Restless Empire

by Odd Westad

  Do you know that “Macau” has never been my real name?

  I have been away from you for too long, Mother.

  They have captured my body

  But my soul is always yours.

  Oh, Mother, I have remembered you for three hundred years.

  Call me by my baby name; call for me by the name “Aomen.”

  Mother! I want to come home, Mother!

  In Guangzhou, the younger leaders of Guomindang and their Communist allies started understanding that the combination of Sun’s martyrdom, Soviet support, northern political chaos, and the May Thirtieth Movement had created the best of opportunity ever for a march toward Beijing. Chiang Kai-shek, the powerful commander of the Huangpu Academy, urged an early start to the expedition north. Chiang believed that the GMD’s time had come. He also insisted on action in order to honor the dead Sun Yat-sen, whom he had revered, and because of his revulsion at the killing of Chinese civilians in Shanghai, Wuhan, and elsewhere by foreign forces. Chiang saw himself as the natural choice to lead the military campaign; though still a young man at thirty-eight, he believed in an almost mystical way that his life and the cause of ridding China of foreign domination were one and the same.

  Chiang Kai-shek was born in 1887 near Ningbo, a treaty port in Zhejiang province, just south of Shanghai. He received military training in Japan and served in the Japanese army for two years. Returning to China after the 1911 revolution, Chiang became one of Sun Yat-sen’s trusted lieutenants, traveling between Shanghai and Japan in the service of his mentor. After Sun moved to Guangzhou, Chiang became one of his chiefs of military affairs and increasingly the man the president relied on for his personal safety. Chiang’s vision of China was simple, but strongly held. He wanted a country that was united, orderly, and militarily powerful—all values that had been instilled in him during his strict Confucian upbringing and his military training in Japan. Sun’s death was a profound shock for Chiang, and he imagined himself taking the dead leader’s place and fulfilling Sun’s dream of a new China.

  The Northern Expedition, which began in July 1926, quickly became a stunning political and military success. Guomindang and Communist organizers, and local nationalists without any party links, helped set up underground committees and prepare the arrival of the revolutionary army through strikes and nationalist demonstrations. The military strategy that Chiang, Bliukher, and other GMD military leaders worked out was remarkably successful: Moving north fast, spread out in three main armies, the Northern Expedition overwhelmed their enemies one by one, with many local leaders finding it much smarter to submit than to fight. Propaganda played an increasingly important part. In spite of their differing social and political aims, everyone within the Guomindang spread a simple message of patriotism and national renewal. Their slogans were simple: “Chinese to rule China.” “Long live Sun Yat-sen. Long live the People’s Three Principles. Long live the national revolution.” As the revolutionary armies approached the main cities in central China, the fighting intensified. The poet Guo Moruo, who fought with the revolutionary army outside Wuhan, saw fallen soldiers “strewn on both sides of the route of the railway. . . . In the lakes nearby . . . countless corpses floated—some with faces turned up, some with faces turned down, some on their sides.”46

  Wuhan fell to the GMD forces in October 1926 and a new national government was set up under Wang Jingwei. Nationalist celebrations were intense. Guo Moruo saw “the streaming of group, party, and national flags; the chorused singing of the ‘International,’ the ‘Song of the Vanguard,’ and the ‘Song of the Revolution’; the shouting of slogans and of wansui [long live], the speeches to the multitude.”47 But the new left-wing Wuhan government did not have the loyalty of Chiang Kaishek. As his troops approached Shanghai, Chiang was becoming increasingly skeptical of the aims of his Communist allies. Already in Guangzhou there had been bad blood between them. Chiang believed that the Communists were planning to have him killed. But it was the sudden success of the march north that drove the alliance apart. The CCP and the Soviets saw Chiang as a potential military dictator, a Napoleon. Chiang, on his side, was becoming increasingly worried that after the liberation of China from Western influence, the CCP and the left wing of the Guomindang would put the country under Soviet control. In his diary, Chiang was increasingly critical of his Soviet advisors: “I treat them with sincerity, but they reciprocate with deceit.”48 The Communists were criticizing Chiang in public and preparing to take control of Shanghai from within before his troops arrived. The clock was ticking for a confrontation.

  Chiang Kai-shek struck first. The left-wing Wuhan government had ordered his arrest, but were without power to carry it out. Chiang’s soldiers responded by putting Shanghai under martial law as soon as they entered the city. Chiang then acted on a plan, almost certainly prepared months in advance, to destroy the CCP and curtail the influence of the GMD left wing. Within days his agents and members of various organizations loyal to Chiang (including some criminal gangs in the coastal cities) had seized or killed almost the entire CCP leadership and tens of thousands of ordinary party members and leftist sympathizers. Even though a few party leaders (such as Mao Zedong, who fled to the mountains in southern China) survived the massacre, the CCP as an organization was destroyed for years to come. In Moscow, Stalin loudly demanded a revolutionary response in China. The Soviet leader was eager to hide that it was his insistence on preserving the CCP-GMD alliance that had led the Chinese Communists to their slaughter.

  The Wuhan government gradually capitulated. By the spring of 1928 Chiang Kai-shek was the undisputed leader of the Guomindang. During 1928 the last of the main regional strongmen pledged allegiance to the new regime, giving the GMD at least nominal control of all of China except Manchuria. Sun’s Northern Expedition, laughed off by many three years before as the pipedream of a soft-headed adventurer, had succeeded beyond the wildest imagination of its initiator.

  The success of the Northern Expedition and the rise of Chinese nationalism were profound shocks to foreign observers. The spectacle of local strongmen, who had built their positions on promoting regionalism, now won over to the message of one united China, free of foreign domination (or at least too frightened to oppose that message) forced a revised view of the future. Britain, which in many ways had the most to lose, feared the combination of Chinese manpower and Soviet organization. “We are virtually at war with Russia,” wrote the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir William Tyrrell, in December 1926.49 The possible loss of Shanghai was of particular concern. As the British foreign secretary told the cabinet, “Owing to the magnitude of our interests there, its loss would have lasting disastrous consequences on our position in Asia, and would have most serious reactions in India and on Japan.”50 Some Western observers conjured up images of the Boxer Rebellion and foresaw the slaughter of foreigners, except Russians. The British sent 15,000 troops to defend the concessions in Shanghai—for London this was a battle for civilization against rebellious Chinese and their insidious Russian masters.

  NEITHER LONDON NOR OTHER FOREIGN CAPITALS understood how much Chiang Kai-shek and his Guomindang wanted to be masters in their own house. The destruction of the CCP was but one missed signal. By the end of 1928 all local strongmen had been forced to declare their allegiance to Chiang’s government, even though the GMD’s control in the provinces closest to the edges of the former empire was and would remain tenuous up to the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937. During its ten years of governing from Nanjing, the GMD constructed what we today would call a national development state, which—in spite of corruption and poor administration—became the most effective government China had had since the mid-nineteenth century. Patterned politically on the authoritarian regimes in the Soviet Union and Italy (and later in Germany), Chiang’s state tried to learn from the Western and Japanese development experiences without taking over their ideologies. In spite of the adverse international economic climate in the late twenties and thir
ties, the GMD government managed to oversee impressive growth in the urban sectors of the economy. Some claim that this growth happened at least as much in spite of the GMD’s policies as because of them. But it is clear that without the relative stability the new government provided, it would have been unlikely for some parts of the Chinese economy to develop as fast as they did during the so-called Nanjing Decade.

  Chiang’s foreign policy aimed at regaining China’s full sovereignty as soon as possible. He saw two main strategies as essential to this goal: reintegrating all outlying provinces back into China and abolishing all foreign extraterritorial rights. In carrying out these strategies, Chiang saw some successes, but mostly failures, mainly because of continuous and increasing pressure from Japan. Chiang started by informing the concession powers that he intended to unilaterally abrogate all unequal extraterritorial rights for foreigners in China by 1 January 1930. But confronted with the West’s unwillingness to negotiate and weakened by the looming threat of war with Japan, he was in no position to follow up on his threat. The intransigence of the Western powers and their narrow focus on their rights and privileges prevented them from helping to fortify China as a counterbalance to Japan in East Asia. It was a shortsighted and narrow-minded policy, based on the fear that the Guomindang after all could end up in the clutches of the Soviets. To the British, the path was clear. “I have no hesitation,” wrote Tyrrell, “in stating that our policy should be based upon the assumption that Russia is the enemy and not Japan. The most we have to dread from the latter is commercial rivalry.”51

  Just as after the collapse of the second Sino-Soviet alliance in the 1960s, it took the Western powers a lot of time before they realized that the GMD-Soviet break in 1927 was permanent and real. They did not see Chiang’s determination to recover China’s rights from the Soviets nor his conviction that the Chinese Communists had to be eradicated by all means possible, because they formed a Soviet fifth column within China. When Stalin refused to negotiate over ceding control of the Chinese Eastern Railway in Manchuria to China in 1929, Chiang tried to seize it by force, causing a brief border war with the Soviets. Commanded by Bliukher, who had been the GMD’s chief military adviser in Guangzhou, the Red Army won decisive victories in northern Manchuria in November 1929. The USSR kept control of the railway until 1931, when they lost it to the Japanese. But Stalin’s policy was as much a failure as that of the Western powers, since it indirectly strengthened Japan and made a direct confrontation between the two countries more likely in the future. The Soviet leader’s attempts at mobilizing Chinese Communist support for his aims in Manchuria—including an abortive set of CCP attacks on cities in the south—destroyed any chance the Communists might have had to ally with the GMD left and helped impress on Chiang more than ever the CCP’s perfidy and treason.

  While the Soviets were a threat to Guomindang China, Japan was a deadly danger. As the only foreign country Chiang Kai-shek knew and respected, Japan had seemed to him—as it had to his teacher Sun Yat-sen—to be the ideal ally. Together they could form a pan-Asian development partnership that would drive out Western dominance. But the Japanese military gave him no chance to test out his desires for an understanding. As GMD forces moved northward in the final part of their unification of China, Tokyo sent troop reinforcements to Shandong to protect its positions there. After fighting broke out in the provincial capital Jinan in April 1928, imperial army units attacked Chiang’s troops, with Chinese losses of more than 1,500 men. In Manchuria, Japan feared the rise in Chinese nationalism, which saw the local strongman, Zhang Xueliang, declare his adherence to the Nanjing government. That Japanese officers had assassinated his father, Zhang Zuolin, a few years before undoubtedly strengthened Zhang’s determination to switch sides. Japanese leaders, and commanding officers in Korea and Manchuria, also felt that the Soviet Union was getting too strong and that it and the GMD stood as the forces of chaos in Northeast Asia.

  For Chiang Kai-shek, Manchuria was an inalienable part of China. He had no plans to give it up. But he needed to bide his time. China could not confront Japan unless it was united and militarily prepared. In the early 1930s Chiang still had much domestic trouble. Dissatisfied GMD leaders and local strongmen rebelled in serious challenges to his power, and the CCP, although much reduced, still operated from hideouts in southern China. The Chinese armies were neither well-trained nor well-equipped, but a massive armaments and training program—headed in part by Chiang’s German advisers—was starting to show results. With tension on the boil in Manchuria, Japanese army officers stationed in Shenyang planted a bomb near the South Manchurian Railway in September 1931, blamed Zhang Xueliang’s troops, and attacked the Chinese garrison in the city. Against clear orders from Tokyo, the Japanese army in Manchuria fanned out from its barracks along the railway line and, within weeks, occupied most major cities in the region. With the Soviets eager to stay well clear of a conflict with Japan and with the Tokyo government reluctantly accepting its military’s conquest of Manchuria, Chiang Kai-shek faced a hopeless situation. He was lambasted by many of his countrymen for deciding not to launch an all-out war against Japan in 1931, but—given the lack of outside support—China in reality had no other choice. War with Japan would come, Chiang told his closest associates. But China’s survival depended on postponing that war as long as possible.

  IN 1912, FEW INFORMED CHINESE or foreigners had given the new republic much of a chance for survival. It was seen as an anomaly: a government based on democratic principles in a country where eighty percent of the population was illiterate, a constitutional regime in a country that through its long history had known only autocracy. But the republic did survive, although in a very different form from what its founders had imagined. Through its survival it brought China closer to the world at large. It gave the country a form of government that was internationally recognizable (in spite of its various peculiarities). It continued a move toward a more open society, in which individuals and groups could make their own choices on trade, travel, and relations of friendship. And it gave China the possibility of making advances in the dissemination of ideas and practices, and in the building of educational networks, that would be of crucial importance during the dark decades that followed.

  There are two main reasons why the Republic of China survived, and both of them connect to the international. It was saved by Chinese nationalism, which broke through in its modern form in the 1910s and 1920s. This nationalism put the need for a strong state at its core, and its main protagonists were always willing to support those in power if they were seen as standing up for China’s interests. And the new republic was also lucky with the international constellations of its time: World War I made the main Western imperialist countries focus on Europe, and the outcome of the war weakened them, at least temporarily. As during the Napoleonic wars and during the late Cold War, a weak Chinese state survived because the main international predators were preoccupied elsewhere. The troubles in the international system also opened up a chance for China to cooperate with other international outcasts, mainly the Soviet Union and Germany.

  Within this international framework, Japan became the prime threat. By the early 1930s it was abundantly clear that Chinese nationalism and Japanese expansionism could not coexist, in spite of the many attempts from both sides to draw on a common cultural and racial heritage. But, ironically, Japan’s march toward confrontation with the world also meant opportunities for China’s republic. The nationalist reaction within China made the country more cohesive, even if there were strong disagreements on strategy. And Chiang Kai-shek’s lifeline message from 1931 on—that Japan’s “unnatural” ambitions would get it in trouble and create a grand coalition to defeat it—pointed to China’s chance to become a founding member of a new postwar international society. China’s leaders, in other words, had started to see themselves as part of a global system, which, even though they had not chosen to be part of it, could provide advantages for China.

  By 1937, the
year an all-out war against Japan began, China had become a part of the world in ways that its leaders at the turn of the century could never have imagined. Its legal system was modeled on that of the West. Foreign products found their way to the far reaches of the country. Education was mostly based on foreign concepts and ideas. In the younger generation, there had been a substantial change in how Chinese saw themselves. No longer a people apart, they wanted to be treated like other people elsewhere and have the same opportunities. But the 1930s was not a good time for a generation to come of age, in China or elsewhere. The decade saw a broadly shared sense of a lack of purpose, of determination, of a specific Chinese contribution to world affairs, and a sense of maltreatment in a world where dictatorships determinedly marched ahead. As Chinese nationalism formed itself under the pressure of Japanese aggression, those who had embraced the transnational networks in the cities became increasingly suspect. When the war came, even many of the educated young people in Shanghai, Tianjin, Beijing, and Guangzhou—those who went out in the evening wearing Western dress and listened to jazz—had become convinced that the only possible answer to China’s ills could come from within China itself.

  CHAPTER 5

  FOREIGNERS

  DURING THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, China became internationalized. In 1900, both natives and foreigners saw the Chinese empire as a thing apart, but by the late 1940s the country had become integrated into a capitalist world of expanding markets and movements of people and ideas. Foreigners in China played a significant role in this transformation. Coming from all parts of the world and representing all kinds of backgrounds and professions, they helped transform China (though not always in directions that most Chinese appreciated). They were missionaries and businessmen, advisers and adventurers, revolutionaries and refugees. While some came for short-term profit, many stayed in China and died there. In each single case they influenced and were influenced by their Chinese contacts, often in directions that would profoundly affect China and the world up to today.