Chiang Kai-shek was not one of the Western-educated group nor did he become Soviet-oriented, but rather the contrary, during his sojourn in Moscow. Born in 1886 of petty bourgeois origins in Chekiang, whose rather plebeian accent he never overcame, he had received a military education at the Paoting Academy and the Tokyo Military Academy. When in Japan he joined Sun’s party and later participated in the Revolution. In the decade afterwards he appeared and disappeared, sometimes sharing in Sun’s attempted coups, sometimes moving in the Shanghai mafia world of the Green Society, the archetype tong which controlled various rackets as well as the Chinese version of ward politics. He made connections with a leading Chekiang businessman, Chen Chi-mai, who became Dr. Sun’s principal financial patron, and he served for a while on the staff of the Fukien warlord who was alternately Sun’s ally and enemy.
Appointed head of the Whampoa Academy upon his return from Moscow in 1924, Chiang enjoyed the prestige of the Teacher to whom the highest loyalty of a Chinese is given. By virtue of control of the Revolutionary Army which went with the Whampoa post, he emerged the dominant figure in the Kuomintang. Advised by Galen, he led the first class of Whampoa to the first test of the new Army, winning a victory over provincial forces in the south. In these years the alliances of the Whampoa clique were formed which gave Chiang Kai-shek his band of adherents. He attracted loyalty and respect not through political inspiration as Sun Yat-sen did, but by the magnetism of an impressive personality. He was slim, laconic and expressionless except for alert dark eyes which seemed to pierce through as if from an inner head behind a mask. His great talent was not military but political, exercised through a mastery of balance among factions and plots so that he came to be called the “Billiken” after the weighted doll that cannot be knocked over.
As soon as Sun’s death removed restraint, a schism between right and left wings within the Kuomintang came to the surface, with Chiang as leader of the right. He and his associates wanted national sovereignty while the Communist-Left coalition concentrated on social revolution. Cabals and intrigues, arrests and assassinations marked the internal struggle for control of the Party.
Revolutionary effort among China’s proletariat, laboring twelve hours a day seven days a week in textile mills and dockyards, provided the tinder for the Shanghai Incident in 1925. Hatred of the foreigner, drummed on by agitators, spread north and south, surpassing anything since the Boxer outburst. More shots were fired and men killed at a riot in Hankow on June 11. At Canton a great parade of workers, students and soldiers led by Whampoa cadets along the Bund drew fire again—with some provocation—from British and French marines lined up opposite. This time 50 were killed and 100 wounded.
A paralyzing boycott of the British in Hong Kong followed that was to last 15 months, cost the British millions of pounds and, with servants deserting and goods and services withheld, emphasize to every foreigner in China his final vulnerability. Missionaries in the interior as in Boxer days suffered harassment and attacks forcing some to close down or flee. Living as they did in Western-style houses in their own walled compounds, the missionaries appeared to the Chinese as much the exponents of the unequal treaties as the consuls or the agents of Standard Oil and Jardine Matheson. Missionary presence was more of an insult, despite the medicine and schooling they offered, because its basis was the assumption that Chinese ways of worship were inferior and should be discarded for those of the West.
The Kuomintang found its opportunity in the antiforeign furor and in July 1925 proclaimed itself the Nationalist Government of China. Rivalry for the succession to Sun Yat-sen was not yet resolved and leadership was shared in fragile partnership between Chiang Kai-shek as military chief and the good-looking, persuasive, French-educated Wang Ching-wei as political chairman. Wang was the man who as a young revolutionist had suffered imprisonment in chains for his attempt to assassinate the Prince Regent in 1910. Chiang soon ousted his partner and in March 1926 attempted a purge of the Communists which ended in a draw. The movement was still revolutionary. Communist members were active in the Hong Kong boycott and in organizing peasants and labor unions. Political advisers of the commissar type headed by Chou En-lai were attached to the faculty of Whampoa and their slogans appeared on the walls: “Down with Imperialism! Laborers of China Arise! The World Revolution Will Save You! Down with Foreign Cultural Aggression! Destroy the Unequal Treaties!” The walls of the Whampoa auditorium were adorned by three large paintings of foreign oppression: the burning of the opium in 1842, the shooting and bayoneting of Boxers by Allied soldiers as they entered Peking in 1900 with the gates of the city burning in the background, and the Shanghai Incident of 1925 with foreign machine guns (replacing the original rifles) mowing down students, women and children. Though propaganda, they epitomized the profound underlying antiwhite temper of China so seldom appreciated or acknowledged by the West.
By the spring of 1926 the adherence of the two progressive leaders of Kwangtung and Kwangsi, Li Tsung-jen and Pai Ch’ung-hsi, gave the Kuomintang the base and the strength it needed for the march north to national power. For the next twenty years Li and Pai were to be linked to Chiang in the peculiarly Chinese seesaw of enmity and alliance. The time for the Northern Expedition, which Sun Yat-sen had so often tried and failed to launch, had come. It began in July 1926 with the three great cities of the Yangtze valley, Hankow, Nanking and Shanghai, as the objective of the first stage. The Kuomintang Nationalist forces numbered under 100,000 with Chiang Kai-shek none too solidly in control as Commander-in-Chief. Their opponents, composed of various forces of the tuchuns, numbered over a million. These were joined by the crisis in an incompatible union of old antagonists, all of whom had fought each other at one time or another. The union embraced Chang Tso-lin, Wu Pei-fu, Chang Tsung-chang—the notorious warlord of Shantung, said to have “the physique of an elephant, the brain of a pig and the temperament of a tiger” and to be “dangerous even to look at”—and Sun Chuan-fang, warlord of five provinces in the Shanghai area. Off in the northwest Stilwell’s two former clients, the Model Governor Yen Hsi-shan and the Christian General Feng Yu-hsiang, watched and waited; Yen as a highly uncertain ally of the other tuchuns and Feng as an intended ally of the Nationalists.
The Kuomintang soldiers, following the revolutionary doctrine of not molesting or preying upon the people, swept forward during the first months in a series of triumphs. Many units of the northern armies came over to them or fell back without fighting. They took Hankow by September, the month in which Stilwell arrived, and scattered Wu Pei-fu’s forces in October. Chiang Kai-shek’s First Army suffered a setback in Kiangsi but otherwise the advance, like a flooding river, spread outward and northward toward Nanking and Shanghai. Its way was opened by the hopes and hospitality of a people weary of oppression. The Kuomintang’s promise of “better days” to come, not its military prowess, accounted for its easy success. As it entered Hangchow, 100 miles from Shanghai, thousands of spectators lined the streets with smiling faces to watch the well-equipped troops parade through the city. Never before had soldiers been welcomed by the populace. Chiang Monlin, a future Chancellor of Peking University, stood among the crowd “with my heart thumping against my ribs in ecstasy…as the good name of a modern army in China was once more established.” His feelings confirmed Chiang Kai-shek’s assertion, “I expect to win the war 30 per cent by fighting and 70 per cent by propaganda.”
By January 1, 1927, the Nationalist Government had moved up to Hankow where the left wing gained control. While Chiang concentrated on his drive toward Nanking, former southern capital, and Shanghai, the locus of money power, Hankow seethed in the ardent atmosphere of international revolt. Borodin was the gray eminence and real leader, Mme. Sun Yat-sen, nee Soong Ch’ing-ling, the presiding spirit, and Eugene Chen, reputedly the best brain in the Kuomintang, the new Foreign Minister. Small, clever, venomous, West-Indian born of part-Negro parentage and Western-educated, in gold-rimmed spectacles and white spats, Chen, who could not write Chinese an
d scarcely speak it, was famous for his grandiloquent English and consuming hatred of the foreigner, which soon made itself felt.
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Among Americans and other foreigners in China the rise of the Nationalists precipitated a violent quarrel between the Treaty Port community which took a colonial view of China and the missionaries who for the sake of their own survival championed China’s rights. The missionary establishment was at a peak at this time of 8,000 Protestant missionaries in 1,149 stations with half again as many Catholics. If they were to exorcise the hostility of the Chinese, the missionaries had to divorce themselves from the foreign treaty system even though this was what protected their position in China. Supported by the liberal foreign journals, they argued for China’s right of self-determination and presented her cause as one concerned with “the same questions for which we fought when we separated ourselves from Great Britain.” They persuaded themselves that the Kuomintang, with its source in the Christian Sun Yat-sen, was the sincerely progressive force that would at last end civil strife and bring good government to China. They castigated businessmen and diplomats for taking the cynical view and pleaded China’s rights in letters to their boards and churches, in magazine and newspaper articles, lecture tours and public conferences.
Their view of China was naturally echoed in America by the large constituency from which they drew support. When the Federal Council of Churches of Christ speaking for 20 million members petitioned the United States Government to relinquish the unequal treaties, it represented a China lobby of significant size. A major assembly of groups with interest in China met at Johns Hopkins in 1925. As spokesman, John Leighton Stuart, president of Yenching University and a future Ambassador to China, called on the United States to take the lead by “an act of aggressive good” toward ending the treaty system. Only through American action, he argued, could the powers’ relations with China be reformed.
Campaigns such as these infuriated the Treaty Ports whose existence depended on the unequal treaties. They saw in them a sinister exercise of the missionaries’ “powerful influence.” The Treaty Port press, aroused to a frenzy, accused the church groups of “unwarrantable impertinence,” “meddlesome interference” and “unspeakable drool” about China’s rights and aspirations.
The “man in the club,” who personified the business community, upheld without question the right of the West to arrange conditions favorable to the well-being and commerce of Westerners wherever they might be. Chinese effort to curtail Western privileges was regarded as “encroachment on foreign rights” and mission-fostered Western education blamed for breaking down the old Confucian morality and raising up ideals inappropriate to China.
“Elected assemblies and democratic institutions,” wrote J. O. P. Bland, the tribune of the Treaty Ports, “are wholly inapplicable because unintelligible, to the race mind of Asia.” That was true enough but it led men like Bland, who believed that democracy was the proper form of government, to the conclusion that since Chinese found it unsuitable, therefore Chinese were “manifestly incapable of self-government.”
That view did not appeal to the American public. Americans saw in the Chinese a people rightly struggling to be free and assumed that because they were struggling for sovereignty they were also struggling for democracy. This was a delusion of the West. Many struggles were going on in China—for power, for nationhood, even in some cases for the welfare of the people—but election and representation, the sacred rights on which Westerners are nursed, were not their goal.
The American Government, like its people, leaned toward China’s rights, at least in the abstract. But it was saved from doing anything positive by a policy which required evidence of a stable and responsible government in China before extrality could be relinquished. In 1926 when the two commissions promised by the Washington Conference were meeting in Peking and Shanghai to review tariff autonomy and extrality, China hardly had a government. The Kuomintang was still a pretender and the tuchuns’ puppet government in Peking, after the last change of partners in the annual square dance of the northern warlords, had virtually disintegrated. A regency cabinet set up by Chang Tso-lin and Wu Pei-fu was not recognized by the treaty powers; consequently they could claim the moment was not ripe for abandoning treaty rights.
The year 1926 was to be the last chance for the “act of aggressive good,” the act of voluntary relinquishment. The treaty powers were not obtuse and some gestures were made. Chinese members were added to the Shanghai Municipal Council. The Tariff Conference agreed that tariff autonomy should be restored by a target date of 1929. The Extrality Commission, however, reached the expected conclusion that China must make progress toward rational judicial and governmental procedures before extrality could be yielded. Its report was issued in September 1926 just as the Nationalists swept into Hankow. After that the choice would no longer be voluntary; China began taking back her sovereign powers without asking.
In October when Eugene Chen announced the intention to levy taxes on foreigners, the Legations in horrified concert agreed that unless forcibly opposed this meant the beginning of the end of treaty rights in China. They were right but their governments could not agree on joint action. Neither Britain nor the United States was disposed to resort to arms against a people on the march to sovereignty. If in the past they had not been prepared to yield their privileges, neither were they now prepared to use force to preserve them.
Taking the lead away from the Americans, the British formulated this conclusion in a statement of policy known as the Christmas Memorandum which called on the powers to recognize the “essential justice” of the claim for treaty revision and meet the “legitimate aspirations of the Chinese people.” In America the House of Representatives followed with a resolution urging the United States to end the unequal treaties and renegotiate treaties with the Chinese on an “equal and reciprocal basis.” Americans equated China’s revolution with their own. The Nationalists represented, according to the Baltimore Sun, “a spirit as fine as anything that animated the revolutionary troops of George Washington.” The press as a whole (inevitably excepting the Chicago Tribune) refused to respond to the Red scare. “Chiang’s army is as red as Washington’s at Valley Forge,” stated the New York World, which, considering the presence of the Communists, was an understatement. Led by predisposition in China’s favor, American public opinion for the first time in history was moved to minimize rather than inflate the Red menace.
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The 15th Infantry in Tientsin felt the vibration of these events without greatly concerning itself, being precluded by American policy from playing any role that might involve it in Chinese affairs. Planted in the midst of the Concession area, it was quartered in three-story brick barracks buildings facing a parade ground. Its officers attended to regimental affairs, tea and dinner dances and polo at the race club; its enlisted men enjoyed a venereal disease rate three times that of the American Army as a whole; its weekly journal, The Sentinel, published news under the heading “Domestic” which referred to the United States. The paper could have appeared without change at any regimental post in America.
Tientsin, located 60 miles up-river from the sea, was the main port and business center of north China. As in Shanghai, the Concession area was policed by Sikhs provided by the British, and had its advantages for the Chinese. During the warlord era two presidents, a premier and 26 provincial governors at one time or another took refuge there. The Concession’s main street was named in its different sections Kaiser Wilhelmstrasse (renamed Woodrow Wilson Street), Victoria Road, Rue de la France and Via Italia. The United States had not taken a territorial concession until after the World War when it took over a section of the former German Concession, about a city block in area, now called the American Compound. Besides the barracks, the Compound housed the post hospital, service club and recreation hall where the heartbeat of America throbbed through a change of three or four American movies a week. Stilwell, who had contrived to remain unacquai
nted with Tientsin during his previous tour, had specified a Chinese-style house and was disgusted to find nothing but Western-style available. He had to settle for a “horrible 3-story house,” ponderously furnished, at 242 Race Course Road in the British Concession.
One battalion of the 15th Infantry had served against the Boxers in 1900 but the regiment had not taken up its station in China until after the Revolution of 1911. Its regular complement was three battalions, of which one remained in the Philippines. The two in China totaled about 50 officers and 800 men, somewhat less than the British and French contingents in Tientsin and approximately the same as the Japanese at that time. The 15th’s motto was “Can Do,” taken from the pidgin phrase used by Chinese to express, as the regimental manual put it, “ability to carry out the mission.” At the end of the training year a Can Do Week was held with track, field and marksmanship events, horse and transportation shows and much awarding of trophies and medals. The duty day, dominated by the sergeant and taken up with rifle and machine-gun drill, was short, generally over by noon, with little field exercise because the area for maneuver was limited. The regiment maintained a subpost at Tongshan, 85 miles to the southeast, to guard the railroad shops of the Peking-Mukden Railway, a summer training camp near Shankaikwan on the seacoast, and a Mounted Patrol of ex-cavalrymen on Manchurian ponies. The entire regiment was served by coolies, each company having its number-one boy dressed in long blue gown and black skullcap. The coolies pitched officers’ tents during field exercises, waited on their mess and performed all the menial tasks, even sometimes cleaning the enlisted men’s rifles. Soldiers’ reenlistment was high, too high for the Army’s liking, since it testified to “cohabiting with low caste native women,” according to General Castner, the overall commander and a choleric man. “Women, intoxicants and narcotics can be obtained in their vilest forms for a few cents,” he indignantly reported. In an effort to keep down the venereal rate free rickshaws were sent to bring home the men from bars at closing time.