This Revolution has seemed to bring into being a China that shall be utterly different from any other China that has gone before. It is in very truth a New China, and no one who, with a mildly understanding heart, watches China to-day can fail to see in all parts of the Empire that are known to civilisation much which forms a good augury in the Revolution, the genuineness of a common impulse, an impulse linked with a dogged persistence of effort to get out of the shallows of the past into the depths of the future—a glimpse beyond the garden and cloister of Chinese antiquity into the wonderful golden age, if the Revolutionary party is blessed.
But this Young China party will be bound to pass through a great home and foreign political crisis, the eccentricities of whose national programme may, if the Republican party be guided skilfully, change the Old China into a powerful participator in the affairs of the world. It must now be granted by all the world that the Reform spirit in China is peculiarly the most real thing in China, and China herself—by virtue of the Revolution—the most striking feature of the world's politics to-day. But what is the sum of it all? There are many aspects. Enjoying all the advantages which have come naturally to her, China, we must remember, is as old as all history. One sees the legend of age repeated again and again in the hard enduring things of time, and equally as much in the great conflict that had China in its grip for many months. Every symbol of the common life, every action of the common people, everything in the land points with powerful significance to fundamental enduring things. China, during the past few years, has been furnishing us with most things that she has dabbled in—the Revolution itself is one of the most striking products, with evidence that she will rise to the position that such a race should. We are able vividly to trace, amid the seeming unalterable commonalities of life, the story of a great overpowering reform. In many areas this reform reaches from the minutest details of the ordinary life to the topmost rung of the political and social ladder; in other parts, through which I have travelled during the last two years, the general trend of the people's lives will not allow one to believe for a single moment that China's chance, even through revolution, will ever come.
But, generally speaking, one has to admit that at one appalling stroke this mediæval people have come to mingle in the stream of world politics, behind which they have been lagging for centuries. In the whirl of her present revolutionary excitement, in the rush of the commercial torrent which will sweep through the land, the force of which probably will eclipse even Japan's early activities in the world's trade, we see a light on the surface of the national life of this strange people heralding the dawn of a greater day. Even we who live in China are lost in wonderment; those at a distance find it impossible to form a just estimate of its value. And so vast is the Empire, and so numerous the people, so great still the incongruities and absurdities in everyday life in most parts, that we who spend our lives side by side with the Chinese find difficulty in condensing concrete opinion on any given subject. The one thing that is keeping China back is the Dragon. We foreigners fail efficiently to understand China because we do not understand the Dragon. In China the Dragon has presided for centuries. Wrapped intertwiningly into the private and the national life of the Chinese, this Dragon has reigned supreme over a make-believe, a show of things, and innate insincerity and hollowness unparalleled anywhere among civilised peoples. The Chinese has, because of the Dragon, cramped himself into strange shapes all down through history, and the world has not known what to do with him, so foreign has been his aspect. But now the Revolution tells us that China and hundreds of millions of her people have changed irretrievably—so much must be taken for granted. The change would probably be quicker and better were it not for the Dragon, whose fangs, deeply indented into the national life, render it one great counterpoise to the young Revolutionary party. Another counterpoise to that reform which the New China party would institute at once is the lamentable fact that in a very large proportion of the Empire's area, in isolated parts far removed from spheres more easily affected by the Reform movement, there exists not a single evidence that China is not still in the torpor of the ages. Here we find a disorganised condition of society, and see how many forces work blindly in a wasteful and degenerate manner. I do not say that nothing had changed before the Revolution, for certain phases of reform one could not get away from in even the remotest corners of China. But if we discount the military and opium and a certain kind of popular education, we found little indeed commensurate with the hue and cry of the reform supposed to have been taking place to induce those who do not know that the whole Empire was in a desperate state of eagerness to forge ahead to believe that the Young China had annihilated the Old China.
And in the times through which we have just passed, it is pardonable for foreigners, except those who have made the real study of China a serious matter, to believe that China is getting more and more to love the foreigner. I believe that she is—but the love comes slowly, slowly indeed.
My personal opinion is that to-day, not perhaps less than in 1900, there are many places in China where the unveneered feeling of the Chinese towards the foreigner has not changed. But with that, at present, I can have nothing to do, and I trust that this Revolution will not unfold to us further stories—such as had to be told in Sianfu in Shensi last winter—that will make sad reading. China has gained, and is still fast gaining, strength in naval and military strategy, knowledge in education, in art, in science, in commerce, in all that she has set her heart upon from outside. But by the policy of conservatism, that "China for the Chinese" policy, a great majority of her literati are weakening her from the inside—and to such an extent that she may yet have to eat humble bread. For as the disturbances in Szechuen have so forcefully proved to the world, China has not by any means succeeded in putting her own house in order, and the Revolution has given us another overwhelming truth.
If the reader will turn to a map of China, he will find that perhaps one-third, certainly one-fourth, of the areas of the provinces of Western China, and much territory farther north, are marked "unsurveyed," occupied for the most part by unconquered and independent and semi-independent tribes of people. And herein lies the danger zone of what I would characterise as the greatest of China's hidden menaces. Sun Yat Sen's greatest enemy, Yuan Shih K'ai's greatest enemy—or "the greatest enemies" of any particular faction of the Government which will become paramount—the peculiarities of which are not known to a dozen men, it is a menace which China herself knows little of. I am fully aware that my contention will open up entirely new ground. The question of the possibility of the Chinese Government having been given such trouble as she underwent in Szechuen by the aboriginals of interior provinces has never been broached, so far as my memory serves me, in any of the literature dealing with China's reform during the last decade. I am aware that I shall spring upon the ordinary student of China's affairs a problem he may wriggle out of by stigmatising as unimportant, for the world's manner of dealing with China is with those things seen on the political surface only. Indeed, this is the greatest error in literature upon China. But I am not speaking without first-hand knowledge. After having travelled some seven thousand miles in China, in parts often where no other foreigner has ever entered, and having lived for several months out in the wilds where none other than the missionary could have contact—so that none but the missionary would be able to write about it, which is very rarely done—it may be granted that an opinion in some definite form is at least justifiable. My purpose was to make the subject a special study. In most of the country where these tribes people, ordinary foreign travellers are not allowed to enter. Officials at the fus or the hsiens where escorts are supplied, refuse to allow you to start if you are foolish enough to let them know that you intend starting. But it is only by actually travelling in these areas that an accurate impression of existing conditions can be gathered. Because a man has travelled from end to end of China by the main road does not justify him in giving an opinion on the subject; quite easy it is to travel along the main roads anywhere, but here one sees comparatively little of the tribal element. Some may speak of the patriotism which has grown in China of late years, and ask if it is possible for any such menace to continue while this spirit of patriotism thrives. I admit that a peculiar patriotism has certainly sprung up among the people of China, but in the places I have in mind, in the wind-swept savage country of China Far West, patriotism is not known. Those who have been watching the trouble in Szechuen, started long before the Revolution broke out, have been able to see what sort of patriotism has existed. It is merely a common spirit of hooliganism among the common multitudes, and a spirit of alarming omnipotence among the scholars—little less, little more. This exists among the Chinese in these regions, but I speak here more particularly of the tribal races, among whom this hatred towards the Government is infinitely more bitter. These aboriginal races, or most of them, were, almost without exception, at one time in the occupation of vast kingdoms, and their first idea is that the Chinese Government has been built up by a succession of excessively wicked and unscrupulous men, great commandment breakers, a peculiarly dangerous type of mankind to which it is unfortunate to belong. They know nothing about revolutions or reforms. They have it in strong for the Chinese, and are boiling over with a spirit of revenge. It is with these people that China will have to deal during the next decade. If China were to be engaged in an altercation with any other Power, this tribal danger would be formidable; if all becomes peaceful, when the Revolution shall have passed onward, the task of putting all men and things in China underfoot of the Government will not be accomplished without effort.
As things stand at present, there looms before China a problem that will not find solution in being continually shelved. In conquering the tribes in her own country, China faces a danger more momentous than she knows of and greater than the Western world ever dreamed of.
It would be too long a story here to detail the tribes and the peculiarities of each family—suffice it to say that every tribe in western China (and their number may be judged from the fact that no less than twenty are found in Yunnan alone), hate the Chinese and the Manchus. In the event of any disturbances arising from the Tibetan border, the Burma border, the Tonking border, the Mongolian border, this involved problem of her tribespeople and how to deal with them would so upset China's calculations that she might lose territory in China Far West, and history might have to record another rebellion as terrible, perhaps, as the Mohammedan rebellion in Yunnan of 1855 and onwards. Yunnan might then go to France, Tibet to Britain, Mongolia to Russia. This would be the zenith of complications, but it is of this that China has always been afraid, and she will always have cause for fear so long as this question is ignored. At the present moment, when most of the outlying dependencies are declaring their independence, these fears have a greater significance. The non-ability of the officials to grip the situation in these outlying corners of the Chinese Empire, and to have that local knowledge of affairs which will come only with local experience, is where China would feel the pinch in a stand-up combat with unconquered races within her own dominions. This feeling of strife has been growing for years, long before China had an adventurous policy in Tibet, but however expert China may have been in duping Europe as to her intentions in Tibet, and maintaining tranquillity in that country, it is certain that Peking did not, or would not, recognise the presence of the evil in China Far West, to say nothing of Tibet for the moment, of many thousands of her nominally governed races being in a state of lawlessness and social savagery. Complications in Tibet are liable, as they have been for many years, to arise at any time, equally as they are in Kansu, Sinking, Szechuen, or Yunnan—we have seen them, of course, in Szechuen. For serious complications in any of these provinces China has always been ill-prepared. It has been extremely doubtful whether her troops would remain loyal, even after she had got them at the seat of action after a tortuous march over incomprehensibly difficult country. There are no railways in Western China to speak of—there are absolutely none in the areas we have under survey in this article—and the only West China railway from Tonking into the heart of the Yunnan province would offer no advantages.
The main trunk lines of China, such as they are, run through country removed by many days of arduous walking over land from the districts likely to be first affected. Suppose, for a moment, that China had decided to repel the British at Pienma, or that a civil war were to break out in Yunnan (and neither of these is so unlikely when one knows the aggressive Yunnanese spirit), the probability is that, were military assistance necessary, the armies of Szechuen or Hunan would be mobilised. But to the provincial capital of Yunnan no less then thirty-three days would be required from Chengtu (Szechuen's capital), and to reach Yunnan-fu from Changshu (Hunan's capital) at least fifty days. The entire distance in either case would have to be negotiated on foot and by native boat, and over country ranging from sea level to say 12,000 feet above, and if complications with any other Power had arisen in China Far West, with Szechuen in her fearful ferment one may guess at the sequel.
Generally speaking, the problem of China Far West with the tribes is akin to that now holding the attention of the world between China and Tibet. We all know how, if the Nepaulese had thrown in their lot with the Dalai Lama there would have been an abrupt interruption to China's Imperialistic policy there. With China's awakening in Tibet and the dispatch of troops to reside there to maintain Chinese supremacy, we have seen how Great Britain rightly sends her troops a little farther on the Indian frontier, showing that she intends to maintain her own status quo. China has Britain to watch there. And we seem to see in China's activity in Tibet a menace to the peace of the neighbouring States between Tibet and India. As Britain watches China from the Indian side, France, as we have said, watches China on the Yunnan southern border. It should be remembered that the dream of the French in the days of their irresistible impulse for colonial expansion in the Far West was to annex Yunnan to Indo-China, and, however many her mistakes, her faith has survived her disappointment. Abandoning her dream of territory, she is now going hard and fast for the trade, and has many thousands of troops to guard her interests on the Tonking border now that she has her own railway. All through Yunnan a strong feeling exists among the Chinese against the French—the French are not liked, and have been the bone of contention for many years. Taking these facts into consideration, one is inclined to doubt whether China is really the Power to introduce that government into Tibet which will keep the country free from internal strife. So far, it must be admitted, she has done well, but so many dangers will face her after the Revolution that it seems a most difficult political task. Trouble seems inevitable if the reforming hand is laid too heavily upon the Tibetans.