The National Government of the Republic of China, located at the auxiliary capital of Chungking, is one of the most important governments in contemporary world affairs. It has provided fairly effective unification for the largest nation on earth, and has fought a great power to a standstill.

The present work is an analysis of this government. Not a biography of Chiang K'ai-shek, it is instead a delineation of the institutions, the parties and movements, and the armies which today determine the Chinese destiny. Free China, mutilated as it is, is still far more populous and complex than the Soviet Union or Germany. Its political institutions cannot be reduced to the terms of one man's caprice, and the personality of Chiang—while brilliantly conspicuous—is not the entire picture of China. Generalissimo Chiang works, perhaps because he wishes to, certainly because he must, within the framework of a triune organization: the National Government, the central armies and the Kuomintang. These institutions have developed to their present efficacy only by means of thirty years of war, preceded by almost thirty years more of conspiracy. They have become the norm of contemporary China and, whatever their particular future, significant determinants of China's eventual development.

The Chinese Political Inheritance: Some Continuing Aspects

Because of cultural and historical differences between China and the West, the application of identical terms to both is probably either wrong or meaningless. Nevertheless, Westerners can live in China, deal with the Chinese, scrutinize their affairs, and transpose these to such Western descriptions as may suit the purpose. In reading of China, however, one should keep in mind the fact that the words are English, freighted with special meanings, and are used not by scientific choice but for lack of others. Part of this difference can be bridged if one recalls the salient peculiarities of China as against the Western world.

No other society comparable in size, duration and extent has ever existed; the Chinese Empire, from the beginning of the Ch'in (221 B.C.) to the end of the Manchus (A.D. 1911), remains the greatest social edifice mankind has yet brought forth. As such, its modern successor is everywhere stamped with archaic catholic traits which are today both obsolescent and futuristic. To these must be added the characteristics of China as a special area—a cultural zone seeking national form; fragmented economies working their way out of backwardness in technology and helplessness in world economics; a people in quest of government which will give them power without enslaving them. This modern "Chinese Republic," a Western-form state only by diplomatic courtesy in the years succeeding 1912, has been the widest zone of anarchy in the modern world; the Japanese attack on its emergent institutions has helped immeasurably to re-identify the Chinese-speaking people and the officers who presume to govern them.

To understand Chinese government in war time, one might first check the outstanding points of old Chinese development and their modern derivatives.

Pre-eminently, China has been pro forma Confucian ever since the tenth century after Christ. This has meant an ordering of classes in society based on the ideal of scholarship and public administration, rather than on ideals of valor, piety or acquisitiveness. By setting the requirements of the examinations, and through concealed but sharp discouragement of heterodoxy or wilful originality, the governing mechanism made of itself a vast machine of scholars which—because its authority rested in tradition, in language, in social usages—was able to ride out domestic revolution and foreign invasion, and was in a position to ensure its own perpetuation despite political or military interruption.

The traditions of scholastic bureaucracy working in a pluralistic society have left the Chinese people largely independent of the routine functioning of government. The Western state becomes the articulation of society. The government of old China was pseudomorphic as a state, having only some of the functions of the Western state, and its governing power was the residual capacity of an organization devoted to the ends of ceremony, exemplarization, education and the cultivation of personality. Administration was confined chiefly to revenue collection, flood control and defense. In the West, the most important purposes of society are framed in law after discussion, and are executed as policy; in China these purposes, defined by the Confucian ideology, were known throughout the society, with scholar-officials as their expositors. Fulfillment was by no means a prerogative of government alone. By contrast with the Confucian standards, the Western states, whether democracies or not, are capricious, despotic and nonmoral; by Western standards, Chinese society was unresponsive, sanctimonious and amorphous.

This political excellence and stability was accompanied by economic phenomena which are, by modern standards, less desirable. Overcrowding and a slow rate of progress have been fairly constant features of Chinese society since the Han. Owen Lattimore has recently appraised the economics behind the dynastic cycle in China.[1] Each community in old China was cell-like, largely autonomous and autarkic. Hence, the increase of wealth was sought within the cell, and not within a larger framework of economic advance—such as commerce or invention would provide—and the economically predominant class (the landowners) possessed a vested interest in overpopulation (which cheapened agricultural labor and maintained a high, even urgent, demand for food products). Equilibrium was reached, and a cycle of diminishing returns initiated, when population began to outrun the land's subsistence maximum. This drop in returns, in the face of continued population rise, led to peasant rebellion, distributism and a reinauguration of the same type of state—made necessary by the monopoly of managerial expertness (essential to water conservancy, land wealth and the familiar intensive cultivation) in the ideographically literate class. Control of the richest water-conservancy region meant the hegemony of China.

The impact of Western imperialism has struck China in the past century, during the critical or revolutionary phase of this immemorial cycle. Chinese politics took the color of a back-country struggle. The centers of modern power were beyond Chinese administrative reach. The emergent Chinese state, deprived of its foci of power in the metropolises, was promised control thereof only when it had become an effective and complete state—a condition largely unobtainable without control of Shanghai, Tientsin, Hankow, and the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong.

In theory, the Chinese Republic was established January 1, 1912. In practice, the name Republic has masked a mÊlÉe of governments and power-organizations, ranging from bandit gangs with pretentious political color to authentic regional governments administering large areas. This culminated in the National Government which, beginning as a conspiracy, becoming the leading regional government, is now in the position of de facto government for virtually all Free China, the Chinese dominions, and much of the occupied area. None of these governments has ever held an election based on wide suffrage; none has systematically subordinated policy to law; none has possessed a treasury, fleet or air force worthy of a second-class power, until the present war. Out of these unpromising materials the counter-attacking Chinese state has arisen; only by legal formula is it the same Republic as its predecessors; only by courtesy is this the Year XXX (1941) of the Republic.[2]

The governmental developments of the Republican era fall conveniently into four periods: the period of establishment, 1911-1916; the period of tuchÜnism, 1917-1926; the rule of the National Government, 1927-1936; the period of invasion, 1937 to the present. The turning points between these periods are, respectively, the fall of the Manchu Empire of China (1911), the death of the dictator-President YÜan Shih-k'ai (1916), the Great Revolution under Kuomintang-Communist leadership (culminating, 1927), and the Sian affair (December 1936) followed by full-scale invasion (July 1937).

The present governments of China are accordingly the successors of a wide variety of decaying imperial administration, experimental modernism and outright confusion. Any change in China had to be made at the expense of the haves—the Western powers and Japan. Japan, in seeking the control of China, is fighting China and the Western powers; China, in fighting back, must fight Japan, and behind Japan the whole structure of imperialism. Most Chinese have abandoned hope of surviving as a people without eventually triumphing as a state. In the past, they absorbed conquerors whose bases were transferred to China; today, they cannot accommodate invaders who come as transients from an overseas base. The Chinese war of resistance is a revolution. It is a continuation of the Nationalist revolution, begun against the Manchus, continued against the imperialist powers, and now directed against the Japanese and their Chinese associates. At the same time, this revolution struggles to incorporate in its dynamics the drive of an endemic peasant rebellion, Communist in its extreme phase. Nationalist in supreme emphasis, the revolution finds its highest expression in the articulation of an effective state—something not known in China for twenty-two centuries.

China at the Outbreak of War

Sun Yat-sen's legacy of doctrine included a program of revolution by three stages:

(1) the military conquest of power by the Kuomintang;

(2) the tutelary dictatorship of the Kuomintang while democracy was being instilled and adopted from the bottom up; and

(3) constitutionalism, requiring abdication of the Kuomintang in favor of a popularly elected government.[3]

Upon coming to power in Nanking, the National Government had begun promising a short period of tutelage and had made various gestures in favor of experimental popular government. A Provisional Constitution was adopted by a Kuo-min Hui-i (commonly termed, National People's Convention) in 1931, operating under complete government supervision; a transition instrument, self-acknowledged as such, it anticipated a Permanent Constitution upon the accomplishment of constitutional government in a majority of provinces (Articles 86, 87).[4] Although the Kuomintang has ruled parts of China for more than fifteen years, and is by profession the party of democracy, it has not yet relinquished power. The period of tutelage is still legally in force.

In the years immediately preceding the outbreak of war, this monopoly of governmental power by the Kuomintang was not only an important political irritant but also an obstacle to effective Chinese unity. Discontent was aggravated by inelasticity of the Party. Overweighted with petty bureaucracy, it offered too few up-channel opportunities for potential leaders. Since Nationalists were the Ins, Kuomintang membership carried privileges rather than obligations. Many distinguished and active citizens either refused to join, or let their purely nominal membership ride along. The Party was saved from complete decline because it included most of the government personnel, and new recruits to government service gave it some freshness, vigor and inward criticism.

The leading difficulty of both state-building and democratization had been overcome by the creation of a government which was well-designed, functioning de facto and able to meet most of the specialized problems of modern administration. The regime was far from being a crude hierarchy of soldiers and taxgatherers, but had accrued about its policy-making core the essential staff and line services of modern rule. Inadequacies lay not in absolute lack of species of personnel or structure, but in the relative weakness of many key functions. During the third decade of the Republic the then Nanking Government, under Chiang's leadership, gave China its first modern national government.

Despite this beginning, which—without the invasion—stood a very good chance of evolving into a paternalistic oligarchy in democratic form, such as Brazil, there were enormous difficulties still facing genuine China-wide government. First among these difficulties was the question of regional autonomy—lingering vestiges of tuchÜnism, reinforced by a vigorous provincialism. Whole regions of China were under the merely nominal control of the National Government.

The second difficulty was that of personal politics. Modern China has had ample politics of principle. It is a rare ideological cult, of any kind, anywhere, which does not have its Chinese affiliates. No other nation has known such a wide choice of doctrines, each represented by armed forces and by definite political leadership. At the same time, this ideological struggle was and is paralleled by the politics of individuals and cliques. This made the National Government function as an oligarchy based on three patterns of control:

(1) ideological eminence, orthodoxy, appeal and timeliness;

(2) military or economic control of power in the form of soldiers or cash, the two being for the most part interchangeable; and

(3) governmental incumbency.

A man like Hu Han-min could owe his importance almost altogether to his past associations with the Party and with Dr. Sun, to his authority as an exponent of the San Min Chu I, and to his appeal to the sense of prestige, dignity and stability on the part of other people who did not possess such power, which was exercised in the name of the Kuomintang and its ideology. T. V. Soong, in money matters, or Chang HsÜeh-liang, in military matters, were important because they had under their immediate influence so much cash or so many troops, the availability and mobility of which from day to day determined their actual share of power. Lastly, these same men possessed political authority by narrowly lawful means, i.e., by the governmental offices which they held.

Thirdly, the government was deeply out of harmony with an overwhelming majority of college students, much of the professional and intellectual classes, and a broad section of the articulate farmer and labor groups. In the pre-war years of strain, unofficial persons could follow world fashions in ideas associated with Leftism. Although the full Western pattern of Right, Center, and Left was not imposed upon Chinese politics, many of the most active publicists wrote in these terms. There was, accordingly, a traditional China and a Leftist China; the latter faithfully imported European concepts and did much to change the language of Chinese political struggle. The government—itself Left from the point of view of the pre-existent order, yet committed to modes of thought and policy formally little more radical than the American New Deal—was constantly recalled to the most cold-blooded of realpolitische considerations.

Fourthly, the student movement—in some phases a part of the general Leftist drive—proved a constant source of difficulty and trouble. Chinese students (both collegiate and secondary) are self-conscious, frequently arrogant inheritors of the Chinese tradition of rule by literati. Their influence over the masses is impressive; their patriotism, however unreflective, is ardent; and their interest in international affairs is violent.[5]

Fifthly, Chinese society, accustomed to acting independently of government, urged varied foreign policies and sought wars. Almost every kind of organization, from archaic guilds and secret societies to business groups, sought to wage its own attack on Japan. Uncanalized, counter-attacked, dammed up, these efforts might have undone the government. Toward the end, the government raced frenziedly with time, losing power through unpopularity, and increasing power through rearmament and technical preparation. The vigorous extra-governmental pressure of a populace accustomed to spontaneous mass action is a factor which qualifies and will probably continue to qualify Chinese foreign policy. It is often left out of account in Western comment on China.

Sixthly, in the winter and spring of 1936-37, the National Government was under pressure from its own subjects to begin the negotiation of national unity, starting with a Communist armistice and continuing with the incorporation of as many regions as possible into the sphere of the government; but despite such increasing pressure, the government took no effective step in this direction until after the kidnapping of Chiang at Sian.[6] As a result of this melodramatic affair, however, the National Government revised policies which had become traditions ten years old and agreed to an armistice with the Communists. The Kuomintang—bearing full responsibility for an actual emergent state—found intra-Chinese diplomacy as perplexing as foreign.

Thus, at the outbreak of war, the National Government had reached a higher level of actual political and administrative power than its predecessors, but was faced with grave problems. In any other country the government would presumably have been on the verge of ruin. Controlling only major sections of its internationally recognized territory; faced by autonomous provinces, half-legal military satrapies and outright warlord despotism, all backed by vehement provincialism, great distances, linguistic difficulties and mutual geographical isolation; unpopular with its own student, intellectual and professional elites; ridden by personal politics; just emerging from a ten years' civil war—with these handicaps, a second-rate power undertook to challenge the greatest power of Asia to an irreversibly fateful war. The Chinese went further: they sought in the war not only victory, but unity, democracy and prosperity as well! This background of purpose makes China's internal politics richly meaningful in relation to the world scene.

The Beginning of Active Hostilities

After nearly six years of military and political conflict, a full quasi-war[7] broke out with the episode at Loukouchiao on the night of July 7-8, 1937. It was the evident intention of the Japanese to end an unsatisfactory state of affairs (i.e., Chinese control) in that area once and for all, although they were perfectly willing to express temporary amity and ad interim non-aggression toward what was left of China. The National Government, after a few days of uncertainty, began real preparations for war. Since the government's appeasement policy had accustomed many to think of resistance in terms of the Left, there was an enormous inflation of Leftist sentiment, not deflated for about eighteen months.

While new mass organizations were formed, the Chinese military command framed a plan for a three-stage war:

(1) a period of resistance by heavy regular forces fighting positionally;

(2) a period of stalemate wherein enemy forces, immobilized by opposing regular armies, found lines of communication, supplies and business harassed by guerrillas and saboteurs;

(3) a period of counter-attack in which the Chinese, having prepared themselves technologically during the stalemate and having weakened the enemy by a test of endurance, should drive the Japanese back into the sea.

The strategy of this type of war was based upon the plan of retreating in space in order to advance in time—that is, to yield area slowly and purposefully, without too great cost to oneself, in order to outlast the enemy and reach victory. In thus purchasing time by the mile, the Chinese could not afford to yield intact cities, factories, communications, mines, docks, warehouses and the other goods of business; such cessions would only profit Japan: hence the scorched earth policy. The strategy was obviously suited to a country rich in territory and population, but poor in matÉriel. It not only made both regulars and guerrillas effective against Japan but made each truly reliant upon the other. Without the Nationalist regular armies, who in attempting to suppress the Communists had done almost everything which the Japanese now had to do—guarding railroads, pacifying disaffected and hostile rural areas, promoting industries and watching agitation—the Japanese forces might disperse enough to enable Japan to patrol and pacify enough of China to pay for the occupation. Chiang had to hold the Japanese together, immobilize large bodies of their troops, keep their war expenses up, and wait for the time to counter-attack. Meanwhile the guerrillas, together with the Communist veterans, were to prevent the Japanese from settling down, to worry them with agitation, to sabotage their economic efforts and to wear them out for Chiang's rÉvanche.

One of the first governmental changes in wartime was the re-institution of an effective propaganda service under the Political Department of the Military Affairs Commission. In this Department, many of China's most active controversialists, censored or exiled for years, found officially sanctioned scope for their energies. Formal unity came slowly. Although Shanghai was attacked on August 13, 1937, it was not until September 10 following that a fairly definitive arrangement was reached in regard to the Communist-occupied zone in the Northwest.

The settlement transformed a pre-existing armistice into an intranational alliance; technically it amounted to submission by the Communists and their incorporation into the national government and armies. The area of the Chinese Soviet Republic assumed the name Special Regional Government of the Chinese Republic (Chunghua Min-kuo T'Ê-ch'Ü ChÊng-fu), which it had been using informally for months; the Chinese Red Army became the Eighth Route Army (Pa-lu-chÜn); and the Chinese Communist Party accepted the San Min Chu I as the constitutional state ideology of China, abandoning immediate measures of class war and expropriation. The settlement was in the form of a Communist reply to Kuomintang terms offered in February 1937 and the reply of the Generalissimo as Chief of the Kuomintang to the Communist declaration.[8]

For the first few months the war kept its quasi-European pattern. The greater part of the fighting was done in the Shanghai area, while Japanese forces proceeded down from North China. The Japanese still had some expectation of localizing the North China and the Shanghai conflicts. At most, they expected the war to be a short one, not extending beyond the capture of Nanking. Occupation of the capital was counted on for the ruin of the central government, the end of Chiang and the reversion of China to a condition of malleable anarchy.

December 1937 was the blackest month of the war for the Chinese. The Japanese advanced toward Nanking, with Chinese resistance crumbling; part of the armies withdrew in good order, but on occasion there were hopeless, panicky routs. To this month the Japanese looked for victory, and were so confident that they formed the pro-Japanese Provisional Government of the Republic of China, in Peking on December 11.[9] Four days later the Japanese forces entered Nanking, and the ensuing fortnight set the record for atrocity in the modern world. The Japanese forces were preoccupied with their own disorder. The National Government escaped up-river to Hankow, where it promptly began to function under the three-headquarters plan: some offices at Hankow, some at Changsha and some at Chungking. The presence of the foreign affairs, propaganda, and military agencies at Hankow made this the practical capital of China, although Nanking was and is the constitutional capital.

The Hankow Period

The greatest part of the year XXVII (1938) was spent in continuation of slow retreat and heavy frontal resistance. Until October communications with the outside world were wide open through the railroad to Canton. Heavy supplies could arrive by the shipload. Hundreds of Japanese air attacks on the railroad disrupted schedules but never led to serious suspension of service. Leftist influence became overwhelming in Hankow. That city had been the capital of the ill-fated Wu-han Kuomintang-Communist government, which fell with the secession of Chiang to Nanking eleven years before; its connotations still lingered. Even conservative Kuomintang leaders, who had gone to lengths of appeasement at which Neville Chamberlain would have blanched, tried to talk like Negrin or Alvarez del Vayo.

In January 1938, two organizations were formed which, along with the Communist zone in the Northwest, were to be among the most active agencies of guerrilla leadership. The first of these was the New Fourth Army (Hsin-ssu-chÜn), which emerged in the area just south of the Japanese forces at the Yangtze mouth. It was composed of peasant and student militia, of regular army fragments, and of some Kuomintang volunteers, under the leadership of Communist remnants which had hidden away, banditti-fashion, when the Red Army trekked Northwest. Its emergence was recognized by legal order of the National Military Affairs Commission.[10] The other organization was the Provisional Executive Committee of the Shansi-Chahar-Hopei Border Region (Chin-ch'a-chi Pien-ch'Ü Lin-shih Hsing-chÊng Wei-yÜan-hui), established by a conference at Fup'ing, January 8-15, and authorized by central government mandate. This agency also sprang from Leftist organizations—in this case, a bold, determined, student-peasant guerrilla army—which had first developed despite government opposition. It was designed to provide an emergency guerrilla government for those portions of the three provinces which were under occupation by the Japanese. Unoccupied portions of the provinces retained their existing administrations.

In the next month, February 1938, there was established an agency of supreme importance, the Supreme National Defense Council.[11] This replaced the Central Political Council,[12] which had exercised routine functions of the Party's sovereign control over the government; like its predecessor, the Supreme National Defense Council tended to act as the supreme governmental organ, although it was technically a Party organ. The Council provided and provides a unified civilian-military control for the duration of the war; but the Kuomintang shares its power with other groups only in the consultative organs of state, not in the executive.

March 1938 followed with another political step forward—the Emergency Session of the Kuomintang Party Congress. The Party Congress had the functions of a special constituent assembly in part, and in part those of a restricted parliament; in this session two further actions were taken. The first was the adoption of the momentous Program of National Resistance and Reconstruction (K'ang-chan Chien-kuo Kang-ling),[13] which provides a plan for the war and commits the Kuomintang and the National Government to a policy of victory, of industrialization, and of economic reform as a means to war.

The second step taken by this important Congress was the provision for a People's Political Council (Kuo-min Ts'an-chÊng Hui, also translatable as People's Advisory Political Council). This was the first breach in the Kuomintang monopoly of government since the establishment of the Party dictatorship.[14] The government, through the constitutional fiction of appointing members as representative individuals, provided a rough, approximate, but fair representation of the active political forces in China.

While the Emergency Session of the Party Congress took these steps for further national defense, the Japanese were collecting a coterie of ex-politicians, friends of Japan, and old men to serve as the Reformed Government of the Republic of China at Nanking. They disregarded the anomaly of having two "Chinese" national governments—the Provisional Government in Peiping being undisturbed by these measures—and continued to seek the division of China, even on the level of the pro-Japanese States. The Reformed Government was established on March 27, 1938.

The autumn of 1938 brought another phase of discouragement. Relying on the prestige of British power and the nearness of Hong Kong, the Chinese were not watchful in the Canton area. The Japanese landed almost unopposed. Chinese negligence, corruption, and a little treachery worked in their favor. The landing forces performed almost superhuman feats of endurance in forced marches overland; on several occasions Japanese advance troops ran so far ahead of schedule that Japanese warplanes, thinking them disguised Chinese, strafed them![15] Canton fell without a major battle. Hankow, the great radical capital, scene of the 1926-27 Leftist upsurge and of the anti-Fascist enthusiasm of 1938, was entered by the Imperial Japanese army, and the entire Wu-han area was lost to China.

Not only was the Hankow period ended. By breaking the last rail connection of the Chinese government and the outside world, and by driving the Chinese leadership into the remote interior, Japan shut off the ready play of international influence on domestic Chinese politics. Foreign visitors became more rare. The government, moving to the mountain fastnesses of Szechuan, found a home on the great Gibraltar-like promontory of Chungking city, tiered along cliffs above the Yangtze and Kialing rivers. The last withdrawal was a final test of strength. Hankow, six hundred miles up-river, was commercially, architecturally, and politically a coastal city. It was still an outpost of world imperialism and of modern technology. With the next remove the Chinese government found itself beyond tangible Western influence; for the first time since 1860 the capital was out of the military reach of Western powers, and in a city which had only slight traces of Western influence.

The Chungking Period

The Chungking period began with the transfer of further government offices to the West, to join President Lin ShÊn, and marks a distinct phase in the process of government-building in China. As the Chungking regime, the National Government took new forms of temper and character. Government, Kuomintang, Communists—all were in the position of an inner-Asiatic state, without convenient access to the sea, seeking to fight an oceanic nation whose trade reached every port in the world. Foreign imperialism could no longer be blamed for the demoralizations of the hour; foreign aid was too tenuous and remote to qualify the inner play of Chinese political growth. Politically, the Chinese had to stand on their own feet.

The second phase of the war had begun. Chinese armies stood front-to-front against the Japanese, and kept hundreds of thousands of invading troops immobilized. The guerrillas got to work. Most of all, the machinery of modernization began functioning; all the programs had been completed, and the task was clear. The international developments of the time—the first American loan, $25,000,000 in 1938; the brief Manchoukuo-Outer Mongol war of 1939, wherein Japan and Russia fought each other through their respective dependencies; even the outbreak of the European war—were remote from this far inland scene. Military events had some effect, but nothing comparable to the Japanese victories at Shanghai, Nanking, Canton, and Hankow recurred. The Japanese invaded Kwangsi in the fall of 1939; they left a year later, when their drive into French Indo-China made it unnecessary to cut those colonies off from China. In South Hunan the Japanese suffered catastrophically when they advanced boldly and contemptuously into non-modern areas and were encircled by the Chinese. Even the flight and treason of Wang Ch'ing-wei at the year's end of 1938, and his open cooperation with Japan in March 1940, did not change the general picture. The emphasis was no longer on sudden changes, on personality, on dramatic shifts of power. It was on construction—on the development of a modern, democratic, technically equipped Chinese state out of the vast resources of China's hinterland. The China which was to win had to be created before it could counter-attack.[16]

[1] Lattimore, Owen, Inner Asian Frontiers of China, New York, 1940, p. 45 and passim. The author, a noted geographer, presents significant new analyses of the interconnections of Chinese economics and culture.