Chiang Kai-shek responded to his expulsion from the Kuomintang by forming his own Nationalist Government at Nanking on 18 April 1927 in opposition to the Wang Ching-wei government at Hankow. Reporting the civil war for The Times as a special correspondent was Basil Riley, a 34-year-old Australian who was sympathetic towards the Chinese democratic cause. ‘I want to travel in order to get some idea of what Australia ought to develop into before plunging into Australian politics,’ he had written to a friend before setting off on a series of foreign adventures that took him from Baghdad to New York to Shanghai.11
Frank Basil Riley was one of the three sons of the Reverend Charles Riley, the Archbishop of Perth. Born on 20 September 1893, Basil was educated at Perth High School (renamed Hale School in 1929) and was school head for two years until 1912 when he went up to New College, Oxford, as a 19-year-old Rhodes Scholar. He had a sturdy confidence in himself and proved to be a young man of ability, grit and potential leadership.
Riley arrived at Shanghai in May with ‘a roving commission from The Times to observe in various provinces the rapidly changing conditions’. At meetings with Shanghailanders, he scandalised his hosts by suggesting greater Chinese representation on the Municipal Council, opening the parks to the Chinese, tackling the child labour problem ‘and generally trying to treat the Chinese as equals, not as inferiors’.
The Times later admitted that some of Riley’s conversations had been extremely controversial ‘for he loved argument and was fond of assuming an attitude merely for the sake of getting at the facts’. ‘I discovered,’ Riley wrote in one letter to a colleague in London, ‘that many, if not most [business leaders in Shanghai] are not free agents. They have to take account of the opinions and decisions of their head offices in London or New York.’ This meant making unpopular decisions to protect their investments in the International Settlement, which resulted in the boycott of British goods and agitation against foreign ‘imperialists’.12
Riley took a particular interest in the activities of General Feng Yu-hsiang, the Christian General who had betrayed his fellow Northerners in 1924 and then fled to Moscow after being kicked out of Peking the following year.13 Feng returned to China in 1926 and in April 1927 his revitalised National People’s Army intervened in a battle between the two warring factions of the Kuomintang. The battle was indecisive until Feng occupied the Lunghai sector of the Honan railway system, putting himself in a position to decide the outcome.14
Mikhail Borodin, Wang Ching-wei and Eugene Chen travelled from Hankow to Chengchow, at the junction of the Peking–Hankow and Lunghai railways, in an endeavour to persuade the renegade commander to join forces with them against Chiang Kai-shek. Riley reported from Shanghai that ‘the Hankow faction is expected to propose that it should confine itself to the provinces of Hunan and Hupeh and hand over Honan to Feng Yu-hsiang – provided Wu Pei-fu (to whom, as War Lord, the province nominally belongs) does not interfere’. Riley added that Hankow had dispatched its entire propaganda department to Honan with large stocks of silver dollars to open up the route to Peking.15
Milly Bennett agreed this was indeed the Hankow delegation’s plan. ‘The side that could buy General Feng for a partner was likely to get to Peking first,’ she wrote. ‘It looked as simple as that.’16 The Hankow delegation’s spirits rose when Feng described Chiang as a ‘wolf-hearted, dog-lunged, inhuman thing’ and pledged his loyalty to the Hankow Government. The People’s Tribune hailed the three-day meeting as ‘a victory for the united front’. Secretly, though, Feng had also turned on his Moscow masters. He told Wang Ching-wei that Borodin and the rest of the Soviet advisers should be sent back to Russia and all Chinese Communists purged from their positions in the Kuomintang. Wang was inclined to agree. For economic as well as political reasons, he favoured a rapprochement with Nanking, which was impossible while Borodin remained active in China.17
Feng then turned his attention to Chiang Kai-shek. He knew he had been high up on Chiang’s death list in his campaign against the warlords but all that was forgotten when they met in the railway station at the key rail junction of Hsuchow on 19 June. Chiang proposed that Feng encourage the pro-Hankow armies to fight their way to the very gates of Peking. At the last minute, Chiang and Feng would show up with fresh troops, brush aside the Communists and enter the city as victors. Betrayal was second nature to Feng and the idea of two-timing the Communists greatly appealed to him. He agreed to throw in his lot with Chiang.18
Meanwhile, Basil Riley had taken a steamer up the Yangtze to Nanking and Hankow. He found both factions of the Kuomintang ‘honeycombed with friends of the other regime’. Nanking had the money that Wang Ching-wei desired, but Hankow had an arsenal turning out 200 rifles and nearly 200,000 rounds of ammunition daily, as well as pistols, bombs, machine-guns and even field pieces. ‘During a visit to the arsenal, I saw some 4000 men working 16 and 17 hours daily on behalf of the revolution with apparently adequate supplies of steel, brass, chemicals and powder,’ he wrote. ‘Little more than personal quarrels keep the regimes apart. Intelligent leaders fear Chiang Kai-shek’s domination; they fail to appreciate that it is an enormous asset in the present conditions of the country.
The only apparent beneficiaries [of the dispute between Hankow and Nanking] will be the Northerners, either Chang Tso-lin, who will secure a longer lease of life at Peking, or Feng Yu-hsiang. The latter sits astride the Lunghai Railway . . . carefully placing supporters both at Nanking and Hankow.19
In the capital on 3 July 1927, the reigning warlord Chang Tso-lin issued the manifesto of his new government, which shrewdly denounced the evils of Bolshevism and at the same time advocated peaceful revision of the unequal treaties. ‘We in North China are just as Nationalist as our Southern fellow-countrymen,’ he said, ‘in fact, more so, for our policy is China for the Chinese, not for the “Reds”.’20
On 21 July Basil Riley left Hankow and headed north by rail towards Chengchow. According to a report in The West Australian, he joined the Belgian vice-consul with the idea of visiting Feng’s headquarters. Two days later he vanished. Despite the presence of dozens of witnesses in the Chengchow area, all attempts by the British diplomatic staff in Peking to find any trace of Riley drew a blank. The editor of The Times, Geoffrey Dawson, authorised the hiring of a confidential Chinese agent to make a secret investigation into the disappearance of his special correspondent.21
According to the investigator, Riley reached Chengchow on 22 July and the following morning decided to visit a nearby Christian village. He was to have been accompanied by Chen Tzu-shen, manager of the YMCA at Chengchow, but Chen, who was known to be hostile towards foreigners, claimed to be unwell. Riley set off alone along the railway line and stopped to question some villagers. They were unable to understand him and a small crowd gathered. Some of General Feng’s soldiers came up to see what was happening.
The Chinese troops became aggressive at the sight of a foreigner in their midst. Excitement and noise ensued and the villagers ran away to avoid being implicated in any trouble. They watched from a distance as the soldiers attacked Riley with swords. Struck on the head, neck and body, he fell mortally wounded. His killers dragged his body into a field and buried it. ‘Other accounts filtering from Chengchow vary considerably in regard to details,’ The Times said, ‘but are unanimous on the point that the culprits were soldiers.’22
Vivian Chow, the Lismore-born journalist, wrote a short story entitled ‘What Happened to Riley?’ which was published in his magazine, United China, in 1932. Although a work of fiction, the story professes to tell the real story behind Riley’s violent demise. Chow states that Riley had been sent to China on a mission for the British Secret Service. ‘But at Shanghai, he was warned both by the Chinese authorities and by the foreigners not to proceed inland,’ Chow wrote.
He was urged to make Shanghai his base, but all entreaties were unavailing. It seemed to the foreigners that he had set his heart upon goin
g to the war zone, and knowing the tenacity of Australians, none were surprised, weeks later, to be notified by Hankow people that Riley was missing. Then the news flashed around the world, and Riley’s newspaper came out with an urgent reward of ten thousand pounds for information leading to the discovery of Riley, dead or alive.23
According to Chow’s version, ‘Captain Riley’ was caught spying on Feng Yu-hsiang’s troops. He was taken to the soldiers’ camp, interrogated by an officer and then executed. While this version of events might have been the product of Chow’s fertile imagination, it is true that Riley had served as an officer in the British Army in World War I. It was also true that the British Secret Service sometimes used The Times as a cover for agents involved in the Great Game against Britannia’s enemies in Asia. And the newspaper itself admitted that Riley ‘went northward on his own initiative to find out the truth about Feng Yu-hsiang’, leaving little doubt that he would have been regarded as a spy if caught by Feng’s troops.24
Given Riley’s earlier conversations with British businessmen, the paper added, ‘it is not altogether surprising, perhaps, that some of those with whom he came in contact in Shanghai should have regarded him at the time as a dangerous newcomer with revolutionary notions’.25
There were in fact plenty of revolutionaries roaming the countryside, many of them spying on Chiang Kai-shek. Moscow had set up a military advisory group in the Soviet Union to deliver intelligence to Mao’s poorly armed Communists through a network of agents operating in Nationalist offices near the Red Army. Nationalists, Communists and warlords were now locked in a disastrous pattern of ideological conflict and military confrontation that would weaken all sides and leave the field open to Japan.
The previous year Borodin’s paymaster Lev Karakhan had invited Bill Donald to the Soviet Legation to discuss the Russian presence in China. ‘At that time Borodin and the Can- tonese element were in Kiangsi province pushing towards Hankow,’ Donald said.
My brief prophecy to Karakhan was this: Soviet propaganda would fail in China and the Soviet crowd would be kicked out for the simple reason that to consummate their plans they would have to dictate to the Chinese what they must do. When that time did come, Borodin would make the great discovery that the Chinese would refuse to be ordered about and the whole dream would burst and Borodin would be forced out. That is what happened.26
Karakhan was recalled to Moscow soon after speaking to Donald and missed seeing his prediction come true. Borodin was expelled from China in July 1927, just a few weeks after his meeting with General Feng, when Chang Tso-lin ordered his men to raid the Soviet military attaché’s office in Peking. Documents were found which proved conclusively that the Soviet adviser was not a freelance revolutionary, as he had claimed, but a fully-fledged Comintern agent committed to turning China into a Communist country.
General Galen, the Soviet commander who had played a major role in the Nationalists’ early victories, was also expelled from China and later executed on Stalin’s orders. Karakhan did not escape, either – he was shot during a Stalinist purge a few years hence.27
The military council at Nanking now sought to make peace with the three Wuhan cities in order to unify the entire Yangtze Valley under a single Nationalist government. Wang Ching-wei hoped the expulsion of the Russians from his ranks would satisfy Chiang Kai-shek but the latter was determined to extinguish the flame of Red Hankow for all time. To break the deadlock, the council asked Chiang to step down as commander of the Revolutionary Army and accept the lesser post of commander of the Eastern Army. Instead, the wily Chiang resigned his command altogether and returned to his home village to allow events to play into his hands.28
Ten days later General Sun Chuan-fang, the warlord who had formerly ruled Shanghai and Nanking, crossed the Yangtze with 30,000 troops in an attempt to overthrow the Nationalist regime. The ferocious Kwangsi Clique – which hailed from the same province as the Taiping rebels of the previous century – included General Li Tsung-jen, commander of the Nationalists’ Seventh Army, and General Pai Chung-hsi, the Nationalist ‘liberator’ of Shanghai. They fought Sun off in a six-day battle. General Li then marched on Wuhan and deposed Wang Ching-wei and his supporters.
With Nanking in disarray, Chiang Kai-shek moved to Shanghai and met a crestfallen Wang, who agreed to serve with him in a new government. Triumphant, Chiang then moved to consolidate his relationship with the powerful Soong family. First, he sent his wife Chen Chieh-ju, known as Jennie Chen, off to the United States with a promise that their marriage would be resumed in five years’ time. Then on 1 December he climbed into a cutaway coat with flowery buttonhole and married the third Soong sister, Mayling, in a civil ceremony in front of more than one thousand guests at the Majestic Hotel in Bubbling Well Road.
The matchmaker of this long, difficult and apparently sexless union had been Ayling Soong, who seized the chance to enhance her family’s position politically and financially, if not socially, with ‘China’s man of destiny’.29 Chingling Soong, however, vehemently opposed the marriage. She had turned down a proposal from Chiang shortly after the death of Sun Yat-sen and branded him a traitor to the revolution over the ‘White Terror’ slaughter of the Communists.
At 30, Mayling Soong was a slim, elegant woman with a striking, porcelain beauty and boyishly bobbed hair. Charlie Soong hadn’t lived to see his daughters rise to positions of eminence in the new China. He died on 3 May 1918 and was buried in Shanghai’s International Cemetery.
As newsreel cameras whirred inside the nuptial ballroom, Chiang issued a statement that his wedding would greatly benefit the Kuomintang ‘because I can henceforth bear the tremendous responsibility of the revolution with peace of heart’. The Nationalist regime at Nanking responded favourably. On 1 January 1928 Chiang was returned to power. Under his deal with Wang Ching-wei, he became commander-in-chief of the armed forces, with Wang as head of the Nationalist Government.
When Chiang’s armies fought their way into Peking six months later, Chang Tso-lin made a diplomatic withdrawal back to his Manchurian homeland. As his train was passing under a bridge on the outskirts of Mukden, an officer of the Kwantung Army, the Japanese force stationed in the Manchurian railway zone, detonated a bomb. Tons of bricks and mortar rained down on Chang’s sky-blue carriage, fatally injuring him. He died in a Japanese hospital four hours later at the age of 54. Chiang Kai-shek’s capture of Peking and the Old Marshal’s assassination effectively ended the Warlord Era, although there would be sporadic outbreaks from time to time for years to come.
On 10 October 1928 – the 17th anniversary of the Chinese Revolution – Bill Donald quit as director of the Bureau of Economic Information in protest against the financial pressure of Chiang’s government and its clumsy attempts to turn the bureau into a propaganda vehicle. The minister of finance expected a bribe of $5000 Mexican a month, which he reduced to $1000 when Donald declined to pay up. ‘I refused all overtures and eventually got away with it,’ he wrote to Herbie Elliston, who was working for the United States Government in Washington.
In the end, Donald was spending his own money to keep the bureau going. ‘He resigned under circumstances that enhanced his reputation in responsible quarters,’ the Sydney Morning Herald reported.30 ‘He is the only adviser of China I know who never felt he had to sing for his supper,’ Elliston said. ‘More, he was incorruptible – also a rare feat in China.’
When Donald’s first resignation failed to take effect, he planned a more dramatic exit. ‘I am going to do what the average Chinese official does when things get beyond endurance – flee,’ he wrote to Elliston from Shanghai on 7 December 1928. ‘I shall go to Mukden. They want me to work for them.’
Donald took a steamer down the Yangtze and across to Dairen on the Liaotung Peninsula and then caught a train to Mukden. His new employer was Chang Hsueh-liang, the Young Marshal, who had turned 27 on 3 June, the day before his father was murdered.31
Donald met the young man in the Tiger Room – so-called because of the presence of two huge stuffed Manchurian tigers – in his palace in the old walled city. The man he had known in Peking as a fine sportsman and dashing Romeo had indeed turned into a trembling drug addict. ‘The Young Fellow’, as Donald called him, had taken to smoking vast amounts of opium two years earlier while commanding his father’s troops. Prescribed morphine as a substitute, he had become doubly addicted.33
Donald discussed the problem with James C. ‘Jimmy’ Elder, the Young Marshal’s Scottish financial adviser. Elder’s father had been director of construction on the Peking–Mukden Railway and had known Chang since they were children. However, their combined efforts to coax Chang into a healthy regime of diet and exercise in the hope of beating his addiction ended in demoralising failure. Donald described Chang as ‘a young man of no ambition whatever, rather resentful of the fact that he had responsibilities and that troublesome people should expect him to bestir himself in matters concerning China as a whole’.
Shanghai Fury Page 28