Mao Zedong.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
In March 1920 word reached China of Soviet Russia’s revolutionary foreign policy enunciated in the first Karakhan Manifesto, which promised to give up all special rights gained by tsarist Russia at China’s expense and to return the Russian-owned Chinese Eastern Railway in Manchuria without compensation. The contrast between this promise and the Versailles award to Japan that had touched off the 1919 protest demonstrations could hardly have been more striking. Although the Soviet government later denied such a promise and attempted to regain control of the railway, the impression of this first statement and the generosity still offered in a more diplomatic second Karakhan Manifesto of September 1920 left a favourable image of Soviet foreign policy among Chinese patriots.
Russia set up an international communist organization, the Comintern, in 1919 and sent Grigory N. Voytinsky to China the next year. Voytinsky met Li Dazhao in Beijing and Chen Duxiu in Shanghai, and they organized the Socialist Youth League, laid plans for the Communist Party, and started recruiting young intellectuals. By the spring of 1921 there were about 50 members in various Chinese cities and in Japan, many of them former students who had been active in the 1919 demonstrations. Mao Zedong, a protégé of Li Dazhao, had started one such group in Changsha. The CCP held its First Congress in Shanghai in July 1921, with 12 or 13 attendants and with a Dutch communist—Hendricus Sneevliet, who used his Comintern name, Maring, in China—and a Russian serving as advisers. Maring had become head of a new bureau of the Comintern in China, and he had arrived in Shanghai in June 1921. At the First Congress, Chen Duxiu was chosen to head the party.
The CCP spent the next two years recruiting, publicizing Marxism and the need for a national revolution directed against foreign imperialism and Chinese militarism, and organizing unions among railway and factory workers. Maring was instrumental in bringing the KMT and the CCP together in a national revolutionary movement. A number of young men were sent to Russia for training. Among the CCP members were many students who had worked and studied in France, where they had gained experience in the French labour movement and with the French Communist Party; Zhou Enlai was one of these. Other recruits were students influenced by the Japanese socialist movement. By 1923 the party had some 300 members, with perhaps 3,000 to 4,000 in the ancillary Socialist Youth League.
Communist-Nationalist cooperation
By then, however, the CCP was in serious difficulty. The railway unions had been brutally suppressed, and there were few places in China where it was safe to be a known communist. In June 1923 the Third Congress of the CCP met in Guangzhou, where Sun Yat-sen provided a sanctuary. After long debate, this congress accepted the Comintern strategy pressed by Maring—that communists should join the KMT and make it the centre of the national revolutionary movement. Sun had rejected a multiparty alliance but had agreed to admit communists to his party, and several, including Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, had already joined the KMT. Even though communists would enter the other party as individuals, the CCP was determined to maintain its separate identity and autonomy and to attempt to control the labour union movement. The Comintern strategy called for a period of steering the Nationalist movement and building a base among the Chinese masses, followed by a second stage—a socialist revolution in which the proletariat would seize power from the capitalist class.
By mid-1923 the Soviets had decided to renew the effort to establish diplomatic relations with the Beijing government. Lev M. Karakhan, the deputy commissar for foreign affairs, was chosen as plenipotentiary for the negotiations. In addition to negotiating a treaty of mutual recognition, Karakhan was to try to regain for the Soviet Union control of the Chinese Eastern Railway. On the revolutionary front, the Soviets had decided to financially assist Sun in Guangzhou and to send a team of military men to help train an army in Guangdong. By June, five young Soviet officers were in Beijing for language training. More importantly, the Soviet leaders selected an old Bolshevik, Mikhail M. Borodin, as their principal adviser to Sun Yat-sen. The Soviet leaders also decided to replace Maring with Voytinsky as principal adviser to the CCP, which had its headquarters in Shanghai. Thereafter three men—Karakhan in Beijing, Borodin in Guangzhou, and Voytinsky in Shanghai—were the field directors of the Soviet effort to bring China into the anti-imperialist camp of “world revolution.” The offensive was aimed primarily at the positions in China of Great Britain, Japan, and the United States.
Reactions to warlords and foreigners
These countries too were moving toward a new, postwar relationship with China. At the Washington Conference (November 1921–February 1922), China put forth a 10-point proposal for relations between it and the other powers, which, after negotiations, became four points: to respect the sovereignty, independence, and territorial and administrative integrity of China, to give China opportunity to develop a stable government, to maintain the principle of equal opportunity in China for the commerce and industry of all countries, and to refrain from taking advantage of conditions in China to seek exclusive privileges detrimental to the rights of friendly countries. The treaty was signed as the Nine-Power Pact on February 6. Two other Chinese proposals, tariff autonomy and abolishing extraterritoriality, were not included in the pact but were assigned to a committee for further study. In the meantime, separate negotiations between China and Japan produced a treaty in which Japan agreed to return the former German holdings in Shandong to China—although under conditions that left Japan with valuable privileges in the province.
For a few years thereafter, Great Britain, Japan, the United States, and France attempted to adjust their conflicting interests in China, cooperated in assisting the Beijing government, and generally refrained from aiding particular Chinese factions in the recurrent power struggles. But China was in turmoil, with regional militarism in full tide. Furthermore, a movement against the Unequal Treaties began to take shape.
Militarism in China
During the first years of the republic, China had been fractured by rival military regimes to the extent that no one authority was able to subordinate all rivals and create a unified and centralized political structure. Southern China was detached from Beijing’s control; even the southern provinces, and indeed districts within them, were run by different military factions (warlords). Sichuan was a world in itself, divided among several military rulers. The powerful Beiyang Army had split into two major factions whose semi-independent commanders controlled provinces in the Yangtze valley and in the north; these factions competed for control of Beijing. In Manchuria, Zhang Zuolin headed a separate Fengtian army. Shanxi was controlled by Yan Xishan (Yen Hsi-shan). Each separate power group had to possess a territorial base from which to tax and recruit. Arms were produced in many scattered arsenals. Possession of an arsenal and control of ports through which foreign-made arms might be shipped were important elements of power. Most of the foreign powers had agreed in 1919 not to permit arms to be smuggled into China, but that embargo was not entirely effective.
The wealthier the territorial base, the greater the potential power of the controlling faction. Beijing was the great prize because of its symbolic importance as the capital and because the government there regularly received revenues collected by the Maritime Customs Service, administered by foreigners and protected by the powers. Competition for bases brought on innumerable wars, alliances, and betrayals. Conflict was continuous over spoils, even within each military system. To support their armies and conduct their wars, military commanders and their subordinates taxed the people heavily. Money for education and other government services was drained away; revenues intended for the central government were retained in the provinces. Regimes printed their own currency and forced “loans” from merchants and bankers. This chaotic situation partly accounts for the unwillingness of the maritime powers to give up the protection that the treaties with China afforded their nationals.