Response to Eastman

RESPONSE TO EASTMAN by Joseph Fewsmith Professor Eastman•s review article •New Insights into to the Nature of the Nationalist Regime• provides a valuable service by summarizing and criticizing the recent literature on that regime. By doing so, he points to some of the ways in which our views of Nationalist politics have changed and become more sophisticated. By implication, he directs attention to areas in which future research is likely to prove particularly rewarding. In responding to Professor Eastman•s article, my purpose is not to be defensive but rather to provoke discussion of some important issues. In particular, I feel that the concepts of •corporatism• and •mentality• should not be dismissed too easily; they are useful notions which, if applied creatively and sensitively to the Chinese case, can yield important insights. I should point out that my thinking on these and other issues has developed considerably since the writing of my dissertation, and so, to some extent, my response is from a different vantage point than that adopted in the work Eastman criticizes. More extensive discussion of these concepts as well as documentation for the points made below will be found in my forthcoming book, Party, State, and Local Elites in Republican China. In addition to the concepts of corporatism and mentality, Eastman's paper ~so discusses the issue of the suppression of the left Kuomintang. This issue raises questions that are central to my research interests (and not unrelated to the concepts of corporatism and mentality), so I will take the liberty of addressing that issue as well. Again, I hope that my comments will provoke controversy and new research. I will start with this last i~sue first and address each of these questions in turn. Suppression of the Left Kuomintang One. area in which the recent literature has contributed greatly to our understanding of the Nanking period is in exploring the debate between the •left• and the •right• Kuomintang. It is apparent that this debate continued well after the 1927 suppression of the Communists--at least until 1929 and perhaps after. It is also clear that this debate was closely connected to the fate of mass organizations in Nationalist :China. [ 1] The defeat of the •left • was associated with the emasculation of party-run mass organizations for women, students, merchants, and peasants. The failure of these organizations had a strong impact on the capacity and will of the regime to bring about seriou• social change. 19 Even if, as seems likely, those suppressed were young, .dealistic, and committed to social reform, it nevertheless remains tnclear to what extent, if at all, they were •leftists.• Eastman .mplies that such political activists were primarily connected to ~ng Ching-wei and his followers. That is by no means clear. lsiao Cheng's memoirs, to which Eastman refers, provide vivid :estimony of a young party activist whose life was threatened and who ras forced out of governmental affairs in Chekiang. [2] But Hsiao :heng was not a Wang Ching-wei follower; he was, on the contrary, a :lose associate of Ch'en Kuo-fu. Another example from my own research on Shanghai illustrates the >roblem. Two of the leading Kuomintang cadres in-that city were Wu C'ai-hsien and Ch 1 en Teh-cheng. They came from very different >ackgrounds. Wu was a student activist who played an important role ts an organizer at Shanghai University during the May Thirtieth 1ovement. He joined not only the Kuomintang but also the Communist ~outh League, thus coming to possess dual party membership. In :ontrast, Ch'en Teh-cheng had solid rightist credentials. Ch!en, in L923, was principal of the Middle School of Shanghai University but ;oon left that position because of his opposition to Communist tctivities. He then joined veteran revolutionary and right wing Leader Yeh Ch'u-ts•ang at the Republican Daily News. In April 1927, !h'en joined the Shanghai party branch as a member of the commission :or Communist elimination. [3) If one were to guess, on the basis of such biographical data, 1hich of these two party members would be likely to fare better under :he Nationalists, most of us would probably say Ch...