The Deluge

by Adam Tooze

  On 21 November the Washington Conference approved the so-called Root resolutions. These promised to ‘respect the sovereignty, the independence and territorial and administrative integrity of China’. The Chinese delegation had wanted a specific commitment to the integrity of the Chinese Republic, but Japan thought it better not to prejudge the question of the Chinese constitution.22 Nevertheless, this commitment went further than all previous guarantees in promising to uphold China’s political as well as its territorial integrity. In what they regarded as a major concession, Britain persuaded Japan to evacuate all its troops from the hotly contested Shandong Peninsula. Japan promised China the right to buy out the German railway lease over a 15-year period. Here, too, Tokyo’s retreat was in line with the strategic reorientation initiated by Hara and pushed forward by Takahashi.

  A year earlier, in the summer of 1920, Tokyo had once again faced a crisis in its China policy. Its favoured warlord Duan Qirui had been ousted as Prime Minister for the second time by the Zhili faction led by Generals Wu Pei Fu and Cao Kun.23 Amongst the Japanese army stationed in Manchuria, there were influential voices demanding that Japan’s Manchurian client Chang Tso-lin should use this opportunity to extend his power in the north-east and even as far as Mongolia. But Chang’s loyalty was suspect and Tokyo was still reeling from the huge upsurge in anti-Japanese feeling following the protests of 4 May 1919 over Shandong and Versailles. Following a conference on eastern strategy in May 1921, Tokyo resolved to reassert its defensive posture. Japan would hold fast to its special interest in the territories that lay to the north of the Great Wall and were thus outside China proper. But warlord Chang was to be discouraged from any aspirations to national leadership. Between Chang and the Zhili, Japan would attempt to preserve neutrality. A cooperative and mutually profitable economic relationship would be far more helpful in underwriting both China’s and Japan’s position in the new world order.24 Japan’s restless Manchurian army was put on the leash. At the Washington Conference, it was Kijuro Shidehara, the liberal-minded ambassador, who took charge of the Sino-Japanese negotiations and pushed them in a conciliatory direction, the line that he was to continue to personify for the next ten years.

  The Chinese were not appeased by the Shandong settlement proposed at Washington.25 Outside the conference there were angry demonstrations by Chinese Americans who sought to prevent their representatives from even continuing the talks. Since Versailles, however, the international mood had shifted. In Paris in 1919 China’s position had attracted international sympathy. On that occasion it had been the Japanese who were in the dock. Since then, China’s assertive nationalist diplomacy had unsettled the international community. The Western Powers were no friends of the Soviets, but China’s efforts to exploit Russia’s weakness in East Asia were viewed with unmitigated alarm. In October 1920, a year before the Washington Conference, Wellington Koo had reported from the US that the American media were treating China’s abrogation of Russian rights as a ‘preliminary step’ toward the general abolition of all foreign privileges in China. According to opinion in the US, it was nothing less than a Bolshevik-instigated plot to ‘attack the economic and political system of the capitalistic states’.26 Wilson’s last Secretary of State, Bainbridge Colby, opined ominously that ‘by merely appearing to be subservient to the influence of the Russian communists, China would, it is to be feared, lose the friendly regard’ of the international community and might well ‘give an excuse for aggressions’. The need to safeguard strategic Russian assets such as the Chinese Eastern Railway was precisely the kind of excuse the Western Powers needed for intervention. On 11 October 1920 the diplomatic corps in China had addressed a note of collective protest to Beijing, insisting that the abrogation of Russia’s rights should not be seen as setting any precedent. The Chinese reply was non-committal. The final treaty with the Russian government was pending. It would negotiate with the diplomatic corps over a modus vivendi, but would settle individual issues bilaterally.

  When at Washington it was once again the Chinese who appeared to be obstructing a well-intentioned international settlement, there was less willingness than there had been in 1919 to overlook the disorder in Chinese domestic politics. In the first days of January 1921, as negotiations with the Japanese reached deadlock in Washington, the Beijing government installed by Chang Tso-lin was swept away by a tide of patriotic fervour orchestrated by the nationalists in the South and the Zhili.27 At the end of April open warfare resumed between the major warlord blocs, which resulted after only a week of savage fighting in the decisive defeat of Chang and his retreat beyond the Great Wall to Manchuria. At the time of the Washington Conference, as one British diplomat pointed out scathingly, the Beijing government was in fact little more than a ‘group of persons who call themselves a government but who have long ceased to function as such in the western sense of the term’.28 Wellington Koo might put a brave face on things, but ‘a delegation which represented Peking as a political unit would not and could not . . . tell the truth about China’. Out of a ‘mistaken sense of loyalty to Peking and an undue regard for “face”’, China’s diplomats were obscuring their country’s ‘real condition and needs’. What China needed was not patriotic grandstanding, by Western-educated mandarins, but an honest reckoning with its predicament and an earnest appeal for ‘support and protection’ to build a functioning state.29 This was all very well, but what might such an internationally supported project of state-building in China entail? Washington’s clear aim was to put an end to great-power competition in East Asia. But this did not imply the immediate recognition of China’s equality.

  As the conference in Washington dragged into its third month in January 1922, agreement was reached on the anodyne Nine Power Treaty that required all the major international powers to uphold the Open Door in China. This treaty mirrored the loan consortium that had finally been re-established with both Japan and America as members in May 1920.30 Under the terms of the consortium, the United States, Britain, France and Japan agreed to abstain from rivalry in any financial ventures in China. In return, Beijing was expected to borrow only through the consortium. Thomas W. Lamont of J. P. Morgan referred to the partnership as a ‘little League of Nations’.31 In practice the main effect was to put an embargo on China loans, since cooperative deals were hugely complicated and no substantial political faction in China could be found willing to cooperate with the paternalist arrangements they required. In early 1922 US representative Jacob Gould Schurman spelled out to Beijing what Washington would expect in exchange for any substantial injection of funds. Control over the strategic Chinese Eastern Railway must be transferred to an international cartel. Schurman hinted darkly that ‘he hoped that China would voluntarily request cooperation’ since ‘the powers would deplore using pressure against’ it. To this the Foreign Ministry in Beijing simply refused to respond.32 By 1922 no warlord, however unscrupulous, could comply with such radical foreign demands. It would have been political suicide.

  Likewise, no progress was made over tariffs. China wanted control over its own tax revenues and the right to protect its own industries against foreign dumping. But the Washington Conference powers dragged their feet. With the end of the war, France, Italy, Belgium and Spain expected resumption of the payments on the Boxer indemnity. Given its own humiliating financial problems, France insisted on payment in pre-war gold currency, not depreciated modern francs. When Wellington Koo refused, Paris suspended ratification of the Washington Treaty. The state-building momentum that might have emerged from the conference was frittered away. Instead, the continuing disorder in the Chinese hinterland provided ample excuse to uphold the legal extraterritoriality claimed by foreigners. In May 1923, 19 foreign railway travellers were kidnapped in Lincheng.

  As Secretary of State Hughes put it most pompously, these events had provided painful confirmation that the ‘course of political development in China’ had disappointed the expectations of ‘those who had hoped that a ful
ler measure of opportunity for independent development would hasten . . . the establishment of a governmental entity capable of fulfilling the international obligations correlative to the rights of sovereignty . . .’.33 Others jumped to rather more drastic conclusions. US representative Schurman suggested ‘sweeping away . . . the Chinese government’ altogether and replacing it with ‘an international agency’. When Washington refused to consider such a huge deployment of military force, Schurman retreated to arguing for international supervision of the Chinese railway system. The fact that radical ‘students’ and other ‘champions of unabridged sovereignty of China will . . . oppose it’ would simply have to be ignored.34

  The British representative at the Washington Conference, Victor Wellesley from the Foreign Office’s Far Eastern Department, agreed that radical action was called for. ‘Nothing can be more fatal than a display of weakness,’ he opined. ‘The prestige of the European races has been steadily declining in the Far East ever since the Russo-Japanese war and it has suffered a severe blow as the result of the Great War.’ He too supported the idea of an international constabulary to take charge of the major traffic arteries across China. But as cooler heads in the Foreign Office immediately pointed out, in 1923 the idea of a collective expedition along the line of the Boxer intervention was out of the question. As one official in London commented in jaundiced tones, ‘whereas in the days gone by we could make things uncomfortable for China or the Chinese, though we (still) could, they now know that we are not really prepared to do anything, and have called the bluff’.35 He was surely right. The Washington Conference was both a dramatic demonstration of the global power hierarchy and a deliberate decision to deflate the currency of military power. The aim was to clear the way for economic forces to take the lead in reconstruction. But in the most troubled arenas of world power, in Asia and Europe, would that be enough?36

  22

  Reinventing Communism

  America announced its entry into great-power politics at the highest level in 1905 when President Teddy Roosevelt arbitrated the Portsmouth Treaty that ended the Russo-Japanese War. When 16 years later his Republican successors welcomed the world to the Washington Conference, Japan was invited, as was China, but Russia was not. Though the Red Scare was over, there was no question of the Republicans being willing to host the Communists. But it was not just that they were excluded. In 1919 at Versailles the spectre of revolution had at least been seen as a menace. Two years later at Washington, the Soviets registered in the international balance only by way of the humiliating concessions that they were making to Beijing. The Soviet Union had survived. But its economy was in ruins and its attempts to spread the revolution had been contained, in large part through local counter-revolutionary action.1

  This failure of the promise of revolution is an essential element in the story of post-war stabilization, and it is significant not only in a negative sense. Out of that failure the Communist movement developed a new long-range strategy of insurgency, not metropolitan but peripheral in its base, not based on the proletariat but appealing to the majority of the world’s population, the peasantry. It was an ideological shift that marked a profound break with the nineteenth century, a wrenching reorientation within Marxist political thought at least as fundamental as anything that happened, for instance, to the tenets of bourgeois liberalism.2 Whereas London and Washington were worrying about what self-determination might mean for the constitution of India or the Philippines, in Moscow the Comintern was recognizing the colonial and semi-colonial peasantry as one of the pre-eminent historical forces of the future.

  I

  In the aftermath of the war the international Communist movement had swung from anxiety to euphoria. The Third Communist International, the Comintern, which met for the first time during March 1919 in Moscow, was initially little more than a hastily improvised answer to the meeting of the Social Democratic International that had convened at Berne in February to celebrate Wilson and squabble over war guilt. At its inception the Comintern was not yet the disciplined, Moscow-centred organization that it was to become.3 Along the lines of the pre-war Socialist International, it served as a multilateral meeting place for the Russian Communists and their comrades in the West. Its lingua franca was as much German as Russian. English and French were barely spoken. It reflected a vision of the global revolution as a gigantic all-encompassing blaze, not directed from Moscow but flaring up at many places at once, not defensive and contained but leaping aggressively from city to city. In 1919, true to Marxist orthodoxy, the centre of that firestorm was expected to be in the developed world. The strike waves in Britain and the United States were unprecedented. Even more promising was the situation in Germany, where the USPD had adopted the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets.’ Most dramatic of all was the situation in Italy, where Socialist Party militants were spearheading a huge wave of strikes and peasant land occupations.4 The central question was how these struggles were to be linked to the revolutionary centres in Russia.

  The prospect of revolutionizing central Europe was what gave such significance to the uprising in the tiny, newly formed state of Hungary.5 Hungary was in the unfortunate position of being both a new creation of the 1918 upheaval and, due to the privileged position it had enjoyed within the Habsburg Dual Monarchy, a defeated enemy of the Entente. It was thus perfectly placed for victimization. Its territory would ultimately be slashed by two-thirds. Not surprisingly, the first post-revolutionary government in Budapest, headed by President Mihaly Karolyi, was a keen exponent of Wilsonianism – of the ‘peace without victory’ variety. But the government was soon overwhelmed by punitive Allied demands and on 21 March 1919 Karolyi handed over power to a coalition nominally led by the Social Democrats but dominated by Hungary’s tiny Communist Party and its chief ideologue Bela Kun. Meanwhile the new Soviet government announced a dramatic programme of domestic reforms, but its main priority was to fight off the ambitions of Czechs and Romanians and to regain at least some of Hungary’s pre-war territory. Coinciding as it did with the formation of a Soviet Republic in Munich on 6 April 1919 and the main crisis of the Versailles peace talks, the prospect of a revolutionary overthrow in central Europe created moments of panic in Paris and a thrill of excitement across the left wing of European socialism, above all in Italy.

  A dramatic mobilization by the Hungarian Red Army raised its numbers to 200,000 men, including a brigade of international volunteers from Serbia, Austria and Russia, and on 20 July the revolutionary forces began an offensive due east into Romania across the Tisza River. Their hope was to connect with the Soviet forces that had taken Odessa and now dominated Ukraine. Aerial contact between Hungary and Soviet Russia had already been established in the spring. But unfortunately for the Hungarians at the crucial moment, the Red Army in the Ukraine suffered a setback against resurgent White forces. On 24 July, with the full weight of the Entente behind them, the Romanians counter-attacked. After hard fighting on 4 August the Romanian Army marched proudly down the grand boulevards of Budapest. Communism had been quashed.

  There were those, Winston Churchill most prominent amongst them, who wanted to go further than this, to roll back the Bolshevik revolution itself. And by the spring of 1919, even though London and Paris had decided against full-scale intervention, the White forces of General Alexander Kolchak in Siberia and Anton Denikin in southern Russia had received enough materiel to pose a major threat to the survival of the Bolshevik regime. The White surge reached its high-water mark on 20 October 1919. With General Nikolai Yudenich’s counter-revolutionary army advancing on the suburbs of Petrograd, Denikin driving towards Moscow from the south, and Kolchak on the march from Siberia, the possibility of simply putting an end to the Bolshevik regime looked more real than ever.6 What saved Lenin and Trotsky was that they did not, in fact, face a united front. To have orchestrated a truly effective anti-Bolshevik campaign would have required not only substantial Western commitment, but, more importantly, a political
resolution of the problem of self-determination, as well as a strategic decision on the future of Russia – the same problems that had reduced the strategists of Imperial Germany to embarrassing incoherence in the summer of 1918.

  Over the summer of 1919 the Allies had extracted from Kolchak a commitment to hold elections for a new Constituent Assembly in Russia. But that was not enough for the Poles. Concerned about a resurgence of Russian nationalism, on 11 October Warsaw entered into furtive negotiations with the Soviets.7 In exchange for Polish neutrality, the Bolsheviks ceded much of Belorussia and Lithuania. This arrangement allowed the Bolsheviks to redeploy over 40,000 troops against Yudenich, who was approaching Petrograd along the Baltic.8 Combined with Trotsky’s radical mobilization, which dragooned 2.3 million men into the Red Army, this was enough to tilt the balance. By mid-November the tide of the battle had turned. The Reds triumphed. Denikin and Kolchak were driven to flight. On 17 November 1919 Lloyd George announced to the House of Commons that London, after having spent almost half a billion dollars, was abandoning the attempt to break the Bolshevik regime by military force. The cost was too great and Britain really had no interest in restoring a legitimate and powerful Russian nation state. Echoing the German Foreign Secretary Richard von Kühlmann in the summer of 1918, Lloyd George reminded the House that a ‘great, gigantic, colossal, growing Russia rolling onwards like a glacier towards Persia and the borders of Afghanistan and India’ was the ‘greatest menace the British Empire could be confronted with’. With the threat of revolution on the wane in western Europe, the better policy was to quarantine the Soviet regime behind a ‘barbed wire fence’.9