The imperialist constellation in the far East had undergone profound changes with the end of World War I.
Already after the Russian-Japanese 1905 war Japan continued to remain the dominant force in the far East, but after World War I Japan was no longer going to clash mainly with European rivals. Instead the main rivalry was going to unfold with the USA who was the big winner of World War I. Following the period after World War I the USA and Japan became the main imperialist sharks in the far East for several decades.
Japan was the main beneficiary of World War I without ever being directly involved on a large scale in the fighting. Unlike the other winner states in Europe (Britain, France), who had to pay a high price for their victory, Japan was not ruined through the war. Instead Japan managed to improve its position substantially – first it speeded up its industrialisation; secondly it improved its trade position at the expense of the European rivals and become a big arms supplier. Imports and exports tripled during World War I, steel and concrete production doubled, big progress in chemical and electro-technical equipment was achieved and Japan managed to write off its foreign debts during the war – which it had “contracted” because of its war against Russia in 1905. It became a donor nation. It also expanded its commercial navy and became a big ship building nation, increasing its ship building capacity by a factor of 8.
However, as soon as the war was over in 1918, the war boom collapsed and Japan found itself in a big economic crisis.
On the imperialist level, Japan strengthened its position mainly in relation to China above all at the expense not only of the loser country – Germany – but also at the expense of other European imperialist rivals, which were absorbed by the war carnage in Europe. After having occupied Korea in 1909 Japan hoped to become the uncontested ruling imperialist power in China as well.
Already in the first weeks after the outbreak of the war in 1914, Japan snatched the German settlement of Tsingtao in China and occupied German possessions in the Pacific (Marshall and Caroline Islands) which Japan saw as a counterweight to the US presence in Hawaii, the Philippines and Guam.
As Russia disappeared from the imperialist scene, Japan tried to claim the dominant position in China. As soon as the imperialist countries launched a counter-revolutionary offensive against the proletarian bastion in Russia in 1918, Japan was the first country to participate in the invasion and the last country to leave Siberian territory in 1922. Instead of sending 7,000 troops as demanded by the USA, Japan sent 72,000 soldiers, declaring openly its imperialist appetites towards Russia.
After Japan emerged as the big beneficiary of the war, the USA tried to contain Japanese military might.
And while the European countries disarmed partially after World War I, Japan did not really reduce its military expenditure significantly. Between 1888 and 1938 total military expenditure corresponded to 40-50% of the national budget through this period.1
Yet while Japan was a ‘winner’ of World War I it had not been able to make any major territorial gains through the war. Although not a “have-not” (as it had Korea under its control since 1909) it was under the strongest pressure to challenge the status quo in the region and try to expand towards the Asian continent.
Whereas imperialist tensions in Europe receded after World War I to a large extent because of the wave of revolutionary struggles of the working class, imperialist tensions in the far East evolved differently.
Once again, Japan was going to clash with Russia as soon as Russia reappeared as an imperialist power on stage (see further down). In 1931 Japan occupied Manchuria and proclaimed the foundation of a new state – Manchukuo. The creation of this new state, which was nothing but a vassal of the biggest imperialist shark in the region, meant that Japan had above all a springboard for the ensuing further expansion of Japan towards Southern China at its hand.
1 Lockwood, Economic Development of Japan, p. 292
In the previous article we saw that the Chinese bourgeoisie had been unable to pave the way for a capitalist modernisation. Although in 1911 the Chinese republic was proclaimed by ousting the old Manchu dynasty, no strong central bourgeois government had arisen. This historical weakness of the Chinese bourgeoisie meant that China was going to go down, under a spiral of militarism, even if at the beginning foreign powers were not yet directly involved in the military escalation. But China became one of the birthplaces of a new phenomena - warlordism - which was going to put its stamp on the whole 20th century.
Faced with an increasingly powerless central government, certain provinces declared their independence from Beijing after 1915. In most of the provinces warlords became the dominant force.
Their sources of income were: (forced) exactions of taxes mainly from peasants; they lived on the basis of banditry and the drug trade(opium). It was no coincidence that drug trade, which more than half a century before had been curbed, then revived. Production of opium had almost been stopped by 1916, but warlords gave large areas of land to opium growth, there was even a ‘laziness tax’ on those farmers who did not plant opium. Land tax was raised 5 to 6 times by warlords and many taxes were collected in advance - in some areas collected for decades in advance. The warlords recruited a large number of soldiers from the peasantry and lumpenised elements. With the disintegration of the dynasty and the fragmentation of China at the beginning of the 20th century, an increasing number from among the floating mass of poor and landless peasants began to enrol in the professional armies of the regional ‘warlords’. Most warlord soldiers were unreliable, since most of them were jobless and hungry people who fought without a cause but only for money. As a result many of these soldiers changed sides or ran away in battle. This is why soldiers had to be constantly recruited, often forcefully. At the same time in many areas peasants were forced to join secret societies for self-protection against marauding troops.
Because there was no united nation state with a central government at its head, capable of defending national unity, each warlord could claim his territory. But at the same time these were not aiming at splitting off from the Chinese ‘empire’ and setting up a new nation. Generally they were not tied to a particular sector of society and they were not particularly involved in the defence of particular sectors of the economy. They were classical “parasites”, feeding off the population without any special ideological, ethnical or religious basis. The goals of their military operations were neither so much the largest possible extension of their area of domination nor wars of conquest to open up new markets or to plunder raw materials. In a certain sense they waged war 'on the spot' and pillaged the country. As a result trade became restricted. The transport system suffered heavily not only from the direct war ravages but also because of the fact that it had to carry a lot of troops and because of the payment of special taxes to the militarists.
All the resources of society were absorbed by militarism. Frequent dictatorial seizure of goods, the irresponsible handling of money by the warlords (whenever money was needed to finance their legions of soldiers and arms purchases they printed as much money as they needed) meant a terrible burden on the economy. In short they revealed a pure process of decomposition, a rotting on the feet of society. They expressed the incapacity of the national bourgeoisie to unite the country. The fragmentation of the country into a number of fiefdoms (smaller units), which were under the control of marauding warlords, meant a gigantic fetter on the productive forces; it also showed that in China national liberation was no longer on the agenda, because the nation could no longer be an adequate framework for the development of the productive forces.
Even if during World War I the foreign imperialists tried to influence and win over different warlords, the wars waged by the local warlords at that time were not yet dominated by the rivalries amongst the foreign sharks.
In 1915 the southern province Hunan declared its independence and between 1916-1918 a growing polarisation between Northern and Southern warlords led to a wave of military conflicts. Thus when World War 1 came to an end in 1918 in Europe, China had been fractured by rival military regimes to the extent that no one authority was able to subordinate all rivals and create a unified and centralized political structure. The nation state had to be abolished altogether, if society was to avoid demise into militarism and chaos. As the Communist International recognised in its Manifesto of 1919 “The national state, which gave a mighty impulse to capitalist development, has become a fetter on further development of the productive forces.” But while the Communist International was far sighted in its clarity of the need to abolish all states, this emphasis of its founding congress was quickly clouded afterwards. The more the revolution went into retreat and the more the Comintern became desperate in its attempts to win support for the isolated revolution in Russia, it practised an opportunistic policy. At its 4th World Congress in 1922 the Comintern propagated a united front between certain Communist Parties and what it called the "left" or "democratic" wings of the respective bourgeoisie. In China, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in accordance with the Comintern in 1922 declared in its “First Manifesto of the CCP on the Current Situation” (June 10, 1922) “We welcome a war to achieve the triumph of democracy, to overthrow the military... The proletariat’s urgent task is to act jointly with the democratic party to establish a united front of democratic revolution... This struggle along a broad united front is a war to liberate the Chinese people from a dual yoke – the yoke of foreigners and the yoke of powerful militarists in our country.”.1
This orientation of launching a coalition of proletarian and bourgeois forces with the goal of fighting a war against foreign capital was strongly opposed by the emerging forces of the Communist Left.
Within the framework of this article we cannot elaborate more on this aspect of developments. We have extensively dealt with this question in a series of articles in our International Review.2
The “united front” course of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was a disaster for the working class since it forced the workers to submit to the KMT (Kuomintang) and it contributed to the triumph of the KMT as the dominant force of the Chinese bourgeoisie.
As we have illustrated in other articles of our press, the experience of the wave of struggles in 1925-27 showed, that the Comintern imposed united front policy paved the way for an even higher degree of militarization.
While in Europe there was a time span of two decades between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II (heralded by the war in Spain in 1936), China irreversibly continued in its descent into militarism immediately after the end of World War I. From the early 1920s on a series of wars between different warlords continued to wreck the country. The number of regular troops rose from 500,000 in 1916 to two million in 1928. The number of armed people must have been much higher, each defeat of an army led to an explosion in the number of bandits.
Amongst the forces of the Chinese bourgeoisie, the KMT was the most coherent and most determined in its defence of the interests of national capital. Chiang Kai-shek’s party could only pursue the attempts of unification of the country on a militarist path. With the support of the CCP, in spring 1926 Chiang Kai-shek launched a military expedition to eradicate various feuding warlords in central and northern China. In spring 1927, at a time, when a massive wave of strikes shook the most important Chinese city, Shanghai, the KMT, the force which for years had been hailed by the Comintern as the “the democratic party” with whom the working class should struggle for a “democratic revolution” showed its real face. The KMT spearheaded the massacre of thousands of workers in Shanghai and Nanking. The first KMT led government - known as the first 'National Government' - was established in Nanking on April 18, 1927. This first government of a “unified” China could only rise to power through a massacre of the working class. But even if the Nanking government meant the highest level of centralisation of national capital since 1911, militarism did not come to a halt. Because, although China’s unity was nominally established around the Nanking government in 1928, the Central government was forced to pursue its combat against war lords without interruption – because neither in the north nor in other areas had the local warlords been eliminated, even after the establishment of the Nanking central government.
1 (“First Manifesto of the CCP on the Current Situation”, June 10, 1922, in Conrad Brandt, Benjanmin Schwarz and John K. Fairbank, A Documentary History of Chinese Communism, New York: Atheneum, 1971, pp. 61-63)
2 (see”A link in the chain of imperialist war” International Review no 81, 84, 94 series).
Even if the period after 1928 was not marked by wars of the same size and intensity as in the previous years, the following years saw a number of military campaigns which bled the country. For example:
1929: Attempts to disband the swollen armies failed, the Kwangsi army’s insurrection and a revolt in Hunan were suppressed.
1930: A bloody war involving a million men erupted in North China from March to September 1930. Between 1931–1935 several campaigns against the troops of the Communist Party were launched.
Even if warlordism receded slowly in the early 1930s, a real unification of the country was never achieved, and the more force the centralised government gained, the more militarised the regime became. The weight of armed conflicts in society can be gauged by the fact that military government expenditure in China never fell below 44% of the State budget between 1928-1934.
Following the offensive of the Nanking government troops against the CCP forces, some 90,000 poorly equipped Red Army forces were chased across the country and had to embark upon the “Long March”. After this military hunt only 7000 Red Army troops reached the remote area of Yennan in northern Shaanxi. In this war between two “unequal” forces, the CCP systematically applied a military tactic which was going to mark the military conflicts during the 20th and well into the 21st century. As a typical weapon of the “underdog”, which is unable to recruit a “standing army” with the full equipment of an army financed and run by a State and its government, the Red Army forces started to develop a guerrilla war. Although in previous wars of the 19th century there had been some limited partisan activities, this phenomenon took on a new proportion in the deluge in China.
The Red Army turned civilians into a human shield, i.e. targets to protect the movement of the regular “Red Army”. At the same time, the brutal terrorisation of the peasants and the extraction of enormous taxes through the Nanking government forced millions of peasants either to abandon their land and flee or this drove many of them into the arms of the Red Army. They became cannon fodder between two opponents. War started to ravage almost permanently not only around the big cities but above all in the country.
What was mystified by the Maoists as a heroic war was in reality the plague of “moving” (rolling) war with millions of refugees and a policy of scorched earth.
The more imperialist tensions sharpened internationally, the more China also became involved in these. At the time, when inside China the military expeditions against different warlords continued after 1928, the first major clash with a foreign country occurred with Russia in 1928/29. No sooner had a “central government” been set up in Nanking, then it claimed and occupied the Northern Manchurian railway, which until then had been under Russian control. In a first violent confrontation of Stalinist Russia with its imperialist rival in the far East, Russia mobilised 134,000 soldiers and succeeded in defeating the Chinese troops, which could not offer any major resistance due to the dispersal of their forces in the combats against different warlords.
The Sino-Japanese war: internationalism “Supporting the 'just' war of China today means linking up with English, American, French imperialism. It means to work for the 'Holy Union' (Union Sacrée) in the name of a 'revolutionary future' which will be illustrated – as in the case of Spain – by piles of dead bodies of workers and the triumph of the 'order'. On both sides of the fronts there is a rapacious, dominant bourgeoisie, and which only aims at massacring workers. On both sides of the fronts there are workers led to the slaughter. It is wrong, absolutely wrong to believe that there is a bourgeoisie which the Chinese workers could – even temporarily – side with to 'struggle together even for only a short time', since only Japanese imperialism must be defeated in order to allow the Chinese workers to struggle victoriously for the revolution. Everywhere imperialism sets the pace, and China is only the puppet of the other imperialisms. To find their way to revolutionary battles, the Chinese and Japanese workers must return to the class struggle which will lead to their unification. Their fraternisation should cement their simultaneous assault against their own exploiters (…). Only the Fractions of the International Communist Left will oppose all the currents of traitors and opportunists and will hold high the flag of the struggle for the revolution. Only they will struggle for the transformation of the imperialist war which pours blood over Asia into a civil war of the workers against their exploiters: fraternisation of the Chinese and Japanese workers, destruction of the fronts of ‘national wars’, struggle against the Kuomintang, struggle against Japanese imperialism, struggle against all the currents which mobilise the workers for imperialist war.” (journal of the Italian Left, Bilan, n°44, October 1937, p1415) |
However, the main antagonism was unfolding between China and Japan. In 1931/32 Japan occupied Manchuria and proclaimed the new state Manchukuo. Early 1932 Japan attacked and bombed Shanghai. At that time – i.e. after Japan had occupied Manchuria – the KMT led government still pursued the policy of trying to eliminate other warlords and above all the Communist Party. It was only in 1937, once Japan had started its war drive from Manchukuo into China, that the Chinese bourgeoisie united and pushed its own rivalries temporarily into the background – but this unification could only be that of a united war front against Japan.
The need to develop a “united war front” against Japan also meant that the Chinese bourgeoisie had to reposition itself in its relationship to foreign imperialists.
Until 1937 each wing of the Chinese bourgeoisie pursued a different foreign policy orientation. While the CCP was oriented towards Stalinist Russia and received support from Moscow, the KMT counted on the help of Germany and other states. Chiang Kai-shek himself, who after 1920 had received support from the degenerating Comintern and rising Stalinism until 1927, tried to avoid a head-on confrontation with Japan. In the early 1930s he signed a factual “truce” with Japan, only to give him more leeway to attack the troops of the Communist party. But with the advance of Japanese troops from Manchukuo to Beijing and towards Shanghai in 1937, Chiang had to drop his alliance with Germany – which was establishing an alliance with Japan. Global imperialist rivalries compelled every local rival to choose his allies and the historic course on a world level towards war was also going to determine the antagonisms in the far East.1
1 Already by 1921 Germany had started delivering arms to China. Arms of all types were needed for the continuing Chinese wars. Most of the German arms reaching China in the early 1920’s were clearly from the stocks that Germany had hidden from the Versailles arms inspectors. A former Chief of Staff to Ludendorff – Max Bauer – became military advisor to Chiang-Kai-shek in 1926. In 1928 while the Chinese army had some 2.25 million men under arms, the German military adviser Bauer recommended that China retain only a small core army and integrate the rest of the soldiers into militia forces. German army advisers trained a central army of 80.000 men, which soon grew to a crack force of 300.000. In the battle for Shanghai in 1937 German military advisers were dressed in Chinese uniforms and directed Chinese troops right up to the Japanese front lines. German military advisers recommended Chiang to fight a war of attrition against Japan and employ guerilla tactics against the Japanese army. Only by summer 1938 were German military advisers recalled from China once the Nazi-regime chose to work towards an alliance with Japan. Just before German advisers left, Chiang had signed a treaty whereby German advisers should train the whole Chinese army until 1940. (German Military Mission to China 1927-38, Arvo L. Vecamer, see also https://www.feldgrau.com/china.html [3])