CHAPTER 4
THE notable advantage of Japan in the 1930s was that it was a relatively well-organized and modern state attacking, in China, a society which was still in the early stages of adopting modern institutions. At the time, Japan’s resolve to subdue China did not seem absurd or incredible. It faced, it is true, a huge adversary. That China was immense, and had unlimited manpower, might well have daunted it. Japan had only one fifth of China’s population. But there were many factors which told against China’s deployment of its potential strength, and which made Japan’s ambition seem less absurd.
There was the economic position. China had a totally inadequate industry for making war. Except for coal, with which China was bursting, it was generally short of accessible raw materials. Initially it had a pitifully small steel industry. Its equipment for generating power was completely insufficient. Its railway system had great gaps. Its roads, for modern needs, were, for the most part, terrible. It had no system for enlisting its scientists, who were produced in some quantity in the gifted Chinese race, in its war effort. Its population contained far too many illiterate peasants, far too small a middle class, for its economy to be properly organized. Such was the technical side of China’s capacity for war-making. The facts encouraged aggressors against it.
In China the state did not have the same reality as it had come to have in Japan. China, in spite of chaos, held together as a society, but this was because of the natural cohesiveness of families and clans. The principles of its unity were of very ancient origin. The family, and not the state, was the centre of loyalty. In a day when the Japanese were becoming, in form at least, more and more like the typical nation-states of the West, the Chinese continued to be rather archaic, to breathe the air of the ancient world, to be sceptical of the overriding claims of the state upon the individual. It is true that, from these very qualities, China drew on a massive strength – something primeval – with which it could confront Japan. But, equally, it was at a deep disadvantage.
In an effort to redress this weakness China put its faith in nationalism. In doing this, it followed the pattern of all the peoples of Asia. Nationalism was their support. Peoples responded to it, and it gave them an impetus which propelled them past crises which would otherwise have overthrown them.
Nationalism was an astonishingly simple force. For all its surprising lack of intellectual content, it produced in country after country the same result. Nationalism brought in new considerations, and a man was given by it new motives by which to govern his conduct. It burst the narrow confines in which men had been content to see the affairs of the world. It made a man feel that he belonged to and had objectives in common with the whole community, and not simply his own family. The majority of the Chinese people espoused nationalism with passion. Few were untouched by it. Its wings beat strongly in all recent history. It was the central, compelling force of the times. It was the root of the war, just as religion was the base of events in the Thirty Years War in Europe.
Of course it happened that nationalism, great as was the stir which it made, loudly as it raised its voice, often had to compromise. Too often it came off second best in China at this time in a struggle with the quiet voice of family obligation. It was seldom that the claims of the nation would totally prevail over the more ancient social ties. Throughout the period, this was true of China, as it was also of most other agrarian societies. All men, or nearly all men, acted in ways which proved that the family was still the centre of their interest. Society was simply a federation of families. To keep this in mind is to understand many things about the modern history of Asia. Yet, by and large, nationalism prevailed in China in the 1930s. It was the force which animated politicians, and gave them the power to make China perform tasks which would otherwise have seemed impossible.
At the start of the war with Japan, China was governed by the quintessential national party, the Kuomintang. The Kuomintang had its origin in a number of societies, more or less secret, which had worked to overthrow the Manchus. As a single party it dates from 1912. When the old régime fell, the Kuomintang was not yet strong enough to claim the succession. It came, however, to power in Canton, and raised an army. With this, and with the support of the relics of the old system of government, it had made good its authority, subduing the warlords who had divided up the inheritance from the Manchus. It gradually became the dominant power throughout the country. But in doing so, it compromised, abandoned large parts of its revolutionary programme, and took care to make itself acceptable to the social classes which had great traditional authority in Chinese society. It took in tens of thousands of members who would have been shocked at the modernizing radical programme of the original founders. By the time Japan struck, it would have been hard to say exactly what the Kuomintang stood for. It was a purely national party. It was dedicated to advancing China’s interests, and to protecting these against the foreigner, Japan included, and in this it was ferocious. But beyond that, it was hard to see any principles which it followed, except feathering the nests of its many members. Its Government had to rule over a hotch-potch of interests, and for this a succession of compromises was necessary.
The party brought together the rural gentry and urban bankers and merchants, bosses of secret societies and trade unionists, brokers, soldiers and bandit leaders. Its attitude to the particular questions it faced was determined by expediency. Some classes, for example landlords and bankers, were more powerful socially than others, and the party mirrored, instead of trying to modify, the existing social system. The Kuomintang was a comprehensive party, never a party of genuine revolutionaries. In general the party had become more conservative the older and larger it grew, because each group that it included strove, before all else, for its own survival.
The Kuomintang liked to represent itself as a progressive, avant-garde party. The westernized and sophisticated classes, which made up one of its influential parts, advertised it as being democratic. Certainly it was, in the intention of this wing, to be aligned with the progressive forces of mankind. But the enlightened part of the party leadership was all too aware that it sat with colleagues who were anything but liberal and democratic. They also had to reconcile their claim with the blatant fact that the Kuomintang operated a single-party system of government, that (with one temporary exception to be described later) it did not tolerate the existence of rival parties, and that it carried on government – if only as a temporary measure – as a Kuomintang dictatorship. It announced that it would become democratic in future but it fixed no date for this transition. The dictatorship aspect of the Kuomintang was to give many of its leaders a sense of unity with the Axis countries of Europe. It embarrassed greatly the pro-American and pro-British circles, which were very powerful among the Shanghai businessmen who formed the support of the Kuomintang with which westerners came most readily in touch. But they did not count in the party for as much as was supposed.
The Kuomintang, from its earliest days, owed its strength to the Army. In fact the Kuomintang was the Army. Its being, ethos, performance, all depended on the military. This was the outstanding fact about it, and the paradox is that this fact was never grasped by western observers. The westerners in China, in dealing with the rise of nationalism, commonly met and negotiated with the middle-class and civilian members of the party. Chinese militarism had a bad name, and the middle class, who struggled against it, were ready to assure the foreigner that their party – the Kuomintang – stood for the complete supremacy of the civilian element, which was what the West desired to hear. The westerner, in this and other matters in which the Kuomintang was interested in misleading him, too easily accepted the expurgated version of Chinese reality. After all, the civilians were often highly articulate and convincing. By contrast, the generals were for the most part ill-educated, and even the best of them trained in very poor military academies. The westerner seldom understood how the decisions as to power were taken in the Kuomintang; he did not understand how the mind of the generals moved. And yet for a true appreciation of Chinese history at the time, the politics of the generals were the essential study.
The Chinese war-lords never stopped being war-lords. Republicanism was to that extent a veneer, democracy a debased and irrelevant concept in the day-to-day existence of peasant, landlord and soldier. National identity, however, was a mystical concept – xenophobic, Utopian, mercenary and feudal all alike.
How, then, was the Kuomintang ‘Army’ made up?
The Kuomintang Army was a painful thing to contemplate, especially in the early days of the Chinese revolution. The southern forces had a far better reputation than those of the north. From the late 1920s, the Kuomintang hired several bands of gifted German military advisers, led first by the redoubtable Max Bauer, Ludendorf’s right-hand man during the First World War; then successively by Hans von Seeckt, architect of Germany’s post-war Wehrmacht, and by Alexander von Falkenhausen, perhaps the most courageous of them all. They sought to improve the equipment and organization of the Chinese Nationalist Army and, above all, to create cadres of the type that made both the Wehrmacht and the professional British Indian Army so effective when it became necessary first to train and afterwards to lead vast conscript armies into battle. But the situation in China was not exactly comparable. The few smart, well-drilled regiments which the Germans brought into being scarcely concealed that the dedication of the German instructors and their herculean labours were not equal to the politics, corruption and social upheaval of China. Organization of the whole Army continued to be dreadfully poor. The Kuomintang Army generally appeared as much a rabble as did the army of the Revolution in France in the years which followed 1793. But for a time that had incarnated the spirit of the Revolution. In the same way, in an oriental and haphazard fashion, these soldiers were the true spirit of the Chinese revolution.
The Chinese Army was an army of mercenaries. The leaders of the Kuomintang were content, unlike the Japanese, with raising an army by payment, as China had always done. This was peculiar for an army which was the instrument of revolution: a political force is more usually raised by making service compulsory. But China could raise a force of millions, at incredibly little expense, so overcrowded was the land. There were far more men than there was equipment. There was a rudimentary general staff. The financial administration of the Army opened the door to corruption: the pay for whole régiments was made to colonels, who were left to fix the pay scales and conditions of service with their men. They were divided in their allegiance between the central and the provincial authorities, and between the centre and local generals, who were little more than respectable bandits. A Japanese, taking note of their indiscipline, had little cause to be anxious about them.
The weakness of the Chinese Army reflected the essential backwardness of the social system. It was an army which was raised from the peasantry. This peasantry had so many just causes of grievance against the holders of power in China that it could not be relied upon to fight with any tenacity. Here is the key to the life of the country, here the explanation of all the events which have since followed.
The Kuomintang could not trust the rank and file of the Army, and this lay at the core of the frustration of Chinese nationalism. The party, which claimed essentially to be the party of the nation, evolved a policy for which it could not expect the support of a sufficient part of the Chinese nation.
This was the most important fact about China in 1931. It leads to an examination of the realities of Chinese society.
The trouble of China at this period was that it was virtually without an effective administration. From this proceeded many of the peculiarities of Chinese society.
The Government issued enlightened decrees – hence the good reputation internationally of the Kuomintang. But there was no civil service to give effect to them; no government with an effective will; almost anarchy. The apparatus of the Chinese administration was adequate when it was worked by educated and dedicated men; but the spirit of the times had forced these into retreat. A rapid and appalling worsening took place. The machinery of government fell into decay. There was an abundance of officials, but these were not bound together in any articulated system. They stood out, but each acted on his own, without giving the impression of orderly administration. Most offices became objects for purchase. The magistrates and assistant magistrates, having bought their posts, set themselves to exploit their office to recoup themselves. They taxed remorselessly, and they sold justice. They were venal and incompetent in the performance of their principal functions which should have been to protect the people against those who always appeared to prey on them in the times of decay of government. In the atmosphere of general decline, the elements of society which felt themselves naturally strong organized themselves and usurped the functions of government. Usually this meant groups of landlords: in many areas they raised an unofficial militia, which terrorized the countryside and ran the locality: it seized grain from the peasants at low prices, intervened to back up the money-lender in exploiting the farmer, carried out a forced loan on the people to meet the Government’s demand for troops, put down forcibly the resistance of the bolder spirits, supported all kinds of obnoxious practices, such as protecting the opium trade, and gave more or less open protection to bandits. Sometimes the local bosses found themselves on different sides in support of different claimants on governmental power; and the pressures on the rank and file of society were thus doubled.
In spite of all this, it is important to remember that the Chinese peasant, if the whole circumstances of his life are considered, still probably enjoyed, at least at the start of this period, the best life of any peasant in any country in the world. China was in decay politically; it was in mortal danger from the Powers around it; but for a long while the degree to which this affected the peasant, and the number of peasants whose lives felt the consequences, can be exaggerated. China had begun to fall to pieces, but this process had not yet reached a stage where, for the mass of the people, it discounted the other advantages of Chinese civilization. If the miseries over so large a part of the rest of the world are borne in mind, if the misfortunes and the quality of life caused by creeping industrialization are weighed up by the observer, the balance is tilted and the virtues of Chinese life appear very shining. The worst man-made calamities which the Chinese had to fear were famine and the insecurity of life due to there being no adequate rule of law. On the other side, he enjoyed the protection of the family, of public opinion, and the many things which are summed up in the term ‘Chinese civilization’. At any rate, the peasant was not dissatisfied with his lot.
He would have been surprised to learn that he was pitied. The decay of China he regarded as a passing phenomenon: he must wait, be patient, and all would come well again. Misery was to break over him, but civil war, its root cause, did not become endemic until the middle of the second decade of this century. The checks and balances which limited arbitrary powers, the pressure of public opinion, still operated, and did not cease to do so until the break-up of society had proceeded a long way.
At the centre of life in China, there was, like a canker, the question of the ownership of the land. China had always been rent by a great schism. It was divided between the peasants who owned some land and the peasants who were landless. The schism was the fundamental one in Chinese life: from this division of the population, and all the facts incidental to it, there have followed, almost from the beginnings of Chinese history, many of the characteristic trends of its society and politics.
In 1931 five out of every six Chinese lived by agriculture: and the proportion had remained more or less constant throughout history. From his relation to the land depended most of what was significant to the status, to the life itself, of the typical inhabitant of the country. Land ownership gave a man the entitlement to a share in the good things of civilization. Without land he was virtually an outlaw. Education, which was the key to social advance and to status, was firmly in the hands of the landed. They controlled the village school. Without going to the school, there was no way of progressing upward on the educational ladder, and of taking advantage of the opening of careers to talent, which should otherwise have been a unique benefit of the Chinese social order.
A peculiarity of the Chinese agrarian system was that in spite of the social importance of land ownership, there was no rich landed class. There was nothing comparable to the Junkers, or to the landlords of eighteenth-century England or Ireland. There were a few excessively rich landlords, usually the product of families which had recently done extremely well in state service: but these were the exception, and were like fish out of water in the rural society. The landowners in China were very numerous, but each possessed land on a scale grotesquely small, and did nothing to make these privileges less painful to the landless labourers, and to the masses in the country districts who were totally unprivileged.
The division between the rural gentry and rural proletariat was exceedingly sharp and brutal. The landless were powerless: they were at the mercy of the landowners, who were also local officials, money-lenders, or merchants. (The only alleviation of their position was that if, by a miracle, they chanced to prosper economically, society put no obstacles in the way, legal or otherwise, of their acceptance.) The situation is now the constant theme of Chinese communist propaganda. Its contention is that in Chinese society one part has lived off and mercilessly exploited the other part. The classic film The White-headed Girl represents very well the plight of the exploited class. Possibly their state of wretchedness is exaggerated, but not very much. In all China’s long dynastic history, behind all the civilization and elegance of life, the reality was that it was the arena of a permanent class war. China has been permanently divided between two classes, one of whom has had nothing to lose but its chains, and has, through the centuries, sat down constantly with appalling insecurity. The Chinese landowners bled white the masses of the people. As it had been since the beginnings of time, so it was still in 1931.
This tension was reflected in the politics of the period. The Kuomintang, as it developed, came to be completely monopolized by the landowning class. Though it had originally had place for eccentrics, for deracinated Chinese, for émigrés who were the product of a different social system, it underwent a change as it spread widely throughout China, and was adapted for purposes of the class struggle. The landless were denied membership, or at least denied any office of power. The Kuomintang régime was essentially a landlord régime. The Kuomintang official or politician was bound together in a kind of freemasonry with most of the Army officers. They all belonged to the exploiting class; they banded together against the landless. Any threat to the landed interest and the landlords closed their ranks, however much they might struggle and be divided over other matters; and as a result the landless mass had no escape, except to contract out of society, and take to a bandit life. Brigandage was thus endemic over every province of China; in China, alone among civilized countries, banditry was talked of as an everyday condition of life, to which the poor might resort from time to time as a matter of course. The provinces never had a police force which could cope with this stream of malcontents.
The nature of the Kuomintang had grave consequences in the organization of the Army. Most of its rank and file were drawn from the landless class: on the other hand, all of the officers were from the landed. The officers were well enough contented with the policy of the party. The rank and file could not be. Thus there was always a sense of grievance in the Army, and a sense of incipient revolt. The Army might for a time be made loyal – by occasional bounties, by the popularity of some local commander. But over the long run the Army remained sullen and of uncertain temper. It saw no reason to fight wars, or to incur danger, and found the lure of military life to lie in the plunder which was traditionally the reward of its exertions.
Here the contradiction at the centre of the Kuomintang – to use a Marxist phrase – became obvious. It was a party which, born out of revolutionary civil war, should have been carried forward by the Army. But its leadership, after the early years, took fright, and did not countenance the Army playing with revolutionary ideas such as the expropriation of the landlords. The Army ceased to be revolutionary. Discipline was called in against radical sentiment. By this action, the Kuomintang ceased to be a genuine revolutionary force in Asia.
The social disruptiveness, which was the inevitable result of such a social system, was increased by a tendency which has always existed in Chinese society and which from time to time in Chinese history bursts out and determines the affairs of the country. This is a very deep sentiment among the Chinese people towards anarchy. This is found among all classes, landed and landless, and goes with Taoism and Buddhism, two religions which have always been popular in China. There is a deep distrust of government as such: the typical Chinese has an insuperable scepticism about its benefits, and a temperamental optimism about the chances of regulating life without the recourse to official paraphernalia. For the three decades after the fall of the Manchus, this instinctive trend in the country was powerful, especially among the landless. The rise of the Kuomintang happened essentially as a reaction to this, and was marked by a revival of Confucian ideas and the notions of the more realist figures of Chinese civilization. But at this time, the natural and amiable inclination of the Chinese towards anarchy was not yet passed. It weakened considerably the reformist aims of the Kuomintang.
The inclination of the Kuomintang rank and file to mutiny, and the dissent of much of the country from a social order dominated by the rural gentry, were expressed in the rise of a rival nationalist party and government, that of the Chinese communists. From the early 1920s, China had seen both the nationalist Kuomintang, and, though it was at first very weak, a Communist Party which also appealed to nationalism, though it claimed to be internationalist. The Chinese Communist Party was founded at Shanghai in July 1921 by members of the intelligentsia. In its first months it had been a study centre for fostering the readings of Marxist writings. These had had a great boom in interest due to the revolution in Russia; before that, Marxism had been practically unknown. The achievements of communist government in Russia gave Communism a great prestige in China: and Communism in China also began to receive direct aid from Russia: Moscow began to direct its disciples. The doctrine spready widely, and the Communist Party began to be of some consequence. At this time the Kuomintang still retained some of the radicalism of its early days, and a section of the party was not averse to some of the communist ideas. It looked with envy upon the support which Communism was gaining, and was prepared to collaborate with the communists in return for the accession of strength which this might bring to a coalition. In the mid-twenties, the two parties collaborated in advancing their common cause against the war-lords. Together they established the Kuomintang power, sketchily it is true, throughout China.
But the communists, with their Marxist beliefs, were not a safe ally for such a party as the Kuomintang. The communists were real revolutionaries, determined that one branch of political thought alone should prevail. The Kuomintang was a comprehensive party. Though it was itself a dictatorship, it was in reality much more a federation of parties, and it attempted nothing like the rigid thought control of Communism. Gradually it became clear to the Kuomintang that, by the understanding with the communists, it was nursing a viper in its bosom. It drove them out of the alliance.
The breach occurred in 1927, at the moment when the great port of Shanghai fell to the Kuomintang. This brought the vast accession of the economic backing of bankers and great commercial interests. The Kuomintang judged that its strength from this was worth much more than the strength which an alliance with Communism could bring it. It was willing to sacrifice the former association, which brought it a certain mass backing, to the new partnership, which brought it the immediate, tangible economic strength. It seized, shot and arrested as many of the communist leaders as it could lay hands upon. In Shanghai it used the secret societies, which were its habitual allies, for rounding up the known organizers of the Communist Party. It included in this purge a number of radical Kuomintang members of whose sympathies it felt unsure. Radicalism withdrew from the Kuomintang. From the time of the coup in Shanghai, the Kuomintang was definitely a conservative and right-wing party.
In retrospect it is obvious that these events in Shanghai were of great importance for Chinese history. But at the time they were not appreciated fully. The western observers, in particular, saw them as a bloodletting which strengthened the Kuomintang. The Kuomintang was, at this period, in the ascendant, and there was no comparison between it, and its sudden great prestige – its recognition as the legitimate government of China, and the millions of dollars with which it was watered by Shanghai business – and the communists, who led a hunted life, and who only appeared in the news as the comrades of China’s notorious bandits.
The Communist Party took years to recover from this blow. In the interval the Kuomintang appeared supreme. But the communists survived, and reorganized. Their earliest actions, on recovering the zest for a campaign, had been frittered away in trying to organize secret anti-Kuomintang centres in the towns. They were under the influence of the Russians, and the Russians, from the experience of the October Revolution, considered that the only way of making revolution was by inducing the industrial proletariat to take action. But such a tactic was entirely impossible in China: the towns did not dominate political life, industry was too small, the powerful armies could move in to suppress them. From the futility of these tactics, they were saved by the genius of several rising young figures, one of whom was Mao Tse-tung. He was the discoverer of the way to make Communism an effective power in China. From 1928 he had shifted the effort to the rural areas. He laid claim to have discovered the power of the peasantry. He used the slogans of land reform to raise revolutionary armies. Through Mao Tse-tung the communists became again a power in China, however modest was their strength at first in comparison with that of the Kuomintang.
The communists, by making alliance with local bandit chiefs, managed to organize a small opposition government in the heart of the Chinese countryside. This was the famous Kiangsi Soviet, the first communist government in China. It owed its being and its survival to the general disorder sweeping China. But their ability to create a government was to have vast consequences in the direction of Chinese affairs. It meant that the radicalism which was endemic in China was being provided with a practical programme. It is true that in the past there had often been a ferment of desperation in the country, but it had remained always without an effective organization and effective ideas to attach itself to. The masses were ripe for revolution, but their emotions were never attached to some cause worthy of them. For example, the Taiping Rebellion, in the middle of the last century, was a far more significant revolt than is today in general understood, and came near to overthrowing the Manchu Government: but the Taiping acted under an ideology which was unworthy of their rebellion. It was a half-crazy messianic movement, which borrowed most of its ideas from the corrupted teaching of Christian missions. The movement failed because the Taiping did not offer a régime which, in the country’s judgement, was comparable to that of the imperial régime.
It was now different. In Kiangsi, the communists had set up an actual government. It had teachings, organization, slogans, all of which attracted classes which were deeply hostile to the Kuomintang. It provided the standard round which they could rally. They had been able to set up on Chinese soil a soviet government which had become the centre of revolutionary action.
At first the Kiangsi Soviet had simply the sympathy of the dispossessed and alienated masses elsewhere in rural China. It was conscious of waves of sympathy which washed round it, but it was unable to bear any effective support to its well-wishers. Other Soviets were established, too, but they had a more ephemeral existence. Over vast areas of the country, the Kuomintang was still unchallenged. Nevertheless, by founding the Kiangsi Soviet, and keeping it alive, the communists had kept open the possibility that one day they would eclipse the Kuomintang, and that, one day, the support of the country, still given to the Kuomintang, would be transferred in bulk to them.
At first, the significance of these events was overlooked by the outside world. Very little was known about them; the communists were underrated as a danger to the Kuomintang. The Japanese had a livelier appreciation than the westerners, but it was supposed that they were so much interested in blackening the face of the Kuomintang, as a disorderly, untrustworthy government, that their concern could be regarded as routine propaganda. Chiang Kai-shek, the military leader of the Kuomintang, judged however – rightly as events were to make clear – that the danger was acute and deadly. He threw a cordon round the communist district, and kept up a constant pressure upon it. He proclaimed that, if the communists were not extirpated, they might grow into a force which would eventually overwhelm the Kuomintang. They might transform all the existing politics in the Far East.
All this was eventually to prove a correct forecast. Chiang Kai-shek, who had received a very limited education, who was the product of rural China and who was obviously outshone in intellect by the haute bourgeoisie of the Kuomintang to which he had been linked, was found to have perceived the realities of China more correctly than did his more sophisticated colleagues, trained in the universities and banking houses.
Chiang not only judged events. He set himself to try to influence how these would move. It was his will which determined that at first the threat from Japan should be given less weight than the threat from the Chinese communists. As a result, the head-on clash between Japan and China was delayed for some years. He had a civil war on his hands, whose issue would be of greater consequence than that of any war between China and Japan. Therefore the civil war loomed far larger in his mind than a national war. The civil war came first.
Chiang Kai-shek was therefore in the unpopular position of demanding that Chinese should concentrate on fighting Chinese. He neglected to take account of the fact that Chinese national feeling demanded that Chinese should fight Japanese. Even though there were plenty of wealthy and propertied Chinese, who saw that Communism was a real threat to their interests, they were held back and checked by nationalism from wholeheartedly acting upon calculation. The majority were ashamed to do what calculation directed.