reinforced cement poles, as well as creosoted poles, being used. The
largest creosote works are at Osaka, and the preserved wood is now used
for Japan’s famous light buildings, railroad trestling, ties, bridges,
etc. Japan has an exceedingly rich treasure forest (one of the world’s
last) east of the South Manchurian Railway, and also bordering the
Fusan-Mukden line. Much of the hard wood of Japan and her colonies is
being brought to America for furniture-making at present.
Japanese steamers will doubtless run to the east coast of America
through the Panama Canal. Micki Shonzo talks of sending twenty of his
vessels through. A Japanese line now carries nitrates, hides, salt,
horses, beef, wool, fish, grain, etc., from Chile, and coal, rice, tea,
silk, oils, bean cake, manufactures, matting, etc., to Chile. Japanese
shipping in 1912 amounted to the enormous tonnage of 1,000,000, as
compared with 170,000 tons on the day before the Chinese indemnity was
paid to Japan in 1895.
Perhaps the rich dividends made by the Oriental Consolidated (gold)
Mining Company, at Unsan, in the Yalu district of Korea, made Japan as
anxious commercially as diplomatically to secure Korea. This American
company, with which Leigh Hunt was connected, and whose concession was
obtained through the offices of United States Minister Allen, has
made in a concession 500 miles square 4,000 per cent. in ten years.
One hundred thousand dollars was put into the gold mining plant, and
$4,000,000 has been paid in dividends, the mines themselves, instead
of added capital, paying for their own development. The Unsan plant is
largely self-contained, having crushers, a foundry, machine shops, a
fleet, a railway and lumbering plant, hospital and barracks. The mining
costs only one dollar and forty cents per ton, hand labor, the Koreans
being the best miners in the Far East, owing to their docile patience.
Some of the mines are one thousand feet deep. The Korean Exploration
Company (half American and half Japanese) has a gold mining concession
at Chicksan, south of Seoul. The new terms that will probably be
imposed on foreign mining by Japan will be at least twenty-five per
cent. royalty on the net profits, machinery imported and ore exported
to be duty and loti taxes remitted, respectively. If Japan can do the
smelting, of course ores must go there for treatment.
In Formosa the three largest Japanese sugar companies are the Niitaka,
the Taihoku and the Minami Seito (Southern Sugar Company), capitalized
at about $2,000,000 gold each, with an output of 300,000 tons a year.
Japan can increase this, and supply the world. The government grants
subsidies to the cane growers for fertilizer, and money prizes for
model plantations, the high tariff against Hongkong, of course, being
a subsidy for the Formosan sugar mills, as far as supplying Japan is
concerned.
Japan has opened an electric-driven cotton mill, the Naigai Wata, at
Suchow Creek, Shanghai, sending to America for the boilers, to Germany
for the dynamos, and to England (Oldham) for the spinning machinery.
The owners and foremen are Japanese, the workers Chinese. Eighty-five
per cent. of the material is local grown, and fifteen per cent. comes
from India in Japanese steamers. The finished product, mainly yarns,
is sent up the Yangtze River and along the coast in Japanese steamers,
and is admitted into Japan preferentially as far as foreign products
are concerned. The Japanese are extending their ownership of cotton
mills erected in China, for the Mitsui Bussan Kaisha has bought the Hua
Hsuan, the Shanghai and the San Tai mills at Shanghai, and the Wuchang
Spinning Mill at Wuchang. The Mitsui Bishi Kaisha has bought the Chen
Hua mill at Shanghai, and the Nippon Mill Company has bought the Jih
Hsin mill in China. There is much food for thought in this situation.
The Japanese also own one-third of the largest translating press in
China, the Commercial Press of Shanghai.
The Japanese firm of Mitsui has established a refinery at Hankau to
handle the famous nuts of Szechuen province, which produce the oil
known as China wood oil. The Mitsui firm also handles the production
of soy-bean oil in Manchuria, shipping the oil and the cake in great
quantities in their own steamers to Europe and America. The Mitsuis do
their own banking. The soy-oil is used for cooking, soap making, and as
a substitute in paints for linseed oil, which is becoming scarce. The
cake is used as a milk food and a fertilizer in Europe and America. To
what proportions the industry has grown can be judged by the following
figures: Newchwang (Chinese) shipped 230,000 tons of beans and 400,000
tons of bean cake in 1911. Dairen (Japanese) shipped 450,000 tons of
beans and 300,000 tons of bean cake. Vladivostok (Russian) shipped
250,000 tons of each. The soy-bean oil amounted to about 700,000
hundredweight. This immense crop speaks eloquently of the richness of
the black soil of the three provinces of vast Manchuria. The bean
is also now being planted in Szechuen province in the rows where the
nefarious poppy once bloomed, and America is using quantities of seed
in the southern states in connection with enriching land which has
been impoverished by cotton. The soy-bean, being nitrogenous, adds to,
instead of taking from, the life of the soil. One ton of beans, besides
two tons of soy hay, can be produced per acre.
Canadian and South African railways may own hotels, express, telegraph,
telephone and land companies, but here is what the charter of the
South Manchuria (Japan owned) Railway Company permits them to do:
operate railways, cities, steamships, hotels, mines, electric light
and gas plants, tramways, laboratories, laundries, shops, dormitories,
go-downs (warehouses), hospitals, Y. M. C. A.’s, schools, libraries,
mills, selling agencies, stockyards, forests, sawmills, farms, kaoliang
distilleries, etc. This reminds one of the ancient East India Company’s
powers before Warren Hastings was impeached, or of the ambition of
Incoporator Dill in the palmy days of the incorporation laws of New
Jersey State before the Interstate Commerce Commission got into its
stride.
The pernicious influence of the yoshiwara and the demi-monde in Japan
and the Japanese settlements and colonies throughout the Far East, is
fully covered in the tenth chapter of Price Collier’s _The West in the
East_. If the fire which destroyed the extensive, obtrusive yoshiwara
quarter in the Susaki section of Tokio in 1911 had swept the whole
institution away, womanhood throughout the world would not have the
grievance against Japanese society which it now has. Neither China
nor India ever sank this low in morals, despite all the talk about
concubinage and slavery. The fault lies in the inherent weakness of
religion in Japan. The Buddhism and Confucianism (Shintoism) which
Japan imported, have degenerated and lost soul in the exotic state.
If China needs Christianity, Japan needs it more. The Japanese women
are delightfully vivacious; it is a pity so many should lose their
self-respect. Possibly some of it substantiates the eternal teaching
that no nation can persistently ignore poverty and not suffer in
morals. The Japanese government is now doing something to remedy
conditions and raise the moral tone. The fault lies largely with the
people themselves; too great a love of money and too little a love of
real religion, with the usual result that sacred womanhood is the first
to be driven down at the wall.
XIV
PRESSURE OF RUSSIA AND FRANCE ON CHINA
Many books have been written on the Russian advance to the Pacific,
and they eventually induced Britain to hurl Japan on the aggressor.
These volumes include Putnam Weale’s fervid volumes, works by Lord
Beresford, Senator Beveridge, Norman, Chirol, Colquhoun, Alexandria
Hosie, Younghusband, Krausse, Lord Curzon and others. That advance has
been pushed back as far as the borders of Shingking, the southernmost
of Manchuria’s three provinces, and out of the Korean Peninsula, but
it is marking time in the other two Manchurian provinces of Kirin
and Helung-Kiang, and in vast Mongolia, Jungaria and Turkestan. Some
critics have said that in having Russia pushed back from the Pacific,
the wave has backed up on Persia. The American one-time treasurer of
Persia, Mr. Shuster, believes Britain has recently lost to Russia in
the buffer states of the Indian border. Certainly a new party has
risen in British diplomacy, whose writers are Maurice Baring, Hardinge
and others, which is not at all Russophobic. Many believe that Russia
intends to try again in Manchuria, and others believe that Japan will
concede to Russia the two northern Manchurian provinces; or again,
that Japan will occupy all Manchuria, and support Russia’s occupation
of Mongolia and part of the Pechili province. As long as there is
oligarchic rule in Russia, there will be danger of the Russian advance,
as the aristocracy wishes to keep an army employed, so as to use
it when necessary on an ambitious Duma, or a people who demand real
representation in return for the tax privilege. Therefore Russia will
for many years press China at one spot or another, and how to checkmate
this pressure is one of Britain’s hardest problems, in which America is
involved because of the Hay doctrine of the “non-partition of China,”
which is the Monroe doctrine of the Far East.
Early in 1911 Russia disturbed the diplomats by sending a note to the
powers that she intended to make a military demonstration against
Sungaria and reoccupy, as from 1871 to 1881, trade routes and frontier
cities like Kuldja and Kobdo. Gullible China was induced to include in
the treaty with Russia at that time permission for Russian caravaners
to cross Western China under Russian arms; to trade without paying
duty, and to establish Russian “_imperium in imperio_” settlements.
The _Novi Krai_ of Harbin admitted that these extraterritorial
demonstrations in Far Western China aimed not so much at aggression
in Turkestan as cajoling further privileges in Manchuria, such as
navigation on the Sungari, Russian settlements, mining and railway
rights, etc. On another occasion, Russia is party to the rejection of
America’s proposal of the internationalization of Manchurian railways;
or again Russia cites some secret coerced treaty and compels China to
refuse a franchise for an American railway from Chin-Wang to Aigun,
or Chin-Wang to Kailar. Yet at the same time Russia is arranging with
China to drop a railway on Peking down from Irkutsk, and a railway from
Semipalatinsk down on Jungaria and the headwaters of the great Tarim
River. The Russian advance is not an extinct volcano; one never knows
when it will be recrudescent somewhere. The party of Admiral Alexeyev,
General Spiridovitch, State Secretary Bezobrazov and Count Bobrinsky,
is not dead at St. Petersburg. Russia is to-day moving 100,000
colonists a year into Siberia. She is double-tracking the Siberian
railway eastward to Lake Baikal.
The following memorial to the throne, written by Viceroy Liu Ming
Chuan, and approved by Li Hung Chang in 1893, reveals China’s knowledge
of Russia’s deep designs: “We feel Russia’s grip on our throat, and her
fist upon our back, and our contact with her is a source of perpetual
uneasiness to our minds. When a quarrel occurs, we have to yield to her
demands.”
Though no one can show why, land-rich Russia considers Mongolia,
Turkestan, Ili, Jungaria, and two provinces of Manchuria, and even
Tibet, as her sphere. In the troubles of the revolution, during the
last months of 1911, harassed China felt Mongolia dragged from under
her feet. The Chinese amban at Koren (Urga) was discountenanced, and
Russia set up the Buddhist Lama as an independent ruler. Plans were
also laid to run a railway down from Kiakhta. The Mongolian princes
frequently receive presents to retain their sympathy and increase their
obligations. Russia even made demands that China should withdraw her
troops from the outposts and discontinue colonization, for China is
beginning to learn the strategy of emigration. The building of the
all-Russian link on the north side of the Amur River from Stretyinsk to
Khabarovsk and Vladivostok, is going on apace at great cost, because
the Russians, in trying to settle the district, refuse to employ
Chinese, and have brought out 15,000 Russian railway laborers. The
river has too many shallows for successful transportation, and it would
not pay yet to dredge it. The _Chun Kuo Pao_, a native paper of Peking,
was so pusillanimous in its fear of Russia and Japan, as to recommend
in 1910 the abandonment of Manchuria to save Mongolia. I have said
pusillanimous, but I might have said venal, as an illustration that
Russian money may not neglect to seek power with some Chinese editors
in the northern provinces.
America desired to keep Japan and Russia separated in Manchurian
aggrandisement, and instead Russia came to a secret amicable agreement
with her old enemy, Japan, in June, 1912. The American, Mr. Shuster,
at the desire of Persia, was satisfactorily managing the customs of
Persia, but Russia successfully intrigued for his retirement. On
February 22, 1912, in the Hall of the Nobility, St. Petersburg, the
Nationalist Party held a meeting to denounce treaties with America.
Count Bobrinsky, the president of the Constitutional Conservative
Party, stood up and called Ex-president Roosevelt the “enemy of
Russia,” referring to the Portsmouth Peace Treaty. Plans were laid
before the meeting showing how Chinese Turkestan could supply America’s
place in growing cotton for Russia. Several reasons were given why
Russia opposed America. The real reason was that Russia does not
like America’s and Britain’s policy of the “non-partition of China.”
The aristocracy of Russia also hate the influence upon the Duma of
America’s and Britain’s system of budgets and armies controlled by
the lower house of the people. The oligarchy of Russia hate America’s
altruism that would secure to growing China her ancient fields, mines
and forests of Turkestan, Mongolia and Manchuria. The Chinese rely on
America’s altruism. There was possibly more than humor in the Tientsin
shopkeeper’s sign: “All languages spoken; American understood.”
The Chinese bitterly remember the massacre at Blagovestchensk on the
Amur River in 1900. When the Europeans were besieged in Peking, the
Russians drove the innocent and unarmed Chinese inhabitants into
the river at the point of the bayonet. Many were drowned, and their
bodies choked the landing wharves as they floated down-stream. Yet some
inquirers ask why there should be an anti-foreign feeling in China!
The name of General Chitchegoff, who gave the murderous order, would
live in history yoked to Nero’s if we had writers to-day as able and
patriotic as fearless Seneca and Lucan. If you are an American and
ask Chitchegoff in the place of his retirement why he did it, he will
answer: “Ask the Bureau, and blame the oligarchical system, not the
miserable agent.”
There was a time, too, when Prince Henri d’Orleans, Paul Doumer,
Garnier, Leroy Beaulieu, Riviere, Loti, Petit, Bert, Imbere and
Bonheur wrote, when France, as Russia’s ally, had her aggressive
designs on China. Hongkong, when I lived there, was haunted by
continual nightmares after France took possession of Kwangchou Bay in
Kwangtung province. Since the French ran their railway from Haiphong
to Yunnan City, French influence is strong in Yunnan province, and
the Szechuenese are looking for France’s hand at the headwaters of
the Yangtze River. In a sense this puts a barrier against the British
attack on Western China from Burma, and the American attack from the
Philippines. While France at home and in Tonquin is a high tariff
country, there is more confidence in the republican people of France
on the part of America and Britain than there is in the reliability of
the other mighty diplomatic competitors. Still French aggression is
potential and not to be ignored, especially as France has in Indo-China
a colony of 735,000 square miles with a population of 34,000,000 people
at the southern gates of old China. The heavily subsidized Messageries
Maritimes mail line plies between Marseilles, Saigon and the ports as
far as Japan. I once sailed half around the world on one of their
white boats and know their service to be excellent. At present the
French monopolize the Yunnan traffic with their railway, charging in
addition to the rates a high transit fee on bonded traffic. This is
internationally illegal, and is exactly what incensed Germany blew
out of French diplomacy in Morocco at the muzzle of the _Panther’s_
guns, when that vessel dropped anchor at Agidir one eventful morning.
In desperation, the Chinese tin miners of Kuo Chia (some of whom are
citizens of Hongkong) contemplate an opposition railway to Nanning, and
the old water route to Hongkong. The division of Siam between France
and Britain is slowly going on, France having recently taken over one
of the Shan States. To protect Singapore as a world equator gate,
Britain must connect the Malay states with Burma, and in time take
part of Siam. At one time France had a design of pressing her Tonquin
influence through Western China, and meeting the Russian advance at
Peking, but by the “entente-cordiale” France is now nearer to Britain
than Russia, and this is for the good of the world, including potential
American trade in the Far East. The Supreme Council of Indo-China
has recently raised a loan of $40,000,000 in France for irrigation,
drainage, agricultural and mining development, and extended railways
and roads in Annam and Tonquin.
Chinese imperial influence in the last few centuries has not extended
far south of the Yangtze River. All through French China, that is,
Annam, Tonquin, Cambodia, etc., and in Siam and the Shan states (now
partly absorbed by British Burma), in the old days there were hundreds
of petty kings and princes (a king to a hill in that land of hills),
who themselves, with the exception of the brave and intelligent Black
Flag Leader, Liu Jung, were really adventurers, or descendants from
Chinese adventurers from Kwangtung, Kwangsi and Yunnan provinces. Send
a Chinese to America, and he tries to become a monopolist because of
the ambitious example set before him; send him to British Singapore,
and he strives to become a contractor with designs on knighthood;
send him to Annam or Tonquin, and in the merry old days he became a
swashbuckler king, and strutted upon his ant hill. The French had to
pension or dethrone a hundred of these “royal” fellows from the Si
Kiang valley. The dethroned one said: “As for me now, back to the
pirate waters of the West River, and the admiralty of a snake-boat
fleet.” They have all recently turned up in the pirate waters of
Kwangtung province, and during the revolution of 1911–12 made endless
trouble for the gunboat fleet of Britain, America and China, operating
in the interests of civilization and trade, from Hongkong and Canton.
One brigand named Luk captured the famous Bogue forts of Canton on
March 12, 1912.
The Frenchman takes Paris with him wherever he goes, and as one
indication I found him in all the cafés that lined the red streets
of Indo-China, dropping his absinthe on ice in a long glass, though
a physician would shudder at the risk taken in such a terrifically
hot and humid climate. To balance “pidgin English” he has taught
the Annamese “petit negre.” He has brought his costly Parisian
architecture, as in the Palais, the Opera, the Cathedrals of Saigon,
Hanoi and Haiphong. Since 1873 the five provinces of Indo-China, with
an area larger than Texas, have cost the French $150,000,000 for
military expenses. The trade last year was $50,000,000 imports and
$30,000,000 exports. The colony is only beginning to exploit its great
wealth, especially in coal at Hongay, Kebao and Laokai in Tonquin.
XV
SOME FOREIGN TYPES IN CHINA, AND THEIR INFLUENCE
The mainstay of Chinese revenue, and the main security as yet for
foreign loans, is the National (formerly Imperial) Customs of five per
cent. duty ad valorem. The organization was started at Canton in 1859
by Sir Robert Hart, an Armagh Irishman who was transferred from the
British consular service. He served as head from that year until his
retirement with a fortune of $500,000 in 1910. Sir Robert Hart lived
in princely style at Peking and managed the service honestly. He has
been criticized for taking so large a reward from straitened China by
members of the India civil service, who are satisfied to retire on
$1,000 a year after even more arduous service. In 1901 Sir Robert Hart
wrote his book, _These from the Land of Sinim_. He was a brilliant
propagandist for things Chinese, the most popular Occidental who ever
served China, though he was not so heroic a figure as “Chinese” Gordon.
Sir Robert Bredon was next in office, and in 1911 Sir Francis Aglen
was put in charge. The son of an English clergyman, a well equipped
sinologue, trained under Sir Robert Hart, Mr. Aglen is a thorough
leader of this great work, which includes loan departments, lighthouse
service, a cadet school, a pension bureau, and an internal revenue
organization to a degree. As British commerce is the largest in China,
being nearly four times as large as America’s trade, the British name
the head of the customs service. Many Americans, Germans and French are
also employed, and a thorough knowledge of Chinese and its dialects is
insisted upon by Sir Francis Aglen.
In the region about Shanghai and Nanking, the name of “Chinese” Gordon
(General Charles) still lives for his victorious leadership of Li Hung
Chang’s army, which crushed the Taiping rebellion, and saved the Manchu
throne for the time. General Gordon had many bitter quarrels with Li
Hung Chang, insisting that assassination and murder must not follow a
victory. That the rebels of 1911 in this same region did not forget
Gordon’s precepts was shown by their leniency under great provocation,
after capturing Nanking from the Manchus. No foreigner who has aided
in forming the ten divisions of China’s Northern army has had the
personality or exercised the influence that Gordon did, and in the
great trial of the revolution and the mutinies of 1911–12 the army
showed frequently that no strong personality had inspired the men with
a fixed purpose, honor or patriotism.