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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 40350 ***
+
+  GOVERNMENT IN REPUBLICAN CHINA
+
+
+
+
+  GOVERNMENT
+  IN
+  REPUBLICAN CHINA
+
+  BY
+  PAUL MYRON ANTHONY LINEBARGER
+  _The Department of Political Science_
+  _Duke University_
+
+  FOREWORD BY
+  FRITZ MORSTEIN MARX
+
+
+  FIRST EDITION
+
+  [Illustration]
+
+  HYPERION PRESS, INC.
+  WESTPORT, CONNECTICUT
+
+
+
+
+  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
+
+    Linebarger, Paul Myron Anthony, 1913-1966.
+      Government in republican China.
+
+      Reprint of the 1st ed. published by McGraw-Hill,
+    New York, in series: McGraw-Hill studies in political science.
+      Includes bibliographical references.
+      1. China--Politics and government--1912-1949.
+    I. Title.
+    DS775.L48 1973      320.9'51'04      73-888
+    ISBN 0-88355-081-4
+
+
+  Published in 1938
+  by The McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., New York
+  Copyright 1938 by The McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc.
+
+  First Hyperion reprint edition 1973
+
+  Library of Congress Catalogue Number 73-888
+
+  ISBN 0-88355-081-4
+
+  Printed in the United States of America
+
+
+
+
+  _Dedicated with filial affection_
+  _to_
+
+  PAUL MYRON WENTWORTH LINEBARGER
+
+  United States Judge in the Philippines,
+  Counselor to and Biographer of President
+  Sun Yat-sen, Formerly Legal Adviser to
+  the National Government of China
+
+
+
+
+FOREWORD
+
+
+To the cynic, two nations clasped in murderous embrace yet nominally
+living in peace with each other might well be one of the miracles of our
+century. No less miraculous has been for many the tenacity of Chinese
+resistance to Japan's invasion ever since the first bullets whizzed
+through the night near the Marco Polo Bridge southwest of Peking early
+in July, 1937. The undeclared war has spread disaster through an area
+larger than that immediately affected in Europe's battles from 1914 to
+1918; hundreds of thousands have died in action; for months China's
+capital has been in the hands of the enemy. But China is not on her
+knees.
+
+The explanation is simple. For the first time in her history, China
+fights as a nation. More is involved than can be attributed to
+Generalissimo Chiang K'ai-shek's personal leadership or the strategic
+and organizational services rendered, until his recent recall to
+Germany, by Alexander von Falkenhausen, chief of staff of the Turkish
+armies during the World War. A people without allegiance to its
+government and without faith in itself would have been incapable of
+braving the ordeal of retreat, massacre, and occupation as successfully
+as have the Chinese. That China fights today as a nation is no small
+tribute to the National Government of the Kuomintang established at
+Nanking in 1927. How long she will be able to fight as a nation is a
+question to be answered only by reference to the national mentality and
+political institutions which have emerged since the collapse of the
+Manchu Empire in 1911-1912. It is the purpose of this volume to appraise
+the record of China's republican era.
+
+The author was compelled to beat his own path. Only a few books on
+modern government in China are available in English, and these, written
+by Chinese, are modeled in their presentation on Western prototypes to
+an extent of obscuring, though unintentionally, the very substance of
+Chinese politics. In Dr. Linebarger's pioneer venture the dynamics of
+internal instability, typical of the earlier phases of the Republic, and
+the gradual consolidation under the Nanking regime are analyzed with
+extraordinary penetration. Instead of being confronted with meaningless
+form and empty legality, the reader is placed in a position to view step
+by step the evolution of conflicting and merging forces: political
+movements and their contest for the loyalty of the masses, the rough and
+ready rule of military might, and the official hierarchies representing
+organized governments. Throughout this work, as in Dr. Linebarger's
+earlier _Political Doctrines of Sun Yat-sen_, the broad stream of
+Confucian thought fertilizing age after age of China's social existence
+and Sun's purposeful ideological adaptations combined in his _San Min
+Chu I_ are shown in fundamental harmony. One distinction, however,
+stands out clearly. The Confucian tradition applied itself to a vaguely
+conceived but essentially unified world order. In the _San Min Chu
+I_ we encounter the elements of a national credo, self-assertive and
+militant.
+
+The role of ideology in modern government has suffered curious neglect
+among students of politics for a considerable time. In periods of
+relative ideational saturation or stagnation, the mechanics of
+constitutional law or the give and take of legislative barter may
+distract from the basic framework of values and objectives giving shape
+to the political order. The rise of totalitarian systems relying heavily
+on ideological appeal and propaganda techniques has laid new stress upon
+those factors which predetermine political behavior. In China's vast
+experience we have the supreme example of ideological guidance so firmly
+established as to reduce to a minimum direct governmental intervention
+in the affairs of the individual. It is perhaps Sun Yat-sen's tragedy
+that for years he placed his faith in the magic of democratic verbiage
+imported from the West; a new orientation came to prevail after 1923,
+when at Sun's instance tested practitioners of mass organization from
+the Soviet Union began to overhaul and streamline the Kuomintang
+apparatus.
+
+Government in China has become migratory as a result of Japan's advance.
+A mere description of its previous structure and functions would today
+have little relevance. But Dr. Linebarger has probed deeply enough into
+the foundations of Chinese political life to distinguish with uncommon
+discernment between the ephemeral and the durable. His long-range
+exposition transcends the exigencies of the hour and delineates the
+issues of China's future.
+
+                                                FRITZ MORSTEIN MARX.
+  ADAMS HOUSE,
+    HARVARD UNIVERSITY.
+
+
+
+
+ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
+
+
+I am deeply indebted to the five gentlemen who have read the entire
+manuscript in some one of its stages. My father, Judge Paul Myron
+Wentworth Linebarger, has given me tireless help in this as in all my
+projects, for which I shall never be able to tender sufficient thanks.
+My teacher, Professor Harley Farnsworth MacNair of the University of
+Chicago, supplied numerous addenda and corrigenda of great value from
+his knowledge of modern Chinese history. Professor Arthur N. Holcombe of
+Harvard University suggested changes which have made the work more
+realistic. Assistance offered me by the Sinologue and philosopher,
+Professor H. H. Dubs of Duke University, was of the utmost value.
+Professor Paul H. Clyde, Duke University, provided many useful and
+significant hints, especially in the field of Sino-foreign relations.
+
+I am also under obligation to Mr. J. C. Yang, Library of Congress, and
+Professor James R. Ware, Harvard University, for further suggestions; to
+Professor Charles Sidney Gardner and Dr. John Fairbank, Harvard
+University, and Professor George Kennedy, Yale University, for aid in
+the general course of my Chinese studies; to Professor Maria Magdalena
+Schoch, until recently of the University of Hamburg, Germany, for a
+critical reading of the revised manuscript; and to Miss Hazel Foster and
+Mr. M. F. Nelson for similar assistance. Mrs. W. M. Gibson, Miss Whitty
+Daniel, and my wife have helped in the preparation of the manuscript.
+
+                                                         P. M. A. L.
+  DURHAM, N. C.,
+    _August_, 1938.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                               PAGE
+
+  FOREWORD BY FRITZ MORSTEIN MARX                               vii
+
+  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS                                                xi
+
+  INTRODUCTION                                                    1
+    Duality or Confluence?                                        1
+    The Peculiarities of Old China                                2
+    The Peculiarities of Modern China                             6
+    The World Significance of Chinese Government                  7
+    The Main Factors in Modern Chinese Government                 9
+    The Approach                                                 11
+
+
+  FIRST PART
+  MOVEMENTS
+
+  CHAPTER I
+  CONFUCIANISM                                                   13
+    The Ages before Confucius                                    13
+    The Ideology Called Confucian                                15
+    Government in the Confucian Ideology                         18
+    The Replacement of the Confucian Ideology                    22
+    The Chief Movements in the Rebuilding of China               24
+    Confucianism in the Republic                                 26
+
+  CHAPTER II
+  THE RISE OF NATIONALISM                                        31
+    Nationalism: Patriotic Anti-Manchu Phase                     31
+    Nationalism: Revolutionary Modernist Phase                   34
+    Nationalism: Republican Phase                                36
+    Nationalism: Constitutionalist Phase                         38
+    The Political Doctrines of Sun Yat-sen                       41
+    Opportunist Movements and Their Anticonstitutional Effects   44
+    Christianity as a Political Force                            48
+    Nationalism: Social Revolutionary Phase                      50
+
+  CHAPTER III
+  BATTLING CREEDS                                                57
+    Nationalism: Governing Phase                                 57
+    Independent Marxism in China                                 63
+    Japanese Efforts to Participate in Creating a New China      69
+    Patriotism: The United Front                                 72
+
+
+  SECOND PART
+  ARMIES
+
+  CHAPTER IV
+  WARRIORS                                                       76
+    Military Rule and Political Economy                          76
+    The Downfall of the Charioteers                              79
+    Military Elements in Chinese Imperial History                83
+    The Military Organization of the Manchu Dynasty              86
+    The Army and the Republican Revolution                       97
+
+  CHAPTER V
+  CAUSES                                                        102
+    The Age of the War Lords                                    102
+    The Age of Air Conquest                                     108
+    Governmental and Political Role of the Armies               113
+    War and the Agrarian Economy                                115
+    Imperialism and Chinese Wars                                119
+
+
+  THIRD PART
+  GOVERNMENTS
+
+  CHAPTER VI
+  THE EMPIRE                                                    126
+    Government to the End of the Warring States                 126
+    The Chinese Imperial Government                             129
+    Family, Village, and _Hui_                                  136
+    Governmental Changes Foreshadowing the Republic             139
+
+  CHAPTER VII
+  THE REVOLUTION                                                145
+    The Presidency of Sun Yat-sen and the Republican Revolution 145
+    The Parliamentary Republic                                  149
+    The Presidential Dictatorship of Yüan Shih-k'ai             152
+    The Phantom Republic in Peking                              155
+    The Governments of Sun Yat-sen in Canton                    160
+    The Nationalist Government, Soviet in Form                  162
+
+  CHAPTER VIII
+  RECONSTRUCTION                                                167
+    The National Government of China                            167
+    The Chinese Soviet Republic                                 182
+    Other Governments in China                                  184
+    The Growth of Government in China                           186
+
+
+  CONCLUSION                                                    191
+    The Collapse of the Imperial Society                        191
+    The Nature of the Transformation                            192
+    The Problems of Government in China                         193
+    The Question of Chinese Political Survival                  195
+
+  CHRONOLOGY OF DYNASTIES                                       197
+
+  INDEX                                                         199
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+The origins of Chinese society may reach half a million years into the
+past. Anthropologists have suggested that Sinanthropus Pekinensis, among
+the earliest forms of man, resembles the modern Chinese more closely
+than he does any other modern race. In what specific period the earliest
+ancestors of the Chinese came to China is not known. It is certain,
+however, that about 1500 B. C. there existed a well-developed
+civilized society in the Yellow River valley, and that this same society
+has lived on--modified by the centuries, but in unbroken
+continuity--down into the present. China has outlasted Crete, Tyre,
+Greece, and Rome. The Aztec empire, which arose in Mexico when China was
+already ancient, has become only a memory, while China is still vital.
+How is it that China's institutions survive, while those of other
+nations did not? How real are Chinese institutions today? What,
+precisely, is the Republic of China?
+
+
+_Duality or Confluence?_
+
+The phrase _Republican China_ indicates an era rather than a system. The
+preceding ages of China have been known by the names of great dynasties.
+T'ang China (620-906 A. D.) overawed and instructed all eastern Asia.
+Sung China (A. D. 960-1279) flourished, civilian and tolerant, in a
+world marked by bigotry and arms. Well into the past century the West
+remained distant and vague. Republican China struggles in the presence
+of the modern world and subject to its superior force; her very name is
+a capitulation to the twentieth century. The problems of the Republican
+era are not merely the problems of republican government; they involve
+the broad question of the meeting and interpenetration of civilizations.
+How are the Chinese, schooled for thousands of years in the effective
+operation of their own political system, to adapt themselves fast enough
+to the Western scheme? What happens when they must and yet cannot
+effectuate such adaptation? These are not queries to be answered simply
+in the routine terms of Western politics.
+
+For the past three thousand years and more the eastern end of the
+European-Asiatic land mass has formed a world to itself. Most of this
+time it was larger, richer, and more civilized than the European world.
+Down to the nineteenth century of the Christian era the Chinese had no
+reason to suppose that theirs was not the most advanced and powerful of
+civilized societies. They looked upon the Far East as the all-inclusive
+universe of civilization; to them, their way of life was the
+common-sense way. The Europeans did likewise, with reference to their
+own sphere. When the European realm expanded so as to include the whole
+planet, when Western civilization began to dominate the earth, and the
+Christian family of nations became the world-wide international system,
+the Chinese were forced to concede that the Far East could not be kept
+to itself. They have found it indispensable to respond, as individuals
+and as a people, to the new environment closing in on them. Doing so has
+necessitated the reexamination and restatement of nearly all basic
+values of Chinese life.
+
+Since the nineteenth century the Chinese have been faced with the
+alternative of adhering to their own traditions or accepting those of
+the West. Institutions and practices which are so well established that
+they seem to rest on sheer common sense in each of the competing
+civilizations have been placed in juxtaposition. As a result, the
+Chinese now know two kinds of common sense to justify a course of
+action. The ensuing difficulty at times goes deeper; for they may be
+said to have even two kinds of sanity. In old China a man who wanted no
+sons seemed a patent lunatic; in the Western world he might be perfectly
+sane. A modern Chinese faces thousands of such choices.
+
+
+_The Peculiarities of Old China_
+
+Obviously, government in Republican China cannot be understood without
+analysis of the foundations upon which it is built. Such an analysis
+requires an inquiry, however cursory, into the peculiarities of old
+China and those of contemporary China. Some of the difficulties of
+modern China arise from the very adequacy of the old system. Had the
+Chinese of the past been less satisfied with their society, they might
+have become more accustomed to change and transience.
+
+China from the first millennium B. C. occupied the central position in
+the Far East. No other country in that part of the earth was so powerful
+or so civilized. India, despite important contributions to Chinese
+religious thought, was too far away to impinge greatly upon the Chinese.
+Japan was heavily indebted to the Chinese, and encouraged the Chinese in
+viewing themselves as the most civilized of peoples. This had important
+consequences. As China was unified most of the time, and as there was no
+other polity to compare with the Chinese, their political system took on
+the appearance of a universal empire. The neighboring states paid formal
+tribute, and the Chinese were unprepared to meet another people who
+might claim political equality as an organized state. Even today, in the
+attitudes of the Chinese and Japanese toward one another, there are
+strong traces of this traditional point of view and indications that the
+Japanese would like to restore a closed Far Eastern order with
+themselves in supremacy.
+
+Since old China was rarely confronted with international problems, the
+Chinese were not aware of their realm as a nation-state. There was no
+sharp territorial limit to the Chinese polity, and no requirement that
+within certain boundaries one authority be defined as supreme. The
+Chinese were able to make their adjustments in the interplay of social
+and political controls with less frequent resort to theory than the
+Westerners. Nor was the Chinese ruler ever so firmly entrenched as to
+eliminate the chance of being overthrown or to preclude the existence of
+other--pluralistic--independent social controls. The power of government
+was indeed limited. It maintained the peace of the Chinese world,
+directed education, supported the social proprieties, and was ornamental
+rather than efficient for the greater part of its activities.
+
+The Chinese lived primarily under the dominance of nonpolitical
+agencies. These were the family (comparable to the Western clan), the
+village and district, and the _hui_ (association, guild, society--in the
+narrowest sense of the term). The family was intimately bound up with
+the Chinese religious system, which stressed the continuity of each
+individual in the flesh. A personal immortality was to be secured with
+greatest certainty through the survival of one's own blood. The village
+was the main economic unit, and the union of villages into districts
+(_hsien_) provided an administrative division of importance: below the
+_hsien_ level, common interests were fostered by community home rule;
+above it, by the government. This meant that elders, clans in council,
+village bosses, and other nongovernmental agencies carried on police
+work, all local public construction, and most of the activities which
+are regarded in the modern West as falling under the jurisdiction of the
+state. The _hui_ was able to supplement the family and the village; in
+guild form, it provided the chief framework of commercial and industrial
+organization.
+
+If the government was weak and limited, and social control ensured
+primarily by nongovernmental agencies, how did the Chinese achieve so
+great a political stability? Why did their polity not break up into a
+wilderness of tiny social groups, each jealous and particularistic, like
+medieval Europe? The answer is to be found in the psychological controls
+which the Chinese established. They devised a system of indoctrination
+unequaled by that of any other people.
+
+The Chinese sought to guide men through the guidance of their ideas:
+government by education, or government by propaganda. For this purpose
+scholarship and administration were closely allied. The government was
+made up of scholars, who thereby occupied the position of greatest
+prestige in the society; the scholars were trained to serve as
+government officials. Few officials were not scholars; few scholars
+pursued a nonpolitical course. This led to a profound uniformity of
+thought, and was in accord with the dictates of the Confucian
+tradition.[1]
+
+From the earliest times Chinese thought was social and political in
+emphasis, rather than metaphysical and scientific. For thousands of
+years scholars studied problems of society, government, and ethics. They
+appealed to tradition, and interpreted it. They organized the primitive
+religion of the Chinese into a sophisticated social philosophy, and over
+the centuries their work took effect. Chinese of different racial
+backgrounds, using different spoken languages and unable to communicate
+with one another by writing, living under different climatic and
+economic conditions, came to show a startling uniformity of behavior.
+Custom and common sense were woven into a solid pattern by the scholars
+and accepted by the masses. Everything in human life bore some relation
+to everything else, and the life of man was related to the world of
+nature. There was no sharp distinction between natural science and
+social philosophy.
+
+The educational integration of government, mores, and physical existence
+created a system of control which has exceeded all others in lasting
+power. The group in command was the scholastic bureaucracy, but
+membership in it was not hereditary. Scholar-officials were recruited by
+civil service examinations, and to this degree the society was a
+democratic one. Every child in the society had the theoretical
+opportunity of becoming prime minister. Furthermore, the power exercised
+by the scholar-officials was different in its nature from that of legal
+rulers in the West. Government was preventive rather than remedial.
+Constitutionality was not confined to legal matters; in a broader sense
+it extended to all subjects. The scholars were as much subject to
+established tradition as the humblest Chinese, and everyone knew the
+tradition. The scholars excelled only in knowing it more thoroughly.
+
+It may be stated as a truism that under any government the actual scope
+of its intervention is confined to a certain category of affairs,
+bounded on the one hand by matters which are so trivial or so unexplored
+that they are left to the citizen's free choice and on the other by
+subjects in which there is such general agreement as to make political
+action unnecessary. This latter sphere might be called ideological
+compliance--control of men brought about by the inculcation of broad
+uniform patterns of belief and behavior. If men are induced to agree
+upon a traditionally fixed mode of behavior, they will unite in
+persecuting dissenters and will not be conscious of the tyranny of
+ideological doctrine. But if they think in many different ways, they
+will be able to gain security only by promises of mutual
+noninterference. Liberty--as absence of governmental restraint--may thus
+result either from a complete concord, in which every man is free to do
+as he wishes since all men wish to do basically the same, or from a
+specific guarantee of each individual's freedom to follow his own
+interest or caprice within a defined limit. The old system of China was
+a free society in so far as dissent calling for government interference
+was relatively negligible, and at the same time a society rigidly
+controlled with respect to the uniformity of individual behavior.
+
+This tradition was pragmatic and realistic. The Chinese ideological
+controls operated successfully because they corresponded reasonably well
+with the actualities of social and economic existence. With the coming
+of the West, the old Chinese system was affected in two ways: First, the
+amorphous Chinese society was threatened by the strong, effectively
+organized states of the West. Secondly, the competitive accomplishments
+of Western civilization destroyed, in large part, the assumption of
+universality upon which much Chinese tradition depended, and thereby
+impaired the power of the scholar-officials. The twentieth century
+brought China a new freedom, unaccustomed and unsought. The old system
+was threatened with ruin, and modern China faced the problem:
+replacement or reconstitution? Or, more dangerously: chaos or political
+extinction?
+
+
+_The Peculiarities of Modern China_
+
+The lifetime of one man can span the gap between old China and new.
+There are men living in Peking today who can remember when the Forbidden
+City (the palace-city of the emperors) was sacred and inviolate, and
+when the mandarinate ruled in accordance with immemorial usage. These
+may regard all Western science as a confusion, a wild torrent of exotic
+words, which answers no problems, gives human life no aim and no
+dignity, and is bound to return to the alien dust whence it came.
+Opposing them are younger Chinese who hate the dead hand of the past and
+look forward to a Westernized, scientific, industrial China which will
+differ from Europe and America only in being even more modern than they.
+
+Most Chinese fall into neither of these groups. Many of them, however,
+have a definite conception of the West and of the benefits which Western
+civilization has to bestow. They also realize the threat which it
+contains for those who do not master it. Yet they have been nurtured in
+the serene humanity of ancient custom and hold to it with the
+effortlessness of habit long transmitted. Out of this dual standard
+there spring daily problems of ethics and conduct, of private life and
+public policy. Administrative organization versus family loyalty and
+nepotism, promptness versus leisureliness, discipline versus courtesy:
+these and many others are omnipresent antitheses.
+
+Anachronism is China's second self. There is no set scheme of things.
+Modern Western civilization has not been adopted so fully as to make the
+traditional habits seem outmoded, nor has the past survived to an extent
+as to make everything modern appear ridiculous. The notion of world
+government, for example, is gone from China, and the notion of
+multi-national government not yet clear. The relation of the individual
+to society and of the parts of society to the whole are not yet
+reformulated; this affects such matters as criminal law, political
+organization, and economic development. Virtually every adaptation in
+China must be thought through from the beginning by the Chinese; and
+even in thinking there are varying styles. Are the Chinese to think
+after the fashion of the West--scientifically and logically--or are they
+to think in their accustomed traditional and empirical manner?
+
+It is thus patent that the new Chinese world which is appearing must
+grow out of the background of the past and the necessities of the
+present. It cannot readily be planned because there are not enough
+formulas common to the old Far Eastern and the new Western worlds. New
+China must be a blending, from use, from habit, from new skills imposed
+upon old. Out of the dangers and misfortunes of the years since 1912 the
+Chinese have developed a small body of political methods which is
+temporarily workable. But the greater part of their social and
+governmental thought and custom has yet to go through the process of
+reevaluation by practice. Chinese political development has perforce to
+be emergent and not planned.
+
+According to either time scheme, that of her long past or of the modern
+world, modern China is anachronistic. The transformation of the Chinese
+world of the past to the China of the future involves the creation of a
+whole set of transitional institutions designed to lead from one to the
+other. Contemporary Chinese institutions are neither those of the past
+nor those of the future; they are a peculiar scheme of more recent
+origin and bound to be replaced. Old China is gone. Modern China is
+novel and unstable; in time it too will yield to a China of which
+prophecy affords but few glimpses.
+
+
+_The World Significance of Chinese Government_
+
+If government in Republican China is an extemporized and doomed system,
+rooted in no past, committed to no future, why should it be scrutinized
+at all? A number of reasons for examining Chinese government suggest
+themselves. Some of these are of sufficient significance to merit
+statement, so as to suggest facts and issues worthy of special notice.
+If certain points of key importance are kept in mind, they may serve as
+references whereby the relative ranking of any specific topic may be
+ascertained.
+
+First, the mere geographic extent of China is such as to make her
+government necessary to a picture of contemporary governments. At least
+every fifth human being now living is a Chinese.
+
+Second, in international relations China has been of great passive
+importance. The wars between Western and Far Eastern nations have all
+been fought over the so-called Chinese question. The partition of China
+and the open door in China have been issues of international concern.
+Since 1931 the Chinese have been active participants in the struggle for
+the control of China, and the nature of their government determines in
+large part the effectiveness of their resistance. China is a vast
+market, and an even vaster reserve of man power--for troops or for
+industrial labor.
+
+Third, the pathology of government deserves attention. Chronic social
+disorder may provide a great variety of political facts wherewith to
+gauge the nature of political power. Well-governed societies do not
+supply similar material because they rarely need to probe political
+fundamentals.
+
+Fourth, old China offers a challenging demonstration of secular,
+civilian, pacific world government. The Chinese commonwealth of the past
+was supernational; it seemed to the Chinese like unified civilized
+humanity. Among the conflicting currents of present world politics,
+there are some which drift toward world unity; old China may present
+significant analogies to the international institutions of today.
+
+Fifth, the universal features of government may be more fruitfully
+scrutinized in a novel cultural and social setting. China presents a
+background radically different from the Western one, and affords a
+unique test whereby Western political patterns and those of world-wide
+significance may be distinguished from one another.
+
+Sixth, the question of method in political science may meet
+qualifications after being applied to Chinese political thought. The
+Chinese did not seek that illusory precision which has been one of the
+chief goals of Western thought ever since logical procedure was
+established by the Greeks. The Western man in the street, however,
+depends very little on mathematics or logic in his everyday thinking.
+Indirectly, the effect of inductive and deductive method has been
+revolutionary, but their importance in routine operation or
+unspecialized thought is open to question--especially in view of the
+findings of modern psychology. It may well be that Chinese thought can
+assist in the interpretation of everyday experience in the West,
+precisely because it is not too specialized or scientific.
+
+Seventh, the Chinese may contribute in a practical way to political
+knowledge and leadership throughout the world. These contributions may
+be anticipated by a consideration of past and present Chinese
+government.
+
+Eighth, the Chinese have lived in a peculiar historical environment,
+consideration of which may broaden our outlook. Most Western "world
+histories"--with few exceptions such as H. G. Wells's brilliant
+_Outline_--are histories of the West Asiatic and European worlds, with
+only perfunctory references to China.
+
+The relative novelty of Chinese materials to Western research explains
+in great part the neglect accorded them in the Western social sciences.
+With the narrowing of the world by modern means of transport and
+communication the situation is changing. The science of Sinology
+(systematic study of China through Chinese texts) has won its place
+among the archaeological disciplines. Sinologists have made available to
+Westerners a great deal of material, but its value depends in large part
+upon the degree to which it is incorporated into the generally
+accessible and usable body of knowledge.
+
+
+_The Main Factors in Modern Chinese Government_
+
+In the consideration of modern Chinese government a somewhat novel
+approach to government is called for: one which distinguishes different
+elements and levels of control and makes plain their interrelation. The
+narrow consideration of the formal structure would be puzzling and
+discouraging, since the various governments of modern China have been
+the ornaments rather than the engines of political power. An attempt to
+explain modern China in terms of constitutional legal development alone
+would lead to exasperation or frustration; the ideological and
+institutional context which might convey meaning would be lost.
+
+How can government be studied when politics are antecedent to
+government? If the rulers make and unmake the form of government almost
+at will, where is the real source of their power? If armies can dissolve
+overnight and be reassembled under different banners on the morrow,
+military power may seem tenuous and dependent on other factors. What are
+these? If property is insecure and the standards of wealth subject to
+variation, how can economic power be treated as an ultimate determinant?
+How do men wield authority of any sort, while they create or destroy the
+machinery of authority?
+
+For centuries China had been held together by a close-knit system
+dependent upon tradition. This tradition, the ideology called
+_Confucian_, was the device whereby the scholar-officials of the old
+imperial bureaucracy controlled society. Government itself was
+subordinate to the moral and social leadership of the intellectuals, who
+relegated the economic and military professions to the less honored
+categories of society. The whole fabric of Chinese life was made up of
+interlocking patterns; the West, by destroying a part, tore the whole
+asunder. Modern China faces more than political problems; a totalitarian
+revolution has engulfed it. China has been proceeding not from partial
+control to complete control, as are Italy,[2] Germany,[3] and the
+Soviets,[4] but from complete control to something not far from
+universal license--freedom all-pervading, unwanted, and terrifying. The
+problem of modern Chinese government is the problem of re-creating
+government out of its raw materials: land, people, doctrine, force, and
+law.
+
+In this problem certain factors stand forth as preeminent: ideological
+movements, military and economic factors, governments.
+
+First, the movements. These supplant the ancient tradition and the old
+hierarchy of scholars. In the place of one settled authority over all
+subjects, there suddenly appeared thousands of little authorities.
+Anarchism, dress reform, Christianity, feminism, nationalism,
+pro-Japanism, communism, atheism, capitalism--discordant and partially
+contradictory, these all compete for the authority or a part of the
+authority once held by the old system. China undergoes intellectual,
+moral, educational, political, economic, military, scientific, and
+industrial revolutions all at once, and all for the same reason--the
+passing of the old unified order. Imagine the Renaissance, the
+Reformation, the French Revolution, the industrial revolution, the Gold
+Rush of '49, the World War, and the Russian Revolution all happening in
+the same country in the same generation! This is a common-place
+comparison, frequently made. Movements determined the loyalty of troops,
+the title to property, the form of government. Power inhered in them,
+since they determined the conditions under which men would seek and
+wield power. A great part of the control of China has been exerted
+directly, by means of the movements themselves.
+
+Second, the armies took the power which goes with military force, simply
+because theirs was military force. They did not have to seek power. It
+accrued to them, out of the disorder of society. Along with military
+power went economic power as the most tangible and negotiable. Guns and
+property seem very realistic indices of power, as long as the troops are
+loyal and the property safe from confiscation or devaluation.
+
+Third, the governments. Between ideological movements, which sought to
+rebuild the ideas and habits of men, and armies wielding a brief but
+nearly unrestricted authority, government played its tertiary role. It
+was at times of ludicrous unimportance, and on some occasions possessed
+power in its own right. It leaped to a sharply improved position after
+1928, but never possessed the generality of assent or the monopoly of
+force to the degree common in the West.
+
+
+_The Approach_
+
+Government may mean the control (or attempted control) of society by men
+professing to act in the name of all society. In this sense it includes
+propagandists and educators who seek to reconstitute society, leaders of
+movements, soldiers, economic leaders of all classes, and government
+leaders (so far as they use government establishments as an actual means
+of control). Viewed thus, the political processes of modern China are
+manifold and significant. Here is power stripped naked, power without
+ornament, power resting squarely upon the brains or guns of men. Men
+rise and fall in the contest for power; they rise and fall absolutely,
+not in a fictitious scheme which establishes a fictitious order of
+constitutional offices sometimes providing asylum for popular leaders in
+eclipse.
+
+Government may also mean the structure and function of that formally
+organized group in society which claims to act upon the mandate of legal
+sovereignty. When the concept of sovereignty itself is vague, confused,
+or absent, government by title may be merely one among several factors
+of power. Government in China is broader than the governments of China;
+the two should be distinguished from one another.
+
+In outlining government in Republican China, the present analysis
+follows the broader construction of the word _government_. The
+governments proper are accordingly discussed in the last part, the first
+two being devoted to the ideological movements and to the military and
+economic factors. For the purpose of defining the three sets of controls
+as clearly as possible, each is treated separately. This has
+necessitated a corresponding arrangement of the historical data, though
+in each part presented from a different point of view. But it is highly
+desirable that the long-range Chinese chronology be kept in mind. To
+this end a table of Chinese dynasties has been provided.[5] As a result
+of separate analysis the movements, the armies, and the governments may
+appear in bolder relief than would otherwise be possible, and the role
+of government in the broadest sense may be made clearer, not only for
+China but for the West as well.
+
+
+NOTES
+
+[1] For a description of this system see below, pp. 18 ff.
+
+[2] _Cf._ H. Arthur Sterner, _Government in Fascist Italy_, New York and
+London, 1938.
+
+[3] _Cf._ Fritz Morstein Marx, _Government in the Third Reich_, 2d ed.,
+New York and London, 1937.
+
+[4] _Cf._ Sidney and Beatrice Webb, _Soviet Communism_, 2d ed., New
+York, 1937.
+
+[5] See below, p. 197.
+
+
+
+
+FIRST PART
+
+
+MOVEMENTS
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter_ I
+
+CONFUCIANISM
+
+
+The continuity of Chinese civilization depends not alone upon its
+political virtues, but upon its working effectiveness in all relevant
+spheres of human activity. In emphasizing certain aspects of old China,
+it is impossible to trace the entire broad evolution.[1] In fact, the
+emergence of those devices which, along with government in the narrow
+sense, guided China in her long past dates back to prehistory.
+Throughout the ages, however, Chinese life has preserved its identity.
+
+  Chinese culture is unique in its continuity. Its most striking
+  characteristic is a capacity for change without disruption. It would
+  appear that that characteristic goes back even to [those] cultures
+  which preceded the Shang in northeast China. Shang culture, like all
+  great cultures, was eclectic, fertilized by influences from many
+  quarters. But these influences and techniques, when they were
+  accepted, met the same fate which has overtaken every people, every
+  religion, every philosophy which has invaded China. They were taken
+  up, developed to accord with Chinese conditions, and transmuted into
+  organic parts of a culture which remained fundamentally and
+  characteristically Chinese.[2]
+
+This is the comment of H. G. Creel, an American Sinologue who has helped
+to explain the archaeological sites of a Chinese civilization
+considerably older than any other. Even in its historical beginnings the
+civilization of man in China displayed features corresponding to that of
+the modern Chinese.
+
+
+_The Ages before Confucius_
+
+The earliest Chinese state known is the Hsia, which is traditionally
+termed a dynasty in the Chinese chronicles and given the dates 2205-1765
+B. C. More critical examination of the materials of Chinese tradition,
+the excavation of the engraved bones and bronzes from succeeding
+periods, and an interpretation of Chinese history with the technique of
+modern archaeology have upset the credibility of the records of the
+earliest periods. All that is established is the fact that the Hsia was
+a state before the Shang. It is unlikely that Hsia exercised any
+imperial hegemony over other peoples, since the empire system did not
+rise till Chou times.
+
+Of the Shang dynasty (traditionally 1765-1123 B. C.) much more is
+known. Thirty years ago most Western scholars thought the Shang
+chronicles to be myth, but excavations in northeast China have located a
+Shang capital and have unearthed a large body of inscriptions on
+bone.[3] The Shang culture must have been highly developed, possessing
+an urban life, writing, and a definite system of monarchical government.
+The germs of scholastic leadership were present. Power was in the hands
+of a single ruler (_wang_, or king), who claimed hegemony for an
+undetermined distance beyond the walls of the capital.
+
+In the twelfth century B. C. the Shang dynasty was overthrown by
+conquerors from the west, the Chou. The Chou dynasty bridges the gap
+between the semihistoric and the definitely historic period of Chinese
+antiquity. Under the Chou the chief features of Chinese social and
+intellectual existence took on clear form. From the Chou conquest and
+their attempts to establish stable government China derived striking
+social and political characteristics. One of the astonishing facts about
+early Chinese history is the manner in which the Chou rulers utilized
+propaganda to make their conquest secure, and in which their propaganda
+furnished dynamic concepts of Chinese social thought and development.
+
+The most important of these widely propagandized concepts was that of
+the Chinese Empire. The city of Shang had been the center of a dominion
+which could not possibly have included more than a fraction of what is
+known today as China. The civilized areas along the Yellow River were
+probably no larger than Palestine. Most of what is now China was
+conquered in succeeding centuries. Even in this small area, it is not
+known what relationship existed between the ruler of Shang and other
+rulers. The Chou monarchs built up the legend that the Shang rulers had
+occupied a position of primacy among the rulers of the civilized world,
+and then claimed the position themselves by right of succession through
+conquest. There was thus fostered the notion of one ruler, central and
+supreme.
+
+Secondly, the Chou themselves taught the doctrine of the right of
+revolution. They identified their god with the Shang god instead of
+declaring that their god had overwhelmed the other. They asserted that
+this one god had been displeased by the profligacy and wickedness of the
+Shang and had called upon the Chou to overthrow the Shang rulers. Both
+these theories, refined and amplified, became fundamentals of Chinese
+political thought in later ages.[4]
+
+The Chou established a system of government which left an imprint on
+Chinese politics for three thousand years. In relating their
+metropolitan administration to their occupation of the lands of North
+and Central China they were less successful. Lacking any other device of
+government, they turned to feudalism, and on the quasi-feudal
+foundations of the Shang they imposed a fief system. This led first to
+the division of China into many small feudal units and later to the
+appearance of powerful territorial states. The first of these
+periods--that in which feudalism predominated--was known as the Ch'un
+Ch'iu, or Spring and Autumn epoch (770-473 B. C.). The second--in
+which the states developed--was known as the Chan Kuo, or Warring States
+epoch (473-221 B. C.).
+
+The rise of the Chou provided China with her first government on an
+imperial scale and with the beginnings of a theory concerning the nature
+of imperial government. The increasing disorganization during the Ch'un
+Ch'iu and Chan Kuo periods led to the development of the Confucian and
+other philosophies, wherein the Chinese, conscious of political
+shortcomings, sought the good society.
+
+
+_The Ideology Called Confucian_
+
+551 B. C. is most commonly given as the year of Confucius' birth.
+Confucius (K'ung Ch'iu; also Master K'ung--K'ung Fu-tz[)u], from which
+Confucius is derived) was a wandering scholar and would-be official
+whose life was spent in the advocacy of political and social reform. He
+was important because of his part in establishing the profession of
+teaching and for his doctrines upholding good government. Discontented
+with the present, he turned to the past--becoming conservative and
+aristocratic in outlook. His position in the history of political
+thought he owes to the bent which he gave aristocratic conservatism. He
+sought the leadership of the _chün-tz[)u]_ (the upright, superior, or
+aristocratic man) rather than the domination of laws. He developed an
+ethical system secular and practical in its orientation and humane in
+its tenets. He emphasized the necessity of the individual's appropriate
+self-consciousness in the society, and the need for following _li_
+(propriety), the established values. He stressed family loyalty above
+all others, and insisted on respect for tradition. After his death in
+479 B. C. his ideas were elaborated, clarified, and revised into what
+is known as the _Confucian system_.[5]
+
+This system underwent many changes. The Confucian influences came to
+prevail in the Han dynasty, in the second and first centuries B. C.,
+but lost its official preeminence with the fall of the Han in the third
+century. It nevertheless retained a great share of intellectual
+leadership. In the Sung period (960-1279) the philosopher Chu Hsi
+developed Confucianism into its most recent accepted form. Others joined
+him in sharpening and refining Confucianism.
+
+The Sung philosophers evolved a Confucianism which showed the influence
+of the Taoist and Buddhist philosophies. They reinterpreted the classics
+by emphasizing works other than those hitherto regarded as preeminent.
+With reference to the concept _li_, they developed the notion of a truly
+complete order running through both spirit and matter. Metaphysics,
+alien to the mind of Confucius himself, became an operative part of
+Confucian thought. Through their ethical and psychological studies the
+Sung Confucians translated the Confucian rationale into an effective
+ideological technique for domination. It is not inconsistent to find
+them opposing any action definitely governmental. Furthermore, they
+showed themselves to be conservatives in politics, and through their
+commentaries on the classics--which were studied in succeeding centuries
+along with the texts themselves--imprinted their conservatism upon the
+Chinese mind.
+
+The ideology called _Confucian_ is not identical with Confucianism as
+the philosophic system proper. In the first place, it is not known how
+much of the social doctrines taught by Confucius and his successors was
+original and how much mere transmission of preexisting beliefs.
+Confucius himself regarded his work as that of a transmitter and not a
+creator. Secondly, the whole Chinese culture contributed elements of
+strength to the ideology to which the name of Confucius became attached
+by Westerners. Thirdly, the system developed in practice to an extent
+which Confucius could not have anticipated. The Confucian ideology and
+society bear the relation to Confucius which Christendom bears to Jesus
+Christ; both founders would scarcely recognize the derivations to which
+their teachings have led.
+
+The Confucian ideology came to prevail in China just before the day of
+Christ. At the time of Christ, Wang Mang, a usurper and a zealous
+Confucian, shook the Han Empire with his experiments. A period of
+reaction against Confucianism set in. Taoism and Buddhism provided rival
+cults. After the twelfth century, Confucianism rose slowly to power over
+men's minds again--although it had never been wholly superseded by other
+doctrines, it had long lacked its all-compelling primacy. Not until the
+Ming dynasty (1368-1643) did it become the state philosophy of China,
+the ideology whereby China lived politically and whereby she was
+governed.
+
+Descriptions of Confucian China apply, therefore, with particular
+cogency to the past five hundred years, if account is taken of the role
+of Confucianism as a state philosophy. But if those elements of Chinese
+culture which are subsumed under the name of Confucianism are considered
+apart from Confucian philosophy, the time may be extended indefinitely.
+Confucian doctrine is one aspect of Chinese culture which has in various
+centuries risen to the forefront. Underneath this doctrine there are
+tenets, near the level of unconscious habit, which apply to almost all
+ages of China. It is difficult to separate the two phenomena and to
+distinguish between Chinese culture and its most representative
+philosophy. An analogy, remote but suggestive, is the influence of
+Aristotle in the West. Periods of Aristotelian predominance can be
+distinguished from the general history of Western thought, in which
+Aristotle plays a consistent but lesser role. As Aristotle was
+interpreted by Aquinas, so was Confucianism by the Sung philosophers.
+Aristotelian politics are far removed from the specific problems of
+representative or modern authoritarian government; nevertheless they
+possess great value and exercise an indeterminable influence upon the
+entire West. The analogy holds for China if left in its loosest terms.
+Confucianism is far from oblivion. The China which met the Western
+impact--"old China" in the eyes of the twentieth century--was in fact
+more Confucian than was the West Aristotelian. She was permeated by an
+ideology in which Confucius' teachings were the key pattern, though not
+one which he had made up in its entirety.
+
+
+_Government in the Confucian Ideology_
+
+In Confucian China, government was reduced to a minimum. There existed a
+set of institutions which in many respects afforded a remarkable
+although misleading parallel to the governments of the West. In fact,
+the earliest Western visitors to China found no difficulty in applying
+their own political language to China. The supreme Chinese leader they
+called the _emperor_, despite the inevitable Caesarian connotations of
+the term and the fact that it erased the peculiar significance of the
+Chinese title. Subordinate areas were called _provinces_. All the way
+through, the use of European concepts compelled whole series of
+unwarranted parallels. The term _mandarin_ forced its way into Western
+tongues, however, since there was no existing term to describe the
+members of the curious hierarchy of scholar-bureaucrats occupying a
+position of hegemony among the institutions of Chinese society.
+Unfortunately for Chinese as well as Westerners, both were so poorly
+informed in the beginnings of intercourse that the Chinese could not
+secure an adequate picture of Europe, while the Europeans assumed that
+the Chinese were more, rather than less, like themselves. The Chinese
+society, with a single supreme ritual leader, was termed an _empire_,
+and the predominant hierarchy of that society a _government_.
+
+Actually, modern political scientists would have to hesitate before
+applying the term _government_ to the hierarchy of old China. In many
+respects that hierarchy was more like Europe's medieval universities and
+our fraternal societies than the governments of the West. The prestige
+accruing to positions in the system was not derived so much from
+political power as from the status which the system offered to its
+members. An official, although he might value his power, was regarded in
+the society at large almost as much for what he was as for the dignity
+with which the office invested him. This arose from his peculiar role,
+in which his function was to provide a model of propriety in his private
+and public life rather than to interfere in the lives of others.
+Interference, to be sure, occurred--sharply, Draconically, directed more
+against the social group of the offender than against the offender
+himself, on the theory that it was the function of the group to keep its
+members in line with the common-sense traditions. In such rare cases the
+officialdom became a government--government as the institution of men
+who seek to control society in the name of all society. Normally the
+officialdom was not a government in this sense, as it claimed leadership
+rather than control, preached rather than punished, shamed rather than
+intimidated the people.
+
+Confucius said, "If the people be led by laws, and uniformity sought to
+be given them by punishments, they will try to avoid the punishment, but
+have no sense of shame. If they be led by virtue, and uniformity sought
+to be given them by the rules of propriety, they will have the sense of
+shame, and moreover will become good."[6] In a governmental system which
+was avowedly Confucian, the officials were discouraged from trying to
+formulate rules, for such rules, if specific, could only duplicate the
+enactments of custom and, if general, might entangle the official in a
+web of words. If the officials were personally and individually
+worthless, there would be no hope for good government and the only
+remedy would consist in selecting good officials and placing them in
+high positions. If the officials were good, their integrity and common
+sense would show them the solutions to problems and they would have no
+need to solicit advice from some manual of commands. No lifeless paper
+and ink could guide a people unless there were upright officials to
+study the classics and put the judicious rules found in them into
+effect. The only safeguard against bad government was good government by
+good men; the only remedy for bad government was the effort of good men.
+The Chinese never set up an imaginary machinery and turned themselves
+into its cogs. To the simple, common-sense humanity of the Confucians, a
+government made up of rigid laws--a system having no reference to the
+personality or value of individuals, but embedded in a vast mechanism of
+numbers--would have seemed anathema and lunacy.
+
+Government in China was an auxiliary activity, the reserve power of a
+hierarchy given to the pursuit of different ends. The officials were
+teachers first and magistrates afterward; the emperor was a supreme
+model first and a ruler afterward; the people were shamed, and punished
+only when they were shameless. Such was the ideal theory upon which the
+Chinese built their world society. The facts were rarely as bright as
+they might have hoped; the reserve power never disappeared.
+
+The necessity for government did not always proceed from the frailties
+of the governed. The Confucian system, although worthy of its great
+esteem, was marked by the difficulties which attend all human
+organization. Corruption and tyranny appeared, and were not by any means
+negligible. In many cases it may be supposed that a system of laws would
+have provided redress for individuals treated arbitrarily or unjustly;
+but, if one is to judge by experience in the West, even law brings with
+it other types of injustice peculiar to itself. In China some of the
+most benevolent and effective emperors advocated at times a government
+of rules and not of men, in order to check the caprice and the
+oppression of officials; yet the role of law in China, in contrast to
+the part it has played in the West, remained slight. The West affords
+instances of effective political work outside legal systems, while the
+Chinese have produced law codes of considerable breadth and
+significance. Nevertheless, the power of Chinese government aside from
+law is just as clear as the Western development of government within
+law.
+
+The old Chinese system was based upon control through ideas, control
+exercised through the maintenance of clear notions of right and wrong,
+as founded in certain well-established common-sense traditions. The
+world of fact and the world of right and wrong were bound together, and
+the whole ideology was one of general and all-pervasive order. While the
+Western impact was felt cumulatively through the nineteenth century, the
+Chinese world of fact went down into the limbo of myth in a few
+disestablished generations, and with it went the compulsion which
+Confucian common sense had exerted.[7] The consequent development of new
+ways of acting, which had nothing to do with traditional control, upset
+the entire scheme. When the system of ideological guidance began
+breaking down, there was a stampede to get away from it. Men no longer
+trusted it, no longer trusted the tameness of their neighbors. A new
+wildness, a savagery armed with science, had come with the aliens from
+beyond the seas. It was the old hierarchy to which men turned, calling
+it _the state_.
+
+As a state, as an all-embracing control institution, the old Chinese
+hierarchy was a pseudomorph--it looked like a state but was not really
+one. Now it had to develop those characteristics of regularity,
+impersonality, and machine effectiveness demanded of a state in the
+modern world. It had to restore the virtue of men by telling them how it
+was possible to be virtuous in a world in which all things turned and
+changed with the days and not with the centuries. It had to gather
+together the members of the old Chinese world-community, reorient them
+with respect to the new, divided world around them, and fight off the
+inroads of outsiders. Above everything else, it had to grow strong, so
+that it might institute order, so that it might someday grow weak again.
+On the other hand, if a governmental system were set up which tried to
+maintain the precarious supremacy that Western states have enjoyed, and
+which was subject to uncontrolled fluctuations in the thought of the
+people upon whom it rested, the Chinese might lose their character as
+Chinese. They might be absorbed into the Western world and become a
+group of yellow-skinned traditionless men, living according to the
+heritage of white men's laws and doomed to a perpetual inferiority
+because these laws were not their own. They might be aliens upon the
+earth, with no group to call their own. Such a nightmarish vision may
+have come to Sun Yat-sen when he pleaded with all his heart for the
+unification and defense of a China still Chinese.
+
+The old system broke and collapsed in 1911-1912. This collapse was
+hastened by the fact that the imperial family was incapable of
+leadership. A succession of degenerates and children occupied the
+throne--the one intelligent emperor was imprisoned by a clique--and a
+fanatical old woman held enough power to keep anyone else from using it,
+but not enough to lead or to want to lead a revolution from above. When
+the old structure caved in, over four hundred million people were
+without effective government, and no one really knew how to create it.
+
+
+_The Replacement of the Confucian Ideology_
+
+Only some of the movements which have occurred in China have had
+political significance. With the collapse of the old stable order, the
+Chinese fell into great confusion, devoting themselves to a variety of
+doctrines and crusades. Some of these movements may be regarded as
+subordinate to the day-to-day struggle for military or governmental
+power; others, though within the sphere of politics as far as their
+interests were concerned, never acquired sufficient importance to
+impress themselves upon the general political scene.
+
+The only movements which need be here considered are constituent ones.
+It has been noted that the real basis for the stability and operation of
+the old Chinese society lay not in the power of an organized body of
+law-makers, law-enforcers, and law-interpreters but in the
+constitutionalism of common sense, in the deep harmony of agreement
+which the Confucian outlook on fact and value had created. Men were
+raised tame, and what tamed them was an ideology--a unified, coherent
+body of ideas--which related the knowledge of the world to the sphere of
+morals, which was applied by the intellectually dominant classes as a
+means of control, and which secured for the controlling classes hegemony
+over all groups in society.
+
+The moment the old order weakened, it was inevitable that men would try
+to find substitutes which met four criteria: (1) a plausibly
+satisfactory explanation for the world of fact; (2) a persuasively
+related scheme of values (right, wrong; good, bad); (3) use of this
+explanation and the value scheme (both together forming an ideology) to
+control behavior; (4) authoritative status of the individuals promoting
+the ideology, whether or not organized as a group.
+
+It will be recognized that these criteria fit the great religious
+movements of mankind; it is equally apparent that they lend themselves
+to the promotion of governance. Governing under conditions of
+ideological anarchy is at best a precarious effort--a makeshift, a
+pitiable building upon sand. The Western world faces today the same
+problem that the Chinese face: How are men to agree widely enough to
+live together in peace? But the Chinese approached this problem from an
+experience of deliberately fostered agreement. Confucianism had the
+effectiveness of the great religions and a sophistication and
+malleability superior, perhaps, to any of them. As a consequence, the
+modern Chinese were keenly aware of the necessity of the last two
+criteria. The problem of ideological guidance is only half solved with
+the presentation of a new scheme of facts and a new scheme of morals;
+propaganda and institutionalization remain.
+
+Complaints are current in the West to the effect that art, science, and
+letters are becoming propaganda--that is, that they are being used to
+control men, or as attempts to control men. The Chinese of 1912 and
+after never had similar scruples. All human effort was propaganda, and
+whatever was not, was of only passing interest. There was no alternative
+while the Chinese tried to found a new common sense in the discredited
+ruins of their old world order. Their natural science had been impeached
+by the demonstrable superiority of Western science. Their code of
+ethics, whatever its aesthetic appeal, was ineffectual as a way of
+conduct among people who had different, more violent notions of right
+and wrong. Even the code of personal behavior--the elaborate courtesies,
+the leisureliness, the grace of life in old China--was worthless in an
+environment which put a high premium upon speed, impersonality,
+efficiency. As the Chinese turned to a revision of all aspects of their
+mode of life at once, different groups, trying to find some one key
+reform which would solve all difficulties, fell into discord. Economic
+advance, political reorganization, "realism" in outlook, educational
+reform--all these had their adherents. None was allowed, by either
+adherents or opponents, to stand simply as a group of separate reform
+measures to be considered on their own merits; the drive for a new
+ideology made all proposals important for their bent rather than their
+content. A simple thing like the desirability of using Latin letters in
+mass education immediately took on a vast significance when related to
+the _Kulturpolitik_ of the time. The left-wingers once attacked the
+missionaries who had first tried to introduce it, on the ground that the
+missionaries were seeking to prostitute the Chinese mind and to make the
+Chinese betray the past. Later the Communists enthusiastically pushed
+the same scheme, stating that the Chinese ideographs were a stronghold
+of reactionary thought. The torments of the struggle inevitably caused
+the terms of conflict to resolve; gradually several more or less
+determinant movements emerged, around which all other reforms tended to
+cluster, because of sympathy or logical relationship.
+
+
+_The Chief Movements in the Rebuilding of China_
+
+Among the movements, Confucianism stands first. Even with its limpness
+and decadence, it still represents the greatest single intellectual
+force in the country. To the Chinese, this force may not even be
+apparent, and they take it as much for granted as the air they breathe.
+Nevertheless, the outside observer can see that even though Confucianism
+is inert as a movement, its inertia is more important than the pressures
+of other causes. Unconsciously, the Chinese accept whole tracts of
+Confucian thought. They accept, in other words, the guidance of
+Confucian ideology in much the same way that Americans who are not
+churchgoers still accept the major premises of Christianity, simply
+because their whole environment is charged with it. Just as in the West
+a universal and potent Christian revival in politics is not likely but
+is nevertheless conceivable, so in China it is not very probable but
+quite possible that there will be a successful resurrection of the
+orthodox Confucian philosophy. Whether a strict Confucianism could
+return without monarchy is doubtful; and Sun Yat-sen's blend of
+republicanism and Confucianism is so well established that it may
+prevent the successful promotion of uninterpreted Confucianism.
+
+The Taoists and Buddhists are similarly inactive in politics. More
+strictly concerned with the supernatural than is Confucianism, they
+represent significant tangential forces upon the flow of political
+development, but do not express themselves in overt intervention. Among
+the leaders of all groups except the Communists there are important
+members of both sects. It is not uncommon for any of them, defeated in
+war or temporarily eliminated from politics, to turn to a monastery and
+study ancient texts, much in the way that an idle American politician
+goes to a farm, cultivating his health and his reputation.
+
+Islam is a minor but living force in China. It has long prevailed in the
+border territories of the Northwest, and for generations has presented
+vital and effective opposition to the Chinese influence. The territory
+of the Mohammedans was consequently a hotbed of rebellion and
+separatism, until the ghastly religious wars of the past century drowned
+autonomous tendencies in an ocean of blood. At the present time the
+Islamic movement faces another equal to itself in ferocity and
+persuasiveness--Marxism--in Outer Mongolia, across the border in the U.
+S. S. R., and in the northwest controlled by the Chinese Red Army. Thus
+far Islam has given no promise of power.
+
+Nationalism--the movement launched by Sun Yat-sen, which follows his
+doctrines of the _San Min Chu I_[8]--is the official movement of the
+National Government of China and of the Nationalist armies under Chiang
+K'ai-shek. It is consequently the chief power of positive action in the
+whole country. At various times, Sun's followers have been known as
+Progressives, Revolutionists, Republicans, and Nationalists--according
+to the phase of their program then uppermost.
+
+Opportunism, rationalized by one or another ornamental philosophy, has
+been very common in modern China. It has accepted ideological materials
+the way they are used in superficial struggles of the West--making
+ideals fit the facts and using them for the sake of the facts.
+Opportunism has been characterized by the avid acceptance of wholly
+implausible doctrines, or by a disingenuous "realism." Proalien and
+defeatist movements have been opportunist in practical matters; "strong
+man" philosophies have served the causes of individual ambitions.
+Ideologically these currents were noteworthy only because they stirred
+up the mud, making genuine intellectual clarification all the more
+difficult.
+
+Finally, three important movements have come from outside. These are
+Christianity, Marxism, and pro-Japanism.
+
+Each sociopolitical movement in China has had economic connections. Some
+movements are avowedly bourgeois and capitalist and find their roots in
+Western tradition. Others are inspired by the challenge of the land
+problem, which is very acute. World production has upset Chinese farm
+prices; international trade has ruined many peasant craft industries;
+modern armies have imposed unprecedented tax burdens; opium and erosion
+ruin large portions of the people and the land. In some cases the chaos
+in the countryside can only be stilled by massacre. Despite the presence
+of capitalist, proletarian, and agrarian economic movements, it seems
+likely that economic questions will be settled by groups which do not
+concentrate upon them to the exclusion of all others. Meanwhile, each of
+the movements seeking to create a new China will have to provide for
+reform or replacement of the economic system, which is decrepit because
+of its internal decline and the appearance of economic devices from the
+West vastly more effective, but inconsistent with Chinese modes of
+existence.
+
+
+_Confucianism in the Republic_
+
+Confucianism as an official movement has been used to support other
+tendencies, to further the opportunist activities of particular cliques,
+and to bolster--by disguising--the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. It
+is incorrect, however, to limit the role of Confucianism in modern China
+to these facts. In serving as a foundation for other movements it
+possesses unmeasured potentialities.
+
+Confucianism supposes that the truth and the socially desirable are
+identical; that both are identical with the Confucian tradition; and
+that an elite of scholars is required to propagate truth, clothing it
+with the language of tradition and morality. Confucianism is hostile to
+the very notion of sovereignty, leaves no room for a system of
+permanently separate nations, and is unable to accommodate the Western
+idea of an accidental growth in knowledge, dependent upon sporadic
+individual initiative. Confucianism is strong in so far as it promotes a
+society based upon knowledge, in which individuals can ascend or descend
+according to their personal virtue and competence. Such an ideal has a
+definite end in the physical universe by working toward a human
+immortality of the flesh and the spirit--flesh through the perpetuation
+of the family name in the male line, spirit through the transmission of
+records and knowledge. Its present-day defects are obvious. The world of
+fact in the Confucian ideology does not correspond with the beliefs
+accepted as fact by the dominant West. The intellectual insulation
+against the outside necessary to ideological control could not be
+achieved by any single modern nation without the use of tyranny.
+Moreover, Confucian ethics and politics, more than twenty-four centuries
+old, can scarcely be expected to conform to the changed minutiae of
+human life, dominated by technology. Nevertheless, while the Chinese may
+not turn again to the classics for guidance in concrete situations, or
+consult ancient authorities for solutions to simple practical problems,
+the moral and social doctrines of Confucianism, redefined or modified,
+could well play a definite role in the modern world. In China the chief
+rivals to Confucianism will be the new heterodox schools of
+reinterpreted Confucianism--such as the versions posed by Sun Yat-sen
+and Chiang K'ai-shek, or the watery Confucianism of Manchoukuo.
+
+The nonformal unorganized power of Confucianism weighs more heavily. If
+Confucianism were to be considered alone on the strength of the
+movements featuring the password "Back to Confucius!" it would be so
+negligible as to merit no attention. Not the strength of its partisans
+but the concessions of its opponents and rivals make Confucianism
+important. Confucius can no more be eradicated from modern China than
+Plato, Aristotle, and Christ from the background of Western society.
+Every Chinese movement, starting with Confucianism as the status quo,
+will have to incorporate a large part of the traditional doctrines. It
+may well be that in the new breeds of thought the Confucian strain will
+prove dominant and most lasting.
+
+Until the breakdown of the Empire, Confucian texts were studied
+appreciatively rather than critically. One does not criticize common
+sense unless one is anxious for the reputation of a crank. With the
+blinding dawn of Western knowledge, Confucianism went into the
+wastebasket. Two years in New York were worth a generation of study over
+the ancient authorities. From time to time, under the Republic, the
+various governments discussed plans for educational reform, or
+haphazardly encouraged the dying traditionalist schools; but nothing
+could restore the prestige of classicism. Strangely, the greatest
+impetus toward classical learning was provided by the challengers of the
+classics. Modern Chinese scholarship, using Western methods of critical
+study, and armed with new specializations undreamed of by the archaists,
+found that the traditional authorities were valuable not only for what
+they pretended to be--plain, direct, factual records--but also as source
+material for penetrating interpretations.
+
+The Chinese have turned to this task since the opening of the various
+scientific agencies of the National Government at Nanking and have
+already produced works of importance on their own past. They have pushed
+back their scientifically ascertainable history almost a thousand years.
+The modern Chinese students, who hated the classics when they were
+mouthed by sedate old scholars ignorant of the modern world, now devote
+themselves to the classics to criticize them; criticizing them, they
+study them; studying them, they love them. The "science of the country"
+(Sinology) has recently been added to the curriculum of the modern
+schools; it is causing a veritable renaissance. In fact, the Chinese are
+constantly becoming more anxious to find precedent for political growth
+and development in their own past rather than in the past of the West,
+which they could never appreciate as much as do Westerners.
+
+The actual Confucian movements do not warrant attention. Militarists
+have sponsored little Confucian coteries, or have paid for the
+publication of sumptuous editions of the Confucian classics, with the
+expectation of acquiring a reputation for benevolence and intelligence.
+Wu P'ei-fu, the most accomplished scholar among the military leaders of
+his period, who owed part of his prestige to his scholarship, was
+diligent in promoting Confucianism. With his decline (1926) his example
+was no longer felt to be worth following; Confucianism as a practical
+political expedient passed from the scene. It gave too little sanction
+to the raising of local conscript armies, inflation of the currency, and
+the doubling of taxes. Its complete silence on such necessities could
+not be taken for consent.
+
+In the Japanese-occupied territory in Manchuria, however, an interesting
+experiment in Confucianism has been made. The customs and organization
+of the last Chinese dynasty have been resurrected, touched up by a few
+classical scholars, given a somewhat more orthodox and unrealistic air,
+and proclaimed as the constitution of the Great Empire of Manchou
+(Manchoukuo). Since the effective government of the country is under
+strong Japanese influence, the venture is significant only as a
+political narcotic. The laws proclaimed are in Chinese; the officials'
+names are Chinese; the miranda of government, whatever the fact, are
+consistent with the grand traditions of Chinese history. The Japanese
+might have placed a handful of dreaming reactionaries in actual power
+and helped the growth of an anachronistic Chinese Empire in the
+northeast, but they seem to have spoiled their opportunity of creating a
+friendly and subservient state by acting too arbitrarily and making it
+impossible for the Confucian experiment to work.
+
+Confucianism in modern China owes its position not so much to its
+prospects as to the fact that it has provided a frame of reference,
+however obsolescent, for the political struggle. Hence, through the
+tumultuous modern period, the Chinese have been strengthened by a
+philosophy which emphasized the separateness and stability of each
+institution in society, and which did not make them lose all with the
+fortunes of a single supreme organization. As a positive political
+force, Confucianism has done two things: It has kept the Chinese from
+depending too much on political control, and it has provided a rationale
+in the contest for power. It accomplished the first by making police a
+function of society as a whole, by stressing the appropriateness of
+behavior rather than its legality; and it has given the Chinese ethical
+values despite their sorry political condition. Confucianism has
+rationalized struggle by supplying each individual participant with a
+code to apply if he came to power, and by giving him a good pretense for
+seeking power. Confucius himself lived in a time when Chinese political
+organization was chaotic. He noted the need for righteous men in high
+places and pointed out the good which could be done, apart from general
+reform, by the furtherance of virtue through scattered efforts.
+Confucius supplied the ambitious men of his own time with a reason for
+aspiring to power--by making political responsibility a duty for the man
+of intelligence. The Confucian scholar was no saint contemplating
+eternity; he was a proud, correct, self-righteous, patient individual,
+obliged by his training to take public office wherein his talent could
+gain wide influence.
+
+In modern China, the seekers of political office have been able to avoid
+the appearance of abject venality by professing respectability. Even
+though they may have been just as corrupt as the politicians of other
+nations, and more efficiently so, they nevertheless had the saving grace
+to eschew hard realism and cloak their ambition with a pleasantly
+virtuous tradition. A military leader could surround himself with a few
+scholars and give his efforts to reach power the air of a mild and
+well-mannered crusade. Whenever political strife in China has had no
+meaning but vanity and greed it has at least worn the decent cloak of
+the Confucian tradition.
+
+
+NOTES
+
+[1] For a good general introduction to Far Eastern history and politics
+see G. Nye Steiger, _A History of the Far East_, Boston, 1936, the most
+complete of one-volume works; Harold M. Vinacke, _A History of the Far
+East in Modern Times_, New York, 1937, especially good for social,
+economic, and governmental developments; René Grousset, _Histoire de
+l'Extrême Orient_, Paris, 1929; and Richard Wilhelm, _Ostasien_, Potsdam
+and Zurich, 1928, a brilliant short outline. Diplomatic history is dealt
+with by H. B. Morse and H. F. MacNair, _Far Eastern International
+Relations_, Boston, 1931, the most detailed one-volume work; Paul H.
+Clyde, A _History of the Modern and Contemporary Far East_, New York,
+1937, the most recent; and Payson J. Treat, _The Far East_, New York,
+1935. The most useful one-volume history of China is Kenneth Scott
+Latourette, _The Chinese: Their History and Culture_, New York, 1934.
+All these works carry bibliographies; those of Steiger and Latourette
+are particularly informing.
+
+[2] Herrlee Glessner Creel, _Studies in Early Chinese Culture, First
+Series_, p. 254, Baltimore, 1937. Quoted by permission of the author.
+
+[3] H. G. Creel, _The Birth of China_, London, 1936, provides a
+brilliant popular account of the earliest known Chinese culture.
+
+[4] Creel, _Studies_, pp. 50 ff. For relevant information the writer is
+indebted to Professor H. H. Dubs, Duke University.
+
+[5] On Confucianism and its immediate background see Marcel Granet,
+_Chinese Civilization_, New York, 1930; Fung Yu-lan (Derk Bodde,
+translator), _A History of Chinese Philosophy: The Period of the
+Philosophers_, Peiping, 1937, an authoritative work; Liang Chi-chao, _A
+History of Chinese Political Thought_, New York, 1930; and Leonard
+Shihlien Hsü, _The Political Philosophy of Confucianism_, New York,
+1932, brilliant but open to criticism. For a popular portrait of
+Confucius see Carl Crow, _Master Kung_, New York, 1938.
+
+[6] _Confucian Analects_, Book II, Chapter III.
+
+[7] For its loss of political support see below, pp. 34 ff.
+
+[8] See below, pp. 41 ff.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter_ II
+
+THE RISE OF NATIONALISM
+
+
+Of the constituent movements of modern China, the most important has
+focused on the personality, principles, and following of Sun Yat-sen
+(1867-1925). Now known primarily as the Nationalist movement, it has at
+various times emphasized different aspects of its program. In its
+simplest and most fundamental points, the movement has fallen heir to
+early patriotism. It has assumed different names: the Society for the
+Regeneration of China (1894-1905), or _Hsing Chung Hui_; the League of
+Common Alliance (1905-1912), or _T'ung Mêng Hui_; the Nationalist
+Democratic Party or National People's Party (1912-1914), or Kuomintang;
+the Chung Hua Kê Ming Tang (1914-1920), or Chinese Revolutionary Party;
+and since 1920, again the _Kuomintang_. Kuomintang is the combination of
+three Chinese words meaning "country" or "realm," "people," and "party."
+The name of the party can be translated in innumerable ways: nationalist
+democratic, nationalist popular, national people's party, etc. The
+commonest rendering is "Nationalist," but it is to be remembered that
+the word "people" figures in the name. Furthermore, the Chinese version
+of patriotism has more cosmopolitan and fewer restrictive connotations
+than patriotism ever had in the West.
+
+
+_Nationalism: Patriotic Anti-Manchu Phase_
+
+Even in a world society that knew neither state nor nation the Chinese
+felt attached to their homes and their native land, which led them to
+repel invaders. They never personified this loyalty or tried to express
+it in specific institutions; nor did they admit outsiders to equality
+and concede that there was more of the civilized world outside, thus
+admitting the existence of nations. Their attitude rested on sentiment
+rather than theory. There was no elaborate bolstering of Chinese racial
+superiority, for--by and large--all the peoples in China, conquerors or
+conquered, seemed racially alike, fused under the pressure of great
+social homogeneity.
+
+At the time of the Manchu conquest (about 1644) the Chinese developed a
+passionate hatred for the invaders from the northeast. In entrenching
+themselves the Manchus committed a fateful blunder which was to bring
+momentary strength but ultimate ruin: they enforced racial segregation
+in the political, social, and economic sphere. Legend has it that a
+Chinese statesman, forced into Manchu service, suggested this plan and
+thus laid the cornerstone for the eventual Chinese liberation. The
+Manchus prohibited miscegenation; they established Manchu garrisons
+throughout the Empire, keeping their troops from work (which might have
+led to intermingling with the Chinese) and thus ruining them by sloth. A
+fixed quota of Manchus was introduced into the government service,
+irrespective of the operation of the examination system. In time the
+Chinese scholars submitted willingly enough to the alien rule; two of
+the Manchu emperors were the most enlightened patrons which Chinese
+letters and arts had had in centuries, and the intellectual opposition
+dwindled away to a minimum.
+
+Among the populace there was no such general reconciliation. Deprived
+for the first time of scholarly leadership, the common people, peasants
+and artisans, organized numerous secret societies. The societies
+flourished, coming to supersede the government in whole areas and
+marking many decades with insurrection and riot. Scholars fought the
+secret societies because of their uncouth rituals, their heterodoxy of
+ideas, their opposition to the existing system. The societies answered
+by building up political agencies which were able to act on the lower
+and more generally understood levels of ideology.
+
+These groups kept patriotism afire. The greatest of their uprisings, the
+T'ai-p'ing rebellion of 1849-1865, was put down with the assistance of
+the Western Christian states, but it left a permanent mark on Chinese
+society. The rebels had shown that it was possible to wrest the greater
+part of China from Manchu rule. They were the first to welcome the
+invasion of Christianity, adopting a fantastically modified Christian
+faith. They awakened the Chinese to the immediate possibility of a war
+of liberation against the outsiders who held the throne of the Chinese
+world.
+
+The T'ai-p'ing rebellion showed its strength as a patriotic movement. It
+was successful in shaking the established ideology with a rival
+compounded of the more vulgar parts of the old, combined with
+Christianity. And it indicated the weakest point of the
+dynasty--governmental inadequacy in dealing with the agrarian problem.
+The years of formal stability gave China a much increased population;
+the same years were years of political decline which raised the cost of
+government. A house-cleaning was in order. The T'ai-p'ing demonstrated
+the need for it; the Manchu dynasty refused to yield to the demand.
+
+Sun Yat-sen was born in 1866 or 1867. An uncle of his had been one of
+the rebels. At Sun's parental home the countryside had known of the
+T'ai-p'ing rebellion; many in his native village had participated in it.
+He was as patriotic as any Chinese could be in the far south, where the
+Manchu conquest had penetrated least deeply, but his patriotism did not
+differ from the patriotism of his neighbors until he came to know life
+outside China. From the patriotism of the old Chinese realm to the
+nationalism required of China in the new Westernized world--this was a
+step to be traversed only by rich personal experience.
+
+Sun took this step as a boy, when he went to Honolulu. He soon was
+converted to Christianity, learned English, and became acquainted with
+Western life. He was able to see the world in terms of nations, and he
+saw that from the Western point of view China was a large but weak
+nation. Already committed from childhood to the revolutionary cause, he
+was led by his knowledge of the West to change patriotism into
+nationalism. When he returned to China, after studying medicine in
+Hongkong, he arrived with the notion of transforming the old world
+community into an effective modern nation-state.
+
+He did not seem at first to realize how necessary it was to dispose of
+the monarchy. For a while he petitioned the authorities, trusting that
+immediate reforms might be effected within the existing framework,
+pending an ultimate revolution of patriots. His success must be measured
+in terms of what he and his few fellow workers learned, rather than of
+what they accomplished. His technique of revolution was based upon the
+established traditions of Chinese history--the formation of a small
+nucleus, the gathering of affiliated groups, the permeation of a
+regional bureaucracy when possible, and the launching of terroristic
+attacks to shake the apparent stability of the government.
+
+At the beginning of his work he came into contact with the secret
+groups. When he started organizing in earnest, the first major
+development was the admittance en bloc of a small secret society. In an
+unpublished autobiography Sun wrote: "After my graduation I practised
+medicine in Canton and Macao as a pretext for spreading my revolutionary
+ideas."[1]
+
+
+_Nationalism: Revolutionary Modernist Phase_
+
+The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 was the cause of much disturbance in
+China and the first major event to shake the belief of the masses in
+their own ideology. Fantastic barbarians with deadly contrivances might
+harry the coasts and even allow themselves impertinences with the
+dynasty, but the situation became different when a small, inoffensive,
+ineffectual neighbor nation took over these same weapons and spoiled the
+internal arrangements of the Far Eastern universe. The peripheral
+countries could perhaps even demolish the central suzerainty; this was
+the _mene-tekel_ of the Empire.
+
+The revolutionary organization of Sun Yat-sen had by now become
+definitely modernist, nationalist, and antimonarchical, instead of
+merely patriotic and antidynastic. Under the name of _Hsing Chung Hui_
+there was established a confederacy of secret societies. After a short
+while the member societies were liquidated, and a modern revolutionary
+organization emerged, advocating overthrow of the Manchus. The
+intellectual elite of this group had no part in the ideological control
+which gripped the rest of China, in the form of the traditional
+mandarinate. As a new elite, with a new ideology, it broke the monopoly
+of leadership, the monopoly of thought. The consequences cannot be
+exaggerated. It was symptomatic that Sun's own family became estranged
+in part and that many members of the society had to die a civil death
+before working in the organization. They left their property to heirs
+and changed their names, lest--under the principle of group
+responsibility--terrible punishments be visited upon their native
+villages and their families. Furthermore, an important bloc of
+participants consisted of Chinese from overseas.
+
+The Chinese overseas were for the most part men who had been kidnaped
+and sold in the coolie trade or who had stealthily deserted their native
+regions for adventure and wealth. With the increased foreign commerce it
+was possible for many Chinese to become wealthier outside their own
+country than within. But in leaving they left their custom and tradition
+and met peoples--especially Europeans and Americans--whose way of life,
+though utterly different, was effective in the practical, tangible terms
+of wealth and security. Chinese in increasing numbers bettered their
+condition outside. They did not amass wealth through family effort, nor
+did they broaden their learning through the classics. What they won,
+they won themselves; and they learned something for which the Confucian
+ideology had no place. When they returned home, they were greeted with
+contempt, though also with covert admiration. Those among them who had
+gathered knowledge of the West, of modern methods of business, of
+European languages, found that in the eyes of the traditional literati
+and officials they were lower than the lowest illiterates.
+
+Such men came in great numbers to the revolutionary party. Among
+overseas Chinese merchants, workers, and students, there developed a
+group--possessing power in the form of money and family
+connections--which was determined to overthrow the existing order and
+bring China in line with the outside world. Their effort was idealistic,
+because the Chinese overseas felt that the economic and cultural
+advantages of the West should be secured for their countrymen at home;
+it was also realistic, since they were fighting in the only way they
+knew for a respectable, honorable return to their homes. They could not
+throw their lives away and admit that their ventures and dangers were of
+no profit. They felt that they had acquired something, and they wanted
+it recognized. It was Sun Yat-sen who showed them how they could do it.
+
+In a sense, this feature of the Nationalist movement might be taken as
+the pivot of modern Chinese government and politics. Controlling men
+through controlling their minds and through making sure that every
+possible leader would lead from within the hierarchy--these devices of
+the past had failed. There were now Chinese to whom the Confucian rules
+were pleasant and homelike but not the real material of modern life.
+These Chinese possessed intellectually trained leaders who had nothing
+in common with the dominant elite--who were more interested in building
+railroads, improving water supplies, defending China's frontiers, and
+modernizing the country than in augmenting the virtue of mankind.
+
+
+_Nationalism: Republican Phase_
+
+Every year brought the Nationalists increased strength. The Manchu court
+yielded a series of constitutional reforms which by their promises
+disturbed the minds of those still content with the old order and by
+their nonfulfillment raised fresh storms of resentment against the
+Manchu rule. The court did not really seek to master the drift in the
+thought of the people; it tried to defeat change rather than direct
+it.[2] In a few short years before and after 1900 the Dragon Throne
+declined from the supreme office of mankind to an obsolete and
+picturesque ornament of a government so weak and disorganized as to
+render ornament artificial. While the Empire lost prestige, the
+Nationalists came to emphasize the republican part of their program more
+and more. As Nationalists, they differed little from the generations of
+patriots who had fought the alien rulers of China. As republicans, they
+were the Chinese vanguard of modernization. Some people accepted
+republican ideas as good in themselves; far more thought them better
+than the Manchu rule, especially since there was no Chinese pretender in
+sight--the heir of the Mings, the last native dynasty, was a pensioner
+in Peking. A large number probably thought little about the abstract
+issue one way or another but trusted the revolutionary leaders because
+they seemed to have a competence consonant with the times.
+
+As the Nationalists advanced, they reorganized their party mechanism,
+and formed the T'ung Mêng Hui in 1905. At this time the principles which
+were later to become the _San Min Chu I_[3] were given public
+formulation. The Nationalists began to feel the necessity of an ideology
+with which to replace that of the Confucian monarchy. It had been
+possible to leave doubt unsettled so long as they were a small,
+conspiratorial group. As soon as they began to secure adherents among
+the masses it became necessary to provide their followers with a common
+set of ideas. In seeking agreement on fundamentals, they found
+disagreements within the party. Sun Yat-sen's role began to change from
+conspiracy to statesmanship. The future was to show that even a
+statesman was not enough--that a lawgiver, a state founder, was needed.
+
+The T'ung Mêng Hui was one of the most effective revolutionary
+organizations which the modern world has seen, so far as achievement of
+immediate aims was concerned. In a series of activities which would
+rouse a mystery-story addict to startled incredulity, the
+revolutionaries tried to awaken the populace by spectacular revolts.
+They capitalized on the impotence of a government alien to China, one so
+ineffectual that it could not protect the Chinese from the other, newer
+aliens who had appeared. They realized that it was hopeless to attack
+the monarchy along its entire front, since the old ideological guidance,
+although waning, still held the broad masses in inertia. The
+revolutionaries accordingly attacked the Empire at its top level, its
+most obvious and conspicuous points of strength--the military and
+political headquarters of the viceroyalties and other significant
+positions. Knowing that they themselves could not monopolize the
+government of China, they looked forward to attaining a position of
+leadership among the various groups in the Chinese society and to
+keeping that leadership through parliamentary methods to be established
+under the Republic. Instead of regarding the Empire as a set of
+institutions, they considered it the mere decoration of the country.
+They had no reason to suppose, nor any way of telling, that in
+destroying the old regime they destroyed government and all possibility
+of government for a long time to come. They consequently tried to set in
+motion a snowball revolution--an initial conspiracy of terror which
+would intimidate the Manchus and cause the whole house of cards to
+collapse. It was their task only to start the movement, which could be
+counted upon to avalanche itself into history.
+
+To the revolutionary group a republican scheme seemed possible. They
+felt that in the twentieth century men would disagree but amicably, and
+they regarded democracy as a form of government so excellent that its
+mere inauguration would guarantee success. Furthermore, republicanism
+and democracy were closely associated with nationalism; how could a
+nation be free unless it governed itself in the most direct
+manner--through the votes of its broad majorities?
+
+In failing to provide a stopping point for the revolution before they
+started it, the Nationalists were scarcely guilty of rash action. No
+human being could have foretold the consequences of revolt against a
+civilization. The revolutionaries were men who had passed through the
+transition from the old Confucian ideology to that of the West with
+relative ease. They did not realize that what was obvious to them would
+be a mystery to the masses and that the political changes contemplated
+would rip asunder the very fabric of thought in China. It is evidence of
+the simplicity and usefulness of Confucian ideas that--even when
+admitted to be challenged by the new environment--they continued to
+operate without the sanction of intelligence, and operated well as empty
+habits.
+
+With the old patriotic forces behind them, and an untested Utopia ahead,
+the Nationalists raced the Manchu Empire into revolution. The story of
+the revolution is not complex.[4] In a great part of China the people
+awoke to find no government. In the North the imperial officials and
+princes clamored for the assistance of a man whom they had once
+slighted: Yüan Shih-k'ai, the leader of the modernized armies of the
+Empire. He held the fate of China in his hands. But he betrayed the
+Empire so that he might betray the Republic; he joined the
+revolutionaries and thrust a settlement upon the ruling house. With his
+intervention the whole picture of Chinese politics changed. Yüan brought
+troops into the play of power, troops dependent upon himself, men no
+longer interested in ideas now that the all-compelling force of the old
+way of thought was gone.
+
+
+_Nationalism: Constitutionalist Phase_
+
+The Republic at Nanking enjoyed a brief Utopian existence, with Sun
+Yat-sen as its president. The revolutionaries were independent from
+October, 1911, to March, 1912, when the Republic became the instrument
+of Yüan Shih-k'ai. No substantial power accrued to the legislative.
+
+During their bright heyday of power as a parliamentary party under the
+Republic--which they had founded only to give it away to the
+military--the Nationalists were known as the _Kuomintang_. At this time
+the Chinese name of the party was significantly translated "Democratic
+Party." Sun Yat-sen and the revolutionaries had expected that the
+Chinese people would accept the new ideology without understanding it
+and then would come to understand it very quickly. They could not hope
+to replace the old ideology before the revolution, because the presence
+of the imperial government made large-scale educational work impossible.
+After the establishment of the Republic, however, they found themselves
+hamstrung because they had not inculcated republicanism. It was a
+vicious circle. The governmental pattern set up at Nanking was replaced
+by another to make room for Yüan Shih-k'ai, who proposed a third, in
+which he should have more power, in order that he might create a fourth
+government, in which he should be emperor.[5] The armies of the
+revolutionaries, such as they were, became absorbed in the forces of
+Yüan. When, in a few months, the Republic had been won and lost, the
+Nationalists realized that the revolution of 1911-1912 was only the
+first step in their labors. They experimented with a minor revolution in
+1913, and then turned to other measures for securing a return to
+constitutional government and the creation of a republic which should be
+as firmly rooted in men's minds as the majestic but irretrievable
+Confucian order had been. They had won the revolution by creating doubt
+and giving it tangible expression; they lost their revolution because
+doubt persisted, swallowed everything, leaving China in a turmoil beyond
+all systematic thought.
+
+The first years of the nominal Republic, the beginning of the new order
+in China, were marked by a feverish pretense of changed forms. The
+outlook which superseded the ancient ideology was curious. It was a
+mixture of traditionalist acceptance of temporary disorder and
+resignation to a period of transformation into an unconceived and
+unproclaimed future. This outlook gave life no purpose, but it kept men
+from falling into complete anarchy. People were willing to accept
+illegal authorities, since local administrators had traditionally
+maintained a spotty cloak of public order. Modern Chinese were prepared
+to pay lip service to a preposterous parliamentary regime but soon found
+that it was comfortable to think in terms such as armies, foreign
+interference, and money--thus allowing their thinking to settle in the
+large framework of an accepted disorder.
+
+The Nationalists tried to combat this anticonstitutional way of thought.
+For six years (1914-1920) they combined conspiratorial techniques with
+the role of a legally constituted power fighting for law. They assumed
+the name _Chinese Revolutionary Party_ until they discovered that they
+could secure no ideological foothold upon which to base the order they
+proposed. Some of them went so far as to become anarchists, favoring a
+continuance of disorder until the world joined China in collapse. Others
+followed an unrealistic legalism; they held to the paper constitution,
+to the text of the president's oath of allegiance to the constitution,
+to the election laws, thinking that the magic of ink would conjure up a
+government. Sun Yat-sen, and the body of his followers with him,
+attempted to chart a middle course; in 1917 there was created a "lawful"
+administration in the South. With extraordinary good fortune the
+Republic might have succeeded, but the war in Europe, the Japanese
+interventions, and other adverse circumstances prevented this.
+
+The Nationalists changed the name of their party back to _Kuomintang_
+after 1920 but did not discontinue their reformist policies until about
+two years later. Sun Yat-sen had spent years in study and propaganda;
+eventually his program became an ideology. No sharp line can be drawn
+between the two. In some respects the very first programs of the
+revolutionaries were ideological, in that they presupposed a change in
+man's outlook which would accommodate republican government. On the
+other hand, programmatic proposals may be distinguished from ideological
+theses by the fact that programs refer to things which should be done
+and ideologies to things in which men should believe in order to do
+anything at all. A program which is rooted in no ideology is one lacking
+context; unless a program refers to some accepted scheme of thought it
+is words in a vacuum. Similarly, an ideology without programs to put it
+into men's minds, to persuade men to believe in it and give it effect,
+is an airy prettiness for philosophers. The Nationalists had stood on
+the foundations of Confucian common sense and proposed a republic; they
+had destroyed the organization which made that common sense seem real
+and had cut the ground from under their own feet. They could not
+distinguish values because their critical attitude enveloped all moral
+notions or made them isolated points without coherent significance. The
+Nationalists themselves fell prey to day-dreaming when they appealed to
+worthless paper for their right to govern. The epoch is significant in
+the history of the movement in that it taught the Nationalists that men
+would not fight unless there was something to fight for and that there
+was nothing to fight for until men could find desirable elements
+embedded in some larger scheme of life. Politics had to have an end and
+an environment; without either it was a series of monologues in the
+wilderness, the soliloquies of logicians.
+
+Sun Yat-sen during this time wrote the drafts of monumental treatises
+which were to relate the general body of his doctrines to the background
+of fact and thought from which they had emerged. He never finished them,
+but meanwhile he and his followers realized that if they were to have a
+grip over government they must grasp power within the brains of men. The
+revolutionary reformists had to supply some better medium of persuasion
+than the frivolity of military cynicism or the impudence of shadow
+government. They had to abandon legalism and bring forth an ideology
+capable of serving as the new foundation for a just and effective system
+of government in China. If their original importance was that of an
+effective counter-elite springing up in the intellectual borderlands
+between the Western and Chinese ideologies, their second period of
+significance begins with their realization that a new framework of
+thought would have to be set up before any of their programs could be
+effectuated.
+
+
+_The Political Doctrines of Sun Yat-sen_
+
+The ideology which the Nationalists were to teach was one which had lain
+dormant in the party for more than thirty years. It was the invention of
+Sun Yat-sen--his reinterpretation of Confucianism to suit the modern
+world. He did not settle down with books before him, pen in hand and
+notebooks all about, to formulate a Utopia; nor did he approach the
+subject as a historian, seeking scientific causes for the emotions and
+loyalties of men. He came to the subject as a political leader,
+modifying the given background only so far as was necessary. His
+doctrines grew with his personal growth and the development of his
+movement. They are scattered among a variety of writings and utterances,
+and are contradictory in many points although remarkably consistent as a
+whole.
+
+Sun Yat-sen asked himself: What is China? China is a race, he said, a
+race which was once great and which held benevolent world leadership in
+the world it knew. It has declined because it has fallen upon evil days,
+under the rule of outsiders, barbarians, and has failed to develop in
+ways which the West discovered. This race should be a nation in the
+modern world; a great, powerful, united, effective nation in a world of
+nations. It should fight for its right of self-rule and should support
+justice in the international community. In order to achieve greatness,
+the Chinese will have to turn their nation into an effective state and
+add the devices of law to the devices of social control through
+ideology. They should rethink their ideology, keeping the old ethical
+philosophy and the old social knowledge (the technique of control
+through thought, as in Confucianism) but adding Western technics. They
+should then strive to make their nation the leader in progress toward
+world peace and eventual cosmopolitanism. China should turn to
+nationalism for the time--decades or centuries--that remained for the
+travail of nations, but the Chinese should never forget the world
+society whence they came. This is the first of Sun's three principles,
+_nationalism_.
+
+The second principle referred to the problem of leadership and the
+organization of government. Obviously, the Chinese could not return to
+monarchy in the modern world. In the first place, it would not be
+modern; Sun lived at a time when the democratic tide was sweeping to its
+high point and when the world triumph of democracy seemed a foregone
+conclusion. Secondly, Sun thought it disloyal to China's past for the
+Chinese to evade the responsibility of democracy, as it was implicit in
+their most ancient traditions and thus an obligation laid upon them by
+their first great leaders. Thirdly, he thought that good administration
+was to be derived from democracy more readily than from any other
+system. Fourthly, because democracy was a modernizing force, it should
+be introduced; the people, participating in progress, would themselves
+become progressive. Fifthly and most necessarily, democracy was simply
+the self-control of a nation. If the nation was to be created and made
+free through nationalism it had to become democratic, since there was no
+other way for a whole people to express and rule itself. But the Chinese
+needed specific devices[6] in order to assure that the old system of
+selecting an intellectual leadership would not be compromised or
+destroyed by democracy. They should see to it that democracy did not
+become mob rule. The Chinese people should become self-indoctrinating
+and thus maintain ideological control along with political. But the
+Chinese should accommodate the concept of the state in their thinking,
+since the concentration of power in Western states made it necessary
+that there be in China an equivalent social device for canalizing and
+concentrating power, in order to meet Western and Japanese attacks. The
+egalitarian features of democracy should be congenial to the democracy
+of customs and manners which was indigenous to old China. This was the
+second principle, _democracy_.
+
+The third principle was the restatement in modern political terms of the
+cardinal economic principles of the past, together with an infusion of
+newly invented doctrines. It protected the livelihood of the people, and
+may be summed up in a single sentence: No government deserves to exist
+unless it assures its people of the maximum of material welfare possible
+under prevailing physical conditions. Government was of no use if the
+people perished. The state was nothing if its substance was lost.
+Political leadership should aim at constant improvement of economic
+conditions, spread economic benefits, and make the nation healthy. In
+doing so it was not to be bound by any creed of capitalism or communism
+but was to experiment and seek the most efficient measures for the
+benefit of the whole community. This last principle involved the _life_
+of the nation, as nationalism did its _birth_ and democracy its
+_freedom_. It was an ethical doctrine rather than a schematic principle,
+and cannot be properly translated. It should best be left in the
+Chinese, and expressed by two words which mean "people" and
+"generation": _min shêng_.
+
+This ideology gave the Nationalists a faith to propagate. It was
+designed to achieve the revision of the old Confucian ideology;
+experience and the accepted ideology would supply this new skeleton with
+flesh. It differed radically from the Marxian doctrine in that it was
+traditionalistic and nationalistic; it resembled the Marxian doctrine in
+that it sought to create a whole new intellectual civilization before
+turning to the question of government.
+
+The new ideology had to make headway against other propagandas, the
+partially adequate ways of thought which had grown up since the
+establishment of the Republic. It had to restore life to the vast corpse
+of Confucianism, and soon after its first general promulgation (1924)
+had to fight its temporary ally--communism--for power over Chinese
+minds.
+
+
+_Opportunist Movements and their Anticonstitutional Effects_
+
+The field which the Nationalists invaded to propagate their doctrines
+was already occupied. The slow evaporation of the Confucian moral,
+intellectual, and social system had given rise to various movements
+which, for lack of a better term, may be called _half-ideological_.
+These movements made no pretense of presenting a new order sufficient
+for Chinese thought and belief, but--in the opinion of those
+constituting them--they did afford an adequate frame of reference for
+immediate action. Some of the half-ideologies were: (1) military
+feudalism, (2) provincial _tuchünism_ (3) China-wide militarism, (4)
+bureaucratism, and (5) capitalism. Although none of them succeeded in
+indoctrinating broad masses of the population, yet each was effective in
+a negative way. Each obstructed the development of any coherent system
+of social and political life. Each was anticonstitutional, since it
+proposed to constitute a scheme narrowly pragmatic or unattainable in
+fact.
+
+The presence of these movements gave China an appearance of considerable
+freedom in the earlier years of the Republican era. Diversity of opinion
+based upon a fundamental concord in outlook--diversity circumscribed by
+one cohesive ideology--may be most wholesome in social and political
+life. When diversity penetrates so deep as to include all major aspects
+of human existence, it becomes insupportable, a hindrance and not a
+stimulant to action. When policy is predetermined by tradition, thought
+is easy, action relatively more difficult; when there is discord even on
+fundamentals, thought is difficult, action easy. Almost any scheme
+mitigating the evils of discord will be assured a hearing; if the world
+cannot be rationalized, the individual will be.
+
+Yüan Shih-k'ai inaugurated, in his efforts to control China through
+military means, a way of thought which might be characterized as
+military feudalism of the twentieth century variety, an order based upon
+contract between commander and soldier, upon the payment of wages by the
+former and the performance of any task by the latter. This militarism
+never flowered in literature, never developed a political theory, never
+achieved governmental form. Even Yüan felt its inadequacy as a state
+philosophy, and by his attempt to establish a modern monarchy ruined
+what chances he might have had for anticipating Mussolini with a Fascist
+movement. As it was, the movement of military thought was derived from
+the facts rather than propagated to excuse the facts. The militarists
+themselves abandoned it whenever they found substitutes.
+
+Nevertheless, the movement for a military ideology was at times the
+prevailing mode of thought among the men who held power in China. They
+were able to gain perspective on their own behavior by reference to the
+old traditions, regarding themselves as upright magistrates in a time of
+chaos. For working purposes they could claim from their subordinates and
+superiors a vague constitutionalism limited to army circles. Amid the
+cowardice, betrayal, and corruption in the military dictatorships,
+tendencies occasionally appeared leading toward an effective military
+spirit. Certain kinds of betrayal or cruelty were beyond the limits of
+good soldiering, but not many.
+
+A more effective explanation for the condition of the armies in China
+from 1916 to about 1931 may be found in _tuchünism_. A _tuchün_ was a
+military commandant ruling an area ranging from a few districts to a
+number of provinces.[7] The imperial regime maintained a military
+counterpart to the provincial governor. After the Republican Revolution
+provinces tended to become separate and autonomous under military
+leaders. The military man, who was prone to apologize for his position
+by admitting that he was not developing a permanent establishment, who
+held his troops together by a modern feudalism, could also rationalize
+his role by presenting himself to his province as a good son, by
+stressing the wickedness and strangeness of the soldiers in other
+provinces, and by suggesting the thought of federalism. The scheme was
+not convincing or edifying, but it could become temporarily popular. A
+great part of the news from China is still written in terms of
+_tuchünism_--since it is a simple pattern and requires no explanation
+involving Chinese peculiarities. Satrapies have become tyrannies in all
+ages. At the very best the _tuchünist_ movement could not have served
+well as the constituent force of a new China. It would necessarily have
+ended in one-man government, almost unthinkable with modern Chinese
+conditions; or it would have implied a military federalism which is
+scarcely a solution to the problem of unity.
+
+Military cliques at times had China-wide proportions, but despite the
+proclamations which were occasionally issued, there was no effective
+single movement for a general military regime. Such movements as there
+were developed within the framework of the shadow Republic. Moreover,
+the shifting alignments of Chinese wars within the nominal organization
+of the Republic were so confused as to make almost anything but order
+seem possible. Yet many Chinese thought in terms of a "realism"
+compounded of slogans and military exigencies.
+
+If movements for military feudalism, provincial _tuchünism_, and (most
+nebulous of all) China-wide militarism failed to provide more than an
+explanation of immediate fact, there were counterparts in the civilian
+administration aspiring to political autonomy for particular cliques.
+Ministries tended at times to develop a spirit of independence. Finance
+was too close to the military, but the revenue collection services (with
+a large European and Japanese personnel) and the postal services behaved
+as _imperia in imperio_. The foreign office functioned frequently
+without effective superiors. Working without pay a great part of the
+time, in a period which offered no near solution for its disastrous
+troubles, bureaucrats saw in the increase of bureaucracy a possible
+inauguration of order. The ministries did function in a way, despite the
+chaos about them. They might have evolved a new bureaucratism to steal
+the _tuchüns'_ power. Their spirit was helpful in particular and
+damaging in general, since it was bound to sabotage any government which
+might come to power. A few years of insecurity may weld a bureaucracy
+together more closely than would decades of spoils; this was the case
+between 1916 and 1928. Bureaucratism demonstrates the limitations of
+opportunist ideology as a foundation for government.
+
+Capitalism flourished wherever economic conditions made it possible;
+such economic conditions did not last very long under the jurisdiction
+of the military. In treaty ports[8] the Chinese capitalists prospered,
+secure under governments which were international in effect, Chinese
+only in legal fiction. There Chinese soon amassed enough capital to
+compete with economic institutions erected by foreigners, and exercised
+an important indirect influence on the growth of Chinese government.
+Capitalism helped to thwart a peasant-labor alliance in China, for
+although the capitalists were an insignificant minority without
+country-wide influence, its form of control was mobile. No army, no
+surge of popular resentment, no propaganda, no conspirator can travel as
+fast as a telegraphic money order. The ideology of capitalism was
+content in China to remain subordinate as long as the political and
+legal conditions were favorable to it. Capitalist groups supported any
+sort of strong government which might protect property and increase
+opportunities for investment.
+
+Among the most pitiful of the movements for the construction of a
+general agreement in China were the proalien movements. They were
+pitiful because they represented a prostitution of thought by men
+conscious of the nature of their action. The Anfu Party flourished in
+the first decade after the death of Yüan in 1916; together with its
+militarism and its meaningless "realism" it was pro-Japanese. The
+present "government" in North China[9] is another such movement.
+Manchoukuo bases little of her official ideology on such a dangerous
+outlook and prefers to propagate a Confucianist traditionalism in so far
+as she propagates anything. Pro-Japanese action may express a discontent
+with the competence of the Chinese for self-government, but more
+forcefully it relates to theories of Pan-Asianism or Pan-Mongolism.
+
+The opportunist movements--militarism, _tuchünism_, military federalism,
+bureaucratic separatism, capitalism, and political puppetry--served to
+confuse the basic alternatives. Because they reflected a narrow and
+accidental scheme of power rather than long-range transformation, they
+possessed a specious realism which obfuscated real issues. They
+distracted attention without rewarding it and polarized opinion around
+conflicts which were beyond settlement. There is no possibility of
+agreement between men who think one another deluded in regard to
+fundamentals. Disorder in China was the more violent because of these
+different explanations. They delayed the creation of a framework in
+which men could find a common reasonableness, an ideology sufficient to
+rationalize all interests and to sublimate all frustrations.
+
+
+_Christianity as a Political Force_
+
+Ever since the establishment of American and British Protestant missions
+in the nineteenth century, Christianity has been a conditioning force
+for a democratic ideology in Asia.[10] The Protestants were among the
+first to make a breach in the stronghold of Confucianism; they secured
+international action to assist them. Their role was that of
+counter-ideologues whose position was guaranteed by treaty (British
+Treaty of Tientsin, 1858; American Treaty of Tientsin, 1858). They
+possessed the power, under the legal sanction of the Chinese government,
+to preach against the moral foundations upon which that government
+rested. A missionary wrote in 1887:
+
+  The foremost opposition to the introduction of Christianity comes from
+  those who esteem themselves the followers of Confucius. They assent to
+  our views about the "emptiness" of Buddhism, the deceptions of Taoism,
+  the character of the priesthood, the mud and stone of the images, but
+  when we gently allude to ancestral idolatry, the worship of heaven and
+  earth, and the sacrifices of the mandarins, they are offended. Also,
+  the Confucianists do the thinking for the people; they have the minds,
+  the books, the schools, and the offices. Without a long residence in
+  the country it is hard to imagine the influence of a penniless scholar
+  in his neighbourhood, and the mental control he exercises over the
+  minds of the peasantry. More than this, the graduates at the
+  government examinations form a clique or "ring," and their voice is
+  the unwritten law of China, their authority above that of His
+  Excellency the Governor. The lamented Carstairs Douglas said at the
+  Shanghai Missionary Conference of 1877, "Confucianism is the citadel;
+  take it, and the war is ended."[11]
+
+But for the presence of Christianity, a Chinese counter-elite with
+sufficient moral self-assurance and intellectual ability to attack the
+traditional institutions of the Empire might not have developed. Sun
+Yat-sen was a Christian, although in his case Christianity has been less
+of a modernizing force compared with the influence of his actual
+experience abroad. Large numbers of the reformist and republican leaders
+were Christian, some of them with missionary or Y. M. C. A. connections.
+These men were not bound by the moral tenets of Confucianism; those
+among them who had mission school educations had little in common with
+the long intellectual tradition of the Chinese. For a while Christianity
+spelled Westernization and provided an avenue of self-advancement
+hitherto unprecedented in China--one outside the archaic scheme of
+things.
+
+With the coming of the Republic, Christian ethics appeared to have an
+open field. The emphasis which Christianity places upon the value of
+individual human life was favorable to the emergence of modern
+republican institutions. Even Yüan Shih-k'ai is said to have
+acknowledged the influence of Christianity in this respect; he is
+reported to have said, in an interview with a leading missionary
+educator, "You missionaries are responsible for this revolution. Now you
+must see us through."[12] The implication of doctrines of human
+brotherhood is obvious, despite the fact that such doctrines--in less
+forceful and spiritual form--were a familiar feature of certain Chinese
+philosophies.
+
+In its more direct effects Christianity demonstrated a variety of new
+points to the Chinese. The intervention of the missionaries was not only
+moral; it was scientific, and the early mission leaders brought Western
+engineering and industrial methods with them. They published the first
+journal in Chinese to give regular accounts of practical mechanics. As
+the missions themselves developed, the physical presence of the
+Protestant missionaries and of Western ways of life--to which they
+adhered in contrast with the Catholics--became strong informational
+influences. Later the rise of churches and of Christian establishments
+gave the Chinese experience in the Western methods of social and
+business organization.
+
+In practical administration the Christian impact has been striking.
+American missionaries were influential in developing popular education
+in China. They have led the way in public health. They have organized
+model orphanages and have assailed infanticide, footbinding, and
+concubinage. They have been the public opinion of the Western world,
+right on the spot, and have introduced the Chinese to a great many of
+the best features of Western life. Finally, the Christians have
+embellished and justified Western imperialism in China. The mission
+enterprises have been among the most expensive and elaborate
+philanthropic agencies ever set up by one state for the benefit of
+another. The advance of the West has been saved from seeming unrelieved
+imperialism. The West has taken, but it has also returned. Christianity
+has been the companion and the antagonist of Western exploitation in the
+East; it has suffered and benefited because of this position.
+
+The total contribution of Christianity to Chinese politics cannot be
+assessed. The ways of Christian influence are frequently pervasive and
+incalculable. In the headquarters of the Chinese Red Army, Chinese
+Communist leaders have quietly gone away to pray. The Christians have
+breached the Confucian citadel and have weakened the ideological
+foundations of government. They have also torn the web of Chinese
+popular superstition and afforded a foothold for religion in a truer
+sense. There has been no genuine Christian party, no real Christian
+army, no government avowedly Christian in policy. Nevertheless, the
+first president of the Republic was a Christian, as was the outstanding
+founder of the National Government at Nanking, Chiang K'ai-shek. The
+Protestant Church counts among its members a large number of the highest
+government personnel; no other religion plays as active a part.
+Christianity, then, has been an indirect force, not a program or an
+immediate political challenge.
+
+
+_Nationalism: Social-revolutionary Phase_
+
+In 1912 the Nationalists had won their revolution, which was political
+in nature, but they found in the ensuing years that mere change in the
+form of government would not of itself bring about the needed
+regeneration of Chinese society. By 1922 Sun Yat-sen and his followers
+possessed a well-defined ideology and a definite new revolutionary
+program but they had neither a way of propagating the ideology nor a
+method of realizing the program. Sun himself thought in political and
+economic rather than agitational terms. He sought loans from abroad and
+schemed for power in the turbulent military politics of the time. His
+slogan was still that of the Confucians: "Hold office in order to
+teach." The Nationalists intended to gain a political rostrum from which
+to expound their teachings, since they no longer hoped to rule
+effectively without converting the masses to their way of thought. They
+had not yet realized that conversion scarcely required governing and
+that--given the appropriate technique--they might agitate more
+successfully as an opposition than as a government.
+
+The means of systematically winning men's minds--wholesale and
+high-speed agitation--did not occur to the Nationalists because the
+Bolshevist revolution was the only successful demonstration of such
+methods, and Russia was not yet understood. China was just reaching that
+phase of revolution which the Communists had already traversed in
+Russia. Without the benefit of Russian advice, the Kuomintang might have
+become a political sect with long-range plans. Fortunately for their
+cause, the Kuomintang leaders were willing to learn and the Russians
+willing to teach. Mere physical contact served to inaugurate the
+process.
+
+Contact was not afforded by way of the Communist Party of China, a small
+and largely academic group which developed after 1920, but through
+direct correspondence and negotiation between Sun Yat-sen and Moscow.
+Sun had communicated with persons of influence all over the world,
+trying to build up interest in the future of a united and powerful
+China. He had conceived a plan for the international development of
+China which envisaged the extension of Allied war budgets for one year
+after the war, and the lending of vast sums for the modernization of
+China. He believed that his project would appeal to imperialism and at
+the same time would serve to create in China a modern state-socialist
+industrialism. China would thereby become a customer for all the
+capitalist nations of the world and alleviate the depression which was
+bound to follow the war. Correspondence about other projects for
+ideological and political reconstruction elicited more replies from
+Russia than from anywhere else. Sun was not doctrinaire in the
+furtherance of immediate projects. He was willing to accept help from
+the Russians, just as he would have accepted help from the imperialist
+nations had they been prepared to risk their money. From 1920 onward he
+was in touch with the Bolsheviks.
+
+In December, 1922, and January, 1923, the decisive turning point was
+reached. Adolf Joffe, the Soviet representative in China, had come to
+Shanghai and conferred with Sun Yat-sen. These two found that there were
+terms on which they could cooperate. The Communist ideology and that of
+the Nationalists coincided in their general opposition to imperialism.
+Resistance to the treaties which bound China[13] became more and more
+apparent to Sun as a necessity for further revolutionary progress. He
+had met polite regret or open ridicule in his solicitation of help for
+China from the imperialist powers, and his invitation to Western capital
+had not been taken seriously. The Communists seemed to have adequate
+idealistic and practical motives for joining the Chinese.
+
+The Communists, moreover, conceded a point which they had not conceded
+to any other country up to that time. They willingly assumed a secondary
+position, agreed that the communist order of things was not suited to
+China, and in effect guaranteed their practical assistance to the
+Nationalists without demanding, as the price, the acceptance of Marxism.
+Sun and Joffe gave out a joint memorandum which made the issue perfectly
+plain. It was to be the constitutional compact between the Nationalists
+and the Communists for the period of their collaboration. The most
+significant paragraph read:
+
+  Dr. Sun Yat-sen holds that the communistic order, or even the Soviet
+  system, cannot actually be introduced into China because there do not
+  exist the conditions for the successful establishment of either
+  communism or Sovietism. This view is entirely shared by Mr. Joffe, who
+  is further of the opinion that China's paramount and most pressing
+  problem is to achieve national unification and attain full national
+  independence; and regarding this great task he has assured Dr. Sun
+  Yat-sen that China has the warmest sympathy of the Russian people and
+  can count on the support of Russia.[14]
+
+In the autumn of 1923 Chiang K'ai-shek was sent by Sun to Russia to
+study the Soviet military system. This was the first step in the
+formation of a non-mercenary Nationalist army. About the same time
+Michael Borodin arrived in Canton, where Sun had come to power for the
+third time. The ensuing period was marked by an intensive reorganization
+of the Nationalist Party and of its technique of revolution, to the end
+that it might become a movement depending upon mass conversion, not upon
+mass apathy, for power. The military mission was followed by other and
+more important grants of aid. The Bolsheviks not only trained Chinese
+sent to Russia but also supplied military instructors who reorganized
+the Nationalist forces on the spot.[15]
+
+The assistance rendered by the Soviets in the application of tested
+propaganda methods to a revolutionary situation resulted in vast
+changes. The Russians found that approximately the same devices could be
+used in China as in Russia without affecting the fundamentals of
+Nationalist philosophy. Integration and regularization of the party
+machinery, formulation of immediate programs to bring large groups into
+the Nationalist fold, development of large-scale propaganda techniques,
+and other improvements designed to enlarge and speed up the Nationalist
+advance were effected within the Kuomintang.
+
+Throughout, Sun Yat-sen worked in close collaboration with Borodin. The
+details of Nationalist party reforms and of Nationalist participation in
+local politics are now part of the history of the modern Far East. These
+details, while significant, tend to blur the cardinal change: the
+transformation of the Nationalist party from a revolutionary elite with
+long-range effectiveness into a mass organization designed for
+propaganda and immediate general measures. The Russian Communists made
+it possible for the Kuomintang to perform in weeks what had been planned
+for the decades, or at least to reach the equivalent of the contemplated
+performance.
+
+A new era had begun. At first the Nationalists had proposed to develop a
+parliamentary government which would gradually foster a modernized
+ideology, and to govern China well in the meanwhile; when this hope
+vanished with the rise of Yüan Shih-k'ai's military power, in 1913, they
+had to reroute the revolution. Had they relied upon the experience of
+the liberal nations, they might have resigned themselves to a policy of
+gradualism. The Communist process of conversion was different from the
+Confucian. The Confucians had gradually built up a body of the most
+public-spirited men and permeated the ruling intellectual class with
+Confucian ideas. Their slow process of persuasion triumphed with the
+elevation of their main texts to the status of bibles in China and with
+their monopoly of advanced education. The Communists proposed to take a
+few simple, obvious issues, to present them dramatically, to win as many
+people as possible to the support of immediate policies and to reach
+power through such support. Once political and military authority had
+been established, they expected to go further in the "education" of the
+masses of the people.
+
+To obtain tangible results quickly the Nationalists had to make
+extensive promises. On the advice of the Communists, they led vigorous
+anti-imperialist movements which embittered both Chinese and foreigners
+and provided the whole country with issues more real than the
+personalities of war lords or the machinations of cliques.
+Communist-trained propagandists took the reforms which the Nationalists
+had proposed among themselves and carried them into the people. Sun's
+principle of _min shêng_ appeared in practical programs as an immediate
+call for socio-economic revolution. Mass organizations grew, swelling
+their ranks by promises to all subordinate economic groups. These
+organizations were bound to cause difficulty as soon as it became
+apparent that the Nationalist-Communist promises could not be realized
+immediately and in full.
+
+In the meantime, the Communists maintained their separate party
+organization within the Kuomintang. The Russians found China a fertile
+field for conversion, and while they assisted the Nationalists they
+fostered the growth of a Chinese Communist Party. From an academic group
+which meant nothing in 1921, the Communist Party grew in 1925-1926 to
+comprise the radical vanguard of the revolution. The Communists assumed
+the vanguard position because they were less bound by loyalty to the
+existing groups in Chinese society than were the Nationalists. The
+working alliance, in which the Nationalists received Communist help in
+money, technical political services, and arms, made the seizure of
+political power a reality. Sun Yat-sen died in March, 1925, before the
+great surge of the revolution came, but in 1926 and 1927 the
+Nationalist-Communist forces proceeded north, brushing the militarists
+aside as they went. The combination of a patriotic, foreign-trained,
+professionalized army, a powerful agitation department, and a party
+organization able to govern after conquest, came to prevail everywhere.
+Half of China was now under Kuomintang dominion, which operated through
+a council form of government.[16] Then came the schism. Conflict was
+inevitable between Communists and Nationalists when the Communists
+proved unwilling to look forward to the establishment of a republic
+according to Sun's principles, pushing on with the revolution as soon as
+the Nationalists slowed down or stopped.
+
+Communist training helped the Nationalists to power, but under
+circumstances which made necessary either the institution of terror or
+the partial inhibition of the Nationalist programs. The Nationalists had
+promised almost anything to almost everyone in order to secure power;
+this was a part of the propaganda methods which Communists taught. After
+seizing power in 1926-1927 the Nationalists could resort only to
+military dictatorship and party terrorism in order to achieve the
+fulfillment of their extravagant promises. But the Nationalists were
+Chinese, and as such cherished the old notions of moderation and
+humanity in government. They were not the master of any legalism or
+dialectic which would justify the slaughter of millions for the good of
+a system. Millions have died in China, but the Chinese never
+acknowledged the massacre. They could not face the program of class war
+which their promises inevitably implied. The Communists kept pressing
+forward, now giving pledges in their own name and in the name of the
+Nationalists, redeemable only by class warfare or involving the
+discredit of the Nationalists. The situation came to a head when the
+Communists began taking independent action. Indiscreet Communists
+informed Nationalist leaders that the Kuomintang was to be discarded so
+that the revolution could continue--along Communist lines. The breaks,
+first with the Kuomintang Right and then with the Kuomintang Left,
+occurred in 1927. The Russians went back to Russia. The Chinese
+Communists faced their future alone.
+
+The Canton-Moscow Entente--as the Nationalist-Communist coalition has
+been called--changed the Nationalist movement profoundly in 1923-1927.
+It found the movement a small elite of opposition and left it a swollen
+party with a government and an army under its control, a vast schedule
+of promises to fulfill, a second revolution to vindicate.[17]
+
+
+NOTES
+
+[1] Sun Yat-sen, _How China Was Made a Republic_ (unpublished manuscript
+written in Shanghai in 1919, now in possession of the present author),
+p. 4.
+
+[2] On the Manchu reforms see H. M. Vinacke, _Modern Constitutional
+Development in China_, Princeton, 1920, and Meribeth E. Cameron, _The
+Reform Movement in China_, 1898-1912, Stanford, 1931. On the
+revolutionary group see T'ang Leang-li, _The Inner History of the
+Chinese Revolution_, New York, 1930.
+
+[3] See below, pp. 41 ff.
+
+[4] See below, pp. 145 ff.
+
+[5] See below, pp. 149 ff.
+
+[6] See below, p. 60. A description of other plans for democracy in
+China is given in M. J. Bau, _Modern Democracy in China_, Shanghai,
+1923.
+
+[7] See below, pp. 102 ff.
+
+[8] See below, pp. 139 ff.
+
+[9] See below, pp. 185 ff.
+
+[10] See, among others, Tyler Dennett, _The Democratic Movement in
+Asia_, New York, 1918; R. Y. Lo, _China's Revolution from the Inside_,
+New York, 1930. The author wishes to thank J. J. Holmes, School of
+Religion, Duke University, for suggestions concerning this section.
+
+[11] Hampden C. DuBose, _The Dragon, Image, and Demon ..._, pp. 48-49,
+New York, 1887.
+
+[12] Paul Hutchinson, _China's Real Revolution_, p. 155, New York, 1924.
+
+[13] See the literature cited above, p. 30, n. 1.
+
+[14] Lyon Sharman, _Sun Yat-sen: His Life and Its Meaning_, p. 248, New
+York, 1934. This is the most critical of the biographies of Sun Yat-sen.
+The one which Sun himself authorized and on which he collaborated to
+some extent is Paul M. W. Linebarger, _Sun Yat Sen and the Chinese
+Republic_, New York, 1924.
+
+[15] For the military development of this period see below, pp. 105 ff.
+
+[16] See below, pp. 163 ff.
+
+[17] For some of the ideological developments involved in the
+Moscow-Canton Entente see 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. On the role of nationalism in education see Victor Purcell,
+_Problems of Chinese Education_, London, 1936.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter_ III
+
+BATTLING CREEDS
+
+
+The right-wing Nationalists, establishing the National Government of
+China at Nanking in 1927, found themselves in the position of
+revolutionaries sitting at roll-top desks. After more than forty years
+of criticism and opposition, the movement had assumed the
+responsibilities of government. In breaking with the Communists the
+Nationalists lost the doctrinal edge of the extreme Left; thenceforth
+there were to be groups more radical than themselves. This disheartened
+some of the revolutionaries, who either lost interest in politics or
+continued revolutionary opposition to the regime their colleagues had
+formed.
+
+
+_Nationalism: Governing Phase_
+
+The Kuomintang was confronted with the issues of national unification,
+development toward democracy, and realization of the economic reforms
+and programs postulated by Sun's principle, of _min shêng_. The
+instrument for their task was a brand-new form of government, fresh
+from the pages of Sun Yat-sen, which at its birth was beset with
+difficult military, administrative, economic, and diplomatic problems.
+But the Nationalists had one particular advantage which they shared only
+with the Communists--that of possessing a well-integrated ideology. It
+was possible for them to couch intra-Party struggles in a reasonably
+consistent set of terms. Even when respect for one of Sun Yat-sen's
+theories had been reduced to mere lip service another from the same
+source took its place. The intellectual outlook inherited from the
+humanistic political training of Confucianism kept the Chinese from a
+dogmatic political pseudo-theology, while the wide circulation of Sun's
+principles provided a moral and programmatic foundation for governmental
+routine.
+
+The break with the Communists and the development of a Red military
+problem were continuing forces driving the Nationalists to the Right,
+where opportunists and reactionaries of all categories welcomed them.
+They were also drawn to the Left--by the social revolution which had
+carried them to power and by the need of agrarian and labor reform.
+Central to the very continuance of the government, however, was the
+military power of the Nationalist armies led by Chiang K'ai-shek.
+Without the armed force to implement their decisions the Nationalists
+would have been compelled to let their endeavors subside into
+subterranean defeat. To the considerations of Right, Left, and armed
+force were added responsibilities incident to government. The Kuomintang
+in its governing phase, therefore, plotted its course with reference to
+three points: doctrinal consistency, military necessity, governmental
+responsibility.[1] As an ideologically constituent movement, how did
+Nationalism use its power?
+
+The Nationalists in power had to find their way through class
+alignments, inert and meaningless oppositions, the rancor of the Left,
+the contempt of the established monarchist Right. Personalities in
+conflict, cliques forming and disbanding, factions denied overt
+expression--these lay behind the pressure politics of the intra-Party
+contest for the control of policy conducted on a thin and novel
+constitutional plane. The written formulas guiding the struggle for
+power were supplemented by the bodies of unwritten practice which had
+developed in the years of the Republic. There were appropriate forms for
+extraconstitutional action, just as for constitutional. It was the
+outstanding contribution of the Kuomintang to modern Chinese government
+that it kept its internal conflicts within its own constitutional
+framework, and did so more successfully than any other movement in
+modern China.
+
+The meandering and difficult course of Kuomintang policy flowed within
+the valley rather than the river bed of Sun Yat-sen's doctrine. The
+planning power of Sun's intellect bound the movement long after his
+death. In his plans for the regeneration of China are to be found the
+ideal requirements for the growth of modern government under the
+tutelage of a patriotic elite of overseas men, revolutionary veterans,
+and scholars. The Nanking government of the Kuomintang had to meet all
+the problems of government while keeping within the broad boundaries of
+Sun's demands. The movement as a whole, however, displayed certain broad
+shifts which are readily traceable.[2] Sun Yat-sen envisaged the
+establishment of authentic democracy by a course of action including
+three steps: (1) the military period, in which the movement should
+acquire power over the nation through the use of force; (2) the period
+of tutelage, in which the members of the movement should exercise a
+benevolent party dictatorship over the nation, while training the
+populace for democracy; (3) the period of constitutional democracy, in
+which the people should exercise actual self-government.
+
+Shortly after its establishment, the National Government announced the
+ending of the period of military conquest and the opening of the period
+of tutelage, which was set for 1930-1935. The Japanese invasions caused
+the establishment of constitutional government to be postponed
+indefinitely, and it is to be feared that even if constitutional
+government were installed it would fall far short of Sun's programs,
+which called for truly effective training in the arts of democracy
+before Chinese government could be entrusted to the broad masses of the
+electorate. In the meantime, the arbitrariness, the political
+composition, and the outlook of the transitional Party dictatorship
+became subjects of hot controversy among the Kuomintang leaders.
+
+The Party dictatorship demanded a rigor of discipline and a deflation of
+revolutionary enthusiasm which soon drove the militant Left out of the
+Kuomintang. Even Sun Yat-sen's brilliant young second wife remained
+outside the Party--a permanent and indefatigable opposition. Within the
+Party personalities came to dominate--Hu Han-min, the chief Rightist
+disciple and interpreter of Sun Yat-sen; Chiang K'ai-shek, Sun's
+outstanding military protege; and Wang Ch'ing-wei, the chief Leftist
+disciple of the Leader. There were also Sun Fo (Sun K'ê), the only son
+of Sun Yat-sen, and other ranking Party members whose opinions ranged
+from philosophic anarchism (as in the case of Wu Chih-hui) to a
+progressive business outlook not unlike Mr. Hoover's (as in the instance
+of T. V. Soong).
+
+The National Government settled down with Chiang and Hu Han-min
+(military and Right) holding the leadership, which Wang Ch'ing-wei
+decried as reactionary. In 1931 Chiang ousted Hu, in the course of a
+conflict over a proposed American silver loan and over constitutional
+questions. Shortly thereafter Wang Ch'ing-wei assumed a place in the
+government, after participating in an unsuccessful armed rebellion (the
+"Nationalist Government" in Peking, 1930-1931).
+
+This might seem to indicate a swing from the Right to the Left within
+the Party. Actually it was indicative of the growing practicality of the
+Nationalist movement and its preoccupation with problems of installing
+the form of government planned by Sun.[3] With the passage of time, the
+Nationalists adopted three main lines of endeavor: (1) the suppression
+of the Communists at all cost, even that of temporary nonresistance to
+Japan; (2) the tendency to abandon revolutionary fervor for
+administrative zeal, and to become governmental in spirit as well as
+form--a tendency illustrated most notably in the promotion of industry
+under H. H. Kung, railways under Sun Fo, and finance under T. V. Soong;
+(3) a policy of emphasizing military power, which meant the rise to
+effective personal leadership of Chiang K'ai-shek. The development of a
+United Front policy in 1937 and the war with Japan led to the reversal
+of the first two policies and an enormous emphasis on the third. The
+Nationalists again turned to patriotism on the mass level rather than
+government action in a patriotically bureaucratic sphere. This latter
+policy, although it may seem strangely nonrevolutionary, was actually a
+part of Sun's programs to which the Nationalists were bound.
+
+The class theory held by Sun was based upon a distinction between power
+and competence. The people should have _power_ to determine the range of
+government policy; they obviously did not have the _competence_.
+Competence was confined to the intellectual leaders and the thinking
+people of society (who were to form two classes) and could not be found
+in the vast majority of people untrained to contemplate political
+problems. Accordingly, Sun's scheme of government assumed the continuity
+of a bureaucracy made up of men of competence, but subject to the
+periodic check of the populace, which possessed the power.
+
+Another of Sun's programs relates to the question: How can democracy be
+reconciled with ideological control? The Chinese had lived in a society
+so completely under the rule of common ideas that independent individual
+thinking had to be moderate, careful, and orthodox in appearance before
+it met with any welcome. The individual was not free to think freely;
+but since most did not think freely, sensing no need for it, they were
+unconscious of control. A problem larger than that of individual freedom
+is raised by the question of ideological control, since the controlled
+individual himself transmits control to his neighbors and his
+dependents. The ideology must be filtered, as it were, at some point.
+Sun believed that democracy would effectuate the filtering, allowing
+long-range revision from outside the bureaucracy. He expected that the
+bureaucracy of democratic China would rule well but would be subject to
+control from a people not completely under its thumb. The ideology was
+to be officially fostered, but it was to be subject to the check of the
+electorate. The Chinese were still to use orthodoxy as a tool of control
+and social pressure as the major instrument of constraint, but they were
+not to be allowed to fall into a blind traditionalism which would
+isolate them.
+
+The old ideology was to be adjusted and supplemented with Western
+science, so that the new would be compounded of three things: old
+Chinese social and political experience, old Chinese ethical knowledge,
+and modern scientific truth. With respect to Western science, the
+Nationalists had to present few startling governmental innovations,
+since the need for a knowledge of the physical and technical sciences
+was widely recognized in China--not only by the Nationalists. That the
+Western technology should serve to build the new China was obvious;
+trade schools needed encouragement rather than initiation. As to the old
+Chinese social and political experience, the Kuomintang stressed study
+of China's past. They attempted to mend the gap between the generation
+born in the 1880's and that born in the 1910's by encouraging
+concentration on the classical texts, reverently, but critically as
+well. Archaeology has heightened interest of the Chinese in their past.
+As a consequence, their sense of national value has deepened.
+
+For the restoration of the old Chinese moral and ethical system the New
+Life movement, which has been fostered personally by Generalissimo
+Chiang K'ai-shek, is of great importance. Its principles consist of a
+simple restatement of the cardinal Confucian personal virtues,
+interpreted to suit modern conditions. It has presumably been influenced
+by Protestant Christianity, and may be said to be a form of puritanism.
+Although the Nationalist movement has not been as successful in ten
+years as was the Confucian in two hundred, it has at least created a
+state pattern. A state in the full sense would require a type of
+organization so clear in its ideology that people would personify it
+willingly, would accord it existence whether leaders and governments
+fell or not, and would be loyal to it and to those who claimed to wield
+its power.
+
+Among negative influences running against the Nationalist ideology, the
+Nationalist neo-militarism has stood forth. As in the other
+ideologically integrated states of the world (Russia, Germany, Italy),
+the army assumed especial importance because its type of law and order
+required no common understanding higher than the assent of idiots. An
+army is the one institution where complete harmony of thought is a
+luxury and not a necessity, where simple agreement on rewards,
+punishments, and organization morale will hold the structure together.
+The Nationalist armies, however, rose to a new position. Ideological
+control was introduced; the literate armies fought best. But despite the
+civilian and intellectual factors from outside, the mere force
+concentrated in weapons was so great as to amount to a constant
+temptation. Whenever the day's fortunes were inclement, the men in
+command tended to settle things with guns. In contrast with sheer
+ideals, the Nationalists were strongly military; in contrast with their
+predecessors, the Nationalist generals showed respect for civilian
+authority. The charge of Nationalist neo-militarism focused upon the
+personal popularity of army leaders, especially that of Chiang
+K'ai-shek. It can be adjudicated only by history.
+
+The Nationalist movement neared its most drastic ordeal in 1936. The
+predetermined period of tutelage as decreed was passing, while the
+inauguration of constitutional government had to be deferred. With the
+approaching abolition of the Party dictatorship the Nationalist leaders
+were to demonstrate their consistency with their own ideals and
+programs. The programs of Sun Yat-sen called for the abdication of the
+patriotic elite, and the requirement--coupled as it had been with the
+proclamation of definite time limits--placed the issue squarely before
+the Kuomintang leadership. Were they to attempt the democratic
+experiment in a nation patently unripe for it, or were they to disavow
+the commands of their deceased and sainted Leader, and continue in
+power?
+
+
+_Independent Marxism in China_
+
+The proponents of Marxism were welcomed into China as trusted friends.
+In 1926 it was obvious to the whole world that China was definitely
+within the orbit of Marxism; in 1935 it was just as apparent that the
+Marxists faced a military doom, and that their forcible suppression
+might mean the end of their political effectiveness. Never ruined beyond
+all hope of recovery and triumph, never successful beyond all danger of
+disaster, the Marxists and their doctrines are the greatest uncertainty
+facing China.
+
+Sinologues, judging from past experience and impressed with the deep
+continuities and repetitions of Chinese history, may well argue that
+Marxism is another religious distributive cult such as periods of
+turmoil always produce in China. They can point to the rise and fall of
+the Yellow Turbans in the third century A. D., when the two leaders--the
+Duke of Heaven and the Duke of Humanity--shook the great Han dynasty
+down into everlasting ruin. Or they can refer to the T'ai-p'ing
+rebellion, which held a territory infinitely greater than that ever
+occupied by the Marxists, which impressed a fantastic but politically
+operative Christianity upon its followers, and which promised to do in
+South China what Brigham Young and the Mormons had done with the United
+Order in Utah; but the T'ai-p'ing went down to an extinction so complete
+that no living advocate of the cult practiced by millions seventy years
+ago can be found today. Thus it would be no violation of the set
+patterns of Chinese history if the movement of Marxism were to rise to
+world-dazzling splendor and then pass into utter oblivion. Yet Chinese
+history is no longer the only kind of history which holds weight for
+precedent in China, and if the T'ai-p'ing rebellion is one example, the
+Russian Revolution is another. Bolshevism certainly has better chances
+of succeeding in China than it could have seemed to have--to anyone but
+a fanatic--in the Russia of 1915.
+
+The Marxian doctrines had already eaten well into Chinese territory
+before entering upon the Chinese scene proper. One of the less savory
+bequests which the tsarist regime left the Communists was the question
+of Outer Mongolia, a vast stretch of land under the admitted suzerainty
+but beyond the real control of the Chinese. The area was used by White
+Russians as a base for operations, and--whether or not it accorded with
+their principles--the Red forces had to cross the frontier to pacify
+Siberia. Once in, they could not get out. It was essentially the sort of
+absent-minded conquest which has contributed so much to the British
+Empire: a strategic occupation leading inevitably to political
+domination. The Russians compromised as well as they might, setting up
+an Outer Mongolian People's Republic and administering the area in the
+way which the world was to observe on a much grander scale in the case
+of the Japanese in Manchuria--through advisers.
+
+Marxism became a force in China through men and literature and money and
+arms reaching China by the sea route, as have most Western things. Its
+position reflected, however, the facts that Russia is China's greatest
+neighbor and that the Russo-Chinese land frontier is one of the longest
+in the world. China is much nearer to San Francisco, in terms of
+shipping costs and speed of connections, than it is to Leningrad, but
+the appearance of closer proximity to the latter played a considerable
+role. The Nationalist-Communist coalition[4] was the result of the
+impact of Marxism from Russia upon China proper. The Communists entered
+as allies, not as leaders. The period of Nationalist-Communist
+cooperation lasted because the practical projects of the two
+revolutionary parties lay in a common direction. The gradual shift in
+the role of the Communists from advisers and allies to teachers and
+masters led to the break between the two organizations.
+
+How did this shift develop? From the Marxian standpoint it was the move
+of a party leadership which was bound by a true ideology, that of
+dialectic materialism. Whatever the ethics of broken individual pledges,
+there is no question that the Communists were justified according to
+their own beliefs in abandoning the Nationalists when the Nationalists
+ceased positive revolutionary action and began a Nationalist
+reconstitution. The Communists felt themselves bound to take up the
+standards of the revolution and proceed against Nationalists as against
+others. There was no room in the Marxian ideology for anything but the
+officially approved Communist Party; there was no ground for conceding
+that the Nationalists might be wise in calling a breathing spell.
+
+The Kuomintang leaders, on the other hand, had every reason to feel
+aggrieved at the Communists. The Communists had come to help the Chinese
+revolutionaries in their struggle for national liberation and to bring
+about a common front against imperialism in the Far East. When the
+revolution of national liberation was more than half accomplished, the
+Communists had increased their following to such an extent that they
+regarded the Nationalist alliance as a mere episode in the growth of
+Marxian power in China. Marxists had come to help the cause of Sun
+Yat-sen; Marxism was spread to fight and undo it. The sobering shock of
+a grasp on power sent the Nationalists into relative conservatism. An
+eminent Chinese writer has suggested the change of mood:
+
+  Our imagination was fired, our enthusiasm was kindled; thousands of
+  young men have fled from home and school from the outermost provinces
+  to join the Nationalist forces; they have toiled and they have
+  sweated, and thousands have gladly laid down their lives on the altar
+  of Nationalism that their dream of a regenerated and redeemed China
+  might come true. But, alas!... The war has ended--so has all
+  idealism.[5]
+
+The Soviet Communists, deprived of their opportunity to broadcast
+propaganda on a large scale, and unable to ride the back of the
+Nationalist tiger any longer, found themselves on a defensive which
+seemed to be permanent. At the same time, the Marxists in China
+encountered difficulties in adjusting their ideology to the fact that
+their strength lay in elements which official Marxism discredited. They
+owed their existence to agrarian discontent and to their excellent
+army--the shock troops, in many cases, of the former coalition. The
+leader of Chinese Marxism, Ch'en Tu-hsiu, broke the party wide open with
+a schism; he believed in modernizing effort rather than orthodox Marxist
+symbols. Other schisms from the Left produced Marxisms intent on
+applying the European technique to China's small proletariat,
+indifferent to the land question and eager to make an Asiatic revolution
+from the textbooks of European labor conflict. Such deviations were as
+unrealistic and sterile as Blanquism, against which the nineteenth
+century Marxists inveighed so heavily. Even so the official Communist
+Party withstood nine years of savage attack and persecution because
+necessity forced the Reds to pursue a simple line of policy--survival.
+Out of the test of deadly experience the Chinese Communists evolved
+means of allying themselves with the discontented peasantry, and found
+the point at which further social reform yielded diminishing returns in
+popular support. In relying on the people for practical help, instead of
+invoking theoretically popular appeals, the Chinese Communists attained
+a defensive strength which could easily be turned into an offensive.
+
+The reorientation in attitude--the splitting off of both extremes, the
+iron necessity for an immediate and effectual popularization of the
+Party among the peasantry, and the lessons derived from responding to
+actual conditions--enabled the Communists to establish a state in
+Kiangsi in 1931: the Chinese Soviet Republic.[6] In 1935 and 1936 Chiang
+K'ai-shek began the most vigorous of his attacks, which led to the
+removal of the Chinese Red Army some two thousand miles from South
+Central to Northwest China--one of the most astonishing military feats
+of modern times. Some observers have suggested that Chiang had no
+intention of allowing the Communists to disappear altogether from the
+scene, as they provided his military power with a _raison d'être_ in the
+eyes of the Japanese. Had he run them utterly to ground, the Japanese
+might have dispensed with him. Later events have made such an
+explanation seem less persuasive, after the _coup d'état_ at Sian in
+December, 1936.
+
+The personal factors and political events in this extraordinary drama
+are not yet known in their entirety, and it may be decades before the
+whole story is pieced together from the accounts of eyewitnesses and
+interpreters. Chiang K'ai-shek in his published diary mentions no formal
+agreement for the institution of a United Front policy, but the rumors
+from the Left persist in affirming the existence of a truce between the
+Nationalists and the Communists, the fruits of which were to be action
+against Japan. Certainly the military and political effects of Chiang's
+kidnaping were substantial,[7] and the ideological scarcely less. In
+brief, the kidnaping arose from action on the part of Chinese National
+Army troops under the command of Chang Hsüeh-liang, the ex-_tuchün_ of
+Manchuria. His forces were mostly from the Manchurian provinces and had
+no stomach for fighting the Communists in the far west of China while
+the Japanese remained in undisturbed occupation of their homelands. They
+had inaugurated an informal understanding with the Communists, and
+fraternization had begun between the opposing armies. When Chiang came
+up to investigate conditions, he was promptly kidnaped (December, 1936).
+His bodyguard was slaughtered and he himself was injured in the spine.
+The kidnaping was nominally the act of the _Tungpei_ (ex-Manchurian)
+troops. Even the Communist forces worked for the release of Chiang,
+since they felt that his death would mean national disaster. The release
+of Chiang was finally procured through the mediation of an Australian
+editor with a long experience in Chinese politics.[8]
+
+The effect on popular thinking was twofold. In the first place, Chiang's
+popularity was made fully apparent by the vigor of the demonstrations in
+his favor all over China. It had long been asserted that even the most
+momentary relaxation of Chiang's despotism, as its opponents termed it,
+would be followed either by anarchy or a new revolutionary regime.
+Neither appeared. The strength of the National Government as a
+government was apparent, despite a strong odor of treason in widely
+separated quarters, and the people as a whole kept quiet. Students,
+workers, capitalists, officials, military men--all groups sought
+Chiang's release. Their anxiety for his personal safety was in some
+cases qualified by a hearty dislike of the man himself, but almost
+everyone admitted to an admiration, either grudging or whole-hearted,
+for the effectiveness of his work. The National Government and its chief
+military leader were indeed strongly entrenched in popular sympathy and
+thought--more so than even the most optimistic observers had dared to
+hope.
+
+The second consequence of the _coup d'état_ at Sian was even more
+important. The mere physical juxtaposition of the two leaderships,
+Marxian and Nationalist, and the probability that forced arbitration
+would be the result of the kidnaping, led to a wild stimulation of
+hopes. At the same time it was generally realized that failure to come
+to terms might end in the murder of Chiang and in fateful results for
+all groups in China. The kidnapers demanded a United Front; the
+Communists had issued a manifesto in behalf of it several months earlier
+(August 1, 1936). The problem was: could Chiang accede without ruining
+his prestige or impairing the ideological position he had so laboriously
+built up for himself?
+
+A compromise was found, which amounted to a paper victory for Chiang,
+nominal punishment of Chang and the other perpetrators of the kidnaping,
+ceremonial apology to the nation by Chiang for having been kidnaped, and
+a series of formally unrelated but probably linked events--all of which
+brought the two ideologies and their adherents to a common ground.
+Throughout the following spring, progress was made in the negotiation of
+a truce, which broadened into an armistice and ended as an alliance. On
+April 30, 1937, for instance, the Young Communist Congress, composed of
+men whose brains Chiang would have cheerfully blown out a few months
+before, elected Chiang and other Nationalist leaders to honorary
+membership. On occasion, the Communists and the Nationalists exchanged
+classical Chinese poems; each side sought to excel in sincere courtesy.
+The armistice lasted through the period of the Japanese invasion in the
+summer of 1937; formal union was achieved in September.[9]
+
+On the political surface, the course of Marxism in China has been one of
+the most startling developments in modern history. Alliance between
+Hitler and Stalin would seem more plausible than the reunion of
+Nationalist and Communist groups in China. To those in the service of
+the Nanking regime in 1936, such an eventuality was the one thing
+certain not to happen. The break between the Marxist and Nationalist
+leaderships and their subsequent reconciliation appeared, however, less
+improbable in consideration of the course steered by the Communist world
+movement during the decade 1927-1937. The United Front in China made it
+possible for the Chinese Communists to concede more than they would
+otherwise have dared to except at the suggestion of the Russian and
+international Communists.
+
+The future role of Marxism in China is still undecided. Nothing can be
+regarded as beyond the limit of probability, except the immediate
+establishment of a permanent and unalterable regime. The challenges the
+Marxists raise are too important to be ignored--land and labor reform
+and the devising of workable techniques for distributive justice. If
+they do not take control of the country themselves, they will at least
+be a formidable factor for whoever does control the government. In the
+event of foreign conquest the Marxians could provide an underground
+resistance of spectacular value. If the Chinese, applying terror and
+espionage against the Marxians then regarded as traitors, were not able
+to root them out in ten years of ferocious warfare, what will aliens
+do--against Communists who have become patriots in the eyes of all the
+people and who are assured help from all sides?
+
+
+_Japanese Efforts to Participate in Creating a New China_
+
+China is Japan's greatest outside problem; she is only a secondary
+problem in the foreign policies of the other great powers. Japan owes
+much to China in the way of borrowed ideas and institutions. Japan and
+Siam are the only free nations in the modern world which share with
+China the background of a Chinese-dominated world society in the Far
+East.[10] The Japanese resisted the extension of Chinese suzerainty to
+their islands, and on only one occasion did they concede formally that
+the Chinese emperor was the head of all civilized society; this they
+bitterly regret. While the Siamese have maintained their independence,
+they are in no position to take an active part in the creation of a new
+Far East, and the issue is between China and Japan, with the other
+Pacific powers largely as spectators. The construction of a way of
+thinking to accommodate the men and territories no longer guided by the
+old order is a problem shared by Japan and China; the competition for
+imposing a feasible system is sharp. Japan wishes to create a new Far
+East in which the Japanese shall constitute the most cultured core; the
+Chinese take their ancient position for granted.
+
+In addition to the ideational conflict for prestige between Chinese and
+Japanese, there is another realm wherein the two nations compete, using
+ideas not as ends but as means. The extension of Western industry and
+trade to the East produced acute dislocations both in China and in
+Japan, and in the case of Japan involved transforming the Japanese
+autarchy into a most dangerous dependence upon a share of the world
+economy. Japan is truly a commercial and capitalist power; hers is no
+mere affectation of modernity. It is conceivable, should the West go
+down to its Armageddon, that the Chinese might swing back to the ways of
+their past. The Japanese could not; their economic and political system
+has expanded too far. They are inextricably bound up with the rest of
+the industrial, capitalist modern world. In China the stock exchanges
+have a mere toehold on the country; in Japan they have become the spine
+of national life. The Japanese must either pay the price of
+modernization by accepting the lowly place of the latecomer or make up
+their tardiness in entering the imperialist scene by a veritable frenzy
+of expansion. Apart from the future of capitalism, there remains the
+question: Will Japan collapse before reaching imperial success in the
+world economy?
+
+China and the unpredictable but colossal Chinese markets are Japan's
+goal, formulated after contact with the West. China and her unquestioned
+cultural prestige are the targets of the Japanese drive for the
+acquisition of standing, a campaign couched in indigenous Far Eastern
+terms. The conflict between the two countries weaves its way back and
+forth through elaborate and self-contradictory sets of terms. The
+Japanese have toyed with a multitude of policies for China. Some of
+these are: (1) simple conquest; (2) the establishment of a peculiar Far
+Eastern order under Japanese leadership--either in terms harmonious with
+Western concepts of international affairs (the "Japanese Monroe
+Doctrine") or in terms derived from a modification of the past
+("Pan-Asia"); (3) a common cause of Japanese and Chinese against the
+white peril, without any special emphasis on the relative positions of
+the two countries; (4) a divine Japanese mission, not merely to save the
+yellow race but to rescue the whole world and put all nations under the
+protecting benevolence of Japanese overlordship; (5) a strict policy of
+day-to-day opportunism--binding those parts of China accessible for such
+procedure with treaties and agreements, and catching the Chinese as they
+come forth into the arena of modern economic life; (6) expediency
+couched in military terms, looking to absolute Japanese gains on the
+map, regardless of the erection of a social system to perpetuate the
+immediate military advances; (7) a pro-Chinese policy, to assure the
+Japanese a close ally (but in such a case a strong independent China
+would inevitably excel Japan, and the Japanese would have to yield to
+Chinese hegemony--however friendly--or else retreat from it into the
+isolation from which they emerged in the 1850's).
+
+Direct military conquest has a considerable appeal to the Japanese,
+except for its limitations. All the armies of the modern world would not
+be enough to garrison and patrol a China desperately hostile through and
+through. The Chinese would not stop at suicide to embarrass their
+enemies, if there were complete ideological antagonism. The Japanese
+would have to persuade the Chinese whom they conquered to remain alive,
+to keep working, to grow wealthy so that the conquest might not be
+without value. It is not possible to consider a policy involving the
+outright murder of from one hundred and fifty to two hundred million
+persons; short of such extermination, there is no way for the Japanese
+to clear the field for colonization in Chinese territories. If the
+Japanese cannot replace the Chinese, they must make use of them; to make
+use of them, they must teach them to think in a way which will permit
+exploitation, for even the most inequitable exploitation involves some
+cooperation.
+
+Ever since their peculiar Far Eastern order had been partially
+recognized the Japanese began building up theories of a zone of
+influence to be based not upon law but upon geographic and racial fact.
+The doctrines of Pan-Asia fitted their purpose. Writers in the different
+Asiatic countries had pointed out the desirability of a union of those
+Asiatic peoples which were not yet under colonial rule to prevent
+further occidental advance and to rescue their conquered neighbors. Sun
+Yat-sen himself thought well of the Pan-Asia idea and stressed it, along
+with the recommendation that all economically exploited powers confront
+the exploiting powers--a class war between nations. As soon as the
+Japanese began turning to Pan-Asia for furtherance of their own peculiar
+ends, these arguments lost much of their realism. The Japanese policies
+generated more disturbance in Asia than did the Western. Their call to
+prevent Western aggression, at a time when the Western powers were in
+retreat, sounded artificial. Nevertheless, the Pan-Asian movement forms
+a link between ideology-conscious leaders in China and Japan; Japan's
+ultra-patriotic Toyama had been friendly and helpful to Sun at the time
+when the former led the _Genyosha_ and the latter the _Hsing Chung
+Hui_.[11] It was natural, however, that the Pan-Asian doctrine, although
+it never disappeared altogether in China, should be strongest in Japan.
+Pan-Asia or its restricted form--Far-Easternism (_Toa-shugi_)--played a
+significant part in the military indoctrination in Japan, even though
+attempts to propagate it in China ended in almost complete failure.
+
+To the ideological conquest of China the Japanese have contributed very
+little. Their theories, summed up, amount to but a drop in the sea of
+doctrines. Only as the spokesman of China's ultra-reactionary
+monarchists--who flourished twenty-five years ago--has Japan presented
+an ideological program which is other than derisible. Rich in the
+ceremonial trappings of government, and in the personal elegance of its
+powerless ministers, the Great Manchou Empire makes a strong appeal to
+literary persons with archaic tastes. Even there, the blunt modernism of
+the Japanese military machine destroys the illusion.
+
+
+_Patriotism: The United Front_
+
+1937 was one of the most critical years of modern China. It marked a
+swift and startling grouping of the three active forces in China:
+Nationalism, Communism, and Japanese compulsion. For ten years the
+Nationalists and the Communists had waged a war of terror against each
+other; for six years a Chinese Soviet Republic had defied the National
+Government of China established at Nanking. Six years had passed since
+the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, five since the establishment of a
+Manchoukuo government. The Nationalists had hated the Japanese, but they
+hated the Communists more; at the humiliating price of non-resistance to
+Japan, Chiang K'ai-shek had brought the full military and agitational
+power of Nationalism to the suppression of the Marxians. The Japanese
+had no great attachment to Chiang and the Nationalists and regarded
+Nationalism itself as a force subversive to Japanese order in the Far
+East. But they had tolerated the Kuomintang because it seemed a buffer
+between themselves and the Communists, and because they did not have the
+power or the immediate inclination to destroy the Nationalist regime.
+
+This triangular deadlock was first broken by the kidnaping at Sian.
+Nationalist and Communist leaderships were brought face to face, and
+preliminary terms were agreed upon. With each step toward a termination
+of the Nationalist-Communist wars the danger of a powerful China became
+more striking to Japan, while simultaneously the Nanking regime became
+less valuable to the Japanese as a bulwark against Communism. The spring
+of 1937 marked the settlement with the Communists in the Northwest, the
+continuance of a general armistice, and the sharp improvement of
+Nationalist prestige throughout the country. Circles which had been
+Rightist recognized the increased military and financial power of the
+Nationalists, now that the long and wasteful struggle with the
+Communists was ended, releasing men, weapons, and money for application
+in other quarters. Leftist groups again found the Nanking state
+philosophy palatable, and discovered in the official tenets of the
+Nationalist Party enough common principles to justify the re-coalition
+of revolutionary forces. The radical intellectuals and students, who had
+swung sharply to the Left as a result of continued Nationalist yielding
+to Japan, turned again to Nationalist leadership.
+
+As practical solutions to the Nationalist-Communist conflict were found,
+the people in the larger cities were released from the governmental
+restrictions which the Nationalists--upon Japanese insistence and threat
+of force--had placed on the expression of patriotic sentiments. A vast
+and vigorous patriotic feeling came suddenly to life, having grown more
+intense under the cramping inhibitions of police prohibition. The
+patriotism was revolutionary in mood but not wholly different from
+Chinese patriotism of the past. The slogans all centered on national
+defense. Release of political prisoners, cessation of internal war, and
+democratization of the government were regarded as steps to union and
+defense.
+
+When the Japanese decided to push forward in earnest and began fighting
+in North China in the summer of 1937, the patriotic movement became so
+powerful that for the time it supplanted all other separate movements.
+Only a number of aged or cynical opportunists remained outside. It was
+now possible, under the slogan of a United Front of all China against
+Japan, to disregard the fundamental differences between the Nationalists
+and the Communists. A Chinese Communist wrote:
+
+  While we declare ourselves, despite the differences in principle that
+  exist between communism and Sun-Yat-sen-ism, advocates of the basic
+  revolutionary slogans of Sun Yat-sen, of the best revolutionary
+  traditions of the Chinese people, we Communists never for an instant
+  under any circumstances cease to be true followers of the
+  Marxist-Leninist teachings.[12]
+
+Such utterances were matched by similar ones from the Nationalist side.
+
+In their haste the Japanese utilized an ideology which they had
+practiced in Manchuria--literary Confucianism colored by notions adopted
+from the Japanese cult of the emperor. They also appealed to the
+practical and immediate needs of the Chinese living in the areas which
+they conquered, setting up governments[13] to govern for them. But this
+was hardly more than an expedient. Of far greater importance than even
+the war itself is its long-range impact upon the Chinese mind.
+
+The formulation of the present Chinese patriotic movement into a
+definite drive for the establishment of a new Chinese way of life may
+emerge as one of the lasting facts of the century. The various movements
+of the Republican era failed to disturb and arouse the masses
+sufficiently to make possible a replacement of the decrepit remnants of
+the old Chinese social and intellectual world, or a reinterpretation
+adding the ingredients needed in a modern civilization. If patriotism
+unites the Chinese permanently, Japanese invasion may have provoked what
+twenty-five years of Chinese effort could not bring about.
+
+Furthermore, the Chinese have reacted to the emergencies of war in a
+manner almost unprecedented among modern nations. War has not meant the
+creation of a temporary despotism; it has brought democracy instead. The
+ideological concord, the supremacy of a common national purpose, which
+could not be achieved in a quarter century of peacetime agony, was
+brought forth in the ordeal of national resistance. Democracy and not
+tyranny was the unifying force. The Kuomintang Party Congress, meeting
+in Hankow from March 29 to April 2, 1938, reaffirmed the primacy of the
+_San Min Chu I_, but at the same time guaranteed the sanctity of private
+rights, even in wartime, of groups who had been liable to official
+suppression for years. The Communist press was flourishing openly in
+Hankow, a testimony to the curious tolerance with which the Chinese
+united for national defense. The governmental structure was increasingly
+democratized. Japan had provided a body of common assumptions strong
+enough to sustain democracy, despite the burden of mutually tolerated
+disagreements.
+
+
+NOTES
+
+[1] For the military aspects see below, pp. 108 ff.; for the immediate
+governmental aspects see below, pp. 167 ff.
+
+[2] The best account of the internal politics of the Kuomintang between
+1927 and 1933 is to be found in Gustav Amann, _Chiang Kaishek und die
+Regierung der Kuomintang in China_, Berlin and Heidelberg, 1936.
+
+[3] See below, pp. 172 ff.
+
+[4] See above, pp. 51 ff.
+
+[5] Lin Yutang, _Letters of a Chinese Amazon and War-Time Essays_, p.
+vi, Shanghai, 1930.
+
+[6] See below, pp. 182 ff.
+
+[7] See below, p. 184 ff.
+
+[8] On the Sian incident see General and Madame Chiang Kai-shek,
+_General Chiang Kai-shek_, Garden City, 1937; James M. Bertram, _First
+Act in China_, New York, 1938, an account by an Australian newspaperman
+in Sian at the time; and Edgar Snow, _Red Star over China_, New York,
+1938--an extraordinarily valuable work on all phases of Chinese
+Communism, by an observer of great insight and acuteness.
+
+[9] See the references below, p. 190, n. 10.
+
+[10] See Yoshi S. Kuno, _Japanese Expansion on the Asiatic Continent_,
+vol. I, Berkeley, 1937, for an authoritative description of early
+Sino-Japanese relations. Chinese records of the time of Christ describe
+the payment of tribute by Japanese chieftains. The most explicit
+acknowledgment of Chinese suzerainty occurred in the time of Yoshemitsu,
+the third Ashikaga shogun (see Kuno, pp. 92-93).
+
+[11] The Japanese patriotic leagues are described in Kenneth Colegrove,
+_Militarism in Japan_, Boston, 1936.
+
+[12] Wang Ming, _China Can Win!_ p. 44, New York, 1938. Wang Ming is a
+Chinese expert on Marxism residing in the U. S. S. R.
+
+[13] See below, pp. 184 ff.
+
+
+
+
+SECOND PART
+
+ARMIES
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter_ IV
+
+WARRIORS
+
+
+From the outside, militarism seems to dominate the Chinese scene. China
+is frequently interpreted in terms of personalities instead of mass
+inclinations, wide-filtering habits, and extensive relocations of
+thought. The picturesqueness of the Chinese leaders has done nothing to
+prevent the notion of many romantic autocracies from appearing real: the
+Dog-Meat General, six feet tall, diabolically cruel and brazenly comic,
+with his veritable zoological garden of ladies from all over the world;
+the Christian General, burly, bluff, honest, Christian and Bolshevik,
+with the happy naïveté of a feudal politician; the Bandit General and
+his infatuation with fine arsenals; the Generalissimo, with his
+Christian wife, himself a Christian, rolling up a military machine
+against the third greatest naval power of the earth--such figures make
+Chinese news a confused but exciting serial story.
+
+
+_Military Rule and Political Economy_
+
+For long-range effects, the literary experiments of men like Hu Shih and
+the mass-education drive of Dr. James Yen and his associates are more
+significant than any one of hundreds of military leaders, but long-range
+trends are never news. The armies and their commanders have occupied the
+center of the stage, overshadowing the quest of the Chinese for civilian
+rule. Civilian rule, however, presupposes a sufficient area of common
+agreement on which to build laws and usages for government; armies
+require nothing but a nearly mechanical discipline and the crudest rule
+of thumb administration. The civilian government of Republican China has
+had to await the coming of at least a minimum of order out of the
+turmoil; armies, for lack of government, have dominated and continued
+that turmoil. China has been disunited in great part because she was
+impoverished by military rule; she has been ruled by arms partly because
+she was disunited. No unifier of the nation would have needed to
+maintain the armed hordes which were the greatest impediment to real
+national defense--hordes powerful enough to wreck governments but not
+powerful enough to build them. The war lords, as they are perhaps too
+flatteringly termed, do by no means measure up to the note of the
+intellectual and political leaders; but they have unquestionably held
+the greater bulk of day-to-day authority in China since 1912.
+
+The most significant function of the armies is one which is quite
+frequently overlooked: their power as agencies of unsettlement. They
+have created disturbances more profound than mere public disorder; they
+have attacked institutions more vital than the public treasury; they
+have kept all parts of China from the dull apathy of conservatism. The
+arrogance and rapacity of the military rulers, their utter incompetence
+as administrators (with a number of honorable exceptions), and their
+ineffectiveness as propagandists have provided that loose and haphazard
+tyranny which some philosophers consider the prime requisite for social
+ferment. The military men have never been intelligent enough to impose
+truly totalitarian regimes, nor efficient enough to make the people of
+any one area content with a permanent separatism. The presence of the
+military rank and file has turned the Chinese social system upside down,
+reversing the accepted scale of ranks within the society and infringing
+upon the interests of every group--even the minimum interest of the very
+poor, their right not to starve to death. More conspicuously, the armies
+have given a picture of power which, in contrast with the scarcely
+traceable lines of influence and persuasion arising from ideological
+movements, is intelligible and reducible to concrete terms.
+
+Without the militarists, there would have been no visible series of
+events to trace the change in China, no stereotypes at all by which to
+show the immediate alterations on the scene of power. Many men did rise
+and fall regardless of military considerations, but such occurrences
+were loosely and popularly ascribed to intrigue or else dismissed as
+beyond all rational understanding. The armies subsisted and roamed
+about, leaders and men both helpless on a sea of ignorance and doctrinal
+conflict; but the mere assent to unthinking discipline looked like
+order, and the most shadowy and insubstantial military hierarchy held
+out a promise of Caesarian peace. From 1915 to 1925 foreign comment
+stressed the movements of the war lords, singling out the man who might
+play the role of a Chinese Napoleon, and to the present this simple
+approach satisfies many. Meanwhile the foundations of social life
+shifted, falling away here, growing more solid there, behind the gloomy
+panorama of brutal, ineffectual warfare.
+
+Closely related to the problem of armies was another category partially
+understandable in narrowly factual terms--political economy. The armies
+conditioned and set the pace, a slow one, for economic development. All
+financial projects were jeopardized by military rule, both by the
+exactions which the military might impose and by the constant threat
+that militarists, devaluating the currency or arbitrarily changing the
+political controls of economy, might alter the very economic system in
+which the project was being considered and fostered. Economic life in
+China could not continue through the traditional agricultural, guild,
+semicapitalist devices; Western trade and social dislocation prevented
+that. Yet no new economy could automatically replace the ruins of the
+old, since economic matters were part of a _political_ economy subject
+to the extra-economic interferences which ideological change, military
+power, and halfway government could impose. One of the truly important
+achievements of the National Government at Nanking was the creation of a
+core for a twentieth century army. But all the military achievements in
+modern China pale before the staggering surprise of a managed currency,
+displacing a commodity and specie system which was older than all modern
+warfare.
+
+One need not subscribe to either military or economic determinism to
+concede the relevance of military and economic matters in any society.
+In China there exists a peculiarly close correlation between the two.
+The absence of a class founded squarely on economic privilege and the
+subordination of the military to the bureaucratic elements in the
+imperial society were largely the result of the position occupied by the
+average nonacademic Chinese, who was typically a farmer capable of being
+a militiaman or a bandit. This duality of role strongly affected the
+development of government in China, and is a factor which still plays a
+great part. The Chinese owe many of their social and political
+peculiarities to the effectiveness of their mass action, which is able
+to take place with a minimum of formal leadership and coordination and
+with a maximum of secrecy and totality. In times when foreign conquest
+of China is no longer in the realm of the improbable, it is worth
+remembering that the Chinese are a people adamant in resistance to force
+and schooled in centuries of rebellion. Neither pacific nor military
+resistance could take place in the traditional Chinese way without the
+diffusion of military and economic power among broad masses of the
+population.
+
+How, it may be asked, have the Chinese succeeded in being such a
+peaceful people, and yet a people so prone to popular uprising? How is
+it that, with their great talents for organization, they have let a
+shabby third-rate militarism sweep their land in modern times? The
+Chinese generals did not command the allegiance widely extended to even
+the meanest of South American despots; yet the people trembled before
+them. Not until the war lords lost power was there great popular
+enthusiasm for military ideals. If Chinese armies are considered solely
+as rough and primitive parallels to their European counterparts, paradox
+will follow paradox without rational explanation. To understand the
+Chinese military situation one must go back across the centuries and
+trace a system and a tradition which, at times obscure and frequently
+submerged, must come to the surface in the decisions upon which rest the
+question of national life or death for China.
+
+
+_The Downfall of the Charioteers_
+
+The Chinese have differed from other peoples not in being peaceful so
+much as in extolling peace. Not even in the Christian tradition of peace
+and love are there condemnations of war stronger than those of the
+Confucians. Yet, century to century, the Chinese have known war against
+the outside barbarians and with each other. Throughout historic times
+there are records of struggle and slaughter. H. G. Creel writes, "If we
+are to locate the traditional Chinese time of 'great peace' it must be
+far back in the Neolithic stage. Experts agree that in the earlier of
+the Neolithic sites known to us there is little evidence of warfare."[1]
+
+At the very edge of history, about 1500 B. C., the Chinese appear as
+accomplished archers, using bows which were probably not dissimilar to
+those in use down to the twentieth century--heavy reflex bows, with a
+pull that was sometimes far greater than the longbow of the celebrated
+English yeomen of medieval times. The pellet bow, a form of slingshot,
+was also common in the earliest times. Armor was known in the earliest
+historic dynasty, the Shang, which by Chinese tradition is dated
+1765-1123 B. C. The chariot, however, seems to have been less widely
+used than it later came to be.[2]
+
+Under the Chou dynasty, in all Chinese history the most caste-bound,
+militaristic, and feudal (traditionally dated 1122-256 B. C.), the
+implements of warfare and the management of conflict fell into the hands
+of the ruling class. Previous to the Chou there was a relative military
+equality of all, despite the sharp lines between masters and men. After
+the Chou the great military states culminating in the warrior-bureaucrat
+tyranny of the Ch'in Shih Huang Ti (third century B. C.) tended to
+reduce war to mass movements, in which establishments, management, and
+broader considerations constantly increased. During this period the
+master class developed a scheme which was not as elaborately traced out
+in legal terms as Norman-English feudalism, nor as solidly grounded in
+outright military effectiveness as the Japanese system twenty-odd
+centuries later, but which amounted to a chivalric order within the
+limits of an ideology rooted in the family. The lords were the spiritual
+guardians and clan leaders as well as the earthly despots of their
+subjects. Standing above the law and invested with positions of high
+political dignity, their class nearly became a caste. Warfare--as apart
+from slaughter--was formalized and ritualized beyond all Western dreams
+of gallantry. According to Marcel Granet, who has brilliantly described
+public life of the period,
+
+  The battle is a confused mélée of boasts, generosities, homages,
+  insults, devotions, curses, blessings and sorceries. Much more than a
+  clash of arms, it is a duel of moral values, an encounter of competing
+  honours.... The battle is the great moment in which each warrior
+  proves his nobility, while in addition they prove to all present the
+  nobility of their prince, their cause and their country.[3]
+
+Our very word _chivalry_ suggests horsemen; the Chinese nobles ruled
+their elaborate realm not from horseback but from chariots. The
+education of every patrician youth involved archery, music, writing, and
+reckoning, among other arts and virtues.[4] Archery was something which
+might be learned, after a fashion, by large numbers of common men; even
+peasants, with a bow and a lance or pike, might constitute light cavalry
+when provided, or providing themselves, with mounts. But the use of the
+four-horse chariot necessarily remained the exclusive privilege of the
+nobles. The chariot fighter had to have a driver and one or two others
+with him in his vehicle, which was itself costly, hard to obtain, and
+difficult to operate. A Chou noble driving forth to war thirty centuries
+ago was as technical a unit as an aviator in a combat plane today or a
+small group of men in a tank. Just as there is a democracy implicit in
+the light machine gun or the automatic rifle, so was there the
+potentiality of equality in vast masses of infantry, supported by light,
+cheaply armed cavalry. Aristocratic individualism meant something when
+wars were short and fought with elaborate equipment; but no noble could
+stand up against the mass forces which emerged and continued fighting
+until the feudal system lost any real significance and left the country
+open to the development of bureaucratic government and military power.
+
+There was no overt attack on the feudal system. The system, however,
+possessed within itself contradictions which led to its doom. The
+central power was insufficient to keep the peace, and certain local
+groups were--by talent, economic factors, or geography--too strong to
+remain subordinate. The period known as the Spring and Autumn epoch
+(Ch'un Ch'iu; 770-473 B. C.) yielded to that known as the Age of Warring
+States (Chan Kuo; 473-221 B. C.). From feudal cores there grew states,
+which began to follow the course of development that led to the
+appearance of a system of sovereign nations in Europe; they increasingly
+interfered with the free operation of the feudal economy. By effecting
+the massing of power they eliminated the overawing charioteer from the
+field of decisive combat.[5] The chariots remained as the vehicles of
+the leaders or the focal points of battles, but they no longer implied a
+skill so great as to make up a monopoly of first-rate military force.
+While the most eminent thinker of the age, Confucius, lamented the
+decline of order, a new order was being shaped from the social,
+economic, and military realities laid bare by rapid development,
+Machiavellian intrigue, and the hard necessities of wartime economies.
+
+The state of Ch'in, a Chinese Prussia, attained overwhelming hegemony in
+the third century before Christ. Its power rested on universal
+registration of the inhabitants, conscription, heavy policing, taxation
+involving constant intervention in economic matters, and legalistic
+administration. In its warfare there was little of the ritual which
+characterized the military period when chariots were dominant; codes did
+not amount to much. The immediate end of war was slaughter for political
+and economic purposes, not the hazardous parade of a feudal class. The
+Ch'in monarch who finally established a centralized empire took the
+vainglorious title of Shih Huang Ti (The First Emperor), and set himself
+the task of eradicating the regionalist ideologies of his conquered
+rivals by suppressing all political history but that of his native
+state. Proceeding from innovation to innovation, he ended by becoming
+one of the historic figures detested by later epochs. One of the
+practices which he extended throughout the Empire of China was the
+regularization of military service. He is also known as the originator
+of the grandiose project of the Great Wall; it is less well known that
+he forbade the erection of walls around cities within the Empire. His
+system of conscription involved three years of compulsory military
+service for all young men, and a corvee of three days' service each year
+at the frontier for every citizen; the former came to depend for its
+inclusiveness upon administrative integrity, while the latter was soon
+replaced by a money tax.
+
+Although the First Empire established by the Ch'in did not last long,
+the Han dynasty (202 B. C. to A. D. 220) continued its military
+system[6] and kept standing armies at the northern frontier and at the
+imperial capital. The frontier forces were composed of militia augmented
+for special campaigns by volunteers and criminals. The Chinese fought
+the barbarians with the tactics of mounted archers, devices learned from
+the nomads. Away from the northern steppes, infantry seems to have
+gained constantly in importance. By the time of Christ the chivalry of
+the religious-social-military class of charioteers was ancient history,
+and mass armies had taken their place.
+
+
+_Military Elements in Chinese Imperial History_
+
+Through the greater part of the past two thousand years, Chinese society
+has been governed by civilians. The scholastic bureaucracy secured and
+kept a position of primacy, and a common ranking of the social classes
+was: scholars, farmers, merchants, soldiers. The Confucians were
+antagonistic to war, and bureaucrats--if for governmental reasons
+alone--suspected the danger which lay in the broad dissemination of
+military knowledge. The Chinese consistently ranked the military man
+below the civilian; as a natural consequence most of the abler men went
+into scholarship and politics. Chinese history has its great military
+names and ample accounts of spectacular military exploits, but even here
+the elements of strategy, of diplomatic and cunning warfare, rate higher
+than in the corresponding European histories. Despite the fact that arms
+did not play as great a role in Chinese history as in Western, the
+difference is one of degree only; military considerations appeared and
+persisted which colored governmental action and social organization.
+Among these was the relation of the armed forces to the social order--in
+point of numbers and in point of force. When elections are lacking in a
+civilized society, fighting power demarcates an electorate of force, as
+it were; the distribution of power determines the center of political
+gravity as located in the society. In China there were, however,
+elements distinctly different from those in the West.
+
+One of these was the correlation of mass power and military power. In
+epoch after epoch, armies seem to spring forth out of the very
+soil--armed groups radically unlike the Roman legion. For seasoned
+veterans marching forth with elaborately effective disciplines China
+substituted mass forces drawn directly from the populace, as need arose.
+In some dynasties the system was regularized in militia form. Of the
+Han, H. H. Dubs writes:
+
+  Chinese armies were largely militia. Everyone was compelled to serve
+  three years in the army or in forced labor; at the northern border,
+  the whole male population had constantly to be ready to repel Hun
+  forays. Hence all males seem to have been able to fight and to be
+  required to do so. When the Emperor Wu [ca. 120 B. C.] wanted armies
+  and none would volunteer, he merely had his officials sentence
+  criminals to army service--and thus secured armies which seemed to be
+  able to fight as successfully as his previous armies. Universal
+  military conscription plus a registration of all able-bodied males
+  seems to have been the Han method.[7]
+
+The common people had crossbows for shooting birds or pronged hoes for
+digging which were efficient even in fighting standing armies; they were
+also frequently in possession of weapons because they were called up as
+militia against barbarians. Underlying such military conditions, with
+their highly important political consequences, there were several
+surprisingly concrete and simple mechanical considerations. The
+charioteers had come to an end partly because the chariots were drawn by
+horses yoked in such a fashion that when the horses pulled hard, they
+often choked themselves. Other factors are suggested by Dubs:
+
+  By the time that horses became plentiful, so that cavalry was
+  employed, the crossbow had reached such a state of development that
+  cavalry was shown to be inferior to infantry with crossbows. The
+  medieval European crossbow was hampered by the mechanical weakness of
+  its trigger mechanism--the crossbow was likely to be discharged
+  prematurely by a jar; the Chinese Han crossbow had no such defect and
+  was a powerful weapon. A group of crossbowmen with others in the rear
+  to string crossbows and others to bring cocked bows to the marksmen in
+  the front rank, could shoot down cavalry before they could come near
+  enough to discharge the lighter bows cavalry necessarily carried.
+  Cocked crossbows could be carried around safely and fired when needed.
+  A bolt from a powerful crossbow could pierce any armor. Hence the
+  strong-backed peasant with a crossbow had an advantage over the noble
+  no matter how well the noble was armed or how good horses the latter
+  possessed. The only advantage retained by the noble was that of
+  leadership--tactical skill and command of large bodies of infantry.
+  Cavalry became useful for scouting and pursuit chiefly.[8]
+
+The character of military techniques caused Chinese politics to be
+qualified by rebellion or the fear of rebellion. The difference between
+a mob and an army became slight. In times of poor government there were
+rebellions almost yearly. Insurrectionary forces gained momentum
+overnight; from era to era huge mobs, tens and hundreds of thousands
+strong, swept away governmental armies and erased corrupt or oppressive
+dynasties. The process may be described as popular unrest made effective
+with arms, which professional armies could not resist. The low place of
+the soldier in society prevented men of genius from organizing a
+dominant military caste; the professional armies were insufficient to
+make military government effective. By a crude and brutal democracy of
+mob and murder the populace of China could destroy dynasties and
+governments whenever economic, social, or political conditions veered
+too far beyond the limits of the tolerable.
+
+Trained fighters there were, but they had the function of frontier
+defense; when civil war broke out behind them, the imperial governments
+frequently called back the frontier forces together with the barbarians
+they had been fighting. At least two great dynasties, the T'ang and the
+Ming, were destroyed because they used the nomads of the northern wilds
+in order to put down domestic insurrections. Light cavalry supplemented
+enormous bodies of infantry. In fact, the Chinese were put down by
+foreign conquerors only when the foreigners had Chinese allies, or when
+a campaign of terror had broken the spirit of popular resistance.
+Chinese warfare showed the disadvantages as well as the advantages of
+being carried on by what were in effect militia forces. The cruelty was
+personal and direct, and not covered with fine disclaimers; restraint of
+armed forces was the distinguished exception rather than the rule. The
+line between soldier and peasant was one which could be crossed easily,
+and the line between soldiery and banditry a matter of intention. At its
+best, military technique was honest and robustly egalitarian; at its
+worst it led to abuse of force such as lynching, robbery, and fanatical
+turbulence. The formal records of Chinese dynasties show the use of
+trained armies in foreign expeditions, in some of which they achieved
+feats of military accomplishment which rank with any of world history.
+Domestic troops were also employed as guards and ornamental bodies
+attached to the throne and other great offices of the Empire.
+
+The convenience of rebellion was such as to make revolt a part of the
+unwritten constitutional practice--that broad ideological framework upon
+which the Chinese world rested. It was sanctioned by the classics. It
+served as a barometer of popular opinion. An unsuccessful rebellion, one
+without the dimmest chance of success, might well be launched by
+intelligent and patriotic men because its very appearance could prompt
+the government to reform. In the words of one of the earliest Western
+writers on the subject:
+
+  A military and police is maintained sufficient to crush merely
+  factious risings, but totally inadequate, both in numbers and in
+  nature, to put down a disgusted and indignant people. But though no
+  despotism, this same government is in form and machinery a pure
+  autocracy. In his district the magistrate is absolute; in his
+  province, the governor; in the empire, the Emperor. The Chinese people
+  have no right of legislation, they have no right of self-taxation,
+  they have not the power of voting out their rulers or of limiting or
+  stopping supplies. _They have therefore the right of rebellion._
+  Rebellion is in China the old, often exercised, legitimate, and
+  constitutional means of stopping arbitrary and vicious legislation and
+  administration.[9]
+
+Thomas Taylor Meadows, the author just quoted, also noted that "of all
+nations that have attained a certain degree of civilization, the Chinese
+are the least revolutionary and the most rebellious."[10] _Revolution_
+is a word broad enough to include principles; _rebellion_, more
+narrowly, suggests action against men. The same tight, enduring system
+of ideological control served to restrain the Chinese in their thinking
+even when they had the material power sufficient to shake off their past
+and build Utopia in its place. Rebels themselves obeyed the unwritten
+precepts. The triumph of the civilians was complete: with infantry
+prevailing on the battlefield, the peasants were the strongest; and with
+the total population saturated in compelling, uniform ideas of right and
+wrong, appropriate and inappropriate, the scholars had only to await the
+establishment of administration to assume the leadership. Against
+malgovernment, the populace retained the power of rebellion. Against
+misrule, the scholars held the power which came to them as interpreters
+of a vast and persuasive code of tradition. Whereas Western courts,
+citing the past, can negate the acts of the executive or legislative by
+interpretation or annulment, the Chinese scholars would do the same not
+merely for law, but for manners, morals, thoughts, and social activities
+as well. The great peasant armies, though able to destroy military
+dictatorship, were by their very nature too loosely organized to
+establish it.
+
+
+_The Military Organization of the Manchu Dynasty_
+
+Although the Manchus, who conquered China in the first half of the
+seventeenth century and ruled it until the opening of the twentieth, did
+not profoundly modify Chinese culture, they affected the military
+scheme. The general outline of Chinese war and its place in society
+remained largely the same; but there were two innovations: the
+establishment of a warrior caste and the introduction of military
+techniques from the West.
+
+The Manchus were a non-Chinese people living in the northeastern
+peripheral zone of Chinese civilization. They had adopted the Chinese
+form of empire and bureaucracy in their capital at Mukden in the early
+seventeenth century, before advancing toward China proper. Invited by
+the Chinese to lend their aid in a civil war, the Manchus found
+themselves excelling in effectiveness and leadership, which soon led
+them to conquer the whole country. The numerical disproportion between
+Chinese and Manchus was such that the conquerors would never have taken
+over the Empire and founded a new dynasty (the Ch'ing) had they not been
+assisted by large numbers of Chinese. On the other hand, the spectacular
+terrorism of the Manchu cavalry was a potent weapon, and the Manchus did
+not feel that they owed their throne entirely to the Chinese. They were
+in the anomalous position of half-conquerors, a people coming into China
+partly as aliens and partly as the new leaders of the Chinese. At the
+very beginning of their rule (commonly dated 1644) they had to decide on
+a policy to determine their relations with the Chinese: Should they
+allow their people to mingle with and disappear into the vast Chinese
+masses, or should they attempt a policy of racial separateness to keep
+their blood clear of Chinese dilution? Underlying this question there
+was the even more practical one: Should the Manchus rule China simply as
+another imperial house, or should they attempt to maintain their status
+as a racially separate caste of conquerors?
+
+There is a Chinese legend which tells of a high minister of state, a
+Chinese in the service of the Manchu conquerors, who saw no remedy from
+the oppression of China in his own generation, but who nevertheless
+worked with craftily concealed patriotism to sow the undoing of the
+house of the Ch'ing. He recommended to the Manchus that they keep their
+fighting men from demoralization by ordaining that no Manchu warrior
+should enter any trade or profession but those of warfare and public
+administration, and that they should guard the ancient heritage of their
+valiant blood by making miscegenation a crime. Thus he schemed to
+stiffen the Manchu monarchy in a position of unbounded arrogance, so
+that a few generations of peace would find its armies sloven, atrophied,
+and useless, and its people still alien to the Chinese. With neither
+military power to overawe the masses nor popular affection to uphold
+their foreign-rooted dynasty, they were bound to go down; all this, the
+legend tells, the Chinese adviser who lived and died with high Manchu
+honors clearly foresaw. Actually the Manchus did move in such a
+direction, and with the prophesied results.
+
+They had conquered China with their own tribal-military system intact,
+organized into units termed _banners_. Unable to hold the country by
+their own force alone and, after putting down serious rebellions,
+unwilling to depend on the Chinese, they arranged a method of dual
+garrisoning. A Manchu military hierarchy paralleled the Chinese
+bureaucracy throughout the Empire, and Manchu bannermen were placed in
+every city of strategic importance. The Manchu garrisons were made up of
+men destined to arms, men who were the descendants of the wild horsemen
+of the northeastern plains, but who soon became tragic and useless
+idlers. Forbidden entrance into the vast and vital civilian society of
+the Chinese, by a decree of their own kinsman on the throne, they spent
+generation after generation in profound peace, forgetting war and losing
+their self-respect as warriors. Whatever the reason, they did not engage
+in practices such as the extended hunts, amounting in fact to great army
+maneuvers, by which Kublai Khan kept his Mongol troops hard and ready
+for war. An English writer, familiar with the state of the Manchu
+garrisons in their last years, thus described them:
+
+  But, unhappily, the inactive bannermen, both at Peking and in the
+  provinces, had towards the end degenerated into idle, flabby, and too
+  often opium-smoking parasites; they had long neglected to keep up
+  their archery, which in any case had become useless in these days of
+  magazine rifles, though it might have nourished a wholesome muscular
+  habit of body if persisted in.... In the provinces these degenerate
+  Manchus were often, practically, honourable prisoners, rigidly
+  confined within the limits of the city walls, in the midst of a
+  semi-hostile population speaking a dialect which the bannermen ... had
+  to learn, ... if they wished even to buy a cabbage in the streets; and
+  the Tartar General, who nominally outranked even the Chinese Viceroy,
+  was really often a self-indulgent, ignorant incompetent.[11]
+
+Politically, the Chinese found themselves face to face with a foreign
+group imbued with an arrogant racial pride and determined to maintain a
+separate existence. The Manchus did not bend to the superior numbers of
+the Chinese, nor yield to the attractions of Chinese culture. They
+maintained the Manchu language at the innermost citadel of Chinese
+civilization--the Forbidden City at Peking--and stamped their West
+Asiatic script on the money of the Empire. They worked out schemes by
+which the Manchus would retain a majority in the highest offices of the
+Empire, on the sole ground of race. Elementary rationalizations of two
+opposing racial attitudes were the result. The Manchu policy fortified
+and brought back from the past the racial pride of the Chinese. They
+were not merely the civilized heart of humanity; they were, civilization
+or no civilization, bound together by blood. If the Manchu garrisons
+served no other purpose, the presence of alien troops in the cities
+taught the Chinese the first lessons of resentment; it prepared them for
+the vigorous racial-nationalist appeal which the Nationalists were to
+put forth.
+
+Governmentally, the effect of Manchu dual government was to force the
+Chinese to an increased consciousness of the implied presuppositions of
+their social and political system. The use of the garrisons constituted
+one of the four main causes of Manchu decline; the second cause was the
+violation of the strict merit system by racial preference in the
+bureaucracy; the other two were failure to maintain domestic
+tranquillity, and corruption in the hierarchy of scholar-officials.[12]
+Manchu rule by military power was unrealistic and a political affront.
+Their army of permanent occupation committed slow suicide in idleness
+and at the same time kept the Manchu dynasty from nativizing itself so
+that the Chinese might think of it as Chinese. Their creation of a
+hierarchy of bannermen, paralleling the older Chinese civilian
+institutions, brought to the surface of thought those prejudices and
+assumptions which had guided and controlled Chinese destiny for
+centuries. Government and society had been one to such a degree that the
+special features of a universal control did not require legalization or
+sharp tracing. The Manchus removed government from the rest of society
+by staining it with militarism and racial preference; it became
+ominously disparate and a conspicuous target for examination and
+consideration.
+
+In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Manchu rule brought into a
+sharper focus the largely unformulated constitutional theory which had
+underlain the Chinese imperial society for nearly twenty centuries. With
+the sharper demarcation of rulers and ruled, the Manchus had to make
+frequent and overt use of legal authority over the ideology. The Chinese
+read of the sanction of rebellion in their own classics; they could turn
+to their histories for a description of the ignoble origins of their
+present masters. The dynasty turned therefore to literary censorship and
+ordered extensive excisions from all writings scholarly, artistic, or
+other, which might weaken the prestige of their house.[13] They ordained
+a most rigid and dogmatic interpretation of the classics so as to suit
+their purposes. This the Chinese met with sharp criticism. The literary
+struggle did much to weaken the scholastic class and to deprive the
+Manchus of academic supporters. At the same time it deprived the peasant
+Chinese of their natural leaders, with the consequence that secret and
+half-literate political associations faced an arbitrary government
+military in character. The old Chinese system remained, but it became
+more and more of a form with every generation. The theory of moral
+agency and ideological control was defamed by the very presence of the
+barbarian garrisons. The barbarians themselves weakened so much that in
+the later days of the Manchu Empire the military occupation became a
+myth instead of being a political fact. For the time being, however,
+Manchu military organization acted as a force-displaying agency until
+the scholars and the less favored classes of society were able to
+combine in a revolution.
+
+Pacific government, government by moral agency, derives its greatest
+powers from assent and agreement; it thrives on symbolization and is
+never necessarily dependent upon the display of outright force.
+Government by force, on the other hand, remains effective almost in
+proportion to the exercise and vigor of that force; stereotyped and
+ritualized, it is essentially weak. Purely ceremonial administration and
+offices may be a burden on the body politic, yet their dignity may make
+up for their lack of efficiency. But an army that cannot fight is an
+object of ridicule, and its very presence a challenge to the resources
+of intelligence.
+
+The Manchu garrisons in the key cities were under the command of Manchu
+military officers, whom Europeans dubbed with the picturesque title of
+_Tartar Generals_. The garrisons were made up of three racial elements:
+Manchu, Mongol, and Chinese. The Chinese in the banner armies were the
+descendants of soldiers in the renegade Han army (_han chün_), the
+Chinese section of the Manchu-Mongol-Chinese formations which conquered
+China for the Manchus in the seventeenth century. The military
+organization seems to have been a simplified copy of civilian
+bureaucracy, with examiners, censors, and other familiar devices of
+Chinese government appearing in quasi-military form. The principle of
+merit was violated, however, in that certain categories of men claimed
+special rank by hereditary right.[14] It was also possible for some of
+the bannermen to transfer between the civilian and the military branches
+of the government.
+
+In the early nineteenth century the _han chün_ possessed considerable
+artillery. There was a separate navy, comprising more than two thousand
+war vessels equipped from a score of dockyards. Even then, Chinese
+military technology was markedly inferior to European; the Chinese navy
+was no match even for Europe's wooden warships. When ironclads entered
+Far Eastern waters and breech-loading cannon were employed, the
+difference made Chinese naval and artillery establishments almost
+antiquarian in nature. With most of the banner forces of the Empire kept
+at Peking and the rest scattered over the country in the great cities,
+the Manchu force was widely diffused. In practice their armies hardly
+exceeded a quarter of a million men; whatever the exact total, the
+military were outnumbered far over a thousand to one by the Chinese, in
+the realm which the Manchus supposedly held by conquest.
+
+The effective army in the later years of the Ch'ing dynasty was formed
+for the most part of the Green Standard (_lü ying_), provincial
+regulars, and the vast hordes of irregulars (_yung_, or "braves") who
+have traditionally done the greater share of the fighting in Chinese
+history. The Green Standard troops appear to have suffered, although to
+a lesser degree, from the long peace which ruined the banner armies, but
+their use in major police enterprises and troubles with primitive
+peoples kept them from the utter demoralization of the banners. The
+common practice under the Ch'ing was to recruit the local toughs, to
+appoint their leaders as probationary officers, and to use such
+emergency armies for real and immediate fighting. Although the Manchu
+dynasty had no system of organized reserves and little machinery for
+rapid mobilization, they were thus nevertheless able to swell their
+armies to astonishing numbers in a very short while. American military
+commentators said in 1900 that the peacetime size of the Chinese
+imperial army was about three hundred thousand men and its wartime
+strength about one million--minute figures for China's reserve of man
+power--and added:
+
+  The total strength of the standing army of China can not be exactly
+  ascertained, and if a statement of the number of men belonging to it
+  could be given, it would be of little value, as many of the men who
+  are carried on the rolls are neither armed nor equipped, and a great
+  number of them are not even performing military service, but are
+  following their usual vocations.[15]
+
+This military regime bears the air of a vast preparation for some
+foreseen but remote emergency. The Manchus themselves seemed to sleep;
+armies drowsed through the centuries, weapons rusting, tactics forgotten
+in the mimicry of parade, while all about them the factual potency of
+military power passed to the Chinese. Even the Europeans at first shared
+the illusion of great although latent military power behind the Manchu
+throne. The easy defeat of the Manchu Chinese forces in the wars with
+England and France in the early and middle nineteenth century led
+writers such as Thomas De Quincey to cry out against the great fraud of
+Asia--the sleeping Manchu giant, who was not sleeping but dead.
+
+The T'ai-p'ing rebellion[16] lasting from 1849 to 1865 provided an
+actual test of military power in the Manchu Empire, and demonstrated two
+remarkable new facts. First, the real forces were no longer the regular
+troops, whether banner or Green Standard, but the militia which might be
+organized and trained for immediate results by robust civilians like the
+viceroys Li Hung-chang and Tsêng Kuo-fan.[17] Second, the military
+technique of the Far East was obsolete; even a little Western equipment,
+leadership, and training made any Chinese army immediately more
+effective. The consequences were contradictory. If the military regime
+of the Manchus existed only in a formal sense, and actual power had
+passed to the Chinese masses, who had only to await a leadership to
+exhibit their power, then force had failed and government by moral
+agency would again be the need of the epoch. At the same time, the
+introduction of Western technique showed the possibility of a new regime
+of force, another opportunity for a minority to overwhelm the vast
+majority by sheer technical military effectiveness, and government by
+moral agency could not be sufficient. The center of military gravity
+would not simply pass to the group possessing the largest army. A new
+form of government, making intelligent use of modern weapons, was called
+for.
+
+Undoubtedly China was and is too large to be governed by mere military
+occupation--unless forces far larger than any which have heretofore
+operated in the Far East are employed. The very garrisoning of the
+country would absorb tremendous armies. At the same time, military force
+is sufficient to overawe and intimidate civilians in any given area,
+since the man with a rifle is superior to the man with the crossbow or
+spear. Conceivably, however, a rhythm may originate between the progress
+in introducing new weapons and the progress of the populace in learning
+new means of counteraction. In 1860 the British and French entered
+Peking and later burned the Summer Palace of the Manchu emperors as a
+lesson to the imperial government. The expedition, casual when measured
+by Western standards, showed that the Manchu bannermen and Chinese
+levies were equally powerless before the intrusion of a more advanced
+skill in warfare. As soon as peace was declared the Chinese began
+organizing some of their metropolitan forces after the Western manner,
+obtaining foreign instructors to put them through the Western manual of
+arms.
+
+At the same time that the Manchu court was learning to its discomfort
+the importance of Western warfare, it was calling Westerners to its aid
+in putting down the T'ai-p'ings. The Manchus assembled a nineteenth
+century navy including steam vessels from British and other sources,
+which broke up without having accomplished much. With land forces there
+was much greater success; an American, Frederick Townsend Ward, and an
+Englishman, Major Charles George ("Chinese") Gordon, organized a small
+body of imperial regular troops along Western lines and with Western
+officers. This force was given the honorific title of "Ever Victorious
+Army" by the court, and together with the militia organized by Tsêng
+Kuo-fan and Li Hung-chang suppressed the T'ai-p'ing rebellion after the
+banner and Green Standard armies had failed.
+
+The ensuing thirty years (1865-1895) witnessed the slow decline in
+Manchu foreign policy and military development and a gradual crumbling
+of Chinese society at large. Revolutionaries such as Sun Yat-sen
+received their first baptism of Westernization in the 1870's and 1880's,
+and foreign trade rose by great leaps. Occasionally the Empire's
+military regime seemed to rally. Between 1883 and 1885 the Chinese
+forces fighting the French in Indo-China were equipped with Mannlicher
+rifles far more up-to-date than the weapons of their enemies. In the
+preceding decade the Chinese destroyed a Mohammedan state set up in
+Chinese Turkestan in defiance of their suzerainty, and overawed the
+Russians into evacuating an area along the Ili seized under the pretence
+of maintaining order. The lack of coordination between the different
+agencies of government was as much to blame for China's weakness as were
+the specific defects of the central departments. When the army was
+winning, the diplomatic agencies yielded; when the army was unprepared,
+the diplomatic agencies, by some ill-timed impertinence, gave aliens the
+pretext for hostilities.
+
+The first Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) offered another test. Hitherto,
+the armed conflicts with Europeans, even including the entry of
+Westerners into Peking in 1860, had seemed remote from the actual
+problem of military power in China. The Europeans might possibly
+withdraw and leave the Empire in peace. But incalculable danger would
+arise to Chinese prestige should the _wo_, the sea dwarfs, defeat the
+Chinese and eat more deeply into the mainland. Chinese began to realize
+that in this war their status was at stake, not only in the dimly
+perceived wide universe of the Westerners but also in that of the Far
+East in which they had long held such comfortable hegemony. They entered
+the war relatively well equipped, so that even outside observers were
+doubtful of the outcome of the struggle. No one was more amazed than the
+Chinese themselves when they were whipped as no modern nation has been
+whipped, routed ignominiously in a sequence of slaughters, and
+ultimately forced to make important territorial and financial
+concessions to the Japanese.
+
+This catastrophe was followed by a series of reforms, some designed to
+enable China to meet the West on its own ground. In January, 1896, a
+turning point was reached with the appointment of Yüan Shih-k'ai to
+command the one efficient brigade assembled in the course of the
+war.[18] Yüan was to find in modern arms the career which led to his
+dictatorship after the fall of the Empire, and was to perform notable
+work as a military and administrative reformer, although of restricted
+value. He joined the reactionaries and brought to an end the Hundred
+Days of Reform of 1898, a movement generated by the initiative of the
+idealistic young Emperor Kuang Hsü, who sought to direct China into the
+course already taken by Japan--modernization within the imperial system.
+In 1900 there occurred the wild upheaval of the Boxers. It began as a
+native racial uprising against the Manchus, but was deflected by the
+Manchus into the support of the court and hostility against the Western
+intruders. During the Boxer movement part of the fighting against the
+Westerners was done by regular banner and Green Standard troops, but the
+greater part by bands of desperadoes and fanatics. The imperial army
+suffered in the chaos following the international occupation of Peking.
+
+Under the name of the _Wu Wei Chün_ the first large-scale attempt was
+made to modernize the Chinese armed forces. After the military and naval
+experiments of the 1860's and later decades, this enterprise evoked
+great hopes. The new army was inaugurated in 1895 with foreign
+instruction and foreign arms. In 1901 one division was made the core of
+Yüan Shih-k'ai's new modern force. Rodney Gilbert, a British publicist,
+has summarized the military changes down to the end of the Manchu
+dynasty as follows:
+
+  In January 1901 the Yangtze Viceroys submitted a memorial to the
+  Throne suggesting among other things the disbandment of the useless
+  _Lü Ying_ [Armies of the Green Standard], the employment of the
+  Bannermen, almost as useless, in service other than military, and the
+  creation of a modern army. This brought forth an Imperial decree
+  ordering reorganization of the army, of which Yuan Shih-kai, then
+  Viceroy of Chihli, took advantage to build up six new divisions, four
+  of which were transferred to the Ministry of War in 1906. This was
+  the real beginning of the _Lu Chun_, the Chinese National Army. In
+  January, 1905, a comprehensive scheme was outlined designed to give
+  China an army of 36 Divisions or 360,000 men, by the year 1911. Three
+  years after this decision was made there were about 60,000 men, with
+  360 guns, in the North, and 40,000 men, with 174 guns, in the South.
+  The army was developing along sound lines when Yuan Shih-kai was
+  removed from office in 1908 after the death of his great patroness
+  the Empress Dowager, and the direction of military, as well as
+  other affairs, fell into the hands of the Manchu princes, whose
+  mismanagement contributed much to the downfall of their dynasty three
+  years later.[19]
+
+The beginning, although auspicious, did not mean that even the model
+sections of the modernized forces were comparable to those of other
+lands. The confusion of weapons was already evident. A member of the
+United States General Staff wrote in 1910:
+
+  To arm these masses China has been obliged to use weapons that are
+  considered somewhat out of date. There are four types of rifles,
+  mostly Mausers and Japanese Murata rifles of old pattern. They are,
+  however, breech-loading, small-caliber weapons, not to be despised,
+  even if they do not reach the ideal which some nations set. In fact
+  they are the weapons which have been used in the great wars of most
+  recent date.
+
+  It is so also with the artillery where even a greater difference of
+  types is to be observed. This is, undoubtedly, a serious drawback,
+  owing, of course, to the great difficulty of providing ammunition.[20]
+
+It was during this period, from the decisive defeat of the dynasty by
+Japan in 1895 to the Republican Revolution of 1911-1912, that the
+Chinese revolutionaries most eagerly studied military manuals and sought
+to purchase Western arms to offset the great advantages gained by the
+modernized portions of the imperial army. Sun Yat-sen became almost as
+much a military authority as he was a political philosopher and leader;
+his chief military follower, General Huang Hsing, performed for the
+revolutionaries the services rendered for the regime by Yüan Shih-k'ai.
+On both sides there was the anxiety to master the mysteries of twentieth
+century warfare. The World War had not yet begun, nor had the staggering
+burdens of modern armament become evident. Great as were the
+improvements in fighting, prewar military organization seemed still
+primarily a matter of well-equipped infantry, properly led, properly
+drilled, and supported by adequate artillery and other auxiliary
+services. Wireless, gas, airplanes, tanks, submarines, torpedo launches,
+and mechanized or aerialized infantry were little more than a matter of
+speculation. The proportions of present-day military budgets no one
+could foresee.
+
+
+_The Army and the Republican Revolution_
+
+The Republican Revolution of 1911-1912 was the last overt act in the
+collapse of the ideologically maintained social system; it brought
+armies into violently free play in the support of movements toward
+re-formation of the ideology and articulation and control of the
+society. On October 10, 1911, the troops of the Wuch'ang garrison rose
+in mutiny and sided with the revolution. A series of uprisings
+engineered by military and agitational leaders followed, province by
+province, all directed against the imperial power in the North. The use
+of violence in Chinese politics served to accentuate a condition which
+had affected China even in the earliest historic times--the unresolved
+contradictions between the North and the South. Differences of race,
+spoken language, and economy produced fundamental cleavages accentuated
+by temperament. Traditionally the North was more conservative and
+solidaristic, the South more rebellious and enterprising. Sun Yat-sen
+was a Southerner; militarism reached its sharpest effectiveness in the
+North.
+
+Yüan Shih-k'ai, who had proved himself the evil genius of Emperor Kuang
+Hsü by betraying the monarch's reforms of 1898, was called to the aid of
+the Manchus only to betray them to the Republic; he then served the
+Republic with the intention of seizing complete power for himself. The
+Republicans set up their regime in Nanking on January 1, 1912, with Sun
+Yat-sen as president. They established contact with Yüan, who acted in
+the triple capacity of negotiator for the Manchus, representative of the
+modernized armies of the North (which were his), and leader in his own
+right and in his own interest. The Republicans realized that Yüan could
+not be dispossessed--indeed, it is fairly certain that he could have
+upheld the throne had he so wished. Their power was indefinite, and as
+Chinese they preferred compromise and order to ideals pushed to the
+bitter end. In the middle of February they yielded to Yüan, and Sun
+surrendered to him the presidency as a reward for his allegiance to the
+Republic. Yüan, for the Manchus, secured a settlement by which the
+Forbidden City (the residence of the emperor in Peking) was made into a
+second Vatican City; the emperor was allowed his formal and ritual
+titles (a status remarkably like that of the Pope) and a very
+substantial stipend. For the Northern armies and himself Yüan obtained
+actual power over the country. A civilian, but a soldier as well, Yüan
+rose by both intrigue and the implied threat of force.
+
+The Republic was launched by valedictory imperial edicts ordering the
+imperial officials throughout the realm to obey Yüan and the new form of
+government; by Republicans nominally headed by their greatest and
+coldest antagonist; and by a soldier of higher professional standing in
+the Western sense than any Chinese leader for centuries past undertaking
+the task of keeping order and ushering China through drastic
+reconstruction. For a few halcyon months it seemed as though the
+Republic might grow into reality from under the aegis of military
+dictatorship.[21] But soon it became apparent that the revolution was
+not a transfer of power and renovation of order but the dissolution of
+power and the erasure of order. What was left was ideological
+uncertainty, social turmoil, economic disorganization--with politics
+reduced to mere pageantry, and the armies, ominously growing under the
+care of President Yüan, maintaining what little order was left to
+maintain. In 1913 the Nationalist-Republicans rebelled in the Yangtze
+valley and were crushed by the armies of the government of the Republic
+of China.
+
+From the military rule of Yüan Shih-k'ai there emerged an army system
+which was to bring China to almost complete political ruin in the decade
+after Yüan's death. Although he organized a model regiment as a sample
+of what could be done in China, inflation of numbers and deterioration
+of morale and _matériel_ were the most obvious symptoms of the new role
+of the army--a role much more concerned with problems of domestic
+intrigue than with defense against the outsiders. For an army of
+national defense, high technical excellence and a commensurate smallness
+of numbers are desirable features; for an army of dictatorship or
+occupation, inferior equipment, poor supplies, and inefficient training
+are all trifling handicaps in comparison with the advantage of vast
+numbers which can be used to garrison large sections of the realm and
+meet the threat of civil war. The very shift from empire to republic
+involved the enlistment of additional thousands of revolutionary
+fighters; once in the army, they were hard to dislodge. The personal
+military interests of Yüan led him to expand the army, and his political
+ambitions nourished the thought that the country would be secure beneath
+him only through the medium of an extensive garrison system. Finally,
+there was a far-reaching shift in the Chinese social pyramid. Men of
+intelligence and of education flocked to the army, and Japan's military
+schools were crowded with young Chinese who saw in war their easiest
+avenue to fortune or to the service of their country.
+
+A reconstituted army, soldiers who could command greater respect than
+ever before, numerical extension and qualitative deterioration of the
+national armed forces--these were the more patent military changes under
+the Republic. To them must be added the factors fusing the elements into
+a system that was to bring immediate fortune and ultimate ruin to
+practically all who ventured into its operations. Many of the provinces
+which turned to the cause of the revolutionaries in 1911 and 1912 became
+gradually militarized. When the Manchus were gone, the old distinction
+between the Tartar General and the civilian viceroy had lost its
+purpose; the new provincial executives combined both military and
+governmental powers. Provincial jealousies and the growing disorder
+favored a strong factual autonomy for the various provinces, even though
+there was no technical claim of provincial independence and very little
+even of confederation. The first Republic was in name a centralized
+parliamentary-presidential state with quasi-federal features; in fact it
+was the combination of an impotent, headless imperial bureaucracy and a
+presidential military dictatorship possessing physically limited and
+indefinable authority over a large group of provinces. Between China and
+the accomplishment of regular and orderly republican government there
+stood ignorance, turmoil, poverty, reaction, and despair. Between Yüan's
+regime and the _tuchün_ system there stood only Yüan's might.
+
+
+NOTES
+
+[1] Herrlee G. Creel, _The Birth of China_, p. 141, London, 1936.
+
+[2] _Ibid._, pp. 142-154.
+
+[3] Marcel Granet, _Chinese Civilization_, p. 270, New York, 1930.
+Quoted by permission of the American publishers, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
+
+[4] Henri Maspero, _La Chine antique_, p. 131, Paris, 1927. This is one
+of the most valuable surveys of ancient China.
+
+[5] An elementary discussion of this period is to be found in Paul M.
+A. Linebarger, _The Political Doctrines of Sun Yat-sen_, pp. 25-29,
+"Nation and State in Chinese Antiquity," Baltimore, 1937.
+
+[6] Pan Ku (H. H. Dubs, translator), _The History of the Former Han
+Dynasty, passim_, Baltimore, 1938.
+
+[7] In a memorandum prepared in response to a request by the present
+writer.
+
+[8] _Ibid._
+
+[9] Thomas Taylor Meadows, _The Chinese and Their Rebellions_, p. 24,
+London, 1856. His accounts of the T'ai-p'ing rebellion even today
+possess great liveliness and interest and illuminate twentieth century
+Chinese problems.
+
+[10] _Ibid._, p. 25.
+
+[11] E. H. Parker, _China ..._, pp. 259-260, New York, 1917.
+
+[12] A. N. Holcombe, _The Chinese Revolution_, pp. 70-81, Cambridge,
+1930.
+
+[13] See Luther Carrington Goodrich, _The Literary Inquisition of
+Ch'ien-lung_, Baltimore, 1935.
+
+[14] The most extensive source of information on Manchu military
+organization in China is T. F. Wade, "The Army of the Chinese Empire:
+Its Two Great Divisions, the Bannermen or National Guard, and the Green
+Standard or Provincial Troops; Their Organization, Pay, Condition &c.,"
+_The Chinese Repository_ (Canton), vol. 20, pp. 250-280, 300-340,
+363-422, 1851, which is now unfortunately rare. William James Hail,
+_Tseng Kuo-fan and the Taiping Rebellion_, New Haven, 1927, presents an
+accessible and informative digest of this and other material in its
+opening pages. Two French works based on Wade are Jules Picard, _État
+générale des forces maritimes et militaires de la Chine ..._, Paris,
+1860, and P. Dabry, _Organisation militaire des Chinois, ou la Chine et
+ses armées_, Paris, 1859. William Frederick Mayers, _The Chinese
+Government_, Shanghai, 1897, is one of the most valuable references for
+the structure of the last imperial government of China; designed as a
+manual of titles, it presents a concise outline of all major civil and
+military offices. A more elaborate treatise is P. C. Hsieh, _The Chinese
+Government_, 1644-1911, Baltimore, 1925. See also Anatol M. Kotenev,
+_The Chinese Soldier_, Shanghai, 1937. The text refers to Wade, p. 391,
+and Hsieh, p. 260.
+
+[15] United States War Department, Adjutant-General's Office, no. 30,
+_Notes on China_, pp. 57-69, "The Chinese Army," Washington, 1900.
+Except for cursory references, this pamphlet is of no great value.
+
+[16] See above, pp. 32 ff.
+
+[17] See Hail, _op. cit._ in note 14.
+
+[18] See Meribeth E. Cameron, _The Reform Movement in China_, 1898-1912,
+p. 59, Stanford, 1931.
+
+[19] H. G. W. Woodhead (ed.), _The China Year Book_, 1921-2, Tientsin,
+1921; chap. XIX, "Defense," by Rodney Gilbert, pp. 511-512. Gilbert's is
+a competent contemporary account of tuchünism, sketching the background
+very clearly.
+
+[20] George H. Blakeslee (ed.), _China and the Far East_, New York,
+1910, Chapter X, "The Chinese Army--Its Development and Present
+Strength," by Major Eben Swift, p. 181. See also General H. Frey,
+_L'Armée chinoise: l'armée ancienne, l'armée nouvelle, l'armée chinoise
+dans l'avenir_, Paris, 1904.
+
+[21] For a discussion of the governmental changes of the period see
+below, pp. 145 ff. See also H. F. MacNair, _China in Revolution_,
+Chicago, 1931; A. N. Holcombe, _The Spirit of the Chinese Revolution_,
+New York, 1931. For a contemporary censure of Yüan Shih-k'ai see Paul
+Myron [Paul M. W. Linebarger], _Our Chinese Chances_, Chicago, 1915.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter_ V
+
+CAUSES
+
+
+Yüan's closing years might have resembled Napoleon's rise from the
+position of First Consul to that of emperor, had he not been checked at
+the very last moment by armed uprisings and expressions of deep popular
+contempt. Even so, he retained control of the country.[1] The
+humiliation of his defeat lacked even dramatic compensations, and he
+died in June, 1916, of disease, poison, or chagrin. With his death the
+Republic had a chance to stand by itself, but it could not.
+
+
+_The Age of the War Lords_
+
+Yüan had fastened the symbols of old on the scaffolding of a new order.
+With his death the momentum of administrative routine retained from the
+Manchu dynasty was lost; the Republican government in Peking degenerated
+from impotence to comedy. The process called government began to
+nauseate patriotic Chinese and foreigners alike; few were able to take a
+long view, to maintain their courage, and to keep on fighting against
+disgusting and disheartening realities. With the decomposition of the
+central government--except the modern bureaucracies such as posts and
+customs, which were kept intact by their foreign personnel and their
+special international status--the armies, though divided provincially,
+stepped into positions of unprecedented authority. There was a veritable
+epidemic of monarchical ambition, greed, and willfulness among the
+provincial military commanders; many Chinese expected a new Yüan to
+emerge from that group and become the "strong man of China." With such a
+stage to strut on, it is not surprising that the Chinese military lost
+constructive vision. A sober nucleus of idealistically hard-headed,
+patriotic men, each a George Washington, might have used military power
+to reunite the country, but order could not be expected to emerge from
+the unsystematized competition of armed forces.
+
+Three broader factors affected the ascendancy of war lords, in addition
+to obvious motives and interests. The ideological ruin was bad enough;
+the consequent social disorder crippled China. But the armies now came
+to provide a refuge for the unemployed and dispossessed. A second
+factor, the mechanical mobilization of military forces through the
+railways, made warfare more expensive and ruinous than it would have
+been with the slow-moving infantry of the past. Thirdly, the war lords
+gave physical embodiment to the ideological and social disunity of
+China, inviting the constant intervention of the Western powers and of
+Japan in Chinese affairs.
+
+Individually the war lords warrant no special attention. There was Chang
+Tso-lin in Manchuria; Tuan Chi-jui and Ts'ao Kun in North China; Yen
+Hsi-shan ("The Model Governor") and, to the west of him, Fêng Yü-hsiang
+("The Christian General"); Chang Chung-chang in Shantung, significant
+more for his brutality than for his political and military position; the
+quaint, conservative scholar Wu P'ei-fu, in the Yangtze valley, minor
+figures in the South and West. It was not the generals who were
+important, but militarism.
+
+Militarism machine-gunned the Confucian ethics out of politics; it taxed
+the land into ruin; it laid China wide open to imperialistic thrusts,
+and--by the same act--made her a poor market. Militarism built roads
+when they were strategically required, established a few railways and
+spoiled more, modernized China, but did so in the costliest way of all.
+Only in the intellectual world was military domination not outright
+destruction. The generals and their staffs were surprisingly ignorant of
+the power of ideas, ineffectual in their censorship, oblivious to the
+great leverage of undercover agitation. Trusting arms, they failed to
+see that the only opposition able to destroy them was not military but
+mental.
+
+While the soldiery stirred the country with murder and oppression, their
+system progressed steadily toward self-destruction. Two great pressures
+forced constant further expansion of the armies. The first is obvious:
+military rivalry. The second was the growing abuse of army organization
+as a means of unemployment relief. Military taxation drove the peasants
+off the land, whereupon they had no recourse but to become bandits or
+soldiers. If they were bandits, consolidation under a chieftain
+transformed them into military irregulars and induced some ambitious
+general to include them in his forces. If they were soldiers, the bandit
+stage remained in reach. In either case, they added to the burden
+falling upon their commander, which in turn led to still greater
+impoverishment of the peasants, a further increase of dispossessed men,
+bandits, and soldiers. With the widening circulation of arms, Western
+guns and fighting methods became less and less a secret of small groups
+capable of establishing a firm military oligarchy and more and more the
+property of a cross section of the Chinese masses.
+
+From an estimated total of 1,369,880 in 1921,[2] the number of men under
+arms rose to a figure estimated to be between 1,883,300 and 1,933,300
+five years later.[3] This increase occurred in one of the poorest
+countries of the world, despite conditions of extreme misery:
+
+  Recruiting goes on incessantly in every town in North China where
+  there is a garrison. There are no statistics available, but it is
+  known that the death rate from disease is very high because, even in
+  garrison, sanitary precautions are crude and the medical service is
+  inefficient and inadequate. In battle the care of the wounded is
+  barbarously primitive, even in the best units, and death from infected
+  wounds is rather the rule than the exception; while those who cannot
+  walk from the field to the nearest hospital more often than not die of
+  exposure or clumsy handling. One of a Chinese commander's major
+  concerns is filling the gaps in the ranks, but at the same time these
+  conditions have kept the proportions of the armies down to a fairly
+  constant figure. Chinese officers have advanced the theory that if
+  recruiting were everywhere abandoned, disease, desertions and losses
+  in battle would account for ten per cent. per annum, so that the
+  armies would automatically cease to exist in ten years.[4]
+
+The use of the railways for military purposes unsettled large groups of
+Chinese geographically and caused meetings of extensive bodies of men
+from different areas. At first such contacts, especially under wartime
+conditions, would only intensify provincial sentiment and mistrust of
+strangers, but gradually this influence began to make for a new national
+consciousness. In the meantime, the troops learned the intricacies of
+modern transport. A coolie in a peaceful part of Asia might see trains
+for years, observing the Westerners riding in them, and remain impressed
+by the sight; a Chinese bandit sitting on a freight car in a
+commandeered train would become rapidly familiar with the fire vehicles.
+
+The role of the militarists with respect to China's international status
+was ambiguous. In the first place, the weakness which they created
+reduced China to an international pawn. The discord into which she had
+fallen allowed for semipartitions--various foreign interests backing
+different war lords--although a genuine partition may thereby have been
+staved off. In China proper the influence of the Japanese seemed to be
+behind Chang Tso-lin and the Northern militarists; the British were
+regarded as friendly to Wu P'ei-fu in the Yangtze valley; and the French
+achieved something not far from domination in the province farthest
+southwest, Yünnan. Fêng Yü-hsiang was supposed to have veered
+picturesquely for foreign friends between the Protestant missions and
+the Bolshevik agents. A miniature replica of the European balance of
+power could be played in China, with outside groups friendly to one or
+the other war lord. An agreement between the chief participants in 1919
+sought to prevent the shipping of arms to unauthorized military groups
+in China but proved largely ineffectual in the end.
+
+Between 1922 and 1926 there was formed in South China a nexus of armies
+which were to provide the military edge to ideological revolution and
+establish the followers of Sun Yat-sen in power. These armies were built
+up with the assistance of Russian and German advisers and with American
+arms which had been left in Siberia and had fallen into the hands of the
+Bolsheviks; the troops were led by new-style Chinese officers under the
+leadership of Chiang K'ai-shek. The Whampoa Academy was the most obvious
+sign of the new school of military thought, coming forth as a
+consequence of the Nationalist-Communist coalition.[5] Armaments did not
+differ in any substantial degree from those of the war lords, but they
+were more carefully kept and more skillfully used. The military machine
+which arose in the South was better organized, better disciplined,
+better led, and better cared for than any army on the Chinese scene for
+a decade.
+
+From 1926 to 1927 the ensuing campaign for the Nationalist conquest of
+China, as outlined in the principles of Sun Yat-sen,[6] drove forward
+with striking success. The Nationalist troops everywhere pushed their
+enemies before them with astonishing speed. The explanation is to be
+found in part in the efficiency and military honesty of officers and
+men, but even more in the nonmilitary factors which fortified the armies
+and the ideological weapons which cleared the ground before it. The new
+armies not only represented military might; they were also propaganda
+machines. To every regiment there was attached a political staff to keep
+up the morale of the troops and to win over the enemy and the civilian
+population. The troops themselves were propaganda brigades as well as
+military units. Literacy in the armies was made a point of great pride,
+and certain divisions made novel reputations for themselves on this
+ground. The Nationalists were known by many as the soldiers who did not
+harm the people. Without the troops the Nationalists would never have
+come to power; but without the supporting sweep of mass propaganda the
+Nationalist movement might have gone on for decades in the form of
+civilian conspirators fighting against overwhelming odds or else seeking
+to make venal mercenaries the prime instrument for the regeneration of
+Chinese civilization.
+
+The military revolution of 1926-1927 brought new factors to the Chinese
+military scene. It indicated that a point of equilibrium had been
+reached between the military and the ideological modes of control and
+that it was no longer possible for sheer force and a minimum of
+intelligence to hold unchallenged power in the Chinese society. It was,
+furthermore, a threefold struggle: a patriotic and progressive uprising
+against domestic and foreign oppression and inefficiency; an agrarian
+revolt on a grand scale; and a proletarian uprising on the part of the
+relatively small but strategically placed Chinese proletariat. Only in
+the first of these aspects did the revolution meet with the approval of
+most Chinese--the victims and not the bearers of arms. Men of all shades
+of opinion were able to agree on a policy of attacking the system of
+_tuchüns_, which offered no planning for the future, no resurrection of
+the past, and little public order. The patriotic troops were enraged by
+the corruption and inadequacy all about them and by the fortresses of
+privilege reared by aliens on their coasts and in their greatest inland
+cities.
+
+The campaign of 1926-1927 marked the identification of the coolie
+soldier with his own class and of the peasant fighter with his. The rank
+and file were given to understand that they were not fighting in some
+game beyond their understanding but for the security of people like
+themselves. Under the influence of the propaganda put forth by the
+Nationalists and the allied Communists, an incipient agrarian revolt was
+fanned into flame and proletarian uprisings in the cities were made
+possible for the first time. Whole sections of the countryside fell into
+a condition not far from anarchy as the revolutionary troops led the
+people in revolt. After 1927, however, the military forces developed
+along two antagonistic lines. The Nationalists, seizing the political
+instruments of the revolution but finding its ideological factors
+largely beyond their control, began to create a professionalized army
+with which to stabilize their regime. The Communists, and their agrarian
+allies, standing to the Left of the newborn Nanking government, were
+eager to fight on in the tested informal fashion. In the year of the
+establishment of the Nanking government, 1927, the Red Army could still
+demonstrate its effectiveness. Shortly afterward the precautionary arms
+embargo of the foreign powers, which had prevailed since 1919, was
+lifted, thereby opening up the means by which Chiang K'ai-shek could
+renovate and specialize the armies under his command.
+
+The break with the war-lord tradition was much more obvious in the case
+of the Communists than in the case of the Nationalists. The Communists,
+lacking sufficient support to occupy any broad contiguous territory,
+fell back on guerrilla fighting of their own. The Nationalists, strong
+enough to hold a certain portion of the area, nevertheless compromised
+with the existing military system to seek mastery. For three years after
+the establishment of the Nanking government, it remained doubtful
+whether the whole government might not subside into inertia and neglect,
+leaving Chiang standing alone, distinguished from the other war lords
+only by his character.
+
+Late in 1930 and early in 1931 a menacing alliance was organized between
+two of the most influential remaining Northern _tuchüns_ and the
+"liberal" wing of the Nationalists. Operating from the north, after the
+proclamation of an insurgent "National Government" at Peking, the rebels
+at first seemed to have the military advantage. Chiang had learned many
+lessons, however, and in the most serious fighting which China had seen
+in years he broke the force of the Northern offensive. Airplanes
+appeared as a threat against the civilian population of Peking, although
+no actual deaths were reported. There were ugly rumors that gas was
+being used at the front. Small tanks from England, though giving a
+rather poor performance, symbolized a novel trend. More and better heavy
+artillery was used than ever before. Trenches came up to World War
+standards. The war ended with the intervention from Manchuria of Chang
+Hsüeh-liang, a strangely progressive and patriotic _tuchün_; but the
+fighting had been enough to show that of all the great armed forces in
+China the Nationalist armies of Chiang K'ai-shek and the Nanking
+government were the most effective.
+
+The rehabilitation of men's thinking had not proceeded far enough to
+eliminate the dangers of an overemphasized military leadership, but the
+tide had turned. After 1931 the military situation in China had become
+subordinate to the problems of ideology and of government. The chief
+military factors were now the governmentalized armies, the guerrilla
+opposition of the Communists, and the problem of foreign war.
+
+
+_The Age of Air Conquest_
+
+The new military period which replaced the war-lord system was marked by
+(1) technical improvement of the armies, especially in the direction of
+air power; (2) supplementation of the armies by the quasi-military power
+of the civil government, so that Chinese wars ceased to be a question
+of armed bands drifting about the surface of the social system;
+(3) organization of the Nationalist armies into national units in
+fact as well as name; (4) increasing pressure of the disbandment
+problem; (5) development of guerrilla tactics by the Reds and of
+guerrilla-suppression tactics by the Nationalists; (6) problems arising
+from Japanese conquest, which overwhelmed Manchuria in one fierce
+onslaught and harassed China for six years of military aggressions
+before breaking forth anew in the catastrophic surge of 1937-1938.
+
+Aviation was to leap to a sensational place. Aviation and national
+civilian government became almost natural complements of one another.
+Only by aviation could all parts of the country be brought under the
+jurisdiction of Nanking and the geographical handicaps of China be
+overcome, and only a national government could afford the long-term
+investments in machines and men necessary to effective air armament. The
+record of technical improvement in the Nationalist armies is clearly
+symbolized by the advancement of military aircraft. Military aviation in
+China previous to the establishing of the Nanking government
+demonstrated the weakness of the preceding regime. As early as 1909 a
+French aviator was giving demonstration flights over Shanghai.[7] The
+Ch'ing dynasty sought to establish an airplane factory but met with no
+success. Yüan Shih-k'ai purchased a few planes and set up a flying
+school. The first telling use of planes in Chinese politics and war
+occurred, however, with the bombardment of the imperial palace by a lone
+aviator in the course of an attempted monarchical restoration in 1917.
+In the period of the war lords there were many isolated efforts to build
+up flying services. The most promising of these, undertaken by the
+Peking Republic with British assistance after 1920, failed through
+neglect, mismanagement, and corruption. As late as 1928 there was no
+prospect of significant air fighting in China.
+
+By 1931 the Nanking government had built up an air force of about
+seventy serviceable planes; a contemporary commentator observed,
+"Aeroplanes played a very considerable--some would even say a
+decisive--part in the civil war of 1930...."[8] By 1932, when an
+American aviation mission arrived to help in the training of a Chinese
+military air force, the estimates ran into a total of 125 to 140
+commercial and training planes.[9] In the ensuing five years the Chinese
+national air force developed rapidly. It played the leading role in
+suppressing the Fukien uprising of 1932-1933 and in driving the
+Communists into the Northwest. In 1937 the head of the American aviation
+mission, Colonel John Jouett, wrote, "Japan maintains that China has a
+thousand planes; my guess would be seven hundred and fifty of all types.
+But no one knows...."[10] Other experts would reduce the figure to
+one-third or less by the elimination of planes which would not be of
+first-class utility in actual combat. The preparations for foreign
+hostilities up to 1937 were accompanied by such a degree of secrecy that
+definite figures are not available. For domestic purposes, however,
+almost every plane would count, and the cardinal fact remains that
+domestically the National Government possesses a monopoly of air power
+in China. It is thereby in a better position to make its supreme will
+formidably known than was any emperor of any dynasty. The future may
+show that Chinese mastery of aircraft is psychologically as important as
+was mastery of the steamship for the Japanese--a visible demonstration
+to an Asiatic people of their own accomplishments with Western
+technology.
+
+As for other improvements of the armies, only three factors need be
+mentioned. The armies were consolidated generally, and with their better
+status--in literacy, pay, means of subsistence, and regularity of
+control--there came a realization that the military force was the
+creature of the national state. The Chinese nation was taking form as an
+ideological and social entity of sufficient strength to command the
+direct allegiance of fighting men. A new respect arose for the officers
+and men of the armies. Under Yüan Shih-k'ai the armies had been able to
+evolve a respectability of their own making; under Chiang K'ai-shek this
+respectability began to be accepted at its face value by the rest of the
+society, so that a pilot was not only admired by the crowd but was
+recognized as an expert among experts, even in literary and civil-minded
+circles. Secondly, the armies affected the nation by road construction.
+In the course of the Nationalist-Communist wars of 1927-1937 the
+Nationalists built thousands of miles of highway in order to make full
+use of their new mobility gained from machine power. The military roads,
+supplemented by civilian roads built with an eye to military use,
+constituted a network of communications upon which a new political
+geography could be framed--with new strategic points and new avenues of
+commerce. Thirdly, the armies began to emphasize culture and comfort.
+The soldiers were given a taste of twentieth century life and standards;
+their civilian kin and friends who lived under less favorable conditions
+saw in the elite sections of the armies a mass demonstration of China's
+modernization.
+
+In the age of air power in China the relation between the army, the
+government, and the economy was revolutionized. The new power of a state
+with actual authority[11] led to the creation of an army dependent on an
+intricate and sensitive financial and economic system, operating under a
+regular scheme of law. The strength of the government made modern armies
+possible; modern armies made corresponding political forms imperative. A
+resulting tendency was for the armies to take on national form. Even in
+those areas where _tuchünism_ had left its imprint upon society, or
+where provincial autonomy provided a factual check upon the national
+authorities, the regional armies accepted organizational details and
+long-range plans set forth by the central government. Armies which had
+arisen as dumps for the unemployed or as resources for civil war were
+fitted together so as to make the Chinese forces resemble the other
+armies of the world--which exist for the preservation, defense, or
+aggrandizement of national states. Foreign military observers, equipped
+with the critical faculties of their profession, might look at the
+Chinese armies and state point-blank that China had not an army but
+merely armed men. They could not, however, deny that the Chinese armed
+forces in their latest phase were on the way to becoming an army
+nationally organized and fit to serve as the instrument of a great
+nation. The lessons of nearly a thousand years of European and American
+political experience may be epitomized in great part in the word
+_nation_; the Chinese armies helped to give this word true significance
+in China.
+
+For the time being, the armies continued to serve their role of a refuge
+for the economically displaced. Armed paupers are a menace to the
+security and stability of any society; with the emergence of a higher
+degree of Chinese unity a great proportion of the armed forces lost
+their _raison d'être_. Nevertheless, the last great war-lord war, that
+of 1930-1931, was fought largely over the issue of army reduction. The
+National Government forces gradually increased in preparation for the
+disbandment of others--extensive bodies of irregulars were roughly
+systematized and placed under central supervision. They were used in
+moderately successful but insufficient colonization efforts in the
+Northwest, and as labor reserves in the construction of highways,
+airports, and similar projects. Even so, the size of the armies did not
+cease to interfere with their rapid improvement. Too much had to go into
+pay, even with the ridiculously low rates of compensation. As against
+the estimates of nearly 1,400,000 men for 1921 and about 1,900,000 for
+1926, the size of the armies was unofficially estimated at 2,379,770 for
+1936.[12] This figure did not include Communists, brigands, or the
+Manchurian garrisons in the service of the Japanese (the Manchoukuo
+army), which would bring the total to well over 2,500,000 men.
+Differences in definition of what made a coolie or peasant into a
+soldier caused violent discrepancies in the estimates. If training equal
+to that of a German Republican Reichswehr soldier were set as the
+criterion, the Chinese army could be measured in scores. If some more or
+less vague relation to a military payroll, or to the possession of arms,
+or both, were taken as the requirements, the number would run into
+millions. Japanese propagandists, in the light of these facts, made
+injudicious statements when commenting thus on the Chinese army of 1937:
+
+  China had 198 divisions comprising 2,250,000 officers and men. This
+  gigantic army has further been reinforced by 200,000 Communist
+  soldiers whom Nanking worked hard to set against Japan.
+
+  In comparison the Japanese Army is a puny affair, consisting of 17
+  divisions of 250,000 officers and men.[13]
+
+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 constituted 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 masses 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 passion 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, mass 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
+_matériel_, 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 Japanese 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 Japanese 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 Japan 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 Yüan
+Shih-k'ai as its midwife. Yüan 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 tuchüns 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 Yüan into separate entities 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
+masses, 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 Yüan Shih-k'ai. The years after his death were a pitiful
+period wherein the civilian authorities in the central government
+constituted either the puppets of the war lords or their sycophants. The
+Peking Republic fell into the expedient of giving _de jure_ status to
+every shift in the interplay of power. Military leaders of provincial
+importance easily captured the functions of _tuchüns_; regional leaders
+obtained correspondingly higher titles. The Peking Republic tried to
+govern on the Western pattern when the country was not ready for it, and
+it governed poorly. Soon it passed 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 classes 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 masses
+into the revolution of 1926-1927, and the necessity of establishing
+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 masses 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,
+associated in villages (_hui_) and families but tilling their own land
+in fairly small units. The farming class provided the nourishment for
+the bulk of society but did not hold a low status, since the
+compensations of interclass kinship 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 quantities. 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 class
+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
+Mêng 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 passed, 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 _tuchüns_ 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 _tuchün_ 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 _tuchün_ 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 competitive 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 class 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
+constitute a nation in fact; they had even lost the old unity of the
+Confucian society. The _tuchüns_ 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
+class 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 constitute 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]-wên), 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 Japanese 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 Japanese invasion in 1931.
+
+The crowning point in the economic achievements of the National
+Government at Nanking was the successful institution 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 leadership 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 Japanese 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 ownership 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 Japanese leaders visualized as part
+of the manifest destiny of their country. The Japanese might have
+tolerated the _tuchün_ system for decades had the _tuchüns_ 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 Japan; if that
+republic was bound by sheer physical proportions to overshadow Japan,
+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 Japan 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 Japanese have destroyed much of the
+Chinese manufacturing equipment and are placing what remains under
+Japanese control. Significantly, the deadliest enemy of Japanese
+business--in the unlikely event of a complete Japanese success--will be
+Japanese-owned factories in China. Chinese labor will deeply affect
+Japan's domestic production, unless the Japanese succeed in
+rationalizing their economic system to an extent not yet contemplated.
+Hence, Japan'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 competition of
+Chinese output with Japanese home industries disadvantaged by the
+cheaper labor markets of China. But Japan'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 Japanese 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 Japanese 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 _tuchüns_); (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.
+
+[3] _Ibid._, 1926, p. 1065.
+
+[4] _Ibid._, p. 1062.
+
+[5] See above, pp. 51 ff.
+
+[6] See above, pp. 58 ff.
+
+[7] Gilbert, _loc. cit._, 1928, pp. 1283-1285.
+
+[8] _Ibid._, 1931, pp. 251 ff.
+
+[9] Source confidential.
+
+[10] John H. Jouett, "War Planes over China," _Asia_, vol. 37, pp.
+827-830, 1937.
+
+[11] See below, pp. 167 ff.
+
+[12] _The China Year Book_, 1936, p. 427.
+
+[13] Japanese Chamber of Commerce of New York, _The Sino-Japanese
+Crisis_, 1937, p. 18, New York, 1937.
+
+[14] Walter H. Mallory, "Japan Attacks, China Resists," _Foreign
+Affairs_, vol. 16, pp. 135-136, 1937.
+
+[15] Paschal M. d'Elia, S. J., _The Triple Demism of Sun Yat-sen_, pp.
+252-273, Wuchang, 1931. This is one of the most useful translations of
+Sun Yat-sen's lectures on the _San Min Chu I_. Others are Frank Price,
+_San Min Chu I, The Three Principles of the People_, Shanghai, 1930; and
+L. S. Hsü, _Sun Yat-sen, His Political and Social Ideals_, Los Angeles,
+1933.
+
+[16] See below, pp. 167 ff. It is to be noted that the Nanking
+government did not secure international recognition until 1928--the year
+following its establishment.
+
+[17] Among the more recent discussions of economics in Chinese history
+is Chi Chao-ting, _Key Areas in Chinese Economic History_, New York,
+1936.
+
+[18] See Karl August Wittfogel, _Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Chinas_,
+Leipzig, 1931, and the same author's outline of one of the boldest
+programs of Chinese studies, "A Large-Scale Investigation of China's
+Socio-Economic Structure," _Pacific Affairs_, vol. 11, pp. 81-94, 1938.
+
+[19] R. H. Tawney, _Land and Labour in China_, p. 77, New York, 1932.
+
+[20] Paul M. W. Linebarger, _Sun Yat Sen and the Chinese Republic_, pp.
+67-71, New York, 1924.
+
+[21] See Lyon Sharman, _Sun Yat-sen: His Life and Its Meaning_, New
+York, 1934; and Paul M. A. Linebarger, _The Political Doctrines of Sun
+Yat-sen_, pp. 132-156, Baltimore, 1937, for discussion of the
+development of Sun's economic programs.
+
+[22] Jefferson D. H. Lamb (Lin Tung-hai), _The Development of the
+Agrarian Movement and Agrarian Legislation in China_, p. 134, Shanghai,
+1934.
+
+[23] _Ibid._, p. 221.
+
+[24] _Ibid._, p. 77.
+
+[25] See _Pacific Affairs_ for 1934 and 1935, for articles by George
+Taylor and others dealing with reconstruction.
+
+[26] Linebarger, _op. cit._ in note 21, chap. VII, "The Programs of Min
+Shêng," discusses these points at greater length.
+
+[27] See P. H. B. Kent, _The Twentieth Century in the Far East_, p.
+364, London, 1937, for an extract from the mandate sent by the
+Chinese-Manchu Emperor Ch'ien-lung to England's George III.
+
+[28] See G. E. Hubbard, _Eastern Industrialization and Its Effect on
+the West_, London, 1935, for a very illuminating survey. J. E. Orchard,
+_Japan's Economic Position_, New York, 1930, is equally informative.
+Much current information will be found in _Far Eastern Survey_
+(semimonthly, New York), and _Amerasia_ (monthly, New York) on economic
+matters. _Pacific Affairs_ (quarterly, New York) and _International
+Affairs_ (bimonthly, London) possess book review sections which are
+useful guides to the literature. The _Bulletin of Far Eastern
+Bibliography_ (quarterly, Washington, D. C.) is the most complete guide
+of its kind, but has just completed its initial volumes.
+
+
+
+
+THIRD PART
+
+GOVERNMENTS
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter_ VI
+
+THE EMPIRE
+
+
+The governing of China is not and has not been confined to governments.
+In many instances the working of specific institutions called
+_governments_ has been of less importance than that of other
+establishments and organizations. The problems of government in
+Republican China are affected but not determined by the fate of
+individual governments. Movements and armies have predetermined action;
+governments have reflected it. Government in China may be divided into
+three chief periods. The first extends from prehistory to 221 B. C. The
+second is the imperial period.[1] The third--the Republican epoch--did
+not begin until 1912, although it was foreshadowed in the nineteenth
+century.
+
+
+_Government to the End of the Warring States_
+
+In the semihistoric Shang dynasty, which ruled China during the second
+millennium B. C., there was a central overlordship which might well have
+claimed primacy over all offices of the world. In its own territory,
+Shang rule seems to have been based not upon a feudal system such as
+developed later in the time of the charioteering lords but upon the
+reduction of defeated princes to positions of vassaldom. History cannot
+yet tell of the exact relations between the Shang overlord and his
+vassal princes, nor of other monarchs who, in the shadowy bypaths of
+present knowledge, stand forth vaguely from complete obscurity as rivals
+to the hegemony of Shang. The rulers of twenty-five or twenty-six
+centuries ago are recognized by modern Chinese as the direct
+predecessors of the Ch'ing emperor who in turn yielded to the Republic.
+This is no case of a Mussolini seeking to weave together the long-broken
+threads between Augustan and modern Rome; in China the succession is as
+direct as that from St. Pius I to Pius XI. The central monarchy comes
+over the edge of history as an identifiable institution.
+
+In rudimentary form this monarchy already suggests the features of
+bureaucracy. Like the Prussian kings thousands of years later, the Shang
+monarchs seem to have relied upon commoners as their royal officials,
+and for the same reasons. A commoner strengthened the position of the
+monarch: "He could not easily usurp the place of his master, even if he
+had the power. And if he was disobedient he could be executed on the
+spot, with complete impunity; he had no powerful clan to exact
+vengeance."[2] Whether or not the system of loose overlordship be termed
+_feudalism_, social forms not too unlike European feudalism originated
+under the next dynasty, the Chou (traditionally dated 1122-256 B. C.).
+Conquering the great city of the Shang, the Chou turned to feudalism for
+means of internal control and defense. Powerful vassals arose, however,
+so that after the eighth century B. C. the original Chou dynasty was no
+longer in actual command. From the eighth to the third century B. C.,
+when China was consolidated under the Ch'in Shih Huang Ti, a rapid
+spread of feudal organization brought about a state system resembling
+that of early modern Europe.
+
+Before the Chou rulers lost their power and became the faraway analogues
+of the late Holy Roman emperors or the Tennos of shogunal Japan, there
+emerged from their house one of the most remarkable of all Chinese
+political leaders. The Duke of Chou, who lived in the eleventh century
+B. C., seems to have done most in founding the system which later ages
+called _Confucian_--after Confucius had reformed it, clarified it, and
+given it ethical stature. He is also regarded as the father of the
+Constitution of Chou, a plan for a bureaucratic monarchy with an
+emperor, three Great Dukes, and six ministers (in charge of
+administrative, educational and economic, religious and historiographic,
+military, judicial, and engineering matters, respectively) ruling over
+nine large provinces.[3] The Duke of Chou is finally credited with the
+authorship of several important treatises. He has served as the
+archetype of intellectual statesmanship in Chinese legend. His work may
+have contributed in great part to the long life of the Chou dynasty, as
+a _de jure_ ruling house, since a family which had produced such an
+eminent member was not to be set aside lightly.
+
+In the earlier part of this period the feudal order seems to have
+ensured relative stability, but in the later part a system of states
+arose. The greatest Chinese philosophers, Confucius (Kung Fu-tz[)u]) and
+Lao Tz[)u], lived in interstate turmoil. They saw all about them the
+displacement of virtues which had long been recognized, the advance of
+states which substituted greed for morality, the centralization of
+power, the destruction of the feudal economy, the transformation of
+ceremonial warfare into outright slaughter, and the rising disrespect of
+the advancing kings for the Chou overlord. Lao Tz[)u] preached a
+philosophy devoid of constructive politics; he had little use for the
+state and for the organization of society. Not quite an anarchist, his
+programs are probably closer to those of Herbert Spencer than of any
+other Western thinker. But the spiritual and psychological background
+from which he wrote is roughly identical with that of the world's great
+mystical intuitionists. Confucius (551-479 B. C.) preached a system of
+ethics and education which was to rationalize and systematize preceding
+Chinese thought and lead to the system of ideological control known as
+Confucian.
+
+Chinese historians themselves term the closing period of the Chou the
+Age of Warring States. Diplomacy lubricated the machinery of conflict,
+smoothing struggle without eliminating it. The regional governments
+fought each other for centuries, though at times venturing into
+collective security pacts entrusting authority to a preeminent king for
+defense against the outer barbarians. The last years of interstate wars,
+however, were marked by an ever increasing awareness of the meaningless
+character of a struggle which had enveloped the Chinese world. Legalism
+and militarism, twin media of centralized monarchy, blossomed forth.
+While the Western political system, molded by geography and conditioned
+by language, has frozen into a pattern of theoretically sovereign and
+theoretically eternal states--the "mortal Gods" of Hobbes's
+imagination--without promise of workable universal government, China's
+states were swept aside by the conqueror Ch'in Shih Huang Ti, who
+established imperial unity for Chinese government. With the rise to
+domination of the state of Ch'in, its king took the title of _Shih_
+(First) _Huang Ti_ (Emperor), and the Chinese Empire was established.
+
+
+_The Chinese Imperial Government_
+
+The Shih Huang Ti was not revered by succeeding ages for the great
+mission which he performed. His methods were those not of a cautious
+reformer but of a bullying conqueror. With the aid and advice of a
+legalist philosopher, he organized all of China (covering the area of
+much of modern China) into a strongly centralized and despotic military
+monarchy. He destroyed all books not of obvious practical use,
+completely eradicating the histories of rival states and the works of
+philosophers whose opinions might undermine his regime. His tyranny
+brought his house to a rapid end; his heirs held the throne only a short
+while. But the work he had done was done. He had persecuted the worship
+of the past. He had extirpated a large part of the literature which
+might have survived as a source of dissent. He had cleared China of all
+military power but his own. He had brought operative law into being and
+had spread the institution of private ownership of land. Feudalism might
+remain as a form, but its economic and political realities were lost.
+
+In 206 B. C. there began the reign of the Han dynasty. They effected a
+compromise between the past and the governmental, military, and
+political system created by the Shih Huang Ti. They retained legalism in
+practice but turned more and more to Confucianism. Under them the cult
+of Confucius grew into the major influence on the state.[4] The Han
+allowed the imperial system to grow, whereas the Shih Huang Ti had
+sought to build it. In consequence, Han rule--although interrupted in
+the time of Christ by a Utopian usurper--lasted from the third century
+B. C. to the third century A. D. There followed the turbulent Chinese
+middle ages, extending until the reinstitution of organized government
+with the Chin and the Sui.[5]
+
+Out of the earliest tradition attributed to the Duke of Chou and put in
+definite shape by Confucius, out of the arbitrary military despotism of
+the conqueror of the Chinese world, Shih Huang Ti, and out of the actual
+practices of the Han, there evolved a governmental system which, though
+altered dynasty by dynasty and epoch by epoch, nevertheless retained its
+general form down into the days of men now living. It never became,
+however, the prime agency of government, even of the men governing.
+Ritual and scholarship were more significant functions of the dominant
+hierarchy than was administration itself. The emperor was the head of
+the country's family structure, the focal point in the social sphere,
+the outstanding member of the community at large, the chief examiner and
+model of the scholars, the pontiff of the quasi-religious hierarchy, the
+moral scapegoat and intermediary between destiny and mankind, and the
+autocrat of a despotism constitutionalized, as it were, by the power of
+traditional practices.
+
+The imperial system of China was thus a monarchy in the proper sense of
+the word, with none of the parvenu features suggested by the etymology
+of the word _imperial_. As the preeminent leader in an organic society,
+the emperor held a position comparable with that of other family heads.
+His authority could rival that of a father but not excel it; among all
+the families of the Chinese Empire the imperial stood forth as a family.
+Second, the emperor was the chief dignitary in the social life of the
+Chinese world. He was not unlike the British monarchs, providing a model
+of formal propriety and elegance in setting the fashions of the decade.
+The physical isolation of most of the emperors prevented them from
+playing this role with widespread effectiveness, but it was a part of
+their function. Third, the emperor bore the relation to the Empire which
+the outstanding villager bore to the village. It was he of whom men
+talked; his behavior commanded greatest interest; his future conduct was
+a constant source of speculation. Apart from his role as a formal
+dignitary, he occupied the more immediate position of most conspicuous
+person, of the first member of society. He had the human accountability
+of a leader and was to be praised or blamed for his actions in the
+histories and by his subjects. In the normal routine, the emperor
+himself was not to govern; but he selected and supervised his ministers,
+who did and who consequently bore the odium for evil deeds.
+
+Fourth, the emperor himself was the ultimate examiner of scholars. He
+thus had contact with the most successful of the civil service
+candidates and completed their examination. These examinations served
+the emperor as a means of selecting advisers who upon further testing
+became ministers. The Forest of Pencils (_Han Lin_, the Imperial
+Academy) was within his jurisdiction, and the emperor was supposed to be
+enough of a scholar to check the most important of the documents of
+state. The myth of intellectual supremacy is suggested by the fact that
+the chief implement of the imperial office was a red pencil. The
+imperial symbolism did not stop here. Fifth, the quasi-religious
+hierarchy of the Chinese, competing with Buddhism and the superstitions
+of popular Taoism for the support of the people, centered on the
+performance of certain rites in the propitiation of fortune and the
+honoring of the dead. To this were added the cult rituals of
+Confucianism. The Confucian temples, with tablets bearing the names of
+worthies, served as the visible demonstration of the ideological power
+wielded by the scholars over the populace, and of the emperor over the
+scholars.
+
+Sixth, the emperor had the more definitely religious status referred to
+in his title _Son of Heaven_. He was the intermediate figure between the
+will of Heaven and mankind. In him were summarized and epitomized the
+virtues or the evils of the generation; he had to represent mankind in
+its best light to all supernatural forces or agencies. Upon his conduct
+of worship depended the good or ill will of the deities and hence
+weather, crops, life and death. Conversely, he was responsible to
+mankind for the misbehavior of nature, and an earthquake, a two-headed
+calf, or any other monstrous occurrence was blamed on his disturbance of
+the routine of things. The order which enveloped the Confucian society
+was conceived not merely as a set of traditional and moral man-made
+customs but as a type of behavior which fitted in with the life of the
+natural world. In the eyes of the Chinese, perturbations in the world of
+men soon produced consequent natural calamities. Lastly, the Chinese
+emperor was the autocrat of the administration. His action, however, was
+limited by various customary devices; for example, while the
+countersignature of a minister was not needed on an edict, the emperor
+was supposed not to take the initiative but to secure the wisest
+suggestions and adopt them. Practical considerations rendered a stable
+bureaucracy impervious to constant intermeddling of the emperor,
+although the effect of imperial action was not negligible.
+
+The administrative outline of Chinese government from the establishment
+of the Empire by the Ch'in Shih Huang Ti in 221 B. C. to its overthrow
+by Sun Yat-sen and his followers in 1911 varied from dynasty to dynasty
+and ruler to ruler. Nevertheless, certain general characteristics were
+common to the whole period. The government operated as the chief
+implementation of the emperor's power over the people. The people
+maintained its social organizations, but none of these developed office
+hierarchies comparable to that of the government. The government alone
+served as the connecting link between the ideologically unified Chinese
+world as a whole and its many separate parts. The T'ang dynasty (A. D.
+620-906) provided an exceptionally clear articulation of the Empire,
+which not only compelled the admiration and imitation of later ages but
+even served as a model for state governments on the periphery of the
+Chinese world. In the great Taikwa Reforms of 645, the Japanese made a
+heroic attempt to adapt the T'ang form of government to dissimilar
+conditions; the scheme worked on paper but failed to recast the
+fundamental mold of Japanese society, which remained feudal.
+
+The three most striking features of the Chinese bureaucracy were: (1)
+the central administrative organization; (2) the operation of civil
+service examinations and the use of administrative supervision; (3) the
+integration of government operation on the imperial, regional, and local
+levels. The metropolitan administrative organization under the T'ang
+dynasty was headed by the emperor. But the intricate regularity of the
+hierarchy beneath him was such as to preclude imperial autocratic
+caprice. The outline of the hierarchical organization was as follows:[6]
+
+  THE THRONE
+
+  THE GRAND COUNCIL
+
+  The Departments:
+
+  _a._ Department of Ministerial Coordination
+     1. Ministry of Administrators
+     2. Ministry of Finance
+     3. Ministry of Rites
+     4. Ministry of War
+     5. Ministry of Justice
+     6. Ministry of Public Works
+  _b._ The Imperial Chancery
+  _c._ The Grand Secretariat
+
+  The Tribunal of Censors
+
+  Imperial Commissioners
+
+  Provinces (10) and _Governments-General_ (at the frontiers)
+    Prefectures
+    Subprefectures
+    Townships
+    Villages
+
+The general structure of Chinese administration differed little from
+that of preceding ages, and has not changed markedly during the
+following centuries. Later developments strengthened the provinces, at
+the expense of both the central government and the local areas; earlier
+conditions had tolerated a much greater extent of feudal establishments.
+Nevertheless, the six ministries may have been established as early as
+about 1000 B. C., and remained a feature of Chinese government until
+1906.
+
+The Grand Council met daily. It was composed of grand ministers, who--in
+the phrase of Baron des Rotours--"under the T'ang held in their hands
+the government of the Empire."[7] The emperor's chief power lay in
+appointing the council members, to whom fell the greater share of
+governing in fact. Directly under the Grand Council there were the three
+departments. The Department of Ministerial Coordination served as an
+administrative center and clearinghouse for the work of the separate
+ministries under it. The names of the ministries are self-explanatory.
+The Ministry of Administrators was in charge of the examination system
+and the arrangement of the offices in the bureaucracy. The Ministry of
+Rites, by an extension of its protocol features, was in charge of the
+reception of foreign ("barbarian") princes and ambassadors, and
+emissaries. The other two departments provided one of the most ingenious
+systems of checks and balances to be found in any constitutional scheme.
+The Imperial Chancery received all communications from the various parts
+of the Empire. Since most of the governing was carried out by means of
+written orders, instructions, and requests for reports, the Chancery
+occupied an important place. But the function of drafting replies to
+such communications, preparing manifestoes, or issuing ordinances was in
+the hands of the Grand Secretariat. Thus the Chancery was prevented from
+exerting an outside influence, while it was impossible for the
+Secretariat to receive any communication directly. As a final check, all
+outgoing documents of state had to pass through the Chancery to receive
+the official seal, without which they were invalid. Thus any item of
+government business was routed first through the Chancery for
+registration and classification, then to the Secretariat for reply, and
+back to the Chancery for what amounted to countersignature (by seal).[8]
+Yet the Secretariat was no mere drafting agency for the Chancery.
+
+The Tribunal of Censors occupied a position not unlike that of the great
+independent establishments of the United States government. It was
+directed by a president and two vice-presidents, and concerned itself
+with ferreting out and exposing irregularities and abuses in the
+administration. The morale of the censorate varied from time to time,
+but at its optimum efficiency it was a formidable and significant
+institution. Han Confucianism provided the general background from which
+the organization rose to effectiveness.
+
+This sophisticated and rationally designed central bureaucracy was
+supplemented by regional administrations. Under the T'ang the regional
+establishments were a source of trouble to the government. The Empire
+was divided into provinces, but the provincial administrations were
+superseded by Imperial Commissioners whenever an emergency arose. Later
+dynasties placed the provincial system on a more stable basis, which
+resulted in genuine and geographically sound regionalism. The provincial
+governments were replicas in miniature of the central; their heads might
+be regarded as appointive and removable satraps whose authority was a
+smaller reproduction of the power of the emperor. It was not until the
+Ming dynasty (A. D. 1368-1643) that the provinces took on their modern
+form. The provincial governments were a source of great strength to
+China in that they made possible a quasi-federal government. In the
+Ch'ing period no officer was eligible to a post in his native
+province;[9] this custom had considerable centripetal effect and offset
+the danger that populace and officials, united by common sympathies,
+might revolt or secede.[10]
+
+Another feature to be noted about the Chinese government under the
+Empire was the examination and civil service system. The T'ang dynasty
+provided for three major types of examination: (1) The _chü_
+corresponded most closely to a modern academic degree, and allowed the
+candidate to qualify in any one of a number of subjects, including the
+classics, law, and mathematics. (2) The _hsüan_ was the special
+examination necessary for appointment to a post in the bureaucracy; it
+was both written and oral and included the personal history of the
+candidate. (3) The _k'ao_, an in-service examination, consisted of
+annual reports on the performance of all officers in the Empire. They
+were transmitted to the Bureau for Examination of Merits in the Ministry
+of Administrators on a schedule varying with the distance of the office
+from the capital. There were five points on which to report: virtue and
+justice; integrity and circumspection; equity and impartiality;
+diligence and activity; and one of twenty-seven special talents suitable
+to the particular office in question. The grades received on these
+reports determined the advancement or demotion of the officer, in
+accordance with an elaborate and exact schedule.[11] All three
+examinations provided the administrative form for the close relation
+between the government and the scholastic elite. The _chü_, with its
+emphasis on the classics, framed the content of all curriculums. The
+_hsüan_, with its oral examination and personal record, made the
+prospective candidate careful in observing the customs. The _k'ao_ kept
+up the morale and efficiency of the bureaucracy, while the ominous
+Tribunal of Censors was present to guard against abuse of the system.
+Every detail was precise, well ordered, explicit, to a degree that would
+delight present-day industrial personnel managers. Formulation was
+refined and impressive. In fact the T'ang laws, although their part in
+Chinese life was less than a Westerner might expect, were a code of such
+force and appeal that the Japanese and the Annamese used them as a model
+for their juridical systems.[12]
+
+The decline of particular dynasties in China--caused by poor economic
+policy, demoralization of the court, corruption of the bureaucracy,
+laxity in the examinations, oppression of the farmers--did not effect
+great alterations in the structure of government. With the centuries the
+Chinese government settled into more and more definitive form.
+Unfortunately, the Manchu government (1644-1911)[13] had sunk into
+administrative demoralization when the full force of the Western impact
+was felt. In the early nineteenth century a British observer wrote of an
+imperial official:
+
+  The late _tungling_ [gendarmerie commander] Wanking, degraded last
+  year for connecting himself with a magician whose confessions went to
+  implicate a large number of nobles and public servants, was a Reader
+  at the Classical Feasts, Manchu President of the Board of Civil
+  Office, Revisor-General of the Veritable Records of the Reign, a
+  Superior of the Academy, Supervisor of the Household, t'utung of a
+  Banner [military division], superintendent of the Gymnasium in the
+  Ning-shan Palace, and of the Treasuries of the Board of Revenue, and
+  Visitor of the 17 Granaries in the City, and at Tungchau.[14]
+
+When such conditions of indifference toward sharply defined hierarchic
+ethics began to be common among the bureaucracy, the end of the dynasty
+was near. The Chinese Empire had remained intact even when it had fallen
+into the hands of Tartars, Mongols, and Manchus. It had returned to the
+bases of its former greatness, and the administrative machinery created
+since the day of the Shih Huang Ti continued for twenty centuries. With
+the decrepitude of the Manchu dynasty, and the simultaneous collision
+with the Western world, the old political system broke and had to be
+reshaped into new forms. Nevertheless, even in the Republican era
+techniques of the T'ang have reappeared in the administration of
+government services.
+
+Underneath all shifts there remained a series of social groupings which
+were affected far less than were the broad and conspicuous central
+regimes. They have existed since the times before organized government,
+and may well be sufficiently strong to set the conditions under which
+any government or any race of rulers will succeed or fail in China.
+
+
+_Family, Village, and Hui_
+
+The ideological control in old China operated through those groups most
+closely attached to the individual. The government was not one of them.
+The fundamental strength of Chinese society rests upon the cohesion and
+power of three outstanding quasi-political agencies: the family system,
+the village and district, and the _hui_ (associations, leagues,
+societies or guilds.)[15] The family was an intricate structure,
+"composed of a plurality of kin alignments into four families: the
+natural family, the economic family, the religious family, and the
+sib."[16] The natural family corresponded to the family of the West. The
+economic family commonly extended through several degrees of kinship,
+and may have included from thirty to one hundred individuals, who formed
+a single economic unit, living collectively. The religious family was an
+aggregate of economic families; it would be difficult to give any
+specified number of constituent families as an average. This unit
+provided the organization for the proper commemoration and reverence of
+ancestors and maintained an ancestral shrine where the genealogical
+records were kept; the cult feature has largely disappeared in modern
+times. The sib resembled the clan as found in the West; its role was
+determined by the immediate environment. In some cases, especially in
+the South, the sib was powerful enough to engage in feuds; at times one
+or more sibs dominated whole communities. In the greater part of China
+it was a loose organization, holding meetings from time to time to unite
+the various local religious families which constituted it.
+
+Family consciousness played its part in sustaining certain elements of
+the Confucian ideology. It stressed the idea of the carnal immortality
+of the human race. It oriented the individual not only philosophically
+but socially as well. The size of each family determined his position
+spatially, and family continuity fixed a definite location in time for
+him. With its many-handed grasp upon the individual, the family system
+held him securely in place and prevented his aspiring to the arrogant
+heights of nobility or falling into the degradation of a slavery in
+which he might become a mere commodity. A Chinese surrounded by his
+kinsmen was shielded against humiliations inflicted upon him by
+outsiders and against the menace of his own potential follies. It was
+largely through the family system, with its religious as well as
+economic and social foundation, that the Chinese counteracted
+undesirable mobility of individuals in a society stable as a whole.
+Stability thus obtained a clear and undeniable purpose--the continued
+generation of the human race through the continuity of innumerable
+families, each determined upon survival. A materialistic interpretation
+would point out the need for cheap and plentiful human labor in
+maintaining the agrarian economy of China, and reduce the rationale of
+the system to a mere web of justifications.
+
+The family was equaled if not excelled in importance by the village.[17]
+Had the family been the only vital social grouping, it might have been
+impossible for democratic processes to develop in China. The family
+pattern provided, indeed, the model for the government, but the
+influence of villages in Chinese life mitigated the familistic
+tendencies of government. It would have been heresy to revolt against an
+unrighteous father; but there was nothing to prevent the deposition of
+an evil village elder. In times of contentment, the emperor was the
+father of the society; at other times he might be looked upon as a
+fellow villager subject to the criticism of the people. The village was
+the largest working unit of local self-government; it, and the groups
+within it, such as the sib, was almost completely autonomous and subject
+to outside interference only in very rare cases. At the same time, the
+village was the smallest unit of district organization. The District
+Magistrate, as the government officer in charge of a district containing
+from one to twenty villages, relied on the village leaders in performing
+the duties imposed upon him. Village government was at times very
+democratic.[18]
+
+Next in importance was the _hui_. It was in all probability the last to
+appear. Neither ordained, as the family seemed to be, by the eternal
+physical and biological order of things, nor made to seem natural, as
+was the village, by the geographic and economic environment, this
+association emerged from the Chinese propensity toward cooperation.
+Paralleling and supplementing family and village, the _hui_ won for
+itself an unchallenged place in the Chinese social structure. The _hui_
+may be classified into six categories[19]: (1) fraternal societies; (2)
+insurance groups; (3) economic guilds; (4) religious societies; (5)
+political societies; and (6) militia and vigilante organizations. The
+_hui_ made up the greater part of the economic organization of old
+China, and offered vocational education to men not destined for
+literature and administration. Under such names as the Triad and the
+Lotus the _hui_ provided the party organizations of old China and
+challenged the dynasties whenever resentment was ripe.
+
+The old Chinese society, made up of innumerable families, villages, and
+_hui_, comprised the whole "known world." Its strength was
+inexhaustible. Having no one nerve center, the world society could not
+be destroyed by the inroads of barbarians or the ravages of famine,
+pestilence, and insurrection. The Confucian ideology continued. At no
+one time were conditions so bad as to break the many threads of Chinese
+culture and to release a new generation from tradition. Throughout the
+centuries education and government continued side by side, even though
+dynasties fell and the country was overrun by conquerors. The absence of
+any rigid organization of legal authority facilitated survival, while a
+certain minimum of order could be maintained even in the absence of an
+emperor or, as more commonly occurred, in the presence of several.
+
+The governmental superstructure kept the Chinese world together in a
+formal manner; it did not give it vitality. The family, the village, and
+the _hui_ were fit subjects for imperial attention, but the emperor
+could not remove his sanction from their existence and thereby
+annihilate them. No precarious legal personality was attributed to the
+family, the village, and the _hui_, which could be extirpated by a mere
+edict. It was possible for the English kings to destroy the Highland
+clan of the MacGregor--"the proscribed name"--without liquidating the
+members of the clan _in toto_. In China the emperor could wipe out a
+family by massacre, but it was practically impossible for him to destroy
+an organization without destroying all its members. On the whole,
+however, the government of China pursued its three main ends--the
+maintenance of the ideology (education), the defense of the realm
+against barbarians (military affairs) and against adverse forces of
+nature (public works), and the collection of funds for the fulfilment of
+these functions (revenue).
+
+
+_Governmental Changes Foreshadowing the Republic_
+
+The pressure of the West compelled the Chinese government to define more
+clearly than ever before its own boundaries, its relations with the
+vassal states, and its lines of contact with the Chinese people. By the
+Treaty of Nerchinsk, negotiated in 1689 with Russia, the Chinese tried
+to demarcate their land frontier. The vassal nations presented a crucial
+problem. The Chinese failed to make explicit their quasi suzerainty in
+terms comprehensible to Western jurisprudence. At the same time they
+followed a policy of brisk exaggeration of territorial rights
+alternating with outright disclaimer of responsibility. The scope of
+government itself was affected by new functions which arose with the
+coming of the Westerners. The tax system was expanded. The development
+of an imperial customs service with Western personnel and Western
+methods of accounting provided the government with a source of large
+revenue. The demands that Western states be given adequate consideration
+in the transaction of business led to the establishment in 1860 of the
+Foreign Office (_Tsung-li Yamên_), a new institution which modified the
+traditional administrative pattern.
+
+In addition, the Western states introduced their own type of government
+into China through the demand that their citizens be subject only to the
+law with which they were familiar at home. In dealing with Westerners
+the Chinese had at first employed a code far more Draconic than the
+provisions of Chinese penal practice. After many years of irritation the
+Western powers, under the leadership of Great Britain, secured
+extraterritorial privileges for their citizens. Extraterritoriality
+placed Westerners in China solely under the jurisdiction of their
+respective national representatives. If an American today were to shoot
+down the Dalai Lama in Tibet, he could be tried legally only in the
+United States Court in Shanghai--although it is improbable that the
+Tibetans would insist upon juridical niceties. Apart from the guarantee
+of personal immunity from Chinese law for their citizens, wherever they
+might be in China, the Western powers, through a long series of special
+arrangements and actual usage, obtained certain footholds on Chinese
+soil where even Chinese were under Western rule. These areas were known
+as _concessions_ and _settlements_, and the cities of their location as
+the _treaty ports_. Both the presence of Westerners subject only to
+Western law throughout the Empire, and of areas where Western governance
+was paramount, taught the Chinese the lesson of strong government.
+
+Nor was this all. The British-Chinese treaty of Nanking (1842) and that
+with the United States (1844) both contained provisions relating to the
+protection of the life and property of foreigners. The imperial
+government found itself pledged to the fulfillment of a policy which
+collided directly with the xenophobia engendered by ideological control.
+The enforcement of these provisions, half-hearted as it was, involved
+constantly increasing imperial intervention in regional affairs,
+although the issues arising between the central government and the
+provincial authorities were settled through negotiation rather than
+enforceable commands.
+
+Toward the end of the nineteenth century the gradual transformation in
+China gave rise to a reform movement carried forward by a group of
+constitutional monarchists. One of their leaders, K'ang Yu-wei, became
+in 1898 the tutor of the young Emperor Kuang Hsü. The summer of that
+year witnessed a steady stream of edicts which ultimately might have
+made China under the leadership of the throne as progressive as Japan.
+The reforms aimed primarily at efficiency and modernization, and
+partially at the parliamentarization of the regime. The young Emperor,
+however, was soon checked by Yüan Shih-k'ai, his leading military
+adviser, and outmaneuvered by the reactionary Empress Dowager. He spent
+the rest of his life in actual imprisonment, and the Six Geniuses--as
+the reformers behind his policy were called--were exiled or executed.
+One of those who were put to death was the poet Tan Shih-tung, a man of
+great skill in the classical literature and of ambitious visions for the
+future, who might, had the Hundred Days succeeded, have lived to be a
+guardian of the throne in a modern Chinese Empire. Just before his
+execution he wrote the following poem, calling forth the memory of
+Chiang-ch'ing and Tou-keng, upright men of the past, and comparing his
+faith with the mountain range of Kuang-lêng:
+
+  LAST SONG FROM PRISON
+
+    _Prison door facing me--thoughts of Chiang-ch'ing--
+    I could die easily, if like Tou-keng ...
+    Laughing and alone, I lift the knife to heaven:
+    I die but leave behind hopes higher than Kuang-lêng!_[20]
+
+Reform, indeed, could not be downed. The Manchu dynasty itself began to
+tread cautiously in the footsteps of Japan. In 1905 an agency was set up
+for the purpose of studying various foreign forms of government and of
+making recommendations for the modernization of the imperial government.
+In 1908 a draft constitution, very similar to the constitution of the
+Japanese Empire, was approved. A nine-year program, from 1908 to 1916
+inclusive, was to lead to constitutional, parliamentary monarchy--if
+parliamentary monarchy be regarded merely as a monarchy with a
+parliament appended. The principle of cabinet responsibility to
+parliament was not established, and from the very beginning the Manchus,
+less wise than the ruling house in Japan, not only failed to grant
+sufficient powers on paper but began packing the quasi-parliamentary
+institutions before they were set up. Hand-picked, the preliminary
+National Assembly which met in 1909 began wrangling with the Throne.[21]
+The old Empress Dowager had died in the preceding year; so had the
+imprisoned Emperor Kuang Hsü. The new Emperor was an infant, and the
+court was little more than a gathering of bewildered Manchu princes
+listening to the advice of the eunuchs and palace officials.[22] Reform
+from above, had there been a single man of will and courage to take
+charge of it, might have had considerable chances of success. But while
+the Manchus tinkered with the superstructure of government, the
+foundations of society were washing away beneath their feet. More was
+involved than the improvement of administrative technique and the
+illusion of popular representation. A political and social revolution
+was in the making. Sun Yat-sen was the man who, more than any other
+single person, shaped its course.
+
+In 1893 Sun had gone north to advocate reform and present a petition to
+Li Hung-chang, an eminent imperial statesman.[23] The mission failed. In
+1897 Sun was willing to speak openly of revolution. He refrained,
+however, from advocating a republic before Western audiences, even
+though his party was committed to it. He wrote in his book _Kidnapped in
+London_:
+
+  The prime essence of the movement was the establishment of a form of
+  constitutional government to supplement the old-fashioned, corrupt,
+  and worn-out system under which China is groaning.
+
+  It is unnecessary to enter into details as to what form of rule
+  obtains in China at present. It may be summed up, however, in a few
+  words. The people have no say whatever in the management of Imperial,
+  National, or even Municipal affairs. The mandarins, or local
+  magistrates, have full power of adjudication, from which there is no
+  appeal. Their word is law, and they have full scope to practice their
+  machinations with irresponsibility, and every officer may fatten
+  himself with impunity. Extortion by officials is an institution; it is
+  the condition on which they take office; and it is only when the
+  bleeder is a bungler that the government steps in with pretended
+  benevolence to ameliorate but more often to complete the depletion....
+
+  This official thief, with his mind warped by his mode of life, is the
+  ultimate authority in all matters of social, political, and criminal
+  life....[24]
+
+In 1905 Sun Yat-sen lashed out at the monarchical reformers, subjecting
+their motives to vigorous criticism:
+
+  Since the Boxer war many have been led to believe that the Tartar
+  [Manchu or Ch'ing government] is beginning to see the sign of time and
+  to reform itself for the betterment of the country, just from the
+  occasional ... edicts ... not knowing that they are mere dead letters
+  made for the express purpose of pacifying popular agitations. It is
+  absolutely impossible for the Manchus to reform the country because
+  reformation means detriment to them. By reformation they would be
+  absorbed by the Chinese people and would lose the special rights and
+  privileges which they are enjoying. The still darker side of the
+  government can be seen when the ignorance and corruptness of the
+  official class are brought to light. These fossilized, rotten,
+  good-for-nothing officials know only how to flatter and bribe the
+  Manchus, whereby their position may be strengthened to carry on the
+  trade of squeezing [graft].[25]
+
+He also insisted that China's difficulties could be solved only by the
+establishment of a republic, which he envisaged with great optimism:
+
+  A new, enlightened and progressive government must be substituted in
+  place of the old one; in such a case China would not only be able to
+  support herself but would also relieve the other countries of the
+  trouble of maintaining her independence and integrity. There are many
+  highly educated and able men among the people who would be competent
+  to take up the task of forming a new government, and carefully
+  thought-out plans have long been drawn up for the transformation of
+  this ... Tartar monarchy into a Republic of China. The ... masses of
+  the people are also ready to accept the new order of things and are
+  longing for a change for better to uplift them from their ...
+  deplorable condition of life. China is now on the eve of a great
+  national movement, for just a spark of light would set the whole
+  political forest on fire to drive out the Tartar from our land. Our
+  task is indeed great but it will not be an impossible one....[26]
+
+Sun's diagnosis of the situation was remarkably correct; he clearly
+sensed the coming Republic whose first president he was to become seven
+years later. The ideological revolution was already under way, and the
+Empire about to dissolve into the past. What neither Sun nor anyone else
+realized was that ahead of China there lay government problems more
+serious than misrule. The ideological shift had terminated the reality
+of the old regime, and the military conditions were favorable; but would
+men be ready to invest their faith durably in a new order?
+
+
+NOTES
+
+[1] See above, pp. 17 ff., 83 ff.
+
+[2] Herrlee G. Creel, _The Birth of China_, p. 138, London, 1936.
+
+[3] Leon Wieger, S. J., _La Chine à travers les âges: hommes et
+choses_, pp. 22-25, Hsien-hsien, 1920. This is among the most useful
+handbooks of Chinese history and bibliography. It is written on a
+popular level and designed for the rapid and easy information of
+Catholic missionaries in China. H. F. MacNair, _Modern Chinese History,
+Selected Readings_, Shanghai, 1923, will be found entertaining as well
+as highly informative.
+
+[4] See John K. Shryock, _The Origin and Development of the State Cult
+of Confucius_, New York, 1932, for a description of the rise of
+Confucianism.
+
+[5] For a list of the Chinese dynasties see below, p. 197.
+
+[6] T'ang government is outlined on the basis of Baron Robert des
+Rotours, _Le Traité des examens_, Paris, 1932, a lucid and detailed
+translation of a section of the T'ang dynastic history dealing with the
+civil service. The book includes a valuable account of the organization
+of T'ang government and may well be cited as a model of Sinological
+achievement. The rendering _Department of Ministerial Coordination_ was
+suggested by the usage of Professor C. S. Gardner, Harvard-Yenching
+Institute.
+
+[7] Rotours, _op. cit._, p. 10. See also _ibid._, p. 3.
+
+[8] Cf. Hans Wist, _Das Chinesische Zensorat_, Hamburg, 1932.
+
+[9] For a Western parallel see Fritz Morstein Marx, _Civil Service in
+Germany_, in: _Civil Service Abroad_, p. 181 _n._ 31, New York and
+London, 1935.
+
+[10] For further detail on local home rule see below, pp. 177 ff.
+
+[11] Rotours, _op. cit._, pp. 26-55, "Les examens sous la dynastie des
+T'ang."
+
+[12] Jean Escarra, _Le droit chinois_, p. 97, Peiping and Paris, 1936.
+This is the outstanding work on Chinese law, by a French scholar long in
+the service of Chinese governments. The exhaustive bibliography of
+Escarra may be supplemented by Cyrus H. Peake, "Recent Studies in
+Chinese Law," _Political Science Quarterly_, vol. 52, pp. 117-138, 1937.
+
+[13] P. C. Hsieh, _The Chinese Government_, 1644-1911, Baltimore, 1925;
+William F. Mayers, _The Chinese Government_, Shanghai, 1897.
+
+[14] T. F. Wade, "The Army of the Chinese Empire," _The Chinese
+Repository_ (Canton), vol. 20, p. 300 n., 1851.
+
+[15] The following discussion has been taken from the author's _The
+Political Doctrines of Sun Yat-sen_, pp. 38-43, Baltimore, 1937.
+
+[16] D. H. Kulp, _Family Life in South China_, p. xxiv, New York, 1925.
+
+[17] See H. G. Creel, _Sinism_, Chicago, 1929.
+
+[18] See Arthur H. Smith, _Village Life in China_, p. 228, New York,
+1899.
+
+[19] See J. S. Burgess, _The Guilds of Peking_, New York, 1928. The
+present classification is a modification of that of Burgess.
+
+[20] Translation by the present author.
+
+[21] See Hsieh, _op. cit_., in note 13; Meribeth E. Cameron, _The
+Reform Movement in China_, 1898-1912, Stanford, 1931; Harold M. Vinacke,
+_Modern Constitutional Development in China_, Princeton, 1920.
+
+[22] Reginald Johnston, _Twilight in the Forbidden City_, London, 1934,
+presents an interesting narrative of court life before and after the
+revolution of 1911-1912.
+
+[23] Lyon Sharman, _Sun Yat-sen: His Life and Its Meaning_, pp. 30-32,
+New York, 1934.
+
+[24] Sun Yat-sen, _Kidnapped in London_, pp. 13-15, Bristol and London,
+1897. This is a most engrossing work, whether considered as a political
+revelation, a personal narrative, or a story of adventure.
+
+[25] Sun Yat-sen (Hu Han-min, editor), _Tsung-li Ch'üan-chi (The
+Complete Works of the Leader)_, vol. IV, p. 357, Shanghai, 1930; from
+"The True Solution to the Chinese Question," pp. 347-368, an article
+written by Sun himself in English.
+
+[26] _Ibid._, p. 366.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter_ VII
+
+THE REVOLUTION
+
+
+On October 9, 1911, a follower of Sun Yat-sen, one of the heroic and
+desperate "Dare-to-dies" who had harassed the imperial government for
+years, was working over a bomb in the Russian concession in the upriver
+port of Hankow. The bomb exploded accidentally; the secret storage of
+munitions was discovered; the next day, in the ensuing turmoil, the
+Republic of China was born. Double Ten Day (October 10, 1911) has since
+been celebrated as the Chinese Fourth of July. When the imperial
+officials sought to suppress the insurrection, they uncovered a
+conspiracy in the ranks of their own troops; in self-protection the
+troops revolted. In the next two months the Manchu Empire crumbled away.
+Sun Yat-sen, who was in Chicago at the time of the outbreak,[1] could
+trust his organization. Sure that destiny was working with him, he took
+his leisure in returning to China and stopped in London to forestall
+financial aid to the collapsing Empire.
+
+
+_The Presidency of Sun Yat-sen and the Republican Revolution_
+
+The fall of the Empire was not the result of a great mass movement
+agitating the whole population; it developed from the revolutionary
+nucleus which Sun and his followers had built up to secure power. They
+had hammered away at the imperial regime by instigating mutiny and
+terror for many years, since they realized that the incompetence of the
+government was matched only by its impotence. The revolution itself was
+a chain of rebellions, occurring province by province under the
+leadership of revolutionaries or officials joining the revolution.
+Except for the massacre of Manchus in some of the cities, it was a
+nearly bloodless revolution. However, the various groups pushed in
+different directions, and different men tried to seize power. The
+constitutional monarchists compelled the throne to issue a very liberal
+constitution, which might be accepted by the populace in place of the
+Republican programs. Military men began to come to the fore, as the army
+units alone were in a position of unchallengeable power. Men who had no
+thought of revolution might join it in time to become leaders of the
+revolutionary-military juntas. Li Yüan-hung, an officer of the Empire,
+hid under his bed when revolutionary soldiers sought him out; given the
+choice between death and adherence to the revolutionaries, he sided with
+the new powers, and in a short while became the commanding officer of
+the revolutionary forces in the Wu-han cities. Similar instances were
+not uncommon.
+
+The revolutionaries managed to call together representatives of their
+party and of the troops to a National Convention at Nanking. They were
+seriously handicapped by the absence of Sun Yat-sen, who now hastened
+back to China from London. Few of the members of the revolutionary
+group--heretofore forced to operate as a secret society--were well
+enough known to have the prestige needed to form a new government. Huang
+Hsing, Sun's chief military follower, sought to manage in the interim,
+but not until the arrival of Sun Yat-sen in Shanghai on December 24,
+1911, was there a prospect of consolidation. Five days later the
+National Convention elected him president of the Provisional Government
+of the United Provinces. On January 1, 1912, he took office; with the
+adoption of the Gregorian calendar now in use, this date became the
+first day of the Year I of the Chinese Republic. With the presidency
+there was created a cabinet, whose ministers did not yet hold any
+specific portfolios. The portions of the country under revolutionary
+control were ruled for the time being by a temporary system which
+combined the military and civilian governments in each province.
+
+Meanwhile, the Empire was still the internationally recognized
+government of China and continued to function in Peking. Thoroughly
+frightened, the imperial court saw no alternative to calling into its
+service the one man who could be expected to master the situation--Yüan
+Shih-k'ai, who had ruthlessly terminated the experiment of the Hundred
+Days in 1898 and whipped up the first effective modern army of the
+Empire. Yüan, who had fallen into disfavor as a result of court
+machinations a few years before, waited his time, receiving offers from
+both sides. Finally he went to Peking, on October 27, 1911.
+
+The negotiations which ensued over the establishment of a new government
+and the pacification of the country brought into the spotlight two of
+the outstanding personalities of modern China--men whose characters were
+to mold the institutions in a highly plastic society and whose
+influences were to last beyond their deaths. Sun Yat-sen, a Cantonese
+with many overseas connections, stood outside the old-style elite--a
+constitutionalist and an idealist. Yüan was a soldier and diplomat from
+the North, narrow in outlook, altogether a tradition-bound official
+despite his up-to-date military ideas--an opportunist and a realist in
+politics. Rarely have two leaders represented such opposite extremes.
+
+In the conclusion of the negotiations Yüan played a part which would
+have filled Machiavelli with admiration. The imperial family was cajoled
+into taking the baby Emperor off the throne but was at the same time
+wheedled into refusing outright abdication. The edicts of February 12,
+1912, are among the most curious state papers of modern times. They
+turned over "the power of government" to Yüan, admitted the faults of
+the dynasty, and ordered him to negotiate with the revolutionists and
+establish a Republic of China. Nothing was said about any eventual
+resumption of power by the dynasty, although provision was to be made
+for the comfort and dignity of the court. The Manchu house was to retain
+the Forbidden City (imperial palace) in Peking, where the monarch could
+continue to exercise his functions, freed from the cares of government.
+
+Sun Yat-sen indignantly repudiated any idea that the Republic derived
+from a formal authorization extended by the hated Manchus--the Republic
+for which he and his revolutionists had struggled for decades. But he
+held his peace, unwilling to upset the chances of national unification
+on a point of form. Yüan was recognized as an able man, although he
+lacked trustworthiness and intellectual ability; it seemed possible to
+make use of him and simultaneously to satisfy him by giving him a
+position within the Republican framework. After the edicts of
+abdication, the issue became one of ultra-idealist constitutionalism
+versus brutal military realism.
+
+It was agreed that Sun should keep the provisional presidency until Yüan
+could be inaugurated as president. Under the circumstances it was the
+only possible course. Yüan possessed decisive military power, and there
+could have been no hope of bending him. Furthermore, Sun actually did
+not wish the office of president. He realized that his own strength was
+that of ideologue and leader and felt that by enforcing his principle of
+_min shêng_[2] he could serve China best.
+
+Yüan, it was arranged, was to come south to the new capital at Nanking.
+This was something which he had no desire to do, as the city was in the
+hands of the revolutionists and his army was in the north. When he was
+pressed to take office, he engineered a military mutiny in the Peking
+area, which did enormous property damage and gave him an adequate excuse
+for remaining where he was. By thus forcing the government to establish
+itself at Peking, he followed out the spirit of the imperial abdication
+edict and brought the Republican regime to the very city in which the
+Emperor still lived, and in which the imperial bureaucracy awaited its
+new Republican garments--socially and ideologically the stronghold of
+resourceful reaction. There was thus no problem of creating a new modern
+administration. The old Peking mandarinate continued, and the
+revolutionary Republicans came into the government offices as strangers
+intruding into a closed system. For the initial months of the Republican
+experiment Peking's novel status was merely the evidence of Yüan's
+prestige; thereafter, Peking was to become the embodiment of archaism,
+blind pragmatism, and corruption.
+
+On March 10, 1912, Yüan Shih-k'ai took a solemn oath to preserve and
+defend the Republic and assumed office as president. On the same day a
+Provisional Constitution went into effect, whereby the National
+Convention placed the greater share of government power in the hands of
+a National Council, to serve until the promulgation of election laws for
+the choice of a national parliament. Republican mistrust of Yüan was
+evident in this action. Yet Sun Yat-sen was satisfied that his first
+principle, nationalism, had been realized in great part by the expulsion
+of the Manchus, and that his second, democracy, was in the process of
+fulfillment. He turned to the realization of the third, _min shêng_.[2]
+Yüan placed him in charge of all railway development in China, and Sun
+cherished the freedom to carry out the practical aspect of the
+revolution. He had passed beyond the stage of agitation and conspiracy,
+of wandering about in the world, his life in year-long daily jeopardy,
+seeking men and funds for a revolution which seemed Utopian to most. Now
+he could do his work quietly, without inducing simple merchants and
+workers to risk sudden death or the torture racks of the Board of
+Punishments. He had no way of realizing that his miraculous success was
+to be followed by defeat and that the revolution for which he had fought
+was not over but had only begun.
+
+The presidency of Sun Yat-sen in Nanking, terminated by Yüan Shih-k'ai's
+assumption of office, was little more than a military and revolutionary
+junta linking together the various provincial revolutionary groups. It
+had to face no serious problems of administration, and the collection of
+taxes was the last thing that a brand-new revolutionary government would
+dare to stress in China. Its principles were republican, but it
+inaugurated no formal institutions and resorted to no elections,
+referenda, or plebiscites. The task of constituting democracy in China
+was placed under the stewardship of the most versatile military
+opportunist of the age: Yüan Shih-k'ai.
+
+
+_The Parliamentary Republic_
+
+After Sun Yat-sen relinquished the presidency to Yüan Shih-k'ai and the
+Republican regime settled down in the citadel of the old regime, a form
+of government was set up which did not immediately reveal itself as
+patently unworkable but which in retrospect seems a curiously
+ill-conceived experiment in transplanting institutions. Sun and his
+followers assumed that democratic, parliamentary institutions were
+adaptable, that the existing grouping would soon lend itself to the
+purpose of effective multi-party government, and that parties would
+arise organically from honest differences of opinion. They considered
+the republicanization of the provincial and local governments of less
+immediate importance than the establishment of a national democratic
+order. They expected to have a constitutional government with the five
+"races" of China--Chinese, Mongol, Manchu, Tibetan, and Turkic
+(Mohammedan)--united under the new five-barred banner. At the time,
+these assumptions seemed practicable.
+
+The Provisional Constitution of March, 1912, established a relatively
+weak presidency though with somewhat greater powers than the French.
+Article 45 required the countersignature of all presidential orders by
+the appropriate cabinet minister; the ministers were to be appointed by
+the president with the concurrence of the legislative. Unfortunately,
+the principle of ministerial responsibility to parliament was not
+explicitly stated, although it might have been expected that the
+far-reaching powers of the legislative body would have led to actual
+parliamentarism very shortly. It was obviously the intention of the
+Republicans to promote Yüan to a position of ineffectiveness. The
+premier and the cabinet selected by the president with legislative
+concurrence were to be subject to interpellation. On the other hand,
+they were granted the privilege of speaking in the legislative body
+(Articles 43-47). The unicameral National Council (_ts'an-i-yüan_)--to
+continue only until the election of the legislative body--was to be
+constituted in the following manner, under Article 18:
+
+  The Provinces, Inner and Outer Mongolia, and Tibet shall each elect
+  and depute five members to the National Council, and Ch'inghai
+  [Kokonor] shall elect one member.
+
+  The electoral districts and methods of election shall be decided by
+  the localities concerned.[3]
+
+As a result of this procedural latitude, the delegates to the National
+Council were either elected by the provincial assemblies or appointed by
+the military governors or came with no formal credentials whatever. All
+officials were ordered to continue in their posts. The revolutionists
+still exerted control over large military bodies in the South and held
+many of the provinces under their military leaders or juntas, so that
+Yüan proceeded cautiously in the creation of his first administration.
+He chose personalities acceptable to the revolutionists, but appointed
+no outstanding men of Sun's Tung Mêng Hui.
+
+The parliamentary system looked well enough on the surface, but the
+basis of government had disappeared and the problem of mass democracy
+was more fundamental than anyone then imagined. Many groups in the
+country began organizing as parties; Yüan himself appeared to further
+the new way. But he had his own thoughts. He ordered his followers to
+enter the revolutionary units to undermine them, and simultaneously
+pushed for the establishment of a party of his own. There was on all
+sides a pathetic eagerness to live up to the formal expectations of the
+Western world. Tragically, this government was comic opera. Yüan began
+having skirmishes with the Council within a few months. The Republicans
+allowed the actual power to slip away from them while seeking to
+exercise the authority derived from a constitution which most citizens
+of the new Republic could not understand at all. In the summer of 1912
+Sun Yat-sen's followers began to face a definitely hostile executive.
+The Council looked for redress but found that parliamentary tricks
+turned easily against it. The conservative members, supporting Yüan,
+walked out, and the Council lacked a quorum.
+
+In August, 1912, the old revolutionary organization of Sun Yat-sen,
+founded by his coordination of earlier secret societies, was transformed
+into a regular party, the Kuomintang. The Kuomintang devoted themselves
+to the development of genuine party government; looking upon the
+Republic as their own creation, they were less ready for compromise than
+Chinese usage might have required. This did not improve the position of
+Sun's adherents. Yüan countered by forming the Progressive Party
+(_Chinputang_). While both sides lost control over the people, the party
+system was not even important enough to amount to carpetbagging. The
+only power in the country, as doctrine and administration melted away,
+was the military.[4]
+
+Under the terms of the Provisional Constitution the Council was to yield
+to a bicameral National Assembly, for which it should provide by law
+within ten months. It was to be the duty of the National Assembly to
+prepare a permanent constitution (Articles 53 and 54). In the summer of
+1912 the Council passed the required law, providing for the indirect
+election of a Senate and the direct election, by a limited electorate
+and under a very complicated electoral scheme,[5] of a House of
+Representatives. About 1/35 of 1 per cent of the total population voted.
+The Kuomintang came out far ahead of any other party, with a definite
+plurality but one insufficient to give it absolute control of the
+Assembly, which met early in 1913. Inexperienced even in the elementary
+requirements of parliamentary practice, let alone the conduct of
+government, the legislative branch was destined to be sheer ornament.
+The Kuomintang had relegated themselves to the occupancy of the least
+important branch of the government. The new parliament met amid great
+theatricals and placed heavy emphasis on form but was unable to make its
+will felt. The quarrels with the President over foreign loans,
+democratic policy and party rule were not settled by a showdown, but by
+resort to technicalities on both sides.
+
+Yüan, however, had his finger on the trigger. March, 1913, was marked by
+the murder of Sung Chiao-jên, one of the ablest of Sun's followers. It
+was the first political act to indicate that Yüan was embarking upon a
+program of assassinations. Even upon this occasion, Sun Yat-sen held his
+hand, ready to let the new regime prove its character. Yüan used the
+waiting spell to replace Kuomintang men in the provincial armies and
+governments with his own adherents. In July, 1913, a second revolution
+broke out. It was a move of self-defense on the part of the Republicans,
+followers of Sun. The revolution was suppressed by Yüan.
+
+Undisturbed, the work of constitution drafting proceeded apace in the
+North. Again, the trend, paradoxically, was toward French precedent. The
+paradox became patent when Yüan forced the advance adoption of the
+provisions relating to the presidency; on October 10, 1913, the Assembly
+elected him president of the Republic. This gave him full _de jure_
+status as head of the Chinese state in the eyes of the foreign powers.
+On November 4 Yüan suppressed the party which had created the Republic,
+the Kuomintang. This not only eliminated serious opposition to him but
+paralyzed the Assembly as well. It was left without a quorum and without
+a constitution under which a new Assembly could be elected--one of the
+most surprising constitutional cul-de-sacs in modern times. The
+dictatorship began.
+
+
+_The Presidential Dictatorship of Yüan Shih-k'ai_
+
+Not content with having immobilized the National Assembly, Yüan
+proceeded to kill it. He called together an extraconstitutional body of
+his supporters, known as the Political Council. It recommended two
+measures: the dissolution of the National Assembly and the calling of a
+Constitutional Council to frame a permanent constitution. On January 10,
+1914, Yüan suspended the Assembly by presidential decree. With that day
+the Chinese Republic ceased to have a government consonant with its
+laws. Technically the whole Republic lapsed into unconstitutionality and
+illegality, until it was swept out of existence by the National
+Government in 1928.[6] Nevertheless, the military leaders had sufficient
+belief in the political value of twentieth century formalities to
+preserve the appearance of constitutional procedure. During the
+following months Yüan's Constitutional Council, which succeeded the
+Political Council and was, similarly, made up of persons favorable to
+his rule, labored over another constitutional document. On May 1, 1914,
+the document was promulgated under the name _Constitutional Compact_.
+The Compact changed the style of Yüan's rule from a nominal
+parliamentarism to presidential government, and legitimatized the
+dictatorship.
+
+Two and a half years after the establishment of the Republic, the
+country had grown accustomed to the rule of Yüan. His government had the
+advantage of carrying on from the seat of the former imperial
+administration. Yüan's peculiar faculties of old-school diplomacy and
+his grasp of modern militarism stood him in good stead. The Republic was
+generally admitted to be not much of a democracy, but even democratic
+Westerners applauded the hard-headed competence of the "strong man of
+China." Government was more efficient and more despotic than it had been
+in the last days of the Manchu dynasty; resistance and defiance did not
+take open forms, except for the activities of Sun Yat-sen and his
+followers, who had reverted to revolutionary tactics since the outlawry
+of their party. Their agitation was spreading with rapidity. Yüan made
+the same mistake the Republicans had made before: he failed to sink the
+roots of government into the minds of the people and to provide a
+coherent explanation for his own existence. Underestimating the change
+which had taken place, Yüan sustained the illusion that the Chinese
+society in which he was reared still existed. While he failed to evolve
+a symbolism emphasizing the rise of a new order with him as the head,
+the realization that the old Empire was gone was allowed to spread
+slowly across China. There was no more throne; the child Emperor dwelt
+quietly in his museum.
+
+In 1915 Yüan embarked upon one of the strangest exploits in modern
+Chinese politics. After prostituting the democratic formulas in
+accordance with which he professed to govern, he began to use the same
+formulas for a cautious approach to the creation of a new monarchy. He
+was partly encouraged by a memorandum presented to him on August 9,
+1915, by his constitutional adviser, Professor Frank Goodnow. The
+memorandum suggested, as a sane political theorem, the desirability of
+establishing a constitutional monarchy _if_ there was general demand for
+it rather than of maintaining the trappings of Republicanism without
+operative democracy. But Yüan's scheming met with strong opposition.
+Both sides to the ensuing monarchical controversy misconstrued Professor
+Goodnow's memorandum; Yüan's foes denounced it even as a recommendation
+for autocracy. Seen from a purely institutional point of view, there was
+no harm in the proposal. A disadvantage might lie in the fact that other
+military leaders would be jealous of Yüan's obtaining the throne on
+which so many of them speculated. If the state of mind of the Chinese
+and the new doctrines of the Republicans are considered, the proposal
+becomes less feasible. Having gone through the terrific mental and moral
+jolt of a fundamental shift of living forms, and having realized that
+the Empire was irrecoverable, substantial sections of the population
+were in no mood to allow an untried Republic to be superseded by an even
+less tried modern military monarchy.
+
+Yüan used Japan's Twenty-one Demands of 1915, which might have made
+China a quasi protectorate of Japan, as an argument for the immediate
+necessity of strengthening the central government. In sponsoring the
+movement for monarchy he virtually copied the procedure of Napoleon III
+in establishing the Second Empire. The whole technique of modern
+usurpation was brought into play, and no one stopped to consider who
+might be impressed by it. The only audience which might have taken at
+their face value Yüan's carefully staged "popular demonstrations" and
+his recommendations for "representative" public bodies was the Western
+public outside. Chinese familiar enough with elections to understand
+their meaning were for a Republic; the Chinese who did not understand
+them were not impressed.
+
+Had China possessed a man with the administrative and military talents
+of George Washington, a genuine republic might have developed from
+beneath the tutelage of a strong military ruler. Sun Yat-sen, because of
+his Southern birth, his thoroughly revolutionary tenets, and his
+impatience with the jobbery of petty politics, was not prepared for the
+presidential office in Peking. He might have headed a revolutionary
+government elsewhere in China but not a carry-over administration in
+Peking. Yüan misjudged his own opportunities and went back to the ritual
+of the Empire in an endeavor to place himself on a widely coveted
+throne. In December, 1915, after a circus of plebiscites and
+constitutional councils had been provided, the constitutional monarchy
+was proclaimed. In the same month Yüan performed the ancient ceremonials
+of the Imperial Sacrifice to Heaven, clad in the traditional gowns of
+the emperor. On Christmas Day, 1915, the province of Yünnan--in the
+extreme southwest of China--revolted against Yüan. The revolt spread,
+and in March, 1916, Yüan renounced the throne. His dream had come to a
+dismal end; he died on June 6, 1916. In the same month Vice-President Li
+Yüan-hung--the imperial officer whose political career began when he was
+dragged from beneath his bed in 1911--assumed the title of president.
+The National Assembly was convoked. The Provisional Constitution was put
+into effect again. And, as a sign of the times, the provincial military
+commanders took the new title _tuchün_ in place of the older version
+_tutu_.
+
+
+_The Phantom Republic in Peking_
+
+When the Manchu Empire fell in 1911-1912, it left the military power to
+Yüan Shih-k'ai, who cloaked it with the Republic which he appropriated.
+When Yüan died, control of the armies passed to the provincial military
+commandants whom he had installed as a prime feature of his "strong man"
+regime. With the passing of the Empire, civilian bureaucracy fell into
+disuse yet retained just enough cohesion to serve the purposes of Yüan,
+so far as they were to be served by government. After Yüan's death, the
+governments in the provinces followed the flow of power--to the
+provincial commanders. The Indian summer of the parliamentary Republic
+was founded upon its toleration of the army system which Yüan had left
+standing in its fragments. The weight of power was now to go into these
+fragments and not into the Republic, which fell heir merely to Yüan's
+naive and almost contemptuously conceived "constitutional" show.
+
+Sun Yat-sen was favorable to the newly restored Republic but did not
+participate in it, since it was made up largely of second-string
+revolutionists--men who had joined when the cause was winning in
+1911--with a sprinkling of his own followers, together with a
+substantial cohort of the new-style military. Sun had been in exile in
+Japan during Yüan's regime, sounding out the possibility of Japanese
+assistance in furthering his movement. Without the participation of any
+group competent to attract ideological support to civilian government,
+and without any one military leader able to serve or master its cause,
+the Republic had to rest upon the administrative structure. Its power
+was virtually nil. The legislative, as in the early days of the
+Republic, was dominated by Sun's revolutionary Republicans, the
+executive by a conservative cabal of soldiers. The situation differed
+from the earlier one in that the military leader from the North, Tüan
+Chi-jui, occupied the post of premier instead of that of president.
+Within a year the fundamental contradictions in the regime displayed
+themselves. Tüan quarreled with the President and the Assembly,
+demanding dissolution of the latter. Not obtaining what he wished, he
+joined in 1917 other military chieftains in forming a provisional
+military junta in Tientsin. The President called in for his support the
+most reactionary army man of all, Chang Hsün. Chang forced the
+dissolution of the Assembly, the very contingency he was supposed to
+prevent. He capped this act by restoring the Manchu dynasty and putting
+the boy ex-Emperor Hsüan T'ung back on the throne (July 1, 1917).
+
+While the country was startled to learn of the restoration of the
+dynasty, and to receive edicts by telegraph issued in the name of Hsüan
+T'ung, forces of opposition began to gather. The restoration lasted
+until the Northern military leaders could catch their breaths; on July
+12 Tüan Chi-jui marched back into Peking to prevent Chang Hsün from
+stealing a march on him. The unfortunate ex-Emperor was promptly deposed
+for the second time. He was not to be put on a throne again until he
+became the Emperor of Manchoukuo in 1934.
+
+At this juncture the arena was to broaden. In October, 1917, Sun Yat-sen
+was elected Generalissimo of the South by the remnants of the parliament
+which had gathered in Canton. Their action was provoked largely by
+China's declaration of war on Germany--a step which Sun bitterly opposed
+as serving no Chinese interest. From now on there were to be _two_
+Republican traditions in China, each one of them with theoretical claims
+to the legitimate succession from the 1912-1913 Republic. The government
+established by Sun Yat-sen in the South did not secure any international
+recognition, nor did it contain remnants of the imperial bureaucracy, or
+win the respect of the soldiery. But it did fall heir to the ideological
+revolution. The people were still skeptically indulgent toward Sun the
+idealist and his ramshackle governments, although they conceived of
+government in China largely as the problem of fattening the Peking
+phantom and raising it to husky manhood. The Northern Republic survived
+until 1928, increasingly a puzzle and an illusion.[7]
+
+The details of its slow death are intricate. The military did not ignore
+the Republic altogether. They requested its sanction for their
+manipulation of the balance of power. The Republic legitimized the
+gradations of military strength which grew out of conspiracy, tax
+exploitation, opium farming, and ineffectual war. The Republic and its
+presidency were the chief pawns in the pointless game of Chinese
+militarism. The Republic lent a color of unity to the country and
+preserved those proprieties dominant in the Chinese mind. Even banditry
+becomes respectable if it observes "political" formalities, and at times
+the line between banditry and generalship became a matter of day-to-day
+intentions or of the size of the armed forces at hand. The government in
+Peking struggled to provide a suitable organizational form for the
+status quo, though never quite catching up with the new _faits
+accomplis_ of each week.
+
+In three connections the Republic of China at Peking is worthy of
+consideration: in its constitutional development, which in a dreamlike
+and ineffectual way mirrored the political ideals of the
+nonrevolutionary elite;[8] in its international role, which was of
+genuine importance and value to China; and in its administrative
+accomplishments, which--for a government--were negligible to the point
+of absurdity, but admirable indeed for bureaucracy working in chaos.
+
+The Peking government was technically based on the Provisional
+Constitution of 1912. At the earliest period of the restored Republic
+(1917) it fell into the hands of the Anfu clique, which administered to
+China a dose of Reconstruction on the American model. The treasury was
+literally looted, and the politicos who attached themselves to the
+government and to the military dominating it fell over each other in
+their haste to sell the nation out to Japan. A peace conference with the
+representatives of the South met in 1919 but accomplished nothing. A new
+parliament was chosen from the areas claimed by Peking; when this passed
+out of existence another parliament stemming from the National Assembly
+dissolved by Yüan in 1913 assembled in 1922--a rare modern instance of a
+legislative body succeeding its successors. This so-called Old
+Parliament returned to the task which had been interrupted ten years
+before and in 1923 gave birth to a constitution.
+
+The 1923 constitution--China's third Republican constitution, after the
+Provisional Constitution of 1912 and the Constitutional Compact of
+1914--was adopted by a body revoltingly corrupt. The constitution itself
+was the work of political scientists; it was as admirable a document as
+John Locke's constitution for the colony of Carolina, although the
+parliament elected Ts'ao Kun president under conditions which set a
+record for indefensible practices. The constitution itself was
+federalist, but with many adaptations of French institutions in so far
+as the central government was concerned. As a theoretical device for
+government, it would stand high among the constitutions of the world,
+but if not stillborn it was never brought to life. Within a year it was
+set aside, and another provisional system of government was established.
+A committee was set to work on a fourth constitution more strongly
+federal.[9] The provisional government lasted from 1924 to 1926. In 1926
+Chang Tso-lin, the _tuchün_ of Manchuria, took over the city of Peking
+and the government. In doing so he did not bother to appoint a
+constitutional committee or to bribe a parliament. He appointed himself
+dictator (_ta yüan shuai_) and let the legalistic logicians construe it
+as they might. On June 5, 1928, Sun Yat-sen's armies from the South
+occupied Peking, and the Peking Republic was at an end. A ghost of a
+ghost, it was to reappear as a Japanese device in 1937, at a time when
+constitutional debate was at a minimum.
+
+From the metamorphoses of the Peking Republic the Chinese learned most
+bitterly the lessons of political reality. It dawned upon them that
+government would have to rest upon foundations reaching deep into
+society and could not be superimposed upon the existing disorder. Their
+constitutional experience also satiated the Chinese with Western
+formalism. Yet the phantom governments at Peking enjoyed the full
+recognition of the Great Powers, and the Waichiaopu (Foreign Office)
+maintained an impeccable diplomatic front. Although the Chinese scored
+no triumph at the Paris peace conference, they came off much better than
+they would have done without any representation. Three years later, at
+the Washington Conference, the Chinese, favored by the jealousies
+prevailing between the other powers, won a notable diplomatic victory.
+Representing a government whose authority scarcely reached beyond its
+own capital and whose limited financial resources threw its diplomatic
+corps largely on their own, the members of the Chinese delegation
+secured advantages for China greater than any won at the time by the
+Soviet Union.[10]
+
+In the international field the Chinese owed their strength to the same
+factors that weakened them at home: careful attention to form, the
+anxious cherishing of prestige and appearance, and a limitless patience
+which did not predispose the diplomats to violent action. Since the
+Peking regime, in point of military forces available for world-wide
+action, was on about the same level as Liberia, the fact that China
+remained a second-rate power instead of becoming a plain victim suggests
+the degree of her international prestige. The Peking government provided
+a background, however shadowy, for the Chinese Foreign Office, and the
+Foreign Office carefully nursed the fictions of China's international
+status. Moreover, some domestic machinery remained. Around the Peking
+government there clustered a group of administrations which were so
+purely bureaucratic and non-policy-making in character that they were
+tolerated even by the military, or else were under the protection of
+international agreements. The Maritime Customs in Shanghai was staffed
+in its key positions with Westerners. This feature arose out of
+conditions during the T'ai-p'ing rebellion; it was later given
+international status by Chinese assurances that under certain
+stipulations the customs were to retain their foreign personnel. The
+autonomy of the customs became a striking characteristic of the
+international legal and financial position of China, since most of the
+Chinese debts were secured by a mortgage on customs receipts.[11] The
+Salt Revenue Administration was similarly separated from the rest of the
+Chinese bureaucracy by international agreement, since loans had been
+secured upon this revenue. The surpluses from both services were paid
+for the greater part to the central government at Peking and provided a
+definite fiscal incentive for the maintenance of the Republic. The
+Chinese Post Office was also manned in part by Westerners, and it
+managed to preserve reasonably good postal service throughout the
+country despite the governmental anarchy which otherwise prevailed.
+These administrations were largely autonomous; they made up the
+deficiencies of the Peking government so far as it was within their
+power. Thus the regime could boast of an excellent written constitution,
+a first-class Foreign Office, several good revenue agencies, a good
+postal service, and almost nothing else.
+
+In the age of the _tuchüns_ the Peking regime had no domestic power to
+speak of; most of the time government was by courtesy only.
+
+
+_The Governments of Sun Yat-sen in Canton_
+
+In 1917, when the National Assembly was dissolved for the second time by
+the intervention of the _tuchün_ Chang Hsün, a group of its members met
+first in Shanghai and then adjourned to Canton. Assembling as an
+Extraordinary Parliament, it elected Sun Yat-sen Generalissimo of the
+South. He was not given the title of president because he did not wish
+to create the appearance of national disunity. Sun was in the peculiar
+position of being placed in military command at the sufferance of
+regional military leaders. He even had to fight for support in the rump
+parliament which had elected him.
+
+In this first Cantonese government, Sun's military objectives
+overshadowed all others. Attempts were made to promote a frontal assault
+on the army plague, and various expeditions were launched against the
+North. Sun Yat-sen had his experiences in the years of revolt before
+1911 to hearten him. The Republican Revolution of 1911-1912 was not so
+much a carefully timed universal conspiracy as it was the seizure of a
+few pivotal points by small bands of revolutionists, backed by
+provincial support. Sun did not think in terms of nationalism as yet,
+for he felt that with the expulsion of the Manchus the Chinese had
+solved the major problem of foreign oppression. His course of action in
+the first Cantonese government was therefore that of a man fighting on a
+constitutional and democratic issue while leaning on a temporary
+military government. His new regime had acquired at one time an enormous
+reach of territory by bringing under its fold, through a process of
+negotiation and intrigue, the leading military figures of Southern
+China.
+
+Sun was, however, working too much outside his own party. He had both
+the parliament and the Southern militarists to contend with. The task of
+maintaining a revolutionary movement with troops who were no more
+interested in it than the troops opposing them, transcended even Sun's
+optimism and courage. Despite demonstrations of his personal capacity
+and bravery, he felt that his work lacked momentum. In May, 1918, after
+his office as generalissimo had been abolished and he had been made one
+of a Supreme Committee of Seven, Sun left for Shanghai.
+
+In Shanghai Sun had time to ponder organizational strategy, to conduct
+the world-wide operations of the Kuomintang officially now _Chung-hua
+Kê-ming Tang_, or Chinese Revolutionary Party, and to consider types of
+government and methods of propaganda. He worked with Judge Paul
+Linebarger, his sympathizer and supporter since 1906, on a biography
+similar to the campaign biographies of American presidential
+candidates.[12] At this time he was still devoting himself to the
+organization of the existing groups in Chinese society for revolutionary
+purposes. He saw himself as the moral leader of the revolution and
+simultaneously as the necessary advocate of constitutionalism. He was
+anxious to implement the ideological revolution but thought that the
+parliamentary democratic techniques had been designed in the West to
+accomplish just that end. While he was in Shanghai, the Canton regime
+carried on a fragmentary existence. In November, 1920, he returned to
+Canton after his military friends had cleared the way for him. On this
+occasion the Canton government came forth as a fully civilian regime.
+Sun was elected Extraordinary President of the Republic of China by the
+Southern parliament in April, 1921. Using the city of Canton as his
+base, Sun continued the long series of military expeditions he had led
+for years, trying to whip the _tuchüns_ at their own game without
+becoming one himself. He personally went with forces into the field
+again. In 1922 treason on the part of his chief war-lord supporter drove
+him out of Canton. Back in Shanghai, he established contact with the
+representative of the Soviets, Adolf Joffe; both men stipulated the
+terms of the alliance between the Kuomintang and the Communists.[13]
+
+In 1923 Sun laid new emphasis on one part of his program hitherto
+neglected: the doctrine of the three stages of revolution. The
+revolution had failed in fact because it had not provided adequate
+measures for democratic training. The revolutionists had assumed an
+organic political change, and militarists had profited by their mistake
+in taking over the Republic and using its forms to subvert what were the
+merest beginnings of democracy. Henceforth, the revolutionary group
+would have to emphasize a sequential process in democratic state
+construction: (1) the acquisition of political power by the missionaries
+of the revolution; (2) the teaching of the new ideology of democracy and
+the training of the people in the techniques of self-government; (3) the
+establishment of constitutional democracy.[14] When offered the
+opportunity of forming his third Canton government, he took no chances
+and himself assumed the title generalissimo and the command of the
+armies. In October, 1923, a plan was drawn up for the reorganization of
+the Kuomintang, with the advice of Borodin. Next January the First
+Congress of the Party opened. Sun Yat-sen, delighted with the new
+instrument for promoting the ideological revolution, allowed government
+problems to recede. The Party came to the front, and with the Party
+organization were to be solved the problems of a universe in revolution.
+During the fifteen months of life which remained to Sun Yat-sen, his
+third government at Canton was not to undergo any transformation. The
+strictly political purposes of the revolution had become mere adjuncts
+to the ideological and military features. The government continued to
+possess the now familiar parliamentary-democratic formulas which,
+misused and deformed as they were throughout China, had come to be the
+embroidery of might.
+
+
+_The Nationalist Government, Soviet in Form_
+
+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
+_tuchüns_ 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 passed 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 shêng_, 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 _tuchün_ 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-_tuchünism_, 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
+associations. 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 buttressed 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 municipal
+governments. There was not the faintest show of popular participation 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 mass participation, not in the
+government but in the movement. The Nationalist Revolution won with the
+assistance 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
+reconstitute a government both Chinese and modern.
+
+
+NOTES
+
+[1] Sun Yat-sen, _How China Was Made a Republic_ (unpublished
+manuscript 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 documentation 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-Japanese in the autumn
+of 1937.
+
+[5] Harold M. Vinacke, _Modern Constitutional Development in China_,
+pp. 145-146, 150, Princeton, 1920.
+
+[6] See Wu, _op. cit._ in note 3, pp. 50-51, for the problem of
+constitutional 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 documents.
+_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 Washington 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. Hsü, _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 constitutionelle en
+Chine_, Peiping, 1935; Tsêng Yü-hao, _Modern Chinese Legal and Political
+Philosophy_, Shanghai, 1930.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter_ VIII
+
+RECONSTRUCTION
+
+
+The National Government of China set up at Nanking in April, 1927, was
+not definitively organized until late that year. Chiang K'ai-shek had to
+resign from the government before the Left Kuomintang group would accept
+the regime. In the following year, with the return of Chiang and the
+adoption of a new constitution (Organic Law of the National Government),
+the Nanking government was more firmly established than any previous
+government since the death of Yüan Shih-k'ai. A high price had been paid
+for stability: Northern military leaders had been allowed to join it,
+much as those of the South had supported Sun Yat-sen ten years before.
+The break with the Communists meant stopping a vast agrarian-proletarian
+revolution midway in its course, at a cost of many lives. The
+Nationalists, thrust into the role of governors, could not avoid turning
+against many of those who had helped to put them in power but wished to
+continue the revolution.
+
+
+_The National Government of China_
+
+Despite the difficulties which it faced, the National Government had
+many assets. In the realm of ideology, it had the advantage of
+possessing a state philosophy and a patron saint: the _San Min Chu I_[1]
+and its author, Sun Yat-sen. In the military sphere, it had at its
+disposal an army unequaled in China; in the economic, the support of the
+Chinese bourgeoisie, together with the friendly interest of the
+capitalist powers. In the province of politics, it carried with it much
+of the personnel formerly serving the Nationalist Government, soviet in
+form, to which it claimed succession. Its officials were accustomed to
+devote themselves seriously to government, so that from the very
+beginning the Nanking government was inclined to enforce its laws as
+well as promulgate them--thereby breaking with the usage of the shadow
+Republic at Peking. Finally, the new government secured full
+international recognition with the flight of Chang Tso-lin from Peking
+and the disappearance of the rival regime in the North (1928).
+
+Sun's state philosophy fulfilled a cardinal function. Even in its most
+troubled phases, when military factors came closest to the surface of
+government, the new government did not lapse into fiction. There was a
+programmatic index against which Nanking's accomplishments could be
+tested, and a definite long-range plan to follow. The program enabled
+the National Government to utilize the forms of revolution for the
+purpose of stabilizing government--far less dangerous than the practice
+of their Northern predecessors, to use government in order to further
+disunited military despotism. The officers of the Kuomintang exhibited a
+meticulous respect for the dead Leader of their Party. Sun Yat-sen,
+known by his honorific pseudonym _Chung Shan_, was buried in one of the
+most magnificent tombs of modern times. In carrying out Sun's legacy,
+the Kuomintang was pledged to the principles of intraparty democratic
+centralism and party dictatorship over the rest of the nation. The
+formal party organization was not seriously effected by the change from
+a soviet form of government.
+
+Government under the Kuomintang, despite the breakdown of morale which
+followed the disintegration of the Great Revolution (1927), was
+radically unlike that of the Peking regimes. In 1927, when Chiang
+K'ai-shek turned against the peasant unions and officialized the labor
+unions, a tendency toward outright military dictatorship became
+apparent. The developments of the following ten years did not at any
+time suggest that military power had meekly yielded to governmental
+power, but they did indicate that government was taking an increasing
+part in the control of society. The close interrelation of ideology and
+government, dating from the period of the Nationalist-Communist
+alliance, was to endure after the revolution had been transformed into a
+reconstructive process and rebellion had been superseded by
+administration. However much Sun and his teachings failed to create a
+new political Islam, they weathered criticism sufficiently well to
+provide a scheme of policy, political values, and broad objectives.
+
+The influence of Sun Yat-sen was harmed, rather than reinforced, by the
+hysterical ritualists who seem to be the parasites of all one-party
+governments. The memory of the Leader and his teachings settled into the
+stabilizing roles of founding father and general dogma. Only a few
+veterans of the movement are still inspired by the fire of his words and
+the vigor of his personality. To the vast bulk of Chinese public opinion
+Sun Yat-sen is the human embodiment of virtuous, brave, and intelligent
+conduct, whose theories are acceptable in their general form and whose
+programs have proved pragmatically usable. The _San Min Chu I_ failed to
+cause widespread political ecstasy; it succeeded in bringing direction
+and sanity, after a limited fashion. To spread allegiance the government
+fostered a Sun Yat-sen memorial ritual; every Monday morning, in every
+government office, college, school, police station, and other public
+building, there was held a service consisting of the reading of Sun
+Yat-sen's political testament and passages from his speeches clarifying
+his doctrines. The services seemed for a while to resemble a state
+religion; but the moderateness and formalism of Chinese life was
+inimical to the fervor necessary for political religion. The Kuomintang
+and its government came to see these limitations; although the services
+have remained, they are now severely secular in spirit.
+
+The most dynamic part of the _San Min Chu I_, the doctrine of
+nationalism, had contributed to placing the Kuomintang in power. The new
+government was accordingly nationalist and centralistic; it opposed any
+type of regionalism--political, administrative, economic, or military.
+The Northern generals who sided with the government at the time of its
+formation were brought within the operation of the national military
+laws. When they revolted--quite properly, according to their _tuchün_
+standards--against reduction of their forces in the Disbandment War of
+1930-1931, they were defeated. With the Southern and the Western
+military leaders Chiang was not as successful, until Japanese and
+Communist pressure brought first the one and then the other group into
+his fold. After actual autonomy for a number of years, the province of
+Kuangtung (Canton) submitted in 1936 to the authority of the National
+Government, thereby bringing to an end the generation-old division of
+North and South. Nationalism and centralism affected not only the armies
+but also the entire administration, whose service functions and police
+powers developed amazingly. Although the Nanking government had
+originally faced broad popular suspicion, it began to win genuine
+respect because of its accomplishments.
+
+Was the Nanking government a dictatorship? Its record does not justify
+the assumption that it was merely to camouflage a military dictatorship
+commandeered by Chiang K'ai-shek. Moreover, the policy-making power was
+not by any means a prerogative of Chiang K'ai-shek. Chiang was nearly
+sovereign in technical military matters and possessed more political
+influence than did any other single individual. Yet the power of policy
+making rested with a small group of men not over a hundred in number.
+Some of the gentlest, sincerest, and quietest of these leaders had once
+been _tuchüns_ in their own right; some of the most military and
+forthright had never handled anything more lethal than a cash register.
+The leaders tended to work within the party and government structure, so
+that the political organization, while not of great simplicity or
+clarity, accurately portrayed the distribution of power. No one can
+gauge the degree of interdependence between the leaders of a government
+system in its formative period, and between the offices which these
+leaders occupy. The Sian episode indicated that the Nanking government
+could continue without Chiang and that Chiang's incarceration was not
+the signal for immediate anarchy. But Chiang was not actually dead, nor
+was the government deprived of the support which his prestige had
+generated. From 1927 to 1937 the Nanking government remained under
+approximately the same leading officials.
+
+The last test for the sources of Nanking's power may be found in
+considering the relation between the men in command and the authority
+which placed them there. The supreme organ of the party was the Party
+Congress. This body did determine the course of government policy
+frequently, and on such occasions clarified issues through action. The
+Congress elected the Central Executive Committee and the Central
+Supervisory Committee of the Kuomintang. The entire membership of the
+Congress would vote in the elections, any of the members being eligible.
+Since the Congress was composed of representatives from the various
+regional and functional divisions of the party, intraparty democracy was
+insured in theory and--though to a lesser extent--in practice. The two
+top committees elected smaller Standing Committees; the Central
+Executive Committee in addition elected the Central Political Council,
+which was the highest organ of government in China and the agency
+through which the party controlled the government. The Central Political
+Council did not seek to keep track of the detail of government; it
+outlined governmental policy, appointed major officials, and directed
+rather than supervised administration. It was a policy-making body in
+the strictest sense, and its action took effect upon the Council of
+State, which coordinated the government establishments.[2]
+
+Had there been a schism between the Nanking government and the
+Kuomintang, it might have been possible to trace a political issue as it
+was fought out--all the way from the party membership up through the
+Party Congress and the Central Executive Committee, from party to
+government by action of the Central Political Council, and down through
+the Council of State and the subordinated government organs to the
+administrative network operating upon the broad masses of the populace.
+In fact, however, no issue saw the light, since the same group that
+dominated the party controlled the government. The relation between the
+leaders and the Party Congresses can perhaps best be compared with that
+between the leading personalities of a Republican or Democratic
+convention in the United States and the convention delegates. Convention
+action rarely transfers power or upsets leadership, nor do constructive
+plans or formulated policies emerge from convention sessions; and yet
+the conventions cannot be regarded merely as tools in the hands of the
+party leadership. A similar situation existed in China. Even when Chiang
+and the other leaders seemed to hold the bag, the meetings of the Party
+Congress did not lack importance, and the issues before the Congress
+were not considered predetermined. This was no personal regime in the
+Napoleonic sense. Party dictatorship expressed itself in defined forms,
+as a part of Sun Yat-sen's state philosophy. Benevolent oligarchy of
+patriotic modernists, acting with party sanction obtained through
+intraparty democratic processes, was not foreign to Sun's mind. The
+Nanking government further differed from fascist governments, and
+resembled the Russian, in that it was democratic in intent; its
+dictatorial character was avowedly temporary. Throughout the period
+during which the Kuomintang ruled from Nanking, democracy was regarded
+as a definite goal of governmental policy. The Japanese invasions
+culminating in open war made impossible the immediate abrogation of
+Kuomintang party dictatorship. Yet when war broke out in 1937, the
+National Government was on the verge of reconstituting itself as a
+democracy; but now the regime itself became itinerant, moving into the
+hinterland.
+
+The Nanking government was organized under Kuomintang rule in a form
+unique among modern states. Its three most distinctive features were:
+(1) the concentration of power in the supreme agencies; (2) a fivefold
+division of power and function through the _yüans_; and (3) the absence
+of parliamentary chambers.[3] While the Organic Law was in effect as a
+constitution (1928-1931), the government was headed by a president
+wielding considerable power and a Council of State which served as the
+chief control agency. In 1931 a National People's Convention made up of
+representatives of the Kuomintang and of occupational groups adopted a
+Provisional Constitution.[4] Under this constitution the power of the
+president was sharply reduced, making him practically a titular officer.
+The Council of State became a more formalized agency, and the greater
+weight of government routine was placed in the Executive _Yüan_. Under
+the draft constitution proposed for the period after the end of party
+dictatorship a presidential system was to have been inaugurated.
+
+The years 1931-1937 were characterized by the use of the Council of
+State as the supreme agency of formal government. The president of the
+National Government was little more than the chairman of the Council.
+The Council received instructions from the Central Political Council,
+and transmitted them to the five regular departments of government in
+the form of policies. Great as its powers may seem to be, the Council of
+State was largely an intermediary agency, although the personal
+influence of its members was extensive. The Council, with its
+administrative adjuncts, was of value in that it provided an
+institutional center for the government and gave governmental form to
+the commands of the party. There was no judicial check on the executive
+or the legislative branches.
+
+The fivefold division of powers (adopted as the _yüan_ system) is one of
+the most original points in Sun Yat-sen's political scheme. _Yüan_ is an
+almost untranslatable Chinese term signifying a "public body" and used
+in modern China to designate the five great coordinate departments of
+government.
+
+
+  PARTY MEMBERSHIP
+
+  PARTY CONGRESS
+
+  CENTRAL EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE  CENTRAL SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE
+      STANDING COMMITTEE           STANDING COMMITTEE
+
+  CENTRAL POLITICAL COUNCIL
+
+  1. Secretariat for Civil Affairs
+  2. Secretariat for Military Affairs
+  3. Commission for the Disciplinary Punishment of Political Officials
+
+  PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT
+  COUNCIL OF STATE
+
+  1. Commission of Military Affairs
+  2. Board of General Staff
+  3. Directorate-General of Military Training
+  4. Military Advisory Council
+  5. National Reconstruction Commission
+  6. Academia Sinica
+  7. National Economic Council
+  8. Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum Commission
+
+  I. EXECUTIVE YÜAN
+    President
+    Vice-president
+    Secretariat
+    1. Ministry of the Interior
+    2. Ministry of Foreign Affairs
+    3. Ministry of Military Affairs
+    4. Ministry of the Navy
+    5. Ministry of Finance
+    6. Ministry of Industries
+    7. Ministry of Education
+    8. Ministry of Communications
+    9. Ministry of Railways
+    10. Commission on Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs
+    11. Commission on Overseas Chinese Affairs
+    12. National Health Service
+    13. Hopei-Chahar Political Council
+    14. Mongolian Local Autonomy Council
+    15. Weihaiwei Administration
+    16. Preparatory Commission for the Sikang Provincial Government
+    17. Boards of Trustees for Boxer Refunds
+    18. Committee on Efficiency
+
+  II. LEGISLATIVE YÜAN
+    President
+    Vice-president
+    Legislative Members
+    Legislative Research Bureau
+    Bureau of Statistics
+
+  III. JUDICIAL YÜAN
+    President
+    Vice-president
+    Commission for the Disciplinary Punishment of Public Functionaries
+    Administrative Court
+    Supreme Court
+    Ministry of Justice
+
+  IV. EXAMINATION YÜAN
+    President
+    Vice-president
+    Examination Commission
+    Ministry of Personnel
+
+  V. CONTROL YÜAN
+    President
+    Vice-president
+    Ministry of Audit
+
+  PROVINCIAL COMMISSIONS
+  _Hsien_    Municipalities
+  Villages
+
+The Executive _Yüan_ was headed, as were all the others, by a
+_yüan_ president (_yüan-chang_), assisted by a vice-president, a
+secretary-general, and a director of political affairs. The yüan
+included all the major executive ministries, and the formal meeting of
+the Executive _Yüan_ was a meeting of the _Yüan_ officers, the heads of
+the ministries, and other directing officials. Such meetings took place
+once a week and corresponded to cabinet meetings in Western countries.
+The executive work of the entire government was performed by the
+Executive _Yüan_ and--through characteristic Chinese devices--the _Yüan_
+Secretariat, divided into bureaus and committees, came to occupy a
+position of high strategic importance in Chinese government. All
+executive measures were funneled through the Secretariat, which cast
+them into proper form and determined whether or not they should be put
+on the _yüan_ agenda. It thus occupied a position not unlike that of the
+Grand Chancery and Grand Secretariat of the T'ang dynasty or of the
+Office of Transmissions under the Manchus. The Executive _Yüan_ combined
+within itself nine ministries: Interior (having charge of provincial and
+local government), Foreign Affairs, Military Affairs, Navy, Finance,
+Industries, Education, Communications, and Railways. Included were also
+a number of special commissions and agencies.
+
+The Legislative _Yüan_ consisted of a president, a vice-president, and
+eighty-six members, with an extensive administrative staff attached to
+it. The _yüan_ was divided, as are parliaments, into committees, but it
+was not a representative body, nor able to enact laws independently of
+the other divisions of government. Its president's powers were so wide
+as to make the cameral organization of the _yüan_ more apparent than
+real and to reduce the _yüan_ to a legislative drafting and research
+agency. The Judicial _Yüan_ was made up of four establishments: Supreme
+Court, Administrative Court, Commission for the Disciplinary Punishment
+of Public Functionaries (dealing with the government personnel below
+political rank), and the Ministry of Justice. The Examination _Yüan_,
+composed of two divisions (Examination Commission and Ministry of
+Personnel) gave expression to the Chinese tradition of separate
+examining agencies. Its function was to provide a merit system
+applicable to the whole government staff, except those relatively few
+positions which were political in nature. Because of the difficulty of
+developing elaborate machinery under unusual circumstances, the
+Examination _Yüan_ did not establish for itself a high standard of
+accomplishment. Finally, the Control _Yüan_ served as a chamber of
+censors entitled to bring suit against dishonest or treacherous
+officials, and maintained a central Ministry of Audit. In the last few
+years of the Nanking regime it brought over two hundred and fifty cases
+to bar each year.
+
+An informative picture of the practical workings of one of the key parts
+of the National Government, the Secretariat of the Executive _Yüan_, is
+given by Tsiang Ting-fu, the Chinese ambassador to the Soviet Union and
+formerly one of the ranking officials of that _Yüan_:
+
+  The Bureau of General Affairs keeps the internal machinery of the
+  Secretariat going. It receives the dispatches and distributes them
+  among the sections. It manages the funds and looks after supplies.
+
+  The Bureau of Confidential Affairs handles confidential telegrams and
+  keeps the secret codes.
+
+  The Secretaries in the Drafting Bureau draft documents that require
+  high literary finish, usually formal documents.
+
+  The Reception Bureau takes care of callers and visitors and sees to it
+  that dignitaries who come to the Executive Yüan for business or
+  courtesy calls are accorded a due reception.
+
+  The Meetings Bureau arranges for all meetings held in, or under the
+  auspices of, the Executive Yüan.
+
+  The Compilation and Translation Bureau watches over the periodical
+  press, both Chinese and foreign.
+
+  The real political work is done in the Sections. Let us take up first
+  political correspondence. A minister, governor, or mayor sends a
+  dispatch to the Executive Yüan, asking for instructions in regard to,
+  let us say, a problem in raising funds. It goes to Section 5. The head
+  clerk and his assistants look up regulations, precedents, and other
+  relevant facts and write a memorandum. The dispatch with the
+  memorandum goes to the secretary or councillor in charge of the
+  Section, who writes a minute suggesting a solution or approving a
+  solution suggested by the head clerk. Then the dispatch, memorandum,
+  and minute go to the Director of Political Affairs, who, taking into
+  consideration political factors, renders a tentative decision for
+  final approval by the Secretary-General. The clerical staff sticks to
+  law, tradition, and precedent. Adjustments are usually made only by
+  the ranks above. As the majority of problems are so-called routine
+  problems, in connection with which the opinion of the clerical staff
+  is usually sound, the ranks above usually accept the proposed
+  solution. What is important and bothersome is the minority of unusual
+  problems, for the treatment of which procedures are varied.
+
+  The sender of a dispatch dealing with an unusual problem may call, or
+  send a representative to call, on the Secretary-General or the
+  Director of Political Affairs before or simultaneously with the
+  sending of the dispatch, giving a personal detailed explanation of the
+  matter and sounding the opinion of the Executive Yüan as represented
+  by the Secretary-General and the Director of Political Affairs. An
+  agreed solution may be arrived at during the interview. In that case
+  the correspondence will be only formal. But the parties involved may
+  disagree, in which case the Secretary-General will courteously say
+  that the matter must be referred to the President or to the Yüan
+  meeting, and the Director has an additional solution of the problem by
+  resorting to consultation with the Secretary-General. In some cases
+  the Secretary-General and the Director will decide the matter during
+  the interview whether the caller likes it or not.
+
+  Some unusual matters touch several jurisdictions, _i.e._, two or three
+  ministries; or a number of provinces or cities; or both. The Executive
+  Yüan then calls a meeting of representatives of the jurisdictions
+  affected and the matter is threshed out there. The conclusions of such
+  meetings may be referred to the President or to the Yüan meetings.
+
+  In dealing with unusual problems of primary importance the
+  Secretary-General usually consults the President, and the Director of
+  Political Affairs consults the Secretary-General in most cases and the
+  President in some cases where the work is specifically assigned to the
+  Director by the President.
+
+  The average of dispatches (including telegrams) received and sent out
+  daily by the Executive Yüan is about three hundred, of which number
+  only two or three need to be referred to the President or the Yüan
+  meeting, the rest being handled by the Secretariat without such
+  reference.
+
+  The Secretariat on its part, by the order of the President as Chairman
+  of the Yüan meeting, or on the initiative of the Secretary-General or
+  at the suggestion of the Director of Political Affairs, sends
+  dispatches to the ministries, commissions, provinces and
+  municipalities, in the form of decrees, ordinances, instructions,
+  inquiries and requests.
+
+  The energies of the clerical staff are devoted entirely to the
+  incoming and outgoing correspondence. About half of the time of the
+  secretaries and councillors is devoted to correspondence and half to
+  conferences. The sub-committees created by the Yüan meeting are
+  numerous and are almost always convoked by the Secretariat. In a few
+  cases the Secretary-General and the Director of Political Affairs,
+  usually accompanied by a secretary or councillor, attend; in most
+  cases, however a secretary or a councillor is designated as the Yüan's
+  representative. The conclusions of such sub-committees are always
+  reported back to the Yüan meeting.[5]
+
+Strange as the _yüan_ system may appear, it seems to have been the most
+effectual form of government that the Chinese have devised in the
+Republican era. In times of military or revolutionary crisis, however,
+this elaborate scheme of bureaucratic departmentalization would prove
+too cumbersome for rapid readjustment and action; during the Japanese
+invasions, great reliance was placed on the creation of emergency
+commissions. In addition to the _yüans_ there were a number of agencies
+which did not fit into the five-power scheme. Great independent
+establishments were attached directly to the Council of State. An
+Academia Sinica took the place of the Han Lin of imperial times as a
+national center for scholarship. A National Economic Council and a
+National Reconstruction Commission performed specialized functions
+effectively, with assistance from experts provided by the League of
+Nations. In fact, there was a scattering of foreign advisers throughout
+the government. Of these the highest in rank were placed at the disposal
+of the Council of State, some rendering actual technical service, others
+active in unofficial representation abroad, propaganda, lobbying in
+foreign capitals, or similar tasks. Other advisers were attached to the
+_yüans_ and to the ministries.
+
+Provincial government under the Nanking regime was subordinated to the
+Executive _Yüan_ through the Ministry of the Interior. The provinces
+each possessed a commission form of government, with the commission
+chairman serving as titular head of the province. The actual operation
+of the provincial governments exhibited a great deal of variation,
+depending on the character of the area, the extent of its political
+development, and the tangible influence enjoyed by the National
+Government. The provincial commission combined the policy-making,
+policy-executing, and quasi-judicial functions, operating largely on the
+basis of instructions from Nanking and transmitting reports through the
+Secretariat of the Executive _Yüan_ at the other end. Attached to each
+commission were a secretariat and four or more departments--mainly civil
+affairs, finance, reconstruction, and education. The department heads
+were members of the commission--a type of government not unlike that of
+American cities under the Galveston plan. The theory of Sun Yat-sen
+provided, however, that the province should decrease in importance with
+the growth of modern government in China, so that the dangerous
+regionalism in the country would eventually be denied overt political
+expression. He saw the future significance of the provincial governments
+only in their role as intermediaries for _hsien_-national relationships.
+Under the National Government while at Nanking, the tendency was to
+centralize control and to emphasize national guidance in those provinces
+squarely under Nationalist rule. In other provinces the provincial
+governments tended to follow local conditions and mirror the national
+standards as a matter of decorum only. The provincial governments were
+far less important in the life of the provinces than was the National
+Government for the nation. They had the national civilian and military
+authorities to cope with, in addition to the impositions of their own
+local military. Their sources of revenue were not ample, and their
+authority not well established. In some provinces the commission form
+was adopted only as a matter of legal compliance, leaving to local
+leaders the actual conduct of affairs. In fact, reform centered on the
+_hsien_ rather than the province, partly because the province was a
+potential rival to the nation, and partly because the _hsien_ was a more
+organic unit in Chinese society.
+
+Between the provincial authorities and those of the _hsien_ there stood
+Special Commissioners of Administrative Inspection, whose function was
+to relate the two administrative units and to work for the modernization
+of _hsien_ organization. The _hsien_ served, and still serves, not only
+a rural area but also the central municipality in which the _hsien_
+magistrate has his headquarters. The _yamên_ (official building)
+occupies the center of the town, mostly a one-story edifice built around
+a courtyard; some _yamêns_ still display the two flagpoles and the two
+stone lions that were required by the custom of the Empire. Usually the
+_yamên_ contains:
+
+"(_a_) the rooms occupied by the tax collectors and the administrative
+and judicial police; (_b_) the court and the assembly room; (_c_) the
+offices of the various bureaus; (_d_) the residence for magistrates and
+the dormitory for officers."[6] The conduct of _hsien_ government is
+influenced by three main groups--the illiterate masses, the conservative
+gentry, and the younger progressives. In those _hsien_ units where no
+reformist or revolutionary pressure is felt, the magistrate and the tax
+collector do little more than collect funds, and the administration is
+marked by the laxity which characterized old Chinese government in its
+inadequate form. The gentry, the scholar-administrators, and the tax
+collectors represent a single social group and manage to rule in their
+own economic interest. In other _hsien_ units the influence of modern
+government is noticeable; the magistrate is in most cases a man
+determined to put into effect the standards of twentieth-century
+administration. The prestige and power of young men with modern
+educations have so increased that they are able to obtain a considerable
+number of magistracies, and if they are willing they may introduce a
+respectable measure of good government and reform.
+
+The magistrate selects his secretary and four bureau heads, subject to
+the approval of the provincial authorities. The secretary performs the
+work usually expected of permanent officials, carrying on much of the
+routine so as to leave the magistrate free for political and
+quasi-judicial functions. The secretary is virtually a vice-magistrate
+and, if successful, keeps the governmental machinery of the _hsien_ in
+smooth operation. When the magistrate is absent, he acts as the
+substitute. The four bureaus of the _hsien_ correspond to the four chief
+administrative divisions of the province--civil affairs, finance,
+reconstruction, and education. An opium suppression bureau is often
+added, carrying on the anti-narcotic campaign. The civil affairs bureau
+has charge of the census, and supervises local areas within the
+district. Such matters as police, militia, sanitary administration,
+public buildings, classical shrines, and parks are frequently under its
+jurisdiction. The subordinate units of administration are provisional,
+but the _pao-chia_ system has been restored at the lowest level. This is
+a device for the mutual guarantee, protection, and responsibility of
+citizens, in which ten families make a _pao_ and ten _pao_ make a
+_chia_. The tax bureau is one of the weakest links in Chinese local
+government, as in this office corruption is rife, and severe oppression
+of the farmers most frequent. In unreformed _hsien_ units, the tax
+bureau is likely to be the political plum of members of the local
+gentry, who use it to extend their tenant farms, promote usury, and
+defraud the government. The provincial governments have begun to send
+out accountants and to install regular bookkeeping systems--an
+undertaking which if completed would be one of the major reforms of
+local administration.
+
+In the smaller _hsien_ units the magistrate is assisted for judicial
+purposes by a judge; in the larger, separate courts are provided. Up to
+the outbreak of hostilities in 1937 the national and provincial
+governments were making great strides in reorganizing judicial
+administration and in the professionalization of police work. The judges
+are appointees of the provincial courts, a factor which may make for
+greater professional capacity and independence. The general importance
+of the _hsien_ is illustrated by the fact that in Manchoukuo the
+Japanese have been forced to revive this system. They have, however,
+implemented it with a Japanese officer known as the _Kanjikan_, who is
+supposed to advise his Chinese colleague. The experiment is of great
+interest, as it provides the acid test for the Japanese attempt actually
+to administer a Chinese area. Without firm _hsien_ governments beneath
+them, the Japanese puppet regimes are foredoomed to failure.[7]
+
+Until the beginning of the undeclared war, the departmentalization and
+modernization of the _hsien_ had proceeded most extensively in certain
+model districts selected for the purpose of political and administrative
+experimentation. Some of these had reached a level of efficiency which
+augured well for the future of Chinese government. With the coming of
+war, however, administrative interests had to yield in many cases to
+political or military ones, but in one significant respect _hsien_
+government was constructively affected. The evocation of popular
+interest in and cooperation with the government caused a great
+acceleration of progress toward local democracy, and focused attention
+on reaction and corruption in the inland regions. War propaganda among
+the masses of the people amounted to a call for public-spirited action;
+such action is bound to take the form of direct military enlistment or
+of collaboration in local patriotic and defense schemes.
+
+Municipal government in old China was carried on largely by the
+officials of the imperial or provincial bureaucracy. Cities and towns
+were graded and even named according to the rank of the office for which
+they served as headquarters. The imperial administration thus extended
+to municipal affairs; each municipal government included a designated
+rural area surrounding the city. With the growth of modern government in
+China, plans were considered for a definite and systematic development
+of municipal administration. The foreign-controlled cities of the coast
+provided models of Western administration, and the Chinese were not slow
+to copy. A few years ago the cities of China were divided for
+administrative purposes into three categories: those administered
+directly by the national government; those placed directly under the
+provincial governments; and those for which no special category was
+provided, leaving them under the established bureaucratic hierarchy. In
+1936 there were five cities of the first class (Nanking, Peiping,
+Shanghai, Tientsin, and Tsingtao) and eighteen of the second class,
+including the very important cities of Hankow and Canton. The municipal
+administration is headed by the mayor and the council. The mayor is
+appointed by the authority under whose jurisdiction the city is placed.
+The council is composed of two appointed councillors and the chiefs of
+the municipal bureaus--four or more. The four required bureaus are civil
+affairs, finance, public works, and education. Intracity organization
+was accomplished through the use of _ch'u_, or wards, subdivided into
+family groups of defined size. With the development of democracy it was
+intended for each of these to take part in the promotion of
+self-government; at each level representatives should be chosen by free
+suffrage. The family foundation has remained a significant feature even
+of municipal administration.
+
+The chief political question before the National Government at the
+outbreak of hostilities in the summer of 1937 was the adoption of a
+permanent democratic constitution. This was to be accomplished in much
+the same way that the Provisional Constitution had been adopted in
+1931--by means of a specially elected People's Congress. In the
+meantime, a draft constitution had reached a nearly final form. The
+outstanding features of the draft included the strengthening of the
+presidency, the abolition of the Kuomintang party dictatorship, the
+extension of a widely defined suffrage to operate on an unprecedented
+scale, and provision for periodically assembling People's Congresses to
+take, by and large, the position of the Kuomintang by exercising the
+four powers of the people: initiative, referendum, election, and recall.
+The elective offices would be reduced to a few. The installation and
+removal of the major government officers was a function to be divided
+between the People's Congress and the president, who was himself to be
+elected and recalled by the Congress.
+
+The Japanese invasion led to the scattering and the partial suspension
+of government. Military needs began to rule the hour. The Kuomintang
+Party Congress held in the spring of 1938 elevated Chiang K'ai-shek to
+the newly-created position of _Tsung-tsai_--a term meaning Party Leader,
+which had been the office held by Sun Yat-sen under the more august
+synonym _Tsung-li_. Not only was this a partial recognition of the
+leadership principle[8] in a democracy at war and a testimonial to
+Chiang as the supreme military leader of the Republic, but it was also a
+substantial grant of power. Four new powers were given Chiang as Party
+Leader: (1) the position of Chairman of the National Kuomintang
+Congress; (2) the chairmanship of the Central Executive Committee of the
+Kuomintang; (3) the power to ask (impliedly, to demand) that the
+National Kuomintang Congress reconsider its resolutions, which amounted
+to the grant of a courteous but effective conditional veto; and (4)
+final authority on Central Executive Committee resolutions, by means of
+a parallel veto.[9] This apparent trend toward emergency one-man control
+was, however, offset by the convening on July 6, 1938, of the People's
+Political Council, an advisory all-Party representative body, designed
+to substitute temporarily for the again-postponed National Congress. Its
+appearance was the widest break in the formal front of one-party
+Kuomintang rule to occur in a decade, and was heralded as a signal for
+the practical democratization of the government.
+
+
+_The Chinese Soviet Republic_
+
+After the suppression of the Marxists by Chiang K'ai-shek and the
+liquidation of the Nationalist government at Wu-han, the Chinese
+Communist movement took to underground agitation. It demonstrated its
+power, however, by proclaiming the Canton Commune on December 11, 1927.
+The Commune ended in bloody suppression. At the same time, in the far
+interior, the first Chinese Soviet had been established; from it, in
+Tsalin on the Hunan-Kiangsi border, was to develop the Chinese Soviet
+Republic.
+
+On the fourth anniversary of the Canton Commune the Chinese Soviet
+Republic came into official being. A constitution was adopted, and soon
+in the Communist districts soviets began to spread during a period of
+relative peace. Nevertheless, the Soviet organization was always under
+considerable pressure because of the war waged upon it by Chiang.
+Although labor and agrarian legislation was adopted, the regime
+had to operate under conditions of extreme military activity,
+counterrevolution, and terror. Despite all these handicaps, the
+Communists kept their government intact; they were able to move it
+thousands of miles across China in the historic Long March from South
+Central to Northwest China, which began October 16, 1934, and ended
+October 20, 1935.
+
+Under its constitution, the Chinese Soviet Republic is declared to be
+"the democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants."[10] The
+suffrage was set at the age of sixteen. The government was formed in a
+manner similar to that employed in the U. S. S. R. before the adoption
+of the new Soviet Constitution: local soviets elect district or city
+soviets, which in turn elect provincial soviets, which elect a National
+Congress of Soviets. In practice, the pattern could not be followed
+closely, since elections were difficult to hold and territorial division
+not always certain. The Central Executive Committee of the Congress of
+Soviets was the chief political authority of the Communist regime; it
+had the familiar executive organization of the Soviet system: a
+Presidium of the Central Executive Committee and under it the People's
+Council, the equivalent of a cabinet. The strength of the Chinese
+Communists lay in their Party and adjunct organizations, in their land
+policy, and in their Red Army.
+
+The central government of the Chinese Soviet Republic was no mere torso.
+It included the following agencies immediately subordinate to the
+People's Council: the Supreme Court, the Ministry of Inspection, the
+Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Land, the Ministry of Labor, the
+Revolutionary Military Commissariat, the Ministry of Home Affairs, the
+Political Safety Bureau, the Ministry of Communications, the People's
+Economic Commissariat, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Food, the
+Ministry of Education, and--strangely--the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
+
+As a result of the kidnaping at Sian at the end of 1936, the
+Nationalists and the Communists drifted toward a _rapprochement_. The
+next February the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang accepted
+the Communist offer of United Front collaboration, although disguising
+the acceptance by formal conditions for a Communist surrender. In
+September the Chinese Soviet Republic was ready to assume the name of
+_Special Administrative District of the Chinese Republic_. This left
+their governmental and administrative organization unaffected; nor did
+it mean the dissolution of the Red Army, now also under a new name, that
+of the Eighth Route Army. With the commencement of the Japanese advance,
+Communist leaders began taking part in the work of the National
+Government, first at Nanking and then inland.
+
+
+_Other Governments in China_
+
+As the National Government at Nanking rose to a dominant position in
+Chinese affairs, regional regimes outside its fold found it less easy to
+fit themselves into the framework of the new Chinese state. The
+Disbandment War of 1930-1931 had witnessed the defeat of the two most
+redoubtable _tuchüns_ remaining in the North. On the other hand, it
+became increasingly evident that acceptance of the Nanking hegemony in
+name led to the infiltration of Nanking rule in fact.
+
+Nothing but a register of encyclopedic proportions could list and
+describe the various political institutions which arose calling
+themselves _governments_ in the troubled quarter-century of the Chinese
+Republican era. Some have bordered on the pathological: Islamistan, for
+instance, which was the work of an Englishman who proclaimed himself
+emperor of a new Moslem Empire in Central Asia. The provincial
+authorities of Chinese Turkestan (Sinkiang) drove him out by using
+airplanes borrowed from the Soviet Union. In Foochow, in 1932-1933,
+there arose a movement headed by exiled Left Kuomintang leaders and
+other ultra-patriots eager for immediate war with Japan. This government
+was the first in years which did not pay lip service to the _San Min Chu
+I_, nor claimed legitimate descent from the movement of Sun Yat-sen and
+his revolutionaries--a surprising circumstance. Its very flexible
+constitution would have permitted collaboration with the Chinese
+Soviets--had the Red leaders not decided against it. The other main
+point in which it varied from the pattern set by the Nanking government
+was its profession of federalism. Known as the Federal Revolutionary
+Government of China, it lasted a few months only to be destroyed by
+Chiang, who had no scruples against using the weight of his modern
+armies, including planes and motorized troops. These vegetations of
+government can only interest the political botanist. Far more
+troublesome have been the opposition governments mentored or sponsored
+by outside forces. Tibet and Sinkiang (Chinese Turkestan) provided a
+fertile field of anti-Nanking agitation. Two "states" in China proper--
+Manchoukuo and an equally Japanese-controlled Peking Republic
+(1937)--find their counterparts in three others located in Chinese
+dependencies: the Communist republics of Outer Mongolia and Tannu-Tuva,
+and the ambiguous "state" in Eastern Inner Mongolia (sometimes called
+_Mêngkokuo_).
+
+These Communist republics are under stable government, and, judged from
+reports which reach the outside, seem efficiently administered. They lie
+in the former Imperial Russian sphere of influence, south of the
+Sino-Russian border; except for the complications which would have
+arisen internationally, they might just as well have been in the Soviet
+Union as outside. Both governments maintain legations in Moscow. It
+might be mentioned that when the Russian Red Army invaded Manchuria in
+1929 during the conflict over the Chinese Eastern Railway, a Barga
+Mongol Soviet was temporarily established. The Communist "states" cannot
+be compared with the Chinese Soviet Republic, which depended on no
+outside military support and resulted from a great ideological drive.
+They serve as advance posts of the Soviet Union--precedent for the
+creation of puppet states within China. Years later the Japanese
+manufactured a "state" in Eastern Inner Mongolia, with the cooperation
+of anti-Chinese Mongol princes, which Japan has publicized very little.
+Known in the world press as _Mêngkokuo_, it provides a Japanese buffer
+state to meet the Russian buffer of Outer Mongolia. On October 29, 1937,
+it reached its latest phase with the proclamation of the Autonomous
+Government of Inner Mongolia.
+
+The Great Empire of Manchou, to use its present official name, arose as
+Manchoukuo. The word itself was a concession to world opinion, as
+Manchuria is known to the Chinese simply as the Three Eastern Provinces
+(Tung San Shêng); its population is overwhelmingly Chinese. With the
+development of Chinese national unity, the Japanese position in this
+area was threatened. They invaded Manchuria in September, 1931; the
+following year they proclaimed the independence of Manchoukuo, inviting
+the young man who as a child had been the last Manchu emperor of China
+to serve as the head of the state. In 1934 he was installed as Emperor
+Kang Têh of the Great Empire of Manchou. The Japanese have done a great
+deal toward bettering their own economic position in Manchuria, but the
+effect of their policies on the Chinese population is of doubtful merit.
+Equal motives underlay the rebirth of Peking, where on December 14,
+1937, the Provisional Government of the Republic of China was
+proclaimed.[11] The old Peking-Republican flag was flown. The heads of
+the new regime were aged men who already twenty years ago had cooperated
+with the Japanese. Others served under duress and performed their mock
+routine in the cold agony of treason. The new administration is
+honeycombed with Japanese "advisers" and under the domination of the
+Japanese army.
+
+To round out their collection of puppet governments, the Japanese
+established in the spring of 1938 a Reformed Government of the Republic
+of China in Nanking, and even went so far as to adopt--provisionally, at
+least--the constitutional form of the National Government, which had
+moved upriver. This regime was admittedly even more ephemeral than the
+others, and the Japanese announced their intention of consolidating it
+with the set-up they had organized in Peiping. For the time, it was to
+be subordinate for purposes of theory to the Northern regime, but the
+future of the whole Japanese adventure was in doubt, and that of their
+half-conceived instrumentalities even more dubious.
+
+
+_The Growth of Government in China_
+
+In the decade following 1927, Chinese government became more significant
+than it had been since the days of the founding emperors of the Ch'in
+and the Han. Power was based on a correlation of government with
+ideological and military forces. The Nationalist Party was the first to
+effectuate this correlation, in part as a result of lessons learned from
+the Soviet advisers in the period of collaboration.[12] The Nationalists
+utilized the doctrinal bases of the _San Min Chu I_, tested in the
+social revolution which arose from the Nationalist-Communist propaganda.
+The great personal prestige of Sun Yat-sen was one of the most important
+contributing factors to the growth of Nationalist administration in
+Canton.
+
+The military ability and political leadership of Chiang K'ai-shek
+largely determined the success of the subsequent National Government.
+Chiang created a military machine superior to any other in China and
+coordinated army and government in such a way as to add strength to
+both.[13] But Chiang stood not alone. His wife became his _alter ego_
+for press relations, and important in her own right. His brother-in-law
+T. V. Soong, resourceful financier, and his sisters-in-law, Mme Sun
+Yat-sen (Sun's second wife) and Mme H. H. K'ung (wife of a later
+minister of finance), were strong influences at Nanking. Yet these
+members of the "Soong dynasty" did not shape the course of Nanking
+policies as a closed concern. They were part of a larger group sharing
+responsibility equally.
+
+Once the National Government was established its success was largely the
+result of success. Improvements in the international status of China
+accrued to the prestige of the regime, and a new surge toward
+reconstruction, delayed intolerably long by the anarchy of _tuchüns_,
+occurred as the result of the Nanking hegemony. In the later years of
+the National Government, before the Japanese onslaught transformed it
+into a quasi-military regime fighting for its existence, the increased
+extent of the national police power was brought into sharp relief. With
+the extension of a unified gendarmery service over great parts of the
+nation, and the development of a court system which worked well except
+when under political pressure, the individual came to face government as
+a reality--more than ever before, under any dynasty. The government
+defied custom and tradition in promoting public health, in attacking
+epidemics, in sponsoring modern burial practices, and in deriding
+unhygienic superstitions. In the broad field of mores which adjoins
+public health, the influence of the government made itself felt--in
+reducing the cost of marriage, in promoting municipal cleanliness and
+tidiness in public places, in furthering temperance. The New Life
+movement combined the prestige of the government with the elasticity of
+voluntary association. In its closing days Nanking whipped up an
+unprecedented wave of public spirit among the masses.
+
+As to government control of the economy, the Nanking government aimed at
+system, in place of the inchoate conditions which existed before its
+ascendancy. Chinese banks began to be as reliable as those of the West.
+The currency was standardized on a national basis. A national fiscal
+policy was adopted. A great achievement was the introduction of a
+managed paper currency in a country where specie alone had been
+respected for ages. Agriculture, however, was lagging behind.
+
+Government disavowed its previous identification with a scholastic
+officialdom. It dispensed with a state religion, although the
+commemoration of Sun Yat-sen compensated in part for the change.
+Government disclaimed any vague totalitarianism and instead clarified
+its zone of functioning through the use of law. By narrowing the field
+of its authority, it increased its effectiveness. Nationalization,
+centralization, bureaucratization, the development of lawful process,
+the emergence of a half-Western state working for Chinese needs--thus
+may the growth of government be characterized in the period after 1928.
+Obstacles remained, enough to dismay any ruler; but they had become
+obstacles and were not impassable barriers of cynicism, incomprehension,
+and futility.
+
+The Japanese invasion of 1937 had two immediate effects on the
+government. It shattered overnight the structure erected by the Nanking
+regime. The work of a decade was undone. On the other hand, the Japanese
+threat helped to drive the Communists and Nationalists together and
+forced into the national nexus those regional leaders who were
+maintaining the last vestiges of separatism. Most consequential of all:
+Japan's push--the greatest invasion the Chinese had known since the
+1600's--thrust government and people toward each other. Foreign troops
+taught inland China what nationalism really meant.
+
+They taught nationalism not merely with the fury of their guns, or with
+the cruelties of their hysterical troops in Nanking. The Japanese
+fostered nationalism most strikingly when they drove inland the
+protagonists of nationalism. Students, merchants, engineers, soldiers,
+administrators, physicians, and scientists of the coast were forced into
+the far interior. Villagers to whom the sight of these modern Chinese
+was as rare as the sight of a lama in Arkansas now had such refugees
+dwelling among them. The effect of forced cultural cross-fertilization
+is yet to be seen, but it may prove to be of extraordinary significance.
+Chinese able to hold their own with any representative of the Western
+world can now be found in the remote valleys and plateaus of the
+hinterland--twentieth-century China and timeless China, united in their
+hatred of the invaders, and deeply aware of their new national unity,
+their desperate need for power.
+
+
+NOTES
+
+[1] See above, pp. 41 ff.
+
+[2] See Wu Chih-fang, _Chinese Government and Politics_, pp. 147 ff.,
+Shanghai, 1934.
+
+[3] The outline given and the description offered are brief and
+generalized because the Japanese invasion will probably lead to
+recurrent reorganization of the government. Shih Chao-ying and Chang
+Chi-hsien (editors), _The Chinese Year Book_, 1936-1937, have an
+excellent series of short descriptions by acknowledged authorities of
+the organs of government. Some of these are: Tsui Wei-wu, "Kuomintang,"
+pp. 223-229; Ray Chang, "Central and Local Administrative Systems," pp.
+230-240; Tsiang Ting-fu, "Executive Yüan," pp. 241-246; Hsieh Pao-chao,
+"Legislative Yüan," pp. 247-292; Hsieh Kuan-sheng, "Judicial Yüan," pp.
+293-336; Chien Chih-shiu, "Control Yüan," pp. 337-347; Chen Ta-chi,
+"Examination Yüan," pp. 348-362; and Chu Shih-ming, "Army," pp. 946-955.
+This annual, which is written by Chinese in English and edited by
+Chinese, is not to be confused with the British _China Year Book_,
+1912-; the latter gives a broad outline of Chinese government.
+
+[4] Kalfred Dip Lum, _Chinese Government_, Shanghai, 1934. The author
+was himself a member of this convention; his work, therefore, possesses
+unusual interest.
+
+[5] Tsiang Ting-fu, _loc. cit._ in note 3, pp. 244-245.
+
+[6] A number of French doctoral dissertations by Chinese students deal
+with Chinese local government. Although they are of uneven quality, some
+give considerable material not otherwise available in a Western
+language. Among these are Chang-Yu-Sing, _L'Autonomie locale en Chine_,
+Nancy, 1933; Hsu Han-hao, _L'Administration provinciale en Chine_,
+Nancy, 1931; Ku-Yen-Ju, _Le Regime actuel le l'indépendance
+decentralisée en Chine_, Nancy, 1931; and Loo Kon-tung, _La Vie
+municipale et l'urbanisme en Chine_, Lyon, 1934. Among the most valuable
+and informing pictures of hsien government is "Hsien Government and
+Functions" by W. H. Ma, _The Chinese Recorder_ (Shanghai), vol. 68, pp.
+506-512, 1937. The quotation is from p. 506. The _Information Bulletins_
+published by the Council of International Affairs, Nanking, 1936-1937,
+include much material on Chinese politics and government. Especially
+interesting are E. C. Tang, _Five Years of the Control Yüan_, Nanking,
+1936, and C. L. Hsia, _Background and Features of the Draft Constitution
+of China_, Nanking, 1937.
+
+[7] See "An Account of the Hsien and Banner Council System of
+Manchoukuo," _Contemporary Manchuria_ (Dairen), vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 92
+ff., 1938.
+
+[8] Compare the position of Chiang as Party Leader in China with that
+of the _Führer_ in Germany, as described in Fritz Morstein Marx,
+_Government in the Third Reich_, 2d ed., pp. 62 ff., New York and
+London, 1937.
+
+[9] See the news reports in _The China Weekly Review_ (Shanghai), vol.
+84, pp. 150 ff., 1938.
+
+[10] See _Fundamental Laws of the Chinese Soviet Republic_, p. 18, New
+York, 1934. Edgar Snow's _Red Star Over China_, New York, 1938, is the
+best book on the Chinese Communists. P. Miff, _Heroic China_, New York,
+1937, is a useful condensed history of Communism in China based on the
+material currently available in the Soviet press. Mao Tse-tung, Wang
+Ming and others, _China: The March Toward Unity_, New York, 1937,
+contains some of Snow's material and also translations of important
+speeches and manifestoes regarding the inauguration of a United Front
+policy. A considerable amount of Chinese Communist material is to be
+found in the magazines _The Voice of China_ (now suspended), Shanghai,
+and _China Today_, New York.
+
+[11] For a description of the nature and organization of the
+pro-Japanese Peking regime of 1937-1938 see Andrew W. Canniff, "Japan's
+Puppets in China," _Asia_, vol. 38, pp. 151-153, 1938. The new Nanking
+regime is described in the _China Weekly Review_ (Shanghai), Apr. 2,
+1938.
+
+[12] Tsui Shu-chin, "The Influence of the Canton-Moscow Entente upon
+Sun Yat-sen's Revolutionary Tactics," _The Chinese Social and Political
+Science Review_ (Peiping), vol. 20, pp. 101 ff., 1936.
+
+[13] For biographies of Chiang K'ai-shek see Chen Tsung-hsi, Wang
+An-tsiang, and Wang I-ting, _General Chiang Kai-shek, the Builder of New
+China_, Shanghai, 1929; Gustav Amann, _Chiang Kaishek und die Regierung
+der Kuomintang in China_, Berlin and Heidelberg, 1936, which is only
+incidentally a biography of Chiang, since its scope is that of providing
+nation-wide reportage; Hollington K. Tong, _Chiang Kai-shek_, 2 vols.,
+Shanghai, 1937; and Robert Berkov, _Strong Man of China_, Boston, 1938.
+The Japanese retired Admiral Ishimaru Tota published a sensational life
+of Chiang (which appeared in Chinese as _Chiang Chieh-shih Wei-ta_,
+Shanghai, 1937); since Mr. Ishimaru's other works have been translated
+into English, this one may soon be available for Western readers.
+
+
+
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+
+Government in China has in the Republican era undergone one of the most
+significant transformations to be found anywhere in the world's
+political experience. The oldest society on earth found itself forced to
+redefine its position and to reconstruct its ways of thought and
+internal means of organization. Pressure from without compelled China to
+adopt the modern state. Chinese society was required to incorporate this
+state and all implied institutions in its routine living. The earlier
+period of the Republic marks an epoch in which modern forms had been
+established in harmony with the accepted standards of the Western state
+system. Chinese society fell into chaos beneath the up-to-date
+superstructure. The later period witnessed the correlation of state and
+society by coordination of ideological, military, and governmental
+power. From the collapse of the Manchu rule in 1911 to the operative
+zest of the National Government at Nanking in 1937 there was a
+revolution in the processes of government which for completeness can
+compare with any century of Western transformation.
+
+
+_The Collapse of the Imperial Society_
+
+Western ideology has failed to enter China as a constructive whole, but
+it has smashed whatever reality there was to the old world view.
+Western-educated Chinese leadership has undertaken the task of governing
+a people which has learned only indirectly of the West. In carrying out
+a program of adaptation, contemporary Chinese leadership has relied on
+Sun Yat-sen's phrase, "modernization without Westernization." But a
+dilemma remains. How can the standards of the modern world be divorced
+from their Western origins? How can Western technology be used without
+the attitude of mind which has created it and brought it to operative
+efficiency? How can a world which never knew Rome or the Normanic _Curia
+Regis_ know jurisprudence? How can modern government be made Chinese,
+when government itself has meant something far different in China from
+what it has meant in the West?
+
+Further, the nature of Chinese leadership has not only been transformed
+from being literary and ethical in its orientation to being technical
+and legal; it has also been transformed socially in the replacement of
+scholars by soldiers. The ideal ruler of old was a humane classicist
+with a taste for historical studies; the contemporary Chinese ruler must
+be military, if not militaristic, and must have the inevitable
+background of engineering and management which modern war connotes. The
+soldier must collaborate with the modern administrator, while both
+recapture the high ideals of devotion typical of the old scholastic
+rule, even if they cannot use its substance. These imperatives are
+indispensable if China is to live.
+
+Finally, the language system which did so much to create and then
+perpetuate the scholastic elite through thousands of years of Chinese
+culture has now submitted to changes deeper and more far-reaching than
+any in the past. The development of the _pai-hua_ school of literature
+and the progress of mass education indicate that even with ideographs
+the Chinese can reach conditions of uniform literacy approximating those
+which prevail in the advanced Western nations. If the alphabetization of
+the Chinese language, which is now in the form of tentative experiment,
+should become a fact, even more striking developments could take place.
+Reading and writing, and on this basis the transmission of authoritative
+tenets, does not presuppose profound economic adjustments. The modern
+Chinese will know his classics increasingly through paraphrases no more
+difficult than a newspaper column. When it is realized that the
+simplification of intellectual activity is offered to a people schooled
+in the idolatry of books, the potentialities of educational and
+intellectual renaissance--already partially realized--become apparent.
+
+With the disappearance of the imperial world society of the Confucians
+as a consequence of its encirclement by Westernized states, with the
+passing of the scholars and the rise of Western-trained soldiers,
+lawyers, and technicians, and with the alteration of the linguistic and
+intellectual foundation upon which the old society rested, what is there
+left of old China?
+
+
+_The Nature of the Transformation_
+
+In the first place, the ideological change is not complete. No Western
+idea can enter China unimpaired. Sun Yat-sen was influenced by the
+almost entirely contradictory notions of Western nationalism, democracy,
+and socialism. In the _San Min Chu I_ their Western identity was
+destroyed, and the new doctrines had much in common with the past.
+Western ideas served largely as a mold; when the mold was removed, the
+form was Western but the content was still Chinese. Mazzini and
+Confucius might both approve of Sun's political doctrines.
+
+Secondly, the extrapolitical agencies of Chinese life remain. Chinese
+society may be shattered in dogma, but it persists in fact. The family,
+though subject to legal redefinition caused by Western cultural and
+economic influences, nevertheless plays a role far greater than in the
+West. The village is still the fundamental grouping among the rural
+masses. The guild system is impaired by the Western impact, but the
+party organizations--Nationalist and Communist--have absorbed much of
+the strength which once lay in the _hui_. Under foreign domination,
+these institutions may play a determining role in the struggle against
+the intruder.
+
+Thirdly, for modern government the Chinese have resources of their own
+experience on which to rely. But they also have Western devices and
+prescriptions. The National Government, while falling short of Western
+levels of government efficiency, nevertheless trained large numbers of
+Chinese to think in terms of the modern state. But no new pattern has as
+yet crystallized. Chinese political and military development may well
+present a flexibility beyond Western grasp.
+
+Fourth, the Chinese have still ahead of them the choice of criteria of
+authority to prevail in society. Learning, office, property played a
+decisive part in the old society. Hitherto, the Republic has grown with
+three modes of power: ideological, military, governmental. The relation
+between them is not yet determined.
+
+
+_The Problems of Government in China_
+
+Among the governmental problems confronting China the acquisition of
+national territorial sovereignty stands out. Ever since the
+establishment of the Republic the Chinese have grown acutely conscious
+of the fact that some of their most important economic centers have been
+lifted out of the national territory. Sun Yat-sen realized in the
+frustration of his first efforts toward republicanization and social
+policy that the problems of internal government could not be settled
+unless the people as a whole were free. Without general freedom there
+could be no question of democracy, no question of a coordinated plan for
+the realization of the _min shêng_ principle.[1] Observing the intimate
+relation between the _tuchüns_ and the foreign interests, which often
+favored them, Sun and his followers began to stress their nationalist
+role. With the Japanese invasion of the Northeast in 1931, of Shanghai
+in 1932, of Inner Mongolia and North China in the following years, and
+of China as a whole in 1937, the issue of territorial sovereignty has
+become the most important one of all. Until it is settled, all other
+questions must necessarily be considered in their relation to it.
+
+Second, the question of economic sustenance and development is becoming
+pressing. Without an adequate economic base, the Chinese population
+lives under the constant threat of simply starving to death. Military
+difficulties emphasize this problem; in fact, military effectiveness and
+strategy will have to depend upon the physical existence of the people
+in and behind the lines. The Chinese masses have lived close to the edge
+of starvation for a long time. As a consequence, the Chinese cannot wage
+war but in close proximity to the point of economic paralysis--plain
+exhaustion of the physical necessities of life. The economic problem
+cannot wait for spontaneous self-cure.
+
+Third, the Chinese will have to recognize the need for politicalization
+of public opinion. They must evolve the faculty of transforming group
+opinion into governmental or organizational action. They must acquire
+techniques for group collaboration which will allow them to break down
+traditional groups into more diversified units--a government commission,
+a factory workshop, an army unit--without reference to family bonds or
+village and _hui_ connections. This is less a problem of doctrine or
+education than one of habit and practice.
+
+Fourth, the restoration of national prestige is necessary to the
+security of the Chinese nation in the international sphere, and to the
+wholesome development of the Chinese people within their national
+boundaries as well. They cannot effectively borrow from the West if they
+do so reluctantly, overcome by the thought of inferiority or by shame.
+Unless they conquer their present handicap, the Chinese will continue to
+lack self-confidence.
+
+Fifth, the army problem must be solved. In the last analysis, the excess
+of men under arms damages the Chinese military, as the number of
+well-equipped effectives remains disproportionately small. The hordes of
+half-armed soldiers constitute a heavy burden upon the society, reduce
+the general economic level, and--by affording one particular group a
+disproportionate opportunity for making its preferences felt--brutalize
+the operation of public opinion and discourage peaceable group pursuit.
+
+Sixth, the Chinese state--if China is to solve political questions
+through governmental procedures--must be constituted as a clear and
+legal entity. The old imperial society of China was able to dispense
+with law through reliance upon social forces expressing themselves in a
+large number of small but stable units. If these disappear the question
+arises: How can the individual conceive clearly his relationships within
+Chinese society? Systematized modern organization requires a legal
+framework.
+
+
+_The Question of Chinese Political Survival_
+
+That the Chinese will survive, biologically, as a race--this no one
+doubts. That the Chinese will survive culturally is more open to
+question. The Chinese absorbed all their conquerors of the past because
+the country was large, because the people were extraordinarily
+homogeneous in ideology and habit, because the Chinese were wealthier
+than their conquerors and more cultured. Absorption or cultural
+extinction is not a matter of race; it is a question of ideology, of
+thought and the habits which arise from ways of thought. What ways of
+thought are there today that will absorb the conquerors? What ways of
+thought are there that the conquerors might tear apart from the long
+past, to change China into a mere geographical expression?
+
+In the past, China has been conquered by invaders who accepted the
+Chinese estimate of China, and who reciprocated the Chinese self-esteem
+with a deep admiration for Chinese culture. China's modern invaders
+bring with them a veritable cult of national self-aggrandizement. Their
+fondness for the Chinese past is mixed with contempt for modern China.
+Will the Chinese preserve their national equanimity and sanity in the
+face of such an attitude? Much depends upon their military and political
+fortune and its effect upon their confidence.
+
+Government in the Republican era demonstrates the fertility and
+inventiveness of the Chinese mind in building political and
+administrative institutions and in finding means of uniting and
+controlling the Chinese as a people. When the chaos from which they have
+been emerging is considered, their recent accomplishments are an
+attestation of political ability. The National Government and the
+Chinese Soviet Republic were worthy adversaries; each met disastrous
+odds, not the least of which was the other. Their governmental forms may
+be destroyed and yet reappear so long as the Chinese remain Chinese in
+the sense of their long past. Sun Yat-sen expressed his countrymen's
+elementary social and national consciousness, so different from the
+feverish nationalism of the West, in very clear language:
+
+  Suppose that we, Chinese, were naturalized English or Americans and
+  helped England or America to conquer China on the principle that we
+  accept cosmopolitanism, would our consciences, I ask you, be at rest
+  or not? If our consciences troubled us, that would be a sign that we
+  have nationalism; nationalism would trouble our consciences.[2]
+
+Such nationalism may prove indestructible. With democracy and _min
+shêng_ as nationalism's corollaries, China promises to contribute a gift
+of peace and political intelligence to the world, and may yet return to
+her ancient role as the pacific preceptress of nations.
+
+
+NOTES
+
+[1] See above, pp. 41 ff.
+
+[2] Paschal M. d'Elia, S. J., _The Triple Demism of Sun Yat-sen_,
+p. 132, Wuchang, 1931.
+
+
+
+
+CHRONOLOGY OF DYNASTIES
+
+
+This is the accepted time scheme in China. The dates are the Western
+equivalents of the most widely current Chinese computation, which is
+known to be incorrect or haphazard from the eighth century B.C. back.
+The periods given for the dynasties are chronological formulas rather
+than the exact expression of political realities. For a discussion of
+the materials of Chinese historiography, see Charles S. Gardner,
+_Chinese Traditional Historiography_, Cambridge, 1938. For an excellent
+short summary of Chinese history, see the "Historical Sketch" by Lei
+Hai-tsung in _The Chinese Year Book_, 1936-1937, Shanghai. Chronologies
+are to be found in the major Chinese-English dictionaries, and--among
+many others--in Leon Wieger, S. J., _La Chine à travers les âges_,
+Hsien-hsien, 1920, where they are accompanied by a great deal of the
+old-style, uncritical, but nevertheless informative, Chinese
+scholarship.
+
+  HSIA                            ended 1765 (?)B.C.   } prehistoric
+  SHANG                           1765(?)-1123 (?)B.C. } or
+  CHOU                            1122(?)-256 B.C.     } semihistoric
+    _Ch'un Ch'in_ (Spring and
+        Autumn Epoch)             770-473 B.C.
+    _Chan Kuo_ (Warring States
+        Epoch)                    473-221 B.C.
+  CH'IN                           221-203 B.C.
+  EARLY HAN (including Wang Mang) 202 B.C.-A.D. 25
+  LATER HAN                       A.D. 25-220
+  SAN KUO (Three Kingdoms)        A.D. 221-264 }
+  CHIN                            A.D. 265-419 }    China's
+  NAN PEI CH'AO (Northern                      }  "dark ages"
+     and Southern Dynasties)      A.D. 420-588 }
+  SUI                             A.D. 589-619
+  T'ANG                           A.D. 620-906
+  WU TAI (Five Dynasties)         A.D. 907-960
+  SUNG                            A.D. 960-1279
+  YÜAN (the Mongols)              A.D. 1280-1367
+  MING                            A.D. 1368-1643
+  CH'ING (the Manchus)            A.D. 1644-1911
+  MIN KUO (The Republic)          1912-
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+  A
+
+  Administration (_see_ Hsien; Scholastic bureaucracy; and _Yüan_
+  system)
+
+  Agrarian problems, 115ff.
+
+  Aircraft, military, 108ff.
+
+  Anfu party, after 1916, 47, 157
+
+  Armies, under the Han, 83ff.;
+    Manchu period, 86ff.;
+    Nationalist, 105ff.;
+    national, 110ff.;
+    _tuchünal_, 104ff.
+
+
+  B
+
+  Barga Mongol Soviet Republic, 185
+
+  Borodin, Michael, 53, 162
+
+  Boxer uprising, 95, 117
+
+  Buddhism, 24, 131
+
+
+  C
+
+  Canton governments (established by Sun in opposition to the Peking
+  Republic), 156ff., 160ff.
+
+  Canton-Moscow entente (_see_ Nationalist-Communist coalition)
+
+  Capitalism, 46, 69
+
+  Chan Kuo epoch, 473-221 B.C., 15ff., 82
+
+  Chang Chung-chang, the Dog-Meat General, 103
+
+  Chang Hsüeh-liang, 1898-   (ex-_tuchün_ of Manchuria, son of
+  Chang Tso-lin), 108
+
+  Chang Hsün (monarchist _tuchün_), 156
+
+  Chang Tso-lin, 1876-1928 (_tuchün_ of Manchuria), 103ff., 158, 168
+
+  Charioteers (Chou period), 80ff.
+
+  Ch'en Tu-hsiu, 1879-   (excommunicated Communist leader), 65
+
+  Chiang K'ai-shek [Chiang Chieh-shih], 1888-   (military heir
+  to Sun Yat-sen; educated in Japan, further trained by Russians,
+  advised by Germans; leading general in China after 1927, and
+  outstanding figure in the National Government), 52, 105ff., 122,
+  164, 182
+
+  Ch'in Shih Huang Ti, 259-210 B.C. (king of Ch'in, legalist, despot,
+  unifier, conquered all China by 221 B.C.), 80ff., 128ff.
+
+  Chinese Soviet Republic (established in Kiangsi, 1931; merged with
+  National Government, 1937), 66, 182ff.
+
+  Ch'ing dynasty (_see_ Manchu dynasty)
+
+  Chinputang (Progressive Party), 151
+
+  Chou, Duke of (died 1105 B.C.[?]; semi-historic state founder), 127
+
+  Chou dynasty, 1122(?)-256 B.C., 14ff., 80ff., 127ff.
+
+  Christianity, 48ff.
+
+  Chu Hsi, 1130-1200 (Sung philosopher; interpreter of Confucianism), 16
+
+  Ch'un Ch'iu epoch, 770-473 B.C., 15, 81, 128
+
+  Communism, 51ff., 63ff., 72ff., 182ff.
+
+  Communist Party, 54ff., 68, 182ff.
+
+  Concessions, foreign, 140
+
+  Confucius [K'ung Ch'iu], 551-479 B.C. (China's most important
+  philosopher, spent his life teaching, with intervals of practical
+  administration), 15ff., 128
+
+  Constitutions: Constitution of 1923, 158;
+    Constitutional Compact, 1914, 153;
+    Draft Constitution, 1937, 181;
+    Nanking Organic Law, 1928, 172;
+    Nanking Provisional Constitution, 1931, 172;
+    Provisional Constitution of 1912, 148ff.
+
+  Council of State (_see_ Yüan system)
+
+  Customs, Maritime, 159
+
+
+  D
+
+  Democracy (_see_ San Min Chu I)
+
+  Double Ten Day, 145
+
+
+  E
+
+  Emperor, in old China, 18ff., 130ff.
+
+  Empress Dowager Tzu[)u] Hsi [Yeho-nola], 1835-1908 (actual ruler of
+  China in the latter days of the Ch'ing), 141
+
+  Extraterritoriality, 140
+
+
+  F
+
+  Family system, 3, 136ff.
+
+  Federal Revolutionary Government, 1932-1933 (Foochow), 184ff.
+
+  Fêng Yü-hsiang, 1880-   (the Christian general,
+  later pro-Soviet, joined the Nationalists, revolted in 1930, took
+  part in anti-Japanese agitation), 103ff.
+
+  Feudalism, 80ff.
+
+  Foreign Office, 139, 159
+
+
+  G
+
+  Genyosha (ultra-patriotic Japanese group), 71
+
+  George, Henry, 118
+
+  Goodnow, Professor Frank, 154
+
+  Gordon, Charles George, 1833-1885 (British commander of the
+  Ever-Victorious Army), 93
+
+
+  H
+
+  Han dynasty, 202 B.C.-A.D. 220, 82ff., 116, 129
+
+  Han Lin (Imperial Academy), 130, 177
+
+  Hsia dynasty, 2205(?)-1765(?) B.C., 13
+
+  _Hsien_ (district) system, 178ff.
+
+  Hsüan T'ung (last Manchu emperor of China; abdicated in his boyhood;
+  now Kang Têh, Emperor of Manchoukuo), 156, 186
+
+  Hu Han-min, 1886-1937 (leader, Right Kuomintang), 59
+
+  Hu Shih, 1891-   (philosopher, literary critic, language reformer), 76
+
+  Huang Hsing (early military leader of Republicans), 96
+
+  _Hui_ (guild, league) system, 3, 136ff.
+
+  Hundred Days, the (see Reform Movement)
+
+
+  I
+
+  Ideology (see San Min Chu I)
+
+  Imperialism, 119ff.
+
+  Islam, 24ff., 94
+
+  Islamistan, 184
+
+
+  J
+
+  Japanese-Chinese conflict, 34, 69ff., 74, 122ff., 154, 188ff.
+
+  "Japanese Monroe Doctrine," 70
+
+  Joffe, Adolf (Soviet agent in China), 51ff., 161ff.
+
+
+  K
+
+  K'ang Yu-wei, 1856-1928 (monarchical reformer), 140
+
+  Kuang Hsü, Emperor, 1871-1908 (modernist and reformer), 95, 140ff.
+
+  Kublai Khan, 1214-1294 (emperor, Yüan dynasty), 88
+
+  K'ung, H. H. [K'ung Hsiang-hsi], 1881-   (industrial and financial
+  administrator; Kuomintang leader), 60
+
+  Kuomintang, 31ff., 38ff., 50ff., 57ff., 72ff., 161ff., 167ff.
+
+
+  L
+
+  Lao Tz[)u], traditionally 6th century B.C. (founder of Taoism,
+  mystical philosophy antistate in effect), 24, 128
+
+  Li Hung-chang, 1822-1901 (Ch'ing viceroy), 92, 142
+
+  Li Yüan-hung (military opportunist; once President), 146, 155
+
+  Linebarger, Judge Paul (adviser to Sun Yat-sen), 161
+
+  Local government (_see_ Hsien)
+
+
+  M
+
+  Manchoukuo, 28, 72, 185ff.
+
+  Manchu (Ch'ing) dynasty, 1644-1911, 32, 86ff., 135ff.
+
+  Mandarins (_see_ Scholastic bureaucracy)
+
+  Marxism (_see_ Communism)
+
+  Mêngkokuo, 185
+
+  Militarism (_see_ Armies; _Tuchünism_)
+
+  _Min shêng_ (_see_ San Min Chu I)
+
+  Ming dynasty, A.D. 1368-1643, 17, 85
+
+  Missionaries (_see_ Christianity)
+
+  Mohammedanism (_see_ Islam)
+
+  Municipal government, 181
+
+
+  N
+
+  Nanking government (_see_ National Government of China; "Reformed
+  Government")
+
+  National Government of China (Nanking, 1927-1937; inland thereafter),
+  114, 164, 167ff.
+
+  Nationalism (_see_ San Min Chu I)
+
+  Nationalist-Communist coalition 1923-1927, 54ff., 161ff.
+
+  Nationalist Government at Nanking (_see_ National Government of
+  China)
+
+  "Nationalist Government" of Peking, 1930-1931 (rebellious coalition of
+  Northern tuchüns and Left Kuomintang; suppressed), 59, 107
+
+  Nationalist Government, soviet in form (Canton, 1925-1926; Wu-han,
+  1926-1927), 162ff.
+
+  Nationalists (_see_ Kuomintang)
+
+  New Life movement, 61
+
+
+  O
+
+  Opportunist movements, 44ff.
+
+  Outer Mongol People's Republic, 185ff.
+
+  Overseas Chinese, 35ff.
+
+
+  P
+
+  Pan-Asianism, 47, 70ff.
+
+  Pan-Mongolism, 47
+
+  Parliamentary Republic at Peking, 1912-1928, 114ff., 149ff., 157ff.
+
+  Party Congress, Kuomintang, 170ff.
+
+  Political doctrines, Sun Yat-sen's, 41ff.
+
+  Pro-Japanese movements, 47
+
+  Propaganda, 23ff.
+
+  Provincial government, 134, 177ff.
+
+  "Provisional Government" at Peking, 1937-   , 186
+
+  Provisional Government of the United Provinces of China, Nanking,
+  1911-1912, 146
+
+
+  R
+
+  Red Army, Chinese, 107, 182ff.
+
+  Reform Movement, Manchu, 140ff.
+
+  "Reformed Government" at Nanking, 1938-   , 186
+
+  Republicans (_see_ Kuomintang)
+
+  Revolution, doctrine of, 59, 162;
+    of 1911-1912 [the Republican Revolution], 38, 97ff., 145ff.;
+    of 1926-1927 [the Great Revolution], 55, 105ff., 168
+
+  Revolutionists (_see_ Kuomintang)
+
+
+  S
+
+  Salt Revenue Administration, 159ff.
+
+  San Min Chu I (the philosophy of Sun Yat-sen, since 1927 the official
+  state dogma of China), 36, 41ff., 59ff., 72ff., 120, 167ff.
+
+  Scholastic bureaucracy, 5, 86, 129ff., 188
+
+  Settlements, foreign, 140
+
+  Shang dynasty, 1765(?)-1123(?) B.C., 14, 80, 126
+
+  Shih Huang Ti (_see_ Ch'in Shih Huang Ti)
+
+  Siam, 69
+
+  Sian, kidnaping of Chiang K'ai-shek at, 62, 66ff.
+
+  Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, 34
+
+  Soong, T. V. [Sung Tz[)u]-wen], 1894-   (brother-in-law of Sun
+  Yat-sen; Kuomintang leader; finance administrator), 59ff., 121
+
+  Soviet Republic, Chinese (_see_ Chinese Soviet Republic)
+
+  Soviet Russia (_see_ Nationalist-Communist coalition)
+
+  Sun K'ê [Sun Fo], 1891-   (son of Sun Yat-sen; Kuomintang
+  leader; railway administrator), 59ff.
+
+  Sun Yat-sen [Sun I-hsien; Sun Wên], 1867(?)-1925 (agitated for a
+  republic; first President, 1912; author of the San Min Chu I; elected
+  Leader, Tsung-li, of the Kuomintang; known after death as Chung Shan),
+  31ff.
+
+  Sun Yat-sen, Mme., 59
+
+  Sung Chiao-jen, Nationalist, 152
+
+  Sung dynasty, A.D. 960-1279, 1, 16
+
+
+  T
+
+  Taikwa reforms, 645 A.D., 132
+
+  T'ai-p'ing rebellion, 1849-1865 (Christian agrarian jacquerie), 32ff.,
+  117
+
+  T'ang dynasty, A.D. 620-906, 1, 85, 132ff.
+
+  Tannu-Tuva People's Republic, 185
+
+  Taoism (_see_ Lao Tz[)u])
+
+  Toa-shugi [Far-Easternism], 71
+
+  Treaties, with Western states, 48, 139ff.
+
+  Treaty ports, 140
+
+  Tsao Kun (Northern tuchün), 103
+
+  Tsêng Kuo-fan, 1811-1872 (Ch'ing viceroy), 82
+
+  Tuan Chi-jui (Northern _tuchün_; once President), 103
+
+  _Tuchünism_, 45ff., 76ff., 107ff., 114ff., 157
+
+  Tungpei troops (Chinese soldiers exiled from Manchuria), 67
+
+
+  U
+
+  United Front policy, 1937-   , 60, 67ff., 72ff., 184
+
+
+  V
+
+  Village system, 3, 136ff.
+
+
+  W
+
+  Wang Ch'ing-wei, 1885-   (leader, Left Kuomintang), 59
+
+  Wang Mang, 33 B.C.-A.D. 23 (Utopian who usurped the throne, dividing
+  early and later Han), 17
+
+  War, in Chinese thought, 79
+
+  War lord (_see Tuchünism_)
+
+  Ward, Frederick Townsend, 1831-1862 (American adventurer in Manchu
+  service), 93
+
+  Whampoa Military Academy, 105
+
+  Wu Chih-hui, 1864-   (Kuomintang leader with anarchist leanings), 59
+
+  Wu P'ei-fu (_tuchün_ of the Yangtze valley), 28, 103ff.
+
+  Wu-han regime (_see_ Nationalist Government, soviet in form)
+
+
+  Y
+
+  Yellow Turbans, 3rd century A.D. (farmer rebels), 63
+
+  Yen Hsi-shan,  1881-   (the "Model Governor"; Northern _tuchün_ who
+  joined the Nationalists, revolted in 1930, subsequently retired), 103
+
+  Yen, Dr. James [Yen Yang-chu], 1894-   (mass-education leader), 76
+
+  Yüan Shih-k'ai, 1859-1916 (administrator, soldier, politician; served
+  the Manchus, leading in army modernization; became President,
+  attempted usurpation, failed, and died), 38, 44, 94ff., 146ff.
+
+  _Yüan_ system (five-fold division of powers), 172ff.
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes: Obvious errors in spelling have been silently
+corrected. Also 'u' with breve is represented as [)u] in this text.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Government in Republican China, by 
+Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 40350 ***