The New Penguin History of the World (173 page)

One important aspect of this Revolution long went unremarked. Theoretical Marxism stressed the indispensable revolutionary role of the industrial proletariat. The Chinese communists were proud of the progress they had made in politicizing the new urban workers, but the mass of Chinese were peasants. Still trapped in the Malthusian vice of rising numbers and land shortage, their centuries of suffering were, if anything, intensified by the breakdown of central authority in the warlord years. Some Chinese communists saw in the peasants a revolutionary potential which, if not easy to reconcile with contemporary Marxist orthodoxy (as retailed by the Moscow theorists), none the less embodied Chinese reality. One of them was Mao Tse-tung. He and those who agreed with him turned their attention away from the cities to the countryside in the early 1920s and began an unprecedented effort to win over the rural masses to communism. Paradoxically, Mao seems to have continued to cooperate with the Kuomintang longer than other Chinese communists just because it was more sympathetic to the organization of the peasants than was his own party.

A great success followed. It was especially marked in Hunan, but altogether some ten million or so peasants and their families were by 1927 organized by the communists. ‘In a few months’, wrote Mao, ‘the peasants have accomplished what Dr Sun Yat-sen wanted, but failed to accomplish in the forty years he devoted to the national revolution.’ Organization made possible the removal of many of the ills that beset the peasants. Landlords were not dispossessed, but their rents were often reduced. Usurious rates of interest were brought down to reasonable levels. Rural revolution had eluded all previous progressive movements in China and this was identified by Mao as the key shortcoming of the 1911 revolution; the
communist success in reaching this goal was based on the discovery that it could be brought about by using the revolutionary potential of the peasants themselves. This had enormous significance for the future, for it implied new possibilities of historical development throughout Asia. Mao grasped this. ‘If we allot ten points to the democratic revolution,’ he wrote, ‘then the achievements of the urban dwellers and the military units rate only three points, while the remaining seven points should go to the peasants in their rural revolution.’ In an image twice-repeated in a report on the Hunan movement he compared the peasants to an elemental force; ‘the attack is just like a tempest or hurricane; those who submit to it survive, those who resist perish’. This image was significant; here was something rooted deeply in Chinese tradition and the long struggle against landlords and bandits. If the communists tried hard to set aside tradition by eradicating superstition and breaking family authority, they nevertheless drew upon it, too.

Communism’s rural lodgement was the key to its survival in the crisis which overtook its relations with the KMT after Sun Yat-sen’s death. Sun’s removal permitted a rift to open in the KMT between a ‘left’ and a ‘right’ wing. The young Chiang, who had been seen as a progressive, now emerged as the military representative of the ‘right’, which reflected mainly the interests of capitalists and, indirectly, landlords. Differences within the KMT over strategy were resolved when Chiang, confident of his control of his troops, committed them to destroying the left factions and the Communist Party’s organization in the cities. This was accomplished with much bloodshed in Shanghai and Nanking in 1927, under the eyes of contingents of European and American soldiers, who had been sent to China to protect the concessions. The CCP was proscribed, but this was not quite the end of its cooperation with the KMT, which continued in a few areas for some months, largely because of Russian unwillingness to break with Chiang. This had already made easier the destruction of the city communists; the Comintern in China, as elsewhere, myopically pursued what were believed to be Russian interests refracted through the mirror of dogmatic Marxism. These interests were for Stalin in the first place domestic; in external affairs, he wanted someone in China who could stand up to the British, the greatest imperialist power, and the KMT seemed the best bet for that. Theory fitted these choices; the bourgeois revolution had to precede the proletarian, according to Marxist orthodoxy. Only after the triumph of the KMT was clear did the Russians withdraw their advisers from the CCP, which gave up open politics to become a subversive, underground organization.

Chinese nationalism had in fact done well out of Russian help even if
the CCP had not. Nevertheless, the KMT was left with grave problems and a civil war on its hands at a time when the Revolution needed to satisfy mass demands if it was to survive. The split within the Revolution was a setback, making it impossible to dispose finally of the warlord problem and, more serious, weakening the anti-foreign front. Pressure from Japan had continued in the 1920s after the temporary relaxation and handing back of Kiao-chou. Its domestic background was changing in an important way. When the wartime economic boom finally ended in 1920, hard times and growing social strains followed, even before the onset of the world economic depression. By 1931, half of Japan’s factories were idle; the collapse of European colonial markets and the entrenchment of what remained of them behind new tariff barriers had a shattering effect as Japanese exports of manufactures went down by two-thirds. Japan’s export outlets on the Asian mainland were now crucial. Anything that seemed to threaten them provoked intense irritation. The position of the Japanese peasant deteriorated, too, millions being ruined or selling their daughters into prostitution in order to survive. Grave political consequences were soon manifest, though less in the intensification of class conflict than in the provocation of nationalist extremism. The forces which were to pour into this had for a long time been absorbed in the struggle against the ‘unequal treaties’. With those out of the way, a new outlet was needed, and the harsh operation of industrial capitalism in times of depression provided anti-western feeling with fresh fuel.

The circumstances seemed propitious for further Japanese aggression in Asia. The western colonial powers were clearly on the defensive, if not in full retreat. The Dutch faced rebellions in Java and Sumatra in the 1920s, the French a Vietnamese revolt in 1930; in both places there was the sinister novelty of communist help to nationalist rebels. The British were not in quite such difficulties in India. Yet although some Englishmen were not yet reconciled to the idea that India must move towards self-government, it was by now the proclaimed aim of British policy. In China the British had already shown in the 1920s that they wanted only a quiet accommodation with a nationalist movement they found hard to assess, and not too grave a loss of face. Their Far Eastern policies looked even feebler after economic collapse, which also knocked the stuffing out of American opposition to Japan. Finally, Russian power, too, seemed in eclipse after its attempt to influence events in China. Chinese nationalism, on the contrary, had won notable successes, showed no sign of retreat and was considered to be beginning to threaten the long-established Japanese presence in Manchuria. All these factors were present in the calculations made by Japanese statesmen as the depression deepened.

Manchuria was the crucial theatre. A Japanese presence there went back to 1905. Heavy investment had followed. At first the Chinese acquiesced, but in the 1920s began to question it, with support from the Russians, who foresaw danger from the Japanese pushing their influence towards Inner Mongolia. In 1929 the Chinese in fact came into conflict with the Russians over control of the railway which ran across Manchuria and was the most direct route to Vladivostok, but this can only have impressed the Japanese with the new vigour of Chinese power; the nationalist KMT was reasserting itself in the territories of the old empire. There had been armed conflict in 1928 when the Japanese had tried to prevent KMT soldiers from operating against warlords in north China whom they found it convenient to patronize. Finally, the Japanese government was by no means unambiguously in control on the spot. Effective power in Manchuria rested with the commanders of the Japanese forces there, and when in 1931 they organized an incident near Mukden, which they used as an excuse for taking over the whole province, those in Tokyo who wished to restrain them could not do so.

There followed the setting up of a new puppet state, Manchukuo (to be ruled by the last Manchu emperor), an outcry at the League of Nations against Japanese aggression, assassinations in Tokyo which led to the establishment there of a government much more under military influence, and the expansion of the quarrel with China. In 1932 the Japanese replied to a Chinese boycott of their goods by landing forces at Shanghai; in the following year they came south across the Great Wall to impose a peace which left Japan dominating a part of historic China itself and trying unsuccessfully to organize a secessionist north China. There matters stood until 1937.

The KMT government thus proved unable, after all, to resist imperialist aggression. Yet from its new capital, Nanking, it appeared to control successfully all save a few border areas. It continued to whittle away at the treaties of inferiority and was helped by the fact that as the western powers saw in it a means of opposing communism in Asia, they began to show themselves somewhat more accommodating. These achievements, considerable though they were, none the less masked important weaknesses which compromised the KMT’s domestic success. The crux was that though the political revolution might have continued, the social revolution had come to a stop. Intellectuals withdrew their moral support from a regime which had not provided reforms, of which a need to do something about land was the most pressing. The peasants had never given the KMT their allegiance as some of them had given it to the communists. Unfortunately for the regime, Chiang fell back more and more at this juncture upon
direct government through his officers and showed himself increasingly conservative at a time when the traditional culture had decayed beyond repair. The regime was tainted with corruption in the public finances, often at the highest level. The foundations of the new China were therefore insecure. And there was once more a rival waiting in the wings.

The central leadership of the CCP for some time continued to hope for urban insurrection; in the provinces, none the less, individual communist leaders continued to work along the lines indicated by Mao in Hunan. They dispossessed absentee landlords and organized local soviets, a shrewd appreciation of the value of the traditional peasant hostility to central government. By 1930 they had done better than this, by organizing an army in Kiangsi, where a Chinese Soviet Republic ruled fifty million people, or claimed to. In 1932 the CCP leadership abandoned Shanghai to join Mao in this sanctuary. KMT efforts were now directed towards destroying the communist army, but always without success. This meant fighting on a second front at a time when Japanese pressure was strongest. The last great KMT effort, it is true, drove the communists out of their sanctuary, thus forcing them on the ‘Long March’ to Shensi, which began in 1934, the epic of the Chinese Revolution and an inspiration ever since. Once there, the 7000 survivors found local communist support but were still hardly safe; only the demands of resistance to the Japanese prevented the KMT from doing more to harass them.

Consciousness of the external danger explains why there were tentative essays in cooperation between the CCP and KMT again in the later 1930s. They owed something, too, to another change in the policies of the Comintern; it was an era of ‘Popular Fronts’ elsewhere which allied communists with other parties. The KMT was also obliged to mute its anti-western line and this won it a certain amount of easy sympathy in England and, above all, the United States. But neither the cooperation of communists nor the sympathies of western liberals could prevent the nationalist regime from being forced on the defensive when the Japanese launched their attack in 1937.

The ‘China incident’, as the Japanese continued to call it, was to take eight years’ fighting and inflict grave social and physical damage on China. It has been seen as the opening of the Second World War. At the end of 1937 the Chinese government removed itself for safety’s sake to Chungking in the far west while the Japanese occupied all the important northern and coastal areas. League condemnation of Japan and Russian deliveries of aircraft seemed equally unable to stem the onslaught. The only bonus in the first black years was an unprecedented degree of patriotic unity in China; communists and nationalists alike saw that the national revolution
was at stake. This was the view of the Japanese, too; significantly, in the area they occupied, they encouraged the re-establishment of Confucianism. Meanwhile, the western powers felt deplorably unable to intervene. Their protests, even on behalf of their own citizens when they were menaced and manhandled, were brushed aside by the Japanese, who by 1939 made it clear that they were prepared to blockade the foreign settlements if recognition of the Japanese new order in Asia was not forthcoming. For British and French weakness there was an obvious explanation: they had troubles enough elsewhere. American ineffectiveness had deeper roots; it went back to a long-established fact that however the United States might talk about mainland Asia, Americans would not fight for it, perhaps wisely. When the Japanese bombed and sank an American gunboat near Nanking the State Department huffed and puffed but eventually swallowed Japanese ‘explanations’. It was all very different from what had happened to the USS
Maine
in Havana harbour forty years before, though the Americans did send supplies to Chiang K’ai-shek.

By 1941, China was all but cut off from the outside world, though on the eve of rescue. At the end of that year its struggle would at last be merged with a world war. By then, though, China had been badly damaged. In the long duel between the potential Asian rivals, Japan was by then clearly the winner. On the debit side of Japan’s account had to be placed the economic cost of the struggle and the increasing difficulty experienced by its occupying forces in China. On the other hand its international position had never seemed stronger; this was demonstrated by humiliating western residents in China and by forcing the British in 1940 to close the Burma Road by which supplies reached China, and the French to admit an occupying army to Indo-China. Here was a temptation to further adventure, and it was not likely to be resisted while the prestige of the military and their power in government remained as high as it had been since the mid-1930s.