Victorious Insurgencies: Four Rebellions that Shaped Our World

1. China: The Long War, 1929-1949

1 China The Long War, 1929–1949 Origins of the Chinese Conflict China, wrote Lucian Pye, is “a civilization pretending to be a state.”1 The sheer massiveness of the country is impressive. In area, China is three times the size of India, six times that of Iran, twenty-five times that of Japan, and twenty-seven times that of Germany. The distance from Beijing to Hong Kong—by no means the longest axis in the country—is roughly equal to the distance between Stockholm and Istanbul. And China’s population of 1.25 billion is equal to that of NorthAmerica and Europe combined. More than one out of every five human beings on this planet is Chinese. Consider also that “a billion or so Europeans in Europe and the Americas live divided into some fifty separate and sovereign states, while more than a billion Chinese live in only one state.”2 It was in this vast and ancient arena that the Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek became the first government in the world to be confronted by a Communist guerrilla insurgency. Rebellions and civil wars in the middle of the nineteenth century —Taiping, Nien, Muslim, and others—reduced China’s population from approximately 410 million in 1850 to 350 million in 1873.3 “Thus the coercion of China by western gunboats and even the AngloFrench occupation of Peking [the old name of Beijing] in 1860 were brief, small, and marginal disasters compared with the midcentury rebellions that swept over the major provinces. The Europeans and Americans who secured their special privileges in China’s new treaty ports were on the fringe of this great social turmoil, not its creators.”4 6 ■ Victorious Insurgencies China Indeed, for most of its existence, China lived in near isolation from Europe, separated from it by boundless deserts, daunting mountains, treacherous seas, primitive communications, and also—not least—by Sinocentrism, a profound indifference to the nature and events of the outside world.5 Nevertheless, it would not be much of a distortion to interpret twentieth-century Chinese politics as a reaction on the part of key elements in the population to foreign intrusion. China suffered all the penalties of colonialism without any of the benefits. By 1900 debts and indemnities to foreign states consumed between one-quarter and one-third of Chinese government revenues.6 As Ernest P. Young writes, “Although never a colony, China was a semi-colony, or in constant danger of being divided into colonies. The steady diminution of formal sovereignty over seventy years had made the Chinese state immensely vulnerable.” Consequently, “to prevent an occasion for the partition of the country and to establish more advantageous lines of defense had become the first task of politics.”7 China ■ 7 Military defeat by foreigners was constant and humiliating, from the Opium Wars to the Boxer Rebellion, and especially in the first Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. The latter conflict revealed China’s utter helplessness against a country the Chinese had considered to be their cultural offspring, and the war heralded the overthrow of the Ch’ing dynasty. A decade later the Chinese witnessed at close hand another stunning Japanese victory, this one over the Russians in the war of 1904–5. In that conflict, the first time in modern history that a European power had suffered defeat at the hands of an East Asian state, much of the fighting between the Japanese and the Russians actually took place on Chinese soil. The contrast between a burgeoning Japan, with the might and prestige of its booming industries and modern armed forces, and a decrepit China, economically backward and militarily feeble, astounded and humiliated a whole generation of young Chinese. Fearing that foreign powers would soon carve up China, they concluded that national salvation required new institutions that could impose strong measures. All this mounting discontent and confusion prepared the way for the Revolution of 1911, the beginning both of contemporary Chinese politics and of forty years of civil and foreign war. The overthrow of the decadent Manchu dynasty in 1911 proved to be unexpectedly easy: “The Revolution of 1911 was essentially a collapse, not a creation,” a major reason why it turned out to be so unsatisfactory to everyone.8 Conservative elements played the major role in this initially cautious revolution, and the former Imperial general, statesman, and military reformer Yuan Shih-k’ai...