MCLC: Whampoa spirit

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Whampoa spirit
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (12/27/12):
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/28/world/asia/with-focus-on-unity-china-look
s-to-nationalist-past.html

GUANGZHOU JOURNAL | CHANGING OF THE GUARD
With Focus on Unity, China Embraces Its Pre-Communist Past
By EDWARD WONG

GUANGZHOU, China — It was 1926, not long after the fall of the Qing
dynasty, and much of China had been divided among warlords. In the south,
leaders of the young Kuomintang mustered an army. At its head rode Chiang
Kai-shek, who called to his side officers he had helped train, and
together they marched north to take down the warlords, one by one.

The Northern Expedition was one of the first major tests for graduates of
the Whampoa Military Academy, founded just two years earlier on quiet
Changzhou Island, about 10 miles east of central Guangzhou, then known to
the West as Canton. Mr. Chiang was the academy’s first commandant,
appointed by Sun Yat-sen, the idealistic firebrand who wanted to build an
army that would unite China.

The academy, now a collection of two-story white buildings near an active
naval yard, stands as one of the most potent symbols of the nationalist
movement led by Mr. Sun, which has strong contemporary echoes in the
rallying cry that Xi Jinping made to his fellow Chinese after taking over
in November as general secretary of the Communist Party.

Mr. Xi has spoken of a “great revival of the Chinese nation,” apparently
to be accomplished through further opening the economy, tackling official
corruption and building up the military. This month, on his first trip
outside Beijing, Mr. Xi traveled to several cities here in Guangdong
Province; the tour included visits with senior officers of the People’s
Liberation Army and a photo opportunity on a naval destroyer. Though he
did not visit the Whampoa academy, the message Mr. Xi was telegraphing was
the same one Mr. Sun had relayed a century ago.

“When Sun Yat-sen founded the Whampoa academy, his goal was to unite China
and to revive China as a nation, which is exactly the same mission that
Secretary Xi is on,” said Zeng Qingliu, a historian with the Guangzhou
Academy of Social Sciences who wrote a television script for a drama
series on Whampoa. “Under that goal and that mission, Chinese people from
all over the world and across the country were attracted to Whampoa.”

In fits and starts since the end of the Mao era, the Communists and the
Kuomintang, who decamped to Taiwan after losing the civil war in 1949,
have been engaging in rapprochement. The Whampoa academy represents an era
when the two sides cooperated for a greater good, and recent exhibitions
organized there by a museum portray the Kuomintang in a relatively
conciliatory light. That, too, has resonance with Mr. Xi’s clarion call,
which is meant to inspire all Chinese, even those outside the mainland,
including in Taiwan, to take part in the Communist-led project of reviving
the motherland.

The first class at Whampoa had 600 students, 100 Communists among them,
Mr. Zeng said. Prominent Russian advisers worked at the school. Zhou Enlai
was the political director, and other famous Communists held posts or
trained there. But the school was never under the party’s control.

The Kuomintang moved it to the city of Nanjing in 1927, after a split with
the Communists, and then to the southwestern city of Chengdu, after the
Japanese occupied Nanjing, then known as Nanking. After the Kuomintang
moved to Taiwan, they established a military academy there that they
called the successor to Whampoa. But when historians speak of Whampoa,
they mean the original incarnation of the school, before it moved from
Guangzhou, Mr. Zeng said.

Japanese bombs decimated the campus in 1938; it was not rebuilt until
after 1984, when plans were made to establish a museum. The white
buildings interlaced with thick wooden beams are recreations of the
originals. A statue of Mr. Sun overlooks the site from a hill. Military
enthusiasts, history buffs and other tourists reach the museum by a
10-minute ferry ride from a quiet pier on the east side of Guangzhou.

On a recent afternoon, a young woman guided a handful of soldiers. They
walked along a balcony on the second floor and peered into the recreated
rooms, including a dormitory with dozens of simple beds on wooden
floorboards, a dining room and Mr. Sun’s office.

Outside the main gate, not far from a black wall inscribed with the names
of fallen soldiers, tour groups posed for photographs. Then they walked
slowly through the gallery rooms to gaze at the black-and-white photos and
paintings that showed, from a party-approved perspective, the history of
China’s 20th-century wars.

This year, there was a special exhibition on Chinese soldiers who had
fought the Japanese in southwest China, along the Burma Road. The
exhibition included photographs of Lt. Gen. Claire Lee Chennault, the
American aviator who led the “Flying Tigers
<http://www.flyingtigersavg.com/tiger1.htm>” unit in that theater. One
showed him with Mr. Chiang.

Depictions of Mr. Chiang and senior Kuomintang cohorts seemed to draw the
most attention, especially from visitors who had spent decades hearing the
Communists demonize them. Texts praised Mr. Chiang for leading the
Northern Expedition and the earlier Eastern Expedition, which in 1925
wrested territory from warlords in Guangdong.

“In my time, the Communists called him Bandit Chiang,” said Yook Kearn
Wong, 80, a former Communist soldier visiting from the United States (and
a relative of this reporter). “Now he’s known as Mr. Chiang.”

Mr. Wong and two of his former high school classmates from Guangzhou who
were touring the museum pointed at various figures in the photos.

“There are even portraits of officers who fought the Communists,” said
Chen Guorong, one of the classmates. “We’ve read about all this on the
Internet and watched documentaries online. Before, we didn’t know our
history. Now it’s slowly returning.”

The third man, Zhou Zhaohong, nodded. “The Communists never revealed the
true history of the Kuomintang,” he said.

The museum took the unusual step this year of organizing an exhibition of
240 historical photographs that traveled to two cities in Taiwan in early
December, according to a report by Xinhua, the state news agency. More
than 100 Whampoa alumni attended the exhibit opening in Kaohsiung on Dec.
1, Xinhua reported; it added that there were more than 200 living alumni
in mainland China and Taiwan.

“The photos really bring history to life, and what glorious history it
was,” said Liu Ding-Pang, 55, a graduate of the Kaohsiung academy
descended from Whampoa.

But Mr. Liu, who viewed the exhibition in Taiwan, added that he did not
see as many images of famous Kuomintang graduates of Whampoa as he had
expected. “I wish the mainland would have a more open attitude towards
history,” he said.

An agency under the Chinese Ministry of Culture and an alumni club on the
mainland helped organize the exhibition. Lin Shangyuan, 88, chairman of
the Whampoa Alumni Association <http://www.huangpu.org.cn/>, a national
umbrella group, said the aim of the alumni clubs was to “keep the Whampoa
spirit alive.”

Sounding a bit like Mr. Xi and other party leaders today, Mr. Lin said
those like him who attended Whampoa had the “same goal, the same dream,
the same belief, which is to make the Chinese nation an independent,
democratic and prosperous one.”

Mia Li contributed research.