When the news of what had happened reached Chiang, he became “almost hysterical” with fury. As Chiang’s superior, however, Hsu had to be handled with extreme caution. “What happened is unfortunate,” Chiang told Hsu. “It means that a large number of my cadets and soldiers have died in vain. However, I will lead another expedition to recapture the city. For me to accomplish this, however, you must furnish me with some of your troops.”
“Certainly! I’ll be glad to arrange that,” said Hsu, who was understandably chastened.
“But the discipline of your whole Cantonese army, from top to bottom, is deplorable,” Chiang contended.
“What do you suggest be done?”
“Let me reorganize your army for you. Will you grant me permission to do that?”
“I will agree to whatever you suggest.”
“To make a success of it, however, I must have a period of one year and a free hand to do a thorough job.”
“What do you mean?” Hsu asked.
“I cannot reorganize your army while you are here in Canton,” said Chiang. “That you can well understand. It will take me a year to do a good job, and you during that period must go to Shanghai for a holiday. When your army is fully reorganized, I will invite you to come back and resume command.”
“Marvelous,” said Hsu, for whom the idea of a year in Shanghai was a blinding inducement.
The following week, Hsu transferred the command of the Cantonese army, 100,000 strong, to Chiang. Two of Hsu’s generals, however, refused to take orders from their new commander, warning Hsu, “You have fallen into a trap! You may as well say good-bye to the army, for it will not be returned to you even after thirty years!” Two days later, the two generals accepted an invitation to a banquet in a private dining room in one of the best restaurants in Canton. While they were eating and drinking, an officer with a warrant for their arrest walked in, followed by a phalanx of soldiers who drove the two generals to the Eastern Parade Grounds and shot them.
SUN’S TRIP NORTH had coincided with an attempt by the Chinese Communist Party to take over the KMT in Canton, starting with trade unions, student associations, and workers’ guilds. According to the North-China Herald,“one could not walk a block without seeing Lenin’s head peering out at him from the wall of some building or other.” Two specific events, called “incidents” by the British and “massacres” by the Chinese, boosted the Communist cause. The first occurred on May 30, when police from the International Settlement fired on a Communist-inspired demonstration of cotton mill workers in Shanghai, killing some of them. Borodin was ecstatic: “We did not make May 30th. It was made for us.” The effect was redoubled a few weeks later when a French gunboat, joined by British machine guns, bombarded demonstrators in Canton who had gathered to protest the killings.
Meanwhile, faced with the necessity of another assault on Waichow, Chiang had approached Generals Yang and Liu to ask for soldiers from their armies but had received no response. Realizing that the Communists were the only people who could help him oust the Hakka General, Chiang did what all warlords did—he made alliances where he could, even going to the extent of putting on a red tie every morning. One of the Communists whom Chiang proposed for membership in the Kuomintang during this period was Chou En-lai, who, because of his wit and scholarship, was able to write petitions for the party. Chiang recommended Chou for head of the Political Department attached to the First Army.
Chiang’s subsequent capture of Waichow nearly coincided with Sun’s death in Peking, and although he and all his officers wore the appropriate black armbands, he was so busy reorganizing the administration of the city that he had little time to grieve. His inborn sense of entitlement fed on triumph, and he started issuing “imperious commands… far beyond his own domain.… He took it for granted that he was the genuine heir to Dr. Sun’s revolutionary work,” said his wife. “Everyone understood that all followers of Dr. Sun would now move up a step in the invisible rankings within the Kuomintang. Wang Ching-wei and Hu Han-min were by seniority the logical ones to take the leader’s place.… But the fever of leadership entered Kai-shek’s veins, so he forged ahead to achieve his ambition.”
Jennie was not the only one to comment on her husband’s aspirations. According to an article in the North-China Herald, Chiang’s “every move has been actuated by the desire for self-aggrandizement.” To further these plans, he began by removing Generals Yang and Liu. Liu, it will be remembered, had been wounded driving the Hakka General and his army from Canton in early 1923 and had ever since been known as “Living Angel Liu,” a fact that Jennie says she brought to her husband’s attention. “The past is past,” Chiang replied. “Liu Chen-huan has outlived his usefulness. He must be eliminated along with the others.… He has collected taxes from the Canton citizens for over a year and has been amply repaid for whatever services he rendered.”
Two days before he was due to march his troops back into Canton, triumphant from their victory over the Hakka General, Chiang arranged for all the railway and public transportation workers to go on strike. Unable to position their soldiers around the city to face Chiang’s army, Generals Yang and Liu fled. On June 12, less than three months after Sun’s death, Chiang assumed sole responsibility for the security of Canton. He had now moved up from number seven to number four in the hierarchy of the Kuomintang. Eight days later, when the Central Executive Committe of the KMT met to reorganize itself in light of the changes in Canton, Chiang asked the members to elect him to the committee. They could not refuse. Given the title Defense Commander of Canton, which essentially made him head of the army, now called the National Revolutionary Army, he also served on the new National Military Council, headed by Wang Ching-wei.
Throughout this period after Sun’s death, there were major upheavals in both the left and right wings of the Kuomintang. Chiang’s old friend Liao Chung-kai, number four in the list of party seniority, was assassinated, presumably for his leftist politics. The assassin was believed to be Hu Yin, brother of the rightist Hu Han-min, listed as number two. While Hu’s brother was imprisoned, Hu himself was told to go abroad on a tour of “inspection” of Russia. With Liao dead and both Hu brothers out of the way, Chiang now moved up to number two. Meanwhile, other disgruntled right wingers left Canton for Peking, where they gathered before Sun’s coffin and issued a resolution for the expulsion of all Communists from the KMT, the dismissal of Borodin, and the transfer of KMT headquarters from Canton to Shanghai.
It is no wonder they were concerned. At the Second National Congress of the Kuomintang, which took place in January 1926, more than a third of the delegates from the party were members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), among them Mao Tse-tung, Wang Ching-wei’s former assistant who now ran the Propaganda Department and edited the party’s journal. At the congress, Wang delivered the political report, and Chiang, the military one. According to Chiang, the treatment of ordinary Chinese soldiers had improved. Their pay had been raised from $9 to $11 a month, and officers received between $160 and $500. He proposed that average soldiers be given several dollars more a month and that they be paid in silver dollars instead of the discounted currency they were now receiving.* This would be important, he said, for the success of the Northern Expedition, which he planned to undertake in about six months. At this second annual meeting of the KMT, Chiang was elected to the Central Executive Committee. Ching-ling, who had been met by “an enormous crowd” when she arrived in Canton and was subsequently elected to the Presidium of the congress, attended the meeting with sister May-ling.
“Dearest Dada,” May-ling wrote Emma, reverting to the familiar mode of their early correspondence,
I came here [to Canton] some two weeks ago with Mrs. Sun as she had to attend the Second Congress of the Kuomintang.… We are visiting my brother T.V. who is Minister of Finance here. Since he came into office four months ago, he has increased the Government Revenue from $1,700,000 to $4,200,000 per month every month without increasing taxation on necessit
ies. Even all the Hongkong papers which jeered at him four months ago when he announced his intention to stabilize finances now say that he has accomplished the seemingly impossible. People call him the official who is honest and who has the last word to say in the Canton Government.… Canton is so clean and peaceful, and very different from what the newspapers paint it to be.
Between January and September of 1926, May-ling made two trips to Canton. Chiang mentions her for the first time in his diary on January 17, at the graduation ceremony at Whampoa, noting only that “Madame Sun [Ching-ling] and her sister also were there.” But the fact that Chiang asked T.V. to accompany the army on their northward surge, appointed H. H. Kung in his place as acting minister of finance in Canton, and took the Kungs’ eldest son, David, along as the army’s mascot indicates that there was now a connection between him and the Soong family.
The following month, in February of 1926, Borodin left Canton for Peking to discuss the future of communism in China with a secret commission composed of members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR, sent by Stalin from Moscow. Their assignment: to assess the possibilities of a Communist takeover in China. In his place, Borodin left a man named Kissanka in charge of the Soviet Military Mission. Although Borodin had approved Chiang’s plan to start the Northern Expedition, Kissanka contended that the expedition was bound to fail. Chiang believed that Kissanka was also the author of a smear campaign against him—a conviction strengthened when handbills attacking the expedition and Chiang himself began to appear around Canton. Then an incident occurred that only increased his suspicions.
No one seems to know exactly what happened on March 20, 1926, but a highly detailed and colorful story is told by Chiang’s wife Jennie, who did not hesitate to cast herself in the role of her husband’s savior. Although Jennie is left out of Chiang’s own version, which he wrote thirty years later, the basic elements of Chiang’s and Jennie’s stories are similar—with one notable difference: Jennie implicates Wang and his wife in the plot, and Chiang does not. Other chroniclers have seized on different elements of this tale of political skullduggery, which came to be known as the “Incident of the Gun-boat Chung Shan.”
Chiang’s new duties required that he live part of the time in Canton, where he and Jennie rented a small house with a telephone so that he could keep track of matters at the academy in Whampoa. In the gunboat story as related by Jennie, Becky Wang, the wife of Wang Ching-wei, called the Chiang house on the afternoon of March 18 and asked to speak to Chiang, who was not home. Becky asked Jennie which jetty Chiang would take that evening for Whampoa, where he had a meeting, so that her husband, Wang, could go with him. After Becky’s fifth call, Jennie began to get suspicious, and when Chiang got home, she advised him not to leave the house. On Chiang’s insistence that he had an important meeting at Whampoa at 7:00 P.M., Jennie called the academy and put her husband on the phone. He was told by the dean of the school that there was a gunboat* waiting outside, sent down from Canton for fueling.
Chiang stayed home that night. The following morning he learned that the acting director of the Naval Forces Bureau, a Communist named Li, had received an order to send the gunboat to Whampoa, where it would be loaded with enough coal for a long voyage. (Jennie said that Wang had issued the order; Chiang said it was Li’s commandant, i.e., Chiang himself, thereby concluding that Li had forged his name.) Chiang was to have been taken on board when he arrived at the academy and sent as a prisoner to Russia, thus leaving the field open for the Communists to take over the Kuomintang. Chiang took quick advantage of his position as defense commander of Canton to declare martial law, imprison or place under supervision twenty-five members of the Chinese Communist Party, including Li and Chou En-lai, and put China’s Soviet advisers under house arrest. He issued these orders at three in the morning on March 20, 1926. In retaliation, the Communists called for a strike against what they called his “reign of terror.” Chiang had the leaders arrested and ordered some one hundred courts-martial.
Next day, there was a meeting of the Central Political Committee with Wang as chairman. The committee endorsed Chiang’s action. Either during or after the meeting, Wang asked to be removed from his political responsibilities and allowed to go to the hospital for treatment of his diabetes. He remained there for six weeks, after which he left secretly for France. Chiang, who had overstepped his authority, offered to submit himself to discipline by the Central Political Committee, but the committee turned down his offer. With Wang out of the picture, Chiang Kai-shek was now the sole head of the party and the government.
Chiang’s coup had taken the Russians by surprise, and a representative of the Soviet Consulate was sent to inquire if Chiang’s actions had been directed against the plotters or the Soviets. Chiang assured him that it was only the former, adding, however, that he wished Borodin would return to Canton. The consular officer requested Kissanka’s recall, and Borodin returned six weeks later. Meanwhile, a raid on Russian premises in Peking had disclosed links between the Soviets and the CCP. After two weeks of conferences between Chiang and Borodin, the Central Executive Committee of the KMT passed eight regulations concerning Communist members of the Kuomintang. These included a requirement that the CCP submit a complete list of its members with dual membership in the KMT; a ruling that members of the CCP were no longer eligible to head departments in the KMT;* and a prohibition against members of the KMT joining the CCP. “Though these measures are harsh,” Chiang told Borodin, “a large party must prevent itself from being ruined by allowing a smaller one to undermine it from inside.”
Another result of Chiang’s coup was the establishment of a secret service. After the assassination of Liao the previous year and two attempts on his own life, Chiang had started compiling files on possible enemies from either the Right or Left and assigning a secret force to keep them under surveillance. The new group was organized by the two sons of his first mentor, Chen Chi-mei, whom Chiang called his “nephews.” Members of Chiang’s secret service, according to Jennie, were “told to forget all other duties except fealty to their boss and to be ever ready to arrest, kill, torture, or mutilate any suspect or culprit that fell into their hands.” For this, they were compensated with a yearly bonus and a promised pension after ten years’ service.
With the Communists temporarily under control, Chiang was ready to set about making preparations for the great Northern Expedition. In early April, he presented detailed plans to the KMT. Two months later, he was named commander in chief of the Northern Punitive Expedition and, as the Chinese had a habit of doing, given more titles, i.e., chairman of the Central Executive Committee and of the Military Council, thus becoming head of both the party and the army. On July 1, Chiang issued mobilization orders, and on July 9, in an elaborate ceremony, the soldiers of the National Revolutionary Army took an oath of loyalty and approved a manifesto specifying that “the purpose of the military campaign is to build an independent nation on the basis of the Three People’s Principles and to protect the interests of the nation and of the people.” They also called on other Chinese soldiers to join them in their fight for national revolution. During the ceremony, Dr. Sun Fo, Sun Yat-sen’s son, held a portrait of his father beneath the blue flag of the republic.
WHEN CHIANG STARTED out on the Northern Expedition, there were three major warlords standing in his way: Chang Tso-lin of Manchuria, Wu Peifu of Central China, and Sun Chuan-fang, who controlled the five southeastern provinces, including Chiang’s home province of Chekiang. Called the Old Marshal to distinguish him from his son, Chang had recently marched down from Manchuria, which he controlled, and taken over Peking. He had an army of about 300,000 men. Wu Pei-fu will be remembered as the scholar warlord with his personal spittoon bearer. His army also consisted of about 300,000 soldiers. Once a date had been set for Chiang’s Northern Expedition, Marshal Chang and General Wu, formerly at loggerheads with each other, decided to cooperate to defeat the National Revolutionary Army coming up from the so
uth. The third warlord, Sun Chuan-fang, had about 200,000 men in his army. Taken together, the major armies opposed to Chiang counted some 800,000 soldiers.
But before he could even leave on his great mission, Chiang had to cope with the general strike in Canton, sending some of his soldiers to reinforce the police and secret service in order to keep track of Communist agitators. In addition to the unrest, the Canton Chamber of Commerce, which represented the city’s merchants, balked at meeting its obligation of collecting 500,000 Chinese dollars* to finance the Northern Expedition. Chiang made it clear to the local businessmen, whose coffers had already been picked clean by Generals Yang and Liu, that it was in their best interest to fund the expansion of the revolution. While Chiang was settling these problems and before he was free to join his soldiers, the National Revolutionary Army made its way north through the (friendly) southern half of the province of Hunan to the (unfriendly) northern half. Accompanying the army was General Galen (Blücher). This was in mid-July of 1926, “a momentous year,” according to May-ling, “in the surge and sweep of revolutionary modern China.” By the end of the month, when Chiang joined his men, his army had captured the city of Changsha in the province of Hunan and grown from 85,000 to 100,000, including political commissars styled after those in the Soviet army.
The Last Empress Page 19
