Restless Empire (23 page)

has long possessed a world-wide organization having branches and affiliated societies distributed throughout the globe. . . . The platform of the society has always been extremely democratic, and in its manifestos the society has declared itself in favor of Socialism. Sun Yat-Sen . . . coquetted at various times with every shade of revolutionary sentiment, with the result that an extreme revolutionary section rapidly sprang up [in the GMD]. . . , and has now attained such numbers and influence that it has virtually captured the control of the party machine. The society is in close touch with the Communist party in the Dutch East Indies and with Indian revolutionaries, with the result that it has to some extent assumed the aspect of a pan-Asiatic movement with the primary object of the destruction of Britain as the great despotic Power tryannising [sic] over Asia and therefore the chief obstacle in the way of world democracy. The danger of these activities has been aggravated by the close liaison which has been established during the last few years between the society and the Soviet. The [GMD] receives large contributions from Moscow, and the extreme section is infected with Bolshevik ideas and sentiment.
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By the early 1920s the new GMD had a popular cause and powerful backers in the Soviet Union. The Russian revolution had changed the
landscape of politics in East Asia, as it had in Europe. The Soviets stood for national self-determination and social justice. Moscow was not just the center of a new state. It symbolized a set of causes that were international: anticolonialism, proletarian power, and radical culture among them. In China, Bolshevism fed into the ideas of the May Fourth Movement, and young Chinese intellectuals were infatuated with the appearance of a Western state that was righteous and could serve as a model of development that promised both modernity and equality. The declaration of Lev Karakhan, the Bolshevik deputy commissar for foreign affairs, in July 1919, sent shock waves through Chinese politics: “The government of the workers and peasants has then declared null and void all secret treaties concluded with Japan, China and the ex-Allies, the treaties which were to enable the Russian government and the Tsar and his Allies to enslave the peoples of the East and principally the people of China by intimidating or bribing them for the sole interests of capitalists, financiers and the Russian generals.”
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It is no surprise that some Chinese believed that Russia was setting the pattern for the future.

For a few young men and women, the Bolshevik revolution held the promise of a new world. They wanted to become part of the international movement that Soviet Communism represented. Inspired by Chinese socialists such as Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, who became their leaders, these young people formed urban radical groups and were gradually drawn into a more centralized organization, which, at a congress in the French concession in Shanghai in 1921 became the Chinese Communist Party. The money and organizational know-how for the new party were supplied by agents of Comintern—the Communist International, the Moscow center set up by Lenin in 1919 to guide Communist movements outside Russia—but Chinese Communism remained rooted in a variety of Chinese dreams and aspirations. Their expression for Communism—borrowed from Japanese—was
gonghe
, common property, but how that aim was to be achieved through Marxist doctrine was uncertain. Throughout its early years the CCP remained
a small, often divided, group, and its main aim was assisting Sun Yat-sen with his revolution. “The great cause of revolution is no easy matter, even less so in China, a country under the twofold pressure of the foreign powers and the militarists,” wrote Mao Zedong, a young Hunanese porter at Beijing University Library who was among the founders of the CCP. “The only solution is to call upon the merchants, the workers, the peasants, the students, and the teachers of the whole country, as well as all the others who constitute our nation and who suffer under a common oppression, and to establish a closely knit united front. It is only then that this revolution will succeed.”
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The Soviets saw their main task in China as building the military and organizational strength of Sun Yat-sen’s movement, with the Communists as a small but active part within it. The reasons were both ideological and practical: Lenin and his successors believed that China needed a nationalist bourgeois revolution before socialism could be put on the agenda. And the Guomindang seemed to fit the bill for leaders of such a revolution, given its political views and Sun’s national prestige. In spite of Sun’s exhilaration at getting Soviet support, he always kept his political distance from the Soviets and the Communists. But he was more than willing to accept Soviet aid in setting up a military academy, the Huangpu Academy, in Guangzhou, in which one of Sun’s favorites, young Chiang Kai-shek, was commander. There Soviet military advisers taught alongside GMD leaders including Wang Jingwei, who later became Japan’s chief Quisling in China, and Chinese Communists such as Zhou Enlai, the later premier, and Ye Jianying, a CCP officer who fifty years later would destroy the Communist left. The reorganization of the Guomindang forces was led by Vasilii Bliukher, a Soviet Red Army officer. And the preparations for a political reorganization of the party was strongly influenced by Mikhail Gruzenberg, who called himself Borodin, a veteran Comintern agent. By 1925 Soviet support had made the Guomindang into a very different and much stronger party than it had ever been.

Lenin’s main successors in Moscow, Trotsky and Stalin, worked with the GMD but also kept the option of approaching the Beijing government or individual local strongmen who might serve Soviet security interests. Against Karakhan, who had promised to return the Russian-controlled Chinese Eastern Railway to China without receiving compensation, Trotsky wrote that he does “not understand why it is that rejecting imperialism presupposes renouncing our property rights . . . [and] why the Chinese peasant should have the railway at the expense of the Russian peasant. . . . Russia is also very poor and is absolutely unable to pay with material sacrifices for the sympathies of colonial or semicolonial peoples.”
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After Trotsky was outmaneuvered by Stalin in the Soviet power game, the emphasis on adjusting the aims of the Chinese revolution to Soviet interest and doctrine became even more pronounced. Stalin first wanted the Chinese Communists to ally themselves with the left within the Guomindang, in order to increase their influence within the movement. Then, when non-Communists in the GMD started attacking the CCP for what they considered factional behavior, the Soviet leader insisted that the only political future for Communists in China was within the Guomindang. Stalin’s policy provided vital assistance for the Chinese nationalist alliance, but exposed the small band of CCP members to the jealousy and distrust of their allies.

Sun Yat-sen’s first attempts at a military campaign to reunify China ended in failure. By late 1924, however, Sun, many of his advisers, and most foreign observers believed that the GMD’s moment had come. The regional leaders in the north were increasingly at odds over who of them was to lead the republic. Soviet support had massively increased the military capacity of the GMD. And, crucially, some local strongmen in the south had concluded that the Guomindang might now be so strong that it was better to cooperate with it than to oppose it. To Sun, the political situation seemed to be in flux, and, true to style, he used the occasion to change his mind one more time. So he left Guangzhou for the north and for yet another attempt at getting the northern leaders
to accept his supremacy without having to fight. On the way he stopped in Japan, in Kobe, where he gave one of his most pro-Japanese speeches ever, showing that he was in no way under the thumb of the Soviets. On arrival in Tianjin, Sun fell ill. He died in Beijing on 12 March 1925, with his closest disciple Wang Jingwei and his main Soviet adviser Borodin at his side. He was fifty-eight. On his deathbed he admonished his followers to unite, wrote a pro-Soviet final letter, and reaffirmed his belief in Christianity.

But those who thought that the Guomindang project was finished with the disappearance of this brilliant if inconsistent man had a big surprise waiting for them. In the spring of 1925 most of eastern China was engulfed in a series of anti-imperialist demonstrations that, for the first time, seemed to rock the stability of the system foreign powers had set up to manage China after 1911. In the international concession in Shanghai, on 30 May, nine student demonstrators were killed by British police. In other cities, foreign police also had to open fire on demonstrating students and workers who threatened to invade the key institutions of foreign power. Strikes and blockades spread, most of them spontaneously, but some organized by GMD sympathizers or Communists. The Beijing government, deeply divided and challenged by its northern rivals, with whom it had just fought a brief but bloody civil war, was powerless. And to all of the demonstrators in what became known as the May Thirtieth Movement, Sun Yat-sen was a martyr for the nationalist cause and a harbinger of a new, powerful, and united China.
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The poet Wen Yiduo—an experimenter in hyperbolism—gave voice to the parts of China under foreign control and their longing to become again part of the motherland:

Do you know that “Macau” has never been my real name?

I have been away from you for too long, Mother.

They have captured my body

But my soul is always yours.

Oh, Mother, I have remembered you for three hundred years.

Call me by my baby name; call for me by the name “Aomen.”

Mother! I want to come home, Mother!

In Guangzhou, the younger leaders of Guomindang and their Communist allies started understanding that the combination of Sun’s martyrdom, Soviet support, northern political chaos, and the May Thirtieth Movement had created the best of opportunity ever for a march toward Beijing. Chiang Kai-shek, the powerful commander of the Huangpu Academy, urged an early start to the expedition north. Chiang believed that the GMD’s time had come. He also insisted on action in order to honor the dead Sun Yat-sen, whom he had revered, and because of his revulsion at the killing of Chinese civilians in Shanghai, Wuhan, and elsewhere by foreign forces. Chiang saw himself as the natural choice to lead the military campaign; though still a young man at thirty-eight, he believed in an almost mystical way that his life and the cause of ridding China of foreign domination were one and the same.

Chiang Kai-shek was born in 1887 near Ningbo, a treaty port in Zhejiang province, just south of Shanghai. He received military training in Japan and served in the Japanese army for two years. Returning to China after the 1911 revolution, Chiang became one of Sun Yat-sen’s trusted lieutenants, traveling between Shanghai and Japan in the service of his mentor. After Sun moved to Guangzhou, Chiang became one of his chiefs of military affairs and increasingly the man the president relied on for his personal safety. Chiang’s vision of China was simple, but strongly held. He wanted a country that was united, orderly, and militarily powerful—all values that had been instilled in him during his strict Confucian upbringing and his military training in Japan. Sun’s death was a profound shock for Chiang, and he imagined himself taking the dead leader’s place and fulfilling Sun’s dream of a new China.

The Northern Expedition, which began in July 1926, quickly became a stunning political and military success. Guomindang and Communist
organizers, and local nationalists without any party links, helped set up underground committees and prepare the arrival of the revolutionary army through strikes and nationalist demonstrations. The military strategy that Chiang, Bliukher, and other GMD military leaders worked out was remarkably successful: Moving north fast, spread out in three main armies, the Northern Expedition overwhelmed their enemies one by one, with many local leaders finding it much smarter to submit than to fight. Propaganda played an increasingly important part. In spite of their differing social and political aims, everyone within the Guomindang spread a simple message of patriotism and national renewal. Their slogans were simple: “Chinese to rule China.” “Long live Sun Yat-sen. Long live the People’s Three Principles. Long live the national revolution.” As the revolutionary armies approached the main cities in central China, the fighting intensified. The poet Guo Moruo, who fought with the revolutionary army outside Wuhan, saw fallen soldiers “strewn on both sides of the route of the railway. . . . In the lakes nearby . . . countless corpses floated—some with faces turned up, some with faces turned down, some on their sides.”
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Wuhan fell to the GMD forces in October 1926 and a new national government was set up under Wang Jingwei. Nationalist celebrations were intense. Guo Moruo saw “the streaming of group, party, and national flags; the chorused singing of the ‘International,’ the ‘Song of the Vanguard,’ and the ‘Song of the Revolution’; the shouting of slogans and of
wansui
[long live], the speeches to the multitude.”
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But the new left-wing Wuhan government did not have the loyalty of Chiang Kaishek. As his troops approached Shanghai, Chiang was becoming increasingly skeptical of the aims of his Communist allies. Already in Guangzhou there had been bad blood between them. Chiang believed that the Communists were planning to have him killed. But it was the sudden success of the march north that drove the alliance apart. The CCP and the Soviets saw Chiang as a potential military dictator, a Napoleon. Chiang, on his side, was becoming increasingly worried that after the
liberation of China from Western influence, the CCP and the left wing of the Guomindang would put the country under Soviet control. In his diary, Chiang was increasingly critical of his Soviet advisors: “I treat them with sincerity, but they reciprocate with deceit.”
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The Communists were criticizing Chiang in public and preparing to take control of Shanghai from within before his troops arrived. The clock was ticking for a confrontation.