1919 Chinese national elections
Senate of the Republic of China (274 Seats)
Guomindang (Nationalist Party) - 130 Seats (+32)
Jinbudang (Progressive Party) - 123 (-26)
Multi-Party Candidates - 15 (-6)
Independents - 6 (-1)
House of Representatives of the Republic of China (596 Seats)
GMD - 307 Seats (+56)
JBD - 219 Seats (-64)
Independents - 48 Seats (+22)
Multi-Party - 22 Seats (-14)
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"...producing what in effect was a divided government and quickly revealing the limitations of Liang Qichao's 1912 constitution, at least insofar as it was able to produce a stable government representative of constitutional democracy. Arguably, that had not been its intent; after all, the Second Republic's leaders were ex-Qing officials of the more moderate half of the establishment who had sought to undo the autocracy of the First Republic without bending to revolutionaries. Mandarins and oligarchs had been replaced by rule of generals and conservative, traditionalist intellectuals, and while this had provided a fair deal of political (and in Shanghai, Canton and to a lesser extent Hankow and Peking, economic) stability, the 1919 elections served to not only validate the Guomindang's political strategy, but its ideological one too in portraying the Second Republic as hopelessly corrupt and contemptuous of the general public.
The Jinbudang government had good reason to be alarmed. Despite fewer than six percent of Chinese citizens being eligible to vote, the Guomindang in the staggered January and February elections had successfully done what they had hoped to do in the last two elections and become the largest party in the House of Representatives, seeing the Jinbudang suffer severe losses and earning an outright majority which, when paired in one-off circumstances with sympathetic multi-party candidates
[1] and independents, gave them a commanding position in that body. The Senate was an even more impressive victory; despite the considerable headwinds in individual provinces (such as the Jinbudang's practice of appointing senators "in absentia" from the "lost provinces" of 1901 and the Civil War) the Guomindang was nonetheless able to end the Jinbudang's outright majority and become the largest faction, able to earn majorities through crossover votes more easily than the government. While it was a narrow result there compared to their landslide in the House, the outcome was an utter humiliation for the government, and foretold of a newer, more muscular nationalism. It was argued that the crowds in Canton that met Song Chiao-jen as he addressed raucous supporters may have numbered over a million, a throng so massive that dozens were killed of asphyxiation in the crush. The party's red flag with its blue and white star was flown from buildings in place of the Republic's five-colored banner; marches and demonstrations were held streets not just in the party's bastion of Canton but across China. The factionalism that had assailed the party was no more; left-wing figures such as Liao Chongkai and Wang Chao-ming (who would be better known in the future as Wang Jingwei) stood beside Song, Hu Hanmin on the steps of the National Assembly in Nanking as the new Assembly was convened, publicly insinuating that with this paradigm shift a "third republic" was upon China with the results of the election; Sun Yat-sen, for his part, named the election "the Revolution of Joy" and was, at least for a brief moment, dispelled of his notion that China was not ready for democracy and that the Guomindang would need to "guide" the country there via his Three Principles.
The Second Republic's reputation as the "Parliamentary Republic" was only due to the immense power vested in the Cabinet and its power over legislation, taxation, and all manner of other privileges; this was in part a byproduct of Liang, who had once joined Kang Youwei in advocating a constitutional imperial monarchy, viewing the Presidency of the Republic as a stand-in for the Chinese monarchy. However, one extremely important role vested in the office of the President that was not ceremonial was the exclusive right of the President of China to appoint not only regional governors but the Prime Minister, who in turn would assemble a cabinet of his peers. This had been done to serve as a check on the powers of the National Assembly, making the legislature responsible to the people in triennial elections but looking to the German, French and Russian models for how to appoint the most powerful figure of that government. The Second Republic's founders had intentionally designed their system to benefit what would become the Jinbudang, and they had little interest in changing course on that. While the choice of a provincial governor could be blocked by a simple majority of both houses or a two-thirds majority of Senators from that province and cabinet ministers could be impeached through a somewhat straightforward process, the appointment of a Prime Minister could not be defeated by the legislature, and in that provision lay the seeds of the crisis that would before long consume the Second Republic and bring it to an end.
Following the elections, President Li was left with a dilemma. The Jinbudang's patronage machine had failed it, particularly getting annihilated across much of the South and, increasingly, in Shanghai and Nanking, areas it had hoped would serve as its strongholds. The violence of the 1917 Presidential elections had suggested to him that a victorious Guomindang would mean anarchy and potentially another civil war, opening the door to a Manchurian-Russian re-invasion of China that could credibly threaten Nanking. However, while he was hardly a liberal and strongly supportive of the centralized government, Li was wary of completely ignoring the results of the election. Here he received conflicting advice; Wu Tingfang, a respected figure who was now nearly eighty, declined the potential of replacing his protege Tang Shaoyi as a unity Prime Minister but did propose that such a Cabinet that drew on nonpartisan as well as partisan figures across the Chinese political spectrum be formed. Tang, who was eyeing the Presidency in 1922, disagreed, and found support from the ruthless Minister of Patrol Qian Nengxun in suggesting instead that the government crack down aggressively on the Guomindang's revolutionary cells and aggressively prosecute an effort to curtail "all counter-statal activities." Liang Qichao sought to split the difference - he advised that a nonpartisan Prime Minister be appointed, perhaps the broadly popular Wang Zhanyuan, and that the Guomindang instead of Cabinet be given first say on provincial governors. If they afterwards attempted to stage a general strike or revolution,
then they could be crushed.
Li hated both of those suggestions, particularly appointing his rival Wang to serve as Prime Minister, but he viewed his duty to China being that of avoiding an anarchic revolution, and upon the convening of the Assembly, announced that he would relieve Tang Shaoyi as Prime Minister to allow him instead to serve as Foreign Minister in the government of Xu Shichang, one of Liang's closest confidants. The Assembly was stunned - Song had gone so far as to schedule a banquet to celebrate his appointment as Prime Minister. Li attempted to split the difference in offering Song the Ministry of Finance and thus grant the Guomindang powerful influence over the Chinese economy, but Song politely declined. In the letter, which was made public to the Guomindang's lettered base of support, Song stated, "It goes against the precepts of this moment of democratic change to refuse to appoint the choice of the electorate as the government. I will not betray the people's confidence, and I will not paper over this great injustice."
Part of Li's hope in his poorly-planned gambit was to split the famously factional Guomindang in half. Inviting Song, Hu, and other "rightists" into government had been intended to be an olive branch towards a unity Cabinet that would pointedly exclude the "leftists" thought to be close to Sun, who was canny enough to read the tea leaves and immediately head into exile in Tokyo in anticipation of a violent crackdown. But Song did not take the bait. The Guomindang's fiery young leader proposed his own unity cabinet, one in which the Guomindang held two-thirds of the ministries but acknowledged a divided government by reserving the other third, including the powerful Foreign Ministry, for Li's Jinbudang. This too was rebuffed - Li's missives noted bluntly that the President had sole discretion in appointing a Prime Minister, and the executive was "uninterested," in exact words, of "an inexperienced campaigner serving in such a critical role." This justification was nonsense and was understood accordingly, but once again Song refused to take the bait and agitate in the streets; rather, Song announced that the Guomindang would "serve the people from the halls of the Assembly" and "do our constitutional duty."
This
did split the Guomindang, though in a way that in the long run benefitted Song. Liao proposed a general strike and was swiftly arrested even in friendly Canton; his arrest sparked street brawls between the Guomindang's paramilitary wing, the friendly Cantonese police, and the national
gendarmes of the Republican Army who had been sent south to carry out the arrest. The confinement of Liao and, before long, Wang in the Canton City Prison, which was place under heavy guard and evacuated of non-critical prisoners by Nanking, quickly made both of them heroes to the street, but they could do little from jail. Song, on the other hand, relished in his role as the chief of an embittered and aggrieved democratic opposition, which defeat legislation sometimes arbitrarily and vetoed provincial governors at will. Making clear his opposition to violent resistance, Song gave Li little opening to have him arrested, and a truly apocalyptic confrontation was avoided.
Nonetheless, the Second Republic had been fatally wounded. The demonstrations against Li and his "hatchet man" Qian intensified into a mass movement on May 4th,
[2] when across China hundreds of thousands gathered to demand the appointment of a democratic government and, in a more nationalistic vein, demand that China take advantage of the eruption of the Central European War and "undo" the humiliations of 1901 by seizing European concessions and treaty ports. The protesters were hardly the poor working class but rather university students, Western-educated merchants, and other members of the Chinese
literati, and the explosion in left-colored nationalism that flowed out from the March 4th Movement became the underpinning of the next several years, a time that Sun himself before long came to term "the Constitutional Struggle." Li, Liang and their core coterie did not realize it yet, but the hourglass had been turned on the Second Republic..."
- An Unfinished Revolution: The Second Chinese Republic, 1912-1924
[1] No idea how this works in practice, but it was a thing during China's brief 1910s experiment with democracy.
[2] When writing about 1910s China on May 4th, I couldn't
not, lol
