Yuan Shikai was born into a family of officials in 1859,
and he purchased an official title in 1880.
He rose in the army and had more than
a dozen wives and many children.
After the 1895 defeat by Japan he trained officers in Korea,
where he became resident.
In 1898 Yuan made the critical decision to stay loyal
to Empress Cixi, dooming the reforms of
Kang and Emperor Guangxu.
As governor of Shandong he disobeyed imperial orders
by punishing criminal Boxers,
but he refused to march on Beijing in early summer of 1900.
He was governor-general of the capital province
of Zhili 1901-07, and he had started schools
for self-government by 1906; but his power was weakened
when he was transferred to Beijing the next year.
After Cixi died in November 1908,
Yuan was quickly pushed into retirement.
During the 1911 revolution he was summoned
by the Qing regime and cleverly negotiated more power
for himself with them and with the revolutionaries.
He insisted on keeping the capital at Beijing and gained
more power by getting the court to recognize him as the
successor of the abdicating Emperor Puyi.
Sun Yat-sen offered to let Yuan replace himself as president
of the new republic as long as he accepted
the republican constitution and parliament.
Yuan Shikai was inaugurated as provisional president
on March 10, 1912 and the Nanjing government
was dissolved on April 1.
Yuan Shikai refused to pay Huang Xing’s 50,000 troops,
and so they had to disband.
After Yuan dismissed the governor-general of Zhili in June
without his countersignature, Premier Tang Shaoyi resigned
along with four Revolutionary Alliance cabinet ministers.
The next premier, the diplomat Lu Zhengxiang, was so
ineffective that he was impeached by the Parliament.
Internal Affairs minister Zhao Bingjun became premier
and made the cabinet compliant.
Yuan claimed he had 800,000 men under arms in order
to negotiate loans for demobilization.
Yuan invited Sun Yat-sen to Beijing, and after many hours
of meetings he appointed him director of railways
on September 9; Huang Xing was put in charge of the
Guangzhou-Hankou and Sichuan railways.
Sun appointed his old friend Charlie Soong (Song Jiashu)
treasurer and hired his oldest daughter Ailing
as his English secretary.
Hu Hanmin would not cooperate with Yuan, and with the
activists Zhu Zhixin, Liao Zhongkai, and Chen Jionming
he formed a revolutionary government in Guangdong.
They applied Henry George’s theories to sell land,
and many merchants and gentry fled to Hong Kong or Macao.
The Chinese Socialist Party had been founded by Jiang Kanghu
with a small study group in Shanghai in November 1911,
but after the revolution it grew rapidly to 400,000 members.
At their second annual congress in October 1912 Sun Yat-sen
spoke for twelve hours over three days.
Anarchists interested in vegetarianism, chastity, and self-sacrifice
opposed his efforts to politicize the party,
and the split caused a rapid decline.
Yuan Shikai banned the Socialist party in the summer of 1913.
The election laws had been promulgated in August.
The new Chinese constitution called for a Senate and a
House of Representatives, and elections were scheduled
for December 1912.
The Revolutionary Alliance led by Sun Yat-sen and
Huang Xing absorbed four small parties and founded the
National People’s Party (Guomindang).
Song Jiaoren had drafted the new constitution, and he
became the leader of the party and appealed to the gentry
and merchants by moderating policies and deleting socialism
and equality of the sexes.
Liang Qichao became chairman of the small Democratic Party
(Minzhudang), and after the election they merged with the
Unification Party and the Republican Party to form the
Progressive Party.
About forty million men over 21 years of age with property
worth $500 or who paid at least $2 in taxes with an
elementary school certificate were eligible to vote.
Suffragist Tang Junying led a demonstration at the National
Council in Nanjing to demand equal rights for women
and the vote, but they were evicted.
The Guomindang was the most organized party,
and they won 269 of the 596 seats in the House
and 123 of the 274 Senate seats.
While the Parliament was adjourned in January 1913,
Yuan promulgated rules for provincial government
that aroused protests.
Guomindang leader Song Jiaoren began criticizing
President Yuan Shikai publicly, demanding a party cabinet.
On March 20, 1913 Song Jiaoren was shot twice while
boarding a train and died two days later.
The evidence led to Premier Zhao and the cabinet.
The assassin died mysteriously in prison,
and Zhao refused to answer a subpoena, claiming illness.
He was made governor-general of Zhili,
but he died of poisoning on February 17, 1914.
Others involved in the case were also killed,
and no one was convicted.
Vice President Li Yuanhong refused to join an
anti-Yuan conspiracy.
Before the Parliament convened in April, Yuan asked
Americans to pray in their churches for China.
The next month the United States became the first nation
to grant Yuan’s government full diplomatic recognition.
Yuan arranged a loan of £25 million from the Five-Power
Banking Consortium on April 26 despite massive opposition
by the Parliament.
Sun Yat-sen and Huang Xing urged them to reject the loan,
but acting Premier Duan Qirui surrounded the Parliament
building with troops.
This money helped Yuan defeat the impending revolution.
The Nationalist (Guomindang) party impeached the
government in May.
Sun Yat-sen decided that Yuan had to be replaced and tried to
negotiate an alliance with Japan to support a second revolution.
Yuan dismissed the governors of Jiangxi, Anhui, and Guangdong,
and in early July they declared independence,
followed by four more provinces within a month.
Yuan sent 10,000 troops from Beijing to Hubei.
Fighting began in Jiangxi on July 12, but the revolutionary
commander Huang Xing abandoned Nanjing on July 29.
Sun Yat-sen went to Japan on August 8, soon followed by
Huang and other leaders.
The Chinese navy in Shanghai with fresh funds sided with Beijing,
and Yuan’s forces defeated the revolution by September.
General Zhang Xun’s forces, who still had Manchu queues,
took Nanjing on September 1 and spent two weeks
pillaging, raping, and burning.
The damage was estimated at about $20 million.
British minister John Jordan supplied Yuan with loans and
munitions, and he banned Sun and Huang Xing from Hong Kong.
Yuan’s generals in the Yangzi Valley became warlords,
and his imperial troops occupied provinces
that had not even revolted.
Tens of thousands of people who had participated in the
uprising were punished, and thousands were executed for sedition.
In Hunan under Tang Xiangming
about 5,000 people were executed in 1914.
Customs dues were being collected by foreigners who were
keeping them to pay the interest on China’s foreign debts,
and so the Yuan government was running a deficit of
13 million yuan per month in 1913.
Yuan spent money building and improving prisons and to
make elementary education free and compulsory for boys.
He objected to reducing the Confucian education and insisted
that the entire book of Mencius be taught in elementary school.
In 1912, the first year of the republic, the number of schools
in China increased to 87,272 with 2,933,387 students
including 141,430 girls.
Yuan tried to suppress the opium trade and smoking,
but opium dealers were protected in foreign areas.
The British backed Tibet, and on October 7, 1913
Yuan Shikai acknowledged Tibet’s autonomy.
That day England recognized the Chinese republic.
Japan and Russia also gained concessions before they
extended diplomatic recognition.
On October 6 Yuan’s soldiers and police compelled the new
Parliament to vote three times until they had elected him
president for a five-year term.
He was inaugurated four days later.
On October 31 the Parliament promulgated a constitution
with a cabinet system to check the president’s powers,
but four days later Yuan denounced the Guomindang as
seditious, dissolved the party, and evicted their members
from Parliament.
After their affiliates were searched, 438 Guomindang party
members were banned from Parliament.
Sun Yat-sen fled once again to Japan in November.
Yuan in December ordered that magistrates had to pass a
qualifying examination on Chinese laws, treaties, customs,
literature, and local administration.
Parliament did not have a quorum and was dissolved
on January 4, 1914 as Yuan annulled the 1912 constitution.
The next month he also ordered the provincial assemblies
and local governments dissolved.
About forty specialists on finance met and recommended a
silver currency and minting a national dollar to replace
foreign coins and the provincial “dragon dollars.”
All of China was ordered to worship formally
Heaven and Confucius.
Yuan also called a national conference attended by 66 delegates,
and on May 1 they replaced the provisional constitution with the
Constitutional Compact that gave President Yuan extraordinary
powers with ten-year terms that allowed re-election.
The two years of press freedom that had allowed nearly
five hundred newspapers to reach a circulation of 42 million
ended when censorship was imposed with severe penalties.
In the spring of 1914 Yuan promulgated regulations to give
civil governors more authority in the provinces so that the
military would be less likely to revolt.
Yuan liked bureaucracy and instituted examinations that
emphasized bureaucratic skills.
He ordered prosecution of official corruption, revived the
Censorate, and instituted a special court
for judging official crimes.
On July 8, 1914 Sun Yat-sen formed the secret Revolutionary
Party (Gemingdang).
Those who joined before and during the revolution were
to have more political privileges, and everyone had to sign
and attach their fingerprints to an oath of loyalty to Sun.
Only a few hundred activists in Japan joined the party.
Chen Qimei emerged as a leader, and he was friends with the
Shanghai businessman Li Houyi and the millionaire
Zhang Jingjiang, who was connected to Du Yuesheng,
leader of the Green Gang.
Chen also brought the young Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek),
who was wanted for armed robbery and had assassinated
Chen’s rival Tao Chengzhang in his hospital bed
on February 15, 1912.
Sun supported the bandit White Wolf (Bai Lang), who led
rebel troops in southern Henan and Anhui before gaining a
base in Shanxi; but White Wolf died in August, and
hundreds of thousands of imperial troops were used
to defeat them by late 1914.
Great Britain had large investments in China and increased
them to $607 million by 1914.
By then Germany, Russia, Japan, France, the United States,
and others had a total of one billion dollars invested in China.
They wanted to protect their assets and guarded the passage
between Beijing and the sea.
When the European war began in August 1914,
loans became difficult; but Japan increased theirs.
On August 15 Japan gave Germany one month to transfer
the territory of Jiaozhou that it had leased from China in 1898.
Japan sent troops to China on September 2, and they occupied
Qingdao in Shandong on November 7.
In January 1915 Japan presented China with its Twenty-one
Demands that included control of Shandong, Manchuria,
Inner Mongolia, the southeast coast, and the Yangzi Valley.
They also wanted joint administration of the Han-Ye-Ping
Coal and Iron Company, nonalienation of Chinese ports and
islands to other powers, Japanese police and economic advisors
in the north, and more commercial rights in Fujian province.
Newspapers opposed the demands, and the public was aroused.
Nineteen governors urged Yuan Shikai to refuse.
Tens of thousands met in the International Settlement in Shanghai
on March 18 and resolved to begin a boycott of Japan.
One week later Yuan Shikai ordered the boycott abandoned,
but the boycott spread.
On May 7 Japan gave China an ultimatum to accept the
territorial concessions but not the other demands.
Yuan agreed two days later and signed the treaty on May 25
without consent of the Parliament, which had been dissolved.
Many Chinese students left Japan, and merchants organized
a boycott of Japanese products.
Yuan ordered all the provincial governments to prohibit the
boycott, and so the campaign changed
to encouraging the use of native goods.
Sun Yat-sen became unpopular during this time
because he was still trying to negotiate with Japan
in order to overthrow Yuan.
Sun fell in love with his secretary Song Ailing;
but her Christian father, Charlie Soong, would not approve
the marriage because Sun was already married.
Her younger sister Song Qingling became Sun’s secretary,
and they fell in love and eloped on October 25, 1915,
causing a scandal among Christians because of bigamy and
among Confucians for not having her father’s permission.
Their marriage was happy, and Qingling became a respected figure,
eventually being honored as the vice president
of the People’s Republic of China until her death in 1980.
Yuan made Confucianism China’s state religion and gradually
tried to give himself imperial authority.
On August 21, 1915 Yang Du and the Peace-Planning Society
began a campaign to make Yuan emperor,
and the famous translator Yan Fu was listed as one of the
six directors without his permission.
Liang Qichao published an article opposing a return to the
monarchy, arguing against changing the basic form of the state
and explaining that the republican revolution had destroyed
respect for the monarchy.
As the revolt against it developed, he also argued that
Yuan was unsuitable.
In November the National People’s Representative Assembly
of 1,993 people voted unanimously to
approve Yuan being emperor.
In Shanghai on November 10 his commander was assassinated,
and a warship was seized on December 5.
Cai E escaped from detention on November 11 and organized
the National Protection Army in Yunnan to defend the republic.
Yuan accepted the petition to be emperor on December 12
and began planning for his inauguration on January 1, 1916
by ordering a 40,000-piece porcelain dinner set,
a large jade seal, and two costly imperial robes.
Protests spread throughout China, and on December 23 the
Yunnan military leader Cai E gave Yuan two day
to cancel his monarchist plan.
Two days later Yunnan declared independence,
and 10,000 soldiers began marching.
Guizhou declared independence on December 27,
and Yuan postponed his enthronement.
Cai E invaded Sichuan in January, and two leading generals
declined to go after his National Protection Army.
On March 7, 1916 Japan declared that
Yuan should be removed.
Guangxi declared independence that month, and another
anti-monarchist army formed in Shandong.
Sun Yat-sen raised more than 1,400,000 yen,
and Cen Chunxuan collected another million.
On March 20 Feng Guozhang and others demanded that
Yuan cancel the monarchy, and he did so two days later.
Nonetheless Guangdong and Zhejiang declared independence
in April.
Kang Youwei advised Yuan to resign and leave the country.
Shaanxi, Sichuan, and Hunan announced their
independence in May.
Yuan’s assassins killed Chen Qimei on May 18 while
he was trying to organize an insurrection in Shanghai.
Yuan Shikai became ill and died of uremia on June 6, 1916.
Vice President Li Yuanhong became president on June
and recalled the old Parliament of 1913, but some argued that
the terms of these members had expired and debated
which constitution should be effective.
Li appointed Duan Qirui premier and
Feng Guozhang vice president.
Duan had opposed Yuan’s attempt to become emperor but
backed the 1914 constitution and the senior commanders from
the Beiyang army.
In October 1916 the French annexed the Chinese quarter of
Laoxikai in Tianjin; when this provoked mass meetings,
a boycott, and a strike, the French withdrew.
In 1916 Chinese laborers were recruited in Shandong
to help the war effort in Europe.
Volunteers were given twenty Chinese dollars
when they embarked, and their families in China were
to receive ten dollars a month.
After passing severe medical exams and being disinfected,
they had dog tags riveted to their wrists.
About 200,000 Chinese worked for the Allies in France,
Flanders, and elsewhere, and nearly 2,000 died overseas.
After the Germans sank a boat in the Mediterranean, killing 543,
Chinese recruits were shipped east, crossed Canada in a train,
and were convoyed across the Atlantic.
They worked ten hours every day except for Chinese holidays
and were not in combat.
The YMCA helped them,
and they sent 50,000 letters home each month.
The military governors (dujun) were called warlords by the
Europeans, and they held meetings at Xuzhou.
At their third meeting in January 1917 they recommended
dissolving Parliament.
They also wanted to restore Confucianism as the state religion.
Japan loaned Duan five million yen in January, and in March
the Parliament broke diplomatic relations with Germany;
but President Li Yuanhong opposed declaring war.
The movement for neutrality was supported by chambers of
commerce and Sun Yat-sen, who wrote to Lloyd George that
the Chinese were not concerned with European quarrels.
Duan persuaded Parliament to break off diplomatic relations
with Germany in March.
He declared war himself on May 14 and surrounded the
Parliament with partisans demanding a war declaration.
Li dismissed Duan on May 23, but nine provinces supported
Duan by declaring independence.
Anhui’s military governor Zhang Xun brought 5,000 soldiers
to Beijing on June 7 to mediate and demanded the
Parliament be dissolved.
One week later Li complied.
In Shanghai the naval commander sent the fleet to Guangzhou
(Canton) and declared independence on June 25, 1917.
Sun Yat-sen had organized a government in Guangzhou with
130 members from the Parliament, and he got two million
Chinese dollars from Germany to buy the army and navy.
Yet the Guangzhou government declared war against
Germany on September 13.
Feng Guozhang urged Beijing to restore the 1912 constitution.
General Zhang Xun led his army from the Yangzi provinces to
Beijing and restored the 11-year-old Emperor Puyi on July 1.
The monarchist Kang Youwei was invited to the court and
drafted numerous reforms but was not given much access.
Zhang replaced Cao Kun as governor-general of Zhili.
Duan and Cao gathered their Beiyang forces and drove
Zhang’s army out of Beijing on July 12.
Puyi was deposed again, and President Li Yuanhong ordered
that he receive a modern education from Western tutors.
Li resigned on July 14,
and Duan resumed his position as prime minister.
Feng Guozhang became acting president on August 1, 1917.
A re-elected Parliament convened on August 12 and declared
war on Germany and on Austria-Hungary two days later.
This enabled Duan to negotiate another 145 million yen in loans.
He sent troops to fight the revolutionaries in the south;
but President Feng wanted to avoid a civil war,
and the military campaign was sabotaged.
After declaring war, China seized German property and ships
and took over their concessions in Qingdao, Tianjin, and Hankou.
The Allies demanded that these should remain international
concessions, and Duan’s regime agreed.
Western investors controlled the customs, salt tax,
and the post office, and the revenues were used to make
China’s debt payments first.
Usually none of what was left went to dissenting southern
governments.
China’s annual debt payments were estimated at £10,800,000.
Japan extended eight more loans to China in 1917 and eleven
in 1918 in return for the Bank of Korea, Bank of Taiwan,
and the Industrial Bank of Japan getting contracts for mines,
forests, and railways in northeast China, the telegraph, and
revenues from the Grand Canal and the stamp duty.
In the next year Japan lent Duan 140 million yen ($70 million).
Sun Yat-sen returned to Guangzhou in July 1917, and 250 of the
old members of parliament elected him grand marshal.
However, Europeans cut off funds for his supporters.
The revolutionary Tang Jiyao had opposed the monarchical
movement in 1915 in Yunnan, and he wanted
to control Guizhou and Sichuan.
In 1917 he invaded the latter as far as Chengdu.
Lu Rongting led the Guangxi militarists
who also controlled Guangdong.
Lu declared Guangxi-Guangdong independent in order to lift
the bans on taxing opium and gambling.
An international agreement made in 1911 to make growing and
trading opium illegal after the end of 1917 was ignored in China,
and many warlords made the opium business a major source of
revenue, especially in Guangdong, Fujian, Henan, Anhui, Guizhou,
Shaanxi, and Sichuan.
Customs seizures of foreign opium increased from 26,676 pounds
in 1918 to 48,375 pounds in 1919 and 96,627 pounds in 1920.
In a treaty made on February 20, 1917 Russia recognized
Japan’s 21 Demands, and Japan acknowledged Russia’s
recent gains in Outer Mongolia.
The next day Britain agreed to Japan’s claims in Shandong.
Japan also made secret agreements with France and Italy that
were not revealed until January 1919.
On November 2, 1917 the United States signed the Lansing-Ishii
Agreement recognizing Japan’s special position in China.
When Duan called a new provisional parliament on November 10
instead of the old one, Sun Yat-sen organized a military
government in Guangzhou and a Constitution Protection Movement.
Feng Guozhang’s Zhili clique controlled northern and central China,
and Duan resigned on November 22.
In February 1918 the general Feng Yuxiang sent a circular
telegram from Henan with a peace proposal.
Feng had become a Methodist in 1913, and his troops marched
singing Christian hymns and patriotic songs.
He believed in Confucian principles of moral politics
and tried to rule his areas justly.
About 1915 he wrote the short Book of the Spirit with
admonitions and aphorisms on morality, patriotism, and military
discipline, and in 1926 he added a chapter on revolution.
Feng established a Military Training Corps at Changde in Hunan
from 1915 to 1917, and he excelled in training troops.
He described these years as his most enthusiastic Christian period.
He encouraged his soldiers to pray and to attend Bible classes
and religious services for which he employed Chinese preachers.
He encouraged baptism, but it was not required
and did not affect promotion.
Feng did not allow his men to smoke opium or tobacco,
drink alcohol, use obscene language, gamble,
or visit brothels, which he closed.
While governing Henan for half a year in 1922, Feng Yuxiang’s
aims included aiding war victims, eliminating oppressive taxes,
arresting corrupt officials, establishing factories to give work to
the unemployed, repairing roads and irrigation, instituting free
education, and prohibiting opium, gambling,
prostitution, and foot-binding.
On March 7, 1918 Duan’s chief of staff, Xu Shuzheng,
organized the powerful Anfu Club with support from Finance
minister Cao Rulin, and they began bribing members of parliament.
Duan gained control of the army and became premier again
on March 23, forcing Feng Guozhang to retire.
The new Soviet government revealed and renounced the
secret agreements that Russia had made with Japan
to take Manchuria and Mongolia from China.
On March 25 Duan accepted the Sino-Japanese Military
Mutual Assistance Conventions, which were kept secret
until February 1919.
On May 18, 1918 Eugene Chen published the editorial
Selling Out China” in the Beijing Gazette that exposed the
negotiations and called Duan a traitor; Chen was imprisoned,
and the newspaper was suppressed.
At that time China had 330 newspapers.
On May 5, 1918 the three thousand Chinese students in Japan
met and resolved to return to China.
The next day Japanese police arrested 46 Chinese students.
In Beijing more than two thousand college students protested
the military conventions by going to the office of
President Feng Guozhang on May 21.
Student demonstrations also were organized in Tianjin, Shanghai,
Fuzhou, and other cities.
The Chinese government ordered the students to return to Japan,
but many went to Shanghai where they founded the
Save-the-Nation Daily.
On June 30 they founded the Young China Association to
rejuvenate the Chinese spirit, study “true theories,” expand
education and commercial reforms, and overturn declining customs.
When Premier Duan Qirui used all of the 120-million yen
Nishihara loan for military and political expenses even though
it was intended for industrial development, 2,000 students
demonstrated outside the President’s residence.
Liang Qichao, who had been Yuan’s minister of Justice,
became Finance minister in 1918, and his followers
were called the Research clique.
The Anfu clique was led by Duan and other Beiyang officers,
and they conducted elections in two stages.
After each provinces’ electors were chosen, they met in June
and July to elect the Parliament.
In the second stage especially the candidates bought the votes for
the House for $150 to $500 and paid much more for the Senate.
Out of 470 seats the Anfu Club controlled 342, the
Communications clique between 50 and 80,
and the Research clique about 20 seats.
The Anfu caucus was run by those who
organized it and controlled the money.
Xu Shichang had been Yuan Shikai’s secretary
and he was a member of the Anfu clique.
The dujun association recommended him,
and the Parliament elected him president
unanimously on September 4.
After 72,000 Japanese troops invaded Soviet Siberia in July,
President Xu Shichang sent a Chinese army to help them.
China’s warlord government accepted a 20-million-yen loan
from Japan in September and granted them
the right to build two railways in Shandong.
Duan resigned on October 10, and Qian Nengxun
was appointed acting premier.
After the European war ended on November 11, the Chinese
government proclaimed a three-day holiday;
thousands paraded in Beijing.
On November 16 a truce was ordered in the north-south civil war.
Lu Rongting and his Black Flags of Guangdong and Guangxi
forced Sun Yat-sen to abandon his military government that month.
Sun resigned and fled to Shanghai, where in August 1919
he founded the periodical Reconstruction (Jianshe) and renamed
his party again the Chinese Nationalist Party in October.
In 1919 a movement by the Cantonese elected Wu Tingfang
governor, but the Guangxi clique cancelled the results.
In Sichuan the Anfu leaders were overcome in 1918 by the
warlord Xiong Kewu, who governed there for more than thirty years.
Tan Yankai became governor of Hunan in 1911, and he fought the
Anfu clique from 1916 to 1918; but in 1919
the Anfu warlord Zhang Jingyao regained Hunan.
Yuan Shikai had appointed Zhang Zuolin governor of Mukden.
He managed to take over Heilongjiang in 1917 and Jilin in 1919,
giving him control of three provinces in Manchuria.
Zhang’s Fengtian clique supported the Anfu group and mortgaged
the forests of Jilin for loans from Japan.
The Anfu leaders Ni Sichong in Anhui and Wang Zhanyuan
in Hubei were especially unpopular, and they were opposed by
President Feng Guozhang’s Zhili clique that included generals
Cao Kun and Wu Peifu in the Yangzi Valley.
The war years stimulated the Chinese to develop their own
industries, and their exports increased greatly.
By 1920 machines were producing more than three billion
cigarettes that were marketed with modern advertising.
The number of Chinese banks increased, though some warlords
caused chaos by issuing so many paper notes.
H. H. Kung (Kong Xiangxi) had married Charlie Soong’s daughter
Song Ailing in 1914, and these two related families
built up a financial empire.
Money was appropriated for railways,
but some of it was lost to corrupt warlords.
Foreign investors still controlled 77% of the shipping,
45% of cotton spindles, and 78% of coal mining.
Although China’s import surplus was low during the European war,
it went from 16 million taels in 1919 to 220 million taels in 1920.
More mills were added, and China’s flour exports were forty times
higher in 1920 than they were in 1914.
Peasant landowners were pushed off their lands, and rents rose.
Warlords collected more taxes,
and fewer landowners held more land.
In 1912 the famous translator Yan Fu became the first chancellor
of the modernized Beijing University, which was completely
funded by the government.
In December 1916 he was succeeded by the dean Cai Yuanpei,
who had founded the Work and Study Movement in 1912.
Sun Yat-sen had made Cai his minister of education in 1912,
but he resigned after Yuan Shikai became president.
By 1917 more than ten million Chinese
had received modern educations.
Cai emphasized research with scientific methods, a broader
curriculum than was needed for government recruitment,
and academic freedom.
He co-founded the China Society for the Promotion of
New Education in January 1919, and by then Beijing University
had a faculty of 202 professors teaching 2,228 students.
Chen Duxiu left Japan in protest of the 21 Demands.
In September 1915 he founded New Youth,
and he became the dean of Beijing University in 1917.
Chen recommended that the Chinese be independent,
progressive, aggressive, cosmopolitan, utilitarian, and scientific.
He criticized Confucianism for its superfluous ceremonies,
meek compliance, making family more important than the
individual, upholding inequality, subservient filial piety, and
orthodoxy that discouraged free thinking.
He favored Western innovations and praised
Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy.
Li Dazhao became head librarian at Beijing University
in February 1918, and in June he published a favorable
description of the Russian Revolution.
A study group met in his office
and became the Marxist Research Society.
Cai Yuanpei formulated the slogan “Work is sacred,”
and Li and Chen started the Weekly Critic in December
to discuss national and world politics.
In the first issue of New Tide on January 1, 1919
Luo Jialun opposed reform by violence and wrote,
We would rather worship
George Washington than Peter the Great,
Benjamin Franklin than Bismarck,
Karl Marx’s economics that Richelieu’s public finance,
and Thomas Edison’s inventions
than Alfred Krupp’s manufacture.1
Li Dazhao’s students began sending out
lecturers to educate people.
Li emphasized that the society based on force
should be replaced by one based on love.
Chen was forced to resign as dean in March.
New Youth came out with a special issue on Marxism on
May 1, 1919 that included Li’s essay, “My Marxist Views.”
Hu Shi studied philosophy with John Dewey at
Columbia University, where he earned his Ph.D.
In February 1915 he wrote in his diary,
“It is not a disgrace for a nation to lack a navy or to lack an army!
It is only a disgrace for a nation to lack
public libraries, museums, and art galleries.”2
In 1917 Cai Yuanpei appointed Hu a professor, and he became a
leader in the movement to write in plain language (baihua)
that Huang Yuanyong had proposed in 1915.
Hu summarized the literary reforms in the following eight guidelines:
1. Write with substance.
2. Do not imitate the ancients.
3. Emphasize grammar.
4. Reject melancholy.
5. Eliminate old clichés.
6. Do not use allusions.
7. Do not use couplets and parallelisms.
8. Do not avoid popular expressions.3
In 1918 Hu summarized this literary revolution
in the following four statements:
1. Speak only when you have something to say.
2. Speak what you want to say
and say it in the way you want to say it.
3. Speak what is your own and not that of someone else.
4. Speak in the language of the time in which you live.4
This change from using classical Chinese (wenyan) has been
compared to the Renaissance when Europeans began writing
in their national languages rather than in Latin.
In January 1918 New Youth began publishing all its articles
in baihua, and the government adopted
baihua in the schools in 1920.
Hu published a study of the family in the famous novel,
The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin.
He published a complete translation of A Doll’s House in a special
1918 issue of New Youth on the plays of Henrik Ibsen.
Hu Shi published his Outline of the History of Chinese Philosophy
in February 1919.
He also criticized Confucianism and exalted Western ideas
such as democracy and science.
Hu favored critical thinking and problem solving
rather than the idle discussion of “-isms.”
He wanted reforms to eliminate poverty, sickness,
illiteracy, corruption, and disorder.
Many of the young radicals were anarchists.
In 1913 Liu Sifu had founded the
Consciousness Society in Guangzhou.
They learned Esperanto and recommended abstaining from
twelve things—meat, wine, tobacco, servants, marriage,
surnames, official positions, rickshaws, running for parliament,
political parties, military service, and religion.
However, Liu died of tuberculosis in 1915,
and his group dissolved.
On November 17, 1918 in Beijing 6,000 Chinese had
celebrated the Western democracies’ victory over German
militarism, and many hoped that Woodrow Wilson’s ideal
of self-determination would prevail.
China’s 62 delegates to the Versailles peace conference
included officials from Beijing and
from Sun Yat-sen’s government in Guangzhou.
Their demands for China’s self-determination and the removal
of foreign controls were backed by the press, chambers of
commerce, and student associations.
However, the peace conference focused only on issues
related to the war, and the only Chinese issue was Shandong.
The diplomat V. K. Wellington Koo explained that Japan
forced China to sign the treaty of 1914, that Shandong is
holy land for China as the birthplace of Confucius and Mencius,
and that China had a right to the restoration of Qingdao based
on the principle in international law that treaties can be revised
after the conditions on which they were based have changed.
Koo pointed out that the loss of Qingdao would harm China
economically because it was the best harbor they had.
He argued that the Chinese Parliament had never ratified
Japan’s 21 Demands and that when China entered the war
in 1917, these and the treaties with
Germany were made null and void.
However, the Japanese pointed to the agreement Beijing
made in 1918 with Japan, and on April 30, 1919 Wilson,
Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau decided to grant
Shandong to Japan despite the latter’s promise
to restore it to China.
Beijing’s daily China Press published the report on May 1.
Several hundred students from thirteen colleges in the Beijing
area met on May 4, 1919 and passed five resolutions to send
telegrams protesting the Shandong settlement of the Versailles
treaty, to awaken the Chinese people to their desperate plight,
to hold a mass meeting in Beijing, to form a Beijing student union,
and to demonstrate against the Versailles treaty that afternoon.
Some anarchists planned to burn Cao Rulin’s house,
but they kept their plans secret from the others.
At least three thousand students gathered in Tiananmen Square
and marched toward the foreign legations
to present petitions on the Paris treaty.
Signs protested foreign interference
and condemned Chinese traitors.
The British, French, and Italian ministers were absent,
and letters were left.
At the home of the foreign minister Cao Rulin five students
broke in by a window and opened the front door.
Students poured in and beat up the politician Zhang Zongxiang,
who had agreed to give up the rights in Shandong to the Japanese.
Cao had escaped with a servant, but they set his house on fire.
Most of the police had been neutral,
but now they arrested 32 demonstrators.
Orders came from above, and a fight between police and
demonstrators resulted in one student dying.
Martial law was declared in the area.
The student union formed on May 5 in Beijing included
middle-school and high-school students as well as
those from colleges and universities.
China’s President Xu Shichang issued two orders to
discipline the students in the next three days.
Cai Yuanpei was pressured to resign on May 8.
Minister of Education Fu Zengxiang left office on May 12,
and two days later the Government ordered
force used against the students.
In the next five days student demonstrations occurred in
major cities, and student unions were formed.
Beijing students from all eighteen colleges and universities went
on strike on May 19 and presented six demands to the President.
In the next three weeks demonstrations erupted
in more than two hundred cities.
Students disobeyed an order to return to classes on May 25,
and on June 1 President Xu declared martial law in Beijing.
When middle schools and above began a strike on June 1
in Wuhan, the Hubei governor Wang Jianyuan sent troops to
guard the schools; about a hundred students lecturing in the
streets were wounded and arrested.
In June student delegates from Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing,
Tianjin, and Japan met in Shanghai and formed the
Student Union of the Republic of China.
On June 2 in Beijing seven students were arrested.
On the next day more than nine hundred students went out in
groups of fifty to lecture in the streets, and by the end of June 4
about 1,150 students had been arrested.
Education minister Yuan Xitao resigned after twenty days in office.
On the next day more than a thousand students from girls schools
marched to the President’s palace to demand free speech
and the release of the imprisoned students.
That day a commercial strike began in Shanghai to support
the 13,000 students on strike, and within a week it grew to
at least 60,000 workers in forty factories.
The acting minister of Education was replaced,
and learning of the Shanghai strike, he withdrew the troops
and police from the school buildings.
Hu Renyuan was appointed temporary
chancellor of Beijing University.
When 1,473 merchants, workers, students, journalists, and
others in the Federation of All Organizations of China met in
the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce on June 6,
they requested the Beijing government annul the unjust
treaties and punish the authorities responsible.
They noted that the strikes were most peaceful and
asked friendly countries to uphold justice
and give them spiritual support.
That day merchants closed their shops in Nanjing.
About 2,400 students on strike were attacked by troops,
and in the next three days strikes by merchants
spread along the Yangzi River.
Four officials tried to persuade the students to leave the
Beijing jail on June 7; they refused
but marched out in triumph the next day.
On June 10 the hated Cao Rulin, Zhang Zongxiang,
and Lu Zongyu were allowed to resign.
Chen Duxiu distributed pamphlets demanding the resignation
of the Anfu government, disbanding the Beijing police,
and free speech; he was arrested the next day
and detained for three months.
On June 12 the Government released the other students,
dismissed the three hated officials, and announced
they would not sign the Treaty of Versailles.
That day the merchants’ and workers’ strikes ended.
Premier Qian resigned on June 13.
Chinese students surrounded the quarters of the Chinese
delegates in Paris with a continuous vigil, and so none of them
went to the treaty-signing ceremony on June 28.
Although China rejected the peace treaty with Germany,
they signed one with Austria-Hungary;
thus China became a member of the League of Nations.
On July 22 the Student Union of China
declared the student strikes over.
On July 25 Leo Karakhan as the Soviet Commissar of
Foreign Affairs signed a manifesto that renounced all the
factories that Russians had built or owned in China and
all the extraterritorial rights of Russians in China.
Chancellor Hu Renyuan was removed on July 30,
and Cai Yuanpei resumed his position
at Beijing University on September 20.
Leaders founded the review Young China,
and many other journals and clubs formed such as
Emancipation and Reconstruction in Shanghai
and the Xiang River Review in Changsha
by the Hunan Students’ Association.
Tracts, banners, and pamphlets of the movement
were written in the vernacular baihua.
The “Manifesto of New Youth Magazine” was written by
Chen Duxiu and approved by other editors in December.
They opposed warlords and plutocrats and
wanted to get rid of antiquated ideas.
They aimed for a new era that is “honest, progressive,
positive, free, equal, creative, beautiful, kind, peaceful,
full of universal love and mutual assistance, and pleasant labor.”5
They advocated women’s rights, and the first females were
admitted into Beijing University in 1920.
The Women’s Association of Hunan was founded in
February 1921 to work for equal rights in property inheritance,
voting, office-holding, education, work, and choice in marriage.
Mao Zedong had founded the New People’s Study Society
in Hunan in April 1918, and they formed a Communist cell.
In December 1919 the Society for the Study of Socialism
began in Beijing and other cities.
Socialist clubs grew, and new journals were published.
The Beijing Society for the Study of Marxist Theory
began in March 1920.
Chen Duxiu founded a Marxist Study Society in May
and a Socialist Youth Corps in August.
Nineteen issues of Labor World were published
in Shanghai during the second half of 1920.
The Trade Union Secretariat established
its headquarters in Shanghai.
In the summer of 1920 Hu Shi published a series of
articles in the Weekly Critic on “Problems and –isms.”
He observed that the slaves of Confucius and Zhu Xi
were being replaced by the slaves of Marx and Kropotkin.
He questioned whether Marxism and anarchism which
claimed to have “fundamental solutions”
could solve specific problems.
Hu suggested they educate the masses, emancipate women,
and reform schools.
Hu Shi joined with others and Li Dazhao in August and
published the “Manifesto of the Struggle for Freedom”
in which they asked for an end to police oppression,
regulations limiting publications, and the emergency
enactments of 1912 and 1914.
They demanded freedom of speech, press, assembly, and
association as well as privacy, writ of habeas corpus,
and non-partisan supervision of elections.
Liang Qichao had attended the Paris peace conference,
and he wrote “Reflections on a European Journey” criticizing
Western civilization for its materialism, subjugation of nature
through science and technology, and Darwinian conflicts
between individuals, classes, and nations.
He began to see that Eastern ways may be an antidote
to the
European trends that led to the massive violence of the World War.
Liang wrote about an inner realm that he found in the works
of the Neo-Confucians Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming
and the Mahayana Buddhists.
A New Culture movement developed that also valued
vernacular fiction as high literature.
Liang wrote that the four emotional powers of fiction
are to incense, immerse, prick, and uplift.
Liang’s friend Zhang Junmai studied German philosophy and
compared Kant’s epistemology and ethics
to the practical idealism of Wang Yangming.
He argued that science could not completely explain human
experience because people are subjective, intuitive,
and have free will.
Wang Yangming had found that intuitive moral insight
was learned from individual action in the world.
Droughts in 1919 and 1920 devastated Zhili, Shandong,
Henan, Shanxi, and Shaanxi.
In the 1920-21 famine at least a half million people died,
and about twenty million peasant homes were destitute.
The peasants suffered exploitation by the warlords and the gentry.
Prices increased as one yuan (silver dollar) was worth
138 coppers in 1919; but by 1925 the yuan was valued
at 217 coppers in Shanghai and 285 coppers in Beijing.
A National Bankers’ Association was formed in 192
to regulate currency reform.
They refused to buy any more government bonds
until the old ones were readjusted.
The 27 foreign banks with branches in China had three or
four times as much capital as about 120 Chinese banks.
In 1921 the Chinese government put its customs surplus
into the Consolidated Internal Loan Service that was
administered by Francis Aglen, the inspector-general of customs.
Qu Qiubai was in Li Dazhao’s study group and went
to Moscow in 1920 for Beijing’s Morning News.
Despite the poverty he reported on the positive spirit of the
revolution, and he was most impressed by the Soviet
commissar of education, Anatoly Lunacharsky.
Qu later became chairman of the social sciences
department at Beijing University.
Lenin sent the Third Communist International (Comintern)
agents Grigori Voitinsky and Yang Mingzhai to China.
They met Li Dazhao in Beijing in January 1920
and Chen Duxiu in Shanghai in May.
A meeting of socialists, anarchists, progressives, and
Guomindang members elected Chen secretary
of a provisional central committee.
They used a Sino-Russian news agency and a
foreign-language school to recruit Communists.
In April 1921 a Chinese Comintern office was opened in Irkutsk,
and Li Dazhao sent some associates there.
In May 1921 the Chinese government signed a treaty with the
Weimar Republic in which Germany renounced
“all its special rights, interests and privileges” in China
and canceled its Boxer indemnity.
China signed similar treaties with Hungary and Turkey.
That year the Soviet diplomat I. Yurin persuaded the Beijing
government to give the Boxer indemnity funds to him
instead of to the Czarist ambassador.
China had about 1,500,000 soldiers.
Japanese exports to China went down from 656 million yen
in 1919 to 424 million yen in 1921.
In July 1921 Mao Zedong was Hunan’s delegate to the
first plenary meeting of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
in Shanghai which met secretly in a closed girls’ school
in the French concession.
Zhou Enlai had been arrested for a raid in early 1919,
and he led the May 4th protestors from Tianjin
before going to France the next year.
His future wife Deng Yingchao had helped to form the
Association of Patriotic Women Comrades in Tianjin.
Young Deng Xiaoping was known in Paris
for distributing mimeographed papers.
Xiang Jingyu was a friend of Mao, and she married another
Hunanese worker in France, where she worked
for women’s rights and socialism.
When she returned to China, she was appointed director of a
new women’s department; she organized women who worked
in silk and cigarette factories in Shanghai.
Mao, Liu Shaoqi, and Li Lisan organized miners in the Anyuan
collieries, workers on the Guangzhou-Hankou railroad, and
construction guilds and rickshaw pullers in Changsha.
In September 1921 radical Chinese students occupied
university buildings in Lyons, and 103 were arrested and deported.
In January 1922 about forty Chinese delegates joined others
from Mongolia, Korea, Japan, Java, and India to attend the
Far Eastern Workers’ Congress in Petrograd.
Qu Qiubai served as an interpreter for Grigory Zinoviev, who
urged them to cooperate with the nationalist bourgeoisie
to expel foreign imperialists at this stage of the revolution.
The CCP grew slowly and had about
two hundred members in 1922.
In July at Shanghai the second congress of the CCP passed
a resolution that explained that the world’s economic order
had been destroyed by the imperialist war of 1914-18 and
that the capitalists were planning to exploit the raw materials
and the working class in their colonies.
They noted that China had been suffering from the violence
of warlords for the past eleven years and that Wu Peifu was
intending to use military means to unify China.
They set as their goals to overthrow the feudal warlords
and stop civil wars, free China from imperialist oppression,
unify China in a federal system while recognizing the autonomy
of Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang, and protect all freedoms
of workers, peasants, women, and children.
The Russian agent called Maring urged the CCP to ally itself with
the Guomindang to fight the warlords in a democratic revolution.
At the third congress at Guangzhou in June 1923 the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) added many more goals
such as abolishing all the unequal treaties; banishing warlords
and confiscating their property for the public good;
nationalizing railroads, banks, mines, and large industries;
electing all public officials; abolishing the secret police and laws
that oppressed unions; enforcing sexual equality before the law;
unifying and standardizing the monetary system while excluding
all foreign currencies; taxing incomes and inheritance while
abolishing commercial surcharges; providing free and
compulsory education separate from religion; abolishing
corporal and capital punishment while reforming litigation laws;
replacing mercenary military recruitment with universal
conscription; providing housing subsidies for the poor and
controlling rent; imposing price ceilings on necessities;
helping peasants with rent reductions, improved irrigation,
government loans, and price supports for staple crops;
and helping workers with labor rights, the eight-hour day,
equal pay for women, sanitation regulations and workers’
hospitals with compulsory insurance,
and relief for the unemployed.
John Dewey came to China with his wife on May 1, 1919
and taught there for more than two years.
Hu Shi often interpreted his lectures.
Bertrand Russell also traveled widely in China from
October 1920 to July 1921; he emphasized peace and the
positive value of Confucianism and Daoism that he found more
useful than Western imperialism and militarism.
China had a Russell Study Society and a Russell Monthly.
Russell was accompanied by his lover Dora Black,
who lectured at women’s schools and to anarchists.
In 1923 Rabindranath Tagore gave a series of lectures and
emphasized nonviolence, but he was criticized by Communists
for India’s acceptance of colonialism.
Carsun Zhang spread the philosophy of Bergson;
Wang Guowei promoted Schopenhauer and Nietzsche;
and Li Shizeng emphasized Kropotkin’s mutual assistance
as a better means of evolution than Darwinian struggle.
Liang Shuming was brought up as a Buddhist
but gained a Western education.
In 1917 he became the first Buddhist
to teach at Beijing University;
but after his father committed suicide in despair at
China’s situation in 1918, he returned to Neo-Confucianism.
In 1921 Liang published his famous
Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies.
He described India as obsessed with religion and spiritual
development to the exclusion of everything else and
suggested that that attitude should be rejected.
Liang Shuming believed that China needed reform and
should adopt Western institutions critically so as to
renew its own harmonious culture.
Hu Shi noted that Easterners are generally satisfied
with their simple life and so often do not seek
to improve their material world.
Hu Shi wanted to “reorganize the national heritage”
by applying the methods of science to evaluate with
historical criticism religion and other traditions.
In 1922 he helped found the journal Endeavor
that was dedicated to political action.
He criticized the dogmatic assumptions of
both Sun Yat-sen and the Marxists.
Gu Jiegang studied the customs, folklore, and folksongs
of the people with scientific methods,
and he founded the journals Folksong Weekly and Folklore.
Zhang Junmai (Carsun Chang) was influenced by
spiritual philosophy, Wang Yangming, and Henri Bergson.
He argued that science has its limits and does not account for
subjectivity, intuition, synthesis, free will, and personal unity.
Later Zhang tried to develop a liberal mean between the
extremes of the Nationalists and Communists by founding
a socialist party that emphasized human rights, free expression,
and the constitutional separation of powers.
They influenced intellectuals but did not have
a large popular following.
Wu Chihui argued for science and denied
the spiritual elements and soul.
Hu Shi saw the limits of a materialistic philosophy and offered
a synthesis that accepted science and a philosophy of life.
Hu suggested that beyond the small self of the individual is
the large self of society that does not die.
He believed that living for the sake of the species and posterity
is a higher religion than the selfish pursuit
of a future life in Heaven or the Pure Land.
Chinese workers suffered from low wages, long hours,
few if any vacations, and miserable housing conditions.
Wages were often docked, and kickbacks were demanded.
Children worked in bad conditions up to thirteen hours a day.
In 1918 twenty-five major strikes took place, and in 1919
Shanghai cotton mills had to increase wages by 12% or more.
In January 1922 Guomindang activists instigated a strike in
Hong Kong and Guangzhou involving 40,000 sailors and
dock-workers that affected more than 150 ships.
Others joined the strike in March, and with more than 120,000
on strike the owners granted wage increases of 15% to 30%
with benefits and recognition of the union.
In May the Communists Li Lisan and Liu Shaoqi began
organizing workers’ clubs among Anyuan coal miner
and Day steel workers, but the strike by
50,000 coal miners in Tangshan failed in October.
That August the first major strike by women occurred
in the silk-spinning mills of Pudong outside Shanghai.
That summer the Trade Union Secretariat appealed
unsuccessfully to the new government of President
Li Yuanhong to pass labor laws including the eight-hour day.
There had been 50 major strikes in 1921,
but in 1922 there were 91.
In 1920 and 1921 the Guomindang promoted a federalist
movement by trying to get Hunan, Hubei,
and Shaanxi to become independent.
In the summer of 1920 Liu Xiang and Xiong Kewu drove
Tang Jiyao’s Yunnan troops out of Sichuan
and declared independence,
and the next year Liu ousted Xiong.
Tan Yankai tried to make Hunan independent in 1920,
but he was pushed out by the warlord Zhao Hengti,
who proclaimed Hunan independent and even promulgated
a constitution in January 1922.
However, as Mao Zedong pointed out, he used force to
suppress students and workers.
In the spring of 1921 federalists in Hubei overthrew the
Anfu governor Wang Zhanyuan, but the Zhili clique in Beijing
sent General Wu Peifu to crush the federalist effort in 1921.
Wu received massive arms shipments from the United States
and loans from British banks.
Zhejiang’s governor Lu Yongxiang proclaimed independence i
September 1921 but still ruled autocratically.
Yu Youren led an independence movement in Shaanxi
in the summer of 1921 and set up a Citizens’ Assembly.
In October some Chinese bankers in Shanghai issued a
manifesto calling for international cooperation, an end to
extraterritoriality, and Chinese control over their own railways.
In November 1921 the United States invited diplomats from
Japan, China, and six European powers to meet in Washington,
and they agreed to limit their navies according to a formula
that made Japan strongest in the Pacific.
The Chinese delegation proposed nine points—honoring China’s
political independence, no treaties among other countries
that affected China, respecting Chinese neutrality in future wars,
removing all limitations on China’s political freedom and
jurisdiction, reviewing foreign rights, immunities, and
concessions in China, and limiting China’s commitments.
France and Britain offered to relinquish leased territories,
but Japan refused to do so.
Several of China’s points were granted in the Nine-Power
Treaty signed on February 6, 1922.
That month world public opinion persuaded Japan
to sell most of its properties in Shandong back to China.
In 1923 the powers agreed to close their post offices
except in leased territories,
and China’s import tariffs could be raised to 5%.
In April 1922 Zhang Zuolin attacked the Zhili clique near Beijing,
but Feng Yuxiang’s forces drove them back to Manchuria.
The Luoyang faction led by Wu Peifu tried to unify China
by having Xu Shichang yield the presidency to Li Yuanhong.
Wu asked Sun Yat-sen to resign too, but he refused.
The new Finance minister Luo Wengan reduced the government
debt by £200 million by renegotiating the Austrian loans
while obtaining £80,000 for ready use.
When he was charged with corruption, President Li had him
arrested on November 18.
The cabinet resigned although Luo was
exonerated eighteen months later.
Wu extorted 300,000 yuan from the Hankou Chamber of
Commerce and another 100,000 from the bankers.
Feng got little support from Wu and was reported
to have accepted a large bribe from Japan.
On February 2, 1923 the Communists combined sixteen
workers’ clubs into a union that went on strike
and shut down the Beijing-Hankou railway.
On February 7 General Wu Peifu ordered his men to attack
the strikers, killing 35 workers and wounding many more.
That day the union leader Lin Xiangqian was arrested in Wuhan.
When he refused to order his members to go back to work,
he was beheaded.
The railway men went back to work on February 9,
and the year 1923 had only 48 major strikes.
In May 1923 a thousand bandits attacked the
Tianjin-Pukou luxury train at Lincheng, killed some Chinese,
and kidnapped more than a hundred others,
including sixteen foreigners.
The diplomats in Beijing demanded better supervision
but
came up with a plan to exploit more money from the railway.
Chinese public opinion was outraged,
and the foreigners withdrew their plan to take over the railway.
The Chinese government compensated the victims,
and the bandits were allowed to join the army.
When President Li Yuanhong’s government could no longer
pay wages, Cao Kun arrested his minister of Finances.
Four cabinet members loyal to Cao resigned on June 6, 1923
causing the rest of the cabinet to resign also.
The garrison troops protested for back-pay;
police went on strike; and
organized demonstrations surrounded the palace.
President Li fled the capital on June 13 and was detained
on a train by Cao’s general Yangcun
until he submitted his resignation.
The Parliament moved to Shanghai; but the Dianzinbaoding
faction bribed members of Parliament with $5,000 each to
return to Beijing and elect Cao Kun president.
Li fled to Japan. Cao was inaugurated on October 10
as a new constitution was promulgated.
Cao had spent $13,560,000 to become president,
and the foreign diplomats immediately
recognized his government.
In May 1924 Beijing recognized Soviet control over
Outer Mongolia and the East China Railway through
Manchuria, and Russia renounced extraterritoriality,
its concessions in Tianjin and Hankou,
and its Boxer indemnities.
The Anfu party still controlled Zhejiang.
On September 3, 1924 Zhili forces from Jiangsu and Fujian
invaded Zhejiang and Shanghai.
Two weeks later Zhang Zuolin’s Fengtian forces invaded from
Manchuria, joining the war on the side of Zhejiang.
Two days later the Anfu forces abandoned Zhejiang and
retreated to the perimeter of Shanghai.
The Fengtian army broke through the Zhili lines on October 7,
and five days later the Anfu army abandoned Shanghai.
After heavy fighting, Wu Peifu stabilized the Zhili front,
and on October 23 Feng Yuxiang led his army into Beijing.
Wu Peifu’s Zhili army had 170,000 men and probably could
have defeated the Fengtian forces, but Feng Yuxiang
betrayed Wu and changed sides in Beijing.
Feng reorganized the cabinet by deposing
President Cao Kun on November 2.
The next day Wu Peifu boarded ships at Tanggu with his
portion of the remaining Zhili forces
to retreat to the Yangzi Valley.
Feng negotiated with Zhang Zuolin of the Fengtian clique
and with the Anhui clique to form the National People’s army,
and on November 24 they brought back Duan Qirui to run the
government as “provisional chief executive.”
Zhang Zuolin signed a treaty with Moscow in November.
Feng had invited Sun Yat-sen to come to Beijing,
and he arrived at Tianjin on December 4;
but nine days later Duan Qirui dissolved the
parliament and abolished the constitutions.
Sun Yat-sen reorganized the Chinese Nationalist party
on October 10, 1919 without distinctions between
members or a personal oath of loyalty.
On November 9, 1920 they resolved to implement
his Three People’s Principles and a
constitution with the five branches.
Sun in the first part of his
Plan for National Reconstruction
emphasized the psychological reconstruction
of moving from thought to action.
He reversed a truism and argued that
it is easy to act but hard to know.
The second part on material reconstruction
was also published separately as
The International Development of China.
Sun attributed China’s poverty to lack of development,
crude methods of production, and wasted labor.
He called for foreign capital and equipment with their
scientific and technological expertise.
With China’s abundant natural resources and cheap labor
he predicted that China would become
“an unlimited market for the whole world”
and an essential part of international trade.
He suggested that capitalism could create socialism in China
and thus was one of the first to recommend a mixed economy.
He believed that industries could provide for
the needs of every individual and family.
Sun proposed that an international organization could
coordinate the aid that China needed for its development
in order to avoid “commercial warfare.”
Sun’s ideas to open China to the West, use foreign technological
and financial experts, develop coastal outlets, allow a public
sector to co-exist with private enterprise, and value social
stability foreshadowed the Four Modernizations
later implemented by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s.
The anarchist general Chen Jiongming regained Guangzhou,
and he called Sun Yat-sen back in October 1920.
They set up a republican government in April 1921,
and 225 members of the old Parliament
under the 1912 constitution elected Sun president.
He accepted the autonomy of the provincial government with
Chen Jiongming as governor and
commander of the Cantonese army.
Chen promulgated a provincial constitution and limited
military expenditures to 30% of the budget
while reserving 20% for education.
Chen Duxiu was appointed education commissioner.
Chen Jiongming’s anarchist friends led the trade unions.
Sun got his son Sun Fo reinstated as mayor of Guangzhou.
After refusing Wu Peifu’s request to resign,
Sun Yat-sen tried to dismiss Chen Jiongming,
but he was popular from his victories in Guangxi.
When Sun ordered General Ye Ju to withdraw from Guangzhou
within ten days and threatened him,
Ye Ju had Sun’s presidential palace shelled on June 16, 1922.
Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) was a field officer for
General Chen Jiongming, but he helped Sun escape.
Sun tried to negotiate from a gunboat, but he had lost
popularity because of his refusal to resign.
A British gunboat enabled him to reach Hong Kong,
and then he went to Shanghai.
Sun Yat-sen had met the Comintern agent Hans Maring
(Hendricus Sneevliet) in 1921, and in the fall of 1922
Communists were allowed to join the Guomindang.
The Comintern sent Adolf Joffe to China, and the
New Tide Society and thirteen other organizations
welcomed him to Beijing in August 1922.
Joffe agreed that conditions in China were not right
for Soviet Communism, but he offered Russian support.
Sun hoped that when the Communists understood the
beauty of Chinese civilization, especially its ethics,
that they would adopt the principles of the Guomindang.
Because Soviet Russia had renounced the privileges that
Czarist Russia had in China and was showing sympathy
for their cause, Sun believed they should accept their friendship.
Through correspondence he agreed to an alliance with the
Soviets and to admit Communists into the Guomindang.
On September 4 a Nationalist conference at Shanghai
approved this, and Hu Hanmin drafted a manifesto
that was proclaimed on January 1, 1923.
On January 12 the Comintern ordered Chinese Communists
to join the Nationalist party and work with them for
Sun’s bourgeois revolution,
and the Sun-Joffe Declaration was signed on January 26.
On that day Sun Yat-sen also sent a circular telegram
to the leading militarists with a plan for peaceful unification
calling for a voluntary demobilization of troops under the
good offices of a “friendly power” such as the United States.
Sun Yat-sen hired troops for Ch$400,000, and they drove
Chen Jiongming out of Guangzhou in January 1923.
Sun returned in triumph on February 21
to establish a military government again.
Most of the old parliamentarians went back to Beijing,
where they were offered $5,000 each to vote as requested.
The diplomatic corps in Beijing refused to give Sun the surplus
customs revenues as they did to the militarists in the north.
Sun’s requests for loans from Hong Kong merchants,
the Guangzhou Chamber of Commerce,
and British businessmen were rejected.
However, his son Sun Fo returned as mayor of Guangzhou
and got military financing from the city.
The mercenaries that Sun Yat-sen had hired from
Yunnan, Guangxi, and other places
financially exploited the city and the region.
In March 1923 the Comintern in Moscow decided
to send advisors to Sun Yat-sen and authorized
two million Chinese dollars for him.
He began collecting the local salt revenues in May and
took in nearly $3 million by December; the foreign powers
only protested that the debts were not being paid.
Sun wrote to the diplomatic corps in September and
October complaining that the arrears due the Guangdong
government from customs were Ch$12,600,000,
but instead they were being used by the Beijing
government to make war on the South.
The Comintern agent Mikhail Borodin (Gruzenberg),
who spoke English, reached Guangzhou on October 6
and advised Sun to implement an eight-hour day,
a minimum wage, and to confiscate land to distribute
it to peasants, but Sun declined to alienate his
supporters and never agreed to confiscate land.
Yet Borodin became his most influential advisor.
On October 25 Sun appointed a Provisional Central
Executive Committee of nine and included a Communist.
Chen Jiongming had been besieging Sun’s army at
Huizhou since August, and Borodin in November urged
the Guomindang to mobilize the masses against them
by declaring the confiscation and redistribution of land.
Sun was not available to approve the Committee’s
resolution, but he was grateful that Chen’s forces retreated.
Sun announced in December that he would seize the
maritime customs revenues in Guangzhou, but threatening
foreign gunboats caused him to change his mind.
The first Guomindang national congress in January 1924 was
attended by 165 delegates, and they recessed for three days
to mourn the death of Lenin.
The party had registered 23,360 members in China
and had about 4,600 abroad.
They elected Li Dazhao, Sun Yat-sen, Hu Hanmin,
Wang Jingwei, and Lin Shen to the presidium,
and they dedicated themselves to defeating imperialism and
the warlords by following Sun’s three people’s principles of
independence, democracy, and socialism
and the five-power constitution.
The delegates approved participation by the Communists
without giving up their party affiliation,
but the right wing still made up two-thirds of party officials.
Sun Yat-sen sent Jiang Jieshi to Moscow for three months.
He came back impressed by the discipline and efficiency of the
Communist Party and recommended it as a model for the
Guomindang; but he also was convinced that the Soviet Union
wanted to take over large provinces from China.
Sun Yat-sen appointed Jiang head of the new military academy
on the island of Huangpu (Whampoa) in May 1924.
The Guangzhou government provided Ch$186,000,
and the Soviets contributed Ch$2,700,000 and 8,000 guns.
Borodin got the Communist Zhou Enlai named as director
of the political department, and the Soviet general Vassili Blücher
(known as Galen) was the military advisor.
Cadets were required to have a middle-school diploma,
and that excluded most workers and peasants.
Most cadets did not like Communism and became loyal to Jiang.
The Guomindang also set up a Farmers’ Bureau with Peng Pai
as secretary and the Farmers’ Movement Training Institute
where Mao Zedong taught.
After an attempted assassination of the visiting
Governor-General Merlin of French Indochina in the
Shamian concession of Guangzhou, the British and French
imposed stricter security measures.
All the Chinese workers in Shamian went on strike on July 15,
and they were supported by 26 unions.
Sun mediated for a month, and the French and British
lifted the new security measures.
From January to August 1924 Sun Yat-sen gave a series
of sixteen lectures at Guangzhou University that were revised
and published as The Three Principles of the People.
The first principle minzuzhuyi means literally
“the doctrine of the people’s lineage” and implies the
Chinese
race and culture as well as nationalism and independence.
This was the main principle that mobilized the anti-Manchu
feeling for the Chinese revolution of 1911.
Sun had proclaimed the equality of the five races in 1912,
but he noted that only about ten million of the
four hundred million people in China were not Han Chinese.
Sun praised the Confucian virtues of Chinese culture
and their high moral standards that enabled them
to assimilate other ethnic groups.
Whereas European society was based on the individual,
Chinese society was based on the family.
In his second lecture on nationalism Sun described the political
and economic oppression of China by imperialist nations.
Although China was not completely colonized politically,
economically it was colonized and exploited by several powers.
Dismantling the “unequal treaties” was one
of the most important goals for independence.
Sun’s second principle minquan means
“the rights of the people”
and has been interpreted as democracy.
Sun recognized that the masses are sovereign,
and their rights are election, recall, initiative, and referendum;
but he believed that governmental power
should be exercised by those with vision.
His five branches of government included the
traditional executive, legislative, and judicial
plus the Chinese civil service examinations
and the censorate, which included the power to impeach.
Sun still held to his theory of three stages
of a successful revolution,
especially because of the failure in 1912.
He believed that to stabilize the revolution the
government may impose martial law for a time
to suppress counter-revolutionary forces.
In the second tutelary phase a period of education allows
the local governments to learn and practice democracy.
When the provincial districts have become autonomous,
then the constitution may be promulgated
and a national parliament may be elected.
Sun Yat-sen’s third principle minshengzhuyi means
“the people’s livelihood” and was interpreted by Sun
himself as socialism or communism but not Marxism.
Sun believed that the problem of subsistence motivates
people to cooperate for social progress and that
class conflict is an aberration.
He pointed to the recent progress in Europe and America
as the result of a rising general level of education,
nationalizing the means of communication,
higher taxes on income, and other reforms which
enabled production to increase and distribution
to be improved for both employers and workers.
Thus Sun emphasized Confucian harmony rather than
material conflicts. He noted that Karl Marx’s predictions
of longer working hours, reduced wages for workers,
and higher prices for manufactured goods had been wrong.
Sun suggested that when the people
in the state share everything,
the Confucian commonwealth may be attained.
When everyone works for the common good,
then universal love reigns.
Sun realized that China was poor and that its inequality
was not between the rich and the poor
but was differences among the poor.
The Nationalist party aimed to equalize
land rights and restrict capital.
He still agreed with Henry George that the land should
be given to its cultivators and that unearned wealth
should be taxed and redistributed.
Sun aimed to equalize landownership and regulate capital.
The government would tax land
according to its estimated value,
which was set by the owner; but the government
could buy the land for that estimated amount.
Thus the owners had to set the value
between countervailing deterrents.
Sun prophetically realized that technological improvements
such as mechanization, fertilizers, electrification,
and crop rotation would increase production
so much that wealth could be redistributed.
Sun was influenced by Maurice William’s
Social Interpretation of History and proposed
nationalizing the means of transportation and
communication, higher taxes on income and inheritances,
and collectivizing the distribution networks.
Sun recommended that the state promote industry
and the use of machinery while
coexisting with private enterprise.
He wanted the government to develop communication,
railroads, waterways, and mines on a large scale.
He emphasized the immediate need to abolish the
unequal treaties and take back the customs from
foreign control so that China could end imperialistic
exploitation and participate fairly in international trade.
The private Merchant Corps army of volunteers in
Guangzhou had risen from 13,000 in 1923
to more than 50,000 by the summer of 1924.
On August 9 Sun Yat-sen ordered their weapons from the
Norwegian cargo ship Hav seized
and guarded in the Huangpu Academy.
Later he offered to release them for a price.
On October 10 Guomindang demonstrators interrupted the
delivery, and the Merchant Volunteer Corps fired on them.
The merchants called for a general strike to overthrow
Sun’s government and bring back Chen Jiongming.
Five days later the first Huangpu class of 800 defeated the
Merchant Corps and burned and looted
the Xiguan business quarter.
This destruction made Sun unpopular with that class
in Guangzhou and Shanghai, and in November
he left to attend the national reconstruction conference
called by Feng Yuxiang in Beijing.
Sun hoped to bring about a revolution from the top and
published his Manifesto on Going North on November 10.
He wanted to end the unequal treaties and distribute power
between the capital and the provinces with national unity.
He called for a national convention of delegates from various
associations that included entrepreneurs, merchants, educators,
students, workers’ unions, peasants, and even militarists.
Sun’s 58th birthday was celebrated on November 12
in Guangzhou by 20,000 people with a parade.
The next day he and his wife Qingling, accompanied by
Wang Jingwei, Eugene Chen, and Borodin, left for Hong Kong.
They spent five days in Shanghai and a week in Japan,
where he gave a speech in Kobe on November 28
proposing Asian solidarity against Western imperialism.
Sun reached Tianjin on December 4,
and from then on his illness forced him to stay in bed.
Duan Qirui criticized Sun’s idealism and confirmed
the foreign treaties in order to get
their recognition of his government.
Sun was welcomed in the capital on December 31
by more than 100,000 people and was hospitalized
at the Beijing Union Medical College,
where he was diagnosed with liver cancer.
Wang Jingwei helped Sun write his “Political Testament”
that became a charter for the Nationalist party.
He died on March 12, 1925 and was succeeded
by Liao Zhongkai and Wang Jingwei on the left
and Hu Hanmin on the right.
Sun’s family wanted a Christian funeral; but others wanted
a political demonstration, and so two separate
ceremonies were held on March 19.
Many have called Sun Yat-sen the father of modern China.
Zhang Zuolin was the warlord who controlled Manchuria,
and in the fall of 1924 he sent troops south to challenge
his rival Wu Peifu in Beijing.
They took over the Tianjin-Pukou railway
and invaded the Yangzi Valley.
In the spring of 1925 the Zhili army of Jiangsu defeated the
Anfu faction in Zhejiang, and the warlord Sun Chuanfang
took over the five provinces of the lower Yangzi.
In 1925 the Russians provided Feng Yuxiang with weapons,
money, and advisers, but he tried to prevent the
political indoctrination of his troops.
After his war against Zhang Zuolin went badly in late 1925
and ended, Feng resigned in early 1926
and went to the Soviet Union for five months.
In the south in February 1925 armies led by Jiang Jieshi’s
Huangpu officers with Soviet guns won several battles
over the warlord Chen Jiongming, taking Shantou in March.
In May at the Second National Workers Congress in Guangzhou
281 delegates represented 166 unions with 540,000 members,
and they set up the General Labor Union.
After defeating two more warlords, Jiang’s troops occupied
Guangzhou in June, capturing 17,000 prisoners and 16,000 guns.
On May 15, 1925 Japanese guards at a Shanghai
textile mill shot eight Chinese labor representatives
who were negotiating with management, killing one.
One week later Chinese students and workers held a
memorial service and verbally attacked the Japanese owner.
On May 30 three thousands workers and students
from eight colleges assembled outside a police station
in the Shanghai International Settlement to demand the
release of six Chinese students who had been arrested
by the British for protesting imperialism and militarism.
The British inspector Everson ordered the Chinese and Sikh
constables to fire, and they killed eleven and wounded twenty.
This “May 30th atrocity” provoked demonstrations
in about thirty cities, and 160,000 people
in Shanghai went on a general strike.
The General Union negotiated an agreement with Japan
in August and with the British in September.
The May 30th Movement stimulated thousands of Chinese
to join the Nationalists (Guomindang) or the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which increased in
membership from 1,000 in 1925 to 30,000 in 1926.
That year Guomindang membership increased to 150,000.
On June 10-11 in Hankou the British and Japanese militia
killed fourteen Chinese and wounded one hundred.
The Nationalist armies that were fighting in eastern Guangdong
returned to Guangzhou and had to
fight for six days to regain the city.
On June 14 the Guomindang Political Council met with
Borodin advising, and they organized the government
with nine ministries and reformed the military
as the National Revolutionary Army.
Labor leaders went to Hong Kong and persuaded the unions
to begin a strike and boycott on June 21.
In Guangzhou a rally on June 23 faced Shamian Island,
from where British and French troops shot at the protestors,
killing 52 and wounding 117.
Some Chinese fired back and killed one European.
The strike in Hong Kong was supported by a massive boycott
of British goods, and both lasted sixteen months.
Finally after the British threatened military action
in September 1926, Guomindang’s foreign minister
Eugene Chen promised to end the boycott in October
and levy extra taxes to pay off the strikers.
In December 1925 the British police inspector
and his lieutenant were fired,
and the Municipal Council paid a $75,000 indemnity
to the deceased and wounded.
The Chinese in Shanghai protested against taxation without
representation, and in 1926 the foreigners allowed
three Chinese to be elected to the Municipal Council.
A Nationalist government was established in Guangzhou
on July 1, 1925 with Wang Jingwei as president.
They pacified the opposition in Guangdong
and Guangxi by February 1926.
Sun Yat-sen’s friend Liao Zhongkai became governor of
Guangdong and was in charge of Guomindang’s workers
department, and he organized massive strikes
and boycotts in the early summer.
While going to attend a Guomindang Executive Committee
meeting on August 20, 1925
he was assassinated by several gunmen.
Jiang Jieshi and Wang Jingwei led the committee that
investigated and arrested many suspects, executing a few.
Jiang and Borodin sent suspected Hu Hanmin to Russia.
The National Revolutionary Army won three campaigns
in eastern Guangdong, and three generals from Guangxi
brought that province into alliance with Guangzhou.
Guangdong was a rich province and raised $1,200,000
per month from gambling taxes
even after what officials took in graft.
A Political Training Department began functioning
in October to instruct officers and troops.
The daily Political Work was edited by a Communist
and distributed 18,000 copies in the army.
In the summer of 1925 Dai Jitao published two books
on Sun Yat-sen’s philosophy that argued against
having Communists in the Guomindang.
Fifteen members of the Executive Committee met
on November 23, 1925 by Sun Yat-sen’s tomb
at Western Hills near Beijing.
They supported Hu Hanmin and resolved to drive
the Communists out of the Guomindang.
On the Communist side Chen Duxiu noted that in
the Guomindang the rightists only talked about the
three people’s principles while
the leftists acted to attain them.
At the second Guomindang congress held in Guangzhou
in January 1926 a majority of the 278 delegates were
Communists while only 45 were on the right.
Peng Pai had been organizing social services for peasant
associations since 1921 and had 100,000 members by 1923.
Mao Zedong was director of the Guomindang’s
Peasant Movement Training Institute in Guangzhou
and was organizing in Hunan around Changsha.
Guangzhou was considered so “Red” that many businessmen
moved to Shanghai or Beijing.
The successful banker T. V. Soong (Song Ziwen),
Sun Yat-sen’s brother-in-law, had become Guomindang’
Finance minister in 1925, and he was raising
more than 3.6 million yuan per month.
Borodin agreed to limit the Communists
to one-third of the committees.
The cadets at Huangpu had formed the
Society for the Study of Sun Yat-senism.
They were anti-Communist and set up
their own party headquarters in Shanghai.
In early 1926 Zhang Zuolin made an alliance with Wu Peifu
and gained control of southern Hebei and Hubei.
Writer Lu Xun was teaching in Beijing on March 18 when
some of his students were among the 47 shot and killed
while demonstrating against politicians who had given in
to foreign demands based on the unequal treaties.
Lu Xun and his wife fled south to Guangzhou.
Feng Yuxiang helped Duan Qirui’s government survive
but Zhang Zuolin ousted Duan in April.
Zhang’s army combined with those of Wu Peifu and
Sun Chuanfang numbered more than 600,000.
Feng Yuxiang and Zhang Zuolin fought a costly war
in 1926 that lasted eight months.
From the middle of 1926 to the middle of 1927
a regency cabinet was set up; but it had little power,
and so government had no funds and no direction.
Zhang Zuolin proclaimed himself grand marshal
on June 17, 1927 and organized a military government.
As the Guomindang armies advanced north,
so many would defect to the south that
Wu Peifu and Sun Chuanfang lost their power in 1927.
Zhang Zuolin still controlled Beijing,
and his vassal Zhang Zongchang ruled Shandong.
On March 20, 1926 the gunboat Zhongshan commanded
by a Communist appeared off Huangpu, and Jiang Jieshi
(Chiang Kai-shek), fearing they would abduct him,
had the Zhongshan commander arrested.
Jiang declared martial law in Guangzhou, disarmed workers’
pickets, and arrested more than thirty Russian advisors.
Communist newspapers were shut down.
Borodin returned to Guangzhou
from Comintern meetings in Beijing.
In April he agreed with Jiang that
no CCP members would head Guomindang bureaus,
and he gave the Executive Committee a list of CCP members.
On May 9 Wang Jingwei left for France.
On May 15 the Central Executive Committee limited
Communists to no more than a third of committee
memberships and made other restrictions.
The CCP Executive Committee rejected these,
but Soviet premier Joseph Stalin
ordered them to stay in the Guomindang.
By the time of its congress in May the
General Labor Union had grown to 1,241,000 members.
Huangpu had graduated 7,795 officers,
and Jiang Jieshi had 85,000 men
in his National Revolutionary Army.
Guangxi added another 30,000 troops
and had 6,000 cadets in other military schools.
Jiang became commander of the National Revolutionary Army
in June, and using all these forces, he began the northern
expedition on July 1 to eliminate Wu Peifu
and achieve national unification.
The Guomindang force occupied Changsha on July 11,
and in August they chased the retreating Hunan army along
the Miluo River and threatened the tri-city area of Wuhan.
General Wu Peifu arrived and had
eight of his commanders beheaded.
The Hanyang commander went over to the Nationalists,
who gained its huge arsenal.
When Hankou submitted,
Jiang promised to protect all its foreigners.
While they besieged Wuchang, the Jiangxi warlord
had Communists and radicals rounded up and beheaded
based on their short Russian hair-styles.
Civilians were starving, and the Wuchang commander
opened the gates on October 10.
Nationalists entered the city while others attacked Jiangxi.
By November the National Revolutionary Army had suffered
15,000 casualties while taking Jiujiang and Nanchang.
Fujian’s navy changed sides,
and its capital Fuzhou fell in December.
The Nationalists had conquered Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi,
and Fujian while Guangxi and Guizhou
had negotiated agreements.
The National Revolutionary Army was trained
not to loot nor press workers into service.
Zhou Zhangshou (Lu Xun) was born as the oldest son
in a gentry family in 1881 in Shaoxing, Zhejiang,
where he was well educated.
In 1893 his grandfather Zhou Fuqing was caught attempting
to bribe the chief examiner with 10,000 taels and was
imprisoned until the general amnesty of 1901.
His father Zhou Boyi was barred from the exams,
became depressed, drank, became ill, took opium,
and died in 1896, leaving Zhangshou head of the family.
He had studied the classics, history, and philosophy
in a private school under the outstanding teacher Shou Jingwu.
Zhangshou attended the Jiangnan Naval Academy and in 1898
he did well on the civil service examination.
His uncle persuaded him to change his name to Zhou Shuren
because soldiers were not respected.
In 1901 he read Yan Fu’s translation of Thomas Huxley’s
Evolution and Ethics,
and he was influenced by its social Darwinism.
Then Shuren read Lin Shu’s translations of
La dame aux camelias by Dumas and other fiction
by Charles Dickens, Walter Scott, Rider Haggard,
and Arthur Conan Doyle.
He was especially impressed by
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Shuren graduated from the School of Mines and Railroads
in 1902 and went to Japan for more study on a
Qing-government scholarship.
He cut off his queue in 1903 and translated
two science-fiction novels by Jules Verne into Chinese.
After pawning clothing and jewelry to buy rare herbs for his
ill father, Zhou Shuren had decided
that Chinese doctors were quacks.
He had learned that Japanese modernization had begun
with its study of Western medicine, and so in 1904
he went to medical school in Sendai, Japan.
In his second year a teacher showed slides of Japanese
military victories over Russia as the
Japanese students shouted “Banzai!”
One slide showed a Chinese spy about to be beheaded,
and Shuren was struck by the passive attitude of the
Chinese bystanders in the picture.
He thought how the Chinese needed spiritual transformation
more than physical medicine, and two months later in
March 1906 he withdrew from medical school
to become a writer and to promote a literary movement.
He returned to Shaoxing, and in July he was married to Zhu An,
who had been chosen for him by his mother.
She had her tiny feet bound, was illiterate, and unattractive.
Shuren may not have consummated the marriage,
but he continued to support her financially for the rest of his life.
Apparently Zhu An spent her time serving Shuren’s mother,
and he considered her his mother’s wife.
In 1907 Shuren, his brother Zhou Zuoren, and Qian Xuantong
with others organized the Society for the
Promotion of National Learning, and they persuaded
the revolutionary Zhang Taiyan to be director
and lecture on literature.
For a short time while their money lasted, Shuren, Zuoren,
and Xu Shoushang published a magazine called New Life,
and in the essay “On Breaking Through the Voices of Evil”
Zhou Shuren accused hypocritical scholars of blaming China’s
problems on the common people.
He especially admired Nikolai Gogol for awakening the
Russians to the suffering of their people.
In his essay “The Erratic Development of Culture,”
Shuren suggested that China’s isolation was the cause
of its weaknesses and strengths.
In 1909 the Zhou brothers published two volumes of
Stories from Abroad translated from Russian
and from other countries, but they sold
only a few copies in Tokyo and Shanghai.
Zhou Shuren took a teaching job in Hangzhou
and also served as interpreter
for a Japanese botany teacher.
When the dean Xu Shaoshang refused to kowtow
to the new director, he, Shuren and the faculty
resigned but were later reinstated.
In 1910 Shuren became the dean and a teacher
at Shaoxing High School.
After the 1911 revolution he was appointed
principal of a primary school.
That winter he wrote in literary Chinese his first short story,
“Remembrances of the Past,” about an incident in his
childhood when his lessons were interrupted by local
people discussing whether to flee from “hairy rebels.”
In 1912 he took a position in the
Ministry of Education under Cai Yuanpei.
For several years Shuren occupied his spare
time copying manuscripts so that he would
not be suspected by Yuan Shikai’s agents.
The philologist Qian Xuantong suggested that
Zhou Shuren write for New Youth
in the common language (baihua).
Shuren was reluctant to infect young people with his loneliness.
He said it was like there is a closed iron room in which
sleeping people were going to suffocate.
He asked if he would be doing them a favor by awakening
some of them; but Xian replied that
those awakened might find a way out.
Shuren began using the pen name Lu Xun
when he published his next story,
“The Diary of a Madman,” in New Youth in May 1918.
Inspired by Gogol, this story has been called the first truly
modern short story in Chinese literature.
After an introduction in literary wenyan, the diary is written in
baihua by a paranoid man who fears that
almost everyone has become a cannibal.
He imagines how they must feel ashamed before
real human beings, as reptiles do before those
who have evolved into primates.
Some think that people always ate human flesh
while others know it is wrong but do it anyway.
The diarist urges them to change from the bottom of their hearts
because in the future cannibals will not be allowed
in the world anymore.
His final plea is to “save the children.”
This macabre story reflects the chaotic violence
of the warlord era when Chinese lives were cheap.
Lu Xun’s next story “Kong Yiji” is about a scholar
who fails to pass the exams and gradually falls to less
ethical means of getting money for food and wine.
Finally he is caught stealing by a Selectman who breaks his legs.
Kong has to crawl with his hands and can no longer pay his debt.
This story reflects on the decline of traditional scholarship
that educated some only for the exam system.
“Medicine” is another morbid story about a boy with
tuberculosis who is given bread soaked in fresh blood
from an execution to try to cure his disease.
In the final scene his mother mourns at his grave
and meets there the mother of a revolutionary martyr
who finds a wreath of flowers has been laid.
A wretched death in poverty and superstition is compared
to the hope of a revolutionary sacrifice.
In the autobiographical “Hometown” Lu meets a childhood
friend and realizes they have become separated by a social
hierarchy, and he questions whether his hope for the future
is different than his friend’s idol-worship
of a censer and candlestick he took.
In 1919 Lu Xun bought a large house in Beijing
where he lived with his mother, wife,
brothers Zuoren and Jianren, and their families.
The next year he began lecturing on Chinese fiction at
Beijing University, and this material was published in 1924
as A Concise History of Chinese Fiction.
In 1920 he wrote “The Story of Hair.”
Men who did not wear a queue during the Qing dynasty
were considered revolutionaries, and women who bobbed
their hair even in 1920 were treated as “loose women”
and were expelled from school.
In “A Passing Season” people in a rural town discuss
changes when they hear a rumor that
the Emperor is going to assume the throne.
Lu Xun’s most famous work is
“The True Story of Ah Q,”
which was first serialized as weekly
humorous anecdotes in a Beijing newspaper in 1921.
After a while Lu Xun got tired of writing them
and completed the novella with a tragic ending.
Ah Q is a homeless and illiterate man
who does odd jobs to survive.
Despite his low status he is arrogant
and imagines the worst in people.
He often suffers from bullies and also
mistreats those weaker than himself.
He foolishly offends a woman by pinching her
and loses his work opportunities
and even most of his clothes to survive.
Later he arrives back in town with money he has taken
rom being a look-out for robbers,
but he pretends to be a revolutionary
to boost his ego and to protect himself.
The revolutionaries will not let him participate in their
plundering, but ironically he is later paraded as a criminal
and executed for being part of their looting.
The story portrays the desperate plight
of many poor Chinese who try to justify
their existence with rationalizations.
After clashing with his brother Zuoren
over his Japanese wife in 1923,
Lu moved out with his wife and mother.
That year Lu Xun published his first
collection of fourteen short stories.
In his preface he commented that anyone who falls
from affluence to poverty will see the true face
of the world on the way down.
Lu Xun published his second collection
of eleven stories in 1926.
“New Year’s Sacrifice” was written in 1924.
Sacrifices are made to the Kitchen God to solicit blessings
for the family in the next year.
The narrator meets Sister Xanglin, a widowed beggar
who asks him if a soul exists after the body dies.
When told probably, she asks if hell exists too.
Lu makes the safe answer that he “can’t say for sure.”
She dies the next day.
After her husband died, she got a job as a servant
and did good work until her mother-in-law
dragged her off and forced her to marry again.
During the wedding Xanglin tried to resist
by cutting her head open;
but she was forced into a locked room
and gave in to her husband.
He died, and their baby was taken and eaten by a wolf.
Xanglin was expelled from the house and went back
to her former employer; but they considered her so fallen
that she was not allowed to help prepare for the sacrifices.
She lost her job, became a beggar,
and died, a victim of superstition.
The narrator ironically concludes that the gods were
honored by the sacrifices and would
shower their blessings on the people.
“The Loner” is autobiographical,
and Lu describes his friend,
the bachelor Wei Lianshu, who wailed
at his step-grandmother’s funeral.
Wei is a teacher; but almost no one understands him,
and he loses his job because of his critical journalism.
He sells his books and furniture to survive.
The narrator has lost his teaching job too
and cannot help him.
When Wei is about to die from tuberculosis,
he takes a job as an aide to a warlord and
suddenly adopts a bountiful life-style.
When the narrator returns to the town,
he learns that Wei has died.
He walks away from the funeral and lets out a howl
like a wounded animal.
“Divorce” was written in November 1925 and describes
how powerful men decide the fate of a woman
who has complained that her husband
is having an affair with a widow.
Between May 1924 and April 1926
Lu Xun wrote 23 prose poems that were collected together
as Wild Grass or Weeds.
These express Lu’s dark mood and pessimistic view of life.
When he began writing these prose poems, Lu was influenced
by Kuriyagawa Hakuson’s Symbols of Mental Anguish,
which he was translating from Japanese.
In May 1925 Lu was on a faculty committee in support
of six student rebels who had been expelled from the university.
The Minister of Education closed the school,
and Lu was dismissed from the Ministry in August
but was reinstated in January 1926.
In a 1931 preface to Wild Grass Lu explained that
when he wrote these, he could not write in plain language
because of the oppressive warlord regime in Beijing.
In that preface Lu described his motives for writing some of them.
“My Lost Love” was written to satirize the poems
about lost loves which were then the vogue;
“Revenge” was written out of revulsion
at the number of bystanders in society;
“Hope” out of astonishment at the passivity of young people.
“Such a Fighter” was my reaction to those
men of letters and scholars who abetted the warlords.
“The Blighted Leaf” was written for my friends
who wanted to preserve me.
After the Duan Qirui government
fired on unarmed demonstrators,
I wrote “Amid Pale Bloodstains,”
at a time when I had left home and gone into hiding.6
This last-mentioned prose poem is presented here
as an outstanding example.
At present the creator is still a weakling.
In secret, he causes heaven and earth to change,
but dares not destroy this world.
In secret, he causes living creatures to die,
but dares not preserve their dead bodies.
In secret, he causes mankind to shed blood,
but dares not keep the bloodstains fresh forever.
In secret, he causes mankind to suffer pain,
but dares not let them remember it forever.
He provides for his kind only, the weaklings among men;
using deserted ruins and lonely tombs
to set off rich mansions;
using time to dilute pain and bloodstains;
each day pouring out one cup
of slightly sweetened bitter wine
— not too little nor too much—to cause slight intoxication.
This he gives to mankind
so that those who drink it can weep and sing,
seem both sober and drunk, conscious and unconscious,
appear willing to live on and willing to die.
He must make all creatures willing to live on.
He has not the courage yet to destroy mankind.
A few deserted ruins and a few lonely tombs
are scattered over the earth, reflected by pale bloodstains;
and there men taste their own vague pain and sorrow,
as well as that of others.
They will not spurn it, however,
thinking it better than nothing;
and they call themselves “victims of heaven”
to justify their tasting this pain and sorrow.
In apprehensive silence they await the coming of
new pain and sorrow, new suffering which appalls them,
which they none the less thirst to meet.
All these are the loyal subjects of the creator.
This is what he wants them to be.
A rebellious fighter has arisen from mankind, who,
standing erect, sees through all the deserted ruins
and lonely tombs of the past and the present.
He remembers all the intense and unending agony;
he faces squarely the whole welter of clotted blood;
he understands all that is dead and all that is living,
as well as all that is being born and all that is yet unborn.
He sees through the creator’s game.
And he will arise to resuscitate or else destroy mankind,
these loyal subjects of the creator. The creator,
the weakling, hides himself in shame.
Then heaven and earth change color
in the eyes of the fighter.7
In 1925 the student Xu Guangping began writing to Lu,
and they became lovers.
He was especially radicalized in March 1926 when some of his
students were killed by police for protesting
in front of the Government House.
His critical essays got him put on a list of fifty radicals,
and he fled from Beijing with Xu.
She took a teaching position in Guangzhou while Lu accepted
Lin Yutang’s offer to teach literature at Xiamen (Amoy) University.
1. Lo Chia-lun 336, “New Tide of the World Today,” p. 22 quoted in
The May Fourth Movement by Chow Tse-tsung, p. 61.
2. Hu Shih 205, Diary, IX, 566 quoted in The May Fourth Movement
by Chow Tse-tsung, p. 28.
3. “A Preliminary Discussion of Literary Form” by Hu Shih in
Sources of Chinese Tradition, p. 820.
4. “Constructive Literary Revolution” by Hu Shih in Sources of Chinese Tradition,
p. 825.
5. The May Fourth Movement by Chow Tse-tsung, p. 174.
6. Wild Grass by Lu Hsun, p. 1-2.
7. Ibid., p. 64-65.
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