by Odd Westad
For Comintern agents and foreign radical supporters of Communism in China, Chiang Kai-shek’s eradication of most of the CCP in the late 1920s was a disaster. Stalin chose the facile explanation that China was simply not ready for socialism, but many of the adherents of an international socialist strategy within the Comintern hoped to resurrect the CCP. The main Comintern agent in China in the early 1930s was Manfred Stern, who would go on to command the international brigade in the Spanish Civil War under the nom de guerre Emilio Kléber. Stern’s task was to make alliances between the CCP and the left-wing GMD opposition, while designing a strategy for the Chinese Communists to find their way back into the cities from their scattered rural redoubts. The strategy failed. It fell to his successor, the German Otto Braun, a veteran Communist, to help the CCP escape the offensives of the GMD army. Ironically, during the CCP’s Long March to the north in 1934–1936, both the Communists and their pursuers were aided by German advisers, Braun on the CCP side and Alexander von Falkenhausen on the GMD side. Mao Zedong is said to have commented later that the GMD had the best Germans.20
Some foreign radicals came to China on their own rather than being sent by the Comintern. The American journalist Anna Louise Strong, who came to the country to cover the Chinese revolution from the inside, is a good example, especially because she settled in China and died there in 1970. The daughter of a Nebraska minister, Strong had traveled to the Soviet Union in the 1920s. “Will Moscow,” she wrote in 1935, “become the center also for hundreds of millions—the yellow and brown races to the south and east of Asia, unlike, and yet so like their brother peasants of the Soviet Union?” Strong married a Russian and became a leading propagandist for the Soviet system—her most notorious book is The New Soviet Constitution: A Study in Socialist Democracy, published as Stalin’s purges were reaching their peak in 1937.21 She believed that only a socialist revolution, and an alliance with the Soviet Union, could save China from collapse and give hope to the millions of poor people she encountered on her travels in the country.
Revolutionaries from other Asian countries were also drawn to China in the early part of the twentieth century. The Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh (then known as ), born in 1890 in north-central Vietnam, had studied Chinese as part of his Confucian upbringing. Spending most of the 1910s in Europe and America, Ho became a founding member of the French Communist Party and was sent to China by the Comintern in 1924. While there, he taught at the Huangpu military academy in Guangzhou, where Chiang Kai-shek was commander and Zhou Enlai political commissar. He married a Chinese woman and lived in the same house as Borodin. Expelled from China after Chiang’s 1927 coup, Ho secretly returned in 1929, working for the CCP in Shanghai and Hong Kong. He spent the years 1938–1945 with CCP units in southern China, except for a period in 1942–1943, when he was in a GMD prison. Ho remained very close to the Chinese Communist leaders for the rest of his life.
Kim Il-sung, who after 1945 became the leader of North Korea, had an even closer relationship with China. Born in 1912, he grew up in a Christian Korean family in Manchuria and studied in Jilin City, where he started his activities against the Japanese occupation of Korea. Kim joined the CCP in 1931, when he was nineteen years old, was imprisoned briefly by the Japanese, and became part of a Chinese Communist guerrilla unit. By the late 1930s he commanded a Communist group of around a hundred, mostly Koreans, in southern and eastern Manchuria with occasional symbolic forays into Korea. In 1940, after the Japanese pressure against them increased, the leaders of Kim’s group were evacuated to the Soviet Union, where he trained as a Red Army officer, before returning to Korea in 1945 as the president the Soviets had selected for the country. Kim was formed as a leader through growing up in China, and his understanding of Korea’s neighbor helped him navigate through the international affairs of the Cold War.22
THROUGHOUT THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, massive amounts of foreign texts were translated into Chinese, and some of these translations had a profound impact in China. The first concentrated on science, religion, government, politics, and society. As we have seen already, the texts on science had a particular influence in China: Within a generation the scientific worldview of the Chinese elite was transformed, paving the way for the further development of knowledge and for the import of technology. Books on law and social theory were almost as influential as those on science. John Dewey, the American philosopher and educator, taught in China between 1919 and 1921, and his translated work became very influential. Much of the Western philosophical tradition was introduced to China through translations of Dewey’s works. By the 1910s China also had its first translations of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, most of it retranslated from Japanese.23
By the 1920s, translations from foreign languages had become big business in China. The main publishing houses produced large compendia, often in hundreds of volumes, of the Western canon, which all Chinese bourgeois families aspired to own. As can be imagined, some translations were less than authentic, and some downright disastrous. In some cases translators changed the storyline of foreign fiction, so that it would (in their or their publisher’s opinion) fit a Chinese audience. In spite of such attempted embellishments, foreign fiction became increasingly popular in China. The great Russian writers of the nineteenth century—Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ivan Turgenev— were particularly popular, but so was later Soviet literature and Western authors who discussed problems of society, such as Henrik Ibsen or George Bernard Shaw. But it was crime and entertainment literature that were the surest winners: In terms of copies sold the most popular Western writer in prewar China was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. His Sherlock Holmes stories inspired Chinese variations, notably Cheng Xiaoqing’s tales of the Shanghai master detective Huo Sang and his faithful sidekick Bao Lang. While more preoccupied with social issues than the originals, Huo and Bao are in no way their inferiors in detection as they cut through the Chinese underworld of the 1920s.24
Film was the universal art form of the twentieth century, and no less so in China than elsewhere. From 1898, films were shown in China, and the first movie house opened in Shanghai in 1908. By the 1920s there were cinemas all over the main Chinese cities and towns, including in working-class neighborhoods. The movies were mostly American, and films were the medium through which the United States was introduced to most Chinese. Their movie heroes were American stars, and many elements of style and fashion were taken over from Hollywood. The early Chinese film industry often remade American movies, done in Chinese and with Chinese actors, and one of the stars of such films was Jiang Qing, who married Mao Zedong. There was even a film made, in 1922, about a (fictitious) visit by Charlie Chaplin to China. By 1933 the major US movie companies had distribution offices in the country. In remote villages where most residents were illiterate and never traveled outside their county, movies were shown by itinerant projectionists. People would walk for days to witness such events. For many Chinese I met in the late 1970s, memories of the pre-Communist period were linked to seeing an American movie projected on a wall in the village square.
Like film, other forms of art were influenced by the foreign presence in China. Chinese artists had known about foreign techniques and styles for centuries, but by the late nineteenth century this knowledge infused all forms of art, and a number of hybrid styles appeared. Chinese painters and sculptors became masters of mixing Western and Chinese motifs and styles, just as Chinese porcelain artists had been doing for generations for the export market. Meanwhile, in the West in the late Victorian era, collecting classical Chinese porcelain—especially from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644)—became all the rage. The collecting was followed by research and an improved foreign understanding of Chinese art. In the West, modernism in both art and literature was inspired by East Asian examples; in painting, artists from Claude Monet to Picasso and Matisse drew from Chinese sources, and Ezra Pound and other poets wrote in Chinese styles. The influence in music also went in both directions. Western classical music was performed in Chines
e cities as one of the hallmarks of modernity, and Western tonal systems influenced music written for Chinese instruments. In Europe, several modern composers—Stravinsky and Mahler first among them—used elements of Chinese music in their works. But during the 1930s no type of music linked East and West more closely than jazz. Shanghai became a center for jazz, with foreign, mostly American, and Chinese bands competing and mixing in a place for which jazz seemed a perfect expression.25
The first Chinese world exposition in 1929 was intended to show Chinese and foreigners the modern China. Over four months the beautiful city of Hangzhou on West Lake became a focus for demonstrating what China now could produce and how new technologies could further help Chinese businesses expand. The exhibition had eight main halls, showing among other things the plans of the new government, Chinese traditional art and modern design, agricultural products and technology, textiles, pharmaceuticals, and ninety-six other branches of industry. The organizers hoped that the exposition would raise the awareness of domestic products and stimulate strategies for exports. But because it coincided with the onset on the great depression, it also attracted a fair number of foreign companies that hoped to expand their share of the Chinese market. Although small if compared with the Paris and Chicago world fairs, the West Lake expo helped show Chinese who were eager for a view of the outside world a tightly managed version of what it contained.26
MUCH OF THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY transformation of China happened because of international influences on education, advanced training, and research. As we have seen, Christian institutions played a key role in this transformation, but there were a host of other key contributors as well: universities, foreign teachers and experts, and transnational networks of scholars and scientists, some Chinese and some non-Chinese. For radicals in China, the goal was to create a modern nation, through foreign ideas and foreign assistance if needed. Chen Duxiu, who became the first general secretary of the CCP, in 1919 made the point with Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science:
In support of Mr. Democracy, we must oppose Confucian teaching and rites, the value of chastity, old ethics and old politics. In support of Mr. Science, we must oppose old arts and old religions. In support of both Mr D and Mr S, we must oppose the “national essence” and old literature. . . . How many upheavals occurred and how much blood was shed in the West in support of Mr D and Mr S, before these two gentlemen gradually led Westerners out of darkness into the bright world? We firmly believe that only they can resuscitate China and bring it out of all the present darkness of its politics, morality, scholarship and thought.27
By the 1930s China had its first modern unified school system. It had compulsory six-year primary education, with centralized curriculum management, roughly following the US model. In reality, of course, access to primary education varied from region to region. It was under-funded, and there was massive corruption at the provincial level and in school boards. The Guomindang’s attempts at controlling foreign-run education institutions also did not help the advance of China’s educational system. Despite these problems, a new generation, born around 1920, grew up with educational opportunities that earlier generations had not had. And they made good use of them.28
Universities were more quickly transformed through foreign influence than any other aspect of Chinese education. We have seen the roles of Christian universities and of missionaries in secular institutions. Along with these, government-run universities were rapidly expanding. Peking University (PKU), which in 1952 was merged with Leighton Stuart’s Yanjing University, was the largest and most prestigious. It had two remarkable leaders in Cai Yuanpei, who was chancellor from 1917 to 1927, and Jiang Menglin, who served from 1930 to 1937. Cai was a classically trained scholar who went to Germany to study in 1907 and later became China’s best-known educator. Jiang received a PhD from Columbia University in 1917 and championed the integration of foreign and Chinese approaches to learning. He wrote of his goals:
On the stem of the Confucian system of knowledge, which starts with the investigation of things, or nature, and leads to human relationships, we shall graft the Western system of scientific knowledge, which starts with the same investigation of things or nature but leads the other way round to their interrelationships. As in the West, the moral universe will co-exist in China with the intellectual, one for stability and the other for progress.29
The most remarkable advances in learning in modern China took place in physics, chemistry, and biology. The preconditions for these were a combination of translations of Western texts, foreign teachers, good basic training programs, and the opportunity to study abroad. Some historians of science also argue that China was well placed to benefit from the latest advances in science because it had no traditional approaches that stood in the way of new ideas. As soon as Western science was adopted, it was all fresh and new. The acceptance of relativity in physics is a good example of this: When Albert Einstein visited China in 1922 at Cai Yuanpei’s invitation, his principles were already accepted by most Chinese. The leading Chinese physicist of the next generation, Wu Dayou, who was also at PKU, trained a whole string of Chinese scientists who would go on to global recognition, including Li Zhengdao and Yang Zhenning, who won the Nobel Prize in 1957 for their discoveries regarding elementary particles. In less than fifty years, Chinese science had gone through a remarkable transformation.
Advances in learning were in no way limited to science. During the early twentieth century the Chinese language itself went through a fundamental change, inspired by foreign models. Classical Chinese, a written language for the elite with no spoken equivalent, was gradually replaced by baihua, plain speech, a vernacular based on Beijing dialect. Although there had been some vernacular writing around for at least two centuries, it was the Bible translations of the late nineteenth century that popularized the practice. In many ways the defeat of classical Chinese was the last great clash between opponents and supporters of foreign influence. The opponents of the reform argued that China would lose its culture by adopting a new type of language. The proponents, who gradually won in the 1920s, based their positions on a new form of Chinese nationalism, as set forth by Hu Shi during his studies at Cornell in 1916:
What we need today is a readable, audible, singable, speakable, dictatable language which we can read aloud without the need to translate into the spoken language, with the help of which we can take notes without the need to translate into the literary language, which we can use at the speaker’s desk as well as on the stage, and which even village grannies, women and children can understand if we read it to them. Any language that does not meet these requirements is not a living language and can under no circumstances become the national language of our country.30
The debate over language is characteristic of the debates that surrounded Chinese learning in the early part of the twentieth century. Different groups wanted to move in very different directions, often under the influence of different foreign ideas. Some scholars suggested abolishing Chinese altogether and replacing it with English as a national language. Meanwhile, in Moscow, Qu Qiubai was making a phonetic alphabet, based on Soviet inventions for its Asian republics, which eventually became today’s romanized version of Chinese. Of course, China was not unique in having to deal with a classical heritage under modern circumstances—Greece and the Arab world also come to mind. But the solution imposed in China was typical of its approach to modernity: replacing its written language with the transcribed speech of the capital, thereby making learning both more difficult and more accessible at the same time.
Contact with the rest of the world also changed forever the roles of Chinese women and the family. Though their relative position had differed from region to region and between different social groups, women in Qing China were subservient within a patriarchal system that favored fathers, husbands, and first-born sons. Usually denied education outside the household, they were limited to reproduction and housekeeping, often under the supervision of a depreciating mother-in-law
or a husband they had not chosen. Even if China was ruled by a woman for forty years—the Empress Dowager Cixi—there was no recognition during her time that the overall position of women should be changed. The conservative Cixi, it was said, willingly took on the role of everyone’s least favorite mother-in-law. By the late nineteenth century, however, Chinese were learning about women’s emancipation in the West. Young elite female nationalists, often educated in missionary schools, began insisting on new roles for themselves in society and politics. For many traditionally minded Chinese, female emancipation was the most disastrous part of foreign influence; it destroyed the family, and would, they believed, therefore also destroy China.
Much of the early agitation in China for women’s rights was connected to political rights. Both male and female activists believed that the position of women would improve if they were given an opportunity to participate in creating a new state based on the nationalist agenda. Qiu Jin, an anti-Qing cross-dressing, sword-wielding revolutionary who was executed in 1907, symbolized this trend. She thought that after the Qing was overthrown, women would gain their rightful role in society. Later feminists—female or male—were not so optimistic. In the May Fourth era, Chinese society was seen as the root of the problem, irrespective of the state that ruled it. Institutions such as arranged marriages and patriarchal control came under attack, inspired by foreign ideas. In a famous essay on Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Lu Xun pondered where Nora went after she left home and concluded that the economic independence of women was the key to change in society. Mao Zedong, who himself had been in an unhappy arranged marriage, attacked all such pacts. In 1919, he wrote about a young girl who had killed herself before her wedding: “In the Western family organization, father and mother recognize the free will of their sons and daughters. Not so in China. . . . The parents of Miss Zhao very clearly forced her to love someone she did not want to love. . . ; that is a form of rape. . . .Chinese parents all indirectly rape their sons and daughters.”31