Republic of China
The republic that Sun Yat-sen
( ) and his associates envisioned
evolved slowly. The revolutionists lacked an army, and the power of Yuan Shikai
( ) 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 ( 1882-1913), one of Sun's
associates. The party, the Guomindang ( 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 ( ). 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 ( ). 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 CommunismAfter 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 ( ) 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 ( ). 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 WarlordsThe 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 ( ) 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 (
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 ( ). 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 ( ); 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 ( ), Changsha ( ), Shantou ( ), 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 ( 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.
Ringling Asian Art Center.
|