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Chinese Culture and History
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Republican
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ARMY AREA HANDBOOK access is provided courtesy of UM-St. Louis
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Match 12 DB Rec# - 605 Dataset-ARMAN
Source :U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY
Source key :AR
Program :ARMY AREA HANDBOOKS
Program key :AR ARMAN
Update sched. :Occasionally
ID number :AR ARMAN CHINACH1.04
Title :CHAPTER 1.04: REPUBLICAN CHINA
Data type :TEXT
End year :1994
Date of record:04/19/1994
Keywords 3 : China |
| 中华民国 |
| The republic that Sun Yat-sen (孙逸仙) and his associates envisioned
evolved slowly. The revolutionists lacked an army, and the power
of Yuan Shikai (袁世凯) began to outstrip that of parliament. Yuan
revised the constitution at will and became dictatorial. In August
1912 a new political party was founded by Song Jiaoren (宋教仁 1882-1913),
one of Sun's associates. The party, the Guomindang (国民党 Kuomintang
or KMT--the National People's Party, frequently referred to as the
Nationalist Party), was an amalgamation of small political groups,
including Sun's Tongmeng Hui (同盟会). In the national elections held
in February 1913 for the new bicameral parliament, Song campaigned
against the Yuan administration, and his party won a majority of
seats. Yuan had Song assassinated in March; he had already arranged
the assassination of several pro-revolutionist generals. Animosity
toward Yuan grew. In the summer of 1913 seven southern provinces
rebelled against Yuan. When the rebellion was suppressed, Sun and
other instigators fled to Japan. In October 1913 an intimidated
parliament formally elected Yuan president of the Republic of China,
and the major powers extended recognition to his government. To
achieve international recognition, Yuan Shikai had to agree to autonomy
for Outer Mongolia and Xizang (西藏). China was still to be suzerain,
but it would have to allow Russia a free hand in Outer Mongolia
and Britain continuance of its influence in Xizang.
In November Yuan Shikai, legally president, ordered the Guomindang
dissolved and its members removed from parliament. Within a few
months, he suspended parliament and the provincial assemblies
and forced the promulgation of a new constitution, which, in effect,
made him president for life. Yuan's ambitions still were not satisfied,
and, by the end of 1915, it was announced that he would reestablish
the monarchy. Widespread rebellions ensued, and numerous provinces
declared independence. With opposition at every quarter and the
nation breaking up into warlord factions, Yuan Shikai died of
natural causes in June 1916, deserted by his lieutenants. |
| Nationalism and Communism |
After Yuan Shikai's death, shifting alliances of regional warlords
fought for control of the Beijing government. The nation also was
threatened from without by the Japanese. When World War I broke
out in 1914, Japan fought on the Allied side and seized German holdings
in Shandong (山东) Province. In 1915 the Japanese set before the warlord
government in Beijing the so-called Twenty-One Demands, which would
have made China a Japanese protectorate. The Beijing government
rejected some of these demands but yielded to the Japanese insistence
on keeping the Shandong territory already in its possession. Beijing
also recognized Tokyo's authority over southern Manchuria and eastern
Inner Mongolia. In 1917, in secret communiques, Britain, France,
and Italy assented to the Japanese claim in exchange for the Japan's
naval action against Germany.
In 1917 China declared war on Germany in the hope of recovering
its lost province, then under Japanese control. But in 1918 the
Beijing government signed a secret deal with Japan accepting the
latter's claim to Shandong. When the Paris peace conference of 1919
confirmed the Japanese claim to Shandong and Beijing's sellout became
public, internal reaction was shattering. On May 4, 1919, there
were massive student demonstrations against the Beijing government
and Japan. The political fervor, student activism, and iconoclastic
and reformist intellectual currents set in motion by the patriotic
student protest developed into a national awakening known as the
May Fourth Movement (五四运动). The intellectual milieu in which the
May Fourth Movement developed was known as the New Culture Movement
and occupied the period from 1917 to 1923. The student demonstrations
of May 4, 1919 were the high point of the New Culture Movement,
and the terms are often used synonymously. Students returned from
abroad advocating social and political theories ranging from complete
Westernization of China to the socialism that one day would be adopted
by China's communist rulers. |
| Opposing the Warlords |
The May Fourth Movement helped to rekindle the then-fading cause
of republican revolution. In 1917 Sun Yat-sen had become commander-in-chief
of a rival military government in Guangzhou (广州) in collaboration
with southern warlords. In October 1919 Sun reestablished the Guomindang
to counter the government in Beijing. The latter, under a succession
of warlords, still maintained its facade of legitimacy and its relations
with the West. By 1921 Sun had become president of the southern
government. He spent his remaining years trying to consolidate his
regime and achieve unity with the north. His efforts to obtain aid
from the Western democracies were ignored, however, and in 1921
he turned to the Soviet Union, which had recently achieved its own
revolution. The Soviets sought to befriend the Chinese revolutionists
by offering scathing attacks on "Western imperialism."
But for political expediency, the Soviet leadership initiated a
dual policy of support for both Sun and the newly established Chinese
Communist Party (共产党 CCP). The Soviets hoped for consolidation but
were prepared for either side to emerge victorious. In this way
the struggle for power in China began between the Nationalists and
the Communists. In 1922 the Guomindang-warlord alliance in Guangzhou
was ruptured, and Sun fled to Shanghai (上海). By then Sun saw the
need to seek Soviet support for his cause. In 1923 a joint statement
by Sun and a Soviet representative in Shanghai pledged Soviet assistance
for China's national unification. Soviet advisers--the most prominent
of whom was an agent of the Comintern, Mikhail Borodin--began to
arrive in China in 1923 to aid in the reorganization and consolidation
of the Guomindang along the lines of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union. The CCP was under Comintern instructions to cooperate
with the Guomindang, and its members were encouraged to join while
maintaining their party identities. The CCP was still small at the
time, having a membership of 300 in 1922 and only 1,500 by 1925.
The Guomindang in 1922 already had 150,000 members. Soviet advisers
also helped the Nationalists set up a political institute to train
propagandists in mass mobilization techniques and in 1923 sent Chiang
Kai-shek ( Jiang Jieshi in pinyin), one of Sun's lieutenants from
Tongmeng Hui days, for several months' military and political study
in Moscow. After Chiang's return in late 1923, he participated in
the establishment of the Whampoa ( Huangpu in pinyin) Military Academy
outside Guangzhou, which was the seat of government under the Guomindang-CCP
alliance. In 1924 Chiang became head of the academy and began the
rise to prominence that would make him Sun's successor as head of
the Guomindang and the unifier of all China under the right-wing
nationalist government.
Sun Yat-sen died of cancer in Beijing in March 1925, but the Nationalist
movement he had helped to initiate was gaining momentum. During
the summer of 1925, Chiang, as commander-in-chief of the National
Revolutionary Army, set out on the long-delayed Northern Expedition
against the northern warlords. Within nine months, half of China
had been conquered. By 1926, however, the Guomindang had divided
into left- and right-wing factions, and the Communist bloc within
it was also growing. In March 1926, after thwarting a kidnapping
attempt against him, Chiang abruptly dismissed his Soviet advisers,
imposed restrictions on CCP members' participation in the top leadership,
and emerged as the preeminent Guomindang leader. The Soviet Union,
still hoping to prevent a split between Chiang and the CCP, ordered
Communist underground activities to facilitate the Northern Expedition,
which was finally launched by Chiang from Guangzhou in July 1926.
In early 1927 the Guomindang-CCP rivalry led to a split in the
revolutionary ranks. The CCP and the left wing of the Guomindang
had decided to move the seat of the Nationalist government from
Guangzhou to Wuhan. But Chiang, whose Northern Expedition was
proving successful, set his forces to destroying the Shanghai
CCP apparatus and established an anti-Communist government at
Nanjing in April 1927. There now were three capitals in China:
the internationally recognized warlord regime in Beijing; the
Communist and left-wing Guomindang regime at Wuhan (武汉); and the
right-wing civilian-military regime at Nanjing, which would remain
the Nationalist capital for the next decade.
The Comintern cause appeared bankrupt. A new policy was instituted
calling on the CCP to foment armed insurrections in both urban
and rural areas in preparation for an expected rising tide of
revolution. Unsuccessful attempts were made by Communists to take
cities such as Nanchang (南昌), Changsha (长沙), Shantou (汕头), and
Guangzhou, and an armed rural insurrection, known as the Autumn
Harvest Uprising, was staged by peasants in Hunan Province. The
insurrection was led by Mao Zedong (毛泽东 1893-1976), who would
later become chairman of the CCP and head of state of the People's
Republic of China. Mao was of peasant origins and was one of the
founders of the CCP.
But in mid-1927 the CCP was at a low ebb. The Communists had
been expelled from Wuhan by their left-wing Guomindang allies,
who in turn were toppled by a military regime. By 1928 all of
China was at least nominally under Chiang's control, and the Nanjing
government received prompt international recognition as the sole
legitimate government of China. The Nationalist government announced
that in conformity with Sun Yat-sen's formula for the three stages
of revolution--military unification, political tutelage, and constitutional
democracy--China had reached the end of the first phase and would
embark on the second, which would be under Guomindang direction. |
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