A new era had begun. At first the Nationalists had proposed to develop a

parliamentary government which would gradually foster a modernized

ideology, and to govern China well in the meanwhile; when this hope

vanished with the rise of Yüan Shih-k'ai's military power, in 1913, they

had to reroute the revolution. Had they relied upon the experience of

the liberal nations, they might have resigned themselves to a policy of

gradualism. The Communist process of conversion was different from the

Confucian. The Confucians had gradually built up a body of the most

public-spirited men and permeated the ruling intellectual class with

Confucian ideas. Their slow process of persuasion triumphed with the

elevation of their main texts to the status of bibles in China and with

their monopoly of advanced education. The Communists proposed to take a

few simple, obvious issues, to present them dramatically, to win as many

people as possible to the support of immediate policies and to reach

power through such support. Once political and military authority had

been established, they expected to go further in the "education" of the

masses of the people.

To obtain tangible results quickly the Nationalists had to make

extensive promises. On the advice of the Communists, they led vigorous

anti-imperialist movements which embittered both Chinese and foreigners

and provided the whole country with issues more real than the

personalities of war lords or the machinations of cliques.

Communist-trained propagandists took the reforms which the Nationalists

had proposed among themselves and carried them into the people. Sun's

principle of _min shêng_ appeared in practical programs as an immediate

call for socio-economic revolution. Mass organizations grew, swelling

their ranks by promises to all subordinate economic groups. These

organizations were bound to cause difficulty as soon as it became

apparent that the Nationalist-Communist promises could not be realized

immediately and in full.

In the meantime, the Communists maintained their separate party

organization within the Kuomintang. The Russians found China a fertile

field for conversion, and while they assisted the Nationalists they

fostered the growth of a Chinese Communist Party. From an academic group

which meant nothing in 1921, the Communist Party grew in 1925-1926 to

comprise the radical vanguard of the revolution. The Communists assumed

the vanguard position because they were less bound by loyalty to the

existing groups in Chinese society than were the Nationalists. The

working alliance, in which the Nationalists received Communist help in

money, technical political services, and arms, made the seizure of

political power a reality. Sun Yat-sen died in March, 1925, before the

great surge of the revolution came, but in 1926 and 1927 the

Nationalist-Communist forces proceeded north, brushing the militarists

aside as they went. The combination of a patriotic, foreign-trained,

professionalized army, a powerful agitation department, and a party

organization able to govern after conquest, came to prevail everywhere.

Half of China was now under Kuomintang dominion, which operated through

a council form of government.[16] Then came the schism. Conflict was

inevitable between Communists and Nationalists when the Communists

proved unwilling to look forward to the establishment of a republic

according to Sun's principles, pushing on with the revolution as soon as

the Nationalists slowed down or stopped.

Communist training helped the Nationalists to power, but under

circumstances which made necessary either the institution of terror or

the partial inhibition of the Nationalist programs. The Nationalists had

promised almost anything to almost everyone in order to secure power;

this was a part of the propaganda methods which Communists taught. After

seizing power in 1926-1927 the Nationalists could resort only to

military dictatorship and party terrorism in order to achieve the

fulfillment of their extravagant promises. But the Nationalists were

Chinese, and as such cherished the old notions of moderation and

humanity in government. They were not the master of any legalism or

dialectic which would justify the slaughter of millions for the good of

a system. Millions have died in China, but the Chinese never

acknowledged the massacre. They could not face the program of class war

which their promises inevitably implied. The Communists kept pressing

forward, now giving pledges in their own name and in the name of the

Nationalists, redeemable only by class warfare or involving the

discredit of the Nationalists. The situation came to a head when the

Communists began taking independent action. Indiscreet Communists

informed Nationalist leaders that the Kuomintang was to be discarded so

that the revolution could continue--along Communist lines. The breaks,

first with the Kuomintang Right and then with the Kuomintang Left,

occurred in 1927. The Russians went back to Russia. The Chinese

Communists faced their future alone.

The Canton-Moscow Entente--as the Nationalist-Communist coalition has

been called--changed the Nationalist movement profoundly in 1923-1927.

It found the movement a small elite of opposition and left it a swollen

party with a government and an army under its control, a vast schedule

of promises to fulfill, a second revolution to vindicate.[17]

NOTES

[1] Sun Yat-sen, _How China Was Made a Republic_ (unpublished manuscript

written in Shanghai in 1919, now in possession of the present author),

p. 4.

[2] On the Manchu reforms see H. M. Vinacke, _Modern Constitutional

Development in China_, Princeton, 1920, and Meribeth E. Cameron, _The

Reform Movement in China_, 1898-1912, Stanford, 1931. On the

revolutionary group see T'ang Leang-li, _The Inner History of the

Chinese Revolution_, New York, 1930.

[3] See below, pp. 41 ff.

[4] See below, pp. 145 ff.

[5] See below, pp. 149 ff.

[6] See below, p. 60. A description of other plans for democracy in

China is given in M. J. Bau, _Modern Democracy in China_, Shanghai,

1923.

[7] See below, pp. 102 ff.

[8] See below, pp. 139 ff.

[9] See below, pp. 185 ff.

[10] See, among others, Tyler Dennett, _The Democratic Movement in

Asia_, New York, 1918; R. Y. Lo, _China's Revolution from the Inside_,

New York, 1930. The author wishes to thank J. J. Holmes, School of

Religion, Duke University, for suggestions concerning this section.

[11] Hampden C. DuBose, _The Dragon, Image, and Demon ..._, pp. 48-49,

New York, 1887.

[12] Paul Hutchinson, _China's Real Revolution_, p. 155, New York, 1924.

[13] See the literature cited above, p. 30, n. 1.

[14] Lyon Sharman, _Sun Yat-sen: His Life and Its Meaning_, p. 248, New

York, 1934. This is the most critical of the biographies of Sun Yat-sen.

The one which Sun himself authorized and on which he collaborated to

some extent is Paul M. W. Linebarger, _Sun Yat Sen and the Chinese

Republic_, New York, 1924.

[15] For the military development of this period see below, pp. 105 ff.

[16] See below, pp. 163 ff.

[17] For some of the ideological developments involved in the

Moscow-Canton Entente see Tsui Shu-chin, "The Influence of the

Canton-Moscow Entente upon Sun Yat-sen's Political Philosophy," _The

Chinese Social and Political Science Review_ (Peiping), vol. 18, pp. 177

ff., 1934. On the role of nationalism in education see Victor Purcell,

_Problems of Chinese Education_, London, 1936.

_Chapter_ III

BATTLING CREEDS

The right-wing Nationalists, establishing the National Government of

China at Nanking in 1927, found themselves in the position of

revolutionaries sitting at roll-top desks. After more than forty years

of criticism and opposition, the movement had assumed the

responsibilities of government. In breaking with the Communists the

Nationalists lost the doctrinal edge of the extreme Left; thenceforth

there were to be groups more radical than themselves. This disheartened

some of the revolutionaries, who either lost interest in politics or

continued revolutionary opposition to the regime their colleagues had

formed.

_Nationalism: Governing Phase_

The Kuomintang was confronted with the issues of national unification,

development toward democracy, and realization of the economic reforms

and programs postulated by Sun's principle, of _min shêng_. The

instrument for their task was a brand-new form of government, fresh

from the pages of Sun Yat-sen, which at its birth was beset with

difficult military, administrative, economic, and diplomatic problems.

But the Nationalists had one particular advantage which they shared only

with the Communists--that of possessing a well-integrated ideology. It

was possible for them to couch intra-Party struggles in a reasonably

consistent set of terms. Even when respect for one of Sun Yat-sen's

theories had been reduced to mere lip service another from the same

source took its place. The intellectual outlook inherited from the

humanistic political training of Confucianism kept the Chinese from a

dogmatic political pseudo-theology, while the wide circulation of Sun's

principles provided a moral and programmatic foundation for governmental

routine.

The break with the Communists and the development of a Red military

problem were continuing forces driving the Nationalists to the Right,

where opportunists and reactionaries of all categories welcomed them.

They were also drawn to the Left--by the social revolution which had

carried them to power and by the need of agrarian and labor reform.

Central to the very continuance of the government, however, was the

military power of the Nationalist armies led by Chiang K'ai-shek.

Without the armed force to implement their decisions the Nationalists

would have been compelled to let their endeavors subside into

subterranean defeat. To the considerations of Right, Left, and armed

force were added responsibilities incident to government. The Kuomintang

in its governing phase, therefore, plotted its course with reference to

three points: doctrinal consistency, military necessity, governmental

responsibility.[1] As an ideologically constituent movement, how did

Nationalism use its power?

The Nationalists in power had to find their way through class

alignments, inert and meaningless oppositions, the rancor of the Left,

the contempt of the established monarchist Right. Personalities in

conflict, cliques forming and disbanding, factions denied overt

expression--these lay behind the pressure politics of the intra-Party

contest for the control of policy conducted on a thin and novel

constitutional plane. The written formulas guiding the struggle for

power were supplemented by the bodies of unwritten practice which had

developed in the years of the Republic. There were appropriate forms for

extraconstitutional action, just as for constitutional. It was the

outstanding contribution of the Kuomintang to modern Chinese government

that it kept its internal conflicts within its own constitutional

framework, and did so more successfully than any other movement in

modern China.

The meandering and difficult course of Kuomintang policy flowed within

the valley rather than the river bed of Sun Yat-sen's doctrine. The

planning power of Sun's intellect bound the movement long after his

death. In his plans for the regeneration of China are to be found the

ideal requirements for the growth of modern government under the

tutelage of a patriotic elite of overseas men, revolutionary veterans,

and scholars. The Nanking government of the Kuomintang had to meet all

the problems of government while keeping within the broad boundaries of

Sun's demands. The movement as a whole, however, displayed certain broad

shifts which are readily traceable.[2] Sun Yat-sen envisaged the

establishment of authentic democracy by a course of action including

three steps: (1) the military period, in which the movement should

acquire power over the nation through the use of force; (2) the period

of tutelage, in which the members of the movement should exercise a

benevolent party dictatorship over the nation, while training the

populace for democracy; (3) the period of constitutional democracy, in

which the people should exercise actual self-government.

Shortly after its establishment, the National Government announced the

ending of the period of military conquest and the opening of the period

of tutelage, which was set for 1930-1935. The Japanese invasions caused

the establishment of constitutional government to be postponed

indefinitely, and it is to be feared that even if constitutional

government were installed it would fall far short of Sun's programs,

which called for truly effective training in the arts of democracy

before Chinese government could be entrusted to the broad masses of the

electorate. In the meantime, the arbitrariness, the political

composition, and the outlook of the transitional Party dictatorship

became subjects of hot controversy among the Kuomintang leaders.

The Party dictatorship demanded a rigor of discipline and a deflation of

revolutionary enthusiasm which soon drove the militant Left out of the

Kuomintang. Even Sun Yat-sen's brilliant young second wife remained

outside the Party--a permanent and indefatigable opposition. Within the

Party personalities came to dominate--Hu Han-min, the chief Rightist

disciple and interpreter of Sun Yat-sen; Chiang K'ai-shek, Sun's

outstanding military protege; and Wang Ch'ing-wei, the chief Leftist

disciple of the Leader. There were also Sun Fo (Sun K'ê), the only son

of Sun Yat-sen, and other ranking Party members whose opinions ranged

from philosophic anarchism (as in the case of Wu Chih-hui) to a

progressive business outlook not unlike Mr. Hoover's (as in the instance

of T. V. Soong).

The National Government settled down with Chiang and Hu Han-min

(military and Right) holding the leadership, which Wang Ch'ing-wei

decried as reactionary. In 1931 Chiang ousted Hu, in the course of a

conflict over a proposed American silver loan and over constitutional

questions. Shortly thereafter Wang Ch'ing-wei assumed a place in the

government, after participating in an unsuccessful armed rebellion (the

"Nationalist Government" in Peking, 1930-1931).

This might seem to indicate a swing from the Right to the Left within

the Party. Actually it was indicative of the growing practicality of the

Nationalist movement and its preoccupation with problems of installing

the form of government planned by Sun.[3] With the passage of time, the

Nationalists adopted three main lines of endeavor: (1) the suppression

of the Communists at all cost, even that of temporary nonresistance to

Japan; (2) the tendency to abandon revolutionary fervor for

administrative zeal, and to become governmental in spirit as well as

form--a tendency illustrated most notably in the promotion of industry

under H. H. Kung, railways under Sun Fo, and finance under T. V. Soong;

(3) a policy of emphasizing military power, which meant the rise to

effective personal leadership of Chiang K'ai-shek. The development of a

United Front policy in 1937 and the war with Japan led to the reversal

of the first two policies and an enormous emphasis on the third. The

Nationalists again turned to patriotism on the mass level rather than

government action in a patriotically bureaucratic sphere. This latter

policy, although it may seem strangely nonrevolutionary, was actually a

part of Sun's programs to which the Nationalists were bound.

The class theory held by Sun was based upon a distinction between power

and competence. The people should have _power_ to determine the range of

government policy; they obviously did not have the _competence_.

Competence was confined to the intellectual leaders and the thinking

people of society (who were to form two classes) and could not be found

in the vast majority of people untrained to contemplate political

problems. Accordingly, Sun's scheme of government assumed the continuity

of a bureaucracy made up of men of competence, but subject to the

periodic check of the populace, which possessed the power.

Another of Sun's programs relates to the question: How can democracy be

reconciled with ideological control? The Chinese had lived in a society

so completely under the rule of common ideas that independent individual

thinking had to be moderate, careful, and orthodox in appearance before

it met with any welcome. The individual was not free to think freely;

but since most did not think freely, sensing no need for it, they were

unconscious of control. A problem larger than that of individual freedom

is raised by the question of ideological control, since the controlled

individual himself transmits control to his neighbors and his

dependents. The ideology must be filtered, as it were, at some point.

Sun believed that democracy would effectuate the filtering, allowing

long-range revision from outside the bureaucracy. He expected that the

bureaucracy of democratic China would rule well but would be subject to

control from a people not completely under its thumb. The ideology was

to be officially fostered, but it was to be subject to the check of the

electorate. The Chinese were still to use orthodoxy as a tool of control

and social pressure as the major instrument of constraint, but they were

not to be allowed to fall into a blind traditionalism which would

isolate them.

The old ideology was to be adjusted and supplemented with Western

science, so that the new would be compounded of three things: old

Chinese social and political experience, old Chinese ethical knowledge,

and modern scientific truth. With respect to Western science, the

Nationalists had to present few startling governmental innovations,

since the need for a knowledge of the physical and technical sciences

was widely recognized in China--not only by the Nationalists. That the

Western technology should serve to build the new China was obvious;

trade schools needed encouragement rather than initiation. As to the old

Chinese social and political experience, the Kuomintang stressed study

of China's past. They attempted to mend the gap between the generation

born in the 1880's and that born in the 1910's by encouraging

concentration on the classical texts, reverently, but critically as

well. Archaeology has heightened interest of the Chinese in their past.

As a consequence, their sense of national value has deepened.

For the restoration of the old Chinese moral and ethical system the New

Life movement, which has been fostered personally by Generalissimo

Chiang K'ai-shek, is of great importance. Its principles consist of a

simple restatement of the cardinal Confucian personal virtues,

interpreted to suit modern conditions. It has presumably been influenced

by Protestant Christianity, and may be said to be a form of puritanism.

Although the Nationalist movement has not been as successful in ten

years as was the Confucian in two hundred, it has at least created a

state pattern. A state in the full sense would require a type of

organization so clear in its ideology that people would personify it

willingly, would accord it existence whether leaders and governments

fell or not, and would be loyal to it and to those who claimed to wield

its power.

Among negative influences running against the Nationalist ideology, the

Nationalist neo-militarism has stood forth. As in the other

ideologically integrated states of the world (Russia, Germany, Italy),

the army assumed especial importance because its type of law and order

required no common understanding higher than the assent of idiots. An

army is the one institution where complete harmony of thought is a

luxury and not a necessity, where simple agreement on rewards,

punishments, and organization morale will hold the structure together.

The Nationalist armies, however, rose to a new position. Ideological

control was introduced; the literate armies fought best. But despite the

civilian and intellectual factors from outside, the mere force

concentrated in weapons was so great as to amount to a constant

temptation. Whenever the day's fortunes were inclement, the men in

command tended to settle things with guns. In contrast with sheer

ideals, the Nationalists were strongly military; in contrast with their

predecessors, the Nationalist generals showed respect for civilian

authority. The charge of Nationalist neo-militarism focused upon the

personal popularity of army leaders, especially that of Chiang

K'ai-shek. It can be adjudicated only by history.

The Nationalist movement neared its most drastic ordeal in 1936. The

predetermined period of tutelage as decreed was passing, while the

inauguration of constitutional government had to be deferred. With the

approaching abolition of the Party dictatorship the Nationalist leaders

were to demonstrate their consistency with their own ideals and

programs. The programs of Sun Yat-sen called for the abdication of the

patriotic elite, and the requirement--coupled as it had been with the

proclamation of definite time limits--placed the issue squarely before

the Kuomintang leadership. Were they to attempt the democratic

experiment in a nation patently unripe for it, or were they to disavow

the commands of their deceased and sainted Leader, and continue in

power?

_Independent Marxism in China_

The proponents of Marxism were welcomed into China as trusted friends.

In 1926 it was obvious to the whole world that China was definitely

within the orbit of Marxism; in 1935 it was just as apparent that the

Marxists faced a military doom, and that their forcible suppression

might mean the end of their political effectiveness. Never ruined beyond

all hope of recovery and triumph, never successful beyond all danger of

disaster, the Marxists and their doctrines are the greatest uncertainty

facing China.

Sinologues, judging from past experience and impressed with the deep

continuities and repetitions of Chinese history, may well argue that

Marxism is another religious distributive cult such as periods of

turmoil always produce in China. They can point to the rise and fall of

the Yellow Turbans in the third century A. D., when the two leaders--the

Duke of Heaven and the Duke of Humanity--shook the great Han dynasty

down into everlasting ruin. Or they can refer to the T'ai-p'ing

rebellion, which held a territory infinitely greater than that ever

occupied by the Marxists, which impressed a fantastic but politically

operative Christianity upon its followers, and which promised to do in

South China what Brigham Young and the Mormons had done with the United

Order in Utah; but the T'ai-p'ing went down to an extinction so complete

that no living advocate of the cult practiced by millions seventy years

ago can be found today. Thus it would be no violation of the set

patterns of Chinese history if the movement of Marxism were to rise to

world-dazzling splendor and then pass into utter oblivion. Yet Chinese

history is no longer the only kind of history which holds weight for

precedent in China, and if the T'ai-p'ing rebellion is one example, the

Russian Revolution is another. Bolshevism certainly has better chances

of succeeding in China than it could have seemed to have--to anyone but

a fanatic--in the Russia of 1915.

The Marxian doctrines had already eaten well into Chinese territory

before entering upon the Chinese scene proper. One of the less savory

bequests which the tsarist regime left the Communists was the question

of Outer Mongolia, a vast stretch of land under the admitted suzerainty

but beyond the real control of the Chinese. The area was used by White

Russians as a base for operations, and--whether or not it accorded with

their principles--the Red forces had to cross the frontier to pacify

Siberia. Once in, they could not get out. It was essentially the sort of

absent-minded conquest which has contributed so much to the British

Empire: a strategic occupation leading inevitably to political

domination. The Russians compromised as well as they might, setting up

an Outer Mongolian People's Republic and administering the area in the

way which the world was to observe on a much grander scale in the case

of the Japanese in Manchuria--through advisers.

Marxism became a force in China through men and literature and money and

arms reaching China by the sea route, as have most Western things. Its

position reflected, however, the facts that Russia is China's greatest

neighbor and that the Russo-Chinese land frontier is one of the longest

in the world. China is much nearer to San Francisco, in terms of

shipping costs and speed of connections, than it is to Leningrad, but

the appearance of closer proximity to the latter played a considerable

role. The Nationalist-Communist coalition[4] was the result of the

impact of Marxism from Russia upon China proper. The Communists entered

as allies, not as leaders. The period of Nationalist-Communist

cooperation lasted because the practical projects of the two

revolutionary parties lay in a common direction. The gradual shift in

the role of the Communists from advisers and allies to teachers and

masters led to the break between the two organizations.

How did this shift develop? From the Marxian standpoint it was the move

of a party leadership which was bound by a true ideology, that of

dialectic materialism. Whatever the ethics of broken individual pledges,

there is no question that the Communists were justified according to

their own beliefs in abandoning the Nationalists when the Nationalists

ceased positive revolutionary action and began a Nationalist

reconstitution. The Communists felt themselves bound to take up the

standards of the revolution and proceed against Nationalists as against

others. There was no room in the Marxian ideology for anything but the

officially approved Communist Party; there was no ground for conceding

that the Nationalists might be wise in calling a breathing spell.

The Kuomintang leaders, on the other hand, had every reason to feel

aggrieved at the Communists. The Communists had come to help the Chinese

revolutionaries in their struggle for national liberation and to bring

about a common front against imperialism in the Far East. When the

revolution of national liberation was more than half accomplished, the

Communists had increased their following to such an extent that they

regarded the Nationalist alliance as a mere episode in the growth of

Marxian power in China. Marxists had come to help the cause of Sun

Yat-sen; Marxism was spread to fight and undo it. The sobering shock of

a grasp on power sent the Nationalists into relative conservatism. An

eminent Chinese writer has suggested the change of mood:

Our imagination was fired, our enthusiasm was kindled; thousands of

young men have fled from home and school from the outermost provinces

to join the Nationalist forces; they have toiled and they have

sweated, and thousands have gladly laid down their lives on the altar

of Nationalism that their dream of a regenerated and redeemed China

might come true. But, alas!... The war has ended--so has all

idealism.[5]

The Soviet Communists, deprived of their opportunity to broadcast

propaganda on a large scale, and unable to ride the back of the

Nationalist tiger any longer, found themselves on a defensive which

seemed to be permanent. At the same time, the Marxists in China

encountered difficulties in adjusting their ideology to the fact that

their strength lay in elements which official Marxism discredited. They

owed their existence to agrarian discontent and to their excellent

army--the shock troops, in many cases, of the former coalition. The

leader of Chinese Marxism, Ch'en Tu-hsiu, broke the party wide open with

a schism; he believed in modernizing effort rather than orthodox Marxist

symbols. Other schisms from the Left produced Marxisms intent on

applying the European technique to China's small proletariat,

indifferent to the land question and eager to make an Asiatic revolution

from the textbooks of European labor conflict. Such deviations were as

unrealistic and sterile as Blanquism, against which the nineteenth

century Marxists inveighed so heavily. Even so the official Communist

Party withstood nine years of savage attack and persecution because

necessity forced the Reds to pursue a simple line of policy--survival.

Out of the test of deadly experience the Chinese Communists evolved

means of allying themselves with the discontented peasantry, and found

the point at which further social reform yielded diminishing returns in

popular support. In relying on the people for practical help, instead of

invoking theoretically popular appeals, the Chinese Communists attained

a defensive strength which could easily be turned into an offensive.

The reorientation in attitude--the splitting off of both extremes, the

iron necessity for an immediate and effectual popularization of the

Party among the peasantry, and the lessons derived from responding to

actual conditions--enabled the Communists to establish a state in

Kiangsi in 1931: the Chinese Soviet Republic.[6] In 1935 and 1936 Chiang

K'ai-shek began the most vigorous of his attacks, which led to the

removal of the Chinese Red Army some two thousand miles from South

Central to Northwest China--one of the most astonishing military feats

of modern times. Some observers have suggested that Chiang had no

intention of allowing the Communists to disappear altogether from the

scene, as they provided his military power with a _raison d'être_ in the

eyes of the Japanese. Had he run them utterly to ground, the Japanese

might have dispensed with him. Later events have made such an

explanation seem less persuasive, after the _coup d'état_ at Sian in

December, 1936.

The personal factors and political events in this extraordinary drama

are not yet known in their entirety, and it may be decades before the

whole story is pieced together from the accounts of eyewitnesses and

interpreters. Chiang K'ai-shek in his published diary mentions no formal

agreement for the institution of a United Front policy, but the rumors

from the Left persist in affirming the existence of a truce between the

Nationalists and the Communists, the fruits of which were to be action

against Japan. Certainly the military and political effects of Chiang's

kidnaping were substantial,[7] and the ideological scarcely less. In

brief, the kidnaping arose from action on the part of Chinese National

Army troops under the command of Chang Hsüeh-liang, the ex-_tuchün_ of

Manchuria. His forces were mostly from the Manchurian provinces and had

no stomach for fighting the Communists in the far west of China while

the Japanese remained in undisturbed occupation of their homelands. They

had inaugurated an informal understanding with the Communists, and

fraternization had begun between the opposing armies. When Chiang came

up to investigate conditions, he was promptly kidnaped (December, 1936).

His bodyguard was slaughtered and he himself was injured in the spine.

The kidnaping was nominally the act of the _Tungpei_ (ex-Manchurian)

troops. Even the Communist forces worked for the release of Chiang,

since they felt that his death would mean national disaster. The release

of Chiang was finally procured through the mediation of an Australian

editor with a long experience in Chinese politics.[8]

The effect on popular thinking was twofold. In the first place, Chiang's

popularity was made fully apparent by the vigor of the demonstrations in

his favor all over China. It had long been asserted that even the most

momentary relaxation of Chiang's despotism, as its opponents termed it,

would be followed either by anarchy or a new revolutionary regime.

Neither appeared. The strength of the National Government as a

government was apparent, despite a strong odor of treason in widely

separated quarters, and the people as a whole kept quiet. Students,

workers, capitalists, officials, military men--all groups sought

Chiang's release. Their anxiety for his personal safety was in some

cases qualified by a hearty dislike of the man himself, but almost

everyone admitted to an admiration, either grudging or whole-hearted,

for the effectiveness of his work. The National Government and its chief

military leader were indeed strongly entrenched in popular sympathy and

thought--more so than even the most optimistic observers had dared to

hope.

The second consequence of the _coup d'état_ at Sian was even more

important. The mere physical juxtaposition of the two leaderships,

Marxian and Nationalist, and the probability that forced arbitration

would be the result of the kidnaping, led to a wild stimulation of

hopes. At the same time it was generally realized that failure to come

to terms might end in the murder of Chiang and in fateful results for

all groups in China. The kidnapers demanded a United Front; the

Communists had issued a manifesto in behalf of it several months earlier

(August 1, 1936). The problem was: could Chiang accede without ruining

his prestige or impairing the ideological position he had so laboriously

built up for himself?

A compromise was found, which amounted to a paper victory for Chiang,

nominal punishment of Chang and the other perpetrators of the kidnaping,

ceremonial apology to the nation by Chiang for having been kidnaped, and

a series of formally unrelated but probably linked events--all of which

brought the two ideologies and their adherents to a common ground.

Throughout the following spring, progress was made in the negotiation of

a truce, which broadened into an armistice and ended as an alliance. On

April 30, 1937, for instance, the Young Communist Congress, composed of

men whose brains Chiang would have cheerfully blown out a few months

before, elected Chiang and other Nationalist leaders to honorary

membership. On occasion, the Communists and the Nationalists exchanged

classical Chinese poems; each side sought to excel in sincere courtesy.

The armistice lasted through the period of the Japanese invasion in the

summer of 1937; formal union was achieved in September.[9]

On the political surface, the course of Marxism in China has been one of

the most startling developments in modern history. Alliance between

Hitler and Stalin would seem more plausible than the reunion of

Nationalist and Communist groups in China. To those in the service of

the Nanking regime in 1936, such an eventuality was the one thing

certain not to happen. The break between the Marxist and Nationalist

leaderships and their subsequent reconciliation appeared, however, less

improbable in consideration of the course steered by the Communist world

movement during the decade 1927-1937. The United Front in China made it

possible for the Chinese Communists to concede more than they would

otherwise have dared to except at the suggestion of the Russian and

international Communists.

The future role of Marxism in China is still undecided. Nothing can be

regarded as beyond the limit of probability, except the immediate

establishment of a permanent and unalterable regime. The challenges the

Marxists raise are too important to be ignored--land and labor reform

and the devising of workable techniques for distributive justice. If

they do not take control of the country themselves, they will at least

be a formidable factor for whoever does control the government. In the

event of foreign conquest the Marxians could provide an underground

resistance of spectacular value. If the Chinese, applying terror and

espionage against the Marxians then regarded as traitors, were not able

to root them out in ten years of ferocious warfare, what will aliens

do--against Communists who have become patriots in the eyes of all the

people and who are assured help from all sides?

_Japanese Efforts to Participate in Creating a New China_

China is Japan's greatest outside problem; she is only a secondary

problem in the foreign policies of the other great powers. Japan owes

much to China in the way of borrowed ideas and institutions. Japan and

Siam are the only free nations in the modern world which share with

China the background of a Chinese-dominated world society in the Far

East.[10] The Japanese resisted the extension of Chinese suzerainty to

their islands, and on only one occasion did they concede formally that

the Chinese emperor was the head of all civilized society; this they

bitterly regret. While the Siamese have maintained their independence,

they are in no position to take an active part in the creation of a new

Far East, and the issue is between China and Japan, with the other

Pacific powers largely as spectators. The construction of a way of

thinking to accommodate the men and territories no longer guided by the

old order is a problem shared by Japan and China; the competition for

imposing a feasible system is sharp. Japan wishes to create a new Far

East in which the Japanese shall constitute the most cultured core; the

Chinese take their ancient position for granted.

In addition to the ideational conflict for prestige between Chinese and

Japanese, there is another realm wherein the two nations compete, using

ideas not as ends but as means. The extension of Western industry and

trade to the East produced acute dislocations both in China and in

Japan, and in the case of Japan involved transforming the Japanese

autarchy into a most dangerous dependence upon a share of the world

economy. Japan is truly a commercial and capitalist power; hers is no

mere affectation of modernity. It is conceivable, should the West go

down to its Armageddon, that the Chinese might swing back to the ways of

their past. The Japanese could not; their economic and political system

has expanded too far. They are inextricably bound up with the rest of

the industrial, capitalist modern world. In China the stock exchanges

have a mere toehold on the country; in Japan they have become the spine

of national life. The Japanese must either pay the price of

modernization by accepting the lowly place of the latecomer or make up

their tardiness in entering the imperialist scene by a veritable frenzy

of expansion. Apart from the future of capitalism, there remains the

question: Will Japan collapse before reaching imperial success in the

world economy?

China and the unpredictable but colossal Chinese markets are Japan's

goal, formulated after contact with the West. China and her unquestioned

cultural prestige are the targets of the Japanese drive for the

acquisition of standing, a campaign couched in indigenous Far Eastern

terms. The conflict between the two countries weaves its way back and

forth through elaborate and self-contradictory sets of terms. The

Japanese have toyed with a multitude of policies for China. Some of

these are: (1) simple conquest; (2) the establishment of a peculiar Far

Eastern order under Japanese leadership--either in terms harmonious with

Western concepts of international affairs (the "Japanese Monroe

Doctrine") or in terms derived from a modification of the past

("Pan-Asia"); (3) a common cause of Japanese and Chinese against the

white peril, without any special emphasis on the relative positions of

the two countries; (4) a divine Japanese mission, not merely to save the

yellow race but to rescue the whole world and put all nations under the

protecting benevolence of Japanese overlordship; (5) a strict policy of

day-to-day opportunism--binding those parts of China accessible for such

procedure with treaties and agreements, and catching the Chinese as they

come forth into the arena of modern economic life; (6) expediency

couched in military terms, looking to absolute Japanese gains on the

map, regardless of the erection of a social system to perpetuate the

immediate military advances; (7) a pro-Chinese policy, to assure the

Japanese a close ally (but in such a case a strong independent China

would inevitably excel Japan, and the Japanese would have to yield to

Chinese hegemony--however friendly--or else retreat from it into the

isolation from which they emerged in the 1850's).

Direct military conquest has a considerable appeal to the Japanese,

except for its limitations. All the armies of the modern world would not

be enough to garrison and patrol a China desperately hostile through and

through. The Chinese would not stop at suicide to embarrass their

enemies, if there were complete ideological antagonism. The Japanese

would have to persuade the Chinese whom they conquered to remain alive,

to keep working, to grow wealthy so that the conquest might not be

without value. It is not possible to consider a policy involving the

outright murder of from one hundred and fifty to two hundred million

persons; short of such extermination, there is no way for the Japanese

to clear the field for colonization in Chinese territories. If the

Japanese cannot replace the Chinese, they must make use of them; to make

use of them, they must teach them to think in a way which will permit

exploitation, for even the most inequitable exploitation involves some

cooperation.

Ever since their peculiar Far Eastern order had been partially

recognized the Japanese began building up theories of a zone of

influence to be based not upon law but upon geographic and racial fact.

The doctrines of Pan-Asia fitted their purpose. Writers in the different

Asiatic countries had pointed out the desirability of a union of those

Asiatic peoples which were not yet under colonial rule to prevent

further occidental advance and to rescue their conquered neighbors. Sun

Yat-sen himself thought well of the Pan-Asia idea and stressed it, along

with the recommendation that all economically exploited powers confront

the exploiting powers--a class war between nations. As soon as the

Japanese began turning to Pan-Asia for furtherance of their own peculiar

ends, these arguments lost much of their realism. The Japanese policies

generated more disturbance in Asia than did the Western. Their call to

prevent Western aggression, at a time when the Western powers were in

retreat, sounded artificial. Nevertheless, the Pan-Asian movement forms

a link between ideology-conscious leaders in China and Japan; Japan's

ultra-patriotic Toyama had been friendly and helpful to Sun at the time

when the former led the _Genyosha_ and the latter the _Hsing Chung

Hui_.[11] It was natural, however, that the Pan-Asian doctrine, although

it never disappeared altogether in China, should be strongest in Japan.

Pan-Asia or its restricted form--Far-Easternism (_Toa-shugi_)--played a

significant part in the military indoctrination in Japan, even though

attempts to propagate it in China ended in almost complete failure.

To the ideological conquest of China the Japanese have contributed very

little. Their theories, summed up, amount to but a drop in the sea of

doctrines. Only as the spokesman of China's ultra-reactionary

monarchists--who flourished twenty-five years ago--has Japan presented

an ideological program which is other than derisible. Rich in the

ceremonial trappings of government, and in the personal elegance of its

powerless ministers, the Great Manchou Empire makes a strong appeal to

literary persons with archaic tastes. Even there, the blunt modernism of

the Japanese military machine destroys the illusion.

_Patriotism: The United Front_

1937 was one of the most critical years of modern China. It marked a

swift and startling grouping of the three active forces in China:

Nationalism, Communism, and Japanese compulsion. For ten years the

Nationalists and the Communists had waged a war of terror against each

other; for six years a Chinese Soviet Republic had defied the National

Government of China established at Nanking. Six years had passed since

the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, five since the establishment of a

Manchoukuo government. The Nationalists had hated the Japanese, but they

hated the Communists more; at the humiliating price of non-resistance to

Japan, Chiang K'ai-shek had brought the full military and agitational

power of Nationalism to the suppression of the Marxians. The Japanese

had no great attachment to Chiang and the Nationalists and regarded

Nationalism itself as a force subversive to Japanese order in the Far

East. But they had tolerated the Kuomintang because it seemed a buffer

between themselves and the Communists, and because they did not have the

power or the immediate inclination to destroy the Nationalist regime.

This triangular deadlock was first broken by the kidnaping at Sian.

Nationalist and Communist leaderships were brought face to face, and

preliminary terms were agreed upon. With each step toward a termination

of the Nationalist-Communist wars the danger of a powerful China became

more striking to Japan, while simultaneously the Nanking regime became

less valuable to the Japanese as a bulwark against Communism. The spring

of 1937 marked the settlement with the Communists in the Northwest, the

continuance of a general armistice, and the sharp improvement of

Nationalist prestige throughout the country. Circles which had been

Rightist recognized the increased military and financial power of the

Nationalists, now that the long and wasteful struggle with the

Communists was ended, releasing men, weapons, and money for application

in other quarters. Leftist groups again found the Nanking state

philosophy palatable, and discovered in the official tenets of the

Nationalist Party enough common principles to justify the re-coalition

of revolutionary forces. The radical intellectuals and students, who had

swung sharply to the Left as a result of continued Nationalist yielding

to Japan, turned again to Nationalist leadership.

As practical solutions to the Nationalist-Communist conflict were found,

the people in the larger cities were released from the governmental

restrictions which the Nationalists--upon Japanese insistence and threat

of force--had placed on the expression of patriotic sentiments. A vast

and vigorous patriotic feeling came suddenly to life, having grown more

intense under the cramping inhibitions of police prohibition. The

patriotism was revolutionary in mood but not wholly different from

Chinese patriotism of the past. The slogans all centered on national

defense. Release of political prisoners, cessation of internal war, and

democratization of the government were regarded as steps to union and

defense.

When the Japanese decided to push forward in earnest and began fighting

in North China in the summer of 1937, the patriotic movement became so

powerful that for the time it supplanted all other separate movements.

Only a number of aged or cynical opportunists remained outside. It was

now possible, under the slogan of a United Front of all China against

Japan, to disregard the fundamental differences between the Nationalists

and the Communists. A Chinese Communist wrote:

While we declare ourselves, despite the differences in principle that

exist between communism and Sun-Yat-sen-ism, advocates of the basic

revolutionary slogans of Sun Yat-sen, of the best revolutionary

traditions of the Chinese people, we Communists never for an instant

under any circumstances cease to be true followers of the

Marxist-Leninist teachings.[12]

Such utterances were matched by similar ones from the Nationalist side.

In their haste the Japanese utilized an ideology which they had

practiced in Manchuria--literary Confucianism colored by notions adopted

from the Japanese cult of the emperor. They also appealed to the

practical and immediate needs of the Chinese living in the areas which

they conquered, setting up governments[13] to govern for them. But this

was hardly more than an expedient. Of far greater importance than even

the war itself is its long-range impact upon the Chinese mind.

The formulation of the present Chinese patriotic movement into a

definite drive for the establishment of a new Chinese way of life may

emerge as one of the lasting facts of the century. The various movements

of the Republican era failed to disturb and arouse the masses

sufficiently to make possible a replacement of the decrepit remnants of

the old Chinese social and intellectual world, or a reinterpretation

adding the ingredients needed in a modern civilization. If patriotism

unites the Chinese permanently, Japanese invasion may have provoked what

twenty-five years of Chinese effort could not bring about.

Furthermore, the Chinese have reacted to the emergencies of war in a

manner almost unprecedented among modern nations. War has not meant the

creation of a temporary despotism; it has brought democracy instead. The

ideological concord, the supremacy of a common national purpose, which

could not be achieved in a quarter century of peacetime agony, was

brought forth in the ordeal of national resistance. Democracy and not

tyranny was the unifying force. The Kuomintang Party Congress, meeting

in Hankow from March 29 to April 2, 1938, reaffirmed the primacy of the

_San Min Chu I_, but at the same time guaranteed the sanctity of private

rights, even in wartime, of groups who had been liable to official

suppression for years. The Communist press was flourishing openly in

Hankow, a testimony to the curious tolerance with which the Chinese

united for national defense. The governmental structure was increasingly

democratized. Japan had provided a body of common assumptions strong

enough to sustain democracy, despite the burden of mutually tolerated

disagreements.

NOTES

[1] For the military aspects see below, pp. 108 ff.; for the immediate

governmental aspects see below, pp. 167 ff.

[2] The best account of the internal politics of the Kuomintang between

1927 and 1933 is to be found in Gustav Amann, _Chiang Kaishek und die

Regierung der Kuomintang in China_, Berlin and Heidelberg, 1936.

[3] See below, pp. 172 ff.

[4] See above, pp. 51 ff.

[5] Lin Yutang, _Letters of a Chinese Amazon and War-Time Essays_, p.

vi, Shanghai, 1930.

[6] See below, pp. 182 ff.

[7] See below, p. 184 ff.

[8] On the Sian incident see General and Madame Chiang Kai-shek,

_General Chiang Kai-shek_, Garden City, 1937; James M. Bertram, _First

Act in China_, New York, 1938, an account by an Australian newspaperman

in Sian at the time; and Edgar Snow, _Red Star over China_, New York,

1938--an extraordinarily valuable work on all phases of Chinese

Communism, by an observer of great insight and acuteness.

[9] See the references below, p. 190, n. 10.

[10] See Yoshi S. Kuno, _Japanese Expansion on the Asiatic Continent_,

vol. I, Berkeley, 1937, for an authoritative description of early

Sino-Japanese relations. Chinese records of the time of Christ describe

the payment of tribute by Japanese chieftains. The most explicit

acknowledgment of Chinese suzerainty occurred in the time of Yoshemitsu,

the third Ashikaga shogun (see Kuno, pp. 92-93).

[11] The Japanese patriotic leagues are described in Kenneth Colegrove,

_Militarism in Japan_, Boston, 1936.

[12] Wang Ming, _China Can Win!_ p. 44, New York, 1938. Wang Ming is a

Chinese expert on Marxism residing in the U. S. S. R.

[13] See below, pp. 184 ff.

SECOND PART

ARMIES

_Chapter_ IV

WARRIORS

From the outside, militarism seems to dominate the Chinese scene. China

is frequently interpreted in terms of personalities instead of mass

inclinations, wide-filtering habits, and extensive relocations of

thought. The picturesqueness of the Chinese leaders has done nothing to

prevent the notion of many romantic autocracies from appearing real: the

Dog-Meat General, six feet tall, diabolically cruel and brazenly comic,

with his veritable zoological garden of ladies from all over the world;

the Christian General, burly, bluff, honest, Christian and Bolshevik,

with the happy naïveté of a feudal politician; the Bandit General and

his infatuation with fine arsenals; the Generalissimo, with his

Christian wife, himself a Christian, rolling up a military machine

against the third greatest naval power of the earth--such figures make

Chinese news a confused but exciting serial story.

_Military Rule and Political Economy_

For long-range effects, the literary experiments of men like Hu Shih and

the mass-education drive of Dr. James Yen and his associates are more

significant than any one of hundreds of military leaders, but long-range

trends are never news. The armies and their commanders have occupied the

center of the stage, overshadowing the quest of the Chinese for civilian

rule. Civilian rule, however, presupposes a sufficient area of common

agreement on which to build laws and usages for government; armies

require nothing but a nearly mechanical discipline and the crudest rule

of thumb administration. The civilian government of Republican China has

had to await the coming of at least a minimum of order out of the

turmoil; armies, for lack of government, have dominated and continued

that turmoil. China has been disunited in great part because she was

impoverished by military rule; she has been ruled by arms partly because

she was disunited. No unifier of the nation would have needed to

maintain the armed hordes which were the greatest impediment to real

national defense--hordes powerful enough to wreck governments but not

powerful enough to build them. The war lords, as they are perhaps too

flatteringly termed, do by no means measure up to the note of the

intellectual and political leaders; but they have unquestionably held

the greater bulk of day-to-day authority in China since 1912.

The most significant function of the armies is one which is quite

frequently overlooked: their power as agencies of unsettlement. They

have created disturbances more profound than mere public disorder; they

have attacked institutions more vital than the public treasury; they

have kept all parts of China from the dull apathy of conservatism. The

arrogance and rapacity of the military rulers, their utter incompetence

as administrators (with a number of honorable exceptions), and their

ineffectiveness as propagandists have provided that loose and haphazard

tyranny which some philosophers consider the prime requisite for social

ferment. The military men have never been intelligent enough to impose

truly totalitarian regimes, nor efficient enough to make the people of

any one area content with a permanent separatism. The presence of the

military rank and file has turned the Chinese social system upside down,

reversing the accepted scale of ranks within the society and infringing

upon the interests of every group--even the minimum interest of the very

poor, their right not to starve to death. More conspicuously, the armies

have given a picture of power which, in contrast with the scarcely

traceable lines of influence and persuasion arising from ideological

movements, is intelligible and reducible to concrete terms.

Without the militarists, there would have been no visible series of

events to trace the change in China, no stereotypes at all by which to

show the immediate alterations on the scene of power. Many men did rise

and fall regardless of military considerations, but such occurrences

were loosely and popularly ascribed to intrigue or else dismissed as

beyond all rational understanding. The armies subsisted and roamed

about, leaders and men both helpless on a sea of ignorance and doctrinal

conflict; but the mere assent to unthinking discipline looked like

order, and the most shadowy and insubstantial military hierarchy held

out a promise of Caesarian peace. From 1915 to 1925 foreign comment

stressed the movements of the war lords, singling out the man who might

play the role of a Chinese Napoleon, and to the present this simple

approach satisfies many. Meanwhile the foundations of social life

shifted, falling away here, growing more solid there, behind the gloomy

panorama of brutal, ineffectual warfare.

Closely related to the problem of armies was another category partially

understandable in narrowly factual terms--political economy. The armies

conditioned and set the pace, a slow one, for economic development. All

financial projects were jeopardized by military rule, both by the

exactions which the military might impose and by the constant threat

that militarists, devaluating the currency or arbitrarily changing the

political controls of economy, might alter the very economic system in

which the project was being considered and fostered. Economic life in

China could not continue through the traditional agricultural, guild,

semicapitalist devices; Western trade and social dislocation prevented

that. Yet no new economy could automatically replace the ruins of the

old, since economic matters were part of a _political_ economy subject

to the extra-economic interferences which ideological change, military

power, and halfway government could impose. One of the truly important

achievements of the National Government at Nanking was the creation of a

core for a twentieth century army. But all the military achievements in

modern China pale before the staggering surprise of a managed currency,

displacing a commodity and specie system which was older than all modern

warfare.

One need not subscribe to either military or economic determinism to

concede the relevance of military and economic matters in any society.

In China there exists a peculiarly close correlation between the two.

The absence of a class founded squarely on economic privilege and the

subordination of the military to the bureaucratic elements in the

imperial society were largely the result of the position occupied by the

average nonacademic Chinese, who was typically a farmer capable of being

a militiaman or a bandit. This duality of role strongly affected the

development of government in China, and is a factor which still plays a

great part. The Chinese owe many of their social and political

peculiarities to the effectiveness of their mass action, which is able

to take place with a minimum of formal leadership and coordination and

with a maximum of secrecy and totality. In times when foreign conquest

of China is no longer in the realm of the improbable, it is worth

remembering that the Chinese are a people adamant in resistance to force

and schooled in centuries of rebellion. Neither pacific nor military

resistance could take place in the traditional Chinese way without the

diffusion of military and economic power among broad masses of the

population.

How, it may be asked, have the Chinese succeeded in being such a

peaceful people, and yet a people so prone to popular uprising? How is

it that, with their great talents for organization, they have let a

shabby third-rate militarism sweep their land in modern times? The

Chinese generals did not command the allegiance widely extended to even

the meanest of South American despots; yet the people trembled before

them. Not until the war lords lost power was there great popular

enthusiasm for military ideals. If Chinese armies are considered solely

as rough and primitive parallels to their European counterparts, paradox

will follow paradox without rational explanation. To understand the

Chinese military situation one must go back across the centuries and

trace a system and a tradition which, at times obscure and frequently

submerged, must come to the surface in the decisions upon which rest the

question of national life or death for China.

_The Downfall of the Charioteers_

The Chinese have differed from other peoples not in being peaceful so

much as in extolling peace. Not even in the Christian tradition of peace

and love are there condemnations of war stronger than those of the

Confucians. Yet, century to century, the Chinese have known war against

the outside barbarians and with each other. Throughout historic times

there are records of struggle and slaughter. H. G. Creel writes, "If we

are to locate the traditional Chinese time of 'great peace' it must be

far back in the Neolithic stage. Experts agree that in the earlier of

the Neolithic sites known to us there is little evidence of warfare."[1]

At the very edge of history, about 1500 B. C., the Chinese appear as

accomplished archers, using bows which were probably not dissimilar to

those in use down to the twentieth century--heavy reflex bows, with a

pull that was sometimes far greater than the longbow of the celebrated

English yeomen of medieval times. The pellet bow, a form of slingshot,

was also common in the earliest times. Armor was known in the earliest

historic dynasty, the Shang, which by Chinese tradition is dated

1765-1123 B. C. The chariot, however, seems to have been less widely

used than it later came to be.[2]

Under the Chou dynasty, in all Chinese history the most caste-bound,

militaristic, and feudal (traditionally dated 1122-256 B. C.), the

implements of warfare and the management of conflict fell into the hands

of the ruling class. Previous to the Chou there was a relative military

equality of all, despite the sharp lines between masters and men. After

the Chou the great military states culminating in the warrior-bureaucrat

tyranny of the Ch'in Shih Huang Ti (third century B. C.) tended to

reduce war to mass movements, in which establishments, management, and

broader considerations constantly increased. During this period the

master class developed a scheme which was not as elaborately traced out

in legal terms as Norman-English feudalism, nor as solidly grounded in

outright military effectiveness as the Japanese system twenty-odd

centuries later, but which amounted to a chivalric order within the

limits of an ideology rooted in the family. The lords were the spiritual

guardians and clan leaders as well as the earthly despots of their

subjects. Standing above the law and invested with positions of high

political dignity, their class nearly became a caste. Warfare--as apart

from slaughter--was formalized and ritualized beyond all Western dreams

of gallantry. According to Marcel Granet, who has brilliantly described

public life of the period,

The battle is a confused mélée of boasts, generosities, homages,

insults, devotions, curses, blessings and sorceries. Much more than a

clash of arms, it is a duel of moral values, an encounter of competing

honours.... The battle is the great moment in which each warrior

proves his nobility, while in addition they prove to all present the

nobility of their prince, their cause and their country.[3]

Our very word _chivalry_ suggests horsemen; the Chinese nobles ruled

their elaborate realm not from horseback but from chariots. The

education of every patrician youth involved archery, music, writing, and

reckoning, among other arts and virtues.[4] Archery was something which

might be learned, after a fashion, by large numbers of common men; even

peasants, with a bow and a lance or pike, might constitute light cavalry

when provided, or providing themselves, with mounts. But the use of the

four-horse chariot necessarily remained the exclusive privilege of the

nobles. The chariot fighter had to have a driver and one or two others

with him in his vehicle, which was itself costly, hard to obtain, and

difficult to operate. A Chou noble driving forth to war thirty centuries

ago was as technical a unit as an aviator in a combat plane today or a

small group of men in a tank. Just as there is a democracy implicit in

the light machine gun or the automatic rifle, so was there the

potentiality of equality in vast masses of infantry, supported by light,

cheaply armed cavalry. Aristocratic individualism meant something when

wars were short and fought with elaborate equipment; but no noble could

stand up against the mass forces which emerged and continued fighting

until the feudal system lost any real significance and left the country

open to the development of bureaucratic government and military power.

There was no overt attack on the feudal system. The system, however,

possessed within itself contradictions which led to its doom. The

central power was insufficient to keep the peace, and certain local

groups were--by talent, economic factors, or geography--too strong to

remain subordinate. The period known as the Spring and Autumn epoch

(Ch'un Ch'iu; 770-473 B. C.) yielded to that known as the Age of Warring

States (Chan Kuo; 473-221 B. C.). From feudal cores there grew states,

which began to follow the course of development that led to the

appearance of a system of sovereign nations in Europe; they increasingly

interfered with the free operation of the feudal economy. By effecting

the massing of power they eliminated the overawing charioteer from the

field of decisive combat.[5] The chariots remained as the vehicles of

the leaders or the focal points of battles, but they no longer implied a

skill so great as to make up a monopoly of first-rate military force.

While the most eminent thinker of the age, Confucius, lamented the

decline of order, a new order was being shaped from the social,

economic, and military realities laid bare by rapid development,

Machiavellian intrigue, and the hard necessities of wartime economies.

The state of Ch'in, a Chinese Prussia, attained overwhelming hegemony in

the third century before Christ. Its power rested on universal

registration of the inhabitants, conscription, heavy policing, taxation

involving constant intervention in economic matters, and legalistic

administration. In its warfare there was little of the ritual which

characterized the military period when chariots were dominant; codes did

not amount to much. The immediate end of war was slaughter for political

and economic purposes, not the hazardous parade of a feudal class. The

Ch'in monarch who finally established a centralized empire took the

vainglorious title of Shih Huang Ti (The First Emperor), and set himself

the task of eradicating the regionalist ideologies of his conquered

rivals by suppressing all political history but that of his native

state. Proceeding from innovation to innovation, he ended by becoming

one of the historic figures detested by later epochs. One of the

practices which he extended throughout the Empire of China was the

regularization of military service. He is also known as the originator

of the grandiose project of the Great Wall; it is less well known that

he forbade the erection of walls around cities within the Empire. His

system of conscription involved three years of compulsory military

service for all young men, and a corvee of three days' service each year

at the frontier for every citizen; the former came to depend for its

inclusiveness upon administrative integrity, while the latter was soon

replaced by a money tax.

Although the First Empire established by the Ch'in did not last long,

the Han dynasty (202 B. C. to A. D. 220) continued its military

system[6] and kept standing armies at the northern frontier and at the

imperial capital. The frontier forces were composed of militia augmented

for special campaigns by volunteers and criminals. The Chinese fought

the barbarians with the tactics of mounted archers, devices learned from

the nomads. Away from the northern steppes, infantry seems to have

gained constantly in importance. By the time of Christ the chivalry of

the religious-social-military class of charioteers was ancient history,

and mass armies had taken their place.

_Military Elements in Chinese Imperial History_

Through the greater part of the past two thousand years, Chinese society

has been governed by civilians. The scholastic bureaucracy secured and

kept a position of primacy, and a common ranking of the social classes

was: scholars, farmers, merchants, soldiers. The Confucians were

antagonistic to war, and bureaucrats--if for governmental reasons

alone--suspected the danger which lay in the broad dissemination of

military knowledge. The Chinese consistently ranked the military man

below the civilian; as a natural consequence most of the abler men went

into scholarship and politics. Chinese history has its great military

names and ample accounts of spectacular military exploits, but even here

the elements of strategy, of diplomatic and cunning warfare, rate higher

than in the corresponding European histories. Despite the fact that arms

did not play as great a role in Chinese history as in Western, the

difference is one of degree only; military considerations appeared and

persisted which colored governmental action and social organization.

Among these was the relation of the armed forces to the social order--in

point of numbers and in point of force. When elections are lacking in a

civilized society, fighting power demarcates an electorate of force, as

it were; the distribution of power determines the center of political

gravity as located in the society. In China there were, however,

elements distinctly different from those in the West.

One of these was the correlation of mass power and military power. In

epoch after epoch, armies seem to spring forth out of the very

soil--armed groups radically unlike the Roman legion. For seasoned

veterans marching forth with elaborately effective disciplines China

substituted mass forces drawn directly from the populace, as need arose.

In some dynasties the system was regularized in militia form. Of the

Han, H. H. Dubs writes:

Chinese armies were largely militia. Everyone was compelled to serve

three years in the army or in forced labor; at the northern border,

the whole male population had constantly to be ready to repel Hun

forays. Hence all males seem to have been able to fight and to be

required to do so. When the Emperor Wu [ca. 120 B. C.] wanted armies

and none would volunteer, he merely had his officials sentence

criminals to army service--and thus secured armies which seemed to be

able to fight as successfully as his previous armies. Universal

military conscription plus a registration of all able-bodied males

seems to have been the Han method.[7]

The common people had crossbows for shooting birds or pronged hoes for

digging which were efficient even in fighting standing armies; they were

also frequently in possession of weapons because they were called up as

militia against barbarians. Underlying such military conditions, with

their highly important political consequences, there were several

surprisingly concrete and simple mechanical considerations. The

charioteers had come to an end partly because the chariots were drawn by

horses yoked in such a fashion that when the horses pulled hard, they

often choked themselves. Other factors are suggested by Dubs:

By the time that horses became plentiful, so that cavalry was

employed, the crossbow had reached such a state of development that

cavalry was shown to be inferior to infantry with crossbows. The

medieval European crossbow was hampered by the mechanical weakness of

its trigger mechanism--the crossbow was likely to be discharged

prematurely by a jar; the Chinese Han crossbow had no such defect and

was a powerful weapon. A group of crossbowmen with others in the rear

to string crossbows and others to bring cocked bows to the marksmen in

the front rank, could shoot down cavalry before they could come near

enough to discharge the lighter bows cavalry necessarily carried.

Cocked crossbows could be carried around safely and fired when needed.

A bolt from a powerful crossbow could pierce any armor. Hence the

strong-backed peasant with a crossbow had an advantage over the noble

no matter how well the noble was armed or how good horses the latter

possessed. The only advantage retained by the noble was that of

leadership--tactical skill and command of large bodies of infantry.

Cavalry became useful for scouting and pursuit chiefly.[8]

The character of military techniques caused Chinese politics to be

qualified by rebellion or the fear of rebellion. The difference between

a mob and an army became slight. In times of poor government there were

rebellions almost yearly. Insurrectionary forces gained momentum

overnight; from era to era huge mobs, tens and hundreds of thousands

strong, swept away governmental armies and erased corrupt or oppressive

dynasties. The process may be described as popular unrest made effective

with arms, which professional armies could not resist. The low place of

the soldier in society prevented men of genius from organizing a

dominant military caste; the professional armies were insufficient to

make military government effective. By a crude and brutal democracy of

mob and murder the populace of China could destroy dynasties and

governments whenever economic, social, or political conditions veered

too far beyond the limits of the tolerable.

Trained fighters there were, but they had the function of frontier

defense; when civil war broke out behind them, the imperial governments

frequently called back the frontier forces together with the barbarians

they had been fighting. At least two great dynasties, the T'ang and the

Ming, were destroyed because they used the nomads of the northern wilds

in order to put down domestic insurrections. Light cavalry supplemented

enormous bodies of infantry. In fact, the Chinese were put down by

foreign conquerors only when the foreigners had Chinese allies, or when

a campaign of terror had broken the spirit of popular resistance.

Chinese warfare showed the disadvantages as well as the advantages of

being carried on by what were in effect militia forces. The cruelty was

personal and direct, and not covered with fine disclaimers; restraint of

armed forces was the distinguished exception rather than the rule. The

line between soldier and peasant was one which could be crossed easily,

and the line between soldiery and banditry a matter of intention. At its

best, military technique was honest and robustly egalitarian; at its

worst it led to abuse of force such as lynching, robbery, and fanatical

turbulence. The formal records of Chinese dynasties show the use of

trained armies in foreign expeditions, in some of which they achieved

feats of military accomplishment which rank with any of world history.

Domestic troops were also employed as guards and ornamental bodies

attached to the throne and other great offices of the Empire.

The convenience of rebellion was such as to make revolt a part of the

unwritten constitutional practice--that broad ideological framework upon

which the Chinese world rested. It was sanctioned by the classics. It

served as a barometer of popular opinion. An unsuccessful rebellion, one

without the dimmest chance of success, might well be launched by

intelligent and patriotic men because its very appearance could prompt

the government to reform. In the words of one of the earliest Western

writers on the subject:

A military and police is maintained sufficient to crush merely

factious risings, but totally inadequate, both in numbers and in

nature, to put down a disgusted and indignant people. But though no

despotism, this same government is in form and machinery a pure

autocracy. In his district the magistrate is absolute; in his

province, the governor; in the empire, the Emperor. The Chinese people

have no right of legislation, they have no right of self-taxation,

they have not the power of voting out their rulers or of limiting or

stopping supplies. _They have therefore the right of rebellion._

Rebellion is in China the old, often exercised, legitimate, and

constitutional means of stopping arbitrary and vicious legislation and

administration.[9]

Thomas Taylor Meadows, the author just quoted, also noted that "of all

nations that have attained a certain degree of civilization, the Chinese

are the least revolutionary and the most rebellious."[10] _Revolution_

is a word broad enough to include principles; _rebellion_, more

narrowly, suggests action against men. The same tight, enduring system

of ideological control served to restrain the Chinese in their thinking

even when they had the material power sufficient to shake off their past

and build Utopia in its place. Rebels themselves obeyed the unwritten

precepts. The triumph of the civilians was complete: with infantry

prevailing on the battlefield, the peasants were the strongest; and with

the total population saturated in compelling, uniform ideas of right and

wrong, appropriate and inappropriate, the scholars had only to await the

establishment of administration to assume the leadership. Against

malgovernment, the populace retained the power of rebellion. Against

misrule, the scholars held the power which came to them as interpreters

of a vast and persuasive code of tradition. Whereas Western courts,

citing the past, can negate the acts of the executive or legislative by

interpretation or annulment, the Chinese scholars would do the same not

merely for law, but for manners, morals, thoughts, and social activities

as well. The great peasant armies, though able to destroy military

dictatorship, were by their very nature too loosely organized to

establish it.

_The Military Organization of the Manchu Dynasty_

Although the Manchus, who conquered China in the first half of the

seventeenth century and ruled it until the opening of the twentieth, did

not profoundly modify Chinese culture, they affected the military

scheme. The general outline of Chinese war and its place in society

remained largely the same; but there were two innovations: the

establishment of a warrior caste and the introduction of military

techniques from the West.

The Manchus were a non-Chinese people living in the northeastern

peripheral zone of Chinese civilization. They had adopted the Chinese

form of empire and bureaucracy in their capital at Mukden in the early

seventeenth century, before advancing toward China proper. Invited by

the Chinese to lend their aid in a civil war, the Manchus found

themselves excelling in effectiveness and leadership, which soon led

them to conquer the whole country. The numerical disproportion between

Chinese and Manchus was such that the conquerors would never have taken

over the Empire and founded a new dynasty (the Ch'ing) had they not been

assisted by large numbers of Chinese. On the other hand, the spectacular

terrorism of the Manchu cavalry was a potent weapon, and the Manchus did

not feel that they owed their throne entirely to the Chinese. They were

in the anomalous position of half-conquerors, a people coming into China

partly as aliens and partly as the new leaders of the Chinese. At the

very beginning of their rule (commonly dated 1644) they had to decide on

a policy to determine their relations with the Chinese: Should they

allow their people to mingle with and disappear into the vast Chinese

masses, or should they attempt a policy of racial separateness to keep

their blood clear of Chinese dilution? Underlying this question there

was the even more practical one: Should the Manchus rule China simply as

another imperial house, or should they attempt to maintain their status

as a racially separate caste of conquerors?

There is a Chinese legend which tells of a high minister of state, a

Chinese in the service of the Manchu conquerors, who saw no remedy from

the oppression of China in his own generation, but who nevertheless

worked with craftily concealed patriotism to sow the undoing of the

house of the Ch'ing. He recommended to the Manchus that they keep their

fighting men from demoralization by ordaining that no Manchu warrior

should enter any trade or profession but those of warfare and public

administration, and that they should guard the ancient heritage of their

valiant blood by making miscegenation a crime. Thus he schemed to

stiffen the Manchu monarchy in a position of unbounded arrogance, so

that a few generations of peace would find its armies sloven, atrophied,

and useless, and its people still alien to the Chinese. With neither

military power to overawe the masses nor popular affection to uphold

their foreign-rooted dynasty, they were bound to go down; all this, the

legend tells, the Chinese adviser who lived and died with high Manchu

honors clearly foresaw. Actually the Manchus did move in such a

direction, and with the prophesied results.

They had conquered China with their own tribal-military system intact,

organized into units termed _banners_. Unable to hold the country by

their own force alone and, after putting down serious rebellions,

unwilling to depend on the Chinese, they arranged a method of dual

garrisoning. A Manchu military hierarchy paralleled the Chinese

bureaucracy throughout the Empire, and Manchu bannermen were placed in

every city of strategic importance. The Manchu garrisons were made up of

men destined to arms, men who were the descendants of the wild horsemen

of the northeastern plains, but who soon became tragic and useless

idlers. Forbidden entrance into the vast and vital civilian society of

the Chinese, by a decree of their own kinsman on the throne, they spent

generation after generation in profound peace, forgetting war and losing

their self-respect as warriors. Whatever the reason, they did not engage

in practices such as the extended hunts, amounting in fact to great army

maneuvers, by which Kublai Khan kept his Mongol troops hard and ready

for war. An English writer, familiar with the state of the Manchu

garrisons in their last years, thus described them:

But, unhappily, the inactive bannermen, both at Peking and in the

provinces, had towards the end degenerated into idle, flabby, and too

often opium-smoking parasites; they had long neglected to keep up

their archery, which in any case had become useless in these days of

magazine rifles, though it might have nourished a wholesome muscular

habit of body if persisted in.... In the provinces these degenerate

Manchus were often, practically, honourable prisoners, rigidly

confined within the limits of the city walls, in the midst of a

semi-hostile population speaking a dialect which the bannermen ... had

to learn, ... if they wished even to buy a cabbage in the streets; and

the Tartar General, who nominally outranked even the Chinese Viceroy,

was really often a self-indulgent, ignorant incompetent.[11]

Politically, the Chinese found themselves face to face with a foreign

group imbued with an arrogant racial pride and determined to maintain a

separate existence. The Manchus did not bend to the superior numbers of

the Chinese, nor yield to the attractions of Chinese culture. They

maintained the Manchu language at the innermost citadel of Chinese

civilization--the Forbidden City at Peking--and stamped their West

Asiatic script on the money of the Empire. They worked out schemes by

which the Manchus would retain a majority in the highest offices of the

Empire, on the sole ground of race. Elementary rationalizations of two

opposing racial attitudes were the result. The Manchu policy fortified

and brought back from the past the racial pride of the Chinese. They

were not merely the civilized heart of humanity; they were, civilization

or no civilization, bound together by blood. If the Manchu garrisons

served no other purpose, the presence of alien troops in the cities

taught the Chinese the first lessons of resentment; it prepared them for

the vigorous racial-nationalist appeal which the Nationalists were to

put forth.

Governmentally, the effect of Manchu dual government was to force the

Chinese to an increased consciousness of the implied presuppositions of

their social and political system. The use of the garrisons constituted

one of the four main causes of Manchu decline; the second cause was the

violation of the strict merit system by racial preference in the

bureaucracy; the other two were failure to maintain domestic

tranquillity, and corruption in the hierarchy of scholar-officials.[12]

Manchu rule by military power was unrealistic and a political affront.

Their army of permanent occupation committed slow suicide in idleness

and at the same time kept the Manchu dynasty from nativizing itself so

that the Chinese might think of it as Chinese. Their creation of a

hierarchy of bannermen, paralleling the older Chinese civilian

institutions, brought to the surface of thought those prejudices and

assumptions which had guided and controlled Chinese destiny for

centuries. Government and society had been one to such a degree that the

special features of a universal control did not require legalization or

sharp tracing. The Manchus removed government from the rest of society

by staining it with militarism and racial preference; it became

ominously disparate and a conspicuous target for examination and

consideration.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Manchu rule brought into a

sharper focus the largely unformulated constitutional theory which had

underlain the Chinese imperial society for nearly twenty centuries. With

the sharper demarcation of rulers and ruled, the Manchus had to make

frequent and overt use of legal authority over the ideology. The Chinese

read of the sanction of rebellion in their own classics; they could turn

to their histories for a description of the ignoble origins of their

present masters. The dynasty turned therefore to literary censorship and

ordered extensive excisions from all writings scholarly, artistic, or

other, which might weaken the prestige of their house.[13] They ordained

a most rigid and dogmatic interpretation of the classics so as to suit

their purposes. This the Chinese met with sharp criticism. The literary

struggle did much to weaken the scholastic class and to deprive the

Manchus of academic supporters. At the same time it deprived the peasant

Chinese of their natural leaders, with the consequence that secret and

half-literate political associations faced an arbitrary government

military in character. The old Chinese system remained, but it became

more and more of a form with every generation. The theory of moral

agency and ideological control was defamed by the very presence of the

barbarian garrisons. The barbarians themselves weakened so much that in

the later days of the Manchu Empire the military occupation became a

myth instead of being a political fact. For the time being, however,

Manchu military organization acted as a force-displaying agency until

the scholars and the less favored classes of society were able to

combine in a revolution.

Pacific government, government by moral agency, derives its greatest

powers from assent and agreement; it thrives on symbolization and is

never necessarily dependent upon the display of outright force.

Government by force, on the other hand, remains effective almost in

proportion to the exercise and vigor of that force; stereotyped and

ritualized, it is essentially weak. Purely ceremonial administration and

offices may be a burden on the body politic, yet their dignity may make

up for their lack of efficiency. But an army that cannot fight is an

object of ridicule, and its very presence a challenge to the resources

of intelligence.

The Manchu garrisons in the key cities were under the command of Manchu

military officers, whom Europeans dubbed with the picturesque title of

_Tartar Generals_. The garrisons were made up of three racial elements:

Manchu, Mongol, and Chinese. The Chinese in the banner armies were the

descendants of soldiers in the renegade Han army (_han chün_), the

Chinese section of the Manchu-Mongol-Chinese formations which conquered

China for the Manchus in the seventeenth century. The military

organization seems to have been a simplified copy of civilian

bureaucracy, with examiners, censors, and other familiar devices of

Chinese government appearing in quasi-military form. The principle of

merit was violated, however, in that certain categories of men claimed

special rank by hereditary right.[14] It was also possible for some of

the bannermen to transfer between the civilian and the military branches

of the government.

In the early nineteenth century the _han chün_ possessed considerable

artillery. There was a separate navy, comprising more than two thousand

war vessels equipped from a score of dockyards. Even then, Chinese

military technology was markedly inferior to European; the Chinese navy

was no match even for Europe's wooden warships. When ironclads entered

Far Eastern waters and breech-loading cannon were employed, the

difference made Chinese naval and artillery establishments almost

antiquarian in nature. With most of the banner forces of the Empire kept

at Peking and the rest scattered over the country in the great cities,

the Manchu force was widely diffused. In practice their armies hardly

exceeded a quarter of a million men; whatever the exact total, the

military were outnumbered far over a thousand to one by the Chinese, in

the realm which the Manchus supposedly held by conquest.

The effective army in the later years of the Ch'ing dynasty was formed

for the most part of the Green Standard (_lü ying_), provincial

regulars, and the vast hordes of irregulars (_yung_, or "braves") who

have traditionally done the greater share of the fighting in Chinese

history. The Green Standard troops appear to have suffered, although to

a lesser degree, from the long peace which ruined the banner armies, but

their use in major police enterprises and troubles with primitive

peoples kept them from the utter demoralization of the banners. The

common practice under the Ch'ing was to recruit the local toughs, to

appoint their leaders as probationary officers, and to use such

emergency armies for real and immediate fighting. Although the Manchu

dynasty had no system of organized reserves and little machinery for

rapid mobilization, they were thus nevertheless able to swell their

armies to astonishing numbers in a very short while. American military

commentators said in 1900 that the peacetime size of the Chinese

imperial army was about three hundred thousand men and its wartime

strength about one million--minute figures for China's reserve of man

power--and added:

The total strength of the standing army of China can not be exactly

ascertained, and if a statement of the number of men belonging to it

could be given, it would be of little value, as many of the men who

are carried on the rolls are neither armed nor equipped, and a great

number of them are not even performing military service, but are

following their usual vocations.[15]

This military regime bears the air of a vast preparation for some

foreseen but remote emergency. The Manchus themselves seemed to sleep;

armies drowsed through the centuries, weapons rusting, tactics forgotten

in the mimicry of parade, while all about them the factual potency of

military power passed to the Chinese. Even the Europeans at first shared

the illusion of great although latent military power behind the Manchu

throne. The easy defeat of the Manchu Chinese forces in the wars with

England and France in the early and middle nineteenth century led

writers such as Thomas De Quincey to cry out against the great fraud of

Asia--the sleeping Manchu giant, who was not sleeping but dead.

The T'ai-p'ing rebellion[16] lasting from 1849 to 1865 provided an

actual test of military power in the Manchu Empire, and demonstrated two

remarkable new facts. First, the real forces were no longer the regular

troops, whether banner or Green Standard, but the militia which might be

organized and trained for immediate results by robust civilians like the

viceroys Li Hung-chang and Tsêng Kuo-fan.[17] Second, the military

technique of the Far East was obsolete; even a little Western equipment,

leadership, and training made any Chinese army immediately more

effective. The consequences were contradictory. If the military regime

of the Manchus existed only in a formal sense, and actual power had

passed to the Chinese masses, who had only to await a leadership to

exhibit their power, then force had failed and government by moral

agency would again be the need of the epoch. At the same time, the

introduction of Western technique showed the possibility of a new regime

of force, another opportunity for a minority to overwhelm the vast

majority by sheer technical military effectiveness, and government by

moral agency could not be sufficient. The center of military gravity

would not simply pass to the group possessing the largest army. A new

form of government, making intelligent use of modern weapons, was called

for.

Undoubtedly China was and is too large to be governed by mere military

occupation--unless forces far larger than any which have heretofore

operated in the Far East are employed. The very garrisoning of the

country would absorb tremendous armies. At the same time, military force

is sufficient to overawe and intimidate civilians in any given area,

since the man with a rifle is superior to the man with the crossbow or

spear. Conceivably, however, a rhythm may originate between the progress

in introducing new weapons and the progress of the populace in learning

new means of counteraction. In 1860 the British and French entered

Peking and later burned the Summer Palace of the Manchu emperors as a

lesson to the imperial government. The expedition, casual when measured

by Western standards, showed that the Manchu bannermen and Chinese

levies were equally powerless before the intrusion of a more advanced

skill in warfare. As soon as peace was declared the Chinese began

organizing some of their metropolitan forces after the Western manner,

obtaining foreign instructors to put them through the Western manual of

arms.

At the same time that the Manchu court was learning to its discomfort

the importance of Western warfare, it was calling Westerners to its aid

in putting down the T'ai-p'ings. The Manchus assembled a nineteenth

century navy including steam vessels from British and other sources,

which broke up without having accomplished much. With land forces there

was much greater success; an American, Frederick Townsend Ward, and an

Englishman, Major Charles George ("Chinese") Gordon, organized a small

body of imperial regular troops along Western lines and with Western

officers. This force was given the honorific title of "Ever Victorious

Army" by the court, and together with the militia organized by Tsêng

Kuo-fan and Li Hung-chang suppressed the T'ai-p'ing rebellion after the

banner and Green Standard armies had failed.

The ensuing thirty years (1865-1895) witnessed the slow decline in

Manchu foreign policy and military development and a gradual crumbling

of Chinese society at large. Revolutionaries such as Sun Yat-sen

received their first baptism of Westernization in the 1870's and 1880's,

and foreign trade rose by great leaps. Occasionally the Empire's

military regime seemed to rally. Between 1883 and 1885 the Chinese

forces fighting the French in Indo-China were equipped with Mannlicher

rifles far more up-to-date than the weapons of their enemies. In the

preceding decade the Chinese destroyed a Mohammedan state set up in

Chinese Turkestan in defiance of their suzerainty, and overawed the

Russians into evacuating an area along the Ili seized under the pretence

of maintaining order. The lack of coordination between the different

agencies of government was as much to blame for China's weakness as were

the specific defects of the central departments. When the army was

winning, the diplomatic agencies yielded; when the army was unprepared,

the diplomatic agencies, by some ill-timed impertinence, gave aliens the

pretext for hostilities.

The first Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) offered another test. Hitherto,

the armed conflicts with Europeans, even including the entry of

Westerners into Peking in 1860, had seemed remote from the actual

problem of military power in China. The Europeans might possibly

withdraw and leave the Empire in peace. But incalculable danger would

arise to Chinese prestige should the _wo_, the sea dwarfs, defeat the

Chinese and eat more deeply into the mainland. Chinese began to realize

that in this war their status was at stake, not only in the dimly

perceived wide universe of the Westerners but also in that of the Far

East in which they had long held such comfortable hegemony. They entered

the war relatively well equipped, so that even outside observers were

doubtful of the outcome of the struggle. No one was more amazed than the

Chinese themselves when they were whipped as no modern nation has been

whipped, routed ignominiously in a sequence of slaughters, and

ultimately forced to make important territorial and financial

concessions to the Japanese.

This catastrophe was followed by a series of reforms, some designed to

enable China to meet the West on its own ground. In January, 1896, a

turning point was reached with the appointment of Yüan Shih-k'ai to

command the one efficient brigade assembled in the course of the

war.[18] Yüan was to find in modern arms the career which led to his

dictatorship after the fall of the Empire, and was to perform notable

work as a military and administrative reformer, although of restricted

value. He joined the reactionaries and brought to an end the Hundred

Days of Reform of 1898, a movement generated by the initiative of the

idealistic young Emperor Kuang Hsü, who sought to direct China into the

course already taken by Japan--modernization within the imperial system.

In 1900 there occurred the wild upheaval of the Boxers. It began as a

native racial uprising against the Manchus, but was deflected by the

Manchus into the support of the court and hostility against the Western

intruders. During the Boxer movement part of the fighting against the

Westerners was done by regular banner and Green Standard troops, but the

greater part by bands of desperadoes and fanatics. The imperial army

suffered in the chaos following the international occupation of Peking.

Under the name of the _Wu Wei Chün_ the first large-scale attempt was

made to modernize the Chinese armed forces. After the military and naval

experiments of the 1860's and later decades, this enterprise evoked

great hopes. The new army was inaugurated in 1895 with foreign

instruction and foreign arms. In 1901 one division was made the core of

Yüan Shih-k'ai's new modern force. Rodney Gilbert, a British publicist,

has summarized the military changes down to the end of the Manchu

dynasty as follows:

In January 1901 the Yangtze Viceroys submitted a memorial to the

Throne suggesting among other things the disbandment of the useless

_Lü Ying_ [Armies of the Green Standard], the employment of the

Bannermen, almost as useless, in service other than military, and the

creation of a modern army. This brought forth an Imperial decree

ordering reorganization of the army, of which Yuan Shih-kai, then

Viceroy of Chihli, took advantage to build up six new divisions, four

of which were transferred to the Ministry of War in 1906. This was

the real beginning of the _Lu Chun_, the Chinese National Army. In

January, 1905, a comprehensive scheme was outlined designed to give

China an army of 36 Divisions or 360,000 men, by the year 1911. Three

years after this decision was made there were about 60,000 men, with

360 guns, in the North, and 40,000 men, with 174 guns, in the South.

The army was developing along sound lines when Yuan Shih-kai was

removed from office in 1908 after the death of his great patroness

the Empress Dowager, and the direction of military, as well as

other affairs, fell into the hands of the Manchu princes, whose

mismanagement contributed much to the downfall of their dynasty three

years later.[19]

The beginning, although auspicious, did not mean that even the model

sections of the modernized forces were comparable to those of other

lands. The confusion of weapons was already evident. A member of the

United States General Staff wrote in 1910:

To arm these masses China has been obliged to use weapons that are

considered somewhat out of date. There are four types of rifles,

mostly Mausers and Japanese Murata rifles of old pattern. They are,

however, breech-loading, small-caliber weapons, not to be despised,

even if they do not reach the ideal which some nations set. In fact

they are the weapons which have been used in the great wars of most

recent date.

It is so also with the artillery where even a greater difference of

types is to be observed. This is, undoubtedly, a serious drawback,

owing, of course, to the great difficulty of providing ammunition.[20]

It was during this period, from the decisive defeat of the dynasty by

Japan in 1895 to the Republican Revolution of 1911-1912, that the

Chinese revolutionaries most eagerly studied military manuals and sought

to purchase Western arms to offset the great advantages gained by the

modernized portions of the imperial army. Sun Yat-sen became almost as

much a military authority as he was a political philosopher and leader;

his chief military follower, General Huang Hsing, performed for the

revolutionaries the services rendered for the regime by Yüan Shih-k'ai.

On both sides there was the anxiety to master the mysteries of twentieth

century warfare. The World War had not yet begun, nor had the staggering

burdens of modern armament become evident. Great as were the

improvements in fighting, prewar military organization seemed still

primarily a matter of well-equipped infantry, properly led, properly

drilled, and supported by adequate artillery and other auxiliary

services. Wireless, gas, airplanes, tanks, submarines, torpedo launches,

and mechanized or aerialized infantry were little more than a matter of

speculation. The proportions of present-day military budgets no one

could foresee.

_The Army and the Republican Revolution_

The Republican Revolution of 1911-1912 was the last overt act in the

collapse of the ideologically maintained social system; it brought

armies into violently free play in the support of movements toward

re-formation of the ideology and articulation and control of the

society. On October 10, 1911, the troops of the Wuch'ang garrison rose

in mutiny and sided with the revolution. A series of uprisings

engineered by military and agitational leaders followed, province by

province, all directed against the imperial power in the North. The use

of violence in Chinese politics served to accentuate a condition which

had affected China even in the earliest historic times--the unresolved

contradictions between the North and the South. Differences of race,

spoken language, and economy produced fundamental cleavages accentuated

by temperament. Traditionally the North was more conservative and

solidaristic, the South more rebellious and enterprising. Sun Yat-sen

was a Southerner; militarism reached its sharpest effectiveness in the

North.

Yüan Shih-k'ai, who had proved himself the evil genius of Emperor Kuang

Hsü by betraying the monarch's reforms of 1898, was called to the aid of

the Manchus only to betray them to the Republic; he then served the

Republic with the intention of seizing complete power for himself. The

Republicans set up their regime in Nanking on January 1, 1912, with Sun

Yat-sen as president. They established contact with Yüan, who acted in

the triple capacity of negotiator for the Manchus, representative of the

modernized armies of the North (which were his), and leader in his own

right and in his own interest. The Republicans realized that Yüan could

not be dispossessed--indeed, it is fairly certain that he could have

upheld the throne had he so wished. Their power was indefinite, and as

Chinese they preferred compromise and order to ideals pushed to the

bitter end. In the middle of February they yielded to Yüan, and Sun

surrendered to him the presidency as a reward for his allegiance to the

Republic. Yüan, for the Manchus, secured a settlement by which the

Forbidden City (the residence of the emperor in Peking) was made into a

second Vatican City; the emperor was allowed his formal and ritual

titles (a status remarkably like that of the Pope) and a very

substantial stipend. For the Northern armies and himself Yüan obtained

actual power over the country. A civilian, but a soldier as well, Yüan

rose by both intrigue and the implied threat of force.

The Republic was launched by valedictory imperial edicts ordering the

imperial officials throughout the realm to obey Yüan and the new form of

government; by Republicans nominally headed by their greatest and

coldest antagonist; and by a soldier of higher professional standing in

the Western sense than any Chinese leader for centuries past undertaking

the task of keeping order and ushering China through drastic

reconstruction. For a few halcyon months it seemed as though the

Republic might grow into reality from under the aegis of military

dictatorship.[21] But soon it became apparent that the revolution was

not a transfer of power and renovation of order but the dissolution of

power and the erasure of order. What was left was ideological

uncertainty, social turmoil, economic disorganization--with politics

reduced to mere pageantry, and the armies, ominously growing under the

care of President Yüan, maintaining what little order was left to

maintain. In 1913 the Nationalist-Republicans rebelled in the Yangtze

valley and were crushed by the armies of the government of the Republic

of China.

From the military rule of Yüan Shih-k'ai there emerged an army system

which was to bring China to almost complete political ruin in the decade

after Yüan's death. Although he organized a model regiment as a sample

of what could be done in China, inflation of numbers and deterioration

of morale and _matériel_ were the most obvious symptoms of the new role

of the army--a role much more concerned with problems of domestic

intrigue than with defense against the outsiders. For an army of

national defense, high technical excellence and a commensurate smallness

of numbers are desirable features; for an army of dictatorship or

occupation, inferior equipment, poor supplies, and inefficient training

are all trifling handicaps in comparison with the advantage of vast

numbers which can be used to garrison large sections of the realm and

meet the threat of civil war. The very shift from empire to republic

involved the enlistment of additional thousands of revolutionary

fighters; once in the army, they were hard to dislodge. The personal

military interests of Yüan led him to expand the army, and his political

ambitions nourished the thought that the country would be secure beneath

him only through the medium of an extensive garrison system. Finally,

there was a far-reaching shift in the Chinese social pyramid. Men of

intelligence and of education flocked to the army, and Japan's military

schools were crowded with young Chinese who saw in war their easiest

avenue to fortune or to the service of their country.

A reconstituted army, soldiers who could command greater respect than

ever before, numerical extension and qualitative deterioration of the

national armed forces--these were the more patent military changes under

the Republic. To them must be added the factors fusing the elements into

a system that was to bring immediate fortune and ultimate ruin to

practically all who ventured into its operations. Many of the provinces

which turned to the cause of the revolutionaries in 1911 and 1912 became

gradually militarized. When the Manchus were gone, the old distinction

between the Tartar General and the civilian viceroy had lost its

purpose; the new provincial executives combined both military and

governmental powers. Provincial jealousies and the growing disorder

favored a strong factual autonomy for the various provinces, even though

there was no technical claim of provincial independence and very little

even of confederation. The first Republic was in name a centralized

parliamentary-presidential state with quasi-federal features; in fact it

was the combination of an impotent, headless imperial bureaucracy and a

presidential military dictatorship possessing physically limited and

indefinable authority over a large group of provinces. Between China and

the accomplishment of regular and orderly republican government there

stood ignorance, turmoil, poverty, reaction, and despair. Between Yüan's

regime and the _tuchün_ system there stood only Yüan's might.

NOTES

[1] Herrlee G. Creel, _The Birth of China_, p. 141, London, 1936.

[2] _Ibid._, pp. 142-154.

[3] Marcel Granet, _Chinese Civilization_, p. 270, New York, 1930.

Quoted by permission of the American publishers, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

[4] Henri Maspero, _La Chine antique_, p. 131, Paris, 1927. This is one

of the most valuable surveys of ancient China.

[5] An elementary discussion of this period is to be found in Paul M.

A. Linebarger, _The Political Doctrines of Sun Yat-sen_, pp. 25-29,

"Nation and State in Chinese Antiquity," Baltimore, 1937.

[6] Pan Ku (H. H. Dubs, translator), _The History of the Former Han

Dynasty, passim_, Baltimore, 1938.

[7] In a memorandum prepared in response to a request by the present

writer.

[8] _Ibid._

[9] Thomas Taylor Meadows, _The Chinese and Their Rebellions_, p. 24,

London, 1856. His accounts of the T'ai-p'ing rebellion even today

possess great liveliness and interest and illuminate twentieth century

Chinese problems.

[10] _Ibid._, p. 25.

[11] E. H. Parker, _China ..._, pp. 259-260, New York, 1917.

[12] A. N. Holcombe, _The Chinese Revolution_, pp. 70-81, Cambridge,

1930.

[13] See Luther Carrington Goodrich, _The Literary Inquisition of

Ch'ien-lung_, Baltimore, 1935.

[14] The most extensive source of information on Manchu military

organization in China is T. F. Wade, "The Army of the Chinese Empire:

Its Two Great Divisions, the Bannermen or National Guard, and the Green

Standard or Provincial Troops; Their Organization, Pay, Condition &c.,"

_The Chinese Repository_ (Canton), vol. 20, pp. 250-280, 300-340,

363-422, 1851, which is now unfortunately rare. William James Hail,

_Tseng Kuo-fan and the Taiping Rebellion_, New Haven, 1927, presents an

accessible and informative digest of this and other material in its

opening pages. Two French works based on Wade are Jules Picard, _État

générale des forces maritimes et militaires de la Chine ..._, Paris,

1860, and P. Dabry, _Organisation militaire des Chinois, ou la Chine et

ses armées_, Paris, 1859. William Frederick Mayers, _The Chinese

Government_, Shanghai, 1897, is one of the most valuable references for

the structure of the last imperial government of China; designed as a

manual of titles, it presents a concise outline of all major civil and

military offices. A more elaborate treatise is P. C. Hsieh, _The Chinese

Government_, 1644-1911, Baltimore, 1925. See also Anatol M. Kotenev,

_The Chinese Soldier_, Shanghai, 1937. The text refers to Wade, p. 391,

and Hsieh, p. 260.

[15] United States War Department, Adjutant-General's Office, no. 30,

_Notes on China_, pp. 57-69, "The Chinese Army," Washington, 1900.

Except for cursory references, this pamphlet is of no great value.

[16] See above, pp. 32 ff.

[17] See Hail, _op. cit._ in note 14.

[18] See Meribeth E. Cameron, _The Reform Movement in China_, 1898-1912,

p. 59, Stanford, 1931.

[19] H. G. W. Woodhead (ed.), _The China Year Book_, 1921-2, Tientsin,

1921; chap. XIX, "Defense," by Rodney Gilbert, pp. 511-512. Gilbert's is

a competent contemporary account of tuchünism, sketching the background

very clearly.

[20] George H. Blakeslee (ed.), _China and the Far East_, New York,

1910, Chapter X, "The Chinese Army--Its Development and Present

Strength," by Major Eben Swift, p. 181. See also General H. Frey,

_L'Armée chinoise: l'armée ancienne, l'armée nouvelle, l'armée chinoise

dans l'avenir_, Paris, 1904.

[21] For a discussion of the governmental changes of the period see

below, pp. 145 ff. See also H. F. MacNair, _China in Revolution_,

Chicago, 1931; A. N. Holcombe, _The Spirit of the Chinese Revolution_,

New York, 1931. For a contemporary censure of Yüan Shih-k'ai see Paul

Myron [Paul M. W. Linebarger], _Our Chinese Chances_, Chicago, 1915.

_Chapter_ V

CAUSES

Yüan's closing years might have resembled Napoleon's rise from the

position of First Consul to that of emperor, had he not been checked at

the very last moment by armed uprisings and expressions of deep popular

contempt. Even so, he retained control of the country.[1] The

humiliation of his defeat lacked even dramatic compensations, and he

died in June, 1916, of disease, poison, or chagrin. With his death the

Republic had a chance to stand by itself, but it could not.

_The Age of the War Lords_

Yüan had fastened the symbols of old on the scaffolding of a new order.

With his death the momentum of administrative routine retained from the

Manchu dynasty was lost; the Republican government in Peking degenerated

from impotence to comedy. The process called government began to

nauseate patriotic Chinese and foreigners alike; few were able to take a

long view, to maintain their courage, and to keep on fighting against

disgusting and disheartening realities. With the decomposition of the

central government--except the modern bureaucracies such as posts and

customs, which were kept intact by their foreign personnel and their

special international status--the armies, though divided provincially,

stepped into positions of unprecedented authority. There was a veritable

epidemic of monarchical ambition, greed, and willfulness among the

provincial military commanders; many Chinese expected a new Yüan to

emerge from that group and become the "strong man of China." With such a

stage to strut on, it is not surprising that the Chinese military lost

constructive vision. A sober nucleus of idealistically hard-headed,

patriotic men, each a George Washington, might have used military power

to reunite the country, but order could not be expected to emerge from

the unsystematized competition of armed forces.

Three broader factors affected the ascendancy of war lords, in addition

to obvious motives and interests. The ideological ruin was bad enough;

the consequent social disorder crippled China. But the armies now came

to provide a refuge for the unemployed and dispossessed. A second

factor, the mechanical mobilization of military forces through the

railways, made warfare more expensive and ruinous than it would have

been with the slow-moving infantry of the past. Thirdly, the war lords

gave physical embodiment to the ideological and social disunity of

China, inviting the constant intervention of the Western powers and of

Japan in Chinese affairs.

Individually the war lords warrant no special attention. There was Chang

Tso-lin in Manchuria; Tuan Chi-jui and Ts'ao Kun in North China; Yen

Hsi-shan ("The Model Governor") and, to the west of him, Fêng Yü-hsiang

("The Christian General"); Chang Chung-chang in Shantung, significant

more for his brutality than for his political and military position; the

quaint, conservative scholar Wu P'ei-fu, in the Yangtze valley, minor

figures in the South and West. It was not the generals who were

important, but militarism.

Militarism machine-gunned the Confucian ethics out of politics; it taxed

the land into ruin; it laid China wide open to imperialistic thrusts,

and--by the same act--made her a poor market. Militarism built roads

when they were strategically required, established a few railways and

spoiled more, modernized China, but did so in the costliest way of all.

Only in the intellectual world was military domination not outright

destruction. The generals and their staffs were surprisingly ignorant of

the power of ideas, ineffectual in their censorship, oblivious to the

great leverage of undercover agitation. Trusting arms, they failed to

see that the only opposition able to destroy them was not military but

mental.

While the soldiery stirred the country with murder and oppression, their

system progressed steadily toward self-destruction. Two great pressures

forced constant further expansion of the armies. The first is obvious:

military rivalry. The second was the growing abuse of army organization

as a means of unemployment relief. Military taxation drove the peasants

off the land, whereupon they had no recourse but to become bandits or

soldiers. If they were bandits, consolidation under a chieftain

transformed them into military irregulars and induced some ambitious

general to include them in his forces. If they were soldiers, the bandit

stage remained in reach. In either case, they added to the burden

falling upon their commander, which in turn led to still greater

impoverishment of the peasants, a further increase of dispossessed men,

bandits, and soldiers. With the widening circulation of arms, Western

guns and fighting methods became less and less a secret of small groups

capable of establishing a firm military oligarchy and more and more the

property of a cross section of the Chinese masses.

From an estimated total of 1,369,880 in 1921,[2] the number of men under

arms rose to a figure estimated to be between 1,883,300 and 1,933,300

five years later.[3] This increase occurred in one of the poorest

countries of the world, despite conditions of extreme misery:

Recruiting goes on incessantly in every town in North China where

there is a garrison. There are no statistics available, but it is

known that the death rate from disease is very high because, even in

garrison, sanitary precautions are crude and the medical service is

inefficient and inadequate. In battle the care of the wounded is

barbarously primitive, even in the best units, and death from infected

wounds is rather the rule than the exception; while those who cannot

walk from the field to the nearest hospital more often than not die of

exposure or clumsy handling. One of a Chinese commander's major

concerns is filling the gaps in the ranks, but at the same time these

conditions have kept the proportions of the armies down to a fairly

constant figure. Chinese officers have advanced the theory that if

recruiting were everywhere abandoned, disease, desertions and losses

in battle would account for ten per cent. per annum, so that the

armies would automatically cease to exist in ten years.[4]

The use of the railways for military purposes unsettled large groups of

Chinese geographically and caused meetings of extensive bodies of men

from different areas. At first such contacts, especially under wartime

conditions, would only intensify provincial sentiment and mistrust of

strangers, but gradually this influence began to make for a new national

consciousness. In the meantime, the troops learned the intricacies of

modern transport. A coolie in a peaceful part of Asia might see trains

for years, observing the Westerners riding in them, and remain impressed

by the sight; a Chinese bandit sitting on a freight car in a

commandeered train would become rapidly familiar with the fire vehicles.

The role of the militarists with respect to China's international status

was ambiguous. In the first place, the weakness which they created

reduced China to an international pawn. The discord into which she had

fallen allowed for semipartitions--various foreign interests backing

different war lords--although a genuine partition may thereby have been

staved off. In China proper the influence of the Japanese seemed to be

behind Chang Tso-lin and the Northern militarists; the British were

regarded as friendly to Wu P'ei-fu in the Yangtze valley; and the French

achieved something not far from domination in the province farthest

southwest, Yünnan. Fêng Yü-hsiang was supposed to have veered

picturesquely for foreign friends between the Protestant missions and

the Bolshevik agents. A miniature replica of the European balance of

power could be played in China, with outside groups friendly to one or

the other war lord. An agreement between the chief participants in 1919

sought to prevent the shipping of arms to unauthorized military groups

in China but proved largely ineffectual in the end.

Between 1922 and 1926 there was formed in South China a nexus of armies

which were to provide the military edge to ideological revolution and

establish the followers of Sun Yat-sen in power. These armies were built

up with the assistance of Russian and German advisers and with American

arms which had been left in Siberia and had fallen into the hands of the

Bolsheviks; the troops were led by new-style Chinese officers under the

leadership of Chiang K'ai-shek. The Whampoa Academy was the most obvious

sign of the new school of military thought, coming forth as a

consequence of the Nationalist-Communist coalition.[5] Armaments did not

differ in any substantial degree from those of the war lords, but they

were more carefully kept and more skillfully used. The military machine

which arose in the South was better organized, better disciplined,

better led, and better cared for than any army on the Chinese scene for

a decade.

From 1926 to 1927 the ensuing campaign for the Nationalist conquest of

China, as outlined in the principles of Sun Yat-sen,[6] drove forward

with striking success. The Nationalist troops everywhere pushed their

enemies before them with astonishing speed. The explanation is to be

found in part in the efficiency and military honesty of officers and

men, but even more in the nonmilitary factors which fortified the armies

and the ideological weapons which cleared the ground before it. The new

armies not only represented military might; they were also propaganda

machines. To every regiment there was attached a political staff to keep

up the morale of the troops and to win over the enemy and the civilian

population. The troops themselves were propaganda brigades as well as

military units. Literacy in the armies was made a point of great pride,

and certain divisions made novel reputations for themselves on this

ground. The Nationalists were known by many as the soldiers who did not

harm the people. Without the troops the Nationalists would never have

come to power; but without the supporting sweep of mass propaganda the

Nationalist movement might have gone on for decades in the form of

civilian conspirators fighting against overwhelming odds or else seeking

to make venal mercenaries the prime instrument for the regeneration of

Chinese civilization.

The military revolution of 1926-1927 brought new factors to the Chinese

military scene. It indicated that a point of equilibrium had been

reached between the military and the ideological modes of control and

that it was no longer possible for sheer force and a minimum of

intelligence to hold unchallenged power in the Chinese society. It was,

furthermore, a threefold struggle: a patriotic and progressive uprising

against domestic and foreign oppression and inefficiency; an agrarian

revolt on a grand scale; and a proletarian uprising on the part of the

relatively small but strategically placed Chinese proletariat. Only in

the first of these aspects did the revolution meet with the approval of

most Chinese--the victims and not the bearers of arms. Men of all shades

of opinion were able to agree on a policy of attacking the system of

_tuchüns_, which offered no planning for the future, no resurrection of

the past, and little public order. The patriotic troops were enraged by

the corruption and inadequacy all about them and by the fortresses of

privilege reared by aliens on their coasts and in their greatest inland

cities.