The Consequences of the Northern Expedition for China

A Co-Founder of the CCP was killed by Zhang Zuolin, who was assassinated by the Japanese. Madame Sun Yat sen (Soong Qingling) left for Moscow.

Welcome back.  In early June 1928, Zhang Zuolin, the Manchurian Warlord, decided to leave Beijing for Manchuria since he had failed to stop the Northern Expedition.  He bid farewell to the capital, seen off by an honour guard, and boarded a train heading northeast.  As it crossed a Japanese controlled bridge in Manchuria, a massive explosion rocked the train.  Zhang Zuolin, the Manchurian General, had been assassinated by the Japanese. 

Why did the Japanese military kill their former ally? 

Manchuria’s economy was in dreadful shape.  The 1920s had started out well for the government in northeast China.  They had a stable regional currency, well supported by reserves and loans from Japanese banks.  By 1923, the government was running a major budget surplus and paying off debts.  But then the wars that Zhang Zuolin and the Fengtian Clique had fought changed that. Especially since 1924, as soldiers were mostly paid by printing money. The value of the Fengtian currency plummeted.  Hyperinflation ravaged the province.  On March 1, 1927, it cost 6.71 Fengtian Yuan for one Japanese gold yen.  Six weeks later, the value of the Fengtian Yuan had halved.  It now cost 12.25 Yuan to buy a Japanese gold yen.  In February 1928, it cost 40 to buy one.  That drop in the value of the currency is equivalent to a more than 6-fold increase in prices in one year.  Today, people are upset by 4 or 5% inflation.  That was 600% inflation.  Such hyperinflation had real consequences.  Businesses didn't have confidence in what they would be able to get for their goods.  Imagine a good sold for a dollar today might only be able to buy 80 cents worth of things tomorrow.  So, it makes more sense to sell for a dollar twenty today, hoping to have a dollar’s value by the time tomorrow when the money can be converted for something useful.  Wages didn’t go up as fast as prices, so then workers couldn’t keep up with costs.  They couldn’t afford to make major purchases.  Businesses suffered and laid off workers and the situation spiraled down.

Around the same time, Chinese refugees had been streaming north from Shandong to Manchuria.  Shandong experienced fighting before and during the Northern Expedition as it was a battleground both between the Christian and Manchurian Warlords and then between the Nationalists and the Manchurians.  It was also experiencing a famine.  These new arrivals in Manchuria were unhappy and there was lawlessness and attacks on Japanese interests in Manchuria.  Also, in 1927, Zhang had prohibited land sales in the region to Japanese.  So, by 1928, Zhang was perceived by the Japanese for various reasons to no longer be defending their interests strongly enough anymore.  After years of service, he no longer suited their interests.  As would become clear, Japan wanted even more control over Manchuria.  They hoped to use the assassination and lawlessness to increase their control. 

But Zhang’s son Xueliang was able to conceal his father’s death long enough to assume his late father’s diminished empire.  He pretended that his father was only injured in the explosion.  Japan didn’t announce Zhang Zuolin’s death themselves as that would have shown their inside knowledge about the bombing and risk a backlash.  The Young Marshall, Zhang Xueliang, was now in charge in the northeast and he knew the Japanese had killed his father.  Zhang Xueliang did not fight Chiang Kai-shek, pledged loyalty, and accepted the Nationalist government while maintaining his regional autonomy. Japan learned from this experience and next time they bombed railway infrastructure in Manchuria in 1931, Japan would be ready to assume the dominant political position.

Sun Chuanfang, the former warlord of the lower Yangzi River provinces, was killed in Dalian after he had retreated to that Japanese controlled port in southern Manchuria following his losses in the Northern Expedition.  He is said to have been killed by the daughter of an officer that he himself had executed. 

Similarly, the Shandong Warlord who had been allied with the Manchurian General, and who was largely responsible for the famine that forced countless people to flee his province, lost power to the Nationalists and then was killed by one of his former subjects for the mistreatment of that person’s father.  He had been a particularly wicked warlord.  He was perhaps best remembered for his three "don’t knows”.  He always said he didn’t know how much money he had, how many soldiers or how many concubines he had.  We do know that he taxed everything he could, printed as much money as he could and stole as much from his subjects and their businesses as he could.  Few people mourned his death.

In July 1928, the USA became the first country to recognize the Nanjing Nationalist administration as the lawful government of China.  Other nations than followed and Japan recognized the Kuomintang as the de facto regime, even if they did not recognize it formally.

The KMT proclaimed Nanjing as the capital, keeping the city that had served Jiang during his dispute with Wuhan.  Jing means capital and Nanjing means southern capital. Beijing means northern capital.  So, since Beijing was no longer the capital of China, that city was renamed Beiping during this period.  The KMT said that China needed a period of tutelage.  That is, the second step, in Sun Yat-sen’s three step process to democracy.  The first step was the military period.  With the Northern Expedition a success and Beijing captured, the military period was considered at an end.  Now could come the period of tutelage, where the KMT would (in theory) educate China and eventually enable a democracy starting at the county level and, again in theory, moving then to the regional and then national levels.  The previous national constitutions were suspended.  In its place, an Organic Act, was passed to create the new administration.  Government was responsible to the KMT Party Congress, rather than to Parliament.  That meant that the Nationalist Party was the final decision maker, not any elected representatives nor the Chinese people themselves.

That is essentially how China is run today.  But instead of the KMT in charge, it is the Communist Party of China that is the real power who decides how government shall be run.

One major difference between 1928 and today is that the KMT did not have complete control over the whole country, which the Communist Party has today.  The civilian and military governors in charge of provinces and regions had tremendous power in 1928.  These were the former warlords.  The Northern Expedition was successful in the sense that there was no army in the field opposing the Nationalists anymore.  All opponents had either been defeated or accepted that the KMT was now the national government.

But all provincial governments, and in particular their civilian and military governors tried to maintain as much local power as possible.  No provincial or regional armies were disbanded.  The land taxes were administered provincially and mostly kept at the provincial budget level.  That meant that the provincial and regional authorities had real budgets and serious armies.  This was a major constraint on the Nationalists power.

The Northern Expedition had not strengthened the central government in any meaningful way, except in those provinces where the Nationalists had directly campaigned.  The Nationalist Army had moved through the central and eastern provinces and occupied them.  It was the strongest military force in those parts. Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists could appoint governors and had more power there.  Those were the provinces that generally would obey the KMT.  But in the north and west of the country, the provincial and regional armies were still around and untested.  For now, they were not challenging Chiang.  But that also didn’t mean that they were voluntarily sending him tax revenue or waiting for his orders.  They tried to keep as much tax revenue and authority under their own control as they could. 

This decentralization of military and political power was a real problem for the new KMT government.  It was not easily solved.  It was a problem that had been building since the Taiping Rebellion.  During that insurrection, the Qing had relied on local officials to stamp out the Taiping. They had done so by raising and commanding provincial armies.  That tradition had continued and no one, not even Yuan Shikai, had been able to disband those provincial armies.

Also, the end of the Qing Dynasty meant that officials could govern their own provinces.  The Qing had prohibited that and moved senior officials around every three years or so.  That was meant to prevent officials from getting too strong, especially in their home area where they would have the advantages of speaking the local tongue, having family and personal connections and probably owning land too.  Now that restriction was over, and provinces were generally run by a strongman from that province.  Locals generally preferred one of their own to be in charge, instead of some unknown person from another region of China. 

I just mentioned the local tongue.  It’s important to remember that for most of history and even around 1928, most people in China did not speak the same way or use the same words.  For example, the word for something as common as fish would vary.  Now that nationalism was on the mind of intellectuals, scholars were thinking about how to change that: how to unify the country through speech. 

The written language was uniform, although for much of history, only the scholar class could read.  Peasants and ordinary workers generally couldn’t read at all.  But those that did read the symbols would speak them differently in, say, Guangzhou, than in Beijing.  Even today, a Cantonese speaker can read the same symbol as a Mandarin speaker but say that symbol differently.  During the early Republic of China, there weren't just a few different regional speeches.  There were a multitude. 

To give an example, Mao Zedong’s mother and father were born in different counties in Hunan next to each other.  But there was a mountain ridge between them.  People from each of those neighbouring counties spoke very differently.

That perhaps wasn’t unusual.  Britain too had strong local dialects until recently.  In the era before television, radio and common culture, areas had different ways of speaking.  But in China it was more than just an issue of accent and a few different words.  The differences were profound and interfered with nation building.

The Republic of China began working on the issue of speech right away.  In 1913, there had been a Conference for the Unification of Reading Pronunciations in Beijing.  Its goal was a system of national pronunciation of the written characters. The 47 experts who met decided not to change the script.  They would not choose a western style alphabet or a Japanese style phonetic script.  These conference attendees wanted an authentically Chinese solution.  They would work with 1000-year-old symbols.

Beijing speech was considered ugly by the speakers in the lower Yangzi River valley.  They thought a Beijing person sounded like a barking dog.  The conference came close to adopting Wu Chinese, from the lower Yangzi River valley, as the national speech.  That was because the largest number of delegates came from that region, and it was a cultural important part of China.  But after a standoff of over a month, the southerners and northerners agreed to block it.  So now it was inevitable that another speech would win and the one that did win was the one spoken in the capital.  There were a few compromises, like the inclusion of a tone not found in Beijingese but used by the Wu speakers.  And the final recommendations were for a speech which resembled that of the old imperial officials of Beijing, rather than the language commonly spoken by people in Beijing.  So, the conference selected that the official speech would be the manner of speaking of the old officials, rather than of any other particular group of ordinary Chinese or of any other region. 

This decision was made, but because of the disruptions of the Chinese Warlord period, little progress was actually made implementing this national speech in the following years.  In 1919, the national Ministry of Education agreed to promote the recommendations of the Conference, also to promote the use of vernacular style writing and to compile a single national dictionary.  Only a year earlier, in 1918, Chen Duxiu had been advocating for the vernacular style of writing in his New Youth Journal.  That was the man who became the first Chairman of the Communist Party.  His recommendations on language reform were already national policy, at least on paper.

In 1928, once the Northern Expedition was won, there was hope for a stronger national government.  The KMT appointed Cai Yuanpei to the successor organization of the Ministry of Education. This visionary reformer who I mentioned before and who had sent the Chinese students to France and who had hired Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao to Peking University. Now Li was dead at the hands of Zhang Zuolin, when he ordered a raid of the Soviet Embassy. Li and other Communists were then killed by Zuolin’s men.  The Nationalist government now went to work building a nation through a common language.

I spent some time on the topic of language to reinforce how strong the forces of decentralization were during the early Republic of China.  The Nationalists tried to strengthen the nation.  One way, which made a difference in the long run, was to build the common tongue.  That is what most people in English call Mandarin Chinese.  In mainland China, that is now called the “common speech”.  It is also the called the National Language in Taiwan.  The People’s Republic of China adopted it in 1955 with few changes.  But the People’s Republic did change the system of written Chinese characters around 1956, by introducing Simplified Chinese, which made it easier to read and write Chinese.  Those characters contrast with traditional Chinese characters, which is what you will commonly find in the Chinatowns around the world and on the signs of older Chinese businesses there.  Traditional Chinese was still used in Taiwan and in British controlled Hong Kong and Portuguese controlled Macau.  Singapore, which has four official languages, accepted use of simplified Chinese there around 1976.  Now that is the written form of that official language there.

Cai Yuanpei was not the only old official brought into the Nationalist Government.  Wellington Koo, who was the diplomat who had secured Shandong back for China from Japan at the Washington Conference.  He became Chinese Ambassador to the League of Nations under the KMT government.

Feng Yuxiang, the Christian Warlord and Yan Xishan, the so-called Model Governor, had allied with the Nationalists and helped them take Beijing.  Both officially ceased to be warlords, but both kept their armies and had territories under their control.  They were examples of the strong regional and provincial leaders who controlled territories, armies and revenue. 

Wu Peifu, the Jade Marshall, was a loser of the Northern Expedition.  He fled west to Sichuan where he was welcomed and then he moved on to Gansu. The areas he retreated to were effectively beyond the Nationalists’ control and had high degrees of autonomy.  While he did command troops and make some moves, he was never a major force again. 

Soong Ching-ling (Song Qingling), also known as Madame Sun Yat-sen, had been living in Wuhan unlike her sisters who were in Shanghai.  Qingling left China after the KMT broke with the Communists.  By public telegram, she resigned from the KMT over its breaking of relations with the Soviets. She said this was subverting the principles of her late husband. 

She went into self-imposed exile in Moscow.  Her family tried to talk her out of it but she was headstrong and made her way there.  Once she arrived, she was treated as a guest of the state.  She was assigned servants and had access to foods unavailable to the common people.  She lived at the Metropol Hotel.  On the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, she was a VIP watching the parade with Soviet leaders at Red Square.  She saw Chinese students unfurl banners hailing Trotsky.  She then saw police arrest them. A week later Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party.  Adolphe Joffe, the man who had signed the agreement with her late husband Sun Yat-sen, was a follower of Trotsky and shot himself a few days after Trotsky’s expulsion from the party.  Borodin was staying in the same hotel as Qingling, but they never spoke.  He was keeping his distance from any connection to the recent failures for communism in China.

She had given one speech early on at Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow.  It was a place where Chinese revolutionaries studied under Communist leadership.  Among its students was Deng Xiaoping, the future Chinese leader who opened up China’s economy following Mao Zedong’s death.  He also acted behind the scenes to end the pro democracy protests by students at Tiananmen Square in 1989, which ended with the killing of protesters.  But the head of Sun Yat-sen University was expelled because of his connections to Trotsky.  Qingling stayed away from the campus and from the internal feuds within the Soviet Union.  She was able to avoid those squabbles during her 8 months in the Soviet capital.

Qingling’s sister Meiling married Chiang Kai-shek in late 1927.  Their older sister Song Ailing was married to H.H. Kung.  She was considered the smartest and most business minded of these three famous sisters.  The older sister had introduced Meiling to the Generalissimo.  Eiling appreciated his anti-communism, as it was her and her husband that had insisted on Sun Yat-sen having a Christian funeral to prove he was not a Bolshevik.  Eiling’s husband, Mr. Kung was perhaps the wealthiest Chinese man.  He had been Minister of Industry in the Wuhan Government and would now be brother-in-law of Chiang Kai-shek.  H.H. Kung became Minister of Industry and Commerce in Nanjing.  Later he became Minister of Finance and Chairman of the Central Bank of China.  I'll likely return to this topic later, but it was widely understood that he and his family personally profited from government positions or the inside information that came from these positions.  Corruption will be one of the dark marks on the Nanjing government.  It certainly wasn’t a problem unique to them.  The warlords and regional governors were almost all personally profiting from their positions and many became extremely wealthy at the expense of their people.  But it also seems to have been a fact in the Nanjing regime and undermined public confidence in them.

Meiling was looking to marry and was taken when she met the young general.  She enjoyed the finer things and had been searching for a purpose.  Her future role as First Lady would suit her.  Jiang had told a confidant that he had position but lacked prestige.  Jiang wanted to marry into the Song family, which was already known in China.

Their brother T.V. Soong had already been involved with the KMT and joined the Nanjing government by becoming Governor of the Central Bank of China and Minister of Finance in 1928.  The Song family was very closely tied to Jiang’s Nanjing government.  This was the family I mentioned in a previous episode that had all studied in the United States.  Including the middle sister Qingling, widow of Sun Yat-sen, who was choosing to live in exile.  She was becoming Red Sister.