After Tamerlane (60 page)

Yet this was not what happened. The explanation lies in a powerful
convergence between China's politics and the conflictual relations of the great powers in East Asia. It was true that Peking could not impose its will on the provincial dujuns. But there was little doubt that on questions of ‘rights recovery' the nationalist programme of its intellectual elite (centred in Peking's newuniversity)
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commanded mass support in the treaty-port cities of maritime China. That was the significance of the May Fourth movement. By the end of 1920, the Peking government had revoked the extraterritorial privileges of Germany and Austria–Hungary, its wartime enemies. The Bolshevik government had renounced Russia's claims. It seemed more than likely that Peking would go on to denounce the privileged status of the treaty powers that remained, including Britain, Japan and the United States.
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It was easy to imagine the explosive effect of such a move in Shanghai and elsewhere, and the enormous difficulty of defending foreign interests and property against the mass demonstrations and boycotts that seemed certain to follow. It seemed safer by far to enlist Peking's support for a gradual change. The British and the Americans had an added reason to come to terms with Peking. They had watched with alarm the growing power of Japan, and mistrusted the ‘militarist clique' that directed its policy.
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Throughout 1920 they pressed the Japanese government to pool its commercial concessions in an international consortium, and opposed its claim to a special position ‘beyond the Wall' in Manchuria.
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This Anglo-American pressure was feared and resented in Tokyo, but Japanese leaders had other reasons to change course in East Asia. They faced domestic unrest, the outgrowth in part of the economic strains of wartime.
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The Siberian expedition, with its costs and its losses, was deeply unpopular.
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Without the old Russian threat, it was even harder to justify. In Korea, where an independence campaign had been brutally crushed in 1919, political tranquillity was urgently needed.
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And the Japanese shared the Westerners' alarm that anti-foreign feeling might get out of hand in China and inflict big losses on their business interests, especially by Chinese boycott of their textile exports.
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The case for conciliation had become overwhelming.

The upshot was the remarkable settlement embodied in the Washington treaties of 1921–2. The Western powers and Japan guaranteed the independence and integrity of the Chinese republic. Provision was
made to reform the unequal treaties. No power was to seek any special concessions or make exclusive deals. China, it seemed, had recovered the national dignity painfully surrendered in the chaotic 1890s. But the status revolution was not the end of the story. From 1922 onward, foreign interests in China faced militant nationalism on a growing scale. A second revolution, social and political, made the Washington treaties' leisurely timetable for the recovery of China's full sovereignty look strangely complacent. The epicentre was Canton, the southern metropolis. Canton had been the centre of anti-Ch'ing politics. The Cantonese, said an old China-coast diehard, were the ‘Irish of China' (it was not meant as a compliment).
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Canton was less than eighty miles from Hong Kong, which served as its outport, and a safe haven for dissent in imperial times. It was where Sun Yat-sen had struggled before 1911 to build up his revolutionary party, later the Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party (KMT).
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But, without a mass following, Sun was poorly placed to exploit the growing antagonism of merchants and artisans towards the exactions and oppressions of the newprovincial rulers (many of them military) who had pushed aside the mandarin-scholars of the old imperial system. Nor could he appeal to the educated class (a category that included the young Mao Tsetung), who bitterly resented their displacement from power by warlords and soldiers. In 1922 he was even chased out of Canton by a warlord faction. But the next three years brought an astonishing change. For in 1923 Sun made an epic compact with an agent sent from Bolshevik Russia. He accepted the offer of military aid and a corps of Soviet advisers
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to rebuild the KMT on the Leninist model, in partnership with the infant Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The KMT–CCP began to build a mass base among peasants and town workers.
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And with its own party army it at last had the means to defeat the warlords and build a new state.
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The revolutionary year was 1925. It started badly for the KMT, which lost control of Canton (briefly), and its leader Sun to a premature death. But on 30 May labour tension in Shanghai (where foreign enterprise was concentrated) burst into violence when the British police force in the International Settlement shot dead twelve Chinese during a large demonstration. A huge wave of protest swept up the Yangtze valley and along the coast to Hong Kong. On 23 June there
was further shooting in the European enclave of Shameen in Canton. A general strike and boycott of British trade was organized in Hong Kong, in a direct challenge to the British authorities. The KMT now reaped the reward for its new credibility as a nationalist movement with the physical power to govern effectively. Soviet support, the anti-foreign mass movement and a bloody civil war between the warlords in the north suddenly opened the way to reunify China under a national government pledged to expel all foreign power.
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In July 1926 the KMT army set off from Canton on the ‘Northern Expedition', destination Peking. By the end of the year it had reached Wuhan, the great crossroads city in the middle of China. Nanking and Shanghai lay within its grasp. China's titular sovereignty – hailed with enthusiasm at the Washington conference – had become frighteningly real. For the British, whose stake in the old order was largest, there began a race to withdraw from the most vulnerable outposts before the shooting started.
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What the future held for the large foreign presence (Japanese and Western) in Shanghai, the greatest treaty port of all, was anyone's guess.

There is a strange but important epilogue to this tale of revolution and empire in the aftermath of war. Across much of Northern Eurasia, what mattered most was the fate of imperial Russia, apparently dissolving in chaos in 1918. As tsarist rule collapsed, the subject peoples of what Lenin had called the ‘prison of nations' had a glimpse of freedom. In the Ukraine, the Caucasus and
Central Asia, and among the ethnic minorities of Russia proper (like the Bashkirs and Tatars), independent regimes made their bid for power. On the face of things, their chances were good. In 1918–19 the Bolsheviks were struggling to survive in a civil war. Moreover, the Bolshevik view had favoured liberation for Russia's subject nationalities, seeing them as allies against the tsarist autocracy. Lenin himself had proclaimed in his famous wartime manifesto
Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism
(1916) that colonial freedom was the crucial first step towards destroying capitalism in its European heartlands. In their state of siege after 1917, the Bolsheviks found that this revolutionary principle coincided with self-interest. They were anxious to pre-empt the threat of pan-Islamic sentiment among the Muslims of the Caucasus and Central Asia. And, as we have seen, the fear of Japanese expansion and Anglo-American influence on its East Asian frontier had lain behind Moscow's intervention in 1922–3, first of all in North China and then, more profitably, in the nationalist south.
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Like the Romanovs before them, however, the Bolsheviks soon grasped that no Russian state was secure without the political mastery of Inner Eurasia and its strategic borderlands. To defeat the Whites in the civil war, they mobilized an army of over 5 million men.
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The Red Army's attempt to carry revolutionary struggle into Central Europe was stopped by the Poles in 1920. But Moscowregained control over most of Belorussia and the Ukraine, which the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had taken away. In the Volga region, where Moscow at first seemed to smile on an independent state for the Bashkirs and Tatars, the power of the centre was reasserted forcibly during 1920.
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In Central Asia, the Russian settler community, many of them railwaymen, resisted the attempt of the local Muslim elite to recover the freedoms lost forty years earlier. But the decisive factor was the Red Army's arrival to capture Khiva in February 1920 and Bukhara in September. Though ‘Basmachi' fighters waged a guerrilla war on into 1921, their cause was lost. In the Caucasus, Moscow at first trod more carefully. It was anxious not to alienate either Turkey or Iran, both potential allies against British influence in the Middle East. It lacked the military power to subjugate a fractured region. It faced a tough Georgian government, whose independence it recognized in May 1920. But by the end of that year Russia's strategic position had become much more favourable. British power was ebbing from its high-water mark at the end of the war.
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For fear of conquest by a resurgent Turkey, the Armenians abandoned independence in favour of Russian protection. The following year, for similar reasons, the Georgians did the same. By the end of 1921, Moscowwas master of the tsar's old Caucasian provinces. Then in 1922 Japan's withdrawal from Siberia restored Russian control of the Pacific territories wrested from China after 1860. The empire was back.
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This astonishing recovery undoubtedly owed much to the military prowess of Trotsky's Red Army. It was also critical that, within the vast geographical realm that made up Inner Eurasia, no rival state could match the manpower and resources that Moscow could mobilize
in European Russia. But, for all their triumph, the Bolsheviks lacked both the means and the will to revive the pre-war pattern of Russian imperial power. In the political trauma of 1918–23, amid civil war, foreign invasion, economic breakdown, peasant revolt, military disaster and the virtual collapse of the state apparatus, it could hardly be otherwise. Lenin was insistent that the loyalty of non-Russians in the old tsarist empire would have to be won by political concession and a display of sympathy for their national aspirations. The commissar of nationalities who applied this policy was a Georgian expatriate, Joseph Stalin. Stalin was the doyen of borderland warfare and the master of ‘steppe politics'.
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In his capable hands, nationality policy became the means to an end in the larger struggle. ‘During four years of civil war,' he later told Lenin, ‘given the foreign intervention, we were obliged to demonstrate Moscow's liberalism on the national question.'
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Moscow's agents were ordered to restrain the chauvinist instincts of Russian settler communities like those in Central Asia.
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As the borderland provinces (like the Ukraine and Belorussia) surrendered their brief independence, they were reinvented as soviet socialist republics under their own Bolshevik leaders. The smaller subject nations were also appeased by the promise to make them into separate republics and autonomous regions. Their leaders would be locals. They would enjoy ‘cultural autonomy', to promote their own language, education and culture. They were free to build nations. Of course Stalin intended this offer of freedom to fall far short of sovereignty. The autonomous republics should have no foreign relations. The ‘national Communists' would owe a higher allegiance to the Bolshevik cause. In effect, the Bolshevik party state would have a new ‘party empire' until the Soviet nations eventually fused into a single Soviet people. In late 1922 he gave an angry warning that the borderland Communists were ‘refusing to understand the game of independence as a game' and were trying to make it real (an echo of British complaints about Egypt).
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They even wanted to have their own foreign policies. Stalin pressed the case for incorporating all the new soviet republics into a Russian federation. Lenin refused. The new Soviet constitution of 1924 preserved the legal fiction of a Soviet ‘union' made up of equal states. The real guarantee of Moscow's authority over the member republics would be the invisible hand of
the party's power. But the nationality principle, the child of a desperate crisis, was inscribed indelibly on the Soviet system.

By the mid-1920s, after the great phase of upheaval, much of the world seemed to be moving towards a more settled state. Those who looked back to the pre-war years as a form of ‘international anarchy', or were scandalized by the predatory excesses of European imperialism, sawthe League of Nations as a new beginning. The
ancien régime
of dynastic empires had become a ‘world of nations'. The ‘covenant' of the League, which bound its nation-state members, outlawed armed aggression and prescribed the peaceful resolution of international disputes. The age-old tradition that colonial conquests were legitimate spoils of war had been swept away. Germany's lost colonies, and the Ottomans' lost provinces, were to be international ‘mandates', open to inspection by the League's officials, and open equally to the commerce of all. For some of them at least, there was a presumption in favour of early self-rule. The League itself held out a grander hope: that an international society sharing liberal values and a common framework of law would spread irresistibly from Europe to the ‘neo-Europes' (like the Latin American states) and to the non-Western world beyond.
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The League was expected to act like the old Concert of Europe, but on a global scale and with liberal democracy as its ideological beacon. As in the Concert, its larger members would exert moral suasion over their more quarrelsome juniors. What made the League vital, in the eyes of its champions, was that international politics in future would be even more ‘global' than before the war. The national interests of states would be interlocked more closely; the collective interest in non-aggressive behaviour would be felt more deeply; ideological influences (especially nationalism and democracy) would be diffused more widely. But, for the League to serve as the collective guardian of international peace, one thing was essential. All sovereign states had to enter its membership and acknowledge its rules. Of course, this never happened.