Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (38 page)

Thus the principle of legitimacy was destroyed, leaving a vacuum, which could only be filled by force. The point was noted by a young peasant, Mao Tse-tung, who had been seventeen in 1910 when he heard in his Hunan village the news of the Empress’s death, two years after it occurred. When the revolution came he cut off his pigtail and joined the army, discovering in the process that, in China, it was necessary to have an army to achieve anything; an
aperçu
he never forgot.
³⁹
The owlish Dr Sun came to the same conclusion rather later, and when he did so handed over the presidency to the last commander of the imperial troops, General Yuan Shih-kai. General Yuan would almost certainly have made himself emperor, and founded a new dynasty – as had many Chinese strong-men in the past. But in 1916 he died, the cause of monarchy was lost, and China
embarked on what Charles de Gaulle was later to call
les délices de l’anarchie.

The object of overthrowing the monarchy was to restore China’s possessions according to the 1840 frontiers, unify the country and curb the foreigner. It did the opposite in each case. In Outer Mongolia the Hutuktu of Urga declared himself independent and made a secret treaty with Russia (1912), a realignment never since reversed. By 1916 five other provinces had opted for home rule. Japan moved into Manchuria and the North, and many coastal areas. The other great powers settled their ‘spheres of influence’ at meetings from which China was excluded. The only dependable source of revenue possessed by the Chinese Republican government (when it had one) was what remained of the old Imperial Maritime Customs, created by the Irishman Sir Robert Hart and manned by Europeans, mainly from the United Kingdom, which controlled the coasts and navigable rivers, maintained buoys, lighthouses and charts and collected duties. The rest of the government’s taxation system dissolved into a morass of corruption. As there was no money, there could be no central army.

Moreover, the destruction of the monarchy struck a fatal blow at the old Chinese landed gentry. They lost their privileges in law, and immediately sought to erect a system of bastard feudalism (as in Japan) to restore them in fact. Hitherto, their factions and clans had operated within the rules of the court. Without the court there was nothing. Traditional cosmology had gone with the throne. So had religion, for Confucianism revolved round monarchy. Taoism, a private cult, was no substitute as a creed of public morals. Some took refuge in Buddhism, others in Christianity. But most of the gentry aligned themselves with whatever local source of military authority they could find, becoming, with their dependents, its clients. Confronted with the state of dissolution so graphically described by Hobbes, they chose Leviathan, in the shape of the war-lord. Alas, there was not one monster but many: by 1920 four major war-lords held sway, and scores of minor ones. China entered a hateful period reminiscent of the Thirty Years’ War in Europe.
⁴⁰

Dr Sun, the sorcerer’s apprentice, had himself re-elected President, then in 1921 made Generalissimo. But he had no army, and no money to pay one. He wrote books,
San-min chu-i (The Three Principles of the People)
and
Chien-kuo fang-lueh (Plans for the Building of the Realm).
It was all so easy on paper. First would come the phase of struggle against the old system; then the phase of educative rule; then the phase of true democratic government. He changed his revolutionary organization into the Kuomintang (
KMT)
,
or People’s Party. It was based on Three Principles: National
Freedom, Democratic Government, Socialist Economy. A master of the classroom, Sun used to draw on a blackboard a big circle with smaller circles within, Conservatism, Liberalism, Socialism and Communism – the
KMT
took the best out of each and combined them. The reality was rather different. Dr Sun admitted: ‘Well-organized nations count votes out of ballot boxes. Badly organized nations count bodies, dead ones, on the battlefields.’ To his head bodyguard, a celebrated Canadian Jew called ‘Two-Gun’ Cohen, he confessed his real political aim was modest: ‘I want a China where there is no need to shut one’s outer gate at night.’
⁴¹

In the circumstances, the aim was too ambitious. Outer gates remained essential; so did bodyguards. Holed up in Canton, Dr Sun required six hundred men to guard him. Sometimes he could not pay them. Then they would mutiny and raid the Treasury, to see what they could find. When Sun and other military and civil leaders moved about, they did so in big American Packards, with gun-toting heavies mounted on the running-boards. Sometimes Sun was forced to go into hiding, in weird disguises. Once he fled to Hong Kong, in a British gunboat. Indeed, he would dearly have liked British help as a Protecting Power – so much for China’s independence – but Lord Curzon vetoed it. He then turned to America, and urged Jacob Gould Schurman, the US Minister in Canton, for a five-year American intervention, with power to occupy all railway junctions and provincial capitals, authority over the army, police, sanitation, flood-control, and the right to appoint key administrative experts. But this too was turned down, in 1923 and again in 1925.
⁴²

Baffled, Sun turned to the Soviet government in 1923. A Chinese Communist Party had been formed in 1920–1, but joint membership with the
KMT
was permitted by both. Indeed the Soviet regime insisted on this alliance, forcing the
CCP
, at its third Congress, to declare: ‘The
KMT
must be the central force in the national revolution and assume its leadership.’
⁴³
So Moscow (that is, Stalin) welcomed Sun’s request, and in October 1923 sent him one Michael Borodin, also known as Berg and Grisenberg, to reorganize the
KMT
on Leninist lines of democratic centralism, and a military expert, ‘Galen’, also known as ‘General Blucher’, to create an army. They brought with them many ‘advisers’, the first instance of a new Soviet form of political imperialism. Galen sold Sun Soviet rifles, at US $65 each, then gave the cash to Borodin who put it into the
CCP
‘s organization. Galen also set up a military academy at Whampoa, and put in charge of it was Sun’s ambitious brother-in-law, a former invoice-clerk called Chiang Kai-shek (they had married sisters of the left-wing banker, T.V. Soong).

The arrangement worked, after a fashion. The academy turned out
five hundred trained officers, whom Chiang made the élite of the
KMT’S
first proper army. Then he decided to turn war-lord on his own account. The trouble with Chinese armies was discipline. Generals, indeed whole armies, often just ran away. In 1925 Chiang, promoted chief-of-staff to Generalissimo Sun, issued his first orders: if a company of my troops goes into action and then retreats without orders, the company commander will be shot. This rule will also apply to battalions, regiments, divisions and army corps. In the event of a general retreat, if the commander of the army corps personally stands his ground and is killed, all the divisional commanders will be shot.’ And so on down the line. This was followed up by drumhead courts-martial and mass-shootings.
⁴⁴

In 1924 Sun had held the first
KMT
Congress, and it emerged as a mass party organized on
CP
lines, with over 600,000 members. But he died in March 1925, lamenting the way that
CP
militants were taking over, and deploring the failure of Britain or America to help him save China from Communism. In the circumstances, the
KMT’S
own war-lord, Chiang, was bound to take over, and did so. There now followed one of those decisive historical turning-points which, though clear enough in retrospect, were complicated and confused at the time. How should the revolution be carried through, now that Dr Sun was dead? The
KMT
controlled only the Canton area. The Communists were divided. Some believed revolution should be carried through on the slender basis of the small Chinese proletariat, concentrated in and around Shanghai. Others, led by Li Ta-chao, librarian of Peking University (whose assistant Mao Tse-tung became), thought revolution should be based on the peasants, who formed the overwhelming mass of the Chinese population. Orthodox Communist doctrine scouted this notion. As Ch’en Tu-hsiu, co-founder of the Chinese party, put it, ‘over half the peasants are petit-bourgeois landed proprietors who adhere firmly to private property consciousness. How can they accept Communism?’
⁴⁵
Stalin agreed with this. The Russian peasants had defeated Lenin; he himself had not yet settled their hash. He took the view that, in the circumstances, the Chinese
CP
had no alternative but to back the
KMT
and work through Chinese nationalism.

In the vast chaos of China, everyone was an opportunist, Chiang above all. At the Whampoa Academy, whose object was to produce dedicated officers, he worked closely with a young Communist, Chou en-Lai, head of its political department. There was virtually no difference between
KMT
and
CP
political indoctrination. Indeed, the
KMT
at this stage could easily have become the form of national Communism which Mao Tse-tung was eventually to evolve. It was Chiang, not the Communists, who first grasped that hatred of
foreigners and imperialism could be combined with hatred of the oppressive war-lords to mobilize the strength of the peasant masses. Mao Tse-tung, who was a member of the
KMT
Shanghai bureau, found this idea attractive, and he was made head of the Peasant Movement Training Institute, with an overwhelming stress on military discipline (128 hours out of the total course of 380 hours). His views and Chiang’s were very close at this time. In some ways he was much more at home in the
KMT
, with its stress on nationalism, than in the
CCP
, with its city-oriented dogmatism. He collaborated with the
KMT
longer than any other prominent Communist, which meant that after he came to power in the late 1940s he had to ‘lose’ a year out of his life (1925–6) in his official biographies.
⁴⁶
An article Mao wrote in February 1926, which forms the first item in the official Maoist Canon, is remarkably similar to a declaration by Chiang in Changsha the same year: ‘Only after the overthrow of imperialism’, said Chiang, ‘can China obtain freedom …. If we want our revolution to succeed, we must unite with Russia to overthrow imperialism …. The Chinese revolution is part of the world revolution.’
⁴⁷

The possibility of a merger of the
KMT
and the
CCP
into a national communist party under the leadership of Chiang and Mao was frustrated by the facts of life in China. In 1925–6 Chiang controlled only part of south China. The centre and north were in the hands of the war-lords. Marshal Sun Chuan-fang controlled Shanghai and ran five provinces from Nanking. North of the Yangtze, Marshal Wu Pei-fu ran Hankow. General Yen Hsi-shan controlled Shansi Province. Marshal Chang Tso-lin occupied Mukden and dominated the three Manchurian provinces. Marshal Chang Tsung-chang was the war-lord in Shantung, and Chu Yu-pu in the Peking-Tientsin area.

In the early spring of 1926 this pattern was broken when Marshal Feng Yu-hsiang, the ablest of the
KMT
commanders, marched his 300,000-strong force (known as the Kuominchun or People’s Army) some 7,000 miles, circling southern Mongolia, then east through Shensu and Hunan, to attack Peking from the south. This stupendous physical and military feat (which became the model for Mao’s own ‘long march’ in the next decade) made possible Chiang’s conquest of the North in 1926–7.
⁴⁸
As a result, four of the principal war-lords recognized Chiang’s supremacy, and the possibility appeared of uniting China under a republic by peaceful means. The Northern campaign had been fearfully costly in life, particularly of the peasants. Was it not preferable to seek a settlement by ideological compromise now, rather than trust to the slow carnage of revolutionary attrition? If so, then instead of expelling the ‘foreign capitalists’, Chiang must seek their help; and being the brother-in-law of a leading banker was an advantage. But such a course must mean a
break with the Communist elements within the
KMT
and a public demonstration that a workers’ state was not just round the corner. Hence in April 1927, when he took Shanghai, Chiang turned on the organized factory workers, who had risen in his support, and ordered his troops to gun them down. The Shanghai business community applauded, and the banks raised money to pay the
KMT
army.

Stalin now decided to reverse his policy. He had recently ousted Trotsky and, following his usual custom, adopted the policies of his vanquished opponents. The Chinese Communist Party was ordered to break with the
KMT
and take power by force. It was the only time Stalin ever followed Trotsky’s revolutionary line, and it was a disaster.
⁴⁹
The Communist cadres rose in Canton, but the citizens would not follow them; in the fighting that followed many townsfolk were massacred and a tenth of the city burnt down. The
KMT
attacked in force on 14 December 1927, the Communists broke, and they were hunted down through the streets by the Cantonese themselves. Most of the staff of the Soviet consulate were murdered. Borodin returned to Moscow in disgust and told Stalin: ‘Next time the Chinese shout “Hail to the World Revolution!” send in the
OGPU
.’ Stalin said nothing; in due course he had Borodin put to death.
⁵⁰