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Message:: [QUOTE="kaparthy, post: 99246, member: 57463"]A fuller picture comes from THE SOONG DYNASTY by Sterling Seagrave.  The Communist Party was nearly inactive.  People -- including the Soongs (Madame Chiang's family, and also Mme Sun Yat Sen's) -- hid their wealth from the Kuomintang (KMT).  In the late 1920s, the Soongs gave China a stable silver-backed currency and then Chiang kai-Shek looted the banks.  For most of the 1930s and 1940s, Chiang's KMT basically counterfeited their own national currency, forcing worthless paper on the people they robbed.  Through most of this, the Reds were hard to find and had little to do with this. The communists were not the good guys by any stretch of the imagination, but neither were they actually involved in the legalized looting that drove people to get their wealth away from Chiang and the KMT. The numismatic angle can be documented many ways.  For one thing, look at the banknotes of the period.[/QUOTE]