A History of China (72 page)

The May 4 incident took on great symbolic significance. Reformers clustered around the concept of a May Fourth movement, which appeared to encompass the changes they sought. All agreed that Yuan Shikai and the other leaders who assumed power after his death had failed to rectify China’s international image and to implement domestic reforms, but each of the figures proposed different solutions. Nonetheless, they agreed about specific issues, including the use of
baihua
(colloquial language) in written Chinese, women’s rights, human rights, and elimination of the stifling aspects of Confucianism. The political institutions they advocated differed, but they concurred about these basic social reforms. Each would side with different political factions in the struggles that plagued China from 1919 to 1949.

Who were these nationalist intellectuals? Several of the most important had been educated abroad – in Japan, but also as far away as Germany, France, and the USA. Some of the most renowned either taught or were associated with Beijing University, which had been founded in 1898 and had rapidly become the country’s most famous intellectual center. It was a hotbed for discussion of China’s future, with individual writers, teachers, and speakers reflecting a wide variety of philosophical, literary, and political views. Intellectuals had not formed a consensus. Representatives of many stripes, from anarchism to social Darwinism to Wilsonian idealism, expressed their viewpoints. Some were concerned about literature and writing, others focused on women’s rights, and still others sought democracy and alleviation of social and economic inequalities. Chinese intellectuals capitalized on the disorder in China to present widely diverging ideas.

One of the most important figures in promoting and protecting the intellectual ferment at Beijing University was Cai Yuanpei (1868–1940). Cai had received a classical Confucian education and had passed the civil-service examinations so brilliantly that the Hanlin Academy, the most prestigious organization for scholars in traditional China, had selected him for admission. The disastrous Sino–Japanese War of 1894–1895 had shocked him into questioning whether a classically trained official could provide China with the skills and strength to protect itself and to foster economic development. He sought to learn about Western education and obtained funding to attend Leipzig University from 1908 to 1911, then eventually extended his university training in France. Even before his sojourn in France, he had served briefly as minister of education in Yuan Shikai’s cabinet. However, he quickly grew disillusioned with Yuan, resigned, and went back to Europe.

Only after Yuan’s death in 1916 did Cai return to China to assume the post of Chancellor of Beijing University. During his off-and-on service at Beijing University until 1926, he contributed enormously to its development. He did so not necessarily through his own ideas but by fighting for freedom of expression and by tolerating and permitting an extraordinary range of ideas to be presented and discussed. By rallying popular support, he prevented local warlords and the Beijing government from intruding and suppressing such outpourings of intellectual discourse. When the government tried to intervene, he would threaten to resign, and his great popularity and the esteem he enjoyed among the general public would often compel officials to back down. His position as chancellor led to an intellectual flowering, as well as considerable student and faculty interest in and involvement in politics. Both students and faculty were free to present dissenting opinions and to participate in demonstrations and political activities because of the safe haven he provided. In 1928, after his position at Beijing University had ended, he founded the Academia Sinica, the most important organization for high-level and cutting-edge research in China, and became its first president. By then, he had already had a significant impact on the burgeoning intellectual atmosphere in Beijing.

Hu Shi (1891–1962) was one of the intellectuals who took advantage of the freedom at Beijing University to have a major impact on Chinese society. A brilliant boy from a family in straitened circumstances, he managed, at the age of thirteen, to move from his native village to Shanghai, where he studied ­so-called Western learning in several schools, which prepared him to pass a test for a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship to study in the USA. He initially attended the College of Agriculture at Cornell University, seeking pragmatic skills that China could use. However, his intellectual interests outweighed his practical concerns, prompting him to major in philosophy at Cornell and then to earn a PhD at Columbia University under the tutelage of John Dewey, the apostle of pragmatism and of the use of the scientific method as a source of knowledge. Returning to China, he became a professor of philosophy at Beijing University. Like Cai Yuanpei, he was a moderate and did not take an active role in politics, emphasizing only his hatred of violence and revolution. His reform efforts centered on use of
baihua
rather than the classical language in written texts, be they newspapers, literature, or government documents. He argued that such a change would, in itself, be revolutionary because the written language would be simpler, leading to a higher rate of literacy. This populism accorded with his emphasis on reason and science and his dedication to the political and social values of Western civilization. He championed women’s rights, good government, and democracy, among other features of Western civilization. Although Hu later served as ambassador to the USA and ­presidents of both Beijing University and the Academia Sinica, he may have made his most important contributions in his early years at Beijing University with his support for
baihua
.

Chen Duxiu (1879–1942) of Beijing University turned out to have the greatest political influence of these three representative figures. Although he started out with a classical Confucian education, in his late teens he studied at a modern Westernized school. He learned French and English in China, and also studied abroad in Japan and France and became conversant with and impressed by Western civilization. He started a magazine in Japan, and on his return to China
New Youth
, his newly renamed magazine, became extremely popular with intellectuals. His espousal of Western liberal values, as personified in his concepts of Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science and his publication of young but increasingly distinguished authors in
New Youth
, bolstered his reputation, prompting Cai Yuanpei to offer him the position of Dean of the College of Letters at Beijing University in 1917. He served in that position for two years, during which time he associated with Hu Shi, the chief university librarian Li Dazhao (1889–1927), and other future luminaries. The intellectual ferment of the time was heightened by the lack of respectable central government and by the influence and manipulation of Western powers and Japan. Chen himself was captivated by Woodrow Wilson’s vision and pledge of national self-determination. Chen looked askance at what he perceived to be the Western betrayal of China in the Treaty of Versailles that came at the end of the First World War; he thus supported students who called for an activist response on May 4, 1919.

The most renowned of these figures was Lu Xun (1881–1936), a pseudonym for Zhou Shuren. Like many of his sophisticated and intellectual peers, when he went abroad to study in Japan, he chose medicine, a practical subject. However, he revealed in later writings that he abandoned medicine after ­viewing a Japanese documentary that recorded the decapitation of a Chinese, accused of spying for Russia, at which fellow Chinese simply looked on ­without protesting or registering emotion. He decided at that point that China’s priority ought to be spiritual uplift, not merely physical health. Returning to China, he had a twenty-year career as a writer of short stories and essays. His stories, such as “Diary of a Mad Man” (
Kuangren Riji
), offer devastating critiques of the unpleasant underside of the traditional Confucian values, portraying them as oppressive and metaphorically cannibalistic. His most popular short story, “The True Story of Ah Q” (
A Q Zhengzhuan
), yields another metaphorical image of the depths and false self-images that China had fallen to in the face of the foreign powers. It also satirizes the retardant effects of the Confucian values. All these critiques were produced with a satiric light touch, and Lu Xun did not adhere to a specific political or social ideology. In 1936, he joined a ­so-called League of Left-Wing Writers, but never belonged to a political ­faction. Communist critics pilloried him for his seeming cynicism and his lack of a leftist solution to China’s problems, but he had a large readership ­throughout the 1920s and 1930s until his death in 1936.

Chen Duxiu, in particular, was disillusioned by the lack of Western support for preventing Japan from occupying Shandong. Turning away from his earlier faith in the Western emphasis on national self-determination, he began a search for an ideology that would help China. His espousal of Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science appeared to be ineffective. Prompted by his colleague Li Dazhao, he joined a group studying Marxism. Li had studied in Japan, and on his return to China in 1916 became an editor of a newspaper that advocated reforms. Shortly thereafter (as mentioned above), Cai Yuanpei appointed him head of the library at Beijing University, where he became acquainted with Chen Duxiu. He threw himself into the life of the university and helped and became popular with students. Perhaps his most fateful assistance for students was offering Mao Zedong a job in the library. Disappointed by the West’s lack of support for China at Versailles, he sought another source of aid for China. Influenced by the Russian Revolution of 1917, he turned to Marxism and ­persuaded his friend and colleague Chen Duxiu to join him in a study group. The following year, an agent from the Communist International (or Comintern) arrived in Beijing to advise and influence the group. Marxism’s emphasis on class struggle, its espousal of industrialization, its support for the proletariat, and its opposition to imperialism appealed to Chen and his compatriots. They also found the dynamics of so-called dialectical materialism of great intellectual interest. However, the Marxist-Leninist resistance to colonialism was especially attractive.

Developments in Russia (later the USSR) would help shape events in China in the 1920s. When V. I. Lenin took power in Russia, he assumed that the ­success of the Bolshevik Revolution would prompt so-called proletarian ­revolutions in the advanced capitalist countries such as Britain, France, and Germany. The failure of his prediction that proletarian revolutions would topple the bourgeois governments necessitated an explanation. He attributed this failure to imperialism. He argued that Britain, France, and the other capitalist countries had gained so much revenue from their colonies that they could provide a pittance of social welfare (pensions, unemployment insurance, etc.), which was a sop to their people but nevertheless undermined attempts to overthrow the bourgeois governments. They could also allocate substantial funds to bolster their military and police forces to suppress recalcitrant members of the proletariat and their communist vanguard. Lenin asserted that only the smashing of imperialism would lead to economic crises and then revolution in the capitalist countries. The Comintern focus would thus shift somewhat to Africa and Asia, the principal colonial regions.

Lenin recognized that the colonial areas scarcely had industrial economies and had not reached the capitalist stage of development. He argued that the proletariat in these countries was tiny, that it could not by itself overcome the existing social system, and that it could not immediately set up a communist government. The proletariat thus needed to cooperate with the similarly tiny native bourgeoisie in opposition to the imperialists. Such cooperation, which the Comintern would label a “united front,” would entail a temporary restraint on calls for social revolution and would instead emphasize nationalism. The enemy would be the foreign imperialists and their so-called lackeys, natives who worked for or collaborated with the foreigners rather than with the indigenous bourgeoisie. Comintern agents would be dispatched to help identify the representatives of the bourgeoisie and to assist in forging alliances with them.

The Comintern’s representative, Grigori Voitinsky (1893–1956), identified the Guomindang, Sun Yat-sen’s political party, as the natural partner for a Chinese Communist Party because it represented the progressive elements of the bourgeoisie. The Chinese Communist Party itself was in its infancy. Fearing arrest and possibly worse, Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu had not attended the initial meeting that founded the party on July 1, 1921 on a boat coasting in the waters off Shanghai. Nonetheless, Chen was elected as secretary of the party. The small contingent of about fifty men who met on the boat lacked unity because of ideological differences, and a few would eventually leave the party and would later provide valuable accounts of its founding and initial operations. Comintern instructions to form a united front with the Guomindang added to the disputes within the party. Many members were displeased with these instructions. Yet they could not challenge the dictates of the leader of the only successful communist revolution, the USSR, which included the Ukraine, central Asia, the Caucasus, and regions in Siberia and was the preeminent center of the communist movement. Chinese communist leaders chafed at the USSR’s instruction to cooperate with the Guomindang, but they abided by it. This disagreement was to be the first of many such ideological, territorial, and economic differences that culminated in a split between the Chinese communists and the USSR in the late 1950s. The Chinese Communist Party would eventually conclude that the USSR’s principal objectives relating to China were based on Soviet, not Chinese, national interests.

In 1921, however, the fledgling Chinese Communist Party acquiesced to Soviet demands and sought to collaborate with Sun Yat-sen’s party. Earlier, however, it had started to organize its less than one thousand members into a cohesive force. Facing considerable pressure to ally with the Guomindang, the party nonetheless continued on its own path in attempting to serve as the vanguard of the proletariat. Some of its members traveled to factories and mines to meet with workers and to proselytize for the movement. They were offered fertile ground, for the post-First World War period witnessed an increase in industrial production. The construction of railroads facilitated transport of goods and lured substantial foreign investment. Foreign companies aided by compradors developed new industries such as tobacco production, metals, coal, cotton and silk textiles, and soybeans. Workers were exploited in most of the plants, with low wages, long hours, few benefits, and scant health and safety precautions. The various governments throughout China dealt harshly with those who dissented or tried to organize workers or to initiate protests and strikes. The communists faced obstacles, as the number of workers was paltry. Factory and mine owners were not bound by restrictive laws or regulations and often had the support of the local government, police, and army. Dissenters were suppressed, workers were intimidated, and some of their leaders were executed. These circumstances confirmed Lenin’s observations about China’s limited industrialization and weak proletariat.