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芦笛
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作者：芦笛 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
The Opium War was the turning point of Chinese history. It marked the beginning of the end of the ever-lasting Chinese way of life. For the first time, China was confronted with a more powerful civilisation which she could neither assimilate nor buy off. Knocked out of her own orbit for ever, she has been unable to readjust, resume her position in the world and come to terms with the foreign way of life. Like a bankrupt man thrown out of his own house and unable to find a shelter and settle down, the Chinese have been wandering in a desert between two civilisations and swaying between peaceful reform and violent revolution, while being tormented all the time by the memory of lost glory.
Soon the other European powers followed suit and competition between these scavengers was intensified. Wars with Anglo-France, France and Japan broke out one after another, each time ending with more humiliation and concessions. Within a few decades after the Opium War, the "Supreme Empire of Celestial Court" found herself reduced to a sub-colony serving many masters, with vast areas of land taken by Russia and Japan, foreign "influential zones" all over the country and "international settlements" in the major cities and with railways, the post office, customs etc all run by foreign masters. The catastrophe went on for a century and continuously delivered fatal blows to the society. In order for readers to perceive the extent of the suffering of the Chinese people, it suffices to see only two figures: after the Sino-Japan War in 1894, China had to pay 200 million liang (one liang is about 50 gram) of silver in reparation; after the Boxers Rebellion and the resultant invasion of Eight Powers in 1900, she had to pay 450 million liang (one liang per head) of silver, not to mention the fact that she lost to Russia a piece of territory larger than Germany and France put together.
The disaster culminated in the anti-Japanese War in 1937-1945, in which inestimable properties were destroyed and 40 million people killed, many perishing in atrocities under the Japanese war policy of "kill all, loot all and burn all". But to most intellectuals, the most unbearable humiliation was symbolized by a sign at the gate of a park in the "International Settlement" in Shanghai, which reads "Chinamen and dogs not allowed". As long as China exists, I believe that this sign will never be removed from the Chinese history textbook which tells pupils how great we used to be and what kind of insults we have recently suffered. Perhaps only against this background, could one understand why xenophobia breaks out in Chinese society from time to time.
Attempts to catch up
With their historical burdens, it was most difficult for our ancestors to open their eyes to see the outside world as it really was. During the Opium War, a hot-blooded patriot seriously suggested to a general that the magic weapon for handling those "Ocean Devils" should be gou lian qiang, a spear with a hook on it. The beauty of this strategy lay in its simple logic: Since the British soldiers could not bend their knees (or they did not have knees that enabled their legs to bend), all one had to do was to pull their legs (literally, not metaphorically) with the hooks to make them fall over. Once they fell, they would never be able to get up by themselves and would be at the mercy of our spears. (I have no idea where this respectable patriot got inspiration for his anatomical discovery. I can only guess that he must have watched some sort of British military parade intended to intimidate the local people. The flaw in my explanation is that British soldiers do not parade in goose step, which is said to be a Prussian tradition. But at that time, the Germans had not yet come.)
Even in the thick of crisis, when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Qing Dynasty was subjected to daily extortion by foreign powers for more concessions, the Celestial Court still refused to face reality. A minister of the court offhandedly rejected the very existence of Spain and Portugal, which are translated in Chinese as xi ban ya and pu tao ya, respectively. As every Chinese character has its own meaning, and it happens that pu tao in Chinese means grape and ya means tooth, his argument was most persuasive: "Whoever has heard that a grape or xi ban (God knows what it is) has teeth?! Are the English devils considering us such half-wits as to buy this outrageous lie that there are really two countries with such ridiculous names? This is but another dirty trick played by the English and French devils so that they can extort us for more concessions in the name of fictional countries."
The response of the intelligentsia was no better. In their opinion, the foreigners, with their guns and other inventions, could be nothing but barbarians since they knew nothing about Confucius and his doctrines. Even those who were better informed and had more open minds could only see Western material achievements but nothing behind them. The most radical slogans of the time were "adhere to the framework of Confucianism while utilising Western technology" and "learn the barbarians' techniques to beat them". What we needed, they argued, was an army armed with Western weapons.
So we had such an army. However, in the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, the whole North Sea Fleet with its modern warships purchased from the West was sunken or neutralised in no time by the Japanese fleet of similar might. The war ended with China surrendering Taiwan to Japan, in addition to a huge reparation. To the most liberal intellectuals, this was the last straw. Now they started to see something beyond foreign weaponry. Unlike the "Ocean Devils", yesterday Japan was just a tiny island submitting to the glory of the Central Empire, now she turned herself into a new power almost overnight, simply by copying the Western civilisation as she used to copy ours. If the "Little Japs" can, why not us indeed?
Hence, a reform campaign was formally launched in 1898 to Westernise China by Emperor Guang Xu and his advisors. The emperor issued a series of orders demanding radical changes in political, economical, military and educational systems following Western models. Furthermore, he even considered the possibility of starting a parliament with a Constitution so that China could gradually evolve into a constitutional monarchic state. For an emperor, his far-reaching foresight and courage were certainly unprecedented and perhaps could be found only in a Manchu court which had a more superficial root in the Han culture and thus was less corrupt and inflexible.
Unfortunately, the campaign got involved in the power struggle between the emperor and his adopted mother, Empress Dowager Ci Xi. Only three months after the reform started, Ci Xi launched a coup, put the emperor under house arrest, made him a complete puppet, and arrested and executed some of his radical advisors who failed to escape abroad. Nonetheless, the reform policies were not abandoned but were put into practice in a less abrupt way: students were sent abroad to learn modern science and technology; banks were set up, railways were built and industry took shape. By the first decade of this century, all the measures were successfully under way. The court again considered a constitutional monarchic system and even sent a large delegation abroad to learn how to run a parliamentary government.
From bad to worse: the age of revolution
While the reform carried on promisingly, one of the Chinese traditions, namely, having senseless rebellions, fought back. A Dr. Sun Yat-sen emerged on the scene. He had received a medical education in Hong Kong where he got some vague ideas about Western democracy. Ignorant of both the West and his own country, hidden safely abroad, he started his crusade to save his motherland. All the trouble, he argued, came from the Manchus who, after all, were foreign barbarians and should be kicked out of China. All we needed was a revolution to create a republic. That, he promised, would definitely make our country as powerful and glorious as before.
Unfortunately, Sun's propaganda sowed seeds in the newly-reformed army, especially among some middle-ranking officers who had been trained abroad. To make things worse, Emperor Guang Xu and Empress Dowager Ci Xi both died suddenly in 1909, leaving the court in the incapable hands of Guang Xu's brother. In 1911, a mutiny led by a few revolutionary officers in Wuchang spread into several other cities. Although the revolution never got massive support and was not at all a serious threat, the court was paralysed by the lack of strong leadership. Worse still, the commander-in-chief, Marshal Yuan Shikai, was plotting to steal the throne. He had earned his position by betraying Emperor Guang Xi to his adopted mother and was now manipulating the court and the revolutionaries to scare each other. At first he attacked the revolutionaries and severely beat them. When they started panicking, however, he halted his troops and started bargaining with them. In the mean time, he terrified the court with an assassination in the name of the revolutionaries and with rumours that the situation was beyond hope. In the end, both the court and the revolutionaries gave in. The last emperor, then 6 years old, resigned his throne and was replaced by Yuan as the first President of the Republic of China. Now Pandora's Box was thrown wide open.
From the very beginning, the republic was a sheer disaster. For thousands of years, the Chinese had been used to emperors. Living without an emperor was just like living under the sky without the sun. Now all of a sudden, here was "the people's state" which did not even have an emperor! The only winner in the whole business was President Yuan Shikai, but even he could not hold his catch very long. As soon as he was sworn to the office, he started to assassinate and outlaw all the revolutionaries and Dr Sun and his comrades soon found themselves once again in flight. Then Yuan proceeded to take the throne formally. However, this proved too much for the public to swallow. Yuan was forced to give up the "emperor" title and soon died of depression. Now without anybody with enough authority in charge, China quickly broke up into many areas, each ruled by a warlord (often a former revolutionary officer) whose only business was waging wars against neighbouring warlords to expand his own kingdom. The whole country became a battlefield for a decade.
Meanwhile, Dr Sun had been trying to bungle things even further. Sheltered by a former disciple who was now a powerful warlord based in Canton, he tried to ally other revolutionary-turned warlords to overthrow the Beijing government which was controlled by the major warlords. Despite all the impressive titles such as Extraordinary President and Generalissimo that he generously granted himself, he achieved nothing and came to the bitter conclusion that all his allies were just using his name to gain more territory for themselves. In desperation, "to quench thirst by drinking poison", he turned to the red Russians for help.
The Russians had good reason to embrace Dr. Sun. They had lost all hope for proletarian revolutions in more advanced European countries and found themselves encircled by a hostile capitalist world. Thus, Lenin switched his attention to the underdeveloped countries. If those countries rose up and got rid of their imperialist masters, he predicted, the industrialised countries would lose cheap labour, raw materials and markets and would soon collapse. China was an ideal guinea pig for trying out his ideas and thus Russian secret agents were sent to China to stir things up. In 1921, with Mao Zedong and 12 other Chinese delegates participating, the Russians set up the Chinese Communist Party. However, the prospect of the CCP becoming a force carrying any weight appeared extremely remote since there had never been a decent proletarian class in China.
Now the Russians had Dr Sun to start with. Arms were shipped to his base along with Russian advisors and gold roubles. With Russian help, Dr Sun reorganised his Kuomintang (the Nationalist Party) based on the model of the Russian Communist Party and allowed Chinese communists to take many important posts. The reform not only turned the Kuomingtang into a powerful device for seizing power, but also gave the CCP tremendous opportunity to expand itself in the name of the Kuomintang. The number of communists soon increased from hundreds to tens of thousands, many having infiltrated into critical branches of the Kuomintang, especially the newly-created Nationalist Revolution Army.
The Chinese Communists might have taken power decades sooner had Dr. Sun not died in 1924. After his death, General Chiang Kai-shek emerged as the outstanding successor. Unlike Sun, he had more common sense and knew what danger Sun had put his party in. Despite the strong opposition from his Russian advisors who also had secret deals with northern warlords, he launched the North Expedition campaign in 1926. Starting from its base in Guangdong, the Nationalist Revolution Army commanded by Chiang conquered most of southern China in one year. Shortly after Chiang entered Shanghai victoriously, he turned on his communist allies, arresting and shooting them in their hundreds. The honeymoon between the KMT and CCP was over and the communists went into hiding. Then Chiang resumed his march northwards, defeating or allying warlords on his way. In 1928, the whole country was once again nominally unified.
Under Chiang's leadership, the modernisation campaign started again and was even more successful than the previous one. Apart from many economic and cultural achievements made in this "Golden Decade" (1928-1937), perhaps the best feature of Chiang's rule was his efforts to combine good Chinese traditions with Western ideas. For example, he filled the government offices with scholars, as emperors used to do. On the other hand, these scholars were selected because they had been trained abroad. With their help, Chiang was trying to lay down cornerstones for a modern nation which would be ruled by law as well as cemented with traditional ethics. Given time, Chiang's cause would certainly have succeeded, as it did succeed many years later in Taiwan.
Sadly, fate intervened once again: this time it was the Japanese. By now Japan had built herself into a powerful imperialist country with Korea, Taiwan and Manchuria as her colonies. Aspiring to rule the whole of Asia and kick the whites out, the Japanese invaded China in 1937 and thus triggered the eight-year Resistance War which was later to become part of WWII.
The Japanese invasion saved the communists from destruction. Split from their KMT ally, they had gone underground and launched a few disastrous uprisings. Finally, inspired by ancient peasant outlaws, Mao Zedong took his few remaining troops to the mountains in the middle south and started a guerrilla war there. Taking advantage of the conflicts between Chiang and the warlords, he managed to expand his base to several counties and set up a Soviet Republic with himself as chairman. However, after Chiang had dealt with the warlords and thrown in his crack troops, the Reds were defeated and had to break out and retreat six thousand miles to the northwest (the so-called Long March). With an army of only twenty thousand encircled tightly in the most barren area, the communist cause had come to a dead end.
Now the situation changed overnight. For almost a century, the foreign powers had been shaking China out of her delusions and nurturing Chinese nationalism. The Japanese invasion completed the last stroke. Driven by the new-born patriotism, the public now demanded that all Chinese troops stop fighting each other and use their weapons against the Japanese. Under this pressure, General Chiang stopped his campaigns against the communists on the conditions that the communists should abolish their Soviet Republic and that like all other remnant warlords, they should hand over their troops to the Chinese National Army to fight the Japanese. However, he was outmanoeuvred by his rival. As a cunning strategist, Mao saw the formation of the Anti-Japanese United Front as a Heaven-sent opportunity for him to seize power. Openly, he promised Chiang everything and the communists painted themselves as the most devoted patriots. In reality, he was not going to let the central government touch his troops. Instead, he secretly allocated 70% of his force to self-expansion, 20% to fighting Chiang's troops and 10% to dealing with the Japanese.
This strategy worked out beautifully. Thousands of communist agents released from Kuomingtang's jails went straight to the nearby countryside, taking over local governments and recruiting peasants, young patriots and even bandits to form guerrilla troops. In only a few months, the communists were no longer a tiny local force trapped hopelessly in the most impoverished and sparsely-populated area. Their troops were now active just outside Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan and other large cities. Furthermore, Mao split his troops into small units and sent them to infiltrate the front line to take over vast rural areas left behind by the Japanese army. Carefully avoiding exposing their real might, and having had only one major battle with the Japanese during the whole period of eight years, the communists managed to grow into a giant under the noses of the Japanese, commanding an army of one million and ruling a population of a hundred million.
In contrast to the communists' success, the Anti-Japanese War destroyed Chiang's regime. Confronted with the grimmest modern war machinery in human history, without any aid from international society until Pearl Harbour, Chiang had to fight on his own. Unlike the communists, Chiang knew nothing about "people's war" and could only conduct conventional warfare. The Chinese National Army suffered enormous casualties. Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan, Nanjing, and Canton fell one by one. After the Japanese took over Nanjing (Nanking, then the Capital), they started to loot, rape and round up local residents, mowing them down with machine guns, killing them with bayonets, swords and grenades, burning them alive with petrol and forcing them to walk into the Yangtze River to drown. Three hundred thousand civilians and POWs are believed to have been murdered in the Rape of Nanking alone, not to mention the tens of millions who perished in the war. Yet, while everyone in the West knows a great deal about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, almost no one has heard of the Rape of Nanking. Neither has the current Beijing regime ever made any effort to let the world know. On the contrary, Chairman Mao expressed his gratitude more than once to his Japanese guests, including the former Prime Minister Tanaka, for the decisive role that the Japanese invasion played in helping him rise to power.
The catastrophe was complete. The crack troops of the National Army were wiped out or routed. Vast territories, especially the more developed coast areas, were lost and the Republic shrank to only a few provinces in the southwestern backyard. To run the war, the government had to squeeze the people for money and call them up by force to substitute the casualties. The morale was low as soldiers were barely fed and sometimes even had to fight with swords. Worse still, unable to sustain the hardship, the Kuomingtang quickly became corrupt, no longer being reformers themselves. Yet Chiang hung on and rejected peace offers from the Japanese. He even considered replacing the corrupt Kuomingtang with a more vigorous youth organisation to carry on his cause.
Although final victory came in 1945 and rewarded China handsomely with the recovery of Manchuria and Taiwan and a permanent seat in the UN Security Council, Chiang's regime never recovered from the devastation. However, Chiang failed to face reality and made a fatal mistake in underestimating the communists. On the other hand, after the Russian Red Army handed over to them the whole arsenal of Japanese weapons surrendered in Manchuria at the end of the war, the communists were now ready for a showdown with Chiang. Thus a new civil war soon broke out and further ruined the economy. Inflation went wild and Chiang's regime became generally resented. Only four years after Japanese surrender, Chiang's army was destroyed by the communist troops. He had to flee to Taiwan with the remains of his army, while Mao declared in Beijing on Oct 1, 1949 the birth of the People's Republic of China.
作者：芦笛 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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