‘Ambiguous talk and equivocal attitudes'

Song Zheyuan had emerged from the crises of 1935 with his military forces intact, his political status significantly enhanced, and his freedom of action severely restricted. Throughout 1936, the issues confronting north China, from its internal political organisation and economic development, to its relations with the Nanjing government, were the subject of constant re-negotiation between Song, Nanjing and the Japanese authorities. Song was now faced on one hand with demands for rapprochement with Yin Rugeng’s east Hebei regime in Tongzhou, action with Japan against Communism, and economic co-operation, and on the other with Nanjing’s demands that he participate in national enterprises such as elections. As the Chinese central government and the Japanese authorities, civil and military, sought not only realisation of their various policy goals but also a clarification on their own terms of the relationship between China and Japan, Song depended for his survival on an avoidance of any such clarification. At first, he resorted to evasion and promises of compromise to postpone commitment to either Nanjing or the Japanese armies; as the year progressed his room for manoeuvre steadily diminished, and his reliance on the ‘ambiguous talk and equivocal attitudes’, condemned by Hu Shi in June, increased.