CHINA BEFORE WWII


I. The Land and the People

The student who wishes to gain some general idea of East Asia might note some comparisons between China and the United States. They have approximately the same area. Greater China has an area of 3,750,000 square miles, which is a little more than the aggregate area of the U.S. and its overseas possessions (3,628,130).

Both lie in approximately the same latitudes. Both have a neighbor to the north, a neighbor with sparsely settled provinces stretching toward the Arctic. Both have tropical areas, peninsulas, and islands to the south, for Burma, Thailand, Laos, Kampuchea, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia may be roughly likened to Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean Islands. Both the U.S. and China face the rising sun with a long, bulging, eastern coastline with numerous ports, and in both the population is heavily concentrated in the eastern section, with sparsely populated, semi-aried regions commencing between one and two thousand miles inland. Still farther inland both have high mountain ranges to the west and the south. But there the comparisons end. China has no Far West, no second coastline beyond the mountains, with growing ports, timbered ranges, rich fruitlands, fisheries, factories, and shipyards like those which stretch from Washington to California.

Throughout their long history the Chinese have lived with the knowledge that they had a desert behind them thinly peopled by barbarian tribes against whom early emperors constructed the Great Wall. This oft-noted example of China's spirit of isolation is one of the greatest engineering ventures of all times. Built by a prodigious use of human labor, the massive Great Wall stretches from the Yellow Sea 1500 miles inland. In front of the Chinese lay the widest of the world's oceans, which, so far as the Chinese knew, had no other shore. Thus Chinese civilization developed according to its own intrinsic patterns, flourishing on the fertile stretch between two deserts, the desert of the hinterland and the desert of the sea.

Until the twentieth century, Chinese civilization, the Chinese character, and the Chinese way of life remained remarkably stable. The Chinese possessed their own pictographic and ideographic records 3500 years ago and had developed an advanced culture before 1000 BC. They possessed also, in rudimentary form, such modern inventions as printing, paper, and gunpowder long before the Europeans. Their subtle poetry and philosophy; their exquisite masterpieces of painting, sculpture, and metalwork; their marvelously colored silks and brocades; their tasteful work in ceramics and lacquer; and their delicate and arresting architecture have won for the Chinese an honored place among the most highly gifted peoples of history.

The Chinese character commanded respect because of their realism, adherence to the golden mean, cheerfulness in adversity, and resiliency. In religion they were tolerant and philosophical. While the upper classes professed Confucianism (which is really an ethical code rather than a religion), the lower classes adhered to Buddhism and Taoism. The great Chinese sage Confucius (551-479 BC) extolled respect for parents above all virtues. The Chinese of all classes worshipped their ancestors and regarded duty to the family as standing above all duties. China had no hereditary aristocracy, but owing to strong family loyalties many families retained a position of pre-eminence over long generations.

Since time immemorial the Celestial Empire-as China was sometimes called-was a hereditary monarchy. It was ruled by an emperor who was styled the "Son of Heaven." He was believed to rule by a "mandate of heaven." Under the emperor was a hierarchy of officials (mandarins), chosen by competitive exams in the Chinese classics. Scholastic ability was believed to be the best test of fitness for public office. Writers, scholars, and philosophers enjoyed a social standing second to none.

Until recently the great bulk of the Chinese people were engaged in agriculture. They lived in tiny villages and worked their family farms, which seldom exceeded five acres, in a garden-like fashion. An owner of ten to fifteen acres was reckoned a rich landowner. He did not work his land himself, for he could afford hired labor. The alluvial plains on the lower reaches of the great Chinese rivers-Hoangho, Yangtze, and Si-are very fertile. In the south the tropical climate permits raising of two crops annually.

As pressure of population increased, the Chinese people migrated westward up the river valleys and into the hills of western China, which they denuded of forests and terraced, often up to the very summits. Terracing was necessary to make the fields level, for the staple crop of China was rice and it has to be inundated for some time during its growth. Another important crop was tea. Cities were numerous and colorful, with their massive walls, towered gates, and characteristic "pie-crust" roofs. The townsmen included artisans and merchants, both working in family-operated shops and both organized into guilds, as in medieval Europe.

Chinese civilization and the Chinese monarchy exercised an influence beyond China proper. China proper is the water basins of the great Chinese rivers, which comprise only about 1,500,000 square miles of the total area of Greater China. Beyond China proper, stretching to the Himalaya and Altay mountains, lay the sparsely inhabited outlying provinces of China. In the southwest on the high Himalayan plateau lay Tibet, a land of monks and nomad herdsmen ruled by the Dalai Lama at Lhasa. The Dalai Lama was a god incarnate, who recognized the political suzerainty of the Chinese emperor.

In the west, astride the ancient "Silk Road" to Europe, lay Sinkiang (Chinese Turkestan), a land of bleak deserts and towering mountains through which roamed fierce Turkic-Moslem nomads. In the north, separated from China proper by the Gobi desert, lay Mongolia. It was inhabited by Mongol herdsmen who were descendants of the warriors of Genghis Khan. Finally, in the northeast lay Manchuria, the land of the Manchus, who had given China her last dynasty. Unlike other outlying provinces, Manchuria contained good farmland, abundant timber lands, and rich deposits of coal, iron ore, and oil. But until he end of the nineteenth century it was closed to Chinese immigrants to prevent friction with the Manchu tribesmen.

The relationship of the outlying provinces to China varied. When the Chinese monarchy was strong it asserted its authority over them; when it was weak they asserted their independence of it. In the thirteenth century the Mongols and in the seventeenth century the Manchus overran China and imposed their rule on the Chinese. But thanks to their large numbers and their superior civilization, each time the Chinese "conquered their conquerors" by assimilating them.

At different times in the long Chinese history the Chinese monarchy asserted its authority also over Burma, Thailand, "Indo-China", and Korea. And all over East Asia Chinese civilization exercised an influence comparable to the influence exercised by Roman civilization over the Mediterranean world. Isolated from the Western world, the Chinese long regard their country as the center of the universe (hence China's name Chungkuo, meaning Middle or Central Kingdom) and their civilization as the highest ever attained. This self-centered and self-satisfied concept was rudely shaken by the arrival of the Europeans in East Asia.

II. China in Revolution

Western influence came to China late. In the sixteenth century the Portuguese established themselves at Macao, and individual Jesuit missionaries were received at the Chinese court. In the eighteenth century western merchants were permitted to trade at Canton. But owing to her relative unity, isolation, and inaccessibility, China escaped western imperialist penetration until the nineteenth century.

Then by the First Opium War (1839-1842) the British forcefully "opened up" China to western influence. By the Treaty of Nanking (1842) Britain secured Hongkong and extraterritorial rights in Shanghai and four other "treaty ports" and-to add insult to injury-exacted an "indemnity" for the aggression she had committed against China. The Treaty of Nanking established a precedent for a long line of "unequal treaties" imposed on China by European powers. Under the rules of European imperialist diplomacy a concession granted to one power had to be followed by a round of "compensations" to the other powers in order to maintain a balance of power in the area. Russia, France, Japan, and Germany joined Britain in seeking concessions in China.

Like tearing the leaves of an artichoke, they seized one Chinese port and province after another. Only the U.S. stood aloof from this undignified scramble and vainly pleaded for the preservation of Chinese territorial integrity and the maintenance of an "Open Door," that is, the right of all nations to trade with China on equal terms (1899). By the end of the century, China had lost control of Burma, Thailand (Siam), Indochina, Korea, Formosa, many provinces of China proper, and all her principal ports.

The humiliation inflicted on China caused rebellion and mounting restlessness. But unlike the Japanese, who in analogous situation rapidly came to the conclusion that the only way to stop the western imperialists was by modernizing Japan, the conservative and tradition-bound Chinese were slow to accept this lesson. In 1900 members of a patriotic society, called the Boxers by westerners, attacked the western embassies in Peking. The siege was relieved by an international expedition, and further humiliations followed.

During the Boxer Uprising the Russians occupied Manchuria and refused to evacuate it afterwards. The Chinese government was helpless to do anything about it, but Japan, which had an eye on the province herself, challenged Russia. The quarrel led to the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) and the defeat of Russia. However, Russian defeat did not mean Chinese victory, for the result of the war was to divide the rich province into Russian and Japanese spheres of interest.

The complete helplessness of the Manchu government caused it to lose face in the eyes of the Chinese people. In 1911 a revolution broke out which led to the dethronement of the boy emperor Pu-yi and the proclamation of the Chinese Republic under Dr. Sun Yat-sen (1867-1925), an Americanized Chinese revolutionary from Canton (1912). But while the Manchu dynasty had clearly lost the mandate of heaven to rule, the republican government had not acquired it. Republican and democratic concepts were beyond the comprehension of most Chinese people. Sun Yat-sen was soon forced to step aside and an old imperial general, Yuan Shi-kai, assumed the presidency. He proposed to restore the monarchy with himself as emperor, but death prevented him from carrying out his plan (1916).

The central government in Peking, whether monarchical or republican, had in any event little control over the country. The Chinese empire had disintegrated into a number of shifting states. Encouraged by the British and the Russians, Tibet, Sinkiang, and Mongolia had asserted their independence. In China proper a number of the old imperial governors had set themselves up as independent war lords and paid scanty attention to the decrees of the Peking government. Like feudal dukes in medieval Europe, they organized private armies in their fiefs, collected taxes, administered justice, and made war on one another and occasionally on the Peking government.

China was not united again under a single government until 1949-by the communists. The outbreak of World War I lessened the pressure of the European imperialist powers on China, but increased that of Japan. The Japanese took over the German concession in Shantung and made on China the notorious Twenty-one Demands. Seeking American protection against Japan, China followed the example of the U.S. and declared war on Germany (August 1917). But she contributed little to the Allied war effort and was cavalierly treated at the Paris Peace Conference. The Allies refused to act against Japan and return the Shantung concession to China, and the Chinese delegation demonstratively left Paris without signing the Treaty of Versailles.

The anger of the Chinese nationalists against the Allied peacemakers pushed them into the arms of Soviet Russia. The Bolsheviks, acting on Lenin's dictum that the road to Paris and London led through Peking and Bombay, renounced all the privileges secured from Asian peoples by the Tsarist government and presented themselves as victims of European imperialism-the same as colonial peoples. The exclusion of the Soviet government from the Paris Peace Conference and the allied intervention in Russia gave some plausibility to this posture.

The Russian Revolution had also internal repercussions in China. The western imperialist nations had brought the modern industrial age to China. In the coastal areas, where they were active, railways, telephones, telegraphs, and machine industry appeared alongside the old Chinese handicraft industries. Small but growing Chinese industrial capitalist and working classes were born. Stimulated by the Russian Revolution, a small but energetic Chinese communist party appeared, which proceeded to organize the industrial proletariat.

But by far the most important Chinese revolutionary party was Sun Yat-sen's Kuomintang party, based in his native city of Canton in the south. Its program was nationalist rather than socialist. It was based on the "Three Principles of the People" (nationalism, democracy, and social progress). But their common enmity to the western powers created a bond between the Kuomintang and communist parties. Sun Yat-sen received a Russian Comintern agent, Michael Borodin, as advisor on party organization and techniques to seize power and admitted the Chinese communists into the Kuomintang (1924).

His brother-in-law and chief lieutenant, General Chiang Kai-shek, an able officer trained in Japan, visited Moscow to study Russian military and political tactics. Upon his return, he organized with the aid of Soviet and German military instructors the Whampoa Military Academy for training of Kuomintang officers (1924). Before an attempt to seize power could be made, Sun Yat-sen died (1925). He was presently enshrined, like Lenin, and passed into Chinese revolutionary mythology.