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Revolution and Civil War, episode 12

One Flag

Chiang Kai-shek, back in command, drives north in 1928 to finish the expedition, finds Japan's army in his way at Jinan, and then Japanese officers kill Zhang Zuolin, the warlord who ruled Manchuria and Beijing, by blowing up his train. The episode follows Chiang and Zhang's son Zhang Xueliang, the Young Marshal, who raises the Nationalist flag over Manchuria against Japan's warning, and then Chiang's new government at Nanjing as it wins back control of China's tariffs and fights a war against its own generals and Wang Jingwei in 1930, and gives real time to the season's question of whether the Nanjing decade was a new dictatorship or a promising start. It leans on scholars and the Nationalists' own history.

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Jinan Manchuria Shenyang China Nanjing
Map drawn by Then and There on Natural Earth's public domain coastlines, rivers and lakes

Transcript

Fukuda's 5,000 Nationalist army Reinforcements Reinforcements Marines land Chiang marches north Zhang Zuolin withdraws Jinan Manchuria Korea Wenzhou Beijing Nationalist army Japanese army Zhang Zuolin
Jinan, 1928-05. Map drawn by Then and There from the episode's sources, on Natural Earth's public domain coastlines and rivers
Chiang Kai-shek
Chiang Kai-shek. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last time, the Communists, purged first by Chiang and then by the party's left, took to the gun, and their risings ended in defeat and slaughter. Mao Zedong led the beaten remnant of his rising into the Jinggang mountains, and in April 1928 Zhu De arrived with his men, and the two armies became one. Meanwhile Chiang Kai-shek resigned, married Soong Mei-ling, and was called back to command within weeks, with a new wife, new in-laws and new money behind him. This time, Chiang finishes the march north. He takes Beijing, and the old warlord government with it. But on the way he collides with Japan, and the collision leaves a mark on him that never fades. This episode also stands on the work of the historian Odd Arne Westad. Chiang Kai-shek is one of the two people this episode follows. He was a soldier from Zhejiang who had learned his trade in Japan's army schools, had run the Nationalists' military academy at Whampoa, and in 1926 had led its army north from Guangzhou to unite China by force. He greatly admired parts of Japanese society. But he also knew the cruelty and the will to dominate that lay at its samurai heart, and he already feared that Japan would do everything it could to keep China from uniting. Now Chiang had money again. His new brother-in-law, T. V. Soong, now his minister of finance, wore a holstered pistol that showed whenever he took off his jacket, and the Shanghai bankers trusted him. Very soon more money was flowing in than the summer before. Merchants and factory owners were expected to buy notes or bonds worth a month's payroll, and a wave of kidnappings of Shanghai businessmen was believed to be aimed at those who had not given enough. But for all they gave, the Shanghai capitalists once again won little or no say over Chiang's decisions. With that money, Chiang turned to the battlefield. Facing him were the combined armies of the northern warlords, still 600,000 men. The northern warlords were the generals who had held Beijing and the government that the foreign powers still recognised there, and the greatest of them now was Zhang Zuolin, the warlord of Manchuria. By spring the Nationalists were fighting in Shandong province. The troops of the warlord Sun Chuanfang put up a short, stiff fight there and then fled across the Yellow River. The road lay open to the provincial capital, Jinan. And Jinan was a problem. Some two thousand Japanese civilians lived there, and Japan's prime minister, Tanaka Giichi, had asked that the Nationalist army keep away from the city. But Chiang needed the railway lines that ran north and south through it. Since the First World War Japan had treated Shandong as part of its sphere, and many Japanese lived and traded in its cities. The cabinet in Tokyo, sensing danger to its people, approved sending 5,000 soldiers under General Fukuda to protect Japanese nationals and their property. Chiang knew the risk. As his army closed on the city in April, he tossed and turned in bed and could not sleep. On the evening of 1 May 1928, dressed in his plain field uniform, Chiang rode into Jinan in a staff car. He found Fukuda's 5,000 soldiers camped both inside and outside the city walls. He had a reassuring meeting with the Japanese general. But elsewhere in the city, soldiers of a new Chinese corps were tearing down Japanese flags, and clashes were bound to follow. The next morning the Japanese fired artillery into parts of the city and killed hundreds of civilians. On 5 May Chiang told Fukuda that he would take all his troops across the river and leave only a few men in the city to keep order. Then the Japanese arrested the head of the Nanjing government's foreign affairs office in Jinan, claiming that shots had been fired at them from his office. When he refused to kneel or name the man who had fired, the Japanese cut out his tongue, gouged out his eyes, and then shot him dead along with more than ten of his staff. That night, in his diary, Chiang for the first time used the old Chinese insult for the Japanese: dwarf pirates. His officers pressed him to bring up his artillery and fight. Among them were the liaison officers of his ally Feng Yuxiang. He had 100,000 men in the area, far more than the Japanese. But he knew that Japan's warplanes, tanks, heavy guns and machine guns were far better than his, and that Tokyo would send as many armies as it took to have its revenge. "The dwarf pirates are displaying this kind of perverse tyranny," he wrote, and he could only urge his furious soldiers and people to calm down. "If one does not bend," he asked, "how can one extend?" When the news reached Japan, Tanaka ordered 16,000 more troops to Jinan from Manchuria and Korea. Japanese warships steamed up the Yangtze, and Japanese marines landed on the coast of Zhejiang. All over China people protested, calling on the Nanjing government to break off relations with Japan and to boycott Japanese goods. "The people are in high spirits," Chiang noted. But such a spirit, he worried, was not easy to keep up over the long term. He ordered most of his army out of Jinan and across the Yellow River well to the west, leaving two regiments, 5,000 men, behind. Fukuda demanded that the Chinese leave the city entirely, and the next day, saying his demands had not been met, the Japanese attacked the soldiers who remained. Chiang ordered the two regimental commanders to break through the Japanese lines and get out. With heavy losses, they did. By various estimates the Japanese killed somewhere between two thousand and eleven thousand Chinese soldiers and civilians. By their own count, they lost thirty-eight men. The world was outraged by the arrogance and savagery of what Japan had done, and Tanaka, worried that things had gone too far, agreed to talk. Japanese civilians died at Jinan too. Hallett Abend summed up Jinan this way. "There had been eight days of fighting, with the Japanese victorious." But, he added, many Japanese civilians had been murdered, and their bodies mutilated by the Chinese. Against that stands the rest of the record: a city shelled, an official mutilated and shot, and thousands of Chinese dead against thirty-eight Japanese. Both were true. Only one side had the artillery. On 10 May Chiang apologised to the Japanese and removed his commander in the city. And he made himself a promise. From now on, he would write in his diary each day "a way to kill the Japanese." In his journal he wrote and rewrote two words: revenge, and patience. Before one can settle scores, he noted, "one must be strong." Ordinary people, he wrote, cannot easily endure great humiliation with patience, and so in the end they never find the strength to take revenge. He told a class of military students to help him wash away the shame of Jinan, but to hide their hatred until the last moment, so as not to warn the Japanese. Was backing down the right call? Once the fighting began, it was probably the wisest course. Japan could have wiped out his young, badly equipped army, and in 1928 China would have found no real help from an isolationist America or anyone else. Only a decade and more later, when Japan's threat was joined to Nazi Germany's, would the Western powers come to care seriously about Japan's advance into China. But the Japanese militarists drew their own lesson: China could be treated shamelessly without fear of the consequences. And the Communists drew theirs. From now on, attacking Chiang for appeasing Japan would be one of their favourite weapons. Jinan had convinced Chiang that Japan, not the European powers, not the Communists and not the warlords, was China's greatest enemy. His answer was to appease Japan for now, never to sign away Chinese sovereignty, and meanwhile to unite the country and rebuild its army with German weapons and German training. It took nearly a year to settle. On 28 March 1929 both sides accepted responsibility for the incident, and the Japanese army was given two months to leave Shandong, which it did. Chiang went around Jinan and kept marching north.

Zhang Xueliang
Zhang Xueliang. Central Archive Press, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The final drive on Beijing was a joint effort. Two great northern warlords had come over to Chiang: Feng Yuxiang, the general who had beaten Wu Peifu, and Yan Xishan, who had long ruled the province of Shanxi. Waiting at the end of that march was Zhang Zuolin, the Old Marshal. Zhang had begun life as a bandit, and he had risen to rule Manchuria and then to hold Beijing too, as the head of its government. Manchuria is the vast northeast of China beyond the Great Wall, rich in farmland, forests, coal and iron. Manchuria was where Japan had its deepest interests in China: it held a leased territory at the tip of the Liaodong peninsula, the South Manchuria Railway, and an army to guard them, the Kwantung Army. In May, as Chiang closed on Beijing, Japan's prime minister surprised Chiang and the whole world. Japan, Tanaka announced, would accept a Nationalist takeover of China, except for Manchuria. Zhang Zuolin understood what that meant. Without Japanese help there was no hope of holding the north, and he ordered his troops back to Manchuria. On the evening of 2 June, dressed in their finest regalia, Zhang and his senior officers steamed out of Beijing in a special train, bound for home. Behind them, the old capital waited. Foreigners in China had long since grown used to war. In 1926, when attackers were only a dozen miles from Beijing and the flashes of their guns could be seen from the roof of the tallest hotel, the foreigners danced in the roof garden, and more people than usual strolled along the old city wall. But in the summer of 1928, the same observer wrote, the city's indifference gave way to the keenest anxiety. In his telling, advancing Nationalist troops had murdered American missionaries, looted in city after city, and carried out summary punishments of Chinese tied to the old regime. The northern soldiers had pulled out of the city except for about 3,200 men left to keep order. For six days its massive gates stayed shut and barricaded. For six days no one came in or went out, and the railway, the telephone and the telegraph were all cut. Then on the evening of 5 June it was announced that the next morning the Nationalists would march in by the South Gate, while the last northern troops marched out by another gate at the same hour. There was a bright, nearly full moon, he wrote, and under it lay the great city, "a city of more than a million people, huddled inside useless medieval walls, and waiting for an unknown fate." The Nationalists took Beijing. And Zhang Zuolin never reached home. On 4 June, two days after he left, his train was nearing Shenyang, his capital in Manchuria, and passing under a bridge, when a bomb exploded and sent the overpass crashing down on the marshal's own carriage. Zhang was badly hurt, and he died a few days later. The government in Tokyo knew nothing about it. The killers were a group of Japanese officers of the Kwantung Army, unhappy with their own prime minister's policies and sure that they could control Zhang's son. Another account has the Japanese simply unhappy that Zhang had been so passive in the war against the Nationalists. They hoped to plunge Manchuria into chaos, so that Japanese troops could step in and rescue it. But Tokyo did not back them. No invasion came, and the man they had counted on controlling turned out to be something else entirely. Zhang's son and heir, Zhang Xueliang, known as the Young Marshal, was not yet thirty. He is the other person this episode follows, and he will matter enormously to this story for years to come. He suspected at once that the Japanese army in Manchuria was behind his father's killing. He slipped secretly back to Shenyang, and after some uncertainty took the title of commander in chief of his father's army, the Northeastern Army. He was, it turned out, a fervent Chinese patriot, determined never to sell out to Japan. And so the murder had an ironic effect. Meant to tear Manchuria away from China, it may instead have helped Chiang bring the northern warlords to heel.

Zhang Xueliang in 1928
Zhang Xueliang in 1928. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Who was this young man? He was a warlord's son, and he lived like one. He was the richest of all the warlords, a playboy and an opium addict. He wanted to keep as much freedom as he could, for his kingdom, for himself, his large family and his circle of senior officers. But he was also, by the standards of his world, liberal and modern, an idealist ready, if he had to, to risk everything for his dream of a great, united China. Many of the older warlords resented the upstart Chiang Kai-shek. The Young Marshal was of a new generation. He looked up to Chiang, whose silence and hardness seemed to him to carry the same toughness and drive as his own father's. On 19 June he cabled Chiang to pledge his loyalty to the Chinese nation and Manchuria's wish to join the central government. Chiang was not sure about him. The Young Marshal seemed sincere and honest, Chiang wrote in his diary, "but he has never experienced hardship ... and he lacks an iron will and perseverance." Meanwhile, Chiang had a debt to pay to the dead. On 6 July 1928, after taking Beijing, he met his chief allies in the Western Hills outside the city. There was the Christian general Feng Yuxiang, boisterous and cheerful as ever, and Yan Xishan, the ruler of Shanxi, who rarely laughed and kept himself very much to himself. There were the two Guangxi generals, the reserved Bai Chongxi, who had no time for flattery or small talk, and the more outgoing Li Zongren, who at gatherings like this tended to sit back and watch. Together they walked into the Temple of the Azure Cloud and gathered round the coffin of Sun Yat-sen. Sun had died three and a half years before, and his coffin still lay there in the hills, while a grand tomb was built for him at Nanjing. Few would have predicted it, but now the Nationalist flag flew from Beijing to Guangzhou. Chiang put his hand on the coffin and wept openly. Feng and Yan wiped their eyes. Each of them swore undying loyalty to the founder and to the Chinese nation. But only Chiang believed what Sun had believed: that China had to be not only united but centralised, ruled from one place. The others had their own provinces, and their own armies, and they meant to keep them. Beijing itself, now held by Yan Xishan's troops, was no longer the capital. Even its name was changed, from northern capital to northern peace. On 10 October Chiang became chairman of the new State Council, in effect the president, while staying leader of the party and commander in chief of the armed forces. And he reached an agreement with the Young Marshal to raise the Nationalist flag, with its large, twelve-pointed white star, over Manchuria. The Young Marshal was given a seat on the State Council and the chair of the Manchurian Political Council. Tokyo saw what was coming. Prime Minister Tanaka sent Zhang a stern warning not to join the Nanjing government. The Young Marshal coolly replied that the decision rested on the will of the people. It was a bold stance, and a dangerous one, for a young man whose father had just been killed by Japanese officers. On 29 December 1928 he pledged his allegiance to the National Government and raised the Nationalist flag, now the flag of all China, at Shenyang. And the young playboy could be as ruthless as any warlord. By then he had come to fear that his father's old chief of staff, Yang Yuting, was plotting with the Japanese. On 10 January 1929 he invited Yang and a close associate to dinner. At some point he excused himself for a smoke of opium, or, in another telling, a shot of morphine. Then his guards came into the room and killed both men. According to one account, he had tossed a coin to decide whether to kill Yang himself. Despite all his threats, Tanaka quietly accepted that Manchuria was again a sovereign part of China, much to the disgust of the Japanese army. Decades later, the Young Marshal told an interviewer how he had felt in those years. "At first I gave all my heart and soul to help" Chiang, he said. At first. For now, though, the map looked whole. From the Ussuri River in the far north to the borders of Southeast Asia, China seemed to be one country again, even if the central government's real authority reached only a few provinces. Against all the odds, Chiang had beaten the warlords or brought them under one republican government and one party. It was a historic achievement. The question was what kind of country he meant to build with it.

Chiang did not put his capital in Beijing. Beijing seemed too exposed to invaders from the north, and too heavy with the imperial and bureaucratic past. He put it in Nanjing, on the Yangtze, where his military and economic control was strongest. It was an old Ming dynasty capital in the heart of the country, still a centre of art and culture as well as industry. But as a capital it was modest. It had only about 340,000 people, fewer than Shanghai, with no big department stores and no racetrack, and it was even sweatier in summer. The government took over the old palace built by the Heavenly King of the Taipings, and work crews were already cutting wide new boulevards through the narrow, winding lanes. The Taipings were the rebels who had made Nanjing their capital in the 1850s, in the bloodiest civil war of the century before. Soong Mei-ling, unlike the wives of some officials, moved there, and in the Purple Mountains outside the city she built a small mansion not far from the grand new tomb going up for Sun Yat-sen. She was often at her husband's office, or out in the town with groups helping orphans, the wounded and the families of dead soldiers, and she still sometimes went with Chiang on campaign. But she was troubled. She had suffered a miscarriage, and afterward she went through bouts of severe depression. Many years later she told her nephews and nieces that she had wanted children, but that an incompetent doctor in Nanjing had bungled a procedure, and she could never conceive. Chiang, meanwhile, was studying her faith. Since his wedding day he had read the Bible she gave him, resolving to go through it twice before deciding whether to become a Christian, and he usually carried one when he travelled. After three years of study he was baptised in the Soong family's church in Shanghai, and like most things he professed to believe in, he took his new faith seriously. Its stress on sin and atonement suited his preoccupation with shame, and its call to persevere through suffering suited the stern, self-denying code he had always lived by. Abroad, the foreign powers recognised the new government in a way they had never quite recognised the governments in Beijing. So what kind of state was this? On paper, it was following Sun Yat-sen's plan. Sun had laid out three steps to democracy: first military rule, then a period of political tutelage, in which, as one observer put it, the party set itself to teach the Chinese how to govern themselves, and only then democracy itself. Tutelage is guardianship, the way a tutor has charge of a child. In October 1928 Nanjing issued a new organic law setting up a government of five branches, called yuan. On 1 January 1929 the period of military rule was declared over, and a stage of political tutelage was proclaimed for the next six years. Behind the idea lay Sun's belief in a vanguard. He divided people into three kinds: those who know first and are fit to rule, those who can understand once taught and may administer, and the great mass who can only follow. And the guardian made its terms clear. During the period of political tutelage, the Nanjing government laid down in 1929, the Chinese people must obey and support the Nationalist party and swear loyalty to Sun's Three Principles of the People before they could exercise the rights of citizens. The Three Principles of the People were Sun's creed: nationalism, democracy and social welfare. Citizenship, in other words, was something you earned, not something you had. Nanjing tried to bring its possible enemies inside the tent, from capitalists and warlords to gangsters and rural elites, but only on the state's terms. The same spirit ran through the factories. The party purged the Communists from the unions and herded workers into tame unions that renounced class struggle. When a union and an employer fell out, the city government stepped in to mediate. While it did, strikes were illegal, but the employer could not fire or lock out his workers either. In Tianjin, workers were taught slogans like "Promote cooperation between labor and capital!" and "Stamp out the CCP!" And in Shanghai the go-between was often the Green Gang. Du Yuesheng made alliances with the big company unions and with the party, won real gains for their members, and sometimes paid strike pay out of his own pocket, gathering followers and rackets as he went. In 1929, too, Nanjing announced that the party might restrict the freedoms of assembly, association, speech and publication, within the limits of the law. The liberal writer Hu Shi answered sharply. The government decided what the limits of the law were, he wrote, and if officials violated human rights there was nothing to check them. "One may still denounce the emperor", Hu wrote, meaning Chiang, "but one cannot criticise Sun Yat-sen." "One is not yet forced to worship Confucius," he added, "although his birthday has become sacred again." Another liberal, Luo Longji, who had studied in Wisconsin, London and New York, put it bitterly. "It is considered 'rebellious' to discuss a constitution," he wrote, "and 'a cover for nefarious plotting' to discuss human rights." Luo was briefly jailed in 1930, and the liberals' journal was shut down. Lawyers, too, criticised the Nationalists' disregard for due process and human rights, though they never broke with the government openly. Liberals like these, and the nationalist students, were the voice of the cities. And the promise to make China strong and united was the yardstick they measured Nanjing by. The government had its secret services too. A party loyalist, Chen Lifu, ran an investigation section inside the party, and a Whampoa graduate named Dai Li ran a second bureau in the army, and both bought off enemies, spread lies and now and then killed. Spying and big bribes to warlords played a large part in Chiang's successes. Chiang's critics in the party noticed other things. On 18 April 1929, one of them wrote, Chiang issued a new postage stamp bearing his own picture, a step without precedent in the party. One voice against Chiang came from inside his own new family. Sun Yat-sen's widow, Soong Ching-ling, was the elder sister of Chiang's new wife, and she had harsh words for her brother-in-law's government. "Who is benefited?" she asked the men in Nanjing. "Only those of you who ride about in limousines." "Militarists and officials who, a few years ago, I knew to be poor, are suddenly parading about in fine limousines", she went on, buying up mansions in the foreign concessions for their newly acquired concubines. "I ask you, where did the money come from?" And of Sun's program, she said, "They have betrayed even his last instructions, to which they render lip-service every day. Does one start to awaken and educate the masses by suppressing their voices?" The observer who printed her words added his own lament. With bitterness and hatred dividing the patriots, he asked, and venality and ambition steering the generals, "what chance have the voiceless and unarmed hundreds" of millions of the Chinese masses? She was not alone. In March 1929 the leading Shanghai newspaper complained that in Hangzhou the tax on finished silk had risen more than fivefold since the warlord days, and thirty silk factories had gone bankrupt. China's national chamber of commerce said that an old hated transit tax had been abolished on paper only to be replaced by a new one, heavier and growing every day. "To squeeze is the aim, and to oppress the method", it said, and everywhere people were suffering in silence. That was the case against Nanjing, and it was a strong one. Here the sources disagree. On one side, the Nanjing government gave China not a new emperor but a new kind of dictatorship: a party machine that called itself the vanguard of society, that hoped to mobilise the masses but distrusted every real mass organisation. Corruption, incompetence and authoritarian rule marked it from the beginning. Chiang himself was not personally corrupt, but many around him were, and he often complained of it. Chiang put military men in charge of things like the economy, for which they were unsuited. "One can only be surprised," one of his more progressive aides recalled, "to know just how unaware people at the top were of what was going on". The regime barely understood the immense crisis in the countryside, and it met unrest with repression, which only cut it off further from reality. Its greatest failing was the one that gave the Communists their chance: it never dealt with the desperate poverty of the countryside, because its power rested on the better-off, who had every interest in nothing changing. Even the student movement and the discontent in the cities were only driven underground. It borrowed heavily, too: about a fifth of its revenue came from bonds and bank loans. By one Nationalist critic's count, the bonds issued from 1927 to the end of 1929 came to more than 400 million dollars, and how the money was used was a public mystery. Its control systems, from making village heads answer for every villager's crimes to party discipline in the schools, would later be inherited and perfected by the Communists. And its control of the country was partial at best. The Yangtze delta provinces were firmly Chiang's, but the farther one went from Nanjing, the weaker his grip became. Shanxi stayed in effect a state of its own under Yan Xishan, a progressive warlord who had campaigned hard against footbinding, and Manchuria stayed the Young Marshal's. Its defenders answered that Japan's attacks had created a national emergency, and an emergency needed a firm hand. On the other side, the decade that began in Nanjing would show China and the world what a modern Chinese state might begin to achieve. It did so in terrible conditions: a world depression, collapsing exports, no foreign aid, record droughts and floods, clashes with Japan and rebels at home, huge military budgets, old habits of corruption, and a party with many heads. When the world depression hit in 1929, China's new exports of silk, tobacco, cotton and soybeans collapsed, and in some country districts tens of thousands died of hunger. It was the first stretch of relative peace China had known for almost a century. Politics were kept on a tight rein, but the city economy slowly picked up, helped by foreign investment, and in most of the countryside people could at least sow and harvest without war. Some of the countryside seemed untouched by any of it. An American missionary in a poor corner of Shandong wrote home in 1935 that she felt she was back several centuries, watching an ox and an ass drag a stone round a threshing floor, and at the same time seeing the West just beginning to crash in. Yet she rode out in a Ford car on a dirt road, the best she had ever travelled, and marvelled at "Telephones, busses, bridges—all within so short a time." On the same trip she met a crowd of flood refugees being shared out among the villages to be cared for. The government, she wrote, was trying to meet the situation as never before, but it was a tragic drain on people who had next to nothing themselves. It had, after all, survived the pressure of the foreign powers and weathered the world depression, and to its defenders that suggested it was on the right track. It held national conferences on education, on economic reconstruction and on cutting the armies, and it set up a budget commission and a commission to suppress opium. It hired famous American economists, German staff officers and British political experts as advisers, and two American architects at 200,000 gold dollars a year to help modernise the new China. Was it a failure, or a promising start cut short? Seen one way, its modest but real gains would in the long run have built a stable and prosperous country, had Japan not invaded in 1937. In the end, it was a period of slow and sporadic progress, in which Chiang's standing as China's leader grew mostly from his skill at outmanoeuvring and stalemating his rivals. For a one-party dictatorship, the Nationalist party was remarkably mixed. Its members ran from liberals to the deeply conservative, and often all they shared was loyalty to Chiang, and it was a mark of his skill that he held them together. We will be weighing that record all season. But one of its real gains came early, and it came at the expense of the foreigners.

For the better part of a century, ever since the treaties that followed the Opium War, China had not been free to set its own import duties. The rates were fixed by treaty, and foreigners ran the customs service that collected them. Chinese nationalists had fought for decades to win that right back. In 1928, by promising the foreign powers to abolish internal transit taxes and other petty taxes on trade, the Nationalist government won what was called tariff autonomy, the right to set its own tariffs. The United States, for one, recognised China's right to set its own tariffs in a treaty of 25 July 1928. Between 1928 and 1930 most of the major powers signed agreements handing the right back. The money mattered at once. Customs revenue rose far enough to pay about half of the government's costs. And the customs service began to replace its foreign staff with Chinese, a sign that China meant to take charge of its own finances. It had its limits. Extraterritoriality and the rest of the unequal treaties stayed in place. Extraterritoriality was the right of foreigners in China to be tried by their own consuls under their own laws. A Nationalist critic of Chiang called the new treaties equal "only in name, not in substance", since a clause guaranteeing each power the best terms any other got still left China bargaining over its own tariffs. But the people who worried most were in Tokyo. Japan's imperialists felt they were only doing what the West had taught them. In 1922 a Japanese general on his deathbed had pointed at a map of the world and, sweeping from Siberia to New Zealand, declared, "That must all become Japan's!" Japan's government was coming to believe, almost to the point of obsession, that China was Japan's special sphere, and a China that ran its own customs filled it with deep concern. In Nanjing, meanwhile, Chiang had more urgent worries than customs. His generals were about to turn on him.

Chiang Kai-shek's troops gathered at Liuhe station for the Central Plains War, 1930
Chiang Kai-shek's troops gathered at Liuhe station for the Central Plains War, 1930. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The biggest threat to the new government came not from the warlords on the fringes, and not yet from Japan, but from what might be called the warlordisation of the Nationalist party itself. The march north had built a new government, but it had left warlords in control of whole regions, and even where the Nationalists ruled, the land tax mostly stayed in local hands. In January 1929 Chiang called his generals to a conference on cutting the size of their armies. He pointed to Germany and Japan as the models for a new Chinese army, and he insisted that control of the armed forces had to go back to the National Government. The generals heard something else: Chiang wanted all the guns in his own hands, at their expense. They all pretended to agree. Then Yan Xishan, deputy head of the Military Council, and Feng Yuxiang, the minister of war, abandoned their posts in Nanjing and went home to their own territories. Chiang's only choice, as he saw it, was to play the warlords off against each other, bribe them, buy their followers, and when he had to, beat them in battle. For two years the intrigue never stopped, and now and then it broke into big battles. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were involved, and tens of thousands died. In March 1929 the Guangxi generals openly challenged Nanjing. Chiang beat them in a campaign that lasted only three months. But one Nationalist critic of Chiang claimed the credit belonged to the armies of the party's left, under the old Ironsides commander Zhang Fakui and others, who had hated the Guangxi men ever since December 1927 and did most of the fighting. When Feng Yuxiang threatened next, Chiang bought over two of Feng's leading generals and headed off a new war for the moment. Chiang had hoped to win Yan Xishan over instead. But Yan, the so-called model governor of Shanxi, wanted above all to rule his province in peace, and he judged Feng's enmity more dangerous than Chiang's friendship was useful. Through all of it, one man stayed loyal: the Young Marshal. But he did not always ask first. In April 1929, acting on his own, as he later said, he raided the Soviet consulate in Harbin and seized its documents. Three months later, with Chiang's promise of support, he seized the Chinese Eastern Railway in Manchuria, which China and the Soviet Union had run together since 1896. He and Chiang believed, naively, that Stalin would not dare to invade, or that if he did, the Manchurian army could match the Red Army's Far Eastern divisions. On 12 October 1929 Soviet troops crossed the border and routed his best troops, taking 8,000 prisoners, and Chiang quickly backed away and told him to retreat. The Soviets got their railway back, and the Japanese took note: Chiang would give ground before superior force, and the world would not come to his aid. Then the storm broke. In June, four of the usual warlords, the Guangxi generals Li Zongren and Bai Chongxi, Feng Yuxiang, and the Ironsides commander Zhang Fakui, and this time Yan Xishan too, joined a new coalition with Wang Jingwei, back from abroad. They called it the movement to save China from Chiang's dictatorship. Wang Jingwei still believed himself Sun Yat-sen's true heir, and he refused to serve under his rival. What frightened the warlords was everything Chiang was trying to build: a strong central government, a powerful central army with German weapons and training, and a single currency in place of the provinces' own. All of it, of course, was what China needed if it was ever to stand up to Japan. Across the country the coalition had an impressive 600,000 armed men. Chiang had a million, but many of them were tied down guarding cities and railways. And in Manchuria, the Young Marshal held the balance of power. Through the summer and into the autumn of 1930, bloody battles laid waste once again to great stretches of Henan, Hunan and Shandong. And in the end, Chiang's Central Army, with German-trained troops in battle for the first time, won, joined at the last by the Young Marshal's fur-hatted Manchurians. The Young Marshal had chosen his side, and it was Chiang's. He had brought his army south of the Great Wall to put down the rebellion, and half his troops now stood there, far from Manchuria. Remember where his army is standing. It will matter sooner than anyone expects. It was a costly war. In all, 240,000 men were killed or wounded. And Chiang did not finish the job. He did not chase the beaten warlords into their home provinces, or force them to cut their armies. Perhaps he hoped his new prestige would bring them round. More likely, he knew the Young Marshal would object. So the warlords survived, and Chiang was left with a vast, splintered army of mixed quality and doubtful loyalty. Still, four years of war had made him an accomplished commander. With no tanks, one artillery unit with cannon from the First World War, often no maps, almost no trucks and only a few railway lines, he had moved whole army corps across fronts as long as a thousand miles. He concentrated his forces in some places, held on the defensive in others, and turned his enemies' flanks. Foreign correspondents and Chinese alike reported on his personal bravery. Against the warlords he also used divide and rule, big subsidies and personal bribes, methods that would be no use at all against the Communists or the Japanese. In his diary he still scolded himself for his failings, and he usually had a realistic grasp of his own and his army's weaknesses. At the end of 1930 he promised the country that the government would now turn to reform and rebuilding, with open budgets, honest accounts, one currency and, above all, a strong, effective and honest central government. He was no doubt serious. Such a government was in his interest as much as China's. But there was one enemy that bribes and flanking marches had not touched. Busy with the warlords, Chiang had put off a major campaign against the Communists, leaving bandit suppression, as he called it, to local and provincial commanders. The Communists had been driven out of the cities and had lost many of their best leaders. By 1930 the biggest of them lay in the mountains between Jiangxi and Fujian, where Mao Zedong at first had about fifteen hundred soldiers. Given three years to grow, some of those bases had become real forces. Even so, the three Communist bases together had only about 15,000 rifles. Chiang had won his war with the generals. Next, he turned his armies on the hills of Jiangxi. Next time, we go up into those hills, where Mao Zedong is building a Red republic of his own, and where he is about to learn the price of it.

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