CHINA'S REVOLUTION
1911-1912
CHAPTER I
THE REVOLUTION
The story of the great Chinese Revolution of 1911-12 will probably never be told fully or accurately. China is a continent in its vast area. Its population is one-fourth of the whole human race. The country is not opened up by roads or railways and travel generally is arduous and slow; exaggeration among the people, as among all Orientals, is second nature. And so it would be at once impossible for any one man closely to follow up and widely and accurately to write of the Revolution which broke out at Wuchang last year, tracing it up to the present moment and getting a clean political and international outlook whilst doing so. Although I have endeavoured by careful study to get into focus with doings all over the Empire, I confess that I have been unable to secure unimpeachable information on any part of China other than that in which I was living (I speak of the interior of China, for it was easy enough to be kept informed in the main centres and the treaty ports whilst the telegraph lines were intact). Had there been roads and railways and communication of a kind to render it physically possible to move about, even then this would have been impossible; for soon after the Revolution broke the anti-foreign spirit and the outlawry shown in many parts of the country forbade any European going far from the treaty ports—and, of course, practically all foreigners were ordered to the coast by their consuls. Had a man a workable knowledge of the Chinese language in character, it would have been foolish to form one's opinions from the rumours that were printed everywhere in the Chinese Press. And so it comes about that only upon those things which one saw and did is a man justified to write.
The reader, if he knows China, will need no further explanation, for readily will he recognise my meaning. He will understand by experience what a mass of inconsistency and incongruity China and her people are. But to the Westerner who has never been into China nor rubbed shoulders closely with this peculiar people it will perhaps be necessary to add that life in China, in all its forms and phases, is fraught with such a truly remarkable atmosphere of the unexpected that to write on any Chinese man, woman, custom, habit, place, or thing one is able only to generalise—unless he goes into the tedium of particularising. To get into line it is necessary so to cut down and to prune and generally to reinterpret that when one has told his story there seems to be very little at all in it. But those who have lived in China know the conditions. They will have absorbed this incomprehensible spirit of the country, will understand what is written—and what is more important still, will magnetically feel what is left out which the writer on Chinese affairs would have said. When in writing upon men and things Chinese you think you have pruned down all apparent misinterpretation or misrepresentation, you find there is still a little pruning left to be done; you prune again, and in the end you find you often are, to the Western mind, misinterpreting and misrepresenting facts merely because you have left out that which, to you, with your Chinese eyes, appeared untrue. You see a thing in China and you think that you understand it. You fix it in your mind and tell yourself that you have absorbed it, whatever it may be, and that you now have the final thought and word and correct meaning. But after a little time you find, by a peculiar process of Chinese national twisting and shifting, no matter what you see, hear, think, believe, your final thought and word and correct meaning are changed completely.
This, perhaps, describes the political atmosphere during the Revolution. Into everything there came an exasperating suspense, a terrible tangle of all national affairs, as there still must be for a very long time to come. Therefore to the man who sets out to write a detailed history of China's Revolution, and correctly to diagnose the effect of one event upon another in a consecutive and truthful line, there at once appears a formidable task.
What the author has set out to do in this volume is to tell of what he saw and understood, and then to put into print carefully considered opinion on the general situation and a historical survey of revolutions and main events in China that have led up to the Revolution of last October. This Revolution, although outbreaking prematurely, was all wonderfully planned. "The movement began to take definite shape about fifteen or sixteen years ago," says Sun Yat Sen, the greatest of Chinese revolutionists, though he had been interested in the movement for a longer time than that. "Three years ago we were ready to take over Wuchang, Canton, and Nanking, but we were waiting to gain control of the Peking soldiers. We had been working for some time through the students. Following the war with Japan, the Peking Government began to organise its new army, sending students abroad to be trained to take charge of the army. It was at once seen that if the Manchus were able to organise and control a modern army it would greatly strengthen their position, and the Revolutionary party set to work to counteract their efforts. They worked through the students, so that when they returned to China to take positions as officers in the army they came as revolutionists. The outbreak could not have been postponed for more than a few months, but it did occur before it was expected. We knew that we had Wuchang, Nanking, and Canton, but there was a preliminary outbreak at Canton, then another one last summer. Then when the outbreak at Wuchang occurred it was no longer possible to postpone action, for the Government would have begun to disarm the soldiers who sympathised with us. At Canton they scattered our sympathisers over the province, so that it was very difficult to concentrate them. If our original plan had been carried out, there would have been very little fighting. Canton, Nanking, and Wuchang would have quietly gone over to us, and then all the troops could have marched on Peking if necessary. We have always had half of the Peking troops with us."
Thus declared Sun Yat Sen—and there is little doubt he was right. The hitherto irremediable suppression of the individual qualities and national aspirations of the people arrested the intellectual, the moral, and the material development of China. The aid of revolution was invoked to extirpate the primary cause, and China now proclaimed the resultant overthrow of the despotic sway wielded by the Manchu Dynasty and the establishment of a Republic. The substitution of a Republic for a Monarchical form of government was not the fruit of a transient passion; it was the natural outcome of a long-cherished desire for broad-based freedom, making for permanent contentment and uninterrupted advancement. It was the formal declaration of the will of the Chinese nation.
In a manifesto issued to all friendly nations from the Republic of China, when Sun Yat Sen was appointed Provisional President, it was declared that "we, the Chinese people, are peaceful and law-abiding. We have waged no war except in self-defence. We have borne our grievances during two hundred and sixty-seven years of Manchu misrule with patience and forbearance. We have by peaceful means endeavoured to redress our wrongs, secure our liberty, and ensure our progress, but we have failed. Oppressed beyond human endurance we deemed it our inalienable right as well as our sacred duty to appeal to arms to deliver ourselves and our posterity from the yoke to which we have so long been subjected, and for the first time in our history inglorious bondage has been transformed to an inspiring freedom splendid with a lustrous light of opportunity. The policy of the Manchu Dynasty has been one of unequivocal seclusion and unyielding tyranny. Beneath it we have bitterly suffered, and we now submit to the free peoples of the world the reasons justifying the Revolution and the inauguration of our present government. Prior to the usurpation of the Throne by the Manchus, the land was open to foreign intercourse, and religious tolerance existed, as is evidenced by the writings of Marco Polo and the inscription on the Nestorian Tablet of Sian-fu. Dominated by ignorance and selfishness, the Manchus closed the land to the outer world, and plunged the Chinese people into a state of benighted mentality, calculated to operate inversely to their natural talents and capabilities, thus committing a crime against humanity and the civilised nations almost impossible of expiation."