forces who perpetrated the massacre JArthur1984 (talk) 12:12, 24 June 2023 (UTC)