TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/20s/20china

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 9.3 KB | 210 lines

                ߫o                                                          China


  [Communism was also an important factor in the China of the
1920s. Still reeling from the collapse of the decadent Ch'ing
dynasty in 1911, carved into feuding fiefdoms by brutal warlords
who preyed upon a people who could barely wring a living from
the crowded land, China was desperately disorganized and Sun
yat-sen, whose slogan was "China for the Chinese!" and who
organized the Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party.

  Sun, who died in 1925, gratefully accepted Soviet aid and
aides. His heir, Chiang Kai-shek, appeared in the decade's early
years to be just another warlord, and very much under Red
influence. Avowed Communists, including even Mao Tse-tung, a
party organizer in Shanghai, joined the KMT and worked through
it under Moscow's orders. The KMT's Whampoa Military Academy in
Canton employed Chou En-lai, Chinese Communist Premier-to-be,
as its political commissar.

  In 1926-27, by which tie he had used Communist help to become
the ruler of most of southern China, Chiang began to move
against the war-lords of the North, especially "Supertuchun"
Chang Tso-lin of Peking and Manchuria.]


(DECEMBER 13, 1926)

  Against this astute Mogul, wise in the thought of the
Occident, the Cantonese War Lord Chiang Kai-shek steadily
deployed his troops last week. He it was who created for Dr. Sun
the Whampoa Military Academy in which the officers of the new
Cantonese army received their military and political
training--for they have been shown no less the use of the sword
than how to propagandize their troops into a frenzy of Cantonese
loyalty. Chiang Kai-shek, a sort of super-Whampoa Cadet, is
content to wear an austere cotton shirt and sips hot water with
his frugal meals, while Chang Tso-lin banquets among his dancing
girls. From the cold north of Manchuria and Peking comes the
barbaric Mogul to drive back if he can the Cadet who has
conquered half China--and last week Great Britain seemed to
favor the Cadet.

  How Bolshevistic is Chiang Kai-shek? Dr. Sun sent him to
Moscow in 1922, and there he studied for a few months, bringing
back with him Russian military experts who became instructors
at Whampoa. Chiang has taken what Russian gold and guns he could
get, but it should be noted that he could get no others. He has
said: "We can and will use men and money from any nation
sympathetic to us...Russia, in general, has treated China better
than the other nations."

  There rests the crux of Chiang's "Bolshevism." It is rather
pan-Chinese patriotism. As he walks among his soldiers they
cry: "China for the Chinese!"


  [Chiang's troops began taking their slogan seriously and in
early 1927 took over the British concession at Hankow, in
central China, to the immense consternation of the Powers, those
countries that had carved out huge chunks of Chinese economic
activity for their own national interest and profit.

  The Nationalist troops next moved on Shanghai, the Chinese
city most in thrall to foreign interests. The Communist Party
there backed them up by staging a general strike in late
February 1927.]


(FEBRUARY 7, 1927)

  The new and conquering Nationalist Government of South China
continued last week the slow encirclement by its armies of the
great international city of Shanghai.

  The Nationalist Foreign Minister Eugene Chen, issued a
proclamation: "A great and impressive fact must be grasped by
all: the Chinese question now is not what Great Britain and
other powers may wish to grant China to meet 'the legitimate
aspirations of the Chinese'; but the question is what China may
justly grant to Great Britain and the other powers."


(MARCH 7, 1927)

  General Li Pao-chang, Shanghai Commissioner of Defense,
continued his attempts to break the general strike by ordering
soldiers to march about the streets cutting off the head of
alleged strikers and setting up these gory warnings upon poles.

  After five days of this wanton decapitation General Li
Pao-chang posted up a bland proclamation: "I am touched by the
numerous executions by my subordinates. They were prompted
thereto by my orders to execute on the spot, without question
and without trial. This order I now rescind." Li's butchery had
indeed caused about half the 110,000 strikers to return to work.


(MARCH 28, 1927)

  The dense, teeming Chinese quarter of the great international
city at Shanghai was captured by the Cantonese Nationalist army,
last week; but this great victory over a city of almost two
million souls was won in a fashion inglorious and ridiculous...

  The white men and women in the Occidental Quarter of Shanghai
were protected by 20,000 troops, mostly British. They scarcely
knew or cared who captured the Chinese quarter.

  Not even in the Chinese quarter did anyone much care what
happened. The city has been the prey of super-bandits, calling
themselves "War Lords" for years; and all the inhabitants faced,
last week, was the arrival of another army which might be a
little more lenient about looting than the last, since its
leaders profess the brotherhood of Chinese against the
foreigner. But small disturbances bred riots; the streets of the
native city seethed with turbulent and unorganized fighting. To
the International Settlement, thousands of fugitive Chinese, 100
white Russians fled, sought refuge.

  The Cantonese had so often been announced to be at the gates,
on a false alarm, that when they arrived, last week, their
coming was almost an anti-climax. There was no fighting. The
defenders, a miserable rabble of mercenaries, had simply fled
back from the previous scene of battle; and, as they scattered
to hide as best they could, the Cantonese Nationalist columns
trudged in.

  Far more important than events at Shanghai, last week, was a
meeting of the central Executive Committee of the Nationalist
Party at Hankow. Paramount was the revelation that the
Nationalist--hitherto united--are dangerously if not
disastrously split. Victorious Chiang Kai-shek was reported in
one despatch to have publicly renounced the Bolshevism professed
by the Committee; and to be on the point of constituting himself
civil as well as military dictator of the Nationalist movement.


(APRIL 4, 1927)

  At precisely two o'clock, one afternoon last week, a long
grim cavalcade of motor cars entered Shanghai from the South.
Armed men, a hundred strong, rode in these automobiles--modern
equivalents of a bodyguard of cavalry. A slim but unmistakably
commanding Southern Chinese, clad in a uniform entirely
unadorned, rode in the third motor car. This was the great
Conqueror of half China, the Nationalist War Lord Chiang
Kai-shek.

  Thoroughly modern, businesslike, Chiang Kai-shek had ready a
short typed statement for the press: "Right must triumph. The
Powers cannot keep China suppressed no matter how many warships
and soldiers they send here. We will use the economic boycott
against any nation which still desires to keep intact the
treaties which have oppressed China in the past and validated
the foreign concessions. The Chinese people are unable to feel
contented so long as the present situation obtains."

  These statements, firm, clear, dispassionate, were little more
than a notation of the fact that China has been fired by the
Nationalist program, "China for the Chinese," to a pitch
seriously menacing the long supremacy in Chinese affairs of the
Great Powers.


  [Meanwhile, Chiang was reconsidering his relationship with
his Communist allies. In April a rump KMT group at Nanking
impeached the entire Red-leaning Cabinet sitting at Hankow, and
as savage repression of the Communist-led general strike at
Shanghai was permitted after the victory of Chiang's forces. the
victorious forward movement of the KMT continued for the time
being. But Chiang had made enemies who would prove his undoing
20 years later.]

(MAY 2, 1927)

  Martial Law was declared in the Chinese city of Shanghai last
week, by Chinese officers adherent to Chiang Kai-shek. Their
soldiers nabbed haphazard and executed approximately 100 "Reds";
and concurrently the intermittent "general strike" seemed to be
petering out, with all but a few thousand factory hands back at
work.


(JUNE 11, 1928)

  The city of Peking, for five centuries the traditional Capital
of China, fell last week to the South Chinese Nationalist
Armies. Noble was the evacuation carried out by the great
Marshal Chang Tso-lin. Scarcely a retreat, and in no sense a
rout, the War Lord's departure took on the semblance of a
stately pilgrimage. The event was of paramount importance
because, for the first time in the present decade of Civil War,
it can now be substantially claimed that all of China proper is
under a single regime--the Nationalist Government, founded by
the late, famed and revered Dr. Sun Yat-sen, and led to
victorious dominion by its present Generalissimo, slender,
modest, democratic Chiang Kai-shek.

  Since 1911 the word of War Lord Chang Tso-lin has been and
still is law in Manchuria, the vast and fruitful Chinese
province which adjoins China proper on the North and it adjacent
to Japanese territory.

  Thus it was to Manchuria that Marshal Chang departed, last
week, with his armies, his armored trains, his Packard
limousines, his wives, children, concubines, innumerable
bastards, faithful retinue.