JAMES CARTER
On May 4, 1919, thousands of university students gathered at Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, in Beijing. For 500 years, this gate had served as the entryway to the Forbidden City, home of China’s emperors in the Ming and Qing dynasties. The Qing’s last emperor still lived behind its walls, but the protesters were not concerned with him. The students wanted to save their nation.
China had joined the Allies in World War I expecting to be repaid by having German colonial holdings—centered around the city of Qingdao—returned to Chinese sovereignty, and US President Woodrow Wilson’s (vague) promises of national self-determination reinforced this expectation. While the Allied victory in 1918 seemed to assure this outcome, the peace conference in Versailles dashed Chinese hopes. Bowing to realpolitik, Britain, France, and the United States agreed to allow Shandong to remain under Japanese control as it had since the start of the war. Japan’s military power—it had defeated Russia in war just fifteen years earlier—gave it political clout, whereas China remained internally divided and militarily weak. Under Japanese pressure, US President Wilson, French President Clemenceau, and the British Prime Minister broke their promises to China and allowed Shandong to remain in Japanese hands.
News of the betrayal reached China on May 1. University students, at the forefront of cultural and political change in China, reacted by organizing demonstrations against Western imperialism, Japanese aggression, and China’s weakness in the face of both. Beginning around 1915, students had responded to the failure of the new Republican government to unify and govern China with the New Culture Movement, seeking to renew China’s strength by adopting and adapting ideas from the West—especially science and democracy. Rejecting, partly or completely, traditional Chinese values like Confucianism, leaders of this movement embraced the West as a model for modernizing China’s society, culture, and politics.
Versailles changed that. By handing over Chinese territory to Japan, the Allies demonstrated that China still could not fully trust the Western imperial powers. China had overthrown its monarchy, established a nominal republic, and sent its citizens to Europe to support the war effort. Many in China expected that these actions would make China an equal member of the family of nations, ending decades of humiliation. Yet after the war had been won the Allied powers again compromised China’s sovereignty on the basis of imperial military power (this time Japan’s). Instead of a total embrace of Western ideas, Chinese intellectuals after May 4 took a more nuanced approach, still rejecting traditional Chinese culture (which had, in their view, led China to weakness and domination by foreign powers) but wary of the goodwill of Western imperialists.
The journal New Youth exemplified the ideals of the May Fourth and New Culture Movements. New Youth was founded in Shanghai in September 1915 by Chen Duxiu, and moved with Chen to Beijing in 1917 when he was recruited to the faculty of Peking University. After 1917, when Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution succeeded in Russia, New Youth increasingly advocated Marxism alongside science, democracy, and the usage of the vernacular in place of classical Chinese. New Youth also showcased the work of many of China’s most prominent and progressive writers—including Lu Xun.
The literature of the May Fourth era is among its most enduring legacies, and Lu Xun (born Zhou Shuren) is its most prominent representative. Three of his short stories illustrate his work’s themes and goals: “Diary of a Madman,” “Medicine,” and “The True Story of Ah Q.” “Diary of a Madman,” published in New Youth in 1918 (before the May Fourth Movement, and so more properly included in the New Culture Movement), takes the form of a “found text,” a diary discovered by a young man sent to a village to care for his brother, who has gone mad. With growing paranoia and horror, the diary reveals the brother’s discovery that his friends and neighbors, and eventually all Chinese people, are and have been cannibals. The “Madman” discovers the command “eat people” written between the lines of Confucian morality texts. As he explores further, he comes to understand that Chinese society has been devouring its young for millennia, and anyone who discovers and objects to this practice becomes the next meal. Assigning these cannibalistic values to Confucianism, Lu Xun makes a powerful metaphor out of the New Culture Movement’s critique of traditional Chinese culture: that it consumes youth, innovation, and individualism, relying instead on ancient texts and customs.
The same themes animate “Medicine,” published in New Youth in 1919. Just a few pages long, the story focuses on two interrelated deaths: a revolutionary executed by the government, and a young boy sick with tuberculosis. In the opening scene, the sick boy’s desperate father tries a traditional remedy: feeding his son a bun soaked in human blood. That blood, of course, flowed from the revolutionary’s veins, pierced by the firing squad’s bullets. By the story’s end, the two boys—one from the Hua family, the other from the Xia family—are buried next to one another, the family names on adjacent tombstones spelling out huaxia, a traditional name for China. One killed by reactionary politics and the other by outmoded beliefs, the two boys’ deaths represent China’s future unless it rejects both.
Lu Xun’s best-known story is perhaps the most famous piece of modern Chinese literature: “The True Story of Ah Q,” a thinly veiled allegory of the 1911 Revolution and its failures that transcends its immediate context by parodying traditional Chinese culture and politics. Published serially in 1921 and 1922, the story describes the life of a poor villager who claims descent from Confucius himself—or at least from ancient Chinese nobility—but cannot document any of his claims. He mocks others in his village for being low-class, and is routinely beaten up for his insults. Desperate to redeem his reputation, Ah Q takes to slapping himself in the face, declaring this a “great victory” and congratulating himself for delivering the blow. Misogynist, uneducated, and unemployed, Ah Q embodies the worst aspects of Chinese society during this era. Yet he is also a victim. Rejected from participating in the revolution, he finds himself convicted of a crime he did not commit and then executed as an example to others. The assembled crowd of onlookers disdains Ah Q for his crime and his unenlightened nature, and mocks him for failing to sing the opera arias considered customary for a condemned criminal. In the story’s memorable final scene, the observers are compared to ravenous wolves who devour Ah Q.
Typical of May Fourth literature, the story of Ah Q depicts Western goods and ideas throughout the story as ambiguous. When the revolution comes to the village, one of its two leaders is a member of the local village elite and the other is an “imitation foreign devil,” a young student recently returned from study abroad (apparently in Japan), who gets his name because he dresses in Western clothes and advocates foreign values and ideas. Ah Q deems the revolution too risky and refuses to join, then changes his mind when its success seems imminent, but is barred from joining because of his lack of ideological purity. Lu Xun criticizes both the Chinese people and the revolutionary leaders, as both put ideology and self-interest above the good of their country. He shows reliance on Western ideas to be promising, but dangerous—as China discovered at Versailles. Lu Xun also addresses the interaction of Chinese and Western culture in Ah Q’s name, which is written with a Chinese character and a Latin letter: “阿Q.” His surname Ah has no real meaning and is usually used either to represent the sound in transliterating foreign words or as a prefix of endearment. It is rarely used as a surname or given name. The “Q” is written, even in the original Chinese text, with the Latin letter “Q.” Numerous reasons have been suggested for this choice, such as that it makes Ah Q both anonymous and, thus, very malleable as a character, as well as exotic and strange.
The tension between Chinese and Western models for the intellectuals of the May Fourth Movement is captured in Ding Ling’s story “Miss Sophie’s Diary.” Ding Ling’s protagonist, Miss Sophie, encounters nationalism, revolution, and modernization, just as Lu Xun’s characters did. Gender, however, also shaped her experience. Lu Xun addressed questions of gender relations and sexuality occasionally: Ah Q attempted to rape a nun who he perceived to have slighted him (and he later begged her to marry him), but these depictions tend to be broad attacks on traditional Chinese culture, including its sexism. Ding Ling takes a much more personal and individual angle on these issues through Miss Sophie, a twenty-something student who is sexually adventurous yet also confused and curious. Readers of Fiction Monthly, which published “Miss Sophie’s Diary,” may have been shocked to read about masturbation, bisexuality, and premarital sex in the story. Among the many challenges Miss Sophie confronts in the story is a choice between two men, a choice that maps closely onto political debates facing China. One of Miss Sophie’s suitors, a Chinese man named Wei, is attentive and romantic, with good prospects and eager to fill the role of a conventional husband. Sophie, though, mocks his attention and finds herself drawn to another man, Ling Jishi. Ling is physically attractive, but treats her poorly. He is also from Singapore—a British colony with a largely Chinese population. The comparison between the weak traditionally minded Wei and the foreign-influenced Ling is a metaphor for the choices facing China: neither was satisfying, and in the end Sophie was doomed either way. Unlike Lu Xun, though, Ding Ling’s characters were drawn primarily as human beings, not as metaphors. Sophie’s inability to find satisfaction in her personal relationships is partly a commentary on China’s dilemma between its traditional culture and Western imperialism, but mainly the inability of the Chinese culture to accommodate a woman who defies conventional social roles. Ding Ling’s experience as a woman taking part in the progressive politics of the time was complicated: the revolutionary movement had put women’s issues—including access to education, equality before the law, and an end to footbinding—near the top of their political agenda. Yet, women were rarely part of the leadership of revolutionary parties. When conflict arose, “women’s issues” were frequently postponed or de-emphasized in favor of concerns associated more closely with class or nation.
The May Fourth and New Culture Movements left powerful legacies of literature, poetry, and intellectual ferment. The style and content of this new literature charted a new course for Chinese culture, and even the language itself changed, as May Fourth writers popularized the use of vernacular language, a movement that had been gaining momentum since the nineteenth century. (“The True Story of Ah Q” was the first story to be widely published that was written entirely in the vernacular.) For the first time in centuries, the written Chinese language corresponded to the way people spoke.
China’s urban modernity
Though fictional, Miss Sophie illustrated the mixing and merging of modernity and Western influence with traditional ideas of Chinese culture. Although most of the country (perhaps 95 percent of the population) was rural, coastal metropolises were home to millions of people and were a window into global trends and ideas. It was no surprise that the May Fourth demonstrations occurred in Beijing, the political center of the nation. Ports like Tianjin, Canton, and Xiamen (Amoy) had long histories as hubs for foreign trade. But by the 1920s there was simply no place in China like Shanghai.
Guidebooks to the city were written for foreign tourists, and overflowed with hyperbole. Shanghai was called the “Paris of the East,” the “New York of the West,” and even “the most cosmopolitan city in the world.” The buildings along the Bund—Shanghai’s waterfront on the Huangpu River—were the tallest in Asia. Exemplifying the wealth and power of European institutions in semi-colonial China were buildings such as the British Consulate, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, the Shanghai Club, the Cathay Hotel, and the Customs House. Nanjing Road connected the Bund to the Shanghai Race Club, where horse racing provided a focal point of life in Shanghai for many foreign and local residents.
Shanghai’s unique status as a bridge between Chinese and foreign communities fueled its political, cultural, social, and commercial success and importance. In the 1920s, Shanghai’s population approached 3 million—about 90 percent of it Chinese—with the city itself behind equally divided between foreign- and Chinese-controlled districts. Foreign concessions such as the International Settlement, dominated by British and American interests, and the French Concession, operated their own governments, police forces, and public works. While not technically colonies, those living in them operated under extraterritoriality. The roaring twenties were just that in Shanghai: with the world at a peak of free trade policies, the Chinese market just upstream from Shanghai offered seemingly limitless opportunities. Hollywood movies, American automobiles, and dozens of dancehalls, bars, and restaurants all tried to capture some of the money flowing through Shanghai. And not all of Shanghai’s enterprise was legal. Some estimate that Shanghai was home to more prostitutes per capita than any other city on earth, and the Green Gang crime syndicate effectively governed many parts of the city. Viewed from outside China, Shanghai’s reputation of dance clubs, mobsters, hostesses, and the exotic Orient made it a required stop on many tourist agendas. For many foreigners, Shanghai was China.
But of course, Shanghai was unlike anywhere else in China, and for Chinese the city’s place on the edge of many cultures, nationalities, and jurisdictions had different consequences. Many Chinese took part in the jazz scene and bet on the horse races, but others had more political agendas. Revolutionary movements had found shelter in Shanghai as early as the nineteenth century, when Zou Rong had published his anti-Qing tract The Revolutionary Army from Shanghai. With political chaos spreading across China in the 1920s, the protection and stability of the foreign concessions became even more appealing. The protection of foreign jurisdictions combined with the easy access to foreign goods and ideas should make it unsurprising that Shanghai was a center of avant-garde and progressive politics and culture among Chinese intellectuals. Ding Ling wrote “Miss Sophie’s Diary” in Shanghai. Lu Xun moved to the city and spent his last years there. For leftist politics, the city was especially important. As China’s industrial center it had the largest concentration of workers, and was perhaps China’s only city with a Marxist urban proletariat. By the 1930s, there were some 2,500 manufacturing plants in Shanghai, the most numerous of which were textile mills (cotton and silk), but also rice- and flourmills, canneries, and cigarette factories. It was estimated that half of all the cotton spindles operating in China at that time were in Shanghai.
Founding the Communist Party
This concentration of industry made Shanghai a center of labor politics in China, the leaders of which were spurred to action during the May Fourth era. Activists sought a solution that was neither traditionally Chinese nor fully Western. Marxism, which had first arrived in China late in the nineteenth century, seemed to fit the bill. The Communist Manifesto had first been translated into Chinese around 1899, and the revolutionary movements that eventually overthrew the Qing dynasty included many strands of Marxism. Anarchism, especially, was powerful in the first decades of the twentieth century. In the years following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, international socialism began to find more adherents in China. This intensified when Russia withdrew from World War I and Lenin proclaimed the anti-imperialist policies of the new Soviet Union. Clustered around Peking University, early Marxists included the editors of New Youth, Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu, who organized a Marxist study group at Peking University. Mao Zedong, though not prominent at this stage, was also a member of the Peking University group.
The Chinese search for national strengthening coincided with the Soviet desire to export revolution. When the Communist International (the Comintern) set out to develop a Marxist revolution in China, it quickly identified the Peking University group. Using the extraterritorial protection of Shanghai, in July 1921 the Comintern agent Grigorii Voitinksy helped facilitate a meeting in the French Concession that established the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The meeting was an unusual one: Li Dazhao, generally seen as the founder of the Party, was not present. Chen Duxiu became Party Secretary, working closely with Dutch Comintern agent Henk Sneevliet (known as “Maring”). Among the fifty-three delegates was Mao Zedong, one of two representatives from Hunan.
The Comintern influence on the early CCP was enormous. Comintern agents insisted that the CCP pursue an orthodox Marxist formula for revolution in China. This meant the Party intended to follow Marx’s prediction that revolution would be based on the proletariat and also that a “bourgeois” revolution was required to bring national industrial capital to power before the socialist revolution could take place. This strategy had several implications for China. First, the base for organizing the revolution was to be the large coastal cities, especially Shanghai, with the most developed industrial sectors. Second, because China had yet to extensively industrialize, revolution there was not imminent. Third, the focus on urban, industrial workers meant that the peasantry (the great majority of China’s population) was not to be directly involved in the revolution, at least not yet.
To help bring about the bourgeois revolution that would precede the Communist one, the Comintern endorsed a policy of cooperation with other revolutionary parties. In China this meant the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang (KMT), which had grown out of Sun Yat-sen’s Revolutionary Alliance (Tongmenghui), the driving force of the 1911 revolution. The Revolutionary Alliance had brought together numerous anti-Qing groups around the turn of the century. After the revolution, the Alliance merged with several other organizations and was recast as a political party, establishing the Kuomintang in the summer of 1912.
The KMT was soon a victim of its own success. The Party won the great majority of seats in the first republican elections, in 1912, leaving Song Jiaoren (along with Sun, the leading political figure in the Party) in a position to establish a government. The Party’s success, though, threatened Yuan Shikai’s plans for autocracy, and Yuan had Song assassinated in March of 1913. Shortly thereafter, the KMT was banned. As the Republic crumbled, and Yuan himself died, the KMT and Sun Yat-sen worked to rebuild the Party, once again as a rebel organization rededicated to the ideal of republican revolution.
Disillusioned by the failure of the 1911 Revolution to produce an effective government, Sun tried to learn from the lessons of the past. He remained committed to his “Three Principles of the People”—nationalism, socialism, and democracy—and was keenly aware of the need for a military force to support the Party. Sun had yielded the presidency to Yuan Shikai in 1912 because, in part, Sun’s Revolutionary Alliance had no military capability, relying on Yuan and his Beiyang Army to carry out the revolution.
Sun’s need for resources and military capability matched well with the Comintern’s abilities to provide them. Sun had reservations about the anti-democratic elements of the Soviet Union’s centrally planned economy, but he interpreted Lenin’s New Economic Policies as a sign of moderation. Sun—then based in Shanghai—met with Comintern agents in 1923, and issued a statement, suggesting that while the conditions for Communism did not presently exist in China, China (and by implication, the KMT) could rely on Russian support. Sun’s vaguely worded endorsement of Russian support—and the Russians’ vaguely worded endorsement of the KMT—began an ambiguous relationship that would persist for decades.
Befitting this ambiguity, Comintern support came to play a crucial role for both political parties. The Communists were obviously much ideologically closer to the Soviets, but the KMT was the stronger—and much larger—organization. Yet, the KMT badly wanted Comintern support in order to arm itself. Russian aid was only forthcoming, though, if an alliance could be forged between the Communists and the Nationalists. Sun agreed, and the First United Front was established in 1923. The United Front guaranteed that the two parties would work together to combat imperialism and feudalism, and to promote the idea of a unified Chinese state. All members of the Chinese Communist Party (only a few hundred at this time) were automatically made members of the KMT as well.
Embodying the idea of the First United Front was the Whampoa Military Academy, which opened in May 1924. The academy was located near Sun’s new power base in Canton and enrolled both nationalists and communists. The advisers for the academy, and its funding, were primarily Soviet. Political instruction was central to training a Party army along Leninist lines. Yet most of the cadets were not Communists and the academy’s first commandant, Chiang Kai-shek, was among the most anti-Communist of the KMT officers. Tension between CCP and KMT cadets at Whampoa was kept at bay largely because of the unifying figure of Sun Yat-sen and due to the practical benefits that Soviet military training and aid could provide. After decades of trying to build an army with revolutionary capabilities, Sun seemed finally to have the pieces in place to do so.
Warlords
The most immediate objective of Sun’s Party was to reunify China, which had fragmented after the death of Yuan Shikai. Although a central government remained nominally in charge, disparate groups of local militarists controlled large swathes of China ranging from a few counties to several provinces. Known as warlords, these men dominated Chinese politics and society for more than a decade, from Yuan Shikai’s death in 1916 until the late 1920s. An example of one such warlod is Duan Qirui (1865–1936), who was the most powerful man in China after Yuan’s death. Duan’s power was largely regional, rooted in military power and patronage. Deriving their strength from local military cliques, warlords sought control over Beijing: whoever controlled the capital could claim to rule the entire country. The warlords who dominated this era were a colorful and diverse group. Some were brutal petty dictators, little more than gang leaders on a grand scale. Others were progressive social reformers, bureaucrats, and would-be emperors. Examining some of the most prominent warlords during this era gives some indication of the range of experience across China, and also the motivation for Sun and his Party to reclaim the power of a central government.
Although the personalities of individual warlords are memorable, it is crucial to bear in mind that the roots of warlordism were structural. Yuan Shikai was himself a ruler with power based on military status and the personal loyalty of his troops. When Yuan died and the focus of that loyalty vanished, China’s military and political establishment fragmented. In place of a single national army, three dominant factions, or cliques, emerged, each named for the general geography of its power base. The Anhui clique, led by Duan Qirui, was based in central China’s Anhui province. The Zhili clique’s power was centered on the province now known as Hebei, headed by Feng Guozhang, the vice-president of the Republic under Yuan Shikai, along with Wu Peifu. Finally, the Fengtian clique, taking its name from the old name for Liaoning province, was Zhang Zuolin’s personal army, centered in Manchuria. None of these three cliques was able to govern effectively, partly because they were constantly fighting with one another, both politically and militarily. The central government itself divided between these two factions even before Yuan Shikai died. The presidency went to the weak, unpopular Li Yuanhong following Yuan’s death, but real power was held by the vice-president, Feng Guozhang, and the Premier, Duan Qirui. Soon, their two factions came to blows, with Wu Peifu (1874–1939) leading the Zhili armies. Within the fluid and unpredictable structure of these three cliques, China split among various militarists beginning around 1915. There was no such thing as a “typical” warlord. The group was varied and, in many ways, defined by their diversity. Feng Yuxiang (1892–1948) may be seen as representative of the group. His path to power was typical, and his control strictly regional. Yet at moments he became a player on the national stage and, again like many, his personal idiosyncrasies defined the areas he controlled. Feng rose through the ranks of the Qing Beiyang Army, commanded by Yuan Shikai, but joined the rebels in 1911. After being captured and imprisoned, he rejoined Yuan’s army’s in 1914 and was one of Yuan’s most trusted generals. After Yuan’s death, Feng rose within the ranks of the Zhili clique, but retained his own independence. A devout Christian (there were rumors that he baptized his troops en masse with a fire hose), he was popular with Westerners and attempted social reforms in areas under his control. He also proved difficult to predict or control, shifting alliances numerous times, and even inviting Sun Yat-sen to Beijing for negotiations that might lead to the unification of China.
Zhang Zuolin (1875–1928), the leader of the Fengtian clique, made his career in northeast China, also known as Manchuria. He had become the head of a local gang in the late nineteenth century, operating in the power vacuum that accompanied the international rivalry among China, Japan, and Russia, particularly following the first Sino-Japanese War (1894–95). Legends depict him as a “Robin Hood” figure, but his career was defined by a clear lack of principles. The only consistent agenda he advanced was his own power. His group of several hundred men worked for the Qing to maintain order following the Boxer Uprising in 1900, and also as mercenaries for the Japanese during the Sino-Russian War (1904–05). When that war ended, Zhang’s soldiers were again recognized as part of the Qing army, and were instrumental in keeping the region from seceding following the 1911 Revolution.
Although formally part of the Republic of China, Manchuria acted largely as an independent state in the 1910s and 1920s, and Zhang had himself appointed governor-general of the region. Though this title gave him legitimacy in the Republican hierarchy, his real source of power was his Fengtian Army, which grew to 300,000 strong by the mid-1920s. In a series of wars, he was able to capture Beijing, becoming de facto head of state from 1926 to 1928, and was thus China’s internationally recognized ruler. This power, though, was not able to protect him against his Japanese would-be patrons, who arranged for his railroad car to be blown up when they deemed him unlikely to assist their plans for domination in Manchuria.
Numerous other warlords wielded significant local power. Yan Xishan (d. 1960), for example, was a reformer based in Shanxi. Yan outlawed footbinding, prostitution, gambling, and even sleeping late. Another such warlord was Zhang Zongchang (1881–1929), a brutal former bandit leader who kept a harem of women from different countries and made a hobby of splitting the heads of his victims.
7. How the country was divided (before the Northern Expedition).
Consequences of warlordism
Although the personalities and programs of warlords differed greatly, the consequences of warlordism on rural society (more than 90 percent of China’s population) were uniformly dire. The drone of warfare was constant, destroying villages and fields, killing livestock and, of course, people. Boys and men were conscripted into warlord armies, taking them away from their families, but also depriving their village of labor. Desertion was common, yet had mixed consequences. Those who were caught were harshly punished, and even those who succeeded were often drafted again, either into the same army or into rival forces.
The same process of conquest and re-conquest drained peasants’ coffers. Desperate for revenue to support social programs, armies, or just greed, warlords heavily taxed many villages, sometimes collecting taxes years in advance. When territory changed hands, the new regime would follow the same procedure, meaning rural families might have paid several years’ of taxes to several different warlords. This burden condemned peasants already living on the margins to years of destitution. In a desperate attempt to survive while satisfying the demands of their politicians, peasants often turned away from the traditional food crops they had cultivated in favor of cash crops that would bring higher prices at market. As much as 20 percent of China’s arable land was taken up in the production of opium, which could be sold at higher profits but which also reduced the food supply. This conversion of food to cash crops exacerbated the famines that could follow bad weather or military devastation, and the breakdown of central government undermined the relief infrastructure—including a system of granaries that had been a staple of Chinese governance for centuries. Widespread and severe famines were commonplace, including major famines in 1920–21, which left half a million people dead, and another in 1928–30 that killed perhaps 3 million.
Northern Expedition
Since Yuan Shikai’s death in 1916, China had been fragmented and weak. In 1917, Sun failed to re-establish the Republic from his base in Canton. This failure, he recognized, was due to his lack of a military force that could regain order. The Whampoa Academy was meant to give the KMT an army that could carry out this plan. In 1922, Sun began planning a “Northern Expedition” that would move the Nationalist Army north to the capital. To facilitate this plan, Sun worked to convince many of the warlords to join the Nationalist cause. It was in 1924, while Sun was in Beijing negotiating with rival warlords to join the Northern Expedition, that he took ill, checking into an American hospital on December 31, 1924. Within ten weeks he was dead of liver cancer.
The loss of a leader challenges any political movement, but Sun’s death was particularly damaging for the divided and unstable revolutionary movement. While a nominal truce existed between the Nationalists and Communists, known as the United Front, the agreement understated the differences between the two parties. It also ignored the deep divisions within the Guomindang itself, where Sun’s legacy was fiercely contested around two main factions. One camp, led by Wang Jingwei and Sun’s widow, Song Qingling, promoted a vision of socialism and state-sponsored capitalism. This left branch of the Guomindang embraced closer cooperation with the Soviet Union and emphasized the third of Sun’s Three People’s Principles, the People’s Livelihood. The other faction gathered around Chiang Kai-shek and focused on Sun’s first two principles—nationalism and democracy—and tolerated the Communists as temporary, yet uneasy, allies. During his lifetime, Sun’s stature and connections had obscured these divisions between the two factions; his sudden and unexpected death exposed them quickly and clearly.
Chiang and Wang
The question of succession to Sun Yat-sen revolved around Chiang Kai-shek and Wang Jingwei. Chiang received training at the Qing military academy in Baoding, the Tokyo Military Academy from 1905, and even served in the Imperial Japanese Army 1909–11. He was recruited to the Revolutionary Alliance and following the 1911 Revolution he returned to China to become a founding member of the Guomindang. When the Republic foundered, Chiang, like Sun, fled to exile in the south, working first in Shanghai and then joining Sun in Canton in 1918. It was in 1923 that Chiang established himself firmly in Sun’s favor, when he helped Sun to escape assassination by a local warlord in 1923. From that point on, Chiang enjoyed increasingly prestigious appointments, traveling to Moscow in early 1924 to both study Soviet methods and garner greater Soviet support. Following his return from the Soviet Union three months later, he was appointed commandant of the Whampoa Academy.
Three elements in Chiang’s biography shaped his political identity. His experience in Japan gave him a strong military training and convinced him of the importance of an effective, centralized military. His time in the Soviet Union proved to him that Soviet-style Communism was unworkable in China. Finally, the instability and chaos of the 1910s and 1920s in China emphasized that a social and political order coordinated by a strong central government was essential if China were to prosper. These three principles—anti-Communism, an effective military, and a strong central government—guided Chiang as he competed for Sun’s legacy.
Chiang’s rival for Party leadership was Wang Jingwei. Wang’s revolutionary credentials were stronger than Chiang’s. He had worked actively in the Revolutionary Alliance during the 1910s, and was jailed for plotting the assassination of a Qing prince. Wang was among Sun’s closest advisers for the next two decades, holding several positions in the Guomindang’s revolutionary government in Canton. Whereas Chiang Kai-shek viewed communism as the greatest threat to China’s stability, Wang Jingwei saw Western imperialism as the greater danger. For this reason Wang favored the United Front with the Communists.
The contest over Sun’s legacy was especially volatile because his teachings were so ambiguous. The third of Sun’s Three Principles of the People (minsheng) is most literally translated “people’s livelihood.” Some have interpreted this as economic well-being or prosperity, while others have seen it as socialism. Most of his actions lent themselves to diverse interpretations: his cooperation with the Comintern, for example, could be seen as a principled endorsement of Communism and an acknowledgment that China’s revolution fit into the Marxist revolutionary tradition. It could also have been a practical maneuver intended to gain military and financial support. Likewise, Sun’s will was contested: some claimed he had planned to deepen ties with the Soviet Union, while others say he was going to renounce communism. In any case, the uncertainty surrounding the Guomindang did not help Sun’s dream of reunifying China under the Party’s flag. In the years after Sun’s death, Chiang was able to outmaneuver Wang to gain control of the Party, although Wang’s left faction of the Guomindang remained important for some time.
As commandant of the Whampoa academy, Chiang emphasized his leadership of the National Revolutionary Army as the vital aspect of the Northern Expedition. Speaking on July 9, 1926, to cadets at the academy, Chiang formally launched his campaign to reunify China. Better trained, organized, and equipped than the armies of the warlords resisting them, the KMT forces moved quickly from their base in Canton, wrestling control from the weakened Zhili faction of most of the territory south of the Yangzi river in just about six months. As the center of the revolution moved north, the KMT established its new capital at Wuhan, a traditional crossroads of China where the 1911 Revolution had first broken out. With Chiang and his troops spending a majority of their time fighting in the field, however, the Wuhan capital became largely a base for Wang Jingwei and his KMT left faction.
Shanghai massacre
Continuing his struggle with Wang Jingwei, Chiang Kai-shek now used his success in the Northern Expedition to rid himself of his Communist rivals within the Nationalist party structure. Shanghai was central to any plan for controlling all of China. The CCP was well positioned to exert influence over the metropolis, an industrial center with China’s most highly developed (some would say only) urban proletariat. In addition, Shanghai was a place where foreign domination often provoked nationalist tensions. This was especially vivid in May of 1925 when Chinese workers in a Japanese-owned cotton mill shot a Japanese foreman during a protest. The perpetrators were held in the Shanghai Municipal Police station (the foreign-run police force for the International Settlement) on Nanjing Road, at the heart of the city’s commercial district. When protesters demanded the workers’ release, violence broke out and on May 30, 1925, police firing into the crowed killed nine protesters, and injured more than a dozen. The shooting catalyzed anti-imperialist sentiment in China, and in the weeks and months that followed, boycotts and demonstrations against foreign imperialism spread across China, some of which were met with further violence.
While this event, known as the May Thirtieth Incident, led to few practical changes, it undermined the position of foreign powers and began the process of undoing or revising the so-called “unequal treaties” of the nineteenth century. It also reinforced Shanghai’s status as a center of both foreign power and anti-imperialist resistance; the center of capitalism in China, but also of resistance to capitalism.
As the Northern Expedition began (with the United Front still in effect), the CCP was tasked with delivering Shanghai to the Nationalists. Workers, mobilized and armed by the CCP, defeated Zhili warlord troops and took control of the city. While the Wuhan government (the KMT Left) initially welcomed the CCP’s success, Chiang Kai-shek declared the Communist actions “anti-revolutionary.” In early April, the KMT declared martial law in Shanghai, and on April 12—aided by the connections to the Green Gang—KMT troops entered the city and disarmed the Communists. Many Communists and suspected Communists were killed on April 12 itself, which began a period of “White Terror” lasting for several weeks, during which hundreds were arrested on charges of being or supporting the Communists. Many of those detained were ultimately executed. Not long after, the KMT Left also denounced the Communists, emphatically ending the first United Front.
The “White Terror”—the April 12 Massacre and the wave of persecution that accompanied it—brought enormous consequences for both the Nationalists and the Communists. For the KMT, Chiang Kai-shek’s victory in Shanghai led him to establish a new capital in Nanjing. From there he launched the second half of his Northern Expedition. Within a year, the major areas of political and economic power came under Nationalist control. Most were directly governed by the Nationalists; others continued to be ruled through a coalition with local regional powerbrokers. This ten-year span from 1927 until the full-scale Japanese invasion in 1937 became known as the Nanjing Decade.
Nanjing decade
Now China’s pre-eminent leader, Chiang Kai-shek, sought to remake the country according to the lessons he had learned during his career by establishing a centralized state, a modern military, and a sense of social order. The challenges of this approach were manifold, and results were mixed. Economically, some parts of China thrived, especially in the Yangzi Delta—Chiang’s powerbase surrounding Nanjing and Shanghai. Many indices showed tremendous progress, such as in the tripling of road infrastructure during the Nanjing Decade. The number of students attending high school grew by ten times, and those attending elementary school grew by five times. Factories, imports, and exports all increased. By some measures, China appeared to be recovering from decades of division and war.
Chiang responded to the decades of weak central government by imposing a top-heavy administrative structure and a strong central government presence. There was little democracy in rural areas, with county administrators being appointed directly by the central government. A large proportion of the national budget was spent on the military, reaching as much as 60 percent in the 1930s. The emphasis on a strong state and powerful military edged toward fascism: he modeled his own “blueshirts” on the Italian blackshirts and German brownshirts of their respective fascist parties, eventually implementing in 1934 the “New Life Movement” that he believed would invigorate the country and enable its survival. Combining Christianity, Confucianism, and Fascism, the New Life Movement sought to enforce social cohesion and national unity by requiring people to care for their neighbors, reject individual rewards, follow government instructions, and practice good manners. In language that echoed Mussolini’s, Chiang asserted that the New Life Movement would “Thoroughly militarize the life of the people of the entire nation. It is to make them nourish courage and alertness, a capacity to endure hardship and especially a habit and instinct for unified behavior. It is to make them willing to sacrifice for the nation at all times.”
The New Life Movement’s attempt to regularize daily habits and manners such as spitting and cursing rang hollow for many Chinese. Indeed, most Chinese were concerned only with earning a living and having enough to eat. For example, a 1929 strike by Beijing rickshaw pullers, the bottom of the city’s social order, had ended with thousands of arrests and the executions of several leaders. Nor was such social and economic unrest confined to cities. Despite Chiang Kai-shek’s dreams of a strong central government, Nationalist control over the countryside remained weak, and Chiang’s ability (and interest) in improving economic conditions in rural areas was marginal at best. Decimated by warlordism and its legacies, peasants were driven to rebellion against the social order by famine and poverty. One such rebellion which took place in Hunan in 1927 was observed with interest by a young CCP operative named Mao Zedong.
Mao Zedong
Born in 1893 to a prosperous peasant family, Mao Zedong received a traditional Confucian education before enrolling in a modern school in the years preceding the 1911 Revolution. He joined the Revolutionary Army, but apparently saw no combat. Although exposed to European, American, and Japanese languages and ideas during his schooling, he did not leave his home province of Hunan until 1918. It was at this time that he went to Beijing and worked for a time in the Peking University library. It was during those years that he met Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu—the co-founders of the CCP—and it was a 1920 discussion with Chen that led him to embrace Marxism, becoming in 1921 a founding member of the CCP.
From the beginning, Mao felt that the Chinese peasantry—the great majority of the country’s population—would be the key to a successful Communist revolution. This stood in contrast to the official CCP policy under Comintern influence, which advocated revolution led by the urban proletariat. Mao began as early as 1925 experimenting with organizing villages against local landlords. In 1926, his seminal “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society” identified the peasants as the “semi-proletariat” that would “provide the revolution with its numbers.” Although this failed to persuade the CCP leadership, he was able to continue his observations, including the 1927 visit to Hunan. This visit led to his “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan,” written just weeks before the commencement of the White Terror. Impassioned, bold, violent, and optimistic, the document asserts that violence was necessary to purge rural China of centuries of oppression. It also argued that the peasants would quickly develop the class-consciousness necessary to enable a full-blown Communist revolution.
Mao was not alone in emphasizing the potential of the peasantry, but he was certainly marginalized. This changed when the White Terror all but wiped out the CCP. With its central strategy in shreds, new approaches to revolution were in order. Mao, along with Zhu De (who would become a pivotal military leader for the CCP), led uprisings in the fall of 1927. Still not approved by the CCP leadership, Mao, Zhu, and others established a series of Communist base areas in the Jinggangshan mountains along the Hunan–Jiangxi border and a provisional soviet in 1930.
The Jiangxi Soviet
After the reversals of March 1927, CCP prospects for survival now focused on these base areas in the remote and mountainous region surrounding the town of Ruijin, in Jiangxi province, near the border with Fujian. Led at first by Mao, the Jiangxi Soviet was small, but soon took on many of the functions of a sovereign state, issuing currency, establishing social services, and collecting revenues. The CCP leadership, including its Comintern advisers, came to Jiangxi, where they denounced Mao’s tactics and demoted him from the leadership of the Soviet he had helped to establish. Chiang Kai-shek thought he had eliminated the Communist presence in China in 1927, but soon directed enormous resources toward the small Communist base area, starting a series of encirclement campaigns in 1930 designed to exterminate the remaining Communists (similar campaigns were directed against the smaller Communist base areas scattered across China).
Chiang’s first three campaigns all ended in defeat. The third of these campaigns ended in September 1931, which by coincidence marked the intensification of another threat to Chiang’s government: the Japanese. On September 18, dynamite was detonated close to a railway line owned by Japan’s South Manchuria Railway. Accusing the Chinese of attempting to attack the Japanese, the Japanese military flooded troops into northeast China. Chiang, focused on exterminating the Communists, instructed his armies not to resist. Within six months, Manchuria had been proclaimed an independent state with the last Qing emperor, Puyi, as its Chief Executive.
Japanese aggression was not restricted to Manchuria. In January 1932, an anti-Japanese mob killed a Japanese monk in Shanghai, leading to escalating responses that culminated in a Japanese attack on the city, generally considered the world’s first large-scale aerial bombardment of civilians. Chinese troops responded, and the battle lasted for a month, with almost all military engagement located within the Chinese parts of Shanghai. Foreigners gathered on rooftops in the International Settlement to watch the fighting, which involved some 150,000 troops. More than 20,000 people were killed, most of them civilians.
This attack in Shanghai occupied Chiang’s attention for a time, but despite complaints from many generals, and popular sentiment, Chiang soon redoubled efforts to eliminate the Jiangxi Soviet. A fourth and fifth encirclement campaign took place in 1933. Now mobilizing nearly half a million troops, which was four to five times that of the Red Army, German-advised KMT forces advanced on the CCP stronghold. Although slow, the KMT advance was steady. By the summer of 1934 the Communists had concluded that maintaining a position in Jiangxi was untenable.
8. Communist base areas and marching routes, 1932–1935.
9. China circa the late 1930s.
The Long March
Facing defeat or surrender, the CCP found a third option. In October 1934, about 100,000 soldiers and support personnel broke through the encircling KMT lines and marched south and west. Nearly half of the Red Army force was lost in the first months of constant fighting. The heavy casualties threatened the CCP’s survival, and also called into question the leadership of the Comintern advisers and their allies, especially Otto Braun (1900–74), a German Comintern agent whom Moscow had assigned to work with the Chinese Communists, and Bo Gu (1907–46), a senior leader within the CCP who had studied in Moscow and was part of an orthodox Marxist faction within the Party known as the 28 Bolsheviks. Disputes over direction, strategy, and tactics were constant, with Mao frequently at odds with the Party Central Committee. At the city of Zunyi, in western Guizhou, the Communist Red Army paused to consider strategy amid these disagreements. After several days of meetings and arguments, the leadership of the army and the Party were reshuffled, with Zhou Enlai emerging as the formal leader, but with Mao poised to take actual leadership. The Soviet-funded Comintern wing of the Party fell out of favor, and from this point forward Mao became the dominant force in the CCP. From Zunyi, the Red Army split into three armies, each seeking a way to link up with other Communist forces scattered across China. A year after their initial breakout, after many thousands of miles, the forces reached Yan’an, in northwest China. While only about 10 percent of the original force that had fled Jiangxi remained, far from the coast, and with Japanese pressure diverting Chiang Kai-shek’s attention, the CCP had nevertheless survived and found a place to regroup.
Disentangling the myths from the reality of the Long March is a challenging endeavor. It remains the origin myth of the Communist Party and Mao’s leadership, and like all myths its truth is often less important than its meaning. Original accounts that the Red Army marched nearly 10,000 miles have been challenged, though certainly covering 6,000 miles across mountainous terrain is no small feat. Many of the most heroic moments of the Long March have been questioned, and many appear to have been staged or reframed for propaganda value. It seems that Mao and other leaders may have been carried for long stretches of the March. Yet, its significance remains undiminished. Future leaders like Deng Xiaoping, Liu Shaoqi, Zhu Du, and of course Zhou and Mao, took part in the Long March. The myth of the March, as well as the Yan’an years that followed it, provided instant credentials for that generation of leaders as well as an endless source of mythology.
Yan’an spirit
Yan’an was a remote and poor part of a remote and poor province, Shaanxi. But while there, the Communists were able to develop the formula that would ultimately lead them to victory over the KMT. Anti-Japanese sentiment was high across China, and Chiang Kai-shek’s refusal to fight the Japanese so that he could focus on attempting to exterminate the CCP was very unpopular. A few months after the CCP’s arrival in Yan’an, demonstrations in Beijing (now renamed Beiping to emphasize that the capital—“jing”—had relocated to Nanjing) against the government broke out. Some 6,000 students from Beiping universities clashed with police, demanded an immediate end to the Civil War against the Communists, as well as free speech and other liberal reforms. These December Ninth (1935) demonstrations were the largest of their kind since the May Thirtieth Incident, and embodied the power of anti-Japanese sentiment. Supporting these protests, the CCP was able to identify itself with the patriotic defense of the nation while casting Chiang as weak, perhaps even treasonous.
People now streamed to the Communist base area, including the author Ding Ling who escaped from a KMT prison and went to Yan’an in 1936. Like the Long March, CCP’s decade at Yan’an, from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s, has become part of the fundamental mythology of the Communist Party. This myth celebrates the “Yan’an Way” and the “Yan’an Spirit,” that underlay an egalitarian and patriotic community at Yan’an, where the leaders lived, rank and file, in caves alongside the populace, sharing meals, chores, and responsibilities. While later scholarship has questioned this idealized picture, first presented by foreign journalists like the American Edgar Snow, it is certainly true that the Communists during this period successfully identified themselves—not Chiang’s Nationalist government—with the cause of Chinese nationalism in the face of Japanese aggression.
The Communists also established a reputation during this period as good neighbors and protectors of rural interests. Unlike warlords, who pillaged the land and abused the people, or the KMT army, which fought other Chinese, the Red Army became known as a friend to peasants, assisting villagers with chores, and defending the nation from Japanese invaders. Movements like December Ninth clearly illustrated the depth of anti-Japanese feeling in China. Yet Chiang remained committed to exterminating the Communists before fighting Japan. “The Japanese are a disease of the skin,” Chiang famously said, “but the Communists are a disease of the heart.” Determined to destroy the Communist base area in Shaanxi, Chiang flew to Xi’an, the nearest major city to Yan’an, in the fall of 1936.
The general whose troops Chiang intended to lead against the Communists belonged to Zhang Xueliang, the son of Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin. Zhang was among the KMT commanders who had been ordered not to fight the Japanese in Manchuria, and had reluctantly surrendered his homeland by withdrawing to Shaanxi. Zhang—whose father the Japanese had assassinated in 1928—remained determined to fight the Japanese armies, and met secretly with Communist leaders such as Zhou Enlai who urged Zhang to join with them against the Japanese. When Chiang arrived in Xi’an, on December 12, Zhang pleaded his case, asking his commander to not attack the Communists, but instead to ally with them against the foreign invaders. When Chiang refused, Zhang Xueliang took a radical and shocking step, kidnapping Chiang Kai-shek and holding him hostage until he agreed to a second United Front to jointly fight Japan.
The kidnapping sparked a crisis that lasted weeks. Zhang Xueliang invited a CCP delegation to Xi’an to discuss what to do. Many in the CCP wanted to execute Chiang for his near-destruction of their party, but eventually it was decided that killing Chiang would damage both the Party and China. Following the arrival of a KMT delegation and intense negotiations, both sides agreed to the Second United Front, allying Communists and Nationalists to resist the Japanese threat. Chiang returned to Nanjing on December 25. Using himself as collateral, Zhang Xueliang flew with Chiang to Nanjing, where he immediately turned himself in for arrest for his role in the kidnapping. Although pardoned, Zhang lived for decades under house arrest.
The year 1937 began, then, with the Communists and Nationalists once again as uneasy allies. Neither side trusted the other, but both maintained the pretense of alliance. For the CCP, the United Front bought them continued time and space to recover from the devastation of the Long March. Chiang worked to solidify his regime, but remained reluctant to confront Japan, which he deemed too strong for China to defeat, even in alliance with the Communists. Yet both sides were not far from being put to the test. In July 1937 Japanese armies began a full-scale invasion of China plunging all of China once again back into war.