In
1949 the Guomindang were defeated by the Chinese Communist Party after
twenty-three years of intermittent fighting. There are many factors that played
a role in the Nationalists defeat. Reasons such as military tactics used by
both sides, support that they gained from various allies, and the actions and
personalities of the leaders involved, all played a role in deciding who
finally won the civil war on mainland China. One factor is how corruption in
the Goumindang contributed to its losing the Chinese Civil War. There are many
different ways in which corruption contributed to the Nationalists’ defeat. First
is how it effected them in the areas of the bureaucracy, and the military. Second,
even though corruption had been a part of day to day life in China it had
reached intolerable levels during the GMD rule. Next, the presence of corruption
contributed to the economic instability of the era. Finally, the CCP was able
to defeat of the GMD because the CCP was not as corrupt and had better
relations with the Chinese public.
The Chinese are masters when it comes to bureaucratic
institutions. They have always valued highly skilled civil servants that followed
Confucian morals. While no dynasty ever lived up perfectly to this standard,
there are levels of corruption that people are willing to tolerate and levels
that they are not. The high levels of immorality in the Nationalist bureaucracy
were at levels that people were not will to accept. One of the reasons for this
was the chaos that China was in, because it did not have a strong central
government. Since China did not have a strong central source of state power,
many small centers of power surfaced. This created a great need for soldiers
regardless of where they came from. In a rush to bring new soldiers to the
battlefield, many commanders abandoned more discriminating recruiting standards
and reduced training, with obvious effect on troop discipline[i]. The Nationalists had to recruit
anyone and everyone into their forces, so that they could fight on the
battlefield. Chiang Kai-shek did recognize this as a problem. He knew that he
had to have a more effective organization if he was going to win the Chinese
Civil War. Orders and admonitions aimed at curbing corrupt practices were
issued repeatedly. But the local officials responsible for their implementation
were in most cases themselves engaged in the very practices the regulations
were intended to control[ii]. Unfortunately, the Nationalists
were so corrupt that even when they tried to institute reforms their officials
did not want to do it. The officials that were in charge of making decisions
were benefiting from the corrupt practices that were going on. This amount of
illegal activity made reforms impossible to implement.
Since
reforms were difficult to conduct the problem of corruption only got worse. The
problems spread all the way to the Nationalists elite units. Members of the
regiment were involved in the illegal arrest of civilians under the pretext of
rounding up traitors, the take-over of privately-owned houses and vehicles, and
the seizure of large quantities of essential commodities[iii]. These were the actions
of the elite 23rd regiment of the Central Gendarmerie Corp. They
were stealing land and valuables from Chinese citizens throughout Shanghai and
other parts of the country-side as well. By stealing from the very people that
they were supposed to protect they turned their own people against them. In
societies that functioning on a more honest level, people can trust the police
or the local officials to do their jobs in a very professional manner. When
these people are in need they can call upon those officials for help. People
did not look to the Nationalists for help. They know that they would just get
robbed when the Nationalists came through. After years and years of this
behavior the population began to hate and distrust the Nationalists. People
would lock-up or try to hide their valuables when they heard that the
Nationalist army was coming through. The constant marauding throughout the
country side took its toll on the economy and the people of mainland China. If
problems with troops raging across the country side was not bad enough, their
were even greater examples of corruption within the officer corp.
High
officials with gorgeously gowned ladies drove in chauffeured automobiles
through the street of fuel-short Chungking; they purchased perfumes,
cigarettes, oranges, butter, and other luxuries smuggled from abroad; they
dined extravagant, multi-course banquets[iv]. This was going on while
the rest of the population was struggling to feed itself on a day to day base. Food
riots in Nanking and Shanghai ended yesterday with the imposition of martial
law, but not until, in Nanking, mobs had attacked at least 40 rice shops and
restaurants, three persons had been trampled to death, and 11 others had been
injured by police using their pistol butts[v]. This report from a
newspaper during that time shows the stark contrast between the Nationalist
elite and the population at large. The people of the cities would see the well
dressed officers riding by in their cars while other families were starving. Even
at the end of World War Two American officers that had worked in China
complained about the Nationalists. I placed major emphasis in my report on the
fact that economic deterioration, incompetence, and corruption in the political
and military organizations in China should be considered against an
all-inclusive background, “lest there be disproportionate emphasis on defects”[vi]. The United States had to
work with Chiang Kei-Shek because he was their best option. However, this made
him far from perfect. General Wedemeyer tried to downplay all the negatives
about the Nationalists, but they were still there. Even with as bad as the
Nationalists were they were still perceived better then the Communists by the
Americans. The Cold War was starting after World War II and the Nationalists
were the group that Washington was supporting. Unfortunately with the staggering
amount of problems that the Nationalists had policy makers in Washington were
getting tired of inadvertently helping the Chinese Communist Party. This helped
to create an image problem for the Nationalists as a whole.
There has always been a certain level of corruption in
all governments, but if it gets out of control it can hurt the health of an
organization. Problems occur when the corruption is so bad that the government
can not function. This is what happened to the Nationalists in China after the
Anti-Japanese War. They had certain types of corruption that contributed to
their down fall. The third condition recognizes the importance of parochial corruption
(Scott 1970) or the building of “social capital” (for example “guanxi” in
China, Tanzi 1995) through misuse of power[vii]. Guanxi has been common
throughout Chinese history, and even the Nationalists practiced it. To the
Chinese this would not be considered corruption, but the way that things are
done. Some level of corruption had always been a part of Chinese society, but
with the GMD it had become intolerable. In terms of public legitimacy, official
corruption therefore had a generic negative effect – it presented the state as
unjust, and it prompted the regime to take highly unpopular actions to add to
its income[viii]. People in China
believed that one of the signs that a ruling power had lost the Mandate of
Heaven was excessive corruption. Since the GMD was excessively corrupt they
were losing the right to rule. Typically in Chinese history, once the Mandate
of Heaven begins to slip there is no turning back[ix]. Once the ruler had lost
the Mandate of Heaven it was time for someone else to take over. The actions
that the regime did take to help restore its rule over the people added to
their unpopularity and gave the people even more reasons not to support them.
The
Chinese citizenry were being taxed very highly by the Nationalists as well as having
their private belongings confiscated. This created a kind of double taxation
that the Chinese people had to endure. Even in the United States, which had
know about the corruption of the GMD, their started to be changing attitudes towards
Chiang’s regime. The complete ineptness of high military leaders and the
widespread corruption and dishonesty throughout the armed forces could, in some
measure, have been controlled and directed had the above authority and
facilities been available[x]. Officers on the ground
were either selling their guns and ammunition to others or just leaving them on
the battlefield to be taken over by the communists. Of the $2 billion in
military aid, it was estimated that 90 per cent had been eventually acquired by
the Communists, either through sales by corrupt officials or by capture[xi]. American aid was being
wasted in China. So high a percentage of the arms provided by the United States
have fallen into the hands of the Communists without ever inflicting serious battle
damage on them that this country has been inadvertently arming the enemies of
the Nationalist Government[xii]. The tides of public
opinion begin to shift away from the Nationalists and Chiang Kai-shek. The
American people and their government started to see how bad things were really
going in China and wanted to end the aid that they had been giving. The
evidence of corruption hurt the Nationalist cause. During World War II when the
Nationalists were needed in China by the American government, they could afford
to over look their weaknesses. However, after the war had ended there was no
strong reason to keep wasting money on a failing regime. This shift helped to
weaken the Nationalist stance in China. It might be argued, of course, that
corruption in China was not greater, only more conspicuous, than in some
Western countries[xiii].
For the most part this could be considered true, because there is a degree of
corruption in all nations. China was like any other nation in the fact that
while it had many good people in its government, it also had some who were less
then honest. The debilitating factor for the Nationalist was that they had to
rely on foreign aid. They had to rely on the US air force to get around the
country effectively. They also relied on money in the form of aid that could be
used to fix their economy that had been debilitated by years of war. When the
American’s saw that the aid that they were giving the Nationalist was being
wasted, they stopped giving. This put the Nationalists in an even worse
position then before. They had gone from being with aid and misusing it, to
having no aid at all. This continued to put more strain on an already exhausted
Chinese economy.
Corruption had a very negative effect on the economy of
China. The problem started with the large deficits that the Nationalists had
been running to finance the war. These large budget deficits had to be financed
one of two ways; an increase in taxes or seigniorage. The Nationalists chose to
go with seigniorage, which is the process of the government printing money to
pay for things. However, this created a new problem called inflation. The
government continued to print money to pay its debts as the value of the
currency continued to drop. Inflationary pressures later spread to the
household and business sectors[xiv]. This created an
environment where honest people could not make enough money to purchase the
things that they needed. Civil servants and soldiers alike were not being paid
anymore as inflation continued to rise. Their wealth and real income shrank as
prices rose. The trouble with all of this is that it was completely man made
and was completely the fault of the men who were in power. They were the ones
who were running the government's press and it was them alone who could stop
them. However, the government did not stop printing money. The lack of adequate
administrative machinery and personnel and the inflation-induced moral weakness
of the officials in charge of the various control programs further contributed
to the ineffectiveness of the controls[xv]. Over the years
government officials had come to rely on extortion and kickbacks to make up for
lost income, so they had no intention of carrying out reforms. The problem in
the late 1940’s, simply put, was that few of the basic incentives for growth
were present, and that official corruption prevented some of these incentives
from being formed[xvi].
The increases in inflation made it harder for legitimate business to be
conducted. Add to that the fact that people’s property was being confiscated
made it almost impossible for people to make an honest living. People would
just try to extort more money from each other, so that they could cover the costs
of living. There is a clear distinction between what the Nationalists tried to
do and what the Communists did do.
The Chinese Communist Party took a totally different
approach well dealing with the Chinese people at the local level. The main
strategic issue for CCP decision-making during the civil war was land policy[xvii]. The communist
understood what was important to people, so they went on a public relations
campaign before the Red Army would go into an area. Newspaper reports from the
time state how successful that these efforts were at the local level: There has
been a successful drive against illiteracy; careful cultivation of small-scale
industry and agriculture; and measures against inflation[xviii]. These efforts helped
to increase the reputation of the Chinese Communist Party relative to the
Nationalists. They were seen as actually doing things to help people. The
country is overwhelmingly agricultural and the peasant has always been the
victim of the landlord, the tax-collector, and the money-lender[xix]. The Chinese Communists
saw this as a problem and went to meet it head on with land reform. They
divided up land according to the size of people’s families. There, according to
the report, 3,000 mou (500 acres) of
land had been allotted to the poor peasants, each person receiving four mou (2/3 acre) while a family with only
two members received three persons’ shares[xx]. People were receiving
and able to work more land, so they were able to produce more food. This small
rise in production was able to make families living in communist controlled
areas better off. The Communist troops did not steal from the people like the
Nationalist troops did, so people were able to keep what little extra that they
were able to produce. This extra savings helped to contribute to families
having better lives in the communist controlled region. This Communist victory
is attributed to the farsighted planning of the leaders of international
communism and their control and guidance of the Chinese Communist party[xxi]. This account from a
paper during that time gives some what of an exaggerated image to the CCP, but
it is not totally wrong. Mao Zedong did have a fairly well developed plan about
what he wanted to do. It was formulated during his time in Jiangxi province and
was later reformulated as the CCP held up in Yunnan province during the
Sino-Japanese War. He had tried other policies before and therefore knew what
worked and what did not. The CCP was eventually able to control all of northern
China to the Yangtze by April 1949. The probable reason for the Communists’
stalling is believed to be a desire to mop up points held by the Nationalists
in north China, bringing everything from the Yangtze to Manchuria under a
unified Government at Peking[xxii]. The communists had
control over most of northern China. There they started to institute the
reforms that Mao Zedong and his group of cadres had designed. Many of these
reforms were able to be implemented because the communists had less corruption
on their side then the Nationalists did. It could also be said that the
corruption on the communist side was less obvious because Chiang Kai-shek and
the Nationalists were the official face of China on the world stage. The world’s
media paid attention to them therefore people were able to see their faults. In
time the CCP was able to oust the Nationalists from power, however, they were
still unable to totally implement their policies. Unlike other areas of China
that had been “liberated” before the CCP formally took power in 1949, Yunnan,
Sichuan, and Guizhou had been under GMD control until very late in 1949 and
early 1950, and as a result had very few CCP officials capable of implementing
central state policies[xxiii]. This would change as
the CCP consolidated its power over mainland China, but the days of Chinese
Nationalist rule over the mainland were over.
History remembers the victors and tends to forget the
losers. However, it is important to remember the losers and why they lost.
Sometimes the lessons from losing can be more important then the ones from
winning. The Nationalists fall into this category. They had started with just a
small group of military officials, but were able to get to the top by cutting
deals with warlords and international power brokers. They had tried to stamp
out their opposition, but had been undone by their own shortcomings. There were
many things that contributed to the Nationalists losing; poor policies,
nearsighted goals, and appalling military tactics to name a few, but corruption
played an important role as well. Corruption was one of the key factors of how
the Nationalists lost the Chinese civil war. It contributed to their down fall
in several ways: the different views of corruption between Chinese and Western
culture, the fact that they were corrupt, the ability of people to see their
corruption, and finally the economic factors that contributed to their
corruption. All of these things helped to show how corruption contributes to
the Nationalists lose.
[i]
Diana Lary and Stephen MacKinnon, Scars
of War: The Impact of Warfare on Modern
China (Vancouver: UBC Press,
2001), 25.
[ii] Suzanne Pepper, Civil War in China: The Political Struggle
1945-1949 (Berkeley:
University
of California Press, 1978), 21.
[iii] Suzanne Pepper, Civil War in China: The Political Struggle 1945-1949
(Berkeley:
University
of California Press, 1978), 21-22.
[iv] Lloyd E. Eastman, The Nationalist era in China 1927-1949
(New York: Cambridge
University
Press, 1991), 158-159.
[v] “Big Battle for Nanking,” The Times, 11 November 1948, p. 4.
[vi]Albert C. Wedemeyer, Wedemeyer Report (New York: Henry Holt
& Company, 1958), 393.
[vii]Arvind K. Jain, Economics of Corruption (Boston: Kluwer
Academic, 1998), 18.
[viii] Odd Arne Westad, Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War,
1946-1950 (Stanford:
Stanford
University Press, 2003), 73.
[ix] John F. Melby, The Mandate of Heaven, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1968), 50.
[x] “U.S. Gives Account of Total China
Aid,” New York Times, 6 August 1949,
p. 3.
[xi] “Climax in China,” New York Times, 24 April 1949, p. E1.
[xii] “U.S. Gives Account of Total China
Aid,” New York Times, 6 August 1949,
p. 3.
[xiii] Freda Utley, The China Story (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1951), 59.
[xiv] Shun-hsin Chou, The Chinese Inflation 1937-1949 (New
York: Columbia University
Press,
1963), 186.
[xv] Kia-ngau Chang, The Inflationary Spiral: The Experience in
China, 1939-1950 (New
York: The Technology Press of
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1958),
243.
[xvi] Odd Arne Westad, Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War,
1946-1950 (Stanford:
Stanford
University Press, 2003), 73.
[xvii] Odd Arne Westad, Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War,
1946-1950
(Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2003), 115-116.
[xviii] “Work of Communists
in North China: The Yenan Administration,” The
Times, 25
January
1945, p. 3.
[xix] “The China
Communists: Mao Tse-Tung’s Campaign Against Feudal Survivals.” The
Times, 4 December 1948, p.
5.
[xx] Frank C. Lee, “Land
Redistribution in Communist China,” March 1948 [jstor];
available from
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0030-851X%28194803%2921%3A1%3C20%3ALRICC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P;
Internet; accessed 27 March 2008.
[xxi] Tang Tsou, “The
China Story,” June 1953 [jstor] available from
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0043-4078%28195306%296%3A2%3C296%3A%22CS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-I;
Internet; accessed 27 March 2008.
[xxii]
“Climax in China,” New York Times, 24
April 1949, p. E1.
[xxiii]
Diana Lary and Stephen MacKinnon, Scars
of War: The Impact of Warfare on
Modern China
(Vancouver: UBC Press, 2001), 175.
