Restless Empire

by Odd Westad

  THE RELATIONSHIP TO JAPAN was crucial in the final reformist phase of the Qing empire and during the period of instability and search for a new political system that replaced the empire in 1912. The rise of Japanese power meant that Tokyo was seen as a model and a source of support for Chinese leaders of all political hues. The constitutionalists around Kang Youwei wanted to see China take Meiji Japan as its political inspiration. The revolutionaries around Sun Yat-sen admired Japan’s military and economic strength and sought Japanese funds for their missions. Chinese dissident organizations subscribing to these views—and all possible ones in between—were usually headquartered in Tokyo, where they benefited from many freedoms they encountered there and from Japanese largesse. Meanwhile, the new policy of administrative reform announced by the Qing in 1901 was also patterned on Japanese practices. Around 1910 one finds Qing loyalists and their opponents battering each other over the head with slogans adopted from the Meiji experience a generation earlier. When the former shouted, “Reform the state and revere the emperor,” the latter countered, “Only the foreign can save China.”

  In 1910, frightened by an increasing Western predominance in East Asia, Tokyo had decided to annex Korea fully and make it a Japanese province. With Korean nationalism on the rise, the decision could not have come at a worse moment for the relationship between the two peoples. Even those Koreans who admired Japan refused to cooperate with the new authorities, at least at first. Tokyo’s own gaze now quickly shifted from Seoul to Beijing, where the same form of chaos and dissolution that had made Korea a target for foreigners seemed to be threatening China. Intent not to lose out, Japan entered World War I as a British ally in order to try to seize the German possessions in China. In November 1914, when the German forces capitulated to the Japanese navy, Tokyo gained a strategic foothold on the Shandong peninsula. But Japan’s leaders worried that it would lose out to Western powers when the war ended, as had happened in 1895 and 1905. And so, in January 1915, Japan issued a set of demands that intended to mark China out as an area for its own special influence.

  Japan’s Twenty-One Demands, as they became known, were a classic case of diplomatic overreach. The Japanese cabinet piled point upon point to satisfy the desires of each of its members and ended up with a text that, if accepted, would have made China a virtual Japanese protectorate. Not only would Tokyo gain full control of Shandong; it would also solidify its power in Manchuria and extend its position of primacy in Fujian, the coastal province across from Japanese-held Taiwan. Sections of the Chinese military and police would come under Japanese control. China would also pledge not to allow any other power to gain further concessions along its coast and would grant Japan permission to build railways in its southern provinces. The other allied powers, including Japan’s old ally Britain, protested when the terms became known, because of their content and because Tokyo had tried to carry out the negotiations in secret. In the end, the Japanese had to beat a humiliating retreat, securing very little beyond what they had already got. Even that they could obtain only by threatening the weak Chinese government with war.

  The Twenty-One Demands became a watershed in Sino-Japanese relations. To many Chinese they symbolized an aggressive Japan that had become the main threat to China’s independence and that treated the country just as it had treated Korea before annexation. All over the country students protested Japanese pressure, and Japanese goods were boycotted. Both Yuan Shikai’s government and the opposition were weakened as a result: Yuan because he had offered to cooperate with the Japanese, the opposition because it was badly split on the issue. Sun Yat-sen, in one of his less popular moves, had attempted to outbid Yuan’s Beijing regime by offering to let Tokyo veto any diplomatic agreement China would make if he got back into the presidency. The result was widespread disillusionment among younger Chinese with an elite—whatever its political orientation—that was much too acquiescent to Japan.

  The changing view of Japan, both in the West and in China, was an important reason why Beijing was allowed to join in World War I as an allied power in August 1917, after the United States had given up its neutrality. By then large numbers of Chinese laborers had been recruited to work for the allies on the fronts in Europe. It was by far the biggest and most concentrated mass transport of Chinese workers ever to go to another continent. It would have major consequences in terms of spreading information about Europe into even the remotest parts of China. And many of those who participated came back fired up by new ideas and new knowledge. China’s diplomatic reward for having joined the war on the winning side was small, however: Article 156 of the 1919 Versailles Treaty confirmed Japan’s control of the former German-held territory in China. The decision caused large demonstrations in China and provided the background for the May Fourth Movement, the attempt to create a new national consciousness, which would help transform China’s approach to the world in the interwar years.

  FOR CENTURIES THE MANCHU RULERS of China had tried to set off the northeastern part of the country, Manchuria, as their own preserve by preventing Chinese migrants from settling there. Manchuria is a beautiful land, in spite of its harsh winters. Its lakes, forests, and abundant natural resources have long been a draw for the more adventurous Chinese, a kind of inner frontier that beckoned with the promise of a better life on the other side. As the Qing came under siege from its foreign and domestic enemies in the nineteenth century, many Chinese moved to Manchuria and settled its rich farmlands. But it was not only the Chinese who coveted the northeastern provinces. Russia, first, and then Japan had moved in too, cultivating the fiction that the territory belonged to no one, and that they could therefore colonize it. In the 1850s Russia had wrested the eastern coast of Manchuria away from China, to become the Russian Pacific Maritime Provinces, where the city they named Vladivostok (Conqueror of the East) is today. After 1905, Japan controlled the southern part of Manchuria, while the Russians still, tenuously, held onto the north. The two powers signed a number of secret agreements, setting out demarcation lines for their influence both in Manchuria and in Mongolia, a Qing territory of which the northern part had declared its independence in 1912 under Russian tutelage, while the southeastern part was coming increasingly under Japanese influence. Manchuria and its neighboring dominions seemed lost to China.

  After the revolution of 1911/12, the fate of Manchuria became a rallying point for Chinese nationalists and for leaders who themselves hailed from the region. To many Chinese the gradual exclusion of China’s interests from the area was worse than the foreign occupations that had taken place elsewhere in the country. The European coastal concessions, most people thought, were reversible and therefore temporary. But the penetration of the northeastern provinces could become irreversible, because the foreign countries that operated there were China’s neighbors. They aimed to take Manchuria permanently away from China. All over the country, the recovery of “Chinese Manchuria” became a rallying cry for those who wanted to define what Chinese nationalism meant. Some writers claimed that the test of a person’s Chineseness was whether he or she was willing to shed blood in order to get back the Northeast and make China whole again.

  When the Bolsheviks overthrew the Russian regime in 1917 and began building a socialist state, they unilaterally declared that they would withdraw all Russian forces from Chinese territory and abolish all unequal treaties. These promises, which were largely kept, had a massive effect in China, turning many young Chinese toward Soviet Communism. Inside Manchuria, however, the situation went from bad to worse after 1917. Japan attacked the new Soviet state together with the Western powers and thereby expanded its military influence all over the region, including in China. During the 1920s, Japan came to dominate all parts of Manchuria in an uneasy alliance with Zhang Zuolin, a flamboyant Chinese regional leader with national ambitions.

  The initial phase of Japanese control of the three northeastern provinces was first and foremost economic. Exploiting the region’s enormous agricultural potential (in par
t by forcing Chinese farmers off their land), Japan set up an export-oriented farming sector, producing processed and unprocessed agricultural goods. Japanese companies also developed small but increasingly influential industries centered on textiles and household goods. By 1928, thirty-two percent of all of China’s exports came from Manchuria,20 and the whole region’s economy was increasingly linked with Japan’s both domestically and internationally. That year Japan began a process of breaking even the formal ties that bound the northeastern provinces to the rest of China. Believing that Zhang Zuolin stood in the way of this process, local officers of the imperial army placed a bomb under his Japanese-made railway carriage and blew their former ally sky-high, demonstrating to all how far some Japanese were willing to go to fasten their country’s grip on Manchuria. While Tokyo was increasingly losing full control of its army’s actions abroad, the Japanese government feared the rise in Chinese nationalism and the vigorous new regime of Chiang Kai-shek. It also feared the effects of the global depression on Japan and its development aims. Japan’s response was to do as much as it could to preserve Manchuria as its exclusive zone of influence, even if that meant fighting future wars over it.

  WITHIN A GENERATION CHINA’S Japan had gone from being the foremost inspiration in creating a new state and society to being the main threat to China’s existence. In the 1920s and 1930s there were still people around on both sides who called for the relationship to be less confrontational and more cooperative. Sun Yat-sen, in one of his last speeches in 1924, claimed that the two countries were still connected by common blood and common interests:

  What problem does Pan-Asianism attempt to solve? The problem is how to terminate the sufferings of the Asiatic peoples and how to resist the aggression of the powerful European countries. In a word, Pan-Asianism represents the cause of the oppressed Asiatic peoples. . . . [W]e advocate the avenging of the wrong done to those in revolt against the civilization of the rule of Might, with the aim of seeking a civilization of peace and equality and the emancipation of all races. Japan to-day has become acquainted with the Western civilization of the rule of Might, but retains the characteristics of the Oriental civilization of the rule of Right. Now the question remains whether Japan will be the hawk of the Western civilization of the rule of Might, or the tower of strength of the Orient. This is the choice which lies before the people of Japan.21

  But as imperial Japan moved to secure its role as a great power at China’s expense, the voices of cooperation became fewer and increasingly reviled by their compatriots. Much of Chinese nationalism, as it was formed in the interwar years, became ingrained with a vision of Japan as China’s deadly enemy, a vision that persists among many Chinese today. Instead of a new East Asia in which China and Japan were partners, as so many had dreamed about in the nineteenth century, the region in the next century became a nightmare of conflict, a nightmare that by the 1930s seemed to have no end.

  There were several main reasons for this sorry outcome. As both countries broke out of their systems of beliefs and traditions in the late nineteenth century, they soon found that they had less and less in common. Japan’s Confucianism, originating from China, but developing independently during the 250-year Tokugawa period, became less of a tie as old ideas and concepts came under pressure. After the 1890s, Chinese society became a permanent warning to many Japanese, in the form of what some today would call a failed state: an ungovernable region from which lawlessness, disease, and terrorism emanated. That Japanese and Chinese seemed closely related in a racial sense (at least under the Western gaze) made matters worse: Japan had to become everything China was not, almost to the degree that Chinese society by the 1920s was constituted as a kind of anti-Japan. It was dirty, when Japan was clean and hygienic. It was backward, when Japan was progressive. It was weak, when Japan was strong. It was wayward, when Japan was purposeful.

  Both Japanese and Chinese nationalisms took part of their core purpose from ideas adopted from the West. But even so they were very different in character. Japan developed a form of ethnic nationalism, in some ways similar to the new nationalisms found in Germany and Italy, or in parts of Eastern Europe. Defining all Japanese as one ethnie, the state constructed a religion (Shintoism), an educational system, and an army that taught the new message: All Japanese were one, bound together by bloodline and territory (what the Germans called Blut und Boden) into one national state. In China such an ethnic nationalism was difficult to imagine. China had been everything, not just a group of people tied together by some form of inheritance. China was a culture as well as an empire, and it took a long time—really up to today—before Chinese fully began seeing themselves as one group, defined by where they live and what they look like. Still, the Chinese nationalism of the early twentieth century—centered on the state—was enough of a challenge to others, and especially to Japan, whose incursions into China were predicated on the absence of a viable Chinese state.

  For Japan, the relationship to China was closely connected to the fear of foreign domination. As Japan’s power grew in the early twentieth century, some Japanese elites came to believe that their country’s survival depended on having an empire of its own, as the leading Western states had, and on not becoming isolated. To this form of Japanese thinking, which developed into the militarism of the 1930s, China was an object of conquest and subordination. But there were also Japanese who sincerely believed in East Asian cooperation as a barrier against the West, and who believed that Japan could help China protect itself and build a new state in close cooperation with its eastern neighbor. To both groups, however, Japan could not stay away from China: Either by conquest or by example, Japan had to prevent the country from becoming a Western dominion directed against Japan.

  In China, the sense of enduring weakness that set in among some elites in the early twentieth century was projected onto the relationship with Japan. From being a model that could help China out of its despair, some Chinese came to see Japan as a root cause of their country’s problems. China was weak because Japan was strong. Tokyo was not just exploiting China’s condition but held it in place and extended it. Expanding on traditional stereotypes, some Chinese felt that it was only through destroying China that Japan could replace it as the dominant power in East Asia. The attempts by the Japanese to create an empire in China’s place was so perverse, so against the natural order of things, that it was in its essence the worst problem China faced. Whatever existed otherwise and elsewhere, there was no room for two powers within the region. This attitude toward Japan is one that some Chinese have kept, even after their rival’s spectacular collapse in World War II.

  CHAPTER 4

  REPUBLIC

  IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY, China went through a series of political convulsions that would shape all of its future foreign affairs. In 1900, large groups of ordinary Chinese organized violent protests against the foreign presence in what became known in the West as the Boxer Rebellion (but which should rather be known as the Boxer Revolution). In 1911, regional elites all over the country rose up against the Qing, and an army mutiny forced the mother of the last emperor, the four-year-old Puyi, to issue his abdication. By imperial decree, China became a republic, though very few people knew what a republic meant (the new Chinese word for it, minguo, means “people’s country” or “people and country”). Did the new order mean elections and a representative government? Or did it mean the rule of the best-qualified experts? Was China ripe for republicanism, or would old patterns of patronage and deference reassert themselves? Did a republic mean every man for himself, the dissolution of central power, the end of Confucianism, and, eventually, the breakup of China? Or could the new authorities fashion a new country, one that kept its Chineseness while becoming one with the rest of the world?

  Between 1900 and the late 1920s, China saw many different regimes, foreign interventions, and provincial centers of power. The Qing empire was replaced by a succession of weak central governments, which slowly ceased exerting
full authority in most matters outside a section of northern China, around the capital, Beijing. Foreign powers, and especially Japan, were becoming more powerful within China than they had ever been during the Qing (though the political chaos made China less interesting for foreign investment than it might otherwise have been). Regional powerholders, some of them representing national minorities, became key political figures, often with effective control of both politics and commerce within their regions. It was a period of tremendous change, both in people’s daily lives and, not least, in how the Chinese viewed themselves and their country.

  Understanding China’s foreign relations in this tumultuous period requires grasping two realities. Throughout the period and in spite of all challenges—domestic and foreign—China as a state retained enough cohesion to keep in place the semblance of a central government with a mandate to conduct foreign affairs. This mattered, because it would have been much easier for other countries to have shaved outlying provinces off China if there had not been a government of sorts claiming to represent the country as a whole. The remarkable fact that China’s borders today are almost identical to those of the Qing empire in its waning years is testimony to the significance of the idea of one integrated state, even when the republic was at its weakest. But it is also important to understand that no foreign great power wanted the complete dismemberment of China. Even Japan, which was moving ever closer to full control over Manchuria, did not want to see China south of the Great Wall carved up into zones of foreign occupation, because Tokyo (quite sensibly) believed that such a division would privilege Western states over Japan. And the Western powers—including the Russians/Soviets—were happy to work through local powerholders, factions, or political parties: Always watching each other for advantage, they were perfectly willing to work through those Chinese authorities that gave them the best deal, while preferring a weak central government over its abolition. Western businessmen felt that a little Chinese disunity was good for business, but full dismemberment would unleash inner and outer power struggles that could do nothing but harm the prospects for the China trade.