Tuesday, April 1

Reading:  The Nanjing Decade

Today we return to the narrative of China's 20th century experience, and the events we'll cover are not only dramatic, but are unusually rich in moral irony.  The years between the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the coming of the Second World War in East Asia (which the Chinese call the War of Resistance Against Japan, and which dates, for China, from 1937 to 1945) involved a political battlefield with three distinct combatants -- the Communists, the KMT Nationalists, and the Japanese.  Last week, we covered the period through the Northern Expedition of 1927-28.  Today, we'll discuss the events of the succeeding decade, known as the "Nanjing Decade" (1927-37), the period when the KMT-led ROC government was located in Nanjing, dominated by Chiang Kai-shek.. We will discuss the shape that government took until it was driven from Nanjing at the outset of the war with Japan, and we will see how the "Nationalist Revolution" -- that is, the KMT's "Second Republican Revolution," which largely tamed the warlords who had undermined the Republican Revolution of 1911 -- soon degenerated into a semi-fascist state, deeply corrupted by Chiang Kai-shek's personal group of supporters, most notably the Soong family.

Japanese aggression will be our second topic, and we will see how throughout the Nanjing Decade, Japanese military adventures in Manchuria increased pressure on the Nanjing government.  The first stage of this culminated in the "Mukden Incident" (1931) -- a staged military maneuver in Manchuria -- which was followed by a full-scale Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the establishment in 1932 of a Japanese puppet country called Manchukuo on China's border.  We'll see that a key element of this event was the expulsion from his homeland of the "warlord of Manchuria," a man named Zhang Xueliang (1898-2001), who had become a major ally of the KMT (he's pictured at right, behind his father, Zhang Zuolin, who had been assassinated by the Japanese). 

Despite Japanese aggression, Chiang Kai-shek continued to be more concerned with the CCP enclave in Jiangxi, against which he devoted all his government's military efforts.   The next phase of our discussion will examine how KMT military campaigns against the CCP in 1933-34 ultimately forced the Communists to flee from Jiangxi in a famous retreat called The Long March (1934-35).  The events that led to this retreat utterly discredited those men who had been leading the CCP under the direction of Moscow's Comintern, and led directly to the elevation of Mao Zedong to party leadership.  By the time the Long Marchers made their way, after a year of intense suffering, to safe haven in the Northwest of China (Yan'an), a new CCP leadership group had emerged (see the photo below of Zhou Enlai, Zhu De [army leader], and Mao at Yan'an), and the revolution had been redesigned as a Maoist peasant revolution.

Despite an ever-growing Japanese threat, as we'll see, Chiang Kai-shek continued to be solely concerned with the Communist threat to his domestic power.  Consequently, he moved his military forces to the Northwest, to prepare for an attack on the new CCP base camp.  But Chiang appointed as leader of this campaign the former Manchurian warlord Zhang Xueliang, who could not understand how Chiang could continue to fight the Communists when the Japanese were overrunning China.  We will see that the consequence of Zhang's appointment was the Sian Incident (1936), which fundamentally changed the dynamics of Chinese politics, and -- astonishingly -- led to the KMT-CCP United Front Against Japan (1936-1941).

And none too soon.  In 1937, the Japanese launched the first attacks of World War II -- the assault on the Marco Polo Bridge (7/7/37), which was the first phase of a sustained invasion of all of eastern China.