Chiang Kai-Shek

by Emily Hahn

  The old merry-go-round promptly started up. Feng Yu-hsiang, now self-styled commander-in-chief of the People’s Anti-Japanese Army in Chahar, called on all patriots of China to help combat the Japanese menace and forswear Nanking’s pusillanimous attitude. He got a certain amount of response; Canton joyously threw itself into the chorus. But nothing more came of it. Some of the southerners were beginning to grow up a little bit, and the more balanced of their leaders saw Japan as a genuine menace, not merely a stick to beat Chiang with. The hotheads, baffled by moderate Pai Chung-hsi, finally removed themselves to Fukien Province and operated from there.

  The Tangku truce was signed at the end of May, and the news leaked out almost immediately. There was to be a demilitarized zone just under the Wall, in which Chinese troops must not make war on anyone. The Japanese could keep an eye on it by reconnaissance plane whenever they thought it necessary to make sure the Chinese were not indulging in “provocative acts.” Yet Chinese police must be responsible for keeping the rules.

  Busily the dissident southerners set about their plans to join forces with Feng Yu-hsiang, intending to stop off at Nanking on the way and deal with the government there. They were not dissuaded by the fact that Chen Chi-tang, the big boss of Canton, had counted himself out of the project like Pai Chung-hsi. They mobilized a number of comparatively petty generals under the one big name they could count as theirs, Tsai Ting-kai of the Nineteenth Route Army, and so the “Anti-Japanese Relief Army for Marshal Feng Yu-hsiang” started out on the old, old road that leads through Hunan. History does not often repeat itself; it didn’t this time. The Governor of Hunan, by prearrangement with Chiang, sent forces to block the road at the border. The expedition called it a day, dispersed, and went home.

  Chiang didn’t wait in the capital to deal with each crisis that developed. Handling difficult southern generals had become a familiar task. Through the months his real attention was riveted on the Communist campaign, and he spent much time on that front. But by the middle of November it became clear that something stronger than usual was needed to quiet the insurgents at Foochow. Chiang had used soft words and soft soap; he had even sent President Lin Sen in person to Fukien to talk things over, hoping that this sign of taking them seriously might flatter them into a reasonable state of mind. Nothing worked. On November 20 the Foochow crowd announced their government. Hu Han-min wasn’t in it; he had thought better of it at the last minute. But Eugene Chen was Minister of Foreign Affairs. He always loved being Minister of Foreign Affairs.

  The announcement sputtered and went out like a wet firecracker. Eugene Chen was amazed: he had been confident of a great upsurge of anti-Chiang feeling, certain that the Communists, above all, would rally to his banner. But his venture came at a time when Moscow was changing policy and wondering if Chiang Kai-shek might not be just what the Reds wanted at that point to hold off Japanese attempts against their own territory. A quiet directive went out: Eugene’s effort was boycotted. Even Madame Sun, zealously obedient, published a disclaimer of any interest in the Fukien movement. It was a bitter blow to her erstwhile comrade.

  The Canton crowd too, of whom Eugene had never quite given up hope, had no sympathy with him. The Cantonese already possessed a certain amount of autonomy, and though they would never hesitate to attack Chiang from their home base, they didn’t want to give any rope to the rival party of independents. The Southwest Political Council, like Madame Sun, hurried to send a disclaimer. So did Chen Chi-tang, who never pretended to have connections with the legal government of Canton, though everyone knew he ran it.

  Hu Han-min added his remarks of disapproval. Even Feng Yu-hsiang went on record; he did not support Foochow.

  But just to keep Chiang from getting delusions of grandeur, the Southwest Political Council followed up their gesture against Foochow with another message of defiance to Nanking, imploring Chiang to resign. The signatures included that of Wang Ching-wei, and Chiang must have been stung by a sudden impatience with the dreary old round. At any rate he brought in a change. He eschewed resignations, noble renunciatory speeches, and long telegrams. Instead, he stuck out his jaw and waded in and opened hostilities against Fukien.

  It may not have been worth his wrath, but he had other reasons than wrath. Orderly administration was what he wanted. He unloosed the full strength of his army, complete with the modern equipment he had been keeping under cover all this time. Among other things he unwrapped was the new air force. Until now, December 1933, the only time Chinese bombers had been used to any effect was when a few planes had flown over Changsha to rout the Communists. Now there were more planes, quite a respectable number, flown by men who knew how to handle them. These machines had been imported in small numbers at a time, and the pilots had been trained in the States.

  It was the modern world against the old, Western methods against outdated Oriental; the Fukien rebels didn’t stand a chance. Even the Nineteenth Route Army, in spite of its Shanghai record, broke ranks and fled. In a few weeks nothing was left of the revolt, and by the end of 1933 all that remained for the Nationalists to do was reorganize the beaten army. Chiang incorporated the Fukien government’s men in the Nanking forces, as he had already done with Chang Hsueh-liang’s dispossessed troops. One way and another, Nanking was collecting an impressive force.

  Then the Generalissimo turned to Canton, which had hatched out so many of his headaches, and said it was time to stop fooling. He promised to subsidize Canton’s military expenses, and even to permit their autonomous Political and Military councils, but Chen Chi-tang must in turn support him in his anti-Red drive. No more distracting clamor about resisting Japan, he said sternly: Communists first!

  Chen Chi-tang promised, and the war lords of the other Red-infested provinces followed his lead.

  The Central Soviet Government of the Chinese Communists was located at Juichin in Kiangsi. In spite of Nanking’s most vigorous attacks it remained deeply rooted. Mao Tse-tung and his next in command, Chu Teh, were slowly gaining control against the strong competition of the Returned Students clique which had supplanted Li Li-san. Little by little Mao proved his point about agrarian reform as a major strategy. There were still discussions in Moscow, and contradictory orders and an occasional reprimand, but Mao continued to gain ground. In the autumn of 1932 he scored in an important move when he persuaded Moscow, in spite of opposition from the Returned Students, to shift all party activity from its underground position in Shanghai and concentrate it in Juichin.

  Japanese aggression favored the Reds in an immediate way by distracting Chiang’s attention. To force the Generalissimo into a change of emphasis the Communists continued to condemn the island empire in loud tones. If they were running China, they declared, Japan would not be permitted to carry on like this. Yet they did nothing themselves against the Japanese. They tried to maintain a nice balance in their attitude: the time might come when they would need something to hold the Japanese off Russia herself. It suited them to keep the Generalissimo suspended between two threats. Solidly sitting in Kiangsi, acquiring an aspect of permanency, the C.C.P. evolved away from its original form of a guerrilla army. The more regular their life, the more rapidly they could spread teaching and land reform among villagers and farmers. They recruited the dispossessed who were wandering about, the victims of local wars; they fed these people and educated them and sent them out to carry the word. Kiangsi and the other provinces where they worked were in a hinterland that had never been more than nominally a part of Chiang’s domain. All their lives the people there had been at the mercy of war-lord rule, with its accompaniment of rapacious landlords, officials, and usurers. They were pathetically easy to convert.

  In 1934, for the first time in years, Chiang looked around him in Nanking and realized that he had the leisure to start a thorough program of Red eradication. Like the villagers, he had learned something from their methods. Force alone would never suffice to stamp out their influence, but force was the first thing necessary, and its applicati
on would be costly and slow. He was sure of his ground in that part of the campaign. But the Communists, even if driven out, would leave their doctrine and disciples, and unless the vacuum created by their absence could be filled, their spirit would still reign. The country needed political and moral reconstruction.

  Chiang marshaled his knowledge of both Confucian ethics and Methodism. He talked it over with his wife, with some of the high-ranking Kuomintang, and with Donald, safely back with his young fellow from the pitfalls of Rome. The conferences discussed matters that had never before interested the China-bred Generalissimo; Western standards of cleanliness and probity in public life. It was a sore point, for example, that Westerners said China was dirty. The Chinese had always resented this statement, but defensively laughed it off and maintained that they liked to be dirty, and, anyway, Westerners were much dirtier. Who cared what the outer barbarians might say? But the Generalissimo was married to a woman who agreed with the foreigners. Mayling’s ideas were passionate and fierce; she had been in a state about China’s hygiene ever since she came back from her American schooling. She was miserable about the filth of city streets, the happy-go-lucky dirtiness of Chinese kitchens, the communal feeding bowl into which everyone stuck his sucked chopsticks. She carried clean sheets about with her to put down on chairs or floors, and in her own house she invented a system of serving the food with special chopsticks, and of using individual helpings. But even she had been able to do nothing about the hawking and spitting that were a familiar part of the Chinese scene.

  The more Chiang thought about it, the more he liked the idea of teaching cleanliness, as well as austerity, to his troops. It was in tune with his philosophy of regular exercise, careful eating, and all the rest of it. The New Life Movement got under way.

  Madame decided that Donald would be a useful friend to keep around. His management of the Young Marshal had stirred her admiration; she had a proper missionary horror of opium. Moreover, she had heard him speak up and harangue Chiang about everything he considered wrong in the government: corruption, opium-dealing, nepotism, inefficiency, all the things an old-style Chinese administrator pretended not to notice and old-style officials were too polite to mention. Of course he couldn’t say this in Chinese, but Madame interpreted it all with relish. The friendship was to continue, by correspondence, after the Young Marshal and Donald went to Hankow, where Chang Hsueh-liang had been given a new post commanding the “Bandit Suppression” troops. In the meantime Donald sat in on some of the discussions of the New Life Movement.

  So did Chen Li-fu, one of the two Chen brothers, in his capacity of expert on young China. Chen had been associated with the Whampoa cadets in the early days before the break with the Russians. He still kept his fingers on the pulse of military youth; he was in charge of the mysterious “Blue Shirt” organization, a pallid imitation of Europe’s rainbow-shirted brigades of Fascists. There was a lot of resentful whispering about these Blue Shirts. Their methods never approached the bullying terrorism of German and Italian organizations of the same sort, but the public had no assurance that they wouldn’t. The label of Fascism, as a matter of fact, was not damning in itself: the Chinese weren’t particular whose ideology they borrowed from. Their committee system was Russian and their Blue Shirts Fascist. But the New Life Movement was peculiarly Chinese.

  In conference, the Generalissimo expounded his plan—more stringent rules for neatness and hygiene, the popularizing of the toothbrush in the Army and among civilians as well; reminders of the usual rules of courtesy. Chen thought it an excellent idea as far as it went, but he argued that the concept merely of cleanliness and austerity was too limited. Leaders must give their people something inspirational, he said. People wanted ideals; they liked ideals. One must go back to the good old Chinese virtues and give the whole thing uplift. So in deference to this theory, four solid, ancient—and, to a Westerner, confusingly vague—virtues were added to the list of those to which good Chinese should aspire: li, yi, lien, and chih. Li means etiquette, or rather propriety, or even things as they should be. Yi means justice. Lien is integrity. Chih is conscientiousness, which is not the same thing as integrity because it applies more to one’s private, personal life. (Any Chinese scholar is at liberty to differ with these interpretations; a number, doubtless, will. No two of these dissidents, however, will agree with each other, so we may as well let them stand.)

  Nonmissionary Westerners and many Western-educated Chinese greeted the New Life Movement with impatient skepticism. It was muddled and sanctimonious and do-goody, they complained, and full of platitudes. What was wrong with dancing, anyway? Why should you need all that fanfare to tell people to clean their teeth and keep their collars buttoned? Some of the admonitions were resounding emptiness, said the critics. Scornfully they cited, “Observe rules, have faith, honesty and humility.” Or, “Act on your promises. Better, act without promising.”

  But pious precepts are in the nature of Chinese things. Their education consists in a series of such commandments, and some of the new precepts embodied ideas which, however platitudinous they sound to us, were new to the people. Many persons had actually never been told before that improved eating habits would make them healthier or that streets should be kept clean and swept. Furthermore, when Chiang exhorted the public to be frugal, he was saying something that needed saying. Thrifty though the Chinese were, there were points on which tradition forced them to be lavish to a reckless degree. The New Life Movement discouraged expensive funerals, deprecated “showing-off” dinners where the host served thirty or forty dishes that no one could possibly finish, and introduced the custom of “mass weddings,” in which all young couples in the town who wanted to marry were polished off in one day during the season, with one ceremony and one feast. Frugality became fashionable.

  So did hygiene. At schools and colleges girls threw themselves into the New Life Movement and did exercises and sports. Willowy pallor went out of style; Amazonian beauty came in. Shrilly the women protested that though they were doing their best, the men were lagging. Girls wrote to the newspapers complaining that their Chinese boy friends were sickly, weedy-looking specimens; they threatened to look for sturdier beaux elsewhere. This was all new to a race that had hitherto deprecated rude good health as being unaesthetic.

  The whole thing was formally inaugurated in March, at Nanchang, with one of Chiang’s marathon speeches. Within a few months, though the intellectuals sneered and jeered, there were placards everywhere urging the people to be neat and clean. Arrests were made of anti-social characters who spat recklessly on the sidewalks or in railway stations. Enthusiasts deprecated smoking in public. Opium was denounced. Dancing was frowned on. The old happy-go-lucky men’s fashion of wearing the collar open—no small relief on a summer day, when a Chinese collar can be torture—went out. It was a laugh-worthy mixture of values from our point of view, but it worked. Through it, the Chinese were steamed up for the great all-out anti-Red drive.

  Chiang spoke of another plan, to be put into effect as soon as he won the victory he was so confident of. Once free of the Communists, he said, the land would be made over according to the “People’s Economic Reconstruction.” No longer would the Reds hold the monopoly for reform, education, and exploitation of natural resources. He had reason to speak in more detail about the reconstruction during a meeting he called in June to address the generals and governors of the provinces involved; Kiangsi, Fukien, and Kwangsi. If these men would co-operate with Nanking to the best of their ability, said Chiang, and with all the troops at their disposal, he would include them in the national reconstruction, and subsidize improvements in their domains afterward. Though these men had no love for the Generalissimo—Pai Chung-hsi definitely hated him—they had even less affection for the Reds. They promised. They sat in on military meetings with Chiang’s considerable corps of German advisers, and with exclusive knowledge of the terrain helped to evolve the over-all strategy.

  Already the campaign had begun, with ad
vance guards of soldiers making roads and building blockhouses. The whole sovietized area was marked out and encircled with these little forts and an efficient network of communications. Slowly tightening the circle the Nanking army of about four hundred thousand men set up a blockade, preventing supplies of any sort going in or any exports coming out. The people inside the circle, unfortunate civilians who were caught on their home ground, soon felt the pinch. They began to desert the Communists, for when things got tight even the amiable Reds took their food from them by force. The Communists ran out of ammunition, and they needed salt. All the while the Nanking soldiers with their allies moved inward, coolly and methodically tightening the belt.

  As activities continued and peripheral towns were evacuated by fleeing Reds, Chiang’s secret police moved in. This “Special Movement Force” was organized much on the lines of a similar body of Soviet youths, a fact which did not prevent the Communists making capital, in their propaganda later on, of the iniquity of such proceedings. It appears that there was nothing especially sinister or terroristic about the Special Movement Force, though that doesn’t make it more palatable. The Westerner dislikes any sort of secret police however restrained. In all there were about twenty thousand of them—“a combination of the intelligence section and of the military police, such as are to be found in all modern armies,” says Tong defensively—but their duties smacked more of the Y.M.C.A. than is usual in modern armies. They wore plain clothes and were supposed to round up deserters or stray Communists, enforce the blockade, search travelers, see that the troops didn’t molest the farmers and other civilians, organize and train the masses, shepherd the troops and billet them, “elevate popular morale,” re-establish schools, train volunteers—everything, in fact, except put out the cat at night. “All of them were educated men, some of them graduates of higher primary or middle schools, while others were graduates or former pupils of the Whampoa Military Academy.… The members were required to take a special oath to act justly and to deal fairly in and with all things.” (Tong, Chiang Kai-shek.)