Government in Republican China

Government in Republican China
Author: Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger
Pages: 493,843 Pages
Audio Length: 6 hr 51 min
Languages: en

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Notes

1. Sun Yat-sen, How China Was Made a Republic (unpublished manuscript written in Shanghai in 1919, now in possession of the present author), p. 4.

2. On the Manchu reforms see H. M. Vinacke, Modern Constitutional Development in China, Princeton, 1920, and Meribeth E. Cameron, The Reform Movement in China, 1898-1912, Stanford, 1931. On the revolutionary group see T'ang Leang-li, The Inner History of the Chinese Revolution, New York, 1930.

3. See below, pp. 41 ff.

4. See below, pp. 145 ff.

5. See below, pp. 149 ff.

6. See below, p. 60. A description of other plans for democracy in China is given in M. J. Bau, Modern Democracy in China, Shanghai, 1923.

7. See below, pp. 102 ff.

8. See below, pp. 139 ff.

9. See below, pp. 185 ff.

10. See, among others, Tyler Dennett, The Democratic Movement in Asia, New York, 1918; R. Y. Lo, China's Revolution from the Inside, New York, 1930.The author wishes to thank J.J.Holmes, School of Religion, Duke University, for suggestions concerning this section.

11. Hampden C. DuBose, The Dragon, Image, and Demon ..., pp.48-49, New York, 1887.

12. Paul Hutchinson, China's Real Revolution, p.155, New York, 1924.

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

14. Lyon Sharman, Sun Yat-sen: His Life and Its Meaning, p. 248, New York, 1934. This is the most critical of the biographies of Sun Yat-sen. The one which Sun himself authorized and on which he collaborated to some extent is Paul M. W. Linebarger, Sun Yat Sen and the Chinese Republic, New York, 1924.

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

16. See below, pp. 163 ff.

17. For some of the ideological developments involved in the Moscow-Canton Entente see Tsui Shu-chin, "The Influence of the Canton-Moscow Entente upon Sun Yat-sen's Political Philosophy," The Chinese Social and Political Science Review (Peiping), vol. 18, pp. 177 ff. , 1934. On the role of nationalism in education see Victor Purcell, Problems of Chinese Education, London, 1936.

Chapter III

BATTLING CREEDS

The right-wing Nationalists, establishing the National Government of China at Nanking in 1927, found themselves in the position of revolutionaries sitting at roll-top desks.After more than forty years of criticism and opposition, the movement had assumed the responsibilities of government.In breaking with the Communists the Nationalists lost the doctrinal edge of the extreme Left; thenceforth there were to be groups more radical than themselves.This disheartened some of the revolutionaries, who either lost interest in politics or continued revolutionary opposition to the regime their colleagues had formed.

Nationalism: Governing Phase

The Kuomintang was confronted with the issues of national unification, development toward democracy, and realization of the economic reforms and programs postulated by Sun's principle, of min shêngThe instrument for their task was a brand-new form of government, fresh from the pages of Sun Yat-sen, which at its birth was beset with difficult military, administrative, economic, and diplomatic problems. But the Nationalists had one particular advantage which they shared only with the Communists—that of possessing a well-integrated ideology.It was possible for them to couch intra-Party struggles in a reasonably consistent set of terms. Even when respect for one of Sun Yat-sen's theories had been reduced to mere lip service another from the same source took its place.The intellectual outlook inherited from the humanistic political training of Confucianism kept the Chinese from a dogmatic political pseudo-theology, while the wide circulation of Sun's principles provided a moral and programmatic foundation for governmental routine.

The break with the Communists and the development of a Red military problem were continuing forces driving the Nationalists to the Right, where opportunists and reactionaries of all categories welcomed them. They were also drawn to the Left—by the social revolution which had carried them to power and by the need of agrarian and labor reform. Central to the very continuance of the government, however, was the military power of the Nationalist armies led by Chiang K'ai-shek. Without the armed force to implement their decisions the Nationalists would have been compelled to let their endeavors subside into subterranean defeat. To the considerations of Right, Left, and armed force were added responsibilities incident to government. The Kuomintang in its governing phase, therefore, plotted its course with reference to three points: doctrinal consistency, military necessity, governmental responsibility.1 As an ideologically constituent movement, how did Nationalism use its power?

The Nationalists in power had to find their way through class alignments, inert and meaningless oppositions, the rancor of the Left, the contempt of the established monarchist Right.Personalities in conflict, cliques forming and disbanding, factions denied overt expression—these lay behind the pressure politics of the intra-Party contest for the control of policy conducted on a thin and novel constitutional plane.The written formulas guiding the struggle for power were supplemented by the bodies of unwritten practice which had developed in the years of the Republic.There were appropriate forms for extraconstitutional action, just as for constitutional.It was the outstanding contribution of the Kuomintang to modern Chinese government that it kept its internal conflicts within its own constitutional framework, and did so more successfully than any other movement in modern China.

The meandering and difficult course of Kuomintang policy flowed within the valley rather than the river bed of Sun Yat-sen's doctrine.The planning power of Sun's intellect bound the movement long after his death.In his plans for the regeneration of China are to be found the ideal requirements for the growth of modern government under the tutelage of a patriotic elite of overseas men, revolutionary veterans, and scholars.The Nanking government of the Kuomintang had to meet all the problems of government while keeping within the broad boundaries of Sun's demands.The movement as a whole, however, displayed certain broad shifts which are readily traceable.2 Sun Yat-sen envisaged the establishment of authentic democracy by a course of action including three steps: (1) the military period, in which the movement should acquire power over the nation through the use of force; (2) the period of tutelage, in which the members of the movement should exercise a benevolent party dictatorship over the nation, while training the populace for democracy; (3) the period of constitutional democracy, in which the people should exercise actual self-government.

Shortly after its establishment, the National Government announced the ending of the period of military conquest and the opening of the period of tutelage, which was set for 1930-1935.The Japanese invasions caused the establishment of constitutional government to be postponed indefinitely, and it is to be feared that even if constitutional government were installed it would fall far short of Sun's programs, which called for truly effective training in the arts of democracy before Chinese government could be entrusted to the broad masses of the electorate.In the meantime, the arbitrariness, the political composition, and the outlook of the transitional Party dictatorship became subjects of hot controversy among the Kuomintang leaders.

The Party dictatorship demanded a rigor of discipline and a deflation of revolutionary enthusiasm which soon drove the militant Left out of the Kuomintang.Even Sun Yat-sen's brilliant young second wife remained outside the Party—a permanent and indefatigable opposition.Within the Party personalities came to dominate—Hu Han-min, the chief Rightist disciple and interpreter of Sun Yat-sen; Chiang K'ai-shek, Sun's outstanding military protege; and Wang Ch'ing-wei, the chief Leftist disciple of the Leader.There were also Sun Fo (Sun K'ê), the only son of Sun Yat-sen, and other ranking Party members whose opinions ranged from philosophic anarchism (as in the case of Wu Chih-hui) to a progressive business outlook not unlike Mr. Hoover's (as in the instance of T.V.Soong).

The National Government settled down with Chiang and Hu Han-min (military and Right) holding the leadership, which Wang Ch'ing-wei decried as reactionary.In 1931 Chiang ousted Hu, in the course of a conflict over a proposed American silver loan and over constitutional questions.Shortly thereafter Wang Ch'ing-wei assumed a place in the government, after participating in an unsuccessful armed rebellion (the "Nationalist Government" in Peking, 1930-1931).

This might seem to indicate a swing from the Right to the Left within the Party.Actually it was indicative of the growing practicality of the Nationalist movement and its preoccupation with problems of installing the form of government planned by Sun.3 With the passage of time, the Nationalists adopted three main lines of endeavor: (1) the suppression of the Communists at all cost, even that of temporary nonresistance to Japan; (2) the tendency to abandon revolutionary fervor for administrative zeal, and to become governmental in spirit as well as form—a tendency illustrated most notably in the promotion of industry under H. H. Kung, railways under Sun Fo, and finance under T. V. Soong; (3) a policy of emphasizing military power, which meant the rise to effective personal leadership of Chiang K'ai-shek. The development of a United Front policy in 1937 and the war with Japan led to the reversal of the first two policies and an enormous emphasis on the third. The Nationalists again turned to patriotism on the mass level rather than government action in a patriotically bureaucratic sphere. This latter policy, although it may seem strangely nonrevolutionary, was actually a part of Sun's programs to which the Nationalists were bound.

The class theory held by Sun was based upon a distinction between power and competence. The people should have power to determine the range of government policy; they obviously did not have the competenceCompetence was confined to the intellectual leaders and the thinking people of society (who were to form two classes) and could not be found in the vast majority of people untrained to contemplate political problems. Accordingly, Sun's scheme of government assumed the continuity of a bureaucracy made up of men of competence, but subject to the periodic check of the populace, which possessed the power.

Another of Sun's programs relates to the question: How can democracy be reconciled with ideological control? The Chinese had lived in a society so completely under the rule of common ideas that independent individual thinking had to be moderate, careful, and orthodox in appearance before it met with any welcome. The individual was not free to think freely; but since most did not think freely, sensing no need for it, they were unconscious of control. A problem larger than that of individual freedom is raised by the question of ideological control, since the controlled individual himself transmits control to his neighbors and his dependents. The ideology must be filtered, as it were, at some point. Sun believed that democracy would effectuate the filtering, allowing long-range revision from outside the bureaucracy. He expected that the bureaucracy of democratic China would rule well but would be subject to control from a people not completely under its thumb. The ideology was to be officially fostered, but it was to be subject to the check of the electorate. The Chinese were still to use orthodoxy as a tool of control and social pressure as the major instrument of constraint, but they were not to be allowed to fall into a blind traditionalism which would isolate them.

The old ideology was to be adjusted and supplemented with Western science, so that the new would be compounded of three things: old Chinese social and political experience, old Chinese ethical knowledge, and modern scientific truth.With respect to Western science, the Nationalists had to present few startling governmental innovations, since the need for a knowledge of the physical and technical sciences was widely recognized in China—not only by the Nationalists.That the Western technology should serve to build the new China was obvious; trade schools needed encouragement rather than initiation.As to the old Chinese social and political experience, the Kuomintang stressed study of China's past.They attempted to mend the gap between the generation born in the 1880's and that born in the 1910's by encouraging concentration on the classical texts, reverently, but critically as well.Archaeology has heightened interest of the Chinese in their past.As a consequence, their sense of national value has deepened.

For the restoration of the old Chinese moral and ethical system the New Life movement, which has been fostered personally by Generalissimo Chiang K'ai-shek, is of great importance. Its principles consist of a simple restatement of the cardinal Confucian personal virtues, interpreted to suit modern conditions. It has presumably been influenced by Protestant Christianity, and may be said to be a form of puritanism. Although the Nationalist movement has not been as successful in ten years as was the Confucian in two hundred, it has at least created a state pattern. A state in the full sense would require a type of organization so clear in its ideology that people would personify it willingly, would accord it existence whether leaders and governments fell or not, and would be loyal to it and to those who claimed to wield its power.

Among negative influences running against the Nationalist ideology, the Nationalist neo-militarism has stood forth.As in the other ideologically integrated states of the world (Russia, Germany, Italy), the army assumed especial importance because its type of law and order required no common understanding higher than the assent of idiots.An army is the one institution where complete harmony of thought is a luxury and not a necessity, where simple agreement on rewards, punishments, and organization morale will hold the structure together.The Nationalist armies, however, rose to a new position.Ideological control was introduced; the literate armies fought best.But despite the civilian and intellectual factors from outside, the mere force concentrated in weapons was so great as to amount to a constant temptation.Whenever the day's fortunes were inclement, the men in command tended to settle things with guns.In contrast with sheer ideals, the Nationalists were strongly military; in contrast with their predecessors, the Nationalist generals showed respect for civilian authority.The charge of Nationalist neo-militarism focused upon the personal popularity of army leaders, especially that of Chiang K'ai-shek.It can be adjudicated only by history.

The Nationalist movement neared its most drastic ordeal in 1936.The predetermined period of tutelage as decreed was passing, while the inauguration of constitutional government had to be deferred.With the approaching abolition of the Party dictatorship the Nationalist leaders were to demonstrate their consistency with their own ideals and programs. The programs of Sun Yat-sen called for the abdication of the patriotic elite, and the requirement—coupled as it had been with the proclamation of definite time limits—placed the issue squarely before the Kuomintang leadership.Were they to attempt the democratic experiment in a nation patently unripe for it, or were they to disavow the commands of their deceased and sainted Leader, and continue in power?

Before the Nationalist movement underwent this final test, however, other issues arose which swept all previous plans aside. The kidnaping of Chiang K'ai-shek at Sian, the reconciliation of the Communists and Nationalists, and the Japanese invasion in 1937 forced Nationalism into concord with all other patriotic movements and merged them all in a dramatic resurgence for national defense.

Independent Marxism in China

The proponents of Marxism were welcomed into China as trusted friends.In 1926 it was obvious to the whole world that China was definitely within the orbit of Marxism; in 1935 it was just as apparent that the Marxists faced a military doom, and that their forcible suppression might mean the end of their political effectiveness.Never ruined beyond all hope of recovery and triumph, never successful beyond all danger of disaster, the Marxists and their doctrines are the greatest uncertainty facing China.

Sinologues, judging from past experience and impressed with the deep continuities and repetitions of Chinese history, may well argue that Marxism is another religious distributive cult such as periods of turmoil always produce in China. They can point to the rise and fall of the Yellow Turbans in the third century a.d., when the two leaders—the Duke of Heaven and the Duke of Humanity—shook the great Han dynasty down into everlasting ruin.Or they can refer to the T'ai-p'ing rebellion, which held a territory infinitely greater than that ever occupied by the Marxists, which impressed a fantastic but politically operative Christianity upon its followers, and which promised to do in South China what Brigham Young and the Mormons had done with the United Order in Utah; but the T'ai-p'ing went down to an extinction so complete that no living advocate of the cult practiced by millions seventy years ago can be found today.Thus it would be no violation of the set patterns of Chinese history if the movement of Marxism were to rise to world-dazzling splendor and then pass into utter oblivion.Yet Chinese history is no longer the only kind of history which holds weight for precedent in China, and if the T'ai-p'ing rebellion is one example, the Russian Revolution is another.Bolshevism certainly has better chances of succeeding in China than it could have seemed to have—to anyone but a fanatic—in the Russia of 1915.

The Marxian doctrines had already eaten well into Chinese territory before entering upon the Chinese scene proper. One of the less savory bequests which the tsarist regime left the Communists was the question of Outer Mongolia, a vast stretch of land under the admitted suzerainty but beyond the real control of the Chinese. The area was used by White Russians as a base for operations, and—whether or not it accorded with their principles—the Red forces had to cross the frontier to pacify Siberia. Once in, they could not get out. It was essentially the sort of absent-minded conquest which has contributed so much to the British Empire: a strategic occupation leading inevitably to political domination. The Russians compromised as well as they might, setting up an Outer Mongolian People's Republic and administering the area in the way which the world was to observe on a much grander scale in the case of the Japanese in Manchuria—through advisers.

Marxism became a force in China through men and literature and money and arms reaching China by the sea route, as have most Western things.Its position reflected, however, the facts that Russia is China's greatest neighbor and that the Russo-Chinese land frontier is one of the longest in the world.China is much nearer to San Francisco, in terms of shipping costs and speed of connections, than it is to Leningrad, but the appearance of closer proximity to the latter played a considerable role.The Nationalist-Communist coalition4 was the result of the impact of Marxism from Russia upon China proper. The Communists entered as allies, not as leaders. The period of Nationalist-Communist cooperation lasted because the practical projects of the two revolutionary parties lay in a common direction. The gradual shift in the role of the Communists from advisers and allies to teachers and masters led to the break between the two organizations.

How did this shift develop? From the Marxian standpoint it was the move of a party leadership which was bound by a true ideology, that of dialectic materialism. Whatever the ethics of broken individual pledges, there is no question that the Communists were justified according to their own beliefs in abandoning the Nationalists when the Nationalists ceased positive revolutionary action and began a Nationalist reconstitution. The Communists felt themselves bound to take up the standards of the revolution and proceed against Nationalists as against others. There was no room in the Marxian ideology for anything but the officially approved Communist Party; there was no ground for conceding that the Nationalists might be wise in calling a breathing spell.

The Kuomintang leaders, on the other hand, had every reason to feel aggrieved at the Communists.The Communists had come to help the Chinese revolutionaries in their struggle for national liberation and to bring about a common front against imperialism in the Far East.When the revolution of national liberation was more than half accomplished, the Communists had increased their following to such an extent that they regarded the Nationalist alliance as a mere episode in the growth of Marxian power in China.Marxists had come to help the cause of Sun Yat-sen; Marxism was spread to fight and undo it.The sobering shock of a grasp on power sent the Nationalists into relative conservatism.An eminent Chinese writer has suggested the change of mood:

Our imagination was fired, our enthusiasm was kindled; thousands of young men have fled from home and school from the outermost provinces to join the Nationalist forces; they have toiled and they have sweated, and thousands have gladly laid down their lives on the altar of Nationalism that their dream of a regenerated and redeemed China might come true.But, alas!...The war has ended—so has all idealism.5

The Soviet Communists, deprived of their opportunity to broadcast propaganda on a large scale, and unable to ride the back of the Nationalist tiger any longer, found themselves on a defensive which seemed to be permanent. At the same time, the Marxists in China encountered difficulties in adjusting their ideology to the fact that their strength lay in elements which official Marxism discredited. They owed their existence to agrarian discontent and to their excellent army—the shock troops, in many cases, of the former coalition. The leader of Chinese Marxism, Ch'en Tu-hsiu, broke the party wide open with a schism; he believed in modernizing effort rather than orthodox Marxist symbols. Other schisms from the Left produced Marxisms intent on applying the European technique to China's small proletariat, indifferent to the land question and eager to make an Asiatic revolution from the textbooks of European labor conflict. Such deviations were as unrealistic and sterile as Blanquism, against which the nineteenth century Marxists inveighed so heavily. Even so the official Communist Party withstood nine years of savage attack and persecution because necessity forced the Reds to pursue a simple line of policy—survival. Out of the test of deadly experience the Chinese Communists evolved means of allying themselves with the discontented peasantry, and found the point at which further social reform yielded diminishing returns in popular support. In relying on the people for practical help, instead of invoking theoretically popular appeals, the Chinese Communists attained a defensive strength which could easily be turned into an offensive.

The reorientation in attitude—the splitting off of both extremes, the iron necessity for an immediate and effectual popularization of the Party among the peasantry, and the lessons derived from responding to actual conditions—enabled the Communists to establish a state in Kiangsi in 1931: the Chinese Soviet Republic.6 In 1935 and 1936 Chiang K'ai-shek began the most vigorous of his attacks, which led to the removal of the Chinese Red Army some two thousand miles from South Central to Northwest China—one of the most astonishing military feats of modern times. Some observers have suggested that Chiang had no intention of allowing the Communists to disappear altogether from the scene, as they provided his military power with a raison d'être in the eyes of the Japanese. Had he run them utterly to ground, the Japanese might have dispensed with him. Later events have made such an explanation seem less persuasive, after the coup d'état at Sian in December, 1936.

The personal factors and political events in this extraordinary drama are not yet known in their entirety, and it may be decades before the whole story is pieced together from the accounts of eyewitnesses and interpreters.Chiang K'ai-shek in his published diary mentions no formal agreement for the institution of a United Front policy, but the rumors from the Left persist in affirming the existence of a truce between the Nationalists and the Communists, the fruits of which were to be action against Japan.Certainly the military and political effects of Chiang's kidnaping were substantial,7 and the ideological scarcely less. In brief, the kidnaping arose from action on the part of Chinese National Army troops under the command of Chang Hsüeh-liang, the ex-tuchün of Manchuria. His forces were mostly from the Manchurian provinces and had no stomach for fighting the Communists in the far west of China while the Japanese remained in undisturbed occupation of their homelands. They had inaugurated an informal understanding with the Communists, and fraternization had begun between the opposing armies. When Chiang came up to investigate conditions, he was promptly kidnaped (December, 1936). His bodyguard was slaughtered and he himself was injured in the spine. The kidnaping was nominally the act of the Tungpei (ex-Manchurian) troops. Even the Communist forces worked for the release of Chiang, since they felt that his death would mean national disaster. The release of Chiang was finally procured through the mediation of an Australian editor with a long experience in Chinese politics.8

The effect on popular thinking was twofold.In the first place, Chiang's popularity was made fully apparent by the vigor of the demonstrations in his favor all over China.It had long been asserted that even the most momentary relaxation of Chiang's despotism, as its opponents termed it, would be followed either by anarchy or a new revolutionary regime.Neither appeared.The strength of the National Government as a government was apparent, despite a strong odor of treason in widely separated quarters, and the people as a whole kept quiet.Students, workers, capitalists, officials, military men—all groups sought Chiang's release.Their anxiety for his personal safety was in some cases qualified by a hearty dislike of the man himself, but almost everyone admitted to an admiration, either grudging or whole-hearted, for the effectiveness of his work.The National Government and its chief military leader were indeed strongly entrenched in popular sympathy and thought—more so than even the most optimistic observers had dared to hope.

The second consequence of the coup d'état at Sian was even more important. The mere physical juxtaposition of the two leaderships, Marxian and Nationalist, and the probability that forced arbitration would be the result of the kidnaping, led to a wild stimulation of hopes. At the same time it was generally realized that failure to come to terms might end in the murder of Chiang and in fateful results for all groups in China. The kidnapers demanded a United Front; the Communists had issued a manifesto in behalf of it several months earlier (August 1, 1936). The problem was: could Chiang accede without ruining his prestige or impairing the ideological position he had so laboriously built up for himself?

A compromise was found, which amounted to a paper victory for Chiang, nominal punishment of Chang and the other perpetrators of the kidnaping, ceremonial apology to the nation by Chiang for having been kidnaped, and a series of formally unrelated but probably linked events—all of which brought the two ideologies and their adherents to a common ground.Throughout the following spring, progress was made in the negotiation of a truce, which broadened into an armistice and ended as an alliance.On April 30, 1937, for instance, the Young Communist Congress, composed of men whose brains Chiang would have cheerfully blown out a few months before, elected Chiang and other Nationalist leaders to honorary membership.On occasion, the Communists and the Nationalists exchanged classical Chinese poems; each side sought to excel in sincere courtesy.The armistice lasted through the period of the Japanese invasion in the summer of 1937; formal union was achieved in September.9

On the political surface, the course of Marxism in China has been one of the most startling developments in modern history.Alliance between Hitler and Stalin would seem more plausible than the reunion of Nationalist and Communist groups in China.To those in the service of the Nanking regime in 1936, such an eventuality was the one thing certain not to happen.The break between the Marxist and Nationalist leaderships and their subsequent reconciliation appeared, however, less improbable in consideration of the course steered by the Communist world movement during the decade 1927-1937.The United Front in China made it possible for the Chinese Communists to concede more than they would otherwise have dared to except at the suggestion of the Russian and international Communists.

The future role of Marxism in China is still undecided. Nothing can be regarded as beyond the limit of probability, except the immediate establishment of a permanent and unalterable regime. The challenges the Marxists raise are too important to be ignored—land and labor reform and the devising of workable techniques for distributive justice. If they do not take control of the country themselves, they will at least be a formidable factor for whoever does control the government. In the event of foreign conquest the Marxians could provide an underground resistance of spectacular value. If the Chinese, applying terror and espionage against the Marxians then regarded as traitors, were not able to root them out in ten years of ferocious warfare, what will aliens do—against Communists who have become patriots in the eyes of all the people and who are assured help from all sides?

Japanese Efforts to Participate in Creating a New China

China is Japan's greatest outside problem; she is only a secondary problem in the foreign policies of the other great powers.Japan owes much to China in the way of borrowed ideas and institutions.Japan and Siam are the only free nations in the modern world which share with China the background of a Chinese-dominated world society in the Far East.10 The Japanese resisted the extension of Chinese suzerainty to their islands, and on only one occasion did they concede formally that the Chinese emperor was the head of all civilized society; this they bitterly regret. While the Siamese have maintained their independence, they are in no position to take an active part in the creation of a new Far East, and the issue is between China and Japan, with the other Pacific powers largely as spectators. The construction of a way of thinking to accommodate the men and territories no longer guided by the old order is a problem shared by Japan and China; the competition for imposing a feasible system is sharp. Japan wishes to create a new Far East in which the Japanese shall constitute the most cultured core; the Chinese take their ancient position for granted.

In addition to the ideational conflict for prestige between Chinese and Japanese, there is another realm wherein the two nations compete, using ideas not as ends but as means. The extension of Western industry and trade to the East produced acute dislocations both in China and in Japan, and in the case of Japan involved transforming the Japanese autarchy into a most dangerous dependence upon a share of the world economy. Japan is truly a commercial and capitalist power; hers is no mere affectation of modernity. It is conceivable, should the West go down to its Armageddon, that the Chinese might swing back to the ways of their past. The Japanese could not; their economic and political system has expanded too far. They are inextricably bound up with the rest of the industrial, capitalist modern world. In China the stock exchanges have a mere toehold on the country; in Japan they have become the spine of national life. The Japanese must either pay the price of modernization by accepting the lowly place of the latecomer or make up their tardiness in entering the imperialist scene by a veritable frenzy of expansion. Apart from the future of capitalism, there remains the question: Will Japan collapse before reaching imperial success in the world economy?

China and the unpredictable but colossal Chinese markets are Japan's goal, formulated after contact with the West.China and her unquestioned cultural prestige are the targets of the Japanese drive for the acquisition of standing, a campaign couched in indigenous Far Eastern terms. The conflict between the two countries weaves its way back and forth through elaborate and self-contradictory sets of terms. The Japanese have toyed with a multitude of policies for China.Some of these are: (1) simple conquest; (2) the establishment of a peculiar Far Eastern order under Japanese leadership—either in terms harmonious with Western concepts of international affairs (the "Japanese Monroe Doctrine") or in terms derived from a modification of the past ("Pan-Asia"); (3) a common cause of Japanese and Chinese against the white peril, without any special emphasis on the relative positions of the two countries; (4) a divine Japanese mission, not merely to save the yellow race but to rescue the whole world and put all nations under the protecting benevolence of Japanese overlordship; (5) a strict policy of day-to-day opportunism—binding those parts of China accessible for such procedure with treaties and agreements, and catching the Chinese as they come forth into the arena of modern economic life; (6) expediency couched in military terms, looking to absolute Japanese gains on the map, regardless of the erection of a social system to perpetuate the immediate military advances; (7) a pro-Chinese policy, to assure the Japanese a close ally (but in such a case a strong independent China would inevitably excel Japan, and the Japanese would have to yield to Chinese hegemony—however friendly—or else retreat from it into the isolation from which they emerged in the 1850's).

Direct military conquest has a considerable appeal to the Japanese, except for its limitations. All the armies of the modern world would not be enough to garrison and patrol a China desperately hostile through and through. The Chinese would not stop at suicide to embarrass their enemies, if there were complete ideological antagonism. The Japanese would have to persuade the Chinese whom they conquered to remain alive, to keep working, to grow wealthy so that the conquest might not be without value. It is not possible to consider a policy involving the outright murder of from one hundred and fifty to two hundred million persons; short of such extermination, there is no way for the Japanese to clear the field for colonization in Chinese territories. If the Japanese cannot replace the Chinese, they must make use of them; to make use of them, they must teach them to think in a way which will permit exploitation, for even the most inequitable exploitation involves some cooperation.

Ever since their peculiar Far Eastern order had been partially recognized the Japanese began building up theories of a zone of influence to be based not upon law but upon geographic and racial fact. The doctrines of Pan-Asia fitted their purpose. Writers in the different Asiatic countries had pointed out the desirability of a union of those Asiatic peoples which were not yet under colonial rule to prevent further occidental advance and to rescue their conquered neighbors. Sun Yat-sen himself thought well of the Pan-Asia idea and stressed it, along with the recommendation that all economically exploited powers confront the exploiting powers—a class war between nations. As soon as the Japanese began turning to Pan-Asia for furtherance of their own peculiar ends, these arguments lost much of their realism. The Japanese policies generated more disturbance in Asia than did the Western. Their call to prevent Western aggression, at a time when the Western powers were in retreat, sounded artificial. Nevertheless, the Pan-Asian movement forms a link between ideology-conscious leaders in China and Japan; Japan's ultra-patriotic Toyama had been friendly and helpful to Sun at the time when the former led the Genyosha and the latter the Hsing Chung Hui11 It was natural, however, that the Pan-Asian doctrine, although it never disappeared altogether in China, should be strongest in Japan. Pan-Asia or its restricted form—Far-Easternism (Toa-shugi)—played a significant part in the military indoctrination in Japan, even though attempts to propagate it in China ended in almost complete failure.

To the ideological conquest of China the Japanese have contributed very little.Their theories, summed up, amount to but a drop in the sea of doctrines.Only as the spokesman of China's ultra-reactionary monarchists—who flourished twenty-five years ago—has Japan presented an ideological program which is other than derisible.Rich in the ceremonial trappings of government, and in the personal elegance of its powerless ministers, the Great Manchou Empire makes a strong appeal to literary persons with archaic tastes.Even there, the blunt modernism of the Japanese military machine destroys the illusion.

Patriotism: The United Front

1937 was one of the most critical years of modern China.It marked a swift and startling grouping of the three active forces in China: Nationalism, Communism, and Japanese compulsion.For ten years the Nationalists and the Communists had waged a war of terror against each other; for six years a Chinese Soviet Republic had defied the National Government of China established at Nanking.Six years had passed since the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, five since the establishment of a Manchoukuo government.The Nationalists had hated the Japanese, but they hated the Communists more; at the humiliating price of non-resistance to Japan, Chiang K'ai-shek had brought the full military and agitational power of Nationalism to the suppression of the Marxians.The Japanese had no great attachment to Chiang and the Nationalists and regarded Nationalism itself as a force subversive to Japanese order in the Far East.But they had tolerated the Kuomintang because it seemed a buffer between themselves and the Communists, and because they did not have the power or the immediate inclination to destroy the Nationalist regime.

This triangular deadlock was first broken by the kidnaping at Sian. Nationalist and Communist leaderships were brought face to face, and preliminary terms were agreed upon. With each step toward a termination of the Nationalist-Communist wars the danger of a powerful China became more striking to Japan, while simultaneously the Nanking regime became less valuable to the Japanese as a bulwark against Communism. The spring of 1937 marked the settlement with the Communists in the Northwest, the continuance of a general armistice, and the sharp improvement of Nationalist prestige throughout the country. Circles which had been Rightist recognized the increased military and financial power of the Nationalists, now that the long and wasteful struggle with the Communists was ended, releasing men, weapons, and money for application in other quarters. Leftist groups again found the Nanking state philosophy palatable, and discovered in the official tenets of the Nationalist Party enough common principles to justify the re-coalition of revolutionary forces. The radical intellectuals and students, who had swung sharply to the Left as a result of continued Nationalist yielding to Japan, turned again to Nationalist leadership.

As practical solutions to the Nationalist-Communist conflict were found, the people in the larger cities were released from the governmental restrictions which the Nationalists—upon Japanese insistence and threat of force—had placed on the expression of patriotic sentiments.A vast and vigorous patriotic feeling came suddenly to life, having grown more intense under the cramping inhibitions of police prohibition.The patriotism was revolutionary in mood but not wholly different from Chinese patriotism of the past.The slogans all centered on national defense.Release of political prisoners, cessation of internal war, and democratization of the government were regarded as steps to union and defense.

When the Japanese decided to push forward in earnest and began fighting in North China in the summer of 1937, the patriotic movement became so powerful that for the time it supplanted all other separate movements.Only a number of aged or cynical opportunists remained outside.It was now possible, under the slogan of a United Front of all China against Japan, to disregard the fundamental differences between the Nationalists and the Communists.A Chinese Communist wrote:

While we declare ourselves, despite the differences in principle that exist between communism and Sun-Yat-sen-ism, advocates of the basic revolutionary slogans of Sun Yat-sen, of the best revolutionary traditions of the Chinese people, we Communists never for an instant under any circumstances cease to be true followers of the Marxist-Leninist teachings.12

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

In their haste the Japanese utilized an ideology which they had practiced in Manchuria—literary Confucianism colored by notions adopted from the Japanese cult of the emperor.They also appealed to the practical and immediate needs of the Chinese living in the areas which they conquered, setting up governments13 to govern for them. But this was hardly more than an expedient. Of far greater importance than even the war itself is its long-range impact upon the Chinese mind.

The formulation of the present Chinese patriotic movement into a definite drive for the establishment of a new Chinese way of life may emerge as one of the lasting facts of the century.The various movements of the Republican era failed to disturb and arouse the masses sufficiently to make possible a replacement of the decrepit remnants of the old Chinese social and intellectual world, or a reinterpretation adding the ingredients needed in a modern civilization.If patriotism unites the Chinese permanently, Japanese invasion may have provoked what twenty-five years of Chinese effort could not bring about.

Furthermore, the Chinese have reacted to the emergencies of war in a manner almost unprecedented among modern nations. War has not meant the creation of a temporary despotism; it has brought democracy instead. The ideological concord, the supremacy of a common national purpose, which could not be achieved in a quarter century of peacetime agony, was brought forth in the ordeal of national resistance. Democracy and not tyranny was the unifying force. The Kuomintang Party Congress, meeting in Hankow from March 29 to April 2, 1938, reaffirmed the primacy of the San Min Chu I, but at the same time guaranteed the sanctity of private rights, even in wartime, of groups who had been liable to official suppression for years.The Communist press was flourishing openly in Hankow, a testimony to the curious tolerance with which the Chinese united for national defense.The governmental structure was increasingly democratized.Japan had provided a body of common assumptions strong enough to sustain democracy, despite the burden of mutually tolerated disagreements.

Notes

1. For the military aspects see below, pp. 108 ff.; for the immediate governmental aspects see below, pp. 167 ff.

2. The best account of the internal politics of the Kuomintang between 1927 and 1933 is to be found in Gustav Amann, Chiang Kaishek und die Regierung der Kuomintang in China, Berlin and Heidelberg, 1936.

3. See below, pp. 172 ff.

4. See above, pp. 51 ff.

5. Lin Yutang, Letters of a Chinese Amazon and War-Time Essays, p.vi, Shanghai, 1930.

6. See below, pp. 182 ff.

7. See below, p. 184 ff.

8. On the Sian incident see General and Madame Chiang Kai-shek, General Chiang Kai-shek, Garden City, 1937; James M. Bertram, First Act in China, New York, 1938, an account by an Australian newspaperman in Sian at the time; and Edgar Snow, Red Star over China, New York, 1938—an extraordinarily valuable work on all phases of Chinese Communism, by an observer of great insight and acuteness.

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

10. See Yoshi S. Kuno, Japanese Expansion on the Asiatic Continent, vol.I, Berkeley, 1937, for an authoritative description of early Sino-Japanese relations.Chinese records of the time of Christ describe the payment of tribute by Japanese chieftains.The most explicit acknowledgment of Chinese suzerainty occurred in the time of Yoshemitsu, the third Ashikaga shogun (see Kuno, pp.92-93).

11. The Japanese patriotic leagues are described in Kenneth Colegrove, Militarism in Japan, Boston, 1936.

12. Wang Ming, China Can Win! p. 44, New York, 1938. Wang Ming is a Chinese expert on Marxism residing in the U. S. S. R.

13. See below, pp. 184 ff.

SECOND PART

ARMIES

 

Chapter IV

WARRIORS

From the outside, militarism seems to dominate the Chinese scene.China is frequently interpreted in terms of personalities instead of mass inclinations, wide-filtering habits, and extensive relocations of thought.The picturesqueness of the Chinese leaders has done nothing to prevent the notion of many romantic autocracies from appearing real: the Dog-Meat General, six feet tall, diabolically cruel and brazenly comic, with his veritable zoological garden of ladies from all over the world; the Christian General, burly, bluff, honest, Christian and Bolshevik, with the happy naïveté of a feudal politician; the Bandit General and his infatuation with fine arsenals; the Generalissimo, with his Christian wife, himself a Christian, rolling up a military machine against the third greatest naval power of the earth—such figures make Chinese news a confused but exciting serial story.

Military Rule and Political Economy

For long-range effects, the literary experiments of men like Hu Shih and the mass-education drive of Dr. James Yen and his associates are more significant than any one of hundreds of military leaders, but long-range trends are never news. The armies and their commanders have occupied the center of the stage, overshadowing the quest of the Chinese for civilian rule. Civilian rule, however, presupposes a sufficient area of common agreement on which to build laws and usages for government; armies require nothing but a nearly mechanical discipline and the crudest rule of thumb administration. The civilian government of Republican China has had to await the coming of at least a minimum of order out of the turmoil; armies, for lack of government, have dominated and continued that turmoil. China has been disunited in great part because she was impoverished by military rule; she has been ruled by arms partly because she was disunited. No unifier of the nation would have needed to maintain the armed hordes which were the greatest impediment to real national defense—hordes powerful enough to wreck governments but not powerful enough to build them. The war lords, as they are perhaps too flatteringly termed, do by no means measure up to the note of the intellectual and political leaders; but they have unquestionably held the greater bulk of day-to-day authority in China since 1912.

The most significant function of the armies is one which is quite frequently overlooked: their power as agencies of unsettlement.They have created disturbances more profound than mere public disorder; they have attacked institutions more vital than the public treasury; they have kept all parts of China from the dull apathy of conservatism.The arrogance and rapacity of the military rulers, their utter incompetence as administrators (with a number of honorable exceptions), and their ineffectiveness as propagandists have provided that loose and haphazard tyranny which some philosophers consider the prime requisite for social ferment.The military men have never been intelligent enough to impose truly totalitarian regimes, nor efficient enough to make the people of any one area content with a permanent separatism.The presence of the military rank and file has turned the Chinese social system upside down, reversing the accepted scale of ranks within the society and infringing upon the interests of every group—even the minimum interest of the very poor, their right not to starve to death.More conspicuously, the armies have given a picture of power which, in contrast with the scarcely traceable lines of influence and persuasion arising from ideological movements, is intelligible and reducible to concrete terms.

Without the militarists, there would have been no visible series of events to trace the change in China, no stereotypes at all by which to show the immediate alterations on the scene of power. Many men did rise and fall regardless of military considerations, but such occurrences were loosely and popularly ascribed to intrigue or else dismissed as beyond all rational understanding. The armies subsisted and roamed about, leaders and men both helpless on a sea of ignorance and doctrinal conflict; but the mere assent to unthinking discipline looked like order, and the most shadowy and insubstantial military hierarchy held out a promise of Caesarian peace. From 1915 to 1925 foreign comment stressed the movements of the war lords, singling out the man who might play the role of a Chinese Napoleon, and to the present this simple approach satisfies many. Meanwhile the foundations of social life shifted, falling away here, growing more solid there, behind the gloomy panorama of brutal, ineffectual warfare.

Closely related to the problem of armies was another category partially understandable in narrowly factual terms—political economy. The armies conditioned and set the pace, a slow one, for economic development. All financial projects were jeopardized by military rule, both by the exactions which the military might impose and by the constant threat that militarists, devaluating the currency or arbitrarily changing the political controls of economy, might alter the very economic system in which the project was being considered and fostered. Economic life in China could not continue through the traditional agricultural, guild, semicapitalist devices; Western trade and social dislocation prevented that. Yet no new economy could automatically replace the ruins of the old, since economic matters were part of a political economy subject to the extra-economic interferences which ideological change, military power, and halfway government could impose. One of the truly important achievements of the National Government at Nanking was the creation of a core for a twentieth century army. But all the military achievements in modern China pale before the staggering surprise of a managed currency, displacing a commodity and specie system which was older than all modern warfare.

One need not subscribe to either military or economic determinism to concede the relevance of military and economic matters in any society. In China there exists a peculiarly close correlation between the two. The absence of a class founded squarely on economic privilege and the subordination of the military to the bureaucratic elements in the imperial society were largely the result of the position occupied by the average nonacademic Chinese, who was typically a farmer capable of being a militiaman or a bandit. This duality of role strongly affected the development of government in China, and is a factor which still plays a great part. The Chinese owe many of their social and political peculiarities to the effectiveness of their mass action, which is able to take place with a minimum of formal leadership and coordination and with a maximum of secrecy and totality. In times when foreign conquest of China is no longer in the realm of the improbable, it is worth remembering that the Chinese are a people adamant in resistance to force and schooled in centuries of rebellion. Neither pacific nor military resistance could take place in the traditional Chinese way without the diffusion of military and economic power among broad masses of the population.

How, it may be asked, have the Chinese succeeded in being such a peaceful people, and yet a people so prone to popular uprising?How is it that, with their great talents for organization, they have let a shabby third-rate militarism sweep their land in modern times?The Chinese generals did not command the allegiance widely extended to even the meanest of South American despots; yet the people trembled before them.Not until the war lords lost power was there great popular enthusiasm for military ideals.If Chinese armies are considered solely as rough and primitive parallels to their European counterparts, paradox will follow paradox without rational explanation.To understand the Chinese military situation one must go back across the centuries and trace a system and a tradition which, at times obscure and frequently submerged, must come to the surface in the decisions upon which rest the question of national life or death for China.

The Downfall of the Charioteers

The Chinese have differed from other peoples not in being peaceful so much as in extolling peace. Not even in the Christian tradition of peace and love are there condemnations of war stronger than those of the Confucians. Yet, century to century, the Chinese have known war against the outside barbarians and with each other. Throughout historic times there are records of struggle and slaughter. H. G. Creel writes, "If we are to locate the traditional Chinese time of 'great peace' it must be far back in the Neolithic stage. Experts agree that in the earlier of the Neolithic sites known to us there is little evidence of warfare."1

At the very edge of history, about 1500 b.c., the Chinese appear as accomplished archers, using bows which were probably not dissimilar to those in use down to the twentieth century—heavy reflex bows, with a pull that was sometimes far greater than the longbow of the celebrated English yeomen of medieval times. The pellet bow, a form of slingshot, was also common in the earliest times. Armor was known in the earliest historic dynasty, the Shang, which by Chinese tradition is dated 1765-1123 b.c. The chariot, however, seems to have been less widely used than it later came to be.2

Under the Chou dynasty, in all Chinese history the most caste-bound, militaristic, and feudal (traditionally dated 1122-256 b.c.), the implements of warfare and the management of conflict fell into the hands of the ruling class. Previous to the Chou there was a relative military equality of all, despite the sharp lines between masters and men. After the Chou the great military states culminating in the warrior-bureaucrat tyranny of the Ch'in Shih Huang Ti (third century b.c.) tended to reduce war to mass movements, in which establishments, management, and broader considerations constantly increased.During this period the master class developed a scheme which was not as elaborately traced out in legal terms as Norman-English feudalism, nor as solidly grounded in outright military effectiveness as the Japanese system twenty-odd centuries later, but which amounted to a chivalric order within the limits of an ideology rooted in the family.The lords were the spiritual guardians and clan leaders as well as the earthly despots of their subjects.Standing above the law and invested with positions of high political dignity, their class nearly became a caste.Warfare—as apart from slaughter—was formalized and ritualized beyond all Western dreams of gallantry.According to Marcel Granet, who has brilliantly described public life of the period,

The battle is a confused mélée of boasts, generosities, homages, insults, devotions, curses, blessings and sorceries.Much more than a clash of arms, it is a duel of moral values, an encounter of competing honours....The battle is the great moment in which each warrior proves his nobility, while in addition they prove to all present the nobility of their prince, their cause and their country.3

Our very word chivalry suggests horsemen; the Chinese nobles ruled their elaborate realm not from horseback but from chariots. The education of every patrician youth involved archery, music, writing, and reckoning, among other arts and virtues.4 Archery was something which might be learned, after a fashion, by large numbers of common men; even peasants, with a bow and a lance or pike, might constitute light cavalry when provided, or providing themselves, with mounts. But the use of the four-horse chariot necessarily remained the exclusive privilege of the nobles. The chariot fighter had to have a driver and one or two others with him in his vehicle, which was itself costly, hard to obtain, and difficult to operate. A Chou noble driving forth to war thirty centuries ago was as technical a unit as an aviator in a combat plane today or a small group of men in a tank. Just as there is a democracy implicit in the light machine gun or the automatic rifle, so was there the potentiality of equality in vast masses of infantry, supported by light, cheaply armed cavalry. Aristocratic individualism meant something when wars were short and fought with elaborate equipment; but no noble could stand up against the mass forces which emerged and continued fighting until the feudal system lost any real significance and left the country open to the development of bureaucratic government and military power.

There was no overt attack on the feudal system. The system, however, possessed within itself contradictions which led to its doom. The central power was insufficient to keep the peace, and certain local groups were—by talent, economic factors, or geography—too strong to remain subordinate. The period known as the Spring and Autumn epoch (Ch'un Ch'iu; 770-473 b.c.) yielded to that known as the Age of Warring States (Chan Kuo; 473-221 b.c.).From feudal cores there grew states, which began to follow the course of development that led to the appearance of a system of sovereign nations in Europe; they increasingly interfered with the free operation of the feudal economy.By effecting the massing of power they eliminated the overawing charioteer from the field of decisive combat.5 The chariots remained as the vehicles of the leaders or the focal points of battles, but they no longer implied a skill so great as to make up a monopoly of first-rate military force. While the most eminent thinker of the age, Confucius, lamented the decline of order, a new order was being shaped from the social, economic, and military realities laid bare by rapid development, Machiavellian intrigue, and the hard necessities of wartime economies.

The state of Ch'in, a Chinese Prussia, attained overwhelming hegemony in the third century before Christ.Its power rested on universal registration of the inhabitants, conscription, heavy policing, taxation involving constant intervention in economic matters, and legalistic administration.In its warfare there was little of the ritual which characterized the military period when chariots were dominant; codes did not amount to much.The immediate end of war was slaughter for political and economic purposes, not the hazardous parade of a feudal class.The Ch'in monarch who finally established a centralized empire took the vainglorious title of Shih Huang Ti (The First Emperor), and set himself the task of eradicating the regionalist ideologies of his conquered rivals by suppressing all political history but that of his native state.Proceeding from innovation to innovation, he ended by becoming one of the historic figures detested by later epochs.One of the practices which he extended throughout the Empire of China was the regularization of military service.He is also known as the originator of the grandiose project of the Great Wall; it is less well known that he forbade the erection of walls around cities within the Empire.His system of conscription involved three years of compulsory military service for all young men, and a corvee of three days' service each year at the frontier for every citizen; the former came to depend for its inclusiveness upon administrative integrity, while the latter was soon replaced by a money tax.

Although the First Empire established by the Ch'in did not last long, the Han dynasty (202 b.c. to a.d. 220) continued its military system6 and kept standing armies at the northern frontier and at the imperial capital. The frontier forces were composed of militia augmented for special campaigns by volunteers and criminals. The Chinese fought the barbarians with the tactics of mounted archers, devices learned from the nomads. Away from the northern steppes, infantry seems to have gained constantly in importance. By the time of Christ the chivalry of the religious-social-military class of charioteers was ancient history, and mass armies had taken their place.

Military Elements in Chinese Imperial History

Through the greater part of the past two thousand years, Chinese society has been governed by civilians.The scholastic bureaucracy secured and kept a position of primacy, and a common ranking of the social classes was: scholars, farmers, merchants, soldiers.The Confucians were antagonistic to war, and bureaucrats—if for governmental reasons alone—suspected the danger which lay in the broad dissemination of military knowledge.The Chinese consistently ranked the military man below the civilian; as a natural consequence most of the abler men went into scholarship and politics.Chinese history has its great military names and ample accounts of spectacular military exploits, but even here the elements of strategy, of diplomatic and cunning warfare, rate higher than in the corresponding European histories.Despite the fact that arms did not play as great a role in Chinese history as in Western, the difference is one of degree only; military considerations appeared and persisted which colored governmental action and social organization.Among these was the relation of the armed forces to the social order—in point of numbers and in point of force.When elections are lacking in a civilized society, fighting power demarcates an electorate of force, as it were; the distribution of power determines the center of political gravity as located in the society.In China there were, however, elements distinctly different from those in the West.

One of these was the correlation of mass power and military power.In epoch after epoch, armies seem to spring forth out of the very soil—armed groups radically unlike the Roman legion.For seasoned veterans marching forth with elaborately effective disciplines China substituted mass forces drawn directly from the populace, as need arose.In some dynasties the system was regularized in militia form.Of the Han, H.H.Dubs writes:

Chinese armies were largely militia. Everyone was compelled to serve three years in the army or in forced labor; at the northern border, the whole male population had constantly to be ready to repel Hun forays. Hence all males seem to have been able to fight and to be required to do so. When the Emperor Wu [ca. 120 b.c.] wanted armies and none would volunteer, he merely had his officials sentence criminals to army service—and thus secured armies which seemed to be able to fight as successfully as his previous armies. Universal military conscription plus a registration of all able-bodied males seems to have been the Han method.7

The common people had crossbows for shooting birds or pronged hoes for digging which were efficient even in fighting standing armies; they were also frequently in possession of weapons because they were called up as militia against barbarians.Underlying such military conditions, with their highly important political consequences, there were several surprisingly concrete and simple mechanical considerations.The charioteers had come to an end partly because the chariots were drawn by horses yoked in such a fashion that when the horses pulled hard, they often choked themselves.Other factors are suggested by Dubs:

By the time that horses became plentiful, so that cavalry was employed, the crossbow had reached such a state of development that cavalry was shown to be inferior to infantry with crossbows.The medieval European crossbow was hampered by the mechanical weakness of its trigger mechanism—the crossbow was likely to be discharged prematurely by a jar; the Chinese Han crossbow had no such defect and was a powerful weapon.A group of crossbowmen with others in the rear to string crossbows and others to bring cocked bows to the marksmen in the front rank, could shoot down cavalry before they could come near enough to discharge the lighter bows cavalry necessarily carried.Cocked crossbows could be carried around safely and fired when needed.A bolt from a powerful crossbow could pierce any armor.Hence the strong-backed peasant with a crossbow had an advantage over the noble no matter how well the noble was armed or how good horses the latter possessed.The only advantage retained by the noble was that of leadership—tactical skill and command of large bodies of infantry.Cavalry became useful for scouting and pursuit chiefly.8

The character of military techniques caused Chinese politics to be qualified by rebellion or the fear of rebellion. The difference between a mob and an army became slight. In times of poor government there were rebellions almost yearly. Insurrectionary forces gained momentum overnight; from era to era huge mobs, tens and hundreds of thousands strong, swept away governmental armies and erased corrupt or oppressive dynasties. The process may be described as popular unrest made effective with arms, which professional armies could not resist. The low place of the soldier in society prevented men of genius from organizing a dominant military caste; the professional armies were insufficient to make military government effective. By a crude and brutal democracy of mob and murder the populace of China could destroy dynasties and governments whenever economic, social, or political conditions veered too far beyond the limits of the tolerable.

Trained fighters there were, but they had the function of frontier defense; when civil war broke out behind them, the imperial governments frequently called back the frontier forces together with the barbarians they had been fighting.At least two great dynasties, the T'ang and the Ming, were destroyed because they used the nomads of the northern wilds in order to put down domestic insurrections.Light cavalry supplemented enormous bodies of infantry.In fact, the Chinese were put down by foreign conquerors only when the foreigners had Chinese allies, or when a campaign of terror had broken the spirit of popular resistance.Chinese warfare showed the disadvantages as well as the advantages of being carried on by what were in effect militia forces.The cruelty was personal and direct, and not covered with fine disclaimers; restraint of armed forces was the distinguished exception rather than the rule.The line between soldier and peasant was one which could be crossed easily, and the line between soldiery and banditry a matter of intention.At its best, military technique was honest and robustly egalitarian; at its worst it led to abuse of force such as lynching, robbery, and fanatical turbulence.The formal records of Chinese dynasties show the use of trained armies in foreign expeditions, in some of which they achieved feats of military accomplishment which rank with any of world history.Domestic troops were also employed as guards and ornamental bodies attached to the throne and other great offices of the Empire.

The convenience of rebellion was such as to make revolt a part of the unwritten constitutional practice—that broad ideological framework upon which the Chinese world rested.It was sanctioned by the classics.It served as a barometer of popular opinion.An unsuccessful rebellion, one without the dimmest chance of success, might well be launched by intelligent and patriotic men because its very appearance could prompt the government to reform.In the words of one of the earliest Western writers on the subject:

A military and police is maintained sufficient to crush merely factious risings, but totally inadequate, both in numbers and in nature, to put down a disgusted and indignant people. But though no despotism, this same government is in form and machinery a pure autocracy. In his district the magistrate is absolute; in his province, the governor; in the empire, the Emperor. The Chinese people have no right of legislation, they have no right of self-taxation, they have not the power of voting out their rulers or of limiting or stopping supplies. They have therefore the right of rebellion. Rebellion is in China the old, often exercised, legitimate, and constitutional means of stopping arbitrary and vicious legislation and administration.9

Thomas Taylor Meadows, the author just quoted, also noted that "of all nations that have attained a certain degree of civilization, the Chinese are the least revolutionary and the most rebellious."10 Revolution is a word broad enough to include principles; rebellion, more narrowly, suggests action against men.The same tight, enduring system of ideological control served to restrain the Chinese in their thinking even when they had the material power sufficient to shake off their past and build Utopia in its place.Rebels themselves obeyed the unwritten precepts.The triumph of the civilians was complete: with infantry prevailing on the battlefield, the peasants were the strongest; and with the total population saturated in compelling, uniform ideas of right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate, the scholars had only to await the establishment of administration to assume the leadership.Against malgovernment, the populace retained the power of rebellion.Against misrule, the scholars held the power which came to them as interpreters of a vast and persuasive code of tradition.Whereas Western courts, citing the past, can negate the acts of the executive or legislative by interpretation or annulment, the Chinese scholars would do the same not merely for law, but for manners, morals, thoughts, and social activities as well.The great peasant armies, though able to destroy military dictatorship, were by their very nature too loosely organized to establish it.

The Military Organization of the Manchu Dynasty

Although the Manchus, who conquered China in the first half of the seventeenth century and ruled it until the opening of the twentieth, did not profoundly modify Chinese culture, they affected the military scheme. The general outline of Chinese war and its place in society remained largely the same; but there were two innovations: the establishment of a warrior caste and the introduction of military techniques from the West.

The Manchus were a non-Chinese people living in the northeastern peripheral zone of Chinese civilization.They had adopted the Chinese form of empire and bureaucracy in their capital at Mukden in the early seventeenth century, before advancing toward China proper.Invited by the Chinese to lend their aid in a civil war, the Manchus found themselves excelling in effectiveness and leadership, which soon led them to conquer the whole country.The numerical disproportion between Chinese and Manchus was such that the conquerors would never have taken over the Empire and founded a new dynasty (the Ch'ing) had they not been assisted by large numbers of Chinese.On the other hand, the spectacular terrorism of the Manchu cavalry was a potent weapon, and the Manchus did not feel that they owed their throne entirely to the Chinese.They were in the anomalous position of half-conquerors, a people coming into China partly as aliens and partly as the new leaders of the Chinese.At the very beginning of their rule (commonly dated 1644) they had to decide on a policy to determine their relations with the Chinese: Should they allow their people to mingle with and disappear into the vast Chinese masses, or should they attempt a policy of racial separateness to keep their blood clear of Chinese dilution?Underlying this question there was the even more practical one: Should the Manchus rule China simply as another imperial house, or should they attempt to maintain their status as a racially separate caste of conquerors?

There is a Chinese legend which tells of a high minister of state, a Chinese in the service of the Manchu conquerors, who saw no remedy from the oppression of China in his own generation, but who nevertheless worked with craftily concealed patriotism to sow the undoing of the house of the Ch'ing. He recommended to the Manchus that they keep their fighting men from demoralization by ordaining that no Manchu warrior should enter any trade or profession but those of warfare and public administration, and that they should guard the ancient heritage of their valiant blood by making miscegenation a crime. Thus he schemed to stiffen the Manchu monarchy in a position of unbounded arrogance, so that a few generations of peace would find its armies sloven, atrophied, and useless, and its people still alien to the Chinese. With neither military power to overawe the masses nor popular affection to uphold their foreign-rooted dynasty, they were bound to go down; all this, the legend tells, the Chinese adviser who lived and died with high Manchu honors clearly foresaw. Actually the Manchus did move in such a direction, and with the prophesied results.

They had conquered China with their own tribal-military system intact, organized into units termed bannersUnable to hold the country by their own force alone and, after putting down serious rebellions, unwilling to depend on the Chinese, they arranged a method of dual garrisoning.A Manchu military hierarchy paralleled the Chinese bureaucracy throughout the Empire, and Manchu bannermen were placed in every city of strategic importance.The Manchu garrisons were made up of men destined to arms, men who were the descendants of the wild horsemen of the northeastern plains, but who soon became tragic and useless idlers.Forbidden entrance into the vast and vital civilian society of the Chinese, by a decree of their own kinsman on the throne, they spent generation after generation in profound peace, forgetting war and losing their self-respect as warriors.Whatever the reason, they did not engage in practices such as the extended hunts, amounting in fact to great army maneuvers, by which Kublai Khan kept his Mongol troops hard and ready for war.An English writer, familiar with the state of the Manchu garrisons in their last years, thus described them:

But, unhappily, the inactive bannermen, both at Peking and in the provinces, had towards the end degenerated into idle, flabby, and too often opium-smoking parasites; they had long neglected to keep up their archery, which in any case had become useless in these days of magazine rifles, though it might have nourished a wholesome muscular habit of body if persisted in....In the provinces these degenerate Manchus were often, practically, honourable prisoners, rigidly confined within the limits of the city walls, in the midst of a semi-hostile population speaking a dialect which the bannermen ...had to learn, ...if they wished even to buy a cabbage in the streets; and the Tartar General, who nominally outranked even the Chinese Viceroy, was really often a self-indulgent, ignorant incompetent.11

Politically, the Chinese found themselves face to face with a foreign group imbued with an arrogant racial pride and determined to maintain a separate existence. The Manchus did not bend to the superior numbers of the Chinese, nor yield to the attractions of Chinese culture. They maintained the Manchu language at the innermost citadel of Chinese civilization—the Forbidden City at Peking—and stamped their West Asiatic script on the money of the Empire. They worked out schemes by which the Manchus would retain a majority in the highest offices of the Empire, on the sole ground of race. Elementary rationalizations of two opposing racial attitudes were the result. The Manchu policy fortified and brought back from the past the racial pride of the Chinese. They were not merely the civilized heart of humanity; they were, civilization or no civilization, bound together by blood. If the Manchu garrisons served no other purpose, the presence of alien troops in the cities taught the Chinese the first lessons of resentment; it prepared them for the vigorous racial-nationalist appeal which the Nationalists were to put forth.

Governmentally, the effect of Manchu dual government was to force the Chinese to an increased consciousness of the implied presuppositions of their social and political system.The use of the garrisons constituted one of the four main causes of Manchu decline; the second cause was the violation of the strict merit system by racial preference in the bureaucracy; the other two were failure to maintain domestic tranquillity, and corruption in the hierarchy of scholar-officials.12 Manchu rule by military power was unrealistic and a political affront. Their army of permanent occupation committed slow suicide in idleness and at the same time kept the Manchu dynasty from nativizing itself so that the Chinese might think of it as Chinese. Their creation of a hierarchy of bannermen, paralleling the older Chinese civilian institutions, brought to the surface of thought those prejudices and assumptions which had guided and controlled Chinese destiny for centuries. Government and society had been one to such a degree that the special features of a universal control did not require legalization or sharp tracing. The Manchus removed government from the rest of society by staining it with militarism and racial preference; it became ominously disparate and a conspicuous target for examination and consideration.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Manchu rule brought into a sharper focus the largely unformulated constitutional theory which had underlain the Chinese imperial society for nearly twenty centuries. With the sharper demarcation of rulers and ruled, the Manchus had to make frequent and overt use of legal authority over the ideology. The Chinese read of the sanction of rebellion in their own classics; they could turn to their histories for a description of the ignoble origins of their present masters. The dynasty turned therefore to literary censorship and ordered extensive excisions from all writings scholarly, artistic, or other, which might weaken the prestige of their house.13 They ordained a most rigid and dogmatic interpretation of the classics so as to suit their purposes. This the Chinese met with sharp criticism. The literary struggle did much to weaken the scholastic class and to deprive the Manchus of academic supporters. At the same time it deprived the peasant Chinese of their natural leaders, with the consequence that secret and half-literate political associations faced an arbitrary government military in character. The old Chinese system remained, but it became more and more of a form with every generation. The theory of moral agency and ideological control was defamed by the very presence of the barbarian garrisons. The barbarians themselves weakened so much that in the later days of the Manchu Empire the military occupation became a myth instead of being a political fact. For the time being, however, Manchu military organization acted as a force-displaying agency until the scholars and the less favored classes of society were able to combine in a revolution.

Pacific government, government by moral agency, derives its greatest powers from assent and agreement; it thrives on symbolization and is never necessarily dependent upon the display of outright force.Government by force, on the other hand, remains effective almost in proportion to the exercise and vigor of that force; stereotyped and ritualized, it is essentially weak.Purely ceremonial administration and offices may be a burden on the body politic, yet their dignity may make up for their lack of efficiency.But an army that cannot fight is an object of ridicule, and its very presence a challenge to the resources of intelligence.

The Manchu garrisons in the key cities were under the command of Manchu military officers, whom Europeans dubbed with the picturesque title of Tartar Generals. The garrisons were made up of three racial elements: Manchu, Mongol, and Chinese. The Chinese in the banner armies were the descendants of soldiers in the renegade Han army (han chün), the Chinese section of the Manchu-Mongol-Chinese formations which conquered China for the Manchus in the seventeenth century.The military organization seems to have been a simplified copy of civilian bureaucracy, with examiners, censors, and other familiar devices of Chinese government appearing in quasi-military form.The principle of merit was violated, however, in that certain categories of men claimed special rank by hereditary right.14 It was also possible for some of the bannermen to transfer between the civilian and the military branches of the government.

In the early nineteenth century the han chün possessed considerable artillery. There was a separate navy, comprising more than two thousand war vessels equipped from a score of dockyards. Even then, Chinese military technology was markedly inferior to European; the Chinese navy was no match even for Europe's wooden warships. When ironclads entered Far Eastern waters and breech-loading cannon were employed, the difference made Chinese naval and artillery establishments almost antiquarian in nature. With most of the banner forces of the Empire kept at Peking and the rest scattered over the country in the great cities, the Manchu force was widely diffused. In practice their armies hardly exceeded a quarter of a million men; whatever the exact total, the military were outnumbered far over a thousand to one by the Chinese, in the realm which the Manchus supposedly held by conquest.

The effective army in the later years of the Ch'ing dynasty was formed for the most part of the Green Standard (lü ying), provincial regulars, and the vast hordes of irregulars (yung, or "braves") who have traditionally done the greater share of the fighting in Chinese history. The Green Standard troops appear to have suffered, although to a lesser degree, from the long peace which ruined the banner armies, but their use in major police enterprises and troubles with primitive peoples kept them from the utter demoralization of the banners. The common practice under the Ch'ing was to recruit the local toughs, to appoint their leaders as probationary officers, and to use such emergency armies for real and immediate fighting. Although the Manchu dynasty had no system of organized reserves and little machinery for rapid mobilization, they were thus nevertheless able to swell their armies to astonishing numbers in a very short while. American military commentators said in 1900 that the peacetime size of the Chinese imperial army was about three hundred thousand men and its wartime strength about one million—minute figures for China's reserve of man power—and added:

The total strength of the standing army of China can not be exactly ascertained, and if a statement of the number of men belonging to it could be given, it would be of little value, as many of the men who are carried on the rolls are neither armed nor equipped, and a great number of them are not even performing military service, but are following their usual vocations.15

This military regime bears the air of a vast preparation for some foreseen but remote emergency.The Manchus themselves seemed to sleep; armies drowsed through the centuries, weapons rusting, tactics forgotten in the mimicry of parade, while all about them the factual potency of military power passed to the Chinese.Even the Europeans at first shared the illusion of great although latent military power behind the Manchu throne.The easy defeat of the Manchu Chinese forces in the wars with England and France in the early and middle nineteenth century led writers such as Thomas De Quincey to cry out against the great fraud of Asia—the sleeping Manchu giant, who was not sleeping but dead.

The T'ai-p'ing rebellion16 lasting from 1849 to 1865 provided an actual test of military power in the Manchu Empire, and demonstrated two remarkable new facts. First, the real forces were no longer the regular troops, whether banner or Green Standard, but the militia which might be organized and trained for immediate results by robust civilians like the viceroys Li Hung-chang and Tsêng Kuo-fan.17 Second, the military technique of the Far East was obsolete; even a little Western equipment, leadership, and training made any Chinese army immediately more effective. The consequences were contradictory. If the military regime of the Manchus existed only in a formal sense, and actual power had passed to the Chinese masses, who had only to await a leadership to exhibit their power, then force had failed and government by moral agency would again be the need of the epoch. At the same time, the introduction of Western technique showed the possibility of a new regime of force, another opportunity for a minority to overwhelm the vast majority by sheer technical military effectiveness, and government by moral agency could not be sufficient. The center of military gravity would not simply pass to the group possessing the largest army. A new form of government, making intelligent use of modern weapons, was called for.

Undoubtedly China was and is too large to be governed by mere military occupation—unless forces far larger than any which have heretofore operated in the Far East are employed.The very garrisoning of the country would absorb tremendous armies.At the same time, military force is sufficient to overawe and intimidate civilians in any given area, since the man with a rifle is superior to the man with the crossbow or spear.Conceivably, however, a rhythm may originate between the progress in introducing new weapons and the progress of the populace in learning new means of counteraction.In 1860 the British and French entered Peking and later burned the Summer Palace of the Manchu emperors as a lesson to the imperial government.The expedition, casual when measured by Western standards, showed that the Manchu bannermen and Chinese levies were equally powerless before the intrusion of a more advanced skill in warfare.As soon as peace was declared the Chinese began organizing some of their metropolitan forces after the Western manner, obtaining foreign instructors to put them through the Western manual of arms.

At the same time that the Manchu court was learning to its discomfort the importance of Western warfare, it was calling Westerners to its aid in putting down the T'ai-p'ings.The Manchus assembled a nineteenth century navy including steam vessels from British and other sources, which broke up without having accomplished much.With land forces there was much greater success; an American, Frederick Townsend Ward, and an Englishman, Major Charles George ("Chinese") Gordon, organized a small body of imperial regular troops along Western lines and with Western officers.This force was given the honorific title of "Ever Victorious Army" by the court, and together with the militia organized by Tsêng Kuo-fan and Li Hung-chang suppressed the T'ai-p'ing rebellion after the banner and Green Standard armies had failed.

The ensuing thirty years (1865-1895) witnessed the slow decline in Manchu foreign policy and military development and a gradual crumbling of Chinese society at large.Revolutionaries such as Sun Yat-sen received their first baptism of Westernization in the 1870's and 1880's, and foreign trade rose by great leaps.Occasionally the Empire's military regime seemed to rally.Between 1883 and 1885 the Chinese forces fighting the French in Indo-China were equipped with Mannlicher rifles far more up-to-date than the weapons of their enemies.In the preceding decade the Chinese destroyed a Mohammedan state set up in Chinese Turkestan in defiance of their suzerainty, and overawed the Russians into evacuating an area along the Ili seized under the pretence of maintaining order.The lack of coordination between the different agencies of government was as much to blame for China's weakness as were the specific defects of the central departments.When the army was winning, the diplomatic agencies yielded; when the army was unprepared, the diplomatic agencies, by some ill-timed impertinence, gave aliens the pretext for hostilities.

The first Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) offered another test. Hitherto, the armed conflicts with Europeans, even including the entry of Westerners into Peking in 1860, had seemed remote from the actual problem of military power in China. The Europeans might possibly withdraw and leave the Empire in peace. But incalculable danger would arise to Chinese prestige should the wo, the sea dwarfs, defeat the Chinese and eat more deeply into the mainland.Chinese began to realize that in this war their status was at stake, not only in the dimly perceived wide universe of the Westerners but also in that of the Far East in which they had long held such comfortable hegemony.They entered the war relatively well equipped, so that even outside observers were doubtful of the outcome of the struggle.No one was more amazed than the Chinese themselves when they were whipped as no modern nation has been whipped, routed ignominiously in a sequence of slaughters, and ultimately forced to make important territorial and financial concessions to the Japanese.

This catastrophe was followed by a series of reforms, some designed to enable China to meet the West on its own ground. In January, 1896, a turning point was reached with the appointment of Yüan Shih-k'ai to command the one efficient brigade assembled in the course of the war.18 Yüan was to find in modern arms the career which led to his dictatorship after the fall of the Empire, and was to perform notable work as a military and administrative reformer, although of restricted value. He joined the reactionaries and brought to an end the Hundred Days of Reform of 1898, a movement generated by the initiative of the idealistic young Emperor Kuang Hsü, who sought to direct China into the course already taken by Japan—modernization within the imperial system. In 1900 there occurred the wild upheaval of the Boxers. It began as a native racial uprising against the Manchus, but was deflected by the Manchus into the support of the court and hostility against the Western intruders. During the Boxer movement part of the fighting against the Westerners was done by regular banner and Green Standard troops, but the greater part by bands of desperadoes and fanatics. The imperial army suffered in the chaos following the international occupation of Peking.

Under the name of the Wu Wei Chün the first large-scale attempt was made to modernize the Chinese armed forces. After the military and naval experiments of the 1860's and later decades, this enterprise evoked great hopes. The new army was inaugurated in 1895 with foreign instruction and foreign arms. In 1901 one division was made the core of Yüan Shih-k'ai's new modern force. Rodney Gilbert, a British publicist, has summarized the military changes down to the end of the Manchu dynasty as follows:

In January 1901 the Yangtze Viceroys submitted a memorial to the Throne suggesting among other things the disbandment of the useless Lü Ying [Armies of the Green Standard], the employment of the Bannermen, almost as useless, in service other than military, and the creation of a modern army. This brought forth an Imperial decree ordering reorganization of the army, of which Yuan Shih-kai, then Viceroy of Chihli, took advantage to build up six new divisions, four of which were transferred to the Ministry of War in 1906. This was the real beginning of the Lu Chun, the Chinese National Army. In January, 1905, a comprehensive scheme was outlined designed to give China an army of 36 Divisions or 360,000 men, by the year 1911. Three years after this decision was made there were about 60,000 men, with 360 guns, in the North, and 40,000 men, with 174 guns, in the South. The army was developing along sound lines when Yuan Shih-kai was removed from office in 1908 after the death of his great patroness the Empress Dowager, and the direction of military, as well as other affairs, fell into the hands of the Manchu princes, whose mismanagement contributed much to the downfall of their dynasty three years later.19

The beginning, although auspicious, did not mean that even the model sections of the modernized forces were comparable to those of other lands.The confusion of weapons was already evident.A member of the United States General Staff wrote in 1910:

To arm these masses China has been obliged to use weapons that are considered somewhat out of date.There are four types of rifles, mostly Mausers and Japanese Murata rifles of old pattern.They are, however, breech-loading, small-caliber weapons, not to be despised, even if they do not reach the ideal which some nations set.In fact they are the weapons which have been used in the great wars of most recent date.

It is so also with the artillery where even a greater difference of types is to be observed.This is, undoubtedly, a serious drawback, owing, of course, to the great difficulty of providing ammunition.20

It was during this period, from the decisive defeat of the dynasty by Japan in 1895 to the Republican Revolution of 1911-1912, that the Chinese revolutionaries most eagerly studied military manuals and sought to purchase Western arms to offset the great advantages gained by the modernized portions of the imperial army.Sun Yat-sen became almost as much a military authority as he was a political philosopher and leader; his chief military follower, General Huang Hsing, performed for the revolutionaries the services rendered for the regime by Yüan Shih-k'ai.On both sides there was the anxiety to master the mysteries of twentieth century warfare.The World War had not yet begun, nor had the staggering burdens of modern armament become evident.Great as were the improvements in fighting, prewar military organization seemed still primarily a matter of well-equipped infantry, properly led, properly drilled, and supported by adequate artillery and other auxiliary services.Wireless, gas, airplanes, tanks, submarines, torpedo launches, and mechanized or aerialized infantry were little more than a matter of speculation.The proportions of present-day military budgets no one could foresee.

The Army and the Republican Revolution

The Republican Revolution of 1911-1912 was the last overt act in the collapse of the ideologically maintained social system; it brought armies into violently free play in the support of movements toward re-formation of the ideology and articulation and control of the society.On October 10, 1911, the troops of the Wuch'ang garrison rose in mutiny and sided with the revolution.A series of uprisings engineered by military and agitational leaders followed, province by province, all directed against the imperial power in the North.The use of violence in Chinese politics served to accentuate a condition which had affected China even in the earliest historic times—the unresolved contradictions between the North and the South.Differences of race, spoken language, and economy produced fundamental cleavages accentuated by temperament.Traditionally the North was more conservative and solidaristic, the South more rebellious and enterprising.Sun Yat-sen was a Southerner; militarism reached its sharpest effectiveness in the North.

Yüan Shih-k'ai, who had proved himself the evil genius of Emperor Kuang Hsü by betraying the monarch's reforms of 1898, was called to the aid of the Manchus only to betray them to the Republic; he then served the Republic with the intention of seizing complete power for himself. The Republicans set up their regime in Nanking on January 1, 1912, with Sun Yat-sen as president. They established contact with Yüan, who acted in the triple capacity of negotiator for the Manchus, representative of the modernized armies of the North (which were his), and leader in his own right and in his own interest. The Republicans realized that Yüan could not be dispossessed—indeed, it is fairly certain that he could have upheld the throne had he so wished. Their power was indefinite, and as Chinese they preferred compromise and order to ideals pushed to the bitter end. In the middle of February they yielded to Yüan, and Sun surrendered to him the presidency as a reward for his allegiance to the Republic. Yüan, for the Manchus, secured a settlement by which the Forbidden City (the residence of the emperor in Peking) was made into a second Vatican City; the emperor was allowed his formal and ritual titles (a status remarkably like that of the Pope) and a very substantial stipend. For the Northern armies and himself Yüan obtained actual power over the country. A civilian, but a soldier as well, Yüan rose by both intrigue and the implied threat of force.

The Republic was launched by valedictory imperial edicts ordering the imperial officials throughout the realm to obey Yüan and the new form of government; by Republicans nominally headed by their greatest and coldest antagonist; and by a soldier of higher professional standing in the Western sense than any Chinese leader for centuries past undertaking the task of keeping order and ushering China through drastic reconstruction.For a few halcyon months it seemed as though the Republic might grow into reality from under the aegis of military dictatorship.21 But soon it became apparent that the revolution was not a transfer of power and renovation of order but the dissolution of power and the erasure of order. What was left was ideological uncertainty, social turmoil, economic disorganization—with politics reduced to mere pageantry, and the armies, ominously growing under the care of President Yüan, maintaining what little order was left to maintain. In 1913 the Nationalist-Republicans rebelled in the Yangtze valley and were crushed by the armies of the government of the Republic of China.

From the military rule of Yüan Shih-k'ai there emerged an army system which was to bring China to almost complete political ruin in the decade after Yüan's death. Although he organized a model regiment as a sample of what could be done in China, inflation of numbers and deterioration of morale and matériel were the most obvious symptoms of the new role of the army—a role much more concerned with problems of domestic intrigue than with defense against the outsiders. For an army of national defense, high technical excellence and a commensurate smallness of numbers are desirable features; for an army of dictatorship or occupation, inferior equipment, poor supplies, and inefficient training are all trifling handicaps in comparison with the advantage of vast numbers which can be used to garrison large sections of the realm and meet the threat of civil war. The very shift from empire to republic involved the enlistment of additional thousands of revolutionary fighters; once in the army, they were hard to dislodge. The personal military interests of Yüan led him to expand the army, and his political ambitions nourished the thought that the country would be secure beneath him only through the medium of an extensive garrison system. Finally, there was a far-reaching shift in the Chinese social pyramid. Men of intelligence and of education flocked to the army, and Japan's military schools were crowded with young Chinese who saw in war their easiest avenue to fortune or to the service of their country.

A reconstituted army, soldiers who could command greater respect than ever before, numerical extension and qualitative deterioration of the national armed forces—these were the more patent military changes under the Republic. To them must be added the factors fusing the elements into a system that was to bring immediate fortune and ultimate ruin to practically all who ventured into its operations. Many of the provinces which turned to the cause of the revolutionaries in 1911 and 1912 became gradually militarized. When the Manchus were gone, the old distinction between the Tartar General and the civilian viceroy had lost its purpose; the new provincial executives combined both military and governmental powers. Provincial jealousies and the growing disorder favored a strong factual autonomy for the various provinces, even though there was no technical claim of provincial independence and very little even of confederation. The first Republic was in name a centralized parliamentary-presidential state with quasi-federal features; in fact it was the combination of an impotent, headless imperial bureaucracy and a presidential military dictatorship possessing physically limited and indefinable authority over a large group of provinces. Between China and the accomplishment of regular and orderly republican government there stood ignorance, turmoil, poverty, reaction, and despair. Between Yüan's regime and the tuchün system there stood only Yüan's might.

Notes

1. Herrlee G. Creel, The Birth of China, p.141, London, 1936.

2. Ibid., pp.142-154.

3. Marcel Granet, Chinese Civilization, p.270, New York, 1930.Quoted by permission of the American publishers, Alfred A.Knopf, Inc.

4. Henri Maspero, La Chine antique, p.131, Paris, 1927.This is one of the most valuable surveys of ancient China.

5. An elementary discussion of this period is to be found in Paul M. A. Linebarger, The Political Doctrines of Sun Yat-sen, pp.25-29, "Nation and State in Chinese Antiquity," Baltimore, 1937.

6. Pan Ku (H. H. Dubs, translator), The History of the Former Han Dynasty, passim, Baltimore, 1938.

7. In a memorandum prepared in response to a request by the present writer.

8. Ibid.

9. Thomas Taylor Meadows, The Chinese and Their Rebellions, p.24, London, 1856.His accounts of the T'ai-p'ing rebellion even today possess great liveliness and interest and illuminate twentieth century Chinese problems.

10. Ibid., p.25.

11. E. H. Parker, China ..., pp.259-260, New York, 1917.

12. A. N. Holcombe, The Chinese Revolution, pp.70-81, Cambridge, 1930.

13. See Luther Carrington Goodrich, The Literary Inquisition of Ch'ien-lung, Baltimore, 1935.

14. The most extensive source of information on Manchu military organization in China is T. F. Wade, "The Army of the Chinese Empire: Its Two Great Divisions, the Bannermen or National Guard, and the Green Standard or Provincial Troops; Their Organization, Pay, Condition &c. ," The Chinese Repository (Canton), vol. 20, pp. 250-280, 300-340, 363-422, 1851, which is now unfortunately rare. William James Hail, Tseng Kuo-fan and the Taiping Rebellion, New Haven, 1927, presents an accessible and informative digest of this and other material in its opening pages. Two French works based on Wade are Jules Picard, État générale des forces maritimes et militaires de la Chine ..., Paris, 1860, and P. Dabry, Organisation militaire des Chinois, ou la Chine et ses armées, Paris, 1859. William Frederick Mayers, The Chinese Government, Shanghai, 1897, is one of the most valuable references for the structure of the last imperial government of China; designed as a manual of titles, it presents a concise outline of all major civil and military offices. A more elaborate treatise is P. C. Hsieh, The Chinese Government, 1644-1911, Baltimore, 1925. See also Anatol M. Kotenev, The Chinese Soldier, Shanghai, 1937.The text refers to Wade, p.391, and Hsieh, p.260.

15. United States War Department, Adjutant-General's Office, no. 30, Notes on China, pp.57-69, "The Chinese Army," Washington, 1900.Except for cursory references, this pamphlet is of no great value.

16. See above, pp. 32 ff.

17. See Hail, op.cit. in note 57.

18. See Meribeth E. Cameron, The Reform Movement in China, 1898-1912, p.59, Stanford, 1931.

19. H. G. W. Woodhead (ed.) , The China Year Book, 1921-2, Tientsin, 1921; chap.XIX, "Defense," by Rodney Gilbert, pp.511-512.Gilbert's is a competent contemporary account of tuchünism, sketching the background very clearly.

20. George H. Blakeslee (ed.) , China and the Far East, New York, 1910, Chapter X, "The Chinese Army—Its Development and Present Strength," by Major Eben Swift, p. 181. See also General H. Frey, L'Armée chinoise: l'armée ancienne, l'armée nouvelle, l'armée chinoise dans l'avenir, Paris, 1904.

21. For a discussion of the governmental changes of the period see below, p. 145 ff. See also H. F. MacNair, China in Revolution, Chicago, 1931; A. N. Holcombe, The Spirit of the Chinese Revolution, New York, 1931. For a contemporary censure of Yüan Shih-k'ai see Paul Myron [Paul M. W. Linebarger], Our Chinese Chances, Chicago, 1915.

Chapter V

CAUSES

Yüan's closing years might have resembled Napoleon's rise from the position of First Consul to that of emperor, had he not been checked at the very last moment by armed uprisings and expressions of deep popular contempt.Even so, he retained control of the country.1 The humiliation of his defeat lacked even dramatic compensations, and he died in June, 1916, of disease, poison, or chagrin. With his death the Republic had a chance to stand by itself, but it could not.

The Age of the War Lords

Yüan had fastened the symbols of old on the scaffolding of a new order.With his death the momentum of administrative routine retained from the Manchu dynasty was lost; the Republican government in Peking degenerated from impotence to comedy.The process called government began to nauseate patriotic Chinese and foreigners alike; few were able to take a long view, to maintain their courage, and to keep on fighting against disgusting and disheartening realities.With the decomposition of the central government—except the modern bureaucracies such as posts and customs, which were kept intact by their foreign personnel and their special international status—the armies, though divided provincially, stepped into positions of unprecedented authority.There was a veritable epidemic of monarchical ambition, greed, and willfulness among the provincial military commanders; many Chinese expected a new Yüan to emerge from that group and become the "strong man of China."With such a stage to strut on, it is not surprising that the Chinese military lost constructive vision.A sober nucleus of idealistically hard-headed, patriotic men, each a George Washington, might have used military power to reunite the country, but order could not be expected to emerge from the unsystematized competition of armed forces.

Three broader factors affected the ascendancy of war lords, in addition to obvious motives and interests.The ideological ruin was bad enough; the consequent social disorder crippled China.But the armies now came to provide a refuge for the unemployed and dispossessed.A second factor, the mechanical mobilization of military forces through the railways, made warfare more expensive and ruinous than it would have been with the slow-moving infantry of the past.Thirdly, the war lords gave physical embodiment to the ideological and social disunity of China, inviting the constant intervention of the Western powers and of Japan in Chinese affairs.

Individually the war lords warrant no special attention.There was Chang Tso-lin in Manchuria; Tuan Chi-jui and Ts'ao Kun in North China; Yen Hsi-shan ("The Model Governor") and, to the west of him, Fêng Yü-hsiang ("The Christian General"); Chang Chung-chang in Shantung, significant more for his brutality than for his political and military position; the quaint, conservative scholar Wu P'ei-fu, in the Yangtze valley, minor figures in the South and West.It was not the generals who were important, but militarism.

Militarism machine-gunned the Confucian ethics out of politics; it taxed the land into ruin; it laid China wide open to imperialistic thrusts, and—by the same act—made her a poor market.Militarism built roads when they were strategically required, established a few railways and spoiled more, modernized China, but did so in the costliest way of all.Only in the intellectual world was military domination not outright destruction.The generals and their staffs were surprisingly ignorant of the power of ideas, ineffectual in their censorship, oblivious to the great leverage of undercover agitation.Trusting arms, they failed to see that the only opposition able to destroy them was not military but mental.

While the soldiery stirred the country with murder and oppression, their system progressed steadily toward self-destruction. Two great pressures forced constant further expansion of the armies. The first is obvious: military rivalry. The second was the growing abuse of army organization as a means of unemployment relief. Military taxation drove the peasants off the land, whereupon they had no recourse but to become bandits or soldiers. If they were bandits, consolidation under a chieftain transformed them into military irregulars and induced some ambitious general to include them in his forces. If they were soldiers, the bandit stage remained in reach. In either case, they added to the burden falling upon their commander, which in turn led to still greater impoverishment of the peasants, a further increase of dispossessed men, bandits, and soldiers. With the widening circulation of arms, Western guns and fighting methods became less and less a secret of small groups capable of establishing a firm military oligarchy and more and more the property of a cross section of the Chinese masses.

From an estimated total of 1,369,880 in 1921,2 the number of men under arms rose to a figure estimated to be between 1,883,300 and 1,933,300 five years later.3 This increase occurred in one of the poorest countries of the world, despite conditions of extreme misery:

Recruiting goes on incessantly in every town in North China where there is a garrison.There are no statistics available, but it is known that the death rate from disease is very high because, even in garrison, sanitary precautions are crude and the medical service is inefficient and inadequate.In battle the care of the wounded is barbarously primitive, even in the best units, and death from infected wounds is rather the rule than the exception; while those who cannot walk from the field to the nearest hospital more often than not die of exposure or clumsy handling.One of a Chinese commander's major concerns is filling the gaps in the ranks, but at the same time these conditions have kept the proportions of the armies down to a fairly constant figure.Chinese officers have advanced the theory that if recruiting were everywhere abandoned, disease, desertions and losses in battle would account for ten per cent.per annum, so that the armies would automatically cease to exist in ten years.4

The use of the railways for military purposes unsettled large groups of Chinese geographically and caused meetings of extensive bodies of men from different areas. At first such contacts, especially under wartime conditions, would only intensify provincial sentiment and mistrust of strangers, but gradually this influence began to make for a new national consciousness. In the meantime, the troops learned the intricacies of modern transport. A coolie in a peaceful part of Asia might see trains for years, observing the Westerners riding in them, and remain impressed by the sight; a Chinese bandit sitting on a freight car in a commandeered train would become rapidly familiar with the fire vehicles.

The role of the militarists with respect to China's international status was ambiguous.In the first place, the weakness which they created reduced China to an international pawn.The discord into which she had fallen allowed for semipartitions—various foreign interests backing different war lords—although a genuine partition may thereby have been staved off.In China proper the influence of the Japanese seemed to be behind Chang Tso-lin and the Northern militarists; the British were regarded as friendly to Wu P'ei-fu in the Yangtze valley; and the French achieved something not far from domination in the province farthest southwest, Yünnan.Fêng Yü-hsiang was supposed to have veered picturesquely for foreign friends between the Protestant missions and the Bolshevik agents.A miniature replica of the European balance of power could be played in China, with outside groups friendly to one or the other war lord.An agreement between the chief participants in 1919 sought to prevent the shipping of arms to unauthorized military groups in China but proved largely ineffectual in the end.

Between 1922 and 1926 there was formed in South China a nexus of armies which were to provide the military edge to ideological revolution and establish the followers of Sun Yat-sen in power.These armies were built up with the assistance of Russian and German advisers and with American arms which had been left in Siberia and had fallen into the hands of the Bolsheviks; the troops were led by new-style Chinese officers under the leadership of Chiang K'ai-shek.The Whampoa Academy was the most obvious sign of the new school of military thought, coming forth as a consequence of the Nationalist-Communist coalition.5 Armaments did not differ in any substantial degree from those of the war lords, but they were more carefully kept and more skillfully used. The military machine which arose in the South was better organized, better disciplined, better led, and better cared for than any army on the Chinese scene for a decade.

From 1926 to 1927 the ensuing campaign for the Nationalist conquest of China, as outlined in the principles of Sun Yat-sen,6] drove forward with striking success. The Nationalist troops everywhere pushed their enemies before them with astonishing speed. The explanation is to be found in part in the efficiency and military honesty of officers and men, but even more in the nonmilitary factors which fortified the armies and the ideological weapons which cleared the ground before it. The new armies not only represented military might; they were also propaganda machines. To every regiment there was attached a political staff to keep up the morale of the troops and to win over the enemy and the civilian population. The troops themselves were propaganda brigades as well as military units. Literacy in the armies was made a point of great pride, and certain divisions made novel reputations for themselves on this ground. The Nationalists were known by many as the soldiers who did not harm the people. Without the troops the Nationalists would never have come to power; but without the supporting sweep of mass propaganda the Nationalist movement might have gone on for decades in the form of civilian conspirators fighting against overwhelming odds or else seeking to make venal mercenaries the prime instrument for the regeneration of Chinese civilization.

The military revolution of 1926-1927 brought new factors to the Chinese military scene. It indicated that a point of equilibrium had been reached between the military and the ideological modes of control and that it was no longer possible for sheer force and a minimum of intelligence to hold unchallenged power in the Chinese society. It was, furthermore, a threefold struggle: a patriotic and progressive uprising against domestic and foreign oppression and inefficiency; an agrarian revolt on a grand scale; and a proletarian uprising on the part of the relatively small but strategically placed Chinese proletariat. Only in the first of these aspects did the revolution meet with the approval of most Chinese—the victims and not the bearers of arms. Men of all shades of opinion were able to agree on a policy of attacking the system of tuchüns, which offered no planning for the future, no resurrection of the past, and little public order.The patriotic troops were enraged by the corruption and inadequacy all about them and by the fortresses of privilege reared by aliens on their coasts and in their greatest inland cities.

The campaign of 1926-1927 marked the identification of the coolie soldier with his own class and of the peasant fighter with his. The rank and file were given to understand that they were not fighting in some game beyond their understanding but for the security of people like themselves. Under the influence of the propaganda put forth by the Nationalists and the allied Communists, an incipient agrarian revolt was fanned into flame and proletarian uprisings in the cities were made possible for the first time. Whole sections of the countryside fell into a condition not far from anarchy as the revolutionary troops led the people in revolt. After 1927, however, the military forces developed along two antagonistic lines. The Nationalists, seizing the political instruments of the revolution but finding its ideological factors largely beyond their control, began to create a professionalized army with which to stabilize their regime. The Communists, and their agrarian allies, standing to the Left of the newborn Nanking government, were eager to fight on in the tested informal fashion. In the year of the establishment of the Nanking government, 1927, the Red Army could still demonstrate its effectiveness. Shortly afterward the precautionary arms embargo of the foreign powers, which had prevailed since 1919, was lifted, thereby opening up the means by which Chiang K'ai-shek could renovate and specialize the armies under his command.

The break with the war-lord tradition was much more obvious in the case of the Communists than in the case of the Nationalists.The Communists, lacking sufficient support to occupy any broad contiguous territory, fell back on guerrilla fighting of their own.The Nationalists, strong enough to hold a certain portion of the area, nevertheless compromised with the existing military system to seek mastery.For three years after the establishment of the Nanking government, it remained doubtful whether the whole government might not subside into inertia and neglect, leaving Chiang standing alone, distinguished from the other war lords only by his character.

Late in 1930 and early in 1931 a menacing alliance was organized between two of the most influential remaining Northern tuchüns and the "liberal" wing of the Nationalists. Operating from the north, after the proclamation of an insurgent "National Government" at Peking, the rebels at first seemed to have the military advantage. Chiang had learned many lessons, however, and in the most serious fighting which China had seen in years he broke the force of the Northern offensive. Airplanes appeared as a threat against the civilian population of Peking, although no actual deaths were reported. There were ugly rumors that gas was being used at the front. Small tanks from England, though giving a rather poor performance, symbolized a novel trend. More and better heavy artillery was used than ever before. Trenches came up to World War standards. The war ended with the intervention from Manchuria of Chang Hsüeh-liang, a strangely progressive and patriotic tuchün; but the fighting had been enough to show that of all the great armed forces in China the Nationalist armies of Chiang K'ai-shek and the Nanking government were the most effective.

The rehabilitation of men's thinking had not proceeded far enough to eliminate the dangers of an overemphasized military leadership, but the tide had turned.After 1931 the military situation in China had become subordinate to the problems of ideology and of government.The chief military factors were now the governmentalized armies, the guerrilla opposition of the Communists, and the problem of foreign war.

The Age of Air Conquest

The new military period which replaced the war-lord system was marked by (1) technical improvement of the armies, especially in the direction of air power; (2) supplementation of the armies by the quasi-military power of the civil government, so that Chinese wars ceased to be a question of armed bands drifting about the surface of the social system; (3) organization of the Nationalist armies into national units in fact as well as name; (4) increasing pressure of the disbandment problem; (5) development of guerrilla tactics by the Reds and of guerrilla-suppression tactics by the Nationalists; (6) problems arising from Japanese conquest, which overwhelmed Manchuria in one fierce onslaught and harassed China for six years of military aggressions before breaking forth anew in the catastrophic surge of 1937-1938.

Aviation was to leap to a sensational place. Aviation and national civilian government became almost natural complements of one another. Only by aviation could all parts of the country be brought under the jurisdiction of Nanking and the geographical handicaps of China be overcome, and only a national government could afford the long-term investments in machines and men necessary to effective air armament. The record of technical improvement in the Nationalist armies is clearly symbolized by the advancement of military aircraft. Military aviation in China previous to the establishing of the Nanking government demonstrated the weakness of the preceding regime. As early as 1909 a French aviator was giving demonstration flights over Shanghai.7 The Ch'ing dynasty sought to establish an airplane factory but met with no success. Yüan Shih-k'ai purchased a few planes and set up a flying school. The first telling use of planes in Chinese politics and war occurred, however, with the bombardment of the imperial palace by a lone aviator in the course of an attempted monarchical restoration in 1917. In the period of the war lords there were many isolated efforts to build up flying services. The most promising of these, undertaken by the Peking Republic with British assistance after 1920, failed through neglect, mismanagement, and corruption. As late as 1928 there was no prospect of significant air fighting in China.

By 1931 the Nanking government had built up an air force of about seventy serviceable planes; a contemporary commentator observed, "Aeroplanes played a very considerable—some would even say a decisive—part in the civil war of 1930...."8 By 1932, when an American aviation mission arrived to help in the training of a Chinese military air force, the estimates ran into a total of 125 to 140 commercial and training planes.9 In the ensuing five years the Chinese national air force developed rapidly. It played the leading role in suppressing the Fukien uprising of 1932-1933 and in driving the Communists into the Northwest. In 1937 the head of the American aviation mission, Colonel John Jouett, wrote, "Japan maintains that China has a thousand planes; my guess would be seven hundred and fifty of all types. But no one knows...."10 Other experts would reduce the figure to one-third or less by the elimination of planes which would not be of first-class utility in actual combat. The preparations for foreign hostilities up to 1937 were accompanied by such a degree of secrecy that definite figures are not available. For domestic purposes, however, almost every plane would count, and the cardinal fact remains that domestically the National Government possesses a monopoly of air power in China. It is thereby in a better position to make its supreme will formidably known than was any emperor of any dynasty. The future may show that Chinese mastery of aircraft is psychologically as important as was mastery of the steamship for the Japanese—a visible demonstration to an Asiatic people of their own accomplishments with Western technology.

As for other improvements of the armies, only three factors need be mentioned.The armies were consolidated generally, and with their better status—in literacy, pay, means of subsistence, and regularity of control—there came a realization that the military force was the creature of the national state.The Chinese nation was taking form as an ideological and social entity of sufficient strength to command the direct allegiance of fighting men.A new respect arose for the officers and men of the armies.Under Yüan Shih-k'ai the armies had been able to evolve a respectability of their own making; under Chiang K'ai-shek this respectability began to be accepted at its face value by the rest of the society, so that a pilot was not only admired by the crowd but was recognized as an expert among experts, even in literary and civil-minded circles.Secondly, the armies affected the nation by road construction.In the course of the Nationalist-Communist wars of 1927-1937 the Nationalists built thousands of miles of highway in order to make full use of their new mobility gained from machine power.The military roads, supplemented by civilian roads built with an eye to military use, constituted a network of communications upon which a new political geography could be framed—with new strategic points and new avenues of commerce.Thirdly, the armies began to emphasize culture and comfort.The soldiers were given a taste of twentieth century life and standards; their civilian kin and friends who lived under less favorable conditions saw in the elite sections of the armies a mass demonstration of China's modernization.

In the age of air power in China the relation between the army, the government, and the economy was revolutionized.The new power of a state with actual authority11 led to the creation of an army dependent on an intricate and sensitive financial and economic system, operating under a regular scheme of law. The strength of the government made modern armies possible; modern armies made corresponding political forms imperative. A resulting tendency was for the armies to take on national form. Even in those areas where tuchünism had left its imprint upon society, or where provincial autonomy provided a factual check upon the national authorities, the regional armies accepted organizational details and long-range plans set forth by the central government. Armies which had arisen as dumps for the unemployed or as resources for civil war were fitted together so as to make the Chinese forces resemble the other armies of the world—which exist for the preservation, defense, or aggrandizement of national states. Foreign military observers, equipped with the critical faculties of their profession, might look at the Chinese armies and state point-blank that China had not an army but merely armed men. They could not, however, deny that the Chinese armed forces in their latest phase were on the way to becoming an army nationally organized and fit to serve as the instrument of a great nation. The lessons of nearly a thousand years of European and American political experience may be epitomized in great part in the word nation; the Chinese armies helped to give this word true significance in China.

For the time being, the armies continued to serve their role of a refuge for the economically displaced. Armed paupers are a menace to the security and stability of any society; with the emergence of a higher degree of Chinese unity a great proportion of the armed forces lost their raison d'êtreNevertheless, the last great war-lord war, that of 1930-1931, was fought largely over the issue of army reduction.The National Government forces gradually increased in preparation for the disbandment of others—extensive bodies of irregulars were roughly systematized and placed under central supervision.They were used in moderately successful but insufficient colonization efforts in the Northwest, and as labor reserves in the construction of highways, airports, and similar projects.Even so, the size of the armies did not cease to interfere with their rapid improvement.Too much had to go into pay, even with the ridiculously low rates of compensation.As against the estimates of nearly 1,400,000 men for 1921 and about 1,900,000 for 1926, the size of the armies was unofficially estimated at 2,379,770 for 1936.12 This figure did not include Communists, brigands, or the Manchurian garrisons in the service of the Japanese (the Manchoukuo army), which would bring the total to well over 2,500,000 men. Differences in definition of what made a coolie or peasant into a soldier caused violent discrepancies in the estimates. If training equal to that of a German Republican Reichswehr soldier were set as the criterion, the Chinese army could be measured in scores. If some more or less vague relation to a military payroll, or to the possession of arms, or both, were taken as the requirements, the number would run into millions. Japanese propagandists, in the light of these facts, made injudicious statements when commenting thus on the Chinese army of 1937:

China had 198 divisions comprising 2,250,000 officers and men.This gigantic army has further been reinforced by 200,000 Communist soldiers whom Nanking worked hard to set against Japan.

In comparison the Japanese Army is a puny affair, consisting of 17 divisions of 250,000 officers and men.13

The well-informed expert on Chinese famine relief, Walter H.Mallory, set the total for 1937 at 1,650,000, of which 150,000 were Communist and 350,000 the crack troops of Chiang K'ai-shek; arms would be available for less than 1,000,000.14 All factors considered, the figure of 2,000,000 armed men with nonproductive occupations seems to be in rough accord with the facts. Two salient conclusions emerge from these figures: Firstly, the armies constituted an enormous burden, which could only be reduced by partial disbandment; this in turn would not be achieved until greater national prosperity had become a fact. Secondly, and in China's favor, the armed forces have spread some elementary notions of modern fighting throughout the rest of the population and have enhanced not merely the willingness of the Chinese masses to fight but also their capacity to do so.

Disbandment programs had not made enough progress by 1937 to alter the general position of the armies in Chinese society. Nevertheless, the counterpart of disbandment—selective recruiting—produced a central force which became the vocation, avocation, and passion of Generalissimo Chiang K'ai-shek. Though not marked in any recognizable way as apart from the rest of the armed forces, the central units were given special arms, special equipment, regular pay, mass education, and training in the patriotic and reform doctrines of the New Life movement. "Chiang's own" were to distinguish themselves; they seem to have profited by new matériel, modern military instruction (chiefly from Germans), and the excellent opportunities for practice which arose from the Communist wars of 1928-1937. They were a testimonial to the fact that, had the disbandment program fully materialized, a more effective and much smaller Chinese army might have appeared. Despite the failure of disbandment, alliance with the quondam enemies, the Chinese Red Army, gave the national forces of 1937 a great diversity and wealth of actual experience in all types of fighting. Although the Chinese have never had adequate training for aggressive, coordinated warfare, they possess a marvelous background in guerrilla methods. The Communist forces have been hunted for a decade; technical superiority they have learned to meet by tactics which force the enemy to meet them on their own terms. Ultimately they were driven by the Nationalists across China, but at most disproportionate cost. The Nationalists, on the other hand, learned to master the terrain of inland war and thus acquired the very knowledge which a foreign enemy would need most.

In time, the Chinese armies became increasingly less the free agencies of domestic tyrants and, after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, more and more the protective force for the whole nation.The enemy began to force Chinese society into national form more sharply than could any pressure from within.Even the efforts of the National Government at Nanking to make a truce with the Japanese in order to continue the drive against the Communists failed to still the widespread clamor for unification.Whether or not Chiang, as a soldier, thought successful war with Japan conceivable, he found that destiny had cast him in the role of the defender—he had only the choice of accepting or rejecting the challenge.

Governmental and Political Role of the Armies

Broadly, the political role of the armies was that of giving a day-to-day index for the influence of ideological control, and of providing the framework to which government had to accommodate itself. The Republic was born with Sun Yat-sen as its father but with Yüan Shih-k'ai as its midwife. Yüan and his armies established the order in which the parliamentary Republic had its illusory success; with his death the military order broke into military anarchy, and the political order disappeared almost completely from the arena of actual power. The armies and the tuchüns expressed a certain provincial autonomy and a desire for a crude stability. They ruled the chaos but kept the society stirred by war until the Nationalist-Communist revolution in 1926-1927 brought ideology back to a conspicuous place in the play of events. The armies developed under Yüan into separate entities exercising the power derived from the monopoly of force. In time this monopoly of force was broken. The problem was one not of tyranny but of anarchy. Force was too broadly distributed, order too insufficiently achieved. The Chinese, said Sun Yat-sen, did not need liberty; they needed wealth, in the form of food for those starving and the necessities of life for impoverished millions.15 When even soldiers were treacherous and tumultuous, order could not come from bayonets. It had to arise within men's minds, including the minds of the soldiers. This happened; the ideological revolution absorbed the military forces, but only to disgorge them, as it were, into opposing camps—the one identifying military power and the masses, the other seeking to build up a new military elite with which to impose government and law on the society. Each of the two incompatible ideals reached a considerable measure of fulfillment, and they were reconciled only by the very presence of alien invaders. From being the de facto rulers, the armies found themselves called upon to act as de facto defenders. Hitherto the forces unsettling ideological control, they became the instruments of ideologies reconciled on the minimal terms of national defense for national existence.

The armies had supplied the power necessary to government but not the order. The Peking Republic lost its claim to authority when it was made the tool of Yüan Shih-k'ai. The years after his death were a pitiful period wherein the civilian authorities in the central government constituted either the puppets of the war lords or their sycophants. The Peking Republic fell into the expedient of giving de jure status to every shift in the interplay of power. Military leaders of provincial importance easily captured the functions of tuchüns; regional leaders obtained correspondingly higher titles.The Peking Republic tried to govern on the Western pattern when the country was not ready for it, and it governed poorly.Soon it passed from nominal control into nonexistence.

The National Government established at Nanking in 192716 gained actual effectiveness partly because the armies under its command were in need of essentials not obtainable by merely military measures. The modernized Nationalist armies under Chiang K'ai-shek were dependent upon a complementing state which would provide support behind the lines. Furthermore, the cry from the educated classes for civilian government was loud, and practical considerations prompted the acquiescence of the Nationalist generals in the development of civilian government. Although by 1938 a government primarily civilian was not yet in evidence, the auspices were favorable to the regularization and demilitarization of government.

Finally, the most significant role of the armies may be found in their destructive powers.Modern weapons coming into China pressed on her the mold of a modern state.By preventing any tranquil change from the Ch'ing dynasty to another form of government preserving the older controls of village and family, Western armament brought China into a condition of military anarchy in which a strong modern government became imperative.The armies and their irresponsible leaders goaded the masses into the revolution of 1926-1927, and the necessity of establishing military superiority for the sake of stability led the victorious Nationalists to create a modern defensive force, a working government, and the outline of operative statehood—to be partly Chinese, but modified by Western influences, according to the teachings of Sun Yat-sen.From 1931 on, the army and the government became more and more the integral parts of a single machine.

War and the Agrarian Economy

There is a close correlation between militarism and agricultural conditions in China.Distress among the Chinese farming masses is both a cause and an effect of war.Misery creates unrest, unrest brings war, war brings misery—until government stops the vicious circle.On the whole, the economic system of old China was probably more stable, and ensured greater distributive justice, than did the Western systems during the same centuries; but periods of famine, flood, and—worst of all—oppression were far from rare.17

At its best, the old economy rested on a vast body of farmers, associated in villages (hui) and families but tilling their own land in fairly small units. The farming class provided the nourishment for the bulk of society but did not hold a low status, since the compensations of interclass kinship and of free play in the hierarchy of politics and intellect made families (if not individuals) approximately equal. There were no families in old China to compare with the aristocracy which Europe inherited from the Middle Ages, nor castes to compare with those of India. When functioning well, the Chinese economic system resembled some Western ideals of freehold farming governed by a hierarchy of scholars.

But at its worst, when the government became sterile and unimaginative, or corrupt and demoralized, the taxes rose sharply, and usurers added to the burden.Lack of resources caused the loss of the land, and the peasant proprietor found himself a tenant farmer.When economic and political exploitation overreached itself, social upheaval followed, and peasant rebellions tore down the government and the economy together.Most Chinese dynasties met their end as a consequence of the land problem.18

Moreover, the Chinese farmer maintained very slight reserves of foodstuffs, so that flood or drought resulted in appalling famines, sometimes costing the lives of millions in one year.Governments established large granaries which, under good management, were filled in time of plenty and dispersed in time of need.R.H.Tawney says of drought and flood:

Those directly affected by them cannot meet the blow, for they have no reserves.The individual cannot be rescued by his neighbors, since whole districts together are in the same position.The district cannot be rescued by the nation, because means of communication do not permit of food being moved in sufficient quantities.Famine is, in short, the last stage of a disease which, though not always conspicuous, is always present.19

Whether or not natural calamities struck in conjunction with specific extortions sanctioned by social injustice, the Chinese farmer has been faced with threefold oppression whenever times were bad. The tax collector, the usurer, and the landlord were able to lay their hands on the harvest, reduce the peasant to subsistence level or beneath it, and place him under a system of exploitation which was as severe as Western feudalism. The check which provided a stop to any indefinite decline into greater and greater horror was the fighting power of the peasants. Peasant revolts periodically followed agrarian oppression, and swept the land free for the time. The Han dynasty, in some ways the greatest in all Chinese history, went down in an uproar of peasant rebellions. Peasant bandits have provided the ancestry of many imperial houses. Politics or war might ease the economy, until the government again became weak and exploitation common.

It is one of the tragic coincidences of history that the Europeans should have appeared in China at a time when the Chinese were entering upon one of their most acute periods of agrarian decline and class exploitation.Roughly, from the middle of the eighteenth century down to the present day the lot of the Chinese farmers has become worse and worse.At periods the country as a whole seemed fairly prosperous, but the broad agricultural recession remained constant.The nineteenth century was one long record of rebellions, and the twentieth amplified the disturbances.

Government in modern China has fallen heir to a depression centuries old, arising from inequitable land distribution, overtaxation, insufficient public works for drainage and communications, and—in more recent generations—the evils attendant upon sharp economic change.Most economic writers agree that some of the difficulties of Chinese agriculture are caused by the smallness of individual holdings and by population pressure.Such factors are not subject to immediate remedy; the peasants have attributed their misfortune primarily to landlordism and political oppression.The Chinese Communists, on their economic front, may perform a valuable service if they are able to devise new methods of social organization which will provide relief for the organic difficulties of Chinese agriculture.Of all the important problems of China, the land problem shows government ineffectiveness at its worst.

Behind the T'ai-p'ing rebellion which flared up in unparalleled fanaticism in the 1850's and 1860's, there was the long provocation of a land system which made farming unprofitable and a government supine in the face of unreversed decline. The Boxer rebellion burst forth from the unrest of the peasants, although it could be deflected by the demagoguery of the Manchu officials and changed into wild xenophobia. When the fiercely discordant economics of imperialism and international industrialism intruded upon the old and already corrupted economy, farm existence became even less tolerable than it might have been if left to its native miseries. Dynastic decomposition was hastened by the collapse of handicraft economy and the fiscal disorganization caused by Western commercial activity.

In the earliest days of the Republican-Nationalist movement led by Sun Yat-sen, emphasis was on land reform.Sun Yat-sen's family had suffered from overtaxation when he was a boy.20 Nationalization and equalization of the land were slogans used at the founding of the Tung Mêng Hui; the program seems at that time to have been derived from old Chinese distributism and from Henry George.21 With the coming of the Republic, two years went by, however, before any agrarian legislation was passed, and the new laws had no perceptible consequence.22 The problem of land reform had to be fought out on the ideological front and placed above the military before it could become a fit subject for competent government action.

The epoch of the tuchüns added to agricultural misfortune. Militarism had a direct effect on the deterioration of the land economy, and an indirect one in that it led to the cultivation of opium as the one money-making crop which could meet the excessive tax demands of the militarists. A Chinese writer has described the years which marked the ending of the tuchün system as follows:

The ...misery among the farming population in the decennial period 1920-1930 [must be] attributed to (1) internal warfare; (2) neglect of agriculture; (3) low stage of art; and (4) over-population.The civil wars during the last eighteen years have increased the cost of production, have added to the farmers' ...burden of taxation, have raised the rate of interest on loan, and have caused endless suffering to [those] who form the basis of our social and economic life.Great many people have often wondered as to why a country like China with 75 per cent of her total population engaged in farming and with such a vast territory should suffer from the high cost of living; but to the student of social problems the question is comparatively simple, for the recurrence of civil war since the establishment of the Republic has [changed] conditions of supply and has driven millions of farmers out of cultivated areas, and this alone suffices to explain an unprecedented rise of prices of food and other necessities of life during the last few years, especially since 1926.23

These conditions led to farmers' movements, which became effective, however, only as they merged with the broader ideological tendencies in China.

The Farmers' Movement ...may ...be divided into four periods: (1) the period of reaction to bad conditions ...(1921-1925); (2) the period of communistic activities and violence (1925-1927); (3) the period of retrenchment and preparation for reconstruction (from the spring of 1927-1928); and (4) the period of reconstruction (since 1928).24

The Kuomintang-Communist alliance struck severely at the tuchün armies by giving their own forces a sense of doctrine and by tying together the causes of patriotism and agricultural reform. The joint agrarian program was a failure in that it accentuated precisely those issues on which neither of the parties could compromise. When the Communists and the Nationalists parted, the Nationalists took one portion of Sun Yat-sen's economic program (industrialization and communications) for emphasis, and the Communists another (land reform). The agrarian issue was a source of strength to the Chinese Red Army, intent upon winning the peasantry. It was a military weakness to the new-style Nationalist armies officered largely by the relatives of landlords; they had little sympathy for the economic troubles of the farmers whose lands they occupied. The Nationalist Reconstruction aimed in great part at removing both the acute and the latent causes of peasant rebellion, thereby cutting the ground from under the feet of the Communists. Although it met with more success than any other project of its type in modern China, Western observers agree in regarding it as inadequate.25

Imperialism and Chinese Wars

A great part of the military disturbances in modern China can be regarded as both the cause and the effect of agrarian evils, and some of the struggles as peasant rebellions in modern guise, carrying on the immemorial farmer-infantry tradition. Another part is traceable to the impact of the Western economy on China. It was Western economic activity that gave most compelling proof of the fact that the Westerners had encircled China and were compressing it from a world in its own right into a nation. The military intervention of Western powers in China not only caused much of the ideological reaction and forced a reorganization of the government, but also provided deadly evidence of the superiority of Western fighting. Western economy helped to bring the confusion which meant war in China; and Western economy itself waged war.

Sun Yat-sen saw China's unfortunate position as a whole, and in his programs there may be discerned three separate demands, for (1) a national economic revolution, (2) an industrial revolution, and (3) a social revolution.26 Since the Chinese could no longer function as a self-contained world economically, and scorn foreign trade as a magnanimous concession to the outer barbarians,27 the Chinese would have to develop an economic system conforming to national patterns in the society and in thought. They must relate their economy to their independence and defense, if they were to survive. In the first place, they could not afford to remain the only free market of the world, subject to exploitation and haphazard development. It would be necessary for them to establish governmental controls over economic matters and protect their national livelihood. Secondly, they had to work toward a complete transformation of their technological system and meet Western productive practices, if they were to claim a competitive position; this involved an industrial revolution. Thirdly, they had to correct the abuses inherited from their forefathers. Simultaneously they would have to construct an economic system not only modern but equitable, if they wished to avoid the horrors of early capitalism and the tragedy of the industrialist class war. This would require a social revolution.

At the time that Sun Yat-sen formulated his ideas (1924), none of the three revolutions was making any progress. The Chinese did not constitute a nation in fact; they had even lost the old unity of the Confucian society. The tuchüns opposed Chinese nationalism by preventing the development of any one authority able to monopolize force, and by acting as agents of, or in alliance with, foreign powers. Thus they helped to make China something not far from a quasi colony under pooled control of all the industrial capitalist nations. The Nationalists and Communists were able to join forces on this issue of a class war of nations, both believing in the independence of China. The Nationalists, however, saw China's most direct approach toward national unity in the development of a national economic system, with a reasonable military independence of imports and the economic devices current throughout the world as instruments of national policy. The Communists did not agree that such an economy, national in form, would have much meaning unless it were grounded upon a peasant-proletarian regime. Nor did they feel that change from imperialist to native capitalism would constitute an advance in itself.

After the schism, the Nationalists devoted themselves to the national-economic and industrial revolutions, while the Communists stressed the social revolution, particularly the land problem.The Nationalists were able to secure tariff autonomy for China, and thereupon entered upon a policy of protective tariffs and other mechanisms designed to make China a reasonably self-sufficient nation.At the same time they pushed hard toward the industrial revolution, in developing highways, railroads, airways, and radio, and in creating the economic controls required for modern government—standard weights, measures, currency, civil law, and fiscal uniformity.

T.V.Soong (Sung Tzŭ-wên), a veteran minister of finance, stands out as the organizer of the modern Chinese economy.Veritable miracles were performed in the development of national credit; after 1928 the National Government adopted the policy—as remote as a mirage to its predecessors—of floating all government loans within the country and making the Chinese government independent of Japanese and Western financiers.The only loans of any importance contracted abroad were taken up with other governments.Financial independence was a great step toward the realization of the Nationalist ideals, but it may be questioned whether the loss of financial allies was a price to be paid without hesitation in a capitalist world.Had the Chinese had more bonds in the Western capital markets, or larger debts to the American or British governments, they might have elicited greater international support in repelling the Japanese invasion in 1931.

The crowning point in the economic achievements of the National Government at Nanking was the successful institution of a managed currency. China had dealt with currency merely as a convenient form for specie, and the Chinese were accustomed to regard a dollar as worth only the amount of metal in it. When the National Government placed the currency on a national basis, it drew together the whole financial structure of China by one gigantic move, and placed finance in a position of greater unity and dependence upon government than ever before. Together with the financial reforms, the Nationalists organized a legal system providing a minimum foundation of law and order. The codification of laws, the revamping of the judiciary, the clarification of policies by legal formulation—all these contributed to China's emergent nationhood.

The economic program accorded with considerations partly Hamiltonian, partly state-socialist.The economy had first of all to be organized and integrated in national terms, and later to be revised so as to ensure social justice.The Nationalists were convinced that a policy of immediate land reform would lead to internal disharmony and frustrate the very purposes for which the revolution of 1926-1927 had been launched.The Communists, on the other hand, succeeded in keeping the agrarian issue from being forgotten and forced the Nationalists to better the lot of the peasant.In the meantime, China's boom in physical development and the unification of the commercial, financial, productive, and legal systems began to startle observers.

As a result, China was able to build national armies in direct ratio with the invigoration of her national economic system.The war machine of the National Government, under the care and leadership of Generalissimo Chiang K'ai-shek, became the most powerful in China.The central government's military power in turn speeded up the pace of general unification.There was thus a remarkable interaction of forces tending toward national integration.From 1932 to 1937, between the first and second major phases of the Japanese invasion, progress was rapid—stimulated, perhaps, by the external menace.

The two greatest dangers to the Nationalist policy of military and economic unification were (1) the dismal condition of the Chinese proletariat, as yet small but constantly growing, and (2) the vested interests of the industrial powers. Had China's growth been less rapid, the foreigners might have withdrawn slowly and found compensation in Chinese commerce for their losses in direct ownership in China. There was one power, however, to which Chinese unification was a living and increasing threat. The rising military-economic power of the Chinese was incompatible with the position which Japanese leaders visualized as part of the manifest destiny of their country. The Japanese might have tolerated the tuchün system for decades had the tuchüns been able to establish orderly regional governments; or they might have aided a reactionary Chinese regime which asked for survival only. The appearance of a genuine republic in the Far East was a menace to Japan; if that republic was bound by sheer physical proportions to overshadow Japan, the unification and modernization of China had to be averted at all costs.

Nevertheless, China's development, even apart from the hindrances of war, cannot be regarded as possessing the same potentialities as did American growth during the past century.China, from all indications available to date, is an area much poorer in natural resources than is the United States; she does not offer comparable opportunities for the heavy industries.The steel, coal, oil, and water power necessary for large-scale industrialization are by no means negligible, but not sufficient to make possible the rise of another America.The far future may change man's dependence upon currently utilized resources and facilitate greater strides in China's technological advancement.Meanwhile, she can look forward to decades of measurable development through exploiting raw materials already available, if political conditions permit.

The conflict with Japan has thrown Chinese economic development back to conditions not too far from the pre-Nanking stage.China not only faces the handicaps of social dislocations but also the ruin of her factories and her industrial centers.The Japanese have destroyed much of the Chinese manufacturing equipment and are placing what remains under Japanese control.Significantly, the deadliest enemy of Japanese business—in the unlikely event of a complete Japanese success—will be Japanese-owned factories in China.Chinese labor will deeply affect Japan's domestic production, unless the Japanese succeed in rationalizing their economic system to an extent not yet contemplated.Hence, Japan's losing the war may well be brought about by bankruptcy from sheer military indebtedness; her winning the war, however, may lead to more remote but no less certain ruin—through the competition of Chinese output with Japanese home industries disadvantaged by the cheaper labor markets of China.But Japan's loss is not inevitably China's gain, and the Chinese may find themselves, at some point in the future, controlling an industrial system which has been wrecked, looted, and bankrupted.

Whatever the ultimate outcome, loans will again play a part in Chinese development.The placing of large foreign loans has been a key part of Chinese development, and the task of reconstruction in China—no matter who undertakes to do it—will require large amounts of capital.Consequently, the loan policies of the wealthier nations may return to the importance which they enjoyed in 1913, and the dictates of the Western states may again direct the lines of Chinese economic progress.The effects of the Japanese conquest, if it is partial and then lapses into a stalemate, may well be determined by the extension of loans to the Chinese or to the Japanese in China.The effect of the war has already complicated the picture of China's economic future to the extent of making even cautious prophecy hazardous.28

In the military sphere, the Chinese have come of age, although their fighting strength will be determined by the importance of infantry. If later wars continue to depend upon man power, China will become more and more significant in world politics. Internally, the armies provided (1) a transitional administration from the Empire to the Republic; (2) a physical expression of the ideological confusion and the regional disunity of China from 1916 to 1931 (the period of tuchüns); (3) the armed edge of the ideological revolution of 1926-1927; (4) decisive instruments in the conflict between the Communists and Nationalists from 1927 to 1937; and (5) one of the most powerful unifying agencies at the command of the National Government at Nanking.The Chinese military system spread the knowledge of Western warfare and, with it, of modern techniques throughout the country; it shaped the ideological and governmental experience of modern China.