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THE FIGHT FOR THE REPUBLIC IN CHINA
BY B. L. PUTNAM WEALE
PREFACE
This volume tells everything that the student or the casual reader
needs to know about the Chinese Question. It is sufficiently
exhaustive to show very clearly the new forces at work, and to
bring some realisation of the great gulf which separates the
thinking classes of to-day from the men of a few years ago;
whilst, at the same time, it is sufficiently condensed not to
overwhelm the reader with too great a multitude of facts.
Particular attention may be devoted to an unique feature--namely,
the Chinese and Japanese documentation which affords a sharp
contrast between varying types of Eastern brains. Thus, in the
Memorandum of the Black Dragon Society (Chapter VII) we have a
very clear and illuminating revelation of the Japanese political
mind which has been trained to consider problems in the modern
Western way, but which remains saturated with theocratic ideals in
the sharpest conflict with the Twentieth Century. In the pamphlet
of Yang Tu (Chapter VIII) which launched the ill-fated Monarchy
Scheme and contributed so largely to the dramatic death of Yuan
Shih-kai, we have an essentially Chinese mentality of the
reactionary or corrupt type which expresses itself both on home
and foreign issues in a naively dishonest way, helpful to future
diplomacy. In the Letter of Protest (Chapter X) against the
revival of Imperialism written by Liang Ch'i-chao--the most
brilliant scholar living--we have a Chinese of the New or Liberal
China, who in spite of a complete ignorance of foreign languages
shows a marvellous grasp of political absolutes, and is a
harbinger of the great days which must come again to Cathay. In
other chapters dealing with the monarchist plot we see the
official mind at work, the telegraphic despatches exchanged
between Peking and the provinces being of the highest diplomatic
interest. These documents prove conclusively that although the
Japanese is more practical than the Chinese--and more concise--
there can be no question as to which brain is the more fruitful.
Coupled with this discussion there is much matter giving an
insight into the extraordinary and calamitous foreign ignorance
about present-day China, an ignorance which is just as marked
among those resident in the country as among those who have never
visited it. The whole of the material grouped in this novel
fashion should not fail to bring conviction that the Far East,
with its 500 millions of people, is destined to play an important
role in post-bellum history because of the new type of modern
spirit which is being there evolved. The influence of the Chinese
Republic, in the opinion of the writer, cannot fail to be
ultimately world-wide in view of the practically unlimited
resources in man-power which it disposes of.
In the Appendices will be found every document of importance for
the period of under examination,--1911 to 1917. The writer desires
to record his indebtedness to the columns of The Peking Gazette, a
newspaper which under the brilliant editorship of Eugene Ch'en--a
pure Chinese born and educated under the British flag--has fought
consistently and victoriously for Liberalism and Justice and has
made the Republic a reality to countless thousands who otherwise
would have refused to believe in it.
PUTNAM WEALE. PEKING, June, 1917.
CONTENTS
I. GENERAL INTRODUCTION
II. THE ENIGMA OF YUAN SHIH-KA
III. THE DREAM REPUBLIC (From the Manchu Abdication to the
dissolution of Parliament)
IV. THE DICTATOR AT WORK (From the Coup d'etat of the 4th. Nov.
1913 to the outbreak of the World-war, 1. August, 1914)
V. THE FACTOR OF JAPAN
VI. THE TWENTY-ONE DEMANDS
VII. THE ORIGIN OF THE TWENTY-ONE DEMANDS
VIII. THE MONARCHIST PLOT 1 DEGREE The Pamphlet of Yang Tu
IX. THE MONARCHY PLOT 2 DEGREES Dr. Goodnow's Memorandum
X. THE MONARCHY MOVEMENT Is OPPOSED The Appeal of the Scholar
Liang Chi-chao
XI. THE DREAM EMPIRE ("The People's Voice" and the action of the
Powers)
XII. "THE THIRD REVOLUTION" The Revolt of Yunnan
XIII. "THE THIRD REVOLUTION'" (CONTINUED) Downfall and Death of
Yuan Shih-kai
XIV. THE NEW REGIME--FROM 1916 TO 1917
XV. THE REPUBLIC IN COLLISION WITH REALITY: Two TYPICAL INSTANCES
OF "FOREIGN AGGRESSION"
XVI. CHINA AND THE WAR
XVII. THE FINAL PROBLEM:--REMODELLING THE POLITICO-ECONOMIC
RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CHINA AND THE WORLD
APPENDICES--DOCUMENTS AND MEMORANDA
THE FIGHT FOR THE REPUBLIC IN CHINA
CHAPTER I
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
The revolution which broke out in China on the 10th October, 1911,
and which was completed with the abdication of the Manchu Dynasty
on the 12th February, 1912, though acclaimed as highly successful,
was in its practical aspects something very different. With the
proclamation of the Republic, the fiction of autocratic rule had
truly enough vanished; yet the tradition survived and with it
sufficient of the essential machinery of Imperialism to defeat the
nominal victors until the death of Yuan Shih-kai.
The movement to expel the Manchus, who had seized the Dragon
Throne in 1644 from the expiring Ming Dynasty, was an old one.
Historians are silent on the subject of the various secret plots
which were always being hatched to achieve that end, their silence
being due to a lack of proper records and to the difficulty of
establishing the simple truth in a country where rumour reigns
supreme. But there is little doubt that the famous Ko-lao-hui, a
Secret Society with its headquarters in the remote province of
Szechuan, owed its origin to the last of the Ming adherents, who
after waging a desperate guerilla warfare from the date of their
expulsion from Peking, finally fell to the low level of inciting
assassinations and general unrest in the vain hope that they might
some day regain their heritage. At least, we know one thing
definitely: that the attempt on the life of the Emperor Chia Ching
in the Peking streets at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century
was a Secret Society plot, and brought to an abrupt end the
pleasant habit of travelling among their subjects which the great
Manchu Emperors K'anghsi and Ch'ien Lung had inaugurated and
always pursued and which had so largely encouraged the growth of
personal loyalty to a foreign House.
From that day onwards for over a century no Emperor ventured out
from behind the frowning Walls of the Forbidden City save for
brief annual ceremonies such as the Worship of Heaven on the
occasion of the Winter Solstice, and during the two "flights"--
first, in 1860 when Peking was occupied by an Anglo-French
expedition and the Court incontinently sought sanctuary in the
mountain Palaces of Jehol; and, again, in 1900, when with the
pricking of the Boxer bubble and the arrival of the International
relief armies, the Imperial Household was forced along the stony
road to faroff Hsianfu.
The effect of this immurement was soon visible; the Manchu rule,
which was emphatically a rule of the sword, was rapidly so
weakened that the emperors became no more than rois faineants at
the mercy of their ministers.
[Footnote: As there is a good deal of misunderstanding on the
subject of the Manchus an explanatory note is useful.
The Manchu people, who belong to the Mongol or Turanian Group,
number at the maximum five million souls. Their distribution at
the time of the revolution of 1911 was roughly as follows: In and
around Peking say two millions, in posts through China say one-
half million,--or possibly three-quarters of a million; in
Manchuria Proper--the home of the race--say two or two and a half
millions. The fighting force was composed in this fashion: When
Peking fell into their hands in 1644 as a result of a stratagem
combined with dissensions among the Chinese themselves, the entire
armed strength was re-organized in Eight Banners or Army Corps,
each corps being composed of three racial divisions, (1) pure
Manchus, (2) Mongols who had assisted in the conquest and (3)
Nothern Chinese who had gone over to the conquerors. These Eight
Banners, each commanded by an "iron-capped" Prince, represented
the authority of the Throne and had their headquarters in Peking
with small garrisons throughout the provinces at various strategic
centres. These garrisons had entirely ceased to have any value
before the 18th Century had closed and were therefore pure
ceremonial and symbolic, all the fighting being done by special
Chinese corps which were raised as neccessity arose.]
The history of the Nineteenth Century is thus logically enough the
history of successive collapses. Not only did overseas foreigners
openly thunder at the gateways of the empire and force an ingress,
but native rebellions were constant and common. Leaving minor
disturbances out of account, there were during this period two
huge Mahommedan rebellions, besides the cataclysmic Taiping rising
which lasted ten years and is supposed to have destroyed the
unbelievable total of one hundred million persons. The empire,
torn by internecine warfare, surrendered many of its essential
prerogatives to foreigners, and by accepting the principle of
extraterritoriality prepared the road to ultimate collapse.
How in such circumstances was it possible to keep alive
absolutism? The answer is so curious that we must be explicit and
exhaustive.
The simple truth is that save during the period of vigour
immediately following each foreign conquest (such as the Mongol
conquest in the Thirteenth Century and the Manchu in the
Seventeenth) not only has there never been any absolutism properly
so-called in China, but that apart from the most meagre and
inefficient tax-collecting and some rough-and-ready policing in
and around the cities there has never been any true governing at
all save what the people did for themselves or what they demanded
of the officials as a protection against one another. Any one who
doubts these statements has no inkling of those facts which are
the crown as well as the foundation of the Chinese group-system,
and which must be patiently studied in the village-life of the
country to be fitly appreciated. To be quite frank, absolutism is
a myth coming down from the days of Kublai Khan when he so proudly
built his Khan-baligh (the Cambaluc of Marco Polo and the forebear
of modern Peking) and filled it with his troops who so soon
vanished like the snows of winter. An elaborate pretence, a
deliberate policy of make-believe, ever since those days invested
Imperial Edicts with a majesty which they have never really
possessed, the effacement of the sovereign during the Nineteenth
Century contributing to the legend that there existed in the
capital a Grand and Fearful Panjandrum for whom no miracle was too
great and to whom people and officials owed trembling obedience.
In reality, the office of emperor was never more than a politico-
religious concept, translated for the benefit of the masses into
socio-economic ordinances. These pronouncements, cast in the form
of periodic homilies called Edicts, were the ritual of government;
their purpose was instructional rather than mandatory; they were
designed to teach and keep alive the State-theory that the Emperor
was the High Priest of the Nation and that obedience to the
morality of the Golden Age, which had been inculcated by all the
philosophers since Confucius and Mencius flourished twenty-five
centuries ago, would not only secure universal happiness but
contribute to national greatness.
The office of Emperor was thus heavenly rather than terrestrial,
and suasion, not arms, was the most potent argument used in
everyday life. The amazing reply (i.e., amazing to foreigners)
made by the great Emperor K'ang-hsi in the tremendous Eighteenth
Century controversy between the Jesuit and the Dominican
missionaries, which ruined the prospects of China's ever becoming
Roman Catholic and which the Pope refused to accept--that the
custom of ancestor-worship was political and not religious--was
absolutely correct, POLITICS IN CHINA UNDER THE EMPIRE BEING ONLY
A SYSTEM OF NATIONAL CONTROL EXERCISED BY INCULCATING OBEDIENCE TO
FOREBEARS. The great efforts which the Manchus made from the end
of the Sixteenth Century (when they were still a small Manchurian
Principality striving for the succession to the Dragon Throne and
launching desperate attacks on the Great Wall of China) to receive
from the Dalai Lama, as well as from the lesser Pontiffs of Tibet
and Mongolia, high-sounding religious titles, prove conclusively
that dignities other than mere possession of the Throne were held
necessary to give solidity to a reign which began in militarism
and which would collapse as the Mongol rule had collapsed by a
mere Palace revolution unless an effective MORAL title were
somehow won.
Nor was the Manchu military Conquest, even after they had entered
Peking, so complete as has been represented by historians. The
Manchus were too small a handful, even with their Mongol and
Chinese auxiliaries, to do more than defeat the Ming armies and
obtain the submission of the chief cities of China. It is well-
known to students of their administrative methods, that whilst
they reigned over China they RULED only in company with the
Chinese, the system in force being a dual control which, beginning
on the Grand Council and in the various great Boards and
Departments in the capital, proceeded as far as the provincial
chief cities, but stopped short there so completely and absolutely
that the huge chains of villages and burgs had their historic
autonomy virtually untouched and lived on as they had always
lived. The elaborate system of examinations, with the splendid
official honours reserved for successful students which was
adopted by the Dynasty, not only conciliated Chinese society but
provided a vast body of men whose interest lay in maintaining the
new conquest; and thus Literature, which had always been the door
to preferment, became not only one of the instruments of
government, but actually the advocate of an alien rule. With their
persons and properties safe, and their women-folk protected by an
elaborate set of capitulations from being requisitioned for the
harems of the invaders, small wonder if the mass of Chinese
welcomed a firm administration after the frightful disorders which
had torn the country during the last days of the Mings. [Footnote:
This most interesting point--the immunity of Chinese women from
forced marriage with Manchus--has been far too little noticed by
historians though it throws a flood of light on the sociological
aspects of the Manchu conquest. Had that conquest been absolute it
would have been impossible for the Chinese people to have
protected their womenfolk in such a significant way.]
It was the foreigner, arriving in force in China after the capture
of Peking and the ratification of the Tientsin Treaties in 1860,
who so greatly contributed to making the false idea of Manchu
absolutism current throughout the world; and in this work it was
the foreign diplomat, coming to the capital saturated with the
tradition of European absolutism, who played a not unimportant
part. Investing the Emperors with an authority with which they
were never really clothed save for ceremonial purposes
(principally perhaps because the Court was entirely withdrawn from
view and very insolent in its foreign intercourse) a conception of
High Mightiness was spread abroad reminiscent of the awe in which
Eighteenth Century nabobs spoke of the Great Mogul of India.
Chinese officials, quickly discovering that their easiest means of
defence against an irresistible pressure was to take refuge behind
the august name of the sovereign, played their role so
successfully that until 1900 it was generally believed by
Europeans that no other form of government than a despotism sans
phrase could be dreamed of. Finding that on the surface an
Imperial Decree enjoyed the majesty of an Ukaze of the Czar,
Europeans were ready enough to interpret as best suited their
enterprises something which they entirely failed to construe in
terms expressive of the negative nature of Chinese civilization;
and so it happened that though the government of China had become
no government at all from the moment that extraterritoriality
destroyed the theory of Imperial inviolability and infallibility,
the miracle of turning state negativism into an active governing
element continued to work after a fashion because of the disguise
which the immense distances afforded.
Adequately to explain the philosophy of distance in China, and
what it has meant historically, would require a whole volume to
itself; but it is sufficient for our purpose to indicate here
certain prime essentials. The old Chinese were so entrenched in
their vastnesses that without the play of forces which were
supernatural to them, i.e., the steam-engine, the telegraph, the
armoured war-vessel, etc., their daily lives could not be
affected. Left to themselves, and assisted by their own methods,
they knew that blows struck across the immense roadless spaces
were so diminished in strength, by the time they reached the spot
aimed at, that they became a mere mockery of force; and, just
because they were so valueless, paved the way to effective
compromises. Being adepts in the art which modern surgeons have
adopted, of leaving wounds as far as possible to heal themselves,
they trusted to time and to nature to solve political differences
which western countries boldly attacked on very different
principles. Nor were they wrong in their view. From the capital to
the Yangtsze Valley (which is the heart of the country), is 800
miles, that is far more than the mileage between Paris and Berlin.
From Peking to Canton is 1,400 miles along a hard and difficult
route; the journey to Yunnan by the Yangtsze river is upwards of
2,000 miles, a distance greater than the greatest march ever
undertaken by Napoleon. And when one speaks of the Outer
Dominions--Mongolia, Tibet, Turkestan--for these hundreds of
miles it is necessary to substitute thousands, and add there to
difficulties of terrain which would have disheartened even Roman
Generals.
Now the old Chinese, accepting distance as the supreme thing, had
made it the starting-point as well as the end of their government.
In the perfected viceregal system which grew up under the Ming
Dynasty, and which was taken over by the Manchus as a sound and
admirable governing principle, though they superimposed their own
military system of Tartar Generals, we have the plan that
nullified the great obstacle. Authority of every kind was
delegated by the Throne to various distant governing centuries in
a most complete and sweeping manner, each group of provinces,
united under a viceroy, being in everything but name so many
independent linked commonwealths, called upon for matricular
contributions in money and grain but otherwise left severely
alone. [Footnote: A very interesting proof--and one that has never
been properly exposed--of the astoundingly rationalistic
principles on which the Chinese polity is founded is to be seen in
the position of priesthoods in China. Unlike every other
civilization in the world, at no stage of the development of the
State has it been necessary for religion in China to intervene
between the rulers and the ruled, saving the people from
oppression. In Europe without the supernatural barrier of the
Church, the position of the common people in the Middle Ages would
have been intolerable, and life, and virtue totally unprotected.
Buckle, in his "History of Civilization," like other extreme
radicals, has failed to understand that established religions have
paradoxically been most valuable because of their vast secular
powers, exercised under the mask of spiritual authority. Without
this ghostly restraint rulers would have been so oppressive as to
have destroyed their peoples. The two greatest monuments to
Chinese civilization, then consist of these twin facts; first,
that the Chinese have never had the need for such supernatural
restraints exercised by a privileged body, and secondly, that they
are absolutely without any feeling of class or caste--prince and
pauper meeting on terms of frank and humorous equality--the race
thus being the only pure and untinctured democracy the world has
ever known.] The chain which bound provincial China to the
metropolitan government was therefore in the last analysis finance
and nothing but finance; and if the system broke down in 1911 it
was because financial reform--to discount the new forces of which
the steam engine was the symbol--had been attempted, like military
reform, both too late and in the wrong way, and instead of
strengthening, had vastly weakened the authority of the Throne.
In pursuance of the reform-plan which became popular after the
Boxer Settlement had allowed the court to return to Peking from
Hsianfu, the viceroys found their most essential prerogative,
which was the control of the provincial purse, largely taken from
them and handed over to Financial Commissioners who were directly
responsible to the Peking Ministry of Finance, a Department which
was attempting to replace the loose system of matricular
contributions by the European system of a directly controlled
taxation every penny of which would be shown in an annual Budget.
No doubt had time been vouchsafed, and had European help been
enlisted on a large scale, this change could ultimately have been
made successful. But it was precisely time which was lacking; and
the Manchus consequently paid the penalty which is always paid by
those who delay until it is too late. The old theories having been
openly abandoned, it needed only the promise of a Parliament
completely to destroy the dignity of the Son of Heaven, and to
leave the viceroys as mere hostages in the hands of rebels. A few
short weeks of rebellion was sufficient in 1911 to cause the
provinces to revert to their condition of the earlier centuries
when they had been vast unfettered agricultural communities. And
once they had tasted the joys of this new independence, it was
impossible to conceive of their becoming "obedient" again.
Here another word of explanation is necessary to show clearly the
precise meaning of regionalism in China.
What had originally created each province was the chief city in
each region, such cities necessarily being the walled repositories
of all increment. Greedy of territory to enhance their wealth, and
jealous of their power, these provincial capitals throughout the
ages had left no stone unturned to extend their influence in every
possible direction and bring under their economic control as much
land as possible, a fact which is abundantly proved by the highly
diversified system of weights and measures throughout the land
deliberately drawn-up to serve as economic barriers. River-
courses, mountain-ranges, climate and soil, no doubt assisted in
governing this expansion, but commercial and financial greed was
the principal force. Of this we have an exceedingly interesting
and conclusive illustration in the struggle still proceeding
between the three Manchurian provinces, Fengtien, Kirin and
Heilungchiang, to seize the lion's share of the virgin land of
Eastern Inner Mongolia which has an "open frontier" of rolling
prairies. Having the strongest provincial capital--Moukden--it
has been Fengtien province which has encroached on the Mongolian
grasslands to such an extent that its jurisdiction to-day envelops
the entire western flank of Kirin province (as can be seen in the
latest Chinese maps) in the form of a salamander, effectively
preventing the latter province from controlling territory that
geographically belongs to it. In the same way in the land-
settlement which is still going on the Mongolian plateau
immediately above Peking, much of what should be Shansi territory
has been added to the metropolitan province of Chihli. Though
adjustments of provincial boundaries have been summarily made in
times past, in the main the considerations we have indicated have
been the dominant factors in determining the area of each unit.
Now in many provinces where settlement is age-old, the regionalism
which results from great distances and bad communications has been
greatly increased by race-admixture. Canton province, which was
largely settled by Chinese adventurers sailing down the coast from
the Yangtsze and intermarrying with Annamese and the older
autochthonous races, has a population-mass possessing very
distinct characteristics, which sharply conflict with Northern
traits. Fuhkien province is not only as diversified but speaks a
dialect which is virtually a foreign language. And so on North and
West of the Yangtsze it is the same story, temperamental
differences of the highest political importance being everywhere
in evidence and leading to perpetual bickerings and jealousies.
For although Chinese civilization resembles in one great
particular the Mahommedan religion, in that it accepts without
question all adherents irrespective of racial origin, POLITICALLY
the effect of this regionalism has been such that up to very
recent times the Central Government has been almost as much a
foreign government in the eyes of many provinces as the government
of Japan. Money alone formed the bond of union; so long as
questions of taxation were not involved, Peking was as far removed
from daily life as the planet Mars.
As we are now able to see very clearly, fifty years ago--that is
at the time of the Taiping Rebellion--the old power and spell of
the National Capital as a military centre had really vanished.
Though in ancient days horsemen armed with bows and lances could
sweep like a tornado over the land, levelling everything save the
walled cities, in the Nineteenth Century such methods had become
impossible. Mongolia and Manchuria had also ceased to be
inexhaustible reservoirs of warlike men; the more adjacent
portions had become commercialized; whilst the outer regions had
sunk to depopulated graziers' lands. The Government, after the
collapse of the Rebellion, being greatly impoverished, had openly
fallen to balancing province against province and personality
against personality, hoping that by some means it would be able to
regain its prestige and a portion of its former wealth. Taking
down the ledgers containing the lists of provincial contributions,
the mandarins of Peking completely revised every schedule,
redistributed every weight, and saw to it that the matricular
levies should fall in such a way as to be crushing. The new
taxation, likin, which, like the income-tax in England, is in
origin purely a war-tax, by gripping inter-provincial commerce by
the throat and rudely controlling it by the barrier-system, was
suddenly disclosed as a new and excellent way of making felt the
menaced sovereignty of the Manchus; and though the system was
plainly a two-edged weapon, the first edge to cut was the Imperial
edge; that is largely why for several decades after the Taipings
China was relatively quiet.
Time was also giving birth to another important development--
important in the sense that it was to prove finally decisive. It
would have been impossible for Peking, unless men of outstanding
genius had been living, to have foreseen that not only had the
real bases of government now become entirely economic control, but
that the very moment that control faltered the central government
of China would openly and absolutely cease to be any government at
all. Modern commercialism, already invading China at many points
through the medium of the treaty-ports, was a force which in the
long run could not be denied. Every year that passed tended to
emphasize the fact that modern conditions were cutting Peking more
and more adrift from the real centres of power--the economic
centres which, with the single exception of Tientsin, lie from 800
to 1,500 miles away. It was these centres that were developing
revolutionary ideas--i. e., ideas at variance with the Socio-
economic principles on which the old Chinese commonwealth had been
slowly built up, and which foreign dynasties such as the Mongol
and the Manchu had never touched. The Government of the post-
Taiping period still imagined that by making their hands lie more
heavily than ever on the people and by tightening the taxation
control--not by true creative work--they could rehabilitate
themselves.
It would take too long, and would weary the indulgence of the
reader to establish in a conclusive manner this thesis which had
long been a subject of inquiry on the part of political students.
Chinese society, being essentially a society organized on a
credit-co-operative system, so nicely adjusted that money, either
coined or fiduciary, was not wanted save for the petty daily
purchases of the people, any system which boldly clutched at the
financial establishments undertaking the movement of sycee
(silver) from province to province for the settlement of trade-
balances, was bound to be effective so long as those financial
establishments remained unshaken.
The best known establishments, united in the great group known as
the Shansi Bankers, being the government bankers, undertook not
only all the remittances of surpluses to Peking, but controlled by
an intricate pass-book system the perquisites of almost every
office-holder in the empire. No sooner did an official, under the
system which had grown up, receive a provincial appointment than
there hastened to him a confidential clerk of one of these
accommodating houses, who in the name of his employers advanced
all the sums necessary for the payment of the official's post, and
then proceeded with him to his province so that moiety by moiety,
as taxation flowed in, advances could be paid off and the
equilibrium re-established. A very intimate and far-reaching
connection thus existed between provincial money-interests and the
official classes. The practical work of governing China was the
balancing of tax-books and native bankers' accounts. Even the
"melting-houses," where sycee was "standardized" for provincial
use, were the joint enterprises of officials and merchants;
bargaining governing every transaction; and only when a violent
break occurred in the machinery, owing to famine or rebellion, did
any other force than money intervene.
There was nothing exceptional in these practices, in the use of
which the old Chinese empire was merely following the precedent of
the Roman Empire. The vast polity that was formed before the time
of Christ by the military and commercial expansion of Rome in the
Mediterranean Basin, and among the wild tribes of Northern Europe,
depended very largely on the genius of Italian financiers and tax-
collectors to whom the revenues were either directly "farmed," or
who "assisted" precisely after the Chinese method in financing
officials and local administrations, and in replenishing a central
treasury which no wealth could satisfy. The Chinese phenomenon was
therefore in no sense new; the dearth of coined money and the
variety of local standards made the methods used economic
necessities. The system was not in itself a bad system: its fatal
quality lay in its woodenness, its lack of adaptability, and in
its growing weakness in the face of foreign competition which it
could never understand. Foreign competition--that was the enemy
destined to achieve an overwhelming triumph and dash to ruins a
hoary survival.
War with Japan sounded the first trumpet-blast which should have
been heeded. In the year 1894, being faced with the necessity of
finding immediately a large sum of specie for purpose of war, the
native bankers proclaimed their total inability to do so, and the
first great foreign loan contract was signed.
[Footnote: (a) This loan was the so-called 7 per cent Silver loan
of 1894 for Shanghai Taels 10,000,000 negotiated by the Hongkong &
Shanghai Bank. It was followed in 1895 by a 3,000,000 pounds Gold
6 per cent Loan, then by two more 6 per cent loans for a million
each in the same year, making a total of 6,635,000 pounds sterling
for the bare war-expenses. The Japanese war indemnity raised in
three successive issues--from 1895 to 1898--of 16,000,000 pounds
each, added 48,000,000 pounds. Thus the Korean imbroglio cost
China nearly 55 millions sterling. As the purchasing power of the
sovereign is eight times larger in China than in Europe, this debt
economically would mean 440 millions in England--say nearly double
what the ruinous South African war cost. It is by such methods of
comparison that the vital nature of the economic factor in recent
Chinese history is made clear.]
Little attention was attracted to what is a turning-point in
Chinese history. There cannot be the slightest doubt that in 1894
the Manchus wrote the first sentences of an abdication which was
only formally pronounced in 1912: they had inaugurated the
financial thraldom under which China still languishes. Within a
period of forty months, in order to settle the disastrous Japanese
war, foreign loans amounting to nearly fifty-five million pounds
were completed. This indebtedness, amounting to nearly three times
the "visible" annual revenues of the country--that is, the
revenues actually accounted for to Peking--was unparalleled in
Chinese history. It was a gold indebtedness subject to all sorts
of manipulations which no Chinese properly understood. It had
special political meaning and special political consequences
because the loans were virtually guaranteed by the Powers. It was
a long-drawn coup d'etat of a nature that all foreigners
understood because it forged external chains.
The internal significance was even greater than the external. The
loans were secured on the most important "direct" revenues
reaching Peking--the Customs receipts, which were concerned with
the most vital function in the new economic life springing up, the
steam-borne coasting and river-trade as well as the purely
foreign trade. That most vital function tended consequently to
become more and more hall-marked as foreign; it no longer depended
in any direct sense on Peking for protection. The hypothecation of
these revenues to foreigners for periods running into decades--
coupled with their administration by foreigners--was such a
distinct restriction of the rights of eminent domain as to amount
to a partial abrogation of sovereignty.
That this was vaguely understood by the masses is now quite
certain. The Boxer movement of 1900, like the great proletarian
risings which occurred in Italy in the pre-Christian era as a
result of the impoverishment and moral disorder brought about by
Roman misgovernment, was simply a socio-economic catastrophe
exhibiting itself in an unexpected form. The dying Manchu dynasty,
at last in open despair, turned the revolt, insanely enough,
against the foreigner--that is against those who already held the
really vital portion of their sovereignty. So far from saving
itself by this act, the dynasty wrote another sentence in its
death-warrant. Economically the Manchus had been for years almost
lost; the Boxer indemnities were the last straw. By more than
doubling the burden of foreign commitments, and by placing the
operation of the indemnities directly in the hands of foreign
bankers by the method of monthly quotas, payable in Shanghai, THE
PEKING GOVERNMENT AS FAR BACK AS FIFTEEN YEARS AGO WAS REDUCED TO
BEING A GOVERNMENT AT THIRTY DAYS' SIGHT, AT THE MERCY OF ANY
SHOCK OF EVENTS WHICH COULD BE PROTRACTED OVER A FEW MONTHLY
SETTLEMENTS. There is no denying this signal fact, which is
probably the most remarkable illustration of the restrictive power
of money which has ever been afforded in the history of Asia.
The phenomenon, however, was complex and we must be careful to
understand its workings. A mercantile curiosity, to find the
parallel for which we must go back to the Middle Ages in Europe,
when "free cities" such as those of the Hanseatic League
plentifully dotted river and coast line, served to increase the
general difficulties of a situation which no one formula could
adequately cover. Extraterritoriality, by creating the "treaty
port" in China, had been the most powerful weapon in undermining
native economics; yet at the same time it had been the agent for
creating powerful new counter-balancing interests. Though the
increasingly large groups of foreigners, residing under their own
laws, and building up, under their own specially protected system
of international exchange, a new and imposing edifice, had made
the hovel-like nature of Chinese economics glaringly evident, the
mercantile classes of the New China, being always quick to avail
themselves of money-making devices, had not only taken shelter
under this new and imposing edifice, but were rapidly extending it
of their own accord. In brief, the trading Chinese were
identifying themselves and their major interests with the treaty-
ports; they were transferring thither their specie and their
credits; making huge investments in land and properties, under the
aegis of foreign flags in which they absolutely trusted. The
money-interests of the country knew instinctively that the native
system was doomed and that with this doom there would come many
changes; these interests, in the way common to money all the world
over, were insuring themselves against the inevitable.
The force of this--politically--became finally evident in 1911;
and what we have said in our opening sentences should now be
clear. The Chinese Revolution was an emotional rising against the
Peking System because it was a bad and inefficient and retrograde
system, just as much as against the Manchus, who after all had
adopted purely Chinese methods and who were no more foreigners
than Scotchmen or Irishmen are foreigners to-day in England. The
Revolution of 1911 derived its meaning and its value--as well as
its mandate--not from what it proclaimed, but for what it stood
for. Historically, 1911 was the lineal descendant of 1900, which
again was the offspring of the economic collapse advertised by the
great foreign loans of the Japanese war, loans made necessary
because the Taipings had disclosed the complete disappearance of
the only raison d'etre of Peking sovereignty, i.e. the old-time
military power. The story is, therefore, clear and well-connected
and so logical in its results that it has about it a finality
suggesting the unrolling of the inevitable.
During the Revolution the one decisive factor was shown to be
almost at once--money, nothing but money. The pinch was felt at
the end of the first thirty days. Provincial remittances ceased;
the Boxer quotas remained unpaid; a foreign embargo was laid upon
the Customs funds. The Northern troops, raised and trained by Yuan
Shih-kai, when he was Viceroy of the Metropolitan province, were,
it is true, proving themselves the masters of the Yangtsze and
South China troops; yet that circumstance was meaningless. Those
troops were fighting for what had already proved itself a lost
cause--the Peking System as well as the Manchu dynasty. The fight
turned more and more into a money-fight. It was foreign money
which brought about the first truce and the transfer of the so-
called republican government from Nanking to Peking. In the
strictest sense of the words every phase of the settlement then
arrived at was a settlement in terms of cash.[Footnote: There is
no doubt that the so-called Belgian loan, 1,800,000 pounds of
which was paid over in cash at the beginning of 1912, was the
instrument which brought every one to terms.]
Had means existed for rapidly replenishing the Chinese Treasury
without having recourse to European stockmarkets (whose actions
are semi-officially controlled when distant regions are involved)
the Republic might have fared better. But placed almost at once
through foreign dictation under a species of police-control,
which while nominally derived from Western conceptions, was
primarily designed to rehabilitate the semblance of the authority
which had been so sensationally extinguished, the Republic
remained only a dream; and the world, taught to believe that there
could be no real stability until the scheme of government
approximated to the conception long formed of Peking absolutism,
waited patiently for the rude awakening which came with the Yuan
Shih-kai coup d'etat of 4th November, 1913. Thus we had this
double paradox; on the one hand the Chinese people awkwardly
trying to be western in a Chinese way and failing: on the other,
foreign officials and foreign governments trying to be Chinese and
making the confusion worse confounded. It was inevitable in such
circumstances that the history of the past six years should have
been the history of a slow tragedy, and that almost every page
should be written over with the name of the man who was the
selected bailiff of the Powers--Yuan Shih-kai.
CHAPTER II
THE ENIGMA OF YUAN SHIH-KAI
THE HISTORY OF THE MAN FROM THE OPENING OF HIS CAREER IN KOREA, IN
1882 TO THE END OF THE REVOLUTION, 12TH FEBRUARY, 1912
Yuan Shih-kai's career falls into two clear-cut parts, almost as
if it had been specially arranged for the biographer; there is the
probationary period in Korea, and the executive in North China.
The first is important only because of the moulding-power which
early influences exerted on the man's character; but it is
interesting in another way since it affords glimpses of the sort
of things which affected this leader's imagination throughout his
life and finally brought him to irretrievable ruin. The second
period is choke-full of action; and over every chapter one can see
the ominous point of interrogation which was finally answered in
his tragic political and physical collapse.
Yuan Shih-kai's origin, without being precisely obscure, is
unimportant. He came of a Honanese family who were nothing more
distinguished than farmers possessing a certain amount of land,
but not too much of the world's possessions. The boy probably ran
wild in the field at an age when the sons of high officials and
literati were already pale and anaemic from overmuch study. To
some such cause the man undoubtedly owed his powerful physique,
his remarkable appetite, his general roughness. Native biographers
state that as a youth he failed to pass his hsiu-tsai
examinations--the lowest civil service degree--because he had
spent too much time in riding and boxing and fencing. An uncle in
official life early took charge of him; and when this relative
died the young man displayed filial piety in accompanying the
corpse back to the family graves and in otherwise manifesting
grief. Through official connections a place was subsequently found
for him in that public department under the Manchus which may be
called the military intendancy, and it was through this branch of
the civil service that he rose to power. Properly speaking Yuan
Shih-kai was never an army-officer; he was a military official--
his highest rank later on being that of military judge, or better,
Judicial Commissioner.
Yuan Shih-kai first emerges into public view in 1882 when, as a
sequel to the opening of Korea through the action of foreign
Powers in forcing the then Hermit kingdom to sign commercial
treaties, China began dispatching troops to Seoul. Yuan Shih-kai,
with two other officers, commanding in all some 3,000 men, arrived
from Shantung, where he had been in the train of a certain General
Wu Chang-ching, and now encamped in the Korean capital nominally
to preserve order, but in reality, to enforce the claims of the
suzerain power. For the Peking Government had never retreated from
the position that Korea had been a vassal state ever since the
Ming Dynasty had saved the country from the clutches of Hideyoshi
and his Japanese invaders in the Sixteenth Century. Yuan Shih-kai
had been personally recommended by this General Wu Chang-ching as
a young man of ability and energy to the famous Li Hung Chang, who
as Tientsin Viceroy and High Commissioner for the Northern Seas
was responsible for the conduct of Korean affairs. The future
dictator of China was then only twenty-five years old.
His very first contact with practical politics gave him a peculiar
manner of viewing political problems. The arrival of Chinese
troops in Seoul marked the beginning of that acute rivalry with
Japan which finally culminated in the short and disastrous war of
1894-95. China, in order to preserve her influence in Korea
against the growing influence of Japan, intrigued night and day in
the Seoul Palaces, allying herself with the Conservative Court
party which was led by the notorious Korean Queen who was
afterwards assassinated. The Chinese agents aided and abetted the
reactionary group, constantly inciting them to attack the Japanese
and drive them out of the country.
Continual outrages were the consequence. The Japanese legation was
attacked and destroyed by the Korean mob not once but on several
occasions during a decade which furnishes one of the most amazing
chapters in the history of Asia. Yuan Shih-kai, being then merely
a junior general officer under the orders of the Chinese Imperial
Resident, is of no particular importance; but it is significant of
the man that he should suddenly come well under the limelight on
the first possible occasion. On 6th December, 1884, leading 2,000
Chinese troops, and acting in concert with 3,000 Korean soldiers,
he attacked the Tong Kwan Palace in which the Japanese Minister
and his staff, protected by two companies of Japanese infantry,
had taken refuge owing to the threatening state of affairs in the
capital. Apparently there was no particular plan--it was the
action of a mob of soldiery tumbling into a political brawl and
assisted by their officers for reasons which appear to-day
nonsensical. The sequel was, however, extraordinary. The Japanese
held the Palace gates as long as possible, and then being
desperate exploded a mine which killed numbers of Koreans and
Chinese soldiery and threw the attack into confusion. They then
fought their way out of the city escaping ultimately to the
nearest sea-port, Chemulpo.
The explanation of this extraordinary episode has never been made
public. The practical result was that after a period of extreme
tension between China and Japan which was expected to lead to war,
that political genius, the late Prince Ito, managed to calm things
down and arrange workable modus vivendi. Yuan Shih-kai, who had
gone to Tientsin to report in person to Li Hung Chang, returned to
Seoul triumphantly in October, 1885, as Imperial Resident. He was
then twenty-eight years old; he had come to the front, no matter
by what means, in a quite remarkable manner.
The history of the next nine years furnishes plenty of minor
incidents, but nothing of historic importance. As the faithful
lieutenant of Li Hung Chang, Yuan Shih-kai's particular business
was simply to combat Japanese influence and hold the threatened
advance in check. He failed, of course, since he was playing a
losing game; and yet he succeeded where he undoubtedly wished to
succeed. By rendering faithful service he established the
reputation he wished to win; and though he did nothing great he
retained his post right up to the act which led to the declaration
of war in 1894. Whether he actually precipitated that war is still
a matter of opinion. On the sinking by the Japanese fleet of the
British steamer Kowshing, which was carrying Chinese
reinforcements from Taku anchorage to Asan Bay to his assistance,
seeing that the game was up, he quietly left the Korean capital
and made his way overland to North China. That swift, silent
journey home ends the period of his novitiate.
It took him a certain period to weather the storm which the utter
collapse of China in her armed encounter with Japan brought about
--and particularly to obtain forgiveness for evacuating Seoul
without orders. Technically his offence was punishable by death--
the old Chinese code being most stringent in such matters. But by
1896 he was back in favour again, and through the influence of his
patron Li Hung Chang, he was at length appointed in command of the
Hsiaochan camp near Tientsin, where he was promoted and given the
task of reforming a division of old-style troops and making them
as efficient as Japanese soldiery. He had already earned a wide
reputation for severity, for willingness to accept responsibility,
for nepotism, and for a rare ability to turn even disasters to his
own advantage--all attributes which up to the last moment stood
him in good stead.
In the Hsiaochan camp the most important chapter of his life
opens; there is every indication that he fully realized it.
Tientsin has always been the gateway to Peking: from there the
road to high preferment is easily reached. Yuan Shih-kai marched
steadily forward, taking the very first turning-point in a manner
which stamped him for many of his compatriots in a way which can
never be obliterated.
It is first necessary to say a word about the troops of his
command, since this has a bearing on present-day politics. The
bulk of the soldiery were so-called Huai Chun--i.e., nominally
troops from the Huai districts, just south of Li Hung Chang's
native province Anhui. These Kiangu men, mixed with Shantung
recruits, had earned a historic place in the favour of the Manchus
owing to the part they had played in the suppression of the
Taiping Rebellion, in which great event General Gordon and Li Hung
Chang had been so closely associated. They and the troops of Hunan
province, led by the celebrated Marquis Tseng Kuo-fan, were "the
loyal troops," resembling the Sikhs during the Indian Mutiny; they
were supposed to be true to their salt to the last man. Certainly
they gave proofs of uncustomary fidelity.
In those military days of twenty years ago Yuan Shih-kai and his
henchmen were, however, concerned with simpler problems. It was
then a question of drill and nothing but drill. In his camp near
Tientsin the future President of the Chinese Republic succeeded in
reorganizing his troops so well that in a very short time the
Hsiaochan Division became known as a corps d'elite. The discipline
was so stern that there were said to be only two ways of noticing
subordinates, either by promoting or beheading them. Devoting
himself to his task Yuan Shih-kai gave promise of being able to
handle much bigger problems.
His zeal soon attracted the attention of the Manchu Court. The
circumstances in Peking at that time were peculiar. The famous old
Empress Dowager, Tzu-Hsi, after the Japanese war, had greatly
relaxed her hold on the Emperor Kwanghsu, who though still in
subjection to her, nominally governed the empire. A well-
intentioned but weak man, he had surrounded himself with advanced
scholars, led by the celebrated Kang Yu Wei, who daily studied
with him and filled him with new doctrines, teaching him to
believe that if he would only exert his power he might rescue the
nation from international ignominy and make for himself an
imperishable name.
The sequel was inevitable. In 1898 the oriental world was
electrified by the so-called Reform Edicts, in which the Emperor
undertook to modernize China, and in which he exhorted the nation
to obey him. The greatest alarm was created in Court circles by
this action; the whole vast body of Metropolitan officialdom,
seeing its future threatened, flooded the Palace of the Empress
Dowager with Secret Memorials praying her to resume power.
Flattered, she gave her secret assent.
Things marched quickly after that. The Empress, nothing loth,
began making certain dispositions. Troops were moved, men were
shifted here and there in a way that presaged action; and the
Emperor, now thoroughly alarmed and yielding to the entreaties of
his followers, sent two members of the Reform Party to Yuan Shih-
kai bearing an alleged autograph order for him to advance
instantly on Peking with all his troops; to surround the Palace,
to secure the person of the Emperor from all danger, and then to
depose the Empress Dowager for ever from power. What happened is
equally well-known. Yuan Shih-kai, after an exhaustive examination
of the message and messengers, as well as other attempts to
substantiate the genuineness of the appeal, communicated its
nature to the then Viceroy of Chihli, the Imperial Clansman Jung
Lu, whose intimacy with the Empress Dowager since the days of her
youth has passed into history. Jung Lu lost no time in acting. He
beheaded the two messengers and personally reported the whole plot
to the Empress Dowager who was already fully warned. The result
was the so-called coup d'etat of September, 1898, when all the
Reformers who had not fled were summarily executed, and the
Emperor Kwanghsu himself closely imprisoned in the Island Palace
within that portion of the Forbidden City known as the Three
Lakes, having (until the Boxer outbreak of 1900 carried him to
Hsianfu), as sole companions his two favourites, the celebrated
odalisques "Pearl" and "Lustre."
This is no place to enter into the controversial aspect of Yuan
Shih-kai's action in 1898 which has been hotly debated by
partisans for many years. For onlookers the verdict must always
remain largely a matter of opinion; certainly this is one of those
matters which cannot be passed upon by any one but a Chinese
tribunal furnished with all the evidence. Those days which
witnessed the imprisonment of Kwang Hsu were great because they
opened wide the portals of the Romance of History: all who were in
Peking can never forget the counter-stroke; the arrival of the
hordes composed of Tung Fu-hsiang's Mahommedan cavalry--men who
had ridden hard across a formidable piece of Asia at the behest of
their Empress and who entered the capital in great clouds of dust.
It was in that year of 1898 also that Legation Guards reappeared
in Peking--a few files for each Legation as in 1860--and it was
then that clear-sighted prophets saw the beginning of the end of
the Manchu Dynasty.
Yuan Shih-kai's reward for his share in this counter-revolution
was his appointment to the governorship of Shantung province. He
moved thither with all his troops in December, 1899. Armed cap-a-
pie he was ready for the next act--the Boxers, who burst on China
in the Summer of 1900. These men were already at work in Shantung
villages with their incantations and alleged witchcraft. There is
evidence that their propaganda had been going on for months, if
not for years, before any one had heard of it. Yuan Shih-kai had
the priceless opportunity of studying them at close range and soon
made up his mind about certain things. When the storm burst,
pretending to see nothing but mad fanatics in those who, realizing
the plight of their country, had adopted the war-cry "Blot out the
Manchus and the foreigner," he struck at them fiercely, driving
the whole savage horde headlong into the metropolitan province of
Chihli. There, seduced by the Manchus, they suddenly changed the
inscription on their flags. Their sole enemy became the foreigner
and all his works, and forthwith they were officially protected.
Far and wide they killed every white face they could find. They
tore up railways, burnt churches and chapels and produced a
general anarchy which could only have one end--European
intervention. The man, sitting on the edge of Chinese history but
not yet identifying himself with its main currents because he was
not strong enough for that, had once again not judged wrongly.
With his Korean experience to assist him, he had seen precisely
what the end must inevitably be.
The crash in Peking, when the siege of the Legations had been
raised by an international army, found him alert and sympathetic--
ready with advice, ready to shoulder new responsibilities, ready
to explain away everything. The signature of the Peace Protocol of
1901 was signalized, by his obtaining the viceroyalty of Chihli,
succeeding the great Li Hung Chang himself, who had been
reappointed to his old post, but had found active duties too
wearisome. This was a marvellous success for a man but little over
forty. And when the fugitive Court at length returned from Hsianfu
in 1902, honours were heaped upon him as a person particularly
worthy of honour because he had kept up appearances and maintained
the authority of the distressed Throne. As if in answer to this he
flooded the Court with memorials praying that in order to restore
the power of the Dynasty a complete army of modern troops be
raised--as numerous as possible but above all efficient.
His advice was listened to. From 1902 until 1907 as Minister of
the Army Reorganization Council--a special post he held
simultaneously with that of metropolitan Viceroy--Yuan Shih-kai's
great effort was concentrated on raising an efficient fighting
force. In those five years, despite all financial embarrassments,
North China raised and equipped six excellent Divisions of field-
troops--75,000 men--all looking to Yuan Shih-kai as their sole
master. So much energy did he display in pushing military
reorganization throughout the provinces that the Court, warned by
jealous rivals of his growing power, suddenly promoted him to a
post where he would be powerless. One day he was brought to Peking
as Grand Councillor and President of the Board of Foreign Affairs,
and ordered to hand over all army matters to his noted rival, the
Manchu Tieh Liang. The time had arrived to muzzle him. His last
phase as a pawn had come.
Few foreign diplomats calling at China's Foreign Office to discuss
matters during that short period which lasted barely a twelve-
month, imagined that the square resolute-looking man who as
President of the Board gave the same energy and attention to
consular squabbles as to the reorganization of a national fighting
force, was almost daily engaged in a fierce clandestine struggle
to maintain even his modest position. Jealousy, which flourishes
in Peking like the upas tree, was for ever blighting his schemes
and blocking his plans. He had been brought to Peking to be tied
up; he was constantly being denounced; and even his all powerful
patroness, the old Empress Dowager, who owed so much to him,
suffered from constant premonitions that the end was fast
approaching, and that with her the Dynasty would die.
In the Autumn of 1908 she took sick. The gravest fears quickly
spread. It was immediately reported that the Emperor Kwanghsu was
also very ill--an ominous coincidence. Very suddenly both
personages collapsed and died, the Empress Dowager slightly before
the Emperor. There is little doubt that the Emperor himself was
poisoned. The legend runs that as he expired not only did he give
his Consort, who was to succeed him in the exercise of the nominal
power of the Throne, a last secret Edict to behead Yuan Shih-kai,
but that his faltering hand described circle after circle in the
air until his followers understood the meaning. In the vernacular
the name of the great viceroy and the word for circle have the
same sound; the gesture signified that the dying monarch's last
wish was revenge on the man who had failed him ten years before.
An ominous calm followed this great break with the past. It was
understood that the Court was torn by two violent factions
regarding the succession which the Empress Tzu-hsi had herself
decided. The fact that another long Regency had become inevitable
through the accession of the child Hsuan Tung aroused instant
apprehensions among foreign observers, whilst it was confidently
predicted that Yuan Shih-kai's last days had come.
The blow fell suddenly on the 2nd January, 1909. In the interval
between the death of the old Empress and his disgrace, Yuan Shih-
kai was actually promoted to the highest rank in the gift of the
Throne, that is made "Senior Guardian of the Heir Apparent" and
placed in charge of the Imperial funeral arrangements--a
lucrative appointment. During that interval it is understood that
the new Regent, brother of the Emperor Kwang-hsu, consulted all
the most trusted magnates of the empire regarding the manner in
which the secret decapitation Decree should be treated. All
advised him to be warned in time, and not to venture on a course
of action which would be condemned both by the nation and by the
Powers. Another Edict was therefore prepared simply dismissing
Yuan Shih-kai from office and ordering him to return to his native
place.
Every one remembers that day in Peking when popular rumour
declared that the man's last hour had come. Warned on every side
to beware, Yuan Shih-kai left the Palace as soon as he had read
the Edict of dismissal in the Grand Council and drove straight to
the railway-station, whence he entrained for Tientsin, dressed as
a simple citizen. Rooms had been taken for him at a European
hotel, the British Consulate approached for protection, when
another train brought down his eldest son bearing a message direct
from the Grand Council Chamber, absolutely guaranteeing the safety
of his life. Accordingly he duly returned to his native place in
Honan province, and for two years--until the outbreak of the
Revolution--devoted himself sedulously to the development of the
large estate he had acquired with the fruits of office. Living
like a patriarch of old, surrounded by his many wives and
children, he announced constantly that he had entirely dropped out
of the political life of China and only desired to be left in
peace. There is reason to believe, however, that his henchmen
continually reported to him the true state of affairs and bade him
bide his time. Certain it is that the firing of the first shots on
the Yangtsze found him alert and issuing private orders to his
followers. It was inevitable that he should have been recalled to
office--and actually within one hundred hours of the first news of
the outbreak the Court sent for him urgently and ungraciously.
From the 14th October, 1911, when he was appointed by Imperial
Edict Viceroy of Hupeh and Hunan and ordered to proceed at once to
the front to quell the insurrection, until the 1st November, when
he was given virtually Supreme Power as President of the Grand
Council in place of Prince Ching, a whole volume is required to
discuss adequately the maze of questions involved. For the
purposes of this account, however, the matter can be dismissed
very briefly in this way. Welcoming the opportunity which had at
last come and determined once for all to settle matters
decisively, so far as he was personally concerned, Yuan Shih-kai
deliberately followed the policy of holding back and delaying
everything until the very incapacity marking both sides--the
Revolutionists quite as much as the Manchus--forced him, as man of
action and man of diplomacy, to be acclaimed the sole mediator and
saviour of the nation.
The detailed course of the Revolution, and the peculiar manner in
which Yuan Shih-kai allowed events rather than men to assert their
mastery has often been related and need not long detain us. It is
generally conceded that in spite of the bravery of the raw
revolutionary levies, their capacity was entirely unequal to the
trump card Yuan Shih-kai held all the while in his hand--the six
fully-equipped Divisions of Field Troops he himself had organized
as Tientsin Viceroy. It was a portion of this field-force which
captured and destroyed the chief revolutionary base in the triple
city of Hankow, Hanyang and Wuchang in November, 1911, and which
he held back just as it was about to give the coup de grace by
crossing the river in force and sweeping the last remnants of the
revolutionary army to perdition. Thus it is correct to declare
that had he so wished Yuan Shih-kai could have crushed the
revolution entirely before the end of 1911; but he was
sufficiently astute to see that the problem he had to solve was
not merely military but moral as well. The Chinese as a nation
were suffering from a grave complaint. Their civilization had been
made almost bankrupt owing to unresisted foreign aggression and to
the native inability to cope with the mass of accumulated wrongs
which a superimposed and exhausted feudalism--the Manchu system--
had brought about. Yuan Shih-kai knew that the Boxers had been
theoretically correct in selecting as they first did the watchword
which they had first placed on their banners--"blot out the
Manchus and all foreign things." Both had sapped the old
civilization to its foundations. But the program they had proposed
was idealistic, not practical. One element could be cleared away--
the other had to be endured. Had the Boxers been sensible they
would have modified their program to the extent of protecting the
foreigners, whilst they assailed the Dynasty which had brought
them so low. The Court Party, as we have said, seduced their
leaders to acting in precisely the reverse sense.
Yuan Shih-kai was neither a Boxer, nor yet a believer in
idealistic foolishness. He had realized that the essence of
successful rule in the China of the Twentieth Century was to
support the foreign point of view--nominally at least--because
foreigners disposed of unlimited monetary resources, and had
science on their side. He knew that so long as he did not openly
flout foreign opinion by indulging in barefaced assassinations, he
would be supported owing to the international reputation he had
established in 1900. Arguing from these premises, his instinct
also told him that an appearance of legality must always be
sedulously preserved and the aspirations of the nation nominally
satisfied. For this reason he arranged matters in such a manner as
to appear always as the instrument of fate. For this reason,
although he destroyed the revolutionists on the mid-Yangtsze, to
equalize matters, on the lower Yangtsze he secretly ordered the
evacuation of Nanking by the Imperialist forces so that he might
have a tangible argument with which to convince the Manchus
regarding the root and branch reform which he knew was necessary.
That reform had been accepted in principle by the Throne when it
agreed to the so-called Nineteen Fundamental Articles, a corpus of
demands which all the Northern Generals had endorsed and had
indeed insisted should be the basis of government before they
would fight the rebellious South in 1911. There is reason to
believe that provided he had been made de facto Regent, Yuan Shih-
kai would have supported to the end a Manchu Monarchy. But the
surprising swiftness of the Revolutionary Party's action in
proclaiming the Republic at Nanking on the 1st January, 1912, and
the support which foreign opinion gave that venture confused him.
He had already consented to peace negotiations with the
revolutionary South in the middle of December, 1911, and once he
was drawn into those negotiations his policy wavered, the
armistice in the field being constantly extended because he saw
that the Foreign Powers, and particularly England, were averse
from further civil war. Having dispatched a former lieutenant,
Tong Shao-yi, to Shanghai as his Plenipotentiary, he soon found
himself committed to a course of action different from what he had
originally contemplated. South China and Central China insisted so
vehemently that the only solution that was acceptable to them was
the permanent and absolute elimination of the Manchu Dynasty, that
he himself was half-convinced, the last argument necessary being
the secret promise that he should become the first President of
the united Republic. In the circumstances, had he been really
loyal, it was his duty either to resume his warfare or resign his
appointment as Prime Minister and go into retirement. He did
neither. In a thoroughly characteristic manner he sought a middle
course, after having vaguely advocated a national convention to
settle the matter. By specious misrepresentation the widow of the
Emperor Kwang Hsu--the Dowager Empress Lung Yu who had succeeded
the Prince Regent Ch'un in her care of the interests of the child
Emperor Hsuan Tung--was induced to believe that ceremonial
retirement was the only course open to the Dynasty if the country
was to be saved from disruption and partition. There is reason to
believe that the Memorial of all the Northern Generals which was
telegraphed to Peking on the 28th January, 1912, and which advised
abdication, was inspired by him. In any case it was certainly Yuan
Shih-kai, who drew up the so-called Articles of Favourable
Treatment for the Manchu House and caused them to be telegraphed
to the South, whence they were telegraphed back to him as the
maximum the Revolutionary Party was prepared to concede: and by a
curious chance the attempt made to assassinate him outside the
Palace Gates actually occurred on the very day he had submitted an
outline of these terms on his bended knees to the Empress Dowager
and secured their qualified acceptance. The pathetic attempt to
confer on him as late as the 26th January the title of Marquess,
the highest rank of nobility which could be given a Chinese, an
attempt which was four times renewed, was the last despairing
gesture of a moribund power. Within very few days the Throne
reluctantly decreed its own abdication in three extremely curious
Edicts which are worthy of study in the appendix. They prove
conclusively that the Imperial Family believed that it was only
abdicating its political power, whilst retaining all ancient
ceremonial rights and titles. Plainly the conception of a
Republic, or a People's Government, as it was termed in the native
ideographs, was unintelligible to Peking.
Yuan Shih-kai had now won everything he wished for. By securing
that the Imperial Commission to organize the Republic and re-unite
the warring sections was placed solely in his hands, he prepared
to give a type of Government about which he knew nothing a trial.
It is interesting to note that he held to the very end of his life
that he derived his powers solely from the Last Edicts, and in
nowise from his compact with the Nanking Republic which had
instituted the so-called Provisional Constitution. He was careful,
however, not to lay this down categorically until many months
later when his dictatorship seemed undisputed. But from the day of
the Manchu Abdication almost, he was constantly engaged in
calculating whether he dared risk everything on one throw of the
dice and ascend the Throne himself; and it is precisely this which
imparts such dramatic interest to the astounding story which
follows.
CHAPTER III
THE DREAM REPUBLIC
(FROM THE 1ST JANUARY, 1912, TO THE DISSOLUTION OF PARLIAMENT)
To describe briefly and intelligibly the series of transactions
from the 1st January, 1912, when the Republic was proclaimed at
Nanking by a handful of provincial delegates, and Dr. Sun Yat Sen
elected Provisional President, to the coup d'etat of 4th November,
1913, when Yuan Shih-kai, elected full President a few weeks
previously, after having acted as Chief Executive for twenty
months, boldly broke up Parliament and made himself de facto
Dictator of China, is a matter of extraordinary difficulty.
All through this important period of Chinese history one has the
impression that one is in dreamland and that fleeting emotions
take the place of more solid things. Plot and counter-plot follow
one another so rapidly that an accurate record of them all would
be as wearisome as the Book of Chronicles itself; whilst the
amazing web of financial intrigue which binds the whole together
is so complex--and at the same time so antithetical to the
political struggle--that the two stories seem to run counter to
one another, although they are as closely united as two assassins
pledged to carry through in common a dread adventure. A huge
agglomeration of people estimated to number four hundred millions,
being left without qualified leaders and told that the system of
government, which had been laid down by the Nanking Provisional
Constitution and endorsed by the Abdication Edicts, was a system
in which every man was as good as neighbour, swayed meaninglessly
to and fro, vainly seeking to regain the equilibrium which had
been so sensationally lost. A litigious spirit became so universal
that all authority was openly derided, crimes of every description
being so common as to force most respectable men to withdraw from
public affairs and leave a bare rump of desperadoes in power.
Long embarrassed by the struggle to pay her foreign loans and
indemnities, China was also virtually penniless. The impossibility
of arranging large borrowings on foreign markets without the open
support of foreign governments--a support which was hedged round
with conditions--made necessary a system of petty expedients under
which practically every provincial administration hypothecated
every liquid asset it could lay hands upon in order to pay the
inordinate number of undisciplined soldiery who littered the
countryside. The issue of unguaranteed paper-money soon reached
such an immense figure that the market was flooded with a
worthless currency which it was unable to absorb. The Provincial
leaders, being powerless to introduce improvement, exclaimed that
it was the business of the Central Government as representative of
the sovereign people to find solutions; and so long as they
maintained themselves in office they went their respective ways
with a sublime contempt for the chaos around them.
What was this Central Government? In order successfully to
understand an unparalleled situation we must indicate its nature.
The manoeuvres to which Yuan Shih-kai had so astutely lent himself
from the outbreak of the Revolution had left him at its official
close supreme in name. Not only had he secured an Imperial
Commission from the abdicating Dynasty to organize a popular
Government in obedience to the national wish, but having brought
to Peking the Delegates of the Nanking Revolutionary Body he had
received from them the formal offer of the Presidency.
These arrangements had, of course, been secretly agreed to en bloc
before the fighting had been stopped and the abdication
proclaimed, and were part and parcel of the elaborate scenery
which officialdom always employs in Asia even when it is dealing
with matters within the purview of the masses. They had been made
possible by the so-called "Article of Favourable Treatment" drawn-
up by Yuan Shih-kai himself, after consultation with the
rebellious South. In these Capitulations it had been clearly
stipulated that the Manchu Imperial Family should receive in
perpetuity a Civil List of $4,000,000 Mexican a year, retaining
all their titles as a return for the surrender of their political
power, the bitter pill being gilded in such fashion as to hide its
real meaning, which alone was a grave political error.
In spite of this agreement, however, great mutual suspicion
existed between North and South China. Yuan Shih-kai himself was
unable to forget that the bold attempt to assassinate him in the
Peking streets on the 17th January, when he was actually engaged
in negotiating these very terms of the Abdication, had been
apparently inspired from Nanking; whilst the Southern leaders were
daily reminded by the vernacular press that the man who held the
balance of power had always played the part of traitor in the past
and would certainly do the same again in the near future.
When the Delegates came to Peking in February, by far the most
important matter which was still in dispute was the question of
the oath of office which Yuan Shih-kai was called upon to take to
insure that he would be faithful to the Republic. The Delegates
had been charged specifically to demand on behalf of the seceding
provinces that Yuan Shih-kai should proceed with them to Nanking
to take that oath, a course of action which would have been held
tantamount by the nation to surrender on his part to those who had
been unable to vanquish him in the field. It must also not be
forgotten that from the very beginning a sharp and dangerous
cleavage of opinion existed as to the manner in which the powers
of the new government had been derived. South and Central China
claimed, and claimed rightly, that the Nanking Provincial
Constitution was the Instrument on which the Republic was based:
Yuan Shih-kai declared that the Abdication Edicts, and not the
Nanking Instrument had established the Republic, and that
therefore it lay within his competence to organize the new
government in the way which he considered most fit.
The discussion which raged was suddenly terminated on the night of
the 29th February (1912) when without any warning there occurred
the extraordinary revolt of the 3rd Division, a picked Northern
corps who for forty-eight hours plundered and burnt portions of
the capital without any attempts at interference, there being
little doubt to-day that this manoeuvre was deliberately arranged
as a means of intimidation by Yuan Shih-kai himself. Although the
disorders assumed such dimensions that foreign intervention was
narrowly escaped, the upshot was that the Nanking Delegates were
completely cowed and willing to forget all about forcing the
despot of Peking to proceed to the Southern capital. Yuan Shih-kai
as the man of the hour was enabled on the 10th March, 1912, to
take his oath in Peking as he had wished thus securing full
freedom of action during the succeeding years. [Footnote: The
defective nature of this oath of office will be patent at a
glance: "At the beginning of the Republic there are many things to
be taken care of. I, Yuan Shih-kai, sincerely wish to exert my
utmost to promote the democratic spirit, to remove the dark blots
of despotism, to obey strictly the Constitution, and to abide by
the wish of the people, so as to place the country in a safe,
united, strong, and firm position, and to effect the happiness and
welfare of the divisions of the Chinese race. All these wishes I
will fulfil without fail. As soon as a new President is elected by
the National Assembly I shall at once vacate my present position.
With all sincerity I take this oath before the people of China.
"Dated the tenth day of March in the First Year of the Republic of
China (1912)."
(Signed) Yuan Shih-kai.]
It was on this astounding basis--by means of an organized revolt--
that the Central Government was re-organized; and every act that
followed bears the mark of its tainted parentage. Accepting
readily as his Ministers in the more unimportant government
Departments the nominees of the Southern Confederacy (which was
now formally dissolved), Yuan Shih-kai was careful to reserve for
his own men everything that concerned the control of the army and
the police, as well as the all-important ministry of finance. The
framework having been thus erected, attention was almost
immediately concentrated on the problem of finding money, an
amazing matter which would weary the stoutest reader if given in
all its detail but which being part and parcel of the general
problem must be referred to.
Certain essential features can be very rapidly exposed. We have
already made clear the purely economic nature of the forces which
had sapped the foundations of Chinese society. Primarily it had
been the disastrous nature of Chinese gold-indebtedness which had
given the new ideas the force they required to work their will on
the nation. And just because the question of this gold-
indebtedness had become so serious and such a drain on the nation,
some months before the outbreak of the Revolution an arrangement
had been entered into with the bankers of four nations for a
Currency Loan of 10,000,000 pounds with which to make an organized
effort to re-establish internal credit. But this loan had never
actually been floated, as a six months' safety clause had
permitted a delay during which the Revolution had come. It was
therefore necessary to begin the negotiations anew; and as the
rich prizes to be won in the Chinese lottery had attracted general
attention in the European financial world through the
advertisement which the Revolution had given the country, a host
of alternative loan proposals now lay at the disposal of Peking.
Consequently an extraordinary chapter of bargaining commenced.
Warned that an International Debt Commission was the goal aimed at
by official finance, Yuan Shih-kai and the various parties who
made up the Government of the day, though disagreeing on almost
every other question, were agreed that this danger must be fought
as a common enemy. Though the Four-Power group alleged that they
held the first option on all Chinese loans, money had already been
advanced by a Franco-Belgian Syndicate to the amount of nearly two
million pounds during the critical days of the Abdication. Furious
at the prospect of losing their percentages, the Four Power group
made the confusion worse confounded by blocking all competing
proposals and closing every possible door. Russia and Japan, who
had hitherto not been parties to the official consortium,
perceiving that participation had become a political necessity,
now demanded a place which was grudgingly accorded them; and it
was in this way that the celebrated six-power Group arose.
It was round this group and the proposed issue of a 60,000,000
pounds loan to reorganize Chinese finance that the central battle
raged. The Belgian Syndicate, having been driven out of business
by the financial boycott which the official group was strong
enough to organize on the European bourses, it remained for China
to see whether she could not find some combination or some man who
would be bold enough to ignore all governments.
Her search was not in vain. In September (1912) a London
stockbroker, Mr. Birch Crisp, determined to risk a brilliant coup
by negotiating by himself a Loan of 10,000,000 pounds; and the
world woke up one morning to learn that one man was successfully
opposing six governments. The recollection of the storm raised in
financial circles by this bold attempt will be fresh in many
minds. Every possible weapon was brought into play by
international finance to secure that the impudence of financial
independence should be properly checked; and so it happened that
although 5,000,000 pounds was secured after an intense struggle,
it was soon plain that the large requirements of a derelict
government could not be satisfied in this Quixotic manner. Two
important points had, however, been attained; first, China was
kept financially afloat during the year 1912 by the independence
of a single member of the London Stock Exchange; secondly, using
this coup as a lever the Peking Government secured better terms
than otherwise would have been possible from the official
consortium.
Meanwhile the general internal situation remained deplorable.
Nothing was done for the provinces whose paper currency was
depreciating from month to month in an alarming manner; whilst the
rivalries between the various leaders instead of diminishing
seemed to be increasing. The Tutuhs, or Military Governors, acting
precisely as they saw fit, derided the authority of Peking and
sought to strengthen their old position by adding to their armed
forces. In the capital the old Manchu court, safely entrenched in
the vast Winter Palace from which it has not even to-day been
ejected (1917) published daily the Imperial Gazette, bestowing
honours and decorations on courtiers and clansmen and preserving
all the old etiquette. In the North-western provinces, and in
Manchuria and Mongolia, the socalled Tsung She Tang, or Imperial
Clan Society, intrigued perpetually to create risings which would
hasten the restoration of the fallen House; and although these
intrigues never rose to the rank of a real menace to the country,
the fact that they were surreptitiously supported by the Japanese
secret service was a continual source of anxiety. The question of
Outer Mongolia was also harassing the Central Government. The
Hutuktu or Living Buddha of Urga--the chief city of Outer
Mongolia--had utilized the revolution to throw off his allegiance
to Peking; and the whole of this vast region had been thrown into
complete disorder--which was still further accentuated when Russia
on the 21st October (1912) recognized its independence. It was
known that as a pendent to this Great Britain was about to insist
on the autonomy of Tibet,--a development which greatly hurt
Chinese pride.
On the 15th August, 1912, the deplorable situation was well-
epitomised by an extraordinary act in Peking, when General Chang
Cheng-wu, one of the "heroes" of the original Wuchang rising, who
had been enticed to the capital, was suddenly seized after a
banquet in his honour and shot without trial at midnight.
This event, trivial in itself during times when judicial murders
were common, would have excited nothing more than passing interest
had not the national sentiment been so aroused by the chaotic
conditions. As it was it served to focus attention on the general
maladministration over which Yuan Shih-kai ruled as provisional
President. "What is my crime?" had shrieked the unhappy
revolutionist as he had been shot and then bayonetted to death.
That query was most easily answered. His crime was that he was not
strong enough or big enough to compete against more sanguinary
men, his disappearance being consequently in obedience to an
universal law of nature. Yuan Shih-kai was determined to assert
his mastery by any and every means; and as this man had flouted
him he must die.
The uproar which this crime aroused was, however, not easily
appeased; and the Advisory Council, which was sitting in Peking
pending the assembling of the first Parliament, denounced the
Provisional President so bitterly that to show that these
reproaches were ill-deserved he invited Dr. Sun Yat-sen to the
capital treating him with unparalleled honours and requesting him
to act as intermediary between the rival factions. All such
manoeuvres, however, were inspired with one object,--namely to
prove how nobody but the master of Peking could regulate the
affairs of the country.
Still no Parliament was assembled. Although the Nanking
Provisional Constitution had stipulated that one was to meet
within ten months i. e. before 1st November, 1912, the elections
were purposely delayed, the attention of the Central Government
being concentrated on the problem of destroying all rivals, and
everything being subordinate to this war on persons. Rascals,
getting daily more and more out of hand, worked their will on rich
and poor alike, discrediting by their actions the name of
republicanism and destroying public confidence--which was
precisely what suited Yuan Shih-kai. Dramatic and extraordinary
incidents continually inflamed the public mind, nothing being too
singular for those remarkable days.
Very slowly the problem developed, with everyone exclaiming that
foreign intervention was becoming inevitable. With the beginning
of 1913, being unable to delay the matter any longer, Yuan Shih-
kai allowed elections to be held in the provinces. He was so badly
beaten at the polls that it seemed in spite of his military power
that he would be outvoted and outmanoeuvred in the new National
Assembly and his authority undermined. To prevent this a fresh
assassination was decided upon. The ablest Southern leader, Sung
Chiao-jen, just as he was entraining for Peking with a number of
Parliamentarians at Shanghai, was coolly shot in a crowded railway
station by a desperado who admitted under trial that he had been
paid 200 pounds for the job by the highest authority in the land,
the evidence produced in court including telegrams from Peking
which left no doubt as to who had instigated the murder.
The storm raised by this evil measure made it appear as if no
parliament could ever assemble in Peking. But the feeling had
become general that the situation was so desperate that action had
to be taken. Not only was their reputation at stake, but the
Kuomingtang or Revolutionary Party now knew that the future of
their country was involved just as much as the safety of their own
lives; and so after a rapid consultation they determined that they
would beard the lion in his den. Rather unexpectedly on the 7th
April (1913) Parliament was opened in Peking with a huge Southern
majority and the benediction of all Radicals. [Footnote: The
Parliament of China is composed of a House of Representatives
numbering 596 members and a Senate of 274. The Representatives are
elected by means of a property and educational franchise which is
estimated to give about four million voters (1 per cent of the
population) although in practice relatively few vote. The Senate
is elected by the Provincial Assemblies by direct ballot. In the
opinion of the writer, the Chinese Parliament in spite of obvious
shortcoming, is representative of the country in its present
transitional stage.] Hopes rose with mercurial rapidity as a
solution at last seemed in sight. But hardly had the first
formalities been completed and Speakers been elected to both
Houses, than by a single dramatic stroke Yuan Shih-kai reduced to
nought these labours by stabbing in the back the whole theory and
practice of popular government.
The method he employed was simplicity itself, and it is peculiarly
characteristic of the man that he should have been so bluntly
cynical. Though the Provisional Nanking Constitution, which was
the "law" of China so far as there was any law at all, had laid
down specifically in article XIX that all measures affecting the
National Treasury must receive the assent of Parliament, Yuan
Shih-kai, pretending that the small Advisory Council which had
assisted him during the previous year and which had only just been
dissolved, had sanctioned a foreign loan, peremptorily ordered the
signature of the great Reorganization Loan of 25,000,000 pounds
which had been secretly under negotiation all Winter with the
financial agents of six Powers, [Footnote: The American Group at
the last moment dropped out of the Sextuple combination (prior to
the signature of the contract) after President Wilson had made his
well-known pronouncement deprecating the association of Americans
in any financial undertakings which impinged upon the rights of
sovereignty of a friendly Power,--which was his considered view of
the manner in which foreign governments were assisting their
nationals to gain control of the Salt Administration. The exact
language the President used was that the conditions of the loan
seemed "to touch very nearly the administrative independence of
China itself," and that a loan thus obtained was "obnoxious" to
the principles upon which the American government rests. It is to
be hoped that President Wilson's dictum will be universally
accepted after the war and that meddling in Chinese affairs will
cease.] although the rupture which had come in the previous June
as a forerunner to the Crisp loan had caused the general public to
lose sight of the supreme importance of the financial factor.
Parliament, seeing that apart from the possibility of a Foreign
Debt Commission being created something after the Turkish and
Egyptian models, a direct challenge to its existence had been
offered, raged and stormed and did its utmost to delay the
question; but the Chief Executive having made up his mind shut
himself up in his Palace and absolutely refused to see any
Parliamentary representatives. Although the Minister of Finance
himself hesitated to complete the transaction in the face of the
rising storm and actually fled the capital, he was brought back by
special train and forced to complete the agreement. At four
o'clock in the morning on the 25th April the last documents were
signed in the building of a foreign bank and the Finance Minister,
galloping his carriage suddenly out of the compound to avoid
possible bombs, reported to his master that at last--in spite of
the nominal foreign control which was to govern the disbursement--
a vast sum was at his disposal to further his own ends.
Safe in the knowledge that possession is nine points of the law,
Yuan Shih-kai now treated with derision the resolutions which
Parliament passed that the transaction was illegal and the loan
agreement null and void. Being openly backed by the agents of the
Foreign Powers, he immediately received large cash advances which
enabled him to extend his power in so many directions that further
argument with him seemed useless. It is necessary to record that
the Parliamentary leaders had almost gone down on their knees to
certain of the foreign Ministers in Peking in a vain attempt to
persuade them to delay--as they could very well have done--the
signature of this vital Agreement for forty-eight hours so that it
could be formally passed by the National Assembly, and thus save
the vital portion of the sovereignty of the country from passing
under the heel of one man. But Peking diplomacy is a perverse and
disagreeable thing; and the Foreign Ministers of those days,
although accredited to a government which while it had not then
been formally recognized as a Republic by any Power save the
United States, was bound to be so very shortly, were determined to
be reactionary and were at heart delighted to find things running
back normally to absolutism.
[Footnote: The United States accorded formal recognition to the
Republic on the election of the Speakers of the two Houses of
Parliament: the other Treaty Powers delayed recognition until Yuan
Shih-kai had been elected full President in October. It has been
very generally held that the long delay in foreign recognition of
the Republic contributed greatly to its internal troubles by
making every one doubt the reality of the Nanking transaction.
Most important, however, is the historical fact that a group of
Powers numbering the two great leaders of democracy in Europe--
England and France--did everything they could in Peking to
enthrone Yuan Shih-kai as dictator.]
High finance had at last got hold of everything it required from
China and was in no mood to relax the monopoly of the salt
administration which the Loan Agreement conferred. Nor must be the
fact be lost sight of that of the nominal amount of 25,000,000
pounds which had been borrowed, fully half consisted of repayments
to foreign Banks and never left Europe. According to the schedules
attached to the Agreement, Annex A, comprising the Boxer arrears
and bank advances, absorbed 4,317,778 pounds: Annex B, being so-
called provincial loans, absorbed a further 2,870,000 pounds:
Annex C, being liabilities shortly maturing, amounted to 3,592,263
pounds: Annex D, for disbandment of troops, amounted to 3,000,000
pounds: Annex C, to cover current administrative expenses totalled
5,500,000 pounds: whilst Annex E which covered the reorganization
of the Salt Administration, absorbed the last 2,000,000 pounds.
The bank profits on this loan alone amounted to 1 1/4 million
pounds; whilst Yuan Shih-kai himself was placed in possession by a
system of weekly disbursements of a sum roughly amounting to ten
million sterling, which was amply sufficient to allow him to wreak
his will on his fellow-countrymen. Exasperated to the pitch of
despair by this new development, the Central and Southern
provinces, after a couple of months' vain argument, began openly
to arm. On the 10th July in Kiangse province on the river Yangtsze
the Northern garrisons were fired upon from the Hukow forts by the
provincial troops under General Li Lieh-chun and the so-called
Second Revolution commenced.
The campaign was short and inglorious. The South, ill-furnished
with munitions and practically penniless, and always confronted by
the same well-trained Northern Divisions who had proved themselves
invincible only eighteen months before, fought hard for a while,
but never became a serious menace to the Central Government owing
to the lack of co-operation between the various Rebel forces in
the field. The Kiangse troops under General Li Lieh-chun, who
numbered at most 20,000 men, fought stiffly, it is true, for a
while but were unable to strike with any success and were
gradually driven far back from the river into the mountains of
Kiangse where their numbers rapidly melted away. The redoubtable
revolutionary Huang Hsin, who had proved useful as a propagandist
and a bomb-thrower in earlier days, but who was useless in serious
warfare, although he assumed command of the Nanking garrison which
had revolted to a man, and attempted a march up the Pukow railway
in the direction of Tientsin, found his effort break down almost
immediately from lack of organization and fled to Japan. The
Nanking troops, although deserted by their leader, offered a
strenuous resistance to the capture of the southern capital which
was finally effected by the old reactionary General Chang Hsun
operating in conjunction with General Feng Kuo-chang who had been
dispatched from Peking with a picked force. The attack on the
Shanghai arsenal which had been quietly occupied by a small
Northern Garrison during the months succeeding the great loan
transaction, although pushed with vigour by the South, likewise
ultimately collapsed through lack of artillery and proper
leadership. The navy, which was wholly Southern in its sympathies
and which had been counted upon as a valuable weapon in cutting
off the whole Yangtsze Valley, was at the last moment purchased to
neutrality by a liberal use of money obtained from the foreign
banks, under, it is said, the heading of administrative expenses!
The turbulent city of Canton, although it also rose against the
authority of Peking, had been well provided for by Yuan Shih-kai.
A border General, named Lung Chi-Kwang, with 20,000 semi-savage
Kwangsi troops had been moved near the city and at once attacked
and overawed the garrison. Appointed Military Governor of the
province in return for his services, this Lung Chi-kwang, who was
an infamous brute, for three years ruled the South with heartless
barbarity, until he was finally ejected by the great rising of
1916. Thoroughly disappointed in this and many other directions
the Southern Party was now emasculated; for the moneyed classes
had withheld their support to the end, and without money nothing
is possible in China. The 1913 outbreak, after lasting a bare two
months, ignominiously collapsed with the flight of every one of
the leaders on whose heads prices were put. The road was now left
open for the last step Yuan Shih-kai had in mind, the coup against
Parliament itself, which although unassociated in any direct way
with the rising, had undoubtedly maintained secret relations with
the rebellious generals in the field.
Parliament had further sinned by appointing a Special
Constitutional Drafting Committee which had held its sittings
behind closed doors at the Temple of Heaven. During this drafting
of the Permanent Constitution, admittance had been absolutely
refused to Yuan Shih-kai's delegates who had been sent to urge a
modification of the decentralization which had been such a
characteristic of the Nanking Instrument. Such details as
transpired showed that the principle of absolute money-control was
not only to be the dominant note in the Permanent Constitution,
but that a new and startling innovation was being included to
secure that a de facto Dictatorship should be rendered impossible.
Briefly, it was proposed that when Parliament was not actually in
session there should be left in Peking a special Parliamentary
Committee, charged with supervising and controlling the Executive,
and checking any usurpation of power.
This was enough for Yuan Shih-kai: he felt that he was not only an
object of general suspicion but that he was being treated with
contempt. He determined to finish with it all. He was as yet,
however, only provisional President and it was necessary to show
cunning. Once more he set to work in a characteristic way. By a
liberal use of money Parliament was induced to pass in advance of
the main body of articles the Chapter of the Constitution dealing
with the election and term of office of the President. When that
had been done the two Chambers sitting as an Electoral College,
after the model of the French Parliament, being partly bribed and
partly terrorised by a military display, were induced to elect him
full President.
On the 10th October he took his final oath of office as President
for a term of five years before a great gathering of officials and
the whole diplomatic body in the magnificent Throne Room of the
Winter Palace. Safe now in his Constitutional position nothing
remained for him but to strike. On the 4th November he issued an
arbitrary Mandate, which received the counter-signature of the
whole Cabinet, ordering the unseating of all the so-called
Kuomingtang or Radical Senators and Representatives on the counts
of conspiracy and secret complicity with the July rising and
vaguely referring to the filling of the vacancies thus created by
new elections. [Footnote: According to the official lists
published subsequent to the coup d'etat, 98 Senators and 252
Members of the House of Representatives had their Parliamentary
Certificates impounded by the police as a result of the Mandates
of the 4th November, and were ordered to leave the Capital. In
addition 34 Senators and 54 Members of the Lower House fled from
Peking before their Certificates could be seized. Therefore the
total number affected by the proscription was 132 Senators and 306
Representatives. As the quorums in the case of both Houses are
half the total membership, any further sittings were thus made
impossible.] The Metropolitan Police rigorously carried out the
order and although no brutality was shown, it was made clear that
if any of the indicted men remained in Peking their lives would be
at stake. Having made it impossible for Parliament to sit owing to
the lack of quorums, Yuan Shih-kai was able to proceed with his
work of reorganization in the way that best suited him; and the
novel spectacle was offered of a truly Mexican situation created
in the Far East by and with the assent of the Powers. It is
significant that the day succeeding this coup d'etat of the 4th
November the agreement conceding autonomy to Outer Mongolia was
signed with Russia, China simply retaining the right to station a
diplomatic representative at Urga. [Footnote: A full copy of this
agreement will be found in the appendix.]
In spite of his undisputed power, matters however did not improve.
The police-control, judiciously mingled with assassinations, which
was now put in full vigour was hardly the administration to make
room for which the Manchus had been expelled; and the country
secretly chafed and cursed. But the disillusionment of the people
was complete. Revolt had been tried in vain; and as the support
which the Powers were affording to this regime was well understood
there was nothing to do but to wait, safe in the knowledge that
such a situation possessed no elements of permanency.
CHAPTER IV
THE DICTATOR AT WORK
(FROM THE COUP D'ETAT OF THE 4TH NOVEMBER, 1913, TO THE OUTBREAK
OF THE WORLD-WAR 1ST AUGUST, 1914)
With the Parliament of China effectively destroyed, and the
turbulent Yangtsze Valley dragooned into sullen submission, Yuan
Shih-kai's task had become so vastly simplified that he held the
moment to have arrived when he could openly turn his hand to the
problem of making himself absolutely supreme, de jure as well as
de facto. But there was one remaining thing to be done. To drive
the last nail into the coffin of the Republic it was necessary to
discredit and virtually imprison the man who was Vice-President.
It is highly characteristic that although he had received from the
hero of the Wuchang Rising the most loyal co-operation--a co-
operation of a very arduous character since the Commander of the
Middle Yangtsze had had to resist the most desperate attempts to
force him over to the side of the rebellion in July, 1913,
nevertheless, Yuan Shih-kai was determined to bring this man to
Peking as a prisoner of state.
It was just the fact that General Li Yuan-hung was a national hero
which impelled the Dictator to action. In the election which had
been carried out in October, 1913, by the National Assembly
sitting as a National Convention, in spite of every effort to
destroy his influence, the personal popularity of the Vice-
President had been such that he had received a large number of
votes for the office of full President--which had necessitated not
one but three ballots being taken, making most people declare that
had there been no bribery or intimidation he would have probably
been elected to the supreme office in the land, and ousted the
ambitious usurper. In such circumstances his complete elimination
was deemed an elementary necessity. To secure that end Yuan Shih-
kai suddenly dispatched to Wuchang--where the Vice-President had
resided without break since 1911--the Minister of War, General
Tuan Chi-jui, with implicit instructions to deal with the problem
in any way he deemed satisfactory, stopping short of nothing
should his victim prove recalcitrant.
Fortunately General Tuan Chi-jui did not belong to the ugly breed
of men Yuan Shih-kai loved to surround himself with; and although
he was a loyal and efficient officer the politics of the assassin
were unknown to him. He was therefore able to convince the Vice-
President after a brief discussion that the easiest way out of the
ring of intriguers and plotters in which Yuan Shih-kai was rapidly
surrounding him in Wuchang was to go voluntarily to the capital.
There at least he would be in daily touch with developments and
able to fight his own battles without fear of being stabbed in the
back; since under the eye of the foreign Legations even Yuan Shih-
kai was exhibiting a certain timidity. Indeed after the outcry
which General Chang Cheng-wu's judicial murder had aroused he had
reserved his ugliest deeds for the provinces, only small men being
done to death in Peking. Accordingly, General Li Yuan-hung packed
a bag and accompanied only by an aide-de-camp left abruptly for
the capital where he arrived on the 11th December, 1913.
A great sensation was caused throughout China by this sudden
departure, consternation prevailing among the officers and men of
the Hupeh (Wuchang) army when the newspapers began to hint that
their beloved chief had been virtually abducted. Although
cordially received by Yuan Shih-kai and given as his personal
residence the Island Palace where the unfortunate Emperor Kwang
Hsu had been so long imprisoned by the Empress Dowager Tsu Hsi
after her coup d'etat of 1898, it did not take long for General Li
Yuan-hung to understand that his presence was a source of
embarrassment to the man who would be king. Being, however, gifted
with an astounding fund of patience, he prepared to sit down and
allow the great game which he knew would now unroll to be played
to its normal ending. What General Li Yuan-hung desired above all
was to be forgotten completely and absolutely--springing to life
when the hour of deliverance finally arrived. His policy was shown
to be not only psychologically accurate, but masterly in a
political sense. The greatest ally of honesty in China has always
been time, the inherent decency of the race finally discrediting
scoundrelism in every period of Chinese history.
The year 1914 dawned with so many obstacles removed that Yuan
Shih-kai became more and more peremptory in his methods. In
February the young Empress Lun Yi, widow of the Emperor Kwang Hsu,
who two years previously in her character of guardian of the boy-
Emperor Hsuan Tung, had been cajoled into sanctioning the
Abdication Edicts, unexpectedly expired, her death creating
profound emotion because it snapped the last link with the past.
Yuan Shih-kai's position was considerably strengthened by this
auspicious event which secretly greatly delighted him; and by his
order for three days the defunct Empress lay in State in the Grand
Hall of the Winter Palace and received the obeisance of countless
multitudes who appeared strangely moved by this hitherto unknown
procedure. There was now only a nine-year old boy between the
Dictator and his highest ambitions. Two final problems still
remained to be dealt with: to give a legal form to a purely
autocratic rule, and to find money to govern the country. The
second matter was vastly more important than the first to a man
who did not hesitate to base his whole polity on the teachings of
Machiavelli, legality being looked upon as only so much political
window-dressing to placate foreign opinion and prevent
intervention, whilst without money even the semblance of the
rights of eminent domain could not be preserved. Everything indeed
hinged on the question of finding money.
There was none in China, at least none for the government.
Financial chaos still reigned supreme in spite of the great
Reorganization Loan of 25,000,000 pounds, which had been carefully
arranged more for the purpose of wiping-out international
indebtedness and balancing the books of foreign bankers than to
institute a modern government. All the available specie in the
country had been very quietly remitted in these troubled times by
the native merchant-guilds from every part of China to the vast
emporium of Shanghai for safe custody, where a sum not far short
of a hundred million ounces now choked the vaults of the foreign
banks,--being safe from governmental expropriation. The collection
of provincial revenues having been long disorganized, Yuan Shih-
kai, in spite of his military dictatorship, found it impossible to
secure the proper resumption of the provincial remittances. Fresh
loans became more and more sought after; by means of forced
domestic issues a certain amount of cash was obtained, but the
country lived from hand to mouth and everybody was unhappy. Added
to this by March the formidable insurrection of the "White Wolf"
bandits in Central China--under the legendary leadership of a man
who was said to be invulnerable--necessitated the mobilization of
a fresh army which ran into scores of battalions and which was
vainly engaged for nearly half a year in rounding-up this replica
of the Mexican Villa. So demoralized had the army become from long
license that this guerilla warfare was waged with all possible
slackness until a chance shot mortally wounded the chief brigand
and his immense following automatically dispersed. During six
months these pests had ravaged three provinces and menaced one of
the most strongly fortified cities in Asia--the old capital of
China, Hsianfu, whither the Manchu Court had fled in 1900.
Meanwhile wholesale executions were carried out in the provinces
with monotonous regularity and all attempts at rising ruthlessly
suppressed. In Peking the infamous Chih Fa Chu or Military Court--
a sort of Chinese Star-Chamber--was continually engaged in
summarily dispatching men suspected of conspiring against the
Dictator. Even the printed word was looked upon as seditious, an
unfortunate native editor being actually flogged to death in
Hankow for telling the truth about conditions in the riverine
districts. These cruelties made men more and more determined to
pay off the score the very first moment that was possible.
Although he was increasingly pressed for ready money, Yuan Shih-
kai, by the end of April, 1914, had the situation sufficiently in
hand to bring out his supreme surprise,--a brand-new Constitution
promulgated under the euphonious title of "The Constitutional
Compact."
This precious document, which had no more legality behind it as a
governing instrument than a private letter, can be studied by the
curious in the appendix where it is given in full: here it is
sufficient to say that no such hocuspocus had ever been previously
indulged in China. Drafted by an American legal adviser, Dr.
Goodnow, who was later to earn unenviable international notoriety
as the endorser of the monarchy scheme, it erected what it was
pleased to call the Presidential System; that is, it placed all
power directly in the hands of the President, giving him a single
Secretary of State after the American model and reducing Cabinet
Ministers to mere Department Chiefs who received their
instructions from the State Department but had no real voice in
the actual government. A new provincial system was likewise
invented for the provinces, the Tutuhs or Governors of the
Revolutionary period being turned into Chiang Chun or Military
Officials on the Manchu model and provincial control absolutely
centralized in their hands, whilst the Provincial Assemblies
established under the former dynasty were summarily abolished. The
worship at the Temple of Heaven was also re-established and so was
the official worship of Confucius--both Imperialistic measures--
whilst a brand-new ceremony, the worship of the two titulary
Military Gods, was ordered so as to inculcate military virtue! It
was laid down that in the worship of Heaven the President would
wear the robes of the Dukes of the Chow dynasty, B. C. 1112, a
novel and interesting republican experiment. Excerpts from two
Mandates which belong to these days throw a flood of light on the
kind of reasoning which was held to justify these developments.
The first declares:
... "In a Republic the Sovereign Power is vested in the people,
and the main principle is that all things should be determined in
accordance with the desires of the majority. These desires may be
embraced by two words, namely, existence and happiness. I, the
President, came from my farm because I was unable to bear the
eternal sufferings of the innocent people. I assumed office and
tried vainly to soothe the violent feelings. The greatest evil
nowadays is the misunderstanding of true principles. The
Republicans on the pretext of public interest try to attain
selfish ends, some going so far as to consider the forsaking of
parents as a sign of liberty and regarding the violation of the
laws as a demonstration of equality. I will certainly do my best
to change all this."
In the second Mandate Yuan Shih-kai justifies the re-establishment
of the Confucian worship in a singular way, incidentally showing
how utterly incomprehensible to him is the idea of representative
government, since he would appear to have imagined that by
dispatching circular telegrams to the provincial capitals and
receiving affirmative replies from his creatures all that is
necessary in the way of a national endorsement of high
constitutional measures had been obtained.
... "China's devotion to Confucius began with the reign of the
Emperor Hsiaowu, of the Han dynasty, who rejected the works of the
hundred authors, making the six Confucian classics the leading
books. Confucius, born in the time of the tyranny of the nobility,
in his works declared that after war disturbances comes peace, and
with peace real tranquillity and happiness. This, therefore, is
the fountain of Republicanism. After studying the history of China
and consulting the opinions of scholars, I find that Confucius
must remain the teacher for thousands of generations. But in a
Republic the people possess sovereign power. Therefore circular
telegrams were dispatched to all the provinces to collect
opinions, and many affirmative answers have already been received.
Therefore, all colleges, schools, and public bodies are ordered to
revive the sacrificial ceremony of Confucius, which shall be
carefully and minutely ordained" ...
With the formal promulgation of the Constitutional Compact the
situation had become bizarre in the extreme. Although even the
child-mind might have known that powers for Constitution-making
were vested solely in the National Assembly, and that the re-
division of authority which was now made was wholly illegal,
because Yuan Shih-kai as the bailiff of the Powers was able to do
much as he pleased; and at a moment when Liberal Europe was on the
eve of plunging into the most terrible war in history in defence
of right against might, reaction and Prussianism of the most
repulsive type were passed by unnoticed in China. In a few loosely
drafted chapters not only was the governance of the country
rearranged to suit a purely dictational rule, but the actual
Parliament was permanently extinguished and replaced by a single
Legislative Chamber (Li Fa Yuan) which from its very composition
could be nothing but a harmless debating Society with no greater
significance than a dietine of one of the minor German States.
Meanwhile, as there was no intention of allowing even this chamber
to assemble until the last possible moment, a Senate was got
together as the organ of public opinion, ten Senators being chosen
to draft yet another Constitution which would be the final one.
Remarkable steps were taken a little later in the year (1914) to
secure that the succession to the dictatorship should be left in
Yuan Shih-kai's own hands. An elaborate ritual was contrived and
officially promulgated under the title of the Presidential
Succession Law on the 29th December whereby the Chief Executive
selected three names which were placed in a gold box in a Stone
House in the grounds of the Palace,--the gold box only to be
opened when death or incapacity deprived the nation of its self-
appointed leader. For the term of the presidency was openly
converted into one of ten years and made subject to indefinite
renewal by this precious instrument which was the work of the
puppet senate. In case of the necessity of an election suddenly
arising, an Electoral College was to be formed by fifty members
drawn from the Legislative Chamber and fifty from the Senate, the
Presidential candidates consisting of the President (if he so
desired) and the three whose names were in the gold box in the
Stone House in the Palace grounds. It is not definitely known to
whom these provisions were due, but it is known that at least they
were not the work of the American adviser.
His responsibility, however, was very great; for the keynote of
all this scheme, according to Dr. Goodnow, [Footnote: It is
significant that Dr. Goodnow carried out all his Constitutional
Studies in Germany, specializing in that department known as
Administrative Law which has no place, fortunately, in Anglo-Saxon
conceptions of the State.] was "centralization of power," a
parrot-like phrase which has deluded better men than ever came to
China and which--save as a method necessary during a state of war
--should have no place in modern politics. But it was precisely
this which appealed to Yuan Shih-kai. Although as President he was
ex officio Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, he now turned
this office into a direct and special organization installed
within the precincts of the Imperial City. The flags of this new
dictatorship constantly floated over his palace, whilst scores of
officers were appointed to scores of departments which were
directly concerned with centralizing the control of every armed
man in the country in the master's hands. Meanwhile in order to
placate provincial commanders, a "Palace of Generals," was created
in Peking to which were brought all men it was held desirable to
emasculate. Here, drawing ample salaries, they could sit in
idleness the livelong day, discussing the battles they had never
fought and intriguing against one another, two occupations in
which the product of the older school of men in China excels.
Provincial levies which had any military virtue, were gradually
disbanded, though many of the rascals and rapscallions, who were
open menaces to good government were left with arms in their hands
so as to be an argument in favour of drastic police-rule. Thus it
is significant of the underlying falseness and weakness of the
dictator's character that he never dared to touch the troops of
the reprobate General Chang Hsun, who had made trouble for years,
and who had nearly embroiled China in war with Japan during the
so-called Second Revolution (July-August, 1913) by massacring some
Japanese civilians in the streets of Nanking when the city was
recaptured. So far from disbanding his men, Chang Hsun managed
constantly to increase his army of 30,000 men on the plea that the
post of Inspector-General of the Yangtsze Valley, which had been
given to him as a reward for refusing to throw in his lot with the
Southern rebels, demanded larger forces. Yuan Shih-kai, although
half-afraid of him, found him at various periods useful as a
counterweight to other generals in the provinces; in any case he
was not the man to risk anything by attempting to crush him. As he
was planted with his men astride of the strategically important
Pukow railway, it was always possible to order him at a moment's
notice into the Yangtsze Valley which was thus constantly under
the menace of fire and sword.
Far and wide Yuan Shih-kai now stretched his nets. He even
employed Americans throughout the United States in the capacity of
press-agents in order to keep American public opinion favourable
to him, hoping to invoke their assistance against his life-enemy--
Japan--should that be necessary. The precise details of this
propaganda and the sums spent in its prosecution are known to the
writer; if he refrains from publishing them it is solely for
reasons of policy. England it was not necessary to deal with in
this way. Chance had willed that the British Representative in
Peking should be an old friend who had known the Dictator
intimately since his Korean days; and who faithful to the
extraordinary English love of hero-worship believed that such a
surprising character could do little wrong. British policy which
has always been a somewhat variable quantity in China, owing to
the spasmodic attention devoted to such a distant problem, may be
said to have been non-existent during all this period--a state of
affairs not conducive to international happiness.
Slowly the problem developed in a shiftless, irresolute way.
Unable to see that China had vastly changed, and that government
by rascality had become a physical and moral impossibility, the
Legations in Peking adopted an attitude of indifference leaving
Yuan Shih-kai to wreak his will on the people. The horde of
foreign advisers who had been appointed merely as a piece of
political window-dressing, although they were allowed to do no
work, were useful in running backwards and forwards between the
Legations and the Presidential headquarters and in making each
Power suppose that its influence was of increasing importance. It
was made abundantly clear that in Yuan Shih-kai's estimation the
Legations played in international politics much the same role that
provincial capitals did in domestic politics: so long as you bound
both to benevolent neutrality the main problem--the consolidation
of dictatorial power--could be pushed on with as you wished.
Money, however, remained utterly lacking and a new twenty-five
million sterling loan was spoken of as inevitable--the accumulated
deficit in 1914 being alone estimated at thirty-eight million
pounds. But although this financial dearth was annoying, Chinese
resources were sufficient to allow the account to be carried on
from day to day. Some progress was made in railways, building
concessions being liberally granted to foreign corporations, this
policy having received a great impetus from the manner in which
Dr. Sun Yat Sen had boomed the necessity for better communications
during the short time he had ruled at a National Railway Bureau in
Shanghai, an office from which he had been relieved in 1913 on it
being discovered that he was secretly indenting for quick-firing
guns. Certain questions proved annoying and insoluble, for
instance the Tibetan question concerning which England was very
resolute, as well as the perpetual risings in Inner Mongolia, a
region so close to Peking that constant concentrations of troops
were necessary. But on the whole as time went on there was
increasing indifference both among the Foreign Powers and Chinese
for the extraordinary state of affairs which had been allowed to
grow up.
There was one notable exception, however, Japan. Never relaxing
her grip on a complicated problem, watchful and active, where
others were indifferent and slothful, Japan bided her time.
Knowing that the hour had almost arrived when it would be possible
to strike, Japan was vastly active behind the scenes in China long
before the outbreak of the European war gave her the longed for
opportunity; and largely because of her the pear, which seemed
already almost ripe, finally withered on the tree.
CHAPTER V
THE FACTOR OF JAPAN
(FROM THE OUTBREAK OP THE WORLD-WAR, 1ST AUGUST, 1914, TO THE
FILING OP THE TWENTY-ONE DEMANDS, 18TH JANUARY, 1915)
The thunderclap of the European war shattered the uneasy calm in
China, not because the Chinese knew anything of the mighty issues
which were to be fought out with such desperation and valour, but
because the presence of the German colony of Kiaochow on Chinese
soil and the activity of German cruisers in the Yellow Sea brought
the war to China's very doors. Vaguely conscious that this might
spell disaster to his own ambitious plans, Yuan Shih-kai was
actually in the midst of tentative negotiations with the German
Legation regarding the retrocession of the Kiaochow territory when
the news reached him that Japan, after some rapid negotiations
with her British Ally, had filed an ultimatum on Germany,
peremptorily demanding the handing-over of all those interests
that had been forcibly acquired in Shantung province in the great
leasing-year of 1898.
At once Yuan Shih-kai realized that the Nemesis which had dogged
his footsteps all his life was again close behind him. In the
Japanese attack on Kiaochow he foresaw a web of complications
which even his unrivalled diplomacy might be unable to unravel;
for he knew well from bitter experience that wherever the Japanese
sets his foot there he remains. It is consequently round this
single factor of Japan that the history of the two succeeding
years revolves. From being indisputably the central figure on the
Chinese canvas, Yuan Shih-kai suddenly becomes subordinate to the
terror of Japanese intervention which hangs over him constantly
like a black cloud, and governs every move he made from the 15th
August, 1914, to the day of his dramatic death on the 6th June,
1916. We shall attempt to write down the true explanation of why
this should have been so.
It is extremely hard to discuss the question of Japan for the
benefit of an exclusively Western audience in a convincing way
because Japanese policy has two distinct facets which seem utterly
contradictory, and yet which are in a great measure understandable
if the objects of that diplomacy are set down. Being endowed with
an extraordinary capacity for taking detached views, the Statesmen
of Tokio long ago discerned the necessity of having two
independent policies--an Eastern policy for Eastern Asia and a
Western policy for Western nations--because East and West are
essentially antithetical, and cannot be treated (at least not yet)
in precisely the same manner. Whilst the Western policy is frank
and manly, and is exclusively in the hands of brilliant and
attractive men who have been largely educated in the schools of
Europe and America and who are fully able to deal with all matters
in accordance with the customary traditions of diplomacy, the
Eastern policy is the work of obscurantists whose imaginations are
held by the vast projects which the Military Party believes are
capable of realization in China. There is thus a constant
contradiction in the attitude of Japan which men have sought in
vain to reconcile. It is for this reason that the outer world is
divided into two schools of thought, one believing implicitly in
Japan's bona fides, the other vulgarly covering her with abuse and
declaring that she is the last of all nations in her conceptions
of fair play and honourable treatment. Both views are far-fetched.
It is as true of Japan as it is of every other Government in the
world that her actions are dictated neither by altruism nor by
perfidy, but are merely the result of the faulty working of a
number of fallible brains and as regards the work of
administration in Japan itself the position is equally
extraordinary. Here, at the extreme end of the world, so far from
being in any way threatened, the principle of Divine Right, which
is being denounced and dismembered in Europe as a crude survival
from almost heathen days, stands untouched and still exhibits
itself in all its pristine glory. A highly aristocratic Court,
possessing one of the most complicated and jealously protected
hierarchies in the world, and presided over by a monarch claiming
direct descent from the sacred Jimmu Tenno of twenty-five hundred
years ago, decrees to-day precisely as before, the elaborate
ritual governing every move, every decision and every agreement.
There is something so engaging in this political curiosity,
something so far removed from the vast world-movement now rolling
fiercely to its conclusion, that we may be pardoned for
interpolating certain capital considerations which closely affect
the future of China and therefore cannot fail to be of public
interest.
The Japanese, who owe their whole theocratic conception to the
Chinese, just as they owe all their letters and their learning to
them, still nominally look upon their ruler as the link between
Heaven and Earth, and the central fact dominating their cosmogony.
Although the vast number of well-educated men who to-day crowd the
cities of Japan are fully conscious of the bizarre nature of this
belief in an age which has turned its back on superstition,
nothing has yet been done to modify it because--and this is the
important point--the structure of Japanese society is such that
without a violent upheaval which shall hurl the military clan
system irremediably to the ground, it is absolutely impossible for
human equality to be admitted and the man-god theory to be
destroyed. So long as these two features exist; that is so long as
a privileged military caste supports and attempts to make all-
powerful the man-god theory, so long will Japan be an
international danger-spot because there will lack those democratic
restraints which this war has shown are absolutely essential to
secure a peaceful understanding among the nations. It is for this
reason that Japan will fail to attain the position the art-genius
and industry of her people entitle her to and must limp behind the
progress of the world unless a very radical revision of the
constitution is achieved. The disabilities which arise from an
archaic survival are so great that they will affect China as
adversely as Japan, and therefore should be universally
understood. Japanese history, if stripped of its superficial
aspects, has a certain remarkable quality; it seems steeped in
heroic blood. The doctrine of force, which expresses itself in its
crudest forms in Europe, has always been in Japan a system of
heroic-action so fascinating to humanity at large that until
recent times its international significance has not been realized.
The feudal organization of Japanese society which arose as a
result of the armed conquest of the islands fifteen hundred years
ago, precluded centralizating measures being taken because the
Throne, relying on the virtues of Divine Ancestors rather than on
any well-articulated political theory, was weak in all except
certain quasi-sacerdotal qualities, and forced to rely on great
chieftains for the execution of its mandates as well as for its
defence. The military title of "barbarian-conquering general,"
which was first conferred on a great clan leader eight centuries
ago, was a natural enough development when we remember that the
autochthonous races were even then not yet pushed out of the main
island, and were still battling with the advancing tide of
Japanese civilization which was itself composed of several rival
streams coming from the Asiatic mainland and from the Malayan
archipelagoes. This armed settlement saturates Japanese history
and is responsible for the unending local wars and the
glorification of the warrior. The conception of triumphant
generalship which Hideyoshi attempted unsuccessfully to carry into
Korea in the Sixteenth Century, led directly at the beginning of
the Seventeenth Century to the formal establishment of the
Shogunate, that military dictatorship being the result of the
backwash of the Korean adventure, and the greatest proof of the
disturbance which it had brought in Japanese society. The
persistence of this hereditary military dictatorship for more than
two and a half centuries is a remarkable illustration of the fact
that as in China so in Japan the theocratic conception was
unworkable save in primitive times--civilization demanding
organization rather than precepts and refusing to bow its head to
speechless kings. Although the Restoration of 1868 nominally gave
back to the Throne all it had been forced to leave in other hands
since 1603, that transfer of power was imaginary rather than real,
the new military organization which succeeded the Shogun's
government being the vital portion of the Restoration. In other
words, it was the leaders of Japan's conscript armies who
inherited the real power, a fact made amply evident by the
crushing of the Satsuma Rebellion by these new corps whose
organization allowed them to overthrow the proudest and most
valourous of the Samurai and incidentally to proclaim the triumph
of modern fire-arms.
Now it is important to note that as early as 1874--that is six
years after the Restoration of the Emperor Meiji--these facts were
attracting the widest notice in Japanese society, the agitation
for a Constitution and a popular assembly being very vigourously
pushed. Led by the well-known and aristocratic Itagaki, Japanese
Liberalism had joined battle with out-and-out Imperialism more
than a quarter of a century ago; and although the question of
recovering Tariff and Judicial autonomy and revising the Foreign
Treaties was more urgent in those days, the foreign question was
often pushed aside by the fierceness of the constitutional
agitation.
It was not, however, until 1889 that a Constitution was finally
granted to the Japanese--that instrument being a gift from the
Crown, and nothing more than a conditional warrant to a limited
number of men to become witnesses of the processes of government
but in no sense its controllers. The very first Diet summoned in
1890 was sufficient proof of that. A collision at once occurred
over questions of finance which resulted in the resignation of the
Ministry. And ever since those days, that is for twenty-seven
consecutive years, successive Diets in Japan have been fighting a
forlorn fight for the power which can never be theirs save by
revolution, it being only natural that Socialism should come to be
looked upon by the governing class as Nihilism, whilst the mob-
threat has been very acute ever since the Tokio peace riots of
1905.
Now it is characteristic of the ceremonial respect which all
Japanese have for the Throne that all through this long contest
the main issue should have been purposely obscured. The
traditional feelings of veneration which a loyal and obedient
people feel for a line of monarchs, whose origin is lost in the
mists of antiquity, are such that they have turned what is in
effect an evergrowing struggle against the archaic principle of
divine right into a contest with clan-leaders whom they assert are
acting "unconstitutionally" whenever they choose to assert the
undeniable principles of the Constitution. Thus to-day we have
this paradoxical situation: that although Japanese Liberalism must
from its very essence be revolutionary, i.e., destructive before
it can hope to be constructive, it feigns blindness, hoping that
by suasion rather than by force the principle of parliamentary
government will somehow be grafted on to the body politic and the
emperors, being left outside the controversy, become content to
accept a greatly modified rule.
This hope seems a vain one in the light of all history. Militarism
and the clans are by no means in the last ditch in Japan, and they
will no more surrender their power than would the Russian
bureaucracy. The only argument which is convincing in such a case
is the last one which is ever used; and the mere mention of it by
so-called socialists is sufficient to cause summary arrest in
Japan. Sheltering themselves behind the Throne, and nominally
deriving their latter-day dictatorship from the Imperial mandate,
the military chiefs remain adamant, nothing having yet occurred to
incline them to surrender any of their privileges. By a process of
adaptation to present-day conditions, a formula has now been
discovered which it is hoped will serve many a long year. By
securing by extra-legal means the return of a "majority" in the
House of Representatives the fiction of national support of the
autocracy has been re-invigourated, and the doctrine laid down
that what is good for every other advanced people in the world is
bad for the Japanese, who must be content with what is granted
them and never question the superior intelligence of a privileged
caste. In the opinion of the writer, it is every whit as important
for the peace of the world that the people of Japan should govern
themselves as it is for the people of Germany to do so. The
persistence of the type of military government which we see to-day
in Japan is harmful for all alike because it is as antiquated as
Tsarism and a perpetual menace to a disarmed nation such as China.
So long as that government remains, so long must Japan remain an
international suspect and be denied equal rights in the council-
chambers of the Liberal Powers.
If the situation which arose on the 15th August, 1914, is to be
thoroughly understood, it is necessary to pick up threads of
Chino-Japanese relations from a good many years back. First-hand
familiarity with the actors and the scenes of at least three
decades is essential to give the picture the completeness, the
brilliancy of colouring, and withal the suggestiveness inseparable
from all true works of art. For the Chino-Japanese question is
primarily a work of art and not merely a piece of jejune diplomacy
stretched across the years. As the shuttle of Fate has been cast
swiftly backwards and forwards, the threads of these entwining
relations have been woven into patterns involving the whole Far
East, until to-day we have as it were a complete Gobelin tapestry,
magnificent with meaning, replete with action, and full of
scholastic interest.
Let us follow some of the tracery. It has long been the habit to
affirm that the conflict between China and Japan had its origin in
Korea, when Korea was a vassal state acknowledging the suzerainty
of Peking; and that the conflict merited ending there, since of
the two protagonists contending for empire Japan was left in
undisputed mastery. This statement, being incomplete, is
dangerously false. Dating from that vital period of thirty years
ago, when Yuan Shih-kai first went to Seoul as a general officer
in the train of the Chinese Imperial Resident (on China being
forced to take action in protection of her interests owing to the
"opening" of Korea by the American Treaty of 1882) three
contestants, equally interested in the balance of land-power in
Eastern Asia were constantly pitted against one another with Korea
as their common battling-ground--Russia, China and Japan. The
struggle, which ended in the eclipse of the first two, merely
shifted the venue from the Korean zone to the Manchurian zone; and
from thence gradually extended it further and further afield until
at last not only was Inner Mongolia and the vast belt of country
fronting the Great Wall embraced within its scope, but the entire
aspect of China itself was changed. For these important facts have
to be noted. Until the Russian war of 1904-05 had demonstrated the
utter valuelessness of Tsarism as an international military
factor, Japan had been almost willing to resign herself to a
subordinate role in the Far East. Having eaten bitter bread as the
result of her premature attempt in 1895 (after the Korean war) to
become a continental power--an attempt which had resulted in the
forced retrocession of the Liaotung Peninsula--she had been placed
on her good behaviour, an attitude which was admirably reflected
in 1900 when her Peking Expeditionary Force proved itself so well-
behaved and so gallant as to arouse the world's admiration. But
the war with Russia and the collapse of the Tsar's Manchurian
adventure not only drew her back into territory that she never
hoped to see again, but placed her in possession of a ready-made
railway system which carried her almost up to the Sungari river
and surrendered to her military control vast grasslands stretching
to the Khingan mountains. This Westernly march so greatly enlarged
the Japanese political horizon, and so entirely changed the
Japanese viewpoint, that the statesmen of Tokio in their
excitement threw off their ancient spectacles and found to their
astonishment that their eyes were every whit as good as European
eyes. Now seeing the world as others had long seen it, they
understood that just as with the individuals so with nations the
struggle for existence can most easily be conducted by adopting
that war-principle of Clausewitz--the restless offensive, and not
by writing meaningless dispatches. Prior to the Russian war they
had written to Russia a magnificent series of documents in which
they had pleaded with sincerity for an equitable settlement,--
only to find that all was in vain. Forced to battle, they had
found in combat not only success but a new principle.
The discovery necessitated a new policy. During the eighties, and
in a lesser degree in the nineties, Japan had apart from
everything else been content to act in a modest and retiring way,
because she wished at all costs to avoid testing too severely her
immature strength. But owing to the successive collapses of her
rivals, she now found herself not only forced to attack as the
safest course of action, but driven to the view that the Power
that exerts the maximum pressure constantly and unremittedly is
inevitably the most successful. This conclusion had great
importance. For just as the first article of faith for England in
Asia has been the doctrine that no Power can be permitted to seize
strategic harbours which menace her sea-communications, so did it
now become equally true of Japan that her dominant policy became
not an Eastern Monroe doctrine, as shallow men have supposed, but
simply the Doctrine of Maximum Pressure. To press with all her
strength on China was henceforth considered vital by every
Japanese; and it's in this spirit that every diplomatic pattern
has been woven since the die was cast in 1905. Until this signal
fact has been grasped no useful analysis can be made of the
evolution of present conditions. Standing behind this policy, and
constantly reinforcing it, are the serried ranks of the new
democracy which education and the great increase in material
prosperity have been so rapidly creating. The soaring ambition
which springs from the sea lends to the attacks developed by such
a people the aspect of piracies; and it is but natural in such
circumstances that for Chinese Japan should not only have the
aspect of a sea-monster but that their country should appear as
hapless Andromeda bound to a rock, always awaiting a Perseus who
never comes. ...
The Revolution of 1911 had been entirely unexpected in Japan.
Whilst large outbreaks had been certainly counted on since the
Chinese Revolutionary party had for years used Japan as an asylum
and a base of operations, never had it been anticipated that the
fall of an ancient Dynasty could be so easily encompassed.
Consequently, the abdication of the Manchus as the result of
intrigues rather than of warfare was looked upon as little short
of a catastrophe because it hopelessly complicated the outlook,
broke the pattern which had been so carefully woven for so many
years, and interjected harsh elements which could not be assigned
an orderly place. Not only was a well-articulated State-system
suddenly consigned to the flames, but the ruin threatened to be so
general that the balance of power throughout the Far East would be
twisted out of shape. Japanese statesmen had desired a weak China,
a China which would ultimately turn to them for assistance because
they were a kindred race, but not a China that looked to the
French Revolution for its inspiration. To a people as slow to
adjust themselves to violent surprises as are the Japanese, there
was an air of desperation about the whole business which greatly
alarmed them, and made them determined at the earliest possible
moment to throw every ounce of their weight in the direction which
would best serve them by bringing matters back to their original
starting-point. For this reason they were not only prepared in
theory in 1911 to lend armed assistance to the Manchus but would
have speedily done so had not England strongly dissented from such
a course of action when she was privately sounded about the
matter. Even to-day, when a temporary adjustment of Japanese
policy has been successfully arranged, it is of the highest
importance for political students to remember that the dynastic
influences in Tokio have never departed from the view that the
legitimate sovereignty of China remains vested in the Manchu House
and that everything that has taken place since 1911 is irregular
and unconstitutional.
For the time being, however, two dissimilar circumstances demanded
caution: first, the enthusiasm which the Japanese democracy, fed
by a highly excited press, exhibited towards the Young China which
had been so largely grounded in the Tokio schools and which had
carried out the Revolution: secondly--and far more important--the
deep, abiding and ineradicable animosity which Japanese of all
classes felt for the man who had come out of the contest head and
shoulders above everybody else--Yuan Shih-kai. These two
remarkable features ended by completely thrusting into the
background during the period 1911-1914 every other element in
Japanese statesmanship; and of the two the second must be counted
the decisive one. Dating back to Korea, when Yuan Shih-kai's
extraordinary diplomatic talents constantly allowed him to worst
his Japanese rivals and to make Chinese counsels supreme at the
Korean Court up to the very moment when the first shots of the war
of 1894 were fired, this ancient dislike, which amounted to a
consuming hatred, had become a fixed idea. Restrained by the
world's opinion during the period prior to the outbreak of the
world-war as well as by the necessity of acting financially in
concert with the other Powers, it was not until August, 1914, that
the longed-for opportunity came and that Japan prepared to act in
a most remarkable way.
The campaign against Kiaochow was unpopular from the outset among
the Japanese public because it was felt that they were not
legitimately called upon to interest themselves in such a remote
question as the balance of power among European nations, which was
what British warfare against Germany seemed to them to be. Though
some ill-will was felt against Germany for the part played by her
in the intervention of 1895, it must not be forgotten that just as
the Japanese navy is the child of the British navy, so is the
Japanese army the child of the German army--and that Japanese army
chiefs largely control Japan. These men were averse from "spoiling
their army" in a contest which did not interest them. There was
also the feeling abroad that England by calling upon her Ally to
carry out the essential provisions of her Alliance had shown that
she had the better part of a bargain, and that she was exploiting
an old advantage in a way which could not fail to react adversely
on Japan's future world's relationships. Furthermore, it is
necessary to underline the fact that official Japan was displeased
by the tacit support an uninterested British Foreign Office had
consistently given to the Yuan Shih-kai regime. That the Chinese
experiment was looked upon in England more with amusement than
with concern irritated the Japanese--more particularly as the
British Foreign Office was issuing in the form of White Papers
documents covering Yuan Shih-kai's public declarations as if they
were contributions to contemporary history. Thus in the preceding
year (1913) under the nomenclature of "affairs in China" the text
of a dementi regarding the President of China's Imperial
aspirations had been published,--a document which Japanese had
classified as a studied lie, and as an act of presumption because
its wording showed that its author intended to keep his back
turned on Japan. The Dictator had declared:--
... "From my student days, I, Yuan Shih-kai, have admired the
example of the Emperors Yao and Shun, who treated the empire as a
public trust, and considered that the record of a dynasty in
history for good or ill is inseparably bound up with the public
spirit or self-seeking by which it has been animated. On attaining
middle age I grew more familiar with foreign affairs, was struck
by the admirable republican system in France and America, and felt
that they were a true embodiment of the democratic precepts of the
ancients. When last year the patriotic crusade started in Wuchang
its echoes went forth into all the provinces, with the result that
this ancient nation with its 2,000 years of despotism adopted with
one bound the republican system of government.
It was my good fortune to see this glorious day at my life's late
eve; I cherished the hope that I might dwell in the seclusion of
my own home and participate in the blessings of an age of peace.
But once again my fellow-countrymen honoured me with the pressing
request that I should again assume a heavy burden, and on the day
on which the Republic was proclaimed I announced it the whole
nation that never again should a monarchy be permitted in China.
At my inauguration I again took this solemn oath in the sight of
heaven above and earth beneath. Yet of late ignorant persons in
the provinces have fabricated wild rumours to delude men's minds,
and have adduced the career of the First Napoleon on which to base
their erroneous speculations. It is best not to inquire as to
their motives; in some cases misconception may be the cause, in
others deliberate malice.
The Republic has now been proclaimed for six months; so far there
is no prospect of recognition from the Powers, while order is far
from being restored in the provinces. Our fate hangs upon a hair;
the slightest negligence may forfeit all. I, who bear this arduous
responsibility, feel it my bounden duty to stand at the helm in
the hope of successfully breasting the wild waves.
But while those in office are striving with all their might to
effect a satisfactory solution, spectators seem to find a
difficulty in maintaining a generous forbearance. They forget that
I, who have received this charge from my countrymen, cannot
possibly look dispassionately on when the fate of the nation is in
the balance. If I were aware that the task was impossible and
played a part of easy acquiescence, so that the future of the
Republic might become irreparable, others might not reproach me,
but my own conscience would never leave me alone.
My thoughts are manifest in the sight of high heaven. But at this
season of construction and dire crisis how shall these mutual
suspicions find a place? Once more I issue this announcement; if
you, my fellow countrymen, do indeed place the safety of China
before all other considerations, it behooves you to be large-
minded. Beware of lightly heeding the plausible voice of calumny,
and of thus furnishing a medium for fostering anarchy. If evilly
disposed persons, who are bent on destruction, seize the excuse
for sowing dissension to the jeopardy of the situation, I, Yuan
Shih-kai, shall follow the behest of my fellow-countrymen in
placing such men beyond the pale of humanity.
A vital issue is involved. It is my duty to lay before you my
inmost thought, so that suspicion may be dissipated. Those who
know have the right to impose their censure. It is for public
opinion to take due notice."
Moreover Yuan Shih-kai had also shown in his selection and use of
foreign Advisers, that he was determined to proceed in such a
manner as to advertise his suspicion and enmity of Japan. After
the Coup d'etat of the 4th November, 1913, and the scattering of
Parliament, it was an American Adviser who was set to work on the
new "Constitution"; and although a Japanese, Dr. Ariga, who was in
receipt of a princely salary, aided and abetted this work, his
endorsement of the dictatorial rule was looked upon as traitorous
by the bulk of his countrymen. Similarly, it was perfectly well-
known that Yuan Shih-kai was spending large sums of money in Tokio
in bribing certain organs of the Japanese Press and in attempting
to win adherents among Japanese members of Parliament. Remarkable
stories are current which compromise very highly-placed Japanese
but which the writer hesitates to set down in black and white as
documentary proof is not available. In any case, be this as it
may, it was felt in Tokio that the time had arrived to give a
proper definition to the relations between the two states,--the
more so as Yuan Shih-kai, by publicly proclaiming a small war-zone
in Shantung within the limits of which the Japanese were alone
permitted to wage war against the Germans, had shown himself
indifferent to the majesty of Japan. The Japanese having captured
Kiaochow by assault before the end of 1914 decided to accept the
view that a de facto Dictatorship existed in China. Therefore on
the 18th of January, 1915, the Japanese Minister, Dr. Hioki,
personally served on Yuan Shih-kai the now famous Twenty-one
Demands, a list designed to satisfy every present and future need
of Japanese policy and to reduce China to a state of vassalage.
CHAPTER VI
THE TWENTY-ONE DEMANDS
Although the press of the world gave a certain prominence at the
time to the astounding demarche with which we now have to deal,
there was such persistent mystery about the matter and so many
official dementis accompanied every publication of the facts that
even to this day the nature of the assault which Japan delivered
on China is not adequately realized, nor is the narrow escape
assigned its proper place in estimates of the future. Briefly, had
there not been publication of the facts and had not British
diplomacy been aroused to action there is little doubt that Japan
would have forced matters so far that Chinese independence would
now be virtually a thing of the past. Fortunately, however, China
in her hour of need found many who were willing to succour her;
with the result that although she lost something in these
negotiations, Japan nevertheless failed in a very signal fashion
to attain her main objective. The Pyrrhic victory which she won
with her eleventh hour ultimatum will indeed in the end cost her
more than would have a complete failure, for Chinese suspicion and
hostility are now so deep-seated that nothing will ever completely
eradicate them. It is therefore only proper that an accurate
record should be here incorporated of a chapter of history which
has much international importance; and if we invite close
attention to the mass of documents that follow it is because we
hold that an adequate comprehension of them is essential to
securing the future peace of the Far East. Let us first give the
official text of the original Demands:
JAPAN'S ORIGINAL TWENTY-ONE DEMANDS
Translations of Documents Handed to the President, Yuan shih-kai,
by Mr. Hioki, the Japanese Minister, on January 18th, 1915.
GROUP I
The Japanese Government and the Chinese Government being desirous
of maintaining the general peace in Eastern Asia and further
strengthening the friendly relations and good neighbourhood
existing between the two nations agree to the following articles:--
Article 1. The Chinese Government engages to give full assent to
all matters upon which the Japanese Government may hereafter agree
with the German Government relating to the disposition of all
rights, interests and concessions, which Germany, by virtue of
treaties or otherwise, possesses in relation to the Province of
Shantung.
Article 2. The Chinese Government engages that within the Province
of Shantung and along its coast no territory or island will be
ceded or leased to a third Power under any pretext.
Article 3. The Chinese Government consents to Japan's building a
railway from Chefoo or Lungkow to join the Kiaochou-Tsinanfu
railway.
Article 4. The Chinese Government engages, in the interest of
trade and for the residence of foreigners, to open by herself as
soon as possible certain important cities and towns in the
Province of Shantung as Commercial Ports. What places shall be
opened are to be jointly decided upon in a separate agreement.
GROUP II
The Japanese Government and the Chinese Government, since the
Chinese Government has always acknowledged the special position
enjoyed by Japan in South Manchuria and Eastern Inner Mongolia,
agree to the following articles:--
Article 1. The two Contracting Parties mutually agree that the
term of lease of Port Arthur and Dalny and the term of lease of
the South Manchurian Railway and the Antung-Mukden Railway shall
be extended to the period of 99 years.
Article 2. Japanese subjects in South Manchuria and Eastern Inner
Mongolia shall have the right to lease or own land required either
for erecting suitable buildings for trade and manufacture or for
farming.
Article 3. Japanese subjects shall be free to reside and travel in
South Manchuria and Eastern Inner Mongolia and to engage in
business and in manufacture of any kind whatsoever.
Article 4. The Chinese Government agrees to grant to Japanese
subjects the right of opening the mines in South Manchuria and
Eastern Inner Mongolia. As regards what mines are to be opened,
they shall be decided upon jointly.
Article 5. The Chinese Government agrees that in respect of the
(two) cases mentioned herein below the Japanese Government's
consent shall be first obtained before action is taken:--
(a) Whenever permission is granted to the subject of a third Power
to build a railway or to make a loan with a third Power for the
purpose of building a railway in South Manchuria and Eastern Inner
Mongolia.
(b) Whenever a loan is to be made with a third Power pledging the
local taxes of South Manchuria and Eastern Inner Mongolia as
security.
Article 6. The Chinese Government agrees that if the Chinese
Government employs political, financial or military advisers or
instructors in South Manchuria or Eastern Inner Mongolia, the
Japanese Government shall first be consulted.
Article 7. The Chinese Government agrees that the control and
management of the Kirin-Changchun Railway shall be handed over to
the Japanese Government for a term of 99 years dating from the
signing of this Agreement.
GROUP III
The Japanese Government and the Chinese Government, seeing that
Japanese financiers and the Hanyehping Co. have dose relations
with each other at present and desiring that the common interests
of the two nations shall be advanced, agree to the following
articles:--
Article 1. The two Contracting Parties mutually agree that when
the opportune moment arrives the Hanyehping Company shall be made
a joint concern of the two nations and they further agree that
without the previous consent of Japan, China shall not by her own
act dispose of the rights and property of whatsoever nature of the
said Company nor cause the said Company to dispose freely of the
same.
Article 2. The Chinese Government agrees that all mines in the
neighbourhood of those owned by the Hanyehping Company shall not
be permitted, without the consent of the said Company, to be
worked by other persons outside of the said Company; and further
agrees that if it is desired to carry out any undertaking which,
it is apprehended, may directly or indirectly affect the interests
of the said Company, the consent of the said Company shall first
be obtained.
GROUP IV
The Japanese Government and the Chinese Government with the object
of effectively preserving the territorial integrity of China agree
to the following special articles:--
The Chinese Government engages not to cede or lease to a third
Power any harbour or bay or island along the coast of China.
GROUP V
Article 1. The Chinese Central Government shall employ influential
Japanese advisers in political, financial and military affairs.
Article 2. Japanese hospitals, churches and schools in the
interior of China shall be granted the right of owning land.
Article 3. Inasmuch as the Japanese Government and the Chinese
Government have had many cases of dispute between Japanese and
Chinese police to settle cases which caused no little
misunderstanding, it is for this reason necessary that the police
departments of important places (in China) shall be jointly
administered by Japanese and Chinese or that the police
departments of these places shall employ numerous Japanese, so
that they may at the same time help to plan for the improvement of
the Chinese Police Service.
Article 4. China shall purchase from Japan a fixed amount of
munitions of war (say 50% or more) of what is needed by the
Chinese Government or that there shall be established in China a
Sino-Japanese jointly worked arsenal. Japanese technical experts
are to be employed and Japanese material to be purchased.
Article 5. China agrees to grant to Japan the right of
constructing a railway connecting Wuchang with Kiukiang and
Nanchang, another line between Nanchang and Hanchow, and another
between Nanchang and Chaochou.
Article 6. If China needs foreign capital to work mines, build
railways and construct harbour-works (including dock-yards) in the
Provinces of Fukien, Japan shall be first consulted.
Article 7. China agrees that Japanese subjects shall have the
right of missionary propaganda in China. [Footnote: Refers to
preaching Buddhism.]
The five groups into which the Japanese divided their demands
possess a remarkable interest not because of their sequence, or
the style of their phraseology, but because every word reveals a
peculiar and very illuminating chemistry of the soul. To study the
original Chinese text is to pass as it were into the secret
recesses of the Japanese brain, and to find in that darkened
chamber a whole world of things which advertise ambitions mixed
with limitations, hesitations overwhelmed by audacities,
greatnesses succumbing to littlenesses, and vanities having the
appearance of velleities. Given an intimate knowledge of Far
Eastern politics and Far Eastern languages, only a few minutes are
required to re-write the demands in the sequence in which they
were originally conceived as well as to trace the natural history
of their genesis. Unfortunately a great deal is lost in their
official translation, and the menace revealed in the Chinese
original partly cloaked: for by transferring Eastern thoughts into
Western moulds, things that are like nails in the hands of soft
sensitive Oriental beings are made to appear to the steel-clad
West as cold-blooded, evolutionary necessities which may be
repellent but which are never cruel. The more the matter is
studied the more convinced must the political student be that in
this affair of the 18th January we have an international coup
destined to become classic in the new text-books of political
science. All the way through the twenty-one articles it is easy to
see the desire for action, the love of accomplished facts,
struggling with the necessity to observe the conventions of a
stereotyped diplomacy and often overwhelming those conventions. As
the thoughts thicken and the plot develops, the effort to mask the
real intention lying behind every word plainly breaks down, and a
growing exultation rings louder and louder as if the coveted
Chinese prize were already firmly grasped. One sees as it were the
Japanese nation, released from bondage imposed by the Treaties
which have been binding on all nations since 1860, swarming madly
through the breached walls of ancient Cathay and disputing hotly
the spoils of age-old domains.
Group I, which deals with the fruits of victory in Shantung, has
little to detain us since events which have just unrolled there
have already told the story of those demands. In Shantung we have
a simple and easily-understood repeated performance of the
history of 1905 and the settlement of the Russo-Japanese War.
Placed at the very head of the list of demands, though its
legitimate position should be after Manchuria, obviously the
purpose of Group I is conspicuously to call attention to the fact
that Japan had been at war with Germany, and is still at war with
her. This flourish of trumpets, after the battle is over, however,
scarcely serves to disguise that the fate of Shantung, following
so hard on the heels of the Russian debacle in Manchuria, is the
great moral which Western peoples are called upon to note. Japan,
determined as she has repeatedly announced to preserve the peace
of the Orient by any means she deems necessary, has found the one
and only formula that is satisfactory--that of methodically
annexing everything worth fighting about.
So far so good. The insertion of a special preamble to Group II,
which covers not only South Manchuria but Eastern Inner Mongolia
as well, is an ingenious piece of work since it shows that the hot
mood of conquest suitable for Shantung must be exchanged for a
certain judicial detachment. The preamble undoubtedly betrays the
guiding hand of Viscount Kato, the then astute Minister of Foreign
Affairs, who saturated in the great series of international
undertakings made by Japan since the first Anglo-Japanese Treaty
of 1902, clearly believes that the stately Elizabethan manner
which still characterizes British official phrasing is an
admirable method to be here employed. The preamble is quite
English; it is so English that one is almost lulled into believing
that one's previous reasoning has been at fault and that Japan is
only demanding what she is entitled to. Yet study Group II closely
and subtleties gradually emerge. By boldly and categorically
placing Eastern Inner Mongolia on precisely the same footing as
Southern Manchuria--though they have nothing in common--the
assumption is made that the collapse in 1908 of the great Anglo-
American scheme to run a neutral railway up the flank of Southern
Manchuria to Northern Manchuria (the once celebrated Chinchow-
Aigun scheme), coupled with general agreement with Russia which
was then arrived at, now impose upon China the necessity of
publicly resigning herself to a Japanese overlordship of that
region. In other words, the preamble of Group II lays down that
Eastern Inner Mongolia has become part and parcel of the
Manchurian Question because Japan has found a parallel for what
she is doing in the acts of European Powers.
These things, however, need not detain us. Not that Manchuria or
the adjoining Mongolian plain is not important; not that the
threads of destiny are not woven thickly there. For it is certain
that the vast region immediately beyond the Great Wall of China is
the Flanders of the Far East--and that the next inevitable war
which will destroy China or make her something of a nation must be
fought on that soil just as two other wars have been fought there
during the past twenty years. But this does not belong to
contemporary politics; it is possibly an affair of the Chinese
army of 1925 or 1935. Some day China will fight for Manchuria, if
it is impossible to recover it in any other way,--nobody need
doubt that. For Manchuria is absolutely Chinese--people must
remember. No matter how far the town-dwelling Japanese may invade
the country during the next two or three decades, no matter what
large alien garrisons may be planted there, the Chinese must and
will remain the dominant racial element, since their population
which already numbers twenty-five millions is growing at the rate
of half a million a year, and in a few decades will equal the
population of a first-class European Power.
When we reach Group III we touch matters that are not only
immediately vital but quite new in their type of audacity and
which every one can to-day understand since they are politico-
industrial. Group III, as it stands in the original text, is
SIMPLY THE PLAN FOR THE CONQUEST OF THE MINERAL WEALTH OF THE
YANGTSZE VALLEY which mainly centres round Hankow because the vast
alluvial plains of the lower reaches of this greatest of rivers
were once the floor of the Yellow Sea, the upper provinces of
Hupeh, Hunan, Kiangsi being the region of prehistoric forests
clothing the coasts, which once looked down upon the slowly-
receding waste of waters, and which to-day contain all the coal
and iron. Hitherto every one has always believed that the Yang
tsze Valley was par excellence the British sphere in China; and
every one has always thought that that belief was enough. It is
true that political students, going carefully over all published
documents, have ended their search by declaring that the matter
certainly required further elucidation. To be precise, this so-
called British sphere is not an enclave at all in the proper
sense; indeed it can only seem one to those who still believe that
it is still possible to pre-empt provinces by ministerial
declarations. The Japanese have been the first to dare to say that
the preconceived general belief was stupid. They know, of course,
that it was a British force which invaded the Yangtsze Valley
seventy-five years ago, and forced the signature of the Treaty of
Nanking which first opened China to the world's trade; but they
are by no means impressed with the rights which that action has
been held to confer, since the mineral resources of this region
are priceless in their eyes and must somehow be won.
The study of twenty years of history proves this assumption to be
correct. Ever since 1895, Japan has been driving wedges into the
Yangtsze Valley of a peculiar kind to form the foundations for her
sweeping claims of 1915. Thus after the war with China in 1894-95,
she opened by her Treaty of Peace four ports in the Yangtsze
Valley region, Soochow, Hangchow, Chungking and Shasi; that is, at
the two extreme ends of the valley she established politico-
commercial points d'appui from which to direct her campaign.
Whilst the proximity of Soochow and Hangchow to the British
stronghold of Shanghai made it difficult to carry out any
"penetration" work at the lower end of the river save in the form
of subsidized steam-shipping, the case was different in Hunan and
Hupeh provinces. There she was unendingly busy, and in 1903 by a
fresh treaty she formally opened to trade Changsha, the capital of
the turbulent Hunan province. Changsha for years remained a secret
centre possessing the greatest political importance for her, and
serving as a focus for most varied activities involving Hunan,
Hupeh, and Kiangsi, as well as a vast hinterland. The great Tayeh
iron-mines, although entirely Chinese-owned, were already being
tapped to supply iron-ore for the Japanese Government Foundry at
Wakamatsu on the island of Kiushiu. The rich coal mines of
Pinghsiang, being conveniently near, supplied the great Chinese
Government arsenal of Hanyang with fuel; and since Japan had very
little coal or iron of her own, she decided that it would be best
to embrace as soon as possible the whole area of interests in one
categorical demand--that is to claim a dominant share in the
Hanyang arsenal, the Tayeh iron-mines and the Ping-hsiang
collieries. [Footnote: The reader will observe, that the
expression "Hanyehping enterprises" is compounded by linking
together characters denoting the triple industry.] By lending
money to these enterprises, which were grouped together under the
name of Hanyehping, she had early established a claim on them
which she turned at the psychological moment into an international
question.
We can pass quickly by Group IV which is of little importance,
except to say that in taking upon herself, without consultation
with the senior ally, the duty of asking from China a declaration
concerning the future non-leasing of harbours and islands, Japan
has attempted to assume a protectorship of Chinese territory which
does not belong to her historically. It is well also to note that
although Japan wished it to appear to the world that this action
was dictated by her desire to prevent Germany from acquiring a
fresh foothold in China after the war, in reality Group IV was
drafted as a general warning to the nations, one point being that
she believed that the United States was contemplating the
reorganization of the Foochow Arsenal in Fuhkien province, and
that as a corollary to that reorganization would be given the
lease of an adjoining harbour such as Santuao.
It is not, however, until we reach Group V that the real purpose
of the Japanese demands becomes unalterably clear, for in this
Group we have seven sketches of things designed to serve as the
coup de grace. Not only is a new sphere--Fuhkien province--
indicated; not only is the mid-Yangtsze, from the vicinity of
Kiukiang, to serve as the terminus for a system of Japanese
railways, radiating from the great river to the coasts of South
China; but the gleaming knife of the Japanese surgeon is to aid
the Japanese teacher in the great work of propaganda; the Japanese
monk and the Japanese policeman are to be dispersed like
skirmishers throughout the land; Japanese arsenals are to supply
all the necessary arms, or failing that a special Japanese arsenal
is to be established; Japanese advisers are to give the necessary
advice in finance, in politics, in every department--foreshadowing
a complete and all embracing political control. Never was a more
sweeping program of supervision presented, and small wonder if
Chinese when they learnt of this climax exclaimed that the fate of
Korea was to be their own. For a number of weeks after the
presentation of these demands everything remained clothed in
impenetrable mystery, and despite every effort on the part of
diplomatists reliable details of what was occurring could not be
obtained. Gradually, however, the admission was forced that the
secrecy being preserved was due to the Japanese threat that
publicity would be met with the harshest reprisals; and presently
the veil was entirely lifted by newspaper publication and foreign
Ambassadors began making inquiries in Tokio. The nature and scope
of the Twenty-one Demands could now be no longer hidden; and in
response to the growing indignation which began to be voiced by
the press and the pressure which British diplomacy brought to
bear, Japan found it necessary to modify some of the most
important items. She had held twenty-four meetings at the Chinese
Foreign Office, and although the Chinese negotiators had been
forced to give way in such matters as extending the "leasing"
periods of railways and territories in Manchuria and in admitting
the Japanese right to succeed to all German interests and rights
in Shantung (Group I and II), in the essential matters of the
Hanyehping concessions (Group III) and the noxious demands of
Group V China had stood absolutely firm, declining even to discuss
some of the items.
Accordingly Japanese diplomacy was forced to re-state and re-group
the whole corpus of the demands. On the 26th April, acting under
direct instructions from Tokio, the Japanese Minister to Peking
presented a revised list for renewed consideration, the demands
being expanded to twenty-four articles (in place of the original
twenty-one largely because discussion had shown the necessity of
breaking up into smaller units some of the original articles).
Most significant, however, is the fact that Group V, (which in its
original form was a more vicious assault on Chinese sovereignty
than the Austrian Ultimatum to Serbia of June, 1914) was so
remodelled as to convey a very different meaning, the group
heading disappearing entirely and an innocent-looking exchange of
notes being asked for. It is necessary to recall that, when taxed
with making Demands which were entirely in conflict with the
spirit of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, the Japanese Government
through its ambassadors abroad had categorically denied that they
had ever laid any such Demands on the Chinese Government. It was
claimed that there had never been twenty-one Demands, as the
Chinese alleged, but only fourteen, the seven items of Group V
being desiderata which it was in the interests of china to endorse
but which Japan had no intention of forcing upon her. The writer,
being acquainted from first to last with everything that took
place in Peking from the 18th January to the filing of the
Japanese ultimatum of the 7th May, has no hesitation in
stigmatising this statement as false. The whole aim and object of
these negotiations was to force through Group V. Japan would have
gladly postponed sine die the discussion of all the other Groups
had China assented to provisions which would have made her
independence a thing of the past. Every Chinese knew that, in the
main, Group V was simply a repetition of the measures undertaken
in Korea after the Russo-Japanese war of 1905 as a forerunner to
annexation; and although obviously in the case of China no such
rapid surgery could be practised, the endorsement of these
measures would have meant a virtual Japanese Protectorate. Even a
cursory study of the text that follows will confirm in every
particular these capital contentions:
JAPAN'S REVISED DEMANDS
Japan's Revised Demands on China, twenty-four in all, presented
April 26, 1915.
NOTE ON ORIGINAL TEXT:
[The revised list of articles is a Chinese translation of the
Japanese text. It is hereby declared that when a final decision is
reached, there shall be a revision of the wording of the text.]
GROUP I
The Japanese Government and the Chinese Government, being desirous
of maintaining the general peace in Eastern Asia and further
strengthening the friendly relations and good neighbourhood
existing between the two nations, agree to the following
articles:--
Article 1. The Chinese Government engages to give full assent to
all matters upon which the Japanese Government may hereafter agree
with the German Government, relating to the disposition of all
rights, interests and concessions, which Germany, by virtue of
treaties or otherwise, possesses in relation to the Province of
Shangtung.
Article 2. (Changed into an exchange of notes.)
The Chinese Government declares that within the Province of
Shantung and along its coast no territory or island will be ceded
or leased to any Power under any pretext.
Article 3. The Chinese Government consents that as regards the
railway to be built by China herself from Chefoo or Lung kow to
connect with the Kiaochow-Tsinanfu Railway, if Germany is willing
to abandon the privilege of financing the Chefoo-Weihsien line.
China will approach Japanese capitalists to negotiate for a loan.
Article 4. The Chinese Government engages, in the interest of
trade and for the residence of foreigners, to open by China
herself as soon as possible certain suitable places in the
Province of Shantung as Commercial Ports.
(Supplementary Exchange of Notes)
The places which ought to be opened are to be chosen and the
regulations are to be drafted, by the Chinese Government, but the
Japanese Minister must be consulted before making a decision.
GROUP II
The Japanese Government and the Chinese Government, with a view to
developing their economic relations in South Manchuria and Eastern
Inner Mongolia, agree to the following articles:--
Article 1. The two contracting Powers mutually agree that the term
of lease of Port Arthur and Dalny and the terms of the South
Manchuria Railway and the Antung-Mukden Railway shall be extended
to 99 years.
(Supplementary Exchange of Notes)
The term of lease of Port Arthur and Dalny shall expire in the
86th year of the Republic or 1997. The date for restoring the
South Manchurian Railway to China shall fall due in the 91st year
of the Republic or 2002. Article 12 in the original South
Manchurian Railway Agreement stating that it may be redeemed by
China after 36 years after the traffic is opened is hereby
cancelled. The term of the Antung-Mukden Railway shall expire in
the 96th year of the Republic or 2007.
Article 2. Japanese subjects in South Manchuria may lease or
purchase the necessary land for erecting suitable buildings for
trade and manufacture or for prosecuting agricultural enterprises.
Article 3. Japanese subjects shall be free to reside and travel in
South Manchuria and to engage in business and manufacture of any
kind whatsoever.
Article 3a. The Japanese subjects referred to in the preceding two
articles, besides being required to register with the local
authorities pass-ports which they must procure under the existing
regulations, shall also submit to police laws and ordinances and
tax regulations, which are approved by the Japanese consul. Civil
and criminal cases in which the defendants are Japanese shall be
tried and adjudicated by the Japanese consul; those in which the
defendants are Chinese shall be tried and adjudicated by Chinese
Authorities. In either case an officer can be deputed to the court
to attend the proceedings. But mixed civil cases between Chinese
and Japanese relating to land shall be tried and adjudicated by
delegates of both nations conjointly in accordance with Chinese
law and local usage. When the judicial system in the said region
is completely reformed, all civil and criminal cases concerning
Japanese subjects shall be tried entirely by Chinese law courts.
Article 4. (Changed to an exchange of notes.)
The Chinese Government agrees that Japanese subjects shall be
permitted forthwith to investigate, select, and then prospect for
and open mines at the following places in South Manchuria, apart
from those mining areas in which mines are being prospected for or
worked; until the Mining Ordinance is definitely settled methods
at present in force shall be followed.
PROVINCE OF FENG-TIEN
Locality District Mineral
Niu Hsin T'ai Pen-hsi Coal
Tien Shih Fu Kou Pen-hsi Coal
Sha Sung Kang Hai-lung Coal
T'ieh Ch'ang Tung-hua Coal
Nuan Ti Tang Chin Coal
An Shan Chan region From Liao-yang
to Pen-hsi Iron
PROVINCE of KIRIN
(Southern portion)
Sha Sung Kang Ho-lung Coal and Iron
Kang Yao Chi-lin (Kirin) Coal
Chia P'i Kou Hua-tien Gold
Article 5. (Changed to an exchange of notes.) The Chinese
Government declares that China will hereafter provide funds for
building railways in South Manchuria; if foreign capital is
required, the Chinese Government agrees to negotiate for the loan
with Japanese capitalists first.
Article 5a. (Changed to an exchange of notes.) The Chinese
Government agrees that hereafter, when a foreign loan is to be
made on the security of the taxes of South Manchuria (not
including customs and salt revenue on the security of which loans
have already been made by the Central Government), it will
negotiate for the loan with Japanese capitalists first.
Article 6. (Changed to an exchange of notes.) The Chinese
Government declares that hereafter if foreign advisers or
instructors on political, financial, military or police matters,
are to be employed in South Manchuria, Japanese will be employed
first.
Article 7. The Chinese Government agrees speedily to make a
fundamental revision of the Kirin-Changchun Railway Loan
Agreement, taking as a standard the provisions in railroad loan
agreements made heretofore between China and foreign financiers.
If, in future, more advantageous terms than those in existing
railway loan agreements are granted to foreign financiers, in
connection with railway loans, the above agreement shall again be
revised in accordance with Japan's wishes.
All existing treaties between China and Japan relating to
Manchuria shall, except where otherwise provided for by this
Convention, remain in force.
1. The Chinese Government agrees that hereafter when a foreign
loan is to be made on the security of the taxes of Eastern Inner
Mongolia, China must negotiate with the Japanese Government first.
2. The Chinese Government agrees that China will herself provide
funds for building the railways in Eastern Inner Mongolia; if
foreign capital is required, she must negotiate with the Japanese
Government first.
3. The Chinese Government agrees, in the interest of trade and for
the residence of foreigners, to open by China herself, as soon as
possible, certain suitable places in Eastern Inner Mongolia as
Commercial Ports. The places which ought to be opened are to be
chosen, and the regulations are to be drafted, by the Chinese
Government, but the Japanese Minister must be consulted before
making a decision.
4. In the event of Japanese and Chinese desiring jointly to
undertake agricultural enterprises and industries incidental
thereto, the Chinese Government shall give its permission.
GROUP III
The relations between Japan and the Hanyehping Company being very
intimate, if those interested in the said Company come to an
agreement with the Japanese capitalists for co-operation, the
Chinese Government shall forthwith give its consent thereto. The
Chinese Government further agrees that, without the consent of the
Japanese capitalists, China will not convert the Company into a
state enterprise, nor confiscate it, nor cause it to borrow and
use foreign capital other than Japanese.
GROUP IV
China to give a pronouncement by herself in accordance with the
following principle:--
No bay, harbour, or island along the coast of China may be ceded
or leased to any Power.
Notes to be Exchanged A
As regards the right of financing a railway from Wuchang to
connect with the Kiu-kiang-Nanchang line, the Nanchang-Hangchow
railway, and the Nanchang-Chaochow railway, if it is clearly
ascertained that other Powers have no objection, China shall grant
the said right to Japan.
B
As regards the rights of financing a railway from Wuchang to
connect with the Kiu-kiang-Nanchang railway, a railway from
Nanchang to Hangchow and another from Nanchang to Chaochow, the
Chinese Government shall not grant the said right to any foreign
Power before Japan comes to an understanding with the other Power
which is heretofore interested therein.
NOTES TO BE EXCHANGED
The Chinese Government agrees that no nation whatever is to be
permitted to construct, on the coast of Fukien Province, a
dockyard, a coaling station for military use, or a naval base; not
to be authorized to set up any other military establishment. The
Chinese Government further agrees not to use foreign capital for
setting up the above mentioned construction or establishment.
Mr. Lu, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, stated as follows:--
1. The Chinese Government, shall, whenever, in future, it
considers this step necessary, engage numerous Japanese advisers.
2. Whenever, in future, Japanese subjects desire to lease or
purchase land in the interior of China for establishing schools or
hospitals, the Chinese Government shall forthwith give its consent
thereto.
3. When a suitable opportunity arises in future, the Chinese
Government will send military officers to Japan to negotiate with
Japanese military authorities the matter of purchasing arms or
that of establishing a joint arsenal.
Mr. Hioki, the Japanese Minister, stated as follows:--
As relates to the question of the right of missionary propaganda
the same shall be taken up again for negotiation in future.
An ominous silence followed the delivery of this document. The
Chinese Foreign Office had already exhausted itself in a
discussion which had lasted three months, and pursuant to
instructions from the Presidential Palace prepared an exhaustive
Memorandum on the subject. It was understood by now that all the
Foreign Offices in the world were interesting themselves very
particularly in the matter; and that all were agreed that the
situation which had so strangely developed was very serious. On
the 1st May, proceeding by appointment to the Waichiaopu (Foreign
Office) the Japanese Minister had read to him the following
Memorandum which it is very necessary to grasp as it shows how
solicitous China had become of terminating the business before
there was an open international break. It will also be seen that
this Memorandum was obviously composed for purpose of public
record, the fifth group being dealt with in such a way as to fix
upon Japan the guilt of having concealed from her British Ally
matters which conflicted vitally with the aims and objects of the
Anglo-Japanese Alliance Treaty.
MEMORANDUM
Read by the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Mr. Hioki, the Japanese
Minister, at a Conference held at Wai Chiao Pu, May 1, 1915.
The list of demands which the Japanese Government first presented
to the Chinese Government consists of five groups, the first
relating to Shantung, the second relating to South Manchuria and
Eastern Inner Mongolia, the third relating to Hanyehping Company,
the fourth asking for non-alienation of the coast of the country,
and the fifth relating to the questions of national advisers,
national police, national arms, missionary propaganda, Yangtsze
Valley railways, and Fukien Province. Out of profound regard for
the intentions entertained by Japan, the Chinese Government took
these momentous demands into grave and careful consideration and
decided to negotiate with the Japanese Government frankly and
sincerely what were possible to negotiate. This is a manifestation
to Japan of the most profound regard which the Chinese Government
entertains for the relations between the two nations.
Ever since the opening of the negotiations China has been doing
her best to hasten their progress holding as many as three
conferences a week. As regards the articles in the second group,
the Chinese Government being disposed to allow the Japanese
Government to develop the economic relations of the two countries
in South Manchuria, realizing that the Japanese Government
attaches importance to its interests in that region, and wishing
to meet the hope of Japan, made a painful effort, without
hesitation, to agree to the extension of the 25-year lease of Port
Arthur and Dalny, the 36-year period of the South Manchurian
Railway and the 15-year period of the Antung-Mukden Railway, all
to 99 years; and to abandon its own cherished hopes to regain
control of these places and properties at the expiration of their
respective original terms of lease. It cannot but be admitted that
this is a most genuine proof of China's friendship for Japan.
As to the right of opening mines in South Manchuria, the Chinese
Government has already agreed to permit Japanese to work mines
within the mining areas designated by Japan. China has further
agreed to give Japan a right of preference in the event of
borrowing foreign capital for building railways or of making a
loan on the security of the local taxes in South Manchuria. The
question of revising the arrangement for the Kirin-Changchun
Railway has been settled in accordance with the proposal made by
Japan. The Chinese Government has further agreed to employ
Japanese first in the event of employing foreign advisers on
political, military, financial and police matters.
Furthermore, the provision about the repurchase period in the
South Manchurian Railway was not mentioned in Japan's original
proposal. Subsequently, the Japanese Government alleging that its
meaning was not clear, asked China to cancel the provision
altogether. Again, Japan at first demanded the right of Japanese
to carry on farming in South Manchuria, but subsequently she
considered the word "farming" was not broad enough and asked to
replace it with the phrase "agricultural enterprises." To these
requests the Chinese Government, though well aware that the
proposed changes could only benefit Japan, still acceded without
delay. This, too, is a proof of China's frankness and sincerity
towards Japan.
As regards matters relating to Shangtung the Chinese Government
has agreed to a majority of the demands.
The question of inland residence in South Manchuria is, in the
opinion of the Chinese Government, incompatible with the treaties
China had entered into with Japan and other Powers, still the
Chinese Government did its best to consider how it was possible to
avoid that incompatibility. At first, China suggested that the
Chinese Authorities should have full rights of jurisdiction over
Japanese settlers. Japan declined to agree to it. Thereupon China
reconsidered the question and revised her counter-proposal five or
six times, each time making some definite concession, and went so
far to agree that all civil and criminal cases between Chinese and
Japanese should be arranged according to existing treaties. Only
cases relating to land or lease contracts were reserved to be
adjudicated by Chinese Courts, as a mark of China's sovereignty
over the region. This is another proof of China's readiness to
concede as much as possible.
Eastern Inner Mongolia is not an enlightened region as yet and the
conditions existing there are entirely different from those
prevailing in South Manchuria. The two places, therefore, cannot
be considered in the same light. Accordingly, China agreed to open
commercial marts first, in the interests of foreign trade.
The Hanyehping Company mentioned in the third group is entirely a
private company, and the Chinese Government is precluded from
interfering with it and negotiating with another government to
make any disposal of the same as the Government likes, but having
regard for the interests of the Japanese capitalists, the Chinese
Government agreed that whenever, in future, the said company and
the Japanese capitalists should arrive at a satisfactory
arrangement for co-operation, China will give her assent thereto.
Thus the interests of the Japanese capitalists are amply
safeguarded.
Although the demand in the fourth group asking for a declaration
not to alienate China's coast is an infringement of her sovereign
rights, yet the Chinese Government offered to make a voluntary
pronouncement so far as it comports with China's sovereign rights.
Thus, it is seen that the Chinese Government, in deference to the
wishes of Japan, gave a most serious consideration even to those
demands, which gravely affect the sovereignty and territorial
rights of China as well as the principle of equal opportunity and
the treaties with foreign Powers. All this was a painful effort on
the part of the Chinese Government to meet the situation--a fact
of which the Japanese Government must be aware.
As regards the demands in the fifth group, they all infringe
China's sovereignty, the treaty rights of other Powers or the
principle of equal opportunity. Although Japan did not indicate
any difference between this group and the preceding four in the
list which she presented to China in respect to their character,
the Chinese Government, in view of their palpably objectionable
features, persuaded itself that these could not have been intended
by Japan as anything other than Japan's mere advice to China.
Accordingly China has declared from the very beginning that while
she entertains the most profound regard for Japan's wishes, she
was unable to admit that any of these matters could be made the
subject of an understanding with Japan. Much as she desired to pay
regard to Japan's wishes, China cannot but respect her own
sovereign rights and the existing treaties with other Powers. In
order to be rid of the seed for future misunderstanding and to
strengthen the basis of friendship, China was constrained to
iterate the reasons for refusing to negotiate on any of the
articles in the fifth group, yet in view of Japan's wishes China
has expressed her readiness to state that no foreign money was
borrowed to construct harbour work in Fukien Province. Thus it is
clear that China went so far as to see a solution for Japan of a
question that really did not admit of negotiation. Was there,
then, evasion, on the part of China?
Now, since the Japanese Government has presented a revised list of
demands and declared at the same time, that it will restore the
leased territory of Kiaochow, the Chinese Government reconsiders
the whole question and herewith submits a new reply to the
friendly Japanese Government.
In this reply the unsettled articles in the first group are stated
again for discussion.
As regards the second group, those articles which have already
been initialled are omitted. In connection with the question of
inland residence the police regulation clause has been revised in
a more restrictive sense. As for the trial of cases relating to
land and lease contracts the Chinese Government now permits the
Japanese Consul to send an officer to attend the proceedings.
Of the four demands in connection with that part of Eastern Inner
Mongolia which is within the jurisdiction of South Manchuria and
the Jehol intendency, China agrees to three.
China, also, agrees to the article relating to the Hanyehping
Company as revised by Japan.
It is hoped that the Japanese Government will appreciate the
conciliatory spirit of the Chinese Government in making this final
concession and forthwith give her assent thereto.
There is one more point. At the beginning of the present
negotiations it was mutually agreed to observe secrecy but
unfortunately a few days after the presentation of the demands by
Japan an Osaka newspaper published an "Extra" giving the text of
the demands. The foreign and the Chinese press has since been
paying considerable attention to this question and frequently
publishing pro-Chinese or pro-Japanese comments in order to call
forth the World's conjecture--a matter which the Chinese
Government deeply regrets.
The Chinese Government has never carried on any newspaper campaign
and the Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs has repeatedly
declared this to the Japanese Minister.
In conclusion, the Chinese Government wishes to express its hope
that the negotiations now pending between the two countries will
soon come to an end and whatever misgivings foreign countries
entertain toward the present situation may be quickly dispelled.
The Peking Government, although fully aware of the perils now
confronting it, had dared to draft a complete reply to the revised
Demands and had reduced Japanese redundancy to effective limits.
Not only were various articles made more compact, but the
phraseology employed conveyed unmistakably, if in a somewhat
subtle way, that China was not a subordinate State treating with a
suzerain. Moreover, after dealing succinctly and seriously with
Groups I, II and III, the Chinese reply terminates abruptly, the
other points in the Japanese List being left entirely unanswered.
It is important to seize these points in the text that follows.
CHINA'S REPLY TO REVISED DEMANDS
China's Reply of May 1, 1915, to the Japanese Revised Demands of
April 26, 1915.
GROUP I
The Chinese Government and the Japanese Government, being desirous
of maintaining the general peace in Eastern Asia and further
strengthening the friendly relations and good neighbourhood
existing between the two nations, agree to the following
articles:--
Article 1. The Chinese Government declares that they will give
full assent to all matters upon which the Japanese and German
Governments may hereafter mutually agree, relating to the
disposition of all interests, which Germany, by virtue of treaties
or recorded cases, possesses in relation to the Province of
Shantung.
The Japanese Government declares that when the Chinese Government
give their assent to the disposition of interests above referred
to, Japan will restore the leased territory of Kiaochow to China;
and further recognize the right of the Chinese Government to
participate in the negotiations referred to above between Japan
and Germany.
Article 2. The Japanese Government consents to be responsible for
the indemnification of all losses occasioned by Japan's military
operation around the leased territory of Kiaochow. The customs,
telegraphs and post offices within the leased territory of
Kiaochow shall, prior to the restoration of the said leased
territory to China, be administered as heretofore for the time
being. The railways and telegraph lines erected by Japan for
military purposes are to be removed forthwith. The Japanese troops
now stationed outside the original leased territory of Kiaochow
are now to be withdrawn first, those within the original leased
territory are to be withdrawn on the restoration of the said
leased territory to China.
Article 3. (Changed to an exchange of notes.)
The Chinese Government declares that within the Province of
Shantung and along its coast no territory or island will be ceded
or leased to any Power under any pretext.
Article 4. The Chinese Government consent that as regards the
railway to be built by China herself from Chefoo or Lung kow to
connect with the Kiaochow-Tsinanfu railway, if Germany is willing
to abandon the privilege of financing the Chefoo-Weihsien line,
China will approach Japanese capitalists for a loan.
Article 5. The Chinese Government engage, in the interest of trade
and for the residence of foreigners, to open by herself as soon as
possible certain suitable places in the Province of Shantung as
Commercial Ports.
(Supplementary Exchange of Notes)
The places which ought to be opened are to be chosen, and the
regulations are to be drafted by the Chinese Government, but the
Japanese Minister must be consulted before making a decision.
Article 6. If the Japanese and German Governments are not able to
come to a definite agreement in future in their negotiations
respecting transfer, etc., this provisional agreement contained in
the foregoing articles shall be void.
GROUP II [Footnote: Six articles found in Japan's Revised Demands
are omitted here as they had already been initiated by the Chinese
Foreign Minister and the Japanese minister.]
The Chinese Government and the Japanese Government, with a view to
developing their economic relations in South Manchuria, agree to
the following articles:--
Article 2. Japanese subjects in South Manchuria may, by
arrangement with the owners, lease land required for erecting
suitable buildings for trade and manufacture or agricultural
enterprises.
Article 3. Japanese subjects shall be free to reside and travel in
South Manchuria and to engage in business and manufacture of any
kind whatsoever.
Article 3a. The Japanese subjects referred to in the preceding two
articles, besides being required to register with the local
authorities pass-ports which they must procure under the existing
regulations, shall also observe police rules and regulations and
pay taxes in the same manner as Chinese. Civil and criminal cases
shall be tried and adjudicated by the authorities of the defendant
nationality and an officer can be deputed to attend the
proceedings. But all cases purely between Japanese subjects and
mixed cases between Japanese or Chinese, relating to land or
disputes arising from lease contracts, shall be tried and
adjudicated by Chinese Authorities and the Japanese Consul may
also depute an officer to attend the proceedings. When the
judicial system in the said Province is completely reformed, all
the civil and criminal cases concerning Japanese subjects shall be
tried entirely by Chinese law courts.
RELATING TO EASTERN INNER MONGOLIA (To be Exchanged by Notes)
1. The Chinese Government declare that China will not in future
pledge the taxes, other than customs and salt revenue of that part
of Eastern Inner Mongolia under the jurisdiction of South
Manchuria and Jehol Intendency, as security for raising a foreign
loan.
2. The Chinese Government declare that China will herself provide
funds for building the railways in the part of Eastern Inner
Mongolia under the jurisdiction of South Manchuria and the Jehol
Intendency; if foreign capital is required, China will negotiate
with Japanese capitalists first, provided this does not conflict
with agreements already concluded with other Powers.
The Chinese Government agree, in the interest of trade and for the
residence of foreigners, to open by China herself certain suitable
places in that part of Eastern Inner Mongolia under the
jurisdiction of South Manchurian and the Jehol Intendency, as
Commercial Marts.
The regulations for the said Commercial Marts will be made in
accordance with those of other Commercial Marts opened by China
herself.
GROUP III
The relations between Japan and the Hanyehping Company being very
intimate, if the said Company comes to an agreement with the
Japanese capitalists for co-operation, the Chinese Government
shall forthwith give their consent thereto. The Chinese Government
further declare that China will not convert the company into a
state enterprise, not confiscate it, nor cause it to borrow and
use foreign capital other than Japanese.
Letter to be addressed by the Japanese Minister to the Chinese
Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Excellency: I have the honour to state that a report has reached
me that the Chinese Government have given permission to foreign
nations to construct, on the coast of Fukien Province, dock-yards,
coaling stations for military use, naval bases and other
establishments for military purposes; and further, that the
Chinese Government are borrowing foreign capital for putting up
the above-mentioned constructions or establishments. I shall be
much obliged if the Chinese Government will inform me whether or
not these reports are well founded in fact.
Reply to be addressed by the Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs
to the Japanese Minister.
Excellency: I have the honour to acknowledge the receipt of your
Excellency's Note of ... In reply I beg to state that the
Chinese Government have not given permission to foreign Powers to
construct, on the coast of Fukien Province, dock-yards, coaling
stations for military use, naval bases or other establishments for
military purposes; nor do they contemplate to borrow foreign
capital for putting up such constructions or establishments.
Within forty-eight hours of this passage-at-arms of the 1st May it
was understood in Peking that Japan was meditating a serious step.
That vague feeling of unrest which so speedily comes in capitals
when national affairs reach a crisis was very evident, and the
word "ultimatum" began to be whispered. It was felt that whilst
China had held to her rights to the utmost and had received
valuable indirect support from both England and the United States,
the world-situation was such that it would be difficult to prevent
Japan from proceeding to extremities. Accordingly there was little
real surprise when on the 7th May Japan filed an ultimatum
demanding a satisfactory reply within 48 hours to her Revised
Demands--failing which those steps deemed necessary would be
taken. A perusal of the text of the Ultimatum will show an
interesting change in the language employed. Coaxing having
failed, and Japan being 'now convinced that so long as she did not
seek to annex the rights of other Foreign Powers in China open
opposition could not be offered to her,' states her case very
defiantly. One significant point, however, must be carefully
noted--that she agrees "to detach Group V from the present
negotiations and to discuss it separately in the future." It is
this fact which remains the sword of Damocles hanging over China's
head; and until this sword has been flung back into the waters of
the Yellow Sea the Far Eastern situation will remain perilous.
JAPAN'S ULTIMATUM TO CHINA
Japan's Ultimatum delivered by the Japanese Minister to the
Chinese Government, on May 7th, 1915.
The reason why the Imperial Government opened the present
negotiations with the Chinese Government is first to endeavour to
dispose of the complications arising out of the war between Japan
and China, and secondly to attempt to solve those various
questions which are detrimental to the intimate relations of China
and Japan with a view to solidifying the foundation of cordial
friendship subsisting between the two countries to the end that
the peace of the Far East may be effectually and permanently
preserved. With this object in view, definite proposals were
presented to the Chinese Government in January of this year, and
up to today as many as twenty-five conferences have been held with
the Chinese Government in perfect sincerity and frankness.
In the course of the negotiation the Imperial Government have
consistently explained the aims and objects of the proposals in a
conciliatory spirit, while on the other hand the proposals of the
Chinese Government, whether important or unimportant, have been
attended to without any reserve.
It may be stated with confidence that no effort has been spared to
arrive at a satisfactory and amicable settlement of those
questions.
The discussion of the entire corpus of the proposals was
practically at an end at the twenty-fourth conference; that is on
the 17th of the last month. The Imperial Government, taking a
broad view of the negotiation and in consideration of the points
raised by the Chinese Government, modified the original proposals
with considerable concessions and presented to the Chinese
Government on the 26th of the same month the revised proposals for
agreement, and at the same time it was offered that, on the
acceptance of the revised proposals, the Imperial Government
would, at a suitable opportunity, restore, with fair and proper
conditions, to the Chinese Government the Kiaochow territory, in
the acquisition of which the Imperial Government had made a great
sacrifice.
On the 1st of May, the Chinese Government delivered the reply to
the revised proposals of the Japanese Government, which is
contrary to the expectations of the Imperial Government. The
Chinese Government not only did not give a careful consideration
to the revised proposals but even with regard to the offer of the
Japanese Government to restore Kiaochow to the Chinese Government
the latter did not manifest the least appreciation for Japan's
good will and difficulties.
From the commercial and military point of view Kiaochow is an
important place, in the acquisition of which the Japanese Empire
sacrificed much blood and money, and, after the acquisition the
Empire incurs no obligation to restore it to China. But with the
object of increasing the future friendly relations of the two
countries, they went to the extent of proposing its restoration,
yet to her great regret, the Chinese Government did not take into
consideration the good intention of Japan and manifest
appreciation of her difficulties. Furthermore, the Chinese
Government not only ignored the friendly feelings of the Imperial
Government in offering the restoration of Kiaochow Bay, but also
in replying to the revised proposals they even demanded its
unconditional restoration; and again China demanded that Japan
should bear the responsibility of paying indemnity for all the
unavoidable losses and damages resulting from Japan's military
operations at Kiaochow; and still further in connection with the
territory of Kiaochow China advanced other demands and declared
that she has the right of participation at the future peace
conference to be held between Japan and Germany. Although China is
fully aware that the unconditional restoration of Kiaochow and
Japan's responsibility of indemnification for the unavoidable
losses and damages can never be tolerated by Japan yet she
purposely advanced these demands and declared that this reply was
final and decisive.
Since Japan could not tolerate such demands the settlement of the
other questions, however compromising it may be, would not be to
her interest. The consequence is that the present reply of the
Chinese Government is, on the whole, vague and meaningless.
Furthermore, in the reply of the Chinese Government to the other
proposals in the revised list of the Imperial Government, such as
South Manchuria and Eastern Inner Mongolia, where Japan
particularly has geographical, commercial, industrial and
strategic relations, as recognized by all the nations, and made
more remarkable in consequence of the two wars in which Japan was
engaged the Chinese Government overlooks these facts and does not
respect Japan's position in that place. The Chinese Government
even freely altered those articles which the Imperial Government,
in a compromising spirit, have formulated in accordance with the
statement of the Chinese Representatives thereby making the
statements of the Representatives an empty talk; and on seeing
them conceding with the one hand and withholding with the other it
is very difficult to attribute faithfulness and sincerity to the
Chinese authorities.
As regards the articles relating to the employment of advisers,
the establishment of schools, and hospitals, the supply of arms
and ammunition and the establishment of arsenals and railway
concessions in South China in the revised proposals they were
either proposed with the proviso that the consent of the Power
concerned must be obtained, or they are merely to be recorded in
the minutes in accordance with the statements of the Chinese
delegates, and thus they are not in the least in conflict either
with Chinese sovereignty or her treaties with the Foreign Powers,
yet the Chinese Government in their reply to the proposals,
alleging that these proposals are incompatible with their
sovereign rights and treaties with Foreign Powers, defeat the
expectations of the Imperial Government. However in spite of such
attitude of the Chinese Government, the Imperial Government,
though regretting to see that there is no room for further
negotiations, yet warmly attached to the preservation of the peace
of the Far East, is still hoping for a satisfactory settlement in
order to avoid the disturbance of the relations.
So in spite of the circumstances which admitted no patience, they
have reconsidered the feelings of the Government of their
neighbouring country and, with the exception of the article
relating to Fukien which is to be the subject of an exchange of
notes as has already been agreed upon by the Representatives of
both nations, will undertake to detach the Group V from the
present negotiation and discuss it separately in the future.
Therefore the Chinese Government should appreciate the friendly
feelings of the Imperial Government by immediately accepting
without any alteration all the articles of Group I, II, III, and
IV and the exchange of notes in connection with Fukien province in
Group V as contained in the revised proposals presented on the
26th of April.
The Imperial Government hereby again offer their advice and hope
that the Chinese Government, upon this advice, will give a
satisfactory reply by 6 o'clock P. M. on the 9th day of May. It is
hereby declared that if no satisfactory reply is received before
or at the specified time, the Imperial Government will take steps
they may deem necessary.
EXPLANATORY NOTE
Accompanying Ultimatum delivered to the Minister of Foreign
Affairs by the Japanese Minister, May 7th, 1915.
1. With the exception of the question of Fukien to be arranged by
an exchange of notes, the five articles postponed for later
negotiation refer to (a) the employment of advisers, (b) the
establishment of schools and hospitals, (c) the railway
concessions in South China, (d) the supply of arms and ammunition
and the establishment of arsenals and (e) right of Missionary
propaganda.
2. The acceptance by the Chinese Government of the article
relating to Fukien may be either in the form as proposed by the
Japanese Minister on the 26th of April or in that contained in the
Reply of the Chinese Government of May 1st. Although the Ultimatum
calls for the immediate acceptance by China of the modified
proposals presented on April 26th, without alteration but it
should be noted that it merely states the principle and does not
apply to this article and articles 4 and 5 of this note.
3. If the Chinese Government accept all the articles as demanded
in the Ultimatum the offer of the Japanese Government to restore
Kiaochow to China, made on the 26th of April, will still hold
good.
4. Article 2 of Group II relating to the lease or purchase of
land, the terms "lease" and "purchase" may be replaced by the
terms "temporary lease" and "perpetual lease" or "lease on
consultation," which means a long-term lease with its
unconditional renewal.
Article 4 of Group II relating to the approval of police laws and
Ordinances and local taxes by the Japanese Council may form the
subject of a secret agreement.
5. The phrase "to consult with the Japanese Government" in
connection with questions of pledging the local taxes for raising
loans and the loans for the construction of railways, in Eastern
Inner Mongolia, which is similar to the agreement in Manchuria
relating to the matters of the same kind, may be replaced by the
phrase "to consult with the Japanese capitalists."
The article relating to the opening of trade marts in Eastern
Inner Mongolia in respect to location and regulations, may,
following their precedent set in Shantung, be the subject of an
exchange of notes.
6. From the phrase "those interested in the Company" in Group III
of the revised list of demands, the words "those interested in"
may be deleted.
7. The Japanese version of the Formal Agreement and its annexes
shall be the official text or both the Chinese and Japanese shall
be the official texts.
Whilst it would be an exaggeration to say that open panic followed
the filing of this document, there was certainly very acute
alarm,--so much so that it is today known in Peking that the
Japanese Legation cabled urgently to Tokio that even better terms
could be obtained if the matter was left to the discretion of the
men on the spot. But the Japanese Government had by now passed
through a sufficiently anxious time itself, being in possession of
certain unmistakable warnings regarding what was likely to happen
after a world-peace had come,--if matters were pressed too far.
Consequently nothing more was done, and on the following day China
signified her acceptance of the Ultimatum in the following terms.
Reply of the Chinese Government to the Ultimatum of the Japanese
Government, delivered to the Japanese Minister by the Minister of
Foreign Affairs on the 8th of May, 1915,
On the 7th of this month, at three o'clock P. M. the Chinese
Government received an Ultimatum from the Japanese Government
together with an Explanatory Note of seven articles. The Ultimatum
concluded with the hope that the Chinese Government by six o'clock
P. M. on the 9th of May will give a satisfactory reply, and it is
hereby declared that if no satisfactory reply is received before
or at the specified time, the Japanese Government will take steps
she may deem necessary.
The Chinese Government with a view to preserving the peace of the
Far East hereby accepts, with the exception of those five articles
of Group V postponed for later negotiation, all the articles of
Group I, II, III, and IV and the exchange of notes in connection
with Fukien Province in Group V as contained in the revised
proposals presented on the 26th of April, and in accordance with
the Explanatory Note of seven articles accompanying the Ultimatum
of the Japanese Government with the hope that thereby all the
outstanding questions are settled, so that the cordial
relationship between the two countries may be further
consolidated. The Japanese Minister is hereby requested to appoint
a day to call at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to make the
literary improvement of the text and sign the Agreement as soon as
possible.
Thus ended one of the most extraordinary diplomatic negotiations
ever undertaken in Peking.
CHAPTER VII
THE ORIGIN OF THE TWENTY-ONE DEMANDS
The key to this remarkable business was supplied by a cover sent
anonymously to the writer during the course of these negotiations
with no indication as to its origin. The documents which this
envelope contained are so interesting that they merit attention at
the hands of all students of history, explaining as they do the
psychology of the Demands as well as throwing much light on the
manner in which the world-war has been viewed in Japan.
The first document is purely introductory, but is none the less
interesting. It is a fragment, or rather a precis of the momentous
conversation which took place between Yuan Shih-kai and the
Japanese Minister when the latter personally served the Demands on
the Chief Executive and took the opportunity to use language
unprecedented even in the diplomatic history of Peking.
The precis begins in a curious way. After saying that "the
Japanese Minister tried to influence President Yuan Shih-kai with
the following words," several long lines of asterisks suggest that
after reflection the unknown chronicler had decided, for political
reasons of the highest importance, to allow others to guess how
the "conversation" opened. From the context it seems absolutely
clear that the excised words have to deal with the possibility of
the re-establishment of the Empire in China--a very important
conclusion in view of what followed later in the year. Indeed
there is no reason to doubt that the Japanese Envoy actually told
Yuan Shih-kai that as he was already virtually Emperor it lay
within his power to settle the whole business and to secure his
position at one blow. In any case the precis begins with these
illuminating sentences:
... Furthermore, the Chinese revolutionists are in close touch and
have intimate relations with numerous irresponsible Japanese, some
of whom have great influence and whose policy is for strong
measures. Our Government has not been influenced by this policy,
but if your Government does not quickly agree to these
stipulations, it will be impossible to prevent some of our
irresponsible people from inciting the Chinese revolutionists to
create trouble in China.
The majority of the Japanese people are also opposed to President
Yuan and Yuan's Government. They all declare that the President
entertains anti-Japanese feeling and adopts the policy of
"befriending the Far" (Europe and America) and "antagonizing the
Near" (Japan). Japanese public opinion is therefore exceedingly
hostile.
Our Government has all along from first to last exerted its best
efforts to help the Chinese Government, and if the Chinese
Government will speedily agree to these stipulations it will have
thus manifested its friendship for Japan.
The Japanese people will then be able to say that the President
never entertained anti-Japanese feelings, or adopted the policy of
"befriending the Far and antagonizing the Near." Will not this
then be indeed a bona fide proof of our friendly relations?
The Japanese Government also will then be inclined to render
assistance to President Yuan's Government whenever it is necessary
... .
We are admittedly living in a remarkable age which is making waste
paper of our dearest principles. But in all the welter which the
world war has made it would be difficult to find anything more
extraordinary than these few paragraphs. Japan, through her
official representative, boldly tears down the veil hiding her
ambitions, and using the undoubted menace which Chinese
revolutionary activities then held for the Peking Government,
declares in so many words that unless President Yuan Shih-kai bows
his head to the dictation of Tokio, the duel which began in Seoul
twenty-five years ago would be openly resumed.
Immediately following the "conversation" is the principal document
in the dossier. This is nothing less than an exhaustive
Memorandum, divided into two sections, containing the policy
advocated by the Japanese secret society, called the Black Dragon
Society, which is said to have assumed that name on account of the
members (military officers) having studied the situation in the
Heilungchiang (or "Black Dragon") province of Manchuria. The
memorandum is the most remarkable document dealing with the Far
East which has come to light since the famous Cassini Convention
was published in 1896. Written presumably late in the autumn of
1914 and immediately presented to the Japanese Government, it may
undoubtedly be called the fulminate which exploded the Japanese
mine of the 18th January, 1915. It shows such sound knowledge of
world-conditions, and is so scientific in its detachment that
little doubt can exist that distinguished Japanese took part in
its drafting. It can therefore be looked upon as a genuine
expression of the highly educated Japanese mind, and as such
cannot fail to arouse serious misgivings. The first part is a
general review of the European War and the Chinese Question: the
second is concerned with the Defensive Alliance between China and
Japan which is looked upon as the one goal of all Japanese
Diplomacy.
PART I. THE EUROPEAN WAR AND THE CHINESE QUESTION
The present gigantic struggle in Europe has no parallel in
history. Not only will the equilibrium of Europe be affected and
its effect felt all over the globe, but its results will create a
New Era in the political and social world. Therefore, whether or
not the Imperial Japanese Government can settle the Far Eastern
Question and bring to realization our great Imperial policy
depends on our being able to skilfully avail ourselves of the
world's general trend of affairs so as to extend our influence and
to decide upon a course of action towards China which shall be
practical in execution. If our authorities and people view the
present European War with indifference and without deep concern,
merely devoting their attention to the attack on Kiaochow,
neglecting the larger issues of the war, they will have brought to
nought our great Imperial policy, and committed a blunder greater
than which it can not be conceived. We are constrained to submit
this statement of policy for the consideration of our authorities,
not because we are fond of argument but because we are deeply
anxious for our national welfare.
No one at present can foretell the outcome of the European War. If
the Allies meet with reverses and victory shall crown the arms of
the Germans and Austrians, German militarism will undoubtedly
dominate the European Continent and extend southward and eastward
to other parts of the world. Should such a state of affairs happen
to take place the consequences resulting therefrom will be indeed
great and extensive. On this account we must devote our most
serious attention to the subject. If, on the other hand, the
Germans and Austrians should be crushed by the Allies, Germany
will be deprived of her present status as a Federated State under
a Kaiser. The Federation will be disintegrated into separate
states, and Prussia will have to be content with the status of a
second-rate Power. Austria and Hungary, on account of this defeat,
will consequently be divided. What their final fate shall be, no
one would now venture to predict. In the meantime Russia will
annex Galicia and the Austrian Poland: France will repossess
Alsace and Lorraine: Great Britain will occupy the German Colonies
in Africa and the South Pacific; Servia and Montenegro will take
Bosnia, Herzegovina and a certain portion of Austrian Territory;
thus making such great changes in the map of Europe that even the
Napoleonic War in 1815 could not find a parallel.
When these events take place, not only will Europe experience
great changes, but we should not ignore the fact that they will
occur also in China and in the South Pacific. After Russia has
replaced Germany in the territories lost by Germany and Austria,
she will hold a controlling influence in Europe, and, for a long
time to come, will have nothing to fear from her western frontier.
Immediately after the war she will make an effort to carry out her
policy of expansion in the East and will not relax that effort
until she has acquired a controlling influence in China. At the
same time Great Britain will strengthen her position in the
Yangtsze Valley and prohibit any other country from getting a
footing there. France will do likewise in Yunnan province using it
as her base of operations for further encroachments upon China and
never hesitate to extend her advantages. We must therefore
seriously study the situation remembering always that the combined
action of Great Britain, Russia, and France will not only affect
Europe but that we can even foresee that it will also affect
China.
Whether this combined action on the part of England, France and
Russia is to terminate at the end of the war or to continue to
operate, we can not now predict. But after peace in Europe is
restored, these Powers will certainly turn their attention to the
expansion of their several spheres of interest in China, and, in
the adjustment, their interests will most likely conflict with one
another. If their interests do not conflict, they will work
jointly to solve the Chinese Question. On this point we have not
the least doubt. If England, France and Russia are actually to
combine for the coercion of China, what course is to be adopted by
the Imperial Japanese Government to meet the situation? What
proper means shall we employ to maintain our influence and extend
our interests within this ring of rivalry and competition? It is
necessary that we bear in mind the final results of the European
War and forestall the trend of events succeeding it so as to be
able to decide upon a policy towards China and determine the
action to be ultimately taken. If we remain passive, the Imperial
Japanese Government's policy towards China will lose that
subjective influence and our diplomacy will be checked forever by
the combined force of the other Powers. The peace of the Far East
will be thus endangered and even the existence of the Japanese
Empire as a nation will no doubt be imperilled. It is therefore
our first important duty at this moment to enquire of our
Government what course is to be adopted to face that general
situation after the war? What preparations are being made to meet
the combined pressure of the Allies upon China? What policy has
been followed to solve the Chinese Question? When the European War
is terminated and peace restored we are not concerned so much with
the question whether it be the Dual Monarchies or the Triple
Entente which emerge victorious but whether, in anticipation of
the future expansion of European influence in the Continents of
Europe and Asia, the Imperial Japanese Government should or should
not hesitate to employ force to check the movement before this
occurrence. Now is the most opportune moment for Japan to quickly
solve the Chinese Question. Such an opportunity will not occur for
hundreds of years to come. Not only is it Japan's divine duty to
act now, but present conditions in China favour the execution of
such a plan. We should by all means decide and act at once. If our
authorities do not avail themselves of this rare opportunity,
great difficulty will surely be encountered in future in the
settlement of this Chinese Question. Japan will be isolated from
the European Powers after the war, and will be regarded by them
with envy and jealousy just as Germany is now regarded. Is it not
then a vital necessity for Japan to solve at this very moment the
Chinese Question?
No one--not even those who care nothing for politics--can deny
that there is in this document an astounding disclosure of the
mental attitude of the Japanese not only towards their enemies but
towards their friends as well. They trust nobody, befriend nobody,
envy nobody; they content themselves with believing that the whole
world may in the not distant future turn against them. The burden
of their argument swings just as much against their British ally
as against Germany and Austria; and the one and only matter which
preoccupies Japanese who make it their business to think about
such things is to secure that Japan shall forestall Europe in
seizing control of China. It is admitted in so many words that it
is too early to know who is to triumph in the gigantic European
struggle; it is also admitted that Germany will forever be the
enemy. At the same time it is expected, should the issue of the
struggle be clearcut and decisive in favour of the Allies, that a
new three-Power combination formed by England, France and Russia
may be made to operate against Japan. Although the alliance with
England, twice renewed since 1902, should occupy as important a
place in the Far East as the Entente between England and France
occupies in Europe, not one Japanese in a hundred knows or cares
anything about such an arrangement; and even if he has knowledge
of it, he coolly assigns to his country's major international
commitment a minimum and constantly diminishing importance. In his
view the British Alliance is nothing but a piece of paper which
may be consumed in the great bonfire now shedding such a lurid
light over the world. What is germane to the matter is his own
plan, his own method of taking up arms in a sea of troubles. The
second part of the Black Dragon Society's Memorandum, pursuing the
argument logically and inexorably and disclosing traces of real
political genius, makes this unalterably clear.
Having established clearly the attitude of Japan towards the
world--and more particularly towards the rival political
combinations now locked together in a terrible death-struggle,
this second part of the Memorandum is concerned solely with China
and can be broken into two convenient sections. The first section
is constructive--the plan for the reconstruction of China is
outlined in terms suited to the Japanese genius. This part begins
with an illuminating piece of rhetoric.