TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century

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<text> <title> (1920s) China </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1920s Highlights </history> <link 07903> <link 07851> <link 07791> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> China </hdr> <body> [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 dispatch 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. </body> </article> </text>