Leaving out the Camarilla of the Court, of whom nothing certain can be predicated, the executive statesmen who have to outward appearance directed the public affairs of the Chinese empire for forty years may almost be counted on the fingers of one hand. Prince Kung, the highest in station and nearest to the throne, was rather a moderating than an active force in the State, and his attention was very much divided between public affairs and those of more personal concern. His colleague, Wênsiang, was a more energetic character. By common consent he was the most conscientious as well as the most liberal-minded statesman that China has produced during the sixty years of foreign intercourse. Mr Adkins, who knew him intimately in the early days, says: "He was courteous in manner and a lively conversationalist. He once told me over the teacups that, if he could have his will, every brick and stone of Hongkong city should be torn down and thrown into the sea." This was not the kind of language he held at a later period; for, in a private interview with Sir Rutherford Alcock in 1869, while admitting the hostility of his class and that he himself had originally shared all their prejudices, he declared that his long and intimate relations with the foreign Legations had opened his eyes to the favourable side of the foreign character and progressive policy. Perhaps the best account of this Manchu statesman is that given by Sir Rutherford Alcock himself in an article in 'Fraser's Magazine,' 1871:—
Wênsiang is by far the most distinguished, both from his superior knowledge and his intellectual grasp of the position occupied by China in its relations with foreign States.... As a member of the Grand Secretariat, and vested with other high functions, his influence is very great, both personal and official—subject, nevertheless, to such attenuation as the active hostility of a very powerful party of anti-foreign functionaries within and without the palace can effect. This party, if party that can properly be called which is composed of nearly the whole of the educated classes of the empire—officials, literati, and gentry—are unceasing in their opposition to all progressive measures, whether emanating from the Foreign Board or elsewhere. But Wênsiang is held in especial hatred as the known advocate of a policy of progressive improvement with foreign aid and appliances. The failure of the Lay-Osborn fleet very nearly effected his ruin, and that of his patron the prince [Kung] also, and has ever since told against his influence. The cost and humiliation of that most disastrous experiment were all visited on his head, and it has no doubt tended not solely to impair his power, but also to render him more timid and less disposed to make any further venture in the same direction. He has the reputation among his own people of being honest, and foreigners know him to be patriotic and earnest in what he believes to be for the good of his country, while far in advance of all his contemporaries in enlightened views as to how in the actual situation of affairs that end may best be served. Upon occasions he can be both bitter and sarcastic, and speaks out his mind plainly enough against the pretensions of foreigners to shape everything to their own ends in China. He nevertheless gets little credit from the opposite faction for patriotism or a disinterested love of his country, and of late there has been remarked, with failing health, an expression of weariness, as if he were losing heart and hope, and began to feel unequal to any further struggle. With the ever-increasing demands for better execution of treaties—in things often materially and legally impossible in the present state of affairs, for larger facilities and increased privileges on the foreign side, and the gathering of hostile elements in front and all round him proceeding from the Chinese national party, who would refuse everything, and, if left to themselves, precipitate the country into another war with the Western Powers, he may well feel weary.
Wênsiang, in short, suffered the fate of those who are too liberal and too far advanced for their surroundings, and became a martyr to his own disappointment. Old before his time, and overwhelmed with difficulties which he was unable to surmount, his mind became depressed, and his death in 1876 cost China the ablest, the best, and most devoted of her public men. No doubt there have been good and well-meaning men since his time, both in the Tsungli-Yamên, the Great Council, and in the provincial governments; but none of them has shown any quality of leadership, and all have for the most part been content with the maxim, "Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof."
The comparatively early death of Hu Lin-yi, a Hunanese, Governor of the province of Hupei, who, in conjunction with Kuanwen, the Governor-General of the Hu provinces, originated the scheme for repressing the Taiping rebellion, prevented him from receiving the credit of that notable achievement. The institutions of the country paralysed its defence, for a provincial army was an object of dread to the Manchu rulers, while they possessed no imperial organisation to cope with the calamity. No attempt, therefore, could be made to organise a force to resist the rebellion, and so the devastation was allowed to spread from province to province without check. Hu Lin-yi set himself to overcome this difficulty, and thought out a scheme by which the rebellion might be overcome. Before taking any action, however, it was necessary that he should bring the Peking Government to his views, which he accomplished by first converting the Governor-General, who was a Manchu. The two thereupon joined in a memorial to the throne, praying that they might be permitted to raise in the Central Provinces a mobile military force to repel the invasion of the insurgents.
The nucleus of this force already existed in the province of Hunan, where volunteer levies under the leadership of Tsêng Kwo-fan, the father of the late Marquis Tsêng, Minister to Great Britain, had done good service in several small engagements with the rebels. The execution of the general scheme of defence against the rebels fell naturally, therefore, to the lot of Tsêng, who during his subsequent governor-generalship of the Lower Yangtze had the honour of putting an end to the ravages of the Taipings. No man was held in higher esteem among the counsellors of the Chinese empire than this sagacious statesman. At once moderate and resolute, he perceived the need of accommodation to the exigencies of the new time, and though he would have resisted the ingress of foreigners to the uttermost, he had the wisdom to see that this was no longer possible, and the advice tendered to his sovereign, while tempered to the susceptibilities of the Court, was distinctly in favour of respecting the treaties and avoiding conflict with foreign nations.
A contemporary of Tsêng Kwo-fan, and his equal in rank and authority, was Tso Tsung-tang, best known as the Conqueror of Kashgar, where he was credited with military exploits which history will scarcely ratify. He was a thoroughgoing man, blunt in manner, but straightforward, and loyal to his engagements. He was somewhat rash and uncompromising, seeking the end sometimes without considering the means, and his opinion on matters of State would have carried no weight but for his reputation for exemption from the prevailing vice of his class—financial corruption. This character obtained him toleration for many originalities. On one occasion he camped outside the walls of Peking for several days because he refused to pay the customary exactions of the officials in charge of the gates, so that his audience of the emperor seemed likely to be indefinitely postponed. But high officials in China of austere views have usually a man of business in attendance who oils the wheels while saving the face of their master. Tso's money matters were in the hands of a very politic gentleman of this class, and so the Grand Secretary's entry into the city was duly arranged. Tso had a lofty idea of the dignity of his country, and of the necessity for its defending itself against all enemies. To this end he threw his energies into the development of the arsenal and shipbuilding-yard at the Pagoda anchorage in the Foochow river. He was generally considered an opponent of his younger contemporary, Li Hung-chang, the one being held to stand for the old conservatism of China, and the other for its liberalisation. They were for many years the two chief provincials, the one being Imperial Commissioner for the southern and the other for the northern ports of China. It was customary for the emperor to refer important questions connected with foreign affairs to these two advisers, whose opinions must very often have neutralised each other. In the end Tso recognised the necessity for a change of policy for the preservation of the empire, but being himself too old to change he recommended his rival, Li Hung-chang, to the Throne as the fitting man to introduce needed innovations. If the records are to be implicitly trusted Tso would appear to have undergone a sort of death-bed repentance, for in his political testament, a document which is regarded with a kind of sacred authority in China, he recommended to the throne the improvements he had steadfastly opposed, including even the introduction of railways into the country.
Although out of the chronological order, we may mention here another eminent official, distinguished by many of the characteristics of Tso Tsung-tang, who has been Governor of the province of Shansi, Governor-General of the Canton provinces, and is now Governor-General of the central provinces. Wherever he has been, Chang Chih-tung has proved himself bold and original. His open mind has led him to take up schemes warmly without counting the cost, and under his inspiration immense sums have been spent in both his viceroyalties for which but little return was obtained, and of which indeed it was scarcely possible to render a clear account. His reputation for purity, however, has saved him from the consequences of his recklessness, both in the eyes of the people and of the Government, and enabled him to hold office long enough to show some results of his expensive enterprises. The great ironworks which he set up in Hanyang, with very little consideration as to how they were to become effective, have at last produced iron of a quality sufficient to make inferior rails, thus giving an earnest of the ultimate realisation of his dream of rendering China independent of foreign countries. Chang's literary power is of a very high order, his style is terse and incisive, and this is a weapon which renders him formidable in a country which cultivates literature as a religion. To say that Chang Chih-tung is the opponent of foreigners is merely to credit him with the ordinary patriotism of his countrymen. But though he often treats strangers with the studied discourtesy which characterised the older generation of Chinese officials, he has never allowed his prejudices to stand in the way of free intercourse with any foreigner whom he thought he could make subservient to some purpose of his own. As a statesman Chang Chih-tung has failed through intensity and want of comprehensiveness. In fact he is not a statesman, but a sciolist, and a trenchant essayist, unaccustomed to accommodate his ideas to the circumstances of actual life. He, too, has been a bitter opponent of Li Hung-chang, which, however, did not hinder him from composing a most fulsome panegyric on that statesman on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, in which he was credited with all the attributes of all the heroes of Chinese mythology. The many fantastic schemes which Chang has originated would in any Western country have relegated their author to the custody of the Commissioners of Lunacy. One of these was to prevent foreign ships entering the Gulf of Pecheli by sinking tiers of junks between Shantung and Talien-wan; another was to catch the Japanese soldiers in a gigantic locust-trap, consisting of a deep trench to be dug at their supposed landing-place near Shanhai-kwan, and the fact of this proposal being seriously adopted and some miles of the trench actually dug by the Chinese soldiers reveals more of the military impotence of China than the most voluminous dissertations.
Without carrying the exhaustive process further, it is safe to say that whatever concrete statesmanship there has been in China during the past generation has been embodied in the person of Li Hung-chang. He alone has a continuous record, has followed a definite line, and kept his ideals, like a captive balloon, strictly attached to the earth on which he had to work. He also was a literate of distinction, having taken the highest degree, that of the Hanlin College. But though his literary tastes have not been left wholly uncultivated, they have never intruded themselves into his conduct of affairs, so that an estimate of his position cannot be based upon his writings, but only on his actions. He indulged in no speculations, propounded no theories, but was eminently a man of fact. Contrary to all Chinese tradition he laid himself out for personal intercourse with foreigners, from whom he was never weary of learning, and in doing so he braved the odium of his peers, and incurred the charge of treason as a truckler to barbarians. Living in the eyes of the world, both of his own and foreign countries, for a period of nearly forty years, he has been the one familiar figure in modern China. His accessibility has afforded to travellers and visitors endless opportunities of delineation, so that if ever a Chinese of rank was known throughout the world it must be Li Hung-chang.
The interest attaching to this statesman consists in his having in his own person, and without a party, stood between the Old World and the New, having devoted his life to working out in practice a modus vivendi between them. His methods have been wholly empirical and opportunist, and hence no synthesis of his plan of operations is available, except such as we may compose out of the facts themselves. A few cardinal principles, nevertheless, stand out clearly in the life-work of this statesman. One is that of reorganising the defensive forces of the empire in accordance with the lessons learned from foreign raids; a second has been so to observe the treaties made with foreigners as to afford them no ground for complaint; and a third, when causes of difference arose, whether by inadvertence or by design, to agree with the adversary quickly. The following out of the first two might very well have entailed upon Li the reproach of favouring foreigners; the following out of the third may with greater justice have earned for him the character of a peace-at-any-price man. So consistently did he follow the line of action dictated by these principles, that no attacks on foreigners or on Christian missions have ever been tolerated within his jurisdiction. During the twenty-four years of his governor-generalship of Chihli, whose population is one of the most turbulent in the empire, there was not a single missionary outrage, his instructions to his district officials being peremptory, that, right or wrong, they must have no questions with foreigners. Had the other viceroys been similarly minded and equally resolute, no attacks on missionaries would have been recorded throughout the Chinese Empire. Though Li Hung-chang was as much anti-foreign at heart as every true Chinaman must be, he endeavoured, crudely following the example of the Japanese, to employ foreign men and appliances in order the more effectually to resist them. His pacific tendencies were no proof of pusillanimity, but rather of a deep consciousness, derived from personal experience, of the incapacity of China to resist foreign attack. Li Hung-chang's external policy, therefore, may be defined as the strengthening of the country to meet invasion, and the avoidance, while such preparations were being made, of every cause of collision with foreigners. These cardinal points had to be kept in view, like guiding stars, amid the exigencies of daily affairs, which alone were sufficient to fill up the measure of one man's capacity. The administration of two populous provinces, the superintendency of the maritime trade of half the empire, and incessant consultations concerning imperial affairs generally, constituted a burden which no one man could bear. While to these were added the whole details of national defence, naval and military reorganisation, the construction of a navy on foreign lines, the whole of which was undertaken by Li Hung-chang, working not only without a party but practically without a staff, and at the mercy of technical advisers who owed him no allegiance. The briefest recapitulation of the duties so undertaken would be enough to stagger the credulity of the most active administrator of the West; the recital would suffice, without any proof from experience, to show that these labours of Hercules could never, in fact, be performed. But the difference between performance and non-performance marks the chasm which divides the Chinese from the Western world, and distinguishes the order of ideas and practice which make for the preservation, from those which tend to the disintegration, of the Chinese empire itself. The task from which the mass of Chinese statesmen have recoiled, and which has only been attempted in a persistent manner by Li Hung-chang himself, was probably beyond the power of any man and of any party.
But here the inquiry suggests itself, why a strong-headed and practical-minded man should have devoted a lifetime to impossible achievements, and why in a nation of great intellects the task should have been virtually relegated to one man? The Chinese are not fools; their mental capacity is second to that of no other race. Their culture is excessive, though narrow; and if we find them exhibiting in great national affairs no more intelligence than that shown by children in building castles of sand, it is natural to conclude that there is some fundamental misconception either on their part or on ours of the problem before them. But if we consider the Chinese as belonging to the world of moral force, then their misconception of all that belongs to the world of physical force is not only explicable, but it is inevitable; for between the two there is no common ground on which even a compromise might be effected, and the one must eternally misunderstand the other.