PEKING POLITICS,I918-1923 CONSTITUTIONALISM AND ITS FAILURE 7 the condition could be cured by adopting a federal form of government that achieved merely by enacting republican constitutions and laws."1 How could would grant more power to the provinces.A provincial constitution on federa- the early republican leaders have failed to wake up to this fact as mishap piled list lines was adopted in Hunan in 1922,but the movement did not spread. upon disaster?As Lyon Sharman puts it,"Our perception of the impracticality A third line argued that since the constitution was supposed to have been pro- of [the republic's]policies has been so sharpened that is it difficult to credit even duced by parliament,and parliament's legal status bad become confused,a the leaders with the optimism that their words and actions so clearly expres- national conference of all major political and military figures should be con- sed."1a vened to cut the Gordian knot,agree on a constitution,and set the republic back But we will understand the republic ill if we content ourselves with analysis on the right track.This idea was finally realized in the form of the Reconstruc- by ridicule."The wrangles [over constitutions]might be unreal,but they tion Conference (Shan-hou hui-i)of 1925,?which,however,failed to arrest the nevertheless absorbed the interest of the literati-official class."14 Politicians accelerating slide into disorder. might often wield the language of constitutionalism for ulterior purposes,but it Constitutionalist pipe dreams and protestations were greeted skeptically must been have a politically meaningful language to be worth using at all.If even by some contemporaries."The Republic was never more than a sham," the republic commanded the loyalty of an ever-decreasing cadre of politicians wrote one foreign observer;it was a comic opera in which "we see the most and intellectuals,still those who continued for seventeen years to try to make sedate and law-abiding people in the world temporarily swept with a fever for it work did so on the basis of a true constitutionalist faith,whose sources and boyish adventures."8 A distinguished Chinese political scientist called the meaning to its proponents we must try to understand. republic a"farce,"noting that"no fixed principles and no unchanging loyalties marked the factions."A popular history of the republic,the Min-kuo yen-i Social Sources [Romance of the republic],cynically assimilated the political struggles of the period to the genre of strategems played in popular novels by power-seeking Only a small proportion of the 400 million Chinese around 1920 knew or cared rivals constrained only by the fertility of their imaginations.10 anything about constitutionalism,and of these a still smaller group was so placed Contemporaries'skepticism is reinforced for late twentieth-century students as to be able to attempt to put the beliefinto practice.The interests and outlooks by a growing body of social-science scholarship which rejects the former of the political elite go some way to explain the appeal of the constitutionalist Western faith in constitutional engineering as the road to stable democratic faith.15 government and looks instead to economic,social and cultural variables to explain political phenomena.11 We now hold that "a republic cannot be Engineering and the Problem of Viable Representative Government,"in Harry Eckstein and David E.Apter,eds.,Comtparative Politics:A Reader (New York,1963).pp.97-104; 6.Li Chien-nung,Political History,pp.403-404. and Harry Eckstein,Division and Cohesion in a Democracy:A Study of Norway (Princeton, 7.For examples of the conference idea,see Wu P'ei-fu's Lushan conference proposal, N.J1966).pp.20-32,269-87.Of course,this body of scholarship does not establish ir- described in Li Chien-nung,Political History,p.420;Liang Shih-i's conference proposal of refutably that constitutional engineering cannot create stable goverment,but at the least it 1922,in F.O.228/2994,"Memorandum",by Mr.Mayers,Peking,February 9,1922;Sun shows that the constitutionalist faith is not self-evidently true,but is an ideology requiring Yat-sen's concept of a citizen's convention (ko-min hui-)in late 1924 and early 1925, analysis.See Chapter III for a brief discussion of ways in which the republican constitution covered in Ko-ming wen-hsien 10(1955)and GSK,January 1925,and following months. did affect politics. There are many sources for the study of the 1925 Reconstruction Conference (a study not 12.Ch'ien Tuan-sheng,Government and Politics,p.61. undertaken here).Columbia University's East Asian Library has aset of the Shan-houui-i 13.Lyon Sharman,Sun Yat-sen:His Life and Its Meaning;A Critical Biography (Stanford, kg-pao (Reconstruction Conference gazette).Ko Kung-chen,Cheng-kuo peo-hsueh shih Calf,1968),p.140. (Taipei,1964),p.254,shows a sample of the Shnoj'n(Daily publication of the 14.Ch'icn Tuan-sheng,Govermnent and Politics,p.74. Reconstruction Conference),of which copies may survive somewhere.Extensive coverage 15.This section makes a first approximation at understanding constitutionalism in the is given to the conference in GSK. early republic through what Clifford Geertz calls the "interest theory"of ideology. 8.Upton Close(pseud.of Josef Washington Hall),In the Land of the Laughing Buddha: while the next section looks at the ideology as a system of meaning.Cf.Clifford Geertz The Adventures of an American Barbarian in China(New York,1924),pp.x,xvi. "Ideology asa Cultural System,"in David E.Apter,ed.,Ideology and Discontent (New York, 9.Ch'ien Tuan-sheng,The Government and Politics of China,1912-1949 (Stanford,Calif., 1964).pp.47-76. 1970,Pp.61,76. It is not easy to decide what analytical language to use in parsing the social composition 10.Ts'ai Tung-fan,Min-kuo t'ung-su yen-i(Shanghai,1936). of the early republican political elite.Traditional terminology for social levels is outdated 11.See,for reviews of the literature,Harry Eckstein,"Introduction:Constitutional for the 1920s;Western terms are forced.Broad terminology does not distinguish sufficiently