He went south to Canton, where the financial situation was chaotic and where his older sister Ching-ling suggested he help her husband, Dr. Sun, solve the ever-troubling financial and banking problems of the KMT. Dominated by foreign banks, the city ran on foreign currency, since Chinese money had not yet been standardized. The first thing that Sun Yat-sen asked T.V. to do was organize a bank in Canton that would serve as the central bank of the southern (KMT) government and issue its currency. T.V. tried to introduce Western concepts into the new bank, advising the government not to use it merely as a storehouse of money to be drawn from whenever the need arose. He failed. Nevertheless, the central bank was opened with great ceremony in August 1924, and T.V. was named its president.
In July of 1925, four months after the death of Sun, Chiang Kai-shek established his Kuomintang government in Canton and appointed T.V. finance minister. During the workers’ strikes, T.V. voiced the dilemma of a liberal financier faced with revolution: “On the one hand, I should protect the businessmen, but on the other I should be responsible not to destroy the workers. I must pursue profits for the business community, but I cannot let down the patriotism of the workers.” When the left wing of the government moved to Wuhan, T.V. was one of its core members. Chiang objected to moving the government’s money to Wuhan. Without money, the Wuhan faction could not function, and it asked T.V. to talk to Chiang. Chiang was delighted to confer with his brother-in-law, who was known as the best money man in China, and he invited T.V. to come into his wing of the government as minister of finance. In spite of both “persuasion and threats,” T.V., who still held that position in Wuhan, refused. Angry but determined to avoid direct confrontation, Chiang closed the central bank of the southern government, making it clear that T.V. could accomplish nothing if he did not join his faction of the party. He sent spies to watch Ching-ling’s house in the French Concession in Shanghai, to which T.V. retreated when he could no longer stand the pressure at the Kungs’ or his mother’s home.
If Chiang was determined to have T.V. in his government, so were his rivals. “Hankow [i.e., Wuhan] needed T.V. badly,” said Vincent Sheean. “The ability of that young man to inspire confidence, to make the books balance, to coax money out of hiding places, was an ability nobody at Hankow possessed.… In Hankow the financial situation was beginning to be desperate.” When Sheean left Wuhan to report from Shanghai, Ching-ling gave him a letter to take to her brother saying that “she wished he would return to his post in Hankow.”
“When I went to see him [T.V.] in Shanghai,” Sheean reported, “he seemed ready to fall in with the plan.” T.V., the journalist noted, had become extremely nervous. Aware that the Sun house was being watched, he was afraid to leave the French Concession for fear of being nabbed by Chiang’s soldiers. According to Sheean, T.V.’s alternatives, if he were caught by Chiang, were to join the Finance Ministry or go to prison. “He was, in fact, in a rare state of funk, and the suggestion I brought from Hankow seemed to offer him a way out of all his troubles.” Although T.V. agreed to return to Wuhan and asked Sheean to book a ticket for him under a false name, by the next day, he had changed his mind. “In the interim,” said Sheean, “he had talked to his mother, his sister, his brother-in-law [H. H. Kung], and they were a fundamentally reactionary family. ‘There’s no point in my going to Hankow,’ he said, worried and nervous. ‘You see the truth is that I’m not a social revolutionary. I don’t like revolution, and I don’t believe in it. How can I balance a budget or keep a currency going if the labour policy frightens every merchant or factory owner into shutting up shop?… Look at what they’ve done with my bank notes, my beautiful bank notes.… They’ve been inflated out of existence.… Nothing can be done if they keep on encouraging strikes and mass meetings.’ “
T.V.’s hesitation also had to do with the fact that during one of the many demonstrations in Wuhan, his car had been mobbed and a window smashed by an angry crowd, leaving him with a residual terror of mass behavior. “How can I be sure that I will be safe if I return to Wuhan? Maybe the mob will pull me out of the Finance Ministry and tear me into pieces.… I’m not popular, mind you. I’ve never been popular. The mob doesn’t like me. They would have killed me last winter, if the soldiers hadn’t come in time.” T.V. continued to seesaw back and forth for a week, and on the day Sheean was to collect him for the trip back to Wuhan, he “happened to be in one of his pro-Hankow states of mind.” The journalist went to pick him up at midnight, but by the time he got to the Sun home on Rue Molière, he had changed his mind again. “ ‘I can’t go,’ he said the moment he came down the stairs.’” He then went to see his mother, May-ling, Ai-ling, and H. H. Kung. “After some hours of argument T.V. came out of the recesses of the Kung house and spoke—dejectedly, gloomily. ‘It’s all settled,’ he said, ‘I’m not going. Tell my sister [Ching-ling] I shall write to her. I’m sorry you were troubled for nothing.’ I have never seen him since,” Sheean concluded, “and the events of that night were to give my final impression of Soong Tse-vung… as… the honest Liberal at sea between opposing shores.”
This is a fair assessment of T. V. Soong at the time. Before the split in the KMT became irreparable, T.V. had sold bonds to Chinese businessmen to raise funds for Chiang’s government. But the day after Wuhan put a price on his head, Chiang announced the establishment of his rival government in the city of Nanking and began to issue his own government bonds. But the bankers and businessmen, aware of the rift between Chiang’s government and Wuhan, wanted guarantees that their loans would be repaid, and they asked to have T. V. Soong, whom they trusted, cosign them as finance minister. When T.V. made it known that he would not cosign the loans, Chiang appointed another minister of finance and closed T.V.’s office. Eventually, Chiang was able to force his future brother-in-law into his own camp.
If Chiang refused to take no for an answer from T.V., he also hesitated at nothing to get “loans” from the business community in Shanghai. According to the correspondent of The New York Times, “The plight of the Chinese merchant in and about Shanghai is pitiable. At the mercy of General Chiang Kai-shek’s dictatorship, the merchants do not know what the next day will bring, confiscation, compulsory loans, exile, or possible execution.” This was written in early May 1927, and matters got worse after that. In the middle of the month, the son of a rich indigo merchant was seized as a counter-revolutionary and released only after his father donated 200,000 Chinese dollars* to the Nationalists. The cotton and flour king of Shanghai was arrested on grounds of corruption, and the order to seize his mills was withdrawn—but only after a donation of 250,000 Chinese dollars† was obtained. And the three-year-old son of the director of the Sincere Company Department Store was kidnapped, requiring a donation of 500,000 Chinese dollars‡ to the KMT coffers for his release. Strong-arm tactics quickly engulfed Shanghai’s bankers and merchants in what the American consul called “a veritable reign of terror among the money classes.” An Australian who happened on the scene noted with some irony, “Millionaires were arrested as ‘Communists’!”
Another way of extricating funds for the government was through an anti-Japanese boycott, begun in June 1927. At the end of May, Japanese troops were sent to Shantung province to guard Japanese interests against the soldiers of the Northern Expedition. This led to anti-Japanese demonstrations in various cities around China and the boycott of Japanese goods. Using this as an excuse, government inspectors ransacked Chinese shops for Japanese products, levied fines, and blackmailed their owners. Merchants in the protected International Settlement were treated to the sight of large cages placed along settlement boundaries with signs threatening to fill them with those who violated the boycott. Although Chiang’s KMT agents could not operate legally in these foreign-controlled areas, his alliance with members of the Green Gang gave them access, particularly in the French Concession, where Pockmarked Huang was still chief detective of the police force.
MEANWHILE,THE RADICAL contingent in Wuhan, left relatively defensel
ess with its army in the north, had begun to hear rumors of imminent attacks by the forces of Chiang. By the middle of May, it had been confirmed that Chiang’s allies were less than a hundred miles away and that a general whom Wuhan considered its man had gone over to the other side. On May 16, Moscow ordered the Communists to be ready to leave Hankow—a flight facilitated by the arrival of a special courier with a check for $150,000* in gold. When he received his instructions, Borodin ordered his secretaries to burn his papers. A few days later the government called for the removal of all the anti-Chiang posters plastered on the walls of the tri-city area. Bad news for the radicals came on May 22 with the fall of Changsha, capital of the province of Hunan, to the supporters of Chiang. Changsha, where the teaching of the classics had been outlawed and magistrates had been replaced by citizens’ councils, was the center of what even Wuhan radicals referred to as “left infantilism.” Word from Moscow that “the mass of the poor peasants is the reliable basis of the revolutionary Wuhan government” did not help bolster the confidence of those who wondered if it was already too late to escape the vengeance of the counterrevolution. “The Communists propose to us to go together with the masses,” said Wang Ching-wei at a meeting of the Wuhan Military Council. “But where are the masses? Where are the highly praised forces of the Shanghai workers or the Kwangtung or Hunan peasants? There are no such forces.… To go with the masses means to go against the army. No, we had better go without the masses but together with the army.”
In any case, with the exception of Ching-ling—called by Borodin “the only man in the whole left wing of the Kuomintang”—the leadership in Wuhan was not a particularly staunch group. Certainly Wang Ching-wei had not proved to be much of a leader. He was, as left-wing journalist Harold Isaacs put it, “indecisive in all things except his readiness to retreat before stronger personalities.” Isaacs, a friend of Trotsky and author of a classic history, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, had even less regard for Dr. Sun’s son, Sun Fo. Sun Fo, in Isaac’s words, was “a squirmy politican who changed his views and allegiances so often that even his own colleagues, hardly noted for their steadfastness, contemptuously called him ‘Sun Wu-k’ung’ after the mythical monkey who covered 10,000 miles in a single leap.”
Outside KMT headquarters, things were no better. Ordinary citizens gathered at the central bank to change their paper money into silver but found the doors locked and bolted. “The area around the Central Bank got to looking like a mob scene from ‘Ben Hur,’” wrote one American reporter. “Day after day, the hungry and the poor collected there. They howled for silver and copper, they shrieked and threw their bodies against the bronze doors.” The well-to-do, of course, had other options. “Open carriages, jewels of black lacquer and crammed with people of fashion, went clattering over the cobblestones in the general direction of the French Concession,” the reporter continued. “The French would as usual give refuge to the rich Chinese, at a price.”
The coup de grâce for the Wuhan leaders arrived in the form of a wire from Stalin, ordering, among other things, the arming of twenty thousand members of the Chinese Communist Party, the creation of a 50,000-man army from the peasants of Hunan and Hupeh, and the seizure of the KMT Central Executive Committee by the radicals. Borodin, no fool he, realized that Stalin had sent impossible instructions in order to avoid taking the blame for the failure of his China policy.
With their political position, their finances, and their army all collapsing, the radicals’ last hope of wresting the KMT from Chiang was the Christian warlord Feng, who commanded an army of 200,000 soldiers. Feng had recently returned to China after a period of “instruction and contemplation” in Moscow. By the previous August (1926), Moscow had invested some 6 million rubles in Feng—in guns, cannons, planes, and ammunition, along with the usual quota of military and political advisers. Since then, the Russians had continued to pour millions more into his coffers. Or, as Borodin’s biographer put it, “Moscow thought it had bought Feng in spite of considerable evidence to the contrary.”
The evidence was pretty clear. General Feng had never permitted the Chinese Communist Party to operate in areas under his control and had always suppressed its strikes. More recently, he had ordered the removal of anti-Chiang posters and stopped demonstrations against him. Ignoring these obvious signals, the Wuhan government set up a meeting with Feng for Wang Ching-wei, Madame Sun, and Sun Fo. The Christian General was late, arriving on a freight train, to which he had switched, having traveled from the front on a luxurious coach appropriate to a rich warlord. A man who clearly understood appearance versus reality, it didn’t take him long to figure out that Moscow’s government in China was broke and on the way out. Nevertheless, its representatives offered him three provinces—Honan, Shensi, and Kansu. In exchange, Feng demanded that members of the Chinese Communist Party be removed from the Wuhan government and that Borodin be sent back to Moscow. Convinced that they had made a deal, the delegates arrived back in Wuhan to a jubilant demonstration complete with fireworks. Wang announced that the trip had been successful and that “Feng Yu-hsiang supported Wuhan.”
A week later Feng met with Chiang Kai-shek, and by the end of two days, Feng, a typical warlord looking for the best deal, had decided to join forces with him. For this he was promised $2 million a month and control of the province of Honan. Toward that end, Feng sent Wang a wire suggesting that Borodin return to Moscow and that members of the Wuhan government who wished to join the Nanking national government should do so. The others, he added, ought to take this opportunity to visit foreign lands. But with the exception of Ching-ling and her friend General Teng Yen-ta, a man with the “courage of his convictions that lifted him a long notch above his fellows,” Wuhan had already decided to go with the winner.
On July 15, 1927, the Chinese Communists were officially thrown out of the KMT, and soldiers friendly to Chiang began to take over parts of the tri-city area. No one of note appeared on the street without a bodyguard, and summary executions became “commonplace” on both sides. An unsuccessful attempt was made on the life of Galen, who left for Shanghai to say good-bye to Chiang. After this, the Russian general purchased trucks and cars for his escape through northern China and from there across the rocky steppes and desolate deserts of Inner Mongolia to Russia. As The North-China Herald put it, “Having achieved fame almost equal to that of the ‘Mysterious Borodin,’ he [Galen] goes—like Borodin—unheralded and unsung… a successful military leader, a failure by the turn of Chinese political events.”
Borodin himself, with a price of $30,000* on his head, hid in T.V.’s apartment until he could safely and secretly get out of the tri-city area. Concerned about his safety, T.V. accompanied him to the city of Lushan until plans for his escape could be finalized. Lushan, a summer resort in the mountains, had been founded by the English in the nineteenth century. An oasis of villas surrounded by pines, bamboo, and waterfalls, it could be reached only by palanquins and bearers, who negotiated the three-hour trip up narrow mountain trails, planting little sticks below the boulders to propitiate the spirits holding up the mountainside and crossing bridges that swayed back and forth in the wind. After a week or so, word reached Lushan that Feng had been bribed enough to guarantee Borodin safe conduct through his territory. Accompanied by a retinue of thirty people, five cars, and five trucks, Borodin left Wuhan on July 27 for the two-month overland trip through the desert.
Ching-ling still refused to switch sides or flee. On July 14, she issued a statement condemning Chiang Kai-shek and his nationalist government:
[A]ll revolutions must be… based upon fundamental changes in society, otherwise it is not a revolution, but merely a change of government.… Dr. Sun… was determined that the lot of the Chinese peasant should not continue to be so wretched.… Yet today… men… who profess to follow his banner… think in terms of “revolution” that would virtually disregard the sufferings of those millions of povery-stricken peasants of China. Dr. Sun’s policies are clear. If certai
n leaders of the party do not carry them out consistently then they are no longer Dr. Sun’s true followers, and the party is no longer a revolutionary party, but merely a tool in the hands of this or that militarist.
Before this was published—and immediately suppressed—Ching-ling left for Shanghai, where she returned to her old home on Rue Molière. From there, she continued to denounce Chiang Kai-shek’s government—a practice that for anyone else would have led, according to Sheean, to “a certain and terrible death.” It is said that a frustrated member of the KMT called on her one day. “If you were anyone but Madame Sun, we would cut your head off,” he said sullenly. “If you were the revolutionists you pretend to be,” she smiled back, “you’d cut it off anyway!” Continally pressured by her family to join the pro-Chiang faction and unable to prevent the use of her husband’s name to invoke a blessing on the counterrevolution taking place around her, she passed ten days of frustration before deciding to visit Moscow. She arranged to meet an American friend, a woman named Rayna Prohme, and leave in secret at 3:00 A.M. one night. Joined by Eugene Chen and two of his daughters, they were met in Vladivostok by a special train sent by the Soviets, which took them to Moscow. “I think she is more confused than anything else,” Ching-ling’s friend commented on Sun’s widow. “I haven’t yet been able to determine what the revolution really means to her, if it is blind loyalty to her husband, or some active driving force in herself. If the latter, there will be much to overcome, an instinctive withdrawal from contacts, an almost pathological distaste for anything that is not scrupulously clean, both in things and people, and an impulse to be surrounded always by nice things.”
The Last Empress Page 22