The China of Chiang K'ai-Shek: A Political Study. Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger
occasions Japanese advance troops ran so far ahead of schedule that Japanese warplanes, thinking them disguised Chinese, strafed them![15] Canton fell without a major battle. Hankow, the great radical capital, scene of the 1926–27 Leftist upsurge and of the anti-Fascist enthusiasm of 1938, was entered by the Imperial Japanese army, and the entire Wu-han area was lost to China.
Not only was the Hankow period ended. By breaking the last rail connection of the Chinese government and the outside world, and by driving the Chinese leadership into the remote interior, Japan shut off the ready play of international influence on domestic Chinese politics. Foreign visitors became more rare. The government, moving to the mountain fastnesses of Szechuan, found a home on the great Gibraltar-like promontory of Chungking city, tiered along cliffs above the Yangtze and Kialing rivers. The last withdrawal was a final test of strength. Hankow, six hundred miles up-river, was commercially, architecturally, and politically a coastal city. It was still an outpost of world imperialism and of modern technology. With the next remove the Chinese government found itself beyond tangible Western influence; for the first time since 1860 the capital was out of the military reach of Western powers, and in a city which had only slight traces of Western influence.
The Chungking Period
The Chungking period began with the transfer of further government offices to the West, to join President Lin Shên, and marks a distinct phase in the process of government-building in China. As the Chungking regime, the National Government took new forms of temper and character. Government, Kuomintang, Communists—all were in the position of an inner-Asiatic state, without convenient access to the sea, seeking to fight an oceanic nation whose trade reached every port in the world. Foreign imperialism could no longer be blamed for the demoralizations of the hour; foreign aid was too tenuous and remote to qualify the inner play of Chinese political growth. Politically, the Chinese had to stand on their own feet.
The second phase of the war had begun. Chinese armies stood front-to-front against the Japanese, and kept hundreds of thousands of invading troops immobilized. The guerrillas got to work. Most of all, the machinery of modernization began functioning; all the programs had been completed, and the task was clear. The international developments of the time—the first American loan, $25,000,000 in 1938; the brief Manchoukuo-Outer Mongol war of 1939, wherein Japan and Russia fought each other through their respective dependencies; even the outbreak of the European war—were remote from this far inland scene. Military events had some effect, but nothing comparable to the Japanese victories at Shanghai, Nanking, Canton, and Hankow recurred. The Japanese invaded Kwangsi in the fall of 1939; they left a year later, when their drive into French Indo-China made it unnecessary to cut those colonies off from China. In South Hunan the Japanese suffered catastrophically when they advanced boldly and contemptuously into non-modern areas and were encircled by the Chinese. Even the flight and treason of Wang Ch'ing-wei at the year's end of 1938, and his open cooperation with Japan in March 1940, did not change the general picture. The emphasis was no longer on sudden changes, on personality, on dramatic shifts of power. It was on construction—on the development of a modern, democratic, technically equipped Chinese state out of the vast resources of China's hinterland. The China which was to win had to be created before it could counter-attack.[16]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Lattimore, Owen, Inner Asian Frontiers of China, New York, 1940, p. 45 and passim. The author, a noted geographer, presents significant new analyses of the interconnections of Chinese economics and culture.
[2] Detailed descriptions of the political history of the period are to be found, inter alia, in Holcombe, Arthur N., The Chinese Revolution, Cambridge, 1930; MacNair, Harley F., China in Revolution, Chicago, 1931; and, most popularly, Escarra, Jean, China Then and Now, Peiping, 1940. Descriptions of the government are Wu Chih-fang, Chinese Government and Politics, Shanghai, 1934; Lum Kalfred Dip, Chinese Government, Shanghai, 1934; and Linebarger, Paul M. A., Government in Republican China, New York and London, 1938.
[3] This is given in the Chien Kuo Ta Kang (Outline of National Reconstruction), of April 12, XIII (1924), particularly points 3, 5, 6, 7, and 23. Translations are to be found in Hsü, Leonard Shihlien, Sun Yat-sen: His Political and Social Ideals, Los Angeles, 1933, and Wu Chih-fang, work cited, p. 430 ff.
[4] For the text of this constitution, see Wu Chih-fang, cited, p. 430 ff.
[5] In particular, see Freyn, Hubert, Prelude to War: The Chinese Student Rebellion of 1935–1936, Shanghai, 1939. Reference to contemporary Left-liberal and Left publications in Europe and America will disclose numerous sympathetic eyewitness accounts of the troubles and the fortitude of the students. Some of these accounts now possess a wry, inadvertent humor in their characterization of Chiang as a willing accomplice of Japan.
[6] For the Generalissimo's own diary of the kidnapping, together with a narrative by his wife, see Chiang, Mme. Mayling Soong, Sian: A Coup d'Etat, bound with Chiang K'ai-shek, A Fortnight in Sian: Extracts from a Diary, Shanghai, 1938. The Chinese edition of this appeared as Chiang Wei-yüan-chang [Chairman Chiang], Hsi-an Pan Yüeh-chi [A Fortnight's Diary from Sian], Shanghai, XXVI (1937). A first-hand Western account is Bertram, James M., First Act in China, New York, 1938. Edgar Snow, in Red Star over China, New York, 1938, p. 395 ff., gives an account sympathetic to the Left; Harold Isaacs, in The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, London, 1938, p. 445 ff., presents a penetrating Trotskyist critique. An excellent factual summary of this crucial year, written by a well-known writer who visited the scene at first hand, is to be found in Bisson, T. A., Japan in China, New York, 1938.
[7] "War" used to mean the reciprocal application of violence by public, armed bodies; private and informal homicide was termed "murder" or was otherwise clearly designated. Today these distinctions are less clear. The author must enter a caveat lector: no term is employed in other than a general (i.e., literary) meaning, except upon special notice. The Sino-Japanese hostilities differ greatly from war in several interesting but technical respects; they are a very special Japanese invention. Yet it would be cumbersome to refer to Chinese changes in Conflict-time, or to speak meticulously of armies engaged in an Incident.
[8] See Council of International Affairs, The Chinese Year Book, 1938–39 [Hong Kong], 1939; article by Chu Chia-hua, "Consolidation of Democracy in China," Chapter IV; "Reconciliation with the Communists," p. 339–40. This Council is an informal and extra-legal offshoot of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs; accordingly the annual, rich in official materials, provides insufficient data on Communist, guerrilla, and unofficial activities. See also, Epstein, I., The People's War [Shanghai], 1939, p. 88 ff., for an excellent, clear account of this period.
[9] See below, p. 193. See also Taylor, George E., The Struggle for North China, New York, 1940, in the Inquiry Series of the Institute of Pacific Relations.