Constitution of 1912. At the earliest period of the restored Republic
(1917) it fell into the hands of the Anfu clique, which administered to
China a dose of Reconstruction on the American model. The treasury was
literally looted, and the politicos who attached themselves to the
government and to the military dominating it fell over each other in
their haste to sell the nation out to Japan. A peace conference with the
representatives of the South met in 1919 but accomplished nothing. A new
parliament was chosen from the areas claimed by Peking; when this passed
out of existence another parliament stemming from the National Assembly
dissolved by Yüan in 1913 assembled in 1922--a rare modern instance of a
legislative body succeeding its successors. This so-called Old
Parliament returned to the task which had been interrupted ten years
before and in 1923 gave birth to a constitution.
The 1923 constitution--China's third Republican constitution, after the
Provisional Constitution of 1912 and the Constitutional Compact of
1914--was adopted by a body revoltingly corrupt. The constitution itself
was the work of political scientists; it was as admirable a document as
John Locke's constitution for the colony of Carolina, although the
parliament elected Ts'ao Kun president under conditions which set a
record for indefensible practices. The constitution itself was
federalist, but with many adaptations of French institutions in so far
as the central government was concerned. As a theoretical device for
government, it would stand high among the constitutions of the world,
but if not stillborn it was never brought to life. Within a year it was
set aside, and another provisional system of government was established.
A committee was set to work on a fourth constitution more strongly
federal.[9] The provisional government lasted from 1924 to 1926. In 1926
Chang Tso-lin, the _tuchün_ of Manchuria, took over the city of Peking
and the government. In doing so he did not bother to appoint a
constitutional committee or to bribe a parliament. He appointed himself
dictator (_ta yüan shuai_) and let the legalistic logicians construe it
as they might. On June 5, 1928, Sun Yat-sen's armies from the South
occupied Peking, and the Peking Republic was at an end. A ghost of a
ghost, it was to reappear as a Japanese device in 1937, at a time when
constitutional debate was at a minimum.
From the metamorphoses of the Peking Republic the Chinese learned most
bitterly the lessons of political reality. It dawned upon them that
government would have to rest upon foundations reaching deep into
society and could not be superimposed upon the existing disorder. Their
constitutional experience also satiated the Chinese with Western
formalism. Yet the phantom governments at Peking enjoyed the full
recognition of the Great Powers, and the Waichiaopu (Foreign Office)
maintained an impeccable diplomatic front. Although the Chinese scored
no triumph at the Paris peace conference, they came off much better than
they would have done without any representation. Three years later, at
the Washington Conference, the Chinese, favored by the jealousies
prevailing between the other powers, won a notable diplomatic victory.
Representing a government whose authority scarcely reached beyond its
own capital and whose limited financial resources threw its diplomatic
corps largely on their own, the members of the Chinese delegation
secured advantages for China greater than any won at the time by the
Soviet Union.[10]
In the international field the Chinese owed their strength to the same
factors that weakened them at home: careful attention to form, the
anxious cherishing of prestige and appearance, and a limitless patience
which did not predispose the diplomats to violent action. Since the
Peking regime, in point of military forces available for world-wide
action, was on about the same level as Liberia, the fact that China
remained a second-rate power instead of becoming a plain victim suggests
the degree of her international prestige. The Peking government provided
a background, however shadowy, for the Chinese Foreign Office, and the
Foreign Office carefully nursed the fictions of China's international
status. Moreover, some domestic machinery remained. Around the Peking
government there clustered a group of administrations which were so
purely bureaucratic and non-policy-making in character that they were
tolerated even by the military, or else were under the protection of
international agreements. The Maritime Customs in Shanghai was staffed
in its key positions with Westerners. This feature arose out of
conditions during the T'ai-p'ing rebellion; it was later given
international status by Chinese assurances that under certain
stipulations the customs were to retain their foreign personnel. The
autonomy of the customs became a striking characteristic of the
international legal and financial position of China, since most of the
Chinese debts were secured by a mortgage on customs receipts.[11] The
Salt Revenue Administration was similarly separated from the rest of the
Chinese bureaucracy by international agreement, since loans had been
secured upon this revenue. The surpluses from both services were paid
for the greater part to the central government at Peking and provided a
definite fiscal incentive for the maintenance of the Republic. The
Chinese Post Office was also manned in part by Westerners, and it
managed to preserve reasonably good postal service throughout the
country despite the governmental anarchy which otherwise prevailed.
These administrations were largely autonomous; they made up the
deficiencies of the Peking government so far as it was within their
power. Thus the regime could boast of an excellent written constitution,
a first-class Foreign Office, several good revenue agencies, a good
postal service, and almost nothing else.
In the age of the _tuchüns_ the Peking regime had no domestic power to
speak of; most of the time government was by courtesy only.
_The Governments of Sun Yat-sen in Canton_
In 1917, when the National Assembly was dissolved for the second time by
the intervention of the _tuchün_ Chang Hsün, a group of its members met
first in Shanghai and then adjourned to Canton. Assembling as an
Extraordinary Parliament, it elected Sun Yat-sen Generalissimo of the
South. He was not given the title of president because he did not wish
to create the appearance of national disunity. Sun was in the peculiar
position of being placed in military command at the sufferance of
regional military leaders. He even had to fight for support in the rump
parliament which had elected him.
In this first Cantonese government, Sun's military objectives
overshadowed all others. Attempts were made to promote a frontal assault
on the army plague, and various expeditions were launched against the
North. Sun Yat-sen had his experiences in the years of revolt before
1911 to hearten him. The Republican Revolution of 1911-1912 was not so
much a carefully timed universal conspiracy as it was the seizure of a
few pivotal points by small bands of revolutionists, backed by
provincial support. Sun did not think in terms of nationalism as yet,
for he felt that with the expulsion of the Manchus the Chinese had
solved the major problem of foreign oppression. His course of action in
the first Cantonese government was therefore that of a man fighting on a
constitutional and democratic issue while leaning on a temporary
military government. His new regime had acquired at one time an enormous
reach of territory by bringing under its fold, through a process of
negotiation and intrigue, the leading military figures of Southern
China.
Sun was, however, working too much outside his own party. He had both
the parliament and the Southern militarists to contend with. The task of
maintaining a revolutionary movement with troops who were no more
interested in it than the troops opposing them, transcended even Sun's
optimism and courage. Despite demonstrations of his personal capacity
and bravery, he felt that his work lacked momentum. In May, 1918, after
his office as generalissimo had been abolished and he had been made one
of a Supreme Committee of Seven, Sun left for Shanghai.
In Shanghai Sun had time to ponder organizational strategy, to conduct
the world-wide operations of the Kuomintang officially now _Chung-hua
Kê-ming Tang_, or Chinese Revolutionary Party, and to consider types of
government and methods of propaganda. He worked with Judge Paul
Linebarger, his sympathizer and supporter since 1906, on a biography
similar to the campaign biographies of American presidential
candidates.[12] At this time he was still devoting himself to the
organization of the existing groups in Chinese society for revolutionary
purposes. He saw himself as the moral leader of the revolution and
simultaneously as the necessary advocate of constitutionalism. He was
anxious to implement the ideological revolution but thought that the
parliamentary democratic techniques had been designed in the West to
accomplish just that end. While he was in Shanghai, the Canton regime
carried on a fragmentary existence. In November, 1920, he returned to
Canton after his military friends had cleared the way for him. On this
occasion the Canton government came forth as a fully civilian regime.
Sun was elected Extraordinary President of the Republic of China by the
Southern parliament in April, 1921. Using the city of Canton as his
base, Sun continued the long series of military expeditions he had led
for years, trying to whip the _tuchüns_ at their own game without
becoming one himself. He personally went with forces into the field
again. In 1922 treason on the part of his chief war-lord supporter drove
him out of Canton. Back in Shanghai, he established contact with the
representative of the Soviets, Adolf Joffe; both men stipulated the
terms of the alliance between the Kuomintang and the Communists.[13]
In 1923 Sun laid new emphasis on one part of his program hitherto
neglected: the doctrine of the three stages of revolution. The
revolution had failed in fact because it had not provided adequate
measures for democratic training. The revolutionists had assumed an
organic political change, and militarists had profited by their mistake
in taking over the Republic and using its forms to subvert what were the
merest beginnings of democracy. Henceforth, the revolutionary group
would have to emphasize a sequential process in democratic state
construction: (1) the acquisition of political power by the missionaries
of the revolution; (2) the teaching of the new ideology of democracy and
the training of the people in the techniques of self-government; (3) the
establishment of constitutional democracy.[14] When offered the
opportunity of forming his third Canton government, he took no chances
and himself assumed the title generalissimo and the command of the
armies. In October, 1923, a plan was drawn up for the reorganization of
the Kuomintang, with the advice of Borodin. Next January the First
Congress of the Party opened. Sun Yat-sen, delighted with the new
instrument for promoting the ideological revolution, allowed government
problems to recede. The Party came to the front, and with the Party
organization were to be solved the problems of a universe in revolution.
During the fifteen months of life which remained to Sun Yat-sen, his
third government at Canton was not to undergo any transformation. The
strictly political purposes of the revolution had become mere adjuncts
to the ideological and military features. The government continued to
possess the now familiar parliamentary-democratic formulas which,
misused and deformed as they were throughout China, had come to be the
embroidery of might.
_The Nationalist Government, Soviet in Form_
The sorry picture of inadequacy in both the North and the South was
interrupted by the launching of the Nationalist Revolution of 1926-1927.
As a preparatory step to the acquisition of revolutionary power, Sun
Yat-sen's followers reorganized the Canton government in June, 1925.
This action followed Sun's death on March 11, 1925, in Peking, where he
had gone to take part in a reunification conference with the leading
_tuchüns_ of the North. The conference had failed, but it is
characteristic that Sun, embittered though he was, lent his last hours
to formulating a compromise. The new Canton government took the name of
_The Nationalist Government of China_, thereby disavowing succession
from the ineffectual Republic which preceded it. It remained in Canton
until the end of 1926; on January 1, 1927, it was transferred to Hankow,
the greatest inland city of China, located some six hundred miles up the
Yangtze River from Shanghai. Hankow is one of three sister cities
collectively termed the Wu-han cities; hence this phase of the
Nationalist Government is referred to as the Wu-han regime. It came to
an end in the fall of 1927, enjoyed a momentary resurrection in Canton,
and then passed into history, being succeeded by another Nationalist
Government at Nanking.
In the last two years of his life, Sun had come to stress again his
principle of nationalism. After the birth of the 1912 Republic he had
for some years placed in the foreground democracy and _min shêng_, until
he became aware that the problem of China's internal reconstruction
could not be solved without an adequate adjustment of foreign relations.
He saw that the _tuchün_ wars were influenced by competing imperialisms,
agreed upon resistance to the Chinese revolution while expressing pious
hopes for Chinese unity. Accordingly, the Kuomintang began emphasizing
its nationalist character, and Sun's followers, previously termed
Republicans or merely revolutionaries, were called Nationalists. With a
program of anti-imperialism, anti-_tuchünism_, and national unification,
the Party began making great headway. The propaganda machinery which the
Russian advisers had devised was turned against the vested interests. In
addition, the rapid rise of the Nationalists must be explained through
their party organization and the creation of agencies linked with the
Party, such as youth groups, labor unions, peasant unions, and women's
associations. Thus, instead of trying to superimpose a modern government
upon preexisting social forms, the Nationalists built their government
by molding the social groups necessary to its support.
The government was composed of a hierarchy of committees, similar to the
Soviet system in Russia. The topmost committees of the government were
subject to the control of the Central Executive Committee of the Party.
The Party secured its authority through a policy of democratic
centralism buttressed by the election of a Party Congress from the
various branches of the party. Power thus followed a perfectly clear and
traceable line; it did not depend upon mock elections or upon indefinite
delegations of authority. The party members elected the delegates to the
Party Congress; the Party Congress chose a Central Executive Committee;
the Central Executive Committee or its Standing Committee controlled the
Political Council (policy-making) and the Administrative Council
(cabinet), together with the Military Council. These three were the
supreme government agencies. The same party authorities appointed and
removed all members of all other councils in provincial or municipal
governments. There was not the faintest show of popular participation in
the government; government had become the exclusive tool of the Party.
But by being admittedly a tool, the government possessed definite power.
Party agencies opened wide the doors of mass participation, not in the
government but in the movement. The Nationalist Revolution won with the
assistance of the Communists in 1926-1927 rested on the extension of
every conceivable agitational device to every group of the population.
The government tied these devices together. Halfway on the road to
victory the differences between the Right and Left Kuomintang, and
between the Communists and the Kuomintang, became too acute to allow for
further operation. In April, 1927, Chiang K'ai-shek, the Nationalist
Generalissimo, established a Nationalist Government at Nanking. The
Nationalist Government, soviet in form, remained in Hankow for a few
more months, transferred again to Canton, and then expired. Even so, the
councils of the Nationalist governments at Canton and Wu-han had served
their purpose well; they had effected the concentration of power,
instead of its division, in the course of a revolution when
concentration was at a premium. With the approaching victory and peace,
the council form of government began to appear to the Chinese as no less
alien than parliamentarism. The Nanking government set out to
reconstitute a government both Chinese and modern.
NOTES
[1] Sun Yat-sen, _How China Was Made a Republic_ (unpublished
manuscript written in Shanghai in 1919, now in possession of the present
author), p. 40.
[2] See above, pp. 43 ff.
[3] Wu Chih-fang, _Chinese Government and Politics_, p. 361, Shanghai,
1934. Wu's work, and Kalfred Dip Lum, _Chinese Government_, Shanghai,
1934, are the two surveys in a Western language of modern Chinese
government. Wu's work, while carefully done and containing a great deal
of useful material, is patterned rather closely after Western works on
Western government and makes no attempt to transpose Chinese politics
into Chinese terms, nor does it give adequate documentation of Chinese
sources; Lum's outline is based in great part on first-hand contact with
Chinese politics and, while brief, is helpful, especially on Kuomintang
organization and problems. M. T. Z. Tyau, _Two Years of Nationalist
China_, Shanghai, 1930, is a statistical and official commemoration
volume and useful within its obvious limitations; anonymous,
_Twenty-five Years of the Chinese Republic_, Nanking, 1937, contains
short essays and monographs, some excellent, some undistinguished, on
the Nanking regime and its predecessors. See also Sih-gung Cheng,
_Modern China: A Political Study_, Oxford, 1919, and the "China" issue
of _The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science_,
vol. 152, Philadelphia, 1930.
[4] Jermyn Chi-hung Lynn, _Political Parties in China_, Peking, 1930,
gives the most detailed outline of political parties yet available.
Bitterly anti-Kuomintang, the author became pro-Japanese in the autumn
of 1937.
[5] Harold M. Vinacke, _Modern Constitutional Development in China_,
pp. 145-146, 150, Princeton, 1920.
[6] See Wu, _op. cit._ in note 3, pp. 50-51, for the problem of
constitutional succession.
[7] Bertram Lennox-Simpson, who wrote under the pseudonym Putnam Weale,
was an Englishman native to North China who spent his life editing
newspapers, writing books, and playing the game of North Chinese
politics. He was murdered in 1931. His books cover the period from the
Boxer incident to the triumph of the Nationalists of Nanking, and--while
not always reliable in detail--are stimulating contemporary documents.
_The Fight for the Republic in China_, London, 1918, and _The Vanished
Empire_, London, 1926, are very readable. His novels, which suffer from
neglect, present some aspects of Chinese and foreign life in the North
which are not dealt with by any other writer with the same
qualifications.
[8] A. N. Holcombe, _The Chinese Revolution_, pp. 96-101, Cambridge,
1930, discusses this point with clarity and vigor.
[9] Jean Escarra, _Le droit chinois_, p. 133, Peiping and Paris, 1936.
[10] W. W. Willoughby, the very competent and sympathetic adviser to
the Chinese delegation at the Washington Conference, has written _China
at the Conference_, Baltimore, 1922, and _Foreign Rights and Interests
in China_, 2 vols., Baltimore, 1927. For further treatment of recent
Chinese foreign relations see, among others, R. T. Pollard, _China's
Foreign Relations_, 1917-1931, New York, 1933.
[11] For the origin of this system see John K. Fairbank, "The Creation
of the Foreign Inspectorate of Customs at Shanghai," _The Chinese Social
and Political Science Review_ (Peiping), vol. 19, pp. 469 ff.,
1935-1936.
[12] Paul M. W. Linebarger, _Sun Yat Sen and the Chinese Republic_, New
York, 1924.
[13] See above, pp. 51 ff.
[14] This program is very pithily put by Sun in his _Fundamentals of
National Reconstruction_, issued the following year (to be found in M.
T. Z. Tyau, _op. cit._ in note 3, pp. 439 ff., and L. S. Hsü, _Sun
Yat-sen, His Political and Social Ideals_, pp. 85 ff., Los Angeles,
1933). The point is elaborated by Tsui Shu-chin, "The Influence of the
Canton-Moscow Entente upon Sun Yat-sen's Political Philosophy," _The
Chinese Social and Political Science Review_ (Peiping), vol. 18, pp. 177
ff., 1934; and Paul M. A. Linebarger, _The Political Doctrines of Sun
Yat-sen_, pp. 209-214, "The Three Stages of Revolution," Baltimore,
1937. See also Hou Yong-ling, _La vie politique et constitutionelle en
Chine_, Peiping, 1935; Tsêng Yü-hao, _Modern Chinese Legal and Political
Philosophy_, Shanghai, 1930.
_Chapter_ VIII
RECONSTRUCTION
The National Government of China set up at Nanking in April, 1927, was
not definitively organized until late that year. Chiang K'ai-shek had to
resign from the government before the Left Kuomintang group would accept
the regime. In the following year, with the return of Chiang and the
adoption of a new constitution (Organic Law of the National Government),
the Nanking government was more firmly established than any previous
government since the death of Yüan Shih-k'ai. A high price had been paid
for stability: Northern military leaders had been allowed to join it,
much as those of the South had supported Sun Yat-sen ten years before.
The break with the Communists meant stopping a vast agrarian-proletarian
revolution midway in its course, at a cost of many lives. The
Nationalists, thrust into the role of governors, could not avoid turning
against many of those who had helped to put them in power but wished to
continue the revolution.
_The National Government of China_
Despite the difficulties which it faced, the National Government had
many assets. In the realm of ideology, it had the advantage of
possessing a state philosophy and a patron saint: the _San Min Chu I_[1]
and its author, Sun Yat-sen. In the military sphere, it had at its
disposal an army unequaled in China; in the economic, the support of the
Chinese bourgeoisie, together with the friendly interest of the
capitalist powers. In the province of politics, it carried with it much
of the personnel formerly serving the Nationalist Government, soviet in
form, to which it claimed succession. Its officials were accustomed to
devote themselves seriously to government, so that from the very
beginning the Nanking government was inclined to enforce its laws as
well as promulgate them--thereby breaking with the usage of the shadow
Republic at Peking. Finally, the new government secured full
international recognition with the flight of Chang Tso-lin from Peking
and the disappearance of the rival regime in the North (1928).
Sun's state philosophy fulfilled a cardinal function. Even in its most
troubled phases, when military factors came closest to the surface of
government, the new government did not lapse into fiction. There was a
programmatic index against which Nanking's accomplishments could be
tested, and a definite long-range plan to follow. The program enabled
the National Government to utilize the forms of revolution for the
purpose of stabilizing government--far less dangerous than the practice
of their Northern predecessors, to use government in order to further
disunited military despotism. The officers of the Kuomintang exhibited a
meticulous respect for the dead Leader of their Party. Sun Yat-sen,
known by his honorific pseudonym _Chung Shan_, was buried in one of the
most magnificent tombs of modern times. In carrying out Sun's legacy,
the Kuomintang was pledged to the principles of intraparty democratic
centralism and party dictatorship over the rest of the nation. The
formal party organization was not seriously effected by the change from
a soviet form of government.
Government under the Kuomintang, despite the breakdown of morale which
followed the disintegration of the Great Revolution (1927), was
radically unlike that of the Peking regimes. In 1927, when Chiang
K'ai-shek turned against the peasant unions and officialized the labor
unions, a tendency toward outright military dictatorship became
apparent. The developments of the following ten years did not at any
time suggest that military power had meekly yielded to governmental
power, but they did indicate that government was taking an increasing
part in the control of society. The close interrelation of ideology and
government, dating from the period of the Nationalist-Communist
alliance, was to endure after the revolution had been transformed into a
reconstructive process and rebellion had been superseded by
administration. However much Sun and his teachings failed to create a
new political Islam, they weathered criticism sufficiently well to
provide a scheme of policy, political values, and broad objectives.
The influence of Sun Yat-sen was harmed, rather than reinforced, by the
hysterical ritualists who seem to be the parasites of all one-party
governments. The memory of the Leader and his teachings settled into the
stabilizing roles of founding father and general dogma. Only a few
veterans of the movement are still inspired by the fire of his words and
the vigor of his personality. To the vast bulk of Chinese public opinion
Sun Yat-sen is the human embodiment of virtuous, brave, and intelligent
conduct, whose theories are acceptable in their general form and whose
programs have proved pragmatically usable. The _San Min Chu I_ failed to
cause widespread political ecstasy; it succeeded in bringing direction
and sanity, after a limited fashion. To spread allegiance the government
fostered a Sun Yat-sen memorial ritual; every Monday morning, in every
government office, college, school, police station, and other public
building, there was held a service consisting of the reading of Sun
Yat-sen's political testament and passages from his speeches clarifying
his doctrines. The services seemed for a while to resemble a state
religion; but the moderateness and formalism of Chinese life was
inimical to the fervor necessary for political religion. The Kuomintang
and its government came to see these limitations; although the services
have remained, they are now severely secular in spirit.
The most dynamic part of the _San Min Chu I_, the doctrine of
nationalism, had contributed to placing the Kuomintang in power. The new
government was accordingly nationalist and centralistic; it opposed any
type of regionalism--political, administrative, economic, or military.
The Northern generals who sided with the government at the time of its
formation were brought within the operation of the national military
laws. When they revolted--quite properly, according to their _tuchün_
standards--against reduction of their forces in the Disbandment War of
1930-1931, they were defeated. With the Southern and the Western
military leaders Chiang was not as successful, until Japanese and
Communist pressure brought first the one and then the other group into
his fold. After actual autonomy for a number of years, the province of
Kuangtung (Canton) submitted in 1936 to the authority of the National
Government, thereby bringing to an end the generation-old division of
North and South. Nationalism and centralism affected not only the armies
but also the entire administration, whose service functions and police
powers developed amazingly. Although the Nanking government had
originally faced broad popular suspicion, it began to win genuine
respect because of its accomplishments.
Was the Nanking government a dictatorship? Its record does not justify
the assumption that it was merely to camouflage a military dictatorship
commandeered by Chiang K'ai-shek. Moreover, the policy-making power was
not by any means a prerogative of Chiang K'ai-shek. Chiang was nearly
sovereign in technical military matters and possessed more political
influence than did any other single individual. Yet the power of policy
making rested with a small group of men not over a hundred in number.
Some of the gentlest, sincerest, and quietest of these leaders had once
been _tuchüns_ in their own right; some of the most military and
forthright had never handled anything more lethal than a cash register.
The leaders tended to work within the party and government structure, so
that the political organization, while not of great simplicity or
clarity, accurately portrayed the distribution of power. No one can
gauge the degree of interdependence between the leaders of a government
system in its formative period, and between the offices which these
leaders occupy. The Sian episode indicated that the Nanking government
could continue without Chiang and that Chiang's incarceration was not
the signal for immediate anarchy. But Chiang was not actually dead, nor
was the government deprived of the support which his prestige had
generated. From 1927 to 1937 the Nanking government remained under
approximately the same leading officials.
The last test for the sources of Nanking's power may be found in
considering the relation between the men in command and the authority
which placed them there. The supreme organ of the party was the Party
Congress. This body did determine the course of government policy
frequently, and on such occasions clarified issues through action. The
Congress elected the Central Executive Committee and the Central
Supervisory Committee of the Kuomintang. The entire membership of the
Congress would vote in the elections, any of the members being eligible.
Since the Congress was composed of representatives from the various
regional and functional divisions of the party, intraparty democracy was
insured in theory and--though to a lesser extent--in practice. The two
top committees elected smaller Standing Committees; the Central
Executive Committee in addition elected the Central Political Council,
which was the highest organ of government in China and the agency
through which the party controlled the government. The Central Political
Council did not seek to keep track of the detail of government; it
outlined governmental policy, appointed major officials, and directed
rather than supervised administration. It was a policy-making body in
the strictest sense, and its action took effect upon the Council of
State, which coordinated the government establishments.[2]
Had there been a schism between the Nanking government and the
Kuomintang, it might have been possible to trace a political issue as it
was fought out--all the way from the party membership up through the
Party Congress and the Central Executive Committee, from party to
government by action of the Central Political Council, and down through
the Council of State and the subordinated government organs to the
administrative network operating upon the broad masses of the populace.
In fact, however, no issue saw the light, since the same group that
dominated the party controlled the government. The relation between the
leaders and the Party Congresses can perhaps best be compared with that
between the leading personalities of a Republican or Democratic
convention in the United States and the convention delegates. Convention
action rarely transfers power or upsets leadership, nor do constructive
plans or formulated policies emerge from convention sessions; and yet
the conventions cannot be regarded merely as tools in the hands of the
party leadership. A similar situation existed in China. Even when Chiang
and the other leaders seemed to hold the bag, the meetings of the Party
Congress did not lack importance, and the issues before the Congress
were not considered predetermined. This was no personal regime in the
Napoleonic sense. Party dictatorship expressed itself in defined forms,
as a part of Sun Yat-sen's state philosophy. Benevolent oligarchy of
patriotic modernists, acting with party sanction obtained through
intraparty democratic processes, was not foreign to Sun's mind. The
Nanking government further differed from fascist governments, and
resembled the Russian, in that it was democratic in intent; its
dictatorial character was avowedly temporary. Throughout the period
during which the Kuomintang ruled from Nanking, democracy was regarded
as a definite goal of governmental policy. The Japanese invasions
culminating in open war made impossible the immediate abrogation of
Kuomintang party dictatorship. Yet when war broke out in 1937, the
National Government was on the verge of reconstituting itself as a
democracy; but now the regime itself became itinerant, moving into the
hinterland.
The Nanking government was organized under Kuomintang rule in a form
unique among modern states. Its three most distinctive features were:
(1) the concentration of power in the supreme agencies; (2) a fivefold
division of power and function through the _yüans_; and (3) the absence
of parliamentary chambers.[3] While the Organic Law was in effect as a
constitution (1928-1931), the government was headed by a president
wielding considerable power and a Council of State which served as the
chief control agency. In 1931 a National People's Convention made up of
representatives of the Kuomintang and of occupational groups adopted a
Provisional Constitution.[4] Under this constitution the power of the
president was sharply reduced, making him practically a titular officer.
The Council of State became a more formalized agency, and the greater
weight of government routine was placed in the Executive _Yüan_. Under
the draft constitution proposed for the period after the end of party
dictatorship a presidential system was to have been inaugurated.
The years 1931-1937 were characterized by the use of the Council of
State as the supreme agency of formal government. The president of the
National Government was little more than the chairman of the Council.
The Council received instructions from the Central Political Council,
and transmitted them to the five regular departments of government in
the form of policies. Great as its powers may seem to be, the Council of
State was largely an intermediary agency, although the personal
influence of its members was extensive. The Council, with its
administrative adjuncts, was of value in that it provided an
institutional center for the government and gave governmental form to
the commands of the party. There was no judicial check on the executive
or the legislative branches.
The fivefold division of powers (adopted as the _yüan_ system) is one of
the most original points in Sun Yat-sen's political scheme. _Yüan_ is an
almost untranslatable Chinese term signifying a "public body" and used
in modern China to designate the five great coordinate departments of
government.
PARTY MEMBERSHIP
PARTY CONGRESS
CENTRAL EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE CENTRAL SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE
STANDING COMMITTEE STANDING COMMITTEE
CENTRAL POLITICAL COUNCIL
1. Secretariat for Civil Affairs
2. Secretariat for Military Affairs
3. Commission for the Disciplinary Punishment of Political Officials
PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT
COUNCIL OF STATE
1. Commission of Military Affairs
2. Board of General Staff
3. Directorate-General of Military Training
4. Military Advisory Council
5. National Reconstruction Commission
6. Academia Sinica
7. National Economic Council
8. Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum Commission
I. EXECUTIVE YÜAN
President
Vice-president
Secretariat
1. Ministry of the Interior
2. Ministry of Foreign Affairs
3. Ministry of Military Affairs
4. Ministry of the Navy
5. Ministry of Finance
6. Ministry of Industries
7. Ministry of Education
8. Ministry of Communications
9. Ministry of Railways
10. Commission on Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs
11. Commission on Overseas Chinese Affairs
12. National Health Service
13. Hopei-Chahar Political Council
14. Mongolian Local Autonomy Council
15. Weihaiwei Administration
16. Preparatory Commission for the Sikang Provincial Government
17. Boards of Trustees for Boxer Refunds
18. Committee on Efficiency
II. LEGISLATIVE YÜAN
President
Vice-president
Legislative Members
Legislative Research Bureau
Bureau of Statistics
III. JUDICIAL YÜAN
President
Vice-president
Commission for the Disciplinary Punishment of Public Functionaries
Administrative Court
Supreme Court
Ministry of Justice
IV. EXAMINATION YÜAN
President
Vice-president
Examination Commission
Ministry of Personnel
V. CONTROL YÜAN
President
Vice-president
Ministry of Audit
PROVINCIAL COMMISSIONS
_Hsien_ Municipalities
Villages
The Executive _Yüan_ was headed, as were all the others, by a
_yüan_ president (_yüan-chang_), assisted by a vice-president, a
secretary-general, and a director of political affairs. The yüan
included all the major executive ministries, and the formal meeting of
the Executive _Yüan_ was a meeting of the _Yüan_ officers, the heads of
the ministries, and other directing officials. Such meetings took place
once a week and corresponded to cabinet meetings in Western countries.
The executive work of the entire government was performed by the
Executive _Yüan_ and--through characteristic Chinese devices--the _Yüan_
Secretariat, divided into bureaus and committees, came to occupy a
position of high strategic importance in Chinese government. All
executive measures were funneled through the Secretariat, which cast
them into proper form and determined whether or not they should be put
on the _yüan_ agenda. It thus occupied a position not unlike that of the
Grand Chancery and Grand Secretariat of the T'ang dynasty or of the
Office of Transmissions under the Manchus. The Executive _Yüan_ combined
within itself nine ministries: Interior (having charge of provincial and
local government), Foreign Affairs, Military Affairs, Navy, Finance,
Industries, Education, Communications, and Railways. Included were also
a number of special commissions and agencies.
The Legislative _Yüan_ consisted of a president, a vice-president, and
eighty-six members, with an extensive administrative staff attached to
it. The _yüan_ was divided, as are parliaments, into committees, but it
was not a representative body, nor able to enact laws independently of
the other divisions of government. Its president's powers were so wide
as to make the cameral organization of the _yüan_ more apparent than
real and to reduce the _yüan_ to a legislative drafting and research
agency. The Judicial _Yüan_ was made up of four establishments: Supreme
Court, Administrative Court, Commission for the Disciplinary Punishment
of Public Functionaries (dealing with the government personnel below
political rank), and the Ministry of Justice. The Examination _Yüan_,
composed of two divisions (Examination Commission and Ministry of
Personnel) gave expression to the Chinese tradition of separate
examining agencies. Its function was to provide a merit system
applicable to the whole government staff, except those relatively few
positions which were political in nature. Because of the difficulty of
developing elaborate machinery under unusual circumstances, the
Examination _Yüan_ did not establish for itself a high standard of
accomplishment. Finally, the Control _Yüan_ served as a chamber of
censors entitled to bring suit against dishonest or treacherous
officials, and maintained a central Ministry of Audit. In the last few
years of the Nanking regime it brought over two hundred and fifty cases
to bar each year.
An informative picture of the practical workings of one of the key parts
of the National Government, the Secretariat of the Executive _Yüan_, is
given by Tsiang Ting-fu, the Chinese ambassador to the Soviet Union and
formerly one of the ranking officials of that _Yüan_:
The Bureau of General Affairs keeps the internal machinery of the
Secretariat going. It receives the dispatches and distributes them
among the sections. It manages the funds and looks after supplies.
The Bureau of Confidential Affairs handles confidential telegrams and
keeps the secret codes.
The Secretaries in the Drafting Bureau draft documents that require
high literary finish, usually formal documents.
The Reception Bureau takes care of callers and visitors and sees to it
that dignitaries who come to the Executive Yüan for business or
courtesy calls are accorded a due reception.
The Meetings Bureau arranges for all meetings held in, or under the
auspices of, the Executive Yüan.
The Compilation and Translation Bureau watches over the periodical
press, both Chinese and foreign.
The real political work is done in the Sections. Let us take up first
political correspondence. A minister, governor, or mayor sends a
dispatch to the Executive Yüan, asking for instructions in regard to,
let us say, a problem in raising funds. It goes to Section 5. The head
clerk and his assistants look up regulations, precedents, and other
relevant facts and write a memorandum. The dispatch with the
memorandum goes to the secretary or councillor in charge of the
Section, who writes a minute suggesting a solution or approving a
solution suggested by the head clerk. Then the dispatch, memorandum,
and minute go to the Director of Political Affairs, who, taking into
consideration political factors, renders a tentative decision for
final approval by the Secretary-General. The clerical staff sticks to
law, tradition, and precedent. Adjustments are usually made only by
the ranks above. As the majority of problems are so-called routine
problems, in connection with which the opinion of the clerical staff
is usually sound, the ranks above usually accept the proposed
solution. What is important and bothersome is the minority of unusual
problems, for the treatment of which procedures are varied.
The sender of a dispatch dealing with an unusual problem may call, or
send a representative to call, on the Secretary-General or the
Director of Political Affairs before or simultaneously with the
sending of the dispatch, giving a personal detailed explanation of the
matter and sounding the opinion of the Executive Yüan as represented
by the Secretary-General and the Director of Political Affairs. An
agreed solution may be arrived at during the interview. In that case
the correspondence will be only formal. But the parties involved may
disagree, in which case the Secretary-General will courteously say
that the matter must be referred to the President or to the Yüan
meeting, and the Director has an additional solution of the problem by
resorting to consultation with the Secretary-General. In some cases
the Secretary-General and the Director will decide the matter during
the interview whether the caller likes it or not.
Some unusual matters touch several jurisdictions, _i.e._, two or three
ministries; or a number of provinces or cities; or both. The Executive
Yüan then calls a meeting of representatives of the jurisdictions
affected and the matter is threshed out there. The conclusions of such
meetings may be referred to the President or to the Yüan meetings.
In dealing with unusual problems of primary importance the
Secretary-General usually consults the President, and the Director of
Political Affairs consults the Secretary-General in most cases and the
President in some cases where the work is specifically assigned to the
Director by the President.
The average of dispatches (including telegrams) received and sent out
daily by the Executive Yüan is about three hundred, of which number
only two or three need to be referred to the President or the Yüan
meeting, the rest being handled by the Secretariat without such
reference.
The Secretariat on its part, by the order of the President as Chairman
of the Yüan meeting, or on the initiative of the Secretary-General or
at the suggestion of the Director of Political Affairs, sends
dispatches to the ministries, commissions, provinces and
municipalities, in the form of decrees, ordinances, instructions,
inquiries and requests.
The energies of the clerical staff are devoted entirely to the
incoming and outgoing correspondence. About half of the time of the
secretaries and councillors is devoted to correspondence and half to
conferences. The sub-committees created by the Yüan meeting are
numerous and are almost always convoked by the Secretariat. In a few
cases the Secretary-General and the Director of Political Affairs,
usually accompanied by a secretary or councillor, attend; in most
cases, however a secretary or a councillor is designated as the Yüan's
representative. The conclusions of such sub-committees are always
reported back to the Yüan meeting.[5]
Strange as the _yüan_ system may appear, it seems to have been the most
effectual form of government that the Chinese have devised in the
Republican era. In times of military or revolutionary crisis, however,
this elaborate scheme of bureaucratic departmentalization would prove
too cumbersome for rapid readjustment and action; during the Japanese
invasions, great reliance was placed on the creation of emergency
commissions. In addition to the _yüans_ there were a number of agencies
which did not fit into the five-power scheme. Great independent
establishments were attached directly to the Council of State. An
Academia Sinica took the place of the Han Lin of imperial times as a
national center for scholarship. A National Economic Council and a
National Reconstruction Commission performed specialized functions
effectively, with assistance from experts provided by the League of
Nations. In fact, there was a scattering of foreign advisers throughout
the government. Of these the highest in rank were placed at the disposal
of the Council of State, some rendering actual technical service, others
active in unofficial representation abroad, propaganda, lobbying in
foreign capitals, or similar tasks. Other advisers were attached to the
_yüans_ and to the ministries.
Provincial government under the Nanking regime was subordinated to the
Executive _Yüan_ through the Ministry of the Interior. The provinces
each possessed a commission form of government, with the commission
chairman serving as titular head of the province. The actual operation
of the provincial governments exhibited a great deal of variation,
depending on the character of the area, the extent of its political
development, and the tangible influence enjoyed by the National
Government. The provincial commission combined the policy-making,
policy-executing, and quasi-judicial functions, operating largely on the
basis of instructions from Nanking and transmitting reports through the
Secretariat of the Executive _Yüan_ at the other end. Attached to each
commission were a secretariat and four or more departments--mainly civil
affairs, finance, reconstruction, and education. The department heads
were members of the commission--a type of government not unlike that of
American cities under the Galveston plan. The theory of Sun Yat-sen
provided, however, that the province should decrease in importance with
the growth of modern government in China, so that the dangerous
regionalism in the country would eventually be denied overt political
expression. He saw the future significance of the provincial governments
only in their role as intermediaries for _hsien_-national relationships.
Under the National Government while at Nanking, the tendency was to
centralize control and to emphasize national guidance in those provinces
squarely under Nationalist rule. In other provinces the provincial
governments tended to follow local conditions and mirror the national
standards as a matter of decorum only. The provincial governments were
far less important in the life of the provinces than was the National
Government for the nation. They had the national civilian and military
authorities to cope with, in addition to the impositions of their own
local military. Their sources of revenue were not ample, and their
authority not well established. In some provinces the commission form
was adopted only as a matter of legal compliance, leaving to local
leaders the actual conduct of affairs. In fact, reform centered on the
_hsien_ rather than the province, partly because the province was a
potential rival to the nation, and partly because the _hsien_ was a more
organic unit in Chinese society.
Between the provincial authorities and those of the _hsien_ there stood
Special Commissioners of Administrative Inspection, whose function was
to relate the two administrative units and to work for the modernization
of _hsien_ organization. The _hsien_ served, and still serves, not only
a rural area but also the central municipality in which the _hsien_
magistrate has his headquarters. The _yamên_ (official building)
occupies the center of the town, mostly a one-story edifice built around
a courtyard; some _yamêns_ still display the two flagpoles and the two
stone lions that were required by the custom of the Empire. Usually the
_yamên_ contains:
"(_a_) the rooms occupied by the tax collectors and the administrative
and judicial police; (_b_) the court and the assembly room; (_c_) the
offices of the various bureaus; (_d_) the residence for magistrates and
the dormitory for officers."[6] The conduct of _hsien_ government is
influenced by three main groups--the illiterate masses, the conservative
gentry, and the younger progressives. In those _hsien_ units where no
reformist or revolutionary pressure is felt, the magistrate and the tax
collector do little more than collect funds, and the administration is
marked by the laxity which characterized old Chinese government in its
inadequate form. The gentry, the scholar-administrators, and the tax
collectors represent a single social group and manage to rule in their
own economic interest. In other _hsien_ units the influence of modern
government is noticeable; the magistrate is in most cases a man
determined to put into effect the standards of twentieth-century
administration. The prestige and power of young men with modern
educations have so increased that they are able to obtain a considerable
number of magistracies, and if they are willing they may introduce a
respectable measure of good government and reform.
The magistrate selects his secretary and four bureau heads, subject to
the approval of the provincial authorities. The secretary performs the
work usually expected of permanent officials, carrying on much of the
routine so as to leave the magistrate free for political and
quasi-judicial functions. The secretary is virtually a vice-magistrate
and, if successful, keeps the governmental machinery of the _hsien_ in
smooth operation. When the magistrate is absent, he acts as the
substitute. The four bureaus of the _hsien_ correspond to the four chief
administrative divisions of the province--civil affairs, finance,
reconstruction, and education. An opium suppression bureau is often
added, carrying on the anti-narcotic campaign. The civil affairs bureau
has charge of the census, and supervises local areas within the
district. Such matters as police, militia, sanitary administration,
public buildings, classical shrines, and parks are frequently under its
jurisdiction. The subordinate units of administration are provisional,
but the _pao-chia_ system has been restored at the lowest level. This is
a device for the mutual guarantee, protection, and responsibility of
citizens, in which ten families make a _pao_ and ten _pao_ make a
_chia_. The tax bureau is one of the weakest links in Chinese local
government, as in this office corruption is rife, and severe oppression
of the farmers most frequent. In unreformed _hsien_ units, the tax
bureau is likely to be the political plum of members of the local
gentry, who use it to extend their tenant farms, promote usury, and
defraud the government. The provincial governments have begun to send
out accountants and to install regular bookkeeping systems--an
undertaking which if completed would be one of the major reforms of
local administration.
In the smaller _hsien_ units the magistrate is assisted for judicial
purposes by a judge; in the larger, separate courts are provided. Up to
the outbreak of hostilities in 1937 the national and provincial
governments were making great strides in reorganizing judicial
administration and in the professionalization of police work. The judges
are appointees of the provincial courts, a factor which may make for
greater professional capacity and independence. The general importance
of the _hsien_ is illustrated by the fact that in Manchoukuo the
Japanese have been forced to revive this system. They have, however,
implemented it with a Japanese officer known as the _Kanjikan_, who is
supposed to advise his Chinese colleague. The experiment is of great
interest, as it provides the acid test for the Japanese attempt actually
to administer a Chinese area. Without firm _hsien_ governments beneath
them, the Japanese puppet regimes are foredoomed to failure.[7]
Until the beginning of the undeclared war, the departmentalization and
modernization of the _hsien_ had proceeded most extensively in certain
model districts selected for the purpose of political and administrative
experimentation. Some of these had reached a level of efficiency which
augured well for the future of Chinese government. With the coming of
war, however, administrative interests had to yield in many cases to
political or military ones, but in one significant respect _hsien_
government was constructively affected. The evocation of popular
interest in and cooperation with the government caused a great
acceleration of progress toward local democracy, and focused attention
on reaction and corruption in the inland regions. War propaganda among
the masses of the people amounted to a call for public-spirited action;
such action is bound to take the form of direct military enlistment or
of collaboration in local patriotic and defense schemes.
Municipal government in old China was carried on largely by the
officials of the imperial or provincial bureaucracy. Cities and towns
were graded and even named according to the rank of the office for which
they served as headquarters. The imperial administration thus extended
to municipal affairs; each municipal government included a designated
rural area surrounding the city. With the growth of modern government in
China, plans were considered for a definite and systematic development
of municipal administration. The foreign-controlled cities of the coast
provided models of Western administration, and the Chinese were not slow
to copy. A few years ago the cities of China were divided for
administrative purposes into three categories: those administered
directly by the national government; those placed directly under the
provincial governments; and those for which no special category was
provided, leaving them under the established bureaucratic hierarchy. In
1936 there were five cities of the first class (Nanking, Peiping,
Shanghai, Tientsin, and Tsingtao) and eighteen of the second class,
including the very important cities of Hankow and Canton. The municipal
administration is headed by the mayor and the council. The mayor is
appointed by the authority under whose jurisdiction the city is placed.
The council is composed of two appointed councillors and the chiefs of
the municipal bureaus--four or more. The four required bureaus are civil
affairs, finance, public works, and education. Intracity organization
was accomplished through the use of _ch'u_, or wards, subdivided into
family groups of defined size. With the development of democracy it was
intended for each of these to take part in the promotion of
self-government; at each level representatives should be chosen by free
suffrage. The family foundation has remained a significant feature even
of municipal administration.
The chief political question before the National Government at the
outbreak of hostilities in the summer of 1937 was the adoption of a
permanent democratic constitution. This was to be accomplished in much
the same way that the Provisional Constitution had been adopted in
1931--by means of a specially elected People's Congress. In the
meantime, a draft constitution had reached a nearly final form. The
outstanding features of the draft included the strengthening of the
presidency, the abolition of the Kuomintang party dictatorship, the
extension of a widely defined suffrage to operate on an unprecedented
scale, and provision for periodically assembling People's Congresses to
take, by and large, the position of the Kuomintang by exercising the
four powers of the people: initiative, referendum, election, and recall.
The elective offices would be reduced to a few. The installation and
removal of the major government officers was a function to be divided
between the People's Congress and the president, who was himself to be
elected and recalled by the Congress.
The Japanese invasion led to the scattering and the partial suspension
of government. Military needs began to rule the hour. The Kuomintang
Party Congress held in the spring of 1938 elevated Chiang K'ai-shek to
the newly-created position of _Tsung-tsai_--a term meaning Party Leader,
which had been the office held by Sun Yat-sen under the more august
synonym _Tsung-li_. Not only was this a partial recognition of the
leadership principle[8] in a democracy at war and a testimonial to
Chiang as the supreme military leader of the Republic, but it was also a
substantial grant of power. Four new powers were given Chiang as Party
Leader: (1) the position of Chairman of the National Kuomintang
Congress; (2) the chairmanship of the Central Executive Committee of the
Kuomintang; (3) the power to ask (impliedly, to demand) that the
National Kuomintang Congress reconsider its resolutions, which amounted
to the grant of a courteous but effective conditional veto; and (4)
final authority on Central Executive Committee resolutions, by means of
a parallel veto.[9] This apparent trend toward emergency one-man control
was, however, offset by the convening on July 6, 1938, of the People's
Political Council, an advisory all-Party representative body, designed
to substitute temporarily for the again-postponed National Congress. Its
appearance was the widest break in the formal front of one-party
Kuomintang rule to occur in a decade, and was heralded as a signal for
the practical democratization of the government.
_The Chinese Soviet Republic_
After the suppression of the Marxists by Chiang K'ai-shek and the
liquidation of the Nationalist government at Wu-han, the Chinese
Communist movement took to underground agitation. It demonstrated its
power, however, by proclaiming the Canton Commune on December 11, 1927.
The Commune ended in bloody suppression. At the same time, in the far
interior, the first Chinese Soviet had been established; from it, in
Tsalin on the Hunan-Kiangsi border, was to develop the Chinese Soviet
Republic.
On the fourth anniversary of the Canton Commune the Chinese Soviet
Republic came into official being. A constitution was adopted, and soon
in the Communist districts soviets began to spread during a period of
relative peace. Nevertheless, the Soviet organization was always under
considerable pressure because of the war waged upon it by Chiang.
Although labor and agrarian legislation was adopted, the regime
had to operate under conditions of extreme military activity,
counterrevolution, and terror. Despite all these handicaps, the
Communists kept their government intact; they were able to move it
thousands of miles across China in the historic Long March from South
Central to Northwest China, which began October 16, 1934, and ended
October 20, 1935.
Under its constitution, the Chinese Soviet Republic is declared to be
"the democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants."[10] The
suffrage was set at the age of sixteen. The government was formed in a
manner similar to that employed in the U. S. S. R. before the adoption
of the new Soviet Constitution: local soviets elect district or city
soviets, which in turn elect provincial soviets, which elect a National
Congress of Soviets. In practice, the pattern could not be followed
closely, since elections were difficult to hold and territorial division
not always certain. The Central Executive Committee of the Congress of
Soviets was the chief political authority of the Communist regime; it
had the familiar executive organization of the Soviet system: a
Presidium of the Central Executive Committee and under it the People's
Council, the equivalent of a cabinet. The strength of the Chinese
Communists lay in their Party and adjunct organizations, in their land
policy, and in their Red Army.
The central government of the Chinese Soviet Republic was no mere torso.
It included the following agencies immediately subordinate to the
People's Council: the Supreme Court, the Ministry of Inspection, the
Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Land, the Ministry of Labor, the
Revolutionary Military Commissariat, the Ministry of Home Affairs, the
Political Safety Bureau, the Ministry of Communications, the People's
Economic Commissariat, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Food, the
Ministry of Education, and--strangely--the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
As a result of the kidnaping at Sian at the end of 1936, the
Nationalists and the Communists drifted toward a _rapprochement_. The
next February the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang accepted
the Communist offer of United Front collaboration, although disguising
the acceptance by formal conditions for a Communist surrender. In
September the Chinese Soviet Republic was ready to assume the name of
_Special Administrative District of the Chinese Republic_. This left
their governmental and administrative organization unaffected; nor did
it mean the dissolution of the Red Army, now also under a new name, that
of the Eighth Route Army. With the commencement of the Japanese advance,
Communist leaders began taking part in the work of the National
Government, first at Nanking and then inland.
_Other Governments in China_
As the National Government at Nanking rose to a dominant position in
Chinese affairs, regional regimes outside its fold found it less easy to
fit themselves into the framework of the new Chinese state. The
Disbandment War of 1930-1931 had witnessed the defeat of the two most
redoubtable _tuchüns_ remaining in the North. On the other hand, it
became increasingly evident that acceptance of the Nanking hegemony in
name led to the infiltration of Nanking rule in fact.
Nothing but a register of encyclopedic proportions could list and
describe the various political institutions which arose calling
themselves _governments_ in the troubled quarter-century of the Chinese
Republican era. Some have bordered on the pathological: Islamistan, for
instance, which was the work of an Englishman who proclaimed himself
emperor of a new Moslem Empire in Central Asia. The provincial
authorities of Chinese Turkestan (Sinkiang) drove him out by using
airplanes borrowed from the Soviet Union. In Foochow, in 1932-1933,
there arose a movement headed by exiled Left Kuomintang leaders and
other ultra-patriots eager for immediate war with Japan. This government
was the first in years which did not pay lip service to the _San Min Chu
I_, nor claimed legitimate descent from the movement of Sun Yat-sen and
his revolutionaries--a surprising circumstance. Its very flexible
constitution would have permitted collaboration with the Chinese
Soviets--had the Red leaders not decided against it. The other main
point in which it varied from the pattern set by the Nanking government
was its profession of federalism. Known as the Federal Revolutionary
Government of China, it lasted a few months only to be destroyed by
Chiang, who had no scruples against using the weight of his modern
armies, including planes and motorized troops. These vegetations of
government can only interest the political botanist. Far more
troublesome have been the opposition governments mentored or sponsored
by outside forces. Tibet and Sinkiang (Chinese Turkestan) provided a
fertile field of anti-Nanking agitation. Two "states" in China proper--
Manchoukuo and an equally Japanese-controlled Peking Republic
(1937)--find their counterparts in three others located in Chinese
dependencies: the Communist republics of Outer Mongolia and Tannu-Tuva,
and the ambiguous "state" in Eastern Inner Mongolia (sometimes called
_Mêngkokuo_).
These Communist republics are under stable government, and, judged from
reports which reach the outside, seem efficiently administered. They lie
in the former Imperial Russian sphere of influence, south of the
Sino-Russian border; except for the complications which would have
arisen internationally, they might just as well have been in the Soviet
Union as outside. Both governments maintain legations in Moscow. It
might be mentioned that when the Russian Red Army invaded Manchuria in
1929 during the conflict over the Chinese Eastern Railway, a Barga
Mongol Soviet was temporarily established. The Communist "states" cannot
be compared with the Chinese Soviet Republic, which depended on no
outside military support and resulted from a great ideological drive.
They serve as advance posts of the Soviet Union--precedent for the
creation of puppet states within China. Years later the Japanese
manufactured a "state" in Eastern Inner Mongolia, with the cooperation
of anti-Chinese Mongol princes, which Japan has publicized very little.
Known in the world press as _Mêngkokuo_, it provides a Japanese buffer
state to meet the Russian buffer of Outer Mongolia. On October 29, 1937,
it reached its latest phase with the proclamation of the Autonomous
Government of Inner Mongolia.
The Great Empire of Manchou, to use its present official name, arose as
Manchoukuo. The word itself was a concession to world opinion, as
Manchuria is known to the Chinese simply as the Three Eastern Provinces
(Tung San Shêng); its population is overwhelmingly Chinese. With the
development of Chinese national unity, the Japanese position in this
area was threatened. They invaded Manchuria in September, 1931; the
following year they proclaimed the independence of Manchoukuo, inviting
the young man who as a child had been the last Manchu emperor of China
to serve as the head of the state. In 1934 he was installed as Emperor
Kang Têh of the Great Empire of Manchou. The Japanese have done a great
deal toward bettering their own economic position in Manchuria, but the
effect of their policies on the Chinese population is of doubtful merit.
Equal motives underlay the rebirth of Peking, where on December 14,
1937, the Provisional Government of the Republic of China was
proclaimed.[11] The old Peking-Republican flag was flown. The heads of
the new regime were aged men who already twenty years ago had cooperated
with the Japanese. Others served under duress and performed their mock
routine in the cold agony of treason. The new administration is
honeycombed with Japanese "advisers" and under the domination of the
Japanese army.
To round out their collection of puppet governments, the Japanese
established in the spring of 1938 a Reformed Government of the Republic
of China in Nanking, and even went so far as to adopt--provisionally, at
least--the constitutional form of the National Government, which had
moved upriver. This regime was admittedly even more ephemeral than the
others, and the Japanese announced their intention of consolidating it
with the set-up they had organized in Peiping. For the time, it was to
be subordinate for purposes of theory to the Northern regime, but the
future of the whole Japanese adventure was in doubt, and that of their
half-conceived instrumentalities even more dubious.
_The Growth of Government in China_
In the decade following 1927, Chinese government became more significant
than it had been since the days of the founding emperors of the Ch'in
and the Han. Power was based on a correlation of government with
ideological and military forces. The Nationalist Party was the first to
effectuate this correlation, in part as a result of lessons learned from
the Soviet advisers in the period of collaboration.[12] The Nationalists
utilized the doctrinal bases of the _San Min Chu I_, tested in the
social revolution which arose from the Nationalist-Communist propaganda.
The great personal prestige of Sun Yat-sen was one of the most important
contributing factors to the growth of Nationalist administration in
Canton.
The military ability and political leadership of Chiang K'ai-shek
largely determined the success of the subsequent National Government.
Chiang created a military machine superior to any other in China and
coordinated army and government in such a way as to add strength to
both.[13] But Chiang stood not alone. His wife became his _alter ego_
for press relations, and important in her own right. His brother-in-law
T. V. Soong, resourceful financier, and his sisters-in-law, Mme Sun
Yat-sen (Sun's second wife) and Mme H. H. K'ung (wife of a later
minister of finance), were strong influences at Nanking. Yet these
members of the "Soong dynasty" did not shape the course of Nanking
policies as a closed concern. They were part of a larger group sharing
responsibility equally.
Once the National Government was established its success was largely the
result of success. Improvements in the international status of China
accrued to the prestige of the regime, and a new surge toward
reconstruction, delayed intolerably long by the anarchy of _tuchüns_,
occurred as the result of the Nanking hegemony. In the later years of
the National Government, before the Japanese onslaught transformed it
into a quasi-military regime fighting for its existence, the increased
extent of the national police power was brought into sharp relief. With
the extension of a unified gendarmery service over great parts of the
nation, and the development of a court system which worked well except
when under political pressure, the individual came to face government as
a reality--more than ever before, under any dynasty. The government
defied custom and tradition in promoting public health, in attacking
epidemics, in sponsoring modern burial practices, and in deriding
unhygienic superstitions. In the broad field of mores which adjoins
public health, the influence of the government made itself felt--in
reducing the cost of marriage, in promoting municipal cleanliness and
tidiness in public places, in furthering temperance. The New Life
movement combined the prestige of the government with the elasticity of
voluntary association. In its closing days Nanking whipped up an
unprecedented wave of public spirit among the masses.
As to government control of the economy, the Nanking government aimed at
system, in place of the inchoate conditions which existed before its
ascendancy. Chinese banks began to be as reliable as those of the West.
The currency was standardized on a national basis. A national fiscal
policy was adopted. A great achievement was the introduction of a
managed paper currency in a country where specie alone had been
respected for ages. Agriculture, however, was lagging behind.
Government disavowed its previous identification with a scholastic
officialdom. It dispensed with a state religion, although the
commemoration of Sun Yat-sen compensated in part for the change.
Government disclaimed any vague totalitarianism and instead clarified
its zone of functioning through the use of law. By narrowing the field
of its authority, it increased its effectiveness. Nationalization,
centralization, bureaucratization, the development of lawful process,
the emergence of a half-Western state working for Chinese needs--thus
may the growth of government be characterized in the period after 1928.
Obstacles remained, enough to dismay any ruler; but they had become
obstacles and were not impassable barriers of cynicism, incomprehension,
and futility.
The Japanese invasion of 1937 had two immediate effects on the
government. It shattered overnight the structure erected by the Nanking
regime. The work of a decade was undone. On the other hand, the Japanese
threat helped to drive the Communists and Nationalists together and
forced into the national nexus those regional leaders who were
maintaining the last vestiges of separatism. Most consequential of all:
Japan's push--the greatest invasion the Chinese had known since the
1600's--thrust government and people toward each other. Foreign troops
taught inland China what nationalism really meant.
They taught nationalism not merely with the fury of their guns, or with
the cruelties of their hysterical troops in Nanking. The Japanese
fostered nationalism most strikingly when they drove inland the
protagonists of nationalism. Students, merchants, engineers, soldiers,
administrators, physicians, and scientists of the coast were forced into
the far interior. Villagers to whom the sight of these modern Chinese
was as rare as the sight of a lama in Arkansas now had such refugees
dwelling among them. The effect of forced cultural cross-fertilization
is yet to be seen, but it may prove to be of extraordinary significance.
Chinese able to hold their own with any representative of the Western
world can now be found in the remote valleys and plateaus of the
hinterland--twentieth-century China and timeless China, united in their
hatred of the invaders, and deeply aware of their new national unity,
their desperate need for power.
NOTES
[1] See above, pp. 41 ff.
[2] See Wu Chih-fang, _Chinese Government and Politics_, pp. 147 ff.,
Shanghai, 1934.
[3] The outline given and the description offered are brief and
generalized because the Japanese invasion will probably lead to
recurrent reorganization of the government. Shih Chao-ying and Chang
Chi-hsien (editors), _The Chinese Year Book_, 1936-1937, have an
excellent series of short descriptions by acknowledged authorities of
the organs of government. Some of these are: Tsui Wei-wu, "Kuomintang,"
pp. 223-229; Ray Chang, "Central and Local Administrative Systems," pp.
230-240; Tsiang Ting-fu, "Executive Yüan," pp. 241-246; Hsieh Pao-chao,
"Legislative Yüan," pp. 247-292; Hsieh Kuan-sheng, "Judicial Yüan," pp.
293-336; Chien Chih-shiu, "Control Yüan," pp. 337-347; Chen Ta-chi,
"Examination Yüan," pp. 348-362; and Chu Shih-ming, "Army," pp. 946-955.
This annual, which is written by Chinese in English and edited by
Chinese, is not to be confused with the British _China Year Book_,
1912-; the latter gives a broad outline of Chinese government.
[4] Kalfred Dip Lum, _Chinese Government_, Shanghai, 1934. The author
was himself a member of this convention; his work, therefore, possesses
unusual interest.
[5] Tsiang Ting-fu, _loc. cit._ in note 3, pp. 244-245.
[6] A number of French doctoral dissertations by Chinese students deal
with Chinese local government. Although they are of uneven quality, some
give considerable material not otherwise available in a Western
language. Among these are Chang-Yu-Sing, _L'Autonomie locale en Chine_,
Nancy, 1933; Hsu Han-hao, _L'Administration provinciale en Chine_,
Nancy, 1931; Ku-Yen-Ju, _Le Regime actuel le l'indépendance
decentralisée en Chine_, Nancy, 1931; and Loo Kon-tung, _La Vie
municipale et l'urbanisme en Chine_, Lyon, 1934. Among the most valuable
and informing pictures of hsien government is "Hsien Government and
Functions" by W. H. Ma, _The Chinese Recorder_ (Shanghai), vol. 68, pp.
506-512, 1937. The quotation is from p. 506. The _Information Bulletins_
published by the Council of International Affairs, Nanking, 1936-1937,
include much material on Chinese politics and government. Especially
interesting are E. C. Tang, _Five Years of the Control Yüan_, Nanking,
1936, and C. L. Hsia, _Background and Features of the Draft Constitution
of China_, Nanking, 1937.
[7] See "An Account of the Hsien and Banner Council System of
Manchoukuo," _Contemporary Manchuria_ (Dairen), vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 92
ff., 1938.
[8] Compare the position of Chiang as Party Leader in China with that
of the _Führer_ in Germany, as described in Fritz Morstein Marx,
_Government in the Third Reich_, 2d ed., pp. 62 ff., New York and
London, 1937.
[9] See the news reports in _The China Weekly Review_ (Shanghai), vol.
84, pp. 150 ff., 1938.
[10] See _Fundamental Laws of the Chinese Soviet Republic_, p. 18, New
York, 1934. Edgar Snow's _Red Star Over China_, New York, 1938, is the
best book on the Chinese Communists. P. Miff, _Heroic China_, New York,
1937, is a useful condensed history of Communism in China based on the
material currently available in the Soviet press. Mao Tse-tung, Wang
Ming and others, _China: The March Toward Unity_, New York, 1937,
contains some of Snow's material and also translations of important
speeches and manifestoes regarding the inauguration of a United Front
policy. A considerable amount of Chinese Communist material is to be
found in the magazines _The Voice of China_ (now suspended), Shanghai,
and _China Today_, New York.
[11] For a description of the nature and organization of the
pro-Japanese Peking regime of 1937-1938 see Andrew W. Canniff, "Japan's
Puppets in China," _Asia_, vol. 38, pp. 151-153, 1938. The new Nanking
regime is described in the _China Weekly Review_ (Shanghai), Apr. 2,
1938.
[12] Tsui Shu-chin, "The Influence of the Canton-Moscow Entente upon
Sun Yat-sen's Revolutionary Tactics," _The Chinese Social and Political
Science Review_ (Peiping), vol. 20, pp. 101 ff., 1936.
[13] For biographies of Chiang K'ai-shek see Chen Tsung-hsi, Wang
An-tsiang, and Wang I-ting, _General Chiang Kai-shek, the Builder of New
China_, Shanghai, 1929; Gustav Amann, _Chiang Kaishek und die Regierung
der Kuomintang in China_, Berlin and Heidelberg, 1936, which is only
incidentally a biography of Chiang, since its scope is that of providing
nation-wide reportage; Hollington K. Tong, _Chiang Kai-shek_, 2 vols.,
Shanghai, 1937; and Robert Berkov, _Strong Man of China_, Boston, 1938.
The Japanese retired Admiral Ishimaru Tota published a sensational life
of Chiang (which appeared in Chinese as _Chiang Chieh-shih Wei-ta_,
Shanghai, 1937); since Mr. Ishimaru's other works have been translated
into English, this one may soon be available for Western readers.
CONCLUSION
Government in China has in the Republican era undergone one of the most
significant transformations to be found anywhere in the world's
political experience. The oldest society on earth found itself forced to
redefine its position and to reconstruct its ways of thought and
internal means of organization. Pressure from without compelled China to
adopt the modern state. Chinese society was required to incorporate this
state and all implied institutions in its routine living. The earlier
period of the Republic marks an epoch in which modern forms had been
established in harmony with the accepted standards of the Western state
system. Chinese society fell into chaos beneath the up-to-date
superstructure. The later period witnessed the correlation of state and
society by coordination of ideological, military, and governmental
power. From the collapse of the Manchu rule in 1911 to the operative
zest of the National Government at Nanking in 1937 there was a
revolution in the processes of government which for completeness can
compare with any century of Western transformation.
_The Collapse of the Imperial Society_
Western ideology has failed to enter China as a constructive whole, but
it has smashed whatever reality there was to the old world view.
Western-educated Chinese leadership has undertaken the task of governing
a people which has learned only indirectly of the West. In carrying out
a program of adaptation, contemporary Chinese leadership has relied on
Sun Yat-sen's phrase, "modernization without Westernization." But a
dilemma remains. How can the standards of the modern world be divorced
from their Western origins? How can Western technology be used without
the attitude of mind which has created it and brought it to operative
efficiency? How can a world which never knew Rome or the Normanic _Curia
Regis_ know jurisprudence? How can modern government be made Chinese,
when government itself has meant something far different in China from
what it has meant in the West?
Further, the nature of Chinese leadership has not only been transformed
from being literary and ethical in its orientation to being technical
and legal; it has also been transformed socially in the replacement of
scholars by soldiers. The ideal ruler of old was a humane classicist
with a taste for historical studies; the contemporary Chinese ruler must
be military, if not militaristic, and must have the inevitable
background of engineering and management which modern war connotes. The
soldier must collaborate with the modern administrator, while both
recapture the high ideals of devotion typical of the old scholastic
rule, even if they cannot use its substance. These imperatives are
indispensable if China is to live.
Finally, the language system which did so much to create and then
perpetuate the scholastic elite through thousands of years of Chinese
culture has now submitted to changes deeper and more far-reaching than
any in the past. The development of the _pai-hua_ school of literature
and the progress of mass education indicate that even with ideographs
the Chinese can reach conditions of uniform literacy approximating those
which prevail in the advanced Western nations. If the alphabetization of
the Chinese language, which is now in the form of tentative experiment,
should become a fact, even more striking developments could take place.
Reading and writing, and on this basis the transmission of authoritative
tenets, does not presuppose profound economic adjustments. The modern
Chinese will know his classics increasingly through paraphrases no more
difficult than a newspaper column. When it is realized that the
simplification of intellectual activity is offered to a people schooled
in the idolatry of books, the potentialities of educational and
intellectual renaissance--already partially realized--become apparent.
With the disappearance of the imperial world society of the Confucians
as a consequence of its encirclement by Westernized states, with the
passing of the scholars and the rise of Western-trained soldiers,
lawyers, and technicians, and with the alteration of the linguistic and
intellectual foundation upon which the old society rested, what is there
left of old China?
_The Nature of the Transformation_
In the first place, the ideological change is not complete. No Western
idea can enter China unimpaired. Sun Yat-sen was influenced by the
almost entirely contradictory notions of Western nationalism, democracy,
and socialism. In the _San Min Chu I_ their Western identity was
destroyed, and the new doctrines had much in common with the past.
Western ideas served largely as a mold; when the mold was removed, the
form was Western but the content was still Chinese. Mazzini and
Confucius might both approve of Sun's political doctrines.
Secondly, the extrapolitical agencies of Chinese life remain. Chinese
society may be shattered in dogma, but it persists in fact. The family,
though subject to legal redefinition caused by Western cultural and
economic influences, nevertheless plays a role far greater than in the
West. The village is still the fundamental grouping among the rural
masses. The guild system is impaired by the Western impact, but the
party organizations--Nationalist and Communist--have absorbed much of
the strength which once lay in the _hui_. Under foreign domination,
these institutions may play a determining role in the struggle against
the intruder.
Thirdly, for modern government the Chinese have resources of their own
experience on which to rely. But they also have Western devices and
prescriptions. The National Government, while falling short of Western
levels of government efficiency, nevertheless trained large numbers of
Chinese to think in terms of the modern state. But no new pattern has as
yet crystallized. Chinese political and military development may well
present a flexibility beyond Western grasp.
Fourth, the Chinese have still ahead of them the choice of criteria of
authority to prevail in society. Learning, office, property played a
decisive part in the old society. Hitherto, the Republic has grown with
three modes of power: ideological, military, governmental. The relation
between them is not yet determined.
_The Problems of Government in China_
Among the governmental problems confronting China the acquisition of
national territorial sovereignty stands out. Ever since the
establishment of the Republic the Chinese have grown acutely conscious
of the fact that some of their most important economic centers have been
lifted out of the national territory. Sun Yat-sen realized in the
frustration of his first efforts toward republicanization and social
policy that the problems of internal government could not be settled
unless the people as a whole were free. Without general freedom there
could be no question of democracy, no question of a coordinated plan for
the realization of the _min shêng_ principle.[1] Observing the intimate
relation between the _tuchüns_ and the foreign interests, which often
favored them, Sun and his followers began to stress their nationalist
role. With the Japanese invasion of the Northeast in 1931, of Shanghai
in 1932, of Inner Mongolia and North China in the following years, and
of China as a whole in 1937, the issue of territorial sovereignty has
become the most important one of all. Until it is settled, all other
questions must necessarily be considered in their relation to it.
Second, the question of economic sustenance and development is becoming
pressing. Without an adequate economic base, the Chinese population
lives under the constant threat of simply starving to death. Military
difficulties emphasize this problem; in fact, military effectiveness and
strategy will have to depend upon the physical existence of the people
in and behind the lines. The Chinese masses have lived close to the edge
of starvation for a long time. As a consequence, the Chinese cannot wage
war but in close proximity to the point of economic paralysis--plain
exhaustion of the physical necessities of life. The economic problem
cannot wait for spontaneous self-cure.
Third, the Chinese will have to recognize the need for politicalization
of public opinion. They must evolve the faculty of transforming group
opinion into governmental or organizational action. They must acquire
techniques for group collaboration which will allow them to break down
traditional groups into more diversified units--a government commission,
a factory workshop, an army unit--without reference to family bonds or
village and _hui_ connections. This is less a problem of doctrine or
education than one of habit and practice.
Fourth, the restoration of national prestige is necessary to the
security of the Chinese nation in the international sphere, and to the
wholesome development of the Chinese people within their national
boundaries as well. They cannot effectively borrow from the West if they
do so reluctantly, overcome by the thought of inferiority or by shame.
Unless they conquer their present handicap, the Chinese will continue to
lack self-confidence.
Fifth, the army problem must be solved. In the last analysis, the excess
of men under arms damages the Chinese military, as the number of
well-equipped effectives remains disproportionately small. The hordes of
half-armed soldiers constitute a heavy burden upon the society, reduce
the general economic level, and--by affording one particular group a
disproportionate opportunity for making its preferences felt--brutalize
the operation of public opinion and discourage peaceable group pursuit.
Sixth, the Chinese state--if China is to solve political questions
through governmental procedures--must be constituted as a clear and
legal entity. The old imperial society of China was able to dispense
with law through reliance upon social forces expressing themselves in a
large number of small but stable units. If these disappear the question
arises: How can the individual conceive clearly his relationships within
Chinese society? Systematized modern organization requires a legal
framework.
_The Question of Chinese Political Survival_
That the Chinese will survive, biologically, as a race--this no one
doubts. That the Chinese will survive culturally is more open to
question. The Chinese absorbed all their conquerors of the past because
the country was large, because the people were extraordinarily
homogeneous in ideology and habit, because the Chinese were wealthier
than their conquerors and more cultured. Absorption or cultural
extinction is not a matter of race; it is a question of ideology, of
thought and the habits which arise from ways of thought. What ways of
thought are there today that will absorb the conquerors? What ways of
thought are there that the conquerors might tear apart from the long
past, to change China into a mere geographical expression?
In the past, China has been conquered by invaders who accepted the
Chinese estimate of China, and who reciprocated the Chinese self-esteem
with a deep admiration for Chinese culture. China's modern invaders
bring with them a veritable cult of national self-aggrandizement. Their
fondness for the Chinese past is mixed with contempt for modern China.
Will the Chinese preserve their national equanimity and sanity in the
face of such an attitude? Much depends upon their military and political
fortune and its effect upon their confidence.
Government in the Republican era demonstrates the fertility and
inventiveness of the Chinese mind in building political and
administrative institutions and in finding means of uniting and
controlling the Chinese as a people. When the chaos from which they have
been emerging is considered, their recent accomplishments are an
attestation of political ability. The National Government and the
Chinese Soviet Republic were worthy adversaries; each met disastrous
odds, not the least of which was the other. Their governmental forms may
be destroyed and yet reappear so long as the Chinese remain Chinese in
the sense of their long past. Sun Yat-sen expressed his countrymen's
elementary social and national consciousness, so different from the
feverish nationalism of the West, in very clear language:
Suppose that we, Chinese, were naturalized English or Americans and
helped England or America to conquer China on the principle that we
accept cosmopolitanism, would our consciences, I ask you, be at rest
or not? If our consciences troubled us, that would be a sign that we
have nationalism; nationalism would trouble our consciences.[2]
Such nationalism may prove indestructible. With democracy and _min
shêng_ as nationalism's corollaries, China promises to contribute a gift
of peace and political intelligence to the world, and may yet return to
her ancient role as the pacific preceptress of nations.
NOTES
[1] See above, pp. 41 ff.
[2] Paschal M. d'Elia, S. J., _The Triple Demism of Sun Yat-sen_,
p. 132, Wuchang, 1931.
CHRONOLOGY OF DYNASTIES
This is the accepted time scheme in China. The dates are the Western
equivalents of the most widely current Chinese computation, which is
known to be incorrect or haphazard from the eighth century B.C. back.
The periods given for the dynasties are chronological formulas rather
than the exact expression of political realities. For a discussion of
the materials of Chinese historiography, see Charles S. Gardner,
_Chinese Traditional Historiography_, Cambridge, 1938. For an excellent
short summary of Chinese history, see the "Historical Sketch" by Lei
Hai-tsung in _The Chinese Year Book_, 1936-1937, Shanghai. Chronologies
are to be found in the major Chinese-English dictionaries, and--among
many others--in Leon Wieger, S. J., _La Chine à travers les âges_,
Hsien-hsien, 1920, where they are accompanied by a great deal of the
old-style, uncritical, but nevertheless informative, Chinese
scholarship.
HSIA ended 1765 (?)B.C. } prehistoric
SHANG 1765(?)-1123 (?)B.C. } or
CHOU 1122(?)-256 B.C. } semihistoric
_Ch'un Ch'in_ (Spring and
Autumn Epoch) 770-473 B.C.
_Chan Kuo_ (Warring States
Epoch) 473-221 B.C.
CH'IN 221-203 B.C.
EARLY HAN (including Wang Mang) 202 B.C.-A.D. 25
LATER HAN A.D. 25-220
SAN KUO (Three Kingdoms) A.D. 221-264 }
CHIN A.D. 265-419 } China's
NAN PEI CH'AO (Northern } "dark ages"
and Southern Dynasties) A.D. 420-588 }
SUI A.D. 589-619
T'ANG A.D. 620-906
WU TAI (Five Dynasties) A.D. 907-960
SUNG A.D. 960-1279
YÜAN (the Mongols) A.D. 1280-1367
MING A.D. 1368-1643
CH'ING (the Manchus) A.D. 1644-1911
MIN KUO (The Republic) 1912-
INDEX
A
Administration (_see_ Hsien; Scholastic bureaucracy; and _Yüan_
system)
Agrarian problems, 115ff.
Aircraft, military, 108ff.
Anfu party, after 1916, 47, 157
Armies, under the Han, 83ff.;
Manchu period, 86ff.;
Nationalist, 105ff.;
national, 110ff.;
_tuchünal_, 104ff.
B
Barga Mongol Soviet Republic, 185
Borodin, Michael, 53, 162
Boxer uprising, 95, 117
Buddhism, 24, 131
C
Canton governments (established by Sun in opposition to the Peking
Republic), 156ff., 160ff.
Canton-Moscow entente (_see_ Nationalist-Communist coalition)
Capitalism, 46, 69
Chan Kuo epoch, 473-221 B.C., 15ff., 82
Chang Chung-chang, the Dog-Meat General, 103
Chang Hsüeh-liang, 1898- (ex-_tuchün_ of Manchuria, son of
Chang Tso-lin), 108
Chang Hsün (monarchist _tuchün_), 156
Chang Tso-lin, 1876-1928 (_tuchün_ of Manchuria), 103ff., 158, 168
Charioteers (Chou period), 80ff.
Ch'en Tu-hsiu, 1879- (excommunicated Communist leader), 65
Chiang K'ai-shek [Chiang Chieh-shih], 1888- (military heir
to Sun Yat-sen; educated in Japan, further trained by Russians,
advised by Germans; leading general in China after 1927, and
outstanding figure in the National Government), 52, 105ff., 122,
164, 182
Ch'in Shih Huang Ti, 259-210 B.C. (king of Ch'in, legalist, despot,
unifier, conquered all China by 221 B.C.), 80ff., 128ff.
Chinese Soviet Republic (established in Kiangsi, 1931; merged with
National Government, 1937), 66, 182ff.
Ch'ing dynasty (_see_ Manchu dynasty)
Chinputang (Progressive Party), 151
Chou, Duke of (died 1105 B.C.[?]; semi-historic state founder), 127
Chou dynasty, 1122(?)-256 B.C., 14ff., 80ff., 127ff.
Christianity, 48ff.
Chu Hsi, 1130-1200 (Sung philosopher; interpreter of Confucianism), 16
Ch'un Ch'iu epoch, 770-473 B.C., 15, 81, 128
Communism, 51ff., 63ff., 72ff., 182ff.
Communist Party, 54ff., 68, 182ff.
Concessions, foreign, 140
Confucius [K'ung Ch'iu], 551-479 B.C. (China's most important
philosopher, spent his life teaching, with intervals of practical
administration), 15ff., 128
Constitutions: Constitution of 1923, 158;
Constitutional Compact, 1914, 153;
Draft Constitution, 1937, 181;
Nanking Organic Law, 1928, 172;
Nanking Provisional Constitution, 1931, 172;
Provisional Constitution of 1912, 148ff.
Council of State (_see_ Yüan system)
Customs, Maritime, 159
D
Democracy (_see_ San Min Chu I)
Double Ten Day, 145
E
Emperor, in old China, 18ff., 130ff.
Empress Dowager Tzu[)u] Hsi [Yeho-nola], 1835-1908 (actual ruler of
China in the latter days of the Ch'ing), 141
Extraterritoriality, 140
F
Family system, 3, 136ff.
Federal Revolutionary Government, 1932-1933 (Foochow), 184ff.
Fêng Yü-hsiang, 1880- (the Christian general,
later pro-Soviet, joined the Nationalists, revolted in 1930, took
part in anti-Japanese agitation), 103ff.
Feudalism, 80ff.
Foreign Office, 139, 159
G
Genyosha (ultra-patriotic Japanese group), 71
George, Henry, 118
Goodnow, Professor Frank, 154
Gordon, Charles George, 1833-1885 (British commander of the
Ever-Victorious Army), 93
H
Han dynasty, 202 B.C.-A.D. 220, 82ff., 116, 129
Han Lin (Imperial Academy), 130, 177
Hsia dynasty, 2205(?)-1765(?) B.C., 13
_Hsien_ (district) system, 178ff.
Hsüan T'ung (last Manchu emperor of China; abdicated in his boyhood;
now Kang Têh, Emperor of Manchoukuo), 156, 186
Hu Han-min, 1886-1937 (leader, Right Kuomintang), 59
Hu Shih, 1891- (philosopher, literary critic, language reformer), 76
Huang Hsing (early military leader of Republicans), 96
_Hui_ (guild, league) system, 3, 136ff.
Hundred Days, the (see Reform Movement)
I
Ideology (see San Min Chu I)
Imperialism, 119ff.
Islam, 24ff., 94
Islamistan, 184
J
Japanese-Chinese conflict, 34, 69ff., 74, 122ff., 154, 188ff.
"Japanese Monroe Doctrine," 70
Joffe, Adolf (Soviet agent in China), 51ff., 161ff.
K
K'ang Yu-wei, 1856-1928 (monarchical reformer), 140
Kuang Hsü, Emperor, 1871-1908 (modernist and reformer), 95, 140ff.
Kublai Khan, 1214-1294 (emperor, Yüan dynasty), 88
K'ung, H. H. [K'ung Hsiang-hsi], 1881- (industrial and financial
administrator; Kuomintang leader), 60
Kuomintang, 31ff., 38ff., 50ff., 57ff., 72ff., 161ff., 167ff.
L
Lao Tz[)u], traditionally 6th century B.C. (founder of Taoism,
mystical philosophy antistate in effect), 24, 128
Li Hung-chang, 1822-1901 (Ch'ing viceroy), 92, 142
Li Yüan-hung (military opportunist; once President), 146, 155
Linebarger, Judge Paul (adviser to Sun Yat-sen), 161
Local government (_see_ Hsien)
M
Manchoukuo, 28, 72, 185ff.
Manchu (Ch'ing) dynasty, 1644-1911, 32, 86ff., 135ff.
Mandarins (_see_ Scholastic bureaucracy)
Marxism (_see_ Communism)
Mêngkokuo, 185
Militarism (_see_ Armies; _Tuchünism_)
_Min shêng_ (_see_ San Min Chu I)
Ming dynasty, A.D. 1368-1643, 17, 85
Missionaries (_see_ Christianity)
Mohammedanism (_see_ Islam)
Municipal government, 181
N
Nanking government (_see_ National Government of China; "Reformed
Government")
National Government of China (Nanking, 1927-1937; inland thereafter),
114, 164, 167ff.
Nationalism (_see_ San Min Chu I)
Nationalist-Communist coalition 1923-1927, 54ff., 161ff.
Nationalist Government at Nanking (_see_ National Government of
China)
"Nationalist Government" of Peking, 1930-1931 (rebellious coalition of
Northern tuchüns and Left Kuomintang; suppressed), 59, 107
Nationalist Government, soviet in form (Canton, 1925-1926; Wu-han,
1926-1927), 162ff.
Nationalists (_see_ Kuomintang)
New Life movement, 61
O
Opportunist movements, 44ff.
Outer Mongol People's Republic, 185ff.
Overseas Chinese, 35ff.
P
Pan-Asianism, 47, 70ff.
Pan-Mongolism, 47
Parliamentary Republic at Peking, 1912-1928, 114ff., 149ff., 157ff.
Party Congress, Kuomintang, 170ff.
Political doctrines, Sun Yat-sen's, 41ff.
Pro-Japanese movements, 47
Propaganda, 23ff.
Provincial government, 134, 177ff.
"Provisional Government" at Peking, 1937- , 186
Provisional Government of the United Provinces of China, Nanking,
1911-1912, 146
R
Red Army, Chinese, 107, 182ff.
Reform Movement, Manchu, 140ff.
"Reformed Government" at Nanking, 1938- , 186
Republicans (_see_ Kuomintang)
Revolution, doctrine of, 59, 162;
of 1911-1912 [the Republican Revolution], 38, 97ff., 145ff.;
of 1926-1927 [the Great Revolution], 55, 105ff., 168
Revolutionists (_see_ Kuomintang)
S
Salt Revenue Administration, 159ff.
San Min Chu I (the philosophy of Sun Yat-sen, since 1927 the official
state dogma of China), 36, 41ff., 59ff., 72ff., 120, 167ff.
Scholastic bureaucracy, 5, 86, 129ff., 188
Settlements, foreign, 140
Shang dynasty, 1765(?)-1123(?) B.C., 14, 80, 126
Shih Huang Ti (_see_ Ch'in Shih Huang Ti)
Siam, 69
Sian, kidnaping of Chiang K'ai-shek at, 62, 66ff.
Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, 34
Soong, T. V. [Sung Tz[)u]-wen], 1894- (brother-in-law of Sun
Yat-sen; Kuomintang leader; finance administrator), 59ff., 121
Soviet Republic, Chinese (_see_ Chinese Soviet Republic)
Soviet Russia (_see_ Nationalist-Communist coalition)
Sun K'ê [Sun Fo], 1891- (son of Sun Yat-sen; Kuomintang
leader; railway administrator), 59ff.
Sun Yat-sen [Sun I-hsien; Sun Wên], 1867(?)-1925 (agitated for a
republic; first President, 1912; author of the San Min Chu I; elected
Leader, Tsung-li, of the Kuomintang; known after death as Chung Shan),
31ff.
Sun Yat-sen, Mme., 59
Sung Chiao-jen, Nationalist, 152
Sung dynasty, A.D. 960-1279, 1, 16
T
Taikwa reforms, 645 A.D., 132
T'ai-p'ing rebellion, 1849-1865 (Christian agrarian jacquerie), 32ff.,
117
T'ang dynasty, A.D. 620-906, 1, 85, 132ff.
Tannu-Tuva People's Republic, 185
Taoism (_see_ Lao Tz[)u])
Toa-shugi [Far-Easternism], 71
Treaties, with Western states, 48, 139ff.
Treaty ports, 140
Tsao Kun (Northern tuchün), 103
Tsêng Kuo-fan, 1811-1872 (Ch'ing viceroy), 82
Tuan Chi-jui (Northern _tuchün_; once President), 103
_Tuchünism_, 45ff., 76ff., 107ff., 114ff., 157
Tungpei troops (Chinese soldiers exiled from Manchuria), 67
U
United Front policy, 1937- , 60, 67ff., 72ff., 184
V
Village system, 3, 136ff.
W
Wang Ch'ing-wei, 1885- (leader, Left Kuomintang), 59
Wang Mang, 33 B.C.-A.D. 23 (Utopian who usurped the throne, dividing
early and later Han), 17
War, in Chinese thought, 79
War lord (_see Tuchünism_)
Ward, Frederick Townsend, 1831-1862 (American adventurer in Manchu
service), 93
Whampoa Military Academy, 105
Wu Chih-hui, 1864- (Kuomintang leader with anarchist leanings), 59
Wu P'ei-fu (_tuchün_ of the Yangtze valley), 28, 103ff.
Wu-han regime (_see_ Nationalist Government, soviet in form)
Y
Yellow Turbans, 3rd century A.D. (farmer rebels), 63
Yen Hsi-shan, 1881- (the "Model Governor"; Northern _tuchün_ who
joined the Nationalists, revolted in 1930, subsequently retired), 103
Yen, Dr. James [Yen Yang-chu], 1894- (mass-education leader), 76
Yüan Shih-k'ai, 1859-1916 (administrator, soldier, politician; served
the Manchus, leading in army modernization; became President,
attempted usurpation, failed, and died), 38, 44, 94ff., 146ff.
_Yüan_ system (five-fold division of powers), 172ff.
Transcriber's Notes: Obvious errors in spelling have been silently
corrected. Also 'u' with breve is represented as [)u] in this text.