Modern China. A Very Short Introduction (6 page)

Local elites had been instrumental in forming New Armies from the 1860s that allowed the threat from the Taiping and other rebels to be beaten back. But this moved infl uence away from the central government and squarely towards to the provinces.

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This would be a factor when the empire fi nally did collapse: the ground had been set for China to divide into feuding provinces led by warlords, each with his own local army, something that would have been harder to imagine in 1800.

Finally, it may have been the reforms themselves that doomed the dynasty. Empires often collapse when they try to reform, and unleash a forum for voices that are hostile to those in authority.

It was in 1989, during the most liberal era of communist rule, and not in 1969, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, that protesters fi lled Tian’anmen Square demanding that the leadership step down. It was under the liberal Gorbachev, not the brutal Stalin, that the USSR fi nally collapsed.

The abolition of the examinations, for instance, created a huge
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number of angry local elites. For centuries, men would spend years learning the Confucian classics in the hope that they might pass the increasingly severe level of examinations that would let them rise to local and even national status in the bureaucracy. Thousands of young (and not so young) men took
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these examinations and very few passed. But now, the government abolished their
raison d’être
at a stroke. From 1898 onwards, with the sudden ending of a promising series of reforms, too many of China’s elites no longer trusted the Qing to reform China successfully. The Xinzheng reforms were not too little, too late, but perhaps too much, too late.

Among the fi gures dedicated to ending, rather than reforming, the dynasty’s rule was the Cantonese revolutionary Sun Yatsen (1866–1925). Sun and his Revolutionary League made multiple attempts to undermine Qing rule in the late 19th century, raising sponsorship and support from a wide-ranging combination of diaspora Chinese, the newly emergent middle class, and traditional secret societies. In practice, his own attempts to end Qing rule were unsuccessful, but his reputation as a patriotic 29

fi gure dedicated to a modern republic gained him high prestige among many of the emerging middle-class elites in China. As it turned out, however, his stock was less high among the military leaders who would have China’s fate in their hands for much of the early 20th century.

The end of the dynasty came suddenly, and had nothing directly to do with Sun Yatsen. Throughout China’s southwest, popular feeling against the dynasty had been fuelled by reports that railway rights in the region were being sold off to foreigners. A local uprising in the city of Wuhan in October 1911 was discovered early, leading the rebels to take over command in the city and hastily to declare independence from the Qing dynasty. Within a space of days, then weeks, most of China’s provinces did the same thing. Provincial assemblies across China declared themselves in favour of a republic, with Sun Yatsen (who was not even in China at the time) as their candidate for president. Yuan Shikai, leader
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of China’s most powerful army, went to the Qing court to tell them that the game was up: on 12 February 1912, the last emperor, the
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6-year-old Puyi, abdicated.

The crisis of the republic

In 1912, the Republic of China was declared. In 1949, Mao Zedong announced the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. The 37 years of the Republic were dismissed by the Communists as a time of failure and broken promises, and in general, they continue to be regarded as a dark time in China’s modern history. Certainly there was much to condemn during the period: poverty, corruption, and China’s weakness in the international system. Yet, as in Weimar Germany, another period of political turmoil, the chaos actually cleared space for new ideas and a powerful cultural renaissance to begin. In terms of freedom of speech and cultural production, the Republic was a much richer time than any subsequent era in Chinese history. Even in political and economic terms (see also Chapter 5), the period 30

demands serious reassessment. Yet one cannot deny that the high hopes that the revolutionaries had for their Republic were swiftly dashed.

Sun Yatsen had returned to China from his trip abroad when the 1911 Revolution broke out, and briefl y served as president, before having to make way for the militarist leader Yuan Shikai. In 1912, China held its fi rst general election, and it was Sun’s newly established Nationalist (in Chinese,
Guomindang
or
Kuomintang
) Party which emerged as the largest party.

Parliamentary democracy did not last long. The Nationalists’

prime-minister-in-waiting, Song Jiaoren, was assassinated at Shanghai railway station, and shortly afterwards, the Nationalist Party itself was outlawed by Yuan Shikai. Sun had to fl ee into exile in Japan, not to return until 1917, after Yuan had died.

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However, the death of Yuan and the lack of parliamentary representation meant that there was no unifying leader for China, and the country split into rival regions ruled by militarist leaders (‘warlords’) from 1916 onwards. Whoever controlled Beijing was recognized by the international community as the
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offi cial government of China, and was also entitled to national tax revenues from the Maritime Customs Service, the foreign-run agency that brought in income for the national government.

This meant that control of the capital was a fi nancial as well as symbolic prize. Yet governments in Beijing in reality often controlled only parts of northern or eastern China and had no real claim to control over the rest of the country.

The most notable challenge to the idea that the new Republic of China was an independent, sovereign, and modern state was the reality that foreigners still had right of veto or control over much of China’s domestic and international situation.

The global situation following World War I had ended European imperial expansion, but Britain, France, the US, and the other Western powers showed little desire to lose those rights, such as extraterritoriality and tariff control, which 31

they already had. Japan, unlike the Western powers, sought further expansion: in 1915, while Europe was distracted by war, the Tokyo government made the infamous ‘Twenty-One Demands’ to the warlord government of the time, demanding and obtaining exclusive political and trading rights in large parts of China. To many Chinese, the weakness and venality of the Republic seemed a mockery of the whole project of modernizing China.

The city of Shanghai became the focal point for the contradictions of Chinese modernity. By the early 20th century, Shanghai was a wonder not just of China, but of the world, with skyscrapers, neon lights, women (and men) in outrageously new fashions, and a vibrant, commercially-minded, take-no-prisoners atmosphere that made it famous – or notorious – as the ‘pearl’ or the ‘whore’ of the Orient. Its central areas, the International Settlement and French Concession, were out of Chinese governmental control, being
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run respectively by a foreign ratepayers’ council (the Shanghai Municipal Council) and a French governor. This caused a confl ict
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of feelings among many Chinese, from elite to grassroots level.

The racism that came with imperialism could be seen every day, from the kicks and beatings given by boorish European travellers to rickshaw-drivers all the way to the race bar that prevented rich, bourgeois Chinese from membership in European clubs or entry to certain public parks in the city. Yet the glamour of modernity was undeniable too. Millions of migrant workers streamed from the countryside to Shanghai to make a new life. More elite Chinese came to the city to encounter French fashion, British architecture, and American movies, and to enjoy the relative freedom of publication and speech that the city seemed to afford.

It is no surprise that Shanghai in the pre-war period had more millionaires than anywhere else in China, yet also hosted the fi rst congress of the Chinese Communist Party.

Overall, however, Chinese politics seemed to many to be collapsing into warlordism and regionalism by the 1920s. Yet the 32

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4. A patrol car in the foreign-run International Settlement in
Shanghai. Foreigners were constantly concerned about the threat to
their position from nationalism and communism
political situation was not all bleak, nor were the warlord armies simply the ‘chocolate soldiers’ they were often mocked as being by
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Western observers. Some militarist leaders lived up to the popular image, such as Zhang Zuolin (1875–1928) of Manchuria, who was an illiterate though shrewd and calculating former bandit who in 1923 spent 76% of his region’s tax revenues on warfare to increase his territory, and only 3% on education. Others, however, were interested in construction as well as warfare. Yan Xishan (1883–

1960) of Shanxi became well known as one of the most progressive warlords, aggressively promoting an anti-foot-binding campaign in his province, and Zhang Zuolin’s son, Zhang Xueliang (1900–

2001), oversaw a signifi cant increase in transport, education, and commercial infrastructure in Manchuria, the northeastern provinces of China.

Nor, despite their reputation for corruption, were the militarist governments capable only of considering their own immediate interests. A case in point is China’s entry into World War I. The 33

militarist group that held power in Beijing in 1917 had calculated that the Great War in Europe would end with the defeat of Germany, one of the great European empires which held colonial rights on Chinese territory. Prime Minister Duan Qirui argued that it would help China’s cause to support the war on the Allied side. Duan’s government offered combat troops, which the French were willing to accept, as the number of French casualties climbed higher by the month. The British were less keen: they had lost proportionately fewer men and were more sensitive about racial hierarchy. In the end, 96,000 served on the Western Front not as soldiers but digging trenches and doing hard manual labour.

Around 2,000 of them died in Europe. The Chinese government, despite its problems and its lack of popular mandate, had made a momentous decision: China could - and should – become involved in international confl icts.

It was involvement in World War I, however, that led to one of
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the most important events in China’s modern history: the student demonstrations on 4 May 1919.

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May Fourth Movement

The news was bad. On 30 April, it became clear that the
Paris Peace Conference was not going to return to Chinese
sovereignty the parts of Shandong province that had been
colonized by the now-defeated Germans; instead, the Allied
Powers would hand them to Germany. Just fi ve days later,
on 4 May 1919, some 3,000 students gathered in central
Beijing, in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, and then
marched to the house of a Chinese government minister
closely associated with Japan. Once there, they broke in and
destroyed the house, and beat a visiting offi cial so badly that
his body was covered in marks that ‘looked like fi sh-scales’ on
his skin.

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This event, over in a few hours, became a legend. Even now,
any educated Chinese will understand what is meant by ‘May
Fourth’ – no year necessary. For the student demonstration
came to symbolize a much wider shift in Chinese society
and politics. The new republic had been declared less than
eight years earlier, yet already the country seemed to be
falling apart because of imperialist pressure from outside
and warlord government within China that had destroyed
its fragile parliamentary democracy. The May Fourth
Movement, as it became known, was associated closely with
the ‘New Culture’ which intellectuals and radical thinkers
proposed for China, to be underpinned by the twin panaceas
of ‘Mr Science’ and ‘Mr Democracy’. In literature, a ‘May
Fourth’ generation of authors wrote fi ercely anti-Confucian
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works, condemning the old culture that they felt had
brought China to its current crisis, and explored new issues
of sexuality and individual selfhood (see Chapter 6). In
politics, young Chinese turned in desperation to new political
solutions: among them, the Nationalist Party of Sun Yatsen,
and for the more daring, the fl edgling Chinese Communist
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Party, founded in 1921. Many of its founder members,
including the young Mao Zedong, had been associated with
the intellectual ferment at Peking University, whose students
had been prominent in the May Fourth demonstrations. In
the decades since, the CCP has become the world’s largest
governing party, and has long since become the establishment
in Chinese politics. Yet it still regularly attributes its origins
to the rebellious students who marched on 4 May 1919.