by Odd Westad
Traces of Christianity dating to the seventh century have been found in China. Jesuit missionaries tried to establish themselves in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, mostly from Macao and Japan. After the double disasters of the nineteenth century—the Christian-inspired Taiping movement and the anti-Christian Boxers—Catholicism in China began a careful rebuilding of its structure. In some areas Christian communities had survived from early evangelization, in a few cases from the early seventeenth century on. In others Catholic missionaries began a painstaking work of proselytizing, mostly led by Lazarist and Jesuit priests. Many Catholic missionaries concentrated on working in the cities, setting up educational institutions, hospitals, and orphanages, such as the St. Ignatius School in Shanghai, and a number of superb European Catholic intellectuals spent many years in China; Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the philosopher, paleontologist, and geologist, spent twenty years there. Still, Catholicism as a religious practice spread mostly in the countryside, and in areas where there were established Chinese Catholic communities and Chinese as well as foreign priests. These centers of Chinese Catholicism, most of which exist and are in some cases expanding today, can be found all over the country, with a particular influence among minority peoples in the south, in Fujian, Zhejiang, and parts of Hebei and the Northeast.
The form of Christianity that expanded most rapidly in the early twentieth century was Protestantism. Sun Yat-sen was a Christian, baptized by American Congregationalist missionaries when he was in his teens. Chiang Kai-shek converted to Christianity in 1930, and his Methodism remained a matter of great importance to him for the rest of his life (in spite of his critics sneering at yet another “Christian warlord”). The muscularity of Chiang’s Christianity was not in the least in conflict with how the Gospel was presented by many Protestant missionaries. One such was C. T. Studd, one of the Cambridge Seven, a group of Cambridge University graduates who spent their lives as missionaries in China. Christian life had to be a life of battle, Studd claimed. “Some want to live within the sound of church or chapel bell; I want to run a rescue shop within a yard of hell.”12 Like their nineteenth-century predecessors, Studd and his colleagues combined their Christian missions with a dedication to advancing knowledge in China. Henry W. Luce, the father of the founder of Time magazine, was a Presbytarian missionary. He spent three decades in China, mostly at Qilu University in Jinan, the capital of Shandong. With funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, Luce helped build Qilu into one of China’s premier universities. Its medical school, established in 1911, provided full medical training for Chinese men and women. The most remarkable medical school in China was also a missionary enterprise: the Hackett Medical College for Women in Guangzhou, founded in 1901. Its graduates would influence the course of medicine in China right up to the present. Little wonder that some young Chinese women regarded Christianity as a way of breaking out of the confines of a patriarchical society.
Of the missionary universities one had a particular status, because it would develop into present-day China’s most famous institution of higher learning. Yanjing University, founded in 1919 through a merger of five Christian colleges in Beijing, was a liberal, high-level academic institution. It was led for much of its existence by a second-generation American Presbyterian missionary in China, John Leighton Stuart, born in Hangzhou in 1876. With help from American foundations and donors Stuart bought an old Qing pleasure garden north of Beijing, which he equipped as a modern university. Today it is the central campus of Peking University. Many of its graduates from the 1920s and 1930s became leading political figures in China, not least on the Communist side. When Leighton Stuart, in his tragic tenure as US ambassador to China, tried to negotiate with the Communists in 1949, he sat across from a former Yanjing student, Huang Hua, who had become a key CCP foreign affairs specialist and promoter of anti-US slogans.13
Just as the early part of the twentieth century was a high point for Christianity in China, it was also a high point of the indigenization of Christianity. Across the whole roster of religious movements Chinese priests and ministers were gradually replacing foreigners or working alongside them. Nothing contributed more to this trend than the Shandong revival of the late 1920s, in which existing Christian communities were exhorted to follow the Holy Spirit to an emotional and direct experience of God. The catalyst for this movement was the quasi-Pentecostalist Norwegian missionary Marie Monsen, but it soon branched out into new Chinese Christian communities, some of which began to incorporate transcendental themes from other Chinese religions, such as Buddhism and Daoism. Among the Christian sects—with names such as The True Jesus Church, The Jesus Family, and The Little Flock—a remarkable group of native preachers emerged, some of whom had influence both inside and outside China. Ni Tuosheng (dubbed Watchman Nee), the founder of The Little Flock, became a revivalist leader in Asia and Europe. The communalist and nationalist strains of the “new” churches became a challenge to Chinese Christians and non-Christians alike. Preachers such as Ni were preoccupied with making Christianity native, because for them China was key to Christ’s second coming. Others had to respond to that message, whether they liked it or not.14
The relationship between Christianity and nationalism in the mid-twentieth-century China was a complicated one. At the peak of nationalist agitation in the mid-1920s, many radical Chinese began to believe that Christianity was a tool of Western imperialism and that it was a narrow and intolerant faith. They argued that most Christian teachings—just like those of Islam, Buddhism, and Daoism—had been rendered obsolete by science and that modern men needed no such superstitions. But at the same time others saw an indigenized form of Christianity as part of China’s rebirth: Why should the religion not serve the same purposes in China as it had in the West, where it had given purpose and meaning to unsettled lives, and steadiness through unsettled times, for almost two thousand years? For China’s Christians it was not difficult to see themselves as part of their country’s rescue, even if their opponents objected to it.
ALL CHINESE GOVERNMENTS in the twentieth century, with the brief exceptions of the Qing’s Boxer adventure and Mao’s Cultural Revolution madness, have employed foreign advisers. Some of these have served their masters faithfully, to the great benefit of the regime they represented. Others have been at least as corrupt and neglectful as the majority of Chinese civil servants. But without the labors of these foreign advisers, much of China’s infrastructure and government organization would have looked very different throughout this period. Its income would also have been much reduced—even if foreigners who collected taxes and fees did so in part so the Chinese government of the day could repay its loans to foreign institutions, what the state kept constituted a major part of its income. The Salt Administration, which collected the salt tax that the state levied on both producers and importers, in the 1920s provided close to twenty percent of the state income. But even more importantly these advisers influenced the Chinese they worked with and opened up new avenues for civilian administration in China, some of which remain up to today.
Just as in other countries that came under pressure by European states during the nineteenth century, China’s main foreign advisers concentrated on diplomacy, law, and military affairs. Later they became attached to various Chinese government departments, from infrastructure to health, education, language reform, and propaganda. In late Qing and the early Republic, most were Japanese, and during early Communist rule, most were Soviets. Ariga Nagao, one of Japan’s foremost scholars of international law, served in Yuan Shikai’s government. He was born in Osaka in 1860 and trained in law in Germany and Austria. Ariga saw sovereignty as the key element of statehood and was convinced that China needed centralization in order to protect its sovereignty. Concerned that Japan’s appetite for expansion in Asia was leading it away from the international and domestic norms he wanted it to adhere to, Ariga counseled Yuan Shikai to use force to bring the provinces under control. He also interceded with the Japanese government
over its Twenty-One Demands in 1915, urging it not to attempt to coerce China, advice for which he almost paid with his life at the hands of Japanese ultranationalist terrorists.15
Sir Robert Hart’s successors as inspectors-general of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service were always among the closest foreign advisers of various Chinese governments. The service had been set up to control China’s customs income for Western purposes, but in the twentieth century it became an integral part of the Chinese central administration. The career of the last foreign inspector general, Lester Knox Little, symbolizes this development. Little was born in Rhode Island in 1892 and spent forty years in China, first as a clerk in the Customs Service, then head of the customs administration, a foreign affairs adviser to the Chinese government, and finally (after World War II) as inspector general, in which capacity he fled with Chiang Kai-shek to Taiwan in 1949. He had hundreds of colleagues with similar careers. The Italian Luigi de Luca became China’s foremost trade and tariff negotiator. The Frenchman Théophile Piry developed the Chinese postal service. The Norwegian Johan Munthe worked as a customs official, military adviser, and banker. They spent all of their careers in China, did well for themselves there, and contributed much to China in return.
The other main foreign-led administration in Republican China, the Salt Inspectorate, was almost as important as the Maritime Customs. Its founding director, the former head of excise in the Indian civil service, Sir Richard Dane, created in the 1910s an administration that worked for the Chinese government but was independent of other departments. Staffed by Chinese and foreigners, the inspectorate offered good salaries, clear lines of authority and promotion, and even a pension plan, and through its efforts on its employees’ behalf earned their loyalty. Principles of staff rotation and expulsion of those found guilty of nepotism or corruption served the service well. But as important were the positive values through which organizational ideals were translated into concrete administrative strategies. The experiences of the Salt Inspectorate were also drawn on by another major foreign adviser, the Frenchman Jean Monnet. Monnet worked in China from 1934 to 1936. He was chairman of the Chinese government’s committee to facilitate the availability of credit to Chinese companies and foreign companies that wanted to invest in China. The cosmopolitan Frenchman helped set up the Development Finance Corporation, made up of the main Chinese banks and government agencies to fund promising ventures. Monnet went on to become one of the main founders of the European Union.16
Foreign advisers were part of China’s weakness and part of China’s strength. Some Chinese resented their presence, because they felt that it belittled their own country and made it seem that China depended on foreigners. They also suspected that in reality these foreign advisers would always be working for their own governments first and foremost; when push came to shove they would be little more than foreign intelligence agents or agents otherwise carrying out the will of their home countries. But other Chinese lauded those among the foreign advisers who were incorrupt and hardworking, and who made a contribution to building state institutions while introducing new forms of administrative and economic skills. The new nationalist government in China under the Guomindang and Chiang Kai-shek knew that it needed models for how to build the modern state it wished for. It needed a new state. And it needed protection against its enemies.
FOR THE GMD GOVERNMENT in place after 1927, a modern army was essential. Chiang Kai-shek was himself a military man, and he wanted China to have armed forces similar to those found in Japan, the United States, and Europe. The purpose of such an army was not just to protect the country and his regime. It was also to embody a form of modernity that Chiang believed in—a well-regulated state, a hierarchical system of command, purposeful training, and regimentation of people’s lives. He wanted to see the army as the key element in the new state, not just because everyone depended on it for their protection, but because it could symbolize in a smaller form the kind of society that Chiang and many of his contemporaries believed could deliver a modern China. And the way to arrive at this kind of army was through the best possible training, led by foreign instructors.
By far the most important influence on military affairs in Guomindang China came from Germany. The Nazi regime continued the cooperation that had been built in the 1920s, and in 1934 Hitler sent Hans von Seeckt, who had been chief of the German army staff during the Weimar Republic, to China. There, von Seeckt headed a German Advisory Commission, which provided assistance on economic planning and military affairs. Alexander von Falkenhausen, who succeeded von Seeckt in 1935, concentrated on planning and training for the Chinese army. One of the best German military strategists of his generation, von Falkenhausen immediately saw that China did not stand a chance in massive battles against Japan. He advised Chiang Kai-shek to throw everything into planning for the coming war and develop a strategy of attrition, in which the Japanese would have to fight for all of the territory they wanted to conquer. The Germans promised to train twenty Chinese infantry divisions by 1938 and help China build a navy by the early 1940s. Germany also gave China access to advanced weapons and military technology, which Chinese could not obtain elsewhere. From the German perspective, arming the Guomindang showed Nazi Germany as a world power and gave it access to China’s strategic raw materials.
Germany’s Nazi dictatorship was a kind of modernity that appealed to Chiang. Although he was never a fascist, he certainly admired order. He also believed that Germany and China were a near perfect fit. Both had been outcast nations and were now reemerging. The German chief instructor for Chiang’s bodyguards, Walter Stennes, was among those who convinced the Chinese leader about this affinity. Stennes’s own background was in the Nazi movement, but he had broken with Hitler in 1931, because he believed in a more radical social revolution in Germany. For understandable reasons Stennes kept his distance from the official German advisers in China, but he had a strong influence on Chiang and on the GMD head of police, Dai Li. Stennes stayed in China to 1949, even after Hitler’s alliance with Japan had forced von Falkenhausen out, reluctantly, by mid-1938. Chiang Wei-kuo, Chiang’s son, who was receiving military training in Germany, stayed on in Berlin until right before the invasion of Poland in 1939. (Chiang’s older son, Chiang Ching-kuo—a child of another era, quite literally—had been educated in the Soviet Union, where he stayed until 1937).17
For his air force needs, which the Germans were not able to fill, Chiang turned to the United States. By 1934 the Americans were supplying substantial numbers of military aircraft to China, and Colonel John Jouett, who had been in charge of training in the US Army Air Corps (as the US Air Force was called at the time), became the chief instructor for the new Chinese air force. By 1937, when Claire Chennault took over from Jouett, China had 645 military aircraft in twelve tactical squadrons, several aircraft factories and aviation training schools, and more than 250 airports. Captain Chennault, who had had a checkered career in the US Army Air Corps, directed the Chinese air force during most of the war against Japan, both when the United States was a supposed neutral and after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.18 Meanwhile much of the regular police training in China was also undertaken by US advisors, led by A. S. Woods. Woods had worked under the legendary police chief, August Vollmer in Berkeley, California, who is considered “the father of modern law enforcement.” Chiang Kai-shek considered US policing methods the wave of the future, even though (or maybe especially because) he was skeptical of what he saw as the moral laxity of American society.
As Japan’s pressure on China increased, Chiang Kai-shek also turned to an old adversary for help. To get access to military supplies, he restored relations with the Soviets in 1932. Stalin realized that giving aid to the Chinese government, in spite of their clash with the Chinese Communists, was the only way Moscow could buy added security against Japan. After China’s war with Japan broke out in the summer of 1937, the Soviets began a large-scale support program for Chiang’s armies. Soviet advisers and technic
al personnel replaced the departing Germans. Stalin sent several of his top people to China, including Pavel Rybalko, who would become the key tank-warfare strategist of World War II; Pavel Zhigarev, who later commanded the Soviet air force; and Vasilii Chuikov, who was to conquer Berlin in 1945. Chuikov, who had studied Chinese and been part of the support team for the GMD during its first Soviet alliance, in the early 1920s, made a very strong impression on the Chinese commanders, who saw him as embodying the will to win. Chuikov believed that the Chinese were capable not just of resisting Japan but of creating modern armies on a vast scale, the like of which, as he wrote in his memoirs, the world had never seen.19
General Chuikov was in many ways a link between the first foreign Communist involvement in China, in the early 1920s, and the second, at the outset of the war against Japan in 1937. Chuikov had served as a young military adviser to the Guomindang’s Northern Expedition in 1926, along with many other Soviet officers who had helped build and equip the armies of the Chinese nationalists and their then Communist allies. From the 1920s to the 1940s, China was a focus point for left-wing revolutionaries from all over the world, most of whom were connected to the Communist International. The Chinese Communist Party was founded and formed by the advice of foreign radicals, who influenced a whole host of Chinese organizations, societies, and intellectual trends. They were the link between the Russian Revolution and China, and between European and North American Marxists and like-minded Chinese. They were without doubt among the most important foreigners in terms of China’s future development.
The creation of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921 was largely due to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. At the CCP founding congress, the Dutch Comintern official Hendricus Sneevliet (in China known as Maring) had a strong influence on questions of doctrine and strategy. Most importantly, he insisted that the new party should ally itself with the Guomindang in a united front. Sneevliet, who had lived in Indonesia (then a Dutch colony), had represented the Indonesian Communist Party at the founding congress for the Comintern in Moscow, and had been hand-picked by Lenin to help set up a Communist party in China. His successor as Comintern representative, the Soviet Mikhail Borodin, designed how the united front would function and how Soviet aid to the Guomindang would be organized. Borodin, an old Bolshevik and an experienced Comintern agent, had proven his skills as an organizer in the United States, Mexico, and Britain before coming to China. He believed in a long-term alliance between the GMD and the much smaller CCP, during which the CCP would help the nationalist revolution while recruiting members and gaining influence.