Chart of Chinese progress from a US wartime pamphlet

The Bund in Shanghai in the 1930s

The Nanjing decade (also Nanking decade, Chinese: 南京十年; pinyin: Nánjīng shí nián, or the Golden decade, Chinese: 黃金十年; pinyin: Huángjīn shí nián) is an informal name for the decade from 1927 (or 1928) to 1937 in the Republic of China. It began when Nationalist Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek took Nanjing from Zhili clique warlord Sun Chuanfang halfway through the Northern Expedition in 1927. Chiang declared it to be the national capital despite the existence of a left-wing Nationalist government in Wuhan. The Wuhan faction gave in and the Northern Expedition continued until the Beiyang government in Beijing was overthrown in 1928. The decade ended with the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 and the retreat of the Nationalist government to Wuhan. GDP growth averaged 3.9 per cent a year from 1929 to 1941 and per capita GDP about 1.8 per cent.^[1] Historians view the decade as a period of Chinese conservatism.^[2][3][4]

Nanjing was of symbolic and strategic importance. The Ming dynasty had made Nanjing a capital, the republic had been established there in 1912, and Sun Yat-sen's provisional government had been there. Sun's body was brought and placed in a grand mausoleum to cement Chiang's legitimacy. Chiang was born in nearby Zhejiang and the general area had strong popular support for him.

The Nanjing decade was marked by both progress and frustration. The period was far more stable than the preceding Warlord Era. There was enough stability to allow economic growth and the start of ambitious government projects, some of which were taken up again by the new government of the People's Republic after 1949. Nationalist foreign service officers negotiated diplomatic recognition from Western governments and began to unravel the unequal treaties. Entrepreneurs, educators, lawyers, doctors, and other professionals were more free to create modern institutions than at any earlier time. However, the Nationalist government also suppressed dissent, corruption and nepotism were rampant and revolts broke out in several provinces; internal conflicts also perpetuated within the government. The Nationalists were never able to fully pacify the Chinese Communist Party, and struggled to address the widespread unrest and protests over their failure to check Japanese aggression.

The party-state

Zones of control during the "Nanjing Decade"

The organization and function of the KMT one-party state was derived from Sun's "Three Stages of Revolution" and his policy of Dang Guo. The first stage was military unification, which was carried out with the Northern Expedition. The second was "political tutelage" which was a provisional government led by the KMT to educate people about their political and civil rights, and the third stage was constitutional government. The KMT considered themselves to be at the second stage in 1928.

The KMT set up its five-branch government (based on the Three Principles of the People) using an organic law including Executive Yuan, Legislative Yuan, Judicial Yuan, Control Yuan and Examination Yuan. This government disavowed continuity with the defunct Beiyang government that enjoyed international recognition; however the state was still the same – the Republic of China. Nevertheless, many bureaucrats from the Beiyang government flooded into Nanjing to receive jobs.

Chiang was elected President of the National Government by the KMT central executive committee in October 1928. In the absence of a National Assembly, the KMT's party congress functioned in its place. Since party membership was a requirement for civil service positions, the KMT was full of careerists and opportunists.

The KMT was heavily factionalized into pro- and anti-Chiang groups. The largest faction in the party following reunification was the pro-Chiang Whampoa clique (a.k.a. the National Revolutionary Army First Army Group/Central Army), which made up slightly over half of the party membership. A Whampoa sub-faction was the infamous Blue Shirts Society. Next was the CC Clique, a pro-Chiang civilian group. A third group, the technocratic Political Study Clique, was more liberal than the other two pro-Chiang factions. They were formed by KMT members of the first National Assembly back in 1916. These three factions competed with each other for Chiang's favor.

Opposition to Chiang came from both the left and the right. The leftist opposition was led by Wang Jingwei and known as the Reorganizationists. The rightist opposition was led by Hu Hanmin. Hu never created or joined a faction but he was viewed as the spiritual leader by the Western Hills Group, led by Lin Sen. There were also individuals within the party who were not part of any faction, like Sun Fo. These anti-Chiang figures were outnumbered in the party but held great power by their seniority, unlike many pro-Chiang cadres that joined only during or after the Northern Expedition. Chiang cleverly played these factions off against one another. The party itself was reduced to a mere propaganda machine, while real power lay with Chiang and the National Revolutionary Army (NRA).

Intra-party struggles

In 1922, the KMT had formed the First United Front with the Communists to defeat the warlords and reunify China. In April 1927, however, Chiang split with the Communists and purged them from the Front against the wishes of the KMT leadership in Wuhan, setting up a rival KMT government in Nanjing. The split and the purge was detrimental to the KMT's Northern Expedition and allowed the Zhili-Fengtian coalition to launch a successful counterattack. The mostly leftist Wuhan faction soon purged the Communists as well and reunited with Chiang in Nanjing. The Northern Expedition restarted in February 1928 and successfully reunited China by the end of the year.

At the end of the Expedition, the NRA consisted of four army groups: Chiang's Whampoa clique, Feng Yuxiang's Guominjun, Yan Xishan's Shanxi clique, and Li Zongren's New Guangxi clique. Chiang did not have direct control of the other three so he considered them to be threats.

In February 1929, Li Zongren fired the pro-Chiang governor of Hunan but Chiang objected and the two clashed in March, leading to Li's defeat and (temporary) expulsion from the KMT by the third party congress. Feng Yuxiang rebelled on May 19 but was humiliated when half of his army defected through bribery. From October to February, fighting resumed with Wang Jingwei and Lin Sen joining the opposition. In May 1930, the Central Plains War erupted, pitting Chiang against the Beiping faction of Yan Xishan, Feng Yuxiang, Li Zongren, and Wang Jingwei. Though victorious, the conflict left Chiang's government bankrupt.

In 1931, Hu Hanmin attempted to block Chiang's provisional constitution and was put under house arrest. This caused another uprising by Chen Jitang, Li Zongren, Sun Fo and other anti-Chiang factions who converged on Guangzhou to set up a rival government. War was averted due to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria but it did cause Chiang to release Hu and resign as president and premier. Chiang's influence was restored when he was made chairman of the Military Affairs Commission at the start of the Battle of Shanghai (1932). Hu moved to Guangzhou and led an autonomous government in Liangguang.

In November 1933, the Fujian Rebellion erupted by dissident KMT elements. The rebellion was crushed in January.

During Chiang's second premiership, Hu Hanmin died on 12 May 1936 and left a power vacuum in the south. Chiang wanted to fill it with a loyalist that would end the south's autonomy. Chen Jitang and Li Zongren conspired to overthrow Chiang but were politically outmaneuvered by bribes and defections. Chen resigned and the plot fizzled. In December, Chiang was kidnapped by Zhang Xueliang and forced to ally with the Communists in the Second United Front to combat the Japanese occupation.

In addition, the Ma clique and the Xinjiang clique, both KMT affiliates, were contesting each other in the western fringes from 1931 until 1937 in the Xinjiang Wars when the Soviet Union's support helped the Xinjiang group to triumph. Xinjiang then became a Soviet protectorate and safe haven for Communists. The Ma clique also fought Sun Dianying in 1934.

Wang Jingwei's collaborationist government during the Second Sino-Japanese War can be seen as an extension of these party power struggles.

These civil wars extended Chiang's direct rule from four provinces to eleven just prior to the Marco Polo Bridge Incident.

Suppression of Communists and other parties

The Chinese Civil War which began with the purge of communists in 1927 would continue until the forming of the Second United Front in December 1936. During this period, the Nationalists tried destroying the Communists by using Encirclement Campaigns. The failure of early Communist strategy of urban warfare led to the rise of Mao Zedong who advocated guerrilla warfare. The Communists were much weaker in the urban areas due to secret police repression led by Dai Li. Many Communists and suspected or actual Communist sympathizers were imprisoned, including the wife and four year old daughter of Marshal Nie.^[5]

Other parties that were heavily persecuted were the Young China Party and the "Third Party". They would remain banned until the Second Sino-Japanese War when they were allowed into the Second United Front as part of the China Democratic League.

Warlord conflicts during the Nanjing decade

• Warlord Rebellion in northeastern Shandong
  • Beijing Revolt
• Central Plains War
• Han–Liu War
• War in Ningxia (1934)

Conflicts with Japan and Soviet Union

• Sino-Soviet conflict (1929)
• Soviet Invasion of Xinjiang
• Xinjiang War (1937)
• Nanking incident of 1927
• Jinan incident

Military developments

Following the Central Plains war Chiang was unable to re-assert his full control over the country as Hu Hanmin prevented him from using the legislative Yuan and Wang Jingwei from using the Executive Yuan. Thus Chiang turned to Field Headquarters a military body subordinate to the Military Affairs Commission which he headed thus Chiang based his power around the military and used it to force his agenda through government. These headquarters consisted of the Yu E Wan (Henan, Hubei and Anhui), Yu Shan Jin (Henan, Shaanxi and Shanxi) Beiping (Rehe, Chahar, Suiyuan and Hebei) the largest and most important of these was the Nanchang HQ which controlled areas of Jiangxi, Guangdong, Hunan, Fujian and Hubei.^[6]

Reforms

China's first government sponsored social engineering program began in 1934 with the New Life Movement.^[14] In addition, non-governmental reforms, such as the Rural Reconstruction Movement made substantial progress in addressing the problems of the countryside. Many social activists who participated in this movement were graduated as professors of the United States. They made tangible but limited progress in modernizing the tax, infrastructural, economic, cultural, and educational equipment and mechanisms of rural regions until the cancellation of government coordination and subsidies in the mid-to-late 1930s due to rampant wars and the lack of resources. The rural reconstructive activists advocated a “third way” between the communist violent land reform and the reformism of the Nationalist Government based on the respect of human rights and individual liberties for educational doctrine.^[15][16]

Economic improvements and social reforms were mixed. The Kuomintang supported women’s rights and education, the abolition of polygamy, and foot binding. The government of the Republic of China under Chiang’s leadership also enacted a women’s quota in the parliament with reserved seats for women. During the Nanjing Decade, average Chinese citizens received the education they’d never had the chance to get in the dynasties that increased the literacy rate across China. The education also promotes the ideals of Tridemism of democracy, republicanism, science, constitutionalism, and Chinese Nationalism based on the Political Tutelage of the Kuomintang.^{[17][18][19][20][21]} However, Periodic famines continued under Nationalist rule: in Northern China from 1928 to 1930, in Sichuan from 1936 to 1937, and in Henan from 1942 to 1943. In total, these famines cost at least 11.7 million lives by some estimates.^{[22][23][24][25]} GDP growth averaged 3.9 per cent a year from 1929 to 1941 and per capita GDP about 1.8 per cent.^[1] Among other institutions, the Nationalist Government founded the Academia Sinica and the Central Bank of China. In 1932, China sent a team for the first time to the Olympic Games.

Economic developments

Agriculture

The Field Headquarters acting as the enactors of Chiang's will also ventured into economic development particularly in the countryside. The Co-operatives encouraged by the national government were a major source of development in rural areas, they provided loans, seed, fertiliser and tools as well as establishing irrigation works, workshops and coordinating tree planting to control flooding and rejuvenate soil. The Rural financial assisstance bureaus also provided capital to the countryside and cooperatives. However, these programs were not national nor were they universal in the areas they were implemented, nonetheless progress was made mostly in the lower and central Yangtze regions which were the areas most under Chiang's control and recipients of his attention and resources. A total of 6,223 cooperatives were formed by mid-1935 with over 710,000 members. In Jiangxi where the largest effort was made due to the presence of Communist forces over 3,400,000 Yuan was spent in aid or given as loans with further resources represented with 2,500 ploughs thousands of field tools and 180,000 kilograms of rice seed.^[33]

Granaries were also established to store up to 3 months of food and by 1935 in the Nanchang HQ area 228,000 tons of grain was stored.^[34]

Warlord activities

Guangdong

Chen Jitang, the governor of Guangdong prioritised as typical of warlords his own provincial development above all else, though he did collaborate with Nanjing when politically expedient, he nonetheless remained devoted to his province. To these ends, Guangdong began a major highway construction programme under his rule, increasing from 3,661 km in 1929 to 17,587 by 1935, the highest in China by province. Another was the usage of his military to suppress banditry which was assisted by the large road network facilitating the movement of troops throughout the province.^[35]

Chen, having secured his position in the province saw military development as his priority expanding his army from 50,000 in June 1931 to over 150,000 by July 1932:

First Group Army^[36]

Commander/ formation	First Army	Second Army	Third Army	Independent forces
Commander	Yu Hanmou	Xiang hanping	Li yangjing
Chief-of-Staff	Yang Gang	Ye Minyu	Zhou Zhi
Political Department Director	Li Xunhuan	Li Heling	Di Junqian
1st Division	Li Zhenqiu	Zhang Meixin	Huang Tingzhen	Huang Renhuan
2nd Division	Ye Zhao	Zhang Da	Huang Zhiwe	Zhang Ruigui
Training Division				Mou Peinan
Guards Brigade				Chen Hanguang
1st Brigade				Fan Dexing
2nd Brigade				Chen Zhang
3rd Brigade				Yan Yingyu
1st-8th regiment

To equip his much larger army, Chen renovated the Shijing Arsenal from 1933 to 1935 to the extent that it employed 2,000 workers and had an annual cost of 2,400,000 Yuan. The arsenal producing monthly 12,000 rifles, 2,100,000 cartridges, 6-18 mortars, 6-18 machine guns, 1,200 shells and 20,000 grenades. However, even this was deemed insufficient in terms of artillery production and gas masks and 11,000,000 additional yuan was spent on building further arsenals to remedy this, though these projects were not completed by the time the Liangguang incident broke out and Chen was removed from power. Chen additionally purchased 12 tanks, 15 armoured cars in 1932 and from 1933 to 1936, 29 fighters, 10 reconnaissance planes, 6 monoplanes, 6 bombers, 3 trainers and a transport plane to bolster his airforce. This purchase of material was accompanied by a 300,000 yuan aircraft plant in Shaoguan.^[36]

Chen Jitang the Governor of Guandong until his removal in 1936

Provincial revenue and expeniture of Guangdong^[37]

Tax name	1930-31	1932-33	1934-35
Revenue
Provincial treasury:
All tax receipts	28,858,817	31,731,193	52,181,711
Non-tax receipts	20,537,010	17,226,681	22,045,527
Total	49,395,827	48,957,874	74,227,238
Expenditure
Provincial treasury:
Regular expenses	16,988,095	15,401,788	30,143,869
Total expenses	65,666,101	63,969,102	72,432,654
Balance of Provincial treasury	-16,270,274	14,993,228	+1,794,584

As the table indicates, the province of Guangdong ran consistent budget deficits and its overspending meant that the money allocated to the national treasury and therefore for Nanjing were never forwarded to the central government, though military expenses of a province were allocated to the national treasury and not the provincial treasury, unless there was a deficit where the provincial treasury would account for the shortfall.^[37]

National treasury revenue and expenditure of Guangdong^[37]

Revenue and expenditures	1930-31	1932-33	1934-35
Salt tax	8,325,137	7,054,409	5,004,271
Tobacco/wine tax	4,103,348	4,635,919	5,029,683
Stamp tax	1,692,228	1,731,235	1,998,822
Customs	632,690	37,258	63,098
Consolidated tax*	1,275,677	10,176,848	15,257,598
Opium Suppression	5,994,699	8,699,971	11,271,292
Others	7,911,580	188,780	283,306
Non-tax receipts	1,672,362	3,959,155	5,004,956
Total	31,607,721	36,483,575	43,913,026
Party expenses	49,880	15,856	30,472
Diplomatic expenses	5,320	4,088	7,862
Administrative expenses of home affairs	236,993	352,536	406,999
Financial administration expenses	1,378,978	572,797	2,725,880
Educational expenses	1,277,800	1,993,597	3,590,275
Military expenses	40,256,960	45,412,781	59,956,742
Others	13,442,491	7,595,984	3,772,706
Total	56,648,422	55,947,639	70,490,936
Balance	-25,040,701	-19,464,064	-26,577,910

*excise on cloth,rolled tobacco, cotton yarn, matches and cement

The Guangdong national treasury never turned a profit under Chen Jitang, this angered Chiang Kai-Shek who in 1931 (prior to Chen's large military expansion) complained that Chen had claimed the entire national treasury to defray his own military spending and accordingly his military expenditure. According to the central government, regulations should not exceed 1,500,000 a month, yet Chen claimed 4,300,000 yuan a month, triple the amount of men he retained in 1931. He additionally earned 800,000 yuan a month from the Guangxi territories he occupied and did not report this to the central government at all.^[37]

Social policies

In Jiangxi, the new life movement was driven by the motivation of Chiang Kai-Shek and his encirclement campaigns to eradicate communism in the province. The movement was intended to mobilise society against communism and provide a viable alternative system of administration. Xiong Shihui was the long term governor of Jiangxi in between 1931 and 1942. The association was organised at a county level by the end of 1935c in Jiangxi alone there were associations in 64 counties, 2 townships and 2 special districts.^[38]

By 1935, the Movement was openly collaborating with the YMCA and Churches within China, with New life corps of up to 10 members being formed to disseminate the principles of the movement at a grassroots level, as well as during Church services, with Chiang and his wife openly appointing Christian leaders into the movement and visiting them calling for cooperation with the movement.^[39]

The Government additionally re-organised schools from the bao level up and forming Sun Yat-Sen's People Schools. Central government funding for education increased from 23,290,000 Yuan in 1933 to 55,400,000 Yuan in 1936, though schools were additionally subsidised by the local elites, so the total education budget cannot be obtained. The New Life Movement had its teachings woven into the curriculum. The schools accepted pupils between the ages of 10-16 and adults 16-50. The curriculum teaching included writing, reading, maths, the Three Principles of the People, communist atrocities, traditional morals, citizenship physical education and self-defence. It also promoted local agriculture, co-operatives and new life principles. Lessons around filial piety in particular were emphasized in terms of self-sacrifice for one's nation. In 1934, Jiangxi had 47 counties and 5 special districts who had 1,168 people's schools with 56,500 students and 2,025 teachers at an annual cost of 65,022 Yuan.^[39]

The Bao schools were aimed more towards eliminating illiteracy in children. Adults with attendance made compulsory children aged 6–15 who had not been previously educated, had to enroll for 4 years. Adults who had not attended the schools were to attend for 6 months in night classes. Whilst the schools obtained money from the provincial government, Military Affairs Council and the Boxer Indemnity fund, the bao schools obtained funding from the provincial and local governments as well as the local elite. In 1935, there were 14,448 schools, a total of 54.3% of bao possessed schools and this percentage rose as the total number of schools grew to 17,938 in 1937.^[39]

Conclusion

The decade came to an end with the Second Sino-Japanese War. Being located near the coast, it was vulnerable so the capital was moved to Chongqing for the duration of the war. While the transfer of the capital marked its political end, the symbolic end was the Nanjing Massacre (the Rape of Nanjing) when up to 300,000 inhabitants died during the Japanese occupation.

See also

• Timeline of events leading to World War II in Asia

References

• Peter Zarrow. China in War and Revolution, 1895–1949. Includes Chapter 13: "The Nanjing decade, 1928–1937: The Guomindang era" (pp. 248–270). Routledge, 2005. ISBN 0-415-36448-5.