Revolution and Civil War, episode 7

The Academy and the Testament

In 1924 Sun Yat-sen remakes his party on the Soviet model and founds a military academy at Huangpu, below Guangzhou, with Chiang Kai-shek at its head and a young Communist back from France, Zhou Enlai, in charge of its political teaching. The episode follows Sun and Chiang as the cadets crush Guangzhou's merchant militia and a betrayal in the north topples Wu Peifu and draws Sun to Beijing to negotiate, where he dies in March 1925 with his disciple Wang Jingwei at the bedside taking down his testament, and asks who would inherit a party that now held Sun's words beyond question. It leans on the Nationalists' own insider history and on scholars, with the British writer Putnam Weale, a long-time Beijing resident, as outside witness to the coup in the north.

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Transcript

Last time, Sun Yat-sen hit bottom, and then found a patron. In 1922 Sun removed his own general in Guangzhou, Chen Jiongming, as governor of the province and commander of its army, and Chen's troops rose and tried to seize the city. Sun had to flee in the dead of night. He held out on a gunboat anchored off Whampoa, on the river below the city, and on 29 June a young officer named Chiang Kai-shek came aboard to share his exile. Then Sun turned to Moscow. In January 1923 a ranking Soviet diplomat, Adolph Joffe, called on him in Shanghai with a plan: Soviet weapons and cash, the Communists admitted into Sun's party, and the party rebuilt along Bolshevik lines. Then Chiang went to Russia with a delegation to look the Soviets over, and in his diary he called their government "conceited and autocratic". And Sun agreed to let members of the tiny Chinese Communist Party join his own party as individuals. He was not worried about who would be riding whom. "We merely yoke up the Soviet Union and mount it," Sun promised. So Sun had a patron, a programme and, on paper at least, the makings of an army. This time we watch him use them. And then we watch him run out of time. If you are just joining us, here is who Sun was. He was born to a farming family near Macau, schooled in Hawaii and trained as a doctor in Hong Kong, and he spent most of his life plotting against China's last dynasty. In 1912, when that dynasty fell, he became the first president of the new republic, for a few short weeks, before handing the office to a general with an army. His party was the Kuomintang, which means the National People's Party, and its members called themselves the Nationalists. Since then, the republic had been carved up by generals, and Sun had spent years in the southern port of Guangzhou, trying to rule from there with armies that belonged to other men. By now he was back in Guangzhou, and he meant to fix that. Look at the city he came back to. In early 1923, mercenary armies from the provinces of Yunnan and Guangxi had driven Chen Jiongming out of Guangzhou, and invited Sun home. But Chen still held the east of the province, and the armies that had brought Sun back were not his. Their generals collected the city's taxes, protected its gambling dens and opium shops, and fought for Sun when it suited them. Sun had a title, a flag and a city. What he did not have was anything that would obey him. On the evening of 20 January 1924, Sun formally opened the first national congress of the Kuomintang, in Guangzhou. Sun meant to remake the party from the ground up, and his followers believed the fate of the party, and of the nation, hung on what this congress decided. There was a reminder, right outside, of what the party was up against. The congress, Sun pointed out, held its sittings under the guns of the foreign gunboats at Shamian. Shamian was a small island on Guangzhou's waterfront, leased to Britain and France, where the foreign merchants and consuls lived behind bridges and gates, under their own laws. Sun told the delegates why the party had failed before. The trouble, he said, was that while each member enjoyed freedom, the party as a whole had none, and while each member had ability, the party as a whole was deprived of it. Then he told them what had to change. "We destroyed ourselves. Therefore, if we are going to succeed, we must be united and of one mind." To get there, he said, "the comrades must be prepared to sacrifice their individual freedom, and to put all their ability at the disposal of the Party." This was the Bolshevik model of a party: a disciplined machine in which the members obey and the leaders decide. And pushed hard by Sun, the congress voted to make party discipline absolute. Not everyone in the room liked it. Many of the party's veterans bitterly opposed the reorganisation, and they liked even less what one of Sun's followers called his Shake Hands With Russia policy. Some of them muttered in private but habitually obeyed Sun and dared not object in public. They would cause trouble later. Another group disagreed so strongly that they left the party altogether. But Sun was Sun. The congress accepted his guidance in its entirety, and in only three days it had a new manifesto and a programme. And the new rules named Sun, as the originator of the party's doctrines, its president for life. Those doctrines were his Three Principles of the People: nationalism, democracy and the people's livelihood, the last a loose word for fairer shares and a decent living. The new leading committees showed the new shape of things. Communists won seats on them, while the committee meant to keep watch over the party was made up entirely of old veterans. And Sun's own son, Sun Ke, was left off the list of nominations, though his father was pressed hard to include him. The question everyone wanted answered was the Communists. Sun's answer was that the Communists were joining his party in order to work for the National Revolution, and that was all. Li Dazhao, the leader of the Communist delegates, rose to make the terms clear. The Communists would not give up their own party. They would join the Kuomintang one by one, as individuals, and submit to its discipline. Among the Communists who joined that way was a young schoolteacher from Hunan named Mao Zedong. He sat in the congress as a delegate, and came away as an alternate member of the Kuomintang's central committee. So the man who would one day drive the Nationalists off the mainland began his national career on their payroll, working for their united front. Sun had already told the doubters that if the Communists ever betrayed the Kuomintang, he would be the first to propose their expulsion. Keep that promise in mind; after he is gone, other men will remember it for him. Two pieces of news reached the hall while the congress sat, and between them they tell you which way the wind was blowing. On 24 January the delegates learned that Ramsay MacDonald was forming a government in Britain, the first Labour government Britain had ever had, and Sun sent him a telegram of congratulation on behalf of the congress. No reply ever came. The next day came news from the other direction. Official word arrived that Lenin had died. The congress adjourned for a few minutes to record its sympathy with the Russian people, and for three days there were no official banquets, as a sign of mourning. Hold on to that silence from London. It is going to matter before the year is out. Now, Moscow had a man in the hall, or at least near it: Mikhail Borodin, the adviser Stalin's Politburo had sent to Guangzhou the autumn before. Borodin was a veteran Bolshevik who had spent years in exile in Chicago, running a school for immigrants, and he and Sun talked in English, the one language they shared. He was patient, persuasive and very good at getting his way. With Sun, on the points that mattered most to Moscow, he did not get it. Borodin wanted more than a reorganised party. He pressed Sun to declare a public anti-imperialist alliance with the Soviet Union, and to confiscate land across Guangdong province and hand it to the peasants. Sun resisted on both counts. He wanted Moscow's help, not Moscow's enemies. For years he had asked Britain, America and Japan to back him, and been turned down every time, and he was not ready to slam those doors for good. Nor was he ready to confiscate the land of Guangdong's landlords and hand it out, as Borodin wanted. He even told the congress that China had no marked class distinctions, which was a flat contradiction of everything the Communists believed. Inside the party, the lines were already drawn. A group of the party's veterans strongly backed the turn to Russia: Hu Hanmin, Liao Zhongkai, Dai Jitao and the man who drafted the congress manifesto. That man was Wang Jingwei, one of Sun's closest collaborators. Wang will matter a great deal to this story, so let me introduce him properly. In 1910, as a young revolutionary, Wang had tried to kill the prince regent who ruled for China's boy emperor, with a bomb hidden under a bridge in Beijing. He was caught, sentenced to prison for life, and set free by the revolution the next year. He was handsome, eloquent and devoted to Sun, and he had been at Sun's side ever since. Borodin wanted Wang's draft to preach the class struggle, and the confiscation of land without compensation. Wang steadfastly refused, and carried his point. Remember that. When people later called the manifesto Borodin's work, Sun's inner circle answered that the truth was just the opposite. What the manifesto did say was this. The revolution of 1911 had only got rid of the Qing dynasty. Its real aim was a strong and efficient government that would free China from the domination of the imperialist powers and lift it out of its half colonial state. It admitted, too, why the first revolution had failed: the leaders had shrunk from prolonging a civil war, the party had no coherent organisation or discipline, and most revolutionaries had never understood what the revolution was for. And for the first time in an official statement, the party blamed foreign countries for their part in China's chaos. The manifesto did call for land to be redistributed. It just never said whose land. That silence suited everyone for now. Landlords could read it one way, and peasants another.

The congress gave Sun a disciplined party. What he still lacked was an army that would obey it. You saw last time where that had got him: when his own commander, Chen Jiongming, turned his troops on him, Sun had to flee by night to a gunboat on the river. Now Sun declared that the goal was "a new revolutionary army", modelled after the Soviet Red Army. The way to build one was a school. The academy's purpose was to create a professional army that belonged to the party, not to any general. Moscow paid for it. The Soviet government transferred 900,000 rubles to Sun for the academy, which officially opened on 16 June 1924. Moscow sent men as well as money. Over these years the Comintern sent well over a hundred advisers to work with Sun's party. The most important of them for the academy was a Red Army commander, Vasily Blyukher, who arrived that autumn as Sun's chief military adviser, under the name Galen. One of Sun's own circle later admitted that without Russian help, the academy would probably never have come into existence. It stood on an island in the Pearl River, downstream from Guangzhou, at a place called Whampoa, and that is the name it went down in history under: the Whampoa Military Academy. It was the same stretch of river where, two years before, Chiang had climbed aboard Sun's gunboat. At the opening, Sun told the first cadets why he needed them. For thirteen years, he said, the revolution had failed, because it had never had an army of its own. Sun appointed Chiang Kai-shek its commandant, and Liao Zhongkai as the academy's political commissar. Chiang was thirty-six, a career officer from Zhejiang province on the coast. He was the son of a salt merchant who died when he was a boy, and he was raised by a mother he revered. He had trained as a soldier in Japan, joined Sun's revolutionaries there, and spent the years after the revolution drifting around Shanghai, trading on its stock exchange and keeping company with its gangsters. He was proud, quick tempered, prone to fits of gloom, and intensely loyal to Sun. Liao was one of Sun's oldest lieutenants. He had been born in San Francisco to a Chinese family, studied in Japan, and served Sun as his finance man for years. Now he was the leader of the party's left, the veteran most eager to make the Soviet alliance work. Chiang nearly did not take the job. Early in 1924 he quarrelled with the party, resigned and went home to Zhejiang in a sulk, and it took weeks of letters from Sun and Liao to bring him back. It was a habit he would keep all his life: walk away, and wait to be begged to return. In the Soviet way, a commissar sat beside the commander to make sure that the soldiers believed the right things as well as fired straight. Over the academy gate hung a couplet that told the cadets what was expected of them. Those who want promotion and riches, it said, should go elsewhere. Those who fear death should not enter this gate. The young men came from all over China, to an island in the river below Guangzhou. They came in their thousands. Nationalist recruiters signed up some seven thousand hopeful cadets, and Chiang chose first classes of about five hundred. What the cadets got was not much like a normal military school. Classes on tactics and weapons took up only a quarter of their time. The rest was politics. Wang Jingwei came to give his famous lectures on the history and principles of the Kuomintang. And the Communist Party nominated one of its own to help run the political teaching, a young party member named Zhou Enlai, as deputy to the head of the political department, the Nationalist theorist Dai Jitao. In practice the young Communist was in charge of the cadets' ideology, while Chiang ran the academy. Communists and Nationalists sat side by side in the same classrooms. Among those early cadets were young men who would one day command armies against each other, on both sides of the civil war that ends this season. Zhou is one of the people this season follows all the way through, so take a good look at him. He came from a family of scholars and officials, had studied in Japan, and had spent months in jail as a student activist in Tianjin, in the wave of protest against Japan that began in 1919. In 1920 he went to France on a work and study scheme, and spent the next years in Europe organising young Chinese into the Communist movement. He came home in 1924, polished, tireless and very good with people. So here is the strange picture at Whampoa. The future leader of the Nationalists runs the school, the future premier of Communist China teaches its politics, and Moscow pays the bills. The other armies in Sun's camp were not impressed. Their men mocked the cadets as the Doll's Army. They would stop laughing. The corps of the academy grew fast, from 3,500 men at the beginning of 1925 to 10,000 by the middle of the year. And the cadets became something more than an army. This Whampoa clique, the men Chiang trained and commanded, would give him his core supporters for the next twenty-five years. But first, the Doll's Army needed someone to fight. Guangzhou's own merchants obliged.

Sun's government in Guangzhou was always short of money, and it squeezed the city's merchants hard for taxes and levies to keep its hired armies paid. The merchants had their own answer: a merchants' volunteer corps, a private militia to guard their shops and streets. At its head was Chen Lianbai, the local comprador of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. A comprador was the Chinese agent who managed a foreign firm's dealings with Chinese merchants, so Chen was a very rich man, with a foot in both worlds. Together, the merchants' association and the party's own right wing built the corps into a volunteer militia of 9,000. A militia needs guns, and in the summer of 1924 the corps secretly bought some 10,000 rifles and 3,000,000 cartridges abroad. The consignment arrived at Guangzhou on 10 August, on board a Norwegian steamer called the Hav, and Sun's government seized it. The corps called a strike of the city's merchants to get its guns back, and the quarrel turned into a standoff. For Sun, those rifles were not just guns. They were a private army, in his own capital, paid for by the men who most disliked his government. Then the British stepped in. On 26 August, the British consul in Guangzhou, Sir Bertram Giles, delivered a warning to Sun from a British naval officer. Sun's government read it as a threat by British warships to bombard a Chinese town, over a fight that, it insisted, concerned only the rebels' stronghold in the western quarter, the merchants' district. Sun was dumbfounded. He had expected the new Labour government in London to sympathise with his fight against the militarists and reactionaries. Instead, he found that a change of cabinet had not changed British policy in the slightest. That was the government he had sent his congratulations to in January, and which had never replied. Sun had his foreign minister draft an answer, found it too feeble, and gave the job to Eugene Chen. Chen was a sharp tongued lawyer, born in Trinidad, who had become one of Sun's closest advisers and wrote the best English in the party. On 1 September Sun published Chen's draft as a manifesto. It denied that his government had ever wanted to fire on a defenceless town, and it called the British suggestion a specimen of British hypocrisy. It reminded the British of their own record, from the slaughter at Amritsar in India to Egypt and Ireland, and asked whether they threatened to bombard a Chinese town again only because China was too weak and divided to stop them. It called Chen Lianbai the most devoted agent of British imperialism, and his bank its most powerful instrument, and it said that the British guns were really aimed at the only government in China that still meant to keep the revolution alive. And then it said something new. The battle cry of the revolution, it said, had once been the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty. "Henceforth it will be the overthrow of Foreign Imperialism in China". That was a long way from the Sun who had hoped for Western help all his life. From here on, the enemy had a new name. Thanks to the British, the standoff in Guangzhou stayed a deadlock. And just then, war broke out again in the north, between Zhang Zuolin and Wu Peifu. We will come to that war in a minute. Sun left everything in Guangzhou to Hu Hanmin, took charge himself of an expedition against Wu, and set up his headquarters at Shaoguan. Hu, the governor of Guangzhou, decided to compromise with the merchants' corps, to pacify it. He handed back the confiscated rifles. As soon as the corps had the rifles in hand, it began mobilising and barricading the streets of the western quarter. It was the tenth of October, the anniversary of the revolution of 1911, and a procession of workers and students was marching through the city. The corps's men fired on the procession, causing several hundred casualties. Up at Shaoguan, Sun got the news by telegraph and acted at once. He cabled back, naming a special commission with full powers to put down the revolt. Its members were Wang Jingwei, the general Xu Chongzhi, Eugene Chen, Liao Zhongkai and Chiang Kai-shek. Sun gave Chiang the order to suppress the militia. On 15 October, Xu ordered his Guangdong army to attack the western quarter. Chiang formed his cadets into a fighting corps, marched them into the city alongside, and seized the arms. After two days of fighting, the volunteers were beaten and disarmed. Chiang had finished the job in a few days. Fire broke out in the fighting, and a large part of the western quarter, the richest shopping district in the city, burned. Chen Lianbai fled to the safety of Hong Kong. The cadets had not fought alone. Armed union men and peasant guards, organised by the party's left and by the Communists, came out on the streets with them. The Doll's Army had fought its first battle in the streets of its own city, against its own merchants, and won. For Chiang it was the first proof that his cadets could be trusted with a fight, and for Guangzhou's shopkeepers it was a lesson in who now held the guns.

Now to that war in the north. If you have been with us from the start of this season, you will remember Wu Peifu, the general who had beaten Zhang Zuolin's Manchurian army and made himself master of Beijing. Wu was a soldier who had passed the old scholars' examinations as a young man, and liked to be seen as an educated patriot. Foreign newspapers adored him. That September, an American news magazine put him on its cover as the biggest man in China. He was the strong arm of the Zhili faction, the generals of the northern province around Beijing, and its head, Cao Kun, had bought his way into the presidency of the republic with bribes in 1923. Zhang Zuolin had started out as a bandit and become the master of Manchuria, and after his defeat by Wu in 1922 he had spent two years rebuilding his army, with a great arsenal at Mukden and with Japanese help. So against Wu and Cao stood Zhang Zuolin, the warlord of Manchuria, and Duan Qirui, the old strongman whose faction Wu had broken in 1920. And Sun had joined them in what his circle called a Triple Alliance. By the terms of that alliance, a war between Zhang and Wu meant war for Sun against Wu as well. That was why Sun had gone up to Shaoguan. From there, in September, he issued three manifestoes to the people, explaining what his expedition was for and asking for their support. It was a small army with large hopes. Sun's men were not going to decide this war. The decision would come from the north. The fuse was lit in the south, around Shanghai, where two of the factions' generals fell to fighting in September 1924. As the fighting began, the president, Cao Kun, received a written warning from Zhang Zuolin. Unless he stopped it, by cutting off supplies, he would have to reckon with a rude awakening from the north. Cao did not stop it. Within forty-eight hours, reports spread that a general mobilisation had begun in Henan province, Wu's stronghold. We have a vivid witness for this war, and I am going to lean on him for a while. He wrote as Putnam Weale, a British journalist who had spent most of his life in China. He had no love for Sun or for his turn to Moscow, which he saw as a grab for force dressed up in high-sounding phrases. The mobilisation, he wrote, had thrown together a quarter of a million men, in "ill-assorted commands, insufficiently supplied with food and equipment, and with an ear open to every rumour." The other powers watched with their own interests in mind. Britain and the United States were favourably inclined toward Wu's efforts to unify China by force. Japan was not. It feared for its special position in Manchuria and Mongolia, and it sent funds to Wu's rivals. Officially, the powers had agreed not to sell arms into China's civil wars. But Japanese munitions, the journalist reported, had certainly poured in to the Manchurian forces, and all their aerial bombs were of Japanese make. This was the biggest war China had seen since the fall of the dynasty, fought with railways, armoured trains, warships and aircraft. The fighting centred on Shanhaiguan, the pass where the Great Wall comes down to the sea, and the gateway between Manchuria and the rest of China. Wu went up to the front himself, to command in person. Among the Manchurian commanders was Zhang Zuolin's young son, Zhang Xueliang, leading an attacking corps. Remember that son. One day he will hold the fate of the whole country in his hands. This war had aeroplanes in it. Their tireless eyes, the journalist wrote, made surprise landings impossible, and Zhang's attempt to break through in front failed. Then came a report from Shanhaiguan that Zhang's men, beaten off in front, had found an unguarded pass in the Wall. Wu had a fight on his hands, but it was a fight he could still win. What he did not have was a safe rear.

But one of Wu's own generals was a man named Feng Yuxiang. Feng was a giant of a man who had risen from the ranks, and he was known as the Christian General. He had converted to Christianity, and he made his soldiers sing hymns and banned them from drinking and gambling. He had fought on Wu's side in 1922, and been rewarded with an honorary post in Beijing that gave him plenty of soldiers and very little else. He did not forget it. Wu had sent him north with his army, toward the passes of the Great Wall, on the far flank of the war. His troops spent the time building a road. It was such a good road, the joke went, that Feng was able to come back along it and seize Beijing without firing a shot. On the night of 19 October, Feng called a meeting of his officers. He told them that he would stop the civil wars in China for ever, by overthrowing the existing government. Then he marched. The Christian General made his coup by a forced march down from the northeastern pass at Gubeikou, on the Great Wall. By 22 October his men had reached a point fifteen miles outside the capital. The officer in command of Beijing's garrison was given a choice: throw in his lot with the plotters, or never return alive. In the journalist's words, "He saluted and accepted the situation." At four in the morning, Feng's vanguard seized the telegraph and the telephones and the railway stations, and made the president, Cao Kun, a prisoner in his own palace. When Beijing woke up on 23 October, the journalist wrote, the city "was so flattened out that scarcely a thing moved." And through the silent streets, Feng's marching soldiers burst into song, in rhythmic chants that shaped themselves into familiar hymn tunes, such as Onward, Christian Soldiers. Why did he do it? Sun's own circle said simply that he was tired of the endless fighting between Chinese. What everyone agreed on was what he had done: in October 1924 he turned against his patron, Wu Peifu. Wu was stranded at the front with Zhang's army before him and Feng's behind him, and his army fell apart. Think about that from Wu's side. Only weeks earlier he had been the biggest man in China, the general the foreigners hoped would unite it. Now his own man had stolen his capital from behind, and nobody had fired a shot. Feng had one more surprise for Beijing. Inside the Forbidden City, the old imperial palace, the last emperor, Puyi, had gone on living in comfort for thirteen years after the dynasty fell, as the republic had promised he could. Now, after those thirteen undisturbed years, he was ordered out of the palace at twenty-four hours' notice and placed under guard. He took a motor trip, and then slipped into the Japanese legation and asked for sanctuary. A few months later the Japanese moved him to their concession in the port of Tianjin. Hold on to that. A former emperor in Japanese hands is a card that someone will play one day. Feng had taken the capital, but he could not run it. He was unable to form a government, because his political friends were too unimportant. So Feng, holding Beijing, put up Duan Qirui as chief executive, in the place of the president he had deposed. Duan was the old general who had dominated Beijing in the years after 1916, until Wu helped drive him from power. Now he was back, as a figurehead for the men with the guns. Feng, for his part, renamed his troops the National People's Army, which tells you he had been reading the same pamphlets as everyone else that year. Zhang Zuolin's Manchurian army came down through the Wall, and he and Feng made themselves the new masters of the north. And Wu? He did not run. The journalist found something to admire in him here. Wu came down slowly from the front, and stayed for more than a week in a railway carriage near the new front line, "daring his enemies to seize him". Nobody did. In the end he slipped away by steamer, down the coast and up the Yangtze, with a small bodyguard, and there he was left in peace. The two great Western powers had favoured him, the Japanese had paid his enemies, and his own subordinate had sold him out. His fall shows the hard rule of the warlord years: no single general could unite the country, because the ambition and jealousy of all the others, and the interests of the foreign powers, would pull him down.

Down in the south, Sun's expedition against Wu had suddenly lost its point. With peace restored in the north, the expedition was called off. And the new men in Beijing wanted to talk. Duan sent his secretary, Xu Xiying, south to invite Sun to the capital, to discuss how to put the country back together. Sun decided to accept the invitation from Duan and Feng. It was the chance he had been waiting for, to sit down in the capital as an equal and argue for a single government for all of China. Before he left, Sun set his house in order. He named Hu Hanmin to act for him as generalissimo, the commander in chief, in his absence, and told Xu Chongzhi and Chiang to pay special attention to training the party army. He made Liao Zhongkai the party's representative in the party army and all the cadet schools, to oversee their political education. And he made Wang Jingwei his chief of staff for the journey north, and told him to issue a manifesto. That manifesto did not aim at Cao Kun and Wu Peifu alone. It called for the overthrow, once and for all, of all militarism in China. So look at the line up as Sun leaves. Hu in charge of the city, Liao in charge of the soldiers' politics, Chiang in charge of their drill, and Wang at Sun's elbow. Each of those men will matter when Sun is gone. Then it was time to go. He left Guangzhou on 11 November 1924. It was the last time he would see the city. He did not go straight north. He sailed first to Shanghai, and from there by way of Japan, the country that had sheltered him for so many years in exile. Japan's radicals gave him a cordial welcome, but the Japanese authorities treated him coolly. While he was there, Sun spoke about what Japan had once meant to Asia. In 1905, Japan had beaten Russia in war, the first time in modern memory that an Asian power had beaten a European one. Ever since then, Sun said, the peoples of Asia had hoped to shake off the yoke of European oppression. He hoped Japan would stand with the rest of Asia, not with the empires. The Japanese government's coolness was its answer. The government's attitude made Sun cancel his visit to Tokyo, and from Osaka he went straight to Tianjin, the port that serves Beijing. At Tianjin the crowds turned out for him. The people gave him so enthusiastic a welcome that Sun himself was surprised. In Tianjin he also called on Zhang Zuolin, the Manchurian warlord who was now one of the masters of Beijing. The old revolutionary and the old bandit were partners in victory, and had almost nothing else in common. But he was not well. He stayed in Tianjin nearly a month, ill in bed. On 31 December he left Tianjin for Beijing. Huge crowds met his train at the Beijing station, students and workers and party members, come to see the father of the republic arrive. The man who had been the republic's first president was coming back to its capital at last, and he was coming back a sick man. What Sun wanted was a national assembly, with seats for the merchants, the students, the workers and the peasants, to settle China's future. Duan wanted something quite different: a conference of the generals and the old politicians, the very men Sun had come to sweep away. The talks with Duan and Zhang went nowhere, and soon Sun could not have pursued them if they had. On 26 January 1925 he entered a hospital in Beijing, to be operated on. The operation showed that Sun had been suffering for a long time from cancer of the liver, and that it had reached its last stage.

The surgeons could do nothing. Sun was moved from the hospital to a borrowed house in the city, and his followers gathered around him. On 24 February, at twenty-five past four in the afternoon, the doctor attending Sun declared that his life would end in a few days. His followers wanted his last instructions before it was too late. Someone had to ask him. The natural person was his young wife, Soong Ching-ling. She was the daughter of a rich Shanghai family, and she had married him in Japan, against her parents' wishes, when she was in her early twenties and he was nearly fifty. But she was too overcome by grief to take on so delicate a task. So Wang Jingwei spoke to Sun, for the family and for the party. It was not a private moment. Only a few people were in the sick room with Sun and Wang, but many more were gathered in the room next door, and they could hear every word. Wang explained what they wanted. By giving his comrades his instructions, Wang told him, Sun would greatly add to their courage. And then Wang read out what he and the others had already written, from the ideas Sun had so often spoken about. It began, "For forty years I have devoted myself to the cause of the People's Revolution, whose aim is to win for China national liberty and international equality." Forty years of experience, it went on, had taught him that the only way to reach that goal was to awaken the masses, and to join hands with those nations of the world that treated China as an equal. That was the Soviet alliance, written into a dying man's last words. It went on: "The Revolution is as yet unfinished." And it urged the comrades to fight on until victory, following Sun's plans and his principles, and the manifesto of the first party congress. That was the manifesto Wang himself had drafted. And the testament asked that two things in particular be done as soon as possible: a national assembly of the people, and the abolition of the unequal treaties. The unequal treaties were the agreements forced on China since the Opium Wars, which gave the foreign powers their concessions, their gunboats on the rivers and their own law courts on Chinese soil. Sun signified his approval. Then he gave them a warning. "Your attitude is clear. But you are in a dangerous position, as the political enemies are preparing to demoralise you after my death." "Standing firm, you must consider the dangers ahead." Wang answered for all of them. "We are not afraid of dangers, but we will act according to your instructions." Then Wang read out a second, private will, for the family. Sun said that he had given his life to the people, and had never had the chance to build up a fortune. He left all he had, his books, his clothes, his house, to his wife, Soong Ching-ling. His children were grown and could look after themselves, it said, and he hoped they would carry on his unfinished work. Sun approved that too. But when they asked him to sign the two documents, he refused. It was not necessary yet, he said. Wang took the conversation down word for word, and signed a record of it, with Sun's son, H. H. Kung and T. V. Soong among the witnesses. So for now, the testament lay unsigned, because Sun said there was no need yet. On the morning of 11 March, Sun signed the wills, a little before eleven o'clock, with Wang, Sun's son and others of his closest followers as witnesses. Among them was Liao Zhongkai's wife, He Xiangning. On that same day, he signed a farewell message to Soviet Russia, which Eugene Chen had drafted in English. In it, Sun told the Soviet leaders that he left behind a party he had hoped would work with them to free China, and he looked forward to the day when the Soviet Union would greet a strong and free China as its friend and ally. Within a few years, the testament itself became something to fight over. The party's right wing spread the rumour that Sun's will was a forgery, made up by the left, if not by Borodin himself. Wang's circle answered that Borodin had not called on Sun at all since the operation in January, except on 11 March, when Sun was already half unconscious. Whoever held the pen, the words Wang read out in that crowded room were the words the whole party would swear by. And swear by them they did. In the years ahead, Nationalist meetings, schools and offices would open with a bow to Sun's portrait and a reading of his testament, week after week.

Sun lived through one more night. His speech grew broken at three in the morning of 12 March 1925, and stopped altogether at half past nine. His last words, his followers said, were peace, struggle, save China. Sun Yat-sen died that morning in Beijing, of cancer of the liver. He was fifty-eight years old. He had one more wish. He asked to be buried on Purple Mountain, outside Nanjing, the city where his provisional government had been set up in 1912, so that the revolution of 1911 would not be forgotten. Not everyone grieved. While the masses of China mourned him, his followers noted, the militarists felt relief. But the mourning was real, and it was everywhere. It broke out spontaneously, across the whole country, for the man who stood for so many hopes. It would come again four years later, when his body was carried south to its tomb. On 20 March his body was carried to a public park in the heart of Beijing to lie in state, and more than a hundred thousand people followed it. For three weeks the public filed past his glass coffin. They could see Sun lying in a Western suit, partly draped in the flag of the Kuomintang. And standing among the chief mourners as the casket was carried out was the Soviet ambassador, Lev Karakhan. Sun had been baptised a Christian as a young man, and his family held a private Christian service for him before the public rites. When the lying in state was over, the coffin was taken to a Buddhist temple in the Western Hills outside Beijing, the Temple of the Azure Clouds, to wait there until a tomb could be built on Purple Mountain. Remember that temple. Before the year is out, Sun's right wing followers will gather beside his coffin there, to try to undo the alliance he made. The journalist told the story of Sun's death his own way. Sun had been too sick, he wrote, to whisper more than a few words when he came to Beijing to die, "but those words were his political testament." And then, he went on, "It became a sacred duty to all his disciples to insure the apotheosis of one who claimed Lenin as his spiritual guide". In the journalist's eyes, that duty meant turning Guangzhou Bolshevik as no other place in China had been. He had a sharp eye for why the Soviet way appealed. The committee system, he wrote, suited Sun very well, because it left all power with whoever was at once the most voluble and the most ingenious. And South China, he wrote, had spent fourteen years trying to fight the armies of the North with words, and yet more words. Moscow offered something else: organisation, and force. And in Borodin, he wrote, Moscow had a tower of strength in Guangzhou, a man logical and daring, with Red military instructors sent in, and a cadets' college whose European discipline soon gave it a corps better than the rest. He was right about one thing. Sun was never so popular as in death, and the Nationalists would use his memory to win new support across the country. The party made him something close to a saint. After his death, it declared that Sun's writings were never to be contradicted. Think about what that means. A dead man's words could not be argued with. But a dead man cannot tell you which of his words he meant. At the congress, remember, Sun had promised that if the Communists ever betrayed the party, he would be the first to propose their expulsion. And look again at the testament. Join hands with the nations that treat us as equals, it said. To the left, that plainly meant Moscow. To the right, it meant whoever would treat China as an equal, and nobody yet had. The same words, read two ways. The party would soon find out which reading had the guns behind it. So who would inherit it? The obvious candidates had all stood close to Sun. Wang Jingwei, one of Sun's closest collaborators, who had taken down his last instructions. Hu Hanmin, the senior veteran, Sun's longtime secretary and the party's sharpest writer, who had run Guangzhou while Sun was away. And Liao Zhongkai, the leader of the left, the man who kept the money flowing and the Soviet alliance working. Not, it seemed, Chiang Kai-shek. At the time of Sun's death, Chiang was still not even on the party's central standing committee, its inner leadership, and most insiders did not count him a contender at all. A struggle for power broke out inside the party, and very quickly the party's left won it, with Wang Jingwei at its head. And the Communists, still a small party, were working inside a big one. The alliance with Sun had given them a crucial chance to grow. Against Moscow's open friends in Guangzhou, the journalist wrote, stood only the so-called Prince's party, around Sun's son, Sun Ke, who had been mayor of the city and grown rich, and was not popular for it. The Guangzhou delta, he wrote, seemed conquered. Wang had the testament, the manifesto, and the dead man's trust. Chiang had the cadets, and the cadets had guns. And then came an explosion. When it came, the journalist wrote, it was as much a surprise to the Russians as to the rest of the world. It followed the events of the thirtieth of May, in Shanghai. Next time: with Sun dead, Wang Jingwei leads the party in Guangzhou while Chiang builds its army. And before long, in Shanghai, the order is given to fire on a crowd of Chinese protesters, and it sets off a surge of nationalist feeling unseen since the May Fourth protests. Meanwhile, inside the party, the quarrel over who speaks for Sun stops being a quarrel of words. That's next time, on The Making of Modern China.

Sources

• Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine, Mao: The Real Story (2012), pp. 138-139, 142-144
• Arthur Ransome, The Chinese Puzzle (1927), p. 131-133, https://archive.org/details/chinesepuzzle00rans
• B. L. Putnam Weale, Why China Sees Red (1925), pp. 42-46, 46-49, 49-53, 53-56, 56-60, 84-87, 225-228, 269-271, 275-278, https://archive.org/details/whychinaseesred008608mbp
• Bertrand Russell, The Problem of China (1922), https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13940
• Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (2009), pp. 39-41, 41-42, 44-45, 45-47, 47-49
• Peter Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949 (2005), pp. 87-89, 198-199, 199-200, 200-202, 202-203, 215-216, 231-232, 246-248
• Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (2013)
• T'ang Leang-li, The Inner History of the Chinese Revolution (1930), pp. 163-165, 165-167, 176-178, 178-180, 180-183, 183-184, 184-186, 186-188, 188-190, 190-192, 192-194, 194-196, 196-197, 197-199, https://archive.org/details/innerhistoryofch0000unse