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.The biggest threat to the triumphant Nationalists came neither from warlords on the periphery nor, immediately, from imperialist pressures, but from what might be called the warlordization of the GMD itself.Chiang’s own chief of staff complained: “Party headquarters at all levels are concerned only about the quantity, and pay no attention to the quality [of new members].The spirit of the Party therefore becomes more rotten by the day.”9 In effect, the GMD was left a hybrid organization.It had ridden to power on three horses: revolutionary momentum, a professionalized military, and a tax-rich modern economic sector.In the wake of achieving power, the first was purged, the second weakened by the infusion of warlord armies, and the third threatened by the conservatism and fiscal demands of the second.Although several supporters of the GMD’s left wing, including Song Qingling, left China in protest, the termination of social revolution probably did not weaken the GMD in the short run.“Public opinion,” that growing but still largely urban and educated phenomenon, remained positive.The GMD offered a major improvement over warlord rivalries, incompetence, and corruption.A modern administration promised social reform.Leftists were silenced, and liberals who demanded immediate democracy were a small minority.The Nationalists could claim, with some justification, to speak for the nation.244Nationalism and revolution, 1919–37They were thus committed to remaking the nation in their own image.Chiang Kai-shek inherited Sun’s notion that the Party would lead the nation to democracy through a period of tutelage, or in other words dictatorship.Yet authoritarian government did not mean that social and political interests could be suppressed.The very process of state-building required that interest groups be brought into the public arena.And the legitimacy of the Nationalist government depended on the myth of popular sovereignty.For all the Sunist rhetoric about the backwardness of the people and the need for tutelage, not all of the political developments of the 1920s could be reversed.Demands for wider political participation and the growth of elite participation through professional associations and other interest groups were already rooted in the modern political culture.Education was necessarily tied to political questions, and even mass mobilization that was supposed to be under GMD control inevitably escaped control at times.By the same token, however, the GMD – and the new Nanjing government –operated independently of any particular social group.As we will explore in the next chapter, in theory – and to a great extent in practice – the GMDwas autonomous.Whether we see the new government as marking a National Revolution, a counter-revolution, or something in between, it finally confirmed the 1911Revolution.Warlordism proved to be a brief transition from one centralized administration to another.The new Nanjing government also killed off the old myths of the imperial state.Chiang Kai-shek confirmed the beliefs of educated Chinese: not the cosmic powers of the emperor, but rulers who represented the Chinese people and a state that rested on a disciplined and well-ordered citizenry.The Nationalists thus tried to create a top-down model of gradual enlightenment radiating from the state itself to elites and ultimately to the common people.However, demands for democracy ran counter to the Nationalist program in key ways.For all the general belief in a strong state, popular sovereignty remained the most widely accepted replacement for the cosmocratic emperor.It was not necessarily that urban groups favored egalitarian enfranchisement of the masses, but they demanded to represent themselves, thus challenging the GMD’s claims to represent them.In other words, Chiang Kai-shek tried to convert the GMDinto a routinized agent of social control before the basis of that control had been accepted by society.He tried to convert a Leninist party dedicated to ideological indoctrination, discipline, and revolutionary mobilization into a bureaucracy that institutionalized controls over society.But this conversion was only partial.The GMD government remained part revolutionary party, part rationalized bureaucracy, and part warlordized military.This was an awkward amalgam.Chiang did not want to share power with social groups like industrialists or landlords (much less workers or peasants) because they might deflect energies from the task of state-building [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]