While Shanghai’s revolutionary workers lost their lives, Chiang, unwilling to share the glory of conquering Shanghai with the Communist-inspired rabble, kept putting off his assault. With Chiang’s army now only twenty miles away and supposedly due to enter Shanghai between March 20 and March 22, plans went forward for a great demonstration to take place at noon on March 21. When the army failed to appear, the workers struck anyway—some say there were as many as 800,000 of them—and followed their strike with an armed uprising. By that evening they had taken over six of the seven sectors of the city, and by the twenty-second, Shanghai, the great urban symbol of imperialism in China, had fallen to the Chinese Communist Party and its sympathizers.
But no one heard about the fall of Shanghai until the next day, March 23, when Chiang’s National Revolutionary Army entered the city and claimed the honor of conquest for itself. And since everyone had been expecting the army, no one challenged its claim. Even in Moscow, the fall of Shanghai was triumphantly celebrated—in headlines, hymns, parades, and demonstrations—as a great victory for Chiang Kai-shek.
Chiang, however, had not been anywhere near Shanghai. He was on the road to Nanking, 160 miles to the west. The city of Nanking, lying between the Yangtze River on the west and the Purple Mountain on the east, had served as the ancient capital of China from the third to sixth centuries and periodically from the fourteenth century on. A center of political, literary, and artistic life, Nanking was a city of old Ming temples and tombs, museums and palaces, the site of the treaty that had ended the Opium Wars in 1842, and the setting for Sun Yat-sen’s inauguration in 1911. On the day after the National Revolutionary Army moved into Shanghai, forces commanded by Chiang took over Nanking, shooting, looting, killing foreigners, and setting fire to their homes. Six people were killed, including five Westerners and the vice president of Nanking University. In an effort to exculpate himself, Chiang wrote about it many years later: “On March 24, 1927, following the entry of Revolutionary Forces into Nanking some soldiers suddenly broke loose and began attacking European and American residences, including those of members of foreign consular staffs and missionaries. This resulted in the loss of several lives.… Communists in the armed forces had created this incident in the hope of provoking a direct clash between the foreign powers and the Revolutionary Forces.” Perhaps. But according to James McHugh of the U.S. Embassy, one of the generals involved in the killings and destruction in Nanking was later named by Chiang to head the Chinese air force and then promoted to chief of the general staff.
At the time, however, the West wanted to believe Chiang Kai-shek. Up until this point, it had associated him with the more radical revolutionaries. Now, according to the American secretary of state, he was “apparently a leader of the Moderates.” Even President Calvin Coolidge made excuses for Chiang, explaining that it was difficult to protect the lives and property of foreigners in the midst of battle and that Chiang would “no doubt… make adequate settlement for any wrongs we have suffered.” The word was pretty much the same at home. Although the Shanghai North-China Herald called for expiation of the “Nanking outrage,” it added, “We do not think that anyone holds General Chiang to blame.… On the contrary, most people agree that it was a plot of the Hankow Communists to embroil him with foreigners.”
Whatever the real story behind the marauding, it took Chiang only two days after the disaster at Nanking to move on to Shanghai, where he got busy bribing local warlords and urging moderate members of the KMT to join him. Even before his arrival, he had begun a major assault on the Communists. Soviet advisers were arrested and deported, while the Chinese Communists, according to one journalist, were treated with “a little more cruelty than was necessary”—witness the head of the Chinese Communist Party, a former professor at Peking University, whom Chiang had put in a cage and beaten. In early April, Chiang declared a new government and the next day invoked martial law, forbidding all meetings, demonstrations, and strikes. As historian Barbara Tuchman put it, “The revolution was turned from Red to right. Chiang’s coup was both turning point and point of no return.”
Some say that Chiang extorted $3 million* from the business community to finance his fight against the Shanghai Communists, while others insist that the money was freely given by the Federation of Commercial and Industrial Bodies, a group that included every important banking, commercial, and industrial group in the city. Frightened by the Communists in their midst, these business leaders “frantically sought to ally themselves with a more moderate wing of the Kuomintang.” Apparently Chiang also made an arrangement with Big-Eared Du and Pockmarked Huang—a deal that involved exchanging their assistance for a guarantee to protect the Green Gang’s opium monopoly. Sterling Fessenden, the American head of the International Settlement, told the story this way:
In late March the French chief of police phoned me. I went to the address he gave me. I was surprised it was a Chinese residence, with armed guards at the front gate… the large entrance hall was lined with stacks of rifles and sub-machine guns… the French official entered with Du Yuseng [Big-Eared Du].… We got down to business immediately. Du… was willing to move against the Reds, but had two conditions; first he wanted the French to supply him with at least five thousand rifles and ample ammunition, then turning to me he demanded permission to move his military trucks through the International Settlement, something which the Settlement authorities had never granted to any Chinese force.
With Pockmarked Huang still serving as chief of the French Concession detective force, the French contribution to the crackdown was important, as were the efforts by both the British and Japanese. As one author put it, “And so foreign Shanghai and the forces of the underworld, joining hands, were ready to ambush the left.”
On April 11, Chiang Kai-shek, who managed to be far enough away to avoid being implicated, ordered a planned purge of the radicals of Shanghai. At 4:00 A.M. on the twelfth, a shotgun went off in the French Concession, followed by the whistle of a gunboat, giving the signal for 1,500 members of the Green Gang, joined by specific units of the National Revolutionary Army, to attack the Communists at twenty-four places around the city. “Simultaneously,” The China Press reported, “the machine guns broke loose in a steady roll.” Members of the Green Gang traveled in trucks and armored cars supplied by the British, and in eight hours, the battle was over. There were no trials. Some five hundred workers were forced into local prisons before being shot or, in one particularly gruesome scene, taken to the railroad station and “fed alive into the fireboxes of locomotives.” Hundreds or thousands* of radicals were arrested. Among those who escaped was Chou En-lai, who left for Wuhan with a substantial price on his head. The Chinese Communist Party ceased to exist in Shanghai, and within a few days, it was destroyed in several other cities, including Nanking and Canton, home of the revolution. In Canton, it was said that every woman with bobbed hair was taken out and shot. In Hankow a young woman was disemboweled for saying that Chiang Kai-shek did not represent the Kuomintang or the principles of Dr. Sun. “Her intestines were taken out and wrapped around her body while she was still alive,” reported Sheean. And in a paradigm of Chinese understatement, even Chiang’s personal secretary admitted that “many innocent people were killed.”
This assault on the Left was repeated throughout China. Executions were popular entertainment in the countryside, where the victim, hands bound, was kicked down on his knees, so the executioner could more easily sever his head from his body. When the blood spurted forth, women and children ran up to immerse strings of copper coins in it. These homemade necklaces were hung around the children’s necks to keep the evil spirits at bay.
In Peking, the Great Powers, prevented from using their own troops for fear of inciting a diplomatic incident, conspired with the government to send the police and specific units of warlord Marshal Chang Tso-lin’s army to invade the Soviet Embassy. The Old Marshal, who had been executing as many members of the CCP as he could get his hands on, had driven
others into taking refuge in the Russian Embassy, located in the safety of the Legation Quarter. When he attacked the embassy, both the Russians and the Chinese began burning their files, but the firemen assigned to the legations extinguished the fire and saved most of the incriminating papers. Some eighty Russians and Chinese were arrested during the attack, and twenty members of the CCP were imprisoned and strangled by Marshal Chang’s soldiers. Strangulation was a terrible death in China, where an able practitioner, using his bare hands, could make the agony last as long as fifteen minutes, while the victim, in full view of his enemies, lost control of his bladder, his sphincter, and his last shred of human dignity.
Wang Ching-wei, whom the government at Wuhan had called back as an alternative to Chiang, had arrived in Shanghai on the April 1, ten days before Chiang’s purge. Chiang, who played the situation with Wang with noteworthy sangfroid, had written his old enemy urging him to return, addressing Wang as his “beloved friend and teacher” and offering to “share power” with him. “I, your younger brother,” Chiang wrote, “am not educated and have no manners, so have offended you.… You, my Elder Brother, left everything behind without casting a look at me, your younger brother, and the result has been that I have gone through all these difficulties single-handed.” After a week in Shanghai, which included consultations with Chiang, Wang left for Wuhan, where he announced that he had come as the successor to Dr. Sun and that conciliation between the two factions of the Kuomintang was possible if the Wuhan camp joined Chiang in trying to unite the country. But Wang, who still bore a grudge against Chiang, joined enthusiastically in the anti-Chiang rhetoric, the current lingua franca of Wuhan, which one authority dubbed “the new Jerusalem on the Yangtze.”
Foreign advisers had been sent by Moscow to Wuhan to stir up the workers, who made outrageous demands on their employers: salaries to be paid two or three years in advance; fifteen months’ salary for twelve months’ labor; a four-week paid vacation every year plus two weeks off for Chinese New Year, three days for the Western New Year, and one day for all revolutionary holidays. For a death or a marriage in the family, the worker was to be given a six-month bonus, and a worker let go without cause was to receive three years’ salary. With exactions like these, it is not surprising that two thirds of the foreign population left Wuhan, along with many well-off Chinese. Most English, Americans, and Japanese who remained lived on board ships because the city was so dangerous.
Borodin remained a local celebrity. As his biographer explained, it was in the “self-interest” of reporters looking for headlines “to build Borodin into a figure of Herculean proportions.… In their columns… he never worked less than eighteen hours a day for the revolutionary cause. Still he found time to ride horseback, to read and play chess, at which he was ‘unbeatable.’ He was interested in art, literature, history. He read everything that came his way.… A philosopher, a man of remarkable physique, with a booming voice and an iron will, he was a magnet toward whom all eyes were drawn.”
Even Stalin, who had made the Soviet relationship with Chiang an issue in his struggle over power with Trotsky, finally conceded to Borodin in the matter of Chiang Kai-shek. Up until this time, Stalin, contending that the Soviet Union should concentrate its limited resources on internal development while supporting nationalist movements fighting imperialism, had tied Borodin’s hands, not allowing him to launch his missiles against Chiang. Now, denouncing Chiang as an “ally of the Imperialists and an enemy of the labour movement and the Communist International,” he gave Borodin the go-ahead to pursue an all-out anti-Chiang campaign. Propaganda was Borodin’s speciality, and handbills reading “The Revolution Will Never Succeed Without First Striking Down Chiang Kai-shek!” appeared all over the Wuhan area. There was more. The regime at Wuhan, under the leadership of Wang, passed a resolution expelling Chiang Kai-shek from the Kuomintang. Listing twelve “crimes” he had committed—including “massacre of the people and oppression of the Party”—it offered a reward of 250,000 taels* for him alive or 100,000 dead.†
Back in Nanchang, Chiang was informed by telegram that the party had taken away all his power and that he should “await orders.” Chiang reacted, according to Jennie, by behaving “like a madman,” smashing anything he got hold of and, when he couldn’t find his revolver, breaking up the furniture. An emissary arrived from Wuhan with two letters for him. The first was from his old commander, General Hsu, the man who had allowed the town of Waichow to fall back into the hands of the Hakka General; Hsu said that he hoped Chiang would “do what is right and… confess his mistakes.” The second was an open letter from Wang, in which he urged his comrades in the party to “rise up in arms and wipe away this rebel [Chiang] before it is too late! Only in this way,” Wang declared, “can we save our country from annihilation and save the people from servitude to the imperialists.”
But while Wuhan indulged itself in condemnations of and threats to Chiang, foreign banks in the tri-city area closed, banks in Shanghai refused to accept Wuhan currency, and Ichon, a center of the opium trade and a major source of Wuhan’s income, was captured by forces allied to Chiang. On April 21, 1927, the largest British ship in the area, a 9,750-ton cruiser appropriately named Vindictive, joined a line of thirty-five foreign warships that stretched a mile and a half along the Bund at Hankow, blocking commerce and threatening the Wuhan government. The following week another group of ships arrived from Shanghai, bringing the number of foreign warships up to forty-two. Wuhan could and did make a great deal of noise, but for all its bravado, there was “no rice, no oil, no coal, and no money.” The economy of the tri-city area and therefore its validity collapsed under the weight of the freewheeling Communist regime.
“Business men are rallying to the support of General Chiang as their only hope against Bolshevism,” a reporter observed in The North-China Herald. “…Moscow thunders denunciations against the ‘traitor.’ Chiang has burnt his boats.”
15
Our only fault at Wuhan was that we did not get rid of the Communists sooner.
—WANG CHING-WEI
HAVING VOTED Chiang out of the party, the Wuhan regime sent its army north to conquer Peking. Seventy thousand soldiers left from the train station, where such left-wing luminaries as Wang Ching-wei, Sun Ching-ling, Sun Fo, and Eugene Chen gathered to wish them well. Large crowds, collected to demonstrate, obediently shouted, “Down with Chiang-Kai-shek! Down with northern militarists! Down with imperialism!” Preceding the soldiers was another train of twelve cars filled with adorable young girls in blue uniforms, so-called propaganda cadres, sent out to spread the Communist word and “pacify the countryside.”
But the troops that started out with such fanfare did not do well in the field. Many of the soldiers defected to Chiang; 20,000 were killed; and within six weeks 9,000 wounded had arrived back in Wuhan. As they continued to be brought in at the staggering rate of 500 men a day, Ching-ling arranged a series of money-raising benefits to pay for their care in the emergency hospitals that sprang up in the tri-city area.
By this time, Sun’s widow, called by Chou En-lai “the jewel of the nation,” had become a Communist Party icon. “Mme. Sun was ‘China’s Joan of Arc’; she was the leader of a Chinese ‘woman’s battalion’; she was this, that and the other thing, depending on the fantasies of the headline writers. The notion that she had actually led troops in battle was so widespread that even in China some of the foreigners believed it,” wrote Vincent Sheean, who was about to meet her for the first time. “… Although I had sense enough not to believe most of the stories… they must have made, collectively, an impression; for I had certainly expected to meet something formidable.” Sheean was not expecting what he saw:
The door at the end of the darkened reception room on the second floor of the Ministry of Finance opened, and in came a small, shy Chinese lady in a black silk dress.… When she spoke her voice almost made me jump; it was so soft, so gentle, so unexpectedly sweet… here I was face to face with a childlike figure
of the most enchanting delicacy.… You had to know her for a good while before you realized the power of the spirit beneath that exquisite, tremulous envelope.… She had a dignity so natural and certain that it deserved the name of stateliness.… She also possessed moral courage to a rare degree.… Her loyalty to the name of Sun Yat-sen, to the duty she felt she owed it, was able to withstand trials without end. These qualities—dignity, loyalty, moral courage—gave her character an underlying strength that could, at times, overcome the impressions of fragility and shyness created by her physical appearance and endow her figure with the sternest aspect of heroism.
Edgar Snow, who met Ching-ling a few years later, agreed. “Like Sheean,” he said, “I found the contrast between her appearance and her destiny startling.… She was a modest and naturally self-effacing person. It required great moral and physical courage for her to resist the pressures put upon her to compromise with her own conception of the role assigned to her by history.”
Ching-ling’s brother T.V. had not been endowed with the same single-minded convictions as his sister, and while the government at Wuhan was struggling to supersede Chiang, he was groping his way through a political crisis of his own. Four years younger than Ching-ling and three years older than May-ling, T.V. was the third child and first son in the Soong family. Having earned a master’s degree in economics at Harvard and a doctorate at Columbia, he had returned with May-ling to Shanghai, where he went to work for a major industrial conglomerate, promptly setting the company accounts and financial affairs in order. Since T.V.’s English was so good, the head of the company, Sheng Hsuan-huai,* asked him to tutor his daughter. When the two fell in love and asked permission to marry, Sheng objected on social and economic grounds—the Soong family was not yet considered on a par with the Shengs—and transferred T.V. out of Shanghai.
The Last Empress Page 21
