Nanjing Government Research Articles

American technocracy and Chinese response: Theories and practices of Chinese expert politics in the period of the Nanjing Government, 1927–1949

This article describes the spread of the American technocracy movement in China during the 1930s and traces the appeal of a technocratic society among Chinese intellectuals. From 1931 to 1935, Chinese newspapers and magazines translated and published the writing of American technocrats, which inspired Chinese thinkers to explore technocratic ideals. This paper argues that the Nanjing Government (which operated from 1927 to 1949) upheld the Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt administrations as examples of expert politics in action. By studying American technocracy, China remolded American style “expert politics” into expert politics with Chinese characteristics. Although this article contends that American technocracy was the external motivating factor for the movement in China, it also establishes the uniqueness of Chinese technocracy as the merging of Chinese tradition and Western thought, and illustrates key differences between the practices of expert politics in each nation. Such divergences include the emphasis of Chinese technocrats on increasing national power and the movement's failure to change the fundamental power regime in China. The histories of both United States and China show, contra Veblen and other theorists, that technocratic governments, though powerful forces, were not able to bring about any lasting change in political structures.

Study on Composition Elements and Characteristics of External Space of Ancient Nanjing Government Buildings, Republic of China, dated 1912-1949

Study on Composition Elements and Characteristics of External Space of Ancient Nanjing Government Buildings, Republic of China, dated 1912-1949

The development of party rule in the judiciary: personnel changes and political transformation of the Nanjing government’s judicial center, 1927–1937

After the establishment of the Nanjing Nationalist government in 1927, the Guomindang (GMD) gradually founded a national regime and started to implement the principle of “governing the nation by the party.” But the party-rule was not implemented immediately and effectively. In the early years of the Nationalist government, its judicial branch mostly hired former Beiyang judicial officials, who generally pursued the ideals of judicial independence and politics transcending party lines, ideals established in the Beiyang period. In 1932, when Ju Zheng became the president of the Judicial Yuan, founding members of the GMD began to replace the Beiyang officials in the judicial center. This personnel change was completed around 1935. Meanwhile, due to national crisis and the GMD’s concern that the judicial status quo did not meet its political needs, the GMD began to emphasize the political nature of the judiciary and to advocate the party-ization of the judiciary. Consequently, eight years after the founding of the Nanjing Nationalist government, GMD party members began to obtain de facto control of the judicial center, symbolizing the completion of the shift from Beiyang judicial practices to GMD party-rule in the judiciary. Nevertheless, during the following years, the GMD failed to penetrate, dominate, and integrate the middle and lower levels of the judicial system, where the judicial ideals and personnel structures still strongly retained their Beiyang legacy.

The San-Min Doctrine and the early legislation of the Nanjing government

Shortly after the Nanjing Nationalist government was established, Hu Hanmin and others rejected the existing legal system and proposed instead the San-Min Doctrine legislative principles, which they called society oriented. These principles were derived from Sun Yat-sen’s San-Min Doctrine. A direct manifestation of these legislative principles was the Guomindang’s one-party dictatorship under the system of political tutelage. As the legal system developed during the early period of the Nanjing government, a number of laws were designed to restrain capital and equalize landownership. In his legislative principles, Hu Hanmin understood “obligations centered” to mean “society centered.” When his society-centered principle was applied in laws, the resulting legislation appeared authoritarian in that the state, the nation, and society had the first priority. Therefore, the nature of the political tutelage based on this legislation was closer to feudalism than to modern capitalism.

American Military Misconduct in Shanghai and the Chinese Civil War: The Case of Zang Dayaozi

AbstractIn September 1946, an American navy sailor killed a Chinese ricksha puller named Zang Dayaozi in a pointless dispute over an allegedly unpaid fare. The American military shielded the assailant from justice, with the frustrated acquiescence of the Nationalist authorities. This seemingly minor event illustrates that the century-old patterns of personal abuse and legal privilege did not completely evaporate when the “unequal treaty” system ended in 1943. In the context of the Chinese Civil War, the event takes on political significance as well. Critics of the Guomindang government used the episode to illustrate the destructive impact of American interventionism and the callous disregard of the Nanjing government for its own people. Communist propagandists linked Zang's death with the more famous rape of a Chinese college student involving two American Marines in Beiping. The episode further illustrates that American service personnel stationed abroad play multiple roles, interacting with the locals in particular “contact zones” but also serving as the personification of American foreign policy.

Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde: The Modern Woodcut Movement (review)

Reviewed by: Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde: The Modern Woodcut Movement Rossella Ferrari (bio) Xiaobing Tang . Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde: The Modern Woodcut Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. xii, 300 pp. Hardcover $60.00, ISBN 0-52-024909-7. With this impeccably researched and beautifully illustrated volume, Xiaobing Tang has written the definitive account of a significant yet understudied topic within English-language scholarship on China: the modern woodcut movement that revolutionized Chinese art in the early 1930s. Tang traces its genesis and subsequent dissemination through the Nanjing decade (1927-1937), specifically, from the inauguration of Nanjing as the new Nationalist capital in 1928 to the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937. The first three chapters reconstruct the historical and institutional context of the early decades of the twentieth century, addressing the key artistic movements and personalities that populated the cultural-artistic field of modern China in the prewar era. Alongside visual artists such as Liu Haisu, Lin Fengmian, and Xu Beihong, the activities of prominent public intellectuals and writers such as Cai Yuanpei, Tian Han, Ouyang Yuqian, and Guo Moruo are also surveyed. One chief protagonist of Tang's engaging narrative is Lu Xun, who is widely acknowledged as the "spiritual patron of the woodcut movement" (p. 4). All three chapters begin with the year 1928, a crucial historical moment in which artistic production started to be institutionalized by the newly-established Nanjing government. They vividly flesh out the excitement, energy, intellectual diversity, and animated spirit of discussion of the time—especially in the commercialized and cosmopolitan environment of Shanghai. Chapter 1 examines various proposals for art instruction on a national scale, in particular Cai Yuanpei's advocacy of "aesthetic education" (meiyu), and traces the emergence of a notion of "art movement" since the second half of the 1920s. Tang details the major debates of the period relating to the modernization of the Chinese visual arts and highlights the decisive role played by Chinese students in Japan and Europe in the introduction and dissemination of foreign styles and aesthetic concepts. The question of function or purpose of the artwork, which constitutes a central aspect of avant-garde theory, is repeatedly addressed in this and other chapters, and so are related notions of autonomy and "art for art" (the "ivory tower") as opposed to "art for life" (the "crossroads," p. 35). This moment was critical in the history of Chinese art, as new trends and schools emerged and cultural producers constantly redefined their historical mission and social role. The "meaningfulness and consequentiality of art" became persistent concerns (p. 3), and increasingly greater emphasis was laid on art's closeness to life praxis and on the artist's direct involvement in social reform. The woodcut movement, [End Page 271] too, came to address questions of function and purpose, but their responses and approaches to contemporary events "would be critically different" (p. 4) from those of other promoters of aesthetic modernity and cultural reform. This difference, along with its anti-institutional disposition, political drive, and innovative visuality, became the key marker of distinction of the modern woodcut community as "a truly avant-garde movement" (p. 218). Chapter 2 deals specifically with the literary field and its intersections with the visual arts. The intellectual journeys of Tian Han and Guo Moruo from Japan to China, their subsequent involvement with the Creation Society, and its shifting ideological orientations testify to the increasing appeal of left-wing political theories and artistic conceptions since the late 1920s. Emergent notions of proletarian and revolutionary art and literature, also shaped by Marxist movements in Japan, paved the way for the advent of the first generation of modern printmakers in the early 1930s. Chapter 3 introduces Lu Xun's long-standing involvement with the visual arts field, his interest in modern Japanese and European prints, and his advocacy of the "creative woodcut" (chuangzuo muke) as a truly modern, vigorous, and revolutionary art form—a belief that would direct his unremitting patronage of this medium until his death in 1936. The key artists, exhibitions, and publications that contributed to the flourishing and expansion of the movement are comprehensively surveyed in chapters 4 and...

Collaboration within Collaboration: Zhou Fohai's Relations with the Chongqing Government, 1942-1945

Collaboration within Collaboration:Zhou Fohai's Relations with the Chongqing Government, 1942-1945 Brian G. Martin, Visiting Fellow (bio) Until recently, the study of collaboration in China has been relatively neglected, and it has taken more than twenty years for historians to follow up the pioneering studies of John H. Boyle and Gerald E. Bunker.1 This situation stands in marked contrast to the plethora of studies of collaboration in Wartime Europe over the same period, especially the case of Vichy France. A major reason for this tardiness is that the relative dearth of documentary materials on this period is only now being addressed as Chinese archives progressively open their holdings to scholarly enquiry. If there are few studies of China's collaborationist regimes, there are almost none of individual leading collaborators. Although there are numerous works on the Vichy leaders, Philippe Pétain (1856-1951) and Pierre Laval (1883-1945), there is not yet any detailed monographic study of the career of the leading Chinese collaborator Wang Jingwei (汪精衛 1883-1944), let alone of important secondary figures such as Zhou Fohai (周佛海 1897-1948). The only study of Zhou's collaboration is now almost thirty years old.2 The present article analyzes Zhou's cooperation with Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石 1887-1975)'s Chongqing Government as it developed between 1943 and 1945. After a brief discussion of Zhou's pre-war political career and his role as a collaborator in the Wang Jingwei Nanjing Government, the article focuses on his decision to return to his allegiance to Chongqing, his relations with Dai Li (戴笠 1895-1946), the head of Chiang's military intelligence (軍統 Juntong), and his provision of political and military intelligence for Chongqing in the latter part of the war. It discusses Zhou's part in the assassination of Li Shiqun (李士群 1905-1943), the head of Wang's security service-an event that was a turning point in the political history of the Wang regime. The article also discusses the role [End Page 55] that the Chongqing Government assigned to Zhou in the preparations for its proposed counteroffensive in East China in 1944 to 1945, and the important role Zhou played in helping to stabilize a highly volatile situation in the weeks immediately following Japan's unconditional surrender. The most important sources for the present study are the documents relating to Zhou Fohai's trial in September 1946. These were compiled, together with those relating to the trials of other prominent collaborators, by the Nanjing Municipal Archives (南京市檔案館 Nanjingshi dang'anguan) and published in 1991. Some of these were designed to show Zhou's actions in the best possible light, such as Zhou's own deposition and the affidavits of Guomindang (國民黨 [GMD]) politicians and military figures that dealt with Zhou and were collected on his behalf by his defense lawyers. Others, however, were more critical or neutral in their approach, notably the interrogations of Zhou by the public prosecutor, the reports by Dai Li's Juntong (some of whose reports Zhou's defense lawyers had difficulty in obtaining), the telegrams between Zhou Fohai, Dai Li, and the commander of the Nationalist Army's Third War Zone, Gu Zhutong (顧祝同 1893-1987), and the report prepared on the occasion of its winding-up by the organization created by Zhou to maintain order in Shanghai and its environs in the wake of Japan's surrender. Other sources used include the memoirs of leading collaborators associated with Zhou and of Juntong agents involved in managing Zhou's case. Zhou Fohai's Political Background A secondary figure in the political history of the Republican period, Zhou Fohai's career spanned the political spectrum from left to right. Indeed, his career reflected the fluidity of political alignments in early twentieth-century China.3 The product of an impecunious Hunanese gentry family, Zhou scraped together funds to complete his education in Japan, where he graduated from Kyoto Imperial University. In Japan, Zhou became involved in radical Marxist socialist politics among the Chinese students, whom he represented at the inaugural congress of the Chinese Communist Party (共產黨 [CCP]) in Shanghai and Hangzhou in July and August 1921. Acting as secretary for the meeting, Zhou was elected vice-chairman of the CCP.4...

The Making of the Guomindang’s Japan Policy, 1932-1937

From the Manchurian Incident in September 1931 to the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in July 1937, the Nanjing government's agenda was dominated by relations with Japan and conflict with the communists. To deal with the dual threat, Chiang Kai-shek formulated the policy of first internal pacification, then external resistance (xian annei, hou rangwai). Hence, suppressing the communists would take precedence over resisting Japan. The wisdom of this approach was widely contested in the party, the government, and the country at large. It was branded by its critics a policy of nonresistance (bu dikang) toward Japan. But Chiang had the staunch support of Wang Jingwei, the veteran and influential party leader who had formed a political alliance with him in January 1932. They stayed the course despite mounting opposition. Their cooperation in dealing with the Japanese threat gradually dissolved only after Wang withdrew to Europe to recuperate after an assassination attempt in November 1935. In China and in the West, this political alliance forged between Wang Jingwei and Chiang Kai-shek has conventionally been portrayed as joining two unequal partners. Chiang's contemporaries often recollected that the real power of the Nanjing government was in the hands of Chiang (Jiang Tingfu, 1984: 149; He Lian, 1988: 112-15; Chen Gongbo, 1979: 326-30). This assessment has been readily

The Shanghai Green Gang: Politics and Organized Crime, 1919-1937 (review)

498 China Review International: Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall 1997 Brian G. Martin. The Shanghai Green Gang: Politics and Organized Crime, 1919-1937. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. x, 310 pp. Hardcover $40.00, isbn 0-520-20114-0. Researching the Shanghai Green Gang must have been a difficult task since it was such an unsavory organization, engaging as it did in a host of sordid criminal activities ranging from drug dealing to murder. But doing research on organized crime is like doing research on a disease; it is necessary to understand its origins, development, and character, ifways of eradicating it are ever to be found. In view of the rampant corruption and increasing illegal activity that is accompanying the de facto transformation of the People's Republic of China from a socialist to a capitalist economy, Brian G. Martin's thorough investigation of this nefarious organization is a timely one. It is all too easy to envision the emergence of a contemporary Green Gang in Shanghai (or some other major city along the China coast, for that matter), exploiting the working population, profiting from the political tensions both within the municipality and between Shanghai and Beijing, and taking advantage of the opportunities presented by rapid economic development . Martin's cautionary tale should be mandatory reading for the next generation of Chinese leaders. Using such diverse sources as the diplomatic correspondence of the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Shanghai Municipal Police Special Branch files, and manuals issued by the Green Gang itself, Martin reconstructs the Byzantine history of this notorious criminal cartel, which resembles SPECTRE ("Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terror, Revenge, and Extortion"), the fictional criminal organization in James Bond novels and movies. The Green Gang has captured the imagination of generations of China scholars and students; the story of its involvement in Jiang Jieshi's "White Terror" (April 12, 1927), which nearly destroyed the nascent Chinese Communist movement, is a staple of modern Chinese history courses. Martin's detailed account dispels the myths surrounding this secret society, certainly contradicting the Gang's self-serving notion that its members were haoxia ("men of honor and courage") engaged in a crusade against injustice, fighting on behalf of the downtrodden. Chinese Robin Hoods they were not. If anything, they were agents of violence used by the French colonial administration , the Nanjing government, and others against the people of Shanghai. While© 1997 by University Chinese were ambivalent and anxious about the establishment of the Communist ofHawai'i Pressgovernment in 1949, they were at least in agreement that its elimination ofthe Green Gang and other criminal elements was a positive accomplishment. Reviews 499 Martin's central thesis is that the Green Gang was a relatively new "secret society " and an integral part ofmodern Shanghai rather than a feudalistic remnant, with the capability ofadapting to die social and political changes ofthe early part ofthe twentieth century. It was very much a product offin-de-siècle China and was still in the process ofmaturation on the eve of the war ofresistance against Japan. Unfortunately, Martin overreaches himselfin claiming that the Green Gang "played an intrinsic part in [the] modernization" ofShanghai. Except for investing their ill-gotten gains in certain enterprises, it is difficult to see how the Green Gang constituted a modernizing force. In other words, they were hardly investment capitalists. Like Parks M. Coble, Jr., before him, Martin wisely follows the money to trace the Green Gang's political development. It is not a pretty picture. Martin has conducted a painstaking examination ofhow the Green Gang acquired control ofvarious rackets, especially the traffic in opium, and ofits interaction with the different classes ofShanghai society. His work is, in part, a criminological case study of the Shanghai style of organized crime, which he compares, in the conclusion ofhis book, to the Italian Mafia, American organized crime, Indonesian gangsters, and the Japanese yakuza. What is more important, Martin uncovers the Green Gang's symbiotic relationship with various centers of authority such as the colonial governments of the foreign settiements, warlords, nationalists, and communists . Like the Americans in their use of the Binh Xuyen river pirates to combat the National Liberation Front infrastructure in...

The Green Gang and the Guomindang State: Du Yuesheng and the Politics of Shanghai, 1927—37

The complex relationship that developed between Du Yuesheng's Shanghai Green Gang group and the Guomindang regime in the mid-1930s provides useful insights into the nature of the Nanjing government's rule and, in particular, into the manner it exercised power in its Jiangnan bailiwick. Although the Shanghai Green Gang bosses, in particular Du Yuesheng, were coopted by the new Guomindang State, their full integration into the regime's power structure in Shanghai did not occur until after 1932. Despite their participation in Chiang Kai-shek's anti-Communist coup of 1927, they enjoyed a somewhat unstable relationship with the Guomindang regime in the period 1927–31. The context of their incorporation into the Guomindang's system of power in Shanghai was the new accommodation between the Nanjing Government and the leadership of the Shanghai bourgeoisie following the political and economic crisis of 1932. In other words, the cooption of the Green Gang bosses was part of the new structures of state corporatism that were forged by the Guomindang regime in the wake of the Shanghai Incident.

Recalling the Secret Struggle in the Guomindang's Shanghai Social Bureau

In 1934, the party sent me to infiltrate the Guomindang's Nanjing government to do secret work. During the later period of the Anti-Japanese War, as an expert in labor affairs, I was director of the First Department of the Labor Bureau of the GMD's Social Ministry in Chongqing. I often went to 50 Zhenjiayan Road to report to Zhou Enlai and ask for his instructions. The man I often contacted there was Chen Jiakang. In 1945, as soon as the Japanese surrendered, the GMD government posted a lot of important officials "to take over"** throughout the country. Gu Zhenggang, the head of the Social Ministry, was going to fly to Shanghai, and the party organization asked me to try to go with him. Gu knew that I had once studied in Japan and had taught at Shanghai Law College. [He also knew] I had a lot of students in Shanghai, such as Wu Shaoshu and others. [Gu] thought I would be useful as he took on [his new responsibilities], so he agreed that I could go to Shanghai with him. No sooner had I gotten to Shanghai than the party organization sent Zhang Weiyi (who had done intelligence work under the leadership of Li Kenong for a long time, and who would die of illness in 1956) to be my only contact.

Anti-Imperialism and the Left Guomindang

Anti-imperialism and mass movements, two dominant features of the Nationalist revolution during the period of the united front 1924-1926, underwent a qualitative change following the establishment of the Nanjing government in April 1927. The Guomindang's (GMD) break with and purge of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) marked the beginning of a counterrevolution. Reorientations in the GMD's domestic and foreign policies were evident, particularly after the communist-inspired Guangzhou uprising of December 1927. Even before the completion of the Northern Expedition in mid-1928, the GMD had decided that the Nationalist revolution had entered a stage in which the most important and urgent task facing the party was national reconstruction. Mass movements were to be brought under strict party control, and anti-imperialism was to take a different form.' To extirpate all communist influence from the party, Sun Zhongshan's (Sun Yat-sen's) Three Principles of the People were purified.

Imperialism in Transition: British Business and the Chinese Authorities, 1931–37

According to current Chinese views, in 1949 China was liberated from three major evils: feudalism, imperialism and bureaucratic capitalism. The present article takes a closer look at the relationship between the two last mentioned. The period chosen is the early and mid 1930s, which was marked by growing tensions between the powers in East Asia, by acute economic depression and subsequent recovery, and by the gradual extension of the Nanjing Government's control over the country. On the foreigner's side, the focus will be on the British experience at a time when Great Britain's political position in the Far East was being overshadowed by Japan's thrust towards hegemony. It will be argued, the widening gap between Britain's political and economic presence in China was partly bridged by increasingly close co-operation between British business and the Chinese ruling elite.