The Englishman in China During the Victorian Era, Vol. 2 (of 2) / As Illustrated in the Career of Sir Rutherford Alcock, K.C.B., D.C.L., Many Years Consul and Minister in China and Japan

by Alexander Michie

IV. THE DYNASTIC FACTOR.

Irregularity of the succession—Defensive position of the empress-dowager—Cantonese reformers influence emperor—Regent's alarm, vengeance and reaction—The new heir-apparent.

Ever since the coup d'état in January 1875, whereby the empress-regent by her own fiat placed her infant nephew on the throne of her deceased son, to the exclusion of more legitimate heirs, the dynastic question has been regarded by Chinese patriots as a certain source of future trouble.[37] The imperial dignity was not the only matter involved in the succession, but a vast amount of property also, and so many members of the imperial clan were interested in the result that it was deemed certain that the partisans of legitimacy would lie in wait for an opportunity of enforcing the claims of the rightful heir. As it is customary to attribute the acts of statesmen to personal motives, it has never been doubted that the interest of the empress-regent in setting the reigning emperor on the throne was sufficiently explained by her own lust of power. We know what is done, but do not always know what is prevented, and in the case of the families of both the elder brothers who were passed over, there may have been practical as well as judicial reasons to justify even a coup d'état which supplanted them. From what has recently been revealed of the character of Prince Tuan, for example, the exclusion of his progeny may possibly have been a providential deliverance.

Be these things as they may, however, and be her ulterior motives what they may, the solicitude of the empress-regent has been constantly directed to protecting the weak point in her dynastic defences. The childlessness of the present emperor, as well as the misfortunes of the empire since he assumed the reins of power in 1889, of course added indefinitely to her anxiety, while at the same time serving to keep alive the pretensions of the elder branches.

Speaking, as we have done throughout, only of what is apparent, the succession question was brought to the point of incandescence by certain events in 1898. Great and justifiable discontent had arisen in the provinces with the manner in which the affairs of the empire had been conducted, resulting in humiliation and calamity. The idea of doing something to stem the tide of misgovernment by enforcing the lessons of recent misfortune was freely discussed. But the Chinese have not discovered any method of remedying grievances except insurrections in one form or another, on a small or on a large scale. A movement of this character has been on foot in the Canton province ever since the Japanese war. These revolutionary conspiracies have indeed been so well organised, and so powerfully supported, that once, if not oftener, the provincial city of Canton has narrowly escaped capture. The agitation has been directed nominally against the Manchu Government. Whether directly associated with the insurrectionary propaganda or not, another body afterwards challenged public notice under the name of Reformers. As in the case of the insurrectionary movement, many Government officials secretly gave their adhesion to the cause, and inspired the leaders with confidence in the ultimate success of their schemes.

Reform had been preached continuously to China from every foreign pulpit for forty years. "Reform or perish" was the regular formula—words so easily written that no resident, tourist, publicist, foreign official, or any one with a pen or a tongue, refrained from reiterating them continually. Individually every Chinese official with whom foreigners came in contact joined in the cry. But though the general demand was unanimous, there was diversity in the details, and in such a case the details were everything. A dozen writers, each insisting on the necessity of thorough reform, would postulate separately some indispensable preliminary to any reform whatsoever. These indispensable preliminaries, added together, would have left nothing for the substantive portion of the programme; by them Chinese administration would have been renovated from top to bottom. Such was the difficulty which friends and critics experienced in knowing where to begin in their efforts to reduce the general to the particular.

In 1898, however, a bold attempt was made to launch a comprehensive scheme of reform by imperial fiat. A Cantonese named Kang Yu-wei, backed by a body of opinion,—of the extent and value of which different estimates may be formed, "financed," of course, as popular leaders must be,—obtained the ear of the emperor, and induced him to promulgate a budget of edicts of startling novelty. Being deemed revolutionary, they excited alarm in the Imperial Court. What were the specific grounds of alarm may be easily surmised. Foreigners who refer it exclusively to the question of reform may possibly take as partial a view of this as they have done of other Court movements. What is known is, that the empress-regent, always ready to strike when her interest or her schemes have been threatened, pounced on the unfortunate emperor, and by force of will and the parental authority which counts for so much in China, and in virtue of the Great Seal which she had reserved when handing over her trust, made him revoke his revolutionary edicts, hunted out his dangerous counsellors and punished them as traitors. The embers of reform were thus for the time ruthlessly stamped out. Of the ethics of these proceedings it is needless to speak: not ethics but strength decided the issue; nature's primeval law was not suspended in favour of the adventurous spirits who flew at such high game. A reaction against all reform naturally set in, and the old struggle was renewed: between conservation and revolution, viewed from the Chinese Court side; between purity and corruption, viewed from that of the Reformers.

But the quarrel cannot be restricted to so simple an issue as either of these. The question between the Reformers and the Court was complicated by sundry important considerations. In the first place, the capture of the Emperor by Kang Yu-wei was directly inspired by the teaching of foreign missionaries. In the second place, the movement originated in the same southern provinces whence the Taiping rebellion itself had sprung, and where conspiracies against the Government had been active since 1895. And thirdly, the reform agitation was ostentatiously patronised by the foreign, or at least by the English, press, while the leaders of the insurgents found a safe asylum, if not an effective base of operations, in Hongkong and in foreign countries. Taking these circumstances together, therefore, whatever may be thought of the intrinsic merits of the double agitation, it could scarcely be expected that the Powers which saw themselves so seriously menaced should draw any such fine distinction between the ostensible objects of the reformers and of the revolutionaries, as to regard the one with complacency while suppressing the other. The most abject of governments and the most timid of animals will resist to the death an attack which threatens their existence. There would be nothing unnatural, therefore, in the resentment of the Imperial Government against its disaffected people being, by the process which is so familiar to us in family quarrels, temporarily diverted from the domestic to the foreign enemy, against whom the combined hostility of all parties in the Chinese State might, for the time being, be concentrated.

Without, however, attempting to assign their relative values to all or any of these factors in the question, it seems evident that the events of 1898 revealed the elements of a drama in which the contending factions in the Court were forced to show their colours. The course of the conflict during the year and a half following the autumn of 1898 has probably been obscured rather than elucidated by the contradictory reports and fluctuating comments which have been so freely disseminated with but slight regard to the authenticity of their origin. But the nomination of a grandson of Prince Tun as heir-apparent, which was decreed in January 1900, looks like a belated, if not compulsory, recognition of the prior claims of that Princes family, and a confession that the Emperor Kwanghsu has kept the rightful heir twenty-five years out of his inheritance; for the grandson now selected possesses no right which the grandson set aside in 1875 did not possess. The relations of Prince Tuan, the father of the emperor designate, with the empress-regent are as obscure as the intricacies of palace politics usually are to contemporary foreign observers. Fortunately, however (in one sense), the cross-currents and undercurrents of the Court, the question who are confederates and who rivals, who betrayers and who betrayed, in the imperial camp, are matters which have to a great extent been deprived of their significance. Under normal conditions the dynastic imbroglio might have had a perturbing influence on the policy of foreign Powers, but the explosion of last summer has relegated all such domestic questions to a secondary place. When the correspondent of the 'Times' could report that there was "no Government" in Peking, the personnel of that Government lost its practical interest. The old order, with its sins and sorrows, has indeed passed away, but to find a substitute for it is a problem that will tax the wisdom as well as the forbearance of the world. The anarchy which has been so long dreaded is actually upon us, and the prospective horrors of it are assuredly not lessened by the outbreak being signalised in the capital rather than in the provinces.