The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 13: Republican China 1912-1949, Part 2
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NATIONALIST REVOLUTION AND THE POWERS III
China
as
Galen).
Aid and
arms flowed
in
with them. Against this
background
the
Kuomintang held
its
first national congress
in
January
1924.
Under
the
rubric
of the new
basic Kuomintang policy
of
lien-0
jung-kung
(ally with
the
Soviets, admit
the
Communists),
Li
Ta-chao
and
two other
CCP
members were elected
to
regular membership
in the
24-member central executive committee
of the
KMT.
Mao
Tse-tung's
name appears
on the
list
of
its seventeen alternate members.
The subsequent vicissitudes
of the
Comintern-Kuomintang alliance
were
to be
deeply imbedded
in the
great drama
of
China's Nationalist
Revolution from 1923
to
1927. This Russo-Chinese cooperation in making
revolution has been recounted
in its
socio-political context
in
volume
12
of this series. Here we can note that
it
saw
the
start
of
a Soviet influence
on
the
Chinese Revolution which continued
in one
form
or
another
for
a whole generation.
It
also set
up an
alternative structure
of
international
order based
on the
premise that Moscow's brand
of
communism would
inevitably sweep over the world.
As
the Nationalist Revolution marched
north from Canton,
the
Washington Conference powers were
put on the
defensive
and
made various accommodations.
CHINA S NATIONALIST REVOLUTION AND THE POWERS
The National Revolutionary Army
of
the Kuomintang under Chiang
Kai-shek's command headed north through Hunan
in
July 1926 with
the
aim
of
unifying
the
country. Changsha fell
on 12
August, Yochow
on
the
18th,
Hanyang
on 6
September, Hankow
on the 7th,
Wuchang
on
10 October, Kiukiang
on 4
December,
and
Nanchang
on 7
December.
Lurking
in the
background
of
this invincible military sweep
was the
growing discord between
the
Kuomintang left wing
and the new
anti-Communist right wing around Chiang Kai-shek.
The
Comintern
judged
the
time ripe
to
seize
the
leadership
of the
Chinese Revolution,
so
it
issued directives
to
pursue
a
radical revolutionary course.
Britain, who until then had taken
a
hard line against Chinese nationalism,
made
an
about-face
in
December 1926
and
announced
a
moderate
new
China policy.
Her
hopes
for
moderation were dashed, however,
as the
tide
of
nationalism picked
up
greater force. Massed demonstrators broke
into
the
British concession areas
of
Hankow
and
Kiukiang
on 4 and 9
January
1927
respectively. Unable
to
send
in
relief forces,
the
British
ultimately gave
up
these concession areas through
a
restoration
agreement.
53
51
For these developments
in
detail
see
C. M. Wilbur,
'The
Nationalist Revolution: from Canton
to Nanking, 1923-28', CHOC 12.527-720.
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112 CHINA'S INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
When Nanking fell on 24 March, six foreigners were killed in acts of
violence by revolutionary army elements. British and American gunboats
on the Yangtze shelled the city from the river to help their nationals get
away. Japanese who had assembled at their Nanking consulate were raided
by officers and troops of the revolutionary army. Some were manhandled
and others pistol-whipped. Property was damaged. But at no point was
any resistance offered. The naval officers and men who happened to be
at the consulate to establish communication links dismantled their
machine-guns and stored their weapons in a back room at the request of
Japanese civilians, lest their weapons excite the Chinese soldiers. As a
result, and despite the violence, not one life was lost, and all were rescued
without incident.
In the aftermath of this Nanking incident, Britain reinforced her
Shanghai defences, and pressed Japan and the United States to do likewise.
The United States sent reinforcements, but tried to avoid exciting Chinese
nationalist feeling. Japanese Foreign Minister Shidehara Kijuro held fast
to his principle of non-intervention in China. Criticism of the moderate
Shidehara foreign policy, led by the opposition Seiyvikai party, had been
growing in strength for some time. Both the army ministry and the army
general
staff,
moreover, supported joint military action with the British,
arguing that the British dilemma of today could well be the Japanese
dilemma of tomorrow.
Shidehara's thinking was different. He felt, first, that Japan's real China
interests lay not in territory but in markets. Secondly, if indeed, as seemed
likely, the Nationalist government should bring all China under its control,
it behoved Japan to avoid friction. Thirdly, signs of a split were emerging,
as the confrontation between pro- and anti-Communist elements within
the Nationalist government intensified. And lastly, what if China failed to
respond to a Japanese ultimatum, and rejected Japanese demands? To give
Chiang Kai-shek foreign support might make him seem like a traitor.
There was no real alternative to letting Chiang clean the CCP out of the
Nationalist government on his own. This is of course what he did in the
bloody coup of April 1927 and in the subsequent effort to exterminate the
CCP.
With Chiang's anti-radical coup, it might have been expected that the
Washington Conference system would finally be in place. After all, there
was a central government in China with a promise of stability, standing
against the Soviet Union, the one power that had remained outside the
Washington framework. Despite their differences, the Washington powers
had not entirely given up the principle of mutual consultation and
cooperation in China. Unfortunately, the years after 1927 were to
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NATIONALIST REVOLUTION AND THE POWERS II3
demonstrate how difficult it was to create a stable international order in
the Far East, in a period of domestic turmoil which was to engulf not
only China but Japan and the Western nations as well.
The story of this progressive destabilization is treated in a subsequent
chapter. Here, a bare outline of Chinese-Japanese relations after 1927
should suffice to illustrate the extreme difficulties in working out a pattern
of international order that would be acceptable to and sustained by
domestic forces.
In the same month that Chiang Kai-shek made his move against the
Communists, opening up the possibility of the foreign treaty powers
dealing with him and his new Nanking government, the Japanese cabinet
changed hands. Japan's new prime minister and concurrent foreign
minister
was
retired army general Tanaka
Giichi.
As head of the opposition
party, Tanaka had never missed an opportunity to criticize his predecessor,
Shidehara, for the weakness of his China policy. Now suddenly Tanaka
was in the position of having to adopt a strong China policy of
his
own.
54
In May, as revolutionary army troops approached the province of
Shantung
in
the
1927
phase of the Northern Expedition, Tanaka despatched
troops to Shantung on the pretext of protecting Japanese lives. Chinese
troops drew back south of Shantung, and a clash was avoided. The
Northern Expedition was resumed in April 1928, whereupon Tanaka
again sent troops into Shantung. Chinese troops who had taken possession
of Tsinan earlier encountered the Japanese there, and the two sides clashed
on
3
May after some minor incidents. Driven by anti-imperialist passions,
some Chinese soldiers went out and massacred eleven Japanese civilians.
The Japanese army initiated a large-scale operation against the Chinese
army, and drove them out of the Tsinan vicinity. Chinese forces evaded
the Japanese and marched north toward Peking. Though there were no
further clashes with Japanese troops, the fighting at Tsinan nurtured deep
anti-Japanese feelings even among Chiang's politically moderate troops.
Marshal Chang Tso-lin, defeated by these Chinese forces, left Peking
by special train on 3 June, headed for his Mukden (Shenyang) base. A
large explosion just this side of Mukden killed him early the following
morning. His assassination had been plotted by a small group of Japanese
army officers. Their thinking was that the death of Chang Tso-lin would
deprive Manchuria of its leader and plunge it into chaos. The Japanese
army would then step in to restore order, and occupy Manchuria.
55
But,
on the contrary, Manchuria was not plunged into chaos. Chang Hsueh-
M
William F. Morton, Tanaka GUM and Japan's China policy.
« Gavin McCormick, Cbang Tso-lin in Northeast China, ifn-ifiS; and Nobuya Bamba, Japanese
diplomacy in a dilemma: new light
on
Japan's China policy.
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114 CHINA S INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
liang, then in Peking, rushed back to Mukden where his father's death
was kept a secret until 21 June, when young Chang assumed his father's
mantle. The assassination was soon confirmed
to
be the work of the
Kwantung army but, realizing that to make an issue of it might put him
at the mercy of Japan, Chang Hsueh-liang held his peace.
While taking care not to upset Japan, this new ruler of Manchuria also
found himself drawn to the rights recovery element of Chinese nationalism.
First he grasped the hand of
his
father's old enemy, the Kuomintang, and
then he hoisted the Kuomintang 'blue sky and white sun' flag over
Manchuria. The flag went up on 29 December 1928, at the end of secret
negotiations with
the
Nanking government. Chang joined
the
Kuomintang, and was designated commander-in-chief of the north-east
frontier defence army. Thereafter, Chang gradually adopted
an
anti-
Japanese policy and the Chinese anti-Japanese movement in Manchuria
came into the open. Japanese businessmen suffered, and even the giant
South Manchurian Railway Company fell into the red. Then came the great
depression of late 1929.
The deteriorating situation in Manchuria was marked by
a
series of
incidents. Korean farmers in Manchuria, who at one point were said to
have numbered two million, were engaged chiefly in rice culture. But in
1931 the Chinese anti-Japanese movement became
far
more widely
organized, and farmers from Korea, Japanese subjects since 1910, living
in remote areas out of easy reach of Japanese authority, bore the brunt
of countless incidents. The Korean population of Manchuria fell to about
800,000.
In 1931, about 400 Korean farmers rented land in Wanpaoshan, north
of Changchun, from some Chinese, and began
the
hard work
of
converting
it
to rice lands. However, Chinese authorities forbade them
to settle, and ordered them out. The order was temporarily rescinded at
the protest
of
the Japanese consul. But on 1 July, about 800 Chinese
farmers stormed the land and started smashing the new irrigation ditches.
Skirmishes broke out between the interlopers and the Japanese police who
rushed to the scene from nearby Changchun. This made the front page
of Japanese newspapers, and for some time Koreans in various parts of
Korea took violent revenge on local overseas Chinese.
The number one hypothetical enemy of the Japanese army at this time
was the Soviet Union. During the period of the Wanpaoshan incident,
the Japanese army had sent general staff officer Captain Nakamura
Shintaro into western Manchuria to survey its geography, in the event
of a war with Russia. Rabidly anti-Japanese soldiers of Chang Hsueh-liang
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NATIONALIST REVOLUTION AND THE POWERS 11
5
caught and shot him. The alleged murderer was
finally
brought to Mukden
on 18 September 1931, and the Japanese consul notified.
But it was too late, for 18 September was the night of the Mukden
incident. A small group of Kwantung army officers blew up a part of the
South Manchurian Railway and, using that as a pretext, launched an attack
on Chinese troops. In less than half a year, the whole of Manchuria had
fallen to the Japanese army and been severed from China. Japan had
become the primary concern of Chinese foreign policy. Within less than
a generation, a mere two decades, the East Asian regional order of the
Ch'ing dynasty, the international legal order envisaged by the Washington
Conference treaty powers, and the world revolutionary order dreamed
of in Moscow, had all proved unavailing as an international matrix for
the Chinese Republic.
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CHAPTER
3
NATIONALIST CHINA DURING
THE NANKING DECADE 1927-1937
The Nanking regime was born
of
factional strife and bloodshed.
In the
early morning
of
12
April 1927, gangs of thugs belonging to the Mafia-like
Green Gang plunged through the streets of Shanghai, seized Communists
and suspected Communists, and executed them
on
the spot with pistols
or broadswords. Several thousand were massacred then and during
the
ensuing month. Chiang Kai-shek had split with the Communists; the first
united front
was
ended.
Six
days later,
on 18
April,
the
Nationalist
government was inaugurated
at
Nanking.
The challenge confronting the new government
was
awesome
-
nothing
less than to turn back the tide of national disintegration that, for a century
and more, had been washing over the Chinese nation.
A
central, national
government had virtually ceased
to
exist. Political power had devolved
into
the
hands
of
regional militarists, 'warlords',
who too
often were
unconcerned
for the
popular welfare and sought only
to
enhance their
wealth
and
power
by
reliance
on
military force.
The
sense
of
moral
community
-
the broad and pervasive consensus regarding the values and
proper relationships
of
cultural
and
social life, which
had so
richly
contributed
to
the stability
of
traditional China
-
had disintegrated, and
in its place were confusion and contention. Even the economic foundations
of the traditional political system had eroded.
THE INITIAL CONSOLIDATION
OF
POWER
Because the Chinese were profoundly sensitive
to
the abject condition of
their nation,
to
the ravages
of
warlord struggles, and
to
the humiliations
of imperialist aggression, the Nationalist revolutionary armies had been
greeted exultantly
as
their Northern Expedition moved from Canton
in
the south (beginning
in
July 1926)
to
Peking
in
the north (occupied
in
June 1928) (see volume 12).
To
many Chinese, Nationalist rule marked
the beginning of a new era, when China would again be unified and strong,
when there would
be
economic plenty
for
all, and when they would
no
longer feel shame
at
being Chinese.
As
early
as
1929, however, these
116
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INITIAL CONSOLIDATION OF POWER II7
extravagant expectations turned ashen. For the Nationalists, before
turning their attention to the constructive tasks of the new era, had first
to resolve who among them was to wield the power of the new
government.
Since the death of Sun Yat-sen in March 1925, there had been a bitter,
even bloody, struggle for leadership of the Nationalist movement. These
power rivalries had been papered over during the Northern Expedition.
Early in 1927, however, with the prize of national power within reach,
the intraparty struggles resumed with a new and unprecedented ferocity.
When the Nanking decade dawned, therefore, the Nationalist movement
was in utter disarray. Indeed, in the spring of 1927, there existed two
Nationalist governments (that of Chiang Kai-shek and the ' Centrists' in
Nanking, and that of the Left-Kuomintang, still allied with the Com-
munists, in Hankow) and three headquarters claiming leadership of the
Kuomintang (besides those in Hankow and Nanking, the extreme
right-wing Western Hills faction claimed sole legitimacy for its Central
Executive Committee in Shanghai). Complicating the situation was that
each of these power centres was backed by the armed forces of one or
more provincial militarists. These had only recently declared allegiance
to the revolution; they had little or no commitment to the ideological
goals of the movement; and they were now simply indulging in political
manoeuvres which, they hoped, would result in the preservation, if not
the enhancement, of their personal and regional power.
Early in these struggles, Chiang Kai-shek was nearly eliminated from
the competition. Only three months after establishing the government in
Nanking, his troops were defeated by the warlord army of Sun Ch'uan-fang
while he was attempting to push the Northern Expedition toward Peking.
The result was a rout, during which Sun Ch'uan-fang's army threatened
even to occupy Nanking. Chiang Kai-shek's prestige was badly tarnished
as a consequence, and a new coalition within the Nanking government,
headed by the Kwangsi faction of Li Tsung-jen and Pai Ch'ung-hsi, forced
him from power in August 1927.
The Left-Kuomintang at Hankow, headed by Wang Ching-wei, had
meanwhile followed Chiang's example and purged the Communists from
their own ranks. With Chiang Kai-shek in retirement and with the
Communists eliminated, the two chief causes of intraparty altercations had
been removed, and the way lay open to a reconciliation of the warring
factions. In September 1927, representatives of the Nanking and Hankow
governments and of the Western Hills faction formed a ' Central Special
Committee' which established a new, supposedly unified, Nationalist
government at Nanking.
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Il8 THE NANKING DECADE I927-I937
This new government was
no
more stable than its predecessors. The
two most powerful leaders in the Nationalist movement, Chiang Kai-shek
and Wang Ching-wei, had been excluded from it. And
it
never became
financially viable.
By
January 1928, therefore,
the
government
of
the
Special Committee had crumbled. Chiang Kai-shek, after five months
in
retirement (during which time
he
married the comely Soong Mei-ling),
returned to office more powerful than before. In February he was named
chairman
of
the Central Executive Committee
of
the Kuomintang and
commander-in-chief
of
the army.
In
October, he also assumed the office
of chairman of the State Council (and thus was the formal head of state).
He now controlled all three legs of the Nationalists' triad of power
-
the
party, government and military.
Under Chiang's aegis,
the
Nationalist government
in
Nanking was
transformed into
a
military dictatorship. Prior
to
his rise
to
leadership,
the Nationalist movement (whether
in
the form
of
the Kuomintang
or
one
of its
organizational antecedents)
had
never been
a
cohesive,
ideologically unified,
or
tightly disciplined political party. Since
Sun
Yat-sen first formed the Hsing-Chung-hui (Revive China Society) in 1894,
his following had comprised persons
of
widely diverse orientations and
motivations. Indeed,
he
seems never
to
have refused membership
in
his
party
to
anyone who applied.
In at
least one instance
he
even enrolled
the entire army of the warlord Ch'en Chiung-ming into the Kuomintang.
As a consequence, wrote T'ang Leang-Li, who was a member of the party,
the Kuomintang before the 1924 reorganization was not a political party
but simply
'an
agglomeration
of
different individual politicians,
the
majority of whom, caring little
for
the principles Sun Yat-sen stood for,
were merely out
to
exploit his great reputation and prestige among the
population
for
their own ends'.
1
The
agglutinative tendencies
of the
Kuomintang had worsened as the movement approached the threshold
of national power. For then careerists and opportunists of every political
stripe leapt onto the victorious bandwagon; membership in the party grew
from only 150,000
in
1926
to
630,000
in
1929. The party organization,
never tightly controlled, admitted the new applicants with utter disregard
for their backgrounds, character,
or
commitment
to the
goals
of
the
revolution. ' Party headquarters at all levels,' complained Ho Ying-ch'in,
chief-of-staff of Chiang Kai-shek's army, in January 1928, 'are concerned
only about the quantity, and pay no attention
to
the quality [of the new
members].
The spirit
of
the party therefore becomes more rotten by the
day'.
2
The
Kuomintang membership
by
1927
had
therefore become
' T'ang Leang-Li, The inner history of tie Chinese Revolution, 330.
1
Cb'en-pao
(Morning post), 11 Jan.
1928,
in Hatano Ken'ichi, comp.,
GendaiSbina no kiroku
(Records
of contemporary China), Jan. 1928, no.
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INITIAL CONSOLIDATION OF POWER II9
intolerably disparate,
and
Chiang Kai-shek accordingly began
to
screen
out many
of
the members that
to
him appeared
to be
undesirables.
In the
process,
he
fundamentally altered
the
character
of the
Nationalist
movement.
The first
to be
purged from
the
movement were
the
Communists.
Never,
in all
probability, could
the
Nationalists have gained national
power had
it not
been
for
the united front that Sun Yat-sen formed with
the Chinese Communists and the Soviet Union in 1923-4. With the advice,
material aid and organizational skills of the Communists, the Kuomintang
had been reorganized
on the
model
of
the Russian Communist Party;
a
party-led and politically indoctrinated army
had
been created;
and
young
revolutionary cadres
had
gone among
the
peasants
and
workers
in the
warlord-held areas, stirring up and organizing support
for
the revolution.
Significantly, those who had engaged
in
the difficult and dangerous work
of organizing the masses were more closely identified with the Communists
than with the Kuomintang. ' Kuomintang members were unwilling
to do
the real and lower-level work,' Ho Ying-ch'in admitted, and consequently
'
the
Communists naturally took
on
this work
to
split
our
party from
the
peasants
and
workers'.
3
Those less committed
to the
revolution avoided
working among
the
masses
and
thus avoided
the
taint
of
communism.
The purge
of
the Communists therefore
had a
filtering effect, leaving
the
self-servers untouched,
but
removing from
the
revolutionary movement
many
of
those
who had
infused
a
degree
of
vigour, discipline
and
commitment into
the
Kuomintang during
the
period
of
revolutionary
success.
Even after
the
purge
of
the Communists, however, there remained
a
broad stratum
of
Kuomintang members
who
advocated more radical
solutions to the nation's problems than those favoured by Chiang Kai-shek.
This
was the
left wing
of the
party, which during
1928 and 1929 was
Chiang's most formidable political rival
and
which
he
successfully
suppressed only after nearly
two
years
of
bitter struggle. These leftists
loudly denounced
the
'one-man military dictatorship' that Chiang
was
creating, and they demanded that the Kuomintang revive the policies and
spirit that had energized the movement during the period
of
Sun Yat-sen's
revolutionary leadership
in
1924. The party, they contended, and
not the
army, should control
and
provide direction
to the
regime.
The
leftists,
in contrast
to the
Communists, rejected
the
concept
and
policies
of
class
struggle,
but
they believed that
the
party must maintain
and
strengthen
its relations with the masses
by
means
of
peasant, worker, and other mass
organizations. Only with such
a
mass base, they insisted, could they
3
Ho Ying-ch'in, 'Chin-hou chih Chung-kuo Kuo-min-tang' (The Chinese Kuomintang from now
on),
dung-jang panjueb-k'an
(Central semi-monthly),
i
(Oct. 1927)
102.
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I2O THE NANKING DECADE 1927-1937
prevent the revolution from becoming
a
plaything
of
bureaucrats and
militarists.
4
Many Kuomintang members, perhaps
a
majority, supported these
radical views. But the estimate
of
T'ang Leang-Li, himself a member of
the left, that 80 per cent
of
the party members
in
this period belonged
to the left wing was surely an exaggeration.
5
Still,
it is
clear that many
of the low-ranking and young members
of
the party (one-third
of
the
Kuomintang members in 1929 were under twenty-five years of age) were
sympathetic with the views of the left wing.
Wang Ching-wei was the recognized leader
of
the left, but
he
was
sojourning
in
Europe during 1928
and
1929,
and
formally
at
least
dissociated himself from
the
movement opposing Chiang Kai-shek.
Moving spirit behind the left-wing organization, therefore, was Wang's
loyal associate, Ch'en Kung-po, a one-time Communist, who in May 1928
began publishing the weekly
Ko-ming
p'ing-lun
(Revolutionary critic)
as
a mouthpiece for the left wing. Although this journal never exceeded
a
circulation
of
15,000 copies, it enjoyed such popularity and influence that
the Nanking government suppressed
it in
September after an existence
of only
4r\
months.
Facing
the
prospect
of
government suppression, Ch'en Kung-po
decided that the left wing, hitherto an amorphous body of Wang Ching-wei
supporters, should organize. Although Wang himself was ambivalent
about the plan, viewing himself as
a
leader
of
the entire Kuomintang
rather than merely
a
factional leader, Ch'en
in
late 1928 organized the
Chinese Kuomintang Reorganizationist Comrades Association (Chung-
kuo kuo-min-tang kai-tsu t'ung-chih hui)
—
the name symbolizing
the
group's advocacy
of
the revolutionary principles that the Kuomintang
had adopted
at
the time of the 1924 reorganization. The Reorganization
clique,
as it was
called, was
a
formal organization with
a
written
constitution, a party headquarters in Shanghai, and branches throughout
much
of
the country. During 1928, too, Ch'en organized
the
Ta-lu
University in Shanghai, the purpose of which was to indoctrinate youth
with the political views of the left and to train cadres for the faction.
The leftists, although they
all
recognized Wang Ching-wei
as
their
leader, were not unified. Ku Meng-yii led a faction within the Reorganiza-
tion clique that was notably less radical than the faction led
by
Ch'en
4
Ssu-ma Hsien-tao, Pei-fa
hou cbib
ko-p'ai
ssu-cb'ao
(The doctrines of the various cliques after the
Northern Expedition), 133-99; T'ang Leang-Li, Inner history,
331—3;
Arif Dirlik, 'Mass
movements and the left Kuomintang',
Modern
China,
1.1 (Jan. 1975) 57-9-
5
T'ang Leang-Li,
Inner
history,
334. Actual membership in the leading left-wing organization (the
Reorganization clique) at this time was perhaps 10,000. See Chiang Shang-ch'ing,
Cbeng-bai
mi-vm
(Secrets of the political world), 72.
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