China

THE OVERTHROW of the Manchu (Qing) Dynasty in 1911 in China led to the establishment of the Chinese Republic in 1912 by Sun Yat-sen. As Sun wrote in his autobiography, “in 1912 I assumed office, and ordered the proclamation of the Chinese Republic, the alteration of the lunar calendar, and the declaration of that year as the First Year of the Chinese Republic.”

However, actual power was wrested from Sun by General Yuan Shih-k'ai, the first of the tuchuns (warlords) whose armies would plague China like locusts for over a decade. The period had searing impact on Sun, whose republic was paid scant attention to by the Western powers or Japan. At the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 after World War I, the United States in fact took Japan's behalf. This was a diplomatic paradox that Sun did not enjoy. It became clear to him that the “Western way” was not the path for China to follow, although, having lived in Hawaii and been influenced much by American missionaries, this had been his original intent.

In 1919, the May Fourth Movement exploded as a protest against exploitation and victimization of China by the Great Powers. In a very real way, the May Fourth Movement was the birth of strong Chinese nationalism—and Communism. Thus, by 1920, a significant [Page 76]shift occurred in Sun and his Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party. C.P. Fitzgerald wrote in The Birth of Communist China that “it was clear that the Western way was not the solution, and tacitly it was abandoned, even by the revolutionary element.”

In 1917, Vladimir I. Lenin had successfully led the Russian Communist or Bolshevik Party to power in Russia, toppling the three-centuries-old Romanov Dynasty. To the Chinese, there were obvious parallels to their own overthrow of the Manchu rule. Also, in 1919, Bolshevik Russia was attempting to fight counterrevolutionary generals, backed by the same countries that had exerted influence in China, from overturning the 1917 Revolution.

At the same time, it was Lenin's intention to launch a worldwide Communist revolution, and naturally, China, exploited by the Great Powers, posed a likely objective. In July 1921, the first indigenous Chinese Communist Party was formed by Chinese Marxists aided by the Russian Gregor Voitinsky. The Chinese communists approached Sun, who accepted their overtures for a “united front,” or alliance, especially since with the alliance came the promise of desperately needed foreign aid from Russia, now the Soviet Union. Moreover, Sun had a strong ideological attraction toward Russia and communism. In 1923, a formal pact was made between the Communist International (Comintern), which had been set up to export communism, and the Kuomintang.

However, in 1925, Sun died, leaving in power his chosen successor, Chiang Kaishek. Chiang lacked the ideological attraction to communism that animated Sun and saw the alliance only in the most pragmatic of terms. Sun, on the contrary, wrote before he died in “A Message to Soviet Russia” that “you are at the head of the union of free republics—that heritage left to the oppressed peoples of the world by the immortal Lenin.” (Lenin had died in 1924.) Josef Stalin, the General Secretary of the Russian Communist Party, and by 1925 de facto ruler of the Soviet Union, cabled the Kuomintang to honor Sun; promises of continued assistance immediately followed.

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