The first half of the twentieth century saw China submerged in a ‘Period of Disunion’ every bit as blood-soaked and confused – not to say narrative-testing – as the inter-dynastic free-for-alls of the past. If the plight of the Qing court after the Boxer Rebellion had recalled that of the last of the Later Han, the chaos that ensued mirrored that of the fourth-century Three Kingdoms. From 1911 to 1950 the fighting never really stopped; revolution became civil war, became revolution, became civil war, became foreign invasion, became freedom struggle, became civil war, became revolution. Kang Youwei, still in Japan, put the death toll at 20 million just for the two years 1911–12. How he reached this figure is anyone’s guess. Jonathan Spence suspects it was a Japanese exaggeration, ‘but even a figure one tenth as high is bleak enough, and in the context quite conceivable. . . [For] we are presented with cumulative evidence of violence and death that had moved beyond any rational justification, even in the grandiose terms of a final attainment of national order.’14
Throughout the period 1911–49, China remained a historico-cultural concept but was a coherent functioning state only during a brief interlude in the early 1930s. Diligent scholars trace a post-1911 pedigree of republican leadership stretching from Yuan Shikai’s premiership to Sun Yat-sen’s brief presidency in 1912, to Yuan Shikai’s presidency (1912–16), followed by a succession of short-lived generals and warlords to Zhang Zuolin (1928), Chiang Kai-shek (1928–49) and Mao Zedong (1949–76). The ups and downs of the ideological seesaw may be followed, and the shifts of the nation’s capital charted (from Beijing to Nanjing to Beijing to Nanjing to Wuhan to Chongqing to Beijing). But outside the big cities and the ports and away from the railway lines and the river traffic, power lay not with the republican strongmen or such constitutional devices as they tolerated but with those leaders who, by force or favour, controlled a particular locality and its resources. Under the empire these men with their regional bases and roving armies would have been called ‘bandits’ or ‘rebels’, but in an age when nationalism was dependent on accommodations with them, they were classified more ambiguously as ‘warlords’. There were literally thousands of warlords, ranging from generals and officials who ruled whole provinces (successors, in effect, of Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang) to local toughs with a few hundred ‘braves’, or restive hill minorities with an assertive chief.
And beyond them – beyond the warlords – where the telegraph poles disappeared into the haze and the fields stopped, so did China. The steppe had reverted to a no-go area. Manchuria, which had attracted much Han settlement and industrial development in the early twentieth century, was already compromised. A bone of contention in the 1920s between the Russians in the north, the Japanese in the south (they had taken over the Russian concessions in Liaodong after the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–5) and a semi-independent Manchu warlord, the whole of Manchuria was finally overrun by Japanese forces in 1931 and so reduced to a colony in all but name. As Tokyo’s satellite kingdom of Manchukuo – a ‘kingdom’ because the powerless ‘Last Emperor’ Henry Pu-yi was inveigled into lending legitimacy to this fiction – it provided Japan with the bridgehead and marshalling yard from which to launch its invasion of the rest of China in 1937. Not until 1946, after a post-war interlude under Soviet control, was Manchukuo reclaimed by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists. It was then promptly lost in heavy fighting to the communists in 1947–8; and by them it was reformulated as the three provinces constituting, not the now taboo ‘Manchuria’, but ‘the North East’ of the People’s Republic.
Outer (i.e. northern) Mongolia fared better. Its autonomy was acknowledged by China as early as 1915; and with Soviet help, a Mongolian People’s Republic was set up in Urga, the capital, in 1921. Despite recognition of a residual Chinese suzerainty, ‘the Soviet Union now replaced China as the country which had the greatest influence on the [Mongolian] republic’.15 This relationship would survive as long as the Soviet Union itself, China’s claims to suzerainty having been finally retracted amid Sino-Soviet fraternising and following a 1946 Mongolian plebiscite in favour of independence. Urga was renamed Ulan Bator and the Mongolian People’s Republic took its place in the UN.
Inner Mongolia (the arc of steppe south of the Gobi), by now with a substantial Han population, was more problematic. In the 1920s it was contested not by the Russians but by the Japanese, who entertained ideas of penetrating inner Asia from their Manchurian bridgehead by means of its steppe corridor. In the mid-1930s Tokyo therefore set up an ‘Autonomous Government of Inner Mongolia’. A decade later, when the Japanese were finally defeated by the Second World War allies, it was China’s communists from their base at Yan’an in northern Shaanxi who were best placed to fill the resulting vacuum. They duly did so, and the region became the Inner Mongolia (Nei Monggol) Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China.
Xinjiang also enjoyed de facto autonomy from 1912 until 1949, but in this case under a succession of Chinese governors. Warlords in practice, they were ‘governors’ only by virtue of such recognition as they bothered to obtain from whoever headed the republic of China at the time. Muslim Uighurs and Kazakhs repeatedly rose against this local government. They were suppressed only with the help of Soviet Russia. Indeed, had it not been for the post-war strength of communism in China itself, and the Sino-Soviet front against central Asian Islam that resulted, the ‘Eastern Turkestan Republic’ set up by an alliance of Uighurs and Kazakhs in 1945 might still be standing. The Soviet Union became deeply involved in Xinjiang’s development but returned the region to China following the communist triumph in 1949.
Finally there was Tibet. Press photos of Britain’s 1904 Younghusband expedition mowing down Tibetans armed with nothing more lethal than hoes had gone down badly in London. Younghusband’s one-sided Lhasa Convention with the Tibetans therefore proved highly unpopular. It was unacceptable to the other powers, including Russia, which saw it as an extension into central Asia of British influence; unacceptable to the XIIIth Dalai Lama, who had had no part in its terms since he had fled to China; unacceptable to London, which diluted it and censured Younghusband for having exceeded instructions; and totally unacceptable to the Qing government, which denied that the Tibetans had any right to negotiate with a foreign power. Beijing would, however, ratify the convention if the British would in return recognise China’s sovereignty in Tibet. The British, splitting hairs in terms that must have taxed the translators no end, would acknowledge only China’s suzerainty in Tibet, not its sovereignty. The matter being unresolved even in a 1906 Anglo-Chinese treaty on trade with Tibet, Qing forces began a slow advance through Qinghai. The Dalai Lama returned to Lhasa in late 1909, just ahead of the advancing Chinese. This did not stop them; and rather than face humiliation at the hands of more invaders, in early 1910 the Dalai Lama fled again, this time to India.
His Holiness’s Indian exile was shorter than that which awaited his reincarnation in 1959. When in 1911 the revolutionaries’ bomb went off in Hankou, Qing troops in Tibet found themselves besieged, first by their revolutionary colleagues, then by the Tibetans. Routes back to China being blocked, they had to be repatriated via the Himalayan passes and India. The same circuitous and humiliating route was used by Qing, and then republican, emissaries vainly trying to re-estabish contact with Lhasa. When in mid-1912 the Dalai Lama returned home, it was to an already liberated Tibet; ‘the Chinese military occupation of the Dalai Lama’s dominions, begun three years previously, had come to an end’.16 Tibet was now effectively independent. Though this independence was never recognised by any Chinese government, in 1913 President Yuan Shikai did acknowledge Tibetan autonomy in return for British recognition of the Chinese republic.
Thirty years later, when the Second World War brought Britain and Nationalist China together as allies, the issue of Tibet’s status resurfaced. The formula now favoured by the British was a swap: Tibet to accept China’s suzerainty in return for China accepting Tibet’s autonomy. This satisfied neither party and would have been difficult to implement. But the formula was maintained until 1949, when independent India’s Jawaharlal Nehru indicated that he was not inclined to ‘a legalistic view’ of the matter. Mao Zedong took the hint and thereupon made the ‘liberation’ of Tibet a priority for the People’s Liberation Army. It was invaded within the year and secured as an integral, if autonomous, region of the People’s Republic. The XIVth Dalai Lama tolerated this situation until 1959. In that year the Tibetans rose against the Chinese presence, the army returned to suppress the revolt and His Holiness fled to India, this time indefinitely.
Shorn of these vast peripheral territories, riddled by warlord regimes within and hamstrung by infighting among their own leaders, the first republican governments of what remained of China were seldom in a position to take advantage of such international opportunities as came their way. In the First World War China had become an official combatant only when the war was nearly over, although around 100,000 Chinese recruits served as auxiliaries in northern Europe, suffering substantial casualties. On both counts, China was entitled to a place at the table when in 1919 the allied powers sat down to divide the spoils. A sixty-strong delegation duly made the trip to Paris with high expectations of at least regaining control of those treaty ports and concessions now forfeited by the vanquished Germans. Woodrow Wilson disapproved of all colonialisms and was preaching the doctrine of self-determination; there was just a chance that the Japanese would be ordered out of Manchuria and the British out of Hong Kong.
But the Chinese delegation would be disappointed. Ostensibly this was because its members were as disunited as the republic they represented. Sun Yat-sen’s Revolutionary Alliance, now renamed the Guomindang (National People’s Party) and with its strongest support in the south, had won China’s first election in 1913. (About 40 million had the vote, although women were still not among them.) Yuan Shikai, his prior election as president doubtful after this Nationalist victory and his strongest support being in the north, then moved against the Guomindang and attacked provincial governors who supported it. Heavier fighting than usual followed, and the northern forces stormed and ransacked Nanjing. The parliament was dissolved, Sun fled back into exile and Yuan Shikai ruled as dictator, even attempting to set himself up as emperor, until his death in 1916. Meanwhile most of the southern provinces had seceded from the republic and declared themselves autonomous. For appearances’ sake, the delegation sent to the Paris peace talks included some southerners. But its divisions proved hard to disguise and to Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson ‘it was not clear whether [it] represented either a country or a government’. Moreover they assumed that it ‘did not include either China’s president or prime minister mainly because the political situation in China was so precarious that neither dared leave’.17
In reality, though, the composition of the Chinese delegation was irrelevant; for the republican government had already signed away the prized German concessions in Shandong. Qingdao, the nucleus of these concessions and by now a thriving port complete with German schools and an excellent brewery (the ‘Tsingtao’ of the still-popular label being the Wade-Giles form of ‘Qingdao’), had in fact been taken from the Germans by the Japanese in 1914. Tokyo had then presented Yuan Shikai with an ultimatum known as the Twenty-one Demands. Since these would ‘virtually have turned China into a Japanese protectorate’, Yuan Shikai had chosen to buy off the Japanese by pledging China’s support for Tokyo’s claim to Qingdao.18 The Chinese delegates, of course, claimed that this agreement had been signed under duress; but to the allies an agreement was an agreement. It clinched it. Qingdao went to Japan and Chinese hopes were dashed.
When the news of this sell-out reached Beijing, protesters massed in the square outside the Tiananmen, the ‘Gate of Heavenly Peace’ (a smaller space in those days, though no less symbolic). It was 4 May (1919), a date ever after identified with national outrage and reawakening. The lead was taken by students from Beijing’s National University, itself founded in 1898 but reconstituted as the senior institution in a new system of modern tertiary education in 1912. Thousands were eventually arrested, in fact so many that they could not be contained and had to be released. Sun Yat-sen and Kang Youwei, though still constitutional sparring partners, both lent their support. Student unions were formed wherever there were students, workers’ groups joined in, women mobilised as never before, and the ‘May 4 Movement’ spread throughout the country. In Shanghai 100,000 protested. Japanese goods were everywhere boycotted, while feeling against those powers whose liberal sentiments had been sacrificed to appease Japan ran high. But the political fall-out was modest. A couple of pro-Japanese ministers were dismissed, China refused to sign the peace accord, and then, three years later, as part of an international agreement on naval power in the western Pacific, Japan vacated Qingdao anyway.
The social and intellectual legacy of May 4 was a different matter. Born of outrage and impotence in the face of international betrayal, it intensified and radically redirected the whole future course of national resurgence. A new generation of leaders, among them the young Mao Zedong in his native Changsha (Hunan) and Zhou Enlai in Tianjin (Hebei), gained their first experience of political activism. Mass action took on new dimensions with labour unions and women’s groups organising and mobilising as never before. ‘Four hundred or more journals, written in the vernacular and devoted to culture and politics, were founded in this same period; hundreds of new schools, often with radical curricula, were set up’;19 textbooks also went vernacular; and a ‘New Culture Movement’ gained momentum with the publication of some of China’s finest fiction. As ever, political chaos proved a stimulant to cultural activity. Qu Qiubai, a student in Beijing at the time and later a controversial figure in the Communist Party, recalled that it was like being ‘sucked into the whirlwind’. ‘Feelings . . . ran so strong that restlessness could no more be contained.’ For the first time ‘the sharp pain of imperialistic oppression reached our bones, and it awakened us from the nightmares of impractical democratic reforms’.20
Throughout the early 1920s the strikes, protests and boycotts escalated, with organised labour – Hong Kong dockers, Shanghai mill workers, Guangzhou seamen, Wuhan railwaymen – increasingly setting the pace. Demonstrators were shot and sympathy strikes followed. Occasionally the strikers’ demands were met, more often not. A growing awareness that the Beijing government’s reliance on foreign loans made it an accomplice of the foreign-owned companies that were exploiting Chinese labour fuelled the idea of a nationalist revolution to overthrow the republic. This in turn called for unity between Sun’s Guomindang Nationalists, who controlled Guangdong province, and a newer, much smaller but highly organised party of anti-imperialists with strong support in Shanghai – the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Inspired by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and by Chinese students who had taken up Marxism-Leninism while on work-study programmes in Paris, the CCP had been formed in Shanghai in 1921. Mao Zedong attended this first convention as Hunan’s representative, while Chen Duxiu, editor of the leftist journal New Youth and founder of several Marxist study groups, was chosen as secretary-general. Links with Lenin’s Comintern (Communist International) had already been established, and they were cemented when the Russian leadership indicated a willingness to restore to a legitimate Chinese government all Russian concessions in China. Here clearly was a highly desirable ally in the struggle to liberate the country from the foreign imperialists. Comintern advisers, instructors, funds and munitions were therefore welcomed; and despite misgivings, the CCP accepted a Comintern directive that, rather than defer revolution until such time as the proletariat had been mobilised, the party should temporarily join forces with the Guomindang. Together they would then overthrow the ‘feudal’ warlords, by which time the country would be ready for a ‘second stage’ of struggle ending in the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Neither the Guomindang nor the CCP was entirely of one mind; but as of 1922 they were agreed on a joint programme to reunite the country and attain full independence. For the Guomindang, Sun Yat-sen and, following his death in 1925, Chiang Kai-shek set up a military government in Guangzhou. There Chiang, who had himself been trained in a Japanese military academy, established a nationalist naval academy that would provide a dependable corps and much of the leadership in the forthcoming struggle. Discipline and organisation were supplied by the Comintern agent known as Mikhail Borodin; funds came from local taxes and from landlords and industrialists who supported the Guomindang in return for its protection; and troops were drawn from among both parties’ supporters and from the militias of various southern warlords. By July 1926 the so-called Northern Expedition of Nationalists and communists was ready to move out. One arm worked its way up the coast through Fujian to Hangzhou, another headed directly for Nanjing, and a third made for Changsha and the Wuhan ‘tri-city’.
The last, following the route taken by the Taipings in 1851–53, made the most rapid progress thanks to the nearly completed Guangzhou–Wuhan rail link. Changsha fell in July and Wuchang, after heavy fighting and a desperate siege, in October. Chiang Kai-shek, as commander-in-chief, then faced the same decision as the Taipings in 1854 – whether to push on north straight to Beijing or whether first to veer east down the Yangzi to secure Shanghai and the agro-industrial heartland. Unlike the God-worshippers, Chiang favoured Shanghai. Nanjing was taken in March 1927 and Shanghai, already paralysed by a general strike organised by the CCP-dominated trade unions, welcomed the Nationalists later the same month.
The strikers, and the CCP, then became the victims of a flagrant and never-to-be forgotten betrayal. Chiang needed the recognition of the foreign powers, the forbearance of their navies and the loans and exactions available from Shanghai’s banks and corporations. He did not need ardent supporters bent on ousting the foreign imperialists and reclaiming their concessions while using organised labour to smash the power of the corporate bourgeoisie. In short, the CCP was now an embarrassment. Moving all but his most reliable troops out of the city, and availing himself of the services of the Green Gang, an underworld organisation of well-armed thugs used by industrialists to intimidate strikers, Chiang Kai-shek launched an all-out assault on the labour unions. Hundreds of union leaders were gunned down, thousands arrested. Similar acts of repression followed in Wuhan and Guangzhou. The CCP’s hopes of a Marxist revolution based on the seizure of the means of production by the industrial proletariat had always been a long shot in an overwhelmingly agrarian economy. Now those hopes were dashed. Likewise, the strategy of using the Guomindang to turbo-charge a communist grab for power had spectacularly backfired. As of 1928 Nationalists and communists were locked into a disastrous pattern of ideological detestation and military confrontation.