As for other improvements of the armies, only three factors need be mentioned. The armies were consolidated generally, and with their better status—in literacy, pay, means of subsistence, and regularity of control—there came a realization that the military force was the creature of the national state. The Chinese nation was taking form as an ideological and social entity of sufficient strength to command the direct allegiance of fighting men. A new respect arose for the officers and men of the armies. Under Yüan Shih-k'ai the armies had been able to evolve a respectability of their own making; under Chiang K'ai-shek this respectability began to be accepted at its face value by the rest of the society, so that a pilot was not only admired by the crowd but was recognized as an expert among experts, even in literary and civil-minded circles. Secondly, the armies affected the nation by road construction. In the course of the Nationalist-Communist wars of 1927-1937 the Nationalists built thousands of miles of highway in order to make full use of their new mobility gained from machine power. The military roads, supplemented by civilian roads built with an eye to military use, constituted a network of communications upon which a new political geography could be framed—with new strategic points and new avenues of commerce. Thirdly, the armies began to emphasize culture and comfort. The soldiers were given a taste of twentieth century life and standards; their civilian kin and friends who lived under less favorable conditions saw in the elite sections of the armies a mass demonstration of China's modernization.
In the age of air power in China the relation between the army, the government, and the economy was revolutionized. The new power of a state with actual authority[11] led to the creation of an army dependent on an intricate and sensitive financial and economic system, operating under a regular scheme of law. The strength of the government made modern armies possible; modern armies made corresponding political forms imperative. A resulting tendency was for the armies to take on national form. Even in those areas where tuchünism had left its imprint upon society, or where provincial autonomy provided a factual check upon the national authorities, the regional armies accepted organizational details and long-range plans set forth by the central government. Armies which had arisen as dumps for the unemployed or as resources for civil war were fitted together so as to make the Chinese forces resemble the other armies of the world—which exist for the preservation, defense, or aggrandizement of national states. Foreign military observers, equipped with the critical faculties of their profession, might look at the Chinese armies and state point-blank that China had not an army but merely armed men. They could not, however, deny that the Chinese armed forces in their latest phase were on the way to becoming an army nationally organized and fit to serve as the instrument of a great nation. The lessons of nearly a thousand years of European and American political experience may be epitomized in great part in the word nation; the Chinese armies helped to give this word true significance in China.
For the time being, the armies continued to serve their role of a refuge for the economically displaced. Armed paupers are a menace to the security and stability of any society; with the emergence of a higher degree of Chinese unity a great proportion of the armed forces lost their raison d'être. Nevertheless, the last great war-lord war, that of 1930-1931, was fought largely over the issue of army reduction. The National Government forces gradually increased in preparation for the disbandment of others—extensive bodies of irregulars were roughly systematized and placed under central supervision. They were used in moderately successful but insufficient colonization efforts in the Northwest, and as labor reserves in the construction of highways, airports, and similar projects. Even so, the size of the armies did not cease to interfere with their rapid improvement. Too much had to go into pay, even with the ridiculously low rates of compensation. As against the estimates of nearly 1,400,000 men for 1921 and about 1,900,000 for 1926, the size of the armies was unofficially estimated at 2,379,770 for 1936.[12] This figure did not include Communists, brigands, or the Manchurian garrisons in the service of the Japanese (the Manchoukuo army), which would bring the total to well over 2,500,000 men. Differences in definition of what made a coolie or peasant into a soldier caused violent discrepancies in the estimates. If training equal to that of a German Republican Reichswehr soldier were set as the criterion, the Chinese army could be measured in scores. If some more or less vague relation to a military payroll, or to the possession of arms, or both, were taken as the requirements, the number would run into millions. Japanese propagandists, in the light of these facts, made injudicious statements when commenting thus on the Chinese army of 1937:
China had 198 divisions comprising 2,250,000 officers and men. This gigantic army has further been reinforced by 200,000 Communist soldiers whom Nanking worked hard to set against Japan.
In comparison the Japanese Army is a puny affair, consisting of 17 divisions of 250,000 officers and men.[13]
The well-informed expert on Chinese famine relief, Walter H. Mallory, set the total for 1937 at 1,650,000, of which 150,000 were Communist and 350,000 the crack troops of Chiang K'ai-shek; arms would be available for less than 1,000,000.[14] All factors considered, the figure of 2,000,000 armed men with nonproductive occupations seems to be in rough accord with the facts. Two salient conclusions emerge from these figures: Firstly, the armies constituted an enormous burden, which could only be reduced by partial disbandment; this in turn would not be achieved until greater national prosperity had become a fact. Secondly, and in China's favor, the armed forces have spread some elementary notions of modern fighting throughout the rest of the population and have enhanced not merely the willingness of the Chinese masses to fight but also their capacity to do so.
Disbandment programs had not made enough progress by 1937 to alter the general position of the armies in Chinese society. Nevertheless, the counterpart of disbandment—selective recruiting—produced a central force which became the vocation, avocation, and passion of Generalissimo Chiang K'ai-shek. Though not marked in any recognizable way as apart from the rest of the armed forces, the central units were given special arms, special equipment, regular pay, mass education, and training in the patriotic and reform doctrines of the New Life movement. "Chiang's own" were to distinguish themselves; they seem to have profited by new matériel, modern military instruction (chiefly from Germans), and the excellent opportunities for practice which arose from the Communist wars of 1928-1937. They were a testimonial to the fact that, had the disbandment program fully materialized, a more effective and much smaller Chinese army might have appeared. Despite the failure of disbandment, alliance with the quondam enemies, the Chinese Red Army, gave the national forces of 1937 a great diversity and wealth of actual experience in all types of fighting. Although the Chinese have never had adequate training for aggressive, coordinated warfare, they possess a marvelous background in guerrilla methods. The Communist forces have been hunted for a decade; technical superiority they have learned to meet by tactics which force the enemy to meet them on their own terms. Ultimately they were driven by the Nationalists across China, but at most disproportionate cost. The Nationalists, on the other hand, learned to master the terrain of inland war and thus acquired the very knowledge which a foreign enemy would need most.
In time, the Chinese armies became increasingly less the free agencies of domestic tyrants and, after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, more and more the protective force for the whole nation. The enemy began to force Chinese society into national form more sharply than could any pressure from within. Even the efforts of the National Government at Nanking to make a truce with the Japanese in order to continue the drive against the Communists failed to still the widespread clamor for unification. Whether or not Chiang, as a soldier, thought successful war with Japan conceivable, he found that destiny had cast him in the role of the defender—he had only the choice of accepting or rejecting the challenge.
[Governmental and Political Role of the Armies]
Broadly, the political role of the armies was that of giving a day-to-day index for the influence of ideological control, and of providing the framework to which government had to accommodate itself. The Republic was born with Sun Yat-sen as its father but with Yüan Shih-k'ai as its midwife. Yüan and his armies established the order in which the parliamentary Republic had its illusory success; with his death the military order broke into military anarchy, and the political order disappeared almost completely from the arena of actual power. The armies and the tuchüns expressed a certain provincial autonomy and a desire for a crude stability. They ruled the chaos but kept the society stirred by war until the Nationalist-Communist revolution in 1926-1927 brought ideology back to a conspicuous place in the play of events. The armies developed under Yüan into separate entities exercising the power derived from the monopoly of force. In time this monopoly of force was broken. The problem was one not of tyranny but of anarchy. Force was too broadly distributed, order too insufficiently achieved. The Chinese, said Sun Yat-sen, did not need liberty; they needed wealth, in the form of food for those starving and the necessities of life for impoverished millions.[15] When even soldiers were treacherous and tumultuous, order could not come from bayonets. It had to arise within men's minds, including the minds of the soldiers. This happened; the ideological revolution absorbed the military forces, but only to disgorge them, as it were, into opposing camps—the one identifying military power and the masses, the other seeking to build up a new military elite with which to impose government and law on the society. Each of the two incompatible ideals reached a considerable measure of fulfillment, and they were reconciled only by the very presence of alien invaders. From being the de facto rulers, the armies found themselves called upon to act as de facto defenders. Hitherto the forces unsettling ideological control, they became the instruments of ideologies reconciled on the minimal terms of national defense for national existence.
The armies had supplied the power necessary to government but not the order. The Peking Republic lost its claim to authority when it was made the tool of Yüan Shih-k'ai. The years after his death were a pitiful period wherein the civilian authorities in the central government constituted either the puppets of the war lords or their sycophants. The Peking Republic fell into the expedient of giving de jure status to every shift in the interplay of power. Military leaders of provincial importance easily captured the functions of tuchüns; regional leaders obtained correspondingly higher titles. The Peking Republic tried to govern on the Western pattern when the country was not ready for it, and it governed poorly. Soon it passed from nominal control into nonexistence.