ABSTRACT
Early perceptions toward ethnopolitics Even today, when referring to the making of Republican China, a deep-rooted perception remains that the revolutionary campaign under Sun Yat-sen in the late Qing period was the central factor leading to the final collapse of Manchu rule. The political reality, however, was that Sun never really solidified his status as the top leader of Republican China. As a result, the Revolutionaries under Sun were largely unable to confront the ethnopolitical and territorial issues of postQing China. In January 1912, Sun Yat-sen was elected “provisional president” of the Chinese Republic. Yet within less than three months, his presidency was transferred to the northern-based Yuan Shikai, whose military power allowed him to stand out as the most capable figure to depose the ailing Qing imperial house, to command the more powerful Beiyang Army, and to generate foreign support.1 As Yuan became the new political leader of Republican China, it was his Peking-based government – not Sun Yat-sen and his fellow Revolutionaries – that was burdened with the challenging task of integrating the formerly Manchu outlying dependencies into the new Chinese nation-state. The Revolutionaries’ relative lack of political power in the early Chinese Republic by no means suggests that they were uninterested in the young Republic’s precarious frontier scenario. Before the Revolution of 1911, the primary aim of Sun Yat-sen and his followers had been to topple the Manchus. As a result, the political slogan adopted by the Revive China Society and the subsequent Alliance Society (Tongmenghui) – “drive out the Tartar slaves and revive China” – inevitably loomed large in their thinking. During the inchoate stage of Chinese revolution in the last decades of the Qing dynasty, however, the Revolutionaries had been struggling in vain to develop a consonant discourse about the Han peoples’ relations with other ethnic minority groups within the Qing Empire. As Pamela Crossley has argued, in the latter years of the Qing Empire, awareness of the evolving self-identities of non-Han Chinese in the domain of what was supposed to be “China” presented a conceptual crisis to the early nationalist Revolutionaries, regardless of their own varieties of ideological commitment.2 A key figure in the revolutionary activities, Wang Jingwei argued that a new China emancipated from Manchu rule would be a China entirely dominated by
the Han Chinese. As for the other ethnic frontier peoples, Wang optimistically believed that, once the Manchus were toppled and submitted to the Han Chinese, they would ultimately be assimilated into Han culture.3 Yet not all of Wang Jingwei’s fellow revolutionaries agreed with him. Liu Kuiyi, for instance, proposed on the eve of the Qing dynasty’s collapse that the Tongmenghui should expand its membership by recruiting new members from the Manchu, Mongol, Hui Muslim and Tibetan nationalities. Although Liu and many of his associates undoubtedly believed that China proper should belong to the Han Chinese, they nevertheless sensed that Han China proper would not be stable until the surrounding ethnic borderlands were secure. As a result, Liu advocated that the Han Revolutionaries should endeavor to woo the minority nationalities to their side without delay, and should treat them as important potential allies in overthrowing the Qing imperial rule.4 Pragmatic concerns soon came to the fore shortly after the 1911 Revolution, when suddenly the Qing imperial house was no longer the principal enemy; a fresh idea swiftly emerged among the Revolutionaries which imagined postimperial China as “the Republic of Five Nationalities” (wuzu gonghe). The “five nationalities” were to include the five major ethnicities of the former empire: the Han Chinese, Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans and Hui Muslims. The premise of the five-nationality doctrine was the conviction that non-Han peoples on the ethnic frontiers would want equal treatment under Chinese jurisdiction, as opposed to political independence from Chinese control altogether.5 Moreover, behind the political ideology of this “five-nationality republic” was the implication that the Revolutionaries wished to re-create the ethnic political order of the frontier – this time with the Han people at the center – once they took over the political machine of the whole Chinese nation. In August 1912, when the Alliance Society was reorganized as the KMT, and when the Revolutionaries were turning into the Nationalists, such a concept was further substantiated as an appeal for “the strict implementation of racial assimilation.”6 It therefore came as no surprise that, in the strong revolutionary milieu of 1910s China, the KMT Nationalists were outwardly uncompromising and determined in their public expressions that Yuan Shikai’s republican regime should take a pro-active stance toward solving post-Qing China’s problematic frontier territoriality. The crisis in Outer Mongolia (Mongolia north of the Gobi), was one of the earliest thorny problems confronting the nascent Peking authorities, and had attracted much attention among the Nationalists.7 In December 1911, the Mongols at Urga used the chaos of the Chinese Revolution as an opportunity to declare independence, with the reputed Yellow Hat sect prelate, the eighth Jebtsundamba Hutuktu, as their head of state (Bogd Khan). No longer believing that they should be loyal to a new Han Chinese republican regime, the Mongols ousted the Qing-appointed military governor from Urga, and most Han settlers who had flooded into Outer Mongolia in the last decade of Qing were driven out or killed during the period of 1911-12.8 On November 3, 1912, a Russo-Mongol Agreement was signed between Urga and Tsarist Russia, in which the Russians recognized the political autonomy of Outer Mongolia and promised to aid Urga
in the building and training of its own army. In return, the Mongols agreed to grant economic and trade privileges to the Russians. The signing of this agreement also indicated that henceforth the new Republican China’s position in the vast formerly Qing dependency was nearing a point at which it might be entirely excluded.9 The general response of the Nationalists to the situation in Outer Mongolia was sharp and severe. Chiang Kai-shek, then a 26-year-old middle-ranking officer serving in the Shanghai Revolutionary Army, wrote in December 1912 that there was already a “deep consensus” among the majority of Chinese people that the use of military means was necessary if Republican China wished to consolidate its precarious position on the northern frontier. Strongly favoring a proactive stance toward the independent-minded Outer Mongols, Chiang urged Peking to dispatch troops to Urga without hesitation in order to restore Chinese authority there. He also suggested that Yuan Shikai should be prepared to face up to the reality that, behind the scenes, China’s true enemies were the Russians, who were backing the Mongols against the Chinese. The young Chiang Kai-shek cast serious doubt on whether Republican China was then capable of fighting a victorious war against Tsarist Russia. As a military man, however, Chiang still proposed a very detailed military scheme for the review of the policy planners in Peking, in which he argued that once the situation quieted down in Outer Mongolia, some 200,000 troops should be deployed on such northern frontiers as Urga, northern Xinjiang and the Mongolia-Manchuria border in preparation for a possible war with Russia.10 Dai Chuanxian (also known as Dai Jitao), one of Chiang Kai-shek’s closest revolutionary associates and an active revolutionary theorist who would be among Chiang’s most trusted frontier advisors after 1928, was taking an equally proactive view about the infant Republic’s thorny frontier issues. Writing in November 1912 in the popular journal Minchuan Bao (People’s Rights) he edited, Dai exclaimed that the KMT was then the only political party in China courageous enough to propose military solutions for the crisis in Outer Mongolia. Dai accused both Yuan’s central government and other political parties of adopting an evasive attitude toward problems on China’s northern frontiers, and he strongly appealed to Han Chinese commoners to be prepared for a war with the “treacherous and obstinate” Mongols. Toward the end of 1912, Dai was so enthusiastic about using drastic means to secure the Mongolian region that he went as far as to urge his fellow countrymen to fulfill their “citizen duties” by saving daily expenses for the Peking government’s military expenditure.11 The early Revolutionaries-cum-Nationalists like Chiang Kai-shek and Dai Chuanxian were equally concerned about the situation in China’s ethnic borderlands in the southwest. Beginning around 1905, the Qing court implemented a series of reform programs in the southwest in order to strengthen the Qing government’s declining influence in the region. Attempts made by the Qing court included insisting that all inhabitants of the Kham district in Eastern Tibet were subject to the Peking-appointed magistrates; that all taxes were to be paid to the central government; that traditional taxes paid to Lhasa were to be abolished;
and that all ethnic Tibetans were to be subject to Chinese law. These reform programs, coupled with a Qing military advance from Sichuan into Tibet proper, greatly infuriated the thirteenth Dalai Lama, leading to his 1910 flight to India where he was warmly received by the British. The Qing court responded to the Dalai Lama’s flight by deposing him.12
