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The Tutelary State and National Revolution in Kuomintang Ideology, 1928–31

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Robert E. Bedeski
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As the Chinese People's Republic (CPR) enters its third decade the question of viability as a stable nation-state has become increasingly urgent. Events since the Great Leap Forward seem to indicate an internal crisis of confidence which has slowly led to the present emergence of military power within the Government. If unity and stability can be maintained only by using the People's Liberation Army (PLA), then a situation is arising which closely resembles the Nationalist regime in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s. At that time, the army under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek dominated much of the political life of the state. A sense of impending war (against Japan in the 1930s and against the Soviet Union in 1969 and 1970) also reinforces the tendency of the civilian leadership to rely on military instruments. Of course, Lin Piao is not Chiang, Mao Tse-tung is not a Sun Yat-sen, nor is Liu Shao-ch'i a modern counterpart of Wang Ching-wei. Analogies can be constructed, but the problem is that students and scholars of modern China have not devoted sufficient attention to the Nanking state as a comparative referent for Communist China, with the result that they have largely been unprepared to ask questions which a knowledge of the Kuomintang (KMT) experiment might have raised.

Type
Research Article
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 46 , June 1971 , pp. 308 - 330
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1971

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References

1. See Domes, Jürgen, “The Cultural Revolution and The Army,” Asian Survey (Berkeley, Calif.), Vol. VIII, No. 5 (05 1968)Google Scholar for a narrative and analysis of the growth of military influence in national and regional politics.

2. This theme is pursued in my forthcoming study, The Politics of National Unification and the Kuomintang Regime. The material in the present essay is based upon part of that study.

3. See the goals of the transitional state as expressed in the 1954 Constitution: “From the founding of the People's Republic of China to the attainment of a socialist society is a period of transition …” (Preamble).

4. Burke, Kenneth, The Philosophy of Literary Forms (New York, 1957), pp. 6–7.Google Scholar

5. “Democracy is created by human effort We must create it, then give it to the people.” Yat-sen, Sun, San-min chu-i, trans. Price, Frank (Chungking, 1943), Lecture 5.Google Scholar

6. Ibid. Lecture 1.

7. Ibid.

8. There was the additional complication that many members of the KMT had landed investments in the agricultural sector and were therefore not amenable to a radical restructuring of the rural economy.

9. This lesson was repeated in the consequences of some of the over-ambitious projects of the Great Leap.

10. The Five Yuan were: Executive, Legislative, Judicial, Examination and Control.

11. “The attainment of local self-government depends on the completion of the census, the survey of the district, the organization of an efficient police force, and the construction of roads throughout the district Moreover, the people of the district must be able to fulfil their duties as citizens by exercising the four rights … and must pledge themselves to carry out the principles of the revolution, before they are entitled to elect the chief officer of a hsien for the administration of its affairs and representatives of the hsien for the formulation of its laws” (Article 8).

12. The subsequent claim of the Nanking Government that “The Fundamentals of National Reconstruction” was the functional equivalent of a Provisional Constitution and that a strong government was necessary to carry out Sun's programme was denied by the left wing within the KMT. Led by Wang Ching-wed, they pointed to Sun's “Last Testament,” written on 20 February 1925: “The Revolution is not yet achieved. Let all my comrades follow my writings, ‘Plans for National Reconstruction,’ ‘Fundamentals of National Reconstruction,’ ‘The Three Principles of the People’ and the Manifesto issued by the First National Congress of the Party, and work unceasingly for their consummation.” Quoted in Tyau, Min-Ch'ien T. Z., Two Years of Nationalist China (Shanghai, 1930)Google Scholar, frontispiece.

13. Within the context of this essay, the concept of “state” refers to a broad set of institutions and legal structures that embody and operationalize territorial sovereignty. “Government” is the concrete set of structures that define the central decision-making apparatus within the state. “Nation” refers to a social and territorial grouping relevant to the self-identity of a given population.

14. Meng-wu, Sa, San-min chu-i cheng-chih hsueh (Shanghai, 1929), p. 79.Google Scholar

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid. p. 80.

17. Compare this to the “democratic united front”: “In the course of the great struggle to establish the People's Republic of China, the people of our country forged a broad people's democratic front led by the Communist Party of China and composed of all democratic classes, democratic parties and groups, and people's organizations. This people's democratic united front will continue to play its part in mobilizing and rallying the whole people in the struggle to fulfil the general tasks of the state during the transition period and to oppose enemies within and without.” Preamble to 1954 Constitution.

18. Discussion in Meng-wu, Sa, pp. 188–191.Google Scholar

19. Ibid. p. 191.

20. This concept is developed in Wittfogel, Karl, Oriental Despotism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957).Google Scholar

21. “Capitalism cannot be overthrown immediately because other problems are more pressing – livelihood, imperialism, warlordism. … We must temporarily protect Chinese capitalism because of China's unique society.” Meng-wu, Sa, p. 195.Google Scholar

22. Ethics and education are similar in some respects. Both hold out the prospect of human perfectability. Education, like ethics, seeks to develop the innate potentials of men while recognizing the near impossibility of transforming humans into something not already within their nature. Ethics and education are complementary: education liberates the individual while ethical principles provide this liberation with a sense of direction and the dimensions of responsibility towards self and others.

23. It is important to keep in mind that there remained a strong Marxist current in KMT political thought. But the assumptions and conclusions of European Marxism were not directly relevant to China's conditions.

24. I-han, Kao, Cheng-chih hsueh kang-yao (Outline of Political Science)Google Scholar, quoted in Shao-wu, Chang, Chung-kuo ko-ming lun (Concerning China's Revolution) (Shanghai, 1934), p. 86.Google Scholar

25. Han-min, Hu, Tseng-ting san-min chu-i wen ta (Revised Questions and Answers concerning the Three People's Principles) (Shanghai, 1930), p. 1.Google Scholar

26. Ibid. p. 2.

27. Ibid.

28. Han-min, Hu, San-min chu-i-che chih shih-ming (The Mission of the Three People's Principles' Activists) (Shanghai, 1927), pp. 4–5.Google Scholar

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid. pp. 6–11.

31. Ibid.