On 20 March, Chiang struck. He placed Canton under martial law, arrested those he believed to have been plotting his downfall, disarmed a Soviet guard platoon and secured the recall of Kubishev. Wang Jingwei fled to France to recuperate from his political wounds. A few months later, in June 1926, Chiang Kaishek led the National Revolutionary Army as commander-in-chief of the Northern Expedition, which two years later marched into Beijing, allowing Chiang to claim that he had completed Sun Yatsen’s cherished dream of unifying China, bringing it under KMT control, thereby ending the warlord era. In 1929, Chiang Kaishek’s portrait replaced that of Sun Yatsen on the Gate of Heavenly Peace. He had moved the National Government to Nanjing in 1927, making that city his capital, and now he claimed to govern all of China.
Chiang had every reason to feel vindicated when, on 6 July 1928, he led a memorial ceremony for Sun Yatsen, whose body rested awaiting burial in a crystal coffin, which had been donated by the Soviet Union, in the Azure Cloud Temple in the Western Hills just outside Beijing. Surrounded by the highest military leaders and officials on the Nationalist side, including provincial generals who had more or less willingly incorporated their forces in the Nationalist order of battle, Chiang reported to Sun’s spirit that ‘five times the Party came close to destruction and the forces of revolution faced defeat fifteen times’,36 but in the end they had triumphed and Sun’s aim had been achieved.37 Chiang then broke down and had to be helped away as tears streamed down his face.38
Chiang had become China’s man of destiny, the saviour of the hallowed task that Sun Yatsen had set his followers – certainly in his own mind, if not everybody else’s. The path that led Chiang to his new position of prominence revealed much about the man. He was a revolutionary, fiercely opposed to foreign influence in China, but also furious at the dominance of provincial elites, who held back even such minor forms of progress as new schools. For Chiang the transformation of China into a modern nation and the transformation of the self were two sides of the same coin: constant vigilance, strenuous effort, determination, study and sacrifice were needed for both.
Chiang did not reject China’s past; indeed, he was inspired by heroic figures from Chinese history and the writings of Confucian philosophers, finding in them embodiments of qualities such as martyrdom, loyalty, duty, self-sacrifice and the management of human relations. He lived by such strictures in his relationships with Chen Qimei and Dai Jitao. Part of his ethic was that the leader demonstrates his moral suitability for leadership by recognising talent, respecting it and allowing it to do its work. Sun Yatsen had treated Chiang Kaishek with that kind of respect. Wang Jingwei may well have hurt Chiang more than he realised, or intended, when he took his command positions away from him, as by so doing he questioned Chiang’s loyalty, reliability and talent.
Chiang Kaishek usually appeared in public in military uniform; a famous portrait has him sitting on horseback like Napoleon. He was willing to take huge risks, though he played his cards very close to his chest. He trusted few people then, and, inevitably, even fewer later. Chiang would always carefully analyse a situation – often using his diary for the purpose – assess the various forces impacting on it, and then, as with the ousting of Wang Jingwei, act suddenly and decisively when he judged the moment propitious and the impact likely to be decisive.
The victorious end to the Northern Expedition did not mean that answers had now been found to the deeper constitutional questions that had arisen out of the 1911 Revolution. Indeed, to these questions were now added a host of new ones. Large armies had emerged that had to be either demobilised or defeated. The Nationalists were deeply divided among themselves. The Communists were organising revolts in various places following their suppression in the White Terror, which the Nationalists had unleashed on the Communists during the Northern Expedition, leaving thousands dead, and thus sowing bitter legacies of hatred and distrust that would never go away. New relations also had to be forged with foreign countries, while foreign threats lurked on China’s borders. The problems of Chiang Kaishek and his Nationalist government had only just begun.
— TWO —
NATION BUILDING
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Abraham Lincoln, speech at Springfield, on accepting the Republican nomination as senator for Illinois (16 June 1858)
On 18 September 1931, Lieutenant Kawamoto Suemori of the Kuantung Army detonated some sticks of dynamite close to the Japanese-owned South Manchurian Railway, near Shenyang. The act was part of a plot by Col onels Ishiwara Kanji and Doihara Kenji, his commanding officers in the Japanese Imperial Army (of which the Kuantung Army was a part), to create a casus belli for Japan’s seizure of Manchuria. The next day, having accused the Chinese Nationalists of planting the dynamite, the Kuantung Army went into action. Dreams of imperial glory, anxieties about shortages and overpopulation, and a sense of foreboding that it was falling behind in the competition between armed empire blocs pushed Japan on a path that left devastation in its wake and the consequences of which it would have to live with for generations to come.
‘First unity, then resistance’ was the phrase Chiang Kaishek used in November 1931 to explain his approach to resisting Japanese aggression. In speeches and articles he insisted that China would be able to fight back against Japan only if the country was unified, its leadership had broad support and it was governed by a strong and effective administration. ‘If domestically we are divided in our aims and our policies are uncoordinated … we will repeat the Ming tragedy of being subjugated.’1
Chiang Kaishek was referring here to the fate of the Ming Dynasty, which had been overthrown in April 1644 by Li Zicheng, the leader of a peasants’ revolt. When Li Zicheng seized the throne in Beijing, establishing his extremely short-lived Shun Dynasty, the Ming general Wu Sangui had turned to the Manchus for help. They had entered north China in force, defeated Li Zicheng’s armies, and established the Qing Dynasty, which proceeded to rule China from 1644 until the 1911 Revolution. The failure of the Chinese to unite was allowing a foreign invader once more to seize a part of China, argued Chiang; and if such disunity continued, then the Republic of China could suffer the same fate as had befallen Li Zicheng. The Ming Syndrome, as this existential fear might be called, would haunt the minds of Chinese leaders, Communist as well as Nationalist, for decades.
Chiang had solid reasons to believe that it would be suicidal to take on the well-trained, well-equipped Kuantung Army. From the moment they took power right up to the Japanese attack in Manchuria, the Nationalists had been fighting one rebellion after the other. They had convened a military demobilisation conference in Nanjing in 1929 at which the assembled regional military leaders had taken the oath ‘We solemnly swear before the grave of Sun Yatsen that we will respectfully obey his last will and commit ourselves to troop demobilisation and saving the country.’2 The words had hardly passed their lips before the Christian General Feng Yuxiang led a rebellion. This was followed shortly afterwards by an uprising in Guangxi province, south China, of the Guangxi Clique, whose leaders, Generals Li Zongren and Bai Chongxi, drew a powerful army, reckoned to be the second strongest in the country, from this poor province. Having joined the Nationalists during the Northern Expedition, they were a major force in their government. In 1930, during the War of the Central Plains, virtually all of the regional military commanders united in a punitive expedition against Chiang, accusing him of ‘six crimes’ which, they argued, had led him to ‘part from the party and the nation and earn the hatred of the people’.3 The ensuing civil war, which brought a million soldiers into the battlefield, lasted from May until November 1930 – thereby also reinforcing China’s international image as a hopeless basket case.
Neither Chiang Kaishek nor his Nanjing government were popular in north China. Indeed, had he sent troops there when the Japanese took over Manchuria, not only would they have been defeated but the north Chinese generals would have wreaked their revenge. As in the north, so in the south. When the
Japanese went into action in Manchuria, China’s southern generals also refused to come to Chiang’s aid. Chiang sent emissaries to General Chen Jitang, the chair of the Guangdong provincial government, and General Liu Xiang, who headed the largest army in Sichuan province. They rebuffed him, refusing to make any promises about what they would or would not do if he took action against the Japanese. Meanwhile, in his own backyard in central China, the Communists were building up base areas which Chiang had been unable to suppress. His conclusion was that ‘only if we are united can we resist invasion. No country that has been internally divided has ever been victorious over a foreign enemy. We can only succeed if we are united, regardless of whether we use diplomatic or military means to deal with our foreign problems.’4
During the Nanjing Decade, as the years before the outbreak of full-out war in 1937 became known, military development was an important driver behind the nation-building efforts of the Nationalists. After it became clear that convincing the warlords to demobilise their armies was a non-starter, in order to establish their dominance they focused on building up an elite army, with German assistance. Chiang Kaishek regarded the way in which the German army related to the state and was embedded in its society as an essential element of Germany as a modern nation state, and saw China’s divergence from this as an indicator of its backwardness. Chiang had learned about the German model while studying in Japan, of course, but he probably also read about it during the First World War in the Chinese press, which had followed events in Europe closely. One military thinker who had received much attention was General Friedrich von Bernhardi, whose 1911 book Germany and the Next War described war positively as a creative and cleansing act which brought the best out of a civilisation and strengthened its vitality – an idea which ran through Chiang’s thinking as well.5 Chiang’s admiration for the German model also arose from the fact that even though Germany had been defeated in the First World War, it was managing to rebuild its army effectively and rapidly.
Well aware that military victory alone would never be enough, the Nationalists engaged in a host of other nation-building efforts, including constructing a new transport network, fostering industrialisation, promoting education and building up a modern government apparatus, including modern police forces, a judiciary and a civil service. They promoted the New Life Movement, based on a modernised and essentialised Confucianism, to help define the Chinese nation state as well as its culture. If in 1928 assessments and expectations of the Nationalists by foreign observers were low, a decade later they had been replaced by a grudging but nonetheless genuine admiration.
Military Reform
When the divisions of the National Revolutionary Army, as the Nationalists called their armed forces, entered Beijing, the Northern Expedition was declared triumphant. As so often, it proved much easier to begin than to end a war. The number of provincial troops incorporated into the army was alleged to have reached as many as 2.2 million men.6 This figure included units under Chiang Kaishek’s command, but excluded the Fengtian Army in Manchuria, as well as many other less important units. This was no doubt an overestimate, however. Generals padded their roster with fictional soldiers so as to increase their financial base. Nonetheless, it was still a very large number – a product of the fact that military muscle was an indispensable asset in the struggle for power, and also that in a country as poor as China, even at very low rates of pay, military service was an attractive proposition for many.
The Nanjing government adopted an approach that tried to find a way between furthering its core centralising and unifying agenda and the reality that its power was limited. In February 1928, it established KMT branch political councils in Canton, Wuhan, Kaifeng, Taiyuan and Beijing, which ‘in their assigned jurisdictions exercise and supervise supreme local authority’. The main military generals were appointed as chairs of the branch political councils, while they also were given high appointments in the Nanjing government. In return for adopting the KMT nomenclature and accepting these appointments, they continued to enjoy virtual independence in the regions under their control.
Having decided to strengthen his own forces and make a core central army that could dominate all others, Chiang Kaishek turned to his German advisors to assist him. The first German advisor, Max Bauer,7 an artillery expert who served on the German General Staff, had travelled to China in 1928, but in 1933 Chiang went one better when he induced General Hans von Seeckt, ‘the Father of the National Defence Army’ in Germany, to come to China. Von Seeckt viewed the army as a symbol of the nation: it manifested the state and ensured its dominance, both domestically and internationally, but was itself apolitical. In a memorandum to Chiang, von Seeckt argued that he should build an elite army of sixty divisions, supported by a highly trained officers corps, paid for out of central funds and with a strict personnel system, a strong logistical organisation and a domestic arms industry. The implementation of this vision for the Nationalist military was left to General Alexander von Falkenhausen, who had served in the German army in Turkey during the First World War and who had travelled widely in Japan and China.
In November 1932, the Nationalists established a covert general staff, the secret National Defence Planning Council, to implement von Seeckt’s techno-nationalist vision. It began by collecting a vast amount of information, covering most provinces, about China’s natural resources, transport infrastructure, marketing networks, population, agriculture, education, revenue flows, existing military forces and international relations, as well as Japan’s armed forces. It drew up detailed plans for: the training of first six and then eighteen elite divisions; the assumption of control by the government over key economic sectors such as the electronics and iron industries; the construction of an industrial base in central China well away from the coast, which was vulnerable to invasion; the building of new transport links; and the training of a new officer corps. The data derived from these investigations formed the basis of a raft of new policies, including for the army, government ministries, various social programmes and culture.
Supported by a trade agreement with Germany, by which Germany provided arms and industrial equipment in return for Chinese commodities and mineral resources, this programme advanced with considerable speed in subsequent years. In 1934, a secret Army Reorganisation Bureau began to weed out the unqualified, ill or elderly from Nanjing’s forces and retrain the remaining units. In 1933, the Nationalists promulgated a national military service law, which divided China into sixty recruitment regions, one each for the projected sixty divisions. The plan was that all males between the ages of eighteen and forty-five would become liable to serve either in elite ‘reformed’ divisions under officers trained at the national military academy or in territorial units. Following active service for two years, they would be obliged to serve for six years in the first reserves and then until the age of forty-five in the second reserves. Some 50,000 men were recruited in this way before the outbreak of war with Japan.8 A specialist group took charge of the construction of fortifications. Nanjing, as the national capital, was kitted out with anti-aircraft and dual-purpose artillery. Heavy artillery was brought in from Germany to fortify Jiangyin, Zhenjiang and Wuhan along the Yangzi river, as well as coastal cities such as Xiamen, Canton and Ningbo. Defensive positions were prepared at Yellow river crossings and fortified points were also prepared at potential battle sites in north China, including at Xuzhou, where the key battle of the first year of the war would indeed take place.9
Detailed strategic plans were formulated with the help of German advisors, with the first national war plan formally issued in 1936. Given Japan’s military superiority, China opted for a strategy of attrition which would exploit its vast space and huge population. China’s most pre-eminent strategic thinker of the time, the colourful and learned Jiang Baili, argued that no resistance should be offered if Japan attempted to occupy China’s coastal provinces and that the Nationalists should simply retreat into the hinterland. Von Falkenhausen disagr
eed, arguing that any attack should be met head on. The Nationalists also had to show that they were willing to make serious sacrifices to defend their country; the population could not be expected to make their own sacrifices if they did not. Von Falkenhausen’s view prevailed.
On the eve of the War of Resistance, Nanjing was militarily in much better shape than it had been before. Its central army units’ training and weapons surpassed anything that any domestic adversary could bring to the field. Its military dominance in China was assured, even though the ranks of the regional armies remained swollen. Agreement, too, had been reached among the Nationalist military leadership about what strategy to adopt if it came to war with Japan.
Civil Reconstruction
An important plank of Nanjing’s nation-building programme was the New Life Movement, a Confucian moral rearmament campaign that had begun in the military in 1933, and was extended to the civil realm a year later. In conformity with the idea that revolution had to combine the transformation of society and of the self, it was based on the following diagnosis of China’s ills:
In our society today, the general attitude is one of moral laziness and apathy … The bureaucracy is insincere and greedy, the people are disunited and listless, the youth is degenerate and indulgent, adults are corrupt and muddle-headed, the rich live lives of elaborate but dissolute sophistication, and the poor are base and confused. The result is that the bonds that tie the nation together have been weakened, social order has broken down, we are defenceless in the face of national calamities, internal rebellion has spread widely, and foreign aggression continues unabated.10
The New Life Movement promoted ‘four cardinal ethical principles’ (propriety, righteousness, frugality and modesty) and ‘eight virtues’ (loyalty, filial duty, humaneness, love, faith, justice, peace and equality), all derived from Confucianism, which aimed at turning China’s population into properly dressed, courteous, clean, punctual, honest and patriotic citizens who did not spit, knew when to shake hands and queued in line to wait their turn. A New Life hierarchy, reaching down to the lowest levels of society, especially in the cities, promoted New Life ideas by staging rallies, organising propaganda weeks, conducting theatre performances and dispatching students into teahouses and restaurants to upbraid their patrons for their extravagance. Limits were stipulated for banquets, weddings and official entertainment. Physical education and sports were promoted, with many schools installing running tracks, exercise machinery and playing fields.11 Whatever else it aimed to achieve, the New Life Movement was to turn China’s population into healthy and obedient material for the army.
China at War Page 5