Restless Empire (29 page)

For Comintern agents and foreign radical supporters of Communism in China, Chiang Kai-shek’s eradication of most of the CCP in the late 1920s was a disaster. Stalin chose the facile explanation that China was simply not ready for socialism, but many of the adherents of an international socialist strategy within the Comintern hoped to resurrect the CCP. The main Comintern agent in China in the early 1930s was Manfred Stern, who would go on to command the international brigade in the Spanish Civil War under the nom de guerre Emilio Kléber. Stern’s task was to make alliances between the CCP and the left-wing GMD opposition, while designing a strategy for the Chinese Communists to find their way back into the cities from their scattered rural redoubts. The strategy failed. It fell to his successor, the German Otto Braun, a veteran Communist, to help the CCP escape the offensives of the GMD army. Ironically, during the CCP’s Long March to the north in 1934–1936, both the Communists and their pursuers were aided by German advisers, Braun on the CCP side and Alexander von Falkenhausen on the GMD side. Mao Zedong is said to have commented later that the GMD had the best Germans.
²⁰

Some foreign radicals came to China on their own rather than being sent by the Comintern. The American journalist Anna Louise Strong, who came to the country to cover the Chinese revolution from the inside, is a good example, especially because she settled in China and died there in 1970. The daughter of a Nebraska minister, Strong had traveled to the Soviet Union in the 1920s. “Will Moscow,” she wrote in 1935,
“become the center also for hundreds of millions—the yellow and brown races to the south and east of Asia, unlike, and yet so like their brother peasants of the Soviet Union?” Strong married a Russian and became a leading propagandist for the Soviet system—her most notorious book is
The New Soviet Constitution: A Study in Socialist Democracy
, published as Stalin’s purges were reaching their peak in 1937.
²¹
She believed that only a socialist revolution, and an alliance with the Soviet Union, could save China from collapse and give hope to the millions of poor people she encountered on her travels in the country.

Revolutionaries from other Asian countries were also drawn to China in the early part of the twentieth century. The Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh (then known as
), born in 1890 in north-central Vietnam, had studied Chinese as part of his Confucian upbringing. Spending most of the 1910s in Europe and America, Ho became a founding member of the French Communist Party and was sent to China by the Comintern in 1924. While there, he taught at the Huangpu military academy in Guangzhou, where Chiang Kai-shek was commander and Zhou Enlai political commissar. He married a Chinese woman and lived in the same house as Borodin. Expelled from China after Chiang’s 1927 coup, Ho secretly returned in 1929, working for the CCP in Shanghai and Hong Kong. He spent the years 1938–1945 with CCP units in southern China, except for a period in 1942–1943, when he was in a GMD prison. Ho remained very close to the Chinese Communist leaders for the rest of his life.

Kim Il-sung, who after 1945 became the leader of North Korea, had an even closer relationship with China. Born in 1912, he grew up in a Christian Korean family in Manchuria and studied in Jilin City, where he started his activities against the Japanese occupation of Korea. Kim joined the CCP in 1931, when he was nineteen years old, was imprisoned briefly by the Japanese, and became part of a Chinese Communist guerrilla unit. By the late 1930s he commanded a Communist group of around a hundred, mostly Koreans, in southern and eastern
Manchuria with occasional symbolic forays into Korea. In 1940, after the Japanese pressure against them increased, the leaders of Kim’s group were evacuated to the Soviet Union, where he trained as a Red Army officer, before returning to Korea in 1945 as the president the Soviets had selected for the country. Kim was formed as a leader through growing up in China, and his understanding of Korea’s neighbor helped him navigate through the international affairs of the Cold War.
²²

T
HROUGHOUT THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
, massive amounts of foreign texts were translated into Chinese, and some of these translations had a profound impact in China. The first concentrated on science, religion, government, politics, and society. As we have seen already, the texts on science had a particular influence in China: Within a generation the scientific worldview of the Chinese elite was transformed, paving the way for the further development of knowledge and for the import of technology. Books on law and social theory were almost as influential as those on science. John Dewey, the American philosopher and educator, taught in China between 1919 and 1921, and his translated work became very influential. Much of the Western philosophical tradition was introduced to China through translations of Dewey’s works. By the 1910s China also had its first translations of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, most of it retranslated from Japanese.
²³

By the 1920s, translations from foreign languages had become big business in China. The main publishing houses produced large compendia, often in hundreds of volumes, of the Western canon, which all Chinese bourgeois families aspired to own. As can be imagined, some translations were less than authentic, and some downright disastrous. In some cases translators changed the storyline of foreign fiction, so that it would (in their or their publisher’s opinion) fit a Chinese audience. In spite of such attempted embellishments, foreign fiction became increasingly popular in China. The great Russian writers of the nineteenth century—Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ivan Turgenev—
were particularly popular, but so was later Soviet literature and Western authors who discussed problems of society, such as Henrik Ibsen or George Bernard Shaw. But it was crime and entertainment literature that were the surest winners: In terms of copies sold the most popular Western writer in prewar China was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. His Sherlock Holmes stories inspired Chinese variations, notably Cheng Xiaoqing’s tales of the Shanghai master detective Huo Sang and his faithful sidekick Bao Lang. While more preoccupied with social issues than the originals, Huo and Bao are in no way their inferiors in detection as they cut through the Chinese underworld of the 1920s.
²⁴

Film was the universal art form of the twentieth century, and no less so in China than elsewhere. From 1898, films were shown in China, and the first movie house opened in Shanghai in 1908. By the 1920s there were cinemas all over the main Chinese cities and towns, including in working-class neighborhoods. The movies were mostly American, and films were the medium through which the United States was introduced to most Chinese. Their movie heroes were American stars, and many elements of style and fashion were taken over from Hollywood. The early Chinese film industry often remade American movies, done in Chinese and with Chinese actors, and one of the stars of such films was Jiang Qing, who married Mao Zedong. There was even a film made, in 1922, about a (fictitious) visit by Charlie Chaplin to China. By 1933 the major US movie companies had distribution offices in the country. In remote villages where most residents were illiterate and never traveled outside their county, movies were shown by itinerant projectionists. People would walk for days to witness such events. For many Chinese I met in the late 1970s, memories of the pre-Communist period were linked to seeing an American movie projected on a wall in the village square.

Like film, other forms of art were influenced by the foreign presence in China. Chinese artists had known about foreign techniques and styles for centuries, but by the late nineteenth century this knowledge
infused all forms of art, and a number of hybrid styles appeared. Chinese painters and sculptors became masters of mixing Western and Chinese motifs and styles, just as Chinese porcelain artists had been doing for generations for the export market. Meanwhile, in the West in the late Victorian era, collecting classical Chinese porcelain—especially from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644)—became all the rage. The collecting was followed by research and an improved foreign understanding of Chinese art. In the West, modernism in both art and literature was inspired by East Asian examples; in painting, artists from Claude Monet to Picasso and Matisse drew from Chinese sources, and Ezra Pound and other poets wrote in Chinese styles. The influence in music also went in both directions. Western classical music was performed in Chinese cities as one of the hallmarks of modernity, and Western tonal systems influenced music written for Chinese instruments. In Europe, several modern composers—Stravinsky and Mahler first among them—used elements of Chinese music in their works. But during the 1930s no type of music linked East and West more closely than jazz. Shanghai became a center for jazz, with foreign, mostly American, and Chinese bands competing and mixing in a place for which jazz seemed a perfect expression.
²⁵

The first Chinese world exposition in 1929 was intended to show Chinese and foreigners the modern China. Over four months the beautiful city of Hangzhou on West Lake became a focus for demonstrating what China now could produce and how new technologies could further help Chinese businesses expand. The exhibition had eight main halls, showing among other things the plans of the new government, Chinese traditional art and modern design, agricultural products and technology, textiles, pharmaceuticals, and ninety-six other branches of industry. The organizers hoped that the exposition would raise the awareness of domestic products and stimulate strategies for exports. But because it coincided with the onset on the great depression, it also attracted a fair number of foreign companies that hoped to expand their
share of the Chinese market. Although small if compared with the Paris and Chicago world fairs, the West Lake expo helped show Chinese who were eager for a view of the outside world a tightly managed version of what it contained.
²⁶

M
UCH OF THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY
transformation of China happened because of international influences on education, advanced training, and research. As we have seen, Christian institutions played a key role in this transformation, but there were a host of other key contributors as well: universities, foreign teachers and experts, and transnational networks of scholars and scientists, some Chinese and some non-Chinese. For radicals in China, the goal was to create a modern nation, through foreign ideas and foreign assistance if needed. Chen Duxiu, who became the first general secretary of the CCP, in 1919 made the point with Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science:

In support of Mr. Democracy, we must oppose Confucian teaching and rites, the value of chastity, old ethics and old politics. In support of Mr. Science, we must oppose old arts and old religions. In support of both Mr D and Mr S, we must oppose the “national essence” and old literature. . . . How many upheavals occurred and how much blood was shed in the West in support of Mr D and Mr S, before these two gentlemen gradually led Westerners out of darkness into the bright world? We firmly believe that only they can resuscitate China and bring it out of all the present darkness of its politics, morality,
scholarship
and thought.
²⁷

By the 1930s China had its first modern unified school system. It had compulsory six-year primary education, with centralized curriculum management, roughly following the US model. In reality, of course, access to primary education varied from region to region. It was under-funded, and there was massive corruption at the provincial level and in school boards. The Guomindang’s attempts at controlling foreign-run education institutions also did not help the advance of China’s educational
system. Despite these problems, a new generation, born around 1920, grew up with educational opportunities that earlier generations had not had. And they made good use of them.
²⁸

Universities were more quickly transformed through foreign influence than any other aspect of Chinese education. We have seen the roles of Christian universities and of missionaries in secular institutions. Along with these, government-run universities were rapidly expanding. Peking University (PKU), which in 1952 was merged with Leighton Stuart’s Yanjing University, was the largest and most prestigious. It had two remarkable leaders in Cai Yuanpei, who was chancellor from 1917 to 1927, and Jiang Menglin, who served from 1930 to 1937. Cai was a classically trained scholar who went to Germany to study in 1907 and later became China’s best-known educator. Jiang received a PhD from Columbia University in 1917 and championed the integration of foreign and Chinese approaches to learning. He wrote of his goals:

On the stem of the Confucian system of knowledge, which starts with the investigation of things, or nature, and leads to human relationships, we shall graft the Western system of scientific knowledge, which starts with the same investigation of things or nature but leads the other way round to their interrelationships. As in the West, the moral universe will co-exist in China with the intellectual, one for stability and the other for progress.
²⁹