Dynasty

by Elegant, Robert;

  Nonetheless, hostility between Chinese and British erupted in constant clashes in the Colony. Both communities were self-righteously indignant. The British railed over brandy-and-sodas at the “ingratitude” of a people they had given employment; the Chinese denounced the arrogance of their Colonial overlords. The Sekloongs were torn by antagonistic loyalties. After his sour disappointment with Dr. Sun and the Nationalists, Sir Jonathan’s cautious liberalism had progressively eroded. The normal conservatism of age was intensified by disillusionment and by his fear of the new tides; yet he still considered himself Chinese rather than British. Mary instinctively sympathized with the poor Chinese; her lower-middle-class background overcame a quarter century of privilege and her latent anti-Chinese feeling. Charles—that quintessential man of commercial Hong Kong—fumed alternately at the British and the Chinese whose squabbling was disrupting his home. But the Sekloongs, unlike many European businessmen, would not desert the city torn by conflict between rulers and subjects.

  Sir Jonathan was more depressed by the moribund Colony each time he rode to the hushed offices of J. Sekloong and Sons. His ebullient self-confidence dwindled visibly. But his imperious temper flared when his “step-brother” Iain Wheatley came to him on behalf of the British Chamber of Commerce. Nor was his anger allayed by Iain’s fellow emissary, his “senior Chinese secretary,” Charlotte’s husband, Manfei Way, whom the Old Gentleman had learned to distrust.

  Formally flanked by Charles and Mary, Sir Jonathan received Iain and Manfei with cold courtesy. He offered straight-backed blackwood chairs to the heavy-set fifty-year-old taipan and the slight, twenty-eight-year-old Manfei. It was a family confrontation, and within the family Sir Jonathan was unquestionably senior to both his step-brother-by-extension Iain Wheatley and his grandson-in-law, Manfei Way.

  “We will not stand on ceremony.” The Old Gentleman omitted the traditional tea of hospitality and the normal preliminary pleasantries. “Why have you come to me?”

  “We are honored, Sir.” Manfei formulated the prescribed Chinese courtesies in English. “Both your humble grandson-in-law and your younger brother are honored at your receiving us.”

  “Let me speak, Manfei,” Iain Wheatley interrupted. “It’s more my pidgin.”

  “Let’s have it, Iain,” Charles said neutrally. “No point in beating around the bush.”

  “Sir Jonathan,” Iain resumed, “the Chamber’s had long discussions. We’re convinced Hong Kong will go under, we’ll all go to the wall unless this strike is broken.”

  “How?” the Old Gentleman asked.

  “Indian labor. If we bring in twenty thousand South Indian coolies, the Chinese will go back to work. They don’t want their rice-bowls smashed forever. The Chamber feels your cooperation is essential.”

  Charles crossed his legs, leaned back in his chair, and raised his eyes to the plaster moldings on the ceiling. Mary framed a protest, but thought better of it. The Old Gentleman was on his feet, leaning over the pair. He spoke slowly in ice-rimed tones.

  “Gentlemen, my cooperation may be essential, but it will not be offered. Under no circumstances will I join you or endorse this move. If you go ahead, I shall close down the firm of J. Sekloong and Sons, announce my sympathy for …”

  “Grandfather-in-law,” Manfei interrupted ingratiatingly, “we are proposing only a temporary measure to bring the Bolsheviks into line.”

  “… my total sympathy for the strikers.” Sir Jonathan ignored Charlotte’s husband. “I shall urge them to expand the strike. The Tung Wah Hospitals will cease even their present emergency services. No junks will carry any cargoes at all to Hong Kong. I’ll see Hong Kong perish before it becomes a battleground between the Chinese and the British supported by Indians.”

  “Sir Jonathan, perhaps, we’ve not made ourselves clear,” Iain Wheatley said placatingly. “We propose chiefly a threat. Once a few thousand Indians arrive, the strike will die a natural death. Don’t you see that …”

  “Is there anything else, Gentlemen?” Sir Jonathan asked. “I have other business.”

  When the door closed, Mary regarded the Old Gentleman with respect approaching awe. At seventy-two, his fires still burned high.

  “Can’t say I disagree,” Charles observed. “But you know this makes an open breach with the Wheatleys and the British Chamber of Commerce?”

  “So be it,” said Sir Jonathan.

  The General Strike did peter out as hunger forced workers to return to their resentful employers. Hong Kong’s commercial paralysis finally ended in June 1926, a year after its onset, when the Nationalist–Communist alliance that had organized the General Strike was itself being torn apart by its own conflicting purposes. The renewed rift between the British and the Chinese was, however, not to close until December 8, 1941, when the two communities united in futile resistance to Japanese invaders.

  The three Sekloongs who supported the strike did not see its effects upon their home. From September 1925 to June 1926 neither Harry nor Thomas and James could visit Hong Kong, since the British authorities did not welcome firebrands from Canton. They were, further, caught up in the bitter clashes that split the Nationalist–Communist alliance and splintered both political parties.

  Harry Sekloong had rejoiced when his leader Wang Ching-wei became President of the National Government proclaimed in Canton on July 1, 1925. But President Wang Ching-wei and General Chiang Kai-shek were again fighting each other. The General’s frustrated ambitions were not assauged by command of the National Revolutionary Army. Harry Sekloong was further alienated from the former stockbroker when Chiang Kai-shek began to purge the Kuomintang of the Communists against the wishes of President Wang Ching-wei.

  Thomas and James were already virtually committed, the older brother following Chiang Kai-shek, the younger Chou En-lai. But the tenuous Nationalist–Communist alliance was formally preserved, and the brothers were not compelled to confront each other. They were instead given the opportunity to practice the profession of arms that had entranced them since boyhood. In November 1925, the fledgling Revolutionary Army marched into eastern Kwangtung Province to win its first victories over a local warlord. Though still cadets, Thomas and James commanded platoons in those Eastern Expeditions and delighted in their first experience of combat, which was almost bloodless. Marshals’ batons—at least, generals’ stars—glittered in their imaginations. In the pleasant subtropical autumn the reality of war had proved as glorious as their youthful dreams.

  On July 9, 1926, Lieutenants Thomas and James Sekloong marshaled their platoons in the Fourth Division of the National Revolutionary Army. Their company commander was Lin Piao. The youth who had known all the answers in General Chou En-lai’s political study courses was promoted captain by the underground Communist apparatus within the Revolutionary Army because he was already a secret member of the Communist Party. The officers carried Mauser pistols, and the soldiers were armed with Lee-Enfield rifles. All ranks wore foreign-style khaki uniforms: high-collared tunics, knee-breeches, white puttees, and peaked garrison caps. The Fourth Division was the first military unit in Chinese history that marched to battle in leather boots. Under the command of General Chiang Kai-shek, the Northern Expedition that would sweep the warlords from power and establish a unified Chinese national government for the first time in two centuries departed from Canton with banners flying and trumpets blaring.

  April 11, 1927–December 15, 1927

  “A traveling carnival, a troop of opera-players touring from festival to festival—that’s what we are!” Lieutenant Thomas Sekloong had complained so often in the same words that his brother James automatically completed the litany: “To fight the enemy we mobilized men and assembled horses like the heroes of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. But the enemy just fades away. We never fight battles, only celebrate bloodless victories!”

  James suppressed his laughter to point the moral once again: “Just as Comrades Chou and Borodin predicted. This, respected second elder brother, is
political warfare. The less we fight, the better. Bloodless victories because the lao pai-hsing, the masses, support us!”

  Encamped outside Shanghai on April 11, 1927, the young officers of the Ironsides Fourth Division were jubilant in victory. Recalling the campaigns that had wrested half China from the warlords in nine months’ time, the brothers were bidding each other farewell with excitement more fitting to raw recruits than the hard-bitten veterans they considered themselves. Just promoted captain, Thomas had been reassigned to the staff of Commander-in-Chief Chiang Kai-shek.

  The General had halted his triumphant National Revolutionary Army outside China’s largest city while he negotiated with the foreign-ruled Concessions and with leading Chinese citizens. Political Commissar Chou En-lai and his Workers’ Militia had seized the native city, and Shanghai virtually belonged to the alliance.

  After withdrawing when he found himself deprived of all effective power by Chiang Kai-shek, President Wang Ching-wei had on April 1, 1927, ten days earlier, returned from self-imposed exile to resume his office and to endeavor, once again, to cooperate with his strong-willed military commander. The brothers were cheered by that reconciliation and delighted by their reunion with their Uncle Harry, who had returned to China with the President. They warmed their hands over the campfire and reminisced about the spectacular successes of the Northern Expedition.

  In truth meeting no more opposition than an itinerant carnival, the 92,000-man Revolutionary Army had marched through a welcoming countryside. The soldiers could have carried tea instead of cartridges in their bandoliers or flaunted chrysanthemums in their rifles. Their progress was a romp rather than a campaign until they began skirmishing with the stubborn troops of the warlord General Sun Chuan-fang on the borders of Kiangsi Province in mid-September 1926. The first two months of the campaign had proceeded as smoothly as a training exercise from the field-manuals prepared by the Revolutionary Army’s Communist-controlled Political Sections, who preached the new art of Polwar/Agitprop—Political Warfare/Agitation and Propaganda.

  The army had behaved remarkably well. Their enemies, the ragged soldiers of the unstable warlord coalition, raped and looted, alienating those peasants who had not fled. But even the Kwangsi Province warlord Li Tsung-jen’s Eighteenth Division, stiffened by Whampoa Academy officers, generally abstained from marauding. The troops were encouraged to refrain from the depredations practiced for millennia by Chinese armies because they were actually paid at fairly regular intervals. Less generous with gold than advice, Moscow, nonetheless, provided funds to the forces Joseph Stalin believed would conquer China for him. Intelligently self-interested Chinese patriots like the House of Sekloong also contributed to the revolutionaries’ war chest, as did a few far-seeing foreign firms. The enlisted men of the victorious, adequately fed National Army could, therefore, be kept from scourging the countryside. Even those officers who were neither Communists nor Whampoa Academy graduates stole very little.

  The farmers’ ingrained fear of men in uniform was transformed, initially into incredulous wonder at that restraint and subsequently into timorous hope. Perhaps, this once, their self-appointed liberators might honor their promises to give the peasants freedom and land. The farmers did not really understand the word dzu-yu, “freedom,” which literally meant “self-decision”; they skeptically awaited the distribution of land deeds. But they were, at least, not stripped of their meager possessions.

  The army was preceded not only by armed patrols, but by Propaganda Units that incited the oppressed farmers to rise against their landlords. Women were the most effective Agitpropagandists. Singers, dancers, and actresses performed on improvised stages in village squares. The plots of millennia-old traditional dramas were adapted to convey their political message: The National Revolutionary Army would free the lao pai-hsing from centuries of exploitation. Their “oppressed sisters” responded passionately, the patient Chinese women, protected by fewer legal safeguards than the plodding water buffaloes, who held families and communities together by their stubborn courage and unremitting labor. The Women’s Liberation Movement demanded: “Destroy all the mechanisms used by the male-centered society to oppress and exploit women—traditional morality, economic power, and armed might!” Inspired by the resentment of generations, the peasant women were militant converts who prodded their menfolk into serving the Revolutionary Army as recruits, couriers, and informants.

  The Sekloong brothers were surprised by the effectiveness of the Agitprop Teams. They were making a journey of agonizing discovery; the very texture of the countryside and the society they saw for the first time was a shattering revelation. By giving their allegiance to the abstraction called China, they had sworn to emancipate and unify a nation they did not know. Brought up in the splendid isolation of Hong Kong and the foreign-ruled treaty-ports, they had been almost as ignorant of the primitive hinterlands as were the purse-and-race-proud European taipans. The interior of China was as foreign as Patagonia to most of the young Whampoa Academy graduates, who were the sons of the pampered urban bourgeoisie. The cosmopolitan metropolises receded from their consciousness as they marched north through immemorial peasant China and backward through the centuries.

  In the smoky cave dwellings of mountainous Kiangsi Province, the youthful idealists saw mothers and fathers who tended a single pig or a donkey with devotion they could not give their rickety, scabby children if any were to survive. Entire families—twenty human beings spanning three generations—were crammed into hovels of packed earth that disintegrated under the rains. The “big house” of a landlord dominated almost every village. The peasants wore patched rags, supplemented their coarse rice with wild grasses, and considered themselves blessed by the God of Fortune if they ate a sliver of pork, half an egg, or a few shreds of chicken at the Lunar New Year. Some “big houses” were peasants’ hovels only slightly enlarged, but others were mansions amid groves of pines and bamboos. The landlords who lived in those houses wore wool or silk and daily fed upon fowl, meat, and fish. Since no other authority existed, they exercised the powers of magistrates and mayors—and enriched themselves further by money-lending. Not all were the callous exploiters depicted by the Revolutionary Army’s propagandists. Some assumed the gentry’s traditional responsibility for the lao pai-hsing—assisting the poor by maintaining schools and dispensing alms. But the decay of Confucian morality and the anarchy that followed the Manchus’ collapse had left the gentry with a single over-riding moral imperative: the welfare of their own families.

  Like James, Thomas was shocked by the blatant juxtaposition of poverty and comfort. Unlike James, he was impressed neither by the wickedness nor the state of the landlords. The country was so impoverished that even the rich landlords were poor by his standards; most lived no better than the Sekloongs’ servants. Moreover, he respected the divinely ordained hierarchy among men. He shared his idol General Chiang Kai-shek’s Confucian conviction that the proper ordering of mankind required strict distinctions between superiors and inferiors. No more than the General was the matter-of-fact Thomas moved by abstract moral indignation, though both recognized that the peasantry’s lot must improve if China were to become a powerful, modern country.

  Thomas was, however, shocked when he discovered that no peasants and only a few landlords used the word Chung-kuo, literally, “The Central Kingdom,” which meant China. They called themselves not Chung-kuo jen, Chinese, but Tang jen or Han jen, “men of Tang” or “men of Han,” the two greatest Imperial Dynasties. Nationalism, the first of Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s Three People’s Principles, was central to Thomas’s personal creed. He was outraged to find that the lao pai-hsing knew neither China nor, certainly, the concept of nationhood.

  James, for his part, had inherited—or acquired by proximity—his father Harry’s idealism, as well as his irreverence. The younger brother discovered in anger the virtually immeasurable and perhaps unbridgeable gap between his own accustomed manner of life and that of the peasant masses. Popular welfare,
the second of Dr. Sun’s Three Principles, stood foremost in his personal creed. But China, he learned, was so vast, so diverse, and so abysmally poor that he sometimes despaired of ameliorating the people’s brutish poverty. Unknown to his brother, James already was a member of the Socialist Youth League and a candidate member of the Communist Party. Ordered by his cell leader to reveal neither those affiliations nor his personal feelings, he concealed his moral indignation behind raillery.

  But his precarious self-discipline failed spectacularly upon one occasion.

  A week before the carnival ended in bloody skirmishing against the warlord Sun Chuan-fang, the company was billeted in the market town of Hsinkan, one hundred and three miles south of Nanchang. The ever-smiling local magnate, who was called Squire Lee, asked the officers to dinner. Despite his personal reservations, Company Commander Lin Piao accepted the invitation. The Chinese Communist Party still followed Moscow’s explicit instructions: “Cooperate with the Nationalists to win victory for the national bourgeois revolution before rising against the Nationalists to make a proletarian revolution.” Since Squire Lee was unquestionably a “national bourgeois,” virtually untainted by association with the “foreign-imperialist capitalists,” Lin Piao was bound to seek his cooperation. Squire Lee would himself have entertained the Emperor of Hell and his attendant demons if they controlled Hsinkan. Neither Captain Lin Piao nor Squire Lee had any reason to fear the explosive temperament behind the laughing face of Lieutenant James Sekloong. Even Thomas could not have anticipated his brother’s violent response to the Shell Company’s red scallop-shell posted on Squire Lee’s gate.