SUN YAT-SEN used to be fond of saying that there were neither rich nor poor in China—only the poor and less poor. Had he lived a little longer (he died in March 1925) he would have seen what happens when circumstances force into the open the underlying conflict between the "poor" and the "less poor." He would have seen how the "anti-imperialist united front" within the Kuomintang began to divide along class lines. As the mass movement rose and grew, it created new social and political alignments. The factory worker could not be expected long to continue making a formal distinction between the Chinese employer and the foreign employer. If anything, the conditions imposed upon him by the former were worse. Nor could the peasant be expected to remain satisfied with limited promises or to refrain from taking the logical road of action in his own interest as he saw it. The limits so glibly and formally set by the leaders and organizers of the Kuomintang were soon exceeded. A mass movement on such a scale as that which swept China in 1925 developed a momentum all its own. Against its pressure, the propertied classes, the employers of labor and owners of land, began to pit themselves.

The propertied classes obviously preferred compromise with the foreigners to the alternative that the mass movement seemed to suggest. But this did not mean that they would react uniformly to events. The whole social process had been too suddenly shaken, the normal social balances too crudely broken by the intervention of the masses of people in the cities and in the countryside. Crystallization of class forces and of political groupings was taking place simultaneously with the development of the struggle itself. The Chinese ruling class in general wanted the revolution to create a new, stronger, bourgeois power, more stable, more amenable to control than the regime of the war lords, and more capable of commanding better terms from the imperialists who held the real reins of power. But this class was itself divided in sections, ranging from ultraconservative to radical. Their fundamental community of interest would eventually drive them into a common front and a common effort. But this was going to take time. There were groupings which differed on the best way to accomplish the common purpose. There were personalities striving with and mauling one another in the struggle for place and position and power. The common motive, however, was mutually recognized. There was nothing blind about the way that foreign representatives, compradores, Chinese industrialists and bankers, landlords, and their political hangers-on reached out for means with which to control the new political forces in motion. There was a remarkable degree of self-consciousness and definition. They knew what they wanted and set about getting it with the utmost deliberation.

The compradores, the brokers for foreign capital, were one of the most powerful of these groups. Merchant princes, bankers, and commission men, their interests collided most directly with the Nationalist aims of the budding Chinese industrialists who dreamed of competing with the foreigners in industry and trade. The compradores fought the new nationalism from the start. They used the old militarists and provided the channel along which the imperialists backed the militarist defense of the status quo. Through them were supplied the money, the arms, and the encouragement which kept the old militarist provincial forces in the field. In some cases, as in Canton in 1924, they organized their own fighting detachments. But that was when the new Nationalist power had barely established itself in one city. As the movement spread, it became a question of strengthening and using the old militarist armies. This group also had its political representatives in the Kuomintang. These were the oldest, the most conservative, usually the most corrupt, and always the most nearsighted politicians of the old Kuomintang. Most of them had long since become the ministers and clerks and appendages of the war lords. They were utterly opposed to the course that Sun Yat-sen took in 1924, the turn to co-operation with Russia and the Chinese Communists and the program for mobilizing the masses to fight imperialism. When the Kuomintang congress in 1924 adopted these policies, they immediately organized an opposition wl1ose avowed purpose w as to save the Kuomintang from the perdition which they believed threatened it. They argued that the path to effective compromise with the foreign Powers was being hopelessly blocked.

"Since the admission of the Communists into the Kuomintang," said one of their manifestoes, "their propaganda about overthrowing the imperialists of Great Britain, France, the United States, and Japan is aimed at the destruction of the international good will of the Kuomintang.... Their intention is to obliterate the Kuomintang.''1 Various organizations for "saving the party" sprang up. Their members attached themselves to the entourages of the various local militarists in North China and Manchuria. They scurried between Peking, Tientsin, Shanghai, and Hongkong, organizing, propagandizing, intriguing, and conspiring. After Sun Yat-sen died, they raised the slogan of rescuing "pure" Sun Yat-senism from the "Bolshevism" of the epigones. One of these groups, which became the most important one, took the name "Sun Yat-senist Society." It met in November 1925 for a conference in the Western Hills just outside of Peking and from that meeting took the name by which it was subsequently known: the Western Hills Conference group. These groups considered themselves the guardians of the policy of compromise with the Powers. In practice, they played the role of keeping open the path to such a compromise until the time when it would become propitious.

The foreigners, on their part, were driven off balance by the impact of the mass movement. In the beginning they seemed to think that the freebooting methods of the Opium Wars and the Boxer days would suffice. But the more intelligent among them soon realized, with no small sense of shock, that the times had changed. The British threat to use force in support of the Merchants' Volunteers in Canton had availed them nothing. Foreign gunfire the next year at Shanghai, Tsingtao, Hankow, and Canton, far from cowing the Chinese, had only aggravated the revolt. Foreign bullets sown in Chinese soil brought a swift harvest of tens of thousands of new revolutionary recruits. Without forsaking their own strong-arm policy, the Powers began to give the most active possible support to every available anti-Nationalist force. During the East River wars in 1925, Hongkong vainly fed Chten Ch'inng-ming with munitions and cash. When the pro-Nationalist Kuominchun ("People's Army") of Feng Yu-hsiang in the north attacked the Manchurian war lord Chang Tso-lin late in 1925, Japanese arms and money bolstered Chang's defences. When the revolt of Kuo Sung-ling, one of Chang's subordinates, threatened to bring about Chang's collapse, Japanese military forces were thrown into the battle2 and the threat to Chang was smashed, checking for the time being the further spread of Nationalist influence in North China. But this too, it was understood, was but a temporary respite.

Out of the growing awareness of the new political realities, a whole new orientation in the policies of the leading foreigners in the treaty ports began to make itself felt. It developed into the careful and conscious attempt to establish a common front of foreign and Chinese property owners. "We know by long years of friendly association with you that you do not sympathize with rioters and strikers," said the British-owned North China Daily News to Shanghai's Chinese men of property at the height of the Shanghai general strike. The paper, virtually the official British mouthpiece in the country, called upon wealthy Chinese to show that they had "no fellowship with the unfruitful workers of anarchy and ruin.... How long this threat to your peace, your welfare, and your safety is to last depends largely on you."3 At the same time the Powers hastened to show that they were prepared to discuss compromises of a concrete nature to bolster the puppet Peking government against the Nationalist threat. Arrangements made at the Washington Conference in 1922 to take up the questions of Chinese tariff rights and extraterritoriality had not been implemented. Now they were hastily revived. In October 1925, a tariff conference opened at Peking, and it ended by promising to restore tariff autonomy to China by January 1, 1930.

l At the end of the year an international commission on extraterritoriality was formed to assist in bringing about legislative and judicial reforms which, in the terms of the Washington resolution, "would warrant the several Powers in relinquishing, either progressively or otherwise, their respective rights of extraterritoriality." Early in 1926, Britain sent out a mission to decide on the allotment in China of the British share of the Boxer Indemnity Funds. Thus from several strings, hopes and promises were dangled before the increasingly eager noses of Chinese leaders.4

Strikes had not been confined to foreign enterprises. Even Chinese liberals who agreed that the labor movement had "created a nation-wide social consciousness which is essential toward the building of a new and vigorous Republic" were uneasy about the movements "foolish excesses, like the rapid increase of strikes in China's industries."5 The feeling was growing, a Chinese observer reported, "that it is one thing to utilize the workers . . . but quite another to let them bite off more than they can chew." It was a good thing to enjoy "the benefits of strong organized labor" but on the other hand "too much of a good thing is often harmful."8 The deplorable lack of discrimination shown by the workers soon made the Chinese factory-owner realize that he was in the same boat with his foreign rival Every new event brought this into sharper relief. Moreover, his dependence on the foreigner was only too painfully apparent. When the workers walked out of foreign plants in Shanghai on June 1, the American-owned city power plant cut off all power and wheels stopped in Chinese factories as well. This brought the gentlemen of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce flocking to the council chambers of the foreigners, offering to support drastic reductions in the sweeping demands initially put forth by the striking workers. Rich Chinese began to cut off the flow of contributions into the strike-bound city. Respectable leaders began to put heavy pressure on the unions. Mutual profit dictated an entente with the foreigners and this soon found expression in open attempts to force the labor organizations into line. Gradually the back of the strike was broken. At summer's end the Fengtien military, who had assumed control of Shanghai, in co-operation with the foreign settlement authorities and with full sanction and support of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, closed down the Shanghai General Labor Union, and raided and sealed some 120 workers' clubs and other organizations. The strike wave in Shanghai was temporarily halted and remained so during the winter months of 1925-26.

During this period the flirtation between foreign and Chinese men of property became more audacious. There was no difficulty about the preliminaries. Both sides organized their own anti-Communist leagues, published violent anti-Communist propaganda. British businessmen developed a new and rather touching concern for the fragile structure of Chinese culture. "I appeal to you," pleaded one of them at a Shanghai meeting, "to save for China the priceless heritage of its ancient civilization." As the end of the fiscal year drew near, board chairmen counted up fading earnings. "It is to be hoped," said one company report, "that the authorities will in future take drastic steps to curb the activities of professional agitators."7 What was apparently meant by "drastic steps" was demonstrated on March 18, 1926, in Peking, when troops of Tuan Ch'i-jui, head of the Peking government, fired on a student demonstration, killing scores of boys and girls who were protesting Tuan's readiness to submit to a foreign ultimatum concerning demilitarization of Tientsin harbor.8 That same night an unusual affair took place in Shanghai.

At the Majestic Hotel, the members of the foreign Municipal Council sat down to dine with the pillars of Shanghai Chinese society. The event was called a "milestone in the history of Shanghai." It was "the first time in the history of this municipality when any such gathering has taken place."9 The foreign official or taipan (business leader) present at this dinner was the type that was accustomed to sending Chinese of all classes to the back doors of the exclusively foreign clubs. For the Chinese present, bankers, brokers, merchants, and officials, this dinner was exactly the kind of social revolution they wanted.

"We, your hosts," began the American chairman, Stirling Fessenden, speaking for his British and Japanese colleagues on the council, "count ourselves fortunate in having been able to secure the attendance of so distinguished a company of Chinese gentlemen.

We have with us a representative gathering of the men who mold and guide that vast and wonderful force known as public opinion." He then came directly to the point. Trouble lay ahead and it was necessary "to devise countermeasures." Force might have to be used but had its drawbacks because it might "quickly lead to an international situation of extreme gravity." Attempts at arbitration would "probably end in failure." The workers of Shanghai were gullible victims of agitators who lured them from the security of their factories. Why not, then, take advantage of the "extreme credulousness of the Chinese working classes . . . why not take advantage of it for their good and for ours? Why not set up a different kind of leadership from that to which they have been accustomed, a leadership they would be inclined to follow at least as readily as any other?… It needs, I suggest, men like some of whom we have with us here tonight."

Yu Ya-ch'ing, leading Chinese banker and compradore, rose to reply. "We are all fully aware of the exceedingly tense situation," he said. "It is no exaggeration to say that spontaneous combustion is apt to take place at the slightest provocation which may quickly lead to a worse conflagration than that of last year. For our respective and common interests we must by all means prevent it." Time was short and drifting dangerous, he went on. "It is most important for us, through combination of local initiative and concerted action on a national and international scale to provide the earliest and most satisfactory settlement of our outstanding problems." Peace was desirable, Yu then said bluntly, "but speaking frankly, we do not care to have it at 'any price.' " The foreigners had to give some recognition to the principles of "racial equality" and "sovereign rights." More specifically for the moment, they had to give the Chinese property owners a hand in the administration of Shanghai.10

Three weeks later the annual meeting of foreign ratepayers approved the admission, for the first time, of three Chinese members to the Shanghai Municipal Council, governing body of the International Settlement. This bargain, the first of many, was a plain example of the new relationship established between Chinese and foreign property interests. It was a frank and deliberate alliance against the revolutionary mass movement. It became increasingly conscious, alert, and planful in all its moves. Its influence was by no means confined to Shanghai and the North but reached down into the heart of the nationalist movement in Canton itself. The more simple-minded moneyed men, Chinese and foreign, were prone to see Canton in the single hue of red. Others began to learn that it was not that simple. The foreigners, particularly, had to learn a great deal in those harried months and the sharpest of them learned quickly. They had to discover that their end would be gained not by use of their brute force but by class differentiation inside the movement that threatened their interests. "The serious mistake made by foreigners," wrote one of them at the time, "was to emphasize Communism as the cause of all the troubles in 1925.... As long as anti-Communism was in any way identified with pro-foreignism, there was little hope of the better elements among the Chinese really opposing the Communists.''1l The Chinese politicians and businessmen with whom these foreign leaders were rapidly cementing new contacts had to teach their less intelligent colleagues that Canton, far from being of a single hue, in reality reflected all the colors in the class spectrum. It had to be broken down with the utmost care if the red was to be crowded from the screen.

At Canton, class antagonisms smoldered and grew. The oldguard "Rights" of the Kuomintang had broken away in opposition to the 1924 Reorganization, which they believed shut the door on compromise with the Powers. But the so-called "Left" at Canton consisted of men whose primary calculation was that a powerful mass movement would extract concessions from the imperialists. Events so far had justified them. The great mass strikes of 1925 had brought from the foreign Powers and interests substantial offers to concede and to compromise, although still on a limited scale. But the rise of this mass movement at the same time sharply raised the question of leadership. The Right Wing of the Kuomintang had to assert, establish, and consolidate its control. Thanks to the acquiescent policy of the Communists this was duly accomplished. To follow the process by which it was done, we need to reach into the maze of intrigues and clash of individual wills that composed the political life of Canton, and find and trace a single thread, the career of a young officer named Chiang Kai-shek, a man whose ambition, fathered by ruthless cunning and a total lack of scruple, brought him, now to the center of the Chinese political scene.

Scion of a moderately well-to-do Chekiang merchant family, Chiang Kai-shek was at military school in Toyko when the first revolution took place in 1911. He hurried back to Shanghai where he joined the staff of a general named Ch'en Ch'i-mei. Under Ch'en's patronage, Chiang met Sun Yat-sen. He also came into contact with Yu Ya-ch'ing, then already a powerful compradore, and Chang Ching-chiang, a millionaire banker and dealer in bean curd and curios. Chiang also associated with Huang Ching-yung, one of Shanghai's notorious underworld leaders, and is generally believed to have become a member at this time of the most powerful secret society in Shanghai, known as the Green Circle. Gangsters, bankers, military men, murderers, thieves, smugglers, and brothel-keepers helped draw the original lines of the portrait the world was to come to recognize as Chiang Kai-shek. Far from being effaced as time passed, they deepened In the years to come Chiang was destined to lean upon and be leaned upon by these early mentors. Curiously little is said about this period in the official biographies of Chiang Kai-shek. Details vary widely in different accounts and the dates are vague. It is clear, however, that Chiang for a time abandoned his military career and became a petty broker on the Shanghai Stock Exchange under the tutelage of some of his wealthy sponsors. For reasons on which the available records are not clear, he was soon in trouble. Chang Ching-chiang and his other sponsors bailed him out of a difficult situation.

They made good some questionable losses, lined his pockets, and shipped him off to Canton to link his fortunes with those of Sun Yat-sen. Few investments have ever paid greater dividends.

In Canton, Chiang Kai-shek joined Sun Yat-sen's military staff. After Sun made contact with the Soviet government, he sent Chiang to Moscow to study Red Army methods. Chiang left China in July 1923 and remained in Russia for six months. There is no credible record of his impressions of that visit, but from his own subsequent conduct it seems plain that he must have been impressed by the effectiveness of centralized political power and party discipline. He certainly had the opportunity to observe the power of a popular movement as a political and military weapon. He returned to China, at any rate, with an enormous advantage over his fellow militarists. For as long as it suited him, he could now cry "Long live the world revolution!" and reap the benefits of association with that slogan. He used it crudely and deliberately to build up his own power. Chiang undoubtedly understood the risks involved, but his boldness and readiness to gamble, which had undone him on the Stock Exchange, paid off when power became the stake. On his return to Canton at the end of the year, Chiang became the dark-haired darling of Borodin and the Russian military advisers. In May 1924 they set up the Whampoa Military Academy. Chiang Kai-shek, the only military man who had been to Russia and studied Russian military methods at first hand, and what is more, a man who made himself sound reliably radical, was the logical choice for director. Whampoa set out to breed a new type of soldier for China. It became the breeding ground of Chiang Kai-shek's power in the land.

Whampoa's cadets distinguished themselves in all the early battles

—in the suppression of the Merchants' Volunteers, the expeditions to the East River, the short war against the Yunnanese generals, and the clean-up of the rest of southern Kwangtung. Chiang was their military leader and each of these campaigns heightened his prestige, power, and influence, especially after Whampoa cadets began to take their places as officers in regular military units. But the young men who flocked to Whampoa were all involved in or affected by the surrounding political atmosphere. All their military successes had been won in joint fighting with worker and peasant detachments. Some cadets were actually drawn from these forces. Many regarded themselves as Kuomintang radicals. Many were Communists. On the other hand, many of those who entered the first classes at Whampoa from bourgeois and landlord families reacted to events in accordance with their family backgrounds. The Whampoa student body, like every other group in Canton, split into opposing camps. The Sun Yat-senist Society, already active in Central and North China, organized a Whampoa branch. The Communist cadets and their more or less radical Kuomintang allies formed into what they called the League of Military Youth. During the campaigns of 1925 these two groups openly clashed on several occasions. Chiang Kai-shek tried to keep balanced between them, a role he was already trying to play on the broader stages of Canton politics. When the armies got back to Canton after their second successful expedition to the East River in October 1925, Chiang gathered his young officers at a banquet. A guest at the dinner has described how "he pounded the table and scolded them" and demanded that they keep the peace between them.12 It was the time, he knew, for "unity."

Chiang was still some distance from power. He still needed the Communists, the mass movement, and the Russians—their advice and their arms and ammunition. Politically, he was still several rungs down the ladder, below the Kuomintang party leaders, Hu Han-min and Wang Ching-wei, and even below Liao Chung-ktai, political director of the Whampoa Military Academy. In the military domain, he had many rivals among the generals who had hitched their fortunes to the rising Kuomintang star. Chiang Kai-shek counted on the momentum of the mass movement to sweep him to a point of vantage from which he could command. His position coincided almost mathematically with that of the property-owning class; it, too, wanted to reach the point at which its control of this immense movement was assured. Chiang Kai-shek, in full and deliberate consciousness of what he was about, intended to be the wielder-in-chief of that control.

Borodin, for his part, saw in Chiang the most reliable kind of "ally" in the Kuomintang leadership. He and the Kremlin leaders from whom he took his cue were convinced that the Chinese liberal bourgeoisie would have to lead the anti-imperialist revolution to a successful conclusion. He thought he saw in Chiang Kai-shek the best possible confirmation of this belief. The movement needed military leadership and all the other militarists in Canton were products of the war-lord system. Borodin accordingly employed every possible stratagem to drive Chiang to the top of the heap. Chiang, of course, did nothing to discourage him. On the contrary, he wrapped himself in radical phrases and offered himself as the red hope of the revolutionary army. It has been recorded that Chiang "often quoted a saying of Dr. Sun to him that in taking Borodin's advice, he [Chiang] would be taking his [Dr. Sun's] advice. Borodin reciprocated by exhorting that 'no matter whether Communist or Kuomintang, all must obey General Chiang."13 Obviously, when Borodin "advised" the enhancement of Chiang's power, Chiang had no difficulty hearing the ghostly voice of the late leader issuing from the lips of his Russian counsellor.

A murder provided the opportunity for Chiang's next step toward power. Liao Chung-k'ai, who had been close to Sun Yat-sen but had become the real leader of the extreme Left Wing of the Kuomintang, was assassinated in August 1925. The plot was traced to a Right-Wing conspiracy. Hu Han-min, senior leader of the Kuomintang, and General Hsu Chtung-chih, commander of the Cantonese army, were involved. By skillful maneuvering, of which he was evidently very proud, Borodin succeeded in forcing Hu Han-min to go abroad. General Hsu and a number of others linked to the plot likewise left Canton.14 Canton awoke one day with a new set of leaders. Wang Ching-wei, also a leader of the "Left," became head of the party and the government and civilian chairman of the Military Council. Chiang Kai-shek succeeded to the command of the Cantonese army.

These new combinations were being dealt out at the top at a time when the mass movement below had assumed great proportions. The Canton-Hongkong strike, country-wide economic and political strikes involving nearly one million workers, the phenomenal growth of the peasant associations, the beginnings of the war against the landlords in the countryside,15 all marked the sharply rising curve of popular struggle. These forces had been primarily responsible for the victory of the Kuomintang in Kwangtung. Only by grace of them did the Canton government exist at all, a fact which even Chiang Kai-shek publicly acknowledged. Yet the government was not required to respond in any concrete manner to the interests of the workers and peasants. A few minor tax burdens were lifted. A few of the more glaring official abuses were eliminated. The rest was in the realm of promise.

The Communists, who occupied the positions of field leadership in the mass movement, never dreamed of giving it any political orientation of its own. That impulse had dropped away under the pressure of the new dicta that came from Moscow. Their political education, and in turn the education they brought to the people, consisted of developing delusions about the Kuomintang. In Moscow, the band of politicians riding the crest of the revolutionary wave in China had begun to look more and more like the creators and leaders of a future Chinese government that would be tied, by every circumstance of obligation and international position, to the Russian diplomatic wheel. They began, accordingly, to see the Kuomintang as the prime revolutionary force in Asia. In January 1926, Stalin and the presidium of the Fourteenth Party Conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union sent the following telegram to the presidium of the Second Congress of the Kuomintang: "To our party has fallen the proud and historical role of leading the first victorious proletarian revolution in the world.... We are convinced that the Kuomintang will succeed in playing the same role in the East and thereby destroy the foundation of the rule of the imperialists in Asia . . . if the Kuomintang strengthens the alliance of the working class and the peasantry in the present struggle and allows itself to be guided by the interests of these fundamental forces of the revolution.''10 (Italics in original. )

The nature of the Kuomintang was being redefined in various ways. In the beginning it had been viewed as the party of the liberal bourgeoisie with whom the Communists were in a temporary alliance. Then it began to appear that it was the party of the workers and peasants. In a speech to a group of students on May 18, 1925, Stalin said that in colonial or semicolonial countries the nationalist bloc "could assume the form of a single party of workers and peasants, like the Kuomintang.''17 The Sixth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International continued the process of redefinition. In March 1926, the plenum described the Kuomintang as "a revolutionary bloc of the workers, peasants, intellectuals, and urban democracy [i.e., the bourgeoisie] on the basis of a community of cla55 interests of these strata in the struggle against the imperialists and the whole militarist-feudal order.''18

The question of "proletarian hegemony" in the revolution was mentioned in some Comintern accounts of events in China, but the central organ of the Comintern informed its sections that "a Kuomin

MISSING

split between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party. "The only way to surmount future difficulties is, therefore, for the leaders of the Left to present a united opinion."23

This meant, as Borodin later explained, that radical reforms, especially in agrarian matters, could not be introduced at Canton because the Kuomintang, "in view of its mixed class composition" could not "undertake the confiscation of private property."24 This meant, in turn, that the Kuomintang was not, as Stalin said, a "worker-peasant party" and did not really operate, as the Comintern said, on "the basis of a community of class interests." In practice, it was a party whose program was limited by the economic requirements of the bourgeoisie. The other class interests had to be subordinated. The task of the Communists was to see that this was done. This was not an easy matter. In Canton in the winter of 1925 - 26, the Canton-Hongkong Strike Committee, the Canton Workers' Delegates' Council, the peasant associations, and the Left-Wing groups in the army were the real sources of power. They had raised the Kuomintang nationalist leaders on their shoulders. The Communists were now required to hold this mass movement in check in order to keep it within the social and economic limits acceptable to these leaders. In subsequent analyses of the situation in Canton at the end of 1925, Borodin said that any attempt to take an independent course toward political power "would have gone down in a sea of blood."25 Trotsky challenged this view, arguing that all the preconditions of a successful proletarian movement in the Soviet manner were present, and that in any case the Comintern bureaucracy defeated itself by teaching the mass organizations to remain servile in their relation to the bourgeois leaders.26 But the arguments came later when the facts were more commonly known and understood. At the time, on the spot in Canton, the policy dictated by Stalin in Moscow was unquestioningly applied. It was to appease the Kuomintang leadership at any price.

What actually existed at Canton was a power vacuum in which all the elements were defined but their mutual relationships were still undetermined. While a wholly passive strategy dominated the thinking and the actions of the Communists, it was quite otherwise among the Kuomintang leaders. The strongest among them, Chiang Kaishek, was feeling his way toward a decisive assertion of authority.