Government in Republican China Part 10

The well-informed expert on Chinese famine relief, Walter H. Mallory, set the total for 1937 at 1,650,000, of which 150,000 were Communist and 350,000 the crack troops of Chiang K'ai-shek; arms would be available for less than 1,000,000.[14] All factors considered, the figure of 2,000,000 armed men with nonproductive occupations seems to be in rough accord with the facts. Two salient conclusions emerge from these figures: Firstly, the armies const.i.tuted an enormous burden, which could only be reduced by partial disbandment; this in turn would not be achieved until greater national prosperity had become a fact. Secondly, and in China's favor, the armed forces have spread some elementary notions of modern fighting throughout the rest of the population and have enhanced not merely the willingness of the Chinese ma.s.ses to fight but also their capacity to do so.

Disbandment programs had not made enough progress by 1937 to alter the general position of the armies in Chinese society. Nevertheless, the counterpart of disbandment--selective recruiting--produced a central force which became the vocation, avocation, and pa.s.sion of Generalissimo Chiang K'ai-shek. Though not marked in any recognizable way as apart from the rest of the armed forces, the central units were given special arms, special equipment, regular pay, ma.s.s education, and training in the patriotic and reform doctrines of the New Life movement. "Chiang's own" were to distinguish themselves; they seem to have profited by new _materiel_, modern military instruction (chiefly from Germans), and the excellent opportunities for practice which arose from the Communist wars of 1928-1937. They were a testimonial to the fact that, had the disbandment program fully materialized, a more effective and much smaller Chinese army might have appeared. Despite the failure of disbandment, alliance with the quondam enemies, the Chinese Red Army, gave the national forces of 1937 a great diversity and wealth of actual experience in all types of fighting. Although the Chinese have never had adequate training for aggressive, coordinated warfare, they possess a marvelous background in guerrilla methods. The Communist forces have been hunted for a decade; technical superiority they have learned to meet by tactics which force the enemy to meet them on their own terms.

Ultimately they were driven by the Nationalists across China, but at most disproportionate cost. The Nationalists, on the other hand, learned to master the terrain of inland war and thus acquired the very knowledge which a foreign enemy would need most.

In time, the Chinese armies became increasingly less the free agencies of domestic tyrants and, after the j.a.panese invasion of Manchuria, more and more the protective force for the whole nation. The enemy began to force Chinese society into national form more sharply than could any pressure from within. Even the efforts of the National Government at Nanking to make a truce with the j.a.panese in order to continue the drive against the Communists failed to still the widespread clamor for unification. Whether or not Chiang, as a soldier, thought successful war with j.a.pan conceivable, he found that destiny had cast him in the role of the defender--he had only the choice of accepting or rejecting the challenge.

_Governmental and Political Role of the Armies_

Broadly, the political role of the armies was that of giving a day-to-day index for the influence of ideological control, and of providing the framework to which government had to accommodate itself.

The Republic was born with Sun Yat-sen as its father but with Yuan s.h.i.+h-k'ai as its midwife. Yuan and his armies established the order in which the parliamentary Republic had its illusory success; with his death the military order broke into military anarchy, and the political order disappeared almost completely from the arena of actual power. The armies and the tuchuns expressed a certain provincial autonomy and a desire for a crude stability. They ruled the chaos but kept the society stirred by war until the Nationalist-Communist revolution in 1926-1927 brought ideology back to a conspicuous place in the play of events. The armies developed under Yuan into separate ent.i.ties exercising the power derived from the monopoly of force. In time this monopoly of force was broken. The problem was one not of tyranny but of anarchy. Force was too broadly distributed, order too insufficiently achieved. The Chinese, said Sun Yat-sen, did not need liberty; they needed wealth, in the form of food for those starving and the necessities of life for impoverished millions.[15] When even soldiers were treacherous and tumultuous, order could not come from bayonets. It had to arise within men's minds, including the minds of the soldiers. This happened; the ideological revolution absorbed the military forces, but only to disgorge them, as it were, into opposing camps--the one identifying military power and the ma.s.ses, the other seeking to build up a new military elite with which to impose government and law on the society. Each of the two incompatible ideals reached a considerable measure of fulfillment, and they were reconciled only by the very presence of alien invaders. From being the _de facto_ rulers, the armies found themselves called upon to act as _de facto_ defenders. Hitherto the forces unsettling ideological control, they became the instruments of ideologies reconciled on the minimal terms of national defense for national existence.

The armies had supplied the power necessary to government but not the order. The Peking Republic lost its claim to authority when it was made the tool of Yuan s.h.i.+h-k'ai. The years after his death were a pitiful period wherein the civilian authorities in the central government const.i.tuted either the puppets of the war lords or their sycophants. The Peking Republic fell into the expedient of giving _de jure_ status to every s.h.i.+ft in the interplay of power. Military leaders of provincial importance easily captured the functions of _tuchuns_; regional leaders obtained correspondingly higher t.i.tles. The Peking Republic tried to govern on the Western pattern when the country was not ready for it, and it governed poorly. Soon it pa.s.sed from nominal control into nonexistence.

The National Government established at Nanking in 1927[16] gained actual effectiveness partly because the armies under its command were in need of essentials not obtainable by merely military measures. The modernized Nationalist armies under Chiang K'ai-shek were dependent upon a complementing state which would provide support behind the lines.

Furthermore, the cry from the educated cla.s.ses for civilian government was loud, and practical considerations prompted the acquiescence of the Nationalist generals in the development of civilian government. Although by 1938 a government primarily civilian was not yet in evidence, the auspices were favorable to the regularization and demilitarization of government.

Finally, the most significant role of the armies may be found in their destructive powers. Modern weapons coming into China pressed on her the mold of a modern state. By preventing any tranquil change from the Ch'ing dynasty to another form of government preserving the older controls of village and family, Western armament brought China into a condition of military anarchy in which a strong modern government became imperative. The armies and their irresponsible leaders goaded the ma.s.ses into the revolution of 1926-1927, and the necessity of establis.h.i.+ng military superiority for the sake of stability led the victorious Nationalists to create a modern defensive force, a working government, and the outline of operative statehood--to be partly Chinese, but modified by Western influences, according to the teachings of Sun Yat-sen. From 1931 on, the army and the government became more and more the integral parts of a single machine.

_War and the Agrarian Economy_

There is a close correlation between militarism and agricultural conditions in China. Distress among the Chinese farming ma.s.ses is both a cause and an effect of war. Misery creates unrest, unrest brings war, war brings misery--until government stops the vicious circle. On the whole, the economic system of old China was probably more stable, and ensured greater distributive justice, than did the Western systems during the same centuries; but periods of famine, flood, and--worst of all--oppression were far from rare.[17]

At its best, the old economy rested on a vast body of farmers, a.s.sociated in villages (_hui_) and families but tilling their own land in fairly small units. The farming cla.s.s provided the nourishment for the bulk of society but did not hold a low status, since the compensations of intercla.s.s kins.h.i.+p and of free play in the hierarchy of politics and intellect made families (if not individuals) approximately equal. There were no families in old China to compare with the aristocracy which Europe inherited from the Middle Ages, nor castes to compare with those of India. When functioning well, the Chinese economic system resembled some Western ideals of freehold farming governed by a hierarchy of scholars.

But at its worst, when the government became sterile and unimaginative, or corrupt and demoralized, the taxes rose sharply, and usurers added to the burden. Lack of resources caused the loss of the land, and the peasant proprietor found himself a tenant farmer. When economic and political exploitation overreached itself, social upheaval followed, and peasant rebellions tore down the government and the economy together.

Most Chinese dynasties met their end as a consequence of the land problem.[18]

Moreover, the Chinese farmer maintained very slight reserves of foodstuffs, so that flood or drought resulted in appalling famines, sometimes costing the lives of millions in one year. Governments established large granaries which, under good management, were filled in time of plenty and dispersed in time of need. R. H. Tawney says of drought and flood:

Those directly affected by them cannot meet the blow, for they have no reserves. The individual cannot be rescued by his neighbors, since whole districts together are in the same position. The district cannot be rescued by the nation, because means of communication do not permit of food being moved in sufficient quant.i.ties. Famine is, in short, the last stage of a disease which, though not always conspicuous, is always present.[19]

Whether or not natural calamities struck in conjunction with specific extortions sanctioned by social injustice, the Chinese farmer has been faced with threefold oppression whenever times were bad. The tax collector, the usurer, and the landlord were able to lay their hands on the harvest, reduce the peasant to subsistence level or beneath it, and place him under a system of exploitation which was as severe as Western feudalism. The check which provided a stop to any indefinite decline into greater and greater horror was the fighting power of the peasants.

Peasant revolts periodically followed agrarian oppression, and swept the land free for the time. The Han dynasty, in some ways the greatest in all Chinese history, went down in an uproar of peasant rebellions.

Peasant bandits have provided the ancestry of many imperial houses.

Politics or war might ease the economy, until the government again became weak and exploitation common.

It is one of the tragic coincidences of history that the Europeans should have appeared in China at a time when the Chinese were entering upon one of their most acute periods of agrarian decline and cla.s.s exploitation. Roughly, from the middle of the eighteenth century down to the present day the lot of the Chinese farmers has become worse and worse. At periods the country as a whole seemed fairly prosperous, but the broad agricultural recession remained constant. The nineteenth century was one long record of rebellions, and the twentieth amplified the disturbances.

Government in modern China has fallen heir to a depression centuries old, arising from inequitable land distribution, overtaxation, insufficient public works for drainage and communications, and--in more recent generations--the evils attendant upon sharp economic change. Most economic writers agree that some of the difficulties of Chinese agriculture are caused by the smallness of individual holdings and by population pressure. Such factors are not subject to immediate remedy; the peasants have attributed their misfortune primarily to landlordism and political oppression. The Chinese Communists, on their economic front, may perform a valuable service if they are able to devise new methods of social organization which will provide relief for the organic difficulties of Chinese agriculture. Of all the important problems of China, the land problem shows government ineffectiveness at its worst.

Behind the T'ai-p'ing rebellion which flared up in unparalleled fanaticism in the 1850's and 1860's, there was the long provocation of a land system which made farming unprofitable and a government supine in the face of unreversed decline. The Boxer rebellion burst forth from the unrest of the peasants, although it could be deflected by the demagoguery of the Manchu officials and changed into wild xenophobia.

When the fiercely discordant economics of imperialism and international industrialism intruded upon the old and already corrupted economy, farm existence became even less tolerable than it might have been if left to its native miseries. Dynastic decomposition was hastened by the collapse of handicraft economy and the fiscal disorganization caused by Western commercial activity.

In the earliest days of the Republican-Nationalist movement led by Sun Yat-sen, emphasis was on land reform. Sun Yat-sen's family had suffered from overtaxation when he was a boy.[20] Nationalization and equalization of the land were slogans used at the founding of the _Tung Meng Hui_; the program seems at that time to have been derived from old Chinese distributism and from Henry George.[21] With the coming of the Republic, two years went by, however, before any agrarian legislation was pa.s.sed, and the new laws had no perceptible consequence.[22] The problem of land reform had to be fought out on the ideological front and placed above the military before it could become a fit subject for competent government action.

The epoch of the _tuchuns_ added to agricultural misfortune. Militarism had a direct effect on the deterioration of the land economy, and an indirect one in that it led to the cultivation of opium as the one money-making crop which could meet the excessive tax demands of the militarists. A Chinese writer has described the years which marked the ending of the _tuchun_ system as follows:

The ... misery among the farming population in the decennial period 1920-1930 [must be] attributed to (1) internal warfare; (2) neglect of agriculture; (3) low stage of art; and (4) over-population. The civil wars during the last eighteen years have increased the cost of production, have added to the farmers' ... burden of taxation, have raised the rate of interest on loan, and have caused endless suffering to [those] who form the basis of our social and economic life. Great many people have often wondered as to why a country like China with 75 per cent of her total population engaged in farming and with such a vast territory should suffer from the high cost of living; but to the student of social problems the question is comparatively simple, for the recurrence of civil war since the establishment of the Republic has [changed] conditions of supply and has driven millions of farmers out of cultivated areas, and this alone suffices to explain an unprecedented rise of prices of food and other necessities of life during the last few years, especially since 1926.[23]

These conditions led to farmers' movements, which became effective, however, only as they merged with the broader ideological tendencies in China.

The Farmers' Movement ... may ... be divided into four periods: (1) the period of reaction to bad conditions ... (1921-1925); (2) the period of communistic activities and violence (1925-1927); (3) the period of retrenchment and preparation for reconstruction (from the spring of 1927-1928); and (4) the period of reconstruction (since 1928).[24]

The Kuomintang-Communist alliance struck severely at the _tuchun_ armies by giving their own forces a sense of doctrine and by tying together the causes of patriotism and agricultural reform. The joint agrarian program was a failure in that it accentuated precisely those issues on which neither of the parties could compromise. When the Communists and the Nationalists parted, the Nationalists took one portion of Sun Yat-sen's economic program (industrialization and communications) for emphasis, and the Communists another (land reform). The agrarian issue was a source of strength to the Chinese Red Army, intent upon winning the peasantry. It was a military weakness to the new-style Nationalist armies officered largely by the relatives of landlords; they had little sympathy for the economic troubles of the farmers whose lands they occupied. The Nationalist Reconstruction aimed in great part at removing both the acute and the latent causes of peasant rebellion, thereby cutting the ground from under the feet of the Communists. Although it met with more success than any other project of its type in modern China, Western observers agree in regarding it as inadequate.[25]

_Imperialism and Chinese Wars_

A great part of the military disturbances in modern China can be regarded as both the cause and the effect of agrarian evils, and some of the struggles as peasant rebellions in modern guise, carrying on the immemorial farmer-infantry tradition. Another part is traceable to the impact of the Western economy on China. It was Western economic activity that gave most compelling proof of the fact that the Westerners had encircled China and were compressing it from a world in its own right into a nation. The military intervention of Western powers in China not only caused much of the ideological reaction and forced a reorganization of the government, but also provided deadly evidence of the superiority of Western fighting. Western economy helped to bring the confusion which meant war in China; and Western economy itself waged war.

Sun Yat-sen saw China's unfortunate position as a whole, and in his programs there may be discerned three separate demands, for (1) a national economic revolution, (2) an industrial revolution, and (3) a social revolution.[26] Since the Chinese could no longer function as a self-contained world economically, and scorn foreign trade as a magnanimous concession to the outer barbarians,[27] the Chinese would have to develop an economic system conforming to national patterns in the society and in thought. They must relate their economy to their independence and defense, if they were to survive. In the first place, they could not afford to remain the only free market of the world, subject to exploitation and haphazard development. It would be necessary for them to establish governmental controls over economic matters and protect their national livelihood. Secondly, they had to work toward a complete transformation of their technological system and meet Western productive practices, if they were to claim a compet.i.tive position; this involved an industrial revolution. Thirdly, they had to correct the abuses inherited from their forefathers. Simultaneously they would have to construct an economic system not only modern but equitable, if they wished to avoid the horrors of early capitalism and the tragedy of the industrialist cla.s.s war. This would require a social revolution.

At the time that Sun Yat-sen formulated his ideas (1924), none of the three revolutions was making any progress. The Chinese did not const.i.tute a nation in fact; they had even lost the old unity of the Confucian society. The _tuchuns_ opposed Chinese nationalism by preventing the development of any one authority able to monopolize force, and by acting as agents of, or in alliance with, foreign powers.

Thus they helped to make China something not far from a quasi colony under pooled control of all the industrial capitalist nations. The Nationalists and Communists were able to join forces on this issue of a cla.s.s war of nations, both believing in the independence of China. The Nationalists, however, saw China's most direct approach toward national unity in the development of a national economic system, with a reasonable military independence of imports and the economic devices current throughout the world as instruments of national policy. The Communists did not agree that such an economy, national in form, would have much meaning unless it were grounded upon a peasant-proletarian regime. Nor did they feel that change from imperialist to native capitalism would const.i.tute an advance in itself.

After the schism, the Nationalists devoted themselves to the national-economic and industrial revolutions, while the Communists stressed the social revolution, particularly the land problem. The Nationalists were able to secure tariff autonomy for China, and thereupon entered upon a policy of protective tariffs and other mechanisms designed to make China a reasonably self-sufficient nation.

At the same time they pushed hard toward the industrial revolution, in developing highways, railroads, airways, and radio, and in creating the economic controls required for modern government--standard weights, measures, currency, civil law, and fiscal uniformity.

T. V. Soong (Sung Tz[)u]-wen), a veteran minister of finance, stands out as the organizer of the modern Chinese economy. Veritable miracles were performed in the development of national credit; after 1928 the National Government adopted the policy--as remote as a mirage to its predecessors--of floating all government loans within the country and making the Chinese government independent of j.a.panese and Western financiers. The only loans of any importance contracted abroad were taken up with other governments. Financial independence was a great step toward the realization of the Nationalist ideals, but it may be questioned whether the loss of financial allies was a price to be paid without hesitation in a capitalist world. Had the Chinese had more bonds in the Western capital markets, or larger debts to the American or British governments, they might have elicited greater international support in repelling the j.a.panese invasion in 1931.

The crowning point in the economic achievements of the National Government at Nanking was the successful inst.i.tution of a managed currency. China had dealt with currency merely as a convenient form for specie, and the Chinese were accustomed to regard a dollar as worth only the amount of metal in it. When the National Government placed the currency on a national basis, it drew together the whole financial structure of China by one gigantic move, and placed finance in a position of greater unity and dependence upon government than ever before. Together with the financial reforms, the Nationalists organized a legal system providing a minimum foundation of law and order. The codification of laws, the revamping of the judiciary, the clarification of policies by legal formulation--all these contributed to China's emergent nationhood.

The economic program accorded with considerations partly Hamiltonian, partly state-socialist. The economy had first of all to be organized and integrated in national terms, and later to be revised so as to ensure social justice. The Nationalists were convinced that a policy of immediate land reform would lead to internal disharmony and frustrate the very purposes for which the revolution of 1926-1927 had been launched. The Communists, on the other hand, succeeded in keeping the agrarian issue from being forgotten and forced the Nationalists to better the lot of the peasant. In the meantime, China's boom in physical development and the unification of the commercial, financial, productive, and legal systems began to startle observers.

As a result, China was able to build national armies in direct ratio with the invigoration of her national economic system. The war machine of the National Government, under the care and leaders.h.i.+p of Generalissimo Chiang K'ai-shek, became the most powerful in China. The central government's military power in turn speeded up the pace of general unification. There was thus a remarkable interaction of forces tending toward national integration. From 1932 to 1937, between the first and second major phases of the j.a.panese invasion, progress was rapid--stimulated, perhaps, by the external menace.

The two greatest dangers to the Nationalist policy of military and economic unification were (1) the dismal condition of the Chinese proletariat, as yet small but constantly growing, and (2) the vested interests of the industrial powers. Had China's growth been less rapid, the foreigners might have withdrawn slowly and found compensation in Chinese commerce for their losses in direct owners.h.i.+p in China. There was one power, however, to which Chinese unification was a living and increasing threat. The rising military-economic power of the Chinese was incompatible with the position which j.a.panese leaders visualized as part of the manifest destiny of their country. The j.a.panese might have tolerated the _tuchun_ system for decades had the _tuchuns_ been able to establish orderly regional governments; or they might have aided a reactionary Chinese regime which asked for survival only. The appearance of a genuine republic in the Far East was a menace to j.a.pan; if that republic was bound by sheer physical proportions to overshadow j.a.pan, the unification and modernization of China had to be averted at all costs.

Nevertheless, China's development, even apart from the hindrances of war, cannot be regarded as possessing the same potentialities as did American growth during the past century. China, from all indications available to date, is an area much poorer in natural resources than is the United States; she does not offer comparable opportunities for the heavy industries. The steel, coal, oil, and water power necessary for large-scale industrialization are by no means negligible, but not sufficient to make possible the rise of another America. The far future may change man's dependence upon currently utilized resources and facilitate greater strides in China's technological advancement.

Meanwhile, she can look forward to decades of measurable development through exploiting raw materials already available, if political conditions permit.

The conflict with j.a.pan has thrown Chinese economic development back to conditions not too far from the pre-Nanking stage. China not only faces the handicaps of social dislocations but also the ruin of her factories and her industrial centers. The j.a.panese have destroyed much of the Chinese manufacturing equipment and are placing what remains under j.a.panese control. Significantly, the deadliest enemy of j.a.panese business--in the unlikely event of a complete j.a.panese success--will be j.a.panese-owned factories in China. Chinese labor will deeply affect j.a.pan's domestic production, unless the j.a.panese succeed in rationalizing their economic system to an extent not yet contemplated.

Hence, j.a.pan's losing the war may well be brought about by bankruptcy from sheer military indebtedness; her winning the war, however, may lead to more remote but no less certain ruin--through the compet.i.tion of Chinese output with j.a.panese home industries disadvantaged by the cheaper labor markets of China. But j.a.pan's loss is not inevitably China's gain, and the Chinese may find themselves, at some point in the future, controlling an industrial system which has been wrecked, looted, and bankrupted.

Whatever the ultimate outcome, loans will again play a part in Chinese development. The placing of large foreign loans has been a key part of Chinese development, and the task of reconstruction in China--no matter who undertakes to do it--will require large amounts of capital.

Consequently, the loan policies of the wealthier nations may return to the importance which they enjoyed in 1913, and the dictates of the Western states may again direct the lines of Chinese economic progress.

The effects of the j.a.panese conquest, if it is partial and then lapses into a stalemate, may well be determined by the extension of loans to the Chinese or to the j.a.panese in China. The effect of the war has already complicated the picture of China's economic future to the extent of making even cautious prophecy hazardous.[28]

In the military sphere, the Chinese have come of age, although their fighting strength will be determined by the importance of infantry. If later wars continue to depend upon man power, China will become more and more significant in world politics. Internally, the armies provided (1) a transitional administration from the Empire to the Republic; (2) a physical expression of the ideological confusion and the regional disunity of China from 1916 to 1931 (the period of _tuchuns_); (3) the armed edge of the ideological revolution of 1926-1927; (4) decisive instruments in the conflict between the Communists and Nationalists from 1927 to 1937; and (5) one of the most powerful unifying agencies at the command of the National Government at Nanking. The Chinese military system spread the knowledge of Western warfare and, with it, of modern techniques throughout the country; it shaped the ideological and governmental experience of modern China.

NOTES

[1] See below, pp. 154 ff.

[2] Rodney Gilbert in _The China Year Book_, 1921-2, p. 519, Tientsin, 1921.