Part 15 (1/2)

The sorry picture of inadequacy in both the North and the South was interrupted by the launching of the Nationalist Revolution of 1926-1927.

As a preparatory step to the acquisition of revolutionary power, Sun Yat-sen's followers reorganized the Canton government in June, 1925.

This action followed Sun's death on March 11, 1925, in Peking, where he had gone to take part in a reunification conference with the leading _tuchuns_ of the North. The conference had failed, but it is characteristic that Sun, embittered though he was, lent his last hours to formulating a compromise. The new Canton government took the name of _The Nationalist Government of China_, thereby disavowing succession from the ineffectual Republic which preceded it. It remained in Canton until the end of 1926; on January 1, 1927, it was transferred to Hankow, the greatest inland city of China, located some six hundred miles up the Yangtze River from Shanghai. Hankow is one of three sister cities collectively termed the Wu-han cities; hence this phase of the Nationalist Government is referred to as the Wu-han regime. It came to an end in the fall of 1927, enjoyed a momentary resurrection in Canton, and then pa.s.sed into history, being succeeded by another Nationalist Government at Nanking.

In the last two years of his life, Sun had come to stress again his principle of nationalism. After the birth of the 1912 Republic he had for some years placed in the foreground democracy and _min sheng_, until he became aware that the problem of China's internal reconstruction could not be solved without an adequate adjustment of foreign relations.

He saw that the _tuchun_ wars were influenced by competing imperialisms, agreed upon resistance to the Chinese revolution while expressing pious hopes for Chinese unity. Accordingly, the Kuomintang began emphasizing its nationalist character, and Sun's followers, previously termed Republicans or merely revolutionaries, were called Nationalists. With a program of anti-imperialism, anti-_tuchunism_, and national unification, the Party began making great headway. The propaganda machinery which the Russian advisers had devised was turned against the vested interests. In addition, the rapid rise of the Nationalists must be explained through their party organization and the creation of agencies linked with the Party, such as youth groups, labor unions, peasant unions, and women's a.s.sociations. Thus, instead of trying to superimpose a modern government upon preexisting social forms, the Nationalists built their government by molding the social groups necessary to its support.

The government was composed of a hierarchy of committees, similar to the Soviet system in Russia. The topmost committees of the government were subject to the control of the Central Executive Committee of the Party.

The Party secured its authority through a policy of democratic centralism b.u.t.tressed by the election of a Party Congress from the various branches of the party. Power thus followed a perfectly clear and traceable line; it did not depend upon mock elections or upon indefinite delegations of authority. The party members elected the delegates to the Party Congress; the Party Congress chose a Central Executive Committee; the Central Executive Committee or its Standing Committee controlled the Political Council (policy-making) and the Administrative Council (cabinet), together with the Military Council. These three were the supreme government agencies. The same party authorities appointed and removed all members of all other councils in provincial or munic.i.p.al governments. There was not the faintest show of popular partic.i.p.ation in the government; government had become the exclusive tool of the Party.

But by being admittedly a tool, the government possessed definite power.

Party agencies opened wide the doors of ma.s.s partic.i.p.ation, not in the government but in the movement. The Nationalist Revolution won with the a.s.sistance of the Communists in 1926-1927 rested on the extension of every conceivable agitational device to every group of the population.

The government tied these devices together. Halfway on the road to victory the differences between the Right and Left Kuomintang, and between the Communists and the Kuomintang, became too acute to allow for further operation. In April, 1927, Chiang K'ai-shek, the Nationalist Generalissimo, established a Nationalist Government at Nanking. The Nationalist Government, soviet in form, remained in Hankow for a few more months, transferred again to Canton, and then expired. Even so, the councils of the Nationalist governments at Canton and Wu-han had served their purpose well; they had effected the concentration of power, instead of its division, in the course of a revolution when concentration was at a premium. With the approaching victory and peace, the council form of government began to appear to the Chinese as no less alien than parliamentarism. The Nanking government set out to reconst.i.tute a government both Chinese and modern.

NOTES

[1] Sun Yat-sen, _How China Was Made a Republic_ (unpublished ma.n.u.script written in Shanghai in 1919, now in possession of the present author), p. 40.

[2] See above, pp. 43 ff.

[3] Wu Chih-fang, _Chinese Government and Politics_, p. 361, Shanghai, 1934. Wu's work, and Kalfred Dip Lum, _Chinese Government_, Shanghai, 1934, are the two surveys in a Western language of modern Chinese government. Wu's work, while carefully done and containing a great deal of useful material, is patterned rather closely after Western works on Western government and makes no attempt to transpose Chinese politics into Chinese terms, nor does it give adequate doc.u.mentation of Chinese sources; Lum's outline is based in great part on first-hand contact with Chinese politics and, while brief, is helpful, especially on Kuomintang organization and problems. M. T. Z. Tyau, _Two Years of Nationalist China_, Shanghai, 1930, is a statistical and official commemoration volume and useful within its obvious limitations; anonymous, _Twenty-five Years of the Chinese Republic_, Nanking, 1937, contains short essays and monographs, some excellent, some undistinguished, on the Nanking regime and its predecessors. See also Sih-gung Cheng, _Modern China: A Political Study_, Oxford, 1919, and the ”China” issue of _The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science_, vol. 152, Philadelphia, 1930.

[4] Jermyn Chi-hung Lynn, _Political Parties in China_, Peking, 1930, gives the most detailed outline of political parties yet available.

Bitterly anti-Kuomintang, the author became pro-j.a.panese in the autumn of 1937.

[5] Harold M. Vinacke, _Modern Const.i.tutional Development in China_, pp. 145-146, 150, Princeton, 1920.

[6] See Wu, _op. cit._ in note 3, pp. 50-51, for the problem of const.i.tutional succession.

[7] Bertram Lennox-Simpson, who wrote under the pseudonym Putnam Weale, was an Englishman native to North China who spent his life editing newspapers, writing books, and playing the game of North Chinese politics. He was murdered in 1931. His books cover the period from the Boxer incident to the triumph of the Nationalists of Nanking, and--while not always reliable in detail--are stimulating contemporary doc.u.ments.

_The Fight for the Republic in China_, London, 1918, and _The Vanished Empire_, London, 1926, are very readable. His novels, which suffer from neglect, present some aspects of Chinese and foreign life in the North which are not dealt with by any other writer with the same qualifications.

[8] A. N. Holcombe, _The Chinese Revolution_, pp. 96-101, Cambridge, 1930, discusses this point with clarity and vigor.

[9] Jean Escarra, _Le droit chinois_, p. 133, Peiping and Paris, 1936.

[10] W. W. Willoughby, the very competent and sympathetic adviser to the Chinese delegation at the Was.h.i.+ngton Conference, has written _China at the Conference_, Baltimore, 1922, and _Foreign Rights and Interests in China_, 2 vols., Baltimore, 1927. For further treatment of recent Chinese foreign relations see, among others, R. T. Pollard, _China's Foreign Relations_, 1917-1931, New York, 1933.

[11] For the origin of this system see John K. Fairbank, ”The Creation of the Foreign Inspectorate of Customs at Shanghai,” _The Chinese Social and Political Science Review_ (Peiping), vol. 19, pp. 469 ff., 1935-1936.

[12] Paul M. W. Linebarger, _Sun Yat Sen and the Chinese Republic_, New York, 1924.

[13] See above, pp. 51 ff.

[14] This program is very pithily put by Sun in his _Fundamentals of National Reconstruction_, issued the following year (to be found in M.

T. Z. Tyau, _op. cit._ in note 3, pp. 439 ff., and L. S. Hsu, _Sun Yat-sen, His Political and Social Ideals_, pp. 85 ff., Los Angeles, 1933). The point is elaborated by Tsui Shu-chin, ”The Influence of the Canton-Moscow Entente upon Sun Yat-sen's Political Philosophy,” _The Chinese Social and Political Science Review_ (Peiping), vol. 18, pp. 177 ff., 1934; and Paul M. A. Linebarger, _The Political Doctrines of Sun Yat-sen_, pp. 209-214, ”The Three Stages of Revolution,” Baltimore, 1937. See also Hou Yong-ling, _La vie politique et const.i.tutionelle en Chine_, Peiping, 1935; Tseng Yu-hao, _Modern Chinese Legal and Political Philosophy_, Shanghai, 1930.