After the suppression of the Marxists by Chiang K'ai-shek and the liquidation of the Nationalist government at Wu-han, the Chinese Communist movement took to underground agitation. It demonstrated its power, however, by proclaiming the Canton Commune on December 11, 1927. The Commune ended in bloody suppression. At the same time, in the far interior, the first Chinese Soviet had been established; from it, in Tsalin on the Hunan-Kiangsi border, was to develop the Chinese Soviet Republic.
On the fourth anniversary of the Canton Commune the Chinese Soviet Republic came into official being. A constitution was adopted, and soon in the Communist districts soviets began to spread during a period of relative peace. Nevertheless, the Soviet organization was always under considerable pressure because of the war waged upon it by Chiang. Although labor and agrarian legislation was adopted, the regime had to operate under conditions of extreme military activity, counterrevolution, and terror. Despite all these handicaps, the Communists kept their government intact; they were able to move it thousands of miles across China in the historic Long March from South Central to Northwest China, which began October 16, 1934, and ended October 20, 1935.
Under its constitution, the Chinese Soviet Republic is declared to be "the democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants."[10] The suffrage was set at the age of sixteen. The government was formed in a manner similar to that employed in the U. S. S. R. before the adoption of the new Soviet Constitution: local soviets elect district or city soviets, which in turn elect provincial soviets, which elect a National Congress of Soviets. In practice, the pattern could not be followed closely, since elections were difficult to hold and territorial division not always certain. The Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets was the chief political authority of the Communist regime; it had the familiar executive organization of the Soviet system: a Presidium of the Central Executive Committee and under it the People's Council, the equivalent of a cabinet. The strength of the Chinese Communists lay in their Party and adjunct organizations, in their land policy, and in their Red Army.
The central government of the Chinese Soviet Republic was no mere torso. It included the following agencies immediately subordinate to the People's Council: the Supreme Court, the Ministry of Inspection, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Land, the Ministry of Labor, the Revolutionary Military Commissariat, the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Political Safety Bureau, the Ministry of Communications, the People's Economic Commissariat, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Food, the Ministry of Education, and—strangely—the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
As a result of the kidnaping at Sian at the end of 1936, the Nationalists and the Communists drifted toward a rapprochement. The next February the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang accepted the Communist offer of United Front collaboration, although disguising the acceptance by formal conditions for a Communist surrender. In September the Chinese Soviet Republic was ready to assume the name of Special Administrative District of the Chinese Republic. This left their governmental and administrative organization unaffected; nor did it mean the dissolution of the Red Army, now also under a new name, that of the Eighth Route Army. With the commencement of the Japanese advance, Communist leaders began taking part in the work of the National Government, first at Nanking and then inland.
As the National Government at Nanking rose to a dominant position in Chinese affairs, regional regimes outside its fold found it less easy to fit themselves into the framework of the new Chinese state. The Disbandment War of 1930-1931 had witnessed the defeat of the two most redoubtable tuchüns remaining in the North. On the other hand, it became increasingly evident that acceptance of the Nanking hegemony in name led to the infiltration of Nanking rule in fact.
Nothing but a register of encyclopedic proportions could list and describe the various political institutions which arose calling themselves governments in the troubled quarter-century of the Chinese Republican era. Some have bordered on the pathological: Islamistan, for instance, which was the work of an Englishman who proclaimed himself emperor of a new Moslem Empire in Central Asia. The provincial authorities of Chinese Turkestan (Sinkiang) drove him out by using airplanes borrowed from the Soviet Union. In Foochow, in 1932-1933, there arose a movement headed by exiled Left Kuomintang leaders and other ultra-patriots eager for immediate war with Japan. This government was the first in years which did not pay lip service to the San Min Chu I, nor claimed legitimate descent from the movement of Sun Yat-sen and his revolutionaries—a surprising circumstance. Its very flexible constitution would have permitted collaboration with the Chinese Soviets—had the Red leaders not decided against it. The other main point in which it varied from the pattern set by the Nanking government was its profession of federalism. Known as the Federal Revolutionary Government of China, it lasted a few months only to be destroyed by Chiang, who had no scruples against using the weight of his modern armies, including planes and motorized troops. These vegetations of government can only interest the political botanist. Far more troublesome have been the opposition governments mentored or sponsored by outside forces. Tibet and Sinkiang (Chinese Turkestan) provided a fertile field of anti-Nanking agitation. Two "states" in China proper— Manchoukuo and an equally Japanese-controlled Peking Republic (1937)—find their counterparts in three others located in Chinese dependencies: the Communist republics of Outer Mongolia and Tannu-Tuva, and the ambiguous "state" in Eastern Inner Mongolia (sometimes called Mêngkokuo).
These Communist republics are under stable government, and, judged from reports which reach the outside, seem efficiently administered. They lie in the former Imperial Russian sphere of influence, south of the Sino-Russian border; except for the complications which would have arisen internationally, they might just as well have been in the Soviet Union as outside. Both governments maintain legations in Moscow. It might be mentioned that when the Russian Red Army invaded Manchuria in 1929 during the conflict over the Chinese Eastern Railway, a Barga Mongol Soviet was temporarily established. The Communist "states" cannot be compared with the Chinese Soviet Republic, which depended on no outside military support and resulted from a great ideological drive. They serve as advance posts of the Soviet Union—precedent for the creation of puppet states within China. Years later the Japanese manufactured a "state" in Eastern Inner Mongolia, with the cooperation of anti-Chinese Mongol princes, which Japan has publicized very little. Known in the world press as Mêngkokuo, it provides a Japanese buffer state to meet the Russian buffer of Outer Mongolia. On October 29, 1937, it reached its latest phase with the proclamation of the Autonomous Government of Inner Mongolia.