History repeated itself with the Chinese Communist Party victory over the Kuomintang in the Alexander Hamilton Society’s war game event this past Saturday.
Thirty students participated in this re-enactment and learned about the Chinese Civil War.
The society chose the Chinese Civil War because it focuses on one of America’s fiercest enemies, Professor of History Paul Rahe said.
Rahe said hosting war games on events like the Chinese Civil War allow students to engage in counterfactual history.
“It allows you to judge the decisions that were actually made,” Rahe said. “Were they good decisions or bad decisions?”
Conner Bolanos, senior and president of Alexander Hamilton Society, said the Chinese Civil War is important today.
“You can very much say the civil war hasn’t ended,” Bolanos said. “The Republic of China and Taiwan still exists, and the Chinese Civil War and how it was fought is still in a lot of ways how China approaches its military.”
Bolanos said that, in fact, this exercise will be based around the vast disparity between how the West and the East engage in warfare. In the American mind, a war is when we have boots on the ground and battle shots on our TV. Bolanos hopes that through the new roles students can play the differences between western and eastern warfare can become clearer.
“Economic sanctions can be war, how you use economics can be war, how you do diplomacy can be war, so there is this broader understanding of what fits into a war,” Bolanos said. “When you look at China today, it’s not really military confrontation in which they’ve expanded their power, but rather through the same tactics that won the Chinese Communist Party the Chinese Civil War.”
According to Bolanos, participants in prior war games could act as entire nations, moving pieces and resources across the globe. For this war game, the Alexander Hamilton Society wanted to get players more involved and to localize their roles on the conflict they were simulating.
“We’re trying to keep it higher skilled, it’s going to be warlords, military commanders, ministers, and people in important positions,” Bolanos said.
Senior Noah Schleusener, who has participated in previous war games said he thinks this new format will be much different than in the past.
“There’s a lot more personal motivations to keep track of, so maybe it’ll be overwhelming, but we’ll find out,” senior Noah Schleusener said
For his new war games club, junior Carter Mcnish developed this new style of war games which allows each side to jointly operate on their own and at the end of every turn, players view the joint actions by both sides and then prepare their next moves. In both the KMT and the CCP, roles were assigned across the political, economic, and military sectors of government.
Players perform actions related to their roles throughout the game. Additionally, group resolutions may be passed every 40 minutes if chosen by the group, ending each 6 month block of the game.
In this new system, Bolanos said the same problems of incompetence and corruption that plagued the KMT and benefited the CCP might play out with the addition of these new individual roles in each committee.
