On the memorable day of October 11, 1911, when the standard of revolt was raised at Wuchang, somewhat against his will as he was a loyal officer, he was elected military Governor, thus becoming the first real leader of the Republic. Within the space of ten days his leadership had secured the adhesion of fourteen provinces to the Republican cause; and though confronted by grave difficulties owing to insufficiency of equipment and military supplies, he fought the Northern soldiery for two months around Wuchang with varying success. He it was, when the Republic had been formally established and the Manchu régime made a thing of the past, who worked earnestly to bring about better relations between the armies of North and South China which had been arrayed against one another during many bitter weeks. It was he, also, who was the first to advocate the complete separation of the civil and military administration—the administrative powers in the early days of the Republic being entirely in the hands of the military governors of the provinces who recruited soldiery in total disregard to the wishes of the Central Government. Although this reform has even to-day only been partially successful, there is no reason to doubt that before the Republic is many years older the idea of the military dictating the policy and administration of the country will pass away. The so-called Second Revolution of 1913 awakened no sympathy in General Li Yuan-hung, because he was opposed to internal strife and held that all Chinese should work for unity and concerted reform rather than indulge in fruitless dissensions. His disapproval of the monarchy movement had been equally emphatic in the face of an ugly outlook. He was repeatedly approached by the highest personages to give in his adhesion to Yuan Shih-kai becoming emperor, but he persistently refused although grave fears were publicly expressed that he would be assassinated. Upon the formal acceptance of the Throne by Yuan Shih-kai, he had had conferred on him a princedom which he steadfastly refused to accept; and when the allowances of a prince were brought to him from the Palace he returned them with the statement that as he had not accepted the title the money was not his. Every effort to break his will proved unavailing, his patience and calmness contributing very materially to the vast moral opposition which finally destroyed Yuan Shih-kai.
Such was the man who was called upon to preside over the new government and parliament which was now assembling in Peking; and certainly it may be counted as an evidence of China's traditional luck which brought him to the helm. General Li Yuan-hung knew well that the cool and singular plan which had been pursued to forge a national mandate for a revival of of the empire would take years completely to obliterate, and that the octopus-hold of the Military Party—the army being the one effective organization which had survived the Revolution —could not be loosened in a day,—in fact would have to be tolerated until the nation asserted itself and showed that it could and would be master. In the circumstances his authority could not but be very limited, disclosing itself in passive rather than in active ways. Wishing to be above all a constitutional President, he quickly saw that an interregnum must be philosophically accepted during which the Permanent Constitution would be worked out and the various parties forced to a general agreement; and thanks to this decision the year which has now elapsed since Yuan Shih-kai's death has been almost entirely eventless, with the exception of the crisis which arose over the war-issue, a matter which is fully discussed elsewhere.
Meanwhile, in the closing months of 1916, the position was not a little singular. Two great political parties had arisen through the Revolution—the Kuo Ming Tang or Nationalists, who included all the Radical elements, and the Chinputang or Progressives, whose adherents were mainly men of the older official classes, and therefore conservative. The Yunnan movement, which had led to the overthrow of Yuan Shih-kai, had been inspired and very largely directed by the scholar Liang Ch'i-chao, a leader of the Chinputang. To this party, then, though numerically inferior to the Kuo Ming Tang, was due the honour and credit of re-establishing the Republic, the Kuo Ming Tang being under a cloud owing to the failure of the Second Revolution of 1913 which it had engineered. Nevertheless, owing to the Kuo Ming Tang being more genuinely republican, since it was mainly composed of younger and more modern minds, it was from its ranks that the greatest check to militarism sprang; and therefore although its work was necessarily confined to the Council-chamber, its moral influence was very great and constantly representative of the civilian element as opposed to the militarist. By staking everything on the necessity of adhering to the Nanking Provisional Constitution until a permanent instrument was drawn up, the Kuo Ming Tang rapidly established an ascendancy; for although the Nanking Constitution had admittedly failed to bring representative government because of the difficulty of defining powers in such a way as to make a practical autocracy impossible, it had at least established as a basic principle that China could no longer be ruled as a family possession, which in itself marked a great advance on all previous conceptions. President Li Yuan-hung's policy, in the circumstances, was to play the part of a moderator and to seek to bring harmony to a mass of heterogeneous elements that had to carry out the practical work of government over four hundred millions of people.
His success was at the outset hampered by the appeal the military were quick in making to a new method—to offset the power of Parliament in Peking. We have already dealt with the evils of the circular telegram in China—surely one of the most unexpected results of adapting foreign inventions to native life. By means of these telegraphic campaigns a rapid exchange of views is made possible among the provincial governors; and consequently in the autumn of 1916, inspired by the Military Party, a wholly illegal Conference of generals was organized by the redoubtable old General Chang Hsun on the Pukow railway for the purpose of overawing parliament, and securing that the Military Party retained a controlling hand behind the scenes. It is perhaps unnecessary to-day to do more than note the fact that the peace of the country was badly strained by this procedure; but thanks to moderate counsels and the wisdom of the President no open breach occurred and there is reason to believe that this experiment will not be repeated,—at least not in the same way.[[21]]
The difficulty to be solved is of an unique nature. It is not that the generals and the Military Party are necessarily reactionary: it is that, not belonging to the intellectual-literary portion of the ruling elements, they are less advanced and less accustomed to foreign ways, and therefore more in touch with the older China which lingers on in the vast agricultural districts, and in all those myriad of townships which are dotted far and wide across the provinces to the confines of Central Asia. Naturally it is hard for a class of men who hold the balance of power and carry on much of the actual work of governing to submit to the paper decrees of an institution they do not accept as being responsible and representative: but many indications are available that when a Permanent Constitution has been promulgated, and made an article of faith in all the schools, a change for the better will come and the old antagonisms gradually disappear.
It is on this Constitution that Parliament has been at work ever since it re-assembled in August, 1916, and which is now practically completed. Sitting together three times a week as a National Convention, the two Houses have subjected the Draft Constitution (which was prepared by a Special Parliamentary Drafting Committee) to a very exhaustive examination and discussion. Many violent scenes have naturally marked the progress of this important work, the two great parties, the Kuo Ming Tang and the Chinputang, coming to loggerheads again and again. But in the main the debates and the decisions arrived at have been satisfactory and important, because they have tended to express in a concrete and indisputable form the present state of the Chinese mind and its immense underlying commonsense. Remarkable discussions and fierce enmities, for instance, marked the final decision not to make the Confucian cult the State Religion; but there is not the slightest doubt that in formally registering this veritable revolution in the secret stronghold of Chinese political thought, a Bastille has been overthrown and the ground left clear for the development of individualism and personal responsibility in a way which was impossible under the leaden formulae of the greatest of the Chinese sages. In defining the relationship which must exist between the Central Government and the provinces even more formidable difficulties have been encountered, the apostles of decentralization and the advocates of centralization refusing for many months to agree on the so-called Provincial system, and then fighting a battle à outrance on the question of whether this body of law should form a chapter in the Constitution or be simply an annexure to the main instrument. The agreement which was finally arrived at—to make it part and parcel of the Constitution—was masterly in that it has secured that the sovereignty of the people will not tend to be expressed in the provincial dietines which have now been re-erected (after having been summarily destroyed by Yuan Shih-kai), the Central Parliament being left the absolute master. This for a number of years will no doubt be more of a theory than a practice; but there is every indication that parliamentary government will within a limited period be more successful in China than in some European countries; and that the Chinese with their love of well-established procedure and cautious action, will select open debate as the best method of sifting the grain from the chaff and deciding every important matter by the vote of the majority. Already in the period of 1916-1917 Parliament has more than justified its re-convocation by becoming a National Watch Committee. Interpellations on every conceivable subject have been constant and frequent; fierce verbal assaults are delivered on Cabinet Ministers; and slowly but inexorably a real sense of Ministerial responsibility is being created, the fear of having to run the gauntlet of Parliament abating, if it has not yet entirely destroyed, many malpractices. In the opinion of the writer in less than ten years Parliament will have succeeded in coalescing the country into an organic whole, and will have placed the Cabinet in such close daily relations with it that something very similar to the Anglo-Saxon theory of government will be impregnably entrenched in Peking. That such a miracle should be possible in extreme Eastern Asia is one more proof that there are no victories beyond the capacity of the human mind.
General Tsao-ao, the Hero of the Yunnan Rebellion of 1915-16, who died from the effects of the campaign.