About one-fifth of humanity lives in China, the
most populous nation of the world. But until the
nineteenth century, though in touch with the
West, China followed its own path of historical
development unaffected by Western contact. The
chronological cycle of eastern Asian developments
did not coincide with that of Europe, nor did the
First World War mark the great break of ‘before’
and ‘after’ in Chinese history. The war simply
intensified the ongoing disintegration.
The hugeness of China in land area and
population makes it all the more extraordinary
that for more than a thousand years a concept of
unity had been maintained. Other peoples were
absorbed as China expanded. The ethnic origin
of some of these peoples survives to the present
day in the form of national minorities with which
about one in eighteen Chinese identify – though
intermarriage has obliterated the majority. In traditional
China, to be considered Chinese was not
a matter of race or nationality in the Western
sense but depended on an acceptance of Chinese
customs and culture. Those who did not accept
them – even people within Chinese frontiers –
were considered ‘barbarian’. The living traditions
of Chinese culture were so strong that they
absorbed the alien peoples who conquered China
and so turned them into Chinese. These included
the Mongol dynasty and, in the mid-seventeenth
century, the Manchus who ruled from then until
the revolution of 1911 as the Ch’ing dynasty.
Foreign peoples were incorporated by conquest
or else absorbed by China when they conquered
the empire from without. The political and cultural
continuity of China persisted, overcoming
periods of internal rebellion and war. Integration,
not disintegration, was the dominant theme of
more than a millennium of Chinese history until
the mid-nineteenth century. But how should historians
interpret the century that followed?
If we stop the clock in 1925 it would certainly
seem that the disintegration of China had proceeded
so far that the long tradition of the
national unity of the Chinese Empire could never
be restored. It was then a country torn by internal
strife, economically bound to the West and Japan,
yet without significant progress, as far as the mass
of Chinese were concerned, to show for Western
economic penetration, politically divided, and
with parts of China dominated by foreign powers.
From the later Ch’ing period in the 1840s until
the close of the civil war in 1949, China knew no
peace and passed through a number of phases of
disintegration which no single ruler who followed
the Ch’ing dynasty after 1911 could halt. Today,
the Chinese Empire is unified once more and has
reasserted its right to recover territories that were
once Chinese or over which suzerainty was
asserted.
In the nineteenth century a double crisis threatened
the cohesion and stability of China and
undermined traditional China and the rule of the
Ch’ing dynasty. A great blow to central authority
was the defeat of the Manchu Ch’ing dynasty by
the invasion of the ‘barbarians’ of the West. The
West saw an opportunity to trade in China and
made wars to force their way in. The British
fought the Opium Wars (1839–42) and China
ceded its territory (Hong Kong) and was forced to
accept the opening of its trade to Britain. An even
more fundamental cause of unrest was that population
growth was no longer matched by an
increase in the lands under cultivation. Amid the
general distress occurred the greatest rising in
world history – the Taiping Rebellion of 1850–64
which led to huge destruction and to the loss of
between 20 and 30 million lives. The rising was
mastered in the end by gentry-led regional armies.
China was thereby pushed along a path where
regional independence and strength asserted
themselves against central authority. During this
period and later in the nineteenth century other
Western nations followed the British example and
secured concessions; and so began a process
whereby the Western powers acquired territorial
settlements, colonies, leases, rights to trade in
‘treaty ports’, and concessions in some eighty
towns on the coast and inland. The foreigners not
only enjoyed immunity from Chinese government
but in their settlements, in effect, ruled over the
Chinese inhabitants as well. The largest, the foreign
settlements of Shanghai, in 1928 comprised a
Chinese population of more than 1 million subordinated
to 35,000 Westerners. China was not only
defeated and forced to accept the ‘unequal
treaties’ by the West, but during the last decade
of the nineteenth century was attacked by Japan as
well.
The impact of the West and Japan, as well as
China’s internal upheavals, led Chinese intellectuals
to question China’s future role. Yet their
initial reaction was to seek to preserve Chinese
traditions. China should strengthen itself through
the adoption of Western industrial and military
techniques. But little real headway could be made
materially. It was not Confucian tradition that
blocked the path but economic reality. China
remained a peasant society with a surface scratch
of industrial development, largely in the foreigndominated
enclaves. The movement of ‘selfstrengthening’
was nowhere near sufficient to
counter the forces of disintegration. The Ch’ing
dynasty under the formidable Empress Dowager
Tz’u-hsi attempted in a last spasm to adopt
Western techniques in government and education,
but always with the underlying conservative
purpose of strengthening traditional China. The
reforms were undertaken in the wake of the disastrous
Boxer rising of 1900, which attempted to
throw out Western influence – economic, political,
territorial and religious – by force and was,
in its turn, crushed by a Western international
army joined by the Japanese. China was placed
further in debt to the West and lost control over
even more territory since the Russians refused to
leave northern China and Manchuria. Then the
Chinese had to stand aside as Russia and Japan in
1904 and 1905 fought each other for dominance
over this portion of China. China was breaking
apart into foreign spheres of influence; simultaneously
the regions were asserting their autonomy
from central government. In 1908 the
empress died and the strength of the Ch’ing
dynasty was spent. If the misery of the condition
of the country and its people could prove such a
thing, then the Ch’ing dynasty had lost its
Heavenly Mandate.
Among the small group of conservative intellectuals
and administrators there were some who,
under the impact of the experience of their own
lifetime, looked at the world beyond China more
realistically and knowledgeably. They contrasted
Japanese success in maintaining national independence,
in throwing off discriminatory treaties
in their homeland and in inflicting military defeat
on a great Western power with China’s weakness
and helplessness. China had, in theory, preserved
its sovereignty over all but small portions of its
empire. The reality, however, was different since
foreigners controlled its commerce, built its railways
and established industries under their ownership.
Here, though, it is necessary to distinguish
the few Westerners who were dedicated to serving
the interests of China as they saw them. These
were officials like Robert Hart, head of the
Maritime Customs Service, who warned in the
aftermath of the Boxer rising that the Western
powers should take care how they treated the
Chinese: ‘a China in arms will be a big power at
some future day’, he wrote; the Western powers
should make sure that ‘the China of the future
might have something to thank us for and not to
avenge’. There were some Chinese reformers who
sensed that China stood at the parting of the
ways. China could emulate Japan or suffer the fate
of India and south-east Asia, then part of the
colonial empires of the Dutch, the British and the
French.
Many of these reformers had received part of
their education in Japan or the West. Yan Fu, one
of the most important, spent time not only in
Japan but also in England. In his writings he contrasted
the Chinese ideals of harmony and stability
with Western encouragement of the thrusting individual,
competition and the goal of progress. Yan
Fu translated into Chinese seminal Western works
on politics and the economy, books by T. H.
Huxley, John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith among
them. His translations and his own advocacy stimulated
demands for a break with Confucian traditions
and the adoption of a Western-style form of
constitutional government. Another reformer of
great influence in the first decade of the twentieth
century was Liang Qichao, the intellectual leader
of the young Chinese progressives, who wrote
extensively about Western political leaders and
thinkers in the hope of opening up a new world
to the Chinese and thus transforming them into
a new people. In its last years, not so much directly
influenced by the reformers but reacting to
the same stimuli – a desire to strengthen China
against the foreigner – the Ch’ing dynasty promulgated
reforms thick and fast, promising the
gradual introduction of constitutional government,
a process which when set in motion was to lead
to its own downfall and the revolution of 1911.
Thousands of students in the first decade of the
twentieth century travelled and studied abroad.
Their ideas were far more radical than those of the
reformers. Their goal was a revolution against
the ‘foreign’ Ch’ing dynasty and the establishment
of a republic. They identified with another
Western-educated revolutionary, Dr Sun Yat-sen.
A farmer’s son, like many Chinese he had emigrated
abroad joining, at the age of twelve, his
brothers in Hawaii. He was educated in a British
missionary school there and, later, in Hong Kong,
where he graduated in medicine. He did not
practise long as a doctor, instead seeing that his
task was to awaken China to revolution. In breach
of Chinese tradition, Sun Yat-sen encouraged
the Chinese to view themselves as a distinctive
race. The removal of the foreign Manchu Ch’ing
dynasty provided a focus for the revolutionary
movement. Sun Yat-sen wished to create a
modern Chinese nation state, with a constitution
based on that of the US together with some
Chinese traditions grafted on to it such as a
control branch of government – the old censors
under a new name. In Japan he founded the revolutionary
League of Common Alliance, an organised
political movement which in 1912 joined
with other groups to form the Kuomintang or
Nationalist Party. Not until after his death in
1925, however, did the Kuomintang play a
leading role in China’s history.
Sun Yat-sen summed up his political programme
and aims in three principles: first, the
restoration of the Chinese identity, which came
to mean the removal of both the ‘foreign’
Manchu dynasty and foreign imperialism. China,
Sun Yat-sen said, lacked a national spirit; the 400
million people of China were ‘just a heap of loose
sand’, and China the weakest and poorest nation
– ‘other men are the carving knife and serving
dish; we are the fish and meat’. China must seek
its salvation by espousing nationalism and so avert
the catastrophe of ‘China being lost and our
people being eliminated’. The foreign oppression,
he pointed out, was not just political, which was
easily recognised, but economic, transforming
China ‘into a colony of the foreign powers’. The
second principle was democracy, by which he
meant the creation of a strong executive central
power and the ultimate sovereignty of the people
expressed in an electoral process. The third principle,
socialism, was the vaguest; in theory it
stood for landownership equalisation and some
state control to prevent the abuse of monopoly
capitalist power, but since the Kuomintang drew
support from businessmen, the principle was
blurred. Sun Yat-sen developed these ideas
throughout his political life, though in his own
lifetime they found little application.
The advocates of Westernisation always faced
one serious emotional and intellectual problem.
The very people they wished to emulate showed
their belief in Chinese inferiority. Foreign residents,
whether missionaries or merchants, only
too frequently looked down on the Chinese,
regarding their culture as pagan. The roles of the
civilised and the barbarians were reversed. In
Shanghai there were parks reserved exclusively for
the Westerners, characteristic of the racial prejudice
of the time. The Christian missionaries saw
themselves engaged in saving souls otherwise lost
to heathen ways. So the Chinese reacted to
Western ways with both admiration and intense
hostility. The political and economic behaviour of
the Western powers could only strengthen that
hostility.
The course of the revolution of 1911, which
soon ended the monarchy, was not determined by
Sun Yat-sen, though a Chinese Republic did come
into being. A strong Chinese nation dedicated to
the objectives of his loose Alliance movement did
not emerge when the revolution had succeeded in
its first task of overthrowing the Manchus. The
membership of Sun Yat-sen’s party amounted to
only a few thousand within China. More significant
in determining the subsequent course of
events were the men of influence in the provinces
– the merchants and the gentry – who took advantage
of constitutional reform to assert the independence
of the provinces in the newly elected
assemblies. The spark for starting the revolution
was provided by a rising of a small group of revolutionary
soldiers in Wuchang in central China in
October 1911 with only the weakest links with
Sun Yat-sen’s Alliance. Sun Yat-sen at the time
was in Denver in the US. The rising could easily
have been suppressed. But so weak had the power
of the central government become that province
after province in October and November 1911
declared its independence from the central court
government. Hostility to the dynasty was widespread.
The court turned to Yuan Shikai, recently
a governor-general of a northern province, where
he had built up a modern Chinese Northern
Army.
Yuan Shikai was in retirement when the revolution
broke out; the dynasty saw him now as the
only man considered capable of commanding the
loyalty of the officers of the Northern Army,
whose military strength might still re-establish the
dynasty’s authority. Yuan Shikai, however, was
determined to be his own master. He negotiated
with the revolutionaries. They agreed to his
assuming the presidency of the Chinese Republic
provided he could secure the abdication of the
Ch’ing dynasty. In February 1912 the abdication
decree was published and in March 1912 Yuan
Shikai became the first president of China as the
man most acceptable to the provincial gentry and
merchants. These men were basically conservative,
and Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary movement
was abhorrent to them. There was to be no social
revolution. The republic and its new parliament
representing the unity of China were frail institutions.
During the last four years of Yuan Shikai’s
life, from 1912 to 1916, he ruled more and more
as a military dictator through the army and,
shortly before his death, attempted to revive the
monarchy with himself as emperor. Through his
hold over the army, the provinces were unable to
assert complete independence from Peking. But
Yuan Shikai could establish no genuine national
unity and with his death the disintegration of
China accelerated.
The years from 1906 to 1928 mark the warlord
era in modern Chinese history. To the outside
world the Republic of China was governed from
Peking. In reality this was just one of the hundreds
of governments, each headed by a warlord with a
personal army which had gained control of an area
sometimes small, sometimes covering a whole
province. The warlords intrigued and fought each
other in constant wars throughout twelve years of
strife and bloodshed. The peasants suffered from
pillage, tax oppression, destruction of their property
and bloodshed. But during this bleak period
a continuous process of state-building also took
place.
This same period saw some other positive
developments. The combination of China’s misfortunes
internal and external welded together a
new national movement which tried to recapture
the objectives set by Sun Yat-sen but totally
disregarded after the revolution of 1911.
Foreign encroachments on Chinese integrity
provoked the strongest reaction among the young
students and intellectuals. Peking University
became the centre of the intellectual ferment and
participated in what became known as the New
Culture Movement. Japan’s Twenty-one Demands
in January 1915 took advantage of the preoccupation
of the European powers with winning the war
in Europe to demand of the Chinese government
its practical subordination to Japan. In China they
were met with a storm of protest. An even greater
outburst of indignation greeted the decisions of the
Paris Peace Conference in 1919. China was an ally,
yet Japan had been accorded the right to take over
Germany’s extensive concessions in the province of
Shantung, and the warlord government in Peking,
representing China, had accepted this transfer
of what was after all still Chinese territory.
The fourth of May 1919 is an important date
in the history of modern China. It was later seen
as marking the moment when China reasserted its
national identity once more in angry response to
imperialism. Some 3,000 students in Peking
University launched a national protest movement
which took its name from that date. The government
had arrested some students and the protest
was directed equally against the government and
national humiliation. In the burst of publications
that followed, the May the Fourth movement had
a powerful effect on stimulating the young intellectuals
to reject the social and political traditions
of old China, including the Confucian ideals of
duty and filial obedience and the subordination
of women. A boycott of Japanese goods, in turn,
led to the organisation of Chinese labour in the
ports. But the intellectual revolution also had a
divisive effect as the mass of the countryside and
the peasantry was virtually untouched by the fever
for change.
In 1923 Sun Yat-sen was looking for ways to
strengthen his enfeebled Kuomintang Party,
which was nominally ruling Canton but in reality
was dependent on the local warlord. He turned
for help to the tiny Communist Party, numbering
less than a thousand members. The Comintern
welcomed any opportunity to strike a blow against
Western imperialism and agents were sent from
Moscow. The cooperation of Sun Yat-sen and his
Russian advisers soon bore fruit. Sun Yat-sen
adapted his principles to the new situation and the
Comintern ordered the Chinese communists not
to form an alliance but to subordinate their interests
and fuse with the Kuomintang. The communists,
now forming the left wing of the Kuomintang,
never lost their sense of identity. The
party, with the help of Russian advice, was reorganised,
and communist influence among Chinese
labour working for Western interests rapidly grew;
strikes were fomented and supported. In the
countryside, too, the Kuomintang made headway
among the peasants in encouraging the seizure of
landlord’s land.
The right wing of the Kuomintang controlled
the national revolutionary army it was organising.
The task was assigned to one of Sun Yat-sen’s
loyal young followers, Chiang Kai-shek. In 1923
Chiang Kai-shek went to Moscow to study the
new Soviet Red Army. On his return he was placed
in charge of training the officers of the Kuomintang’s
revolutionary army. In 1925 Sun Yat-sen
died. There was no obvious successor. For a time
the party continued under a collective leadership
amid increasing strains between the left and the
right. But Chiang Kai-shek soon made clear his
opposition to the left of the Kuomintang. Chiang
Kai-shek turned against the socialist plans of his
communist allies. He also vied for the assistance of
the propertied and for help from the West. Meanwhile
the communists in following Moscow’s
orders fared disastrously. In April 1927 the
nationalists and their supporters crushed organised
workers in Shanghai and shot protesters. In
the countryside peasant risings were bloodily put
down. By the end of that year the break between
the communists and nationalists was complete.
Driven out of the towns, the communists established
base areas in remote regions. Mao Zedong,
then in his thirties, created the most important in
Jiangxi. Here the Red Army was trained by Zhou
Enlai and taught to help and not plunder the peasants.
Other significant reforms ended the sale of
girls into forced marriages, while the peasants’
greatest need was land reform. After five years,
surrounded by Chiang’s forces, the base became
untenable. Daringly at night on 16 October 1934,
leaving behind a rearguard and the sick and
wounded, the communists broke through the
encirclement and fought their way north for 6,000
miles on the epic ‘Long March’. Yet it was not
civil war that dominated the 1930s but the
Japanese invasion in 1937. Once more, fervent
national feelings created a sense of unity in resisting
the brutal aggressor. Before Chiang Kai-shek’s
decisive breach he utilised the strength of the
communists to support the northern military
expedition started in 1926 to convert what was a
local government into a national one. It was a
tremendous feat to sweep successfully north from
their base in southern China to Peking. There was
some hard fighting; some warlords agreed to
accept Chiang Kai-shek’s authority on behalf of
the nationalist government now established in a
new capital in Nanking.
Chiang Kai-shek took care at this stage not to
offend the Western powers in China. He smashed
the anti-Western movement of the communists in
the Kuomintang. He set himself as his first task
to gain military control over China. But, though
his success had been astonishing, he had not
broken the power of all the warlords and by the
close of the 1920s controlled less than half of
China. In 1930 he quelled a rising in the north
in large-scale battles. Thereafter the remaining
warlords and Chiang Kai-shek’s government
agreed to tolerate each other. China was more
unified, but a new military struggle was opening
up between the Kuomintang and the communists.
Simultaneously Japan took advantage of
China’s weakness to seize Manchuria in 1931. In
the end Chiang Kai-shek, faced with the Japanese
war and simultaneous civil conflict with the communists,
failed to create the national unity of
China which was Sun Yat-sen’s testament to his
followers.
World History
