Overcoming Habits of Mind,
1914–1949
Throughout the world, like the voice of a prophet, has gone the word of Woodrow Wilson, strengthening the weak and giving courage to the struggling. And the Chinese have listened, and they too have heard. . . . They have been told that in the dispensation which is to be made after the war, unmilitaristic nations like China would have an opportunity to develop their culture, their industry, their civilization, unhampered. They have been told that secret covenants and forced agreements would not be recognized. They looked for the dawn of this new era; but no sun rose for China. Even the cradle of the nation [strategically critical Shandong] was stolen.
Shanghai Students’ Union,
The Students’ Strike: An Explanation (1919)1
In the first decade of the twentieth century nobody in China seriously thought that the Western powers and Japan would ever just “go away”; it seemed clear they were there to stay. The desire to push back imperialist encroachment was widespread, but it rarely included either any illusion that it might be possible to detach China from the rest of the world or any wish to do so. Such isolation had never existed in the past and was not now China’s goal.
Nor did any question remain about the validity or desirability of using Western models; the issue was “how” rather than “whether.” Opinion differed sharply about the best way to proceed. We have seen how the idea of selectively adopting such Western knowledge as seemed useful for Chinese national regeneration without also taking on Western cultural baggage, an idea referred to as ti-yong, gained currency in the late nineteenth century. But as China’s industrialization progressed, reformers came to realize that the adoption of foreign technology came with cultural strings attached and that the two might prove inseparable. For cultural conservatives, the close links between Western practical knowledge, whose value they acknowledged, and Western culture, from which that knowledge had sprung, posed a thorny problem.
The growing number of cultural radicals, on the other hand, launched an urgent reappraisal of the Chinese tradition and its continuing relevance to modernity. Many thinkers had begun to conclude that the real origin of China’s loss of power and prestige in the world lay not elsewhere, not with imperialism, but near at hand. They were haunted by the suspicion that traditional Chinese intellectual life had so stultified Chinese minds that the forces propelling Western nations into positions of wealth and power might altogether bypass China. Such suspicions were symptomatic of the enormous influence that Western disparagement of Chinese civilization had even on some defenders of the tradition. Westerners often referred to China’s intellectual heritage as though it were a single, static entity but in reality, as Chinese thinkers well knew, it was rich and diverse. Yet ironically its native defenders sometimes were so unnerved by Western critiques that to some extent they acquiesced in them even when they knew them to be inaccurate.
This chapter describes some of the ways in which Chinese men and women set about overcoming diverse habits of mind—their own and those of the foreign powers—in the first half of the twentieth century. First, educated Chinese tried to overcome their own conventional mind-set about their own culture, to question their own long-held assumptions. Thinking in new ways and the struggle to find the most appropriate ways of thinking were perhaps the predominant characteristics of this period. Second, they wished to find practical means of overcoming the imperialists’ patronizing derogation of their country and their effective denial of China’s right to an independent voice. The powers, having bullied China for more than half a century, now took it for granted that they could continue to impose their will without too much trouble. For Chinese, the sense of possibilities had rarely been stronger. The prospect of one of those possibilities—extinction of the nation—was so excruciating that the search for a feasible alternative absorbed enormous energy.
Around the turn of the century the task of national renewal assumed a new sense of urgency. Among the most compelling ideas introduced from abroad was the theory of Social Darwinism, filtered into China through the nationalist-slanted translations of new-style intellectual Yan Fu. Social Darwinism propounded the idea of a struggle for survival among human societies, in which the “fittest” would emerge victorious. That “strong societies would survive, weak ones would perish” became pervasive as a way of thinking about China’s fate. Under its influence, many people found alarmingly persuasive the view that if China did not strengthen itself, it would sooner or later succumb to stronger nations. Events already suggested that process was under way; stopping it became for many the central imperative.
All manner of Western ideologies flowed through China during its transformation from an imperial to a republican system. It was the special achievement of Chinese radical intellectuals to forge from these a creative synthesis that was distinctively Chinese despite its multifarious alien origins. The constant thread was an obsessive vision of a once more proud and respected nation. The desire to bring this dream to reality sustained China through several revolutions, pitiless political conflict, the brutalities of Japanese occupation, and protracted war, not to mention the growing ambiguities of a continued Western presence.
The foreigners’ impact on China was still uneven. In the treaty ports, particularly Shanghai, the presence of a large, and growing, foreign community had introduced a whole new way of life. At least some Chinese began to adopt foreign ways in their leisure activities, for example, attending Western-style horse and dog races or theater performances where men and women mingled in the audience or dancing in the new dance halls. Also, in the treaty ports Chinese women were able to support themselves in ways unthinkable for their rural compatriots: They worked long hours in the foreigners’ sweatshops or supported themselves by prostitution, a major growth industry, although some, targeted by aggressive marketing techniques, became addicted to new forms of gambling that ate into their meager earnings. In the hinterland traditional ways of life persisted, and foreign influences, while they impinged on people’s consciousness, had a relatively limited impact on society, culture, and the economy. It remained possible to draw a clear distinction between a “modern,” urban, mostly coastal China and a “backward,” rural, interior.
Between 1895 and 1898 a nationwide coalition of young intellectuals protested to the young Guangxu Emperor, just then emerging from the seclusion enforced by his aunt Empress Dowager Cixi. The movement was led by two scholars from Guangdong province, philosopher and constitutional monarchist Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao. The protesters demanded wide-ranging reform of the military, the economy, education, industry, and government. Over the next few years they bombarded the emperor with proposals. The powers, they asserted, had first enslaved and then carved up Africa; China was next. It must learn from the methods of the West or perish. To the extent that domestic resources did not suffice to ensure national survival, China should draw as necessary on the technical skills and financial backing of the several million Chinese overseas. It should send Confucian scholars overseas to broadcast Chinese beliefs as a countermeasure to missionaries’ determined efforts to convert it to Christianity.
In 1898 the Guangxu Emperor made a concerted effort to assert his independence by promulgating many of the reforms Kang, Liang, and others had been promoting over the past few years. Embracing the ideas of copying from abroad and deploying the overseas communities, he declared: “Everything is to be done after the manner of foreign countries, where the mercantile and trading classes are permitted to do as they please.”2
But the reformers’ success was short-lived. After a heady one hundred days of sweeping reform edicts, the empress dowager staged a crackdown, placing her imperial nephew under indefinite house arrest and executing those of the reformers who did not manage to escape abroad. She annulled all the reform decrees except, surprisingly, that establishing a national university (the Imperial University) along Western lines. Even then she tried to minimize its impact by installing a notoriously conservative director. He, however, appointed a well-known Western translator, the former director of the Tongwen Guan, as head of faculty. The curriculum they devised included the study of several foreign languages and Western science. The university gained steadily in prestige, especially after the abolition of the traditional examination system in 1905, and in 1912 it changed its name to the more modern-sounding Beijing University.
The creation of the university, along with the abolition of the examination system, transformed political culture by separating intellectuals from politicians, so that the government was no longer peopled primarily by scholars, and scholars were no longer so dependent on the government for their livelihood. But the new intellectuals, with their foreign knowledge and their imported values, were also much more alienated from ordinary Chinese people than their predecessors had been, just as critics of the new education had repeatedly charged would happen.
At the same time, continued translations of foreign literary works suggested to Chinese intellectuals literature’s potential as an inspiration to all manner of people. Such translations were extremely popular both for the window on new worlds that they offered and for their power to suggest ways to transform China. The towering reformer Liang Qichao, for instance, fervently, if unrealistically, commended such works for their effectiveness as instruments of change:
Formerly, at the start of reform or revolution in European countries, their leading scholars and men of great learning, their men of compassion and patriotism, would frequently record their personal experiences and their cherished views and ideas concerning politics in the form of fiction. Thus, among the population, teachers would read these works in their spare time, and even soldiers, businessmen, farmers, artisans, cabmen and grooms, and schoolchildren would all read them. It often happened that upon the appearance of a book a whole nation would change its views on current affairs. The political novel has been most instrumental in making the governments of America, England, Germany, France, Austria, Italy and Japan daily more progressive or enlightened.3
Nationalism, anarchism, liberalism, socialism, democracy, and individualism all jangled for attention in the minds of Chinese students and thinkers. Learned through translated texts or experienced at first hand by travelers overseas, these ideas meant different things to different people and changed dynamically over time. Often the Chinese language lacked the vocabulary to express the new ideas—there was, for example, no word in Chinese for “revolution”—so that new words had to be formulated to express them. These neologisms might be borrowed, for instance, from Japanese, for the process of translation and the importation of new ideas were well under way in Japan, or they might derive from European loanwords in Japanese; their meanings, however, might shift in the process of borrowing and, once adopted, did not necessarily remain fixed. Overall the most striking common denominator in intellectual life was a radically new open-mindedness and, concomitantly, a sustained surge of energy.
In the opening years of the twentieth century two main strands of political thought emerged, one bent on reform, the other on revolution. The reform movement was committed to gradual change and to exploration of a national constitution. Still spearheaded by Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, in exile since the 1898 debacle, it drew on the example of the powerful liberal democratic nations of the West. The revolutionary movement was headed by another Cantonese, Sun Yatsen (1866–1925). Sun favored fortifying China with Western practical knowledge and immediately ridding China of the Manchus. The transformation of the political system was his first objective in a long-term nationalist agenda that would then turn its attention to the foreign presence. Raised in Hawaii, a graduate of the Hong Kong College of Medicine, and a Christian, Sun lived much of his life outside China. It was a mark of his international background that when Qing agents seized him in London, his medical school professor helped effect his release. Organizations Sun founded or ran staged a number of antidynastic uprisings throughout the last years of the Qing.
The reform movement and its revolutionary counterpart each derived considerable inspiration from abroad, and each competed for funding from overseas Chinese communities. The unprecedented mobilization of the Chinese diaspora for political movements in the home country marked a new and unanticipated tendency whose ramifications were unpredictable. It created a model that has resonated to the last decades of the twentieth century.
Intellectual ferment was intense among Chinese students in the first decade of the century. Especially in Japan, or in the relative security of the foreign concessions in Shanghai, they expressed their opinions in no uncertain terms. One of the most articulate was the Sichuanese student Zou Rong, only nineteen years old when he scathingly denounced the way in which China had degenerated from its former glory as a consequence of Manchu rule. An uncompromising revolutionary, he jeered at his fellow students for learning English “in order to enslave themselves to the foreign imperialists.” Zou was soon arrested and tried in Shanghai’s Mixed Court, whose jurisdiction extended to Chinese residents of the foreign settlements. Sentenced to imprisonment, he died in 1905; after the revolution he was posthumously honored by Sun Yatsen himself. Zou Rong’s manifesto reads in part: “Had we not been trampled underfoot by sinister scoundrels like Nurhaci, Abahai and Fulin [respectively founder, consolidator, and first emperor of the Qing dynasty], we would long ago have thrown off the Manchu yoke, and England, Russia, Germany and France, who are now making inroads into us and dividing us up with bared teeth and flying claws, would now be cowering with bated breath, fearful of our power and terrified of our might. . . .”4
In the last decade of imperial rule, as we have seen, the Qing sought to jump on the bandwagon of patriotism by introducing a number of reforms, including several they had rejected in 1898. They also sought to revise the overall context of China’s relations with the foreign powers. This task was made easier by the growing likelihood of conflict in Europe, which distracted the powers’ attention from China. The exceptions were the United States and Japan. Neither seemed so formidably imperialistic as the other powers, Japan mainly because it was Asian, and the United States because presumably it would not impose on others the colonial experience it itself had so disliked, although recent U.S. activities in Hawaii and the Philippines undercut that presumption.
Hawaii and the Philippines were among a number of places that loomed large in Chinese intellectuals’ increasingly sophisticated conceptualization of the world. A new genre of writing about nations and nationalism focused attention on various countries around the world that Chinese intellectuals referred to as “lost,” in every case because of imperialist rapacity. Among others, these countries included Egypt, the prey of wily maneuvering by Britain and France; Poland and Turkey, victims of Russian expansionism; Annam (Vietnam), now in French hands; and India, Burma, and the Transvaal, devoured by British colonialism. These countries came to symbolize what China at all costs must not become. Although Chinese felt a certain solidarity with each, on the other hand, they criticized them on a number of grounds, including the failure to update their traditions, overcome political disagreements, and change their institutions.
India in particular occupied a highly ambivalent position in the minds of many Chinese. Despised for capitulating to Britain and serving as its lackey—as manifested very conspicuously by the presence of Sikh policemen and guards in the foreign settlements in China—India was also occasionally admired as the wellspring of Buddhism, which by now formed an integral part of Chinese culture. But the dominant rhetoric of the times, fueled by an element of racism, held India up as the pathetic antithesis of the West, whose ancient traditions had served it ill in the modern world.
The institution of empire, and the Qing house, fell in 1911, to be succeeded by a republic. A leading priority of the new regime was to free China from foreign domination, but this was not easily to be achieved, for foreign influences and the threat of foreign intercession in Chinese affairs were simply everywhere. Before long the republican experiment fell victim to self-seeking corruption and sheer brutality. By the mid-teens Sun Yatsen was running an opposition government based in Canton, whose presence on the national political scene remained for some time relatively insignificant. Elsewhere power was fragmented among former supporters of the discredited first president, Yuan Shikai (1859–1916), most of whom owed their standing to military force and used whatever means were available to secure their own positions. Among other things, these “warlords” competed for foreign backing without much regard to nationalist imperatives. The republican revolution seemed to have achieved little more than the overthrow of the Manchus and the destruction of any semblance of order.
The sharp deterioration of social conditions and the travesty of the new politics that marked much of the 1910s and 1920s pushed many Chinese intellectuals to near despair. Widespread political demoralization showed itself in boycotts and demonstrations. Intellectuals began to explore possible choices for more radical transformations at home even as they sought to restore China to a leading role on the world’s stage. By the end of the 1910s both anarchism and Marxism-Leninism had begun to take on a new allure; in particular, for many radical Chinese, Lenin’s analysis of colonialism as the overseas expansion of capitalist exploitation—the theory of imperialism—and the practical success of the Russian Revolution of 1917 both held considerable appeal.
In the meantime in 1914 Japan had stepped into the breach left by the Western powers, now fighting one another in World War One, and assumed control of Shandong, where German influence had disintegrated because of the exigencies of war at home. In 1915, in return for substantial loans to Yuan Shikai (who had already received massive foreign funding), Japan pressed its Twenty-one Demands on China. A foretaste of the future, these called for special Japanese economic privileges in China; for rights of residence, property ownership, and extraterritorial legal privileges in interior portions of southern Manchuria and eastern Inner Mongolia; and for other special rights, including the right for Japan to station its own police in parts of China historically prone to disputes between Chinese and Japanese. Despite vociferous opposition by Chinese desperate to avoid having their country join Korea and Taiwan as Japanese protectorates, Yuan capitulated. As Chinese realized that Japan’s position in China was substantially strengthened by these moves, their resentment against Japan came to a simmering point from which it did not recede for decades.
During World War One almost one hundred thousand Chinese laborers traveled to France to serve the Allied cause. Although the Allies, from habit, still had little confidence in Chinese fighting abilities, they used Chinese manpower for menial jobs, such as digging trenches and building hospitals, to free up more young Europeans to go to the battlefront, where so many had already perished. Like other combatants, the Chinese laborers worked in often horrendous conditions. Several thousand died in Europe, but many of the survivors learned to read and write with the help of such groups as the YMCA and were able to accumulate some savings before they returned to China. They were promising candidates for political organization; returned laborers were in fact among the first to organize labor unions in China in 1919 and 1920.
China generally expected that in return for the contributions of Chinese laborers to the Allied war effort, the recent Japanese encroachments would be abrogated in the peace treaties concluded at war’s end. They took heart from the declarations of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson about the self-determination of nations. Therefore, in 1919, when in the Treaty of Versailles (in accordance with secret agreements made with Chinese warlords purporting to represent the whole nation), Britain and France confirmed Japanese control over Germany’s former sphere of influence in Shandong and over its other recent Chinese acquisitions, Chinese were profoundly shaken, as we can see from the quotation with which this chapter opens. The return from Germany to the Beijing Observatory of the astronomical instruments removed in 1901 offered scant consolation.
In May 1919 thousands of students demonstrated in Beijing and in at least two hundred other locations across the country. Shanghai merchants closed their businesses for an entire week. Workers came out on strike in as many as forty factories. Many foreigners then in China shared in the sense of national betrayal and expressed great dismay at the direction of the national mood in China, evoking fears that played on international apprehensions as the result of the recent success of the Russian Revolution.
Months of unrest culminated in China’s refusal to sign the peace treaty. Largely irrelevant in practical terms—for like it or not, the reality was that Japan was now firmly entrenched in Shandong—the refusal sent a clear message that Versailles would be the last of the unequal treaties. But the implications reached beyond the immediate source of contention, as the early Communist leader Qu Qiubai (1899–1935) noted in 1919:
The patriotic movement had actually a deeper meaning than mere patriotism. The taste of colonialism in its full bitterness had never come home to the Chinese until then, even though we had already had the experience of several decades of foreign exploitation behind us. The sharp pain of imperialistic oppression then reached the marrow of our bones, and it awakened us from the nightmares of impractical democratic reforms. The issue of the former German possessions in Shandong, which started the uproar of the student movement, could not be separated from the larger problem.5
The galvanizing intellectual movement of the first third of the twentieth century, named for the demonstrations that began on May 4, 1919, sought to find a solution to the “larger problem.” The May Fourth Movement took place approximately between 1916 and 1926. It was driven by a passionate desire to take concrete steps to wipe out foreign domination and to reinvigorate China, if necessary through a complete cultural and political transformation.
May Fourth, an iconoclastic attack on every aspect of the Chinese tradition, locked culture and politics together. When May Fourth activists evaluated the Chinese moral heritage by the standards of Western liberalism and by its scientific methods, they found it absolutely wanting and, as such, an insurmountable barrier to progress. Nothing was sacred anymore. The linchpins of Chinese civilization—the family, the classical texts, the accepted codes of behavior, and so on—all were subject to the most thoroughgoing examination and reassessment, undertakings whose ultimate purpose was the revival of the nation. Among the clearest indications that May Fourth divided old China from new China was a novel emphasis on youth as the key instrument of national salvation. This marked a distinct break from the classic veneration of the older generation.
This focus on youth was signaled by a clarion call issued in 1916 by Chen Duxiu (1879–1942), dean of Beijing University. In the first issue of his quickly influential periodical New Youth, Chen called openly for a revolution in moral values, institutions, and habits of mind. Implicit, and sometimes explicit, in Chen’s writings was the desire to emulate not just the methods and the ideas but the dynamism of the West. But the often ill-defined object of desire—”the West”—was at the same time the object of tremendous resentment and often ambivalence.
This inconsistency was indeed not new, and it remained highly visible as May Fourth evolved during the late teens and twenties. As much as Chen and his May Fourth cohort were riveted by the material strength and the prosperity of the West, as their nineteenth-century forebears had been before them, many educated Chinese perceived imperfections in Western societies. Their political systems might be democratic, but their politicians were corrupt and self-seeking. Liberal democracies themselves were by no means perfect, as the Versailles betrayal revealed. The religion from which missionaries derived their sense of superiority was in fact no more than superstition. Individualism could cause tremendous ethical problems and, besides, could not be reconciled with Marxist theories about class. The extraordinary bloodbath of the Great War suggested that not all the end products of Western science and technology were so desirable. The ambivalence derived from these kinds of perceptions was sometimes submerged among radical Chinese, but it was never very far from the surface.
New Youth magazine was only the most famous of hundreds of new periodicals launched in the May Fourth period, most often by Chinese educated abroad. These served a dual purpose: first, the introduction of Western thought and culture and, second, the provision of a forum for debating the burning questions of the day. Most such publications had the word “New” or “Young” in their names. They covered a broad range of ideas—isms—imported from the West: Marxism, feminism, liberalism, anarchism, relativism, Ibsenism, utilitarianism, socialism, and so on. As a consequence of the ever-expanding number of translations—of works of Western literature, ideas, and political theory—circulating by the early to middle 1920s, familiarity with other cultures became the standard among the intelligentsia; a cosmopolitan sophistication was no longer unusual.
The nationalist origins of May Fourth led to a visible shift in attitude that pervaded all aspects of daily life. For example, whereas earlier supporters of Western-inspired change had often sported Western-style clothing, radical young men and women of the May Fourth era were much more likely to wear Chinese-style garments newly redesigned to suit the modern era. Sun Yatsen himself and his American-educated wife, Song Qingling, embodied this trend. A 1915 wedding photograph shows them dressed in European style—Song Qingling in a tailored jacket and skirt, a blouse with a lace collar, cameo jewelry, and high heels, Sun in a Western suit, but photographs from the 1920s, when Sun was leader of a Nationalist party that was growing in power, consistently show them dressed in Chinese style.
After the initial excitement of New Youth radicalism, the intellectual currents of the May Fourth Movement went in various directions. Chen Duxiu, the magazine’s initiator, was one of several who, in the search for a theoretical basis for a new Chinese culture, eventually abandoned the Western liberal values he had originally espoused in favor of Marxism-Leninism. A split in the movement was already evident by 1918, when the views of Chen and his more radical associates were ranged against those of others who, under the leadership of Hu Shi (1891–1962), remained more liberally inclined. Hu as much as Chen supported the adoption of the most rationalistic aspects of the Western tradition, symbolized by the May Fourth slogan “Science and democracy,” to help solve China’s problems. But under the influence of the American educator John Dewey, Hu criticized (in a famous essay entitled “Problems versus Isms”) the radicals’ tendency to claim comprehensive solutions to the problems of an entire society rather than to focus attention on gradually resolving particular problems in specific areas of need.
Hu Shi and others arranged for a number of leading foreign thinkers to visit China in the early 1920s. They included John Dewey, the British pacifist philosopher Bertrand Russell, and the Nobel Prize–winning Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore. Chinese intellectuals seeking to reassess their civilization’s place in world history thus were able to draw on an extraordinarily variegated range of ideas.
The range of responses to Tagore’s message can serve to give us some sense of the complexity of intellectual life during the May Fourth period. Briefly, Tagore proposed that the civilizations of India and China should not abandon the distinctive characteristics of Asian civilization, especially spirituality, for the destructive materialism of the West. Instead they should put their faith in that spiritual nature as well as in the redeeming power of individual self-sacrifice, in the poetic spirit, and in the overarching desire for freedom. In the eyes of some Chinese intellectuals, Tagore’s identity as an Indian—a nonwhite representative from Britain’s largest overseas colony—lent him a special credibility. These admirers had become critical of Western science and scientific methodology, which they had come to regard as more of a mirage than a panacea; in that context Tagore’s eloquent pleas to elevate “Asian spiritualism” over “Western materialism” in the name of patriotism seemed especially pertinent. Others took a different view and spoke up for the merits of China’s own particular path of historical development. They theorized that to force China into the mold of either the materialist West or the self-negating civilization of India would be a disaster. From this perspective, China had simply developed along a different track, which was not necessarily wrong or worse. For a third group, Tagore’s identity and his message were more problematic. They found it objectionable that he should lecture them about the spiritual benefits of suffering and sacrifice in the face of foreign domination when to them the ever more appealing tenets of orthodox theory made plain that armed struggle was the only true solution. Still others found that the past Tagore harked back to, while perhaps romantic, was an absolutely inadequate alternative to the progressive present, as India’s subjection by the British demonstrated.
By the late teens and early twenties it was the turn of the second and even third generations of young Chinese to study overseas. Not only did the numbers, including the numbers of young women among them, increase, but also the nature of their experience changed. For example, during those decades more than two thousand young Chinese students, many of whom had already been exposed to the new radicalism, traveled to France as part of a work-study scheme. The intention was that they would perform both mental and manual labor. Scholars such as the Beijing University president Cai Yuanpei, who organized the programs, regarded such a combination as suitable to the new China, but the pairing was also deeply iconoclastic because of the classical notion, formulated by Mencius, one of the leading classical Confucian thinkers, that those who labor with their minds rule over those who perform physical labor. Apart from thus breaking with tradition, the work-study students, it was hoped, would acquire an appropriately modern outlook by living in France, admired by many as the epicenter of modernity. From a practical point of view, they would also finance their studies by working in French factories, where labor remained in short supply as the result of the slaughter of the war.
The original intention had been that the work-study students would contribute to China’s national salvation by bringing home knowledge of Western technology which they would acquire both through their studies and through their working experience. But in practice the crosscurrents of this period brought about a distinct shift. Many of the Chinese students had links to the Chinese Communist Party, founded in 1921, and what they learned in the factories of Europe were not only manual skills but new forms of political ideology and organization. In the wake of the disillusion with Western liberalism occasioned by Versailles, and in parallel with May Fourth developments back home, then, they began to explore in more depth a range of foreign ideologies, including Marxism and Leninism, as a means of articulating their still embryonic notions of how to resuscitate China.
Chinese students in France and elsewhere could hardly help being affected by political developments in their host countries, some of which they had the opportunity to assess at first hand. Some gained their first experience of labor strikes while abroad; a few even formed Communist cells simultaneously with but independent of developments back home. For many, it was a time when they began to translate into action their growing sense of political commitment. This could take many forms. One Chinese student, for instance, expressed his growing radicalism by taking time out from his studies at the Paris Conservatory to attend meetings of Chinese workers, where he played the socialist anthem, “the Internationale,” on his violin.
Once back in China, a majority of returned students entered politics. A number of leading figures of twentieth-century Chinese politics emerged from their numbers, including Zhou Enlai (1898–1976), who studied in Japan, France, and Germany between 1918 and 1924, and Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997), who studied in France and briefly in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s. Often their common overseas experience and the reality that linguistic and cultural problems threw them on one anothers’ company created lifelong bonds between future national leaders. But although some regarded a study sojourn overseas as a prized revolutionary credential, future Communist leader Mao Zedong (1893–1976), who spent the 1920s gaining experience as a political organizer in China, claimed his very lack of any such experience was a special virtue.
In any event, political skills learned abroad stood students in good stead back in China. For the anti-imperialist impetus of May Fourth reached well beyond Chinese students and began to show signs of a class-based orientation. Many workers participated in the demonstrations and boycotts of 1919, and before long a distinctive labor movement was under way. Both economic and nationalist motivations underlay the new labor activism, which was strongest in Shanghai and Canton, where industry and foreign enterprises were the most extensive.
The first major evidence of the new labor organization was the Hong Kong seamen’s strike of 1922. Although the strikers’ grievances against their shipper employers were primarily economic, the strike’s nationalist overtones were unmistakable. Within a few weeks it had spread to most other sectors of the Hong Kong work force, including domestic servants, rickshaw pullers, tramway workers, vegetable sellers, waiters, dockworkers, and others. When British shippers tried to bypass the strikers by buying in Canton, dockworkers refused to load their vessels. More widespread and better organized than its nineteenth-century antecedents, the strike spread rapidly to other ports in Guangzhou province, while in Shanghai the new Communist Labor Secretariat worked to block the recruitment of replacement workers. Overseas Chinese as well as men and women still in China sent funds and otherwise provided material aid to the strikers. The strike ended with the capitulation of the Hong Kong government, leaving Chinese workers to savor their newfound political power.
Patriotism permeated much of Chinese society, revealing itself in different ways. By the early 1920s, for instance, the more than one million Chinese troops under arms occasionally showed signs of latent hostility to foreign domination. For the most part they fought one another in a series of warlord wars and did not turn their weapons against foreigners. Nonetheless, they timed their annual military maneuvers to coincide with the anniversary of the eight-nation expedition against the Boxers in 1900, a choice that suggested a willingness to exploit an opportunity to display their fundamental antagonism toward foreigners.
After the summer of 1925 hostility to foreigners became overt. On May 30 of that year British-led Sikh and Chinese police in Shanghai fired into a crowd of Chinese demonstrators protesting the killing of a Chinese worker in a labor dispute at a Japanese factory. Labor unrest had proliferated, despite the energetic attempts of both warlords and employers to suppress it. Dozens died in Shanghai and in related demonstrations in Canton. The immediate aftermath was a marked swing against the foreigners, as almost all those resident in China noted in their letters home. In what became known as the May Thirtieth Movement, waves of strikes and demonstrations swept the country, while in Hong Kong another general boycott and strike against the British lasted a full fifteen months. Students withdrew from foreign schools and colleges, which they assailed as a creation of cultural imperialism intended to lure Chinese students away from proper nationalist sentiment. Christian endeavors of all kinds became once again the object of attack.
Above all, the preoccupation with the West, however complicated, provided Chinese with a new perspective on China itself. The function of the West for China in the May Fourth era was primarily to make it possible for Chinese to stand back from their own culture and see it from an outsider’s point of view. But although the purpose was the salvation of the nation, embracing an alien perspective naturally laid the process all the more open to criticism on the part of both cultural conservatives and nationalist revolutionaries, who each accused the new iconoclasts of in effect betraying their own heritage.
May Fourth was full of contradictions. For instance, while foreign imperialism provoked activists’ rancor, at the same time it provided rich sources of opposition to Western domination. Chinese activists also derived from the West much of their intellectual ammunition against the prevalent beliefs of the indigenous tradition. Moreover, the Japanese model was as galling as it was inspiring. The truly radical realization was that the Chinese Revolution had to transcend both the modern West and traditional China, but its full articulation came only later.
When May Fourth radicals turned abroad to arm themselves against the powerful ruling Confucian ideology, they ran the risk of inadvertently replacing one form of domination by another. For example, many May Fourth men championed issues of women’s emancipation and equality, seeking to replace Chinese attitudes toward women with “modern” Western ones. But the reality was that this quest, while it may have been politically liberating for its male advocates, did not necessarily bring Chinese women the complete liberation from patriarchy they desired. To the contrary, even after they were freed, along with their male counterparts, from the oppressive weight of the Chinese past, Chinese women’s newfound release from the burdens of their own tradition often liberated them only to be subjugated in new, Western-style ways. As a result, some Chinese women sought to draw a distinction between the liberation of women and the liberation of China that nationalism aimed to achieve. They rejected the symbolism that equated the fate of Chinese women with the fate of China itself because its practical consequence seemed to be deferral of the woman question in favor of the national question. These issues became even more acute during the war against Japan and World War Two.
THE GUOMINDANG, THE CHINESE COMMUNISTS,
AND THE SOVIET UNION
The experience of Versailles discredited the northern warlords who had purported to make agreements with the powers about former German territories in China. It also gave tremendous impetus to Sun Yatsen and the Nationalists as the revolutionary alternative. The Nationalists’ standing was further boosted by attention from the brand-new Soviet Union, where the successful Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 offered a possible source of inspiration.
Within a year of that revolution, the Soviet government contacted Sun Yatsen. It planned to use his influence to muster popular support in China for its own territorial ambitions, although publicly it expressed the hope of creating an international revolutionary alliance against Western and Japanese imperialism. For Sun, the advantage of an alliance with the Russians was that it might help compel the other foreign powers to recognize as China’s legitimate ruling authority his government based in the south, rather than the northern warlord regime. His support for democratic socialist principles made such an alliance seem only natural, despite the fact that most of his supporters found Soviet views on issues such as class struggle unpalatable. Besides, the Soviet Union provided funding and military aid and training to the Guomindang (GMD), without which it was unlikely to make much progress.
The Russians also contacted radical sympathizers such as Chen Duxiu. The enormous prestige that their own credentials as leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution gave them among budding Communist movements worldwide was a compelling reason for the early Chinese Communist Party, founded in 1921 by Chen and others in Shanghai’s French Concession, to acknowledge the authority of the Soviet-controlled Communist International (Comintern). At the same time, they had no intention of becoming mere satellites of either the Comintern or the Soviet Union.
At Comintern urging, the Chinese Communist Party agreed in the first place to form an alliance with Sun Yatsen’s Nationalists and then to remain in the alliance despite deepening misgivings. It did so partly because it was desperate for Comintern funding and partly because it was not sufficiently well established to have the confidence to break free of domination by the acknowledged leaders of world communism. While the situation in China was showing no signs of improvement, any moves toward revolution were sure to meet vigorous resistance on the part of an alliance forming between the reinvigorated imperialists and indigenous Chinese capitalists, whose economic interests tended to override any nationalist concerns. That made the need for external support all the more pressing. Chinese Communists felt therefore that on the whole the expediency of alignment with the Soviet Union transcended considerations of autonomy, even though they were well conscious of the anomaly of forming an alliance with foreigners while proclaiming an explicitly nationalist agenda.
From the Comintern’s point of view, what was good for the Chinese Communists, who might never amount to much nationally, was less important than what suited Soviet purposes. It preferred to remain allied with Sun’s Guomindang, which it thought had a better chance of achieving national power in China or certainly of doing so before the still-fledgling Communists did. Soviet and Comintern insistence on an alliance between the Chinese Communists and the Nationalists also had to do with the growing rift in the Soviet Union between Stalin and Trotsky. Trotsky had denounced the CCP’s cooperation with the bourgeois Nationalists; his support for a Communist breakaway thus made such a split, by definition, anathema to Stalin, irrespective of any inherent merits.
Chinese radicals felt all the more attracted to the Bolshevik model after the new Soviet Union publicly announced in 1920 its unilateral cancellation of the rights claimed by its imperial predecessors under the unequal treaties. But the Soviet Union was playing a tricky game. The 1920 announcement was effective propaganda, but in a series of almost simultaneous secret agreements made with the northern warlords, the Soviet Union ensured that for some time Russia’s earlier treaty privileges did not in fact disappear. For all their rhetoric against imperialism, in other words, the new Soviet authorities entertained ambitions of empire in East Asia not vastly different from those of the czars or from those of the Western powers and Japan. They had no intention of abandoning Russian claims to territory in Mongolia and Manchuria. They pursued this policy both to strengthen the Soviet Union against hostile foreign powers and because they wanted a firm foothold from which to train native leaders for the next wave of socialist revolutions, which they thought most likely to take place in Asia.
In partial furtherance of these aims, the Soviet Union also concluded a series of secret agreements with Japan in 1925, upholding Japan’s Twenty-one Demands, even as they encouraged the Chinese Nationalists and Communists to step up their agitation against Western and Japanese imperialism in the context of the May Thirtieth Movement. This agitation served a number of purposes. On the one hand, it helped divert international attention from Russian activities on China’s northern frontiers. The deception was important because the Western powers, wary that the USSR might be creating a special relationship with China by virtue of its apparent abrogation of its treaty rights, were inclined to take steps so as not to propel China into the Bolshevik camp. On the other hand, the agitation contributed significantly to a resurgence of Guomindang power, as its politicians vied with one another to demonstrate their patriotism by displaying ever-greater resolution in the face of foreign domination. By injecting nationalistic fervor into the ranks of the working classes, it also gave a vigorous leg up to the still embryonic Communist Party, whose membership began to swell dramatically. The USSR’s supposed support of the Chinese Communists also helped the latter gain legitimacy at a critical moment in its development.
Chinese Communist misgivings about the united front with the Guomindang proved well founded. In 1927 Sun Yatsen’s successor as leader of the Guomindang, Tokyo- and Moscow-educated Chiang Kaishek, concluded that Communist gains in the wake of the May Thirtieth Movement ran counter to his goals for personal power and national reconstruction. He decided to take dramatic action to consolidate his own position and eliminate the threat of a Communist takeover altogether. In the ensuing crackdown tens of thousands of people, Communist Party members and sympathizers and worker and peasant activists, perished at the hands of Guomindang troops. This purge received an influx of funding from contributions, part voluntary, part forced, made by Shanghai capitalists who feared the impact that Communist labor organization would have on the profitability of their businesses. It marked the beginning of two decades in which Chiang Kaishek repeatedly sought ways to eliminate communism in China, at virtually any cost.
For Communist survivors of this cataclysm, which an earlier severance of the GMD-CCP alliance would surely have mitigated, if not avoided altogether, the disaster demonstrated the perils of trying to transcend national differences in the cause of international solidarity against Western and Japanese imperialism. The CCP had stayed in the alliance only at Soviet insistence; its subsequent quest to create specifically Chinese versions of socialism and communism were in part the consequence of their deep mistrust of Soviet and Comintern authority after 1927. In sum, the Soviet Union’s complex and sometimes paradoxical role in Chinese politics during the 1920s spawned a legacy of profound mistrust on the part of the Chinese Communists.
Chiang’s decision to part company with the Communists must be set against the turn of events in relation to the foreign presence in China. Since early in the century the foreign powers had promised in principle to rescind at least the most objectionable portions of the unequal treaties: extraterritoriality and foreign control of various tariffs. But progress had been slow. Germany had involuntarily lost the right to extraterritoriality in China following World War One; the Russians had voluntarily abandoned it in 1924. The United States, by remitting the Boxer indemnity, had at least shown evidence of good intentions. During the 1920s China made considerable further advances toward abrogating foreign rights and privileges. By now the powers, shaken in their moral and military certitudes by the devastation of the Great War, were ready to recognize, at least in principle, the claims of Chinese nationalism. At the 1922 Washington Conference they made arrangements intended gradually to restore full sovereignty to China, but for various reasons these were never fully implemented. The delay only contributed to Chinese resentment.
This resentment was no longer something the foreign powers could laughingly disregard. Gunboat diplomacy was no longer an option. Not only were they themselves unwilling to enter lightly into a China war, but also the evidence showed that Chinese armies now were a force to be reckoned with. Thirty years after the end of the First Sino-Japanese War, Chinese strategy and tactics had had time to catch up with military industrialization. Moreover, a flood of World War One surplus matériel had found its way to China despite attempted Western bans. In an era of warlordism the military had become a much more powerful force in Chinese society. Chinese had also gained a lot of experience in fighting. Among the foreign powers, only Japan was at all likely to risk armed engagement in China.
Western willingness to make concessions gathered momentum after the blossoming of Chinese hostility to imperialism in 1925. Feelings ran especially high in Shanghai, not just because of the strong foreign presence or because the May Thirtieth incident had taken place there but because the city had become a hotbed of vice of all kinds, with the connivance and support of the Westerners who controlled part of the city. Although some attempts were made to clean up Shanghai, it offered countless jurisdictional loopholes, as the result of its multiplicity of municipal authorities and the elaborate network of corrupt collaboration between gangsters and the various police forces and municipal councils. Chinese newspapers accused the foreign authorities of indifference to the corruption of Chinese society, citing the kidnapping and sale of women and children, the destitution of the already impoverished through casino and racetrack gambling, and a flourishing sex industry found at every level of society. It seemed that if the foreigners could not extinguish the nation by military force, they would do their best to do so by steadily destroying its social fabric.
By 1930 China had recovered tariff autonomy from the powers, one of the most irksome of the rights yielded by treaty. It had reclaimed control of some of the foreign concessions, sometimes by mutual agreement and sometimes de facto after spontaneous outbreaks of violence. It was also negotiating the termination of extraterritoriality, although objections from some members of the foreign community stalled negotiations, which then were shelved indefinitely by the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria.
Supporters of the Guomindang were less antagonistic toward the foreigners than were the Chinese Communists, although they regarded the Communists, dominated as they seemed to be by the Soviet-based Comintern, as themselves little more than instruments of expansion-minded foreigners. A number of influential Chinese saw some advantage to the presence of Western establishments in China, either because they hoped that they might prove a desirable counterweight to Japanese aggression or because they preferred the idea of obtaining financial aid from the Western powers and Japan to obtaining it from the Soviet Union. They feared the spread of bolshevism in China much more than they feared foreign capitalism, from which they thought it might be possible to derive some advantage. At the same time, Chiang Kaishek still thought it expedient to keep open the lines of communication with the Soviet Union, for he aimed to use Moscow as a lever against the Chinese Communists, whom they appeared to control.
FLIRTING WITH FASCISM
UNDER NATIONALIST RULE, 1927–1937
Once Chiang Kaishek had ruptured relations with the Communists, he was forced to look beyond the Soviet Union for his principal overseas support. German advisers soon stepped into the breach. If nothing else, China and Germany had in common their ill-treatment by the Allied powers after World War One. Each saw in the other a long-term means to recoup some of their losses. German aid to China began with military supplies and advice, as Chiang began to reorganize and reequip his army on the basis of principles that had proved successful both in Prussia and in Japan, which had itself followed the Prussian model. During the course of the 1930s Chiang’s government reached a series of secret agreements with Germany to exchange German military and industrial supplies for Chinese raw materials that the Germans would use for rearmament. But this lasted only until German fears of the Soviet Union prompted an alliance with Japan, already well established as China’s enemy. The program came to a definitive end as the Germans began to move in the direction of war.
Chiang Kaishek derived inspiration for some of his most notorious programs of the 1930s from abroad, particularly from the totalitarian regimes gaining power in Italy and Germany; he also admired some aspects of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Some of their techniques conformed to Chiang’s basic military orientation; he had formerly directed the Whampoa Military Academy, from which many of the leaders of both the Guomindang and the Communist Party emerged. In 1934 he launched a New Life Movement, using as his advance guard an often brutal organization known as the Blue Shirts (whose name recalled Mussolini’s Black Shirts). The New Life Movement exhorted Chinese to stand up straight, not to spit, to be punctual, to button up their clothes, not to eat noisily, and to wash their faces in icy water. Chiang intended such regimentation would get China back on its feet:
[The New Life Movement] is to thoroughly militarize the lives of the citizens of the entire nation so that they will cultivate courage and swiftness, the endurance of suffering and a tolerance for hard work, and especially the habit and ability of unified action, so that they will at any time sacrifice for the nation . . . in the home, the factory, and the government office, everyone’s activities must be the same as in the army . . . in other words, there must be obedience, sacrifice, strictness, cleanliness, accuracy, diligence, secrecy . . . and everyone together must firmly and bravely sacrifice for the group and for the nation. . . .
Although fascism later fell into discredit, in the 1930s many people around the world saw it as a possible solution to mounting social and political problems. But the tilt toward fascism did not bode well for the democratic institutions towards which the Nationalist Party had once claimed to aspire. Chiang’s calls for a “sense of national superiority and faith in the leader” were of course tailor-made for an authoritarian, nationalistic party headed by an autocratic and ambitious leader.6
The Guomindang was not, then, wholly opposed to foreign ideas and ideologies, but it sought to be selective about which foreign ideas should be allowed to enter China. The Blue Shirts, for instance, frowned on “cultural decadence” imported from abroad, both because they considered it unconducive to effective regimentation and because Nationalist propaganda drew a clear connection between such permissiveness and the leftist political views they regarded as anathema. Such decadence could be deemed to manifest itself, for example, in wearing Western clothing—sartorial patriotism again—or in dancing to modern music. Under the Blue Shirt reign of terror, offenders were liable to physical violence inflicted without warning, while arrests and political assassinations became commonplace. Ironically, a significant percentage of the Guomindang’s revenues and police support came from Shanghai vice in its various manifestations, the most egregious examples of just the kind of activity the New Life Movement claimed to find so abhorrent.
Nationalist goals sometimes made for strange bedfellows. Collaboration with foreigners played a part in the many campaigns against decadence and political dissidence that punctuated the Nationalist era. Under the Qing, foreign settlements in the treaty ports, such as Shanghai’s French Concession and the International Settlement, had once offered a safe haven from imperial authority. But French and British authorities now lagged only slightly behind Chiang Kaishek in their aversion to communism. In the areas under their jurisdiction, they were ready to cooperate in enforcing laws against Communists and other naysayers.
Irony too dogged the flirtation with foreign ideologies. Germany’s alliance with Japan eventually forced Chiang into the Allied camp, so that in World War Two China was on the opposite side from the fascist countries he had once sought to emulate. Despite Guomindang links first with the Soviet Union and then with early Nazi Germany, China provided an important haven for refugees—White Russians and Jews—from both these totalitarian regimes, at least until the Japanese occupation.
The foreign-inspired New Life Movement and the Blue Shirts were only one aspect of the pervasive and complex foreign influences circulating in China during the “nationalist decade” from 1927 to 1937. A completely different example was epitomized by the work of rural reconstruction associated with James Yen, a Sichuanese who had studied in Hong Kong and the United States. He worked for the YMCA among the Chinese laborers in France in World War One, teaching them to read and write and writing letters home for them. After he returned to China, he played a major role in setting up and operating an experimental project to bring basic literacy and hygiene as well as agricultural technology and some degree of self-government to a group of villages in Ding County, in north China. Yen also made good use of his American contacts to raise funds for the project.
The Dingxian (Ding County) project was part of a hybrid movement of rural reconstruction known as the Mass Education Movement. Partly Confucian and partly Christian in its inspiration, it was foreign in its funding—for American philanthropic organizations in particular responded to Yen’s call for help—and it was run by Chinese. With its mix of patriotic means with imported ends, the Dingxian experiment and others resembling it eventually became politically unacceptable, despite their considerable successes, because of the taint of Western religion and Western money. But notwithstanding what might be called Dingxian’s defiant disregard of conspicuous nationalism, the reality was that programs later espoused by the Chinese Communists often aimed to achieve the same overall goals as did the Mass Education Movement.
THE GUOMINDANG, THE COMMUNISTS,
AND JAPAN
By the late 1920s the Japanese presence in Manchuria, in the form of immigrants, railroads, and commercial and industrial enterprises under the authority of a South Manchuria Railway Company, a Foreign Ministry, and a militant army, was already considerable. The Japanese were only one of several foreign powers with armies in China. Among them more than twenty thousand foreign troops were stationed in Shanghai alone, and almost fifty warships were anchored in the vicinity. But Japan took the most aggressive stance in defense of its interests in China. In 1927, when Chiang Kaishek led an army northward in an attempt to reunify China, for example, Japan responded to outbreaks of violence against Japanese in Hankou with machine-gun fire and warships and sent troops to Shandong, its prized sphere of influence, to try to block the advance of the revolutionary army. Chiang bypassed Shandong to try to avoid fighting the Japanese, infuriating his patriotically inclined Chinese troops, who were unkindly disposed to the presence of Japanese soldiers.
In 1931 Japanese troops in Manchuria took advantage of a pretext to mount a brisk military campaign that wiped out Chinese armies stationed in the region. Chiang, awash in political infighting and garnering all available support, ordered the local warlord, Zhang Xueliang (b. 1898), not to fight and held back his own armies because he was conserving them to crush the Communists. The assault culminated in a complete Japanese takeover of Manchuria, where in 1932 the Japanese installed Pu Yi (1906–1967), the last Qing emperor, who as a small child had been deposed in 1912, as puppet ruler of Manchuguo (“Land of the Manchus”). The Japanese thus effectively denied Chinese sovereignty over the whole of the three northeastern provinces, stretching from not far north of Beijing to the Soviet border.
In China outraged nationalist sentiment gave rise to protests and boycotts. In Shanghai the depth of anti-Japanese feeling led to first an exchange of fire between Chinese troops and Japanese marines and then, in early 1932, a full-scale Japanese bombing of the Chinese sections of the city. Chinese fought back with a tenacity few expected, but many civilians as well as soldiers died. The Western allies in effect wrung their hands and declared their indignation at Japanese actions. They refused to recognize Japanese sovereignty in Manchuria but took little concrete action to expel or discourage them. Two years later, when the Japanese fought their way south across the passes to the vicinity of Tianjin, they were able to consolidate their control over the area south of the Great Wall without too much trouble and concluded the grossly advantageous Tanggu Truce.
Japanese expansion in China was fueled partly by its growing need for China’s natural resources during the spreading global economic depression and partly as the result of the Tokyo government’s feeble authority over militaristically inclined adventurers stationed in China. In addition, Japan’s considerable political turmoil during the years leading up to the war resulted among other things in a strong Japanese aversion for communism. At the same time, a new goal was evolving: the establishment of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a Japanese empire in Asia that would match and eventually drive out white imperialism.
By the mid-1930s the global situation was steadily deteriorating. It was still unclear whether Chiang Kaishek’s enormous antipathy to the Communists would eventually push him to accept Japanese offers of aid against them. Late in 1935 Chiang Kaishek dismayed the whole gamut of anti-Japanese forces by reorganizing his cabinet to include several Japanese-educated men more favorably inclined toward Japan. Whether he intended actually to ally with Japan seems unlikely; he hoped in this way, however, at least to gain time to maneuver as negotiations with Japan continued.
But China, however beset, was not willing to exchange one overlord for another. A letter written from occupied Manchuria in 1936 gives some sense of life under Japanese occupation and particularly of the animosity many felt toward collaborators, or “Chinese traitors.” The author was a male college student returning home to care for a sick father:
. . . On the train I discovered I was being followed by a Chinese-traitor plainclothes detective. He sat next to me and, posing as an ordinary passenger, periodically looked over and spoke to me. At first we chatted casually about everyday matters, but then we gradually shifted to the situation in China proper and recent student movements. He blabbed on and on throughout the whole trip. I disliked him very much but I had to pretend to be interested. When the train arrived in Yingkou, I was immediately grabbed by the [Japanese] military police, who took me to the . . . Police Station. . . . Besides myself, a young, husky ricksha puller was there, having been brought in before I was. He was on his knees crouching like a mouse listening to a Chinese traitor tongue-lash him. At first I thought that he had committed a major crime as serious as murder. Later I learned that he had delivered a [Japanese] woman to the wrong address. Before they let him go, they beat him severely and fined him two dollars.
My interrogator was typical of the “people from the friendly power”[i.e., Japanese]. He spoke beautiful Chinese, asking questions more or less similar to the ones that the detective had asked on the . . . train. But this time I had to write down in detail my native place, my address, and the names of my ancestors for three generations. In the end his face became more serious and he said to me: “You are a student. We have universities in Manzhouguo and they are free of charge. Why must you go to China to study? Hey, it’s all right if you go to China as long as you report monthly on the situation concerning the Chinese student movement. Otherwise, I will consider you a member of the group that opposes Manzhouguo and resists [Japan].”7
Within China, the Communists were under siege. Driven by Nationalist encirclement from their bases in Jiangxi province, in 1934 and 1935 they undertook the Long March, a yearlong, zigzagging flight that decimated their numbers and, for survivors, came to constitute almost unimpeachable revolutionary credentials. Journeying through extraordinarily difficult terrain, the Communists for a time lost all contact with the outside world, including Moscow. This isolation suggested that any alliance the Communists could achieve, however out of sync with their ideological preferences, might be necessary if they were to avoid becoming altogether irrelevant. At the same time, it encouraged the formation of an independent ideology and strategy more geared to specifically Chinese circumstances. At the end of the Long March, the Communists reestablished their headquarters in Yan’an, in northwest China, where they remained until the end of World War Two.
In 1936 an upsurge of nationalist activism compelled Chiang to shelve the Communist question for the time being because of the growing Japanese threat. That activism manifested itself, first, in widespread student demonstrations and, second, in the Xi’an Incident. In this crisis Chiang’s own officers helped the Manchurian warlord Zhang Xueliang kidnap Chiang, whom they refused to release until he swore to form an alliance with the Communists against Japan. Chiang’s extreme reluctance to fight the Japanese until he had destroyed the Communists enabled the latter to accuse the Nationalists of a lack of patriotism. It was an assertion that set them off to considerable moral advantage in the subsequent struggle for control of China.
In the meantime the Soviet Union had become extremely concerned about Japan’s aggressive intentions toward itself and sought a strong China that could help fend off any Japanese attack on Soviet territory. In November 1936 Soviet apprehensions intensified when Germany and Japan signed an anti-Comintern pact, which Stalin feared Chiang might join. During the Xi’an Incident Soviet fears that if Chiang were killed, his replacement might well be even more pro-Japanese prompted them to push the Chinese Communists into an anti-Japanese united front with the Guomindang. Mao and the Chinese Communists agreed to this second united front despite their detestation of Chiang mainly because of their ongoing desperate need for Soviet support and because they calculated—correctly, as it turned out—that the long-term domestic political gain would be theirs. At the same time, Moscow convinced Chiang it would use its influence with the Chinese Communists to restrain them from subverting the Nationalist government.
In 1937 Japan openly declared war on China. The Japanese assault on Chiang Kaishek’s former capital at Nanjing in December 1937 left hundreds of thousands of Chinese dead in an attack of notorious savagery. The Nanjing massacre launched a brutal period of warfare and occupation that affects Chinese attitudes toward Japan to this day.
With the declaration of war on China, in 1937 the Japanese rapidly took Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Nanjing. Within the year they also controlled Wuhan, in central China; Canton, in the southeast; and most major industrial cities. China suffered massive losses, particularly in Nanjing, and was divided into occupied zones run by puppet governments and “free China,” based in Chongqing, far up the Yangzi River in Sichuan province. Japanese control of the coastline cut off inland China from this line of communication to the outside world. Free China itself was split between Nationalist and Communist control; fragmentation became once more the order of the day.
The rapidity of the Japanese advance was profoundly demoralizing. But out of the darkness came occasional rays of hope. The Nanjing massacre, horrendous as it was, bolstered the Chinese will to resist, while occasional Chinese victories against the apparently invincible Japanese, such as that won at Taierzhuang, Shandong, in April 1938, suggested the enemy might after all be vulnerable. For despite Japan’s impressive military power, in China it found it had bitten off more than it could chew. Added to Japanese overextension, the vastness of the terrain and the dogged tenacity of the Chinese people made China ultimately unconquerable even by Japan’s far superior technological power.
Politically the war was fought three ways, between the Japanese and the Nationalists, the Japanese and the Communists, and the Communists and the Nationalists. The theoretical alliance between the Nationalists and Communists lasted only until 1941, when in a notorious incident Nationalist forces unexpectedly turned on their supposed allies and destroyed an entire Communist army.
Intellectuals, whatever their political persuasion, were fairly uniformly opposed to the Japanese. But some people were more ambivalent. Despite prohibitions issued on both sides, illicit trade flourished between free and occupied areas, with Japanese exchanging cotton and other imports for food and the raw materials needed to supply their military machine. Chinese Nationalist military personnel were among the most active traders with the Japanese, an involvement that often compromised their willingness to serve their country. For example, in 1944 the commander of the Chinese Nationalist forces in Guangdong province negotiated an agreement with the occupying Japanese not to attack nearby coal mines in which he had a financial interest. In return, he apparently agreed not to attack Japanese-occupied Canton, for when he was ordered to do so by Chiang Kaishek, he refused. There were many similar examples in which economic benefit eroded patriotic fervor. Both sides rationalized their dealings with the enemy: the Chinese on the ground of economic need, and the Japanese on the assumption, apparently justified, that commerce with the enemy helped neutralize Chinese military effectiveness.
Substantial numbers of Nationalist Chinese troops defected to the Japanese. Many were incorporated into the armies of occupation in the puppet zones and given garrison and patrol work, so as to free the more certainly reliable Japanese troops for active combat duty. Some defectors effectively continued to serve Chiang Kaishek by fighting the Communists from the Japanese side. Even at the height of the war Chiang remained in contact with puppet army commanders and with the Japanese. Thus at war’s end it was hardly surprising that some Chinese troops who had fought on the Japanese side used their strategic position to receive the Japanese surrender. In this way they helped the Nationalist cause by preventing occupied areas from falling at once into the hands of the Communists, whom they feared even more than the Japanese.
Among ordinary Chinese there was great animosity toward the Japanese, but it was not as universal as patriotic propaganda might lead one to suppose. Some who experienced Japanese brutality at first hand may well have been aroused to nationalist sentiment, but many merely wished to survive the depredations of all comers. Political consciousness was surprisingly limited in some areas. Even in 1948, after the Japanese war was over and only a year before the establishment of the People’s Republic, peasants in a village just forty miles from the Nationalists’ wartime capital in Chongqing had only the vaguest idea about the leaders of the two sides of the civil war, of which they were barely aware, or about the different ideological positions of the two sides.
CHINA AND THE WESTERN ALLIES
IN WORLD WAR TWO
By tying down perhaps 40 percent of Japan’s military forces, China contributed importantly to the Allied war effort in World War Two. But it seemed to gain little in return. The German and Italian advisers, ubiquitous a decade earlier, were gone; commerce with the European Axis countries and joint industrial development projects had atrophied or simply dried up. Britain and France, once the leading imperialist powers in Asia, were too beleaguered at home to resist Japanese demands in Asia. Any lingering Chinese respect for the power of the leading European imperialists withered away as Britain lost Singapore, Malaya, Hong Kong, and Burma, one after the other, to Japanese control, while France underwent German occupation. After 1941 the Soviet Union was fully occupied with fending off Nazi invasion. The United States watched developments in China closely and sent money but for the time being concentrated most of its wartime aid on Europe.
Only after the Japanese bombed the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor in late 1941 did America and China effectively become allies. The United States unconditionally granted billions of dollars of lend-lease aid, loans, and supplies to Nationalist China. The unusual grant of aid without specific strings attached arose both from America’s need, for its own strategic purposes, to shore up China’s defenses against Japan, and from a disinclination among powerfully placed men in Washington to believe the spreading tales of the misappropriations of American aid by the Chinese Nationalist government. The change from the situation during World War One was palpable. Chiang Kaishek needed foreign funds and supplies, but unlike Yuan Shikai and other earlier recipients of foreign loans, he absolutely refused to agree to any conditions. Because the Western Allies needed Chinese support, they had little choice in the matter.
Chiang’s relations with the three main American military advisers in China in many ways epitomized China’s awareness that it was now in a position to call the shots. Claire Chennault, formerly of the U.S. Army Air Force, had been an adviser to Chiang since 1937. Convinced of the benefits of airpower, he arranged for China to acquire some of the few American planes that could be spared from the European Allies’ pressing needs. His Flying Tigers, a fighting and training force made up of American fliers, won some impressive victories against the Japanese, although their efforts to train Chinese pilots had only mixed success. Less favored by Chiang was General Joseph Stilwell, President Roosevelt’s appointee to command American troops in the China-Burma-India theater and liaise with Chiang on strategy and supplies. Stilwell disagreed with Chennault about the relative merits of an air or ground war in China and insisted that Chiang cooperate with Allied forces by committing his best troops to fight the Japanese. Chiang, ever mindful of the Communists, showed great reluctance to do this. Stilwell’s independence of mind and his willingness to speak truth to power, in contrast with Chennault’s greater amenability and the dashing exploits of the Flying Tigers, alienated Chiang. He denied Roosevelt’s request that he place Stilwell in command of all Chinese troops and demanded Stilwell be replaced. Acceding after acrimonious exchanges to this demand, Roosevelt sent as Stilwell’s successor General Albert Wedemeyer, whom Chiang much preferred, appreciating his early military training in Germany and his less acidic temperament. Appeasing Chiang Kaishek and the Chinese Nationalists became an American habit of mind that affected the whole tenor of global politics in the postwar decades.
Although at their meeting in Cairo in late 1943 British Prime Minister Churchill and American President Roosevelt agreed with Chiang to return Manchuguo and Taiwan to China after the war, the prospect of actually implementing this agreement was diminished by the Soviet-Japanese neutrality pact, signed two years earlier. Among other things, the pact effectively recognized Manchuguo as an independent state. It took Germany’s invasion of Russia to shift Soviet allegiances. Only at the Yalta summit in early 1945 did the USSR agree to enter the war in the Pacific within three months of Germany’s by then imminent defeat. Until then the Soviet Union’s main contribution to the war in China was to urge the Communists to submerge their differences with the Nationalists, in order the more effectively to distract the Japanese from attacking the USSR.
The goal of uniting all Chinese people in resistance to Japan dramatically affected cultural life during the war. Men and women earlier fired by May Fourth ideals but demoralized by the authoritarian turn of political events during the 1930s found that for all the attendant suffering, war was the answer to at least some of the complex cultural problems they had so far proved unable to solve. Resistance propaganda was a key weapon both against the occupying Japanese and in the rethinking of modern culture. Creating works of propaganda gave many intellectuals a specifically patriotic context for their work, while disseminating them brought them into a close relationship with ordinary people, from whom their acquisition of foreign knowledge and values had tended to separate them.
Wartime propaganda drew its inspiration from both the Chinese tradition and foreign sources. Of the various forms it took, didactic spoken drama was particularly successful. Even before the war such programs as the Mass Education Movement, led by James Yen, had begun to use drama as a means to foster social change. They used peasant actors to stage specially devised plays for rural audiences, for which the more sophisticated fare urban theatergoers enjoyed held little meaning. After war broke out, propagandists took over these tried-and-true techniques and added refinements of their own. Most effective were dramatized versions of newspaper reports, which provided both entertainment and information on current events from a patriotic point of view. Imported models also loomed large.
The other most effective form of Chinese wartime propaganda was cartoons, which often drew their original inspiration from Western models. Satirical art had been known in Chinese painting for several hundred years; the eighteenth-century “eccentric” artist Luo Ping (1733–1799) was a well-known exponent. From the late nineteenth century, with the spread of newspapers and a periodical press, cartoons reemerged as a potentially influential art form. They derived inspiration both in terms of artistic style and in terms of subject matter from Japanese artists, such as Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), and from such Western artists of war as Francisco de Goya (1746–1828), depicter of the splendors and miseries of the Napoleonic Wars in Spain; George Grosz (1893–1959), chronicler of the rise of nazism; Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945), whose radically socially conscious woodcuts an admiring Lu Xun helped disseminate in China; and David Low (1891–1963), well known as a commentator on world affairs in general and on conditions in East Asia in particular.
Chinese wartime cartoonists suffered very consciously from the usual dilemma: some of their best techniques owed much to foreign influence, but since their main purpose was to stimulate nationalist sentiment, they needed to evolve an unadulteratedly Chinese style. They were aware of the need not to imitate the West slavishly but merely to adapt Western ideas, for instance, by incorporating indigenous folk arts into their work.
Like the cartoonists, Chinese musicians and composers now found a new role. Earlier in the century European music had offered young Chinese an appealing alternative to the classic tradition, with its emphasis on the close relationship between music and politics. But within a few decades of this May Fourth trend, musicians were devoting their energies to producing and performing patriotic songs that drew on both Western and Chinese musical cultures, combining, for instance, the martial style of Christian hymns with elements from traditional Chinese folk songs.
In short, the war effort gave a new impetus to politically committed writers. The trend toward deploying culture as a weapon was co-opted by the Communist leader Mao Zedong, whose 1942 “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature” declared that from then on culture must serve the nationalist revolution. The implication that the heyday of foreign cultural influences must now draw to a close was even clearer than it had been in the 1930s.
Japan’s very persuasive propaganda against white imperialism hastened the demise of Western power and prestige all over Asia. In China in 1943 the Japanese interned foreigners resident in occupied areas, terminating their privileged treatment in no uncertain terms. Extraterritoriality in the rest of China finally came to a formal end by mutual agreement in 1943, although for Americans it continued de facto until the end of the war. After the war the foreign powers never fully recovered control of their spheres of influence, although colonial Hong Kong and Macao reverted to British and Portuguese control respectively for another half century. After 1945 Korea and Taiwan ceased to be under Japanese control, while for the European colonies in Southeast Asia, freedom from Japanese occupation paved the way for the fight for full independence.
The opening salvos of the Cold War were fired in the Chinese civil war between the Guomindang and the Chinese Communists, which broke out soon after the Japanese surrender in 1945. Supported respectively by the United States and the Soviet Union, each accused the other of being the tool of foreign imperialists. The Chinese Communists were still uncertain of strong Soviet support. They wanted it and needed it, but at the same time, they were preparing the terrain for a future declaration of independence. That year the Chinese Communists praised Mao’s interpretation of Marxism as best suited to Chinese conditions, a sign they were laying the groundwork for staking out a claim to ideological autonomy. When, a month later, Moscow signed a new treaty with the Nationalists, the Chinese Communists can hardly be blamed for wondering about the USSR’s commitment to international Communist solidarity.
In this climate of uncertainty the Communists had tried to keep their options open by making overtures to the United States about a proposed alliance. But they insisted they would open relations only on the basis of equality and respect for China’s territorial sovereignty. The Truman administration showed little interest. This left the Communists with little alternative but to hope for help from Moscow, even though Stalin, astonishingly, declined to repudiate the recently concluded treaty with the Nationalists until it became clear the Communists would win. The United States continued to pour money and military supplies into Guomindang coffers, as it had done since Pearl Harbor, despite growing signs that the Nationalists had lost popular support and with it the ability to prevail. As late as December 1948, by which time a Communist victory was beginning to look probable, American arms and ammunition were still arriving for the Nationalists.
American support for the Guomindang contributed to a rising tide of anti-American sentiment that spread far beyond Communist circles. The general view was that it was hypocritical of the Americans to purport to be mediating in order to help China achieve peace and reunification, while contributing so actively to the Guomindang war effort as in effect to make possible the continuation of the civil war. Many Chinese thus blamed the Americans for protracting the civil war. But they had other concerns. Individually and in the press growing numbers of Chinese expressed great anxiety that American support of the Guomindang government would drag China willy-nilly into the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union on America’s side. Chinese wanted the opportunity to formulate an independent stance. In the eyes of many, Guomindang dependence on American support, with the implication that American policies were going to decide China’s fate, risked opening a new chapter in foreign imperialism in China. Americans also did not endear themselves to patriotic Chinese by their often high-handed behavior in China, including the 1946 rape by two U.S. marines of a Beijing University student of prominent family that became a cause célèbre.
After 1945 reservations about America were also fueled by the U.S. policy of rebuilding Japan’s economy after the war. Chinese across the spectrum feared a resurgence of militarism in Japan and thought that an American-Japanese alliance could bode only ill for China. They envisaged possible scenarios in which Japan, rearmed with American assistance, sent troops back to China either to combat communism or to fight in a war against the Soviet Union. After all that China had suffered, it was not a prospect the Chinese relished.
News of a growing American military presence on Taiwan, where by the late 1940s the Guomindang were preparing to reestablish the Nationalist government after their defeat in the civil war became inevitable, also began to cause great alarm among patriotic Chinese. Even independent newspapers not aligned with the Communist cause drew attention to America’s interest in Taiwan and declared unacceptable the possibility that Taiwan, only recently restored to China after fifty years of Japanese occupation, might soon be detached by another foreign power. As America assumed the unwanted title of leading imperialist nation in China, the goodwill toward Americans that Chinese had once felt—because the Americans had cast off the yoke of British imperialism and because of their record of philanthropy in China—steadily dwindled away to nothing.
BRINGING FOREIGN DOMINATION
TO AN END
In 1949 the Communists won the civil war. Proclaiming, “The Chinese people have stood up: China will never again be an insulted nation,” Mao announced the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.8 The new government set about implementing some of its long-postponed goals. Bringing foreign privileges in China to an end had been an important goal of the May Fourth Movement. The continued presence of foreign industries, businesses, and missions remained as a visible reminder of the era of foreign domination. But in late 1949 Mao’s new government not only had to remake China in a new image but also faced gargantuan tasks of postwar reconstruction. On the one hand, it was alert to the possibility that continued reliance on foreigners, many of whom continued to harbor a patronizing attitude toward China, risked subverting the momentum of the revolution. But it also recognized that it would be counterproductive to throw all the foreigners out posthaste. It thus made adroit use of foreigners to keep running essential services—such as electric power and telephones in Shanghai, both foreign-run—and as targets of hostility against whom it could unite groups of Chinese not yet convinced of the desirability of a Communist regime. As a short-term measure it took advantage of foreign-funded businesses to save itself money and keep Chinese employed. In determining their treatment of foreigners in China, therefore, the Communists weighed association with the imperialist past against present expediency and acted accordingly.
Among those whose loyalty the Communists identified as uncertain were Chinese living in the treaty ports, who had become habituated to the presence of foreigners in their midst. Much of the huge urban work force, vital to the success of the revolution, came into this category. To bring them under their control, the new Communist government encouraged those working for foreigners to bring grievances against their employers, and it rarely found against them in labor disputes. It also energetically publicized cases in which foreigners were alleged to have mistreated Chinese, to illustrate the imperialists’ iniquitous attitudes of superiority.
Foreign missionaries’ assumption of superiority had always been a particular source of contention with China. Now the day of reckoning had come. The new government allowed missionaries to stay for the time being only to the extent that they could provide needed education in foreign languages and technical subjects or that foreign funding for their colleges could save the Chinese state some money until the schools could be integrated into a national educational system. There were severe limitations to Chinese toleration. Catholics in particular encountered Communist opprobrium, mainly because the focus of their mission effort had been evangelical, whereas Protestants had moved steadily in the direction of educational and social welfare activities. Catholics were also especially suspect, as they had always been, because they were known to have strong links to outside authority. Moreover, they had become large landowners and hence helped prop up the very structure of land tenure that the new government intended to abolish. Finally, their insistence on priestly celibacy raised accusations that they wished to depopulate China, a claim that seems especially unfair given Catholic views on contraception and in the light of China’s subsequent policies of population limitation. Thus, as the Communist government moved to restrict foreign missionaries, Catholics were its first objects of censure.
In small but significant ways the Communists set about reclaiming the terrain of culture. They required all official communications thenceforth to be in the Chinese language, for as a July 1949 newspaper declared, the use of English—customary on, for example, electricity bills (bear in mind that the power company was foreign-run)—”betrays a strong sense of colonial influence,” so that such measures were necessary “to uphold China’s national prestige.”9 Foreigners now found that interviews with Chinese officials must be conducted through an interpreter, whether or not one was needed. Moreover, organizations staffed by foreigners who knew no Chinese, such as the Customs Service, immediately had to replace longtime foreign employees with Chinese, leaving the abruptly out-of-work foreigners with little option but to leave the country. Similarly, the new authorities moved to restrict foreign films, although this proved more unpopular. It took some time before attendance levels at the imports of Soviet cinema reached those once found at Hollywood movies.
Some diplomats formerly accredited to the Nationalists remained in China after the Communist takeover, but the Communists refused to recognize their diplomatic identities or special privileges. Britain, pressed by commercial interests still optimistic about the China market, was among the first to recognize the People’s Republic. American trade concerns in China, on the other hand, were not influential enough to overcome rising anti-Communist sentiment in the United States. Now that the Communists had come to power, the Truman administration showed no inclination to change its mind about them. In early 1950 American ex-diplomats left China. Before long their countrymen would return to fight Chinese troops in Korea.
The self-assertion of the government of the People’s Republic was the logical outcome of a process of evolving nationalism that had begun at least fifty years earlier. Around the turn of the century, learning from the West and adopting Western methods in one form or another had seemed to many to be China’s best bet for survival. After 1919 Westernization as a technique of nationalism became considerably more ambiguous. After 1925 patriots no longer considered recourse to Westernization an acceptable option at all. By 1949 Chinese had achieved the revolutionary goal of ending the old-style foreign domination and set about creating a distinctively Chinese style for the new People’s Republic.