Restless Empire (22 page)

But Yang Zengxin had not solved the Xinjiang problem for the Chinese government. Encouraged by pan-Turkish ideas and modern forms of Muslim thinking coming in from India and the Middle East, an increasing number of young Uighurs and Kazakhs started thinking of themselves as inhabiting a Muslim Turkestan, half of which had been occupied by Russia and the other half held by the Chinese. After the Russian Revolution, independence movements blossomed on both sides of the frontier, and the Soviets—having crushed the Muslim rebels on their side—were only too happy to give cautious support to rebels real and potential in Xinjiang. All the way up to the Communist revolution in China, Xinjiang continued to be governed by local Chinese regimes, even though the last one—that of the Manchurian general Sheng Shicai—increasingly favored the Soviet Union.
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Still, even in a newly conquered zone 2,000 miles from Beijing, the borders of the former empire stayed intact.

If the Chinese republic had been an experiment in civic government based on some form of popular representation, matters of identity, culture, and religion might have been possible to work out politically over time within a common framework. But even then the concept of a unified state based on the borders of the old empire would have been difficult to find support for on the periphery, since the central premise for the change of government in 1912 was Chinese nationalism, a nationalism that in the popular perception increasingly linked Chineseness to one’s ethnic origin. If the rebellion of 1911–12 was necessary because of the Qing oppression of the Chinese majority, then it also follows that Chinese oppression of Mongols, Tibetans, and Muslims should cease through the construction of political entities for these nationalities.
This, after all, is what happened after the collapse of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. But in China the transition from empire to republic—even a republic as unattractive as that of Yuan Shikai and his successors—happened without most non-Han areas being able to break away. And meanwhile the Chinese majority was far too busy defining and redefining their own identity to give much thought to the broader implications of their revolution.

W
HAT IS
C
HINA?
For people who had come of age during the transformations at the end of the Qing era and the beginning of the republic, the answers were complex, stirring, and threatening. Was China its ethnic majority, now free of Manchu domination? Was it one’s home province and people who hailed from that province? Or was it, as the Republic pretended, all of the peoples who had lived within the former empire, from Manchuria to Central Asia and down to the tropical border with Burma? Was China first and foremost an idea or a culture, more than a state or even a society? And, if it was a culture, was that culture now dying under the impact of the West, and would China die with it? The efforts at defining what China was stood at the center of a cultural and political revival after World War I. This period in Chinese history is often called the May Fourth era, after the student rallies against foreign humiliations of China that began on that day in 1919. It was the beginning of a new period in China’s relations with the outside world, through the creation of expressly hybrid cultures, political movements, and state formations. Beginning as an act of desperate protest, May Fourth came to show a way out for those who believed that they had witnessed the death of “Old China.”

The Beijing government thought that when the world war ended it would be rewarded for having been on the Allied side. It believed that some of the preferences foreign powers had taken for themselves inside China would be removed. They and millions of other Chinese put their trust in the US president, Woodrow Wilson, whose Fourteen Points
had convinced many that the war had been fought for self-determination and equality among nations. Chen Duxiu, a writer who later became one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party, called Wilson “the number one good man in the world” and the augur of a new era in which “might is no longer reliable, justice and reason can no longer be denied.”
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A leaflet written by Chinese students in America begged for US support:

Four hundred million people are facing a life-or-death sentence at Paris; and upon this sentence the fate of the permanent peace of the world is going to depend. China pleads for nothing but fair play and sound judgment. For the interest of world peace and for the interest of four hundred million people a death sentence should not be tolerated by the enlightened powers, particularly the United States of America, in whom China has deepest confidence and by whom the upright plan for the League of Nations was originated.
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But at the Versailles conference the Chinese not only failed in having the former German concessions returned to them but—even more importantly—did not get general acceptance for removing the regulations that gave foreigners extraterritorial rights within China itself. The principle of self-determination was apparently not applicable for Chinese or other nonwhite peoples, except the Japanese, who had adopted the instruments of the West. When the former Chinese concessions in Shandong were awarded to Japan in May 1919, Chinese cities saw massive protests, and the burning down of the house of one of the ministers who had signed the 1915 agreement with Tokyo. The government seemed weak when confronted with the fury of the population, with university students in Beijing and Shanghai taking the lead in opposing what they saw as China’s international helplessness and humiliation.
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The May Fourth Movement came in the midst of a period in which many Chinese intellectuals were trying to redefine China and its position in the world. It was the writings of these intellectuals that inspired
the students during the 1919 protests, even though their cultural and political direction was very varied. For some, like Chen Duxiu, it was China’s political direction that had to be corrected: The state had to be made responsible to its citizens. For others, such as the writer Lu Xun, the real revolution was a cultural revolution: Without throwing overboard useless knowledge, empty forms and phrases, deference to tradition, China could not be reconstituted as a modern, effective, and just society. Some wanted to ditch the classical written Chinese language itself, always mastered only by an elite. Increasingly, men like Chen and Lu chose to write in the vernacular, inventing new Chinese terms for things foreign. Their starting point was not an optimistic one. To Chen, “the majority of our people are lethargic and do not know that not only our morality, politics and technology but even common commodities for daily use are all unfit for struggle and are going to be eliminated in the process of natural selection.”
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Lu Xun lampooned the Westernized Chinese bourgeoisie and its ineffectuality in his short story “A Happy Family”:

The family naturally consists of a husband and wife—the master and mistress—who married for love. Their marriage contract contains over forty terms going into great detail, so that they have extraordinary equality and absolute freedom. Moreover they have both had a higher education and belong to the cultured élite. . . . Japanese-returned students are no longer the fashion, so let them be Western-returned students. The master of the house always wears a foreign suit, his collar is always snowy white. His wife’s hair is always curled up like a sparrow’s nest in front, her pearly white teeth are always peeping out, but she wears Chinese dress.
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The response to pessimism that the actions of the students and others who protested in 1919 created was a call for a new form of Chinese culture and for a new, strong, united, and righteous state. The old revolutionary Liang Qichao asked: “What is our duty?” His answer: “It is to develop our civilization with that of the West and to supplement
Western civilization with ours so as to synthesize and transform them to make a new civilization.”
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And in politics new and radical trends emerged, which stressed the need to make China rich and strong within the borders of the former empire. The Russian Revolution and the democratic changes in Germany provided inspiration, as did anticolonial movements elsewhere in Asia. Socialism seemed to be the future, and some Chinese wanted to be part of it. Li Dazhao, who together with Chen Duxiu helped form the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1921, wanted to “look at China’s position among the nations. While the others have already advanced from free competition to socialist collective society, we are about to make our own start, meaning to follow in the footsteps of the others. Under these circumstances, if we wish to adapt ourselves and co-exist with the others, we must cut short the process by leaping to a socialist economy in order to ensure a measure of success.”
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Because of the May Fourth Movement, China to some seemed to have gone from despair to boundless opportunity.

A
MONG THOSE SENSING
the new opportunities in 1919 was the old warhorse Sun Yat-sen, who had spent the time since his resignation as president of the republic in 1912 retracing the steps from his revolutionary youth. He had lived in Japan for almost four years and—to the consternation of many of his supporters—had continued to receive money from Tokyo even as its pressure on China increased. Sun himself was uninterested in where his support came from; he needed funds to build a new revolutionary organization. His links with the United States increased further when he married the twenty-two-year-old Song Qingling, educated at Wesleyan College and the daughter of one of the richest men in Shanghai (her father, Charlie Soong, had arrived in Boston as a stowaway on an American ship in 1879 and made his money from publishing cheap translations). But it was neither Japan nor the United States that in the end inspired Sun to undertake another attempt at conquering China. It was the Bolshevik revolution in Russia,
the same event that had convinced men like Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao that socialism was the future. Though never a Communist, Sun began admiring the Soviets for their efficiency, their ruthless focus, and their promise of making a backward country rich and strong. He also liked the social message of Soviet-style Communism, though mainly as a means to strengthen the state. In 1920 Sun and the reconstituted Guomindang were back in Guangzhou with a new movement and with a tenuous grip on the city and its immediate surroundings.

The new Guomindang, which Sun Yat-sen headed, was a much more centralized organization than it had been before, and a more militarized one. Sun was recognized by his followers as the leader-for-life of the party and as the provisional president of China—the title he had held for a couple of months in 1912. The party’s ideology was built on what Sun called the Three Principles of the People: nationalism, democracy, and “people’s livelihood.” But, while his ideas showed some influence from the Chinese Left and the Soviets, the Guomindang leader recognized that China needed foreign capital and trade in order to develop. Sun planned to lead a reunification campaign to the north. After it succeeded, the new China would request massive foreign loans in order to build communications, promote industry, and settle virgin territories in Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet. In his book
The International Development of China,
Sun wrote,

In my International Development Scheme, I propose that the profits of this industrial development should go first to pay the interest and principal of foreign capital invested in it; second to give high wages to labor; and third to improve or extend the machinery of production. Besides these provisions the rest of the profit should go to the public in the form of reduced prices in all commodities and public services. Thus, all will enjoy, in the same degree, the fruits of modern civilization. . . . In a nutshell, it is my idea to make capitalism create socialism in China so that these two economic forces of human evolution will work side by side in future civilization.
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Sun’s main problem in the early 1920s was that while he had plenty of ideas, some of them similar to the Chinese reform programs of our own time, he had no solid power base. His ability to pick quarrels with those he depended on for support did not help. In 1922–1923 he was temporarily thrown out of Guangzhou by the local strongman Chen Jiongming, a military leader with an anarchist background who believed in provincial autonomy, not conquest by the force of arms. Sun tried to negotiate with other regional leaders, but they all found that supporting the Guomindang would mean a reduction of their own power and of their ability to work individually with foreign states, so they politely declined his offer of becoming their president. His negotiations with Japan and the Western powers fared no better: While they sometimes gave limited funds to Sun, they were unwilling to support his reunification plans or recognize him as China’s president. With his eyes set on a military campaign in the north to begin as soon as possible, Sun appealed to the powers to at least not oppose his aims. The coming war, Sun told them, is “no war between the North and South of China, but a struggle between militarism and democracy, between treason and patriotism. That the people in the North are sympathetic to the purposes and aims of the South has been demonstrated by the fact that they have spontaneously organized demonstrations and boycotts for the same purposes and aims.”
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While Sun’s appeals to the great powers for assistance in undoing their own positions in China may sound naïve, his point about the popular backing that the aims of the Guomindang were getting elsewhere in China was perceptive and right. The change from hopelessness to calls for action that the May Fourth Movement had led to benefited Sun’s plans in regions that he knew little about and where his party had no presence. Peasant associations, often led by students who had been to the city, sometimes included support for Sun Yat-sen and nationalism among their demands. Striking railway workers in the north praised the patriotic policies of the Guomindang and condemned their own
bosses for profiteering and treachery. Organizations in the cities—often a blend of new-type political groups and trade unions with more traditional guilds, native-place organizations, and gangs—appealed for a united China and the abolition of foreign privileges. The big strikes of 1922–1923 in the main cities from Hong Kong to Tianjin had specific nationalist demands. Chinese newspapers, teachers, and student unions advocated a new, activist patriotism, in which mass organizations became the custodians of the nation’s conscience. By the mid-1920s the mood in many parts of China had changed enough to make the Guomindang a force to be reckoned with both by Chinese and by foreigners. In a rather alarmist fashion, the British Foreign Office reported that the GMD