The republic that Sun Yat-sen ()
and his associates envisioned
evolved slowly. The revolutionists lacked an army, and the power
of Yuan Shikai (
) began to
outstrip that of parliament. Yuan revised
the constitution at will and became dictatorial. In August 1912 a
new political party was founded by Song Jiaoren
(
1882-1913), one
of Sun's associates. The party, the Guomindang
(
Kuomintang or
KMT--the National People's Party, frequently referred to as the
Nationalist Party), was an amalgamation of small political
groups, including Sun's Tongmeng Hui (
).
In the national elections
held in February 1913 for the new bicameral parliament, Song
campaigned against the Yuan administration, and his party won a
majority of seats. Yuan had Song assassinated in March; he had
already arranged the assassination of several pro-revolutionist
generals. Animosity toward Yuan grew. In the summer of 1913 seven
southern provinces rebelled against Yuan. When the rebellion was
suppressed, Sun and other instigators fled to Japan. In October
1913 an intimidated parliament formally elected Yuan president of
the Republic of China, and the major powers extended recognition
to his government. To achieve international recognition, Yuan
Shikai had to agree to autonomy for Outer Mongolia and Xizang
(
).
China was still to be suzerain, but it would have to allow Russia
a free hand in Outer Mongolia and Britain continuance of its
influence in Xizang.
In November Yuan Shikai, legally president, ordered the Guomindang dissolved and its members removed from parliament. Within a few months, he suspended parliament and the provincial assemblies and forced the promulgation of a new constitution, which, in effect, made him president for life. Yuan's ambitions still were not satisfied, and, by the end of 1915, it was announced that he would reestablish the monarchy. Widespread rebellions ensued, and numerous provinces declared independence. With opposition at every quarter and the nation breaking up into warlord factions, Yuan Shikai died of natural causes in June 1916, deserted by his lieutenants.
Nationalism and Communism
After Yuan Shikai's death, shifting alliances of regional
warlords fought for control of the Beijing government. The nation
also was threatened from without by the Japanese. When World War
I broke out in 1914, Japan fought on the Allied side and seized
German holdings in Shandong ()
Province. In 1915 the Japanese set
before the warlord government in Beijing the so-called Twenty-One
Demands, which would have made China a Japanese protectorate. The
Beijing government rejected some of these demands but yielded to
the Japanese insistence on keeping the Shandong territory already
in its possession. Beijing also recognized Tokyo's authority over
southern Manchuria and eastern Inner Mongolia. In 1917, in secret
communiques, Britain, France, and Italy assented to the Japanese
claim in exchange for the Japan's naval action against Germany.
In 1917 China declared war on Germany in the hope of recovering
its lost province, then under Japanese control. But in 1918 the
Beijing government signed a secret deal with Japan accepting the
latter's claim to Shandong. When the Paris peace conference of
1919 confirmed the Japanese claim to Shandong and Beijing's
sellout became public, internal reaction was shattering. On May
4, 1919, there were massive student demonstrations against the
Beijing government and Japan. The political fervor, student
activism, and iconoclastic and reformist intellectual currents
set in motion by the patriotic student protest developed into a
national awakening known as the May Fourth Movement
(). The
intellectual milieu in which the May Fourth Movement developed
was known as the New Culture Movement and occupied the period
from 1917 to 1923. The student demonstrations of May 4, 1919 were
the high point of the New Culture Movement, and the terms are
often used synonymously. Students returned from abroad advocating
social and political theories ranging from complete
Westernization of China to the socialism that one day would be
adopted by China's communist rulers.
Opposing the Warlords
The May Fourth Movement helped to rekindle the then-fading cause
of republican revolution. In 1917 Sun Yat-sen had become
commander-in-chief of a rival military government in Guangzhou
() in
collaboration with southern warlords. In October 1919 Sun
reestablished the Guomindang to counter the government in
Beijing. The latter, under a succession of warlords, still
maintained its facade of legitimacy and its relations with the
West. By 1921 Sun had become president of the southern
government. He spent his remaining years trying to consolidate
his regime and achieve unity with the north. His efforts to
obtain aid from the Western democracies were ignored, however,
and in 1921 he turned to the Soviet Union, which had recently
achieved its own revolution. The Soviets sought to befriend the
Chinese revolutionists by offering scathing attacks on "Western
imperialism." But for political expediency, the Soviet leadership
initiated a dual policy of support for both Sun and the newly
established Chinese Communist Party (
CCP). The Soviets hoped for
consolidation but were prepared for either side to emerge
victorious. In this way the struggle for power in China began
between the Nationalists and the Communists. In 1922 the
Guomindang-warlord alliance in Guangzhou was ruptured, and Sun
fled to Shanghai (
).
By then Sun saw the need to seek Soviet support
for his cause. In 1923 a joint statement by Sun and a Soviet
representative in Shanghai pledged Soviet assistance for China's
national unification. Soviet advisers--the most prominent of whom
was an agent of the Comintern, Mikhail
Borodin--began to arrive in China in 1923 to aid in the
reorganization and consolidation of the Guomindang along the
lines of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The CCP was
under Comintern instructions to cooperate with the Guomindang,
and its members were encouraged to join while maintaining their
party identities. The CCP was still small at the time, having a
membership of 300 in 1922 and only 1,500 by 1925. The Guomindang
in 1922 already had 150,000 members. Soviet advisers also helped
the Nationalists set up a political institute to train
propagandists in mass mobilization techniques and in 1923 sent
Chiang Kai-shek (
Jiang Jieshi in pinyin),
one of Sun's
lieutenants from Tongmeng Hui days, for several months' military
and political study in Moscow. After Chiang's return in late
1923, he participated in the establishment of the Whampoa
(
Huangpu in pinyin) Military Academy
outside Guangzhou, which was
the seat of government under the Guomindang-CCP alliance. In 1924
Chiang became head of the academy and began the rise to
prominence that would make him Sun's successor as head of the
Guomindang and the unifier of all China under the right-wing
nationalist government.
Sun Yat-sen died of cancer in Beijing in March 1925, but the Nationalist movement he had helped to initiate was gaining momentum. During the summer of 1925, Chiang, as commander-in-chief of the National Revolutionary Army, set out on the long-delayed Northern Expedition against the northern warlords. Within nine months, half of China had been conquered. By 1926, however, the Guomindang had divided into left- and right-wing factions, and the Communist bloc within it was also growing. In March 1926, after thwarting a kidnapping attempt against him, Chiang abruptly dismissed his Soviet advisers, imposed restrictions on CCP members' participation in the top leadership, and emerged as the preeminent Guomindang leader. The Soviet Union, still hoping to prevent a split between Chiang and the CCP, ordered Communist underground activities to facilitate the Northern Expedition, which was finally launched by Chiang from Guangzhou in July 1926.
In early 1927 the Guomindang-CCP rivalry led to a split in the
revolutionary ranks. The CCP and the left wing of the Guomindang
had decided to move the seat of the Nationalist government from
Guangzhou to Wuhan. But Chiang, whose Northern Expedition was
proving successful, set his forces to destroying the Shanghai CCP
apparatus and established an anti-Communist government at Nanjing
in April 1927. There now were three capitals in China: the
internationally recognized warlord regime in Beijing; the
Communist and left-wing Guomindang regime at Wuhan
(); and the
right-wing civilian-military regime at Nanjing, which would
remain the Nationalist capital for the next decade.
The Comintern cause appeared bankrupt. A new policy was
instituted calling on the CCP to foment armed insurrections in
both urban and rural areas in preparation for an expected rising
tide of revolution. Unsuccessful attempts were made by Communists
to take cities such as Nanchang (),
Changsha (
), Shantou
(
), and Guangzhou, and an armed
rural insurrection, known as the Autumn
Harvest Uprising, was staged by peasants in Hunan Province. The
insurrection was led by Mao Zedong
(
1893-1976), who would later
become chairman of the CCP and head of state of the People's
Republic of China. Mao was of peasant origins and was one of the
founders of the CCP.
But in mid-1927 the CCP was at a low ebb. The Communists had been expelled from Wuhan by their left-wing Guomindang allies, who in turn were toppled by a military regime. By 1928 all of China was at least nominally under Chiang's control, and the Nanjing government received prompt international recognition as the sole legitimate government of China. The Nationalist government announced that in conformity with Sun Yat-sen's formula for the three stages of revolution--military unification, political tutelage, and constitutional democracy--China had reached the end of the first phase and would embark on the second, which would be under Guomindang direction.