In Paris, the maharaja fought most intensely to preserve the privileges of semi-autonomous kingdoms like Bikaner, and the British were only too happy to let him shoot his tigers in peace while holding out some suitably vague prospect of self-government for India. As Mao Zedong wrote, ‘India has earned herself a clown’ but ‘the demands of the Indian people have not been granted’.29 The Egyptians suffered a deeper humiliation. In March 1919, the British arrested Saad Zaghlul and deported him to Malta, provoking a great wave of public protests in Egypt – what later came to be known as the 1919 Revolution. Egyptians went on strike, students at the al-Azhar mosque built barricades, and Egyptian women threw off their hijabs to create picket lines and exhort the crowds. Such was the hatred of the British that mobs routinely murdered their soldiers. Faced with nationwide revolt, the British relented and allowed Zaghlul to proceed to Paris.
But while Zaghlul was honing his English-speaking skills on the journey, the British managed to persuade the Americans that Bolsheviks had joined Islamic fanatics in fuelling serious unrest in Egypt. Indeed, they presented Zaghlul and his nephew to the Americans as ‘Lenin and Trotsky’. Zaghlul was still on his way from Marseilles to Paris when President Wilson moved to recognize the permanent British protectorate over Egypt. The Egyptian journalist Muhammad Haykal expressed a widespread outrage and anger when he wrote later:
Here was the man of the Fourteen Points, among them the right to self-determination, denying the Egyptian people its right to self-determination … And doing all that before the delegation on behalf of the Egyptian people had arrived in Paris to defend its claim, and before President Wilson had heard one word from them. Is this not the ugliest of treacheries?30
Egypt remained volatile, and in 1922 the British were forced to concede it a degree of self-rule.
In Iran, which was still under military occupation by the British, Lord Curzon, now Britain’s foreign secretary, saw an opportunity to create yet another buffer for his cherished Indian empire. In 1919, Curzon helped foil Iranian representation at the Paris Conference and drew up an Anglo-Persian agreement almost entirely destructive of Iranian sovereignty. (Mohammad Mossadegh, confined to Switzerland by the war, wept when he heard about the proposed agreement, and almost decided to make Europe his permanent home.) As it turned out, Curzon, who had already stoked Indian nationalism with his proposed partition of Bengal in 1905, had yet again misjudged the mood of the natives. The agreement with the British was widely denounced by Iranians; pro-British members of the Iranian parliament were physically attacked. Facing widespread opposition, Curzon grew more obdurate. ‘These people have got to be taught’, he wrote, ‘at whatever cost to them that they cannot get on without us. I don’t at all mind their noses being rubbed in the dust.’31 Curzon’s tactics did not work. Iranian anger finally sank the Anglo-Persian agreement in 1920; it also inaugurated an enduringly hostile perception of Britain in Iran. (In 1978, the shah of Iran thought he had damned Ayatollah Khomeini permanently by calling him a British agent in a newspaper article. The result was the first mass protests against him and his rule and the eventual collapse of his dynasty.)
The ways in which the year 1919 changed the world were manifold. In Indonesia, the nationalist group Sarekat Islam, which was founded after the Russo-Japanese War but had remained a toothless entity, began to transform itself into a mass-membership party, demanding complete independence from the Dutch. Ho Chi Minh found a sympathetic audience among the French Communists, and he officially joined the Communist Party in 1921. ‘It was patriotism, not Communism,’ Ho later recalled, ‘which had prompted me to believe in Lenin.’32
In India, where nearly 10 million Indians died in the global influenza epidemic of 1918 – 19, the British reneged on their promise of self-rule and resumed the repressive policies introduced during wartime. But the massacre by troops of 400 demonstrators in Amritsar in April 1919 accelerated the transformation of the Indian National Congress from a gentlemen’s debating club into a mass-based political party and the emergence of Gandhi as its leader. As Tagore wrote to the viceroy of India when he returned his knighthood in protest against the killings: ‘Considering that such treatment has been meted out to a population disarmed and resourceless, by a power which has the most terribly efficient organization for destruction of human lives, we must strongly assert that it can claim no political expediency, far less moral justification.’33 Tagore would later write in the Manchester Guardian of how Asians like himself who ‘believed with all our simple faith that even if we rebelled against foreign rule we should have the sympathy of the West’, were nursing a delusion.34
The Wilsonian moment, the twenty-nine-year-old Jawaharlal Nehru wrote, ‘has passed and for ourselves it is again the distant hope that must inspire us, not the immediate breathless looking for the deliverance’. 35 The Wilsonian moment did not pass without bringing more cruel disappointment to the Ottoman Turks too. ‘It is not Islam that shuns the Europeans,’ al-Afghani’s protege Rashid Rida had written as European pressures on Muslim countries multiplied before the First World War, ‘but the Europeans who force Islam to give them a wide berth. Harmony between them is not an impossibility, but the way to reach it requires the exercise of a large mind.’36 In the event, a large mind was not forthcoming from Western leaders, and especially not from Lloyd George, who thought the Turks were ‘a human cancer, a creeping agony in the flesh of the lands which they misgoverned, rotting every fibre of life’, and who felt that the West had the right to administer victor’s justice to the Ottomans.37
The Allied powers approved Greece’s spurious claim to Western Anatolia on the grounds that Turkish Muslims were not fit and proper people to rule multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies. Then in 1920, British and French troops occupied Istanbul in a bid to forestall the Turkish national movement for independence. The humiliation spurred hatred and distrust for Western powers across the Muslim world. Pan-Islamism briefly revived; even Mustafa Kemal, soon to be known as the hard-line secularist Atatürk, organized a pan-Islamic conference in Ankara and solicited the support of Ahmad al-Sharif al-Sanusi, then famous as a heroic Muslim fighter against Italian colonialists in Libya. If America, the journal Izmir’e Dogru claimed, was ‘keeping quiet in the face of this horrendous event, then the only solution for the Turks is to ask for help from the Muslim world with all its powers and capacity’.38 In 1923, Ahmed Riza, a long-standing Ottoman exile in Paris, authored a famous tract, La Faillite morale de la politique occidentale en Orient, arguing that anti-Westernism in the Muslim world was largely created by Western policies towards it.
Some of the non-Ottoman Muslims most outraged by the shabby treatment of Ottoman Turkey were in India, where they would soon join forces with Gandhi in the Khilafat campaign – an attempt to coerce Britain into a more lenient attitude towards Turkey. As it turned out, the Turks needed such assistance only up to a point.
Miraculously, Mustafa Kemal, the hero of Ottoman battles against Italy, emerged out of the shambles of the First World War to win back Anatolian territories lost to the Greeks and expel all other foreign troops from Turkish soil. In 1923, a peace treaty with Western powers defined the boundaries of the new Turkish nation-state; it also cancelled all the privileges enjoyed by the West in the country. Hailed as the ‘sword of Islam’ in India, Atatürk showed that Wilsonian rights of self-determination or justice in the international system would not be something that Western powers could be persuaded to concede; they had to be fought for and preserved with military force. For the West, Mustafa Kemal told an interviewer in 1923, was ‘an entity that, seeing us as an inferior society, has exerted its best efforts to encompass our destruction’.39 Moreover, mass religious and political ideologies like pan-Islamism could be an effective means to the ends of true sovereignty and freedom from foreign interference – Mustafa Kemal used the rhetoric of communism as deftly as that of Islam when it suited his nationalist objectives. It is hard to exaggerate the impact of Atatürk’s success on opinion across As
ia – the greatest victory of the East since the Battle of Tsushima. ‘The truth’, Muhammad Iqbal wrote, ‘is that among the Muslim nations of today, Turkey alone has shaken off its dogmatic slumber, and attained to self-consciousness.’40
In China this lesson would soon be learnt by young communists. The twenty-year-old poet Qu Qiubai, a student of Buddhism who later became a crucial contact in Moscow for the fledgling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), was not alone in feeling ‘the sharp pain of imperialistic oppression’, which liberated him from the illusions of ‘impractical democratic reforms’.41 Certainly, the post-1919 sense of betrayal was felt most acutely among Asians by millions of Chinese who, unlike the Indians, the Ottomans, the Egyptians and the Koreans, were adequately represented at the conference and felt entitled to a sympathetic hearing by virtue of their contribution to the Allied effort. After all, hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers had stepped into the positions vacated by dead and wounded European soldiers during the war. Liang Qichao had argued for China’s entry into the war precisely to guarantee favourable treatment of it by the Allies.
The Chinese delegation argued eloquently that Shandong was wholly Chinese, and had been taken by Germany by force; it was the birthplace of Confucius and the ‘cradle’ of Chinese civilization. President Wilson was personally sympathetic to Chinese claims on Japanese-occupied Shandong, but he could not persuade Lloyd George and Clemenceau to rescind their wartime promises to Japan that it could hold on to the colony. Besides, both Britain and France had their own interests in China, obtained through force, to maintain. By selling munitions to the Allies and expanding its economic reach into Asian markets, Japan had emerged from the war as much of a great power in the Pacific as the United States was in the Atlantic. Its appeal for racial equality had already received a snub and Wilson, who wanted Japan to join the League of Nations, could not risk annoying the country further.
The blatant cynicism enraged even the American senator William Borah, who asserted that the failure to return Shandong to China would ‘dishonor and degrade any people’, and mocked Woodrow Wilson’s pious hopes for a post-imperial world order: ‘Naked, hideous and revolting, it looms up before us as a monster from the cruel and shameless world which all had hoped and prayed was forever behind us.’42 From Paris Liang Qichao informed his Chinese readers about China’s defeat over Shandong. ‘Japan,’ he reported, ‘had left no stone unturned.’43 But he also blamed the Chinese delegation, and cautioned that the principle ‘might is right’ ‘hold[s] sway today as ever’ and that weak nations who take literally such ‘catch-phrases of the strong’ as ‘justice and humanity’ will be ‘quickly disillusioned’. ‘The only one she [China] could count upon is herself,’ he concluded, ‘and her own undefeatable spirit and courage.’44
So it would be. News of China’s failure in May 1919 brought enraged students out on the streets of Beijing, denouncing the American president as a liar. Demonstrations and strikes erupted across China, an explosion of intellectual and political energy that, later described as the May Fourth Movement, reverberated through the following decades.
The May Fourth Movement began with a single incident: a demonstration by some 3,000 students on 4 May 1919 at Beijing’s Gate of Heavenly Peace, which overlooks Tiananmen Square. Holding flags with slogans in English and French as well as Chinese, the students demanded that the Chinese government reject any treaty that failed to recognize China’s sovereignty over Shandong. The demonstrators turned restless as they passed through the Legation Quarter. Some assaulted the nearby house of a Chinese minister perceived as pro-Japanese, and, though the minister escaped narrowly, the Chinese ambassador to Japan was badly beaten.
The students were arrested, sparking more demonstrations and strikes in their support across Chinese cities, most notably in Shanghai, the intellectual and political centre for young Chinese. In June, workers and merchants joined the protests, initiating a successful series of anti-Japanese boycotts. Even in remote Singapore, the Chinese community erupted into demonstrations and riots, abruptly revealing the strength of anti-colonial sentiment in the city. Later that month, the new alliance of students, workers and merchants seemed to have won when the Chinese delegation to the Paris conference, overturning instructions from its superiors in Beijing, refused to endorse the Versailles Treaty.
Nothing much seemed to change. Japan, targeted by massive Chinese boycotts and protests, did not give up Shandong until 1923. Warlordism in China was to get worse. Still, the political significance of the May Fourth Movement was immense. It mobilized a new generation which spoke a completely different language from that of its predecessors. In contrast to Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei, this generation was educated in schools and universities following a Western-style curriculum. It felt much less need to carry the burden of tradition; it spoke to a broader constituency of newly educated Chinese. Nearly three decades after the first efforts of elite reformists around Kang Youwei, China now plunged into mass politics. The initiative lay with the ‘people’, rather than with the literati, officials, warlords or professional politicians.
Still hopelessly aspiring to restore the monarchy with Confucian underpinnings, Kang Youwei nevertheless admitted that if any ‘real public opinion or real people’s rights have been seen in China in the eight years’, it was due to the ‘students’ actions’.45 The Chinese worker-students who had gone to France during the war had not been as unlucky as Vietnamese and Indian soldiers. Still, they returned to China radicalized by their harsh exposure to Europe. Deng Xiaoping later recalled the ‘sufferings of life and the humiliations brought upon [us] by … the running dogs of capitalists’.46
Upon arrival in France, I learned from those students studying on a work-study program who had come to France earlier that two years after World War I, labor was no longer as badly needed as in the wartime … and it was hard to find jobs. Since wages were low, it was impossible to support study through work. Our later experiences proved that one could hardly live on the wages, let alone go to school for study. Thus, all those dreams of ‘saving the country by industrial development,’ ‘learning some skills,’ etc., came to nothing.47
There was more politicization to come. Unlike the wheeler-dealer politicians and the warlords, the new activists were to be motivated by long-term causes and organized by modern political groups, whether the Nationalists or the Communists. As Mao later put it, the ‘whole of the Chinese revolutionary movement found its origin in the action of young students and intellectuals who had been awakened’.48
Liang’s telegrams from Paris to China had kept a large public at home informed of the goings-on at the conference. He also amplified its growing sense of betrayal. Writing in the Manchester Guardian about the humiliation of China, Liang said, ‘No well-informed man can have any doubt that it will profoundly modify the history of the Asiatic continent, if not the whole world.’49 ‘China’s only crime’ had been ‘her weakness and her belief in international justice after the war. If, driven to desperation she attempts something hopeless, those who have helped to decide her fate cannot escape a part of the responsibility.’50
Little did Liang know that he was describing the onset of a hard-line political ideology in China. In July 1919, Russian revolutionaries, sensing an opportunity in the Western betrayal, unilaterally renounced their country’s unequal treaties with China, declaring that
if the Chinese nation desires to become free like the Russian people, and to escape the destiny prescribed for it at Versailles in order to transform it into a second Korea or a second India, it should understand that its only allies and brothers in the struggle for liberty are the Russian worker and peasant and the Red Army of Russia.51
In less than two years, the Chinese Communist Party would be formed in Shanghai, gathering disaffected young radicals and giving them a clear cause and a set of ideas free of the baggage of the past. Mao Zedong was among the young Chinese who stumbled out of the events of 1919 into an absolute scepticism of Western motives and pol
icies and a broader awareness of the political possibilities available to subjugated peoples. About to formally commit himself to communism in 1919, Mao wrote:
I venture to make a singular assertion: one day, the reform of the Chinese people will be more profound than that of any other people, and the society of the Chinese people will be more radiant than that of any other people. The great union of the Chinese people will be achieved earlier than that of any other people. Gentlemen! Gentlemen! We must all exert ourselves! We must all advance with the utmost strength! Our golden age, our age of glory and splendor, lies before us!52
The discrediting of President Wilson, Nehru wrote, had raised ‘the spectre of communism’ over Asia. Like Ho Chi Minh, Mao was finding that only communism could help bring true sovereignty to China. He wrote to his friends in France to say he was through with all other ideas and was devoting himself to the ‘Russian Revolution’. The idea of revolution re-emerged in China after the failure of 1911, this time with a sharper target – Western imperialism – in sight. And this idea of revolution now had an essential international dimension.
From the Ruins of Empire Page 24
