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5 Chinese Cultural Nationalism and Southern Localism In contrast to the one-China conception in dominance now, regionalism was indeed a key theme of early Republican Chinese politics, as there was no stable central Chinese government until Chiang Kai-shek led the Northern Expedition in 1926. The lingering regional rivalries were partly a continuation of the lateQing situation. The southern provinces, largely out of reach of Qing imperial control, could be used by various forces as testing grounds for new projects such as reformist experiments in building Western-style institutions and the revolutionary mobilization of migrants returned from overseas. In this regard, the southern provinces were the place where different political forces sought support from foreign powers. In contrast, the northern provinces fell under the control of traditional imperial bureaucrats and, therefore, remained relatively uncontested in cultural and political terms. The Republican Revolution of 1911 elevated the political status of the southern provinces signaling the rise of southern influence. According to a writer of the popular Travellers’ Handbook for China, published in 1913, The Chinese have a saying “everything new originates in Canton.” This is especially true of things political. It was in the narrow streets of this southern city that the plots that resulted in the recent Revolution were hatched, and during that brief but dramatic struggle, the principal parts were played by Cantonese. (Crow 1913: 178) However, the distinct political importance of southern China did not mean the end of the traditional northern dominance — dominance that had come into being long before, in the imperial past. After the abdication of Emperor Guangxu in 1911, there was no fully legitimized Republican government for one and a half decades. General Yuan Shikai was in command of several cliques of military power in the North, while Sun Yat-sen held Canton as his base. Some military leaders of Yunnan and Guangxi who commanded their provincial ch.05(p.103-130).indd 103 3/5/09 12:41:04 PM Hong Kong In-Betweens 104 troops (known as “guest troops”) effectively dominated and controlled Guangdong; they pledged lip-service loyalty to Sun (MacKinnon 1973; Lary 1974; MacKinnon 1980; Sutton 1980; Lary 1985).1 Amid constant military clashes between different factions of warlords during this era, which was politically characterized by a rough North-South divide, intellectual efforts were devoted to the search for a solution to the political problem of forming an effective central government that could enforce an acceptable Republican constitution. Against the old imperial ideal of maintaining a unified China under a strong central authority, some people conceived federalism as the foundation of a genuinely democratic China because regional autonomy, so the conception went, would facilitate the participation of the local people. According to this proposed preparatory stage for a future unified China, each province was to come up with its own independent local constitution. This stable provincial autonomy would then provide the basis for the negotiation of a federalist Chinese state structure. Ou Qujia, in a pamphlet New Guangdong, called for Guangdong’s autonomy (Ou 1981); Yang Shouren, another Republican revolutionary, echoed Ou in a similar piece that called for Hunanese autonomy (Yang, S. 1981). Although the word “autonomy” (zili), and not “independence” (duli), commonly appeared in this literature, it strongly argued for unhindered local rule in the respective provinces, which only later would be linked through liansheng zizhi (federal self-government) (Li, Jiannong 1956: ch. 13; Chesneaux 1969; Schoppa 1977; Hu 1983; Li, Dajia 1986). These advocates of federal self-government movements conceived of a federalist China as a realization of progressive politics and held that the principle of local autonomy related closely with the concept of popular sovereignty (Duara 1995: ch. 5, 6). When Mao Zedong joined the independence movement of Hunan province in the early 1920s, he even suggested that the idea of Zhongguo (“the Central Country,” the very name of China), which implies unity under a center, was the fundamental cause of the people’s misfortunes (Mao 1920b, a, c; McDonald 1976).2 These impulses for local autonomy were well received in the South, which has had close economic and cultural connections to Hong Kong. For example, Chen Jiongming, commander of the Guangdong army and former governor of Guangdong, drove out the intruding Guangxi army under the banner “Guangdong people rule Guangdong” (yueren zhi yue). He was an enthusiast for anarchism and socialism but held an elaborate idea of Chinese unification under democratic federalism (Chen, Jiongming 1928; see also Tung-yueh-fousheng 1922; Duan 1989...

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