The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 13: Republican China 1912-1949, Part 2
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STATE AND SOCIETY IN THE REVOLUTIONARY PROCESS 6l
Perhaps the first openly published attack on Manchu rule appeared in
Shen-pao
in the summer of 1900.
115
Some have held that once the
government embarked on a course of reform after 1901 it could have
succeeded if only it had been able to maintain control for a little longer.
Such arguments underestimate the problem of change in so large a
country, but rightly point to the vigour of the official Ch'ing reform
movement and the rapid progress it made in a few years. The flaw in this
argument lies in its underestimating the political gap that had opened
between the bureaucratic state and elite society.
Participation and control, not reform, remained at the heart of the
clashes that occurred in the last ten years of the dynasty. The way in which
the Peking government combined reform with aims of centralizing power
and extending bureaucratic control provoked opposition.
116
One of the
most persistently reformist governors-general, Chang Chih-tung, clashed
with elites over who would control railway development despite their
shared commitments to national strengthening and industrial moderniza-
tion. Had leading elites been offered what they considered a meaningful
role they might have joined or cooperated with the government, but they
withheld support when officials repeatedly sought to limit outside
initiatives.
The opposition that produced the 1911 Revolution was shaped by the
basic conflict with the bureaucratic state.
117
It grew from a number of
elite social groups that had different interests and various ideas about
government and society. They did not, however, function as interest
groups in the liberal democratic sense. Chinese society was too corporate,
distinctions within the elite class too weak, and socio-political concepts
too holistic for politics to suddenly adopt Western European or,
particularly, American patterns. Members of different elite strata, old and
new, remained interconnected by kinship, geographical and other ties.
Members of the opposition also shared some basic views: they were
nationalistic, believed in some degree of popular mobilization, desired
redistribution of political power to provide greater societal participation
in government, and were prone to feel betrayed by and ready to distrust
the Ch'ing officials. Major political movements of the 1900s, like the
anti-American boycott of 1905, the provincial railway agitations, and the
constitutional movement broadly defined, mobilized combinations of
opposition groups and inextricably intertwined nationalistic sentiments
with their demands for representational government.'
l8
Fierce competition
115
I-bo
/'nan
(The Boxers), 4.171-1.
116
On the Ch'ing official reform programme, see C Ichiko, CHOC 11.37J—415.
117
On the 1911 Revolution, see M. Gasster, CHOC 11.463-534.
"* Basic works on the constitutionalist movement are Chang P'eng-yuan, U-bsitnp'aiyi
Hsin-bai
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
62 INTRODUCTION: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
developed abroad, in an emigre situation, between the Revolutionary
Alliance and the constitutional monarchists led by K'ang Yu-wei, but
their struggles in Toyko, South-East Asia, and the United States were
not duplicated within China.
At home the divisions between different elements in the opposition
were not as great as the gap between all of them and the centralizing
bureaucratic state. Their roles were complementary rather than competi-
tive.
The revolutionary parties put forth a republican alternative that was
eventually accepted as preferable to a vitiated, Manchu-defined constitu-
tionalism that sought to control rather than enlarge the scope for outside,
non-governmental, initiatives. Radical intellectuals provided visions of a
stronger nation based on a freer, more equitable society and won public
sympathy through occasional heroism. Their violent tactics helped to
illegitimize a resistant government. The revolutionary infiltrated New
Army units furnished the military strength that unreliable secret society
allies failed to supply. Merchants and gentry, business and professional
elites provided a measure of social support without which the 1911
Revolution would not have succeeded.
In the mid-nineteenth century, elites supported the Ch'ing government
against rebellion to preserve their positions. In 1911 they defended their
interests by supporting revolution against a political system from which
they had became estranged. Chambers of commerce, educational associa-
tions,
and provincial assemblies all served as vehicles for upper-level social
mobilization, furthering the opposition. Economic strains of course
increased the turmoil of the last Ch'ing decade. Inflation, copper
devaluation, land-tax surcharges, renewed flooding in the Yangtze and
ko-ming
(The constitutionalists and the 1911 Revolution) and Chang Yu-fa,
Cb'ing-cbi
ti
li-bsien
t'udn-t'i
(Constitutionalist groups of the late Ch'ing period). See also Chang P'eng-yuan,
'Provincial
assemblies:
the emergence of
political participation
1909-1914',
Bulletin
of
the
Institute
of
Modern
History,
Academia Sinica, 12 (June 1983) 273-99. Interpretations of elite roles in the
last
Ch
'ing
decade
include Eshcrick
's
theory of
an'
urban
reformist
elite'
(Joseph
Esherick,
Reform
and
revolution
in
China:
the ifn
Revolution
in
Hunan and
Hubei,
ch. 3) and Fincher's picture of
a
substantial movement for self-government and democracy, expressed through the assemblies,
that
rested on older socio-economic changes but was triggered by the Ch'ing official reforms
(John
Fincher,
Chinese
democracy:
the
self-government
movement
in
local,
provincial
and
national
politics,
ifOj—1914).
MacKinnon has suggested a less competitive picture of expanding political power
at
national, provincial and county levels, providing room for both officials and elites to expand
their
political roles (Stephen MacKinnon,
Power
and
politics
in late imperial
China,
10-11,
conclusion);
whereas, C. Ichiko sees gentry adjusting to initiatives by the government or
revolutionaries
in a conservative way, simply to maintain their power (Chuzo
Ichiko,'
The
role
of
the
gentry:
an hypothesis', in Mary
C.
Wright, ed.
China
in
revolution:
the
first
phase,
1900-1913,
308).
Proliferation
of
elite
organizations
in
inner-core
areas
of
Chekiang
as
an
index
of
socio-political
development
is detailed in Keith Schoppa,
Chinese
elites
and political
change:
Zhejiang
province
in
the
early
twentieth
century,
59-74- For a basic historical perspective on the Chinese approach to local
government
in general, see Kuhn, 'Local self-government', pp. 257-98 in Wakeman and Grant,
eds.;
also Kuhn, 'Late Ch'ing views of the polity',
Select
papers from
the
Center
for
Far
Eastern
Studies,
4 (1979-80) 1—18.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
STATE AND SOCIETY IN THE REVOLUTIONARY PROCESS 63
Huai River valleys, and, above all, new miscellaneous taxes to finance the
New Policies on the local level contributed to anti-government social
unrest. In some places these strains brought lower classes into conflict
with dominant elites. In the violence-prone rural society of Honan, for
instance, the Revolutionary Alliance found allies among bandit forces
competing with militia or with gentry-led village-protection forces with
government backing.
119
In 1911 village-based peasant armies, from
regions hit by a drop in the silk market and by the competition from rice
imports after the opening of the Canton-Kowloon railway, converged on
Canton and occupied the city for several weeks.
120
Urban mobs also took
part in the revolution in Canton, Shanghai and other major cities.
On balance, however, in 1911 the Revolution emerged from economic
growth in core areas, from involvement of China in world trade, and from
social organization on the upper, not the lower, levels of society. It was
not narrowly bourgeois and not entirely urban, but it did centre in areas
experiencing economic growth and was led by groups created or
strengthened by this growth. It successfully forestalled the inherently
doomed effort of an outmoded bureaucratic monarchy to convert itself
into a modern authoritarian state. It did not solve the problem of how
locally rooted popular movements without strong military forces could
create a new national government.
Trends in
Republican
politics
Because the main features of China's late imperial polity were as deeply
rooted as those of the economy and society, the first half of the twentieth
century saw an often bewildering fluctuation between new and old,
innovation and reaction. Modern-minded patriots, hoping for China's
regeneration, canvassed and discussed contemporary political thought
from the outside world in great abundance, often with precocious
insight.
121
Despite the range and fecundity of their ideas, however, the
main trends ot Chinese politics grew out of situations already being defined
at the end of the Ch 'ing.
First of all, the cluster of doctrinal beliefs and institutional practices
by which the imperial Confucian monarchy had controlled China since
the T'ang continued to disintegrate.
122
It would not be easy to reassemble
119
Billingsley, 'Bandits', 261.
120
Winston Hsieh, 'Peasant insurrection and the marketing hierarchy
in the
Canton delta,
1911',
in Elvin and Skinner, eds.,
138-41.
121
The breadth and variety
of
avant-garde political discussion
is
exhibited
in
Robert
A.
Scalapino
and George Yu, Modern China and its revolutionary proctss, vol. 1: Recurrent
challenges
to the traditional
order,
ijjo-ipio.
'" For analysis of Chinese despotism and 'officialism' (scholar-official domination of
the
society) see
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
64
INTRODUCTION: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
such
a
cluster because all the components were
in
flux, rapidly changing.
In the end, a consensual belief system and world view, official examinations
to select self-indoctrinated bureaucrats, an autocratic and self-perpetuating
central leadership and its monopoly
of
justice,
education, surveillance and
military power
-
all these ingredients
of
the
old
Chinese state would
not
be brought fully
to
function together again until after 1949.
But by
that
time both their content
and
their overall configuration would
be
quite
different.
Within four years
of
the 1911 Revolution
it
was clear that there would
be
no
simple progression
to
follow either
the
proto-liberal democratic
mobilization
or the
statist modernization
at the end of the
Ch'ing.
In
1912-13,
when the newly organized Nationalist Party (KMT) won China's
first and only parliamentary elections,
it
was continuing the trend toward
urban elite participation
in
government.
But
both
it and the
rival
Progressive Party were hardly more than 'elite alliances', whose
con-
stituency was thin
and
scattered even
in the
restricted electorate
of
some
40 million.
123
Although Sung Chiao-jen hoped
his
followers among
the
gentry-merchant elite could control
the new
Republican government,
multi-party government was distrusted
as
divisive
by
party leaders like
Sun Yat-sen.
124
In
1913 Yuan Shih-k'ai ended China's experiment
in
parliamentary democracy
by
suppressing revolutionaries, disbanding
parliament
and
provincial assemblies,
and
ending
the
thousands
of
local
assemblies that had flourished
in
the first year
of
the republic.
125
Yuan's
build-up
of his
dictatorship included revived examinations
and a
strengthening
of
civil bureaucracy over
the
military, together with
censorship, surveillance and terror against the vanquished revolutionaries.
He succeeded
in
eradicating
the
still immature institutional sprouts
of
broader participation in local government, but not in winning the loyalties
of elites
who had
briefly moved into
the new
positions. Yuan's career
ended
in his
destructive effort
to
revive
the
monarchy
and his
death
in
litienne Balazs, Chinese civilisation
and
bureaucracy:
variations on
a
theme,
6;
also Arthur Wright's
introduction.
For late Ch'ing the classic study
is by
Kung-chuan
Hsiao,
Rural
China;
see
also
Ping-ti
Ho,'
Salient
aspects
of
China's
heritage',
in Ping-ti
Ho and
Tang
Tsou,
eds.
China's
heritage
and
the
Communist
political
system,
1-37,
especially
15-25.
For a
long-term perspective,
see
H.
G.
Creel, The origins
of
statecraft
in
China,
vol. 1, The
Western Chou empire.
'" P'eng-yuan Chang, 'Political participation
and
political elites
in
early Republican China:
the
parliament
of
1913-1914",
JAS
37.2 (Feb. 1978)
293-313;
see p.
301. The trend toward more
representative
institutions
is
more hopefully appraised by Fincher,
Chinese
democracy.
Lest 'local
self-government'
be
erroneously assumed
to be
representative
of the
common people
in
town-meeting
style,
we should remember that
it
consisted rather
of
official devolution upon the
local
gentry elite
of
administrative
functions
they
had
long
been
performing
informally.
See
Kuhn,
Rebellion,
216-19.
124
Friedman, Backward
toward
revolution,
ch. 2, on the
late
1912
'attempts
to
build
an
inclusive single
party'(p.
30).
125
Ernest Young in CHOC 12.242.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
STATE AND SOCIETY IN THE REVOLUTIONARY PROCESS 65
1916,
further discrediting central authority by identifying it with a return
to imperial control.
The ensuing warlordism was remarkable less for the breakdown of the
already considerably rationalized central administrative institutions (as
in dynastic interregnums of the past) than for this general' disintegration
of political authority'.
126
This trend was highlighted by three aspects of
republican politics: militarism, an intellectual ferment in the search for
legitimacy, and the rise of party dictatorship.
Military power had started to grow and change character in the
nineteenth century. The personally organized armies of mid-nineteenth-
century governor-generals began the transformation, but they still
exemplified Confucian principles of moral leadership and reciprocal
loyalty of troops to officers.
127
However, in the latter half of the century
military growth became linked to industrial change. Armament
manufacture, exemplified by the Kiangnan arsenal at Shanghai and the
gunboat industry of the Foochow dockyard, became central to the
self-strengthening movement.
128
Yuan Shih-k'ai's career under the
Ch'ing exemplified how by the end of the century a builder of a modern
army could become a power within the bureaucracy.
With the fall of the Ch'ing there was no longer a long-established,
legitimized government to absorb military leaders. Yuan Shih-k'ai and
his subordinate commanders in the Peiyang army who became warlords
after his death faced a military with new status and orientations, under
conditions in which military power
was
integral to modern government.
I29
First, the imported technology of modern industrialized warfare created
military specialities like artillery, engineering and communications. The
necessary training required military schools, whose students became men
of military learning, part of the new student body of the country. Second,
like other students, the new military men might be moved by patriotism
rather than teacher-pupil loyalties. Military patriots like Huang Hsing
and Chiang Kai-shek appeared in their respective generations. Nationalism,
in short, ennobled the soldier as its necessary front-line leader. It also
demanded that he follow a new style of dedication, not simply order and
116
Wang Gungwu as quoted in Diana Lary,' Warlord studies', Modern China, 6.4 (Oct. 1980) 459—70;
see p. 448.
127
M. Bastid, 'The new military', CHOC 11.J39-47. Cp. Kuhn, Rebellion, 147-8, 185-5.
l2i
Thomas Kennedy, Arms of Kiangnan: modernisation of the
Chinese ordnance
industry iS6o—i!f}. The
theme of the gunboat as the means of progress is illustrated in Robert Hart's long-continued
promotion of Ch'ing naval power. See J. K. Fairbank, K. F. Bruner and E. M. Matheson, eds.
The I.G. in Peking: letters of Robert Hart il6S-ifo?, passim.
119
Stephen MacKinnon, "The Peiyang Army, Yuan Shih-k'ai, and the origins of modern Chinese
warlordism', JAS 52 (May 1972) 405-25; also
ibid.
Power and politics; Edmund S. K. Fung, The
military
dimension
of the Chinese revolution; and Edward A. McCord, 'Recent progress in warlord
studies in the People's Republic of China', Republican China, 9.2 (Feb. 1984) 40-7.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
66 INTRODUCTION: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
obedience.
The new
technology made
an
officers' corps
as
essential
to
government
as
constitutions, parties
or
bankers.
On
one level, militarism,
arising from
the
ashes
of
Confucianism, altered both
the
structure
and
the ideology of the state. Sun Yat-sen re-entered the warlord fray at Canton
as
a
'generalissimo',
and his
eventual successor actually
was
one.
130
In
another sense, militarism made
it
more difficult
for
governments
to
retain
control. Subordinates with their
own
forces betrayed their commanders;
more
or
less evenly matched warlord armies carried
on
their private wars;
and
the
destruction
and
disruption turned city elites
not
only against
warlords
but
also against those governments that could
not
control them.
The
new
military would henceforth be part
of
the state structure,
but
they
alone were
not
able
to
beat their rivals and reconstruct a central state unless
they were part
of
a government that also attracted non-military support.
The Ch'ing dynasty
had
been recognized
as
legitimate
by
Confucian-
educated elites until
the
very last years
of its
rule.
Its
successor would
have
to win
similar acceptance
on new
grounds.
Intellectual turmoil was heightened by nationalistic sentiment
as
patriotism
continued
to
spread among
the
urban populace, primarily
in
response
to
Japanese encroachment (the Twenty-one Demands,
1915;
Versailles, 1919;
Tsinan, 1928;
the
North-east, 1931).
131
Meanwhile
the
fragmentation
of
government authority opened
a
temporary window
for
intellectual
freedom
and
academic autonomy. Thus
the
stage
was set for
China's
experience of liberal education under Anglo-American-French influences.
The
new
belief
in
'science'
as the key to
modernity, plus study abroad,
professional specialization,
and
university independence made possible
the
rise
of an
academic community
of the
sort essential
for
national success
in
the
modern world.
132
At the
same time intellectuals were attracted
to
countless liberal, romantic, neo-traditional
and
other theories; they
formed associations
and
published journals
to set
forth their views.
Parallel with this fragile growth of liberal pluralism, especially
in
higher
education,
was a
trend
to
accept
the
revolutionary ideology
of
Marxism-
Leninism,
a
universal 'science of society'.
133
From
the
beginning, Chinese
revolutionaries
had
tended
to see in
Russia
'a
paradigm
of
universal
revolutionary progress'.
The
heritage
of
imperial Confucianism, with
its
faith
in
'ethocracy', reinforced
the
concern aroused
by the
many social
problems
one
could observe
in
China.
134
Simple nationalism
was
morally
30
C. Martin Wilbur, Sun Yat-sen: frustrated patriot.
31
See ch.
2
below.
» See ch.
8
below.
33
CHOC 12.446-50 (Schwartz), 505-14 (Jerome
Ch'en).
34
Don C.
Price, Russia
and
the
roots
of
the
Chinese Revolution iSpi-ipii. 'Ethocracy'
(as
opposed
to theocracy)
is
suggested
by W. T. De
Bary,
in J. K.
Faixbank,
ed.
Chinese thought
and
institutions,
131.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
STATE AND SOCIETY IN THE REVOLUTIONARY PROCESS 67
inadequate. Theories were not pursued only in the abstract, for both
international and domestic crises continued to turn elite and urban
attention to politics. Governments were not going to be accorded real
legitimacy by volatile, independent urban groups unless they appeared
to fulfil complex, sometimes contradictory, aspirations for economic
progress, national strength, fairness and representation.
Behind this situation lay a basic change in the myth of the state that
legitimized its power. Under imperial Confucianism the emperor's rule
had been sanctioned by virtue of his right conduct in maintaining the social
order, functioning at the central point in a cosmos that embraced both
nature and humankind in an organic whole. The principles of form (It)
were innately imbedded in this organismic cosmos, so that the imperial
rule was immanent in the nature of things, not imposed from outside the
human scene by a transcended deity or law as in the West.
135
By
maintaining unity at home the Chinese ruler more easily asserted his
universal superiority over rulers in contact abroad. But during the
nineteenth century, imperialist expansion on China's periphery destroyed
her suzerain-tributary relations with adjoining states and with it the Son
of Heaven's claim to universal superiority.
136
Ch'ing weakness
internationally, together with the influx of Western learning, destroyed
the validity of imperial Confucianism.
It was replaced in the twentieth century by the nationalistic myth that
ultimate state power resided with the Han people. The classical dictum
that 'Heaven decides as the people decide' could be reinterpreted as a
Chinese form of popular sovereignty. This Western idea gained adherents
early. Liang Ch'i-ch'ao was one of the first popularizers. It was also picked
up by Sun Yat-sen and enshrined in his Three People's Principles
{San-min
chu-i)
as early as 1905. This myth of popular sovereignty represented the
growth of political consciousness, participation, and mobilization, but it
said little about how popular politics could be tied to the state
power-structure.
The political party
was to be the vehicle for actual exercise of popular
sovereignty under the new republican system. The major innovation in
political institutions was the party dictatorship that began to emerge
within a decade after 1912 as a successor to monarchial government. This
appearance of
the
single party as a vehicle for mobilization, indoctrination
135
The Chinese 'have regarded the world and man as uncreated, as ... the central features of a
spontaneously self-generating cosmos having no creator, god, ultimate cause or will external
to
itself.
F. W. Mote, Intellectual foundations of China, 18. Heaven's mandate, 'the cornerstone of
the Chinese Empire' (Creel, Origins of statecraft, 93), must be viewed as operating within this
impersonal, immanent framework; also discussed with European comparisons by Kuhn, 'Late
Ch'ing views', 5-9.
"
6
See J. K. Fairbank, ed. The
Chinese
world order.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
68 INTRODUCTION: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
and control signified the failure in China of the party as a pluralistic,
representational institution, along with the failure of parliamentary
government
—
a phenomenon widely met with in late-developing in-
dustrial states of the twentieth century.
After the Revolutionary Alliance (T 'ung-meng hui) expanded in 1912
to form a parliamentary party, the Kuomintang, its functioning in a
multi-party government was aborted by Yuan Shih-k'ai's dictatorship.
However, the idea of the elite party as a public organization, more
principled than a faction, more open than a conspiracy, had taken hold.
What had not been established was a theory of separation of powers
between legislative and executive that would be a prerequisite for the
practical politics of a Western-style loyal opposition. Instead, old-style
loyalty to persons continued to produce factionalism and, in the absence
of legitimized government, disunity. Sun Yat-sen, rather than adopt a
separation of powers among the legislative-executive-judicial triad as in
Western democracies, had added examination and control powers to create
the five-power constitution adopted by the Nationalist government of the
Kuomintang. This Chinese pentagon worked even less well than the
Western triad. When Chiang Kai-shek became the Nationalist leader he
based his power on a tripod of
party,
army and government, each headed
by
himself.
137
Similarly, law, although developed to meet commercial
needs,
remained little more than a tool of administration, and constitutions
were changed almost as readily as American party platforms.
In circumstances so unfavourable to a multi-party system, the party in
Republican China developed along two intersecting lines - as an instru-
ment of indoctrination and control and as a vehicle of revolutionary
mobilization. Sun Yat-sen early developed the concept of tutelage, seeing
a party mission to instruct the people in their political conduct while
mobilizing them in politics. Behind this idea lay a long history of
Confucian-Mencian faith in the power of ethical teaching and example
to induce virtue and orderly conduct. With the rise of nationalism,
reformers and revolutionaries had agreed that China's leaders had to train
the hitherto politically inert populace to participate actively as citizens in
a
new form of national
politics.
By
1914
the task of tutelage in Sun Yat-sen's
view had to be undertaken by a party with dictatorial powers.
138
Thus
the ground was prepared for a Leninist party dictatorship even before
it came into being in Russia and was transplanted to China.
This claim of the party
to
monopolies in indoctrination and mobilization,
137
Robert
E.
Bedeski, State-building
in
modern China:
the
Kuomintang
in
the prewar period; also Ch'ien
Tuan-sheng,
Tie
government and politics
of
China.
138
Friedman, Backward toward revolution; also George
T. Yu,
Party politics
in
Republican China:
the
Kuomintang, 1)12-1924.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
STATE AND SOCIETY IN THE REVOLUTIONARY PROCESS 69
if combined with government power,
had an
unprecedented potentiality
for control.
If
officials were unchecked except by the usual considerations
of expediency
and
loyalty,
the
combination
of
modern techniques
of
transport, communications
and
fire power with those
of
indoctrination,
manipulation and control opened up the possibility
of
a
twentieth-century
interventionist state penetrating
the
society with little restraint. Under
dynastic rule
the
Confucian myth
of
benevolent despotism
as
well
as
practical limitations
of
technology
had
kept
a
balance between imperial
prestige and state coercion. Public order and proper administration were
maintained not only
by
surveillance and coercion, but also
by
widespread
and persistent indoctrination
in
Confucian principles
of
hierarchy
and
reciprocity. The examination system meant that upward mobility was
for
men
who
thought right. Confucian homilies
of
graded duties
and
responsibilities were dispensed
in the
villages
and
permeated
the
family
system. Government
was by
moral authority almost
as
much
as by
coercion.
After the disappearance of the emperor ended his moral authority, Yuan
Shih-k'ai
and the
warlord governments, lacking legitimacy,
had to
rely
more
on
force.
In the
1920s when
two
parties,
the
KMT
and the
CCP,
were organized
in the
Leninist mould, they advanced
new
claims
to
legitimacy based
on
their differing mixes
of
nationalism and social justice.
Each, however, soon denied the moral legitimacy
of
the other and sought
to annihilate
it.
The second role of the Leninist party
-
and the reason for its appearance
in twentieth-century China
—
was
as an
agent
of
revolution.
The
attrac-
tiveness
of
the revolutionary party was many-sided: the urgent egalitarian
concern
for the
common people;
a
world view claiming
the
prestige
of
science
and
suggesting strategy
and
tactics
for
action; patriotic
and
humane social ideals;
a
daring conspiracy that could satisfy
the
most
insistent conscience while providing
an
exclusive comradeship. Loyalty
to
the
party
as the
ongoing embodiment
of
China's salvation was
a
way
forward.
130
During
the
Republican
era
such attractions were, however, predicated
upon
the
party continuing
to act as an
instrument
of
political
and
social
change. Both
the
Kuomintang
and the
Communists originated
as
revolutionary parties. These common origins, plus nationalism
and
mutual opposition
to
warlordism, made their early collaboration possible.
But there was certainly
no
consensus
in
favour
of
revolution among
the
elites from whom these parties
had to
draw support.
The
Leninist
reorganization
of the
Kuomintang
in
1923-4
was,
moreover,
a
late
IM
See Jerome Ch'en, 'Conversion
to the
doctrine', CHOC 12.505—14.
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7° INTRODUCTION: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
addition
to a
congeries of provincial
and
personal factions that traced their
roots back
to
before
the
amalgamation
of
the Revolutionary Alliance
in
1905.
In
1927-8 bitter ideological divisions between leftists, who favoured
violent social revolution,
and
rightists,
who
favoured either non-violent
change
or the
status
quo,
were superimposed
on the
older factionalism.
The Central Executive Committee
and
Politburo where power
was
concentrated were soon dominated by the military leader, Chiang Kai-shek.
The purge
of
left-wing party members weakened morale
and, as the
Kuomintang became more
the
party
of the
status
quo, the
ideology
of
Dr
Sun was
most prominent
at the
level
of
slogans
and did not
attract
many intellectuals.
The KMT,
despite
its
weekly small-group meetings
and centralist control
of
lower
by
higher levels, continued
to be
severely
faction-ridden.
The Communists were more effective
in
maintaining party solidarity,
combining Soviet
and
Chinese practices.
To
survive, they
had to
adjust
flexibly as they were pushed underground
in the
cities
and
into peripheral
rural areas where
the
Kuomintang
or
warlords were weak. They remained
more clearly devoted
to
their original revolutionary cause.
Later chapters
of
this volume will appraise China's problem
of
government
at
different times
and
from various angles.
In
general,
the
governments
of
the Republican period were
not as
effective
as the
Ch
'ing
had been within
the
less ambitious sphere
in
which
it
had exercised power.
Partly this
was
because
the
interventionist ambitions
of
state officials
outran their capacities when they were unwilling to share power with those
urban elites who might otherwise have supported and participated
in
their
regimes.
The
burden
on
state bureaucracies consequently increased,
especially
as
their very legitimacy depended upon unifying China. Much
can
be
said
for the
thesis that
the
Nationalist government's claims
to
encompass,
at
least potentially,
all
aspects
of
society
and all
areas
of
China
created
a
problem
of
control
so
great that
the
state's energies became
largely absorbed
in
self-maintenance.
As a
counterpart
to the
'high-level
equilibrium trap'
in the
economy, this
may be
called
a
'security
maintenance syndrome'
in the
polity. Revenues
had to be
channelled
to
fighting competitors. Officials were unreliable, particularly
at
lower
levels.
140
Bureaucrats watched each other
and the
ever-suspect public
to
such
a
degree that flexibility
and
innovation became difficult, especially
after
the
KMT-CCP split
of
1927 increased political tensions.
'*"
Duara,
pp.
3
27-36,
argues that
although
the
bureaucracy
was extended
down to the
ward
in Hopei
province,
the new
sub-district officials were
not
effectively controlled
by
higher
levels.
Geisert,
'Power
and
society',
260-1
concludes that
in
Kiangsu
the
Nanking government bureaucracy
was
superimposed
upon existing
elite-controlled structures
without liquidating the power
of
local
elites.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008