In 1928, Chiang Kai-shek founded a new Republic of
China at Nanjing, and over the next three years, he managed
to reunify China by a combination of military oper-
ations and inducements (known as “silver bullets”) to various
northern warlords to join his movement. One of his
key targets was warlord Zhang Zuolin, who controlled
Manchuria under the tutelage of Japan. When Zhang
allegedly agreed to throw in his lot with the Nationalists,
the Japanese had him assassinated by placing a bomb
under his train as he was returning to Manchuria. The
Japanese hoped that Zhang Zuolin’s son and successor,
Zhang Xueliang, would be more cooperative, but they had
miscalculated. Promised a major role in Chiang Kai-shek’s
government, Zhang began instead to integrate Manchuria
politically and economically into the Nanjing republic.
Chiang Kai-shek saw the Japanese as a serious threat to
Chinese national aspirations but considered them less
dangerous than the Communists. (He once remarked to
an American reporter that “the Japanese are a disease of
the skin, but the Communists are a disease of the heart.”)
After the Shanghai massacre of April 1927, most of the
Communist leaders went into hiding in the city, where
they attempted to revive the movement in its traditional
base among the urban working class. Shanghai was a rich
recruiting ground for the party. A city of millionaires,
paupers, prostitutes, gamblers, and adventurers, it had
led one pious Christian missionary to comment, “If God
lets Shanghai endure, He owes an apology to Sodom and
Gomorrah.” 3 Some party members, however, led by the
young Communist organizer Mao Zedong, fled to the
hilly areas south of the Yangtze River.
Unlike most other CCP leaders, Mao was convinced
that the Chinese revolution must be based on the impoverished
peasants in the countryside. The son of a prosperous
peasant, Mao had helped organize a peasant movement
in South China during the early 1920s and then
served as an agitator in rural villages in his native province
of Hunan during the Northern Expedition in the fall
of 1926. At that time, he wrote a famous report to the
party leadership suggesting that the CCP support peasant
demands for a land revolution. But his superiors refused,
fearing that adopting excessively radical policies would
destroy the alliance with the Nationalists.
After the spring of 1927, the CCP-Nationalist alliance
ceased to exist. Chiang Kai-shek attempted to root the
Communists out of their urban base in Shanghai. He succeeded
in 1931, when most party leaders were forced to
flee Shanghai for Mao’s rural redoubt in the rugged hills
of Jiangxi Province. Three years later, using their superior
military strength, Chiang’s troops surrounded the Communist
base, inducing Mao’s young People’s Liberation
Army (PLA) to abandon its guerrilla lair and embark on
the famous Long March, an arduous journey of thousands
of miles on foot through mountains, marshes, and deserts
to the small provincial town of Yan’an 200 miles north of
the modern-day city of Xian in the dusty hills of North
China. Of the ninety thousand who embarked on the
journey in October 1934, only ten thousand arrived in
Yan’an a year later. Contemporary observers must have
thought that the Communist threat to the Nanjing regime
had been averted forever.
Meanwhile, Chiang Kai-shek was trying to build a
new nation. When the Nanjing republic was established
in 1928, Chiang publicly declared his commitment to
Sun Yat-sen’s Three People’s Principles. In a program
announced in 1918, Sun had written about the allimportant
second stage of “political tutelage”:
As a schoolboy must have good teachers and helpful friends,
so the Chinese people, being for the first time under repub-
lican rule, must have a farsighted revolutionary government
for their training. This calls for the period of political
tutelage, which is a necessary transitional stage from
monarchy to republicanism. Without this, disorder will be
unavoidable.4
In keeping with Sun’s program, Chiang announced a period
of political indoctrination to prepare the Chinese
people for a final stage of constitutional government. In
the meantime, the Nationalists would use their dictatorial
power to carry out a land reform program and modernize
the urban industrial sector.
But it would take more than paper plans to create a
new China. Years of neglect and civil war had severely
frayed the political, economic, and social fabric of the nation.
There were faint signs of an impending industrial
revolution in the major urban centers, but most of the
people in the countryside, drained by warlord exactions
and civil strife, were still grindingly poor and overwhelmingly
illiterate. A Westernized middle class had begun to
emerge in the cities and formed much of the natural constituency
of the Nanjing government. But this new Westernized
elite, preoccupied with bourgeois values of individual
advancement and material accumulation, had few
links with the peasants in the countryside or the rickshaw
drivers “running in this world of suffering,” in the poignant
words of a Chinese poet. In an expressive phrase,
some critics dismissed Chiang Kai-shek and his chief followers
as “banana Chinese”—yellow on the outside,
white on the inside.
Chiang was aware of the difficulty of introducing exotic
foreign ideas into a society still culturally conservative.
While building a modern industrial sector, in the
officially promoted New Life Movement, sponsored by his
Wellesley-educated wife, Mei-ling Soong, Chiang sought
to propagate traditional Confucian values of hard work,
obedience, and moral integrity while rejecting what he
considered the excessive individualism and material
greed of Western capitalism.
Unfortunately for Chiang, Confucian ideas—at least
in their institutional form—had been widely discredited
by the failure of the traditional system to solve China’s
growing problems. Critics noted, as well, that Chiang’s
government did not practice what it preached. Much of
the national wealth was in the hands of the so-called four
families, composed of senior officials and close subordinates
of the ruling elite. Lacking the political sensitivity
of Sun Yat-sen and fearing Communist influence,
Chiang repressed all opposition and censored free expression,
thereby alienating many intellectuals and political
moderates.
With only a tenuous hold over the vast countryside
(the Nanjing republic had total control over a handful of
provinces in the Yangtze valley), Chiang Kai-shek’s government
had little more success in promoting economic
development. Although mechanization was gradually beginning
to replace manual labor in a number of traditional
industries (notably in the manufacture of textile goods),
about 75 percent of all industrial production was still
craft-produced in the mid-1930s. Then again, traditional
Chinese exports, such as silk and tea, were hard-hit by the
Great Depression. With military expenses consuming
about half the national budget, distressingly little was devoted
to economic development. During the decade of
precarious peace following the Northern Expedition, industrial
growth averaged only about 1 percent annually.
One of Sun Yat-sen’s most prominent proposals was to
redistribute land to poor peasants in the countryside.
Whether overall per capita consumption declined during
the early decades of the century is unclear, but there
is no doubt that Chinese farmers were often victimized by
high taxes imposed by local warlords and the endemic political
and social conflict that marked the period. A land
reform program was enacted in 1930, but it had little effect.
Since the urban middle class and the landed gentry
were Chiang Kai-shek’s natural political constituency, he
shunned programs that would lead to a radical redistribution
of wealth.
World History
