The New Penguin History of the World (172 page)

In August 1917 the Chinese government went to war with Germany, partly in the hope of winning goodwill and support which would ensure her an independent voice at the peace, but only a few months later the United States formally recognized the special interests of Japan in China in return for endorsement of the principle of the ‘open door’ and a promise to maintain Chinese integrity and independence. All that the Chinese had got from the Allies was the ending of German and Austrian extra-territoriality and the concession that payment of Boxer indemnities to the Allies should be delayed. The Japanese, moreover, secured more concessions from China in secret agreements in 1917 and 1918.

Yet, when the peace came, it deeply disappointed Chinese and Japanese alike. Japan was now indisputably a world power; it had in 1918 the third largest navy in the world. It was true, too, that it won solid gains at the peace: it retained the former German rights in Shantung (promised by the British and French in 1917), was granted a mandate over many of the former German Pacific islands and a permanent seat on the Council of the League of Nations. But the gain in ‘face’ implied in such recognition was offset in Asian eyes by a failure to have a declaration in favour of racial equality written into the Covenant of the League. On this line (the only one on which Japanese and Chinese stood shoulder to shoulder at Paris), Woodrow Wilson rejected a majority vote, ruling that approval should be unanimous. With the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand against it, it fell by the wayside. The Chinese had much to feel aggrieved about, too, for in spite of widespread sympathy over the Twenty-One Demands (notably in the United States) they were unable to obtain a reversal of the Shantung decision. Disappointed of American diplomatic support and crippled by the divisions within their own delegation between the representatives of the Peking government and those of the Kuomintang at Canton, the Chinese refused to sign the treaty.

An almost immediate consequence was an upheaval in China to which some commentators have given an importance as great as that of the 1911 revolution itself. This was the ‘May 4th Movement’ of 1919. It stemmed from a student demonstration in Peking against the peace, which had been planned for 7 May, the anniversary of China’s acceptance of the 1915 demands, but was brought forward to anticipate action by the authorities. It escalated, although at first only into a small riot and the resignation of the head of the university. This then led to a nationwide student movement (one of the first political reflections of the widely spread establishment in China of new colleges and universities after 1911). This in turn spread to embrace others than students and to manifest itself in strikes and a boycott of Japanese goods. A movement which had begun with intellectuals and their pupils spread to include other city-dwellers, notably industrial workers and the new Chinese capitalists who had benefited from the war. It was the most important evidence yet seen of the mounting rejection of Europe by Asia.

For the first time, an industrial China entered the scene. China, like Japan, had enjoyed an economic boom during the war. Though a decline in European imports to China had been partly offset by increased Japanese and American sales, Chinese entrepreneurs in the ports had found it profitable to invest in production for the home market. The first important industrial areas outside Manchuria began to appear. They belonged to progressive capitalists who sympathized with revolutionary ideas all the more when the return of peace brought renewed western competition and evidence that China had not earned her liberation from tutelage to the foreigner. The workers, too, felt this resentment: their jobs were threatened. Many of them were first-generation town-dwellers, drawn into the new industrial areas from the countryside by the promise of employment. Any uprooting from the tenacious soil of peasant tradition was even more important in China than in
ancien régime
Europe. Family and village ties were even stronger in China. The migrant to the town left behind patriarchal authority and the reciprocal obligations of the independent producing unit, the household: this was a further great weakening of the age-old structure which had survived the revolution and still tied China to the past. New material was thus made available for new ideological deployments.

The May 4th Movement first showed what could be made of such forces as these by creating the first broadly based Chinese revolutionary coalition. Progressive western liberalism had not been enough; implicit in the movement’s success was the disappointment of the hopes of many of the cultural reformers. Capitalist western democracy had been shown up by the Chinese
government’s helplessness in the face of Japan. Now, that government faced another humiliation from its own subjects: the boycott and demonstration forced it to release the arrested students and dismiss its pro-Japanese ministers. But this was not the only important consequence of the May 4th Movement. For all their limited political influence, reformers had for the first time, thanks to the students, broken through into the world of social action. This aroused enormous optimism and greater popular political awareness than ever before. This is the case for saying that contemporary Chinese history begins positively in 1919 rather than 1911.

Yet ultimately the explosion had come because of an Asian force, Japanese ambition. That force, not in itself a new one in China’s affairs, was by 1919 operating on a China whose cultural tradition was dissolving fast. The ending of the examination system, the return of the westernized exiles and the great literary and cultural debate of the war years had all pushed things too far for any return to the old stable state. The warlords could provide no new authority to identify and sustain orthodoxy. And now even the great rival of the Confucian past, western liberalism, was under attack because of its association with the exploiting foreigner. Western liberalism had never had mass appeal; now its charm for intellectuals was threatened just as another rival ideological force from the West had appeared on the scene. The Bolshevik Revolution gave Marxism a homeland to which its adherents abroad could look for inspiration, guidance, leadership and, sometimes, material support, a great new factor was thus now introduced into an already dissolving historical epoch, and one bound to accelerate its end.

Both the February 1917 revolution and the Bolshevik victory had been warmly welcomed by one of the contributors to
New Youth
, Li Ta-chao, who was from 1918 a librarian at Peking University. Soon he came to see in Marxism the motive force of world revolution and the means to vitalize the Chinese peasantry. At that moment of disillusion with the West, Russia was very popular among Chinese students. It seemed that the successors of the Tsar had driven out the old imperialist Adam, for one of the first acts of the Soviet government had been a formal renunciation of all extra-territorial rights and jurisdictions enjoyed by the Tsarist state. In the eyes of the nationalists, Russia, therefore, had clean hands. Moreover, her revolution – a revolution in a great peasant society – claimed to be built upon a doctrine whose applicability to China seemed especially plausible in the wake of the industrialization provoked by the war. In 1918 there had begun to meet at Peking University a Marxist study society of whose members some had been prominent in the May 4th Movement. One of them was an assistant in the university library, Mao Tse-tung. By 1920
Marxist texts were beginning to appear in student magazines and in that year the first complete Chinese translation of the
Communist Manifesto
appeared. Now, too, the first attempts were made to deploy Marxist and Leninist principles by organizing strikes in support of the May 4th Movement.

Yet Marxism opened divisions between the reformers. Ch’en Tu-hsiu himself turned to it as a solution for China’s problems in 1920. He threw his energies into helping to organize the emerging Chinese Left around Marxism. The liberals were beginning to be left behind. The Comintern observed its opportunities and had sent its first man to China in 1919 to help Ch’en and Li Ta-chao. The effects were not entirely happy; there were quarrels. Nevertheless, in circumstances still obscure – we know precisely neither names nor dates – a Chinese communist party was formed in Shanghai in 1921 by delegates from different parts of China (Mao Tse-tung among them).

So began the last stage of the Chinese Revolution and the latest twist of that curious dialectic which has run through the relations of Europe with Asia. Once more an alien western idea, Marxism, born and shaped in a society totally unlike the traditional societies of the East, embodying a background of assumptions whose origins were rooted in Judaeo-Christian culture, was taken up by an Asian people and put to their use. It was to be deployed not merely against the traditional sources of inertia in China, in the name of the western goals of modernization, efficiency and universal human dignity and equality, but against the source from which it, too, came – the European world.

Communism benefited enormously in China from the fact that capitalism could easily be represented as the unifying, connecting principle behind foreign exploitation and aggression. In the 1920s, China’s divisions were thought to make it of little account in international affairs, though nine powers with Asiatic interests were got to guarantee its territorial integrity and Japan agreed to hand back former German territories in China which it had taken in the Great War. This was part of a complicated set of agreements made at Washington whose core was the international limitation on naval strength (there was great uneasiness about the cost of armaments); these in the end left Japan relatively stronger. The four major powers guaranteed one another’s possessions, too, and thus provided a decent burial for the Anglo-Japanese alliance, whose ending had long been sought by the Americans. But the guarantee to China, everyone knew, was worth no more than the preparedness of the Americans to fight to support it; the British had been obliged by the treaties
not
to build a naval base at Hong Kong. Meanwhile, foreigners continued to administer the customs and tax revenues on which the Peking government of an ‘independent’ China depended and foreign agents and businessmen dealt directly with the warlords when it suited them. Though American policy had further weakened the European position in Asia, this was not apparent in China.

The apparently continuing grip of the foreign devils on China’s life was one reason why Marxism’s appeal to intellectuals went far beyond the boundaries of the formal structure of the Chinese Communist Party. Sun Yat-sen stressed his doctrinal disagreement with it but adopted views which helped to carry the KMT away from conventional liberalism and in the direction of Marxism. In his view of the world, Russia, Germany and Asia had a common interest as exploited powers against their oppressors and enemies, the four imperialist powers (Germany was well-regarded after it had undertaken in 1921 to place its relations with China on a completely equal footing). He coined a new expression, ‘hypo-colony’, for the state of affairs in which China was exploited without formal subordination as a dependency. His conclusion was collectivist: ‘On no account must we give more liberty to the individual,’ he wrote; ‘let us secure liberty instead for the nation.’ This was to give new endorsement to the absence of individual liberty, which had always been present in the classical Chinese outlook and tradition. The claims of family, clan and state had always been paramount and Sun Yat-sen envisaged a period of one-party rule in order to make possible mass indoctrination to reconfirm an attitude which had been in danger of corruption by western ideas.

There was apparent, then, no grave obstacle to the cooperation of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the KMT. The behaviour of the western powers and of the warlords provided common enemies and the Russian government helped to bring them together. Cooperation with the anti-imperialist power with which China had its longest land frontier seemed at least prudent and potentially very advantageous. The policy of the Comintern, for its part, favoured cooperation with the KMT to safeguard Russian interests in Mongolia and as a step towards holding off Japan. The USSR had been left out of the Washington conferences, though no power had greater territorial interests in Asia. For her, cooperation with the likely winners in China was an obvious course even if Marxist doctrine had not also fitted such a policy. From 1924 onwards the CCP was working with the KMT under Soviet patronage, in spite of some doubts among Chinese communists. As individuals, though not as a party, they could belong to the KMT. Sun Yat-sen’s able young soldier Chiang K’ai-shek was sent to Moscow for training, and a military academy was founded in China to provide ideological as well as military instruction.

In 1925 Sun Yat-sen died; he had made communist cooperation with his followers easier, and the united front still endured. Sun Yat-sen’s will (which Chinese schoolchildren learnt by heart) had said that the Revolution was not yet complete and while the communists made important advances in winning peasant support for the Revolution in certain provinces, the new revolutionary army led by idealistic young officers made headway against the warlords. By 1927 something of a semblance of unity had been restored to the country under the leadership of the KMT. Anti-imperialist feeling supported a successful boycott of British goods, which led the British government, alarmed by the evidence of growing Russian influence in China, to surrender its concessions at Hankow and Kiukiang. It had already promised to return Wei-hai-wei to China (1922), and the United States had renounced its share of the Boxer indemnity. Such successes added to signs that China was on the move at last.