Military cliques at times had China-wide proportions, but despite the proclamations which were occasionally issued, there was no effective single movement for a general military regime. Such movements as there were developed within the framework of the shadow Republic. Moreover, the shifting alignments of Chinese wars within the nominal organization of the Republic were so confused as to make almost anything but order seem possible. Yet many Chinese thought in terms of a "realism" compounded of slogans and military exigencies.
If movements for military feudalism, provincial tuchünism, and (most nebulous of all) China-wide militarism failed to provide more than an explanation of immediate fact, there were counterparts in the civilian administration aspiring to political autonomy for particular cliques. Ministries tended at times to develop a spirit of independence. Finance was too close to the military, but the revenue collection services (with a large European and Japanese personnel) and the postal services behaved as imperia in imperio. The foreign office functioned frequently without effective superiors. Working without pay a great part of the time, in a period which offered no near solution for its disastrous troubles, bureaucrats saw in the increase of bureaucracy a possible inauguration of order. The ministries did function in a way, despite the chaos about them. They might have evolved a new bureaucratism to steal the tuchüns' power. Their spirit was helpful in particular and damaging in general, since it was bound to sabotage any government which might come to power. A few years of insecurity may weld a bureaucracy together more closely than would decades of spoils; this was the case between 1916 and 1928. Bureaucratism demonstrates the limitations of opportunist ideology as a foundation for government.
Capitalism flourished wherever economic conditions made it possible; such economic conditions did not last very long under the jurisdiction of the military. In treaty ports[8] the Chinese capitalists prospered, secure under governments which were international in effect, Chinese only in legal fiction. There Chinese soon amassed enough capital to compete with economic institutions erected by foreigners, and exercised an important indirect influence on the growth of Chinese government. Capitalism helped to thwart a peasant-labor alliance in China, for although the capitalists were an insignificant minority without country-wide influence, its form of control was mobile. No army, no surge of popular resentment, no propaganda, no conspirator can travel as fast as a telegraphic money order. The ideology of capitalism was content in China to remain subordinate as long as the political and legal conditions were favorable to it. Capitalist groups supported any sort of strong government which might protect property and increase opportunities for investment.
Among the most pitiful of the movements for the construction of a general agreement in China were the proalien movements. They were pitiful because they represented a prostitution of thought by men conscious of the nature of their action. The Anfu Party flourished in the first decade after the death of Yüan in 1916; together with its militarism and its meaningless "realism" it was pro-Japanese. The present "government" in North China[9] is another such movement. Manchoukuo bases little of her official ideology on such a dangerous outlook and prefers to propagate a Confucianist traditionalism in so far as she propagates anything. Pro-Japanese action may express a discontent with the competence of the Chinese for self-government, but more forcefully it relates to theories of Pan-Asianism or Pan-Mongolism.
The opportunist movements—militarism, tuchünism, military federalism, bureaucratic separatism, capitalism, and political puppetry—served to confuse the basic alternatives. Because they reflected a narrow and accidental scheme of power rather than long-range transformation, they possessed a specious realism which obfuscated real issues. They distracted attention without rewarding it and polarized opinion around conflicts which were beyond settlement. There is no possibility of agreement between men who think one another deluded in regard to fundamentals. Disorder in China was the more violent because of these different explanations. They delayed the creation of a framework in which men could find a common reasonableness, an ideology sufficient to rationalize all interests and to sublimate all frustrations.
[Christianity as a Political Force]
Ever since the establishment of American and British Protestant missions in the nineteenth century, Christianity has been a conditioning force for a democratic ideology in Asia.[10] The Protestants were among the first to make a breach in the stronghold of Confucianism; they secured international action to assist them. Their role was that of counter-ideologues whose position was guaranteed by treaty (British Treaty of Tientsin, 1858; American Treaty of Tientsin, 1858). They possessed the power, under the legal sanction of the Chinese government, to preach against the moral foundations upon which that government rested. A missionary wrote in 1887:
The foremost opposition to the introduction of Christianity comes from those who esteem themselves the followers of Confucius. They assent to our views about the "emptiness" of Buddhism, the deceptions of Taoism, the character of the priesthood, the mud and stone of the images, but when we gently allude to ancestral idolatry, the worship of heaven and earth, and the sacrifices of the mandarins, they are offended. Also, the Confucianists do the thinking for the people; they have the minds, the books, the schools, and the offices. Without a long residence in the country it is hard to imagine the influence of a penniless scholar in his neighbourhood, and the mental control he exercises over the minds of the peasantry. More than this, the graduates at the government examinations form a clique or "ring," and their voice is the unwritten law of China, their authority above that of His Excellency the Governor. The lamented Carstairs Douglas said at the Shanghai Missionary Conference of 1877, "Confucianism is the citadel; take it, and the war is ended."[11]
But for the presence of Christianity, a Chinese counter-elite with sufficient moral self-assurance and intellectual ability to attack the traditional institutions of the Empire might not have developed. Sun Yat-sen was a Christian, although in his case Christianity has been less of a modernizing force compared with the influence of his actual experience abroad. Large numbers of the reformist and republican leaders were Christian, some of them with missionary or Y. M. C. A. connections. These men were not bound by the moral tenets of Confucianism; those among them who had mission school educations had little in common with the long intellectual tradition of the Chinese. For a while Christianity spelled Westernization and provided an avenue of self-advancement hitherto unprecedented in China—one outside the archaic scheme of things.