THE NATIONALIST REVOLUTION AND THE NANJING GOVERNMENT

Sun Yatsen and the United Front The reunification of warlord-divided China, like many previous

re-unifications, required 30 years, from about 1920 to about 1950. Like all such periods, it seemed

endlessly confusing because several parallel processes were under way at the same time. In foreign

relations there was the Rights Recovery movement of the 1920s to abolish the inequalities of the

treaty system. But after 1931 this had to give way to China’spatriotic resistance to the Japanese

militarists’ effort to conquer China, defeated only in 1945. In domestic politics unification was

pursued by a united front of two party dictatorships,both inspired by Leninist Russia. The Chinese

Communist Party and the Nationalist Party (Guomindang) both cooperated and competed in the

1920s to smash warlordism and roll back imperialism. Breaking apart in 1927, they became deadly

rivals despite their nominal cooperation again after 1937 in a second united front against Japan.

Meanwhile, a third line of struggle was within the Guomindang itself after it set up the Nationalist

Government at Nanjing in an allegedly reunified China in 1928. This intraparty contest was

between certain elements of a civil society that were still developing and the military autocracy

sanctioned by Japan’s invasion. Each of these three lines of conflict was confusing to observers as

well as participants, and altogether they made Republican China an enigma fraught with mystery

and misconceptions. Our analysis must start with Sun Yatsen, a patriot whose sincerity permitted

him to be startlingly nonideological and opportunistic—just what the circumstances demanded.

Sun was a commoner from the Guangdong delta near Portuguese. Macao. But he grew up

partly in Hawaii (winning a school prize for his English!), got a medical education in Hong Kong

(“Dr. Sun”), and then in 1896 achieved fame as China’s pioneer revolutionary when the Qing

legation in London seized him but had to release him. In 1905 the Japanese expansionists helped

him pull together the Revolutionary League in Tokyo, and so as asymbolic senior figure he was
proclaimed presidentof the Chinese Republic for a few weeks in 1912 until he gave way to Yuan

Shikai.

The ambivalent part-way nature of Sun’s Nationalist cause—its limited aims in the

reorganizing of Chinese society—emerged quite clearly in the 1920s. The occasion was provided

by Sun Yatsen’s decision in 1922 to learn from, and his successor, Jiang Jieshi’s (Chiang

Kaishek’s) decision in 1927 to break with, Soviet Russia.

Leninist theory put anti-imperialism on a more than national basis and made it a part of a

worldwide movement. Since political thinking in China had always been based on universal

principles, and the Chinese empire had traditionally embraced the civilized world, Chinese

revolutionists readily sought to base their cause on doctrines of universal validity. Sun Yatsen,

while not subscribing to the Communist idea of class struggle, fully recognized the usefulness of

Communist methods and accepted Communist collaboration in his Nationalist cause.

The Russian Bolsheviks had organized the Comintern (Communist International) out of

scattered groups in various countries. Their first Comintern congress in 1919 encouraged

revolution in many parts of Europe. But after 1921, when Lenin turned to his New Economic

Policy, though the Comintern still competed with the revived socialist parties of Europe, it was

less actively revolutionary, except in China.

Lenin held that Western capitalism was using the backward countries of Asia as a source

of profit to bolster the capitalist system. Without imperialist exploitation of Asia, which allowed

continued high wages for the workers of the West, capitalism would more rapidly collapse.

Nationalist revolutions in Asia, which would deprive the imperialist powers of their profitable

markets and sources of raw materials, would therefore constitute a “flank attack” on Western
capitalism at its weakest point— that is, in Asian economies, where imperialist domination

exploited the working class most ruthlessly.

In China the Soviet Russian government had capitalized upon its own impotence by

grandly renouncing the privileges of the tsar’s unequal treaties. But it subsequently proved a hard

bargainer over the old tsarist rights in Manchuria, and its foreign office continued to deal

diplomatically with the Beijing government and warlords in North China while the Comintern

worked subversively for revolution.

On his part, Sun Yatsen by 1922, after 30 years of agitation, had reached a low point in his

fortunes. He had been proclaimed president of the Chinese Republic in 1912 only to see his country

disintegrate into warlordism. His effort to unify China through warlord means had led him into

dealings with opportunist militarists at Guangzhou. In June 1922 Sun was outmaneuvered and fled

to Shanghai. Just at this moment, when Sun had demonstrated his preeminence as China’s

Nationalist leader but his incompetence to complete the revolution, he joined forces with the

Comintern. In September 1922 he began the reorganization of the Guomindang on Soviet lines.

This marriage of convenience, announced in a joint statement by Dr. Sun and a Soviet

representative in January 1923, was a strictly limited arrangement. It stated that Sun did not favor

communism for China, since conditions were not appropriate, that the Soviets agreed that China

needed unity and independence, and were ready to aid the Chinese Nationalist revolution. As Sun

Yatsen wrote to Jiang Jieshi at the time, he had to seek help where he could get it. The Western

powers offered no aid. But although Sun nowsoughtandacceptedSovietRussianaid,communism in

his mind did not supplant his own Three Principles of the People—Nationalism, People’s Rights

or Democracy, and People’s Livelihood—as the program for the Chinese revolution, even though
he found it useful to incorporate in his ideas the Communist emphasis on a mass movement fired

by anti-imperialism.

On the basis of this uneasy alliance, Soviet help was soon forthcoming. Having

reestablished his government at Guangzhou early in 1923, Sun sent Jiang Jieshi to spend three

months in Russia. He returned to head the new Whampoa Military Academy at Guangzhou in

1924. Meanwhile, a Soviet adviser, Michael Borodin, an able organizer who had lived in the

United States, became the Guomindang’s expert on how to make a revolution. He helped to set up

a political institute for the training of propagandists, to teach Guomindang politicians how to

secure mass support. On the Soviet model the Guomindang now developed local cells, which in

turn elected representatives to a party congress. The first national congress was convened in

January 1924 and elected a Soviet-modeled central executive committee as the chief authority in

the party. Borodin drafted its new constitution.

In addition to aiding the Nationalist revolution, the ulterior objective of the Comintern was

to develop the Chinese Communist Party and get it into a strategic position within the Guomindang

(GMD) so as eventually to seize control of it. Members of the Chinese Communist Party were, by

agreement with the GMD, admitted to membership in it as individuals, at the same time that the

Chinese Communist Party continued its separate existence. This admission of Communists, a “bloc

within” strategy, was accepted by the nascent CCP only at the insistence of the Comintern

representative. It seemed feasible to Sun Yatsen because the CCP were still so few in number, the

two parties were united on the basis of anti-imperialism, and the GMD aimed to lead a broad,

national, multiclass movement avoiding class war. Sun also felt that there was little real difference

between the People’s Livelihood and communism (at least as seen in Lenin’s New Economic
Policy), that the Chinese Communists were only a group of “youngsters” who hoped to monopolize

Russian aid, that Russia would disavow them if necessary to cooperate with the GMD.

On their side, the Chinese Communists were seeking definite class support among urban

workers, poor peasants, and students. But they recognized that this class basis was still weak. They

therefore sought to go along with and utilize the Nationalist movement without antagonizing the

major non-Communist elements within it. It should not be forgotten that the Communist Party in

China at this time was still in its infancy. It numbered hardly more than 300 members in 1922,

only 1,500 or so by 1925, whereas the GMD in 1923 had some 50,000 members. Tony Saich

(forthcoming), surveying the early CCP documents, remarks on the Communists’ spurious sense

of progress under the “bloc within” strategy. In actual fact, getting CCP members into high GMD

posts gave themnotpowerbutonlyinfluence.WhentheCCPclaimedinMay1926 that it led 1.25

million workers simply because their representatives had attended the CCP-dominated Third Labor

Congress, they constructed “no colossus but rather a Buddha” with feet of clay. In the First United

Frontofthe1920stheCCPfailedtoestablisheitherurbanorruralbases of long-term support.

Thus from the beginning the Guomindang–Communist entente was a precarious thing, held

together by the usefulness of each group to the other, by their common enemy, imperialism, and,

while he lived, by Sun Yatsen’s predominance over the more anti-Communist elements of his

Nationalist party.

In 1925 China experienced a great wave of nationwide antiimperialist sentiment roused by

student demonstrations and imperialist gunfire in incidents at Shanghai and Guangzhou (May 30

and June 23, 1925) respectively). These dramatic proofs that the unequal treaties and the

foreigners’ privileges still persisted gave rise to the nationwide May 30th Movement. It included

a prolonged boycott and strike against the British at Hong Kong.

THE ACCESSION TO POWER OF JIANG JIESHI (CHIANG KAISHEK)

After Dr. Sun’s untimely death in March 1925, his followers achieved, in 1926–27, the successful

Northern Expedition from Guangzhou to the Yangzi valley. The newly trained propagandists of

the Nationalist revolution preceded the armies of Jiang Jieshi, who was aided by Russian arms and

advisers. By advance propaganda, popular agitation, and the bribery of “silver bullets,” the

Northern Expedition’s six main armies defeated or absorbed some thirty-four warlord forces in

South China.

Thus Chinese nationalism in the years from 1925 to 1927 had reached a new height of

expression and was focused against Britain as the chief imperialist power. To defend their position,

the British on the one hand restored to China their concessions at Hankou and Jiujiang on the

Yangzi and on the other hand, with the support of the powers, built up an international force of

40,000 troops to protect Shanghai. Infearof antiforeignism, most of the missionaries, several

thousand, evacuated their posts in the interior. In March 1927,when the revolutionary troops

reached Nanjing, foreign residents were attacked, six of them killed, and the others evacuated

under the protecting shellfire of American and British gunboats.

It was at this point in the spring of 1927 that the latent split between the right and left wings

of the revolution finally became complete. For two years the right and left within the movement

had generally cooperated, although as early as March 1926 Jiang Jieshi had arrested leftist

elements at Guangzhou allegedly to forestall a plot to kidnap him. His three-month view of Russia

in 1923 had left him aware of Soviet methods and suspicious of Communist aims. The success of

the Northern Expedition finally took the lid off the situation.
 In brief, the left wing of the GMD together with the Communists by March 1927 dominated

the revolutionary government, which had been moved from Guangzhou to Wuhan. Here were

collected, among other leaders, Madame Sun Yatsen and Wang Jingwei, the widow and the chief

disciple of the founder, and Borodin, the chief adviser on revolution. Wuhan had been proclaimed

the new national capital. This suited Communist strategy because it was a large industrial center.

Two members of the CCP had actually been made cabinet ministers. But this government was

weak in military strength.

Jiang Jieshi, with the support of the more conservative leaders of the GMD, had aimed at

the rich strategic center of the Lower Yangzi. He had come from a merchant-gentry background

inland from Ningbo, acquired military training in North China and in Tokyo, and inherited a

conventional Sino–Japanese Confucian (not liberal) outlook. In 1927, once the Shanghai–Nanjing

region was in his grasp, Jiang was able by military force to forestall the Communists and

consolidate his position. In April 1927 at Shanghai foreign troops and warships confronted the

Communist-led labor unions, which had seized local control. Under Comintern orders they awaited

Jiang as their ally, only to be attacked and decimated by his forces in a bloody betrayal, aided by

the Green Gang of the Shanghai underworld.

Jiang set up his capital at Nanjing, and shortly afterward a local general seized power at

Wuhan and broke up the left-wing government. Some of its leaders fled to Moscow. The new

Nanjing government expelled the Chinese Communists from its ranks and instituted a nationwide

terror to suppress the Communist revolutionaries. In this effort it was, for the time being, largely

successful. Small contingents of Communist-led troops revolted, and in December 1927 the

Communists attempted a coup at Guangzhou. But after this failure to seize power they withdrew

to rural mountain areas, especially in Jiangxi province in Central China.

This ignominious failure of the Comintern’s laboratory experiment in revolution in China had been

affected by a power struggle in Moscow. Trotsky and his followers had criticized the Comintern

effort to work through the GMD. They foresaw Jiang Jieshi’s betrayal and urged an independent

program to develop workers’ and peasants’ soviets in China under purely Communist leadership.

Stalin and his supporters, however, had argued that an independent Communist movement in so

backward a country would invite suppression all the sooner. They had looked forward to the time

at a later stage of the revolution when, in Stalin’s phrase, the Communists could drop their GMD

allies as so many “squeezed-out lemons.”

Much of the Comintern’s ineptitude undoubtedly came from its remoteness from the scene

of action. Stalin could hardly succeed in masterminding by the aid of Marxist dialectics the

confused stirrings of revolution in a place like Shanghai, where the proletariat were barely getting

organized. The Comintern plot in China was also frustrated by the Comintern’s own prior act in

giving the GMD a centralized Sovietstyle party apparatus, which was much harder to subvert than

an open Western-style parliamentary party.

Jiang Jieshi’s break with the Communists represented an effort to consolidate the gains of

the national revolution at a certain level in the revolutionary process, stopping short of class

struggle, social revolution, and the remaking of peasant life in the villages. This consolidation in

the Nanjing government, combined with military campaigns to check revolt, enabled Jiang and the

GMD leaders to achieve a superficial national unity, secure the recognition of the powers, and

begin the process of administrative development, which would be a necessary prerequisite to the

abolition of the unequal treaties. In the spring of 1928 Jiang led a further northern expedition from

the Yangzi to Beijing, which was occupied in June and renamed Beiping (“Northern Peace”). In

November the young warlord of Manchuria completed the nominal unification of all China by
recognizing the jurisdiction of the Nanjing government. Meantime, the foreign powers one by one

made treaties with it and so gave the Nationalist revolution international recognition.

Several conclusions emerge at this point. Although the GMD won power, it was composed

of so many disparate elements that it was unable to function as a party dictatorship. Instead, it soon

became a Jiang Jieshi dictatorship. In its early history, the driving impulse had been nationalism,

first after 1905 against alien Manchu rule, second after 1923 against the imperialism of the treaty

powers. The GMD ideology, so necessary to inspire student activists, was nominally Sun Yatsen’s

Three People’s Principles, but these were really a party platform (a set of goals) more than an

ideology (a theory of history). The GMD had got no farther than regional warlordism at Guangzhou

until in 1923 it allied with the Soviet Union, reorganized itself on Leninist lines, created an

indoctrinated Party army, and formed a United Front with the CCP. The four years of Soviet aid

and CCP collaboration together with the patriotic Marxist–Leninist animus against the warlords’

domestic “feudalism” and the foreign powers’ “imperialism” helped the GMD to power.

This tangled story suggests that there has been at bottom only one revolutionary movement

in twentieth-century China, that of socialism mainly headed by the CCP. (Perhaps this puts the

GMD in a better light, as devoted to state-building and reform rather than to the unending violence

of class struggle.) Jiang Jieshi’s treacherous slaughter of the CCP at Shanghai in April 1927,

though it led to the powers’ recognition of his Nanjing government in 1928, tended to dissipate

the GMD’s revolutionary spirit. Soon it found itself on the defensive against both the CCP and

Japan.
THE NATURE OF THE NANJING GOVERNMENT

The Nationalist Government set up at Nanjing in 1928 seemed the most promising since 1912.

Many of its officials were patriots educated abroad and competent at the functions of a modern

nation-state. Amenities of modern life soon filled the city scene—movies, automobiles, the theatre,

arts and crafts, books and magazines, as well as teachers at universities. Chinese institutions

included the dozen research institutes of Academia Sinica, the Nationalist Government’s Ministry

of Public Health, its National Agricultural Research Bureau, the many-sided work of the Maritime

Customs Service, the Bank of China’s and other research bureaus, and a multitude of similar

agencies. This growth carried on the efforts to build up a civil society noted in Chapter 13.

The Nationalist Government’s potentialities, what it might have done for the Chinese

people, would soon be all but destroyed by Japanese militarism, which seized Manchuria in 1931,

encroached on Shanghai in 1932 and then on the Beijing–Tianjin area, and attacked China full

scale from 1937 to 1945. In the 1930s and 40s Japan’s industrial technology and chauvinist spirit

set back the cause of civilization in China, just as similar capacities of the Germans were doing in

Europe. The inherent weaknesses of the GMD dictatorship at Nanjing grew worse under the

pressures of preparing for war and then having to fight.

A first weakness was the loss of revolutionary aim. In accordance with Sun Yatsen’s theory

of the three stages of the revolution (military unification, political tutelage, and constitutional

democracy), 1929 was proclaimed to be the beginning of the period of political tutelage under the

Guomindang dictatorship.

Ever since the First Party Congress had met in January 1924 and adopted a Soviet-style

organization, the Central Executive Committee (CEC) had become the chief repository of political
authority. High officials of the government were chosen by the CEC and usually from it.

Constitutional government was postponed. Party ministries, such as the Ministries of Information,

Social Affairs, Overseas Affairs, or Party Organization, functioned as part of the central

administration and yet were in form under the Guomindang, not the government. Party and

government thus became indistinguishable.

But in this way the Guomindang became a wing of the bureaucracy and lost its

revolutionary mission. The earlier party supervision of local administration, its political work in

the army, its special criminal courts to try counterrevolutionaries, all were reduced or abandoned.

So also were the mass organizations of workers, peasants, youth, merchants, and women. These

mass movements had mobilized popular support for the Northern Expedition, but the Nanjing

power-holders now looked askance at processions, demonstrations, and mass meetings. They

discouraged student movements, looking back upon all these activities of the mid-twenties as

useful tools to beat the warlords but no longer of value, now that power was theirs to organize for

purposes of control. With this attitude the Guomindang suffered an actual drop in numbers. By

late 1929 its membership totaled barely 550,000, of whom 280,000 were military. Members in

Shanghai were mainly officials or policemen.

Far from being bourgeois-oriented, the GMD destroyed the semi-autonomy of the

Shanghai businessmen. Using gangster methods of abduction and assassination, it intimidated

merchants into contributing large funds for the military. By setting up structures parallel to the

chambers of commerce while regrouping the guilds and changing personnel, it forced the General

Chamber of Commerce to close down and cowed the merchant elite. The new Bureau of Social

Affairs now supervised professional organizations, settled conflicts, collected statistics, pursued
philanthropic works, maintained hygiene and security arrangements, and organized town planning.

Officialdom took over from the merchant class.

The GMD also took over the management of boycotts, which became government-

organized and financed against Japanese trade. Boycotts became controlled-spontaneous mass

movements that could be turned against leading merchants in terrorist fashion. The Municipality

of Greater Shanghai asserted, says Bergère, “what amounted to overseeing rights over the

Settlement’s officials.” The Green Gang of 20,000 or possibly even 100,000 members became

GMD agents ready to track down trade union leaders and Communists just as they continued to

terrorize wealthy merchants who refused to contribute funds to the government. The Shanghai

concession areas no longer provided much refuge for Chinese nationals.

The Shanghai bankers, like those of Beijing and Tianjin, were now making fortunes by

giving public loans to the government. Between 1927 and 1931 they underwrote most internal

loans, which totaled something like a billion dollars. The government bonds were sold below

nominal value and gave the banks an actual interest payment of 20 percent or more.

Improvements under the Nanjing government included the abolition of likin in 1931 and

recovery of tariff autonomy. A modern mint was established and the tael abolished in March 1933.

The National Economic Council was setup to handle foreign-aid funds.Finally the banking coup

of 1935 set up the four major banks as a central bank and the national currency as a managed

currency subject to inflation. The government gained control over two thirds of the banking sector,

taxed business more and more heavily, levied consolidated taxes on production, and raised customs

duties.
 In general it seemed that the “triumphant bureaucratic apparatus was about to stifle the

spirit of enterprise once again,” as E. Balazs remarked. High-rankin gofficials sought personal

profits while the government used modern business to strengthen its own authority, not to

strengthen the economy by investment in productive enterprise. Having foresworn the land tax and

left it to the provincial governments, the Nanjing regime lived parasitically on trade taxes,

handicapping the industrial sector it should have tried by all means to encourage. Both productive

investment at home and capital loans from abroad were discouraged by these antidevelopment

policies. One hypothesis is that the Nanjing decade probably saw continued stagnation in the

agrarian economy, with no appreciable increase of per capita productivity. This was accompanied,

moreover, by a stultifying growth of “bureaucratic capitalism,” that is, domination of industry and

finance by officials and political cliques who feathered their private nests by manipulating

government monopolies, finances, development schemes, and agencies. As a result, Nanjing was

unable to achieve a healthy and solvent fiscal regime, much less a breakthrough into a genuine

process of self-sustaining reinvestment and industrialization. Savings were channeled into current

government use or private speculation, while the nation’s capital resources were not mobilized,

even for military purposes.

Modifyingthisnegativeviewstandstheinsistenceofeconomichistorians like William C.

Kirby (1984) that despite its wartime shortcomings the Nationalist regime did achieve a degree of

state-building. This was evidenced particularly in the military industries under the National

Resources Commission. In either case, most researchers agree that the Nanjing government existed

not to represent the interests of a bourgeoisie but rather to perpetuate its own power, much in the

manner of dynastic regimes.

 If the Nationalist Government was not “bourgeois,” was it not at least “feudal”? In other

words, representing the landlord interest? The answer is mixed. Since Nanjing left the land tax to

be collected by the provinces,the provincial regimes,strapped for revenue,generally left the

landlords in place. Central government army officers in particular might become large landowners.

Nanjing was against mobilizing peasants, but it was for centralization, not dispersal, of power.

“Feudal” lacks precise meaning ; it is more useful to see the Nanjing government as having had a

dual character—comparatively modern in urban centers and foreign contact, reactionary in its old-

style competition with provincial warlords. On its foreign side it could continue the effort to

modernize at least the trappings of government, while on its domestic warlord side it continued to

suppress social change. Foreigners were more aware of its promise, assuming in Anglo–American

fashion that the only way forward in China would be through gradual reform.
SYSTEMIC WEAKNESSES

The Nanjing government’s claim to foreign approbation lay first of all in its modernity. The big

ministries of foreign affairs, finance, economic affairs, education, justice, communications, war,

and navy built imposing office buildings in Nanjing under the wing of the executive branch (yuan)

of the government. Meanwhile, in addition to the legislative and judicial branches, there were

established the control, that is, censorial, and auditing branch, and the examination branch for the

civil service. Into these new ministries were recruited educated talent very conscious of China’s

ignominious place in the world. They began to apply modern science to China’s ancient problems.

There was at first a new atmosphere of hope in the air.

But this ran into a second weakness—the Nanjing government’s limited capacity vis-à-vis

the sheer mass of China’s 400 million people. GMD China in its equipment and modern plant was

a small show. In industrial production it was smaller than Belgium, in air and sea power negligible,

in the gadgets and equipment of American life not as big as a Middle Western state. Yet this small

and relatively insignificant modern state wanted to spread out over the protean body of a vigorous

people in a vast and ancient land. On the whole the Chinese people were notyet heavily taxed.

Thomas Rawski’s (1989) finding is that in the early 1930s central, provincial, and local taxes all

together amounted to only about 5 to 7 percent of China’s total output. Yet Nanjing’s modernizers

wanted to foster modern agronomy, railroads and bus roads, a national press and communications

system, and the modern idea of opportunity for youth and women. As a Westernizing influence,

Nanjing found its strongest support in the treaty-port cities, its best revenue in the Maritime

Customs duties on foreign trade, and its greatest difficulty in reaching the mass of the peasantry.

Indeed, it at first controlled only the lower Yangzi provinces. It was at all times engaged in a

political and often military struggle to dominate provincial warlord regimes.

Finally, the Nationalist Government from the start was plagued by systemic weaknesses that began

with its personnel. Before the Northern Expedition of 1926 the GMD at Guangzhou had included

both the surviving Revolutionary Alliance members of Sun Yatsen’s generation and younger

idealist-activists who often had a dual membership in the GMD and the CCP. The Soviet input

represented by Borodin had been combined with the rising military leadership of Jiang Jieshi.

Within five years, however, the vigorous Dr. Jekyll of Guangzhou had metamorphosed into the

sordid Mr. Hyde of Nanjing. What had happened to change the character of the Nationalist

movement in so short a time?

One factor of course was the slaughter of Communists and the rejection or suppression of

those who survived. The CCP kind of youthful idealism was expunged. A second factor was the

enormous influence of new GMD members from the ranks of the old bureaucracy and the warlord

regimes. The careful selection of members, like the enforcement of party discipline, had never

characterized the GMD. It had remained a congeries of competing factions not under central

control, and it had customarily admitted to membership anyone who applied. Some warlords

brought in whole armies. Once the GMD was in power in Nanjing, its revolutionary idealism was

watered down by the admission of corrupt and time-serving officials and the accumulation of

opportunists generally lacking in principle. As Lloyd Eastman (1974) has remarked, as early as

1928 Jiang Jieshi, who felt the responsibility of leadership, said that “Party members no longer

strive either for principles or for the masses . . . the revolutionaries have become degenerate, have

lost their revolutionaryspiritandrevolutionarycourage.”Theyonlystruggledfor power and profit, no

longer willing to sacrifice. By 1932 Jiang was declaring flatly, “The Chinese revolution has failed.”

By coming to power, in short, the GMD had changed its nature. After all, it had won power

by using the Shanghai Green Gang underworld against the Communists. At the beginning, many
Chinese rallied to the support of Nanjing, but the evils of old-style bureaucratism soon

disillusioned them. In addition to its white terror to destroy the CCP, the GMD police attacked,

suppressed, and sometimes executed a variety of individuals in other parties and the professions.

The press, though it persisted, was heavily censored. Publishers were harassed and some

assassinated. Colleges and universities were brought under regulation, required to teach the Three

Principles of the People, and constantly scrutinized for unorthodox tendencies. Anyone concerned

for the masses was regarded as pro-Communist. This anti-Communist stance had the effect of

discouraging if not preventing all sorts of projects for the betterment of the people. Thus the GMD

cut itself off from revolutionary endeavor. Suppression and censorship were accompanied by

corrupt opportunism and inefficient administration. The old watchword “become an official and

get rich” was revived with a vengeance.

This disaster put a heavy burden on Jiang Jieshi, who remained an austere and dedicated

would-be unifier of his country. By 1932 he was thoroughly disillusioned with his party as well as

with the Western style of democracy, which promised no strength of leadership. He began the

organization of a fascist body, popularly known as the Blue Shirts, a carefully selected group of a

few thousand zealous army officers, who would secretly devote themselves to building up and

serving Jiang Jieshi as their leader in the fashion of Mussolini and Hitler. When a public New Life

Movement was staged in 1934 for the inculcation of the old virtues and the improvement of

personal conduct, much of it was pushed from behind the scenes by the Blue Shirts. This fascist

movement under the Nanjing government would have grown stronger if the fascist dictatorships

in Europe had not been cut off from China.

One key to Jiang Jieshi’s balancing act on the top of the heap was the fact that he committed

himself to no one faction. He claimed to be a devout Methodist and got missionary help for
reconstruction. He sometimes supported his GMD organizational apparatus against the Blue Shirts

but in general he hamstrung the GMD and left it out of participation in administration, while he

balanced the Whampoa clique of his former students against other parts of the army or the Political

Science (or Political Study) clique of administrators against the CC (Chen brothers) clique of party

organizers. His role was such that there could be no other source of final decision, least of all

through a participation by the mass of the people. Like Yuan Shikai twenty years before, Jiang

found that Chinese politics seemed to demand a dictator. While he held various offices at various

times, he was obviously the one man at the top, and his political tactics would have been quite

intelligible to the Empress Dowager. One of Jiang’s model figures was Zeng Guofan, who in

suppressing the Taipings had been his predecessor in saving the Chinese people from a destructive

revolution.

In brief, Jiang was the inheritor of China’s ruling-class tradition: his moral leadership was

couched in Confucian terms while the work style of his administration showed the old evils of

ineffectiveness. As Jiang said in 1932, “When something arrives at a government office it is

yamenized—all reform projects are handled lackadaisically, negligently, and inefficiently.” One

result was that paper plans for rural improvement seldom got off the ground, while economic

development was similarly short-changed.

Sun Yatsen’s five-power constitution fared poorly under the Nanjing government. The

Legislative Yuan (branch) was overshadowed by the Executive Yuan, but the latter was rivaled by

party ministries not unlike the Executive Yuan ministries. The Examination Yuan really did not

function. Eastman reports that “by 1935 for example only 1585 candidates had successfully

completed the Civil Service Examinations.” Many did not receive official positions at all. Again,

the Control Yuan had inherited some of the functions of the censorate of old, but it was almost
entirely ineffectual. From 1931 to 1937 it “was presented with cases of alleged corruption

involving 69,500 officials.Of these theYuan returned indictments on only 1800 persons.” Worse

still, the Control Yuan had no power of judicial decision; and of the 1,800 officials indicted for

corruption, only 268 were actually found guilty by the legal system. Of these, 214 received no

punishment, and 41 received light punishment, yet only 13 were actually dismissed from office

All of the five-Yuan civilian government was equaled by the Military Affairs Commission headed

by Jiang Jieshi, which used up most of the Nanjing government revenues and set up a de facto

military government of its own. Having naturally got rid of the Russian military advisers, Jiang

soon began to substitute Germans and establish his military echelon quite separate from the civilian

government. The general staff and what became the Military Affairs Commission with its various

ministries were under Jiang as commander-in-chief, while the five branches of the civilian

government were under him as president. German military advisers set about training an enormous

military establishment, for which they planned to get German industrial assistance. By 1930 a

China Study Commission arrived from Germany for three months, and several cultural institutions

were set up to develop closer relations. A Sino–German civil aviation line was started.

Spurred by the Japanese seizure of Manchuria in 1931, Beijing intellectuals among others

advocated a national industrial buildup for selfdefense. Scientists were mobilized. A German-

trained geologist became minister of education. In 1932 began the organization of what later

became the National Resources Commission (NRC) under the leadership of the geologist Weng

Wenhao, a first-level graduate of the examination system, who got his Ph.D. in geology and

physics at Louvain in Belgium. Impeccably honest and highly intelligent, Weng rose in the

Nationalist Government to high-level posts in economic development. The NRC was directly

under Jiang and the military. Its aim was to create state-run basic industries for steel, electricity,
machinery, and military arsenals. Part of the plan was to secure foreign investment, particularly

from Germany.By1933aGermanmilitaryadvisorycommissionwasoperatingin China, aiming at

military–industrial cooperation. Chinese tungsten became important for German industry. The

organizer of the modern German army, General Hans von Seeckt, visited China twice and

advocated building a new elite army with a new officer corps.

Thus at the time of the Japanese attack in 1937 the Nationalist Government had worked

out a promising relationship with Nazi Germany, but a parallel development of Nazi relations with

Japan and the Nazi– Soviet pact of August 1939 soon left China dependent on a still minimal

amount of American aid instead of German.