In having closer communion with God, the essential feature is faith that this Supreme Being is close to you all the time. Such external forms as Church worship & the Bible etc. are good only in so far as they help you in getting closer to God. The essential character though is this belief in the all-powerful love of God.… I wish you would try yourself. I have found that the best way to get into close communion with God is to select a hymn, the meaning of which is exactly what you desire, then read or sing the words till the idea permeates through your consciousness, and you really feel that your mind is ready for communion with God; then pray, as you would talk to your father or with a very close friend. Of course every one has a different way of praying; but to me, this is really the way… I can most strongly feel the presence of God.
You will likely think I have gone crazy, but really, Dada, I have tried and tried everything else. Probably you think I have been “goody-goody,” but no! I am even this very minute sitting on the verandah outside my room writing you and smoking a good cigarette, and enjoying its flavor.
ON JANUARY 26, 1922, Emma received a letter from May-ling telling her about a newspaper job she had found for her friend in Shanghai. Emma had trained to become an army nurse but had left Walter Reed General Hospital, discouraged by bad working conditions and cockroaches. After unsuccessful attempts to land a job as a reporter in Washington, she had gone to Chicago and San Francisco, where she had finally settled for a course in secretarial skills. “Of course I’ll go,” Emma wrote in her diary. “Perhaps within a month.” Two months later to the day, she arrived in China. May-ling met her at the boat, and Emma discovered that although she had originally been invited to live with the Soongs, May-ling had made arrangements for a room in a boardinghouse—a change the hostess explained as a chance for her friend to really experience life in China. The next day Emma was interviewed at The Shanghai Gazette. She got the job and stayed in China for three years— first in Shanghai, where she worked for the Gazette, and then in Peking, where she taught English at the North China Language School. During her first months in Shanghai, she saw May-ling almost every day.
DeLong tells us that Emma thought May-ling seemed nervous when she arrived, unable to sit still and jumping in conversation from one subject to another. Apparently, however, “she never faltered as a consummate hostess and eager guide,” taking her friend with her to lunches, teas, dinners, and dances, at which the other guests did all the “latest steps, including cheek to cheek dancing.” Emma was clearly surprised about May-ling’s attitude toward servants, both her own and others’. One day she turned a wastebasket over on the head of her number one houseboy and, when the boy at Emma’s boardinghouse failed to do her laundry on time, demanded his name and address, thus frightening him into working harder. Moreover, according to DeLong, “May-ling rarely hesitated to ask Emma to do special tasks” like shopping, banking, delivering messages, and handling orders from overseas. “They call these creatures private secretaries and pay them a salary!” Emma wrote in her journal. Then the Gazette let Emma go, and when May-ling asked for the reason, she was told that her friend “hadn’t the faculty for nosing out news.”
Emma also spent time with Ai-ling and Ching-ling, both currently in Shanghai. Before she left the city, she was actually spending more time with Ching-ling than with May-ling—a situation that may have had to do with Ching-ling’s neediness at the time (she and Sun had just fled from Canton) or, more likely, a cooling of interest on the part of May-ling, who was going through a period of religious intensity. In August, Emma wrote her mother,
Mayling has acquired a cast-iron, cut and dried classification of the world. The people who are interesting and have a good time are “fast,” and one must have nothing whatever to do with them; the people one may associate with are mostly missionaries and YWCA workers—and boring. She really has grown fearfully narrow-minded and straight-laced. And when it is a question of Chinese people, dreadfully snobbish. All of which I tell her in no uncertain terms but without the slightest effect. She wanted me to vacation with one of her YW friends, a very nice, but fearfully colorless middle-aged English woman, but I rebelled. Would infinitely rather go off by myself.
It is clear that May-ling’s girlish admiration for her friend lessened in the early months of Emma’s sojourn in China, as did what DeLong called May-ling’s “magnetic pull” over Emma, and their friendship nearly ended. Emma moved to Peking, where she taught English, complaining that she rarely heard from May-ling, who was also late forwarding her mail and packages. It was not until the summer of 1923 that May-ling, on a visit north with the Kungs, asked Emma for tea and the two seemed to get back on a better footing. But May-ling’s letters became “comparatively infrequent and inconsequential”—so much so that Emma, who had treasured and saved the earlier ones, now threw many of them away. Whatever the pleasures of their relationship in the early or later years, only six months after arriving in China, Emma had left both Shanghai and May-ling.
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We are the poorest and weakest state in the world, occupying the lowest position in international affairs; the rest of mankind is the carving knife and the serving dish, while we are the fish and the meat.
—SUN YAT-SEN
IN 1922, the year Emma Mills arrived in China and the year before Chiang Kai-shek left on his mission to Russia, Lenin had sent one of his most accomplished diplomats, Adolf Joffe,* to Peking with instructions to establish diplomatic ties for the new Soviet government with the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But the Chinese government, under heavy pressure from the Great Powers, refused to recognize the Communists. Unable to fulfill his commission in the North, Joffe turned south—to Sun Yat-sen and the Kuomintang.
Sun was embarrassed by the association, but he had as few choices of allies as the Soviets did. He conducted his meetings with Joffe in secret, confiding his dream of a great Northern Expedition—a campaign in which a revolutionary army would overcome the warlords and bring all of China under the umbrella of the KMT. To accomplish this, he told Joffe, he needed financial aid and military advisers. In January of 1923, Sun and Joffe signed an agreement and issued a joint manifesto designed to assuage those who said that Sun was selling out to the Communists. “Dr. Sun Yat-sen holds that the communistic order, or even the Soviet system, cannot actually be introduced into China because there do not exist the conditions for the successful establishment of either communism or Sovietism” read the opening paragraph. “This view is entirely shared by Mr. Joffe, who is further of the opinion that China’s paramount and most pressing problem is to achieve national unification and to attain full national independence; and regarding this great task he assured Dr. Sun Yat-sen that China has the warmest sympathy of the Russian people and can count on the support of Russia.”
Six months later, Sun rationalized his actions to a reporter from The New York Times:
The real trouble is that China is not an independent country. She is the victim of foreign countries.… The foreign nations have pursued the disastrous policy of endowing a corrupt and inefficient clique in Peking and insisting upon the fiction of calling it a Government.… The Peking Government could not stand twenty-four hours without the backing it receives from foreign Governments.… The foreign countries have blindly and persistently declined to recognize the Southern Government.… The revenue… goes to Peking, and a considerable proportion of it is used to fight us.… We have lost hope of help from America, England, France or any other of the great powers. The only country that shows any signs of helping us in the South is the Soviet Government of Russia.
The month after Sun issued this statement, in August 1923, Chiang Kai-shek led a four-man delegation to Russia. He had met earlier with Maring, who supplied two of his traveling companions, both members of the Chinese Communist Party. Arriving in Moscow, Chiang was amazed by what he called “the European atmosphere” of the city. “Everything looks so different from Asia,” he wrote Jennie. He met Georgi Chicherin, the people’s commiss
ar for foreign affairs, the chairman of the Supreme Soviet, and Trotsky, with whom he was impressed. “Mr. Trotsky is an important man in Russia,” he wrote Jennie. Chiang’s greatest regret was that Lenin was very ill* and unable to see anyone.
Chiang studied what he was shown of the Soviet system, but his comments on the political scene were vague—an uncomfortable distillation of Soviet propaganda and his own observations. When he looked into military matters, however, he was on solid ground and more specific in his analyses. “I found that in the 144th Regiment of Infantry… the commanding officer is in charge only of military matters. Political and spiritual training and lectures on general knowledge etc. are done entirely by the Party representatives.… The system works very well.” Chiang learned another lesson from the Russian military—one that many Chinese and his allies wished he had not taken quite so much to heart: the Soviet army was primarily a defensive force, and Chiang’s later refusals to follow defensive successes with offensive forays may well date back to this time. He also attended official banquets, receptions, theatrical performances, and mass meetings, one of which had over 220,000 people in attendance. “For my reading,” he wrote his wife, “I have bought Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. I find the first half of this work very heavy-going, but the second half is both profound and entrancing.”
Chiang arrived home on December 15. He was angry when he heard that while he was away, the Russians had sent another emissary to China, a man currently serving as Sun’s primary counselor. “Our leader has caused me to lose face,” Chiang told Jennie. “How could he accept Borodin [the counselor]… while I was away in Russia? At least he should have cabled me for my advice or waited for my return to consult me. It is not ethical! Now I’ll let him wait for my report. I’ll let him wait, wait, and wait.”
Mikhail Borodin, Sun’s new adviser, was already well on his way to becoming an influential figure in China. Born Mikhail Markovich Gruzenberg in Yanovichi, Russia (now Belarus), a tiny village in the Jewish Pale, he had grown up in Latvia, where he belonged to the General Jewish Workers’ Union before joining the Bolsheviks and becoming one of fewer than a hundred followers of Lenin. Lenin sent him to Switzerland, where he remained until “Bloody Sunday,” January 22, 1905, the day the tsar’s troops fired on a demonstration of workers in front of the Winter Palace. That was the day when, as Lenin’s wife put it, “The realization came over everyone… that the revolution had begun.”
One of the first Bolsheviks to return to Russia, Borodin was arrested in 1905 and exiled. He went to the United States, attended Valparaiso University* in northwest Indiana, and founded a school for emigrés in Chicago. Returning to Russia after the revolution of 1917, he worked as an agent of the Comintern (Communist International) in Scandinavia, Mexico, Spain, Turkey, and Great Britain. Although his native language was Yiddish, by this point in his life Borodin had cut himself off from both the language and his Jewish heritage, identifying himself only as a Russian from Saint Petersburg.† He was sent to China in 1923 and, according to the right-wing journalist George Sokolsky, “No foreigner had ever so thoroughly succeeded in influencing Chinese thought and action.” Glib, charming, and eminently adaptable, Borodin spoke English and could therefore communicate with Sun; he also had great organizational skills and was a skillful proselytizer for the Communist cause. He soon realized that Sun was an extremely effective public speaker. “He made it all up on the spur of the moment,” said Chingling. “It all depended on the political situation and the audience. I would be nervous as a cat, sitting next to him on the platform and wondering what was coming next.” Sun was also an excellent conveyor of political philosophy, and, from the time Borodin began to advise him, he started issuing manifestoes in which he simplified and clarified the political principles of his party in a style accessible to those with a limited reading knowledge of Chinese. Borodin also set up a new Department of Propaganda in order to distribute posters, pamphlets, newspapers, flags, and the writings of Dr. Sun.
“YOU CANNOT TRUST a Communist,” Chiang told Jennie when he came home from Russia. The forty-page report on his mission that he prepared for Sun after his return echoed and reechoed this theme. “From my observations, the Russian Party lacks sincerity,” he wrote. “… The sole aim of the Russian Party is to make the Chinese Communist Party its legitimate heir.… I feel that they wish to make Manchuria, Mongolia, Sinkiang, and Tibet a part of their own Soviet Union. As to China Proper, they wish ultimately to Sovietize it, too.”
Sun did not reply to Chiang’s account of his mission. Nor did he send a letter acknowledging its receipt. After what Jennie Chiang called “an interminable period of nervous waiting,” Chiang wrote Sun again:
I have spent half a year of my time, and more than 10,000 dollars on the Russian mission.… But as to my report of this trip and as to what I saw and heard, you have not given it even the slightest attention. Apparently you feel that I have completely failed on the mission. Or perhaps you no longer have faith in me. In either case, I feel an intense slight and that my reputation has plunged to the ground! I feel, however, that my conduct in Russia was impeccable.… Once, when they tried to force me to join the Communist Party, I refused by saying that I had to obtain Dr. Sun’s permission first. For this I was jeered and ridiculed as being too loyal to an individual and not loyal to the state; that I was fostering an idolatrous cult by revering an individual!
Three days later Chiang received a wire from Sun:
To My Brother Kai-shek,
On your shoulders you have an extremely heavy responsibility from your trip. Please come immediately to Canton to make a report personally on all matters and to prepare detailed plans for cooperation with the Soviets. I wish to know what your proposals are. Whatever you suggest will be respected.
But as usual when he was miffed, Chiang took plenty of time getting to Canton. Once there, he tried to explain to Sun that the Russian Communists were no less dangerous than the old Western imperalists. But as usual, Sun did not listen to what he did not wish to hear.
Meanwhile, Borodin had discovered just how insecure Sun Yat-sen’s position in Canton really was. Driven out of the city by the Hakka General the previous year, Sun had been allowed to take back the title of generalissimo by two other warlords: General Yang of the Army of Yunnan and General Liu of the Army of Kwangsi, both provinces lying west of Canton’s province of Kwangtung. Yang and Liu, who had done this primarily as a cover for their criminal activities, had taken over Canton in order to profit from its opium dens and brothels. In spite of this, Sun always referred to the Kwangsi general as “Living Angel Liu” because Liu had suffered wounds in his stomach and shoulder during the fight for the city. Having divided Canton up into individual fiefdoms, Yang and Liu were planning to leave with the illegal taxes and protection money they had collected. Sun had to deal with their forces, which numbered around 40,000, with a personal bodyguard of fewer than 200 men. And, as usual, the Kuomintang was facing a serious shortage of funds.
At a meeting of the executive committee of the KMT, Borodin recommended that its members go out and find volunteers to defend the city. When 540 men answered the call and the Hakka General’s army began to retreat, Sun, who had refused to follow Borodin’s advice in other matters, acquiesced to Borodin’s suggestion of an all-China Kuomintang Congress, which opened on January 20, 1924, with three ceremonial bows to the KMT flag and one to a picture of Sun Yat-sen. Members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had been ordered to join the KMT. Although they made up less than 15 percent of the delegates present, it was clear that the KMT and its new manifesto—reorganization of the party, establishment of a new relationship between the KMT and the CCP, and a definition of terms for cooperation between Moscow and Canton—had fallen under their influence. Aware of how this looked to non-Communists, Li Ta-chao, the first member of the Chinese Communist Party to join the KMT, issued a statement saying that he and the other members of the CCP had joined the KMT “because we have something to contribute to it…
certainly not because of any intention to take advantage of the situation to propagate Communism in the name of Kuomintang.”
On the sixth day of the congress, news arrived that Lenin had died in Moscow. Before the meeting adjourned for a three-day period of mourning, Sun delivered a speech to the delegates in which he addressed the soul of Lenin, saying that he wished “to proceed along the path pointed out by you.… You are dead… but in the memory of oppressed peoples you will live forever, great man.” When the congress reassembled, it established a permanent Central Executive Committee for the Kuomintang, most of whose members, along with the chairmen of nine new departments, were chosen by Sun and Borodin, the latter managing to insert a disproportionate percentage (20 to 25 percent) of Chinese Communists into key positions. Among these were Li Ta-chao, the author of the disingenuous speech to the Congress, and Mao Tse-tung.
Having arrived in Canton only a few days before the congress, Chiang realized that he was now an insignificant player in both the party and the congress. Appointed chairman of the preparatory committee for a proposed military academy to be established on Whampoa Island downriver from Canton, he sloughed the work off on someone else. Named commandant-designate of the same academy, he declined and left in a huff for his old home in Chikow. “The military academy has been opened for you to take charge of,” Sun wrote Chiang shortly after he left. “Preparations are afoot, and we shall find means of raising funds. From considerable distances some hundreds of military officers and cadets have come already, mostly because they admire the choice of the superintendant of the school. You should not disppoint them. I urge you to come without delay.”
But it was May before Chiang returned to Canton to take over the new academy, which opened on June 16, 1924, with five hundred students. Sun presided over the opening ceremonies. “Because of the lack of a revolutionary army, the Republic has been mismanaged by warlords and bureaucrats,” he told the assembled group. “… With the establishment of this school a new hope is born.… This school is the basis of the Revolutionary Army of which you students form the nucleus.”
The Last Empress Page 17