The campaign of 1926-1927 marked the identification of the coolie

soldier with his own class and of the peasant fighter with his. The rank

and file were given to understand that they were not fighting in some

game beyond their understanding but for the security of people like

themselves. Under the influence of the propaganda put forth by the

Nationalists and the allied Communists, an incipient agrarian revolt was

fanned into flame and proletarian uprisings in the cities were made

possible for the first time. Whole sections of the countryside fell into

a condition not far from anarchy as the revolutionary troops led the

people in revolt. After 1927, however, the military forces developed

along two antagonistic lines. The Nationalists, seizing the political

instruments of the revolution but finding its ideological factors

largely beyond their control, began to create a professionalized army

with which to stabilize their regime. The Communists, and their agrarian

allies, standing to the Left of the newborn Nanking government, were

eager to fight on in the tested informal fashion. In the year of the

establishment of the Nanking government, 1927, the Red Army could still

demonstrate its effectiveness. Shortly afterward the precautionary arms

embargo of the foreign powers, which had prevailed since 1919, was

lifted, thereby opening up the means by which Chiang K'ai-shek could

renovate and specialize the armies under his command.

The break with the war-lord tradition was much more obvious in the case

of the Communists than in the case of the Nationalists. The Communists,

lacking sufficient support to occupy any broad contiguous territory,

fell back on guerrilla fighting of their own. The Nationalists, strong

enough to hold a certain portion of the area, nevertheless compromised

with the existing military system to seek mastery. For three years after

the establishment of the Nanking government, it remained doubtful

whether the whole government might not subside into inertia and neglect,

leaving Chiang standing alone, distinguished from the other war lords

only by his character.

Late in 1930 and early in 1931 a menacing alliance was organized between

two of the most influential remaining Northern _tuchüns_ and the

"liberal" wing of the Nationalists. Operating from the north, after the

proclamation of an insurgent "National Government" at Peking, the rebels

at first seemed to have the military advantage. Chiang had learned many

lessons, however, and in the most serious fighting which China had seen

in years he broke the force of the Northern offensive. Airplanes

appeared as a threat against the civilian population of Peking, although

no actual deaths were reported. There were ugly rumors that gas was

being used at the front. Small tanks from England, though giving a

rather poor performance, symbolized a novel trend. More and better heavy

artillery was used than ever before. Trenches came up to World War

standards. The war ended with the intervention from Manchuria of Chang

Hsüeh-liang, a strangely progressive and patriotic _tuchün_; but the

fighting had been enough to show that of all the great armed forces in

China the Nationalist armies of Chiang K'ai-shek and the Nanking

government were the most effective.

The rehabilitation of men's thinking had not proceeded far enough to

eliminate the dangers of an overemphasized military leadership, but the

tide had turned. After 1931 the military situation in China had become

subordinate to the problems of ideology and of government. The chief

military factors were now the governmentalized armies, the guerrilla

opposition of the Communists, and the problem of foreign war.

_The Age of Air Conquest_

The new military period which replaced the war-lord system was marked by

(1) technical improvement of the armies, especially in the direction of

air power; (2) supplementation of the armies by the quasi-military power

of the civil government, so that Chinese wars ceased to be a question

of armed bands drifting about the surface of the social system;

(3) organization of the Nationalist armies into national units in

fact as well as name; (4) increasing pressure of the disbandment

problem; (5) development of guerrilla tactics by the Reds and of

guerrilla-suppression tactics by the Nationalists; (6) problems arising

from Japanese conquest, which overwhelmed Manchuria in one fierce

onslaught and harassed China for six years of military aggressions

before breaking forth anew in the catastrophic surge of 1937-1938.

Aviation was to leap to a sensational place. Aviation and national

civilian government became almost natural complements of one another.

Only by aviation could all parts of the country be brought under the

jurisdiction of Nanking and the geographical handicaps of China be

overcome, and only a national government could afford the long-term

investments in machines and men necessary to effective air armament. The

record of technical improvement in the Nationalist armies is clearly

symbolized by the advancement of military aircraft. Military aviation in

China previous to the establishing of the Nanking government

demonstrated the weakness of the preceding regime. As early as 1909 a

French aviator was giving demonstration flights over Shanghai.[7] The

Ch'ing dynasty sought to establish an airplane factory but met with no

success. Yüan Shih-k'ai purchased a few planes and set up a flying

school. The first telling use of planes in Chinese politics and war

occurred, however, with the bombardment of the imperial palace by a lone

aviator in the course of an attempted monarchical restoration in 1917.

In the period of the war lords there were many isolated efforts to build

up flying services. The most promising of these, undertaken by the

Peking Republic with British assistance after 1920, failed through

neglect, mismanagement, and corruption. As late as 1928 there was no

prospect of significant air fighting in China.

By 1931 the Nanking government had built up an air force of about

seventy serviceable planes; a contemporary commentator observed,

"Aeroplanes played a very considerable--some would even say a

decisive--part in the civil war of 1930...."[8] By 1932, when an

American aviation mission arrived to help in the training of a Chinese

military air force, the estimates ran into a total of 125 to 140

commercial and training planes.[9] In the ensuing five years the Chinese

national air force developed rapidly. It played the leading role in

suppressing the Fukien uprising of 1932-1933 and in driving the

Communists into the Northwest. In 1937 the head of the American aviation

mission, Colonel John Jouett, wrote, "Japan maintains that China has a

thousand planes; my guess would be seven hundred and fifty of all types.

But no one knows...."[10] Other experts would reduce the figure to

one-third or less by the elimination of planes which would not be of

first-class utility in actual combat. The preparations for foreign

hostilities up to 1937 were accompanied by such a degree of secrecy that

definite figures are not available. For domestic purposes, however,

almost every plane would count, and the cardinal fact remains that

domestically the National Government possesses a monopoly of air power

in China. It is thereby in a better position to make its supreme will

formidably known than was any emperor of any dynasty. The future may

show that Chinese mastery of aircraft is psychologically as important as

was mastery of the steamship for the Japanese--a visible demonstration

to an Asiatic people of their own accomplishments with Western

technology.

As for other improvements of the armies, only three factors need be

mentioned. The armies were consolidated generally, and with their better

status--in literacy, pay, means of subsistence, and regularity of

control--there came a realization that the military force was the

creature of the national state. The Chinese nation was taking form as an

ideological and social entity of sufficient strength to command the

direct allegiance of fighting men. A new respect arose for the officers

and men of the armies. Under Yüan Shih-k'ai the armies had been able to

evolve a respectability of their own making; under Chiang K'ai-shek this

respectability began to be accepted at its face value by the rest of the

society, so that a pilot was not only admired by the crowd but was

recognized as an expert among experts, even in literary and civil-minded

circles. Secondly, the armies affected the nation by road construction.

In the course of the Nationalist-Communist wars of 1927-1937 the

Nationalists built thousands of miles of highway in order to make full

use of their new mobility gained from machine power. The military roads,

supplemented by civilian roads built with an eye to military use,

constituted a network of communications upon which a new political

geography could be framed--with new strategic points and new avenues of

commerce. Thirdly, the armies began to emphasize culture and comfort.

The soldiers were given a taste of twentieth century life and standards;

their civilian kin and friends who lived under less favorable conditions

saw in the elite sections of the armies a mass demonstration of China's

modernization.

In the age of air power in China the relation between the army, the

government, and the economy was revolutionized. The new power of a state

with actual authority[11] led to the creation of an army dependent on an

intricate and sensitive financial and economic system, operating under a

regular scheme of law. The strength of the government made modern armies

possible; modern armies made corresponding political forms imperative. A

resulting tendency was for the armies to take on national form. Even in

those areas where _tuchünism_ had left its imprint upon society, or

where provincial autonomy provided a factual check upon the national

authorities, the regional armies accepted organizational details and

long-range plans set forth by the central government. Armies which had

arisen as dumps for the unemployed or as resources for civil war were

fitted together so as to make the Chinese forces resemble the other

armies of the world--which exist for the preservation, defense, or

aggrandizement of national states. Foreign military observers, equipped

with the critical faculties of their profession, might look at the

Chinese armies and state point-blank that China had not an army but

merely armed men. They could not, however, deny that the Chinese armed

forces in their latest phase were on the way to becoming an army

nationally organized and fit to serve as the instrument of a great

nation. The lessons of nearly a thousand years of European and American

political experience may be epitomized in great part in the word

_nation_; the Chinese armies helped to give this word true significance

in China.

For the time being, the armies continued to serve their role of a refuge

for the economically displaced. Armed paupers are a menace to the

security and stability of any society; with the emergence of a higher

degree of Chinese unity a great proportion of the armed forces lost

their _raison d'être_. Nevertheless, the last great war-lord war, that

of 1930-1931, was fought largely over the issue of army reduction. The

National Government forces gradually increased in preparation for the

disbandment of others--extensive bodies of irregulars were roughly

systematized and placed under central supervision. They were used in

moderately successful but insufficient colonization efforts in the

Northwest, and as labor reserves in the construction of highways,

airports, and similar projects. Even so, the size of the armies did not

cease to interfere with their rapid improvement. Too much had to go into

pay, even with the ridiculously low rates of compensation. As against

the estimates of nearly 1,400,000 men for 1921 and about 1,900,000 for

1926, the size of the armies was unofficially estimated at 2,379,770 for

1936.[12] This figure did not include Communists, brigands, or the

Manchurian garrisons in the service of the Japanese (the Manchoukuo

army), which would bring the total to well over 2,500,000 men.

Differences in definition of what made a coolie or peasant into a

soldier caused violent discrepancies in the estimates. If training equal

to that of a German Republican Reichswehr soldier were set as the

criterion, the Chinese army could be measured in scores. If some more or

less vague relation to a military payroll, or to the possession of arms,

or both, were taken as the requirements, the number would run into

millions. Japanese propagandists, in the light of these facts, made

injudicious statements when commenting thus on the Chinese army of 1937:

China had 198 divisions comprising 2,250,000 officers and men. This

gigantic army has further been reinforced by 200,000 Communist

soldiers whom Nanking worked hard to set against Japan.

In comparison the Japanese Army is a puny affair, consisting of 17

divisions of 250,000 officers and men.[13]

The well-informed expert on Chinese famine relief, Walter H. Mallory,

set the total for 1937 at 1,650,000, of which 150,000 were Communist and

350,000 the crack troops of Chiang K'ai-shek; arms would be available

for less than 1,000,000.[14] All factors considered, the figure of

2,000,000 armed men with nonproductive occupations seems to be in rough

accord with the facts. Two salient conclusions emerge from these

figures: Firstly, the armies constituted an enormous burden, which could

only be reduced by partial disbandment; this in turn would not be

achieved until greater national prosperity had become a fact. Secondly,

and in China's favor, the armed forces have spread some elementary

notions of modern fighting throughout the rest of the population and

have enhanced not merely the willingness of the Chinese masses to fight

but also their capacity to do so.

Disbandment programs had not made enough progress by 1937 to alter the

general position of the armies in Chinese society. Nevertheless, the

counterpart of disbandment--selective recruiting--produced a central

force which became the vocation, avocation, and passion of Generalissimo

Chiang K'ai-shek. Though not marked in any recognizable way as apart

from the rest of the armed forces, the central units were given special

arms, special equipment, regular pay, mass education, and training in

the patriotic and reform doctrines of the New Life movement. "Chiang's

own" were to distinguish themselves; they seem to have profited by new

_matériel_, modern military instruction (chiefly from Germans), and the

excellent opportunities for practice which arose from the Communist wars

of 1928-1937. They were a testimonial to the fact that, had the

disbandment program fully materialized, a more effective and much

smaller Chinese army might have appeared. Despite the failure of

disbandment, alliance with the quondam enemies, the Chinese Red Army,

gave the national forces of 1937 a great diversity and wealth of actual

experience in all types of fighting. Although the Chinese have never had

adequate training for aggressive, coordinated warfare, they possess a

marvelous background in guerrilla methods. The Communist forces have

been hunted for a decade; technical superiority they have learned to

meet by tactics which force the enemy to meet them on their own terms.

Ultimately they were driven by the Nationalists across China, but at

most disproportionate cost. The Nationalists, on the other hand, learned

to master the terrain of inland war and thus acquired the very knowledge

which a foreign enemy would need most.

In time, the Chinese armies became increasingly less the free agencies

of domestic tyrants and, after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, more

and more the protective force for the whole nation. The enemy began to

force Chinese society into national form more sharply than could any

pressure from within. Even the efforts of the National Government at

Nanking to make a truce with the Japanese in order to continue the drive

against the Communists failed to still the widespread clamor for

unification. Whether or not Chiang, as a soldier, thought successful war

with Japan conceivable, he found that destiny had cast him in the role

of the defender--he had only the choice of accepting or rejecting the

challenge.

_Governmental and Political Role of the Armies_

Broadly, the political role of the armies was that of giving a

day-to-day index for the influence of ideological control, and of

providing the framework to which government had to accommodate itself.

The Republic was born with Sun Yat-sen as its father but with Yüan

Shih-k'ai as its midwife. Yüan and his armies established the order in

which the parliamentary Republic had its illusory success; with his

death the military order broke into military anarchy, and the political

order disappeared almost completely from the arena of actual power. The

armies and the tuchüns expressed a certain provincial autonomy and a

desire for a crude stability. They ruled the chaos but kept the society

stirred by war until the Nationalist-Communist revolution in 1926-1927

brought ideology back to a conspicuous place in the play of events. The

armies developed under Yüan into separate entities exercising the power

derived from the monopoly of force. In time this monopoly of force was

broken. The problem was one not of tyranny but of anarchy. Force was too

broadly distributed, order too insufficiently achieved. The Chinese,

said Sun Yat-sen, did not need liberty; they needed wealth, in the form

of food for those starving and the necessities of life for impoverished

millions.[15] When even soldiers were treacherous and tumultuous, order

could not come from bayonets. It had to arise within men's minds,

including the minds of the soldiers. This happened; the ideological

revolution absorbed the military forces, but only to disgorge them, as

it were, into opposing camps--the one identifying military power and the

masses, the other seeking to build up a new military elite with which to

impose government and law on the society. Each of the two incompatible

ideals reached a considerable measure of fulfillment, and they were

reconciled only by the very presence of alien invaders. From being the

_de facto_ rulers, the armies found themselves called upon to act as _de

facto_ defenders. Hitherto the forces unsettling ideological control,

they became the instruments of ideologies reconciled on the minimal

terms of national defense for national existence.

The armies had supplied the power necessary to government but not the

order. The Peking Republic lost its claim to authority when it was made

the tool of Yüan Shih-k'ai. The years after his death were a pitiful

period wherein the civilian authorities in the central government

constituted either the puppets of the war lords or their sycophants. The

Peking Republic fell into the expedient of giving _de jure_ status to

every shift in the interplay of power. Military leaders of provincial

importance easily captured the functions of _tuchüns_; regional leaders

obtained correspondingly higher titles. The Peking Republic tried to

govern on the Western pattern when the country was not ready for it, and

it governed poorly. Soon it passed from nominal control into

nonexistence.

The National Government established at Nanking in 1927[16] gained actual

effectiveness partly because the armies under its command were in need

of essentials not obtainable by merely military measures. The modernized

Nationalist armies under Chiang K'ai-shek were dependent upon a

complementing state which would provide support behind the lines.

Furthermore, the cry from the educated classes for civilian government

was loud, and practical considerations prompted the acquiescence of the

Nationalist generals in the development of civilian government. Although

by 1938 a government primarily civilian was not yet in evidence, the

auspices were favorable to the regularization and demilitarization of

government.

Finally, the most significant role of the armies may be found in their

destructive powers. Modern weapons coming into China pressed on her the

mold of a modern state. By preventing any tranquil change from the

Ch'ing dynasty to another form of government preserving the older

controls of village and family, Western armament brought China into a

condition of military anarchy in which a strong modern government became

imperative. The armies and their irresponsible leaders goaded the masses

into the revolution of 1926-1927, and the necessity of establishing

military superiority for the sake of stability led the victorious

Nationalists to create a modern defensive force, a working government,

and the outline of operative statehood--to be partly Chinese, but

modified by Western influences, according to the teachings of Sun

Yat-sen. From 1931 on, the army and the government became more and more

the integral parts of a single machine.

_War and the Agrarian Economy_

There is a close correlation between militarism and agricultural

conditions in China. Distress among the Chinese farming masses is both a

cause and an effect of war. Misery creates unrest, unrest brings war,

war brings misery--until government stops the vicious circle. On the

whole, the economic system of old China was probably more stable, and

ensured greater distributive justice, than did the Western systems

during the same centuries; but periods of famine, flood, and--worst of

all--oppression were far from rare.[17]

At its best, the old economy rested on a vast body of farmers,

associated in villages (_hui_) and families but tilling their own land

in fairly small units. The farming class provided the nourishment for

the bulk of society but did not hold a low status, since the

compensations of interclass kinship and of free play in the hierarchy of

politics and intellect made families (if not individuals) approximately

equal. There were no families in old China to compare with the

aristocracy which Europe inherited from the Middle Ages, nor castes to

compare with those of India. When functioning well, the Chinese economic

system resembled some Western ideals of freehold farming governed by a

hierarchy of scholars.

But at its worst, when the government became sterile and unimaginative,

or corrupt and demoralized, the taxes rose sharply, and usurers added to

the burden. Lack of resources caused the loss of the land, and the

peasant proprietor found himself a tenant farmer. When economic and

political exploitation overreached itself, social upheaval followed, and

peasant rebellions tore down the government and the economy together.

Most Chinese dynasties met their end as a consequence of the land

problem.[18]

Moreover, the Chinese farmer maintained very slight reserves of

foodstuffs, so that flood or drought resulted in appalling famines,

sometimes costing the lives of millions in one year. Governments

established large granaries which, under good management, were filled in

time of plenty and dispersed in time of need. R. H. Tawney says of

drought and flood:

Those directly affected by them cannot meet the blow, for they have no

reserves. The individual cannot be rescued by his neighbors, since

whole districts together are in the same position. The district cannot

be rescued by the nation, because means of communication do not permit

of food being moved in sufficient quantities. Famine is, in short, the

last stage of a disease which, though not always conspicuous, is

always present.[19]

Whether or not natural calamities struck in conjunction with specific

extortions sanctioned by social injustice, the Chinese farmer has been

faced with threefold oppression whenever times were bad. The tax

collector, the usurer, and the landlord were able to lay their hands on

the harvest, reduce the peasant to subsistence level or beneath it, and

place him under a system of exploitation which was as severe as Western

feudalism. The check which provided a stop to any indefinite decline

into greater and greater horror was the fighting power of the peasants.

Peasant revolts periodically followed agrarian oppression, and swept the

land free for the time. The Han dynasty, in some ways the greatest in

all Chinese history, went down in an uproar of peasant rebellions.

Peasant bandits have provided the ancestry of many imperial houses.

Politics or war might ease the economy, until the government again

became weak and exploitation common.

It is one of the tragic coincidences of history that the Europeans

should have appeared in China at a time when the Chinese were entering

upon one of their most acute periods of agrarian decline and class

exploitation. Roughly, from the middle of the eighteenth century down to

the present day the lot of the Chinese farmers has become worse and

worse. At periods the country as a whole seemed fairly prosperous, but

the broad agricultural recession remained constant. The nineteenth

century was one long record of rebellions, and the twentieth amplified

the disturbances.

Government in modern China has fallen heir to a depression centuries

old, arising from inequitable land distribution, overtaxation,

insufficient public works for drainage and communications, and--in more

recent generations--the evils attendant upon sharp economic change. Most

economic writers agree that some of the difficulties of Chinese

agriculture are caused by the smallness of individual holdings and by

population pressure. Such factors are not subject to immediate remedy;

the peasants have attributed their misfortune primarily to landlordism

and political oppression. The Chinese Communists, on their economic

front, may perform a valuable service if they are able to devise new

methods of social organization which will provide relief for the organic

difficulties of Chinese agriculture. Of all the important problems of

China, the land problem shows government ineffectiveness at its worst.

Behind the T'ai-p'ing rebellion which flared up in unparalleled

fanaticism in the 1850's and 1860's, there was the long provocation of a

land system which made farming unprofitable and a government supine in

the face of unreversed decline. The Boxer rebellion burst forth from the

unrest of the peasants, although it could be deflected by the

demagoguery of the Manchu officials and changed into wild xenophobia.

When the fiercely discordant economics of imperialism and international

industrialism intruded upon the old and already corrupted economy, farm

existence became even less tolerable than it might have been if left to

its native miseries. Dynastic decomposition was hastened by the collapse

of handicraft economy and the fiscal disorganization caused by Western

commercial activity.

In the earliest days of the Republican-Nationalist movement led by Sun

Yat-sen, emphasis was on land reform. Sun Yat-sen's family had suffered

from overtaxation when he was a boy.[20] Nationalization and

equalization of the land were slogans used at the founding of the _Tung

Mêng Hui_; the program seems at that time to have been derived from old

Chinese distributism and from Henry George.[21] With the coming of the

Republic, two years went by, however, before any agrarian legislation

was passed, and the new laws had no perceptible consequence.[22] The

problem of land reform had to be fought out on the ideological front and

placed above the military before it could become a fit subject for

competent government action.

The epoch of the _tuchüns_ added to agricultural misfortune. Militarism

had a direct effect on the deterioration of the land economy, and an

indirect one in that it led to the cultivation of opium as the one

money-making crop which could meet the excessive tax demands of the

militarists. A Chinese writer has described the years which marked the

ending of the _tuchün_ system as follows:

The ... misery among the farming population in the decennial period

1920-1930 [must be] attributed to (1) internal warfare; (2) neglect of

agriculture; (3) low stage of art; and (4) over-population. The civil

wars during the last eighteen years have increased the cost of

production, have added to the farmers' ... burden of taxation, have

raised the rate of interest on loan, and have caused endless suffering

to [those] who form the basis of our social and economic life. Great

many people have often wondered as to why a country like China with 75

per cent of her total population engaged in farming and with such a

vast territory should suffer from the high cost of living; but to the

student of social problems the question is comparatively simple, for

the recurrence of civil war since the establishment of the Republic

has [changed] conditions of supply and has driven millions of farmers

out of cultivated areas, and this alone suffices to explain an

unprecedented rise of prices of food and other necessities of life

during the last few years, especially since 1926.[23]

These conditions led to farmers' movements, which became effective,

however, only as they merged with the broader ideological tendencies in

China.

The Farmers' Movement ... may ... be divided into four periods: (1)

the period of reaction to bad conditions ... (1921-1925); (2) the

period of communistic activities and violence (1925-1927); (3) the

period of retrenchment and preparation for reconstruction (from the

spring of 1927-1928); and (4) the period of reconstruction (since

1928).[24]

The Kuomintang-Communist alliance struck severely at the _tuchün_ armies

by giving their own forces a sense of doctrine and by tying together the

causes of patriotism and agricultural reform. The joint agrarian program

was a failure in that it accentuated precisely those issues on which

neither of the parties could compromise. When the Communists and the

Nationalists parted, the Nationalists took one portion of Sun Yat-sen's

economic program (industrialization and communications) for emphasis,

and the Communists another (land reform). The agrarian issue was a

source of strength to the Chinese Red Army, intent upon winning the

peasantry. It was a military weakness to the new-style Nationalist

armies officered largely by the relatives of landlords; they had little

sympathy for the economic troubles of the farmers whose lands they

occupied. The Nationalist Reconstruction aimed in great part at removing

both the acute and the latent causes of peasant rebellion, thereby

cutting the ground from under the feet of the Communists. Although it

met with more success than any other project of its type in modern

China, Western observers agree in regarding it as inadequate.[25]

_Imperialism and Chinese Wars_

A great part of the military disturbances in modern China can be

regarded as both the cause and the effect of agrarian evils, and some of

the struggles as peasant rebellions in modern guise, carrying on the

immemorial farmer-infantry tradition. Another part is traceable to the

impact of the Western economy on China. It was Western economic activity

that gave most compelling proof of the fact that the Westerners had

encircled China and were compressing it from a world in its own right

into a nation. The military intervention of Western powers in China not

only caused much of the ideological reaction and forced a reorganization

of the government, but also provided deadly evidence of the superiority

of Western fighting. Western economy helped to bring the confusion which

meant war in China; and Western economy itself waged war.

Sun Yat-sen saw China's unfortunate position as a whole, and in his

programs there may be discerned three separate demands, for (1) a

national economic revolution, (2) an industrial revolution, and (3) a

social revolution.[26] Since the Chinese could no longer function as a

self-contained world economically, and scorn foreign trade as a

magnanimous concession to the outer barbarians,[27] the Chinese would

have to develop an economic system conforming to national patterns in

the society and in thought. They must relate their economy to their

independence and defense, if they were to survive. In the first place,

they could not afford to remain the only free market of the world,

subject to exploitation and haphazard development. It would be necessary

for them to establish governmental controls over economic matters and

protect their national livelihood. Secondly, they had to work toward a

complete transformation of their technological system and meet Western

productive practices, if they were to claim a competitive position; this

involved an industrial revolution. Thirdly, they had to correct the

abuses inherited from their forefathers. Simultaneously they would have

to construct an economic system not only modern but equitable, if they

wished to avoid the horrors of early capitalism and the tragedy of the

industrialist class war. This would require a social revolution.

At the time that Sun Yat-sen formulated his ideas (1924), none of the

three revolutions was making any progress. The Chinese did not

constitute a nation in fact; they had even lost the old unity of the

Confucian society. The _tuchüns_ opposed Chinese nationalism by

preventing the development of any one authority able to monopolize

force, and by acting as agents of, or in alliance with, foreign powers.

Thus they helped to make China something not far from a quasi colony

under pooled control of all the industrial capitalist nations. The

Nationalists and Communists were able to join forces on this issue of a

class war of nations, both believing in the independence of China. The

Nationalists, however, saw China's most direct approach toward national

unity in the development of a national economic system, with a

reasonable military independence of imports and the economic devices

current throughout the world as instruments of national policy. The

Communists did not agree that such an economy, national in form, would

have much meaning unless it were grounded upon a peasant-proletarian

regime. Nor did they feel that change from imperialist to native

capitalism would constitute an advance in itself.

After the schism, the Nationalists devoted themselves to the

national-economic and industrial revolutions, while the Communists

stressed the social revolution, particularly the land problem. The

Nationalists were able to secure tariff autonomy for China, and

thereupon entered upon a policy of protective tariffs and other

mechanisms designed to make China a reasonably self-sufficient nation.

At the same time they pushed hard toward the industrial revolution, in

developing highways, railroads, airways, and radio, and in creating the

economic controls required for modern government--standard weights,

measures, currency, civil law, and fiscal uniformity.

T. V. Soong (Sung Tz[)u]-wên), a veteran minister of finance, stands out

as the organizer of the modern Chinese economy. Veritable miracles were

performed in the development of national credit; after 1928 the National

Government adopted the policy--as remote as a mirage to its

predecessors--of floating all government loans within the country and

making the Chinese government independent of Japanese and Western

financiers. The only loans of any importance contracted abroad were

taken up with other governments. Financial independence was a great step

toward the realization of the Nationalist ideals, but it may be

questioned whether the loss of financial allies was a price to be paid

without hesitation in a capitalist world. Had the Chinese had more bonds

in the Western capital markets, or larger debts to the American or

British governments, they might have elicited greater international

support in repelling the Japanese invasion in 1931.

The crowning point in the economic achievements of the National

Government at Nanking was the successful institution of a managed

currency. China had dealt with currency merely as a convenient form for

specie, and the Chinese were accustomed to regard a dollar as worth only

the amount of metal in it. When the National Government placed the

currency on a national basis, it drew together the whole financial

structure of China by one gigantic move, and placed finance in a

position of greater unity and dependence upon government than ever

before. Together with the financial reforms, the Nationalists organized

a legal system providing a minimum foundation of law and order. The

codification of laws, the revamping of the judiciary, the clarification

of policies by legal formulation--all these contributed to China's

emergent nationhood.

The economic program accorded with considerations partly Hamiltonian,

partly state-socialist. The economy had first of all to be organized and

integrated in national terms, and later to be revised so as to ensure

social justice. The Nationalists were convinced that a policy of

immediate land reform would lead to internal disharmony and frustrate

the very purposes for which the revolution of 1926-1927 had been

launched. The Communists, on the other hand, succeeded in keeping the

agrarian issue from being forgotten and forced the Nationalists to

better the lot of the peasant. In the meantime, China's boom in physical

development and the unification of the commercial, financial,

productive, and legal systems began to startle observers.

As a result, China was able to build national armies in direct ratio

with the invigoration of her national economic system. The war machine

of the National Government, under the care and leadership of

Generalissimo Chiang K'ai-shek, became the most powerful in China. The

central government's military power in turn speeded up the pace of

general unification. There was thus a remarkable interaction of forces

tending toward national integration. From 1932 to 1937, between the

first and second major phases of the Japanese invasion, progress was

rapid--stimulated, perhaps, by the external menace.

The two greatest dangers to the Nationalist policy of military and

economic unification were (1) the dismal condition of the Chinese

proletariat, as yet small but constantly growing, and (2) the vested

interests of the industrial powers. Had China's growth been less rapid,

the foreigners might have withdrawn slowly and found compensation in

Chinese commerce for their losses in direct ownership in China. There

was one power, however, to which Chinese unification was a living and

increasing threat. The rising military-economic power of the Chinese was

incompatible with the position which Japanese leaders visualized as part

of the manifest destiny of their country. The Japanese might have

tolerated the _tuchün_ system for decades had the _tuchüns_ been able to

establish orderly regional governments; or they might have aided a

reactionary Chinese regime which asked for survival only. The appearance

of a genuine republic in the Far East was a menace to Japan; if that

republic was bound by sheer physical proportions to overshadow Japan,

the unification and modernization of China had to be averted at all

costs.

Nevertheless, China's development, even apart from the hindrances of

war, cannot be regarded as possessing the same potentialities as did

American growth during the past century. China, from all indications

available to date, is an area much poorer in natural resources than is

the United States; she does not offer comparable opportunities for the

heavy industries. The steel, coal, oil, and water power necessary for

large-scale industrialization are by no means negligible, but not

sufficient to make possible the rise of another America. The far future

may change man's dependence upon currently utilized resources and

facilitate greater strides in China's technological advancement.

Meanwhile, she can look forward to decades of measurable development

through exploiting raw materials already available, if political

conditions permit.

The conflict with Japan has thrown Chinese economic development back to

conditions not too far from the pre-Nanking stage. China not only faces

the handicaps of social dislocations but also the ruin of her factories

and her industrial centers. The Japanese have destroyed much of the

Chinese manufacturing equipment and are placing what remains under

Japanese control. Significantly, the deadliest enemy of Japanese

business--in the unlikely event of a complete Japanese success--will be

Japanese-owned factories in China. Chinese labor will deeply affect

Japan's domestic production, unless the Japanese succeed in

rationalizing their economic system to an extent not yet contemplated.

Hence, Japan's losing the war may well be brought about by bankruptcy

from sheer military indebtedness; her winning the war, however, may lead

to more remote but no less certain ruin--through the competition of

Chinese output with Japanese home industries disadvantaged by the

cheaper labor markets of China. But Japan's loss is not inevitably

China's gain, and the Chinese may find themselves, at some point in the

future, controlling an industrial system which has been wrecked, looted,

and bankrupted.

Whatever the ultimate outcome, loans will again play a part in Chinese

development. The placing of large foreign loans has been a key part of

Chinese development, and the task of reconstruction in China--no matter

who undertakes to do it--will require large amounts of capital.

Consequently, the loan policies of the wealthier nations may return to

the importance which they enjoyed in 1913, and the dictates of the

Western states may again direct the lines of Chinese economic progress.

The effects of the Japanese conquest, if it is partial and then lapses

into a stalemate, may well be determined by the extension of loans to

the Chinese or to the Japanese in China. The effect of the war has

already complicated the picture of China's economic future to the extent

of making even cautious prophecy hazardous.[28]

In the military sphere, the Chinese have come of age, although their

fighting strength will be determined by the importance of infantry. If

later wars continue to depend upon man power, China will become more and

more significant in world politics. Internally, the armies provided (1)

a transitional administration from the Empire to the Republic; (2) a

physical expression of the ideological confusion and the regional

disunity of China from 1916 to 1931 (the period of _tuchüns_); (3) the

armed edge of the ideological revolution of 1926-1927; (4) decisive

instruments in the conflict between the Communists and Nationalists from

1927 to 1937; and (5) one of the most powerful unifying agencies at the

command of the National Government at Nanking. The Chinese military

system spread the knowledge of Western warfare and, with it, of modern

techniques throughout the country; it shaped the ideological and

governmental experience of modern China.

NOTES

[1] See below, pp. 154 ff.

[2] Rodney Gilbert in _The China Year Book_, 1921-2, p. 519, Tientsin,

1921.

[3] _Ibid._, 1926, p. 1065.

[4] _Ibid._, p. 1062.

[5] See above, pp. 51 ff.

[6] See above, pp. 58 ff.

[7] Gilbert, _loc. cit._, 1928, pp. 1283-1285.

[8] _Ibid._, 1931, pp. 251 ff.

[9] Source confidential.

[10] John H. Jouett, "War Planes over China," _Asia_, vol. 37, pp.

827-830, 1937.

[11] See below, pp. 167 ff.

[12] _The China Year Book_, 1936, p. 427.

[13] Japanese Chamber of Commerce of New York, _The Sino-Japanese

Crisis_, 1937, p. 18, New York, 1937.

[14] Walter H. Mallory, "Japan Attacks, China Resists," _Foreign

Affairs_, vol. 16, pp. 135-136, 1937.

[15] Paschal M. d'Elia, S. J., _The Triple Demism of Sun Yat-sen_, pp.

252-273, Wuchang, 1931. This is one of the most useful translations of

Sun Yat-sen's lectures on the _San Min Chu I_. Others are Frank Price,

_San Min Chu I, The Three Principles of the People_, Shanghai, 1930; and

L. S. Hsü, _Sun Yat-sen, His Political and Social Ideals_, Los Angeles,

1933.

[16] See below, pp. 167 ff. It is to be noted that the Nanking

government did not secure international recognition until 1928--the year

following its establishment.

[17] Among the more recent discussions of economics in Chinese history

is Chi Chao-ting, _Key Areas in Chinese Economic History_, New York,

1936.

[18] See Karl August Wittfogel, _Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Chinas_,

Leipzig, 1931, and the same author's outline of one of the boldest

programs of Chinese studies, "A Large-Scale Investigation of China's

Socio-Economic Structure," _Pacific Affairs_, vol. 11, pp. 81-94, 1938.

[19] R. H. Tawney, _Land and Labour in China_, p. 77, New York, 1932.

[20] Paul M. W. Linebarger, _Sun Yat Sen and the Chinese Republic_, pp.

67-71, New York, 1924.

[21] See Lyon Sharman, _Sun Yat-sen: His Life and Its Meaning_, New

York, 1934; and Paul M. A. Linebarger, _The Political Doctrines of Sun

Yat-sen_, pp. 132-156, Baltimore, 1937, for discussion of the

development of Sun's economic programs.

[22] Jefferson D. H. Lamb (Lin Tung-hai), _The Development of the

Agrarian Movement and Agrarian Legislation in China_, p. 134, Shanghai,

1934.

[23] _Ibid._, p. 221.

[24] _Ibid._, p. 77.

[25] See _Pacific Affairs_ for 1934 and 1935, for articles by George

Taylor and others dealing with reconstruction.

[26] Linebarger, _op. cit._ in note 21, chap. VII, "The Programs of Min

Shêng," discusses these points at greater length.

[27] See P. H. B. Kent, _The Twentieth Century in the Far East_, p.

364, London, 1937, for an extract from the mandate sent by the

Chinese-Manchu Emperor Ch'ien-lung to England's George III.

[28] See G. E. Hubbard, _Eastern Industrialization and Its Effect on

the West_, London, 1935, for a very illuminating survey. J. E. Orchard,

_Japan's Economic Position_, New York, 1930, is equally informative.

Much current information will be found in _Far Eastern Survey_

(semimonthly, New York), and _Amerasia_ (monthly, New York) on economic

matters. _Pacific Affairs_ (quarterly, New York) and _International

Affairs_ (bimonthly, London) possess book review sections which are

useful guides to the literature. The _Bulletin of Far Eastern

Bibliography_ (quarterly, Washington, D. C.) is the most complete guide

of its kind, but has just completed its initial volumes.

THIRD PART

GOVERNMENTS

_Chapter_ VI

THE EMPIRE

The governing of China is not and has not been confined to governments.

In many instances the working of specific institutions called

_governments_ has been of less importance than that of other

establishments and organizations. The problems of government in

Republican China are affected but not determined by the fate of

individual governments. Movements and armies have predetermined action;

governments have reflected it. Government in China may be divided into

three chief periods. The first extends from prehistory to 221 B. C. The

second is the imperial period.[1] The third--the Republican epoch--did

not begin until 1912, although it was foreshadowed in the nineteenth

century.

_Government to the End of the Warring States_

In the semihistoric Shang dynasty, which ruled China during the second

millennium B. C., there was a central overlordship which might well have

claimed primacy over all offices of the world. In its own territory,

Shang rule seems to have been based not upon a feudal system such as

developed later in the time of the charioteering lords but upon the

reduction of defeated princes to positions of vassaldom. History cannot

yet tell of the exact relations between the Shang overlord and his

vassal princes, nor of other monarchs who, in the shadowy bypaths of

present knowledge, stand forth vaguely from complete obscurity as rivals

to the hegemony of Shang. The rulers of twenty-five or twenty-six

centuries ago are recognized by modern Chinese as the direct

predecessors of the Ch'ing emperor who in turn yielded to the Republic.

This is no case of a Mussolini seeking to weave together the long-broken

threads between Augustan and modern Rome; in China the succession is as

direct as that from St. Pius I to Pius XI. The central monarchy comes

over the edge of history as an identifiable institution.

In rudimentary form this monarchy already suggests the features of

bureaucracy. Like the Prussian kings thousands of years later, the Shang

monarchs seem to have relied upon commoners as their royal officials,

and for the same reasons. A commoner strengthened the position of the

monarch: "He could not easily usurp the place of his master, even if he

had the power. And if he was disobedient he could be executed on the

spot, with complete impunity; he had no powerful clan to exact

vengeance."[2] Whether or not the system of loose overlordship be termed

_feudalism_, social forms not too unlike European feudalism originated

under the next dynasty, the Chou (traditionally dated 1122-256 B. C.).

Conquering the great city of the Shang, the Chou turned to feudalism for

means of internal control and defense. Powerful vassals arose, however,

so that after the eighth century B. C. the original Chou dynasty was no

longer in actual command. From the eighth to the third century B. C.,

when China was consolidated under the Ch'in Shih Huang Ti, a rapid

spread of feudal organization brought about a state system resembling

that of early modern Europe.

Before the Chou rulers lost their power and became the faraway analogues

of the late Holy Roman emperors or the Tennos of shogunal Japan, there

emerged from their house one of the most remarkable of all Chinese

political leaders. The Duke of Chou, who lived in the eleventh century

B. C., seems to have done most in founding the system which later ages

called _Confucian_--after Confucius had reformed it, clarified it, and

given it ethical stature. He is also regarded as the father of the

Constitution of Chou, a plan for a bureaucratic monarchy with an

emperor, three Great Dukes, and six ministers (in charge of

administrative, educational and economic, religious and historiographic,

military, judicial, and engineering matters, respectively) ruling over

nine large provinces.[3] The Duke of Chou is finally credited with the

authorship of several important treatises. He has served as the

archetype of intellectual statesmanship in Chinese legend. His work may

have contributed in great part to the long life of the Chou dynasty, as

a _de jure_ ruling house, since a family which had produced such an

eminent member was not to be set aside lightly.

In the earlier part of this period the feudal order seems to have

ensured relative stability, but in the later part a system of states

arose. The greatest Chinese philosophers, Confucius (Kung Fu-tz[)u]) and

Lao Tz[)u], lived in interstate turmoil. They saw all about them the

displacement of virtues which had long been recognized, the advance of

states which substituted greed for morality, the centralization of

power, the destruction of the feudal economy, the transformation of

ceremonial warfare into outright slaughter, and the rising disrespect of

the advancing kings for the Chou overlord. Lao Tz[)u] preached a

philosophy devoid of constructive politics; he had little use for the

state and for the organization of society. Not quite an anarchist, his

programs are probably closer to those of Herbert Spencer than of any

other Western thinker. But the spiritual and psychological background

from which he wrote is roughly identical with that of the world's great

mystical intuitionists. Confucius (551-479 B. C.) preached a system of

ethics and education which was to rationalize and systematize preceding

Chinese thought and lead to the system of ideological control known as

Confucian.

Chinese historians themselves term the closing period of the Chou the

Age of Warring States. Diplomacy lubricated the machinery of conflict,

smoothing struggle without eliminating it. The regional governments

fought each other for centuries, though at times venturing into

collective security pacts entrusting authority to a preeminent king for

defense against the outer barbarians. The last years of interstate wars,

however, were marked by an ever increasing awareness of the meaningless

character of a struggle which had enveloped the Chinese world. Legalism

and militarism, twin media of centralized monarchy, blossomed forth.

While the Western political system, molded by geography and conditioned

by language, has frozen into a pattern of theoretically sovereign and

theoretically eternal states--the "mortal Gods" of Hobbes's

imagination--without promise of workable universal government, China's

states were swept aside by the conqueror Ch'in Shih Huang Ti, who

established imperial unity for Chinese government. With the rise to

domination of the state of Ch'in, its king took the title of _Shih_

(First) _Huang Ti_ (Emperor), and the Chinese Empire was established.

_The Chinese Imperial Government_

The Shih Huang Ti was not revered by succeeding ages for the great

mission which he performed. His methods were those not of a cautious

reformer but of a bullying conqueror. With the aid and advice of a

legalist philosopher, he organized all of China (covering the area of

much of modern China) into a strongly centralized and despotic military

monarchy. He destroyed all books not of obvious practical use,

completely eradicating the histories of rival states and the works of

philosophers whose opinions might undermine his regime. His tyranny

brought his house to a rapid end; his heirs held the throne only a short

while. But the work he had done was done. He had persecuted the worship

of the past. He had extirpated a large part of the literature which

might have survived as a source of dissent. He had cleared China of all

military power but his own. He had brought operative law into being and

had spread the institution of private ownership of land. Feudalism might

remain as a form, but its economic and political realities were lost.

In 206 B. C. there began the reign of the Han dynasty. They effected a

compromise between the past and the governmental, military, and

political system created by the Shih Huang Ti. They retained legalism in

practice but turned more and more to Confucianism. Under them the cult

of Confucius grew into the major influence on the state.[4] The Han

allowed the imperial system to grow, whereas the Shih Huang Ti had

sought to build it. In consequence, Han rule--although interrupted in

the time of Christ by a Utopian usurper--lasted from the third century

B. C. to the third century A. D. There followed the turbulent Chinese

middle ages, extending until the reinstitution of organized government

with the Chin and the Sui.[5]

Out of the earliest tradition attributed to the Duke of Chou and put in

definite shape by Confucius, out of the arbitrary military despotism of

the conqueror of the Chinese world, Shih Huang Ti, and out of the actual

practices of the Han, there evolved a governmental system which, though

altered dynasty by dynasty and epoch by epoch, nevertheless retained its

general form down into the days of men now living. It never became,

however, the prime agency of government, even of the men governing.

Ritual and scholarship were more significant functions of the dominant

hierarchy than was administration itself. The emperor was the head of

the country's family structure, the focal point in the social sphere,

the outstanding member of the community at large, the chief examiner and

model of the scholars, the pontiff of the quasi-religious hierarchy, the

moral scapegoat and intermediary between destiny and mankind, and the

autocrat of a despotism constitutionalized, as it were, by the power of

traditional practices.

The imperial system of China was thus a monarchy in the proper sense of

the word, with none of the parvenu features suggested by the etymology

of the word _imperial_. As the preeminent leader in an organic society,

the emperor held a position comparable with that of other family heads.

His authority could rival that of a father but not excel it; among all

the families of the Chinese Empire the imperial stood forth as a family.

Second, the emperor was the chief dignitary in the social life of the

Chinese world. He was not unlike the British monarchs, providing a model

of formal propriety and elegance in setting the fashions of the decade.

The physical isolation of most of the emperors prevented them from

playing this role with widespread effectiveness, but it was a part of

their function. Third, the emperor bore the relation to the Empire which

the outstanding villager bore to the village. It was he of whom men

talked; his behavior commanded greatest interest; his future conduct was

a constant source of speculation. Apart from his role as a formal

dignitary, he occupied the more immediate position of most conspicuous

person, of the first member of society. He had the human accountability

of a leader and was to be praised or blamed for his actions in the

histories and by his subjects. In the normal routine, the emperor

himself was not to govern; but he selected and supervised his ministers,

who did and who consequently bore the odium for evil deeds.

Fourth, the emperor himself was the ultimate examiner of scholars. He

thus had contact with the most successful of the civil service

candidates and completed their examination. These examinations served

the emperor as a means of selecting advisers who upon further testing

became ministers. The Forest of Pencils (_Han Lin_, the Imperial

Academy) was within his jurisdiction, and the emperor was supposed to be

enough of a scholar to check the most important of the documents of

state. The myth of intellectual supremacy is suggested by the fact that

the chief implement of the imperial office was a red pencil. The

imperial symbolism did not stop here. Fifth, the quasi-religious

hierarchy of the Chinese, competing with Buddhism and the superstitions

of popular Taoism for the support of the people, centered on the

performance of certain rites in the propitiation of fortune and the

honoring of the dead. To this were added the cult rituals of

Confucianism. The Confucian temples, with tablets bearing the names of

worthies, served as the visible demonstration of the ideological power

wielded by the scholars over the populace, and of the emperor over the

scholars.

Sixth, the emperor had the more definitely religious status referred to

in his title _Son of Heaven_. He was the intermediate figure between the

will of Heaven and mankind. In him were summarized and epitomized the

virtues or the evils of the generation; he had to represent mankind in

its best light to all supernatural forces or agencies. Upon his conduct

of worship depended the good or ill will of the deities and hence

weather, crops, life and death. Conversely, he was responsible to

mankind for the misbehavior of nature, and an earthquake, a two-headed

calf, or any other monstrous occurrence was blamed on his disturbance of

the routine of things. The order which enveloped the Confucian society

was conceived not merely as a set of traditional and moral man-made

customs but as a type of behavior which fitted in with the life of the

natural world. In the eyes of the Chinese, perturbations in the world of

men soon produced consequent natural calamities. Lastly, the Chinese

emperor was the autocrat of the administration. His action, however, was

limited by various customary devices; for example, while the

countersignature of a minister was not needed on an edict, the emperor

was supposed not to take the initiative but to secure the wisest

suggestions and adopt them. Practical considerations rendered a stable

bureaucracy impervious to constant intermeddling of the emperor,

although the effect of imperial action was not negligible.

The administrative outline of Chinese government from the establishment

of the Empire by the Ch'in Shih Huang Ti in 221 B. C. to its overthrow

by Sun Yat-sen and his followers in 1911 varied from dynasty to dynasty

and ruler to ruler. Nevertheless, certain general characteristics were

common to the whole period. The government operated as the chief

implementation of the emperor's power over the people. The people

maintained its social organizations, but none of these developed office

hierarchies comparable to that of the government. The government alone

served as the connecting link between the ideologically unified Chinese

world as a whole and its many separate parts. The T'ang dynasty (A. D.

620-906) provided an exceptionally clear articulation of the Empire,

which not only compelled the admiration and imitation of later ages but

even served as a model for state governments on the periphery of the

Chinese world. In the great Taikwa Reforms of 645, the Japanese made a

heroic attempt to adapt the T'ang form of government to dissimilar

conditions; the scheme worked on paper but failed to recast the

fundamental mold of Japanese society, which remained feudal.

The three most striking features of the Chinese bureaucracy were: (1)

the central administrative organization; (2) the operation of civil

service examinations and the use of administrative supervision; (3) the

integration of government operation on the imperial, regional, and local

levels. The metropolitan administrative organization under the T'ang

dynasty was headed by the emperor. But the intricate regularity of the

hierarchy beneath him was such as to preclude imperial autocratic

caprice. The outline of the hierarchical organization was as follows:[6]

THE THRONE

THE GRAND COUNCIL

The Departments:

_a._ Department of Ministerial Coordination

1. Ministry of Administrators

2. Ministry of Finance

3. Ministry of Rites

4. Ministry of War

5. Ministry of Justice

6. Ministry of Public Works

_b._ The Imperial Chancery

_c._ The Grand Secretariat

The Tribunal of Censors

Imperial Commissioners

Provinces (10) and _Governments-General_ (at the frontiers)

Prefectures

Subprefectures

Townships

Villages

The general structure of Chinese administration differed little from

that of preceding ages, and has not changed markedly during the

following centuries. Later developments strengthened the provinces, at

the expense of both the central government and the local areas; earlier

conditions had tolerated a much greater extent of feudal establishments.

Nevertheless, the six ministries may have been established as early as

about 1000 B. C., and remained a feature of Chinese government until

1906.

The Grand Council met daily. It was composed of grand ministers, who--in

the phrase of Baron des Rotours--"under the T'ang held in their hands

the government of the Empire."[7] The emperor's chief power lay in

appointing the council members, to whom fell the greater share of

governing in fact. Directly under the Grand Council there were the three

departments. The Department of Ministerial Coordination served as an

administrative center and clearinghouse for the work of the separate

ministries under it. The names of the ministries are self-explanatory.

The Ministry of Administrators was in charge of the examination system

and the arrangement of the offices in the bureaucracy. The Ministry of

Rites, by an extension of its protocol features, was in charge of the

reception of foreign ("barbarian") princes and ambassadors, and

emissaries. The other two departments provided one of the most ingenious

systems of checks and balances to be found in any constitutional scheme.

The Imperial Chancery received all communications from the various parts

of the Empire. Since most of the governing was carried out by means of

written orders, instructions, and requests for reports, the Chancery

occupied an important place. But the function of drafting replies to

such communications, preparing manifestoes, or issuing ordinances was in

the hands of the Grand Secretariat. Thus the Chancery was prevented from

exerting an outside influence, while it was impossible for the

Secretariat to receive any communication directly. As a final check, all

outgoing documents of state had to pass through the Chancery to receive

the official seal, without which they were invalid. Thus any item of

government business was routed first through the Chancery for

registration and classification, then to the Secretariat for reply, and

back to the Chancery for what amounted to countersignature (by seal).[8]

Yet the Secretariat was no mere drafting agency for the Chancery.

The Tribunal of Censors occupied a position not unlike that of the great

independent establishments of the United States government. It was

directed by a president and two vice-presidents, and concerned itself

with ferreting out and exposing irregularities and abuses in the

administration. The morale of the censorate varied from time to time,

but at its optimum efficiency it was a formidable and significant

institution. Han Confucianism provided the general background from which

the organization rose to effectiveness.

This sophisticated and rationally designed central bureaucracy was

supplemented by regional administrations. Under the T'ang the regional

establishments were a source of trouble to the government. The Empire

was divided into provinces, but the provincial administrations were

superseded by Imperial Commissioners whenever an emergency arose. Later

dynasties placed the provincial system on a more stable basis, which

resulted in genuine and geographically sound regionalism. The provincial

governments were replicas in miniature of the central; their heads might

be regarded as appointive and removable satraps whose authority was a

smaller reproduction of the power of the emperor. It was not until the

Ming dynasty (A. D. 1368-1643) that the provinces took on their modern

form. The provincial governments were a source of great strength to

China in that they made possible a quasi-federal government. In the

Ch'ing period no officer was eligible to a post in his native

province;[9] this custom had considerable centripetal effect and offset

the danger that populace and officials, united by common sympathies,

might revolt or secede.[10]

Another feature to be noted about the Chinese government under the

Empire was the examination and civil service system. The T'ang dynasty

provided for three major types of examination: (1) The _chü_

corresponded most closely to a modern academic degree, and allowed the

candidate to qualify in any one of a number of subjects, including the

classics, law, and mathematics. (2) The _hsüan_ was the special

examination necessary for appointment to a post in the bureaucracy; it

was both written and oral and included the personal history of the

candidate. (3) The _k'ao_, an in-service examination, consisted of

annual reports on the performance of all officers in the Empire. They

were transmitted to the Bureau for Examination of Merits in the Ministry

of Administrators on a schedule varying with the distance of the office

from the capital. There were five points on which to report: virtue and

justice; integrity and circumspection; equity and impartiality;

diligence and activity; and one of twenty-seven special talents suitable

to the particular office in question. The grades received on these

reports determined the advancement or demotion of the officer, in

accordance with an elaborate and exact schedule.[11] All three

examinations provided the administrative form for the close relation

between the government and the scholastic elite. The _chü_, with its

emphasis on the classics, framed the content of all curriculums. The

_hsüan_, with its oral examination and personal record, made the

prospective candidate careful in observing the customs. The _k'ao_ kept

up the morale and efficiency of the bureaucracy, while the ominous

Tribunal of Censors was present to guard against abuse of the system.

Every detail was precise, well ordered, explicit, to a degree that would

delight present-day industrial personnel managers. Formulation was

refined and impressive. In fact the T'ang laws, although their part in

Chinese life was less than a Westerner might expect, were a code of such

force and appeal that the Japanese and the Annamese used them as a model

for their juridical systems.[12]

The decline of particular dynasties in China--caused by poor economic

policy, demoralization of the court, corruption of the bureaucracy,

laxity in the examinations, oppression of the farmers--did not effect

great alterations in the structure of government. With the centuries the

Chinese government settled into more and more definitive form.

Unfortunately, the Manchu government (1644-1911)[13] had sunk into

administrative demoralization when the full force of the Western impact

was felt. In the early nineteenth century a British observer wrote of an

imperial official:

The late _tungling_ [gendarmerie commander] Wanking, degraded last

year for connecting himself with a magician whose confessions went to

implicate a large number of nobles and public servants, was a Reader

at the Classical Feasts, Manchu President of the Board of Civil

Office, Revisor-General of the Veritable Records of the Reign, a

Superior of the Academy, Supervisor of the Household, t'utung of a

Banner [military division], superintendent of the Gymnasium in the

Ning-shan Palace, and of the Treasuries of the Board of Revenue, and

Visitor of the 17 Granaries in the City, and at Tungchau.[14]

When such conditions of indifference toward sharply defined hierarchic

ethics began to be common among the bureaucracy, the end of the dynasty

was near. The Chinese Empire had remained intact even when it had fallen

into the hands of Tartars, Mongols, and Manchus. It had returned to the

bases of its former greatness, and the administrative machinery created

since the day of the Shih Huang Ti continued for twenty centuries. With

the decrepitude of the Manchu dynasty, and the simultaneous collision

with the Western world, the old political system broke and had to be

reshaped into new forms. Nevertheless, even in the Republican era

techniques of the T'ang have reappeared in the administration of

government services.

Underneath all shifts there remained a series of social groupings which

were affected far less than were the broad and conspicuous central

regimes. They have existed since the times before organized government,

and may well be sufficiently strong to set the conditions under which

any government or any race of rulers will succeed or fail in China.

_Family, Village, and Hui_

The ideological control in old China operated through those groups most

closely attached to the individual. The government was not one of them.

The fundamental strength of Chinese society rests upon the cohesion and

power of three outstanding quasi-political agencies: the family system,

the village and district, and the _hui_ (associations, leagues,

societies or guilds.)[15] The family was an intricate structure,

"composed of a plurality of kin alignments into four families: the

natural family, the economic family, the religious family, and the

sib."[16] The natural family corresponded to the family of the West. The

economic family commonly extended through several degrees of kinship,

and may have included from thirty to one hundred individuals, who formed

a single economic unit, living collectively. The religious family was an

aggregate of economic families; it would be difficult to give any

specified number of constituent families as an average. This unit

provided the organization for the proper commemoration and reverence of

ancestors and maintained an ancestral shrine where the genealogical

records were kept; the cult feature has largely disappeared in modern

times. The sib resembled the clan as found in the West; its role was

determined by the immediate environment. In some cases, especially in

the South, the sib was powerful enough to engage in feuds; at times one

or more sibs dominated whole communities. In the greater part of China

it was a loose organization, holding meetings from time to time to unite

the various local religious families which constituted it.

Family consciousness played its part in sustaining certain elements of

the Confucian ideology. It stressed the idea of the carnal immortality

of the human race. It oriented the individual not only philosophically

but socially as well. The size of each family determined his position

spatially, and family continuity fixed a definite location in time for

him. With its many-handed grasp upon the individual, the family system

held him securely in place and prevented his aspiring to the arrogant

heights of nobility or falling into the degradation of a slavery in

which he might become a mere commodity. A Chinese surrounded by his

kinsmen was shielded against humiliations inflicted upon him by

outsiders and against the menace of his own potential follies. It was

largely through the family system, with its religious as well as

economic and social foundation, that the Chinese counteracted

undesirable mobility of individuals in a society stable as a whole.

Stability thus obtained a clear and undeniable purpose--the continued

generation of the human race through the continuity of innumerable

families, each determined upon survival. A materialistic interpretation

would point out the need for cheap and plentiful human labor in

maintaining the agrarian economy of China, and reduce the rationale of

the system to a mere web of justifications.

The family was equaled if not excelled in importance by the village.[17]

Had the family been the only vital social grouping, it might have been

impossible for democratic processes to develop in China. The family

pattern provided, indeed, the model for the government, but the

influence of villages in Chinese life mitigated the familistic

tendencies of government. It would have been heresy to revolt against an

unrighteous father; but there was nothing to prevent the deposition of

an evil village elder. In times of contentment, the emperor was the

father of the society; at other times he might be looked upon as a

fellow villager subject to the criticism of the people. The village was

the largest working unit of local self-government; it, and the groups

within it, such as the sib, was almost completely autonomous and subject

to outside interference only in very rare cases. At the same time, the

village was the smallest unit of district organization. The District

Magistrate, as the government officer in charge of a district containing

from one to twenty villages, relied on the village leaders in performing

the duties imposed upon him. Village government was at times very

democratic.[18]

Next in importance was the _hui_. It was in all probability the last to

appear. Neither ordained, as the family seemed to be, by the eternal

physical and biological order of things, nor made to seem natural, as

was the village, by the geographic and economic environment, this

association emerged from the Chinese propensity toward cooperation.

Paralleling and supplementing family and village, the _hui_ won for

itself an unchallenged place in the Chinese social structure. The _hui_

may be classified into six categories[19]: (1) fraternal societies; (2)

insurance groups; (3) economic guilds; (4) religious societies; (5)

political societies; and (6) militia and vigilante organizations. The

_hui_ made up the greater part of the economic organization of old

China, and offered vocational education to men not destined for

literature and administration. Under such names as the Triad and the

Lotus the _hui_ provided the party organizations of old China and

challenged the dynasties whenever resentment was ripe.

The old Chinese society, made up of innumerable families, villages, and

_hui_, comprised the whole "known world." Its strength was

inexhaustible. Having no one nerve center, the world society could not

be destroyed by the inroads of barbarians or the ravages of famine,

pestilence, and insurrection. The Confucian ideology continued. At no

one time were conditions so bad as to break the many threads of Chinese

culture and to release a new generation from tradition. Throughout the

centuries education and government continued side by side, even though

dynasties fell and the country was overrun by conquerors. The absence of

any rigid organization of legal authority facilitated survival, while a

certain minimum of order could be maintained even in the absence of an

emperor or, as more commonly occurred, in the presence of several.

The governmental superstructure kept the Chinese world together in a

formal manner; it did not give it vitality. The family, the village, and

the _hui_ were fit subjects for imperial attention, but the emperor

could not remove his sanction from their existence and thereby

annihilate them. No precarious legal personality was attributed to the

family, the village, and the _hui_, which could be extirpated by a mere

edict. It was possible for the English kings to destroy the Highland

clan of the MacGregor--"the proscribed name"--without liquidating the

members of the clan _in toto_. In China the emperor could wipe out a

family by massacre, but it was practically impossible for him to destroy

an organization without destroying all its members. On the whole,

however, the government of China pursued its three main ends--the

maintenance of the ideology (education), the defense of the realm

against barbarians (military affairs) and against adverse forces of

nature (public works), and the collection of funds for the fulfilment of

these functions (revenue).

_Governmental Changes Foreshadowing the Republic_

The pressure of the West compelled the Chinese government to define more

clearly than ever before its own boundaries, its relations with the

vassal states, and its lines of contact with the Chinese people. By the

Treaty of Nerchinsk, negotiated in 1689 with Russia, the Chinese tried

to demarcate their land frontier. The vassal nations presented a crucial

problem. The Chinese failed to make explicit their quasi suzerainty in

terms comprehensible to Western jurisprudence. At the same time they

followed a policy of brisk exaggeration of territorial rights

alternating with outright disclaimer of responsibility. The scope of

government itself was affected by new functions which arose with the

coming of the Westerners. The tax system was expanded. The development

of an imperial customs service with Western personnel and Western

methods of accounting provided the government with a source of large

revenue. The demands that Western states be given adequate consideration

in the transaction of business led to the establishment in 1860 of the

Foreign Office (_Tsung-li Yamên_), a new institution which modified the

traditional administrative pattern.

In addition, the Western states introduced their own type of government

into China through the demand that their citizens be subject only to the

law with which they were familiar at home. In dealing with Westerners

the Chinese had at first employed a code far more Draconic than the

provisions of Chinese penal practice. After many years of irritation the

Western powers, under the leadership of Great Britain, secured

extraterritorial privileges for their citizens. Extraterritoriality

placed Westerners in China solely under the jurisdiction of their

respective national representatives. If an American today were to shoot

down the Dalai Lama in Tibet, he could be tried legally only in the

United States Court in Shanghai--although it is improbable that the

Tibetans would insist upon juridical niceties. Apart from the guarantee

of personal immunity from Chinese law for their citizens, wherever they

might be in China, the Western powers, through a long series of special

arrangements and actual usage, obtained certain footholds on Chinese

soil where even Chinese were under Western rule. These areas were known

as _concessions_ and _settlements_, and the cities of their location as

the _treaty ports_. Both the presence of Westerners subject only to

Western law throughout the Empire, and of areas where Western governance

was paramount, taught the Chinese the lesson of strong government.

Nor was this all. The British-Chinese treaty of Nanking (1842) and that

with the United States (1844) both contained provisions relating to the

protection of the life and property of foreigners. The imperial

government found itself pledged to the fulfillment of a policy which

collided directly with the xenophobia engendered by ideological control.

The enforcement of these provisions, half-hearted as it was, involved

constantly increasing imperial intervention in regional affairs,

although the issues arising between the central government and the

provincial authorities were settled through negotiation rather than

enforceable commands.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century the gradual transformation in

China gave rise to a reform movement carried forward by a group of

constitutional monarchists. One of their leaders, K'ang Yu-wei, became

in 1898 the tutor of the young Emperor Kuang Hsü. The summer of that

year witnessed a steady stream of edicts which ultimately might have

made China under the leadership of the throne as progressive as Japan.

The reforms aimed primarily at efficiency and modernization, and

partially at the parliamentarization of the regime. The young Emperor,

however, was soon checked by Yüan Shih-k'ai, his leading military

adviser, and outmaneuvered by the reactionary Empress Dowager. He spent

the rest of his life in actual imprisonment, and the Six Geniuses--as

the reformers behind his policy were called--were exiled or executed.

One of those who were put to death was the poet Tan Shih-tung, a man of

great skill in the classical literature and of ambitious visions for the

future, who might, had the Hundred Days succeeded, have lived to be a

guardian of the throne in a modern Chinese Empire. Just before his

execution he wrote the following poem, calling forth the memory of

Chiang-ch'ing and Tou-keng, upright men of the past, and comparing his

faith with the mountain range of Kuang-lêng:

LAST SONG FROM PRISON

_Prison door facing me--thoughts of Chiang-ch'ing--

I could die easily, if like Tou-keng ...

Laughing and alone, I lift the knife to heaven:

I die but leave behind hopes higher than Kuang-lêng!_[20]

Reform, indeed, could not be downed. The Manchu dynasty itself began to

tread cautiously in the footsteps of Japan. In 1905 an agency was set up

for the purpose of studying various foreign forms of government and of

making recommendations for the modernization of the imperial government.

In 1908 a draft constitution, very similar to the constitution of the

Japanese Empire, was approved. A nine-year program, from 1908 to 1916

inclusive, was to lead to constitutional, parliamentary monarchy--if

parliamentary monarchy be regarded merely as a monarchy with a

parliament appended. The principle of cabinet responsibility to

parliament was not established, and from the very beginning the Manchus,

less wise than the ruling house in Japan, not only failed to grant

sufficient powers on paper but began packing the quasi-parliamentary

institutions before they were set up. Hand-picked, the preliminary

National Assembly which met in 1909 began wrangling with the Throne.[21]

The old Empress Dowager had died in the preceding year; so had the

imprisoned Emperor Kuang Hsü. The new Emperor was an infant, and the

court was little more than a gathering of bewildered Manchu princes

listening to the advice of the eunuchs and palace officials.[22] Reform

from above, had there been a single man of will and courage to take

charge of it, might have had considerable chances of success. But while

the Manchus tinkered with the superstructure of government, the

foundations of society were washing away beneath their feet. More was

involved than the improvement of administrative technique and the

illusion of popular representation. A political and social revolution

was in the making. Sun Yat-sen was the man who, more than any other

single person, shaped its course.

In 1893 Sun had gone north to advocate reform and present a petition to

Li Hung-chang, an eminent imperial statesman.[23] The mission failed. In

1897 Sun was willing to speak openly of revolution. He refrained,

however, from advocating a republic before Western audiences, even

though his party was committed to it. He wrote in his book _Kidnapped in

London_:

The prime essence of the movement was the establishment of a form of

constitutional government to supplement the old-fashioned, corrupt,

and worn-out system under which China is groaning.

It is unnecessary to enter into details as to what form of rule

obtains in China at present. It may be summed up, however, in a few

words. The people have no say whatever in the management of Imperial,

National, or even Municipal affairs. The mandarins, or local

magistrates, have full power of adjudication, from which there is no

appeal. Their word is law, and they have full scope to practice their

machinations with irresponsibility, and every officer may fatten

himself with impunity. Extortion by officials is an institution; it is

the condition on which they take office; and it is only when the

bleeder is a bungler that the government steps in with pretended

benevolence to ameliorate but more often to complete the depletion....

This official thief, with his mind warped by his mode of life, is the

ultimate authority in all matters of social, political, and criminal

life....[24]

In 1905 Sun Yat-sen lashed out at the monarchical reformers, subjecting

their motives to vigorous criticism:

Since the Boxer war many have been led to believe that the Tartar

[Manchu or Ch'ing government] is beginning to see the sign of time and

to reform itself for the betterment of the country, just from the

occasional ... edicts ... not knowing that they are mere dead letters

made for the express purpose of pacifying popular agitations. It is

absolutely impossible for the Manchus to reform the country because

reformation means detriment to them. By reformation they would be

absorbed by the Chinese people and would lose the special rights and

privileges which they are enjoying. The still darker side of the

government can be seen when the ignorance and corruptness of the

official class are brought to light. These fossilized, rotten,

good-for-nothing officials know only how to flatter and bribe the

Manchus, whereby their position may be strengthened to carry on the

trade of squeezing [graft].[25]

He also insisted that China's difficulties could be solved only by the

establishment of a republic, which he envisaged with great optimism:

A new, enlightened and progressive government must be substituted in

place of the old one; in such a case China would not only be able to

support herself but would also relieve the other countries of the

trouble of maintaining her independence and integrity. There are many

highly educated and able men among the people who would be competent

to take up the task of forming a new government, and carefully

thought-out plans have long been drawn up for the transformation of

this ... Tartar monarchy into a Republic of China. The ... masses of

the people are also ready to accept the new order of things and are

longing for a change for better to uplift them from their ...

deplorable condition of life. China is now on the eve of a great

national movement, for just a spark of light would set the whole

political forest on fire to drive out the Tartar from our land. Our

task is indeed great but it will not be an impossible one....[26]

Sun's diagnosis of the situation was remarkably correct; he clearly

sensed the coming Republic whose first president he was to become seven

years later. The ideological revolution was already under way, and the

Empire about to dissolve into the past. What neither Sun nor anyone else

realized was that ahead of China there lay government problems more

serious than misrule. The ideological shift had terminated the reality

of the old regime, and the military conditions were favorable; but would

men be ready to invest their faith durably in a new order?

NOTES

[1] See above, pp. 17 ff., 83 ff.

[2] Herrlee G. Creel, _The Birth of China_, p. 138, London, 1936.

[3] Leon Wieger, S. J., _La Chine à travers les âges: hommes et

choses_, pp. 22-25, Hsien-hsien, 1920. This is among the most useful

handbooks of Chinese history and bibliography. It is written on a

popular level and designed for the rapid and easy information of

Catholic missionaries in China. H. F. MacNair, _Modern Chinese History,

Selected Readings_, Shanghai, 1923, will be found entertaining as well

as highly informative.

[4] See John K. Shryock, _The Origin and Development of the State Cult

of Confucius_, New York, 1932, for a description of the rise of

Confucianism.

[5] For a list of the Chinese dynasties see below, p. 197.

[6] T'ang government is outlined on the basis of Baron Robert des

Rotours, _Le Traité des examens_, Paris, 1932, a lucid and detailed

translation of a section of the T'ang dynastic history dealing with the

civil service. The book includes a valuable account of the organization

of T'ang government and may well be cited as a model of Sinological

achievement. The rendering _Department of Ministerial Coordination_ was

suggested by the usage of Professor C. S. Gardner, Harvard-Yenching

Institute.

[7] Rotours, _op. cit._, p. 10. See also _ibid._, p. 3.

[8] Cf. Hans Wist, _Das Chinesische Zensorat_, Hamburg, 1932.

[9] For a Western parallel see Fritz Morstein Marx, _Civil Service in

Germany_, in: _Civil Service Abroad_, p. 181 _n._ 31, New York and

London, 1935.

[10] For further detail on local home rule see below, pp. 177 ff.

[11] Rotours, _op. cit._, pp. 26-55, "Les examens sous la dynastie des

T'ang."

[12] Jean Escarra, _Le droit chinois_, p. 97, Peiping and Paris, 1936.

This is the outstanding work on Chinese law, by a French scholar long in

the service of Chinese governments. The exhaustive bibliography of

Escarra may be supplemented by Cyrus H. Peake, "Recent Studies in

Chinese Law," _Political Science Quarterly_, vol. 52, pp. 117-138, 1937.

[13] P. C. Hsieh, _The Chinese Government_, 1644-1911, Baltimore, 1925;

William F. Mayers, _The Chinese Government_, Shanghai, 1897.

[14] T. F. Wade, "The Army of the Chinese Empire," _The Chinese

Repository_ (Canton), vol. 20, p. 300 n., 1851.

[15] The following discussion has been taken from the author's _The

Political Doctrines of Sun Yat-sen_, pp. 38-43, Baltimore, 1937.

[16] D. H. Kulp, _Family Life in South China_, p. xxiv, New York, 1925.

[17] See H. G. Creel, _Sinism_, Chicago, 1929.

[18] See Arthur H. Smith, _Village Life in China_, p. 228, New York,

1899.

[19] See J. S. Burgess, _The Guilds of Peking_, New York, 1928. The

present classification is a modification of that of Burgess.

[20] Translation by the present author.

[21] See Hsieh, _op. cit_., in note 13; Meribeth E. Cameron, _The

Reform Movement in China_, 1898-1912, Stanford, 1931; Harold M. Vinacke,

_Modern Constitutional Development in China_, Princeton, 1920.

[22] Reginald Johnston, _Twilight in the Forbidden City_, London, 1934,

presents an interesting narrative of court life before and after the

revolution of 1911-1912.

[23] Lyon Sharman, _Sun Yat-sen: His Life and Its Meaning_, pp. 30-32,

New York, 1934.

[24] Sun Yat-sen, _Kidnapped in London_, pp. 13-15, Bristol and London,

1897. This is a most engrossing work, whether considered as a political

revelation, a personal narrative, or a story of adventure.

[25] Sun Yat-sen (Hu Han-min, editor), _Tsung-li Ch'üan-chi (The

Complete Works of the Leader)_, vol. IV, p. 357, Shanghai, 1930; from

"The True Solution to the Chinese Question," pp. 347-368, an article

written by Sun himself in English.

[26] _Ibid._, p. 366.

_Chapter_ VII

THE REVOLUTION

On October 9, 1911, a follower of Sun Yat-sen, one of the heroic and

desperate "Dare-to-dies" who had harassed the imperial government for

years, was working over a bomb in the Russian concession in the upriver

port of Hankow. The bomb exploded accidentally; the secret storage of

munitions was discovered; the next day, in the ensuing turmoil, the

Republic of China was born. Double Ten Day (October 10, 1911) has since

been celebrated as the Chinese Fourth of July. When the imperial

officials sought to suppress the insurrection, they uncovered a

conspiracy in the ranks of their own troops; in self-protection the

troops revolted. In the next two months the Manchu Empire crumbled away.

Sun Yat-sen, who was in Chicago at the time of the outbreak,[1] could

trust his organization. Sure that destiny was working with him, he took

his leisure in returning to China and stopped in London to forestall

financial aid to the collapsing Empire.

_The Presidency of Sun Yat-sen and the Republican Revolution_

The fall of the Empire was not the result of a great mass movement

agitating the whole population; it developed from the revolutionary

nucleus which Sun and his followers had built up to secure power. They

had hammered away at the imperial regime by instigating mutiny and

terror for many years, since they realized that the incompetence of the

government was matched only by its impotence. The revolution itself was

a chain of rebellions, occurring province by province under the

leadership of revolutionaries or officials joining the revolution.

Except for the massacre of Manchus in some of the cities, it was a

nearly bloodless revolution. However, the various groups pushed in

different directions, and different men tried to seize power. The

constitutional monarchists compelled the throne to issue a very liberal

constitution, which might be accepted by the populace in place of the

Republican programs. Military men began to come to the fore, as the army

units alone were in a position of unchallengeable power. Men who had no

thought of revolution might join it in time to become leaders of the

revolutionary-military juntas. Li Yüan-hung, an officer of the Empire,

hid under his bed when revolutionary soldiers sought him out; given the

choice between death and adherence to the revolutionaries, he sided with

the new powers, and in a short while became the commanding officer of

the revolutionary forces in the Wu-han cities. Similar instances were

not uncommon.

The revolutionaries managed to call together representatives of their

party and of the troops to a National Convention at Nanking. They were

seriously handicapped by the absence of Sun Yat-sen, who now hastened

back to China from London. Few of the members of the revolutionary

group--heretofore forced to operate as a secret society--were well

enough known to have the prestige needed to form a new government. Huang

Hsing, Sun's chief military follower, sought to manage in the interim,

but not until the arrival of Sun Yat-sen in Shanghai on December 24,

1911, was there a prospect of consolidation. Five days later the

National Convention elected him president of the Provisional Government

of the United Provinces. On January 1, 1912, he took office; with the

adoption of the Gregorian calendar now in use, this date became the

first day of the Year I of the Chinese Republic. With the presidency

there was created a cabinet, whose ministers did not yet hold any

specific portfolios. The portions of the country under revolutionary

control were ruled for the time being by a temporary system which

combined the military and civilian governments in each province.

Meanwhile, the Empire was still the internationally recognized

government of China and continued to function in Peking. Thoroughly

frightened, the imperial court saw no alternative to calling into its

service the one man who could be expected to master the situation--Yüan

Shih-k'ai, who had ruthlessly terminated the experiment of the Hundred

Days in 1898 and whipped up the first effective modern army of the

Empire. Yüan, who had fallen into disfavor as a result of court

machinations a few years before, waited his time, receiving offers from

both sides. Finally he went to Peking, on October 27, 1911.

The negotiations which ensued over the establishment of a new government

and the pacification of the country brought into the spotlight two of

the outstanding personalities of modern China--men whose characters were

to mold the institutions in a highly plastic society and whose

influences were to last beyond their deaths. Sun Yat-sen, a Cantonese

with many overseas connections, stood outside the old-style elite--a

constitutionalist and an idealist. Yüan was a soldier and diplomat from

the North, narrow in outlook, altogether a tradition-bound official

despite his up-to-date military ideas--an opportunist and a realist in

politics. Rarely have two leaders represented such opposite extremes.

In the conclusion of the negotiations Yüan played a part which would

have filled Machiavelli with admiration. The imperial family was cajoled

into taking the baby Emperor off the throne but was at the same time

wheedled into refusing outright abdication. The edicts of February 12,

1912, are among the most curious state papers of modern times. They

turned over "the power of government" to Yüan, admitted the faults of

the dynasty, and ordered him to negotiate with the revolutionists and

establish a Republic of China. Nothing was said about any eventual

resumption of power by the dynasty, although provision was to be made

for the comfort and dignity of the court. The Manchu house was to retain

the Forbidden City (imperial palace) in Peking, where the monarch could

continue to exercise his functions, freed from the cares of government.

Sun Yat-sen indignantly repudiated any idea that the Republic derived

from a formal authorization extended by the hated Manchus--the Republic

for which he and his revolutionists had struggled for decades. But he

held his peace, unwilling to upset the chances of national unification

on a point of form. Yüan was recognized as an able man, although he

lacked trustworthiness and intellectual ability; it seemed possible to

make use of him and simultaneously to satisfy him by giving him a

position within the Republican framework. After the edicts of

abdication, the issue became one of ultra-idealist constitutionalism

versus brutal military realism.

It was agreed that Sun should keep the provisional presidency until Yüan

could be inaugurated as president. Under the circumstances it was the

only possible course. Yüan possessed decisive military power, and there

could have been no hope of bending him. Furthermore, Sun actually did

not wish the office of president. He realized that his own strength was

that of ideologue and leader and felt that by enforcing his principle of

_min shêng_[2] he could serve China best.

Yüan, it was arranged, was to come south to the new capital at Nanking.

This was something which he had no desire to do, as the city was in the

hands of the revolutionists and his army was in the north. When he was

pressed to take office, he engineered a military mutiny in the Peking

area, which did enormous property damage and gave him an adequate excuse

for remaining where he was. By thus forcing the government to establish

itself at Peking, he followed out the spirit of the imperial abdication

edict and brought the Republican regime to the very city in which the

Emperor still lived, and in which the imperial bureaucracy awaited its

new Republican garments--socially and ideologically the stronghold of

resourceful reaction. There was thus no problem of creating a new modern

administration. The old Peking mandarinate continued, and the

revolutionary Republicans came into the government offices as strangers

intruding into a closed system. For the initial months of the Republican

experiment Peking's novel status was merely the evidence of Yüan's

prestige; thereafter, Peking was to become the embodiment of archaism,

blind pragmatism, and corruption.

On March 10, 1912, Yüan Shih-k'ai took a solemn oath to preserve and

defend the Republic and assumed office as president. On the same day a

Provisional Constitution went into effect, whereby the National

Convention placed the greater share of government power in the hands of

a National Council, to serve until the promulgation of election laws for

the choice of a national parliament. Republican mistrust of Yüan was

evident in this action. Yet Sun Yat-sen was satisfied that his first

principle, nationalism, had been realized in great part by the expulsion

of the Manchus, and that his second, democracy, was in the process of

fulfillment. He turned to the realization of the third, _min shêng_.[2]

Yüan placed him in charge of all railway development in China, and Sun

cherished the freedom to carry out the practical aspect of the

revolution. He had passed beyond the stage of agitation and conspiracy,

of wandering about in the world, his life in year-long daily jeopardy,

seeking men and funds for a revolution which seemed Utopian to most. Now

he could do his work quietly, without inducing simple merchants and

workers to risk sudden death or the torture racks of the Board of

Punishments. He had no way of realizing that his miraculous success was

to be followed by defeat and that the revolution for which he had fought

was not over but had only begun.

The presidency of Sun Yat-sen in Nanking, terminated by Yüan Shih-k'ai's

assumption of office, was little more than a military and revolutionary

junta linking together the various provincial revolutionary groups. It

had to face no serious problems of administration, and the collection of

taxes was the last thing that a brand-new revolutionary government would

dare to stress in China. Its principles were republican, but it

inaugurated no formal institutions and resorted to no elections,

referenda, or plebiscites. The task of constituting democracy in China

was placed under the stewardship of the most versatile military

opportunist of the age: Yüan Shih-k'ai.

_The Parliamentary Republic_

After Sun Yat-sen relinquished the presidency to Yüan Shih-k'ai and the

Republican regime settled down in the citadel of the old regime, a form

of government was set up which did not immediately reveal itself as

patently unworkable but which in retrospect seems a curiously

ill-conceived experiment in transplanting institutions. Sun and his

followers assumed that democratic, parliamentary institutions were

adaptable, that the existing grouping would soon lend itself to the

purpose of effective multi-party government, and that parties would

arise organically from honest differences of opinion. They considered

the republicanization of the provincial and local governments of less

immediate importance than the establishment of a national democratic

order. They expected to have a constitutional government with the five

"races" of China--Chinese, Mongol, Manchu, Tibetan, and Turkic

(Mohammedan)--united under the new five-barred banner. At the time,

these assumptions seemed practicable.

The Provisional Constitution of March, 1912, established a relatively

weak presidency though with somewhat greater powers than the French.

Article 45 required the countersignature of all presidential orders by

the appropriate cabinet minister; the ministers were to be appointed by

the president with the concurrence of the legislative. Unfortunately,

the principle of ministerial responsibility to parliament was not

explicitly stated, although it might have been expected that the

far-reaching powers of the legislative body would have led to actual

parliamentarism very shortly. It was obviously the intention of the

Republicans to promote Yüan to a position of ineffectiveness. The

premier and the cabinet selected by the president with legislative

concurrence were to be subject to interpellation. On the other hand,

they were granted the privilege of speaking in the legislative body

(Articles 43-47). The unicameral National Council (_ts'an-i-yüan_)--to

continue only until the election of the legislative body--was to be

constituted in the following manner, under Article 18:

The Provinces, Inner and Outer Mongolia, and Tibet shall each elect

and depute five members to the National Council, and Ch'inghai

[Kokonor] shall elect one member.

The electoral districts and methods of election shall be decided by

the localities concerned.[3]

As a result of this procedural latitude, the delegates to the National

Council were either elected by the provincial assemblies or appointed by

the military governors or came with no formal credentials whatever. All

officials were ordered to continue in their posts. The revolutionists

still exerted control over large military bodies in the South and held

many of the provinces under their military leaders or juntas, so that

Yüan proceeded cautiously in the creation of his first administration.

He chose personalities acceptable to the revolutionists, but appointed

no outstanding men of Sun's Tung Mêng Hui.

The parliamentary system looked well enough on the surface, but the

basis of government had disappeared and the problem of mass democracy

was more fundamental than anyone then imagined. Many groups in the

country began organizing as parties; Yüan himself appeared to further

the new way. But he had his own thoughts. He ordered his followers to

enter the revolutionary units to undermine them, and simultaneously

pushed for the establishment of a party of his own. There was on all

sides a pathetic eagerness to live up to the formal expectations of the

Western world. Tragically, this government was comic opera. Yüan began

having skirmishes with the Council within a few months. The Republicans

allowed the actual power to slip away from them while seeking to

exercise the authority derived from a constitution which most citizens

of the new Republic could not understand at all. In the summer of 1912

Sun Yat-sen's followers began to face a definitely hostile executive.

The Council looked for redress but found that parliamentary tricks

turned easily against it. The conservative members, supporting Yüan,

walked out, and the Council lacked a quorum.

In August, 1912, the old revolutionary organization of Sun Yat-sen,

founded by his coordination of earlier secret societies, was transformed

into a regular party, the Kuomintang. The Kuomintang devoted themselves

to the development of genuine party government; looking upon the

Republic as their own creation, they were less ready for compromise than

Chinese usage might have required. This did not improve the position of

Sun's adherents. Yüan countered by forming the Progressive Party

(_Chinputang_). While both sides lost control over the people, the party

system was not even important enough to amount to carpetbagging. The

only power in the country, as doctrine and administration melted away,

was the military.[4]

Under the terms of the Provisional Constitution the Council was to yield

to a bicameral National Assembly, for which it should provide by law

within ten months. It was to be the duty of the National Assembly to

prepare a permanent constitution (Articles 53 and 54). In the summer of

1912 the Council passed the required law, providing for the indirect

election of a Senate and the direct election, by a limited electorate

and under a very complicated electoral scheme,[5] of a House of

Representatives. About 1/35 of 1 per cent of the total population voted.

The Kuomintang came out far ahead of any other party, with a definite

plurality but one insufficient to give it absolute control of the

Assembly, which met early in 1913. Inexperienced even in the elementary

requirements of parliamentary practice, let alone the conduct of

government, the legislative branch was destined to be sheer ornament.

The Kuomintang had relegated themselves to the occupancy of the least

important branch of the government. The new parliament met amid great

theatricals and placed heavy emphasis on form but was unable to make its

will felt. The quarrels with the President over foreign loans,

democratic policy and party rule were not settled by a showdown, but by

resort to technicalities on both sides.

Yüan, however, had his finger on the trigger. March, 1913, was marked by

the murder of Sung Chiao-jên, one of the ablest of Sun's followers. It

was the first political act to indicate that Yüan was embarking upon a

program of assassinations. Even upon this occasion, Sun Yat-sen held his

hand, ready to let the new regime prove its character. Yüan used the

waiting spell to replace Kuomintang men in the provincial armies and

governments with his own adherents. In July, 1913, a second revolution

broke out. It was a move of self-defense on the part of the Republicans,

followers of Sun. The revolution was suppressed by Yüan.

Undisturbed, the work of constitution drafting proceeded apace in the

North. Again, the trend, paradoxically, was toward French precedent. The

paradox became patent when Yüan forced the advance adoption of the

provisions relating to the presidency; on October 10, 1913, the Assembly

elected him president of the Republic. This gave him full _de jure_

status as head of the Chinese state in the eyes of the foreign powers.

On November 4 Yüan suppressed the party which had created the Republic,

the Kuomintang. This not only eliminated serious opposition to him but

paralyzed the Assembly as well. It was left without a quorum and without

a constitution under which a new Assembly could be elected--one of the

most surprising constitutional cul-de-sacs in modern times. The

dictatorship began.

_The Presidential Dictatorship of Yüan Shih-k'ai_

Not content with having immobilized the National Assembly, Yüan

proceeded to kill it. He called together an extraconstitutional body of

his supporters, known as the Political Council. It recommended two

measures: the dissolution of the National Assembly and the calling of a

Constitutional Council to frame a permanent constitution. On January 10,

1914, Yüan suspended the Assembly by presidential decree. With that day

the Chinese Republic ceased to have a government consonant with its

laws. Technically the whole Republic lapsed into unconstitutionality and

illegality, until it was swept out of existence by the National

Government in 1928.[6] Nevertheless, the military leaders had sufficient

belief in the political value of twentieth century formalities to

preserve the appearance of constitutional procedure. During the

following months Yüan's Constitutional Council, which succeeded the

Political Council and was, similarly, made up of persons favorable to

his rule, labored over another constitutional document. On May 1, 1914,

the document was promulgated under the name _Constitutional Compact_.

The Compact changed the style of Yüan's rule from a nominal

parliamentarism to presidential government, and legitimatized the

dictatorship.

Two and a half years after the establishment of the Republic, the

country had grown accustomed to the rule of Yüan. His government had the

advantage of carrying on from the seat of the former imperial

administration. Yüan's peculiar faculties of old-school diplomacy and

his grasp of modern militarism stood him in good stead. The Republic was

generally admitted to be not much of a democracy, but even democratic

Westerners applauded the hard-headed competence of the "strong man of

China." Government was more efficient and more despotic than it had been

in the last days of the Manchu dynasty; resistance and defiance did not

take open forms, except for the activities of Sun Yat-sen and his

followers, who had reverted to revolutionary tactics since the outlawry

of their party. Their agitation was spreading with rapidity. Yüan made

the same mistake the Republicans had made before: he failed to sink the

roots of government into the minds of the people and to provide a

coherent explanation for his own existence. Underestimating the change

which had taken place, Yüan sustained the illusion that the Chinese

society in which he was reared still existed. While he failed to evolve

a symbolism emphasizing the rise of a new order with him as the head,

the realization that the old Empire was gone was allowed to spread

slowly across China. There was no more throne; the child Emperor dwelt

quietly in his museum.

In 1915 Yüan embarked upon one of the strangest exploits in modern

Chinese politics. After prostituting the democratic formulas in

accordance with which he professed to govern, he began to use the same

formulas for a cautious approach to the creation of a new monarchy. He

was partly encouraged by a memorandum presented to him on August 9,

1915, by his constitutional adviser, Professor Frank Goodnow. The

memorandum suggested, as a sane political theorem, the desirability of

establishing a constitutional monarchy _if_ there was general demand for

it rather than of maintaining the trappings of Republicanism without

operative democracy. But Yüan's scheming met with strong opposition.

Both sides to the ensuing monarchical controversy misconstrued Professor

Goodnow's memorandum; Yüan's foes denounced it even as a recommendation

for autocracy. Seen from a purely institutional point of view, there was

no harm in the proposal. A disadvantage might lie in the fact that other

military leaders would be jealous of Yüan's obtaining the throne on

which so many of them speculated. If the state of mind of the Chinese

and the new doctrines of the Republicans are considered, the proposal

becomes less feasible. Having gone through the terrific mental and moral

jolt of a fundamental shift of living forms, and having realized that

the Empire was irrecoverable, substantial sections of the population

were in no mood to allow an untried Republic to be superseded by an even

less tried modern military monarchy.

Yüan used Japan's Twenty-one Demands of 1915, which might have made

China a quasi protectorate of Japan, as an argument for the immediate

necessity of strengthening the central government. In sponsoring the

movement for monarchy he virtually copied the procedure of Napoleon III

in establishing the Second Empire. The whole technique of modern

usurpation was brought into play, and no one stopped to consider who

might be impressed by it. The only audience which might have taken at

their face value Yüan's carefully staged "popular demonstrations" and

his recommendations for "representative" public bodies was the Western

public outside. Chinese familiar enough with elections to understand

their meaning were for a Republic; the Chinese who did not understand

them were not impressed.

Had China possessed a man with the administrative and military talents

of George Washington, a genuine republic might have developed from

beneath the tutelage of a strong military ruler. Sun Yat-sen, because of

his Southern birth, his thoroughly revolutionary tenets, and his

impatience with the jobbery of petty politics, was not prepared for the

presidential office in Peking. He might have headed a revolutionary

government elsewhere in China but not a carry-over administration in

Peking. Yüan misjudged his own opportunities and went back to the ritual

of the Empire in an endeavor to place himself on a widely coveted

throne. In December, 1915, after a circus of plebiscites and

constitutional councils had been provided, the constitutional monarchy

was proclaimed. In the same month Yüan performed the ancient ceremonials

of the Imperial Sacrifice to Heaven, clad in the traditional gowns of

the emperor. On Christmas Day, 1915, the province of Yünnan--in the

extreme southwest of China--revolted against Yüan. The revolt spread,

and in March, 1916, Yüan renounced the throne. His dream had come to a

dismal end; he died on June 6, 1916. In the same month Vice-President Li

Yüan-hung--the imperial officer whose political career began when he was

dragged from beneath his bed in 1911--assumed the title of president.

The National Assembly was convoked. The Provisional Constitution was put

into effect again. And, as a sign of the times, the provincial military

commanders took the new title _tuchün_ in place of the older version

_tutu_.

_The Phantom Republic in Peking_

When the Manchu Empire fell in 1911-1912, it left the military power to

Yüan Shih-k'ai, who cloaked it with the Republic which he appropriated.

When Yüan died, control of the armies passed to the provincial military

commandants whom he had installed as a prime feature of his "strong man"

regime. With the passing of the Empire, civilian bureaucracy fell into

disuse yet retained just enough cohesion to serve the purposes of Yüan,

so far as they were to be served by government. After Yüan's death, the

governments in the provinces followed the flow of power--to the

provincial commanders. The Indian summer of the parliamentary Republic

was founded upon its toleration of the army system which Yüan had left

standing in its fragments. The weight of power was now to go into these

fragments and not into the Republic, which fell heir merely to Yüan's

naive and almost contemptuously conceived "constitutional" show.

Sun Yat-sen was favorable to the newly restored Republic but did not

participate in it, since it was made up largely of second-string

revolutionists--men who had joined when the cause was winning in

1911--with a sprinkling of his own followers, together with a

substantial cohort of the new-style military. Sun had been in exile in

Japan during Yüan's regime, sounding out the possibility of Japanese

assistance in furthering his movement. Without the participation of any

group competent to attract ideological support to civilian government,

and without any one military leader able to serve or master its cause,

the Republic had to rest upon the administrative structure. Its power

was virtually nil. The legislative, as in the early days of the

Republic, was dominated by Sun's revolutionary Republicans, the

executive by a conservative cabal of soldiers. The situation differed

from the earlier one in that the military leader from the North, Tüan

Chi-jui, occupied the post of premier instead of that of president.

Within a year the fundamental contradictions in the regime displayed

themselves. Tüan quarreled with the President and the Assembly,

demanding dissolution of the latter. Not obtaining what he wished, he

joined in 1917 other military chieftains in forming a provisional

military junta in Tientsin. The President called in for his support the

most reactionary army man of all, Chang Hsün. Chang forced the

dissolution of the Assembly, the very contingency he was supposed to

prevent. He capped this act by restoring the Manchu dynasty and putting

the boy ex-Emperor Hsüan T'ung back on the throne (July 1, 1917).

While the country was startled to learn of the restoration of the

dynasty, and to receive edicts by telegraph issued in the name of Hsüan

T'ung, forces of opposition began to gather. The restoration lasted

until the Northern military leaders could catch their breaths; on July

12 Tüan Chi-jui marched back into Peking to prevent Chang Hsün from

stealing a march on him. The unfortunate ex-Emperor was promptly deposed

for the second time. He was not to be put on a throne again until he

became the Emperor of Manchoukuo in 1934.

At this juncture the arena was to broaden. In October, 1917, Sun Yat-sen

was elected Generalissimo of the South by the remnants of the parliament

which had gathered in Canton. Their action was provoked largely by

China's declaration of war on Germany--a step which Sun bitterly opposed

as serving no Chinese interest. From now on there were to be _two_

Republican traditions in China, each one of them with theoretical claims

to the legitimate succession from the 1912-1913 Republic. The government

established by Sun Yat-sen in the South did not secure any international

recognition, nor did it contain remnants of the imperial bureaucracy, or

win the respect of the soldiery. But it did fall heir to the ideological

revolution. The people were still skeptically indulgent toward Sun the

idealist and his ramshackle governments, although they conceived of

government in China largely as the problem of fattening the Peking

phantom and raising it to husky manhood. The Northern Republic survived

until 1928, increasingly a puzzle and an illusion.[7]

The details of its slow death are intricate. The military did not ignore

the Republic altogether. They requested its sanction for their

manipulation of the balance of power. The Republic legitimized the

gradations of military strength which grew out of conspiracy, tax

exploitation, opium farming, and ineffectual war. The Republic and its

presidency were the chief pawns in the pointless game of Chinese

militarism. The Republic lent a color of unity to the country and

preserved those proprieties dominant in the Chinese mind. Even banditry

becomes respectable if it observes "political" formalities, and at times

the line between banditry and generalship became a matter of day-to-day

intentions or of the size of the armed forces at hand. The government in

Peking struggled to provide a suitable organizational form for the

status quo, though never quite catching up with the new _faits

accomplis_ of each week.

In three connections the Republic of China at Peking is worthy of

consideration: in its constitutional development, which in a dreamlike

and ineffectual way mirrored the political ideals of the

nonrevolutionary elite;[8] in its international role, which was of

genuine importance and value to China; and in its administrative

accomplishments, which--for a government--were negligible to the point

of absurdity, but admirable indeed for bureaucracy working in chaos.