by Emily Hahn
Romantic admirers claim that he met Sun Yat-sen at this time and immediately became one of the charmed inner circle, close to the great man, but even if Chiang entered his orbit the meeting could not possibly have come to much. Sun was always meeting new students. He moved in a world of students, and Chiang Kai-shek was as yet only a raw boy from the provinces.
At length it was clear that Chiang would have to make his entry into the academy, if he did it at all, from China, and so he went home. His absence had given Chikow time to settle down after the affair of the tax collector. Possibly he wore a false pigtail pinned to his skullcap. Many revolutionaries did just that, since Sun Yat-sen had set the style. He was now a father. His wife had given birth to the son who is known today as Ching-kuo, and the very young man was proud of his baby.
Inquiries made in sober mood, without his former impetuous haste, brought the information that he might possibly get into the Tokyo academy by examination if he did a preliminary course at Paoting Military College near Tientsin. The entrance test for this school was suited to his talents and he soon got a place in the ordinary way, without “pull.” I say in the ordinary way, but actually it was extraordinary that he should have succeeded in doing so in circumstances where almost everything usually depended upon knowing the right man or having the right cousin. Forthwith, he went to Paotingfu.
This town is in the North, and northerners in China feel superior to southerners. So do southerners, of course, consider themselves superior to northerners, but Chiang had to live among hostile students who vastly outnumbered the boys from his region. There were a lot of Manchu students, who went about snubbing all the others, and to add to this list of discomforts was the fact that Chiang had no queue. He was the only man in the place who didn’t wear one, and few of his colleagues failed to mention the deficiency at every opportunity.
He was always on the defensive, and one of Dr. Tong’s anecdotes shows how greatly he was under a strain. One day during a lecture on hygiene, the Japanese instructor put a lump of the local clay on the desk and said with heavy jocularity:
“This piece of dirt, roughly a cubic inch in volume, can contain as many as four hundred million germs, like China with her population of four hundred million.”
Furiously, Chiang walked up to the desk and broke the clod into eight pieces, saying, “Japan’s population is fifty million, like the fifty million germs in one eighth of this mud.”
The Japanese made the obvious retort in pointing to Chiang’s head. “Are you a revolutionary?” he demanded. He complained to the chancellor, and Chiang was duly reprimanded for impertinence.
When the time came for Paoting men to take examinations for the Japanese academy, Chiang found himself left out of the list of candidates. He had to struggle for the right to participate. Competition was keen, but he won out in the end by proving he could already speak Japanese, and he did well in the test. So in 1907 he sailed for the island, this time properly accredited, and after that it was plain sailing.
He applied himself dutifully to his studies in Tokyo, but he was more interested in the friendships he made and the earlier acquaintance that he was able to refresh. Chen Chi-mei was still there—indeed, he couldn’t very well have returned to Shanghai, being under a cloud with the Imperial authorities—and Sun Yat-sen was back. It wasn’t long before Chiang was introduced to the chief secret society among Sun’s followers, the League of Brothers or Tung Meng Hui that was in future to become the Kuomintang. In an obscure Japanese house, with the intense solemnity that befitted the occasion, he took the oath of initiation:
“I swear under heaven that I will do my utmost to work for the overthrow of the dynasty, the establishment of the Republic and the solution of the agrarian question by equitable distribution of the land. I solemnly undertake to be faithful to these principles. If I ever betray my trust may I be submitted to the severest possible penalties.”
For the next two years Chiang lived in Japan, passing out of the city’s academy in due course and moving on to Takata, where he served first as an ordinary soldier, then as a non-commissioned officer, and finally as a regular officer. It was an arduous life in the Japanese Army, but it suited him. Yo Fei, too, had undergone harsh experiences when fitting himself for his mission, he reminded himself.
Once or twice in the longer holidays, when finances permitted, the cadet went home to see his mother in Chikow, and on these occasions he was given messages to be delivered secretly to a certain Charlie Soong in Shanghai. Soong, Sun Yat-sen’s most valued friend, was one of the older generation like Sun himself. He was educated in America, and had returned to China as a Christian missionary, but he soon gave up preaching and turned instead to a strange double life. He published religious literature and grew prosperous, and bought a house in Shanghai and begat a large family, and all the time this was going on he also conspired to the best of his ability for the revolution. The six Soong children were mere small fry in 1909, too young to be interested in, or to interest, a serious, dedicated young man like Chiang Kai-shek.
Then it was 1911. The Dowager Empress had died, but the Manchu Dynasty hung on. Pu-yi, a child, sat on the throne; Regent was his uncle Prince Ch’un. There was no outstanding tyrant left, but the old gang of officials hadn’t changed; it had merely slowed down.
The revolutionary party, on the other hand, had speeded up; years of trial and error were good for its technique. The last failure worth noting was a throttled rising in Canton in March 1911, and that was very near to being a success. Everywhere except in Peking Court circles Chinese knew about the Tung Meng Hui and waited confidently for crisis. Sun’s bright young men had discovered propaganda. The Hui’s own paper, Min Pao, circulated widely in the Chinese countryside. Strolling players went from village to village carrying messages for the rebels cunningly hidden in their lines.
The mouth-filling phrases of Chiang Kai-shek’s oath were not mere rhetoric; those principles he had sworn to abide by were a genuine three which Sun Yat-sen had evolved after studying a certain amount of Western socialism, and on which he now based his reform program. He wrote a book on the subject, San Min Chu I [Three People’s Principles]. Other revolutionaries in China had appealed to the public on political or nationalist grounds—to philosophical sentiment—but Sun introduced a new idea; social welfare, the duty of the state to take care of the people in a material way. His Three Principles were:
1. Racial solidarity, or nationalism. This was nothing new in essence, being the familiar cry of liberation from the Manchus, but Sun added to the roster of enemies war lords and foreign exploiters.
2. The people’s sovereignty: their right to choose their leaders. Here, Sun was in favor of a preliminary period of tutelage under the rule of the revolutionary party before the Chinese people should use the vote.
3. The people’s welfare. In China, livelihood depends directly upon the land, and this principle demanded that land ownership be equalized.
Unfortunately Sun didn’t go into detail as to how this last was to be accomplished. Once or twice he mentioned a land tax, vaguely, but no one seems to have pinned him down. The ambiguity of the Third Principle has since given rise to endless argument.
“Our organization is complete,” the leader said, early in 1911, but he never expected his modest boast to be proved so violently within the year. In his opinion the hour for revolution would strike around 1913. In the meantime he continued his wanderings, holding meetings in America from west to east, traversing the continent along the southern route. Sun was somewhere near St. Louis when the balloon went up, an awkward fact for the conventional biographer of a hero to glamorize when writing of his proudest hour.
The fact was nobody meant to touch off a revolution just at that moment. The conspirators had decided upon “Wuhan”—the three manufacturing cities, Wuchang, Hankow and Hanyang on the Yangtse—as their next trouble spot, and had gone to work according to routine, manufacturing bombs in a cellar in the Hankow Russian Concession and busily sub
verting the local Imperial Army troops. Public resentment was already stirred up there in the provinces by the government’s recent highhanded action in confiscating, or, as they called it, nationalizing the railways and appropriating the revenues therefrom. In Szechuan disgruntled contractors called a strike, neighbors joined in, and suddenly what started out as a political quarrel turned into a popular revolt.
It wasn’t a struggle that the Tung Meng Hui could claim to have stirred up, but any strife was useful to them, and the local ringleaders wondered if the moment hadn’t arrived. In any case, events forced action upon them. On October 8 the famous bomb went off by accident in the Hankow cellar, the Viceroy’s men investigated, and four conspirators were caught and executed. The Tung Meng Hui waited no longer. The Revolution was on, and the Imperial troops, given the signal on October 10, promptly mutinied. And, as we have seen, a young officer in Takata gave up his command and hurried back to China.
“The Viceroy declares in his report to the Central Government that he has known for several weeks that a strong revolutionary organization existed in the city,” said a Times editorial in England on the twelfth. “He has certainly known for a very much longer period, as almost everybody in China does know, that profound, widespread, and merited dissatisfaction with the Imperial Government exists over a great part of the Empire.… The suppression of the Taiping rebellion … saved the Manchus a generation ago. They have not profited by the respite, and Young China, at any rate, thinks that their cup is full.”
This severely critical tone was not heard in the Times alone. You would never have guessed, reading British papers, that the Foreign Office had been such a stalwart supporter of Peking. On all sides were comments of sympathy for the rebels, delivered in that admonitory, schoolteacherish spirit which always seemed to possess Westerners discussing the affairs of the Orient. Officially the powers still took it for granted that they we’re on the side of the Manchus, but still the press carped: there was a schizophrenic aspect to the affair which is nothing new in our civilization.
The struggle was difficult for the public to follow. Newspaper readers in foreign lands were still innocent enough to credit the versions of both sides, which alternated and flatly contradicted, each day, what had been said the day before. Usually when the smoke cleared away the rebels’ report proved to have been the more accurate, but the fighting dragged on, for Peking had on its side a superior armory and the capable General Yuan Shih-kai.
Yuan Shih-kai’s name was one to conjure with among the Manchus. The Dowager Empress had employed him to crush the reform movement in 1898. He was hated by liberals, especially revolutionaries. Now the Court sent him to deal with the insurgents, but the authorities were slow and inefficient, as usual, in coming to the decision—it was easier to temporize and tell each other comfortably that everything would blow over—and by the time he drew near Wuhan with his troops, the surrounding country had been swept into the revolt. Yuan Shih-kai, seeing that the situation was awkward, turned back to wait for better conditions.
Chen Chi-mei was in charge of the local branch of the party. They had to work under cover, for the Manchus had taken special precautions with this outpost of Europe, and the concessions and the native city were under heavy guard. But Shanghai of all places was impossible to defend against infiltration, and Chen had the situation well in hand. It was not merely a matter of Shanghai itself that preoccupied him: the city alone was of little value; it must have communication with the interior. The revolutionaries must gain control of Hangchow, a hundred miles from Shanghai, and Chen handed over the responsibility for this part of the campaign to his young friend Chiang. For the first time, the Imperial Army, old-fashioned and corrupt, would be opposed by a Chinese who belonged to the new order of military men trained in the Western tradition, as adopted by Japan.
If Chiang was worried, he didn’t admit it. He had propagandized the Hangchow soldiery during his apprenticeship as a revolutionary, and he knew that the cause numbered many friends among them. However, he commanded a very small detachment, a mere hundred men not well supplied with arms, and he had to reckon, over and above the Chinese soldiers, with a special guard of Manchu bannermen, newly arrived from the North, who had not been indoctrinated. And it was, after all, his first genuine warlike engagement.
The attack started at two o’clock in the morning of November 5. Chiang and his “dare-to-die” hundred got as close as possible to the yamen walls before opening hostilities with bombs. The vigor of the onslaught carried them through, and with the help of reinforcements they succeeded in capturing control of the building, complete with its Governor, before dawn. According to custom they burned the yamen. The bannermen put up more resistance than the first guard, but even so the job was finished by the end of the day; Hangchow captured, and Chekiang Province in the hands of the rebels. The young officer had good reason to be proud, especially as Chen next sent him on a campaign throughout the province. It was more like a triumphal tour than a hard-fought war.
In the meantime, all over China the barbershops did a rushing business cutting off queues.
Any member of the Tung Meng Hui who hoped for paradise as soon as the Manchus were defeated was due for bitter disappointment. The Chinese have always declared that the Double Tenth marked the birth of their liberty, but like most fixed points in historical narrative, this one represents an oversimplification. Certainly it was essential that the Manchu Court be done away with, but their legacy—backward mentality, traditional corruption, and constant lack of funds—was yet to give China years of trouble.
The insurgents were careful not to antagonize the West. Sun, who had been overtaken by his revolution while traveling in America, was now in London endeavoring fruitlessly to arrange a loan. Whitehall was still skeptical. The only satisfaction he obtained was the assurance that British support of the Manchus would probably cease. It was in London that he received a cable from his loyal followers asking him to accept the presidency.
By the time he got back to Shanghai, and to a wildly enthusiastic welcome led by the Soongs, the triumphant rebels had set up their government in Nanking. “Nanking” means “Southern Capital”: the city had served this purpose before in ancient times. The Manchus were still on their shaky throne in the North, still pinning their hopes on Yuan Shih-kai, still refusing to abdicate. Yuan played for time. Of China’s eighteen provinces he held only three, but they were the most important part of the country, the heart of the North. He was no longer in open combat with the republicans, but officially he was still the Emperor’s champion.
Sun’s first few weeks at home were rough sailing. Their sudden success had gone to the heads of the pettier leaders. They squabbled over their respective powers, and as soon as he returned he was seized upon and forced to use all his tact to resolve these conflicts. A man of different type, less gentle, less trustful, could have coped with all this in short order, but that was not Sun’s character: he was no iron man.
On New Year’s Day, 1912, he was proclaimed President in Nanking, having been hastily elected by delegates from seventeen provinces; and the title was qualified, at his own suggestion, by the adjective “provisional.” The business of forming a constitution went forward—a constitution also called “provisional.” But the Manchus were still unresolved, still unabsorbed. The war was nearly over, and Yuan, refusing to fight any longer, was in communication with the Nanking group; their messages had become almost friendly, since they were now in the same dilemma. They all needed money. It was the general opinion among foreign bankers that a Chinese Republic governed by an unpracticed set of visionaries was a bad risk. Now if someone they were familiar with should be President—someone who trod the middle way, someone strong and efficient, like Yuan Shih-kai …
Besides, Yuan had the Manchus in his pocket, and the final outcome of the war rested with him. Within a few weeks of Sun’s installation the northern general made a proposition to the Nanking government: he would depose the Manchus, and then assume th
e presidency. Strange as it may seem to us, Sun agreed.
Immediately the deadlock was broken. The first evidence of landslide was a message that the Manchus’ generals thought it best for the Throne to abdicate. On February 12, 1912, it was done. The little Emperor retired with a large pension. The Manchus were out at last.
Yuan Shih-kai was President of the Republic of China.
Chiang Kai-shek returned to Shanghai with a good reputation. His venture in Chekiang had not been a large part of the revolution, but such as it was he had done it in excellent style. Chen Chi-mei, now Commander-in-Chief of the People’s Army in Shanghai, appointed him regimental commander and set him to training the new troops. Chiang was also given the duty of organizing a supply and transport body. He oversaw the purchase and shipping of the food and ammunition supplies demanded by the front lines, and also had to find the necessary funds with which to pay for these commodities. It was not an easy commission. Sun Yat-sen, the revolutionaries had told each other, would bring back money, but they were disappointed on that score.
Chen also appointed Chiang editor of an army periodical, the Monthly for Military Affairs. Presumably there were not many articulate brother officers around Shanghai, or perhaps, like other editors, Chiang discovered that he liked the work of composing as well as editing. At any rate he supplied his magazine with at least one long thoughtful piece of his own in every issue, and they make interesting reading today. They were straightforward and professional. His thinking was much influenced by his studies in military strategy; for instance, he prophesied that Japan would soon have another go at taking possession of China’s territory. Without rancor, detachedly, he commented in this article on Japan’s poverty and her fierce ambition “to wrestle with the Great Empires for a leading position in the world.” China’s prospects at the moment were not bright, he said, because the Manchus had traded off all her strategical points. An interest in military science must be developed among the people: the old-fashioned concept of militarism must be discarded if China was to survive. He suggested a new law providing for conscription and other modern methods of improving the military potential.