An Unfinished Republic: Leading by Word and Deed in Modern China

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An Unfinished Republic

Leading by Word and Deed

in Modern China

David Strand

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Strand, David.

    An unfinished Republic : leading by word and deed in modern China / David Strand.

          p.  cm.

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-26736-7 (cloth: alk.paper)

    1.   China—History—Republic, 1912-1949—Biography.   2.   Political activists—China—Biography.   3.   Sun, Yat-sen, 1866-1925.   4.   Tang, Qunying, 1871-1937.   5.   Lu Zhengxiang, 1871-1949.   6.   Political oratory—China—History—20th century.   7.   Political leadership—China—History—20th century.   8.   Elite (Social sciences)—China—History—20th century.   9.   Political culture—China—History—20th century. 10.   China—Politics and government—1912-1928.

I.   Title.

    DS776.8.S8 2011

    951.04092—dc22                   [B]2010037307

Manufactured in the United States of America

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This book is printed on Cascades Enviro 100, a 100% post consumer waste, recycled, de-inked fiber. FSC recycled certified and processed chlorine free. It is acid free, Ecologo certified, and manufactured by Bio Gas energy.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Philip E. Lilienthal Asian Studies Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift from Sally Lilienthal.

For Eleanor and Erik

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Republican China

1. Slapping Song Jiaoren

2. Speaking Parts in Chinese History

3. A Woman's Republic

4. Seeing Like a Citizen

5. Losing a Speech

6. Sun Yat-sen's Last Words

Conclusion: Leading and Being Led

Notes

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

Figures

1. Sun Yat-sen in 1912

2. Obstacles to Women's Suffrage

3. Chinese students in Tokyo

4. Tang Qunying

5. Sun Yat-sen presiding in the Nanjing Senate

6. Carrie Chapman Catt

7. Remember

8. Current Affairs

9. Lu Zhengxiang

10. The Guangzhou site of Sun's 1924 lectures

11. Sun Yat-sen speaking in Guilin in 1921

Acknowledgments

A fellowship from the National Humanities Center helped begin this project under ideal conditions. Dickinson College provided generous sabbatical and summer research support. Guy Alitto, Neil Diamant, Joan Judge, Wolfgang Muller, Susan Naquin, Qin Shao, Kristin Stapleton and Wen-hsin Yeh offered indispensable advice for improving the manuscript. Anderson Burke, Eleanor Strand, and Ceceile Strand also read the manuscript with keen editorial eyes. Dickinson librarian Yunshan Ye provided valuable bibliographic advice and assistance. These friends, family members, and colleagues spared me countless errors. Any mistakes of fact or interpretation that remain are my responsibility alone.

Colleagues and students at Dickinson College supplied intellectual stimulation that helped me look at the problems I set for myself in fresh ways. Invitations to a series of academic conferences on related topics provided opportunities to share and test ideas. I thank the organizers of these meetings, including William Theodore de Bary, Léon Vandermeersch, Deborah S. Davis, Richard Kraus, Barry Naughton, Elizabeth J. Perry, Theodore Huters, R. Bin Wong, Pauline Yu, Wen-hsin Yeh, Joseph Esherick, Kjeld Erik Brødsgaard, Merle Goldman, Madeleine Yue Dong, Joshua Goldstein, and Sherman Cochran.

Reed Malcolm expertly guided me through the editorial and publication process. Sheila Berg provided careful and insightful copyediting. Portions of the book were published first elsewhere and are reprinted here by permission: parts of chapters 1 and 2 from Strand, Citizens in the Audience and at the Podium, in Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China, edited by Merle Goldman and Elizabeth J. Perry, pp. 44-69 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), Copyright © 2002 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College; part of chapter 6 from Strand, Calling the Chinese People to Order: Sun Yat-sen's Rhetoric of Development, in Reconstructing Twentieth-Century China: State Control, Civil Society, and National Identity, edited by Kjeld Erik Brødsgaard and David Strand (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 33-68, © 1998 by Oxford University Press; and part of chapter 6 from Strand, Community, Society and History, in Culture and State in Chinese History, edited by Theodore Huters, R. Bin Wong, and Pauline Yu (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 326-45, © 1998 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University.

I am especially grateful to Tang Cunzheng, grandson of Tang Qunying, who graciously welcomed me on a visit to the Tang family home and museum in Xinqiao, Hunan. Mr. Tang's own research on Tang Qunying is essential reading for anyone interested in this remarkable woman. Minglang Zhou kindly helped arrange this trip and the historian Zhu Xiaoping accompanied me and gave me the benefit of her insights into the history of the women's movement in Hunan.

This book is dedicated to our two children, Eleanor and Erik, outspoken and thoughtful since birth.

Introduction

Republican China

Once the 1911 Revolution overthrew the Qing dynasty, monarchy was gone for good in China; revolutionaries drew a line that became a great and defining gulf. In 1915 President Yuan Shikai, who had inherited the revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen's brief and provisional presidency, tried to make himself emperor. Although Yuan had in his possession formidable political skills and resources, he failed miserably in attempting to pick up where the child-emperor Puyi left off at his forced abdication on February 12, 1912. Yuan's failure was not the result of the early Republic's clear success. There were few signs the new regime was more capable than the empire it had replaced. Revolutionaries themselves complained that the Republic was little more than a signboard without real substance. However, when the chips were down, and Chinese faced the prospect of President Yuan becoming the Hongxian (Grand Constitutional Achievement) emperor, citizens with the wherewithal to resist, did so.

Within a few years the Republic became entrenched, not so much as a set of national political institutions, but as a political way of life in which citizens confronted leaders and each other face-to-face in a stance familiar to republics worldwide. Political equality as a value and an everyday practice stood in stark contrast to the inequality and hierarchy that long formed the spine of China's social and cultural order. This change in political and physical posture was accompanied by considerable trepidation and even alarm, as well as excitement and anticipation, especially when contending parties were separated by age, sex, or class. A young woman with bobbed hair scolding a middle-aged male politician standing in the way of her winning political rights conjured up a new brand of politics. These behaviors were partly artifacts of a revolutionary moment in which older conventions broke down in the heat of battle and protest. Even so, when the moment passed activism endured as a new repertoire of public and outspoken things citizens did. Widely shared political practices like speech making, political debate, and street protest, as well as more routine meetings, reports, voting, and assemblies, fostered a political culture of seemingly endless talk punctuated by talk-driven action.

Every political leader now made speeches. Remaining behind palace or government office walls and delegating others to speak for you was no longer the preferred option. This was true in the careers of three public figures profiled in detail here: the suffragist Tang Qunying, the diplomat Lu Zhengxiang, and the politician Sun Yat-sen. All three were pioneers in their respective fields of social advocacy, diplomacy, and national politics. Each spoke out to advance his or her agenda. Venues for their public performances ranged widely, from Chinese student clubs in Tokyo in 1905, where Tang first declaimed her support for patriotic and revolutionary causes, to peace conferences at The Hague in 1899 and 1907, where Lu gave orations to fellow diplomats on behalf of the Qing dynasty and China, and to countless halls, temples, schools, and outdoor gathering places in and out of China, where Sun delivered his revolutionary message. Sometimes the performance site was the same, even if the message delivered and the response received were radically different. Tang Qunying, Lu Zhengxiang, and Sun Yat-sen each spoke at the Republican national legislature, or Senate (Canyi yuan), in 1912. Sun Yat-sen, newly installed as president, attended the formal opening of the Senate in Nanjing on January 28 and gave an address warmly applauded by his fellow revolutionaries.¹ Lu Zhengxiang, serving as prime minister in summer 1912, made a speech on July 18 at the Senate, by then relocated to Beijing, in which he bemoaned the bad habits of China's political elite. The remarks, though heartfelt, were so poorly received that they helped drive Lu from office. Tang Qunying also spoke—or rather shouted—on the floor of the Nanjing Senate, on March 19, after forcing her way into the chamber waving a pistol and leading a band of angry suffragists.

The Senate, as a republican institution, was the scene of many other speeches and debates in 1912 conducted in atmospheres ranging from decorous and sleepy to incendiary and violent. These public encounters among the national elite mirrored the measured discourse and noisy tumult then occurring in native-place lodges, party headquarters, public parks, school dormitories, and faculty lounges throughout the country. Republicanism had not yet struck deep roots. As one student of the period put it, political organizations like parties, clubs, and societies floated like duckweed on the surface of politics.² At the same time, though often improvised and simply structured, the resulting political performances constituted a growing and pervading presence that colored and shaped public life. In a 1929 primer on the new phenomenon of political oratory Mu Jinyuan insisted that nowadays "everyone must hold meetings (kaihui) and those who hold meetings must make speeches."³

Republics by their nature are less than democratic. Leaders, including those in polities with deeper cultural commitments to popular sovereignty and political equality than China, spend a great deal of time attempting to fix the game of politics in favor of incumbency of person and class.⁴ In China in 1912 the republican political game had only just begun to be tested for its strengths and weaknesses in admitting citizens to play a genuine role in affairs of state or in maintaining the power of the few. Speeches were given, elections held, and issues debated in the press. At the same time, politicians were assassinated, speakers driven from the stage, and dissent stifled by political threats and violence. One objection to taking the notion of Republican China seriously is that, whether conceived of narrowly as a regime or more broadly as a political culture, the era seemed to be dominated by Chinese traditions and foreign additions that made genuine political equality nearly impossible.

There is no doubt that antirepublican forces were in play. Montesquieu once observed that England was a nation where the republic hides under the form of a monarchy.⁵ Given the likes of Yuan Shikai and other power holders impatient with rule of law and skeptical of popular sovereignty, the Chinese Republic seemed to offer the reverse: an emperorism or monarchism (huangquan zhuyi) concealed within bodies such as a senate often cowed by military strongmen or in roles like that of citizens who sometimes acted more like subjects.⁶ Add to this the well-known hostility right-wing nationalists and left-wing communists show toward procedural and representative democracy, and what republicanism remained after the rise of autocrats writ large, like Chiang Kai-shek or Mao Zedong, or small, like local power holders in provinces, towns, and villages, presumably succumbed to a common elite ambition to control nearly everything a citizen might say or do.

Nonetheless, Republican China was republican. Not only republican to be sure. Traditional ideas about political authority and leadership endured. Chinese republicanism absorbed key elements of traditional political thinking, for example, the notion that the unity of government and people should be absolute.⁷ The difference was that republicanism by its nature must test this bond. Discomfort with scenes of chaos in a parliamentary chamber or a meeting hall did not prevent parties from competing, or citizens from using moments on the political stage to attack opponents.

After the reorganization of the Nationalist Party along Bolshevik or party-state lines in 1924, Leninism with its commitment to top-down control of political life became the operational code for both the Nationalist and Communist Parties.⁸ Nationalists and Communists agreed that open political competition denied the country the unity needed to counter imperialism and solve China's internal problems. Communists also argued that mere political equality alone could not supply social and economic justice. When suffragists allied with the Nationalists demanded the vote for women in 1912, they meant educated women, not illiterate or poor compatriots of either sex.⁹ In the 1920s the Communist Xiang Jingyu, while acknowledging her debt to women who first spoke out in public about such issues, criticized suffragists for their belief that sitting alongside men in the parliamentary pigsties of the capital and the provinces would advance the cause of all women or China.¹⁰

Nonetheless, Nationalists and Communists, from Sun Yat-sen on down, cut their political teeth on open, competitive, and republican politics. They lived political lives of speech making, debating, passing resolutions, petitioning, protesting, pamphleteering, and running meetings that numbered adversaries as well as allies among the participants. Even Chiang Kai-shek, with a military career in which giving and taking orders rather than debating them was the rule, while a student in Tokyo from 1908 to 1911 was exposed to republican ideas in the radical expatriate and Shanghai newspapers he read and in his friendships with revolutionary publicists like Dai Jitao.¹¹ When he returned to Tokyo for further study in 1912 Chiang founded his own journal, the Army Voice Magazine (Junsheng zazhi).¹² A republican more by association than deep political principle, Chiang had quickly returned to China upon hearing word of the 1911 Wuchang Uprising, and he fought for the new Republic.¹³ When Sun, Chiang, and Mao and their contemporaries became political leaders, they did not so much turn their backs on the republican politics of their youth and middle age as absorb the repertoire into their Leninist regimes. Speech making (yanshuo or yanjiang) became report giving (baogao). Voting was for party-vetted candidates and legislation only. Published writings were censored. Mass assemblies were choreographed and controlled. They and their subordinates called and ran all the meetings to the point that by the 1950s, kaihui, once the hallmark of citizen activism, became the object of satire as an empty and mindless bureaucratic ritual. In Li Zhao's 1955 play, Busy Going to Meetings (Kaihui mang) a self-important midlevel Communist official named Zheng Ruzhi proudly presents himself as a professional kaihui expert schooled in the most democratic way of solving problems [and one that, in formal Leninist terms, is] both democratic and centralized.¹⁴ When Zheng's three-year-old son is asked what his father does, the little boy answers, He goes to meetings. And so, by then, did the whole country.

However, as democratic revolutions of the twentieth century have shown, under a republic each of these antidemocratic and bureaucratic transformations is reversible. This was the case in Eastern Europe in 1989, the Soviet Union in 1991, and Taiwan in 1988. China in the democracy movement of 1989 was almost this kind of revolution.¹⁵ In a mild but telling tremor that prefigured the 1989 upheaval, a vice mayor of Beijing asked a group of Peking University students on mandated summer military training in 1987 a rhetorical question: Military training must be very interesting? He received in reply from one student the unwelcome citizen-to-citizen answer, It's a waste of time. Shen Tong, a future participant in the Democracy Movement, recalled, We did everything we could to hold back our laughter. I hugged my knees and buried my face in my arms. Other people's shoulders were shaking. The vice mayor didn't know what to say.¹⁶

A social technology of citizenship built from meetings, assemblies, reports, voting, and oral, written, and symbolic communication pitched to audiences sitting in judgment of what they see and hear may look in certain cases politically hardwired for democracy or dictatorship alone.¹⁷ Political language can be formalized or fortified in ways that make difficult a challenge to an approved catchphrase like people's democratic dictatorship.¹⁸ As Vaclav Havel pointed out for the case of post-totalitarian Communist systems like Czechoslovakia's, the effect is basic to the entire power structure. [It] integrates its communication system and makes possible the internal exchange and transfer of information and instructions. It is rather like a collection of traffic signals and directional signs, giving the process shape and structure.¹⁹ However, such sloganeering, and an enabling circuitry of official media, indoctrination sessions, and surveillance, can also include a set of rhetorical switches, not easily pushed or pulled one way or the other but within reach of citizens nonetheless. One day, in Havel's famous illustration, a green grocer takes down the Workers of the World, Unite sign at the shop where he works and the directional signs begin to shift.²⁰ For every disciplinary technology deployed, alternative procedures and ruses invariably emerge to form an antidiscipline.²¹ Speaking to fellow citizens as if they agree with you tests the premise. Boos, instead of applause, that surprised the Romanian strongman Nicolae Ceausescu at the center of Bucharest on December 21,1989, at a planned and choreographed pro-government rally can turn ceremonies of absolutist power into moments of resistance and the beginnings of reform or revolution. China's harsh monologue of political orthodoxy was subtly revised by pressures for dialogue (duihua) that began as educational reforms in the 1980s and then surfaced in spring 1989 in events like a televised corrosive duihua between hard-liner Li Peng and student leader and hunger striker Wuer Kaixi, giving viewers the unprecedented spectacle of a twenty-one-year-old student in a pair of pajamas dressing down the premier of China.²²

A precondition for such reversals, commonplace in China in the immediate aftermath of the 1911 Revolution, is the political equality idealized by modern citizenship. The force of such power inversions lies not only in their improvisational and tactical nature—as the art or weapon of the weak—but also in claims to possess and repossess the strategic arts and weapons of the strong.²³ Debate and dialogue practiced by citizens can short-circuit disciplinary technologies of persuasion and propaganda directed at citizens but only if the forms of republicanism, however dormant or emptied, exist to be awakened and filled. The boos of a Romanian student or the scolding by a Chinese student may have roots in everyday arts of resistance described by Michel de Certeau, like writing a love letter on ‘company time,’ or in the hidden transcripts of mockery and criticism contained in peasant proverbs analyzed by James Scott.²⁴ Making these sentiments and transcripts public requires, by contrast, reclaiming the common ground of citizenship, a maneuver that can turn tactics of resistance into transformative strategies or, as the events of June 4,1989, amply demonstrated, repression dedicated to preventing change.

Leninism as a peculiarly efficient political and social technology of control helps explain how Communists, and Leninist Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek, were able to turn a politically lively Republican China into totalitarian and authoritarian polities. An exclusive focus on top-down motions of leadership and governance has a harder time explaining why debate, dissent, and a spontaneous public life have periodically returned in every decade of Communist rule since 1949 and, in the case of Taiwan, finally led to the transformation of Chiang Kai-shek's police state into a democratic republic. Hong Kong, with its colonial and neocolo-nial institutions, has been poised on the edge of such a transformation for the past twenty years. One possibility is the hydraulic one that posits that if you put enough pressure on people, they will push back, even against a highly repressive government.²⁵ The unrestrained state undoes itself by being too powerful for its own good. This can help explain the intensity of an outburst but is less well suited to explaining dissent that is principled and protracted. Another explanation for the survival and revival of republican politics is the role played by a leader like Mao in periodically knocking the pins out from under party control and inciting those who had been silent to speak out. Mao's charisma contributed to the Hundred Flowers episode of 1956 when Mao at first invited and then suppressed dissent among students and intellectuals and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s when Mao called students to revolutionary action against the Communist Party. In the case of the Hundred Flowers episode, Mao unleashed and then suppressed dissent in part by the device of first suspending formulations like dictatorship of the proletariat and class struggle and then reimposing them when the criticism that erupted hit too close to home.²⁶ By permitting political opposition on Taiwan shortly before his death in 1988, Chiang Kai-shek's son Chiang Ching-kuo demonstrated how leadership can help release latent republican and democratic forces. However, the presence or absence of charismatic or transformative leadership does not fully explain the democracy movements that followed Mao's death.²⁷ Nor can this factor account for a robust public and political life in China before Mao's rise or on Taiwan long after Chiang Ching-kuo's death. In addition, memories of dissent by a single iconoclast like the writer Lu Xun, an entire generation like the student protesters of May 4, 1919, or Taiwanese who witnessed violent suppression of the February 28, 1947, protest against Nationalist rule can also incite and inspire political speech and action. The same is true for the introduction or reintroduction of ideas from abroad—republicanism, democracy, or human rights. However, memory and borrowed ideas alone, without the opportunity and means to speak and act, offer an incomplete path to the place and moment where and when the playing field of politics levels off enough to permit political accountability and participation.

Under certain conditions reports become speeches again, censored materials come out of the drawer, formalized language is mocked and discarded, a free show of hands is taken, and spontaneous meetings and assemblies take place. Patterns of control are interrupted and subverted by everyday acts of resistance. The revival of a republican repertoire forged early in the twentieth century is possible in China because the forms were preserved along with the core value of citizenship in the rhetoric and in the institutional practices of regimes themselves. After Yuan Shikai's failure to reanimate monarchy, China faced not the prospect of imperial revival but rather the periodic return of republicanism and active citizenship, helped along by the irresistible elite compulsion to speak to the people as if their opinions mattered.

In the original Chinese Republic some basic republican features were present while others were not. First, like other republics, the Chinese Republic was republican above all because it was not a monarchy. This was by clear choice. The exiled reformer Kang Youwei favored a constitutional monarchy, as did the Qing itself in the last few years of the dynasty, but this option was forcefully rejected in the 1911 Revolution in favor of a republic. Opposition to rule by monarchs, and by extension any titled or privileged order, is the first principle of republicanism. Second, the rhetoric of revolution in China found a touchstone in the republican cry for freedom over slavery.²⁸ Admittedly, many Chinese first favored a republic for this reason out of racial hatred for the Manchus, who, they claimed, had enslaved Chinese in their seventeenth-century conquest.²⁹ One of Sun Yat-sen's more creative political maneuvers was to foster anti-Manchuism as racially charged resistance to enslavement and then channel these rebel sentiments into republican ideology. This anti-slavery rhetoric endured, broadened, and deepened. While no longer slaves of Manchu rulers, Chinese still found themselves under the semicolonial domination of the Great Powers and therefore, in Sun's words, slaves of more than ten masters.³⁰ Politically active women who experienced and condemned patriarchy as a form of slavery felt the same need to resist domination and were consequently among the most ardent republicans. If we have no rights, we are slaves; if we have no freedom, then we are imprisoned, one advocate for women wrote in 1904.³¹ Iconoclasts like the future Communist Party founder, Chen Duxiu, extended this republican critique to a wholesale condemnation in 1915 of traditional values like loyalty, filial piety, and chastity as a slavery mentality that makes oneself subordinate to others.³² Third, and consistent with the republican call for freedom against slavery, is the general impulse to resist subordination and a willingness to look others in the eye.³³ The rapid disappearance of the kowtow, or full prostration, as a political gesture in favor of a standing bow or doff of a hat was an immediate indication that the nature of authority had changed.³⁴ The political record of the early Republic contains plentiful examples of men and women striking this kind of defiant, self-possessed pose. One could still choose to avoid the gaze of one's superior or find other means of signaling a subject status, but this was now, for an expanding circle of Chinese, a choice one made. Finally, citizenship, not only as an idealized state of mobilized support for the Chinese nation, but also as a pattern of individual and group activism, took hold on an everyday basis. As befit a culture that assumed individuals were fundamentally social beings, meetings with comrades, colleagues, and coworkers became the distinctive foundation of political, professional, and occupational life. Groups accustomed to meetings and assemblies as a cultural inheritance, like merchant, craft, and native-place guilds, found the practice becoming more formal, codified, and, in some cases, democratic. Others, like university students and advocacy groups, took the mandate to formally organize, meet, vote in leaders, and chart an agenda as the natural order of things among citizens.

The areas where the Chinese Republic was least republican were critically important ones: electing political representatives to serve in national institutions and sustaining free and open political debate. After a national election in winter 1912-13 in which 40 million men, or one out of every five males, participated, political representation shifted from the selection of leaders by voters or electors in local assemblies to self-selection by officials, militarists, and political party leaders.³⁵ Voting continued sporadically at the provincial and local levels, and not only for government office but also in guilds, chambers of commerce, professional societies, and unions, to select leaders or decide issues. In many instances electoral rules were manipulated by a cabal of merchants, labor bosses, or other social elites.³⁶ However, elections did inject uncertainty and accountability into such bodies sufficient on occasion to oust incumbents.³⁷ Despite periodic repression by national and local governments and warlord generals, actions like giving or attending a speech, participating in a boycott or protest, writing or signing a petition, or sending an open telegram or letter to the editor became ever more widely available.

The failure to sustain elections as a secure institutional practice harmed fledgling republican institutions. In 1912 and 1913 the Senate as a representative republican body peaked in a crescendo of activism and influence. When succeeding assemblies ceased being taken seriously, the Republic suffered a decided blow to its legitimacy. Into the gap flowed the national leadership of Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, and Mao Zedong as well as other leaders and organizations. The Nationalist and Communist political parties claimed to represent all Chinese even in the absence of electoral mandates, but so did nationally organized merchants, bankers, students, doctors, workers, and other groups in their respective professions and occupations. Claims to represent the nation absent the kind of clear certification elections can supply made public displays of authority and authenticity even more important as continuous tests and proofs of legitimacy.

Modern China remained republican despite the fact that republicanism did not become the kind of exalted political ideal found elsewhere with the power to trump other ideologies and traditions.³⁸ This was not for lack of trying by committed republicans like Sun Yat-sen. Sun by 1901 had declared that establishing a republic in China was a prime objective of the revolution.³⁹ His very name became synonymous with the word Republic.⁴⁰ Sun never wavered in his republicanism or succumbed to imperial fantasies about his own role as a leader. In his myriad recorded speeches and writings, Sun used the word republic (minguo or gonghe guo) slightly more often than revolution or even China.⁴¹ Commentators noticed the constancy of Sun's republican loyalties even as they cast doubt on the commitments of rival leaders. An editorialist argued in 1924 that while other leaders take serving the people as their mantra and chant abstractly like an emperor ten thousand miles away, Sun sincerely believed in the Republic.⁴²

Evidence of the manifest and latent power of republicanism in modern Chinese history encourages a rethinking of the Republican period. The standard story is that the 1911 Revolution toppled one set of imperial vintage institutions and replaced these with a new republican set that did not work. Republicans like Sun's young colleague Song Jiaoren tried and failed to consolidate a politics of parties, parliament, and elections. Their failures were clear for all to see. For his trouble Song lost his lifein 1913 to assassins dispatched by the autocrat Yuan Shikai. Sun Yat-sen heralded the Chinese Republic and was then obliged to give up the presidency to Yuan even before national elections were held. Disappointment with the immediate outcome of the 1911 Revolution led to a number of desperate acts ranging from armed revolt by revolutionaries against Yuan's debased Republic in 1913 and Yuan's own brief turn as emperor in 1915–16 to the dramatic rise of a patriotic movement politics, pioneered by students in the 1919 May Fourth Movement and soon joined by all segments of urban society. Under the viselike grip of imperialism on the one side and internal protest and rebellion on the other, a hardened and repressive Leninist regime emerged in the 1920s, led first by the Nationalists and then by the Communist Party. The new regime struggled to suppress, co-opt, or harness popular movements while building a state unencumbered by democracy.

However, a history of dueling autocratic institutions and democratic movements fails to capture the great middle range of civic life in Republican China where the meanings of citizenship, patriotism, rights, and justice were hammered out even as early Republican institutions faltered and Leninist regimes struggled to find their footing. A premise of this book is that political leadership, despite and because of asymmetries of power and authority, is a relational and collaborative venture in which what a leader does or says draws on the details of social and cultural life, even as the lives of followers are shaped by the leader's example and agenda. Making these kinds of connections was a matter of great urgency in early-twentieth-century China. Since the revolution was powered in good part by the pursuit of a better China, the worse government became in terms of weakness, corruption, and brutality, the greater the demand for the arts and institutions of active leadership and citizenship. The Chinese Republic failed in ways that permitted many of its core values and practices to survive.

Revolutions are made, at least in part, by individuals who in the heat of the moment are believed to mean what they say and who carry others along with them. Such meanings and modes of expression can spread like wildfire and burn into individual and collective identities as people come to believe in and perform them. All that is required for this to happen is the capacity to replicate stirring moments, tuned to local personalities, issues, and other circumstances, from point to point on the political landscape and take possession of the reasoning and emotions that result by making them each person's inside property.⁴³

Neither the Nationalists nor the Communists achieved anything like a fully disciplined party, army, or government until the late 1920s. Neither was in a position to impose a way of political life—much less an agreed upon right way of political life or political culture—on the larger population until later than that, and only then in parts of the country they firmly controlled.⁴⁴ What were the Chinese people doing in the intervening twenty to forty years? In 1913 a young American journalist, Gardner L. Harding, interviewed Sun Yat-sen and Tang Qunying and had occasion to observe Lu Zhengxiang and other members of the new Republican political class in action. Harding wrote in reply to the notion that the Chinese Revolution was over almost as soon as it began, I do not believe that the Chinese Revolution has failed, for I do not believe that it is finished.⁴⁵ Hu Shi, philosopher, reformer, and political liberal, quoted the remark with approval in his own stinging attack on Yuan Shikai's imperial adventure.⁴⁶

The Chinese Revolution was many things, from bloodletting to manifesto writing and from training soldiers to learning how to run a meeting. From the battlefield to the provincial lodge or student dormitory, this great political process was always rhetorical, and not in the sense of just words—though the desire to transform words into deeds was intense and pervasive—but in the sense of words that expressed larger arguments, deep feelings, and powerful interests. In an earlier study of Republican politics, I found that conventional ideas about the relationship between political elites and ordinary people like the rickshaw pullers of Beijing seriously overestimated the ability of leaders to impose their will on the masses and underestimated the capacity of these often nameless individuals to shape their political world, to sometimes dramatic and riotous effect.⁴⁷ This book, a social and cultural history of the politically famous and almost famous, makes it clear that elites can riot too, even as they exert the more structured influence on fellow citizens that justifies use of the term leadership to describe the speaking parts they played in helping create, undermine, and sustain a Chinese Republic.

CHAPTER 1

Slapping Song Jiaoren

POLITICAL TRAVELERS IN A LONG REVOLUTION

The Chinese Revolution was remarkable for lasting so long and covering so much territory in and out of China. Conventionally thought to commence with the Opium War (1839-42) and end with the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, the revolution has few rivals as a protracted conflict. Among them might be the French Revolution, with its five Republics to 1958, and the American Revolution, understood as extending through the Civil War of 1861-65 to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Even a more restrictive bracketing of events requires at least four or five decades to tell the story of the collapse of an empire and the building of a new Chinese nation. This was a revolution revolutionaries, if they were lucky, grew old in. Tang Qunying was born in 1871, joined Sun Yat-sen's revolution against the Qing dynasty in 1905 in Japan as a young widow and student, and struggled for women's rights and suffrage throughout the 1910s and 1920s. By the mid-1930s, and in her sixties, as Mao Zedong and the Communists on their Long March yet again eluded annihilation by Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists, Tang was living in Nanjing on a meager sinecure provided by the Nationalist government to her as a retired revolutionary. She grew annoyed when an elite visitor would drop by solely to have a photograph taken with her as a heroine of the now-long-past 1911 Revolution. After all, the goal of women's suffrage, like many other revolutionary objectives, had not been reached. As she remarked to her adopted son's wife with a deep sigh, These people are so different. The nation and people, and the liberation of women, are all now forgotten. All they think and talk about are their own creature comforts. They fritter away their days at the card table and then suddenly turn up in front of me showing off their high positions. This is really too shameful and sad.¹

As a woman who had led an active political life as terrorist, secret agent, propagandist, soldier, editor, educator, and organizer, Tang was understandably vexed by what appeared to be a lull in the revolution, if not its end. Tang Qunying died in June 1937, a month before the Japanese invasion of North China that would eventually help propel the Communists to power and continue the revolution and a year after the Nanjing government included universal male and female suffrage in its draft constitution.²

The Chinese Revolution also traversed a geographic expanse to rival in magnitude its longevity as a historical process. The landscape of its politics was vast not only because Qing conquests in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries doubled the size of the preceding Ming dynasty, bequeathing a gigantism only a few nations exhibit, but also because critical sites of the revolution extended far beyond China's borders, to East and Southeast Asia, America and Europe. As political lives unfolded in a long revolution, they also crossed boundaries of hometown or village, province, country, and continent. The history of revolutionary thought and action winds through exile and immigrant communities in cities like Tokyo and San Francisco, work, study, and training experiences in Lyon, New York, and Moscow, and diplomatic postings in Paris and St. Petersburg. Seeds of revolutionary thinking about rights and social justice were sown in China by returning officials, students, workers, and merchants, with the help of foreign visitors like globe-trotting suffragists and Comintern agents.

An inveterate traveler by force of circumstance as a political refugee twice, from 1895 to 1911 and from 1913 to 1916, and also by choice and conviction as a political campaigner, Sun Yat-sen eventually found travel so vital to his purposes that he declared it a necessity for everyone along with food, clothing and shelter.³ Sun would have been lost without steamships and trains. He traveled to raise money and plot revolution but also to collect slogans and insights for the struggle back home. Returning to China in 1911, Sun continued to journey around the country by train, boat, and the occasional sedan chair. Sun was not alone in embracing what Marie-Claire Bergere has termed in his case extreme geographic mobility as a political response to the vastness of China it-self, the expanse of Greater China in diaspora, and the pressing fact of a global context for national and even local events.⁴ The accelerated opening up of China to the world brought change in every area of life. A 1918 essay titled The Woman Problem in the progressive journal New Youth noted that because of the dense networks of transportation and communication that now bound the world as one, what is happening in European societies today will happen in our society tomorrow.⁵ With transoceanic telegraph lines in operation, tomorrow might actually mean the next day if not week, month, or year.⁶ By the 1880s Shanghai was served by most international steamship lines.⁷ The reciprocal opening up of the world to Chinese with the means and motivation to travel made geographic mobility a stimulus to political thought and a credential that might induce others less traveled to agree with you. Leaving home, and returning changed, helped make the case for a New China.

Upon his return to his home province of Hunan in 1913 after ten years of study in Japan, Britain, and Germany, the scholar Yang Changji, Mao's college teacher and the father of his future wife, Yang Kaihui, wrote an article for the local Changsha magazine Public Word titled My Opinions on Reforming Society.⁸ Yang noted that as a result of the political revolution that took place while he was away in Tokyo, Aberdeen, and Berlin, China has experienced tremendous change in the transformation of its political system into a republic, the profound nature of which can hardly be expressed. He cited the end of the imperial examination system, cutting of Manchu-style queues on men and boys, banning of foot binding for girls, and suppression of opium. Yang still retained powerful attachments to Confucian thought and criticized what he saw as excessive Western reliance on self-interest in ethical matters.⁹ Yang also embraced the urgent need for social change and attacked customs like arranged marriage and concubinage.¹⁰ Pressing ahead on these fronts loudly was needed in order to reach the ears of those who are still deaf. Recently, Yang wrote, I have lived and traveled in several countries both East and West, asking after customs and examining how customs change. There is a great benefit in doing so since the way change actually takes place is through international communication. By comparing customs, the good and the bad become visible.¹¹ The good in the West for Yang included fundamentals like free speech and small pleasures like not having family members read your mail. The bad in China ranged from poor public hygiene to fellow scholars failing to return borrowed books.

In Changsha one can visit the teacher's college where Yang Changji held forth as the Confucius of First Normal and Mao Zedong was his student.¹² There are also less prominent historical sites like a small museum in a turn-of-the-century house dedicated to another Hunan native, Li Fuchun. One of the architects of the new socialist economy of the 1950s, Li spent 1919 to 1924 in France where he joined the Chinese Communist Party and, briefly, in the Soviet Union studying revolution.¹³ Among the exhibits in the museum are postcards Li sent from Paris, a leather document case from his post-1949 party service, eyeglasses, and a large map titled The Tracks of Li Fuchun's Life. On the map one can follow Li from his birth in Changsha to journeys throughout China, including a visit to Beijing to study French, his participation in the Long March, and battles in Northeast China during the final civil war with the Nationalists in the late 1940s. Once he took his place in the central bureaucracy in the 1950s, aside from a diplomatic visit to Moscow in 1952, plotting out Li's life becomes a matter of tracking his ascent through ministries in Beijing rather than charting domestic and international travels.¹⁴

Li's early sojourns in Paris and Moscow are represented by a small inset map. Such cartographic devices typically show a detail of a larger map, like the city plan of Changsha on a map of Hunan Province. Here, instead, geographic details of places once remote and unfamiliar, like France and Russia, find their way onto a map of China. Even Mao Zedong, whose tracks did not lead out of China until his 1950 mission to Moscow to meet Stalin, as a young man began a walk through five counties of Hunan after he read about two other students who journeyed on foot all the way to Tibet.¹⁵ Later Mao traveled widely in China not only on revolutionary business but also for more personal reasons, to visit the hometown of Confucius in Shandong Province as a tourist and to Beijing to woo Yang Kaihui.¹⁶

As Sun Yat-sen intuited early in his career, China's gigantic size and poorly defended borders represented challenges to national governance but also opportunities for individual growth and political careers. Documenting and interpreting the movement of early-twentieth-century politicians and activists requires attention to these global details. As a recent study of the Republic's place in the world suggests, this was, for many, especially men and women of ambition, an age of openness.¹⁷ In Republican China, everything important had an international dimension.¹⁸

This moving and globalized picture of revolutionary politics-in-the-making is at odds with the by now discredited stereotype of Chinese as earthbound tillers.¹⁹ In a revolutionary era one expects individuals, ideas, and organizations to be set in motion as tradition is uprooted. In fact, late imperial China was already moving according to its own rhythms. Scholars traveled to attend school, take the official examination, and assume office in the capital or a distant province. Merchants journeyed far in search of profits. Though ordinary people might wish to remain on ancestral lands, they were often forced to move by war, natural disaster, or economic distress.²⁰ Even relatively earthbound farmers moved around quite a bit within the circuits of the market towns that surrounded them.²¹

Political activists in the modern era did blaze some new trails—to Moscow, for example, for training in Marxism—but they also followed the well-worn tracks of officials and their agents, merchants, laborers, and mendicants of the imperial era while acquiring, refining, and delivering their political message at an ever-accelerating pace. Wen-hsin Yeh has shown how young people from provincial backwaters were radicalized in their journeys as students from conservative rural communities to provincial capitals like Hangzhou, then on to Beijing and Shanghai to study and work in the epicenters of intellectual and political upheaval.²² The resulting juxtaposition of remembered landscapes and new vistas encouraged a complex rethinking of values. Some youths took up avant-garde ideas like anarchism, liberalism, and communism not only for novelty's sake but also, like Yang Changji, out of a fundamentalist ardor to salvage the ethical intent of the Confucianism they had imbibed in their family and village schools.²³

New uses for older travel routes and social expectations as to who would be out and about on them led to artful dodges and comic missteps. During one of her pre-1911 revolutionary missions in rural Hunan Tang Qunying disguised herself as an itinerant tea picker in order to misdirect Qing troops.²⁴ Not shedding the clothes and demeanor of her feminist persona would have been a giveaway to officials on the lookout for revolutionaries. By contrast, when the Communist revolutionary Peng Pai set out one day in i92i full of more hope than guile to organize the peasants of his home province of Guangdong, wearing a student-style Western white suit and solid white cap, he was mistaken for a tax collector by a vigilant, and world-wise, farmer.²⁵ The dynamic landscapes of old and new China invited one to blend in, or stand out. Courtesy of railways and steamboats, political cadre often moved more quickly and farther than had been possible in the past, and so did their counterparts in business and other fields.²⁶ Any moment, large or small, in the long and expansive Chinese Revolution forms a knot of influences and consequences that leads in many directions: backward and forward in time and to and from a given point on the map.

The event chosen to anchor this book is a brief but dramatic moment in the early history of the Chinese Republic: a public fight over women's rights during the founding of the Nationalist Party (Guomindang) in Beijing on August 25, 1912. The political convention is important enough to merit a small stone monument in the now-restored Huguang Native-Place Lodge (Huguang huiguan) where it took place and brief mention in histories of the period.²⁷ The larger significance of the encounter arises from the very ordinariness of the participants' efforts to grasp and guide an unfinished revolution over cultural ground at once