THE USE (AND ABUSE) OF MODESTY

The Shanghai Metro authority recently posted the photo below on its official Weibo account (the Chinese equivalent of Twitter), along with a caption urging women to "pay attention to how you dress" to avoid sexual harassment on the busy underground.

It added: "It's no wonder that some people get harassed if they dress like this. [...] Please be self-dignified to avoid perverts."

It has sparked a passionate debate in the Chinese media about what is considered appropriate dress in public, and the balance of individual rights and social responsibilities as regards sexual harassment on the underground, which is of course not uncommon in many other countries.

Here is the BBC News item on the varied public reaction to the microblog:

In response, several young women posted pictures of themselves in rather less revealing clothing with placards that read: "I can be flirtatious, but you can't harass" and "We want to feel cool! We don't want dirty hands."

The debate has touched on similar themes to those that surrounded last year's "Slutwalk" protests in the U.S., namely, whether authorities advising young women to dress more conservatively are simply fulfilling their duty of care, or whether they are implicitly - and insidiously - shifting the blame for sexual harassment from the perpetrators to the victims.

However, I think that there is a uniquely Chinese dimension to this story. It is about how a country undergoing rapid economic change, without democratisation on any comparable scale, goes about negotiating the inevitable conflicts that arise when boundaries between the private and public spheres are in a permanent state of flux - and the temptation on the part of ruling political elites to exploit such tensions and frame them as moral crises, obviating their responsibility to address their underlying structural causes.

Because that is exactly what happened seventy years ago, when the Nationalist government made public dress a politically-charged issue.

A FAR-REACHING VESTIMENTARY REVOLUTION



"A century of humiliation"



According to Valery Garrett's Chinese Dress: From the Qing Dynasty to the Present, late-imperial China had fashion - in the sense of short-term shifts in tastes and consumption associated with social mobility - but no fashion industry (though we have to remember that, until 1949, simple jackets and trousers were the norm for all but a relatively small urbane minority).

Throughout the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), clothing signified the social rank of its wearer even more than it signified gender differences: men and women of comparable rank thus wore clothes of similar style and colour.

This began to change with the increasing militarisation of society in the late Qing and early Republican period. Reformers believed China's weak standing in the world reflected the weakness of its people, so that ending foot-binding and breast-binding was part and parcel of promoting the value of physical strength and vigour.



Cutting off the Manchu queue

Likewise, the cheongsam, a close-fitting, high-collared jacket - known as a "banner gown" for its association with the Manchus - developed in two directions. On the one hand, it became the qipao, a convenient and figure-hugging one-piece, high-collared dress for women ("natural feet" also enabled more women to wear skirts without trousers); on the other, it became the changpao, otherwise known as the "Sun Yat-sen suit" - a civilianised military uniform popularised by the Kuomintang (KMT) leader:

In her book Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation, Antonia Finnane has described the Republican period of the 1920s-40s as bearing witness to "a far-reaching vestimentary revolution. [...] Styles came and went as quickly as governments."

After the "May Fourth" movement, a skirt and jacket-blouse combination became an essential marker of modernity for urban women. But after a brief period of androgyny in the 1920s, the fashions of the 1930s saw a renewed separation of the sexes.

As I previously mentioned, this trend was initially promoted by the Nationalist government, since it believed that clothing that clearly delineated male from female bodies would also encourage people to take pride in their bodies, their fitness, and physical appearance more generally. This in turn was thought to be beneficial to the nation, and help foster a sense of collective purpose and much-needed national identity: "For the Nationalists, re-defining the boundary between male and female was part of the process of sorting out the chaos into which Chinese society had descended."

Another reason the government supported these developments, which I address in more detail below, was a widely-felt need to combat Western "Orientalist" prejudices about how Chinese people were inherently less civilised than the imperialist powers. If Chinese women could also walk the streets in tight-fitting dresses without constant harassment from male passers-by, it was seen as one more step towards disproving Orientalism.

The qipao



But there was a deep tension underlying these ideas, connected with the ambivalence that ran through all the reforming efforts of China's turn-of-the-century modernisers towards the importation of Western values (or "essence", as opposed to mere "form"). If being civilised in the eyes of the West meant being modern, then it entailed venturing into the unknown, which Western societies also found unsettling. Finnane has observed of the system of ideas used to legitimise the West's civilising mission that:

"Progress placed much store on clothing, which separated the savages from the civilised, but the essential decorum of Chinese women's dress challenged Western observers, whose own clothing culture fostered a deep tension between tendencies to conceal and to reveal the human body in its sexual aspect."

Leo Tolstoy, in The Kreutzer Sonata, railed against "those detestable jerseys, bustles, and naked shoulders, arms, almost breasts." And for the KMT, "ultimately the line between femininity and overt sexuality in dress proved difficult to draw."

"IF IT'S WEIRD AND WONDERFUL, SHANGHAI IS SURE TO HAVE IT"

According to a fascinating article by Louise Edwards, the politics of public dress in China took a very strange turn in the 1930s. The progressive and left-leaning intellectuals who had led the "May Fourth" protests and subsequent New Culture Movement, and who opposed the increasingly repressive and anti-democratic government of Chiang Kai-shek, nevertheless concurred with the KMT in attributing the young Republic's failings to the moral deficiencies of the "new woman" (xin nuxing).

Traditionally, scholars played a key role in governing China in the role of mandarin officials. But the very same dissident intellectuals who had helped to pave the way for the founding of the Republic, and went on to edit reformist/cosmopolitan journals like New Youth and T'ien Hsia  found themselves alienated from their creation: "the artifice of the intellectual class's right to rule - education's link to morality - had been dismantled by May Fourth anti-Confucianism."

In an attempt to reclaim their moral authority, the public intellectuals chose to focus on the figure of the "new woman" because these women caused such anxiety on the part of the government; making personal ethics a political matter was a strategy for re-empowering disenchanted philosophers:

"The policing of the modern woman by the intellectuals who had led the charge in "imagining" a modern China was a symbolic attempt at policing the boundaries of national governance to ensure these included "virtue and education." [...] Moralising about "what modern women do with their freedom" allowed the reformist intellectuals to claim the platform of spiritual guardians."

In their turn, the KMT feared the new woman because they didn't trust these women with their newfound freedom and self-awareness. Emerging from such a deeply patriarchal society, the women were seen as lacking experience of making decisions for themselves and controlling their own lives; but for the very same reason, they held such potency as political symbols in the Nationalist project of presenting a fresh, clean, civilised image of China to the outside world - if the people with the least experience of freedom could be trusted to use it responsibly, it could shatter the self-confidence of the "civilising" Europeans.

In the same vein, the liberal writer Hu Jian argued that how "new women" conducted themselves represented whether China would use its new freedom to do good or bad things: "The choice she makes affects not just her family but society and indeed the entire nation."

According to Edwards, for the KMT "The link between political awareness and modern women was sufficiently strong for women in modern, Western clothing to be accused of having left-wing sympathies." In an attempt to impose its own very particular vision of how liberated women should look and behave, the KMT launched the 'New Life Movement' in 1934, a curious fusion of Christianity, Confucianism and European Fascism.

In his study of the ideological roots of the Movement, Arif Dirlik describes it as a fundamentally modern form of counter-revolution designed to harness the forces of modernisation for strengthening the national state:

"The Movement was against both individualism and class conflict, the two basic new forces in Chinese politics. Individualism was the basic issue of the New Culture Movement, class struggle the means advocated by the Communists. [...] New Life objections to these were grounded in the view that they were expressions of selfish interests."


As this quote indicates, the Movement was a comprehensive political campaign designed to re-orient people's basic thoughts towards serving and embodying the common good, as articulated by the central state - one of the main slogans was "from the self, to others." Chiang saw corruption and insubordination in the lower ranks of the state bureaucracy as a critical threat to his authority. But in his view the way to solve this was through making people see the world from the state's point of view, and the means to that end would be the detailed regulation and control of people's most basic manners and customs - one of the other slogans was "from the simple to the complex."

Zhiwei Xiao has described how sartorial regulations comprised an important part of the policy:




New Life Movement stamp



"The entire population was subject to a dress code that stressed cleanliness and tidiness - not a fancy and elaborate kind of grooming...but a simple and austere appearance conveying a sense of frugality and discipline. [...] In 1934 the authorities in Beijing banned women from wearing clothing that would expose their legs; the governor of Shandong, Han Fuqu, ordered the arrests of women on the streets following their alleged failure to observe the feminine virtue of modesty in public places."

It was intended to channel people's energies away from using force to effect political change and towards "an administrative vision of politics" whereby "everyone would reform his or her self to become a model for others and also to watch over their behaviour." In a speech he gave in 1934, Chiang summarised the Movement's 'Essentials': "Virtues must be applied to ordinary life in the matter of food, clothing, shelter and action. [...] By the observance of these virtues, it is hoped that social disorder and individual weakness will be remedied and that people will become more military-minded."

According to Finnane, the Movement "managed a great deal of individual harassment and interference. Women especially were made to feel the whip of those who resented the changes in female behaviour...and were frequently harried or even attacked if they wore immodest clothes or behaved flirtatiously." Yet it failed to make the hoped-for advance from focussing people's minds on smoking in public, provocative clothing and casual sexual liaisons, to focussing on matters of national importance:





"Detailed regulations in Jiangxi gave the exact dimensions for hem lines to fall below the knee (4 inches), for the slit in the traditional Chinese dress to rise above the knee (3 inches), and for a blouse worn with trousers to fall below the line of the buttocks (3 inches). Despite the seriousness of its original intent, the New Life movement gradually trickled away in a stream of trivia."

Yet what concerned the marginalised reformist intellectuals was the way in which a Movement ostensibly targeted against "self-seekingness" was paradoxically fuelling a consumer boom amongst urban women. Although it praised "frugality" and "modesty", in fact the Movement had given a significant boost to consumerism and fashion-consciousness by telling women they had to obsess over how they looked in comparison with others around them - dressing for the nation inevitably meant dressing like the best in the nation. 

You can get some impression of the (limited) cosmopolitanism of Shanghai from this footage:

For the progressives, this new advertising and marketing culture threatened to hollow out the power of the "new woman" as a political symbol altogether.

Here is how Zhiwei Xiao describes these concerns:

"The commodification of woman that replaced China's traditional oppressive attitudes was not a true liberation and moreover would damage the national cause. [...] This was not because she would jeopardise the nation with her lack of chastity, as the conservative moralists would have argued, but rather because she would jeopardise the nation with her inadvertent falling into "traditional" misogynist modes."

Hence, in his 1933 article Xu Qingyu argued that to achieve true equality women had to "wash off the cosmetics, throw out the pearls, liberate the breasts and discard the high-heel shoes and qipaos." "As they walk around in their high-heel leather shoes", wrote Zhang Yinghua in the same year, "you can hear the hobbled patter of bound feet."

HOLDING UP HALF THE SKY



National Women's Day, 1959



Early on in the People's Republic of China (PRC), Mao had proclaimed the liberation of women as inseparable from the creation of a "new China" - "women," he famously proclaimed, "hold up half the sky." Of the rhetorical attacks on women from the left and the right before 1949, he had written: "I think women are regarded as criminals to start with, and tall buns and long skirts are the instruments of torture applied to them by men."

Overall, the Mao era's record on women's rights is decidedly mixed - having made divorce and contraception more readily available, they also demanded a certain amount of public service from women which was not always balanced by a proportionate increase in the domestic work of men.

The Communists (CPC) also reversed the KMT policy on women's dress. In an article that covers this period, Finnane has written that the CPC framed this as part of reversing the Confucian separation of the sexes (nan nu you bie): "The climate of the Cultural Revolution was unfavourable to the survival of the qipao and indeed to any form of gender- or status-distinctive dress. [...] Safety was sought in obscurity."



The return of involuntary haircuts



In the 1920s, the jacket-suit had briefly been fashionable amongst both men and women as an androgynous fashion; in the 1960s-70s, it once more became a ubiquitous gender-neutral form of dress in China's streets, now re-christened the "Mao suit" (ganbu zhifu).  

I emphasise the period from the 1960s onwards, because I want to correct a common misconception that exactly before and after the period of Mao's rule (1949-76) everyone in China suddenly had to dress like him. In fact, there was a short-lived renaissance of interest in modern, Western-style clothes in the PRC during the 1950s. Just as Deng Xiaoping would later declare that "poverty is not socialism", so too did the CPC - before the Anti-Rightist Campaign of the late 1950s stifled dissent - flatly reject the KMT's obsession with presenting an image of modesty and self-restraint to Western observers (there was a periodic emphasis on frugality in campaigns, but this had more to do with the needs of the beleaguered economy than public image).

In the mid-50s, numerous Party-controlled newspapers, such as the New Observer (Xin Guancha), published parodies mocking the affected austerity of some overly earnest comrades, who seemed to be trying to dress themselves to look as drab and bland as possible. At the same time, a flurry of hybridised styles borrowing elements from French and Russian fashions became popular in urban China after the Soviet Union, then in the swing of Khruschev's reformist "thaw", held fashion shows across the country.

Here is a picture of Christian Dior in Moscow:

And a Soviet fashion show as part of the National Exhibition in the U.S.:



Shen Congwen and
Zhang Zhaohe



It was in this atmosphere that a widely respected historian named Shen Congwen decided to investigate the recent history of Chinese clothes, to see whether a diversity of clothes for men and women could in fact be framed as a rejection of a discredited imperial past. But as Finnane has described, the history proved to be too politically-sensitive:

"A dress reform campaign launched in 1955 featured a few discussions of historical clothing but these were drowned out by the hubbub of the Hundred Flowers movement and the subsequent anti-rightist campaign. In 1964 the eminent Shen Congwen embarked on an archival research project on clothing of the imperial era, but the project ground to a halt in the Cultural Revolution. Shen was sent down to the countryside to raise pigs and many of his research notes were destroyed."

From the 1960s civilian dress was once again re-militarised in the form of the unisex outfits typical of the Red Guards.

In form, if not in content, this signified a revival of the ethos of the New Life Movement, with its emphasis on outward appearance as a marker of righteousness:  

"The exclusively social interpretation of morality abolished the distinction between inner virtue and external appearance... Orderly behaviour - in its manifestation of "love for the state and loyalty to the nation" - was incontrovertible proof of inner rectitude."

IT IS GLORIOUS TO QUEUE!

In the post-Mao era, the "new woman" has once again become, in Finnane's phrase, "a signifier of the nation." On the subject of China's "millennial youth" and the new individualism that emerged from the pro-market economic reforms of the '80s and '90s, Robert L. Moore has written:

"With the post-Mao reforms, individualistic tendencies emerged. [...] New clothing styles appeared in the 1980s, replacing the virtually universal, solid blue, grey or brown loose-fitting shirt and pants combination of the Mao years. For the first time in decades, young women in colourful dresses and men in Western-influenced sports shirts and pants appeared in urban China."



Fendi Fashion Show at the Great Wall

At the same time, because of the legacy of intermittently extreme authoritarianism during the Mao era, new women are once more seen as gauges of whether Chinese people can be trusted to enjoy their new personal freedoms in a responsible manner. As Moore has noted in his article, there is a prevalent anxiety, especially amongst the older generation, that today's young women have been abandoned in a moral vacuum by a state that undermined all previous social constraints by interfering in private family life and then itself began to retreat from private affairs.

Herein lies a basic contradiction in China's development model: the state has formally withdrawn from significant areas of people's private lives and by doing this it has unleashed vast amounts of entrepreneurial energy and stimulated an economic boom. But that economic growth has been achieved under a highly unequal growth model, with two important consequences.

First, the hukou system of residency registration has helped to manage the public costs of urbanisation, by encouraging the families of rural-urban migrant workers to remain in the villages. As such, the policy has fostered a swathe of young illegal migrants in China's urban centres who lack the basic rights of other residents, including health and education, but also the protection of the law (since reporting crimes to the police would implicate themselves).

Here is a talk on the lives of young female migrant workers by Leslie T. Chang, who has written an absolutely must-read book on the subject, Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China. A key message of that book is that the Mao-era campaign for gender equality had a limited reach in the countryside, so that today arranged marriages and similar traditions continue - for many migrant women, their brief sojourns in the towns and cities is their only chance to experience romantic love.

Second, the abolition of the so-called "iron rice-bowl" - the system of comprehensive state-provided social benefits - for most of China's citizens (especially in rural areas) in combination with the one-child policy, has left large numbers of people materially insecure and dependent on their children in old age.

As a result of this combination of policies, in China today there is a vast range of factors that divide the generations - in terms of economic prospects, social experiences, geographic location, etc. - but which are all essentially problematised by the systemic imbalances in a growth model that best serves the interests of the ruling Party.



Shanghai 'Sexpo', 2010



Moreover, the Party periodically exploits generational divisions in order to distract attention away from the structural divisions which make them a political problem. And a way that it does this is to whip up a moral panic that the young women of today have been corrupted by sexual promiscuity and loose morals compared with their upstanding buttoned-up seniors.

Below is an excerpt from an interesting CBC documentary about the "sexual revolution" in contemporary China. It shows how the Party launches regular "crackdowns" on the karaoke bars and massage parlours that are fronts for brothels, and then forces their staff to undergo "public humiliation" sessions to appease the moralists - but this is ultimately a cynical token gesture, because the government knows that the gender imbalance caused by the one-child policy drives the demand for prostitution beyond state control.

Besides various government campaigns launched to improve "civility" and public conduct ahead of important international events in China (e.g. a 'Citizen's Guide' published ahead of the 2010 World Expo that encouraged residents to "trim your nostril hair short" and intoned that "it is glorious to queue"), moralising commentaries by public authorities on women's public appearance have additional resonance, because of this history of politicising dress. Evidently, the government continues to use the imputed moral deficiencies of marginalised and vulnerable social groups as scapegoats for its own political and economic inadequacies.

The last word goes to the social critic Lu Xun who wrote eighty years ago: "A woman has so many parts to her body, life is very hard indeed."

 

BO XILAI AND THE FUNCTION OF FACTION

One of the most significant and dramatic events to occur in post-Tiananmen Chinese politics happened earlier this year. In this post I have tried to take a long view of that event.



On March 15th, the then Chinese Communist Party (CPC) chief of the "mega-city" of Chongqing, Bo Xilai, was removed from his post and disappeared from public view. This was a month after his police chief, Wang Lijun, had fled to the US consulate in Chengdu, reportedly to seek asylum. Since then, Bo has been formally stripped of all his Party posts and his wife is under investigation in connection with the suspicious death of a British businessman with whom she had had business dealings.

For those unfamiliar with the key personalities, and the various twists and turns , here is a useful report and panel discussion on Newsnight:

It is a seminal event, because it has brought to public attention the usually secret power-struggles and factional infighting within an institution that tries to project itself as being monolithic. There has been some excellent coverage and provocative commentary on the unfolding scandal (e.g. Wang Hui's controversial essay in the London Review of Books), and the best of it has tried to fit it within a broader historical context - such as this BBC comparison with three other CPC rising stars who were brought back down by factional competition.

But, in general, I think that inadequate attention has been paid to the question of what factions in the CPC are for: where did they come from?; what functions do they serve in the wider political system?; what is the difference between a "faction" and a "party"? If, as Cheng Li argues, we are witnessing the emergence of bipartisanship in China in all but name (a system he describes as "One Party, Two Coalitions"), then the need to understand the historical causes and effects of the major factions inside the CPC becomes all the more urgent.

SOME FACTS ABOUT FACTIONS

What is a party faction? In their NBER paper, Persico, et al. (2007) provide a useful overview of how the concept has been used by political scientists. In his study of the Italian Christian Democratcs (DC) Zuckerman (1975) defines it as something more durable than a single-issue or time-limited alliance:

"A structured group within a political party which seeks, at a minimum, to control authoritarive decision-making positions of the party. It is a "structured group" in that there are established patterns of behaviour and interaction for the faction members over time. Thus, party factions are to be distinguished from groups that coalesce around a specific or temporarily limited issue and then dissolve [...]"

According to Zuckerman, two features make a given party especially vulnerable to factionalism - promotion within the party depends on other officials' support, and the power to allocate resources (incl. public goods) is broadly dispersed. The CPC certainly exhibits these characteristics; despite the centralisation of authority in the party, in practice there is a high degree of interdependency between different levels of authority, especially given the absence of strong external safeguards against the abuse of power.

As the diagram below shows, the CPC relies on a precarious system of institutionalised self-regulation; according to Pye (1981), "the prime basis for factions among cadres is the search for career security and the protection of power."

Bettcher (2005) further distinguishes between "factions of principle" (ideology-based) and "factions of interest", the latter being "hierarchical networks of patron-client relationships among party officials." Ideology matters, but the key coalitions of factions in the CPC should be understood as factions of interest.

Finally, just for the sake of conceptual clarity, here is a definition of a political party from Heywood (2007):

"A group that is organised for the purpose of winning [or securing] government power; parties typically adopt a broad issue focus and are united by shared political preferences and a general ideological identity."

This definition makes clear the essential differences between parties and party factions: parties are to some extent defined by a shared general ideology, whereas factions needn't be; the immediate goal of a party is to secure government power, whilst the immediate goal of a faction is to control how the party uses its power.

One of the more enthralling articles about the Bo Xilai affair was a piece by John Garnaut in Foreign Policy, which traced Bo's demise - and his implicit criticism by Premier Wen Jiabao - to the fateful battle between Bo's father and Wen's patron 25 years earlier.

But to really understand the function of faction in Chinese politics - the useful purpose it serves, albeit at a huge risk - you have to go back even further, to the years before and after the birth of the Republic and the end of the last Imperial dynasty, at the beginning of the last century.

And to a time when the CPC was itself a faction in another, larger party.

CELL FUSION

In 1894 Sun Yat-sen, the man remembered on both sides of the Taiwan Straits as "a pioneer of the revolution", founded the Society to Restore China's Prosperity. Like many of the other secret societies actively trying to overthrow the ailing Qing dynasty, it was small, consisting of about 100 members.

Sun Yat-sen

Sun had once been an advocate of peaceful reform, and he had even written to the Imperial court with suggestions for how they could win back national independence and modernise industry. Disillusioned with the seeming inability of the monarchy to reform itself, he had turned to organising underground networks of opposition, and attempted several unsuccessful uprisings, before and after being exiled abroad.

In 1905, Sun formed a union of many of the secret societies - it was called Tongmenghui (Alliance Society).The various secret societies that formed it (with names like 'Regeneration' and 'Revive the Light') were all united by the goal of an anti-Qing revolution; their four stated aims were "to expel the Tartar barbarians, to revive the Chinese nation, to establish a Republic, and to distribute land equally among the people." Unlike its predecessor organisations, it was very effectively organised, operating cells at home and abroad (Sun oversaw its HQ in Tokyo).

This map shows the Tongmenghui HQ, and its 18 "shadow branches" - on in Shanghai, and one for each of the 17 provinces:

Internally it became a microcosm of the modern republican government that Sun, as its Chair, hoped to build in practice - with executive, legislative and judicial branches.

In 1911, they got their chance when a military revolt against the Qing erupted in the city of Wuchang. When the court dithered, other southern provinces joined Wuchang in declaring their secession. The regent summoned the esteemed Gen. Yuan Shi-kai out of retirement to save the Qing, but once Yuan saw which way the wind was blowing he changed sides and negotiated an armistice.

The revolution caught the leaders of Tongmenghui off-guard. Sun raced back to China upon hearing the news, and he was promptly elected the first President of the Republic by the Nanjing Assembly. Yet almost immediately he realised that he lacked the authority to lead the new Republic - in effect, the revolution had removed any lingering illusions about where power really resided, but the only authority that mattered still lay in the military not the civilian sphere.


Song Jiaoren

After only three months Sun passed over the Presidency to Yuan and devoted his time to organising a mass party to contest the upcoming parliamentary elections. The Tongmenghui formed the nucleus of the new Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang (KMT). At the time of his inauguration, Sun had clashed with the man leading the KMT into the election, Song Jioaren. Song wanted the new constitution to enshrine an assertive parliament and prime minister, and a mere figurehead President, to which Sun replied angrily that he would not "stand apart like some holy excrescence."

When the KMT won majorities in both chambers of the Assembly in Feb. 1913, Song rejected forming a coalition government so that the new parliament could act as a powerful check on President Yuan - who was outside of the KMT, and resented any such restraint on his authority. Two months after his victory Song was assassinated whilst waiting for a train, on his way to give a speech in defence of strong parliamentary government - evidence linked the gunman to Yuan, who proceeded to strip the National Assembly of any potential for independent action, sending armed men to surround the building and intimidate opponents into submission.

Here is a postcard featuring Yuan next to the new flag, the banner of 'Five Races Under One Union':

Horrified by this betrayal, Sun launched an unsuccessful "second revolution" against Yuan, who sent him into exile again and banned the KMT as a "secret organisation." From his swearing-in ceremony in 1913 to his death in 1916, Yuan managed to alienate even his most conservative civilian and military supporters with his attempts to rule by violence alone. His final years began a decade of chaos known as the "Warlord Era" - and made necessary an alliance between the KMT and the newly-formed CPC.

SYMBIOSIS 

Yuan's period of misrule persuaded Sun that the task of bringing the warlords to heel could not be safely outsourced - and he set about making the KMT a body of national power, militarily and politically. Rebuffed by Britain and the United States, he turned to the USSR.

In return for arms and military/political advisors, Sun consented to the Comintern's condition that the members of the CPC be allowed to join the KMT. Both parties would work together for the greater good of defeating the warlords and reunifying the country. Below I have included a map to illustrate how fragmented the country was - red lines indicate areas ruled by different military units:

Although Sun wanted a face-saving condition that they would have to abandon Marxism and agree to follow KMT leadership, the agreement of 1922-3 - the beginning of the 'First United Front' - allowed the Communists to remain as CPC members and to keep their weapons.

The two parties shared the Leninist principle of "democratic centralism" - "under which any KMT [or CPC] decision, once reached by a majority of members of the relevant committees, would be wholly binding on all party members" (Spence 1999). Everyone was meant to know their place in the party, and whilst one could debate any issue within one's jurisdiction, one was not free to debate that issue at any time, in any place, or with just anyone.

Chiang Kai-shek


The Comintern established a military training academy on Whampoa Island, under the command of Gen. Chiang Kai-shek. There, Chiang made his name and developed a powerful following. In 1925 he took charge of the KMT, but unlike Sun he had a visceral hatred of communism and intended to eradicate the CPC as soon as he no longer needed their support.

According to Stuart Schram (1967), by the time of Sun's death "his name had become the symbol of a firm policy of collaboration with the Communists." Spence tells us: "When overseas supporters cabled Sun that he was being subtly "Sovietized", he answered that if the CPC were not allowed to cooperate with the KMT, then he himself would join the CPC." Here was one respect in which Chiang differed sharply from his mentor.

Chiang believed the Soviets were stalling him to give the CPC time to use KMT resources to build their own support base. So in 1926 he staged a coup within his own party, rounding up Communists and putting Soviet advisors under "protective custody." He then got the KMT Central Executive Committee to pass a resolution stating, "comrades of the left...should retire for a while." All instructions issued by the CPC had to be approved by the KMT first. No CPC members could head KMT or government bureaus.

To the Communists it seemed as if their plan to exploit the KMT from within had backfired - as the smaller, lesser-equipped force, they were more vulnerable to sudden shifts in the mood of the KMT leadership. But there were still dangers for the KMT: "though Chiang had asserted his supremacy, divisions between the right and left of the KMT simmered below the surface." The Communists were potential recruits that might embolden factions in the upper echelons of the KMT to challenge Chiang.

In a backlash against Chiang's seizure of power, the civilian administration, mostly from the left of the party, moved to Wuhan and "tried to rein in Chiang, cancelling the special powers granted to him at the start of the expedition, and making him answerable to a commission which included a Communist." But Chiang was now confident enough to show his true colours, and in 1927 he launched the "White Terror" to purge the KMT of Communists.

Here is a documentary clip about the Northern Expedition and the White Terror:

Chiang had responded to the growing polarisation of the KMT leadership by entrenching those divisions - there were two rival KMT governments, a left-wing one in Wuhan, and a right-wing one in Nanjing. Fenby describes how acrimonious the split was:

"Wuhan expelled Chiang from the KMT. A mass meeting in the leftist capital denounced him as the 'counter-revolutionary chief'. [...] The [Wuhan] government sought to keep the united front alive as mass organisations and trade unions sprouted."

However, when Moscow advised the CPC to start building their own army, it was too much for the KMT, even its radical wing; Wuhan responded by expelling the Communists from its administration.  For Chiang, expelling the Communists without exterminating them seemed incredibly dangerous - the rival wings of the KMT were reconciled, and there were mutterings of a new government being formed without him. Only after a failed CPC rising in Canton did the different KMT factions rally behind him as a strong leader.

Fundamentally, the country had not yet moved on from ruling by resort to violence, to political rule, and yet at the same time it was plain that the country could not be reunified by force alone. As long as various warlords remained ensconced around the Republic, the political stability necessary for political rule would be difficult to achieve - there were systemic incentives for rival factions in the KMT to escalate intra-party competition, in the hope of bringing about a new balance of power.

Denied formal channels to resolve their grievances, an anti-Chiang coalition emerged under the telling title of the Enlarged Conference of the Kuomintang. It was a broad alliance of frustrated politicians, but it too was soon brought under control, and Chiang used the opportunity to push through changes to the constitution that increased his power.

"CRAWLING OUT OF THE KUOMINTANG DEN"

One last event of the 'Nanjing Decade' (1928-37) is noteworthy. Four years after it was founded, the CPC recruited a student activist named Bo Yibo - Bo Xilai's father. Here is a picture of the young Bo taken after the 1949 revolution that brought the CPC to power:

After Chiang had declared war on the communists in 1927, Bo had gone underground. But he was captured by the KMT in Tianjin in 1931. Like many of his captured comrades, Bo wrote a confession condemning the communists in order to get out of jail.

Nearly four decades later, when China was in the grip of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Mao began mobilising - and arming - groups outside of the formal CPC organisation to confront sections of the Party that had dared to oppose him.

Mao had not always been so intolerant of opposition - in the 1920s he had enthusiastically supported the CPC joining the KMT and was at one point labelled a "right-wing opportunist" for his forgiving attitude towards the right-wing of the KMT. 

Perhaps the repeated setbacks and near-defeats of the next two decades taught him that this kind of 'soft-Leninism' was not a sustainable strategy. Either way, by the mid-1960s Mao was throwing "democratic centralism" out of the window in order to purge the CPC of officials who had criticised his more utopian schemes. These included Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping - and Bo Yibo, who had risen to chairman of the State Economic Commission. Mao's ringleaders in the Cultural Revolution jumped on his confession as 'proof' of his guilt as a "counter-revolutionary." Red Guards declared: "He is a dog, crawling out of the KMT den." Here is a photograph of Bo defending himself against these accusations:

Bo and his family suffered vicious persecution; three of his four children were detained and his wife died from the beatings she received in prison. (In a grim piece of irony, Bo Xilai was active at the time as a student Red Guard.)

After Mao died, Bo was rehabilitated along with other conservatives in the Party. As they set about restoring authority and discipline to the formal organs of the Party, the scars of the period remained. By publicising private disagreements, the Cultural Revolution had given ammunition to organised opponents of the Party's rule, and the result had been anarchy. The overriding priority was to rebuild an outward appearance of unity to prevent any resurgence of opposition.

SPIRITUAL POLLUTION

The first phase of strengthening the centre was to cut off the left and the right. Mao's successor Hua Guofeng was at first opposed to the rehabilitation of economic reformers like Deng, but his primary focus was on defeating the radical left, which he achieved by purging Mao's inner circle, the "Gang of Four."

Below is a picture of Mao's widow, Jiang Qing, standing trial in 1981:

And here is an infamous photograph of mourners at Mao's funeral, with the Gang of Four expunged:



Hua lacked a power base of his own, and he was quickly sidelined by the moderate Party grandees. Bo, as one of the so-called 'Eight Immortals' (survivors of the Long March from the KMT in the 1930s), returned to prominence.

Through the 1980s, tensions between economic reform and political stasis rumbled just beneath the surface. The CPC anxiously shifted between reform and reaction, launching short-lived campaigns against "spiritual pollution." But some rising stars in the next generation of leaders wanted to accomodate social trends by democratising the Party from within, and allowing greater civil liberties. Their figurehead was Hu Yaobang, secretary-general of the CPC.

Here is Hu Yaobang, with Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao on the right:

The conservatives were nervous; they feared that by undermining restrictions on the freedom to disagree in public, Hu risked unleashing the chaos of the Cultural Revolution all over again. In Dec. 1986, Bo went to visit Deng to demand Hu's dismissal for his alleged sympathy towards students protesting about their living standards; after Hu stepped down, Bo wrote the official Party verdict on Hu, a lengthy report called Document No. 3, which accused him of supporting "bourgeois liberalisation" - i.e. multiparty democracy.

This clip shows how the same elders' fears led Deng to order the crackdown against the students in Tiananmen Square in 1989:

THE PRINCE OF POP

The prospects for meaningful Party reform seemed bleak. Nevertheless, as the grandees have faded from view the Party has been moving in the direction of greater institutionalisation and regularisation.

Just as important is the emergence and consolidation of two factional coalitions in the CPC in recent years, a development that, according to Cheng Li, "reflects the trend in the Chinese political establishment to maintain a balance of power."

The "elitist" faction is dominated by "princelings" (those who rose to leadership via family connections to revolutionary veterans, mostly via positions in the prosperous "blue states"); the "populists" are centred around the "tuanpai" (those who rose up from the Communist Youth League in the 1980s, and who are more likely to have worked in the poorer interior "yellow states").

The history of factionalism in Chinese politics is one of ruling parties facing a recurring choice between tolerating autonomous, and potentially oppositional, external forces in society, dominating them by force, or attempting to absorb and co-opt them.

The first mass political party in China was formed out of an alliance of secret societies that operated on the basis of strictly controlling the flow of information among its members. The KMT chose to co-opt the CPC and discovered that this did them more harm than good - a Leninist party within a Leninist party was a source of factional conflict in the host organisation. Remembering how Chiang's party had torn itself apart from within, Mao rallied external opponents to 'purify' the Party machine through struggle. Those who were struggled against devoted themselves to restoring a stable balance of power in the Party - and, in the process, they contributed to the rise and fall of Bo Xilai two decades later.

The leaders of both Leninist-style parties repeatedly sought to strike a balance between internal unity and inclusivity, bringing just enough outsiders inside the ring to keep any potential opposition divided. The most famous recent example of this was Jiang Zemin's decision to allow entrepreneurs to become CPC members.

The "function of faction", therefore, is to check and balance the excessive accumulation of power by informal and internal means, without the need for robust external institutions like an independent judiciary. Equilibrium is maintained so long as the two factions recognise their relationship as one of mutual interdependence, based on respect for the different knowledge and experience each contributes. As Cheng argues: "The two coalitions tend to fix each other's problems, thus avoiding a single-minded approach. [...] Factional politics is no longer a vicious power struggle and zero-sum game in which a winner takes all. Neither coalition is willing to, or capable of, defeating the other."

The only problem is that some officials, like Bo Xilai, try to have the best of both worlds, using the fragility and interdependency of factionalism to engage in high-stakes brinkmanship. Bo tried to use his "Chongqing model" to put himself centre-stage, gambling that the leadership would not dare to stop him for fear of upsetting the delicate balance.

Unfortunately for him, he miscalculated. And when damaging rumours of a military coup flew around the internet after his dismissal, we saw the downside to using factions as a power-balancing mechanism - the lack of transparency that breeds mistrust of officialdom and risks making every unanticipated reshuffle seem a portend of general chaos.

But then, "One Party, Two Coalitions" with transparency wouldn't be "One Party" anymore.