“Strand eloquently joins political theories to historical reinterpretation, offering a cogent and multifaceted re-reading of China’s political culture in the twentieth century. An Unfinished Republic is a stunning book of scholarly imagination, diligence, and sophistication.”―Wen-hsin Yeh, Richard H. & Laurie C. Morrison Professor in History, Walter & Elise Haas Professor in Asian Studies, Director, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley

“An Unfinished Republic proposes a compelling new interpretation of early twentieth century Chinese history. It opens up unvisited avenues of inquiry into the uniquely Chinese mode and meaning of Republicanism and remaps the trajectory of Chinese politics over the course of the century. Strand is a particularly thoughtful and well-read scholar, who commands knowledge of a range of literatures including political science, cultural history, women’s history and political philosophy. He adeptly uses tools from all of these fields to support fresh insight into how Chinese Republicanism was understood, and more importantly, into how it was practiced.”―Joan Judge, author of The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China

David Strand teaches politics and history at Dickinson College and is the author of Rickshaw Beijing: City People and Politics in the 1920s (UC Press).

An Unfinished Republic

Leading by Word and Deed in Modern China

By David Strand

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2011 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-26736-7

Contents

List of Figures, xi,
Acknowledgments, xiii,
Introduction: Republican China, 1,
1. Slapping Song Jiaoren, 13,
2. Speaking Parts in Chinese History, 52,
3. A Woman’s Republic, 97,
4. Seeing Like a Citizen, 146,
5. Losing a Speech, 186,
6. Sun Yat-sen’s Last Words, 236,
Conclusion: Leading and Being Led, 283,
Notes, 291,
Glossary, 343,
Bibliography, 347,
Index, 373,

CHAPTER 1

Slapping Song Jiaoren

POLITICAL TRAVELERS IN A LONG REVOLUTION

The Chinese Revolution was remarkable for lasting so long and covering so much territory in and out of China. Conventionally thought to commence with the Opium War (1839–42) and end with the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, the revolution has few rivals as a protracted conflict. Among them might be the French Revolution, with its five Republics to 1958, and the American Revolution, understood as extending through the Civil War of 1861–65 to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Even amore restrictive bracketing of events requires at least four or five decades to tell the story of the collapse of an empire and the building of a new Chinese nation. This was a revolution revolutionaries, if they were lucky, grew old in. Tang Qunying was born in 1871, joined Sun Yat-sen’s revolution against the Qing dynasty in 1905 in Japan as a young widow and student, and struggled for women’s rights and suffrage throughout the 1910s and 1920s. By the mid-1930s, and in her sixties, as Mao Zedong and the Communists on their Long March yet again eluded annihilation by Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists, Tang was living in Nanjing on a meager sinecure provided by the Nationalist government to her as a retired revolutionary. She grew annoyed when an elite visitor would drop by solely to have a photograph taken with her as a heroine of the now long past 1911 Revolution. After all, the goal of women’s suffrage, like many other revolutionary objectives, had not been reached. As she remarked to her adopted son’s wife with a deep sigh, “These people are so different. The nation and people, and the liberation of women, are all now forgotten. All they think and talk about are their own creature comforts. They fritter away their days at the card table and then suddenly turn up in front of me showing off their high positions. This is really too shameful and sad.”

As a woman who had led an active political life as terrorist, secret agent, propagandist, soldier, editor, educator, and organizer, Tang was understandably vexed by what appeared to be a lull in the revolution, if not its end. Tang Qunying died in June 1937, a month before the Japanese invasion of North China that would eventually help propel the Communists to power and continue the revolution and a year after the Nanjing government included universal male and female suffrage in its draft constitution.

The Chinese Revolution also traversed a geographic expanse to rival in magnitude its longevity as a historical process. The landscape of its politics was vast not only because Qing conquests in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries doubled the size of the preceding Ming dynasty, bequeathing a gigantism only a few nations exhibit, but also because critical sites of the revolution extended far beyond China’s borders, to East and Southeast Asia, America and Europe. As political lives unfolded in a long revolution, they also crossed boundaries of hometown or village, province, country, and continent. The history of revolutionary thought and action winds through exile and immigrant communities in cities like Tokyo and San Francisco, work, study, and training experiences in Lyon, New York, and Moscow, and diplomatic postings in Paris and St. Petersburg. Seeds of revolutionary thinking about rights and social justice were sown in China by returning officials, students, workers, and merchants, with the help of foreign visitors like globe-trotting suffragists and Comintern agents.

An inveterate traveler by force of circumstance as a political refugee twice, from 1895 to 1911 and from 1913 to 1916, and also by choice and conviction as a political campaigner, Sun Yat-sen eventually found travel so vital to his purposes that he declared it a “necessity” for everyone along with “food, clothing and shelter.” Sun would have been lost without steamships and trains. He traveled to raise money and plot revolution but also to collect slogans and insights for the struggle back home. Returning to China in 1911, Sun continued to journey around the country by train, boat, and the occasional sedan chair. Sun was not alone in embracing what Marie-Claire Bergère has termed in his case “extreme geographic mobility” as a political response to the vastness of China itself, the expanse of “Greater China” in diaspora, and the pressing fact of a global context for national and even local events. The accelerated opening up of China to the world brought change in every area of life. A 1918 essay titled “The Woman Problem” in the progressive journal New Youth noted that because of the “dense networks of transportation and communication” that now bound the world as one, “what is happening in European societies today will happen in our society tomorrow.” With transoceanic telegraph lines in operation, tomorrow might actually mean the next day if not week, month, or year. By the 1880s Shanghai was served by most international steamship lines. The reciprocal opening up of the world to Chinese with the means and motivation to travel made geographic mobility a stimulus to political thought and a credential that might induce others less traveled to agree with you. Leaving home, and returning changed, helped make the case for a New China.

Upon his return to his home province of Hunan in 1913 after ten years of study in Japan, Britain, and Germany, the scholar Yang Changji, Mao’s college teacher and the father of his future wife, Yang Kaihui, wrote an article for the local Changsha magazine Public Word titled “My Opinions on Reforming Society.” Yang noted that as a result of the political revolution that took place while he was away in Tokyo, Aberdeen, and Berlin, “China has experienced tremendous change in the transformation of its political system into a republic, the profound nature of which can hardly be expressed.” He cited the end of the imperial examination system, cutting of Manchu-style queues on men and boys, banning of foot binding for girls, and suppression of opium. Yang still retained powerful attachments to Confucian thought and criticized what he saw as excessive Western reliance on self-interest in ethical matters. Yang also embraced the urgent need for social change and attacked customs like arranged marriage and concubinage. Pressing ahead on these fronts “loudly” was needed in order to “reach the ears of those who are still deaf.” “Recently,” Yang wrote, “I have lived and traveled in several countries both East and West, asking after customs and examining how customs change. There is a great benefit in doing so since the way change actually takes place is through international communication. By comparing customs, the good and the bad become visible.” The good in the West for Yang included fundamentals like free speech and small pleasures like not having family members read your mail. The bad in China ranged from poor public hygiene to fellow scholars failing to return borrowed books.

In Changsha one can visit the teacher’s college where Yang Changji held forth as the “Confucius of First Normal” and Mao Zedong was his student. There are also less prominent historical sites like a small museum in a turn-of-the-century house dedicated to another Hunan native, Li Fuchun. One of the architects of the new socialist economy of the 1950s, Li spent 1919 to 1924 in France where he joined the Chinese Communist Party and, briefly, in the Soviet Union studying revolution. Among the exhibits in the museum are postcards Li sent from Paris, a leather document case from his post-1949 party service, eyeglasses, and a large map titled “The Tracks of Li Fuchun’s Life.” On the map one can follow Li from his birth in Changsha to journeys throughout China, including a visit to Beijing to study French, his participation in the Long March, and battles in Northeast China during the final civil war with the Nationalists in the late 1940s. Once he took his place in the central bureaucracy in the 1950s, aside from a diplomatic visit to Moscow in 1952, plotting out Li’s life becomes a matter of tracking his ascent through ministries in Beijing rather than charting domestic and international travels.

Li’s early sojourns in Paris and Moscow are represented by a small inset map. Such cartographic devices typically show a detail of a larger map, like the city plan of Changsha on a map of Hunan Province. Here, instead, geographic details of places once remote and unfamiliar, like France and Russia, find their way onto a map of China. Even Mao Zedong, whose “tracks” did not lead out of China until his 1950 mission to Moscow to meet Stalin, as a young man began a walk through five counties of Hunan after he read about two other students who journeyed on foot all the way to Tibet. Later Mao traveled widely in China not only on revolutionary business but also for more personal reasons, to visit the hometown of Confucius in Shandong Province as a tourist and to Beijing to woo Yang Kaihui.

As Sun Yat-sen intuited early in his career, China’s gigantic size and poorly defended borders represented challenges to national governance but also opportunities for individual growth and political careers. Documenting and interpreting the movement of early-twentieth-century politicians and activists requires attention to these global details. As a recent study of the Republic’s place in the world suggests, this was, for many, especially men and women of ambition, an “age of openness.” In Republican China, “everything important had an international dimension.”

This moving and globalized picture of revolutionary politics-in-the-making is at odds with the by now discredited stereotype of Chinese as “earthbound tillers.” In a revolutionary era one expects individuals, ideas, and organizations to be set in motion as tradition is uprooted. In fact, late imperial China was already moving according to its own rhythms. Scholars traveled to attend school, take the official examination, and assume office in the capital or a distant province. Merchants journeyed far in search of profits. Though ordinary people might wish to remain on ancestral lands, they were often forced to move by war, natural disaster, or economic distress. Even relatively earthbound farmers moved around quite a bit within the circuits of the market towns that surrounded them.

Political activists in the modern era did blaze some new trails—to Moscow, for example, for training in Marxism—but they also followed the well-worn tracks of officials and their agents, merchants, laborers, and mendicants of the imperial era while acquiring, refining, and delivering their political message at an ever-accelerating pace. Wen-hsin Yeh has shown how young people from provincial backwaters were radicalized in their journeys as students from conservative rural communities to provincial capitals like Hangzhou, then on to Beijing and Shanghai to study and work in the epicenters of intellectual and political upheaval. The resulting juxtaposition of remembered landscapes and new vistas encouraged a complex rethinking of values. Some youths took up avantgarde ideas like anarchism, liberalism, and communism not only for novelty’s sake but also, like Yang Changji, “out of a fundamentalist ardor to salvage the ethical intent of the Confucianism they had imbibed in their family and village schools.”

New uses for older travel routes and social expectations as to who would be out and about on them led to artful dodges and comic missteps. During one of her pre-1911 revolutionary missions in rural Hunan Tang Qunying disguised herself as an itinerant tea picker in order to misdirect Qing troops. Not shedding the clothes and demeanor of her feminist person a would have been a giveaway to officials on the lookout for revolutionaries. By contrast, when the Communist revolutionary Peng Pai set out one day in 1921 full of more hope than guile to organize the peasants of his home province of Guangdong, “wearing a student style Western white suit and solid white cap,” he was mistaken for a tax collector by a vigilant, and world-wise, farmer. The dynamic landscapes of old and new China invited one to blend in, or stand out. Courtesy of railways and steamboats, political cadre often moved more quickly and farther than had been possible in the past, and so did their counterparts in business and other fields. Any moment, large or small, in the long and expansive Chinese Revolution forms a knot of influences and consequences that leads in many directions: backward and forward in time and to and from a given point on the map.

The event chosen to anchor this book is a brief but dramatic moment in the early history of the Chinese Republic: a public fight over women’s rights during the founding of the Nationalist Party (Guomindang) in Beijing on August 25, 1912. The political convention is important enough to merit a small stone monument in the now-restored Huguang Native Place Lodge (Huguang huiguan) where it took place and brief mention in histories of the period. The larger significance of the encounter arises from the very ordinariness of the participants’ efforts to grasp and guide an unfinished revolution over cultural ground at once familiar and strikingly new. The knotted influences of history and geography meant there was more than a little London, Tokyo, Shanghai, and rural Hunan in the hall that day, as well as echoes of Rousseau, Mencius, Mencius’s mother, Mulan the Woman Warrior, and Robert’s Rules of Order.

Chapters 2 and 4 survey the evolving political culture of early-twentieth century China as a pattern of old and new and Chinese and foreign ideas and feelings about power and authority that together made political navigation from empire to nation, and monarchy to republic, so challenging. The three individuals chosen to represent Republican politics in summer 1912 are profiled in chapters 3, 5, and 6. The suffragist Tang Qunying fought hard for rights for women with the support of thousands of women and not a few men who believed the Chinese Republic ought to include both sexes as full citizens. Classically educated and politically radical, she was gifted in areas as diverse as bomb making, poetry, battlefield tactics, and public speaking. Tang Qunying had imperfectly bound feet, a quick temper, and a fierce loyalty to comrades and revolutionary ideals. The Qing diplomat Lu Zhengxiang as a prime minister of the young Republic held the kind of high official position denied Tang. Lu’s experiences as civil servant and politician in the early Republic were as typical in their turbulent course as he was unusual in his deep Catholic faith, fastidious professionalism, and cosmopolitan sensibility. He lost the post of prime minister, the highest office he held in his long career, as a result of the corrosive and contentious nature of public life and his own surprising missteps. As one of the most important political figures of China’s twentieth century, Sun Yat-sen is a tricky subject for the biographer on account of his mercurial behavior, seemingly facile approach to politics, and ability to influence nearly all aspects of modern Chinese politics both despite and because of his slight record as actual ruler of China. Being the “good father” figure of a Republic he never really commanded contrasted with the records of his more violent and powerful successors and imitators Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong.

Sun Yat-sen knew Tang Qunying well as a loyal revolutionary comrade and political thorn in his and his party’s side on the subject of women’s rights. Sun and Tang were much alike in their rhetorical styles of leadership and ability to attract public attention. Together, their lives as political equals, who were attached by bonds of loyalty and common cause but not by romance or marriage, offer an opportunity to examine shared and separate experiences of men and women in the Chinese Revolution. Sun and Lu Zhengxiang met in late August 1912 in the aftermath of the Nationalist Party convention and in the midst of Lu’s political ordeal. Sun knew Lu well enough as a fellow political actor on the national stage to upbraid him personally during that encounter for a lack of toughness and fortitude as a leader. Both men exemplified geographic mobility and political flexibility, and each built a career on the political and cultural fault lines that ran between China and the outside world.

Fighting a long revolution took levels of courage, cunning, and endurance on the part of men and women like Tang, Lu, and Sun that made wavering and faltering an occupational hazard and stubborn determination in defiance of reason a sometimes unwelcome and uncomfortable virtue. And so, on a warm summer morning, August 25, 1912, in the first year of the Chinese Republic, and also the thirteenth day of the seventh lunar month of the Renzi year of the water rat that began on February 18, in the forty-ninth year in the sixty-year cycle of heavenly stems and earthly branches that commenced in 1864 and would be completed in 1924, three women—Tang Qunying, Shen Peizhen, and Wang Changguo—rushed the stage of the Huguang Lodge ceremonial hall in Beijing where Sun Yat-sen had just spoken and threw the inaugural convention of the Nationalist Party into turmoil. August 25 was also a Sunday according to the Western calendar, a day of rest for government officials and foreigners and a convenient time for the new political classes of the capital to assemble.

(Continues…)Excerpted from An Unfinished Republic by David Strand. Copyright © 2011 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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