Stilwell and the American Experience in China: 1911-1945

by Barbara W. Tuchman

It is not in the nature of established governments to opt for change, even in their own interest.

While acknowledging that under present conditions China was not ripe for Communism, the U.S.S.R. agreed to aid the Kuomintang to achieve national unity and independence. Under the terms of the alliance with Sun Yat-sen, the Chinese Communists, who had formed their own party in 1921, were admitted into the Kuomintang as collaborators in the goal of regenerating the country and for the time being agreed that the Kuomintang should assume the leadership of the national revolution.

the Oriental attitude did not insist on man conquering his circumstances.

This was the pattern of Western activism and Chinese acceptance.

The Chinese themselves never confused material aid which was what they looked to America for with either counsel or leadership.

Siege of the Legations by the Boxers.

Boxer Rebellion

In November 1922 the United States Supreme Court confirmed an earlier Act of Congress limiting acquired citizenship to “free white persons,” thus in effect ruling that Japanese could not become American citizens by naturalization. In 1924 after clamorous agitation by the western states, Congress enacted the Japanese Exclusion Bill. As a gesture hardly conducive to goodwill, it did not augur well for the Washington Treaties.

It began with the order to “Fire!” given by a British Inspector of Police against Chinese students and workers demonstrating in the course of a textile strike in Shanghai on May 30, 1925. Twelve Chinese were killed and 17 wounded. The Shanghai Incident, as it came to be called, was only one incident in a train of history but, like those other shots from British rifles called the Boston Massacre, it was fuel for an upheaval that led to sovereignty.

The Kuomintang, by this time infused with new strength by its alliance with the Comintern, was already on the way up. The most significant help Sun Yat-sen had received from the Russians came in the form of two foreign advisers, Michael Borodin for civilian affairs and a man known as Galen for military affairs, who later as

Marshal Vassili Bluecher was to command the Soviet ...

The Russian advisers, together with Russian arms and other material support, marked the turning point in Kuomintang fortunes. Revolution, Dr. Sun was told, was not to be accomplished by relying on opportunistic alliances without a common goal.

Its first requirement is an indoctrinated armed force of its own. Accordingly a Military Academy with thirty Russian instructors under the direction of Galen was founded at Whampoa in 1923. For reciprocal indoctrination and training Dr. Sun sent a military mission to Moscow headed by a thirty-seven-year-old disciple of outstanding qualities, Chiang Kai-shek.

In 1924 Dr. Sun had proclaimed his program of the Three Principles—Nationalism, Democracy and the People’s Livelihood—with inspiring effect throughout China. But lured as ever by the prospect of power through arrangement, he accepted an invitation from Chang Tso-lin and Feng Yu-hsiang in Peking to join a conference of “reorganization” for national union. While in Peking he died of cancer on March 12, 1925, leaving ...

Chiang Kai-shek was not one of the Western-educated group nor did he become Soviet-oriented, but rather the contra...

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

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.

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 le...

along the Bund drew fire again—with some provocation—from British and French marines lined up opposite. This time...

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.

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

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 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.

Chiang Kai-shek’s assertion, “I expect to win the war 30 per cent by fighting and 70 per cent by propaganda.”

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 year 1926 was to be the last chance for the “act of aggressive good,” the act of voluntary relinquishment.

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.

Until their entry into Shanghai, the Nationalist advance was generally regarded by the Treaty Ports as “the Red Wave on the Yangtze.” The profound split between right and left in the Kuomintang was not yet known to foreigners.

But Chiang Kai-shek and his supporters, if they were to achieve power in their own right, had to have the revenue and loans they could only obtain in alliance with capitalism.

Labor troubles, peasant uprisings and antiforeign riots alarmed property-owners in their own ranks and property-owners whose support they needed. Communists working with the Kuomintang, including Mao Tse-tung, were busy organizing rent strikes and anti-landlord demonstrations among 2,000,000 peasants of Hunan, and Mao was promising that soon all over China “several hundred million peasants will rise like a tornado…and rush forward along the road to revolution.” Chiang needed t...

Chiang was determined that the great metropolis of commerce, banking and foreign trade must not fall like Hankow under left-wing control. Shan...

Arriving by gunboat, Chiang Kai-shek made contact with merchants and bankers through his former connections and secured a loan on the security of his assurances.

Chiang Kai-shek made a wider sweep. On the night of April 12–13, assisted by agents of the Green Society and police of the French Concession, he carried out a bloody purge of the left, disarming and hunting down all who could be found and killing more than 300. The revolution was turned from Red to right. Chiang’s coup was both turning point and point of no return. He was now on the way to unity but he had fixed the terms of an underlying disunity that would become his nemesis.

the Northern Expedition had come to a halt at Hsuchow. Suffering from more problems than lack of rolling stock, it went no farther in 1927 and almost foundered in factional strife before the end of the year.

public welcome. He was trapped by his alliance with the capitalists into a campaign of Communist suppression that took on all aspects of a white terror.

the Manchurian crisis,

On September 18, 1931, the Japanese Kwantung Army, using the arranged pretext of a bomb explosion on the tracks of the South Manchurian Railway, seized Mukden in “self-defense,” and spread out swiftly to the military occupation of Manchuria.

History is the unfolding of miscalculations,

Under the formula of “tutelage” the Government remained a one-party autocracy and became increasingly authoritarian and repressive, sowing the wind of rebellion. Deprived of the possibility of reform within the framework of government and hounded as outlaws, the Communist movement according to the American Vice-Consul in Hankow, Edmund Clubb, “has been forced…into a bitter rebellion which is sweeping the oppressed—liberal students and all—with a savage hatred of the existing regime in China.”

The Manchurian crisis was one of the causative events of history born, not of tragic “ifs,” but of the inherent limitations of men and states.

The year 1931 cowered under economic blizzard. Britain, the major Western power in the Far East, was in the midst of political and financial crisis and about to go off the gold standard, the bourses of Europe were trembling on the edge of panic, the Weimar Republic was dying and the United States was sunk in the slough of depression. Japan’s act was indeed embarrassing in view of all the machinery set up to restrain aggression but as the French Premier André Tardieu said, it was “a long way off.”

It seemed immediate and compelling to the American Secretary of State, Henry L. Stimson, an outstanding advocate of disarmament and of the collective effort to outlaw war.

Through Stimson the attack on Manchuria reactivated the United States in world affairs, ultimately with disillusioning result that was to play its role in renewed isolation. Stimson had two objectives in the crisis: to prevent further Japanese expansion on the mainland of Asia as had been the American effort since 1917, and to uphold the system of collective security.

But when the League, in the hope of sharing or possibly devolving responsibility on the United States, was prepared to invite ad hoc American adherence to the Council, he shied off,

He wanted Japan to be curbed by the “vigorous judgment” of world opinion, not by the United States alone.

Throughout the first four decades of the twentieth century it was always this beckoning figure of the liberal thin man inside the Japanese body politic and the hope of his reemergence that lured American policy.

In 1931 who could say whether international condemnation of the Manchurian adventure, backed by threat of sanctions, would strengthen the hand of the moderates or unite Japan behind the superpatriots?