As we read from previous readings, the Chinese republic had a bumpy start. It began with the disintegration of the imperial regime, and the country suffered from further disintegration during the republican era. Meanwhile, China's confrontation with foreign powers over Chinese territories continued. And alternative measures, especially cultural transformation, were proposed in China as ways to salvage the Chinese nation. Political parties, such as the Nationalists and Communists, were founded, but they would wage life/death struggles against each other instead of forming a parliamentary government. Eventually, the Nationalists unified China and triumphed as the Chinese government, only to be confronted with the imminent invasion from Japan.

1.The Republic and Transition to Warlord Rule.

The beginning of the republic also saw the beginning of the first modern political party in China, the Nationalist Party (Guomindang). Based on an anti-Manchu political alliance established in the late 19th century, the Nationalist Party, headed by Sun Yat-sen, was founded on three principles: nationalism, the people’s rights, and the people’s livelihood. Sun’s ideal vision was that every farmer in China could have a reasonably good livelihood and each would have his own plot of land to farm on. The Nationalist Party became the majority party in the first Chinese parliament.

In April 1912, however, Yuan Shi-kai, a former imperial minister of the Qing Dynasty, replaced Sun Yat-sen as the president. Yuan was a conservative Han Chinese whose role as president of a modern military academy in northern China won him the support of many military generals in the north who were formerly his students. Yuan thus enjoyed the support in the north that Sun Yat-sen, a Cantonese from Guangdong (Canton) Province in southern China, did not have. Yuan also claimed that he was the only one who could persuade the last Chinese emperor, Puyi, to abdicate, with the condition that Yuan himself had to be the president. Sun Yat-sen agreed to these terms and retired from his provisional presidency, but made one crucial change in the Chinese republican system. The original plan for the presidency, upon Sun’s insistence, gave the elected president predominant power in the government, with the right to appoint the prime minister. When he was to transfer power to Yuan, Sun decided on the cabinet system, with the prime minister in control of government who would come from the leader of the majority party in the parliament. Yuan’s initial decisions as president, however, shocked Sun and other republicans. Yuan forced the prime minister Tang Shaoyi to resign in order to better control parliament, and then he tried to intimidate a leading Nationalist Party member, Song Jiaoren, into becoming the next prime minister under his control. A staunch republicanist who believed in the cabinet system, Song refused to obey Yuan. When the Nationalist Party won the majority seats in the 1913 election, Yuan decided he needed to teach the Nationalist Party a lesson in obedience. In March 1913, while waiting for a train at the Shanghai Railway Station, Song Jiaoren was assassinated by a peddler hired by Yuan Shi-kai.

Song’s death led to what was called in Chinese history the “Second Revolution,” this time by the Nationalist Party and its allies against Yuan Shi-kai who tried to undermine the republic. Sun Yat-sen and his followers declared war on Yuan, and various provinces, including Jiangsu, Guangdong, Anhui, Hunan, and Fujian, as well as the city of Shanghai, declared independence from Yuan, but the Second Revolution was quickly suppressed by Yuan because the revolutionaries did not have sufficient support.

Yuan, however, felt his position was not secure and wanted to consolidate his power by restoring imperial rule. To get financial support Yuan relied more heavily on foreign loans than the Qing imperial government, giving rights of Chinese territories to foreign countries, especially to Japan, China’s largest creditor, as a condition to borrowing foreign loans. These practices led to greater condemnation of Yuan by a wide range of people in China. In 1915, Cai E (pronounced er), a military general from Yunnan Province, declared independence from Yuan’s government and declared war on Yuan, starting a nationwide war against Yuan’s imperial rule. In March 1916, three months after becoming the emperor, Yuan had to abdicate the throne. Yuan died in humiliation in June 1916.

Yuan’s death, however, did not lead to the restoration of republican rule. China simply fragmented into domains controlled by warlords. A president still nominally existed, but could no longer control the whole China. Yuan's overthrower, Li Yuanhong, quickly got into a disagreement with his prime minister Duan Qirui over whether China should participate in World War I. The mediator, a warlord Zhang Xun, who tried to restore Puyi, the last emperor, momentarily back to the throne in 1917 (Cheng 12.4), was soon driven out of  Beijing by Duan Qirui and his allies. Duan came to dominate the Beijing government until the early 1920s. Duan, warlord over Anhui Province, attempted to monopolize the government without due parliamentary procedure, however. Sun Yat-sen, the Nationalist leader, tried to restore the republic by declaring war on Duan but failed in 1918. China thus entered into a period called Warlord Rule, when warlords controlled both national and regional politics. Warlords came in all shapes and types. They included the Christian general Feng Yuxiang, who largely ruled over Henan Province (Cheng, 12.6), and the Shandong warlord Zhang Zongchang (Cheng, 12.7). China would finally be reunified in 1928 under the Nationalist Party, but not before the Nationalists bloodily purged the Communists from their ranks in 1927.

   Warlord rule would continue until 1928, with the country fragmented into regions controlled by various military strongmen.

2. The May Fourth Movement: further introduction of science and democracy

The instability of the Chinese republic led to calls for more changes. But what triggered off immediate changes was what transpired at the diplomatic conference table in Paris, 1919, when the Chinese province of Shandong, formerly a Germany concession, was transferred to Japan rather than returned to China upon German defeat in World War I. It triggered off a nation-wide student movement in China starting from May 4, 1919, hence its name: the May 4th Movement.

i. Background to the Shandong Controversy:

By the second half of the 19th century, especially after the signing of the Treaty of Tianjin (1858)and the Convention of Peking (1860), China, especially the coastal region, gradually came under the control of various foreign countries, where foreign jurisdiction and administration were exercised by foreign police and foreign board of trustees, called "spheres of influence." Much of Shandong Province became the German sphere of influence by the 1890s.

During World War I, both Japan and China joined the British and French side against Germany. Japan did so because it had a mutual defensive treaty with Britain signed in 1903 that called for military alliance should one country go to war with a third country. Japan's duty during the war (1914-1918) was not fighting on the European theatre, where the bulk of the war was waged, but to guard Germans in China should they try to take advantage of the war and take over British colonies in China. At the beginning of the war, since major German forces in China all moved back to the European front, Japan took over Shandong province. After the war was over, as a victorious country, Japan wanted the the rights to Shandong be transferred to Japan as a reward, and it was written into the Versailles treaty at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.

China also participated in the war, in April 1917. In early 1917, Germany's new policy of "unlimited submarine warfare" led Britain and France to pressure Japan to send its navy to the European front. Instead of that, Japan pressured China into the war as a condition for continued Japanese loans to the Chinese government. The Chinese government sent 20,000 laborers to the European front. Thus at the end of the war, China was also a victorious country. With the Fourteen Points promulgated by American President Woodrow Wilson in early 1918, the Chinese delegation to the Paris Peace Conference believed the age of democracy had arrived. Thus they came to Paris shocked that they were to sign a treaty that would give the Chinese province of Shandong to Japan.

On April 28, 1919, despite the protests by the Chinese delegation, the Paris peace conference adjudicated the Shandong question in favor of Japan. In fact, the Duan Qirui administration of China had already agreed to this clause as early as September 1918, in return for a 20 million yen loan. The Japanese won the right to build two railways in Shandong, to station troops at various key points, and to train and direct Chinese railway guards. The Chinese minister in Tokyo, Zhang Zongxiang (Chang Tsung-hsiang) also agreed to these terms. (Immanuel Hsu, The Rise of Modern China, Oxford University Press, 2000, pp.501-505.)

When news of the treaty content reached Beijing (Peking), university students poured into the streets to protest. It evolved into a nation-wide movement that put so much pressure on the countries at the Paris Peace Conference that they finally dropped the clause. Shandong officially went back to China, although it was in actual control by Japan.

ii. Modern Chinese Nationalism

The May 4th Movement marked a new stage in Chinese nationalism: it proved to many educated Chinese that despite modernizations in weapons industry and a political transformation of China from an empire to a republic, China still was weak and subject to unjust treatment. Therefore, further reform needed to be undertaken. This time, the reform should be in the cultural realm, and more Western culture was to be introduced to replace traditional Chinese culture. The New Culture Movement, which started around 1915, gained new momentum from the May 4th Movement and developed into a serious nation-wide movement introducing Western science and democracy, and demolishing traditional Chinese learning, including Confucian learning. If Hong Xiuquan's Taiping Heavenly Kingdom denounced the teachings of Confucius, the May 4th Movement marked the official ending of the Confucian orthodoxy in China.

In retrospect, China's humiliation at the Paris Peace Conference was caused perhaps more by an inept government rather than by a moribund culture. The biography of Duan Qirui is a very good example to illustrate the instability of the Chinese republican regimes, both in terms of popular support, and in terms of nation-wide authority. The result was their constant reliance on foreign loans for survival.

The Paris Peace Conference also left Japan bitterly disappointed. Unable to obtain Shandong, and unable to have ratified a "racial equality" clause in the Versailles Treaty, they left with the belief that it would not be possible for the Japanese to cooperate with the European countries.

iii. The New Culture Movement

May 4th inspired greater resolve to introduce Western culture and transform Chinese culture, so that China would build a strong presence in the international community. The introduction of the new was called the New Culture Movement. The new movement had the following characteristics:

• The politicization of the masses: in comparison with Qing China where political activities could only be conducted in secret, modern political ideas were spread through the mass media. The Chinese Communist Party, founded in 1921, was a product of the New Culture Movement.
• The changes in values: Confucian values came under attack. The part of Confucian culture that came most under attack was its network of social relations, which included the relationship between men and women, father and son, old and young, the place of the individual in society, and practices related to those relations, such as arranged marriages by parents, and absolute obdience to authority. Attacks on Confucian learning didnot mean total negation of the system of thought. In other respects, many have tried to update Confucian learning so it is compatible with the modern times, such as the New Confucians of the 20th century.
  • For some, especially the intellectuals, nationalism meant informing and enlightening the Chinese of the need to change. Examples included Lu Xun, one of the forerunners of the New Culture Movement. For Lu Xun and many others of the May 4th generation, they had a mission to transform Chinese culture by first annihilating the hold of Confucian culture on Chinese society. Under Lu Xun's pen, such as in his novel Madman's Diary, Confucian culture became cannibalistic, through its rituals that forced e.g. widows not to remarry, and children to be filial to their parents even though it meant the sacrifice of their own future. In his novel Kong Yiji, Lu Xun satirized the Chinese literati who wasted their lives away preparing for the imperial examinations.
• Nationalism: Although modern China has largely been dominated by two political parties, the Nationalist Party and the Commuist Party, these two parties were not inclusive of all the expressions of Chinese nationalism. Chinese nationalism was composed of various strands of thought that went beyond party lines. It often drew models from the newly (financially) independent state of the Soviet Union, and the newly independent states of Eastern Europe as examples of how states could become independent of foreign hegemonic rule. They also drew on examples of Turkey, where the father of modern Turkey or Ataturk Mustafa Kemal introduced a modernization program that implemente reforms from the language to social and political infrastructures.
• Political and violent solutions to China's problems: The influx of ideas about China's future in the 1920s did not point to an inevitable political and violent solution to China's problems. in fact, Muhatma Ghandi,. the Indian non-violent leader, was often an example cited in Chinese journals. The path to radical politics in China committed by both parties, according to Hans Van de Den, was the "result of attempts to mobilize a society which was highly internally divided, leading political actors to conclude that they had little choice but to use force to achieve their ends." *
• Introduction of (radical) Marxism: The radicalization of Chinese politics was also due to the introduction of Marxism, and application of Marxist categories to introduce Chinese society. Historically, China long departed feudal rule (fengjian) (decentralized rule by hereditary aristocratic families) that characterized European societies till around 1600. From 1100 on, China gradually moved onto junxian, centralized bureaucratic rule by appointed government bureaucrats (meritocracy). But in order to usher in greater changes, when introducing Marxist categories to explain society, the Chinese chose the term fengjian (feudalism) to describe Chinese society up to 1850. It meant that for Chinese Marxists, the path to socialism and Communism meant discarding much of Chinese social, economic, and political practices up to late 19th century.

Therefore, the radical momentum in Chinese social and political changes became irrevocable, and lasted well into the beginning of the 21st century.

iv. The continued political fragmentation of China (1912-1937)

From 1912 to 1927, China was a republic dominated by warlord rule. During the early years of the two political parties, the Nationalists and Communists, because they were both weak against the warlords, they sought an alliance. In 1926, they sought a radical political solution to China's fragmented politics by jointly conducting an expedition to the north to reunify China. The united front was cut short with Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist party leader's slaughtering of the Communists when they reached Shanghai in April 1927. The problem with both parties was they were not able to subject their differences to institutionalized solutions, much as the Americans today express their political differences through electoral channels. Eventually the Nationalist Party unified China and established their capital in Nanjing in 1928, while the Communists had to shift their activities underground. Civil war between the two parties continued until all -out Japanese invasion of 1937.

* Quoted in Rana Mitter, The Bitter Revolution: China's Struggle with the Modern World (Oxford, 2004), p.131.