ABSTRACT
The Nationalist government was able to gain some respite after signing the inglorious ceasefire with the Japanese in May 1932. Nonetheless, the Nationalists remained fearful of a renewal of hostilities, and therefore it was essential that they seek a new territorial base for the sake of national survival and regime security.6 After the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the subsequent attack on coastal China, more Chinese intellectuals and government officials came to believe that, in the long run, an all-out Japanese invasion of China seemed inevitable. When it came to safeguarding their precarious regime from the war that they were sure was forthcoming, top Nationalist leaders began feeling the urgent need to find an inland power base capable of withstanding an attack by their enemy from the east.7 It was this crisis-driven and strategically based consideration, rather than the politically and ideologically oriented revolutionary theory, that played the crucial role in the subsequent formulation of Nationalist China’s frontier and ethnic policies. Henceforth, Nationalist leaders would invariably view China’s frontier and ethnopolitical issues as central to the security and survival of their regime. This perspective was best demonstrated in Chiang Kai-shek’s private speech to his top advisors at his residence in Nanchang in March 1934. Under the current circumstance, Chiang articulated candidly, the Nationalist center was utterly
incapable of crafting an effective five-nationality republic. Instead, Chiang underlined the importance of using frontier policy to aid in the development of the regime’s national security, while retaining the Three People’s Principle as part of the rhetoric of Nationalist frontier and ethnic policy.8 Between 1931 and 1934, new regulations were adopted by Nationalist military establishment with the goal of facilitating and legitimating their work in the frontier regions. Increasingly, military personnel began receiving special ethnopolitical training as they were prepared to be sent off to border areas where Nanking sought to build up potential power bastions.9 It is noteworthy that, at this juncture, it was China’s far northwest that was the focal point of Nationalist policy, as opposed to the southwest, where the Nationalists would later establish their wartime capital. In the eyes of Chiang Kai-shek and his strategists, targeting the bleak, barren and undeveloped Northwest as their possible power base was a Hobson’s choice.10 The April 26, 1932 editorial of the influential Da Gong Bao (Impartial Daily) of Tianjin made it plain that developing the northwest was “the only way out” for the war-menaced Nationalist government. The editorial asserted that China proper could not be secured if vast Manchuria were to fall to the Japanese. As a result, it was essential to bolster Nationalist power in the northwest, since the southwest was at that time still plagued with ceaseless warfare between local warlords who gave only superficial allegiance to the central authorities in Nanking.11
