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

by Adam Tooze

A lasting peace could not simply reinstate the status quo ante ‘out of which this iniquitous war issued . . . that status must be altered in such a fashion as to prevent any such hideous thing from ever happening again’. The vital precondition was that Germany must be defeated first. And there must be no hesitation ‘... we may never be able to unite or show conquering force again in the great cause of human liberty. The day has come to conquer or submit . . . If we stand together, victory is certain and the liberty which victory will secure. We can afford then to be generous, but we cannot afford then or now to be weak . . .’

In the summer of 1917 the greatest threat to the British war effort were not the U-boats, nor the threat of a Soviet in Leeds, but the very real possibility of default on the loans contracted in Wall Street since 1915. In this regard the American declaration of war provided immediate relief. Already by the end of April, Washington had provided Britain with an unprecedented official advance of $250 million, pending congressional approval of as much as $3 billion in loans.

For Russia’s democratic revolutionaries this show of belligerence was a disaster. If neither London nor Washington would countenance this talk of peace, this left Petrograd with two options. The Petrograd Soviet might have embraced the risky course of entering into separate peace talks with Germany. In July, if it had not already been otherwise committed, it could have seized on the Reichstag peace resolution, and challenged the rest of the Entente to respond.

The discontent of the workforce was undeniable.32 But in Russia neither the Provisional Government nor the majority in the Soviets could bring themselves to take a first step toward Germany. To usher in the new revolutionary era by suing for a separate peace would be a fundamental betrayal. Russian democracy could have no future in isolation. Was there a more radical alternative? On the left wing of the revolution the Bolsheviks were a growing force.

For Lenin, the Petrograd Soviet’s peace formula was not enough. Self-determination and no annexations might sound like progressive principles, but why should a revolutionary accept the endorsement of the pre-war status quo implied by ‘no annexations’?33 The only truly revolutionary formula was unqualified support for ‘self-determination’. Whereas liberals and reformist progressives shrank from such a formula because of the violence and inter-ethnic conflict it could easily stir up, Lenin espoused the slogan precisely because he expected it to unleash a whirlwind.

Whereas more orthodox Marxists dismissed Sinn Fein as suicidal putschists who lacked substantial working-class backing, for Lenin they were a vital pointer to the revolutionary future: ‘To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices . . . to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution . . .’ Anyone, who expected a ‘“pure” social revolution’, made only by the working class, would ‘never live to see it . . . We would be very poor revolutionaries if, in the proletariat’s great war of Liberation for socialism, we did not know how to utilise every popular movement . . .’34 Lenin demanded an immediate revolutionary peace. But, as anyone familiar with his writings would soon realize, this slogan was easily misunderstood. Lenin wanted urgently to halt the all-consuming, imperialist World War that was threatening to extinguish any hope of historical progress. But he wanted this peace only because he hoped that it would unleash an even more encompassing international class war – the ‘proletariat’s great war of Liberation’. A revolutionary peace concluded by an all-Soviet Russian regime would cause an uprising of the German proletariat. That liberals and Mensheviks shrank from such a course, fearing that it would unleash civil war in Russia, was precisely what marked it for Lenin as the correct revolutionary line. He wa...

So long as Russia remained loyal to the Entente, America was willing to provide aid. On 16 May the US Treasury agreed to provide the Provisional Government with an immediate loan of $100 million. Supplies were piled high at Vladivostok, if only they could be moved along Russia’s disintegrating railway system. To address this bottleneck Wilson authorized the immediate despatch of a technical railway mission to restore the capacity of the Trans-Siberian railway.

But the prospect of hunkering down in the ragged trench lines to hold out for another season of indecisive campaigning went fundamentally against the spirit of revolutionary Petrograd. There was a serious risk that if the army was left inactive throughout the summer, the Provisional Government would lose whatever capacity it still had to counteract Bolshevik subversion.

To force the rest of the Entente to take seriously Russian democracy’s appeals for a negotiated peace, in May 1917 Kerensky, Tsereteli and their colleagues set themselves frantically to rebuilding the army as a fighting force. They were not unrealistic enough to imagine that they might defeat Germany. But if Russia could deliver the kind of blow against Austria that Brusilov had pulled off in 1916, the Entente would surely have to listen. It was an extraordinary wager that reveals, not the timidity, but the desperate ambition of the February revolution.37

Russia, the impact of the failure of Kerensky’s democratic war effort was even more dramatic. The advocates of revolutionary defensism were humiliated. The peasant soldiers, many of whom had reluctantly steeled themselves for one last offensive, now abandoned the cause en masse. On 17 July, as the tide on the battlefield was about to turn, radicalized military units in the garrisons around Petrograd marched on the centre of the city to put an immediate end to the war. They acted seemingly without orders from Bolshevik headquarters, but as the demonstrations escalated, Lenin and the party leadership threw themselves behind the rebellion.

The uprising was not put down until the following day. The revolution was now openly and violently divided against itself.

Having survived an attack from the left wing, the main danger to Russian democracy was now from the right. With Brusilov’s reputation in tatters, the obvious Bonapartist pretender was General Kornilov, who Kerensky had approved as commander-in-chief.42 After weeks of open conspiracy, on 8 September 1917 Kornilov mounted his coup, only to find himself foiled by precisely the same force that had doomed the summer offensive. The mass of the army was no longer willing to take orders for decisive action. Kornilov was arrested. But who was to govern? Kerensky, who had launched the disastrous offensive and appeared to have colluded with Kornilov, was utterly discredited.

On 23 October, during a conspiratorial meeting in Petrograd, Lenin blurted out: ‘Now was the moment for seizing power, or never . . . it is senseless to wait for the Constituent Assembly that will obviously not be on our side . . .’

As far as the Bolsheviks were concerned, the Constituent Assembly elected on the basis of universal suffrage, including the bourgeoisie as well as workers and peasants, could never be anything more than a cloak for bourgeois power. ‘All power to the Soviet’ had been Lenin’s slogan from the start. After the embarrassment of the Kornilov putsch, the all-important Petrograd Soviet was firmly under the sway of the Bolsheviks.

Lenin had not forgotten the scorn heaped on his ‘peace’ policy by the majority of Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries at the summer session of the All-Russian Congress. To ensure that there was no repeat, Trotsky planned to launch a pre-emptive coup, overthrowing the remnants of the Provisional Government and installing an all-socialist government in Petrograd, thus facing Lenin’s critics with a fait accompli. On the evening of 6 November, one day before the All-Russian Congress of Soviets was due to meet, Red Guards occupied every key point in the city.

At least 44 million Russians cast a vote. To date it was the largest expression of popular will in history. Almost three times as many Russians voted in November 1917 as Americans had done in the 1916 presidential election. Not until the 1940s was any Western election to outdo this spectacular event. Turnout ran at just short of 60 per cent. Participation was somewhat higher in the ‘backward’ countryside than in the cities. There was little or no evidence of fraud. The Russian electorate cast their ballots in a manner that clearly reflected both the basic structure of Russian society and the course of national political events since February 1917.

Since the spring of 1917, the SRs and Mensheviks had been imploring the Bolsheviks to form a broad-based revolutionary coalition. But this was of no interest to Lenin and Trotsky. Instead, they allied themselves opportunistically with the extreme left wing of the agrarians, the Left SRs, whose advocacy of class war was even more militant than their own. The first meeting of the Constituent Assembly was postponed until January 1918 and in the meantime the Bolsheviks set about consolidating a Soviet regime and making good on Lenin’s most popular slogan: ‘Land, Bread and Peace’.

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 internal disorder reaches a point in Russia where Germany can intervene, it is conceivable that in the future she may be able to dominate Russia both politically and economically. Then the clock of progress would indeed be set back.’ If, on the other hand, democracy were to be ‘firmly established’ in Russia, House urged, ‘German autocracy would be compelled to yield to a representative government within a very few years.’

For the Chinese political class this was a direct challenge. Even less than the United States had China been able to insulate itself from the conflict. 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? Not to have joined Washington in taking a stand would have amounted to a humiliating admission of incapacity.

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.8 By the spring of 1916 the southern provinces, the traditional counter-weight to Beijing, abetted by Japanese agents provocateurs, were in open opposition, demanding a federalist constitution.9 More threateningly, the younger leaders of Yuan’s own militarist grouping, General Duan Qirui of Anhui province and General Feng of Zhili, declared against their former patron.

China’s energetic new press mounted a furious nationalist clamour against Yuan’s bid for absolute power.10 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.

Against Japan and the European imperialists, America had emerged as the great hope of many Chinese. As the youthful nationalist student Mao Zedong wrote to a friend in early 1917: ‘Japan is our country’s strong enemy.’ Within ‘twenty years’, Mao was convinced, ‘China would have to fight Japan, or go under’. Sino-American friendship, by contrast, was fundamental to the nation’s future. ‘The two Republics East and West will draw close in friendship and cheerfully act as reciprocal economic and trade partners.’ This alliance was ‘the great endeavour of a thousand years’.

But 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? As Reinsch reported to Secretary of State Lansing, President Li and Prime Minister Duan were hesitating because they feared that if China was to become a combatant and if this were to require a ‘more adequate military organization’, this would enable the Japanese to demand a ‘mandate’ from the Allies ‘to supervise such organization’.14 If Beijing refused, could China count on America’s support? Much now depended on President Wilson.

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’.17

For liberal China Hands such as Ambassador Reinsch or Millard, a confrontation with Japan was not unwelcome. But as we have seen, Wilson harboured deep fears about the global racial balance. 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.

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 first four sections of the 21 Points were familiar expressions of sphere-of-influence diplomacy – a forceful restatement of familiar Japanese objectives in securing their interests in Northern China and Manchuria, contiguous with their colony of Korea.

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.

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’.

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. But although by the spring of 1916 Tanaka had managed to push China to the brink of civil war, this did little in a positive sense to secure Japan’s long-term strategic position.

Facing what it believed to be a threat on an oceanic scale from the United States, the Terauchi government was insistent that Japan must go beyond a regional policy of spheres of interest. It was not enough for Japan to carve out its place in Manchuria, alongside British emplacements in Central China and France in the South, let alone to engage in the kind of destructive divide and rule tactics pursued by Tanaka.22 Instead, to confront the threat from across the Pacific, Tokyo must intensify its effort to place all of China under Japanese influence, thereby excluding the Western Powers altogether from the region.

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.23

As Foreign Minster Motono Ichiro put it in December 1916: ‘There are those who say that we should make China a protectorate or partition it, and there are those who advocate the extreme position that we should use the European war to make China completely our territory . . . but even if we were able to do that temporarily, the (Japanese) Empire lacks real power to hold on to it very long’.25 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.’

Such was the delicately poised situation into which Wilson’s appeal to the neutral powers exploded in early February 1917. How would Japan and China react? The American Embassy at least had no doubts about its mission. To consolidate the Chinese Republic and ward off Japan’s influence, Beijing must join Washington in an immediate break with Germany.

The British Embassy informed London that the majority of the cabinet and 80 per cent of China’s newspaper-reading public were in favour. From the nationalist South, the Republican newspaper Chung-Yuan Pao declaimed: ‘This is the time for action. We must range ourselves on the side of justice, humanity and of international law . . .’28 But within days of the Chinese break with Germany, these hopes were to suffer a shattering disappointment. 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: ‘The American government highly appreciates disposition of China but does not wish to lead it into danger. It regrets practical inability to give any present assurances . . . The Chinese government, therefore would do well to consult its representatives in the Allied countries. Ignorance of Japan’s attitude also suggests caution.’

very different message emerged from Japan. Since 1914 Tokyo had adopted a negative attitude toward China’s participation in the war against Germany. Now, Terauchi’s cabinet was eager to put its new strategy of comprehensive hegemony to the test. On 13 February Nishihara arrived in Beijing with the mission to bring China into the war on Japanese terms.

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.

The unintended effect of Tokyo’s new policy of working concertedly with the Beijing government was to discredit their Chinese collaborators and to unleash precisely the kind of disintegration that General Tanaka’s secret agents had worked so hard to manufacture through subversive means in 1916. 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. Echoing the fears that Prime Minister Duan himself had expressed to the Americans, Sun insisted, that ‘Whether a country can promote her status’ by means of war, depended ‘on the strength she has gained. For China, to join the allies will result in domestic disorder rather than improvements.’

The battle for the future of the Chinese Republic began in April 1917, with America’s declaration of war on Germany.

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. When Duan refused, President Li dismissed him. Duan’s military cronies left Beijing announcing that they would raise a rebellion. But Li was in no mood to compromise. 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’.

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. Japan wanted to deal with an authoritative government. 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 restora...

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.

In this conflict, all the sides looked to outside help. With Britain and France tied down in Europe, Russia consumed by revolutionary turmoil and Japan firmly committed to the Northern militarists, the Southern nationalist government turned to the United States.

This was profoundly humiliating. At the beginning of the year, the Chinese political class had thrilled to the idea that by joining the coalition against Germany they might gain recognition in the advance guard of the family of nations. Now, Lansing was openly asserting China’s unreadiness for any such alliance and refusing to take sides in China’s internal struggles. By contrast, Imperial Japan had picked a side and was shepherding China into the war under an authoritarian regime.

In an open letter published from Shanghai en route to joining Sun Yat-sen’s breakaway Southern government, Wu Tingfang addressed himself once more to America: ‘The war in Europe is being fought . . . to put an end to Prussian militarism,’ he insisted. ‘And I want the Americans here to understand that China’s present troubles are due to exactly the same causes.’ Drawing on his Gladstonian background, the new language of liberal internationalism came fluently to Wu: ‘We are engaged in a struggle between democracy and militarism . . . I ask Americans to be patient and give China a chance. Democracy will triumph . . . I hope to see the day when the stars and stripes and fire-coloured flag of China will be intertwined in an everlasting friendship.’

‘It is becoming rather ridiculous, at a time when America is engaged in a world-war . . . with the avowed principal object of saving democratic principle of government from being smothered by autocratic militarism, that the power and influence of the US should be applied in one place abroad, and should not be applied in another place abroad.’

Rather than engaging China, Lansing chose to deal with Japan. In November 1917, without consulting Beijing, Lansing and the Japanese ambassador Viscount Ishii issued a public statement that affirmed the Open Door policy in China – the principle of equal access for all foreign trade and investment – but also recognized Japan’s ‘special interest’ in Northern China on account of its geographic proximity.

Had he been party to private conversations within the Wilson administration, Koo would have been even more indignant. In September, Colonel House had proposed to Wilson that the vast population of China be placed under the administration of an international mandate, made up of three trustees nominated, with ‘Chinese consent’, by the USA, Japan and the ‘other powers’. China, he felt, was ‘in a deplorable condition. The prevalence of disease, the lack of sanitation, a new system of slavery, infanticide, and other brutal and degenerate practices make the nation as a whole a menace to civilization. There is no administration of justice worthy of the name, and the intercommunication is wholly inadequate . . .’ The international ‘trusteeship’ would ‘last for an agreed upon number of years, but long enough to put China in order, develop a civilization and purchasing power, and take her out of the backward nations and make her a blessing rather than a menace to the world’.