Modern China. A Very Short Introduction (7 page)

Double-dealing by the Western Allies and Chinese politicians who had made secret deals with Japan led to an unwelcome discovery for the Chinese diplomats at the Paris Peace Conference: the former German colonies on Chinese soil would not be returned to Chinese sovereignty, but instead would be handed over to the 35

Japanese, who had also entered the war on the Allied side in 1917.

Patriotic demonstrations by students in Beijing on ‘May Fourth’

became symbolic of a wider feeling of national outrage that China was being weakened internally by its unstable, militarist governments, and externally by the continuing presence of foreign imperialism.

The outrage symbolized by the May Fourth demonstrations gave rise to a whole range of new thinking collectively termed the

‘New Culture’ movement, which stretched from around 1915 to the late 1920s. In China’s cities, literary fi gures such as Lu Xun and Ding Ling wrote fi ction that was designed to alert China to its state of crisis (see Chapter 6). Political thinkers turned to a variety of –isms, such as liberalism, socialism, and anarchism, and also sought inspiration in a variety of foreign examples, including nationalist fi gures such as Washington and Kossuth, but also non-European fi gures such as Gandhi and Atatürk. The shooting
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of striking factory workers in Shanghai by foreign-controlled police on 30 May 1925 (the ‘May Thirtieth Incident’) infl amed
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nationalist passions yet further, giving hope to Sun Yatsen’s Nationalist party, now regrouping under the protection of a friendly warlord in Canton.

The ‘ism’ which emerged at this time and would later become dominant was, of course, communism. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), later the engineer of the world’s largest peasant revolution, started with tiny, urban roots. It was founded in the intellectual turmoil of the May Fourth Movement, and many of its founder fi gures were associated with Peking University, such as Chen Duxiu (dean of humanities), Li Dazhao (head librarian), and a young Mao Zedong (a mere library assistant). In its earliest days, the party was more like a discussion group of like-minded intellectuals with few members, although it was still politically dangerous to take part in its activities. Few of its members yet had a strongly theoretical view of Marxism. The process that would help turn the CCP into a machine to rule China would be catalysed 36

by the intervention of Soviet assistance. Before that happened, the CCP would fi nd itself in alliance with the Nationalist leader, Sun Yatsen.

The Northern Expedition

Sun himself did not return to China as a national leader in 1917.

Instead, he was forced to rely on the support of a militarist leader in Guangdong province, Chen Jiongming, who was sympathetic to Sun’s ultimate aim of reuniting China, and allowed him a base in Canton. The other key source of support for Sun was international. Sun had tried in vain to gain Western and Japanese assistance, but in 1923, he was able to gain formal support from the world’s newest and most radical state: Soviet Russia (later the USSR). The Soviets did not think that the fl edgling CCP,
The old order and the ne

which they advised from its foundation in 1921, had any realistic prospect of seizing power in the near future. Therefore, they ordered the party to ally itself with the much larger ‘bourgeois’

party, the Nationalists. At the same time, their alliance was attractive to Sun: the Soviets would provide political training,
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military assistance, and fi nance. From the Canton base, the Nationalists and CCP trained together from 1923 in preparation for their mission to reunite China.

Sun himself died of cancer in 1925. The succession battle in the party coincided with the sudden rise in anti-foreign feeling that came with the May Thirtieth demonstrations and boycotts. Under Soviet advice, the Nationalists and CCP prepared for their big push north in 1926, the ‘Northern Expedition’ that was supposed fi nally to free China from splits and exploitation. In 1926–27, the Soviet-trained National Revolutionary Army made its way slowly north, fi ghting, bribing, or persuading its opponents into accepting Nationalist control. The most powerful military fi gure turned out to be an offi cer from Zhejiang named Chiang Kaishek (1887–1975). Trained in Moscow, Chiang moved steadily forward and fi nally captured the great prize, Shanghai, in March 1927.

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5. Chiang Kaishek was China’s leader from 1928 to 1949, and
ruled over Taiwan until his death in 1975. He had some success in
modernizing the mainland, but his government was undermined by
corruption, factionalism, and war with Japan
However, there was a horrifi c surprise in store for his Communist allies. Chiang’s opportunity to observe the Soviet advisers close-up had not impressed him; he was convinced (not without reason) that their intention was to take power in alliance with the Nationalists and then thrust the latter out of the way to seize 38

control, Bolshevik-style, on their own. Instead, Chiang struck fi rst.

Using local thugs and soldiers, Chiang organized a lightning strike that rounded up Communist party activists and union leaders in Shanghai, and killed thousands of them with immense brutality.

Chiang’s actions were part of a wider tapestry of violent confl ict that rocked China throughout this period: in the south, where the CCP had the upper hand, there were massacres of Nationalist supporters.

The Nationalist government of Chiang Kaishek was born in blood. Yet it deserves a more objective assessment than it has had until recently. In many ways, as the next chapter suggests, the Nationalists under Chiang and the Communists, eventually led by Mao, had much in common. Both parties saw themselves as revolutionary, and both would swiftly conclude that their
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revolutions had come grinding to a halt. The slogan of the Nationalist party – ‘the revolution is not yet complete’ – could have been uttered with equal conviction by Mao. It was their similarity of intention, in part, that made their rivalry so deadly.

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The story of politics in 20th-century China has usually been told as a narrative of confl ict: in particular, the confl ict between the Nationalists under Chiang Kaishek and the Communists under Mao Zedong. Certainly, the clash between these two parties shaped Chinese life for decades. Chiang’s China was marked by the rhetoric of
jiaofei
– bandit extermination – a reference to the elimination of the Communists, whom he refused to dignify even with the term ‘party’ until forced into an alliance with them during the anti-Japanese war. In Mao’s China, it was Chiang who was the bogeyman: the feudal, corrupt warlord whose family had exploited China for all it was worth until the Communists had swept the country clean in 1949.

Decades after the deaths of Mao and Chiang, it is possible not only to look at those two major fi gures with some perspective, but also to pay more attention to the context around them.

There is an alternative to regarding the early 20th century as a clash of the two Chinese giants: instead we can treat the period from the establishment of Chiang’s Nationalist government in 1928 to the present day as one, long modernizing project by two parties that agreed as well as disagreed. Both the Nationalists and the Communists wished to establish a strong centralized state, remove imperialist power from China, 40

reduce rural poverty, maintain a one-party state, and create a powerful industrialized infrastructure in China. Both parties launched powerful campaigns against ‘superstition’, believing that ‘backward’ spiritual beliefs were preventing China from reaching modernity. The major ideological difference was that the CCP believed that none of these goals, especially rural reform, was possible without major class warfare. The Nationalists opposed this, in part because it was captive to forces that opposed economic redistribution. This division led to a deadly falling-out by the mid-1920s, which was resolved only by the Communist victory in 1949. Ironically, though, by the end of the century, the CCP had also abandoned class war, although only after decades of factional, often highly destructive, confl ict between classes.

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The Nationalists in power

Chiang Kaishek’s Nationalist government came to power in 1928

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through a combination of military force and popular support.

Chiang’s bloody tactics had been displayed at Shanghai, then at Canton, in 1927, when his henchmen turned on his former Communist allies and had thousands of them killed. This action seemed to many to be an augury of the type of government that Chiang would run: keener to use violence than persuasion.

His government spoke of the ‘people’s rights’, one of the Three Principles of Sun Yatsen’s political philosophy (along with

‘nationalism’ and ‘the people’s livelihood’), but it suppressed political dissent with great ruthlessness, using arbitrary arrest and torture, the latter technique characterized by the activities of the Nationalist secret service chief, Dai Li. Nationalist governance was marked by corruption and frequent capitulation to the demands of those who had a vested interest in the old order. An indicative fi gure is that in 1930, China’s mortality rate was the highest in the world, more than that of colonial India and 2.5 times that of the US.

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Yet the Nationalist record in offi ce also had signifi cant strengths which have generally been overlooked. In particular, many of the aspects of contemporary China which have attracted interest today, as well as achievements for which Mao has been given credit, actually originated with the Nationalist government.

Chiang’s government began a major industrialization effort, greatly augmented China’s transport infrastructure, and successfully renegotiated many of the ‘unequal treaties’ which had so blighted relations between China and the imperial powers since the Opium Wars.

Throughout its life, though, the government suffered from one crippling reality. Its status as the ‘National Government’ of China was internationally recognized. Yet it never really controlled more than a few (albeit very important) provinces, although Chiang’s level of infl uence in western China grew by the mid-1930s as he allied with regional militarists to drive the Communists north.

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Regional militarists continued to control much of western China; the Japanese occupied Manchuria in 1931; the Communists
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re-established themselves in the northwest. Yet even Chiang’s partial consolidation was quickly shattered in 1937. ‘Free China’, the Nationalist-controlled interior of the country, was confi ned to parts of southern and central China during the war years.

The fi nal reunifi cation in 1945 came too late for the government to take advantage of it, and the crippled Chiang government gave way to the Communists just four years later. Chiang was permanently hobbled by having to act as head of a country which was actually signifi cantly disunited.

Furthermore, the causes of some of the horrifi c realities of early 20th-century China were not fully understood at the time. It was commonplace to argue that China’s problems stemmed in part from too large a population and too little food. Yet it now seems that, although famines did hit parts of China on a regular basis, there was no chronic shortage of food. Rather, appalling levels of hygiene and health care before 1949 meant that mortality 42

rates were high even among a population which had enough to eat overall. Hygiene campaigns under the CCP after 1949

heavily reduced mortality rates even when the population was much larger than a few decades earlier. Nor was the economy as disastrous as has been implied (see also Chapter 5). It was assumed for a long time that the traditional handicrafts practised in the Chinese countryside were destroyed by imperialism and the mechanization it brought along with it. Yet we now know that some traditional handicrafts did remain strong into the 1930s.

Although the spinning of yarn by hand had been made obsolete by the development of mechanized cotton mills, the weaving of high-quality handmade cotton and silk cloth was of considerable importance in China’s pre-war economy.

To make a balanced assessment of the government which
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ruled China from 1928 to 1949, it is important not to see the Nationalists simply as their enemies perceived them, but also in
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the terms in which they saw themselves. Chiang believed entirely sincerely that his role was to carry out the ‘unfi nished revolution’

of Sun Yatsen. In this vision, China would be united and the militarist divisions which had torn it apart for two decades would end. China would have a full role in the community of nations, but colonialism on its soil would no longer be permitted. The Nationalist vision for China also saw it as an industrialized state: indeed, it was Sun Yatsen who fi rst suggested damming the Yangtze to provide electric power, a goal that would eventually be fulfi lled some eight decades later when the Three Gorges Dam opened in 2003.