At the end of 1928, Chiang undertook a tour of inspection, returning to Nanking in a state of frustration with local officials of the party. “I have often observed that many… do not seem to know what they are supposed to do.… Our office hours are short—only six hours a day.… But yet I have often observed that many staff members just sit at their desks and gaze into space, others read newspapers and still others, sleep.” In line with a new work ethic and moral crackdown, Chiang ordered the brothels and opium dens of Pengpu, a city west of Nanking, to be closed and told the magistrates of Anking, a city southwest of the new capital, to get busy building roads, opening schools, and ridding themselves of local bandits.
But these were minor problems when compared with the need for reducing the size of the National Revolutionary Army, which currently numbered more than 2 million men and cost the nation around $300 million* a year. Since the entire annual revenue of the country was in the vicinity of $400 million,† this was far more, Finance Minister T. V. Soong said, than China could afford. Soong called for a reduction of military expenditures along with specific plans for demobilization, but cutting the army back to 715,000 men—the number suggested as sufficient for China’s current needs—was more easily proposed than accomplished.
The Chinese army, unlike those of many other nations, was not a collection of draftees happy to return home but a group of mercenaries for whom fighting was the only way of life and subsistence they knew. Chinese armies were traditionally composed of men recruited from areas of famine. In the service of the government or the warlords, they could get food, clothing, and a place to sleep and, if their employer was rich or generous, an occasional sum of money. Even if these soldiers had been willing to give this up, the warlords had no intention of turning over the source of their power to a central authority. Chiang’s official biographer, Hollington Tong, explained the situation: “After the Northern Expedition… the area of which the National Government actually ruled comprised only a few provinces.… China was still broken up into regional spheres of influence, almost feudal states, and the situation was potent with danger.” Or, as another writer put it, “The Northern Expedition did not eliminate the warlords; it simply brought them into the Kuomintang.” Moreover, many of the warlords refused to remit to the central government the taxes collected in their provinces.
Although they had no intention of reducing the forces under their personal control, in true Chinese fashion the warlords agreed with Chiang that this was a necessary step and had signed a statement to that effect in July 1928. Six months later, a Disbandment Commission met at Nanking. Explaining how Japan had become a rich and powerful nation, Chiang contrasted the Japanese samurai—noblemen who had overthrown Japan’s military government and immediately handed their lands and troops to the Mikado—to the Chinese warlords, who continued to fight among themselves and ignore the central government. “The Japanese militarists are loved by their own people but the Chinese militarists are hated by the Chinese. Which would you prefer?” he asked the members of the commission.
It was a good parable, and by the end of the month, the Disbandment Commission had divided the country into six areas, agreed that the armed forces would be cut to 65 divisions of 11,000 men each, and set a figure of no more than 41 percent of the national revenue for their upkeep. But, in fact, nothing of the sort was done. What followed the conference was not demobilization but civil war. Although it would appear that Chiang and his party had succeeded in unifying China, it seems that no sooner was he able to quell one rebellion than one or two others broke out in its place.
The first group to turn on the central government was a coalition of three warlords from the southern province of Kwangsi who called themselves the Warlords’ Council, established themselves in the tri-city area of Wuhan, and collected taxes from the rich provinces of Hunan and Hupeh. When General Lu Ti-ping, who had been loyally remitting the revenues from his area directly to the central government, refused to reroute the money through the Warlords’ Council, it threw him out of office. Chiang’s initial response was to issue an edict prohibiting branch councils from hiring or firing officials without approval from Nanking. This insipid reaction was followed by the appearance of soldiers sent by the Warlords’ Council to fight General Lu, who quickly retreated.
The rebellion of the three warlords had coincided with preparations for the Third National Congress of the KMT, due to take place in Nanking in March 1928. Shortly before the congress convened, Wang Ching-wei sent a wire denouncing Chiang’s government and encouraging other Leftists to refuse to serve as delegates. Very little could be accomplished at the congress anyway, since the members were obsessed with the revolt of the Warlords’ Council and urged Chiang to take military action. His only move for the moment was against one of the Kwangsi generals, Li Chen-shen, who, having received a safe conduct to attend the congress, was arrested as soon as he arrived in Nanking.
Although it took some time for Chiang to decide to fight the Warlords’ Council, he eventually defeated it. Some ascribed his victory to better disciplined and equipped troops, while others claimed that Chiang had successfully bribed a large number of soldiers to switch sides. In exchange for acceptance of his authority, he appointed two of the warlords to government offices, naming General Li Tsung-jen pacification commissioner for Kwangsi and giving General Pai Chung-hsi a place on the Standing Committee of the National Military Council.* Chiang emerged from his victory with increased prestige, and—even more to the point—his government could now collect taxes from twenty-two of the twenty-three provinces (not counting autonomous regions and municipalities) of China.
As usual, it all came down to money, and the problem of taxation continued to plague Chiang as it had other Chinese leaders. According to one historian, nothing had changed since the days of the Manchus:
At every turn the peasant is dominated by the landowner; police, judicial, education systems are all built upon the landlord class, and the taxation system is also run by tax-collectors who are the agent of the landlord-officials. Poor peasants failing to meet their obligations are imprisoned and even tortured by the landlord-official; peasants owning small farms cannot secure credit from the banks, run by landlord-usurers.… The rate of interest on loans is around thirty-six percent per annum, but when money is tight (as in time of drought, flood, poor crops), reaches sixty per cent… the few landowner-official-usurer-militarist families who are also the provincial authorities… thus exercise a complete monopoly over all so-called public funds, derived from taxes, which become their private treasury….
The land-tax, supposed to be assessed only once a year, was sometimes collected two or three times.… On top of that were extra taxes to be paid by the tenant-farmer: tax for release from… forced labour… release from military service… local grain transport; upkeep of roads and dykes, patrol of highways (by the landlord’s privately recruited retainer armies)… support of schools… the schoolmaster being one of the landlord’s cousins. There was a bandit eradication tax, pacification tax, door and window tax, roof tax.… Here are some of the forty-four taxes payable until 1949, in the one province of Kansu: kettle tax, stocking tax, bedding tax, wheat bran tax, water-mill tax, copper tax, flour-shop tax, extraordinary tax, hog tax, penalty tax, wealthy house tax, “purification of countryside” tax, army mule tax, kindling wood tax, skin overcoat tax, miscellaneous expenses tax, temporary expenses tax, soldier enlistment tax, circulation (of money) tax, hemp shoe tax, troop movement tax, soldier reward tax. After Chiang Kai-shek came to power, none of these taxes was repealed; on the contrary they were increased, both in number and in amount. There was even inaugurated in certain areas a “happy tax,” for the purpose of promoting happiness on the day taxes were paid.
It must also be remembered that ever since the end of the First Opium War in 1842, China’s customs had been under the control of the West, which had earmarked them for repayment of past loans. In fact, all taxes on salt, railroads, and internal transportation w
ere used to repay foreigners, who had to be reimbursed before China ever saw any of her own money. Thus, according to Han Suyin, “the enormous profits benefitting from China’s cheap labour remitted back to the West.”
It was not until May 1930 that Chiang’s Nationalist government finally succeeded in regaining tariff autonomy and was able to pass a surtax of 2.5 percent over and above the 5 percent tariff fixed by the West in the previous century. T.V. made this into a new source of government revenue and used it to issue bonds. According to Coble, it was the “wizardry of Soong” that “kept Nanjing [Nanking] financially afloat until the outbreak of the SinoJapanese War in 1937.” But from 1928, when the Kuomintang took over the country, to 1943, the tax burden on the peasantry, who made up 85 percent of the population, increased by nearly 40 percent. And like the mandarins of old, certain members of Chiang’s extended family were said to be skimming what they could off the top, or, as Hallett Abend of The New York Times put it, the Chiangs and their relations were now referred to as “the royal family.” According to one American who served on a financial commission in China in 1929 and worked with the Lend-Lease Administration in 1943–1944, “Although we didn’t have proof at the time, I think we rather sensed the way in which his wife’s relations were simply looting the country.”
Under circumstances like these, it is hardly surprising that as each new faction arose, complaining about Chiang, his relatives, and the KMT, it gained enough of a following to cause the central government a great deal of trouble. The next challenge came from the Christian General, Feng.
After the successful outcome of the Northern Expedition, Chiang had tried to pacify Feng by giving him the post of minister of war. As such, Feng cut quite a figure in Nanking. He received visitors only between 5:00 and 7:00 A.M., rode around the capital in a truck, and continued to sport the uniform of an ordinary soldier with cotton shoes and his trademark straw hat. A rich man who ate well and traveled in great luxury when no one was looking, Feng believed in appearances, delivering lectures on the virtues of simple living to his conspicuously consuming peers. Openly disapproving of almost everything in Nanking, he finally resigned his post, retired to his fiefdom in the North, and began his rebellion by intriguing with the Warlords’ Council, which he planned to join. He first tried to gain control of the province of Shantung, which Japan had finally ceded back to China, but, unfortunately for him, the Kwangsi generals started their campaign before the Japanese evacuated the area, and he was afraid to delay his move any longer. As a prologue to entering the fray, Feng took on the benevolent title of “Commander in Chief of the Northwestern Army to Protect the Party and Save the Country.”
Busy directing the fight against the Warlords’ Council in the South, Chiang was not prepared to take on a second war in the North. To keep Feng on hold, he began an exchange of “unbelievably long” telegrams with the Christian General, designed to forestall military action. Throughout this exchange, neither man ever admitted that he was making active preparations for war against the other. The main subject of their correspondence was a disagreement over the allegiance of Feng’s soldiers: Chiang said that all commanders must submit to the central authority, while Feng believed that his troops belonged exclusively to him.
Chiang even invited Feng to Nanking, explaining that he was planning to go to Peiping to accompany the body of Sun Yat-sen back from the old capital for a state burial in the new one.
Before I leave for Peiping I fervently hope you will come to Nanking to take charge of the Government; otherwise you must come to the Capital for the state funeral… you are suspected by the nation of having stored up arms and war materials to hold the North-west in defiance of the Government… you are, in addition, suspected of refusing to come to the Capital because you had made a previous alliance with Kwangsi [the Warlords’ Council] and were planning to attack Wuhan.… All such rumours, it is quite needless to say, are not worth listening to.… Therefore we can only hope that, as you are loyal to the Government, you will not remain in the North-west. Your presence here will quash all rumours and the nation will be certain of peace.
To which Feng replied that considering what had happened to General Lu (the Kwangsi leader who was arrested on his arrival in Nanking), he had no intention of coming to the capital and that, in any case, he was too ill to travel. He also demanded to know why Kuomintang soldiers were massing along his borders.
After a few more similar exchanges, Feng was formally dismissed from the KMT and the State Council issued a mandate against him. Chiang sent off one last wire, listing Feng’s crimes against the state and suggesting that he go abroad. “There are but two courses open to you: either you obey or you revolt. If you awaken to the realities with your customary alertness and resolutely pull yourself out of your present evil environment, your mistakes will not affect your future.… if you wish to go abroad, I shall speak on your behalf to the Government so that you may go under full protection.”
At this point Chiang could afford to issue an ultimatum to Feng, for he had successfully outwitted the Christian General’s scheme to take over the province of Shantung. The Japanese had agreed to leave the province within two months after signing an agreement to do so, but just as they were about to withdraw, Chiang had asked them to delay so that government troops, rather than Feng’s, could move in. Chiang then offered an “enormous” bribe to one of Feng’s trusted commanders, General Han, who defected to the Nationalists with about 100,000 (one third) of Feng’s most experienced soldiers. Chiang also bribed another of Feng’s men, General Shih, a man who had changed sides so often that he was dubbed “Triple-crosser Shih.”
But while Han and Shih were switching their allegiance to the central government, Feng managed to make an alliance with the other important warlord in the north, the wily General Yen who had led the Third Army in the Northern Expedition. This new alignment, Chiang realized, changed “the entire political situation in northern China” to the disadvantage of the Nationalist government. Emissaries of all three men met in June 1929 and reached an agreement whereby Chiang would cancel his threats to arrest Feng; the government would pay Feng’s soldiers their salaries in arrears with a first payment of $3 million;* Feng’s troops would be kept together; and Feng’s trip would be postponed. It was, as we have seen, a typical bribe for an atypical warlord.
AT THE SAME time that Chiang was trying to pacify the warlords, May-ling was helping convert Nanking, a city of a quarter-million inhabitants, into an appropriate capital for a new era. Lying in the shadow of the Purple Mountain on the southern bank of the Yangtze River, Nanking was once encircled by the longest city wall in the world, something over twenty miles in length. Built of bricks, each one of which was stamped with the name of the brick maker and the overseer for that section, the Nanking wall, much of which still stands, dates back some six hundred years to the Ming Dynasty and was the first city wall to be contoured to the rise and fall of the land rather than laid out in a precise square. Nanking, the site of the treaty that ended the First Opium War in 1842, had also served as the capital of the Taipings. It was now, almost a hundred years later, the official home of the Nationalist government.
Starting with the streets—narrow paths of cobblestone, smelling of night soil—the Chiangs tried to turn venerable antiquities into buildings suitable to modern life without offending those eager to accuse them of desecrating tradition. They envisioned the old Chinese architecture—sloping roofs, colorful tiles, interior courtyards, and painted ceilings—cleaned and made comfortable with the addition of electricity.† It must have been May-ling’s idea to hire an American architect to work out an appropriate style for the new buildings, but Chiang seems to have enjoyed the process immensely. While the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was under construction, he and May-ling visited the site daily, and it is said that they strolled around the area arm in arm—a distinctly un-Chinese display of marital intimacy.* But the true measure of their success came during the summer of 1928, when Great Britain recogni
zed the new national government and the British ambassador presented his credentials to Chiang in Nanking. Diplomats from eleven other countries—ambassadors and ministers who had thus far refused to leave “the luxury and heedless spending of Peking’s officials circles”— eventually and “with reluctant feet,” followed. By transferring their diplomats to Nanking, these nations tacitly recognized the right of Chiang’s government to exist and, more important, to collect taxes.
With the diplomats stationed in Nanking, May-ling’s role became essential to the government. Chiang did not speak English when he married her, and he was never able to learn. She apparently tried to teach him, and one day he decided to try out his English during a meeting with the new British ambassador, Sir Miles Lampson, “Good morning, Lampson,” he said. “Kiss me, Lampson,” he added.
After that, Chiang gave up, and May-ling was left to do his translations, acting as both secretary and interpreter with the foreign community. Up until this point in her life, she had filled her days with activities considered appropriate to an educated Chinese woman. As one journalist put it, “The institution of ‘First Lady’ is virtually nonexistent in China, where woman’s prime role is that of wife, mother and mother-in-law.” Now she acquired work that was difficult enough to keep her mind occupied and an infinitely larger stage on which to perform. It would be fascinating to know how accurately she translated the messages to and from her husband, whose famous intransigence and abrupt temper must surely have been showing up by now. This author is convinced that May-ling rarely translated anything that he said or was said to him without changing and/or softening both the words and their meaning.
While helping to bring Nanking up to date, May-ling also established two Schools for the Children of the Heroes of the Revolution just outside the city. “These children, I thought, would be the most valuable material if they were molded right,” she explained in a total abandonment of logic, “as they all had revolutionary blood in their veins.” The children entered school at the age of six and stayed until eighteen. “What I have learned about the training of students,” she said later,
The Last Empress Page 27
