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The Making of the Modern Chinese State: 1600–1950
 9780429777899, 0429777892

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of figures
List of tables
List of maps
Preface
1. Introduction
The modern Chinese state: why “big” and “strong”?
Geopolitics, finance, and identity: amacrohistorical analysis
Preliminary arguments
Notes
PART I: The formation of the Qing state
2. The rise of an early modern territorial state: China in the early to mid-Qing period
Frontier expansion
Governing the frontiers
Governing the interior provinces
The uniqueness of the Qing in Chinese history
Notes
3. Limits to territorial expansion: fiscal constitution and war-making under the Qing
War and finance under the Qing
The low-level equilibrium in Qing finance
Qing China in world historical perspective
Notes
PART II: The transition to a sovereign state
4. Regionalized centralism: the resilience and fragility of the late Qing state
Fiscal regionalization
The rise of conditional loyalty
Regionalized centralism
Notes
5. Between the frontier and the coast: geopolitical strategy reoriented
The ending of the traditional geopolitical order
Frontier Defense versus Maritime Defense
Centralized regionalism at work
The transition to asovereign state
Notes
6. A nation-state in the making: Manchu–Han relations under the New Policies
Modernization and fiscal expansion
Recentralization and alienation
The making of anew nation
Acomparison with the Ottoman empire
Notes
PART III: The making of a unified and centralized state
7. Centralized regionalism: the rise of regional fiscal-military states
Warlordism
Why did the Nationalist force win?
China as alatecomer: from regional to national in state-making
Notes
8. In search of national unity: frontier rebuilding under the Republic
Under the “suzerainty” of China: Tibet in 1912–1950
From autonomy to independence: Outer Mongolia, 1911–1946
Recovering China’s territorial entity
China’s territorial entity: lost and rescued
Notes
9. The fate of semi-centralism: the nationalist state succeeded and failed
Toward aunified state
The making of anew orthodoxy
Political identity under the party-state
The semi-centralism of the nationalist state
Notes
10. Total centralism at work: the confluence of breakthroughs in state-making
Political identity under Mao
Manchuria and the Civil War
Fueling the war: the making of acommunist fiscal regime
Acomparison
Notes
11. Conclusion
Making sense of the Chinese leviathan
State rebuilding in China: an unfinished task
Note
List of characters
References
Index

Citation preview

The Making of the Modern Chinese State

The Making of the Modern Chinese State: 1600–1950 offers an historical analysis of the formation of the modern Chinese state from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, providing refreshing and provocative interpretations on almost every major issue regarding the rise of modern China. This book explores the question of why today’s China is unlike any other nation-state in size and structure. It inquires into the reasons behind the striking continuity in China’s territorial and ethnic compositions over the past centuries, and explicates the genesis and tenacity of the Chinese state as a highly centralized and unified regime that has been able to survive into the twentyfirst century. Its analysis centers on three key variables, namely geopolitical strategy, fiscal constitution, and identity building, and it demonstrates how they worked together to shape the outcome of state transformation in modern China. Enhanced by a selection of informative tables and illustrations, The Making of the Modern Chinese State: 1600–1950 is ideal for undergraduates and graduates studying East Asian history, Chinese history, empires in Asia, and state formation. Huaiyin Li is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Village Governance in North China, 1875–1936; Village China under Socialism and Reform: A Microhistory, 1948–2008; and Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing.

The Making of the Modern Chinese State 1600–1950

Huaiyin Li

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Huaiyin Li The right of Huaiyin Li to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with Sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Li, Huaiyin, author. Title: The making of the modern Chinese state 1600-1950 / Huaiyin Li. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2019014830 (print) | LCCN 2019019540 (ebook) | ISBN 9780429432071 (eBook) | ISBN 9781138362444 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781138362451 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9780429432071 (ebk.) Subjects: LCSH: China--Politics and government--1644-1912. | China--Politics and government--1912-1949. Classification: LCC DS754.17 (ebook) | LCC DS754.17 .L49 2019 (print) | DDC 951/.03--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019014830 ISBN: 978-1-138-36244-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-36245-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-43207-1 (ebk) Typeset in Galliard by Swales & Willis, Exeter, Devon, UK

Contents

1

List of figures List of tables List of maps Preface

vii viii ix x

Introduction

1

PART I

The formation of the Qing state 2 3

21

The rise of an early modern territorial state: China in the early to mid-Qing period

23

Limits to territorial expansion: fiscal constitution and war-making under the Qing

52

PART II

The transition to a sovereign state 4 5 6

Regionalized centralism: the resilience and fragility of the late Qing state

83 85

Between the frontier and the coast: geopolitical strategy reoriented

112

A nation-state in the making: Manchu–Han relations under the New Policies

132

vi

Contents

PART III

The making of a unified and centralized state 7 8 9 10 11

161

Centralized regionalism: the rise of regional fiscal-military states

163

In search of national unity: frontier rebuilding under the Republic

192

The fate of semi-centralism: the nationalist state succeeded and failed

216

Total centralism at work: the confluence of breakthroughs in state-making

242

Conclusion

276

List of characters References Index

289 298 326

Figures

3.1 The Qing state’s cash reserves, war expenses, and tax exemptions, 1644–1862 3.2 The low-level equilibrium in the fiscal constitution of the Qing state

55 64

Tables

2.1 Land tax as a percentage of land yield, 1652–1820 2.2 All taxes collected as a percentage of total economic output, 1652–1820 3.1 The Qing state’s official revenue and expenditure, 1653–1840 3.2 Agricultural productivity during the Qing, 1600–1887 3.3 Agricultural production and population during the Qing, 1600–1887 4.1 The revenue and expenditure of the Qing state, 1841–1911 7.1 Revenue of the central government of the Republic, 1912–1945 7.2 Budgeted revenue and expenditure of individual provinces, 1925

38 39 54 65 66 91 166 171

Maps

I.1 China under the Qing, circa 1800 III.1 China under the Republic, circa 1920

22 162

Preface

This book is about how the Chinese state has become what it is today – or at least what it was by 1949, if we do indeed believe that no significant changes have occurred to it since then. There have been two grand narratives about the making of the modern Chinese state. One can be subsumed under the rubric of revolution. It is assumed that the encroachment of foreign imperialism since the mid-nineteenth century, coupled with the escalating tax burden imposed by various authorities throughout the late Qing and Republican periods, resulted in the impoverishment and dislocation of the rural population, and the rise of local bullies and ruffians in village leadership; all these paved the way for recurrent peasant rebellions and ultimately the rise of the Communist Revolution. The Japanese full-scale aggression after 1937 and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s ability to penetrate rural society only accelerated this process. The other body of literature on modern China can be put under the category of reform or modernization. Its arguments can be summarized as follows – at the risk of oversimplification. The introduction of foreign culture, technology, and capital and the expansion of foreign trade stimulated China’s economic growth and enabled its progress in defense, industry, transportation, education, urban development, and so on. Meanwhile, China also made headway in state building, as seen in the experiments of representative democracy, the institutionalization of government bodies, the internationalization of diplomatic practices, and the recovery of its sovereignty by the end of World War II. The Communist Revolution and the founding of a communist state, seen in this light, was an anomaly rather than a necessary outcome of long-term structural developments in late Qing and Republican China. History-writing, as I argue elsewhere, is inseparable from the temporal context in which historians identify the issues that concern them and offer interpretations that reflect more of their ideological inclination and intellectual tradition than the historical realities they attempt to reconstruct (H. Li 2013). Different versions of the “revolution” narrative thus prevailed in China in the 1950s through the early 1980s when legitimizing the CCP’s “mandate of heaven” to rule China was historians’ chief duty, and to some degree it also influenced the understanding of “Red China” in the West, where researchers attempted to

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build connections between China’s past experiences and the present realities. The “modernization” narrative, for its part, came to reshape Chinese historiography in the late 1980s and 1990s when China abandoned Maoism and embraced the world with the programs of “Reform and Opening-Up,” and when Chinese historians became eager to find historical precedents for the country’s ongoing modernizing endeavors. In the West (and also Taiwan), this narrative emerged as early as the 1950s at the height of the Cold War and resurged in the 1990s when neoliberalism came to dominate the thinking of global geopolitics after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Both narratives, however, are flawed by an ideology-driven teleology. While the revolution thesis sees China’s transition to socialism as the inevitable end of its modern history, the modernization construct interprets Western-style representative democracy and free-market capitalism as the ultimate destination of China’s modern development. This book offers an alternative, open-ended account of the making of the modern Chinese state. I reinterpret the rise of modern China as a process of state transformation that is longer in time span and wider in scope than both revolution and modernization, and which remains unfinished at the present time. To put it briefly, the Chinese state as it was by the mid-twentieth century was the accumulative result of state-rebuilding that had lasted for three centuries and consisted of three key breakthroughs: the formation of an early modern territorial state by the mid-eighteenth century that had laid a territorial and ethnic foundation for the making of modern China; its transition to a sovereign state in the late nineteenth century to become integrated with the global system of nation-states; and its gradual transformation into a centralized and unified state in the first half of the twentieth century. China redefined and rebuilt itself in each of these three stages; developments in each stage shaped the direction and dynamics of state-rebuilding in the next stage. In two important ways, the making of the modern Chinese state differed from the experiences of Western countries and many other nonWestern societies. First, instead of the “normative” path of transition “from empire to nationstate” commonly found in the literature on state-building in the modern world (i.e., the emergence of multiple nation-states on the ruins of a former military or colonial empire following its prolonged decline and eventual loss or splitting of territories), China witnessed striking continuities in its territorial, demographic, and administrative patterns throughout the three-century process of state transformation. The key to understanding this puzzle, I shall argue, lies in the fact that the formation of the Qing state after inaugurating its rule in China departed fundamentally from empire-building in other parts of the early modern world, as evidenced in the motivation behind its expansion, the fiscal mechanism that bolstered its military operations, and the way it governed the frontiers, as the individual chapters of this book will document. The Qing, in other words, was not an empire, but instead an “early-modern territorial state” as I would term it. State-making in China means first of all its painstaking yet successful

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transformation from a territorial state into a sovereign state, rather than the disruptive transition from an empire to a nation-state. Behind the territorial continuity were the impressive records of the Qing in maintaining the frontiers and dealing with the unprecedented crises at home and abroad by rebuilding its fiscal, military, and administrative systems, for all the frustrations and failures in the process. Second, state transformation in late Qing and Republican China took the form of a protracted struggle between regionalism and centralism in the restructuring of power relations between central and local/regional authorities, culminating in the creation of a highly centralized, authoritarian state by the mid-twentieth century. The historical root of the high-level centralism that features the Chinese state today can be traced to the unique mode of geopolitical and fiscal constitutions of the Qing, termed “low-level equilibrium” in this book. This denotes the Qing state’s unparalleled geopolitical security and fiscal sufficiency. Temporary and conditional as it was, this equilibrium prevailed throughout most of the eighteenth century, thanks to the presence of a peculiar combination of international, demographic, and financial factors. The vulnerability of this equilibrium and the Qing state’s subsequent unpreparedness for the advent of domestic and foreign crises in the nineteenth century, however, gave rise to a new form of power relations, dubbed “regionalized centralism,” which in turn paved the way for the emergence of “centralized regionalism” in the early Republican years, “semi-centralism” of the Nationalist state, and “total centralism” of the Communist state, to be explicated in each of the chapters that follow. Each of these prevailed over its predecessor because of its higher level of centralization and greater competitiveness in the rivalry for dominance in China. This dynamism again distinguishes China from the historical paths of many nation-states in the West that ended in creating a government by the principles of representative democracy that ideally manifests popular sovereignty, and from the experiences of many other nonWestern countries whose state-building centered on a nationalist movement against colonialism and imperialism. Finally, it is worth emphasizing that the making of the modern Chinese state, a process beginning in the 1640s, remains unfinished by the early twenty-first century. While the contemporary Chinese state has shown impressive stability and vitality since its founding in the mid-twentieth century, the legacies and deficiencies it inherited from the aforementioned three breakthroughs continue to empower as well as challenge China and will shape its future trajectory of evolution. Unlike the revolution or the modernization narrative of the twentieth century that has a definite, closed ending, the thesis of state transformation presented in this book offers us a different angle to comprehend the issues of China’s uncertainties and potentialities as a modern state in the twenty-first century, an age of accelerated globalization in which its impact on the rest of the world is bigger than ever before. My writing of this book has benefited from two bodies of scholarly work. On the theoretical or explanatory level, this project has been inspired by the

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xiii

literature on state-making and, more recently, on the fiscal-military states in early modern and modern Europe; I found discussions on the roles of geopolitics, war-making, and fiscal institutions in state formation particularly relevant to this project. On the empirical level, while much of my research is based on my own use of original source material, it is impossible for me to delve into such sources for every topic examined in this book, given the breadth of the entire project. Therefore, I have relied heavily on the findings that historians of different sub-fields in late imperial and modern China have presented in their publications over the past few decades, which I cite throughout this book. In the past few years, I have been fortunate to have direct exchanges with the most prominent scholars in China in each of these sub-fields and to give talks on my research at their institutions. Among them are Professors Chen Feng and Zuo Songtao of Wuhan University; Professors Lu Xiaobo, Li Lifeng, Sun Jiang, Kong Fanbin, and Zhang Sheng of Nanjing University; Professor Jin Guangyao of Fudan University; Professors Wang Qisheng, Gao Shiyu, and Niu Ke of Peking University; Professor Wang Xutian of Renmin University of China; Professors Zhong Weimin and Ni Yuping of Tsinghua University; Professors Wang Xianming, Yu Xinzhong, and Jiang Pei of Nankai University; Professor Liu Jiafeng of Shandong University; Professor Li Deying of Sichuan University; Professors Liu Zenghe and Zeng Guangguang of Jinan University; Professors Liu Yonghua, Lu Xiqi, Zhang Kai, and Zheng Zhenman of Xiamen University; Professors Xie Shi and Zhao Libing of Sun Yat-Sen University; Professor Liu Chang of East China Normal University; Professors Zhu Ying, Xu Xiaoqing, and Jiang Manqing of Central China Normal University; Professors Yang Songtao and Zhang Xiangdong of Henan University; Professors Xing Long, Hu Yingze, and Chang Libing of Shanxi University; and Professors Zhao Xiaoyang, Li Changli, Ma Yong, and Zuo Yuhe of the Institute of Modern Chinese, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. My sincere thanks to all of them for their hospitality and the many good questions and insights on the topics we discussed. This book originated from two papers I read at the conferences of the Social Science History Association in 2010 and the Association for Asian Studies in 2011. Part of the book manuscript was also presented at the conference on “The Inner and Outside of Historic China” at Beijing Normal University in 2016. I thank the organizers and discussants of these conferences and panels for their invitations and comments on my papers; among them are Professors Mark Elliot, Siyen Fei, Wenkai He, James Lee, and R. Bin Wong. For their comments and suggestions on the book manuscript, I would like to thank Professors Marc Blecher, Vivienne Shue, and my colleagues who worked in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin, including Professors Anthony Hopkins and Mark Metzler, as well as my former and current PhD students John Harney (Centre College), James Hudson (UNC), Zhaojin Zeng (Pitt), Jing Zhai, Guangji Hu, He Tan, Benjamin Yeager, and Fei Guo. Comments by the anonymous reviewers for Routledge helped me sharpen my arguments and refine the structure of the entire project.

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Finally, and most importantly, I thank my wife Gwen Zhao and our two children, Cathy and Daniel, whose many questions about China in their journeys from middle or high schoolers to longhorns of UT Austin motivated my writing of this book. This book is for all of you. Huaiyin Li Austin, Texas August 2019

1

Introduction

The modern Chinese state as it exists today, namely the People’s Republic of China (PRC), is unlike any other nation-state in the world in size and structure. Physically, it is big. China has not only one of the largest territories, crossing from the northeastern provinces to central Asia and from Inner Mongolia down to the tropical Hainan islands, but also the very largest population with diverse ethnic backgrounds, encompassing the Han people as well as the Mongols, Uighurs, Tibetans, and other ethnic groups. More importantly, the composition of its land and peoples is directly traceable to the legacies of the Qing that conquered China in the 1640s; China, therefore, is believed to be the only modern state today that has inherited its territorial and ethnic patterns from a former “empire” (Esherick 2006: 229), if that term applies to its last dynasty. Equally important about the Chinese state is that its power structure is highly centralized and proves to be exceptionally durable. Since it won the Civil War against the Nationalist regime in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has exclusively and continuously governed the country, and its functionality explains in large part China’s emergence as a global power by the beginning of the twenty-first century. There are no signs indicating the state’s demise in the foreseeable future, for all the challenges and turbulences confronting it over the past decades. This reality again distinguishes China from the vast majority of nation-states that have developed or at least constitutionally adopted a democracy in the Western sense, from many other Third World countries that have been plagued with a “failed” state, and from all other communist states that are either short-lived (the Soviet Union and its satellite states in East Europe) or small in size (North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba). Why, then, did the centuries of political transformation in China end in the rise of an enormous state under an authoritarian government that remains as robust as it appears in the twenty-first century? To what extent did the Chinese experiences in state-building resemble or deviate from the trajectories of other nation-states? Has the modern Chinese state taken a definite shape, or will it continue to evolve in the future? These are the central issues to be pursued throughout this study. But before turning to these questions, let us first briefly

2

Introduction

look at how the Chinese state is interpreted in the existing literature in the Chinese and English languages.

The modern Chinese state: why “big” and “strong”? Contrasting interpretations The CCP’s historiography offers a straightforward explanation of the origins of the state it inherited and rebuilt. Its basic assumptions are as follows. First, China is a “unified, multiethnic” state because, for more than two thousand years since the Qin (221–206 BC) and the Han (206 BC–AD 220), unified dynasties have predominated in its history; its historical territory covered areas inhabited by both the Han and non-Han peoples under such dynasties; and the Qing, as the last unified, multiethnic dynasty, was the culmination of the long tradition of China’s territorial unification and ethnic integration (e.g., Tan Qixiang 1982; Fan Wenlan et al. 2008). Second, the CCP’s leadership in China was the necessary outcome of a century-long revolution by the Chinese people against feudalism and imperialism, which began with their resistance against British aggression during the Opium War of 1840, continued in the Taiping Rebellion, the Revolution of 1911, and the Boxer Rebellion, but failed one after another until the CCP came into being in 1921 and took over the leadership of the revolution and made it a success in 1949, after overthrowing the corrupt and incompetent Nationalist (Guomindang or GMD) regime through a civil war (e.g., Hu Sheng 1981). Unification and revolution thus constitute the two overarching themes in the CCP’s narratives of China’s imperial and more recent histories; these narratives, well formulated in standard history textbooks in today’s China, well serve the purpose of legitimizing the political system built and maintained by the Party (H. Li 2013). Yet, in the eyes of many observers in the West, it is precisely the combination of the two basic characteristics (i.e., being simultaneously “big” and “strong”) of the contemporary Chinese state that make its legitimacy and viability problematic. For decades, interpretations on the making of modern states in the English-language literature have tended to juxtapose empire and nation-state as the two contrasting forms of polity. An empire is typically associated with warlike propensities and territorial expansion; it is therefore demographically multiethnic and culturally heterogeneous; ideologically it is cosmopolitan, claiming the universality of its ideas and institutions throughout the world; and politically it maintains indirect rule over colonies, dependencies, and tributaries.1 In sharp contrast, a nation-state, according to interpretations based mainly on the historical experiences of state-making in Western Europe, is supposed to have the following three traits. First, it is characterized by the identification of its people with the land they inhabit; ideally, the territory of a nation-state corresponds to the geographic area of the people who have shared cultural and political traditions and/or ethnic origins. Second, its ideology, nationalist in nature, emphasizes the particularities of their ethnic origins and/or the glories of their shared

Introduction

3

experiences; as a sovereign state, it claims equality with all other nations under the international laws and exclusive rights on its territory that has fixed and clearly demarcated borders with other states. Third and no less important, the sovereignty of a nation-state is vested in its people rather than the monarch, and the ideal form of government is a rights-based state as the liberal thinkers of seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries Europe envisioned or a representative democracy that prevailed increasingly in both the Western and non-Western worlds.2 Modern state-making, therefore, is largely equated with a linear progression from empire to nation-state.3 The historical realities of state formation in the modern world, including the past of European states per se, are much more complex than the teleology above suggests.4 China’s experiences in building a modern state, in particular, contradict the above assumptions in two important ways. First, instead of the breakdown of a former empire and the emergence of multiple nation-states on its ruins as commonly seen after the fall of all other empires, what characterized China is the striking continuity between the Qing and the Republic found in 1912 (as well as the PRC) in territorial and ethnic compositions (Zhang Yongle 2016). Second, instead of establishing a democracy that presumably best exemplifies popular sovereignty, what has prevailed in China since 1949 is a government system that is constitutionally different from the polities in many other countries. Given these conspicuous “anomalies” of the Chinese state, it is not surprising that many have predicted the inevitable splitting of China’s territory, the collapse of the communist state, and its eventual transition to a Western-style democracy in the future.5

Three major issues To answer why the Chinese state is unusually “big” and “strong” or whether or not it is historically legitimate, we should first of all avoid quick judgment based on any theoretical presumptions derived from the experiences of European countries. Nor should we limit our attention to the period after 1840, a turning point signaling the coming of foreign influences as a driver behind a wide spectrum of changes in late Qing and Republican China. Instead, we should think of state formation in China as a longer process that started much earlier than the mid-nineteenth century.6 Compared to the past studies that have addressed aspects of the modern Chinese state, this work offers a systematic account of the making of modern China from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Central to my concern is the formation of the three key features of China as a modern state, namely its territory, sovereignty, and government system. More specifically, this study centers on the following three issues. (1) The territorial expansion of the Qing and the nature of its rule in China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The origins of the twentieth-century Chinese state can be traced to the Qin and Han dynasties in term of its territorial coverage and governing institutions. From the Qin down to the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), much of the

4

Introduction

central features of the Chinese state, such as centralized bureaucracy and the geographic scope of its rule, persisted by and large for all the developments throughout the dynasties in between. But the Chinese state today is unlike any of its predecessors prior to the Qing in that its territory encompasses not only the interior provinces inhabited by predominantly the Han people but also the frontiers of the Manchus, Mongols, Uighurs, Tibetans, and so on. It was during the Qing that China underwent a transition from a largely monoethnic state of the Han people to a multiethnic state comprising both the Han provinces and the non-Han frontiers. The first set of questions that we have to explain in this book thus is: why did the Qing expand? What is the peculiar fiscal-military mechanism that enabled as well as constrained its expansion? How did the Qing rule China? Was the Qing an empire or something else? These questions are important because the Qing laid the territorial and demographic foundations on which the modern Chinese state was established in the twentieth century. An exploration of these questions (Chapters 2–3) is essential to our understanding of the origins of China as a modern state and the nature of its territoriality. (2) China’s transformation into a sovereign state and its integration with the global system of states in the nineteenth century. Given its conventional role as the only dominant power claiming cultural and political superiority over all the other states around it, China’s involvement in the Europe-centered system of states was particularly difficult and prolonged. For China, the most challenging task in this transition was to renounce its selfclaimed centrality in the world order, to accept all other states as its equals, and to give up its suzerainty over the surrounding tributary states and acknowledge their independence. Needless to say, China would not do so until it came under irresistible pressure from outside, which took the form of its repeated defeat by foreign powers in the nineteenth century. Thus, before it became a sovereign state, China had to concede to the demands of the powers that had subjugated it militarily, such as extraterritoriality, fixed tariff rates, cession of land, and the one-sided most-favored-nation status granted to foreign powers. Nevertheless, China was among the few (others include Japan, Siam/Thailand, Persia/Iran, and Abyssinia/Ethiopia) that avoided conquest by colonial powers and survived imperialism in its modern era. Even more surprisingly, unlike all other empires that invariably ended in territorial splitting-up into multiple independent states, the Qing succeeded in preserving most of its territory, including the frontiers, until the very end, which it then passed on in entirety to its heir, the Republic of China. Why was late Qing China able to resist the threats of foreign powers and keep its land largely intact? How did the Qing redefine its geopolitical strategies and rebuild its fiscal-military institutions in response to external and internal challenges? And how did changes in the relationship between the ruling court and provincial authorities explain the viability as well as vulnerability of the Qing state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? We cannot understand the trends and outcome of state rebuilding after the fall of the Qing without a thorough analysis of all these questions (Chapters 4–6).

Introduction

5

(3) The making of a unified and centralized state in the Republican period. Influenced by the various doctrines of nationalism and, in particular, the idea of popular sovereignty, and inspired by the precedents of American and French Revolutions, almost all national revolutionaries of different ethnicities in the modern world aspired to establish a government on their land that not only had complete sovereignty over its territory but also took the form of representative democracy. The Chinese state-makers were no exception. The revolutionaries of the late Qing period and later both the GMD and the CCP were all committed to establishing a republic in China. But the democracy prescribed in the constitutions of the Republic of China never became truly functional; it was frequently compromised by dictatorship under the Republican government in Beijing (1912–1927) and yielded to one-party rule under the Nationalist regime (1927–1949). The Communists who defeated the Nationalists in 1949 defined the newly established PRC as a socialist state under “people’s democratic dictatorship,” a new form of government influenced by the Soviet Union and characterized by high-level centralization of power under the sole control of the CCP. What concerns us here is not the question why the Communist revolution succeeded, but rather why the centuries of state rebuilding ended in the formation of a highly centralized regime instead of Western-style democracy. While an in-depth inquiry into these questions (Chapters 7, 9, and 10) will shed light on the dynamics behind the rise of a unified and centralized state in the first half of the twentieth century, a discussion on frontier rebuilding under the Republic (Chapter 8) is necessary for understanding the striking continuity in China’s territoriality. State transformation in modern China, in a nutshell, is a coherent process consisting of three key links, namely (1) territorial expansion in the early-to-mid Qing period, (2) adaptation to the world system of states in the late Qing period, and (3) consolidation of state power in the Republican period. These three major breakthroughs in state rebuilding were historically and logically linked. The successive expansions in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries resulted in the enlargement and redefinition of China, which generated a geographic and demographic basis on which the modern Chinese state defined its territoriality and sovereignty. In its subsequent integration into the global system of states in the nineteenth century, China suffered damages to its territorial integrity and sovereignty but nevertheless succeeded in preserving its territorial and demographic settings, despite the tilting of the power structure of the state towards the regional level. State rebuilding in twentieth-century China, therefore, meant the consolidation of its territorial integrity and the recentralization of the state apparatus. It is, therefore, the combined effects of the three developments over a three-century process of state formation and transformation that account for the physical size and structural strength that the Chinese leviathan had developed by the mid-twentieth century.

Geopolitics, finance, and identity: a macrohistorical analysis This study employs a macrohistorical approach to examine China’s three-century process of state rebuilding. Macrohistory refers to the analysis of a long-term

6

Introduction

historical process that has a wide and profound impact on society or a human group. However, unlike the general history of a nation or society that covers all aspects of human activity, macrohistory seeks to identify the patterns or “laws” of historical trends or a particular process of historical significance, and its analysis centers on a limited number of variables that shape the dynamics and patterns of that process. A macrohistorical study, therefore, tends to adopt a comparative or world-historical perspective to inquire into the causes of change and paths of development characteristic of the society or process under investigation. Furthermore, macrohistory does not respect borders in time, especially periodization based on regime change; instead, it looks for connections in human activities over a long time range that form a coherent process with its own dynamics.7 In this study, my analysis of state transformation in China centers on three variables; namely geopolitical setting, fiscal constitution, and identity building.

Geopolitical setting Geopolitics is first of all about a state’s strength and position in relation to other powers and the impact of its foreign relations on domestic politics. In early modern and modern Europe, a horizontal pattern of interstate relations prevailed after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, where the individual states saw one another as equals legally and diplomatically, and they “always appear in competition with each other, and gain their identities by contrast with rival states” (Tilly 1990: 23). Countries with a greater degree of geographic exposure and hence facing greater threat of land warfare had the greater urgency to build a standing army and a bulky bureaucracy under an absolutist state to withstand that threat, whereas a maritime power such as England, free of the sustained military pressure that confronted continental powers, was able to do away with a standing army and develop parliamentarism and self-government (Roberts 1967; Hintze 1975). The fierce competition among the various forms of political entity resulted in recurrent wars between individual states or groups of states, causing them to decrease in number, from roughly 200 in 1490 to about 30 in 1890, and to enlarge in size, with the average size of European countries growing from 9,500 to 63,000 square miles during the same period (Tilly 1990: 42–47). It is true indeed that “war made the state, and the state made war” in European history (Tilly 1975: 42). War-making, and the lack of it, is also key to understanding the dynamics of state transformation in China. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, China’s geopolitical relations with its neighbors and rivals underwent drastic changes, involving (1) the Qing state’s competition with the Zunghar Mongols of Central Asia that led to the expansion of its Inner Asian frontiers by the mid-eighteenth century; (2) its dominance within a tributary system it maintained with neighboring states before the mid-nineteenth century; and (3) rebuilding of its defenses and restructuring of territoriality in overcoming the crises in foreign relations in the late Qing period. Challenges and

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opportunities in China’s geopolitical settings also fundamentally drove state rebuilding in the first half of the twentieth century, which took the form of fierce competition among the regional forces that rivaled for national dominance. Exactly how the imperatives in China’s geopolitical strategy triggered the major events in state rebuilding and where China resembled or differed from other states and empires in geopolitical strategizing will be one of the focal points in this study.

Fiscal constitution Whether or not a state is able to achieve its strategic objectives, however, depends in large measure on its fiscal and military capabilities, which in turn reflect the extractability of its economy and the state’s ability to turn the extracted resources into real military strength. Among the various methods of extraction, the most important is taxation, which takes the form of collecting direct taxes on the land and indirect taxes on goods and service. The state can also use financial tools for extra revenue, including currency inflation, issuance of government bonds, or loan borrowing. Additionally, the state generates income by selling government positions or honorary titles. Finally, military expansion and conquest for new territories, hence taxation of the conquered land and demand for tributes from the dependencies, are the most effective means for empires to increase wealth. The different levels and means of extraction have different impacts on the formation of the state apparatus. It is widely assumed that taxation on the land is highly difficult and costly; rulers of early modern European states, therefore, preferred the convenience of farming out tax collection to entrepreneurial agents, whose predatory and exorbitant methods in collecting taxes often incurred resistance from taxpayers. Rural resistance in turn necessitated the state’s use of coercion to generate the needed revenues, hence the rise of absolutist regimes or the coercion-intensive path to state formation. On the other hand, taxing commerce and the wealth of landed elites or borrowing from financiers with their consent are relatively easy in a commercialized economy, but bargaining with the wealthy also meant the rulers dispensing with an extensive bureaucratic system and coercive means of exaction, which provided a basis for the urban elites to participate in government and hence the growth of a constitutional state, or the capital-intensive path to state formation (Tilly 1985; M. Mann 1980, 1986: 450–499; Downing 1992: 3–17).8 Generating enough revenue for strategic purposes is also a central task for builders and rulers of the Chinese state as well as their challengers during the centuries under consideration. The sources of revenues for each of them varied widely, ranging from predominantly the land tax under the Qing before the mid-nineteenth century and in the Communist base areas in the 1930s and 1940s, to taxes on trade and industry, which became increasingly important in the late Qing and Republican periods, and banking and financing, which were critical to the Nationalist state. How much revenue they generated and how

8

Introduction

they obtained it directly shaped their approaches to governance and strength in competing with their adversaries.

Identity building Identity building here means not only the legitimization of a regime through the propagation of its ideology or the forging of consensus on its goals among the social and political groups under its rule, but more importantly the optimization of relationships between the state’s power center and its regional agencies, among regions of different interests under its rule, and among people of different ethnic origins and religious or political persuasions on its territories. How efficient the fiscal-military resources are redistributed at different levels and in different regions and how effective they are used for the state’s strategic goals, therefore, depend in large part on the level of identity among the individuals or groups involved in the redistribution. In the process of state rebuilding in Qing and Republican China, we can identify three redistribution patterns. In the first, as seen in the Qing before the mid-nineteenth century, the central government monopolized almost all resources, leaving local authorities devoid of any substantial means at their disposal and therefore completely submissive to the center. In the second, the reverse is true: the redistribution was highly decentralized, resulting in a weak central government and strong regional forces; the latter controlled the revenues and the military within their areas and contended among themselves or with the central government for more power and wealth, a situation prevailing in early Republican years. In the third, the distribution of resources fell between the two extremes; both the center and its local contenders controlled a certain amount of revenue and armed forces, and the balance between the two sides shifted constantly, as seen in the late Qing period and under the Nationalist regime. Much of the redistribution of fiscal and military capabilities in different periods of modern China reflected the level of identity building among the different political forces at play; the higher the level of political identity was achieved, the more likely the fiscal and military power could be centralized, and the more powerful the central government would be in rivalry with its challengers inside and outside its territory, and vice versa. On the other hand, a regional force could also be a formidable challenger to the authority above it, if it not only controlled the resourses within the region or group but also built strong identity among group members, as we will find in the early history of the Nationalist force in the 1920s and in the rise of the Communist force in the 1940s. To recapitulate, while external or internal imperatives conditioned the formulation of geopolitical priorities of any political entity (the state or a regional competitor) in Qing and Republican China, whether or not it was able to achieve its strategic goals, hinged on the fiscal resources it generated (hence its military strength) as well as the level of political identity it built among its

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supporters. These three key variables – geopolitics, finance, and identity – interplayed to propel state transformation in modern China.

Preliminary arguments The formation of an early modern territorial state This book has three parts, each covering one of the three major breakthroughs in the making of modern China. Part I examines the formation of the Qing state in the seventeen and eighteenth centuries. It was the Qing, after all, that laid the territorial, ethnic and even administrative foundations by the mideighteenth century on which the modern Chinese state was established. Given that the Qing originated as an “alien” dynasty of the Manchus, establishing its rule in China after conquering the Ming, and that it further extended its control over Outer Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang after a series of wars on the frontiers, it comes as no surprise that the Qing is often equated with a conquest dynasty arguably showing parallels in state formation to expansionist empires in other parts of the world. Chapter 2 challenges this received wisdom. It shows that, in several important ways, the Qing is fundamentally different from other major empires in the Eurasian continent. First, after establishing its rule in China, the Qing limited its expansion of Inner Asian frontiers (i.e., Outer Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang) only to the period from the 1690s to the 1750s. There was no military operation to seek frontier expansion in the five decades before the 1690s or the one and a half centuries after the 1750s, though wars of varying scales for frontier consolidations occurred from time to time before and after that interim. In other words, military conquest and territorial expansion were the exceptions rather than the norm in the history of the Qing, unlike other empires in the early modern and modern world that constantly engaged in wars throughout their existence. Second, unlike its counterparts in premodern or early modern Eurasia who fought wars for the purposes of either increasing wealth or spreading a religion, the Qing established its Inner Asian frontiers for none of these reasons. Instead, its frontier expansions were the unexpected results of its resistance to the repeated fatal threats from the Zunghar Khanate. The Qing launched a series of expeditions into the Gobi Desert in the 1690s only after the Zunghars invaded Outer and Inner Mongolia, thus constituting an immediate threat to Beijing, the capital city of the Qing, and to its alliance with the Mongols south of the Gobi Desert, which had enabled the Qing conquest of China in the 1640s and remained central to the Qing’s geopolitical security afterwards. Later, the Qing launched expeditions into Tibet and Xinjiang in the early to mid-eighteenth century only after the Zunghars invaded Tibet, threatening to sever the traditional political and religious ties between Lhasa and Beijing and thus undermine the Qing court’s patronage of Lamaism, which, together with intermarriage between Manchu and Mongol nobles, was essential for maintaining the Manchu–Mongol alliance. Therefore, the primary goal for the Qing to rule the

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newly established frontiers was to safeguard its strategic security; not surprisingly, instead of demanding payment of taxes or tributes from the frontiers, it was content with establishing direct military control of the frontiers by stationing a standing army at the key points of the frontiers, allowing the religious and secular elites of the frontiers full autonomy to manage their internal governing affairs, and patronizing Lamaism yet at the same time containing the influences of the separate Lama leaders in Tibet and Mongolia by practicing the “divide and rule” policy. All these explain why the Qing was able to maintain its stable control of the frontiers all the way until its demise in 1911, which contrasted sharply with other contemporary empires whose frontiers were in constant flux. Third and most important, the Qing cannot be likened to an expansionist empire chiefly because it was fiscally self-sufficient. Three factors contributed to the Qing state’s financial sufficiency, namely (1) the huge population of the interior provinces, which constituted an immense basis from which it generated a revenue more than it needed during times of peace; (2) the geopolitical security that kept its military spending at a stable and low level; and (3) the informal mechanisms of local governance that minimized the cost of government. The goal of its geopolitical strategy, therefore, was inward-oriented, that is, to perpetuate its rule in China by maintaining its legitimacy in the interior provinces of the Han people and, to that end, demonstrating itself as a dynasty embracing the institutions and ideology of the preceding dynasties of the Han Chinese, as best seen in its unfailing adherence to the policy of light taxation on the land throughout its history in accordance with the Confucian tradition of “benevolence” in governance. The interior provinces and the frontiers were very different in terms of their importance to the Qing: the former was where the dynasty maintained its status as a legitimate regime ruling Zhongguo or China and where it obtained almost all of its fiscal resources, and the latter only served as instruments to enhance its strategic security and control of China. These historical realities contradict the assumption that the Qing was an “Inner Asian empire” under a “universalistic” rulership which treated its Inner Asian constituencies on equal terms with the interior provinces. Nor can we liken the Qing to the preceding Chinese dynasties and simply equate it with yet another dynasty in the long series of dynastic cycles in China’s imperial past. After all, the Manchu conquest resulted in the enlargement and redefinition of Zhongguo from an essentially monoethnic state of the Han people that was largely limited to the land south of the Great Wall to a larger state encompassing both the interior of the Han population and the frontiers of Inner Asian nomads. Therefore, the conventional Sinocentric view that sees non-Han peoples as “ethnic minorities” and marginalizes their roles in the formation of the Qing state downplays the most significant and defining part of Qing history. The Qing did indeed inherit from the preceding Ming a highly centralized bureaucracy that was unmistakably “Chinese” in terms of the overall administrative structure and the political culture that undergirded it; yet what made the Qing unique was its hybridity, most evident in the Manchu-Han diarchy in the higher levels of the bureaucratic hierarchy and the complementary

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relationship between the interior and frontiers unseen in the previous Chinese dynasties. Chapter 3 takes a deeper look into the formation of the Qing state by focusing on its fiscal constitution in order to understand how the peculiar mechanism in its revenue generation and expending empowered as well as constrained the dynasty’s frontier expansion. Central to my analysis is the concept of “low-level equilibrium,” which distinguishes the Qing from all other states in the early modern world and explains its fate in the nineteenth century. Unlike the “fiscal-military states” in early modern Europe whose revenue structure was highly dynamic and full of the potentials to expand (partly because of the ever-growing industry and commerce that formed the major sources of tax revenues and partly because of the ever-escalating demands for revenue for war efforts and an enlarged bureaucracy), the fiscal system of Qing China before the mid-nineteenth century was largely static, with a rigid structure of regular revenues primarily from the land and regular expenditures that remained relatively stable over time. Two factors made this inelastic structure possible. The first is the Qing’s geopolitical security that allowed for a stable and low military spending, and the second is an optimal ratio of population to the land that allowed for a huge source of revenue from the large number of taxpayers, even though the tax rate was kept at a very low level. The coexistence of these two preconditions resulted in the prevalence of a delicate equilibrium in its fiscal structure (i.e., a fixed regular revenue that was slightly highly than a fixed regular spending). When this equilibrium existed, the Qing state had the advantage of an enormous amount of cash reserves accumulated year after year because of its fixed spending on the one hand and an annual surplus on the other in the times of peace; it was this cash reserve that enabled the Qing to expand in wartime. However, neither the Qing state’s geopolitical supremacy nor the size of its population was a given, and the equilibrium that was based on them was vulnerable and would be lost whenever any of the two preconditions disappeared. It was, therefore, the low-level and eventual loss of this equilibrium that ultimately shaped China’s course of transformation in the nineteenth century when both preconditions vanished. The Qing state, in the final analysis, is neither a typical expansionist empire nor an emerging fiscal-military state resembling its counterparts in early modern Europe and beyond. Instead, it can be best described as an early modern territorial state. The Qing was a “territorial state” because it had stable frontiers and effectively controlled its territory that had fixed borders clearly demarcated with the neighboring states, though it was yet to be incorporated into the system of sovereign states that had prevailed in Europe since the seventeenth century. The Qing state was “early modern” because it possessed full-fledged state apparatuses such as a standing army, a centralized and specialized bureaucracy, and an institutionalized tax-collecting system, which the national states in Europe also gradually developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

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Introduction

The transition to a sovereign state Part II scrutinizes the second breakthrough in the making of the modern Chinese state, namely, the transformation of the Qing from an early modern territorial state into a sovereign state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Conventional historiography typically depicts this period as a time of the Qing’s decline. The late Qing state did indeed suffer repeated defeats at the hands of foreign powers, the subsequent loss of part of its territory, and damages to its sovereignty. Yet, unlike any other empires whose decline invariably ended in territorial splitting, and unlike most non-Western states whose encounters with colonialism all ended in their loss of independence and the establishment of colonial rule, the Qing was among the few in the non-Western world and the only non-Western “empire” (so to put it) that successfully defended most of its territory and maintained its independence until its sudden demise in 1911. By that point, China had reinvented itself as a sovereign state, kept its Inner Asian frontiers largely intact, and achieved a substantial level of military and government modernization. Thus, unlike past studies on late-nineteenth-century China that have tended to center on the issue of why the late Qing state “failed,” Chapter 4 explicates its impressive resilience by first inquiring into its fiscal constitution. Central to my analysis is the transformation of the late Qing fiscal constitution from one of low-level equilibrium, which lacked elasticity and expandability on both the demand and supply sides, to one of high-level disequilibrium, in which evergrowing demand propelled the expansion of the supply and in which nonagricultural revenues (indirect taxes, borrowing, and other means of financing) replaced the land tax to be the most important sources of government income. This took place in the 1850s through the 1870s, after the two factors bolstering the original low-level equilibrium disappeared because of the fatal threats of foreign powers that entailed the Qing state’s huge expenses on defense and because of the internal crisis of the population explosion which, coupled with the outflow of silver from the domestic market, had exhausted much of China’s economic surpluses and thus curtailed its population’s tax-paying ability. This transformation accounted in large measure for the Qing state’s success in pacifying internal revolts, modernizing its military, and defending its frontiers against foreign aggression, hence the three decades of “restoration” (zhongxing) from the mid-1860s to the mid-1890s. But the transformation was achieved at the expense of the imperial court’s centralized control of regular and irregular revenues on the one hand and the rise of provincial elites on the other hand, who played a key role in the restoration by taking advantage of regional financial, military, and administrative resources at their disposal. However, instead of interpreting this development as the root cause of the late Qing state’s decline, as often found in past studies, this chapter underscores the fact that, for all the growing autonomy of regional leaders in military and civil administration, the central government never lost its control of provincial authorities in the late nineteenth century; it retained and exercised its power in decision-making over

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the allocation of the officially reported resources of all kinds (financial, military, and administrative) at the regional level, a relationship that can be best termed as “regionalized centralism,” which was key to the late Qing state’s abilities to survive domestic and foreign crises. Chapter 5 examines how regionalized centralism functioned, focusing on the Qing state’s adjustment of its geopolitical strategy and the efficacy and limits of this adjustment in actual implementation. The Qing adjusted its strategies in response to geopolitical crises on two fronts: the traditional threat to its northwestern frontier (i.e., the invasion of a Kokand-based force into Xinjiang) in the mid-1860s, and the new threat from Japan to the southeast and east coasts after the mid-1870s. Overall, its strategy underwent a transition from solely concentrating on the security of Inner Asian frontiers to paying attention to both frontier and maritime defenses, though priority was persistently given to the northwestern frontiers until the 1880s, and the defense of the east and southeast coasts, for all its growing importance in the redefined strategy, was never a top priority for the imperial court until its defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894. Regionalized centralism explains in large part the Qing state’s success in defending its northwestern frontier: Governor-General Zuo Zongtang was able to carry out the highly expensive operations in Xinjiang partly because of the central government’s generous funding and effective coordination of fiscal and military resources at both national and regional levels, and partly because of Zuo’s utilization of his personal networks and his access to the newly available means of financing. In sharp contrast, the secondary importance of maritime defense in the Qing court’s new strategy and hence its limited spending on this front, more than any other factor, accounted for Governor-General Li Hongzhang’s eventual loss in competing with the Japanese, despite his initial success in industrial and military modernization because of the limited availability of regionalized financial and administrative resources. Regionalized centralism, while contributing to the Qing state’s longevity, nevertheless enhanced the fiscal, military, and administrative leverages for regional leaders to bargain with the imperial court and gave rise to “conditional loyalty” among them, to distinguish them from the unconditional loyalty of their predecessors before the mid-nineteenth century. This was especially true in the last decade of the Qing, when a series of “New Policies” (xinzheng) were vigorously pursued at both national and local levels as a comprehensive scheme of modernization. Central to the implementation of the New Policies, Chapter 6 shows, was the Qing court’s efforts to recentralize its control of fiscal and military institutions, hence an infringement of the interests of regional authorities, which in turn led to their weakened identity with the Qing court; the Manchu elite’s monopolistic control of the cabinet and exclusion of Han bureaucrats only worsened the identity crises. The fall of the Qing, in a word, was chiefly the immediate consequence of the Manchu elites’ radical measures of recentralization and the widened Manchu–Han schism during the New Policies decade, rather than an inevitable result of regionalized centralism of the late nineteenth century.

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Along with the obvious failures of the Qing state in its last decade, Chapter 6 also highlights other developments that worked together to keep China from falling apart in 1911, namely, the Qing court’s effective management of its frontiers through religious patronage and preferential treatment of frontier elites, the Sinification of the Manchus, the migration of the Han people to Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang, and the frontiers’ administrative integration with the interior provinces in the last decades of the Qing. All these contributed to the forging of a shared statehood among the elites and ordinary people of different ethnic origins. Although rebels and revolutionaries in different parts of China turned to anti-Manchu racism to win popular support in the early stage of the anti-Qing movement around the turn of the twentieth century, they quickly renounced it and embraced the formulation of a “Republic of Five Races” (Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans, the Hui Muslims, and the Han), as did the Manchu and other non-Han elites of the frontiers. All these enabled the Republic’s retention of the frontiers of the former Qing upon its inauguration in 1912.

The making of a centralized and unified state Part III explores the third breakthrough in the modern transformation of the Chinese state that ended the long-term regionalization of fiscal, military, and administrative power. It was in their quest for a unified and centralized state that we find parallels between Republican China and other latecomers to statemaking in both the West and the non-Western world. For the first time, war became the driver of state-building in China, and developing the capacity to generate the revenues for war became the most decisive factor in state formation and in shaping the outcome of competition among regional contenders. Chapter 7 focuses on the years under the Republican government in Beijing (1912–1928). Instead of viewing this period as a time of warlordism and equating the latter with political decay or failure in state-rebuilding, this chapter highlights the rise of regional fiscal-military states as a critical link in China’s long-term process of state transformation and a prelude to the making of a unified and centralized state on the national level. The warlords or warlord cliques of individual provinces, I argue in this chapter, were not just concerned with military buildup and war making; the most successful of them also took vigorous steps to strengthen themselves by centralizing the bureaucratic system within the territories under their jurisdiction, unifying and standardizing the fiscal and financial systems, constructing highways, railroads, and other infrastructural projects, promoting public education and health, encouraging the development of industry and commerce, advocating self-government at the grassroots level, and allowing the existence of representative and deliberative assemblies at the provincial or county level to build consensus among the elites. Together, these efforts fell under the rubric of “centralized regionalism,” a new development in the age of warlordism that enabled the most ambitious provincial leaders to turn their areas into regional “fiscal-military states.” By

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the mid-1920s, two powers emerged as the most successful and influential among all of the regional states, namely, the Fengtian clique under Zhang Zuolin in Manchuria, and the Guomindang force under Sun Yat-sen and later Chiang Kai-shek in Guangdong. It was eventually the Guomindang state that triumphed over all of its competitors and proceeded the furthest in the making of a unified national state in China by the mid-1930s. State-making in modern China, therefore, did not follow the top-down path experienced by European first-comers such as France and Britain, where the centralization and bureaucratization of state power proceeded from the central to local levels; instead, after the failure of a similar top-down experiment under the New Policies in the late decade of the Qing, China took on the bottom-up path, following the precedents of later-comers such as Germany, Italy, and Japan, where the most powerful regional states took the lead in unifying the country and establishing a government on the national level. Chapter 8 explores how the frontiers were rebuilt during the Republican period through the triangular interactions of three factors: the influences of foreign powers, the attitudes of frontier elites, and domestic politics in China. Britain played a key role in Tibet; its strategy to turn the highland into a buffer between British India and China and its persistent acknowledgment of Beijing’s suzerainty over Lhasa explained Tibet’s capricious relationship with Beijing and its failure to seek official independence and international recognition. Regime changes in Russia and Moscow’s shifting strategies in the Far East formed the geopolitical background in which Outer Mongolia exited, rejoined, and finally separated from China. Finally, China’s alliance with the United States was key to its triumph in the war with Japan and the recovery of its sovereignty over the lands that had been ceded to Japan or ruled under its puppet state. Equally important in shaping the continuity in China’s territory in the twentieth century were the survival of the historical and religious ties that the Qing court had built with frontier elites as well as the nationalism of political leaders under the Republic. A more decisive factor, however, had to do with the resilience of the Nationalist state under Chiang Kai-shek during its most difficult years in the late 1930s and early 1940s, when China suffered Japanese invasion and occupation. Without the Nationalist state’s resistance and contribution to the Allies’ war against Japan, China’s recovery of its lost territories from Japan would have been significantly delayed and discounted. Chapter 9 examines the Nationalist regime’s successes and failures in state rebuilding. Guomindang achievements in state-rebuilding were impressive: it eliminated or subjugated all other regional competitors and established a national government in China that was at least nominally unified by the late 1920s; as the only ally fighting Japan in the Far East before the outbreak of the Pacific War in December 1941, it survived Japan’s full-scale invasion in the most difficult years of the War of Resistance; and it fully recovered China’s sovereignty over the lands lost to Japan by the end of World War II, and turned China into one of the five permanent members of the Security Council of the newly founded United Nations, thus paving the way for China to act as a major

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player in world politics in the decades to come. Yet, the Nationalist state’s failures were equally striking. Instead of underscoring the rampancy of corruption and moral deterioration as conventional wisdom suggests, this chapter shows that the GMD regime’s vicissitudes in state-making lay chiefly in the peculiar nature of its fiscal-military formation and identity building, which can be subsumed under the rubric of “semi-centralism.” In sharp contrast with the high level of centralization and unification that the Guomindang force once achieved in its early years in Guangdong, after its unification of China in 1928 Nanjing never succeeded in incorporating the original warlord forces into a unified and centralized state system, not to mention its abilities to penetrate rural society and establish an infrastructure for social control and mobilization. Fiscally, it was increasingly constrained, not only because it prioritized military spending for power consolidation and national defense, but also because, as a national regime, it shouldered the huge burden of supporting the entire civilian personnel. Its failure to establish an efficient, centralized bureaucracy greatly curtailed its abilities at revenue generation, hence the worsening disequilibrium in its fiscal regime that ultimately resulted in bankruptcy. Politically, Chiang Kai-shek based his leadership more on compromises with his rivals than on ideological persuasion and personal charisma. Thus, when the War of Resistance was over and the Civil War broke out, the Guomindang regime was crippled by the defiance of regional Nationalist leaders and the defection of Nationalist soldiers, which, coupled with the bankruptcy of its fiscal system and loss of popular support, led to its collapse in 1949. In sharp contrast, the CCP outcompeted the GMD not only because of the Communists’ abilities at mass mobilization or the incompetence of its enemy, as past studies have shown, but rather because of the convergence of its breakthroughs in identity building, geopolitical setting, and fiscal-military constitution in the 1940s. Chapter 10 demonstrates that the Communist force overcame the problems of regional autonomy (shantouzhuyi or “mountaintop-ism”) that had long been embedded in separate Communist base areas and factionalism (zongpaizhuyi) within the top leadership of the Party, after years of the Rectification Campaign in the early 1940s. As a result, by the end of the War of Resistance, Mao Zedong had established himself as the undisputed leader of the Party, the supreme commander of its military, and the sole ideological authority. All these allowed the CCP to achieve a high level of organizational solidarity and political identity among its members throughout the country and prepared it well to prevail over the Nationalists on the battleground. Geopolitically, the CCP’s situation fundamentally improved after World War II, when Japan was no longer a barrier to China’s state-building and the Soviet Union stepped in as the biggest geopolitical factor to influence China’s domestic politics. Its support turned out to be critical to the CCP, making possible its swift infiltration and eventual occupation of Manchuria, the strategically most decisive area in the Party’s rivalry with the Nationalists. Controlling Manchuria further fundamentally reshaped the CCP’s fiscal and military constitution, from being based on the isolated, poverty-stricken rural areas in northwestern China to fully utilizing the

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resources of the northeast, one of the most productive regions both agriculturally and industrially in the nation. For the first time, the Communists were able to compete with the Nationalists on an equal footing. No less important to the CCP, however, was its mobilizing abilities that it had developed through its incessant penetration into rural communities, from which the CCP generated the manpower and logistic support on a massive scale for its military offensives. What characterized the Communist force, therefore, was a peculiar yet supplementary combination of its newly obtained strength through centralized control of urban manufacturing and financial resources on the one hand and its traditional ability in the decentralized mobilization of rural manpower and labor service on the other. It generated an equilibrium in the CCP’s fiscal constitution that was self-sustainable and highly expandable. The strength of the Communist force in the 1940s, in the final analysis, lay in its “total centralism” or all-round centralization in party organization, fiscal-military institutions, and political identity. It was on the basis of total centralism that the CCP defeated the GMD and built a highly unified and centralized state in 1949.

State transformation unfinished The modern Chinese state that took shape in the mid-twentieth century is best seen as the accumulative result of the three breakthroughs outlined above; namely the birth of an early modern territorial state, its transition to a modern sovereign state, and the making of a unified and centralized state. Each of these three breakthroughs has its own logic and dynamic; together, they made the Chinese path to a modern state distinct from the “normal” transition from empire to nation-state commonly seen in other parts of the world. Instead of building an expansionist empire, what emerged under the Qing by the mid-eighteenth century was an early modern state that laid the territorial and ethnic foundations for the rise of a modern Chinese state. Instead of its colonization by Western powers or splitting into multiple entities upon its demise, China’s transition from an early modern territorial state to a sovereign state in the nineteenth century was characterized by the striking continuities in its territorial and ethnic structures. Finally, instead of embracing Western-style democracy, state-making in Republican China ended in the rise of a unified and centralized state, a result of both regionalized centralism of the late Qing period and centralized regionalism of the early Republican period. The modern state thus made in China by the mid-twentieth century appeared to be at once “big” in size and “strong” in structure. However, despite the establishment of the PRC in 1949, and despite the surprising stability and vitality it has displayed throughout its existence in the past seven decades, state transformation in modern China, a process that began in the mid-seventeenth century, remains unfinished. Chapter 11 identifies three challenges that confront the Chinese state in the twenty-first century: (1) the cultivation of national identity among Han and non-Han peoples, by doing away with the Han-centered construct of national history, cultivating

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Introduction

the awareness of a shared nationhood on the basis of mutual cognition of their respective cultural heritage and distinctiveness, and developing a shared set of interests, values, and national goals on the basis of economic integration; (2) the reconfiguring of China’s relations with the rest of the world, by doing away the victim mindset of the revolutionary age, participating or creating mechanisms of regional integration and global governance to benefit all participating nations, and promoting in the rest of the world its “soft power” or cultural, intellectual, and political creativeness and commitment to the whole of humanity; (3) the rebuilding of its relationship with the people it governs at home, by prioritizing the wellbeing of the people in policy-making and opening the process of governance at all levels to participation by all citizens regardless of their stances. China cannot be a great nation-state with the global standing it deserves unless it tackles these challenges with success in the decades to come.

Notes 1 For an overall analysis of empires and imperial ideologies in world history, see, e.g., Eisenstadt (1963); Doyle (1986); Hobsbawn (1987); Scammell (1989); Pagden (1995, 2003); Howe (2002); Burbank and Cooper (2010). 2 For literature on nationalism and popular sovereignty, see Morgan (1988); Greenfeld (1992); Alter (1994); Brubaker (1996); Gellner (1997, 2006); Hechter (2000); Yack (2001); Anderson (2006); Bourke and Skinner (2015); and Lee (2016). 3 For discussions on the rise of modern nation-states, see Emerson (1960); Mehta (1999); Muthu (2003); Opello (2004); Roeder (2007); Hobsbawn (2012); and Tuck (2015). 4 Recent studies have shown that conquest and colonization were also central to the formation of the major states and kingdoms in medieval and early modern Europe, including England/Britain, France, and Spain, a process not too different from empire-building, although these countries are often invoked as well-defined early nation-states in the literature of nationalism. The differences between empire and nation-state blur when one looks at how nationalist rivalries among the great powers of Europe such as Britain, France, and Germany developed into imperialism in the period from the 1870s to World War I, when they competed for overseas territories and turned each of them into a global empire. Nationalism of this period, therefore, was inherently imperialist, and “imperialism and nationalism were part of the same phenomenon,” as historian Christopher Bayly aptly puts it (Bayly 2004: 230). Despite their expansive look and colonial rule over different parts of the world, all those European powers treated one another as nation-states. “If nationstates can be seen as empires,” Krishan Kumar thus writes, “empires, especially modern empires, can seem no more than nation-states writ large” (Kumar 2010: 133). 5 Not surprisingly, whether “the Chinese communist regime [is] legitimate” constitutes the number one issue when specialists in the field address the various “China questions” (Rudolph and Szonyi 2018). 6 There have been, to be sure, a number of studies on the modern Chinese state from the perspective of long-term developments throughout the Qing and the Republican periods, and each of these works focuses on a particular aspect of state-making, such as political participation and competition (Kuhn 2002), the rise of nationalism as an ideology (Harrison 2001), continuity and transformation in legal institutions (P. Huang 2001, 2010),

Introduction

19

territoriality and frontier building (X. Liu 2010), moral discipline and corruption control (Thornton 2007), and so on. Other scholarly works emphasize a global, comparative approach to understand the patterns of the Chinese experiences in state building, as seen in, for instance, state formation and social resistance (Wong 1997), transformation in fiscal institutions (W. He 2013), or renovations in statecraft (Halsey 2015). There are even more studies on the Chinese state of a given period, such as the high Qing (1644–1840), the late Qing (1840–1911), or the Republican (1912–1949) period, and each of these studies centers on a specific issue, such as ethnic relations, ideology, finance, military systems, and institutional building (to be cited throughout the following chapters). 7 For discussions on macrohistory and its differences from “long-range history” of a given nation or a “total world history,” see Galtung (1997). For an overall review of the literature on macrohistory, see Collins (1999). 8 This generalization about the relationship between socioeconomic conditions and the mechanism of recourse extraction and its consequence on state formation, while helping us to make sense of the historical trajectories of the English state and the major powers in continental Europe, does not fully reflect the actual experiences of individual European states in developing their respective political institutions (Brewer 1989: xiii–xxii; Storrs 2009; Glete 2002: 42–51), nor does the assumption about the correlation between an agrarian or commercialized economy and the different levels of difficulty in resource extraction stand the test of the histories of specific states (Ertman 1997: 10–19).

Part I

The formation of the Qing state

Map I.1 China under the Qing, circa 1800

2

The rise of an early modern territorial state China in the early to mid-Qing period

On the surface of it, the Manchu rulers’ conquests in the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries appeared to be no different from the similar processes of empire-building in the rest of the world. This began with the rise of a tribal people of Jurchen stock in the area along the northern edge of the Korean border in the Changbaishan (Long White Mountain) region in southern Manchuria, their competition with other tribal forces and the unification of the entire Manchuria region under the Later Jin (founded in 1616, renamed “Qing” in 1636), and their subjugation of the 24 Mongol tribes (mainly the Chahar Mongols) south of the Gobi Desert in the 1630s. The next and most important step was their conquest of the Ming and the inauguration of their rule in China in 1644 after relocating their capital city to Beijing. The conquest resumed decades later through a series of expeditions that ended in the incorporation into their territory of Outer Mongolia in the 1690s, Xinjiang in the 1750s, and Tibet from the 1720s through the early 1750s. Not surprisingly, students of Qing history have tended to compare the expansion of frontiers by the Manchus to empire-building in other parts of the world. Evelyn Rawski, for instance, posits that “[t]he Qing conquests in Inner and Central Asia were comparable to the colonizing activities pursued by European nations” and that the so-called Qing formation “bears many of the hallmarks of the early-modern paradigm used to characterize European history in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries” (2004: 217, 220). James Millward (1998), too, describes the Qing conquest of Xinjiang as a sort of imperialism, although he distinguishes it from European colonialism that was associated with economic motives and a missionary impulse. Peter Perdue is most explicit in comparing the Qing expansion to state-building in other parts of the Eurasian continent. Like Rawski, he challenges the conventional wisdom that groups China, India, and the Ottomans as “agrarian empires” and distinguishes them from European “states” that experienced “state building” and led in the making of the early modern and modern world. Central to his argument is the importance of warfare in shaping the structure of the Qing state and thus making China analogous to Western Europe. He writes, “[i]n the early seventeenth century, the Manchus constructed a state apparatus designed for military conquest. Expansion of their state’s territory remained the primary task of the dynasty’s

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The formation of the Qing state

rulers until the mid-eighteenth century” (Perdue 2005: 518). Military mobilization “transformed the fiscal system, commercial networks, communication technology, and local agrarian society.” The Qing state, therefore, “was not an isolated, stable, united ‘Oriental empire’ but an evolving state structure engaged in mobilization for expansionist warfare”; and the empire “did not diverge from Europe” until its territorial expansion came to an end (2005: 527). Was the Qing truly a warlike, expansionist empire comparable to the European military-fiscal states or colonial empires in terms of state formation? If yes, why was the Qing able to keep almost all of its territory until its very end, unlike other empires? If no, what can we draw from this historical process for understanding the nature of the Qing and its implication for the rise of the modern Chinese state? To address these questions, this chapter first looks at the dynamics and motivations of the Qing operations leading to territorial expansion. The rest of the chapter examines the different approaches adopted by the Manchus to govern the frontiers and the interior, and explicates the uniqueness of Qing formation against political traditions in Chinese history.

Frontier expansion To understand the changing dynamics of state formation under the Qing, it is important to distinguish between two different waves of its territorial expansion. During the first wave that ended with the Qing conquest of the Ming dynasty by the 1650s, the driving force behind the war efforts of Manchu warriors was their thirst for land, people, and resources, which made the Qing expansion during this period essentially no different from the empire-building activities in the rest of the Eurasian continent. However, after its control of the interior provinces in the mid-seventeenth century, the Qing lost the momentum to expand. For nearly half a century from the 1640s, its Inner Asian frontiers remained largely unchanged, when its goals were to preserve what it had conquered and to revive the suzerain-tributary relationships that had existed between the Ming and Inner Asian tribal states. There was no sign that the Qing rulers wanted to expand its frontiers in the north, northwest, or southwest any further. It was not until the late 1690s that another wave of expansion started, resulting in the incorporation of Outer Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang into its territory by the 1750s.

Geopolitical strategy and military campaigns The key to understanding the Manchus’ engagement in the second wave of expansions after 1690 lies in the Qing dynasty’s new geopolitical strategy, which the Manchus formed after conquering the interior provinces in the 1640s. At the core of this strategy was their alliance with the southern Mongols, who had enabled their joint conquest of the Ming and remained critical to the safety of the Capital City (Beijing) after the conquest because of Inner Mongolia’s geographic proximity to it. Next to the Manchu–Mongol alliance in strategic

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importance was the Qing court’s close ties with Tibet, which permitted its role as the supreme patron of Lamaism or Tibetan Buddhism, a religion that was central to the spiritual life of both Tibetans and Mongols and therefore fundamental to the Manchu–Mongol alliance as well. The Qing launched a series of military expeditions in the late 1690s and afterwards precisely because it faced a new threat, the invasion by Zunghar Mongols west of the Gobi Desert into Outer Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, and Tibet in succession, which challenged the core strategic interest of the Qing. Therefore, unlike its conquests before the mid-seventeenth century that were offensive and expansionist in nature, military operations in the second phase were defensive at the beginning and increasingly preemptive later; its inclusion of Xinjiang, Outer Mongolia, and Tibet into its territory was an unexpected outcome of its expeditions against the Zunghars, rather than the original objective of its war efforts. The second wave of the Qing expansion involved several steps. The first was incorporating into its territory the areas inhabited by the Khalkha Mongols north of the Gobi Desert in 1691. Right after the inauguration of his reign in Beijing, the Shunzhi emperor (r. 1644–1661) had shown his intention to unite with the Khalkha Mongols on the ground: that both the Mongols and the Manchus had “long belonged to one family” (su wei yi jia) or that both had “long belonged to one single entity” (yi ti zhi guo) (Qimudedaoerji 1998), repeating the same appeal that had been used by his grandfather Nurhaci (1559–1626) in 1620 to win over the Khalkhas in resisting the Ming (Elliott 2001: 69). But the early Qing rulers were generally satisfied with maintaining their nominal suzerainty over the Khalkhas despite the repeated defiance by the latter. The Khalkhas saw no necessity to seek protection from the Qing until 1688, when they suffered fatal attacks from the Zunghars, the strongest of the four major Oirat Mongol tribes that dominated the vast area west of the Gobi Desert and who had for long claimed their tributary status from the Qing. Led by Galdan, the Zunghars’ invasion also constituted an immediate threat to the Qing. After defeating the Khalkha Mongols, the Zunghars moved southward, invading the land of the southern Mongols until they suffered defeat by the Qing force at Ulan Butong in 1690 (Wang Sizhi 2003, 1: 350–360; Perdue 2005: 155–157). In 1691, the Khalkha Mongols formally joined the Qing, to be grouped with its new leagues and banners, as were the southern Mongols; Outer Mongolia thus was fully integrated into the Qing. To completely eliminate the Zunghars from the steppes south and north of the Gobi Desert, Kangxi personally led three campaigns in 1696 and 1697, forcing the enemy to withdraw from these areas. The next step was the Qing’s control of Tibet after defeating the occupying Zunghars in 1718 and 1720. For decades since its rule in Beijing, the Qing court had only maintained a nominal relationship with the highland, content with its role in endorsing the spiritual supremacy of the Dalai Lama and the administrative power of the Khoshut khans of the Oirat Mongols in Tibet. Conflict developed, however, between the ruling Mongol khans (especially the last one, Lhazang Khan, who had been backed by the Qing) on the one hand and

26

The formation of the Qing state

the Tibetan regent (Sanggye Gyatso), who acted on behalf of the Dalai Lama, and local Gelug abbots on the other. The Qing court did not interfere until 1717 when Zunghars invaded Tibet at the appeal of the Tibetan abbots, killed Lhazang Khan, and put the Dalai Lama into custody. In response, Emperor Kangxi launched two campaigns in 1717. After expelling the Zunghars from Tibet in 1720, the Qing officially established its protectorate over Tibet by sending a garrison to Lhasa, setting up a government there consisting of Tibetan ministers appointed by the Qing court, and in 1728 sending a royal commissioner to directly supervise the government and mediate between the Tibetan ministers (Zhao Yuntian 1995: 40–46; Goldstein 1997: 13–15; van Schaik 2011: 138–141). The most important step was of course the Qing’s eventual subjugation of the Zunghars. Believing that “its land, if annexed, is not suitable for cultivation, and its people, if obtained, is not fit for exploitation” (bing qi di buzu yi genzhong, de qi ren buzu yi qushi), Emperor Kangxi treated the Oirats, as well as the Khalkhas north of the Gobi Desert, as peoples different from the Southern Mongols. He intended them to keep their status as tributaries of the Qing, as long as they stayed where they were and did not challenge the Qing or its allies, primarily the southern Mongols and Tibetans (QSL, Kangxi 227: 45–10-yiji). He even tolerated the claims from the Oirats and the Khalkhas for being equal to the Qing, instructing, for instance, in 1682 his envoys to tolerate Mongol etiquette when received by the Oirat and Khalkha leaders, without insisting on the humbling ritual on the part of the latter appropriate for their tributary status (QSL, Kangxi 102: 21–7-yimao). Later, Kangxi decided to launch several campaigns between 1690 and 1697 against the Zunghars only when the latter marched eastward, invading the lands of the Mongols north and south of the Gobi Desert and thus posing a direct threat to the Qing as mentioned above. He launched a second round of campaigns against the Zunghars only after the latter invaded Tibet in 1716 and thus threatened the Qing’s rights over the highland. Afterwards, the Qing sought to restore the traditional relationship with the Zunghars, accepting the Zunghar Khanate as a tributary (zhigong zhi guo or nagong zhi guo) to the Qing while maintaining trade relations and a peaceful border between the two sides (QSL, Kangxi 143: 28–12-xinwei). In other words, Kangxi’s actions again the Zunghars were largely reactive and defensive; he showed no intention of attacking the homeland of the Zunghars and completely rooting them out. However, the Qing did change its strategy from a passive one into a preemptive type during the reigns of Yongzheng and Qianlong. Other than Galdan Tseren’s (head of the Zunghar khanate) refusal to return Lobzang Danjin, a Khoshut prince who had rebelled against the Qing in 1723, Emperor Yongzheng experienced no severe provocation from the Zunghars, and his view of Zungharia was no different from his father’s: “its land, even if obtained, is not up for cultivation, and its people, even if conquered, is not up for employment” (de qi tu buzu yi gengyun, de qi min buzu yi qushi) (QSL, Yongzheng 4: 7–2-kuiji). Nevertheless, he insisted on an expedition against them, which did

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happen in 1729, believing that, if not eliminated, the Zunghars “would constitute a huge harm to all Mongols and could become a potential threat to the state” (ibid.). Eliminating the potential threat from the Zunghars was especially important for the Qing to secure its control of Tibet. For Emperor Yongzheng, the question of Tibet would not be settled as long as the Zunghars remain to be eliminated. If the Tibetan affairs cannot be properly handled, all of the Mongols would remain undecided and skeptical. This is really a potential worry of the state, which matters to the well-being of the state and the people. Shenzu [Emperor Kangxi] knew well the whole issue and its implications, and was determined to stabilize Tibet by eliminating the Zunghars. How insightful Shenzu was! Without any other options, he could only take this action in response [to the Zunghars’ threats] (budeyi, biying juzhao yi). (XZDA, 2: 395–396) Unfortunately, Yongzheng’s campaign resulted in an unexpected loss at Hoton Nor in 1731; the emperor saved face only after a Khalkha cavalry annihilated more than ten thousand Zunghar troops in a single battle at Guangxiansi (or Erdeni Zu) in 1732 (Feng Erkang 2003: 254–263; Perdue 2005: 252–255). Emperor Qianlong continued the preemptive strategy. Taking advantage of the recurrent internal strife among the Zunghar nobles contending for the khanship after the death of Galdan Tseren, Qianlong launched a campaign in 1755 that defeated the forces of Dawaachi, the most powerful contender, captured him, and further defeated the forces of Amursanaa in 1756–1757, another contender who once sided with but quickly rebelled against the Qing (Zhou Yuanlian 2003: 131–186; Perdue 2005: 274–289). To rationalize his invasion into the homeland of the Zunghars, Emperor Qianlong refuted a shared assumption among the “mediocre folk” (yongzhong) – including his grandfather in fact – who had thought the Zunghars to be a people “who showed no fear when confronted with the might [of the Qing] and no gratitude when granted favor, and whose land is uncultivable and whose people is unruly” (wei zhi buzhi wei, hui zhi buzhi huai, di buke geng, min buke chen); for him, the Zunghars had to be subjugated because, in his words, “our country encompasses all of the Mongols; how could then the Zunghars alone be left outside the kingly civilization (wanghua)?” (cf. Zhang Yuxin 1995: 369). Not surprisingly, after defeating the Zunghars, Qianlong incorporated the entire area inhabited by the Oirats into the formal territory of the Qing, deeming this area to be “no different from the interior provinces in all institutions and regulations” (yiqie zhidu zhangcheng yu neidi shengfen wuyi) (QSL, Qianlong 722: 29–11-wushen). In addition to the military expeditions outlined above, the Qing also engaged in campaigns against the Uyhgur Muslims, the Tibetans, the Miao, and Burma to consolidate its frontiers in the northwest and southwest. But the expeditions against the Zunghar Mongols turned out to be the most decisive in expanding

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The formation of the Qing state

the territory of the Qing. One and a quarter centuries later, when justifying his proposal of defending Xinjiang against Yaqub Bek’s invasion (see Chapter 4), Governor General Zuo Zongtang well explained the significance of the campaigns against the Zunghars and the strategic importance of Xinjiang to the Qing’s safety: The reason to emphasize Xinjiang is to safeguard Mongolia; to safeguard Mongolia is to defend the capital. If the northwestern frontiers remain complete like the fingers connected with the arm, then no cracks will be left [for enemies] to take a chance. If Xinjiang is not stabilized, Mongolia will be insecure, the borders of Shaanxi, Gansu, and Shanxi will be exposed to frequent intrusions, causing endless threats to our defense, and the posts and mountains directly north [of the capital city] will not be at rest. The reason why “our dynasty, with Beijing as the capital and Mongolia to surround it in the north, has no alarms and threats for a century and several decades” was precisely because of the feats of “our ancestral reigns” that “destroyed the Zunghars, pacified the Muslims, explored Xinjiang, and established military administrative authorities there” (ZZT, 6: 701–702).

Limits to Qing expansion It is worth emphasizing, however, that in the course of military expeditions into the northwestern frontiers, the Qing court showed no intention of expanding its territory any further than the land of the Zunghars. The Manchu rulers generally limited their expansion to areas inhabited by the Mongols and Tibetans who practiced Lamaism as well as areas of different ethnic and religious backgrounds that had been controlled by the Mongols, and they showed no interest in further expanding the territory of the Qing into the land beyond these areas. From Emperor Qianlong’s point of view, the Zunghars had been part of the Mongol people (yi Menggu tonglei) and subject to the rule of the Yuan Dynasty (1206–1368) (ben you Yuan zhi chenpu); it was only during the Ming that the Zunghars withdrew from China and constituted a constant threat to the Ming frontiers. Therefore, it was right for him to terminate the Zunghars’ state of “staying lonely outside [China] and resisting civilization for generations” (he zi waixie, shushi genhua) (QSL, Qianlong 496: 20–10-wuwu). In sharp contrast, his attitude towards the Kazakhs was totally different. Having once sheltered Amursana, the head of the rebelling Zunghar force, and afraid of the Qing force’s retaliation in its pursuit of the Zunghar chief, the Kazakh Khan Ablai proposed submitting the entire land of the Kazakhs to the Qing in August 1757. Qianlong rejected this. For him, the Kazakhs “had never been in communication with China since ancient times” and were different from the Zunghars who had been part of the Mongols and once ruled by the Yuan. In other words, the Kazakhs had always been “outsiders” to China, whereas the Zunghars had once been insiders and therefore they had to be incorporated into

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the dynasty of China once again. The emperor, therefore, instructed the Kazakhs to remain a tributary state of China, in the manner of states such as Annam, Liuqiu, and Siam, to which the Qing court would “neither grant official titles nor demand taxes” (bu shou guanjue, bu ze gongfu) (QSL, Qianlong 555: 23–1-bingchen), instead of being incorporated into the Qing’s territory and turned into provinces and counties of interior China or into the banners of the Qing frontiers such as the land of the Khalkha Mongols, to which the emperor often referred as “our Khalkha tribes” (wo Kaerka zhubu) (e.g., QSL, Qianlong 526: 21–11-genshen) (see also Guo Chengkang 2005). To recapitulate, unlike the territorial expansion of other empires driven primarily by a religious cause or the greed for wealth, the Qing’s wars against the Zunghars were largely defensive; a religious war or the thirst for more people and land were never part of its plans. After all, the Manchu rulers of China did not accept and promote any religion to legitimate their regime, and the 18 inland provinces were large and affluent enough to generate the revenues needed by the Qing rulers to maintain the state apparatus. Thus, instead of demanding payment of taxes or tributes in substantial amounts from the newly established frontier, the Qing government subsidized Xinjiang as much as 1 million taels of silver each year in the eighteenth century (Millward 1998: 58–61). The ultimate goal of state formation under the Qing, in the final analysis, was not unlimited expansion of territory and subjugation of the population for the purpose of enlarging the sources of state revenue; instead, it was driven primarily by the imperial rulers’ pursuit of geopolitical security.

China enlarged and redefined In the course of frontier expansion, the Qing rulers redefined the concept of “Middle Kingdom” (Zhongguo, Huaxia, or Zhongxia) and its relationship with the peoples outside it. Since the early days of Chinese civilization, the rulers of Zhongguo, or the land inhabited by the Han Chinese, had assumed their cultural superiority over the surrounding barbarians (yi or di, or yidi). The area inhabited by the “civilized” (hua or xia, or huaxia), mostly the Han people, was divided into commanderies (later provinces) and counties under the junxian system, and they were subject to the direct control of a bureaucratic hierarchy, primarily through tax collection and lawsuit adjudication. The surrounding tributary states, for their part, were only expected to acknowledge the suzerainty of the emperor of the Middle Kingdom through their periodical tributary visits to his court and the subsequent performance of the ritual of kowtow to the emperor. The emperor, therefore, was supposed to be the ruler of “All under Heaven” (tianxia), whose relationship with the surrounding tributary states was likened to that between the sovereign and the subject. It is also important to note that, for Confucian adherents dating back to Mencius (372–289 BC) who underscored cultural identities in defining different peoples, the boundary between the civilized and the uncivilized was never fixed, and it was by no means defined merely by ethnicity; whether a people were civilized or not

30

The formation of the Qing state

depended on their acceptance and practice of the cultural norms and political institutions prevailing in the Middle Kingdom, a process known in Confucian discourse as “kingly acculturation” (wanghua). Therefore, the yi (barbarians) could become the xia (the civilized) if they were assimilated, and, as a result, their land could be part of the Middle Kingdom, and the xia could degenerate into the yi if they lost the cultural identities of the civilized (Zhang Qixiong 2010: 133). After conquering the Ming, the Manchu rulers inherited from their predecessors the Chinese notion of All under Heaven, believing that the All under Heaven is the All under Heaven of all those who are under Haven and it is not to be privately controlled by those from any part of it, be they from the north or south or from the interior or exterior of it (fu tianxia zhe, tianxiaren zhi tianxia ye, fei nanbei zhongwai suo de er si). (QSL, Qianlong 1225: 50–2-xinchou) In other words, the Manchus as a people from the exterior had equal rights to claim their ruling status as the Han Chinese from the interior. Without having to deny their origins as the yi, the Manchu rulers repeatedly justified their legitimacy to reign in Zhongguo by stressing the interchangeability between xia and yi, and they were more than eager to prove their legitimacy before the Han elites by showing their commitment to “kingly acculturation” (wanghua) or Sinicization and therefore their attainment of the identity as a new member of the xia, which did not have to be achieved at the expense of their original ethnic identities. It was precisely for the purpose of legitimating its role as the ruling dynasty of All under Heaven that the Qing inherited the tributary system from the preceding Ming dynasty and demanded the former tributaries of the Ming perform exactly the same rituals to the Qing court as they had done to the Ming, as evidenced by its dealing with the Koreans after subjugating the latter in 1637 (Rawski 2010: 80). Where the Qing rulers truly departed from the traditional Sino-centric notion, however, is their redefinition of Zhongguo (or Zhongtu) in the course of the empire’s westward expansion. As Emperor Yongzheng stated clearly in 1729 when launching an expedition against the Zunghars: Since our dynasty came to dominate the Zhongtu (the Middle Kingdom) and to be the lord of All under Heaven, even the Mongol tribes of extreme distance were all incorporated into the domain. The territory of Zhongguo thus has been expanded widely and much farther, which is indeed a huge blessing for the people of Zhongguo. (QSL, Yongzheng 86: 7–9-kuiwei) Although Yongzheng’s expedition failed, his redefinition of Zhongguo nevertheless influenced the perception of China by the following rulers. It is in this context that a statement made by Emperor Qianlong in 1755 can be properly

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understood. To justify his military campaign that ultimately defeated and eliminated the Zunghars, the emperor claimed that “the Zhongxia of the imperial Qing” was not the same as “the Zhongxia of the Han, the Tang, the Song, and the Ming” (QSL, Qianlong 496: 20–10-wuwu). For him, the territory of the Middle Kingdom encompassed not only the 18 provinces of the Han Chinese, but also the lands inhabited by the Manchus and the Mongols, which had been grouped into the various “banners” (qi) and under the effective administration of the Qing court. The old divide between the “inner” (nei) and “outer” (wai) by the Great Wall made no more sense and yielded to a united China (Elliott 2001: 359).

Governing the frontiers The formation of the Qing state, therefore, is more than military conquest and territorial expansion. Equally challenging to the Qing rulers was how to govern the vast land comprising different populations, cultures, and religions. Whether or not the imperial state could keep the different parts together and perpetuate itself depended chiefly on the rulers’ abilities to legitimize their rule among the diverse groups of people and cultivating their loyalty to the imperial court, rather than the use of coercion and violence over the subjugated peoples.

From equals to subordinates: the frontiers under the Qing In the course of frontier expansion, the Manchu rulers changed their relationship with the Mongols and Tibetans from one of equals in hostility against, or in alliance with, each other to one of inequality, in which the Mongols and Tibetans were submissive to the Qing court. Take the Mongols north and west of the desert, for example. Before it conquered the Mongols of these areas, the Qing court treated them as outside its territory and separate from the southern Mongols; it was generally content with the relationship with the Mongol tribes that it had inherited from the Ming, in which the latter claimed themselves as tributaries of the Qing court. Having been a tribal state itself before conquering China, the Qing at times even tolerated the Mongol tribes’ claim of being equal to it and the subsequent treatment of the envoys of the Qing court with “Mongolian etiquette” (Mengguli) or “Mongolian practices” (Menggu zhi li) that bespoke of equality between the two sides, instead of the ritual appropriate for their tributary status (QSL 102: Kangxi 21–7-yimao; Kangxi 22–7-wuxu). The same relationship existed between the Qing and Tibet before the 1720s, in which the former claimed its political supremacy over the latter but tolerated a de facto equality between the two (Zhang Yongjiang 2001: 89, 92). After the conquest was completed, however, the Manchu rulers transformed their relationship with the Mongols and Tibetans from a horizontal one into a vertical one that entailed a political and moral hierarchy between the center and the periphery. Epitomizing this transition was the Khalkha Mongol nobles’ performance of “three prostrations and nine kowtows” (san bai jiu kou) before the

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The formation of the Qing state

Qing emperor or his envoys after 1691 (QSL, Kangxi 151: 30–5-dingkai). This transition was also seen in the relationship between the Qing court and Tibetan leaders. While Manchu nobles suggested Emperor Shunzhi travel to the border area to personally welcome the visiting Dalai Lama in 1652, the Han ministers objected on the ground that this proposal contradicted the emperor’s role as “the lord of all states under heaven” (tianxia guojia zhi zhu) (QSL, Shunzhi 68: 9–9-renshen). Although the Qing court imposed on the frontiers a hierarchy that had its origins in the Confucian moral order and ritualistic traditions unique to the Chinese political universe, it avoided extending to the frontiers the administrative system of interior provinces; nor did it propagate Confucianism among the peoples of the frontiers (Rawski 2004: 229). Instead, it created a separate administrative system that allowed the Mongol and Tibetan leaders a degree of autonomy in managing domestic administrative affairs while asserting its political supremacy over the latter by stationing its troops at the frontiers and appointing or authenticating their spiritual and administrative chiefs. Upon their submission to the Qing one after another, the Mongol tribes were grouped into banners (qi) in the Manchu style in the south (49 banners), north (86 banners), and west (16 banners) of the Gobi Desert and in Qinghai, with the leaders of individual tribes being officially appointed as the heads of the banners (known as the jasagh or zhasake in Chinese), directly under the jurisdiction of the Court of Frontier Affairs (Lifanyuan, traditionally translated as Court of Colonial Affairs) in the Capital City (Beijing). Above the banners were the larger regional leagues (meng). The Court not only appointed and supervised the heads of the banners and leagues, but also demarcated the boundaries between different banners and installed border inspection stations (karan, or kalun, and ebo) staffed with patrol soldiers to prevent the tribes and herds of each banner from transgressing into the pastures of neighboring banners.1 An important purpose behind the Qing court’s division of the vast areas of the Mongols into separate banners and leagues was “to dissipate their power through multiple partitioning” (zhong jian er fen qi shi) (Liu Yuewu 2009: 65). The Mongol nobles who were appointed as the heads of the banners and leagues were independent from one another and each answered directly to the Court of Frontier Affairs; therefore, it was difficult for them to act as a group to challenge Beijing. To safeguard the borderlands and ensure the Mongol elites’ subordination, the Qing government installed garrison troops under the commanders of different ranks in the land inhabited by the Mongols, including the Uliyasutai (Uliastai) General as the supreme military and administrative leader as well as two subsidiary ministers stationed in Khobdo (Kebuduo) and Kuren (Kulun or Ulan Bator) to oversee Outer Mongolia, and the Ili (Yili) General to oversee the Mongols west of the Gobi Desert. The Qing court’s treatment of the Tibetans was somewhat different. After expelling the Zunghar invaders from Tibet in 1720 through two military expeditions, the Qing put Tibet under its direct control by stationing a permanent garrison in Lhasa and appointing an Imperial Commissioner in Tibet to

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supervise the newly organized government, known as the Kashag (gaxia). In 1793, the Imperial Commissioner was further granted the power to supervise the religious ceremony of selecting the new “living Buddha” (the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama). But the Qing court allowed greater autonomy in Tibet than in Mongolia and Xinjiang, as best seen in the fact that it never attempted to divide the highland into administrative subunits under the direct supervision of the Court of Frontier Affairs as it did to Mongolia (Zhang Yongjiang 2001: 129); instead, a unitary secular Tibetan government was retained to govern the entire highland. The different treatments of Mongolia and Tibet reflected the Qing court’s different purposes on the two frontiers. It had to put Mongolia, especially Inner Mongolia, under its close and effective control because of its geographic proximity to the Capital City and therefore its strategic importance to the Qing’s security. Tibet, on the other hand, was distant from the political center; fragmenting the highland into smaller units and putting them under the Qing court’s direct control was strategically unnecessary, geographically inconvenient, and fiscally uneconomical. Therefore, the imperial court allowed the unitary Tibetan government to retain a high degree of autonomy in ruling the entire highland. In addition, after suppressing the Muslim rebels in 1759, the Qing government put the Uighurs in different localities in southern Xinjiang under the leadership of the hereditary beg (boke) of different ranks (328 in total), who were subject to the jurisdiction of the Court of Frontier Affairs as well (Wang Dongping 2005). To prevent the Muslims from becoming too autonomous and powerful, the Qing court prohibited the Islamic priests (Akhund) from interfering with the administrative tasks of the begs, a policy that contrasted sharply with its allowing Lamaist leaders to have administrative power in Tibet and Mongolia. It also enforced the policies of segregating the Han immigrants from the Muslims and prohibiting their intermarriage to avoid potential conflicts between the two populations (Yang Shu and Cai Wei 2008). All of the Mongol leaders of the banners and leagues as well as the Uighur begs had to pay a mandatory visit to the imperial court in December annually (known as chaojin or nianban); failure to personally report to the court would subject them to the penalty of stipend suspension. The Dalai and Panchen Lamas in Tibet had the obligation of sending their envoys to Beijing every two years (see Zhang Shuangzhi 2010).

Lamaism as an Inner Asian denominator For the Qing rulers, Tibet was important not only because it served as a geographic buffer between the interior provinces and the outside world beyond Tibet but more importantly because it was home to Lamaism; patronizing and promoting Lamaism turned out to be critical for the Manchus to control Inner and Outer Mongolia. But the Manchu elites’ attitude towards Lamaism was complex and changed over time. During the Later Jin and the early days of the Qing, the Jurchen/Manchu leaders were actually disinterested

34

The formation of the Qing state

in, and even repelled by, Lamaism, believing it to be responsible for the decline of the Mongols because of their indulgence in the “wasteful” and “deceptive” practices of the religion (Shang Hongkui 1982: 109). Later, Hong Taiji (1592–1643) became enthusiastic in building close ties with the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama by sending his emissaries to Tibet and inviting the Tibetan Lamaist delegates to Shengjing (today’s Shenyang, capital city of the Qing before 1644) only after he saw Lamaism as an effective tool to win support from the Mongols and form an alliance for his objective of conquering the Ming. After the conquest, Emperor Shunzhi continued the policy by inviting the fifth Dalai Lama to Beijing and treating him in a lavish manner in 1652, as mentioned above, for the purpose of stabilizing the alliance with the southern Mongols and winning over the defiant Khalkha Mongols north of the desert. The next year, the emperor granted the Dalai Lama an elaborate honorific title upon his return to Tibet, which established the precedent of the Dalai Lama of following generations to receive their post officially from the Qing court. The emperor’s gesture as “the Lord Patronizing the Dharma” (hu fa zhi zhu) turned out to be very effective. The Khalkha nobles, as devout believers in Lamaism, soon established their tributary relationship with the Qing and committed to providing the Qing court with the “tribute of nine whites” (jiu bai zhi gong, including one white camel and eight white horses). Later, emperor Kangxi adopted the tactic of “divide and rule” towards the spiritual leaders of the Tibetans and Mongols to prevent Lamaism from developing into a unitary religious organization so as to compete with Beijing for dominance in Tibet and Mongolia. He deliberately elevated the status of Zanabazar (1635–1723), the first Jebtsundamba Khutuktu or spiritual head of the Gelug lineage of Tibetan Buddhism among the Khalkha Mongols, to counterbalance the influence of the Dalai Lama, an action that led to resentment from the Zunghar Mongols under Galdan, who was backed by the fifth Dalai Lama, hence their invasion of the land of the Khalkas in 1688; and Zanabazar turned out to be a key figure in leading the Khalkha Mongols to join the Qing in 1691 (Shang Hongkui 1982: 110–111).2 It is also worth noting that, despite their prolonged confrontation with the Qing, the Zunghars, too, distinguished clearly between Russia and the Qing on a religious basis; they tenaciously resisted Russian encroachment, while intermittently maintaining a tributary relationship with the Qing. Galdan thus claimed in 1688 and 1690, even when fighting with the Qing forces, that “Zhonghua and us share the same tradition” (Zhonghua yu wo yidao tonggui) (QSL, Kangxi 146: 29–6-jiashen) and that “I have no intention to alienate myself from the emperor of China and the Dharma of the Dalai Lama” (QSL, Kangxi 137: 27–11-jiashen; see also Guo Chengkang 2005: 8). In fact, part of the reason behind the military confrontation between Galdan and Kangxi, as indicated earlier, had to do with their competition for influencing Lamaism through different religious leaders and thereby building their political dominance. Lamaism, therefore, played a key role in the formation of the Qing state from the late seventeen to the mid-eighteenth centuries. For the Qing court, revering the spiritual leaders of Lamaism and maintaining close ties with them was the

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most effective way to win over the Mongols and Tibetans. But the Manchu rulers’ approach to Lamaism was pragmatic; they needed it only when they found it useful in frontier-building. They did not believe in Lamaism themselves and did not promote the same religion among the Manchus; later, they lost much of their interest in patronizing Lamaism and instead became increasingly restrictive of it after the dynasty was consolidated. The Qing court deliberately encouraged the different traditions of Tibetan Buddhism to grow in different regions and thereby to weaken the influence of the Dalai Lama, who had once been the supreme spiritual leader over all of Tibet and Mongolia in the first few decades of the Qing (Liu Yuewu 2009: 65–66; Zhao Yuntian 1984, 1995: 55–56). Hence the emergence of four major tulkus or “Living Buddhas” in the eighteenth century, namely the Dalai Lama over the Lhasa-centered Front Tibet, the Panchen Lama over the Shigatse-centered Rear Tibet, the Jebtsundamba Khutuktu in Khalkha (Outer) Mongolia, and the Cang-skya Khutuktu in Inner Mongolia (Yuan Senpo 1996; Xing and Chen 2010). To sum up, not all of the Inner Asian frontiers were equally important to the Qing court. For the Manchu rulers, their alliance with the southern Mongols and therefore the security of Inner Mongolia were most important. Next to Inner Mongolia was Tibet, whose security and submission to the imperial court were critical to its control of the southern Mongols because of Tibetan Buddhism being the spiritual tie between the Manchu and Mongol elites. Finally, Xinjiang and Outer Mongolia were important only to the extent that their stability or instability directly affected the security of Tibet and Inner Mongolia. At any rate, all of these frontiers served one purpose for the Qing, that is, providing geopolitical security for the dynasty. In relation to the interior, their roles were instrumental and indeed peripheral; the core of the Qing dynasty remained the interior provinces, which mattered the most to its legitimacy, wealth, and longevity. How to govern the land of the Han Chinese, therefore, was the most challenging task to the Qing rulers.

Governing the interior provinces The ideological, geopolitical, and social contexts The Qing differed from any prior Chinese dynasties of non-Han origins in that, before relocating its capital city to Beijing, it had been under the influence of Chinese culture, as seen in their veneration of Confucius (Shang Hongkui 1982: 107–108), acceptance of the Chinese notion of All under Heaven, and definition of itself as a periphery in relation to the dynasty that ruled the interior provinces (Guo Chengkang 2005: 2–3). Nevertheless, the biggest challenge to the Qing rulers after conquering the interior was that they were to rule a population far outnumbering the Manchus and having shown an unusual ability of assimilation in history, partly because of the sheer size of the population and partly because of the superiority of the civilization it had created. They thus endeavored to maintain the ethnic, linguistic, and cultural distinctions of the

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The formation of the Qing state

Manchus as a privileged ruling group, while making great efforts to legitimate and perpetuate its rule in China by proving its authenticity as the successor to the Ming, with the Mandate of Heaven to rule the country. To that end, it inherited from the Ming a centralized bureaucracy to rule the Han people and embraced the Confucian ideology that undergirded the government system. As gestures to confirm this legitimacy, the inaugural Emperor Shunzhi was enthroned in typical Chinese style by personally presiding over a ceremony to offer sacrifices to Heaven and Earth, a mausoleum was constructed to duly rebury the last emperor of the Ming, and an honorary title was granted to the descendant of Confucius. Later, to prove himself as an authentic ruler of China, Emperor Kangxi paid a personal visit in 1684 to the Temple of Confucius in Qufu and performed the ritual of “three prostrations and nine kowtows” to the statue of Confucius, rather than merely “two prostrations and six kowtows” as Han Chinese emperors had done prior to the Qing, and he performed the same ritual to the founding emperor of the Ming during five out of his six southern tours to show his proper respect to, and inheritance of his rulership in China from, the preceding dynasty (Shang Hongkui 1982: 109). But the Qing did not simply duplicate the Ming. Aside from a greatly expanded territory, a changed geopolitical setting, and many administrative innovations, the biggest difference between the two dynasties lay in the Qing’s non-Chinese origin and the antagonism between the conquerors and the conquered throughout the history of the dynasty, which constituted the biggest threat to the Qing court. Indeed, most of the rebellions in the interior provinces appeared as anti-Manchu revolts by the Han Chinese, including the rebellions by the Three Feudatories in the 1670s, the White Lotus Sect in the 1790s, the Triads throughout the Qing, more recently the Taipings in the mid-nineteenth century, and, finally, the revolutionaries in the early twentieth century. But in most of the eighteenth century, the Qing rulers successfully handled Manchu– Han relations, established the legitimacy of the Manchu rule, and minimized the cost of maintaining peace in China. The key to their success lay in the Qing court’s policy towards the gentry elites in Chinese society. It ruthlessly persecuted disloyal literati through the so-called “literary cases” (wenziyu). Meanwhile, to win over the literati, it revived the civil service examination, offered them high-ranking positions in the government, and entrusted them with the task of compiling encyclopedic works. More importantly, to enhance the Qing’s legitimacy in Chinese society, the Manchu elites not only embraced Chinese culture and therefore turned out to be much more Sinicized than any preceding non-Chinese regimes in China (Ho 1998), but they also appeared to be more enthusiastic and sincere than preceding Han Chinese dynasties in promoting Confucianism as the ideology of the state. For Confucian elites as well as Qing rulers, the best way to practice Confucianism was to implement administrative policies that best manifested the Confucian tenet of “benevolent government” (renzheng); light taxation, therefore, became a sacred principle that the Qing rulers faithfully adhered to throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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But the Qing’s ability to implement this policy rested on the following two preconditions. The first is a favorable geopolitical setting. After subduing the Three Feudatories in 1681 and incorporating Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet into its territory, the Qing emerged as a dominant power in the Far East, where no surrounding state could challenge its supremacy. In the absence of severe threats outside the empire and content with its supremacy over the neighboring states under the tributary system, the Qing rulers saw no reason to enlarge or upgrade its standing army. In most of the eighteenth century, the size of the standing army was limited to a total of approximately 800,000 to 850,000 men, including 600,000 of the “Green Standards” and 200,000 to 250,000 of the “Eight Banners” (Peng Zeyi 1990: 55; Chen Feng 1992: 21–23, 97), which only accounted for an insignificant fraction of the total population in China (0.4% around 1700 and 0.19% around 1800) (Ho 1959). The government’s regular expenditures on the military, ranging from 13 million taels per year in the 1720s to 17 million in the 1790s (Chen Feng 1992: 194), again accounted for a negligible percentage of China’s total economic output (1.24% in the 1720s and 0.85% in the 1790s). Although the annual expense of maintaining the regular forces accounted for 58–65% of the Qing government’s total expenditure, it was well within affordability. Staying at the level of about 17 million taels, they remained largely unchanged from the 1730s through the 1840s. The second precondition is ethnic homogeneity – hence the overall absence of social disorder engendered by ethnic or religious differences – within the interior that minimized the cost of government, and the large population of interior provinces that provided a huge tax base. All these made it possible for the Qing to tax the land at a very low rate; they also made the Qing different from any of the preceding Chinese dynasties; the latter, despite their embrace of the Confucian principle of benevolent government, did not hesitate to increase the tax burden on the ruled to sustain huge military spending when confronted with threats from the neighboring tribal states, as seen in the late Ming dynasty.

Low taxation The Qing declared its commitment to the policy of “light taxation” (qingyao bofu) from the very beginning of its rule in China.3 By and large, the burden of land taxes under the Qing from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries was light and decreased in relation to land yield. Table 2.1 shows the total amount of land taxes that were actually collected (including the illegal or informal surcharges that accounted for about 25% of the legal tax liabilities, see Yeh-chien Wang 1973, Table 4.1, note d). As shown, after the Qing suppressed internal revolts, the tax burden quickly decreased to less than 10% of the gross amount of land yields in 1685, about 5% in 1724, less than 3.5% in the late eighteenth, and below 3% in the early nineteenth century. Another way to gauge the level of tax burden is to compare the total amount of all taxes that were actually collected (including both the direct taxes on land and adult males and the indirect taxes on commodities and transactions) to the total agricultural and industrial output. Again, we find in Table 2.2 a similar

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The formation of the Qing state Table 2.1 Land tax as a percentage of land yield, 1652–1820 (in 1,000 silver taels) Year

Land taxes collecteda

Land yieldb

Tax burden (%)

1652 1685 1724 1766 1784 1820

49,795 38,809 44,550 57,360 54,348 63,478

315,991 415,359 890,648 1,783,965 1,646,449 2,313,710

15.75 9.35 5.01 3.21 3.30 2.74

Notes: a Land taxes in 1652 include (1) diding: 21,261,383 taels in silver and 5,739,424 dan in grain (He Ping 1998: 84) (the payment in grain equals 18,574,746 taels, converted at 3.30 taels per dan), totaling 39,836,129 taels; and (2) informal surcharges: 9,959,032 taels (25% of diding; the same rate is applied to the following years). Land taxes in 1685 include (1) diding: 24,449,724 taels and 7,331,131 dan (including 3,000,000 dan as caoliang) or 6,598,018 taels at 0.90 tael per dan, totaling 31,047,742 taels; (2) informal surcharges: 7,761,936 taels. Land taxes in 1724 include (1) diding: 26,362,541 taels and 7,731,400 dan (including 3,000,000 dan as caoliang) or 9,277,680 taels at 1.20 taels per dan, totaling 35,640,221 taels; and (2) informal surcharges: 8,910,055 taels. Land taxes in 1766 include (1) diding: 29,917,761 taels and 8,317,735 dan (or 15,970,051 taels at 1.92 taels per dan), totaling 45,887,812; and (2) informal surcharges: 11,471,953 taels. Land taxes in 1784 include (1) diding: 29,637,014 taels and 7,820,067 dan (including 3,000,000 as caoliang), equivalent to 13,841,519 taels at 1.77 taels per dan, totaling 43,478,533 taels; and (2) surcharges: 10,869,633 taels. Land taxes in 1820 include (1) diding: 30,228,897 taels and 8,821,183 dan or 20,553,356 taels (at 2.33 taels per dan), totaling 50,782,253 taels; and (2) surcharges: 12,695,563 taels. b The total size of arable land in 1652 was 403,392,500 mu (Chen Zhiping 1986: 89). Suppose that grain yield per mu declined to a third of the late Ming level, i.e., 0.627 dan per mu, due to war devastation, then the total land yield would be 252,792,633 dan. Further assume that two-thirds of the total land yield, i.e., 168,528,422 dan, was unhusked rice or wheat, thus worth 252,792,633 taels at 1.5 taels per dan. The remaining one-third (84,264,211 dan), as miscellaneous grains, was worth 63,198,158 taels at 0.75 tael per dan (i.e., a quarter of the price of husked rice; the same for the following years). The value of the total land yield, then, was 315,990,791 taels, assuming that the land devoted to cash crops had the same return as land for grain production. The value of total land yield in other years is calculated using the same method.

level of tax burden (though slightly higher) in those years and a similar longterm decline. The tax burden in Qing China was also light when compared to the level of taxation in major European countries in the eighteenth century. In England, for instance, taxes accounted for nearly 12% of its GNP in 1700 and 18.61% in 1789 (Goldstone 1991: 204–206). In France, the tax burden increased from 5.06% of its GNP in 1700 to 6.87% in 1751 and 8.71% in 1789. It should be noted, however, that in both England and France, industry and trade were much more important to their economies than in China. In France, industry and trade accounted for 25% of its GNP in 1700 and 31% in 1789. In England,

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Table 2.2 All taxes collected as a percentage of total economic output, 1652–1820 (in 1,000 silver taels) Year

Total amount of taxes collecteda

Total economic outputb

Tax burden (%)

1652 1685 1724 1766 1784 1820

55,328 45,658 52,412 76,480 72,464 84,639

351,100 461,510 1,047,821 2,098,782 1,936,999 2,722,012

15.76 9.89 5.00 3.64 3.74 3.11

Notes: a Including the actual amount of land taxes from Table 2.1 and all other kinds of taxes that are estimated to be 10% of the total amount of taxes actually collected in 1652, 15% in 1685 and 1724, and 25% in 1766, 1784, and 1820 (for the actual share of land tax in the state’s official revenue, see Table 3.3). b Including the amount of land yields from Table 2.1 and non-agricultural output that is estimated to be 10% of the total economic output in 1652 and 1685 when the economy had not fully recovered, and 15% in the following years (for a gross estimate of non-agricultural output as a percentage of total economic output during the Qing, see also Zhou Zhichu 2002: 40).

they made up 45% of its GNP in 1700 and 55% in 1789 (ibid.: 204–206). By contrast, in China, industry and trade contributed only about 10% to its total economic output in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and 15% in the second half of the eighteenth century. As a result, tax income from industry and trade also had a much higher percentage in the total tax revenues of the two European countries (in France, 54% in 1700 and 50% in 1789; in England, 66% in 1700 and 82% in 1789) (ibid.: 204–206), whereas in China, they accounted for only about 10% of the government’s revenues in the early eighteenth century and about 25% in the second half of that century. Yet, despite its smaller share in the total tax revenues in France and England in most of the eighteenth century, agricultural taxes in both countries remained heavy when measured against their agricultural output and when compared to the situation in China. In the 1780s, for example, agricultural tax accounted for nearly 6.34% of land yield in France, and 7.36% in England (ibid.: 204–206), whereas in China, it accounted for only 3.3% of land yield, or approximately half of the level in the two European countries. The tax burden was especially light in China when compared to that in smaller European states such as Prussia, where cultivators paid 16% of their produce as military taxes and an additional 18% as seigneurial dues in the second half of the eighteenth century (Wilson 2009: 118).

Fiscal sufficiency and tax exemptions To further understand why the Qing rulers adopted the light taxation policy, we need to inquire into the reasons behind the state’s recurrent efforts to limit and

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The formation of the Qing state

reduce the tax burden throughout the eighteenth century. A frequently practiced measure was regional or nationwide exemption of land taxes for a given year. From the beginning of the Shunzhi reign (1644–1661) to the first two decades of the Kangxi reign (1662–1722), when the dynasty was not yet stabilized and the economy not fully recovered, the Qing rulers had already repeatedly exempted the burden of land taxes in certain areas that suffered war devastation, excessive logistic service to the military, or natural calamities. Tax exemption in the early Qing, in other words, was used only as a means of relief for victims of artificial or natural disasters. After 1700, such disaster-related exemptions continued and became even more frequent and more generous than before. What was new to the exemptions in the eighteenth century, however, was the universal waiver that applied to the entire country no matter whether or not a disaster had happened. The countrywide tax waiver first occurred in 1711, when the Kangxi emperor announced that the 19 provinces of the empire would be grouped into three batches to benefit from the waiver in turns over three years (1711–1713) and which would apply to not only the land and adult male taxes due in one of those years but also to all of the arrears owed by the provinces. As a result, more than 38 million taels were exempted (Zhang Jie 1999: 58). The universal tax waiver took place five times during the reign of Qianlong (1736–1795): in 1746, 1770, 1777, 1790, and 1795, respectively, and a total of more than 27 million taels was waived each time (SQYJ: 12–17; see also He Ping 1998: 41). What made the universal waiver possible, of course, was economic prosperity in most of the eighteenth century and hence the unprecedented level of surplus of cash reserves at the Board of Revenue. When the Kangxi emperor announced the first countrywide tax waiver in 1710, for example, the surplus had reached 45 million taels, which were more than the state’s total amount of annual revenue (about 35 million taels). During the Qianlong reign, the surplus almost reached or surpassed the mark of 70 million taels each time when the empire proclaimed a countrywide tax exemption. But the unprecedented affluence was not the only reason behind the Qing state’s repeated announcements of universal exemption. In his decrees to announce the universal tax waiver, the Qianlong emperor repeatedly (at least three times in the 10th, 35th, and 37th year of his reign) justified his decision by asserting the following two points. First, the wealth of “All under Heaven” was a fixed amount (tianxia zhi cai zhi you ci shu), which could “either gather together at the above level or disperse at the lower level” (bu ju yu shang, ji san yu xia) (QSL, Qianlong 242: 10–6-dingwei). In other words, the distribution of wealth between the government and the people was a zero-sum game: it could either concentrate in the hands of the central government or be shared by the people; to have too much reserve at the state’s control would mean a reduced share of wealth by the latter. Second, the government’s expenditures were a regular amount (guoyong yuan you changjing) and now it had “abundant reserves” (fangjing lu cang cong ying) that could satisfy all of its financial needs (Cf. Dai Yi 1992: 28). Therefore, “instead of hoarding too much wealth at the state’s treasury, it is preferable to let it circulate among the

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ordinary people” (yuqi duo ju zuo chang, wuning shi maoyan buwu ziwei liutong) (QSL, Qianlong 850: 35–1-jimao; see also Qianlong 920: 37–11-guimao). “The sufficiency of the people” (zu min), the emperor admonished, was the fundamental way to “maintain abundance and secure peace” (chi ying bao tai) (QSL, Qianlong 242: 10–6-dingwei). The goal of the Qing state’s fiscal policy, as these statements indicate, was not to maximize the government’s tax revenue or to endlessly increase its reserves but instead to seek a balance between the state and the people in wealth distribution; once the state gathered enough for its needs, to keep increasing its reserve would threaten the livelihood of the people, which in turn would hurt the state’s revenue and social stability.

Limits to taxation Among the many measures taken by the Qing rulers to limit the level of taxation, the most important one was no doubt the 1712 announcement to freeze the tax on adult males and therefore permanently exempt males born afterwards from paying that tax, which led to the merging of the adult male tax into the land tax in most of China in the following decades and consequently the cancelation of the tax burden on the landless.4 Another important measure to lessen the tax burden was the so-called huohaoguigong implemented in the 1720s. The “melting fee” (huohao) was an unofficial surcharge collected together with the formal land tax under the excuse of offsetting the loss of silver paid by individual households in its melting into bullions for shipment to the treasury of the central government. The rate of the surcharges ranged from 10% to as high as 30 or 40% (as in Shanxi province) or even up to 50% (in Shaanxi and Gansu) of the land tax, most of which were controlled by the county or prefectural yamen and used to augment yamen personnel’s salaries (Zelin 1984: 73, 88, 329 n44). The new measure promoted by the Yongzheng emperor legalized and regularized huohao but limited its collection rate to 10–20% of the land tax. While most of the huohao income was used as supplementary salary (yanglianyin) for local government officials, the regularization of its collection at a fixed rate effectively reduced the burden of taxpayers and improved the local government’s fiscal situation (ibid.: 130). The Qing court repeatedly adjusted its tax policies on newly reclaimed land for the same purpose. During the initial Shunzhi reign (1644–1661) when the state’s military expenditures surpassed its limited tax revenue, the ruler imposed a tax on this type of land after a period of tax exemption for three to six years (Chen Feng 2008: 134–145). By the 1710s, as the economy recovered and the state’s fiscal condition improved, the Kangxi emperor discouraged taxation on the new land.5 Shortly after his enthronement, the Qianlong emperor took a further step in dealing with the newly reclaimed land. In his view, local administrators were interested in the registration of reclaimed land and reporting this type of land to the imperial court only for the purpose of increasing the government’s tax revenues; such activities, however, “do not benefit the local [government] at all and can only do harm to the people” (feitu wuyi yu defang, erbing

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yihai yu baixing ye) (QSL, Yongzheng 4: 13–9-yihai). Therefore, at his instruction, the court enacted a new law that permanently terminated the survey of fields and the compulsory registration of newly reclaimed land in the country. Obviously, the Qing state was satisfied with the existing quantity of revenue generated from the land. To increase its revenue by taxing the newly reclaimed land made no more sense to the state, and would only increase the burden of landowners. The best option for the Qing rulers, therefore, was to tolerate the wide existence of unregistered “black land” or “hidden land” and the subsequent evasion of land taxes. By adopting the policy against land surveying and the registration of newly reclaimed land, the Qing government actually put a freeze on its revenue from land taxes. Indeed, throughout the reigns of Qianlong, Jiaqing, and Daoguang, the state’s revenues from the land remained largely stable, fluctuating around 30 million taels per year, which was only slightly higher than the land taxes of the Ming during the Wanli reign. The result was an increasing gap between the taxable amount of land that remained a largely fixed quantity throughout the eighteenth century (varying from 720 million mu in the 1720s to 750 million mu in the 1850s, see Guo and Zheng 1995: 101–102) and the actual amount of arable land that increased steadily during the same period because of the incessant efforts of land reclamation. The Qing state had no interest in investigating the actual amount of taxable land in China as long as the predetermined quantity of tax revenues was secured. To recapitulate, the Qing state’s low taxation policy was based on two explicitly stated assumptions: (1) its annual expenditures were a fixed and institutionalized amount, and the tax revenues that had been established by the Qing statute were sufficient to cover all of its regular expenditures; (2) the increased population had caused an unprecedented pressure on land resources and, therefore, priority should be given to the “sufficiency of the people” rather than the augmentation of state revenues. These two assumptions further gave rise to two features of the fiscal system under the Qing. The first is the overall inelasticity of the state’s revenues, which resulted from three measures: (1) fixing the tax on adult males in 1712; (2) merging the fixed male taxes into the land tax and the regularization of melting fees during the Yongzheng reign, mostly in the 1720s; and (3) fixing the land taxes by placing a ban on land surveying and the taxation of newly reclaimed land in the 1730s. The second feature is the state’s substantive approach to the perceived population pressure on the land: it chose to put a ceiling on the overall level of the tax burden by terminating the taxation of unregistered and newly reclaimed land, rather than conduct a thorough and universal land survey and thereby impose a reduced flat tax rate on both the registered and the unregistered or newly reclaimed land.

Local governance The low level of government spending under the Qing also had to do with the pragmatic method it used in ruling local communities. The formal, centralized

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bureaucracy of the Qing dynasty was limited to the county level and above; below the county were various indigenous organizations and practices, which aimed to serve the interests of the local population while collaborating with state authorities in taxation and security control. By the Qing state’s design, all of the rural and urban households were to be incorporated into a system called baojia (every ten households formed a jia and every ten jia formed a bao) for mutual surveillance and collective responsibility in tax payments. In reality, however, few communities were able to organize their households into the decimal unit from the very beginning of its implementation, and few baojia units thus created were able to operate and survive. Instead, in most localities, the baojia was incorporated into, or built on the basis of, the preexisting community organizations and therefore took different forms in different regions. In parts of South China where the village community was built on lineage ties, for example, the clan organization often superseded the baojia to perform the duty of tax collection on behalf of the member households of the clan. In the lower Yangzi region, in another instance, where land ownership was highly differentiated and the wealthy households, especially those who had members graduating from the civil service examination or retiring from government service, predominated, the landed elites often engaged in proxy remittance (baolan) in tax payments, that is, to pay taxes on behalf of the households under their patronage at a reduced tax rate that was granted only to the privileged degree holders, a practice that benefitted both the elites and their clients but caused the loss of the state’s tax revenues (Bernhardt 1992). In most parts of North China where social differentiation was low and ownercultivators prevailed and where the influential gentry elites were relatively weak, ordinary villagers often took the lead to form various voluntary organizations within or across village communities to sponsor temple fairs, the ceremonies of rain prayer or worshipping the Dragon King, crop watch, flood control, defense against banditry, and so on. In taxation, various communities developed different practices. In communities where the livelihood was harsh, moving into or out of the village was common, and therefore lineage ties were weak – as best seen in the existence of multiple surnames in a single village – and the residents found it difficult to cooperate in paying taxes to the government; instead, it was usually up to the most influential individuals in the community to nominate an ordinary person to serve as a semi-official agent, known locally as xiangbao, dibao, or difang, who was responsible for urging the households in his community or the larger area of multiple villages to pay the land tax before a time limit and assisting the county government in carrying out other kinds of administrative duties (P. Huang 1988: 225–232; Duara 1991: 50–53, 130). In sharp contrast, in communities where the lineage ties were strong, cooperation in tax payments prevailed, in the form of rotation among members of the same lineage to serve as the agent of the community, called xiangdi, who paid in advance the dues on behalf of all households within the community, thus saving the member households the cost and time in paying taxes to the county seat individually. Likewise, the xiangdi also served as an intermediary between

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the county government and his community to carry out all kinds of administrative duties. Without salary payment and formal appointment by the government, the xiangdi position was unofficial, filled by villagers according to local customs or “village regulations” (cungui). These regulations established the order of rotation among the member households for the xiangdi service and made it mandatory for the rest of the member households to compensate him for his service by paying him a “commission” whenever they sold their properties or goods, no matter whether or not the xiangdi served as a broker in the transaction. Whenever the villagers disputed over the selection of the xiangdi, either because of their attempts to avoid the service due to its burdensome duties or because of their competition for this position when the commissions that the xiangdi received from his fellow villagers outweighed the cost, mediation was usually conducted within the community according to the villagers’ regulations. If mediation failed and the litigation went to the county court, the magistrate again would base his ruling on the village regulation, in the absence of any state laws guiding the selection and service of the xiangdi (H. Li 2005: 66–91). Given the preponderance of informal community arrangements and quasiofficial agents in local taxation and administration at the village or trans-village level, the formal bureaucracy of the Qing state at the county level and above was relatively small. Until the end of the nineteenth century, its size was limited to roughly 23,000 salaried officials (Chang 1962: 42), or one official per 17,000 people. Its spending on civil administration was also very limited. In 1766, for instance, its spending on the salaries and stipends for all of the civilian bureaucrats and the nobility was only 4.97 million taels, and the state’s entire spending was only 42.21 million taels (Chen Feng 2008: 408–409), which accounted for only about 2% of the total economic output at the same period. The government system in Qing China was truly small in relation to the size of its population, though it was cost-efficient in relation to the size of its economy. In the final analysis, the Qing state that operated in the interior provinces was a peculiar combination of a highly centralized formal bureaucracy, which existed at the county level and above, with the informal or semi-official mechanisms that performed the government’s everyday administrative functions at the grassroots level. Rather than a consequence of its incompetence or shortage of revenues, the Qing state’s limited penetration into local society resulted primarily from its limited demand for revenues, which in turn reflected the state’s low-level spending on defense within a secured geopolitical setting as well as the limited size of the government system in a highly homogeneous society. The Qing state, in a word, felt no need to enlarge its formal apparatus, extend it beyond the county level, and penetrate local communities as long as the latter fulfilled their duties to the central government in paying taxes and maintaining stability.

The uniqueness of the Qing in Chinese history Now we can put together the two separate systems of government that the Qing employed to rule the frontiers and the interior and rethink the nature of

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the Qing state and the reasons behind its unusual longevity and stability as a dynasty of alien origin. For long, historians have tended to interpret the conquest dynasties in Chinese history from a Han-centered perspective, assuming a shared sense of superiority among the Han people in their relations with those of different ethnic origins, and underscoring their abilities to assimilate the conquerors that were inferior to the Han economically and culturally. John K. Fairbank described this dominant attitude among the ruling elites of Chinese dynasties as a form of culturalism, to distinguish it from nationalism that is premised on competition and equality among all nation-states in the modern world. It was this assumption of cultural superiority that undergirded the Qing dynasty’s regulation of foreign trade under the tributary system (Fairbank 1969; Hamashita 2008: 29–32). When explaining the Qing’s striking longevity in relation to other “alien” dynasties in Chinese history and its success in ruling a vast, multiethnic land, a prevailing view up to the 1980s was to emphasize its policies of Sinicization: the Manchus who founded the dynasty and conquered China not only inherited from the preceding Ming the entire administrative system at all levels as well as the Confucian ideology that accompanied the system, but they also embraced Chinese culture and language to such an extent that by the early nineteenth century few Manchus were able to speak their own language. The Qing was able to rule China for more than two and a half centuries, according to this thesis, in large part because of its institutional adaptation (Fairbank and Goldman 2006: 147) or Sinicization (Ho 1967, 1998) that allowed the Confucian elites of the Han people to develop identity and loyalty with the conquest dynasty. More recent studies since the 1990s have challenged this interpretation in two important ways. Instead of viewing the Qing as another Chinese dynasty in China’s long series of “dynastic cycles,” they present a new image of the emperors of the Qing at the peak of its influence in the eighteenth century as cosmopolitan rulers seeking to embody in their rulership the religious authorities and cultural values of different subject peoples on their territory (Rawski 1996). A Qing ruler arguably acted as a sagely, benevolent emperor, a khan, and a cakravartin king at the same time, or aspired to be a “transcendent, universal ruler” as did the Qianlong emperor (Crossley 1992, 2002: 224). The imperial ideology, accordingly, constructed a “universal empire” made of the Manchu, Mongol, Tibetan, Uighur, and Han Chinese “constituencies.” Rather than the center, China was reduced in this ideology to “a province of the empire” (Crossley 2002: 341) or regarded “as only a part, albert a very important part, of a much wider dominion that extended far into the Inner Asian territories” (Waley-Cohen 2004: 195; see also Crossley 1992: 221; Rawski 1998: 2; Millward 1998: 201). Another way to challenge the thesis of Sinicization is to highlight the differences between the Manchu and Han peoples. Throughout the history of the Qing dynasty, as Mark Elliott argues, the Manchu rulers endeavored to defend the identities and privileges of the Manchus by preserving their language and customs in dealing with an “identity crisis” that loomed in the eighteenth century, safeguarding the Eight Banners as an institutional

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framework to preserve the integrity of the Manchus as the conquest people, and promoting the use of the Manchu language and the cultural heritages of nomadic origins, which altogether formed the characteristic “ethnic sovereignty” of the Manchu elites (Elliott 2001, 2006).

Between the Inner Asian and Chinese traditions Throughout this chapter I have emphasized the distinctiveness of state formation in China under Manchu rule. The Qing’s origins from Manchuria, its conquest of the Ming, and its incorporation of Manchus, Mongols, Muslims, and Tibetans into its territory made the new dynasty very different from the Ming; it can thus be termed a truly multiethnic state. To treat the Inner Asian populations of the frontiers as mere “minorities” playing a marginal role in the Qing formation, as does the traditional Han-centered historiography, downplays the most significant part of the history of the Qing. Instead, this chapter emphasizes the characteristic hybridity of the Qing state, which distinguishes it from all of the preceding Chinese dynasties. As shown above, Qing China consisted of two distinctive parts territorially, ethnically, culturally, and administratively: the inland provinces of the Han people and the frontiers of the Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans, and other non-Han populations. The state relied on the provinces for wealth and manpower while safeguarding its geopolitical security with the establishment of frontiers. To ensure its effective extraction of taxes and maintain its legitimacy as the rightful dynasty ruling Zhongguo, the Qing court put the Han population within the provinces under its direct control while embracing Confucianism and practicing the Confucian principle of benevolence in local administration. To ensure the stability of the frontiers and cultivate their identity with the imperial court, it allowed the elites of the non-Han races outside the interior a degree of autonomy, patronized Lamaism among the Mongols and Tibetans, and separated the Uighur Muslims and other tribal peoples from the Han population. Despite these distinctions, however, the Qing succeeded in cultivating a shared consciousness of a single statehood among the elites of all populations on its territory, due to its emphasis on the use of religious ties, cultural assimilation, and administrative adaptation, rather than military control and administrative coercion, in ruling the different parts of the country. Nevertheless, the so-called Inner Asian characteristics of the Qing state cannot be overstated so as to equate the Qing with an Inner Asian empire and downplay the interior provinces to only a part of it. A basic fact about the Qing was that, after relocating its capital to Beijing and conquering the interior, it changed itself from a frontier regime of the Manchus to a dynasty of the Middle Kingdom, redefined Zhongguo by enlarging it to include the newly established frontiers, and thereby equated the Qing with Zhongguo (see also G. Zhao 2006; Huang Xingtao 2011a). Accordingly, the Qing rulers transformed their relationship with frontier elites from the traditional one bespeaking a degree of equality between tribal states to a new type inherited from the preceding Chinese dynasty and based on the Confucian principle of appropriate relationship

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between the ruler and the subject. This was precisely the reason why Emperor Kangxi rejected the use of Mongol etiquette by the leaders of Khalkha Mongols and instead required their performance of “three prostrations and nine kowtows” after incorporating Outer Mongolia into his territory. Therefore, despite the administrative and religious autonomy granted to the non-Han elites of the frontiers, the relationship between the imperial court and the frontiers remained characteristically the one continued from the Chinese past and embedded in the Confucian vision of political hierarchy. Safeguarding the stability of the frontiers remained critical to the Qing’s geopolitical security throughout the history of the dynasty. But the importance of the frontiers stopped there; the Qing rulers were neither attracted by the people and the wealth of Xinjiang, nor did they truly believe in Lamaism. These frontiers were important only because they worked to enhance the Qing dynasty’s geopolitical security and nothing else. For the Qing rulers, the most important part of Zhongguo remained unmistakably the interior, which provided the imperial court with not only the revenue and talent to run the state apparatus but also the political and cultural basis to legitimize their authority over the entire Middle Kingdom, including its newly established frontiers. The frontiers, for their part, only served as the “fences” to enhance the security of the Qing state and safeguard its rule in the interior provinces rather than to increase its revenues. The goal for the Qing to rule the frontiers, therefore, was primarily to keep them in order and in submission. Its approach to ruling the frontiers thus was highly pragmatic: it patronized Lamaism in Tibet and Mongolia but enforced measures to restrict the influence of religious leaders in both regions while discouraging its spread among the Manchus (Zhao Yuntian 1984). Its concerns with Islam as a potential threat to the Qing emperor’s ultimate authority and with the volatility of the Muslim population accounted for its policy to encourage the immigration and settlement of Han farmers and merchants first in the northern part and later in the southern part of Xinjiang (Fletcher 1978; Millward 1998). Its expedition against the Zunghar Mongols ended in massacring almost the entire Zunghar population at the instruction of the Qianlong emperor (Perdue 2005: 282–285). All these contrast sharply with the Qing rulers’ earnest promotion of Confucianism and steadfast adherence to the tenet of benevolent government in the interior provinces. The Qing ruler’s boast of equal treatment of all peoples on his territory was a high-sounding rhetoric rather than a historical reality. All in all, the Qing is best seen as a hybrid polity that combined the traditions of a conquest dynasty of nomadic origins with the cultural and political heritages of the imperial Chinese state. Compared to the dynasties of alien origins that ruled North China or the entire Chinese land before the Qing, including most notably the Northern Wei (386–534) of the Tuoba clan of the Xianbei, the Liao (907–1125) of the Khitans, the Jin (1115–1234) of the Jurchens, and the Yuan (1206–1368) of the Mongols, the Qing had the longest history in ruling China (1644–1911). Central to its exceptional durability was the supplementary combination of two features: (1) its formal incorporation of the Inner Asian frontiers into its territory and hence elimination of the threat from tribal states;

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and (2) its transformation from a conquest dynasty into a hybrid dynasty inheriting its legitimacy from the preceding Ming. Therefore, it won the loyalty of gentry elite from inland provinces by respecting their privileges, adhering to the Confucian ideology, and governing the populace accordingly; it thus was able to put the Han population under its direct control yet keep the government to a minimal size by delegating most of the everyday administrative duties to the elite that dominated local communities while preventing them from becoming autonomous from the central government. It also won the support of the religious and secular leaders of the frontiers by promoting Lamaism and granting them autonomy in local administrations; it thus was able to maintain its stable control over the frontiers without having to station a large number of troops and use coercion to ensure the submission of the border regions. The unity that the Qing court maintained with the frontiers through religious and political ties, instead of coercion, also contributed to the growth of identity of the frontiers with the imperial court, who would remain within the territory of China even after the fall of the Qing. The two-century process of frontier-building and consolidation resulted in not only China’s territorial expansion but also the cultivation of a shared awareness among the Han and non-Han elites of belonging to a redefined state, a consciousness that turned out to be more lasting than the state itself. The Qing, in the final analysis, was undoubtedly the last in the genealogy of Chinese dynasties, but the Chineseness of the Qing was not the same as the one before the Qing; it was redefined and regenerated, embodying the traits essential to the cultural and political legacies from the Chinese past while showing a diversity and vibrancy unseen before. In fact, the Chinese civilization itself has been so enduring precisely because of its long tradition of openness to the cultural and ethnic influences of the aliens; it was the unusual power of the Han Chinese to assimilate the aliens and at the same time to incorporate the elements of cultural legacies of the latter that accounted for its resilience and continuity over the past thousands of years; the Qing was only the last episode of that long story.

Between empire and sovereign state What, then, is the nature of the Qing state? First of all, the Qing was not an expansionist empire. Despite its early history of vigorous territorial expansion, which resembled empire-building in other parts of the world, the nature of the Qing changed after occupying China, from a conquest dynasty aiming to enlarge its territory and wealth to the ruling dynasty of the Middle Kingdom inheriting its legitimacy from the preceding Ming. In other words, it lost the incentive to continue the conquest. Committed to turning itself into the legitimate dynasty in China, the Qing continued most of the institutions of the Ming in governing the interior and regulating its relations with the tributaries; it did not seek to conquer Korea, Vietnam, or any other neighbors of China, nor did it demand the payment of tributes in large quantities from its tributaries. For the first half-century after its inauguration in Beijing, the Qing was

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content with the territory it had inherited from the Ming; territorially, its only difference from the Ming was the adding of Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, which it had controlled before occupying the interior provinces, in addition to Taiwan, which was turned into part of Fujian province in 1683 after defeating the Ming loyalists on the island. Later its establishment of frontiers in the north, northwest, and southwest from the 1690s to the 1750s resulted from its reactions to the threats from the Zunghars, and it showed no intension to push its frontiers any further into Central Asia, although it was certainly able to do so at the peak of its fiscal and military capabilities in the 1750s. Unlike the empires in the rest of the Eurasian continent, whose limited size of their heartland often compelled them to expand their territories incessantly for more revenues and, to that end, to turn the subjugated territories into their tributaries or provinces, the Qing saw no reason to do so, given the vast size of the Chinese heartland and the abundant revenues obtainable from it. Unless its security was threatened, the Qing court felt no need to turn its tributaries into frontiers for the sole purpose of augmenting its revenues. Thus, although the Qing began as a conquest dynasty of nomadic origins, it eventually developed into a hybrid state that combined its tradition as an Inner Asian nomadic regime and Chinese political legacies. Nor was the Qing state a sovereign state in the European sense because it firmly rejected the idea of legal equality among all sovereign polities that prevailed within the Westphalian system of states. Nevertheless, it also showed unmistakable signs of evolving towards the sovereign state before it was encapsulated in the Europe-centered system of states in the nineteenth century. Although the Qing inherited most of its tributaries from the Ming and such tributary states remained important for sustaining its legitimacy, it showed much less enthusiasm for increasing the number of the tributaries or the frequency of their visits to the imperial court, having established itself on the basis of alliance with other forces outside China proper and felt much more confident and secure than the Ming rulers. To the merchants and emissaries from Europe and Russia, the Qing showed more flexibility in accommodating their needs and requests and did not insist on regulating its relationship with them strictly according to the conventions long established under the tributary system. More important, the Qing state showed a growing awareness of its territorial sovereignty through its confrontation with Russia and contacts with other Asian states; it demarcated its boundaries with the neighboring states by negotiating treaties with the latter, mapping its territories with the cartographic technologies borrowed from Europe, and routinely patrolling its borders (Li Zhiqin 1995; Yu Fengchun 2006; Li Zhiting 2011; Sun Hongnian 2011; Esherick 2010: 23), thus departing from the traditional Chinese political principle that assumed the Chinese ruler’s universal sovereignty over All under Heaven. But the most essential characteristic of the Qing state, aside from its hybridity, was its fiscal sufficiency before the nineteenth century. The establishment of the Inner Asian frontiers and the disappearance of external threats by the mideighteenth century allowed the Qing to limit its military spending to a largely

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fixed, low level in the following century, while the prevalence of informal practices in the administration of local communities allowed the government to keep its size to a minimal level. At the same time, the huge population of tax payers generated a revenue for the government that was much more than the latter actually spent during years of peace, even when the rates of the land taxes were deliberately kept at a very low level. It was ultimately the financial solvency, epitomized by its repeated universal exemptions of land taxes, that explained the loss of momentum for the Qing state to conquer any further, hence the stability of its frontiers after the 1750s and the stabilization of its borders with the neighboring states. All these distinguished Qing China from an expansionist empire and qualified it as a self-sufficient, territorial state. It was not yet a modern sovereign state before it was incorporated into the Westphalian system of states, but it had developed some of the most essential features of an “early modern” state found in Europe after the seventeenth century, in particular a centralized bureaucracy, a merit-based officialdom, and a standing army. Taking all these into account, we may term early to mid-Qing China as an early modern territorial state.

Notes 1 The karan stations were also installed along the boundary between the Qing frontiers and Russia and other neighboring states to patrol the borders (including 28 such stations along the border between Russia and the land of the Khalkha Mongols or Outer Mongolia) (Baoyinchaoketu 2007). 2 The rationale for the first Jebtsundamba to propose the Khalkas’ annexation by the Qing, rather than Russia, was religious and cultural: “to the north of us, there is the state of Russia, which is governed fairly, but its land is unsuitable for preaching Buddhism, and its people, with different customs, is not communicable with us; to the south of us, there is China, which is governed fairly too, and the country is peaceful and stable, where Buddhism is worshipped, and people wear fantastic costumes. So wealthy is the land that embroidered silk, brocade, and fabric of fine hair abound. If we join them, we will have good fortune for ten thousand years” (Miao Zhou 1988: 5.17). 3 In 1644, Prince Regent Dorgon (1612–1650) abolished the notorious “three military surcharges” (san xiang) that had been imposed on taxpayers by the preceding Ming in its last few decades and that totaled 169.5 million silver taels, or 67% of its regular annual tax revenues (Yang Tao 1985). The Qing court reasserted its light taxation policy in 1646 by compiling Fuyi quanshu (the complete compendium of taxes and labor service) (completed in 1657). As the only official guidebook for tax collection, its stipulations on the kinds and rates of taxes and the methods of tax collection were all based on the original standards and practices established during the Wanli reign (1573–1619) of the Ming, and it eliminated all of the surcharges later added during the rest of the preceding dynasty (He Ping 1998: 4–5). But the huge amount of military expenses involved in its conquest of China throughout the Shunzhi reign (1644–1661) and in maintaining the regular forces, which was more than 30 million taels per year, far surpassed its affordability (its annual revenue hovered around 24 to 25 million taels in the 1650s), making it impossible to carry out the light tax policy in reality. In 1646, the Qing government restarted the collection of the “Liao surtax” (Liao xiang) that totaled 5.2 million taels a year. In 1661, it further revived the collection of the “Lian surtax” (Lian xiang) that amounted to 7.3 million taels a year (ibid.: 12). Both

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surtaxes had been created by the late-Ming rulers and officially abolished by the Qing in 1644. The actual burden of land taxes under the Qing in its first few decades thus could be as heavy as 15% of land yield or above (see Table 2.1). It was only after the suppression of the Three Feudatories in 1681 that the Qing rulers were able to seriously implement that policy by terminating the wartime revenue-generating measures and observing the rules and regulations in tax collection as stipulated in Fuyi quanshu. 4 An obvious reason leading to this policy, as the Kangxi emperor explained in his 1712 decree, was that “the treasury of the state abounds nowadays. Despite the repeated exemptions (of taxes) that amounted to more than tens of millions, there is no worry of insufficiency in meeting the needs of the state’s expenditures” (QSL, Kangxi 249: 51–2-renwu). But the emperor also linked the policy with his understanding of the increasing population pressure on the land: “Having enjoyed a long period of peace within the country,” wrote the emperor, “mouths and households multiply. It has become infeasible to increase the taxes according to the current numbers of adult males: although the population increases, the size of arable land does not.” “Because of the gradual increase of the people since the Pacifications [of the Three Feudatories],” the emperor further explained, “there is no more land that is not reclaimed, and there is no wasteland even in mountainous and hilly areas. Viewed in this light, the living beings have become really too numerous” (ibid.: 51–2-renwu). The Kangxi emperor’s reasoning was plain enough: just like the wealth of China that was a fixed quantity, there was also a limit to the arable land in the country, whereas population growth was unlimited. To continue taxation on the increased number of mouths made no sense not only because the state had already enough revenue to satisfy all of its needs but also because doing so would jeopardize the subsistence of the people. 5 Commenting on a report of land reclamation in the southern provinces, the emperor wrote in 1713: “My idea is that the state has already had enough for its expenditures, and there is no need to impose new taxes [on the reclaimed land]” (zhen yi guoyong yi zu, bu shi jiazheng). Again he justified this decision by referring to the population pressure on the land: “In earlier years, one mu of land was only worth a few cash coins because of the abundance of land and the dearth of people. Nowadays, owing to the numerous people, the land has become as expensive as several taels per mu. In the capital city and its vicinity, residential and business houses have increased so much that no land is left vacant.” “This year,” he further noted, “not only was there a bumper harvest of staple crops, but crops such as sesame and cotton also had a good yield. Despite a year of bumper harvest, however, rice and millet remain expensive. The reason is nothing less than the abundance of people and the shortage of land” (QSL, Kangxi 256: 52–10-bingzi).

3

Limits to territorial expansion Fiscal constitution and war-making under the Qing

As shown in the preceding chapter, the Qing state’s expansion and establishment of its Inner Asian frontiers in the late seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries, as the most important steps in the formation of the Qing state, were primarily a result of the imperial court’s reactions towards the constant threat from Zunghar Mongols. The Qing rulers’ strategies in dealing with this threat changed over time, from being reactive and defensive during the reign of the Kangxi emperor (r. 1662–1722), to being preemptive under the Yongzheng (r. 1723–1735) and Qianlong (r. 1736–1795) emperors, and finally, as seen in this chapter, to becoming once again conciliatory in the 1830s. After defeating the Zunghar Mongols in the areas north and south of the Gobi Desert in the 1690s, the Kangxi emperor showed no willingness to continue his operation into the vast area west of the desert where the Zunghars came from and instead allowed the latter to maintain a tributary relationship with his court. Decades later, the Qianlong emperor reversed Kangxi’s strategy and succeeded in an expedition to completely wipe out the Zunghars in the 1750s, but the Qing stopped its expansion afterwards at the peak of its fiscal and military strength. The Qing rulers justified their varying strategies rhetorically over time: whereas Kangxi legitimated his conservatism by dismissing the land and people of the Zunghars as useless and unruly, Qianlong couched his offensives in the lofty language of “kingly civilization.” Neither geopolitics nor the rulers’ justifications, however, can sufficiently explain why the Qing expansion into Inner Asian frontiers took more than half a century, nor can it explain why the Qing rulers’ strategies changed over time. What, then, was the mechanism that sustained and constrained its war efforts? And what does this dynamism tell about the nature of the Qing state, especially when viewed from the perspective of empire-building or state-making in the early modern and modern world? In his studies of the Qing expeditions against the Zunghars, Peter Perdue underscores logistics as a key factor in shaping the decisions on military operations: while the logistic barrier prevented the Kangxi emperor from launching a prolonged campaign against his enemies, the construction of a supply route leading through Gansu into Xinjiang allowed the Qianlong emperor to eventually defeat the Zunghars. The improved transportation of logistic supplies, he argues, was in turn sustained by “growing market

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integration” in China (Perdue 1996: 780). “Only the commercialization of the eighteenth-century economy as a whole allowed Qing officials to purchase large supplies on the markets of northwest China and ship them out to Xinjiang” (Perdue 2005: 523). But he admits the limited level of market integration in Gansu, as evidenced in the fact that grain price increased by three times in this area during the campaigns of 1755–1760 because of the army’s purchase of grain from local markets (Perdue 1996: 781, 2005: 523). This chapter shows, however, that aside from the Qing court’s calculation of its geopolitical interests, a more fundamental reason behind its adjustments of military strategies had to do with changes in its financial condition from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries; it was its fiscal strength and weakness, which was more fundamental than logistic service per se, that ultimately explain the Qing state’s varying strategies toward the frontiers. It further demonstrates that the key to understanding the state’s fiscal constitution is an equilibrium prevailing in most of the eighteenth century, in which the supply of revenues was largely commensurate with, or moderately higher than, the demand for routine military and administrative expenditures. To explicate this equilibrium and its implication for the Qing state, in this chapter I first examine the overall relationship between the Qing state’s military operations and its fiscal regime, as seen in a series of “fiscal cycles.” I then scrutinize the changing availability of land resources to the ever-growing population, which was key to understanding the government’s financial abilities or, more specifically, the prevalence and vulnerability of the low-level equilibrium in the Qing state’s fiscal constitution. A thorough analysis of its fiscal–military relations in turn sheds light on the unique nature of the Qing dynasty, which is compared with early modern European states in the last section of this chapter.

War and finance under the Qing Fiscal cycles A good way to gauge the fiscal condition of the Qing state is to look at the size of the surplus of cash reserves at the imperial court’s Board of Revenue, or the accumulative amount of the remainder of the board’s annual revenues after deducting its annual expenditures (see Table 3.1 for the state’s annual revenue and expenditure). In most of the period under study, the annual revenue of the Board, which increased slowly yet steadily from, for example, 31.32 million taels in 1685 to 48.54 million taels in 1766 (see Figure 3.1 for details), was larger than its regular expenditures that remained relatively stable, ranging from 27 million taels in 1687 to 30.77 million taels in 1766, thus yielding an annual surplus of several (up to more than 10) million taels. But the cost of suppressing domestic rebellions, conquering tribal peoples in border areas, or fighting an international war, which were in addition to the regular expenditures, could drastically reduce the reserves and even cause a deficit in the Board’s annual expending allowances, hence undermining the solvency of the state. By and

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Table 3.1 The Qing state’s official revenue and expenditure, 1653–1840 (in 1,000 silver taels) Year Total revenue

Diding taxes

Salt tax

Tariff and transit

Misc. incomes

Total expenditure

Balance

1652 24,380

21,260

2,120 1,000

1654 17,824

14,804

2,720

300

15,219

2,605

1685 34,240

28,230

3,880 1,220

910

29,207

5,033

1724 36,490

30,280

3,870 1,350

990

1725 35,850

30,070

4,430 1,350

1748 42,660

29,640

7,010 4,590

1,420

1766 42,540

29,910

5,740 5,400

1,490

34,510

8,030

1766 62,497

42,210

20,288

1791 43,590

31,770

1657 25,486 1682 31,100

1812 40,140

28,020

5,800 4,810

1,510

31,500

1838 41,273

36,209

5,063

1839 40,307

34,788

5,520

1840 39,035

35,805

3,230

Sources: for revenues in the years 1652, 1685, 1724, 1753, 1766, and 1812, see Xu and Jing 1990; SQYJ: 113–115. For data for 1654, see Liu Cuirong 1967; for data for 1652, 1682, 1766, and 1791, see QSG, 125: 3703–3704. For data for 1838–1840, see HBS, 1.1: 172; Peng Zeyi 1983: 38.

large, we can identify five cycles, each spanning approximately 40 to 50 years, in the fiscal condition of the Qing from the mid-1600s to the mid-1800s. Typically, a cycle started when the fiscal health improved, as seen in increases in the reserve, owing largely to the restoration of peace and order in society; the cycle reached its peak when the reserve increased to the highest level as a result of economic recovery or expansion during prolonged peace; and it came to an end when the reserve declined to the lowest level because of war expenses. What follows is a brief description of the five cycles. Cycle I, 1644–1681. Throughout the Shunzhi reign (1644–1661), the Qing government spent approximately 100 million taels of silver on conquering the interior provinces, averaging nearly 6 million taels a year, which were in addition to the regular expenses in maintaining the military (about 13 million taels

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Figure 3.1 The Qing state’s cash reserves, war expenses, and tax exemptions, 1644–1862

a year) (Peng Zeyi 1990: 55). For example, the total amount of annual military expenses was 20 million taels in 1656 and 24 million taels in the following few years, whereas the Qing government’s total revenue was only about 20 million taels a year, causing an annual deficit of about 4 million in the late 1650s (He Ping 1998: 6). But the financial situation of the Qing soon improved after the conquest. The Board of Revenue saw a surplus in its cash reserves during the following nine years (1664–1673) when the Qing state enjoyed peace and stability by and large. The surplus reached its highest level (21.36 million taels of silver) in 1673, right before the outbreak of the rebellion of three Han feudatories in Yunnan, Guangdong, and Fujian. Under Emperor Kangxi, the eight-year campaign (1674–1681) cost the Qing at least 100 million taels in total (Chen Feng 1992: 247), averaging 12.5 million per year, and drained most of the Board of Revenue’s surplus, reducing it to as low as 3.32 million taels in 1678, when the Qing army was fighting the most costly battles with its enemies. Cycle II, 1682–1722. After defeating the Three Feudatories in 1681, the situation under the Qing stabilized. Military campaigns occurred intermittently in border regions afterwards, including: a two-year operation (1682–1683) to take Taiwan from the Zheng regime, which cost about 4 million taels in total or 2 million a year; the war with Russians on the northeast border in 1695 and 1696, which cost less than 1 million taels in total; and the eight-year expeditions (1690–1697) against the Zunghar tribes under Galdan in the region across the Gobi desert, which culminated in the three decisive campaigns led by Emperor Kangxi in person in 1696 and 1697 and cost a total of about 10 million taels, or 1.25 million a year. Well affordable to the Qing, these operations did not

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affect the fiscal condition negatively; quite the reverse, the surplus of cash reserves at the Board of Revenue saw a steady growth, from less than 10 million taels in the late 1670s to 26 million in 1686, nearly 32 million in 1691, and 40 million in 1694. After 1697, the Qing state enjoyed peace in its border regions for 17 years; in most of this period, the board had a surplus of more than 40 million taels (peaking at the level of 47 million taels in 1708), which allowed Emperor Kangxi to repeatedly announce the policy of land-tax exemption in selected regions during this period. But the peace on the borders came to an end when Emperor Kangxi launched a prolonged campaign (1715–1726, especially 1720–1722) against the Zunghars who had invaded and occupied Tibet, in which the Qing army spent a total of approximately 50 million taels, or about 5.5 million a year (Chen Feng 1992: 251–252). The rebellion led by Zhu Yigui in Taiwan worsened the fiscal condition of the Qing; suppressing the rebels cost 9 million taels in 1721. As a result, the surplus of cash reserves at the Board of Revenue increased to 27 million taels in 1722 (Shi Zhihong 2009: 104). Cycle III, 1723–1761. After 1723, battles with the Zungars lingered for a few more years into the Yongzheng reign but no longer constituted a financial burden to the Qing. As a result, the Board of Revenue’s reserves quickly bounced back to 47 million taels (the highest level in the previous cycle) in 1726 and skyrocketed during the next few years when peace prevailed in the border areas, peaking at the level of 62 million taels in 1730. New threats, however, soon came from the Zungars under Galdan Tseren, forcing Emperor Yongzheng to launch a six-year expedition (1729–1734) into the northwest, which cost about 54 million taels, or 9 million per year. In 1734–1735, the campaign to suppress the Miao people in Guizhou province in the south further consumed 4 million taels. As a result, the Board of Revenue’s surplus plummeted during those years, to as low as 32.5 million taels in 1734, or only about half of its level in 1730. Battles with tribal peoples took place sporadically in the rest of this phase, including, most importantly, the revived expedition to the northwest that ultimately subjugated the Zunghars (1755–1757) and the subsequent campaign against the Uighur Muslims (1758–1761), which cost the Qing state a total of 33 million taels, averaging more than 4 million a year.1 Because of these war expenses and other expenditures, the surplus of the Board of Revenue’s cash reserves fluctuated largely between 30 and 40 million taels in most of the period from 1734 to 1761 (Shi Zhihong 2009: 104; Chen Feng 1992: 258–259). Cycle IV, 1762–1804. After stabilizing the northwestern borders, the Qing enjoyed relative peace in the following three decades. As a result of unprecedented security and economic expansion (to be discussed later), the surplus of the cash reserve at the Board of Revenue soon hit the mark of 60 million taels (the highest level in the previous cycle) in 1765, further surpassed the 70 million taels level in 1768, and reached nearly 82 million taels in 1777, which was the highest record throughout Qing history. To be sure, sporadic wars took place in the southern boarder regions during the three decades. The biggest was the revived campaign (1771–1776) against the Tibetans in Jinchuan, which consumed a total

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of 70 million taels, or 11.66 million a year, thus bringing the Board’s surplus from nearly 79 million down to 74.6 million, though the overall health of the Qing fiscal condition remained intact.2 Nevertheless, the state’s affluence was short-lived. A turning point in the fiscal history of the Qing was the outbreak of the White Lotus rebellion at the beginning of the Jiaqing reign, which lasted for nine years (1796–1804) and swept five provinces in central and northwest China. As a result of the Qing government’s massive spending (totaling 150 million taels, or 16.66 million a year) on subduing the rebels, the Board’s surplus precipitated from nearly 70 million taels on the eve of the rebellion to less than 17 million taels in 1801, a very low level unseen in the preceding century (Chen Feng 1992: 268, 270, 275; Shi Zhihong 2009: 104).3 Cycle V, 1805–1840. Peace prevailed again in the Qing after it had suppressed the White Lotus rebellion in 1804. For the next 16 years, no major warfare took place within China or along its borders.4 Surprisingly, the surplus of the Board’s cash reserves did not recover as quickly as it had happened at the beginning of each of the previous cycles. In most of those years, the surplus was limited to a range between 20 and 30 million taels, owing to reasons to be explained shortly. The intrusion of the Kokand-based Jahangir Khoja and his followers into the northwestern border region in 1820 incurred the Qing state’s nine-year campaign (1820–1828) to completely defeat him and an additional two-year (1830–1831) operation to subjugate his brother, Yusuf Khoja. The Qing spent a total of 12 million taels (or 1.33 million per year) for the first campaign (causing a drop of the Board’s surplus from 31 million taels in 1820 to 17.6 million in 1826) and 9 million taels (or 4.5 million per year) for the second (hence a drop of the surplus from 33.4 million taels in 1829 to 25.7 million taels in 1832; no data for 1831 is available). Throughout the 1830s, the Board’s surplus remained at a low level, ranging between 20 and 30 million taels, despite the fact that no major warfare took place during the decade (Chen Feng 1992: 273–275; Shi Zhihong 2009: 104).5

Financing the war It is obvious from the above account that war expenses had an immediate impact on the fiscal health of the Qing state. From the 1690s to the 1830s, the recurrent campaigns against the Mongols, Tibetans, Gurkhas, Uighurs, and the Miao involved a large sum of spending, totaling approximately 250 million taels. Unlike the expenses on the normal operation of the government and the military, which were usually a predictable and fixed quantity, those on wars were not included in the state’s “budget” or regularly planned expenditures, because warfare was unpredictable in most cases. Therefore, once a war broke out, the surplus of cash reserves from the Board of Revenue would be the major source of funding, which could be directly allocated to the military for a campaign or be used to offset “Coordinate Remittances” (xiexiang) (see Chapter 4) from individual provinces for war purposes when the campaign was over.6 The scale of the war and hence the expenses involved thus directly affected the balance of the Board’s surplus; this is evident in the fiscal cycles in the cash surplus

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between the 1640s and the early 1830s as shown above. Each time a major campaign took place, the level of the cash surplus declined; and when the campaign was over, it bounced back. By and large, the expenditure on military expeditions on the border, which rarely exceeded 10 million taels a year, was within the scope of the Board of Revenue’s cash surplus, which ranged between 30 and 50 million taels of silver each year in most of the period from the 1690s to the early 1760s, and between 60 and 80 million taels each year during the period from the late 1760s to the early 1790s, and therefore was well affordable to the Qing. Of course, the cash surplus of the Board of Revenue was not the only source of funding for the military expenses. A supplementary source, for instance, was the voluntary donations from wealthy merchants.7 From the 1670s to the 1830s, salt merchants contributed a total of 42.75 million taels of silver to support the state’s wartime military expenditures, which accounted for about 17% of the government’s total expenses on border wars during the same period.8 The salt merchants were enthusiastic in donating money to the court because that was the most convenient and indeed the noblest means to show their loyalty to it and improve their standing in society; each time a merchant donated a huge sum of silver to the court, he would be rewarded by the latter an honorary high-ranking official title or be invited to a meal or entertainment with the emperor. In fact, during the reigns of Qianlong and Jiaqing (from the 1730s to the 1810s), when the salt trade was most profitable, the merchants were so active in willingly donating silver to the court during wartime that the Qian long emperor had to reject many such contributions, claiming that “the state’s treasury is abundant enough that there is no need to rely on merchants’ contributions” (guojia kufu chongying, wuji shangren juanshu) (cf. Chen Feng 1992: 334). Military expeditions against the non-Han tribal peoples in border regions that led to territorial expansion, therefore, did not necessitate the Qing government’s measures of creating new taxes or increasing the rate of existing taxes. The Yongzheng emperor thus proudly claimed in 1735 that “for the campaigns in the western frontiers, all military expenditures were obtained from the imperial court’s treasury, and no slightest burden was added to the people” (xichui yongbing yilai, yiying junxu jie qugi yu gongnu, sihao buyi leimin) (QSL, Yongzheng 156: 13–5-jiachen); virtually the same words were repeated by Emperor Qianlong in his comments on the campaign against Burma in 1769 (QSL, Qianlong 840: 34–8-genshen). This was in sharp contrast to the Qing government’s fiscal reactions to the massive campaigns against domestic rebellions by the mainly Han population. During the period under study, there were two major domestic rebellions by the Han people, one by the Three Feudatories (1674–1681) and the other by the White Lotus Sect (1796–1804). Sweeping many provinces and lasting for years, both rebellions undermined the Qing fiscal condition by causing a huge loss of tax incomes from the areas damaged or occupied by the rebels and incurring an enormous amount of expenses on quenching the revolts. The Three Feudatories’ rebellion, therefore, wiped out

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85% of the Board of Revenue’s surplus in a short span of six years, reducing it to as low as 2.6 million taels in 1678 and even lower in the following few years. The White Lotus rebellion, likewise, reduced the Board’s surplus by 76% over the same number of years, to about 17 million taels by 1801. In fact, so huge were the costs of the two wars that the Qing state, as to be explained soon, had to reverse or revise many of its domestic policies to increase its tax incomes. And the damage caused by the war to the Qing economy and the state’s solvency was so immense and profound that it actually brought to an end the unprecedented era of prosperity that lasted during the reigns from Kangxi to Qianlong (the so-called “Kang-Qian shengshi”); in the following decades after 1800, the Board of Revenue’s surplus would never recover to a level higher than 33.5 million taels, or only 40% of its highest level in the late 1770s. In sharp contrast, the wars against the non-Han peoples in the border areas only had limited effects on the fiscal conditions of the Qing. Instead of a decline in its cash reserves during the eight-year campaign (1690–1697) against the Zunghars, the Board of Revenue actually saw a steady increase in the surplus (from about 31 million taels at the beginning to more than 40 million at the end), owing to the limited amount of war expenses (1.25 million taels a year on average) and a rapidly recovering economy after suppressing the Three Feudatories. The following two major operations against the Zunghars did cause a significant decline in the Board’s surplus (by approximately 40% between 1714 and 1723 and by 46% between 1729 and 1734, when the wars were most costly), but they were nevertheless within the range of the Qing state’s financial affordability, as evidenced in the fact that the state felt no need to make any change to its domestic policies regarding revenue generation (to be discussed in detail soon). The last war against the Zungars (1755–1757) had almost no effect on the Board’s surplus, which actually increased during the first two years of the war and remained largely equal to its level before the war. During the following four-year battle against the Uighur Muslims (1758–1761), the Board’s surplus remained basically unchanged, suggesting no effect of the war on the Qing state’s finance. The most expensive war that the Qing ever fought with the non-Han people in its border regions was on the Tibetan rebels in Jinchuan during 1771–1776. Despite the hefty expenditure of more than 11 million taels per year and a total cost of 70 million, the Board’s surplus surprisingly showed little change during the six years; it stayed at the high level of nearly 65 million taels even during the year (1775) when the war was most costly, thanks to the unprecedented affluence that the Qing state enjoyed during the peak of its fiscal strength and a prolonged economic prosperity throughout the entire country. The abundance of the imperial court’s revenue, in turn, accounted for its generous funding on the campaigns over the frontiers (Zhang Xiaotang 1990: 26–27). In fact, so affluent was the Qing court that the Yongzheng emperor ordered in 1729 the exemption of the five peripheral provinces of Gansu, Guangxi, Guizhou, Sichuan, and Yunnan from the following year’s

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land taxes (Dai Yi 2009: 192) at the beginning of the six-year campaign against the Zunghars under Galdan Tseren. The contrast between the campaigns against internal rebellions and those on the frontiers is especially stark when we look at their different impacts on the Qing state’s fiscal policies. To put it briefly, the huge cost of wars in suppressing the Han rebels within China proper and the subsequent strains on Qing finances necessitated various measures for the state to increase its revenues, whereas during the rest of the High Qing period, the state consistently adopted the policy of “light taxation” that aimed to limit, reduce, and even exempt the tax burden on landowners and cultivators as shown in the previous chapter, irrespective of the recurrent wars against nomadic and tribal peoples in the border regions. The impact of warfare on the finance of the Qing was especially evident during the campaign against the Three Feudatories. This rebellion erupted at a time when the economy under the Qing was far from a full recovery due to the Manchu conquest that persisted throughout the Shunzhi reign and involved the massive slaughter of the Han people, the destruction of their dwellings, and the devastation of farmland. Thus, instead of a surplus in the Board of Revenue’s cash reserve, there was a net deficit of 4 million taels at the beginning of the Kangxi reign (1662–1722) (He Ping 1998: 17). In the following 12 years, the improved stability of society permitted a slow rehabilitation of the population and economy, and hence a surplus of more than 20 million taels at the Board of Revenue on the eve of the rebellion. The outbreak of the rebellion, however, interrupted the recovery and greatly curtailed the tax revenue of the Qing when the rebels occupied most of the southern provinces. The massive spending on suppressing the rebels, therefore, soon exhausted the surplus and forced the state to take various fiscal measures to increase its revenue and satisfy its military needs: 1. increasing the tax rate by 30% on the land owned by government officials and degree holders in prefectures of the historically prosperous lower Yangzi region that was not affected by the war; 2. increasing the rate of salt taxes by 7.8 to 39.0% in different salt production areas; 3. temporary collection (in 1676 and 1681 only) of the tax on houses for commercial purposes at the rate of 0.2 to 0.6 tael per room throughout the entire country; 4. the creation (in 1677) of new taxes on the sales of land and houses, which were imposed as a total quota ranging from 100 to 600 taels on each county; 5. shortening the period of tax exemption on newly reclaimed land from the original ten years to three years; 6. investigating, informing against, and self-reporting of unregistered and untaxed land;

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7. selling government positions that were immediately available (between 1674 and 1677, the selling of more than 500 positions of county magistrates generated a total income of more than 2 million taels); 8. cutting the salaries of government officials at all levels from 50 to 100% (Chen Feng 1992: 302–331). During the campaign against the White Lotus sectarians in 1796–1804, the Qing court once again turned to extraordinary means to generate enough revenue for its unprecedented war needs. Unlike the fiscal situation at the beginning of the war against the Three Feudatories, however, the Board of Revenue had a huge surplus (nearly 70 million taels, or more than three times the figure in 1673) before the outbreak of the rebellion. Thus, the Qing government did not have to increase the rates of land and salt taxes or any other means of revenue generation that would increase the burden of landowners as it did during the war against the feudatories. Instead, it relied on the following two measures: 1. selling government positions in larger number and more frequently than before, which generated a total income of more than 70 million taels during the war and the following few years of rehabilitation (Zheng Tianting 1999: 319); 2. contributions from salt merchants, which resulted in a total of 15.8 million taels between 1799 and 1803 (Chen Feng 1992: 333). It thus can be concluded that, while the wars against large-scale internal revolts, which were limited only to the short periods in the second half of the 1670s and at the turn of the nineteenth century, did incur a large amount of military expenses and hence significant changes to the Qing state’s fiscal policies, the recurrent wars in border regions in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had little effect on its fiscal policies. Why, then, was there such a difference? To answer this question, we have to first look at the Qing state’s different strategies towards the challenges from within the interior and on the borderland. For the Manchu rulers, the interior provinces were not just another piece of land their ancestors or they themselves had conquered; it formed the core of the Qing territory and the very basis on which they claimed their supremacy over other Inner Asian peoples and all the tributary states to Zhongguo. The Han people’s revolts, especially the large-scale rebellions sweeping several provinces, therefore, constituted a fundamental challenge to the Qing court, and it had to eliminate them at all cost and, to that end, meet the needs of military expenditures by all possible methods, including creating new taxes or increasing the rates of existing taxes. By contrast, the Qing court’s strategy toward threats on the borderland displayed a striking degree of flexibility and varied over time, depending on the geopolitical importance of the frontier in trouble regarding the security of the dynasty. By and large, as demonstrated earlier, the court underwent a transition from the conservative one of the Kangxi reign to an

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increasingly aggressive one during the Yongzheng and especially the Qianlong periods, which in essence also reflected the improved fiscal condition of the central government over time. The fiscal abundance of the Qing state in the eighteenth century, to be sure, was not the sole factor leading to its offensives against the border peoples, but it definitely encouraged the rulers to take actions against them and to eliminate the threats once and for all. Not surprisingly, the two most expensive offensives (in terms of average annual expenditure), namely Yongzheng’s operation against Galdan Tseren in 1729–1734, which cost 9 million taels a year, and Qianlong’s operation against the Jinchuan Tibetans in 1771–1776, which cost nearly 12 million taels a year(!), coincided with the two most remarkable surges of the Board of Revenue’s cash reserves, first in the late 1720s and again in the late 1760s and early 1770s (see Figure 3.1). It was, in a word, the Qing state’s exceptional fiscal strength during those years that enabled its most expensive military operations. In sharp contrast, by the early nineteenth century, when the Board’s cash revenue had plummeted to somewhere between 20 and 30 million taels (compared to its peak at around 80 million taels in the 1770s), the Qing court’s strategies toward trouble in the border areas again became conservative and conciliatory, as best seen in the case of the invasion of Kokand forces into southern Xinjiang in 1830, to which Emperor Daoguang responded by instructing his diplomats to “concede to all of the requests” (yiqie ru qi suo qing) from Kokand for religious and consular privileges in Xinjiang (WY: 195), thus signaling its comprise with Britain and other European powers in 1840 and afterwards.

The low-level equilibrium in Qing finance The equilibrium defined To further understand the Qing state’s fiscal constitution, we should take into account both the demand and supply sides of its revenues. The demand side is readily clear. It was argued in the preceding chapter that, in most of the eighteenth century, the Qing state enjoyed a peculiar combination of two factors, namely (1) the high degree of security in its relationship with neighboring states, and (2) the low cost of maintaining domestic order among a homogeneous population which led to the state’s low spending on the military and government. It was the coincidence of these two factors that enabled the state to keep its military spending and hence its demand for revenues to a low level in relation to the size of its economy and population. Indeed, as Table 3.1 shows, the Qing state’s annual expenditure was relatively stable from the 1760s through the 1840s, ranging between 34 and 38 million taels in most of those years. Now let us focus on the supply side. Here again two key factors worked together to determine the availability of fiscal resources to the Qing state. One was its reliance on the land tax as the main source of revenues, which was no different from the fiscal condition of the empires in other parts of Eurasia and some of the continental European states in the seventeenth and eighteenth

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centuries. Given the low productivity of the land under traditional farming technologies and hence the limited size of economic surplus from agriculture, this excessive reliance on the land tax seemed to be unfavorable to the Qing. However, this disadvantage was greatly offset by the other factor, namely the huge size of its taxable land. The Qing state was able to generate enough revenue to satisfy its regular needs, even when the tax rate was set at a low level in relation to the yield of the land. Given the Qing rulers’ persistent adherence to the light taxation policy, as outlined in the preceding chapter, the annual revenue from land taxes remained largely a constant figure during most of the eighteenth century. Throughout the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries, the state’s income from land taxes was limited to approximately 30 million taels of silver a year, while its total annual revenues increased from about 35 million taels around 1700 to more than 40 million in the second half of the eighteenth century, thanks to an escalation in indirect taxes (on salt and other goods) (see Table 3.1). Therefore, throughout the eighteenth century, the Qing state was able to maintain a favorable balance between its revenue and expenditure, with the former somewhat higher than the latter, hence an accumulative sum of surpluses sufficient enough to cover unexpected expenses (on war and flood-control projects). Hence the existence of an equilibrium in the Qing state’s fiscal constitution. But this equilibrium was conditional and fragile. It existed only when the following two conditions prevailed. First, there was no severe challenge to the geopolitical settings and internal socio-political orders that had allowed the Qing state to keep its expenditures at a low level; once a large-scale internal revolt or a devastating challenge from outside took place that entailed a huge spending on the military, the balance between demand and supply could be quickly disrupted. Second, there were no strains on the generation of tax revenues, especially the ability of landowners to fulfill their tax duties; once the population grew to a point that would exhaust much of the economic surplus and thereby handicap taxpayers’ ability to fulfill their duties to the state, causing the disappearance of the state’s cash reserves and shortage in the state’s revenue, the equilibrium would disappear. In Figure 3.2, which illustrates the equilibrium, the U-shaped curve indicates the conditions of demand (y-axis) and supply (x-axis) in Qing finance. From the inauguration of the Qing in China in 1644 to the pacification of the country in 1681 (point “b” on the curve), the demand (mostly from military expenditures) surpassed the supply in most of those years, and the gap was the widest at point “a” when the deficit in the Qing budget reached the highest level. The equilibrium came into being only between points “b” and “d” (from the 1680s to the 1830s) when the supply surpassed the demand; once the difference between supply and demand reached a high level (at point “c”), the state would reduce the supply by the measures of regional or universal tax exemptions. But the equilibrium in Qing finance was temporary and at a low level: it would disappear once there was a change on either the demand or the supply side. In actuality, what brought that equilibrium to an end were precisely the following two

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Figure 3.2 The low-level equilibrium in the fiscal constitution of the Qing state

factors: first, a change on the supply side, or a strain on revenue generation in the late eighteenth century because of the increased population pressure and a reduced size of economic surplus available for the state’s extraction; and second, a sudden increase in demand caused by large-scale internal revolts and unprecedented external threats in the nineteenth century which finally toppled the balance between supply and demand in the Qing fiscal system. In fact, except for the first four decades of the Qing when the suppression of domestic resistance, especially the rebellion of the Three Feudatories (1673–1681), incurred a huge amount of spending on military campaigns, the Qing court was able to maintain an equilibrium in its fiscal constitution until the mid-nineteenth century. Its revenues were slightly higher than its routine expenditures, and the Board of Revenue thus was able to generate a cash reserve, that is, the balance of the state’s total revenue after deducting its regular expenditures. Theoretically, the cash reserve would increase indefinitely when the state’s annual income was higher than its spending, thus producing a margin to add to the cash reserve year after year. The cash reserve, which peaked at a range between 70 and 80 million silver taels in the 1770s, or nearly twice of the Qing state’s total annual revenue, was critically important for the state to meet its extra needs of spending on unexpected events, such as disaster relief, water-control projects, or military operations. For the Qing court, whether or not to launch a military expedition on its frontier depended not only on its perception of the severity of the threat to its geopolitical security but also on its affordability, which depended in large measure on the size of the cash reserve.

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Not surprisingly, the level of the Qing court’s cash reserve rose and fell in a number of cycles from the late seventeenth throughout the first half of the nineteenth century before the equilibrium was destroyed; these cycles are key to understanding the Qing state’s recurrent efforts at frontier-building.

The affordability of the Qing economy It was noted earlier that until the early nineteenth century the tax burden in Qing China accounted for only a small fraction (3–5%) of its total economic output. That does not mean, however, that the tax duties were always easily affordable to taxpayers. To understand their affordability, we need to consider several factors: the total economic output, especially the yield of agricultural production that constituted the major source of government revenues through the collection of land taxes; the amount of economic output needed to maintain the subsistence of the population; and the remainder of the total economic output after deducting the portion for consumption by the population, that is, the amount of economic surplus potentially available for extraction through taxation. The studies by economic historian Guo Songyi (1994, 1995, 2001) offer so far the most exhaustive and reliable estimate of agricultural output in Qing China. Based on more than 1,000 data items on crop yields per land unit in different parts of China and different periods of the Qing as well as more than 3,000 items of data on the yield of individual crops in more than 400 counties and prefectures, Guo assesses the total grain output, the amounts of grain yield per mu (1 mu equals 0.16 acre) and per cultivator, and the number of mouths that a cultivator could feed in different periods of the Qing, as shown in Table 3.2. To further determine the amount of surplus grain or the remainder of grain after self-consumption, Guo first arrives at the gross amount of grain per person

Table 3.2 Agricultural productivity during the Qing, 1600–1887 Year Total amount of grain yield (in 1,000 catties)

Total size of grain land (1,000 mu)

Grain Total yield number of per mu farmers (1,000)

Grain yield per farmer (catty)

Number of mouths fed

1600 171,601,741

669,946

256

26,359

6,510

8.3

1766 289,074,380

932,498

310

41,081

7,037

8.9

1790 286,151,985

908,419

315

60,251

4,749

6.0

1812 301,298,820

944,695

319

70,293

4,286

5.4

1887 290,835,468

1,013,364

287

81,138

3,584

4.6

Note: 1 catty equals 1.1 pounds.

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in rural households by dividing the gross amount of grain in China by the number of people involved in agriculture; he then determines the per capita amount of processed grain ready for consumption by deducting 20% as a production cost from the gross amount and further deducting 58% for husks left after grain processing that were usually not for consumption. The average amount of surplus grain per capita is the remainder of the net amount of processed grain after deducting 350 catties for self-consumption (see Table 3.3). Guo’s estimates, to be sure, do not cover the agricultural population’s income from cash crops (such as cotton, tea, sugar cane, hemp, mulberry trees) and family sideline activities (handicraft, fishing, husbandry, etc.). But the foremost importance of grain production in agriculture was obvious: it occupied about 90% of all cultivated land in Qing China (Xu and Wu 2003a: 221) and about 80% of peasant households’ income from the land.9 Since our purpose here is to look at the long-term changes in the levels of agricultural productivity and economic surplus from agriculture, rather than an accurate estimate of total economic output in a given period, Guo’s figures, incomplete as they are, are particularly relevant here, for they clearly show such changes. First of all, it is clear from Tables 3.2 and 3.3 that the Qing economy showed an expanding momentum until the 1760s, and the increase in grain production (1.69 times in 1760 that of the 1600s) was accompanied by a largely comparable expansion in the population (1.66 times) and cultivated land (1.43 times) in China. In other words, most of the increase in grain yield came from the enlarged arable land, and the vast majority of the increased population was absorbed by the newly reclaimed land or sparsely inhabited areas through migration.10 As a result, while the total size of the rural population increased remarkably during the Qing before the 1760s, the average size of arable land per farmer remained largely constant, hovering around 25 to 27 mu per capita. This means that population growth did not cause a severe strain on the land or

Table 3.3 Agricultural production and population during the Qing, 1600–1887 Year Total Agricultural Arable land Grain shared by agricultural population population population (catties per capita) Total size Per (1,000) (1,000) (1,000 farmer Gross Net Surplus mu) (mu) 1600 120,000

97,200

725,464

27.52

1,765

819

469

1766 200,000

170,000

1,036,109

25.22

1,700

789

439

1790 300,000

255,000

1,009,354

16.75

1,122

521

171

1812 350,000

297,500

1,050,436

14.94

1,012

470

120

1887 400,000

340,000

1,125,960

13.88

855

397

47

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a significant increase in the population–land ratio. In other words, there was no grave population pressure in China before the 1760s. Although there was no significant improvement in technological or capital inputs, the expanded farmland and the use of preexisting techniques of intensive farming that had been developed in the preceding centuries allowed farmers to produce enough to support the enlarged population without lowering its living standard. In the absence of a revolution in farming techniques and inputs, to be sure, there could not be any significant increase in labor productivity. However, land reclamation and migration effectively alleviated the possible pressure of the increased population on the land and avoided the process of labor intensification in agriculture and the subsequent decrease in labor productivity. This is evident in the fact that, by as late as the 1760s, the amount of grain produced by an average farmer could still support as many as nearly nine individuals, and each individual of the agricultural population had an additional 439 catties of grain as surplus after self-consumption. Altogether, the enlarged arable land, the stable level of labor productivity in agriculture, and an increase in the sheer size of the agricultural surplus explain in large part not only the unprecedented prosperity of the Chinese economy in the mid-eighteenth century but also the affordability of the tax burden to the population and the large surplus in the Qing state’s cash reserves during the same period. But the situation changed a lot in the late eighteenth century, as population pressure became increasingly palpable. While the population grew from roughly 200 million in 1766 to 350 million in 1812, the land available for reclamation became scarce during the same period (in fact, there was almost no increase in the total acreage of arable land during this period), hence a steady decline in the average size of arable land per farmer to 16.75 mu in 1790 and 14.94 mu in 1812 (less than 60% of its 1766 level). To secure the subsistence of the increased population, several developments occurred after the mid-eighteenth century or became more observable than before, which in turn evidenced the existence of a mounting population pressure on the land in the late eighteenth century and afterwards. These include: 1

2

3

the wide cultivation of maize and potato, which had been introduced from America as early as the mid-to-late Ming period but which did not see their widespread use in different parts of the country (especially the hilly areas that had been newly inhabited by immigrants) until the period from the mid-eighteenth century through the early nineteenth century (Guo Songyi 2001: 384); the practice of double cropping (wheat in winter and rice in summer, or growing rice twice a year) in the lower Yangzi region and triple cropping in the southeastern region, which had been rare in the Ming but increasingly observable after the 1750s and more rapidly promoted in the early nineteenth century (Min Zongdian 2003);11 the Qing rulers’ reassertions of the policy of permanent exemption of taxes and strict prohibition of the registration of newly reclaimed land in the midto-late eighteenth century;12

68 4

The formation of the Qing state most importantly, the sharp decline in labor productivity in agriculture after the 1760s, as evidenced in the decrease in grain yield per farmer (from 7,037 catties in 1766 to 4,749 in 1790 and 4,286 in 1812) and grain surplus per capita (from 439 catties in 1766 to 171 in 1790 and 120 in 1812) (see Tables 3.2 and 3.3).

All these signs suggest the effects of a mounting population pressure on agriculture in the last few decades of the eighteenth century and their implications for the Qing state’s fiscal conditions. As the reclaimable land was exhausted and emigration slowed down, most of the increased population had to be absorbed locally, hence the intensification of labor input in farming and greater involvement in off-farm income-making activities. It was likely, therefore, that economic growth in the Qing was experiencing a transition from the traditional type driven primarily by the booming market and, behind it, the specialization and commodification of production in agriculture and other sectors (known as the Smithian model of economic growth) before the 1760s to a new type propelled mainly by labor intensification under the mounting population pressure (the Malthusian model) afterwards. The result of this transition was an enlarged size of the rural economy and the total economic output in China but a decreased size of the economic surplus, much of which had been exhausted by the increased population, as clearly evidenced in the sharp decline in the per capita amount of surplus grain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Thus, although the government’s tax revenues, which remained largely unchanged, constituted a smaller proportion than before when compared to the expanded economy, the decrease in economic surplus greatly curtailed the ability of the population to fulfill its tax duties to the government as well as the government’s commitment to “benevolent governance.”13 After the 1790s, this greatly reduced size of economic surplus was coupled by two new developments that further undermined landowners’ tax-paying ability. One was the drainage of silver from the Chinese market by the rapidly developing opium trade and hence the escalation of the price of silver and the actual increase in the tax duties that had to be paid in silver (Peng Xinwei 2007: 629–645). Price inflation, coupled with the increasing expenditure of the government in response to rapid population growth, made it difficult for the income from the regularized and fixed surcharge of the “melting fee” after the enforcement of huohaoguigong (see Chapter 2) to satisfy the actual needs of county governments, which gave rise to the collection of various customary fees and gifts (lougui) from taxpayers or subordinates as a solution to the worsening deficit in government spending and salary payment (Zelin 1984: 298–301). The other development was the government’s turning to the illegal practice of tax farming by profiteering merchants to ensure its timely completion of tax collection, which was widespread in the collection of commercial levies (S. Mann 1987). Taxpayers, for their part, also turned to the privileged local elites for the illegal business of proxy remittance (baolan) to reduce their tax burden (Bernhardt 1992). All these led to the growing tension between the government and local communities,

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which surfaced first in the mid-nineteenth century as clearly seen in the revolt in Leiyang county of Hunan province in 1843 (Kuhn 2002: 80–91) and heightened in the early twentieth century when tax resistance became increasingly frequent (Prazniak 1999; Thornton 2007: 85). To conclude, while the Qing state’s peculiar geopolitical setting explains the necessity of its military operations on the frontiers, the low-level equilibrium in its fiscal constitution determines both the possibility and limits of its war efforts. The immense size of taxable land and the taxpaying population within China proper brought the Qing court revenues that not only satisfied its routine expenditures but also generated an ever-increasing surplus during times of peace, making possible the unprecedented military prowess and the territorial expansion that happened by the mid-eighteenth century. But the huge quantity of its cash reserves quickly dwindled as the three preconditions that sustained the equilibrium (optimal geopolitical setting, population-to-land ratio, and stable silver price) disappeared in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries due to the phenomenal population growth, the drainage of silver from the domestic market, and, most fatally, the arrival of European powers. This reversal in its fiscal condition, in turn, explains much of the Qing court’s conciliatory strategies in handling geopolitical crises in the decades to come.

Qing China in world historical perspective The above discussion on the effects of the Qing state’s fiscal mechanism on its war efforts and the socioeconomic factors behind the functioning of this mechanism offers us another vantage point to further think about the nature of the Qing state by comparing it to the Ottoman empire and the emerging nationstates in early modern Europe.

The Qing state and the Ottoman empire Both the Qing and the Ottoman empire emerged as conquest dynasties, expanding their territories to encompass the vast areas inhabited by peoples of different ethnic and religious backgrounds. But the motivations behind their conquests were different. The Ottoman warriors embarked on incessant offensives primarily out of their zeal for Islamic conversion; spreading their faith by waging the Holy War motivated the sultan and his cavalry more than any other factor (Baer 2008). There were, however, also economic and social reasons behind their war efforts. The practice of dividing the newly conquered areas into sections and granting them as non-hereditary or hereditary revenue assignments (timars) to the ruling elites and fighting men for military service, for instance, generated a strong incentive for expansion (Streusand 2010: 81, 208); the constant need for more land forced the rulers to undertake conquests continuously. Therefore, the entire state apparatus of the Ottoman empire, including its military organizations, civil administration, landholding, and tax systems, was geared to the needs of military expansion and colonization into the land of

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the infidel. For the Ottomans, war was essential to the operation of their state, and the concept of perpetual war to defend and spread their faith was integral to their world view. Their territorial expansion would not stop until military conquests reached a limit imposed by climate, geography, and the transportation technologies available to them. Once the expansion came to a standstill and no more resources could be obtained, however, the oversized bureaucratic and military systems that had been built for war and were reliant on military operations would contract and deteriorate (Guilmartin 1988; see also Lewis 1958). In sharp contrast, religion played no role in motivating the Manchus’ conquest of China or the incorporation of the Inner Asian frontiers into their territory; nor was there a major economic reason to incentivize their war efforts after the 1640s. Instead, their primary goal was to replace the Ming as the legitimate dynasty ruling China proper. Therefore, their conquest was limited to the land that had been ruled by the Ming. Once this objective was achieved, the Manchus lost the incentive to conquer any further. Their campaigns against the Zunghars were largely reactive and preemptive, taking place only after the latter repeatedly invaded Outer and Inner Mongolia and Tibet, constituting a constant threat to the geopolitical security of the Qing, as shown in the preceding chapter. A starker contrast between the Qing and the Ottomans lay in their different ways of generating revenues. Like the Qing, the Ottoman empire had a vast territory holding a population of diverse ethnic and religious origins. While allowing Egypt, North Africa, and most of the Arab world a high degree of administrative and fiscal autonomy, and content with the reception of an annual tribute or a fixed quantity of payment from local tax-farm holders (Streusand 2010: 102; Shaw 1976: 121–122), the imperial government established in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a centralized timar system for tax collection and local control in most of its European and Anatolian provinces, which constituted the core parts of the empire. Here about 85% of the arable land was worked by individual farming households, thus called miri land, who owed a tax to the central government. About half of the miri land, which was the most fertile part, was under the government’s direct control, and the cultivators on it had to pay a tax either to the imperial treasury or through tax farmers from the capital or local provinces. Another half of the miri land was assigned to the empire’s cavalrymen, who were allowed to collect taxes from the farmers on the fief to compensate their military service, including the cost of raising horses, and the government had the right to confiscate the fief from a cavalryman who had failed to perform his military duties for seven years. But this centralized system of taxation deteriorated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries despite the empire’s intermittent efforts to rebuild it, due in part to miri farmers’ abandonment of their land under the ever-growing burden of taxes, and in part to fief holders’ inability to provide military services, thus giving rise to provincial notables turning the miri land into their own estates, engaging in tax farming, and arrogating to themselves as much as about two-thirds of the empire’s net tax revenues in the eighteenth century (Kıvanç and Pamuk 2010: 609).

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Unlike the diverse Ottoman populations who had to be grouped into millets of different sizes and structures based on their religions for administrative and taxation purposes even in the capital city Istanbul and the core provinces of the Balkans and Anatolia, the homogeneity of the Han population allowed the Qing to implement a uniform bureaucratic hierarchy in the interior provinces. The state channeled its power from the center all the way down to every community through provincial and prefectural/county yamen, who interacted with individual households through the quasi-official baojia organization or its local variants (Hsiao 1960; Ch’ü 1962; H. Li 2005). Furthermore, despite the huge size of the Han population, which was more than five times the entire Ottoman population in the early seventeenth century and more than 13 times the latter by the late eighteenth century, the Qing went much further than the Ottoman empire in building a centralized fiscal system. As a result, the central government in China controlled most of the land taxes collected from landowners throughout the provinces; and it regulated the collection and remittance of tax funds by curbing illegal practices, such as charging taxpayers an extra-statutory “melting fee,” and converting it into part of the regular land tax but limiting it to 10 to 30% of the total tax dues (Zelin 1984: 130). Tax farming, a dominant form of tax collection in the Ottoman empire, was banned in land taxation under the Qing before the nineteenth century (Wang 1973; Bernhardt 1992). However, the higher level of centralization that the Qing state achieved did not translate into its longevity any more than that of the Ottoman empire. A fundamental weakness of the Qing lay in the low-level equilibrium trap that characterized its fiscal system. The Qing state’s fiscal system in the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries operated on a relatively fixed budget for routine expenditures, which was slightly highly than the revenues derived primarily from land taxes that were set at a very low and fixed level; the stable and low levels of revenues and spending were in turn based on two preconditions: its military supremacy and geopolitical security in relation to other states, which allowed the Qing to keep its military spending to a fixed level; and an optimal, if not unchanging, population-to-land ratio in China, which allowed the Qing rulers to set the rate of land taxes at a low level and to guarantee the ability of taxpayers to pay. Both preconditions prevailed in the early and high Qing periods but disappeared in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the ever-expanding population, together with the outflow of silver from China to overseas markets, drained much of the economic resources available for the state’s extraction and crippled small landowners’ ability to pay tax, while the arrival of Western powers caused a fundamental challenge to the Qing state’s geopolitical security. The Ottoman empire’s fiscal system showed a totally different dynamic. Unlike the Qing that claimed its military supremacy over the neighboring states and had a long period of peace in much of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Ottomans engaged in interstate wars one after another throughout the history of their empire, fighting repeatedly with the Habsburgs,

72

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Russians, Safavids, and other competitors for new territories or suzerainty over the neighboring minor political entities. With much of its miri land already assigned to the existing cavalry force, the empire had to keep expanding its territory; its revenues from the conquered land thus always lagged behind its demands for more sources of revenues to sustain the military, which in turn forced the imperial ruler to maximize its revenues by farming out land taxes to local notables in the absence of an effective administrative system able to penetrate local communities. The equilibrium between supply and demand that prevailed in the Qing state’s fiscal system in the eighteenth century rarely existed under the Ottoman empire. Nevertheless, unlike Qing China where the steady growth of the population by roughly three times from the early seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries resulted in the eruption of large-scale rebellions by the impoverished peasants and thus destroyed the equilibrium in the end, revolts of this magnitude were absent in the Ottoman empire, because its population was not only small (less than one tenth of China’s population by 1800) but also largely unchanging throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Ottoman rulers were certainly nagged by the unrest among the rural dwellers who lost their farmland in Anatolia, especially in the late sixteenth century after a long period of population growth (Shaw 1976: 156, 174), but the stable population-to-land ratio afterwards made them free of large-scale peasant revolts that confronted the Qing rulers; instead, the domestic threats to the Ottoman sultan came primarily from the rebelling soldiers when they failed to receive the expected salaries from the government (Shaw 1976: 193, 196, 206, 211).

Qing China and early modern Europe At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Europe was extremely fragmented, encompassing up to 500 political entities of different sizes and with varying degrees of autonomy and a monopoly of coercive power within their territories; there were large empires and sovereign states as well as duchies, principalities, bishoprics, city-states, and other smaller entities. The sovereigns of large states tended to rule their populations indirectly, via the privileged and autonomous intermediaries, such as priests, feudal lords, and urban oligarchies, who acted independently and often resisted state demands that infringed on their interests. Nor did the states have their own armed force on a permanent and regular basis. Instead, military organizations were often heterogeneous, uncoordinated, and in many cases dominated by mercenaries, usually belonging to local lords, bishops, cities, guilds, and other communities, whose loyalty to the state was conditional, often depending on the degree of their interest in the success of the war. In sharp contrast, by the late seventeenth century, the armed forces in different parts of Europe had become standardized and permanently controlled by the states through a hierarchy of professional officers. To raise the enlarged and upgraded forces, the state broadened its financial bases by increasing taxes and customs duties. What made this possible was in turn a process of political

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transformation, in which the state achieved a high level of uniformity in jurisdiction, tax collection, and economic activities by weakening the political and military roles of local interests and integrating many autonomous cities and territories into the larger areas under its direct control (Tilly 1990: 38–47). A key force driving this transformation in early modern and modern Europe, as widely observed, was war. Warring with neighboring states forced the sovereigns to build effective military machines, which in turn necessitated the state’s increased abilities in taxation, conscription, and resource mobilization, hence the proliferation and differentiation of government apparatuses. Because of the central importance of the use of fiscal resources for strengthening and monopolizing the means of coercion, historians have tended to describe the emerging national states in Britain and continental Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries as “fiscal-military states” (Brewer 1989). Military revolution played a key role in the rise and survival of such states, in which not only did weapons, tactics, and strategies improve dramatically but the armies also became larger, more sophisticated, and more permanent; raising the military and waging a war also became more expensive, which in turn forced the state to enlarge and elaborate the fiscal system as well as the entire administrative apparatus in order to extract more taxes and exploit other sources of revenue, hence the transition from a demesne state that generated its income primarily from its landholdings to a tax state that based its revenue mainly on the taxable wealth of its subjects (Brewer 1989; see also Glete 2002: 10–15; M. Mann 1986; Rasler and Thompson 1989; Downing 1992; Storrs 2009).14 To some extent, early to mid-Qing China resembled the fiscal-military states in early modern Europe. It had a centralized administrative apparatus that controlled a well-defined territory through a professional bureaucracy; it had an effective tax-extracting machine, and more than half of its revenues were used to support the military; the state possessed a standing army that was larger than any of its European counterparts; and it repeatedly engaged in campaigns to expand its territory and consolidate its borders. It thus makes sense to categorize the Qing as an “early modern” state that paralleled its counterparts in Europe from the sixteenth century onward in several ways (Rawski 2004; Lieberman 2008). In her study of fiscal reform during the Yongzheng reign (1723–1735), for instance, Madeleine Zelin depicts the Qing as “a dynamic state struggling to devise its own formula for rational and efficient bureaucratic rule” (1984: xv), which made eighteenth-century China comparable to its counterparts in early modern Europe, because both of them shared the need for fiscal stability when confronted with resource competition from within or outside the government. Likewise, Kent Guy (2010) finds parallels between, on the one hand, the institutionalization of provincial governors in Qing China as a means to enhance the ruler’s prerogatives by making preferential appointments and, on the other hand, the formation of absolutist monarchy in Europe from the mid-seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries. Nevertheless, a comparison in the geopolitical, economic, and historical contexts of state formation also reveals fundamental differences between the Qing and early modern European states.

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Qing China differed from the European states chiefly in its geopolitical setting. Unlike the European states who were members within the same interstate system and who maintained a horizontal, if not equal, relationship with one another, China appeared as the only dominant power within its geopolitical universe. Instead of mutual competition or alliance on an equal footing, the interstate relations here were vertical, at least symbolically and ideologically, with the Qing at the top and almost all of the surrounding states as its tributaries. The Qing warred with neighboring states only when the latter challenged its suzerainty or threatened its geopolitical security. The lack of rivalry between equals within the China-centered interstate setting had a profound impact on the inner workings of the Chinese state. Unlike the situation in early modern Europe where the constant competition and warfare forced the rulers of individual states to keep expanding and upgrading their armed forces and hence increasing their expenses on the military, Qing China in the eighteenth century saw a largely static picture of its military spending, organization, and training. From the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century, the number of regular armies remained limited to roughly 800,000 to 850,000 soldiers, as mentioned earlier. The same was largely true in the Qing state’s regular expenditure on the military, which was fixed at the amount of approximately 17 million taels of silver from the 1730s down to the mid-nineteenth century. The methods to recruit, raise, and train the soldiers saw no significant changes throughout the Qing until the late nineteenth century. Without imminent threats from outside or inside China, the ruling elites were content with the preexisting military institutions and showed no interest in improving them. The rigid regulations of the cost and standards of manufacturing weaponry and long-term price inflation further made it impossible to upgrade their armaments (Mao Haijian 2005: 33–88). As a result of the poor training of soldiers during the extended period of peace, insufficient funding, and deterioration of military equipment, the overall combating abilities of the Qing armed forces declined throughout the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries. The lack of substantial competition and challenges from outside China not only led to the deterioration of the military capabilities of the Qing but also accounted to a large extent for the overall stagnation in the development of its administrative and fiscal apparatuses. Except for the measure taken by the Yongzheng emperor (r. 1723–1735) to restructure the decision-making organs at the top level and thereby enhance his own power, the bureaucratic system of the Qing experienced no significant changes until the late nineteenth century. The Qing rulers saw no reason to expand and upgrade the fiscal machine when the existing amount of tax revenue was sufficient to cover its regular expenditures that remained largely constant and unchangeable in principle. What characterized the fiscal regime of the Qing thus were its reliance on direct tax on the land as its most important source of revenues, its highly centralized system of tax collection and remittances, its exceptionally low rate of land taxes, its prohibition on tax farming and other illegal activities in taxation, and therefore the overall absence of peasant riots against taxation before the nineteenth century.

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All these contrasted strikingly with the chaotic situation in early modern continental Europe, where the biggest challenge for any government was “how to mobilize the resources of the state in time of war without arousing excessive discontent among the population at large” (Bonney 1988: 1). Constrained by a limited tax base and a decentralized tax system, the French kings, for instance, had to rely on borrowing from financiers, farming out the collection of indirect taxes, and burdening the poorer peasants with an exorbitant direct tax (the taille) for their financial needs, which inevitably resulted in the growth of the king’s debt, rampant corruption in the government, huge losses of state revenues, and recurrent peasant rebellions (Bonney 1981, 1988).

Socioeconomic structure and state formation Economic and social structures were as important as geopolitics in shaping the process of state formation and the subsequent relationship between the state and society. Both Charles Tilly and Michael Mann find a close link between the availability of resources for extraction and the form of government in European countries. Those with a large rural population and less commercialized economy, for example, would find it difficult to increase their revenues (mainly through the collection of land taxes) for war and other government activities and therefore were likely to develop an extensive fiscal apparatus and an absolutist regime in order to “mobilize” in a coercive way monetary and manpower resources from mainly rural areas. On the other hand, those with a highly developed commerce and a large pool of resources would find it relatively easy to generate enough revenues by taxing commerce and the wealth of landed elites; therefore, they were likely to avoid building a centralized bureaucracy and instead develop a constitutional government (Tilly 1985: 172–182; M. Mann 1986: 456, 476, 479; see also Downing 1992: 9; Ertman 1997: 13). In his study of European states, Tilly further distinguished three distinctive patterns in which the economy conditioned state activities. First, in “coercion-intensive” regions where agriculture predominated, the rulers turned primarily to head taxes and land taxes for war-making and other activities and, to that end, created large fiscal machines and left a wide array of power to local elites. Second, in “capital-intensive” regions where the economy was commercialized, the state turned to customs and excise duties that were convenient to collect as well as readily available credit as sources of state revenue, which hence resulted in limited and segmented central apparatuses. Between the two ideal types was the third pattern in regions of “capitalized coercion,” where the state extracted resources from both land and trade and thus created dual state structures in which the landed elites confronted as well as collaborated with financiers (Tilly 1990: 99). To what extent, then, is Tilly’s model of the three trajectories of state formation relevant to our understanding of the nature of the Qing state? Obviously, both the capital-intensive path and the capitalized-coercive path do not apply to eighteenth-century China, a predominantly agricultural country. This is clear

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when it is compared to England, a country that took the path of capitalized coercion. Although China’s total economic size was 7.7 times that of England in 1700 and 6.3 times in 1820 (Maddison 2001: Table B-18), its industry and trade accounted for only about 30% of its total economic output, whereas in England, industry and trade contributed 45% to its GNP in 1700 and 55% in 1789 (Goldstone 1991: 206).15 The contrast between the two countries is even starker when we look at the share of the taxes on industry and trade in their respective government revenues. In China, it accounted for only about 17% of the Qing government’s total income around 1700 and 30% around 1800 (Xu and Jing 1990), while in England, it accounted for 66% in 1700 and 82% in 1789 (Goldstone 1991: 206). The relative unimportance of the taxes on industry and trade in Qing China is obvious even when it is compared to eighteenthcentury France: although France’s economic structure was quite similar to China’s (75% of its GNP was from agriculture in 1700, which remained as high as 69% in 1789), its taxes from industry and trade accounted for 54% of its total income in 1700 and 50% in 1789 (Goldstone 1991: 204–205).16 The varying importance of industry and trade to government revenues meant a lot to the rulers in Europe and China. In the capital-intensive regions of Europe, the rocketing cost of war drove the rulers to increasingly rely on capitalists (merchants, bankers, and manufacturers) for revenues through borrowing, taxation, and purchase, without creating a bulky and durable state apparatus, and the capitalists in turn took advantage of their economic and financial dominance to shape the policies of the states that prioritized the protection and expansion of commercial enterprise (Tilly 1990: 150–151). In countries of capitalized coercion, the expensive warfare and the growing needs for taxes, credits, and payment of debts forced the rulers to bargain with the major classes within the population over issues ranging from the right of election to the use of violence, which led to the creation or strengthening of representative institutions in the form of Estates, Cortes, and eventually national legislatures (ibid.: 188). None of these developments occurred in eighteenth-century China. Despite the growing share of the taxes on industry and trade in the Qing state’s revenues (from 13% or less at the beginning of the Qing to about 30% by 1800, see above), their importance in its revenue structure remained marginal, and its primary purpose to collect the mercantile-based taxes was to regulate the market places rather than to increase its revenues (S. Mann 1987: 18–25). Land taxes remained the major source of government income until the late nineteenth century (Zhou Yumin 2000: 238–239). Although contributions from wealthy salt merchants were an important supplement to the government’s extra expenditures during times of war and other exigencies, the Qing rulers never needed to increase the taxes on industry and trade or to borrow from merchants and financiers for funds on war or catastrophe relief; they relied chiefly on their own cash reserves for most of the unexpected expenses. Therefore, Chinese merchants lacked any leverage to bargain with the state for political and economic privileges, and the state indeed took no measures to promote the merchants’ standing in society or to encourage their expansion of commercial enterprise, except

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for bestowing them an honorary title upon receiving a generous donation. Quite the contrary, in the state’s ideology, agriculture was the very “root” (ben) of the economy that had to be nurtured and protected, while commerce and industry were only the “branches” (mo) that competed with the root for human and material resources and therefore had to be restricted, as a famous saying of Emperor Yongzheng evidenced, although in reality the Qing government also implemented a series of regulations to ensure the normal operation of trading and manufacturing businesses and the livelihood of ordinary merchants (Deng Yibing 2004; Wang Rigen 2000). Nor should China be equated with a coercion-intensive state. In coercionintensive regions such as Russia where the economy was uncommercialized and the resources extractable from capitalists were limited, the state had to turn to the means of coercion rather than negotiation and contracts to generate enough revenues for war and state-making. The result was their enhanced exploitation of cultivators by enforcing the system of serfdom and the construction of a centralized bureaucracy to its full, ponderous form (Tilly 1990: 140–141). In sharp contrast, the large taxpaying population and a relatively small size of the military allowed the Qing state to keep the land taxes at a level that was easily affordable to most of the landowners before the increase in population exhausted much of the economic surplus in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Therefore, the rulers in China felt no need to maximize their extraction of rural resources by turning cultivators into serfs and even slaves or building a bulky administrative machine. Instead, the Chinese state saw the existence of a large taxpaying population of mainly small owner-cultivators and their economic security as the fiscal foundation of the dynasty and, therefore, took various measures, such as tax exemption, land reclamation, rent limitation, and famine relief, to ensure their subsistence. And the state saw no reason to extend its administrative arms beyond the county level as long as the existing fiscal machine generated enough revenues to satisfy its regular and irregular needs. In the absence of a formal state apparatus below the county level, local communities in rural and urban China from the Song down to the late Qing period displayed a degree of “autonomy” in self-governance. A variety of village regulations or community covenants was developed to define the duties and rights of community members in tax collection, security control, local defense, and public benefits (Hsiao 1960; Rowe 2001: 388–405). These functioned to benefit members of the community and at the same time also satisfy the state’s needs for revenue extraction and social control, rather than to exclude the state’s influences. The state did not intervene with such activities unless disputes occurred with villagers that could not be solved by the community itself and which would threaten their fulfillment of their duties to the government (H. Li 2005).

The low-level equilibrium jeopardized All in all, geopolitical relations and socioeconomic conditions in eighteenthcentury China gave rise to its characteristic form of government that was unlike

78

The formation of the Qing state

any of the three paths of state formation found in early modern Europe. The constant competition for territory and military superiority among the European powers explained the overall absence of equilibrium between their everincreasing demand for revenues and the sluggish growth of income from direct taxes (primarily on the land), which in turn led to their quest for more income through enhanced exploitation of the rural population and tightened the control of society or taxation on commodities and borrowing from the rich, and hence their development into coercion-intensive or capital-intensive states or something between. In sharp contrast, the lack of outside competitors of comparable strength explained the largely unchanged size and armaments of the military in early to mid-Qing China, and therefore its limited and fixed demand for revenues, which in turn led to its limitation on land taxation – the major source of its income. Despite its fixed amount and shrinking size in relation to the enlarged economy throughout the eighteenth century, however, the tax revenue of the Qing government not only satisfied its needs for regular expenditures but also generated a sizeable surplus for unexpected spending before the evergrowing population exhausted the extractable economic resources, a situation at least true until the 1760s. Central to understanding the characteristics of the Qing state, in a nutshell, was the prevalence of the peculiar equilibrium in its fiscal constitution as well as in the relationship between the state and society, which in essence reflected an optimal geopolitical and demographic situation prevailing in China by the late eighteenth century. That equilibrium, however, came into jeopardy in the last two or three decades of the eighteenth century when the ratio between the population and economic resources in China became increasingly unfavorable, causing a steady decrease in the government’s fiscal surpluses and consequently its defensive strategies in handling border troubles. Meanwhile, it was during the same period that the most advanced countries in Europe underwent the Industrial Revolution. Before the Industrial Revolution, the European powers could never become a real threat to China when their economies were based on manual labor and organic energy; although the division of labor and commodification as well as the degree of population pressure drove their economies to expand, the growth was slow and incremental. None of the European powers before the Industrial Revolution was able to rival China in terms of both total economic output and the overall competitiveness of manufactured goods. However, by the 1820s and 1830s when the Industrial Revolution was first complete in Britain, the manufacturing capacities of the island had exploded; what propelled its economic growth, which was truly exponential, was primarily the use in production and transportation of machines propelled by fossil energy, rather than the traditional dynamics in the Smithian or Malthusian model.17 For the first time, the European capitalist economy became a truly global force: “the need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere” (Marx and Engels [1848] 1969). China was inevitably to

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become involved in the global wave of capitalist expansion that was accompanied with the advent of military threat from the European powers. Unfortunately, the Qing state was ill prepared. Despite its success in handling the crises on its northwestern frontiers, until the mid-nineteenth century the Qing court never perceived its geopolitical issues from a global perspective and never developed an integrated foreign policy that transcended its narrowly defined, fragmented, frontier policies (Mosca 2013: 1–18). Even worse than its failure to develop a grand strategy on a global scale, the Qing court was faced with a fiscal crisis from within, which constrained its capacity to tackle the new challenge from outside, as shown in the next chapter.

Notes 1 Other military operations included: the campaigns against the Miao in Hunan province in 1737 and in Guizhou in 1741, which cost about 100,000 taels in total; the war against the Tibetan tribes in Zhandui in 1745–1746, which cost more than 1 million taels; and the war against the Tibetan tribes in Jinchuan in 1747–1749, which cost 3.3 million taels, or 1.1 million a year on average. 2 Other military expenditures include: 13 million taels on the operation in Burma (1767–1769, or 4.33 million a year); 10 million on the campaign in Taiwan (1787–1788, or 5 million a year); 1.3 million on the war against Vietnam (1788–1789); 1 million on fighting the Gurkhas of Nepal (1788–1789) and another 11 million on the same enemy (1791–1792); and 15 million on suppressing the Miao in Hunan and Guizhou provinces (Chen Feng 1992: 275). 3 In addition to the spending on suppressing the White Lotus rebels (averaging 16.66 million taels per year), there was an additional 15 million taels spent on defeating the Miao in Hunan and Guizhou in 1795–1797 (averaging 5 million), thus the average expenses on wars in 1796–1797 were hypothetically 21.66 million taels per year. 4 There were only two noteworthy military operations during those years. The first is the nine-year (1802–1810) annihilation of the so-called “oceanic bandits” (yangfei) led by Cai Qian, who frequently harassed southeastern coastal provinces; suppressing the rebels cost a total of 7 million taels, or about 780,000 taels a year. The second was the suppression of the rebellion by the Tianli Sect in 1813, which cost 110,000 taels in Anhui province (Chen Feng 1992: 274) and probably up to 1 million in the whole country. 5 The only noticeable campaign in this decade was the suppression of the Yao people in Hunan and Guangdong in 1832, which used 1.53 million taels (Chen Feng 1992: 275). 6 Ulrich Theobald notes that the funds for the first Jinchuan war “was financed by the province of Sichuan” and that “the burden of 35 million liang spent for the western campaigns was likewise distributed on the shoulders of various provinces and those of the Ministry” (2013: 103), but he fails to point out that all these funds from individual provinces were actually the Coordinate Remittances that the provinces owed to the Board. 7 Other sources included provisional impositions on residents in the regions where the war took place, which, however, could be reimbursed sometimes in part or in full after the war. 8 During the campaign against the Tibetans in Small Jinchuan in 1773, for example, Jiang Chun, a merchant from the Huai River region, alone contributed 4 million taels. In another instance, during the second campaign against the Gurkhas of Nepal

80

9

10

11

12

13 14

The formation of the Qing state in 1791–1792, the contribution from salt merchants amounted to 6.1 million taels, or more than half of the total expenditure (11 million taels) on this operation (Chen Feng 1988, 1992: 334). These generous donations were possible because the merchants had amassed a huge sum of wealth through their monopoly of salt trading; each of the more than 100 large merchants in the Huai River region, for example, was believed to have assets from a few million to 10 million and even as much as 70 to 80 million taels (Song Liangxi 1998). During the period from 1914 to 1918, grain production accounted for 79.78% of the total volume of agricultural output and 83.11% of the total market value of agricultural output (Xu and Wu 2003b: 1098). The role of grain production in agriculture in the Qing should not be too different from this estimate. Multiple factors accounted for the phenomenal economic growth in the eighteenth century. Aside from the long period of peace, the reclamation of the land, the settling of new territories, the expansion of foreign trade, and the introduction of new crops from America, historians have also underscored the growing number of free, independent peasant households in south China following the disappearance of large estates in the course of the Qing conquest and the marketization and specialization of production as important reasons behind economic expansion (B. Li 1998; Goldstone 2004). Of the 159 instances of double cropping of rice found in local gazetteers during the Ming and the Qing period, 113 of them (or 71%) occurred after the 1750s (Min Zongdian 1999). The ban on the registration of newly reclaimed land and hence its taxation was first included in the Qing code in 1740. In the same year, Emperor Qianlong reasserted the policy of allowing people to freely reclaim the scattered pieces of wasteland without tax obligations. In 1773, Emperor Qianlong once again stressed the prohibition of taxing the newly reclaimed land by denying the existence of uncultivated land in China proper; in his view, it was only in the Urumqi region of Xinjiang province where land was still available for reclamation (Zhang Yan 2008: 123–124). For a discussion on the decline in the Qing ruler’s commitment to “nourishing the people” after the mid-eighteenth century, see Dunstan (2006). War-making, to be sure, was not necessarily the most important factor accounting for state-building in early modern Europe, and it was not always conducive to the rise of “modern” state forms; war could also lead to the destruction of the local economy, crises in state finances, and the breakdown of a centralized state. The growth of military forces, likewise, was often accompanied by corruption, nepotism, and decentralization – not to mention pillage and plunder in wartime – instead of their rationalization, the expansion of the power of the state, and provision of protection to the civilians within their territory. And the development of the fiscal systems to sustain states at war frequently involved negotiation, compromise, and distortion (Gunn 2010). Other factors such as jurisdiction, religion, and ideology were no less important than the development of fiscal-military institutions to the rise of centralized national states. Thomas Ertman (1997), for his part, traces the origins of different political regimes (absolutist or constitutional) at the end of the early modern period to their very starting conditions, especially the various patterns of local government in different parts of Europe in the centuries following the demise of the western Roman Empire; he stresses, in particular, the timing of the onset of sustaining geopolitical competition as an important factor explaining the varying nature of state infrastructures across the continent by the late eighteenth century. Others underscore the role of internal judicial, administrative, and ideological developments in the process of state-building (e.g., Strayer 1970: 35–89; van Creveld 1999: 126–184; A. Harding 2002: 295–335). For legal historians, the development of a “law state” in late medieval England, as seen in the proliferation of litigation and legislation, for example,

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was no less important than the development of a “war state” (Kaeuper 1988: 134–184; Harriss 1993; Gunn et al. 2008). 15 According to Angus Maddison (1998), industry and trade accounted for 31.5% of China’s GDP in 1890, which was essentially no different from its economic structure back in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Liu Ruizhong (1987) estimated that the share of industry and trade in the Chinese economy was 30% in 1700, 33% in 1750, and 36% in 1800. As for the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), it is estimated that industry and trade accounted for 10% of its economy in the early period of its history and about 20% in the rest of the dynasty (Li and Guan, n.d.). 16 There were, to be sure, enormous differences between England and continental Europe. The highly centralized tax system, its increasing reliance on indirect taxes, its abolition of farming indirect taxes, and hence the rapid increase in the English state’s revenues that far outpaced its economic growth, all these lead Patrick K. O’Brien to dub the fiscal regime in England from the late seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries as “fiscal exceptionalism,” which contrasted with the decentralized, corrupt, and inefficient tax systems based on inflexible regional quotas and the prevalence of tax farming in continental Europe during the same period (O’Brien 2002). 17 For further discussions on the different types of economic growth and their implications for understanding late imperial Chinese economy, see Feuerwerker (1992); Wong (1997: 43–52); Goldstone (2004).

Part II

The transition to a sovereign state

4

Regionalized centralism The resilience and fragility of the late Qing state

Beginning in the 1790s, the Qing state encountered two fatal challenges in succession. One was the expansion of the Europe-centered system of states, driven by the unmatched military prowess and industrial productivity of Western countries, which were in turn bolstered by the proliferation of capitalism in the economy and the application of modern scientific knowledge to the military and production. China’s collision with this system in the nineteenth century inevitably led to the breakdown of the interstate order in East Asia, the transformation of the Chinese dynasty into an ordinary sovereign state, and its integration into the European interstate order on the basis of legal equality among sovereign states. China, however, would have had a better chance to absorb the impact of the collision, to accommodate the new interstate relations, and to strengthen itself by actively and selectively borrowing from Europe, had the clash taken place before the late eighteenth century when the Qing was economically dynamic, fiscally solvent, and militarily well-built. Unfortunately, the advent of the European challenge coincided with the occurrence of another crisis, that is, the explosion of the population, which exhausted most of the economic surplus and undermined the Qing state’s fiscal health as well as domestic stability as seen in the Taiping Rebellion (1851–1864). Nevertheless, the Qing survived the fiscal and geopolitical crisis; even more surprisingly, it witnessed three decades of “Restoration” from the mid-1860s to the mid-1890s and another wave of modernization in the last decade (1901–1911). This and the following two chapters, therefore, will discuss how the Qing survived these two crises and, more importantly, how China became a sovereign state for all the setbacks and pitfalls it encountered in this period. Earlier studies of late Qing China generally underscored various forms of incompetence, corruption, and frustration in its modernizing endeavors.1 This narrative of failure mirrored the modernization paradigm in social sciences in the 1950s and 1960s, central to which was a shared assumption about the fundamental incompatibility between the cultural values of a “traditional” society and the requirements of modernization. Joseph Levenson’s interpretation of Confucianism (1968) best exemplified this paradigm in the historiography of modern China (see also Cohen 2010). The prevalence of the failure narrative also had to do with the comparative perspective characteristic of the modernization

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paradigm; scholars frequently highlight the “failures” of late Qing China by comparing it to the “successes” of Meiji Japan.2 More recent scholarship on late Qing China has challenged the failure narrative. The reason why the Self-Strengthening movement has long been seen as a failure, according to Benjamin Elman, was because of China’s defeat by Japan in 1894 that abruptly ended the program. However, he argues, China had taken the lead for years since the 1860s in East Asia in importing Western science and technology through translations, manufacturing, and military modernization. It was the disastrous result of the Sino-Japanese war, which few in and outside China could predict, that caused contemporary observers as well as historians to retrospectively interpret China as a loser in the competition with Japan during the Self-Strengthening period (Elman 2004, 2006). Rather than a failure, Stephen Halsey (2015) shows the impressive accomplishments of a famous steamship navigation company and other government-sponsored enterprises in the 1870s and 1880s in breaking the Western monopoly on modern shipping and developing industries in China.3 But the most important achievement of the late Qing state is no doubt its success to defend most of its territories and its transition to a sovereign state. This chapter, therefore, focuses on an examination of the institutional context in which those achievements took place. At the core of this context is the transformation of the Qing state’s fiscal constitution, which had a profound impact on the relationship between the central government and provincial authorities. It was the changes in this relationship that accounted for both the phenomenal achievements of the modern initiatives as well as the emergence of new problems that were fatal to the Qing in the end.

Fiscal regionalization The low-level equilibrium deteriorated The best indicator of the Qing fiscal condition before the 1850s, as explained in Chapter 3, was the size of the surplus of the cash reserve at the Board of Revenue. A turning point in this regard was the White Lotus Rebellion (1796–1804), which exhausted most of the reserve, reducing it from above 70 million taels before the rebellion to less than 20 million by the end of the rebellion because of the massive military spending incurred. The Qing state saw relative peace both domestically and on the border in the next four decades until the outbreak of the Opium War in 1840, except for a few small-scale military operations that cost 4.5 million taels a year on average (see Chapter 3). Yet, the surplus level of the cash reserve remained limited to a low level, ranging largely between 20 and 30 million taels in most of the four decades; the only exception was from 1828 to 1830 when it reached 32 or 33 million taels. This was in sharp contrast with the rapid increase in the surplus level during the times of peace in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The situation worsened steadily in the 1830s on the eve of the Opium War when the surplus

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87

decreased from 32 million taels in 1830 to 22 million in 1833 and 10 million in 1840 (see Figure 3.1); this was surprising, given the fact that China enjoyed almost complete peace without major military operations in that decade. Even more surprising was that this decline in the cash surplus was only the figure on paper; the actual amount was significantly lower than the official record.4 Two basic factors explain why the fiscal condition of the Qing state deteriorated in the first half of the nineteenth century, despite the fact that the country saw no major troubles at home or on the border. The first is population growth, which increased from about 120 million in the 1640s to 200 million in the 1760s and 300 million in the 1790s, hence a steady decrease in the size of arable land per farmer, from 27.52 mu in 1600 and 25.22 mu in 1766, to 16.75 mu in 1790, 14.94 mu in 1812, and 13.88 mu in 1887 (see Table 3.3).5 As a result, the amount of “surplus grain,” or the total output of grain after deducting the amount for self-consumption by the farming population, also decreased from 439 catties per capita in 1766 to 171 catties in 1790, 120 catties in 1812, and only 47 catties in 1887 (Table 3.3), which crippled land owners’ abilities to fulfill their tax duties to the state. The second factor is the drainage of silver from the domestic market because of opium smuggling on the southeast coast and the subsequent deficit of foreign trade on the Chinese side. It is estimated that to offset the deficit that increased steadily in the early nineteenth century, the silver that left China totaled more than 11 million taels between 1800 and 1809 (Li Qiang 2008: 261), 20 million taels between 1823 and 1831, another 20 million taels between 1831 and 1834, and more than 30 million taels between 1834 and 1838, thus amounting to more than 100 million taels altogether during the 15 years from 1823 to 1838, or 2.5 times the Qing state’s annual revenue (roughly 40 million taels). An immediate result of the continuous outflow of silver from China was the growing value of silver tael, which was used mandatorily in tax payment, in relation to copper cash, which was used by ordinary people in everyday transactions. The price of each silver tael almost doubled in the first four decades of the nineteenth century, increasing from 700 or 800 wen in copper cash in the mid-1790s to 1,243 wen in 1816–1826, 1,234 wen in 1827, 1,420 wen in 1835, and 1,643 wen in 1840 (Deng Shaohui 1998: 38–39). Small owner-cultivators, therefore, had to pay twice what they used to as tax to the government (Luo Ergang 1947: 16). Combined, the reduced grain surplus under population pressure and the doubled value of silver taels explain the increasing difficulties that confronted tax payers and hence the escalating deficit that the Qing state faced in tax collection. Compared to the official quota of land taxes (33.35 million taels) to be collected annually in the entire country, which the Qing government had no difficulty in achieving at its full amount in most years before the 1790s, it collected only 30.43 million taels or 8.75% less than its target in 1841, 11.27% less in 1842, 9.40% in 1845, and 21.07% less in 1849 (Liang Fangzhong 2008: 573). By and large, however, the low-level equilibrium continued into the 1840s, with the traditional fiscal system remaining functional on the eve of the Taiping Rebellion. Thanks to the huge amount of cash reserves in surplus that had

88

The transition to a sovereign state

accumulated over the Qianlong reign, the Qing was able to survive the White Lotus Rebellion in the late 1790s and early 1800s without having to overhaul the tax system; by turning in part to its already decreased cash surplus and in part to the treasuries of the southeast provinces, the Qing again survived the Opium War without the destruction of its fiscal equilibrium.

The regionalization of fiscal power What brought the low-level equilibrium to an end was the Taiping Rebellion. Multiple reasons explain why the rebellion swept through South and Central China and became an unprecedented threat to the Qing dynasty. Aside from the lingering anti-Manchu feeling among the Han Chinese, to which the rebels appealed in agitating the populace, and the heightened tax burden that threatened the livelihood of peasants, the ultimate reason behind the widespread rebellion, as Luo Ergang (1958) argues, lay in the enlarged population and its pressure on the available resources, which led to the drainage of the economic surplus, the impoverishment of the rural population, and the subsequent emergence of uprooted people in large numbers (see also Ho 1959: 183, 274). Given the rampancy and persistence of the rebellion and the fact that it broke out at a moment when the surplus of the Board of Revenue’s cash reserve had decreased to its lowest level in history (merely 8.96 million taels in 1850 and 7.63 million taels in 1851 according to official records; the actual amount of surplus in cash was only 1.87 million taels by the end of 1850, see Deng Shaohui 1998: 45), the challenge for the Qing government to meet the demand for military expenditure to suppress the rebels was unprecedented; the cost of the war was far beyond its affordability. The Qing court’s military expenses during 1850–1852 in Guangxi province alone, where the rebellion originated, exceeded 11.24 million taels; altogether, the expenses on suppressing the rebels during the first three years of the rebellion in affected provinces amounted to 29.63 million taels, nearly 10 million a year on average (Peng Zeyi 1983: 127). As a result, the Board of Revenue’s cash reserve decreased to as little as 0.22 million taels in June 1853. Likewise, the treasuries of the provinces affected by the rebellion were either completely drained (such as Hunan in August 1853) or left with only a few thousand taels (such as Hubei and Anhui in late 1853) (Shi and Xu 2008: 58–60). The Qing court’s fiscal condition reached its worst point when the Taiping rebels occupied the lower Yangzi region, the most important source of the Qing state’s revenues. Subsequently, the Board of Revenue’s official figure of accumulative surplus plummeted from 5.72 million taels in 1852 to 1.69 million in 1853 when the rebels occupied Nanjing, and to 1.17 million in 1860 when the rebels captured Suzhou (see Figure 3.1); the actual amount of the surplus was only 119,000 taels in 1853 and 69,000 taels in 1860 (Shi Zhihong 2009: 111). The Qing state’s treasury was virtually exhausted, and the low-level equilibrium that characterized the Qing government’s fiscal system before the 1850s no longer existed.

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How then did the Qing court manage to meet the demands for massive military spending during the years of the Taiping Rebellion and other revolts? According to an incomplete estimate, the Qing spent a total of 170.6 million taels as direct reimbursements for expenses on combating the Taipings as reported by military and civilian authorities from different provinces (Peng Zeyi 1983: 127, 136). The actual expenses on the war, however, could have been more than 290 million taels during the 14 years (1851–64), averaging 20.71 million taels per year (Zhou Yumin 2000: 153). In addition, the Qing spent 31.73 million taels on the Nian Rebellion (1853–1868), 118.89 million taels on the rebellion of the Hui people in the northwestern provinces (1862–1873), and 101.07 million taels on small-scale revolts in the southwestern and southeastern provinces (1851–1873). Altogether, the Qing government’s spending on the revolts during the 23 years from 1851 to 1873 totaled more than 541 million taels, or 23.55 million taels per year, which was roughly 60% of the Qing state’s annual revenue in the first half of the nineteenth century (approximately 40 million taels). In addition, the expedition into Xinjiang in 1875–1878 cost another 70–80 million taels; the war with France cost 30 million taels; and the spending on the Northern Fleet alone totaled about 23 million taels for two decades by 1894 (ibid.: 267–277). To pay the war indemnities after the major defeats in 1840, 1894, and 1900 as well as other forms of compensation to foreign powers, the Qing spent no less than 900 million taels in total (Xiang Ruihua 1999). In the absence of a minimal amount of cash reserve at the Board of Revenue, the Qing court’s initial response to the huge spending at the beginning of the Taiping Rebellion was to turn to two traditional methods without revamping the tax system per se. One was selling official titles (juanli or juanna), which started in 1851, originally intended for a period of one year but repeatedly extended until 1879. This was effective in the first two years, generating 1 to 3 million taels a year in the early 1850s. The other was minting copper cash and printing paper notes with a large face value. From 1851 to 1861, the largevalue copper cash and paper notes or paper cash issued by the Board equaled 60,249,000 taels in total, or 69.5% of the Board’s total revenues during the same period, which greatly made up the imperial court’s deficit during the Taiping Rebellion (Peng Zeyi 1983: 87–115, 146–149; Deng Shaohui 1998: 48–51; Shi Zhihong and Xu Yi 2008: 70–72). More fundamental than these two traditional solutions to the fiscal mire of the Qing state after the outbreak of the Taiping Rebellion are measures associated with the devolution of power from the Board of Revenue to provincial governors and governors general to raise funds on themselves by whatever methods that were workable in the local area as the Xianfeng emperor ordered in July 1853 (QSL, Xianfeng 97: 3–6-yichou). It was these new measures that led to the restructuring of the tax system and the transition of the fiscal system of the Qing state from the conventional type characteristic of its fixed sources, and the rigid level of regular revenue and its fixed regular expenditures, to the new one that was open, elastic, and dynamic.

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One of the measures of fiscal decentralization was collecting surcharges on the preexisting land taxes, thus breaking the rule, and indeed a taboo, of “never increase the land tax” (yong bu jia fu) faithfully observed by the Qing rulers since 1712.6 Borrowing from domestic or foreign debtors was another important source for additional revenue during wartime.7 A third and the most important measure was the collection of a new tax, lijin, on goods when sold locally or shipped to a new locality. First created in the vicinity of Yangzhou of northern Jiangsu in 1853 and promoted countrywide in 1855, this transit tax was collected in different ways in different provinces. Typically, however, a lijin was levied on commodities at the locality of their origins and then recollected each time they were transported to a different place. Since all of the lijin income went to provincial treasuries in theory, rather than the Board of Revenue of the central government, local governors or governors general and military authorities had a strong incentive to maximize their revenue from this source by creating as many lijin collection stations as possible along important transportation routes within the area under their jurisdiction. In Hubei province, for instance, more than 480 collection stations were set up before they were reduced to 86 in 1868 (Peng Zeyi 1983: 157). The rate of lijin varied from 5% to as high as 10% of the value of goods. Thus, after being transported through several collection stations within a local area, the total payment of lijin before the goods were finally sold to consumers could be 20–30% or as high as 40–50% of the value of the goods per se, most of which were embezzled by collecting clerks and government officials (Peng Zeyi 1983: 159; Shi Zhihong 2009: 123). The total amount of lijin collected throughout the country and officially reported ranged from 14 to 15 million taels in the 1870s and 1880s (Luo Yudong 1970: 469). It is estimated that, because of the collection of lijin, the Qing state’s mercantile-based taxes increased tenfold by 1908 (S. Mann 1987: 7, 45).

The fiscal constitution transformed As a result, the fiscal condition of the Qing improved steadily in the three decades following the Taiping Rebellion. Compared to the Qing government’s total revenue in the first half of the nineteenth century, which fluctuated by around 40 million taels per year, the total amount of officially reported revenues had more than doubled three decades later, reaching 80.76 million taels in 1889 and 89.68 million taels in 1891, the highest level before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894 (see Table 4.1). It should be kept in mind, however, that the provincial authorities rarely reported to the Board the full amount of revenues they had obtained; before the nineteenth century, the unreported portion usually accounted for 20–30% of its actual income. During the three decades following the Taiping Rebellion, this hidden income could be as high as 40%. If we take into account the unreported portion, the total amount of the Qing government’s annual revenue could be as high as 140 to 150 million taels in the late 1880s and early 1890s (Shi and Xu 2008: 279; see also Table 4.1).

4,986

7,394 6,735 6,998 7,507 7,716 7,428 7,172 7,403 7,680 6,737

32,813

32,357 32,805 32,790 33,224 32,083 33,736 33,587 33,281 33,268 32,669

14,250 15,693 16,747 15,565 14,930 15,324 16,326 15,315 14,277 14,216

4,958 4,982 5,074

29,432 29,576 30,214

Salt tax

1841 1842 1845 1846 1847 1848 1849 1874 1881 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890 1891 1892 1893 1894

Lijin

Land tax

Yeara

13,528 14,366 19,319 17,754 16,767 16,710 18,207 17,623 16,801 10,674

4,705

4,208 4,130 5,511

Maritime custom

9,558 11,669 8,360 13,742 9,265 13,609 14,432 10,742 11,083 16,737

Other incomes

38,598 38,688 40,799 39,223 39,387 37,940 42,504 60,800 82,349 77,086 81,270 84,217 87,793 80,762 86,808 89,685 84,364 83,110 81,034

55,000 55,000 58,000 56,000 56,000 54,000 61,000 111,000 150,000 140,000 148,000 153,000 160,000 147,000 158,000 163,000 153,000 151,000 147,000

Realb

Revenue Official

Table 4.1 The revenue and expenditure of the Qing state, 1841–1911 (in 1,000 silver taels)

72,866 78,552 81,281 81,968 73,070 79,411 79,355 79,645 73,433 80,276

37,340 37,140 38,816 36,287 35,584 35,890 36,444

Expenditure

(Continued )

4,221 2,718 2,936 6,423 7,682 7,397 10,330 7,719 9,677 758

1,796 2,935 3,803 2,050 556

Balance

43,188

48,101

46,312

13,050 12,500 13,000

Salt tax

42,139

22,052 31,500 40,000

Maritime custom

117,221

27,132 9,460 27,000

Other incomes

108,328 104,920 130,000 234,820 263,219 296,962

Official

181,000 175,000 217,000 276,000 310,000 349,000

Realb

Revenue

6,762 –30,000 –2,180 –6,657 –41,690 237,000 269,876 338,652

Balance

101,566 134,920

Expenditure

Notes: aThe data for 1911 are budgeted estimates rather than the actual amounts of government revenues and expenditures (QCXW, 68: 8245–8246). b Estimates of the Qing state’s real revenues are based on its official revenues, assuming that the latter is 25% less than the former before the Taiping Rebellion, 40% less than the former between 1851 and 1907 (Shi and Xu 2008: 277, 279, 289), and 15% less than the former between 1908 and 1911 because of the Qing court’s investigation of local fiscal conditions in 1908 that greatly narrowed the gap between reported and actual revenues (QCXW, 68: 8249).

Sources: QCXW, 66: 8225, 8227–8229; 67: 8231–8232; 68: 8245–8249; SQYJ: 144–148; HBS, 1.1: 172–173; QSG, 125: 3704–3709.

12,160 16,000 12,000 21,000

33,934 35,460 35,000

1899 1903 1906 1908 1909 1911

Lijin

Land tax

Yeara

Table 4.1 (Cont.)

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What made possible the rapid growth of the state’s total revenue was primarily income from the following two sources. One is the collection of lijin discussed above, which officially generated 14 million taels or more each year in the 1880s and early 1890s, or 15–17% of the Qing state’s official revenue. The other is the income from maritime customs, which increased from 4 or 5 million taels a year in the 1840s to 14.47 million taels in 1885 and 23.51 million taels (26% of the state’s total income) in 1891 (Deng Shaohui 1998: 99). As a result, the structure of the Qing government’s revenues underwent a meaningful change in the second half of the nineteenth century. Before the 1850s, the land tax constituted the most important source of its revenue, accounting for 73–77% of its total income; by the early 1890s, its share had reduced to about 40% or less. On the other hand, the revenue from commercial sources (salt taxes, lijin, maritime customs, etc.) increased from less than 30% before 1850 to about 60% before 1894 (Table 4.1). What needs to be further explained is how the revenues from lijin and maritime customs were allocated and used. As noted earlier, lijin was collected and controlled by provincial authorities, but most of its officially reported revenue was used for the Qing court’s countrywide purposes (the so-called guoyong) in the form of various remittance quotas that went to the Board of Revenue, whereas the portion of the reported lijin revenue for local provincial usages (shengyong) rarely exceeded 10% (Luo Yudong 1970: 222–229). The same is true for the revenue from maritime customs. The amount for “countrywide usages” (guoyong) accounted for roughly 70% of the total revenue of maritime customs in the 1870s through the early 1890s, whereas the portion for provincial usages was only 13–19% (Shi and Xu 2008: 186–187). But there was a fundamental difference between the two sources. Unlike the lijin income, most of which (70–80%, see ibid.: 123) was unreported to the Board of Revenue, the reported income from maritime customs, which were efficiently managed by Westerners and largely free of the corruption and embezzlement of Qing bureaucrats, was close to its actual level, and most of it was indeed used for countrywide purposes, although provincial authorities continued to detain most of the portion for “countrywide usages” on the grounds of revenue shortages or that they were in charge of those countrywide programs that were ongoing in their own provinces, and the actual amount eventually remitted to the Board of Revenue accounted for 20–37% of the total income from maritime customs in the 1870s, and only 7–20% in the 1880s and early 1890s (ibid.: 182–183). At any rate, the Qing state’s fiscal constitution experienced a transition from relying on traditional sources of revenue, primarily the land taxes that remained largely a fixed quantity, to increasingly drawing on indirect taxes. Compared to its revenue before the transition, such as in 1849, when the land tax account for 77% of total government income, by 1885, the land tax only contributed 42% to its total revenue, and the rest came from the taxes on commodities, primarily the lijin, salt tax, and maritime customs. By the end of the Qing, the land tax further declined to only 16% of the government’s total revenue, while the

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revenues from the lijin, salt tax, and maritime customs were 2.73 times the revenue from the land tax. The fiscal condition of the Qing state, therefore, significantly improved from the 1860s to the early 1890s. This was true for the entire government system, as evidenced in the doubling of its annual revenue during this period, as well as for the imperial court in Beijing, as best seen in the increases in the cash reserve at the Board of Revenue, which reached 8.06 million taels by the end of 1882, 9.85 million taels by 1883, and 10.38 million taels by 1891 (Shi and Xu 2008: 276), thus in sharp contrast with the emptiness of the Board’s treasury in most of the 1850s. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to term the ten years from 1885 to 1894 before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War as a “golden decade” for the late Qing state in terms of its fiscal solvency. This was a decade when the country enjoyed domestic order and peace on the border, when its economy recovered from war devastation and expanded, and when government revenues not only grew steadily but also generated a sizable surplus. In each year of this decade, the official revenues of the Qing government, averaging 83.57 million taels, exceeded its official expenditures, averaging 77.59 million taels, by a margin of more than 7%, and generated a surplus of 5.98 million taels per year. As mentioned earlier, the actual income of the Qing government, including the reported and the unreported, could be as high as 140–150 million taels a year, almost twice its annual expenditures.

The fiscal autonomy of provincial authorities But the transition in the sources of government revenues from the land to mainly commerce and borrowing was not driven by the expansion of trade or the growth of the non-agricultural economy, nor did it come with the establishment of a centralized and bureaucratized state for the efficient extraction and use of revenues, as often seen in the most successful fiscal-military states in early modern Europe. Instead, the transition was a result of provincial governors’ response to the pressing tasks of dealing with external and internal exigencies; the fiscal measures leading to the transition were typically introduced in a passive, piecemeal, and corrective style, often initiated and implemented by local administrators for extra revenues to fund the urgent tasks that confronted them. Therefore, this transition inevitably led to the decentralization or regionalization of the fiscal system. Unlike the situation before the mid-nineteenth century when the imperial court was able to put most of the revenues under its control, in the late nineteenth century most of the new sources of revenue were in the hands of provincial leaders and not subject to the central government’s effective surveillance and reallocation. What made this possible was the formalization of the temporary measures that had been practiced during wartime as a solution to the plight of the budget deficit, a development leading to the growing fiscal autonomy of provincial authorities. A hallmark of the Qing state’s highly centralized control of tax revenues before the mid-nineteenth century was the remittance system. Under this

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system, the remainder of every province’s tax revenues, after deducting the statutory portion retained for local administrative expenses, had to be completely remitted to the Board of Revenue (hence named jingxiang or “Metropolitan Remittance”) and, if necessary, to other provinces as instructed by the Board (xiexiang or “Coordinate Remittance”) (Liu Zenghe 2014: 49–54; Ni Yuping 2017: 15). The total amount of Metropolitan Remittance from individual provinces was roughly 10 million taels each year in the late eighteenth century, or a quarter of the state’s total annual revenue (Shi Zhihong 2009: 11). During the early years of the Taiping Rebellion, however, the provinces affected by the revolt petitioned one after another for delaying or retaining the Metropolitan Remittance for local military expenses and even detained the remittance from neighboring provinces being transported to the capital city or other needy provinces. So chaotic and paralyzed was the remittance system that the imperial court, without sufficient funds to allocate, eventually decided in 1853 to allow provincial authorities to raise funds on their own for local administrative and military expenses, as mentioned earlier. Nevertheless, to ensure that the Board had the necessary minimal income to sustain the central government and regular military forces, the court ordered in 1856 individual provinces to remit a total of 4 million taels a year as a “fixed” amount of Metropolitan Remittance, to be apportioned among the provinces. This “fixed” quota was later increased to 5 million taels in 1860, 7 million in 1861, and 8 million in 1867, which would remain unchanged until the end of the Qing (Deng Shaohui 1998: 54–60; Shi and Xu 2008: 136). But the Metropolitan Remittance was not the only obligation of provincial authorities to the central government in the late nineteenth century. From the 1860s through the 1880s, the Qing court imposed on individual provinces and maritime customs additional annual quotas of mandatory remittance to the Board of Revenue for specific purposes, including: • • • • • • • • • •

enhancing the defense of the capital city (660,000 taels from 1863); increasing the budget for the Imperial Household Department (neiwufu, 600,000 taels from 1869); building coastal fortresses and naval forces (4 million taels from five maritime customs and the lijin of coastal provinces from 1875); sending diplomats abroad (more than 1 million taels from 1876); strengthening the garrison troops in Manchuria (2 million taels from 1880); relieving famines (120,000 taels from 1883); recovering the salaries of bureaucrats in Beijing to full levels (260,000 tales from 1883); compensating bureaucrats in Beijing whose salaries had been reduced from 1851 (1 million taels from 1885); training the Banner troops in Beijing (1.33 million taels from 1885); constructing railroads (800,000 taels from 1889);

96 •

The transition to a sovereign state strengthening the defense in the vicinity of the capital city (2 million taels from 1892) (Luo Yudong 1970: 196–207; Shi and Xu 2008: 137–138; Ni Yuping 2017: 248–255).

Altogether, the mandatory recurring revenue contributions (the Metropolitan Remittance and other obligatory remittances) shared by all provinces and maritime customs to the central government increased to 21.77 million taels annually by 1892. The fiscal system of the Qing thus underwent a transition from the imperial court’s centralized and complete control of government revenues at all levels before 1851 to relatively fixed revenue-sharing between the central and provincial authorities in the second half of the nineteenth century. What, then, does this transition mean for the Qing state and its fiscal abilities? An obvious result of this transition was the growing autonomy of provincial leaders, who were able to control the remainder of the revenues generated within their territories after fulfilling their obligations to central government. Because of this, they had a strong incentive to increase the revenues of provincial treasuries by whatever means available to them, primarily maximizing the collection of lijin and surcharges on land taxes and domestic or foreign debts, as mentioned earlier, for new projects they initiated and sponsored in their own provinces. And they set up their own financial bureaus under various names to collect and manage the non-conventional revenues; these agencies answered directly to the provincial leaders. On the other hand, the Board of Revenue’s power to supervise the fiscal activities at the provincial level deteriorated; the Financial Commissioner (buzhengshi) to every province, who had conventionally been an agent of the Board in charge of tax revenues in the province and acted independently of the provincial governor and governor general, was gradually turned into a subordinate of the latter.8 The financial autonomy of provincial authorities was also seen in their ability to bargain with the central government over their sharing of various remittance quotas imposed by the latter. The governors or governors general rarely remitted the full amount of required quotas to the Board, and they would use whatever excuse to delay or reduce their remittances, despite the Board’s repeated prompts. Overall, the provincial authorities fulfilled only 44.4% of their quotas in 1897, 45.8% in 1898, and 60% in 1899 (Shi Zhihong 2009: 268–272; also see Shi and Xu 2008: 140). In fact, the same situation existed before 1894. In general, they showed greater commitment to fulfilling their duties directly linked with the security of the imperial capital and Manchuria – the homeland of the Manchus, because doing so helped prove their loyalty to the court – than to projects that only worked to strengthen the position of certain provincial leaders, especially the funds on coastal defense and naval forces, which were often perceived as a personal enterprise of Governor General Li Hongzhang from the mid-1870s to the mid-1890s, as shown in the following discussion on maritime defense. At any rate, fiscal regionalization (i.e., the growth of the financial independence of provincial authorities) was an unmistakable trend during and after the Taiping Rebellion.

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But the autonomy of late Qing provincial authorities should not be so exaggerated as to conclude that the central government had lost control of fiscal resources at the provincial level. In fact, the Board of Revenue remained decisive in reallocating between the central and provincial governments all of the revenues reported to it; what the Board could not control was only the portion hidden from the reports of provincial or lower-level governments. By and large, the unreported revenues accounted for up to about 40% of the actual amount of revenues generated by governments at different levels in the second half of the nineteenth century (see Table 4.1). Among all the different kinds of taxes, lijin had the biggest problem with underreporting; nevertheless, the Board of Revenue was able to spend most of the officially reported lijin income on projects at the national level (guoyong), as discussed earlier. We will see in Chapter 6 that, by implementing a nationwide fiscal investigation, the central government was able to put under its control most of the lijin income that had been previously unreported, thus resulting in the skyrocketing of the lijin revenue to 43 million taels in 1911, three times its level in the 1890s (ranging from 12 to 16 million taels annually); and the unreported incomes were accordingly reduced to about 15% of the total revenues that were actually generated in individual provinces (see Table 4.1).9

The rise of conditional loyalty The devolution of power to Han bureaucrats The regionalization of the fiscal system came with the restructuring of power relations during and after the Taiping Rebellion in the 1850s and early 1860s. Before the rebellion, what characterized the government system at the top level and within the 18 interior provinces was not only a highly centralized bureaucratic system, much of which had been inherited from the Ming, but also the Qing court’s firm control of provincial authorities through its appointment of Manchu nobles and Banner elites to almost all of the positions of governors general, who were in charge of the military and local defense, while allowing only half of the positions of provincial governors to be filled by Han bureaucrats to manage local civilian affairs, as typically seen during the reign of Emperor Qianlong (1736–1795) (Kong Lingji et al. 1993: 327). The situation improved during the Jiaqing (1796–1820) and Daoguang (1821–1850), when the Han elites occupied half of the governor-general positions (Long Shengyun 1990: 298). In 1850, for instance, six out of the ten governors general were the Han Chinese, and among the 15 provincial governors, only one was a Manchu, and the rest were all Han bureaucrats (Wang Kaixi 2006). However, whenever a crisis emerged, the emperor invariably appointed a Manchu he trusted as his commissioner (jinglue dachen or canzan dachen and later qinchai dachen) to supervise military campaigns, and the provincial administrators (governors and governors general) were only to carry out the orders of the commissioner and play an auxiliary role in military operations (cheng haoling, bei ceying), a fact that

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remained true during the Opium War (QSG: 3264). During normal times, the governors and governors general were also subject to an intricate mechanism of checks and balances in their relationship with the two key agents of the central government at the provincial level, the Financial Commissioner (buzhengshi), who supervised civil administration and taxation in his province, and the Judicial Commissioner (anchashi), who oversaw litigation and adjudication of the province. The outbreak of the Taiping Rebellion reversed this tradition. During the first two years of the rebellion, the Qing court failed to curb the rapidly spreading rebellion with its regular army, the Green Standards, which had long lost its fighting abilities due to the lack of training, poor organization, and corruption among military officials. As a result, the rebels marched swiftly up to central China to capture Wuchang, the capital city of Hubei, in December 1852, thus they were in a position to attack and occupy the key cities of the lower Yangzi region, the most prosperous area. It was at that point that the Qing court ordered government officials in retirement to recruit adult males from their communities to form a military corps (tuanlian) as an auxiliary force to guard their communities and fight the rebels, a practice that had been tried in the 1790s in suppressing the White Lotus Rebellion. Zeng Guofan of Hunan province was one of the 43 “ministers of the limitary corps” (tuanlian dachen) in ten provinces appointed by Emperor Xianfeng in early 1853. Zeng soon proved his military talents by leading a force of more than ten thousand men from his province to retake Wuchang in July 1854. After fighting in different parts of the middle and lower Yangzi region over the next few years, he was eventually appointed as the Governor General of Liangjiang (Jiangsu and Anhui provinces) and Imperial Commissioner supervising military affairs in Jiangnan or the lower Yangzi region in 1859; in late 1861, he was further authorized to supervise all civilian and military officials in the provinces of Jiangsu, Jiangxi, Anhui, and Zhejiang. At his recommendation, a number of his subordinates from Hunan province were appointed as governors of the provinces in the middle and lower Yangzi region, hence the rise of the Hunan faction that would influence Qing politics at the provincial level for decades in the second half of the nineteenth century. Wenqing (1796–1856), Grand Secretary and Grand Councilor of State, explained well why the Qing court had to rely on the Han elites instead of the Manchus and put them to the key positions of civilian and military leadership: the Han people have to be relied on for handling tasks of the first magnitude under Heaven. These men are all from the fields of the countryside, familiar with the weal and woe of the people and knowing well what is true and what is false. How can we [Manchu nobles] compare to them, having never stepped out of the capital city and having no idea about grand strategies? (Xue Fucheng 1987: 250)

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It is estimated that from 1851 to 1912, Manchus held only 34.6% and 22.2% of all governor and governor-general positions, respectively, during this period, which contrasts with 57% and 48.4% during the entire Qing dynasty (Rhoads 2000: 47–48). What bolstered the persistent dominance of the Hunan faction of provincial leaders in late Qing politics, however, was first of all their tight control of the personalized militia as the main force in place of the regular army to suppress the Taiping rebels. The Hunan corps differed fundamentally from the regular army in that strong personal ties bound together different ranks of commanders and soldiers. When creating a corps, the commander at each level was responsible for recruiting his subordinate officers at the next level all the way down to the head of the basic unit of ten soldiers, and the head was to see that he recruited his solders from his home community, that he knew well the soldiers’ home addresses, parents, personalities, and abilities, and that the soldiers signed a pledge to ensure their obedience to the disciplinary rules of the corps (Liu Wei 2003: 119; Kuhn 1970: 122–148). This method of organization precluded the soldiers’ defection and delinquency on the battleground that were common among the soldiers of the Green Standards. It also turned the corps into essentially a private army of the provincial governors or governors general who established it. The corps was in essence the private army of the provincial leaders also because it was self-sustained and completely independent of central government’s support. The provincial leaders had to support their respective corps, using whatever resources locally available to them (jiudi chou xiang), such as collecting the lijin, selling government titles for contributions, detaining the remittance of tax monies and maritime customs, levying surcharges on land taxes, and so on, as discussed earlier in this chapter. To ensure that they generated enough revenue and managed it efficiently, each province established its own fiscal agency (liangtai or zhong liangtai) under the direct control of the governor or governor general, to disburse funds and reimburse expenses without being supervised by the Financial Commissioner of the province. The provincial leaders not only controlled the military and finances of their provinces and took them largely out of the central state’s reach, they further controlled the personnel of local governments by appointing their own men to the key positions of the provinces. It had long been a tradition in the history of the Qing for the provincial leaders to recommend candidates to the imperial court for appointments of administrators at the circuit, prefecture, and county levels, but their recommendations were limited (three candidates a year for a governor general and two a year for a governor) (Liu Ziyang 1988: 35). After being appointed as the Governor General of Liangjiang in charge of military affairs of four lower Yangzi provinces, Zeng Guofan went far beyond the limit and made frequent recommendations for a wide array of positions ranging from provincial governors to financial and judicial commissioners as well as officials at lower levels. To satisfy the needs of providing logistic support to the corps, postwar rehabilitation, and other administrative tasks, a governor or governor

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general was free to establish as many “bureaus” (ju), “stations” (tai), or “offices” (suo) as he saw fit, each in charge of a specific task. All of them were outside the regular government system and responsible only to the provincial leaders. In a word, in the course of suppressing the Taiping Rebellion and post-war rehabilitation, provincial governors and governors general, mostly of Han origin, emerged as strong regional leaders by arrogating to themselves the military, fiscal, and personnel power to a level unseen before the midnineteenth century and by weaving themselves into factions through personal ties to rival the Manchu elites, who had dominated Qing politics before the rebellion. The end result of the rebellion, then, was the unmistakable trend of power devolution from the imperial court to provincial leaders, in which Han bureaucrats came to dominate late Qing politics at the expense of Manchu and Banner elites.

Loyalty redefined The Qing court, to be sure, was alert to the rapidly growing power of the Han elites. Zeng Guofan’s retaking of Wuchang in 1854, for instance, made Emperor Xianfeng at once excited and worried, after being reminded by a grand secretary of the potential danger from an “ordinary person” (pifu) such as Zeng who had been able to “rally more than ten thousand followers with a single shout,” a fact that signaled “a bad omen for the state” (kong fei guojia zhi fu) (cf. Wang Kaixi 2006: 170). Emperor Xianfeng, therefore, gave up his original decision to award Zeng with the position of acting governor of Hubei province, and would remain vigilant regarding Zeng for the next six years. With only the nominal title of “Assistant Minister of the Board of War,” Zeng was repeatedly frustrated when he failed to gain support for his troops from local military and civilian officials while combatting rebels in neighboring provinces. While using the informal corps to fight the rebels in the middle and lower Yangzi provinces, the Qing court concentrated its regular Green Standard forces on two major camps stationed on the two sides of the Yangzi river on the outskirts of Nanjing, the capital of the Taiping rebels, to besiege the city, but it would not attack it until the informal corps had annihilated most of the rebel forces in the surrounding provinces. The primary purpose of the two camps led by the Manchu commissioners, in other words, was to prevent the informal corps led by the Han elites from claiming their decisive role in defeating the enemy. Not surprisingly, when the two camps were completely destroyed by the Taiping rebels in 1860, Zeng Guofan and his subordinates reacted with unconstrained joy and relaxation in their private communications (Fan Wenlan 1949: 144–145). Afterwards, the Qing court had to rely entirely on the informal corps under Zeng and other Han elites. He was eventually appointed as a governor general in charge of military affairs in four provinces that enabled him to command all military and civilian officials in this region.

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But tension between the court and the Han elites continued in the following years and became exceptionally keen at certain moments.10 The alliance between the Manchu and Han elites was essentially conditional; it was based on the Confucian notion of a proper relationship between the ruler and the minister: “the ruler employs his ministers by the rule of propriety, and the minister serves the ruler with loyalty” (jun shi chen yi li, chen shi jun yi zhong) (ibid.). In other words, the relationship between the two sides was reciprocal; the ruler’s proper treatment of a minister was the precondition of the latter’s loyalty to him. At the critical moments testing their relationship, a crisis could erupt into uncontrollable chaos if either of the two sides refused to concede. Fortunately, for the Qing court, Zeng turned out to be a savvy statesman, imbued deeply in the tradition of Confucian morality and statecraft and able to navigate the recurrent crises with his vigilance and forbearance. To some degree, his loyalty to the Qing, conditional as it was, can be seen as a reward to the latter for its persistent efforts in the preceding two centuries of embracing neo-Confucianism as its orthodox ideology and of narrowing the gap between the Manchus and the Han in filling government positions. In return, the vast majority of the Han elites had identified with the Qing in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, accepting it as a legitimate regime in China, despite its alien origins, and defined their relationship with the court on the basis of the Confucian tenet of morality. Added to Zeng’s loyalty to the Qing was also the fact that the two sides faced the same enemy, the Taiping rebels. For Zeng and many other Han elites, to combat the rebels was not only to save the Qing, but more importantly to defend the “Chinese-ness” of his country that had been threatened with the rebels’ embrace of an alien religion (pseudo-Christianity), which was in many aspects subversive to the Confucian values and Chinese cultural traditions, as he articulated eloquently in his famous “Proclamation of an Expedition against the Bandits from Guangdong” (Tao Yue fei wen) (ZGF, shiwen: 232–233). Therefore, what made the Han elites of the 1850s and 1860s unique and a powerful force in late Qing politics was primarily a leverage that none of their predecessors had ever possessed, that is, their control of the military, finance, and personnel of their provinces and, more importantly, their formation of a tightly knit faction to defend themselves as a group and bargain with the Qing court.11 The relationship between the Qing court and Han bureaucrats thus underwent a substantial change during and after the Taiping Rebellion. Before the 1850s, for more than two centuries since its inception in Beijing, the Qing state experienced power concentration to a level unseen in the preceding Chinese dynasties.12 The Manchu rulers defined their relationship with the Han people – including high-ranking bureaucrats of the Han origin – as essentially the one between the conquers and the conquered, demanding unconditional submission and loyalty from the latter (Guo Chengkang 2000), thus departing from the Confucian doctrines of statecraft that assumed a reciprocal relationship between the emperor and his ministers and saw the loyalty of the latter as contingent on the proper treatment of them by the former. This one-way

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relationship, however, came to an end in the second half of the nineteenth century. The indispensable role of the Han bureaucrats in suppressing the rebels and handling the foreign crisis, the devolution of military, fiscal, and administrative power to them, and the subsequent growth of their autonomy in relations to the imperial court made their loyalty to the latter increasingly conditional.

The “eighteen small countries” What needs to be clarified here is whether or not the trend of regionalization during the Taiping Rebellion was reversed in the post-Taiping decades when the Qing court attempted to recover the military and fiscal powers that it had lost in the 1850s and early 1860s. The strongest evidence that supports this assumption of recentralization was the dissolution of most of the Hunan army right after its capture of Nanjing in 1864. Indeed, in a matter of a few months, a division of the Hunan army, roughly 50,000 men, that sacked Nanjing under the leadership of Zeng Guoquan (Zeng Guofan’s younger brother) were completely disbanded, and Guoquan himself renounced all of his positions to return to his home community for a “sick leave.” A year later, most of the Hunan army, which once had more than 200,000 men during its height, was dispersed, except for a few battalions of about 10,000 that survived for local security and a traditional naval force to patrol the Yangzi River. Disbanding the Hunan Army, however, was only one side of the story. The other side was the survival and expansion of the Huai Army that had originated from the former under the leadership of Zeng’s disciple, Li Hongzhang. Li was appointed as the Governor of Jiangsu province in 1862 for his key role in defending Shanghai against the Taiping rebels with his newly created army, known later as the Huai Army, mostly recruited from his home province. After cutting down a few thousand aged, feeble, or wounded soldiers, the Huai Army kept more than 50,000 men, which turned out to be indispensable for the Qing government to suppress the Nian Rebellion (1853–1868), especially after the Nian rebels decisively defeated the Qing’s best regular force and killed its commander, the Mongol General Senggelinqin in 1865. Li Hongzhang’s success in completely and swiftly annihilating the Nian rebels as well as his proven abilities in handling the thorny foreign affairs led to his appointment as the Governor General of Zhili and the Commissioner for Trade in North China for fully 25 years (1870–1895), which made him the most influential figure among the Han bureaucrats in the late nineteenth century. His Huai Army also expanded to 95 battalions in 1875 and as many as 146 battalions over the next two decades and which were stationed in more than ten provinces, which in effect replaced the antiquated and incompetent Eight Banners and Green Standards to become the best equipped and the most important defense force of the Qing, before it was finally replaced by Yuan Shikai’s New Army during the decade following the Boxer Rebellion (Dong Conglin 1994: 28; Liu Wei 2003: 277–278). Li’s unparalleled influence allowed him to appoint or recommend his trusted subordinates to the key positions of the Huai Army, the newly established Northern

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Fleet, and provincial authorities; they thus formed a faction on the basis of family and kinship ties, fellow townsmanship, and patron–client relations. The Qing court not only failed to reestablish its centralized control of the military, but it also found it difficult to curb the growing autonomy of provincial leaders in civil administration. Throughout the Tongzhi and Guangxu reigns, the court took measures repeatedly to limit the power of provincial governors or governors general. When making appointments at the provincial or lower levels, for instance, it only permitted the governors to make recommendations, while keeping the power of decision-making on appointments to itself, a policy reasserted at the beginning of the Tongzhi reign. To stem provincial leaders’ nepotism in making recommendations, it announced in 1894 a new policy of rejecting all of the candidates in the same package of recommendations if any of them was found to be unqualified. To enhance its supervision of provincial governments, the court encouraged the financial commissioners and judicial commissioners of each province to impeach their governors and governors general for any kind of wrongdoings they had uncovered, realizing that these commissioners had not submitted any substantial memorials to the court for several decades since the 1860s other than routinely reporting their commencement of, or retirement from, their positions (Liu Wei 2003: 362–363). These measures, however, had little effect on local governors or governors general. The central government had no control of the large number of informal positions (titled zongban, huiban, tidiao, weiyuan, siyuan, etc.) of the irregular agencies (the various bureaus or offices) created and appointed by the provincial authorities, which multiplied in the 1870s through the 1890s to accommodate the new needs of modernizing projects. The Qing court’s biggest failure in recentralizing state power, however, lay in its inability to control local finance in the late nineteenth century. As noted earlier, provincial administrators only reported to the court 30–40% of their revenues from lijin, and the actual revenue of the Qing government at all levels in 1894, for example, could be as high as 146 million taels of silver, rather than the official figure of merely 81 million taels (Shi and Xu 2008: 133, 275, 279, 289). Equally difficult for the imperial court to know was how much the local governments actually spent on new projects that had never been part of their conventional expenditures, primarily those associated with the Self-Strengthening movement. When the provincial authorities fell short of funds, they were free to make loans from foreign banks or domestic debtors without the court’s approval. Because of the underreported revenue and unknown expenses, the auditing system that the Qing court had used to supervise the financial activities of the provincial government before the Taiping Rebellion was largely ineffective and perfunctory, despite its recovery from wartime paralysis. The result was the fiscal independence and self-sufficiency of the provincial authorities in the late Qing period, which contrasted sharply with the central government’s effective control of local finance before the nineteenth century. Given the growing autonomy of provincial leaders in managing the military, personnel, and finance of local governments in the late nineteenth century, it is

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no wonder that contemporaries tended to describe the 18 interior provinces as “eighteen countries” (shiba guo) (LQC, 2: 649). The Qing court’s dependence on the governors and governors general for defense and revenues also accounted for their rise as a decisive force in shaping the central government’s decisionmaking process, which distinguished them from their predecessors before the nineteenth century who had usually played a passive and subservient role in relation to the imperial court. Li Hongzhang, for example, was so powerful during his tenure as the Governor General of Zhili and the Commissioner for Trade in North China that “the court has to consult [him] on whatever issues of importance before a decision was made, and it invariably approves whatever the Northern Commissioner has requested,” as a contemporary observed (Wang Ermin 1987: 393). In addition to Li, the most prominent provincial leaders also include: Zuo Zongtang (1812–1885), Li Hongzhang’s long-time rival and the Governor General of the southeastern, northwestern, and lower Yangzi provinces in sequence from the 1860s to the early 1880s; Liu Kunyi (1830–1902), serving repeatedly as the Governor General of the lower Yangzi and southern coastal provinces from the 1870s to the 1890s; and later Zhang Zhidong (1837–1909), the Governor General of three different regions in the 1880s through the 1900s but mostly of Hubei and Hunan, the two middle Yangzi provinces. Each of them played a key role in making policy suggestions or directly shaping the Qing court’s decisions on domestic and foreign affairs.

“Self-strengthening” and incipient nationalism The relative autonomy of provincial authorities in fiscal constitution and civil administration made it possible for some of the governors and governors general to launch a series of projects during the Self-Strengthening movement. Beginning with the training of the self-recruited militia in Western methods and equipping it with modern weaponry in the early 1860s in the course of suppressing the Taiping rebels, the movement focused on establishing three major arsenals in Shanghai, Nanjing, and Tianjin, a modern shipyard in Fuzhou, as well as a number of small-scale arsenals in other provinces. The modernization of defense culminated in the establishment of three fleets to patrol the waters along the northern, eastern, and southeastern coasts, respectively, with the Northern Fleet fully established in 1888 as the largest and most advanced in China and the Far East as well. Affiliated with these military establishments were the institutions to translate books in Western languages into Chinese and the schools to train students in foreign languages and modern sciences. In addition, the movement also expanded in the 1870s to construct a series of civilian projects ranging from steam ship navigation and railroad transportation to mining, iron smelting, telegraph communication, and textile manufacturing, as well as a program to send students to the United States for education (Kuo and Liu 1978; Elman 2005: 355–395; Halsey 2015). Except for the fleets that were funded mostly by the central government, all other projects were initiated and fully funded by the governors or governors general using their own financial

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resources. Altogether, the total spending on establishing and running the arsenals and shipyard during the period from 1866 to 1895 ranged from 50 to 60 million taels. The methods of funding for the civilian enterprises varied; some of them were fully financed by the provincial government, and others were either partially funded by the government and partially by private investors or fully invested by merchants but supervised by the government. The total amount of funding by provincial authorities on the civilian projects during the same period could be as high as 15 million taels (Zhou Yumin 2000: 303–304). The immediate reason leading to the provincial leaders’ establishment of the arsenals was, of course, to equip their own armies with the advanced weapons and thereby to elevate their standing within the bureaucratic system. But this selfish motivation alone cannot explain why the Self-Strengthening movement persisted for more than three decades and developed into a comprehensive program in modernizing not just the military but also manufacturing, education, and the infrastructure. When justifying their initiatives for a new project, Li Hongzhang and other leaders invariably linked it with China’s “self-strengthening” to survive the challenges from European powers and rival Japan, a country that also made efforts to modernize its military and become a new threat to China. It is worth stressing that Li Hongzhang realized this potential danger from Japan as early as 1864, four years before the Meiji Restoration. As he insightfully stated in a memorial to the imperial court: today’s Japan is where the dwarf pirates of the Ming came from, being distant from the West but close to us. If we have the means to remain independent, then it will depend on us and thereby get to know the strength and weakness of the West; if we have no means to strengthen ourselves, then it will imitate the West and join the West to take advantage of us. He then went on to argue that: if China wishes to strengthen itself, nothing is better than learning from foreign countries their advanced equipment; to learn their advanced equipment, nothing is better than studying their technologies to produce the advanced equipment, that is, to study their methods but not to have to rely on foreigners. (LHZ, 29: 313) It is also worth noting that whenever Li referred to China in relation to foreign powers in his memorials, he invariably used the word “Zhongguo” (the Central State), an informal term that had long been used by the Han Chinese to describe their land, rather than “Da Qing” (the Great Qing), huangchao (the imperial dynasty), or tianchao (the celestial dynasty), terms that had been widely used in official discourse and documents by the Qing rulers. This frequent use of Zhongguo in lieu of Da Qing reflected a subtle transition among the Han bureaucrats in their consciousness of identifying themselves and their modernizing

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efforts with the benefits of the land of the Chinese people rather than with the interests of the Qing dynasty. This consciousness foreshadowed the rise of incipient nationalism among the Han elites in response to the recurrent foreign threats in the late nineteenth century, no matter how ambiguously defined and how entangled it was with their commitment to the imperial state. Unlike the nationalism of twentieth-century China that pervaded the society, incipient nationalism was largely limited to the Han Chinese ruling elites who had contacts with, or knowledge of, the West and Japan before the Sino-Japanese War of 1894. And its roots can be traced to the pragmatism in Confucian statecraft thinking, which Kwang-ching Liu (1970) terms “Confucian patriotism.” But the provincial leaders’ incipient nationalism was curtailed by their prioritization of local and personal interests over national interests. With a large and ever-increasing amount of informal and unreported revenues at their disposal, the provincial authorities decided where and how much they spent the monies primarily according to their own stance and interests. They were most enthusiastic in building and strengthening their own military and civilian enterprises with the funds available to them. They were also willing to release their funds as Coordinate Remittance for the projects of governors or governors general who were their friends or relatives or members of the same faction, and for military operations that they proposed or supported. However, they were reluctant to remit the mandatory quotas imposed by the court to a destination that did not relate to themselves, and they would use whatever excuses they had to delay or reduce their remittance. The success or failure of the Self-Strengthening movement or any military operation during the three decades of the movement thus depended in large measure on the attitudes of the provincial leaders and the amount of funds they contributed, a fact that was most evident in the processes of frontier defense and maritime defense, the subjects of the next chapter.

Regionalized centralism To conclude, most of the changes in the relationship between the central and local authorities of the Qing state in the second half of the nineteenth century can be subsumed under the category of “regionalized centralism,” a development that had positive as well as negative impacts on China’s transition to a modern sovereign state. First of all, the diversification and regionalization of government revenues under the initiative of provincial governors and governors general resulted in a transformation of the Qing state’s fiscal constitution, in which the ever-growing demand for revenues drove the expansion of the supply, and in which non-agricultural revenues (indirect taxes, borrowing, and other means of financing) replaced the land tax to be the most important sources of government income, thus showing a striking level of expandability. This transformation, taking place from the 1850s to the 1870s, accounted in large measure for the Qing state’s success in pacifying internal revolts, modernizing its military, and defending its frontiers against foreign aggression, hence a “restoration” (zhongxing) from the mid-1860s to the mid-1890s. But the transformation was achieved at the

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expense of the imperial court’s centralized control of regular and irregular revenues on the one hand and the rise of provincial elites on the other hand, who played a key role in the restoration by putting regional financial, military, and administrative resources at their disposal. Hence the subtle yet critical changes in the relationship between Han bureaucrats and the imperial court, which account for both the striking resilience of the late Qing state and its eventual demise. By and large, before the 1850s, this relationship was characterized by the Han bureaucrats’ unconditional, one-way loyalty to the Qing court, which can be attributed to two basic factors. One is the Qing court’s inheritance from the preceding Ming of neo-Confucianism as a state ideology and its time-honored adherence to Confucian tenets in governing the interior provinces, which won the Han elites’ endorsement of its legitimacy. The other is the Qing court’s inheritance of the patrimonial tradition from its own past as a nomadic state before 1644, which assumed a master–slave type of relationship between the ruler and his subjects and demanded absolute submission from the latter, thus departing from the Confucian principle of reciprocity between the monarch and his subjects, by which the latter were committed to the well-being of “All under Heaven,” rather than the ruler alone, and whose loyalty was premised on the former’s respect and trust of them. After the mid-nineteenth century, however, the rise of Han bureaucrats at the provincial level and their arrogation to themselves of regional fiscal, administrative, and military power to an unprecedented level led to a return to their reciprocal relationship with the imperial court: they served the latter with loyalty as long as they were trusted by the court and as long as they were bound by the Confucian way of thinking; much of the success of the “restoration” in the 1850s and 1860s thus can be attributed to these realities. However, they would turn their backs on the imperial court if they were distrusted and excluded by the latter from the power center, which was exactly what happened to them during the last years of the Qing dynasty. It is worth emphasizing, however, that for all the enhanced control of fiscal, military, and administrative resources by provincial leaders within the areas under their jurisdiction and their shared assumption of conditional loyalty to the imperial court, the central government never lost its effective control over the appointment, promotion, demotion, or removal of provincial governors or governors general, and it firmly maintained the ultimate decision-making power over the redistribution of all officially reported revenues between the central and provincial governments. The centralized bureaucracy that the Qing state inherited from the Ming in its early history and developed in the eighteenth century remained largely in shape and functioning by the end of the nineteenth century. The regionalization of financial and military power in individual provinces after the Taiping rebellion did not necessarily mean the subvention or malfunctioning of the Qing state’s centralized bureaucracy; it took place within the centralized bureaucratic system. By and large, the regionalization process was a win–win situation for both the Qing court and local authorities. Its positive effects, as seen in the thriving of regional modernizing enterprises and the overall improvement of the Qing state’s capabilities, outweighed its negative

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consequences on the state’s coordination and control of local resources during the reigns of the Tongzhi and Guangxu emperors (1862–1908). The secret of the late Qing state’s exceptional resilience lay precisely in the regionalization of government power on the premise of conditional allegiance. But the late Qing state was also fragile, because its legitimacy rested ultimately upon the identification with it by local political elites, especially the provincial leaders of the Han origin. As shown in Chapter 6, once they were distrusted by, or ousted from, the power center, and the premise of conditional allegiance no longer existed, the Han bureaucrats and social elites would openly confront the Qing court, counting on the strength that they had built in the preceding decades; and the Qing state would become extremely vulnerable when their challenge to the central authorities from within the government system was joined by the assaults from the anti-Qing revolutionaries and anti-Manchu radicals outside the system.

Notes 1 In her classic study of the “Tongzhi Restoration” in the 1860s and early 1870s, Mary Wright, for instance, contends that the Qing failed to modernize its defense, education, and foreign relations, because of the conservatism among gentry scholars and bureaucrats, which had its roots in the Confucian values and practices that bolstered the existing social and political orders (Wright 1957). In a similar fashion, Albert Feuerwerker (1958) examined China’s “early industrialization” in the late Qing period, through the examples of a steamship navigation company and some other enterprises. He found the roots of their failures in the institutional and ideological obstacles inherent in Chinese society, as evidenced by the notorious mold of “official supervision and merchant management” (guandu shangban) in running the enterprises, which militated against impersonal, rationalized, and specialized organizations to make the modern projects a success. Likewise, John Rawlinson blamed traditional institutions based on classical ideology for the Qing’s inability to develop a modern navy (Rawlinson 1967). 2 Later studies questioned the failure narrative. Instead of interpreting the SelfStrengthening program as one ending in total disaster, they found “marked success” of some of the modern projects in expanding their businesses, competing with foreign firms, and transferring modern technology from the West to China (Lai 1994; K. Liu 1994). And instead of seeing Confucianism as an obstacle to modernization, these studies reinterpret it as a conducive factor. Kwang-Ching Liu, for instance, attributed the success of Zeng Guofan (1811–1872) in the “Restoration” to his Confucian statecraft thinking; Liu also traced the leading role of Li Hongzhang (1823–1901) in the Self-Strengthening movement to what he called “Confucian patriotism” or commitment to China’s security that had its roots in “a strain of realism in Confucianism” (K. Liu 1970: 43). What constrained the modernizing projects to develop and compete successfully was not the ideological and cultural values inherent to Chinese society, but primarily the lack of sufficient funding from the central government (Pong 1994). 3 Wenkai He (2013) finds the emergence of institutional elements that enabled the late Qing state to make long-term borrowing, which would have allowed the Qing to build a modern fiscal state, had there been the necessary economic conditions and a credit crisis to force its transition in this direction. 4 As shown later in 1843, while the Board of Revenue had an official figure of 12.18 million taels as cash surplus, the actual amount of the surplus was only

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2.92 million as a thorough investigation revealed (Zhou Yumin 2000: 69; Shi Zhihong 2009: 110); in other words, there was a difference of 9.25 million taels that was missing. As it turned out, the actual amount of the cash reserves at the Board of Revenue had never been verified for more than 60 years since Heshen (1750–1799) headed the board in 1780; therefore, at the order of the Daoguang emperor, the families of all the board officials since 1780 were held responsible for collectively making up the deficit (Zhou Yumin 2000: 110). The size of arable land per capita was 7.87 mu in 1736, 4.98 mu in 1766, 3.35 mu in 1790, 2.89 mu in 1812, 2.78 mu in 1840, and 2.78 in 1851. China’s population was 125 million, 208.1 million, 301.49 million, 363.7 million, 412.81 million, and 450 million in 1736, 1766, 1790, 1812, 1840, and 1851 respectively (Jiang Tao 1990). The size of arable land was 984 million mu in 1736, 1,147 million mu in 1840, and 1,254 million mu in 1851 (Shi Zhihong 1989, 2011). The surcharges were collected in different ways in different provinces. In Sichuan, a province known for its lightest land tax in history, beginning in 1854, all landowners had to officially pay one additional tael (known as “land tax subsidy” or an liang jintie) to each tael of their land tax quotas; in addition, they had to pay a “contribution” (juanshu) as high as 2 to 4 taels for each tael of land tax quota. Their total land tax burden thus was increased by three to five times. In other provinces, the surcharge was usually based on the size of landholdings; in Guizhou, for instance, landowners paid 10 to 20% of their harvest as a surcharge (ligu), whereas in reality, it could be 40 or 50% of their harvest. In Jiangsu and Anhui, the surcharge (known as mujuan) was collected at the rate of 20 to 80 wen of copper cashes per mu of land, which could be as high as 400 wen per mu in some localities. In Jiangsu and Zhejiang where the taxpayers paid grain taxes (caoliang), each shi of the tax quota was often discounted again and again, so that taxpayers had to actually pay two or more shi of grain to fulfill each shi of the tax quota (Peng Zeyi 1983: 160–166). The domestic debtors were invariably wealthy families or “gentry merchants” (shenshang) who made “both contributions and loans” (juan jie jian xing) to the local government. The amount of a loan from these people varied from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands of taels, depending on the needs of local authorities and the affordability of the loaners. Beginning with a loan borrowed by the intendant of the So-Song-Tai circuit in 1853 from a foreign firm in Shanghai, foreign debt became a more important and regular source of extra revenue than domestic loans for local authorities in the 1860s and afterwards to satisfy their military and civilian needs, mostly to be repaid from the income of local maritime customs. During the few years from 1861 to 1865, the administrators in Jiangsu, Fujian, and Guangdong, for instance, made 12 loans from English and American companies, which totaled 1,878,620 taels, with an interest rate at 8–15% a year. In another instance, from 1867 to 1868, Shaan-Gan Governor General and Commissioner Zuo Zongtang borrowed a total of 2.2 million taels from British firms in Shanghai for his campaigns against Nian and Hui rebels in the northwestern provinces (Deng Shaohui 1998: 57; Peng Zeyi 1983: 152–153). Obviously, most of the loans were short-term debts; in comparison, long-term loans worked better to enhance the state’s fiscal ability and to contribute to its transition to a modern fiscal state (He 2013). To put the provincial fiscal activities under its control, the Qing court attempted to audit in 1864 (the end of the Taiping Rebellion) the military spending by provincial leaders during the rebellion but soon gave up because of its impracticability and possible recalcitrance by the governors; later the court did revive the traditional practice of annual auditing (zouxiao) over the collection and management of regular taxes in individual provinces, but it became more of a perfunctory formality than an effective tool to check provincial finance, because the official figure of revenues reported by

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provincial authorities rarely reflected the actual amount of income they had generated through non-conventional venues. Susan Mann’s analysis of the reallocation of lijin revenues in Guangdong and Jiangsu provinces adds evidence to the overall improvement in the central government’s ability to control local revenues, as seen in the decline of the portion retained for provincial usages to less than 50% of the total lijin revenue in Guangdong and 15 to 20% in Jiangsu in the early twentieth century (S. Mann 1987: 105–110). Challenging the conventional wisdom that equates the history of late Qing China with “decentralization, disintegration, or weak central control,” her findings underscore improvements in the state’s governing capabilities, especially its penetration into local political and economic activities for augmentation of government revenues; its dependence on tax farmers in collecting commercial taxes and levies, which has been seen as a sign of the state’s deteriorating abilities, is interpreted as “useful compromises” conducive to the building of a modern Chinese state (ibid.: 6–7). One such moment, for example, was when the corps led by Zeng Guoquan (Zeng Guofan’s younger brother) captured Nanjing and thus decisively defeated the Taiping rebels in July 1864. To prevent the Zengs from claiming too much for their unparalleled feats, the Qing court threatened to investigate the whereabouts of the tons of treasures hoarded by the Taiping leaders in Nanjing that had been plundered by Hunan soldiers as well as the whereabouts of the missing Young Heavenly King of the Taiping regime. Zeng conceded by promising to disband the militia, cut down military spending, and send his younger brother back to his home province; as a result, the court stopped the investigation. In another instance, Prince Gong was repeatedly impeached in 1865, right after the suppression of the Taiping Rebellion, for several offenses, one of which was his excessive reliance on the Han bureaucrats such as Zeng. Empress Dowager Cixi, resentful of the prince for long, deprived him of all positions. Zeng responded with “bitter disappointment and fear to the extreme” (hanxin zhuili zhi zhi). When discussing a proper reaction to this move in a secret conversation with one of his trusted subordinates on a small boat, the two “sighed again and again” (xixu jiu zhi), as Zeng described in his diary (cf. Zhu Dong’an 2007: 37). Fortunately, Prince Gong was soon rehabilitated, and the crisis for Zeng was over. In each of the many critical moments like these, the relationship between the Qing court and Zeng verged on a breakup. At the core of the Hunan faction was of course Zeng Guofan until his death in 1872; so influential was Zeng during the peak of his career that “seven or eight provinces were under his control, and state affairs ranging from government appointments to taxation and military logistics were all subject to his dictation; it was as if the entire country listened to one single person” (Rong Hong 1985: 107). Surrounding Zeng were his numerous subordinates who were soon elevated to the key positions of local governments. By 1872, 11 of them had been appointed to the positions of governors or governors general (five served as governors general and nine as provincial governors in 1863). The most prominent among Zeng’s disciples was of course Li Hongzhang, who later started his own Anhui faction, named after his home province. Li and his elder brother served simultaneously as governor general for four years, and four of his key subordinates served as provincial governors during the period from 1865 to 1877 (Long Shengyun 1990: 482). In sharp contrast, during the same period, apart from only one or at most two Manchus serving as governors general, and for two years only, there was no Manchu governor general at all. Also, there was only one Manchu governor each year during most of the period; there was only one year when two Manchu governors existed, and another year when no Manchu governor existed at all (ibid.). After conquering China, the Manchu rulers not only inherited from the Ming the whole set of government apparatus that had been already highly centralized, they

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further rebuilt it by combining the Chinese system with the practices originating from their earlier history as a tribal state in which the cooperation in military operations and hence the rise of a mechanism of power-sharing among the chiefs of nomadic groups under the emerging confederacy of tribes was coupled with the unifying khan’s absolute power over those he subjugated and enslaved (Crossley 1992). It was through their incessant struggles against the institution of collective deliberation at the top level, known in the early Qing years as “the council of princely ministers on state affairs” (yizheng wangdachen huiyi), that the Qing emperors of the eighteenth century restructured the central organ of decision-making to concentrate power in their own hands, while reducing, if not completely eliminating, the roles of the counseling princes.

5

Between the frontier and the coast Geopolitical strategy reoriented

The geopolitical crisis that the Qing encountered in the nineteenth century was twofold, involving a traditional challenge from Inner Asian forces to its northwestern frontier and a new threat from the oceanic powers to its coast and heartland. Given its incremental adaptation to the new geopolitical setting and its sluggish yet solid steps in rebuilding its fiscal-military apparatuses, it was not unlikely that the Qing state would have slowly but steadily transformed itself into a modern power and reasserted its influence in East Asia following the temporary frustrations wrought by the European states around 1840 and 1860. Unfortunately, a new development in East Asia in the mid-1870s added uncertainty to the geopolitical realities in this region, and that was the rise of Japan, which saw a modernizing China as its chief geopolitical rival and the biggest barrier to its becoming a dominant power in the region. Therefore, from the 1870s, conflicts with Japan gradually replaced the tensions with European powers to be the primary challenge to the Qing’s foreign relations, which in turn had a profound impact on its domestic politics. It was in this reshuffled geopolitical setting that China had to redefine its geopolitical strategy while experiencing the transition to a modern sovereign state.

The ending of the traditional geopolitical order Just like the demographic crisis that loomed in the late eighteenth century and led to the ending of the low-level equilibrium in the fiscal constitution of the Qing state, signs of a geopolitical challenge emerged in the same period. After establishing its colonial rule in parts of the South Asian subcontinent, the British East India Company expanded its trade to China while seeking to establish normal diplomatic relations with the Qing court, as seen in its sponsorship of the mission of Lord McCartney to Beijing in 1793, which failed for the obvious reason of conflict over the etiquette by which the English envoy was received by Emperor Qianlong but more fundamentally because of China’s lack of interest in foreign trade, given the self-sufficiency and huge domestic market, and because of the Qing ruler’s fear of potential damage to the existing system governing China’s relationship with other states.

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The growing tension between the English merchants trying to expand their trade in, and smuggling opium to, China on the one hand, and the Qing government’s restriction on foreign trade under the monopoly of authorized Cantonese guilds (the Cohongs) and the confiscation of opium from the English merchants on the other hand, led to the Opium War from 1840 to 1841, followed by the Second Opium War from 1856 to 1860 in which China suffered the joint attacks of British and French forces. No less important for the European powers was to establish formal diplomatic relations with China under the conventions that had been widely practiced in the West since the Truce of Westphalia, central to which was the legal equality of all sovereign states in their relations to one another. For the Qing court, however, preserving the existing interstate order and defending its self-assumed supremacy over all other states were key to maintaining the political order and its legitimacy at home. For the Manchus originating from outside China and ruling the Middle Kingdom as conquerors and with dubious legitimacy, safeguarding the supremacy of the imperial court in its foreign relations was especially important for the court to legitimate itself as the authentic regime in China. To accept any other countries as China’s equals or any foreign rulers as parallel to the Qing was to deny the latter as the supreme ruler of the universe within the Chinese political imagination and thus constituted a fundamental challenge to the traditional political order and the legitimacy of the imperial regime. Not surprisingly, the European powers’ demand for equality in diplomatic relations with China turned out to be the most difficult part for the Qing court to accept. Although the Treaty of Nanjing of 1841 provided that communication between the subordinates of both countries be conducted “on a footing of perfect equality” (TN: 11), there was no explicit statement of equality between China and Britain at the state-to-state level, and the tributary system under the Qing as well as all of its traditional diplomatic practices continued after the Opium War, except for the Cohong system that was officially ended by the treaty. The treaty itself, in fact, was kept a secret by the Qing court and never made known to the public in China. It was only after it was decisively defeated that the Qing conceded to the Europeans and allowed for equality in China’s foreign relations under the pressure of military occupation. The Treaty of Tientsin (Tianjin) signed between the Qing and Britain in June 1858 thus prescribed that the ambassador, minister, or other diplomatic agent from one side would be sent to the capital city of the other side “in accordance with the universal practice of great and friendly nations,” and more important, the English diplomat in Beijing “shall not be called upon to perform any ceremony derogatory to him as representing the Sovereign of an independent nation on a footing of equality with that of China,” and at the same time “he shall use the same forms of ceremony and respect to His Majesty the Emperor as are employed by the Ambassadors, Ministers, or Diplomatic Agents of Her Majesty towards the Sovereigns of independent and equal European nations.” The treaty further demanded that “the character ‘I’ (barbarian) shall not be applied to the Government or subjects of Her Britannic Majesty in any Chinese official document

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issued by the Chinese authorities, either in the capital or in the provinces” (Hertslet 1908: 33). Needless to say, none of these requests from the British side was excessive and unjust in the light of modern international relations. To exchange ambassadors and to officially communicate between two countries on an equal footing were indeed “universal practices” of the sovereign states within the Westphalia system of nations, and they by no means caused any damage to China’s sovereignty. Chinese historians of the twentieth century, keenly aware of the importance of sovereign rights to a modern nation-state, therefore were puzzled by the Qing court’s stubborn but futile resistance to these requests of equality in stateto-state relations and at the same time its easy concession to the British demands for territory (Hong Kong) and privileges, such as extraterritoriality and mostfavored-nation status, which truly damaged China’s sovereignty (Jiang Tingfu 1939; Xiao Yishan 1967, 3: 708). In fact, the right of the extraterritoriality of foreign nationals, as a convenient solution for the Qing court concerning disputes involving foreigners, had its historical roots in the “legal pluralism” in Chinese administrative and jurisdictional traditions (Cassel 2012). At any rate, the signing of the Treaty of Tientsin symbolized the official ending of the Qing dynasty’s self-assumed superiority in its traditional geopolitical order and the beginning of its incorporation into the Europe-centered system of international relations. In 1861, the Zongli Geguo Shiwu Yamen (or the Tsungli Yamen) was established as a department of the imperial court to handle foreign affairs as well as domestic programs in connection with foreign countries; part of its task was to investigate and selectively adopt the diplomatic conventions of Western countries, primarily through the translation and publication of foreign treaties on international laws. As it turned out, the translation of Western-language writings on international law and their growing popularity among intellectuals and bureaucrats after 1895 was one of the key catalysts behind a transition in the Chinese discourse on international questions from that of Sinocentrism to “unambiguously that of seeing China as a sovereign nation in the large family of nations defined by international law” (Svarverud 2011). Practicing diplomacy with the European powers “on a footing of perfect equality” turned out to be no less difficult than negotiating and signing the treaty per se. It was not until 1873 when the young Emperor Tongzhi officially began his attendance of state affairs at the age of 18 that his reception of the ministers of Britain, France, Russia, the USA, and the Netherlands and the ambassador of Japan was held, after several months of negotiation in which the Qing court finally gave up its insistence on the foreign diplomats’ performance of full prostration before the emperor; as a compromise, the ministers and ambassador removed their hats and bowed to the emperor five times instead of only three times as they originally proposed. Earlier in 1868, the Qing court had sent its first envoy, Zhigang, to the USA and Europe. In 1870, it sent Zhonghou as a minister to France, who was also the first minister of the Qing to a specific foreign country (Xiao Yishan 1967, 3: 861–862).

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Frontier Defense versus Maritime Defense After defeating the Taiping rebels in 1864, especially after suppressing the Nian and Hui rebels in the late 1860s and early 1870s, the Qing entered an era of relative order and peace domestically. Meanwhile, the threats from European powers receded; after having two Opium Wars with the Qing, Britain and France appeared to be content with what they had secured in China through the signing of several treaties. By 1866, when the Qing court paid off the war indemnities to the two European countries, the humiliation inflicted on China by Western powers seemed to be over. Nevertheless, the Qing soon encountered new threats from neighboring countries. First in Xinjiang, the widespread Muslim revolts in the 1860s incurred the invasion of a Kokand-based force led by Muhammad Yaqub Bek (1820–1877), who soon defeated his competitors and occupied southern Xinjiang and part of northern Xinjiang by 1870, causing Russia to occupy the city of Ili in 1871 to safeguard its interests in central Asia. Trouble also came from Japan, which sent a fleet of more than 2,000 men to land in southern Taiwan in 1874, which ended in the signing of an agreement whereby the Qing government offered “compensation” of 500,000 taels to Japan to avoid having to wage war with it. These two threats were different in nature. The invasion of the Kokand force and its creation of an independent state in Xinjiang repeated the geopolitical crisis that had confronted the Qing in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; subjugating the conventional central Asian enemies entailed massive expenses on the military, especially on its logistic support, given the long distance between Xinjiang and the interior provinces, without having to upgrade its weaponry, because its enemy was not superior to the Qing forces in terms of armaments. The Japanese invasion of Taiwan, on the other hand, renewed the maritime threats that had started after the Opium War in 1840 and would continue to challenge the Qing in the late nineteenth century. This was totally different in nature. The enemy never outnumbered the Qing forces in manpower but it was equipped with modern weaponry. Surviving the challenge from maritime enemies entailed the modernization of the Qing defense, which in turn meant long-term massive investment in the construction of manufacturing and infrastructural facilities. It is interesting, therefore, to look at how the Qing state responded to the different types of geopolitical challenges, one traditional and one new, with different strategies, and how effective the newly transformed fiscal system was in meeting the state’s needs to overcome the crisis. The concurrence of the incidents in Xinjiang and Taiwan in the early 1870s triggered a debate among provincial leaders over the strategic priority to be given to either “Frontier Defense” (saifeng, i.e., military campaigns against the Kokand-based enemy in Xinjiang) or “Maritime Defense” (haifang, i.e., construction of coastal defenses and a modern naval force). Supporters on each side offered different rationales to justify their preferred strategy. Zuo Zongtang, Governor General of Shaaxi and Gansu and Imperial Commissioner for military affairs in the northwest, was the most ardent in advocating

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Frontier Defense, though he never discounted the importance of Maritime Defense. He prioritized Frontier Defense by resorting to history and the rationale that the earlier Qing rulers had used to justify their military campaigns in the northwest, that is, the critical importance of Xinjiang to the safety of Mongolia and the key role of Mongolia to the safety of the capital city of the dynasty. For Zuo, the only difference between the times of Emperors Kangxi and Qianlong and his own times was that Russia had replaced the Zunghars to be the greatest threat to China in the long run, which shared with the Qing the longest border from the northwest to the northeast and had already occupied Yili. If the Qing forces gave up the defense in the northwest and “retreat by an inch,” the enemy would then “move in by a foot” (ZZT, 6: 191). Zuo was not alone in speaking for Frontier Defense; he was joined by a few other provincial leaders, such as the governors of Hunan, Shandong, and Jiangsu, who shared with Zuo the same concern with the potential threat from Russia. “The troubles from all other countries,” in the words of Ding Baozhen, Governor of Shandong, “are like the diseases on the four limbs, which are distant and light, but the trouble from Russians is like the disease of the heart, which is close and severe” (cf. Jia Shuocun 2004: 91). The most decisive support to Zuo came from Wenxiang (1818–1876), Minister of Personnel and Grand Councilor of State, who was one of the two key statesmen of the Qing court during the reign of Tongzhi, the other being Yixin (1833–1898) or Prince Gong. Wenxiang concurred with Zuo by distinguishing the Qing from the preceding Ming that had limited its territory to interior provinces and by emphasizing the strategic importance of Xinjiang to the safety of Mongolia and the security of the capital city. Wenxiang’s opinion turned out to be pivotal for the two empress dowagers (Ci’an and Cixi) of the court to make the decision regarding an expedition to be led by Zuo against the forces of Yaqub Bek in Xinjiang. Wenxiang was in fact also the first to propose Maritime Defense. In November 1874, in response to the Japanese extortion for a compensation following the Taiwan incident, he submitted together with Yixin a memorial to the emperor, in which they officially suggested a comprehensive program of Maritime Defense. The target of Maritime Defense, for Wenxiang and Yixin, was no longer Britain and France that had invaded the southeast coast decades earlier but Japan, “a tiny state in the eastern ocean who dared to make troubles under an excuse, having recently practiced Western military skills and bought two ironclads” (CBYW, Tongzhi, 98: 41). It would be too late, they warned, if no measure was taken to prepare for further threats from Japan. The court responded by asking provincial leaders to deliberate on the six concrete measures suggested by the memorial. Among the replies from the governors and governors general, Li Hongzhang (1823–1901), Governor General of Zhili and Imperial Commissioner for Trade in the North, was the most ardent in supporting Maritime Defense, and he did so by downplaying the importance of Frontier Defense. Li first pointed out a fundamental change in China’s geopolitical situation in recent decades. Compared to the situation of border defense in the previous

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dynasties that had focused on the northwest, Li found that contemporary China was faced with “a totally different situation that has never been seen in the past several thousands of years” (shu qiannian lai weiyou zhi bianju), in which the more than ten-thousand li of the southeastern coast is open to the trade and missionary activities of all countries; [foreigners] travel freely, flocking to the capital and interior provinces. While pretending to be at peace [with China] in public, they all harbor the conspiracy of eating up [China] in secret; whenever a country makes trouble, all others provoke together. Meanwhile, China was confronted with “formidable enemies unseen in the past several thousands of years” (shu qiannian lai weiyou zhi qiangdi): Their steam boats and telegraphs are as swift as lightning; their military weapons and machines are a hundred times more efficient than human labor; their canons and guns destroy all and no passes and posts on the land or in the water can stop them. (LHZ, 24: 825) China, in a word, entered a totally different age. Li Hongzhang further pinpointed two coastal areas central to China’s strategic interests: the most important was the area around Dagu, Beitang, and Shanghaiguan of Zhili, which served as the front gate of metropolitan Beijing, “the very foundation of All under Heaven”; the other was the area from Wusong to Jiangyin of Jiangsu, the mouth of the Yangzi River, the most important source of China’s revenues. In sharp contrast, Li found that Xinjiang, which had been included in the territory of the Qing as late as the Qianlong reign, cost as much as “three million taels of silver a year to keep it even at times of peace”; “it is not worth it to keep the wasteland as wide as thousands of li and add a leaking wine vessel for hundreds and even thousands of years.” Surrounded by growing neighbors such as Russia, Turkey, Persia, and British India, Li observed, “Xinjiang can never be kept forever in the future, even if it is temporarily restored.” Therefore, he proposed terminating the military operations in the northwest, withdrawing the force from the frontier, and diverting the spending there to Maritime Defense. The best solution to the crisis in the northwestern frontiers, Li suggested, was to allow the Muslim tribes there to govern themselves and accept the Qing’s suzerainty as did the Vietnamese, Koreans, and the various ethnic groups of the southwestern provinces. For Li Hongzhang, “the failure to recover Xinjiang does no harm to the fundamental health of the body; leaving the maritime frontier unguarded, however, would complicate the severe disease of the heart” (LHZ, 24: 825). Li’s view, in a word, was to allow the vast area of Xinjiang to return to its original state before the 1750s.

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Most of the governors and governors general of coastal provinces as well as a few Manchu courtiers supported Li Hongzhang’s opinion. But proponents of Frontier Defense eventually prevailed during the debate in late 1874 and early 1875. The reasons behind the triumph of Frontier Defense supporters were multiple. First, despite Li’s exceptionally keen insight on China’s entry into a new era when its geopolitics was completely redefined by its enemies who were equipped with modern weaponry, and despite his emphasis on modernizing China’s coastal defense and naval forces, which turned out to be a key factor shaping the country’s destiny in the late nineteenth century, the peaceful handling of Japan’s brief intrusion into Taiwan with an insignificant sum paid to Japan did not alert most of the Qing high-ranking officials to the severity of the unprecedented challenge to China as Li Hongzhang had correctly perceived. For most of the ruling elites, the trouble was over, and a tiny neighbor such as Japan was far from becoming a real and imminent threat to China; Maritime Defense was indeed important to China’s survival in the long run, but it was by no means as urgent as Frontier Defense at the time of the debate when the vast territory of Xinjiang had already fallen into the hands of the enemy. Second, the Qing court and most of the ruling elites inevitably continued to define China’s strategic priorities from the perspective of their traditional geopolitical thinking, irrespective of the new challenges that confronted the country. For them, Xinjiang was important not only because it was critical to the safety of Mongolia and the security of the imperial capital but more important because it was a legacy of the preceding reigns of the Qing. Safeguarding the ancestors’ bestowal was central to their legitimacy as the rightful ruler of the dynasty. Finally, having recently survived the domestic upheavals and foreign humiliations, the Qing state witnessed the improvement of its fiscal conditions, which, compounded with the pacification of the interior provinces and restoration of a peaceful relationship with European powers, added to the court’s determination to solve the problem in Xinjiang, hence Zuo Zongtang’s legendary Western Expedition of 1875–1878. It should be noted, however, that the Qing court did not ignore the needs of Maritime Defense. In fact, in May 1875, the same month when the decision on the Western Expedition was made, the court also decided to establish two modern fleets in northern and southern China, with Li Hongzhang and Shen Baozhen (1820–1879, Governor General of Liangjiang) appointed as the imperial commissioners responsible for coastal defense in the north and the south and building the two fleets respectively. This development was strategically significant. For more than three decades since the conclusion of the Opium War of 1840, the Qing had made no substantial steps towards the strengthening of its Maritime Defense. The Second Opium War, which culminated in foreign troops occupying Beijing, had far greater impact on the Qing ruling elites than the Japanese momentary intrusion into Taiwan, though it did not cause the imperial court to start the construction of modern naval forces. A widely shared opinion among the ruling elites since 1840, beginning with Lin Zexu and Emperor Daoguang, had been that the Europeans from afar did not intend to occupy

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China’s territory but only aimed at expanding their commercial interests in China; therefore, it was unnecessary and impractical for China to have a war at sea with European powers; the only way to deal with them was waiting until the enemy landed on the coast and then annihilating it (CBYW, 13: 23). But the intrusion of Japan into Taiwan in 1874 was of a different sort and an omen of greater trouble for China in the future. In the view of Li Hongzhang, Japan “emulates Britain and the U.S. for everything and is bound to be an immediate and imminent threat (zhouye zhi huan, literally ‘the decease of the upper arm and armpit’) for China” (LHZ, 30: 439–440), and it “goes even further than the West in craftily bullying others”; to establish the naval force and strengthen Maritime Defense, therefore, was primarily to deal with Japan, not the West (LHZ, 9: 261). The Qing court’s decision to build two modern fleets in 1875 thus signaled a transition from its conventional geopolitical strategy that prioritized the defense of Inner Asian frontiers to the new one that stressed both Frontier Defense and Maritime Defense. The concept of Frontier Defense essentially continued the traditional Inner Asian strategy that had preoccupied the Qing rulers since the late seventeenth century; the only change was that Russia increasingly replaced Central Asian tribal forces to become China’s greatest threat in the northwestern, northern, and northeastern frontiers. In sharp contrast, the concept of Maritime Defense was brand new; it reflected the Qing rulers becoming alert to the new threat from Japan. As it turned out in the rest of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, it was primarily the threat from Japan, rather than any other foreign power, that would redefine China’s geopolitical setting in the modern era and have a profound impact on its domestic politics. It is thus interesting to examine how the Qing simultaneously handled the two different kinds of challenges in the 1870s and before the eventual outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894.

Centralized regionalism at work Financing the Western Expedition The single decisive factor leading to the stark success of Zuo’s expedition was the Qing state’s generous funding of this project, which amounted to 26.7 million taels of silver during the three years from 1875 to 1877 and another 25.6 million taels in 1878–1881, thus totaling 52.3 million taels during the seven years (Liu and Smith 1980: 239). In fact, the actual expenses on the Western Expedition (1875–1877) could be as high as 42.71 million taels. The total spending on Frontier Defense (from 1875, when the Western Expedition started, to 1884, when the Province of Xinjiang was established) was even more, ranging from 70 to 80 million taels (Zhou Yumin 2000: 266–267). Why, then, was the Qing state able to pool so much money on this project? The most important source of the funding for the Western Expedition was Coordinate Remittance from different provinces, which totaled 20.49 million

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taels, or about 48% of the funds that Zuo received during 1874–1877. The annual amount of Coordinate Remittance assigned by the court to each province varied, ranging from 240,000 taels for Anhui, 360,000 taels for Jiangsu, and 480,000 taels for Fujian, Jiangxi, and Hubei, to 840,000 taels for Guangdong and 1,440,000 taels for Zhejiang, most of which came from the lijin revenues of the provinces. Altogether, the annual Coordinate Remittances from all provinces for Zuo’s Western Expedition should have been “more than seven million taels” officially (GXCD, 1: 167). But few provinces remitted their respective quotas in full. The actual amount that Zuo received in 1874, for instance, was only 4.69 million taels (Jiang Zhijie 1988); according to Zuo’s memorial in October 1875, the total amount of delinquent remittances owed by individual provinces had reached 27.4 million taels since Zuo was in charge of military affairs in the northwestern provinces in 1866, and Fujian province alone had more than 3 million taels in arrears (GXCD, 1: 167; Shi and Xu 2008: 141). The situation did not improve in the following years. To make up the deficit in remittances, Zuo resorted to a second source, borrowing foreign and domestic debts. During the three years of the Western Expedition in Xinjiang, Zuo obtained three loans from foreign banks, including two in 1875 (1 million and 2 million taels, respectively) and one in 1877 (5 million taels), with the assistance of the famous financier Hu Guangyong (1823–1885) as his agent in Shanghai. In addition, Zuo borrowed from individual Chinese merchants a total of 5.6 million taels. All of these debts would be repaid by individual provinces and maritime customs, to offset the delinquent Coordinate Remittances they had owed to Zuo; and the provincial and custom administrators were required by the imperial court to affix their seals to the transaction documents to guarantee their timely repayment of the debts (Ma Jinhua 1911: 71). Therefore, these debts, 13.6 million taels in total, can be counted as part of their Coordinate Remittances as well. Other sources include the direct allocation of funds from the Board of Revenue’s cash reserve; a total of 4.5 million taels was sent to Zuo in 1874–1877, accounting for 10.5% of all funds Zuo received during those years’ donations and contributions (1.67 million taels), and other miscellaneous sources (Jiang Zhijie 1988). Thus, despite the common delinquency among provincial leaders in fulfilling their financial commitments to the Western Expedition, the actual funds Zuo received, totaling more than 42 million taels during the three years of military campaigns, or more than 70 million taels for the decade-long (1875–1884) endeavor of Frontier Defense, were sufficient to warrant his success on the battleground, while the exceptionally high morale of his forces, boosted by Zuo’s personal determination and the generous stipends on his soldiers, was no less important in explaining the recovery of Xinjiang, a shining accomplishment of Tong-Guang Restoration. The mechanism that enabled the largely successful funding of this project can be termed “regionalized centralism,” as discussed in the preceding chapter. Nearly 80% of the funds that Zuo received for his military operations

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came from individual provinces in the form of either Coordinate Remittance or the repayment of Zuo’s debts by the delinquent provinces, and the most important source of provincial funding was lijin, which was generated and administered locally by provincial authorities and independently of the central government’s direct control. The provincial governors or governors general managed to delay and reduce their remittance or to bargain with the central government over the quota of their remittance, or tried their best to support Zuo, depending on their personal relationship with the latter. The Western Expedition thus witnessed the continuation of the kind of regionalism that had emerged during the Taiping Rebellion. Nevertheless, unlike Zeng Guofan and other provincial leaders back in the 1850s who had to raise funds on their own for their militia corps without substantial support from the central government at all during the most difficult years of the campaign against the rebels, Zuo received critical and consistent support from the court. Having reestablished the remittance system, the Board of Revenue was able to partially fund Zuo’s campaign with money directly from its own cash surplus, a fact that contrasted sharply with its dearth of funds in the 1850s, and it was also able to impose on individual provinces, especially those in the southeast with the largest revenue from lijin, mandatory quotas and force those in delinquency to pay off the foreign or domestic debts on Zuo’s behalf. It punished the few provinces and maritime customs that had failed to remit at least 80% of their quotas (Liu Zenghe 2017). What accounted for the relative success of the funding of the Western Expedition, in a word, was the combination of the regionalized means of revenue generation with the centralized means of revenue reallocation. An immediate result of Zuo Zongtang’s stunning victory over the Kokandbased forces during the three-year Western Expedition in 1875–1877 was the full integration of Xinjiang into the administrative system governing the interior provinces. Except for a few prefectures and counties in northeastern Xinjiang populated by the Han Chinese, for more than a century since it defeated the Zunghars and Uighurs in the late 1750s and early 1760s, the Qing had ruled the rest of Xinjiang through the military government (junfu) system in which the General of Ili (Yili jiangjun) was at the top of a hierarchy of military commanders at different levels to garrison separate areas of Xinjiang, leaving the routine administration of the civilian affairs of local populations to the chieftains of different ethnic groups under the beg (boke in Chinese) system for Uighurs in Ili and Southern Xinjiang and under the jasak (zhasake in Chinese) system for the Mongols, Kazaks, as well as the Uighurs in the rest of Xinjiang (Ma and Ma 1994: 333–356; Perdue 2005: 338–342; Cassel 2012: 19). All of those who filled the key positions of the military units in Xinjiang, ranging from the General of Ili to his subordinates at different localities, had been mostly the Manchus since the 1760s. With the military government largely destroyed by the rebellions of local populations and the invasion of the Kokand forces, the Western Expedition and the subsequent control of Xinjiang by Zuo Zongtang’s forces fundamentally

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changed the political landscape; most of the key military and civilian positions in Xinjiang came into the hands of the Han Chinese who had been Zuo’s subordinates (the so-called “Hu Xiang dizi man Tianshan”) (Wang 2010: 15). Zuo thus was in a position to call for turning Xinjiang into a regular province and thereby substituting the junfu system with the standard bureaucratic system (junxian). His official rationale was of course to enhance the Qing government’s control of Xinjiang, but a more practical reason was to open opportunities for the Han Chinese, mostly his followers, to perpetuate their control of local government positions. The provincialization of Xinjiang thus was in essence the continuation of the strengthening of the position of the Han bureaucrats at the expense of Manchu elites in the interior provinces during and after the Taiping Rebellion. Not surprisingly, the Qing court hesitated initially in responding to Zuo’s proposal. The final solution was a compromise: Xinjiang officially became a province in 1884, and the position of the General of Ili was also kept, but it was reduced from the military commander-in-chief for the entire Xinjiang to the leader of Banner troops in a limited area (Ili and Tarbagatai), while the rest of Xinjiang was reorganized into prefectures and counties under the civilian Governor of Xinjiang. The beg and jasak systems throughout Xinjiang were abolished, and a large portion of native dwellers, who had been serfs to local nobles, now became landowners and taxpayers (Ma and Ma 1994: 359–360). As it turned out, the Sinicization of Xinjiang in the 1880s was a critical step leading to its full integration with China after the fall of the Qing. With most of the government positions in the hands of Han Chinese after the founding of Xinjiang province, the Republican decades saw their continual control of Xinjiang and their strong commitment to staying within China as an integral province. In sharp contrast, the failure of the Qing court to establish two proposed provinces in Outer Mongolia and subsequently the limited penetration of the Han Chinese into the administrative authorities and the limited migration of the Han Chinese into this area accounted for its loss of identity with the Chinese state after the fall of the Qing and its eventual separation from China in the Republican years.

Financing Maritime Defense As mentioned earlier, the Qing court was also committed to funding Maritime Defense as a result of the debate in 1875. But Maritime Defense was less urgent and important than Frontier Defense to the Qing court because Xinjiang was already in the hands of an invading force and losing Xinjiang meant a grave and imminent threat to the stability of the Inner Asian frontiers in the Manchu rulers’ traditional geopolitical thinking. Therefore, despite Li Hongzhang’s request of “at least a budget of more than ten million taels to begin with” for the three Maritime Defense tasks of “purchasing vessels, training soldiers, and procuring weapons,” the imperial court only came up with an allocation of 4 million taels per year, to be distributed equally to Li Hongzhang and Shen

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Baozhen, the two commissioners responsible for building two fleets in north and south China. Half of the 4 million taels would be derived from maritime customs and another half from the lijin revenues of six southeastern provinces (Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, Jiangxi, Hubei, and Guangdong) (Zhang Xia et al. 1982: 615–617). Li Hongzhang realized from the outset that the budget of 4 million taels for Maritime Defense was more of a promise than a reality; he knew well that the maritime customs did not have much left after fulfilling their obligation of Coordinate Remittance while the six provinces had committed most of their lijin income to other expenditures. Not surprisingly, during the first three years (1875–1877), the actual amount of funds spent on Maritime Defense was only about 2 million taels, or roughly 670,000 taels a year on average. As Li complained in 1877, the six provinces had remitted either half of their Maritime Defense quotas or none at all, while the maritime customs had to divert half of their quotas to repay the debt for the Western Expedition. To ensure that the Northern Fleet, which was strategically more important for the security of the capital city, had the necessary funds to start up, Shen Baozhen willingly gave up his share of half of the Maritime Defense funding for the first three years so that Li had more to spend on the Northern Fleet. The situation worsened in the next three years (1878–1880), when the funds had to be evenly divided between the two fleets while the six provinces remitted even less than before.1 The exceptional difficulties Li and Shen encountered in obtaining the funds promised by the imperial court accounted for the sluggish progress in Maritime Defense during the decade from 1875 to 1884.2 Thus, by the outbreak of the Sino-French War in early 1884, China’s Maritime Defense forces remained rudimentary in nature. The Northern Fleet was equipped with two cruisers, six steel gunboats, four wooden gunboats, and a few other vessels for logistic and training purposes, totaling 12,296 tons and 10,655 horse power (Fan Baichuan 2003: 1017). The Southern Fleet was smaller, with 14 small-size vessels, mostly manufactured by the Kiangnan Arsenal in Shanghai and the Foochow Arsenal in Fuzhou. In addition, two other even smaller naval forces were established in Fujian and Guangdong, each having more than ten vessels of varying sizes. Not surprisingly, when the Sino-French War broke out, the southeastern coast was poorly guarded, and the French forces easily destroyed the 11 vessels of the Fuzhou naval force as well as almost the entirety of the Foochow Arsenal in August 1884, although they later suffered a sound defeat at the hands of the Qing army on the border between China and Vietnam in February 1885. The Sino-French War was a turning point in the course of Maritime Defense. Right after signing the truce with France, the Qing court announced a decree in June 1885 to declare its determination on “investing in the naval forces on a massive scale” (da zhi shuishi) (LHZ, 11: 99). This announcement signaled a shift in the Qing state’s geopolitical strategy from prioritizing Frontier Defense over Maritime Defense during 1875–1884 to focusing solely on Maritime Defense afterwards. As an initial step, the imperial court ordered the establishment of the Admiralty (haijun yamen) in October 1885, which was responsible

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for the unified management of the funding of Maritime Defense for all fleets. At the Admiralty’s request, the court repeatedly urged individual provinces and maritime customs to prioritize the full remittance of their respective Maritime Defense quotas, totaling 4 million taels a year, over all other commitments, thus making it more difficult for the provinces to default on their payments, though delinquency never ceased. The court further generated an additional revenue of 4.5 million taels through a three-year program (1885–1887) of selling government titles under the name of “contributions to maritime defense” (haifang juanshu) and another 4 to 5 million taels through a second round of contributions (1890–1894); it also ordered the Board of Revenue to commit an extra 1 million taels to Maritime Defense funding from the source of lijin on the opium trade (Fan Baichuan 2003: 1139–1143). Altogether, the Qing government spent a total of 41.248 million taels on Maritime Defense during the decade from 1885 to 1894 (ibid.: 1171), averaging more than 4 million taels a year; the Northern Fleet alone received 23.18 million taels, more than 56% of the Qing government’s total spending on Maritime Defense (ibid.: 1228). Compared to the preceding decade (1875–1884) when the Northern Fleet received less than 1 million taels per year on average (ibid.: 1103), its funding during this decade more than doubled, thanks to the Qing state’s stronger commitment to Maritime Defense and, more importantly, to the overall improvement of its fiscal condition during this decade.

Why Maritime Defense failed However, despite the large amount of funding on Maritime Defense during the two decades from 1875 to 1894, about 69 million taels all told (including about 28 million taels in 1875–1884 and 41 million taels in 1885–1894, see Fan Baichuan 2003: 1173, also 1033–1034, 1171), the Qing failed to achieve its original goal, that is, to fend off the threats from Japan and safeguard China’s territory. Beginning with a debate triggered by Japan’s invasion of Taiwan in 1874, Maritime Defense ended in the complete destruction of the Northern Fleet during the Sino-Japanese War in 1894 and the eventual cession of Taiwan to the Japanese. To understand this outcome, let us first look at how the funds for Maritime Defense were spent in 1885–1894. Regrettably, the doubling of the funding for the Northern Fleet did not result in corresponding progress in the building of its combating capabilities. This is evident in its spending on new warships, which totaled 4.44 million or more than 34% of the fleet’s total spending in 1875–1884 (including the cost of two ironclads that remained the most important battleships of the fleet in 1894) but only 2.8 million taels or 12% of the fleet’s total spending in 1885–1894 (mostly the cost of four cruisers and one torpedo boat); the same was true about its spending on imported weapons, which cost 2.7 million taels or nearly 21% of its total spending in 1875–1884 but only 2.18 million taels or 9.4% of its funding in the following decade. On the other hand, the Northern Fleet spent nearly 9 million taels or more than

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37% of its funding as salaries to its Chinese and foreign crews in 1885–1894, compared to only 2 million taels or 15% in the preceding decade (Fan Baichuan 2003: 1227–1228). In sharp contrast with the first decade when the fleet’s spending on its personnel was only 28% of its expenses on vessels and weapons, in the second decade its payment to the former was 1.78 times the cost of the latter. Obviously, the fleet should have been able to spend more on expanding its battle capabilities than on its personnel. It should be noted that the establishment of the Admiralty, while enabling its centralized management of the funds for Maritime Defense and thereby making possible the increased funding of the Northern Fleet, also discouraged provincial leaders of the southeast coast from developing their own naval forces, because it allowed the Northern Fleet to use and even requisition their vessels under the pretext of coordinated exercises, and because it kept its allocation of funds to the naval forces of the southeastern provinces to the minimal level, for example, only 6.5 million taels of the Southern Fleet in 1885–1894. Another important purpose of the Admiralty, as it turned out, was to facilitate the Qing court’s extraction of funds from provincial sources for its own projects, most notoriously the reconstruction of the Summer Palace (Yiheyuan), under the pretext of raising funds for Maritime Defense. It is estimated that the Qing court obtained a total of 14 to 16 million taels in this way, which would have permitted the full establishment of the Southern Fleet (Fan Baichuan 2003: 1146–1157). In fact, as a result of the Qing court’s diversion of funds from Maritime Defense to its own luxurious expenses, the development of the Southern Fleet and the naval forces in Guangdong and Fujian slowed down or came to a standstill; the original grand plan of Maritime Defense, that is, to establish three full-fledged fleets to patrol China’s waters in the north, the east, and the south, was never realized. To what extent, then, did the Northern Fleet, the only one that was fully established, satisfy China’s needs for Maritime Defense? The first and foremost goal of the Northern Fleet, as Li Hongzhang and other proponents of Maritime Defense clearly stated, was to deal with Japan. Indeed, since Japan showed off its ironclad when invading Taiwan in 1874 and later again when annexing Liuchiu in 1879, there had been a naval armaments race between the two countries, especially in purchasing ironclads. For Li Hongzhang and Shen Baozhen, the two commissioners responsible for establishing the Northern and Southern Fleets, possessing the largest and the best equipped ironclads was the only way to outcompete Japan and wipe out its threat to China’s coastal waters. The purchases of two battleships in 1880 and 1881, named Dingyuan and Zhenyuang, respectively, partially fulfilled their goals, both being the largest (7,000 tons each) and the most advanced in the Far East. By 1888 when the Northern Fleet was fully established, it stood out as the biggest in the Far East, far surpassing the Japanese fleet in tonnage and battle capacities (Fan Baichuan 2003: 1113; for a complete comparison between China and Japan of their naval forces from 1875 to 1894, see ibid.: 1175–1176). Therefore, Li Hongzhang had a good reason to claim with confidence that “as far as the defense of the Bohai Bay is

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concerned, a state of solidity and invincibility have been achieved” (jiu Bohai menhu er lun, yiyou shengubuyao zhi shi). For him, the visit of the Northern Fleet to several Japanese cities in the summer of 1891 was indeed a longawaited occasion to show off the latest development of China’s naval force. Unfortunately, after its establishment in 1888, the Northern Fleet stopped buying any new vessels and upgrading its weaponry, partly because of its inflated spending on personnel, and partly because of the Qing court’s diversion of its revenue from Maritime Defense to its own recreational projects. As a result, only three vessels made at the Foochow Arsenal were added to the fleet during the following years until 1894 (Fan Baichuan 2003: 1095–1096). By contrast, the Japanese government, stimulated by the visiting Chinese fleet, was determined to outcompete China in naval armaments; it drastically increased its spending on the navy, from about 5 million yen a year in the late 1880s to 10 million yen in 1891 and even more in each of the following years, accounting for about one-tenth of the Japanese government’s annual expenditure, and thereby quickly narrowing its gap with the Qing. Thus, by the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, the naval forces of the two countries were largely comparable to each other in terms of the number of vessels, total tonnage, and battle capacities; in general, however, the Japanese warships, many of which were newly made in the early 1890s, were speedier than the Chinese ones. Li Hongzhang realized the danger of his fleet’s lagging behind Japan’s. He noted on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War: a tiny country such as Japan can still save enough to add large vessels annually. China, however, has not added a single vessel since establishing the Northern Fleet in 1888. What can be done is only to diligently train the twenty-plus vessels. Whether this can continue is really worrisome. (LHZ, 15: 335) Shortly after the outbreak of the war, Li requested an additional allocation of 2 million taels to buy new cruisers, but it was too late. Not surprisingly, when the war was over, Li lamented: Had the naval budget been fully allocated every year, the vessels and canons of the Northern Navy would have been on top of the world in less than ten years. How could there be such a huge defeat? I would not take the blame for the failure.3 (Xiao Yishan 1967: 942) In the final analysis, then, insufficient funding, more than any other factor, led to the failure of Maritime Defense. Compared to its spending on Frontier Defense, which totaled 42 million taels during 1875–1877, averaging 14 million taels a year, the monies on the Northern Fleet during the key decade of 1885–1894 were less than 23 million taels, or 2.29 million taels a year, only one-sixth of its annual spending on Frontier Defense. In fact, Maritime Defense

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only accounted for a small fraction of the Qing state’s total spending on the military. The largest portion of its annual budget (36 million taels!) went to the traditional but increasingly useless military forces (18 million taels a year on the Eight Banners and Green Standards and another 18 million a year on local corps or yong camps) (Shi and Xu 2008: 227). The Qing state spent so little on Maritime Defense not because it was fiscally impossible to do so, but because of its lack of determination to maximize its spending on the Northern Fleet and other naval forces, which in turn had to do with its perception of China’s geopolitical situation. For most of the decision-makers in the Qing court in the 1880s and early 1890s, the threat from Japan was only potential in nature; it was not as urgent as the Kokand forces’ occupation of Xinjiang back in the early 1870s that was real and fatal to the Qing state’s conventional geopolitical interests. This was especially true in the few years after 1888. The three decades of the “Tong-Guang Restoration” had made solid headways by that time; the Qing state had succeeded in quelling domestic revolts, maintaining a peaceful relationship with foreign powers, rapidly increasing its revenues and generating a sizeable surplus, and modernizing its defense, which culminated in the full establishment of the Northern Fleet that far surpassed the Japanese naval force at that point. All these developments, truly impressive as they were, caused the Qing elites to form an illusion that the decades of humiliation at the hands of foreign powers was over and that China had reemerged as a dominant, modernizing power in the Far East (YBSWJ, 2: 688). China only needed to observe its treaties with the European powers to avoid further troubles; Japan, on the other hand, did have the potential to make trouble along China’s coast with its quickly modernizing fleet but remained a secondary power that was too small in size to be a serious and imminent threat to China. Thus, despite China’s repeated defeats by European powers during the two Opium Wars and its more recent confrontation with French forces in 1884, the ruling elites adhered to their faith in the validity and legitimacy of the basic institutions underlying the Qing state. Their goal of statecraft was to preserve the status quo by reestablishing the institutions that had deteriorated during the times of disorder, adjusting the state’s defense strategy, or borrowing the advanced technologies from the West to enhance and protect those timehonored institutions. They wanted no more changes or improvements as long as the status quo in domestic politics or diplomatic relations could be maintained. It was this mentality among the Qing elites that explained why the court failed to keep increasing its funding on Maritime Defense after the goal of restoring domestic order and geopolitical security was temporarily achieved in the late 1880s and early 1890s. It was not until 1894 when the Qing suffered a fatal defeat at the hands of the Japanese, resulting in the loss of Taiwan and the payment of a huge sum of war indemnity, that the Qing ruling elites were eventually awakened from the illusion of a restoration. It was also because of this defeat that the Qing state eventually lost its feature as a suzerain dynasty in East Asia and experienced a metamorphosis into a modern sovereign state.

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The transition to a sovereign state For more than two centuries since establishing its rule in China, the Qing had managed its relationship with neighboring states under the tributary system. Central to this system was the suzerainty of the Qing court over the latter. As an extension of China’s domestic political order, the proper relationship between the court and the tributary states was designed to be the one between the ruler (jun) and his subjects (chen). The first and foremost purpose of the tributary system, therefore, was to evince China as the center of the universe and the emperor of China as the universal ruler of “All under Heaven,” which in turn served to confirm and enhance the political order at home and, above all, the standing of the emperor as the legitimate ruler of China. Another and a more practical purpose of this system was using the tributaries as the surrounding “fence” to enhance China’s security. The security strategy of the Qing thus was using “Liuchiu to guard the southeast, Korea to guard the northeast, Mongolia to guard the northwest, and Vietnam to guard the southwest” (cf. Sun Hongnian 2011: 20). The European concept of sovereignty was alien to both the Qing and the surrounding tributary states in managing their mutual relations. While they did have customary borders to separate their respective territories and rights from each other, the tributary states saw the Qing court as the ultimate source of legitimacy for their own power, while the Qing was expected to show its generosity by granting its territory in dispute to the former if they appeared to be truly submissive and respectful (Sun Hongnian 2006: 24). Unfortunately, as Western powers came to expand their commercial and colonial interests in the Far East, and as Japan quickly upgraded its military to challenge the existing geopolitical order in East Asia, the tributary states of the Qing became the first targets of their aggression and colonization. Obligated to protect the tributary states but driven primarily by security reasons, the Qing court was inevitably involved in conflicts with the imperialist powers, and its failures in this regard resulted in not only the ending of the tributary system after the neighboring states became “independent” by the treaties between the Qing and the colonial powers but also the unprecedented disasters that befell the Qing dynasty itself. Depending on how strategically important the tributary states were, the Qing court’s involvement in protecting each of them varied. Liuchiu was the very first among the tributary states to cease its traditional ties with the Qing.4 Having been a tributary kingdom to China from the beginning of the Ming but controlled in actuality by the Satsuma han of Japan since the early seventeenth century, the Liuchiu islands were officially turned into the Okinawa Prefecture by the Meiji government of Japan in 1879. In response, the Qing court intervened, attempting to restore Liuchiu’s traditional relationship with itself, but it soon gave up, on the grounds that Liuchiu was, in the words of Li Hongzhang, “only a tiny island in isolation on the sea, far from China but close to Japan” or, as the governor and governor general of the southeastern provinces stated, “has never been a place of strategic importance;

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without the benefit of defending the border, it only causes the worry of incurring provocation by neighboring countries” (cf. Wang Yunsheng 2005, 1: 153). Vietnam’s attitude toward its tributary status in relation to the Qing was hesitant and opportunist. Since the early nineteenth century, it had showed reluctance to acknowledge the Qing’s suzerainty and aimed to achieve its full autonomy in managing diplomatic issues, especially after witnessing China’s repeated defeat by European powers; it thus did not notify the Qing court at all when ceding its three southern provinces to France in 1862 and even tried to terminate its tributary relationship with the Qing by turning to France for protection. As a result, the Qing court acted only as an onlooker of this event – as long as the French encroachment in Vietnam did not constitute an immediate threat to China’s security. However, when France threatened to invade the northern part of its territory in the early 1880s, the Vietnamese court had to seek protection from the Qing by appealing to its traditional tributary relations with the latter. Responses from the ruling elites of the Qing varied. Li Hongzhang, Governor General of Zhili, insisted on a non-intervention stance, on the grounds that China did not have to risk war with a European power for a disloyal neighbor and that its naval force was ill-prepared for a possible sea battle. However, having recently won the Western Expedition and upgraded the military with modern weaponry for two decades, the war party prevailed and argued for the “protect[ion of] the fence to consolidate the territory” (bao fan gu yu) on the grounds of France’s possible encroachment on China’s southern border after its complete control of Vietnam (Zheng and Zheng 1993). The Qing won the decisive battles in the border area but suffered the French fleet’s fatal attack on the fleet and shipyard of Fujian province as mentioned earlier. Without having to pay a reparation to France, the war nevertheless cost the Qing somewhere from 20 to 30 million taels, and China lost Vietnam as its “fence” forever by recognizing the French protectorate over Annam and Tonkin. Even more costly to the Qing was its involvement in the crisis of Korea and the subsequent Sino-Japanese War of 1894. The leading decision-makers of the Qing unanimously acknowledged the extreme importance of Korea to China’s strategic security: neighboring Manchuria and close to the metropolitan area of the capital city, Korea’s relationship with China was likened to lips and teeth: “losing the lips will cause the chilliness of the teeth” (chunwangchihan). Therefore, while allowing the Korean court full autonomy in managing its domestic affairs, the Qing was committed to protecting its immediate and loyal “fence,” which paid tributary visits to Beijing more often than any other tributary state. Not surprisingly, when a military coup erupted in 1882 and later a peasant rebellion swept Korea in 1894, the Qing government actively intervened by sending troops to suppress the rebels and playing a key role in reshaping its domestic and diplomatic policies, and thereby turning the tributary relationship from the one of formality during normal times to its actual dominance of the Korean court during the times of crisis in the 1880s and early 1890s, hence its inevitable confrontation with Japan, which had long coveted the peninsula. The resultant Sino-Japanese War was devastating to

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the Qing: it not only lost Korea as its most important tributary state but further ceded Taiwan to Japan and paid to the latter 250 million taels as war indemnity, which was more than three times the Qing government’s total spending on Maritime Defense in the preceding two decades. Nevertheless, the late Qing state succeeded by and large in keeping its frontiers, thanks in part to the historical, cultural, and religious bonds that the Manchu rulers had maintained with the Tibetans, Mongols, and other frontier peoples, and in part to the renewed military and fiscal strength of the dynasty that accounted for its effective defense of the frontier in the late nineteenth century. The last decade of the Qing further saw the imperial court’s systematic efforts to incorporate the frontiers into provinces. As part of the “New Policies” (see next chapter), the Qing government encouraged the migration of Han Chinese into the frontiers, legalized their intermarriage with non-Han peoples, and established three provinces in Manchuria, following the precedents of Xinjiang and Taiwan in 1884 and 1885 respectively; Inner Mongolia almost became a province on the eve of the fall of the Qing and eventually did so in 1914; serious proposals were also made to turn Tibet and Outer Mongolia into provinces and thereby fully integrate them into the centralized bureaucratic system under the Qing (Jiang Bingming 1990: 58–60; Sun Hongnian 2004; Li Yongjun 2011). To recapitulate. In response to the rampant unrest under the mounting population pressure in interior provinces, crises on its northwestern frontier, and the growing threat from Japan, the Qing state experienced a series of fundamental shifts in statecraft in the late nineteenth century. The most important among such shifts were: (1) the reorientation of its geopolitical strategy from stressing the security of its Inner Asian frontiers to safeguarding its east and southeast coasts; (2) the transformation of its fiscal-military constitution from the imperial court’s centralized control to the growing autonomy of provincial authorities; and (3) the rebuilding of its foreign relations by giving up its claim of suzerainty over the surrounding tributaries and accepting all other states as its equals. It was in the process of defending its Inner Asian frontier against foreign invasion, building a modern defense to fend off the Japanese threats, establishing formal diplomatic relations and handling disputes with foreign countries under international law (wanguo gongfa) that late Qing China gradually shook off its old, self-assumed image as a “celestial dynasty and superior state” (tianchao shangguo) and became an ordinary member of the world system of states at the expense of its territorial entity and sovereign rights.

Notes 1 Three provinces (Jiangsu, Guangdong, and Fujian) never remitted at all, while the other three and the maritime customs altogether remitted only about 300,000 taels a year on average, or 15% of what Li Hongzhang should have received. According to Li, the reason that the aforementioned three provinces failed to remit was because “these provinces simply kept [their lijin income] for self use” or because they “have been squeezed by the Metropolitan Remittance and various Coordinate Remittances”

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(LHZ, 34: 10). Whenever these provinces were confronted with conflicting commitments over the limited funds available to them, they would prioritize other more urgent expenditures over Maritime Defense. Thus, the part of lijin income that should have been reserved as remittance for Maritime Defense was diverted for use as either the repayment of foreign debt or the compensation to foreigners involved in the “religious incident” in Yunnan, or the relief funds in northern provinces, or expenses on various construction projects. All these provinces, as Li lamented in 1880, “see Maritime Defense as of little importance” (shi haifang wei wuzuqingzhong) (YWYD, 2: 424). 2 Li’s original vision of Maritime Defense was ambitious. He expected that the building of China’s naval force, beginning with the creation of the northern fleet, would result in three fleets to guard China’s northern, eastern, and southern waters. After trying a few cheap, small-size gunboats (dubbed “mosquito boats”) only suitable for shortdistance coastal defense during the first few years after 1875, especially after Japan’s annexation of Liuchiu (China’s long-time tributary) in 1879, counting on its armament with three ironclads, both Li and Shen were determined to purchase the most advanced, high-tonnage ironclads from Europe in order to develop their fleets’ oceangoing, combating capabilities (SBZ: 351). In Li’s view, China needed at least four such ironclads, two in the north and two in the south, in order to outcompete Japan (Zhang Limin 1982, 1: 21–24). With the improvement of funding for Maritime Defense, Li did put his plan into action by ordering two ironclads from a German shipbuilding enterprise (Aktien-Gesellschaft Vulcan Stettin) in 1880 and 1881, each having more than 7,000 tons, which, however, did not arrive in China and join the northern fleet until late 1885. 3 To attribute the failure merely to the Qing court’s insufficient funding was not completely convincing; a more immediate reason behind the defeat of the Northern Fleet, as pointed out by the court, had to do with the incompetence of its commanders and their poor performance during the war and with its lack of sufficient and proper training before the war (Fan Baichuan 2003: 1114–1128). However, in the face of a rapidly expanding naval force in Japan, the Qing court’s failure to keep increasing its budget for the naval forces and the subsequent standstill in the Northern Fleet’s building of battle capacities was decisive in shaping Li Hongzhang’s strategy for dealing with the enemy and the morale of the commanders when confronted with the Japanese fleet. Li lacked confidence; he adhered to a defensive strategy for his fleet throughout the war, and his goal was to avoid a battle with the enemy and preserve his forces. 4 Liuchiu was spelt, following Chinese pronunciation, as Loo-choo or Lew Chew in English literature in the late nineteenth century, and more popularly as Liuchiu in the first half of the twentieth century. It was only after World War II that its spelling in English was changed to Ryukyu according to its pronunciation in Japanese following the founding of the “United States Civil Administration of the Ryukyu Islands” in December 1950. Throughout this book, the islands are spelt as Liuchiu to respect the historical reality.

6

A nation-state in the making Manchu–Han relations under the New Policies

The Qing encountered unprecedented geopolitical and fiscal crises after 1894. Its defeat in the Sino-Japanese War resulted in the cession of Taiwan to Japan, the loss of Korea as its most important tributary, and the subsequent scramble for concessions and spheres of influence by foreign powers in the late 1890s; China’s image as a modernizing power in East Asia was gone. No less damaging to the Qing court was the huge burden of war indemnity to Japan, which totaled 231.5 million taels, or more than ten times the Qing government’s total spending on the Northern Fleet during the preceding decade. Six years later, the raging of the Boxer Rebellion in North China resulted in the joint occupation by eight foreign powers of Beijing and the Qing court’s payment of war indemnities that would total 982 million taels (including principal and interest at the rate of 4% per year).1 These calamities greatly weakened the Qing state, both fiscally and politically. Given the fact that the Qing collapsed in 1911, only ten years after the signing of the Boxer Protocol, it is not surprising that the literature on the last decade of the dynasty has tended to interpret the events after 1900 as a series of failures leading to the eventual demise of the Qing. Yet, the post-Boxer decade also turned out to be the most critical moment in China’s transition to a nation-state. Despite the crushing burden of war reparations, the Qing state embarked on the audacious program of “New Policies” (xinzheng, or “new administrative measures”), which involved the transformation of the state’s infrastructural institutions, ranging from defense and public security to education, jurisdiction, revenue generation and expenditure, and economic planning; all these entailed massive spending by the governments at both national and local levels and a huge amount of investment by private parties. Nevertheless, solid progress was made during this decade in revamping the political, economic, legal, and educational systems, which paved the way for China’s further development in the rest of the twentieth century. Even more surprising was the fact that, although the Qing dynasty collapsed, China’s vast territory remained largely intact and continued into the Republican era. The country faced three possible scenarios before and after the fall of the Qing. The worst was of course its splitting by foreign powers and their establishment of colonial governments in the divided land to replace the Qing, a possibility that did exist during the Eight Powers’ occupation of Beijing as

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well as the northern and northeastern provinces in 1900 and 1901. Less disastrous would be the separation of the areas inhabited by the Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans, Uighurs, and other Muslim groups from the interior provinces and the return of the country to a land of the Han Chinese, which was indeed the goal of some of the anti-Manchu revolutionaries on the eve of the Revolution of 1911. A third possibility, which was least disruptive and also appeared to be in the best interests of China from the viewpoint of the majority of Chinese elites, was the survival and maintenance of China as a multiethnic state. China in fact achieved the best result after the fall of the Qing: it survived the peril of foreign invasion, maintained territorial integrity, and retained the framework of the Chinese state as a political entity of multiple ethnicities. The abrupt demise of the Qing in 1911 reflected more the failure of the Manchu elites in monopolizing their control of the central government than the efforts in rebuilding the infrastructure of the state during the prior decade.

Modernization and fiscal expansion Financing the Xinzheng program Right after the signing of the Boxer Protocol in 1901, the Qing court issued a series of decrees to implement the New Policies, including: •









The establishment of a centrally controlled and standardized New Army, with the goal of creating 36 divisions, each having 12,500 men, to replace the traditional regular forces of the Eight Banners and Green Standards as well as various irregular regional forces; a related task was the creation of a police force, which was first tried out in the key cities of Zhili in 1902 and soon expanded to other parts of the country. The reorganization of the government system, including the establishment of consultative and legislative bodies at the national and provincial levels in 1909 and 1910, the restructuring of the central government from the traditional six boards to eleven ministries, and, most important, the 1908 announcement of creating a constitution and a congress within nine years. The modernization of the financial and fiscal system, beginning with the founding of a central bank in 1904 (The Bank of the Board of Revenue, renamed the Bank of China in 1911), a commitment made in 1910 to creating a standardized currency, and the introduction of a fiscal budget of government revenues and spending in 1911. The promotion and protection of private investments in industry, commerce, and railroad construction through the promulgation of a series of laws, most importantly the Corporate Law of 1904, and the wide establishment of Chambers of Commerce in towns and cities. The introduction of new-style schools at different levels to offer Westernized curricula in place of the traditional education under private tutoring schools that solely focused on the rote learning of Confucian texts.

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The transition to a sovereign state Beginning with the promulgation of an imperial regulation of the new school system in 1902, the reform culminated in the abolition of the civil service examination system in 1905. The reform of the legal system, including the promulgation of laws on civil rights and criminal and civil litigation, and most importantly a penal code that replaced the traditional set of punishments with a new one borrowed from the West, as well as reforms pertaining to jury, attorneys, and jails.

These reforms were indeed a very ambitious and comprehensive package to modernize the state and the entire country, far exceeding the scope of the proposals and policies made during the Hundred-Day Reform of 1898. Despite the imperial court’s hesitation in implementing a constitutional government and the interruption of the movement by the Revolution of 1911, the xinzheng program succeeded in establishing the framework of a modern legal and justice system, a modern educational system, modern military institutions, as well as legislative organs and self-government bodies at local levels; all these would continue in modified forms after the fall of the Qing and have a profound impact on statebuilding in twentieth-century China. The central government was responsible for funding the newly created military forces, which were the most costly among all xinzheng projects; the planned 36 divisions and additional subdivisions would have required an annual budget of 120 million taels, or roughly 3 million for each division (Deng Shaohui 1998: 211). Local governments’ burden was even more cumbersome; it was estimated that each province would have to spend 2 to 3 million taels on maintaining a police force, 1 million on the new justice system, and another million on the new school system. A more serious budget on the preparation of a constitutional government in nine provinces showed that the total spending on education, jurisdiction, policing, self-government, and industrial growth during the planned period of 1910–1916 would be 418.67 million taels (Zhou Yumin 2000: 399–400); if the other nine provinces had similar budgets, then the expenses on the xinzheng projects in the entire country would mount to 837 million taels. Given the Qing government’s huge burden of war reparation in the postBoxer years, the xinzheng program seemed to be a mission impossible, because the total cost of the program would be several times the principal of war indemnities to be paid to the Eight Powers. Nevertheless, this program proceeded steadily during the post-Boxer decade. Six divisions of the New Army were first created in 1904 under the commandership of Yuan Shikai, who had succeeded Li Hongzhang as the Governor General of Zhili and the Northern Commissioner for Trade since 1901. Stationed separately in the northern provinces around Beijing, it was the largest (more than 70,000 men) and best equipped among the many divisions of the New Army in different provinces. By the end of the Qing, the New Army had about 161,800 men, consisting mainly of 14 divisions (zhen) and 18 additional “mixed sub-divisions” (hunchengxie) (Deng Shaohui 1998: 213). The educational reform was also fruitful. New-style schools

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increased from 769 in 1903 to 4,476 in 1904, 8,277 in 1905, 23,862 in 1906, and 59,117 in 1909; students enrolled in these schools increased from 6,912 in 1902 to 1.6 million in 1909 (Shang Bing 2007: 147). Equally impressive was industrial growth, which accelerated after the promulgation of the Corporate Law and the wide establishment of Chambers of Commerce in 1904. In comparison to the nine years from 1895 to 1903 when less than 23 enterprises were created each year on average, with a total investment of 4.14 million taels per year, the eight years from 1904 to 1911 saw the founding of more than 74 companies with a total investment of 16 million silver yuan each year. New investments in Chinese industrial enterprises totaled more than 138 million silver yuan during the post-Boxer decade (1902–1911). In addition, Chinese investors pooled 87.6 million silver yuan in total to fund railroad construction during the 1905–1911 period (Wang Jingyu 2000: 79). Altogether, progress in the realms of education, jurisdiction, finance, police, and the military contributed to the renewal of the infrastructure of the Chinese state, although their effects on state-building were less visible than the transformation of its superstructure or the government framework at the top level. As a result, the Qing state’s spending in the post-Boxer decade skyrocketed, from roughly 80 million taels before the Sino-Japanese War of 1894, to nearly 135 million taels in 1903, 237 million in 1908 and 270 million in 1909. By 1911, the last year of the Qing, its annual spending had reached 338 million taels, or more than four times its 1894 level (see Table 4.1). As the Qing government’s 1911 budget suggested, most spending was on the military and police (27.16%), war indemnities (16.79%), transportation (15.36%), and government administration (8.48%); the rest was on finance (5.82%), administration of justice (2.15%), civil affairs (1.43%), education (0.83%), industry (0.52%), and other items such as foreign affairs, custom administration, construction, public debts, and border defense (QCXW: 8245). Behind the dramatic escalation in the Qing state’s spending was the expansion of its revenues, which grew from 81 million taels in 1894 to nearly 105 million in 1903, 235 million in 1908, and 297 million in 1911. Among the major sources of government revenues, the land tax, which generated 32 to 33 million taels annually during the decade prior to 1894, saw an increase to more than 37 million taels in 1903 and 48 million taels in 1911. But its relative importance declined, accounting for 88% of the government’s total revenue in 1849, 40% in 1894, and only 16% in 1911 (Table 3.3). Adhering to the old principle of light taxation, the Qing court refrained from increasing the official collection rate of land taxes per se, despite the imposition of temporary surcharges on taxpayers by local administrators during wartime or postwar rehabilitation and despite the manipulation by tax collectors in converting copper cashes into silver taels in tax payment. Therefore, the Qing state’s official revenue from the land tax did not increase too much before 1900 (fluctuating around 30 million taels from the late eighteenth century) and its increase in the last few years of the Qing was primarily a result of the formalization of local revenues, as to be discussed shortly. In fact, because of

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the long-term decline in the price of silver in the last six decades of the Qing and the subsequent rise of the price of agricultural crops by more than twofold, the actual income of the Qing government from land taxes, or more exactly the purchasing power of its revenue from land taxes, dwindled (Xu Daofu 1983: 89–90; Wang and Yan 2007: 36, 43–46). In other words, despite the creation of various surcharges on the land tax in the late Qing period, the actual tax burden of landowners did not increase as much as the numbers in silver taels of the land taxes suggested. Instead of maximizing its extraction of revenues directly from landowners, the Qing court turned primarily to the following two methods to increase its revenues. One was the imperial court’s efforts to investigate and consolidate the collection and management of tax revenues at the provincial level, and thereby to turn much of the unreported or underreported revenues from the land taxes and lijin into the formal revenue of the state, subjecting them to its unified budgeting and allocation. As mentioned in Chapter 4, the informal income of governments at the provincial and lower levels that had never been reported to the imperial court could be as much as 40% of the reported revenue. Most of the increases in government revenues after 1908, therefore, was a result of the Qing court’s investigation of local finances in the last four years of the dynasty (QCXW: 8249). More important in augmenting the Qing state’s revenue was its growing reliance on the non-traditional, commercial sources. One such source was foreign and public debts, which the central and local governments frequently borrowed to make up deficits. From 1900 to 1911, for example, the Qing court borrowed a total of 340 million taels as foreign debt (this was in addition to the debt for paying war reparations), mostly (76.86%) for the construction of railroads (Xu Yisheng 1962: 90). The biggest source of revenue, however, was commercial taxes, including primarily salt tax, lijin, and maritime custom duties, which altogether generated a total of 42.55 million taels (or 52% of the government’s total revenue) in 1894 and 131.64 million (44%) in 1911. Among the three sources, maritime customs was the largest, increasing steadily from 11 million taels in 1871 to 22 million in 1890, 30 million in 1902, and 36 million by 1911, which reflected the expansion of the domestic market for imported goods and of the size of China’s economy on the whole. Next to this was the revenue from lijin, which contributed 13 to 17 million taels annually until 1908. The third was salt taxes, generating 6 to 7 million taels a year in most of the nineteenth century but surging quickly to 13 million in 1900 and as high as 46 million by the end of the Qing, thus becoming the largest commercial source, as a result of the Qing court’s centralization and consolidation of the production and marketing of salt (see Table 4.1). The revenue structure of the Qing state, therefore, finished a revolutionary transition in the last decades of its history, from the traditional one that was based primarily on agricultural sources (the land taxes) and remained largely stagnant and fixed, to the new one that was based on commercial sources (taxes on industrial and commercial goods as well as foreign and public debts) and

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open to expansion, which made the late Qing government analogous to modern nation-states in other parts of the world in terms of revenue composition.

The rise of high-level disequilibrium As shown in the preceding chapter, the first two decades of the Guangxu reign saw a rapid increase in the Qing state’s revenues and the reestablishment of a low-level equilibrium in its fiscal constitution, in which its revenue was slightly higher than its expenditures. The Qing government revenue continued to grow, at a higher rate, after 1894, especially in the last decade of the Qing. By 1911, its total revenue (297 million taels) had been three times its 1894 level (81 million taels), or a growth of 7.94% a year. But the expenditures of the Qing state grew even faster, from 80 million taels in 1894 to more than 376 million by 1911, at 9.53% a year! The result was a widening deficit, almost 13 million taels in 1899 (or 14% of the Qing state’s revenue), 30 million in 1903, 41 million in 1910, and 79 million (or 26% of its revenue) in 1911 (see Table 4.1). A more fundamental difference in the Qing state’s fiscal condition before and after 1894 lay in the dynamics behind the changes in the fiscal structure. During the first two Guangxu decades, growth in government revenues came primarily from the rapid expansion of maritime custom duties; free of war indemnities, the state was able to use the increased revenue to finance its projects in military modernization, despite all the constraints discussed in the last chapter. In other words, it was the increases in government revenue that permitted increases in government spending. In sharp contrast, after 1894, it was the rapid increases in government spending, primarily the payment of war indemnities to foreign powers and the funding of the New Army and other xinzheng projects, that drove the Qing state to enlarge the sources of government revenues; but the increases in revenues lagged increasingly behind the expenditures, hence a disequilibrium in the Qing state’s fiscal structure. The disequilibrium, to be sure, had occurred during wartime, first in the 1670s and again during the Taiping Rebellion, as an anomaly in the long history of the Qing state’s finances since the 1680s. After 1900, however, it became a new norm of China’s fiscal constitution in the decades to follow. Did the recurrence and perpetuation of the disequilibrium mean a crisis in the Qing fiscal system, as the fall of the dynasty in 1911 seemed to suggest? To judge whether or not the Qing state’s extraction of resources from society through taxation and other means of revenue generation was so excessive as to hurt its legitimacy, we have to take into account two factors. One was the longterm decline in the price of silver in the world market in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the subsequent increases in the conversion rate between copper cashes, used by ordinary people in daily transactions, and silver tael, used in collecting and paying taxes. During the last 17 years of the Qing (1894–1911), because of the depreciation of silver in the world market and the increase in the value of copper cashes, the purchasing

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power of silver tael in China declined by 40.35% (Wang and Yan 2007: 272–273). The actual value of the 297 million taels of silver that the Qing state generated in 1911 was only 2.18 times the value of the 81 million taels of silver generated in 1894, rather than 3.66 times, as the face values of its revenues suggest, and the annual growth rate of its actual revenue was only 4.69%, rather than 7.94%, during the same period. The other factor was the Qing state’s revenue in relation to the potential of taxable resources. According to the estimate made in 1899 by Robert Hart, Inspector-General of the Imperial Maritime Custom Service, for example, China had at least 4 billion mu of arable land, which had the potential to generate at least 400 million taels as taxes (ZGHG: 49), or more than ten times the land taxes actually collected around 1899. Hart’s estimate, to be sure, was a wild assumption, for the actual size of the arable land in China was only about 1.25 billion mu as late as 1952 and roughly 2 billion mu in the 1980s (Shi Zhihong 2011). However, even if we take 1.2 billion mu as the actual size of the arable land in late Qing China, there could have been an additional amount of 24.9 million taels as land taxes to be generated, or 52% of the land taxes actually collected in 1911. We can also gauge the potential of revenue generation by looking at the size of China’s economy. Historians have offered different estimates of China’s gross national product in the late Qing period, ranging from 2 billion taels in 1800 (Liu Ruizhong 1987) and 3.3 billion taels in 1888 (Fairbank and Liu 1980: 2), to 4.2 billion in 1894, 5.8 billion in 1903, and 6.9 billion in 1908 (Zhou Zhichu 2002: 259). If these estimates are plausible, then the Qing government’s official amount of tax revenues only accounted for 1.5% of China’s economic output in 1800, 1.92% in 1894, 1.81% in 1903, and 3.4% in 1908. If we further accept 6.9 billion taels as a conservative estimate of China’s economic output in 1911, then the state extracted only 4.3% of it as taxes. But the official records of revenues were far below the actual amount of taxes and fees collected by local governments and their agents. Liang Qichao, for instance, believed that the taxes and fees collected by government officials and runners could be as high as “three or four times” the official amount reported to the central government and that the total tax burden of Chinese people could be “above four hundred million taels” (YBS, 8: 26). Despite the rapid increase in government revenues and the huge quantity of tax incomes unreported by local administrators and pocketed by tax collectors, the real tax burden in the late Qing period was not as exorbitant as the conventional wisdom has suggested. It accounted for only 5.79% of China’s total economic output, if we accept Liang’s estimate (400 million taels). However, this burden had different meanings for people in different economic sectors. For the rural population, the land tax remained relatively light, accounting for roughly 2–4% of agricultural output in the last few years of the Qing.2 For urban dwellers, especially those living on small trades, however, the newly created taxes and fees, which quickly increased after 1894, especially during the xinzheng period, could be truly extortionate. The Qing court’s 1911 budget

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shows that the revenue from miscellaneous taxes had replaced maritime customs to become the most important source of its revenue, accounting for as much as 40% of its total revenue, which contrasts sharply with only 12–14% before 1894 (see Table 4.1). It was small wonder that unrest took place primarily among the people in non-agricultural sectors rather than the taxpaying cultivators during the xinzheng years, especially in the last few years of the Qing (see, e.g., Prazniak 1999). But these riots were by no means fatal to the Qing dynasty; they were on a small scale, limited to local areas, and were largely manageable to local authorities. The increased tax burden alone cannot explain why the Qing dynasty fell abruptly during the height of the xinzheng movement; to understand the demise of the Qing, we need to further inquire how the xinzheng projects and the subsequent rise of high-level disequilibrium affected the relationship between the Qing court and local authorities.

Recentralization and alienation Recentralizing fiscal power One of the central agendas of the xinzheng program was lixian, or creating a constitutional government. However, people of different backgrounds embraced it for different purposes. For its advocates among the reform-minded intellectuals and the emerging bourgeoisie, imposing a constitution on the government was believed to the best way to make the latter accountable and to have their own voice heard in the policy-making process. For provincial bureaucrats, especially those of Han origin, the constitutional government appeared to be a better choice that hopefully worked to curb the power of the inexperienced, capricious Manchu nobles, who came to dominate the court after the death of Empress Dowager Cixi in 1908. The Manchu elites also welcomed the proposal of a constitutional government, anticipating their enhanced control of power under a constitutional government. Tieliang (1863–1939), Grand Councilor of State, stated unequivocally in 1906, right after the announcement of “preparation for a constitutional government” (yubei lixian): “government power has to be centralized before the establishment of a constitutional government; and to centralize government power, the military and fiscal power of governors and governor-generals have to be taken away and returned to the central government” (cf. Hou Yijie 1993: 79). A key step in fiscal centralization was the Qing court’s decision to “investigate and consolidate the fiscal system” (qingli caizheng) in 1908. It thus sent out two fiscal superintendents to each province, whose duties were to oversee the operation of the newly established Fiscal Clearance and Consolidation Bureau in the province and its compilation of a detailed report on the revenues and expenses of provincial government institutions, especially the portion that had never been reported to the central government (Su Quanyou 2010). Provincial governors and governors general were held responsible for submitting their budgets to the central government within a time limit to avoid the penalty of

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demotion and salary suspension for up to a year. Meanwhile, all of the irregular fiscal bureaus and offices originally set up by provincial authorities had to be abolished, and the Financial Commissioner’s Department had to be completely overhauled or replaced with a new organ called the Financial Department (caizheng ju) or the Financial Institute (caizheng gongsuo). And the provincial governors and governors general were prohibited from borrowing foreign loans and issuing paper currency on their own (Liu Zenghe 2014; Deng Shaohui 1998: 264–269). Another important step in recentralizing fiscal power to the imperial court was to revamp the administrative system in salt production and marketing. The Division for Supervising Salt Administration was set up and headed by a Manchu prince in 1909 to curb the rampant practices of smuggling illegal salt, embezzling licensing fees, and taking bribes from salt merchants; and the most important measure in this regard was taking away the power of personnel appointment and income management from provincial authorities and putting the salt administrative system under its direct control. These measures produced some obvious effects. The amount of lijin reported to the court increased dramatically from 12–13 million taels a year in the early 1900s to 21 million in 1908 and more than 43 million in 1911, as reflected in the Fiscal Department’s 1911 budget. Even more surprising was the increase in salt taxes, from around 13 million taels around 1900 to more than 46 million taels in 1911, which surpassed lijin and maritime customs to become the second largest source of government revenue, next to the land taxes (see Table 4.1). Provincial governors and governors general resisted the financial investigation and consolidation program from the beginning; they refused to “disclose the whole” (hepantuochu) of unreported revenues to the central government, give up their power in managing salt taxation, and include the spending on local public welfare programs into their administrative expenses; they were particularly resentful of the preliminary budget for 1910 that allocated most of the administrative expenditures to the individual departments of the central government while cutting down the budgeted expenses of local governments (Liu Wei 2003: 376). After the 1911 budget plan was finalized and publicized, they ignored it. The Financial Superintendents complained in early 1911 that “the individual provinces remain as wasteful in spending as before, and they discard the budget plan altogether; savings of funds have been barely heard of” (DQXFL, 11: 8). The fiscal reform, in a word, succeeded in uncovering much of the hidden revenues from provincial administrations, but failed in centralizing the actual management and spending of the public funds from provincial administrators.

Recentralizing military power Even more challenging to the Qing court was centralizing its military power through the establishment of the New Army. The official reason for creating the New Army right after the Boxer Rebellion, when the state was burdened with a huge amount of war reparation, was to protect the capital city against potential

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unrest from surrounding provinces where the rebellion had just subsided and to safeguard the interior provinces against the impending outbreak of the RussoJapanese war in Manchuria. As an initial step, the Division of Military Training (lianbingchu) was established in October 1903 to establish 36 divisions of 450,000 soldiers under its unified command. Conflicts between the imperial court and provincial administrators became inevitable when the latter, especially the prominent governors general of the southern provinces such as Zhang Zhidong of Hubei and Wei Guangtao of Jiangsu, resisted the court’s demand for more funds to support the New Army and openly opposed the unification and standardization of the military units that would threaten their control of local forces; but they soon gave up under pressure from the court. In sharp contrast with these provincial administrators as losers in the centralization of military power, Yuan Shikai, Governor General of Zhili and the Minister-Superintendent of Trade in the North, emerged as the biggest winner. Trusted by Empress Dowager Cixi for his proven loyalty that led to Emperor Guangxu’s failure in the Hundred-Day Reform back in 1898, Yuan was appointed as Assistant Minister of the Division of Military Training. With Prince Yikuang (1838–1919) as the head of the division, who was widely believed to be ignorant of military affairs, Yuan dominated the planning of the New Army. Most of the funds contributed by individual provinces for this purpose thus was spent on the six divisions (70,000 soldiers altogether) of the New Army created by Yuan himself and stationed in the key localities of Zhili and Shandong provinces. These divisions became the best equipped and best trained in the country. Yuan tightly controlled the six divisions through his selection and appointment of highranking officers from his own subordinates, who owed their personal loyalty to him for his long-time patronage. Yuan, however, did not limit his influence to the military; he dominated the planning of the bureaucratic reform (guanzhi gaige) as a key member of a board (guanzhi bianzhi ju) appointed in 1906 to oversee the reform. He was particularly interested in the idea of a “responsibility cabinet” (zeren neige) and generally supportive to the ongoing constitutional movement, partly to show his alleged commitment to political progress in China, but more importantly to safeguard himself against the potential revenge from the Guangxu emperor after the death of the Empress Dowager; to limit the ruler’s power with a constitution and an independent cabinet, in other words, was the best way to protect himself. But Yuan’s unparalleled influence in the military and his unveiled political ambition also made the Empress Dowager increasingly cautious of him. To appoint him as a Grand Councilor of State and thereby remove him from the position of Governor General of Zhili in September 1907 thus was at once a promotion for him and a weakening of his power base. The death of Empress Dowager Cixi in November 1908 signaled a turning point for both Yuan’s political career and the Qing dynasty. While Cixi was alive, a bond existed between the imperial court and senior Han bureaucrats; for decades, the Empress Dowager had trusted the latter with the most important tasks in defense and counted on them to make key decisions that helped the

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Qing survive the recurrent crises, and the Han bureaucrats remained loyal to the imperial court as long as they received proper treatment and respect from it. Added to this bond was the existence of a small group of Manchu elites such as Ronglu and Duanfang who kept a close relationship with the Han bureaucrats and mediated between the Manchu and Han elites. The death of the Empress Dowager coincided with the passing of this generation of experienced and trusted Han bureaucrats, most prominently Li Hongzhang who died in 1901, Liu Kunyi in 1902, Wang Wenshao in 1908, and Zhang Zhidong in 1909. After 1908, the new generation of Manchu princes who dominated the court had isolated themselves to the circle of the Manchu elite itself, had no personal contact with Han bureaucrats at provincial and central levels, and lacked sufficient experience in managing state affairs. They did not readily trust the latter and in fact had no sense of security when dealing with them, especially with powerful Han leaders such as Yuan Shikai, who appeared to be self-assured and aggressive, lacking the prudence and integrity found in the old generation of Han bureaucrats. Therefore, the old divide between the Manchus and the Han, which had been taboo in the public discourse of the ruling elites, came back to shape their consciousness when faced with the initiatives of political reforms, which the Manchu nobles readily interpreted as steps to limit their privilege and aggrandize the Han people. Not surprisingly, a major step taken by the Manchu princes in enhancing their power was ousting Yuan from the court on the excuse of his need to recover from a foot illness in January 1909. But Yuan never lost his control of the six divisions of the New Army through his trusted subordinates, who remained loyal to him. The death of Cixi and his subsequent expulsion only made Yuan no longer obligated to support the Qing court; the conditional loyalty that the Han bureaucrats had maintained since the 1850s eventually came to an end for Yuan and his followers. To reappoint Yuan to the key positions of the government and the military after the outbreak of the Uprising of Wuchang in October 1911 merely offered him the power to bargain with the revolutionaries regarding the terms of his role in the abdication of the Qing ruler and the newly born Republic. The individual governors and governors general of the different provinces, who had been discontent with the Qing court’s recurrent and heightened measures to limit their power and extract local revenues, saw no reason to remain loyal to the court when the Revolution swept their provinces without much violence involved.

The gentry elite A generational transition was also visible in the composition of the gentry elites and their relations with the Qing state in the 1900s. Before 1900, the gentry class, consisting mainly of graduates from civil service examinations at county through metropolitan levels but also including a small portion of purchaseddegree holders, served as the very foundation of the imperial state (Chang 1955). Trained in Confucian classics, the gentry class was the primary source

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from which the state recruited government officials. As informal leaders of local communities, the gentry members who did not enter the government or retired from officialdom also acted as intermediaries between the government and society. The social and political standing of the gentry class, therefore, was directly linked with the state’s sponsorship of the examination and recognition of their privileges as degree holders. The government, for its part, was able to keep itself to a minimal size and yet effectively ruled its people through the gentry elites without having to enlarge the formal bureaucracy and penetrate society. All this came to an end after the Qing court abolished the civil service examination in 1905 as part of the xinzheng package. This it did for a good reason: as long as the examination continued, parents would be reluctant to send their children to new-style schools for education in modern knowledge. But terminating the examination also meant shutting off the source that generated the traditional gentry class and severing its ties with the state. Students therefore had to either receive new-style education, mostly in the mushrooming “schools of law and administration” (fazheng xuetang) or military schools in the cities, or travel to Japan and other countries for higher education. As graduates from the new schools or returned students, their standing in society and career development no longer depended upon the Qing state’s recognition; therefore, they no longer owed their chief loyalty to the imperial court. Many of them shifted their interest from serving the government to investing in commerce and industry, especially in modern businesses such as railroad construction and transportation or textile manufacturing. Known as gentry-merchants (shenshang), they constituted the main body of the reformist elite and came to dominate urban society (Esherick 1976: 66–105; Bergère 1986: 37–62). Those who graduated from military schools at home or abroad would later became the backbones of the New Army. Together, these civilian and military elites came to dominate political transformation in the last decade of the Qing and early Republican years. Thanks to the introduction of the self-government program at the local level as part of the xinzheng program, the gentry-merchants organized themselves into the chambers of commerce (shanghui) that were bourgeoning in cities and towns. The most active of the gentry elites were elected into the local Deliberative Councils (yishihui) and Board of Directors (dongshihui), which had been established in each county as self-government organs to collaborate with county magistrates in managing public affairs, especially in determining the kinds and rates of surcharges and the fees for local xinzheng projects; they also headed the newly established schools or other self-government organs such as the SchoolPromotion Office (quanxuesuo), the Police Office (xunjinshu), or the Financial Clearing Office (qingli caizheng chu). At the provincial and national levels, a consultative assembly (ziyiju in each province and zizhengyuan in Beijing) was established in 1909 and 1910, which had the right to make policy recommendations and the power to approve or veto government budget plans. All these newly created institutions offered a channel for the gentry elites to formalize their leading role in society and their influence upon the government. Conflicts between the gentry-controlled deliberative councils or assemblies on the one

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hand and government leaders on the other took place at each level, when the deliberative organs questioned the administrators’ budget or tax plans, or when the administrators rejected the assembly’s proposal; frequently the elected representatives in those organs accused the administrators of being conservatives resisting reforms while the latter condemned the assemblies as unruly elements infringing on government prerogatives (Rankin 1986: 202–299; Liu Wei 2003: 186–187; H. Li 2005: 196–197). Despite such recurrent and sometimes bitterly vented schisms, however, the two sides more often than not found grounds to collaborate in dealing with the imperial court. This was especially true at the provincial level, where the governors or governors general often took the initiative in promoting selfgovernment programs within their provinces. For instance, the provincial administrators were generally sympathetic to the “rights recovery” (shouhui liquan) movement in which local gentry-merchants raised funds on their own to buy back the rights of mine production and railroad construction from foreign investors (X. Zheng 2018). The governors were particularly interested in promoting the construction of railroads, believing it to be the most effective way to boost the local economy and government revenues.3 Therefore, when the Qing court tried to take over the construction of two major railroads in South and Southwest China by signing a loan contract with European debtors in April 1909, the governors of concerned provinces joined gentry-merchants to oppose this move. The Qing court’s decision in May 1911 to “nationalize” railroads in the country only caused gentry-merchants to agitate widely and confront the central government. Some governors asked to resign after they failed to appeal to the imperial court or found that their fiscal and military power was greatly curtailed. It was no wonder that, when the Uprising of Wuchang broke out and the Consultative Assembly of Hubei declared the province’s independence from the court, governors in other provinces either joined this action or adopted a wait-and-see attitude, or simply abandoned their job and fled; few remained loyal to the Qing. To conclude, the end result of the Qing court’s measures of fiscal and military recentralization in its last years was its alienation of two key groups, namely, the gentry elites that played a leading role in local communities and the bureaucrats of the Han who ran the government in most provinces. Having served as the most important social basis of imperial states in Chinese history since the Tang, the gentry class eventually severed its ties with the government during the last decade of the Qing. The most fundamental challenge to the Qing dynasty, however, came from the Han bureaucrats at the provincial level. Their loyalty to the imperial court hinged on (1) the court’s respect of their interests, especially their control of local financial resources and hence the survival of xinzheng projects they founded and maintained, and (2) the Qing court’s proper treatment of them in line with the Confucian tenets on the relationship between the ruler and ministers. What undermined this relationship in the last decades of the Qing were precisely (1) the imperial court’s infringement upon their interests through the incessant efforts of

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recentralization that aimed to deprive the provincial administrators of their fiscal and military power, and (2) the loss of mutual trust between the two sides, and the subsequent worsening of the Manchu–Han divide in their political thinking and action. Nevertheless, the fall of the Qing in 1911 should not be equated with the failure of state-rebuilding in nineteenth and early twentieth-century China. Many of the xinzheng programs implemented in the last decade of the dynasty continued after 1911 and spearheaded China’s modernization on almost every front. Most importantly, the collapse of the Qing did not result in the splitting of its territory that the early Qing ruler had put together through military conquest and consolidation: the Republic after 1911 continued to be a multiethnic state with its territorial boundary largely identical to the Qing’s. Despite the popularity of the slogan of “expelling the barbarians and restoring a Chinese state” (quchu dalu huifu Zhonghua) among the anti-Qing activists before and during the Revolution of 1911, the fall of the dynasty did not lead to the creation of a Han Chinese state as the rebels had intended or the separation of the frontiers of the former Qing from the Republic. We thus need to further explore why the Republic was able to inherit the frontiers from the Qing.

The making of a new nation Homogenizing the Manchus and the Han For mainstream historians in post-1949 China, the territorial and administrative continuities between the Qing and the Republic were a given. The Revolution of 1911, therefore, was interpreted as a revolution by an emerging Chinese bourgeois class against the autocratic imperial regime (e.g., Hu Sheng 1981). The anti-Manchu mobilization and the tensions between Han revolutionaries and the elites of non-Han populations under the Qing, which had been central to the narrative of the Revolution in the nationalist historiography before 1949, were obscured. In the writings on modern China in the West, preoccupation with the thesis of modernization vis-à-vis cultural tradition in the 1950s and 1960s also led scholars to dismiss ethnic tensions between Manchus and Han in the late Qing period as insignificant or irrelevant. Based on an 1865 edict of the Qing court that allowed the Manchus to exit the banner system, make their own living, and be treated the same way as the Han people in litigation, Mary Wright concludes that “[m]ost of the last restrictions separating the Manchus from the [Han] Chinese were removed” thereafter (Wright 1957: 53–54) and that “[t]he Sino-Manchu amalgam that had been developing since the eighteenth century had reached its full maturity in the mid-nineteenth century” (Wright 1968: 21). Indeed, by the last decade of the Qing, the Manchus had been Sinicized to such a degree that, according to a contemporary, “all of the Manchus speak the language of the Han people, and there is not a single Manchu who can speak the Manchu language” and “those of the Manchus who are literate are only able to read the Chinese rather than the Manchu texts”

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(YDJ, 1: 273); the early Qing rulers’ efforts to encourage the use of the Manchu language among the imperial elites of Manchu origins failed. More recent historiography has questioned this proposition. Instead of the melting of Manchu–Han cleavages, Pamela Crossley argues that the rise of a racial consciousness among the Manchus was partly in response to the hostility of the Han people during the Taiping Rebellion and partly a result of “court sponsored ideals of Manchu identity which had made racial thinking not only acceptable but required” (1990: 228). This “sharpening” of ethnic consciousness among the Manchus, Mongols, and other non-Han peoples, together with inspiration from Chinese nationalism, she suggests, gave rise to the secessionist movements in Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet in the early twentieth century (Crossley 2002: 343–344). Edward Rhoads, too, challenges Wright by demonstrating the ineffectualness of the 1865 edict, the continuation of institutions and practices that segregated the Manchus from the Han, and gross inequality between the two populations, as seen in the prohibition against intermarriage between them, the quotas of government positions for the Manchus, the banner people as a paralytic population living entirely on government stipends and in isolation from Han society, the severer punishment of the Han than the Manchus for similar offenses, and the persistence of the Eight Banners as a garrison force stationed in cities throughout the country to supervise the Han people despite its declined role in national defense (Rhoads 2000: 35–63).4 Mark Elliott offers a more nuanced analysis of ethnic relations in late Qing China. He underscores the success of the Qing in maintaining what he calls the “ethnic sovereignty” of the Manchus, or the special professional, legal, and residential arrangements of the banner people as a conquest force, through the Eight Banners system that remained in place until the early twentieth century, although he does not deny the fading of most of the cultural and linguistic traits that distinguished the Manchus from the Han by the nineteenth century. More importantly, while he cautions against equating the “Great Qing” with Zhongguo or a historical China, given the contradictions associated with the making of the Qing and a modern Chinese state, Elliott nevertheless identifies a historical link between the Qing court’s efforts to unify the “inner” (China proper) and the “outer” (Inner Asian frontiers) territorially and the redefinition of the modern Chinese nation in the twentieth century, hence a paradox in which the centuries of Manchu rule that was “so un-Chinese” yielded a territorial and ethnic legacy that accounts for the myth of a “unified China” in the modern era (Elliott 2001: 359–361). At any rate, ethnic and institutional divides continued to shape the mutual perceptions and animosity between the Manchu and Han peoples, which indeed worsened at the beginning of the twentieth century as an increasing number of revolutionaries built their strength by agitating the Han people with the slogan of “expelling the Manchus” (pai Man). Both the Han and Manchu elites realized the severity of the Manchu–Han divide and its threat to the legitimacy of the Qing state at a time when Chinese society, especially the Han elites, was exposed to new ideas of popular rights and nationalism imported from the

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West and Japan. Zhang Zhidong, the Governor General of Huguang, thus noted in 1901 that “ironing out the Manchu–Han differences” (hua Man Han zhenyu) was “an idea of utmost importance” (shangshang zuiyao zhi yi) among the Qing state’s many political proposals of post-Boxer rehabilitation and was key to its survival and the elimination of revolutionary rebels (ZWXG, 175: 14). Duanfang, the acting Governor General of Liangjiang, too, saw the Manchu–Han cleavage as the “the biggest barrier to the xinzheng of China and the severest danger to the future of the imperial dynasty” (XHGM, 4: 39). Both governors, therefore, proposed the equal treatment of the Manchus and the Han and the elimination of Manchu privileges as a fundamental solution to the crisis of the Qing and the precondition for successful implementation of xinzheng programs. The Qing court acted accordingly. Beginning in 1901, the imperial court no longer applied the rule of dyarchy between the Manchus and the Han to the four newly created ministries (of foreign affairs, commerce, police, and education), a practice that was adopted in 1906 during the “reform of bureaucracy” (guanzhi gaige) for other government offices. At the same time, the court also allowed Han bureaucrats to fill positions that had been monopolized by the Manchus, such as the positions of jiangjun (the supreme military commander and civil administrator of a large border area) and dutong (the supreme military commander and civil administrator of each of the Eight Banners). In 1907, the court further turned Manchuria into three provinces, replacing the original jiangjun positions with the new positions of a single governor general and three provincial governors, to be filled by candidates regardless of their Manchu or Han origins. In fact, by the very end of the Qing, of the nine governors general, four were Han, two were banner men of Han origin, and only three were Manchus; and of the fourteen provincial governors, only two were Manchus (QMLX, 1: 559–565). The Qing court also took steps to narrow the gap between ordinary Manchu and Han people. In early 1902, it revoked the ban on intermarriage between them. In 1908, it prescribed the same punishment for the Manchus and the Han for the same offense. The criminal code of 1909 further prescribed the adjudication of cases involving the Manchu or Han people by the same organ (i.e., the newly established court system at the local level that was independent of county and prefectural administrators). Most importantly, in 1906, the Qing court allowed banner people to seek their own vocations and to purchase real estate under their own names; next year, it further ordered them to be governed by local administrative authorities and for banner soldiers to be demobilized with a ten-year stipend plan and to make a living on their own afterwards (Chi Yunfei 2001). But the effects of these measures on eliminating the differences between the two populations were limited. Intermarriage between ordinary Manchu and Han residents remained rare in the following years because of their different customs. The equal treatments of the two peoples in adjudication and civil administration would undoubtedly have helped integrate the Manchus or the entire banner

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people into a society dominated by the Han, had the Qing stayed longer to allow enough time for these new policies to take effect. Unfortunately, all these developments were curtailed by developments in court politics after 1908 and interrupted by the outbreak of the Revolution of 1911. To concentrate the fiscal and military power of the government into the hands of the few Manchu nobles only aroused the ill-feelings of the Han bureaucrats against them, alienated the gentry-merchant class who had harbored the hope of a constitutional government, and offered the anti-Qing revolutionaries a new reason to agitate the ordinary Han people. We can thus distinguish two parallel trends in Manchu–Han relations in the late Qing period, which competed with each other during the last decade of the Qing: one was the long-term trend of incorporating the Manchus into Chinese society and the rise of the Han bureaucrats at the provincial and central levels; the other was the Manchu rulers’ recurrent efforts to maintain the ethnic characteristics of the Manchu people and safeguard the privileges of Manchu elites. By and large, however, the first trend prevailed, resulting in the systematic integration of the former into Han society before and during the xinzheng decade; the Manchu elites’ attempts to reassert their prerogatives should be seen as a temporary and last stand against the trend of integration. In the final analysis, the homogenization of the Manchus and the Han in language and culture, the dependence of the Manchu elites on Han bureaucrats in government, the inseparability of the Manchus from Han Chinese society, and, no less important, the integration of Manchuria with interior provinces, altogether these developments contributed to the growth of a shared nationhood between the Manchu and Han populations.

Imagining “the Chinese nation” To understand why the Republic of China was able to inherit the entirety of the Qing state’s territory upon its inauguration in 1912, we need to look further at how the revolutionaries who founded the Republic, as well as their enemies, defined and redefined China as a new nation that they wanted to create before and during the Revolution of 1911. To begin with, it is important to note the growing awareness among the ruling elites of the Qing, including both the Manchus and the Han, of China or Zhongguo as a country that was more extensive in scope and carried greater weight than the Qing state itself. While they generally referred to the Qing state as Da Qing (“the Great Qing”), Huang Qing (“the Imperial Qing”), or Huang Chao (“the Imperial Dynasty”) in official discourse, especially in discussions concerning the relationship between the Qing and preceding Chinese dynasties or on matters between the imperial court and its subjects, the Qing rulers and bureaucrats switched to the word Zhongguo when discussing issues pertaining to the entire country. The word Zhongguo, to be sure, had been used commonly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the Qing elites in discussion concerning China’s relations with neighboring tributary states and other

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countries. What was new in the discourse of the late Qing period, especially during the xinzheng decade, was that Zhongguo was increasingly used also in discussions on domestic issues arising from China’s contact with the outside. They frequently juxtaposed Zhongguo with waiguo or foreign countries when describing domestic changes resulting from foreign influences and when rationalizing a proposal or a new policy that departed from traditional practices and aimed to catch up with foreign countries. This “Zhong-wai” (Zhongguo versus foreign countries) dyad permeated and indeed undergirded their discourse on reforms and new projects during the Self-Strengthening movement, the Hundred-Day Reform, and the xinzheng movement. To embark on such new reforms and modernizing projects, in other words, was important not only for the viability of the Qing dynasty alone but also for the well-being of the entire country that was Zhongguo. This shared awareness among the Manchu and Han elites of belonging to one country grew in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when they were confronted with the fatal challenges coming from outside China and were committed to updating its own military and civil institutions for the survival of the country; it increasingly superseded the old Manchu–Han dyad to become the most decisive factor redefining their self-identity and political consciousness, allowing them to build consensus on major issues concerning China’s survival and progress, regardless of their Han or Manchu origins, and to transcend the narrow notion of a Manchu–Han rift that tended to divide them. Not surprisingly, those who were most enthusiastic for the Self-Strengthening projects in the late nineteenth century or for the constitutional movement in the early twentieth century were not limited to the reform-minded Han bureaucrats; the enlightened Manchu elites were equally active and even playing a more important role in advancing the modernizing projects. One such Manchu nobles was Ruicheng (1863–1915), the Governor General of Huguang, who joined Xiliang (1853–1917), the Governor General of the three Manchurian provinces, in October 1910 to lead the third petition by 19 provincial governors and governors general for the early opening of congress, forcing the court to announce its commitment to opening it in 1913. A contemporary thus observed that “not all Manchus are evil, for there is no lack of those who have revolutionary ideas and seek social progress” and, on the other hand, “not all Han people are good, for many of those in power today are helpers to the evildoers, and they should not be condoned simply because they are the Han people” (SLXJ, 2: 1005–1006). Being a Manchu or a Han alone was not a sufficient criterion in judging one’s political attitude. The necessity of a shared national identity among the Han and other ethnic groups was most clearly articulated in the early twentieth century by a new generation of literati who had been exposed to political doctrines imported from the West and concerned with modernizing reforms in China. Liang Qichao, for example, saw eliminating the differences between the Han and Manchu as the very beginning of future reforms in China.5 For Liang, the Han people or the “Chinese nation” (Zhonghua minzu) itself “has never been a single ethnic group

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from its very beginning but a blend of multiple ethnic groups in actuality” (ibid., 3: 1679–1680). Yang Du (1875–1931), another young activist, expounded on the new concept of “Chinese nation” and expanded it to include other ethnic groups than the Han.6 Similar ideas were also found among the young generation of Manchus and Mongols studying in Japan in the 1900s. For them, the Manchus and the Han, as well as the entire “people of China” (Zhongguo zhi renmin), had currently become “people of the same nation but different ethnic origins” (tong minzu yi zongzu zhi guomin), and they “belong to the same nation in historical reality and suffer the same exploitation by foreign powers” (cf. Huang Xingtao 2011b: 77). But these young Manchus and Mongols also admitted that, while the Manchus and the Han had been so integrated to make them “inseparable” from each other, it would take time for the Mongols, the Hui, and the Tibetans to be fully and necessarily assimilated, or China would soon face the danger of losing its land (ibid.: 78). At any rate, a growing consensus among the new generation of Han and non-Han elites in the early twentieth century was that the making of a new nation was as important as the making of a new state and that the new nation, based on shared memory of the past and shared concern with the vicissitudes of the land where they lived, would be possible only when the state was rebuilt to fully represent the interests of the people regardless of their ethnic origins, so that China could be turned from a “nationless state,” to borrow from Fitzgerald (1995), into a true nation-state. In addition to the forging of a national consensus as outlined above, the implementation of a series of administrative measures under the late Qing state also substantially facilitated the integration of the frontiers into interior provinces and worked against the centrifugal inclination among frontier elites. The first was the Qing state’s policy of allowing Han people to migrate into its frontiers in Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang in the nineteenth century, thus spawning economic and cultural ties between the frontiers and the interior, and driving the gradual integration of the trading and production activities on the frontiers into the larger markets and economy of interior provinces, which in turn cultivated the loyalty of non-Han elites and landowners to the Qing court, given their growing dependence on inland markets (see, e.g., ReardonAnderson 2000; Kim 2016). The second measure was merging the frontiers into the interior administrative system, which began with turning Xinjiang into a province in 1884 and culminated in establishing three provinces in Manchuria in 1907. As a result, most of the key administrative and even military positions in these provinces fell into the hands of Han bureaucrats, which accounted in large measure for these provinces’ allegiance to the newly established Republic after the fall of the Qing. The third measure was the Qing court’s religious policies on Tibetan Buddhism. While patronizing the Lamaist priests in different parts of Tibet and Mongolia to win their loyalty, the Qing court also made efforts to prevent the Dalai Lama in Tibet and the Jebtsundamba Khutughtu in Mongolia from becoming too influential by retaining its power in sanctioning the procedures of their reincarnation and by elevating the status of the Panchen

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Lama in western Tibet and the Icang-skya Khutughtu in Inner Mongolia. It was primarily through its prerogative in conferring the official title to the Lamaist leaders that the Republican government renewed and maintained its claim of sovereignty over the two frontiers; the persistent allegiance of the Panchen Lama and Icang-skya Khutughtu to the Republican state further evinced and enhanced its claim. Therefore, in the absence of a shared sense of national belonging among the Han and non-Han peoples, the heritages of Qing administrative and religious institutions, more than any other factors, explain the Qing–Republican continuity in China’s territoriality.

From “eighteen stars” to “five colors” It is interesting here to examine how the revolutionaries, who were committed to overthrowing the Qing dynasty, thought about the issue of ethnic division and integration in China. At the beginning of his revolutionary career, Sun Yatsen defined the Revolution as primarily an “anti-Manchu” (pai Man) struggle with the goal of “expelling the barbarians and recovering Zhonghua” (quchu dalu, huifu Zhonghua). For him, expelling the Manchus, or “nationalism” as he defined it, meant overthrowing the Manchu court and reestablishing a government of the Han people, rather than “completely eliminating the Manchu people”; he reminded his followers that “we have no reason to take revenge on the Manchus if they do not oppose us during the revolution” (SZS, 1: 325). Not all of the revolutionaries agreed with him. The most radical of them embraced a narrowly defined nationalism, or more exactly a unique version of racism, that aimed at establishing an exclusive state of the Han people and expelling the non-Han populations from Zhongguo, which was again narrowly defined as consisting merely of the 18 interior provinces. Zou Rong (1885–1905), a young radical propagandist from Sichuan, thus called for “killing all of the five-millions-odd animal-like Manchus and washing away the shame of two-hundred sixty years of brutal persecution and harsh exploitation” and thereby establishing “a China of the Chinese China” (ZRWJ: 55). Zhang Taiyan (1869–1936), a philologist trained in the Han-centric tradition, also targeted the entire Manchu population when authoring his influential anti-Manchu essays in the early 1900s; for him, “hatred against the Manchus necessarily means hatred against all of them” (ZTY, 1: 197). However, the radical revolutionaries soon realized the problem of the exclusive nationalism they upheld, admitting that “expelling the Manchus” was merely a tactic to mobilize the people, rather than the ultimate goal of the Revolution. Chen Tianhua (1875–1905), another radical propagandist, thus wrote before his suicide that the anti-Qing Revolution was essentially a political rather than a racist one and that the Manchus should be granted equal status after the Revolution since “modern-day civilization will never allow vindictive killing [of the Manchus]” (SLXJ, 1: 155). Zhang Taiyan later also clarified on the eve of the Revolution of 1911 that the “nationalist revolution” (minzu geming) only meant “recovering our own sovereignty and preventing its

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arrogation by others” and that it should never be equated with “killing all of the Manchus” or “discriminating against the Manchus” (ZTY, 1: 519).7 Publications by the revolutionaries in Japan in the late 1900s generally promised their equal treatment of all ethnic groups in China after the fall of the Qing and defined the Revolution as the one targeting only the Manchu court rather than the entire Manchu population. Thus, despite their different goals, the anti-Qing revolutionaries and those who embraced a constitutional government under the Qing had a shared cognition of integrating the Han and other major ethnic groups into a new nation and respecting their political equality under the new government they endeavored to create. But the power of the racist anti-Manchu mobilization should not be underestimated. After all, the discourse on national integration and the equality of all ethnic groups in China was largely limited to the political elites. To agitate the common people who were largely illiterate and had never been exposed to the imported political ideas, appealing to the history of the Manchus’ atrocities back in the mid-seventeenth century and to the realities of Manchu discrimination against the Han remained the most convenient and powerful tool. In fact, the revolutionaries had to recruit their members primarily from the underground anti-Qing societies that had long been active in South China, who were committed to expelling the Manchus and recovering the preceding Ming dynasty. Not surprisingly, when the Revolution of 1911 broke out first in the city of Wuchang on October 10, the revolutionaries declared their goal to be “restoring the Han and expelling the Manchu slaves,” and they appealed to the slogan of “killing all of the barbarians” and “reviving the Han and eliminating the Manchus.” The flag they invented was the so-called Eighteen-Star Flag that represented the 18 provinces of the Han people, thus excluding the territories populated by the non-Han peoples. The same flag was also used by the rebels in many other provinces during the Revolution. The announcement of Li Yuanhong, commander of the revolutionary force in Wuchang, also treated all of the Manchus as well as the Mongols, the Hui, and the Tibetans as potential enemies, to be separated from the Han people (Wang Xi’en 2011: 23). Despite this extreme form of expression of Han-centered nationalism and the subsequent violence against the Manchus or banner people during the rebellions in several localities, which resulted in the killing of Manchu civilians in hundreds or as many as thousands (Rhoads 2000: 187–205), large-scale atrocities against the Manchus did not occur widely in the interior provinces (Jin Chongji 2001: 17). Nevertheless, the Han-centered mobilization aroused wide concern among the experienced revolutionaries, who saw the danger of the separation of Manchuria, together with the lands of the Mongols, the Uighurs, and the Tibetans, from China, which had served as the “border fence” (pingfan) of the interior provinces (Esherick 2006: 247). After he returned to China, Sun Yat-sen worked with his colleagues to redesign the flag through repeated discussions. The new Five-Color Flag, consisting of five horizontal stripes in red, yellow, blue, white, and black, and representing the unity of the Han, Manchu, Mongol, Hui, and Tibetan peoples, was used by the rebels in Jiangsu, Zhejiang,

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and other places during the Revolution. In his declaration on the New Year of 1912, Sun Yat-sen, the provisional president of the newly founded Republic of China, stated: “The foundation of the nation lies in its people. Integrating the Han, the Manchus, the Mongols, the Hui, and the Tibetans into one people is the gist of the unification of the nation” (SZS, 2: 2). Nevertheless, whether or not the newly inaugurated Republic was able to legally and actually establish its rule over the whole territory of the Qing dynasty depended on not only the revolutionaries’ own willingness and announcements, but more importantly on the attitudes of the Qing court and the elites of its frontiers. After all, the revolutionaries, loosely organized as they were, only controlled the provinces in South and Central China and a few northern provinces during the first few months after the Wuchang Rebellion. Most of the provinces in North China as well as all of the frontiers remained loyal to the Qing court. A prolonged negotiation between the Qing court and the revolutionaries thus took place to end the confrontation between the north and the south, which offered an opportunity for the court to bargain for the terms of its abdication. As a result, Sun agreed to renounce his provisional presidency upon the Qing emperor’s abdication. After the “Emperor-chaired Conference” (yuqian huiyi) held on January 17–23, 1912 and participated in by the key members of the royal family as well as the representatives of Mongol princes and the cabinet headed by Yuan Shikai, who all agreed on the terms of the abdication, the Empress Dowager Longyu officially announced the “Decree of Abdication” (xunwei zhaoshu) on February 12, 1912, wishing “the integration of the whole territory of the five peoples of the Manchus, the Mongols, the Han, the Hui, and the Tibetans into one single greater Republic of China” (MGDA, 1: 217). The idea of “a five-race republic” (wuzu gonghe) was later fully articulated in the Provincial Constitution of the Republic of China publicized on March 11, 1912, which defined the territory of the Republic as “twenty-two provinces, Inner and Outer Mongolia, Tibet, and Qinghai,” allowing each of the provinces, Inner Mongolia, Outer Mongolia, and Tibet to provide five members to form the senate of the congress and Qinghai to provide one. The fifth article of the second chapter of the Constitution further stated: “the people of the Republic of China are all equal regardless of their differences in ethnicity, class, and religion” (MGDA, 2: 123). The Qing court’s Decree of Abdication was critical for the Republic to legally exercise its sovereignty over the entire territory it had inherited from the Qing and for the frontiers of the former Qing to stay within the Republic (Zhang Yongle 2016). Right on the eve of the Wuchang Rebellion, witnessing the rampant anti-Qing agitations and foreseeing the inevitable collapse of the dynasty, Liang Qichao expressed his deep concern over the potential separation of the frontiers from China after the fall of the Qing; for him, these frontiers had been “attached to the interior” (neifu) only because of “this dynasty’s influence and might” (benchao zhi shengwei) (YBSWJ, 3: 1618.). During the north–south negotiation following the outbreak of the Wuchang Rebellion, the Mongol princes showed strong aversion to the revolutionaries from the south who had

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built popular support by appealing to the racist slogan of expelling from China all “barbarians” (quchu dalu), including both the Manchus and the Mongols. In their collective letter to Yuan Shikai on November 26, 1911, therefore, the 24 Mongol princes affirmed their loyalty to the Qing emperor only: they could only “lead the land and the people to accept the unity under the Great Emperor and acknowledge nothing else” (yi wei shi shuai qi tudi renmin yi shou tongyi yu dahuangdi, buzhi qita ye) (XHGM, 7: 298–299). At the “Emperor-chaired Conference,” a few Mongol princes stated that: Mongolia has for long been a subservient part of China only because of its blood ties with the Qing court that has kept it as a dependency and their mutual relations in intimacy and fraternity for two centuries and decades. Once the Qing court is abolished, the relationship between Mongolia and China would come to an end. (Bohai shouchen 1969: 899) But they were quick to assert that their attitudes depended on the result of the conference: “[we] all depend on the Emperor-chaired conference for a resolution. If it decides on a republic, we Mongols will all join the great republican state” (ibid.: 906). The announcement of the Decree of Abdication, therefore, invalidated the legal ground for the Mongol elites to seek separation from China, because it ordained the transfer of its rule over the entire country to the new Republic by explicitly stating that the Empress Dowager, in conjunction with the emperor, “return the right of government to the entire country, of which the state system shall be a constitutionalist republic” and that “the five races of the Manchus, the Han, the Mongols, the Hui, and the Tibetans shall be united with their entire territories to form a single great republic of China” (MGDA, 1: 217). For the Mongol elites, especially the princes from Inner Mongolia, who had been loyal to the Qing, the reason to stay outside the Republic thus no longer existed; for those in Outer Mongolia, who had been discontented with the Qing court’s “New Policies” during the last decade of the dynasty, to be discussed in Chapter 7, the legal ground for separation from China also vanished. All this suggests the complexity of the consciousness and discourse of the Han and non-Han elites in the late Qing and early Republican periods. Among the Han intellectuals, there were radical nationalists such as Zhang Taiyan who fervently advocated expelling the Manchus from China to create a purely Han Chinese state, and there were also cosmopolitan liberals such as Liang Qichao who called for integrating all ethnic groups in China into a single Chinese nation (YBSWJ, 1: 454; see also Crossley 2002: 344–361); and among the nonHan elites there were those who sought the separation of their frontier land from China and those who endorsed the idea of a “Republic of Five Races” (Huang Xingtao 2010). Regardless of their different ideas about a future state, a basic fact about late Qing and early Republican politics is that a unified and centralized nation-state based on the identity of all peoples on the territory of

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China was far from a reality. Equally important, however, are the facts that the transition from the Qing to the Republic involved only a limited amount of violence and that the fall of the Qing did not cause the separation of its frontiers from China. These facts should be best seen as the results of cultural homogenization among the Manchu and Han peoples from the midseventeenth century as well as the administrative and economic integration of the frontiers with interior provinces that accelerated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. All these developments undoubtedly contributed to the growth of shared identities among the Han and nonHan elites as well as ordinary people in the last decades of the Qing.

A comparison with the Ottoman empire The Qing state’s abilities to defend most of its frontiers stood in sharp contrast with the Ottoman empire’s loss of territories in the Balkans and North Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. More surprisingly, after the collapse of the Qing, all of its frontiers remained under the Chinese state’s control or suzerainty, which again contrasted with the modern Turkish republic, whose territory was limited to the heartland of the original Ottoman state. To understand why the Qing and the Ottoman empire took different paths in their transition to modern nation-states, let us begin with a look at their respective fiscal and geopolitical conditions in the nineteenth century. Before the nineteenth century, both the Qing and Ottoman states derived their revenues primarily from the land, and both witnessed a very slow growth of annual revenues throughout the eighteenth century, reaching about 80 million taels or roughly 3,000 tons of silver for the Qing around 1800, and about 150 tons of cash revenue for the Ottoman government or a total of 250 tons of silver if the receipts kept by cavalrymen under the timar system were also included (the total revenue of the Ottoman empire, therefore, fluctuated between 200 and 300 tons from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century, without a significant upward trend) (see Kıvanç and Pamuk 2010: 604). In the nineteenth century, especially after the 1850s, both states saw a rapid increase in revenue, reaching more than 3,000 tons by the 1910s, or a growth factor of 15, for the Ottoman government (ibid.: 594, 619–621), and more than 11,000 tons by 1911, or a growth factor of about 4, for the Qing court. And both governments made possible the phenomenal growth in revenue by turning to the creation of surcharges, taxation of goods, debasements, and borrowing from the financial market. This huge increase in revenue explains in large measure why both the Qing and the Ottoman empire were able to update their military, survive foreign pressures, and defend their sovereignties with varying degrees of success in the nineteenth centuries. Both survived as sovereign states by the turn of the twentieth century also because of their unique role in the regional geopolitical order. Both were huge in size, playing a pivotal role in sustaining the balance of power among the major contenders in the region; and none of the

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great powers allowed a single member among them to dominate or conquer the entire country. What accounted for the different fates of the Qing and Ottoman empire in keeping their land was primarily the peculiar pattern of geopolitical relations within their territory. A fundamental weakness of the Ottomans was the geographic location of their capital city, Istanbul, which was too close to Europe, thus forcing them to defend their European possessions with excessive attention and resources until the Balkans were lost. They failed to keep the latter partly because of revolts by the Christian populations and more importantly because of intervention by European powers in this region under the pretext of protecting the Christian minority; the latter had been content with their autonomy under the Ottoman policy of tolerance for centuries when the empire remained powerful, but sought independence in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries after the empire suffered repeated defeat by Russia and other great powers (Braude 2014). The Arab and African provinces, having contributed little or nothing to the empire fiscally and militarily, received much less attention from the center throughout history than did the Turkish core and they became increasingly dissatisfied with the empire in the modern era for its weakness in dealing with foreign powers on the one hand and incompetence and arbitrariness in managing the provinces outside the Turkish heartland on the other. Egypt, which had never been effectively incorporated into the empire, became independent as early as the end of the seventeenth century. The most fatal step toward the loss of its Arabian provinces was, of course, the Ottoman government’s decision to ally with Germany and Austria–Hungary in World War I; their defeat in 1914 led to the collapse of the Ottoman empire and the loss of its territories other than Anatolia and a small area in Europe, on which the Republic of Turkey was established in 1923. The Qing dynasty’s advantages in relation to the Ottomans lay in, first of all, the overwhelming dominance of the Han population in its demographic, economic, fiscal, and military formations, which contrasted sharply with the Ottoman empire which had excessively relied on its European possessions throughout history and whose population of 12 million in the Turkish heartland accounted for only 57% of its entire population (roughly 21 million) as late as the end of the nineteenth century. Thus, whereas the independence of individual Balkan provinces from the empire from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries constituted a huge loss to the Ottomans demographically, economically, and fiscally, the homogeneity of the Han population in all of the provinces under the Qing precluded the possibility of the independence of any of these provinces. And while the Qing allowed its frontiers outside the provinces a high degree of autonomy in internal administration, as did the Ottomans towards its provinces outside the Turkish core, the close political and religious ties that the Qing court had established with the frontiers, and more importantly its decisive role in selecting the chief administrators or religious leaders of the frontiers, and its stationing of military forces at key points of the frontiers,

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also worked to prevent the latter from seeking independence from the imperial court. Ideology and identity also mattered in explaining the different consequences between China and Turkey in their transition to modern nation-states. In response to the growing threats from foreign powers and under the influence of patriotic and nationalist ideas imported from Europe, the political and intellectual elites of the Ottoman empire were attracted to various schemes to forge political identity among them and their supporters, including: 1

2

3

Ottomanism, which called for equality of all religious groups (millets) within the empire and once prevailed among the Young Turks but failed to appeal to the Balkan Christians who were reluctant to identify themselves as Ottomans; Pan-Islamism, which advocated unity of all Muslims throughout the empire and beyond for the goal of creating a single state under a legitimate caliph, which interested the Ottoman government but failed to attract the young generation of intellectuals educated in the West or influenced by Western ideas; and Pan-Turkism, or the unification of all the Turkish-speaking peoples in Turkey, Russia, Persia, Afghanistan, and China into a single state, an idea that found its supporters mainly among the Turkish exiles and immigrants from Russia.

What eventually prevailed and worked in building a new state on the ruins of the Ottoman empire, however, was the idea of creating a territorial state of the Turkish people in Turkey, as formulated by Mustafa Kemal (1881–1938), who limited the scope of his revolution only to the land inhabited by the Turks, which he termed “our natural and legitimate limits” (Lewis 2002: 353–354). The Qing shared with the Ottoman empire its emphasis on loyalty to the monarch in identity building among its subjects, as did all other dynastic states in world history. However, in three important ways, the Qing was fundamentally different from the Ottomans when it came to the definition of its rulership and the state per se. First, unlike the Ottoman sultan who defined himself as not only the ruler of his empire but more importantly the caliph of the entire Islamic community committed to unifying Muslim lands and conquering the non-Islamic world, and who relied on religious ties more than any other means to keep the empire together, the Qing emperors defined themselves primarily as the ruler of a secular state and played no role in any religions in China, nor did they make efforts to promote any religion throughout the land they ruled, although they frequently acted as the patron of the Lamaist communities in Tibet and Mongolia for the pragmatic purpose of keeping them in submission. The Chinese state, in a word, was a secular state; it was never defined in religious terms. Second, unlike the Ottoman empire that had no definite geographic borders because of its frequent expansion or loss of frontiers, the border of the Qing state after the 1750s was stable and saw no significant change until

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the second half of the nineteenth century when foreign powers encroached; it defined its borders with neighboring states by signing treaties, agreements, stationing patrolling forces, or customary arrangements, and the term Zhongguo was widely used in official documents to refer to the entire territory under its rule, including both the interior provinces and the newly established frontiers outside them. And third, unlike the Turks that had ancestral origins outside the Turkish core of the Ottoman empire and had their related populations scattered from central and eastern Europe to central Asia, the Han people that constituted the dominant population in China were concentrated in the interior provinces, although the growing number of emigrants from coastal provinces to southeast Asia gave rise to Chinese diasporas there by the early twentieth century. Before the Manchu conquest in the 1640s, the geographic distribution of the Han people was largely identical with the territory of the state they had established; the Qing incorporation of the Inner Asian frontiers into its territory turned the state into a multiethnic one in theory but the demographic, economic, and cultural predominance of the Han people remarkably distinguished the Qing from the Ottomans where the population outside the Turkish core accounted for more than 40% of the empire’s total population by the turn of the twentieth century. Qing China, in a nutshell, was a secular, territorial state, whose borders could be easily defined by its written or customary demarcations with neighboring states and by its people and their shared historical traditions. Unlike the Turks in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who had difficulties in identifying or redefining the political entities to which they belonged or aspired to build, hence struggling with ambiguous and often illusory religious, imperial, or ethnic boundaries, and even having a hard time finding a proper name for the new state they wanted to build (Lewis 2002: 354–355), for the Chinese state-makers in the early twentieth century, the state they wanted to remake was clearly defined and already there; it was the Zhongguo that the Qing had inherited from the Ming and expanded by the 1750s, a state that included both the interior provinces and the newly established frontiers. To be sure, the most radical among them once called for the establishment of an exclusive republic of the Han people. But this scheme was more of a propaganda device intended to arouse the Han population’s anti-Manchu feelings by recalling the history of the Manchu conquest; it soon yielded to a consensus among them to build a “Republic of Five Races,” which came to guide the organization of the new Republican state after the Revolution of 1911. The contrast between the makers of modern China and Turkey thus is stark. While for Mustafa Kemal, Ottomanism, Pan-Islamism, and Pan-Turkism were nothing less than “great fantasies” or “ideas which we did not and could not realize” (Lewis 2002: 353–354), for Sun Yat-sen and his comrades, to establish a new Republic on the territory of the former Qing was not only feasible but also mandatory for the legitimacy of the new state being built – after all, the state called Zhongguo had already been there for centuries; they only needed to rebuild it, rather than invent it.

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Notes 1 In actuality, China paid 652 million taels in total from 1902 through 1938 (see Wang Nianyong 1994: 177). 2 Official revenue from the land tax was 32.79 million taels in 1887, but the tax monies and extra charges pocketed by local tax collectors and the portion remitted to the local government but unreported by government authorities at the provincial and lower levels were more than the officially reported figure, while agricultural output was 2,230 million taels in the same year. By the end of the Qing, the officially reported land tax income increased to more than 48 million taels as a result of fiscal consolidation in the preceding three years, though the amount of taxes and surcharges actually paid by landowners remained around 60 to 70 million taels while agricultural output did not change too much from its 1908 level. 3 They helped the merchants raise funds by using government influence or directly collecting special levies on the land and other commodities, and they generally favored railroad companies when mediating disputes over the purchase of land for railroad construction and provided protection whenever the construction encountered local resistance. Sixteen railroad companies were established in 1903–1907 through the “joint efforts between the government and the people” (guan min heli). Contemporaries described this relationship as “the government takes advantage of the gentry’s strength, and the gentry relies on the government’s power” (guan yong shen li, shen ji guan wei) (ZGTL, 2: 1012). 4 The Qing court had long tolerated since the early eighteenth century intermarriage between the Han banner people and ordinary Han residents found in Liaodong and other places, but it strictly banned intermarriage between the banner people of Manchu and Mongol origins and the Han residents (Ding Yizhuang et al. 2004: 272–273). 5 Influenced by the works of Johann Kaspar Bluntschli (1808–1881), Liang proposed in 1903 the concept of “greater nationalism” (da minzuzhuyi) or “merging the Han, the Manchus, the Hui, the Miao, and the Tibetans into one large nation” in China, to replace the outdated “petty nationalism” (xiao minzuzhuyi) or the ethnocentrism of the Han people, following the precedents of the ancient Roman Empire and the United States, where “the major ethnic groups within a country were united and melted into a new nation” (YBSWJ, 1: 454). 6 For him, the Manchus had long been assimilated into the “Chinese nation” while the Mongols, the Hui (namely the Uighurs and other non-Han Muslims), and the Tibetans were “yet to be fully integrated into it.” Central to the task of “national integration” (guomin tongyi), therefore, was “promoting the equality between the Manchus and the Han while assimilating the Mongols, the Hui, and the Tibetans,” so that no ethnic distinctions would ever exist in the “Chinese nation” that had already “mixed myriads of ethnic groups in the past thousands of years.” Yang further elaborated the idea of Zhongguo as a territorial and national entity. “Situated in today’s world,” he wrote, “Zhongguo cannot afford to lose any of the lands of the Hans, the Manchus, the Mongols, the Hui, and the Tibetans, and it cannot afford to lose any of the peoples of the Hans, the Manchus, the Mongols, the Hui, and the Tibetans.” To “merge the five into one” (he wu wei yi), he suggested, should be “a policy of supreme importance” for China in the future (YDJ, 1: 303). 7 For a discussion on the different attitudes between Zhang Taiyan and Liang Qichao towards ethnic relations in China, see Crossley (2002: 345–361). Note that Crossley fails to point out Zhang’s adjustment of his opinion on this issue as shown here.

Part III

The making of a unified and centralized state

Map III. 1 China under the Republic, circa 1920

7

Centralized regionalism The rise of regional fiscal-military states

Known as the age of warlordism, the years following the death of President Yuan Shikai in 1916 witnessed the rise and fall of political factions and military groups vying for dominance under the Republican government in Beijing, prior to the establishment of the Nationalist government in Nanjing as a national regime in 1928.1 To explain the success or failure of the warlords, scholars have typically emphasized the role of personal ties or factionalism, especially when discussing the old-fashioned warlords in North China.2 Others pay more attention to the importance of ideological propagation and party organization when analyzing the rise of the Nationalist (or Guomindang) forces in the southern provinces (e.g., Wilbur 1968; Luo Zhitian 2000).3 This chapter instead reinterprets the dynamics of military rivalry among the warlord cliques from the perspective of modern state-building. It shows that the warlords or warlord cliques of individual provinces were not just concerned with military buildup and war making; the most successful of them also took vigorous steps to strengthen themselves by centralizing the bureaucratic system within their territories, unifying and standardizing the fiscal and financial systems, constructing highways, railroads, and other infrastructural projects, promoting public education and health, encouraging the development of industry and commerce, advocating selfgovernment at the grassroots level, and allowing the existence of autonomous representative and deliberative assemblies at the provincial or county level to build consensus among the elites. Altogether, these efforts allowed the most ambitious contenders to turn their provinces into regional “fiscal-military states,” a development quite comparable to state-making in early modern Europe. Which warlord or regional force would survive the competition and prevail in the end depended ultimately on how they organized their fiscal and military institutions and how they generated their revenues. Those who centralized and bureaucratized the fiscal and military apparatus would eventually outcompete those who did not. Geopolitical and socioeconomic conditions also mattered. Those who enjoyed a relatively secured geopolitical position and at the same time established a centralized apparatus for resource extraction, especially the taxation of commerce and urban economy, and had access to the modern means of financing, would be able to build a powerful fiscal-military regime and prevail in the competition for national dominance. The most competitive force, therefore,

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The making of a unified and centralized state

was invariably the one that possessed not only a well-endowed and secured region but also a highly centralized machine of control and extraction. In contrast, those who failed to establish their stable control of a region and a centralized regime would inevitably lose the competition and be wiped out or subjugated by the winner.

Warlordism The central government crippled The emergence of warring regional cliques in early Republican China can be traced to the decentralization of fiscal and military power since the late 1850s, when the Metropolitan and Coordinate Remittance systems, a device used by the central government to centrally control the revenues generated by local authorities, collapsed because of the Taiping Rebellion. Consequently, provincial governments were allowed to keep the remainder of whatever they had collected and controlled after fulfilling two basic categories of obligations: (1) zhuanxiang jingfei, or fixed quotas of annual remittance to the central government for specific civilian and military purposes, and (2) tanpai, or the compulsory sharing of foreign debt and war indemnities, which first occurred in 1895 after the SinoJapanese War and dramatically increased after 1901 (Zhou Yumin 2000: 242–244, 389–396). The Qing court, to be sure, attempted repeatedly to formalize and recentralize the provincial governments’ collection and management of taxes, customs, and fees in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Especially noteworthy was its systematic efforts in the last few years of the dynasty to investigate the fiscal condition of provincial authorities, which resulted in dramatic increases in the formally reported quantity of local revenues, to centralize its control of the salt tax, which soon surpassed the land tax and maritime customs to become the largest source of revenue, and to establish a modern budget system (Liu Zenghe 2014: 80–198). The outbreak of the Revolution of 1911, however, interrupted all this progress towards fiscal centralization. The Republican government in Beijing, therefore, had only a few million yuan annually at its disposal, mostly from the salt taxes and domestic customs from adjacent provinces in 1912 and 1913, whereas its administrative and military expenses amounted to 4 to 5 million yuan a month (MGDA, 3.1: 87; Jia Shiyi 1934: 45–46, 170). The only way to meet the state’s fiscal needs was to incur foreign debt and issue government bonds, the largest of which was the so-called “grand debt for postwar rehabilitation” (shanhou da jiekuan) of £25 million (equivalent to 248.3 million yuan), made by the banking groups of five foreign countries to the central government under President Yuan Shikai in April 1913.4 In the following years, as Yuan Shikai gradually consolidated his power over individual provinces, he was able to reestablish the revenue sharing system, and provincial governments had to submit to Beijing a fixed quantity of local tax funds. The remittance of the shared tax funds (zhongyang jiekuan) increased from 5.6 million yuan in 1913 to 14 million in 1914 and 19.02 million

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165

in 1915 when Yuan was at the height of his political influence (see Table 7.1). In addition, the Yuan government was also able to obtain from individual provinces a growing amount of tax income that was designated as revenue belonging exclusively to the central government (known as zhongyang zhuankuan), including the taxes on deeds, stamps, salt and tobacco sales and licenses, and sales commissions; the Beijing government’s revenue from this source increased to more than 18.7 million yuan in 1915 and 24.4 million in 1916 (Table 7.1). Combined, the revenues that the Yuan government obtained from the provinces reached nearly 38 million yuan in 1915 and more than 43 million yuan (equivalent to roughly 30 million taels) in 1916, which were more than the special funds that the provinces owed to the Qing court in the late nineteenth century (22 million taels, see Zhou Yumin 2000: 371). This was undoubtedly a considerable achievement toward the goal of fiscal and military recentralization, to which the Yuan administration was committed. In the absence of serious challenges after suppressing the rebellion in the southern provinces, Yuan indeed appeared to be the most competent leader to reestablish political order in China. Unfortunately, Yuan’s failure to establish an imperial regime and his subsequent death in June 1916 opened the door for the recurrence of political chaos and military rivalry among the different cliques of power contenders in the next decade. A central government continued to exist, but it was fiscally weak, due to the disappearance of provincial contributions (jiekuan and zhongyang zhuankuan) after 1922, which had been the major source of the government’s regular revenue during Yuan’s presidency, and due to the ending of its revenues from the “remainder of maritime customs” (guanyu) (most of the maritime customs had been retained by the Maritime Customs Service as repayment of foreign debts and war indemnities) after 1921. The “remainder of salt taxes” (yanyu), the largest source of domestic revenue in the 1910s (again most of the salt taxes had been retained as payment of foreign debts since 1913), also diminished in the 1920s, to less than 9 million yuan by 1926 (Yang Yinfu 1985: 5–9). Thus, the Beijing government had to increasingly rely on foreign loans and government bonds, which brought its total revenue to as much as 350 million yuan in 1918. As the central government’s borrowing abilities dwindled in the following years, however, its annual revenue also decreased to 126 million yuan in 1922 and to only 29 million yuan by 1926 (Table 7.1). In sharp contrast with the poor and feeble government in Beijing was the steady buildup of fiscal and military strength of provincial warlords in the 1910s and 1920s. Three major cliques of warlords prevailed in North China. One was the Anhui clique, which controlled eight provinces (Shanxi, Shaanxi, Shandong, Anhui, Zhejiang, Fujian, Gansu, and Xinjiang as well as two special administrative zones, Rehe and Chahar). The second was the Zhili clique, which occupied five provinces (Zhili, Jiangsu, Henan, Hubei, and Jiangxi as well as Suiyuan and Ningxia). The third was the Fengtian clique, which ruled three northeastern provinces (Fengtian, Jilin, and Heilongjiang). All these reflected the situation in June 1920 prior to the outbreak of the war between the Anhui and Zhili cliques (Lai Xinxia et al. 2000: 594). In addition, there were minor warlord factions

1912 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932

10,800 2,700 21,700 17,800 0 0 0 0 0 0 12,500 179,142 275,545 312,987 369,742 325,500

6,000 6,000 5,000 4,200 4,800 3,500 3,600 690 718 668 668 668 600 27,691 36,567 53,330 88,681 79,600

Yeara Maritime Domestic/ customsb unified taxc

52,800 43,300 36,100 29,500 21,000 20,000 15,000 12,000 8,900 20,800 29,542 14,544 122,146 11,385 150,484 3,548 144,223 175 158,100

31,389

5,600 14,000 19,018 18,875 15,472 6,043 5,553 4,917 2,959 0 0 0 0

Salt taxb Central remittance funds

18,748 24,400 10,360 5,755 4,245 4,245 4,245 0 0 0 0

Central special funds

6,000 4,000 2,673 2,230 1,784 1,450 1,400 1,400 1,400 1,400 3,549 6,831 8,617 7,626

2,000 2,000 2,000 1,500 800 750 720 720 720 720 3,034 5,427 6,111 4,799

Public debt

137,000 350,000 153,000 256,000 260,000 126,000 68,000 39,000 16,000 29,000 148,256 434,440 539,005 714,468 682,991 673,300

130,678

Real revenue

(Continued )

185,458 108,111

28,078

15,400

1,160 0 8,000 0 669 2,736 45,163 6,885 5,858 185

Treasury Bank bonds loans

111,700 6,200 0 331,900 6,800 2,200 33,500 25,000 10,100 1,600 25,800 400 35,100 8,800 1,800 68,800 10,500 200 126,200 139,400 7,000 34,000 28,400 5,300 36,200 122,000 24,700 27,400 115,400 29,000 9,700 83,200 2,200 31,000 5,000 3,500 16,200 5,200 100 125,900 23,000 0 1,900 70,000 44,506 24,048 90,511 192,816 125,456

Stamp/ Tobacco / Foreign direct alcohol loanse d tax tax

Table 7.1 Revenue of the central government of the Republic, 1912–1945 (in 1,000 yuan)

Central special funds

5,950 6,059 11,046 17,860 11,014 7,205 $200,000

$100,000 $175,668 $45,000 $70,000 $500,000

Stamp/ Tobacco / Foreign direct alcohol loanse taxd tax 124,000 124,000 560,000 455,000 256,000 10,975 7,033 626 4,635 1,996 18,193 2,799

Public debt

Treasury Bank bonds loans

801,600 1,207,000 1,328,500 1,972,600 2,010,000 712,739 858,246 403,949 392,557 329,126 287,926 303,103 628,070

Real revenue

Notes: (a) Data from 1912 to 1926 are in silver dollars (yin yuan). Statistics of the years from 1938 to 1945 are recalculated into the amounts in the fixed value of the fabi (legal tender) in 1937 (see Yang Yinpu 1985: 159); (b) Maritime customs and salt taxes before 1928 were the remainders of the custom dues (guanyu) and remainder of salt taxes (yanyu); (c) The data under “domestic/general tax” before 1928 are the amounts of domestic regular taxes (changguanshui), and the data after 1928 are the amounts of the unified tax (tongshui); (d) The numbers under “stamp/direct taxes” refer to stamp tax before 1940 and various direct taxes (including stamp tax, income tax, and sales tax, etc.) (see Yang Yinpu 1985: 112); (e) Foreign loans in 1938-1942 and 1944 were in U.S. dollars (Yang Yinpu 1985: 153).

Sources: Yang Yinpu (1985: 7-8, 10, 12, 15-16, 22, 45, 47, 64, 104, 107, 109, 112, 150); Jia Shiyi (1932: 55-63, 158-159); Jia Shiyi (1933: 160-170, 199-206, 296299, 409-410, 556-559); Jia Shiyi (1934: 60-61); MGDA 3.1: 197-200, 212-216, MGDA 5.1.1: 547-549; 551-553, 565-567, 572-581, 599-600; Young (1971: 38, 52, 56 and 73).

15,104 14,217 24,697 26,753

177,400 206,700 184,700 247,400 141,000 29,265 17,159 6,264

1933 352,400 1934 71,200 1935 24,200 1936 635,900 1937 239,000 1938 78,041 1939 98,173 1940 2,975 1941 0 1942 0 1943 0 1944 0 1945 0

105,000 115,300 152,400 131,300 30,000 9,755 6,188 5,715 6,898 12,864 12,779 11,898 12,094

Salt taxb Central remittance funds

Yeara Maritime Domestic/ customsb unified taxc

Table 7.1 (Cont.)

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The making of a unified and centralized state

including the Guangxi clique that occupied Guangxi and Guangdong, and the Yunnan clique that dominated Yunnan and Guizhou.

The weakness of the Anhui and Zhili cliques In terms of their fiscal strength, the first two cliques were quite comparable to each other: the revenues of the eight provinces and two zones of the Anhui clique totaled about 54 million yuan, while the five provinces and two zones of the Zhili clique generated a total of nearly 51 million yuan (Jia Shiyi 1932: 138–139). The resemblance between the Anhui and Zhili cliques in total amounts of revenues explained at least in part their rough equivalence in military forces on the eve of the war between them in June 1920: 55,000 men on the Anhui side and 56,000 men on the Zhili side (Lai Xinxia et al. 2000: 618–619). On the other hand, the Fengtian clique appeared to be much weaker, having only 26 million yuan as its total revenue. But the Anhui and Zhili cliques had their own weakness. Duan Qirui and Feng Guozhang, the respective leaders of the two cliques, had been Yuan’s two most capable and trusted subordinates, but Duan and Feng had competed with each other while Yuan was alive. After Yuan died, Duan controlled the central government as the premier of the state council and much of North China through the military governors loyal to him; Feng, for his part, prevailed in South China by serving as the military governor of the most prosperous Jiangsu province and allying with other governors in the Yangzi River region while also serving as the vice president and the acting president of the Beijing government until October 1918. But the military governors of individual provinces formed a clique under Duan or under Feng (or Cao Kuan after Feng’s death in late 1919) only on the basis of their personal relationship with either of the two clique leaders (Lai Xinxia et al. 2000: 26). In other words, Duan or Feng (or Cao) built their respective factions only by taking advantage of their position as leaders of the Beijing government to appoint or recommend their trusted followers or friends as the military governors to different provinces within their reach of power; when they had conflicts in appointing the governors, Duan and Feng had to bargain with each other to achieve a gross balance between the appointments each of them proposed. Such personal networks and loyalty to the factional leaders did matter when the two factions had a war; for the military governors, to join the war was the best way to protect their own positions and military forces. Nevertheless, neither Duan nor Feng (and other Zhili leaders) had succeeded in turning the individual provinces of their respective cliques into a solid fiscal-military entity. Each of the military governors completely controlled their own armies and were responsible for raising enough monies to feed their soldiers; they also completely controlled the tax revenues generated within their own provinces, and refused to contribute any part of their revenues to the central government regardless of their personal loyalty to the clique leader who held a key position in the central government. Both the Anhui and Zhili cliques, in a word, were essentially

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a confederation of warlords who were loosely brought together by their personal loyalty to the clique leader; there was no centralized administrative or military mechanisms to keep them together as members of a political and military body with a high level of group solidarity. Later in 1926 and 1927, the Zhili clique lost their control of the provinces in the Yangzi River region precisely because the key leaders of the group in different provinces (most notably, Wu Peifu in Hubei and Sun Chuanfang in Jiangsu) failed to act together and help each other to fight their shared enemy, the Guomindang force from the south; the latter had no difficulty defeating each of them one after another (Lai Xinxia et al. 2000: 990–991).

The rise of the Fengtian clique The lack of group solidarity on the part of the Anhui and Zhili groups was in sharp contrast with the centralized administrative and military organizations that undergirded the Fengtian clique in Manchuria. In fact, one of the reasons that prevented the Anhui or Zhili clique from building a centralized fiscal and military entity of their own had to do with the fact that the member provinces of these cliques were geographically scattered in different areas of the country and were interwoven with the member provinces of the opposite clique. This scatteredness not only exposed each province to military attacks from its enemy, but also prevented the member provinces of each clique from mobilizing their resources to build a centralized political and military body of their own. The situation of the Fengtian clique was very different. Zhang Zuolin (1875–1928), the head of this clique, started building his power base with his control of the 27th division of the new army that garrisoned Fengtian province after the Revolution of 1911, which enabled him to further seize the positions of the military governor and the provincial governor of Fengtian, and to create the new 29th division and take control of the 28th division of the army after 1916. After establishing his complete control of Fengtian, Zhang extended his reach into the neighboring Heilongjiang province in 1917 by recommending Bao Guiqian, his relative by marriage, to be the new military governor of the province. Zhang himself also received the Beijing government’s appointment as the Inspecting Commissioner of the Three Northeastern Provinces (Dongshansheng xunyueshi) in 1918, which made him the official administrative and military ruler of the three provinces (Hao Bingrang 2001: 174; McCormack 1977: 48). To the extent that Zhang controlled the neighboring two provinces by appointing his trusted men as their military governors, he was no different from the leaders of the Anhui and Zhili cliques in building their respective factional groups. What made Zhang distinctive and successful in the end in the rivalry among the warlords under the Beijing government was that he took advantage of the geographical isolation of Manchuria to turn the three northeastern provinces into an independent and highly centralized political, fiscal, and military entity.

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The making of a unified and centralized state

To achieve this goal, Zhang first cut off the political ties of his three provinces with the Zhili-clique controlled central government by declaring his independence from Beijing, after he lost the war against the Zhili clique in April 1922 and failed to expand his influence into the interior provinces. He further made efforts to modernize the administrative system in Manchuria by introducing the civil service examination system in September 1922 to recruit government officials at different levels on the basis of their merits. Zhang also rebuilt his troops, replacing most of the lower and middle-ranking military officers of bandit backgrounds with graduates from the military academies in Japan or Beijing; he also expanded the size of the Northeastern Military Academy to train his own military officers and held training sessions for high-school graduates to prepare them for military service. To root out the personal networks (mostly in the form of sworn-brotherhoods among the highranking military commanders) from the military, Zhang reorganized the three divisions (the 27th, 28th, and 29th) and an additional new division he had established into 27 infantry brigades and other units, and appointed his trusted subordinates to lead them (Hao Bingrang 2001: 39–42; McCormack 1977: 100–106). The administrative and military unification in Manchuria meant a lot for the Fengtian clique: it prevented internal strife among the three provinces, ensured political stability and social order, freed Manchuria from the recurrent warfare that plagued the interior provinces, and enabled Zhang to mobilize the resources from all of the three provinces for his strategic goals. To enlarge and maintain his military forces, Zhang generated revenues through several channels. In addition to the collection of taxes from the land, industry, and commerce, the Fengtian clique made government investments on a large scale, which ranged from mining and lumbering to textile manufacturing, power generation, sugar production and the defense industry, and, most importantly, its construction of a railroad network. It also developed financial tools to generate additional revenues, such as issuance of public debt and the printing of paper notes, known as fengpiao, which had been widely accepted and circulated in Manchuria because of its stable value from 1917 to early 1924 (Suleski 2002: 47–49; Kong and Fu 1989: 41–42). The strength of the Fengtian clique, in a word, lay in its ability to integrate the three northeastern provinces into a single administrative, fiscal, and military entity that was centralized under one single strongman. Individually, none of the three provinces was the most prosperous in the entire country. In 1925, for instance, Jiangsu province had a budgeted revenue of 16.6 million yuan, much higher than the revenue of Fengtian, the richest of the three northeastern provinces; another two interior provinces, Sichuan and Guangdong, again had an annual revenue higher than or close to Fengtian’s (see Table 7.2). But the problem for the warlord cliques who controlled a number of the interior provinces was that the fiscal resources in each of the provinces fell into the hands of the military governor who controlled that province; as a result, none of the clique leaders was able to single-handedly control the resources from all of the provinces of his clique. In sharp contrast, by establishing his tight control over Manchuria, Zhang Zuolin was able to extract fiscal resources from all of the three provinces for his military buildup; combined, the annual revenues from

Zhili Fengtian Jilin Heilongjiang Shandong Henan Shanxi Shaanxi Gansu Xinjiang Jiangsu Anhui Jiangxi Hubei Hunan Sichuan Zhejiang Fujian Guangdong

Provinces

5,809,139 4,086,999 2,157,052 1,483,047 8,135,171 5,471,148 5,929,289 3,643,281 1,467,451 1,590,412 8,496,046 3,822,137 4,355,234 2,659,757 2,801,952 6,861,394 5,928,980 3,235,290 3,889,585

Land tax

926,790 5,049,778 3,770,359 3,270,218 797,364 846,000 743,980 1,010,000 997,067 472,401 6,428,507 1,538,700 2,572,511 3,223,227 2,352,456 819,402 1,819,822 1,430,000 4,562,179

Taxes on goods

Local fees

1,592,809 270,384 1,359,044 2,041,420 117 1,153,793 43,606 1,281,933 3,500 1,186,134 680,000 622,423 195,943 349,561 129,800 377,129 1,620,000 1,370,800 889,407 20,000 1,605,265 568,465 702,990 4,466,484 869,000 2,240,475 1,167,054 3,302,274 447,285

Local taxes

132,287

3,776 34,551 64,612

656,815 2,860 10,203

460,436 300,644

Gov’t enterprise income

10,850 86,062 168,150 30,380 376,964 31,250 60,000 265,000 319,591 240,974 135,860

282,605 1,597,089 255,876 60,253 185,441 133,788 40,000

Misc. incomes

Table 7.2 Budgeted revenue and expenditure of individual provinces, 1925 (in silver yuan)

9,342,163 12,393,554 8,224,824 6,667,732 10,406,269 9,327,273 7,335,692 4,849,224 2,958,505 2,560,555 16,777,315 6,762,017 8,214,116 8,087,964 5,917,398 12,544,567 11,177,868 6,073,318 12,337,183

Total revenue 6,692,844 6,918,538 8,686,404 5,641,262 13,800,000 16,817,253 5,636,044 2,468,226 3,051,569 3,331,116 6,122,374 3,800,305 9,528,914 8,130,415 3,564,014 26,296,358 9,876,625 10,624,000 15,959,398

Military spending

(Continued )

10,961,692 10,131,248 11,930,995 7,818,573 17,306,301 19,824,134 8,021,263 4,328,662 5,258,741 4,882,701 14,892,393 6,472,491 12,156,409 10,974,811 6,989,338 30,061,790 14,371,463 13,204,829 19,662,056

Total expenditure

Local fees

Gov’t enterprise income

Source: Jia Shiyi (1932: 146–152).

2,324,800 1,435,441 283,100 10,800 1,153,377 642,015 263,169 145,815 739,313 461,289 295,481 157,204 364,148 295,986 18,000 52,000 445,572 72,140 47,734 94,338 66,290 58,921 262386 4,284 87,515,719 45,428,798 28,942,549 4,768,718 1,873,283

Local taxes

Guangxi Yunnan Guizhou Rehe Chahar Suiyuan Total

Taxes on goods

Land tax

Provinces

Table 7.2 (Cont.)

71,761 64,103 44,865 4,561,630

50,000 13,692

Misc. incomes

Military spending

Total expenditure

4,104,141 5,673,435 7,469,452 2,218,068 2,131,416 4,260,138 1,496,102 2,814,300 4,489,078 959,099 997,208 1,575,683 629,549 1,245,538 1,796,439 531,084 709,864 1,072,115 173,333,992 182,418,613 253,797,479

Total revenue

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173

the three provinces totaled 27.3 million yuan (Table 7.2), which was in addition to the revenues he generated through issuing public debts and printing paper currencies. His fiscal power, in a word, surpassed any of the military governors of the interior provinces. The geographical isolation of Manchuria from the rest of China also contributed a lot to Zhang’s success in competing with the warlord cliques of the interior provinces. After establishing his control of the three northeastern provinces, Zhang was able to join the rivalry among the warlords in North and East China and thereby to extend his military and political reach there. He started his military operations in the interior when the warlord cliques there were fighting with each other. When he failed in this venture, he was able to easily withdraw from the interior and keep his home base in Manchuria intact. He was then able to concentrate on building his fiscal and military muscle in Manchuria and wait for another chance to venture into the interior, which he then succeeded at after the interior warlords had exhausted their resources after years of battles. This geopolitical advantage, together with the differences between the Fengtian clique and the major cliques of the interior provinces (Anhui and later Zhili) in their respective fiscal constitutions, were more important than any other factors (political or military) in explaining why the Fengtian clique ultimately won the rivalry and came to dominate the Beijing government.

Small provinces, powerful contenders The Fengtian clique, in fact, was not the only one that took advantage of its geographical isolation to build a highly centralized fiscal and military entity and complete successfully with other cliques. Another example is Shanxi province, which was small in territory but strategically important in national politics throughout the Republican era. Located in northwest China, Shanxi was a plateau fenced by the Taihang Mountains in the east and the Yellow River in the south, while its northern border backed against the Gobi desert, and its western border was lined with mountains. Historically, the province was known for being “easy to defend and difficult (for external enemies) to attack” (yi shou nan gong). For the entire Republican period, it was under the consistent control of warlord Yan Xishan (1883–1960). Yan began his rule in Shanxi as its military governor right after the Revolution of 1911, and controlled all of the military forces within the province in 1917. Like all other warlords, Yan built his power base by vigorously expanding his army, which grew from merely 7,000 men before 1916 to roughly 100,000 around 1923; he thus became one of the few local strongmen in North China that had nationwide influences (Gillin 1967: 19–25). Key to Yan’s survival and longevity in Shanxi was his ability to establish and maintain an efficient and highly centralized political and military system across the entire province, which made it largely free of instability and warfare before the Japanese invasion. He filled key positions in the military with his trusted followers, most originating from Wutai, his home county, or from Shanxi, to

174

The making of a unified and centralized state

a larger extent. But he also paid attention to the merits of government and military officials and thus recruited qualified candidates regardless of their geographical origins; many of them were thus promoted from the rank and file to higher positions and owed their lifetime indebtedness to Yan. A contemporary thus described that “the military and administrative circles throughout Shanxi province look like a big family, with Mr. Yan as the patriarch and all of the cadres as his disciples” (Wang Xutian 2000: 61). To put the rural area under his effective control, Yan promoted the so-called “village-based governance” (cunben zhengzhi), by which the rural communities were reorganized into administrative villages (biancun), each consisting of roughly 300 houses, who were divided into a number of neighborhoods or lü, with each lü further divided into five lin and each lin having five households. Leaders of these organizations shouldered the duties of policing local residents, collecting taxes and levies, and assisting the government to recruit soldiers. The goal of the village-based governance was the so-called “combining farming with warring” (bing nong heyi) or militarizing the rural society in preparation for war (He Yuan 1998). Equally important for Yan’s building of an independent administrative and military system in Shanxi was his efforts to develop the local economy and ensure its sustainability and self-sufficiency. Part of his goal in rural Shanxi was the so-called “six measures” (liu zheng, namely, water control, tree planting, sericulture, a ban on opium smoking, a ban on footbinding for women, and pigtail-cutting for men) and “three matters” (san shi, namely, cotton cultivation, foresting, and husbandry), which aimed to promote prosperity in the village communities (He Yuan 1998: 243). His government invested massively in modern industry and transportation, which later formed the basis of the Northwestern Industrial Incorporation, a conglomerate founded in the early 1930s that encompassed a wide range of manufacturers, including mines, smelters, power plants, and factories producing machinery, chemicals, construction materials, textile and leather products, and consumer goods. But the most important and successful project was the famous Taiyuan Arsenal, which was one of the three major arsenals in China in the 1920s and 1930s (the other two were located in Hanyang of Wubei province and Shenyang of Fengtian province) and which produced a wide variety of guns and canons and a large quantity of ammunition. Given his ability to mobilize the rural population and the capacity of his arsenal, Yan’s army stood out as one of the three major forces in North China by the end of the 1920s, the other two being the forces under Zhang Zuolin and Feng Yuxiang, which will be discussed shortly. The importance of geopolitical security and centralized control of territory for the warlords’ survival and strengthening is also seen in yet another case in Guangxi province. Located at the southwestern border of China and dominated by mountains, Guangxi was never a target for warlords in other parts of China to compete for, yet its remoteness and relative isolation also offered the necessary conditions for ambitious local strongmen to build their independent domain and use it as a power base to vie for national influences when they became strong enough. The first military strongman in Republican Guangxi was Lu Rongting (1859–1928), who ruled the province as its

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military governor right after 1911 for ten years and was later remembered by local people for his ability to weed out bandits and keep the land at peace. At the peak of his influence, Lu was able to defeat his rival in Guangdong in 1917 and dominate the neighboring province for three years (Mo and Chen 1991, 1: 11–27; Lary 1974: 27–32). Although the limited resources from the povertystricken Guangxi constrained his military buildup and explained in large part – in addition to the fatal defection by a key commander of his army – his loss in confronting the newly rising forces in Guangdong, the new warlords who replaced him to rule Guangxi after 1924 turned out to be more successful. Unlike the warlords in other provinces who tended to fight each other for exclusive control of a given area, the new strongmen in Guangxi, namely Li Zongren (1891–1969), Bai Chongxi (1893–1966), and Huang Shaohong (1895–1966), proved to be exceptionally collaborative with one another in building a unitary political and military force – in fact, the limited territory and resources of Guangxi made it unaffordable for any of them to fight with each other; the best strategy for them to survive, therefore, was to work together as a single, unified entity.5 Knowing well the limited revenues of the poor province that greatly curtained their military potentials, the New Guangxi clique adopted an approach to build their fiscal and military strength that was essentially no different from Yan Xishan’s methods in Shanxi. Summarized as the “Three-Self Policies” (san zi zhengce), this approach aimed at three goals. The first was “self-defense” (ziwei) or military buildup. Lacking enough tax revenues to raise a sizeable standing army, they chose to militarize society under the so-called “Three Build-in Policies” (san yu zhengce), namely to build the military by establishing local militia throughout the province (yu bing yu tuan), to train military officers directly among school students (yu jiang yu xue), and to recruit soldiers directly from the registered male adults of the reorganized villages (yu zheng yu mu). Not surprisingly, after the outbreak of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937 that signaled the beginning of a full-scale war of resistance against Japan, Guangxi province turned out to be the fastest among all the provinces at mobilizing; it recruited enough soldiers to create four army corps and 48 regiments in a matter of two months (Mo and Chen 1991: 372). The second goal was “self-government” (zizhi), which aimed to establish a clean and efficient government by purging corrupt officials, training qualified cadres, and, most importantly, restructuring rural society under the baojia system, in which the head of a township or a village also served as the school principal and the militia leader at the same level. To achieve the third goal of “self-sufficiency” (ziji), the Guangxi clique was committed to investing in a wide range of manufacturing, mining, and transportation projects, promoting compulsory and higher education, and developing forestry and agriculture (Tan Zhaoyi 2009, 2010; Levich 1993: 65–98).

Winners and losers The success of the Fengtian, Shanxi, and Guangxi cliques, therefore, lay primarily in their fiscal strength; they used all kinds of methods to generate as much

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revenue as they could. In addition to the traditional methods of taxing the land and commercial goods, they all made systematic efforts to invest in modern industry and a transportation system, and they all utilized modern financial tools for additional incomes. But the sharp contrasts between Fengtian and the other two cliques in geographic and economic sizes meant that there were significant differences between them regarding their respective approaches to state and military building. The rapid development of modern industry and transportation and the large amount of industrial output in the vast area of Manchuria made it possible for the Fengtian clique to rely mainly on the taxes from commercial goods and commerce rather than the taxes on the land. As a result, its budgeted revenue from the taxes on goods and other non-agricultural sectors amounted to 19.6 million yuan in 1925, or more than 2.5 times its revenue from land taxation (Table 7.2). In sharp contrast, despite their efforts to industrialize, the economies in Shanxi and Guangxi remained largely agricultural. The revenue from goods and other non-agricultural sectors in Guangxi, therefore, was only about 73% of its land taxes; and in Shanxi, only 23% (Table 7.2). Even more striking was the contrast between them in the absolute amount of annual revenue. The three provinces of Fengtian clique had a total of 27.3 million yuan in 1925, whereas the Shanxi clique had only about 7.3 million yuan and the Guangxi clique had even less at 4.1 million yuan (Table 7.2).6 Not surprisingly, the Fengtian clique was able to spend more on its military, and its total budget in this regard amounted to more than 21 million yuan in 1925, which was roughly three times the military spending in Shanxi and Guangxi (Table 7.2). For the two smaller cliques, in the absence of sufficient funding of the military, a better, more cost-saving approach to military building, therefore, was to militarize society by reorganizing the rural population into strictly controlled units, establishing militia widely, and making it readily available for mobilization and recruitment. In sharp contrast with the winners are the warlord cliques or provinces that failed because of their lack of advantages that the former had. The first is warlord Feng Yuxiang (1882–1948), whose forces grew to more than 400,000 men and dominated large areas of North and Northwest China at the peak of his career in the late 1920s. Feng’s biggest weakness, however, was his lack of a stable and solvent base area to support his army. He thus faced exceptional and constant difficulties feeding the soldiers, despite the various efforts tried, such as retaining the salt taxes, raising the rates of railroad shipments of cargo, and selling public debts by force in its occupied areas (Liu Jingzhong 2004: 79–82, 104–105, 275, 316, 356–357). The reason Feng was able to expand his forces and survive for more than a decade until the eventual collapse of his clique in 1930 had to do in part with his highly speculative strategies that led to his frequent defection, alliance, breakup, and realignment with other competing cliques, and in part with the generous support from the Soviet Union after 1925.7 After the Soviet Union cut off its supplies, Feng’s competitiveness quickly deteriorated. In addition to its fiscal insolvency, equally fatal to his clique was that Feng never made serious efforts to centralize his control of the

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various corps, divisions, and brigades he created, due to the scatteredness of their occupied areas where the individual forces had grown (Liu Jingzhong 2004: 342, 397–400). A second example that contrasted with the successful cliques is the warlords in Sichuan province. Sichuan, in fact, had the perfect conditions to grow a powerful warlord competing nationally. Located at the southwest frontier, it is relatively isolated from other provinces by the mountains surrounding it, while the vast basin area within it was one of the most fertile in China, giving rise to a highly developed agriculture and a high density of population. Therefore, among all of the provinces in China, Sichuan had the largest area of cultivated land (151 million mu) and the largest population (47 million). The government’s budgeted annual revenue in this province was consistently the second highest in the entire country, around 12.5 million taels in the late 1910s and 1920s, after Jiangsu province (Table 7.2; Jia Shiyi 1932: 139). Precisely because it was so large in size and so important as a huge source of revenue and soldiers, however, warlords inside and outside the province competed for a piece of it, yet no one was able to control the entire province alone. Thus, after years of rivalry and chaos following the Revolution of 1911, by 1918 and 1919 the province had become extremely fragmented as a result of the rise of the so-called “garrison-area system” (fangqu zhi) in the province. Under this system, the province was divided into 15 or more garrison areas, each containing a number of counties (varying from nine or ten to as many as 33 counties), and the military force in each garrison area was responsible for supporting itself with the revenue from within the area. Most of the garrison areas in southern Sichuan and around the city of Chengdu fell into the hands of warlord forces from the neighboring Yunnan and Guizhou provinces, while the rest of the garrison areas belonged to local Sichuan forces. Despite the existence of a provincial government, the warlord force of each garrison area turned the territory it occupied into an independent domain subject to its exclusive control by appointing its own government officials, collecting taxes, and retaining the revenues that should have been remitted to the provincial or central government (Kuang and Yang 1991: 92–99; Kapp 1973: 34–38). To enlarge or protect their garrison areas, the warlord forces fought with each other year after year; therefore, military spending in Sichuan was also the highest in the entire country, reaching more than 26 million yuan in 1925, or more than twice its budgeted revenues for the same year (Table 7.2). The division and chaos in Sichuan persisted until 1935, when the province came under the unified control of the Nationalist government (Kuang and Yang 1991: 451–457; Kapp 1973: 136–141). Before that point, administrative and military fragmentation excluded the possibility of any warlord from Sichuan playing a role in national politics commensurate with its wealth and population. Finally, let us look at Jiangsu, the richest province in imperial and Republican China. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, its budgeted revenue was more than 16 million yuan, well above all other provinces, and its real revenue was not too different from the budget, at about 15 million yuan a year, after the maritime customs and salt taxes, totaling more than 20 million yuan, were diverted from

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the province (Shen Jiarong 1993: 292). But two factors prevented the province from becoming a powerful military contender in the country. The first was geopolitical. Located in the lower Yangzi region and dominated by plains, the province is open to all other provinces without any geographic barrier to separate and protect it. As the most prosperous area in China, it was the target for external warlords to complete for control, but there was no single warlord who could rule Jiangsu for a prolonged time because of the fierce competition among the warlords of different cliques for this area. A second factor that made the warlords’ centralized control of Jiangsu difficult was the existence of a strong gentry-merchant class in this province and its resistance to the warlords’ excessive extraction of revenues from the province by controlling the provincial assembly. Throughout the early Republican years to 1927, the warlords who ruled Jiangsu consistently paid particular attention to the public opinion of the local elites in order to maintain their legitimacy and to yield from time to time to the demand from the latter “the separation of the military from the civilian” (junmin fenzhi) and “government of Jiangsu by the people of Jiangsu” (Su ren zhi Su), which meant preventing the military governor from interfering in the administrative affairs of the province, especially the appointment of key positions of the provincial government, including the governor and the head of the financial department, which they insisted should be filled by natives of Jiangsu, rather than by the warlords’ men (Jiangsu sheng zhengxie wenshi ziliao weiyuanhui 1993: 102; Chen and Shen 2009). The strong resistance from the gentry merchant class in Jiangsu greatly limited the room for the warlords to extract local resources and expand their forces; it also accounted for the fact that, despite its highest level of revenue among all provinces in China, budgeted military spending was limited to only 3.9 million yuan or 23% of its revenue in 1919 and 6.1 million yuan or 36% of its revenue in 1925 (or 23% of the military spending in Sichuan in the same year), whereas in the country as a whole, military spending was 46% and 105% of government revenue in 1919 and 1925, respectively (Table 7.2; Jia Shiyi 1932: 140). All these instances suggest that each of the three factors (namely geopolitical setting, socioeconomic conditions, and fiscal-military organization) is indispensable for any regional force to build its competitive advantage. While stable and secured control of a given region served as the very precondition for long-term military buildup, socioeconomic conditions of the region determined the nature and scope of economic and financial resources available for extraction. Whether or not such resources could be turned from potential into real competitive strength, however, ultimately depended on the regional force’s ability to build a centralized and unified fiscal apparatus.

Why did the Nationalist force win? Now let us look at the situation in Guangdong, a southern province that was only next to Jiangsu in terms of economic prosperity and government

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revenue. Until his death in March 1925, Sun Yat-sen, the Grand Marshall of the Military Government from August 1917 and later the “extraordinary president” of the Republic after April 1921 that ruled only Guangdong and Guangxi, struggled to build an army strong enough to eliminate the warlords and unify the country; but he failed repeatedly (Wilbur 1976: 29–35; Bergère 1998: 247, 296). He never expected, and indeed no one else could anticipate, that only a year after his death the Nationalist Revolutionary Army’s Northern Expedition would begin, and, even more surprisingly, defeat the warlords in the middle and lower Yangzi regions in less than ten months, wipe out the Fengtian-clique forces from the interior provinces, and overthrow the Beijing government in June 1928. The unification of China, which Sun could only dream of, came true in December 1928 when Zhang Xueliang (1901–2001), the warlord of Manchuria, declared his allegiance to the newly established Nationalist government in Nanjing. The Nationalist army was unlike any of the warlord forces in that it emphasized ideological indoctrination among the soldiers and that military officers at different levels were under the control of the Nationalist Party, hence known as the “party army” (dangjun). It thus exhibited an unusual degree of solidarity and high morale when compared to the warlord forces (Wilbur 1976: 220–221, 231–232, 244; McCord 1993: 313–314). But the role of nationalist propaganda in the building up of the Nationalists’ military should not be overemphasized. There were, in fact, significant continuities between the Beijing government and the Nationalist state in their commitments to nationalism and the subsequent foreign policies (Waldron 1995: 273–275). The most important reason behind the Nationalists’ triumph over the warlords, as shown below, is its unparalleled fiscal strength, which was developed through three key steps. The first was of course the making of a solid fiscal-military state in Guangdong, which enabled the Guomindang force to launch the Northern Expedition and occupy most of South China and the middle and lower Yangzi regions in a few months. The second was its alliance with the financiers in Shanghai after occupying the city, which made it possible for the Guomindang force to dramatically increase its revenues by borrowing from the bankers and selling government bonds. The revenues thus generated fueled the Guomindang’s continuous Northern Expedition in North China, which finished in June 1928 when its troops occupied Beijing. The third step was its decision to restore China’s autonomy in maritime customs in December 1928 after unifying the country, which quickly made such customs the most importance source of the central government’s revenue (accounting for about 60% of its total income in the late 1920s and early 1930s; see Table 7.1).

Guangdong and the Northern Expedition The reasons behind Sun’s frustrations lay partly in his reliance on warlord forces in the absence of a military force under his own control. He first sought support from the warlords of Guangxi, who however came to control the military government and turned Sun into a figurehead; later he turned to warlord Chen

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Jiongming (1878–1933), who nevertheless firmly opposed Sun’s idea of a Northern Expedition and only wanted to build his stronghold locally. Sun also attempted in late 1922 to ally with the Fengtian clique to attack the Zhili clique, and later with Feng Yuxiang, after Feng defeated warlord Wu Peifu in October 1924 and terminated the Zhili clique’s control of the Beijing government. It was on his trip to Beijing at the invitation of Feng and other strongmen while seeking the unification of China that Sun died, with a reminder to his followers that “the revolution has not been successfully concluded” (Wilbur 1976: 278). A more fundamental reason leading to Sun’s failures, however, was the inability of his government to generate enough revenues before 1925, which in turn had to do with the fragmented political map of Guangdong in the early 1920s. When he came back to Guangzhou in February 1923 after defeating Chen Jiongming with the help of the Guangxi and Yunan armies, Sun found that the only place where his orders were effective was Guangzhou itself, and the rest of Guangdong remained in the hands of either Chen’s forces or the troops from Yunnan, Guangxi, Hunan, or as far as Henan. As a result, his government only collected 4.6 million yuan as its revenue in the first half of 1924 mostly by farming out tax collection to merchants, and the financial ministers of his government stepped down one after another because of the huge difficulties in raising enough revenue (Qin Qingjun 1982; Wilbur 1968: 227–229). A turning point in Sun’s military buildup was the financial aid and military supplies that he received from Soviet Russia after May 1923, which included a loan of 2 million rubles in 1924, various aid to the amount of 2.8 million rubles in 1925, and at least 2.84 million rubles in 1926 (Zhu Hong 2007). The Soviet aid made it possible for Sun to establish the Whampoa Military Academy in May 1924 and to deploy his newly established forces, including students from the academy, for two “Eastern Expeditions” in February and October 1925, which eventually subjugated the forces of Chen Jiongming and other local warlords and brought the entire province under the Nationalist government. The two years following the unification of Guangdong saw the explosion of the Nationalist government’s revenue. Its tax incomes in 1925, for example, increased from about 4 million yuan in the first half of the year to 12.2 million yuan in the second half, when the Nationalist government expanded its control of the province quickly, thus bringing its annual tax revenue in the entire year to more than 16 million yuan, which nearly doubled its 1924 level (8.6 million yuan). The growth of the Nationalist government’s tax revenues in Guangdong was even more dramatic in the following two years, to 69 million yuan in 1926 and 122.6 million yuan in 1927, which was more than 14 times its 1924 level and 3.3 times Guangdong province’s annual revenue (37.4 million taels) in the last years of the Qing (Qin Qingjun 1982: 169, 171).8 Therefore, the province’s unification alone cannot explain the skyrocketing of its revenue. More important to Guangdong’s fiscal strength were the measures taken by Song Ziwen (Tse-ven Soong or T. V. Soong) (1894–1971), a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia

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University, who began his service as the financial minister of the Nationalist government and the head of the financial department of Guangdong province in September 1925 (Wu Jingping 1992: 5–34). The measures he implemented fell into the following categories: (1) Centralizing the collection and expending of government revenues, such as: • • • •

taking over the power of tax collection from military forces in the localities where they were stationed; terminating the practice of farming out tax collection to merchants; prohibiting the retaining of tax monies by the military or any civilian institutions; and dispatching personnel to the newly occupied areas to establish local financial offices directly answering to the provincial government.

(2) Bureaucratizing the tax collecting agencies, such as: • • • •

incorporating the preexisting separate institutions for collecting taxes on stamps, gambling, and opium prohibition into a unified system under the financial ministry; creating the statistics department within the ministry to enhance its accounting and auditing abilities; building a province-wide force against the smuggling of commodities; and most importantly recruiting civil servants of the ministry through examinations open to the public and punishing their involvement in corruption.

(3) Consolidating the major sources of tax revenues, such as: •

• • •



reorganizing the channels for stamp sales, extending the collection of stamp taxes to alcohol and firecrackers, standardizing the use of stamps on all commodities (together, these measures brought the annual income from stamp taxes from 0.6 million to 3.04 million yuan in 1926); collecting a special tax on kerosene (which generated more than 2 million yuan in the second half of 1926); surveying and taxing the sand fields along the coast (which resulted in an increase by more than a million yuan annually); monopolizing the sales of opium through the prohibition of its smuggling (as a result, the six-month income from this source increased from 2 million yuan in 1925 to more than 9 million yuan in the following year); surveying and auditing the collection of lijin on all domestic commodities and increasing its collection rate by 20% in January 1926 and an additional 30% in the following month (the annual revenue from this source alone increased by a factor of 2 to nearly 16 million yuan in 1926);

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collecting a “domestic tax” on all goods at the rate of 2.5% on ordinary items and 5% on luxury items (which began in late 1926 and generated about 5 million yuan annually); and selling public debts (totaling 24.28 million yuan by September 1926) instead of issuing extra amounts of paper currency by the Central Bank to safeguard its creditability and avoid runaway price inflation (MGDA, 4: 1400–1404; Qin Qingjun 1982).

This is an impressive list. Together, these measures produced a centralized, efficient bureaucracy able to fully tap the financial resources of a province that was only next to Jiangsu in terms of economic prosperity and even more developed in domestic and foreign trading than the latter. The results of these measures were surprising. In a matter of only two years since Song’s tenure as the financial minister, Guangdong province’s annual tax revenue multiplied to more than 122 million yuan by 1927 as noted earlier, which made the Nationalist force the financially most solvent among all competing military forces throughout the country. For years, the Fengtian clique had been the most affluent force, with an annual revenue of more than 27 million yuan from its three Manchurian provinces in the mid-1920s, which militarily made the clique the most competitive among all warlord forces, which had no challengers in North China after defeating the Zhili clique and controlling the Beijing government in 1924. But the rise of the Nationalist force in Guangdong changed this situation, and what backed the Nationalist force’s meteoric rise was the building of a centralized and efficient fiscal machine engineered by Song Ziwen that mobilized the province’s financial resources to its fullest extent. Song’s financial policies in Guangdong were exorbitant. The lijin and “miscellaneous taxes,” which accounted for the largest portion of the province’s revenue, covered almost all kinds of goods and services at a collection rate unseen before. Li Zongren, who ruled Guangxi after 1925 and later joined the Northern Expedition, thus honestly described Song’s measures in Guangdong as “draining the pond to catch all the fish” (jiezeeryu) and “ruthless taxation and extortionate collection” (hengzhengbaolian) (LZR: 244). Nevertheless, Song’s policies worked. The ample revenue they generated provided an indispensable fiscal base on which the Nationalist force started the Northern Expedition in June 1926 and succeeded swiftly on the battleground. According to Song Ziwen’s report on the Nationalist government’s fiscal condition during the year from October 1925 to September 1926, the total revenue of the Nationalist government in Guangdong reached 80.2 million yuan, and its expenditure also expanded to 78.3 million yuan, of which 61.3 million yuan (78.3%) was spent on the military (MGDA 4: 1400). Until as late as November 1926 when the Nationalist force had fully occupied Hunan, Jiangxi, Fujian, and Hubei province and were ready to march up to Henan province and down to the lower Yangzi region, Guangdong province was the only source from which the Nationalist force derived its revenue. And the monthly spending on the military and war increased 7.3 million yuan as the Northern Expedition extended into Henan,

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Zhejiang, and Jiangsu provinces (MGDA 1.1: 518). As Song proudly stated, “as the revolutionary base, Guangdong province alone shouldered the expenses of a countrywide revolution in China. The recent military campaigns across central China as well as the cost of the Northern Expedition have all relied on Guangdong” (Wu Jingping 1992: 43). The success of the Northern Expedition, to be sure, had to do with multiple factors, including the high morale and strict discipline of the Nationalist forces and popular support to them, as well as the collaboration of the forces from Guangxi and Feng Yuxiang’s army from the northwest and, on the other hand, the lack of coordination among the warlords in the middle and lower Yangzi regions. But key to the Nationalist force’s combating capabilities and triumph on the battleground were its quick expansion from 130,000 soldiers at the beginning of the expedition to 550,000 men by early 1927, the ample supply of weapons and ammunition for it, and generous stipends for its soldiers (Zeng Xianlin et al. 1991: 73, 197) – all these would not happen without the unparalleled revenue from Guangdong province that sustained the Nationalist force until early 1927.

The plight of the Nationalist government in Wuhan The Nationalist forces’ control of Hubei in late 1926 and, more importantly, their occupation of Shanghai in March 1927 changed the way the Northern Expedition was fueled. Shortly after the relocation of the Nationalist government from Guangzhou to Wuhan in January 1927, Hubei replaced Guangdong as the primary source of its revenue. In the view of Financial Minister Song Ziwen, Guangdong had been “extremely vulnerable and completely exhausted” (kongxu ji yi, luojue ju qiong) after supporting the Northern Expedition for a year; it was imperative, therefore, for other provinces that had come under the Nationalist government to share the financial burden with Guangdong (Wu Jingping 1992: 43, 61). With Guangdong no longer a viable major source of its revenue and other provinces reluctant to contribute their revenues to it before financial unification in the occupied areas, the Nationalist government in Wuhan had to rely on Hubei province as the major source of its tax incomes, and Song tried some of the measures in Hubei that he had successfully employed in Guangdong to maximize his government’s revenues. Unfortunately, Hubei was very different. Having endured successive wars between different forces for more than a decade, the economy in the province was yet to be recovered from prolonged recession; thus, despite the same measures enforced in Hubei as in Guangdong, the Nationalist government in Wuhan was only able to collect about 19 million yuan as its revenue from various taxes from September 1926 to September 1927, which was only about 34% of the annual revenue that the Guangdong government had generated through taxation prior to September 1926 (Jia Shiyi 1932: 114–116). As a result, the Wuhan government had to rely on issuing public debt, borrowing from banks, and printing paper currency as the major sources of its revenue (accounting for 84.5% of its total revenue during the same period) (Wu Jingping 1992: 43–47).

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Having not firmly controlled the province, however, the Nationalist government in Wuhan found it difficult to obtain collaboration from local business and financial elites. Its growing tension with the Nationalist force in Nanjing and the subsequent embargo by the latter only worsened its insolvency. The Wuhan government thus had to introduce the radical policy of freezing the outflow of cashes from Wuhan and banning the use of currencies other than the paper notes it printed, which only alienated local business elites and caused runaway price inflation and further economic recession (MGDA 4: 1485–1486; Yang Tianshi 1996: 420–427). Having lost its financial creditability, however, the Wuhan government found it increasingly difficult to raise funds through public borrowing or printing paper notes, and it would soon give up in its competition with both the warlords in North China and the Nationalist forces in the lower Yangzi region.

Reenergizing the Northern Expedition The schism between the left and right wings among the Nationalists started well before the Northern Expedition. By and large, the leftists assembled around Wang Jingwei (1883–1944), head of the Nationalist government in Guangdong from July 1925 and later the president of the Nationalist Government in Wuhan after his trip from France in April 1927, who insisted on collaborating with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in his government and the military, while Chiang Kai-shek, the generalissimo of the Nationalist army, led the rightist group that opposed the CCP’s radicalism and the Guomindang’s united front with it. The tension between the two sides mounted in the course of the Northern Expedition, especially after the occupation of Shanghai in March 1927, and developed into open confrontation between the Nationalist government in Wuhan and another Nationalist government started by Chiang in Nanjing on April 18, 1927, who ruthlessly purged the Communists from the cities he controlled. Chiang eventually prevailed over the left-wing Nationalists, after a few months of power consolidation within the Guomindang in late 1927 that allowed him to resume his position as the generalissimo in January 1928 and to restart the Northern Expedition three months later (Taylor 2009: 77–78). The most important reason behind Chiang’s rise as the new leader of the Nationalists and his success in competing with the left-wing opponents within the Guomindang and defeating the warlords in North China during the second phase of the Northern Expedition was his control of Shanghai and the lower Yangzi region, the most prosperous area of the country, which allowed him to take advantage of the abundance of financial resources in this area. Chiang’s personal background as a native of Zhejiang and his earlier career in 1920–1921 as a broker for Shanghai Securities and Commodity Exchange run by Yu Qiaqing (1867–1945), once a leader of the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce, were key to his success in connecting himself with the financiers in Shanghai, who mostly originated from his home province. To collaborate with Chiang, Yu soon created the Shanghai Association of Commerce in March 1927

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to replace the disorganized Shanghai Chamber of Commerce that had sided with warlord Sun Chuanfang and to show his open support to Chiang’s Nationalist force. After his arrival in Shanghai, Chiang took action to purge the Communists by arresting and killing hundreds of them. Two days after establishing the Nationalist government in Nanjing in April 1927, Chiang officially set up the Jiangsu and Shanghai Financial Committee, with 10 of its 15 members appointed from the business and financial leaders in Shanghai and Jiangsu, and headed by Chen Guangfu (K. P. Chen, 1880–1976), president of the Shanghai Banking Association, whose primary duty was to raise funds for the Nationalist government. In exchange, Chiang granted the committee the complete authority in appointing and managing all of the financial institutions of the Nationalist government (Wu Jingping 1992: 58–59). The committee’s first action was to make a short-term loan of 3 million yuan and another loan of 3 million yuan for Chiang in April 1927 (SSL: 57–59). A bigger step it took was to assist the Nationalist government in issuing 30 million yuan of government bonds in May 1927, to be guaranteed by the government’s additional revenue in the future through a rising of maritime customs by 2.5% (MGDA 5.1.1: 4–5); to that end, another committee consisting of 14 members, mostly business leaders from Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanghai, was created to manage the funds raised through the bonds (SSL: 74–75). In October 1927, the Nationalist government issued another 24 million yuan of government bonds, again guaranteed by the government’s revenue from increased maritime customs (MGDA 5.1.1: 521–522). Selling the large amounts of government bonds, however, turned out to be a huge challenge to both Chiang and buyers. For Chiang, raising enough money in a timely manner through the sales of government bonds was “where the lifeblood of all the affairs of the army, the government, and the party lie”; so desperate was his need of funds for the newly established government in Nanjing and the consolidation of his military control in Jiangsu and Zhejiang that he pleaded for help in his letter to Chen Guangfu in May 1927 with these words: “the life and death of the party and the state, as well as the glory and shame of the nation, all depend on this [the sales of government bonds]” (SSL: 110). The bankers and business owners, for their part, tried to reduce or delay under various excuses their purchase of the bonds that had been apportioned among them. Chiang, therefore, repeatedly turned to compulsory measures.9 Such measures could be temporarily effective in obtaining the funds he wanted, but could not be counted as a regular means to generate the required money. Therefore, the sales of another 40 million yuan of bonds in October 1927 was exceptionally sluggish when the purchase of them was intended to be voluntary. Trapped in his prolonged confrontation with the Nationalist government in Wuhan, his defeat by the northern warlord force in Xuzhou, and the retreat of the Nationalist army back to the south of the Yangzi River, Chiang stepped down from his generalissimo position in August 1927, to allow time for a reconciliation between Wuhan and Nanjing and for his own rebuilding of personal connections with financial leaders in Shanghai (Ibid.: 32–35).

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As anticipated, Chiang came back to power in January 1928 when he faced a new situation: the Nationalist government in Wuhan had been relocated to Nanjing to join the Nationalist government there, Chiang himself had married Soong Meiling in December 1927 and thus become Song Ziwen’s brother-inlaw, and most importantly, Song Ziwen had accepted the position of the Minister of Finance in the Nanjing government right before Chiang’s resumption of the generalissimo position. With Song’s help, the Nanjing government’s fiscal situation quickly improved in 1928. In a matter of six months since he began serving as the financial minister of the Nanjing government, Song raised a total of 190 million yuan(!) through acquiring bank loans, sales of government bonds, and taxation (MGDA, 5.1.1: 520–522). The generous funding made it possible for Chiang to restart the Northern Expedition and launch a full-scale campaign against the Fengtian-clique forces in the northern provinces in April 1928. During the height of the war, Song was required to provide 1.6 million yuan every five days. He did the job and, in fact, generated much more than the required amount (Jia Shiyi 1932: 216). The Northern Expedition culminated in the Nationalist force’s occupation of Beijing in June. The Nationalist government in Nanjing thus formally declared the unification of China on June 15, 1928. This, however, reflected more of the Nationalists’ political determination than the reality in the country, because the Fengtian clique, which had withdrawn from Beijing, still controlled the three northeastern provinces. To march into the vast area of Manchuria and defeat the military forces of the Fengtian clique would be the most challenging task for the Nationalists. Fortunately, after Zhang Zuolin died of an explosion planned by the authority of the Japanese Kwantung Army on June 4, 1928, and who had resisted the Japanese pressing for further control of Manchuria, his son Zhang Xueliang, as the new leader of the Fengtian clique, accepted the leadership of the Nanjing government on December 29, 1928 and thus made all of the Chinese provinces officially unified (Taylor 2009: 84).

China as a latecomer: from regional to national in state-making To sum up, what propelled the rise of regional fiscal-military states in Republican China was the dynamics of centralized regionalism. This originated from the regionalized centralism of the late Qing period; one can easily identify the various direct or indirect links between the regionalization of military, fiscal, and administrative power after the 1850s on the one hand and the rise of provincial strongmen and warlord cliques in the early Republican years on the other. However, the centralized regionalism of the early Republican era was essentially different from the regionalized centralism of the late Qing decades. First, the regional powers of the early Republican years were highly independent of the central government’s military, fiscal, and even administrative systems, and their independence was often openly justified; the military strongmen of different regions used the rhetoric or concepts they invented to legitimize the various civil and military programs in areas under their exclusive control, unlike the

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provincial governors or governors general of the late Qing period who had to keep their informal or non-statutory practices in generating and spending extra revenues in a hidden or disguised manner, and whose regionalized measures usually appeared as expedient solutions to the crises that confronted them. Second and more importantly, the relationship between the central government and regional forces in early Republican years was fundamentally different from that in the late Qing period. Under regionalized centralism, the Qing court, though unable to put regional resources and civil or military positions (especially those of the newly created institutions) under its complete control, effectively dominated individual provinces by making or revoking appointments to key positions at the provincial level. It also had the ultimate power to reallocate the revenues generated and officially reported by provincial authorities and, most importantly, to deploy all of the military units stationed throughout the country, a situation that remained true until the last years of the Qing. The provincial civil and military leaders could only exercise their discretion and autonomy within the scope allowed by the center; by no means could they openly challenge the authority and legality of the imperial court. Centralism, in a word, was the most defining characteristic of the relationship between the central and regional authorities in the late Qing period; regional autonomy existed and functioned within, rather than outside, the framework of a highly centralized government system. In sharp contrast, the regional strongmen and warlord leaders of the early Republican years had complete control of the military and fiscal resources as well as the administrative system within the areas they occupied. Instead of submitting to the authority of the central government, they often openly challenged the latter and even used violence to oust their opponents from the top positions of the government; they were essentially a force of regionalism in nature. Finally, and most importantly, late Qing regionalized centralism, while allowing the dynasty to survive domestic turmoil and foreign intrusions and even witness a three-decade restoration, also undermined the central government’s control of regional resources and institutions; once the Han elites who generated and managed such resources lost their allegiance to the imperial house, the latter would become extremely fragile, as seen in the last few months of the Qing when the provincial authorities declared their independence from the imperial court one after another. The regional leaders of the early Republic, for their part, did not seek the independence of their provinces from the central government, despite their defiance of the authority of both Beijing before 1927 or Nanjing afterwards. Quite the reverse; whenever a warlord launched a military campaign against his enemy, his excuse was precisely to defend China’s political unity and national interests (MGDA, 3.2: 4, 6, 63, 65, 74, 79, 180, 276), or to maintain peace and order in the country (MGDA, 3.2: 6, 74, 181, 276) (see also Kuhn 2002: 134). As a matter of fact, national unification was not merely a rhetoric disguising the warlords’ abuse of violence for self-aggrandizement; to engage in war and defeat their competitors was also the best way for the most ambitious warlords to survive the competition and strengthen themselves.

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To make sense of the Chinese path to a modern nation-state under the Republic, let us put it in the larger context of state-making in world history. By and large, we can distinguish between two different paths to the rise of a centralized and unified national state. One is found among the firstcomers, such as England, France, and some other Western and Northwestern European states. These countries first achieved the goal of expanding and consolidating their territories as early as the tenth through the thirteenth centuries through conquest and thereby forming a centralized national monarchy; in the following centuries, they further consolidated state power by turning the monarch’s indirect rule of the country into direct rule, that is, to eliminate the autonomy of intermediary forces such as priests, landed aristocrats, urban oligarchs, or privileged warriors while establishing a standing army to replace the mercenaries and enlarging government bureaucracy to enhance its abilities of tax extraction and hence military buildup. The other path prevailed among the latecomers to modern national states, such as Germany and Italy as well as the Asian states that survived Western colonialism in the nineteenth century. The biggest challenge for these countries in the course of modern state-making was the existence of multiple regional states in a fragmented territory and the predominance of, or direct occupation by, foreign powers over parts of their territories. State-making for the latecomers, therefore, meant first of all eliminating foreign dominance and building the territorial foundation for a future, unified state. Thus, instead of the penetration of a national state down to the regional level as seen among the firstcomers, here state-making typically unfolded from the regional to the national level, beginning with the competition among regional fiscal-military states, each of which aimed to centralize state power and modernize the military, and culminating in the rise of the most powerful regional state that established its national dominance after defeating all other regional competitors and/ or recovering its territory from foreign occupation. By accident, both Germany and Italy finished the task of territorial unification in 1871; in the same year, all of the regional daimyos in Japan returned their territories to the newly established central government. For the latecomers, the regional powers (Prussia for Germany, Piedmont for Italy, and Satsuma-Choshu for Japan) played the most decisive role in the making of a modern national state. By and large, China took the bottom-up path of state-making, but it was different from other latecomers in at least three ways. First, it was huge geographically, which meant that there were necessarily more domestic competitors for national hegemony than in any other country of small size; defeating the rivals and achieving the goals of national unification and power centralization was more difficult for the Chinese state-makers. Second, China was confronted with a geopolitical environment that was much harsher than the other latecomers, because of the threats from foreign powers that all appeared to be stronger and wealthier than China, and, in particular, because of the existence of a militarily aggressive neighbor (Japan) that turned out to be the biggest barrier to China’s quest for a centralized, unitary state. Third, unlike Germany or Italy that had built a strong and centralized regional state before it

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embarked on the course of territorial expansion and national unification, the regional states in early Republican China, for all their efforts at military buildup, economic reconstruction, and power consolidation at home, remained in the rudimentary stage of state-making; there was still a long way for each of them to go before building a strong economy, an efficient bureaucracy, and a powerful military machine. For the Guomindang state that established its national dominance in the late 1920s, how to consolidate its rule and turn China into a truly unified and centralized nation-state remained the most challenging task in the decades to come. Nevertheless, the key factors driving the rise of nation-states in early modern and modern Europe also worked to varying degrees in China. Among such factors are geopolitical setting, fiscal constitution, and socioeconomic structure. The regional powers from Manchuria and Guangdong, and to a lesser degree from Shanxi and Guangxi, prevailed over their opponents, or survived the fierce competition, precisely because of the favorable location of the region they controlled, the centralized apparatuses they built for mobilization and extraction, and ultimately the socioeconomic conditions that determine the availability of resources for extraction. In his study of the formation of modern European states, Charles Tilly distinguishes three patterns in which the economy conditioned state activities, namely, coercion-intensive, capital-intensive, and capitalized coercion (Tilly 1990; see Chapter 3 for more details). To some degree, this typology is illuminating for understanding the regional states in warlord China. In provinces where subsistence agriculture predominated, the local warlord regime had to rely excessively on coercion to extract economic resources for military buildup or self-profiteering. In Sichuan, for instance, the individual warlords of garrison districts competed for taxing the cultivators by increasing the frequency of collection to as many as ten to fourteen times a year or collecting in advance the land taxes of future years to as far as 2008 (Ch’en 1979: 141), but none of them made serious efforts at state-making at the regional or national level. In sharp contrast, the military leaders of Guangdong and Manchuria, by fully tapping local economic resources, succeeded in turning themselves into the most formidable contenders for national dominance. In addition to taxing the land, they both relied primarily on the revenues from trade, industry, and modern financing. Their approach to regional state-building, therefore, resembled more or less the pattern of capitalized coercion in Tilly’s terminology. In the final analysis, geopolitical and socioeconomic conditions critically shaped the competitiveness of regional warlord forces, but the most decisive factor that determined the result of their competitions remained the methods whereby they mobilized the economic and financial resources available from the territories they controlled and turned them into revenues and hence fiscal-military strength. Those who enjoyed geopolitical and socioeconomic advantages and at the same time built highly centralized and unified states were the most competitive. The Nationalist regime prevailed over all others precisely because of a combination of all these factors in its state-building efforts by 1928.

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All in all, the rise of regional fiscal-military states in Manchuria, Guangdong, and other provinces was the most important breakthrough in the century-long process of state rebuilding in China; it reversed the trend of regionalization and fragmentation that had persisted since the mid-nineteenth century, leading China to the recentralization of state power and the reunification of its political landscape. The state-making efforts by those regional forces were reminiscent of the most exciting moments in the courses of state-making in other parts of the world. Manchuria under the Fengtian clique, for instance, would have likely played a role in the unification of China similar to Prussia in Germany, had its developments not been impeded and impaired by Japanese penetration throughout the early Republican years. The Nationalists’ efforts to establish a strong and healthy fiscal regime in Guangdong under Financial Minister Song Ziwen, which were central to the Guomindang’s rise as the most competitive force in South China, echoed in many ways the measures taken by Cavour (1810–1861), Minister of Finance (and later the Prime Minister) of Piedmont-Sardinia, which enabled the northern Italian kingdom to take the lead in unifying Italy. Thus, contrary to the old image of “warlordism” involving incessant warfare, dislocation, chaos, corruption, and all other symptoms of political decay, the late 1910s and the 1920s was a key link in the making of the modern Chinese state. It was during this period that the long-term trend of decentralization and disintegration came to a halt, yielding to the rise of multiple centralized regional states, which paved the way for further steps of centralization and unification taken by the Nationalists, and later the Communists, in the two decades after 1928.

Notes 1 The activities of individual warlords in different parts of the country have been the subject of many studies in the past (e.g., Sheridan 1966; Gillin 1967; Kapp 1973; Lary 1974; McCormack 1977; Wou 1978; McCord 1993, 2014; Suleski 2002). Positive signs of development undoubtedly emerged under the warlord regimes, such as industrial growth, the freedom of the press, the flourishing of cultural institutions, the introduction of parliamentary rule despite its overall dysfunctionality, and the impressive quality of cabinet members, as some studies have documented (Pye 1971; Waldron 1995). Nevertheless, the dominant image in the writings on this period remains the one of extreme fragmentation and chaos in domestic politics, recurring war and social disorder, countless taxes on the people, and national humiliations at the hands of foreign powers. 2 See, e.g., Ch’i (1976); Nathan (1976); Ch’en (1979); Li Xin and Li Zongyi (1987: 212–246); Lai Xinxia et al. (2000: 596–602). For studies that question the conventional wisdom on decentralization and personalization in the late Qing and early Republican periods, see Kwang-ching Liu (1974); MacKinnon (1973). 3 But this juxtaposition between the northern and southern forces should be taken with caution. As it turns out, some of the warlord leaders or regimes in North China displayed a clear nationalist stance when handling foreign conflicts for the sake of national interests or their personal fame (e.g., McCormack 1977: 250; Wou 1978: 29, 39, 262). By contrast, Sun Yat-sen, as the early leader of the Guomindang, actually went further than the northern warlords in seeking support from Japan at the cost of China’s sovereignty regardless of his anti-imperialist rhetoric; his successor, Chiang

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6 7

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Kai-shek, was equally dependent on old-style, private relations in building his leadership and personal control of the Nationalist state (Yang Kuisong 2003; Jin Yilin 2005). For a description of the financial crisis of the Beijing government, see van de Ven (1996). To some degree, the three strongmen were able to work together also because of the perfect complementing of their respective personalities. While Li was said to be kindhearted, tolerant, and generous, which made him a welcome political leader, Bai was eloquent, resourceful, and resolute, which made him a superior military commander, and Huang’s detail-minded and hands-on inclinations made him a good administrator (Wang Yugui 1996: 76). All these, to be sure, were budgeted figures, but they nevertheless suggest the gap between them. By August 1926, the Soviet Union provided to Feng’s army 31,500 rifles, 51 million bullets, 272 machine guns, 60 cannons, 58,000 shells, and 10 aircraft (Liu Jingzhong 2004: 369). One silver tael equaled 1.09 silver yuan in 1910. For instance, to compel the Shanghai branch of the Bank of China to advance 10 million yuan to satisfy the urgent needs of military spending when the sales of the bonds proceeded slowly, Chiang threatened the branch’s manager, who had financed the Nationalist government in Wuhan, with the accusation of “blockading the revolution” (zuai gemeng) and “intending to side with the rebels” (youyi funi) (Wang Zhenghua 2002: 105). He ordered the arrest of the businessmen or their family members and confiscated their property under the excuse of their counter-revolutionary activities in assisting warlords previously, when the latter failed to buy the required amount of bonds (Coble 1986: 32–35).

8

In search of national unity Frontier rebuilding under the Republic

Upon the inauguration of the Republic of China on January 1, 1912, provisional president Sun Yat-sen affirmed in his proclamation the principle of “national unity” (minzu zhi tongyi): the foundation of the state lies in uniting the lands of the Han, the Manchus, the Mongols, the Muslims, and the Tibetans into one country, which also means uniting the ethnic groups of the Han, the Manchus, the Mongols, the Muslims, and the Tibetans into one people. In the same announcement, Sun stated the principle of “territorial unity” (lingtu zhi tongyi) in response to the announcement by individual provinces of their “independence” from the Qing court during the Revolution of 1911: “the so-called independence meant at once separation from the Qing court and unification among the provinces, and the same was true for Mongolia and Tibet” (XZDA, 6: 2346). A few months later, Yuan Shikai, as the formal president of the Republic, reasserted the idea of “a Republic of Five Races” (MGWJ, 1: 84). In his communication with the Jebtsundamba Khutuktu, who had declared the independence of the Mongolian state from the Qing in Kulun on December 1, 1911, President Yuan opposed the independence by appealing to the Qing court’s Decree of Abdication (MGWJ, 1: 99); Yuan’s stance was backed by his understanding of the history of Mongolia’s integration with China: Outer Mongolia belongs to the same Chinese nation and has been of the same family for hundreds of years. There is absolutely no ground for separation at this moment when state affairs are in danger and the frontier issues become increasingly thorny. (MGWJ, 1: 86) This was one of the very first official uses of the broadly defined term of “the Chinese nation” (Zhonghua minzu), which soon came to dominate the discourse on national unity in twentieth-century China. The biggest challenge to Beijing in its efforts to maintain China’s territorial unity came from three powers: (1) Britain, which strove to establish its political

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and military supremacy in Tibet and use Tibet as a buffer to fend off the potential threat to British India from a unified and modernized China that was likely to emerge after the Revolution of 1911; (2) Russia, which aimed to turn Outer Mongolia into an independent state and use it as a buffer to enhance its geopolitical security in the Far East; and (3) Japan, which targeted Manchuria and the eastern part of Inner Mongolia in its ambition for territorial expansion after annexing Korea in 1910. The frontier crises took place at a time when China was politically fragmented. The preoccupation of the central government with recurrent rebellions when Yuan was in power and, after his death, the military competition among provincial warlords for the control of the central government and selfaggrandizement provided the opportune condition for the thriving of centrifugal forces in the frontiers. But there also existed favorable conditions for China to prevent the loss of its frontiers. First of all, as a result of both the increasing awareness of national survival among the elites in Chinese society and the two centuries of integrating the frontiers with the interior, the Chinese elites no longer equated their country with only the 18 provinces by the end of the Qing; instead, the public generally accepted the broadened concept of China as a land encompassing both the interior of the Han Chinese and the frontiers of the non-Han populations (Esherick 2006). Whether or not the government was able to defend the frontiers and maintain China’s enlarged territory thus directly affected its legitimacy. The central government as well as regional competitors invariably came under immense pressure from the public to take action and defend the frontiers whenever the latter were in jeopardy. No less important was the fact that the ruling elites of the frontiers were rarely a monolithic entity in favor of secession from China; they were often divided between those who had vested interests in the preexisting arrangements between the central government of China and local religious and administrative institutions and those who challenged the existing patterns of interests and power relations. Even more decisive was the geopolitical setting that confronted the frontiers; the changing strength and strategic goals of the neighboring powers directly affected the frontier leaders’ decisions on seeking separation and protection from the foreign powers or staying within China. The results of China’s efforts to defend and rebuild its frontiers during the Republican era thus depended on the interplay of three factors: the will and ability of China’s domestic leadership, the attitudes and strength of the ruling elites of the frontiers, and the strategies of the surrounding foreign powers. The situation in the frontiers varied, depending on the degree to which they had been administratively integrated with the interior before the fall of the Qing. After incorporating Xinjiang into its territory in the 1750s, the Qing encouraged Han merchants and farmers to migrate to the eastern and northern parts of this region; it also relied on Han businessmen in southern Xinjiang by the early nineteenth century as a result of its growing distrust toward native residents (Millward 1998: 114–117, 225–226). As a province after 1884, Xinjiang was least troublesome to Beijing, where the government system was in the

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hands of the Han people after Zuo Zongtang’s expedition in 1875–1878, which allowed his subordinates, mostly from his home province of Hunan, to take over local authorities in most parts of the region that later formed the province. During the rest of the Qing, the governor’s position in Xinjiang was invariably filled by Han bureaucrats, while the General of Yili, a separate authority controlled by the Manchus and responsible for local defense and foreign affairs, limited its influence only to the areas of Ili and Tarbahatai along the northwestern border of the province. After 1911, military governor Yang Zengxin (1864–1928) ruled Xinjiang for 17 years until his death by assassination. He centralized the administrative system in the province by putting the military authorities in Yili, Tacheng (Tarbahatai), and Altay under his direct control between 1916 and 1919 (Gu Bao 2005, 5: 52; Chen and Chen 2007: 71–73). Like warlords in other provinces, Yang dictated the administrative and military affairs in Xinjiang and made his province highly autonomous from Beijing, but he was also committed to safeguarding China’s sovereignty over Xinjiang and never intended to separate his province from the Republic. The challenge to Beijing’s claim of China’s territorial integrity, therefore, came primarily from Tibet and Outer Mongolia, the two areas that had been relatively autonomous by and large under the Qing and became even more centrifugal to the Chinese Republic after 1912.

Under the “suzerainty” of China: Tibet in 1912–1950 Compared to Xinjiang and Mongolia, Tibet saw the least penetration by the Han population and experienced no substantial integration with the administrative system of the interior during the Qing. This fact, together with its geographical isolation from the interior, made it most likely for Tibet to seek independence from China. Surprisingly, Tibet never officially declared the founding of an independent state of its own, and throughout the Republican era, the spiritual and secular leaders of Tibet, as well as the foreign powers behind them, never officially denied China’s “suzerainty,” as they called it, over the highland. All these provided a historical ground for the People’s Republic of China to take action to turn Tibet into one of its “autonomous regions” and thereby put it under Beijing’s complete administrative and military control in the 1950s.

The centrifugal tendency Dissatisfaction among the Tibetan elites with the Qing began with its signing of two treaties with Britain in 1890 and 1893, which conceded part of Tibet’s land to Dremojong (Sikkim), Britain’s protectorate, and opened Yadong, a Tibetan locality next to Dremojong, to British subjects for trade. But the growing British influence also incurred resistance from Tibetan elites under the leadership of the 13th Dalai Lama, which culminated in an armed defense at Gyangze in July 1904. The conflict ended in the Tibetan force’s complete defeat, the British

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force’s subsequent occupation of Lhasa, and the Dalai Lama’s escape to Outer Mongolia. The treaty signed in the same year between Tibet’s acting regent and British representatives stipulated that Tibet opened two more ports for trade, dismantled defense facilities along the route to Lhasa, paid Britain a war reparation, and most importantly, denied any foreign countries the right to interfere with Tibet’s domestic affairs, use its land, or do business unless the same business rights were granted to Britain. Without the signatures of the Dalai Lama and the Qing court’s commissioner in Tibet, however, the treaty lacked enough validity. Another treaty thus was negotiated and signed on April 27 1906 between Britain and Beijing, which included the 1904 treaty as an appendix but acknowledged China’s sovereignty over Tibet (Hertslet 1908: 203). The Qing court, however, failed to win over the Tibetan leaders throughout the process. Based on a misleading report from Youtai, the Royal Commissioner in Tibet, who had discouraged the Tibetans’ armed resistance against Britain but later blamed the Dalai Lama for the military failure, the Qing court deprived Thubten Gyatso of his Dalai Lama title in 1904. In 1907, the Qing court reinstalled the Dalai Lama title on Thubten Gyatso upon his visit to Beijing but rejected his request for the right to directly report to the court and insisted on the role of the Royal Commissioner in Tibet as the intermediary between the two sides. The situation worsened after the Dalai Lama’s return to Tibet in 1909. The entry into Tibet of 2000 poorly trained New Army soldiers from Sichuan at the request of Lianyu, the new Royal Commissioner in Tibet, regardless of the Dalai Lama’s opposition, and their random shooting in Lhasa, caused the Dalai Lama to flee to India and the Qing court’s termination of his title again in February 1910. To redefine Tibet’s status, a conference was held in Simla in northern India from October 1913 to July 1914, following President Yuan Shikai’s decision to send more troops to Tibet and “reinstall” the Dalai Lama title on Thubten Gyatso in October 1912. Each of the three parties at the conference had its own goals. The Tibetan delegate’s initial and primary purposes were to seek Tibet’s independence and demarcate its boundary with China’s interior that would include the entire Qinghai province and the border areas of Sichuan into its territory. Britain did not openly propose Tibet’s independence from China but sought to turn Tibet into a buffer state between India and China and establish its dominance in Tibet by forcing China to retreat from its positions as prescribed in the 1906 treaty and reducing China’s role in Tibet to a nominal suzerain. Beijing, for its part, wanted to defend its positions by asserting Tibet to be part of China, maintaining its garrison force of 2,600 men in Lhasa, and having the ultimate authority over Tibet’s foreign and domestic affairs. Nevertheless, confronted with the more urgent tasks of suppressing the rebelling provinces in South China and in need of recognition by Western powers, especially Britain, Beijing had to concede to Britain’s requests except for its proposal of dividing Tibet into the so-called “outer” and “inner” areas. The conference resulted in the so-called Simla Accord officially signed between the British and Tibetan delegates, which recognized China’s “suzerainty” over Tibet as well as

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“the autonomy of Outer Tibet.” The treaty further stipulated that China “engages not to convert Tibet into a Chinese province” while Britain “engages not to annex Tibet or any portion of it” (Goldstein 1989: 833). Beijing, however, refused to ratify this treaty because of strong opposition from within the government after its details were disclosed, despite the Chinese delegate’s preliminary signing of a draft of the treaty at the end of the conference.1

“Turning inward” Therefore, Tibet remained in a state of “autonomy” from the Chinese government in the following decades without officially declaring its “independence” as a sovereign state. The actual relationship between Lhasa and Beijing (and Nanjing after 1927) varied under different Tibetan leaders. From time to time, the 13th Dalai Lama expressed his willingness to “turn inward” (xiangnei) and improve his relationship with the Republican government in Beijing and Nanjing while distancing himself from Britain and punishing the pro-British elites in Lhasa. This change in his attitude had to do in part with the splitting of the Tibetan elites into two factions. The old-generation faction consisted primarily of the priests and leaders of major monasteries in Lhasa, who favored maintaining the status quo, including Tibet’s traditional ties with Beijing, in order to preserve their preexisting status and privileges, while opposing the Westernizing reforms that greatly increased their tax burden. The new-generation faction comprised secular government leaders, especially those who controlled the newly created or upgraded military and police forces, and therefore benefitted from their ties with their British counterparts, and subsequently advocated proBritish policies and Tibet’s independence from China. The Dalai Lama himself felt an immediate threat from the young, pro-British military commanders who planned in vain a coup against him in 1923. To curb the influence of the new elites, he removed the commanders from their military positions, disbanded the military training center, shut down the English-language school in Lhasa, and banned the wearing of Western suits among the Tibetans. Another factor contributing to the Dalai Lama’s inclination to move closer to Beijing and later Nanjing was the worsened economic situation in Tibet. The constant tension and recurrent wars along the border between Tibet and the interior provinces of Sichuan and Qinghai in the 1910s through the early 1930s impeded trading activities between the two sides, hence the skyrocketing of the price of goods imported from the interior. According to Konchok Jungne, who visited Nanjing in 1929 as the Dalai Lama’s delegate and explained in person to Chiang Kai-shek the Dalai Lama’s willingness to “turn inward,” the price of tea rose up to ten times as a result of Tibet’s troubled relationship with the interior (XZDA, 6: 2481). Unable to procure grain from the neighboring provinces, the Tibetan troops along the border had to turn to local Tibetan residents for food supplies and thus threatened their livelihood. As an alternative to trading with the interior, Tibet turned to Britain and India for imported goods and markets of its domestic products, but the unfair exchange rate between the British and

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Tibetan currencies caused huge losses on the Tibetan side. The Dalai Lama pushed for a “turning inward” policy also because of his rivalry with the ninth Panchen Lama, who fled to the interior in 1924 after he felt that his personal security was threatened by the Dalai Lama’s hostile actions. To counterbalance the Panchen Lama’s popularity in the interior, where he received a warm welcome from the central and provincial authorities with majestic ceremonies wherever he traveled, it was necessary for the Dalai Lama to promote his profile in the interior by ameliorating his relationship with the Republican government. The Dalai Lama’s gestures of “turning inward” began with his interaction with the delegates sent by the military governor of Gansu Province to Lhasa in November 1919. The Dalai Lama reportedly told his guests at the farewell banquet that his earlier “pro-British” actions did not reflect his “true intension” but were responses to the Qing commissioner’s “excessive compulsions.” It was said that the Dalai Lama also expressed his determination to “sincerely turn inward and join the effort for the happiness of the Five Races” (qingxin xiangnei, tongmou wuzu xingfu) (XZDF: 353). After the establishment of the Nationalist government in Nanjing, the Dalai Lama ordered his aforementioned delegate to visit Shanxi and Nanjing, where the delegate explained the Dalai Lama’s three points, namely, “not to befriend the British, not to betray the central government, and wish to welcome the Panchen Lama back to Tibet” (XZDA, 6: 2475). According to Konchok Jungne’s explanations, the Dalai Lama had never sought to ally with Britain, and he promised that the administrative, military, and diplomatic affairs of Tibet would be subject to the central government’s management in the future and a standing commissioner of the central government would be allowed to be stationed in Tibet while Tibet should also be allowed sufficient autonomy. In his conversation with Liu Manqing, an emissary of the Nanjing government who visited Lhasa from February to May 1930, the Dalai Lama reportedly made the following remark: The British indeed intended to seduce me, but I know that our sovereignty cannot be compromised. The characters and natures [of the British and Tibetan peoples] are incompatible with each other; therefore, when they came here, I dealt with them only perfunctorily and did not concede to them the slightest degree of rights. It is not difficult to solve the question of Tibet and Xikang peacefully as long as China achieves domestic unity. Having witnessed “the unspeakable suffering of the Indian people in their recent resistance against Britain’s extreme exploitation,” the Dalai Lama told Liu, “What I wish the most is China’s true peaceful unification” and that border disputes between Tibet and the interior provinces should never be solved by violence because they “both belong to China’s territory” (XZDF: 357–358). In response to the invitation by the Nationalist government, the Dalai Lama sent six formal delegates and three non-voting delegates to attend the National Congress in Nanjing in May 1931; the Panchen Lama, too, sent four formal delegates and five non-voting delegates to the same conference.

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The Panchen Lama, for his part, was in fact the most enthusiastic Tibetan leader advocating a pro-China policy. In a statement made upon the inauguration of “the Front Office of the Panchen Lama in the Capital City” in Nanjing in January 1929, he described the relationship between Tibet and China as follows: Tibet’s relations with China have deepened over time since the Han and Tang dynasties; furthermore, government officials and a garrison troop [from China] were installed [in Tibet] in the late Qing period. Given their historic and geographic relations, it is practically impossible for Tibet to separate from China in search of autonomy; on the other hand, for China to lose Tibet is just like a vehicle losing its wheels. Therefore, the relationship between China and Tibet is subject to a definite law: united, they both profit; divided, they both suffer. (XZDA, 7: 3089) Eager to go back to Tibet, he accepted the appointment by the Nanjing government as “Commissioner for Propagation and Education in the Western Frontier” (Xichui xuanhua shi) in December 1932, and began his preparation for the return trip. He also received 1 million yuan from Nanjing and a body guard of 300 men for that purpose. The 13th Dalai Lama also welcomed his return. Unfortunately, the return trip never succeeded after the death of the Dalai Lama in December 1933.2 After the outbreak of a full-scale war of resistance against Japan in July 1937 and in desperate need of help from Western powers, the Nationalist government retreated from its earlier position and instructed the delay of the Panchen’s return trip. The Panchen Lama died in frustration in December 1937.

The ebb and flow of Chinese influence after 1934 After the death of the 13th Dalai Lama, the fifth Reting Rinpoche (Jamphel Yeshe Gyaltsen, 1910–1947) was elected as the regent of Tibet in January 1934; he would remain in this position until his retirement in 1941. The Nanjing government’s influence in Tibet climaxed during his regency. Upon his assumption as the regent, Reting informed Nanjing of his new job, which was the very first of such actions by Tibetan leaders ever since the founding of the Republic in 1912, obviously because he sought confirmation of his authority in Tibet from the Nationalist government, which had recently subjugated all of the regional warlords within the interior and made the emergence of a unified and strong China a promising future. Later in August, the Tibetan government received the delegation of the Nationalist government led by Huang Musong to attend the funeral of the deceased Dalai Lama with a ceremony comparable to the welcome event for the Royal Commissioner of the Qing court before 1911. In their conversations with Huang, the Tibetan leaders objected to the stationing of Chinese troops in Lhasa and on their position over Tibet’s border with Xikang, but they

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agreed that “externally speaking, Tibet is part of China’s territory,” that “the authorities and regulations on Tibet’s domestic and foreign affairs should follow the instructions of the Chinese government as long as these instructions do not obstruct the administrative and religious activities [in Tibet],” and that “the Chinese and Tibetans should work together over the major issues regarding Tibet’s negotiation and signing of treaties with foreign countries” (XZDA, 6: 2684). The Tibetan government, in other words, continued to defend its autonomy but did not deny China’s sovereignty over Tibet. Another important event during Reting’s regency that involved a delegation from the Nationalist government was the selection and installation of the 14th Dalai Lama. After identifying three child candidates, Reting reported to the Nationalist government and invited a delegate from the latter to participate in the ceremony to select the new Dalai Lama by drawing lots in accordance with the established practice during the Qing. In response, the Nationalist government appointed Wu Zhongxin, head of the Council for Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs, as its delegate in December 1938. Wu arrived in Lhasa on January 15, 1940, where he received a warm welcome by the Tibetan government. By that time, however, Reting had determined the candidate from Qinghai to be the true reincarnated Dalai Lama. Wu insisted on personally inspecting the child before permitting the exemption of drawing lots. All of his activities went on smoothly afterwards until the issue of his seating at the ceremony of the new Dalai Lama’s reinstallation arose on February 22. Upon his insistence and with Reting’s support, Wu was seated next to the young Dalai Lama on his left side, facing the south, rather than seated together with other guests in front of the Dalai Lama and facing the north. The British delegate, who would have been seated together with other guests, did not attend the ceremony in the end. Also because of Reting’s support, a permanent Office of the Council of Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs (CMTA) of the Nationalist government was established in Lhasa on April 1 before Wu’s departure two weeks later (XZZL: 297–305). Tibet’s relationship with the Nationalist government deteriorated after Reting stepped down and the third Taktra Rinpoche (Ngawang Sungrab Thutob, 1874–1952) became the regent (1941–1950). To push for Tibet’s independence, Taktra announced the establishment of the “Bureau of Foreign Affairs” in July 1942, stopped his government’s provisions to the CMTA Office in Tibet, and informed the office to directly contact his bureau for whatever issues pertained to the Han and Tibetan peoples, though the CMTA Office firmly refused to deal with the bureau, causing the Tibetan government to create a separate organ in 1943 to communicate with it. A second attempt to claim Tibet’s independent status was Taktra’s decision to send a delegation to the Asian Relations Conference held in New Delhi in March 1947, at the advice of Hugh Edward Richardson, a representative of the British government in Lhasa. After the Chinese delegation protested, the conference organizer removed the “snow lion flag” that had been used by the Tibetan Army from the array of flags of participating countries at the conference and modified the huge map of Asia behind the

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rostrum that had designated Tibet as a separate country from China (Goldstein 1989: 563–564). One more effort to show Tibet’s independent gesture internationally was to send a “business delegation” to travel abroad from December 1947 to March 1949. What concerned the Tibetan as well as the Nationalist governments was how the delegation was treated by the destination countries and, most importantly, how their travel documents were handled. For the Tibetan delegation, carrying a Tibetan passport accepted by the destination countries was an unmistakable sign of their acknowledgement of Tibet as an independent state. Unfortunately, none of the countries the delegation visited officially endorsed their passports. In response to the Chinese ambassador’s inquiry, the Indian government replied that by convention it did not require a passport or any formal procedure for Tibetan visitors to legally enter India. George Marshall, Secretary of State of the United States, assured the Chinese ambassador that his government fully respected the stance of the Nationalist government and that its general consulate in Hong Kong, therefore, only issued a permit of entry to the Tibetan delegation, rather than the standard visa on the passports of its members. The British government explained to the Chinese embassy that it treated the delegation’s visit as only “a private commercial affair, not in any official capacity” (Grunfeld 1996: 89) and that it only required the use of an affidavit instead of a passport to issue visas to the Tibetan visitors (Zhou Gu 1990).

An independent Tibet? The changing relationship between the Tibetan and Republican governments reflected to some extent the rivalry between Britain and China for dominance of this highland. As it turned out, support from the British government or its agents in Tibet was key to the pro-British Tibetan elites’ activities in seeking Tibet’s independence from China. But Britain consistently avoided advocating Tibet’s formal independence; instead, it was only interested in turning Tibet into a buffer between India and China and establishing its dominance there while allowing China nominal suzerainty over Tibet, a strategy that was in the best interests of Britain’s global objectives. For the British government, to preserve its political influence and commercial interests in China and Hong Kong far outweighed the potential interests it could materialize from an independent Tibetan state. The United States did not want to offend China by endorsing Tibet’s independence either. It needed China’s collaboration as an ally during World War II and so continued to support Nationalist China after the war to safeguard its interests in East Asia concerning the oncoming conflict with the Soviet Union. The growing importance of China in global affairs as one of the five standing members of the Security Council of the United Nations after 1945 also made other nations, including India, refrain from openly supporting Tibet’s separation from China.

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The Chinese government, for its part, had not sought actual control of Tibet’s domestic affairs or to incorporate it into the administrative system of the interior following the founding of the Republic in 1912. Preoccupied with the burning tasks of fighting domestic and foreign enemies, the Republican government in Beijing and later in Nanjing had neither the willingness nor the ability to put Tibet under its administrative and military control. Its objective in Tibet, therefore, was only to prevent the highland from being officially separated from China and thereby to preserve the latter’s territorial unity, which was central to its legitimacy as the central government. Understandably, the essential guideline for the Republican government to manage its relationship with Tibet was to maintain the status quo or continue the preexisting arrangements it had inherited from the Qing, as best illustrated by the CMTA’s secret instruction to its office in Lhasa in 1946: “the biggest task is to avoid the rise of any tasks, and the biggest achievement is that nothing is achieved” (yi wushi wei dashi, wugong wei dagong) (WSZL, 79: 130). As a result, both the Republican government’s efforts to defend its rights in Tibet and the pro-British Tibetans’ attempts to assert Tibet’s independence were limited to the symbolic level, as seen in the former’s insistence on its delegate’s seating at the 14th Dalai Lama’s reinstallation and the latter’s use of their own passports and flags outside Tibet. All in all, three basic facts combined to form the geopolitical realities in which Tibet defined its relations with China or other nations in the first half of the twentieth century. First, despite its consistent efforts to defend China’s sovereignty over Tibet, the Nationalist government had little control of Tibet’s domestic affairs, including the selection and reinstallation of the Dalai Lama; compared to the Qing court, its presence in Lhasa greatly weakened in the absence of an institutionalized authority representing it before 1934, and the CMTA’s office in Lhasa after 1934 was far less influential than the Qing court’s Royal Commissioner in Tibet, which was above the secular authority of the Tibetan government before 1911. The Republican state even failed to live up to its role as a “suzerain” as acknowledged by Britain, given the facts that it did not play a positive role in shaping Tibet’s external relations and sanctioning its political leadership, as the word “suzerainty” suggests; its control of Tibet usually took a passive form: externally, it only aimed to prevent Tibet from developing formal diplomatic relationship with other nations; domestically, it only wanted to ensure that its rights inherited from the Qing were respected in Tibet. Second, despite its substantial autonomy from China, the Tibetan authorities never succeeded or even seriously attempted to create an independent Tibetan state during the first half of the twentieth century. To be sure, the 13th Dalai Lama did announce a proclamation in January 1913 upon returning from India to Lhasa, which blamed the Chinese provincial authorities for their attempts “to colonize our territory” (referring to the Sichuan troops’ entrance into Lhasa in 1909), and claimed that “the Chinese intention of colonizing Tibet under the patron-priest relationship has faded like a rainbow in the sky” (referring to the Tibetan rebellion and subsequent expulsion of the Chinese troops from Tibet in

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April 1912 in response to the anti-Qing uprising in Wuchang in October 1911) and that “we must defend our country” (Shakabpa 1967: 246–247). The Dalai Lama made this statement in a particular circumstance: the Qing court had deprived him of the Dalai Lama title twice, forcing him into exile in India; he was so discontented that he rejected President Yuan Shikai’s proposition to “restore” the title to him after the fall of the Qing, saying that he “intended to exercise both temporal and ecclesiastic rule in Tibet” (Goldstein 1989: 59–60). It is equally clear, however, that the Dalai Lama did not say in this statement that the “patron-priest relationship” itself had ended (or “faded like a rainbow”); he referred to the “Chinese intention of colonizing Tibet” or more exactly the stationing of Chinese troops in Lhasa. Instead, as a Tibet historian notes, he “was quite happy for the patron-priest ideal to continue” (van Schaik 2011: 285). It is also important to note that another Tibetan Buddhist leader, the Panchen Lama, whose influences prevailed over the Tsang region centered in Shigatse and whose standing was no less important than the Dalai Lama in Tibetan Buddhism, refused to cooperate with the latter in expelling the Han people (Goldstein 1989: 62–63). The Dalai Lama’s statement, in other words, was not fully representative of the will of all Tibetan leaders. Most importantly, the Dalai Lama himself later modified his stance and at least verbally respected the Nanjing government’s rights over Tibet as shown earlier. Third, there was no sovereign state in the world that officially acknowledged Tibet’s independence and established formal diplomatic relations with it, nor was it accepted as a member of the United Nations after 1945. On the other hand, China’s rights on Tibet were widely recognized. Not only did Britain officially and consistently acknowledge China’s “suzerainty” over Tibet, but the Tibetan leaders, including the 13th Dalai Lama, the ninth Panchen Lama, and the regent Reting, all acknowledged on specific occasions that Tibet was part of China’s territory and that the Republican government in Beijing or Nanjing was the “central government” to Tibet. It was against this background that the relationship between Tibet and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) evolved after 1949. The only difference before and after 1949 was that the PRC leaders, equally committed to China’s territorial unity as their Republican predecessors, not only felt it rightful to defend China’s sovereignty over Tibet, but more importantly, they had the will and strength to do so. After all, turning Tibet into an “autonomous region” of the PRC and sending Chinese troops to Lhasa, for the Communist leaders in the 1950s, was only to restore and continue the relationship between China and Tibet that had prevailed before 1911 but deteriorated afterwards.

From autonomy to independence: Outer Mongolia, 1911–1946 Unrecognized independence Compared to Tibet, which was geographically isolated and remote from the political center of China, Outer Mongolia was closer to Beijing and, therefore,

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subject to the greater impact of the “New Policies” of the Qing during its last decade. The stronger resentment among the Mongolian religious and political elites against the New Policies that had impaired their privileges accounted for their greater inclination to separate from China than their counterparts in Tibet; this, together with tsarist Russia’s support, explained why the Mongol elites went further than the Tibetans by formally declaring the independence of Outer Mongolia from China in late 1911. Outer Mongolia’s independence was in part a result of local elites’ resistance to the Qing court’s New Policies. Unlike its policy in Tibet, the Qing court actively engaged in ruling Outer Mongolia through its Administrative Commissioner (banshi dachen) in Kulun (Niislel Khuree, or Ulan Bator today), who supervised the activities of the Jebtsundamba Khutughtu (head of the Gelug lineage of Tibetan Buddhism in Mongolia), and its General of Uliastai (Uliasutai) (Wuliyasutai jiangjun) and the Deputy Commissioner of Kobdo (Kebuduo canzan dachen), who were in charge of local defense affairs. Among the New Policies introduced in the 1900s by Sanduo, the last Administrative Commissioner, were the creation of a variety of new government offices and military units as well as modern schools, police, clinics, goods exhibition halls, post offices, and telegraph offices. Local people opposed these projects because they saw little benefit from them while their tax burden greatly increased. Those who lived on husbandry opposed the policy that encouraged Han people’s migration and reclamation of pastures into farmland, which only increased local governments’ income from land taxes and rents (Wang Bingming 1990). Among the Mongol elites, the most resentful were the nobles whose stipends from the government were canceled or reduced and who were forced to make contributions to fund the “modernizing” projects. The eighth Jebtsundamba alone, for instance, bought 60,000 taels of bonds for this purpose (Hai Chunliang 2009). The Mongols knew well that their quest for independence could not succeed without support from Russia. But Russia’s strategy in Outer Mongolia was not the same as the goal of the Mongols. Russia only intended to turn Outer Mongolia into a buffer between itself on the one hand and China and Japan on the other; from its point of view, an independent Mongolia would worsen its relationship with Japan, incur rivalry among the powers that could threaten its dominance in this area, and constitute a potential troublesome neighbor to it in the future (Paine 1996: 291–291). It thus was in the best interests of Russia to make Outer Mongolia its protectorate with full autonomy from China while accepting China’s suzerainty, a strategy that was essentially the same as the British approach to Tibet. Not surprisingly, when a Mongol delegation led by Khanddorj (1871–1915) visited Russia in July 1911 to seek their support for Outer Mongolia’s independence, Russia only responded by acting as a mediator between China and Mongolia, suggesting the Qing court put a stop to the New Policies in Outer Mongolia. To enhance its influence there, however, Russia nevertheless provided the Mongols with a loan of 2 million rubles and a large quantity of weaponry and helped train Mongol soldiers while sending a cavalry of more than 800 men to Kulun to enhance its presence there. Later the

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Mongol leaders saw the outbreak of the Revolution of 1911 in Wuchang as a perfect opportunity to push for independence. They gathered together the Mongol forces in Kulun, disarmed the Qing garrison force there, forced Sanduo and his retinue to leave, and declared the founding of an independent Mongolian state on December 1, 1911, with the eighth Jebtsundamba enthroned as a theocratic ruler, called Bogd Khan. A treaty signed between Russia and Mongolia in November 1912 reflected Russia’s unchanged strategy in this area: it supported Mongolia in maintaining its autonomy but refused to recognize it as an independent state; both sides agreed in the treaty, however, that no Chinese troops would be allowed to enter the territory of Mongolia and no Chinese would be granted the rights to migrate and colonize it either. The Republican government in Beijing responded by refusing to acknowledge the treaty and insisting that Mongolia was part of China and that any treaty pertaining to Mongolia had to be made with the central government of China instead of Kulun. However, pressed with the urgent tasks of fighting the pro-Guomindang provinces, seeking the recognition of the newly founded Republic by foreign powers, and obtaining a large foreign loan that involved Russian banks, President Yuan Shikai retreated from his original position and started the negotiation with Russia over Mongolia’s status. The result was the signing in May 1913 of a six-article treaty over Mongolia, by which Russia recognized it as part of China’s territory and agreed not to send troops to Outer Mongolia, while China agreed not to alter the preexisting autonomous institutions in Mongolia, allowed it the rights to organize its own troops and police and to refuse the immigration of non-Mongolian peoples, and recognized Russian business privileges in Outer Mongolia as specified by the 1912 treaty between Russia and Mongolia (MGWJ, 1: 120). The treaty satisfied neither side, however; it was soon negated by the Guomindang-controlled Senate of the Beijing government and abolished unilaterally by the Russian government. Negotiation resumed in Beijing afterwards, resulting in the signing of a five-article treaty in November 1913. By this treaty, Russia acknowledged China’s “suzerainty” over Outer Mongolia and agreed not to send its troops or migrants there, while China acknowledged Outer Mongolia’s autonomy and its rights to handle domestic affairs but retained Beijing’s rights to send its commissioners together with armed guards to be stationed in Kulun and other localities there. In a four-article statement attached to the treaty, Russia further recognized Outer Mongolia as part of China’s territory, while the Chinese government agreed to consult the Russian government for whatever political and territorial issues pertaining to Outer Mongolia arose in the future (YZHB, 2: 947–948). Another treaty signed by China, Russia, and Outer Mongolia in June 1915 largely reaffirmed these terms (YZHB, 2: 1116–1120). As a result, Outer Mongolia failed to be an independent state. Beijing continued to send its commissioners and garrison forces to Kulun and its other parts of Outer Mongolia; most importantly, Beijing retained the right of conferring the Jebtsundamba Khutughtu title to the de facto leader of the Mongolian government, as it actually did in July 1916.

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From the cancellation of autonomy to eventual independence The outbreak of the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 had an immediate impact on Outer Mongolia. Unable to seek protection from Russia anymore, the Mongols were confronted with uncertainties in and outside their land, as seen in the rapid growth of White Russian forces, the invasion of the Red Army from Soviet Russia under the pretext of suppressing the Whites, and the penetration of the Japanese, who attempted to create an independent Mongolian government in collaboration with the White Russians and thereby to put the whole of Mongolia under its control. Division and rivalry also developed among the Mongol elites. While high-ranking priests (the so-called Yellow Faction) around Bogd Khan continued their control of government positions after their declaration of independence in late 1911, the Mongol nobility (the Black Faction) who had ruled Khalkha Mongol tribes before 1911 attempted to take back government power from the priests, and the factional struggle intensified after 1917 when the Yellow Faction lost Russian support. To achieve their goal, members of the Black Faction expressed to Beijing’s commissioner in Kulun their willingness to end Outer Mongolia’s autonomous status in exchange for Beijing’s support, regardless of the opposition from the Yellow Faction. As a result of negotiation between the Mongol nobles and the Beijing government, and under pressure from Xu Shuzheng (1880–1925), the newly appointed Commissioner Overseeing the Northwestern Frontiers (Xibei choubianshi), the Mongol leaders petitioned Beijing to end their government’s autonomous status on November 18, 1919. Four days later, Beijing officially announced the cancellation of Outer Mongolia’s autonomy and the restoration of their relationship that had existed during the Qing (MGWJ, 1: 513–514). Nevertheless, the recovery of the pre-1911 relationship between Beijing and Outer Mongolia was short-lived. In February 1921, a tsarist cavalry unit under Baron Ungern occupied Kulun and drove out the Chinese forces. At Ungern’s machination, the Bogd Khan once again declared Mongolia’s independence. Five months later, a Mongolian resistance force led by Damdiny Sükhbaatar, together with units of the Soviet Red Army, captured Kulun, and an independent “People’s Government” was established on July 11, 1921, with the Bogd Khan as nominal head of state. In 1924, following the mysterious death of the Bogd Khan and the subsequent abolition of the monarchy, the state was renamed the Mongolian People’s Republic. Soviet support was key to the success of Mongolia’s independence. In its declaration on August 3, 1919, the Soviet government claimed Mongolia to be “a free state” whose power belonged to the Mongolian people. The entrance of the Red Army (more than ten thousand soldiers of infantry, cavalry, and artillery) into Outer Mongolia and its defeat of the Whites occupying Kulun in July 1921 directly led to the establishment of the Mongolian People’s Government. In its agreement with the new Mongolian authority signed on November 5, the Soviet government recognized it as the “only legitimate government” of Mongolia. A secret treaty between the Soviet and Mongolian governments

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signed on February 20, 1923, further stipulated the use of Soviet advisors in the Mongolian government and the stationing of the Soviet Army in Mongolia (Ao Guangxu 2007: 60). This happened less than a month after Adolph Joffe, a Soviet diplomat in China, assured Sun Yat-sen, leader of the revolutionary government in Guangzhou, that the Soviet government “will never, nor have the intention to, carry out an imperialist policy in Outer Mongolia or to separate it from China” (SZS, 7: 52). To improve its relationship with China, Lev Mikhailovich Karakhan, the Soviet ambassador to Beijing, signed an agreement with Willington Koo, the Chinese foreign minister, on May 31, 1924, in which the Soviet Union “recognizes Outer Mongolia as a part of the complete Republic of China and respects China’s sovereignty on this territory” (YZHB, 3: 423). Only five months later, however, the Mongolia People’s Republic was established, with Soviet advisors playing a key role in its government and the Soviet Army controlling its territory. No other countries, however, recognized it as an independent state, except for the Soviet Union.3 Mongolia as an independent state won diplomatic recognition only after World War II as the result of a secret deal among Soviet, U.S., and British leaders and the negotiation between the Chinese and Soviet governments. According to the secret agreement regarding Japan signed by Joseph Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill at the Yalta Conference on February 11, 1945, the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan two or three months after German surrender on the conditions that “the status quo in Outer Mongolia (The Mongolian People’s Republic) shall be preserved” and that the Russian rights in Manchuria and beyond “violated by the treacherous attack of Japan in 1904” should be restored. But different parties had different interpretations of “the status quo” in Outer Mongolia. For Stalin, it meant the Soviet Union’s negation of its earlier stance, which was stated in its 1924 agreement with China, and China’s recognition of Outer Mongolia’s independence. For the United States, however, it meant the continuation of China’s legal suzerainty over Outer Mongolia despite its inability to exercise it in actuality. For the Nanjing government, it only meant China’s sovereignty over Outer Mongolia as the 1924 Sino-Soviet agreement affirmed (Wu Jingping 1998: 465). The Nanjing government was informed of this agreement as late as June 14, 1945, and it did not have to accept the conditions demanded by Stalin in order for the Soviet Union to enter the war against Japan because, after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, Japan was doomed to fail even without the Soviet involvement to end the war; and, indeed, to ensure the Soviet Union’s bargaining power after Japanese surrender, Stalin hastily declared war on Japan on August 9 without the signing of a Sino-Soviet treaty to satisfy his terms. The real leverage that Stalin had in pressing Nanjing to accept his terms, in fact, was his attitude toward the imminent civil war in China and the Soviet occupation of Manchuria after the Japanese surrender. During the negotiation, Stalin threatened Song Ziwen (T. V. Soong), the foreign minister of the Nanjing government, that the Chinese Communist force would be allowed to enter Manchuria if no treaty was signed between the two governments (Harriman

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1975: 496). For Chiang, the Soviet siding was decisive to his rivalry with the communist forces. He eventually conceded to Stalin’s pressure after the latter assured him that the Soviet Union would not provide moral or material assistance to the Communists, that all Chinese military forces should be under the control of the Nationalist government, and that the Soviet Union would do its best to push for China’s unification under Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership (Truman 1986: 269). The Nationalist government officially recognized Outer Mongolia as an independent state on January 5, 1946, after a referendum was conducted on October 20, 1945, in favor of Outer Mongolia’s independence from China. But Stalin’s assurances did not come true in the following civil war in China, and the latter lost Outer Mongolia forever.

Recovering China’s territorial entity The Cairo conference of 1943 A defining moment in China’s quest for the recovery of its territorial entity was the Cairo Conference on November 22 to 26, 1943, in which the leaders of China, Britain, and the United States, foreseeing the Allies’ imminent victory over Germany and Japan after starting their offensives in Europe and the West Pacific, discussed their coordinated operations to end the war and arrangements for postwar international relations and settlements of the territories that had been seized by Japan before the war. For Chiang Kai-shek, the top priority in China’s struggle for national survival and the search for territorial entity would be the recovery of the lost territories that had been integral parts of the country, including primarily Taiwan, which had been turned into a province in 1885 but ceded to Japan in 1895, and Manchuria, which had formed three provinces in 1907 but was occupied by the Japanese Kwantung Army in 1931 and ruled by the puppet Manchukuo afterwards. Another important goal for Chiang participating in the Cairo Conference was to free China’s former tributary states from European or Japanese colonial rule and make them independent states; for Chiang and the Nationalist government, this was both China’s moral obligation as an ex-suzerain state towards its former tributary states, of which Korea had been the most important, and a strategic choice to ensure China’s geopolitical security in the postwar era. Thus, among the “biggest issues” (zuida zhi wenti) that Chiang planned to discuss with President Franklin Roosevelt of the United States and Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain, the two pertaining to territory were (1) “the Northeast and Taiwan should be returned to our country” and (2) “the independence of Korea,” as he noted in his diary on November 17 (JJSR: 11/17/1943). Chiang did discuss these issues in Cairo. In his conversation with Roosevelt on November 23 at the dinner hosted by the latter, Chiang raised the territorial issue and insisted on the return of the “four Northeastern provinces, Taiwan, and the Penghu Islands” to China, as noted in his diary. Roosevelt agreed on Chiang’s proposition. This conversation was confirmed by another source, the

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English translation of an official “Chinese summary record,” which was provided by Hollington Tong, the Chiang regime’s ambassador in Washington, in 1956 and included in Foreign Relations of the United States Diplomatic Papers. According to this source, Generalissimo Chiang and President Roosevelt agreed that the four Northeastern provinces of China, Taiwan, and the Penghu Islands [Pescadores] which Japan had taken from China by force must be restored to China after the war, it being understood that the Liaotung Peninsula and its two ports, Lushun (Port of Arthur) and Dairen, must be included. (USFR: 324) Thus, despite Churchill’s suggestion of changing the wording of the settlement pertaining to the aforementioned three Chinese territories from “to be restored to China” to “to be renounced by Japan,” which Chiang opposed, the final draft of the joint statement of the three leaders nevertheless reflected Chiang’s purpose: The three great Allies are fighting this war to restrain and punish the aggression of Japan. They covet no gain for themselves and have no thought of territorial expansion. It is their purpose that … all the territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese, such as Manchuria, Formosa, and the Pescadores, shall be restored to the Republic of China. (ibid.: 448) The Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, did not attend the conference, but he fully endorsed the above statement at the conference he held with Roosevelt and Churchill in Tehran on November 28 to December 1, 1943. According to the minutes of the conference, Stalin “thoroughly approved the communiqué and all its contents.” He further stated that “it was right that Korea should be independent, and that Manchuria, Formosa and the Pescadores Islands should be returned to China” (ibid.: 566). A consensus on the restoration of Manchuria, Taiwan, and the Penghu Islands to China thus was clearly and fully achieved among the leaders of the Allied Powers, including China, the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. Chiang, therefore, could not hide his excitement and pride by writing the following words shortly after the conclusion of the Cairo conference: The three eastern provinces and Taiwan as well as the Penghu Islands, as territories having been lost for fifty or more than twelve years, will be returned to our country by the joint statement of the U.S. and Britain, and it is also recognized that Korea will be independent and free after the war. How immeasurable is the importance of such an event, such a proposition, and such a hope! All of them are included in the publicized joint statement by the three Powers. This is indeed a diplomatic success unprecedented in China and the world. (JJSR: 11/26/1943)

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The Liuchiu issue It is worthwhile at this juncture to probe into the exchanges among the major leaders of the Allies at the Cairo and Tehran conferences over the postwar status of the Liuchiu Islands. According to the aforementioned record provided by Tong, in his conversation with Chiang Kai-shek at the dinner on November 23, Roosevelt “enquired more than once whether China would want the Liuchius,” and Chiang replied that “China would be agreeable to joint occupation of the Liuchius by China and the United States and, eventually, joint administration by the two countries under the trusteeship of an international organization” (ibid.: 324). Chiang’s response to Roosevelt’s inquiry here was not improvisational and unprepared. A week earlier, on November 15, Chiang wrote in his diary: “Liuchiu is different from Taiwan in their respective historical standings in our country. Liuchiu formed a kingdom, whose standing was equivalent to Korea, therefore, the Liuchiu issue should not be raised in this round of proposals” (JJSR: 11/15/1943). Two questions thus remain. First, was Roosevelt sincere in proposing the return of the Liuchiu Islands to China? Two pieces of evidence suggest a positive answer to this question. One was the fact that Roosevelt raised this issue to Chiang “more than once” as quoted above, indicating that this inquiry was not a mere casual remark, but a serious issue that he wanted to discuss with Chiang. More telling evidence comes from the minutes of a meeting of the Pacific War Council held in Washington on January 12, 1944, and attended by President Roosevelt, the ambassadors of the Netherlands, China, and Canada, the representative of the British ambassador, the vice president of the Philippines, and the ministers of New Zealand and Australia. According to this record, Roosevelt informed the Council his “highly satisfactory” discussions with Chiang Kai-shek and with Stalin at the Cairo and Tehran conferences respectively. “President Roosevelt also recalled,” the minutes continue, “that Stalin is familiar with the history of the Liuchiu Islands and that he is in complete agreement that they belong to China and should be returned to her” (USFR: 869). This record suggests that Roosevelt not only discussed the Liuchiu issue with Chiang at the Cairo conference but further discussed the same issue with Stalin at the Tehran conference and that both the U.S. and Soviet leaders agreed on China’s right over the Liuchiu Islands. It should be noted that Roosevelt’s exchange and agreement with Stalin over the Liuchiu issue took place after Chiang Kai-shek had explicitly and repeatedly expressed his idea of joint military occupation and administration by China and the United States. The reasons behind Roosevelt’s insistence on returning Liuchiu to China remain unclear. But three obvious facts certainly worked together to influence Roosevelt’s attitude. First, while historically both China and Japan claimed their suzerainty over Liuchiu, for him China was the only one that maintained the historical right over the islands after Japan was defeated. Second, Chiang Kai-shek had insisted on the joint occupation and administration of the islands by China and the United States, which would actually leave the latter as the

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dominant power to occupy and govern the islands after the war, given China’s limited military capabilities to partner the United States in this regard. Third, by acknowledging China’s sovereignty over Liuchiu, Roosevelt wanted to secure China’s collaboration with the United States in the military operations in the China and Southeast Asia theaters and ultimately to turn China into the United States’ ally in the West Pacific to ensure American dominance in the postwar Far East. The second question is why Chiang rejected Roosevelt’s proposal of returning Liuchiu to China and insisting on the two countries’ joint control of it. In his essay titled “China’s Destiny,” published in early 1943, Chiang put Liuchiu at the top of the list of territories central to China’s security.4 The strategic importance of the Liuchiu islands to Chiang was obvious. In his diary on November 23, Chiang offered three reasons why he did not accept Roosevelt’s proposition. The first was “to assuage the U.S.” (an Meiguo zhi xin). The second was that “Liuchiu had belonged to Japan before 1895”; here again Chiang limited his goal to restoring the Chinese territories that were seized by Japan in and after 1895, primarily Taiwan, the Penghu islands, and Manchuria, disregarding the fact that Japan annexed Liuchiu as late as 1879. The third was that “putting this area under the joint administration with the U.S. is better than under our exclusive possession” (JJSR: 11/23/1943); Chiang knew well that China was militarily too weak to exclusively occupy the Liuchiu Islands and that, with the United States as China’s ally in the postwar era, it was also unnecessary and unwise for China to shoulder all of the duties and costs of occupying and governing the islands.

China’s territorial entity: lost and rescued Republican China encountered the biggest crisis in the 1930s and the early 1940s in safeguarding the territory it had inherited from the Qing. Compared to the Qing at its height in the mid-eighteenth century, China had lost not only all of the tributary states outside its immediate territory, but also Taiwan to Japan and parts of its northeastern and northwestern frontiers to Russia during the late Qing period; after the founding of the Mongolian People’s Republic in 1924 and Manchukuo in 1932, despite their lack of recognition by the international community, China further lost Outer Mongolia and its four northeastern provinces in actuality. Xijiang and Tibet never officially declared their independence from China, but the Nationalist government’s influence in those areas were very limited. China, in a word, returned in essence to where it had been before the Qing in terms of territoriality. The dynamics leading to these results involved an intricate interaction among three sets of players: foreign powers that had a stake in Chinese territory, the ruling elites of the frontiers, and the domestic politics of inland China. Each of the three major powers, namely Britain, Russia, and Japan, which played a decisive role in shaping China’s territory in the Republican era, had its own goals and strategies towards China. Britain had much more direct investment in the Chinese provinces than in Tibet; to protect its economic interests in

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China were no less important than maintaining its influence in Tibet. Therefore, it avoided overt support to Tibet’s separation from China at the risk of offending the latter and sacrificing its interests there. Its basic policy towards Tibet was to support the latter’s autonomy and at the same time acknowledge China’s suzerainty over the highland (Rubin 1968). In sharp contrast, the Soviet Union’s direct investments in China were negligible, but it was a direct neighbor on three frontiers: Xinjiang, Outer Mongolia, and Manchuria, which mattered a lot to China’s security, hence its strategies towards each of the frontiers varied. Russia found it most difficult to penetrate Manchuria, where it encountered a hostile Chinese warlord regime under Zhang Zuolin and a strong Japanese presence in Manchuria; instead, it adopted a defensive strategy in this area and avoided direct confrontation with Japan, its most formidable rival in the Far East. Russia felt most secure in its relationship with Xinjiang, where it faced no competition from any other major powers; on the other hand, the Soviet leaders also found it neither viable to penetrate the Chinese frontier when it was under the firm control of a Chinese governor, Yang Zhengxin (1864–1928), who remained loyal to Beijing until his assassination; nor did they find it wise to alienate Nationalist China by overtly supporting Shen Shicai (1897–1970), the next Chinese warlord in Xinjiang, regardless of his overt pro-Soviet stance, because keeping China as a partner or ally was important to Russia for it to thwart the Japanese threat to it before and during World War II. By contrast, Russia had its biggest stake in Outer Mongolia, and turning this Chinese frontier into an independent state best served its strategic interest, not only because a weak Chinese presence in Outer Mongolia made it possible and relatively easy to separate this area from China, but also because an independent Outer Mongolia could be a buffer in its relationship with Japan, which had dominated Manchuria since the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. The Soviet Union thus encouraged the separationist movement in Outer Mongolia and played a key role in its independence from China. For Japan, Manchuria was critically important not only because of its massive investment and its dependence on the resources and markets in this area, but also because of its expansionist strategy in which Manchuria served as a springboard for its further aggression with China. Putting Manchuria under its direct occupation or under its control through a puppet state best served its economic and strategic interests. But Japan had to remove two barriers before it was able to achieve these goals: the Fengtian clique under Zhang Zuolin that appeared to be accommodative to the Japanese but at the same time fiercely resisted any moves that threatened its own interest; and behind the Fengtian clique the Nationalist government in Nanjing that was to incorporate Manchuria into it and thereby build a unified and strong Chinese state, a prospect that would ultimately shatter the Japanese dream of expanding their empire to the entire East Asian region. Therefore, eliminating the Fengtian forces from Manchuria, militarily occupying this area, and preventing the rise of a unified China under the Nanjing government through a full-scale war against China were the necessary steps that Japan had to take to achieve its strategic goals.

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Each of the frontiers acted differently in dealing with the foreign powers at stake. The Fengtian clique, though among the strongest regional forces in China, was disproportional to Japan militarily. It gave up Manchuria to the Japanese Kwangtung Army in 1931 in conformity to the order of the Nationalist government in Nanjing, which wanted to avoid a full-scale confrontation with Japan at all cost in the early 1930s. Xinjiang, for its part, remained under the Nationalist government throughout the 1930s and 1940s because of Stalin’s lack of interest in annexing the Chinese province, which in turn had to do with the absence of serious threats from this area to Russia, and, more importantly, because of China’s growing importance to the Allies in their coordinated efforts to defeat Japan in the last years of World War II, which explained Shen Shicai’s reversal of his pro-Soviet stance and submission to the Nationalist government after 1943. In Tibet and Outer Mongolia, the schism between religious and secular elites or among the spiritual leaders there accounted for the complexity and capriciousness of their relationship with the Republican government in Beijing or Nanjing. In the end, despite the weak presence of the Beijing or Nanjing government in Lhasa, the Tibetan elites never overtly challenged China’s suzerainty over the highland. Britain’s unwillingness to openly stand behind the separationists was no doubt an important reason. Even more important in explaining this reality, however, was the lingering impact of the religious and political bonds between Tibet and the Chinese state that had existed during the Qing and that survived into the Republican years, as well as the divisions among the Tibetan spiritual and secular leaders, which prevented them from reaching a consensus over their land’s definite relationship with China. In Outer Mongolia, likewise, the division between the secular and spiritual leaders explained the vicissitudes in their relationship with Beijing in the 1910s; it was only in the early 1920s when the pro-Soviet Mongols came to dominate the government that Outer Mongolia’s separation from China became irreversible, partly because of the Soviet Union’s overt support and machinations behind the scenes, and partly because of the Mongol revolutionaries’ lack of any religious or historical ties with Beijing. The attitudes of the Republican state and regional forces towards the frontiers were equally important in explaining the status of the latter in relation to Beijing or Nanjing. It was true that divisions among the domestic forces and the overwhelming pressure of foreign threats made it impossible for Beijing or Nanjing to play an aggressive role in its frontiers as did the Qing in the eighteenth century. However, when confronted with foreign threats or a crisis on the frontiers, the political elites at the national and regional levels were all compelled to commit themselves to defending China’s national interest and safeguarding the security of its frontiers, partly out of the need to protect their own regimes, and partly because of their nationalist impulse. President Yuan Shikai’s handling of China’s foreign relations, therefore, appeared to be conciliatory and at the same time driven by his strong nationalist commitment (Su and Jing 2004). The same was true about Duan Qirui, leader of the Anhui clique, and Wu Peifu, leader of the Zhili clique, both appearing to be at once realistic and uncompromising in dealing

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with Western or Japanese imperialism. The growth of the Fengtian clique under Zhang Zuolin had much to do with his accommodation of Japanese interests in Manchuria, and he was therefore often known as a pro-Japanese warlord; yet, Zhang turned out to be firm in defending Chinese sovereignty and rejecting Japanese excessive claims in the area under his jurisdiction, which led to his assassination by the Japanese in 1928. All in all, despite the fierce confrontation over domestic politics under the Beijing and later the Nanjing governments, the shared need for legitimacy among the national and regional leaders in the age of nationalism and their subsequent commitment to defending China’s sovereignty contributed to the survival of most of the frontiers that the Republican government had inherited from the Qing. In the end, it was the interplay between the vicissitudes in China’s geopolitical setting and the dynamics of its domestic politics that determined what the country would become. The victory of the Allies over Japan in the Pacific War in 1945 directly led to China’s recovery of its sovereignty over Manchuria, Taiwan, and the Pescadores. For a while in 1945 shortly after the Japanese surrender, the Nationalist state was able to claim its sovereignty over a territory that was not too different from the territory of the Qing during its height in the mideighteenth century, ranging from Manchuria in the northeast, through Outer and Inner Mongolia in the north and Xinjiang in the northwest, to Tibet in the southwest and Taiwan in the southeast. China would also have been in a position to establish its sovereignty over the Liuchiu Islands, had Chiang Kaishek been more confident and positive in accepting President Roosevelt’s repeated propositions. But the Nationalist government’s weakness in dealing with the Soviet Union and Chiang Kai-shek’s miscalculation nevertheless led to China’s recognition of Outer Mongolia’s independence at a moment when China had survived the eight-year Japanese occupation and recovered most of its lost territories that had been seized by Japan. In terms of sheer size, what the Republican state lost outweighed what it regained at the end of World War II. Despite these setbacks, the Nationalists’ state-rebuilding efforts should not be underestimated. China emerged as one of the Four Powers, together with the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain, by the end of World War II, and therefore was in a position to play an important role in shaping the postwar international order in the Far East. China’s elevated standing later qualified it to be one of the five standing members of the Security Council of the United Nations, which prepared the country to play a growing role in world politics and shake off its image as a weak nation subject to the bullying of foreign powers. Most importantly, Republican China succeeded in keeping or restoring most of the frontiers it had inherited from the Qing, which was indeed “the greatest accomplishment of Republican diplomacy” (Kirby 1997: 437). Much of the continuity in China’s territory in the twentieth century should be credited to the historical and religious ties that the Qing court had maintained with the Mongol and Tibetan elites as well as to the nationalism of the national and regional leaders under the Beijing and Nanjing governments. A more decisive factor, however, had to do with the amazing tenacity and viability of the

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Nationalist state under Chiang Kai-shek during its most difficult years in the late 1930s and early 1940s when China suffered Japanese invasion and occupation. Without the Nationalist state’s resilience, resistance, and contribution to the Allies’ war against Japan, China’s recovery of its lost territories from Japan would have been significantly delayed and discounted. Exactly how the Guomindang state built itself and managed to survive the crises of domestic division and foreign aggression is to be scrutinized in the next chapter.

Notes 1 A secret agreement between the British and Tibetan delegates at the conference redefined the border between Tibet and India, which was neither officially reported to the Dalai Lama by the Tibetan delegate in the absence of the Tibetan government’s authorization in advance for him to negotiate the border, nor publicized by the British government for years after the conference (Goldstein 1989: 75–76, 299–309, 412–419). By this boundary (known as the “McMahon Line” named after the British delegate), more than 70,000 square kilometers of land that had been under the jurisdiction of the Tibetan government would belong to India. Later it became the focal point in the border dispute between China and India in the early 1960s. 2 One reason had to do with opposition from the secular authorities in Tibet, who saw his return as a threat to their political standing and economic interests, because the Panchen Lama would be the only surviving spiritual leader and enjoy much higher standing in Tibet if he returned, and they would no longer be able to collect taxes from Western Tibet, which had been ruled by the Panchen Lama before his flight in 1924; those who had been involved in the activities causing the Panchen to flee also worried about his potential revenge once he came back. A more important reason, however, was opposition from Britain, which saw the return of a pro-China leader as a clear threat to its influences in Tibet. Their dispute with the Panchen and the Nanjing government focused on the use of the 300 Chinese armed escorts accompanying his return, which the Nanjing government did intend to be a means to enhance its presence in Tibet while the British and secular Tibetan authorities interpreted it as the beginning of the revival of Chinese control there. 3 It is worth noting here the varying attitudes of political forces within China towards Mongolia’s independence and the Soviet role in it. For a few years after 1917, the Beijing government found itself in an advantageous position to deal with Soviet Russia, when the latter was beset by the joint military operation of multiple nations in 1918–1919 and the Japanese threat in the Russian Far East, which continued until 1922. After surviving the allied intervention, Soviet Russia was in desperate need of diplomatic recognition to end its isolation from the international community. To win over China and overcome food shortages at home by reestablishing trade relations with China, the Soviet government announced its willingness to renounce all of the prerogatives, including the Boxer Indemnity, that the tsarist government had procured in China. Skeptical of the Soviet government’s intension and fearful of the influence of the Russian revolution in China, however, the Beijing government ignored this announcement, adopted a hostile attitude toward Soviet Russia, and, as a member of the Allies in World War I, joined the allied intervention against it. To defend China’s sovereignty in Outer Mongolia, the Beijing government planned a military expedition into this region in April 1921, in response to Ungern’s occupation of Kulun. After the Soviet forces defeated the Whites there, Beijing further demanded the return of Kulun and other localities occupied by the Red Army and requested the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Outer Mongolia. It also protested the Soviet government’s signing of a secret agreement with the new Mongolian government in 1922, and succeeded in

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insisting on the Soviet government’s recognition of Outer Mongolia as part of China and its commitment to withdrawing its troops from there, as stipulated in the 1924 agreement mentioned above. Thus, for all the conflicts among the warlords that controlled the central government in turn, Beijing was persistent in defending China’s interests and rights in the northern frontiers, partly because of its need of legitimacybuilding, and partly because of the professionalism of a new generation of Chinese diplomats who had received their training in the West. In contrast, the regional military cliques adopted a more pragmatic approach toward the border issues. To obtain military and financial aid from Soviet Russia, Sun Yat-sen wrote Adolph Joffe in August 1922, for instance, that the Soviet forces did not have to withdraw from Outer Mongolia because Soviet Russia had no intention of occupying that area. In return, Joffe proposed to provide Sun with a loan of 20 million U.S. dollars for ten months, on the condition that Sun would collaborate with the liberal warlord Wu Peifu of the Zhili clique to fight the Fengtian clique, which was openly hostile to Soviet Russia, and form a pro-Soviet government in China (GCGJ, 1: 130–146). Not surprisingly, in the joint Sun–Joffe manifesto signed in January 1923, Sun concurred with Joffe that the Soviet forces did not need to withdraw from Outer Mongolia immediately and that the Russian management of the railroad network in Manchuria, which had been invested in by tsarist Russia, would remain unchanged (SZS, 7: 52). Zhang Zuolin, head of the Fengtian clique, turned out to be more opportunistic. At the Tianjin Meeting attended by the warlords of North China in April 1921, Zhang appeared to be the most ardent in leading an expeditionary force to take back Outer Mongolia from the Russian Whites. After receiving a funding of 3 million yuan from Beijing, he dispatched his troops to Rehe and put the province under his control but refused to order his forces to march further to the north; later, after the Soviet force captured Kulun, he stopped the operation and asked Beijing to deal with Moscow for the return of the city (Hu and Li 2005: 260). 4 Chiang wrote: “Liuchiu, Taiwan and Penghu, the Northeast, Inner and Outer Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet – all these areas constitute the fortress defending national survival. Ceding or splitting any of these areas would mean the dismantling of China’s national defense” (Jiang Jieshi 1946).

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The fate of semi-centralism The nationalist state succeeded and failed

From the 1920s to the 1940s, China experienced the biggest challenge and setback but also the most important breakthrough in state rebuilding. Aside from the persistence of provincial military forces that continued to foil the state’s unifying efforts, the threat to China came primarily from Japan, whose ambition to establish its commercial and military dominance in East Asia drove its occupation of Manchuria in 1931 and its full-scale invasion of China in 1937. Had the GMD force failed to build a national regime or had it lost the war with Japan, the result of World War II in the Far East as well as the historical course of modern China would have been different. As it turned out, however, the Nationalist state not only withstood the Japanese aggression, but also emerged triumphant in 1945 after the eight-year War of Resistance. Even more surprisingly, it recovered all of the lands that had been lost to Japan since the Sino-Japanese War of 1894, and it further joined the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France to form the “Five Powers” to inaugurate the United Nations. At home, the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek reached the peak of his influence and reputation after the Japanese surrender, and a negotiation between his regime and the CCP took place to create a democratic coalition government. For a moment, China appeared to be on the verge of becoming not only an independent nation with its territorial integrity largely salvaged, but also a rising power basing its government on the principles of political freedom and representative democracy. Unfortunately, that key step of state-making failed abruptly in mid-1946, ushering in another round of civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists, in which the CCP eventually prevailed in 1949. The prospect of building a new state embracing capitalism and democracy yielded to the reality of a highly centralized state under the rule of the Communist Party afterwards. Why, then, did the GMD succeed in resisting Japan but fail to fight the CCP? One cannot fully understand the strength and weakness of the Nationalist government in Nanjing without first looking at the Northern Expedition that led to its founding in 1927; it was in this two-year campaign that the Nationalist force arose from a regional competitor, subjugated all other warlords in different parts of China, and turned itself into a national regime. Past studies on the origins of the GMD government have pinpointed different factors behind its

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success in the Northern Expedition, such as the GMD’s nationalist ideology and popular support (Isaacs 1951; Ch’i 1976) or the formation of a “party army” based on the Soviet model to ensure the army’s organizational cohesion (McCord 1993: 313–314). Other observers dismiss the importance of mass mobilization and instead underscore Chiang Kai-shek’s compromise with individual warlords (see, e.g., Jordan 1976). Despite the different interpretations on the rise of the GMD, almost all historians agree on the detrimental effect of Chiang’s policy of warlord conversion into the party-state he established. They find that assimilating the large number of conservative, self-interested warlords or former bureaucrats of warlord governments soon resulted in the rampant problems of corruption, nepotism, and inefficiency in the GMD’s party and government organizations, in spite of its tremendous efforts of state-building that achieved breakthroughs on many fronts.1 No matter whether the Nationalist state was merely another warlord regime beset with failures or a modernizing force, one cannot deny two basic facts about it. The first is its ability to withstand the Japanese attack and survive throughout the eight years of the War of Resistance; as Albert Wedemeyer, Chief of Staff to Chiang Kai-shek commanding all U.S. forces in China, observed, the Nationalist forces displayed “amazing tenacity and endurance in resisting Japan,” which contrasted sharply with France in World War II that collapsed after only six weeks of fighting with Germany (Wedemeyer 1958: 277–278). Thus, even Lloyd Eastman, who is among the most dismissive of the Nationalist regime, praises Nationalist China’s resistance as “a marvel of determination and self-sufficiency,” which “contributed significantly to the total Allied war effort against the Axis powers” by tying up “approximately a million Japanese troops on the continent of Asia – troops that might otherwise have been used to combat the island-hopping armies of the Western allies in the Pacific” (Eastman 1984: 130–131). The other fact about the Guomindang state, of course, is its collapse in the Civil War, which testified to the vulnerabilities inherent in the same regime. To offer a balanced account of the GMD’s state-making efforts, therefore, this chapter looks into the reasons behind the remarkable competence and resilience it demonstrated before and during the War of Resistance as well as its fragility when confronted with the Communists in the decisive Civil War years. Chapter 7 has discussed the origins of the Nationalist state in Guangdong up to 1927; this chapter, therefore, will look at how the GMD rebuilt a centralized and unified state on military, ideological, and political fronts after 1927, which is key to understanding its successes and failures in the 1930s and 1940s.

Toward a unified state Military unification The completion of national unification that the Nationalist government declared at the end of 1928 was nominal and temporary. To achieve the goal of unifying

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China during the Northern Expedition, the Nationalist force did eliminate its immediate enemies, the warlord forces of the Zhili clique, from the middle and lower Yangzi regions, and it also defeated the forces of the Fengtian clique in North China. In doing so, however, the Nationalists also compromised with the rest of the warlords, allowing them to keep the territories, armies, and financial resources that they had possessed before, and expanded during, the Northern Expedition, as long as they allied with the Nationalists and acknowledged the political leadership of Chiang Kai-shek. Thus, China remained divided after 1928. The military forces that occupied the different parts of the interior provinces fell into the following four groups: (1) The First Army, or the “Central Army” (zhongyangjun), of roughly 500,000 men under the direct control of generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, which occupied Jiangsu, Anhui, Jiangxi, Zhejiang, and Fujian provinces; (2) The Second Army, or the “Northwestern Army” (xibeijun), of 420,000 men under Feng Yuxiang, which controlled Shaanxi, Gansu, Ningxia, Henan, and Shandong provinces; (3) The Third Army of more than 200,000 men under Yan Xishan of the Shanxi clique (Jingxi), stationed in Shanxi, Hebei, Chahar, and Suiyuan provinces as well as the cities of Beijing and Tianjin; (4) The Fourth Army of over 200,000 men under Li Zongren of the Guangxi clique (Guixi), garrisoned in Guangxi, Hunan, and Hubei provinces. Open conflicts between Chiang Kai-shek’s central authority and the three regional forces, however, soon culminated into wars because of their disagreements over the program of “reorganizing and discharging the Nationalist Army” (guojun bianqian), which Chiang initiated at the beginning of 1929. For Chiang, military unification and centralization were indispensable for the making of a modern state in China.2 Using the story of the returning of territories and armies from individual domains to the Meiji government after their collaboration in overthrowing the Tokugawa shogunate, Chiang tried to persuade the regional military leaders who had worked together with him in overthrowing the Beijing government to cooperate again in implementing the program. Unfortunately, the Nanjing government had neither the authority nor the resources that the Meiji government had arrogated. For Feng, Yan, and Li, Chiang was only the first among equals, rather than the one above them. None of them was willing to sacrifice his own army for the reorganization of the military that only worked to the advantage of Chiang. True unification was possible only after the regional forces were militarily subjugated. The war first broke out in March 1929 between Chiang’s Central Army and Li Zongren’s Guangxi Army, when Li attempted to enhance his control of Hunan province by removing its governor without Chiang’s approval, and quickly ended next month when Li suffered a defeat and retreated back to Guangxi. Feng, who had been discontented with Chiang’s limitations on his military force and expansion into Hebei and Shandong, launched another war

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against Chiang in October 1929, but quickly failed next month. Chiang thereby expanded his controlled area to Hunan, Guangdong, and parts of Henan and Anhui after defeating Li and Feng. The third and the largest war erupted in May 1930 between Chiang’s army of more than 900,000 people on the one hand and the alliance of the forces of Yan, Feng, and Li on the other. Chiang once again won the war, thanks to Zhang Xueliang’s siding with Chiang and sending his Northeast Army to the interior provinces in September, which decisively changed the balance of military strength in favor of Chiang (LZR: 463). As a result of the war, Feng’s Northwest Army was completely dissolved, while the remnants of the Guangxi and Shanxi cliques retreated to their respective home provinces and would never have the strength to challenge the central government again. An obvious reason behind the repeated failures of regional military leaders was the lack of coordination and the frequent occurrence of defection among themselves when combating Chiang’s Central Army, which in turn had to do with the conflicting interests and goals of the allied forces and the complex composition and poor integration of each of the regional forces. But the most important reason leading to Chiang’s successes on the battleground was the striking disparity between the Nanjing government and its challengers in fiscal and military strength. Among the regional forces, Feng’s was the largest, but it was based on the poorest northwestern provinces; expanding his area to the richer Hebei and Shandong provinces and occupying the major cities (Beijing and Tianjin) of North China thus were the primary goal of his wars against Chiang. Without much resources to support the large size of his army, he kept the stipends and living standards of his soldiers as well the high-ranking officials to a very low level, which in turn affected the overall morale of the Northwest Army. Yan Xishan’s army was best equipped among the regional forces, but the scale of the war he led against Chiang in 1930 was too large for the limited financial resource from his own province to sustain; he tried to raise more funds to support the war by issuing 6 million yuan of “wartime universal notes” (zhanshi tongyong piao), which, however, helped little in relation to the huge expenses on the war. Having been defeated in 1929 and based on the poor and remote province of Guangxi, Li Zongren’s army was the smallest among the three regional forces, having only about 50,000 soldiers to join the war against Chiang in 1930 (Li Jingzhi 1984).

The renewed strength of the Nanjing government In sharp contrast with the limited fiscal resources available to the anti-Chiang alliance, the strength of the Nationalist government in Nanjing lay precisely in its access to the largest sources of tax revenues and public debts in China, thanks to its control of the richest provinces (including Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Jiangxi before 1929 and Guangdong and Hunan thereafter) and the city of Shanghai, where the wealthiest financiers of China concentrated. Even more important to the Nationalist government’s fiscal health was the phenomenal

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increases in its income from maritime customs and salt taxes. What made this possible was first of all the recovery of China’s autonomy on maritime customs, which had been one of the central goals of the Nationalist Revolution. For seven decades since the signing of the Treaty of Tianjin (Tien-tsin) in 1858, the tariff rate on imported goods collected by the Qing and, after 1911, the Republican governments had been limited to 5% of the value of imported goods in principle but only about 3% in reality. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, the Republican government in Beijing made repeated efforts toward the recovery of China’s tariff autonomy and almost succeeded at the international tariff conference in Beijing in 1925, where the 13 participating countries agreed on granting China the autonomy on maritime customs to begin in 1929. The Nationalist government in Nanjing, therefore, resumed the same effort and signed new treaties with 12 Western countries in 1928, and with Japan in 1930, to nullify the preexisting agreements on maritime customs and affirm China’s complete tariff autonomy. Under the new tariff regulations that became effective on February 1, 1929, the maritime customs on imported goods varied from 7.5 to 27.5%, which were later adjusted to 5 to 50 % in 1931 and as high as 80% on certain goods after 1933 (Wu Jingping 1992: 106–107). The result was the skyrocketing in maritime customs from about 134 million yuan in 1928 to 245 million yuan in 1929, 292 million yuan in 1930, and 387 million in 1931 (decreasing to around 300 million yuan per year in the following years because of the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in late 1931) (MGDA, 5.1.1: 547–548). Equally important to the Nanjing government’s fiscal strength was streamlining the collection of salt taxes. As a condition for the Yuan Shikai government’s borrowing of the so-called “postwar rehabilitation loan” from five countries in 1913, salt taxes in China were designated as a guaranteed source for repaying the debt, and, to that end, salt taxation was reorganized under a new hierarchy in which a foreigner and a Chinese were appointed as co-administrators at each level, and all of the income from salt taxes were deposited in designated foreign banks to fulfill China’s obligation of loan repayment; the remainder was then remitted to the Chinese government. To reassert China’s sovereignty in salt taxation, the Nationalist government at once abolished this co-administrative system and established a new set of systems headquartered in Shanghai after 1927, which, however, only resulted in a deterioration in administrative efficiency and a decline in salt tax income. To correct the problem, financial minister Song Ziwen reappointed most of the original Chinese and foreign administrators to the salt tax agencies because of their proven professionalism, but delinked the collection of salt taxes with the repayment of foreign debts, while his ministry was committed to fulfilling the central government’s duties on foreign debts. All of the income from salt taxes, therefore, was deposited in Chinese banks and subject to the complete control of the Nationalist government. Meanwhile, Song’s ministry made systematic efforts to rationalize the rates of salt taxes in different areas, reorganized the administrative and auditing agencies in salt taxation, rebuilt the policing force against salt smuggling throughout the country, and introduced in 1931 the policy of taxation at salt

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production sites only and the free trade of salt instead of the monopoly system in selected areas; by 1937, this new policy had been applied to as many as 60% of the counties and cities in China. As a result of these measures, government revenue from salt taxes escalated from about 29.5 million yuan in 1928 to 122.1 million yuan in 1929, 150.5 million yuan in 1930, and 247.4 million yuan in 1936 (see Table 7.1; listed as 54 million yuan in 1928, 85 million yuan in 1929, 130 million in 1930, and 218 million yuan in 1936 in MGDA, 5.1.1: 551; see also Young 1971: 56). The quick increases in the Nanjing government’s revenues after 1928 and the growing imbalance between Chiang and his regional challengers in fiscal capacities explain in large measure his successes on the battleground. The generous budget on the military, accounting for about 44 to 45% of the government’s total expenditure in 1929–1931 (Yang Yinfu 1985: 70), allowed Chiang to import from Germany advanced weapons in large quantity, which made his Central Army much better equipped than the forces of regional leaders. His offering of financial aid and military supplies to Feng won over the latter’s support during his war against Li Zongren in early 1929, and his generous cash rewards to the high-ranking commanders of Li’s forces accelerated their defection and Li’s failures in the war. Later, to prepare for the war against Feng in late 1929, Chiang successfully bought over Han Fuqu and Shi Yousan, the two key commanders of Feng’s forces, who led more than 100,000 troops away and thus fundamentally undermined the combating ability of Feng’s Northwest Army. Finally, during his confrontation against the allied regional forces in 1930, Chiang outcompeted his enemies both militarily and fiscally. Altogether, the allied regional forces of Yan, Feng, and Li spent only about 10 million yuan per month during the war that lasted for six months, whereas Chiang’s forces spent about 30 million yuan a month (cf. Zhang Hao 2008: 116). Chiang, therefore, was able to offer large sums of rewards to his commanders and soldiers to boost their morale on the battleground (he offered on August 24, 1930, for instance, a reward of 1 million yuan to any of his troops who first occupied Luoyang and Zhengzhou, and a reward of 200,000 yuan to those who first occupied the neighboring Gong county, see Li Jingzhi 1984: 226). The most important step leading to Chiang’s victory in the war of 1930, however, was Zhang Xueliang’s decision to side with him, which was possible only after Chiang agreed to offer Zhang 5 million yuan as the expenses of the Northeast Army, in addition to 10 million yuan as public debt to be raised by Song Ziwen for Zhang (Chen Jinjin 2000: 12). Chiang’s superior fiscal strength thus played a key role in his subjugation of the regional forces and the military unification of China. Chiang’s own observations best illustrate the stark contrast in the political situations in China before and after the three consecutive wars in 1929 and 1930. In March 1929, on the eve of the war against Li Zongren, Chiang remarked: “Has China been truly unified? Just take a look at the actual political condition, and we can conclude that China is still not unified in reality” (SSJY, 1929, Jan.-Apr.: 727). On November 12, 1930, right after the war against the allied regional forces,

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Chiang stated proudly: “it is my deep conviction that a situation has formed for our Party to unify China; it is absolutely impossible for any traitors to the Party and the nation to rise again” (Guo Xuyin 1992: 193). To say that China had become a politically and militarily unified state by the end of 1930 was far from true; the bordering provinces ranging from Guangxi, Yunnan, and Sichuan in the south and southwest to Shanxi in the north and the three northeastern provinces were yet to be fully integrated into the administrative and military systems under the central government, not to mention the numerous base areas of the communist forces that had expanded quickly during the wars against Li, Feng, and Yan in the late 1920s and the early 1930s. Nevertheless, Chiang did indeed firmly establish his political and military supremacy throughout the provinces after 1930. There was no longer any regional cliques and any provincial leaders under the Republic that could openly challenge the authority of the central government. The long-term trend of political fragmentation and military decentralization since the 1850s eventually came to a halt by 1930 and was substantially reversed afterwards, and China definitely moved toward the making of a centralized modern state under Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership.

Fiscal unification The unification of fiscal resources was as important as the centralization of military power to the making of a modern state. Back in Guangdong in the mid1920s, Song Ziwen’s stunning success in centralizing the financial resources within the province was key to the Nationalist force’s meteoric rise in the course of the Northern Expedition. Before its complete subjugation of regional military forces, however, the Republican government in Nanjing faced huge barriers in establishing a unified revenue system throughout the country. With only three provinces (Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Anhui) under its direct control, the Nanjing government during the first few years of its existence received only about 4 million yuan per month as regular tax revenues from these provinces. In the rest of the country, tax collection was in the hands of provincial or lower-level authorities, who retained all of the revenues they generated and resisted the central government’s appointments and policies pertaining to fiscal affairs that did not serve their interests. The most audacious and successful step in fiscal unification taken by the Nanjing government after 1930 was the abolition of lijin and, in its stead, the introduction of “unified taxes” (tongshui).3 Soon after its relocation to Nanjing, the Nationalist government announced in July 1927 its plan to abolish lijin in six lower Yangzi and southeast provinces on September 1 of the same year but delayed the schedule over and again because of warfare and instability throughout the country. As a preliminary step, however, the Nanjing government nevertheless first enforced in February 1928 the abolition of lijin on cigarettes and instead collected a one-time “unified tax” of 27.5% at the factory (for domestic cigarettes) or maritime customs (for imported cigarettes) to qualify their free trade without taxation afterwards (Wu Jingping 1992: 116); the same tax policy

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was also applied to the trading of flour in 1928. It was not until the Central Army decisively defeated the regional forces in late 1930 that the Nanjing government announced the nationwide abolition of lijin to begin on January 1, 1931. Local governments who had relied on lijin for their normal functioning turned to sales tax and subsidies from the central government as the new sources of revenue. To offset the loss of tax revenue after the abolition of lijin, the collection of the unified tax was extended to cotton yarns, matches, and concrete in 1931. The number of provinces where the collection of unified taxes was enforced also expanded from five in 1928 to 15 in 1933 and 20 in 1936. Government revenue from this source also increased from nearly 27.69 million yuan in 1928 to 88.68 million yuan in 1931, 105 million yuan in 1933, and 152 million yuan in 1935 (see Table 7.1). It thus joined maritime customs and salt taxes to be the three major sources of the central government’s revenues in the 1930s prior to the Japanese invasion in 1937.

The making of a new orthodoxy The Nationalist state also made headway in identity building. Unlike any preceding governments in Chinese history, the GMD advocated a unique set of ideology, known as Sanminzhuyi or “the Three Principles of the People” (the principles of nationalism, democracy, and people’s livelihood, or minzu, minquan, and minsheng), and established its orthodoxy and supremacy in political discourse in areas it controlled. First formulated as a guideline for the Tongmenghui established in 1905, Sanminzhuyi was vigorously propagated by Sun Yat-sen after 1923 as a tool to build political consensus among the GMD members and supporters. Having suffered repeated failures in the Second Revolution in 1913, the Pro-Constitution Movement in 1917–1918, and especially the first round of the Northern Expedition that was discontinued because of the treacherous rebellion by Chen Jiongming (1878–1933), one of his most-trusted followers and governor of Guangdong province, in 1922, Sun believed that the biggest reason behind those failures was that the Guomindang had performed “too much struggle by violence but too little struggle by propaganda” (SZS, 8: 568); in other words, the revolution failed because “the vast majority of the people in the country do not understand the reason of the revolution; and people do not understand the reason of the revolution because no propaganda has been widely conducted” (SZS, 8: 322). Therefore, Sun asserted in December 1923 that another task of the GMD afterwards was to propagate Sanminzhuyi and win people’s support, or “to conquer with the ism” (yi zhuyi zhengfu) (SZS, 8: 432), a task “more important than armed struggle” (zhuyi shengguo wuli) for achieving the GMD’s goal of state-building (SZS, 9: 107). After the death of Sun on March 12, 1925, the GMD leadership was even more enthusiastic in propagandizing Sanminzhuyi. Public lectures on Sanminzhuyi by Wang Jingwei and other elites of the Guomindang were frequently held on various occasions in late 1925 and early 1926 before the resumption of the Northern Expedition. The Nationalist government, newly

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established in Guangzhou on July 1, 1925, forcefully promoted “the Partyization education” (danghua jiaoyu) in public schools, as reflected in its resolution that “all educational measures have to be in line with the spirits of Sanminzhuyi, and education at all levels have to be incorporated with the indoctrination of the Party’s teachings as much as possible” (Chen Jinjin 1997: 116). Subsequently, a mandatory class on Sanminzhuyi, at least 50 minutes per week, was added to the curriculum of schools in the GMDcontrol areas, and textbooks were audited and revised to ensure the centrality of the Party’s doctrine and policies in education. A weekly meeting commemorating Sun Yat-sen was routinely held in schools, and schoolchildren were organized into boy scouts by the GMD to receive systematic and ritualized ideological training (He and Wen 2008: 10). After establishing the Nationalist government in Nanjing in April 1927 and officially finishing the task of political unification in June 1928, the GMD made further efforts to establish the orthodoxy of its ideology in order to legitimize its rule in China. Sun Yat-sen was venerated as the “Father of the Republic” (guofu) and, to some degree, deified through the rituals and ceremonies in honor of him. His portrait was required to be displayed at the central site in all official buildings, with couplets on two sides of the portrait that bore his famous saying in two sentences: “The revolution has not succeeded yet; comrades should continue the endeavor” (geming shang wei chenggong; tongzhi reng xu nuli). Beginning in March 1928, government officials, and later all civil servants of the government as well as male teachers of all schools, were required to wear the uniform named after Sun Yat-sen, which was associated with the revolutionary spirits of discipline, rigidity, and conformity and designed to symbolize Sun’s ideas (Chen Yunxi 2007). The history of the Republic of China was also reinvented so that Sun Yat-sen occupied a central place in it. According to the GMD’s new narrative, the Nationalist revolution began with Sun’s founding of Xingzhonghui in 1894 and then Tongmenghui in 1905, culminated in the Revolution of 1911 in which Sun served as a spiritual leader despite his complete absence from it, failed afterwards because of the revolutionaries’ deviation from Sun’s correct path, and resurged in the early 1920s after Sun fully took the leadership of the Party and the military (Ouyang Junxi 2011). All these contrasted sharply with the Beijing government’s deliberate downplaying of the Revolution of 1911 and the overall negative image of Sun Yat-sen in the media and public discourse in the 1910s and early 1920s in areas outside the GMD’s influence. Given the newly established orthodoxy of Sanminzhuyi in China’s political life under the Nationalist rule, it was not surprising that a precondition for the warlord forces to be accepted by the Nanjing government and incorporated into its system in the course of political unification in the late 1920s and 1930s was their acknowledgment of the supremacy of Sanminzhuyi as an ideology, an action that was equated with their recognition of the legitimacy of the Nationalist government.4 Accepting Sanminzhuyi, in other words, was the very basis on which different political forces manifested their identity with the newly established Nanjing government after 1927.

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Despite its supremacy as an orthodox ideology and central role in maintaining the Guomindang government’s legitimacy, however, Sanminzhuyi failed to serve as an ideological basis for building political identity in Nationalist China. Quite the contrary, because of its lack of theoretical coherency and its all-encompassing framework, Sanminzhuyi was subject to different interpretations and therefore in actuality conducive to political division and confrontation. In the early 1940s, both the pro-Japanese forces under Wang Jingwei (WWZQ, 1: 104, 217–218) and the communist forces under Mao Zedong (ZGZY, 11: 633–634) thus were able to interpret the same set of ideology differently to legitimate their existence and enhance their rivalry with the Nationalist force under Chiang Kai-shek. Within the GMD itself, Chiang also failed to use Sanminzhuyi to build solidarity among the party members and loyalty toward himself, because of the lack of sufficient persuasiveness of Sanminzhuyi as a doctrine.5 The weekly commemoration of Sun Yat-sen attended by all public servants in the military, educational, and government institutions on every Monday became purely ritualistic, lacking any substance in indoctrination and identity building. In the absence of ideological commitment and political identity, what kept the GMD elites together were merely their shared interests and power, which would inevitably lead to conflicts and corruption among them. Foreseeing the GMD’s fundamental weakness in this regard and its inevitable failure in identity building, Hu Hanmin (1879–1936), one of the senior Nationalist leaders, made the following remark right after the inauguration of the Nationalist government in Nanjing in 1927: “Short of unwavering faith and unable to generate enough strength to resist temptations and threats because of the fundamental reason of lacking a thorough understanding of its ism, how could such a party avoid its collapse?” (SSJY, 1927, Jan.-Jun.: 883).

Political identity under the party-state Establishing the party rule The Nationalist government departed from the preceding regimes in China not only in its prioritization of the party’s ideology in political life, but also in its establishment of the supremacy of the party (i.e., the GMD) in the entire system of state apparatus. The idea of making a party-state in China can be traced back to Sun Yat-sen’s designation of the unique role of the Chinese Revolutionary Party (Zhonghua geming dang) in government after the Revolution. As he conceived it in 1914, the Party would “shoulder full responsibility for administrating all military and civilian affairs of the state” during the entire period of the Revolution, which began with “military rule” (junzheng) to clear by violence all barriers on the way to a true republic, continued through the phase of “political tutelage” (xunzheng) to promote self-government at the local level, and culminated in the phase of “constitutional government” (xianzheng) that aimed to promulgate a constitution (SZS, 3: 97). During the revolutionary period, however, only party members had the rights to elect or be elected, and their rights varied depending on the inception of their membership at different

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points of the Revolution, while non-party members were not allowed to join the government and denied rights as citizens before the promulgation of the constitution (ibid.: 98, 104). Furthermore, all of the party members had to give up their individual freedom and show unconditional submission to the single will of the party leader, or Sun himself, which he believed to be essential to overcoming the problem of political division among the revolutionaries (ibid.: 92, 105, 184). Sun’s idea of building a party-state in China crystalized in the early 1920s when he endeavored to transform the GMD by borrowing from Soviet Russia. For him, the Soviet one-party system was superior to the parliamentary democracy in Europe and America. As he put it, “both the French and American republics are old-styled, and only the Russian [government] today is of new style; we should therefore build the newest republic [in China]” (SZS, 6: 56). “If we want the revolution to succeed,” he said, “we have to learn from the Russian methods, organizations, and trainings to make the success possible” (SZS, 8: 437). The Russian methods, in his view, were nothing else but the highly centralized organization, its strict disciplinary measures, and, most importantly, the party’s tight control of the military (yi dang ling jun) and soldiers’ indoctrination with the Party’s ideology (zhuyi jianjun). Subject to the GMD’s supervision through its Central Executive Committee and especially the Political Council (zhengzhi weiyuanhui) within the committee, the Nationalist government established in Guangzhou in July 1925 formed a prototype of the party-state envisaged by Sun. With Sun as its chairman, the Political Council served as the highest organ of decision-making for all institutions of the Party, the government, and the military; members of the Political Council headed each of the government’s departments, which only carried out the decisions made by the council (Chen and Yu 1991: 337–338, 347). The Nationalist party-state took its definite form in the late 1920s under the slogan of “Let the Party govern the state” (yi dang zhiguo), when the Revolution entered the phase of political tutelage, following the Nanjing government’s unification of the country. According to the “Outline of Political Tutelage” (xunzheng gangling) announced by the GMD leadership in October 1928, the Party’s Congress exercised governmental power on behalf of the National Congress (guomin dahui) during the period of political tutelage, and the Party’s Congress, when not in session, trusted governmental power to the Party’s Political Council. The National Congress was eventually held in May 1931, but the Provisional Constitution of the Political Tutelage Period (xunzheng shiqi yuefa) which it passed only reaffirmed the principles of the “Outline” and went even further by elevating the power of the president of the national government, who appointed the heads of the Five Yuan and the ministries and served as the General Commander of the military forces. Chiang Kai-shek was again elected as the president of the national government, who further named himself as the head of the Administrative Yuan, thus officially becoming the leader of the Party, the government, and the military. Institutional building under the Nationalist state was characterized by the trend of militarization, in which the military leader

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came to control the government, and the central government controlled individual provinces by military means (Tien 1972).

Chiang’s quest for leadership But Chiang’s efforts to concentrate the power of the Nationalist state into his own hands was far from smooth in the 1920s and 1930s. The biggest challenge to Chiang as a native of Zhejiang province and as military commander in building his leadership within the GMD came from the fact that, from its very beginning, the Party had been dominated by those from Guangdong province who had a strong sense of representing the authentic force of the Nationalist Revolution and the orthodox leadership of the Party, a shared feeling that was further enhanced by their keen awareness of belonging to an exclusive, Cantonese-speaking ethnic group.6 Over the course of the Northern Expedition, when the Revolution expanded from Guangdong to central and eastern China after the death of Sun, the Cantonese members of the GMD continued to see Guangdong as the very basis of the Revolution, not only because they occupied the key positions of the Party, but also because their home province remained the most important fiscal source shouldering the expenses on military operations well until Chiang Kai-shek turned to the Shanghai-based financiers for help, as discussed in Chapter 6. Not surprisingly, the senior Cantonese leaders of the GMD proudly identified themselves as the true revolutionary force representing the orthodoxy of the leadership of the Party; they had no problem accepting Chiang Kai-shek as the general commander of the Nationalist Revolutionary Army (NRA), but they tenaciously resisted Chiang’s attempts to assume the GMD’s supreme political leadership in place of the late charismatic leader Sun Yat-sen. Chiang, for his part, had to turn to the people from Zhejiang, his home province, for help in his rise to the top leadership of the Nationalist state. Among the key Zhejiang supporters of Chiang were Zhang Jingjiang (1876–1950), Sun Yat-sen’s time-honored friend and generous donor and Chiang Kai-shek’s unfailing patron, who recommended Chiang to Sun and named Chiang as the general commander of the NRA; Dai Jitao (1891–1949), once a secretary of Sun and a believer in Marxism and, after Sun’s death, a leading right-wing propagandist standing behind Chiang’s anti-communist maneuvers; and Yu Qiaqing (1867–1945), co-founder of the Shanghai Securities and Commodities Exchange and president of the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce in the early 1920s, who played a key role in making the Shanghai-based financiers’ support available to Chiang.7 Chiang’s biggest barriers to his rise to the GMD leadership in the 1920s and early 1930s were primarily the natives of Guangdong, most prominently Hu Hanmin (1879–1936) and Wang Jingwei (1883–1944), both having been Sun’s faithful followers since the founding of the Tongmenghui and, after Sun’s death, key GMD leaders of the highest seniority, and later also Sun Ke (or Sun Fo) (1891–1973), Sun Yat-sen’s son and a member of the GMD’s central executive committee.

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Chiang’s rivalry with the GMD’s Cantonese elites began with his involvement in the handling of the case of Liao Zhongkai (1877–1925), the most famous leftist among the senior GMD leaders and financial minister of the newly established Nationalist government in Guangzhou, who was assassinated on August 20, 1925. As the leading rightist and the most likely suspect, Hu Hanmin was detained and later sent to the Soviet Union for a tour. Xu Chongzhi (1886–1965), a native of Guangzhou and another leading rightist serving as the military minister of the Nationalist government plus the chairman of Guangdong provincial government, lost his positions for protecting his subordinate who was also suspected, thus clearing the way for Chiang’s control of the military. After the Zhongshan Warship Incident in March 1926, in which the captain of the warship, a CCP member, was accused of rebelling against the Nationalist government, thus causing all CCP members to withdraw from the Nationalist army, Wang Jingwei also quit his positions as the president of the Nationalist government and chairman of the GMD’s military committee and went to France because of his obvious pro-CCP inclinations. Two months later, at the Second Session of the GMD’s Second Congress, Chiang not only proposed a resolution to limit the CCP members’ positions within the GMD party but also enhanced his influence by nominating his patron, Zhang Jingjiang, as the chairman of the standing committee of the Party’s central executive committee. Chiang suffered his first setback in March 1927, when the Third Session of the GMD’s Second Congress, held in Wuhan and dominated by left-wing GMD elites and CCP members, elected Wang Jingwei in absentia as the chairman of the standing committee of the Guomindang central executive committee and the head of the GMD central’s organization department, and at the same time abolished the position of the chairman of the GMD central’s military committee, which had been held by Chiang Kai-shek, while allowing Chiang to keep his position as the General Commander of the NRA. Chiang reacted by establishing a separate Nationalist government in Nanjing to rival Wuhan, which only resulted in the GMD central’s decision to terminate Chiang’s GMD membership at Sun Ke’s proposal. To allow for a reconciliation between Wuhan and Nanjing, Chiang Kai-shek stepped down from his position as the supreme military commander in August 1927 in the wake of a devastating military defeat in northern Jiangsu and under pressure from Li Zhongren of the Guangxi clique, who collaborated with Wang Jingwei of Wuhan, after the latter purged the CCP, to constitute a fatal threat to Nanjing (Huang Daoxuan 1999). When he resumed his position as the General Commander of the NRA in January 1928, Chiang had to allow the Guangdong elites to hold key positions in the Nanjing government, as a way to enhance his legitimacy as the new leader of the partystate, but his rivalry with the Guangdong elites was far from conclusive; the latter accepted Chiang as a military leader but refused to recognize him as a political leader (Dong Xianguang 1952: 108). A second round of his rivalry with the Cantonese elites broke out in February 1931, when Chiang put Hu Hanmin under custody, ostensibly because of

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Hu’s opposition to Chiang’s insistence on promulgating the Provisional Constitution of the Political Tutelage Period and also because of Hu’s insulting defiance of Chiang’s leadership; by that time, Chiang had established his status as the undisputed leader of China after decisively subjugating his most deadly adversaries, including Li Zhongren, Feng Yuxiang, and Yan Xishan, who had allied against him in 1930. In protest against Chiang’s detainment of Hu, almost all of the Cantonese elites left Nanjing and assembled in Guangzhou, where they established the Extraordinary Council of the GMD Central Executive Committee on May 27, 1931, and a separate Nationalist government in Guangzhou the next day. Chiang found himself in a nightmare over the following months, when he had to fight on three fronts simultaneously: the rapidly growing CCP forces in south-central China, the GMD opposition force in Guangzhou, and, more deadly, the Japanese military force that occupied Manchuria and which was taking advantage of the domestic chaos in China. So frustrated was Chiang that he complained of the Cantonese who made excessive requests in negotiating with Nanjing as intending to turn Guangdong into a separate “Cantonese state allying with Japan to besiege and attack our country” (SLGB, 12: 196). In his view, the Cantonese worked together to oppose the Nanjing government “only because of the reason of being Cantonese” and they only showed their “narrow-mindedness” by “confronting the entire country with a few Cantonese comrades” (Jin Yilin 2005: 123–124). Under pressure from Guangzhou and from within the Nanjing government, he stepped down again on December 15, 1931. To prevent a dictatorship within the Party, the First Session of the GMD Fourth Congress held in Nanjing in late December, 1931 passed a resolution that the Administrative Yuan, instead of the president of the Nationalist government, would be trusted with the exercise of government power. Chiang Kaishek, Hu Hanmin, and Wang Jingwei were elected at the same session as the three standing members of the Party’s Central Political Council and who would serve as the chairmen of the Council in rotation. A new cabinet was subsequently formed in the New Year of 1932. Of the 14 members of the cabinet (including the head and ministers of the Administrative Yuan), nine were from Guangdong, including Sun Ke as the head. The Cantonese thus appeared to be triumphant in their rivalry with Chiang. Without the necessary experience and political resources, however, Sun Ke soon faced huge difficulties running the government and, as a result, quit his job in less than a month, despite the moral support he received from Hu Hanmin, who refused to go to Nanjing and stayed in Guangzhou until his death in 1936, where he was officially in charge of the GMD and the Nationalist government’s administrative affairs in Southwest China, thus remaining semi-independent from Nanjing in actuality. After Sun Ke’s resignation, Wang Jingwei and Chiang Kai-shek reached a compromise, by which the two would be in charge of the government and the military, respectively. Consequently, Wang became the new head of the Administrative Yuan on January 28, 1932, while Chiang was elected as the chairman of the GMD Central’s Military Committee on March 6. Seven months later, Wang quit

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his job and went to France again, realizing that his power as the government head had been greatly curtailed by Chiang and that Yuan had been only allowed to handle trivial administrative affairs. Chiang reestablished his control of the Nationalist party-state afterwards. There would be no more substantial challenge to his leadership from within the GMD’s power center before the fall of his government in 1949.

Factionalism Chiang’s establishment of his uncontested leadership at the top level of the GMD by 1932 should not be equated with his valid control of the government system and the military in the entire country. To be sure, since its completion of the Northern Expedition and announcement of China’s unification in June 1928, the Nationalist government in Nanjing had established its status as the only legitimate central government to be unanimously accepted by the authorities of all provinces. After defeating the allied regional forces in 1930, the NRA under Chiang’s direct leadership, known as the Central Army (zhongyangjun), further emerged as the dominant military force in China that no other regional forces could compete with. While accepting Sanminzhuyi as the only orthodox ideology, claiming their loyalty to the Nanjing government, and acknowledging Chiang’s supreme leadership, the regional military authorities remained largely semi-independent and resisted Nanjing’s attempts to penetrate their provinces administratively and militarily. In the early to mid-1930s, these semi-independent forces included: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10)

Chen Jitang of Guangdong province; Li Zongren and Bai Chongxi of Guangxi province; Long Yun of Yunnan province; Wang Jialie of Guizhou province; Liu Xiang of Sichuan province; Liu Wenhui of Sichuan before 1934 and Chuanbian (Xikang) afterwards; Ma Bufang of Qinghai province; Yan Xishan of Shanxi province; Song Zheyuan of Beiping (Beijing), Tianjin, Hebei, and Chahar; and Han Fuqu of Shandong province.

For the Nanjing government, however, the biggest threat to its rule in China came from two sources, the bourgeoning communist base areas in south-central China in the early 1930s, and Japanese aggression beginning with its occupation of Manchuria in 1931. Of the two, Chiang perceived the former as the fatal “disease of the heart” (xinfu zhi huan) (MGSL, 1.3: 35) and therefore carried out the strategy of prioritizing the suppression of the Communists or, in his words, “pacifying the internal before fighting the external” (rangwai bi xian annei) (Furuya 1977, 9: 115). How the regional forces responded to Chiang’s actions in suppressing the Communist forces and resisting the Japanese thus

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reflected the actual relationship between the central government and regional military factions. Both Nanjing and the regional semi-independent forces saw the Communists as their enemies but fought the Red Army with different strategies. In his operations against the communist forces, Chiang typically let the regional forces combat the enemy whenever possible, a strategy that worked to his advantage no matter what the result was, because the weakening of either the Communists or the regional forces or both that he distrusted would always enhance the position of his own army and help expand his control into the areas under regional forces. When chasing the Red Army, he sometimes allowed the enemy to enter the area controlled by regional forces so that he would have good reason to send his troops into the area and thereby establish his control there. The regional forces, for their part, fought the communist forces only to prevent both the enemy and Chiang’s Central Army from entering their area. For them, the very existence of a powerful communist force would keep Chiang preoccupied with the operations against it and thus improve their own opportunities to survive. Therefore, whenever possible, they would avoid a direct conflict with the Red Army to save their own forces. The Red Army thus easily survived the Nationalist forces’ first and second blockade lines along the border areas between Guangdong and Jiangxi provinces in October and November 1935 after its defeat in Chiang’s fifth annihilation campaign and withdrawal from its base area in Jiangxi, thanks to a secret agreement between the CCP and Chen Jitang, by which the former agreed not to proceed deep into Guangdong province and not to station or build a base area there, and the latter promised not to combat the Red Army on its way passing through his territory, though in actuality he provided the former with a large quantity of salt and hundreds of chests of ammunitions (ZHWS, 3: 303).8 Li Zongren and Bai Chongxi, likewise, deliberately allowed the Red Army to peacefully pass through northern Guangxi province in late November 1934 without blocking it head on as Chiang Kai-shek had ordered and only made a gesture of chasing it after most of the communist troops had passed their territory. Later in his memoir, Li thus justified his action: Chiang stationed his army in northern Hunan, allowing the Red Army to march westward, and then ordered the Central Army to move south slowly and force the Communist troops to enter Guangxi, … expecting that both our force and the Communist force suffer from a mutual fight and give the Central Army an excuse to enter and occupy Guangxi. How sinister this is! (LZR: 478) Long Yun, too, ordered his troops to allow the Red Army to pass through Yunnan province peacefully and then pretended to chase it without real combat while making every effort to prevent Chiang’s Central Army from entering Kunming, the capital city of Yunnan; to please Chiang, Long nevertheless removed a few county heads from their positions for “incompetence in annihilating the Communists” (WSZL, 62: 14, 130). Later, the Red Army successfully crossed

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the Dadu River in May 1935, thanks to the minimal resistance of Liu Wenhui’s troops, who were there just for show. The Red Army would have had no chance of surviving, had Liu fought a serious battle with his well-built fortresses on the northern side of the river or had completely destroyed the iron-chained bridge on the river. The only exception among the semi-independent regional GMD leaders was Wang Jialie, who wanted to please Chiang and therefore fought the Red Army hard, only resulting in repeated defeats and hence the Central Army’s entry and occupation of Guizhou province in January 1935; Wang subsequently lost his positions as the commander of his troops and governor of Guizhou (WSZL, 93: 51–59).

National crisis and political unity Japanese aggression was another fatal threat to Nationalist China.9 For Japan, the rise of a centralized, strong China necessarily meant the end of its territorial ambitions in the Asian continent; therefore, it had to do whatever it could to prevent the Nationalist state from establishing its control of Manchuria and to block Chiang’s unification of the entire country. A major step it took thus was to completely occupy Manchuria in 1931 and turn this area into a puppet state under its military control, which constituted the biggest blow to Chiang’s quest for unification. But Japan’s ambition did not stop there; in the following years it kept pushing its military presence down to the North China provinces neighboring Manchuria, which inevitably led to the direct confrontation in July 1937, hence the outbreak of Japan’s full-scale invasion of China’s interior provinces and its subsequent occupation of much of East and Central China over the next eight years (1937–1945), which was the severest crisis of national survival in China’s modern history and the biggest frustration in its century-long course of state-rebuilding. Here again a huge schism existed between Chiang and the regional semiindependent forces. As an ambitious political and military leader, Chiang’s nationalist feeling and commitment to China’s independence were strong, but when it came to the making of his government’s diplomatic policies, Chiang turned out to be exceptionally cautious, and he was particularly pessimistic of China’s abilities to resist the Japanese aggression. For years before and after the Incident of September 18, 1931, he had insisted on a non-resistance policy regarding the Japanese military offensives, claiming that “they [the Japanese] can occupy all of the coastal areas of our country, no matter which locality it is, in a matter of three days rather than ten days” (GMWX, 72: 361). This policy led to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in four months by February 1932. The Tanggu Truce signed between the Nationalist government and the Japanese military authority in May 1933 further allowed the Japanese to occupy the areas north of the Great Wall. But the leaders of regional military forces thought differently. Those who controlled the northern provinces directly faced the Japanese threats and therefore were the most ardent in resisting the Japanese intrusion; Song Zheyuan’s 29th Army and Zhang Xueliang’s Northeastern Army

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thus were among the first to combat the invading Japanese forces in the areas north of the Great Wall in early 1933. When the conflicts with the Japanese subsided in the following three years, however, the regional leaders of the northern provinces, including Song Zheyuan, Yan Xishan, and Han Fuqu, tended to manipulate both the Japanese and the Nanjing government; they sought compromise with the former while bargaining with the latter for greater control of the administrative, fiscal, and military power within their provinces.10 The biggest challenge to Chiang Kai-shek, to be sure, came from Zhang Xueliang of the Northeast Army and Yang Hucheng of the 17th Army. Unwilling to carry out the offensive against the Red Army, Zhang and Yang acted together to detain Chiang Kai-shek in Xi’an on December 12, 1936 (henceforth known as the Xi’an Incident), though they later released him after a two-week negotiation in which Chiang verbally conceded to their demands for terminating the civil war against the Red Army. Because of his unexpected detention that put the country on the verge of fragmentation and civil war at a time when it was already vulnerable enough to the imminent threat of a full-scale Japanese invasion, Chiang won almost unanimous sympathy and support from the entire nation. His return to Nanjing was a nationwide celebration. After the outbreak of the Lugouqiao (Marco Polo Bridge) Incident on July 7, 1937, which signaled the Japanese full-scale invasion of China, Chiang Kai-shek eventually established himself as the undisputed leader of the nation when he showed his determination to lead the country in the War of Resistance and when all of the semi-independent regional forces, including the communists, rallied under the Nationalist government for the concerted effort of fighting the Japanese. Emblematic of Chiang’s unprecedented influence within the GMD as a national leader, he was elected the Party’s Zongcai (general director) at the GMD’s provisional congress in Hankou in April 1938, a newly created position that enabled Chiang to firmly control the party and yield greater power than Sun Yat-sen had had as the Zongli of the party. In July 1940, the seventh session of the GMD’s Fifth Congress further designated July 7 as the date on which all members of the GMD swore their loyalty to the Zongcai. Chiang congratulated himself by saying: “Having fought for thirty years for our party and state, I eventually receive recognition today; having vacillated for fifteen years, our party eventually stabilizes today” (GMDD, 2: 647). During the early years of the War of Resistance, China achieved an exceptional degree of political and military unity for the first time in its modern history. The regional forces actively participated in the war and, in fact, played a key role in the major operations against the Japanese after the battles in Shanghai, in which Chiang Kai-shek put more than 700,000 of his bestequipped troops into the war, though about half of them were lost in the three months from August 13 to November 12, 1937. Among the regional forces, more than 600,000 from Sichuan province were killed, injured, or missing during the eight years of the war, accounting for about one-fifth of all Chinese casualties in the entire country (Ma and Wen 1986: 276); in Guangxi, more than 800,000 were mobilized and about 120,000 suffered casualties (Gao

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Xiaolin 1999); Long Yun dispatched about 200,000 from Yunnan to the fronts and more than half of them suffered casualties (Xie and Niu 1990: 199). Because of their heavy loss on the battleground and Chiang’s military restructuring, most of the formerly semi-independent regional forces were eliminated or greatly weakened by the end of the war. Zhang Xueliang’s Northeast Army was divided and dispatched to different parts of the country after the Xi’an Incident and Zhang himself was put under custody for the rest of his life; Song Zheyuan died in 1940 after his 29th Army suffered huge casualties in the wars in North China and was reorganized by Chiang; Han Fuqu was shot because of his defiance of Chiang’s order and loss of Shandong; Liu Xiang died mysteriously in 1938 and his province came under Chiang Kai-shek’s complete control after the Nationalist government was relocated to Chongqing in December 1937; Long Yun unexpectedly lost his control of Yunnan in October 1945 when his army was dispatched to Vietnam to accept the Japanese surrender. The exceptions were mainly the forces from Guangxi under Li Zongren and Bai Chongxi and from Shanxi and Suiyuan under Yan Xishan and Fu Zuoyi, who would plague Chiang during the upcoming civil war after the Japanese surrender.

The semi-centralism of the nationalist state The GMD made headway in building a unified and centralized state before and during the War of Resistance. It recovered China’s territorial entity and sovereign rights. It made solid steps in curbing and eliminating the centrifugal forces within the country. By the outbreak of Japan’s full-scale invasion in July 1937, Chiang Kai-shek had established his firm control of the Nationalist party by outcompeting his opponents within the top leadership of the Party; the central apparatus of the party-state expanded its control from the few provinces in East China into other regions, in particular, the southern and southwestern provinces. A centralized framework thus was largely established throughout the provinces in administrative, military, fiscal, and educational realms. Fiscally, it controlled the indirect taxes nationwide through the vigorous measures of centralization and standardization, and the greatly widened basis of tax revenues fueled the Nationalist state’s efforts to seek military and administrative centralization throughout the country. These breakthroughs made it possible for Chiang and his government to mobilize the fiscal, military, and political resources on a national level in resisting Japan’s aggression, to implement the strategic relocation of its political center and military forces from East China to southwest China after losing the battle in Shanghai in November 1937, and to act as the most important force among the Allies against Japan in the Far East until the outbreak of the Pacific War in December 1941. Afterwards, the Nationalist force, roughly 4 million troops, worked “to tie down some half a million or more Japanese soldiers, who could otherwise have been transferred elsewhere” (Mitter 2013: 379). Had the Japanese full-scale invasion occurred before Chiang consolidated his national leadership, China’s chances of surviving would have been truly slim.

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In fact, the Nationalist state not only survived and finally triumphed over Japan at the end of World War II, but miraculously joined America, Russia, and Britain to become a member of the Big Four at the Cairo Conference in 1943, dictating the formation of the postwar international order in the Far East, and later to become one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council in 1945.11 While the offensives by the Allied forces directly accounted for Japan’s unconditional surrender, China’s survival during the eight years of Japanese aggression and its enormous contribution to the Allied forces’ defeat of Japan in the last few years of World War II had much to do with the Nationalists’ state-building efforts before and during the war.12 It is equally clear, however, that the Nationalists’ state-making efforts were far from a solid success. The key to understanding the progress and setbacks in the Nationalists’ state-making efforts is “semi-centralism” in the Nationalist state’s fiscal constitution, government organization, and political identity. This is best seen as the result of the ramification, dilution, and distortion of the centralized regionalism that had once made the Guangdong-based GMD force the most powerful regional state before 1927. The highly centralized and unified fiscal system that Song Ziwen established in Guangdong generated as much as 80 to 90 million silver yuan annually, or nearly 150 million silver yuan annually by 1928 if the revenue generated by government bonds were included, thus turning GMD into the fiscally strongest regime among all regional contenders and making possible its military unification of China. After its establishment of a national regime in 1927, however, Nanjing was unable to apply the Guangdong model to the rest of the country, nor could it establish a highly centralized and unified fiscal system at the national level. Its enlargement of government revenue relied primarily on maritime customs, the unified tax, salt tax, and other indirect taxes as well as the sales of government bonds. The growth of government revenues lagged far behind the skyrocketing expenses of a national regime that was burdened with a rapidly expanding government body and non-military expenditures (see Chapter 10 for details), which in turn curtailed government spending on the military. By 1936, for instance, Nanjing’s military spending was only about 555 million silver yuan, or 4.23 times its level in 1927, while nonmilitary spending grew 68 times during the same period, reaching 1.338 billion yuan in 1936 (Yang Yinfu 1985: 70). The constraints on military spending made it difficult for Chiang Kai-shek to completely subjugate the regional forces and achieve real unification of the country. The contrast is also stark in the GMD’s organizational solidarity and political identity before and after 1927. In its early years in Guangdong, the GMD leadership was relatively unified, which, coupled with its alliance with the CCP and engagement in political propaganda against imperialism and warlords, made the Nationalist Army a high-morale combat force in the Northern Expedition. After 1927, however, Chiang Kai-shek faced huge difficulties in his quest for political unity within the Nationalist Party, especially in dealing with the defiant Cantonese elites. Beyond the power center, Chiang had to battle the regional forces that had been incorporated into the Nationalist regime but remained alienated

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from Chiang and autonomous to Nanjing before and during the Japanese invasion, despite their alleged loyalty to the Nationalist state and acceptance of Chiang’s national leadership. Unable to put the party-state apparatus under his personal control and use it effectively for national goals, Chiang had to turn to statism (guojiazhuyi, a doctrine calling for the prioritization of national goals and the enlargement of state power at the expense of individual rights) and, for a moment, imported fascism to rally support for his personal dictatorship and at the same time relied on the intelligence and secret service agencies (under the central government’s military council and the Party’s central organ, known as juntong and zhongtong) as well as fascist organizations (most notably, the Blue Shirts, or lanyishe) to enhance his power (Eastman 1974: 31–84). In the absence of political identity based on shared ideology and commitment, Chiang’s leadership was increasingly based on the use of violence and terror against dissidents and challengers on the one hand and reliance on traditional personal bonds and small-group solidarity on the other. It lacked a well-developed social and political basis. Zhang Zhizhong (1890–1969), one of Chiang’s most-trusted generals, observed that, after 1927, factional consciousness dominated the [Nationalist] Party’s organizational relations, thus turning the Party from the one that had centered on its ideology and revolutionary commitment into the one that centered on factionalism and even individuals. Party members joined the Party only for personal power, rather than the revolution, thus forcing the motivated revolutionaries to quit. (ZZZ : 252–253) Finally, on the local level, the Nationalist state failed to effectively penetrate society. Despite the GMD state’s reorganization of government organs and implementation of the self-government program at the county level and below, malfeasance and corruption by local officials in revenue generation and management, which had long been the central authority’s concern throughout the Qing, remained rampant and worked to undermine the power and legitimacy of the regime. “Local bullies and evil gentry” (tuhao lieshen), which had been the target of the Nationalist Revolution from its very beginning, remained active at the grassroots level, often in collaboration with government officials for selfaggrandizement at the expense of local communities (Wang Qisheng 2003; Thornton 2007). To be sure, compared to the Qing and early Republican states, the Nationalist regime undoubtedly extended its administrative arm further into the village communities, especially in provinces under its direct control, as seen, for instance, in the villagers’ participation in the election of local government offices and the investigation of unregistered “black land,” which resulted in the uncovering of much more illegal holdings to be officially surveyed and taxed by the state than before. The state’s nationalist propaganda also came to influence rural communities and shape the discourse of local elites (H. Li 2005). Nevertheless, traditional community ties based on kinship and

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neighborhood or supra-village networks based on collective undertakings in defense, water control, and religious activities continued to dictate the parameters of the peasants’ social space and the self-governing mechanisms of village communities, a phenomenon that was especially true in places where the state’s efforts of bureaucratization failed and traditional protective elites yielded to the rise of profiteering “entrepreneurial brokers” in taxation (Duara 1991). The vast majority of ordinary rural dwellers continued to identify themselves primarily with their clan, village community, or the immediate area surrounding their village, rather than with the entire Chinese nation or the state above them. Mobilizing the peasant population for state-making projects remained a task beyond the GMD regime’s capability. Preoccupied with defeating warlord and CCP forces in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Nationalist state lacked the time and energy to penetrate rural society by establishing an effective administrative network reaching every household, thus leaving the collection and use of the land tax, which could have been the largest source of revenue for the central government, to provincial and local authorities. Much of the failure of the GMD in competing with the CCP after 1945, therefore, had to do with the bankruptcy of its fiscal system, which was plagued with runaway inflation when its limited revenues from the indirect taxes and borrowing failed to sustain the rapidly escalating spending on the military and feed the huge size of civil and military personnel, hence the low morale of its troops and the quick erosion of the state’s legitimacy among the urban elites. To recapitulate, both the breakthroughs in Guomindang’s quest for a modern nation-state and the nationalism of the contending regional forces accounted for the Nationalist regime’s resilience in withstanding Japanese aggression in the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s. However, Chiang’s failure to build a party-state on ideological and organizational fronts undermined the formation of political identity among his followers and supporters. Chiang’s national leadership and the tenacity of the Nationalist regime during the eight years of Japanese aggression, in other words, was a result of the shared commitment among the different regional forces to China’s survival at the time of an unprecedented national crisis rather than the fruition of Chiang’s state-building efforts. Political unity under Chiang was fragile during the War of Resistance. Severe divisions already existed within the GMD party-state between Chiang and Wang Jingwei, ending in the latter’s creation of another, pro-Japanese Nationalist state in Nanjing in 1940, and between the GMD and the CCP in the early 1940s. Once the national crisis was gone and the common ground disappeared for the regional forces to stay together after the Japanese surrender in 1945, Chiang’s national leadership would be subject to challenges from the regional forces within the Nationalists and, more fatally, from the CCP, and the Nationalist state’s viability would be in jeopardy.

Notes 1 The inability of the central government to penetrate individual provinces, it is argued, forced Chiang to build his leadership by focusing on the use of the military, the cultivation of personal loyalty to himself among party and military elites, and

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various forms of political repression during the decade of the Nationalist rule in Nanjing (1927–1937) (Tien 1972; Eastman 1974). Historians further find that, after losing the best of the armies under his direct control at the beginning of the War of Resistance in 1937 and again in the Japanese offensives in 1944, Chiang’s party-state apparatuses verged on a paralysis because of his inability to control the resistant regional militarists and because of the demoralization of the Nationalist government itself (Ch’i 1982; Eastman 1984). More recent studies offer a different image of the Guomindang state. The Nationalists, Julia Strauss argues, were “surprisingly successful” in institutional building, as best seen in the organization and operation of a number of central government institutions, especially in the bureaucratization and professionalization of the personnel of such institutions, which, she suggests, signified the government’s continuation of the “top-down, centralizing, state-building” initiatives of its late Qing and early Republican predecessors (Strauss 1998: 8, 25). At the local level, state capacities also grew, as evidenced in Elizabeth Remick’s study of two counties in Guangdong province, where the government enhanced its penetration into village communities, thus resulting in increases in both its revenues and expenditures, without having to weaken the existence of local elites (Remick 2004). William Kirby finds in the Republican period breakthroughs in China’s international cooperation on all fronts and impressive records in improving its international standing (Kirby 1984, 1997; see also Taylor 2009: 589–590). He further describes the Guomindang government during the Nanjing decade as a “developmental state” for its use of trained bureaucrats and technocrats to formulate plans for state-led industrialization and for its commitment to integrated economic and industrial developments, which were later inherited by the Communist state after 1949 (Kirby 2000). Along this line, Morris Bian argues for institutional rationalization in China’s ordnance industry and related heavy industries in the 1930s and 1940s in response to the Japanese aggression (Bian 2005). In his study of wartime Wuhan, Stephen MacKinnon depicts the ten-month defense of the city against the Japanese assault in 1938 as a legendary moment of shared responsibility and cooperation among the Nationalist central government, military commanders of non-Whampoa origins, and the Communists, which permitted China to survive the war against Japan; the ordered withdrawal from the city stood in sharp contrast to the collapse that had occurred with the fall of Shanghai and Nanjing (MacKinnon 2009). 2 At the inaugural ceremony of the Committee for Reorganizing and Discharging the Nationalist Army on January 1, 1929, Chiang made the following remark: “What is the condition for the making of a modern state? The first is unification, and the second is centralization” (GMWX, 24: 4–6). 3 Together with the low and fixed tariff rate under the Qing government’s treaties with foreign powers that made the prices of imported goods competitive to domestic products, lijin has long been seen as another major hurdle to the growth of domestic industry and commerce because of the repeated collections of dues on native goods at different localities in their transportation to destinations. The heavy burden of lijin was also the very excuse by which foreign powers had insisted on the fixed tariff rates on imported goods and refused to agree with China’s tariff autonomy. Since its inception in the 1850s, lijin had also constituted the major source of revenue for local military and civilian authorities and been out of the central government’s direct control; it thus formed the fertile soil on which regional autonomy developed in the late Qing and early Republican years. Where the access to the capital market was limited or nonexistent, the collection of lijin became the most important source of income for warlords in the interior provinces in the 1910s and 1920s. Abolishing lijin, therefore, was not only necessary for the healthy development of domestic trade and industry but also essential for recovering China’s tariff autonomy and weakening the financial base of regional warlord forces.

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4 Feng Yuxiang, for instance, formally announced his acceptance of Sanminzhuyi upon pledging his loyalty to the GMD in September 1926 and leading his army to join the National Revolutionary Army under Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership. Earlier, to convert Feng into a pro-GMD revolutionary, Sun had sent him 6,000 copies of pamphlets on Sanminzhuyi and an additional 1,000 copies of his own works when visiting Beijing in early 1925 (Feng and Luo 2009: 6). Yan Xishan, too, announced his acceptance of Sanminzhuyi in June 1927 upon being appointed by Chiang as “the General Commander of the National Revolutionary Army in the North” (SSJY, 1928, Jan.-Jun.: 4). Zhang Zuolin’s Fengtian clique was once the leading force in “punishing the reds” (taochi), that is, warring with the GMD’s Northern Expedition forces, in 1926 and 1927, allegedly because of his hostility to the “radical” ideology of the Guomindang when it was under the influence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Soviet advisors. Therefore, Zhang Zuolin never officially accepted Sanminzhuyi. Nevertheless, to seek compromise and collaboration with the Nationalist force after Chiang Kai-shek purged the CCP members from the Nationalist forces in April 1927, Zhang Zuolin expressed his willingness to “carry out Mr. Sun Yat-sen’s unfinished will, not to betray the principles of Sanminzhuyi, and work together with Mr. Sun Yat-sen’s followers to fight the Communist Party” while blaming the “radicals” for “misunderstanding Mr. Sun’s ism.” After his father’s death, Zhang Xueliang lifted the ban on proGMD magazines, newspapers, and books in Manchuria when negotiating with the Nanjing government over the terms of switching his loyalty to the latter. He finally announced his obedience to the Nationalist government on December 29, 1928 by hanging the flag of Blue Sky and White Sun and acknowledging his “adherence to Sanminzhuyi” (zunshou Sanminzhuyi) (BYJF, 5: 895). 5 Wang Zizhuang, a secretary of the Guomindang central department, thus remarked in the late 1930s: “For more than ten years since the Northern Expedition, books on the Party’s doctrines are rare. Not only did [the Party’s doctrines] find no place in social sciences, but studies that interpret them are also few” (WZZ, 5: 102). 6 The Tongmenghui, the predecessor to the GMD, to be sure, was much more open because of its establishment in 1905 in Tokyo on the basis of several anti-Manchu organizations, including the Revive China Society (Xingzhonghui) of mostly overseas Cantonese, the China Revival Society (Huaxinghui) of the revolutionaries from Hunan, and the Renaissance Society (Fuxinghui) of the students from Zhejiang province. However, after Sun Yat-sen established the Chinese Revolutionary Party in 1914 and later engaged in the Pro-Constitution Movement and the Northern Expedition, Sun turned primarily to the Cantonese for membership of his party (renamed Zhongguo Guomindang, the Chinese Nationalist Party, in 1919) and based his military activities mostly in Guangzhou, which inevitably resulted in the dominance of the Cantonese in the leadership of the party (Jin Yilin 2005: 116). Not surprisingly, at the first two national congresses of the GMD, Cantonese was used as the official language, and all speeches and proposals by the Mandarin-speaking delegates had to be translated into Cantonese. 7 Later, Chiang continued to rely on his fellow natives of Zhejiang in maintaining his control of the party-state, among whom were the brothers of Chen Lifu (1900–2001) and Chen Guofu (1892–1951), who stewarded Guomindang’s organizational growth; Chen Cheng (1898–1965), Tang Enbo (1898–1954), and Hu Zongnan (1896–1962), Chiang’s most-trusted military commanders; Dai Li (1897–1946), who oversaw Guomindang’s intelligence agency; Xu Entong (1896–1985), head of the Guomindang government’s secret service; and Chen Bulei (1890–1948), Chiang’s ghostwriter. 8 A loyal follower of Sun Yat-sen and a commander of the Nationalist force in Guangdong in constant rivalry with Li Zongren’s Guangxi clique in the late 1920s, Chen

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Jitang (1890–1954) allied with Li and other forces in Guangdong and Guangxi to openly challenge Chiang after the latter detained Hu Hanmin; after 1931 he remained the legal ruler of Guangdong in his capacity as a key member of Guomindang’s Southwestern Executive Department and the Nationalist Government’s Southwestern Administrative Council in Guangzhou, making the province largely independent of Nanjing until 1936 when he failed in his collaboration with Li on a military campaign against Chiang. As mentioned in Chapter 4, since the 1870s Japan had replaced the European powers to be the major and immediate threat to China. As it turned out, Japan’s annexation of Liuqiu in 1879 and Taiwan in 1895 were only the first steps in its long quest for expansion. Defeating Russia and turning southern Manchuria into its sphere of influence in 1905 marked the beginning of Japan’s aggression against China’s northeast provinces, which naturally became its next target of expansion after annexing Korea in 1910. In the following years, Japan not only secured its exclusive privileges in southern Manchuria, but repeatedly attempted to expand its influence to eastern Inner Mongolia despite the Yuan Shikai regime’s firm resistance. Japan’s aggression became truly fatal to Nationalist China in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the latter finally ended the century-long trend of disintegration and, for the first time, showed signs of the emergence of a unified, modernizing state under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek. Song, for instance, was appointed as the chairman of the Hebei and Chahar Administrative Council (Ji-Cha zhengwu weiyuanhui) under the Nanjing government in December 1935 to legitimate his control of the vast areas of North China. Indicative of his semi-independence in relation to Nanjing, Song told his subordinates: “We won’t talk about separation from the central government, but we would never be a tool for Chiang Kai-shek’s personal manipulation” (cf. Chen and Chang 1997: 204). Unlike the northern regional leaders who had at once to resist and conciliate with the Japanese, the regional leaders of the southern and southwestern provinces appeared to be consistent in articulating their resistance to Japan, partly because of their nationalism and partly for the purpose of building their own legitimacy as patriotic and democratic forces in rivalry with Chiang Kaishek. On two important occasions, therefore, they openly challenged Chiang because of their disagreement with Chiang’s non-resistance policy as well as dictatorship. The first was the action taken by the commanders of the 19th Army and their supporters to establish the People’s Revolutionary Government of the Chinese Republic in Fuzhou of Fujian province in November 1933 (known as the Fujian Incident), who had been known nationwide for their heroic combat against the Japanese troops in Shanghai in the famous battle of January 28, 1932. The second was the joint military offensives by Chen Jitang of Guangdong and Li Zongren and Bai Chongxi of Guangxi against Chiang’s Central Army in June 1936 (known as the Guangdong-Guangxi Incident) in resisting Nanjing’s attempt at unifying the administrative systems in the two southern provinces after the death of Hu Hanmin. These anti-government actions, however, received little sympathy from the general public at the times of worsened crisis of national survival. Counting on the superiority of his military forces and the support of public opinion, Chiang suppressed the rebellion in Fujian. The allied forces of Chen, Li, and Bai were also aborted because of the defections from within Guangdong; Chen left Guangzhou and completely lost his influence there while the Guangxi leaders remained largely intact. For a discussion of the Nationalist state’s successes in rebuilding China’s international relations, see Kirby (1997). It is also important to note, however, that some of the regional forces who played a prominent role in the War of Resistance, in particular those from Guangxi, Yunnan,

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and Sichuan, accepted Chiang’s leadership not because they had been fully incorporated into the Nationalist party-state; far from that, they had been consistently treated by Chiang with suspicion and among the first to be deployed to the front combatting the Japanese and often suffering more casualties than Chiang’s own forces. Nevertheless, these regional leaders voluntarily dispatched the best of their forces from the remote southern or southwestern provinces to East and Central China and actively participated in the most important campaigns in Xuzhou, Wuhan, and Changsha. The motivation behind their self-sacrifice had more to do with their commitment to China’s survival as an entire nation, which outweighed their calculation of personal or regional interest. Nationalism, in other words, served as the common ground uniting the central and regional forces that had been in conflict for years. The formation of a united front among all political and military forces and the establishment of Chiang Kai-shek’s national leadership, in a nutshell, were the result of both the Nationalists’ state-making efforts and the regional leaders’ prioritization of national survival at the expense of self-interests, which in turn had to do with their need for legitimization in twentieth-century China in which nationalism reigned supreme in political discourse.

10 Total centralism at work The confluence of breakthroughs in state-making

To understand the rise and eventual success of the Communist Revolution, it is important to distinguish between three interrelated yet substantially different phases of the event. The first is the nine years from the CCP’s break with the GMD in 1927 to its defeat by the Nationalists and subsequent relocation to Shaanxi province in 1936. This was when the communist force grew in the mushrooming base areas in south-central China by taking advantage of the Nanjing government’s preoccupation with war against regional forces in the late 1920s and early 1930s, but suffered huge losses as a result of the Nationalists’ annihilation campaigns. The second is the eight years of the War of Resistance from 1937 to 1945, when the communist forces thrived in North China. Compared to its size in November 1935 when the central force of the CCP arrived in northern Shaanxi, with only about ten thousand soldiers, by the end of this period the communist regular forces had expanded to more than 910,000 soldiers occupying 19 base areas, with a total population of nearly one hundred million (Pang and Jin 2011, 1: 372, 2: 713–714), thus constituting the most formidable challenge to the Nationalist regime.1 Nevertheless, no matter how phenomenal its growth was during the War of Resistance, the communist forces by 1945 were far from definitive in shaping the result of the Communist Revolution in 1949. For decades, the CCP was disadvantaged in relation to the GMD regime. Geopolitically, its guerrilla forces were confined to the poverty-stricken rural areas of the southern and, after 1935, northwestern provinces. Without access to the goods, funding, and advisors provided by the Soviet Union, which had been critical to its rise in the 1920s, the communist forces remained poorly equipped and small in size, despite their penetration into the “rear areas” under Japanese occupation. Politically, the Party struggled with factionalism at the top level, between the leaders who had returned from Moscow and the indigenous leaders led by Mao, and with the division between the communist forces of different base areas. In spite of its quick expansion during the War of Resistance, the communist forces were inferior to the Nationalists in almost all regards during the interim from Japan’s surrender in September 1945 to the outbreak of the Civil War in June 1946. There were no clear signs that the CCP was bound to defeat the GMD on the eve of the Civil War.

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What was decisive to the CCP’s fate, then, were the developments during the Civil War years (1946–1949), the third phase of the Communist Revolution. The conventional wisdom typically explains the CCP’s success in the Civil War as a result of its mobilization of the rural population through land reform and its recruitment of a large number of peasant soldiers and laborers for logistic service (e.g., Pepper 1978), while attributing the GMD’s failure to the entrenched corruption of its bureaucrats dating back to the late 1920s and 1930s which only worsened after its takeover of the cities from the Japanese in 1945, the unpopularity of Chiang’s insistence on a war to eliminate the CCP, and most fatally, the lack of coordination among its troops and runaway price inflation in the cities (Pepper 1978; Eastman 1984). More recent interpretations accentuate the military factor by focusing on the key role of the battles in Manchuria in shaping the result of the Civil War without having to downplay the significance of land reform in strengthening the communist forces (Levine 1987; Tanner 2013, 2015), or to focus on the social impact of the war (Lary 2015), or to underscore Mao’s superior leadership and strategic thinking as well as his generals’ combat experience (Cheng 2005; Lew 2009), or to pinpoint the GMD’s mistakes in military strategies and tactics in fighting the CCP in Manchuria and East China while discounting the importance of land reform to the CCP and the damage of the GMD regime’s failures in economic and financial policies to its legitimacy (Westad 2003). To inquire into the reasons behind the CCP’s surprising success, this chapter looks at three key factors, namely the geopolitical settings in which the Revolution unfolded and redefined its goals, the fiscal constitutions of the communist regime that ultimately shaped its military strength or weakness, and identity building that determined the CCP’s ability to tap and employ resources for its strategic goals. We will find that the CCP achieved breakthroughs in each of the three phases of the Communist Revolution, and it was the confluence of these breakthroughs during the last phase that accounted for its success in 1949. The CCP saw its first breakthrough in the late 1920s and early 1930s in penetrating peasant society and building a fiscal regime on the basis of a subsistence economy; it further witnessed success in identity building afterwards, which resulted in the firm establishment of Mao’s leadership of the Party and the unity of its political and military forces which existed in different base areas by 1943. However, the most important breakthrough took place after 1945, in which the communist force capitalized on a totally different geopolitical setting in its favor and therefore transformed its fiscal regime from relying on poverty-stricken rural areas to being centered on Manchuria, the economically most productive and strategically most important region in China. It was the CCP’s combination of its strength built before 1945, that is, its ability to mobilize rural support and maintain high-level identity, with its rebuilt fiscal-military strength after 1945, that enabled the communist force to fight the Nationalist forces on an equal footing and to experience a shift in its military strategy from prioritizing guerrilla warfare, which was defensive most of the time prior to 1945, to regular warfare, which became increasingly offensive by 1947.

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Political identity under Mao Mao’s quest for leadership: from military to political Both Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong emerged as the supreme leaders of the Nationalist and communist forces, respectively, by the late 1930s. But the ways of their quests for dominance were different. Chiang bolstered his leadership invariably with his control of the military; it was the unparalleled fiscal and military strength of the Guomindang forces that enabled him to subjugate the warlords one after another by the early 1930s. It was also on the basis of his military power that Chiang triumphed over his opponents within the Guomindang. Nevertheless, Chiang’s leadership was fragile and incomplete. Instead of eliminating his rivals within and outside the Guomindang, he established his dominance primarily by compromising with them and incorporating them into the military, government, and party organizations under his control, an approach that minimized his efforts at state building but also rendered his leadership unstable and ineffective. Despite the momentary reputation as a national leader that he gained during the War of Resistance against Japan and shortly after the Japanese surrender, Chiang exercised his power primarily as a military strongman, rather than a charismatic leader with unchallenged legitimacy and influence within the Nationalist party-state. Ideologically, he was a poor interpreter of Sun Yat-sen’s Sanminzhuyi; he never developed a set of ideas in his name, not to mention a consensus within the Party on the orthodoxy of his thoughts. In a word, Chiang lacked soft power; he based his rule mainly on military strength, rather than ideological persuasion and spiritual inspiration. Mao Zedong’s leadership of the CCP, too, began with his control of military power within the Party. As one of the founders of the Red Army, Mao lost his position as the “general political commissar” and a key commander of the army at a meeting of Party leaders in Ningdou in October 1932, and was subsequently ousted from the Party’s leadership (Pang and Jin, 1: 297–300). It was after the Red Army suffered repeated defeats, resulting in huge losses from 87,000 to about 30,000 soldiers during the first few months of its retreat from the Jiangxi base area, that Mao was able to make suggestions redirecting the Army’s route of retreat in his capacity as a member of the CCP’s political bureau in late 1934. At the famous meeting at Zunyi of Guizhou province on January 15–17, 1935, Mao was elected as a standing member of the Party’s political bureau and named as an assistant to Zhou Enlai, the supreme commander of the Red Army. After the meeting, Zhou, Mao, and Wang Jiaxiang soon formed the Trio (sanrentuan), with Zhou as the head, to command the army, and Mao to play a key role when making decisions on the army’s operations (ibid.: 353). Later in August 1935, at a meeting of the political bureau, Mao was officially put in charge of the Party’s military affairs (ibid.: 364). His military leadership was further confirmed by his appointment as the chairman of the CCP’s Revolutionary Military Committee in December 1936 after the Red Army migrated to Shaanxi province. The official leader of the Party, however,

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remained Zhang Wentian, who had been the general secretary since February 1935, shortly after the Zunyi meeting (Cheng Zhongyuan 2006: 140). The biggest challenge to Mao in his rise to the Party’s top leadership came from Wang Ming, who had been working for the Comintern in Moscow since 1931 and was sent back to Yan’an in December 1937; by that time the CCP and the GMD had formed the United Front for the War of Resistance (HQM: 44). He was soon appointed as the secretary of the CCP’s Changjiang Bureau in Wuhan, with Zhou Enlai as the vice secretary, to represent the CCP in communication with the Nationalist government that had retreated from Nanjing to Wuhan. Mao continued to oversee the Party’s military affairs. Contrary to Mao’s insistence on the CCP’s autonomy, however, Wang adhered to the Comintern’s instructions and emphasized the supreme importance of the United Front and the CCP’s unreserved acceptance of Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership, including his employment of the communist force in the regular “mobile warfare” against Japanese troops. Behind Wang’s stance was the Comintern’s concern with Chiang Kai-shek’s possible compromise with Japan and, subsequently, Japan’s attack on the Soviet Union after consolidating its control of China. Mao, therefore, had good reason to complain later that Wang “paid too little attention to [China’s] own affairs and cared too much about others’” (Pang and Jin 2011, 2: 518). Backed by the Comintern, Wang saw himself as above all other CCP leaders and acted assertively, a situation that did not change until September 1938, when Wang Jiaxiang came back from Moscow with the Comintern’s new message: the CCP leadership should be “headed by Mao Zedong” and should build an “atmosphere of intimacy and unity” (ibid.: 519). Wang thus lost his standing as the Comintern’s representative within the CCP and the influence associated with it. Zhang Wentian also proposed to hand over his position as the Party’s general secretary to Mao, but Mao refused (Cheng Zhongyuan 2006: 140). With the Comintern’s endorsement, Mao definitely established his leadership of the CCP at its Sixth Session of the Sixth Congress from September 29 to November 6, 1938, in which he refuted Wang’s slogan of “conformity with the United Front in everything” and stressed the importance of the CCP’s independence under the United Front; he further justified the necessity of “concrete application of Marxism to China” or the “combination of Marxism with our country’s specific characteristics” as the CCP’s approach to ideology building (Pang and Jin 2011, 2: 522–523). By this point, Mao had established himself as not only the supreme commander of the CCP’s military forces but also the de facto political leader of the Party.

Toward the hegemony of Maoism Mao’s quest for leadership, however, did not stop there. To legitimate his power and base it on a solid ideological base, he took further steps to create a new set of ideas, known later as “Mao Zedong Thought” (Mao Zedong sixiang). It was in this arena where Mao differed from, and indeed surpassed, Chiang Kai-shek. Mao’s ability to turn his political thinking into the only

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orthodoxy in the CCP’s ideology, coupled with his relentless efforts at organizational consolidation, accounted for the exceptional level of political identity and conformity among the Chinese communists, which was critical to the CCP’s success in its rivalry with the Nationalists in the years to come. Before establishing himself as the sole ideological authority within the CCP, Mao was only recognized as a military talent, and his influence was largely limited to military affairs; although he was later also accepted as the Party’s de facto leader after September 1938, his speeches and writings were not duly respected and accepted by party elites.2 To build his ideological influence, Mao authored a series of essays in late 1939 and early 1940. His writings had two foils. One was Wang Ming, who saw the Chinese Revolution as consisting of three phases, with the struggle against imperialism as the only task of the ongoing first phase, which should be distinguished with its future tasks in the second and third phases, namely the struggle against feudalism and the transition to socialism, respectively, and therefore stressed the importance of the United Front and the CCP’s acceptance of the Guomindang’s leadership for the current task of resisting Japanese aggression (Hu Qiaomu 2003: 198). The other target was the Guomindang’s ideologists, who questioned the legitimacy of the CCP and its Marxist ideology by advocating “one party” and “one ism.” To refute the two enemies inside and outside the Party, Mao formulated his own thesis of “New Democracy” (xin minzhuzhuyi). For him, the Chinese Revolution consisted of two steps, the “New Democratic Revolution” and the socialist revolution. The New Democratic Revolution, Mao wrote, was at once a national revolution against the oppression of external imperialism and a democratic revolution against the oppression of domestic feudalism, and the struggle against imperialism was the most important task (Pang and Jin 2011, 2: 568). To finish the New Democratic Revolution, however, the Chinese proletariat (namely the CCP, as the vanguards of the proletariat) should take the leadership and work together with peasants, the petty bourgeoisie, and the national bourgeoisie as a united front; the Chinese bourgeoisie, for its part, had proven to be liable to compromise with the two enemies and therefore ineligible to be the leader of the Revolution. The state to be established after the Revolution, Mao further explicated, should be neither a bourgeois republic nor a proletarian dictatorship; instead, it should be the dictatorship by a coalition of all classes committed to the struggle against imperialism and feudalism and under the leadership of the proletariat (the CCP). And the government itself should take the form of “democratic centralism” (minzhu jizhongzhi). The state would permit the ownership of private properties and not forbid capitalist production, but state-owned, socialist enterprises should be the leading sector of the national economy. In rural areas, the property of feudal landlords would be confiscated and redistributed to landless and land-poor peasants, while the rich-peasant economy would be permitted and all kinds of cooperative economy would be encouraged. The New Democratic Revolution, in a word, would clear the way for the development of capitalism and at the same time brewed elements of socialism; the ultimate goal of

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the Chinese Revolution in the future, Mao claimed, was the transition to socialism (MXJ, 2: 602–614, 621–656, 662–711). Clearly defined and coherently structured, Mao’s theory of New Democracy immediately distinguished itself from Sanminzhuyi, which was all-encompassing and open to highly subjective and flexible interpretations for different purposes. It was also different from the classic Marxist theory that called for a straightforward transition from capitalism to socialism via a class struggle between capitalists and the proletariat. As a key step in his quest for the CCP’s ideological autonomy, Mao’s theory of New Democracy provided the Party with an effective tool to legitimate its existence when it was ready to break with the GMD and compete for dominance in domestic politics in the years to come. Before he was able to turn his theory into the ideology of the entire Party, however, Mao had to first discredit the existing ideological authorities within the Party. For that purpose, Mao Zedong and his assistants put together all of the relevant documents of the Party of the preceding 13 years and compiled them into a volume, entitled Since the Sixth Congress (Liuda yilai), published in two versions (complete and abridged), and made them available to all of the high-ranking cadres of the Party. Dubbed the “party book” (dangshu), this volume systematically showed for the first time the struggles within the Party between two different lines, the “leftist line” pursued by Wang Ming and his followers that led to the CCP’s repeated disasters, and Mao’s “correct line” that explained the Red Army’s earlier successes. The book produced immediate effects. As Mao described it, “once the party book was published, many comrades put down their weapons” (Pang and Jin 2011, 2: 641). Those who had sided or sympathized with Wang Ming changed their stance and supported Mao. It was against this background that the CCP’s political bureau held its “enlarged conference” in September 1941 (known as the “September Meeting”), in which a consensus was achieved among the Party elites on Mao’s ideological supremacy. The meeting began with Mao’s attack on the “subjectivism” and “sectarianism” characteristic of the political line of Wang and Bo. He won overwhelming support from the high-ranking party cadres, including those who had followed or once sided with Wang Ming, such as Bo Gu, Zhang Wentian, and Wang Jiaxiang, who made “self-criticism” regarding their mistakes (HQM: 194–195; Pang and Jin 2011, 2: 641–643). Mao thus finally established his status as not only the supreme military commander and political leader but also the sole ideological authority of the Party (HQM: 48).

Identity building through indoctrination and compulsion Mao, however, was not content with a consensus on his political leadership and ideological supremacy merely among the top-level party elites, which was obviously achieved at the September Meeting. To ensure the unreserved loyalty to Mao in the entire Party from the top down to the grassroots level, to turn the CCP into an organization with a high level of solidarity, and to free the Party of factionalism, corruption, and lack of discipline, Mao faced two more tasks: to

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propagandize his doctrine among all members of the Party; and, more important, to purge from the ranks of party cadres those who had sided with his political opponents within the Party or who were suspected of being disloyal to the CCP. For these two ends, Mao launched the Rectification Campaign in February 1942. The origin of the campaign can be traced to the Comintern’s resolution on March 11, 1940, that urged the CCP to take measures to purify the ranks of party cadres. Mao welcomed the resolution as well as Stalin’s earlier talk on the Bolshevisation of Communist Parties in individual countries (Zhang Xide 2009), using them as the rationale to launch the Rectification Campaign that served his own political agenda. The campaign, therefore, first targeted more than ten thousand party cadres and pro-CCP intellectuals in Yanan where the Party’s headquarters was located. They were required to study Mao’s writings and other documents of the Party and examine their own “non-proletarian thinking.” After several months of intensive indoctrination and self-examination, Mao believed that the “extremely chaotic and confusing ideas” that had existed “among the large number of young as well as senior cadres and among the intellectuals” were gone, and their thinking was “unified” (Pang and Jin 2011, 2: 657). After June 1942, therefore, the campaign was further extended to CCP members in all areas throughout the country, targeting primarily the high and middle-ranking cadres of regional party organizations, and the focus of the campaign was on the party cadres’ examination of their problems with “liberalism” (ziyouzhuyi, i.e., noncompliance with the Party’s discipline and directives) and “demanding independence from the Party” (dui dang nao dulixing wenti). To ensure the “unified leadership” (yiyuanhua lingdao) of the Party, Mao replaced Zhang Wentian as the official leader of the CCP after he took the position as chairman of both the political bureau and the secretariat of the Party in March 1943 (ibid.: 659). The campaign entered its second phase after April 1943 with a new task: to investigate the history of each and every cadre’s political career and to expunge the “impure” elements from the rank of party cadres, in response to penetration and sabotage by GMD forces. But the investigation soon developed into unrestrained persecution involving the use of torture, unverified accusation, and false confession. In Yan’an alone, more than 1,400 individuals were identified as the GMD’s secret agents in about two weeks (Pang and Jin, 2: 663). Mao later realized the severe consequences of the indiscriminate persecution that targeted mainly intellectuals, forbade the death penalty for any of the persecuted, and rehabilitated most of them in early 1944. By that point, Mao had definitely achieved what he had wanted from the campaign: a high level of political identity and organizational solidarity within the Party on the basis of a consensus of his leadership among the entirety of the Party cadres at different levels and ordinary party members, to be bolstered by their faith in the correctness of the Maoist ideology as well as their fear of removal from the Party. As if all these were not enough, Mao took two more actions to firmly anchor his leadership on an unchallengeable ground. One was to chair a meeting of the CCP’s political bureau on September 7 to October 6, 1943, in which he

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castigated the two major groups of “sectarians,” namely the “dogmatist” group and the “empiricist” group. Since Wang Ming and Bo Gu, as the leaders of the former group which had been completely discredited, Mao’s real target this time was the empiricist group, and Zhou Enlai was number one among them (Shi Zhongquan 2012: 17). To please Mao, attendants at the meeting claimed that since the dogmatist leaders, including Wang, Bo, Zhang Wentian, and Wang Jiaxiang, no longer constituted a threat to the Party, the empiricists, primarily Zhou, would be the most dangerous in the future (HQM: 295). Zhou was the Party leader with the longest service and of the highest reputation before Mao’s rise to the top. Being partly responsible for removing Mao from the Party’s leadership at the Ningdou meeting back in 1932, and as Mao’s superior and the supreme military commander of the Red Army in place of Mao for years afterwards, Zhou was fully aware of his delicate situation at that moment; he made the lengthiest and most thorough “self-reflection” and “historical examination” among all of the speakers at the meeting. Mao was ambivalent towards Zhou. He was resentful of Zhou’s tolerance of, and compromise with, the dogmatist leaders on many occasions, but he was also reliant on Zhou for his ability to handle the thorniest challenges from within and outside the Party. Most importantly, Zhou had never taken the lead to openly challenge Mao and, after the Zunyi Meeting, played a key role in supporting Mao’s leadership. Mao, therefore, did not take further action against Zhou, but he would be on alert against any signs of his unruliness for the rest of his life. The last step Mao took to seal his supremacy within the CCP was to have “the Resolution regarding Several Historical Issues” unanimously passed at the Seventh Session of the Party’s Sixth Congress on April 20, 1945. Central to the resolution was a new narrative of the Party’s history that highlighted the repeated struggles between the correct political line represented by Mao and the wrong line pursued by dogmatist Party leaders. Nevertheless, the Resolution should not be merely interpreted as a result of Mao’s manipulation of the Party leadership for his personal power. Nor should the Rectification Campaign be simply seen as another round of the power struggle between Mao and his opponents within the Party. In fact, no one had been able to challenge Mao’s standing within the CCP since he received the Comintern’s endorsement of his leadership in September 1938, as mentioned earlier. It was likely, to be sure, that seeking revenge on his old-time adversaries and competitors within the Party (including dogmatists such as Wang Ming as well as empiricists such as Zhou Enlai) could be part of the reasons behind Mao’s launching the Rectification Campaign. For Mao, however, the campaign as well as the drafting and passing of the Resolution were necessary not only because they worked to turn himself into a full-fledged leader of the Party and to gloss his leadership with a layer of charisma, but more importantly because they were indispensable for the CCP to achieve a high degree of political identity and organizational solidarity on the basis of a party-wide consensus on his political correctness and ideological supremacy. Likewise, the party elites’ acceptance of Mao’s leadership should not be simply interpreted as a result of their failure in rivalry with him or

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their submission to his growing dictatorship within the Party; it more or less reflected their consensus on his outstanding ability to lead the Red Army and the entire Party as well as the persuasiveness of his theory on the Chinese Revolution. Therefore, the description of Mao in the opening paragraph of the Resolution was not so much a flattery as a shared recognition among the party elites of Mao’s competence as the leader of the Party: Ever since its birth in 1921, the Communist Party of China has made the integration of the universal truth of Marxism–Leninism with the concrete practice of the Chinese revolution the guiding principle in all its work, and Comrade Mao Zedong’s theory and practice of the Chinese revolution represent this integration. … In the course of its struggle the Party has produced its own leader, Comrade Mao Zedong. Representing the Chinese proletariat and the Chinese people, Comrade Mao Zedong has creatively applied the scientific theory of Marxism–Leninism, the acme of human wisdom, to China, a large semi-feudal and semi-colonial country in which the peasantry constitutes the bulk of the masses and the immediate task is to fight against imperialism and feudalism, a country with a vast area and a huge population, where the situation is extremely complicated and the struggle extremely hard, and he has brilliantly developed the theories of Lenin and Stalin on the colonial and semi-colonial question as well as Stalin’s theory concerning the Chinese revolution. It is only because the Party has firmly adhered to the correct Marxist–Leninist line and waged a victorious struggle against all erroneous ideas opposed to this line that it has scored great achievements. (MXJ, 3: 952–953) It is equally undeniable, however, that Mao became increasingly intolerable of different voices and open challenges to his authority in any form, which was true during the Rectification Campaign and particularly so during and after the CCP political bureau’s meeting in November 1943 when Bo Gu, Zhang Wentian, and Zhou Enlai had to make lengthy confessions on their mistakes on the Party’s history. From that point on, free, honest, and collegial exchange of opinions yielded to a mix of respect, fear, and unprincipled flattery among the high-ranking party elites in their attitudes towards Mao. Mao increasingly turned his leadership into a form of dictatorship that necessitated the use of compulsion to exercise his power. But his dictatorship was different from Chiang Kai-shek’s. Chiang, as shown in the preceding chapter, based his leadership mainly on his control of the military, and he was never able to stifle different voices from his challengers within the GMD and to completely eliminate the autonomy of regional military forces. In sharp contrast, Mao not only put the communist forces under his effective and complete control but further established his leadership on a solid ideological ground and wiped out all kinds of “sectarianism” or opposition within the Party and among the military through the Rectification Campaign. The “unprecedented ideological,

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political and organizational solidarity and unity” (MXJ, 3: 953) that the CCP and its military had achieved nationwide by the end of the War of Resistance prepared them well for the Civil War with the Nationalist forces after 1946.

Manchuria and the Civil War For decades, the CCP’s military strategies had been defensive by and large before the outbreak of the Civil War in 1946. This was true during the Jiangxi Soviet period from 1927 to 1934, when the Red Army and its base areas had to survive the Nationalists’ blockade, military sieges, and repeated annihilation campaigns. It was also true during the War of Resistance from 1937 to 1945, when the communist forces and their base areas expanded quickly but suffered the Japanese army’s repeated mopping operations and later the GMD’s blockade and localized attacks. The biggest disadvantage to the communist forces in northern Shaanxi and other areas of North China was that these areas were among the poorest parts of China; they had huge difficulties obtaining enough food and other goods to support the quickly expanding forces.3 Predictably, as the War of Resistance came close to an end and the tension between the communist and Nationalist forces escalated, the CCP leaders’ strategy for the expansion of their base areas was to prioritize their development in the relatively prosperous southern provinces; Mao Zedong and the Party central issued directives one after another to dispatch the communist forces down to the south and create or enlarge base areas in Hunan, Guangdong, Fujian, Zhejiang, and Jiangsu provinces in late 1944 and early 1945 (TDGG 1981, 15: 32–36, 145–147, 181–187). It is also worth stressing that, despite the quick expansion of communist forces during the War of Resistance, the CCP was inferior to the GMD in almost all regards during the interim from Japan’s surrender in September 1945 to the outbreak of the Civil War in June 1946. Having just emerged as a victor in the war against Japan, the Nationalist government and its leader Chiang Kai-shek enjoyed unprecedented popularity among the people. Backed with the military and monetary aid from the United States, the Nationalist troops far surpassed the communist forces in equipment and size. Mao, therefore, succumbed to pressure from Chiang, Joseph Stalin, as well as the general public in China for a negotiation over the formation of a coalition government in August 1945, despite his unwillingness and confidence in the viability of the communist forces. It was widely observed that, even if the negotiation went well, the reorganized government would remain under the GMD’s control and the best result for the CCP was to have a few seats, together with other political parties, at the central level and retain part of the communist troops that would be significantly smaller than the GMD’s. Indeed, when the negotiation was done and an agreement was signed between the two parties in January 1946, the CCP leadership was serious in thinking about ceasing military struggle, embracing “the new phase of peace and democratic reconstruction” (heping minzhu jianshe de xin jieduan)

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(ZGZY, 16: 62), relocating its headquarters from Yan’an to Qingjiang in northern Jiangsu, and continuing its rivalry with the GMD by “using ballots instead of bullets” (Hu Sheng 2001: 13). Later, when the military confrontation between the communist and Nationalist forces in North China and Manchuria escalated and a civil war became imminent, observers such as Liang Shuming, general secretary of the China Democratic League, all excluded the possibility of the GMD’s defeat by the Communists, given its superior military force and control of the national government; the only possible result that the CCP could achieve at most, he believed, was the splitting of China into two halves, with the CCP controlling the northern part and the GMD the southern part (Liang Shuming 2006: 318).

Why was Manchuria so important? But the unexpected events in August 1945 – the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, the Soviet Union’s declaration of war against Japan on August 8, and its subsequent invasion and complete occupation of Manchuria by September 2 – caused a fundamental change to the CCP’s strategy for post-war development. The strategic advantages of Manchuria and its extreme importance were obvious to the CCP. First, Manchuria neighbored the Soviet Union to its north, Mongolia to its west, and North Korea to its east – all of these neighbors were communist states or areas and friendly to the CCP; once it occupied this area, the communist forces would have a secure and stable base area, which would be relatively isolated from the interior provinces and immune to the Nationalist threat, and, from there, it could take an offensive strategy by launching large-scale operations against the Nationalist forces in the interior provinces. Second, unlike the CCP’s preexisting base areas, which were small and scattered, Manchuria was vast, covering about 1.3 million square kilometers, making it impossible for the Guomindang forces to occupy the entire area right after the Japanese surrender while allowing the CCP enough room to establish its own base areas, to retreat when faced with the Nationalist troops’ attack in competition for control of this area, and to display a high level of mobility in planning large-scale offensives to eventually expel and annihilate the Nationalist forces from the area. Third and most important, Manchuria was rich. Agriculturally, the immense and fertile soil in this area accounted for its high level of productivity, which, coupled with the relatively low density of population, yielded a large quantity of surplus in food supply compared to other parts of China, making it a net exporter of grain. Furthermore, Manchuria had a well-developed industry, especially the heavy industry of machinery and energy production, which accounted for about 90% of the total heavy industrial output in the country in the late 1940s; its arsenals were among the best and the largest in China.4 Manchuria also had a highly developed transportation network; its railroads reached 14,000 kilometers in total, or about half of the total mileage of railroads in the country (Zhu Jianhua 1987a: 140). Once occupied, Manchuria would be a solid logistic base for the communist forces to conquer the rest of the country.

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The strategic importance of the Northeast was also clear to the CCP. If they targeted East China first, where the political and economic centers of Nationalist China were located, the Communists had little chance of winning because the Guomindang government, backed by the generous support of the United States, had their best equipped forces stationed in this area, which could easily besiege and annihilate the communist forces that were poorly equipped. Indeed, as it turned out, with about a third of its forces concentrating in Jiangsu and Shandong, the Nationalists had no difficulty wiping out the preexisting communist base areas in central and northern Jiangsu in the second half of 1947 and pushing the communist forces back to southern Shandong and later further back to central Shandong by May 1947 (Zhang Xianwen et al. 2005, 4: 80–83, 103–104). Alternatively, if the communist forces prioritized North China as its target, they would have faced the Nationalists’ attacks from both the Northeast and East China. The best option, therefore, was to control Manchuria first, taking advantage of the Soviet occupation of this area, “seal in” the Nationalist forces in it which had recently entered the area, and completely annihilate them. Only after its complete control of Manchuria, could the communist forces then be concentrated in East China to combat the Nationalists’ main forces, taking advantage of the abundant supply of military and logistic resources from Manchuria (Ye Jianying 1982). Anticipating substantial support from the neighboring communist states, especially the Soviet Union, which continued to occupy Manchuria until April 1946, Mao and the CCP leadership soon gave up the original strategy of southward expansion and instead formulated the new strategy of “develop in the north, defend in the south” (xiang bei fazhan, xiang nan fangyu) in September 1945 (LSQ, 1: 371–372). Mao justified this strategy by saying: “The four northeastern provinces are an extremely important area, having lots of industrial equipment, large factories, and large cities; if they are put under our leadership, we will have a basis to win.” He continued, From our Party’s point of view, and in the light of the nearest future of the Chinese revolution, the Northeast is particularly important. As long as we have the Northeast, the Chinese revolution will have a solid basis, even if we have lost all other bases areas now. Of course, the basis of the Chinese revolution will be even more solid if we have the Northeast while keeping other base areas. (MWJ, 3: 410–411, 426) Liu Shaoqi, who was the Party’s acting chairman of the CCP central committee when Mao was in Chongqing and next only to Mao in the CCP’s new leadership after the Seventh Congress, first suggested the idea of “develop in the north” and held a similar view: As long as we are able to control the Northeast as well as the two provinces of Chahar and Rehe, and as long as we have the collaboration from all of

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The Soviet support The Soviet occupation force’s collaboration was key to the CCP’s establishment of base areas and successful control of the whole of Manchuria, despite the former’s commitment to the terms of the treaty between the Soviet Union and Nationalist China, which forced the CCP to give up its original plan of “exclusively occupying the Northeast” (du zhan dongbei) and switch to the new plan of “giving up the main route and occupying the two sides” (rangkai dalu, zhanling liangxiang) and establishing base areas in the countryside (TDGG, 15: 433–436; Jin Congji 2006: 14–15). The Soviet troops welcomed the arrival of a CCP force at Shanhaiguan and allowed the latter to take over local government authority in early September 1945. Later, they allowed all of the communist troops in different parts of Manchuria to act freely as long as they did not bear the official title of the CCP’s force, a situation that was true especially in the first two months of their entry into Manchuria (Li Yunchang 1988). Their generous provision of weapons made it possible for the preexisting communist army in Manchuria, known as “the Allied Resistance Force” (kanglian), to form a “self-defense force” of 48,500 men within a month. The Russian occupying authority also handed over the arsenal of the former Japanese Kwantung Army, which was not too far from Shenyang, to a communist force under the command of Zeng Kelin, making it possible for Zeng to expand his force from 4,000 to 60,000 men. In early October, it further informed the CCP authority in Manchuria that it was ready to hand over all of the military equipment of the former Kwantung Army in Manchuria that could arm several hundreds of thousands of soldiers. So huge was the quantity, however, that the communist troops in actuality were only able to take over about 10,000 rifles, 3,400 machine guns, 100 canons, and 20 million bullets initially. In late October, the Russians handed over to the communist forces all of the arsenals and ammunition depots, as well as some heavy weapons and even airplanes, in southern Manchuria. Before their withdrawal from Manchuria in April 1946, the Soviet troops further turned over to the communist forces the Japanese arsenals in northern Manchuria, including, among others, more than 10,000 machine guns and 100 canons. Altogether, according to an unverified source, the Communists received from the Russians Japanese weapons that amounted to about 700,000 rifles, 13,000 machine guns, 4,000 canons, 600 tanks, 2,000 vehicles, 679 ammunition depots, 800 airplanes, and some gunboats (Yang Kuisong 1999: 262; see also Liu Tong 2000 for a different estimate). The communist force thus established its definite superiority over the Nationalist troops in Manchuria in terms of armament as well as manpower. In early 1946, to ensure that the communist force had enough time to prepare for its quick occupation of the smaller cities and rural areas in Manchuria after the withdrawal of the Soviet

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occupying forces, the latter used various excuses to deliberately delay their withdrawal and prevent the Nationalist troops from landing in Dalian and taking over the cities as scheduled (Du Yuming 1985: 519–520, 536–545).

Manchuria as a powerhouse Manchuria, therefore, became the theater where the first of the three decisive military campaigns by the communist forces took place (known as the LiaoxiShenyang Campaign), in which they completely defeated the Nationalists and occupied the region by early November 1948 after more than seven weeks of battles. As Mao Zedong anticipated, Manchuria became the CCP’s largest and most important base area. Bolstered by its highly developed modern industry and transportation as well as a productive agriculture, this region soon functioned as a powerhouse to provide the CCP with manpower, weaponry, and logistic support that enabled the Communists’ success in the next two major campaigns against the Nationalists, namely the Huai-Hai Campaign in East China (from November 6, 1948 to January 10, 1949) and the Beijing-Tianjin Campaign in North China (from November 29, 1948 to January 31, 1949), respectively. Manchuria was first of all the CCP’s most important source of soldiers during the Civil War. As a result of its vigorous efforts of recruitment and ample supply of weapons, the communist troops in Manchuria expanded quickly, from about 200,000 soldiers at the end of 1945 to 380,000 soldiers a year later, which almost doubled to more than 700,000 by the end of 1947 (Zhu Jianhua 1987b: 602, 604); combined, the communist forces in the northwestern, northern, eastern, and north-central provinces increased only by 300,000 by late 1947. By August 1948, on the eve of its major offensive against the Nationalist troops, the CCP forces in Manchuria further increased to 1.03 million, far outnumbering its enemy of about 500,000 men (Wang Miaosheng 1997: 94). They were not only the largest among the communist regional forces, accounting for nearly 37% of the entire communist army, but also the best equipped. Altogether, from 1945 to July 1948, the CCP recruited 1.2 million soldiers from Manchuria, accounting for more than 60% of the increased soldiers of the entire communist force during the same period (Zhu Jianhua 1987a: 286). After winning the Liaoxi-Shenyang Campaign in Manchuria, the communist army of the Northeast sent more than 800,000 of its troops, in addition to 150,000 peasants as logistic workers, down to the interior provinces, who constituted the main force to defeat the Guomindang troops in the Beijing-Tianjin Campaign (Zhu Jianhua 1987b: 69). Equally important was Manchuria’s role in weaponry production and its support for the Civil War in the interior provinces. Unlike the small-scale guerrilla warfare the CCP troops fought with the Nationalist or Japanese forces before 1945, in which they had no or little use of heavy weapons, the three major campaigns during the Civil War took the form of large-scale mobile and positional warfare, each involving the deployment of millions of soldiers, intensive use of

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artilleries, and the consumption of ammunition in large quantities. The Soviet assistance in handing over the arsenals of the former Japanese Kwantung Army to them only partially satisfied their needs in Manchuria. Taking advantage of the preexisting equipment and Japanese technical personnel who remained in service, the CCP forces quickly recovered and expanded weaponry production after they entered and occupied Manchuria. Thus, by the summer of 1948, for instance, they had owned 55 military factories of different sizes, able to annually produce about 17 million bullets, 1.5 million grenades, 500,000 shells, and 2,000 60-millimeter cannons (Huang Yao et al. 1993: 436). In 1949, their production capacity further increased to 2.3 million shells and 21.7 million bullets a year, in addition to different kinds of artillery, employing more than 43,000 workers (Zhu Jianhua 1987b: 70). The ammunition made in Manchuria was indispensable to the communist forces to defeat the Nationalists in the major campaigns in the interior provinces. Finally, the Northeast contributed to the Civil War in the interior provinces by providing the CCP forces with large quantities of logistical goods. The productivity of agriculture in Manchuria, which ranged between 900 and 1,000 kilograms of grain per shang (roughly a hectare) or 12–13 million tons of grain annually in total in 1948 and 1949 (Zhu Jianhua 1987b: 141–143), allowed the communist authorities in this area to collect an agricultural tax totaling 2.3 to 2.4 million tons a year (at the rate of 21% in 1947 and about 18% in 1948 and 1949) (ibid.: 446). During the entire Civil War period from 1946 to 1949, the total amount of agricultural taxes (gongliang) collected from Manchurian farmers reached 6.86 million tons of grain; in addition, they procured from the farmers 1.8 million tons of grain and 7,488 tons of cotton as well as other kinds of agricultural products (DBCJ: 210). By exporting these products in large quantities to the Soviet Union, the Communists purchased from the latter the industrial, medical, and military goods they needed. The fiscal revenues from agricultural taxes and other revenues allowed the Northeastern Communist authorities to spend an equivalent of 3.8 million tons of grain on the military in 1949, 45% of which was on their troops operating in the interior provinces. In addition, the Northeastern authorities provided the interior provinces with more than 3 million tons of goods, including 800,000 tons of grain, 200,000 tons of iron and steel, and 1.5 million cubic meters of lumber (Zhu Jianhua 1987a: 384, 1987b: 71).

Fueling the war: the making of a communist fiscal regime From decentralization to centralization: pre-1945 experiences It is apt at this juncture to examine how the communist forces generated revenues to fuel their military operations and expansions. By and large, the communist forces experienced three cycles of expansion and contraction from the late 1920s to 1949, each beginning with a decentralized approach of revenue generation and evolving toward the establishment of a centralized fiscal regime.

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The first cycle took place in the Jiangxi Soviet period, when the newly established Red Army supported itself initially by taking over the possessions of the Nationalist troops or bandits they defeated, and, more importantly, by “attacking local bullies” (da tuhao), confiscating the land and housing of landlords and powerful gentry elites (dizhu haoshen), directly taking away their movable properties such as jewelry, furniture, animals, and tools, or forcing them to pay a hefty fine or amount of cash to redeem the properties sealed by the Red Army; these methods were supplemented by demanding rich peasants and business owners to make “donations” in different amounts commensurate with their economic status instead of confiscating their properties (Xu Yi 1982: 414–417, 458–466).5 Later, the Red Army gradually switched to a more regulated and centralized method of revenue generation, as the “local bullies” available for confiscation vanished and as its base areas expanded.6 The CCP authorities collected the land tax from all of the landowners on a progressive basis, with rich peasants shouldering the highest rate of tax payment. They also collected business income taxes from shop owners and transit taxes on goods in transportation through the 24 customs points within the Central Base Area. Indicative of this transition in revenue generation, the Red Army was officially exempted from the task of “raising funds” after July 1932 (Xu Yi 1982: 434–438, 467–486); it was up to the Financial Department of the Central Government in the base area to provide support to the Red Army. Despite the stable increase in its revenues along with the phenomenal expansion of base areas in Jiangxi and the neighboring provinces, the Red Army’s fiscal situation was very different from the GMD’s during its early days in Guangdong. Basing itself on the commercial center in South China, the Nationalist government in Guangzhou was able to turn itself into a true fiscal-military machine that generated enough revenue to sustain the rapidly growing army and fuel the Northern Expedition through the various modern means of taxation and financing under the leadership of Minister Song Ziwen (T. V. Soong), as was shown in Chapter 7. In sharp contrast, commerce and modern industry were poorly developed in the mountainous areas controlled by the Communists; farmland in this area was also much less fertile than the lower Pearl River and lower Yangzi deltas where the Guomindang government was located before and after 1927, respectively. Without enough revenue from the land or commercial taxes to sustain the Red Army that had grown to more than 100,000 soldiers by late 1933 in the Central Base Area (in a single year from September 1933 to September 1934 alone, more than 100,000 new soldiers were recruited into the Red Army, see Yang Jing 2002: 53), the CCP had to turn to compulsory measures to augment its income, including forcing people to buy government bonds with grain or cash and later with grain only, sending “shock teams” to different localities to collect land taxes in kind, demanding that peasant households “donate” or “lend” grain to the Red Army (Xu Yi 1982: 486–497; ZGZY, 9: 263–268, 10: 82–86, 323–326, 351–354). By early 1934, the communist government in the Central Base Area had encountered a bottleneck in generating

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their revenue; after nearly three months of collection, they obtained less than one-tenth of the planned amount of revenue from the land tax by late January 1934, mostly paid in cash rather than in kind; and after a campaign of more than five months, they had sold less than half of the government bonds. Food shortage thus became a severe problem challenging the Red Army’s sustainability, not to mention its expansion (ZGZY, 10: 82). The fiscal and hence military weakness of the Red Army, more than any other factor, explained its failure in resisting the GMD’s fifth and last campaign of annihilation that employed 1 million soldiers, 200 airplanes, and various kinds of artillery in October 1934. The communist forces’ fiscal situation during the War of Resistance was no better than before. “Attacking local bullies” was no longer an option under the United Front with the GMD, in which the CCP had to incorporate the “enlightened gentry” (i.e., pro-CCP and anti-Japanese landlords and bureaucratic elites) into government organizations in its base areas. Instead, the communist authorities relied on confiscating the properties of the pro-Japanese “collaborators” (hanjian), voluntary donations of cash and grain (you qian chu qian, you liang chu liang) by wealthy and ordinary households, and allocations of funds and goods from the Nationalist government during the initial years of the United Front (ZGZY, 11: 327–330). A general principle guiding the individual communist forces’ activities in revenue generation in separate base areas was “self-raising for self-use” (zichou ziyong) (Lu Shichuan 1987: 235) or “expend what was raised” (shui chou shui zhi) without a budget (Wei Hongyun et al. 1984, 4: 53). Later, the CCP forces increasingly turned to the progressive taxation of landowners, issuance of “government bonds for national salvation” (jiuguo gongzhai), collection of “contributions for national salvation” (jiuguo juan) from wealthy households, imposition of military levies on the CCP-controlled village offices, or the direct “borrowing” of grain and straw from peasant households where the CCP-controlled offices did not exist (ZGZY, 11: 615, 842). The village governments under communist control had to supply the communist troops with “agricultural taxes for national salvation” (jiuguo gongliang) whereon the latter provided them with the “military grain-coupon” (junyong liangpiao) issued by the communist base-area authorities (Wei Hongyun et al. 1984, 4: 180–182, 188–189). Whether imposed by the communist or other military forces, the multiplying military levies as well as the miscellaneous expenses exhausted the villages of the base areas by the early 1940s. After the Nationalist government cut off its supplies to the CCP forces and blockaded the communist base areas because of the mounting tensions between them, the latter encountered severe shortages of food and military supplies, and they could only turn to two options for their survival: downsizing the government and the military (jing bing jian zheng) (MXJ, 3: 880–883), and engaging in production of food, clothing, and goods for self-sufficiency, hence the socalled Great Production Movement (dashengchan yundong). These efforts helped the CCP forces to make ends meet. But the striking poverty of the rural population together with the limited ability of the base areas in the production

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of weapons nevertheless constrained the CCP’s warring capacities. The best option for them to survive and prosper was to avoid large-scale war with the Japanese occupation forces and an escalation of their conflicts with the Nationalists and, at the same time, to take advantage of the weak presence of both the Japanese and the Nationalists in the vast rural areas of North China and penetrate the “rear areas” by widely establishing CCP grassroots organizations in villages, recruiting as many villagers as possible into the Party and its guerrilla forces, putting them under the Party’s centralized control while leaving them self-reliant in logistic support. The CCP followed this strategy and thrived. Its base areas mushroomed in different parts of the country during the eight years of the War of Resistance, covering approximately 880,000 square kilometers in total and a population of more than 100 million by 1945; its membership skyrocketed from about 40,000 in 1937 to 1.2 million in 1945 (MXJ, 3: 1108); and its armed forces similarly exploded by a factor of 28, from roughly about 45,000 men at the beginning of the war to 1.27 million by the time of the Japanese surrender in 1945 (Pang and Jin 2011, 2: 713–715).

Toward fiscal unification After the full-scale outbreak of the Civil War in July 1946, the CCP, with only 1.3 million poorly equipped soldiers, faced tough challenges. First, its enemy, the GMD forces, had a total of 4.3 million men, or 3.3 times the size of the communist forces (Zhang Xianwen et al. 2005, 4: 199). After taking over the military equipment from the Japanese troops of more than 1 million and receiving military supplies from the United States, the GMD troops were far better armed, of which 22 divisions were fully or partially equipped with American weapons. The resources available to the two sides to sustain the war were also disproportional: the Nationalist government controlled three-fourths of the territory of the country and two-thirds of China’s population as well as the major industrial cities and transportation networks. It also received generous economic and military aid from the United States; in the first half of 1946 alone, it obtained $1.33 billion worth of American goods in addition to a large quantity of weaponry sold, leased, or donated (ibid.: 66). Second, the CCP had huge difficulty in sustaining its own rapidly expanding forces, which reached 2 million by late 1947, 3 million by late 1948, and 4 million by mid-1949. The cost of supporting the solders was huge. At the North China Financial and Economic Conference attended by delegates from the CCP’s different base areas in April 1947, it was estimated that feeding one soldier required the equivalent of 16 dan (1 dan equals roughly 2.75 bushels) of millet annually (including 1.5 to 2 catties of grain daily, 1 to 2 catties of meat monthly, and so on), which equaled the total amount of agricultural taxes paid by 60 to 80 peasants, given that each peasant could produce an average of 2.5 dan or 400 catties of millet per year and 15 to 20% of which could be paid as agricultural taxes. In other words, the total size of the communist forces should be limited to 1 to 1.5% of the population under their control; the

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130 million people in the “liberated areas” by that point could only sustain an army of up to 2 million soldiers (Feng and Li 2006; FDS, 1990: 589). Waging a war was also expensive. During the Civil War, each battle often involved the deployment of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and the consumption of thousands to tens of thousands of shells and millions of bullets, and each shell alone cost a middle peasant his income for one or two years (Li Weiguang 2000: 248–249; Feng and Li, 2006: 193). The input of manpower in logistic service was also enormous; typically, one peasant worker was needed for one soldier during the war and for three soldiers during peace time (HBJ: 296). Liu Bocheng (1892–1986), a key commander of the communist forces in North China, thus said: “providing for a large-size corps is no different from providing for a mobile city” (cf. Li Weiguang 2000: 249). To support the millions of soldiers and to afford the huge expenses of the war, the CCP leadership came up with three solutions: unifying the resources from all liberated areas through the establishment of a centralized fiscal regime; launching the land reform to enlarge the base of taxpayers; establishing its mobilizing mechanism at the village level. As in the first two cycles, the communist forces used a decentralized method of logistic support at the beginning of the Civil War, especially when they entered a newly liberated area or fought outside the base area. In the Northeast, for example, “decentralized self-sufficiency” (fensan ziji) was the principle guiding their logistic support in 1946. The properties confiscated from the Japanese and the puppet Manchukuo accounted for 36.7% of the revenue of the CCP authorities in this region for the entire year (Zhu Jianhua 1987b: 427). Whenever they fell short of food and other kinds of supplies when arriving in a newly occupied area, the CCP troops invariably “borrowed” from landlords and rich peasants, and to a lesser degree, also from middle-earning and even poor peasants (Feng and Li 2006: 197). As one of the ten military principles formulated by Mao Zedong in December 1947, the communist forces had to “supply themselves with the entirety of the weapons and most of the personnel captured from the enemy. The sources of our troops’ manpower and supplies lie primarily at the front” (MXJ, 4: 1248). As late as October 1948, Mao was still ordering that “when the troops entered the GMD-controlled areas and thus fought without support from the rear or with only partial support, all military needs have to be solved completely or in most part on their own” (MXJ, 4: 1348). Coordination among different base areas began with agreements between them being made at the North China Financial and Economic Conference in April 1947, by which the trade barriers between the different areas were removed, and mutual aid became possible. The government of the ShanxiHebei-Shandong-Henan Border Area, for instance, was committed to providing for the East China Field Army’s operations in the northern provinces in September 1947, while the CCP’s East China bureau was responsible for providing the Border Area with material compensation (Feng and Li 2006: 176). A more important step towards fiscal unification took place in July 1948, when the CCP Central Committee established a Financial and Economic Department, with

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Dong Biwu as its head. Under its leadership, the North China Financial and Economic Council was created to unify the currencies and policies on trade and finance in the three liberated areas of North China, the Northwest, and Shandong. Beginning in January 1949, the three areas merged their banks and trade organizations, used the standard new currency called renminbi, and unified their revenue and budget systems (Feng and Li 2006: 180). Meanwhile, the CCP’s central military committee established a General Logistics Department in April 1948 to ensure the establishment of a multi-tiered system of logistics in different regions and, after the outbreak of the Huai-Hai Campaign, to coordinate the logistics involving the three strategic zones of North China (Huabei), North-central China (Zhongyuan), and East China (Huadong) and five provinces (Jiangsu, Anhui, Shandong, Henan, and Hebei) (Feng and Li 2006: 197). Fiscal consolidation and unification also took place within each of the liberated areas before they joined the countrywide efforts of centralization. The Northeast was particularly successful in this regard under the stewardship of Chen Yun (1905–1995), one of the key CCP leaders in this area since late 1945 and head of the Northeast Financial and Economic Council after 1948. Beginning in 1947, the consolidation and unification of the fiscal system in the liberated areas involved the following steps: establishing a budget system that required monthly updating of the budgets on, and the monthly reporting of, recurring expenditures; establishing an auditing system with auditors installed in every public institution for monthly examination; establishing a unified, multi-tiered treasury system with strict regulations on the allocation of funds; separating the sources of revenue for the central government (including all of the agricultural taxes, profits of state-owned enterprises, and most commercial taxes) from the revenues for provincial governments (income of provincial enterprises and specific portions of tax revenues); separating the expenditure of the central government (mostly on the main forces of the CCP) from the expenditure of provincial authorities (mainly on local security, construction, education, etc.); standardizing the fiscal system, including its management of personnel and accounting procedures; unifying the collection of taxes on different kinds of commodities and services; and more. After establishing its full control of the entire Northeast in November 1948, to maximize government revenues, the CCP authority further increased the rates of agricultural taxes, enforced the monopolistic sales of tobacco and alcohol, issued government bonds, promoted foreign trade, and stabilized prices (Zhu Jianhua 1987b: 432–438, 487–496). All these measures were reminiscent of the similar steps taken by Song Ziwen in Guangdong in the late 1920s. Thanks in part to the relatively high level of industrialization of its economy and in part to Chen Yun’s exceptional competence in overseeing its financial affairs, the Northeast emerged as the most solvent and affluent among all of the liberated areas; it was closer than all others to a modern “fiscal-military state” in terms of the composition of its revenue. Unlike other liberated areas where the traditional agricultural taxes or gongliang accounted for 70 to 80% of their revenues (FDS 1990: 585), in the Northeast, gongliang (totaling 1.34 million tons) only accounted for 37.04% of its annual

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revenue in 1948, while the profits from foreign trade and textile manufacturing contributed 23.32% to its revenue in the same year, and commercial taxes contributed another 17.15%. In 1949, the income from gongliang (2.48 million tons) further declined to 23.32%, whereas industrial profits accounted for the largest portion (30.41%) of its revenue and commercial taxes occupied third place (17.33%) (Zhu Jianhua 1987b: 440; for different figures, see FDS 1990: 795). As the economically most advanced and the first liberated area, the Northeast was as important to the CCP for defeating the Nationalists and conquering the entire country in the late 1940s as Guangdong had been for the Guomindang forces to defeat the warlords and to unify the country in the late 1920s.

Mobilization and penetration: the dual purpose of the land reform By and large, the villages in North China witnessed a relatively low level of differentiation in land ownership and wealth distribution. Random investigations showed that landlord and rich peasant households, accounting for 10 to 30% of rural households, possessed roughly 30 to 50% of farmland in the surveyed localities (Li Lifeng 2008: 69). Poor peasants in the communist base areas in North China certainly benefited from the CCP’s Double Reductions (jianzu jianxi) policy (namely, for landlords to reduce rent by 25%, and for moneylenders to reduce interest rates to 15%) and a progressive tax policy (higher rates for landlords and rich peasants and low rates for the poor) during the War of Resistance. Many localities saw the increase of middle-earning peasants and the decrease of landless and poor peasants as well as landlord and rich peasant households (Luo Pinghan 2005: 49). In some areas, landlords and rich peasants became rare or nonexistent at all by the mid-1940s (e.g., Hinton 1966: 209; Crook and Crook 1979: 62; Friedman et al. 1991: 42–43; Zhang Peiguo 2000: 70: 152). So why did the CCP launch the land reform campaign in 1946 and push for a radical program of land redistribution in 1947? The land reform began with CCP Central’s announcement of a directive on May 4, 1946. Known as the “May Fourth Directive,” it declared “land to tillers” as its goal and encouraged peasant masses to “obtain the land from the hands of landlords” in the course of the preexisting struggles against proJapanese “traitors” and for the reduction of rents and interests. At the same time, the directive warned against attempts to hurt rich peasants or the landed gentry elites who had been active in the anti-Japanese struggles and cooperative with the CCP; it also urged local CCP authorities to “give proper consideration to the livelihood of middle and petty landlords” and distinguish them from the “traitors, despotic gentry, and native bullies” (Zhang Xianwen 4: 237–238). The moderate nature of this directive is not difficult to understand. Having not yet completely broken up with the GMD, having relied on support from the “enlightened gentry” to maintain its legitimacy in the base areas, and, more importantly, to win sympathy from the vast array of social groups that adopted a neutral stance between the CCP and the GMD, the communist leadership had to adhere to its preexisting United Front policy and avoid isolating itself by

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launching an indiscriminate program against all of the landed elites. This was especially important for the CCP headquarters that was still based in the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Area, where it had developed an amiable relationship with the “enlightened gentry” and absorbed much of it into its government system. Foreseeing an upcoming full-scale confrontation with the Nationalists, however, Mao saw the land reform as the most effective means to win support from the peasants and mobilize them to join the communist forces. Two weeks after the issuance of the Directive, therefore, he ordered local communist authorities to shift the focus of the movement from confiscating the properties of the former Japanese and pro-Japanese puppet authorities and individual traitors to “turning the large quantity of landlords’ land into the hands of peasants,” in response to the escalating conflicts between the communist and Nationalist forces in this area (ZGZY, 16: 164). After the full-scale outbreak of the Civil War in July 1946, Mao overtly urged regional CCP authorities to implement the land reform program as the fundamental way to mobilize the peasants, as he stated in October 1946: The experience of the past three months has shown that, whereas the Central’s Directive of May Fourth was resolutely and quickly implemented and wherever the land problem is deeply and thoroughly solved, the peasants would side with our Party and our troops, to oppose the attacks of Chiang Kai-shek’s troops. The peasants would take a wait-and-see attitude where the Directive of May Fourth was carried out without resolution or implemented too late or in a number of phases mechanically and where the land reform was ignored completely on the excuse of preoccupation with the war. (Zhu Jianhua 1987b: 152) As a result, the CCP abandoned the moderate land reform policy and called for a radical campaign for land redistribution in July 1947 when the communist forces fought hard with the overwhelming Guomindang forces on all of its fronts in the Northeast as well as the interior provinces. It continued the policy of confiscating landlords’ properties until the summer of 1949, when the communist troops grew to 1.95 million, thus surpassing the Nationalist force in size, and started its strategic offensive against the latter afterwards. As the pressure for the CCP to mobilize peasants into the army was greatly mitigated, the Party reintroduced the moderate policy of Double Reductions in all of the “newly liberated areas” (xin jiefangqu) that came under the CCP’s control after July 1947. This reversal, as Mao honestly explained in May 1948, was to ensure that “the wealth of the society will not be dissolved, social order will be relatively stable, so that all of the forces can be concentrated to annihilate the Guomindang reactionaries” (MXJ, 4: 1326). The same policy continued into the next year when Mao emphasized the importance of “maintaining the current level of agricultural production and preventing its decline” as the goal of the CCP’s agrarian policy in South China (MXJ, 4: 1429).

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Penetrating the village Mobilizing the peasantry for the CCP’s war efforts, however, was not the only motivation behind its implementation of land reform. Even more important for the CCP was to use land reform as a means for its penetration into the village. Before the arrival of the communist forces, peasant communities in the base areas, as in the rest of rural China, had been subject to the dominance of lineage organizations or other forms of native networks for the purposes of collective defense, flood control, popular festivals, and religious activities, in which the rural elites played a leading role, be they lineage heads, gentry members, retired bureaucrats, landlords, or simply the ordinary villagers with exceptional abilities and good reputation. When the CCP forces established their base areas in different parts of rural China during the War of Resistance, many of the village elites in those areas continued to occupy the positions of village or township government after showing their willingness to cooperate with the Party for the war effort. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, however, with many of them being landlords or rich peasants, these village or township leaders soon became the barrier to the Communists’ efforts to mobilize the villagers and expand their base areas in preparation for the war with the Nationalists. To effectively carry out land reform in the villages, therefore, the CCP directly appealed to the poor in rural societies by sending “work teams” to every village for propaganda and mobilization activities. With the “poor peasant group” (pinnongtuan) as its core, the newly established “peasant association” (nonghui, later renamed “peasant council” or nongmin daibiaohui) consisted of poor peasants and hired laborers as well as work team members from outside the village. Under the slogan of “all power to the peasant association” (yiqie quanli gui nonghui), it replaced the preexisting CCP branch secretary and village leaders to function as the governing body in every village. It was from the leaders of the peasant association that the head and vice head of the new village government, the secretary of the Party’s branch in the village, and the head of the village’s militia, were selected (TDGG: 89; Hinton 1966: 306–311; DeMare 2019). In addition to enlisting young villagers, the most urgent task in the first year of the Civil War, village authorities in the liberated areas increasingly focused their energies on two key tasks in the last two years of the Civil War: collecting taxes and providing logistics support for the communist troops. The effect of land reform on the Communists’ ability to collect tax was obvious. Before land reform was introduced, the rates of agricultural taxes for individual households in the liberated areas were progressive, with landlords and rich peasants paying 40 to 50% of their incomes and the poor paying at a much lower rate. Overall, each individual in the liberated areas paid 9 to 20% of their agricultural income as agricultural taxes in 1946 (FDS 1990: 601). After land reform was fully carried out in late 1947, the progressive tax system gave way to the proportional tax system that required all households to pay their agricultural taxes at a fixed, universal rate or proportion of their income with or without a deductible (taxation in the “newly liberated areas” remained progressive, where landlords and

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rich peasants were subject to the Double Reduction policy; these people continued to exist until the full completion of land reform in early 1953). The overall tax burden of the rural population escalated as well, from 16% of their annual income in 1946 to 20% in 1947 in Shandong; from 20 to 24% in the Northeast; and from 9 to 27% in the Shan-Gan-Ning Border Area (ibid.: 601–602). In another two areas, the Shanxi-Charhar-Hebei Border Area and the ShanxiHebei-Shandong-Henan Border Area, the annual tax burden increased by 28% and 38% in 1947, respectively, and by a further 24% and 9% in 1948 (ibid.: 639). These increases reflected two basic facts: the first was the widened base of taxpayers from primarily landlords and rich peasants before land reform to all of the rural households subject to a universal tax rate that increased year after year; the second and more important was the enhanced ability of the CCP authorities in controlling the rural population and extracting agricultural resources after establishing its cells at the bottom of society. The communist penetration of village communities also enabled the Party’s mobilization of the peasants for wartime logistics support. It was estimated, for example, that 3.13 million peasants from the Northeast were mobilized to serve the communist troops with more than 300,000 stretchers, the same amount of carts, and more than 900,000 draft animals during the three years of the Civil War in Manchuria (FDS 1990: 800–801). In the Hebei-Shandong-Henan Area, more than 2.9 million peasants, 100,000 stretchers, and 397,000 carts were mobilized for war service during the same period (ibid.: 651). In the Huai-Hai Campaign, the largest of the three campaigns, more than 5.4 million peasant workers were recruited, who rescued more than 110,000 wounded soldiers from the front. During the later stage of the campaign, for every one soldier, nine peasant workers were organized to provide logistics support (Feng and Li 2006: 194). On average, each adult farmer in these areas spent about nine to ten workdays a year on logistics tasks; in the war zone or areas along the transportation lines, the enlisted villagers could spend as many as 20 to 28 days on logistics tasks (FDS 1990: 603, 801).

A comparison Geopolitics and military strategy Between 1927 and 1949, the geopolitical centers of the communist movement shifted from south-central China to the northwest, and further from the northwest to the northeast, which resulted in due changes in its military strategies and the outcomes of its competition with the Nationalists. Throughout the first two phases of its existence in south-central and northwestern China, the communist force was agrarian in nature, not only because its soldiers were almost entirely recruited from the peasantry, but its supplies also came chiefly from the rural base areas, which in turn explained mass mobilization as the primary method for military building, the inferiority of its armaments, and the use of a defensive strategy in dealing with its enemies. It was only

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after shifting its geopolitical center to the northeast after 1946, where the per capita level of agricultural productivity was higher than the rest of the country and where modern industry and transportation were more developed than any other regions, that the communist force grew quickly in size and quality; for the first time, it competed with the Nationalists on an equal footing, changed its strategy to the offensive one, and eventually defeated the Nationalist forces in large-scale, decisive military campaigns. Needless to say, the Soviet occupation of Manchuria at the end of World War II and its assistance given to the communist forces in the course of its withdrawal from this area were key to the latter’s success in controlling the northeastern provinces and the fundamental reversal in its military strategy and relationship with the Nationalist forces. Chiang Kai-shek, to be fair, well realized the strategic importance of the Northeast for his government and military; he was willing to renounce China’s sovereignty over Outer Mongolia in exchange for the Soviets’ commitment to timely withdrawal from the Northeast and handing it over to his forces. But the economic and political centers of his government were located in the lower Yangzi region, which meant that he had to prioritize the defense of the areas surrounding the region, namely the provinces in East, North, and Central China; the Northeast was less important in his military strategizing, not only because it was geographically distant from the economic and political centers and shipping enough soldiers to the area to formally take the northeastern provinces over from the Russians was a huge challenge to his army, but the communist force’s rapid entry into the area despite the Sino-Soviet agreement was also beyond Chiang’s expectation. After the outbreak of the Civil War, Chiang launched a “full-scale attack” against the communist forces on all fronts in northern Jiangsu and the provinces in North and Northeastern China, hoping to defeat the enemy in “eight to ten months” (Zhang Xianwen et al. 2005, 4: 223). Short of a clear and well-planned strategy, however, Chiang as well as his high-ranking commanders had no idea whether they should prioritize their military operations in Manchuria or the interior and whether they should shift the strategic emphasis from the South to the North or otherwise (Wang Chaoguang 2005: 100). In sharp contrast, the Communists’ strategies were clearly and wisely defined: they prioritized the control of Manchuria; once that goal was achieved, they quickly shifted their strategy to emphasize annihilating the Nationalist forces in East China before moving back to the north to wipe out the remnants of the enemy in the Beijing-Tianjin area and the rest of the northern and northwestern provinces. Chiang, therefore, was unprepared for the Communists’ campaign in East China, and his maneuvering of Nationalist forces in response to the campaign was largely a disaster. Added to Chiang’s military failure was the attitude of the United States toward the Civil War in China. Just like the Soviet Union, whose occupation of Manchuria and assistance to the Communists were key to the military success of the latter in this area, the United States provided substantial support to the Nationalists. In the first half of 1946 alone, the United States provided the Nationalist government with various goods worth $1.33 billion and equipped

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22 divisions of Nationalist troops with American weapons (Zhang Xianwen et al. 2005, 4: 66). In April 1948, an act was approved to offer the Nationalist government another $463 million as economic aid (ibid.: 225). But the American aid was conditional. The U.S. forces shipped Nationalist troops to Manchuria in early 1946, for instance, on the condition that Chiang would accept General George Marshall’s mediation and compromise with the Communists, and threatened to stop the shipment or arms sales if Chiang refused to do so (JJSR: 4/22/ 1946, 8/30/1946). Later, as the Nationalists’ failures occurred one after another in the Civil War and as the incurable corruption in the Nationalist government disappointed American observers, the U.S. government rejected Nanjing’s repeated pleas for support and even suspended the 1948 act, causing a dramatic decline in the goods shipped to China in the first half of 1949 and accelerating the collapse of the Nationalist regime.

Identity and morale The contrast was even starker between the Nationalist and communist forces in the realms of political identity and the morale of the military. As noted in the preceding chapter, Chiang Kai-shek brought various regional forces under his government in the late 1920s and early 1930s, but he never succeeded in extending his real influence into the provinces controlled by the former warlords. After 1937, the national crisis caused by the Japanese full-scale invasion enabled Chiang to mobilize the regional forces and thereby consolidate his leadership throughout the War of Resistance, and his influence reached its peak when Japan surrendered. But the schism between Chiang and his regional competitors soon surfaced in the Civil War and worsened as Chiang suffered repeated defeats by the Communists that greatly weakened the forces under his direct command.7 Equally fatal to the GMD was the low morale of its troops, which was especially true after the Nationalist forces lost the wars in Northeast and East China in late 1948 and the beginning of 1949. In January 1949, the CCP leaders, having won the three major campaigns, anticipated fighting several major wars before occupying the major cities such as Nanjing, Wuhan, and Xi’an, and planned to expand their control to only nine provinces in Central, East, and Northwest China by the winter of the same year. To their surprise, the communist forces captured all of these cities without much effort and sweepingly occupied almost all of the provinces in the mainland (except for Tibet) by the end of the year. The Nationalists failed to organize effective resistance throughout this time. Defections occurred everywhere. Throughout the Civil War, nearly 500 organized defections took place among the Nationalist troops, involving 153 complete divisions, more than 1,000 high-ranking commanders, and 1.77 million soldiers (Cai and Sun 1987, 1: 1). Changchun (one of the major cities in Manchuria) and Beiping (Beijing) thus fell into the hands of the communist forces without a major battle. When combating the communist forces or withdrawing from the battlegrounds, the different divisions of the

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Nationalist forces were concerned only with their own survival and made little effort to coordinate with each other. So frustrated was Chiang by the poor performance of his subordinates at the Battle of Menglianggu in May 1947, for instance, that he complained that “the high-ranking commanders have become warlords, corrupt, degenerating, concerned only with preserving their own strength, and unable to assist each other in time of either emergency or peace” (Wang Chaoguang 2005: 103). Reviewing the Nationalists’ failure in the Civil War, Chiang Kai-shek admitted in late 1949: “We failed this time not because we were defeated by the Communist bandits but actually because we were defeated by ourselves” (JGSX, 23: 133). His diary on the last day of 1949 well summarized the reasons why the Nationalists had failed: Only two-tenths of the troops were wiped out because of combating; twotenths surrendered out of speculations; five-tenths perished because of fleeing and escaping the war; only one-tenth was transported to Taiwan and other islands for preservation and consolidation. (JJSR: 12/31/1949) In contrast with the absence of integration among the regional forces under the Guomindang regime and the low morale of its military at all levels, the strength of the CCP lay precisely in its all-round centralization, or “total centralism” as I would term it, evidenced in: Mao’s establishment of his supreme authority within the Party through organizational cleansing and ideological rebuilding; the centralization and unification of Party organizations, military units, and administrative systems at all levels; the formation of an integrated fiscal system for coordination and control of all resources from different base areas; and the functioning of an effective system of logistic support based on the massive mobilization of the rural population. More specifically, the CCP outperformed the GMD first of all in the exceptional degree of political unity it achieved in the early 1940s, a result of Mao Zedong’s efforts to enhance his leadership of the Party by building his supreme authority in the ideological field, completely discrediting the Party leaders before him, and eliminating “sectarianism” or the various factions within the Party that did not obey him. All this made it possible for Mao to introduce the practice of the Party’s “unified leadership” (yiyuanhua lingdao) of the military in September 1942, which aimed to put the Party organizations and military units that were scattered across different base areas throughout the country under the centralized control of the top leadership through its central and regional bureaus (ZGZY, 13: 426–436). In June 1945, the Party decided to reestablish its commissions at every level of the military. After the outbreak of the Civil War, all of the communist forces were grouped into a number of “field armies” under the direct command of the CCP’s Central Military Commission; when in operation, each field army was required to create a “front commission” of the Party, and a “general front commission” of the Party had to be created when two or more armies joined the same operation. Both types of commissions

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were subject to the directives of the Party’s Central Committee (Zhang Yutao et al. 1991: 4). Beginning in January 1948, the Party further enforced the practice of “reporting and requesting instruction” (baogao he qingshi) to curb the tendencies of “lacking discipline and being anarchic” (wu zuzhi wu zhengfu) that were aggravated during war. It was required that the secretary of each regional bureau of the Party had to report every two months to the Party’s Central Committee and Chairman on the military and all other affairs of the region and that the chief commander of each field army, too, had to report to the Party’s Military Commission every month on combat results, casualties, and the strength of the army and every two months on the overall state of the army (MXJ, 4: 1264–1266, 1332–1333). All these measures, while ensuring the Party leadership’s command of its field armies and coordination of their operations, did not preclude the initiatives from the commanders of the field armies. In fact, Mao repeatedly encouraged the commanders to make expedient decisions on their own in times of emergency without having to seek instruction from above on every issue. Not only did the commanders of the field armies show unanimous obedience to the Party Central’s leadership, the morale of the soldiers of the communist troops was also high. The CCP was faced with two challenges in boosting the soldiers’ morale at the beginning of the Civil War. The first came from the fact that a large proportion of the soldiers had joined the army during the War of Resistance out of patriotism. Thus, when the war was over and when the peace talks between the CCP and the GMD continued for months following the Japanese surrender, the mentality of retiring from the military and going home for peace-time life grew widely among them. Not surprisingly, when the Civil War broke out, many were reluctant to fight the battle seriously, adhering to the notion of “Chinese do not fight Chinese,” and fleeing was not rare on the battleground. The other challenge was that a growing number of the soldiers were converted from the captured Nationalist troops, who continued their habits of loose discipline, beating, and robbery after joining the communist forces.8 To correct these problems, the CCP employed two measures. The first was widely conducting meetings of “speaking bitterness” (suku) among the soldiers to cultivate their political loyalty from the winter of 1947 to the summer of 1948. Speakers at these meetings were carefully selected to complain about the unusual hardship of their lives before joining the army and the harshness and brutality of evil landlords and local bullies they had endured. These personal witnesses were often supplemented with stage performances of revolutionary dramas on the same theme. So moving were the speeches and performances that, according to the accounts of official sources, the gatherings often culminated in loud and unrestrained weeping by the entire audience of soldiers, who swore to fight the war hard to end the “old society” and rescue the people from the “sea of bitterness” (Zhang Yong 2010: 76). These occasions of “speaking bitterness” were believed to be most effective in growing the soldiers’ identity with the CCP and arousing their hatred toward the Nationalists. Another

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measure was the so-called “three investigations” (sancha), namely investigating the soldiers’ class status, activity, and morale. It served several purposes: to test the soldiers’ loyalty to the Party by looking at their attitudes toward the land reform and the landlord class; to prevent defection and sabotage among the soldiers by searching for enemy agents, especially the former officers of the Nationalist troops who had disguised themselves as ordinary prisoners of war and joined the PLA; and to curb the various forms of corruption among military officers at different levels and promote equality between commanders and soldiers. All these worked to keep the soldiers in discipline and maintain high morale (Wang Chaoguang 2005: 104).

Fiscal regime How the Nationalists and the communists fed the personnel of their respective party-state apparatuses and financed the military was as important as geopolitics and political identity in shaping the outcome of the Civil War. The Guomindang state had two major financial burdens: to maintain the enlarged rank of civil servants and to meet the rapidly escalating demands for military expenses. Supporting the ever-increasing number of civil servants was a huge burden for the Nationalist state during the few years after 1945.9 Administrative expenses increased from 18.1% of the Nationalist government’s total expenditure in 1944 (He Jiawei 2009: 147), to 28.5% in 1946 and 29.7% in 1947 (Zhang and Yang 1986: 127), much of which were spent on salary payments. The largest part of Guomindang state’s spending, to be sure, was on the military, which accounted for nearly 60% of its total expenditure in 1946, 55% in 1947, and 69% in the first seven months of 1948 (Yang Yinfu 1985: 173). Both of these burdens drove the Nationalist government’s spending to rise quickly in relation to its revenue during the Civil War years, causing widening deficits, which accounted for 47% of its expenditure in 1945, 62% in 1946, and 68% in 1947 (Zhang and Yang 1986: 244). Printing more paper currency became the most convenient means for the government to offset the deficits, which in turn triggered price inflation; prices increased 1.57 million times from January 1946 to July 1948, and another 112,490 times from August 1948 to April 1949 (Zhang and Yang 1986: 243). The social cost of this financing approach was huge. Before the War of Resistance, for instance, university faculty, as a prestigious social group, received a salary (200–600 yuan per month) that was typically more than twenty times the wage of an ordinary worker (10–20 yuan per month), which allowed them to live a very comfortable life. As a result of price inflation, by the end of the war, their living standard had steadily deteriorated to less than one-tenth of the prewar level. After the outbreak of the Civil War, the runaway inflation quickly impoverished school teachers and public servants as well as all those living on salaries to the subsistence level. A large number of them ran into debt and suffered hunger; some committed suicide (Ci Hongfei 1994; Wang Yinhuan 2005). Corruption was rampant among the public servants as a necessary choice

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to secure their survival during times of scarcity; military commanders cut down and pocketed their soldiers’ pay and provisions, which dampened the morale of their troops. All these aggravated the anti-government feeling among the general public. Chiang admitted in November 1948 in his diary that “the general circle of the intellectuals, especially the leftist professors and press editorials, slandered and defamed the government in every possible way. The wavering and hostility of the public opinion has never been as terrible as it is today.” He was vexed that such “slanders and rumors” had “unexpectedly penetrated deep into the cadres of the Party, the government, and the military” and that “this type of venom was more damaging than any kinds of weapons” (JJSR: 11/5/1948). The communist force’s fiscal constitution differed from the Nationalist regime’s in several ways. First of all, its rank of cadres was relatively small, having only about 200,000 to 300,000 individuals on the eve of the Civil War, or one-fifth to one-fourth the number of civil servants under the Nationalist government.10 More importantly, all of the cadres were not salaried; they were maintained under the so-called “supply system” (gongji zhi), which provided them and their family members with different quantities and kinds of free food, housing, and other necessities of life according to their ranks, thus freeing them of the threat to subsistence caused by price inflation as seen in the Guomindang-controlled areas. The supply system did not cause a financial burden to the central authority of the communist forces because it was decentralized; each base area under the CCP’s control was responsible for its own provisions to its cadres, and the standards of provisions varied over time, depending on their availability, which tended to be more egalitarian in times of scarcity and differentiated when the supplies were relatively ample. This decentralized supply system, egalitarian in nature most of the time, was effective in ensuring the subsistence of the communist forces, keeping the cadres’ morale high, and minimizing the problem of corruption among them. Zhu De thus commented on the role of this system at the end of 1948 when the Communist Revolution was bound to succeed: We survived under the condition of the supply system; no pay was needed for fighting a battle, for cooking, or for anything. The revolution succeeded depending on this system; the construction of the new state in the future will also depend on this system. (Yang Kuisong 2007: 116) The CCP also financed its war in a different way. Unlike the Nationalist army that relied entirely on the central government’s budget, which was severely compromised by price inflation and military officials’ corruption, the communist forces used an approach that combined their regional armies’ decentralized financing efforts with the central authority’s unified coordination. Decentralization was the primary method used by the regional forces to fight a war outside their base area, to build a new base area, or to maintain themselves where no funding was available from the CCP central authority. Under these circumstances,

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the troops supported themselves and renewed their combating capacities by primarily capturing weapons and provisions from the defeated enemies, confiscating the properties of wealthy households, or levying ordinary residents. As the base area stabilized and expanded, and especially as the communist forces launched a large-scale offensive that deployed armies in hundreds of thousands which affected several provinces, centralized planning became essential in supplying the combating forces with massive amounts of manpower, weapons, and provisions. To meet this goal, the communist forces again employed two approaches. One was the traditional method of bottom-up mobilization of manpower and provisions supplied by the millions of peasants that minimized the CCP central authority’s spending, as seen in their enlistment into the army, participating in logistics service, and providing the army with the required amount of grain and supplies. The other was the CCP authorities’ newly gained ability of centralized planning in managing production in industrial enterprises, using financial leverages, and procuring resources from the market after their base was shifted from the countryside to the cities. Su Yu (1907–1984), a key commander of the CCP troops in the Huai-Hai Campaign, the largest of the three major campaigns in the Civil War, thus said: “The liberation of East China, especially the victory of the Huai-Hai Campaign, could not have been conducted without the small pushing carts of the peasant logistic workers from East China and the large-size shells manufactured in Dalian” (LSJZ: 587). To conclude, the CCP outcompeted the GMD because of the confluence of its breakthroughs in geopolitical strategizing, its fiscal-military constitution, and identity building. Geopolitically, the CCP found itself in an optimal situation after World War II, when Japan, once the biggest barrier to China’s statebuilding, was finally removed, while Russia stepped in as a key player in favor of the CCP. The Soviet support turned out to be critical to the Communists, making possible their swift infiltration and eventual occupation of Manchuria, the strategically most decisive area in their competition with the Nationalists. Occupying Manchuria permitted a fundamental transformation of the CCP’s fiscal constitution, from being based on the isolated, poverty-stricken rural areas in the northwestern provinces and other parts of China to fully utilizing the resources of Manchuria, one of the most productive regions both agriculturally and industrially in the nation. Equally critical to the CCP was its mobilizing ability that it had developed through its incessant penetration into rural communities, from which it generated the manpower and logistic support on a massive scale for its military offensives. What characterized the communist forces, therefore, was a peculiar yet supplementary combination of its newly obtained strength through centralized control of urban manufacturing and financial resources on the one hand and its traditional ability in the decentralized mobilization of rural manpower and labor service on the other, which resulted in an equilibrium in its fiscal constitution that was self-sustainable and highly expandable. Most importantly, the communist forces achieved a high level of political identity by overcoming factionalism within the top leadership and centrifugal tendencies among its regional forces, and by establishing Mao’s political and

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ideological supremacy in the early 1940s. These developments, together with the CCP’s obvious disadvantages in the size and equipment of its military at the beginning of the Civil War and therefore the unprecedented survival crisis, caused the communist forces in different areas to minimize their differences, submit to Mao’s leadership, and coordinate with one another to fight the Nationalists. In the meantime, the CCP’s stress on ideological propaganda and tight control of the military at the bottom level, coupled with the material incentives generated by the land reform, kept the morale of its solders at a high level. The CCP’s organization and entire military force, from commanders to foot soldiers, thus developed a strong motivation for victory; all these contrasted sharply with the lack of conformity and confidence among the Guomindang’s military commanders and of the discipline among the soldiers. What accounts for the CCP’s success in state-rebuilding, in a nutshell, is a metamorphosis it underwent before and during the Civil War in the 1940s, in which the Party turned itself from an agrarian regime struggling for survival into a formidable fiscal-military apparatus drawing on both rural and urban resources, and from an organization ridden with factionalism into one of highlevel centralism.

Notes 1 Not surprisingly, studies on the Communist Revolution have concentrated on these two phases, especially the second. Depending on the sources and localities they investigated, these studies offer different interpretations of the dynamics of the Revolution. The fact that the communist forces boomed during the Japanese occupation in North China caused Chalmers Johnson (1962), drawing on sources from Japanese agencies on the CCP’s activities behind the lines of the Japanese forces, to emphasize the rise of mass nationalism among the peasantry in response to the brutality of Japanese operations, which paved the way for the Communists to step in and win over the awakening peasants. Likewise, Ralph Thaxton (1983, 1997) underscores the central role of disgruntled peasants against extortionate warlord forces and landlords or against the Nationalist state whose monopolistic policies threatened their livelihood. Here again the CCP only capitalized on the preexisting situation of popular grievance to advance its cause by appealing to the moral norms or subsistence needs of the rural population; its role in peasant mobilization was indirect. Contrary to these interpretations of the Communist Revolution as a reactive movement, others emphasized the CCP’s initiatives and organizing abilities in the making of the Revolution. Mark Selden (1971) thus attributes the Party’s success to its flexibility and audacious experiments in social, economic, and political transformations in the most destitute area in northwest China; his analysis centers on mass mobilization, cooperative production, self-reliance, and the purity of the Party ranks, known altogether as the “Yan’an way” (Yan’an daolu). Pauline Keating (1997) discounts the applicability of the CCP’s flexible and gradualist practices in the area around its headquarters in Yan’an to other parts of rural China with different ecological and socioeconomic conditions, where she finds a different legacy of the Communist Revolution, namely the Party’s top-down compulsion and authoritarianism, which persisted in response to resistance from entrenched local power relations. In the base areas in Jiangsu and Anhui, likewise, Yung-fa Chen (1986) shows the success of the CCP in developing a sophisticated set of strategies to win support from upper elites by appealing to

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nationalism while engaging in moderate reforms and elections to rebuild economic and political relations at the grassroots level, in the wake of the Japanese occupation and the Nationalist regime’s withdrawal from these areas. Odoric Wou (1994), too, underscores the CCP’s active mobilization of peasants in Henan and Anhui through its implementation of a variety of measures to benefit its supporters. The net effect of the communist mobilization of peasant masses, as these studies show, was that, when the Nationalists came back to North and Central China after the Japanese surrender in 1945, they found a predominance of communist influences in rural areas. The ideological authorities within the Party remained those who had received “authentic” Marxist training in Moscow, primarily Wang Ming and Zhang Wentian. Wang had his 1931 essay, “Struggle for the CCP’s Greater Bolshevik-ness,” reprinted for the third time in Yanan in March 1940 and widely circulated among Party members (Pang and Jin 2011, 2: 634). As the Party’s general secretary, Zhang authored in 1937 a textbook, The History of Revolutionary Movements in Modern China, as the CCP’s most authoritative account of modern Chinese history (H. Li 2013: 95–102). Indicative of his ideological authority, Zhang also headed the Marx-Lenin Institute (later renamed the Central Academy), founded in May 1938, to specifically train the CCP cadres in Marxist–Leninist theories (Cheng Zhongyuan 2006: 275–285). In sharp contrast, Mao had little influence in the ideological field. In early 1941, for instance, he wanted to publish his book, Rural Surveys, authored back in 1930 through 1933, in which he argued for the importance of first-hand investigation, but he found it difficult to get his book published. In May 1941, he delivered a lecture, “Reform Our Study,” at the Yanan Cadres’ Meeting, to emphasize the principle of “seeking truth from facts” (shishiqiushi), but this lecture “had no influence at all,” as Mao complained later (Pang and Jin 2011, 2: 641). Without enough ideological creditability, Mao even found it difficult to lecture at the CCP’s Party School (HQM: 287; Pang and Jin 2011, 2: 645). It was precisely the utmost poverty, the sparse population, and the difficulty in recruiting soldiers in Northern Shaanxi province that drove the Red Army to launch an “Eastern Expedition” into Shanxi province in January 1936 (Pang and Jin 2011, 1: 383). For the same reason, the Red Army planned a Western Expedition into Ningxia province in May 1936 to have access to the supplies from the Soviet Union (ibid.: 383, 389, 402). Later, after the outbreak of the Civil War, the severe shortage of food and supplies in the CCP-controlled Shaanxi–Gansu–Ningxia border area prevented the communist forces from other regions to be relocated into this area to fight the Nationalist forces that outnumbered the communist forces in this area by a factor of eight (250,000 versus less than 30,000), leaving Mao and the CCP’s headquarters in an extremely precarious situation (Pang and Jin 2011, 2: 803). It was estimated that in 1943 Manchuria produced 88%, 93%, 66%, 78%, and 50% of pig iron, steel, cement, electric power, and coal in China, respectively (Zhu Jianhua 1987a: 11). These fund-raising activities lacked planning from the top of the CCP. It was up to the individual Red Army troops to identify the targets for confiscation or the demanding of a donation, and they expended the revenues thus generated without a budget; in typical fashion, they “spend what was just obtained” (lai yidian yong yidian) (Wang and Li 1981: 29). Though backed by the communist ideology of class struggle, which was indeed necessary at the beginning of the Red Army’s existence when they lacked a base area stable and large enough to sustain itself, these activities failed to generate stable and adequate revenues and they were essentially no different from the way the traditional bandits and rebels supported themselves; the Red Army thus was vilified as “red bandits” (chifei) in GMD propaganda, not without reason. By November 1931, when the Provisional Central Government of the Chinese Soviet Republic was inaugurated at Ruijin of Jiangxi province, for instance, the

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Central Revolutionary Base Area (the largest among the many communist base areas in south-central China) had expanded to cover 50,000 square kilometers, including 21 county seats and a population of 2.5 million (Yang Jing 2002: 49). As before the War of Resistance, the biggest challenge to Chiang’s leadership continued to be Li Zongren and Bai Chongxi of the Guangxi clique. Thus, while Chiang appointed Bai as the commander of the Nationalist forces in Central China in June 1948 to block the southward deployment of the communist forces under Liu Bocheng and Deng Xiaoping while weakening Bai’s forces at the hands of Liu and Deng, Bai later rejected Chiang’s orders to dispatch his troops to East China during the Huaihai Campaign in December 1948, anticipating the elimination of Chiang’s direct forces by the Communists and the subsequent rise of the Guangxi clique in place of Chiang. Indeed, as it turned out, under pressure from Li Zongren and Bai Chongxi who, with a force of more than 300,000 soldiers, called for peace talks with the Communists after the disastrous failure of the Nationalist forces in the Huaihai Campaign, Chiang stepped down in January 1949, and Li subsequently assumed the position of Acting President (Taylor 2009: 400). Chiang, however, never gave up his actual control of the government as well as the military, and the lack of coordination between his own forces and the troops commanded by Bai Chongxi explained in large part the failure of the Nationalists’ defense along the Yangzi River and the Communists’ rapid occupation of South China. During the three years of the Civil War, 2.8 million prisoners of war from the Nationalist troops joined the communist forces, accounting for 65 to 70% of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in 1949 (Zhang Yong 2010: 72). No reliable data on the size of civil servants of the Republican state before 1945 exist. A 1931 survey shows that the personnel of the central government and its affiliated institutions in Nanjing amounted to 46,266 individuals. It was estimated that the number of government employees at the provincial level could be more than ten times the size, or roughly about 500,000 individuals (Li Lifeng 2004: 103). If we take 300 as the average number of civil servants in each county, the 1,800-odd counties in the entire country (Tan Qixiang 1991: 70–71) could have 540,000 civil servants. Altogether, the total number of civil servants under the Nationalist government could be around 1 million individuals before the War of Resistance. During the war, the number shrank as a result of the loss of the territory under the Nationalist government, but it could be at least half a million before the Japanese surrender. The number expanded quickly after the Nationalist government moved back to Nanjing and retook the provinces and cities that had been occupied by the Japanese and pro-Japanese puppet forces. By 1947, the total number of civil servants at the central, provincial, and municipal level had reached 678,472 (including officials, clerks, military officers, policemen, and all other employees in the administrative, judicial, law-enforcement, and defense services) (He Jiawei 2009: 146). If the salaried government personnel at the county and lower levels were included, the total size could be as high as 1.2 to 1.3 million. If the rank of civil servants was expanded to include teachers and clerks in all public schools as well as all of the employees living on government-paid salaries, its total number was well above 11 million (He and Luo 2011: 42). This estimate is based on the assumption that the cadres accounted for one-fourth or less of the members of the CCP. In 1945, the Party’s membership was 1.21 million, which increased to nearly 4.49 million in 1949, while the number of the communist cadres also reached nearly 1 million.

11 Conclusion

China’s transition to a modern sovereign state deviated from the “normal” path of state-making typically found in the literature on nation-states, which assumes their emergence as a process directly driven by geopolitical competition and interstate war but ultimately shaped by the complex interaction of multiple factors involving commercialization, capital formation, power configuration, legal tradition, religious and political heritages, and so on, as seen in the history of early modern and modern Europe; or as a process of decolonization and nationalism, as happened to the non-Western world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In both cases, the rise of modern sovereign states has been typically interpreted as the aftermath of the collapse of medieval or modern empires on the Eurasian continent or the demise of European colonial empires in the non-Western world. And, ideally, a nation-state, Western or non-Western, should comprise people of shared ethnic or cultural traditions, claim its exclusive sovereignty over the land and water within its boundary, and have a government in the form of representative democracy that manifests popular sovereignty; all these characteristics of a modern nation-state stand in sharp contrast with a continental or colonial empire that typically encompassed peoples of diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds, had unstable or hierarchical territories, and deprived its domestic and/or overseas subjects the right of popular participation. State-making is thus conceived as a grand transition from empire to nation-state.1 This transition never happened to China. The making of the modern Chinese state, as shown throughout the foregoing chapters, involved three key developments: China’s transformation from a prototypic, monoethnic state to an early modern territorial state by the 1750s; from a territorial state to a sovereign state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and from a fragmented and decentralized to a unified and centralized state in the first half of the twentieth century. This three-step transformation, however, should not be equated with, or simplified as, a transition from empire to nation-state, not only because a military or colonial empire never existed in China right before or during the transformation, but because the end result of this transformation is unlike any nation-state in today’s world: compared to all other polities, the Chinese state as it stands today is exceptionally large in physical size and centralized in its

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power structure. This peculiar form of state can be properly understood only when we take all of its three historical developments into consideration. While the first two account for the vastness of China’s territory and the diversity of its population today, the third explains the exceptional cohesiveness and strength of the Chinese state that remains largely unchanged after nearly seven decades since its inauguration in the mid-twentieth century.

Making sense of the Chinese leviathan Why it is so “big” China’s physical immensity and diversity can be attributed to the combined effects of the following heritages. The first is territorial expansion and administrative integration under the Qing. The Qing differed from the preceding Ming dynasty chiefly in that, in addition to the interior provinces taken over from the latter, it added Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet as its frontiers; China, therefore, transitioned from a monoethnic state of the Han Chinese into a multiethnic state consisting of the provinces of the Han people and the frontiers of the non-Han populations. It is important to note, however, that territorial expansion under the Qing was fundamentally different from empire-building in other parts of the premodern or early modern world. Unlike the military empires in world history that constantly engaged in war for territorial expansion, interstate war and expansion were the exception rather than the norm in the history of the Qing from 1644 to 1911. After relocating its capital city to Beijing and conquering the former Ming provinces, the Qing showed no intention of expanding its Inner Asian frontiers any further for about half a century. The Manchu rulers carried out a series of military expeditions from the 1690s to the 1750s primarily because of the recurrent and fatal threats from the Zunghar Mongols. Its incorporation of the land once occupied by the Zunghars into its territory during the expeditions was primarily for the purpose of defending its security rather than for fiscal or religious reasons as typically seen in the histories of empires. Furthermore, unlike the typical course of empire-building in world history that sees recurrent expansion or contraction of territories, with the frontier serving only as a springboard leading to further conquest, the Qing saw no reason for further expansion after eliminating the Zunghars in the 1750s, although its fiscal and military strength had reached a peak by that point and could easily sustain further expeditions. Territorial expansion was the exception rather than the rule in the history of the Qing dynasty in China. Content with its status as the legitimate ruling dynasty in China and the huge quantity of revenue from the 18 provinces, its overall strategy after 1644 was defensive and conservative, aimed at preserving its preexisting territory, rather than endless conquest and expansion, which made no sense to the Qing rulers. Second and more importantly, the Qing succeeded by and large in keeping its land in its entirety until the very end, which further made it different from a conquest dynasty that saw frequent adding or losing of territories. Behind the

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striking stability and continuity of its territorial and demographic basis was the Qing court’s sophisticated and effective methods to govern the Han and nonHan populations. As a dynasty of alien origin, the Qing governed the 18 interior provinces of the Han population by embracing the Confucian principle of “benevolent government” with greater sincerity than its predecessor, in order to establish and maintain its status as the rightful dynasty to rule China. Its unfailing adherence to the policy of light taxation yet tight political and intellectual control of the Han elites resulted in the impressive stability of Han society. The huge amount of revenue that the Qing court obtained from the interior provinces fueled its military operations to safeguard its security, and the geopolitical security it established by building frontiers in turn allowed the Qing court to keep its taxation of the Han people at a low level. Meanwhile, the Qing also demonstrated its striking ability to govern and preserve its frontiers. The close ties between the imperial court and frontier elites through religious patronage and/or intermarriage, the migration of the Han people to the frontiers, the growing economic ties between frontier and interior areas, the administrative integration of the frontiers into interior provinces, and finally a growing awareness among the Han and non-Han elites of a shared statehood at times of crises in the late Qing period – all these factors worked together against the centrifugal inclinations of the frontiers and accounted for China’s territorial continuity after the fall of the Qing. Therefore, rather than an empire with frontiers constantly expanding or shrinking as seen in the history of other parts of the Eurasian continent, the Qing that ruled China is best termed an early-modern territorial state. It was “early modern” because it had fixed and stable-territory; it maintained a large standing army without engaging in frequent interstate war for territorial expansion; and it had a highly centralized and bureaucratized administrative system. All these made Qing China closer to a modern sovereign state than any of its counterparts outside Europe; and it was much better prepared than most of the non-European states for integration into the global system of sovereign states in the modern era. Third, and no less important, China’s huge territory and diverse population also resulted from its fruitful efforts to defend against colonialism in its integration into the Europe-centered system of states after the 1840s, which in turn can be attributed to the following three factors: (1) the working of the mechanism of “regionalized centralism” that enabled the late Qing state to mobilize fiscal and military resources for modernizing defense, education, transportation, and manufacturing and later reforming the entire state apparatus, a development that prevented China from being conquered and divided up by foreign powers; (2) the growth of nationalism among the Chinese political and intellectual elites in the early twentieth century that prevented warlordism in the interior provinces from developing into perpetual fragmentation and splitting of China into separate states;

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(3) the powerful legacies of frontier building under the Qing that remained functional after the fall of the dynasty to prevent Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet from seeking formal independence even when China was plagued with political division and instability under the Republican government. All these factors contributed to the continuities in the Qing transition from an early modern territorial state to a modern sovereign state. Therefore, the overall structure of China’s territoriality remained largely unchanged from the peak of Qing expansion in the 1750s to the founding of the People’s Republic and its consolidation in the 1950s; today’s China is still a land consisting of the interior provinces of the Han people and the frontiers of Mongols, Uighurs, Chinese Muslims, and Tibetans. Thus, rather than a deviation from the “normal” path to the nation-state, China’s regeneration as a modern sovereign state in the mid-twentieth century was the result of a three-century process of state transformation; what happened to China was not a transition from empire to nation-state, but the building of a territorial state by the mid-eighteenth century and its arduous yet successful integration into the system of sovereign states after the mid-nineteenth century.

Why it is so “strong” State transformation in China since the mid-seventeenth century not only resulted in an enlarged territory and a diverse population that showed striking continuity in spite of recurrent regime changes, but also culminated in the making of a highly centralized, authoritarian party-state, rather than a democracy, by the midtwentieth century. Once again China’s experiences deviated from the “normal” course of state-building implied by the paradigm of empire to nation-state that links the modern nation-state with Western-style democracy and further equates the latter with the only legitimate form of government manifesting the ideal of popular sovereignty. China actually experimented with democracy twice in the Republican era, first in 1912–1913 under the government in Beijing, and again in 1946 under the government in Nanjing. Both experiments, however, were short-lived because of intensified struggles between competing political forces. The failure of parliamentary democracy in 1913 ushered in president Yuan Shikai’s dictatorship and the rampancy of warlordism after his death; and the outbreak of a civil war between the GMD and the CCP in 1946 nullified the reintroduced democracy from its very beginning. The most fundamental reason behind the chronic political disorder and subsequent failure of democracies in Republican China, however, lay in institutionalized decentralization of power within the government system, the growth of autonomous provincial or regional forces, and their competition with the central government for control of military, fiscal, and administrative resources, as shown throughout the chapters on the late Qing and Republican periods. The rise of a highly centralized “strong” state in twentieth-century China, for its part, was the result of a dialectic process of interaction between the central

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and regional forces in seeking solutions to the problems of the regionalized distribution of fiscal and military resources. The rise of “regionalized centralism” in the wake of the Taiping Rebellion proved to be an effective and indeed the only viable solution for the Qing state to end domestic disorder and engage in modernizing projects in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, under the condition of a widening rift between the Manchu and Han elites and the vanishing loyalty of the latter toward the royal court in the last few years of the Qing, the regionalization of state power turned out to be fatal to the dynasty, as clearly seen on the eve and during the Revolution of 1911. After the fall of the Qing, especially following the death of President Yuan Shikai, political fragmentation under warlordism worsened; ambitious provincial leaders all engaged in building a highly centralized regional regime to mobilize local fiscal, military, and administrative resources. The predominance of “centralized regionalism,” therefore, aggravated political division and military competition among the regional contenders, yet at the same time it also prepared the basis for the founding of a centralized and unified state at the national level. The reason why the GMD emerged triumphant in the fierce competition among the regional forces is precisely because it had built a fiscal-military organization that was more unified and centralized than all other competitors. Nevertheless, after establishing a national regime in 1927, the GMD was far from successful in incorporating the preexisting regional forces into the national military and government systems and thereby establishing a truly centralized and unified state apparatus, not to mention its failed attempt to penetrate urban and rural society all the way to the bottom level so as to build an effective infrastructure for revenue extraction and social control. Compared to the GMD’s “semi-centralism,” the CCP proved to be strikingly successful in forging an apparatus that was highly unified in party organization and ideology and that characteristically combined a highly centralized fiscal-military system with a decentralized mode of resource mobilization. It was this higher level of centralization or “total centralism,” coupled with a reversal in its geopolitical setting after World War II, that enabled the CCP to outcompete the GMD in 1949. The birth of a strong state in twentieth-century China, in the final analysis, had its roots in the geopolitical setting and fiscal constitution that prevailed in the eighteenth century. It was Qing China’s supremacy in relations with neighboring states and its superiority in military strength that accounted for the dynasty’s loss of incentive to keep upgrading its military and the prevalence of the low-level equilibrium in the dynasty’s fiscal constitution. The stagnation and decline in the size and quality of its regular forces (the Eight Banners and the Green Standards), coupled with a rapidly growing population, the outflow of silver from the domestic market, and hence the deterioration of the fiscal equilibrium, made the Qing poorly prepared in the 1850s when confronted with large-scale domestic disorder; the imperial court had no choice but to count on local initiatives when its regular forces failed to suppress the rebels and when its regular revenues were inadequate to meet the mounting spending on domestic and foreign crises. Had China been surrounded by competitors of equal

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strength in the eighteenth century, the Qing state would have likely engaged in a military revolution, and its revenue structure would have accordingly changed, shifting from relying mainly on the land tax to taxing goods and borrowing, to satisfy its growing military and security needs, as happened to contemporary European states. Developments in state rebuilding during the Republican period were deeply rooted in the heritage of the late Qing years. Regionalized centralism in the second half of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth centuries foreshadowed the rise of centralized regionalism, or the building of centralized and unified fiscal-military regimes at the regional level, in the early Republican years. The GMD state, originally one such regional competitor, outcompeted all other regional contenders because it built the most centralized and unified fiscal-military apparatus. The CCP further defeated the GMD in 1949 because it built a fiscal-military force that was even more unified and centralized than its enemy. The sequence of the key links in state rebuilding in China over the three centuries from the 1640s to the 1940s thus is clear: high Qing supremacy in geopolitical relations established by the 1750s led to low-level equilibrium in fiscal constitution and military stagnation in the following century, which in turn caused the regionalization of military and fiscal resources after the 1850s and the rise of regional fiscal-military states in the late 1910s and the 1920s, and all these paved the way for the rise of the GMD and later the CCP states. For any regional contender committed to national dominance, the only way to survive the fierce competition and realize the objective of establishing a countrywide regime is to build a fiscal-military apparatus that was more centralized and unified than its predecessors and competitors. State transformation in the first half of twentiethcentury China, therefore, took the form of growing levels of centralization and unification in fiscal-military institutions and political identity; the end result of this process was inevitably the birth of a huge, powerful party-state that aimed to penetrate the entire society and control all resources within its reach for extraction and self-strengthening.

China as a historically multi-layered state The rise of the modern Chinese state, then, should be best seen as the result of the combined effect of different layers of historical heritages in the long process of state transformation, and we can identify four such layers that work together to define what China is today. On the top level, China appears as a party-state, with a highly centralized power structure under the leadership of the CCP, which resulted immediately from the Communist Revolution that ended in 1949. On the next level, China exists as a sovereign state, which claims its exclusive rights on the land and water territories within its officially defined boundaries and acknowledges its equality with all other states under international law. This resulted from China’s incorporation into the world system of sovereign states in the second half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century at the expense of part of its territory and

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sovereign rights. The GMD’s state-building efforts from the 1920s to the 1940s were most decisive in shaping the territorial range of China’s sovereignty. On the third level, China represents itself as a unified multiethnic state, comprising provinces of a dominantly Han population and “autonomous regions” or frontiers of minority populations, an administrative structure that has its roots in the Qing expansion that ended in the 1750s and that also owes in large measure to the Qing state’s effective governance of a diverse population and successful maintenance of its territory throughout the rest of its history. Finally, on the bottom level lies a “proto-China” that has grown to cover the 18 provinces of the Qing; this is where the Chinese people of Han origin live and where the Chinese civilization has flourished, nourishing a rich culture which forms Chinese identity. In the twentieth century, this shared sense of belonging fueled the growth of Chinese nationalism and propelled the rise of a modern Chinese state more than any other heritages. State transformation in China, in a nutshell, took place as the continuous buildup of different layers of historical heritages from the bottom to the top levels outlined above, rather than the disruptive transition from empire to nation-state. The form and content of the Chinese state was renewed and redefined each time a new layer was added. With its origins in the remote history of an ancient and undisrupted civilization, the modern Chinese state is ultimately the cumulative result of a long-term transformation that began in the 1640s. China’s experiences in state transformation, then, contradict in many ways the thesis of empire to nation-state commonly found in the literature of nationalism and state-making, including some writings on late imperial and modern China. Instead of the rise of an expansionist empire engaging in incessant conquest, state transformation in China began with the formation of a territorial state that sought no expansion throughout most of its history, and its intermittent expeditions for a relatively short period, which did indeed lead to territorial expansion in response to the Zunghar offensives in Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet, took only about 20 years in total (eight years under Emperor Kangxi: 1690–1697, 1715–1722; eight years under Emperor Yongzheng: 1723–1724, 1729–1734; and five years under Emperor Qianlong: 1755–1759), or less than onethirteenth of the Qing rule in Beijing. Instead of the constant addition or loss of frontier characteristics of the history of a military empire, the Qing frontiers showed striking stability once they joined its territory; instead of the breakup of territory and the establishment of independent states on former frontiers, dependencies, or colonies as happened to all empires in world history, the transition from the Qing to the Republic witnessed striking continuity in China’s territory, which remained largely unchanged in the further transition from the Republic of China to the People’s Republic of China in 1949. And finally, instead of creating a Western-style democracy, what prevailed in China by the mid-twentieth century was a highly centralized and unified state in response to the prolonged fragmentation and disunity that had hindered China’s growth as a modern nation-state.

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All in all, state transformation in China was a long-term process driven ultimately by the forces internal to the land; it was the geopolitical setting, fiscal constitution, and political identities unique to China that combined to dictate the dynamics and define the course of its transition from a proto-, monoethnic state through a multi-ethnic, territorial state to a centralized and unified modern sovereign state. External forces were critical in shaping China’s geopolitical relations and its subsequent strategic priorities, but the country was so immense in size and deeply entrenched in its own traditions that any attempts to transplant a foreign model onto the land would have to yield to the dynamic and logic of state-making intrinsic to the country itself.

State rebuilding in China: an unfinished task Huge changes have taken place in China since the founding of the PRC, the most salient being the transformation of the nation from an agrarian society, with most of its population living on subsistence agriculture, to the largest manufacturer and contributor to world trade than any other nation by the late 2010s. With its industrialization accelerating since the 1980s, the country has also experienced the largest scale of urbanization in world history, turning hundreds of millions of rural dwellers into urban residents in a matter of a generation. After more than six decades of vigorous growth, the Chinese economy continues to expand in the 2010s, and is likely to overtake the United States to become the largest in the world before long. Despite these developments, however, the formation of the Chinese state remains largely unchanged. Territorially, other than its recovery of sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1997 and Macau in 2000, China remains identical to what it was in 1951 after establishing its control over Tibet. Even more striking is the stability and continuity of the state apparatus itself. The government system that was established in 1949 and its key features, such as the CCP’s leadership, the composition of, and relationships among, the major branches of the central government, and the relationship between the state and its people, all remained largely the same over the next seven decades, which, of course, testified to the state’s unusual ability to cope with the myriad of challenges from outside and within while pursuing its strategic goals with impressive records. Yet, the stability that the Chinese state has shown in the past does not suggest that it has taken a definite shape or that the task of state-making is done. Far from that, as China is experiencing economic modernization and social transformation on a scale unseen in human history and redefining its position in relation to other nations, the state will continue to evolve in response to the challenges that will confront it in the decades to come.

Redefining national identity It was true that in the course of territorial expansion the Qing court made deliberate and consistent efforts to build its ties with the ruling elites of the frontiers through religious patronage, intermarriage, and a degree of autonomy allowed

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to the latter in internal governance; these measures indeed succeeded in cultivating the allegiance of frontier elites toward the Qing. And it was true that under the influence of the printed media, and as a result of modern education they received in China or abroad, an awareness of shared destiny grew among the intellectuals of Han and non-Han origins in the last years of the Qing. It was also true that the last decades of the dynasty witnessed the accelerating integration of the frontiers with the interior through the massive migration of the Han people into Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, and Northern and Eastern Xinjiang, and through the establishment of new provinces in parts of the frontiers. All these developments were critical to the Qing in maintaining its claims over the frontiers and preventing the splitting of its territory in its decline in the nineteenth century; they also contributed to the rise of a consensus among the Han and non-Han elites on the idea of a “Republic of Five Races” after the fall of the Qing. The newly established Republic thus was able to inherit from the preceding dynasty the entirety of its territory, including all of the frontiers. Nevertheless, these developments should not be simply equated with signs of the emergence of a shared nationality among the Han and non-Han peoples. After all, the so-called Republic of Five Races was only in part a result of the lingering loyalty of frontier elites toward the ruling house of the Qing and in part a result of the Han elites’ redefinition of “nationalism” after giving up the idea of establishing a republic of the Han people only. The formation of a “Chinese nationality” transcending the ethnic differences between the Han and non-Han populations remained an ideal limited largely to the intellectual and political elites of Han origin; it was far from a reality in the absence of substantial integration among the peoples of different origins in their everyday economic, social, and cultural life. After 1949, huge government efforts were made to promote “national unity” among the 56 officially identified ethnic groups by migrating the Han people to the frontiers, adopting the Beijing-based dialect of Mandarin as the “universal language” throughout the country, cultivating the elites of ethnic minorities through opportunities in education and political careers, improving the living conditions of the ethnic populations through a series of economic and social policies, and integrating the frontiers with the interior provinces through the massive construction of infrastructural projects. National integration certainly made headway in the Mao era from the 1950s through the 1970s, but much of it was achieved by the top-down implementation of the state’s policies and therefore was unsustainable when government intervention yielded to market forces. Since the 1980s, the introduction of economic reforms and the relaxation of some of the policies regulating ethnic relations resulted in the massive inflow of the Han people into the frontiers for business opportunities as well as the migration of the minority people into interior provinces; a spontaneous, bottom-up, and two-way process of integration eventually set in, but the inequality between the Han and minority populations in education and access to resources in the market economy also resulted in widespread tensions and conflicts among them.

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Adjusting its policies toward the minorities to help them succeed in realms where they had been disadvantaged could only provide a temporary solution to the immediate challenges that confronted the state. A more fundamental solution to the strained ethnic relations entails the state’s redefinition and rebuilding of the basis on which a true nationhood shared by both the Han and non-Han populations can develop. Since the founding of the Republican state in 1912, the cultivation of national identity has centered on the glorification of the history and culture of the Han people. The official version of the “national history” (guoshi) of China has little to do with the past of non-Han peoples; when they were mentioned, the nomadic states were invariably depicted as backward and marginal to the civilized dynasties of the Han people; the ethnic and cultural divides between the Han and the surrounding nomadic peoples, which had been central to the Han-centric view prevailing in imperial China, remain deeply ingrained in the minds of the Han Chinese. China remains largely an “ethnic nation” of the Han in which the historical experiences of the non-Han peoples are obscured. Therefore, a more challenging task for the Chinese state is to cultivate the awareness among its entire population of the rich and diverse heritages of all ethnic groups. The making of a “Chinese nationality” should not depend merely on the top-down implementation of compulsory measures for cultural, economic, and political integrations or the imposition of a Han-centered collective memory on the entire population; equally important is respect for the tradition and rights of all other ethnic groups and their voluntary identification with the state.

Repositioning China in the world Aside from rediscovering the history and culture of the non-Han populations, which are essential to the making of a shared nationhood, reassessing China’s recent past in a global context is equally important in shaping its new identity. Since the Nationalist Revolution in the 1920s, the history of China after the Opium War of 1840 has been reinvented into a series of “national humiliations” (guochi) inflicted by foreign imperialism. Two basic reasons explain why this version of history has prevailed in China. One has to do with the history itself. Having long been the only dominant power in East Asia, China found it extremely difficult to give up its self-claimed superiority over all other states and embrace the new system of states in which it would be treated as only an equal, if not inferior, partner to all other members of the system. Its integration into the world system of states, therefore, turned out to be particularly sluggish and painstaking, involving repeated defeats by foreign powers and its loss of all tributaries as well as damages to its territorial entity and sovereign rights. Unlike many other non-Western countries that were quickly subjugated after the arrival of European powers and soon took on the path of colonization or Westernization, it took China more than half a century to adapt to the new order of the world; the mental suffering inflicted upon the Chinese elites over a long period was enduring, shaping their subjective perception of China’s past experiences and relations with the outside world.

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The other reason has to do with the needs of the Nationalist and later Communist state-makers in the twentieth century, who defined their task as primarily a Nationalist Revolution against imperialism; central to the making of their ideologies was the writing of modern Chinese history as a series of conflicts between China and foreign powers. The repeated indoctrination of the antiimperialist ideology and history, compounded with the collective memory of China’s losses in the past century, resulted in a deep-seated subconsciousness about China as a victim of foreign imperialism among the elites as well as the ordinary recipients of Nationalist propaganda. Gone is the old Han-centric view of a civilized Middle Kingdom surrounded by savages; in its stead is a new vision of the world, in which China as a victim is juxtaposed against foreign powers as victimizers. This vision of a polarized world, instrumental as it was in formulating the ideology of the Nationalists and the Communists, worked well for both in their struggle for the recovery of China’s territorial integrity and sovereignty; it also worked well when the state was isolated from the system of states dominated by Western powers, as happened to the PRC throughout most of the Mao era. But it does not help with China’s reentry into the world system and its resurgence as a global power. A lesson that China can learn from the Cold War is that there is no nation in the world which can truly escape the ever-expanding global capitalist system and the states system that accompanies it. Only after it becomes a full member of the world capitalist system and a full member of the system of states can China develop itself by taking full advantage of the opportunities that can be found from within the system or tackle the challenges that confront it. What China needs in preparation for its new role in the world, therefore, is to jettison the victim mentality from among the political elites as well as the populace, which could easily lead to China’s isolation from, and hostility toward, the outside world, and rebuild its self-confidence on the basis of an informed and balanced comprehension of its own past. As shown in the preceding chapters, China’s experiences in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not just a record of failures and humiliations; more significant than that record were a series of breakthroughs that accounted for China’s successes in defending its territory and independence in the nineteenth century, its quick transition from fragmentation to centralization and unification in the early twentieth century, and its emergence as a triumphant, unified nation with its territorial integrity and sovereignty largely restored by the end of World War II; all these developments in the late Qing and Republican periods provided China with the necessary preconditions for its reemergence as a major power in the global age. Instead of repeating the old story of expansion and subjugation that had characterized the rise of empires and major powers in past centuries, China’s engagement with the world in the twenty-first century should focus on building a geopolitical environment friendly to its development, beginning with the formation of transnational mechanisms for regional integration in manufacturing, trade, and finance, which would benefit both China as a powerhouse of the world economy and the surrounding countries as participants in globalization.

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Rebuilding political identity A third and the most challenging task that remains unfinished in China’s quest for a modern nation-state is to redefine the relationship between the state and its people. Much of this has to do with pre-1949 legacies in seeking solutions to the problem of an excessively decentralized power structure in the late Qing decades, and to the worsened situation in the early Republican years. Despite his making of a party-state that placed the Guomindang above the civilian and military institutions and further put the party-state apparatus under his personal dictatorship, Chiang Kai-shek never succeeded in eliminating the centrifugal forces at the regional level and establishing the organizations of the party-state at the local level for effective mobilization of manpower and other resources. The Communist Party succeeded in rivalry with the Nationalists precisely because it built a party-state that was more centralized and unified, effectively penetrating the peasant communities in areas it occupied. However, neither the GMD nor the CCP allowed room for the protection of individual rights or the promotion of the awareness of them among the public. Quite the contrary, individuals under the party-state had to sacrifice personal interest for the cause of the Party. This Party culture, coupled with the survival of the “feudal remnants” of neo-Confucian values on loyalty to authorities and the priority of group objectives over individuals, explained Chiang Kai-shek’s dictatorship and reckless persecution of liberal intellectuals; it also accounts for the cult of Mao Zedong, the brutality of the Red Guards during the height of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), and the tragedies that occurred repeatedly afterwards. The introduction of the mechanisms of market and competition since the 1980s allowed a degree of freedom for people to make a choice in economic realms, but the civil rights of individual citizens remain to be protected, despite the recent formation but malfunctioning of a legal framework for that end; the arbitrary exercise of power by government officials at all levels remains largely unchecked, in the absence of transparency in policy-making, an independent media, and an informed public. Individuals and private corporations remain powerless and helpless when confronted with the abuse of state agents. In sharp contrast to the strong state is the underdevelopment of a civic culture in society, despite the emergence of a sizeable middle class in society and the rapid increase of the wealth in its possession; non-governmental organizations and self-governing bodies remain limited in number and subject to the state’s surveillance. In the absence of independent venues to express themselves, it is difficult for citizens to have a free debate, and build consensus, over the issues that concern them. The state, in other words, is yet to be based on the solid foundation of a citizenry capable of performing their rights and duties defined and protected by law. The strength and viability of the state, in the final analysis, do not come from its monopoly of violence or the increased revenues that enable its enlargement and strengthening of the apparatus of coercion, nor do they come from the state’s indoctrination of a dated ideology that has lost much of its appeal to the people. More fundamental than all these for the state to rebuild its vitality and legitimacy is the consent of the people, which

288

The making of a unified and centralized state

can only be cultivated through the development of civil organizations for citizens to articulate themselves and, more importantly, through the opening of the policymaking process to the supervision and participation of the informed public.

Note 1 Underlying this construct, needless to say, is a Eurocentric perspective that reflects more or less the historical experiences of Western European states in their early modern and modern ages, as critics have pointed out (see, e.g., Torgovnick 1990; Balibar 1991; Said 1979; Hobson 2006, 2012).

List of characters

an liang jintie 按粮津貼 an Meiguo zhi xin 安美國之心 anchashi 按察使 bade 八德 banshi dachen 辦事大臣 bao fan gu yu 保藩固圉 baogao he qingshi 報告和請示 baojia 保甲 baolan 包攬 ben you Yuan zhi chenpu 本有元之臣僕 benchao zhi shengwei 本朝之聲威 biancun 編村 bing qi di buzu yi genzhong, de qi ren buzu yi qushi 併其地不足以耕種,得其人 不足以驅使 boke 伯克 bu ju yu shang, ji san yu xia 不聚於上,即散於下 budeyi, biying juzhao yi 不得已,必應舉著也 buzhengshi 布政使 caizheng gongsuo 財政公所 caizheng ju 財政局 canzan dachen 參贊大臣 caoliang 漕粮 chaojin 朝覲 cheng haoling, bei ceying 承號令,備策應 chi ying bao tai 持盈保泰 chifei 赤匪 chu Jiang 除蔣 chunwangchihan 唇亡齒寒 cunben zhengzhi 村本政治 cungui 村規

290

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da minzuzhuyi 大民族主義 Da Qing 大清 da tuhao 打土豪 da Yazhouzhuyi 大亞洲主義 da zhi shuishi 大治水師 danghua jiaoyu 黨化教育 dangshu 黨書 dashengchan yundong 大生產運動 de qi tu buzu yi gengyun, de qi min buzu yi qushi 得其土不足以耕耘,得其民不 足以驅使 di 狄 dibao 地保 difang 地方 dizhu haoshen 地主豪紳 Dongshansheng xunyueshi 東三省巡閱使 Dongshihui 董事會 du zhan dongbei 獨佔東北 dui dang nao dulixing wenti 對黨鬧獨立性問題 dutong 都統 ebo 鄂博 fangjing lu cang cong ying 方今帑藏充盈 fangqu zhi 防區制 fazheng xuetang 法政學堂 feitu wuyi yu defang, erbing yihai yu baixing ye 非徒無益於地方,而并貽害於百 姓也 fengpiao 奉票 fu tianxia zhe, tianxiaren zhi tianxia ye, fei nanbei zhongwai suo de er si 夫天下 者,天下人之天下也,非南北中外所得而私 Fuxinghui 復興會 Fuyi quanshu 賦役全書 gaxia 噶廈 geming shang wei chenggong, tongzhi reng xu nuli 革命尚未成功,同志仍需努力 genjudi 根據地 geren ziyou 個人自由 gongji zhi 供給制 guan min heli 官民合力 guan yong shen li, shen ji guan wei 官用紳力,紳藉官威 guanyu 關餘 guanzhi bianzhi ju 官制編制局 guanzhi gaige 官制改革 Guixi 桂系 guofu 國父

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291

guojia kufu chongying, wuji shangren juanshu 國家庫府充盈,無藉商人捐輸 guojiazhuyi 國家主義 guojun bianqian 國軍編遣 guomin dahui 國民大會 guomin tongyi 國民統一 guoyong 國用 guoyong yuan you changjing 國用原有常經 haifang 海防 haifang juanshu 海防捐輸 haijun yamen 海軍衙門 hanjian 漢奸 hanxin zhuili zhi zhi 寒心惴栗之至 he wu wei yi 合五為一 he zi waixie, shushi genhua 何自外攜,數世梗化 hengzhengbaolian 橫徵暴斂 Heningwang 和寧王 hepantuochu 和盤托出 heping minzhu jianshe de xin jieduan 和平民主建設的新階段 Hongjun jiangling 紅軍將領 hu fa zhi zhu 護法之主 Hu Xiang dizi man Tianshan 湖湘弟子滿天山 hua Man Han zhenyu 化滿漢畛域 Huabei 華北 Huadong 華東 Huaxinghui 華興會 Huang Chao 皇朝 Huang Qing 皇清 Huaxia 華夏 huiban 會辦 hunchengxie 混成協 Ji-Cha zhengwu weiyuanhui 冀察政務委員會 jiangjun 將軍 Jiangguo fanglue 建國方略, jianzu jianxi 減租減息 jiezeeryu 竭澤而漁 jing bing jian zheng 精兵簡政 jinglue dachen 經略大臣 Jingxi 晉系 jiu Bohai menhu er lun, yiyou shengubuyao zhi shi 就渤海門戶而論,已有深固不 搖之勢 jiu bai zhi gong 九白之貢 jiudi chou xiang 就地籌餉 jiuguo gongliang 救國公糧

292

List of characters

jiuguo gongzhai 救國公債 jiuguo juan 救國捐 ju 局 juan jie jian xing 捐借兼行 juanli 捐例 juanna 捐納 juanshu 捐輸 jun shi chen yi li, chen shi jun yi zhong 君使臣以禮,臣事君以忠 junfu 軍府 junmin fenzhi 軍民分治 juntong 軍統 junxian 郡縣 junyong liangpiao 軍用糧票 junzheng 軍政 kalun 卡倫 kanglian 抗聯 Kebuduo 科布多 Kebuduo canzan dachen 科布多參贊大臣 kong fei guojia zhi fu 恐非國家之福 kongxu ji yi, luojue ju qiong 空虛已極,羅掘俱窮 Kulun 庫倫 lai yidian yong yidian 來一點用一點 lanyishe 藍衣社 lianbingchu 練兵處 liangtai 糧臺 Liao xiang 遼餉 Lifanyuan 理藩院 ligu 釐谷 lijin 釐金 lin 鄰 lingtu zhi tongyi 領土之統一 liu zheng 六政 Liuda yilai 六大以來 lixian 立憲 liyilianchi 禮義廉恥 lü 閭 Mao Zedong sixiang 毛澤東思想 Meng 盟 Menggu zhi li 蒙古之例 Mengguli 蒙古禮 Minben 民本 Minquan 民權

List of characters Minsheng 民生 minzhu jizhongzhi 民主集中制 minzu 民族 minzu geming 民族革命 minzu zhi tongyi 民族之統一 mujuan 畝捐 nagong zhi guo 納貢之國 neifu 內附 nianban 年班 Nian xiang 練餉 Nonghui 農會 nongmin daibiaohui 農民代表會 pai Man 排滿 pifu 匹夫 pinnongtuan 貧農團 qi 旗 qinchai dachen 欽差大臣 qingli caizheng 清理財政 qingli caizheng chu 清理財政所 qingxin xiangnei, tongmou wuzu xingfu 傾心嚮內,同謀五族幸福 quanti ziyou 全體自由 quanxuesuo 勸學所 quchu dalu 驅除韃虜 quchu dalu, huifu Zhonghua 驅除韃虜,恢復中華 rangkai dalu, zhanling liangxiang 讓開大路,佔領兩廂 rangwai bi xian annei 攘外必先安內 renai sixiang 仁愛思想 renminbi 人民幣 renzheng 仁政 Shunningwang 順寧王 Shunyiwang 順義王 saifeng 塞防 san bai jiu ke 三拜九磕 san shi 三事 san xiang 三餉 san yu zhengce 三寓政策 san zi zhengce 三自政策 sancha 三查 Sanminzhuyi 三民主義 sanrentuan 三人團

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294

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shanhou da jiekuan 善後大借款 shanghui 商會 shangshang zuiyao zhi yi 上上最要之義 shen Jiang 審蔣 shengyong 省用 shenshang 紳商 shi haifang wei wuzuqingzhong 視海防為無足輕重 shiba guo 十八國 shishiqiushi 實事求是 shouhui liquan 收回利權 shu qiannian lai weiyou zhi bianju 數千年來未有之變局 shu qiannian lai weiyou zhi qiangdi 數千年來未有之強敵 shui chou shui zhi 隨籌隨支 siwei 四維 siyi 四夷 siyuan 司員 Su ren zhi Su 蘇人治蘇 su wei yi jia 素為一家 suku 訴苦 suo 所 tai 臺 tanpai 攤派 Tao Yue fei wen 討粵匪檄 taochi 討赤 tianxia 天下 tianxia zhi cai zhi you ci shu 天下之財止有此數 tianxia guojia zhi zhu 天下國家之主 Tianzi you dao, shou zai si yi 天子有道,守在四夷 tidiao 提調 tong minzu yi zongzu zhi guomin 同民族異種族之國民 tongshui 統稅 tuanlian 團練 tuanlian dachen 團練大臣 wei zhi buzhi wei, hui zhi buzhi huai, di buke geng, min buke chen 威之不知畏, 惠之不知懷,地不可耕,民不可臣 wanghua 王化 weiyuan 委員 wo Kaerka zhubu 我喀爾喀諸部 wu zuzhi wu zhengfu 無組織無政府 Wuliyasutai jiangjun 烏里雅蘇臺將軍 wuquan fenli 五權分立 wuzhuang baowei Sulian 武裝保衛蘇聯 wuzu gonghe 五族共和

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295

xia 夏 xiang bei fazhan, xiang nan fangyu 向北發展,向南防禦 xiangbao 鄉保 xiangdi 鄉地 xiangnei 嚮內 xianzheng 憲政 xiao minzuzhuyi 小民族主義 Xibei choubianshi 西北籌邊使 xibeijun 西北軍 xichui yongbing yilai, yiying junxu jie qugi yu gongnu, sihao buyi leimin 西陲用 兵以來,一應均需皆取給於公帑,絲毫不以累民 Xichui xuanhua shi 西陲宣化使 xiexiang 協餉 xin jiefangqu 新解放區 xin minzhuzhuyi 新民主主義 xinfu zhi huan 心腹之患 Xingzhonghui 興中會 xixu jiu zhi 欷歔久之 xunjinshu 巡警署 xunwei zhaoshu 遜位詔書 xunzheng 訓政 xunzheng gangling 訓政綱領 xunzheng shiqi yuefa 訓政時期約法 Yan’an daolu 延安道路 yangwu 洋務 yanyu 鹽餘 yi 夷 yi dang ling jun 以黨領軍 yi dang zhiguo 以黨治國 yi Menggu tonglei 亦蒙古同類 yi shou nan gong 易守難攻 yi wei shi shuai qi tudi renmin yi shou tongyi yu dahuangdi, buzhi qita ye 亦惟是 率其土地人民以受統一於大皇帝,不知其他也 yi wushi wei dashi, wugong wei dagong 以無事為大事,無功為大功 yi ti zhi guo 一體之國 yi zhuyi zhengfu 以主義征服 yici geming lun 一次革命論 yidi 夷狄 yiqie quanli gui nonghui 一切權力歸農會 yiqie zhidu zhangcheng yu neidi shengfen wuyi 一切制度章程與內地省份無異 Yili jiangjun 伊犁將軍 yishihui 議事會 yiyuanhua lingdao 一元化領導 yong bu jia fu 永不加賦

296

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you qian chu qian, you liang chu liang 有錢出錢,有糧出糧 yongzhong 庸眾 youyi funi 有意附逆 yubei lixian 預備立憲 yu bing yu tuan 寓兵於團 yu jiang yu xue 寓將於學 yu zheng yu mu 寓徵於募 yuqi duo ju zuo chang, wuning shi maoyan buwu ziwei liutong 與其多聚左藏, 無寧使茅檐部屋自為流通 yuqian huiyi 御前會議 zeren neige 責任內閣 zhanshi tongyong piao 戰時通用票 zhasake 札薩克 zhen 鎮 zhen yi guoyong yi zu, bu shi jiazheng 朕意國用已足,不事加徵 zhengzhi weiyuanhui 政治委員會 zhigong zhi guo 職貢之國 zhong jian er fen qi shi 眾建而分其勢 Zhongdong tielu 中東鐵路 Zhongguo 中國 Zhongguo benbu 中國本部 Zhongguo Guomindang 中國國民黨 Zhongguo zhi mingyun 中國之命運 Zhongguo zhi renmin 中國之人民 Zhonghua minzu 中華民族 Zhonghua yu wo yidao tonggui 中華與我一道同軌 zhong liangtai 總糧臺 Zhonghua geming dang 中華革命黨 zhongtong 中統 zhongxiao renai xinyi heping 忠孝仁愛信義和平 zhongyang jiekuan 中央解款 zhongyang zhuankuan 中央專款 zhongyangjun 中央軍 Zhongyuan 中原 zhouye zhi huan 肘腋之患 zhuanxiang jingfei 專項經費 zhuyi jianjun 主義建軍 zhuyi shengguo wuli 主義勝過武力 zichou ziyong 自籌自用 ziji 自給 ziqiang 自強 ziwei 自衛 ziyiju 諮議局 ziyouzhuyi 自由主義

List of characters zizhengyuan 資政院 zizhi 自治 zongban 總辦 Zongcai 總裁 Zongli 總理 Zongli Geguo Shiwu Yamen 總理各國事務衙門 zouxiao 奏銷 zu min 足民 zuai gemeng 阻礙革命 zuida zhi wenti 最大之問題 zunshou Sanminzhuyi 遵守三民主義

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Index

Admiralty 123 agricultural output 65, 87 All under Heaven 29–30, 35, 40, 49, 107, 117, 128 Alter, P. 18 Amursanaa 27 Anderson, B. 18 Anhui Clique 165, 168 Annam 29, 129 Asia Relations Conference 199 Austria-Hungary 156 Baer, M. 69 Bai Chongxi 175, 231, 234, 240, 275 Balibar, E. 288 Bank of China 133 baojia 43, 71 baolan 43, 68 Baoyinchaoketu 50 Battle of Menglianggu 268 Bayly, C.A. 18 beg/boke 33 Beijing Government 14, 164; budgeted revenue and expenditure of individual provinces under 171–172; and Outer Mongolia 214; revenue of 164–167 Beijing-Tianjin Campaign 255 benevolent governance 68, 278 Bergère, M. 143 Bernhardt, K. 43, 68, 71 Bian, M. 238 Blue Shirts 236 Bluntschli, J. 159 Bo Gu 250

Board of Revenue 40, 53; cash reserves of 57, 60, 64, 86–88, 108–109, 120 Bogd Khan 205 Bonney, R. 75 Bourke, R. 18 Boxer Rebellion 2, 132 Braude, B. 156 Brewer, J. 19, 73 Britain 15, 78, 200; see also England Brubaker, R. 18 Burbank, J. 18 Burma 27, 58, 79 Cai Huilin 267 Cai Qian 79 Cai Wei 33 Cairo Conference 207–208 Cao Kun 168 Cassel, P. 114, 121 CCP 1, 5, 10, 16–17; base areas of 230; historiography of 2; expansion of military forces 242; and factionalism 242; fiscal constitution of 271; and Nationalists 184, 216, 228, 231, 237; and revenue generation 256–262; success in the Civil War 243–273; see also Mao Zedong; Red Army centralized regionalism 14–15, 186, 280 Chahar Mongols 23 chamber of commerce 133, 143 Chang, C. 44, 142 Chang Jiashu 240 Changbaishan 23 Ch’en, J. 189 Chen Beiping 35

Index Chen Bulei 239 Chen Chao 194 Chen Cheng 239 Chen Feng 37, 41, 44, 56, 61, 79, 80 Chen Fulin 175, 226 Chen Guangfu 185 Chen Guofu 239 Chen Huisheng 194 Chen Jinjin 221, 224 Chen Jiongming 179–180, 223 Chen Jitang 230, 231, 239–240 Chen Lifu 239 Chen Mingsheng 178 Chen Shuwei 240 Chen Tianhua 151 Chen, Y. 273 Chen Yun 261 Chen Yunxi 224 Chen Zhiping 38 Cheng, V. 243 Cheng Zhongyuan 245, 274 Ch’i, H. 190, 217, 238 Chi Yunfei 147 Chiang Kai-shek 15, 184, 191, 214, 215; and Cairo conference 207–208, 213; as chairman of GMD Central’s Military Committee 229; as GMD’s zhongcai 233;as General Commander 228; popularity of 251; as president of the Nationalist government 226; on regime failures 271; and regional forces 231, 240–241, 267, 287 Chinese Communist Party see CCP Ch’ü, T. 71 Churchill, Winston 206, 207 Ci Hongfei 270 Ci’an, Empress Dowager 116 civil service examination 143 Cixi, Empress Dowager 110, 116, 141 Coble P. 191 Cohen, P. 85 cohong 113 Collins, R. 19 Comintern 245 Communist revolution 5, 242–243, 271, 273, 281; see also CCP, Mao Zedong, Red Army Confucianism 29, 32, 85, 101; and Confucian patriotism 106; and

327

neo-Confucianism 107; and Tongzhi Restoration 108 Confucius 35; Temple of 36 Cooper, F. 18 Coordinate Remittance 57, 79, 95, 119–120, 121, 123, 130, 164 Corporate Law 133 Court of Frontier Affairs see Lifanyuan Crook, D. 262 Crook, I. 262 Crossley, P.K. 45, 146, 154 Cuba 1 Dai Jitao 227 Dai Li 239 Dai Yi 40 Dalai Lama 25–26, 32, 33–35, 150, 194–199, 201–202, 214 Dawaachi 27 Decree of Abdication 153–154, 192 DeMare 2019 Deng Shaohui 88, 89, 95, 109, 134, 140 Deng Xiaoping 275 Deng Yibing 77 Ding Baozhen 116 Ding Yizhuang 159 Division of Military Training 141 Dong Biwu 261 Dong Conglin 102 Dong Xianguang 228 Dorgon 50 double cropping 67, 80 Double Reduction 265 Downing, B. 7, 73, 75 Doyle, M. 18 Du Yuming 255 Duan Qirui 168, 212 Duanfang 142, 147 Duara, P. 43, 237 Eastman, L. 217, 236, 238, 243 Egypt 70, 156 Eight Banners 37, 102, 127, 133, 147 Eighteen-Star Flag 152 Eisenstadt, S.N. 18 Elliott, M. 25, 45–46, 146 Elman, B. 86, 104 Emerson, R. 18 Emperor Daoguang 62, 118

328

Index

Emperor Kangxi 25, 26, 27, 36, 40–41, 47, 51, 52, 56, 282 Emperor Qianlong 26; ban on taxation of newly reclaimed land 80; and Lord McCartney 112; on military expenditure 58; and tax waiver 40; and Zunghars 28, 31, 282 Emperor Xianfeng 100 Emperor Yongzheng 26, 74, 77, 282; on military spending 58; tax exemption under 59; on war against Zunghars 30 empire 1–3; see also from empire to nation-state, Inner Asian empire Engels, F. 78 England 38–39, 75, 80 Ertman, T. 19, 75, 80 Esherick, J. 1, 49, 143, 152, 193 Ethiopia 4 extraterritoriality 114 factionalism: in CCP leadership 16; of GMD regional forces 230–232; see also zongpaizhuyi Fairbank, J.K. 45, 138 Fan Baichuan 123–126, 131 Fan Wenlan 100 fascism 236 Feng Erkang 27 Feng Guozhang 168 Feng Lida 239 Feng Tianfu 260, 265 Feng Yuxiang 174, 176, 183, 191, 218, 229, 239 fengpiao 170 Fengtian Clique 165, 169–173, 182, 190, 212, 218 Feuerwerker, A. 80, 108 Financial Commissioner 96, 98 Fiscal Clearance and Consolidation Bureau 139 fiscal-military state 73; in early modern Europe 11; in early republican China 14, 163 Fitzgerald, J. 150 Five-Color Flag 152 Fletcher, J. 47 Foochow Arsenal 123, 126 France 15, 38–39, 75, 76, 114, 129, 217

Friedman, E. 262 from empire to nation-state 17, 276, 279, 282 Frontier Defense 115–119 Fu Xiaofeng 170 Fu Zuoyi 234 Fujian Incident 240 Furuya, K. 230 Galdan Tseren 25, 26, 27, 34, 55, 60, 62 Galtung, J. 19 Gao Xianlin 233–234 Gellner, E. 18 gentry elites 142 gentry merchants 143 Geopolitics: defined 6 Germany 15, 156, 188 Gillin, D. 173, 190 Glete, J. 19, 73 GMD 2, 169 Goldman, M. 45 Goldstein, M. 26, 196, 200, 214 Goldstone, J. 38, 76, 80, 81 Great Production Movement 258 Green Standards 102, 127, 133 Greenfield, L. 18 Grunfeld, A.T. 200 Gu Bao 194 Guan Hanhui 80 Guangdong province: in Northern Expedition 179; revenue of 180 Guangxianshi 27 guanyu 165 Guilmartin, J. 70 Gunn, S. 80, 81 Guo Chengkang 29, 34, 35, 101 Guo Songyi 65–67 Guo Xuyin 222 Guomindang see GMD Gurkhas 79 Guy, K. 73 Hai Chunliang 203 Halsey, S. 19, 86, 104 Hamashita, T. 45 Han dynasty 2, 3 Han Fuqu 221, 230, 233–234 Hao Bingrang 169, 170

Index Harding, A. 80 Harriman, W.A. 206 Harrison, H. 18 Harriss, G. 80 Hart, Robert 138 He Jiawei 275 He Ping 40, 50 He, W. 19, 108 He Yuan 174 He Zhaowu 224 Hechter, M. 18 Hertslet, G. 114, 195 Heshen 109 high-level disequilibrium 12, 137 Hinton, W. 262, 264 Hintze, O. 6 Ho, P. 36, 37, 45, 88 Hobsbawn, E.J. 18 Hobson, J. 288 Hong Taiji 34 Hoton Nor 27 Hou Yijie 139 Hsiao, K. 71, 77 Hu Guangyong 120 Hu Hanmin 225, 227–229, 240 Hu Qiaomu 246 Hu Sheng 2, 145, 252 Hu Yuhai 215 Hu Zongnan 239 Huai-Hai Campaign 255, 265, 272 Huang Daoxuan 228 Huang Musong 198 Huang, P. 18, 43 Huang Shaohong 175 Huang Xingtao 46, 150, 154 Huang Yao 256 Hunan Army 99, 102 Hundred-Day Reform 134, 141 Icang-skya Khutughtu 151 identity building 8, 17 India 193 Inner Asian empire 10, 46 Inner Mongolia 1, 9, 14, 24–25, 33, 35, 49, 70, 130, 150–151, 153–154, 193, 213, 240, 279, 284 Iran 4

329

Isaacs, H. 217 Italy 15, 188 Jahangir Khoja 57 Japan 4, 15, 86, 188, 193 jasagh 32 Jebtsundamba Khutuktu 34, 50, 150, 192, 203, 204 Jia Shiyi 164, 167, 168, 172, 178, 183, 186 Jia Shuocun 116 Jiang Bingming 130 Jiang Chun 79 Jiang Jieshi 215 Jiang Tao 109 Jiang Tingfu 114 Jiang Zhijie 120 Jiangsu province 178 Jiangxi Soviet 251 Jin Congji 152, 242, 254 Jin dynasty 47 Jin Yilin 229, 239 Jinchuan 56; Tibetan rebellions in 59, 62, 79 Jing Junjian 54, 76 Johnson, C. 273 Jordan, D. 217 Judicial Commissioner 98 Jurchens 33, 47; see also Manchus Kaeuper, R. 80 Kapp, R. 177, 190 karan 32 Kashag 33 Kazakhs 28 Keating, P. 273 Kemal, Mustafa 157, 158 Khalkha Mongols 25, 29, 31, 34, 47, 50, 205 Khobdo 32 Kiangnan Arsenal 123 Kim, K. 150 Kirby, W. 213, 238, 240 Kivanç, K. 70, 155 Kokand 13, 57, 62, 121 Konchok Jungne 196 Kong Jingwei 170 Korea 48, 128, 129, 193, 207 Kuang Shanji 177

330

Index

Kuhn, P. 18, 69, 99, 187 Kumar, K. 18 Kuo, T. 104 Kuren/Kulun/Ulan Bator 32 Kwantung Army 186, 207, 212, 254, 256 Lai, C. 108 Lai Xinxia 165, 168, 190 Lamaism 9–10, 25, 33–35, 46, 47 land reform 262–263 Land tax 7, 38, 60, 87, 93, 135, 159; see also light taxation Laos 1 Lary, D. 175, 190, 243 Late-Qing state: integration with world system of states 5 Later Jin 23, 33 Lee, D. 18 Levenson, J. 85 Levich, E. 175 Levine, S. 243 Lew, C. 243 Lewis, B. 70, 157, 158 Lhazang Khan 25 Li, B. 80 Li Bingjun 274 Li Daokui 80 Li, H. 2, 44, 71, 77, 144, 236, 274 Li Hongzhang 13, 96, 102, 142; and Maritime Defense 116–117, 122–126, 130, 131; and the Qing court 104; and Self-Strengthening 105, 108; and Zeng Guofan 110 Li Jingzhi 219, 221 Li Lifeng 262, 275 Li Qiang 87 Li Rong 215 Li Weiguang 260 Li Xin 190 Li Yongjun 130 Li Yuanhong 152 Li Yunchang 254 Li Zhiqin 49 Li Zhiting 2011 Li Zongren 175, 182, 218, 219, 221, 228–231, 234, 239, 240, 275 Li Zongyi 190 Liang Qichao 138, 149, 153, 154; on greater nationalism and petty nationalism 159

Liang Shuming 252 Liao dynasty 47 Liao Zhongkai 228 Liaoxi-Shenyang Campaign 255 Lieberman, V. 73 Lifanyuan 32, 33 light taxation 37, 40, 60, 63, 135 lijin 90, 93, 103, 121, 131, 136, 140, 181, 182; abolition of 222–223, 238 Lin Zexu 118 literary cases 36 Liu Bocheng 260, 275 Liu Cuirong 54 Liu Jingzhong 176, 191 Liu, K.C. 104, 106, 108, 119, 138, 190 Liu Kunyi 104, 142 Liu Ruizhong 80, 138 Liu Shaoqi 253 Liu Tong 254 Liu Wei 99, 102, 103, 144 Liu Wenhui 230 Liu, X. 19 Liu Xiang 230 Liu Yuewu 32, 35 Liu Zenghe 95, 121, 140, 164 Liu Ziyang 99 Liuchiu/Liuqiu 29, 128, 131, 209–210, 213, 215, 240 Lobzang Danjin 26 Long Yun 230, 234 Longyu, Empress Dowager 153 Lord McCartney 112 low-level equilibrium 11, 12, 62–65, 77–79, 86–88, 112 Lu Rongting 174 Lu Shichuan 258 Lugouqiao (Marco Polo Bridge) Incident 175, 233 Luo Ergang 87, 88 Luo Jun 275 Luo Pinghan 262 Luo Yuanzheng 239 Luo Yudong 93, 96 Luo Zhitian 163 Ma Bufang 230 Ma Dazheng 121 Ma Jinhua 120

Index Ma Ruheng 121 Ma Xuanwei 233 MacKinnon, S. 190, 238 macrohistory 5–6 Maddison, A. 76, 80 Manchuria: and CCP 16, 252–254; industrial production in 274; Japanese occupation of 232; under Zhang Zuolin 15, 169, 211 Manchus: banners 32; identity of 30; relations with Han elites 97, 101, 110–111, 122, 139, 142, 147–148; Sinification of 14, 45 Mandate of Heaven 36 Mann, M. 73 Mann, S. 68, 76, 110 Mann, M. 7, 75 Mao Zedong 225; and CCP leadership 16, 225, 244–245, 250, 268; cult of 287; ideological dominance 247; on New Democracy 246; and relationship with Zhou Enlai 249; strategizing in the Civil War 251, 255; and Ten Military Principles 260; see also Mao Zedong Thought Mao Zedong Thought 245 maritime customs 91–92, 93–95, 99, 109, 120–121, 123–124, 130, 136, 137, 139–140, 164–165, 166–167, 177, 179, 185, 220, 222–223, 235 Maritime Defense 115–119 Marshall, George 200, 267 Marx, K. 78 May Fourth Directive 262 McCord, E. 179, 190, 217 McCormack, G. 170, 190 McMahon Line 214 Mehta, S. 19 melting fee 41, 68 Mencius 29 Metropolitan Remittance 95, 130, 164 Miao people 27, 79 Miao Zhou 50 millets 71 Millward, J. 23, 29, 45, 47, 193 Min Zongdian 67, 80 Ming dynasty 3, 50, 80 miri land 70

331

Mo Jijie 175 Mongolia 128, 214; see also Inner Mongolia, Outer Mongolia Mongolian People’s Republic 205 Mongols see Chahar Mongols, Khalkha Mongols, Oirat Mongols, Zunghar Mongols Morgan, E. 18 Mosca, M. 79 mountaintop-ism see shantouzhuyi Muthu, S. 18 Nanjing Government 163, 219; military spending of 235, 270; price inflation under 270; revenues of 219–220 Nathan, A. 190 nation-state 1–3, 17, 18, 45, 114, 132, 150, 189, 276, 279, 282 nationalism 5, 15, 18, 45, 278; in early twentieth-century China 146; GMD and 179; greater 159; Han-centered 151–152; incipient 104–106; petty 159; popular 273–274; redefinition of 284; in republican China 213, 240–241; Sun Yat-sen and 223 Nationalist Government: in Guangdong 179–183; in Wuhan 183–184; see also Nanjing Government Nationalist Party see GMD nationless state 150 Nepal 79 New Army 133, 140, 143 New Policies 13, 130, 132–134 Ni Yuping 96 Nian Rebellion 89, 102 Niu Hongbin 234 North Africa 70 North Korea 1 Northern Expedition 179, 182–183, 184–186, 216, 223 Northern Fleet 104, 123, 124 Northern Wei 47 O’Brien, P. 80 Oirat Mongols 25 Opello, W. 18 Opium War 2, 86, 113, 118 Ottoman empire 69–72, 155–158 Ottomanism 157

332

Index

Outer Mongolia 9, 15, 23, 24–25, 28, 32, 33, 35, 47, 50, 122, 130, 153–154, 192–195, 202–207, 210–215, 266 Ouyang Junxi 224 Pagden, A. 18 Pamuk, S. 70 Pan-Islamism 157 Pan-Turkism 157 Panchen Lama 33–34, 150–151, 197–198, 214 Pang Xianzhi 242, 244, 247, 259, 274 Peng Xinwei 68 Peng Zeyi 54, 55, 88, 89, 109 People’s democratic dictatorship 5 People’s Republic of China see PRC Pepper, S. 243 Perdue, P. 23–24, 25, 27, 47, 52–53, 121 Persia see Iran Pong, D. 108 population: of Qing China 66–67 Prazniak, R. 69, 139 Prince Gong 110, 116 Prince Yikuang 141 PRC 1, 3 provincial governors and governors-general: control of the military and local government 99–100; financial autonomy of 96; and unreported tax revenues 136, 139–140; and self-government 144 Pye, L. 190 Qimudedaoerji 25 Qin dynasty 2, 3 Qin Qingjun 180, 182 Qing state: domestic governance 31–44, 278; expenditure of 37, 54; fiscal cycles 53–57; formal bureaucracy of 44; geopolitical strategy 24–28, 123; military forces of 74; military spending 88–89, 124; revenue of 54, 63, 90–94, 135, 137; standing army of 37; territorial expansion 5, 24, 277 Rankin, M. 144 Rasler, K. 73 Rawlinson, J. 108 Rawski, E. 23, 30, 32, 45, 73

Reardon-Anderson, J. 150 Rectification Campaign 248 Red Army: Eastern Expedition of 274; in GMD propaganda 274; in Jiangxi 251; Mao’s leadership of 244, 247, 249–250; methods to generate revenue 257; and Nationalist forces 231–232; Western Expedition of 274; Zhang Xueliang and 233 regionalized centralism 13, 106–108, 120, 186, 187, 278, 280, 281 Remick, E. 238 renminbi 261 Republic government see Beijing Government, Nanjing Government Republic of Five Races 14, 284 Reting Rinpoche 198 Revolution of 1911 2, 134, 152, 204 Rhoads, E. 99, 146, 152 Roberts, M. 6 Roeder, P. 18 Rong Hong 110 Ronglu 142 Roosevelt, Franklin 206, 208, 209 Rowe, W. 77 Rudolph, J. 18 Ruicheng 149 Russia 116, 193, 203; and Mongolia 203–204 Safavids 72 Said, E. 288 salt merchants 58 salt tax 60, 93, 136, 140, 164, 220, 235 Sanggye Gyatso 25 Sanminzhuyi 223–225, 244, 247 Scammell, G.V. 18 Second Opium War 113, 118 Selden, M. 273 Self-Strengthening movement 86, 103, 104–106 semi-centralism 16, 234–237 Shakabpa, T. 202 Shang Bing 135 Shang Hongkui 34, 35, 36 shantouzhuyi 16 Shaw, S. 70, 72 Shen Baozhen 118, 122–123, 125

Index Shen Shicai 211 Shen Xiaoyun 178 Sherridan, J. 190 Shi Yousan 221 Shi Zhihong 56, 57, 88, 89, 93–94, 95–96, 103, 109, 119, 127, 138 Shi Zhongquan 249 Shunzhi emperor 25, 32, 36, 40, 50 Siam 29; see also Thailand Sichuan province: garrison-area system in 177 Simla Accord 195–196 Sinicization 45 Sino-French War 123 Sino-Japanese War of 1894 13, 106, 124, 129, 132, 216 Skinner, Q. 18 Smith, R. 119 Song Lianxi 80 Song Zheyuan 230, 232–233, 240 Song Ziwen 180, 183, 186, 206, 220, 222 Soong Meiling 186 Southern Fleet 123 Soviet Union 1, 176, 180, 191, 211, 214 speaking bitterness 269 Stalin, Joseph 206, 208 state-making: defined 3 statism 236 Storr, C. 19, 73 Strauss, J. 238 Strayer, J. 80 Streusand, D. 69, 70 Su Quanyou 139 Su Yu 272 Suleski, R. 170, 190 Summer Palace (Yiheyuan) 125 Sun Chuanfang 169 Sun Fo see Sun Ke Sun Hongnian 49, 128, 130 Sun Ke 227–229 Sun Weihou 267 Sun Yat-sen 15, 152–153, 158; and Adolph Joffe 206, 215; and Chinese Revolutionary Party 225; and GMD 239; as Grand Marshall 179; and Guomindang 190; as provisional president 192; on Sanminzhuyi 223 Supply System 271

333

Svarverud, R. 114 Szonyi, M. 18 Taiping Rebellion 2, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 95–98, 100–103, 107, 109–110, 121–122, 137, 146, 164, 280 Taiwan 49, 56, 116, 118–119, 124–125, 213, 215, 240, 268; cession to Japan 127, 130, 132, 240; and Cairo conference 207–210; Japan’s invasion of 115; Qing campaign on 79; under the Zheng regime 55 Taktra Rinpoche 199 Tan Qixiang 2, 275 Tan Zhaoyi 175 Tang Enbo 239 Tanner, H. 243 tariff autonomy 220 tax farming 74 tax waivers 40 Taylor, J. 186, 238, 275 territorial state 11 Thailand 4 Thaxton, R. 273 Theobald, U. 79 Thompson, W. 73 Thornton, P. 19, 69, 236 Three Feudatories 36, 37, 55, 58, 60, 61 Tianli Sect 79 Tibet 1, 4, 9, 10, 14, 15, 23, 25–28, 31–35, 37, 45–47, 56–57, 59, 62, 70, 79, 130, 133, 146, 150–154, 157, 159, 192–202, 210–214, 277, 279, 282, 283 Tieliang 139 Tien, H. 238 Tilly, C. 6, 7, 73, 75, 76, 77, 189 timar system 69, 70, 155 Tong, Hollington 208 Tongmenghui 239 Tongzhi emperor 114 Tongzhi Restoration 108 Tonkin 129 Torgovnick, M. 288 total centralism: defined 17 Treaty of Nanjing 113 Treaty of Tianjin (Tien-tsin) 113, 220 tributary system 113, 128 Truman, H. 207

334

Index

Tsungli Yamen 114 Tuck, R. 18 Ulan Butong 25 Uliastai/Uliyasutai 32 unified tax 222, 235 United Front 245, 262 United Nations 15 United States 266 Urumqi 80 Uyhgurs 27, 33, 59 van Creveld, M. 80 van de Ven, H. 191 van Schaik, S. 26, 202 Vietnam 1, 48, 79, 128, 129; see also Annam Waldron, A. 179, 190 Waley-Cohen, J. 45 Wang Bingming 203 Wang Chaoguang 266, 268, 270 Wang Jialie 230 Wang Jiaxiang 244, 245 Wang Jingwei 184, 223, 225, 227–229, 237 Wang Jingyu 135 Wang Kaixi 97, 100 Wang Liqi 274 Wang Miaosheng 255 Wang Ming 245, 246, 274 Wang Nianyong 159 Wang Qisheng 236 Wang Rigen 77 Wang Sizhi 25 Wang Wenshao 142 Wang Xi’en 152 Wang Xutian 174 Wang, Y. 37, 71 Wang Yinhuan 270 Wang Yugui 191 Wang Yuru 136 Wang Yunsheng 129 Wang Zhenghua 191 Wang Zizhuang 239 War of Resistance 15, 16, 175, 198, 216, 217, 233, 234, 237, 238, 240, 242, 244,

245, 251, 258–259, 262, 264, 267, 269, 270, 275 warlordism 14, 164–178 Wedemeyer, Albert 217 Wei Guangtao 141 Wei Hongyun 258 Wen Jing 224 Wen Xianmei 233 Wenqing 98 Wenxiang 116 Westad, O. 243 White Lotus Rebellion 57, 79, 86, 98 White Lotus Sect 36, 58, 61 Wilbur, M. 163, 179, 180 Wong, B. 19, 80 World War II 15 Wou, O. 190, 274 Wright, M. 108, 145 Wu Chengming 66, 80 Wu Jingping 181, 183, 185, 206, 220 Wu Peifu 169, 180, 212, 215 Wu Zhongxin 199 Xi’an Incident 233 xiangbao 43 xiangdi 43 Xiao Yishan 114 Xie Benshu 234 Xiliang 149 Xing Quancheng 35 Xinjiang 9, 13, 14, 23–25, 28–29, 33, 35, 37, 47, 52, 53, 62, 80, 89, 115–116, 127, 130, 146, 150, 165, 171, 193–194, 211–213, 215, 277, 279, 282, 284; beg system in 121–122; incorporated into the Qing 193; jasak system in 121–122; junfu system in 121–122; Qing court’s annual expenditure in 117; Zuo Zongtang’s Western Expedition to 118 Xu Chongzhi 228 Xu Daofu 136 Xu Dixin 66, 80 Xu Entong 239 Xu Shuzheng 205 Xu Tan 54, 76 Xu Yi 88, 257 Xu Yisheng 136

Index Yack, B. 18 Yalta Conference 206 Yan Hongzhong 136 Yan Xishan 173, 218, 219, 229, 230, 233–234 Yang Du 150 Yang Guangyan 177 Yang Hucheng 233 Yang Jing 257, 275 Yang Kuisong 254, 271 Yang Shu 33 Yang Tao 50 Yang Tianshi 184 Yang Yinfu 165, 167, 221, 235, 270 Yang Zengxin 194, 211 Yang Zhixin 270 yanyu 165 Yao people 79 Yaqub Bek 28, 115 Ye Jianying 253 Yixin see Prince Gong Young, A. 167 Youtai 195 Yu Fengchun 49 Yu Qiaqing 184, 227 Yuan dynasty 47 Yuan Senpo 35 Yuan Shikai: and the abdication of the Qing emperor 153; and the Dalai Lama 202; and debt borrowing 164, 220; dictatorship of 279; handling of foreign affairs 212; and Mongol princes 154; and New Army 102, 134, 141; ousted from the court 142; and Outer Mongolia 204; as president 192; relationship with Cixi 141 Yusuf Khoja 57 Zanabazar 34 Zelin, M. 41, 68, 71, 73 Zeng Guofan: and administrative autonomy 99–100; and the Qing court 110; and Taiping Rebellion 98, 121 Zeng Kelin 254 Zhandui 79 Zhang Gongquan 270

335

Zhang Hao 221 Zhang Jie 40 Zhang Jingjiang 227, 228 Zhang Limin 131 Zhang Peiguo 262 Zhang Shuangzhi 33 Zhang Taiyan 151, 154, 159 Zhang Wentian 245, 248, 250, 274 Zhang Xia 123 Zhang Xianwen 253, 259, 262, 266, 267 Zhang Xiaotang 59 Zhang Xide 248 Zhang Xueliang 179, 186, 219, 221, 232–234, 239 Zhang Yan 80 Zhang Yong 275 Zhang Yongjiang 31, 33 Zhang Yongle 3, 153 Zhang Yuxin 27 Zhang Zhidong 104, 141, 142, 147 Zhang Zhizhong 236 Zhang Zuolin 15, 169–170, 174, 186, 211, 213, 215, 239 Zhao, G. 46 Zhao Yuntian 26, 35, 47 Zhigang 114 Zhili Clique 165, 218 Zhongguo 10, 20, 46, 105, 148, 151, 158 Zhonghou 114 Zhonghua minzu 192, 284 Zhou Enlai 244, 249, 250 Zhou Gu 200 Zhou Yuanlian 27 Zhou Yumin 76, 89, 105, 109, 119, 134, 164 Zhou Zhichu 39, 138 Zhu Dong’an 110 Zhu Hong 180 Zhu Jianhua 252, 255, 256, 260, 262 zongpaizhuyi 16 Zou Rong 151 Zunghars 6, 9, 25, 52, 70, 116, 282 Zuo Zongtang 13, 28, 104, 109; on Frontier Defense 115; and Western Expedition 120, 194