by Emily Hahn
“The sole aim of the Russian Party is to make the Chinese Communist Party its legitimate heir. They do not believe that our Party could cooperate with them … they want to make Manchuria, Mongolia, the Mohammedan Province and Tibet each a part of their Soviet, and even as to China Proper they are not without the wish to put their fingers in.…
“What they call ‘Internationalism’ and ‘World Revolution’ are nothing but Kaiser Imperialism.… Russians, as well as the English, French, Americans and Japanese, it seems to me, all have it in their minds to promote the interest of their own respective countries at the cost of other nations. One of them ridiculing the others about this is, as Mencius said, just like a man who had run only fifty paces ridiculing those who had run a hundred paces for having run at all.…
“… some of our Chinese Communists who are in Russia always scold other people as slaves of America, of England and of Japan, never realizing that they themselves have already completely become slaves of Russia.”
4 THE STRUGGLE FOR SUCCESSION 1923–26
They planned to start the academy with three hundred cadets, but there were fifteen hundred applications and in the end five hundred were chosen. Not all of these were green boys; to start off with, Chiang collected soldiers from a disbanded northern army that had been driven out of its garrison in Chekiang. With the new ones he went out of his way to discourage regionalism, deliberately selecting boys from as many districts as possible, as long as they were intelligent and had some education. He was determined to wipe out the old-fashioned prejudice against the military. In new China soldiers must be admired and envied.
Most of the teaching staff were Russian, which didn’t make for a very jolly faculty. The Russians disliked and suspected Chiang and it goes without saying that he returned the compliment, but for the good of the cause they all concealed their feelings—most of the time. At any rate there were many Chinese names among those who gave extracurricular lectures, and one of Chen Chi-mei’s two nephews, Chen Kuo-fu, was Chiang’s assistant.
It was an exacting course, which Americans would have found hard to take. Our students, conditioned to fifty-minute lectures, can’t concentrate for more than that without a brief recess, but Chinese are used to lectures of two or three times that length. Their teachers are capable of feats of filibuster that strike us with awe, and of all long-distance speakers Chiang is surely the champion. He addressed his academy at least once a week, administering hours at a stretch of improving discourse. He specialized in moral precept, recommending discipline and obedience; he urged the boys to think of the nation as an entity, to be loyal to China and Sun and the Kuomintang first of all, even before their commander or corps. They would be officers, he reminded them, with a duty to their men. They were also taught the fundamental political principles that Borodin thought they should know. And then, of course, there was the usual military routine and drill, under Galen’s supervision. In four months’ time the class graduated and dispersed to serve in the regular army near Canton, for practice, while the next group was indoctrinated.
The government itself was being shaken up and reorganized, but most of the big men remained as before. Minister of Finance was Chingling’s brother Soong Tse-ven, or T. V. Soong. It is difficult to remember that T.V. was ever a colleague of Communists, he is such a perfect Chinese version of the typical American capitalist. But so it was; and he was a satisfactory colleague, at that. He knew what most of them did not, the Western methods of finance and industry. During his years in the States he had developed a strong regard for punctuality and efficiency. It is asking for trouble, perhaps, to add that he had learned to respect honesty in politics; the cynical reader might well ask, Where? But T.V. had learned it somewhere.
With Chingling married to Generalissimo Sun and T.V. a Cabinet Minister the Soongs were well represented in Canton, and May-ling often came down to visit her sister. Chiang had made up his mind. He could not bring himself to ask her personally for her hand, in spite of his determination to live up to the Western code, so he compromised with the old ways and spoke to Sun. Was Miss Soong likely to accept him? His first wife, as he assured the Doctor, was now divorced; perhaps it would be better to say detached. At any rate, she didn’t count. Had he any chance with Mayling?
Sun seems to have favored the suggestion; at least he did not set himself against it, and he asked his wife’s advice. But Chingling’s reaction was violent. She didn’t like Chiang at the beginning and she was never to like him, even in the few periods when their aims coincided. She flared up and reminded her husband that Chiang wasn’t at all a moral man. All her Methodist background recurred to the Communist girl: Mayling must never marry such a roué! Why, even at that moment some woman was living with him!
Sun carried the message back to his academy president, advising him to wait until Madame Sun had cooled down and then try his luck again. Chiang was not discouraged: Miss Soong seemed not absolutely to dislike him, in spite of her sister’s opinion, and in spite, too, of the pretty lady who was sharing his quarters at the time. He was a little puzzled by Chingling’s attitude: in his world women didn’t make a fuss over things like that.
There was an added complication in this complicated courtship. Borodin, too, was in love with Mayling. This doesn’t fit in with Edgar Snow’s description of the Communist character. According to Snow, Communists just don’t indulge in sentimental weaknesses. They “talk only about committees, organizations, armies, resolutions, battles, tactics, ‘measures’ and so on, but seldom in terms of experience.” (Red Star over China, p. 133.) But Borodin backslid. He couldn’t very well pay open court to Mayling because he was married, but he couldn’t put her out of his mind, either. One day a delighted servant brought to one of the Soongs a piece of paper filched from Borodin’s bedroom, from his blotter, on which he had written, over and over, “Mayling darling. Darling Mayling.” Her sisters teased Mayling: Sun laughed with them: in time, inevitably, the story came to Chiang’s ears.
Probably this rivalry didn’t have a decisive effect on his feelings about the Communists, but it couldn’t have increased his affection. Already he disliked them cordially. He had plenty of reason. He was jealously on guard where Sun was concerned, and he resented the way the Russians interfered with the Kuomintang. They persuaded Sun to expel from the Party all members who stood out against the Russian ways. Chiang disapproved of this, and there were many more evidences of the same superintending spirit. He had never swallowed Joffe’s reassurances in that manifesto. The Russians were a great help, he realized, and they had a lot to teach the Chinese, and he was quite willing to learn it. But in the end, he knew, they would try to push him out, along with the rest of the faithful. World revolution? Chiang had no faith in the concept. It looked to him like a new technique for ordinary conquest by Russia.
As always, he quarreled with his colleagues. As always, Sun was distressed and tried to keep the peace. But Chiang was too busy now to concentrate on personal enmities. Resentful local merchants, who continued to view Sun’s flourishing socialistic government with alarm, had collected a private army of their own, the Canton Volunteers, and with these forces, under a Cantonese war lord, they began a revolution.
Chiang promptly moved against the Volunteers with a picked party of academy cadets and put into practice the principles of modern, changed warfare that had been drummed into their heads. They attacked in small bands. They moved swiftly and with confidence, outguessing the enemy at every turn. They showed no mercy and much zeal. It was a bloody war and a destructive one, but at the end of it there was no denying that Sun and his Kuomintang—with the Russians behind him, more and more Russians all the time—were running Canton and the province. Chiang’s reputation was enhanced as well.
The picture looks clear enough—Sun’s party and the Russians, ostensibly allies, actually coming apart at the seams because of a fundamental difference between what the Kuomintang wanted and what Communism wanted. It is really a little more complicated than th
at. The Kuomintang left wing, the C.C.P., and the Russians made up a block against all the other Kuomintang members. But there was a dispute for power among these leftists, too. The Russians annoyed the Chinese Communists, just as they annoyed Chiang, with their cavalier behavior. In fact, they were nicer to the non-Red Chiang than to their own brothers in the faith. No Chinese Communist had any voice in the organization of the Whampoa Academy, and certainly no Chinese Communist had any say at all in top-level decisions. These were handled by Borodin and Sun Yat-sen exclusively. The C.C.P. no less than the Kuomintang had reason to complain of highhanded treatment from the Russians.
Early in 1924 Lenin died, and the faith and its future were thoroughly discussed at the Kuomintang’s First National Congress in January. (Mao Tse-tung dropped in for the occasion; he was working in Shanghai.) If Chiang and the other Kuomintang leaders had not already been alert to danger, they soon had the evidence of it thrust upon them. In July of 1924 three zealous right-wingers brought out a “Proposal for the Impeachment of the Communist Party,” which charged that the Reds were breaking their solemn promise to behave as “individuals” within the Kuomintang. They were taking orders from the C. P. Central Committee as a group; they were Communists first and Kuomintang members afterward; they were a party within a party.
Sun could not deny it. But he said that these infringements were the actions of inexperienced students, not the “experienced Soviet leaders.” He begged the question; logically, he must have seen that there is no other way a Communist, either Russian or Chinese, can behave than to work primarily for the Party. But ill-health isn’t conducive to logical thinking, and Sun was dying.
The North watched these various events, but in a rather desultory way. The leading war lord there, Wu Pei-fu, had got into a habit of ignoring Sun Yat-sen as a threat. He was busy unifying his part of China, and the great part of his attention was focused on his quarrel with Chang Tso-lin, the boss, or “Old Marshal,” of Manchuria, which at this time was complicated by Russian action. To understand it, we must remember that Soviet Russia still dealt with Peking on a diplomatic basis, as the rightful capital of China, quite as if all this activity in Canton were not going on at all. It was the Russian Government that dealt with Peking—promising among other things, in a mutual agreement, not to engage in hostile propaganda against Peking—but it was the Comintern that aided Sun Yat-sen, with hostile propaganda and everything else.
The Karakhan Manifesto of 1919 had made its effect on the Chinese by voluntarily giving up all rights in China which had been acquired by Czarist Russia. But now, in 1924, a rather odd thing happened. Soviet Russia again wanted the control over the Chinese Eastern Railway which had been handed back with such fanfare in 1919. Other foreign powers naturally protested against this breach of promise. Chang Tso-lin was particularly indignant, for the railway ran through his domain. But Wu Pei-fu let Russia have it on the old terms. He figured that he needed Russian friendship to keep out the Japanese in Manchuria, and he felt no obligation to listen to the Old Marshal’s protests. On the contrary.
As things turned out, the treaty between Peking and Moscow was to the Old Marshal’s advantage. He made such a row about it that to save trouble the Russians decided to make a special treaty with him, similar to the one they had signed with Peking. This settled his status, which had until then been hazy. He was definitely overlord of Manchuria, acknowledged as such by a foreign power.
The Old Marshal’s attempt to take over Peking in 1922 had been frustrated. He had been driven back to Mukden by Wu Pei-fu and General Feng Yu-hsiang, a character who liked to refer to himself as “the Christian general.” Feng had a great flair for publicity and was the darling of foreign newspapermen. A great fat man, he always boasted of his peasant origin, wore fantastically shabby clothes, and played to the gallery; but he was a capable general, if you didn’t insist on loyalty in your officers. He had contributed largely to the 1922 campaign against the Old Marshal, and when in 1924 Chang Tso-lin started again on the warpath, Wu naturally felt he could rely on Feng to defend Peking’s cause. Himself, he took his troops to Shanhaikuan on the Great Wall and there prepared to hold the line; Feng he sent to Jehol, nearly a hundred and forty miles from Peking.
Feng Yu-hsiang started off as he had been commanded, but as soon as Wu Pei-fu was a safe distance away he sneaked back to Peking. There, with all Wu’s troops gone, it was easy to take control of the government, according to the plan he had secretly worked out with Chang Tso-lin. Within a few hours Wu Pei-fu was out of power in Peking and his rivals were in. But Feng did not, after all, get the high position he had hoped for in the rearrangement that resulted. Chang Tso-lin, when they came to cut up the cake, put in another man instead of Feng as President. Feng’s feelings were hurt by this betrayal, and he must have reflected sadly on the perfidy of human nature, but he did not break off relations with the new regime.
Now in the autumn of 1924 the busy plotters and counterplotters turned and looked southward, and what they saw worried them. Chiang Kai-shek’s effective new academy training, the number of Soviet advisers swarming over Canton, the news of military equipment arriving in a steady stream, regular payments to the soldiers—most convincing evidence of Russia’s friendship—all betokened something threatening. Nor was it a secret that Sun Yat-sen was planning another military expedition against them. They took counsel and wondered aloud: was this war necessary? Chang Tso-lin and Feng Yu-hsiang were neither of them sworn enemies of Sun Yat-sen. Chang had been allied with the Nationalists more than once, making common cause against Peking, while Feng in his role of hearty republican appeared, at least, to be in sympathy with Sun’s aims.
A second invitation went, therefore, from Peking to Canton, in different language but conveying much the same message as the first. Why should the North and the South continue apart? Let Sun Yat-sen come up to Peking and talk it all over. Unification of China was the aim of all of them; wouldn’t it be better to achieve this peacefully?
Sun had declined the first invitation primarily because of the men in the saddle, Wu Pei-fu and Li Yuan-hung. This time he had no such objections, and not so much reason to mistrust the men in power. With Russia backing him, the northern generals should hesitate to play monkey tricks. Besides, Borodin thought the meeting would be a good idea. Sun could well afford to leave Canton: Chiang Kai-shek had the situation under control militarily, the non-Kuomintang portion of the Nationalist Army was outside the vicinity of Canton (this upon Borodin’s advice), and Sun’s old friend Hu Han-min was perfectly capable of acting as his deputy in civilian affairs. Accompanied by Wang Ching-wei and a number of other men, Generalissimo Sun departed for Peking early in 1925.
No one knew how near the end was. Sun had barely arrived at Tientsin when he collapsed and was taken to the Peking Union Medical College Hospital for observation. It was cancer of the liver, well advanced. He held bedside conferences and interviews until he was operated on. He died on March 12. It is possible, though not probable, that he himself wrote his famous will: the generally accepted theory, however, is that Wang Ching-wei composed it.
Had Sun died a few years earlier, before Soviet representatives took over his party propaganda, things might have been very different for his reputation. As it was, his name and fame were in the hands of expert idol-makers, and Sun was given the full Lenin treatment. He became half a god. His portrait still hangs in the place of honor in Chinese houses in Red China, Indonesia, America, England, wherever Chinese may be. As a piece of national property he is owned both by Communists and Nationalists, each party claiming exclusive rights to his philosophy. If Sun’s Christianized Chinese soul ever backslides enough to come back to earth as an ancestral ghost, the father of his country must be puzzled as to whose hospitality, among all his heirs, he ought to accept. Let us hope he is spared the anguish of choice: his children are not.
The world, or that portion of it which was interested, watched eagerly to see who would succeed Sun. Because Wang was present at t
he deathbed and had been “entrusted” with the sainted will, most of the Canton contingent thought he was the logical candidate, yet a number of men had equal claims to the succession, and no doubt the Russians wondered which to back.
The strength of the new Communist influence showed up dramatically in Shanghai on May 30, 1925, at last justifying the fears of the bankers. For some time the organization of trade unions had flourished and here and there strikes and upheavals had taken place in industrial districts. During one of these small riots a number of Chinese workers charged a Japanese cotton mill, and in the fracas one of them was killed. The agitators fanned the flames; speeches were made against the wicked foreign imperialists, and on May 30 such a mood of violence prevailed in the International Settlement that the police stepped in and made a few arrests. Upon this the omnipresent students pushed into the Louza police station, where the prisoners had been taken, and there was a scuffle while they were shoved out. They stayed there in the street shouting defiance. More and more reinforcements arrived until there was a sizable mob. What happened next, or rather why it happened, depends upon who is telling the story. Sympathizers of the strikers say the British police inspector lost his head; others insist that he did the only thing possible. Anyway, he gave the order to fire into the mob. Four students were killed on the spot and many more were wounded: in the end there were at least thirteen deaths.
Had this incident taken place before the arrival of the Russians in Sun Yat-sen’s life, it would have amounted to just that—the death of demonstrating students, no uncommon occurrence in the East. As it was, May 30 became the rallying cry of a crusade. After the fire and flame, Britain was the heaviest loser. More strikes followed rapidly, but the direst result was another shooting affray, the Shakee Massacre in Canton. The French and British at Shameen, in what they too insisted was a necessary act of self-defense, fired into a procession of demonstrators. This time the casualty list was much higher.