How can a political party that is in a hot fight with the chaebols, spending every day drinking and drinking, and with all the lights, roll up its trouser legs and go to the countryside to mingle with the mud legs?
01
In the warlord melee of the 1920s, the revolutionary government of Guangdong, with its modern fiscal and taxation system and the support of Soviet Russia, had far more financial and military power than other warlords. So, the Northern Expedition went well, and by the end of 1928, the country was reunified.
From then until 1937, when Japan invaded China on a massive scale, historians call the "golden decade" of the Republic of China. It was the development of this "golden decade" that gave China the ability to resist the Japanese invasion. Had it not been for the development of China in all its aspects, especially the military, over the years, the outcome of the Japanese invasion of China might have been completely different.
However, on the other hand, the Kuomintang government also accumulated a lot of negative factors in these years, or rather, began to decay and decline, forgetting the original intention of the revolution, so that after the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japan, the superficial prosperity quickly turned into a complete defeat in the War of Liberation.
The core question of this can be summed up: How did the Kuomintang change from a vigorous revolutionary party that successfully unified the whole country to a decadent and declining reactionary?
Let's talk about this topic today.
02
The Guangdong Revolutionary Government appointed Song Ziwen, who had returned from studying abroad. Song Ziwen brought a complete set of modern financial systems, which were applied in Guangdong, and successfully raised huge financial revenues, which directly supported the Northern Expedition.
After the victory of the Northern Expedition, the Kuomintang government's rule greatly expanded, and the center of gravity shifted to the Jiangnan region with Nanjing-Shanghai as the core. At this time, a new problem arose: the power of the Jiangnan chaebol was much stronger than that of the Guangdong merchants. Song Ziwen's "exhaustive" financial system could not be replicated in the Jiangnan region, and there was great resistance.
The key to a modern financial system lies in mobilizing the whole society through various statistics, surveys, management, supervision, and collection, so as to greatly expand the government's financial resources and use them to support various public undertakings, including the military. Therefore, the implementation of a modern financial system is to integrate society and establish a state and government in the modern sense at the same time.
However, the Jiangnan chaebol does not eat this set. The Jiangnan region has been a developed commodity economy in the mainland since the Southern Song Dynasty, and the Ming and Qing dynasties are thriving and full of flowers. The businessmen here have a lot of traditions and experiences on how to fight with the government and keep their property. It is very difficult for the government to establish a modern financial system here, fully integrate society, and expand financial resources. The Jiangnan chaebols have all kinds of ways to fight openly and secretly.
Chiang Kai-shek had spent time in Shanghai and knew that the water was deep. Therefore, after arriving in Nanjing, he did not ask Song Ziwen to immediately move the financial system of Guangdong to Jiangnan. He knew it wasn't that simple.
However, the Northern Expedition was still fighting there, and it was in urgent need of huge military spending. Where does the money come from? The establishment of a modern financial system cannot be used as a method, so we have to resort to other methods.
This other way is to negotiate directly with the Jiangnan chaebol. So, Chiang Kai-shek found Yu Qiaqing, the "talker" of the Jiangnan chaebol. Chiang Kai-shek's quid pro quo was to suppress the Great Revolution, which was flourishing at the time, and to ensure the safety of the chaebols' property, but the chaebols had to pay money to support Chiang Kai-shek.
The two sides hit it off and successfully reached a cooperation agreement.
03
Previously, the warlord occupying the Jiangnan region was Sun Chuanfang, the "Commander-in-Chief of the Five Provinces Allied Army". Sun Chuanfang claimed to occupy the five richest southeastern provinces in the country, but in fact, due to the boycott of the Jiangnan chaebol, Sun Chuanfang did not make much money from this richest place in the country. At that time, the chaebols had a Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce. This Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce is chaotic and inefficient, and its main role is to deal with and fool Sun Chuanfang.
Now that a cooperation agreement has been reached with Chiang Kai-shek, there is no way to fool around. In March 1927, Yu Qiaqing took the lead in establishing the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce to actively cooperate with Chiang Kai-shek in fundraising.
In the following April, Chiang Kai-shek launched the "April 12" counter-revolutionary coup d'état, forcefully suppressed the Great Revolution, and implemented the cooperation agreement with the chaebols. Seeing that Chiang Kai-shek was really capable, the chaebols also spoke their minds, first taking out two loans, both of which were 3 million yuan, and then quickly issuing 30 million yuan of public bonds. In addition, the chaebols directly stepped forward to form the Suzhou-Shanghai Finance Committee to raise funds specifically for Chiang Kai-shek.
Subsequently, Song Ziwen rushed to Nanjing and served as the finance minister of the Nanjing government. Although they were both in charge of finance, Song Ziwen's approach in Nanjing was very different from that in Guangdong. In Guangdong, Song Ziwen established a comprehensive modern financial system. In Nanjing, Song Ziwen mainly cooperated with the chaebol to raise funds through a few taxes such as public bonds, customs duties, and salt taxes. The transformation of comprehensive social integration will be talked about later.
The economic strength of the Jiangnan region is indeed the strongest in the country. In Guangdong, Song Ziwen "exhausted all the money" and collected taxes from all walks of life, and the fiscal revenue in 1927 was 90 million yuan. In Nanjing in 1928, with only a few of the above-mentioned taxes, Song Ziwen raised 190 million yuan within six months.
On the surface, the financial power of the Nanjing government was much stronger than that of the Guangdong revolutionary government, but in reality, the Nanjing government had already made two major regressions:
First, the cooperation between the government and the chaebols has replaced the comprehensive establishment of a modern fiscal system. This means that the full integration of society will be suspended. It can be said that from this moment on, the revolutionary government ceased to exist.
Second, although the funds raised have increased dramatically, it should not be forgotten that after the unification of the country, the scope of governance has also expanded dramatically, and the government has more places to spend money. Comparatively speaking, the Nanking government was much poorer than the Cantonese revolutionary government.
Money is very important, but how it comes from is even more important.
04
For the finances of the Nanjing Nationalist Government, the issuance of public bonds is a very important component. At that time, it was not the ordinary people who could afford to buy public bonds, let alone the vast number of poor people at the bottom of society, but mainly industrialists and business owners. In May 1927, when the issuance of public bonds was not going well, Chiang Kai-shek wrote a letter to Chen Guangfu, a banker in Shanghai, asking for help, in which he said: "The survival of the party-state and the honor and disgrace of the nation are all in this move (the sale of government bonds)".
It can be seen that the financial structure of the Nanjing Nationalist Government determined that it would inevitably come together with industrialists, businessmen, and chaebols to form a political alliance, and it would not be possible to rely on the broad masses of ordinary people.
In other words, the political basis of Chiang Kai-shek's government must be a small number of elites in the upper strata of society. A government based on this kind of politics is necessarily not a revolutionary government, but a reactionary group that defends the interests of a small number of elites.
So to say that they are reactionaries is not too harsh? Not harsh, but appropriate.
This is because, at this stage of history, the most important thing China needs to do is to complete the transformation of modernization, build a modern country, and then promote industrialization, national rejuvenation and national prosperity.
This historical task was placed before the Nanjing Nationalist Government. On the contrary, they chose to safeguard the interests of a small number of elites at the top and abandon the broad masses of the people, that is, to give up the comprehensive integration of society and the historical task of building a modern state. Moving so against the tide of history, what is it that is not a reactionary?
05
Now that he has become a reactionary, all kinds of decay and decline have emerged one after another.
First of all, the financial structure of cooperation with the chaebol is doomed, and the fiscal revenue is very limited. Although on the face of it it appears to be higher than any local warlord, it is far from sufficient for the various financial needs at the central level, such as the expenditure of various institutions such as civil servants and education.
This financial constraint has also constrained the growth of military spending. Therefore, although Chiang Kai-shek was able to maintain a few "ace armies" equipped with German-style equipment, the Nationalist government in Nanjing could not really eradicate the warlords in various places. The so-called national reunification is only nominal, not reunification in the real sense. The real scope of the Nanjing Nationalist Government's rule is similar to that of Sun Chuanfang, the "Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Forces of the Five Provinces".
Secondly, since it is no longer a revolutionary government, revolutionary ideas, revolutionary theories, revolutionary slogans, etc., are gradually not mentioned. The outstanding manifestation of this aspect is that the Three People's Principles have become an empty term. As a revolutionary theory, the Three People's Principles were inherently deficient and very weak, and the Kuomintang government later became uninterested in theoretical construction, and the function of the Three People's Principles in uniting the people and guiding the country's development was almost completely lost.
Without revolutionary theory, the internal organizational strength of Chiang Kai-shek's government had a strong "charlatan" atmosphere, and it mainly relied on personal connections. Teachers and students, comrades, fellow villagers, classmates, etc., are popular. Chiang Kai-shek himself had a whole bunch of "brothers". As a result, the Kuomintang was full of mountains, intrigues, and all kinds of slackness.
More importantly, since the political basis of the political regime is a small number of elites in the upper strata, neither the Kuomintang nor the Kuomintang government has any interest in going deep into the grassroots and thoroughly transforming the lower strata of society.
Sun Yat-sen once put forward the political program of "the tiller has his land," but in order to truly implement this program, the Kuomintang must thoroughly transform and rebuild the economic foundation of the rural areas, especially the land ownership system in the rural areas.
But the Kuomintang government was clearly unable and unwilling to do such "drudgery". When Zhang Zhizhong later reviewed the defeat of the Kuomintang, he said: "The question of the peasants, which is more than 85 percent of the country's population, is the land question...... Ignoring them at all and doing nothing will lead to the establishment of the mass base of the greatest majority. ”
How can a political party that is in a hot fight with the chaebols, spending every day drinking and drinking, and with all the lights, roll up its trouser legs and go to the countryside to mingle with the mud legs?
06
Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary government in Guangdong did not just pay lip service to revolution, but actually carried out various revolutionary measures in Guangdong. In other words, it is to promote the modernization and transformation of Chinese society and build a modern country. It was precisely because the Guangdong Revolutionary Government was the most prominent in this regard that it had the advantage and outstanding strength over other warlords and won the victory of the Northern Expedition.
However, when they succeeded in the Northern Expedition and established a national government, they soon retreated from a revolutionary party to a "ruler" in the traditional sense due to changes in the economic base. The problem was that it was the revolutionaries, not the rulers, that were urgently needed in China at that time. The Kuomintang refused to fulfill the historical tasks entrusted to them by the times, and vigorously suppressed and killed the revolutionaries, did they become reactionaries.
The Kuomintang rejected the historical task entrusted to them by the times. This historical task was entrusted to the Communist Party. So, has the Communist Party fulfilled this historical task?
The next article continues.
Li Huaiyin, The Making of Modern China: 1600-1949, Guangxi Normal University Press, February 2022.
