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The war with Japan was surely the most momentous event in the history of the Republican era in China. During the Nanking decade, Chiang had particularly stressed modernization of the armed forces. Most dramatic of Nationalist China's several acts of wartime mobilization was the removal of population, government, schools and factories from the coastal areas to the interior. General Wedemeyer similarly insisted that ' the Nationalist Government of China, far from being reluctant to fight as pictured by Stilwell and some of his friends among the American correspondents, had shown amazing tenacity and endurance in resisting Japan', whereas 'no communist Chinese forces fought in any of the major engagements of the Sino-Japanese war'. The Ichigo offensive had inflicted terrible losses upon Nationalist China. The demoralization of Nationalist China was largely due to the corrosive effects of inflation and the changing political and military aims of the government.

To many Chinese, Nationalist rule marked the beginning of a new era, when China would again be unified and strong, when there would be economic plenty for all, and when they would no longer feel shame at being Chinese. In September 1927, representatives of the Nanking and Hankow governments and of the Western Hills faction formed a 'Central Special Committee' which established a new, supposedly unified, Nationalist government at Nanking. This new government was no more stable than its predecessors. The two most powerful leaders in the Nationalist movement, Chiang Kai-shek and Wang Ching-wei, had been excluded from it. Under Chiang's aegis, the Nationalist government in Nanking was transformed into a military dictatorship. The Kuomintang membership by 1927 had become intolerably disparate, and Chiang Kai-shek accordingly began to screen out many of the members that to him appeared to be undesirables. In the process, he fundamentally altered the character of the Nationalist movement.

In recent years historians of China have focused increased attention on the critical decades of National rule on the mainland. This recent scholarship has substantially modified our understanding of the political events of this momentous period, shedding light on the character of Nationalist rule and on the sources of the Communist victory in 1949. Yet no existing textbook on modern China presents the events of the period according to these new findings. The five essays in this volume were written by leading authorities on the period, and they synthesize the new research. Drawn from Volume 13 of The Cambridge History of China, they represent the most complete and stimulating political history of the period available in the literature. The essays selected deal with Nationalist rule during the Nanking decade, the Communist movement from 1927 to 1937, Nationalist rule during the Sino-Japanese War, the Communist movement during the Sino-Japanese war, and the Kuomintang-Communist struggle from 1945 to 1949.

“To tell the truth, never, in China or abroad, has there been a revolutionary party as decrepit (tuitang) and degenerate (fubai) as we [the Guomindang] are today; nor one as lacking spirit, lacking discipline, and even more, lacking standards of right and wrong as we are today. This kind of party should long ago have been destroyed and swept away!”1

Historians on the Chinese mainland maintain that the self-strengthening movement became “bankrupt” after the Sino-French War of 1884–1885. Their phraseology is typically value-laden, and contains the usual quotient of exaggeration. Yet these Communist scholars do point to a development in the late Ch'ing period that is usually overlooked by students in the West. During the Sino-French War, French forces had sailed almost at will along the entire coast of the empire, had temporarily occupied a part of Taiwan, and finally had snuffed out the dynasty's last pretensions to sovereignty in Vietnam. In the wake of this conflict, growing threats of Russian and Japanese aggression further raised doubts that the self-strengthening policy was effective as a means of securing the defense of the empire.

The tardy and ineffectual response of China to the Western challenge remains one of the most significant problems confronting historians. This article attempts to shed light on one of the factors that appears to have contributed in some measure to the decline of the Chinese empire in the nineteenth century, viz.,chʻing-i, or literati opinion. An initial section sketches the historical origins ofchʻing-i. Then, I trace the influences thatchʻing-ibrought to bear on the process of policy formation during the early 1880's, when the Chinese empire fought a war with France in a vain attempt to save an imperial tributary from Western domination. Finally, I speculate upon the course the empire might have taken had not the throne—a term that here refers essentially to the Empress Dowager Tzʻu-hsi—had to tack and shift to meet the demands ofchʻing-i.

The Blue Shirts during the 1930s became one of the most influential and feared political movements in China. To both contemporaries and historians, however, the Blue Shirt movement has been a shadowy force, known mostly through hearsay, with little solid information regarding its doctrine or its activities. Now, on the basis of memoirs, interviews, and especially Japanese intelligence reports of the 1930s, a rough picture of this secret organization can be pieced together. And the image that emerges is not simply a terrorist organization, but a political faction that reflected the concerns and ideals of many Chinese during the troubled Nanking decade. This study will, it is hoped, not only provide an insight into the nature of Kuomintang rule, but will shed light on a previously unexamined species of the political genus, fascism.

(1988). Report on the Symposium on the History and Archives of Republican China. Republican China: Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 109-110.