China before and now: Beginning and endings Part One
Chiang Kai-shek's Guomindang
(Kuomintang, KMT), as we earlier detailed in our case
study about the modern re-invention of China today, is considered a prime
representative of right-wing Nationalism. Whereby Chiang Kai-shek's
'Nationalist Party of China' during its party’s Fourth Plenum in January
1928 declared indeed that communism is an ‘erroneous' ideology,
initially, the Guomindang had indeed both a right-wing 'and' a left-wing,
and such luminaries of the Communist Party like Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai
once served in the Nationalist Party.
The first students from China had studied at the Lenin
School and the Communist University of the Toilers of the East, and in 1925
candidates were recruited for a new Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow,
established by the Russians to mirror Whampoa Military Academy. Some 340
students were chosen through a highly competitive process in Canton, Shanghai,
Beijing, and Tianjin, of whom around sixty were women. The first intake
comprised nationalist and communist students in equal measure: the united front
in microcosm. On arrival in Moscow, the students were given new clothes and, as
in the case of Comintern agents, new work names. They lived in relatively
comfortable seclusion in a former palace of an aristocrat near the Kremlin. The
first rector of the university was the charismatic Karl Radek, who taught a
formative course on the history of the Chinese revolutionary movement, as seen
through Comintern eyes. The fifteen-year-old son of Chiang Kai-shek, Chiang
Ching-Kuo, found himself in the same class as Deng Xiaoping, who had been sent
to Moscow after his activism in Paris had finally exhausted the tolerance of
the French authorities.
Ad yes, this is the same Deng Xiaoping who would
re-introduce Nationalism.
Until then, Chinese nationalism had a moderate
orientation; this changed following the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown when history
and memory were developed to become a new power. And it is here that Deng
Xiaoping’s strategy was the redefinition of the “one-hundred-year history of humiliation” as a new
source of legitimacy of
the Chinese Communist Parties’ rule.
In fact, the Communist members were rising in the
Guomindang hierarchy, and they were perceived as a threat to Chiang. He did not
take action until he had his army mobilized for the Northern Expedition. This
Northern Expedition's purpose was to defeat the many warlords operating in
central and northern China. This purpose was being achieved as the army neared
Shanghai in 1927. When Chiang's army came to Shanghai, where the Communist
Party was powerful, Chiang decided to take care of the Communist threat to his
control of the Nationalist Party.
There were additional factors that provoked the
Chiang's actions. In March of 1926, Chiang had struck against Communists and a
Soviet adviser he believed were plotting against him. This incident was
supposedly forgiven on both sides, and the cooperation of Nationalist and
Communist elements continued. In the Northern Expedition, one branch of the
Nationalist Army captured the city of Wuhan. Communist Party members dominated
the Guomindang government that emerged there. In Shanghai, there was an
uprising that preceded the arrival of the Nationalist Army to the area. The
local warlord put down the uprising, but the uprising demonstrated Communist
influence in the labor unions. When the Nationalist troops entered Shanghai,
the labor unions under the leadership of Zhou Enlai established a town council
that pre-empted the creation of a local government by the Guomindang. A final
incident led to the fear that the Communists within the Nationalist Army
pursued their own agenda to Chiang's detriment. This incident was an attack on
the British, American, and Japanese consulates by Nationalist troops when they
entered Nanjing. Chiang believed the incident was Communist-inspired to provoke
animosity by foreign powers toward the Guomindang.
The Communists were machine-gunned, and the labor
unions broke up. The extermination program was a success in the Shanghai area,
but the Communists in the south escaped the pogrom and formed South China's
rural interior. Mao Zedong was the primary leader of this movement.
Chiang was a committed autocrat and would not let any
ideology get in the way of his personal rule. And as seen above, his son went
to Moscow for an education. Stalin would not let the son return for many years,
and Chiang's policies could have been influenced by Stalin holding the son
hostage. Chiang's culture demanded that he have a male heir.
Stalin never gave up hope of including Chiang's
Guomindang in the socialist fold until Mao's forces finally defeated Chiang's
in 1949. During the civil war, Stalin told Mao not to go south of the Yangtse
(Changjiang) River and let Chiang and the Guomindang survive in south China.
Mao did not heed Stalin, and when Mao traveled to Moscow after the communist
victory, Stalin kept him waiting for three days before he acknowledged Mao's
presence.
Chiang and the Guomindang did survive by evacuating
their forces to Taiwan. In Taiwan, the Guomindang slowly renounced its
collectivist character, but the economic policy of the Guomindang in Taiwan
clearly reflects its central planning, state-domination of the economy.
Fortunately for Taiwan, the Guomindang government allowed the relatively free
operation of small scale enterprises that brought about Taiwan's economic
success.
Not to mention that returning the clock once again,
President Xi Jinping promotes a new pan-Chinese
identity.
Though the KMT lost the civil war with the Communist
Party of China in 1949, the party took control of Taiwan and remained a major
political party of the Republic of China-based in Taiwan. Founded in 1912 by
Sun Yat-sen, the KMT helped topple the Qing
Emperor and promoted modernization along Western lines, so let's start with
some of the details here:
China's land route was 3,920 miles on the
Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to Chita's branch, where the Chinese Eastern
Railway dropped through Manchuria: the shortest way to Vladivostok and the
Pacific. This thin strip of the track was the most contested ground of the
Russian Civil War. It was a supply line for the White
shadow government in Omsk, headed by the Tsar’s former war minister,
Admiral Alexander Kolchak, fought over by partisans and controlled by the
Czechoslovak Legion of ex-prisoners of war. In November 1919, Kolchak’s forces
were dislodged from Omsk and slowly retreated along the line supported by the
Japanese and US interventions in Siberia. Kolchak only reached Irkutsk on 15
January 1920 and perished at a Cheka firing squad in February after the city
fell to the Red Army. The Far Eastern Republic, a nominally independent entity,
arose in the power vacuum. Still, its control over the Transbaikal, Amur, and
Maritime regions' vast territories was tenuous until the anti-Soviet forces of
Ataman Semenov were defeated at Chita in November 1920. In mid-1921, Japanese
forces were still encamped in Vladivostok, and in May 1921, a right-wing coup
created a last White redoubt. Only with the Japanese withdrawal, the Far Eastern Republic’s capture of Vladivostok in
October 1922, and its dissolution into the Soviet Union did the borders of the
new regime stabilize.1
The eastern gateway to China was
Harbin, which emerged at a strategic junction where the Chinese Eastern
Railway branched south to Dalian's port on the Yellow Sea to connect in Shenyang
to Tianjin and Beijing. In theory, the railway was a joint Russo-Chinese
enterprise, but effectively it was a Russian corridor 1,700 miles long,
amounting to 40 percent of all China’s railway tracks. It had served as a vital
supply line during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 when Harbin was a rest and
recreation place for Russian officers. In 1921, it was a company town of some
200,000 people with a unique pidgin-Russian as its lingua franca.2 No one
heading to China could avoid it, and refugees' flood overwhelmed the Russian
administration. Existing residents – including over 9,602 young Russians born
in the city – became émigrés ‘by default,’ part of the growing ‘flotsam of the
revolution.’ An influx of Chinese swelled Harbin’s population as it became the
gateway to Manchuria's mines and frontier farming: it was fast becoming a
Chinese town. Americans came to Harbin to sell their heavy agricultural
machinery and saw it as a mirror of their own ‘Wild West.’ And so too did
Japanese in greater numbers: laborers recruited from northern Kyushu,
shopkeepers, and prostitutes.3 Most of the branch line south of Harbin was in
Japanese hands, and there were periodic clashes with Chinese troops. The
Chinese occupied Harbin in December 1917, but there were disputes over the
residual international control over the Chinese Eastern Railway. By June 1920,
Chinese troops finally oust Russian police and railway guards and deported 300
of them back to the Soviet Union.4 The issues of sovereignty in the region were
entangled, emotive, and fought over every foot of ground. They culminated in
mass protests in February 1922 at the ‘Thirty-Six
Sheds,’ an area of cramped and squalid settlement for Chinese railway
workers: a microcosm and metaphor for China’s impoverishment and desire for
change.5
In this moraine of dislocation and asset-grabbing, the
two great revolutionary forces in Asia reached one another. Ten years after the
Wuchang uprising, the Chinese republic was more
fragile than ever. The Beiyang government sat in Beijing and enjoyed
recognizing the Western powers but limited authority within China itself. It
suffered from a lack of revenue from the provinces. The government and the
National Assembly's rump were hostages to the struggle for ascendency between
the rival northern warlords. In July 1920, this erupted into war between the
Zhili and Anhui cliques. Sun Yat-sen struggled to create a foothold for his
revolutionary movement in the south, but he too was constrained to act in
alliance with the regional warlords.6
The Soviet Union launched one approach to China by
open, legal means and another through the illegal underground. With the Beiyang
government, formal diplomacy aimed to secure and fortify Russia’s geopolitical
interests. The covert overtures were in the hands of the Comintern and directed at furthering the Asian revolution. They came
to focus increasingly on Sun Yat-sen and the south. This pas de deux was often
out of step. The first contact with Sun Yat-sen had been made in 1918 when he
telegraphed Lenin from his exile in Shanghai to express the hope for a common
struggle against the European empires that encircled them both. Lenin had no
illusions about what he termed the ‘virginal naiveté’ of Sun Yat-sen’s
expressed commitment to socialism, but he needed allies.7 Soviet Foreign
Minister Georgy Chicherin responded with a vow to take on the ‘iron ring of
bayonets by the imperialist governments that had severed contact.’ But it seems
that this message did not reach the Sun.8 The British and Japanese reported a
string of supposed envoys: refugees, renegades, or prisoners of war, most of
whose credentials were uncertain. Sun’s main rival in the south, the reforming
regional military leader Chen Jiongming, made the first move by dispatching a
letter to Lenin through an ex-Tsarist officer turned freelance intelligencer
Potapov, conveying his support for Bolshevism.9 Both sides had only the vaguest
notion of what they were dealing with.
In China, as elsewhere in Asia,
more had been reported about the February Revolution of 1917 than the Bolshevik
takeover. The Japanese incursion in the east overshadowed the internal affairs
of the new regime in Moscow. The Soviets accused the western powers of blocking
information, and Chinese intellectuals complained of a dearth of reading
material. The Soviet capture of Irkutsk in eastern Siberia in 1918 had
re-established direct telegraphic communication with China. It enabled the
broadcast in March 1920 by the deputy commissar for foreign affairs, Lev
Karakhan, that the Soviet Union ‘has given up all the conquests made by the
government of [the] Tsars.’10 While the Soviet Union later backtracked from
many of its pledges; the ‘Karakhan Manifesto’ was received in China with great
excitement.11 Traffic resumed westwards as Japanese and Koreans traveled via
Shanghai and Harbin for a Congress of the Toilers of the East, scheduled
initially for Irkutsk in November as a belated follow-through to Baku. Due to
the difficulty and spiraling costs of the journey, the meeting was moved to
Moscow in the new year of 1922.12 Qu Qiubai had been part of Li Dazhao’s study
circle in Beijing; he became one of the first Chinese journalists to travel to
Soviet Russia and wrote two books and over sixty newspaper articles about
conditions there. He soon found himself employed as a translator at the
Communist University of the Toilers of the East; this marked his own initiation
into Marxist-Leninist theory's higher realms. In 1921, the first three groups
of students set out from Shanghai to study there.13
The first official Soviet mission to China was
launched by the Far Eastern Bureau of the Bolshevik party in Vladivostok. It
was led by Grigory Voitinsky, a twenty-seven-year-old returned émigré who had
worked as a printer and an accountant in the United States and Canada, where he
was active in socialist circles. He had fought against the White armies in
Siberia, was capture,d, and sent for hard labor in Sakhalin. On his release in
1920, he traveled by sea to Tianjin and Beijing, posing as a journalist, with
his wife and two others, a Chinese interpreter. Through its Russian residents,
particularly a sinologist, S. A. Polevoy, he met Li Dazhao, who had recently
launched a campaign for students in the city's study circles to ‘learn’
Marxism. Karl Radek was later to remark caustically that ‘many of our comrades
out there locked themselves up in their studies and studied Marx and Lenin as
they had once studied Confucius.’14 Certainly,y the Bolshevik movement in
Beijing, such as it was, had little to do with urban workers. But Li Dazhao
gave Voitinsky a letter of introduction to his collaborator, Chen Duxiu, who
was now in Shanghai, having fled Beijing in February 1920 after being jailed
for distributing political leaflets. This was Chen’s first encounter with the
visceral reality of modern capitalism. Here in China’s most proletarian city
–were in 1921 alone forty-two new factories were to open – the focus of the
activism was very different.15
Through Chen Duxiu, Voitinsky soon gained an entrée
into Shanghai's radical circles, exploiting his cover as a journalist to feed
their hunger for information. Around October or November 1920, Chen arranged an
audience for Voitinsky with Sun Yat-sen in the library of Sun’s house on rue
Molière, a comfortable villa in the French Concession built by donations from
Chinese who had made their money abroad. Sun, Voitinsky reported, was
‘well-built and erect, had soft manners and very distinct gesticulations. The
modesty and the cleanliness of his attire at once attracted our attention.’
They discussed connecting the two revolutionary bridgeheads, and Sun suggested
that the Soviets might place a powerful radio station in Vladivostok or
Manchuria capable of reaching Canton.16 On 25 November, Sun left Shanghai and
returned to the south, and it was here that he received his first letter from
Lenin and responded via the Soviet trade mission in London. Sun’s overriding
priority was to consolidate the republic in Canton and march out to take the
north. But his position rested on a fragile alliance with Chen Jiongming, who
had a more circumscribed vision of the south as an industrial ‘model province,’
as a prelude to a more gradual, peaceful reunification of China on a federal
basis. In early 1921, Voitinskytraveledd with Chen Duxiu to Canton to try to
get the measure of Chen Jiongming, whose past associations and support for the
work-study movement had earned him the sobriquet ‘the anarchist warlord.’17 By
the time he left China shortly afterward, Voitinsky had made Bolshevik Russia a
firm presence in Chinese revolutionary circles. Still, it was unclear precisely
how it mapped on to the fluid political landscape.
Whereby the end of Europe's empires has so often been
seen as a story of high politics and warfare, using the new technology of cheap
printing presses, global travel, and the widespread use of French and English,
young radicals from across Asia were able to communicate in ways simply not
available before. These clandestine networks stretched to the heart of the
imperial metropolises: to London, to Paris, and increasingly to Moscow. They
created a secret global network that was for decades engaged in bitter fighting
with imperial police forces. They gathered in the great hubs of empire -
Calcutta, Bombay, Singapore, Penang, Batavia, Hanoi, Shanghai, and Hong Kong -
and plotted with ceaseless ingenuity, both through persuasion and terrorism,
the end of the colonial regimes.
After its Second Congress in June 1920, the Comintern
began to set up bureaux at key crossways of the global revolutionary
underground. Henk Sneevliet was appointed to oversee the revolution in East
Asia from Shanghai. His passage to China from Moscow was through Berlin to
Venice, from where he had to run the gauntlet of British-held ports of the
eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. He was intercepted as soon as he
reached Vienna. He had stopped there to get a visa for China but was picked up
by the Austrian police. The other visas inside his passport revealed his travel
plans. The Austrians passed these on to the British authorities, who placed a
watch on Sneevliet after joining a Lloyd Triestina steamship, the Acquila, at
Venice and sailed to Colombo, Penang, and, finally, Singapore, on 21 May 1921,
where he was forbidden to land. His cover story was that he was travelling to
Japan as a journalist. This was blown, and the Dutch tried to block his entry
into China. But although the major powers shared a degree of information, it
was harder to persuade other governments to apprehend a person who had
committed no crime on their territory. In Singapore, old comrades from Java
joined Sneevliet’s ship to Shanghai: Asser Baars, expelled from the Indies and off
to join an engineering venture in Siberia, and Darsono, the first of the
Indonesians to make his way to Moscow by the overland route.
In mid-1921, Shanghai was a vagrant city, a Nansen
city, a modern Babylon. Around 5,000 Russians were living there, many of them
stranded. The old Tsarist consulate on the waterfront opposite the Astor House
Hotel was closed up; legal cases were left hanging in the air, valuables lodged
in Chinese banks were sequestrated, and in 1921 Russian exiles were stripped of
their citizenship, to become another people with no country. A good number of
them drifted into an underworld of petty theft and trafficking. Les femmes
Russes were a staple of salacious newspaper reports and moral panics. In
fiction and popular lore, they were a new erotic type, charged with a frisson
of danger from their reputation for availability to both western and Asian men.
This flouted the deepest taboos of foreigners increasingly ill at ease with
themselves and their fragile status in China. These women were deeply
implicated in the Bolshevik and émigré plots, imagined and real, which fed
westerners’ myths of them and the city.18 This mystique was further embellished
with the revival of the foreign-language press. One of the city’s two Russian
newspapers, Shankhaiskaia zhizn’, ‘Shanghai Life,’ was seen as a Bolshevik
influence center. The Shanghai Gazette, established in 1918, was an
English-language mouthpiece of Sun Yat-sen’s government, edited by the
Trinidad-born Chinese and British national, Eugene Chen, who in 1922 became one
of Sun’s closest supporters and his foreign minister. He promoted Sun’s
anti-colonial foreign policies. The Shanghai Gazette’s most prominent staff
writer, George Sokolsky, an American of Polish-Lithuanian extraction, who
arrived from Russia in 1918, boasted recent conversations with Lenin and
Trotsky's desire to spread Bolshevism in China. He soon became a confidant of
Sun’s family. With its more protected position, the Chinese and the Western
press were closely entangled in terms of personnel and finances and the
acquisition of news and its translation.19
The austere post-war years – the continuing currency
controls, the stifling social climate – were a stimulus to escape, far
abroad.20 With the revival of long-distance shipping, a fresh wave of
politically minded tourists arrived to examine what one of the most illustrious
among them, Bertrand Russell, in 1920–21 defined in his book The Problem of
China. Russell’s observations and reflections on China left him perplexed – the
country was in turmoil from warlords, strikes, and imperialist threats – yet he
was drawn to its traditional culture. There were several more opportunistic
adventurers. In 1919, the British followed a man called Goodman, one of many
similar individuals, ‘giving conflicting accounts of himself and behaving most
suspiciously’: At the British Consulate, he claimed to be an Egyptian and said
he wished to return to Egypt.
As the only papers he could produce were written
apparently in Arabic on dirty leaves torn from a notebook, and bearing neither
seal not stamp, he was refused assistance until he could obtain proper proof.
He later discovered that he came from Tientsin [Tianjin]. He had represented
himself as an American Presbyterian Missionary to the USA Consul, by whom he
was rejected as an imposter. In Shanghai, he booked rooms in three different
hotels and booked a passage to Hong Kong, saying he was a banker.
He also applied to the USA Consul for a passport to
Hong Kong, saying he was born in New York but has lost his papers. He is about
5 feet 10 inches in height, heavily built, very dark, looks like an Assyrian or
Hindoo, and wears black clothing.21
Such characters populated a new genre of romance
cosmopolites, a model being Maurice Dekobra’s La Madone des Sleepings, or
Madonna of the Sleeping Cars (1925), set in the world of the constantly mobile,
and written in a polyglossic style with knowing sketches of the denizens of the
revolutionary demi-monde.22 In Shanghai, the underworld lay in plain sight. A
bonanza boosted the city’s black economy in the illicit arms trade as China
became the destination of much of the surplus weaponry of the Great War. It was
financed by the opium trade, control of which gave aspirants in the struggle
for China a decisive strategic advantage. It corrupted the police and created a
more or less open shadow government of urban gangs. In 1922, the French
consul-general dismissed an entire police post for being on the take. The head
of the Chinese detectives in the International Settlement led a double life as
a gangland boss. In the five years after 1922, armed robberies rose from
forty-seven to 1,458 in 1927. Police raids only had the effect of pushing
rackets into a Chinese-administered city or a neighboring concession. Criminals
no less than revolutionaries exploited the different police jurisdictions. To
the police, the revolution was merely an extension of crime by other
means.23
Most of the city's new arrivals were Chinese, mainly
from the northern provinces, which now accounted for around 90 percent of 3
million people. Of all the post-war Shanghai transformations, the most visible
was its emergence as a city of petty urban dwellers, loose connections, united
in their exposure to hybrid cosmopolitan tastes and new ways of speaking. These
years saw the bloom of a modernity that had been seeded from the end of the
nineteenth century; a form of modern life experienced in other Asian cities, in
a more accelerated and intense form than that of any country in Europe, ‘more
plastic,’ ‘more artful.’ But Shanghai’s burgeoning culture of capitalism, its
consumerism, was on a scale seen in few other places.24 Here, in the vocabulary
of Bolshevism, the historical destiny of the Asian bourgeoisie would be tested
as nowhere else. So too, in this ‘hypo-’ or ‘hyper-colony,’ would be the
authority of foreign imperialism, at the birth of its jazz age.
At the intersection of all this, and at the meeting
point of Avenue Edward VII and Yu Ya Ching Road, in the French Concession's
open atmosphere, stood the Great World (Da Shi Jie). Founded in 1917, it was an
extravaganza of the city’s worldly dreaming, spread over four floors, topped by
a four-story baroque-inspired tower. The entrance was a distorting hall of
mirrors. The interior was a bricolage of peep shows, modern dramatic theatre,
traditional storytellers in people’s home dialects, music hall, and roller
skating, with free beer on Sundays. Film serials showed on cheap continuous
screenings late into the night, in front of perambulating pleasure-seekers who
ignored the regular movie theatres' seating conventions. There were Japanese
acrobats and western dance bands. There was even an indoor zoo. In one sense,
with its stalls and pavilions, curios and human curiosities, it was a pastiche
reminiscent of the universal fairs and expositions: Paris of 1900 or Semarang
of 1914 or the newly advertised Marseilles colonial exposition of 1922. In
another, it represented the banal, everyday worldliness of the country of the
lost. Here new and old residents, Chinese and foreigners, rubbed shoulders in
intimate proximity seen in few other city spaces. Women were seen on stage, and
– even more controversially – prostitutes left the old courtesan haunts to seek
clients. For many foreign arrivals, the Great World was a fantasy of the exotic
and its erotic possibilities. For locals, for whom the city had been a place of
darkness, it was a blaze of artificial light, a conquest of the night. It was
unpoliced and in the hands of the gangs, one of which ran a ‘Day and Night
Bank’ next door. With its flexible hours, it was the bank of choice for the
poor and the demi-monde. The Great World soon welcomed 20,000 visitors a day.25
‘The time of the silver dollar,’ the fragile
prosperity after the war, saw ‘World fever’ spread across maritime Asia. In
Shanghai, there was also a ‘New World’ (Xin Shi Jie), established in 1915 at
the center of a new entertainment district on Bubbling Well Road; there were
‘sky gardens’ – a journey by lifts to the roofs of department stores – and all
this became part of the accelerated syndication of styles and attitudes to
other cities of China, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The ‘New World’ of Singapore opened
in 1923 and was an open labyrinth of fantastical halls and pavilions, connected
by alleyways of restaurants, hawkers, and sundry stalls. Here too were
theatres, nightclubs, dances, and an open-air cinema. In a new flânerie, crowds
could wander from each to each, and impresarios would attract their attention
by entr’actes of boxing, magic, and other ‘special turns.’ In a colonial city,
the effect of this was even more powerful. The Singapore ‘World’ was a
playground for all ethnic communities and income groups, a place of high and
vulgar culture, an escape for the poor. It was a fantasia for the invisible
city, in a walled enclave within the colonial quarter but outside its order and
exclusions. It soon became a site for political meetings.26
Here the fate of the ‘national bourgeoisie’ was
dramatized. The periodical press in Shanghai was dominated in the first two
decades of the century by the sentimental fictions of the so-called ‘Mandarin
Duck and Butterfly’ writers, so named for the motifs on their covers. Their
stories' escapism seemed to signify a lack of social responsibility and promote
indulgence in the pleasures of the world. This highly commercialized sphere had
a total output of around 2,215 novels, 113 magazines, and forty-nine newspapers
and tabloids. They were a principal target of the angry young writers of the
May Fourth generation. Still, they also fostered among readers a sense of group
solidarity and utopian and republican sentiments.27 The Shanghai ‘Worlds’ had
their own tabloid dailies, popular with those living in the city and with
students, which took up the patriotic calls of May Fourth – especially to
mobilize for boycotts – if not with any consistency. Often the appeal to
collective pleasure – what the screenwriter Zhou Shoujuan called a ‘nation of
joy’ – was at odds with the radical intellectuals' ethical earnestness.28 The
writer Lu Xun moved to Shanghai in 1927 and saw only a ‘scramble for money,
openness of crime, waste of spirit, and rampage of carnality … Was this’, he
asked, ‘the goal of mankind?’29 A similar repugnance at Shanghai society's
self-seeking greed deepened Chen Duxiu’s conviction that only the proletariat
had the organization and moral vision to ‘abolish the old and institute the
new.’30
This vision took form in other, more improvised
cityscapes. A few streets away from the Great World, in the French Concession,
its popular theatre and food stalls were re-enacted in the open air for even
the poorest of the poor: a kaleidoscope of China on the move. Shanghai now had
800,000 urban workers, 250,000 of them in factories. Migrants brought their
villages with them in native place associations and returned to their villages
when they could. New communities formed alongside more rooted city-dwellers,
distinguished by the subtleties of choosing to communicate in Shanghai dialect
instead of vernacular Chinese. In the words of an early publication by migrants
from Zhejiang, one began by thinking of what is most intimate: ‘you can call it
starting with one corner. The process doesn’t end here, but [one is] limited by
what one knows.’ But, in the aftermath of May Fourth, these small corners
formed common fronts, and the likes of Mao Zedong saw in this a prototype for a
great union of the popular masses’.31 These communities shared a distinctive
urban form and worldview in the shape of the lilong or alleyway houses, tucked
out of sight of the city's new commercial thoroughfares. The ubiquitous
building style, the shikumen, or ‘gates wrapped in stone,’ were an amalgam of
traditional Chinese house elements, impossible to build in the pressurized land
market terraced housing industrial cities northern England. They formed a tight
alleyways system, where people were thrown into ever-closer proximity by
multiple, diminishing sub-lets, and on an increasing scale. Siwenli, built
between 1914 and 1921, saw 664 units compressed into eight acres. The shikumen
was the staple interior for the realist Shanghai cinema, especially the back
bedrooms or the pavilion rooms, which fancifully evoked a tranquil garden but
were usually twelve square yards off a landing, above a kitchen. This was the
most transient space, popular with workers, students, artists, and
intellectuals. The ‘pavilion room writers’ of Shanghai became a by-word for
intellectual intensity, social commitment, and political frustration. When Lu
Xun settled in Shanghai, in the Japanese-dominated enclave of Hongkou, he would
call his three collections of essays of the period Qiejieting: a clever pun
suggesting ‘a pavilion room from the semi-concession’.32
The new politics inserted itself swiftly into these
spaces. There were bookstores, places to tarry and talk, and printing presses
among the shops and artisan workshops. They were a constant translation site,
both on an everyday level of strangers negotiating with each other and in
print. There were schools and colleges in these lilongs; even Shanghai
University was housed in an alleyway house in the Zhabei district. Voitinsky’s
wife was active in a ‘foreign-language school’ off avenue Joffre that prepared
students for their trips abroad: this time to Moscow. Shanghai had been an
early center of the Esperanto-speaking world. The inter-language was a medium
in which anarchist literature was distributed from Shanghai by post to
Southeast Asia's colonial cities. When the famous ‘blind Russian poet’ and
anarchist Eroshenko arrived in Shanghai from Harbin, after his banishment from
Japan, in September 1921, his lectures on Esperanto had a powerful impact. He
secured a post at Beijing University and stayed in the family home of Lu Xun,
who became his translator.33 the police of the foreign concessions couldn't
monitor this fully; they launched raids and confiscated materials, but urban
radicals cloaked themselves in the bustle and anonymity of the alleyways. A
small group emerged, the nucleus of a ‘proletarian party,’ a self-conscious
group of intellectuals, workers and teachers, journalists and translators, who
spent more of their time trying to reach the real proletarians through a series
of short-lived journals and by attempting to get involved in trade union
organization and workers’ schools. They had mixed success in crossing the
cultural gulf between them and fared better with the intellectuals and
students. From the French Concession, Chen Duxiu launched a more theoretical
Communist Party Monthly, which appeared for six issues from November 1920.
Students’ unions began to adopt a ‘cell’-like structure and infiltrate existing
organizations such as the YMCA and YWCA, which many activists in Asia –
including Sun Yat-sen and Ghadar leaders – saw as a model for self-cultivation,
civic education, and for operating across borders.34 Shanghai was still a base
for Korean radicals and disaffected Indians. The movement still carried the air
of the anarchist-inflected, non-doctrinaire Pentecostalism of the global
underground before the war. But to the Comintern and its new converts, this now
smacked of petty-bourgeois individualism.35
The small group's principal theoreticians were Li Da
and Li Hanjun, both students who returned from Japan, where they had acquired a
deeper knowledge of Marxist theory than their peers. Japan, not Russia,
remained the principal source of the socialist writings translated in newspaper
supplements with notes to explain their sociological vocabulary. This reading
matter increased with the revival of socialist politics in Japan in 1920, after
the reaction following the 1910 Kotoku Incident, and was absorbed in circles
close to Sun Yat-sen and the younger, more radical students. In August 1920,
the first full Chinese translation of The Communist Manifesto appeared, with a
provenance that stretched back to a Japanese edition of 1904. This was added
material in English imported from the United States, which introduced Lenin and
Trotsky's names and the writings to many Chinese readers.36 So armed, and
through their own work as translators, Li Da and others began to attack
anarchist influence, not least it's hostility to political discipline and the
state. Both, Li Da argued, could be used to transform production and social
conditions. His writings emphasized ‘true’ Marxism and the proletarian strategy
as the sole path to understanding this. Li was a native of Hunan, and his views
carried weight with Mao Zedong and his circle in Changsha.37
1. Laura Engelstein, Russia in Flames: War,
Revolution, Civil War, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. 417–44.
2. Mark Gamsa, ‘Harbin in Comparative Perspective’,
Urban History, 37/1 (2010), pp. 136–49.
3. Olga Bakich, ‘Russian Emigrés in Harbin’s
Multinational Past: Censuses and Identity’, in Dan Ben-Canaan, Frank Grüner and
Ines Prodöhl (eds), Entangled Histories: The Transcultural Past of Northeast
China, London, Springer, 2014, pp. 83–100, at p. 88; Joshua A. Fogel, ‘The
Japanese and the Jews: A Comparative Analysis of their Communities in Harbin,
1898–1930’, in Robert Bickers and Christian Henriot (eds), New Frontiers:
Imperialism’s New Communities in East Asia, 1842–1953, Manchester, Manchester
University Press, 2000, pp. 88–108.
4. Blaine R. Chiasson, Administering the Colonizer:
Manchuria’s Russians under Chinese Rule, 1918–29, Vancouver, UBC Press, 2010,
ch. 3, esp. p. 48.
5. James Carter, ‘Struggle for the Soul of a City:
Nationalism, Imperialism, and Racial Tension in 1920s Harbin’, Modern China,
27/1 (2001), pp. 91–116.
6. For this see Arthur Waldron, ‘The Warlord:
Twentieth-century Chinese Understandings of Violence, Militarism, and
Imperialism’, American Historical Review, 96/4 (1991), pp. 1073–1100; Edward A.
McCord, The Power of the Gun: The Emergence of Modern Chinese Warlordism,
Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993.
7. Allen S. Whiting, Soviet Policies in China,
1917–1924, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 1954, quotation at p. 22,
pp. 110–11.
8. Xenia Joukoff Eudin and Harold H. Fisher (eds),
Soviet Russia and the West, 1920–1927: A Documentary Survey, Stanford, CA,
Stanford University Press, 1957, p. 217.
9. Yoshihiro Ishikawa, The Formation of the Chinese
Communist Party, New York, Columbia University Press, 2013, pp. 90–91. For an
exhaustive list of reported contacts see Liu Jianyi, ‘The Origins of the
Chinese Communist Party and the Role Played by Soviet Russia and the
Comintern’, PhD thesis, University of York, 2000, pp. 67–119.
10. Li Yu-ning and Michael Gasster, ‘Ch’u Ch’iu-Pai’s
Journey to Russia, 1920–1922’, Monumenta Serica, 29 (1970), pp. 537–56;
Karakhan text as quoted in Robert T. Pollard, China’s Foreign Relations,
1917–1931, London, Macmillan, 1933, p. 126.
11. Allen Suess (1926- ) Whiting, Soviet Policies
in China 1917-1924, 1954,, pp. 29–33.
12. George M. Beckmann and Genji Okubo, The Japanese
Communist Party, 1922–1945, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 1969, pp.
39–45.
13. Elizabeth McGuire, Red at Heart: How Chinese
Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution, New York, Oxford
University Press, 2017, pp. 74–5; Stephen A. Smith, A Road Is Made: Communism
in Shanghai, 1920–1927, London, Routledge, 2000, pp. 18–19.
14. Whiting, Soviet Policies in China, p. 96.
15. Jean Chesneaux, The Chinese Labor Movement,
1919–1927, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 1968, p. 157.
16. Xenia Joukoff Eudin, Harold H. Fisher, et
al., Soviet Russia and the West, 1920–1927: A Documentary Survey (Hoover
Institute Publications), 1972, p. 218.
17. Leslie H. Dingyan Chen, Chen Jiongming and the
Federalist Movement: Regional Leadership and Nation Building in Early
Republican China, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1999, esp. pp.
97–109.
18. For the legal situation see Pollard, China’s Foreign
Relations, pp. 153–5. For an indispensable general survey see Marcia R.
Ristaino, Port of Last Resort: The Diaspora Communities of Shanghai, Stanford,
CA, Stanford University Press, 2001.
19. Bryna Goodman, ‘Semi-Colonialism, Transnational
Networks and News Flows in Early Republican Shanghai’, China Review, 4/1
(2004), pp. 55–88. For Sokolsky see The UK National Archive (TNA), FO 371/3816,
‘Secret Appendix to War Diary of the General Staff, Straits Settlements Command
for September 1919: Suspected Persons’.
20. Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling
Between the Wars, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1979.
21. TNA, FO 371/3816, ‘Secret Appendix to War Diary of
the General Staff, Straits Settlements Command for September 1919: Suspected Persons’.
22. Tom Genrich, Authentic Fictions: Cosmopolitan
Writing of the Troisième République, 1908–1940, Oxford, Peter Lang, 2004, pp.
93–141.
23. Brian G. Martin, The Shanghai Green Gang: Politics
and Organized Crime, 1919–1937, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996,
pp. 30–35; Frederic Wakeman, Policing Shanghai, 1927–1937, Berkeley, University
of California Press, 1995, pp. 6–8.
24. For example, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The
Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945, Cambridge, MA, Harvard
University Press, 1999; Wen-Hsin Yeh, Shanghai Splendor: Economic Sentiments
and the Making of Modern China, 1843–1949, Berkeley, University of California
Press, 2007; Alexander Des Forges, Mediasphere Shanghai: The Aesthetics of
Cultural Production, Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 2007.
25. For the ‘Worlds’ see Zhen Zhang, An Amorous
History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896–1937, Chicago, IL,
University of Chicago Press, 2005, pp. 58–64. For the world fair comparisons
and much else besides see Meng Yue, Shanghai and the Edges of Empires,
Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2006, pp. 183–206; see also Andrew
Field, Shanghai’s Dancing World: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919–1954,
Hong Kong, Chinese University Press, 2010, passim. For the underside of this
see Christian Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai: A Social
History, 1849–1949, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001.
26. Wong Yunn Chii and Tan Kar Lin, ‘Emergence of a
Cosmopolitan Space for Culture and Consumption: The New World Amusement Park –
Singapore (1923–70) in the Interwar Years’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 5/2
(2004), pp. 279–304. For ‘World Fever’ see Zhang, An Amorous History of the
Silver Screen, p. 58.
27. Perry Link, ‘Traditional-Style Popular Urban
Fiction in the Teens and Twenties’, in Merle Goldman (ed.), Modern Chinese
Literature in the May Fourth Era, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press,
1977, pp. 327–50, at p. 337.
28. For this see Lam Nga Li, ‘New World, New World
Daily and the Culture of Amusement in early Republican Shanghai’, PhD thesis,
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2015, quotation at p. 29.
29. Lu Hanchao, Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday
Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century, Berkeley, University of California
Press, 1999, p. 10.
30. Lee Feigon, Chen Duxiu, Founder of the Chinese
Communist Party, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1983, pp.
157–60.
31. Bryna Goodman, Native Place, City, and Nation:
Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853–1937, Berkeley, University
of California Press, 1995, esp. pp. 197, 258.
32. Lu, Beyond the Neon Lights, p. 368, fn. 101. See
also Chenlan Zhao, ‘From Shikumen to New-style: A Re-reading of Lilong Housing
in Modern Shanghai’, in James Madge and Andrew Peckham (eds), Narrating
Architecture: A Retrospective Anthology, London, Routledge, 2006, pp.
453–78.
33. Mark Gamsa, The Chinese Translation of Russian
Literature: Three Studies, Leiden, Brill, 2008, pp. 242–5.
34. Hans J. van de Ven, From Friend to Comrade: The
Founding of the Chinese Communist Party, 1920–1927, Berkeley, University of
California Press, 1992, pp. 59–64. For the ‘Y’, Charles A. Keller, ‘The
Christian Student Movement, YMCAs, and Transnationalism in Republican China’,
Journal of American-East Asian Relations 13 (2004), pp. 55–80.
35. Smith, A Road Is Made, pp. 24–5.
36. A principal argument of Ishikawa, The Formation of
the Chinese Communist Party, pp. 7–8, 24–39 and passim.
37. Nick Knight, Li Da and Marxist Philosophy in
China, London, Routledge, 1996, ch. 3.
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