The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

by Adam Tooze

Taken together, the parties of the revolution – the agrarian Socialist Revolutionaries and their Ukrainian sister party, the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks – commanded almost 80 per cent of the vote. The parties of revolutionary defensism – the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and Mensheviks – were still the most popular, even after the Bolshevik coup. But by the autumn of 1917 their positions were painfully incoherent. By contrast, a large and energetic minority clustered around the urban areas and above all around Petrograd, giving their backing to the Bolsheviks.

In the aftermath of the coup, in a last desperate bid to save Russia’s democratic revolution, Viktor Chernov, the veteran leader of the agrarian Social Revolutionaries, appealed to London, Paris and Washington to provide him with a sensational foreign policy breakthrough, with which to answer Lenin’s seductive promise of an immediate peace. But he hoped in vain. There was no reaction.

In Washington, at least, there was some sense of the scale of the impending disaster. Following the collapse of the Kerensky offensive in early August 1917, Colonel House had written to Wilson that he felt an urgent move towards an immediate peace was vital: ‘It is more important . . . that Russia should weld herself into a virile Republic than it is that Germany should be beaten to her knees.

If House had come to his appreciation of the strategic importance of a democratic Russia in May, rather than in mid-August 1917, if Wilson had been willing to respond constructively to the peace feelers of the revolutionary defensists, or to signal his acceptance of a separate peace, perhaps democracy in Russia might have been saved.

As the leading historian of the doomed agrarian party has commented, we will never know whether the determination of the Allies to continue the war ‘killed outright’50 the possibility of a democratic alternative to the Bolsheviks, or ‘merely created an atmosphere in which that idea could not live. But that it was one or the other, there can be no reasonable doubt.’

By the 1940s we are used to seeing Chinese and Soviet Russian history as conjoined under the sign of Communism. But in 1917 for a fleeting moment, a different kind of connection seemed possible.

In China just as in Russia, what was at stake in 1917 was the future of a republican revolution. As in Russia this domestic struggle became intertwined with the global war.

The crisis in Beijing that prompted Millard to his startling call for action was precipitated in February 1917 by Woodrow Wilson’s decision to break off diplomatic relations with Germany and his invitation to the other neutral powers to join him in doing so. Wilson took his stand in the name of ‘just and reasonable understandings of international law and the obvious dictates of humanity’, and bluntly stated that he took it ‘for granted’ that all other neutrals would ‘take the same course’.2 For the Chinese political class this was a direct challenge.

In September 1914 Japan had abruptly occupied the German concession in the city of Qingdao on the Shandong Peninsula. As of 1916 Chinese volunteers were doing labour service for the Entente. While Germany intensified its U-boat campaign in the first days of March 1917, 500 Chinese labourers drowned when the French troopship Atlas was torpedoed. Was Beijing not under the same obligation as Washington to protect its citizens against German aggression?

The fact that the centuries-old Ch’ing dynasty finally collapsed in February 1912 to be replaced by a republic marks one of the true turning points in modern history. Republicanism had arrived in Asia. It caused consternation amongst conservatives in China. But it also came as a nasty shock to the Japanese, who after the Meiji Restoration had as recently as 1889 settled on a monarchical constitution modelled on that of Imperial Germany.

It was easy then, as now, for Chinese strongmen to find Western academics happy to confirm that Asian values ‘required’ authoritarian leadership.4 But throughout decades of turmoil China’s transition from monarchy to republic was to prove remarkably durable.5 The first Chinese general election of 1913 was held under a franchise restricted to men over the age of 21 with elementary education. But by the standards of the day that was hardly ungenerous. Even allowing for the failure of the majority of the Chinese electorate to turn out, the 20 million votes cast made this one of the largest democratic events on record.

Before they could exploit their victory, however, the Guomindang’s parliamentary leader was gunned down by an assassin linked to President General Yuan Shi-kai. After a short-lived rebellion, concentrated mainly in the southern provinces, Sun Yat-sen and the rest of the Guomindang leadership fled into exile. Yuan prorogued the parliament and suspended the provisional constitution drafted by the revolutionaries. Backed by a foreign loan brokered by London and Japan, but boycotted by Wilson’s administration in Washington, Yuan attempted to initiate a fresh authoritarian turn. Yuan, who had come to national prominence in the last years of the empire as the commander of the New Model Army in North-Central China, was a military modernizer who had no faith in new-fangled constitutions.7 But what he did not reckon with was the opposition of the majority of the Chinese political class. When over the winter of 1915–16 Yuan made a bid to install himself as monarch, the result was nationwide revolt.

Realizing that he was risking national disintegration and thereby opening the door to Japanese and Russian intervention, Yuan humiliatingly renounced any monarchical ambition and appointed General Duan as his Prime Minister. Duan was certainly no liberal. He had received his military training in Germany and was loyal to Yuan’s vision of authoritarian consolidation. But he was what the Germans would later dub a Vernunftrepublikaner, a republican out of realism.11

When the discredited Yuan died suddenly in June 1916, he was succeeded as President by Li Yuanhong, one of the figureheads of the original uprising of 1911 and the Guomindang’s preferred candidate for president back in 1913.

In February 1917 the parliament voted to disestablish Confucianism as an official religion. A new generation of Western-influenced intellectuals took charge of Beijing University, including the first generation of Chinese Marxists. Briefly, it seemed as though Chinese politics might be entering a period of constructive reform. A foreign policy that aligned the Chinese Republic with President Wilson seemed the ideal complement to this policy of republican consolidation.

Against Japan and the European imperialists, America had emerged as the great hope of many Chinese.

as both Reinsch and the British Embassy reported, there was deep anxiety in Beijing. To remain inactive might be humiliating. To join in an association with America was certainly tempting. But because the United States had set itself so publicly apart from the Entente, how would France, Britain and above all Japan interpret a Chinese alignment with it?

Any move to strengthen China’s own military capacity was bound to be considered a ‘menace that would justify Japan in demanding control’. If Washington were to encourage an independent Chinese effort, Lansing cautioned, they would have to be ‘prepared to meet Japanese opposition’.

In his vain struggle to preserve American neutrality, he felt himself to be the guardian of ‘white civilization’. With Europe divided this was not the moment for confrontation in the East. Racial fantasies aside, Japan was certainly a force to be reckoned with. Since the Meiji Restoration it had racked up a formidable track record of aggression.

In August 1914 a request from British Foreign Secretary Grey orchestrated by Japan’s Foreign Minister Kato had licensed Tokyo’s hasty declaration of war on Germany and its incursion into Shandong. On the lower reaches of the Yellow River within striking distance of Beijing, it was revered as a holy site of all three of China’s major religious traditions – Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism: its occupation was a new and devastating blow to Chinese prestige.

To gain the protection of the other members of the Entente, Yuan Shi-kai asked to be invited to declare war on Germany too. But Japan vetoed any show of Chinese independence. Instead, in January 1915, Tokyo handed Beijing a list of 21 demands that were soon to acquire global notoriety as one of the most flagrant expressions of imperialism produced by the war.

The notorious Section V demands, by contrast, were a claim to hegemony over the central administration in Beijing, its army and financial administration, that would have given Japan rights superior to all other powers throughout China.19 Because they challenged all the interested powers, the Section V demands were bound to be controversial in the West. But what no one in Japan, nor even amongst President Yuan’s inner circle in Beijing, had reckoned with was the patriotic indignation of the Chinese public.

At a stroke, what the Japanese had intended as a regional coup de main had turned into an international scandal. Whilst British diplomats struggled to prevent China and Japan coming to blows, the Washington Post broadcast the full details of the 21 Points to its indignant readership. There were speeches of protest in Congress denouncing Japan as the ‘Prussia of the East’.

The circle around genro Yamagata, the most influential survivor of the founding Meji generation, speculated more or less openly about the mistake that Japan had made in joining the side of the Entente. Convinced that Japan would in the long run face a confrontation with the United States, they favoured a conservative alliance with autocratic Tsarist Russia, a relationship that was consolidated by a secret treaty over the summer of 1916. But though scepticism about Japanese intentions toward China was certainly warranted, anti-Japanese outrage easily blinded Western observers to the ambiguity of imperialist politics in Japan.

Facing a collapsing regime in China and competing with an aggressively expansionist autocracy in Russia, imperialism often went hand in hand in Japan with reform-minded liberalism.

Up until 1914, Japan’s economic development and public finances depended to an extraordinary extent on the City of London. Nor was Japan in its domestic politics the authoritarian powerhouse of liberal, anti-imperialist cliché. Following the death of the last Meiji Emperor in July 1912, four cabinets succeeded each other in short succession, buffeted by elite infighting and popular protest.

After the war, the Doshikai were to morph into the main liberalizing force in Japanese parliamentary politics. In 1925 they were to carry through the introduction of full manhood suffrage.

From the outbreak of war with Russia in 1905, Japan was repeatedly convulsed by waves of popular agitation. For Japanese intellectuals, deeply influenced by European historical thinking, it was evident that Japan as much as China was caught up in a tidal wave of historical change. The question was what implications it should have for foreign policy.

Invoking Sir Edward Grey and the Anglo-Japanese Treaty to justify the declaration of war allowed Kato to sideline the more conservative figures in the Japanese establishment around genro Yamagata. Looked on in this light, the 21 Points were a further effort by Kato to maintain the respectability of Japanese foreign policy in Western eyes by containing the even more radical, racialized visions of confrontation that were circulating within the imperial military establishment.

Though Beijing was forced into humiliating concessions, Tokyo could not uphold the hugely controversial Section V demands in the face of international protest. Britain negotiated a compromise between Tokyo and Beijing.

Rather than pursuing the vain search for international respectability, the rump of the Okuma cabinet allowed itself to be persuaded by Vice Chief of Staff Tanaka Giichi to commit itself to a radical attack on the central authority of Beijing. Japan would eliminate China from the menacing strategic configuration in the Pacific by a ruthless policy of divide and rule, squeezing Yuan to make humiliating concessions, whilst sponsoring nationalists such as Sun Yat-sen to rebel against him.

In the summer of 1916 the fiasco of the liberal version of Japanese imperialism opened the door to a new government headed by General Terauchi, a bull-necked militarist and ruthless former governor of Korea. Unlike Okuma, Terauchi was openly hostile to any move toward the liberalization of the Japanese constitution.

In pursuing this enormously ambitious agenda, Japan must use new tools. The new programme was not without a military dimension. Japan would seek long-term intergovernmental military agreements. But henceforth Japanese policy in China would be directed through the national government in Beijing and the lead would be taken by bankers, principally the shadowy associate of Interior Minister Goto Shinpei, Nishihara Kamezo.

The enormous centrifugal forces that upended the structures of pre-war finance in the Atlantic were also at work in the Pacific. By 1916, Japan’s balance of payments was so strong and the Entente’s financial position so desperate that Tokyo was in the truly unprecedented position of lending money to the Entente (Table 3).

Japan would exert leverage over Beijing by becoming its chief source of foreign finance. And this shift to a strategy of long-term financial hegemony was further reinforced by Japan’s internal politics. Despite their pretensions to ‘transcendence’, Prime Minister Terauchi and his authoritarian friends needed support in parliament.

Terauchi’s purportedly independent conservative government was in fact dependent on the gentry party of provincial Japan, the Seiyukai. Their redoubtable leader, Hara Takashi, was no progressive. He resisted the rising tide of democracy in Japan and was only too happy to profit from a rigged election in 1917 to establish a huge majority in the Diet. He scoffed at the aspirations of Chinese nationalism. But of one central feature of the new world Hara was unshakably convinced – the dominant power of the future was the United States.

A Chinese warlord put the same point rather more crudely. For all their aggression, the Japanese were ‘not sure’ that they could ‘swallow’ China. ‘We are weak, we are stupid, we are divided, but we are innumerable, and in the end, if they persist, China will burst the Japanese stomach.’26

Faced with Germany’s violation of international law, ‘China for the sake of its status in the world should not remain silent. China will take this opportunity to enter a new era of diplomacy, become an equal member of the international community, and through a firm policy, win favorable treatment from the Allies.’ The British Embassy informed London that the majority of the cabinet and 80 per cent of China’s newspaper-reading public were in favour.

Far from embracing the Chinese Republic in its desire to enter the war, President Wilson and Secretary of State Lansing drafted a polite, but discouraging response:

To offset the dispiriting impact of this message, Wilson asked Reinsch to express verbally his sincere support for Chinese independence.29 But despite Reinsch’s over-eager promises, and despite the fact that as of April 1917 $3 billion were in the pipeline for the Entente, not even $10 million were approved for China.

Not to be outdone by Reinsch, the Japanese played on China’s demand for international respect. Nishihara encouraged China to make substantial demands of the Europeans, including a ten-year suspension of the indemnity imposed after the suppression of the Boxer rebellion, permission to establish a viable tax base for the Chinese national government by raising customs tariffs, as well as the right to station units of the Chinese Army in the territory of the foreign Legation for the duration of war. Furthermore, unlike his American rivals, Nishihara had the means to deliver on his promises.

As far as Tokyo was concerned, its new strategy in China seemed to be paying handsome dividends. The Americans appeared surprisingly easy to intimidate. Given the perilous state of the war in Europe, the British and French were willing to concede virtually anything Japan demanded.31 In January 1917, in exchange for the despatch of a Japanese flotilla to the eastern Mediterranean to help combat the Austro-German U-boat menace, they secretly approved Japan’s retention of Germany’s rights in Shandong after the end of the war.

In Tokyo it might seem that the choice was between a policy of divide and rule and one of sponsoring the consolidation of a cooperative Chinese national government. But the awakening of Chinese nationalism confronted Tokyo with a fundamental dilemma. In 1915 Japan’s 21 Points had united China against Japan.

As news leaked out that Prime Minister Duan had accepted Japan’s generous offer of loans, a wave of nationalist opposition began to build. From his rebel base in Southern China, Sun Yat-sen let it be known that he opposed entering the war.

The battle for the future of the Chinese Republic began in April 1917, with America’s declaration of war on Germany. Prime Minister Duan responded by convoking a conference of military governors in Beijing, who agreed that China must follow suit.

With characteristic tact, his warlord friends decided to surround the parliament with an armed mob of their retainers. Outraged by this blatant act of intimidation, the Guomindang majority agreed that a declaration of war was essential on patriotic grounds, yet declared that China could go to war to defend its honour, only once Duan and his pro-Japanese clique had resigned.

The warlords’ challenge to the parliament was illegitimate and would either lead to ‘a partition of the country’ or risked reducing China to a ‘protectorate [of Japan] like Korea’.33 In fact, sticking as best it could to the principles of its new policy, Tokyo exercised considerable restraint, turning down several requests from Duan for aid.

It was President Li who precipitated the final collapse by summoning to Beijing one of the most reactionary of the warlords, Zhang Xun, who he apparently believed could serve as a counterweight to the two major militarist groupings that had emerged from Yuan Shi-kai’s power bloc: Prime Minister Duan’s Anhui clique and General Feng’s Zhili power base. Zhang, however, had his own ideas. He occupied the imperial palace and proclaimed the restoration of the Ch’ing dynasty.

Nishihara released a generous dole of funds to the Zhili wing of the Northern militarist group whose troops promptly reoccupied the capital, routing General Zhang’s forces. The Anhui and the Zhili cliques divided power between them. Duan was restored as Prime Minister. Feng, the leading commander of the Zhili faction, replaced Li as President. However, refusing to accept the return of the twice-discredited militarists to Beijing, in the summer of 1917 the Guomindang members of the parliament decamped to the South where they constituted a rebel nationalist government headed by their long-time leader Sun Yat-sen.

He had made his country a party to the war, thereby securing the place at the peace conference that many in China’s political class saw as a priceless entry ticket to the international arena. He had also put paid, once and for all, to monarchical restorationism in China. But, with two separate governments in the North and South, China’s thirty-year era of disintegration and civil war had begun.