The Last Empress

by Hannah Pakula

  Unlike the armies of the warlords, Chiang’s men had been and continued to be indoctrinated with reasons for sacrifice. But just in case the lessons failed to take hold, Chiang introduced harsh penalties for cowardice on the field of battle. If a company of soldiers retreated, their commander was to be shot on the spot; if the commander of an army corps stood his ground and was killed, his divisional commanders were shot if they then retreated; and if a divisional commander died under similar circumstances, those below him in rank were shot for falling back. The punishment for any soldier caught stealing was death.

  Draconian though these measures were, they were an attempt by Chiang to set the National Revolutionary Army apart in the minds of the people from the armies of the warlords. Soldiering was not an admired profession in China, and the average Chinese soldier of the day had no motivation to keep him from switching from one army to another. Moreover, Chinese soldiers were forced to live off the land they conquered. During the Warlord Era, an invading army would enter a town, call a meeting of the members of the Chamber of Commerce, and demand that the local merchants provide two or three months’ pay for the army’s soldiers. The warlord would commandeer a large number of private houses for billeting his troops, and if the houses were not vacated immediately, the army packed up the contents and kept them. The inhabitants of the town were also expected to provide transportation and local laborers for the invaders.

  But when Chiang’s troops entered a town, the accompanying propagandists held public meetings at which arguments for the national revolution were interspersed with entertainment. They also passed out posters. “We paid as much attention to posters as to rifles,” Borodin said. As to the soldiers themselves, Chiang’s men slept in temples or other empty public buildings. Moreover, everything Chiang’s soldiers needed on the march was paid for with the money requisitioned from the Cantonese government. “I expect to win the war 30 per cent by fighting and 70 per cent by propaganda,” Chiang asserted. Realizing that they did not need to flee, as they had been accustomed to doing with warlord armies on the march, the locals worked as guides and carriers for Chiang’s soldiers and sold them water and food, all the while being indoctrinated with revolutionary propaganda.

  Two days after catching up with his army in Changsha, Chiang issued a proclamation to the nation—a statement that indicates how much he had already learned from Borodin: “The revolutionary army is about to wage a decisive campaign against the followers of Wu Pei-fu.… It is a struggle between the people and the militarists, between the revolutionaries and the reactionaries, between the Three Principles of the People and imperialism.… As a revolutionary I am fighting for the people. The object of the expedition is… to give birth to a unified government… and… to lay the foundation for liberty and independence.”

  With these high-sounding motives and his new rules of warfare, it is not surprising that Chiang’s brown-clad soldiers moved north with dizzying speed. Nothing seemed to stop them, even an epidemic of cholera. Both the army and its commander gained credence from their march, and Chiang Kai-shek quickly assumed the aura of an unbeatable leader. According to Fortune magazine, “he conquered China, and it does not dull his glory that he won by an astuteness less military than human and political.” And from The New York Times:”China has a new strong man, a new conquering general… he is master of half of China. In all the long centuries of Chinese history there is no parallel for this amazing series of sudden victories.” Like Sun Yat-sen, Chiang dressed simply in a plain cotton uniform with straw sandals; he neither drank alcohol* nor smoked. Moreover, he kept discipline among his soldiers. Within eight months of the death of Sun Yat-sen, it looked as if the Chinese nation had found another hero.

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  General Chiang… wishes to gain supreme control of the political administration as well as the army.

  —NORTH-CHINA HERALD, 1926

  BY SEPTEMBER of 1926, Chiang and his army had reached the Yangtze River, some five hundred miles north of their base in Canton. In spite of the fact that 15,000 men had died or been disabled in battle, the National Revolutionary Army had tripled in size to 220,000. Many of the additions were mercenaries, men who had not yet been indoctrinated with the Three Principles of Dr. Sun but who had been lured by defeat or bribery over to the revolutionary forces.

  “Very soon our army will arrive at Wuchang and Hankow,” Chiang announced. “I hope the people will give it all assistance, and simultaneously arise and try to save the country.” As might be surmised from this rather tentative statement, the prospect of conquering the triple-city enclave of Wuhan (Wuchang, Hankow, and Hanyang), the next major landmark on he road to Peking, was causing the general of the National Revolutionary Army some trepidation. Known as “the Chicago of China,” Wuhan was a metropolis—a port and railway hub where 170,000 workers toiled in mostly foreign-owned factories, making them prime candidates for the kind of radicalism that the Russian and Chinese Communist Parties were trying to foment within the army and the country. To avoid getting bogged down in strikes and demonstrations, Chiang sent part of his army under the leadership of General T’ang, a warlord from Hunan, to Wuhan, while he himself took the best of his soldiers into the province of Kiangsi.

  For the first time the Northern Expedition ran into trouble—not only at Wuhan, where one general told of having to rein in his horse so as not to trample the dead soldiers littering the ground at the front, but at Nanchang, a one-industry (enamelware) town in the northern part of Kiangsi. Dating back to the middle ages, Nanchang, capital of the province, was a maze of dirty, winding lanes, potholes, and stagnant pools of water, surrounded by a wall twenty-two miles long that, Chiang claimed, had not been scaled in the previous nine hundred years of the city’s history. Continually repulsed in his own efforts to breach the wall, Chiang was finally enabled to take the city when General T’ang sent more men, equipment, and money from Wuhan. An enclave of retired landowners, Nanchang, according to Jennie, who followed her husband, was “very conservative, proud and wealthy. The people,” she observed, “still looked with suspicion upon any innovations.… Western influence had not yet penetrated.”

  But Chiang’s decision to split his army had been a serious mistake, resulting in a division of authority between two camps, the other one directed by Soviet advisers who were primarily interested in fomenting a Communist revolution. During the march north, the headquarters of the Kuomintang had remained in Canton with Borodin at the helm, angling to take back some of the authority he had been forced to cede to Chiang after his trip to Russia. Toward that end, the Soviet adviser spearheaded a party conference aimed at attracting discontented peasants, encouraging workers’ strikes, and convincing Wang Ching-wei to return to China.

  Partly to keep an eye on these maneuvers, Chiang proposed that the offices of the KMT be moved north to Wuhan and that the members of the government stop to see him in Nanchang on their way. Among the group that headed for Wuhan with Borodin were Chiang’s future brother-in-law T.V. Soong; his future sister-in-law Sun Ching-ling; her stepson Sun Fo, called by Han Suyin “a morose nonentity”; and Eugene Chen, the KMT’s foreign minister. Chen, who wore gold-rimmed glasses and white spats, had received his legal training in England, served as private secretary to Dr. Sun at the time of his death, and worked as Borodin’s “mouthpiece” in Canton. Mostly Chinese and partly West Indian, Chen was described by American journalist Vincent Sheean as “a small, clever, venomous, faintly reptilian man, adroit and slippery in the movements of his mind… with a kind of lethal elegance in appearance, voice and gesture.” Those who admired Chen spoke of his brilliant mind and the clever jabs of his pen. According to a journalist on The New York Times, Chen threw political polemics around “as if they were confetti at a carnival.”

  The trip north had been an uncomfortable and precarious one, involving daily rainstorms, muddy roads, and sedan chair bearers who had to be hired from local opium dens every morning because their predecessors had run away during the night. Alth
ough the Chinese members of the group were perfectly willing to be carried, Borodin and other Russians, insisting that this mode of transport was not appropriate for members of the Communist Party, stowed their luggage in the palaquins and rode on donkeys or walked. Before reaching Nanchang, they were met by Chiang, who had prepared a welcoming ceremony and subsequent feast. This was followed by a conference at the Fairy Glen Hotel* in the resort of Kuling, a mountain retreat for the wealthy. To get up the steep twelve-mile-long path, guests had to be carried in sedan chairs—assistance that we assume even Borodin did not refuse. In spite of the lovely setting, the meetings did nothing to heal the rift developing between the left and right wings of the KMT.

  When Borodin & Co. finally arrived in Wuhan in early December of 1926, they found a city in revolutionary chaos. Forty-eight hours after General T’ang’s entry into the tri-city complex, more than 60,000 workers had gone on strike. A week later, fifty-two factories closed down. Schools were set up to teach techniques of striking; street meetings followed by boisterous parades were a daily occurrence; and the main avenues were filled with pickets flaunting the red star or the hammer and sickle, greeting each other with raised and clenched fists. Importers no longer dared bring in their goods, and exports remained in the warehouses or on the wharves of the Hankow Bund. Trade, the lifeblood of the city, had been cut “to a trickle.”

  Treated like a hero and welcomed by the occupying forces of General T’ang, Borodin was taken to shore on a small motorboat decorated with flags and bunting. It must be noted, however, that as the boat drew close to land, a British cruiser turned and deliberately sideswiped it, thus issuing a warning that the Great Powers might react if matters got any more out of hand. Which they did a month later, when a crowd, inflamed by anti-imperialistic diatribes, gathered in a square near the British Concession in Hankow* to taunt the British marines guarding the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. The marines fired on the demonstrators, wounding several. The next morning a furious mob attacked the British Concession, smashing windows, destroying automobiles, surrounding the British Consulate, and yelling “Beat the foreigner!” and “Kill the Englishmen!” Outnumbered by the mob, the English abandoned the British Concession and escaped to their gunboats, anchored along the Bund—the first time that the British had given up any Chinese territory in sixty-six years. When KMT leaders got to the scene, they calmed the crowd and arranged for the release of British subjects who had been taken prisoner. Borodin was ecstatic. “The situation is strengthened,” he wired triumphantly to Chiang in Nanchang, “the masses believe us. The taking of the concession… demands the presence of the national government in Wuhan; the leaders must be at the head of the people at the time of the movement.” A second telegram also urged Chiang to come to Wuhan. Chiang, who arrived during the second week of January 1927 and quickly realized that Borodin and General T’ang were now his enemies, demanded that Borodin dispense with the services of Tang. Once back in his own headquarters in Nanchang, he let it be known that Borodin must leave China if he, Chiang, was to make any accommodation with the radical camp.

  Chiang was not the only person appalled by the government in Wuhan. May-ling, who spent three months in the winter of 1926–1927 with her mother and Ai-ling visiting sister Ching-ling and brother T.V., reported that “the divergencies between our National policy and the policy of The Third International” had “developed into gaping chasms due to the pervasive excesses of Communist Cadres.” Wuhan, she said, had become the unhappy scene of “indiscriminate arrests, public lashings, illegal searches and seizures, kangaroo courts and executions. The chaos,” she concluded, was “purposely accelerated and exacerbated by the Communists… to subvert the Kuomintang.”

  During her three-month visit to Wuhan, May-ling engaged Borodin in long conversations, during which he expounded at length on his views on revolution and communism. These exchanges took place in brother T.V.’s apartment in the Central Bank building in Hankow, where May-ling and Ai-ling were staying. They were “outwardly congenial,” although, as May-ling put it, “We three and Borodin were poles apart basically in thinking.” Many years later she would describe him as “undoubtedly the most competent of the competents” and “one of the most persuasive and fascinating Bolshevik propagandists ever sent out from Moscow to spread the revolution abroad.”

  There was nothing particularly unusual in what Borodin said: “he kept on asseverating* and reasseverating Lenin’s preachment that the true revolutionaries are those who are willing to resort to all sorts of strategems [sic], illegal methods, artifices, evasion and subterfuges,” May-ling wrote years later, adding the obvious conclusion that “the Communist end justifies the Communist means.” An ardent Christian, May-ling was probably shocked when Borodin told her that the Communists “must find ways and means to either deal with, neutralize or expose Judeo-Christian thought as a phony, a bogus belief designed to make people resign to their fates.” The Judeo-Christian tradition, Borodin said, was politically “dangerous” precisely because of its enormous power in the Western world and because it permeated “the two great imperialist anti-Communist citadels… the British Empire and the United States of America.”

  Nonetheless, Borodin, who received wired instructions every other day from Moscow, clearly fascinated May-ling, as he fascinated others:

  As I recollect, even now I can see Mr. Borodin in my mind’s eye… pacing to and fro in my brother T.V.’s apartment living-room… with his inveterate cigarette dangling between his index and middle finger of his left hand.… In person he was of a tall,* commanding presence with a leonine head, with a shock of neatly coifed, long, slightly wavy dark brown mane that came down to the nape of his neck, with an unexaggerated but ample moustache.… He was rather heavy-set with strong regular features.… Speaking in a resonantly deep, clear, unhurried baritone voice of mid-America intonation without a trace of Russian accent, he lowered still more his voice into a slow basso profundo when emphasizing the importance of a certain point he was making. He was a man who gave the impression of great control and personal magnetism.… He was capable, able, shrewd if entirely cynical.… He could see cruelty, injustice and degradation committed with detached coolness. He acted out his misguided role as the instrument of The Third International with aplomb and with dedication.

  What May-ling may or may not have been aware of were Borodin’s feelings for her. According to Emily Hahn, who interviewed all three sisters, one day a “delighted” servant brought a scrap of paper taken from Borodin’s bedroom to another one of the Soongs. On it the Comintern operative had written over and over, “May-ling darling. Darling May-ling.” Her sisters, of course, could not resist teasing her about this.

  UNWILLING TO WORK with Borodin or his Soviet sponsors, Chiang declared war on the Communists. In January and February of 1927, he contacted his friends, high and low, in Shanghai. As the leader of the eminently successful National Revolutionary Army and longtime associate of Dr. Sun, Chiang expected and received support from the Great Powers and their Shanghai bankers, as well as anti-Communists and less radical revolutionaries. Frightened that the Kuomintang would be absorbed into the Communist Party, capitalists of all stripes, both foreign and Chinese, contributed to an initial short-term loan of 3 million Chinese dollars,† followed by an additional 7 million.‡

  In February, Chiang began to make his move toward Shanghai, the largest and wealthiest city in China and the center of Western industry, finance, and trade. Shanghai’s citizens, particularly its 70,000 foreigners, were in a state of near panic at rumors of the expected assault. Unable to count on the police, who were either underpaid or owned by the Green Gang, women and children from the foreign concessions crowded onto outgoing ships, as 40,000 soldiers from a dozen nations around the world arrived in the port. Members of the so-called Shanghai Volunteer Corps dug trenches and put up sandbags and barbed-wire barricades on the borders between the Chinese city, where bare, low-wattage bulbs lit the dark alleys at night, and the foreign concession
s, where residents continued to wine and dine in brightly lit splendor.

  According to The Manchester Guardian, the members of Shanghai’s foreign community suffered from a willful inability to understand why they were not loved and appreciated by the Chinese, on whose backs they had built their fortunes. “These people… look round on their magnificent buildings and are surprised that China is not grateful to them for these gifts, forgetting that the money to build them came out of China.” This sentiment was echoed by Sheean: “The coolie population… was easy prey for manufacturers who wished to make the modest profit of a thousand per cent.… I never met anybody in Shanghai who revealed the slightest feeling of shame… in thus taking advantage of human misery.… On the contrary… Shanghai saw itself as the benefactor of all China, and was horrified at the rising Chinese demand for better conditions of life and a recognized share in the spoils.”

  Chiang called for a general strike in Shanghai, and more than 100,000 of the city’s workers obeyed him. To discourage the strikers, one assistant to Shanghai’s chief warlord, Sun Ch’uan-fang, had his chauffeur drive his headsman from one demonstration to another; stopping every so often so the headsman could get out and behead any worker with a red hat, a red muffler, a red notebook, or even a red pen. This bit of butchery infuriated the demonstrators, and three days later, there were 350,000 men on the picket lines. Believing that Chiang’s troops would enter the city momentarily and support them, the revolutionaries turned their strike into an armed uprising. The armies that still controlled Shanghai retaliated, executing more than a hundred strikers and placing their heads on stakes, on platters, or in bamboo cages that were hung on telephone poles in the busiest streets in the Chinese sector of the city. When it rained, the black hair on the bodiless heads dripped on the pedestrians below.