by John Keay
Shorn of these vast peripheral territories, riddled by warlord regimes within and hamstrung by infighting among their own leaders, the first republican governments of what remained of China were seldom in a position to take advantage of such international opportunities as came their way. In the First World War China had become an official combatant only when the war was nearly over, although around 100,000 Chinese recruits served as auxiliaries in northern Europe, suffering substantial casualties. On both counts, China was entitled to a place at the table when in 1919 the allied powers sat down to divide the spoils. A sixty-strong delegation duly made the trip to Paris with high expectations of at least regaining control of those treaty ports and concessions now forfeited by the vanquished Germans. Woodrow Wilson disapproved of all colonialisms and was preaching the doctrine of self-determination; there was just a chance that the Japanese would be ordered out of Manchuria and the British out of Hong Kong.
But the Chinese delegation would be disappointed. Ostensibly this was because its members were as disunited as the republic they represented. Sun Yat-sen’s Revolutionary Alliance, now renamed the Guomindang (National People’s Party) and with its strongest support in the south, had won China’s first election in 1913. (About 40 million had the vote, although women were still not among them.) Yuan Shikai, his prior election as president doubtful after this Nationalist victory and his strongest support being in the north, then moved against the Guomindang and attacked provincial governors who supported it. Heavier fighting than usual followed, and the northern forces stormed and ransacked Nanjing. The parliament was dissolved, Sun fled back into exile and Yuan Shikai ruled as dictator, even attempting to set himself up as emperor, until his death in 1916. Meanwhile most of the southern provinces had seceded from the republic and declared themselves autonomous. For appearances’ sake, the delegation sent to the Paris peace talks included some southerners. But its divisions proved hard to disguise and to Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson ‘it was not clear whether [it] represented either a country or a government’. Moreover they assumed that it ‘did not include either China’s president or prime minister mainly because the political situation in China was so precarious that neither dared leave’.17
In reality, though, the composition of the Chinese delegation was irrelevant; for the republican government had already signed away the prized German concessions in Shandong. Qingdao, the nucleus of these concessions and by now a thriving port complete with German schools and an excellent brewery (the ‘Tsingtao’ of the still-popular label being the Wade-Giles form of ‘Qingdao’), had in fact been taken from the Germans by the Japanese in 1914. Tokyo had then presented Yuan Shikai with an ultimatum known as the Twenty-one Demands. Since these would ‘virtually have turned China into a Japanese protectorate’, Yuan Shikai had chosen to buy off the Japanese by pledging China’s support for Tokyo’s claim to Qingdao.18 The Chinese delegates, of course, claimed that this agreement had been signed under duress; but to the allies an agreement was an agreement. It clinched it. Qingdao went to Japan and Chinese hopes were dashed.
When the news of this sell-out reached Beijing, protesters massed in the square outside the Tiananmen, the ‘Gate of Heavenly Peace’ (a smaller space in those days, though no less symbolic). It was 4 May (1919), a date ever after identified with national outrage and reawakening. The lead was taken by students from Beijing’s National University, itself founded in 1898 but reconstituted as the senior institution in a new system of modern tertiary education in 1912. Thousands were eventually arrested, in fact so many that they could not be contained and had to be released. Sun Yat-sen and Kang Youwei, though still constitutional sparring partners, both lent their support. Student unions were formed wherever there were students, workers’ groups joined in, women mobilised as never before, and the ‘May 4 Movement’ spread throughout the country. In Shanghai 100,000 protested. Japanese goods were everywhere boycotted, while feeling against those powers whose liberal sentiments had been sacrificed to appease Japan ran high. But the political fall-out was modest. A couple of pro-Japanese ministers were dismissed, China refused to sign the peace accord, and then, three years later, as part of an international agreement on naval power in the western Pacific, Japan vacated Qingdao anyway.
The social and intellectual legacy of May 4 was a different matter. Born of outrage and impotence in the face of international betrayal, it intensified and radically redirected the whole future course of national resurgence. A new generation of leaders, among them the young Mao Zedong in his native Changsha (Hunan) and Zhou Enlai in Tianjin (Hebei), gained their first experience of political activism. Mass action took on new dimensions with labour unions and women’s groups organising and mobilising as never before. ‘Four hundred or more journals, written in the vernacular and devoted to culture and politics, were founded in this same period; hundreds of new schools, often with radical curricula, were set up’;19 textbooks also went vernacular; and a ‘New Culture Movement’ gained momentum with the publication of some of China’s finest fiction. As ever, political chaos proved a stimulant to cultural activity. Qu Qiubai, a student in Beijing at the time and later a controversial figure in the Communist Party, recalled that it was like being ‘sucked into the whirlwind’. ‘Feelings . . . ran so strong that restlessness could no more be contained.’ For the first time ‘the sharp pain of imperialistic oppression reached our bones, and it awakened us from the nightmares of impractical democratic reforms’.20
Throughout the early 1920s the strikes, protests and boycotts escalated, with organised labour – Hong Kong dockers, Shanghai mill workers, Guangzhou seamen, Wuhan railwaymen – increasingly setting the pace. Demonstrators were shot and sympathy strikes followed. Occasionally the strikers’ demands were met, more often not. A growing awareness that the Beijing government’s reliance on foreign loans made it an accomplice of the foreign-owned companies that were exploiting Chinese labour fuelled the idea of a nationalist revolution to overthrow the republic. This in turn called for unity between Sun’s Guomindang Nationalists, who controlled Guangdong province, and a newer, much smaller but highly organised party of anti-imperialists with strong support in Shanghai – the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Inspired by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and by Chinese students who had taken up Marxism-Leninism while on work-study programmes in Paris, the CCP had been formed in Shanghai in 1921. Mao Zedong attended this first convention as Hunan’s representative, while Chen Duxiu, editor of the leftist journal New Youth and founder of several Marxist study groups, was chosen as secretary-general. Links with Lenin’s Comintern (Communist International) had already been established, and they were cemented when the Russian leadership indicated a willingness to restore to a legitimate Chinese government all Russian concessions in China. Here clearly was a highly desirable ally in the struggle to liberate the country from the foreign imperialists. Comintern advisers, instructors, funds and munitions were therefore welcomed; and despite misgivings, the CCP accepted a Comintern directive that, rather than defer revolution until such time as the proletariat had been mobilised, the party should temporarily join forces with the Guomindang. Together they would then overthrow the ‘feudal’ warlords, by which time the country would be ready for a ‘second stage’ of struggle ending in the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Neither the Guomindang nor the CCP was entirely of one mind; but as of 1922 they were agreed on a joint programme to reunite the country and attain full independence. For the Guomindang, Sun Yat-sen and, following his death in 1925, Chiang Kai-shek set up a military government in Guangzhou. There Chiang, who had himself been trained in a Japanese military academy, established a nationalist naval academy that would provide a dependable corps and much of the leadership in the forthcoming struggle. Discipline and organisation were supplied by the Comintern agent known as Mikhail Borodin; funds came from local taxes and from landlords and industrialists who supported the Guomindang in return for its protection; and troops were drawn
from among both parties’ supporters and from the militias of various southern warlords. By July 1926 the so-called Northern Expedition of Nationalists and communists was ready to move out. One arm worked its way up the coast through Fujian to Hangzhou, another headed directly for Nanjing, and a third made for Changsha and the Wuhan ‘tri-city’.
The last, following the route taken by the Taipings in 1851–53, made the most rapid progress thanks to the nearly completed Guangzhou–Wuhan rail link. Changsha fell in July and Wuchang, after heavy fighting and a desperate siege, in October. Chiang Kai-shek, as commander-in-chief, then faced the same decision as the Taipings in 1854 – whether to push on north straight to Beijing or whether first to veer east down the Yangzi to secure Shanghai and the agro-industrial heartland. Unlike the God-worshippers, Chiang favoured Shanghai. Nanjing was taken in March 1927 and Shanghai, already paralysed by a general strike organised by the CCP-dominated trade unions, welcomed the Nationalists later the same month.
The strikers, and the CCP, then became the victims of a flagrant and never-to-be forgotten betrayal. Chiang needed the recognition of the foreign powers, the forbearance of their navies and the loans and exactions available from Shanghai’s banks and corporations. He did not need ardent supporters bent on ousting the foreign imperialists and reclaiming their concessions while using organised labour to smash the power of the corporate bourgeoisie. In short, the CCP was now an embarrassment. Moving all but his most reliable troops out of the city, and availing himself of the services of the Green Gang, an underworld organisation of well-armed thugs used by industrialists to intimidate strikers, Chiang Kai-shek launched an all-out assault on the labour unions. Hundreds of union leaders were gunned down, thousands arrested. Similar acts of repression followed in Wuhan and Guangzhou. The CCP’s hopes of a Marxist revolution based on the seizure of the means of production by the industrial proletariat had always been a long shot in an overwhelmingly agrarian economy. Now those hopes were dashed. Likewise, the strategy of using the Guomindang to turbo-charge a communist grab for power had spectacularly backfired. As of 1928 Nationalists and communists were locked into a disastrous pattern of ideological detestation and military confrontation.
LONG MARCH, LONG WAR
In 1928, while the CCP withdrew to remote parts of Hubei, Hunan and Fujian to lick its wounds and regroup as best it could, Chiang Kai-shek went on to secure the northern provinces. The success of this second phase of the Northern Expedition was due, even more than the first, to concessions and alliances with existing warlords. In Shandong, Nationalist troops met their fiercest resistance not from Chinese opponents but from Japanese forces based there to protect Tokyo’s concessions. To the now standard level of carnage was added a new venom as wanton atrocities were inflicted on civilians in the name of race.
Beijing, its latest warlord-master Zhang Zuolin having been blown up by a bomb in Mukden (Shengyang), was too vulnerable to Tokyo’s zealots in nearby Manchuria and Shandong to serve as the Nationalist capital. Instead it was downgraded, as it had been by the Ming Hongwu emperor, from ‘Beijing’ (‘Northern Capital’) to ‘Beiping’ (‘Northern Pacified [city]’). Nanjing was once again preferred as the national capital, and it was effectively consecrated as such when Chiang Kai-shek had the remains of Dr Sun Yat-sen ceremonially reinterred there in a spectacular tomb. Again like the Hongwu emperor, whose own tomb was hard by on Mount Zijin, Sun was portrayed as the Guomindang’s inspiration and his writings were accorded something of the authority of the Hongwu emperor’s ‘ancestral instructions’. In performing this pious act, Chiang sought to portray himself as Sun’s protégé and delegated successor, an arrangement given quasi-dynastic substance by Chiang’s new bride being the sister of Sun’s widow. Legitimacy still lay with the past, not the people.
Since priority was being given to eradicating the CCP, extending Nationalist control into the warlord-ruled countryside and milking Shanghai for funds, ‘there was little need for Chiang to worry about the trappings of democracy’.21 A strongly centralist and bureaucratic form of administration was adopted by China’s first Nationalist government, and an austere Confucianist ideology developed to underpin it. Known as the ‘New Life’ movement – supposedly a Chinese take on the American ‘New Deal’ – this stressed discipline, decorum and loyalty rather than righteousness or reverence for scholarship. When in the 1930s Chiang conceived an admiration for Hitler and Mussolini, it acquired fascist under-tones. The now Generalissimo became the centre of a personal cult and launched his own morality police, the ‘Blueshirts’.
Though Chiang’s China was but a fraction of the Qing empire, and though within it warlords were still rife and fighting was continuous, the Nationalist revolution of 1926–28 attained a wider acceptance than had the republican revolution of 1911–12. This was nicely demonstrated when the British returned, or ‘rendited’, the 775 square kilometres (300 square miles) of mainland Chinese territory that comprised their Shandong concession at Weihaiwei. Technically Weihaiwei could have been returned in 1905 when, in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese war, the Russians withdrew from Dalian. But the Japanese then took over Dalian and so the British stayed on as a counterweight to the Japanese presence. The matter came up again in 1915, at which point Reginald Johnston, Weihaiwei’s district magistrate, was invited to summarise the reasons for its retention. He replied that he was ‘aware of none’. Britain and Japan were allies at the time; the naval base served no strategic purpose, and the seafront was more noted for bathing machines than battleships, being a popular summer resort with foreign families. By 1920 the British had accepted Johnston’s logic and were resolved to hand the place back. But a new problem arose: to whom to hand it. In Beijing warlords were coming and going too quickly, while the Guomindang were at the time far away in the south.
The difficulty was still unresolved when in 1926 Reginald Johnston returned to Weihaiwei as its commissioner. In the interim, he had occupied what he called ‘the peculiar and rather interesting position’ of tutor to Henry Pu-yi. The ‘Last Emperor’ had been allowed to stay on in the Imperial Palace after his 1912 deposition, and so Johnston, living with his young charge, probably enjoyed a closer acquaintance with palace life than any other foreigner during the 250 years of Qing rule. Since then, Pu-yi had been extracted from the palace for his own safety and was now living as a private citizen under Japanese protection in Tianjin. There could be no question of handing Weihaiwei to him; but when in 1929 the British recognised Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government, the problem was at last solved. With a legitimate and reasonably stable government in place, ‘the first British surrender of crown territory since the American War of Independence’ took place in October 1930. The ceremonial procedure adopted for the occasion – handshakes, flag-lowering, salutes, bagpipes, sombre seaward departure, ecstatic landward celebrations – would be repeated in outposts of Britain’s empire at the rate of about one every two years over the next half-century. And a process, begun on the China coast, would culminate there. For in June 1997, when the ninety-nine-year lease of Hong Kong’s ‘New Territories’ expired and the whole colony was ‘rendited’, Britain’s empire was finally laid to rest. China regained the first of its alienated territories; and bar two (Macao, handed over in 1999, and Taiwan, still ‘unrendited’) it was the last.22
As well as reclaiming Weihaiwei, the Nationalist government opened the question of renegotiating the ‘unequal’ treaties of the nineteenth century, especially in respect of extraterritoriality and the treaty ports. Three Yangzi ports were duly handed back, including Hankou, where the bomb had gone off in 1911, while a system of power-sharing was introduced on Shanghai’s municipal council. Negotiations with the foreign powers were still ongoing when in 1932 this brief window of opportunity was slammed shut. The Japanese had in the previous year contrived a pretext for occupying Shenyang (Mukden), the largest city in Manchuria, and then overrunning the rest of Manchuria. A year later in Shanghai, in response to anti-Japanese protests over this
Manchurian grab and the killing of several Japanese nationals, the Japanese navy landed troops. Negotiations with the foreign powers were suspended as a fierce little war raged through the Chinese districts of the great city. By the time a truce was arranged in 1933, 14,000 had died.
These distractions, while affording a stay of execution to the treaty ports, proved the salvation of the communists in that they gave them time to regroup. Since its betrayal by the Guomindang in 1928, the CCP had gone back to the countryside. In several scattered enclaves, the party slowly reformed, usually following an accommodation with local warlords, and then began establishing autonomous local soviets, still with Comintern guidance and support. Troops were recruited and trained; and the leadership was viciously contested. Chen Duxiu and Qu Qiubai had been made scapegoats for the failure of the united front with the Guomindang, despite their reservations about it in the first place. Other figures now contended for high party office. They included: Zhou Enlai, a dedicated ideologue who had studied in Paris, then headed the political department of the Guangdong military academy, and now coordinated party activities; Lin Biao, one of the Guangdong Academy’s cadets who had distinguished himself as a brilliant commander during the first phase of the Northern Expedition; and Mao Zedong, a tall, slightly effete-looking maverick with little military experience, an unreliable record, a ruthless reputation and an unshakeable conviction that he alone understood the requirements of the situation.
But attempts to extend the party’s enclaves fared indifferently. By 1933 all of them were on the defensive as Chiang Kai-shek, relieved by the truce with the Japanese, intensified his blockades and sent wave after wave of Guomindang forces against them. The largest ‘Red’ enclave was located in the hills of Jiangxi near the provincial border with Hunan. When, in 1934, this Jiangxi soviet was faced with imminent extinction, the decision was taken to evacuate it. About 28,000, including the wounded and nearly all the women, were left behind to the none-too-tender mercies of the Nationalists; equal status did not include equal opportunity of survival. The rest, about 80,000, of whom perhaps half were combat troops, broke out of the blockade under cover of darkness, heading west, on 16 October 1934. This was the start of the ‘Ten-thousand Li [about 5,000 kilometres, 3,000 miles] March’, otherwise the Long March.