Modern China. A Very Short Introduction (8 page)

The Nationalist vision of China was indubitably modern: it wished to create a self-aware citizenry which would live in a rational, scientifi c way. For this reason, the Nationalists spent signifi cant energy combating ‘superstition’: traditional folk customs and religious practices which they felt were out of step with a modern China. Despite his desire to restore some of the supposed traditional values of China that had been undermined 43

by modernity, Chiang Kaishek also spoke of ‘science’ as a force that could transform the country into a powerful, independent state.

Chiang’s government has often been criticized as being in the pay of China’s emergent capitalist class. In fact, Shanghai’s capitalists had a wary relationship with Chiang, who was keen to raise revenue from them, and was not above using extortion to do so. More fundamentally, the Nationalists began a project of state-sponsored industrialization and development, much of it in cooperation with the League of Nations, which provided signifi cant technical assistance, the greatest success of which was probably the fl ood control measures undertaken after the disastrous Yangtze river fl oods of 1931. The measures were extensive enough that the next big fl oods, in 1935, caused relatively little loss of life. In its fi rst two years, the Nationalist government also managed to double the length of motor highway in China, from 20,000 to 40,000 miles, and increased the number
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of students studying engineering. State planning has generally been associated with the socialist bloc during the Cold War, but
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in fact it was widely advocated in democracies and dictatorships alike during the interwar period (Roosevelt’s New Deal being a notable example), particularly as the Great Depression encouraged protectionism and turned governments against the idea of letting the unfettered market decide. State planning was at the heart of the Nationalists’ desire to change China through modernization.

In 1934, the Nationalists had succeeded in forcing the Communists onto the Long March away from Jiangxi province, a remote, rural part of central China. It was here that Chiang launched his own attempt at an ideological counter-argument to communism: the New Life Movement. This was supposed to be a complete spiritual renewal of the nation, through a modernized version of traditional Confucian values, such as propriety, righteousness, and loyalty. In terms of personal behaviour, the New Life Movement demanded that the renewed 44

citizens of the nation must wear frugal but clean clothes, consume products made in China rather than seek luxurious foreign goods, and behave in a hygienic and ordered way (no wandering out randomly into the roads or urinating in public places). The Movement’s aims, though, were not traditional but modern: it sought to be a mass movement that would produce a militarized, industrialized and more culturally aware China. Madame Chiang Kaishek said of it in 1935: ‘mere accumulation of wealth is not suffi cient to enable China to resume her position as a great nation.

There must also be a revival of the spirit, since spiritual values transcend mere riches.’ The aim of the movement was to create a citizenry that was self-aware, politically conscious, and committed to the nation. The policy itself was derived from a variety of sources, including Confucianism, muscular Christianity, and Social Darwinism. Despite its anti-communism, it shared many
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values and assumptions with the CCP, with its stress on frugality and collective values. Yet it never had much success. While China
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suffered from a massive agricultural and fi scal crisis, prescriptions about clothes and orderly behaviour did not have much popular traction.

Why did the grand plans of the Nationalists fail, as those of the Qing had failed? Technological modernity was all very well, but much of its impact was confi ned to the cities, and did little to change life on the ground in the countryside, where over 80%

of China’s people lived. (There were exceptions to this, and the role of the railway in shrinking distances within China in the early 20th century should be noted.) The Nationalists did undertake some rural reform, including the establishment of rural cooperatives in several provinces of China, although their effects were small, with only around three-quarters of a million farmers in cooperatives by 1935. The party also quickly became entwined with the interests of local groups who had little interest in reform, and made unwise decisions that weakened their rule. The biggest obstacle to the state’s aims was its inability to gather tax revenue.

Unable to create a strong central revenue agency, it was reliant 45

on other agencies, including the Maritime Customs, a hybrid organization, part of the Chinese government, but headed by a foreigner (usually a Briton), to collect revenue on goods in transit for the Chinese government, and ‘tax farming’. The latter meant the devolution of tax collection to local elites, who were then free to extort and bully payments from the wider population. By devolving its tax-collection enterprise in this way, the Nationalists solved a short-term problem only by an immensely destructive long-term corrosion of public trust in the state’s ability to operate honestly and effi ciently.

But one factor above all affected the ability of the Nationalists to establish any kind of stable and effective government: the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45, known in China as the War of Resistance against Japan. Less than a decade after its establishment, Chiang’s government was plunged into total confl ict.

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The eight years of war devastated China. Exact mortality
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fi gures have never been worked out, but a minimum number appears to be around 15 million (with some estimates as high as 35 million). Some 80 million Chinese may have become refugees. The slowly expanding technological and industrial infrastructure of the previous decade was destroyed (some 52%

of the total in Shanghai, and some 80% in the abandoned capital of Nanjing). The government had to operate in exile from the far southwestern hinterland of China, as its area of greatest strength and prosperity, China’s eastern seaboard, was lost to Japanese occupation. At the same time, the Communists, who were forced into the remote northwest after the Long March of 1935–6, now found themselves able to consolidate and expand their hold on northern China. Chiang’s project of consolidation and unifi cation was thrown into reverse gear. Wartime conditions encouraged corruption, black marketeering, and hyperinfl ation.

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The Japanese invasion of China which began in 1937 was merciless. Among the many atrocities committed against the population, the most notorious is the Nanjing Massacre (‘the Rape of Nanking’) that took place in the weeks between December 1937 and January 1938. The Nationalists had had to abandon their capital and the city was left defenceless when Japanese troops arrived at the gates. Out-of-control soldiers, unrestrained by their commanders, indulged in weeks of mass killings, rapes, and destruction of property that resulted in tens, and quite possibly hundreds of thousands of deaths. Yet this was just one of a series of war crimes committed by the Japanese Army during its conquest of eastern China. Nonetheless, the Japanese succeeded in gaining cooperation from some Chinese, many of whom felt that defi ance of the Japanese would bring down yet further horrors upon them. This was the justifi cation used by one of
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Chiang’s long-time Nationalist rivals, Wang Jingwei, who defected to the Japanese in 1938 and was made president of a ‘reorganized’

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6. The Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45 tore China apart. Here refugees
stream through the wartime capital of Chongqing after a heavy
air-raid

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Nationalist government at Nanjing in 1940. Wang’s government portrayed itself as the real heir to Sun Yatsen, and denounced Chiang as a traitor who had allied with the hated Communists, but his regime had no status independent of collaboration with Japan, and never achieved mass support. Wang himself died of cancer in 1944.

Although Japan was defeated in 1945, postwar China was still in a state of shock. Unlike the pre-war period, food was in genuinely short supply in 1945, as much of China’s agricultural heartland had been destroyed, and famine relief supplies from abroad were able to deal with only a small part of the problem.

Scarcity caused infl ation, to which the government responded by printing money, in part to pay for its huge military commitments: a foolish move, but alternative policies were hard to think of.

A large sack of rice increased in price from 6.7 million yuan in June 1948 to 63 million yuan just two months later. By the
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time China was plunged into yet another war, the Civil War between the Communists and the Nationalists (1946–9), the
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huge disillusionment with Nationalist rule meant that many who were not Marxists by inclination welcomed a Communist victory simply because they felt that the Nationalists had no credibility left.

During all this time, the Communists (CCP) had not stood still.

After Chiang had turned on them in the cities, most of what remained of the party stole into the countryside, away from Chiang’s area of control. A major centre of activity was the base area in Jiangxi province, an impoverished part of central China.

It was here, between 1931 and 1935, that the party began to try out systems of government that would eventually bring them to power, and shape the People’s Republic. After their experience with Chiang, the party felt it essential to train a Red Army of their own. They also experimented with land redistribution and representative government, although they were wary of alienating local elites while the party was still vulnerable, and therefore did 48

not push policies that might lead to local leaders turning against them. It was during this period that Mao fi rst began to gain power: while he had been one of the earliest members of the CCP, it was the period in the rural areas that allowed him to come to the fore. However, it was also Mao’s infl uence that contributed to increased intra-party violence and more radical attacks on local landowners in the mid-1930s. In addition, by that time, Chiang’s previously ineffective, if uncompromisingly named ‘Extermination Campaigns’ were beginning to make the CCP’s position in Jiangxi untenable.

In 1934, the party began the action that remains a legend to the present day: the Long March. Travelling over 4,000 miles, 4,000

of the original 80,000 Communists who set out fi nally arrived, exhausted, in Shaanxi province in the northwest, far out of the
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7. The Long March of 1934–5 helped Mao rise to paramount
leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. This image is taken from
a tapestry depicting scenes from the March

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reach of the Nationalist government. They were safe, but they were also on the run. It seemed possible that within a matter of months, Chiang would once again attack.

The approach of war saved the CCP. There was growing public discontent at Chiang’s unwillingness to fi ght Japan. In fact, this perception was somewhat unfair. The Nationalists had undertaken retraining of key regiments in the army under German advice, and also started to plan for a wartime economy from 1931, spurred on by the invasion of Manchuria. However, Chiang knew that it would take a long time for China to be capable of resisting the well-trained armies, superb technology, and colonial resources of Japan, and preferred an unglamorous but practical solution of diplomatic appeasement. By 1936, however, this was no longer feasible. Events came to a head in December 1936, when the militarist leader of Manchuria (Zhang Xueliang) and the CCP managed to kidnap Chiang. As a condition
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of his release, Chiang agreed to a United Front in which the Nationalists and Communists would sink their differences and
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ally against Japan.

This gave the CCP valuable breathing space. They had several areas under their control in wartime China, but the single most famous was the ShaanGanNing base area with its capital in the small town of Yan’an. However, it was the presence of one fi gure in particular that made ‘Yan’an’ an iconic term: Mao Zedong. His credibility as a political fi gure had been greatly boosted because his advocacy of revolution using the peasantry seemed wiser than the now-discredited, Soviet-backed policy of urban revolution.