ethics of civilization

BECK index
                                                           Qing Dynasty Fall 1875-1912
by Sanderson Beck
China under Cixi 1875-98
Kang's Reforms of 1898
Boxer Uprising of 1900
Late Qing Reforms 1901-10
Sun Yat-sen and Revolutionaries
Chinese Revolution 1911-12
This chapter has been published in the book EAST ASIA 1800-1949.
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China under Cixi 1875-98
Qing Decline 1799-1875
After the Dowager Empress Cixi as regent appointed her three-year-old nephew Guangxu to be emperor in January 1875, some Confucians complained that being of the same generation as Tongzhi he would not be able to mourn him as an ancestor; one official even committed suicide outside of Tongzhi’s tomb in protest. Cixi would remain the power behind the screen even after she “retired” in 1889.

Hoping to open a trade route from Burma, the British consul Augustus Margary ignored Chinese warnings about guerrillas on the frontier and ventured up the Yangzi River to wait for Col. H. A. Brown. Governor Cen Yuying of Yunnan sent an assassin to murder Margary at Dengyue and blame it on local tribesmen, and Margary was killed in an ambush on February 21, 1875. The British demanded that Chinese officials take responsibility, and Thomas Wade called for an investigation and an indemnity. The Chinese court sent a mission led by Guo Songdao to apologize to Queen Victoria while Robert Hart went to Shanghai to persuade Wade to negotiate with Li Hongzhang. Meeting in the summer resort at Zhefu on September 13, 1876 Li agreed that China would pay an indemnity of 200,000 taels to Margary’s family and permit the opening of four more treaty ports. The English would be allowed to set up a court in Shanghai and send an official to sit in on trials of British citizens at any trading port. After transit dues were paid on foreign goods at ports, no lijin tax should be imposed. Steamers were allowed on inland rivers, and the duty on opium was increased. The United States, France, and Russia opposed the unilateral convention, and India complained about the increase on the opium tax; the British did not ratify it until 1885. Guo presented his letter to Queen Victoria on February 8, 1877 and set up the first Chinese embassy in London. In the next two years the Chinese established legations in Paris, Berlin, Spain, Washington, Tokyo, and St. Petersburg.

Conservatives opposed relations with Europeans. Prince Chun (Yihuan) suggested that the court should set an example by abandoning anything that is foreign. In 1880 some officials warned against letting foreigners construct a tall building in Beijing that could be used for spying. When the Zongli Yamen published Guo Songdao’s diary praising European civilization in 1877, the court ordered the printing blocks destroyed. Under pressure he resigned in 1879, and the conservative councilors Li Hongzao and Jinghian would not allow Guo to work in the Zongli Yamen. Conservatives also blocked the development of railways and even had the first one near Shanghai torn out in 1877.

Guo Songdao began the process of reforming China’s legal system in 1877 to make punishments less severe, and this effort was continued by He Gai and Hu Liyuan in 1887, Zheng Guanying in 1892, and Song Yuren in 1895. These reforms were necessary if Europeans were to be persuaded to give up their extraterritorial rights in China. Guo Songdao was elected honorary vice president by the Association for the Reform and Codification of the Law of Nations at their London meeting in 1878. That year Ma Jianzhong studied international law in Paris, and he explained the European theory for balancing power. Chen Qiu proposed in 1893 that international law could be enforced by a world organization composed of all states, which he predicted would occur within thirty years. Zheng Guanying also wrote about international law, and he favored adjusting to changing times by developing commerce and industry. He proposed reforming the examination system and establishing technological and professional schools, mining natural resources, modernizing agriculture, and promoting trade by abolishing local tariffs and expanding exports and imports. He especially recommended improving the processes for producing tea and silk, China’s most lucrative export products. John Fryer edited a Chinese scientific magazine from 1876 to 1892.

Li Hongzhang was governor-general of the capital province of Zhili, and his steamship company was making money shipping government tax grain from central China to Beijing. He ordered four gunboats from England in 1875 for the navy and four more in 1877. That year he expanded the coal mines near Tianjin to supply China’s new navy of steamships.  In 1877 Zuo Zongtang applied steam power in a woolen mill at Lanzhou in Gansu, and the next year Li’s cotton cloth mill at Shanghai was given a ten-year monopoly on foreign textile machinery to save China money on importing textiles. In 1880 he requested permission to build four railway lines. That year the Imperial Telegraph Administration was established, and the School of Telegraphy began in Tianjin. In 1881 Li founded a navy academy at Tianjin and developed arsenals there to manufacture ammunition for Remington and Krupp guns. By 1882 the Chinese navy had fifty steam warships. Li had sent a few boys to Hartford, Connecticut to be educated, but he was disappointed that the United States would not accept Chinese students in their military academies at West Point and Annapolis. So the educational mission in the US was closed, and they returned in 1881. Li began sending students to enroll in military academies in England, France, and Germany. The Shanghai Electric Company began in 1882.

Zuo Zongtang was appointed imperial commissioner for a campaign in the western territory of Xinjiang in 1875. The following March he moved his headquarters forward to Suzhou. General Liu Jintang conquered northern Xinjiang by November. Zuo received 26.7 million taels in three years for the war, and he distributed thousands of European rifles and steel cannons made by Krupp that could destroy cavalry from a distance. Ya‘qub Beg still held southern Xinjiang with an army of 45,360 men trained by Turkish instructors. He offered to pay China tribute and sent an envoy to London asking for British mediation. Ya‘qub retreated to Korla in April 1877, and he died on May 29, probably by suicide. His sons fought on, but by the end of the year the Chinese had recovered all of Xinjiang except Ili, which was occupied by Russians.

Chonghou agreed to the Treaty of Livadia which ceded 70% of Ili to Russia and promised to pay them an indemnity of five million rubles; it also gave Russia the right to have seven consulates and navigate the Sungari River. Learning what he had given away, the Zongli Yamen (Foreign Office) quickly cabled him not to sign the treaty; but Chonghou believed he was committed and signed it on October 2, 1879. Zhang Zhidong demanded that China reject the treaty and decapitate Chonghou even if it meant war. Zeng Goufan’s son, the Marquis Zeng Jize, went to Russia, and finally on February 24, 1881 he signed a treaty in St. Petersburg in which the Russians agreed to return much of Ili.  By that year Zuo had been given another 25.6 million taels in revenue assistance. China made their large western territory the province of Xinjiang in 1884 with Liu Jintang as its first governor.



The Chinese had received about fifty missions of tribute from Annam (central Vietnam) in the previous two centuries and about five hundred from Korea. China refused to recognize the treaty that Annam made with France in 1874 and was concerned when the French occupied Hanoi and Haiphong in 1880. An irregular Black Flag army fought the French in 1882 on the frontier. Some younger politicians calling themselves the Purist party (Qingliu) led by Zhang Zhidong wanted to fight the French. Li Hongzhang and Prince Gong were more cautious and wanted to negotiate; but the French rebuffed Zeng Jize’s efforts in Paris because they did not recognize China’s right to speak for Annam. Li and the French minister Bourée agreed on a joint protectorate, but this was rejected in Paris.

After the French defeated the Black Flag army at Sontay in December 1883, Li assured French navy captain F. E. Fournier that China would recognize French treaties with Annam and would withdraw its troops from  Tonkin (northern Vietnam) in exchange for France not demanding an indemnity nor invading China nor making undignified references to China in future treaties with Annam. The French parliament rejected this agreement because the last point implied Chinese sovereignty over Annam. Thus the Chinese did not withdraw from Tonkin by the ultimatum date of July 12, 1884. In June the Chinese army led by Wang Debang defeated the French near Baché, and in August forces under Liu Mingchuan in the Keelung forts on Taiwan held off the French assault led by Admiral Lespes. Li sent Ma Jianzhong to sell his merchant steamship fleet to the American-owned Russell and Company to protect them by international law. They were not damaged in the war, and then the Chinese repurchased them.

The Chinese court sent the two Qingliu Dang leaders, Zhang Zhidong as governor and Zhang Peilun as commander of the Fujian fleet. The French fleet of twelve ships moved into the harbor at Fuzhou near China’s southern fleet and opened fire on August 22. In one hour they sank or damaged every Chinese ship, destroying the docks and the arsenal. The Chinese lost 521 men with 51 missing while only five French died. Zhang Peilun quickly fled and was banished. While China and France decided to accept the Li-Fournier agreement, the Chinese army did better on land, defeating the French near Damsu in October and at Langson in March 1885. Li Hongzhang and the French made a treaty in June recognizing the French treaties with Annam, but the French withdrew from Taiwan and the Pescadores Islands. China did not have to pay an indemnity but had spent 100 million taels on the war and borrowed 20 million more.

In April 1884 the regent Cixi had reacted to a censor’s criticism of Prince Gong for his weak policy against France by dismissing everyone on the Grand Council and replacing them with five new members led by Prince Li (Shido). Prince Ching also replaced Prince Gong in the Zongli Yamen. In October 1885 Prince Chun was made minister of naval affairs, and a Navy Yamen was established in Beijing.

Liu Mingchuan became governor of Taiwan and was given funds to modernize and defend the island. Immigrants increased the population of Taiwan to 2.5 million people, and he was allowed to construct railways in 1887. He had a force of 22,000 men and two European drill instructors by 1888. That year Liu was allowed to choose his own county magistrates for three years, and he made the Keelung coal mine a government agency. He raised revenues with new land taxes that provoked an uprising in Zhanghua. Liu directed forty campaigns against insurgents. In October 1890 conservative officials had him removed because they suspected he was bringing in foreign investors.

The Portuguese annexed the port of Macao in 1887. Li Hongzhang received the new cruisers from Germany in 1888 and reorganized the northern navy. The former commander Liu Bingzhang governed Sichuan 1886-94 and opposed Western learning. A paper mill opened in Shanghai in 1891, followed by a cotton-weaving mill the next year.

In 1882 the United States had passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited the immigration of Chinese workers for ten years, required the Chinese to register and carry passports, and excluded them from becoming citizens. Four years later the Geary law extended the act for ten years, denied the Chinese bail, and penalized failure to register with imprisonment or deportation. In September 1885 a mob in the Wyoming territory had killed 28 Chinese miners, and in June 1887 ten Chinese miners were murdered near Snake River, Oregon. In 1894 US Secretary of State Walter Q. Gresham made a treaty with Yang Ru, the Chinese minister in Washington, excluding Chinese immigrants for ten years and restricting Chinese who return to the United States.



In 1876 the Chinese court urged Korea to negotiate with Japan, and the Koreans signed the Treaty of Kangwha, which recognized Japanese rights in Korea. The Ryukyu Islands, which the Chinese called Liuqiu, had been paying tribute every other year to the Qing court. After Japan annexed them in 1879 and named the prefecture Okinawa, the Chinese court put Li Hongzhang in charge of the Korean situation. In 1882 he sent Ma Jianzhong to France and Admiral Ding Ruchang to Korea with three warships, and they applied the theory of balancing power by urging Korea to open itself to trade by making treaties with the United States, England, France, and Germany. After Korea signed a treaty with Japan in 1882, Li recommended several steps. The German P. G. von Mollendorf was sent to reform Korean customs offices, and Yuan Shikai went to train the Korean army. China had six battalions in Korea, and Chinese naval strength was increased along with the defense of Liaodong. They intended to keep the Russians out of Korea. Li also appointed his friend Judge Denny, who had been consul at Tianjin, to advise the Korean king, but he urged Korea to be independent.

When China withdrew three battalions to fight the French in the south in 1884, the Japanese attempted a coup at Seoul on December 4 during a banquet. Two days later Yuan Shikai and Wu Zhaoyu led two Korean battalions they had trained in an attack on the palace and rescued the Taewongon. The Japanese burned their embassy to destroy the evidence and fled with Kim Ok-kyun and other Korean rebels to Japan. Tokyo sent an emissary demanding Korea pay $110,000 for their losses and reconstruct their embassy. Ito Hirobumi met with Li Hongzhang at Tianjin (Tientsin), and they agreed that both China and Japan should withdraw their troops from Korea within four months and that neither would train Korean troops. Li returned the Taewongon and appointed Yuan Shikai as the Chinese resident. Japan refused to extradite Kim Ok-kyun. When the British occupied Port Hamilton in 1885, Li negotiated a secret alliance with the Russian minister; but the British evacuated Port Hamilton the next year, and the Russian alliance was never ratified.

In March 1894 Kim Ok-kyun left Japan and went to Shanghai, where he was assassinated by a Korean whose father had been killed in 1884 during the attempted coup. When Korea’s monarchy became unstable in 1894 because of the Tonghak rebellion, the Korean government asked both China and Japan to send troops to protect the royal family. The Japanese got there first with more than 7,000 men and seized the palace on July 21, appointing a regent. That day the British provided three steamers to carry 1,200 Chinese troops along with three Chinese warships to Korea. Four days later the Japanese navy intercepted and sank the British-chartered steamer Kowshing, killing 950 Chinese soldiers. Japan also attacked Chinese forces at Yashan. China and Japan declared war on each other on August 1.

In September off the Yalu River mouth the Japanese also damaged China’s northern fleet, destroying four ships and killing more than a thousand men while losing only one ship. The Japanese army defeated the Chinese in several battles around Seoul and Pyongyang, and in October they crossed the Yalu into Chinese territory. The next month another Japanese army fortified the harbor at Lushun. The Chinese navy retreated to its port at Weihaiwei on the north side of the Shandong peninsula. However, in January 1895 a Japanese army of 20,000 troops and 10,000 field workers arrived by land and captured the defensive forts at Weihaiwei. Then they used the Chinese guns to destroy one Chinese battleship and four cruisers. Admiral Ding committed suicide, and his subordinates surrendered eleven ships. Some Qing commandants in the forts also took their own lives.

In this bleak situation Prince Gong and the disgraced Li Hongzhang were sent to negotiate in Japan, which had refused to talk with lesser officials. Li was shot in the face by a Japanese assassin on March 24, and in sympathy the Japanese reduced the indemnity demanded from 300 million taels to 200 million. Also in the Treaty of Shimonoseki signed on April 17, 1895 China recognized Korea’s independence and the end of its paying tribute to China, which ceded to Japan the Pescadores, Taiwan, and Liaodong in southern Manchuria. Four more treaty ports were added, including Chongqing way up the Yangzi River in Sichuan, and the Japanese could also build factories in any treaty port area. The Russians wanted the ice-free ports of Dairen and Port Arthur in Liaodong. They withdrew 29 warships from Chinese and Japanese harbors and made Vladivostok a war zone. The Russians with support from the French and Germans persuaded the Japanese to retrocede Liaodong for an additional 30 million taels on November 4, 1895.

The people of Taiwan refused to accept Japanese sovereignty and declared an independent republic on May 25, 1895, but a week later the Chinese court sent Li Hongzhang’s son Li Jingfang to turn over the island to the arriving Japanese forces, who suppressed the resistance by October. Li Hongzhang was criticized for choosing his subordinates based on loyalty to him. Many of them embezzled funds to bribe the chief eunuch Li Lianying. Sheng Xuanhuai was backed by Li and Zhang Zhidong, and he founded Beiyang College in Tianjin in 1895 and Nanyang College in Shanghai in 1896 as technical institutes.

Beijing borrowed 400 million francs from a Franco-Russian Banking Consortium at 4% interest, and Count Witte pledged Russian assets as security. In 1896 and 1898 China borrowed £16 million from a British-German Consortium at 5% and 4.5%. Li Hongzhang was invited to the coronation of Czar Nicholas II in 1896, and Prince Ukhtomski was sent to escort him from Suez to Odessa so that he would not visit western Europe. Count Witte negotiated the building of a railway through northern Mongolia and Manchuria to Vladivostok that would be managed by the private Chinese Eastern Railway Corporation. China would cede a strip of land that they could buy back after 36 years and that would revert to China freely after 80 years. China and Russia also agreed to defend each other against any Japanese attack on China, Korea, or Russian territory.

In 1897 Kaiser Wilhelm II visited Russia and gained permission from Czar Nicholas to make Jiaozhou a navy base. When two German missionaries were murdered in Shandong in November, Germans seized Jiaozhou and forced China to lease it for 99 years with a concession to build two railways in Shandong. This encouraged Russia to take over Dairen and Port Arthur the next month. In March the Russians imposed a treaty on China to lease the area around these ports for 25 years and build the Southern Manchuria Railway from them to the Chinese Eastern Railway. Witte later claimed that he bribed Li Hongzhang with 500,000 rubles and Zhang Yinhuan with 250,000 rubles. Thus the Russians gained the Liaodong peninsula. The British leased Weihaiwei for 25 years and Kaulung for 99 years while exacting a promise that China would not let any other power control the Yangzi Valley. Japan gained a similar promise in regard to the Fujian province. France leased Guangzhou Bay and made the southern Guangdong-Guangxi-Yunnan area their sphere of influence.

Christian missionaries were influential and by 1889 had educated 16,000 Chinese. Young J. Allen published The Globe Magazine (Wanguo gongbao) in Shanghai 1875-83 and 1889-1907. The Society for the Diffusion of Christian and General Knowledge among the Chinese (SDK) had been founded in 1887 in Shanghai, and they promoted Western civilization through Chinese translations. Timothy Richard became secretary in 1891 and Beijing representative in 1895. He wrote about the reforms of  Peter in Russia and Emperor Meiji in Japan, published New Views on Current Affairs, and translated Robert MacKenzie’s Nineteenth Century: A History. After the Sino-Japanese War ended in 1895, many scholars argued that China needed to change its policies. Li Hongzhang lost favor and was replaced by Zhang Zhidong, who now advocated modernizing. The Confucian Weng Tonghe was Emperor Guangxu’s tutor and gave him Feng Guifen’s Protest from the Jiaobin Studio in 1889, when he began ruling. Guangxu read translations of Western literature and started learning English in 1891.

Zhang Zhidong published Exhortation to Learning in 1898 and emphasized that China should understand five things—that they had fallen behind Japan, Turkey, Siam, and Cuba; that they should avoid the fate of Vietnam, Burma, Korea, Egypt, and Poland; that machines cannot be improved without better methods; that Chinese learning is practical and that Western politics should be studied more than its technology; and that they should not forget their country when traveling or their family when studying foreign customs or disregard the sages. Zhang’s motto was that Chinese learning should be the foundation for applying Western learning.

Kang's Reforms of 1898
Kang Youwei was born on March 19, 1858 in a scholarly family and studied with his grandfather, a famous Neo-Confucian. After his death Kang meditated on a mountain for two years, and he realized that he had a spiritual self existing outside of his body that is one with everything. He made goodness the center of his philosophy and aimed to follow the will of Heaven to bring about a unity of nations, races, and religions with equality for men and women and universal laws for everyone. He visited Hong Kong and Shanghai and was impressed by British efficiency. He began studying Western writings in translation and abandoned the civil service examinations. In 1883 he tried to ban in his village the binding of women’s feet. In 1887 Kang wrote his Universal Principles of Humanity (Renlei gongli). In this socialist utopia he advocated abolishing the nations and organizing the entire world under one elected government with regional governments also popularly elected. Education should begin with prenatal care and go from nurseries and kindergarten up. The government should provide jobs, public dormitories and dining halls, hospitals, and retirement homes. Rewards should be given for inventions and discoveries.

Kang completed his Book of Great Unity (Datongshu) in 1902 at Darjeeling, but it was not published until 1935, eight years after his death. This book described his visionary ideas for the third and final phase of civilization he called the Age of Universal Peace in which humanity and wisdom would make equality a reality and overcome all restrictions. The Age of Disorder was despotic, but the Age of Rising Peace developed constitutional monarchies. Kang described various kinds of suffering. His eight sufferings from human feelings are stupidity, hatred, lust, imposing burdens, toil, desires, oppression, and class distinctions. Kang’s five sufferings of government are punishment, oppressive taxes, military conscription, the state, and the family. He prophesied that nations would join regional confederations and then under pressure merge into a world parliament with a universal language and complete disarmament of all the former nations.

The way of Great Unity is based on perfect equality, impartiality, humanity, and the best government. This Great Community would end all conflicts based on nations, class, race, gender, family, occupation, chaos, species, and suffering. Kang suggested doing away with all these distinctions that had come from slavery, caste, and feudal institutions. He hoped that when there are no divisions into nations and no differences between races, there would be no war. The world government would organize agriculture, industry, commerce, mining, road building, and reclaiming deserts without competition. When all people are equal, wisdom and humanity may be promoted for the benefit of all people. Kang described humanity as “the mind that cannot bear to see the suffering of others,” and he considered it the root of all benevolent governmental measures.

Kang predicted that in a hundred years the world’s major problem would be the struggle between the rich and poor. He believed that the only way to solve that conflict was to eliminate the family and people’s drive for private property. He foresaw that racial intermarriages on a global scale would eventually merge humanity into one race. In his Great Community the state would distribute resources and provide education from before birth through twenty years of schooling, life-long health care, and homes for the dying. Kang emphasized the equality of men and women, and he castigated men for not letting women participate in social and political life. After the age of twenty any person could choose a marriage contract for not less than one month nor for more than one year, although contracts could be renewed annually. Those of the same sex could also make such contracts. Kang realized that his ideas were too advanced for his time and so only shared them with a few students.

Without being qualified Kang boldly submitted a memorial in 1888 urging China to modernize like Japan, but the Imperial College refused to forward his memorial. So Kang taught in Guangdong, and young Liang Qichao became his best student. Kang opened a new school at Guangzhou in 1891. That year he wrote A Study of the Forged Classics of the Xin Period, adopting the New Text theory that the ancient classics that appeared after the Qin book-burning were forgeries. His Study of Confucius as a Reformer (1897) interpreted the master not as a conservative backer of the status quo but as an uncrowned king intent on improving society just as the Zhou founders had reformed the ancient Shang. This book was banned.

In 1895 Kang and Liang went to Beijing to take the triennial exams. They wrote a 10,000-word memorial and gathered 602 signatures from graduates in eighteen provinces to urge rejection of the peace treaty. They proposed moving the capital, continuing the war, and initiating major reforms that included increasing taxes on the rich, building a railway network to improve commerce, developing industry and shipping, exploiting China’s mineral resources in coal, iron, lead, and tin, unifying and stabilizing Chinese currency, and establishing a national postal system. Liang’s exam paper was rejected as the most radical, and Kang was appointed only a secondary secretary on the Board of Public Works. Kang rejected this and wrote a series of memorials. His third memorial was forwarded to the throne on June 3, 1895, and the Emperor ordered some copies made for a few authorities. Kang’s fourth memorial suggested a parliament and was blocked by the Censorate and the Board of Public Works. Kang Youwei and his brother Kang Guangren founded the Anti-Foot-binding Association in Guangdong.

Kang Youwei and Liang organized the Society for the Study of National Strengthening in September 1895, and Zhang Zhidong contributed 5,000 taels. Liang edited the daily Chinese Global Magazine (Wanguo gongbao), which had a circulation of 2,000, and they were influenced by the missionary Timothy Richard. Kang went to Shanghai to open a branch and began publishing the Journal of National Strengthening. Zhang offered to contribute again, but he objected to their using a calendar from the reign of Confucius instead of the Qing dynasty. In January 1896 the Chinese court ordered the organization closed. In August they began publishing the weekly Current Affairs, and in a few months circulation passed 10,000. Kang traveled and helped found study societies, schools, and newspapers in Hunan, Jiangsu, Guangdong, and Beijing. Within three years 76 study societies had formed.

In November 1897 Yan Fu began editing the daily National Review (Guowen bao) in Tianjin and a weekly magazine. He translated Evolution and Ethics by Thomas Huxley, On Liberty and Logic by John Stuart Mill, A Study of Sociology by Herbert Spencer, The Spirit of the Laws by Montesquieu, and Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. Yan had observed the English and believed that Western policies needed democratic institutions that would allow social evolution. He criticized the examination system and wanted to replace Confucianism with Western ideas. He believed that China must develop scientific education and nationalism. Of the 567 works translated into Chinese in the second half of the 19th century 78% were on the various sciences, whereas before that an even larger percentage had been religious books. Lin Shu was a prolific translator of Western literature, and he worked with a partner who translated orally as he wrote in Chinese style versions of novels by Charles Dickens, Rider Haggard, Walter Scott, Alexander Dumas, and others, a total of 159 books. In his introductions he promoted better human relations, social progress, and patriotism.

Hunan was reformed by Governor Wu Dacheng (1892-95), and he was succeeded by the progressive Chen Baozhen. His Bureau of Protection and Defense established a modern police force, and effort was made to reform and educate criminals. The China Reform Association published The Hunan Daily and the Hunan Journal. Jiang Biao was commissioner of education in Hunan from 1895 to 1897, and he emphasized a balance between Chinese traditions and Western knowledge. The School of Current Affairs began at Changsha in the fall of 1897. Liang became a chief lecturer, and he was assisted by Kang’s disciples. Xu Renzhu succeeded Jiang as commissioner and was even more devoted to Kang’s teachings. Liang had thousands of copies printed of books that criticized despotism and Manchu atrocities. He urged the Governor to declare Hunan independent just as Satsuma and Choshu had seceded from Tokugawa Japan prior to the Meiji reforms. They formed the Southern Study Society, which grew to 1,200 members. Those opposed drafted the Scholars’ Compact of Hunan in the summer of 1898. Most of the gentry did not want the Qing dynasty to collapse, denounced equality, and petitioned Governor Chen to expel Liang and his friends. Chen asked the Chinese court to ban Kang’s Confucius as a Reformer. Huang Zunxian published his History of Japan in 1897, and he invited Liang to Shanghai to edit a journal for the Self-Strengthening Society.

After Germans grabbed Jiaozhou in 1897, Emperor Guangxu told Prince Gong that if he was not given the power to initiate reforms, he would abdicate. Kang presented his fifth memorial, warning that China could be partitioned and urging reforms like those of Peter in Russia and the Meiji in Japan. The memorial was blocked but became known, and the tutor Weng arranged for Kang to have an imperial audience on January 11, 1898. Prince Gong objected it was not permitted, and Kang was sent to the Zongli Yamen on January 24. Kang recommended changing the governmental institutions as circumstances require.

Five days later Emperor Guangxu ordered that Kang could present memorials directly any time, and on that day he presented his sixth memorial suggesting a bureau to draft a constitution and twelve administrative bureaus. Each province should have a People’s Bureau with district branches. With his seventh memorial in February he included studies of the reforms made by Meiji and Peter and Richard’s translation of “An Outline of New Western History.” During the triennial exams in April he organized the National Protection Society, which was joined by hundreds of graduates and government officials. Their goals were to protect the people, religion, sovereignty and territory of China, promote institutional reform, discuss foreign relations, and study political economy. Many Manchu officials feared they wanted to protect China but not the Qing dynasty, and conservative attacks reduced attendance.

When Prince Gong died on May 30, Kang urged Weng to begin the reforms; but he had turned against Kang and told him to leave Beijing. Kang presented his eighth memorial on June 8, and three days later Emperor Guangxu decreed the first reform by urging officials and commoners to study useful knowledge. Weng had been accused of crimes and was removed on June 15. Guangxu gave Kang an audience the next day, and he urged complete reforms. Kang was appointed secretary of the Zongli Yamen, and three days later his memorial requested national reform. Guangxu asked for Kang’s works directly, and the period of reform began. Kang submitted his books on the reforms in Japan, France, Germany, and England. He proposed revising the examination system and the legal code, establishing the government bureaus, creating a parliament in Beijing and a national assembly, and adopting a constitution authorizing executive, legislative, and judicial functions. Liang was appointed head of the translation bureau, and four progressives were made secretaries in the Grand Council.

China’s “New Deal” (Xinzheng) was implemented in 103 days from June to September. In June missionaries were protected, and officials were encouraged to travel in foreign countries. The “eight-legged” examination essay was replaced by essays on current affairs, and the Imperial University at Beijing was founded. Agriculture, industry, commerce, and railway construction were promoted. Administration was to be simplified without delays. In July inventions were encouraged, and both Chinese and Western studies were to be taught in elementary schools, high schools, and colleges. A special exam on political economy was opened. An official newspaper was published, and legal codes were to be simplified and improved. In August the Yellow River was given a director-generalship, and intendants were assigned to grain transport and salt. In September progressives were appointed in government. The capital was to be beautified. A medical school was added to the University. Suggestions by private citizens were to be immediately forwarded to government offices. Manchus were given permission to engage in commerce, and on September 16 a budget was to be prepared.

Most high officials boycotted the reforms, and the Board of Rites objected to changing the exams. The reforms were delayed or blocked in every province except Hunan. The main obstacle was the Empress Dowager Cixi. She was not opposed to reforms and had told her nephew she would not interfere as along as he did not burn the ancestral tablets or cut off his queue. She was alarmed by the elimination of three governorships and the sinecure of offices as well as by the exam changes. The Emperor’s mother died in June and could no longer mediate. The progressives would not tolerate the corruption of the chief eunuch Li Lianying, who was supported by the conservatives and the powerful Governor Ronglu of Zhili, head of the northern army.

The Emperor dismissed the presidents of the Board of Rites on September 1, and six days later Li Hongzhang was removed from the Zongli Yamen. Conservatives asked Cixi to take control, but she declined. So they went to Ronglu and plotted a coup during a troop review at Tianjin in October. Hearing rumors, Kang suggested that Guangxu make Shanghai his capital, cut off his queue, change his clothes, and adopt a new reign title. Yuan Shikai met with the Emperor on September 16 and was made a vice-president. Two days later Guangxu learned that Cixi was upset, and he called upon the reformers to save him. That night Tan Sitong asked Yuan Shikai in Beijing to bring his army of 7,000 to Tianjin. Ronglu transferred troops to Beijing and ordered Yuan to return. The Emperor made Yuan a secret promise, but Yuan returned to Tianjin and sided with Ronglu and Cixi.

On September 21 Cixi had the palace raided to remove all reform documents, and she announced that Guangxu was so ill that she had to take over the administration. Kang fled to Shanghai, and a British warship took him to Hong Kong. Liang took refuge in the Japanese consulate in Tianjin, and he and Kang both went to Japan. Kang’s brother Guangren, the censor, and the four reformers in the Grand Council were executed without a trial. Twenty-two reformers lost their property and were banished, and Kang’s writings were banned. Most of the reforms were reversed except some remained in the schools. Societies were prohibited, and publishers and editors were arrested. Cixi said she favored some reforms but that Kang’s reforms were bad. The reforms had been undone by officials, scholars, army officers, eunuchs, monks, and the Manchus.

Tan Sitong, only 33, was one of the reformers who was arrested and executed, and many believed that he refused to flee so that he would be a martyr for China. Tan had written On the Study of Humanity in 1896-97; but it was only shown to friends such as Liang Qichao, and it was not published until after his death. Tan agreed with Kang that Confucius was a reformer and wrote,

When Confucius first set forth his teachings,
he discarded the ancient learning,
reformed existing institutions,
rejected monarchism, advocated republicanism,
and transformed inequality into equality.1
Tan wrote that the scholars who followed Xun-zi lost the true meaning of the teachings of Confucius and allowed rulers to use Confucianism to control the country. They added the four bonds that made the minister subordinate to the ruler, the son to the father, the wife to the husband, and the younger brother to the older brother. These relationships of authoritarian domination shackle people’s minds so that they are afraid to think or speak. The husband considers himself a master and so does not treat his wife as an equal. In ancient China the wife did not lose her right to be a master because she could ask for a divorce. The fifth Confucian relationship of friendship is the only one that is freely chosen and based on equality, making it most beneficial and least harmful. Tan commented that the ruler is not superior physically nor mentally, and yet he uses his power to oppress four hundred million people. Tan wrote, “If public affairs are not well managed, it is a universal principle that the ruler should be replaced.”2 He advocated a universal community with the moral idealism of Mo-zi, Mahayana Buddhism, Neo-Confucianism, and Christianity combined with the industrial commercialism of the modern West.

Boxer Uprising of 1900
In February 1899 the Italians demanded the cession of Sanmen Bay in Zhejiang. The customs inspector-general Robert Hart rejected their claim, and the Empress Dowager Cixi ordered the governor to fight them. The Italians withdrew their claim in October. On November 21 Cixi instructed all the provincial governors to unite their forces, forget peace, and fight any invaders. Meanwhile the Christian missionaries had been converting many Chinese, defending them in courts, and giving them subsidies for subsistence. Some Chinese resented this proselytizing and said that those who live off the church “eat by religion.”

After the German occupation of Jiaozhou hundreds of conflicts arose over railways, mines, and churches. Since 1861 China was being exploited by foreign capital, and in 1899 the trade deficit was 69 million taels and the government deficit 12 million taels. Taxes had to be increased on the people. The Yellow River had flooded again in 1898, and in 1900 northern China suffered a severe drought. Some religious Chinese blamed the natural catastrophes on the foreign religion in their country.

In Shandong the Big Sword Society was organized against foreigners, and in March 1898 posters were distributed urging people to kill foreigners and traitorous Chinese and burn their homes. Governor Li Bingheng of Shandong encouraged them, and those in the secret society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists were called Boxers by Europeans. The Qian Fists, Kan Fists, and Kun Fists were also called Boxers, and they all wore red. The Boxers called foreigners Primary Hairy Men, Chinese Christians Secondary Hairy Men, and those using foreign goods Tertiary Hairy Men, and they were opposed to all of them. The Boxers believed that their martial arts were magical and that they were invulnerable. They rejected foreign guns and used traditional swords, lances, and daggers. Only the white band remained anti-Qing, but the other Boxers adopted the slogan “Support the Qing and exterminate the foreigners.” Yuxian became governor of Shandong in March 1899, and he changed their name to the Righteous and Harmonious Militia. He ignored complaints about the Boxers and the Big Sword Society and even subsidized them with silver to set up more than eight hundred training centers for teaching his soldiers to box.

In December 1899 the foreigners got Yuxian replaced, but he went to Beijing and complained that suppressing the Boxers was against China’s interest. The reactionary Prince Duan, Prince Zhuang, and Grand Secretary Gang Yi were persuaded, and they recommended that the Empress Dowager Cixi make use of them. Yuxian was appointed governor of Shanxi. The strict Yuan Shikai, the acting governor of Shandong, was warned in December and again in January 1900 not to punish the Boxers, but he continued to suppress the criminal actions of the Boxers. On January 12 the court decreed that those who drilled to protect villages were not to be considered bandits. Again on April 17 the court proclaimed that organized militias should not be prohibited. In May the Boxers killed 68 Chinese Christians and burned 75 houses in the Gaoluo village in Zhili. Governor Yulu took no action against them, and the court was afraid to provoke a catastrophe. The Boxers began destroying railroads and telegraph lines. The court wanted to organize the Boxers into a militia, but Yuan Shikai and Yulu both opposed this. The Dowager summoned some Boxers to the palace, and in a demonstration of their skill they persuaded her of their invulnerability. Princes and nobles invited Boxers into their homes as guards, and about half the government troops joined the Boxers.

The Zongli Yamen tried to limit each foreign legation to 30 guards, but in the first three days of June troops arriving in Beijing from Tianjin included 75 British, 75 French, 50 Americans, 40 Italians, and 25 Japanese. On June 3 the Boxers destroyed the railway line between these two cities. Governor Zhang Zhidong and Railways and Telegraphs director Sheng Xuanhuai pleaded with the court to suppress the Boxers before it was too late but to no avail. When General Nie Shicheng’s soldiers killed some Boxers, Commander-in-chief Ronglu was reprimanded. Prince Duan had become head of the Zongli Yamen, and two more reactionary ministers were appointed. The  British urgently asked Admiral Edward Seymour to send reinforcements from Tianjin, but on June 10 the train with 2,100 men was stopped halfway at Langfang by the Boxers. They cut the telegraph lines and burned the British summer legation in the West Hills. The next day troops under General Dong Fuxiang killed Sugiyama, the chancellor of the Japanese legation.

On June 13 the court told the foreigners that their embassies were adequately protected and needed no more foreign troops in Beijing. Governor Yulu and General Nie were ordered to stop Admiral Seymour’s men. Boxers rampaged into Beijing, killing Chinese Christians and burning churches and foreign residences. The next day legation guards were attacked. The Boxers broke into prisons and freed inmates, and they took weapons from government arsenals. Foreign forces from ships attacked the Dagu forts on June 16 and occupied them the next day. Seymour’s forces fought their way back to Tianjin. The first imperial war council began on June 16, and two days later Empress Cixi decided to fight the foreign powers with the Boxers. The foreign diplomats were told to leave Beijing within 24 hours under a Chinese military escort; they refused. On June 20 the German minister Clemens von Ketteler was killed. Yulu sent an optimistic memorial about Tianjin and the Dagu forts, and on June 21 the court declared war on the foreign powers. Prince Zhuang and Gang Yi were put in command of 30,000 Boxers, and Prince Duan was in charge of 1,400 bands with more than a hundred men in each. These joined with government troops under General Dong Fuxiang in attacking the legations and the Northern Roman Catholic Cathedral. Prince Zhuang offered rewards for every foreign male, female, and child captured.

Learning of the war declaration, the governors Li Hongzhang of Guangzhou, Zhang Zhidong in Wuhan, and Yuan Shikai in Shandong were united in refusing to recognize its legitimacy, and they even formed a pact with the consuls at Shanghai to protect foreigners and their property while suppressing the Boxers in their provinces.

The legation quarter was near the palace in the Forbidden City and had about 450 guards, 475 civilians, 2,300 Chinese Christians, and 50 servants. They appealed to Commander Ronglu; but he replied that he could not control the Boxers because they had infiltrated his army. Sheng Xuanhuai urged Yuan Shikai to march on Beijing, but he declined. On July 3 Cixi issued a decree that provincial authorities should not use the word “peace.” On July 14 the foreign troops took control of Tianjin, and thirteen southeastern provincial authorities pleaded with the Empress to suppress the Boxers and protect foreigners. The court became conciliatory for the next twelve days, and the Zongli Yamen offered foreigners refuge, which they declined. On July 18 the court asked Li Hongzhang to inform foreign diplomats abroad that their legations were safe. The next week the Yamen sent two cartloads of food to the legations. Li Bingheng arrived on July 26, and he and Gang Yi persuaded Cixi that they must fight to gain a reasonable settlement. The war policy was confirmed, and five officials were executed for counseling peace.

On August 4 an international force left Tianjin with 8,000 Japanese, 4,800 Russians, 3,000 British, 2,100 Americans, 800 French, 58 Austrians, and 53 Italians. The  Germans had not yet arrived. They marched toward Beijing and decisively defeated the Chinese, causing Yulu to commit suicide on August 6 and Li Bingheng on August 11. The allies entered Beijing on August 14 and relieved the besieged legations. Ronglu had not openly opposed Cixi, but he had fired empty guns against the legations and withheld his better cannons. The Dowager forced Emperor Guangxu to flee with her in disguise, and for the first time in her life she faced physical hardship. On August 20 she decreed that she was responsible for China’s catastrophe. With a small group after a long journey they arrived at Xian on October 23. The Boxers had killed 231 foreigners and many more Chinese Christians. The province of Shanxi suffered more disturbances because Yuxian was governor there.

Li Hongzhang had declined several requests to go to Beijing in July but instead went to Shanghai. He had argued that the siege of the legations should be lifted and that the diplomats should be given safe conduct to Tianjin. After the court agreed to appoint Prince Qing and Ronglu to join him in peace negotiations, Li went to Tianjin in September. The Allies refused to negotiate with Ronglu, and so Li sent him to Xian to advise the court in exile that was still under the influence of the war policy of Prince Duan and Gang Yi. Zhang Zhidong informed the British consul at Hankou that the Dowager would not return as long as foreign troops were in Beijing. The southern leaders persuaded the court to punish nine ministers who had supported the Boxers, but General Dong Fuxiang still commanded 15,000 troops at Xian.

The United States had announced its Open Door Policy to support Chinese territory for permanent safety and peace in March 1900 and reiterated it on July 3. On October 16 England and Germany agreed to refrain from seizing territory in China, and other powers were invited to adhere to this policy. Field Marshal Waldersee arrived at Beijing with 7,000 Germans on October 17 and used the palace as his quarters. He led the allies in a punitive campaign to punish the areas with the most Boxer activity. The British supported the German attempt to stop the Russian advance in China as the Russians hoped to gain Manchuria.

The Allies agreed on December 24, and the court accepted the terms on January 16, 1901. Twelve officials were to be punished with death, and 119 in the provinces were also punished. China was to pay an indemnity of 450 million taels at 4% interest over the next 39 years with Russia receiving 29%, Germany 20%, France 16%, Britain 11%, Japan 8%, the United States 7%, and Italy 6%. The legations were to have their own permanent guards and could station troops between Beijing and the sea. All the forts in that area were to be destroyed. China was not allowed to import arms for two years. Provinces where the Boxers had been active were not to have examinations for five years. The final Boxer Protocol was signed by Li Hongzhang, Prince Qing, and representatives of the eleven powers on September 7. Ten days later the Allied troops evacuated Beijing. Li died at the age of 78 in November and was succeeded as governor-general of Zhili by Yuan Shikai. The court returned to Beijing on January 7, 1902.

The Russians had sent 200,000 troops into Manchuria in July 1900, and they overcame about 200,000 people in local bands to control it by October. On November 30 Admiral Alexiev, governor of Liaodong, compelled the Manchu military governor of Mukden to disband all his troops and surrender all forts and arsenals in Manchuria to the Russians, but the Qing court refused to accept the agreement and a later treaty. Finally in April 1902 the Russians agreed to evacuate Manchuria in three stages, but a year later in the second stage they had their soldiers put on new uniforms as “railway guards.”

Late Qing Reforms 1901-10
On January 19, 1901 the Dowager Cixi asked for advice from her ministers on political reform, and eight days later Emperor Guangxu’s edict warned against selfishness and precedent that suffocates. On April 21 the Bureau of Government Affairs was instituted under Ronglu to formulate a program. The Yangzi Valley governor-generals Zhang Zhidong and Liu Kunyi presented three memorials in July. The first recommended modern schools that mixed the Chinese classics with Western history, politics, science, and technology. They wanted to end military examinations, and they encouraged travel and study abroad. Their second paper urged the stopping of corruption and reducing the number of useless scribes and clerks in the government. The third memorial proposed expanding the military and promoting agriculture, industry, and technology with regulations in mining, railroads, and commerce. They suggested using the silver dollar, improving the postal service, and translating more foreign books.

Empress Cixi reluctantly ordered many of these reforms implemented in the next four years. The sale of offices was ended in August, and provincial military academies were planned. Education was reorganized into elementary schools, middle schools, and colleges, and provincial authorities were ordered to select students to study abroad. The “eight-legged” essay was replaced by current topics in exams. In 1902 the ban against marriage between a Manchu male and a Chinese female was lifted, and women were liberated from foot-binding. By the end of 1903 provincial taxes on tobacco and liquor were imposed, and palace expenses were reduced in 1904. That year school administration was standardized according to a Japanese model. The silver tael was made the standard currency in 1905, and only five mints were allowed to produce them. Between 1900 and 1905 foreigners constructed 3,222 miles of railways in China compared to only 280 miles in 1896-99. Chinese entrepreneurs began investing in railways, and nineteen local groups had been chartered by 1907.

In 1902 Governor Zhao Erxun in Shanxi experimented with smaller administrative units with more local participation. Yuan Shikai in Tianjin trained a modern police force to strengthen local control. The New Army had 36 divisions with 12,500 men in each division formed from men who had to serve for three years. Then they were in the First Call Reserves for three years, followed by the Second Call Reserves for four years. The Army Ministry took over four divisions from the Beiyang Army, leaving Yuan Shikai with two divisions. In 1907 Zhang Zhidong and Yuan Shikai were transferred from being governor-generals to be grand councilors in Beijing. These changes gave the Manchus more central control over the army.

In treaties of 1902 and 1903 England, the United States, and Japan demanded that China revise their laws. Punishments such as slow slicing, display of heads, tattooing, flogging, torture, and collective punishment were abolished. A new criminal code based on the German-influenced Japanese code of laws was completed by 1908. Complaints that punishments were not severe enough for some crimes caused changes to be made. The Qing Code was promulgated in 1910 and lasted until 1928.

In 1904 the Qing court informed the United States that they would not renew the 1894 treaty without a change. On October 11, 1903 the Boston police had raided Chinatown and arrested 234 people, and at the St. Louis Exposition in 1904 the Chinese delegation of two hundred merchants had suffered discriminatory treatment. On May 10, 1905 the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce resolved to begin a boycott if the American government did not correct its exclusionary policy against the Chinese. In June the merchants in Guangzhou, Shanghai, and other places began to boycott American goods. On July 16 Feng Xiawei took poison and died in front of the American consulate. In his two suicide notes he asked the Chinese people to protest and boycott American goods until the treaty was rectified. The Qing officials intervened in the north, and on August 31 the court gave in to American pressure and proclaimed the boycott illegal. Three men were arrested in Guangzhou (Canton) in September and were not released until October 1906, when the boycott was cancelled. In 1908 the United States decided to remit most of the money owed from the Boxer indemnity by applying it to scholarships for Chinese students in American universities.

China was being exploited by foreign trade, and the trade deficit reached a peak of 219 million taels in 1905. Foreigners controlled 84% of Chinese shipping and all of iron production in 1907. In December 1905 China recognized Japan’s control over the parts of Manchuria they had taken from Russia in their war.

Cixi appointed three prominent Manchus and two Chinese to a study group to travel abroad. On August 26, 1905 as their train was leaving Beijing, it was blown up by a revolutionary. Two commissioners were injured, and the assassin was killed. The mission was delayed and reached Washington DC in January 1906. They also visited Europe and Japan. The Manchu leader Zaize suggested that a constitution within five years could diminish internal unrest, please foreign powers, and preserve the Qing dynasty. After hearing their report, in September the Dowager promised a constitution and administrative reform, and in November a decree defined the names of the new ministries as Foreign Affairs, Education, Civil Offices, Finance, Civil Affairs (police), the Army, Justice, Rites, Dependencies (colonies), and Agriculture, Industry and Commerce. A National Assembly was to express public opinion. However, only four of the thirteen members of the Grand Council were from the vast majority of Han Chinese. Thus the Manchus maintained their anti-Chinese hold on power.

Many believed that Japan’s victory over Russia proved that modern constitutionalism is better than autocracy. Finally in 1905 after thirteen centuries the government examinations were abolished. That year copper workers went on strike. Mint employees went out in 1907, and the next year thousands of street vendors and shop assistants were on strike. In 1906 opium worth £7 million was being imported by the British from India, but by then Chinese production of opium was three times that. That year an imperial edict prohibited opium with a plan to wipe it out in ten years, and in 1908 the British agreed to reduce the opium they imported by ten percent. However, the economic interests involved in opium were difficult to stop. By 1906 Yuan Shikai had established schools for self-government, and in 1907 he approved an election for a Tianjin council. That year the government gave the Manchus land and allowed them to engage in agriculture and commerce.

The first thirteen Chinese students had gone to Japan in 1896, and by 1899 there were more than a hundred. The Determination Society was founded in 1900, and the Youth Society was dedicated to nationalism. In the largest movement of students in history thus far the numbers peaked in 1906 at about 13,000. The Qing court tried to control their studies, but this only made some students more rebellious. In 1905 nearly all the Chinese students in Japan were on strike; but in December a student committed suicide after warning against being self-indulgent and mean. About two thousand returned to China, but the strike continued. In January 1906 a Sino-Japanese Student Association was formed, and in 1907 the best higher schools in Japan were opened to Chinese students.

Many Chinese students read books translated from Japanese which made up more than half of all translations in the first decade of the twentieth century. About a third of these were on natural and applied sciences, a quarter on social sciences, and a quarter on history and geography. In 1904 China had only 4,222 schools with 92,169 students, and the Government emphasized the importance of honoring Confucianism and the Qing empire. Schools replaced the examinations, and the gentry enrolled their sons. In 1907 laws prohibited students from being involved in political affairs or attending mass meetings. In 1909 there were 52,348 schools with 1,560,270 students, but only about 13,000 were girls. Most of the Chinese teachers still did not have modern educations, and so traditional Confucianism was still the main curriculum.

Constitution-Protection Clubs sprang up, and on August 27, 1908 the court announced an outline for a constitution but indicated it would take nine years. Yet all of the executive, legislative, and judicial powers still were controlled by the emperor. To vote for the Provincial Assembly one had to be a male at least 25 years old and either have an education or be a civil official or military officer or own 5,000 yuan. Cixi was 73 and became ill. She was determined that her nephew Guangxu would not outlive her, and the Emperor died one day before she died on November 15, 1908. Many suspected that she had him poisoned. Her three-year-old grand-nephew became Emperor Puyi, and his father, the second Prince Chun, became regent. By the beginning of 1909 he had forced Yuan Shikai to retire.

In February 1909 the Regent ordered the first election for the provincial assemblies, and they met for the first time in October. The votes of the Assemblymen electing the local council depended on how much property they owned. The Qing court announced that a provisional national assembly would meet in October 1910. During that year representatives from sixteen provinces went to Beijing three times with petitions for a constitutional parliament bearing 200,000 signatures in January, 300,000 in June, and 25,000,000 in October. They met in secret conclaves and discussed revolution. The National Assembly that was inaugurated on October 3 had one hundred members elected and one hundred appointed by the Emperor. The silver tael system was abolished, and the silver dollar became the standard coin. The Finance Ministry planned a budget with 296 million taels in revenue and expenditure of 376 million taels.

Also in 1910 Yinchang was appointed minister of War, and he promulgated a new code of military law. Qing forces invaded Tibet and made it the province of Xikang, occupying Lhasa. Chinese soldiers learned how to salute and were allowed to cut off their queues. In 1910 the military budget was eight times what it had been in 1905, and military expenditures accounted for about one-third of the 1911 budget. The national assembly cut 30 million taels from the army budget, but taxes had to be increased on agriculture, real estate, transit dues, and duties on tea, wine, salt, and tobacco. Heavy rains in the Yangzi and Huai valleys in 1910 and 1911 caused floods that destroyed crops and resulted in about 2,500,000 deaths and millions of refugees going to cities. On November 4, 1910 Prince Chun decreed that a parliament would convene in 1913.

Sun Yat-sen and Revolutionaries
Sun Yat-sen was born on November 12, 1866 near Guangzhou in a peasant family. His older brother Sun Mei started a business in Honolulu, and in 1879 Yat-sen and his mother went there. He continued his education at an Anglican boarding school and became a Christian. He graduated from Oahu College in 1883. Sun Yat-sen went to Hong Kong, improved his English, and enrolled in Queen’s College. After marrying in 1885 he studied at a medical school in Guangzhou. There his friend Zheng Shiliang had connections with secret societies. Sun also studied Chinese history and discussed revolution. In 1887 he transferred to the College of Medicine for Chinese in Hong Kong, where he graduated first in his class in 1892. After practicing medicine for a year in Macao, Sun moved to Guangzhou and learned more about secret societies. In 1894 he went to Tianjin with a reform memorial for Li Hongzhang, offering his services, but he was not allowed to meet with him. So Sun went to Honolulu, and on November 24 he and his brother founded the Revive China Society (Xingzhonghui) with 112 members. They aimed to publish newspapers, open schools, build water-conservation systems, improve people’s livelihoods, and get rid of bad habits.

Sun Yat-sen went back to Hong Kong and established the Revive China Society headquarters there in February 1895. The radical Literary Society for the Development of Benevolence led by Yang Quyun merged with the Revive China Society. Branches formed in the provinces, and their goals were to overthrow the Manchus and establish a federal republic. Sun and Yang tried to organize an uprising with Sanyuanli militia; but when Yang telegraphed on October 26 that his shipment of weapons would be delayed, Sun disbanded his mercenaries. However, Sun’s telegram to Yang in Hong Kong arrived too late. Yang’s ship with the weapons and 400 men were met by the garrison in Guangzhou, and they lost 48 lives and the munitions. After six months the Revive China Society in Hong Kong disbanded.

Sun had fled to Hong Kong, but the British put a price on his head and banned him for five years. So he went to Japan, where he was hailed as a revolutionary and established a Revive China Society branch at Yokohama. Sun cut off his queue and began wearing Western clothes. After visiting Honolulu, Sun went to London, where he visited the Chinese legation on October 11. They held him prisoner for twelve days, but his old professor and friend Dr. Cantlie got the Foreign Office to secure his release. The story was given much publicity on October 23 and made Sun famous. He gave interviews, wrote letters to newspapers, and published Kidnapped in London in English in early 1897.

He believed in the justice and rights of the British system, but he could not persuade them to let him return to Hong Kong. He based his revolution on Chinese nationalism that would not only overthrow the Manchus but also be independent of foreign powers. He favored a republican constitution without a monarch, and he began developing socialist ideas based on the single land tax of Henry George. Sun wanted to equalize land ownership, and he proposed having landlords assess the value of their property for the tax. If the assessment was low the government could buy it for that price. His “three people’s principles” had been summed up by Abraham Lincoln as “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Sun studied at the British Museum, and he met Felix Volkovsky, editor of the  monthly Free Russia. They published Kidnapped in London in a Russian translation in 1897.

Sun Yat-sen returned to Japan in 1897. Prime Minister Okuma Shigenabu formulated his doctrine that Japan should show its gratitude by helping a Chinese hero save his country. Sun met Miyazaki Torazo at the home of Chen Shaobai. Miyazaki was won over and introduced him to the liberal journalist Inukai Ki, who was Okuma’s minister of Education. They became friends, and Sun adopted the Japanese name Nakayama. Sun urged the Japanese to support the Filipino revolutionary Aguinaldo in the spring of 1898.

In November 1898 the famous Kang Youwei arrived and was received by Okuma, Prince Konoe Atsumaro, and Inukai. The Japanese funded both Kang and Sun and tried to bring them together, but Kang considered Sun an “uneducated bandit” and would not meet with him. Kang went to Canada and in July 1899 founded the Society to Protect the Emperor (Baohuanghui). His followers organized the Independence Army at Hankou, but the two insurrections they planned against Cixi in 1900 failed. The Qing court had offered a reward of 140,000 taels for Kang, and he was afraid that Sun Yat-sen had hired assassins to kill him. Kang later organized the Society for Constitutional Government. He was able to raise money that he spent lavishly traveling around the world and for an island off the coast of Sweden; other investments were lost in the Mexican Revolution.

In 1899 Sun sent Chen Shaobo to Hong Kong to found the China Daily (Zhongguo ribao). Zheng Shiliang opened a center in Hong Kong, and others met with secret societies in the Yangzi Valley, especially the powerful Society of Elder Brothers; but in the spring of 1900 the Elder Brothers changed their loyalty to Kang’s Society to Protect the Emperor.

During the Boxer uprising Zheng Shiliang organized a rebellion in his ancestral Huizhou, north of Hong Kong. The leaders of the secret societies were not Boxers but wanted to oust the Manchus. These Triads were 70% of the subversives, but most of the rest were Christians. The revolt began spontaneously in Huizhou on October 6, 1900. Zheng led several hundred men from the south; as they routed imperial troops, their numbers increased to ten thousand in ten days. On October 17 Sun directed them to make a long march toward Amoy, where he hoped for aid from the Japanese. They were harassed by imperial troops, and on October 23 they learned that Japan, fearing the Russian reaction, had backed out. Zheng and the Triad leaders fled to Hong Kong. There secret agents killed Yang Quyun in his classroom, and Zheng died of food poisoning. Shi Jianru tried to kill the governor of Guangdong with a bomb on October 28, but he was caught and beheaded. Sun was not allowed in Hong Kong and went to Formosa. The Japanese governor Kodama helped Sun until the new Japanese premier, Prince Ito, ordered him to stop that. Another rebellion in Wuhan failed because the funds and reinforcements promised by Kang did not arrive.

Kang Youwei’s leading disciple Liang Qichao settled in Japan and spread his ideas for a constitutional monarchy by publishing Public Opinion (Qingyibao) 1898-1902 and The New People’s Miscellany 1902-07. He believed in social Darwinism but called for public morality, lamenting, “Among our people there is not one who looks on national affairs as if they were his own affairs.”3 He urged people to observe the trends in the world, study what will benefit China, and create a new morality to solidify, benefit, and develop the people. Liang suggested improving foreign trade by protecting the rights of domestic trade and industry with commercial laws. Corrupt government and sycophantic learning must be replaced by a responsible government with a constitution and a parliament. Liang got along with Sun Yat-sen better than Kang did; but he suggested that if Cixi were eliminated, Emperor Guangxu could be president of the new republic. Liang went to Hawaii in 1899 and won over Sun’s brother Mei to the Society to Protect the Emperor. Liang later founded the Political Information Institute (Zhengwenshe), but the Qing court closed it in 1908. Liang also wrote novels and plays.

After the Boxer disaster, Sun Yat-sen’s ideas for revolution gained more support. Students in Japan published the Citizen’s Tribune and Twentieth-Century China to promote revolution. In 1902 Cai Yuanpei and Zhang Binglin organized the Chinese Educational Association (Zhongguo jiaoyuhui), and that year Zhang published his revised essays as Urgent Advice. His ideas on national revolution were based on the philosophy of the historian Wang Fuzhi (1619-92). Zhang argued that the Manchus had falsified the past and deprived the Chinese of their national consciousness, and so they must restore their culture and eject the Manchus. When Russia refused to evacuate southern Manchuria in 1903, Huang Xing and some Chinese students in Tokyo organized a Resist Russia Corps. When the Japanese government dissolved it, they formed the Association for Military Education.

Sun Yat-sen had asked the French ambassador Jules Harmond in Tokyo for arms in June 1900. In December 1902 Sun went to Hanoi, but in the next six months his efforts for a federal republic in southern China were thwarted. When he returned to Yokohama in June, Sun found so little support that in September he embarked for Hawaii. There he began giving speeches, and he wrote his “Refutation of the Newspapers of the Society to Protect the Emperor,” arguing for revolution. He began selling “patriotic bonds” for $10, promising they would be redeemed for $100 after the revolution. Sun joined a Hawaiian branch of the Triad society in 1904, and he was elected a general in the Hong League. This title helped him win over some Chinese communities in the United States from Kang’s Emperor Protection Society. Sun disagreed with Liang because he believed that the Manchu regime must be overthrown by revolution.

In 1903 young Zou Rong wrote The Revolutionary Army, a diatribe against the Manchus that also expressed admiration for the American and French revolutions and German and Italian unification. Zou wrote,

Revolution is a universal rule of evolution.
Revolution is a universal principle of the world.
Revolution is the essence of the struggle for survival
or destruction in a time of transition.
Revolution submits to heaven and responds to men’s needs.
Revolution rejects what is corrupt and keeps the good.
Revolution is the advance from barbarism to civilization.
Revolution turns slaves into masters.4
Zou concluded by calling for the overthrow of the Manchus, execution of the Emperor, an elected general assembly, military service for all men, equal rights for men and women, freedom of speech and the press, the right to reject an oppressive government, and a constitution and local self-government based on the American system. More than a million copies of his pamphlet were circulated.

In June the Jiangsu Gazette (Subao) published favorable reviews with editor Zhang Binglin’s forward and “Open Letter in Refutation of Kang Youwei’s Views on Revolution.” The Qing court demanded the Europeans extradite them; but the Shanghai Mixed Court only sentenced Zou to two years for distributing inflammatory writing while giving Zhang three years. However, Zou became ill in prison and died in early 1905 at the age of 19.

Huang Xing formed a China Revival Society (Huaxinghui) at Changsha in December 1903 with 500 members. They planned to take over Changsha on the Dowager’s birthday on November 16, 1904; but the plot was discovered in October,  and Huang escaped to Japan. In Shanghai revolutionaries formed a Society for the Education of a Militant Citizenry, and they secretly planned assassinations. The scholar Cai Yuanpei with students and intellectual anarchists from Zhejiang started the Restoration Society (Guangfuhui) in Shanghai; but they lacked effective leadership, and their uprisings were aborted.

Sun Yat-sen had thousands of copies of The Revolutionary Army distributed in Singapore under the title, The Fight for Survival, and he had 11,000 copies printed in San Francisco in 1904. There he had one of his disciples take over a Triad newspaper to publish the Great Harmony Daily. After visiting major cities Sun reached New York in September and published The True Solution to the Chinese Question in English, asking for support for an American-style revolution. In the spring of 1905 he visited the Brussels secretariat and affiliated his organization as a socialist party in the Second International.

Nine days after Sun returned to Japan, he spoke in the offices of the China Daily on July 28 on the need for unity and intellectuals in the revolution. Two days later seventy people (mostly students) met and decided to form the Revolutionary Alliance (Tongmenghui). On August 13 more than seven hundred students crowded into and around the Fuji Restaurant to hear Sun speak, and one week later the Revolutionary Alliance was officially founded as Sun read the charter to three hundred people in the home of a Japanese member of parliament. In 1906 they enrolled 963 members; all but one hundred of them were students in Tokyo, but they were from every province in China but one. Sun’s “Manifesto of the Military Government” explained his plan to have military rule for three years after the revolution while slavery, foot-binding, opium use, and political corruption were removed. Then in the next six years local self-government would be developed before the military government was dissolved and replaced by a constitution.

Sun met with Huang Xing and Song Jiaoren, and in August they formed the United China League with Sun as chairman and Huang as his substitute. After Huang’s Twentieth-Century China was banned, The People’s Report (Minbao) began publishing on November 26, 1905 and put out 24 issues before it was suppressed in 1908. In their first issue they described their six goals as overthrowing the autocratic Qing regime, establishing a republican government, making China strong and united to preserve world peace, nationalizing the land, promoting friendship between the Japanese and Chinese people, and seeking international support to reconstruct China. In the second issue they published introductions to Marx and Engels with selections from the Communist Manifesto. In 1906 the Alliance explained its equalization of landownership policy as follows:

The social and economic structure of China
must be so reconstructed that the fruits of labor
will be shared by all Chinese on an equal basis.
Every tract of land in China must be assessed
to determine its fair value in monetary terms,
and this value belongs, of course, to the landowner.
Any added value,
which results from social progress after the revolution,
will, however, belong to the nation as a whole
and must be shared by all Chinese.
The ultimate goal of a responsible society is the guarantee
of a satisfactory livelihood for all of its members
and everyone, whomever he happens to be,
shall have his own means of support,
via gainful employment or some other source.
Anyone who attempts to monopolize
the livelihood of others will be ostracized.5
The People’s Report also explained the differences between the revolutionaries and the reformers. The Revolutionary Alliance stated that they believe in republicanism, constitutional democracy, the Han Chinese revolution as well as political revolution, the use of force in the revolution, and socialism. They criticized the reformers believing in monarchy and only in political revolution. Sun’s republicanism included three branches of the executive, legislative, and judicial from Montesquieu, but he added two Chinese traditions—an auditing function (censor) and an examination system for selecting officials without clientism.

A few Chinese were studying the Japanese book, Modern Socialism. Some Chinese anarchists in Paris were influenced by Bakunin and Kropotkin, and they founded the New World Society in 1906 and the journal New Era. Most of them were connected to Sun’s Revolutionary Alliance.

In 1905 Sun Yat-sen had negotiated with the French in Paris. Captain Boucabeille headed a French Intelligence Service in southern China that began in May 1905. In April 1906 Sun founded the Alliance’s Southeast Asia Bureau in Singapore, and that summer sections formed on the Malay peninsula. Sun met with Boucabeille in Shanghai on October 11; but five days later Boucabeille was recalled, and the Intelligence Service was ended. In the next two years the Revolutionary Alliance instigated at least seven revolts against the Qing regime—three in Guangdong and others in Hunan, Yunnan, Anhui, and Guangxi.

In the fall of 1904 Qiu Jin wrote an essay on behalf of the unfairly treated two hundred million women in China. She had left China for Japan after an unhappy arranged marriage. She joined the Triad secret society in Yokohama, and in the summer of 1905 became a member of the Revolutionary Alliance. She wrote to her friend Wu Zhiyang, the famous calligrapher,

Women must get educated
and strive for their own independence;
they can’t just go on asking the men for everything.
The young intellectuals are all chanting,
“Revolution, Revolution,”
but I say the revolution will have to start in our homes,
by achieving equal rights for women.6
In 1906 Qiu founded The Chinese Women’s Journal in Shanghai, taught at a girls school, and translated Japanese books on health and nursing. Her cousin Xu Xilin had joined the anarchist Restoration Society, and in 1905 he started the Datong School that hid guns and ammunition in a warehouse. In 1907 he was the head of a police academy and was given a list of names to arrest. Seeing his own code name on the list, Xu assassinated the Manchu Governor Enming of Anhui on July 6. About thirty men fought with him for about four hours before they were arrested, interrogated, and executed. One week later Qiu and some of her students tried to fight off troops in Datong, but she was arrested, tortured, and beheaded on July 15.

Zhang Binglin was released from prison in June 1906 and was welcomed as a hero. In November he began editing the People’s Report and debated Liang’s New People’s Miscellany. In the winter of 1907 Zhang sent Tao Chengzhang to Singapore to ask Sun Yat-sen for $3,000 for the People’s Report, but Sun would not give him anything and forbade Tao to raise money overseas. In 1907 the Qing court persuaded the Japanese government to expel Sun Yat-sen, but while doing so they gave him a large amount of money. He left 2,000 yen with Zhang Binglin for publishing the People’s Report in Tokyo, but Sun took even more money with him for his own operations. This caused a scandal, and Song Jiaoren criticized Sun for being “dictatorial and intransigent.” Although Sun used the money for his expenses, he did not acquire any excess wealth while working for the revolution. During the summer of 1907 the Alliance of the Oppressed Nations of East Asia, which excluded Japan as imperialistic, elected Zhang Binglin president. Zhang criticized Sun’s sponsoring insurrections for giving the revolution a terrorist image while having little chance for success.

Sun Yat-sen went with Huang Xing to Hanoi in March 1907. From there in the next year they supervised six uprisings in Guangdong, Guangxi, and Yunnan until the French also expelled the revolutionaries. In September an insurrection broke out in Guangdong’s border region with Guangxi and Tonkin. Led by Wang Heshun from a secret society, they seized Fangcheng and killed the magistrate; but reinforcements did not arrive, and they dispersed. Sun Yat-sen personally went with Huang Xing and a French army captain in December, and they captured the Zhennanguan fort for a few days. In March 1908 the Qing court persuaded the French to expel Sun from Hanoi, and in the next two months Huang Xing directed two more insurrections. For the next two years Sun operated from Singapore. There the revolutionary Renaissance Daily competed with the reformist Union Times.

Also in 1907 Sun Wu founded the Progressive Association (Gongjin Hui) in Tokyo to unite the secret societies in the Yangzi Valley, and they changed one of Sun Yat-sen’s goals from equalizing land rights to equalizing human rights. Sun Wu soon turned his efforts from secret societies to the New Army. When the Qing regime tried to stop even democratic groups from meeting openly in 1908, the Army Revolutionary Alliance became the Society for the Study of Popular Government. They published a revolutionary newspaper, and in September 1910 became the Institute for the Restoration of the Martial Spirit. In January 1911 they named their front organization the Literary Institute.

During the unrest following the death of Emperor Guangxu and Empress Cixi in November 1908, the Revolutionary Alliance tried to spread mutinies in Guangzhou, but the troops stayed loyal to the Manchus and suppressed them. Song Jiaoren began editing the influential People’s Stand in October 1910, arguing for a moderate constitutional republic.

In 1910 the Cantonese Revolutionary Alliance began a South China Bureau in Hong Kong directed by Hu Hanmin, Huang Xing, and Zhao Sheng. Sun Yat-sen sent them HK $8,000 from the United States, and Hong Kong merchants added HK $20,000 more. On June 15 Sun met Huang Xing in Yokohama and gave him a suitcase full of banknotes. In January 1911 Huang set up his headquarters in Hong Kong. Arms from Japan, Saigon, and Siam were delivered and smuggled into Guangzhou. Sun began having people swear allegiance to the Chinese Revolutionary Party while he was in California in early 1911. He sold bonds for less than half price in San Francisco, and he raised $35,000 from Canada. Between 1907 to 1911 Sun raised an estimated HK $600,000 for the revolution.

Chinese Revolution 1911-12
In late February 1911 hundreds of Chinese students in Tokyo called for armed self-defense in China because they believed the Manchu government could no longer protect China as a nation from Russia, Britain, and France. On March 3 the influential Shanghai newspaper Shaobao and the revolutionary newspaper Minlibao both reported that an international conference in Paris initiated by Japan had agreed to divide up China. This rumor spread around China in the next two months.

In 1910 in Shanghai 51 constitutionalists from sixteen provinces had formed the Federation of Provincial Assemblies. In March 1911 the leading petitioner Sun Hongyi invited the chairmen of the provincial assemblies to meet in Beijing, and that month Liang called for the overthrow of the bad government. Sun Yat-sen raised money in the United States, Canada, and Singapore and sold bonds, promising a large return on the investments after the revolution. He sent $70,000 to Hong Kong for an uprising in Guangzhou (Canton). Huang Xing took command in Guangzhou on April 23 and was wounded in the rebellion. On April 27 at Guangzhou 86 revolutionaries were executed, and they became famous as the “72 martyrs.”

On May 8, 1911 Prince Chun appointed a cabinet of thirteen ministers with five royal relatives and only four Han Chinese. The Federation of Provincial Assemblies met again and on June 4 organized a political party called the Friends of the Constitution (Xianyuhui) or the People’s Party. On July 13 the Revolutionary Alliance established a Central China Bureau in Shanghai with Song Jiaoren as leader. In Hubei the Common Advancement Society and the Military Study Society planned a united action and invited Song to lead the revolution because Sun Yat-sen was traveling in the United States. During the revolution the business community contributed more than seven million Chinese silver dollars to the United League.

Sheng Xuanhuai had taken over the China Merchants’ steamship line and Zhang Zhidong’s industries around Hankou by 1908. That year he combined the Hanyang arsenal with the Daye iron mines and the Pingxiang coal mines to form the Han-Ye-Ping Coal and Iron Company. He worked with Manchu officials to get foreign loans to build railways. Sheng proposed that Beijing nationalize all the provincial railways, and he signed a contract with the Four-Power Banking Consortium, which included England, the United States, Germany, and France. They had loaned the Qing government £10 million to develop Manchuria and reform the currency and in 1911 loaned another £6 million for a railway between Guangzhou and Wuhan and Chengdu. In May the Qing court ordered the railway lines nationalized, and the gentry in four provinces protested during the summer, especially in Sichuan where a smaller indemnity was granted because of an embezzlement conviction. The chairman of the Sichuan Assembly organized a Railway Protection League, and more than two thousand people attended a meeting at Chengdu on June 17. Their goals were to have railways under commercial management and for all state affairs to be open to public discussion.

On August 24, 1911 more than 10,000 people rallied in Chengdu. Governor-General Zhao Erfeng ordered the leaders arrested, and in the conflict 32 people were killed. A week later railway investors decided to stop paying taxes. The Sichuan Assembly demanded the right to control local taxes and inspect schools, and they called for a National Assembly. Mass demonstrations on September 7 led to counties declaring independence, and within a week the Qing court capitulated by promising full compensation to railway investors. When demonstrations continued, imperial troops from Hubei were transferred to Sichuan. Armed bands of up to a hundred thousand peasants supported by provincial forces overcame the imperial troops, who tried to hold the capital and major cities.

By 1911 the Revolutionary Alliance had about 10,000 members, and they infiltrated the New Army. When the Government discovered them, they disbanded the group and went elsewhere. By the fall of 1911 they had won over about 5,000 troops in Hubei. They were making bombs in Hankou on October 9 when one exploded accidentally. Several revolutionaries were injured and taken to a hospital. Police investigated, arrested 32 people, found membership registers of soldiers, and executed three. The revolutionaries decided they had to revolt to save lives.

The first mutiny on October 10 was in the Wuchang battalion. The engineers seized an ammunition depot, and four thousand men under a company commander with the artillery attacked the office of the Governor-General, who fled. The next day the revolutionaries rose up in the nearby city of Hanyang, where they seized the arsenal and ironworks. Hankou soldiers mutinied on October 12. They formed a military government in Hubei with a new calendar using the year 4609 from the founding of their civilization by the legendary Yellow Emperor (Huangdi). They acted in the name of the popular brigade commander Li Yuanhong, and after two days he agreed to become military governor rather than be executed. The former Hubei Assembly chairman, Tang Hualong, sent out telegrams to other provinces urging them to declare independence from the Qing regime. They resolved to honor all treaties made by the Qing regime up to October 13. The foreign consuls remained neutral, but in the next four months Japanese, American, British, French, German, and Italian troops occupied the railroad between Beijing and Mukden.

The desperate Qing court summoned Yuan Shikai from retirement. On October 22 the mutiny spread to Shaanxi and Hunan, and many Manchus were killed in the capitals of Xian and Changsha. By the end of the month the revolt erupted in the provinces of Shanxi, Jiangxi, and Yunnan. The Qing commander Yinchang sent troops from Beijing on the railway to Wuhan, but rebels from Shanxi left Taiyuan and destroyed the railway, cutting off their supply lines. Huang Xing took command of the  revolutionary forces in Hankou on October 28. While negotiating his demands, Yuan Shikai was put in charge of the army and navy on October 27. He sent Feng Guozhang, and his forces recaptured Hankou on November 2; but in the next week Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong went over to the revolution. Hubei called for a meeting of revolutionary governments in Wuhan, but those in Zhejiang and Jiangsu planned a national conference in Shanghai.

Two senior northern generals refused to mobilize their troops and sent a circular telegram with twelve demands that included a parliament, a constitution, an elected premier, no summary executions, and amnesty for political prisoners. The Qing court capitulated as the Regent (Prince Chun) and the Premier (Prince Qing) resigned. Yuan Shikai also demanded a national assembly within a year, his own cabinet, amnesty for revolutionaries, and control over the army and navy with adequate funds. The revolutionary commanders in the north opposed Yuan and tried to prevent him from reaching Beijing, but Yuan had one of them assassinated on November 7. The next day the Beijing provisional national assembly elected Yuan premier, and on November 11 the Qing court appointed him to the same office. He sent an army that recovered Hanyang on November 27, and the British minister, John Jordan, mediated a truce on December 1. The revolutionaries took over Shanghai, and after heavy fighting Nanjing fell to them on December 4. That day the former regent Prince Chun was retired on an annual pension of 50,000 taels. Longyu, the mother of the child Emperor Puyi, had negotiated this and accepted Yuan as premier. On December 14 in Nanjing 44 delegates from seventeen provinces formed a provisional government.

Sun Yat-sen had learned of the revolution from a Denver newspaper while on a train to Kansas City. He went to London and spent three weeks there persuading the British government not to advance any more loans to the Qing regime. After obtaining a similar assurance from Premier Clemenceau in Paris, Sun arrived by ship at Hong Kong on December 21 and discussed revolutionary strategy. He went to Shanghai on Christmas Day and argued for a stronger presidential system rather than a parliamentary government. On December 29 he was elected provisional president of the Chinese republic.

Sun Yat-sen was inaugurated on January 1, 1912 as the republic adopted the Western calendar and its seven-day week in place of the Chinese ten-day week and lunar calendar. Sun sent a telegram to Yuan Shikai that he was waiting for him to take over the presidency, but Yuan felt betrayed by these moves and broke off peace negotiations. He got 80,000 ounces of gold from the Dowager and ordered forty generals to oppose the republic. Assassination attempts against Yuan and several Manchu princes and generals failed except that one deputy chief of staff was killed by a bomb. Sun appointed a military governor of Manchuria and sent a force that included four ships. He wanted to avoid a civil war and was willing to let Yuan be president of the republic if he agreed to notify foreign ministers of the Qing abdication, publicly declared his support for the republic, and pledged to honor the constitution prepared by the parliament. Yuan persuaded his generals to support the republic, and at the end of January a telegram from 44 senior commanders of the Beiyang army urged the Beijing cabinet to form a republic.

Sun Yat-sen offered $300,000 in military bonds that would be repayable in three months, but the provincial delegates censured him. Sun also wanted to let the Japanese take over joint management of the Han-Ye-Ping Company for 12 million yen with an immediate line of credit of 3 million for the Nanjing government. The Nanjing parliament was upset they were not consulted, and Industry minister Zhang Jian resigned in protest. The deal was not carried out because of Sun’s resignation.

Yuan Shikai and the provisional government in Nanjing agreed to let Emperor Puyi reside in the Forbidden City of Beijing and own the imperial treasures with a stipend of $4 million a year; the Manchu ancestral temples were to be protected. In exchange Puyi abdicated on February 12, giving full powers to Yuan, who pledged to support the republic. The next day Sun Yat-sen resigned as provisional president and recommended Yuan as his successor if Nanjing remained the capital and if he came there and observed the provisional constitution drafted by the provisional parliament. On February 14 the provisional parliament elected Yuan provisional president and Li Yuanhong provisional vice-president. The Nanjing parliament voted against transferring the capital from Beijing; but when Huang Xing threatened to send in troops, they changed their minds. Yuan did not want to leave Beijing. When a southern delegation led by Song Jiaoren, Wang Jingwei, and Cai Yuanpei visited him in the northern capital, Yuan quelled a mutiny in the garrison to persuade them he needed to stay there.

On March 6 the Nanjing parliament voted to let Yuan become president in Beijing. He was inaugurated on March 10, and the next day he promulgated the Provisional Constitution that the Nanjing parliament had designed to give more power to the parliament and a prime minister who had to countersign documents signed by the president. In March the United League recognized the more conservative Song Jiaoren as their leader. Sun Yat-sen’s power declined, and his responsibilities ended on April 1. The Parliament voted to make Beijing the national capital on April 5. After more than four thousand years China’s tradition of dynastic monarchies had fallen.

Republican China in Turmoil 1912-1926
Notes

1. On the Study of Humanity by Tan Sitong in Sources of Chinese Tradition ed. Wm Theodore de Bary, p. 750.

2. Ibid., p. 752.

3. A People Made New 12:47 by Liang Ch’i-Ch’ao in Sources of Chinese Tradition ed. Wm Theodore de Bary, p. 757.

4. Gemingjun by Zou Rong, p. 1-2 quoted in The Gate of Heavenly Peace by Jonathan D. Spence, p. 48.

5. Modern China from Mandarin to Commissar tr. Dun J. Li, p. 138-139.

6. Collected Works of Qiu Jin, p. 185-186 quoted in The Gate of Heavenly Peace by Jonathan D. Spence, p. 57.

Copyright © 2007 by Sanderson Beck
This chapter has been published in the book EAST ASIA 1800-1949.
For ordering information, please click here.

Qing Decline 1799-1875
Qing Dynasty Fall 1875-1912
Republican China in Turmoil 1912-1926
Nationalist-Communist Civil War 1927-1937
China at War 1937-1949
Korea 1800-1949
Japan's Modernization 1800-1894
Imperial Japan 1894-1937
Japan's War and Defeat 1937-1949
Philippines to 1949
Pacific Islands to 1949
Summary and Evaluation
Bibliography
ETHICS OF CIVILIZATION Index
BECK index

BECK index
                               Republican China in Turmoil 1912-1926
by Sanderson Beck
Yuan Shikai's Presidency 1912-16
China under Warlords 1916-19
May Fourth Movement of 1919
China's Struggle for Power 1920-24
Sun Yat-sen and Guomindang 1920-24
May 30th Movement of 1925-26
Lu Xun's Stories
This chapter has been published in the book EAST ASIA 1800-1949.
For ordering information, please click here.

Yuan Shikai's Presidency 1912-16
Qing Dynasty Fall 1875-1912
Yuan Shikai was born into a family of officials in 1859, and he purchased an official title in 1880. He rose in the army and had more than a dozen wives and many children. After the 1895 defeat by Japan he trained officers in Korea, where he became resident. In 1898 Yuan made the critical decision to stay loyal to Empress Cixi, dooming the reforms of Kang and Emperor Guangxu. As governor of Shandong he disobeyed imperial orders by punishing criminal Boxers, but he refused to march on Beijing in early summer of 1900. He was governor-general of the capital province of Zhili 1901-07, and he had started schools for self-government by 1906; but his power was weakened when he was transferred to Beijing the next year. After Cixi died in November 1908, Yuan was quickly pushed into retirement. During the 1911 revolution he was summoned by the Qing regime and cleverly negotiated more power for himself with them and with the revolutionaries. He insisted on keeping the capital at Beijing and gained more power by getting the court to recognize him as the successor of the abdicating Emperor Puyi. Sun Yat-sen offered to let Yuan replace himself as president of the new republic as long as he accepted the republican constitution and parliament. Yuan Shikai was inaugurated as provisional president on March 10, 1912 and the Nanjing government was dissolved on April 1.

Yuan Shikai refused to pay Huang Xing’s 50,000 troops, and so they had to disband. After Yuan dismissed the governor-general of Zhili in June without his countersignature, Premier Tang Shaoyi resigned along with four Revolutionary Alliance cabinet ministers. The next premier, the diplomat Lu Zhengxiang, was so ineffective that he was impeached by the Parliament. Internal Affairs minister Zhao Bingjun became premier and made the cabinet compliant. Yuan claimed he had 800,000 men under arms in order to negotiate loans for demobilization. Yuan invited Sun Yat-sen to Beijing, and after many hours of meetings he appointed him director of railways on September 9; Huang Xing was put in charge of the Guangzhou-Hankou and Sichuan railways. Sun appointed his old friend Charlie Soong (Song Jiashu) treasurer and hired his oldest daughter Ailing as his English secretary. Hu Hanmin would not cooperate with Yuan, and with the activists Zhu Zhixin, Liao Zhongkai, and Chen Jionming he formed a revolutionary government in Guangdong. They applied Henry George’s theories to sell land, and many merchants and gentry fled to Hong Kong or Macao.

The Chinese Socialist Party had been founded by Jiang Kanghu with a small study group in Shanghai in November 1911, but after the revolution it grew rapidly to 400,000 members. At their second annual congress in October 1912 Sun Yat-sen spoke for twelve hours over three days. Anarchists interested in vegetarianism, chastity, and self-sacrifice opposed his efforts to politicize the party, and the split caused a rapid decline. Yuan Shikai banned the Socialist party in the summer of 1913.

The election laws had been promulgated in August. The new Chinese constitution called for a Senate and a House of Representatives, and elections were scheduled for December 1912. The Revolutionary Alliance led by Sun Yat-sen and Huang Xing absorbed four small parties and founded the National People’s Party (Guomindang). Song Jiaoren had drafted the new constitution, and he became the leader of the party and appealed to the gentry and merchants by moderating policies and deleting socialism and equality of the sexes. Liang Qichao became chairman of the small Democratic Party (Minzhudang), and after the election they merged with the Unification Party and the Republican Party to form the Progressive Party. About forty million men over 21 years of age with property worth $500 or who paid at least $2 in taxes with an elementary school certificate were eligible to vote. Suffragist Tang Junying led a demonstration at the National Council in Nanjing to demand equal rights for women and the vote, but they were evicted. The Guomindang was the most organized party, and they won 269 of the 596 seats in the House and 123 of the 274 Senate seats. While the Parliament was adjourned in January 1913, Yuan promulgated rules for provincial government that aroused protests. Guomindang leader Song Jiaoren began criticizing President Yuan Shikai publicly, demanding a party cabinet.

On March 20, 1913 Song Jiaoren was shot twice while boarding a train and died two days later. The evidence led to Premier Zhao and the cabinet. The assassin died mysteriously in prison, and Zhao refused to answer a subpoena, claiming illness. He was made governor-general of Zhili, but he died of poisoning on February 17, 1914. Others involved in the case were also killed, and no one was convicted. Vice President Li Yuanhong refused to join an anti-Yuan conspiracy. Before the Parliament convened in April, Yuan asked Americans to pray in their churches for China. The next month the United States became the first nation to grant Yuan’s government full diplomatic recognition. Yuan arranged a loan of £25 million from the Five-Power Banking Consortium on April 26 despite massive opposition by the Parliament. Sun Yat-sen and Huang Xing urged them to reject the loan, but acting Premier Duan Qirui surrounded the Parliament building with troops. This money helped Yuan defeat the impending revolution.

The Nationalist (Guomindang) party impeached the government in May. Sun Yat-sen decided that Yuan had to be replaced and tried to negotiate an alliance with Japan to support a second revolution. Yuan dismissed the governors of Jiangxi, Anhui, and Guangdong, and in early July they declared independence, followed by four more provinces within a month. Yuan sent 10,000 troops from Beijing to Hubei. Fighting began in Jiangxi on July 12, but the revolutionary commander Huang Xing abandoned Nanjing on July 29. Sun Yat-sen went to Japan on August 8, soon followed by Huang and other leaders. The Chinese navy in Shanghai with fresh funds sided with Beijing, and Yuan’s forces defeated the revolution by September. General Zhang Xun’s forces, who still had Manchu queues, took Nanjing on September 1 and spent two weeks pillaging, raping, and burning. The damage was estimated at about $20 million. British minister John Jordan supplied Yuan with loans and munitions, and he banned Sun and Huang Xing from Hong Kong. Yuan’s generals in the Yangzi Valley became warlords, and his imperial troops occupied provinces that had not even revolted. Tens of thousands of people who had participated in the uprising were punished, and thousands were executed for sedition. In Hunan under Tang Xiangming about 5,000 people were executed in 1914.

Customs dues were being collected by foreigners who were keeping them to pay the interest on China’s foreign debts, and so the Yuan government was running a deficit of 13 million yuan per month in 1913. Yuan spent money building and improving prisons and to make elementary education free and compulsory for boys. He objected to reducing the Confucian education and insisted that the entire book of Mencius be taught in elementary school. In 1912, the first year of the republic, the number of schools in China increased to 87,272 with 2,933,387 students including 141,430 girls. Yuan tried to suppress the opium trade and smoking, but opium dealers were protected in foreign areas.

The British backed Tibet, and on October 7, 1913 Yuan Shikai acknowledged Tibet’s autonomy. That day England recognized the Chinese republic. Japan and Russia also gained concessions before they extended diplomatic recognition. On October 6 Yuan’s soldiers and police compelled the new Parliament to vote three times until they had elected him president for a five-year term. He was inaugurated four days later. On October 31 the Parliament promulgated a constitution with a cabinet system to check the president’s powers, but four days later Yuan denounced the Guomindang as seditious, dissolved the party, and evicted their members from Parliament. After their affiliates were searched, 438 Guomindang party members were banned from Parliament. Sun Yat-sen fled once again to Japan in November. Yuan in December ordered that magistrates had to pass a qualifying examination on Chinese laws, treaties, customs, literature, and local administration.

Parliament did not have a quorum and was dissolved on January 4, 1914 as Yuan annulled the 1912 constitution. The next month he also ordered the provincial assemblies and local governments dissolved. About forty specialists on finance met and recommended a silver currency and minting a national dollar to replace foreign coins and the provincial “dragon dollars.” All of China was ordered to worship formally Heaven and Confucius. Yuan also called a national conference attended by 66 delegates, and on May 1 they replaced the provisional constitution with the Constitutional Compact that gave President Yuan extraordinary powers with ten-year terms that allowed re-election. The two years of press freedom that had allowed nearly five hundred newspapers to reach a circulation of 42 million ended when censorship was imposed with severe penalties. In the spring of 1914 Yuan promulgated regulations to give civil governors more authority in the provinces so that the military would be less likely to revolt. Yuan liked bureaucracy and instituted examinations that emphasized bureaucratic skills. He ordered prosecution of official corruption, revived the Censorate, and instituted a special court for judging official crimes.

On July 8, 1914 Sun Yat-sen formed the secret Revolutionary Party (Gemingdang). Those who joined before and during the revolution were to have more political privileges, and everyone had to sign and attach their fingerprints to an oath of loyalty to Sun. Only a few hundred activists in Japan joined the party. Chen Qimei emerged as a leader, and he was friends with the Shanghai businessman Li Houyi and the millionaire Zhang Jingjiang, who was connected to Du Yuesheng, leader of the Green Gang. Chen also brought the young Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek), who was wanted for armed robbery and had assassinated Chen’s rival Tao Chengzhang in his hospital bed on February 15, 1912. Sun supported the bandit White Wolf (Bai Lang), who led rebel troops in southern Henan and Anhui before gaining a base in Shanxi; but White Wolf died in August, and hundreds of thousands of imperial troops were used to defeat them by late 1914.

Great Britain had large investments in China and increased them to $607 million by 1914. By then Germany, Russia, Japan, France, the United States, and others had a total of one billion dollars invested in China. They wanted to protect their assets and guarded the passage between Beijing and the sea. When the European war began in August 1914, loans became difficult; but Japan increased theirs. On August 15 Japan gave Germany one month to transfer the territory of Jiaozhou that it had leased from China in 1898. Japan sent troops to China on September 2, and they occupied Qingdao in Shandong on November 7.

In January 1915 Japan presented China with its Twenty-one Demands that included control of Shandong, Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, the southeast coast, and the Yangzi Valley. They also wanted joint administration of the Han-Ye-Ping Coal and Iron Company, nonalienation of Chinese ports and islands to other powers, Japanese police and economic advisors in the north, and more commercial rights in Fujian province. Newspapers opposed the demands, and the public was aroused. Nineteen governors urged Yuan Shikai to refuse. Tens of thousands met in the International Settlement in Shanghai on March 18 and resolved to begin a boycott of Japan. One week later Yuan Shikai ordered the boycott abandoned, but the boycott spread. On May 7 Japan gave China an ultimatum to accept the territorial concessions but not the other demands. Yuan agreed two days later and signed the treaty on May 25 without consent of the Parliament, which had been dissolved. Many Chinese students left Japan, and merchants organized a boycott of Japanese products. Yuan ordered all the provincial governments to prohibit the boycott, and so the campaign changed to encouraging the use of native goods.

Sun Yat-sen became unpopular during this time because he was still trying to negotiate with Japan in order to overthrow Yuan. Sun fell in love with his secretary Song Ailing; but her Christian father, Charlie Soong, would not approve the marriage because Sun was already married. Her younger sister Song Qingling became Sun’s secretary, and they fell in love and eloped on October 25, 1915, causing a scandal among Christians because of bigamy and among Confucians for not having her father’s permission. Their marriage was happy, and Qingling became a respected figure, eventually being honored as the vice president of the People’s Republic of China until her death in 1980.

Yuan made Confucianism China’s state religion and gradually tried to give himself imperial authority. On August 21, 1915 Yang Du and the Peace-Planning Society began a campaign to make Yuan emperor, and the famous translator Yan Fu was listed as one of the six directors without his permission. Liang Qichao published an article opposing a return to the monarchy, arguing against changing the basic form of the state and explaining that the republican revolution had destroyed respect for the monarchy. As the revolt against it developed, he also argued that Yuan was unsuitable. In November the National People’s Representative Assembly of 1,993 people voted unanimously to approve Yuan being emperor. In Shanghai on November 10 his commander was assassinated, and a warship was seized on December 5. Cai E escaped from detention on November 11 and organized the National Protection Army in Yunnan to defend the republic. Yuan accepted the petition to be emperor on December 12 and began planning for his inauguration on January 1, 1916 by ordering a 40,000-piece porcelain dinner set, a large jade seal, and two costly imperial robes.

Protests spread throughout China, and on December 23 the Yunnan military leader Cai E gave Yuan two days to cancel his monarchist plan. Two days later Yunnan declared independence, and 10,000 soldiers began marching. Guizhou declared independence on December 27, and Yuan postponed his enthronement. Cai E invaded Sichuan in January, and two leading generals declined to go after his National Protection Army. On March 7, 1916 Japan declared that Yuan should be removed. Guangxi declared independence that month, and another anti-monarchist army formed in Shandong. Sun Yat-sen raised more than 1,400,000 yen, and Cen Chunxuan collected another million. On March 20 Feng Guozhang and others demanded that Yuan cancel the monarchy, and he did so two days later. Nonetheless Guangdong and Zhejiang declared independence in April. Kang Youwei advised Yuan to resign and leave the country. Shaanxi, Sichuan, and Hunan announced their independence in May.  Yuan’s assassins killed Chen Qimei on May 18 while he was trying to organize an insurrection in Shanghai. Yuan Shikai became ill and died of uremia on June 6, 1916.

China under Warlords 1916-19
Vice President Li Yuanhong became president on June 7 and recalled the old Parliament of 1913, but some argued that the terms of these members had expired and debated which constitution should be effective. Li appointed Duan Qirui premier and Feng Guozhang vice president. Duan had opposed Yuan’s attempt to become emperor but backed the 1914 constitution and the senior commanders from the Beiyang army. In October 1916 the French annexed the Chinese quarter of Laoxikai in Tianjin; when this provoked mass meetings, a boycott, and a strike, the French withdrew.

In 1916 Chinese laborers were recruited in Shandong to help the war effort in Europe. Volunteers were given twenty Chinese dollars when they embarked, and their families in China were to receive ten dollars a month. After passing severe medical exams and being disinfected, they had dog tags riveted to their wrists. About 200,000 Chinese worked for the Allies in France, Flanders, and elsewhere, and nearly 2,000 died overseas. After the Germans sank a boat in the Mediterranean, killing 543, Chinese recruits were shipped east, crossed Canada in a train, and were convoyed across the Atlantic. They worked ten hours every day except for Chinese holidays and were not in combat. The YMCA helped them, and they sent 50,000 letters home each month.

The military governors (dujun) were called warlords by the  Europeans, and they held meetings at Xuzhou. At their third meeting in January 1917 they recommended dissolving Parliament. They also wanted to restore Confucianism as the state religion. Japan loaned Duan five million yen in January, and in March the Parliament broke diplomatic relations with Germany; but President Li Yuanhong opposed declaring war. The movement for neutrality was supported by chambers of commerce and Sun Yat-sen, who wrote to Lloyd George that the Chinese were not concerned with European quarrels. Duan persuaded Parliament to break off diplomatic relations with Germany in March. He declared war himself on May 14 and surrounded the Parliament with partisans demanding a war declaration. Li dismissed Duan on May 23, but nine provinces supported Duan by declaring independence. Anhui’s military governor Zhang Xun brought 5,000 soldiers to Beijing on June 7 to mediate and demanded the Parliament be dissolved. One week later Li complied.

In Shanghai the naval commander sent the fleet to Guangzhou (Canton) and declared independence on June 25, 1917. Sun Yat-sen had organized a government in Guangzhou with 130 members from the Parliament, and he got two million Chinese dollars from Germany to buy the army and navy. Yet the Guangzhou government declared war against Germany on September 13. Feng Guozhang urged Beijing to restore the 1912 constitution. General Zhang Xun led his army from the Yangzi provinces to Beijing and restored the 11-year-old Emperor Puyi on July 1. The monarchist Kang Youwei was invited to the court and drafted numerous reforms but was not given much access. Zhang replaced Cao Kun as governor-general of Zhili. Duan and Cao gathered their Beiyang forces and drove Zhang’s army out of Beijing on July 12. Puyi was deposed again, and President Li Yuanhong ordered that he receive a modern education from Western tutors. Li resigned on July 14, and Duan resumed his position as prime minister.

Feng Guozhang became acting president on August 1, 1917. A re-elected Parliament convened on August 12 and declared war on Germany and on Austria-Hungary two days later. This enabled Duan to negotiate another 145 million yen in loans. He sent troops to fight the revolutionaries in the south; but President Feng wanted to avoid a civil war, and the military campaign was sabotaged. After declaring war, China seized German property and ships and took over their concessions in Qingdao, Tianjin, and Hankou. The Allies demanded that these should remain international concessions, and Duan’s regime agreed. Western investors controlled the customs, salt tax, and the post office, and the revenues were used to make China’s debt payments first. Usually none of what was left went to dissenting southern governments. China’s annual debt payments were estimated at £10,800,000. Japan extended eight more loans to China in 1917 and eleven in 1918 in return for the Bank of Korea, Bank of Taiwan, and the Industrial Bank of Japan getting contracts for mines, forests, and railways in northeast China, the telegraph, and revenues from the Grand Canal and the stamp duty. In the next year Japan lent Duan 140 million yen ($70 million).

Sun Yat-sen returned to Guangzhou in July 1917, and 250 of the old members of parliament elected him grand marshal. However, Europeans cut off funds for his supporters. The revolutionary Tang Jiyao had opposed the monarchical movement in 1915 in Yunnan, and he wanted to control Guizhou and Sichuan. In 1917 he invaded the latter as far as Chengdu. Lu Rongting led the Guangxi militarists who also controlled Guangdong. Lu declared Guangxi-Guangdong independent in order to lift the bans on taxing opium and gambling. An international agreement made in 1911 to make growing and trading opium illegal after the end of 1917 was ignored in China, and many warlords made the opium business a major source of revenue, especially in Guangdong, Fujian, Henan, Anhui, Guizhou, Shaanxi, and Sichuan. Customs seizures of foreign opium increased from 26,676 pounds in 1918 to 48,375 pounds in 1919 and 96,627 pounds in 1920.

In a treaty made on February 20, 1917 Russia recognized Japan’s 21 Demands, and Japan acknowledged Russia’s recent gains in Outer Mongolia. The next day Britain agreed to Japan’s claims in Shandong. Japan also made secret agreements with France and Italy that were not revealed until January 1919. On November 2, 1917 the United States signed the Lansing-Ishii Agreement recognizing Japan’s special position in China. When Duan called a new provisional parliament on November 10 instead of the old one, Sun Yat-sen organized a military government in Guangzhou and a Constitution Protection Movement. Feng Guozhang’s Zhili clique controlled northern and central China, and Duan resigned on November 22.

In February 1918 the general Feng Yuxiang sent a circular telegram from Henan with a peace proposal. Feng had become a Methodist in 1913, and his troops marched singing Christian hymns and patriotic songs. He believed in Confucian principles of moral politics and tried to rule his areas justly. About 1915 he wrote the short Book of the Spirit with admonitions and aphorisms on morality, patriotism, and military discipline, and in 1926 he added a chapter on revolution. Feng established a Military Training Corps at Changde in Hunan from 1915 to 1917, and he excelled in training troops. He described these years as his most enthusiastic Christian period. He encouraged his soldiers to pray and to attend Bible classes and religious services for which he employed Chinese preachers. He encouraged baptism, but it was not required and did not affect promotion. Feng did not allow his men to smoke opium or tobacco, drink alcohol, use obscene language, gamble, or visit brothels, which he closed. While governing Henan for half a year in 1922, Feng Yuxiang’s aims included aiding war victims, eliminating oppressive taxes, arresting corrupt officials, establishing factories to give work to the unemployed, repairing roads and irrigation, instituting free education, and prohibiting opium, gambling, prostitution, and foot-binding.

On March 7, 1918 Duan’s chief of staff, Xu Shuzheng, organized the powerful Anfu Club with support from Finance minister Cao Rulin, and they began bribing members of parliament. Duan gained control of the army and became premier again on March 23, forcing Feng Guozhang to retire. The new Soviet government revealed and renounced the secret agreements that Russia had made with Japan to take Manchuria and Mongolia from China. On March 25 Duan accepted the Sino-Japanese Military Mutual Assistance Conventions, which were kept secret until February 1919. On May 18, 1918 Eugene Chen published the editorial “Selling Out China” in the Beijing Gazette that exposed the negotiations and called Duan a traitor; Chen was imprisoned, and the newspaper was suppressed. At that time China had 330 newspapers.

On May 5, 1918 the three thousand Chinese students in Japan met and resolved to return to China. The next day Japanese police arrested 46 Chinese students. In Beijing more than two thousand college students protested the military conventions by going to the office of President Feng Guozhang on May 21. Student demonstrations also were organized in Tianjin, Shanghai, Fuzhou, and other cities. The Chinese government ordered the students to return to Japan, but many went to Shanghai where they founded the Save-the-Nation Daily. On June 30 they founded the Young China Association to rejuvenate the Chinese spirit, study “true theories,” expand education and commercial reforms, and overturn declining customs. When Premier Duan Qirui used all of the 120-million yen Nishihara loan for military and political expenses even though it was intended for industrial development, 2,000 students demonstrated outside the President’s residence.

Liang Qichao, who had been Yuan’s minister of Justice, became Finance minister in 1918, and his followers were called the Research clique. The Anfu clique was led by Duan and other Beiyang officers, and they conducted elections in two stages. After each provinces’ electors were chosen, they met in June and July to elect the Parliament. In the second stage especially the candidates bought the votes for the House for $150 to $500 and paid much more for the Senate. Out of 470 seats the Anfu Club controlled 342, the Communications clique between 50 and 80, and the Research clique about 20 seats. The Anfu caucus was run by those who organized it and controlled the money. Xu Shichang had been Yuan Shikai’s secretary, and he was a member of the Anfu clique. The dujun association recommended him, and the Parliament elected him president unanimously on September 4.

After 72,000 Japanese troops invaded Soviet Siberia in July, President Xu Shichang sent a Chinese army to help them. China’s warlord government accepted a 20-million-yen loan from Japan in September and granted them the right to build two railways in Shandong. Duan resigned on October 10, and Qian Nengxun was appointed acting premier. After the European war ended on November 11, the Chinese government proclaimed a three-day holiday; thousands paraded in Beijing. On November 16 a truce was ordered in the north-south civil war.

Lu Rongting and his Black Flags of Guangdong and Guangxi forced Sun Yat-sen to abandon his military government that month. Sun resigned and fled to Shanghai, where in August 1919 he founded the periodical Reconstruction (Jianshe) and renamed his party again the Chinese Nationalist Party in October. In 1919 a movement by the Cantonese elected Wu Tingfang governor, but the Guangxi clique cancelled the results. In Sichuan the Anfu leaders were overcome in 1918 by the warlord Xiong Kewu, who governed there for more than thirty years. Tan Yankai became governor of Hunan in 1911, and he fought the Anfu clique from 1916 to 1918; but in 1919 the Anfu warlord Zhang Jingyao regained Hunan.

Yuan Shikai had appointed Zhang Zuolin governor of Mukden. He managed to take over Heilongjiang in 1917 and Jilin in 1919, giving him control of three provinces in Manchuria. Zhang’s Fengtian clique supported the Anfu group and mortgaged the forests of Jilin for loans from Japan. The Anfu leaders Ni Sichong in Anhui and Wang Zhanyuan in Hubei were especially unpopular, and they were opposed by President Feng Guozhang’s Zhili clique that included generals Cao Kun and Wu Peifu in the Yangzi Valley.

The war years stimulated the Chinese to develop their own industries, and their exports increased greatly. By 1920 machines were producing more than three billion cigarettes that were marketed with modern advertising. The number of Chinese banks increased, though some warlords caused chaos by issuing so many paper notes. H. H. Kung (Kong Xiangxi) had married Charlie Soong’s daughter Song Ailing in 1914, and these two related families built up a financial empire. Money was appropriated for railways, but some of it was lost to corrupt warlords. Foreign investors still controlled 77% of the shipping, 45% of cotton spindles, and 78% of coal mining. Although China’s import surplus was low during the European war, it went from 16 million taels in 1919 to 220 million taels in 1920. More mills were added, and China’s flour exports were forty times higher in 1920 than they were in 1914. Peasant landowners were pushed off their lands, and rents rose. Warlords collected more taxes, and fewer landowners held more land.

May Fourth Movement of 1919
In 1912 the famous translator Yan Fu became the first chancellor of the modernized Beijing University, which was completely funded by the government. In December 1916 he was succeeded by the dean Cai Yuanpei, who had founded the Work and Study Movement in 1912. Sun Yat-sen had made Cai his minister of education in 1912, but he resigned after Yuan Shikai became president. By 1917 more than ten million Chinese had received modern educations. Cai emphasized research with scientific methods, a broader curriculum than was needed for government recruitment, and academic freedom. He co-founded the China Society for the Promotion of New Education in January 1919, and by then Beijing University had a faculty of 202 professors teaching 2,228 students.

Chen Duxiu left Japan in protest of the 21 Demands. In September 1915 he founded New Youth, and he became the dean of Beijing University in 1917. Chen recommended that the Chinese be independent, progressive, aggressive, cosmopolitan, utilitarian, and scientific. He criticized Confucianism for its superfluous ceremonies, meek compliance, making family more important than the individual, upholding inequality, subservient filial piety, and orthodoxy that discouraged free thinking. He favored Western innovations and praised Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy. Li Dazhao became head librarian at Beijing University in February 1918, and in June he published a favorable description of the Russian Revolution. A study group met in his office and became the Marxist Research Society. Cai Yuanpei formulated the slogan “Work is sacred,” and Li and Chen started the Weekly Critic in December to discuss national and world politics. In the first issue of New Tide on January 1, 1919 Luo Jialun opposed reform by violence and wrote,

We would rather worship
George Washington than Peter the Great,
Benjamin Franklin than Bismarck,
Karl Marx’s economics that Richelieu’s public finance,
and Thomas Edison’s inventions
than Alfred Krupp’s manufacture.1
Li Dazhao’s students began sending out lecturers to educate  people. Li emphasized that the society based on force should be replaced by one based on love. Chen was forced to resign as dean in March. New Youth came out with a special issue on Marxism on May 1, 1919 that included Li’s essay, “My Marxist Views.”

Hu Shi studied philosophy with John Dewey at Columbia University, where he earned his Ph.D. In February 1915 he wrote in his diary, “It is not a disgrace for a nation to lack a navy or to lack an army! It is only a disgrace for a nation to lack public libraries, museums,  and art galleries.”2 In 1917 Cai Yuanpei appointed Hu a professor, and he became a leader in the movement to write in plain language (baihua) that Huang Yuanyong had proposed in 1915. Hu summarized the literary reforms in the following eight guidelines:

1. Write with substance.
2. Do not imitate the ancients.
3. Emphasize grammar.
4. Reject melancholy.
5. Eliminate old clichés.
6. Do not use allusions.
7. Do not use couplets and parallelisms.
8. Do not avoid popular expressions.3
In 1918 Hu summarized this literary revolution in the following four statements:

1. Speak only when you have something to say.
2. Speak what you want to say
  and say it in the way you want to say it.
3. Speak what is your own and not that of someone else.
4. Speak in the language of the time in which you live.4
This change from using classical Chinese (wenyan) has been compared to the Renaissance when Europeans began writing in their national languages rather than in Latin. In January 1918 New Youth began publishing all its articles in baihua, and the government adopted baihua in the schools in 1920. Hu published a study of the family in the famous novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin. He published a complete translation of A Doll’s House in a special 1918 issue of New Youth on the plays of Henrik Ibsen. Hu Shi published his Outline of the History of Chinese Philosophy in February 1919. He also criticized Confucianism and exalted Western ideas such as democracy and science. Hu favored critical thinking and problem solving rather than the idle discussion of “-isms.” He wanted reforms to eliminate poverty, sickness, illiteracy, corruption, and disorder.

Many of the young radicals were anarchists. In 1913 Liu Sifu had founded the Consciousness Society in Guangzhou. They learned Esperanto and recommended abstaining from twelve things—meat, wine, tobacco, servants, marriage, surnames, official positions, rickshaws, running for parliament, political parties, military service, and religion. However, Liu died of tuberculosis in 1915, and his group dissolved.

On November 17, 1918 in Beijing 6,000 Chinese had celebrated the Western democracies’ victory over German militarism, and many hoped that Woodrow Wilson’s ideal of self-determination would prevail. China’s 62 delegates to the Versailles peace conference included officials from Beijing and from Sun Yat-sen’s government in Guangzhou. Their demands for China’s self-determination and the removal of foreign controls were backed by the press, chambers of commerce, and student associations. However, the peace conference focused only on issues related to the war, and the only Chinese issue was Shandong. The diplomat V. K.  Wellington Koo explained that Japan forced China to sign the treaty of 1914, that Shandong is holy land for China as the birthplace of Confucius and Mencius, and that China had a right to the restoration of Qingdao based on the principle in international law that treaties can be revised after the conditions on which they were based have changed. Koo pointed out that the loss of Qingdao would harm China economically because it was the best harbor they had. He argued that the Chinese Parliament had never ratified Japan’s 21 Demands and that when China entered the war in 1917, these and the treaties with Germany were made null and void. However, the Japanese pointed to the agreement Beijing made in 1918 with Japan, and on April 30, 1919 Wilson, Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau decided to grant Shandong to Japan despite the latter’s promise to restore it to China. Beijing’s daily China Press published the report on May 1.

Several hundred students from thirteen colleges in the Beijing area met on May 4, 1919 and passed five resolutions to send telegrams protesting the Shandong settlement of the Versailles treaty, to awaken the Chinese people to their desperate plight, to hold a mass meeting in Beijing, to form a Beijing student union, and to demonstrate against the Versailles treaty that afternoon. Some anarchists planned to burn Cao Rulin’s house, but they kept their plans secret from the others. At least three thousand students gathered in Tiananmen Square and marched toward the foreign legations to present petitions on the Paris treaty. Signs protested foreign interference and condemned Chinese traitors. The British, French, and Italian ministers were absent, and letters were left. At the home of the foreign minister Cao Rulin five students broke in by a window and opened the front door. Students poured in and beat up the politician Zhang Zongxiang, who had agreed to give up the rights in Shandong to the Japanese. Cao had escaped with a servant, but they set his house on fire. Most of the police had been neutral, but now they arrested 32 demonstrators. Orders came from above, and a fight between police and demonstrators resulted in one student dying. Martial law was declared in the area.

The student union formed on May 5 in Beijing included middle-school and high-school students as well as those from colleges and universities. China’s President Xu Shichang issued two orders to discipline the students in the next three days. Cai Yuanpei was pressured to resign on May 8. Minister of Education Fu Zengxiang left office on May 12, and two days later the Government ordered force used against the students. In the next five days student demonstrations occurred in major cities, and student unions were formed. Beijing students from all eighteen colleges and universities went on strike on May 19 and presented six demands to the President. In the next three weeks demonstrations erupted in more than two hundred cities. Students disobeyed an order to return to classes on May 25, and on June 1 President Xu declared martial law in Beijing. When middle schools and above began a strike on June 1 in Wuhan, the Hubei governor Wang Jianyuan sent troops to guard the schools; about a hundred students lecturing in the streets were wounded and arrested. In June student delegates from Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Tianjin, and Japan met in Shanghai and formed the Student Union of the Republic of China.

On June 2 in Beijing seven students were arrested. On the next day more than nine hundred students went out in groups of fifty to lecture in the streets, and by the end of June 4 about 1,150 students had been arrested. Education minister Yuan Xitao resigned after twenty days in office. On the next day more than a thousand students from girls schools marched to the President’s palace to demand free speech and the release of the imprisoned students. That day a commercial strike began in Shanghai to support the 13,000 students on strike, and within a week it grew to at least 60,000 workers in forty factories. The acting minister of Education was replaced, and learning of the Shanghai strike, he withdrew the troops and police from the school buildings.

Hu Renyuan was appointed temporary chancellor of Beijing University. When 1,473 merchants, workers, students, journalists, and others in the Federation of All Organizations of China met in the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce on June 6, they requested the Beijing government annul the unjust treaties and punish the authorities responsible. They noted that the strikes were most peaceful and asked friendly countries to uphold justice and give them spiritual support. That day merchants closed their shops in Nanjing. About 2,400 students on strike were attacked by troops, and in the next three days strikes by merchants spread along the Yangzi River. Four officials tried to persuade the students to leave the Beijing jail on June 7; they refused but marched out in triumph the next day.

On June 10 the hated Cao Rulin, Zhang Zongxiang, and Lu Zongyu were allowed to resign. Chen Duxiu distributed pamphlets demanding the resignation of the Anfu government, disbanding the Beijing police, and free speech; he was arrested the next day and detained for three months. On June 12 the Government released the other students, dismissed the three hated officials, and announced they would not sign the Treaty of Versailles. That day the merchants’ and workers’ strikes ended. Premier Qian resigned on June 13. Chinese students surrounded the quarters of the Chinese delegates in Paris with a continuous vigil, and so none of them went to the treaty-signing ceremony on June 28. Although China rejected the peace treaty with Germany, they signed one with Austria-Hungary; thus China became a member of the League of Nations.

On July 22 the Student Union of China declared the student strikes over. On July 25 Leo Karakhan as the Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs signed a manifesto that renounced all the factories that Russians had built or owned in China and all the extraterritorial rights of Russians in China. Chancellor Hu Renyuan was removed on July 30, and Cai Yuanpei resumed his position at Beijing University on September 20. Leaders founded the review Young China, and many other journals and clubs formed such as Emancipation and Reconstruction in Shanghai and the Xiang River Review in Changsha by the Hunan Students’ Association. Tracts, banners, and pamphlets of the movement were written in the vernacular baihua.

The “Manifesto of New Youth Magazine” was written by Chen Duxiu and approved by other editors in December. They opposed warlords and plutocrats and wanted to get rid of antiquated ideas. They aimed for a new era that is “honest, progressive, positive, free, equal, creative, beautiful, kind, peaceful, full of universal love and mutual assistance, and pleasant labor.”5 They advocated women’s rights, and the first females were admitted into Beijing University in 1920. The Women’s Association of Hunan was founded in February 1921 to work for equal rights in property inheritance, voting, office-holding, education, work, and choice in marriage.

Mao Zedong had founded the New People’s Study Society in Hunan in April 1918, and they formed a Communist cell. In December 1919 the Society for the Study of Socialism began in Beijing and other cities. Socialist clubs grew, and new journals were published. The Beijing Society for the Study of Marxist Theory began in March 1920. Chen Duxiu founded a Marxist Study Society in May and a Socialist Youth Corps in August. Nineteen issues of Labor World were published in Shanghai during the second half of 1920. The Trade Union Secretariat established its headquarters in Shanghai.

In the summer of 1920 Hu Shi published a series of articles in the Weekly Critic on “Problems and –isms.” He observed that the slaves of Confucius and Zhu Xi were being replaced by the slaves of Marx and Kropotkin. He questioned whether Marxism and anarchism which claimed to have “fundamental solutions” could solve specific problems. Hu suggested they educate the masses, emancipate women, and reform schools. Hu Shi joined with others and Li Dazhao in August and published the “Manifesto of the Struggle for Freedom” in which they asked for an end to police oppression, regulations limiting publications, and the emergency enactments of 1912 and 1914. They demanded freedom of speech, press, assembly, and association as well as privacy, writ of habeas corpus, and non-partisan supervision of elections.

Liang Qichao had attended the Paris peace conference, and he wrote “Reflections on a European Journey” criticizing Western civilization for its materialism, subjugation of nature through science and technology, and Darwinian conflicts between individuals, classes, and nations. He began to see that Eastern ways may be an antidote to the European trends that led to the massive violence of the World War. Liang wrote about an inner realm that he found in the works of the Neo-Confucians Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming and the Mahayana Buddhists. A New Culture movement developed that also valued vernacular fiction as high literature. Liang wrote that the four emotional powers of fiction are to incense, immerse, prick, and uplift. Liang’s friend Zhang Junmai studied German philosophy and compared Kant’s epistemology and ethics to the practical idealism of Wang Yangming. He argued that science could not completely explain human experience because people are subjective, intuitive, and have free will. Wang Yangming had found that intuitive moral insight was learned from individual action in the world.

China's Struggle for Power 1920-24
Droughts in 1919 and 1920 devastated Zhili, Shandong, Henan, Shanxi, and Shaanxi. In the 1920-21 famine at least a half million people died, and about twenty million peasant homes were destitute. The peasants suffered exploitation by the warlords and the gentry. Prices increased as one yuan (silver dollar) was worth 138 coppers in 1919; but by 1925 the yuan was valued at 217 coppers in Shanghai and 285 coppers in Beijing. A National Bankers’ Association was formed in 1920 to regulate currency reform. They refused to buy any more government bonds until the old ones were readjusted. The 27 foreign banks with branches in China had three or four times as much capital as about 120 Chinese banks. In 1921 the Chinese government put its customs surplus into the Consolidated Internal Loan Service that was administered by Francis Aglen, the inspector-general of customs.

Qu Qiubai was in Li Dazhao’s study group and went to Moscow in 1920 for Beijing’s Morning News. Despite the poverty he reported on the positive spirit of the revolution, and he was most impressed by the Soviet commissar of education, Anatoly Lunacharsky. Qu later became chairman of the social sciences department at Beijing University. Lenin sent the Third Communist International (Comintern) agents Grigori Voitinsky and Yang Mingzhai to China. They met Li Dazhao in Beijing in January 1920 and Chen Duxiu in Shanghai in May. A meeting of socialists, anarchists, progressives, and Guomindang members elected Chen secretary of a provisional central committee. They used a Sino-Russian news agency and a foreign-language school to recruit Communists. In April 1921 a Chinese Comintern office was opened in Irkutsk, and Li Dazhao sent some associates there.

In May 1921 the Chinese government signed a treaty with the Weimar Republic in which Germany renounced “all its special rights, interests and privileges” in China and canceled its Boxer indemnity. China signed similar treaties with Hungary and Turkey. That year the Soviet diplomat I. Yurin persuaded the Beijing government to give the Boxer indemnity funds to him instead of to the Czarist ambassador. China had about 1,500,000 soldiers. Japanese exports to China went down from 656 million yen in 1919 to 424 million yen in 1921.

In July 1921 Mao Zedong was Hunan’s delegate to the first plenary meeting of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Shanghai which met secretly in a closed girls’ school in the French concession. Zhou Enlai had been arrested for a raid in early 1919, and he led the May 4th protestors from Tianjin before going to France the next year. His future wife Deng Yingchao had helped to form the Association of Patriotic Women Comrades in Tianjin. Young Deng Xiaoping was known in Paris for distributing mimeographed papers. Xiang Jingyu was a friend of Mao, and she married another Hunanese worker in France, where she worked for women’s rights and socialism.  When she returned to China, she was appointed director of a new women’s department; she organized women who worked in silk and cigarette factories in Shanghai. Mao, Liu Shaoqi, and Li Lisan organized  miners in the Anyuan collieries, workers on the Guangzhou-Hankou railroad, and construction guilds and rickshaw pullers in Changsha. In September 1921 radical Chinese students occupied university buildings in Lyons, and 103 were arrested and deported.

In January 1922 about forty Chinese delegates joined others from Mongolia, Korea, Japan, Java, and India to attend the Far Eastern Workers’ Congress in Petrograd. Qu Qiubai served as an interpreter for Grigory Zinoviev, who urged them to cooperate with the nationalist bourgeoisie to expel foreign imperialists at this stage of the revolution. The CCP grew slowly and had about two hundred members in 1922. In July at Shanghai the second congress of the CCP passed a resolution that explained that the world’s economic order had been destroyed by the imperialist war of 1914-18 and that the capitalists were planning to exploit the raw materials and the working class in their colonies. They noted that China had been suffering from the violence of warlords for the past eleven years and that Wu Peifu was intending to use military means to unify China. They set as their goals to overthrow the feudal warlords and stop civil wars, free China from imperialist oppression, unify China in a federal system while recognizing the autonomy of Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang, and protect all freedoms of workers, peasants, women, and children. The Russian agent called Maring urged the CCP to ally itself with the Guomindang to fight the warlords in a democratic revolution.

At the third congress at Guangzhou in June 1923 the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) added many more goals such as abolishing all the unequal treaties; banishing warlords and confiscating their property for the public good; nationalizing railroads, banks, mines, and large industries; electing all public officials; abolishing the secret police and laws that oppressed unions; enforcing sexual equality before the law; unifying and standardizing the monetary system while excluding all foreign currencies; taxing incomes and inheritance while abolishing commercial surcharges; providing free and compulsory education separate from religion; abolishing corporal and capital punishment while reforming litigation laws; replacing mercenary military recruitment with universal conscription; providing housing subsidies for the poor and controlling rent; imposing price ceilings on necessities; helping peasants with rent reductions, improved irrigation, government loans, and price supports for staple crops; and helping workers with labor rights, the eight-hour day, equal pay for women, sanitation regulations and workers’ hospitals with compulsory insurance, and relief for the unemployed.

John Dewey came to China with his wife on May 1, 1919 and taught there for more than two years. Hu Shi often interpreted his lectures. Bertrand Russell also traveled widely in China from October 1920 to July 1921; he emphasized peace and the positive value of Confucianism and Daoism that he found more useful than Western imperialism and militarism. China had a Russell Study Society and a Russell Monthly. Russell was accompanied by his lover Dora Black, who lectured at women’s schools and to anarchists. In 1923 Rabindranath Tagore gave a series of lectures and emphasized nonviolence, but he was criticized by Communists for India’s acceptance of colonialism. Carsun Zhang spread the philosophy of Bergson; Wang Guowei promoted Schopenhauer and Nietzsche; and Li Shizeng emphasized Kropotkin’s mutual assistance as a better means of evolution than Darwinian struggle.

Liang Shuming was brought up as a Buddhist but gained a Western education. In 1917 he became the first Buddhist to teach at Beijing University; but after his father committed suicide in despair at China’s situation in 1918, he returned to Neo-Confucianism. In 1921 Liang published his famous Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies. He described India as obsessed with religion and spiritual development to the exclusion of everything else and suggested that that attitude should be rejected. Liang Shuming believed that China needed reform and should adopt Western institutions critically so as to renew its own harmonious culture. Hu Shi noted that Easterners are generally satisfied with their simple life and so often do not seek to improve their material world.

Hu Shi wanted to “reorganize the national heritage” by applying the methods of science to evaluate with historical criticism religion and other traditions. In 1922 he helped found the journal Endeavor that was dedicated to political action. He criticized the dogmatic assumptions of both Sun Yat-sen and the Marxists. Gu Jiegang studied the customs, folklore, and folksongs of the people with scientific methods, and he founded the journals Folksong Weekly and Folklore. Zhang Junmai (Carsun Chang) was influenced by spiritual philosophy, Wang Yangming, and Henri Bergson. He argued that science has its limits and does not account for subjectivity, intuition, synthesis, free will, and personal unity. Later Zhang tried to develop a liberal mean between the extremes of the Nationalists and Communists by founding a socialist party that emphasized human rights, free expression, and the constitutional separation of powers. They influenced intellectuals but did not have a large popular following. Wu Chihui argued for science and denied the spiritual elements and soul. Hu Shi saw the limits of a materialistic philosophy and offered a synthesis that accepted science and a philosophy of life. Hu suggested that beyond the small self of the individual is the large self of society that does not die. He believed that living for the sake of the species and posterity is a higher religion than the selfish pursuit of a future life in Heaven or the Pure Land.

Chinese workers suffered from low wages, long hours, few if any vacations, and miserable housing conditions. Wages were often docked, and kickbacks were demanded. Children worked in bad conditions up to thirteen hours a day. In 1918 twenty-five major strikes took place, and in 1919 Shanghai cotton mills had to increase wages by 12% or more. In January 1922 Guomindang activists instigated a strike in Hong Kong and Guangzhou involving 40,000 sailors and dock-workers that affected more than 150 ships. Others joined the strike in March, and with more than 120,000 on strike the owners granted wage increases of 15% to 30% with benefits and recognition of the union. In May the Communists Li Lisan and Liu Shaoqi began organizing workers’ clubs among Anyuan coal miners and Daye steel workers, but the strike by 50,000 coal miners in Tangshan failed in October. That August the first major strike by women occurred in the silk-spinning mills of Pudong outside Shanghai. That summer the Trade Union Secretariat appealed unsuccessfully to the new government of President Li Yuanhong to pass labor laws including the eight-hour day. There had been 50 major strikes in 1921, but in 1922 there were 91.



In 1920 and 1921 the Guomindang promoted a federalist movement by trying to get Hunan, Hubei, and Shaanxi to become independent. In the summer of 1920 Liu Xiang and Xiong Kewu drove Tang Jiyao’s Yunnan troops out of Sichuan and declared independence, and the next year Liu ousted Xiong. Tan Yankai tried to make Hunan independent in 1920, but he was pushed out by the warlord Zhao Hengti, who proclaimed Hunan independent and even promulgated a constitution in January 1922. However, as Mao Zedong pointed out, he used force to suppress students and workers. In the spring of 1921 federalists in Hubei overthrew the Anfu governor Wang Zhanyuan, but the Zhili clique in Beijing sent General Wu Peifu to crush the federalist effort in 1921. Wu received massive arms shipments from the United States and loans from British banks. Zhejiang’s governor Lu Yongxiang proclaimed independence in September 1921 but still ruled autocratically. Yu Youren led an independence movement in Shaanxi in the summer of 1921 and set up a Citizens’ Assembly. In October some Chinese bankers in Shanghai issued a manifesto calling for international cooperation, an end to extraterritoriality, and Chinese control over their own railways.

In November 1921 the United States invited diplomats from Japan, China, and six European powers to meet in Washington, and they agreed to limit their navies according to a formula that made Japan strongest in the Pacific. The Chinese delegation proposed nine points—honoring China’s political independence, no treaties among other countries that affected China, respecting Chinese neutrality in future wars, removing all limitations on China’s political freedom and jurisdiction, reviewing foreign rights, immunities, and concessions in China, and limiting  China’s commitments. France and Britain offered to relinquish leased territories, but Japan refused to do so. Several of China’s points were granted in the Nine-Power Treaty signed on February 6, 1922. That month world public opinion persuaded Japan to sell most of its properties in Shandong back to China. In 1923 the powers agreed to close their post offices except in leased territories, and China’s import tariffs could be raised to 5%.

In April 1922 Zhang Zuolin attacked the Zhili clique near Beijing, but Feng Yuxiang’s forces drove them back to Manchuria. The Luoyang faction led by Wu Peifu tried to unify China by having Xu Shichang yield the presidency to Li Yuanhong. Wu asked Sun Yat-sen to resign too, but he refused. The new Finance minister Luo Wengan reduced the government debt by £200 million by renegotiating the Austrian loans while obtaining £80,000 for ready use. When he was charged with corruption, President Li had him arrested on November 18. The cabinet resigned although Luo was exonerated eighteen months later. Wu extorted 300,000 yuan from the Hankou Chamber of Commerce and another 100,000 from the bankers. Feng got little support from Wu and was reported to have accepted a large bribe from Japan.

On February 2, 1923 the Communists combined sixteen workers’ clubs into a union that went on strike and shut down the Beijing-Hankou railway. On February 7 General Wu Peifu ordered his men to attack the strikers, killing 35 workers and wounding many more. That day the union leader Lin Xiangqian was arrested in Wuhan. When he refused to order his members to go back to work, he was beheaded. The railway men went back to work on February 9, and the year 1923 had only 48 major strikes.

In May 1923 a thousand bandits attacked the Tianjin-Pukou luxury train at Lincheng, killed some Chinese, and kidnapped more than a hundred others, including sixteen foreigners. The diplomats in Beijing demanded better supervision but came up with a plan to exploit more money from the railway. Chinese public opinion was outraged, and the foreigners withdrew their plan to take over the railway. The Chinese government compensated the victims, and the bandits were allowed to join the army.

When President Li Yuanhong’s government could no longer pay wages, Cao Kun arrested his minister of Finances. Four cabinet members loyal to Cao resigned on June 6, 1923 causing the rest of the cabinet to resign also. The garrison troops protested for back-pay; police went on strike; and organized demonstrations surrounded the palace. President Li fled the capital on June 13 and was detained on a train by Cao’s general Yangcun until he submitted his resignation. The Parliament moved to Shanghai; but the Dianzinbaoding faction bribed members of Parliament with $5,000 each to return to Beijing and elect Cao Kun president. Li fled to Japan. Cao was inaugurated on October 10 as a new constitution was promulgated. Cao had spent $13,560,000 to become president, and the foreign diplomats immediately recognized his government. In May 1924 Beijing recognized Soviet control over Outer Mongolia and the East China Railway through Manchuria, and Russia renounced extraterritoriality, its concessions in Tianjin and Hankou, and its Boxer indemnities. The Anfu party still controlled Zhejiang.

On September 3, 1924 Zhili forces from Jiangsu and Fujian invaded Zhejiang and Shanghai. Two weeks later Zhang Zuolin’s Fengtian forces invaded from Manchuria, joining the war on the side of Zhejiang. Two days later the Anfu forces abandoned Zhejiang and retreated to the perimeter of Shanghai. The Fengtian army broke through the Zhili lines on October 7, and five days later the Anfu army abandoned Shanghai. After heavy fighting, Wu Peifu stabilized the Zhili front, and on October 23 Feng Yuxiang led his army into Beijing. Wu Peifu’s Zhili army had 170,000 men and probably could have defeated the Fengtian forces, but Feng Yuxiang betrayed Wu and changed sides in Beijing. Feng reorganized the cabinet by deposing President Cao Kun on November 2. The next day Wu Peifu boarded ships at Tanggu with his portion of the remaining Zhili forces to retreat to the Yangzi Valley. Feng negotiated with Zhang Zuolin of the Fengtian clique and with the Anhui clique to form the National People’s army, and on November 24 they brought back Duan Qirui to run the government as “provisional chief executive.” Zhang Zuolin signed a treaty with Moscow in November. Feng had invited Sun Yat-sen to come to Beijing, and he arrived at Tianjin on December 4; but nine days later Duan Qirui dissolved the parliament and abolished the constitutions.

Sun Yat-sen and Guomindang 1920-24
Sun Yat-sen reorganized the Chinese Nationalist party on October 10, 1919 without distinctions between members or a personal oath of loyalty. On November 9, 1920 they resolved to implement his Three People’s Principles and a constitution with the five branches. Sun in the first part of his Plan for National Reconstruction emphasized the psychological reconstruction of moving from thought to action. He reversed a truism and argued that it is easy to act but hard to know.

The second part on material reconstruction was also published separately as The International Development of China. Sun attributed China’s poverty to lack of development, crude methods of production, and wasted labor. He called for foreign capital and equipment with their scientific and technological expertise. With China’s abundant natural resources and cheap labor he predicted that China would become “an unlimited market for the whole world” and an essential part of international trade. He suggested that capitalism could create socialism in China and thus was one of the first to recommend a mixed economy. He believed that industries could provide for the needs of every individual and family. Sun proposed that an international organization could coordinate the aid that China needed for its development in order to avoid “commercial warfare.” Sun’s ideas to open China to the West, use foreign technological and financial experts, develop coastal outlets, allow a public sector to co-exist with private enterprise, and value social stability foreshadowed the Four Modernizations later implemented by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s.

The anarchist general Chen Jiongming regained Guangzhou, and he called Sun Yat-sen back in October 1920. They set up a republican government in April 1921, and 225 members of the old Parliament under the 1912 constitution elected Sun president. He accepted the autonomy of the provincial government with Chen Jiongming as governor and commander of the Cantonese army. Chen promulgated a provincial constitution and limited military expenditures to 30% of the budget while reserving 20% for education. Chen Duxiu was appointed education commissioner. Chen Jiongming’s anarchist friends led the trade unions. Sun got his son Sun Fo reinstated as mayor of Guangzhou.

After refusing Wu Peifu’s request to resign, Sun Yat-sen tried to dismiss Chen Jiongming, but he was popular from his victories in Guangxi. When Sun ordered General Ye Ju to withdraw from Guangzhou within ten days and threatened him, Ye Ju had Sun’s presidential palace shelled on June 16, 1922. Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) was a field officer for General Chen Jiongming, but he helped Sun escape. Sun tried to negotiate from a gunboat, but he had lost popularity because of his refusal to resign. A British gunboat enabled him to reach Hong Kong, and then he went to Shanghai.

Sun Yat-sen had met the Comintern agent Hans Maring (Hendricus Sneevliet) in 1921, and in the fall of 1922 Communists were allowed to join the Guomindang. The Comintern sent Adolf Joffe to China, and the New Tide Society and thirteen other organizations welcomed him to Beijing in August 1922. Joffe agreed that conditions in China were not right for Soviet Communism, but he offered Russian support. Sun hoped that when the Communists understood the beauty of Chinese civilization, especially its ethics, that they would adopt the principles of the Guomindang. Because Soviet Russia had renounced the privileges that Czarist Russia had in China and was showing sympathy for their cause, Sun believed they should accept their friendship. Through correspondence he agreed to an alliance with the Soviets and to admit Communists into the Guomindang. On September 4 a Nationalist conference at Shanghai approved this, and Hu Hanmin drafted a manifesto that was proclaimed on January 1, 1923. On January 12 the Comintern ordered Chinese Communists to join the Nationalist party and work with them for Sun’s bourgeois revolution, and the Sun-Joffe Declaration was signed on January 26. On that day Sun Yat-sen also sent a circular telegram to the leading militarists with a plan for peaceful unification calling for a voluntary demobilization of troops under the good offices of a “friendly power” such as the United States.

Sun Yat-sen hired troops for Ch$400,000, and they drove Chen Jiongming out of Guangzhou in January 1923. Sun returned in triumph on February 21 to establish a military government again. Most of the old parliamentarians went back to Beijing, where they were offered $5,000 each to vote as requested. The diplomatic corps in Beijing refused to give Sun the surplus customs revenues as they did to the militarists in the north. Sun’s requests for loans from Hong Kong merchants, the Guangzhou Chamber of Commerce, and British businessmen were rejected. However, his son Sun Fo returned as mayor of Guangzhou and got military financing from the city. The mercenaries that Sun Yat-sen had hired from Yunnan, Guangxi, and other places financially exploited the city and the region.

In March 1923 the Comintern in Moscow decided to send advisors to Sun Yat-sen and authorized two million Chinese dollars for him. He began collecting the local salt revenues in May and took in nearly $3 million by December; the foreign powers only protested that the debts were not being paid. Sun wrote to the diplomatic corps in September and October complaining that the arrears due the Guangdong government from customs were Ch$12,600,000, but instead they were being used by the Beijing government to make war on the South. The Comintern agent Mikhail Borodin (Gruzenberg), who spoke English, reached Guangzhou on October 6 and advised Sun to implement an eight-hour day, a minimum wage, and to confiscate land to distribute it to peasants, but Sun declined to alienate his supporters and never agreed to confiscate land. Yet Borodin became his most influential advisor. On October 25 Sun appointed a Provisional Central Executive Committee of nine and included a Communist. Chen Jiongming had been besieging Sun’s army at Huizhou since August, and Borodin in November urged the Guomindang to mobilize the masses against them by declaring the confiscation and redistribution of land. Sun was not available to approve the Committee’s resolution, but he was grateful that Chen’s forces retreated. Sun announced in December that he would seize the maritime customs revenues in Guangzhou, but threatening foreign gunboats caused him to change his mind.

The first Guomindang national congress in January 1924 was attended by 165 delegates, and they recessed for three days to mourn the death of Lenin. The party had registered 23,360 members in China and had about 4,600 abroad. They elected Li Dazhao, Sun Yat-sen, Hu Hanmin, Wang Jingwei, and Lin Shen to the presidium, and they dedicated themselves to defeating imperialism and the warlords by following Sun’s three people’s principles of independence, democracy, and socialism and the five-power constitution. The delegates approved participation by the Communists without giving up their party affiliation, but the right wing still made up two-thirds of party officials.

Sun Yat-sen sent Jiang Jieshi to Moscow for three months. He came back impressed by the discipline and efficiency of the Communist Party and recommended it as a model for the Guomindang; but he also was convinced that the Soviet Union wanted to take over large provinces from China. Sun Yat-sen appointed Jiang head of the new military academy on the island of Huangpu (Whampoa) in May 1924. The Guangzhou government provided Ch$186,000, and the Soviets contributed Ch$2,700,000 and 8,000 guns. Borodin got the Communist Zhou Enlai named as director of the political department, and the Soviet general Vassili Blücher (known as Galen) was the military advisor. Cadets were required to have a middle-school diploma, and that excluded most workers and peasants. Most cadets did not like Communism and became loyal to Jiang. The Guomindang also set up a Farmers’ Bureau with Peng Pai as secretary and the Farmers’ Movement Training Institute where Mao Zedong taught. After an attempted assassination of the visiting Governor-General Merlin of French Indochina in the Shamian concession of Guangzhou, the British and French imposed stricter security measures. All the Chinese workers in Shamian went on strike on July 15, and they were supported by 26 unions. Sun mediated for a month, and the French and British lifted the new security measures.

From January to August 1924 Sun Yat-sen gave a series of sixteen lectures at Guangzhou University that were revised and published as The Three Principles of the People. The first principle minzuzhuyi means literally “the doctrine of the people’s lineage” and implies the Chinese race and culture as well as nationalism and independence. This was the main principle that mobilized the anti-Manchu feeling for the Chinese revolution of 1911. Sun had proclaimed the equality of the five races in 1912, but he noted that only about ten million of the four hundred million people in China were not Han Chinese. Sun praised the Confucian virtues of Chinese culture and their high moral standards that enabled them to assimilate other ethnic groups. Whereas European society was based on the individual, Chinese society was based on the family. In his second lecture on nationalism Sun described the political and economic oppression of China by imperialist nations. Although China was not completely colonized politically, economically it was colonized and exploited by several powers. Dismantling the “unequal treaties” was one of the most important goals for independence.

Sun’s second principle minquan means “the rights of the people” and has been interpreted as democracy. Sun recognized that the masses are sovereign, and their rights are election, recall, initiative, and referendum; but he believed that governmental power should be exercised by those with vision. His five branches of government included the traditional executive, legislative, and judicial plus the Chinese civil service examinations and the censorate, which included the power to impeach. Sun still held to his theory of three stages of a successful revolution, especially because of the failure in 1912. He believed that to stabilize the revolution the government may impose martial law for a time to suppress counter-revolutionary forces. In the second tutelary phase a period of education allows the local governments to learn and practice democracy. When the provincial districts have become autonomous, then the constitution may be promulgated and a national parliament may be elected.

Sun Yat-sen’s third principle minshengzhuyi means “the people’s livelihood” and was interpreted by Sun himself as socialism or communism but not Marxism. Sun believed that the problem of subsistence motivates people to cooperate for social progress and that class conflict is an aberration. He pointed to the recent progress in Europe and America as the result of a rising general level of education, nationalizing the means of communication, higher taxes on income, and other reforms which enabled production to increase and distribution to be improved for both employers and workers. Thus Sun emphasized Confucian harmony rather than material conflicts. He noted that Karl Marx’s predictions of longer working hours, reduced wages for workers, and higher prices for manufactured goods had been wrong. Sun suggested that when the people in the state share everything, the Confucian commonwealth may be attained. When everyone works for the common good, then universal love reigns.

Sun realized that China was poor and that its inequality was not between the rich and the poor but was differences among the poor. The Nationalist party aimed to equalize land rights and restrict capital. He still agreed with Henry George that the land should be given to its cultivators and that unearned wealth should be taxed and redistributed. Sun aimed to equalize landownership and regulate capital. The government would tax land according to its estimated value, which was set by the owner; but the government could buy the land for that estimated amount. Thus the owners had to set the value between countervailing deterrents. Sun prophetically realized that technological improvements such as mechanization, fertilizers, electrification, and crop rotation would increase production so much that wealth could be redistributed. Sun was influenced by Maurice William’s Social Interpretation of History and proposed nationalizing the means of transportation and communication, higher taxes on income and inheritances, and collectivizing the distribution networks. Sun recommended that the state promote industry and the use of machinery while coexisting with private enterprise. He wanted the government to develop communication, railroads, waterways, and mines on a large scale. He emphasized the immediate need to abolish the unequal treaties and take back the customs from foreign control so that China could end imperialistic exploitation and participate fairly in international trade.

The private Merchant Corps army of volunteers in Guangzhou had risen from 13,000 in 1923 to more than 50,000 by the summer of 1924. On August 9 Sun Yat-sen ordered their weapons from the Norwegian cargo ship Hav seized and guarded in the Huangpu Academy. Later he offered to release them for a price. On October 10 Guomindang demonstrators interrupted the delivery, and the Merchant Volunteer Corps fired on them. The merchants called for a general strike to overthrow Sun’s government and bring back Chen Jiongming. Five days later the first Huangpu class of 800 defeated the Merchant Corps and burned and looted the Xiguan business quarter. This destruction made Sun unpopular with that class in Guangzhou and Shanghai, and in November he left to attend the national reconstruction conference called by Feng Yuxiang in Beijing.

Sun hoped to bring about a revolution from the top and published his Manifesto on Going North on November 10. He wanted to end the unequal treaties and distribute power between the capital and the provinces with national unity. He called for a national convention of delegates from various associations that included entrepreneurs, merchants, educators, students, workers’ unions, peasants, and even militarists. Sun’s 58th birthday was celebrated on November 12 in Guangzhou by 20,000 people with a parade. The next day he and his wife Qingling, accompanied by Wang Jingwei, Eugene Chen, and Borodin, left for Hong Kong. They spent five days in Shanghai and a week in Japan, where he gave a speech in Kobe on November 28 proposing Asian solidarity against Western imperialism.

Sun reached Tianjin on December 4, and from then on his illness forced him to stay in bed. Duan Qirui criticized Sun’s idealism and confirmed the foreign treaties in order to get their recognition of his government. Sun was welcomed in the capital on December 31 by more than 100,000 people and was hospitalized at the Beijing Union Medical College, where he was diagnosed with liver cancer. Wang Jingwei helped Sun write his “Political Testament” that became a charter for the Nationalist party. He died on March 12, 1925 and was succeeded by Liao Zhongkai and Wang Jingwei on the left and Hu Hanmin on the right. Sun’s family wanted a Christian funeral; but others wanted a political demonstration, and so two separate ceremonies were held on March 19. Many have called Sun Yat-sen the father of modern China.

May 30th Movement of 1925-26
Zhang Zuolin was the warlord who controlled Manchuria, and in the fall of 1924 he sent troops south to challenge his rival Wu Peifu in Beijing. They took over the Tianjin-Pukou railway and invaded the Yangzi Valley. In the spring of 1925 the Zhili army of Jiangsu defeated the Anfu faction in Zhejiang, and the warlord Sun Chuanfang took over the five provinces of the lower Yangzi. In 1925 the Russians provided Feng Yuxiang with weapons, money, and advisers, but he tried to prevent the political indoctrination of his troops. After his war against Zhang Zuolin went badly in late 1925 and ended, Feng resigned in early 1926 and went to the Soviet Union for five months.

In the south in February 1925 armies led by Jiang Jieshi’s Huangpu officers with Soviet guns won several battles over the warlord Chen Jiongming, taking Shantou in March. In May at the Second National Workers Congress in Guangzhou 281 delegates represented 166 unions with 540,000 members, and they set up the General Labor Union. After defeating two more warlords, Jiang’s troops occupied Guangzhou in June, capturing 17,000 prisoners and 16,000 guns.

On May 15, 1925 Japanese guards at a Shanghai textile mill shot eight Chinese labor representatives who were negotiating with management, killing one. One week later Chinese students and workers held a memorial service and verbally attacked the Japanese owner. On May 30 three thousands workers and students from eight colleges assembled outside a police station in the Shanghai International Settlement to demand the release of six Chinese students who had been arrested by the British for protesting imperialism and militarism. The British inspector Everson ordered the Chinese and Sikh constables to fire, and they killed eleven and wounded twenty. This “May 30th atrocity” provoked demonstrations in about thirty cities, and 160,000 people in Shanghai went on a general strike. The General Union negotiated an agreement with Japan in August and the British in September. The May 30th Movement stimulated thousands of Chinese to join the Nationalists (Guomindang) or the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which increased in membership from 1,000 in 1925 to 30,000 in 1926. That year Guomindang membership increased to 150,000.

On June 10-11 in Hankou the British and Japanese militia killed fourteen Chinese and wounded one hundred. The Nationalist armies that were fighting in eastern Guangdong returned to Guangzhou and had to fight for six days to regain the city. On June 14 the Guomindang Political Council met with Borodin advising, and they organized the government with nine ministries and reformed the military as the National Revolutionary Army. Labor leaders went to Hong Kong and persuaded the unions to begin a strike and boycott on June 21. In Guangzhou a rally on June 23 faced Shamian Island, from where British and French troops shot at the protestors, killing 52 and wounding 117. Some Chinese fired back and killed one European. The strike in Hong Kong was supported by a massive boycott of British goods, and both lasted sixteen months. Finally after the British threatened military action in September 1926, Guomindang’s foreign minister Eugene Chen promised to end the boycott in October and levy extra taxes to pay off the strikers. In December 1925 the British police inspector and his lieutenant were fired, and the Municipal Council paid a $75,000 indemnity to the deceased and wounded. The Chinese in Shanghai protested against taxation without representation, and in 1926 the foreigners allowed three Chinese to be elected to the Municipal Council.

A Nationalist government was established in Guangzhou on July 1, 1925 with Wang Jingwei as president. They pacified the opposition in Guangdong and Guangxi by February 1926. Sun Yat-sen’s friend Liao Zhongkai became governor of Guangdong and was in charge of Guomindang’s workers department, and he organized massive strikes and boycotts in the early summer. While going to attend a Guomindang Executive Committee meeting on August 20, 1925 he was assassinated by several gunmen. Jiang Jieshi and Wang Jingwei led the committee that investigated and arrested many suspects, executing a few. Jiang and Borodin sent suspected Hu Hanmin to Russia. The National Revolutionary Army won three campaigns in eastern Guangdong, and three generals from Guangxi brought that province into alliance with Guangzhou. Guangdong was a rich province and raised $1,200,000 per month from gambling taxes even after what officials took in graft. A Political Training Department began functioning in October to instruct officers and troops. The daily Political Work was edited by a Communist and distributed 18,000 copies in the army.

In the summer of 1925 Dai Jitao published two books on Sun Yat-sen’s philosophy that argued against having Communists in the Guomindang.  Fifteen members of the Executive Committee met on November 23, 1925 by Sun Yat-sen’s tomb at Western Hills near Beijing. They supported Hu Hanmin and resolved to drive the Communists out of the Guomindang. On the Communist side Chen Duxiu noted that in the Guomindang the rightists only talked about the three people’s principles while the leftists acted to attain them.

At the second Guomindang congress held in Guangzhou in January 1926 a majority of the 278 delegates were Communists while only 45 were on the right. Peng Pai had been organizing social services for peasant associations since 1921 and had 100,000 members by 1923. Mao Zedong was director of the Guomindang’s Peasant Movement Training Institute in Guangzhou and was organizing in Hunan around Changsha. Guangzhou was considered so “Red” that many businessmen moved to Shanghai or Beijing. The successful banker T. V. Soong (Song Ziwen), Sun Yat-sen’s brother-in-law, had become Guomindang’s Finance minister in 1925, and he was raising more than 3.6 million yuan per month. Borodin agreed to limit the Communists to one-third of the committees. The cadets at Huangpu had formed the Society for the Study of Sun Yat-senism. They were anti-Communist and set up their own party headquarters in Shanghai.

In early 1926 Zhang Zuolin made an alliance with Wu Peifu and gained control of southern Hebei and Hubei. Writer Lu Xun was teaching in Beijing on March 18 when some of his students were among the 47 shot and killed while demonstrating against politicians who had given in to foreign demands based on the unequal treaties. Lu Xun and his wife fled south to Guangzhou. Feng Yuxiang helped Duan Qirui’s government survive, but Zhang Zuolin ousted Duan in April. Zhang’s army combined with those of Wu Peifu and Sun Chuanfang numbered more than 600,000. Feng Yuxiang and Zhang Zuolin fought a costly war in 1926 that lasted eight months. From the middle of 1926 to the middle of 1927 a regency cabinet was set up; but it had little power, and so government had no funds and no direction. Zhang Zuolin proclaimed himself grand marshal on June 17, 1927 and organized a military government. As the Guomindang armies advanced north, so many would defect to the south that Wu Peifu and Sun Chuanfang lost their power in 1927. Zhang Zuolin still controlled Beijing, and his vassal Zhang Zongchang ruled Shandong.

On March 20, 1926 the gunboat Zhongshan commanded by a Communist appeared off Huangpu, and Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek), fearing they would abduct him, had the Zhongshan commander arrested. Jiang declared martial law in Guangzhou, disarmed workers’ pickets, and arrested more than thirty Russian advisors. Communist newspapers were shut down. Borodin returned to Guangzhou from Comintern meetings in Beijing. In April he agreed with Jiang that no CCP members would head Guomindang bureaus, and he gave the Executive Committee a list of CCP members. On May 9 Wang Jingwei left for France. On May 15 the Central Executive Committee limited Communists to no more than a third of committee memberships and made other restrictions. The CCP Executive Committee rejected these, but Soviet premier Joseph Stalin ordered them to stay in the Guomindang. By the time of its congress in May the General Labor Union had grown to 1,241,000 members.

Huangpu had graduated 7,795 officers, and Jiang Jieshi had 85,000 men in his National Revolutionary Army. Guangxi added another 30,000 troops and had 6,000 cadets in other military schools. Jiang became commander of the National Revolutionary Army in June, and using all these forces, he began the northern expedition on July 1 to eliminate Wu Peifu and achieve national unification. The Guomindang force occupied Changsha on July 11, and in August they chased the retreating Hunan army along the Miluo River and threatened the tri-city area of Wuhan. General Wu Peifu arrived and had eight of his commanders beheaded. The Hanyang commander went over to the Nationalists, who gained its huge arsenal. When Hankou submitted, Jiang promised to protect all its foreigners. While they besieged Wuchang, the Jiangxi warlord had Communists and radicals rounded up and beheaded based on their short Russian hair-styles. Civilians were starving, and the Wuchang commander opened the gates on October 10. Nationalists entered the city while others attacked Jiangxi. By November the National Revolutionary Army had suffered 15,000 casualties while taking Jiujiang and Nanchang. Fujian’s navy changed sides, and its capital Fuzhou fell in December. The Nationalists had conquered Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi, and Fujian while Guangxi and Guizhou had negotiated agreements. The National Revolutionary Army was trained not to loot nor press workers into service.

Lu Xun's Stories
Zhou Zhangshou (Lu Xun) was born as the oldest son in a gentry family in 1881 in Shaoxing, Zhejiang, where he was well educated. In 1893 his grandfather Zhou Fuqing was caught attempting to bribe the chief examiner with 10,000 taels and was imprisoned until the general amnesty of 1901. His father Zhou Boyi was barred from the exams, became depressed, drank, became ill, took opium, and died in 1896, leaving Zhangshou head of the family. He had studied the classics, history, and philosophy in a private school under the outstanding teacher Shou Jingwu. Zhangshou attended the Jiangnan Naval Academy and in 1898 he did well on the civil service examination. His uncle persuaded him to change his name to Zhou Shuren because soldiers were not respected. In 1901 he read Yan Fu’s translation of Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics, and he was influenced by its social Darwinism. Then Shuren read Lin Shu’s translations of La dame aux camelias by Dumas and other fiction by Charles Dickens, Walter Scott, Rider Haggard, and Arthur Conan Doyle. He was especially impressed by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Shuren graduated from the School of Mines and Railroads in 1902 and went to Japan for more study on a Qing-government scholarship. He cut off his queue in 1903 and translated two science-fiction novels by Jules Verne into Chinese.

After pawning clothing and jewelry to buy rare herbs for his ill father, Zhou Shuren had decided that Chinese doctors were quacks. He had learned that Japanese modernization had begun with its study of Western medicine, and so in 1904 he went to medical school in Sendai, Japan. In his second year a teacher showed slides of Japanese military victories over Russia as the Japanese students shouted “Banzai!” One slide showed a Chinese spy about to be beheaded, and Shuren was struck by the passive attitude of the Chinese bystanders in the picture. He thought how the Chinese needed spiritual transformation more than physical medicine, and two months later in March 1906 he withdrew from medical school to become a writer and to promote a literary movement. He returned to Shaoxing, and in July he was married to Zhu An, who had been chosen for him by his mother. She had her tiny feet bound, was illiterate, and unattractive. Shuren may not have consummated the marriage, but he continued to support her financially for the rest of his life. Apparently Zhu An spent her time serving Shuren’s mother, and he considered her his mother’s wife.

In 1907 Shuren, his brother Zhou Zuoren, and Qian Xuantong with others organized the Society for the Promotion of National Learning, and they persuaded the revolutionary Zhang Taiyan to be director and lecture on literature. For a short time while their money lasted, Shuren, Zuoren, and Xu Shoushang published a magazine called New Life, and in the essay “On Breaking Through the Voices of Evil” Zhou Shuren accused hypocritical scholars of blaming China’s problems on the common people. He especially admired Nikolai Gogol for awakening the Russians to the suffering of their people. In his essay “The Erratic Development of Culture,” Shuren suggested that China’s isolation was the cause of its weaknesses and strengths. In 1909 the Zhou brothers published two volumes of Stories from Abroad translated from Russian and from other countries, but they sold only a few copies in Tokyo and Shanghai.

Zhou Shuren took a teaching job in Hangzhou and also served as interpreter for a Japanese botany teacher. When the dean Xu Shaoshang refused to kowtow to the new director, he, Shuren and the faculty resigned but were later reinstated. In 1910 Shuren became the dean and a teacher at Shaoxing High School. After the 1911 revolution he was appointed principal of a primary school. That winter he wrote in literary Chinese his first short story, “Remembrances of the Past,” about an incident in his childhood when his lessons were interrupted by local people discussing whether to flee from “hairy rebels.” In 1912 he took a position in the Ministry of Education under Cai Yuanpei. For several years Shuren occupied his spare time copying manuscripts so that he would not be suspected by Yuan Shikai’s agents.

The philologist Qian Xuantong suggested that Zhou Shuren write for New Youth in the common language (baihua). Shuren was reluctant to infect young people with his loneliness. He said it was like there is a closed iron room in which sleeping people were going to suffocate. He asked if he would be doing them a favor by awakening some of them; but Xian replied that those awakened might find a way out. Shuren began using the pen name Lu Xun when he published his next story, “The Diary of a Madman,” in New Youth in May 1918. Inspired by Gogol, this story has been called the first truly modern short story in Chinese literature. After an introduction in literary wenyan, the diary is written in baihua by a paranoid man who fears that almost everyone has become a cannibal. He imagines how they must feel ashamed before real human beings, as reptiles do before those who have evolved into primates. Some think that people always ate human flesh while others know it is wrong but do it anyway. The diarist urges them to change from the bottom of their hearts because in the future cannibals will not be allowed in the world anymore. His final plea is to “save the children.” This macabre story reflects the chaotic violence of the warlord era when Chinese lives were cheap.

Lu Xun’s next story “Kong Yiji” is about a scholar who fails to pass the exams and gradually falls to less ethical means of getting money for food and wine. Finally he is caught stealing by a Selectman who breaks his legs. Kong has to crawl with his hands and can no longer pay his debt. This story reflects on the decline of traditional scholarship that educated some only for the exam system. “Medicine” is another morbid story about a boy with tuberculosis who is given bread soaked in fresh blood from an execution to try to cure his disease. In the final scene his mother mourns at his grave and meets there the mother of a revolutionary martyr who finds a wreath of flowers has been laid. A wretched death in poverty and superstition is compared to the hope of a revolutionary sacrifice. In the autobiographical “Hometown” Lu meets a childhood friend and realizes they have become separated by a social hierarchy, and he questions whether his hope for the future is different than his friend’s idol-worship of a censer and candlestick he took.

In 1919 Lu Xun bought a large house in Beijing where he lived with his mother, wife, brothers Zuoren and Jianren, and their families. The next year he began lecturing on Chinese fiction at Beijing University, and this material was published in 1924 as A Concise History of Chinese Fiction. In 1920 he wrote “The Story of Hair.” Men who did not wear a queue during the Qing dynasty were considered revolutionaries, and women who bobbed their hair even in 1920 were treated as “loose women” and were expelled from school. In “A Passing Season” people in a rural town discuss changes when they hear a rumor that the Emperor is going to assume the throne.

Lu Xun’s most famous work is “The True Story of Ah Q,” which was first serialized as weekly humorous anecdotes in a Beijing newspaper in 1921. After a while Lu Xun got tired of writing them and completed the novella with a tragic ending. Ah Q is a homeless and illiterate man who does odd jobs to survive. Despite his low status he is arrogant and imagines the worst in people. He often suffers from bullies and also mistreats those weaker than himself. He foolishly offends a woman by pinching her and loses his work opportunities and even most of his clothes to survive. Later he arrives back in town with money he has taken from being a look-out for robbers, but he pretends to be a revolutionary to boost his ego and to protect himself. The revolutionaries will not let him participate in their plundering, but ironically he is later paraded as a criminal and executed for being part of their looting. The story portrays the desperate plight of many poor Chinese who try to justify their existence with rationalizations.

After clashing with his brother Zuoren over his Japanese wife in 1923, Lu moved out with his wife and mother. That year Lu Xun published his first collection of fourteen short stories. In his preface he commented that anyone who falls from affluence to poverty will see the true face of the world on the way down.

Lu Xun published his second collection of eleven stories in 1926. “New Year’s Sacrifice” was written in 1924. Sacrifices are made to the Kitchen God to solicit blessings for the family in the next year. The narrator meets Sister Xanglin, a widowed beggar who asks him if a soul exists after the body dies. When told probably, she asks if hell exists too. Lu makes the safe answer that he “can’t say for sure.” She dies the next day. After her husband died, she got a job as a servant and did good work until her mother-in-law dragged her off and forced her to marry again. During the wedding Xanglin tried to resist by cutting her head open; but she was forced into a locked room and gave in to her husband. He died, and their baby was taken and eaten by a wolf. Xanglin was expelled from the house and went back to her former employer; but they considered her so fallen that she was not allowed to help prepare for the sacrifices. She lost her job, became a beggar, and died, a victim of superstition. The narrator ironically concludes that the gods were honored by the sacrifices and would shower their blessings on the people.

“The Loner” is autobiographical, and Lu describes his friend, the bachelor Wei Lianshu, who wailed at his step-grandmother’s funeral. Wei is a teacher; but almost no one understands him, and he loses his job because of his critical journalism. He sells his books and furniture to survive. The narrator has lost his teaching job too and cannot help him. When Wei is about to die from tuberculosis, he takes a job as an aide to a warlord and suddenly adopts a bountiful life-style. When the narrator returns to the town, he learns that Wei has died. He walks away from the funeral and lets out a howl like a wounded animal. “Divorce” was written in November 1925 and describes how powerful men decide the fate of a woman who has complained that her husband is having an affair with a widow.

Between May 1924 and April 1926 Lu Xun wrote 23 prose poems that were collected together as Wild Grass or Weeds. These express Lu’s dark mood and pessimistic view of life. When he began writing these prose poems, Lu was influenced by Kuriyagawa Hakuson’s Symbols of Mental Anguish, which he was translating from Japanese. In May 1925 Lu was on a faculty committee in support of six student rebels who had been expelled from the university. The Minister of Education closed the school, and Lu was dismissed from the Ministry in August but was reinstated in January 1926. In a 1931 preface to Wild Grass Lu explained that when he wrote these, he could not write in plain language because of the oppressive warlord regime in Beijing. In that preface Lu described his motives for writing some of them.

“My Lost Love” was written to satirize the poems
about lost loves which were then the vogue;
“Revenge” was written out of revulsion
at the number of bystanders in society;
“Hope” out of astonishment at the passivity of young people.
“Such a Fighter” was my reaction to those
men of letters and scholars who abetted the warlords.
“The Blighted Leaf” was written for my friends
who wanted to preserve me.
After the Duan Qirui government
fired on unarmed demonstrators,
I wrote “Amid Pale Bloodstains,”
at a time when I had left home and gone into hiding.6
This last-mentioned prose poem is presented here as an outstanding example.

  At present the creator is still a weakling.
  In secret, he causes heaven and earth to change,
but dares not destroy this world.
In secret, he causes living creatures to die,
but dares not preserve their dead bodies.
In secret, he causes mankind to shed blood,
but dares not keep the bloodstains fresh forever.
In secret, he causes mankind to suffer pain,
but dares not let them remember it forever.
  He provides for his kind only, the weaklings among men;
using deserted ruins and lonely tombs
to set off rich mansions;
using time to dilute pain and bloodstains;
each day pouring out one cup
of slightly sweetened bitter wine—
not too little nor too much—to cause slight intoxication.
This he gives to mankind
so that those who drink it can weep and sing,
seem both sober and drunk, conscious and unconscious,
appear willing to live on and willing to die.
He must make all creatures willing to live on.
He has not the courage yet to destroy mankind.
  A few deserted ruins and a few lonely tombs
are scattered over the earth, reflected by pale bloodstains;
and there men taste their own vague pain and sorrow,
as well as that of others.
They will not spurn it, however,
thinking it better than nothing;
and they call themselves “victims of heaven”
to justify their tasting this pain and sorrow.
In apprehensive silence they await the coming of
new pain and sorrow, new suffering which appalls them,
which they none the less thirst to meet.
  All these are the loyal subjects of the creator.
This is what he wants them to be.
  A rebellious fighter has arisen from mankind, who,
standing erect, sees through all the deserted ruins
and lonely tombs of the past and the present.
He remembers all the intense and unending agony;
he faces squarely the whole welter of clotted blood;
he understands all that is dead and all that is living,
as well as all that is being born and all that is yet unborn.
He sees through the creator’s game.
And he will arise to resuscitate or else destroy mankind,
these loyal subjects of the creator.
  The creator, the weakling, hides himself in shame.
Then heaven and earth change color
in the eyes of the fighter.7
Finally in “The Awakening” in April 1926 Lu wrote about the students seeing planes on their bombing missions flying over Beijing during the fighting between the warlords of the Fengtian and Zhili cliques, which forced Lu to leave Beijing.

In 1925 the student Xu Guangping began writing to Lu, and they became lovers. He was especially radicalized in March 1926 when some of his students were killed by police for protesting in front of the Government House. His critical essays got him put on a list of fifty radicals, and he fled from Beijing with Xu. She took a teaching position in Guangzhou while Lu accepted Lin Yutang’s offer to teach literature at Xiamen (Amoy) University.

Nationalist-Communist Civil War 1927-1937
Notes
1. Lo Chia-lun 336, “New Tide of the World Today,” p. 22 quoted in The May Fourth Movement by Chow Tse-tsung, p. 61.

2. Hu Shih 205, Diary, IX, 566 quoted in The May Fourth Movement by Chow Tse-tsung, p. 28.

3. “A Preliminary Discussion of Literary Form” by Hu Shih in Sources of Chinese Tradition, p. 820.

4. “Constructive Literary Revolution” by Hu Shih in Sources of Chinese Tradition, p. 825.

5. The May Fourth Movement by Chow Tse-tsung, p. 174.

6. Wild Grass by Lu Hsun, p. 1-2.

7. Ibid., p. 64-65.

Copyright © 2007 by Sanderson Beck
This chapter has been published in the book EAST ASIA 1800-1949.
For ordering information, please click here.

Qing Decline 1799-1875
Qing Dynasty Fall 1875-1912
Republican China in Turmoil 1912-1926
Nationalist-Communist Civil War 1927-1937
China at War 1937-1949
Korea 1800-1949
Japan's Modernization 1800-1894
Imperial Japan 1894-1937
Japan's War and Defeat 1937-1949
Philippines to 1949
Pacific Islands to 1949
Summary and Evaluation
Bibliography
ETHICS OF CIVILIZATION Index
BECK index

BECK index
                                     Republican China in Turmoil 1912-1926
by Sanderson Beck
Yuan Shikai's Presidency 1912-16
China under Warlords 1916-19
May Fourth Movement of 1919
China's Struggle for Power 1920-24
Sun Yat-sen and Guomindang 1920-24
May 30th Movement of 1925-26
Lu Xun's Stories
This chapter has been published in the book EAST ASIA 1800-1949.
For ordering information, please click here.

Yuan Shikai's Presidency 1912-16
Qing Dynasty Fall 1875-1912
Yuan Shikai was born into a family of officials in 1859, and he purchased an official title in 1880. He rose in the army and had more than a dozen wives and many children. After the 1895 defeat by Japan he trained officers in Korea, where he became resident. In 1898 Yuan made the critical decision to stay loyal to Empress Cixi, dooming the reforms of Kang and Emperor Guangxu. As governor of Shandong he disobeyed imperial orders by punishing criminal Boxers, but he refused to march on Beijing in early summer of 1900. He was governor-general of the capital province of Zhili 1901-07, and he had started schools for self-government by 1906; but his power was weakened when he was transferred to Beijing the next year. After Cixi died in November 1908, Yuan was quickly pushed into retirement. During the 1911 revolution he was summoned by the Qing regime and cleverly negotiated more power for himself with them and with the revolutionaries. He insisted on keeping the capital at Beijing and gained more power by getting the court to recognize him as the successor of the abdicating Emperor Puyi. Sun Yat-sen offered to let Yuan replace himself as president of the new republic as long as he accepted the republican constitution and parliament. Yuan Shikai was inaugurated as provisional president on March 10, 1912 and the Nanjing government was dissolved on April 1.

Yuan Shikai refused to pay Huang Xing’s 50,000 troops, and so they had to disband. After Yuan dismissed the governor-general of Zhili in June without his countersignature, Premier Tang Shaoyi resigned along with four Revolutionary Alliance cabinet ministers. The next premier, the diplomat Lu Zhengxiang, was so ineffective that he was impeached by the Parliament. Internal Affairs minister Zhao Bingjun became premier and made the cabinet compliant. Yuan claimed he had 800,000 men under arms in order to negotiate loans for demobilization. Yuan invited Sun Yat-sen to Beijing, and after many hours of meetings he appointed him director of railways on September 9; Huang Xing was put in charge of the Guangzhou-Hankou and Sichuan railways. Sun appointed his old friend Charlie Soong (Song Jiashu) treasurer and hired his oldest daughter Ailing as his English secretary. Hu Hanmin would not cooperate with Yuan, and with the activists Zhu Zhixin, Liao Zhongkai, and Chen Jionming he formed a revolutionary government in Guangdong. They applied Henry George’s theories to sell land, and many merchants and gentry fled to Hong Kong or Macao.

The Chinese Socialist Party had been founded by Jiang Kanghu with a small study group in Shanghai in November 1911, but after the revolution it grew rapidly to 400,000 members. At their second annual congress in October 1912 Sun Yat-sen spoke for twelve hours over three days. Anarchists interested in vegetarianism, chastity, and self-sacrifice opposed his efforts to politicize the party, and the split caused a rapid decline. Yuan Shikai banned the Socialist party in the summer of 1913.

The election laws had been promulgated in August. The new Chinese constitution called for a Senate and a House of Representatives, and elections were scheduled for December 1912. The Revolutionary Alliance led by Sun Yat-sen and Huang Xing absorbed four small parties and founded the National People’s Party (Guomindang). Song Jiaoren had drafted the new constitution, and he became the leader of the party and appealed to the gentry and merchants by moderating policies and deleting socialism and equality of the sexes. Liang Qichao became chairman of the small Democratic Party (Minzhudang), and after the election they merged with the Unification Party and the Republican Party to form the Progressive Party. About forty million men over 21 years of age with property worth $500 or who paid at least $2 in taxes with an elementary school certificate were eligible to vote. Suffragist Tang Junying led a demonstration at the National Council in Nanjing to demand equal rights for women and the vote, but they were evicted. The Guomindang was the most organized party, and they won 269 of the 596 seats in the House and 123 of the 274 Senate seats. While the Parliament was adjourned in January 1913, Yuan promulgated rules for provincial government that aroused protests. Guomindang leader Song Jiaoren began criticizing President Yuan Shikai publicly, demanding a party cabinet.

On March 20, 1913 Song Jiaoren was shot twice while boarding a train and died two days later. The evidence led to Premier Zhao and the cabinet. The assassin died mysteriously in prison, and Zhao refused to answer a subpoena, claiming illness. He was made governor-general of Zhili, but he died of poisoning on February 17, 1914. Others involved in the case were also killed, and no one was convicted. Vice President Li Yuanhong refused to join an anti-Yuan conspiracy. Before the Parliament convened in April, Yuan asked Americans to pray in their churches for China. The next month the United States became the first nation to grant Yuan’s government full diplomatic recognition. Yuan arranged a loan of £25 million from the Five-Power Banking Consortium on April 26 despite massive opposition by the Parliament. Sun Yat-sen and Huang Xing urged them to reject the loan, but acting Premier Duan Qirui surrounded the Parliament building with troops. This money helped Yuan defeat the impending revolution.

The Nationalist (Guomindang) party impeached the government in May. Sun Yat-sen decided that Yuan had to be replaced and tried to negotiate an alliance with Japan to support a second revolution. Yuan dismissed the governors of Jiangxi, Anhui, and Guangdong, and in early July they declared independence, followed by four more provinces within a month. Yuan sent 10,000 troops from Beijing to Hubei. Fighting began in Jiangxi on July 12, but the revolutionary commander Huang Xing abandoned Nanjing on July 29. Sun Yat-sen went to Japan on August 8, soon followed by Huang and other leaders. The Chinese navy in Shanghai with fresh funds sided with Beijing, and Yuan’s forces defeated the revolution by September. General Zhang Xun’s forces, who still had Manchu queues, took Nanjing on September 1 and spent two weeks pillaging, raping, and burning. The damage was estimated at about $20 million. British minister John Jordan supplied Yuan with loans and munitions, and he banned Sun and Huang Xing from Hong Kong. Yuan’s generals in the Yangzi Valley became warlords, and his imperial troops occupied provinces that had not even revolted. Tens of thousands of people who had participated in the uprising were punished, and thousands were executed for sedition. In Hunan under Tang Xiangming about 5,000 people were executed in 1914.

Customs dues were being collected by foreigners who were keeping them to pay the interest on China’s foreign debts, and so the Yuan government was running a deficit of 13 million yuan per month in 1913. Yuan spent money building and improving prisons and to make elementary education free and compulsory for boys. He objected to reducing the Confucian education and insisted that the entire book of Mencius be taught in elementary school. In 1912, the first year of the republic, the number of schools in China increased to 87,272 with 2,933,387 students including 141,430 girls. Yuan tried to suppress the opium trade and smoking, but opium dealers were protected in foreign areas.

The British backed Tibet, and on October 7, 1913 Yuan Shikai acknowledged Tibet’s autonomy. That day England recognized the Chinese republic. Japan and Russia also gained concessions before they extended diplomatic recognition. On October 6 Yuan’s soldiers and police compelled the new Parliament to vote three times until they had elected him president for a five-year term. He was inaugurated four days later. On October 31 the Parliament promulgated a constitution with a cabinet system to check the president’s powers, but four days later Yuan denounced the Guomindang as seditious, dissolved the party, and evicted their members from Parliament. After their affiliates were searched, 438 Guomindang party members were banned from Parliament. Sun Yat-sen fled once again to Japan in November. Yuan in December ordered that magistrates had to pass a qualifying examination on Chinese laws, treaties, customs, literature, and local administration.

Parliament did not have a quorum and was dissolved on January 4, 1914 as Yuan annulled the 1912 constitution. The next month he also ordered the provincial assemblies and local governments dissolved. About forty specialists on finance met and recommended a silver currency and minting a national dollar to replace foreign coins and the provincial “dragon dollars.” All of China was ordered to worship formally Heaven and Confucius. Yuan also called a national conference attended by 66 delegates, and on May 1 they replaced the provisional constitution with the Constitutional Compact that gave President Yuan extraordinary powers with ten-year terms that allowed re-election. The two years of press freedom that had allowed nearly five hundred newspapers to reach a circulation of 42 million ended when censorship was imposed with severe penalties. In the spring of 1914 Yuan promulgated regulations to give civil governors more authority in the provinces so that the military would be less likely to revolt. Yuan liked bureaucracy and instituted examinations that emphasized bureaucratic skills. He ordered prosecution of official corruption, revived the Censorate, and instituted a special court for judging official crimes.

On July 8, 1914 Sun Yat-sen formed the secret Revolutionary Party (Gemingdang). Those who joined before and during the revolution were to have more political privileges, and everyone had to sign and attach their fingerprints to an oath of loyalty to Sun. Only a few hundred activists in Japan joined the party. Chen Qimei emerged as a leader, and he was friends with the Shanghai businessman Li Houyi and the millionaire Zhang Jingjiang, who was connected to Du Yuesheng, leader of the Green Gang. Chen also brought the young Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek), who was wanted for armed robbery and had assassinated Chen’s rival Tao Chengzhang in his hospital bed on February 15, 1912. Sun supported the bandit White Wolf (Bai Lang), who led rebel troops in southern Henan and Anhui before gaining a base in Shanxi; but White Wolf died in August, and hundreds of thousands of imperial troops were used to defeat them by late 1914.

Great Britain had large investments in China and increased them to $607 million by 1914. By then Germany, Russia, Japan, France, the United States, and others had a total of one billion dollars invested in China. They wanted to protect their assets and guarded the passage between Beijing and the sea. When the European war began in August 1914, loans became difficult; but Japan increased theirs. On August 15 Japan gave Germany one month to transfer the territory of Jiaozhou that it had leased from China in 1898. Japan sent troops to China on September 2, and they occupied Qingdao in Shandong on November 7.

In January 1915 Japan presented China with its Twenty-one Demands that included control of Shandong, Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, the southeast coast, and the Yangzi Valley. They also wanted joint administration of the Han-Ye-Ping Coal and Iron Company, nonalienation of Chinese ports and islands to other powers, Japanese police and economic advisors in the north, and more commercial rights in Fujian province. Newspapers opposed the demands, and the public was aroused. Nineteen governors urged Yuan Shikai to refuse. Tens of thousands met in the International Settlement in Shanghai on March 18 and resolved to begin a boycott of Japan. One week later Yuan Shikai ordered the boycott abandoned, but the boycott spread. On May 7 Japan gave China an ultimatum to accept the territorial concessions but not the other demands. Yuan agreed two days later and signed the treaty on May 25 without consent of the Parliament, which had been dissolved. Many Chinese students left Japan, and merchants organized a boycott of Japanese products. Yuan ordered all the provincial governments to prohibit the boycott, and so the campaign changed to encouraging the use of native goods.

Sun Yat-sen became unpopular during this time because he was still trying to negotiate with Japan in order to overthrow Yuan. Sun fell in love with his secretary Song Ailing; but her Christian father, Charlie Soong, would not approve the marriage because Sun was already married. Her younger sister Song Qingling became Sun’s secretary, and they fell in love and eloped on October 25, 1915, causing a scandal among Christians because of bigamy and among Confucians for not having her father’s permission. Their marriage was happy, and Qingling became a respected figure, eventually being honored as the vice president of the People’s Republic of China until her death in 1980.

Yuan made Confucianism China’s state religion and gradually tried to give himself imperial authority. On August 21, 1915 Yang Du and the Peace-Planning Society began a campaign to make Yuan emperor, and the famous translator Yan Fu was listed as one of the six directors without his permission. Liang Qichao published an article opposing a return to the monarchy, arguing against changing the basic form of the state and explaining that the republican revolution had destroyed respect for the monarchy. As the revolt against it developed, he also argued that Yuan was unsuitable. In November the National People’s Representative Assembly of 1,993 people voted unanimously to approve Yuan being emperor. In Shanghai on November 10 his commander was assassinated, and a warship was seized on December 5. Cai E escaped from detention on November 11 and organized the National Protection Army in Yunnan to defend the republic. Yuan accepted the petition to be emperor on December 12 and began planning for his inauguration on January 1, 1916 by ordering a 40,000-piece porcelain dinner set, a large jade seal, and two costly imperial robes.

Protests spread throughout China, and on December 23 the Yunnan military leader Cai E gave Yuan two days to cancel his monarchist plan. Two days later Yunnan declared independence, and 10,000 soldiers began marching. Guizhou declared independence on December 27, and Yuan postponed his enthronement. Cai E invaded Sichuan in January, and two leading generals declined to go after his National Protection Army. On March 7, 1916 Japan declared that Yuan should be removed. Guangxi declared independence that month, and another anti-monarchist army formed in Shandong. Sun Yat-sen raised more than 1,400,000 yen, and Cen Chunxuan collected another million. On March 20 Feng Guozhang and others demanded that Yuan cancel the monarchy, and he did so two days later. Nonetheless Guangdong and Zhejiang declared independence in April. Kang Youwei advised Yuan to resign and leave the country. Shaanxi, Sichuan, and Hunan announced their independence in May.  Yuan’s assassins killed Chen Qimei on May 18 while he was trying to organize an insurrection in Shanghai. Yuan Shikai became ill and died of uremia on June 6, 1916.

China under Warlords 1916-19
Vice President Li Yuanhong became president on June 7 and recalled the old Parliament of 1913, but some argued that the terms of these members had expired and debated which constitution should be effective. Li appointed Duan Qirui premier and Feng Guozhang vice president. Duan had opposed Yuan’s attempt to become emperor but backed the 1914 constitution and the senior commanders from the Beiyang army. In October 1916 the French annexed the Chinese quarter of Laoxikai in Tianjin; when this provoked mass meetings, a boycott, and a strike, the French withdrew.

In 1916 Chinese laborers were recruited in Shandong to help the war effort in Europe. Volunteers were given twenty Chinese dollars when they embarked, and their families in China were to receive ten dollars a month. After passing severe medical exams and being disinfected, they had dog tags riveted to their wrists. About 200,000 Chinese worked for the Allies in France, Flanders, and elsewhere, and nearly 2,000 died overseas. After the Germans sank a boat in the Mediterranean, killing 543, Chinese recruits were shipped east, crossed Canada in a train, and were convoyed across the Atlantic. They worked ten hours every day except for Chinese holidays and were not in combat. The YMCA helped them, and they sent 50,000 letters home each month.

The military governors (dujun) were called warlords by the  Europeans, and they held meetings at Xuzhou. At their third meeting in January 1917 they recommended dissolving Parliament. They also wanted to restore Confucianism as the state religion. Japan loaned Duan five million yen in January, and in March the Parliament broke diplomatic relations with Germany; but President Li Yuanhong opposed declaring war. The movement for neutrality was supported by chambers of commerce and Sun Yat-sen, who wrote to Lloyd George that the Chinese were not concerned with European quarrels. Duan persuaded Parliament to break off diplomatic relations with Germany in March. He declared war himself on May 14 and surrounded the Parliament with partisans demanding a war declaration. Li dismissed Duan on May 23, but nine provinces supported Duan by declaring independence. Anhui’s military governor Zhang Xun brought 5,000 soldiers to Beijing on June 7 to mediate and demanded the Parliament be dissolved. One week later Li complied.

In Shanghai the naval commander sent the fleet to Guangzhou (Canton) and declared independence on June 25, 1917. Sun Yat-sen had organized a government in Guangzhou with 130 members from the Parliament, and he got two million Chinese dollars from Germany to buy the army and navy. Yet the Guangzhou government declared war against Germany on September 13. Feng Guozhang urged Beijing to restore the 1912 constitution. General Zhang Xun led his army from the Yangzi provinces to Beijing and restored the 11-year-old Emperor Puyi on July 1. The monarchist Kang Youwei was invited to the court and drafted numerous reforms but was not given much access. Zhang replaced Cao Kun as governor-general of Zhili. Duan and Cao gathered their Beiyang forces and drove Zhang’s army out of Beijing on July 12. Puyi was deposed again, and President Li Yuanhong ordered that he receive a modern education from Western tutors. Li resigned on July 14, and Duan resumed his position as prime minister.

Feng Guozhang became acting president on August 1, 1917. A re-elected Parliament convened on August 12 and declared war on Germany and on Austria-Hungary two days later. This enabled Duan to negotiate another 145 million yen in loans. He sent troops to fight the revolutionaries in the south; but President Feng wanted to avoid a civil war, and the military campaign was sabotaged. After declaring war, China seized German property and ships and took over their concessions in Qingdao, Tianjin, and Hankou. The Allies demanded that these should remain international concessions, and Duan’s regime agreed. Western investors controlled the customs, salt tax, and the post office, and the revenues were used to make China’s debt payments first. Usually none of what was left went to dissenting southern governments. China’s annual debt payments were estimated at £10,800,000. Japan extended eight more loans to China in 1917 and eleven in 1918 in return for the Bank of Korea, Bank of Taiwan, and the Industrial Bank of Japan getting contracts for mines, forests, and railways in northeast China, the telegraph, and revenues from the Grand Canal and the stamp duty. In the next year Japan lent Duan 140 million yen ($70 million).

Sun Yat-sen returned to Guangzhou in July 1917, and 250 of the old members of parliament elected him grand marshal. However, Europeans cut off funds for his supporters. The revolutionary Tang Jiyao had opposed the monarchical movement in 1915 in Yunnan, and he wanted to control Guizhou and Sichuan. In 1917 he invaded the latter as far as Chengdu. Lu Rongting led the Guangxi militarists who also controlled Guangdong. Lu declared Guangxi-Guangdong independent in order to lift the bans on taxing opium and gambling. An international agreement made in 1911 to make growing and trading opium illegal after the end of 1917 was ignored in China, and many warlords made the opium business a major source of revenue, especially in Guangdong, Fujian, Henan, Anhui, Guizhou, Shaanxi, and Sichuan. Customs seizures of foreign opium increased from 26,676 pounds in 1918 to 48,375 pounds in 1919 and 96,627 pounds in 1920.

In a treaty made on February 20, 1917 Russia recognized Japan’s 21 Demands, and Japan acknowledged Russia’s recent gains in Outer Mongolia. The next day Britain agreed to Japan’s claims in Shandong. Japan also made secret agreements with France and Italy that were not revealed until January 1919. On November 2, 1917 the United States signed the Lansing-Ishii Agreement recognizing Japan’s special position in China. When Duan called a new provisional parliament on November 10 instead of the old one, Sun Yat-sen organized a military government in Guangzhou and a Constitution Protection Movement. Feng Guozhang’s Zhili clique controlled northern and central China, and Duan resigned on November 22.

In February 1918 the general Feng Yuxiang sent a circular telegram from Henan with a peace proposal. Feng had become a Methodist in 1913, and his troops marched singing Christian hymns and patriotic songs. He believed in Confucian principles of moral politics and tried to rule his areas justly. About 1915 he wrote the short Book of the Spirit with admonitions and aphorisms on morality, patriotism, and military discipline, and in 1926 he added a chapter on revolution. Feng established a Military Training Corps at Changde in Hunan from 1915 to 1917, and he excelled in training troops. He described these years as his most enthusiastic Christian period. He encouraged his soldiers to pray and to attend Bible classes and religious services for which he employed Chinese preachers. He encouraged baptism, but it was not required and did not affect promotion. Feng did not allow his men to smoke opium or tobacco, drink alcohol, use obscene language, gamble, or visit brothels, which he closed. While governing Henan for half a year in 1922, Feng Yuxiang’s aims included aiding war victims, eliminating oppressive taxes, arresting corrupt officials, establishing factories to give work to the unemployed, repairing roads and irrigation, instituting free education, and prohibiting opium, gambling, prostitution, and foot-binding.

On March 7, 1918 Duan’s chief of staff, Xu Shuzheng, organized the powerful Anfu Club with support from Finance minister Cao Rulin, and they began bribing members of parliament. Duan gained control of the army and became premier again on March 23, forcing Feng Guozhang to retire. The new Soviet government revealed and renounced the secret agreements that Russia had made with Japan to take Manchuria and Mongolia from China. On March 25 Duan accepted the Sino-Japanese Military Mutual Assistance Conventions, which were kept secret until February 1919. On May 18, 1918 Eugene Chen published the editorial “Selling Out China” in the Beijing Gazette that exposed the negotiations and called Duan a traitor; Chen was imprisoned, and the newspaper was suppressed. At that time China had 330 newspapers.

On May 5, 1918 the three thousand Chinese students in Japan met and resolved to return to China. The next day Japanese police arrested 46 Chinese students. In Beijing more than two thousand college students protested the military conventions by going to the office of President Feng Guozhang on May 21. Student demonstrations also were organized in Tianjin, Shanghai, Fuzhou, and other cities. The Chinese government ordered the students to return to Japan, but many went to Shanghai where they founded the Save-the-Nation Daily. On June 30 they founded the Young China Association to rejuvenate the Chinese spirit, study “true theories,” expand education and commercial reforms, and overturn declining customs. When Premier Duan Qirui used all of the 120-million yen Nishihara loan for military and political expenses even though it was intended for industrial development, 2,000 students demonstrated outside the President’s residence.

Liang Qichao, who had been Yuan’s minister of Justice, became Finance minister in 1918, and his followers were called the Research clique. The Anfu clique was led by Duan and other Beiyang officers, and they conducted elections in two stages. After each provinces’ electors were chosen, they met in June and July to elect the Parliament. In the second stage especially the candidates bought the votes for the House for $150 to $500 and paid much more for the Senate. Out of 470 seats the Anfu Club controlled 342, the Communications clique between 50 and 80, and the Research clique about 20 seats. The Anfu caucus was run by those who organized it and controlled the money. Xu Shichang had been Yuan Shikai’s secretary, and he was a member of the Anfu clique. The dujun association recommended him, and the Parliament elected him president unanimously on September 4.

After 72,000 Japanese troops invaded Soviet Siberia in July, President Xu Shichang sent a Chinese army to help them. China’s warlord government accepted a 20-million-yen loan from Japan in September and granted them the right to build two railways in Shandong. Duan resigned on October 10, and Qian Nengxun was appointed acting premier. After the European war ended on November 11, the Chinese government proclaimed a three-day holiday; thousands paraded in Beijing. On November 16 a truce was ordered in the north-south civil war.

Lu Rongting and his Black Flags of Guangdong and Guangxi forced Sun Yat-sen to abandon his military government that month. Sun resigned and fled to Shanghai, where in August 1919 he founded the periodical Reconstruction (Jianshe) and renamed his party again the Chinese Nationalist Party in October. In 1919 a movement by the Cantonese elected Wu Tingfang governor, but the Guangxi clique cancelled the results. In Sichuan the Anfu leaders were overcome in 1918 by the warlord Xiong Kewu, who governed there for more than thirty years. Tan Yankai became governor of Hunan in 1911, and he fought the Anfu clique from 1916 to 1918; but in 1919 the Anfu warlord Zhang Jingyao regained Hunan.

Yuan Shikai had appointed Zhang Zuolin governor of Mukden. He managed to take over Heilongjiang in 1917 and Jilin in 1919, giving him control of three provinces in Manchuria. Zhang’s Fengtian clique supported the Anfu group and mortgaged the forests of Jilin for loans from Japan. The Anfu leaders Ni Sichong in Anhui and Wang Zhanyuan in Hubei were especially unpopular, and they were opposed by President Feng Guozhang’s Zhili clique that included generals Cao Kun and Wu Peifu in the Yangzi Valley.

The war years stimulated the Chinese to develop their own industries, and their exports increased greatly. By 1920 machines were producing more than three billion cigarettes that were marketed with modern advertising. The number of Chinese banks increased, though some warlords caused chaos by issuing so many paper notes. H. H. Kung (Kong Xiangxi) had married Charlie Soong’s daughter Song Ailing in 1914, and these two related families built up a financial empire. Money was appropriated for railways, but some of it was lost to corrupt warlords. Foreign investors still controlled 77% of the shipping, 45% of cotton spindles, and 78% of coal mining. Although China’s import surplus was low during the European war, it went from 16 million taels in 1919 to 220 million taels in 1920. More mills were added, and China’s flour exports were forty times higher in 1920 than they were in 1914. Peasant landowners were pushed off their lands, and rents rose. Warlords collected more taxes, and fewer landowners held more land.

May Fourth Movement of 1919
In 1912 the famous translator Yan Fu became the first chancellor of the modernized Beijing University, which was completely funded by the government. In December 1916 he was succeeded by the dean Cai Yuanpei, who had founded the Work and Study Movement in 1912. Sun Yat-sen had made Cai his minister of education in 1912, but he resigned after Yuan Shikai became president. By 1917 more than ten million Chinese had received modern educations. Cai emphasized research with scientific methods, a broader curriculum than was needed for government recruitment, and academic freedom. He co-founded the China Society for the Promotion of New Education in January 1919, and by then Beijing University had a faculty of 202 professors teaching 2,228 students.

Chen Duxiu left Japan in protest of the 21 Demands. In September 1915 he founded New Youth, and he became the dean of Beijing University in 1917. Chen recommended that the Chinese be independent, progressive, aggressive, cosmopolitan, utilitarian, and scientific. He criticized Confucianism for its superfluous ceremonies, meek compliance, making family more important than the individual, upholding inequality, subservient filial piety, and orthodoxy that discouraged free thinking. He favored Western innovations and praised Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy. Li Dazhao became head librarian at Beijing University in February 1918, and in June he published a favorable description of the Russian Revolution. A study group met in his office and became the Marxist Research Society. Cai Yuanpei formulated the slogan “Work is sacred,” and Li and Chen started the Weekly Critic in December to discuss national and world politics. In the first issue of New Tide on January 1, 1919 Luo Jialun opposed reform by violence and wrote,

We would rather worship
George Washington than Peter the Great,
Benjamin Franklin than Bismarck,
Karl Marx’s economics that Richelieu’s public finance,
and Thomas Edison’s inventions
than Alfred Krupp’s manufacture.1
Li Dazhao’s students began sending out lecturers to educate  people. Li emphasized that the society based on force should be replaced by one based on love. Chen was forced to resign as dean in March. New Youth came out with a special issue on Marxism on May 1, 1919 that included Li’s essay, “My Marxist Views.”

Hu Shi studied philosophy with John Dewey at Columbia University, where he earned his Ph.D. In February 1915 he wrote in his diary, “It is not a disgrace for a nation to lack a navy or to lack an army! It is only a disgrace for a nation to lack public libraries, museums,  and art galleries.”2 In 1917 Cai Yuanpei appointed Hu a professor, and he became a leader in the movement to write in plain language (baihua) that Huang Yuanyong had proposed in 1915. Hu summarized the literary reforms in the following eight guidelines:

1. Write with substance.
2. Do not imitate the ancients.
3. Emphasize grammar.
4. Reject melancholy.
5. Eliminate old clichés.
6. Do not use allusions.
7. Do not use couplets and parallelisms.
8. Do not avoid popular expressions.3
In 1918 Hu summarized this literary revolution in the following four statements:

1. Speak only when you have something to say.
2. Speak what you want to say
  and say it in the way you want to say it.
3. Speak what is your own and not that of someone else.
4. Speak in the language of the time in which you live.4
This change from using classical Chinese (wenyan) has been compared to the Renaissance when Europeans began writing in their national languages rather than in Latin. In January 1918 New Youth began publishing all its articles in baihua, and the government adopted baihua in the schools in 1920. Hu published a study of the family in the famous novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin. He published a complete translation of A Doll’s House in a special 1918 issue of New Youth on the plays of Henrik Ibsen. Hu Shi published his Outline of the History of Chinese Philosophy in February 1919. He also criticized Confucianism and exalted Western ideas such as democracy and science. Hu favored critical thinking and problem solving rather than the idle discussion of “-isms.” He wanted reforms to eliminate poverty, sickness, illiteracy, corruption, and disorder.

Many of the young radicals were anarchists. In 1913 Liu Sifu had founded the Consciousness Society in Guangzhou. They learned Esperanto and recommended abstaining from twelve things—meat, wine, tobacco, servants, marriage, surnames, official positions, rickshaws, running for parliament, political parties, military service, and religion. However, Liu died of tuberculosis in 1915, and his group dissolved.

On November 17, 1918 in Beijing 6,000 Chinese had celebrated the Western democracies’ victory over German militarism, and many hoped that Woodrow Wilson’s ideal of self-determination would prevail. China’s 62 delegates to the Versailles peace conference included officials from Beijing and from Sun Yat-sen’s government in Guangzhou. Their demands for China’s self-determination and the removal of foreign controls were backed by the press, chambers of commerce, and student associations. However, the peace conference focused only on issues related to the war, and the only Chinese issue was Shandong. The diplomat V. K.  Wellington Koo explained that Japan forced China to sign the treaty of 1914, that Shandong is holy land for China as the birthplace of Confucius and Mencius, and that China had a right to the restoration of Qingdao based on the principle in international law that treaties can be revised after the conditions on which they were based have changed. Koo pointed out that the loss of Qingdao would harm China economically because it was the best harbor they had. He argued that the Chinese Parliament had never ratified Japan’s 21 Demands and that when China entered the war in 1917, these and the treaties with Germany were made null and void. However, the Japanese pointed to the agreement Beijing made in 1918 with Japan, and on April 30, 1919 Wilson, Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau decided to grant Shandong to Japan despite the latter’s promise to restore it to China. Beijing’s daily China Press published the report on May 1.

Several hundred students from thirteen colleges in the Beijing area met on May 4, 1919 and passed five resolutions to send telegrams protesting the Shandong settlement of the Versailles treaty, to awaken the Chinese people to their desperate plight, to hold a mass meeting in Beijing, to form a Beijing student union, and to demonstrate against the Versailles treaty that afternoon. Some anarchists planned to burn Cao Rulin’s house, but they kept their plans secret from the others. At least three thousand students gathered in Tiananmen Square and marched toward the foreign legations to present petitions on the Paris treaty. Signs protested foreign interference and condemned Chinese traitors. The British, French, and Italian ministers were absent, and letters were left. At the home of the foreign minister Cao Rulin five students broke in by a window and opened the front door. Students poured in and beat up the politician Zhang Zongxiang, who had agreed to give up the rights in Shandong to the Japanese. Cao had escaped with a servant, but they set his house on fire. Most of the police had been neutral, but now they arrested 32 demonstrators. Orders came from above, and a fight between police and demonstrators resulted in one student dying. Martial law was declared in the area.

The student union formed on May 5 in Beijing included middle-school and high-school students as well as those from colleges and universities. China’s President Xu Shichang issued two orders to discipline the students in the next three days. Cai Yuanpei was pressured to resign on May 8. Minister of Education Fu Zengxiang left office on May 12, and two days later the Government ordered force used against the students. In the next five days student demonstrations occurred in major cities, and student unions were formed. Beijing students from all eighteen colleges and universities went on strike on May 19 and presented six demands to the President. In the next three weeks demonstrations erupted in more than two hundred cities. Students disobeyed an order to return to classes on May 25, and on June 1 President Xu declared martial law in Beijing. When middle schools and above began a strike on June 1 in Wuhan, the Hubei governor Wang Jianyuan sent troops to guard the schools; about a hundred students lecturing in the streets were wounded and arrested. In June student delegates from Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Tianjin, and Japan met in Shanghai and formed the Student Union of the Republic of China.

On June 2 in Beijing seven students were arrested. On the next day more than nine hundred students went out in groups of fifty to lecture in the streets, and by the end of June 4 about 1,150 students had been arrested. Education minister Yuan Xitao resigned after twenty days in office. On the next day more than a thousand students from girls schools marched to the President’s palace to demand free speech and the release of the imprisoned students. That day a commercial strike began in Shanghai to support the 13,000 students on strike, and within a week it grew to at least 60,000 workers in forty factories. The acting minister of Education was replaced, and learning of the Shanghai strike, he withdrew the troops and police from the school buildings.

Hu Renyuan was appointed temporary chancellor of Beijing University. When 1,473 merchants, workers, students, journalists, and others in the Federation of All Organizations of China met in the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce on June 6, they requested the Beijing government annul the unjust treaties and punish the authorities responsible. They noted that the strikes were most peaceful and asked friendly countries to uphold justice and give them spiritual support. That day merchants closed their shops in Nanjing. About 2,400 students on strike were attacked by troops, and in the next three days strikes by merchants spread along the Yangzi River. Four officials tried to persuade the students to leave the Beijing jail on June 7; they refused but marched out in triumph the next day.

On June 10 the hated Cao Rulin, Zhang Zongxiang, and Lu Zongyu were allowed to resign. Chen Duxiu distributed pamphlets demanding the resignation of the Anfu government, disbanding the Beijing police, and free speech; he was arrested the next day and detained for three months. On June 12 the Government released the other students, dismissed the three hated officials, and announced they would not sign the Treaty of Versailles. That day the merchants’ and workers’ strikes ended. Premier Qian resigned on June 13. Chinese students surrounded the quarters of the Chinese delegates in Paris with a continuous vigil, and so none of them went to the treaty-signing ceremony on June 28. Although China rejected the peace treaty with Germany, they signed one with Austria-Hungary; thus China became a member of the League of Nations.

On July 22 the Student Union of China declared the student strikes over. On July 25 Leo Karakhan as the Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs signed a manifesto that renounced all the factories that Russians had built or owned in China and all the extraterritorial rights of Russians in China. Chancellor Hu Renyuan was removed on July 30, and Cai Yuanpei resumed his position at Beijing University on September 20. Leaders founded the review Young China, and many other journals and clubs formed such as Emancipation and Reconstruction in Shanghai and the Xiang River Review in Changsha by the Hunan Students’ Association. Tracts, banners, and pamphlets of the movement were written in the vernacular baihua.

The “Manifesto of New Youth Magazine” was written by Chen Duxiu and approved by other editors in December. They opposed warlords and plutocrats and wanted to get rid of antiquated ideas. They aimed for a new era that is “honest, progressive, positive, free, equal, creative, beautiful, kind, peaceful, full of universal love and mutual assistance, and pleasant labor.”5 They advocated women’s rights, and the first females were admitted into Beijing University in 1920. The Women’s Association of Hunan was founded in February 1921 to work for equal rights in property inheritance, voting, office-holding, education, work, and choice in marriage.

Mao Zedong had founded the New People’s Study Society in Hunan in April 1918, and they formed a Communist cell. In December 1919 the Society for the Study of Socialism began in Beijing and other cities. Socialist clubs grew, and new journals were published. The Beijing Society for the Study of Marxist Theory began in March 1920. Chen Duxiu founded a Marxist Study Society in May and a Socialist Youth Corps in August. Nineteen issues of Labor World were published in Shanghai during the second half of 1920. The Trade Union Secretariat established its headquarters in Shanghai.

In the summer of 1920 Hu Shi published a series of articles in the Weekly Critic on “Problems and –isms.” He observed that the slaves of Confucius and Zhu Xi were being replaced by the slaves of Marx and Kropotkin. He questioned whether Marxism and anarchism which claimed to have “fundamental solutions” could solve specific problems. Hu suggested they educate the masses, emancipate women, and reform schools. Hu Shi joined with others and Li Dazhao in August and published the “Manifesto of the Struggle for Freedom” in which they asked for an end to police oppression, regulations limiting publications, and the emergency enactments of 1912 and 1914. They demanded freedom of speech, press, assembly, and association as well as privacy, writ of habeas corpus, and non-partisan supervision of elections.

Liang Qichao had attended the Paris peace conference, and he wrote “Reflections on a European Journey” criticizing Western civilization for its materialism, subjugation of nature through science and technology, and Darwinian conflicts between individuals, classes, and nations. He began to see that Eastern ways may be an antidote to the European trends that led to the massive violence of the World War. Liang wrote about an inner realm that he found in the works of the Neo-Confucians Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming and the Mahayana Buddhists. A New Culture movement developed that also valued vernacular fiction as high literature. Liang wrote that the four emotional powers of fiction are to incense, immerse, prick, and uplift. Liang’s friend Zhang Junmai studied German philosophy and compared Kant’s epistemology and ethics to the practical idealism of Wang Yangming. He argued that science could not completely explain human experience because people are subjective, intuitive, and have free will. Wang Yangming had found that intuitive moral insight was learned from individual action in the world.

China's Struggle for Power 1920-24
Droughts in 1919 and 1920 devastated Zhili, Shandong, Henan, Shanxi, and Shaanxi. In the 1920-21 famine at least a half million people died, and about twenty million peasant homes were destitute. The peasants suffered exploitation by the warlords and the gentry. Prices increased as one yuan (silver dollar) was worth 138 coppers in 1919; but by 1925 the yuan was valued at 217 coppers in Shanghai and 285 coppers in Beijing. A National Bankers’ Association was formed in 1920 to regulate currency reform. They refused to buy any more government bonds until the old ones were readjusted. The 27 foreign banks with branches in China had three or four times as much capital as about 120 Chinese banks. In 1921 the Chinese government put its customs surplus into the Consolidated Internal Loan Service that was administered by Francis Aglen, the inspector-general of customs.

Qu Qiubai was in Li Dazhao’s study group and went to Moscow in 1920 for Beijing’s Morning News. Despite the poverty he reported on the positive spirit of the revolution, and he was most impressed by the Soviet commissar of education, Anatoly Lunacharsky. Qu later became chairman of the social sciences department at Beijing University. Lenin sent the Third Communist International (Comintern) agents Grigori Voitinsky and Yang Mingzhai to China. They met Li Dazhao in Beijing in January 1920 and Chen Duxiu in Shanghai in May. A meeting of socialists, anarchists, progressives, and Guomindang members elected Chen secretary of a provisional central committee. They used a Sino-Russian news agency and a foreign-language school to recruit Communists. In April 1921 a Chinese Comintern office was opened in Irkutsk, and Li Dazhao sent some associates there.

In May 1921 the Chinese government signed a treaty with the Weimar Republic in which Germany renounced “all its special rights, interests and privileges” in China and canceled its Boxer indemnity. China signed similar treaties with Hungary and Turkey. That year the Soviet diplomat I. Yurin persuaded the Beijing government to give the Boxer indemnity funds to him instead of to the Czarist ambassador. China had about 1,500,000 soldiers. Japanese exports to China went down from 656 million yen in 1919 to 424 million yen in 1921.

In July 1921 Mao Zedong was Hunan’s delegate to the first plenary meeting of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Shanghai which met secretly in a closed girls’ school in the French concession. Zhou Enlai had been arrested for a raid in early 1919, and he led the May 4th protestors from Tianjin before going to France the next year. His future wife Deng Yingchao had helped to form the Association of Patriotic Women Comrades in Tianjin. Young Deng Xiaoping was known in Paris for distributing mimeographed papers. Xiang Jingyu was a friend of Mao, and she married another Hunanese worker in France, where she worked for women’s rights and socialism.  When she returned to China, she was appointed director of a new women’s department; she organized women who worked in silk and cigarette factories in Shanghai. Mao, Liu Shaoqi, and Li Lisan organized  miners in the Anyuan collieries, workers on the Guangzhou-Hankou railroad, and construction guilds and rickshaw pullers in Changsha. In September 1921 radical Chinese students occupied university buildings in Lyons, and 103 were arrested and deported.

In January 1922 about forty Chinese delegates joined others from Mongolia, Korea, Japan, Java, and India to attend the Far Eastern Workers’ Congress in Petrograd. Qu Qiubai served as an interpreter for Grigory Zinoviev, who urged them to cooperate with the nationalist bourgeoisie to expel foreign imperialists at this stage of the revolution. The CCP grew slowly and had about two hundred members in 1922. In July at Shanghai the second congress of the CCP passed a resolution that explained that the world’s economic order had been destroyed by the imperialist war of 1914-18 and that the capitalists were planning to exploit the raw materials and the working class in their colonies. They noted that China had been suffering from the violence of warlords for the past eleven years and that Wu Peifu was intending to use military means to unify China. They set as their goals to overthrow the feudal warlords and stop civil wars, free China from imperialist oppression, unify China in a federal system while recognizing the autonomy of Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang, and protect all freedoms of workers, peasants, women, and children. The Russian agent called Maring urged the CCP to ally itself with the Guomindang to fight the warlords in a democratic revolution.

At the third congress at Guangzhou in June 1923 the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) added many more goals such as abolishing all the unequal treaties; banishing warlords and confiscating their property for the public good; nationalizing railroads, banks, mines, and large industries; electing all public officials; abolishing the secret police and laws that oppressed unions; enforcing sexual equality before the law; unifying and standardizing the monetary system while excluding all foreign currencies; taxing incomes and inheritance while abolishing commercial surcharges; providing free and compulsory education separate from religion; abolishing corporal and capital punishment while reforming litigation laws; replacing mercenary military recruitment with universal conscription; providing housing subsidies for the poor and controlling rent; imposing price ceilings on necessities; helping peasants with rent reductions, improved irrigation, government loans, and price supports for staple crops; and helping workers with labor rights, the eight-hour day, equal pay for women, sanitation regulations and workers’ hospitals with compulsory insurance, and relief for the unemployed.

John Dewey came to China with his wife on May 1, 1919 and taught there for more than two years. Hu Shi often interpreted his lectures. Bertrand Russell also traveled widely in China from October 1920 to July 1921; he emphasized peace and the positive value of Confucianism and Daoism that he found more useful than Western imperialism and militarism. China had a Russell Study Society and a Russell Monthly. Russell was accompanied by his lover Dora Black, who lectured at women’s schools and to anarchists. In 1923 Rabindranath Tagore gave a series of lectures and emphasized nonviolence, but he was criticized by Communists for India’s acceptance of colonialism. Carsun Zhang spread the philosophy of Bergson; Wang Guowei promoted Schopenhauer and Nietzsche; and Li Shizeng emphasized Kropotkin’s mutual assistance as a better means of evolution than Darwinian struggle.

Liang Shuming was brought up as a Buddhist but gained a Western education. In 1917 he became the first Buddhist to teach at Beijing University; but after his father committed suicide in despair at China’s situation in 1918, he returned to Neo-Confucianism. In 1921 Liang published his famous Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies. He described India as obsessed with religion and spiritual development to the exclusion of everything else and suggested that that attitude should be rejected. Liang Shuming believed that China needed reform and should adopt Western institutions critically so as to renew its own harmonious culture. Hu Shi noted that Easterners are generally satisfied with their simple life and so often do not seek to improve their material world.

Hu Shi wanted to “reorganize the national heritage” by applying the methods of science to evaluate with historical criticism religion and other traditions. In 1922 he helped found the journal Endeavor that was dedicated to political action. He criticized the dogmatic assumptions of both Sun Yat-sen and the Marxists. Gu Jiegang studied the customs, folklore, and folksongs of the people with scientific methods, and he founded the journals Folksong Weekly and Folklore. Zhang Junmai (Carsun Chang) was influenced by spiritual philosophy, Wang Yangming, and Henri Bergson. He argued that science has its limits and does not account for subjectivity, intuition, synthesis, free will, and personal unity. Later Zhang tried to develop a liberal mean between the extremes of the Nationalists and Communists by founding a socialist party that emphasized human rights, free expression, and the constitutional separation of powers. They influenced intellectuals but did not have a large popular following. Wu Chihui argued for science and denied the spiritual elements and soul. Hu Shi saw the limits of a materialistic philosophy and offered a synthesis that accepted science and a philosophy of life. Hu suggested that beyond the small self of the individual is the large self of society that does not die. He believed that living for the sake of the species and posterity is a higher religion than the selfish pursuit of a future life in Heaven or the Pure Land.

Chinese workers suffered from low wages, long hours, few if any vacations, and miserable housing conditions. Wages were often docked, and kickbacks were demanded. Children worked in bad conditions up to thirteen hours a day. In 1918 twenty-five major strikes took place, and in 1919 Shanghai cotton mills had to increase wages by 12% or more. In January 1922 Guomindang activists instigated a strike in Hong Kong and Guangzhou involving 40,000 sailors and dock-workers that affected more than 150 ships. Others joined the strike in March, and with more than 120,000 on strike the owners granted wage increases of 15% to 30% with benefits and recognition of the union. In May the Communists Li Lisan and Liu Shaoqi began organizing workers’ clubs among Anyuan coal miners and Daye steel workers, but the strike by 50,000 coal miners in Tangshan failed in October. That August the first major strike by women occurred in the silk-spinning mills of Pudong outside Shanghai. That summer the Trade Union Secretariat appealed unsuccessfully to the new government of President Li Yuanhong to pass labor laws including the eight-hour day. There had been 50 major strikes in 1921, but in 1922 there were 91.



In 1920 and 1921 the Guomindang promoted a federalist movement by trying to get Hunan, Hubei, and Shaanxi to become independent. In the summer of 1920 Liu Xiang and Xiong Kewu drove Tang Jiyao’s Yunnan troops out of Sichuan and declared independence, and the next year Liu ousted Xiong. Tan Yankai tried to make Hunan independent in 1920, but he was pushed out by the warlord Zhao Hengti, who proclaimed Hunan independent and even promulgated a constitution in January 1922. However, as Mao Zedong pointed out, he used force to suppress students and workers. In the spring of 1921 federalists in Hubei overthrew the Anfu governor Wang Zhanyuan, but the Zhili clique in Beijing sent General Wu Peifu to crush the federalist effort in 1921. Wu received massive arms shipments from the United States and loans from British banks. Zhejiang’s governor Lu Yongxiang proclaimed independence in September 1921 but still ruled autocratically. Yu Youren led an independence movement in Shaanxi in the summer of 1921 and set up a Citizens’ Assembly. In October some Chinese bankers in Shanghai issued a manifesto calling for international cooperation, an end to extraterritoriality, and Chinese control over their own railways.

In November 1921 the United States invited diplomats from Japan, China, and six European powers to meet in Washington, and they agreed to limit their navies according to a formula that made Japan strongest in the Pacific. The Chinese delegation proposed nine points—honoring China’s political independence, no treaties among other countries that affected China, respecting Chinese neutrality in future wars, removing all limitations on China’s political freedom and jurisdiction, reviewing foreign rights, immunities, and concessions in China, and limiting  China’s commitments. France and Britain offered to relinquish leased territories, but Japan refused to do so. Several of China’s points were granted in the Nine-Power Treaty signed on February 6, 1922. That month world public opinion persuaded Japan to sell most of its properties in Shandong back to China. In 1923 the powers agreed to close their post offices except in leased territories, and China’s import tariffs could be raised to 5%.

In April 1922 Zhang Zuolin attacked the Zhili clique near Beijing, but Feng Yuxiang’s forces drove them back to Manchuria. The Luoyang faction led by Wu Peifu tried to unify China by having Xu Shichang yield the presidency to Li Yuanhong. Wu asked Sun Yat-sen to resign too, but he refused. The new Finance minister Luo Wengan reduced the government debt by £200 million by renegotiating the Austrian loans while obtaining £80,000 for ready use. When he was charged with corruption, President Li had him arrested on November 18. The cabinet resigned although Luo was exonerated eighteen months later. Wu extorted 300,000 yuan from the Hankou Chamber of Commerce and another 100,000 from the bankers. Feng got little support from Wu and was reported to have accepted a large bribe from Japan.

On February 2, 1923 the Communists combined sixteen workers’ clubs into a union that went on strike and shut down the Beijing-Hankou railway. On February 7 General Wu Peifu ordered his men to attack the strikers, killing 35 workers and wounding many more. That day the union leader Lin Xiangqian was arrested in Wuhan. When he refused to order his members to go back to work, he was beheaded. The railway men went back to work on February 9, and the year 1923 had only 48 major strikes.

In May 1923 a thousand bandits attacked the Tianjin-Pukou luxury train at Lincheng, killed some Chinese, and kidnapped more than a hundred others, including sixteen foreigners. The diplomats in Beijing demanded better supervision but came up with a plan to exploit more money from the railway. Chinese public opinion was outraged, and the foreigners withdrew their plan to take over the railway. The Chinese government compensated the victims, and the bandits were allowed to join the army.

When President Li Yuanhong’s government could no longer pay wages, Cao Kun arrested his minister of Finances. Four cabinet members loyal to Cao resigned on June 6, 1923 causing the rest of the cabinet to resign also. The garrison troops protested for back-pay; police went on strike; and organized demonstrations surrounded the palace. President Li fled the capital on June 13 and was detained on a train by Cao’s general Yangcun until he submitted his resignation. The Parliament moved to Shanghai; but the Dianzinbaoding faction bribed members of Parliament with $5,000 each to return to Beijing and elect Cao Kun president. Li fled to Japan. Cao was inaugurated on October 10 as a new constitution was promulgated. Cao had spent $13,560,000 to become president, and the foreign diplomats immediately recognized his government. In May 1924 Beijing recognized Soviet control over Outer Mongolia and the East China Railway through Manchuria, and Russia renounced extraterritoriality, its concessions in Tianjin and Hankou, and its Boxer indemnities. The Anfu party still controlled Zhejiang.

On September 3, 1924 Zhili forces from Jiangsu and Fujian invaded Zhejiang and Shanghai. Two weeks later Zhang Zuolin’s Fengtian forces invaded from Manchuria, joining the war on the side of Zhejiang. Two days later the Anfu forces abandoned Zhejiang and retreated to the perimeter of Shanghai. The Fengtian army broke through the Zhili lines on October 7, and five days later the Anfu army abandoned Shanghai. After heavy fighting, Wu Peifu stabilized the Zhili front, and on October 23 Feng Yuxiang led his army into Beijing. Wu Peifu’s Zhili army had 170,000 men and probably could have defeated the Fengtian forces, but Feng Yuxiang betrayed Wu and changed sides in Beijing. Feng reorganized the cabinet by deposing President Cao Kun on November 2. The next day Wu Peifu boarded ships at Tanggu with his portion of the remaining Zhili forces to retreat to the Yangzi Valley. Feng negotiated with Zhang Zuolin of the Fengtian clique and with the Anhui clique to form the National People’s army, and on November 24 they brought back Duan Qirui to run the government as “provisional chief executive.” Zhang Zuolin signed a treaty with Moscow in November. Feng had invited Sun Yat-sen to come to Beijing, and he arrived at Tianjin on December 4; but nine days later Duan Qirui dissolved the parliament and abolished the constitutions.

Sun Yat-sen and Guomindang 1920-24
Sun Yat-sen reorganized the Chinese Nationalist party on October 10, 1919 without distinctions between members or a personal oath of loyalty. On November 9, 1920 they resolved to implement his Three People’s Principles and a constitution with the five branches. Sun in the first part of his Plan for National Reconstruction emphasized the psychological reconstruction of moving from thought to action. He reversed a truism and argued that it is easy to act but hard to know.

The second part on material reconstruction was also published separately as The International Development of China. Sun attributed China’s poverty to lack of development, crude methods of production, and wasted labor. He called for foreign capital and equipment with their scientific and technological expertise. With China’s abundant natural resources and cheap labor he predicted that China would become “an unlimited market for the whole world” and an essential part of international trade. He suggested that capitalism could create socialism in China and thus was one of the first to recommend a mixed economy. He believed that industries could provide for the needs of every individual and family. Sun proposed that an international organization could coordinate the aid that China needed for its development in order to avoid “commercial warfare.” Sun’s ideas to open China to the West, use foreign technological and financial experts, develop coastal outlets, allow a public sector to co-exist with private enterprise, and value social stability foreshadowed the Four Modernizations later implemented by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s.

The anarchist general Chen Jiongming regained Guangzhou, and he called Sun Yat-sen back in October 1920. They set up a republican government in April 1921, and 225 members of the old Parliament under the 1912 constitution elected Sun president. He accepted the autonomy of the provincial government with Chen Jiongming as governor and commander of the Cantonese army. Chen promulgated a provincial constitution and limited military expenditures to 30% of the budget while reserving 20% for education. Chen Duxiu was appointed education commissioner. Chen Jiongming’s anarchist friends led the trade unions. Sun got his son Sun Fo reinstated as mayor of Guangzhou.

After refusing Wu Peifu’s request to resign, Sun Yat-sen tried to dismiss Chen Jiongming, but he was popular from his victories in Guangxi. When Sun ordered General Ye Ju to withdraw from Guangzhou within ten days and threatened him, Ye Ju had Sun’s presidential palace shelled on June 16, 1922. Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) was a field officer for General Chen Jiongming, but he helped Sun escape. Sun tried to negotiate from a gunboat, but he had lost popularity because of his refusal to resign. A British gunboat enabled him to reach Hong Kong, and then he went to Shanghai.

Sun Yat-sen had met the Comintern agent Hans Maring (Hendricus Sneevliet) in 1921, and in the fall of 1922 Communists were allowed to join the Guomindang. The Comintern sent Adolf Joffe to China, and the New Tide Society and thirteen other organizations welcomed him to Beijing in August 1922. Joffe agreed that conditions in China were not right for Soviet Communism, but he offered Russian support. Sun hoped that when the Communists understood the beauty of Chinese civilization, especially its ethics, that they would adopt the principles of the Guomindang. Because Soviet Russia had renounced the privileges that Czarist Russia had in China and was showing sympathy for their cause, Sun believed they should accept their friendship. Through correspondence he agreed to an alliance with the Soviets and to admit Communists into the Guomindang. On September 4 a Nationalist conference at Shanghai approved this, and Hu Hanmin drafted a manifesto that was proclaimed on January 1, 1923. On January 12 the Comintern ordered Chinese Communists to join the Nationalist party and work with them for Sun’s bourgeois revolution, and the Sun-Joffe Declaration was signed on January 26. On that day Sun Yat-sen also sent a circular telegram to the leading militarists with a plan for peaceful unification calling for a voluntary demobilization of troops under the good offices of a “friendly power” such as the United States.

Sun Yat-sen hired troops for Ch$400,000, and they drove Chen Jiongming out of Guangzhou in January 1923. Sun returned in triumph on February 21 to establish a military government again. Most of the old parliamentarians went back to Beijing, where they were offered $5,000 each to vote as requested. The diplomatic corps in Beijing refused to give Sun the surplus customs revenues as they did to the militarists in the north. Sun’s requests for loans from Hong Kong merchants, the Guangzhou Chamber of Commerce, and British businessmen were rejected. However, his son Sun Fo returned as mayor of Guangzhou and got military financing from the city. The mercenaries that Sun Yat-sen had hired from Yunnan, Guangxi, and other places financially exploited the city and the region.

In March 1923 the Comintern in Moscow decided to send advisors to Sun Yat-sen and authorized two million Chinese dollars for him. He began collecting the local salt revenues in May and took in nearly $3 million by December; the foreign powers only protested that the debts were not being paid. Sun wrote to the diplomatic corps in September and October complaining that the arrears due the Guangdong government from customs were Ch$12,600,000, but instead they were being used by the Beijing government to make war on the South. The Comintern agent Mikhail Borodin (Gruzenberg), who spoke English, reached Guangzhou on October 6 and advised Sun to implement an eight-hour day, a minimum wage, and to confiscate land to distribute it to peasants, but Sun declined to alienate his supporters and never agreed to confiscate land. Yet Borodin became his most influential advisor. On October 25 Sun appointed a Provisional Central Executive Committee of nine and included a Communist. Chen Jiongming had been besieging Sun’s army at Huizhou since August, and Borodin in November urged the Guomindang to mobilize the masses against them by declaring the confiscation and redistribution of land. Sun was not available to approve the Committee’s resolution, but he was grateful that Chen’s forces retreated. Sun announced in December that he would seize the maritime customs revenues in Guangzhou, but threatening foreign gunboats caused him to change his mind.

The first Guomindang national congress in January 1924 was attended by 165 delegates, and they recessed for three days to mourn the death of Lenin. The party had registered 23,360 members in China and had about 4,600 abroad. They elected Li Dazhao, Sun Yat-sen, Hu Hanmin, Wang Jingwei, and Lin Shen to the presidium, and they dedicated themselves to defeating imperialism and the warlords by following Sun’s three people’s principles of independence, democracy, and socialism and the five-power constitution. The delegates approved participation by the Communists without giving up their party affiliation, but the right wing still made up two-thirds of party officials.

Sun Yat-sen sent Jiang Jieshi to Moscow for three months. He came back impressed by the discipline and efficiency of the Communist Party and recommended it as a model for the Guomindang; but he also was convinced that the Soviet Union wanted to take over large provinces from China. Sun Yat-sen appointed Jiang head of the new military academy on the island of Huangpu (Whampoa) in May 1924. The Guangzhou government provided Ch$186,000, and the Soviets contributed Ch$2,700,000 and 8,000 guns. Borodin got the Communist Zhou Enlai named as director of the political department, and the Soviet general Vassili Blücher (known as Galen) was the military advisor. Cadets were required to have a middle-school diploma, and that excluded most workers and peasants. Most cadets did not like Communism and became loyal to Jiang. The Guomindang also set up a Farmers’ Bureau with Peng Pai as secretary and the Farmers’ Movement Training Institute where Mao Zedong taught. After an attempted assassination of the visiting Governor-General Merlin of French Indochina in the Shamian concession of Guangzhou, the British and French imposed stricter security measures. All the Chinese workers in Shamian went on strike on July 15, and they were supported by 26 unions. Sun mediated for a month, and the French and British lifted the new security measures.

From January to August 1924 Sun Yat-sen gave a series of sixteen lectures at Guangzhou University that were revised and published as The Three Principles of the People. The first principle minzuzhuyi means literally “the doctrine of the people’s lineage” and implies the Chinese race and culture as well as nationalism and independence. This was the main principle that mobilized the anti-Manchu feeling for the Chinese revolution of 1911. Sun had proclaimed the equality of the five races in 1912, but he noted that only about ten million of the four hundred million people in China were not Han Chinese. Sun praised the Confucian virtues of Chinese culture and their high moral standards that enabled them to assimilate other ethnic groups. Whereas European society was based on the individual, Chinese society was based on the family. In his second lecture on nationalism Sun described the political and economic oppression of China by imperialist nations. Although China was not completely colonized politically, economically it was colonized and exploited by several powers. Dismantling the “unequal treaties” was one of the most important goals for independence.

Sun’s second principle minquan means “the rights of the people” and has been interpreted as democracy. Sun recognized that the masses are sovereign, and their rights are election, recall, initiative, and referendum; but he believed that governmental power should be exercised by those with vision. His five branches of government included the traditional executive, legislative, and judicial plus the Chinese civil service examinations and the censorate, which included the power to impeach. Sun still held to his theory of three stages of a successful revolution, especially because of the failure in 1912. He believed that to stabilize the revolution the government may impose martial law for a time to suppress counter-revolutionary forces. In the second tutelary phase a period of education allows the local governments to learn and practice democracy. When the provincial districts have become autonomous, then the constitution may be promulgated and a national parliament may be elected.

Sun Yat-sen’s third principle minshengzhuyi means “the people’s livelihood” and was interpreted by Sun himself as socialism or communism but not Marxism. Sun believed that the problem of subsistence motivates people to cooperate for social progress and that class conflict is an aberration. He pointed to the recent progress in Europe and America as the result of a rising general level of education, nationalizing the means of communication, higher taxes on income, and other reforms which enabled production to increase and distribution to be improved for both employers and workers. Thus Sun emphasized Confucian harmony rather than material conflicts. He noted that Karl Marx’s predictions of longer working hours, reduced wages for workers, and higher prices for manufactured goods had been wrong. Sun suggested that when the people in the state share everything, the Confucian commonwealth may be attained. When everyone works for the common good, then universal love reigns.

Sun realized that China was poor and that its inequality was not between the rich and the poor but was differences among the poor. The Nationalist party aimed to equalize land rights and restrict capital. He still agreed with Henry George that the land should be given to its cultivators and that unearned wealth should be taxed and redistributed. Sun aimed to equalize landownership and regulate capital. The government would tax land according to its estimated value, which was set by the owner; but the government could buy the land for that estimated amount. Thus the owners had to set the value between countervailing deterrents. Sun prophetically realized that technological improvements such as mechanization, fertilizers, electrification, and crop rotation would increase production so much that wealth could be redistributed. Sun was influenced by Maurice William’s Social Interpretation of History and proposed nationalizing the means of transportation and communication, higher taxes on income and inheritances, and collectivizing the distribution networks. Sun recommended that the state promote industry and the use of machinery while coexisting with private enterprise. He wanted the government to develop communication, railroads, waterways, and mines on a large scale. He emphasized the immediate need to abolish the unequal treaties and take back the customs from foreign control so that China could end imperialistic exploitation and participate fairly in international trade.

The private Merchant Corps army of volunteers in Guangzhou had risen from 13,000 in 1923 to more than 50,000 by the summer of 1924. On August 9 Sun Yat-sen ordered their weapons from the Norwegian cargo ship Hav seized and guarded in the Huangpu Academy. Later he offered to release them for a price. On October 10 Guomindang demonstrators interrupted the delivery, and the Merchant Volunteer Corps fired on them. The merchants called for a general strike to overthrow Sun’s government and bring back Chen Jiongming. Five days later the first Huangpu class of 800 defeated the Merchant Corps and burned and looted the Xiguan business quarter. This destruction made Sun unpopular with that class in Guangzhou and Shanghai, and in November he left to attend the national reconstruction conference called by Feng Yuxiang in Beijing.

Sun hoped to bring about a revolution from the top and published his Manifesto on Going North on November 10. He wanted to end the unequal treaties and distribute power between the capital and the provinces with national unity. He called for a national convention of delegates from various associations that included entrepreneurs, merchants, educators, students, workers’ unions, peasants, and even militarists. Sun’s 58th birthday was celebrated on November 12 in Guangzhou by 20,000 people with a parade. The next day he and his wife Qingling, accompanied by Wang Jingwei, Eugene Chen, and Borodin, left for Hong Kong. They spent five days in Shanghai and a week in Japan, where he gave a speech in Kobe on November 28 proposing Asian solidarity against Western imperialism.

Sun reached Tianjin on December 4, and from then on his illness forced him to stay in bed. Duan Qirui criticized Sun’s idealism and confirmed the foreign treaties in order to get their recognition of his government. Sun was welcomed in the capital on December 31 by more than 100,000 people and was hospitalized at the Beijing Union Medical College, where he was diagnosed with liver cancer. Wang Jingwei helped Sun write his “Political Testament” that became a charter for the Nationalist party. He died on March 12, 1925 and was succeeded by Liao Zhongkai and Wang Jingwei on the left and Hu Hanmin on the right. Sun’s family wanted a Christian funeral; but others wanted a political demonstration, and so two separate ceremonies were held on March 19. Many have called Sun Yat-sen the father of modern China.

May 30th Movement of 1925-26
Zhang Zuolin was the warlord who controlled Manchuria, and in the fall of 1924 he sent troops south to challenge his rival Wu Peifu in Beijing. They took over the Tianjin-Pukou railway and invaded the Yangzi Valley. In the spring of 1925 the Zhili army of Jiangsu defeated the Anfu faction in Zhejiang, and the warlord Sun Chuanfang took over the five provinces of the lower Yangzi. In 1925 the Russians provided Feng Yuxiang with weapons, money, and advisers, but he tried to prevent the political indoctrination of his troops. After his war against Zhang Zuolin went badly in late 1925 and ended, Feng resigned in early 1926 and went to the Soviet Union for five months.

In the south in February 1925 armies led by Jiang Jieshi’s Huangpu officers with Soviet guns won several battles over the warlord Chen Jiongming, taking Shantou in March. In May at the Second National Workers Congress in Guangzhou 281 delegates represented 166 unions with 540,000 members, and they set up the General Labor Union. After defeating two more warlords, Jiang’s troops occupied Guangzhou in June, capturing 17,000 prisoners and 16,000 guns.

On May 15, 1925 Japanese guards at a Shanghai textile mill shot eight Chinese labor representatives who were negotiating with management, killing one. One week later Chinese students and workers held a memorial service and verbally attacked the Japanese owner. On May 30 three thousands workers and students from eight colleges assembled outside a police station in the Shanghai International Settlement to demand the release of six Chinese students who had been arrested by the British for protesting imperialism and militarism. The British inspector Everson ordered the Chinese and Sikh constables to fire, and they killed eleven and wounded twenty. This “May 30th atrocity” provoked demonstrations in about thirty cities, and 160,000 people in Shanghai went on a general strike. The General Union negotiated an agreement with Japan in August and the British in September. The May 30th Movement stimulated thousands of Chinese to join the Nationalists (Guomindang) or the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which increased in membership from 1,000 in 1925 to 30,000 in 1926. That year Guomindang membership increased to 150,000.

On June 10-11 in Hankou the British and Japanese militia killed fourteen Chinese and wounded one hundred. The Nationalist armies that were fighting in eastern Guangdong returned to Guangzhou and had to fight for six days to regain the city. On June 14 the Guomindang Political Council met with Borodin advising, and they organized the government with nine ministries and reformed the military as the National Revolutionary Army. Labor leaders went to Hong Kong and persuaded the unions to begin a strike and boycott on June 21. In Guangzhou a rally on June 23 faced Shamian Island, from where British and French troops shot at the protestors, killing 52 and wounding 117. Some Chinese fired back and killed one European. The strike in Hong Kong was supported by a massive boycott of British goods, and both lasted sixteen months. Finally after the British threatened military action in September 1926, Guomindang’s foreign minister Eugene Chen promised to end the boycott in October and levy extra taxes to pay off the strikers. In December 1925 the British police inspector and his lieutenant were fired, and the Municipal Council paid a $75,000 indemnity to the deceased and wounded. The Chinese in Shanghai protested against taxation without representation, and in 1926 the foreigners allowed three Chinese to be elected to the Municipal Council.

A Nationalist government was established in Guangzhou on July 1, 1925 with Wang Jingwei as president. They pacified the opposition in Guangdong and Guangxi by February 1926. Sun Yat-sen’s friend Liao Zhongkai became governor of Guangdong and was in charge of Guomindang’s workers department, and he organized massive strikes and boycotts in the early summer. While going to attend a Guomindang Executive Committee meeting on August 20, 1925 he was assassinated by several gunmen. Jiang Jieshi and Wang Jingwei led the committee that investigated and arrested many suspects, executing a few. Jiang and Borodin sent suspected Hu Hanmin to Russia. The National Revolutionary Army won three campaigns in eastern Guangdong, and three generals from Guangxi brought that province into alliance with Guangzhou. Guangdong was a rich province and raised $1,200,000 per month from gambling taxes even after what officials took in graft. A Political Training Department began functioning in October to instruct officers and troops. The daily Political Work was edited by a Communist and distributed 18,000 copies in the army.

In the summer of 1925 Dai Jitao published two books on Sun Yat-sen’s philosophy that argued against having Communists in the Guomindang.  Fifteen members of the Executive Committee met on November 23, 1925 by Sun Yat-sen’s tomb at Western Hills near Beijing. They supported Hu Hanmin and resolved to drive the Communists out of the Guomindang. On the Communist side Chen Duxiu noted that in the Guomindang the rightists only talked about the three people’s principles while the leftists acted to attain them.

At the second Guomindang congress held in Guangzhou in January 1926 a majority of the 278 delegates were Communists while only 45 were on the right. Peng Pai had been organizing social services for peasant associations since 1921 and had 100,000 members by 1923. Mao Zedong was director of the Guomindang’s Peasant Movement Training Institute in Guangzhou and was organizing in Hunan around Changsha. Guangzhou was considered so “Red” that many businessmen moved to Shanghai or Beijing. The successful banker T. V. Soong (Song Ziwen), Sun Yat-sen’s brother-in-law, had become Guomindang’s Finance minister in 1925, and he was raising more than 3.6 million yuan per month. Borodin agreed to limit the Communists to one-third of the committees. The cadets at Huangpu had formed the Society for the Study of Sun Yat-senism. They were anti-Communist and set up their own party headquarters in Shanghai.

In early 1926 Zhang Zuolin made an alliance with Wu Peifu and gained control of southern Hebei and Hubei. Writer Lu Xun was teaching in Beijing on March 18 when some of his students were among the 47 shot and killed while demonstrating against politicians who had given in to foreign demands based on the unequal treaties. Lu Xun and his wife fled south to Guangzhou. Feng Yuxiang helped Duan Qirui’s government survive, but Zhang Zuolin ousted Duan in April. Zhang’s army combined with those of Wu Peifu and Sun Chuanfang numbered more than 600,000. Feng Yuxiang and Zhang Zuolin fought a costly war in 1926 that lasted eight months. From the middle of 1926 to the middle of 1927 a regency cabinet was set up; but it had little power, and so government had no funds and no direction. Zhang Zuolin proclaimed himself grand marshal on June 17, 1927 and organized a military government. As the Guomindang armies advanced north, so many would defect to the south that Wu Peifu and Sun Chuanfang lost their power in 1927. Zhang Zuolin still controlled Beijing, and his vassal Zhang Zongchang ruled Shandong.

On March 20, 1926 the gunboat Zhongshan commanded by a Communist appeared off Huangpu, and Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek), fearing they would abduct him, had the Zhongshan commander arrested. Jiang declared martial law in Guangzhou, disarmed workers’ pickets, and arrested more than thirty Russian advisors. Communist newspapers were shut down. Borodin returned to Guangzhou from Comintern meetings in Beijing. In April he agreed with Jiang that no CCP members would head Guomindang bureaus, and he gave the Executive Committee a list of CCP members. On May 9 Wang Jingwei left for France. On May 15 the Central Executive Committee limited Communists to no more than a third of committee memberships and made other restrictions. The CCP Executive Committee rejected these, but Soviet premier Joseph Stalin ordered them to stay in the Guomindang. By the time of its congress in May the General Labor Union had grown to 1,241,000 members.

Huangpu had graduated 7,795 officers, and Jiang Jieshi had 85,000 men in his National Revolutionary Army. Guangxi added another 30,000 troops and had 6,000 cadets in other military schools. Jiang became commander of the National Revolutionary Army in June, and using all these forces, he began the northern expedition on July 1 to eliminate Wu Peifu and achieve national unification. The Guomindang force occupied Changsha on July 11, and in August they chased the retreating Hunan army along the Miluo River and threatened the tri-city area of Wuhan. General Wu Peifu arrived and had eight of his commanders beheaded. The Hanyang commander went over to the Nationalists, who gained its huge arsenal. When Hankou submitted, Jiang promised to protect all its foreigners. While they besieged Wuchang, the Jiangxi warlord had Communists and radicals rounded up and beheaded based on their short Russian hair-styles. Civilians were starving, and the Wuchang commander opened the gates on October 10. Nationalists entered the city while others attacked Jiangxi. By November the National Revolutionary Army had suffered 15,000 casualties while taking Jiujiang and Nanchang. Fujian’s navy changed sides, and its capital Fuzhou fell in December. The Nationalists had conquered Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi, and Fujian while Guangxi and Guizhou had negotiated agreements. The National Revolutionary Army was trained not to loot nor press workers into service.

Lu Xun's Stories
Zhou Zhangshou (Lu Xun) was born as the oldest son in a gentry family in 1881 in Shaoxing, Zhejiang, where he was well educated. In 1893 his grandfather Zhou Fuqing was caught attempting to bribe the chief examiner with 10,000 taels and was imprisoned until the general amnesty of 1901. His father Zhou Boyi was barred from the exams, became depressed, drank, became ill, took opium, and died in 1896, leaving Zhangshou head of the family. He had studied the classics, history, and philosophy in a private school under the outstanding teacher Shou Jingwu. Zhangshou attended the Jiangnan Naval Academy and in 1898 he did well on the civil service examination. His uncle persuaded him to change his name to Zhou Shuren because soldiers were not respected. In 1901 he read Yan Fu’s translation of Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics, and he was influenced by its social Darwinism. Then Shuren read Lin Shu’s translations of La dame aux camelias by Dumas and other fiction by Charles Dickens, Walter Scott, Rider Haggard, and Arthur Conan Doyle. He was especially impressed by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Shuren graduated from the School of Mines and Railroads in 1902 and went to Japan for more study on a Qing-government scholarship. He cut off his queue in 1903 and translated two science-fiction novels by Jules Verne into Chinese.

After pawning clothing and jewelry to buy rare herbs for his ill father, Zhou Shuren had decided that Chinese doctors were quacks. He had learned that Japanese modernization had begun with its study of Western medicine, and so in 1904 he went to medical school in Sendai, Japan. In his second year a teacher showed slides of Japanese military victories over Russia as the Japanese students shouted “Banzai!” One slide showed a Chinese spy about to be beheaded, and Shuren was struck by the passive attitude of the Chinese bystanders in the picture. He thought how the Chinese needed spiritual transformation more than physical medicine, and two months later in March 1906 he withdrew from medical school to become a writer and to promote a literary movement. He returned to Shaoxing, and in July he was married to Zhu An, who had been chosen for him by his mother. She had her tiny feet bound, was illiterate, and unattractive. Shuren may not have consummated the marriage, but he continued to support her financially for the rest of his life. Apparently Zhu An spent her time serving Shuren’s mother, and he considered her his mother’s wife.

In 1907 Shuren, his brother Zhou Zuoren, and Qian Xuantong with others organized the Society for the Promotion of National Learning, and they persuaded the revolutionary Zhang Taiyan to be director and lecture on literature. For a short time while their money lasted, Shuren, Zuoren, and Xu Shoushang published a magazine called New Life, and in the essay “On Breaking Through the Voices of Evil” Zhou Shuren accused hypocritical scholars of blaming China’s problems on the common people. He especially admired Nikolai Gogol for awakening the Russians to the suffering of their people. In his essay “The Erratic Development of Culture,” Shuren suggested that China’s isolation was the cause of its weaknesses and strengths. In 1909 the Zhou brothers published two volumes of Stories from Abroad translated from Russian and from other countries, but they sold only a few copies in Tokyo and Shanghai.

Zhou Shuren took a teaching job in Hangzhou and also served as interpreter for a Japanese botany teacher. When the dean Xu Shaoshang refused to kowtow to the new director, he, Shuren and the faculty resigned but were later reinstated. In 1910 Shuren became the dean and a teacher at Shaoxing High School. After the 1911 revolution he was appointed principal of a primary school. That winter he wrote in literary Chinese his first short story, “Remembrances of the Past,” about an incident in his childhood when his lessons were interrupted by local people discussing whether to flee from “hairy rebels.” In 1912 he took a position in the Ministry of Education under Cai Yuanpei. For several years Shuren occupied his spare time copying manuscripts so that he would not be suspected by Yuan Shikai’s agents.

The philologist Qian Xuantong suggested that Zhou Shuren write for New Youth in the common language (baihua). Shuren was reluctant to infect young people with his loneliness. He said it was like there is a closed iron room in which sleeping people were going to suffocate. He asked if he would be doing them a favor by awakening some of them; but Xian replied that those awakened might find a way out. Shuren began using the pen name Lu Xun when he published his next story, “The Diary of a Madman,” in New Youth in May 1918. Inspired by Gogol, this story has been called the first truly modern short story in Chinese literature. After an introduction in literary wenyan, the diary is written in baihua by a paranoid man who fears that almost everyone has become a cannibal. He imagines how they must feel ashamed before real human beings, as reptiles do before those who have evolved into primates. Some think that people always ate human flesh while others know it is wrong but do it anyway. The diarist urges them to change from the bottom of their hearts because in the future cannibals will not be allowed in the world anymore. His final plea is to “save the children.” This macabre story reflects the chaotic violence of the warlord era when Chinese lives were cheap.

Lu Xun’s next story “Kong Yiji” is about a scholar who fails to pass the exams and gradually falls to less ethical means of getting money for food and wine. Finally he is caught stealing by a Selectman who breaks his legs. Kong has to crawl with his hands and can no longer pay his debt. This story reflects on the decline of traditional scholarship that educated some only for the exam system. “Medicine” is another morbid story about a boy with tuberculosis who is given bread soaked in fresh blood from an execution to try to cure his disease. In the final scene his mother mourns at his grave and meets there the mother of a revolutionary martyr who finds a wreath of flowers has been laid. A wretched death in poverty and superstition is compared to the hope of a revolutionary sacrifice. In the autobiographical “Hometown” Lu meets a childhood friend and realizes they have become separated by a social hierarchy, and he questions whether his hope for the future is different than his friend’s idol-worship of a censer and candlestick he took.

In 1919 Lu Xun bought a large house in Beijing where he lived with his mother, wife, brothers Zuoren and Jianren, and their families. The next year he began lecturing on Chinese fiction at Beijing University, and this material was published in 1924 as A Concise History of Chinese Fiction. In 1920 he wrote “The Story of Hair.” Men who did not wear a queue during the Qing dynasty were considered revolutionaries, and women who bobbed their hair even in 1920 were treated as “loose women” and were expelled from school. In “A Passing Season” people in a rural town discuss changes when they hear a rumor that the Emperor is going to assume the throne.

Lu Xun’s most famous work is “The True Story of Ah Q,” which was first serialized as weekly humorous anecdotes in a Beijing newspaper in 1921. After a while Lu Xun got tired of writing them and completed the novella with a tragic ending. Ah Q is a homeless and illiterate man who does odd jobs to survive. Despite his low status he is arrogant and imagines the worst in people. He often suffers from bullies and also mistreats those weaker than himself. He foolishly offends a woman by pinching her and loses his work opportunities and even most of his clothes to survive. Later he arrives back in town with money he has taken from being a look-out for robbers, but he pretends to be a revolutionary to boost his ego and to protect himself. The revolutionaries will not let him participate in their plundering, but ironically he is later paraded as a criminal and executed for being part of their looting. The story portrays the desperate plight of many poor Chinese who try to justify their existence with rationalizations.

After clashing with his brother Zuoren over his Japanese wife in 1923, Lu moved out with his wife and mother. That year Lu Xun published his first collection of fourteen short stories. In his preface he commented that anyone who falls from affluence to poverty will see the true face of the world on the way down.

Lu Xun published his second collection of eleven stories in 1926. “New Year’s Sacrifice” was written in 1924. Sacrifices are made to the Kitchen God to solicit blessings for the family in the next year. The narrator meets Sister Xanglin, a widowed beggar who asks him if a soul exists after the body dies. When told probably, she asks if hell exists too. Lu makes the safe answer that he “can’t say for sure.” She dies the next day. After her husband died, she got a job as a servant and did good work until her mother-in-law dragged her off and forced her to marry again. During the wedding Xanglin tried to resist by cutting her head open; but she was forced into a locked room and gave in to her husband. He died, and their baby was taken and eaten by a wolf. Xanglin was expelled from the house and went back to her former employer; but they considered her so fallen that she was not allowed to help prepare for the sacrifices. She lost her job, became a beggar, and died, a victim of superstition. The narrator ironically concludes that the gods were honored by the sacrifices and would shower their blessings on the people.

“The Loner” is autobiographical, and Lu describes his friend, the bachelor Wei Lianshu, who wailed at his step-grandmother’s funeral. Wei is a teacher; but almost no one understands him, and he loses his job because of his critical journalism. He sells his books and furniture to survive. The narrator has lost his teaching job too and cannot help him. When Wei is about to die from tuberculosis, he takes a job as an aide to a warlord and suddenly adopts a bountiful life-style. When the narrator returns to the town, he learns that Wei has died. He walks away from the funeral and lets out a howl like a wounded animal. “Divorce” was written in November 1925 and describes how powerful men decide the fate of a woman who has complained that her husband is having an affair with a widow.

Between May 1924 and April 1926 Lu Xun wrote 23 prose poems that were collected together as Wild Grass or Weeds. These express Lu’s dark mood and pessimistic view of life. When he began writing these prose poems, Lu was influenced by Kuriyagawa Hakuson’s Symbols of Mental Anguish, which he was translating from Japanese. In May 1925 Lu was on a faculty committee in support of six student rebels who had been expelled from the university. The Minister of Education closed the school, and Lu was dismissed from the Ministry in August but was reinstated in January 1926. In a 1931 preface to Wild Grass Lu explained that when he wrote these, he could not write in plain language because of the oppressive warlord regime in Beijing. In that preface Lu described his motives for writing some of them.

“My Lost Love” was written to satirize the poems
about lost loves which were then the vogue;
“Revenge” was written out of revulsion
at the number of bystanders in society;
“Hope” out of astonishment at the passivity of young people.
“Such a Fighter” was my reaction to those
men of letters and scholars who abetted the warlords.
“The Blighted Leaf” was written for my friends
who wanted to preserve me.
After the Duan Qirui government
fired on unarmed demonstrators,
I wrote “Amid Pale Bloodstains,”
at a time when I had left home and gone into hiding.6
This last-mentioned prose poem is presented here as an outstanding example.

  At present the creator is still a weakling.
  In secret, he causes heaven and earth to change,
but dares not destroy this world.
In secret, he causes living creatures to die,
but dares not preserve their dead bodies.
In secret, he causes mankind to shed blood,
but dares not keep the bloodstains fresh forever.
In secret, he causes mankind to suffer pain,
but dares not let them remember it forever.
  He provides for his kind only, the weaklings among men;
using deserted ruins and lonely tombs
to set off rich mansions;
using time to dilute pain and bloodstains;
each day pouring out one cup
of slightly sweetened bitter wine—
not too little nor too much—to cause slight intoxication.
This he gives to mankind
so that those who drink it can weep and sing,
seem both sober and drunk, conscious and unconscious,
appear willing to live on and willing to die.
He must make all creatures willing to live on.
He has not the courage yet to destroy mankind.
  A few deserted ruins and a few lonely tombs
are scattered over the earth, reflected by pale bloodstains;
and there men taste their own vague pain and sorrow,
as well as that of others.
They will not spurn it, however,
thinking it better than nothing;
and they call themselves “victims of heaven”
to justify their tasting this pain and sorrow.
In apprehensive silence they await the coming of
new pain and sorrow, new suffering which appalls them,
which they none the less thirst to meet.
  All these are the loyal subjects of the creator.
This is what he wants them to be.
  A rebellious fighter has arisen from mankind, who,
standing erect, sees through all the deserted ruins
and lonely tombs of the past and the present.
He remembers all the intense and unending agony;
he faces squarely the whole welter of clotted blood;
he understands all that is dead and all that is living,
as well as all that is being born and all that is yet unborn.
He sees through the creator’s game.
And he will arise to resuscitate or else destroy mankind,
these loyal subjects of the creator.
  The creator, the weakling, hides himself in shame.
Then heaven and earth change color
in the eyes of the fighter.7
Finally in “The Awakening” in April 1926 Lu wrote about the students seeing planes on their bombing missions flying over Beijing during the fighting between the warlords of the Fengtian and Zhili cliques, which forced Lu to leave Beijing.

In 1925 the student Xu Guangping began writing to Lu, and they became lovers. He was especially radicalized in March 1926 when some of his students were killed by police for protesting in front of the Government House. His critical essays got him put on a list of fifty radicals, and he fled from Beijing with Xu. She took a teaching position in Guangzhou while Lu accepted Lin Yutang’s offer to teach literature at Xiamen (Amoy) University.

Nationalist-Communist Civil War 1927-1937
Notes
1. Lo Chia-lun 336, “New Tide of the World Today,” p. 22 quoted in The May Fourth Movement by Chow Tse-tsung, p. 61.

2. Hu Shih 205, Diary, IX, 566 quoted in The May Fourth Movement by Chow Tse-tsung, p. 28.

3. “A Preliminary Discussion of Literary Form” by Hu Shih in Sources of Chinese Tradition, p. 820.

4. “Constructive Literary Revolution” by Hu Shih in Sources of Chinese Tradition, p. 825.

5. The May Fourth Movement by Chow Tse-tsung, p. 174.

6. Wild Grass by Lu Hsun, p. 1-2.

7. Ibid., p. 64-65.

Copyright © 2007 by Sanderson Beck
This chapter has been published in the book EAST ASIA 1800-1949.
For ordering information, please click here.

Qing Decline 1799-1875
Qing Dynasty Fall 1875-1912
Republican China in Turmoil 1912-1926
Nationalist-Communist Civil War 1927-1937
China at War 1937-1949
Korea 1800-1949
Japan's Modernization 1800-1894
Imperial Japan 1894-1937
Japan's War and Defeat 1937-1949
Philippines to 1949
Pacific Islands to 1949
Summary and Evaluation
Bibliography
ETHICS OF CIVILIZATION Index
BECK index

BECK index
                                   Nationalist-Communist Civil War 1927-1937
by Sanderson Beck
Jiang Jieshi's Nationalist Revolution 1927-28
Chinese Communism 1927-31
Nationalist China 1929-34
Chinese Communism 1932-37
Nationalist China 1934-37
Lu Xun's Essays
Mao Dun, Lao She, and Ba Jin
Ding Ling and Shen Congwen
Pearl Buck
This chapter has been published in the book EAST ASIA 1800-1949.
For ordering information, please click here.

Jiang Jieshi's Nationalist Revolution 1927-28
Republican China in Turmoil 1912-1926
The Guomindang moved its government from Guangzhou (Canton) to Wuhan on January 1, 1927, but the right wing moved to Nanchang instead. Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) went to Wuhan and met with Borodin and other leftists on January 11, but they could not agree. The northern general Feng Yuxiang had visited Moscow and joined the Guomindang. He moved from his base in Shaanxi and invaded Henan. Zhang Zuolin had mobilized an army of 150,000 in Beijing in late 1926, but he changed his mind about marching to the Yangzi Valley. Zhang hated leftists, and in April 1927 he ordered all the Chinese refugees in the Russian embassy arrested; nineteen were hanged, including Li Dazhao, a co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Meanwhile the General Labor Union made progress in central China. Wuhan had 73 unions with 82,000 members by late 1926. Jiang met with the leader of the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce and negotiated with bankers.

In January 1927 the new Provincial Federation of Unions held congresses in Hubei where 580 delegates from 314 unions represented 393,000 members and in Hunan where about 400,000 members were represented. The First National Congress of the Peasant Movement had met in Guangzhou in April 1926, and the unions represented more than a million members, mostly from Guangdong. By January 1927 the peasant unions in Hunan had 1,300,000 members.

Guomindang leaders in Wuhan complained that Jiang Jieshi was suppressing branches of the General Labor Union in Jiangxi. Instigated by Communists, Chinese crowds broke into the foreign concessions in Hankou in January 1927. Shanghai labor leaders organized a general strike in February to support the National Revolutionary Army’s advance. The warlord forces disrupted the workers’ meetings, arrested three hundred strike leaders, and beheaded twenty. CCP leaders Zhou Enlai and Li Lisan organized 5,000 pickets, and many were armed. In the O’Malley-Chen Agreement on February 19 the British promised they would not move forces from Hong Kong into Shanghai, and the Guomindang declared that their policy was not to use force to change international concessions.

On February 10 the League Against Imperialism and for National Independence was founded at a Brussels congress that was attended by 152 delegates from 37 countries including such notables as Jawaharlal Nehru, Albert Einstein, and Roger Baldwin. China had thirty delegates present, and one of the resolutions passed called for the withdrawal of all foreign troops from China, direct action and strikes to prevent the movement of military forces and weapons to China and India, stopping military intervention, recognition of the Chinese National Government and cancellation of the unequal treaties, and united action to support labor movements in England, India, and China.

On March 11 one of Jiang’s officers executed Chen Zanxian, the Communist leader of the General Labor Union. On March 14 Admiral Yang Shuzhang brought the Shanghai fleet over to the Guomindang. Two days later Jiang dissolved the Nanchang Municipal Headquarters because it supported the Wuhan faction. On March 18 the General Labor Union of Shanghai mobilized 800,000 workers, and the union militias with 2,700 men fought the troops of the warlord Zhang Zongchang for four days before gaining control of the city. Then the Nationalist army of 20,000 men commanded by Bai Chongxi arrived on March 22 and set up headquarters on the southern edge of the city. Bai sent General Xue Yue’s forces to subdue the northern army, and he ended the strike on March 24. Many northern generals were executed.

On March 23 Zhang Zongchang withdrew his forces from Nanjing, and Jiang’s Nationalist troops occupied that city and looted the British, Japanese, and American consulates, killing six foreigners. American destroyers and a British cruiser shelled the area around the Standard Oil Company headquarters to assist its evacuation of about fifty Westerners. Both foreigners and the Chinese resented this “Nanjing incident.”

Jiang Jieshi entered Shanghai on March 26, 1927 and praised the unions. Two days later five of the twelve on the Central Supervisory Committee met and voted to expel the Communists from the Guomindang. Wang Jingwei arrived at Shanghai from abroad on April 1, and two days later Jiang sent telegrams announcing that Chairman Wang was head of the Nationalist administration. Shanghai had 22,000 foreign troops and police.

On April 9 Jiang went to Nanjing and declared martial law. In the next two days armed gangs attacked the General Labor Union while the military searched and arrested alleged Communists, killing some. The Comintern had advised the Communists to hide their weapons and avoid military conflict with Jiang.

While the CCP urged the unions in Shanghai to disarm, Jiang had met with Wang Jingwei, Cao Yuanpei, wealthy industrialists, and the Green Gang leaders who had formed the Society for Common Progress. On April 12 this latter group’s men attacked the headquarters of the large unions, killing many with pistols and swords while arresting hundreds. When workers, students, and others rallied in protest the next day, Guomindang troops used machine guns and killed nearly a hundred. The General Labor Union was declared illegal and called off its strikes in Shanghai on April 15, asking the Wuhan government for help. In the next month several thousand people were massacred.

On April 17 the Wuhan government dismissed Jiang Jieshi as commander-in-chief, but the next day he and Hu Hanmin defiantly formed a Nationalist government in Nanjing with a manifesto that was revolutionary but also anti-Communist. That day Wang Jingwei’s Wuhan government, which claimed authority over Hunan, Hubei, and Jiangxi, decided to launch their own northern campaign. Stalin was involved in a power struggle with Leon Trotsky, who accused him of letting collaboration with bourgeois forces limit the action of the Chinese Communists. Stalin supported Jiang’s policies, hoping that his victories would help his standing. Jiang’s army suppressed the Communists and unions in all the provinces he controlled—Guangdong, Jiangxi, Fujian, Zhejiang, and Jiangsu. Most of those executed in these areas were Communists, but it was reported that at radical Changsha in Hunan about thirty Chinese with foreign business connections were executed.

Jiang had been a stock broker in Shanghai and had connections with the gangsters of the Green Band. He tried to extort money from the wealthy in Shanghai. When the chairman of the Chamber of Commerce refused to provide most of a $10-million loan, Jiang confiscated his property and forced him into exile. Bankers eventually loaned Jiang ten million yuan, but he needed twenty million a month. Other businessmen were compelled to purchase short-term government bonds worth 30 million yuan, and large corporations were given quotas of 500,000 yuan or more. Children of the wealthy were arrested as subversives and were not released until their fathers made large donations.

Meanwhile the Wuhan government could not raise the 15 million yuan per month it needed to run its offices and pay 70,000 troops who were fighting in north China. In May 1927 Wang Jingwei, Borodin, Chen Duxiu, and Mao Zedong of the Central Land Committee urged self-government at the local level and agreed to guarantee land holdings of Guomindang soldiers and promised the others land when the war was over. On May 18 General Xia Douyin, who controlled the Changsha-Wuhan railway, mutinied against the Guomindang and marched on Wuhan, destroying peasant associations, but he was overcome by Guomindang forces led by the communist Ye Ting. Xia’s defeated troops terrorized southern and western Hubei and smashed peasant associations, killing thousands. On May 21 General Xu Kexiang of the Changsha garrison raided leftist organizations, arresting and killing nearly a hundred students and peasant leaders. He ordered peasant forces attacked, and thousands were slaughtered. Former landowners took revenge against peasants who had taken their lands. The Wuhan CCP cabled a peasant army not to fight, and they disbanded; but Mao Zedong recruited an army of 2,000 and attacked towns near Changsha. Chen Gongbo started the leftist Revolutionary Critic in May, but the Nanjing government suppressed it in September. Chen also began the Dalu University in Shanghai.

Meanwhile Jiang Jieshi’s forces advanced along the Tianjin-Pukou railway and took Xuzhou on June 2, 1927. Jiang abolished the Political Department. Wuhan leaders went to Zhengzhou and met with Feng Yuxiang on June 6. Feng’s authority in Henan was recognized, and his appointees in Shaanxi and Gansu were confirmed; but he declined to join a campaign against the Nanjing government. Two weeks later Feng met with Nanjing leaders in Xuzhou and accepted from them a much larger subsidy of $2 million a month. Feng then sent a telegram to Wang Jingwei and Tan Yankai demanding that Wuhan expel Borodin and the Communists. Jiang tried to pressure the Japanese to leave Shandong and started the League for the Rupture of Economic Relations with Japan, arresting merchants for violating the boycott and fining them up to 150,000 yuan each.

Wang Jingwei recalled Tang Shengzhi’s army from the north, and on July 15 he expelled the Communists from the Guomindang to reconcile with Nanjing. The next day the Guomindang Central Committee published their resolutions restricting Communists and ordered that no harm should come to workers’ and peasants’ movements. The two parties had irrevocably split. The Wuhan cities were put under martial law, and troops seized union headquarters; the Communists hid or fled. Zhou Enlai led the Nanchang revolt on August 1 (a date celebrated by the Chinese Communist Party as the founding of the Red Army), but they had to evacuate the city four days later. They managed to occupy the port of Swatow in late September before retreating to the interior. Communist generals in Jiangxi led 20,000 troops in August, but they were defeated and retreated to Haifeng, where Peng Pai had a rural soviet. CCP Secretary-General Chen Duxiu was dismissed and replaced by Qu Qiubai, and Stalin chose Li Lisan to be in charge of propaganda. Mao Zedong led the peasant revolt in Hunan east of Changsha during the autumn harvests that destroyed parts of the Guangzhou-Hankou railway. The insurrections were defeated, and Mao barely escaped, leading a thousand men south to the Jinggang Mountains on the Hunan-Jiangxi border. Qu Qiubai and a few others of the Politburo went to Shanghai and secretly established the CCP headquarters there in October.

Jiang Jieshi’s army was routed by the forces of the warlord Sun Chuanfang in July, and Nanjing was even threatened. The Guangxi faction led by Li Zongren and Bai Chongxi forced Jiang from power in August, and he left for Japan on September 28. Jiang arranged to marry Charlie Soong’s daughter Meiling. He was already married; but they accepted when he promised to study Christianity. On November 5 he met with Prime Minister Tanaka Giichi, who advised him to avoid the warlord politics in the north. Jiang indicated he was going to move north and asked for Japan’s support. Wang Jingwei went to Guangzhou on October 29 and set up a Guomindang headquarters that opposed the Special Central Committee in Nanjing. T. V. Soong was sent to Guangzhou to try to reconcile with Wang. After much negotiation, on December 10 Wang accepted Jiang as commander-in-chief and offered to resign for the sake of party unity.

The Comintern had directed Qu Qiubai to order a Communist insurrection in Guangzhou, and on December 11 they seized police stations and took over the city as a soviet of the workers, soldiers, and peasants. Rebels seized railway stations, government offices, and Guomindang headquarters. Banks and shops were looted, and about three hundred police were killed. However, popular support was lacking, and few soldiers joined the rebellion. In three days of fighting, looting, and burning nearly 900 buildings were destroyed, and 600 people were killed. Then in the aftermath the Guomindang killed 5,700 people. Those in the Russian consulate were shot. Recently dyed kerchiefs left red marks on the necks of the radicals, and they were identified and massacred. To save ammunition groups of rebels were tied together and drowned. Wang Jingwei sailed for France again on December 17. This failed Communist uprising directed by Soviet Russia turned much of Chinese public opinion against the Communists. The Nationalist government broke off relations with Soviet Russia, and the Guomindang ended its alliance with the Comintern.

On January 7, 1928 T. V. Soong resumed his position as Finance minister and announced that the monthly deficit was eight million yuan, but he hoped to increase the monthly income by seven million yuan by March. Jiang Jieshi returned to Nanjing, and 29 members and alternates attended the Fourth Central Executive Committee Plenum on February 2. Jiang proposed policies based on Sun Yat-sen’s plan for national reconstruction before he was influenced by Bolshevik ideas. All the provincial departments for peasants, workers, merchants, women, and youth were to be abolished and replaced by the departments of organization, propaganda, and party training. Communist influence in mass movements was to be eliminated. Education should emphasize science. The Nationalist government was organized into the five branches. Jiang was commander-in-chief of the military, and Tan Yankai was put in charge of administration. On February 28 the new Central Military Council made Jiang commander of the First Group Army, Feng Yuxiang of the Second Group Army, and Yan Xishan of the Third Group Army. Yan had ruled Shanxi as military governor since the revolution of 1911, and he had managed to rule well and remain independent of the other factions which surrounded his province.

Jiang’s army advanced into Shandong in April. Prime Minister Tanaka had asked Jiang and Feng to bypass Jinan, where 2,000 Japanese lived, and on April 18 he ordered 5,000 Japanese troops to Shandong. Jiang strongly forbade hostile acts against the Japanese, but fighting broke out on May 3. The next day General Fukuda Hikosuke asked for reinforcements, and Tanaka sent more troops from Korea and Manchuria. Jiang met only some of Fukuda’s demands. So on May 8 Japanese forces attacked Jinan and defeated the Chinese troops three days later. Jiang appealed to the League of Nations, and this Jinan incident inflamed Chinese hatred against the Japanese. Jiang pulled his army back and sent them west across the Yellow River. General Bai Chongxi of Guangxi joined the campaign as the Fourth Group Army and entered Henan.

On May 18 Tanaka sent a memorandum to the Beijing and Nanjing governments proposing that if Zhang Zuolin withdrew from Beijing peacefully, Japan would allow him to return to Manchuria. Japanese forces would not let the Southern army pass north of the Great Wall. The generals Jiang, Feng, and Yan met on June 1, and the Nationalist government decided that Yan’s army would occupy Beijing. Zhang Zuolin withdrew on a special train which was bombed on June 4 near Mukden by Japanese officers, killing Zhang. He was succeeded by his oldest son Zhang Xueliang, who was an opium addict, but he brought the three Manchurian provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning into Nationalist China and was appointed to the State Council.

General Yan’s Shanxi army entered Beijing on June 8, 1928, and the same army took over Tianjin four days later. The National Revolutionary Army had about two million troops. Jiang wanted to reduce them by about half, but he found it difficult to get others to agree. On July 7 the Nationalist foreign minister Wang Zhengting announced that all treaties had expired and would be renegotiated. US Secretary of State Frank Kellogg signed a new tariff treaty with T. V. Soong on July 25 agreeing to equal treatment, but the “most favored nation” clause meant that it would not go into effect unless other governments also agreed. China made tariff agreements with Germany, Belgium, Italy, Britain, and France by the end of the year. Japan did not agree until May 1929. The Fifth Plenum of the Guomindang’s Central Executive Committee met in August 1928 at Nanjing. The government was to be centralized, and T. V. Soong insisted on a budget committee to decide on government appropriations. The military was also to be centralized, and the disbanded troops were to work on reconstruction. All the unequal treaties would be abrogated on January 1, 1929.

Hu Hanmin returned from abroad in September and helped draft the Organic Law of the National Government. On October 3 the Guomindang Central Executive Committee adopted this provisional constitution as the beginning of a period of political tutelage. The five powers were the executive, legislative, judicial, control (auditing), and examination (civil service). Each branch had its own president, and Jiang Jieshi was president of the republic. The executive was led by Tan Yankai until his death in 1930 and had a cabinet with ministries of Internal Affairs, Foreign Affairs, War, Finance, Agriculture and Mining, Industry and Commerce, Education, Communication, Railways, and Health. Hu Hanmin was the first head of the legislative which approved the budget and foreign policy. Jiang established the Guomindang Central Political Institute and training schools in Nanjing to gain loyal followers. Beijing, which means northern capital, was renamed Beiping (northern peace), and the new government was inaugurated in Nanjing on October 10, exactly 17 years after the 1911 revolution began.

Chinese Communism 1927-31
Mao Zedong traveled through Xiangtan and four other counties in January and early February 1927, and he was amazed at the transformation that had occurred among the peasants. Mao Zedong published his “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan” which noted that in the first nine months of 1926 they had begun by meeting in secret, but after the Northern Expedition they met openly. In the last three months of 1926 the peasants rose in revolt, and their associations’ membership increased from 400,000 to 2,000,000. The Hubei peasant movement claimed to have 2.5 million members in May 1927. The next month the peasant department of the Guomindang claimed that the peasant associations in six provinces had nine million members. Yet the peasant associations were forbidden to purchase weapons by the Wuhan government.

Mao’s report described the following victories of the peasants: organizing unions; defeating property owners; eliminating armed forces; canceling the district chief’s authority over family, religion, and marriage; prohibiting luxuries and vice; abolishing abusive taxes; developing culture and cooperatives; and repairing roads and earth banks. He wrote that the execution of one big bully could effect the feudalism of the gentry in an entire county. Their objectives were to reduce land rents and interest rates on debt, end hoarding to bring down prices, and disband the landlord militias and replace them with spear-carrying peasants. They used village assemblies to create new rural administrations. They were overthrowing the feudal and patriarchal domination by the state, clan, religion, and even husbands over their wives. Qu Qiubai favored Mao’s report; but Chen Duxiu had objections, and he kept half the report from being published in Xingdao in March 1927. Later the full text was published as a pamphlet with a preface by Qu.

Meanwhile Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) and his Nationalists had turned on the Communists and slaughtered them in Jiangxi in March and at Shanghai in April. On May 21 the Changsha garrison commander Xu Kexiang cracked down. In three weeks about 10,000 suspected Communists were killed in the Changsha area. The landlord militias went after the peasant associations and killed about 380,000 people in Hunan. Xia Douyin’s force had been defeated by forces under the Communist Ye Ting’s troops near Wuchang. Xia’s army then slaughtered thousands of villagers in Hubei, and in Jiangxi the dissolved peasant associations suffered revenge from the gentry. On June 1 Stalin sent a telegram instructing the Central Committee to raise an army of 70,000 to take over the Guomindang. A year before the CCP’s request for 5,000 rifles had been rejected by Moscow, and now they considered Stalin’s order too late and impractical. The Indian Communist Mahendranath N. Roy had arrived from Moscow in April, and he advocated organizing the peasant movement. Without consulting Borodin or other CCP leaders, Roy showed Stalin’s telegram to Wang Jingwei, who realized the CCP-Guomindang alliance was broken and led a leftist delegation to reconcile with Jiang. Zhou Enlai sent more than a hundred agents to organize armed peasant uprisings against Xu Kexiang’s Guomindang forces.

Mao Zedong was appointed party secretary for Hunan on June 24 and went to Changsha. As late as June 30 the CCP Politburo passed a resolution affirming the Guomindang’s leading place in the revolution. Roy and Voitinsky were recalled to Moscow, and on July 10 Nikolai Bukharin in Pravda denounced the CCP leaders for disobeying Stalin. Two days later Chen Duxiu resigned, and in the next few days the Communists and the Left Guomindang leaders split. Borodin also went back to Russia, and most of the CCP leaders went into hiding. A secret directive, probably by Mao, urged they concentrate their energy on the peasant movement. Only two small military units were still intact—Peng Pai’s forces in Hailufeng and troops led by Zhu De and Chen Yi based in northern Guangdong. Mao reorganized his few forces and Guomindang mutineers in the mountain village of Sanwan in western Jiangxi. He promised that officers would not beat them and that they would use democratic methods. Those who wanted to leave would be given money for their journey. They were to treat civilians well and fairly. These policies were unusual in a China accustomed to warlords. Mao established a base at Maoping and won over forces led by Yuan Wencai and Wang Zuo by giving them rifles and training.

In November the Politburo met in Shanghai, and the Russian Besso Lominadze insisted that Mao be dismissed. The Comintern agent Meyer called Peng a coward, and he lost his position. Zhang Guotao was blamed for the defeat of the Nanchang forces and was also removed. Zhou Enlai and Li Lisan were reprimanded but remained in the Politburo. In December some Communist insurgents, supported by 1,200 cadets trained by the Guomindang and led by Ye Jianying, held Guangzhou for three days, but then thousands of Communists and their supporters were massacred. Party membership fell from 57,000 in May to only 10,000 by the end of 1927.

In March 1928 the junior official Zhou Lu arrived and told Mao that he had been dismissed from the Politburo and (falsely) that he had been expelled from the party. Zhou ordered Mao to support Zhu’s army that was supporting peasant uprisings in southeastern Hunan. In the fighting Zhou Lu was captured and executed, and Mao met up with Zhu De in April. They set up a Soviet base on the Hunan-Jiangxi border with Yuan Wencai as chairman, forming the Fourth Workers’ and Peasants’ Revolutionary Army with about 8,000 men. They held a party congress on May 20-21, and Mao’s strategy of deepening the revolution in a single area was approved. Their military tactics were put into the following folk-rhyme:

When the enemy advances, we withdraw.
When the enemy rests, we harass.
When the enemy tires, we attack.
When the enemy withdraws, we pursue.1
Mao urged moderate treatment of the shopkeepers and traders so that they would not oppose the revolution. He was accused of being “too right-wing,” but Qu Qiubai agreed with him that peasants should not be allowed to burn down towns and kill the gentry. Yet they had to expropriate $5,000 a month to buy food. Peng Dehuai arrived in December with 800 Guomindang troops who had mutinied in Pingjiang.

The CCP Sixth Congress in July 1928 was held in Moscow, and Li Lisan became secretary-general. The number of union members in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had fallen drastically, and Zhou Enlai estimated that only three percent of them were proletarians in 1929. Nationalist attacks forced Mao Zedong to move east to the Jiangxi-Fujian border, where he established the Jiangxi Soviet in Ruijin. Mao was removed from command for a few months in 1929 while he recovered from malaria. He called a conference in December in western Fujian and began his “rectification campaigns” to develop party discipline with his report on “The Problem of Correcting Erroneous and Non-Proletarian Ideological Tendencies in the Party.” He wanted to make sure the party was in charge of the military. He criticized officers for beating their men, shooting deserters, maltreating prisoners, and leaving the sick and wounded to die.

The CCP established about fifteen soviets that survived the Nationalist repression, usually in border regions. Deng Xiaoping led a group in southwest Guangxi that cooperated with Vietnamese Communists. Mao and his military commander Zhu De used guerrilla tactics to harass their enemies and arouse the masses. Moscow changed its policy and persuaded Li Lisan that a revolutionary upsurge was imminent. A Central Committee directive issued on December 8 called for expanding the Red Army by incorporating peasant self-defense units and for concentrating rather than dispersing their military forces.

In February 1930 Mao reorganized the Southwest Jiangxi Special Committee with Liu Shaoqi as head, and they ordered the secret execution of four of those who had founded the local party. Over the next few months Liu expelled from the party hundreds of cadres who had been landlords and rich peasants and were suspected of being in the Anti-Bolshevik League (AB-tuan). By October more than a thousand members had been executed. In the army every unit formed a committee to eliminate counter-revolutionaries, and more than 1,300 in the Fourth Army were killed. In the First Front Army 4,400 soldiers confessed to connection with the AB-tuan, and more than 2,000 were shot.

Li Shaojiu served on Mao’s staff, and on December 7 his men surrounded the Action Committee’s Propaganda Department at Futian and arrested eight members. They were tortured until they confessed the names of others. Within a week 120 were arrested. Liu Di was released and led a mutiny with 400 men, killing 100 of Li Shaojiu’s troops. The 20th Army mutinied and crossed the Gan River to Yongyang. Mao reprimanded Li for excessive zeal, but the new Central Bureau expelled Liu Di and four rebel leaders. Liu Di was brought before Zhu De at a court martial in April 1931 and was beheaded with two others. The purge continued as the Jiangxi Political Security Department proposed arresting every rich peasant and stated “that it was better to kill a hundred innocent people than to have a truly guilty one at large.”2

In July 1931 the 20th Army was disbanded as the officers were arrested. Four hundred officers and men were executed along with several hundred from the 35th Army. As many as ten thousand from the Jiangxi party may have been executed that summer. About 6,000 were suspected of being Social Democrats. Zhang Guotao and Zeng Hongyi in north Fujian each executed about 2,000. In December efforts were made to control the purge, and low-level officials were no longer allowed to order executions. The Communists began a legal system that sentenced to death landlords, rich peasants, and those with “capitalist origins” but not the masses.

Mao became chairman of the Military Commission with Zhu as commander-in-chief, and the CCP Secretary-General Li Lisan ordered attacks on Changsha, Wuhan, and Nanchang. Moscow wanted the offensive called off, but Li kept secret their orders and went ahead anyway. On July 25, 1930 Peng Dehuai’s small army defeated He Jian’s Guomindang force that was four times as large. They took Changsha two days later, but they could hold it for only nine days. Mao and Zhu were defeated at Nanchang and joined Dehuai in August; but they could not recapture Changsha and had to withdraw in September. However, the defenders abandoned Jian, and the Communists took this city of 40,000 in October and held it for six weeks. Mao’s First Front Army had grown to 40,000 men, and most were equipped with modern rifles. On October 30 Mao came up with his new tactic of “luring the enemy in deep.” For six weeks as local Red Guards harassed the advancing Nationalist troops, the Communist army retreated. Finally on December 29 Zhu De’s army of 40,000 defeated 100,000 Nationalists led by Zhang Huizan, taking 9,000 prisoners, 5,000 rifles, and 30 machine-guns. Tan Daoyuan who commanded Jiang’s 50th Division ordered a retreat, and the Front Army pursued them, capturing 3,000 prisoners and valuable equipment including a radio unit.

In 1930 Lu Xun and Xia Yan had helped organize the League of Leftist Writers that criticized the Nationalist government. Qu Qiubai became one of their most prominent advocates. Li Lisan and Qu Qiubai were severely criticized for their strategies by the 28 students who returned from four years of study at the Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow. When Li Lisan proposed an uprising in Manchuria to start a war between Russia and Japan, Stalin quickly had him removed. At the fourth plenum in January 1931 the “real work” group led by He Mengxiong and Luo Zhanglong came into conflict with the 28 Bolsheviks led by Wang Ming and their mentor Pavel Mif. The labor union members opposed the “real work” group, which was defeated. Luo, five young leftist writers, and seventeen others may have been betrayed to the police and were shot on February 7, 1931. Zhou Enlai became head of the Central Bureau, but Xiang Ying replaced Mao as secretary.

In May 1931 the Communists fought more than 200,000 soldiers for a month and inflicted 30,000 casualties while capturing 20,000 rifles. On his third encirclement campaign Jiang took command of 300,000 men himself in July. Mao’s army retreated south and then west, but they were surrounded in August. They broke out to the west and took more than 7,000 prisoners. Encircled again, the Red Army of 20,000 escaped by climbing over a 3,000-foot mountain at night. Jiang’s army had 30,000 wounded, killed, or captured before moving west to take on a rival Guomindang army in Hunan. Then in September they had to return north to face the Japanese threat in Manchuria. This gave the Communists a respite from the Nationalist campaigns for the next two years.

Mao Zedong organized the First All-China Congress of the Soviets in Ruijin on November 7, 1931, founding the Chinese Soviet Republic. The 28 Bolsheviks attended and criticized Mao, keeping him out of the Politburo, but he was elected chairman and remained Chief Political Commissar of the First Front Red Army. Mao distributed all grades of land to all the peasants and to small landlords, implementing Sun Yat-sen’s policy that peasants should own the land they cultivate. Taxes did not exceed twenty percent of the harvest. He observed that poor women held more power than their rich counterparts because they did more work. In December the Jiangxi Soviet passed the Marriage Law that prohibited arranged marriages and the purchase of marriage contracts, and the minimum ages were 20 for men and 18 for women. Divorces were granted at the request of either partner.

Everyone in the Red Army received the same pay regardless of rank. The Red Army had three rules, which were to obey orders, take nothing from the people, and give confiscated goods to the authorities for public distribution. Their eight points of discipline were: