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The
republic of China (1912-1949)
In the industrial city of Wuhan, a soldiers' group with only a loose connection
to Sun's alliance rose in rebellion in the early morning of Oct. 10, 1911
(since celebrated as Double Ten, the tenth day of the tenth month). The
Manchu governor and his commander fled, and a Chinese commander, Li Yuan-hung,
was pressured into taking over the leadership. By early December all of
the central, southern, and northwestern provinces had declared independence.
Sun Yat-sen, who was in the United States during the revolution, returned
and was chosen head of the provisional government of the Republic of China
in Nanjing. The Manchu court quickly summoned Yuan Shikai, the former
commander of the reformed Northern Army. Personally ambitious and politically
shrewd, Yuan carried out negotiations with both the Manchu court and the
revolutionaries. Yuan was able to persuade the Manchus to abdicate peacefully
in return for the safety of the imperial family. On Feb. 12, 1912, the
regent of the 6-year-old emperor formally announced the abdication. The
Manchu rule in China ended after 267 years and with it the 2,000-year-old
imperial system.Early in March 1912, Sun Yat-sen resigned from the presidency
and, as promised, Yuan Shih-kai was elected his successor at Nanjing.
Inaugurated in March 1912 in Beijing, the base of his power, Yuan established
a republican system of government with a premier, a cabinet, a draft constitution,
and a plan for parliamentary elections early in 1913. The Kuomintang (KMT,
National People's party), the successor to Sun Yat-sen's organization,
was formed in order to prepare for the election. Despite his earlier pledges
to support the republic, Yuan schemed to assassinate his opponents and
weaken the constitution and the parliament. By the end of 1914 he had
made himself president for life and even planned to establish an imperial
dynasty with himself as the first emperor. His dream was thwarted by the
serious crisis of the Twenty-one Demands for special privileges presented
by the Japanese in January 1915 and by vociferous opposition from many
sectors of Chinese society. He died in June 1916 a broken man. After Yuan's
death, a number of his proteges took positions of power in the Beijing
government or ruled as warlords in outlying regions. In August 1917 the
Beijing government joined the Allies and declared war on Germany. At the
peace conference in Versailles, France, the Chinese demand to end foreign
concessions in China was ignored.
Sun yat-sen (1866-1925). Known as the father of modern China, Sun Yat-sen
worked to achieve his lofty goals for modern China. These included the
overthrow of the Manchu Dynasty, the unification of China, and the establishment
of a republic. Sun Yat-sen was born on Nov. 12, 1866, in Guangdong Province
and attended several schools, including one in Honolulu, Hawaii, before
transferring to a college of medicine in Hong Kong. Graduating in 1892,
Sun almost immediately abandoned medicine for politics. His role in an
unsuccessful uprising in Canton in 1895 prompted Sun to begin an exile
that lasted for 16 years. Sun used this time to travel widely in Japan,
Europe, and the United States, enlisting sympathy and raising money for
his republican cause. Sun returned to China in 1911 after a successful
rebellion in Wuhan inspired uprisings in other provinces. As leader of
the Kuomintang, or Nationalist party, Sun was elected provisional president
of the newly declared republic but was forced to resign in 1912.
In 1913 his disagreements with government policies led Sun to organize
a second revolution. Failing to regain power, Sun left once again for
Japan, where he organized a separate government. Sun returned to China
and attempted to set up a new government in 1917 and 1921 before successfully
installing himself as generalissimo of a new regime in 1923.
Sun increasingly relied on aid from the Soviet Union, and in 1924 he reorganized
the Kuomintang on the model of the Soviet Communist party. Sun also founded
the Whampoa Military Academy and appointed Chiang Kai-shek as its president.
Sun summarized his policies in the Three Principles of the People--nationalism,
democracy, and socialism. He died of cancer in Peking on March 12, 1925.
Sun's tomb in Nanking is now a national shrine.
The May Fourth Movement
After World War I the Chinese felt betrayed. Anger and frustration erupted
in demonstrations on May 4, 1919, in Beijing. Joined by workers and merchants,
the movement spread to major cities. The Chinese representative at Versailles
refused to endorse the peace treaty, but its provisions remained unchanged.
Disillusioned with the West, many Chinese looked elsewhere for help.
The May Fourth Movement, which grew out of the student uprising, attacked
Confucianism, initiated a vernacular style of writing, and promoted science.
Scholars of international stature, such as John Dewey and Bertrand Russell,
were invited to lecture. Numerous magazines were published to stimulate
new thoughts. Toward the end of the movement's existence, a split occurred
among its leaders. Some, like Ch'en Tu-hsiu and Li Ta-chao, were beginning
to be influenced by the success of the Russian Revolution of 1917, which
contrasted sharply with the failure of the 1911 Revolution in China to
change the social order and improve conditions. By 1920, people associated
with the Comintern (Communist International) were disseminating literature
in China and helping to start Communist groups, including one led by Mao
Zedong. A meeting at Shanghai in 1921 was actually the first party congress
of the Communist Party of China (CCP). The CCP was so small that the Soviet
Union looked elsewhere for a viable political ally. A Comintern agent,
Adolph Joffe, was sent to China to approach Sun Yat-sen, who had failed
to obtain assistance from Great Britain or the United States. The period
of Sino-Soviet collaboration began with the Sun-Joffe Declaration of Jan.
26, 1923. The KMT was recognized by the Soviet Union, and the Communists
were admitted as members. With Soviet aid, the KMT army was built up.
A young officer, Chiang Kai-shek, was sent to Moscow for training. Upon
returning, he was put in charge of the Whampoa Military Academy, established
to train soldiers to fight the warlords, who controlled much of China
(See Chiang Kai-shek). Zhou Enlai (also Chou En-lai) of the CCP was deputy
director of the academy's political department. Sun Yat-sen, whose power
base was in the south, had planned to send an expedition against the northern
warlords, but he died before it could get under way. Chiang Kai-shek,
who succeeded him in the KMT leadership, began the northern expedition
in July 1926. The Nationalist army met little resistance and by April
1927 had reached the lower Yangtze. Meanwhile, Chiang, claiming to be
a sincere follower of Sun Yat-sen, had broken with the left-wing elements
of the KMT. After the Nationalist forces had taken Shanghai, a Communist-led
general strike was suppressed with bloodshed. Following suppressions in
other cities, Chiang set up his own government at Nanjing on April 18,
1927. He professed friendship with the Soviet Union, but by July 1927
he was expelling Communists from the KMT. Some left-wingers left for the
Soviet Union. The northern expedition was resumed, and in 1928 Chiang
took Peking. China was formally unified. Nationalist China was recognized
by the Western powers and supported by loans from foreign banks.
The Nationalist Eera (1928-1937). The Nationalist period began with high
hopes and much promise. More could have been accomplished had it not been
for the problems of Comintern corruption and Japanese aggression. In his
efforts to combat them both, Chiang neglected the land reform needed to
improve the lives of the peasants. Driven from the cities, the Communists
concentrated on organizing the peasants in the countryside. On Nov. 1,
1931, they proclaimed the establishment of the Chinese Soviet Republic
in the southeastern province of Jiangxi, with Mao Zedong as chairman.
Here the first units of the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army were
formed. While conducting guerrilla warfare in these regions, the soldiers
carried out an agrarian revolution that was based on Mao's premise that
the best way to win the conflict was to isolate the cities by gaining
control of the countryside and the food supply. A military man by temperament
and training, Chiang sought to eliminate the Communists by force. He defined
his anti-Communist drive as "internal pacification before resistance
to external attack," and he gave it more importance than opposition
to the increasingly aggressive Japanese. With arms and military advisers
from Nazi Germany, Chiang carried out a series of "extermination
campaigns" that killed about a million people between 1930 and 1934.
Chiang's fifth campaign, involving over half a million troops, almost
annihilated the Communists. Faced with the dilemma of being totally destroyed
in Jiangxi or attempting an almost impossible escape, the Communists decided
to risk the escape. On Oct. 15, 1934, they broke through the tight KMT
siege. Over 100,000 men and women set out on the Long March of about 6,000
miles (9,600 kilometers) through China's most rugged terrain to find a
new base in the northwest. In the meantime, the Japanese had made steady
inroads into China. The Mukden Incident of 1931, through which Mukden
was occupied by the Japanese, was initiated by Japanese officers stationed
along the South Manchurian Railway. This was followed by the occupation
of Manchuria and the creation of the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1932.
By the mid-1930s the Japanese had seized Inner Mongolia and parts of northeastern
China and had created the North China Autonomous Region with no resistance
from the Nationalists. Anti-Japanese sentiment mounted in China, but Chiang
ignored it and in 1936 launched yet another extermination campaign against
the Communists in Shaanxi. Chiang was forced to give up the anti-Communist
drive when his troops mutinied and arrested him as he arrived in Xi'an
in December 1936 to plan strategy. He was released after he agreed to
form a united front with the CCP against the Japanese, who were making
steady inroads into China.
In China, World War II broke out on July 7, 1937, with a seemingly insignificant
little battle between Chinese and Japanese troops near Peking, called
the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. Within a few days, the Japanese had occupied
Peking, and the fighting spread rapidly. The war in China fell into three
stages. The first (1937-1939) was characterized by the phenomenally rapid
Japanese occupation of most of China's east coast, including such major
cities as Shanghai, Nanjing, and Canton. The Nationalist government moved
to the interior, ultimately to Chongqing in Sichuan, and the Japanese
established puppet governments in Peking in 1937 and in Nanjing in 1940.
The second stage (1939-1943) was a period of waiting, as Chiang blockaded
the Communists in the northwest (despite the united front) and waited
for help from the United States, which had declared war on Japan in 1941.
In the final stage (1944-1945), the United States provided massive assistance
to Nationalist China, but the Chongqing government, weakened by inflation,
impoverishment of the middle class, and low troop morale was unable to
take full advantage of it. Feuds among the KMT generals and between Chiang
and his United States military adviser, General Joseph Stilwell, further
hampered the KMT. When Japanese defeat became a certainty in the spring
of 1945, the Communists seemed in a better position to take over from
the Japanese garrisons than the KMT, which was far away in the rear of
the formation. A United States airlift of KMT troops enabled them to occupy
many cities, but the countryside stayed with the Communists.
After the end of World War II in Europe in May 1945, the Allied war effort
moved to the east. The Soviet Union joined the war against Japan at the
end of July. On August 6 and 9 the United States dropped the world's first
atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On Aug.
14, 1945, the Japanese surrendered. In China, however, civil war raged
over who should take charge of the Japanese arms and equipment. At the
end of August an agreement was reached in Chongqing between a CCP delegation
and the KMT, but the truce was brief.
In January 1946 a cease-fire was negotiated by United States General George
C. Marshall. The Nationalist government returned to Nanjing, and China
was recognized by the new United Nations as one of the five great powers.
The United States supplied the Chiang government with an additional $2
billion ($1.5 billion had been spent for the war). Although the KMT's
dominance in weapons and supplies was enormous, it was kept under guard
in the cities, while the Communists held the surrounding countryside.
As inflation soared, both civilians and the military became demoralized.
The CCP, sensing the national mood, proposed a coalition government. The
KMT refused, and fighting erupted again.
The short and decisive civil war that followed was resolved in two main
places: Manchuria andthe Huai River area. Despite a massive airlift of
KMT forces by the United States, Manchuria was lost in October 1948 after
300,000 KMT forces surrendered to the CCP. By the end of 1948 the KMT
had lost over half a million men, more than two thirds of whom had defected.
In April 1949 the Communists moved south of the Yangtze. After the fall
of Nanjing and Shanghai, KMT resistance evaporated. By the autumn, the
Communists had taken all mainland territories except Tibet. Chiang Kai-shek
and a number of his associates fled to the island of Taiwan, where they
set up what they claimed was the rightful government of China.
