The struggle of China to emerge from the Revolution… has been hampered by the unpreparedness of the people for the responsibilities of public life.… For hundreds of years the people of China were discouraged from interesting themselves in the affairs of government and were taught, even with the executioner’s sword, that the administration of the country was the exclusive concern of the official class. The people consequently… ceased to have any interest in government… confining themselves to seeking the welfare of the family and the clan, and knowing nothing, and caring nothing, about the responsibilities of citizenship.… In forced conditions such as these, the habits of the great population of China developed along lines quite contrary to those characterising the peoples of other countries, with the result that when the political window opened they were, in a sense, blinded by the light that suddenly and unexpectedly poured in upon them. They found themselves without understanding of political life, bewildered owing to lack of universal education.… The aim of the New Life Movement is, therefore, the social regeneration of China.… These four virtues [li, yi, lien, and ch’ih] were highly respected by the Chinese people in the past, and they are vitally necessary now, if the rejuvenation of the nation is to be effected.
Chiang said that the immediate inspiration for the New Life Movement came one day when he was driving through Nanchang and saw a schoolboy acting “in an unbecoming manner” on the street. Although he did not specify what the boy was doing, he said he realized that sloppy and unclean personal habits were having a bad effect on the people. A week after he announced the inception of the New Life Movement, a torchlight parade through the streets of Nanchang featured banners painted with edifying commandments such as “Don’t spit”;* “Avoid wine, women and gambling”; “Kill flies and rats”; and “Politeness and obedience smooth the way.” In a speech held before a large crowd in 1934, Chiang scolded his people for spitting, smoking, and, above all, “hosing urine around the streets in public.”
“If we are to have a new life that accords with Li-yi-lien-ch’ih,” said Chiang, “then we must start by not spitting heedlessly.” “If we are to restore the nation and gain revenge for our humiliations, then we need not talk about guns and cannon, but must first talk about washing our faces in cold water.” There is something quaint in Chiang’s apparent belief that heavy doses of cleanliness and courtesy would cure the complex political and economic ailments of China. If his theories sound like those of the eighteen-year-old provincial student who willed himself to stand at rigid attention for half an hour every morning and the “very exacting commander” who railed at cadets for unbuttoned tunics, the similarities are not coincidental.
The New Life Movement was, in fact, a folie à deux—a naive program conceived by husband and wife to fight the centuries of poverty-enforced squalor and insularity of the Chinese masses in order to bring them up to twentieth-century standards of personal hygiene and civic duty. What was dangerous about the movement, however, was less its naiveté than its close connection to fascism. “In fascism the organization, the spirit, and the activities must all be militarized,” Chiang had said at one point, adding later, “What is the New Life Movement that I now propose? Stated simply, it is to thoroughly militarize the lives of the citizens of the entire nation.” To do this, Chiang called on the Blue Shirts, who became the leaders of the movement and promoted its tenets. Military salutes and even goose-stepping were required. In adopting these outward manifestations of Western fascism, the New Life Movement was also declaring war on Western-style appearances and amusements.
“Priggery and hypocrisy, it seemed, were flavored unpleasantly with police bullying,” observed one visitor from the West. “A specimen frock, showing the correct length of sleeve for a chaste woman, had been exhibited in Peking. A young English traveler had been reprimanded in the streets of Sian for smoking a pipe out of doors. Some people even had had their teeth compulsorily scrubbed. Mixed walking, it was rumored, was forbidden in the cities of the interior.”
The rules became more and more absurd: “Holding that the permanent wave and curled hair not only do not add to the beauty of women but also are detrimental to their health,” the Peiping Chronicle noted in January of 1935, “General Chiang Kai-shek has instructed his provisional headquarters at Nanchang to draft an order forbidding Chinese women throughout the country to wave or curl their hair. In addition the Generalissimo is considering the issue of an order to all service men in the country, forbidding them to marry women who do not dress their hair properly.” And indeed, after due consideration, Chiang issued orders that “in the future no military men are permitted to wed girls with bobbed hair.” Then there were the edicts on marriage ceremonies: “All wedding gifts and dowries of brides must be of Chinese native goods, the banquets given on the wedding day shall not exceed $4* for each table; wedding gifts shall not exceed the value of more than a dollar;† neither bands nor firecrackers shall be used at weddings and guests at wedding parties must leave the bridal couple alone before 12 o’clock midnight.”
The reforms piled up. Coolies were told to carry out their jobs fully clothed or tie a towel around their shoulder so as not to show their upper bodies; those who could not afford a towel could be thrown in jail. It was strongly suggested that waiters in restaurants and hotels be required to wear uniforms, and anyone appearing on the street in civilian clothes or uniform must have “each and every button fastened.” The Chinese were no longer allowed to dance—a throwback to Mme. Soong’s strict Methodism—and fanatics were known to burst into dance halls and theaters, where they poured acid on the unfortunates dressed in Western-type clothes. Movies, although permitted, were circumscribed as to content, and directors were told that their films should be 70 percent education and only 30 percent entertainment. Smoking, even by foreigners, was frowned on, and zealous guards were known to stop people smoking cigarettes in the street. May-ling, like many others, continued the habit in private. Lighting up one day under a “No smoking” sign, she shocked an American journalist by saying that the ban was only for the masses.
But movies and dancing were neither as seductive nor as habit-forming as opium, and Chiang soon extended the New Life Movement into a campaign to rid China of its national vice, even though the drug was transported with help from his army and police force, which were also involved in selling it. Government officials were told to stop winking at the opium traffic and given three years to break themselves of the habit. Institutions were opened where opium addicts could go for a cure. Those who failed to do so were told that they would be executed, as would manufacturers and sellers of the drug, and, as was fairly typical of Chiang, he proved his point by having an offending policeman in Peiping killed. The following year, he assumed the title of inspector general for opium suppression—a blatant cover-up for his own activities. It was his public stance, however, that was noted by the “stunned” Anti-Opium Information Bureau at the League of Nations in Geneva. According to an official there, “China loomed large as the biggest victim of her own opium and Japanese-imposed narcotics.… Everybody knew that Japan was systematically poisoning China—as a matter of national policy and to prepare the ground for an all-out conquest.” Like the New Life Movement itself, however, the attempt to rid China of its opium habit was not successful, and Chiang “added a revenue-yielding opium monopoly to his radical Suppression Plan.”
It soon became clear that individual moral regeneration was not going to be embraced by the inhabitants of a country that desperately needed large-scale political reform. In spite of May-ling’s statement that the New Life Movement was “welcomed by our people as water is craved by the famishing,” the Chinese were either too poor to pay attention or too rich to want to change. To get around an ordinance that a group in a restaurant was to order no more dishes than half the number of diners around the table, restaurants began to use larger plates that could accommodate two dishes at once. To fool the food inspectors, liquor and wine arrived at the table in teapots.
IT SEEMS PROBABLE that the New Life Movement was another attempt on the part of the Chiangs, conscious or unconscious, to develop an ethos with which to battle the Communist ideology that was steadily gaining adherents throughout the country. Ever since the uprisings at the end of the 1920s, Chiang had been trying to eliminate the Chinese Communist Party in what he called his “bandit suppression campaign.” The choice of terminology was unfortunate. To quote a leading Chinese journalist:
In the early 1930s, he [Chiang Kai-shek] equated the Communists with bandits, hoping to impress ordinary people that Mao Tse-tung and Chu-teh [general, later commander in chief of the Communist army] were mere criminals. He banned Communist propaganda and literature, but it would have been better if he had let them circulate openly so that the people could see for themselves that the Communists meant to overthrow the whole society and were far more dangerous than ordinary bandits. The Chinese people have been the victims of banditry for many generations. They tended to underestimate the menace of the Communists because they knew that bandits can always be bought or vanquished. Fighting bandits has never been taken very seriously by Chinese soldiers. When they were told to fight Communist bandits, they were psychologically unprepared to face a far tougher job.
Although Chiang’s soldiers had managed to chase the Communists out of Hupei, Honan, and Anhwei, they were not successful in the southeastern province of Kiangsi, where Mao had taken refuge with his troops. A few months before his venture into moral reformation, Chiang had also embarked on what he hoped would be the final campaign of the national government to exterminate the Chinese Communist Party. This was to be the fifth in a series of attempts, each more ambitious than its predecessors. The first of these so-called extermination campaigns had taken place in late 1930 and employed 100,000 soldiers; the second, launched in May 1931, required twice as many men; the third, begun immediately after the second, put 300,000 soldiers into the battle; and the fourth, which took place in April 1933 after almost a two-year hiatus, lasted six months and required the services of 250,000 men. None had succeeded. In each case, the Communists had managed to kill off whole divisions of the KMT, refurbish their armament supplies, entice or compel members of the enemy to join them, and increase their territory.
In one memorable instance of generosity, noted by the normally anti-Chiang journalist Edgar Snow, Chiang Kai-shek actually released one of the Communist commanders. The young man, Chen Ken, had saved Chiang’s life in the early days in Canton, when he served as his aide. Chen, who later joined the Communists, was captured in 1933 by Chiang, who offered him a division of the Nationalist army to command; when Chen refused, the generalissimo put him in prison, hoping that he would change his mind. When he realized that this would never happen, Chiang freed Chen to return to the Red Army.
For the fifth extermination campaign, begun during October of 1933, Chiang called up more than 900,000 soldiers, 400,000 of whom he sent into battle immediately, armed with heavy artillery and protected by 400 planes. Mao and his cohorts, who numbered about 180,000 soldiers plus 200,000 partisans and Red Guards, possessed fewer than 100,000 rifles. The plan of attack had been largely developed by Hans von Seeckt, the German general known for successfully preserving the core and spirit of the German army despite the heavy restrictions imposed on Germany after World War I.* Seeckt’s plan called for Chiang to blockade the Communists and cut off both their access to supplies and their means of escape. To do this, hundreds of miles of new military roads, dotted with thousands of small fortifications, were built in a giant circle around Mao and his followers—a “Great Wall,” as Snow described it, “… which gradually moved inward.” Using tanks and armored cars, protected by heavy bombardment from land and air, Chiang’s forces advanced around the Communist camp. Moving toward the center, the Nationalists continued to build new forts, and “the concrete vice was gradually tightened.” Described by the commander of the Communist army as “the tactics of drying the pond and then getting the fish,” it was extremely successful.
Seeckt met May-ling when he was working with her husband, and, whatever the prejudices that often afflicted those with a “von” before their names, he was impressed, calling her Chiang’s “best collaborator” and referring to her as the Marschallin (feminine for Marschal). “The most striking thing is her complete confidence of social form, through which she becomes a lady,” he wrote in his diary. “I have met very few women of such complete tactfulness. She is completely aware of her and/or her husband’s position, but that does not lead her to the least superiority or arrogance. Her household… is run extraordinarily well but simply. She dresses in attractive Chinese style with subtle taste. Little jewelry, but the individual pieces [are] suitable and valuable. She is very interested in politics, but politics to them means military affairs. She is surprisingly well informed and despite my dislike for women who talk about politics and military matters I rapidly abandoned my original reservation.” Seeckt concluded his notes on May-ling with the following self-relevatory observation: “Being a lady is more important than race. That is nothing new for me, but the recognition is so timeless that it can be from Confucius.”
The fifth extermination campaign started in the fall of 1933 and lasted nearly a year. In early October of 1934, Mao, Chou En-lai, General Chu, and other CCP leaders decided that in order to save themselves and their cause, they had to abandon their stronghold in Kiangsi. “Go north where our comrades have already carved out a base against the Japanese,” Chou counseled, arguing against “one last-ditch battle,” which, he said, would only permit Chiang’s soldiers to complete their siege and require the Communists to regroup their men. According to one of Chou’s biographers, this was “the first time” that Chou found himself… in agreement with Mao,” and it “marked the beginning of the Chou-Mao collaboration.” Two weeks later, the Communists started out on their famous 6,000-mile, 368-day Long March, leaving behind thousands of Red soldiers to fight a rearguard action and enable the majority to get away. Around 90,000 men and 35 women plus pack animals loaded with machinery parts, rifles, and ammunition headed out under cover of darkness, first to the south and west, then north. And if they noticed a plane dipping down every so often to ascertain their position and their miseries, it was Chiang Kai-shek, who had told his pilot to follow, so he could watch his enemy in defeat.*
According to one survivor,
we ourselves did not know, at the beginning, that we were actually on the Long March, and that it was going to be such a big thing. All we knew is that we were getting out of the bases; we were surrounded and being choked, a million men against us, tanks, aeroplanes… defeat after defeat.… In that September of 1934 when we began to get away we broke through one cordon of encirclement, then a second, then a third, and we marched through the late autumn and early winter, westward, always westward, with the rain soaking us to the skin, and the wind in our faces, and we headed towards Szechuan province.… But we had so much equipment with us; trains of stores, and even bedding and furniture, all sorts of things; and this slowed us down. We were… very visible, a long slow caravan. Every day we were attacked, front and back and both sides by Kuomintang armies and by local warlords’ armies; we fought them and defeated them, and went on, but every time many of us died, and then we got to Tsunyi* and it was January of 1935… by that time most of us wanted Mao Tsetung to lead us.… The first thing that Comrade Mao made us do was to throw away all the useless things we carried with us; all of them we threw away and travelled light and swift and clean. Thus we survived the hard, long journey… and we were not disheartened. And we trusted Mao Tse-tung.
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sp; They traveled, according to Mao, “across the longest and deepest and most dangerous rivers of China, across some of its highest and most hazardous mountain passes, through the country of fierce aborigines, through the empty grassland, through cold and through intense heat, through wind and snow and rainstorm.” In their immensely long and circuitous journey, they crossed twenty-four rivers, eighteen mountain ranges—five of which were permanently snowcapped—and twelve provinces before arriving in Yenan in the central province of Shensi, some 450 miles southwest of Peiping. The countryside was barren and rough and the roads were terrible, but Yenan was less accessible to Nationalist soldiers than their previous home.
They had walked for a full year, and by the time it was safe to stop, their numbers had dwindled to about 20,000 men plus wives, children, and dependents. Chou En-lai, who had become seriously ill during the trip, arrived on a stretcher. These survivors joined 10,000 fellow Communist guerrillas already established in the area. It was, as history has noted, a heroic trek. And if the Long March has lost some of its luster since 1935, it is not because of the lack of courage of its participants but rather the excessive burden of propaganda with which it has been weighed down in the intervening years. Although the Communists were forced out of Kiangsi to escape destruction by Chiang’s army, the reason subsequently given for their flight is not that the CCP was running for its life but that it was going north in order to fight the Japanese.
The Last Empress Page 31
