by Odd Westad
The May Fourth Movement came in the midst of a period in which many Chinese intellectuals were trying to redefine China and its position in the world. It was the writings of these intellectuals that inspired the students during the 1919 protests, even though their cultural and political direction was very varied. For some, like Chen Duxiu, it was China’s political direction that had to be corrected: The state had to be made responsible to its citizens. For others, such as the writer Lu Xun, the real revolution was a cultural revolution: Without throwing overboard useless knowledge, empty forms and phrases, deference to tradition, China could not be reconstituted as a modern, effective, and just society. Some wanted to ditch the classical written Chinese language itself, always mastered only by an elite. Increasingly, men like Chen and Lu chose to write in the vernacular, inventing new Chinese terms for things foreign. Their starting point was not an optimistic one. To Chen, “the majority of our people are lethargic and do not know that not only our morality, politics and technology but even common commodities for daily use are all unfit for struggle and are going to be eliminated in the process of natural selection.”35 Lu Xun lampooned the Westernized Chinese bourgeoisie and its ineffectuality in his short story “A Happy Family”:
The family naturally consists of a husband and wife—the master and mistress—who married for love. Their marriage contract contains over forty terms going into great detail, so that they have extraordinary equality and absolute freedom. Moreover they have both had a higher education and belong to the cultured élite. . . . Japanese-returned students are no longer the fashion, so let them be Western-returned students. The master of the house always wears a foreign suit, his collar is always snowy white. His wife’s hair is always curled up like a sparrow’s nest in front, her pearly white teeth are always peeping out, but she wears Chinese dress.36
The response to pessimism that the actions of the students and others who protested in 1919 created was a call for a new form of Chinese culture and for a new, strong, united, and righteous state. The old revolutionary Liang Qichao asked: “What is our duty?” His answer: “It is to develop our civilization with that of the West and to supplement Western civilization with ours so as to synthesize and transform them to make a new civilization.”37 And in politics new and radical trends emerged, which stressed the need to make China rich and strong within the borders of the former empire. The Russian Revolution and the democratic changes in Germany provided inspiration, as did anticolonial movements elsewhere in Asia. Socialism seemed to be the future, and some Chinese wanted to be part of it. Li Dazhao, who together with Chen Duxiu helped form the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1921, wanted to “look at China’s position among the nations. While the others have already advanced from free competition to socialist collective society, we are about to make our own start, meaning to follow in the footsteps of the others. Under these circumstances, if we wish to adapt ourselves and co-exist with the others, we must cut short the process by leaping to a socialist economy in order to ensure a measure of success.”38 Because of the May Fourth Movement, China to some seemed to have gone from despair to boundless opportunity.
AMONG THOSE SENSING the new opportunities in 1919 was the old warhorse Sun Yat-sen, who had spent the time since his resignation as president of the republic in 1912 retracing the steps from his revolutionary youth. He had lived in Japan for almost four years and—to the consternation of many of his supporters—had continued to receive money from Tokyo even as its pressure on China increased. Sun himself was uninterested in where his support came from; he needed funds to build a new revolutionary organization. His links with the United States increased further when he married the twenty-two-year-old Song Qingling, educated at Wesleyan College and the daughter of one of the richest men in Shanghai (her father, Charlie Soong, had arrived in Boston as a stowaway on an American ship in 1879 and made his money from publishing cheap translations). But it was neither Japan nor the United States that in the end inspired Sun to undertake another attempt at conquering China. It was the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, the same event that had convinced men like Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao that socialism was the future. Though never a Communist, Sun began admiring the Soviets for their efficiency, their ruthless focus, and their promise of making a backward country rich and strong. He also liked the social message of Soviet-style Communism, though mainly as a means to strengthen the state. In 1920 Sun and the reconstituted Guomindang were back in Guangzhou with a new movement and with a tenuous grip on the city and its immediate surroundings.
The new Guomindang, which Sun Yat-sen headed, was a much more centralized organization than it had been before, and a more militarized one. Sun was recognized by his followers as the leader-for-life of the party and as the provisional president of China—the title he had held for a couple of months in 1912. The party’s ideology was built on what Sun called the Three Principles of the People: nationalism, democracy, and “people’s livelihood.” But, while his ideas showed some influence from the Chinese Left and the Soviets, the Guomindang leader recognized that China needed foreign capital and trade in order to develop. Sun planned to lead a reunification campaign to the north. After it succeeded, the new China would request massive foreign loans in order to build communications, promote industry, and settle virgin territories in Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet. In his book The International Development of China, Sun wrote,
In my International Development Scheme, I propose that the profits of this industrial development should go first to pay the interest and principal of foreign capital invested in it; second to give high wages to labor; and third to improve or extend the machinery of production. Besides these provisions the rest of the profit should go to the public in the form of reduced prices in all commodities and public services. Thus, all will enjoy, in the same degree, the fruits of modern civilization. . . . In a nutshell, it is my idea to make capitalism create socialism in China so that these two economic forces of human evolution will work side by side in future civilization.39
Sun’s main problem in the early 1920s was that while he had plenty of ideas, some of them similar to the Chinese reform programs of our own time, he had no solid power base. His ability to pick quarrels with those he depended on for support did not help. In 1922–1923 he was temporarily thrown out of Guangzhou by the local strongman Chen Jiongming, a military leader with an anarchist background who believed in provincial autonomy, not conquest by the force of arms. Sun tried to negotiate with other regional leaders, but they all found that supporting the Guomindang would mean a reduction of their own power and of their ability to work individually with foreign states, so they politely declined his offer of becoming their president. His negotiations with Japan and the Western powers fared no better: While they sometimes gave limited funds to Sun, they were unwilling to support his reunification plans or recognize him as China’s president. With his eyes set on a military campaign in the north to begin as soon as possible, Sun appealed to the powers to at least not oppose his aims. The coming war, Sun told them, is “no war between the North and South of China, but a struggle between militarism and democracy, between treason and patriotism. That the people in the North are sympathetic to the purposes and aims of the South has been demonstrated by the fact that they have spontaneously organized demonstrations and boycotts for the same purposes and aims.”40
While Sun’s appeals to the great powers for assistance in undoing their own positions in China may sound naïve, his point about the popular backing that the aims of the Guomindang were getting elsewhere in China was perceptive and right. The change from hopelessness to calls for action that the May Fourth Movement had led to benefited Sun’s plans in regions that he knew little about and where his party had no presence. Peasant associations, often led by students who had been to the city, sometimes included support for Sun Yat-sen and nationalism among their demands. Striking railway workers in the north praised the patriotic policies of the Guomindang and condemned their own bosses for profiteering a
nd treachery. Organizations in the cities—often a blend of new-type political groups and trade unions with more traditional guilds, native-place organizations, and gangs—appealed for a united China and the abolition of foreign privileges. The big strikes of 1922–1923 in the main cities from Hong Kong to Tianjin had specific nationalist demands. Chinese newspapers, teachers, and student unions advocated a new, activist patriotism, in which mass organizations became the custodians of the nation’s conscience. By the mid-1920s the mood in many parts of China had changed enough to make the Guomindang a force to be reckoned with both by Chinese and by foreigners. In a rather alarmist fashion, the British Foreign Office reported that the GMD
has long possessed a world-wide organization having branches and affiliated societies distributed throughout the globe. . . . The platform of the society has always been extremely democratic, and in its manifestos the society has declared itself in favor of Socialism. Sun Yat-Sen . . . coquetted at various times with every shade of revolutionary sentiment, with the result that an extreme revolutionary section rapidly sprang up [in the GMD]. . . , and has now attained such numbers and influence that it has virtually captured the control of the party machine. The society is in close touch with the Communist party in the Dutch East Indies and with Indian revolutionaries, with the result that it has to some extent assumed the aspect of a pan-Asiatic movement with the primary object of the destruction of Britain as the great despotic Power tryannising [sic] over Asia and therefore the chief obstacle in the way of world democracy. The danger of these activities has been aggravated by the close liaison which has been established during the last few years between the society and the Soviet. The [GMD] receives large contributions from Moscow, and the extreme section is infected with Bolshevik ideas and sentiment.41
By the early 1920s the new GMD had a popular cause and powerful backers in the Soviet Union. The Russian revolution had changed the landscape of politics in East Asia, as it had in Europe. The Soviets stood for national self-determination and social justice. Moscow was not just the center of a new state. It symbolized a set of causes that were international: anticolonialism, proletarian power, and radical culture among them. In China, Bolshevism fed into the ideas of the May Fourth Movement, and young Chinese intellectuals were infatuated with the appearance of a Western state that was righteous and could serve as a model of development that promised both modernity and equality. The declaration of Lev Karakhan, the Bolshevik deputy commissar for foreign affairs, in July 1919, sent shock waves through Chinese politics: “The government of the workers and peasants has then declared null and void all secret treaties concluded with Japan, China and the ex-Allies, the treaties which were to enable the Russian government and the Tsar and his Allies to enslave the peoples of the East and principally the people of China by intimidating or bribing them for the sole interests of capitalists, financiers and the Russian generals.”42 It is no surprise that some Chinese believed that Russia was setting the pattern for the future.
For a few young men and women, the Bolshevik revolution held the promise of a new world. They wanted to become part of the international movement that Soviet Communism represented. Inspired by Chinese socialists such as Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, who became their leaders, these young people formed urban radical groups and were gradually drawn into a more centralized organization, which, at a congress in the French concession in Shanghai in 1921 became the Chinese Communist Party. The money and organizational know-how for the new party were supplied by agents of Comintern—the Communist International, the Moscow center set up by Lenin in 1919 to guide Communist movements outside Russia—but Chinese Communism remained rooted in a variety of Chinese dreams and aspirations. Their expression for Communism—borrowed from Japanese—was gonghe, common property, but how that aim was to be achieved through Marxist doctrine was uncertain. Throughout its early years the CCP remained a small, often divided, group, and its main aim was assisting Sun Yat-sen with his revolution. “The great cause of revolution is no easy matter, even less so in China, a country under the twofold pressure of the foreign powers and the militarists,” wrote Mao Zedong, a young Hunanese porter at Beijing University Library who was among the founders of the CCP. “The only solution is to call upon the merchants, the workers, the peasants, the students, and the teachers of the whole country, as well as all the others who constitute our nation and who suffer under a common oppression, and to establish a closely knit united front. It is only then that this revolution will succeed.”43
The Soviets saw their main task in China as building the military and organizational strength of Sun Yat-sen’s movement, with the Communists as a small but active part within it. The reasons were both ideological and practical: Lenin and his successors believed that China needed a nationalist bourgeois revolution before socialism could be put on the agenda. And the Guomindang seemed to fit the bill for leaders of such a revolution, given its political views and Sun’s national prestige. In spite of Sun’s exhilaration at getting Soviet support, he always kept his political distance from the Soviets and the Communists. But he was more than willing to accept Soviet aid in setting up a military academy, the Huangpu Academy, in Guangzhou, in which one of Sun’s favorites, young Chiang Kai-shek, was commander. There Soviet military advisers taught alongside GMD leaders including Wang Jingwei, who later became Japan’s chief Quisling in China, and Chinese Communists such as Zhou Enlai, the later premier, and Ye Jianying, a CCP officer who fifty years later would destroy the Communist left. The reorganization of the Guomindang forces was led by Vasilii Bliukher, a Soviet Red Army officer. And the preparations for a political reorganization of the party was strongly influenced by Mikhail Gruzenberg, who called himself Borodin, a veteran Comintern agent. By 1925 Soviet support had made the Guomindang into a very different and much stronger party than it had ever been.
Lenin’s main successors in Moscow, Trotsky and Stalin, worked with the GMD but also kept the option of approaching the Beijing government or individual local strongmen who might serve Soviet security interests. Against Karakhan, who had promised to return the Russian-controlled Chinese Eastern Railway to China without receiving compensation, Trotsky wrote that he does “not understand why it is that rejecting imperialism presupposes renouncing our property rights . . . [and] why the Chinese peasant should have the railway at the expense of the Russian peasant. . . . Russia is also very poor and is absolutely unable to pay with material sacrifices for the sympathies of colonial or semicolonial peoples.”44 After Trotsky was outmaneuvered by Stalin in the Soviet power game, the emphasis on adjusting the aims of the Chinese revolution to Soviet interest and doctrine became even more pronounced. Stalin first wanted the Chinese Communists to ally themselves with the left within the Guomindang, in order to increase their influence within the movement. Then, when non-Communists in the GMD started attacking the CCP for what they considered factional behavior, the Soviet leader insisted that the only political future for Communists in China was within the Guomindang. Stalin’s policy provided vital assistance for the Chinese nationalist alliance, but exposed the small band of CCP members to the jealousy and distrust of their allies.
Sun Yat-sen’s first attempts at a military campaign to reunify China ended in failure. By late 1924, however, Sun, many of his advisers, and most foreign observers believed that the GMD’s moment had come. The regional leaders in the north were increasingly at odds over who of them was to lead the republic. Soviet support had massively increased the military capacity of the GMD. And, crucially, some local strongmen in the south had concluded that the Guomindang might now be so strong that it was better to cooperate with it than to oppose it. To Sun, the political situation seemed to be in flux, and, true to style, he used the occasion to change his mind one more time. So he left Guangzhou for the north and for yet another attempt at getting the northern leaders to accept his supremacy without having to fight. On the way he stopped in Japan, in Kobe, where he gave one of his most pro-Japanese speeches ever, showing that he was
in no way under the thumb of the Soviets. On arrival in Tianjin, Sun fell ill. He died in Beijing on 12 March 1925, with his closest disciple Wang Jingwei and his main Soviet adviser Borodin at his side. He was fifty-eight. On his deathbed he admonished his followers to unite, wrote a pro-Soviet final letter, and reaffirmed his belief in Christianity.
But those who thought that the Guomindang project was finished with the disappearance of this brilliant if inconsistent man had a big surprise waiting for them. In the spring of 1925 most of eastern China was engulfed in a series of anti-imperialist demonstrations that, for the first time, seemed to rock the stability of the system foreign powers had set up to manage China after 1911. In the international concession in Shanghai, on 30 May, nine student demonstrators were killed by British police. In other cities, foreign police also had to open fire on demonstrating students and workers who threatened to invade the key institutions of foreign power. Strikes and blockades spread, most of them spontaneously, but some organized by GMD sympathizers or Communists. The Beijing government, deeply divided and challenged by its northern rivals, with whom it had just fought a brief but bloody civil war, was powerless. And to all of the demonstrators in what became known as the May Thirtieth Movement, Sun Yat-sen was a martyr for the nationalist cause and a harbinger of a new, powerful, and united China.45 The poet Wen Yiduo—an experimenter in hyperbolism—gave voice to the parts of China under foreign control and their longing to become again part of the motherland: