Restless Empire

by Odd Westad

  A number of Chinese, especially those who had been opposing the Qing for decades and hoping for a democratic revolution, disagreed. As they were pushed aside by local strongmen and army leaders, they remained dedicated to democracy. Song Jiaoren, Sun Yat-sen’s chief assistant, who was assassinated by Yuan’s men in 1913, told his leader as he lay dying, “the foundation of the nation is not yet strong, and the lot of the people is not yet improved. I die with deep regret. I humbly hope that your excellency will champion honesty, propagate justice, and promote democracy, so that the parliament can produce an everlasting constitution.”25 Ironically, the new party that Song helped create, the Guomindang, the National People’s Party, would play a key role in promoting China’s unity and strength, although honesty, justice, and democracy would remain in short supply.

  For the foreign powers, the main issues after 1912 were to keep a semblance of central power in place in China, while working with whoever held power locally to protect and advance their commercial interests. International loan consortia kept the Beijing governments afloat; by far the most important was a British-dominated consortium that made several big loans, including lending £25 million to Yuan’s regime in 1913. In return, the bankers and their home countries insisted that all Chinese income from customs and fees be deposited in foreign-controlled banks in Shanghai and used first to pay interest on the international loans and existing war indemnities from the Qing era. This trick not only deprived the central government of a main part of its remaining fiscal autonomy, but also made it possible for foreign financiers to influence Chinese politics by making parts of China’s own income available to whomever they favored. As one Chinese observer put it, it was like letting much of China’s national revenue go into a massive foreign-controlled financial system, from which only a tiny fraction emerged to be spent in the country itself. Many Third World governments that suffered from the debt crisis of the 1980s would recognize the phenomenon.

  Up to 1928, power in Beijing was in the hands of a confusing succession of northern politicians and warlords. They fought each other in several wars to seize central power. But such power meant less and less. While China retained a government recognized by other nations, real power increasingly went to the provinces or coalitions of provinces that were independent in all but name. Key provinces such as Hunan, Guangdong, and Sichuan were outside any form of control by the Beijing government. Some provincials felt that the central authorities had failed so dismally that provincial independence was the only viable alternative. China, they argued, was too big to be reformed—it was an empire rather than a normal state, and power could only be made accountable to the people if the political units were smaller, more integrated, and more culturally and linguistically coherent, as had happened in Europe. A young Hunanese, Mao Zedong, joined in the search for autonomy. “Our Hunan,” he wrote in September 1920, “must wake up.”

  Hunanese have but one alternative: that is Hunanese self-determination and self-government; that is for Hunanese to build, on the territory of Hunan, a “Hunan Republic.” Moreover, I sincerely think that to save Hunan, to save China, and to look towards cooperation with other liberated people of the whole world, we can do no other. If Hunanese people lack the determination and bravery to build Hunan independently into a country, then there is no hope for Hunan.26

  During the early republican era, while the concern about China’s political future was great, Chinese had more freedom to explore the world than ever before. A quarter million young men and women left their villages each year to work in the cities. There they encountered a teeming and transnational world, dominated by foreign money, Chinese enterprise, and eclectic mores and fashions. Students and workers traveled abroad despite draconian travel restrictions imposed by foreign governments. Many of them would return with new ideas about China’s future. For Chinese whose main concern was with the state and its competition with other states, the period after the fall of the Qing was one of dissolution and extreme danger. But for those who relished the hybridities that lack of effective state control permitted, it was an exciting time.

  THE COLLAPSE OF THE QING EMPIRE immediately opened up the question of the makeup of a future China. For areas that had been conquered by the Qing—Mongolia, Tibet, and large parts of Central Asia—the question was especially acute. But it was also central to many regions in the south and the northeast which the Qing had Sinified and further integrated within the empire. Some activists, infected by a nationalism similar to that of the Chinese revolutionaries, wanted immediate independence. Others wanted autonomy and special rights within a Chinese federal state. In most regions adventurers or strongmen tried to exploit local nationalisms, foreign interests, and Beijing’s attempts to reassert itself. All along the edges of the former empire, groups that the Qing had forcefully incorporated into China were trying to define their own politics and identities.

  But defining China has never been an easy task, and it was certainly not easy after the Qing collapse. Even as it had been fighting off foreign incursions and rebellions at the center, the Qing had continued to reassert themselves along the borders of the empire. Indeed, to many late Qing leaders the need to defend frontiers, crush nativist unrest, and insist on one inclusive identity for all was a crucial mission: Their China would be doomed without it, even if they were to be able to defend themselves successfully against other dangers. In 1908 the Qing sent troops to take direct control of Tibet’s capital, Lhasa. A few years earlier the authorities—in a complete reversal of previous policy—had started encouraging Chinese settlers to move into the Mongolian grasslands. In the far western province of Xinjiang, the central authorities had been able to overcome massive unrest and keep strict control on local Muslim activism. The Qing wanted to show that even if it had been wounded by the West and Japan, it was still a force to be reckoned with for anyone who had irredentist or secessionist claims.

  In 1912, with the Qing gone, those who saw their future as not laying within a united China had their chance. Their work was made easier by the support of foreign powers which, for their own strategic reasons, want to see outlying provinces break free of the authorities in Beijing. In some cases these powers made the success of breakaway provinces a precondition for recognizing the new republican government. The Russians insisted on full independence for northern, or Outer, Mongolia, the British on autonomy for Tibet, and the Japanese—less successfully, as we have seen—on self-government for parts of the Northeast. Only the Russian demand succeeded fully, however, and that was less because of Russian power than because of the determination of the Mongolian separatist leaders, who in December 1911 issued their independence proclamation:

  At present we often hear that in the southernland the Manchus and Chinese are creating disturbances and are about to precipitate the fall of the Manchu dynasty. Because our Mongolia was originally an independent nation, we have now decided . . . to establish a new independent nation, based on our old tradition, without the interference of others in our own rights. We should not be ruled by the Manchu-Chinese officials. After taking away their rights and powers, an ultimatum for their extradition has finally put an end to their power, although by sending them back we do not intend that ordinary Chinese traders who stay at the Chinese trading towns should suffer. . . . All of you should live peacefully and harmoniously together without suspicion. Hereby we have issued this proclamation.27

  The new leader was enthroned as the Bogd Khan in northern Mongolia. He was a religious figure, who appealed for Mongolian unity based on a shared reverence for Buddhism. His argument for independence from 1912 on was straightforward: A Chinese republic did not, could not, inherit the Qing’s empire. All peoples within the territory that the Qing had conquered now had an equal right to form their own states. And although it protested the principle, Yuan Shikai’s government after much wrangling succumbed to Russian pressure and, in 1913, agreed to autonomy for the northern part of Mongolia, although the territory was still to be “under the suzera
inty of China.”28 For Chinese nationalists, the agreement with Russia on Mongolia was another sign of their republic’s weakness, just as Japan’s demands had been. For Mongolian nationalists, the agreement effectively divided their country, keeping the southern half of the nation under direct Chinese control, while still not providing independence in name. Moscow was the main victor. It gained a vast zone of influence in Central Asia, while stopping further Japanese expansion into the region.

  In Tibet, where Buddhism was also the great unifying force, the situation in 1911 was similar to that in Mongolia. The difference was that Britain played Russia’s role. The Qing occupation of Lhasa had driven the main Tibetan religious and political leader, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, into exile in British India, from where he attempted to get London’s support for Tibetan independence. Following an uprising in Lhasa as the Qing collapsed, the Dalai Lama returned and issued what in effect was a declaration of independence:

  The Manchu empire collapsed. The Tibetans were encouraged to expel the Chinese from central Tibet. I, too, returned safely to my rightful and sacred country, and I am now in the course of driving out the remnants of Chinese troops from DoKham in Eastern Tibet. Now, the Chinese intention of colonizing Tibet under the patron-priest relationship has faded like a rainbow in the sky. Having once again achieved for ourselves a period of happiness and peace, I have now allotted to all of you the following duties to be carried out without negligence: Peace and happiness in this world can only be maintained by preserving the faith of Buddhism. . . . Tibet is a country with rich natural resources; but it is not scientifically advanced like other lands. We are a small, religious, and independent nation. To keep up with the rest of the world, we must defend our country. In view of past invasions by foreigners, our people may have to face certain difficulties, which they must disregard. To safeguard and maintain the independence of our country, one and all should voluntarily work hard. Our subject citizens residing near the borders should be alert and keep the government informed by special messenger of any suspicious developments. Our subjects must not create major clashes between two nations because of minor incidents.29

  Like the Bogd Khan in Mongolia, the Dalai Lama was only partly successful in his aims. The British forced Yuan’s regime to participate in a convention at the British summer capital in India, Simla, to discuss the status of Tibet, but the Beijing representatives refused to give ground. They drew on the Qing view of relations within the former empire: “Tibet forms an integral part of the territory of the Republic of China, that no attempts shall be made by Tibet or by Great Britain to interrupt the continuity of this territorial integrity, and that China’s rights of every description which have existed in consequence of this territorial integrity shall be respected by Tibet and recognized by Great Britain.”30

  In the end, the Chinese refused to sign any agreement that gave autonomy to Tibet. Part of the reason was that both the Tibetans and the British overreached with regard to borders. Defining Tibet was (and is) even more difficult than defining Mongolia. Based on historical precedents, a government in Lhasa could lay claim to large areas of what are now the Chinese provinces of Sichuan and Qinghai, which some Tibetans define as Eastern Tibet or Inner Tibet. It was the Dalai Lama’s insistence on incorporating Inner Tibet into the new autonomous nation that killed the deal. Instead, London constructed a British legal fiction, in which it signed a note with the representatives of the Dalai Lama, whose regime it recognized as autonomous and which recognized the incorporation into British India of a large swath of land—what is today Arunachal Pradesh.

  After the 1911 revolution, the region that the republicans in China feared most for was Xinjiang. In the eighteenth century, the Qing had conquered this vast northwest territory, and it had been reconquered, at great cost, only a few years before the 1911 revolution. The new leaders in Beijing knew that both campaigns had been difficult and that the Muslim groups in the region were likely to rebel, with support from Russia. Yuan Shikai was therefore only too pleased when events in the far-off province took a turn nobody had expected. Yang Zengxin, a Qing official posted to Xinjiang from the southwestern province of Yunnan, took power in the provincial capital of Urumqi with the help of Qing troops. Yang introduced a personal dictatorship built on terror. At an official banquet he once had two suspected rivals decapitated at the table. Muslims and Chinese in the province were terrified of Yang and he himself guarded his power carefully against the Russians while expressing at least token obedience to the Chinese central government. Many in Beijing thought that they had got as good a deal as they could expect to get at the far western border.

  But Yang Zengxin had not solved the Xinjiang problem for the Chinese government. Encouraged by pan-Turkish ideas and modern forms of Muslim thinking coming in from India and the Middle East, an increasing number of young Uighurs and Kazakhs started thinking of themselves as inhabiting a Muslim Turkestan, half of which had been occupied by Russia and the other half held by the Chinese. After the Russian Revolution, independence movements blossomed on both sides of the frontier, and the Soviets—having crushed the Muslim rebels on their side—were only too happy to give cautious support to rebels real and potential in Xinjiang. All the way up to the Communist revolution in China, Xinjiang continued to be governed by local Chinese regimes, even though the last one—that of the Manchurian general Sheng Shicai—increasingly favored the Soviet Union.31 Still, even in a newly conquered zone 2,000 miles from Beijing, the borders of the former empire stayed intact.

  If the Chinese republic had been an experiment in civic government based on some form of popular representation, matters of identity, culture, and religion might have been possible to work out politically over time within a common framework. But even then the concept of a unified state based on the borders of the old empire would have been difficult to find support for on the periphery, since the central premise for the change of government in 1912 was Chinese nationalism, a nationalism that in the popular perception increasingly linked Chineseness to one’s ethnic origin. If the rebellion of 1911–12 was necessary because of the Qing oppression of the Chinese majority, then it also follows that Chinese oppression of Mongols, Tibetans, and Muslims should cease through the construction of political entities for these nationalities. This, after all, is what happened after the collapse of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. But in China the transition from empire to republic—even a republic as unattractive as that of Yuan Shikai and his successors—happened without most non-Han areas being able to break away. And meanwhile the Chinese majority was far too busy defining and redefining their own identity to give much thought to the broader implications of their revolution.

  WHAT IS CHINA? For people who had come of age during the transformations at the end of the Qing era and the beginning of the republic, the answers were complex, stirring, and threatening. Was China its ethnic majority, now free of Manchu domination? Was it one’s home province and people who hailed from that province? Or was it, as the Republic pretended, all of the peoples who had lived within the former empire, from Manchuria to Central Asia and down to the tropical border with Burma? Was China first and foremost an idea or a culture, more than a state or even a society? And, if it was a culture, was that culture now dying under the impact of the West, and would China die with it? The efforts at defining what China was stood at the center of a cultural and political revival after World War I. This period in Chinese history is often called the May Fourth era, after the student rallies against foreign humiliations of China that began on that day in 1919. It was the beginning of a new period in China’s relations with the outside world, through the creation of expressly hybrid cultures, political movements, and state formations. Beginning as an act of desperate protest, May Fourth came to show a way out for those who believed that they had witnessed the death of “Old China.”

  The Beijing government thought that when the world war ended it would be rewarded for having been on the Allied side. It believed that some of
the preferences foreign powers had taken for themselves inside China would be removed. They and millions of other Chinese put their trust in the US president, Woodrow Wilson, whose Fourteen Points had convinced many that the war had been fought for self-determination and equality among nations. Chen Duxiu, a writer who later became one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party, called Wilson “the number one good man in the world” and the augur of a new era in which “might is no longer reliable, justice and reason can no longer be denied.”32 A leaflet written by Chinese students in America begged for US support:

  Four hundred million people are facing a life-or-death sentence at Paris; and upon this sentence the fate of the permanent peace of the world is going to depend. China pleads for nothing but fair play and sound judgment. For the interest of world peace and for the interest of four hundred million people a death sentence should not be tolerated by the enlightened powers, particularly the United States of America, in whom China has deepest confidence and by whom the upright plan for the League of Nations was originated.33

  But at the Versailles conference the Chinese not only failed in having the former German concessions returned to them but—even more importantly—did not get general acceptance for removing the regulations that gave foreigners extraterritorial rights within China itself. The principle of self-determination was apparently not applicable for Chinese or other nonwhite peoples, except the Japanese, who had adopted the instruments of the West. When the former Chinese concessions in Shandong were awarded to Japan in May 1919, Chinese cities saw massive protests, and the burning down of the house of one of the ministers who had signed the 1915 agreement with Tokyo. The government seemed weak when confronted with the fury of the population, with university students in Beijing and Shanghai taking the lead in opposing what they saw as China’s international helplessness and humiliation.34