The beginning, although auspicious, did not mean that even the model sections of the modernized forces were comparable to those of other lands. The confusion of weapons was already evident. A member of the United States General Staff wrote in 1910:
To arm these masses China has been obliged to use weapons that are considered somewhat out of date. There are four types of rifles, mostly Mausers and Japanese Murata rifles of old pattern. They are, however, breech-loading, small-caliber weapons, not to be despised, even if they do not reach the ideal which some nations set. In fact they are the weapons which have been used in the great wars of most recent date.
It is so also with the artillery where even a greater difference of types is to be observed. This is, undoubtedly, a serious drawback, owing, of course, to the great difficulty of providing ammunition.[20]
It was during this period, from the decisive defeat of the dynasty by Japan in 1895 to the Republican Revolution of 1911-1912, that the Chinese revolutionaries most eagerly studied military manuals and sought to purchase Western arms to offset the great advantages gained by the modernized portions of the imperial army. Sun Yat-sen became almost as much a military authority as he was a political philosopher and leader; his chief military follower, General Huang Hsing, performed for the revolutionaries the services rendered for the regime by Yüan Shih-k'ai. On both sides there was the anxiety to master the mysteries of twentieth century warfare. The World War had not yet begun, nor had the staggering burdens of modern armament become evident. Great as were the improvements in fighting, prewar military organization seemed still primarily a matter of well-equipped infantry, properly led, properly drilled, and supported by adequate artillery and other auxiliary services. Wireless, gas, airplanes, tanks, submarines, torpedo launches, and mechanized or aerialized infantry were little more than a matter of speculation. The proportions of present-day military budgets no one could foresee.
[The Army and the Republican Revolution]
The Republican Revolution of 1911-1912 was the last overt act in the collapse of the ideologically maintained social system; it brought armies into violently free play in the support of movements toward re-formation of the ideology and articulation and control of the society. On October 10, 1911, the troops of the Wuch'ang garrison rose in mutiny and sided with the revolution. A series of uprisings engineered by military and agitational leaders followed, province by province, all directed against the imperial power in the North. The use of violence in Chinese politics served to accentuate a condition which had affected China even in the earliest historic times—the unresolved contradictions between the North and the South. Differences of race, spoken language, and economy produced fundamental cleavages accentuated by temperament. Traditionally the North was more conservative and solidaristic, the South more rebellious and enterprising. Sun Yat-sen was a Southerner; militarism reached its sharpest effectiveness in the North.
Yüan Shih-k'ai, who had proved himself the evil genius of Emperor Kuang Hsü by betraying the monarch's reforms of 1898, was called to the aid of the Manchus only to betray them to the Republic; he then served the Republic with the intention of seizing complete power for himself. The Republicans set up their regime in Nanking on January 1, 1912, with Sun Yat-sen as president. They established contact with Yüan, who acted in the triple capacity of negotiator for the Manchus, representative of the modernized armies of the North (which were his), and leader in his own right and in his own interest. The Republicans realized that Yüan could not be dispossessed—indeed, it is fairly certain that he could have upheld the throne had he so wished. Their power was indefinite, and as Chinese they preferred compromise and order to ideals pushed to the bitter end. In the middle of February they yielded to Yüan, and Sun surrendered to him the presidency as a reward for his allegiance to the Republic. Yüan, for the Manchus, secured a settlement by which the Forbidden City (the residence of the emperor in Peking) was made into a second Vatican City; the emperor was allowed his formal and ritual titles (a status remarkably like that of the Pope) and a very substantial stipend. For the Northern armies and himself Yüan obtained actual power over the country. A civilian, but a soldier as well, Yüan rose by both intrigue and the implied threat of force.
The Republic was launched by valedictory imperial edicts ordering the imperial officials throughout the realm to obey Yüan and the new form of government; by Republicans nominally headed by their greatest and coldest antagonist; and by a soldier of higher professional standing in the Western sense than any Chinese leader for centuries past undertaking the task of keeping order and ushering China through drastic reconstruction. For a few halcyon months it seemed as though the Republic might grow into reality from under the aegis of military dictatorship.[21] But soon it became apparent that the revolution was not a transfer of power and renovation of order but the dissolution of power and the erasure of order. What was left was ideological uncertainty, social turmoil, economic disorganization—with politics reduced to mere pageantry, and the armies, ominously growing under the care of President Yüan, maintaining what little order was left to maintain. In 1913 the Nationalist-Republicans rebelled in the Yangtze valley and were crushed by the armies of the government of the Republic of China.
From the military rule of Yüan Shih-k'ai there emerged an army system which was to bring China to almost complete political ruin in the decade after Yüan's death. Although he organized a model regiment as a sample of what could be done in China, inflation of numbers and deterioration of morale and matériel were the most obvious symptoms of the new role of the army—a role much more concerned with problems of domestic intrigue than with defense against the outsiders. For an army of national defense, high technical excellence and a commensurate smallness of numbers are desirable features; for an army of dictatorship or occupation, inferior equipment, poor supplies, and inefficient training are all trifling handicaps in comparison with the advantage of vast numbers which can be used to garrison large sections of the realm and meet the threat of civil war. The very shift from empire to republic involved the enlistment of additional thousands of revolutionary fighters; once in the army, they were hard to dislodge. The personal military interests of Yüan led him to expand the army, and his political ambitions nourished the thought that the country would be secure beneath him only through the medium of an extensive garrison system. Finally, there was a far-reaching shift in the Chinese social pyramid. Men of intelligence and of education flocked to the army, and Japan's military schools were crowded with young Chinese who saw in war their easiest avenue to fortune or to the service of their country.
A reconstituted army, soldiers who could command greater respect than ever before, numerical extension and qualitative deterioration of the national armed forces—these were the more patent military changes under the Republic. To them must be added the factors fusing the elements into a system that was to bring immediate fortune and ultimate ruin to practically all who ventured into its operations. Many of the provinces which turned to the cause of the revolutionaries in 1911 and 1912 became gradually militarized. When the Manchus were gone, the old distinction between the Tartar General and the civilian viceroy had lost its purpose; the new provincial executives combined both military and governmental powers. Provincial jealousies and the growing disorder favored a strong factual autonomy for the various provinces, even though there was no technical claim of provincial independence and very little even of confederation. The first Republic was in name a centralized parliamentary-presidential state with quasi-federal features; in fact it was the combination of an impotent, headless imperial bureaucracy and a presidential military dictatorship possessing physically limited and indefinable authority over a large group of provinces. Between China and the accomplishment of regular and orderly republican government there stood ignorance, turmoil, poverty, reaction, and despair. Between Yüan's regime and the tuchün system there stood only Yüan's might.