by Emily Hahn
The anti-Red movement started simultaneously in Shanghai, Nanking and Canton, with a campaign against all alleged Communist sympathizers. Chiang did not employ the Nationalist army for this work, but turned the job over to secret societies, the members of which arrested thousands of suspect agitators and executed many of them. It was a bloody time in the cities of Central and South China. Hankow repudiated Chiang and he was voted out of the Kuomintang. The new government was promptly set up in Nanking, and the two cities carried on a verbal warfare while the Northern Expedition remained in abeyance, waiting for the dispute to cease. Peking’s troops were stationed ominously near Nanking, at Pukow.
For a few months in 1927 [writes Vincent Sheean in Personal History], a little more than half of the year, Hankow concentrated, symbolized and upheld the hope for a revolution of the world. Delegations came there from all over Europe, Asia and America to see for themselves what constituted Hankow’s success, the surprise and delight of a generation of thwarted Communists . . . . French Communists, German Communists, Hindoo Communists, British I.L.P. people, and numerous agitators responsible to the Komintern gave the place a fine mixed savour of international revolt. The fact that many of these revolutionists preferred not to appear in public, and liked to conceal their comings and goings as much as possible, made the phenomenon more significant . . . . The numerous foreign revolutionists were only the froth of the brew, but they caught the eye. Other immediately visible phenomena: frequent strikes, mass meetings and demonstrations; the workmen’s place (the New World, it was called, a centre in the Russian and Italian style), and the conduct of students or trades unionists, gave the illusion of a highly organized social-revolutionary movement that might, at any moment, seize the machinery of production and proclaim the dictatorship of the proletariat.
But it didn’t happen.
As Sheean points out, Borodin could not declare a Soviet because of the strong influence of the British and American interests in Hankow and on the river, quite aside from the fact that most of the Chinese had not as yet been educated in Communist ideas to the necessary pitch. The Hankow government also had trouble with civil wars; Canton seceded under the leadership of Li Chi-sen, and Hunan and Szechwan became restive. Chiang could have dealt with these matters, but Chiang was no longer with them. He was on the other side, suing as was Hankow for the favor of Feng Yu-hsiang.
Feng was encamped in Honan, having scattered the army of his old opponent Chang Tso-lin; he and his troops lay between Hankow and Peking, in a most strategic position. Although he played both sides for a long time, it became fairly evident toward the middle of the year that he was casting in his lot with Nanking.
Then many of the Chinese in Hankow were shaken from their adherence to the Left wing by the evidence that Borodin and his associates had the intention of setting up the Soviet. Many of these people had not realized that they had committed themselves to such an extreme program, and even members of the Kuomintang were horrified at the idea of communizing all private property in China, including their own. The Hankow government was very shaky indeed. Feng’s decision was a death blow to their hopes, at least for that time. At last on July fifth the blow fell, though without warfare or bloodshed of any sort; the Communists and the Kuomintang were divorced. Borodin and the other Russians went back to Moscow by way of Mongolia. The chief among those Chinese who had remained loyal to the Left-wing program went shortly afterwards. Chingling returned to Shanghai, where she remained in Rue Molière for a time. Her farewell message was printed in the People’s Tribune, Hankow, July fourteenth, and was responsible for the suppression of that paper. It began:
We have reached a point where definition is necessary and where some members of the party executive are so defining the principles and policies of Dr Sun Yat-sen that they seem to me to do violence to Dr Sun’s ideas and ideals. Feeling thus, I must disassociate myself from active participation in carrying out the new policies of the party. In the last analysis, all revolutions must be social revolutions, based upon fundamental changes in society; otherwise it is not a revolution, but merely a change of government . . . .
She went on to state her belief that Dr Sun’s third principle, “the livelihood of the people,” was in danger of being forgotten. The working classes, she said, and the peasants become the basis of our strength in our struggle to overthrow imperialism, cancel the unequal treaties that enslave us, and effectively unify the country. These are the new pillars for the building up of a free China. Without their support the Kuomintang, as a revolutionary party, becomes weak and chaotic and illogical in its social platform; without their support, political issues are vague. If we adopt any policy that weakens these supports, we shake the very foundation of our party, betray the masses and are falsely loyal to our leader . . . . We must not betray the people. We have built up in them a great hope. They have placed in us a great faith.
Madame Sun did not stay in Shanghai. Her friends in Hankow were all going, by various roads, to Moscow. Those of her sympathizers who were in touch with her urged her to consider that it was dangerous to remain in the treaty port; if not dangerous bodily, her relationship with T.V. and Dr Kung might still be used as an argument by the Nanking faction that her sympathies were divided, and that she might yet come over to their side.
It was decided that she too go to Russia, to visit Moscow. Her sympathies were with the Hankow government, which she felt was the legitimate interpreter of Sun’s ideology. She left the city secretly and with her American friend, Rayna Prohme, who had worked for Borodin in Hankow, she went to Vladivostok and from there to Moscow.
Eling was living in Shanghai, as were T.V. and Mayling. Even though it now seemed that Hankow should become reconciled with Nanking and the two governments combine, the Soongs had separated.
So began the situation which, added to the political positions of their three husbands, has made the three Soong sisters famous. It is piquant and it makes an excellent story, one that has not lost its fascination in twelve years. Here we have one family in which the two extremes of policy, one would say, and the middle way are all represented.
Indulging in poetic license we relegate Madame Sun to the Left, Madame Chiang to the Right, because of her husband’s anti-Communist activities, and Madame Kung to the Center; the Communist, the Capitalist and the — Liberal, shall we say? There is no good term for the middle way. It is a good story, and we imagine the details that must accompany the situation, the stresses and strains of such a family group. Such a divergence of opinion simply must lead to a split, one would think; we have always assumed that such a split has taken place. Any foreign resident of a treaty port a year ago would have declared that the Soong Family had divided into three camps; Madame Sun repudiated her family, and the other two sisters were supposed to have parted ways over a squabble that had to do with the Ministry of Finance . . . . But in China it seldom happens like that.
Indeed, in the whole world it seldom happens like that. Seldom do the myriad facts and influences of a human relationship arrange themselves into a form convenient for story-telling; that is the chief reason fiction must always mislead its readers. When you put everything in, the story becomes too complicated. It is easier for us to imagine a dramatic family quarrel, the dissolution of the group, the three paths taken thereafter by the three sisters, and so without realizing it we have made that story up, or rather followed the furrows already plowed by our trained imaginations. We have gone wrong, and it is not entirely our fault. Not understanding it, we have failed to make allowances for the family system in China.
The word “instinct” has been misused so often that one is tempted to misuse it again and to say that the Chinese has a strong instinct for his family’s unity. But since we are probably all born with our individual proportion of instincts, and since it has never been proved that the clan spirit is instinctive beyond certain limits — who ever heard of an instinct to make a will, for instance? — it is safer to say that most Chinese are trained from birt
h by precept and example to present to the world an unbroken family front. This does not mean that family members do not quarrel, but it does mean that they do not allow their quarrels to go to the limit. They have not developed the carefully unsentimental attitude of the English, who do their earnestly best to ignore, if not to outrage, family ties. The Chinese pays his mother, even when he is furious with her, every courtesy and kowtows to the family head on New Year’s Day; the Englishman conceals his natural affection and speaks roughly to his wife, and slangs his father, and his wife understands and is pleased thereat, and his father slangs him back, glowing with pride. Both attitudes are simply matters of convention, but they are also matters of fact.
If Chingling had been thoroughly American she might really have flounced off to Russia as she is supposed to have done, and her American family would have sat back on its shameful moneybags and never expected her to darken the door again. She did not flounce. She departed because her principles were involved in this threatened compromise, and she did not wish to appear to countenance it. The struggle in China for unity was not then and it is not now a family affair, nor could it have appeared so to her. No doubt the other members of the clan disagreed with her; even T.V., who had worked with her friends in Canton and Hankow, was now inclined to prefer Chiang to the Russians. This personal disagreement, however, could not affect the strong structure of the Soong family any more than it could affect China’s destiny. To puff it up into a melodrama is false, whether it be Communist or reactionary propaganda. It is not true that Chingling cut herself off from her people, or that her people left her to suffer in poverty in Moscow. We might imagine such a situation, wherein the political ideas of a young woman would lead her family to take such drastic measures, but a representative Chinese would stare in amazement at such a suggestion. Yes, there are ancient plays in China where the righteous Princess kills herself because her husband is a traitor to the Emperor, but such things do not happen now. The Princess of today publicly may disapprove of her husband’s actions, but he is still her husband — in private life.
This extremely humanitarian philosophy of the Chinese is partly responsible, no doubt, for the difficulties encountered in China by sociological agitators of all kinds. A Trotzkyite once told me in despair that he had never dealt with such people in his life, and was convinced he could do nothing with them. “They have no capacity,” he said, “for sustained indignation en masse. They are hopeless.”
CHAPTER XIV
The Generalissimo Takes a Wife
When the two governments agreed to make it up, one of the compromises suggested was the resignation of Chiang as commander of the Nationalist army. Chiang promptly walked out, announcing that he was completely willing to sacrifice his post for the general good of the Party. The other two of the old guard from Canton, Hu Han-min and Wang Ching-wei, who had gone in opposite directions on the subject of Communism, also departed; Hu resigned and Wang went to Europe, while Chiang himself departed for Japan.
These departures left the combined government without a real leader, and the Northern Expedition, once started, had to be carried on. Troops from Peking began to threaten Nanking, and war lords were beginning to make trouble again. The Nationalists begged Chiang to come back.
He came, but not before he had won a victory of another sort, over Mrs Soong. For five years he had been proposing marriage to Mayling, and her consent might have been given sooner save that her mother was very much opposed to the idea of Chiang as a son-in-law. He was a soldier, to begin with, and the educated Chinese of the past generation classed soldiers very low in the social scale. He had been married, too, and though the marriage was a family-arranged affair that took place when he was a boy of fifteen and he was supposed to have been divorced, Mrs Soong was not satisfied that he was clear of this relationship, nor of others that were rumored. Most important of all, he was not a Christian. That fact in itself was enough to set Mayling’s mother firmly against the Commander-in-chief.
She was intensely prejudiced against him. After his hope to marry her youngest daughter became known to her she went to immense trouble to avoid any discussion of the subject, and refused for many days to see him. This behavior was obvious enough; it was the Chinese way of saying No. Any other suitor would have recognized his fate and bowed to it, since Mayling would not have married him without her mother’s consent. But Chiang Kai-shek was determined. He continued to besiege Mrs Soong without ceasing, and in the end he ran her to ground — in Japan.
She had been in the West of the island when she heard of his arrival; she fled immediately to Kamakura, all the way across Japan, at the threat that he would come to call on her and once again ask for Mayling, Chiang followed. He had hopes of success, for Mayling had at last given him reason to think she would consent. It would not be fair to Madame Chiang to say she married the Generalissimo because she thought it her duty; she has never been such a prig as that. But there is no doubt that she did look forward to helping him in his work of unifying China, and that this was one of her reasons for accepting him. Mayling would never have made a marriage in which she would not have the opportunity to do constructive work; she had refused a large number of men, and would have remained unmarried rather than enter the selfish life of the ordinary upper-class Chinese women of the time.
On this occasion, urged by Madame Kung, who was sympathetic to Mayling, Mrs Soong did at last grant an interview to her daughter’s persistent suitor. Chiang had provided himself with proof of his divorce from his childhood wife, and had settled the other complications of which the gossips had made much. There remained, however, the matter of his religion. Mrs Soong asked him if he were willing to become a Christian, and fortunately his answer pleased her. He would try, he said; he would study the Bible and do his best, but he could not promise, sight unseen, to accept Christianity. Mrs Soong began to waver in her prejudice, and after a short time the engagement was announced.
They were married on December first, 1927, with two ceremonies, the Christian and the orthodox Chinese. The first and Christian wedding took place in the Soong home, on Seymour Road; it was very quiet. Dr David Yui, secretary of the Y.M.C.A., officiated. Afterward the party went to the splendid Majestic Hotel, which in those days was at the height of its glory and is still remembered affectionately by Shanghai residents. There, guests awaited the couple — everybody of importance who was within traveling distance of Shanghai had come to see this union between the Soong family and China’s foremost strong man.
From the Shanghai Times of December second:
It was a brilliant affair and the outstanding Chinese marriage ceremony of recent years. It unites on the one hand the former all-powerful leader of the Nanking armies, and on the other the family of Dr T.V. Soong, brother of the bride, in addition to the family of the late Dr Sun, founder of the Kuomintang.
Fully 1,300 persons were present in the ballroom of the Majestic Hotel yesterday afternoon when the ceremony took place. All chairs at tables were filled and scores were standing when Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek made his appearance with his “best man.” Hand-clapping greeted the appearance of the former military leader.
Gathered there were prominent foreigners and Chinese of Shanghai and many parts of China. The Senior Consul, Mr Edwin S. Chunningham; Sir Sidney Barton, HMS Consul-General; Mr N. Aall, Norwegian Consul-General; Mr S. Yada, Japanese Consul-General; M. Naggiar, French Consul-General, and Consul-Generals of various other nations were present. Admiral Mark L. Bristol, Commander-in-Chief of the American Pacific Fleet; Major-General John Duncan, Commander of the North-China Command, and other high foreign service officers were present in civilian clothes.
At the entrance to the Majestic Hotel Ballroom stood Mr. T. W. Kwok, secretary to the Commissioner of Foreign Affairs, serving as head of the reception committee; invitations were shown to Mr Kwok, after which guests were ushered in to the ballroom.
Upon entering the ballroom, gaily decorated for the occasion, one was immediately str
uck with the imposing array of flowers, arranged by the Lewis Nurseries. On the platform, if such it may be called, was a large and lifelike portrait of the founder of the Kuomintang, Dr Sun Yat-sen. On one side of the portrait was the flag of the Kuomintang and on the other the flag of Dr Sun.
On the orchestra platform a Russian orchestra impatiently tuned instruments and awaited orders for the playing of the Mendelssohn wedding march. At 4:15 neither the bride nor the bridegroom had put in an appearance. Outside the ballroom, a crowd of approximately 1,000 Chinese had gathered and were standing by quietly hoping to glimpse the former Generalissimo and his bride.
Inside the hotel and surrounding the premises were scores of foreign and Chinese detectives, carefully guarding the premises and on the alert to prevent any disturbances. At the door of the ballroom it was necessary to show invitations and to sign a register before being admitted. After signing the register the signer was presented with a small pin bearing the name of the Generalissimo and Miss Soong. Signers of the register were also presented with a programme printed in Chinese.
The Programme divided the ceremony into ten parts, as follows:
1. The arrival of the guests
2. The arrival of those officiating and of the witnesses
3. The arrival of the bridegroom
4. The arrival of the bride
5. Three bows to the portrait of Dr Sun Yat-sen
6. Reading of the marriage certificate
7. Affixing the official seal to the certificate
