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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge History of China
  • Cited by 21
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
March 2008
Print publication year:
1986
Online ISBN:
9781139054805
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521243384
Subjects:
East Asian History, History, Twentieth Century Regional History
Series:
The Cambridge History of China
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - Asian History
Information

Book description

This is the second of two volumes of this authoritative history which review the Republican period. The titanic drama of the Chinese Revolution is one of the major world events of modern times. The fifteen authors of this volume are pioneers in its exploration and analysis, and their text is designed to meet the needs of non-specialist readers. After a preliminary overview stressing economic and social history, the History presents a narrative of events in China's foreign relations to 1931, and in the political history of the Nationalist government and its Communist opponents from 1927 to 1937. Subsequent chapters analyse key governmental, educational and literary - offering critical appraisal of the major achievements and problems in each of these areas. Finally, the volume examines China's war of resistance, the civil war to 1949, and the portentous development of the thought of Mao Tse-tung before coming to power.

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Contents

Contents
  • 1 - Introduction: perspectives on modern China's History
    pp 1-73
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter talks about Continental China and the account of recent work in the rapidly developing area of social history. It begins at a high level of generality by asserting that the Chinese revolution of the twentieth century has differed from all other national revolutions in two respects: the greater size of the population and the greater comprehensiveness of the changes it has confronted. The comprehensiveness of change in modern China is a matter of dispute between two schools of interpretation, which posit linear and cyclical patterns. The question of what happened to the Chinese economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a major focus of discussion. Commercialization permeated the agrarian economy during the Ch'ing. The Han Chinese in different regions and at different class levels had a common sense of identity and historical continuity. The horizontal class structure of late imperial China was theoretically divided by the Classics into the four occupational classes: scholar-gentry, peasants, artisans, and merchants.
  • 2 - China's international relations 1911–1931
    pp 74-115
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter looks at the external context of twentieth-century Chinese history, beginning naturally with the collapse of the old order. Certain patterns of Ch'ing response to encroachment may be seen all around the periphery of the empire. Instead of recognizing Outer Mongolia as a sovereign state open to international relations, Russia continued to recognize Chinese suzerainty. For Japan, the First World War provided the opportunity to stabilize its imperialist interests. The chapter lists the Japan's Twenty-One Demands. In less than half a year, the whole of Manchuria had fallen to the Japanese army and been severed from China. Japan had become the primary concern of Chinese foreign policy. Within less than a generation, a mere two decades, the East Asian regional order of the Ch'ing dynasty, the international legal order envisaged by the Washington Conference treaty powers, and the world revolutionary order dreamed of in Moscow, had all proved unavailing as an international matrix for the Chinese Republic.
  • 3 - Nationalist China during the Nanking decade 1927–1937
    pp 116-167
  • View abstract

    Summary

    To many Chinese, Nationalist rule marked the beginning of a new era, when China would again be unified and strong, when there would be economic plenty for all, and when they would no longer feel shame at being Chinese. In September 1927, representatives of the Nanking and Hankow governments and of the Western Hills faction formed a 'Central Special Committee' which established a new, supposedly unified, Nationalist government at Nanking. This new government was no more stable than its predecessors. The two most powerful leaders in the Nationalist movement, Chiang Kai-shek and Wang Ching-wei, had been excluded from it. Under Chiang's aegis, the Nationalist government in Nanking was transformed into a military dictatorship. The Kuomintang membership by 1927 had become intolerably disparate, and Chiang Kai-shek accordingly began to screen out many of the members that to him appeared to be undesirables. In the process, he fundamentally altered the character of the Nationalist movement.
  • 4 - The Communist movement 1927–1937
    pp 168-229
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The decade between the first and second united fronts, from the KMT-CCP break-up in mid-1927 to mid-1937, was a time of disaster, trial and tribulation for the Communist movement that brought it close to extinction. By the end of 1927 there appeared clearly two streams of communism in China - the rural Soviets and the urban leadership; the former had to be led by the latter, else the whole movement might have sunk into the traditional pattern of Chinese peasant rebellions. The theoretical framework of the CCP's strategy in this period was laid out in Wang Ming's famous pamphlet, The two lines, of July 1931 which made much of the crisis of postwar capitalism in its third stage of development, when the contradictions among imperialist powers became increasingly acute. Since the creation of the rural Soviets, tension as well as cooperation had developed between the 'white area' work and the land revolution.
  • 5 - The agrarian system
    pp 230-269
    • By Ramon H. Myers, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Palo Alto
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Agrarian conditions would change after the First World War when in many regions the rural market systems were disturbed from outside by sharp shifts in supply and demand. In heavily populated areas these changes in supply or demand required reallocation of resources in order to avoid large-scale unemployment and a fall in rural income. Due to the failure of state and local administration to maintain law and order or provide economic assistance, such market readjustments had very high social costs. Before describing these conditions of agrarian crisis it is necessary to outline and clarify the agrarian system of this period. The rapid commercialization of agriculture that occurred from the 1870s to the First World War enabled most villagers to feed more people and support the gradual expansion of a small urban sector. This agrarian system made many adjustments to new market forces without rural unemployment becoming serious, without importing large quantities of food from abroad, and without creating serious inflation.
  • 6 - Peasant movements
    pp 270-328
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter on the peasant movement could usefully be balanced by one devoted to the peasant condition and its evolution. K'ang-tsu (resistance to land rents) is a privileged category among the non-Communist peasant actions recorded in the People's Republic of China, because it best represents the struggle of the exploited against the exploiters. By the early 1940s, the iniquities of conscription and the exactions of the army had become comparable even to taxation as a factor leading to peasant agitation. The spontaneous peasant movements show three main characteristics. The first is the weakness of class consciousness among the peasantry, a weakness illustrated by the comparative rarity and traditional nature of the social movements directed against the wealthy. The second is their parochialism. The third characteristic of peasant agitation, namely its almost invariably defensive nature. The first encounter between professional revolutionaries and villagers was led by the pioneer of the Communist peasant movement, P'eng P'ai, in two counties of eastern Kwangtung.
  • 7 - The development of local government
    pp 329-360
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Managerial work by local elites was accompanied by an outpouring of theoretical writing. The focus in local government had been an important part of the 'Restoration' in the 1860s, when China was faced with widespread chaos and devastation in the wake of the mid-century rebellions. As a movement pledged to social transformation as well as national unification, the Nationalists of the 1920s came to power committed to carrying out Sun Yat-sen's vision of a democratic China. The evolution of the Nationalist government's policy toward local administration embodied a general trend away from Sun's conception of local self-government and toward a more rigorous system of bureaucratic control. Liang Shu-ming's rural reconstruction experiment in Shantung achieved at least a temporary protection by political authorities, and relied on a radically nativist Confucian reformism. Rural reconstruction thus involved a broad range of types: Westerninfluenced and nativist, educational and military, populist and bureaucratic. Predictably, the Nanking authorities became involved in rural reconstruction too.
  • 8 - The growth of the academic community 1912–1949
    pp 361-420
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter focuses on the academic community and its institutional achievements in the first half of the twentieth century. It discusses the unexplored story with three main facets. First, China's intellectual history has outpaced her institutional history, and as known more about the late Ch'ing schools of Neo-Confucian thought, the Sung and Han learning, New Text and Old Text scholarship, even the T'ung-ch'eng school, than one does about the network of academies, libraries, printing shops and patrons that sustained Confucian scholarship. Second, in China's relations with Japan, politics has thus far eclipsed the academic story. Most of the thousands of Chinese students who went to Tokyo returned to careers of service in their homeland; not all by any means became revolutionaries. Third, the educational influences streaming into China from Europe and America constitute a vast terrain of unimaginable variety and unexplored proportions. Nearly all the nations and all the disciplines were involved in this largest of all cultural migrations.
  • 9 - Literary trends: the road to revolution 1927–1949
    pp 421-491
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The success of the Communist Revolution stripped modern Chinese literature of its urban component. Most literary historians agree that the May Thirtieth incident marked a crucial turning point: modern Chinese literature moved, in the memorable phrase of Ch'eng Fang-wu, from ' literary revolution' to ' revolutionary literature'. The leadership of the league of Left-wing Writers consisted nominally of an executive committee of seven standing members: Hsia Yen, Hung Ling-fei, Feng Nai-ch'ao, Ch'ien Hsing-ts'un, T'ien Han, Cheng Po-ch'i and Lu Hsun. The seven-year record of the league was one of continuous debates against all kinds of ' enemies': beginning with Lu Hsun's polemic with the liberal Crescent Moon Society, the league combated successively the conservative proponents of 'nationalist literature', the left-leaning 'third category' writers, and finally some of its own members in the debate on' mass language' and in the famous battle of the ' two slogans' connected with the league's sudden dissolution in 1956.
  • 10 - Japanese aggression and China's international position 1931–1949
    pp 492-546
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The story of China's international position from 1931 to 1949 indicates that Japanese aggression, and the ways in which other nations coped with it, served steadily to transform the country from being a weak victim of invasion into a world power, a partner in defining a stable framework of peace. The two factors, China's relative insignificance in international economic relations, and its increasing domestic unity, provided the background of the country's troubles after 1931. On the eve of the Manchurian incident, Chiang Kai-shek's authority had been steadily extended, having weathered serious challenges from some warlords and party dissidents. The Chinese-Japanese conflict over Manchuria was a clash of forces between an industrial country going through severe economic difficulties and a predominantly agricultural society determined to regain and retain national rights. Two years after the Mukden incident, it was clear that while the Manchurian crisis might have given the powers an excellent opportunity to solidify the postwar international system.
  • 11 - Nationalist China during the Sino-Japanese War 1937–1945
    pp 547-608
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The war with Japan was surely the most momentous event in the history of the Republican era in China. During the Nanking decade, Chiang had particularly stressed modernization of the armed forces. Most dramatic of Nationalist China's several acts of wartime mobilization was the removal of population, government, schools and factories from the coastal areas to the interior. General Wedemeyer similarly insisted that ' the Nationalist Government of China, far from being reluctant to fight as pictured by Stilwell and some of his friends among the American correspondents, had shown amazing tenacity and endurance in resisting Japan', whereas 'no communist Chinese forces fought in any of the major engagements of the Sino-Japanese war'. The Ichigo offensive had inflicted terrible losses upon Nationalist China. The demoralization of Nationalist China was largely due to the corrosive effects of inflation and the changing political and military aims of the government.
  • 12 - The Chinese Communist movement during the Sino-Japanese War 1937–1945
    pp 609-722
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The three periods, 1937-8, 1939-43, and 1944-5 were the principal phases of the Communist movement during the Sino-Japanese War. The outbreak of war transformed the political and military environment for all Chinese parties and forced the Chinese Communists into fundamental reconsideration of all important policies, of strategy and of tactics. The principal issues confronting Party Central during the first year and a half of the war were the following: The united front; Military strategy and tactics; and Leaders and leadership. At the outbreak of the war, Mao Tse-tung's position in the Chinese Communist movement was that of primus inter pares. The Communists used the euphemism ' friction' to describe their conflicts with the Nationalists during the middle years of the war. Chinese Communist Party and its principal armies expanded greatly during the Sino-Japanese War. The Japanese were preparing for their greatest military offensive in China since 1937-8, Operation Ichigo.
  • 13 - The KMT-CCP conflict 1945–1949
    pp 723-788
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Hurley's mission was to unify the military forces in China for defeating Japan. Political Consultative Conference (PCC) met from 11 to 31 January 1946 for the purpose of seeking a peaceful solution to the KMT-CCP conflict. For a time it was the chief focus of popular attention and even after the hopes were shown to be illusory, the authority of the PCC agreements was invoked by the government to legitimize a number of its subsequent political actions. The CCP and the Democratic League refused to participate on the grounds that the KMT had not honoured the terms of the PCC resolutions on government reorganization. The strident anti-American themes of the official CCP pronouncements that pursued Stuart out of China in August 1949 were matched by the uncompromising anti-Communist tones which dominated contemporary American diplomatic reports and public opinion in general. Together these Chinese and American postures indicated differences so great that they would require more than two decades to surmount.
  • 14 - Mao Tse-Tung's thought to 1949
    pp 789-870
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter seeks to document and interpret the development of Mao Tse-tung's thought during the first three decades of his active political life. Manifestly, Mao Tse-tung's was able to work effectively in such a formal context because he attached primary importance to national unification and China's struggle to throw off the domination of the imperialists, and accepted that, for the moment, the Kuomintang and its army were the best instrument for achieving this. Mao had already in 1939-40 characterized the regime to be established after the war as a 'joint dictatorship of several revolutionary classes', and had made it fairly clear that this dictatorship was to be under the effective control of the proletariat, or of its ' vanguard', the Chinese Communist Party. Mao sought to promote, in the period from 1939 onwards, a 'new democratic' revolution in China which would be a kind of functional equivalent of the capitalist stage in the development of European society.
  • Bibliographical Essays
    pp 871-907
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This bibliography contains a list of reference materials and works related to the history of China. In the growing flood of publication on modern Chinese history, especially from the PRC, research aids and documentary materials seem to be increasing even faster than historical studies that make use of them. In recent years contact and exchange among historians of China have increased rapidly between the three major sinological areas of China, Japan and the Atlantic community, but less rapidly with the fourth major area, the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, there are few monographs dealing with China's own foreign policy in the 1930s. This in part reflects the paucity of documentation, but also the scholars' predominant interest in examining Chinese domestic politics, in particular Nationalist-Communist relations. The anomaly of studying Chinese foreign affairs mostly through Japanese and Western sources will someday be rectified.

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