Age of Openness, The: China before Mao

2: Open Governance

Introduction 7 The conventional wisdom sometimes makes two mutually exclusive claims about government in the republican period: first it is portrayed as hopelessly corrupt, fractured and weak, unable to hold the country together, to stand up to imperialist aggression and to provide a measure of stability; second, it is described as oppressive, militarist if not outright fascist, ruthlessly exploiting a weak peasantry, seizing private property, damaging trade, manipulating the currency and silencing opposition. Both views attempt to interpret the era in terms of the communist takeover in 1949. By contrast this chapter indicates that while the central government was relatively weak throughout the republican period, nonetheless significant continuities in governance marked the period from 1904 to 1949, whether in terms of political vision, administrative practice or government personnel. In tune with the overall thesis of this book, it is also suggested that open governance, participatory politics and political diversity were far more significant in the decades before 1949 than has usually been accepted. China before communism was not a model republic, as it suffered from government crises open for all to see, but it was politically more democratic than many comparable regimes in Europe at the time or than the People’s Republic has been. Cumulative Governance ‘Militarism’ and federalism ‘Militarism’, in particular in the form of ‘warlordism’, is alleged to have been one of the main forces of political disintegration, not only Open Governance 2 8 The Age of Openness in what is often referred to as the ‘Warlord Period’ from 1916 to 1927, but throughout the entire republican era. So widespread is this assumption that the term ‘warlordism’ is sometimes seen to be synonymous with ‘modern China’: Yuan Shikai, who governed until 1916, is referred to as the ‘first warlord’, and Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) as the ‘last warlord’ before his escape to Taiwan in 1949. Any critical debate should start with an examination of the origins of the term itself, which is less a scholarly category of analysis than a political loaded expression. As Arthur Waldron has demonstrated in a detailed study,1 not only was the relatively new term ‘warlord’ heavily influenced by Marxist ideology, as thinkers such as Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg linked ‘militarism’ to ‘capitalism’, but much of the anti-warlord propaganda used in the 1920s came from the Soviet Union, including the influential cartoons of Boris Efimov. These images, used first by the Nationalist Party to discredit independent provincial governors during the Northern Expedition started in 1924, were appropriated in turn by communist sympathisers critical of Chiang Kai-shek after he moved against his former allies in 1927: they portrayed him as one of the ‘new warlords of the Nationalist Party’. Local artists such as Huang Wenneng contributed popular cartoons linking ‘external imperialism’ with ‘internal warlordism’. These further spread a highly loaded term which presented, in a striking and simple way, the complex and rapidly changing political landscape of the republican era. Sinologists, from Edgar Snow whose influential Red Star over China did so much to further communist propaganda, to John K. Fairbank, doyen of Chinese studies in the United States after World War II, found the notion of ‘warlordism’ congenial, and it has proliferated virtually unopposed to this day. As Arthur Waldron shows, the term ‘warlord’ was nonetheless transformed during its voyage from Europe to China, as most commentators in China downplayed the economic determinism explicit in Marxist ideology and instead understood power to come from the barrel of a gun: a strong central force such as a powerful party, rather than class struggle or economic reform, would be able to crush ‘warlordism’. A value judgment thus undergirded the use Open Governance 9 of the term ‘warlord’, namely that a strong state was desirable, that provincial governors were an impediment to modernisation, and that the entire period was one of ‘disintegration’. Faith was expressed in a strong and unified state, while ideas in favour of provincial autonomy within a federal framework were marginalised. Rare were those who, like Hu Shi, a leading intellectual critical of nationalist ideology, understood that disorder did not come from ‘warlords’ but, on the contrary, from attempts to unify the country by force from above. Hu Shi suggested that in a country as large as China no matter how strong an order imposed from the centre, it would eventually produce division; well-run, self-administered localities, he believed, could knit the country together. The...