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 I³ 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 devices⁶ 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 ports⁸ 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 China⁹ 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 China¹³ 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

Chapter III