Quick questions on The Nanjing Decade 1928-1937: HSC Modern History National Study China

The Nationalist Government was formally established at Nanjing on 18 April 1927. The Five Yuan Constitution of 1928 organised state power into executive, legislative, judicial, examination, and control branches. The Organic Law of the National Government (October 1928) made Chiang chairman; the post became the de facto presidency.

Inherited from the Beijing government were tariffs set by foreign treaty, no central currency, multiple regional silver banknotes, and large foreign debts. The KMT under Finance Ministers T.V. Soong (1928-1933) and H.H. Kung (1933-1944) tackled all four.

Railway mileage grew from around 8,000 km (1928) to 13,000 km (1937). The Longhai trunk reached Xi'an (1934) and Lanzhou by the end of the decade. The Yue-Han line (Wuchang-Guangzhou) opened in 1936. Highway mileage grew from around 1,000 km to over 100,000 km. Domestic aviation (China National Aviation Corp 1929; Eurasia Aviation 1931) connected major cities.

KMT effective control extended over around eight to ten provinces in the lower Yangtze and the south. Beyond that, governance was through bargains: - Yan Xishan held Shanxi as a personal fief. - Feng Yuxiang had been broken in 1930 but his lieutenants ran Hebei. - The Guangxi Clique (Bai Chongxi, Li Zongren) ran the south-west.

The "Blue Shirts" (Society for Vigorous Practice / Lixingshe), founded in March 1932 by Whampoa officers around Dai Li, ran intelligence, secret political assassinations, and propaganda. They modelled themselves partly on Mussolini's blackshirts and the SS. Dai Li ran KMT intelligence (the Bureau of Investigation and Statistics, Juntong) through the 1930s and the war.

Chiang launched the New Life Movement at Nanchang on 19 February 1934. The slogan was the revival of the four Confucian virtues: li (ritual propriety), yi (righteousness), lian (integrity), chi (sense of shame). Practical targets ranged from spitting and smoking to dress and punctuality. Soong Mei-ling led the women's section; Methodist missionaries were enlisted.

From 1928 to 1938 Germany was Chiang's closest military and industrial partner. Successive German military missions (Max Bauer 1928-1929; Hermann Kriebel 1929-1930; Georg Wetzell 1930-1934; Hans von Seeckt 1934-1935; Alexander von Falkenhausen 1935-1938) trained around 80,000 KMT troops in modern doctrine.

The Nanjing Decade's achievements rested on the lower Yangtze region (Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuxi, Hangzhou). When the Japanese took that region in 1937, the KMT lost most of its modern industrial base, around 80 per cent of its tax revenue, and the German-trained divisions at Shanghai.

Jay Taylor (The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China, 2009) is the major rehabilitation of Chiang as a state-builder.

The first half (to 1931) was warlord consolidation; the second half (1931-1937) was constrained by the Manchurian crisis and the Encirclement Campaigns.

GDP, railway mileage, customs revenue, currency stability, and military modernisation all moved in the right direction. The KMT inherited a wreck; it built something.

The state never reached the village; the CCP base areas grew unchecked; peasant grievances were not addressed; the foreign-trained divisions died at Shanghai.