Most of this was under the Republican government led, eventually, by Chiang Kai-shek. By the 1930s, the country was called the sick man of Asia. Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, and Mao Zedong offered three competing visions of what needed to be done. Sun had spent less than a hundred days as provisional President of China from January to March 1912, but his influence remains to this day. Writing in ‘The Three Principles of the People’, he declared in 1922: ‘Considering the law of survival of ancient and modern races, if we want to save China and to preserve the Chinese race, we must certainly promote Nationalism.’ The key issue was that the Chinese people were disunited:
We ought to be advancing in line with the nations of Europe and America. But the Chinese people have only family and clan groups; there is no national spirit. Consequently, in spite of four hundred million people gathered together in one China, we are in fact but a sheet of loose sand. We are the poorest and weakest state in the world, occupying the lowest position in international affairs; the rest of mankind is the carving knife and the serving dish, while we are the fish and the meat.10
The country’s greatest challenge was its internal disunity. There was no loyalty to the larger notion of a nation. Sun continued: ‘If we do not earnestly promote nationalism and weld together our four hundred millions into a strong nation, we face a tragedy – the loss of our country and the destruction of our race.’11
Chiang Kai-shek, as Sun’s effective successor after the latter’s death in 1925, continued the Nationalist Party’s mission. Writing in China’s Destiny, he declared: ‘Thus the opportunity for the recovery of the nation and the hope of the rebirth of the state are now presented to the citizens of the entire country.’12 Chiang was also keen to address what he called the country’s ‘moral deterioration’. The splendid legacy of a long, continuous civilized history had been degraded by the impact of outsiders in modern times. But Chinese people took ultimate responsibility for this. Foreigners had exploited weaknesses which were already present:
The [foreign] concessions were not only the source of drugs, but were havens for prostitutes, gamblers, thieves, and bandits. When economic conditions in the interior were poor, the people migrated to the cities. But it was difficult to find employment and they were therefore forced to sell their sons and daughters and fell into the evil habits of prostitution. Thus, during the past hundred years, beautiful and prosperous cities became hells of misery and chaos.13
In this account, Chinese people had thus betrayed their own history and their identity and moral values.
Chiang’s commitment to nationalism chimed with that of Communist leader Mao Zedong, though their diagnosis of their country’s problems and how to solve them radically differed. Mao had adopted a sinified Marxist-Leninist analysis of why the country was in such poor shape after the collapse of the Qing, and how it would get out of this. Despite being from a similar background to Chiang, as the son of a reasonably well-off landlord, Mao set himself against the Confucian traditions of order and hierarchy that Chiang seemed to embrace. For Mao, these were the problem, not the solution. Marxist dialectics gave him the tools to analyse Chinese history as a story not of moral decline and victimization by foreigners, but instead of the clash between different classes internally, and the rising influence of powerful capitalist forces, many of them coming from outside actors like companies or governments. This was history with a scientific rationale, with a structure that was determined and predictable. The feudalist past was now moving towards a socialist, utopian outcome. As Mao wrote in 1939: ‘The extreme poverty and backwardness of the peasants resulting from ruthless landlord exploitation and oppression is the basic reason why Chinese society remained at the same stage of socio-economic development for several thousands of years.’14 He continued: ‘The purpose of the Chinese revolution at the present stage is to change the existing colonial, semi-colonial and semi-feudal state of society, i.e. to strive for the completion of a new democratic revolution.’15 Mao’s China had a destiny, but in contrast to Chiang’s vision, it was one that would be fulfilled through socialism and class struggle, not the spiritual nationalist recommitment to Confucian ethics sponsored by the Nationalist government’s ‘New Culture’ movement of the 1930s.
Risen from the Ashes: China at War and After
The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) was the most catastrophic moment in modern Chinese history. Japan’s expansionism under its leaders from the 1930s was one cause. Another was the deterioration of the global economy following the Wall Street Collapse of 1929. Japan’s noxious ideology of racial superiority towards neighbouring countries, particularly China, only added to the brewing conflict. From 1937, the two major countries of north-east Asia were pitched against each other in what was to be one of the most devastating wars in modern history. Before its attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Japan was in control of large swathes of coastal China, with a puppet regime doing its bidding installed both in the north-east in Manchuria, and in Shanghai. It had conducted penetrating campaigns in much of the countryside, encircling and destroying in a bid to annihilate any residue of opposition. The Nationalists fled to the south-western city of Chongqing, where, with US and British assistance, they mounted at least some opposition. Their main function, however, was simply to survive. The Communists, in their remote Yan’an revolutionary base in the central northern province known today as Shaanxi, did not have the capacity or the manpower to do much more than harass and survive by guile. But in a loose coalition with the Nationalists, and employing Mao’s guerrilla tactics, they proved surprisingly effective – at least as irritants to a Japan that was slowly and calamitously to discover that while it could control at least some of the cities, in the end the ‘sand-like’ quality of China in the countryside, where 90 per cent of people lived, proved too challenging. Stretched across the whole Asia Pacific, and now fighting against the might not just of the United States but also of Russia, Japan fell to defeat in 1945.
Mao may have been right when he said to the American reporter Edgar Snow in the 1960s that Communism would not have been ultimately successful in China without the searing experience of the Second World War.16 But the war also resulted in more committed and focused nationalism. China had survived – just. But it had experienced first-hand with terrifying consequences the meaning of being undeveloped, weak, and disunited against a foe that was none of these things. Japan’s advanced military, its strength and unity, were factors that caused China to suffer – and upon which after the war it was able to reflect. European colonial involvement with China had been destructive, but piecemeal. Britain never seriously attempted to subjugate the whole of the Chinese landmass. But in the Second Sino-Japanese War, 20 million perished and as many as 50 million were made homeless.
From 1949, the PRC vowed that never again would China be placed in this position of subjugation before an outside power, reinforcing the nationalism that had already been constructed. As Zheng Wang states in his study of the uses of historical memory in modern China,
It is no exaggeration to say that almost all the important changes, revolutions and reforms in [the country] after 1840 [and the first Opium War] are somehow related – if not a direct response – to the national humiliation during those subsequent hundred years. … It is impossible, therefore, to reimagine the recent history of China without the implications of the century of humiliation; it is an integral part of the Chinese Chosenness-Myths-Trauma complex.17
This reached its culmination in the war. It was the moment of most brutal and final exposure to the will and power of others. Even with the conclusion of the war, the country remained troubled. After years of uneasy truce with the Communists as they had tried, together, to beat the invaders, the Nationalists returned to the unfinished business of eliminating their rivals in a Civil War from 1946. Exhausted and demoralized, however, Chiang’s forces were defeated, fleeing to Taiwan, where they continued the Republic of China (which continues to exist to this day). The vision of Mao’s Communist nationalism had prevailed. It now had a world to rebuild.
Notes
