Dynasty

by Elegant, Robert;

  Calamitously, Dr. Sun had died in Peking on March 12, 1925, two and a half months earlier. Sir Jonathan’s grief was still fresh, and it was as much personal as political. Toward the end, he had felt little confidence in Sun Yat-sen’s ability to lead China out of chaos. Almost fifteen years, half a generation, had passed since the Revolution of October 1911, but all Dr. Sun’s endeavors had exacerbated, it seemed, suffering and disorder. For a weak, corrupt monarchy China had substituted a congeries of rapacious, cruel warlords. Besides, Sun Yat-sen had virtually sold the nation to the Bolsheviks, his foolhardy action hardly justified by the Western powers’ maneuvers to keep China splintered so that they could dominate and exploit the nation. Nonetheless, the stomach cancer’s rapid spread had shaken Sir Jonathan profoundly. Sun Yat-sen was his friend as well as his ally, and it was not pleasant to see a friend die at only fifty-nine.

  Dr. Sun’s death had inflicted a new wound on a bleeding nation. Already split into right and left wings, the Kuomintang was riven by new personal rivalries. Harry Sekloong’s mentor, Wang Ching-wei, had hovered over the bed in the hospital of the American-supported Peking Union Medical College, elbowing aside the dying man’s second wife and his son by his first marriage. Wang Ching-wei claimed to be the legitimate successor of Dr. Sun, but the Japanese-educated Chiang Kai-shek, Commandant of the Whampoa Academy, was also contending for supreme power. The pro-Soviet clique, too, was growing stronger, virtually hallowed by the impetuous Dr. Sun’s remarks at Kobe en route to his rendezvous with death in Peking: “Russia symbolizes a live-and-let-live policy. Other powers aim at dominating the so-called weak nations. We Asiatics must emancipate Asia and the down-trodden states of Europe and America from European and American oppression. Japan and China must join hands and harmoniously lead the Asiatics to fight for a greater Asiaticism, thus expediting world-peace.”

  Sir Jonathan frowned, remembering those muddled, ill-chosen words. He required no second sight to see that they would provoke major conflicts in the years to come. But he put aside his forebodings for the distant future to assess what Dr. Sun had really left. Little, in truth, besides a faction-ridden Nationalist Party and his Political Testament. Already canonical, that Testament offered another inflammatory exhortation: “For forty years I have devoted myself to the cause of the people’s revolution with but one end in view, the elevation of China to a position of freedom and equality among the nations.… To attain this goal we must bring about a thorough awakening of our own people and ally ourselves in a common struggle with those peoples of the world who treat us on a basis of equality. The Revolution is not yet completed!”

  The ginseng tea Sir Jonathan sipped was flavored with bitter memories. Just a week earlier, the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang had repudiated all hopes of reconciliation with the National Government in Peking and had dedicated itself to cooperation with the Soviet Union. That decision was too much. He was a patriotic Chinese who had spent millions for China, but he was also committed to free commerce and to amity with the West. China’s salvation could not come from cooperating with—or toadying to—either Moscow or Tokyo.

  His slender fingers lifted the Reuter file. He began reading idly, but stiffened as his eyes scanned the second item:

  BULLETIN … BULLETIN … BULLETIN

  SHANGHAI, MAY 30 (REUTER)—STUDENTS AND STRIKING WORKERS JAPANESE-OWNED EIWA COTTON MILLS TODAY CLASHED INTERNATIONAL SETTLEMENT POLICE.

  UNDER COMMAND BRITISH LIEUTENANT J. EVERSON, INDIAN POLICEMEN OPENED FIRE. PRELIMINARY REPORTS 12 STRIKERS KILLED, 32 INJURED. SOME INFORMED SOURCES REPORT MOST OF SLAIN NOT WORKERS, BUT STUDENTS.

  The file included no follow-up, but the bulletin told Sir Jonathan all he needed—and more than he wished—to know. Unlike his twenty-three-year-old grandson, who was dozing in the arms of Titanya Kerelenkova at the Majestic Hotel in Shanghai, he understood the overwhelming significance of the incident in a single appalling insight. The rising waves of anti-foreign hatred were breaking on the rock of Western obduracy. Greater and gorier clashes—demonstrations, riots, and confrontations—were certain to follow. The productive, if avaricious, business community in which he had worked all his life would inevitably be aligned with the Western powers and the warlords against the radical Kuomintang backed by the Soviet Bolsheviks. The personal dilemma was insoluble. Sir Jonathan suddenly felt aged. Even Jade Lotus, just stirring behind the diaphanous mosquito net, could not at that moment make him feel younger.

  He yearned for the presence of his son Charles and his daughter-in-law Mary. That yearning, he reassured himself fretfully, did not stem from declining self-confidence. At his time of life, a man was entitled to the moral support of his children, the only human beings he could trust without reservation. But Charles and Mary were cruising leisurely through the South Seas aboard Regina Pacis. To his astonishment, their brief messages indicated that they were delighting in a second honeymoon after almost twenty-five years of marriage. Having left Hong Kong five months earlier, they were not planning to return until late July.

  Retreating before the rising tide, Sir Jonathan embarked on the steam pinnace Lucinda for Hong Kong the following day. Jade Lotus remained in Canton to amuse herself—wantonly he feared, but discreetly he hoped. Sekloong Manor was not only his monument, but his strong fortress; Hong Kong was the firm base for his defensive strategy against the forces of anarchy.

  His grandson Jonnie in Shanghai was unaware of those forces. He was enchanted by the polyglot metropolis on the mudflats of the Yangtze, where Western enterprise and Chinese labor had reared towering buildings on the riverside Bund. The city’s attractions were diverse. Tutored by his half-uncles, Gregory and Sydney Sek, he was fascinated by the Sekloong enterprises’ intricate connections with sources of power that ranged from the assertively respectable Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation to the racket-plagued, Secret Society—dominated docks through which flowed the trade that nourished the brawling metropolis.

  Jonnie Sekloong was the most fortunate and the most perplexed young man in the cheerfully sinful port. He had simultaneously discovered two passions: pure love and pure sexuality. His passions centered on two quite different young women. Reluctantly blessed by the family, his romantic yearnings were fixed on Sarah, the twenty-year-old daughter of his grandfather’s associate Judah Haleevie. Her dark vivacity personified the perfect damsel, the fairy princess in a bright tower of whom Jonnie had dreamed at Stonyhurst. While his heart was given to the virgin Sarah, his body was possessed by the earthily inventive Tanya Kerelenkova.

  The resilient insensitivity of youth contrived to reconcile the contradictions between the two women and the divergent roles he played—with Sarah by day and with Tanya by night. Jonnie’s self-indulgence was not deterred by the tough-minded common sense he had inherited from his mother and his grandfather. At his desk in the offices of J. Sekloong and Sons in Sassoon House on the Bund, he occasionally wondered what his mother would say if she learned of his dual life.

  Jonnie’s younger brothers Thomas, twenty, and James, eighteen, were belatedly accepting the stern control he had escaped. At the Whampoa Military Academy, they were for the first time subject to strict discipline. Unlike Jonnie, they were not isolated from the political tides that were sweeping over China, the tides their grandfather feared. But their own responses diverged sharply.

  “I came to Whampoa to soldier,” Thomas complained, “not to listen to ranting Bolshevik agitators.”

  Less than a year after entering the joint Nationalist–Communist officer training school, Thomas had already fixed upon the lodestar he was to follow all his life. His ideal was a thirty-seven-year-old former Shanghai stockbroker who had returned to the career of arms for which he had trained at the Tokyo Military Academy. A follower of Dr. Sun Yat-sen for almost two decades, Chiang Kai-shek had been appointed Commandant of the Whampoa Academy and Commander-in-Chief of the National Revolutionary Army because he was the most experienced among the few trained officers in the Nation
alists’ ranks. He had visited the Soviet Union early in 1924 to seal the Kuomintang’s alliance with the Communists and had been appointed an honorary member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, a distinction whose significance was unclear even to himself. The Kuomintang’s chief soldier was a Confucianist by conviction, soon to be a Methodist by conversion, and an unwavering opponent of his Party’s pro-Soviet left wing by instinct. Between military maneuvers and political intrigues, he was courting Mayling Soong, the sister of Dr. Sun’s widow and the youngest daughter of one of the richest and most strongly Western-oriented men in China, Yale graduate and Methodist Charlie Soong.

  Both Chiang Kai-shek’s ideological inclination and his candid ambition evoked Thomas Sekloong’s admiration. Above all else, the cadet was awed by the military achievements of the dashing figure in the well-cut uniform. Chiang’s detractors scoffed at his spit-and-polish mentality and condemned his tortuous political maneuvers. The superstitious, who were still a majority among the self-consciously “modern” cadets, whispered that the Commandant’s face in repose resembled a skull. However, Thomas Sekloong, the most traditionally Chinese of Mary’s children, had found the warm and stern paternal authority he sought. Charles had unwittingly evaded that role, while Thomas’s autocratic grandfather was remote.

  The first rift between Thomas and his younger brother James was opened by Thomas’s total commitment to Chiang Kai-shek. Though both brothers had irrevocably chosen to serve China as soldiers, James was already moving in another direction. The pronunciations they preferred for their Chinese names demonstrated their differences. Thomas used the Cantonese, calling himself Sek Lai-kwok—his personal name meaning “Build the Nation.” James used the Mandarin (or National Language): Shih Ai-kuo—his name meaning “Love the Nation.” The radicals who opposed Chiang Kai-shek’s gradualism were determined to make the National Language, based on the tongue of Peking, the medium of communication among all Chinese. The welter of dialects, which included Cantonese, was to be eradicated.

  Unaware of his true paternity, James was already showing himself his father’s son. After the death of Sun Yat-sen, Harry Sekloong had given his loyalty to the man he considered Dr. Sun’s legitimate successor. Wang Ching-wei, a fiery activist who had once attempted to assassinate Viceroy Yüan Shih-kai, was close to the Soviet advisers who were guiding the reorganization of the National Revolutionary Army into a modern military force and the transformation of the Nationalist Party into a semi-totalitarian political force. Harry was Wang Ching-wei’s closest adherent amid the internal struggles that were splitting the Kuomintang into left and right. Attempting to bridge the rift between the Nationalists and the Communists, Wang Ching-wei and Harry Sekloong opposed Chiang Kai-shek and his conservative supporters.

  Harry maintained his personal friendship with Morris Abraham Cohen, but the Two-Gun General had become politically irrelevant after the death of his beloved leader. Other foreigners had, however, become powerful in the councils of the new revolution.

  A taciturn former Czarist officer who called himself General Galen was the Soviets’ Chief Military Adviser to Chiang Kai-shek. Mikhail Borodin, representative of the Communist International in China, was a more winning personality. With his American-born wife, who affected peasant blouses and flowing skirts, he had been expelled from the United States in 1916 for political agitation under the name Michael Grusenburg. Jewish like Cohen, Borodin too was charmingly ebullient, and his tall frame was elegant beside the Two-Gun General’s ponderous strength. Borodin’s open features belied his political subtlety. When its American president invited him to lecture at the Canton Christian College, the heavily mustached Comintern agent declined.

  “Communism,” he observed bluffly, “is an ideal and a philosophy for which China is far from ready. China is a hundred years behind the times. From skyscrapers to rickshaws—what a contrast!”

  Borodin rubbed his hands in delight after the massacre in Shanghai that was already hallowed as the May Thirtieth Incident and remarked to his intimates: “We did not make May Thirtieth. It was made for us!” Some years later, as a disillusioned pensioner editing the journal of the Communist International, he was to observe acidly: “The next time a Chinese general comes to Moscow talking of world revolution, send the Secret Police. The Chinese are only interested in guns.”

  Yet in June 1925, when the cauldron of Chinese politics began to overflow, the Soviet advisers still appeared to control the flames under that cauldron. Moscow was the prime source of financial assistance to the Nationalist–Communist alliance, as well as its ideological mentor, and the native Communists were at the center of the Kuomintang.

  Slim and apparently diffident, twenty-seven-year-old Liu Shao-chi, vice-chairman of the Communist-controlled All China Trade Union Federation, had proved himself by organizing the Shanghai textile workers’ strike. He was later to become Chairman of the Chinese People’s Republic and, finally, to be purged as an “agent of the Nationalists and the Imperialists.” An impetuous thirty-two-year-old, whose Hunan accent was hardly more intelligible than Chiang Kai-shek’s slurred Chekiang Mandarin, was a deputy chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang. The irrepressibly self-willed Mao Tse-tung was later to attain almost absolute power as the first Chairman of the Chinese People’s Republic and the perennial Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party.

  James Sekloong gave his unreserved loyalty to a man who in 1925 ranked higher in that Party than either Liu Shao-chi or Mao Tse-tung. Chou En-lai, just twenty-seven, who was later to be the Premier of the Chinese People’s Republic, had recently returned from several years of study in France, Germany, and the Soviet Union. Having organized the Chinese Communist Party’s first branches abroad, he was Moscow’s favorite protégé. A true cosmopolitan, who delighted in his command of French, Chou En-lai wore his uniform with the elegance of a Parisian boulevardier.

  Though he was Chief Political Commissar of the Whampoa Academy, Chou’s uniform appeared identical to the cadets’. But the Sekloongs saw that the khaki cloth was finer, the cut more skilful, and the Sam Browne belt more pliable. Though General Chou wore the peaked garrison cap prescribed for the cadets, his riding-boots came from Kow Hoo, Shanghai’s most expensive boot-maker. He did not affect the straw sandals the cadets sometimes wore to demonstrate their solidarity with the raggle-taggle peasants who were the privates and noncommissioned officers of the Revolutionary Party.

  His own uniforms, like his brother’s, having been made by their father’s tailor, James fiercely defended his idol against the zealots who dismissed him as a “bourgeois fop.” Like the Sekloongs, the Political Commissar was a scion of privilege. His father had been a rising Mandarin under the Manchus and, after the revolution in 1911, a wealthy businessman. Though Chou En-lai was in revolt against both Confucian and bourgeois China, he could neither conceal nor alter the impress of his ancestry: his slender, whipcord figure; his personal fastidiousness; his fine features dominated by large, wide-set eyes; and his inherent assumption that his orders would be obeyed without question. James Sekloong, the grandson of a Eurasian free-booter, was already half-converted to the egalitarian Marxist creed preached by Chou En-lai. But he felt himself inferior to that paladin of the Communist Party—almost as much because of his humbler origins as because of his ideological immaturity.

  Despite their burgeoning political differences, Thomas and James remained inseparable. They slept beside each other on wooden planks covered by thin straw mats; they drilled together on the muddy parade-ground; and they shared the same crude bench in their improvised classrooms. The brothers were further united by intense indignation when General Chou En-lai lectured on the Current Situation and Its Opportunities early on June 23, 1925.

  The rough stone building was cooled by neither electric fans nor punkahs. The humid air was stirred occasionally by a lethargic breeze that carried the acrid reek of drying fish and the fecal stench of privies overhanging the river. Stretching drowsily, Th
omas saw that green mold spangled the distempered ceiling.

  “Comrades!” The taut figure in the fitted uniform spoke the word like a command, rather than a greeting. “Comrades! We stand at a decisive fork in the history of China and humanity. A revolutionary high-tide is rising through the nation. The spontaneous indignation of the working class under the leadership of the Communist Party—and, of course, our allies of the Nationalist Party—is rising to a tidal wave that will sweep away all existing institutions.

  “Comrades! We must rapidly prepare for the critical moment when the powerful armed forces we are building will act decisively. We will smash the exploiting landlords, the rapacious capitalists, the bloodsucking warlords—and their foreign masters. The struggle to liberate the people of China is indistinguishable in essence from the struggle against the European and American imperialists who support, manipulate, enrich, and, also, exploit their Chinese puppets. Only the great Soviet Union, alone among the nations of the world, has demonstrated its sympathy for our just cause by providing generous material assistance and invaluable political guidance. Only the Soviet Union is the life-long, unswerving friend of the Chinese people. We are fighters in the worldwide liberation movement with the Soviet Union at its head.”

  General Chou En-lai flicked drops of sweat from his long upper lip with a starched white handkerchief and sipped tea from a handleless porcelain cup.

  “In the long run, the working class under the guidance of the Communist Party must, inevitably, take power over China and transform our nation into a modern Socialist state. But that time is still far off. For the moment we are all—Nationalists and Communists alike—wholeheartedly engaged in a life-and-death struggle to destroy the native exploiting class and its foreign overlords. Comrades! You will soon be fighting in the vanguard of that struggle. The exploiting class will not leave the stage of history of its own accord when its role is finished. It must be driven from the stage of history by force. You are the spearhead of that force.