persuade a huge newconstituency of potential supporters that his
version of nationalism, with its social and moral content, would
meet the needs and wants of India’s rural masses, and that Indian
problems required Indian answers. He created, in short, an Indian
rather ‘British-Indian’ nationalism. Thirdly (and partly in
consequence), Gandhi made nationalism – and the Congress – a
grass-roots movement, drawing in peasants, women, industrial
workers, the ‘tribal’ peoples of the forests and hills, and the
untouchables. Of course the level of popular interest and the scale of
Congress membership could rise and fall (as they did after 1922).
But the cadre of Gandhians pursuing ‘village uplift’, or promoting
Gandhi’s schemes of education and hygiene, formed a network of
activists ready and waiting for the next satyagraha campaign. It
remained to be seen when their chance would come.23
For the time being, however, even nominal self-rule of the kind
granted to Egypt remained a distant prospect. Gandhi had shaken
British self-con dence badly. But the ‘steel frame’ of Britain’s Raj –
the army, police and bureaucracy – with its tens of thousands of
loyal Indian servants, was still in place. The religious and social
divisions that Gandhi had been so anxious to bridge made a grand
nationalist coalition against alien control something to hope for, not
a practical basis for political action in the immediate future.
China was di erent. Between 1919 and 1922, against all the odds,
Chinese leaders successfully asserted China’s right to full
sovereignty that had seemed at such risk after 1890. They won
China a place on the newLeague Council, the steering committee of
the League of Nations. By refusing to sign the Treaty of Versailles
(because of the clause on Shantung), they eventually forced a
newsettlement for East Asia in the Washington treaties of 1921–2.
They even secured what had seemed almost impossible before 1914:
a programme to reverse the ‘unequal treaties’ – winning tari
autonomy, abolishing extraterritorial privilege, and shutting down
(gradually) the numerous foreign enclaves on Chinese soil. China’s
revolt against a global order in which empire was the norm was far
more complete than almost anywhere else in the Afro-Asian
world.24
Of course, part of the reason was that, although the West had
encroached upon China’s independence in the nineteenth century (a
number of Western countries enjoyed extraterritorial rights,
including the USA, Brazil, Peru and Bolivia), the Chinese had
ercely resisted reduction to a form of semi-colonial dependence in
the crucial decade before 1914. Instead, the need to turn China into
a nation state (not a dynastic empire) with a republican government
to express the popular will was accepted with astonishing rapidity
among the educated class. The explosion of feeling in May 1919
when China’s claim to Shantung was rejected in Paris showed that
this new style of patriotism had not stopped there. The May Fourth
movement began among students in Peking. But it quickly became a
much wider protest, enlisting merchants and artisans in its
demonstrations and boycotts, and spreading far beyond the capital.
It was graphic proof that foreign business interests could be badly
damaged by popular outrage, and that the angry crowds would take
their cue from the nationalist rhetoric of the newliterati. Yet this
newpopular mood was not translated into a strong national
government. Between 1919 and 1922, China had a government in
Canton as well as one in Peking. The Peking government was a
cockpit of factions, and its writ hardly ran beyond the walls of the
city.25 Across much of China, the real voice of authority was the
provincial dujun, the military commander or (a hostile translation)
‘warlord’.26 By 1922 the simmering hostility of these provincial
bosses and their factional groupings had set o the civil wars that
dominated China’s politics until the capture of Peking by Chiang
Kai-shek in 1928. The enthusiastic endorsement of China’s sovereign
statehood and the solemn promises to respect it in the Washington
treaties are thus somewhat puzzling. If anything, the domestic
turmoil of post-imperial China seemed to invite the interference of
the foreign powers as much if not more so than before 1914.
It had certainly seemed so during the First World War. In January
1915, as soon as they grasped the gigantic scale of the European
con ict, the Japanese presented their famous Twenty-One Demands
to the Chinese government, on War O ce paper ‘watermarked with
machine guns and dreadnoughts’.27 They proposed the mother and
father of unequal treaties. China was pressed to agree to a Japanese
takeover of German claims in Shantung, to extend Japanese
concessions and leases in Manchuria for the rest of the century, not
to borrowforeign capital without Japan’s permission to develop
Fukien (a coastal province far to the south of Japan’s usual sphere),
and to take on Japanese advisers ‘in political, nancial and military
a airs’.28 To all intents, they proposed a virtual protectorate.
Without allies or arms, the Chinese government gave in, and the
treaty was signed. It opened the way for the rapid entrenchment of
Japanese in uence in the Chinese north, and the increasing
dependence of the Peking government on loans from Tokyo. The fall
of the tsar and the break-up of his empire ended the last real check
upon Japanese dominance: neither Britain nor the United States was
willing to challenge Tokyo at this stage of the war. When they did
agree to intervene in Siberia to stop Russia falling under German
control (the expected result of the Brest-Litovsk treaty in March
1918), it was Japan that supplied much the largest force, and
expected to reap much the largest gain: extending its in uence deep
into Inner Asia. The Shantung decision in 1919 was thus of a piece
with the massive shift of power in wartime East Asia. As China’s
unity fractured (the rival Canton government had appeared in
1917), and its provincial bosses took the Japanese shilling, it
seemed that it might become part of a vast informal empire whose
centre was Tokyo.
Yet this was not what happened. The explanation lies in a powerful
convergence between China’s politics and the con ictual relations of
the great powers in East Asia. It was true that Peking could not
impose its will on the provincial dujuns. But there was little doubt
that on questions of ‘rights recovery’ the nationalist programme of
its intellectual elite (centred in Peking’s newuniversity)29
commanded mass support in the treaty-port cities of maritime
China. That was the signi cance of the May Fourth movement. By
the end of 1920, the Peking government had revoked the
extraterritorial privileges of Germany and Austria–Hungary, its
wartime enemies. The Bolshevik government had renounced
Russia’s claims. It seemed more than likely that Peking would go on
to denounce the privileged status of the treaty powers that
remained, including Britain, Japan and the United States.30 It was
easy to imagine the explosive e ect of such a move in Shanghai and
elsewhere, and the enormous di culty of defending foreign
interests and property against the mass demonstrations and boycotts
that seemed certain to follow. It seemed safer by far to enlist
Peking’s support for a gradual change. The British and the
Americans had an added reason to come to terms with Peking. They
had watched with alarm the growing power of Japan, and
mistrusted the ‘militarist clique’ that directed its policy.31
Throughout 1920 they pressed the Japanese government to pool its
commercial concessions in an international consortium, and
opposed its claim to a special position ‘beyond the Wall’ in
Manchuria.32 This Anglo-American pressure was feared and resented
in Tokyo, but Japanese leaders had other reasons to change course
in East Asia. They faced domestic unrest, the outgrowth in part of
the economic strains of wartime.33 The Siberian expedition, with its
costs and its losses, was deeply unpopular.34 Without the old
Russian threat, it was even harder to justify. In Korea, where an
independence campaign had been brutally crushed in 1919, political
tranquillity was urgently needed.35 And the Japanese shared the
Westerners’ alarm that anti-foreign feeling might get out of hand in
China and in ict big losses on their business interests, especially by
Chinese boycott of their textile exports.36 The case for conciliation
had become overwhelming.
The upshot was the remarkable settlement embodied in the
Washington treaties of 1921–2. The Western powers and Japan
guaranteed the independence and integrity of the Chinese republic.
Provision was made to reform the unequal treaties. No power was to
seek any special concessions or make exclusive deals. China, it
seemed, had recovered the national dignity painfully surrendered in
the chaotic 1890s. But the status revolution was not the end of the
story. From 1922 onward, foreign interests in China faced militant
nationalism on a growing scale. A second revolution, social and
political, made the Washington treaties’ leisurely timetable for the
recovery of China’s full sovereignty look strangely complacent. The
epicentre was Canton, the southern metropolis. Canton had been the
centre of anti-Ch’ing politics. The Cantonese, said an old China-coast
diehard, were the ‘Irish of China’ (it was not meant as a
compliment).37 Canton was less than eighty miles from Hong Kong,
which served as its outport, and a safe haven for dissent in imperial
times. It was where Sun Yat-sen had struggled before 1911 to build
up his revolutionary party, later the Kuomintang, or Nationalist
Party (KMT).38 But, without a mass following, Sun was poorly
placed to exploit the growing antagonism of merchants and artisans
towards the exactions and oppressions of the newprovincial rulers
(many of them military) who had pushed aside the mandarinscholars
of the old imperial system. Nor could he appeal to the
educated class (a category that included the young Mao Tsetung),
who bitterly resented their displacement from power by warlords
and soldiers. In 1922 he was even chased out of Canton by a
warlord faction. But the next three years brought an astonishing
change. For in 1923 Sun made an epic compact with an agent sent
from Bolshevik Russia. He accepted the o er of military aid and a
corps of Soviet advisers39 to rebuild the KMT on the Leninist model,
in partnership with the infant Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The
KMT–CCP began to build a mass base among peasants and town
workers.40 And with its own party army it at last had the means to
defeat the warlords and build a new state.41
The revolutionary year was 1925. It started badly for the KMT,
which lost control of Canton (brie y), and its leader Sun to a
premature death. But on 30 May labour tension in Shanghai (where
foreign enterprise was concentrated) burst into violence when the
British police force in the International Settlement shot dead twelve
Chinese during a large demonstration. A huge wave of protest swept
up the Yangtze valley and along the coast to Hong Kong. On 23
June there was further shooting in the European enclave of
Shameen in Canton. A general strike and boycott of British trade
was organized in Hong Kong, in a direct challenge to the British
authorities. The KMT now reaped the reward for its new credibility
as a nationalist movement with the physical power to govern
e ectively. Soviet support, the anti-foreign mass movement and a
bloody civil war between the warlords in the north suddenly opened
the way to reunify China under a national government pledged to
expel all foreign power.42 In July 1926 the KMT army set o from
Canton on the ‘Northern Expedition’, destination Peking. By the end
of the year it had reached Wuhan, the great crossroads city in the
middle of China. Nanking and Shanghai lay within its grasp. China’s
titular sovereignty – hailed with enthusiasm at the Washington
conference – had become frighteningly real. For the British, whose
stake in the old order was largest, there began a race to withdraw
from the most vulnerable outposts before the shooting started.43
What the future held for the large foreign presence (Japanese and
Western) in Shanghai, the greatest treaty port of all, was anyone’s
guess.
There is a strange but important epilogue to this tale of revolution
and empire in the aftermath of war. Across much of Northern
Eurasia, what mattered most was the fate of imperial Russia,
apparently dissolving in chaos in 1918. As tsarist rule collapsed, the
subject peoples of what Lenin had called the ‘prison of nations’ had
a glimpse of freedom. In the Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia,
and among the ethnic minorities of Russia proper (like the Bashkirs
and Tatars), independent regimes made their bid for power. On the
face of things, their chances were good. In 1918–19 the Bolsheviks
were struggling to survive in a civil war. Moreover, the Bolshevik
view had favoured liberation for Russia’s subject nationalities,