Season of the Warlords!

 

Part Two: 1911 to 1949

With the fall of the Ching Dynasty, China emerged as a new Republic, ready to take its place on the world stage as a modern nation. With the Last Emperor consigned to house arrest in the Forbidden City, the Republicans began to unify the country; but trouble was looming: Sun Yat-sen was surprisingly ousted from the presidency, replaced by the scheming opportunist Yuan Shi-kai; the inheritors of Sun’s ideological bequest, the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Communist Party of China (CPC) were left to battle it out for supremacy.

Meanwhile, in Shanghai, the party continued. Gorged with every type of excess, the Shanghailanders and the Shanghainese embraced the new Western freedoms of the Jazz Age and made it truly their own. The influx of White Russian and Russian Jewish refugees created an eclectic mix within the city and, if the White Man lost ‘face’ from the sight of his Russian counterparts begging in the streets, the Chinese populace took this as a sign that they themselves were no better or worse than the ‘foreign devils’ who had energised this mud-flat shanty-town and turned it into a goldmine.

In the countryside around Shanghai, warlords battled furiously, realising that to own Shanghai was to have access to unlimited wealth and other resources. As their battles raged and armies washed over the city like waves over rocks, the people of Shanghai barely acknowledged it, lost to their decadence and their rarefied way of life. ‘Communism’ was the new bugbear and whispers of the Red Army’s power were alternately laughed out of court, or taken seriously as the winds of change blew.

From ‘Blood Alley’ to the Bund; from Hongkew to the Western ‘Badlands’, it was ‘plus ça change, plus ça meme chose’ and ‘every man for himself’. The streets rang with gunfire and jazz tunes, screams and the popping of champagne corks; red lanterns glowed outside opium dens and brothels and neon lights blazed above legendary nightspots where anything and anyone could be had for the right price. Looming in the distance was a bigger war than the Great One, but the people of Shanghai lived in an everlasting ‘now’ and cared not for what the morrow might bring...

 

History: From Chinese Revolution to Chinese Civil War (1911 to 1949)

“Nothing more intensely living can be imagined”

-Aldous Huxley on Shanghai

The Republic of China (ROC) and the Northern Expedition

 

Following the lead of Sun Yat-sen’s charge, the southern rebels against the Imperial House rose up and came together under the old battle cry “Eject the Ching; restore the Ming”. It was by no means a bloodless or easy coup: Sun tried twice to kick-start the Revolution in southern Canton and was both times thwarted by bad planning and errors of timing. When the revolt started, it began by accident in a northern stronghold while Sun was in London, avoiding Imperialist thugs and trying to win English sympathy to his cause. By the time he got back to China, Yuan Shi-kai had switched loyalties and been named president of the Republic of China (ROC) while the infant Emperor was locked away in the Purple Forbidden City.

For awhile, Sun pursued minor administrative duties in his new Republic, a period in which many people thought that he had lost his sanity, along with his purpose. After eloping with Soong Ching-ling however, he seemed to regain his focus and returned to right the wrongs caused by Yuan Shi-kai, who had surrounded himself with warlords and seemed bent on naming himself the new Emperor of another dynasty. Calling on his colleagues from the ‘Three Heavenly Harmonies’ triad Sun established the Whampoa Military Academy in Canton and began training troops once more, this time with the assistance of the Bolsheviks and their agent Michael Borodin. He was fated not to see the results of these endeavours however, as he died before they could come to fruition.

An ugly period ensued, a power struggle between several parties vying to take control of the Kuomintang (KMT). In the end, after the interference of Du Yue-sheng and his Green Gang, an hysterical spitfire called Chiang Kai-shek was named leader of the KMT and began staffing the Academy with Green Gang goons. Chiang, a womaniser given to carousing and bouts of over-the-top violence, took an instant dislike to Borodin and his shadowy masters in Moscow and began to work around them. This came to a head in Shanghai where, on the pretext of organising a General Strike to voice complaints against foreign interests, Chiang turned his KMT troops against the Communist factions and purged them in a bloody coup. After this ‘Black Saturday’, the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) were plunged into irrevocable war.

 

The Chinese Civil War (1927 – 1949)

Chiang’s main problem in seizing control of the ROC was in trying to hold the whole thing together. As always in China the hot-headed south was tearing away from the more level-headed north, but Yuan Shi-kai had left a land shattered into myriad pieces, each claimed by a warlord of no small capability whom Chiang needed in his attempt to oust the Communists. The Communists had withdrawn to the southern mountainous region of Kiangsi there to lick their wounds and see what happened next; this gave Chiang time to sort out the north which he did in his usual tempestuous manner.

Consolidating the warlords – of whom Du Yue-sheng was technically one – took no little imagination or money. Some of the warlords were Christians - most notably Feng Yu-hsiang who mass-baptised his troops with a firehose - while others were of Buddhist sympathies, or even Manchu loyalties. The KMT troops took to looting the landscape wherever they seized power in order to pay for themselves and for their boss’s extortion fees. Trying to wrangle this disparate powder keg was like trying to nail jelly to a wall and invariably Chiang’s limited powers of control were tested.

Corruption followed corruption and the whole event was doomed to failure. Inevitably, too much inequity was placed before the eyes of the peasant Chinese and their sympathies turned more and more to the Communist cause. At one point (the Sian Incident) Chiang was kidnapped by his own men who were alarmed by his inability to act against the powers besetting them. By 1949, Chiang’s resources were stretched too far and he fled the country, reaching Taiwan where he established a Government in Exile which he ruled until his death in 1975. His terrorising and greed had brought Sun Yat-sen’s vision to nothing.

The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937 – 1945)

 

After the First Sino-Japanese War and the Boxer Rebellion, the Japanese claimed compensation from the Chinese and outlined a list of 21 Demands before the Tsungli Yamen which were all considered outrageous by the powers of the day. Surprisingly, Yuan Shi-kai acceded to all of them bar the most humiliating: these included the ceding of Manchuria to Japan, which they immediately renamed ‘Manchukuo’. From this launch pad they embarked on a war with Russia which they won with little difficulty, proving themselves to be amongst - if not the most - effective fighting forces in the world at that time.

After this victory they inevitably looked south to the fractious mess that was China and began mobilising to take advantage. They captured the province of Jehol without a shot and then began to nibble further at the map boundaries, daring the Chinese to respond. Incredibly, Chiang, still blinkered by his obsession about the Communists, allowed the Japanese to take more and more territory, until finally they surrounded Peking and claimed all of the far north of China.

The first shots rang out in Shanghai as the National Republican Army (NRA) fired artillery shells over the International Settlement at Japanese warships anchored at the Bund. These largely missed their targets and devastated the waterfront on both sides of the Whangpu. In response, the Japanese invaded the city, bombing the district of Chapei into a wasteland and locking down the city under their control. From this beachhead, the Japanese Imperial Army drove the Chinese Nationalists back to their capital in Nanking and then routed them even from this stronghold. The NRA was forced to retreat further to Chungking from where they sat out the rest of World War Two.

The Second World War

 

Before 1941, the war in Shanghai was a murky and dubious affair. While the city was in Japanese hands, all foreign nationals were kept at arm’s length, as the Imperial Army dealt with the Chinese forces. Formal alliances with Germany gave that country greater access than they had enjoyed previously (not having had much extraterritoriality status in Shanghai) and they proceeded to enact a ‘shadow war’ against the other countries with whom they were openly fighting in the European theatre. Shanghai became a place of cloak and dagger violence and a hotbed of whispers.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbour however, everything shifted again: the Japanese and the Germans were at war with everyone...and the Japanese weren’t too sure about the Germans, either. Foreigners were herded into camps and ghettoes throughout the city and the secret war increased in intensity. In Chungking, the Nationalist government felt compelled to approach the Allied forces as comrades-in-arms and began an uneasy dialogue. Once again though, Chiang played things close to his chest, secretly bent on duplicating the accomplishments of the Nazi Regime and establishing himself as a fascist dictator. The war went on but not well, as all sides played a hidden hand: either a grab for power or a desperate attempt to maintain existing economic assets and future profits.

The Communist Takeover

 

After the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the cessation of hostilities with Japan, Chiang attempted to resume his purge of Communism from China. However, the fight with the Chinese had taken its toll: the Communists had gathered their strength and now turned it full-force against the KMT. Beaten and enervated, the KMT fled the mainland and dispersed into exile - with all of the cash and assets they could lay their hands on - leaving the Communists to rebuild the country anew...