China’s past in the present 13

administration of Qing China disintegrated. A Republic was proclaimed in 1912 to replace the Qing dynasty but it was never able to take a fi rm hold of the country and, when the fi rst President, Yuan Shikai, who had seized power from Sun Yat- sen, attempted to have himself declared Emperor in 1916, the fragile basis of the new system was obvious. It collapsed into a network of regionally based warlord kingdoms which formed fl uid alliances with each other but were also in constant confl ict. From 1917 to 1927, these warlords were the de facto rulers of China: central government was either weak or non-existent. China, a predominantly peasant society, was subject to endemic poverty and disease as well as to periodic and widespread famines, some of which had catastrophic effects on the land and the people. Educated Chinese were conscious of the plight of their country and many were deeply ashamed and angry at the degradation and humiliation of what they continued to believe was a great nation.

A nationalist movement developed in response to this sentiment, with supporters advocating the overthrow of the warlords and the restoration of a unifi ed national political structure. Most of them rejected the old imperial structure, even in a revised form such as a constitutional monarchy, and looked to some kind of republic as the most appropriate form of government for China. Two strands of nationalism, one associated with the Guomindang (GMD) (Kuomintang or Nationalist Party) and the other with the CCP, emerged at about the same time.

The catalyst for the growth of this nationalism was the treatment of China by the major international powers in the peace settlement that followed the Treaty of Versailles, which was signed in June 1919 after the end of the First World War (1914–18). Most educated Chinese who followed international developments had assumed that territorial concessions which had been secured by Germany at the end of the nineteenth century would be returned to China after the Allied victory, since China had been at least nominally an ally of Britain. However, these concessions were in fact handed over to Japan, in recognition of Tokyo’s pact with Britain, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, which had been agreed in 1902, and also its nominal alliance with France during the war. The Japanese army and navy had played little part in the confl ict, but the parties drawing up the treaty were conscious of Japan’s emerging status as the next great power in the Pacifi c. In China, the renowned demonstrations of 4 May 1919 which followed the announcement of the treaty provisions were accompanied by a widespread and profound questioning of the nature of Chinese society and China’s place in the world – a phenomenon which was to become known as the May Fourth Movement or the New Culture Movement. Trade unions were developing rapidly in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Guangzhou (Canton) and many other major Chinese cities, and they fl exed their muscles in a series of strikes, which Marxist activists helped to organise. It was in this setting that the CCP was formally established in 1921 with advice and support from the Comintern in Moscow, and it held its fi rst conference in the grounds of a girls’ school in Shanghai. The twelve delegates who attended represented a total membership of fi fty-seven and the conference was obliged to repair to a boat on a lake for fear of informers. This was a small and inauspicious beginning for the party that was to take control of China within less than thirty years. 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