The Chinese Revolution of 1947, named the Thirty-Six Revolution domestically because it occurred on the 36th year of the Minguo calendar, was a series of popular uprisings that ended the dictatorship of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, then Chairman of the National Government. The revolutionaries brought about an end to the Civil War and ensured major socioeconomic reforms to restore fiscal solvency and protect the civil liberties enumerated in the Constitution of the Republic of China.
Background
The Second Sino-Japanese War caused 17,000,000 to 22,000,000 civilian deaths, over a million military casualties, and a sharp decline in the standards of living for the average Chinese citizen since the prosperity of the Golden decade (1927-1937). After hostilities concluded with Japan, an offensive was launched against the Communist Party of China, which had set up operations in the northern provinces. Under the tenure of the aforementioned Chiang Kai-shek, the Kuomintang (KMT) or the Chinese Nationalist Party fell victim to rampant corruption and increased brutality against its people, although some argue that Chiang was not personally responsible, and that he was made a scapegoat for the difficulties that the government had in those trying circumstances. Regardless, economic hardship continued, and the government's standard response to a lack of military or administrative funding was the printing press, allowing the gap between tax revenue and expenditures to widen unabated. Thus even after the Second World War had ended, inflation continued to increase as the price levels for common goods skyrocketed.
Late in 1946, unemployment was as high as 20% in Canton and 30% in the capital of Nanjing, while labor unrest exploded in frequency, with 1716 strikes in Shanghai for that year alone. The Chiang regime responded by instituting wage and price controls in the first months of 1947. These were effective at first, but prices were soaring again by April, as rice almost doubled in price within three months. These attempts at curbing inflation proved to be ineffective, and were abandoned by May 1947.
Protests and responses
The 228 Massacre
Main article: 228 Massacre
Beginning of the protests in Northern China
Students began to protest the government for its widespread graft and the ongoing conflict with the Communists. On 17-18 May 1947, authorities shut down seventeen universities across Nanjing, Shanghai, Beiping, Hangzhou and Jinhua, as protesters demanded peace, increased subsidies, and more rations. In the waning days of that month, student leaders met in Nanjing to coordinate a nationwide general strike for June 2nd, which would be “Anti-Civil War Day”.
The burgeoning movement contacted three popular Shanghai newspapers Wenhuibao, Lianhebao, and Xinmin Wanbao to write about the planned Anti-Civil War Day. These media outlets were then shut down by the authorities after they had done so, as the students began to propagandize in the streets in order to reach the rest of the people with their anti-government message. Several thousand students were arrested by authorities, with the KMT launching a terror campaign against student protesters, some using nail-studded planks and in one instance killing three young students with rubber bullets in a Wuhan campus raid.
This kind of brutal suppression was not unknown, but many Shanghai workers struggling with increasingly high costs for even basic supplies sympathized with the student protesters and their struggle. On May 27th, workers from the Shanghai Customs Collection Agency and a dozen major department stores went on strike with the demand for the arrested students to be freed. KMT authorities ignored their wishes and began to fill their jails with hundreds of strikers.
This combined with the end of the wage and price controls were taken as signs that the government would no longer be responsive to the demands of laborers, thus expanding the scope of the strikes. As they had in 1946, the workers at the Shanghai Power Company refused to work and prevented others from going into the plant. Suddenly the French Tram, Power and Water Company, the Dalong Machine Factory, as well as various cotton and textile mills, were paralyzed in their operations by the next day. The workers camped out at their workplaces and resisted attempts at arrest, which became increasingly impractical as the number of protesters swelled. In the neighboring city of Nanjing, a meeting of the Kuomintang was called in response to the unrest, and it was agreed that the Central Executive Committee would depart to Chongqing until the crisis had passed, with Zhang Qun, the President of the Executive Yuan (or Premier), and Sun Ko, the President of the Legislative Yuan in attendance. Generalissimo Chiang stayed behind, and sent a notice to K.C. Wu, Mayor of Shanghai, instructing him to declare martial law in the city by tomorrow.
Mayor Wu rejected the necessity of this. As a strong liberal opponent of police brutality, he viewed the ongoing and planned response to be a disproportionate and inappropriate use of force that crippled free expression. He thus arranged for all of those that had been arrested for striking or protesting to be immediately freed on May 31st 1947.
Anti-Civil War Day
Uprisings in Shanghai and Nanjing
Many of the recently freed student protest leaders and organizers left to Nanjing, as Generalissimo Chiang learned of K.C. Wu's actions and dispatched Yu Hung-Chun to be the new Mayor, who declared Martial Law upon arrival on June 1st. Remaining leaders in the Shanghai labor and student protest movement were arrested again on the pretext that they were Communist collaborators, while a city-wide curfew was imposed with the aid of the Army. Thirty-six alleged Communist infiltrators were to be executed the next day, while K.C. Wu was assassinated as he returned home in the evening.
In the early morning of Monday, June 2nd 1947, news of Wu's death caused a spontaneous vigil to be observed, in violation of the curfew. Students refused to return to their schools while workers refused to go to their workplaces. Instead, they marched down the streets of Shanghai in solemn protest. The Shanghai garrison ordered the dispersal of the crowds before opening fire, beginning a massacre of the unarmed protesters. News quickly spread to Nanjing by eyewitnesses, as student leaders had already begun to lead the city in protest, which soon morphed into a revolutionary mass strike in a show of support for those being killed in Shanghai.
Troops in Nanjing refused to fire on the tens of thousands of people protesting in the streets, even as they shouted slogans against government corruption and the war. The Nanjing soldiers instead helped the protesters seize the Presidential Palace, and placed Generalissimo Chiang under arrest, among other critical administrative and financial buildings captured that day. The Nanjing garrison then marched to Shanghai with millions of civilian volunteers, who bloodlessly forced the Shanghai garrison to surrender. All of those responsible for the massacre, including Yu Hung-Chun, were placed under arrest.
Establishment of the RCCP
The Revolutionary Committee for Constitutional Protection (RCCP) was established on June 3rd by known reformist politicians, who pledged themselves to organizing relief for the fiscal crisis and supervising new elections according to the Constitution of the Republic of China.
Zhang Lan, chairman of the China Democratic League, was appointed as the provisional President of the RCCP. He promulgated its first major resolution that day: the Emergency Ordinance to Restore Solvency, which created an independent central bank known as the Chinese People's Central Bank (CPCB) with exclusive powers to print money and mint coins.
The new Chinese yuan was pegged at a 2:1 ratio with United States Dollar, backed by dollar reserves and over half a billion ounces of gold captured in Nanjing and Shanghai. The fact that the RCCP did not have to foot the bill for the military budget of the ROC while being able to collect taxes from the most profitable ports in the nation also helped the new bank in reducing the deficit. Workers were also guaranteed work at government-owned cooperatives, and all citizens promised a basic amount of food. Thousands of young adults united to form the National Salvation Volunteer Army (NSVA) to defend the RCCP so it could organize a peace settlement in the Chinese Civil War, although their funding was very poor.
Reaction of the KMT
President Sun Fo, along with Premier Zhang Qun and Chief of the General Staff Chen Cheng, filled the power vacuum left by Chiang after his arrest. They became known as the "Chongqing Troika", unified by their common effort in saving their ship of state from sinking through reconciliation with the revolutionaries and rapid reforms after failed attempts to negotiate terms for Chiang’s release as had happened in the Xi’an incident.
The Troika first led the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang in its extraordinary session in Chongqing to name President Sun Fo as the new Director-General of the party. He pledged to pass reforms to improve the economy, set up elections, and end the war as soon as possible. He then led the KMT to pass a resolution condemning Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek for his brutality, and the corruption that emerged during his rule. He along with Mayor Yu Hung-Chun, former Governor-General of Taiwan Chen Yi, the Shanghai garrison, and the troops responsible for the 228 Massacre, were to stand trial for their various alleged crimes.
The Nanjing soldiers were also to be honored for their heroism. Soong Ching-ling, a leftist member of the KMT and the widow of Sun Yat-sen who was residing in Shanghai during the time of the Revolution, was designated the official party representative to the RCCP. The incumbent members of the KMT government privately feared that a more widespread revolution would be an opportunity for Communist takeover, and thus they would do all they could to make popular concessions to remain in power.
Finally, the Kuomintang ordered the Republic of China Armed Forces to hold their positions against the People’s Liberation Army and to assert control over national territory liable to breaking away. Ma Bufang, a warlord who served as the Governor of Qinghai, was specifically tasked with intimidating Tibet. Governor Ma thus massed his troops on the Tibetan border and threatened to bomb its cities if it issued a declaration of independence amidst the turmoil in Nanjing and Shanghai.
End of the Second Phase of the Chinese Civil War
Gu Zhutong, Commander-in-Chief of the Republic of China Army, was ordered by President Sun Fo to deliver a ceasefire as a pretext for further negotiations in hopes of preventing the revolution from spreading to urban centers. Communist intelligence meanwhile claimed to their leadership that they had successful instigated the Shanghai and Nanjing uprisings through agents in the labor movements, and that the RCCP could be trusted. The Central Military Commission, headed by Chairman Mao Zedong of the Communist Party of China, sent political commissars from the People's Liberation Army who were then successfully received by the National Salvation Volunteer Army. However, these commissars were not given command over the NSVA, nor significant political influence, despite being treated as important military officers.
Nonetheless, Chairman Mao welcomed the peace settlement, emphasizing the fact that he predicted the revolutionary overthrow of the Chiang Kai-shek regime in his May 30th, 1947 article “The Chiang Kai-Shek Government is Besieged by the Whole People”, wherein he praised the “great and righteous student movement” which “will inevitable promote an upsurge of the whole people's movement”. Hostilities ended as a ceasefire was agreed to by the KMT, the CCP, and the RCCP by June 8th.
The June 23rd Armistice
President Zhang Lan and President Sun Fo met with Chairman Mao Zedong on June 9th 1947 to arrange for a more permanent armistice. President Zhang brought with him two major members of the China Democratic League: Zhang Bojun and Huang Yanpei. The two had met with Mao in 1945 to mediate greater cooperation with the KMT and the CCP; Huang even wrote a book on his conversation with the Communist leader, which was about the cycle of governments rising and falling in the last sixty years, to which his host replied that a new path was already being forged by the people to escape this.
Chairman Mao judged their presence as confirmation that a friendly government had been installed in Nanjing, and after two weeks of talks, the war formally concluded with the June 23rd Armistice. Observing the signing was General George C. Marshall, returning from his earlier mission on behalf of the United States government, and Ambassador Nikolai Roshchin, from the Soviet Union.
The terms of the agreement, called the Twelve Points, were as follows:
1. National elections shall be free and fair, and each party reserves the right to send political representatives to observe the casting and counting of the ballots.
2. No parties shall be privileged politically in the army or government of the Republic of China.
3. No arbitrary arrest or cruel punishment will be imposed upon Chinese citizens.
4. A free press shall be maintained throughout the country.
5. All political prisoners will be released on both sides.
6. The Double Tenth Agreement or the Summary of Conversations Between the Representatives of the Kuomintang and the Communist Party of China shall be honored again, with the CPC being a legal party on all ballots.
7. A second Political Consultative Conference shall be convened in Chongqing with delegates from the Kuomintang, the Communist Party of China, the China Democratic League and other parties to evaluate the Constitution of the Republic of China.
8. Chiang Kai-Shek will be tried and punished for his war crimes, along with others who have committed atrocities, in a national war tribunal organized by the RCCP. None charged in these trials shall be able to hold any position in the national government again regardless of the outcome.
9. The People's Liberation Army will not be forcibly incorporated into the national army, dissolved or in any way punished or attacked.
10. The jurisdiction of the PLA shall be determined on a uti possidetis basis as of June 8th 1947.
11. No political army (i.e. the PLA) shall expand its jurisdiction by extra-legal means such as terror or warfare, nor be involved in any foreign expeditions or disruptive activities, nor receive special military aid from other nations (i.e. the Soviet Union) unless the ROC armed forces are receiving the same.
12. Land reform will be implemented in the Chinese countryside, and the army will also be reorganized.
The 1947 Political Consultative Conference
Main article: 1947 Political Consultative Conference
The National Military Tribunal for China
Main article: National Military Tribunal for China
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