Superpower Empire: China 1912 (version 2.0)

[Hendryk]

http://www.alternatehistory.com/disc...erpower+Empire

1911-1930: the Chinese Meiji

The dynastic change of 1912

In the 19th century, China went through a crisis that seriously weakened its society and political system. Western aggression, British-sponsored opium smuggling, unbalanced budgets, the Taiping uprising, and a string of natural disasters, in the context of the gradual decline of the Qing dynasty, added up to a nearly insurmontable challenge. After the failure of the 1898 reform movement, aborted within 103 days of its launching by Dowager Empress Cixi, many concluded that the only way out of decline went through regime change. The main revolutionary leader was Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan in pinyin, 1866-1925), a republican and anti-Qing activist who became increasingly popular among the overseas Chinese and Chinese students abroad, especially in Japan. In 1905 Sun founded the Tongmenghui (United League) in Tokyo with Huang Xing (1874-1916), a popular leader of the Chinese revolutionary movement in Japan, as his deputy. This movement, generously supported by overseas Chinese funds, also gained political support with regional military officers and some of the reformers who had fled China after the Hundred Days' Reform.

The republican revolution broke out on October 10, 1911, in Wuchang, the capital of Hubei Province, among discontented modernized army units whose anti-Qing plot had been uncovered. It had been preceded by numerous abortive uprisings and organized protests inside China. The revolt quickly spread to neighboring cities, and Tongmenghui members throughout the country rose in immediate support of the Wuchang revolutionary forces. By late November, fifteen of the twenty-four provinces had declared their independence of the Qing empire. A month later, Sun Yat-sen returned to China from the United States, where he had been raising funds among overseas Chinese and American sympathizers. On January 1, 1912, Sun was inaugurated in Nanjing as the provisional president of the new Chinese republic. But power in Beijing already had passed to the commander-in-chief of the imperial army, Yuan Shikai, the strongest regional military leader at the time. To prevent civil war and possible foreign intervention from undermining the infant republic, Sun agreed to Yuan's demand that China be united under a Beijing government headed by Yuan.

However, on January 18, Yuan died, officially of heart failure, although revionist historians have speculated ever since on whether his death may have been "assisted". But even with Yuan out of the way, Sun was made to understand by the conservative faction that had rallied behind Yuan that his legitimacy would not be recognized by the armed forces and much of the state apparatus if he went ahead with his presidency; to spare China a civil war, a man acceptable both to the revolutionaries and the old elite would have to assume power. That man, chosen jointly by both parties, turned out to be Kang Youwei (1858-1927). A native of Nanhai, Guangdong province, Kang came from a wealthy family of scholar-officials. He was an accomplished classical scholar with a knowledge of the West gleaned from Western books in translation. He and Liang Qichao had fled abroad after Cixi’s condemnation of the reform movement in 1898. Kang had spent a total of thirteen years in exile, visiting over forty countries on five continents, and promoting the Society to Protect the Emperor (est. 1899) and its successor the Society for Constitutional Government (1903). To this end Kang and Liang were also involved in two failed insurrections against Cixi in 1900. Kang made his most extensive travels in the West in the years 1904-1909, visiting twenty European countries and North America. He returned to China on February 3, 1912; nine days later, the last Manchu emperor, the child Puyi, abdicated. On March 10, in Beijing, Kang Youwei was sworn in as provisional president of the Republic of China.

Kang had put his time in exile to good use. After the failure of his 1898 reforms, he had concluded that the remedies to China’s decline--beyond the overthrow of the deliquescent Qing--were a revival of Confucian values, to shake them free of the sclerosis caused by their instrumentalization by the previous dynasty, and the right balance between Chinese traditions and Western technological innovations. Having spent several years in Japan, where the Meiji regime was precisley succeeding in creating a viable synthesis between Japanese culture and Western technology, he knew such a balance was possible.

However, Kang wasn’t enough of a reformer to feel at ease at the head of a republic. Within weeks of his coming to power, he convened a constitutional assembly to define the institutional form of the new regime, and gave the chairmanship to his long-time friend Liang Qichao. Under Liang’s influence--which relayed Kang’s--the assembly promptly opted for a return to Imperial rule, but, as a concession to Sun and the progressives, with a parliamentary legislative branch. The inspiration was the Wilhelmine Second Reich, which had already been the basis for Meiji Japan’s institutional structure. Many of Sun’s followers felt betrayed and urged him to break away from Kang, but the latter deftly appeased them by entrusting several key ministry portfolios to members of the Tongmenghui. The Qian (乾) dynasty was officially proclaimed on September 21, 1912, and Kang took the dynastic name Jianguo (建國), “Build the Nation”, although he will remain known in the Western world as Emperor Kang.

One of the first measures taken by newly crowned Jianguo is to declare, in time-honored fashion, the advent of the Great Awakening era. But he also busies himself with more mundane matters: reclaiming control of customs (and their revenues) from the Western powers; reorganizing the civil service; reforming the fiscal system; laying the groundwork for universal education; etc. The first two years of the Qian dynasty are thus busy ones, but the most significant development during that early period is the reconciliation of the traditional and modern Chinese elites around the new regime, facilitated by their cooperation at the legislative level. Indeed, the new Imperial Parliament is bicameral, with a Senate made of appointed members selected from both the old establishment and the business-oriented coastal bourgeoisie, and a Lower House made of elected members; but the minimum income requirement to be part of the electorate limits the latter to the wealthiest 8% of the population. Thus representatives of the two elites, the heirs to the old order and the rising bourgeoisie, get to rub elbows in both chambers, and learn to work together, much as the land-owning aristocracy and the industrialists did in 19th-century Britain.

As a compromise, and because he felt that a new dynasty required a new emblem anyway, Kang endorsed Sun's suggestion for a new Chinese flag.

[Hendryk]

1914: First reclaimed territory

The beginning of WW1 in Europe gives the new regime an opportunity to undo one of the many humiliations suffered by China during the previous decades. In September 1914, Jianguo announces that China sides with the French-British Entente, and therefore gets both countries’ blessing to reclaim the Shandong peninsula, heretofore occupied by Germany. The Germans have but a small expeditionary corps in Qingdao and, with no hopes of reinforcements coming to their rescue, are vanquished after two months of fighting; by December, the last German soldiers have surrendered. The regime’s propaganda machine milks the victory for all its worth, and the population, starved of good news for a century, lap it up. A long-dormant nationalist fervor is reawakened, and Jianguo takes advantage of it to launch an ambitious program of rearmament: British military instructors are hired to complete the modernization of the army along Western norms, and aircraft are purchased from France and Britain to equip the brand-new air force.

The very first plane to fly with Chinese colors is the RAF FE2, a 2-seat pusher-propeller fighter, followed in short order by the Caudron G4 bomber/reconnaissance plane. By 1917, Chinese pilots fly Nieuport 17 and SPAD SXIII fighters, and Vickers Vimy bombers are purchased in 1918.

1918: The Russian "unequal treaties" revoked

It is therefore with newfound confidence in its new military might that China observes the Russian revolution of February 1917, the takeover by the Bolsheviks at the end of the year, and the subsequent descent of the Czarist empire into civil war. The political chaos, and in particular the secession of Russia’s Pacific regions give China the opportunity to intervene militarily into Russian territory, ostensibly to contain the Bolsheviks’ expansion. In fact, the alliances made with the various White Russian factions such as the one led by Von Ungern-Sternberg are purely circumstantial; by 1920, the short-lived Republic of the Far East is promptly annexed, along with the part of Kazakhstan south of Lake Balkhach. China thus restores the Sino-Russian border as it had been defined by the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689, and undoes the annexions perpetrated by Russia in the second half of the 19th century.

The de facto occupation of Eastern Siberia at a time when, in Europe, the embattled Soviet regime is forced to accept important losses of territory to the benefit of the Baltic states, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania spurs China to create wholesale the kingdom of Yakutia, a puppet state that stretches from the East bank of the Ienisei to the Bering Strait, of which Yakutsk becomes the capital. At the time of its creation, the contry has but a scattered population made up of Buriats (23%), Yakuts (22%), White Russians (21%), Tunguz (10%), Mongols (6%), Chukchi (5%), other Siberian peoples (11%) and Chinese (2%). The latters’ share of the population rises in the course of the following decades and reaches 35% by the early 21st century.

Yakutia is predictably satellized politically and economically by China, on which it is dependent for protection against the USSR and for development. The regime is officially a constitutional monarchy, but the real power is in the hands of Chinese “advisors”. Chinese garrisons are stationed along the Yakuto-Soviet border, in Yakutsk, and in the larger towns (Krasnoiarsk, Ulan-Ude and Magadan, for the most part).

Yakutia's creation and vassalization, needless to say, is done with the blessing of the Western powers, who are all to happy to outsource to China the job of containing the Soviets to the East. Better have Eastern Siberia turned into a Chinese-controlled puppet state, the reasoning goes, than remain part of the USSR. After all, can anyone imagine the USA sharing a border with the Soviet Union?

1933-1945 : The Sino-Japanese war

By 1922, Yakutia has been secured and the relationship with the nascent Soviet Union evolves towards the same form of peaceful--if wary--coexistence that also becomes the rule on the USSR’s European borders. Various attempts by the Bolsheviks to export Communism to either China or Yakutia remain fruitless ; except for a handful of frustrated members of the Tongmenghui’s radical wing and the odd exalted intellectual, the Communist ideology fails to seduce a population already mobilized by the new regime. Banned or barely tolerated by the authorities throughout the following decades, the Communist Party will remain a marginal force in Chinese politics.

Having scored a major geopolitical victory at a relatively minor cost, the Qian dynasty focuses inward and takes advantage of the comparative international stability of the 1920s to invest the bulk of its resources into infrastructural development. Military expenditures are no longer a priority from 1922 onwards and the modernization of the Chinese armed forces is for the most part put on hold. The Chinese soldier’s main weapon during that period is the Lee-Enfield Mk. III bolt-action rifle, licence-produced in national armories since 1914, with officers being issued a Chinese-made version of the Mauser M-1896 pistol ; both weapons will remain in widespread use until 1945 and even later in certain units. From 1924 however, a deliberate effort is made to encourage the development of a national aeronautical industry by producing under licence both civilian and military planes ; to that effect, agreements are signed with several European aircraft companies, chief among which Fokker. The new aircraft factories, located in Chongqing, Sichuan, as part of a policy of developing the industrial infrastructure of the inner provinces, begin churning out F.VII airliners and Fokker’s D line of fighter planes, from the D-XI in 1924 to the D-XXI in 1937.

Jianguo dies in 1927 and is succeeded by his son, who takes the dynastic name Guoxing (國星), “Star of the Nation”. Within two years of his coming to power, however, international developments force a radical reevaluation of priorities for the Chinese government.

Japanese victories: 1933-1938

In Japan, the economic impact of the 1929 crisis and the rising influence of the military lead to the implementation of expansionist policies ; as early as 1930, Tokyo no longer hides its imperialistic ambitions in North-East Asia and begins planning for the invasion of former Manchuria from its Korean colony. Faced with the growing Japanese menace, Guoxing resumes the modernization of the armed forces, but privileges the Army and Air Force rather than the Navy, the importance of which is underestimated by the Chinese Chiefs of Staff. Compared with Japan, China in 1930 is sorely outmatched in battleships, both in size and number, especially in the cruiser category ; those few ships built during the 1920s are mostly medium-sized aircraft carriers.

In 1931 and 1932, tensions keep rising between Japan and China ; while the Japanese military lobby pressures the government into endorsing its aggressive agenda, officers on the Sino-Korean border initiate incidents on their own initiative in the hope of creating a strategic fait accompli. They are eventually successful : on March 4, 1933, an exchange of gunfire on the Yalu river degenerates and gives the Japanese the casus belli they needed to officially declare war on China. The first offensives are repelled by the Chinese forces, and both sides dig in along the banks of the Yalu, leading to a situation not unlike Europe’s “phony war” of 1939-1940. Faced with this stalemate, the Japanese Chiefs of Staff begin to plan a series of large-scale operations involving air raids, a land offensive in former Manchuria and troop landings in Qingdao, Tianjin and Shanghai. The offensive is launched in May 1934 ; taken off-guard by its scale, Chinese forces are overwhelmed and cede large chunks of territory in their hasty retreat : by October, the Japanese control the four Manchurian provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, Fengtian and Rehe, although the beachhead on the estuary of the Yangzi is pushed back by the Chinese after heavy fighting. The capital is moved from Nanjing to Chongqing. Yakutia isn’t spared : its small army and the Chinese garrisons, barred from receiving reinforcements, can only offer token resistance to the Japanese advance from the South and the Okhotsk beachhead ; so that the south-east of the country is swiftly conquered and occupied.

By 1935, the Chinese forces have partially recovered from the onslaught and manage to slow down considerably the Japanese advance to the South and West, without however being able to stop it altogether. Partisan warfare in the occupied areas begins to organize and ties down an increasing share of Japanese troops; whenever retreating from a given area, the Chinese army leaves behind carefully concealed caches of weapons, ammunition and explosives, and plants sleeper agents in the civilian population with the aim of organizing resistance networks behind enemy lines. But the Japanese army is still at this point superiorly trained and equipped, and Japanese mastery of the seas is undisputed. The parts of China and Yakutia under Japanese occupation are subjected to thorough exploitation of both their natural resources and manpower. At the end of that year, apart from the aforementioned Manchurian provinces, the Japanese control Suiyuan, Henan (including Beijing), Shandong and Shanxi (with Taiyuan subjected to a brutal siege) ; further landings enable the seizing of Xiamen, Hong Kong, and the island of Hainan. The frontlines eventually stabilize in northern Henan and Jiangsu after the famous battle of Kaifeng. It rages from September 6 to November 17, 1935, and claims the lives of over 130,000 Chinese and 90,000 Japanese ; yet, despite intensive bombing and shelling of the city by the Japanese, the Chinese forces stand their ground, making the city a symbol of national resistance against the invaders, and earning it the nickname “Verdun of the East”. Neither side manages a significant breakthrough in the course of the following three years, although Japan generally retains the initiative during that period and keeps China on the defensive.

The turnaround: 1938-1945

The conflict takes a new turn in late 1938 : from that point on, the Chinese military apparatus, based in the war capital of Chongqing where a sprawling industrial complex has been developed in the course of the previous five years, benefits from the full mobilization of both society and economy, and is now battle-hardened. The long-delayed modernization of the armed forces is by then in full effect, and there is no longer a significant technological gap with the Japanese ; elite Chinese troops (and, increasingly, resistance fighters) are equipped with Schmeisser MP-28.II SMGs, while the Air Force is finally catching up with Japanese aircraft : apart from its workhorse, the Fokker D-XXI, the CAR fields Vickers Wellington bombers, with such cutting-edge fighter designs as the Dewoitine D-520 and the Bloch MB-155 under negotiation with the French for license production. Ground forces are issued with the kind of light armor that has proved most effective in the hilly, waterlogged battlefields of Henan and Jiangsu : the obsolescent Renault FT-17 is being phased out and replaced with newer AMC-35s and Vickers Mk. IVs. Generally speaking, China by that time benefits from the rearmament of Western Europe, as new models of tanks and planes are designed and their licenses sold by the cash-strapped governments of France and Britain. Partisan operations are also in full swing and force the Japanese to divert much of their strength for messy, morale-eroding counterinsurgency operations that for the most part only manage to harden the resolve of civilian resistance ; with over 2 million square kilometers of often densely populated territories to keep under control at the price of brutal repression, the Japanese fighting strength is, slowly but inexorably, beginning to wear out.

The outbreak of WW2 in Europe is a boon for China on three counts. First, thanks to the official alliance between Japan and Germany, China achieves the status of co-belligerent alongside France and Britain against the Axis, meaning it benefits from that point on of the American Lend-Lease program. Second, the European conflict is a timely distraction for the Soviet Union, which may otherwise have taken advantage of the situation to attempt an invasion of Yakutia ; Kremlin archives declassified in the mid-1990s offer evidence that Stalin was at the very least contemplating such a move, although no precise strategy had been formulated. Be that as it may, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact kept him focused on Poland and the Baltic states, and the bulk of the Red Army deployed to the West. Third, being allied to Britain, China gets important assistance from Australia ; from October 1939, new shipyards in Perth built with Chinese labor begin assembling the Chinese Navy’s new war fleet (most of those workers will stay on after the war, and their descendants make up the bulk of today’s sizeable Chinese community in Perth).

The following years confirm the orientation taken by the Sino-Japanese conflict in late 1938 : a war of attrition in which, neither side being able to gain a decisive advantage on the other, each seeks to exhaust the other by inflicting on it unbearable casualties. Despite the Japanese use of chemical and bacteriological warfare, China gradually gains the upper hand as it can draw on virtually unlimited manpower while the bloody insurrection in occupied provinces takes it toll on Japanese forces. Attempts at encirclement by invading French Indochina in September 1940, and Malaysia and the Dutch East Indies in January 1941, while geographically expanding the so-called Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere and giving Japan much-needed access to South-East Asia’s natural resources, contribute to stretching Japanese forces even thinner. The island of Singapore, turned into a virtual fortress by British forces with Chinese reinforcements, successfully resists the Japanese attack. Likewise, the only part of Burma that falls to the Japanese is the southern Tenasserim district; joint British-Chinese expeditionary forces manage to hold the rest of the country. This keeps the strategic Burma Road, completed in 1938 and augmented by a railway line the following year, open. The Sikkim Road, a second railway link between Lhassa and Calcutta, begun in 1939, will only be completed in 1944.

With the Chinese front looking more like a quagmire by the year, and Washington’s embargo on oil and strategic materials putting severe pressure on Japan, Tokyo attempts to break the stalemate with a preemptive strike on the United States. But the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor achieves the opposite of the intended result, and draws the USA into the war on the Allied side, on both the European and Asian fronts. From then on the Japanese defeat is only a question of time, as the Mikado’s empire has neither the manpower nor the resources to hold against two continental powers. Furthermore, America takes over as China’s main provider of military equipment : just as M-2 haltracks and T17E1 light tanks replace the Vickers and Suomis of previous years on the ground, Chinese skies soon fill up with Lockheed P-38s, Republic P-47s and North American P-51s as older Fokker D-XXIs, G1s and Bloch MB-155s find themselves outmatched by the newer Zero fighters (the Dewoitine D-520s stay on, but are primarily used as carrier-based fighters in the latter stages of the conflict). The victories achieved by the Japanese Navy in the Pacific in 1942 are merely the swan song of Japanese power ; by December 1944, having fought to exhaustion, its industrial potential obliterated by Chinese and American bombing raids, its reserves of fuel empty, Japan has no choice but to accept unconditional surrender, which is signed on January 3, 1945. Meanwhile, the Chinese leadership has taken advantage of the Tehran Summit in 1943 to negotiate the retrocession of the foreign concession in Shanghai as soon as victory is achieved and the implementation of a timetable for that of Hong Kong (the issue of Macau, however, remains unsolved at that time).

Victory gives China most of its territorial integrity back, as it regains, besides Shanghai’s foreign concessions, the island of Taiwan, annexed by Japan in 1895 with the treaty of Shimonoseki (Sakhalin island, temporarily occupied by Chinese forces after the war, is eventually ceded back to Japan in 1952). The Qian dynasty’s legitimacy is all the stronger for it ; for the Chinese people, Emperor Guoxing’s famous declaration from the Southern gate of the Forbidden City on Chinese New Year’s Day 1945, "Zhongguo qilai le!" (China has awakened), symbolically erases a century’s worth of humiliations and foreign occupation. Another strongly symbolic move is the sending to Europe of an expeditionary force to help out the Allies against the Third Reich ; many of those soldiers, once demobilized, will stay on in Europe as guest workers to take part in post-war reconstruction. Bringing in their families, they will jump-start a large-scale migration movement of Chinese labor to Western European countries during the following three decades, as Europe’s booming economy needs extra manpower ; by 1975, Chinese will be the largest ethnic minority in France, Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, and the second largest in Italy and Denmark, for a total of 7 million individuals, a figure which has doubled by 2004.

The long and bitter war against Japan has changed China in many ways. Politically, the regime enjoys a level of popular legitimacy unprecedented since the 18th century. Economically, development is no longer confined to the coastal areas, as Sichuan has benefited from the crash industrialization of the war years and now hosts a vibrant industrial complex as well as several renowned technical universities and military academies ; the sleepy prewar backwater is now an economic powerhouse in its own right. Culturally, the war generation has learned to take pride in both the resilience and adaptability of Chinese culture ; historians talk of a "Chongqing generation" of decision makers who came of age during the war years : men and women who grew up in the East but spent a decade in Chongqing, joining the war effort in the embattled capital, and blended the coastal provinces’ typical pragmatism and open-mindedness with the hinterland’s respect for tradition. Last but not least, socially, the war has accelerated evolutions that otherwise may have taken a generation longer, such as greater equality for women, who by 1945 constitute some 39% of the workforce (the armed forces have also gone co-ed in 1938, to make up for the high losses suffered during the initial phase of the war).

(Here is the flag of Yakutia, chosen in 1922)

[Hendryk]

1945-1990 : The emergence of a tripolar world

Dividing up the world : 1945

It is during the four-party summits of Yalta and Potsdam between the USA, the USSR, Britain and China that the general outlines of the geopolitical equilibria of the following decades are drawn, with each power informally negotiating the extent of its sphere of influence with the others. Since Britain, weakened and painfully aware of the programmed disparition of its colonial empire (with a timetable for Indian independence in the works), chooses to align itself on the American position, the three main players are the United States, the Soviet Union and China. At the time of the Yalta summit, whereas the war in Asia is over, the Japanese having surrendered in January 1945, it is still raging on in Europe, although the fact that America can now deploy its entire military might against the Third Reich means that victory is but a question of time. The European theater thus focuses the attention of both Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, so that Guoxing has relatively little difficulty in obtaining key concessions in the reconstitution of China’s traditional influence in East Asia ; and while the future "iron curtain" between the US-British zones and the Soviet zone is gradually being delineated through backroom deals and the reality on the ground, the Chinese leadership imposes the official recognition of China’s occupation of Korea, French Indochina, Malaysia and the Dutch East Indies. In the last three territories, China can therefore channel and influence at will the independence movements.

The stabilization of the tripolar balance : 1945-1973

The early post-war years provide China with several diplomatic opportunities. Both the USA and the USSR remain focused on Europe, where each side interprets the other’s every move as a covert attempt to expand its area of influence. By 1949 the two superpowers are engaged in a high-stakes game of brinkmanship which culminates with the Berlin blockade. Meanwhile the European colonial powers lick their wounds and are unable to prevent Chinese ingerence in their Asian possessions. China, which has placed the negotiations between independence movements and their colonial masters placed under its unofficial arbitrage, skilfully uses its seat at the permanent Security Council of the young UN to give them a multilateral dimension. A series of timetables is--sometimes grudgingly--agreed on for the accession to sovereign status of all European colonies in East Asia. Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia thus become independent in 1950. Then Burma does in 1954. Indonesia follows in 1955, although Nanjing obtains that the island of Bali become a separate country. Finally, in 1958, comes the turn of Malaysia, merged with Singapore but not with the sultanate of Sarawak ; this causes some resentment from the ethnic Malays, as the inclusion of Singapore makes the Chinese the majority community. China further imposes that the retrocession of Macau take place on the same timetable as that of Hong Kong (scheduled for July 1, 1953), under threat of “unilateral liberation” of the Portuguese-controlled territory.

However, one of China’s most far-reaching diplomatic achievements of that period takes place outside of its traditional sphere of influence. Involved with observers’ status in the negotiations between the British government and the Congress party for Indian independence, Chinese diplomats weigh in on the latter’s side, and pressure Britain not to endorse Ali Jinnah’s objective of creating a separate country--which would have been named Pakistan--for India’s Muslim minority. The subcontinent’s partition along religious lines is therefore avoided ; although riots between Muslims and Hindus do take place in 1947 and 1948, a bloody war of religion is preempted. China’s support for Indian unity, it hardly needs saying, was anything but altruistic: the Chinese were simply anxious to avoid letting Indian Muslims create a dangerous precedent that might have fueled demands for independence in one of China’s own Muslim-majority provinces, Xinjiang.

By 1948, the Cold War spills beyond Europe : the Soviet Union asserts its Jdanovian vision of global geopolitics (the struggle between an "imperialist" and a "democratic" side), seeks to infiltrate so-called Third World countries with local Communist parties, and denies Yakutia’s very right to exist. Various border incidents take place along the Ienisei during 1950, as Stalin tests the political and strategic will of China to protect its largest vassal state. But despite the odd dogfight between Soviet Mig-15s and Chinese Daweilan-8s and -9s (the licence-produced versions of the De Havilland Vampire and Venom), the situation fails to degenerate into open conflict : having understood China’s determination, Stalin backs down.

The 1950s are for China a geopolitically fruitful decade : as the former colonies of European powers become independent--mostly without noticeable incident--they have little choice but to align themselves on Nanjing in order to avoid becoming pawns in the strategic power play between the USA and the Soviet Union. So as not to alienate these new allies, China shuns any overtly dominant attitude, and instead reestablishes the old principle "give more, take less" that ruled at the time of the Ming and Qing dynasties its relationship with tributary states. As Laozi put it :

"A great country humbles itself before a small one
And thus wins it over
But if a small country humbles itself before it
The great country shall be the loser
What does a great country want but get more client states
What does a small country want but a secure overlord
Both profit from their relationship
But it is up to the great one to bow down"
(Dao De Jing, chapter 61)

China’s most enthusiastic satellite state is, predictably, Malaysia, in which Prime Minister Lee Kuan-yew governs a population that is 62% Chinese ; at the other end of the spectrum is Indonesia, where the government treads a fine line between keeping Nanjing satisfied and exploiting the population’s anti-Chinese sentiment. Most, like Vietnam (which has become a republic under the presidency of Ho Chi Minh), fall somewhere in between. The one point of contention throughout the period is the status of the Huaqiao, or overseas Chinese, who have formed powerful communities in all South-East Asia and usually control the bulk of their host countries’ economy ; lengthy bilateral negotiations, in some cases lasting into the early 1960s, are necessary to sort out their status and citizenship.

In domestic politics, the Chinese regime remains generally authoritarian, with the executive, under the control of the Emperor, firmly in charge ; but the members of the Lower House are from 1947 elected by universal suffrage (including women), with several parties represented, although the pro-government conservatives hold a de facto monopoly on legislative power until 1965, when the progressives, headed by Zhou Enlai, become the majority party for the first time. The government’s economic policy is consistently growth-oriented, and blends business-friendly measures with a strong dose of social paternalism, akin to what is being practiced in Japan (and indeed by most of China’s satellite states, with stunning results in terms of economic development). Confucianism remains the official ideology, and although freedom of religion is recognized, and most people practice the traditional blend of Buddhism, Taoism, ancestor worship and folk religions (with Islam present in Xinjiang, Ningxia and parts of Yunnan), the activity of Christian missionary movements is strictly monitored. The country’s centralized structure gradually evolves toward federalism as provinces are granted increasing autonomy in such fields as taxation and education, with special provisions in the case of Tibet, Xinjiang and Mongolia. In 1965, Emperor Guoxing declares the end of the "Great Awakening" era, and opens the "Long Prosperity" era ; he dies in 1971 and his succeeded by his son, who takes the dynastic name Wensheng (文胜), "Triumph of Civilization". His reign is initially a continuation of his father’s, but he gradually reduces his involvement in day-to-day government, giving an increasingly more prominent role to the Prime Minister ; by the time of the premiership of Zhao Ziyang (1977-1989), the regime has evolved into a Japanese-style parliamentary democracy, although one with strong technocratic leanings, with the state bureaucracy remaining influential behind the scenes. Did not Confucius say :

"Should the ruler embody virtue, he need not give any order for everything to be well. Should he not, even if he multiply his orders, he shall not be obeyed." (Lunyu, 13 :6)
And : "Who, better than Shun [23rd century BC], knew how to govern through non-action ? What was action to him ? All he had to do for peace to reign, was to sit in all dignity face to the South." (Lunyu, 15 :4)

China's economic and demographic growth, 1945-1973

In economic terms, the period from 1945 to 1973 is when China completes its extensive development phase, which had begun in the early 1920s and was interrupted by the war ; the exceptions were the military-industrial complex and the industrial nexus built around Chongqing between 1934 and 1945. The wartime destructions, especially in the North-East and the coastal areas, require massive investments in infrastructures, transportation and housing, which in turn create a Keynesian effect on the economy at large. Heavy industry and consumer industry develop jointly to feed the huge and growing domestic demand, but also to take advantage of the opening of international markets from then on regulated by such multilateral agreements as the GATT. With a plentiful workforce, the investment potential of the Huaqiao, and a reactive entrepreneurial class, China’s industry closely follows Japan in its penetration of Western markets.

China’s population goes from 520 million in 1945 to 930 million in 1973, with a growing proportion of city-dwellers. This demographic boom, caused by the compounded effects of the post-war surge in birth rates and a rising life expectancy, is partially offset by emigration, mostly to the satellite states of South-East Asia, to Western Europe, and to the USA, Canada and Australia : over a 30-year period, no fewer than 25 million Chinese settle in foreign countries. This process is made easier by a series of bilateral agreements initiated by the Chinese government : just as, at the time of their retrocession in 1945, the residents of the Shanghai International concession are granted the double Chinese-American citizenship and those of the French concession the double Chinese-French concession, the residents of Hong Kong are granted the double Chinese-British citizenship when the city reverts to Chinese rule in 1953 (for fairness’s sake, residents of Macau get the Chinese-Portuguese citizenship, although few leave for Portugal until the mid-1980s) ; so millions of migrants can settle in their host country without administrative hurdles. As for emigration to the USA, Canada and Australia (as well as New Zealand), it is made possible by the repeal under diplomatic pressure by Nanjing of the anti-Chinese laws put in place in those countries in the late 19th century and applied until WW2. The Chinese authorities first obtain the authorization of family reunion for those immigrants arrived from China in earlier decades but often condemned to lifelong bachelorhood, prevented as they were from bringing in their spouses and children. Next, all discriminatory legislation specifically targeted at Chinese people is removed from the books. In spite of scattered xenophobic reactions in those countries’ public opinions--fed in some cases by populist politicians--the legal status of Chinese immigrants is everywhere normalized by 1955.

1973-1990: From Détente to the Second Cold War

The First Cold War, which is conventionally considered to have begun with the Communist takeover of the Czech government in 1948, had gradually given way to détente after what historians commonly refer to as the Havana-Berlin Tradeoff, wherein the Nixon administration, faced with the erection of the Berlin Wall by Warsaw Pact forces in August 1961, agreed with Khrushchev to condone the new German status quo in exchange for the USSR in turn ceasing military assistance to the young Castro regime in Cuba. By the following year, US forces had invaded the island and reinstated President Batista, but at the cost of a civil war between pro- and anticommunist Cubans that would last for over two decades, devolve by the mid-1980s into a Colombian-style endemic insurgency, and would only truly be over with the Clinton-brokered summit of July 1995 between President Gutierrez and Communist leader Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

China takes advantage of the détente both to consolidate its control over its sphere of influence and to increase its economic clout by attracting foreign capital (it becomes the world’s second destination of direct investment after the USA in 1967, and the first by 1974) and expanding its penetration of Western markets. Even with the slowdown caused by the 1973 worldwide recession, its GDP growth rate remains one of the world’s highest, along with Japan’s, Korea’s, Vietnam’s and Malaysia’s. Further, as China’s "hard power" grows, so does its "soft power" : after a parenthesis of some 150 years during which the Chinese cultural model in East Asia had been overshadowed by Western imperialism, it once again becomes prevalent in China’s traditional sphere of influence (several of the region’s countries officially adopt neo-Confucianism as a state ideology, Mandarin becomes the region’s lingua franca, and Vietnamese schools resume teaching the Chinese writing system alongside the newer, French-imposed Latin script), and in the 1970s starts spreading into the Western world, relayed locally by overseas Chinese communities. By 1975, Chinese cultural centers, language schools and universities have opened in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Vancouver, Toronto, Sydney, Perth, Auckland, Jakarta, London, Paris, Rome and Hamburg ; their dual purpose is both to provide a way for the children of Chinese emigrants to remain in touch with their heritage, and to introduce Chinese civilization to the Western public at large. Did not Confucius say : "Studying knowledge to apply it at the right moment, welcoming a friend who comes from afar, are not those the greatest pleasures ?" (Lunyu, 1 :1) Nanjing likewise sponsors the opening of Taoist and Buddhist temples in large Western cities to cater to the spiritual needs of Chinese communities, although the countercultural movement of the late 1960s sparks an interest for Chinese forms of worship among elements of the Western population as well ; while statistics are imprecise, it is estimated that some 1.5 to 2.5% of Westerners have converted to Taoism or Mahayana Buddhism by the early 21st century.

During that period, China acquires two symbolic elements of superpowerdom with the detonation in 1962 of its first nuclear bomb (designed, it later turned out, in partnership with France, which was at the same time developing its own nuclear capability), and the launching in 1971 of its first satellite, using the first of what will turn out to be a highly successful line of rockets, the Tianshen.

Détente however comes to an end in the late 1970s. The trigger event is, as is well known, the Afghan war. After India’s independence in 1947, Afghanistan had aligned itself on Iran in order to escape the geopolitical ambitions of its large Eastern neighbor and the Soviet Union alike. For three decades its position seemed secure, although the inflitration of disgruntled Muslims from the Pashtun-populated regions of Northwestern India remained a recurrent nuisance, and occasionally soured relations with India when some of them attempted to use Afghanistan as a rear base for Islamist activism across the border. But Afghanistan’s precarious stability ends abruptly when Iran falls to Khomeyni’s revolutionary forces in February 1979 : the chaos rapidly spills over across the border, and within four months the Afghan central government’s authority, flimsy at the best of times, breaks down altogether in the turmoil of ethnic, religious and political infighting that pits Sunnis against Shi’ites, Pashtuns against Tajiks, and rural conservatives against urban modernists. By August, both India and the Soviet Union claim a right to "secure their strategic interests" by sending troops to "pacify" Afghanistan ; with the USA temporarily paralyzed by the fall of its allied regime in Iran, and the new Zhao administration in China widely perceived as unwilling to take a firm stand on the international stage, Brezhnev decides to take the gamble. On September 2, the first Soviet troops cross the border ; India quickly follows suit. China decides to preemptively secure the strategic Wakhan corridor that leads to its own border, and by the end of the month the three armies are facing each other off in central Afghanistan. The Second Cold War has begun.

With Afghanistan de facto divided into three zones of occupation, the relations between China and the Soviet Union fall to their lowest level since 1950. Clashes take place between both armies, and once again the Yakuto-Russian border is the theatre of armed incidents, this time pitting Mig-23s against Huofeng-11s (the Chinese version of the Saab-37). The trilateral arms race between the USSR, the USA and China, which had cooled somewhat since the early 1960s, resumes with a vengeance in 1980. China’s armament policy remains unchanged : increasing its technological know-how by producing in its own factories local versions of whatever equipment it needs ; it is because of the reluctance of the US government to allow the sale of licensing rights for advanced weapons systems, and because it seeks to avoid dependency on a single exporter, that China prefers dealing with European manufacturers, such as Saab, British Aerospace, Westland and Aérospatiale. China does however purchase from US manufacturers long-distance transport planes (the Lockheed C-5, the Douglas C-141, and more recently the Douglas C-17), indispensable to its force projection capability, and such aircraft as the Fairchild Republic A-10, the Sikorsky MH-53 and the Bell AH-1. However, from the mid-1980s China increasingly deploys nationally designed weapons systems, as its R&D is by then able to hold its own.

Tensions remain high until 1986, when the new First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev, launches his twin policies of glasnost and perestroika, in a desperate and ultimately doomed attempt to reform the terminally sclerotic political and economic structures of the USSR. New and increasingly far-reaching treaties on arms control are signed in 1986 and 1987 with US President George Bush and Chinese Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang, and in 1988, the border dispute with Yakutia is finally settled when the USSR officially recognizes the Ienisei as its Eastern border (as well as renouncing any right to the territories that China had reclaimed in 1918 south of Lake Balkhash). But the Cold War is only truly over in 1989, with the mostly peaceful collapse of Communist governments in Eastern Europe.

During that decade, while the USSR’s economy slowly grinds to a halt, China’s keeps growing, and that of its satellite states along with it ; in 1985 China’s GDP is equal to 60% of the United States, which had undergone a considerable slowdown during the eight-year Ford administration, in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis (in fact, most pundits agree that without the rise of international tensions in 1979, incumbent President Ford would have lost the White House to Democratic challenger James Carter). It is also in 1985 that China launches its first manned space mission, onboard a Tianshen-7 rocket ; four years later, the Chinese have installed their own permanent orbital station.

Here is the world in 1975:
The US sphere of influence is in blue (the neutral European countries are in purple);
The Soviet sphere of influence is in green;
The Chinese sphere of influence is in red;
The Indian sphere of influence is in orange.
The rest of the world is either nonaligned, disputed or marginalized.

[Hendryk]

1990-2006 : And then there were two

By the early 1990s, China as a whole is no longer in a phase of extensive development, but in one of intensive development : while the level of economic activity in the provinces of the hinterland (with the exception of Sichuan) remain comparatively lower than in the coastal provinces, the gap is narrowing, and the completion of most infrastructural projects causes a relative slowdown of the growth rate ; from then on, China is a First World economy in its own right. In 1992, the average per capita income in Guangdong, Fujian, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Hebei and Shandong is equal to Germany’s, and slightly lower but catching up in Guangxi, Hubei, Sichuan and Liaoning ; in 2004, it is equal in the aforementioned provinces to California’s ; some 580 million Chinese are now economically of middle class level or above. GDP parity with the USA is reached in 2003, and after that date China is the n°1 world economic power.

The Chinese economy benefits to no small extent from the quantum leap in information technologies that takes place in the 1990s ; just as investments in more traditional sectors have reached saturation levels, hich-tech electronics and online services begin to pick up. In order to maximize the potential of those new activities, industrial parks devoted to hardware and software production are created in several locations, the largest of which is in the coastal city of Dalian. As India similarly develops in own electronic industry, businesses in both countries begin merging and concluding assorted deals with each other, leading to the development of what is now known as the Dalian-Bangalore Connexion. In 2004, China has the largest absolute number of PCs in the world, with the USA coming second and India third, which explains that 47% of all online communications are in Chinese. From the early 1990s onward, China also becomes a world pioneer in the development of fuel cells and alternative fuels, as the Chinese government seeks to reduce the country's growing dependence on oil imports; from 1997, the first operational (and affordable) hybrid cars roll off the assembly lines, and by 2006 11% of Chinese vehicles are hybrids, including most public vehicles, and the proportion rises steadily.

Meanwhile, Chinese universities such as Beida and Fudan enroll a constantly rising number of foreign students not only from satellite countries and India but also, increasingly, the Western world, the Middle East and Africa, while enrollment figures in the overseas network of Chinese colleges rise at a similar pace.

The last few years of the 20th century further witness a shift in the flow of international investments : outward investment from China becomes almost as high as inward investment into the country, as Chinese businesses increasingly implant branches abroad or take over foreign firms. While economic links with satellite countries, the USA, Canada, Japan and Europe remain dynamic, China also becomes Australia and New Zealand’s first trading partner, and the second after the USA for Argentina, Chile, Brasil and Mexico. China thus expands its economic and cultural influence in the South Pacific, and makes promising inroads into Latin America.

In 2006, the total number of Chinese worldwide is 1,653 million, of which 79 million live outside of China. The breakdown is as follows :

-- 29 million in vassal Asian countries, including 13 million in Malaysia (62% of the population), 5 million in Indonesia (2% of the population) and 4 million in Yakutia (35% of the population) ;
-- 21 million in the USA (6% of the population) ;
-- 15 million in the European Union (3% of the population) ;
-- 6 million in Canada (17% of the population) ;
-- 4 million in Australia (19% of the population) ;
-- 2 million in Latin America, half of those in Brazil (0.8% of the population) ;
-- 1 million in New Zealand (21% of the population) ;
-- 1 million in South Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, the Pacific and Africa.

This diaspora is both highly economically dynamic and upwardly mobile. Its hold on the economy of China’s satellite states, which in several cases dates back centuries, grows more solid by the year ; and thanks to low-profile, family-based business networks that extend into every overseas Chinese community, as well as the growing integration of Chinese immigrants in the economy of their host societies, this influence--distinct from but contributing to the more classic trading links with China--begins to expand in the rest of the world. But second- and third-generation children of the diaspora take every avenue of social promotion, from the entertainment industry to politics. One of them is the current governor of California, Sonia Cheng, who moved many with her speech at the inauguration of the largest Buddhist temple in the USA, built in 2002 in San Francisco, when she praised Buddhism as "a religion that embraces science where others shun it ; a religion that gives compassion where others demand obedience ; a religion in the name of which no crusade was ever launched, nor any jihad fought."

The fall of Communism in Eastern Europe is followed within two years by the collapse of the USSR as a country ; and whereas the Soviet Union could at least project the appearance a superpower, post-Communist Russia is little more than a Third World state--and a rapidly depopulating one at that--leaving only the USA and China as global powers. The relationship between the two, while not altogether devoid of a strategic dimension, turns out to be primarily diplomatic, economic and cultural, as each deploys its "soft power" to increase its global influence. Each obviously retains a civilizational edge in its own sphere of influence, but, to an increasing extent, the two hegemonic cultures begin competing on each other’s turf. This Protean race is not the less intense for being mostly covert, and as pundits such as Joseph Nye and Benjamin Barber don’t fail to notice, it is the ultimate vindication of Sunzi’s theories over those of Clausewitz, for this "clash of civilizations" is a war without violence whose battlefields are the hearts and minds of people, and whose soldiers are universities, entertainment industries, religious organizations, websites and even restaurants. On one side are the Ivy League colleges, Hollywood, Christian missionary movements, Silicon Valley and McDonalds ; on the other, Beida/Fudan, the Shanghai and Hong Kong studio network, Buddhist NGOs, the Dalian-Bangalore Connexion and Chinese takeaways. It is, in a sense, the purest, most abstract form of warfare, between two different perceptions of history, humanity’s place in the world, and the nature of reality itself : a war between memes and possibly meta-memes. What people read, watch, hear, eat, wear and believe are so many vectors for the competition. However, as Korean scholar Park Sunghee writes, unlike conventional warfare, this conflict may ultimately turn out to be a positive-sum game, as it enriches the global cultural makeup ; in Taoist fashion, out of binary opposition a dynamic process greater than the sum of its parts can emerge. In the most controversial chapter of her seminal book "Two Beget Three : Making Sense of the Sino-US Civilizational Bipolarity" (2002), she speculates on how the global order may have turned out without this equilibrium :

"Let us imagine an international system in which there aren’t, as is the case, two competing hegemonic civilizations of equal influence, but only one. How such a system may have come into being is beside the point ; we shall simply, for the sake of argument, suppose it did. A single dominant civilization, whichever it may have been, would, lacking a counterbalance, have become overly assertive ; it would have aggressively attempted to remake weaker cultures in its image ; and these cultures, unable to compete on the same level--that of civilizational paradigms--would have responded with asymmetrical forms of resistance : petty obstructionism in the best cases, and endemic terrorism in the worst ones. A world in which a dominant civilization has no competitor would hardly be the peaceful one we have come to take for granted since the advent of the Sino-US bipolarity ; rather, it would be one of predatory cultural homogenization on the one hand, and endlessly recurrent acts of violent resistance on the other, the two trends indefinitely reinforcing one another."

Here is the world in 2006:
The Chinese sphere of influence is in brown, and the countries not technically part of it yet generally aligned on China are in orange;
The US sphere of influence is in green;
The European sphere of influence is in blue;
The Indian sphere of influence is in fuschia;
Russia is in khaki;
Iran is in yellow;
The rest of the world is either nonaligned, disputed or marginalized.

[Hendryk]

Name: Yakutia
Type: Constitutional parliamentary monarchy
Capital: Yakutsk
Ruler: Queen Angara I (born 1953, crowned 1981)
Size: 8,678,772 km2 (fourth-largest country in the world after China, Canada and the USA)
Population: 12.3 million:
Chinese: 35 %; Russian: 27%; Sakha: 15%; Buriat: 12%; Mongol: 3%; Tunguz: 3%; Chukchi: 2%; other (Even, Evenk, Tatar, Yukagir, etc.): 3%.
Religions: Buddhism (Mahayana and Lama branches), Taoism, Chinese folk religion, Shamanism, Christianity (Orthodox branch), Islam (Sunni branch).
Resources: Mining (coal, cobalt, diamonds, iron, gold, manganese, nickel, tin, uranium), oil, natural gas, hydroelectricity, timber, fishing, ginseng.
Origin: The history of Yakutia as a country only began in 1921, when Chinese expeditionary forces deployed on Russian territory to fight the Bolsheviks annexed Siberia east of the Ienisei river and turned it into a puppet state of China, with tacit Western approval. The kingdom of Yakutia was officially proclaimed on March 21st, 1922, and joined the Society of Nations the following year.

[Hendryk]

Who's Who

Huang Xing (黃興) (1874-1946), revolutionary leader, militarist and statesman.
He was one of the founders of the Guomindang and the Republic of China along with Sun Zhongshan; together they were known as Sun-Huang during the Xinhai Revolution. He was also known as the "Eight Fingered General" because of wounds sustained during the war.
When Kang Youwei succeeded Yuan Shikai as provisional President of the Republic and convened a Constitutional Assembly, Huang Xing was one of the Guomindang members who joined it and contributed to the elaboration of the new Chinese Constitution. When Kang abolished the Republic and proclaimed himself Emperor, offering moderate members of the Guomindang government positions, Huang, like Lin Sen, initially accepted, and urged fellow Guomindang members to endorse the legitimacy of the Qian dynasty. He was Interior Minister from 1912 to 1919, but quit to help Sun organize the Guomindang as the opposition party to the ruling Jinbudang in Parliament. After Sun’s death in 1925, he became party chairman, a job he held until 1939 when he was succeeded by Zhou Enlai.

Huang Yuanyong (黃遠庸), (Pen name: Huang Yuansheng 黃遠生) (1885-1952) was a renowned Chinese author and journalist during the late Qing Dynasty and early Qian dynasty. Huang made significant contributions to journalism and literacy in China, particularly as an innovator in both journalistic methodology and writing style.
Huang Yuanyong (given name: Huang Weiji 黃為基) was born to an educated family in Jiujiang, Jiangxi. His father was a scholar and an officer in charge of foreign affairs in Ningbo (寧波), and a number of his family members were government officials. Influenced by his family, Huang immersed himself in Chinese classics when he grew up. To improve his English, his family hired a foreign tutor to teach him the language.
Huang completed secondary schooling in Zhejiang. During his studies at Zhejiang Huxing Nanxun Government School (浙江吳興南潯公學), he was involved in educational reform campaigns and became a member of the Progressive Party (進步黨). In 1903, Huang came in seventh place in the regional examination in Jiangxi (江西). Nevertheless, the 19-year-old Huang did not follow the custom of becoming a government official, instead continuing his legal study at Chuo University in Tokyo, Japan. Six years later, he returned to China and started working at the Civil Postal Department (郵傳部). Later on, he became a journalist and worked for several different papers and news agencies. Huang was particularly famous for his discussions of politics and social issues.
Following the collapse of the Qing dynasty, Huang ceased his work as an officer in the new government of the Republic of China. Li Shengduo (李盛鐸), one of the Beiyang five ministers (北洋五大臣), played an influential role for Huang. He advised Huang to enter journalism, saying that "In western countries, the majority of journalists are familiar with history and international affairs. If you choose to work in this field, there is no doubt you will become a famous reporter." After receiving Li's advice, Huang began his career as a journalist.
Huang soon won recognition for his abilities as a journalist. In 1912, Huang, Lan Gongwu (藍公武) and Zhang Junmai (張君勱), who were known as "The trio of youth for modern China" (新中國三少年), first published Shao Nian Zhong Guo Weekly 《少年中國周刊》 to criticise politics. Later on, Huang and two other young journalists, Liu Shaoshao (劉少少) and Ding Foyan (丁佛言), were entitled '"The outstanding trio of journalism" (新聞界三傑).
Huang initially supported the creation of the Republic of China under Yuan Shikai's leadership. Being acquainted with both Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, he welcomed the former’s nomination as provisional President and the creation of a Constitutional Assembly chaired by the latter, and approved of most of their political and institutional reforms. He was an outspoken supporter of the Qian dynasty, and worked for a time for the New China Herald, a pro-government newspaper created by Kang’s daughter. Though he later quit in order to maintain his editorial independence, and preferred to work for independent newspapers and magazines over the following years, he remained an admirer of the new regime.

Jiang Jieshi (蔣介石) (1887-1975) was a military leader.
Jiang Jieshi was born in the town of Xikou, Zhejiang, in a well-off family of salt merchants. However, his ancestral home was the town of Heqiao, Jiangsu. In an arranged marriage, Jiang was married to fellow villager Mao Fumei (1882-1939). Jiang and Mao had a son Jingguo and a daughter Jianhua.
Jiang grew up in an era in which military defeats had left China destabilized and in debt, and he decided to join the military. He began his military education at the Baoding Military Academy in 1906. He left for the Military State Academy in Japan in 1907. There he was influenced by his compatriots to support the revolutionary movement to overthrow the Qing Dynasty and to set up a Chinese Republic. He befriended fellow Zhejiang native Chen Qimei, and in 1908 Chen brought Chiang to the Revolutionary Alliance. Jiang served in the Imperial Japanese Army from 1909 to 1911.
With the outbreak of the Wuchang Uprising in 1911, Jiang returned to China to fight in the revolution as an artillery officer. He served in the revolutionary forces, leading a regiment in Shanghai under his friend and mentor Chen Qimei. The revolution was ultimately successful in overthrowing the Qing Dynasty and Jiang became a founding member of the Guomindang.
After Kang Youwei proclaimed the Qian dynasty and convinced several Guomindang members to join his government, Jiang was offered a position in the new regime’s military structure, a move intended to counterbalance the influence of Yuan’s former followers, many of whom had likewise been coopted. Jiang was given the rank of general, and put in charge of the modernization of the armed forces under the authority of chief of staff Li Yuanhong.
Though he vied for the chairmanship of the Guomindang after Sun’s death in 1925, he found himself outmanoeuvered first by Huang Xing and then, in 1939, by Zhou Enlai.

Kang Sijie (康思杰) a.k.a. Guoxing (國星) (1897-1971): Second emperor of the Qian dynasty.
Born to the second of Kang Youwei’s concubines, Kang Sijie would follow the rest of his father’s family and household in foreign exile after Dowager Empress Cixi’s crackdown on the reform movement in 1898. His early education was by private Chinese tutors hired by his father, but, living in Japan, the United States and Europe until age 15, Kang was also exposed to non-Chinese cultures. He returned to China in 1912, and his status suddenly changed from son of a wanted dissident to that of potential heir to the Imperial throne.
Kang Sijie was carefully groomed by his father for the role of emperor-to-be, and acceded to the throne in 1927, taking the dynastic name Guoxing, “Star of the Nation”. His would turn out to be a troubled reign, as he would have to steer his barely reorganized country through both the Sino-Japanese conflict and the Cold War. Though he was not exempt from despotic temptations, and did rule as a virtual dictator through the early years of the Sino-Japanese war, his reliance of a cadre of qualified (and frequently Western- or Japanese-educated) civil servants gave his reign a distinctly technocratic overtone. Making good on a wartime promise, he organized in 1947 the first-ever elections ever held in China with universal suffrage, though actual democratization would have to wait for his successor.

Kang Sitong (康嗣同) a.k.a. Wensheng (文勝) (1942- ): Third emperor of the Qian dynasty.
Named after his grandfather’s fellow reformist Tan Sitong, who was executed by the Qing in 1898, Kang Sitong acceded to the throne in 1971 and took the dynastic name Wensheng, “Triumph of Civilization”. A quiet, self-effacing man deeply influenced by Taoist and Buddhist thought, Wensheng was instrumental in democratizing China’s neo-Imperial regime, limiting his own role to that of a figurehead on the model of the Japanese emperor, and leaving actual power in the hands of the directly elected Prime Minister. The beginning of his reign coincided with the coming of age of China’s baby-boomer generation, who has been referred to as “the children of Wensheng”. Dearly loved by the people, he favors a simple lifestyle far removed from traditional Imperial pomp, and frequently makes public appearances, usually to promote social and humanitarian initiatives.

Kang Tongbi (康同壁) (1881-1960): Daughter of Kang Youwei, she studied journalism at Barnard College, New York. In 1914, she founded the New China Herald, a pro-government newspaper, and was instrumental in using the nascent Chinese movie industry for propaganda purposes. Her influence helped create the first voluntary female battalions in the regular army during the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Kang Youwei (康有為) a.k.a. Jianguo (建國) (1858-1927): Founder of the Qian dynasty. Coming from a wealthy family of scholar-officials in Guangdong, Kang Youwei watched with dismay the deliquescence of the Qing dynasty and the encroachment of Western powers and Japan both in China’s traditional sphere of influence, and on Chinese territory. In 1898, he led the “Hundred Days” reform movement before it was abruptly cancelled by Dowager Empress Cixi. Spending the next 13 years in exile, he read up on Western political theory and refined his own ideas, which were based on an updated version of Confucianism. The 1911 revolution, which overthrew the Qing, created a chain of events that would lead to his becoming the first Emperor of the Qian dynasty: Yuan Shikai took over as provisional President of the Republic, but his death on January 18, 1912 sparked a power struggle between his former followers and the members of Sun Zhongshan’s Tongmenhui; Kang was seen by both sides as an acceptable compromise, being both a legalist of conservative leanings, and a reformist. Once nominated President on March 10, he convened a Constitutional assembly whose chairmanship he entrusted to his disciple Liang Qichao, and proceeded to turn the short-lived Republic into a neo-Imperial regime inspired both by the Wilhelmine Reich and Meiji Japan. Kang proclaimed the Qian dynasty on September 21, 1912, and took up the dynastic name Jianguo. Liang became his prime minister.
His legitimacy was shaky at first, and the endorsement of China’s various political factions, chief among which the pro-Qing counter-revolutionaries, and Sun’s partisans (now organized as the Guomindang), was accomplished by coopting them into his power structure. While Sun himself declined to hold a government position, several of his followers accepted. Then two events would cement the new dynasty’s legitimacy in the eyes of most of political elites: the restoration of Chinese sovereignty over the German-occupied Shandong peninsula in 1915, and the victory against Russia’s revolutionary forces during the Siberian campaign of 1918-1922, which enabled both the reclaiming of lands annexed by Russia in the 19th century, and the creation of a new satellite state to the North.
In his last years of reign, Jianguo focused on the Empire’s economic development, and encouraged the building of infrastructures in the inner provinces, with mixed results. He died in 1927 and was succeeded by his son Kang Sijie, who took up the name Guoxing.
Kang remained a first-rate calligrapher throughout his life, and many of his works are exposed at the Nanjing National Museum.

Kong Xiangxi (孔祥熙) (1881- 1967), often known as H. H. Kung, was a wealthy Chinese banker and politician in the early 20th Century.
Born in Shanxi Province, he was a 75th generation descendant of Confucius. He studied at Oberlin College and Yale University.
Kong was an early supporter of Sun Zhongshan, but shifted his allegiance to Kang Youwei after 1912 and the instoration of the Qian dynasty. He served as minister of industry and commerce (1924-1929), minister of finance (1929-1935), and governor of the Central Bank of China (1935-1949). He joined the central executive committee of the Jinbudang in 1926.

Li Yuanhong (黎元洪, courtesy Songqing 宋卿) (1864-1928) was a general during the late Qing dynasty and the first chief of staff of the Qian dynasty.
A native of Huangpo, Hubei, he was the son of a Qing veteran of the Taiping rebellion. He graduated from Tianjin's naval academy in 1889 and served as an engineer in the First Sino-Japanese war. His cruiser was sunk and he survived because of his life belt since he could not swim. He later joined the army and became senior military officer in Hankou. In 1910, he attempted to break up revolutionary rings that infiltrated his 21st Mixed Brigade. He did not arrest any caught in subversive activities, but simply dismiss them.
When the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 broke out, the Wuchang mutineers needed a visible high-ranking officer to be their figurehead. Li was well respected, had supported the Railway Protection Movement, and knew English which would be useful in dealing with foreign concerns. He was reportedly dragged from hiding under his wife's bed and forced at gunpoint to be the provisional military governor of Hubei despite killing several of the rebels. Though reluctant at first, he embraced the revolution after its growing momentum and was named military governor of China on November 30. Qing Premier Yuan Shikai negotiated a truce with him on December 4.
Despite Li commanding the rebel army, Sun Zhongshan, then one of the leaders of the Tongmenhui, became the first provisional president in Nanjing on January 1, 1912. Li was made vice president as a compromise and he formed the People's Society to campaign for the presidency. Meanwhile, the north was still under the control of the Qing. A negotiation made Sun step down in favor of Yuan Shikai as president with Li keeping his vice-presidency. This ended the Qing dynasty and reunified north and south China. The People's Society later merged with Liang Qichao’s Constitutionalist Party to form the Progress Party (Jinbudang).
Li was nominated by Kang Youwei as chief of staff of China’s armed forces, with the task of putting an end to factionalism and reorganizing them along rationalized lines. He took advantage of the Shandong campaign of 1915 and the Siberian campaign of 1918-1922 to achieve both objectives: while the fighting kept the officers too busy to plot against each other or the fledgling dynasty, it also provided a rationale for standardizing weapons, supplies and operational procedures. He was succeeded in 1923 by Wu Peifu.

Liang Qichao (梁啟超, courtesy: Zhuoru 卓如, pseudonym: Rengong 任公) (1873-1929) was a scholar, journalist, philosopher and reformist of the late Qing Dynasty and a key statesman of the early Qian dynasty.
He was born in the village of Xinhui (新會), Guangdong. His father, Liang Baoying (梁寶瑛, courtesy name Lianjian 蓮澗), was a farmer, but a background in classics allowed him to introduce Liang to various literary works when Liang was six years old. By the age of nine, Liang started writing thousand-word essays and became a district-school student soon after. Liang had two wives in his life: Li Huixian (李惠仙) and Wang Guiquan (王桂荃). They brought nine children to Liang; all of them became successful individuals through Liang's strict and effective education. Three of them became members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, another embraced politics and became governor of Guangdong.
Liang passed the Xiucai (秀才) degree provincial examination at the age of 11. In 1884, he undertook the arduous task of studying for the traditional governmental exams. At the age of 16, he passed the Juren (舉人) second level provincial exams (the equivalent of a master’s degree) and was the youngest successful candidate at that time.
In 1890, Liang failed in his Jinshi (進士) degree national examinations in Beijing and never earned a higher degree. He took the exams along with Kang Youwei. The examiner had been determined to flunk Kang for his heterodox challenge to existing institutions, but since the exams were all anonymous, he could only presume that the exam with the most unorthodox views was Kang's. Instead, Kang disguised himself by writing an examination essay espousing traditionalist ideas and passed the exam while Liang's paper was assumed to be Kang's and picked out to be flunked.
Inspired by the book Information About the Globe (瀛環志略), Liang became extremely interested in western ideologies. After returning home, Liang went on to study with Kang Youwei, who was teaching at Wanmu Caotang (萬木草堂) in Guangzhou. Kang's teachings about foreign affairs fueled Liang's interest in reforming China.
In 1895, Liang went to Beijing again with Kang for the national examination. After failing to pass the examination for a second time, he stayed in Beijing to help Kang publish Domestic and Foreign Information. He also helped to organize the Society for National Strengthening (強學會), where Liang served as secretary.
As an advocate of constitutional monarchy, Liang was unhappy with the governance of the Qing Government and wanted to change the status quo in China. He organised reforms with Kang Youwei by putting their ideas on paper and sending them to Emperor Guangxu (光緒帝, 1871-1908; reigned 1875-1908). This movement is known as the Wuxu Reform or the Hundred Days' Reform. Their proposal asserted that China was in need of more than "self-strengthening", and called for many institutional and ideological changes such as getting rid of corruption and remodeling the state examination system.
This proposal soon ignited a frenzy of disagreements, and Liang became a wanted man by order of Empress Cixi (慈禧太后,1835-1908), the leader of the political conservative party who later took over the government as regent. Cixi strongly opposed reforms at that time and along with her supporters, condemned the "Hundred Days' Reform" as being too radical.
In 1898 the Conservative Coup ended all reforms and exiled Liang to Japan, where he stayed for the next fourteen years of his life. In Japan, he continued to actively advocate democratic notions and reforms by using his writings to raise support for the reformers’ cause among overseas Chinese and foreign governments.
In 1899 Liang went to Canada, where he met Sun Zhongshan among others, then to Hawaii. During the Boxer Rebellion Liang was back in Canada, where he formed the "Save the Emperor Society" (保皇會). This organization later became the Constitutionalist Party which advocated constitutional monarchy. While Sun promoted revolution, Liang preached reform.
In 1900-1901, Liang visited Australia on a six-month tour which aimed at raising support for a campaign to reform the Chinese empire in order to modernise China through adopting the best of Western technology, industry and government systems. He also gave public lectures to both Chinese and Western audiences around the country. He returned to Japan later that year.
In 1903 Liang embarked on an eight-month lecture tour throughout the United States, which included a meeting with President Theodore Roosevelt in Washington, DC, before returning to Japan. Throughout that period Liang became respected journalist and newspaper editor as well as a prolific writer; Lin Yutang would call him “the greatest personality in the history of Chinese journalism.” His bi-weekly paper New Citizen (新民叢報), published in Yokohama, Japan, from 1902 to 1907, was instrumental in spreading his political ideas to Chinese elites both in China itself and among the diaspora.
Liang advocated reform in both the genres of poem and novel. Collected Works of Yinbingshi (飲冰室合集) are his representative works in literature which were collected and compiled into 148 volumes. Liang gained his idea of calling his work as Collected Works of Yinbingshi from a sentence of a passage written by Zhuangzi (莊子•人間世). In the sentence, it stated that “Although I am suffering from the worry and coldness caused by my involvement in the politic, my heart is still warm and eager to continue my work.” (“吾朝受命而夕飲冰，我其內熱與”). As a result, Liang called his workplace as Yinbingshi and addressed himself as Yinbingshi Zhuren (飲冰室主人), which literally means Host of Yinbing Room in order to present his idea that he was worrying about all the policial matters, so he would still try his best to reform the society by the effort of writings. Liang also wrote fiction and scholarly essays on fiction, which included Fleeing to Japan after failure of Hundred Days' Reform (1898) and the essay On the Relationship Between Fiction and the Government of the People (論小說與群治之關係,1902). These novels emphasized modernization in the West and the call for reform. Liang's works were strongly influenced by the Japanese political scholar Katō Hiroyuki (加藤弘之, 1836-1916), who used methods of social Darwinism to promote the statist ideology in Japanese society. Liang wrote in his well-known manifesto, New People (新民說):
“Freedom means Freedom for the Group, not Freedom for the Individual. (…) Men must not be slaves to other men, but they must be slaves to their group. For, if they are not slaves to their own group, they will assuredly become slaves to some other.”
When the Qing dynasty was overthrown and Yuan Shikai died while provisional President of the Republic, Kang Youwei was chosen by the various political factions to succeed Yuan. One of Kang’s first decisions was to convene a Constitutional Assembly, of which he entrusted the chairmanship to Liang. Having decided to proclaim himself Emperor of the Qian dynasty, Kang named Liang his Prime Minister, a position he would hold until his death in 1929. Liang’s party, the Jinbudang, was joined by many moderates who, although of progressive leanings, considered the Guomindang’s agenda too radical; the Jinbudang would retain a parliamentary majority until the 1965 elections, though that was due in part to the authoritarian nature of the early Qian dynasty, which placed numerous obstacles both formal and informal to parliamentary alternance.
As head of government, Liang found that putting his ideas into practice first required securing the allegiance, or at least the assent, of the various factions that Kang had coopted into his power structure as the price of their endorsement of the new regime. And, although he initially considered implementing democratic reforms, he found it easier to rely on executive fiat and treat the Parliament (only the lower house of which was elected in any case, and only, at that point, by a small percentage of the population) as a rubberstamp for his government’s policies.
In his seventeen years of premiership, he managed to modernize China’s institutions and economy, laying the groundwork for further progress throughout the twentieth century. After his death in 1929, a shrine was erected in his honor in Nanjing, and he is considered to this day one of modern China’s greatest statesmen.

Lin Sen (林森) (1868-1951), courtesy name Zichao (子超), sobriquet Changren (長仁), was a revolutionary and a statesman.
Born in Shangan Township (尚幹鄉), Fujian, Lin worked in the Telegram Bureau of Taipei in 1884. After the First Sino-Japanese War, he engaged in guerilla activities against the Japanese occupiers. He returned to the mainland and worked in the Shanghai customs office in 1902. He then became an anti-imperial revolutionary, joining the United League in 1905, and was an overseas organizer for the Guomindang.
In 1912, when Kang Youwei succeeded Yuan Shikai as provisional President of the Republic and convened a Constitutional Assembly, Lin Sen was one of the Guomindang members who joined it and contributed to the elaboration of the new Chinese Constitution. When Kang proclaimed himself Emperor and invited moderate members of the Guomindang to accept positions in his government, Lin Sen took up the offer, along with Huang Xing, Song Jiaoren and others, and preferred to remain in the government rather than join the parliamentary opposition. For that reason he was expelled from the Guomindang in 1919, and became honorary member of the Jinbudang under the chairmanship of Liang Qichao. He held several ministerial portfolios throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and retired from politics in 1941.
Lin visited Qingzhi ("Green Plant") Mountain in Lianjiang, Zhejiang, and was fascinated by it, which encouraged him to style himself "Old Man Green Plant" (青芝老人 Qingzhi Laoren) in his old age.

Lin Yutang (林語堂) (1895-1976) was a Chinese writer and inventor whose original works and translations of classic Chinese texts became very popular in the West.
Lin was born in Fujian, near Xiamen. This mountainous region made a deep impression on his consciousness, and thereafter he would constantly consider himself a child of the mountains (in one of his books he commented that his idea of hell was a city apartment). His father was a Christian minister.
Lin studied for his bachelor's degree at Saint John's University in Shanghai, then received a half-scholarship to continue study for a doctoral degree at Harvard University. He left Harvard early however, moving to France and eventually to Germany, where he completed his requirements for a doctoral degree (in Chinese) at the University of Leipzig. From 1923 to 1926 he taught English literature at Beijing University.
Lin was very active in the popularization of classical Chinese literature in the West, as well as the general Chinese attitude towards life. He worked to formulate a new method of transliterating the Chinese language into Western script, and created an indexing system for Chinese characters. He was interested in mechanics, he has invented and patented a Chinese typewriter, and several lesser inventions such as a tootbrush with toothpaste dispensing.
His first two books, My Country and My People (吾國吾民) (1935) and The Importance of Living (生活的藝術) (1937), written in English in a charming and witty style, brought him international fame. Others include Between Tears and Laughter (啼笑皆非) (1943), The Importance of Understanding (1960, a book of translated Chinese literary passages and short pieces), The Chinese Theory of Art (1967), and the novels Moment in Peking (京華煙雲) (1939) and The Vermillion Gate (朱門) (1953), as well as Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage (當代漢英辭典) (1973). He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969.
Lin’s political career began when he joined the pro-government Jinbudang in 1931. During the Second Sino-Japanese War he wrote the screenplays of several propaganda movies, and travelled extensively to the United States to lobby the American government into providing more support to China. After 1945 he was instrumental in getting anti-Chinese provisions in US immigration laws to be softened and eventually lifted altogether. He was minister of education from 1953 to 1965, and ambassador to the United States from 1965 to 1971.

Liu Xiling (刘希齡) (1937-) : politician and statesman. Liu was born in Dongwang (formerly known as Vladivostok) while the city was under Japanese occupation. His father, a member of a local partisan cell, was executed by the Japanese in 1939, and his family spent the rest of the war in hiding. He joined the GSP in 1958 while a student at Beijing University, and after graduating involved himself full time in politics.
Rising through the ranks of the party, he gravitated towards its conservative wing. He kept a low profile during Wang’s premiership, quietly building up support among conservative elements and the party’s rank and file, and took advantage of the GSP’s electoral defeat in 1977 to challenge Wang as party chairman.
He became Prime Minister in 1989, just as the Cold War was ending, and with the international context more stable than at any time since the foundation of the Qian dynasty, focused most of his attention on domestic issues.
He lost the 2001 elections and relinquished the party chairmanship to Gong Xin, but remains a prominent figure of the GSP’s conservative wing.

Mao Zedong (毛澤東) (1893-1919): The son of a farmer and money lender, he was a private in the provincial army of Hunan at the time of the 1911 revolution. Following the advent of Kang Youwei’s neo-Imperial regime, he joined the new national army and took part in the 1915 campaign against the German occupation forces in Qingdao. Promoted to the rank of field sergeant, he died in november 1919 during the campaign of Yakutia.

Ruan Lingyu (阮玲玉) (1910-1997): One of the most famous actresses in the early decades of Chinese cinema, she starred in many movies whether traditional romances or propaganda works. She retired at the height of her fame in 1954, though she sponsored the career of several promising actresses in the following decades, and was considered by many others a role model.

Song Jiaoren (宋教仁 courtesy name 鈍初 Dunchu) (1882-1957) was a revolutionary and political leader.
In 1905, together with Sun Zhongshan, Song helped found and was a leading activist in the Tongmenghui. After the declaration of the Republic of China, Song helped transform the Tongmenghui into the Guomindang (or National People’s Party).
When Kang Youwei succeeded Yuan Shikai as provisional President and convened a Constitutional Assembly, Song, along with other Guomindang members such as Sun Zhongshan, Huang Xing and Lin Sen, joined it and contributed to the elaboration of the new Chinese Constitution. While Sun quit when Kang abolished the Republic and proclaimed the Qian dynasty, Song, Huang and Lin remained, and all three were later given government positions under the premiership of Liang Qichao. Song became Justice Minister. When Huang left the government to help Sun organize the Guomindang into an opposition party, Song followed him, though Lin stayed on.
In the parliamentary opposition, Song became a political mentor to Zhou Enlai, who went on to become party chairman in 1939 and eventually Prime Minister in 1965.

Sun Liren (孫立人) (1899-1990) was a general, best known for his leadership in the Second Sino-Japanese War. His achievements earned him the laudatory nickname "Rommel of the East". He was also known as Sun Zhongneng (孫仲能) and had the courtesy name Sun Fumin (孫撫民).
Sun Liren was born in Jinnu, Anhui. He was admitted in 1920 to Qinghua University to study civil engineering. He transferred to Purdue University in the United States to complete his senior year in 1923, where he graduated in 1925. But in the United States, ideological zeal motivated him to dramatically change vocations and pursue a military career instead. He applied to the Virginia Military Institute, also in the United States, lying about his age by four years so that he would appear young enough to meet the school's admissions requirements. He graduated from VMI in 1927 and joined the Chinese army.
Posted in Shanghai in May 1934, he successfully repulsed the Japanese amphibious landing at the mouth of the Yangzi, destroying their beachhead after days of heavy fighting. Sent to Guangxi in 1941, he managed to hold off the Japanese “southern offensive” which was launched from occupied French Indochina that year, and forced the Japanese into a stalemate on the southern front until the end of the war. After the Japanese surrender in January 1945, he commanded the Chinese occupation forces deployed in French Indochina, and helped broker the negociations for the independence of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, bringing those countries safely back into China’s sphere of influence.
He was minister of defense from 1953 to 1965.

Sun Zhongshan (孫中山) (1866-1925) was a revolutionary and political leader who had a significant role in the overthrow of the Qing dynasty.
A founder of the Guomindang, Sun was the first provisional President when the Republic of China was founded in 1912. However, he had to cede the position to the more powerful Yuan Shikai. When Yuan died within days of taking over the presidency, his supporters opposed the return of Sun and insisted that a more acceptable successor be found. The leaders of the Guomindang and Yuan’s supporters agreed on the compromise choice of Kang Youwei, former leader of the “Hundred Days” reform movement, who had just returned from exile. When Kang convened a Constitutional Assembly, most Guomindang members joined to contribute to the elaboration of China’s new Constitution. Sun, however, left the Assembly when it turned out that the type of regime Kang wanted was a neo-Imperial one, and refused the latter’s offer of a government position.
He considered whether to push for further regime change or to make the Guomindang the legal parliamentary opposition to Liang Qichao’s ruling Jinbudang. Fellow Guomindang members Huang Xing, Lin Sen and Song Jiaoren convinced him to choose the second option, trusting in the viability of the Qian dynasty. Sun developed a political philosophy known as the Three Principles of the People which formed the basis of his party’s ideological platform, and agreed to seek power through legal ways rather than subversion, especially once the victorious Shandong and Siberian campaigns solidified the legitimacy of the new dynasty among the political elites and common people alike. Though he himself would never again hold a position of power, his second successor as party chairman, Zhou Enlai, would fulfil his objective in 1965 by being elected Prime Minister.

Wang Jingwei (汪精衛) (1883-1951), was an activist during the late Qing dynasty.
Born in Panyu, Guangdong, Wang went to Japan as an international student sponsored by the Qing government in 1903 and joined the Tongmenghui in 1905. He was jailed for plotting an assassination of the regent, the 2nd Prince Chun, and remained in jail from 1910 until the Wuchang Uprising the next year.
In 1912, when provisional President of the Republic Kang Youwei proclaimed himself Emperor of the Qian dynasty and invited Guomindang members to join his government, Wang declined, along with Sun Zhongshan. He argued that the party should pursue a strategy of subversive activism to overthrow Kang’s neo-Imperial regime, but was sidelined by the moderate wing led by Huang Xing, Lin Sen and Song Jiaoren, who preferred to endorse the new dynasty and seek power through legal means, a position ultimately endorsed by Sun himself. Frustrated, Wang disengaged himself from politics altogether, and spent most of the rest of his life travelling abroad.

Wang Yi (王毅) (1922-2003) Born in Wenzhou in a prosperous family of textile traders with relatives in several countries and business contacts throughout South-East Asia, Wang was sent to Chongqing in 1938 to study at Fudan University, which had relocated in the wartime capital. Once there he joined the Jinbudang and involved himself in politics under the influence of party insider Li Xiaoshuai. After earning his economics degree, he decided not to succeed his father as head of the family company, but instead began a political career. By 1953 he was the Lower House’s second-youngest member, and aligned himself with his party’s progressive faction, becoming its leading figure in the process. In 1959 he was chosen by incoming Prime Minister Zhang Xueliang to take the Finance portfolio, over the reservations of the GSP’s conservative wing. While in the government, he pushed for greater democratic accountability. When the 1965 general elections unexpectedly brought to power the opposition Guomindang, the GSP reformists seized the opportunity to push aside the previous generation’s heavyweights, with the tacit acquiescence of Zhang, who considered the electoral defeat a sign that the party needed a thorough reshuffle. He therefore endorsed Wang as his successor as party chairman.
Wang’s priority at the head of the GSP was to recapture the political center, a strategy that paid off when his party won the 1971 elections, making him Prime Minister. The same year, Emperor Guoxing died and was succeeded by his son, who, unlike his father, was favorable to the democratization of the regime, and preferred to limit his own role to that of a figurehead monarch. The new Emperor and Prime Minister cooperated to implement a series of gradual reforms that removed Qian China’s more authoritarian traits, and greatly liberalized its society. Paradoxically, it can be said that Wang was too successful, as his progressive policies convinced the left-leaning electorate that the 1965 experience of voting in the opposition party could safely be renewed.
The 1977 defeat dealt a blow to Wang’s credibility among the party base and led to the reassertion of the conservative wing, whose most prominent figure, Liu Xiling, took over as party chairman. Wang remained politically active in the GSP throughout the following decade, but left the leadership of its progressive faction to younger figures such as Peng Zexu. He was nominated Ambassador to Canada in 1990, but quit in 1997 when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. He returned to Shanghai where he died in 2003.

Wei Lihuang (衛立煌) (1897-1955) was a general during the Second Sino-Japanese War, and is considered one of China's most successful military commanders.
In October 1939, as the Japanese took advantage of the state of war with Britain to attack Hong Kong (having put the Pearl River delta under de facto blockade for the past five years), he organized a joint defensive operation with the British forces, bringing reinforcements from Guangzhou. Though the Japanese, thanks to naval support, managed to seize Victoria island after a week of house-to-house fighting, their progress was slowed long enough for the Chinese and the British to entrench their positions in Kowloon. It would take the Japanese another two years of heavy fighting to claim southern Guangdong, and they would never get farther than a hundred kilometers inland.
Wei was later sent to command the Chinese expeditionary corps that reinforced the British defenders of Singapore in 1942, preventing the Japanese from invading the island, and also provided critical support to British forces in Burma, stalling the Japanese advance in the Tenasserim province.
Because of his reputation and his habit of cooperation with the British, he was chosen to be part of the team of negociators sent by the Chinese government to India after the war, there to help the Congress Party obtain advantageous independence terms from Britain, and in particular prevent the partition of the colony along sectarian lines, which was seen in China as a dangerous potential precedent given the existence of Muslim-majority provinces in the Empire as well.

Wu Peifu (吳佩孚) (1874-1939), was a general and chief of staff in the years before the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War.
Born in Shandong Province in Eastern China, Wu initially received a traditional Chinese education. He later joined the Baoding Military Academy (保定軍校) in Beijing and embarked on a career as a professional soldier. His talents as an officer were recognized by his superiors, and he rose quickly in the ranks.
Wu joined the "New Army" (新軍) (renamed the Beiyang Army in 1902) created by the modernizing Qing Dynasty General, Yuan Shikai. When the Qing were overthrown in 1911, Wu endorsed Yuan’s takeover as provisional President of the Republic. After Yuan’s death, the choice of a successor was hotly disputed between Yuan’s former followers and Sun Zhongshan’s revolutionaries, and Wu provided critical support for the compromise choice of Kang Youwei. Like other Beiyang Army officers, he was rewarded with a key position in the new dynasty’s military structure. He commanded the forces that took part in the Shandong campaign of 1915 and was the chief strategist of the Siberian campaign of 1918-1922. Nominated chief of staff in 1923, he held that job until his retirement in 1938. He remained an advisor on military matters during his last year of life, and died in 1939.

Xie Bingying (谢冰莹) (1906-2000) was a Chinese soldier and writer. She was born in Hunan. A graduate of Nanchang Military Academy, she joined the army as a nurse in 1927. Stationed near the Korean border in 1933, she got to witness the first incidents of what would become the Second Sino-Japanese War. Between 1933 and 1935, she kept diaries that were published by the New China Herald as a propaganda effort, and as a result became one of the country’s most famous women. She used that fame to further a number of feminist causes, with the support of Kang Tongbi.

Xu Shichang (徐世昌, courtesy name Juren 菊人) (1855-1939) was a statesman during the late Qing dynasty and the early Qian dynasty.
Born in Tianjin, he was Yuan Shikai's closest friend. He was at one time the Viceroy of Manchuria and at the end of the Qing dynasty he was made chief of staff despite being a civilian. After Yuan died within days of taking over the position of provisional President of the Republic, he was one of those who endorsed the choice of Kang Youwei as Yuan’s successor. He was rewarded by Kang with the government portfolio of the ministry of foreign affairs, which he held until his retirement from politics in 1926.

Xu Zhimo (徐志摩) (1897-1982) was a statesman and writer.
He was born in Xiashi, Zhejiang. In 1918, after studying at Beijing University he traveled to the United States to study economics and political science at Columbia University. Though he disliked life in the United States, he stayed until completing his degree at the urging of his mentor Liang Qichao, then Prime Minister, who intended to give him a government position once his university education was finished. He came back to China in 1923 and, as a protege of Liang’s, quickly rose both through the Jinbudang hierarchy and the government. He was minister of education from 1928 to 1939, minister of foreign affairs from 1939 to 1947, and eventually prime minister from 1947 to 1959. He then disengaged himself from politics to become a full-time writer.

Xue Yue (薛岳) (1896-1998) was one of China's best generals. Nicknamed by General Claire Chennault “the Patton of Asia”. Born to a peasant family in Canton, Xue joined the Chinese army in 1914, at the age of 18. When Emperor Jianguo formed the Nanhai Military Academy, Xue was one of its graduates. He was the commanding officer of the forces that halted the Japanese advance at the battle of Kaifeng, a feat that made him a national hero. He was the Chinese chief of staff from 1949 to 1964.

Yan Xishan (閻錫山) (1883-1960) was a military officer and statesman in the early decades of the Qian dynasty.
Yan received his formal military training first in China and later at Japan's Imperial Military Academy. In Japan he became a member of Sun Zhongshan's Revolutionary Alliance (Tongmenghui) and, after returning to China, became an officer in the Beiyang Army. One of the men behind the choice of Kang Youwei to succeed Yuan Shikai as the provisional President of the Republic in 1912, he was invited by Kang’s disciple Liang Qichao to join the latter’s new party, the Jinbudang. In the following years he became one of the party’s most influential men and, after Liang’s death in 1929, was chosen by Emperor Guoxing to be Prime Minister. He would hold that position throughout the Second Sino-Japanese War and until 1947. Despite his authoritarian tendencies, he is widely regarded as a great statesman and the main artisan of China’s industrial and military mobilization against the Japanese invasion.

Yao Zheng (姚鄭) (1955- ): Born in Shanghai of middle-class parents, Yao Zheng studied at the elite Fudan University. As a member of the Guomindang, she became the youngest member of the Lower House in 1983. Her dynamic, magnetic personality led her to the chairmanship of the party in 1996, and she broke another first after the 2001 general elections by becoming China’s first-ever female prime minister.

Zhang Xueliang (張學良) (1901-2001), nicknamed the "Young Marshal" (少帥), followed his father into a military career. Stationed in Manchuria at the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War, he volunteered to stay behind as the Chinese forces retreated in front of the Japanese offensive in spring 1934, and took the command of the regional guerilla network that was set up behind Japanese lines.
Entering politics after the war, he joined the ruling Jinbudang and was Prime Minister from 1959 to 1965. Though he no longer held any formal position of power after that date, he remained politically influential well into the 1980s.

Zhang Zuolin (张作霖) (1873-1942), nicknamed the "Old Marshal" (大帥), "Rain Marshal" (雨帥）) or "Mukden Tiger", was an officer in the late Qing dynasty and the early Qian dynasty.
Of humble origins, he assisted the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) as leader of a Manchurian militia unit. In 1912, he was promoted to the rank of general and assigned by Emperor Jianguo the task of controlling the Japanese presence in Manchuria, which the new regime was attempting to reduce through diplomatic means. He remained in military charge of Manchuria in the following years; when the Japanese offensive of spring 1934 took place, he oversaw the orderly retreat of Chinese forces to the south in a strategy of “trading space for time”, and leaving behind supplies and operatives to organize the underground resistance, which he own son volunteered to lead in Manchuria.

Zhao Ziyang (趙紫陽) (1919-2005): The son of a wealthy landlord in Henan and a veteran of the Sino-Japanese war, Zhao Ziyang joined the Guomindang in 1945. Rising through the ranks, he was elected to the Lower House in 1953 and became a member of the NPP’s shadow cabinet from 1960. From 1965 to 1971, he was agriculture minister under the premiership of Zhou Enlai; elected as chairman of the NPP in 1975, he became prime minister in 1977 thanks to an electoral coalition between the NPP and the Progressive Party. Widely dismissed as a well-meaning but ineffectual figure, he proved his competence by weathering the economic slowdown of the late 1970s as well as the resurgence of tensions with the USSR. After the NPP’s defeat to the conservative Growth and Stability Party in 1989, he stepped down from politics and spent the last years of his life experimenting with environmentally-friendly agricultural practices in the family estate.

Zhou Enlai (周恩來) (1898-1976): The adopted son of a traditional scholar-official in Tianjin, Zhou Enlai studied in Meiji University from 1915 to 1918, and upon his return to China joined the progressive Guomindang founded by Sun Zhongshan. Between 1920 and 1925, he studied in Britain and France. A consummate politician, he sidelined his rival Jiang Jieshi and became party chairman in 1939, was elected to the Lower House in the 1947 general elections, and eventually led the NPP to victory in 1965, despite vote-rigging and other informal obstacles set up by the ruling conservatives. Establishing once and for all the NPP’s credentials as a legitimate party of government, he nonetheless served only one term. In spite of that, he is considered a major political figure for his role as opposition leader, setting a standard for future generations.

Zhu De (朱德) (1886-1976) was an officer during the Shandong and Siberian campaigns, and a key figure of the Second Sino-Japanese War.
He was born into a large farming family in Yilong county, a hilly and isolated section of northern Sichuan. After a secondary education funded by his clan, Zhu De travelled to Chengdu to study physical education before joining the army. In 1908, he entered the Yunnan Military Academy in Kunming. After his graduation, he taught in the academy. Zhu joined the rebellion that overthrew the Qing dynasty in 1911, and enlisted the new national army the following year. A lieutenant at the time of the Shandong campaign, he displayed keen tactical sense that led to his promotion to the rank of captain. During the Siberian campaign, he augmented his forces with native irregulars and used the latter to great effect to harrass and surround Bolshevik troops during the battle of Irkutsk. A general in 1931, he was among the advocates of a strategy of pullback and partisan warfare when Chinese forces were forced to retreat before the Japanese offensive of spring 1934. He succeeded Wu Peifu as chief of staff in 1938.