Revolution and Civil War, episode 14
The Railway Bomb
On the night of 18 September 1931 Japanese officers blow up a stretch of railway outside Shenyang and use the fighting they provoke to take all of Manchuria, though the Young Marshal, Zhang Xueliang, has far more troops there than they do. The episode follows Zhang and Chiang Kai-shek through the student fury that forces Chiang to resign, Japan's attack on Shanghai in 1932, the puppet state of Manchukuo under Puyi, the last emperor, and the truce that leaves Japan the lands beyond the Great Wall, and asks why Chiang chose to settle with Japan while he fought the Communists, and whether his Blue Shirts and New Life movement made his state a fascist one. It leans on scholars, with a little Chinese public voice from the protests.
Listen in Apple Podcasts Spotify
Transcript
Last time, we watched the Communists build a little red republic in the hills of Jiangxi, and beat off army after army that Chiang Kai-shek sent to destroy it. We left its founder, Mao Zedong, stripped of his army by his own party's leaders and sent off to a hospital far from the front. And I said that to understand why Chiang could not finish the Communists sooner, we had to go north, and back a year. So here we are. This episode also draws on the historian William T. Rowe. It is the night of 18 September 1931, just outside the city of Shenyang, in Manchuria. Manchuria is China's far northeast: a huge, fertile country of forests, farmland, coal and iron, beyond the eastern end of the Great Wall. Running through it is a railway, the South Manchuria Railway, and along that railway sits a Japanese army. Japan had won the southern tip of Manchuria and the railway from Russia in the war of 1904 and 1905, and it kept soldiers there to guard them. That force was called the Kwantung Army, and its officers had ideas of their own about what Japan should be doing in China. It was stationed at Port Arthur, at the southern tip of Manchuria, and along the railway, and its officers were politically radical, and used to acting on their own. To see why that mattered, you need a little of the story between the two countries. For a thousand years China had been the great power of East Asia, and Japan had borrowed its writing, its philosophy and much of its idea of government. Then, in the second half of the nineteenth century, Japan remade itself on Western lines, with a modern army, navy and industry, and China did not keep pace. In 1895 Japan beat China in a short war and took the island of Taiwan. In 1915 it pressed a list of twenty-one demands on China's weak government, and in 1919 the peace conference at Versailles handed it Germany's old rights in the province of Shandong. So by now Japan was not a distant foreign power to the Chinese. It was the neighbour that had humiliated them again and again, within living memory. That night, officers of the Kwantung Army set off an explosion on the railway line outside the city, close to the barracks of a Chinese garrison. Then they fired artillery into the Chinese barracks. By the next morning the Japanese held Shenyang, with Zhang Xueliang's arsenal and the aircraft of his little air force. The army announced that Chinese saboteurs had blown up the line. In fact, the Japanese had set off the bomb themselves. The plot belonged to two officers, Kanji Ishiwara and Seishiro Itagaki, and the civilian government in Tokyo knew nothing about it. They used the skirmishes they had provoked as the excuse to take over the whole of Manchuria. It was not the first time. Three years earlier, officers of the same army had killed the warlord who ruled Manchuria, hoping to throw it into a chaos from which Japanese troops could then rescue it, and Tokyo had not backed them. This time, they did not wait for Tokyo at all. In Tokyo, the foreign minister, Kijuro Shidehara, had spent years trying to keep relations with China calm, and the army's coup in Manchuria wrecked his policy; by December 1931 his government had fallen. It is remembered as the Mukden Incident. The man who was supposed to stop them was a young man named Zhang Xueliang, and he is one of the two people this episode follows. He was called the Young Marshal. His father, Zhang Zuolin, the Old Marshal, had ruled Manchuria as a warlord, until Japanese officers blew up his train in 1928, and he died of his wounds a few days later. The son was twenty-seven when he took over his father's lands and armies. He was not what people expected of a warlord's heir. He was a famous playboy, fond of dancing, golf and fast aeroplanes, which he flew himself, and he was addicted to opium. Zhang suspected at once that the Japanese army was behind his father's death. And at the end of 1928, against a stern warning from Japan's prime minister, he pledged his allegiance to Chiang Kai-shek's government in Nanjing and raised its flag over Shenyang, telling the Japanese it was the will of the people. Through all the intrigues and rebellions that followed, he stayed loyal to Chiang. Chiang was not sure what to make of him. Zhang seemed sincere and honest, Chiang wrote in his diary, but he lacked an iron will and the power to persevere. Years later Zhang would say of his early days with Chiang: "At first I gave all my heart and soul to help" him. Notice that word, at first. Now look at the numbers on the night of the bomb. Zhang Xueliang had something over two hundred thousand troops. The Kwantung Army had about eleven thousand, plus reservists. On paper, it should not have been a contest. But the Kwantung Army was a modern force, and most likely Zhang's men could not have beaten it even so. And many of Zhang's men were not even in Manchuria. Chiang had sent the Young Marshal south of the Great Wall to help put down the rebellion of the northern generals, and half his troops were still there. Zhang himself was in Beijing. Reinforcements were already on their way. One foreign adviser telegraphed that on that Friday night the Japanese army had sent seven railway trains packed with soldiers into Manchuria from Korea. Korea was by then a Japanese colony. Zhang asked Nanjing what to do. Chiang Kai-shek was away on a ship, and the answer from his government was a shrug. Do what you think appropriate, it said. Zhang decided that Nanjing had no plan at all, and he ordered his troops in Manchuria to withdraw. Long afterwards, he took the blame on himself: he had misjudged what the Japanese meant to do, and he had retreated once the attack began. And Chiang? Chiang did not order Zhang to counterattack, and he did not send a single division of his own Central Army to help. At his first military meeting after the incident, he told his commanders that with the country in turmoil and so badly prepared, China must avoid an all-out war with Japan. In public he spoke bravely. If the League of Nations failed to uphold justice, he said on 23 September, the National Government was prepared for the final and supreme struggle. But he knew his forces were simply not strong enough to take on the Kwantung Army. He had learned that the hard way. Three years before, in 1928, his armies marching north had run into Japanese troops at the city of Jinan, and the Japanese had shelled the city and killed hundreds of civilians. After the Japanese tortured and shot one of his officials there, Chiang wrote in his diary, for the first time, the old insult for the Japanese, dwarf pirates; a few days later he backed down, and apologised to them. He resolved to write down each day a way to kill the Japanese. But before one can settle scores, he noted, one must be strong. And he did not think China was strong yet. The League of Nations was the world body set up after the First World War to keep the peace, and China appealed to it at once. The incident drew condemnation of Japan from around the world. And it drew no action at all. The League sent a commission of inquiry, which had no power to do anything. Chiang told Western diplomats that China would never give in to force, and would not negotiate in any shape or form until Japan's troops had withdrawn. But words were all he had to give them. In early October, Chiang wrote in his diary: "The Japanese threat is still there but I have done nothing. How ridiculous I am." What shocked Chinese people was not that their army was beaten. It was that it did not fight at all. And that question, why Chiang chose not to fight Japan when it took a vast piece of China, hangs over everything in this episode.
The Kwantung Army moved fast. Within weeks it held an area the size of France and Germany combined, with thirty million people living in it. Soon the whole of Manchuria was in Japanese hands. Why did Japan's officers want it so badly? The Great Depression had wrecked Japan's export trade, and turned many Japanese towards the idea of an empire that could supply itself. The conquest of Manchuria was supposed to solve that, by making Japan economically self-sufficient. Manchuria had coal and iron in vast amounts, and the Japanese would turn it into an industrial powerhouse. And it was run directly by the Japanese army. To understand that army, you have to understand where its officers came from. The officers who wanted Manchuria most were radicals, men of Japan's far right. The Japanese right imagined their country as the victim of international conspiracies of capitalists and communists. As the radicals saw it, Japan had only two roads open to it. One was liberalism: cooperation with the Western powers, free trade, and an open door in China. The other was expansion: the trade of Northeast Asia, Korea and Manchuria above all, held by Japan alone, and Japan dominant across East Asia. To these officers, Japan was dangerously dependent on imported food and raw materials, and the answer was to take what it needed on the mainland. Factions in the army were behind assassinations and attempted coups in Tokyo that removed more liberal civilian leaders. They never quite took control of Japan itself, but on the mainland of Asia they carved out a base where they could act on their own. Many of them sincerely believed they were building not just a stronger Japan but a stronger Asia, freed from the Western empires. They talked of Pan-Asianism, of Asians standing together against Anglo-American imperialism. In 1934 Japan even announced a kind of Monroe Doctrine of its own: the Western powers were to keep their hands off China. The Monroe Doctrine was the old American claim that Europe should keep out of the Americas, and the Japanese borrowed it to point at American hypocrisy. And yet more and more Japanese, after about 1930, wrote of the Chinese as people incapable of running their own country. How do you hold thirty million people who never asked for you? The Japanese combined the threat of terror with a certain amount of spending on local infrastructure, to win the population over. And it worked well enough. Collaboration with the occupiers was not enthusiastic in most cases, but it was widespread. That is a pattern we'll see again and again in this season, as Japan's armies move deeper into China: most people neither resist nor embrace an occupier. They try to survive it. Some refused. In the hills and forests of Manchuria, scattered Chinese units and volunteer bands fought on against the Japanese for years, with little help from anyone. Exiles from occupied Manchuria formed a lobbying group, the Northeast National Salvation Society, to push Chiang's government to resist. In November 1931 it scolded the government for doing nothing and urged it to declare war on Japan. "Only if we unite can we strive for our survival", it told the country. Refugees from Manchuria pressed Chiang to fight, but he insisted on limiting himself to official protests. From now on, Japan was the most pressing problem Chiang's government faced, greater than the Communists or any rival general. Chiang did not see it that way.
The man they were pressing is the other person this episode follows, and it's time we met him properly. Chiang Kai-shek was a soldier from Zhejiang, on the coast south of Shanghai, who had trained in a military school in Japan as a young man. He had risen as the head of the Nationalists' military academy at Whampoa, near Guangzhou, in the 1920s. From there he led the Nationalist armies north to unite the country. In 1927 he broke with his Communist allies in a massacre, and he made himself master of a government at Nanjing that the world recognised as China's. In the autumn of 1931, the country he claimed to lead turned on him. Think about how it looked from a Chinese city that autumn. A foreign army had taken a vast piece of the country within weeks, and Chinese troops had offered no resistance at all. The exiles from Manchuria were lobbying the government to fight, and its answer was angry appeals to the League of Nations. And it came on top of a catastrophe. That summer the Yangtze and Huai rivers had burst their banks in one of the worst floods of the century, drowning huge stretches of central China and killing a vast number of people, by some counts millions. A government that could not hold back the rivers or the Japanese looked, to many of its own citizens, like no government at all. The students led the way, as they had once before. In 1919, in the May Fourth movement, students had poured into the streets against a peace settlement that handed a piece of China to Japan. And they had beaten officials they called traitors. Now they did it again. They organised boycotts of Japanese goods, strikes against Japanese-owned factories, and street demonstrations and mass meetings, some of which drew more than a hundred thousand people. Some thirty thousand Japanese now lived in Shanghai, and the boycott and the strikes hit Japanese business across the whole lower Yangtze drastically. By October Japan was making threats against Nanjing, and there were rumours of a Japanese plan to invade Shanghai. Shanghai's native-place associations, the clubs that bound together people from the same home province, and some of the trade unions sided with the students. The government tried to offer the students military training, and to give the impression that war was coming. It was not. The demonstrations spread from Shanghai to Nanjing, and the students began to turn on their own government. Twenty thousand students gathered in the capital. Chiang's foreign minister, Wang Zhengting, was rumoured to be pro-Japanese. A thousand students from the Central University broke into his office, and beat him up. They beat him severely, much as the May Fourth students had beaten the officials they called traitors. Chiang tried to face them down. It is worth seeing the trap he was in. If he fought Japan now, he believed, his forces were not strong enough, and rushing into war could make the nation perish instead of helping it. If he did not fight, he would lose the one thing a Chinese government in those years most needed, the belief that it stood for the nation. He told the students that they should either go back to their classes or join the army and fight the Japanese. He promoted a national boycott of Japanese goods himself. The government banned all demonstrations. It made no difference. Thousands of students, demanding war with Japan, kept pouring into the capital, and they attacked more high-ranking officials. Look at what the students were really asking. What they were demanding, again and again, was war with Japan. And they were saying, in effect, that a government which would not defend the nation had no right to rule it. By December, Nationalist party thugs were attacking student activists, students were attacking the police, and party offices were being smashed. Unions run by the government threatened the students. And yet the anger never turned into the kind of general strike that had shaken the cities in 1919 and 1925. The mayor of Shanghai resigned. And by the end of the month, so did Chiang Kai-shek.
To understand why Chiang quit, you have to see who else was coming for him. Wang Jingwei had been one of Sun Yat-sen's closest followers, a famous young revolutionary who had once tried to assassinate the Qing regent, and he believed the party's leadership should have been his. In 1931 Chiang's rivals inside the party, led by Wang Jingwei, had set up a breakaway government in Guangzhou, in the south, and they wanted him gone. In the middle of October, Chiang and his wife, Soong Mei-ling, flew to Shanghai to meet Wang Jingwei and another party elder, Hu Hanmin. Chiang had kept Hu Hanmin under arrest earlier that year, so this was not a friendly meeting. Soong Mei-ling was the youngest of three sisters from a rich Shanghai family, educated in America, and the sister of Sun Yat-sen's widow; Chiang had married her in 1927. His rivals accused Chiang of failing to resist the Japanese, and of acting like a dictator. "They slandered and laughed at me as usual," he wrote. Chiang's answer was a gamble. He told one official that if he did not resign, he would have to bring the whole country under military rule, with himself as dictator. He probably also thought that resigning would win back the moral authority he had lost. So on 15 December 1931, Chiang Kai-shek resigned all his posts. The next week he and his wife left Nanjing by air, landed on a grass field near Fenghua, and went on by car, up the old sedan chair route to Xikou. And there he waited. He had a long view of these things. It was a move he had made before, when he resigned in 1927 and came back stronger a few months later. His aim was to prove that in a crisis, no one else could take his place. His replacement was Sun Ke. Sun Ke was the son of Sun Yat-sen, the father of the revolution of 1911 and the founder of the Nationalist party, who had died in 1925 and whose name every faction claimed. What happened next proved Chiang's point for him. The top generals declared they would not serve under Sun Ke. Sun Ke's government had no army it could command and no money it could count on, and it lasted barely a month. Tax offices held back their money from the new government. And crowds began demanding that Chiang come back. By early January 1932 he had agreed to return, and his position was much stronger than when he had left. From now on he shared power with Wang Jingwei, who became the head of the government while Chiang ran the army. It was an odd couple, and we'll see a good deal more of it. Wang had the party's left wing, a famous name and a gift for speeches. Chiang had the army. It was clear enough which of the two mattered more.
Chiang came back just in time for the next blow, and it fell on Shanghai. Shanghai mattered to Chiang more than any other city. Its bankers paid for his government, its gangsters had helped him to power, and its foreign community watched everything he did. Shanghai was China's greatest city and its richest port. At its heart lay the International Settlement, a district run by foreigners under their own laws, by treaty. Just to its north lay Zhabei, the northern part of Chinese Shanghai. By January the student movement was running out of steam. Then, on 18 January 1932, a Chinese mob attacked five Japanese Buddhist monks in Shanghai, and one of them was killed. In fact the attack had been set up by the Japanese military itself, which wanted to draw attention away from Manchuria and was angry at the boycotts. Japan's navy had its own reasons too. It was jealous of the Kwantung Army, and wanted a triumph of its own. The Japanese naval commander, Admiral Shiozawa, demanded an apology and compensation, and an end to the anti-Japanese demonstrations in the city. The Japanese consul general issued an ultimatum: the Shanghai government was to bring the entire anti-Japanese movement to a halt. The mayor agreed to Japan's terms. But the Japanese were already on the move. At the end of January a force of Japanese marines landed in the city, supposedly to protect Japanese citizens. The fighting began on the night of 28 January 1932. The marines ran into the Chinese troops guarding the city, the Nineteenth Route Army, under its commander, Cai Tingkai, and Cai's men opened fire on them. Japanese planes, flying from aircraft carriers nearby, bombed the Chinese city, killing many civilians. From the rooftops of the International Settlement, foreigners could watch the fires in the Chinese districts across the boundary. One of the buildings they destroyed was the Commercial Press, China's largest publisher, with its great library, the Oriental Library, and hundreds of thousands of books burned. And now Chiang played a double game. In public he offered compromise. In private he encouraged Cai Tingkai and the Nineteenth Route Army to fight back. He sent an open telegram to the front saying that he would resist the invasion until death. Shanghai's underworld joined in. Du Yuesheng, the boss of the Green Gang, the city's great criminal brotherhood, sent his gang's sharpshooters to attack the Japanese behind their lines. Du was a gangster who had helped Chiang crush the Communists in Shanghai in 1927, and he was by now one of the most powerful men in the city. The Nineteenth Route Army was not one of Chiang's own armies. It came from Guangdong, in the south, and its leaders were closer to his rivals than to him. But for a few weeks in 1932, its soldiers were the most popular men in China, and money and gifts poured in from all over the country to support them. Chiang sent some of his own German-trained divisions into the fight in February, as the Fifth Army. The Chinese held Zhabei for weeks, until the Japanese brought in reinforcements in February. Japanese troops in the city rose to fifty thousand. And from the air, Zhabei was bombed to ruins. Two hundred and thirty thousand refugees fled into the International Settlement. Then, on 1 March, Japanese ships steamed up the Yangtze to Liuhe, behind the Chinese lines, with ten thousand troops. Chiang had warned Cai of exactly this kind of landing, but Cai failed, or was unable, to send troops to defend the spot. The Chinese army fell back, with four thousand killed and seventy-seven hundred wounded since the fighting began, and Japan declared a truce. Over the whole battle, the Chinese suffered some fourteen thousand casualties and the Japanese about four thousand, and ten thousand or more civilians died. But the Chinese had proved they could fight. And in the hills of Jiangxi, at that very moment, the Red Army was stuck outside the walls of Ganzhou, in a siege that was going nowhere. There was one last act in Shanghai. On 29 April 1932, at a celebration of the Japanese emperor's birthday in a Shanghai park, a Korean independence fighter threw a bomb onto the platform. The Japanese army commander in Shanghai, General Shirakawa, died of his wounds, and Japan's minister to China, Mamoru Shigemitsu, lost a leg. A week later, on 5 May, the agreement that formally ended the fighting was signed. Chiang had authorised it: a local armistice that drew a neutral zone around the city, where Chinese troops were not allowed to go. Neither Wang Jingwei nor Chiang signed it, so in their eyes it was not official. To the Chinese public, it was an agreement that kept Chinese soldiers out of their own greatest city, and it was deeply unpopular. Public opinion had been electrified by Shanghai. Yet Nanjing did not change its policy.
Let's take stock for a moment. Since that September night, China had lost Manchuria, Chiang had resigned and come back, and Japanese planes had bombed Shanghai. And through all of it, Chiang kept to the line he had drawn after Jinan: appease Japan, avoid an all-out war, and build the strength to confront it later. Meanwhile, in Manchuria, the Kwantung Army was building something. The army announced that the local people had risen against Zhang Xueliang's corrupt warlord government, and had set up an independent state of their own, which had asked for Japan's friendly help. In 1932 the army's officers proclaimed Manchuria an independent nation, under the name of Manchukuo. The name means the Manchu country. Manchuria was the old homeland of the Manchu people, who had ruled China as the Qing dynasty from 1644 until 1912. And to head their new nation, they found the last Qing emperor. His name was Puyi. Puyi, whom some of you have already watched cry his way through his own enthronement as a little boy. He had been put on the throne in 1908, when he was two years old, and the revolution of 1911 ended his reign the following year, when he was six. The republic let him keep his title and live on in the palace in Beijing, until a warlord threw him out in 1924, and he took refuge in the Japanese concession in Tianjin. In November 1931, as the Kwantung Army overran Manchuria, Japanese agents smuggled him out of Tianjin and into Manchuria. Now Manchukuo was a client state set up by Japan, and Puyi, the last emperor, was its head. He was a monarch in name only. Puyi had his own reasons. He had never stopped hoping to win back the throne of his ancestors, and the Japanese let him believe they would help. The capital of the new state was Changchun, which the Japanese renamed the New Capital. Every ministry in Manchukuo had Chinese or Manchu ministers at the top, and Japanese officials beside them who made the decisions. Puyi signed what was put in front of him. He was twenty-six years old, and he had been a puppet, in one sense or another, for nearly all of his life. At first he was called the chief executive; two years later, in 1934, the Japanese made him emperor of Manchukuo, which was as close as he would ever get to his old throne. The officers who ran Manchukuo had big dreams for it. The most radical of them thought they could build a model society there, based on military, fascist and Confucian ideas of hierarchy, obedience and respect. Japan itself, in their eyes, had been corrupted by capitalists and socialists; Manchukuo might become a utopia. Few people believed the story that Manchukuo was a free nation. But nobody, including the commission the League of Nations sent out in 1932, had the power or the will to do anything about it. That commission, led by a British peer, Lord Lytton, reported that Manchukuo was no genuine movement for independence and that Japan's action was not self-defence. The Western nations condemned the takeover, and Japan walked out of the League of Nations in protest. And still no action came, because Europe was fixed on the rise of Hitler, and America on itself. Worse, the whole world had now seen that the League of Nations could not protect one of its own members. The powers could not or would not help China defend a territory everyone had long recognised as Chinese, and that helped make the 1930s as unstable as they became. For China, Manchukuo was a terrible blow to its prestige. But it was not, in itself, a disaster. The loss of Manchuria did cost the Nationalist government fifteen percent of its tariff revenue. And it gave Japan a base from which to push into northern China, which is exactly what it did next.
Early in 1933 the Japanese moved again. They took the province of Rehe, between Manchuria and Beijing, and pushed their way to the passes of the Great Wall itself, fighting Chinese troops along it. At some of the passes Chinese soldiers fought hard, in places with broadswords against machine guns, and the battles of the Great Wall became a legend of their own. But they could not hold. Chiang faced the same question again: fight Japan now, or not. And he gave the same answer. Rehe was Zhang Xueliang's to defend, and it fell in a matter of days. The Young Marshal took the blame, resigned his command, and went abroad, to Europe. Before he left, he broke his long addiction to opium. In Europe he met Mussolini, and he came home impressed by the strong men and disciplined nations he had seen there. He would come back the next year a changed man, and Chiang would give him a new job, fighting the Communists. Hold on to that, because the Young Marshal's story is far from over. On 31 May 1933, China and Japan signed the Tanggu Truce. Tanggu was the port near Tianjin where it was agreed. It drew a demilitarised zone between the Great Wall and an area just north of Beijing and Tianjin. In practice it turned the northern part of Hebei province, the province around Beijing, into a buffer zone, and handed another huge piece of China to Japan's control in fact, though not in law. And in effect it was a recognition of Manchukuo. Chiang was ready to accept, quietly and unofficially, not only Japan's control of Manchuria but Japan's interests, including military bases, in the border provinces of Rehe and Chahar. By 1933 Chiang had all but recognised the Japanese client state. Why would he do it? Chiang's own answer was a phrase that became famous. The Communists, he said, were a disease of the heart. The Japanese were only a disease of the skin. China was much weaker than Japan, and he called for complete unification first. The truce, he said, was meant to slow Japan down a little and gain time. In time, he hoped, changes in Japan's own politics, and in the wider world, might let China win. It was the same lesson he had drawn at Jinan five years before, in a phrase of his own: if one does not bend, how can one extend? Backing down at Jinan had probably been the wisest course. But it had also taught Japan's militarists that China could be treated shamelessly without fear of the consequences. Bending, in other words, had a price, and the bill was now coming in. And there is one more thing to weigh. Chiang was surely right to fear a wider war with Japan, and right that his forces were not strong enough for one. But a ruler who asks his people to swallow one humiliation after another, so that he can fight other Chinese, is asking a great deal. How long they would put up with it is one of the great questions of the years ahead. And the truce gave him what he wanted most: a breathing space, in which he could turn to his other priorities, above all his campaigns against the Communists. In late May 1933, in the same days the truce was being agreed, Chiang took personal command of his fifth campaign against the Red Army in Jiangxi. And he had already shown what he meant by it. In April 1932, after the fighting with Japan calmed down, Chiang mustered some four hundred thousand troops against another Communist base, Eyuwan, spread across parts of Hubei, Henan and Anhui, and built rings of fortifications around it. That August its commander, Zhang Guotao, broke out with most of his forces and marched west into Sichuan, on a journey that would last four years. The disease of the heart, in Chiang's eyes, came first. There were less noble reasons too. If Chiang had let Zhang Xueliang's troops go home to Manchuria to fight, he risked reviving the generals' rebellion they had been sent south to crush. And Chiang was not necessarily unhappy to see the Young Marshal lose his base. So was Chiang right? He was surely right to fear a wider war with Japan, which his armies were in no state to win. But appeasement, as people called it, badly weakened his government's claim to lead the nation. Stronger resistance might at least have made Japan's victories more expensive, and helped the civilians in Tokyo rein in their army, though some kind of explosion over Manchuria was probably coming anyway. The Communists, meanwhile, made the most of it. They attacked Chiang as a coward, and offered to form a new united front to resist Japan. From their hills in Jiangxi, as we saw last time, they had even declared war on Japan, a gesture that cost them nothing and won them a great deal. A party that was being hunted by its own government could now pose as the true defender of the nation. Chiang's policy of temporary appeasement would last six years. And Japan did not stop at the Great Wall. From their new base in Manchukuo, Japanese forces kept pushing into northern China. Every year of breathing space Chiang bought was paid for with another slice of the north. Keep that number in mind, because when the six years run out, everything changes.
While he was giving ground to Japan, Chiang was looking for a way to make his own people harder. In early 1932, a group of officers who had studied under him at the Whampoa academy set up a society called the Blue Shirts. They wanted to fight social decadence, corruption in the Nationalist party, communism and the Japanese threat, all at once. It began as a small band of frustrated, idealistic officers, devoted to the nation and to Chiang. Chiang himself only learned the society existed in January 1932. The Blue Shirts admired power for its own sake, like the Black Shirts of Italy and the Brown Shirts of Germany. They wanted to marry the military efficiency and discipline they had learned at Whampoa with the lessons Germany and Italy were teaching about building a strong state. They called Chiang leader, a new title, taken from the German Führer. And though they hated Japan, they backed Chiang's decision to destroy the Communists before taking on the Japanese. Their secret inner society reached out, in the end, to half a million members, and shaped army training, the police, the universities and even the Boy Scouts. The part of the movement the public saw was the Blue Shirts proper: thugs who attacked, and even killed, Chiang's enemies inside and outside the party. Behind them, members formed secret cells in propaganda, intelligence, the army, the police and the government's offices. In their ideal society of the future, all children would belong to the nation, not to their families or clans, and would be schooled in the group and trained as soldiers. The more radical of them wanted the whole economy taken over by the state, and the scattered farms of China turned into state collectives. That is not so far from what the Communists wanted. They shared one more idea with their bitterest enemies, the liberals of the New Culture movement: that Chinese culture had become decadent. Only, to the Blue Shirts, the rot came not from old tradition but from Western liberalism: men wasting their energy in brothels, and women spoiling themselves with cosmetics. Chiang had his hopes for them. He hoped that with the Blue Shirts he had finally found loyal, idealistic followers, like the ones he saw in Mao's camp. By July he was already complaining about their immaturity. Their most notorious activity was murder. Their known victims included two warlord officers and two pro-Japanese newspaper editors in Tianjin. One Blue Shirt publication boasted that in the spring of 1933 its agents had killed forty traitors in Wuhan who had been working with the Japanese. And some of the victims were liberals. Among them were Yang Xingfo, the vice-chairman of a league for civil rights, and Shi Liangcai, the editor of Shanghai's most prominent Chinese-language newspaper. Chiang may or may not have ordered these deaths. His senior intelligence chief, Dai Li, may have done it without asking, which left Chiang able to deny it. Dai Li was one of Chiang's Whampoa students, a quiet, ruthless man who would build the most feared secret police in Nationalist China. But even if Chiang did not know about the killings beforehand, he showed no concern over them in his diary. Was there more? Some accounts accuse Chiang of ordering hundreds of killings and kidnappings, and in the end the evidence is not clear. One document, a so-called death list for assassination naming fifty-five Chinese leaders, came out through the Communists' own press agency, and was most likely invented by Zhou Enlai's propaganda office. In a war of spies and killers, even the lists of the dead could be weapons. So was Chiang's China becoming a fascist state? Here the sources disagree. On one side, the Blue Shirts frankly wanted China to become a fascist nation. And Chiang himself explained in 1933: "The most important point of fascism is absolute trust in a sagely, able leader." He also declared: "In the last several decades we have in vain become drunk with democracy and the advocacy of free thought." As one leading Blue Shirt put it much later, fascism is now thought to be backward, but then it seemed a very progressive way of reviving the nation. On the other side, Chiang was a fascist in neither his ends nor his means. The exclusive Blue Shirts had only about three hundred members when the society was disbanded in 1938, against two million Brown Shirts in Germany. And Chiang never let the Blue Shirts build a mass following like the state-run movements of Italy and Germany. Chiang feared mobilising the masses for anything, even for himself. Membership stayed mostly limited to army officers and party officials. And because the society was secret, it was never clear whose voice, apart from Chiang's, really spoke for it, and on many questions Chiang did not speak clearly. Its attacks on tradition, too, went against Chiang's own instincts. The Blue Shirts were only one of three or four great factions in the party, and Chiang understood that his own power depended on keeping them all at each other's throats, so that none could ever outgrow him. A true Führer would not have needed to. In those years that kind of admiration was not as strange as it sounds today. The world depression had convinced many people that liberal democracy and capitalism were finished. Germany was especially admired in Nationalist China, as a country that had recovered from total defeat by hard work and discipline. Chiang encouraged industrial and military ties with Germany at every level, and German advisers had replaced the party's old Russian advisers in the late 1920s.
And that brings us to the strangest campaign of Chiang's whole career. Chiang believed the revolution had failed because the Chinese people's habits of thinking and daily living had never changed to fit the needs of a modern state. So in 1934 he set out to change them. He called it the New Life movement. Stay with me on this one, because it is even stranger than it sounds. The idea came, the story goes, from his wife, Soong Mei-ling, from an Australian adviser named W. H. Donald, and from a powerful party organiser named Chen Lifu, when Soong Mei-ling was complaining about the abysmal lack of hygiene in China. Chen Lifu and his brother ran one of the strongest factions in the party, and controlled much of its organisation. Donald was a former journalist who had advised the Young Marshal, and who had helped Zhang through the cure for his opium habit before Zhang left for Europe; now he worked for the Chiangs. Chen Lifu suggested that the campaign also stress the old Confucian virtues: propriety, justice, integrity and conscientiousness. Confucius was the ancient sage whose teachings on order, duty and family had shaped Chinese government for two thousand years, and which the radicals of the May Fourth generation had tried to throw out. Chiang was trying to bring them back. In that, the New Life was no fascist movement. It brought Confucianism, and even Christianity, back into Chinese political life. And it was meant to make up for a weak government rather than to build a strong one: if the people were truly disciplined, they would serve society of their own accord, without a powerful state driving them. For Chiang, virtue came first. The starting point of Sun Yat-sen's teachings, Chiang declared, was gong, which means public spirit, the opposite of selfishness, and the driving spirit of the revolution was cheng, which means sincerity, commitment and obedience. These were ancient virtues, and Chiang's New Life was, at heart, an attack on selfishness, large and small. He urged frugality and hard work: the old-time religion. His critics pointed out that even Confucius had thought it unreasonable to expect virtue from people who did not have enough to eat. Chiang answered that virtue must be demanded even of the hungry. If one cannot be a man, Chiang asked, "what is the use of having abundance of food and clothing?" He explained it with the example of a beggar, a man who consumed without producing. Improve his morals, Chiang said, and he would go out and find a job. Years before, the Communist Li Dazhao, one of the party's founders, had asked the obvious question: did giving jobs to China's beggars and robbers not need a working economy first? The movement's goals ran from those lofty heights to detailed rules about brushing your teeth and washing your face. In cold water, for the record. At Soong Mei-ling's suggestion, American missionaries joined in to spread its ideals. The American minister in China noticed that it put more stress on the evils of tobacco, an American scourge, than on opium. But the New Life had teeth. Under its banner, the police sometimes closed down dance halls. In Shandong, women with bobbed hair or short-sleeved dresses were arrested. In Changsha, hair-curling machines were taken out of the beauty salons. And Blue Shirt thugs ripped up dangerous magazines, and poured acid on people they thought were dressed immodestly. Critics were disturbed by its aim to militarise the lives of everyone in the nation. Its rules on grooming and dress were laughed at even at the time, and its war on decadence was, predictably, futile. Still, it reflected a widespread feeling that Chinese society had become too chaotic. For Chiang, the old virtues were less an end in themselves than a way to bring military standards into ordinary life. Washing your face in cold water, like the students of the old Confucian academies sweeping their floors, was meant to build an inner seriousness and discipline. Underneath it lay a picture of society as a strict hierarchy, in which people who were not kept in order were dangerous. In the end, Chiang found much to admire in European fascism: its worship of the state, its rejection of democracy, its glorification of the leader. But it never fitted his own blend of old Chinese virtue and Sun Yat-sen's teachings. And, oddly, its puritan streak would outlive Chiang's China: the same severe tidiness would turn up again, in Mao's. Chiang, a Methodist convert since 1930, read his Bible through all of this. On 4 May 1934, he wrote in his diary: "Believers in Jesus must control themselves, endure insults, and be patient in suffering." Whatever insults he was enduring, he was not being patient with the Communists. Because there is one more thing you need to know about the New Life movement. It began in Jiangxi, as part of the fifth campaign against the Red Republic. Out in the countryside his soldiers were building a ring of blockhouses around the Red Army, and the clean faces belonged to the same war. His early campaigns against the Communists had been failures, but by 1934 his army reforms were beginning to work. So step back and look at Chiang at this moment. He had given up Manchuria, and quietly let Japan into the north. He had a society of young officers who called him leader and killed his critics, and a movement telling his people how to wash their faces. His plan since Jinan had been to appease Japan while he united the country under a strong government and modernised its army, because before one can settle scores, one must be strong. But first, he meant to finish the Communists. And this time Chiang was not going to march into the hills and get lost. The Red Army that had beaten Chiang's earlier campaigns was now led by men who had pushed Mao aside, and Chiang's armies were closing around it. Next time, the ring closes, and the Communists have to decide whether to die in Jiangxi or walk away from it. And Mao Zedong, sidelined and out of favour, is about to get his chance.
Sources
- Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine, Mao: The Real Story (2012), pp. 215-217, 259-260, 263-264, 264-265
- Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (2009), pp. 78-79, 79-83, 83-85, 85-86, 91-93, 93-95, 95-97, 97-98, 98-100, 101-103, 103-104, 104-106, 108-109, 109-111
- Odd Arne Westad, Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946-1950 (2003), p. 25-26
- Peter Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949 (2005), pp. 25-26, 202-203, 254-255, 255-257, 257-258, 262-263, 267-268, 268-270, 280-282, 303-305
- Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (2013)
- William T. Rowe, China's Last Empire: The Great Qing (2009), p. 282-285