[13.] See below, pp. [184 ff.]
SECOND PART
ARMIES
Chapter IV
[WARRIORS]
From the outside, militarism seems to dominate the Chinese scene. China is frequently interpreted in terms of personalities instead of mass inclinations, wide-filtering habits, and extensive relocations of thought. The picturesqueness of the Chinese leaders has done nothing to prevent the notion of many romantic autocracies from appearing real: the Dog-Meat General, six feet tall, diabolically cruel and brazenly comic, with his veritable zoological garden of ladies from all over the world; the Christian General, burly, bluff, honest, Christian and Bolshevik, with the happy naïveté of a feudal politician; the Bandit General and his infatuation with fine arsenals; the Generalissimo, with his Christian wife, himself a Christian, rolling up a military machine against the third greatest naval power of the earth—such figures make Chinese news a confused but exciting serial story.
[Military Rule and Political Economy]
For long-range effects, the literary experiments of men like Hu Shih and the mass-education drive of Dr. James Yen and his associates are more significant than any one of hundreds of military leaders, but long-range trends are never news. The armies and their commanders have occupied the center of the stage, overshadowing the quest of the Chinese for civilian rule. Civilian rule, however, presupposes a sufficient area of common agreement on which to build laws and usages for government; armies require nothing but a nearly mechanical discipline and the crudest rule of thumb administration. The civilian government of Republican China has had to await the coming of at least a minimum of order out of the turmoil; armies, for lack of government, have dominated and continued that turmoil. China has been disunited in great part because she was impoverished by military rule; she has been ruled by arms partly because she was disunited. No unifier of the nation would have needed to maintain the armed hordes which were the greatest impediment to real national defense—hordes powerful enough to wreck governments but not powerful enough to build them. The war lords, as they are perhaps too flatteringly termed, do by no means measure up to the note of the intellectual and political leaders; but they have unquestionably held the greater bulk of day-to-day authority in China since 1912.
The most significant function of the armies is one which is quite frequently overlooked: their power as agencies of unsettlement. They have created disturbances more profound than mere public disorder; they have attacked institutions more vital than the public treasury; they have kept all parts of China from the dull apathy of conservatism. The arrogance and rapacity of the military rulers, their utter incompetence as administrators (with a number of honorable exceptions), and their ineffectiveness as propagandists have provided that loose and haphazard tyranny which some philosophers consider the prime requisite for social ferment. The military men have never been intelligent enough to impose truly totalitarian regimes, nor efficient enough to make the people of any one area content with a permanent separatism. The presence of the military rank and file has turned the Chinese social system upside down, reversing the accepted scale of ranks within the society and infringing upon the interests of every group—even the minimum interest of the very poor, their right not to starve to death. More conspicuously, the armies have given a picture of power which, in contrast with the scarcely traceable lines of influence and persuasion arising from ideological movements, is intelligible and reducible to concrete terms.
Without the militarists, there would have been no visible series of events to trace the change in China, no stereotypes at all by which to show the immediate alterations on the scene of power. Many men did rise and fall regardless of military considerations, but such occurrences were loosely and popularly ascribed to intrigue or else dismissed as beyond all rational understanding. The armies subsisted and roamed about, leaders and men both helpless on a sea of ignorance and doctrinal conflict; but the mere assent to unthinking discipline looked like order, and the most shadowy and insubstantial military hierarchy held out a promise of Caesarian peace. From 1915 to 1925 foreign comment stressed the movements of the war lords, singling out the man who might play the role of a Chinese Napoleon, and to the present this simple approach satisfies many. Meanwhile the foundations of social life shifted, falling away here, growing more solid there, behind the gloomy panorama of brutal, ineffectual warfare.