Interlude: Post-revolutionary Disorder
The capitalists do not plow the fields themselves, yet eat huge meals and drink beer by robbing the surplus of us workers. Yet we who plow the fields and work hard, day in day out, never have full bellies. Why does society tolerate these parasites, these rice buckets?
—A mechanic (1921)1
Political, social, and economic disorder set in almost immediately after the 1911–1912 events deposing the Qing. This disorder mapped onto and was in part fomented by military power holders (conventionally called “warlords”), who quickly moved into competitive positions to claim economic and territorial prerogatives from each other and a crumbling center. Sun Yatsen, for his part, abandoned China for Japan in 1913, fearing for his life; he was to return and leave China repeatedly until his death from liver cancer in Beijing in March 1925. By late 1915, the ever-opportunistic Yüan Shikai declared himself emperor in an attempt to seize glory and reunify state power. Political and social opposition was comprehensive, stiff, and unrelenting; as it turned out, Yüan died of kidney disease in mid 1916, frustrated in his efforts. His death marked the end of the last serious bid to revive monarchy in China. Thereafter, the Republican Revolution, successful at finally banishing most vestiges of political support for dynastic rule (Qing or otherwise), yielded quite a political debacle. No social class was strong enough to impose its hegemony upon the Chinese state, and the constant demands by imperialist powers—now with Japan insistent and uncompromising—rendered the sovereignty of that shifting state often only nominal. China entered the second decade of the twentieth century in parlous condition, ripe for one revolution after the next, through whose sequences the social relations of production and knowledge combined and recombined in unpredictable ways.
In January 1915, taking advantage of the European powers’ preoccupation with the Great War, the Japanese government issued to China an ultimatum known as the Twenty-One Demands. These demands were designed to force the weakened Chinese state—such as it was at the time—to accede to Japanese requirements for political, territorial, and economic gains at the expense of the Europeans, the Americans, and of course, of China itself. Aimed in large part at wresting control of Manchuria from China so as to bind the territory to its colony in Korea, Japan’s demands were articulated in the language of “protection” (that is, Japan protecting its yellow-race Asian neighbor from white-race imperialist depredation). As the Japanese put it, the demands were an “attempt to solve those various questions which are detrimental to the intimate relations of China and Japan with a view to solidifying the foundation of cordial friendship subsisting between the two countries to the end that the peace of the Far East may be effectually and permanently preserved.”2 After negotiations to soften a few of the provisions, Yüan Shikai signed the document in May 1915. In the early 1920s, the whole of part 5 of the document—dealing with economic matters—was vacated by negotiations forced by Britain and the United States, who wanted to curb Japan’s growing control of the Chinese economy. However, the demands set the tone for the continued weakness of the Chinese state with relation to imperialist impositions.
A closely correlated aspect of the military, territorial, and economic expansion of Japan was the social scientific research—on traditions and customs, on politics and military, on social structure and economic systems—that came to undergird the colonial project. Of course, the derivation of knowledge about colonized peoples—the fixing of these peoples into categories, their relegation into indigenous and congenital forms of “backwardness,” the efforts to “civilize” them through the promotion of “advanced” knowledges and practices—was not unique to Japan; this had been a universalizing project of Euro-American colonizing powers for centuries. In the 1910s, after a trial run in Taiwan (which had been colonized in 1895), the Japanese colonial project in Korea, Manchuria, and China was defined explicitly as one of data and information collection in the interests of empire building. This was accomplished through an interlocking set of institutions, with both research and policy implications. A major current of Japanese scholarship on China emphasized sino-logical attention to ancient texts and thinkers: this was intended to demonstrate that while China had had a glorious past, that past was now forsaken and only recoverable through Japanese assistance in a pan-Asian cultural fraternity. Other currents included geographical studies, with attention to the diffusion of civilization across Asia, now defined as a Japan-centric Sinosphere; research into practical matters of military occupation, civilian pacification, and disease control; and trade and commerce research, through which the Japanese would penetrate, dominate, and create markets. A tight connection hence was made between the very design of research in the humanities and the social sciences, and the direction of colonial governance and military conquest.
Meanwhile, the provisions of the Treaty of Shimonoseki of 1895 had yielded the right to set up manufacturing and industrial concerns on Chinese soil to Japan, and by extension, to Euro-American imperialist powers.3 By the 1910s, this had resulted in a wave of urbanized development in the treaty ports that pulled labor from the rural areas into factory work and discipline. From Canton to Fuzhou to Shanghai and Tianjin, male-dominated heavy industrial manufacturing centered on steel and shipbuilding, while female-dominated light industrial manufactures in silk filatures, match factories, and cotton mills busily produced refined raw materials and commodities for the world market, and hence surplus value for Japanese, British, American, and some Chinese factory owners. By the end of the Great War in 1919, there were over 1.5 million industrial workers in the country, with 300,000 concentrated in Shanghai alone. A fragmented urban proletariat came into being: men, whose guilds and unions excluded women, founded organizations that sometimes translated into political recognition;4 and women formed informal “sisterhoods”—self-organized for personal protection against gang depredations—that often yielded strong bonds of labor solidarity and activism, as well as gendered identification.5 Various other lines of fragmentation among the working classes also emerged: native place (corresponding to language divisions tied to birthplace); workshop specializations; skilled and unskilled; and so forth. Most of those lines of division were capable of disappearing in moments of great crisis, and the postrevolutionary period saw a number of such industrial labor crises develop. Yet, as difficult as the lives of these workers were, they had to be counted as the fortunate among those recently displaced from rural areas, for along with urbanization came widespread urban poverty and misery, including large numbers of impoverished children begging or working for pittances and women working as courtesans or streetwalkers, up and down the social ladder.6
A corresponding urban bourgeoisie incipiently formed, although it was more a type of multinational comprador class, comprised mostly of foreigners, along with some Chinese, many of whom had been educated abroad and were multilingual. This mixed elite resided in the colonial parts of the cities in grand mansions and spacious apartments, with in-home kitchens and hygienic facilities fully staffed by recently migrated laborers from the countryside; from these homes, they were transported via rickshaw, pulled by impoverished men from the rural areas, to banks and offices along well-lit multilane macadam-paved roads. Dotted with gardens, parks, and pleasure palaces, the foreign concessions were spaces apart from the often-chaotic, under-regulated Chinese cities in which they were embedded and upon which they preyed for labor and service.7 Here, the monied elites mediated financial and industrial relations among one another, as well as between the domestic Chinese setting and the global capitalist financial and commodity markets. Although Communists later were to distinguish between the “national” bourgeoisie (potentially part of a revolutionary alliance) and compradors (who were presumed always traitorous), the fact is that all capitalists in China (and elsewhere), no matter what their nationality, functioned as compradors, as mediators of capitalist relations. In that role, they were always prone to either support or betray any national state, depending on their own interests and capacities as well