Едгар Сноу: БИТКАТА ЗА АЗИЈА

In the middle of the twentieth century Japan will meet Europe on the plains of Asia and wrest from her the mastery of the world.

Count Okuma (1915)

 

You thieves who oppress and injure the poor, how great boldness you have!… Have you not come to pull the whiskers of a tiger?

Juan the Fifth, in Pearl Buck’s translation of the Shui Hu Chuan

 

PART FOUR

SOUTHERN FRONT

 

2. The Generalissimo

 

Until the final defeat of the invader is accomplished, resistance can never cease.

Chiang Kai-shek

 

…We had already had an odd and illuminating interview with Mme.  Chiang Kai-shek, which she asked me not to report and which naturally I never did. But the Generalissimo made no such request. He gave his usual grunt when he shook hands and I thought I saw a trace of a smile on his tin lips, but it quickly disappeared. Many people say Chiang has aged much since the war. To me he seems much the same alert slender figure, with his sharp eyes looking out from the same austere mask. But I thought he was less tense and he seemed to enjoy an inner repose and greater self-confidence. His messiah-complex or egotism, or whatever it is that makes men say such things, had apparently deepened, for this was his answer when I asked him a question about the future, if Hankow fell:

“Wherever I go there is the Government, the Cabinet and the center for resistance. The outcome of the war will be determined not by the loss of a few cities but how the Leader directs the people in resistance.”

He was not being immodest; he was simply stating his evangel. He seemed really convinced that no matter how much Japanese overran China, they could not conquer it unless they captured Chiang Kai-shek, spiritually, bodily or politically.

The Generalissimo selected the Cabinet, was Commander-in-Chief of the Army, the air force, and what remained of the navy, head of the National Military Council, and chief of the Kuomintang. No single Japanese had anything like such broad powers of command and administration. When later he took over the premiership from Dr. H. H. Kung, replaced Wang Ching-wei as chairman of the People’s Political Council, and assumed the presidency of the combined government banks, and the governorship of Szechuan, it become a nice task to try to separate Chiang the soldier from Chiang the banker, the politician, the governor, the statesman and the bureaucrat. One might thing that anyone who would appoint himself to so many posts, in a nation of 400 million people, must be either a genius or a megalomaniac. Chiang is a little of both, like China he is a series of contradictions – many of which may be resolved in the war. Neither can be understood except in a full historical setting.

Indications of Chiang’s personality and leadership are to be found in his possession of these qualities: tenacity, decision, ruthlessness, energy, ambition, initiative, and a deep love of power. He ha more of them than the average man of any race. Ne is not an intellectual, but a man of action; while others are still theorizing, Chiang consults his instincts and moves. He admits he is an empiricist.

“Without action,” he wrote, “one cannot attain to knowledge”; and again, “The only failure is in failure to act”. That is perhaps the most revolutionary idea in Chiang’s whole approach to politics, and accounts for nearly all of his successes. Nine times out of ten any kind of decision, good or bad, will win in China if it is carried out in prompt action.

An important key to his character is Chiang’s worship of classical heroes. He is more concerned with spiritual values that his average fellow countryman; his reforms nearly always emphasize altering people’s morals rather than their material conditions. Thus, his New Life Movement for years attempted to reform the Red peasants he captured not by improving the basic conditions of their livelihood but by teaching them the old Confucian ethics: li, yi, lien, ch’ih – etiquette, propriety, righteousness and integrity. If Chiang himself had observed them he would probably not be where he is today, but that does not effect his moralizing.

“What really matters,” he quoted Confucius, “is the degradation of personality but not dying in hunger”. Chiang said it perfectly illustrated his idea of – righteousness. Another thing that really mattered was that “those of the lower rank should not enjoy the same thing” as those of the higher. This was yi, or common propriety.

Moral strength, Chiang believed, could conquer any obstacle. During his captivity in Sian he was “determined to fight them (the rebels who were discussing putting him on public trial) with moral character and spiritual strength and with the principles of righteousness”. He went on, in a most revealing passage in his diary, which may actually have been written after his release but it is still significant, to speak of the inspiration of the feudal heroes of the classics, the courageous life of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the martyrdom of Jesus, and the teachings of his mother. “Being a great admirer of these heroes,” he said, “I prefer to follow in their footsteps”.

The same faith in righteousness apparently consoles this moral knight in his reverses on the battlefield. “Japan,” he assured me with unruffled complacence, when I asked him for some fundamental reasons why he thought China would win the war, “has already suffered a spiritual defeat. Without the necessary spiritual foundations, military operations cannot succeed. Because her spiritual concepts are incorrect, Japan cannot win.” Imagine those words in the mouth of any European dictator!

But the Generalissimo likes to be a sole arbiter of what is right and what is wrong, and he himself is always on the side of “good”, the other fellow on the side of “evil”. Complete reconciliation can be effected with Chiang only after the offender’s “confession and repentance”. Chang Hsueh-liang has never “confessed” and he is still a prisoner. Chiang tends to think of anyone who disagrees with him not as a mere political opposition but as a traitor, disloyal to the State. This is in fact one of his gravest weaknesses, and is exploited to the utmost by some of his sycophants.

It is the traditional failing of all but the great historical leaders of China, as elsewhere, that after a time they listen only to the shih-shih (the “yes-yes”) men around them, and if Chiang is ever caught off guard it will probably be because of surrender to this flattery that destroys all Caesars. Some of the “palace satellites” who now surround him are just as expert in the art as any eunuch in days of the Dynasty. For example: one of their favorite devices is to learn what book Chiang has being reading with approval (usually some ancient classic) and then cram it quickly, and come out with ideas paraphrased from it in their next interview with him.

It is important with Chiang always to be in touch with the realities of his true strength because, despite his high-sounding titles, he rules less by a simple command than by a delicate process of balance and maneuver. He has an almost physic feeling for political situations, and in his own historical setting he is a top-fight politician. With all his moral pronouncements, he holds power by focusing in himself a combination of loyalties from disparate political groups. He has his full quota of that peculiar Chinese genius of working off one’s enemies against each other.

Chiang is not a dictator in the European sense. He does not have as much real power of enforcement of decision as some democratically elected leaders – President Roosevelt, for example, or the British Prime Minister. Much of the greatness attributed to him is merely symbolic of a synthesis of forces which would not basically change if he were to die. People who speak of Chiang as the “unifier of China” oversimplify an enormously complex situation by identifying the group impulse with the personality of one man. But we all live by symbols in times of stress and the personification of leadership is one of the bases of politics as well as religion.

That observation can in no way minimize the significance of Chiang-Kai-shek personal influence nor of his dominating position, but rather explains some of his limitations. It does not alter the size of his achievements and his stubborn defense of China’s national integrity. Chiang is the leader by common consent only as long as he continues to symbolize the united national struggle, and he would lose his prestige overnight if he were to betray that trust. But it must be recognized that events have made of him such a key factor that perhaps he is the one individual who alone could break that unity in a disastrous way. His steadfastness under this rest has helped to stamp China’s fight for independence with the dignity of one of the heroic cause of our time.

We cannot how history will measure any of our contemporaries. We cannot know how it will reconcile the contradictions in Chiang-Kai-shek’s role as a leader of a struggle for liberation. A man can only be judged against the milieu of his own country as a whole and with all his faults Chiang seems incomparably more able and competent in that environment that his immediate predecessors in power. Perhaps no leader can be greater than the totality of his time; heroes are not born but made by the most profound and subtle combinations of history. There may be in China better thinkers, organizers and soldiers than Chiang, but if they are ahead of the synthesis of the society in which they live who will understand their true genius? And yet the milieu is still changing.

Examining Chiang a little more closely now, we can perhaps find in him a barometer of the political climate of China at war.

 

3. Disputed legacy

 

What is the principle of Livelihood? It is Communism and Socialism. …But in China class war and the dictatorship of the proletariat are unnecessary …

Dr. Sun Yat-sen

 

Chiang-Kai-shek’s childhood was quite different from that of the late Sun Yat-sen, his mentor and the father of the Republic. Sun was a very poor Cantonese boy who never owned a pair of shoes till he was 16. Chiang was the son of a middle-class merchant and landlord and he grew up near Ningpo, the oldest treaty port in China, in the small village of Chikou, where he was born in 1887.

Chiang father died when he was nine, and he was trained by his mother, a devout Buddhist, an ancestor worshiper, and a stern disciplinarian. He greatly admired her and frequently expresses his indebtedness to hr. Although he became a Methodist after his marriage to Soong Mei-ling, the sister of Mme. Sun, his ethics remain semi-feudal and Confucianist.

Apparently Chiang made up his mind early to be a soldier, but he did not enter Paoting Military Academy until he was 20. He studied there only a few months; then he entered Shinbo Gokyo, a military school in Japan, where he graduated in 1909. Later he served in the Japanese 13^th Field Artillery. Altogether his formal military training lasted only about three years. In Japan he met Sun Yat-sen and joined the Kuomintang, and he returned to China in time to see the capitulation of the Manchu dynasty. Thereafter he worked with Sun Yat-sen in futile attempts to intrigue among and overthrow one provincial warlord or another. Apparently disgusted at repeated failures, he withdrew from politics in 1917 and went into business in Shanghai. He emerged to join Sun Yat-sen’s entourage once more when the Kuomintang found a powerful ally in Soviet Russia.

References has already been made to Chiang’s appointment to the presidency of Whampoa Military Academy. He got this post after Sun had sent him to Russia, where he met Trotsky but not Stalin and made favorable impression on General Bluecher, who later became chief Soviet military advisor to the Kuomintang. Upon his return to Canton he was the only Kuomintang military man who had seen the Red Army and made a brief study of its organization. It was natural that Borodin should select him to head Whampoa, which was supposed to be modeled after the Red Army Academy. Until the obscure, Chiang now began, at the age of 35, to rise rapidly in the Party. He became Commander-in-Chief of the Nationalist Army, which finally established control over most of South China. Then, in 1927, occurred the “party split”. Many books have been written to explain the causes of the subsequent ten years of class war. At this point a few paragraphs must suffice to explain Chiang Kai-shek’s role in it.

Social and economic facts were the fundamental cause of the conflict, of course, but these found expression in two interpretations of one set of principles, each competing for leadership of the revolution. It was easy for this to happen, because of the ambiguous legacy of Dr. Sun Yat-sen. Sun’s doctrine consisted of the San Min Chu I, or “Three Principles of the People”, which were: (1) Nationalism; (2) Democracy; and (3) Livelihood. Nationalism meant full recovery of China’s sovereign rights the abolition of the unequal treaties which foreigners extraterritoriality and special political, economic and territorial concessions. Democracy meant rule by an enfranchised people electing their own government. In the Principle of Livelihood Sun envisaged a state with equal opportunity for all and the elimination of exploitation through the “equalization of the land” and social ownership of the means of industrial production.

However, in his San Min Chu I Dr. Sun seemed to contradict himself about the methods by which these goals were to be attained. In places he asserted that Communism and his Three Principles were one and the same; elsewhere he seemed to repudiate Marxism. But all the inner conflicts going on in the Kuomintang conditioned the seemingly capricious changes of emphasis. The truth was that the lectures in his San Min were delivered extemporaneously, and often to reconcile antagonisms inside his own following, rather than to lay down rigid formulae for the future. As head of a party containing both poor and the rich he was often primarily concerned with maintaining inner harmony, the disruption of which had already repeatedly frustrated his plans. He also had sincere changes of mind.

Sun never compromised his own fundamental sympathies, he never forgot his own identity with the oppressed lower classes and he saw the revolution primarily as a movement to free them. “Everything he planned,” says Mme. Sun Yat-sen, the integrity of whose interpretation will be questioned by no one who knows the deep reverence in which she holds Sun’s memory, “he saw as a means for betterment of the life of the masses. The emancipated workers and peasants were the pillar of which he meant to built a new and free China. He clearly recognized that these two classes were our basis of strength in our gigantic struggle to overthrow imperialism and effectively to unify our country.”

The deepest change in Sun’s conception of the revolution took place not long before he died. In his middle years he still believed that China could get help of Britain and America, through an international plan, to capitalize and develop China as an external market. He was quite ready to trust the Powers to help China through this traditional stage during which the Kuomintang would control the country under a kind of “tutelage” by the great democracies and remain semi-colonial to Western capital. Repeatedly he appealed for help within this framework from America, Britain, France and Germany, in the pre-World War days. Finally he made a detailed proposal to the Versailles Conference calling for international development of China as the basis of stabilizing Far Eastern peace and to develop a great market in which all nations might share.

It seems probable that Sun was at his time impressed with the possibilities discussed by the famous English economist, J. A. Hobson, who wrote that “if capitalist in several Western powers were capable of intelligent co-operation instead of wrangling among themselves for separate national areas of exploitation, they would have combined for a joint international enterprise in Asia, a project which might have given the whole of Western capitalism another generation of active profitable survival.

None of the great statesman of Europe appeared to share Hobson’s idea, however, and it is possible that most of them had never heard of it. Sun Yat-sen received nothing but rebuffs to his proposal for international co-operation in the development of China. At Versailles the great peace-makers would not read his plan and it seemed agreed among the silk hats that Sun was a harmless fanatic. The Powers were not interested in a democratic modern China. They went ahead unperturbed to re-carve the earth in such a manner as to make the present World Incident, as the Japanese might call it, inevitable.

It was only than that Sun realized that China must rely upon her own resources to win her freedom and equality among the nations. It was then that he discarded the idea of “tutelage” under the West and accepted the radical view that China could develop only when feudalism had been overthrown internationally and full national sovereignty had been recovered. Soviet Russia alone at that time was prepared to help realize such a plan, and it is not surprising that Sun accepted her offer.

But Sun Yat-sen knew that his own Kuomintang contained elements which still opposed the agrarian revolution and also wished to continue the unequal relationship with foreign capital. He knew that his Right Wing would be shocked by an alliance with bolshevism. Eventually he asked Adolf Joffe, the Russian representative, to sign with him a document calculated to ally their fears. This Sun-Joffe agreement of January, 1923, stated that both men recognized “condition for successful Communism or Sovietism” were not then present in China and that the immediate task was to achieve full unity and independence.

At the same time Sun accepted the Communist view that the National Revolution could not be finally victorious except in combination with a democratic agrarian revolution, the redistribution of the land, and the guaranty of democratic rights to the workers and farmers. Knowing that, Sun invited the Chinese Communists to enter his own party. This blood transfusion resuscitated the Kuomintang and provided the young and enthusiastic leadership which accounted for the early successes of the National Revolution. [Sun had adopted land redistribution as a fundamental plank as early as 1905, when it was written into the pledge signed by members of the Tungmenghui, forerunner of Kuomintang.]

Now of course the difference between Right and Left over the land question and the political status of the working class was more than theoretical. It represented a fundamental struggle between classes for hegemony of the National Revolution. The Right Wing wanted only mild and gradual reforms in the landlord-merchant-usurer semi-feudal economy in the interior, during a period of a “tutelage”, still dreamed of getting the cooperation of the capitalist powers in developing China, and hence was willing to act as a keeper of peace for imperialist interests. The Left Wing’s program was, as we have seen, for a deep swift revolutionary change from a backward semi-colonial country to a modern independent state. Disputes centered on conflicting interpretations of Sun’s Democracy and Livelihood principles. When he died in 1925 there were enough contradictions in his teachings in different periods to support both conservatives and radicals. An early break was inevitable.

Chiang Kai-shek, anxious to win the favor of Soviet Russian advisers, used to shout slogans about the world revolution, and openly declare that “the realization of the Three People’s Principles means the realization of Communism”. He won Borodin’s confidence sufficiently to continue to get Russian arms and funds, after Sun’s death. But he belonged to the Right Wing; he was a conservative and believed in “tutelage”. There is evidence that from early days in Canton he plotted to throw out the Communists as soon as he felt strong enough. This he did, in April 1927, when the mass movement began to carry out a redistribution of the land. Having led the victorious Nationalist Army as far as Shanghai, Chiang overthrew the two-party alliance and government, and set up his own regime in Nanking. He got the support of the banking, industrial and land-holding families in the lower Yangtze, the powerful gangs of Shanghai, and, of course, the sanction of the Foreign Powers.

Chiang’s Nanking government made it a crime punishable by death to be a Communist or a member of any organization or union considered as such by the “purified Kuomintang”. Thousands of radical leaders, student, officers, soldiers, and members of workers’ and farmers’ unions were killed. Surviving Communists organized a little Red Army which clung tenaciously to the mountains of South China, and civil war spread over many provinces. The Communists went about redistributing the land and organizing local workers’ and peasants’ governments while Chiang Kai-shek went after them, bringing bask the landlord system, restoring boundary stones and executing the rebels and smashing their unions. A decade of this waste took a terrific toll in lives of educated youths with rare qualities of leadership which China could little afford to lose.

…

(Edgar Snow: THE BATTLE FOR ASIA, Random House – New York, 1941 год. стр. 115-125)