From 1926 to 1927 the ensuing campaign for the Nationalist conquest of China, as outlined in the principles of Sun Yat-sen,[6]] drove forward with striking success. The Nationalist troops everywhere pushed their enemies before them with astonishing speed. The explanation is to be found in part in the efficiency and military honesty of officers and men, but even more in the nonmilitary factors which fortified the armies and the ideological weapons which cleared the ground before it. The new armies not only represented military might; they were also propaganda machines. To every regiment there was attached a political staff to keep up the morale of the troops and to win over the enemy and the civilian population. The troops themselves were propaganda brigades as well as military units. Literacy in the armies was made a point of great pride, and certain divisions made novel reputations for themselves on this ground. The Nationalists were known by many as the soldiers who did not harm the people. Without the troops the Nationalists would never have come to power; but without the supporting sweep of mass propaganda the Nationalist movement might have gone on for decades in the form of civilian conspirators fighting against overwhelming odds or else seeking to make venal mercenaries the prime instrument for the regeneration of Chinese civilization.
The military revolution of 1926-1927 brought new factors to the Chinese military scene. It indicated that a point of equilibrium had been reached between the military and the ideological modes of control and that it was no longer possible for sheer force and a minimum of intelligence to hold unchallenged power in the Chinese society. It was, furthermore, a threefold struggle: a patriotic and progressive uprising against domestic and foreign oppression and inefficiency; an agrarian revolt on a grand scale; and a proletarian uprising on the part of the relatively small but strategically placed Chinese proletariat. Only in the first of these aspects did the revolution meet with the approval of most Chinese—the victims and not the bearers of arms. Men of all shades of opinion were able to agree on a policy of attacking the system of tuchüns, which offered no planning for the future, no resurrection of the past, and little public order. The patriotic troops were enraged by the corruption and inadequacy all about them and by the fortresses of privilege reared by aliens on their coasts and in their greatest inland cities.
The campaign of 1926-1927 marked the identification of the coolie soldier with his own class and of the peasant fighter with his. The rank and file were given to understand that they were not fighting in some game beyond their understanding but for the security of people like themselves. Under the influence of the propaganda put forth by the Nationalists and the allied Communists, an incipient agrarian revolt was fanned into flame and proletarian uprisings in the cities were made possible for the first time. Whole sections of the countryside fell into a condition not far from anarchy as the revolutionary troops led the people in revolt. After 1927, however, the military forces developed along two antagonistic lines. The Nationalists, seizing the political instruments of the revolution but finding its ideological factors largely beyond their control, began to create a professionalized army with which to stabilize their regime. The Communists, and their agrarian allies, standing to the Left of the newborn Nanking government, were eager to fight on in the tested informal fashion. In the year of the establishment of the Nanking government, 1927, the Red Army could still demonstrate its effectiveness. Shortly afterward the precautionary arms embargo of the foreign powers, which had prevailed since 1919, was lifted, thereby opening up the means by which Chiang K'ai-shek could renovate and specialize the armies under his command.
The break with the war-lord tradition was much more obvious in the case of the Communists than in the case of the Nationalists. The Communists, lacking sufficient support to occupy any broad contiguous territory, fell back on guerrilla fighting of their own. The Nationalists, strong enough to hold a certain portion of the area, nevertheless compromised with the existing military system to seek mastery. For three years after the establishment of the Nanking government, it remained doubtful whether the whole government might not subside into inertia and neglect, leaving Chiang standing alone, distinguished from the other war lords only by his character.
Late in 1930 and early in 1931 a menacing alliance was organized between two of the most influential remaining Northern tuchüns and the "liberal" wing of the Nationalists. Operating from the north, after the proclamation of an insurgent "National Government" at Peking, the rebels at first seemed to have the military advantage. Chiang had learned many lessons, however, and in the most serious fighting which China had seen in years he broke the force of the Northern offensive. Airplanes appeared as a threat against the civilian population of Peking, although no actual deaths were reported. There were ugly rumors that gas was being used at the front. Small tanks from England, though giving a rather poor performance, symbolized a novel trend. More and better heavy artillery was used than ever before. Trenches came up to World War standards. The war ended with the intervention from Manchuria of Chang Hsüeh-liang, a strangely progressive and patriotic tuchün; but the fighting had been enough to show that of all the great armed forces in China the Nationalist armies of Chiang K'ai-shek and the Nanking government were the most effective.
The rehabilitation of men's thinking had not proceeded far enough to eliminate the dangers of an overemphasized military leadership, but the tide had turned. After 1931 the military situation in China had become subordinate to the problems of ideology and of government. The chief military factors were now the governmentalized armies, the guerrilla opposition of the Communists, and the problem of foreign war.
The new military period which replaced the war-lord system was marked by (1) technical improvement of the armies, especially in the direction of air power; (2) supplementation of the armies by the quasi-military power of the civil government, so that Chinese wars ceased to be a question of armed bands drifting about the surface of the social system; (3) organization of the Nationalist armies into national units in fact as well as name; (4) increasing pressure of the disbandment problem; (5) development of guerrilla tactics by the Reds and of guerrilla-suppression tactics by the Nationalists; (6) problems arising from Japanese conquest, which overwhelmed Manchuria in one fierce onslaught and harassed China for six years of military aggressions before breaking forth anew in the catastrophic surge of 1937-1938.
Aviation was to leap to a sensational place. Aviation and national civilian government became almost natural complements of one another. Only by aviation could all parts of the country be brought under the jurisdiction of Nanking and the geographical handicaps of China be overcome, and only a national government could afford the long-term investments in machines and men necessary to effective air armament. The record of technical improvement in the Nationalist armies is clearly symbolized by the advancement of military aircraft. Military aviation in China previous to the establishing of the Nanking government demonstrated the weakness of the preceding regime. As early as 1909 a French aviator was giving demonstration flights over Shanghai.[7] The Ch'ing dynasty sought to establish an airplane factory but met with no success. Yüan Shih-k'ai purchased a few planes and set up a flying school. The first telling use of planes in Chinese politics and war occurred, however, with the bombardment of the imperial palace by a lone aviator in the course of an attempted monarchical restoration in 1917. In the period of the war lords there were many isolated efforts to build up flying services. The most promising of these, undertaken by the Peking Republic with British assistance after 1920, failed through neglect, mismanagement, and corruption. As late as 1928 there was no prospect of significant air fighting in China.
By 1931 the Nanking government had built up an air force of about seventy serviceable planes; a contemporary commentator observed, "Aeroplanes played a very considerable—some would even say a decisive—part in the civil war of 1930...."[8] By 1932, when an American aviation mission arrived to help in the training of a Chinese military air force, the estimates ran into a total of 125 to 140 commercial and training planes.[9] In the ensuing five years the Chinese national air force developed rapidly. It played the leading role in suppressing the Fukien uprising of 1932-1933 and in driving the Communists into the Northwest. In 1937 the head of the American aviation mission, Colonel John Jouett, wrote, "Japan maintains that China has a thousand planes; my guess would be seven hundred and fifty of all types. But no one knows...."[10] Other experts would reduce the figure to one-third or less by the elimination of planes which would not be of first-class utility in actual combat. The preparations for foreign hostilities up to 1937 were accompanied by such a degree of secrecy that definite figures are not available. For domestic purposes, however, almost every plane would count, and the cardinal fact remains that domestically the National Government possesses a monopoly of air power in China. It is thereby in a better position to make its supreme will formidably known than was any emperor of any dynasty. The future may show that Chinese mastery of aircraft is psychologically as important as was mastery of the steamship for the Japanese—a visible demonstration to an Asiatic people of their own accomplishments with Western technology.