Paris of the East: Chiang Kaishek's Nanjing Decade and the City of Shanghai

Central interpretation

The Nanjing Decade was a real but narrow modernization. Between 1928 and 1937 Chiang Kaishek's government reunified China on paper, won back tariff autonomy and the customs, wrote some of the most progressive family and land laws in the world, and staffed its ministries with foreign-trained experts; its cities electrified and a professional class grew. But the regime's money and attention went to the army, its laws stopped at the city gates, and the village economy, squeezed by population growth and the collapse of silk and tea exports, did not improve. Against the Communists Chiang used force first, encirclement campaigns planned with German advice, and borrowed from European fascism a politics of discipline, a leader cult and a secret police, joined to Confucian morality in the New Life Movement. Shanghai, half of China's modern industry and the most cosmopolitan city in Asia, displayed both sides at once: foreign fortunes and refugee havens, and mill girls bound to labor contractors.

Part I: A Modern Capital (Review Question 3)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 442–444. Reading-guide sentence (p. 444): "The Nationalists' modernizing programs unfortunately failed to bring improvements to the countryside."

Opening with a funeral

The deck opens on 1 June 1929, when Sun Yatsen's coffin was carried up Purple Mountain to Lü Yanzhi's mausoleum (slide b). The burial is not in Ebrey, but it does two things for first-year students. It gives the new capital a face, and it shows the regime's claim to Sun's legitimacy, which matters again when Chiang invokes Sun's "political tutelage" (slide l). Charles Musgrove's study of Nanjing's architecture and ritual is the best guide to how carefully the event was staged, from the special train out of Beiping to Chiang's place beside the coffin.¹

Reunification and the recovery of rights

Ebrey's "three key warlords" (p. 442) are usually identified as Feng Yuxiang, Yan Xishan and the Guangxi clique of Li Zongren and Bai Chongxi; Zhang Xueliang's change of flags in Manchuria on 29 December 1928 completed the map (slide c). The unity was fragile: the Central Plains War of 1930 pitted Chiang against Feng and Yan, with hundreds of thousands of casualties. Ebrey's list of recovered rights (slide d) is accurate. William Kirby has argued that the regime's diplomacy, which won tariff autonomy in 1928–1930 and reorganized the customs and salt revenues, was among its most lasting successes, and that the Nanjing state was more internationalized than any Chinese government before it.² The deck keeps Ebrey's "thirty-three to thirteen" concessions as her count, in the notes only, because I have not found a source that confirms the exact figures.

The laws

The Land Law of 1930 capped rents at 37.5 percent of the main crop, the old Nationalist "25 percent reduction" from a nominal 50 percent; it was almost never enforced outside a few provinces. The family and inheritance books of the Civil Code (promulgated 1930, in force 1931) defined marriage as monogamous, allowed divorce by mutual consent or on judicial grounds, and gave daughters inheritance rights equal to sons'. Kathryn Bernhardt's study of women and property is the standard account of the inheritance revolution, and of how little it reached rural families.³ Slide e softens Ebrey's "a new marriage law outlawing concubinage." Lisa Tran's study of court records shows that the drafters deliberately left concubines out of the code: concubinage was not recognized as marriage, a wife could treat it as adultery for divorce, but taking a concubine was not made a crime.⁴

Cities and villages

Slides f through i give the debate in miniature. The optimistic case, made by Kirby's work on the engineers and planners of the National Resources Commission, is that the Nanjing state built the bones of a developmental state; modern industrial output grew several percent a year until 1937.⁵ The pessimistic case, Lloyd Eastman's, is that the regime never reached the villages, where some 80 percent of the population lived, and where taxes, debt and land hunger worsened.⁶ Ebrey (p. 444) leans to Eastman. James Yen's Ding County experiment (slide h) is the best-known rural reconstruction project; Charles Hayford's biography gives a fair account of both its achievements and its limits.⁷ For the export crisis (slide i), Lillian Li's history of the silk trade explains how Japanese filatures took the American market; the American Silver Purchase Act of 1934, which drained silver from China and forced the currency reform of November 1935, is a good example for students of how distant decisions reached Chinese villages.⁸

Part II: Fighting Communism (Review Question 4)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 443–444. Reading-guide sentence (p. 444): "To combat the intellectual appeal of the communists and build support for his government, Chiang in 1934 launched an ideological indoctrination program, the New Life Movement."

Chiang

Slide k uses the wedding portrait of December 1927, the image Ebrey herself reproduces on p. 444. Jay Taylor's biography, drawing on Chiang's diaries at the Hoover Institution, is now the fullest account of the man; it is sympathetic, and pairs well with Eastman's sharper view.⁹ The names box gives Chiang's pinyin name, Jiang Jieshi, and his formal name Zhongzheng (Chung-cheng), which students will meet in Taiwan's place names.

Force first

The deck places the encirclement campaigns (slide m) in the answer to Review Question 4 because they were Chiang's main answer to communism, and because Lecture 3 opens with the fifth campaign's success. William Wei's study is the standard account; it credits Chiang's own officers, as well as the German advisers, with the blockhouse strategy.¹⁰ Ebrey's phrase "German-planned" (p. 445) is therefore a slight overstatement, and the deck says the Germans helped. Chiang's line that the Japanese were a disease of the skin and the Communists a disease of the heart is widely quoted but hard to pin to one speech and date; the deck attributes it to "a famous speech" without a date.

Germany and fascism

The German connection (slide n) began in 1928 with Max Bauer, before Hitler, and was as much commercial as ideological: Kirby's Germany and Republican China shows the trade of German arms and industrial plant for Chinese tungsten and antimony.¹¹ Hans von Seeckt advised in 1933–1935 and Alexander von Falkenhausen from 1935 until Hitler recalled the mission in mid-1938. The quotation "Can fascism save China?" is from a 1935 speech cited by Eastman, The Abortive Revolution, p. 40; the deck quotes Ebrey's version with an ellipsis. Whether Chiang's regime was fascist is a real debate (slide o). Eastman called the Blue Shirts fascist outright; Frederic Wakeman's "Confucian fascism" stresses the blend of borrowed European discipline with an older moral order; others prefer "authoritarian."¹² The concept slide gives students a working definition before they meet the Blue Shirts.

Blue Shirts and New Life

For slide p, Wakeman's Spymaster documents Dai Li's secret service, including the killings of Yang Quan (June 1933) and of the Shenbao publisher Shi Liangcai (November 1934).¹³ The New Life Movement (slide q) was launched in Nanchang on 19 February 1934. Arif Dirlik's article remains the clearest analysis of its ideology as a counterrevolutionary answer to Marxism.¹⁴ The deck uses a real photograph of Soong Meiling's sixth-anniversary banquet of 1940 rather than a New Life poster, because the posters available are text-only.

Part III: Paris of the East (Review Question 5)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 444–445. Reading-guide sentence (p. 445): "Shanghai attracted more foreigners than any of the other treaty ports, a high of more than thirty-six thousand."

Size and wealth

Ebrey's "about 4 million residents" (p. 444) is high for the mid-1930s; the three jurisdictions' censuses add to roughly 3.5 million in 1935, and the city passed 4 million only in the 1940s, after wartime refugees poured in. Slide s therefore says "over 3 million." Ebrey's figure of "more than thirty-six thousand" foreigners matches one count but not others; the deck says "tens of thousands," and gives Ebrey's number in the notes because the guide asks students to copy that sentence. Marie-Claire Bergère's history of the city is the best one-volume account for instructors.¹⁵ On the refugees (slide t), Marcia Ristaino estimates about 18,000 Central European Jews in Shanghai by 1941, along with some 25,000 Russians.¹⁶

The park sign

Slide u corrects Ebrey's "signs posted that read 'No dogs' and 'No Chinese'" (p. 445). Robert Bickers and Jeffrey Wasserstrom's article traces the regulations of the Public Garden: one rule excluded dogs and bicycles, another reserved the garden for foreigners, and Chinese were admitted only as servants of foreigners until the garden opened to all on 1 June 1928. No sign with the single phrase "Dogs and Chinese Not Admitted" has been documented, though the exclusion was real and bitterly resented.¹⁷ This is a good place to teach students that a legend can be false in its details and true in its meaning.

Mill girls, the qipao, and the writers

For slide v, Emily Honig's Sisters and Strangers is the classic study of the contract-labor system in the cotton mills, and Gail Hershatter's Dangerous Pleasures the classic study of prostitution; both treat Ebrey's figures (170,000 women in industry in 1930; about 50,000 prostitutes) as reasonable orders of magnitude.¹⁸ No suitable real photograph of mill workers was found on Commons, so the slide uses a 1929 postcard of the straw-hut districts where many lived. The qipao (slide w) draws on Ebrey's Material Culture box (p. 448) and on Antonia Finnane's history of dress.¹⁹ Ruan Lingyu's death in March 1935 is mentioned briefly in the notes; Lu Xun's essay on the gossip that hounded her links slides w and x. For slide x, the arrest of the young League writers by Settlement police in January 1931 and their execution at Longhua on 7 February shows that the concessions' protection was conditional.²⁰

Pierian Spring: Women, Law, and Life (Review Question 11)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 442–443. Reading-guide sentence (p. 442): "Men who had studied in Western countries were appointed to many key government posts, and progressive policies were adopted, such as a new land law limiting rents and a new marriage law outlawing concubinage and allowing women to initiate divorce."

The Yuetsim biography (p. 443) is based on Maria Jaschok's interviews in Concubines and Bondservants.²¹ One point needs stressing with students: the laws of 1923 and 1929 that reached Yuetsim were Hong Kong colonial ordinances, passed after a campaign in Hong Kong and in Britain, not Nationalist law. Susan Pedersen's article tells that campaign's story.²² The comparison still works for Review Question 11, because the Nanjing Civil Code faced the same gap between law and household. Slides bb to dd move from promises, to a childhood, to what the law did and did not change, and the checkpoint (slide ee) asks students to weigh law against family.

Corrections and Cautions

Where the deck departs from Ebrey, and why

Nanjing as capital (p. 442). Ebrey: "not used as a capital since the early Ming." It was the Taiping Heavenly Capital (1853–1864) and Sun Yatsen's provisional capital in 1912, both taught earlier in the course (slide c).
Concubinage (p. 442). Ebrey: a marriage law "outlawing concubinage." The Civil Code did not recognize concubines as wives but did not criminalize concubinage (Tran). Slide e softens.
The park sign (p. 445). The exclusion of Chinese from the Public Garden until 1928 was real; a single sign reading "No dogs or Chinese" is a legend (Bickers and Wasserstrom). Slide u.
Shanghai's population (p. 444). "About 4 million" is high for the mid-1930s; the deck says over 3 million (slide s).
Foreign residents (p. 445). "More than thirty-six thousand" is one count; the deck says tens of thousands and keeps Ebrey's figure in the notes (slide t).
"German-planned" fifth campaign (p. 445). German advisers helped, but Chinese officers also designed the blockhouse strategy (Wei). Slide m.
Not confirmed, kept as Ebrey's: concessions reduced "from thirty-three to thirteen"; Victor Sassoon's "reportedly" nineteen hundred buildings; population "over 500 million by 1930."

Notes

Charles D. Musgrove, China's Contested Capital: Architecture, Ritual, and Response in Nanjing (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2013). ↩
William C. Kirby, "The Internationalization of China: Foreign Relations at Home and Abroad in the Republican Era," China Quarterly 150 (1997): 433–458. ↩
Kathryn Bernhardt, Women and Property in China, 960–1949 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). ↩
Lisa Tran, Concubines in Court: Marriage and Monogamy in Twentieth-Century China (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). ↩
William C. Kirby, "Engineering China: Birth of the Developmental State, 1928–1937," in Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond, ed. Wen-hsin Yeh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 137–160. ↩
Lloyd E. Eastman, Family, Fields, and Ancestors: Constancy and Change in China's Social and Economic History, 1550–1949 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). ↩
Charles W. Hayford, To the People: James Yen and Village China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). ↩
Lillian M. Li, China's Silk Trade: Traditional Industry in the Modern World, 1842–1937 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981). ↩
Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009). ↩
William Wei, Counterrevolution in China: The Nationalists in Jiangxi during the Soviet Period (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985). ↩
William C. Kirby, Germany and Republican China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984). ↩
Lloyd E. Eastman, The Abortive Revolution: China under Nationalist Rule, 1927–1937 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974); Frederic Wakeman Jr., "A Revisionist View of the Nanjing Decade: Confucian Fascism," China Quarterly 150 (1997): 395–432. ↩
Frederic Wakeman Jr., Spymaster: Dai Li and the Chinese Secret Service (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). ↩
Arif Dirlik, "The Ideological Foundations of the New Life Movement: A Study in Counterrevolution," Journal of Asian Studies 34, no. 4 (1975): 945–980. ↩
Marie-Claire Bergère, Shanghai: China's Gateway to Modernity, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). ↩
Marcia Reynders Ristaino, Port of Last Resort: The Diaspora Communities of Shanghai (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). ↩
Robert A. Bickers and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, "Shanghai's 'Dogs and Chinese Not Admitted' Sign: Legend, History and Contemporary Symbol," China Quarterly 142 (1995): 444–466. ↩
Emily Honig, Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919–1949 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986); Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). ↩
Antonia Finnane, Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). ↩
Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999); Wang-chi Wong, Politics and Literature in Shanghai: The Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers, 1930–1936 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991). ↩
Maria Jaschok, Concubines and Bondservants: The Social History of a Chinese Custom (London: Zed Books, 1988), 69–77. ↩
Susan Pedersen, "The Maternalist Moment in British Colonial Policy: The Controversy over 'Child Slavery' in Hong Kong, 1917–1941," Past & Present 171 (2001): 161–202. ↩