China Revolutionized

by John Stuart Thomson

The Chinese when in a rage (chih) is not a knife-user as are the southern races of Europe, but a hair or queue-puller. Now that the queue is being severed in China, he will probably take to kicking or boxing, in the French and Anglo-Saxon methods, in expressing his temper.

The social adjuster, or peace-talker, is a well-known institution, more generally employed within the hsiang (village) and guild, than the law. “To go to law is to put one’s estate in the ditch and one’s soul in hell,” is one of their sayings. Therefore, the importance of first engaging the services of the adjuster, or second, to meet the second of the offender, rather than to enter suit, and get into the hands of lawyers, court runners, grasping judges, etc. This heathen adjuster answers to the work that the lay deacon may have done in the early Christian church, in settling cases out of court. It is an institution that might well be copied from China in these days of criticism of the bench and bar by such authorities as Ex-presidents Roosevelt and Taft, and Mr. Bryan. The Chinese adjuster puts the case before, and settles it in accord with, public opinion, without any idea of fee; and certainly public opinion is a better judge than the law whose justice is built too much on fees, appeals and the maintenance of a large set of pettifoggers who live on the woes and ill temper of the unfortunate. In the revision of the Chinese code by Wu Ting Fang, Wang Chung Wei (educated at Yale), etc., long life to the social adjuster, the village Solon, whose ways are ways of peace, but whose path is not one of pleasantness! We have said that authorities have castigated the bar in China and America. Here is what Cicero said of Rome (the mother of laws) in the “Murena” oration: “For though many things have been settled excellently by the laws, yet most of them have been depraved and corrupted by the talkatively litigious genius of lawyers.”

The method of “planting” forged evidence is met with in China where a powerful enemy wishes to ruin some victim. The Yuen Fung Yuen Bank, of Bonham Strand, is one of the largest native banks in Hongkong, in which colony it is illegal to import opium except through the Farm, which pays the government a large royalty. This valuable drug passes almost at bullion value. Anonymous information was sent to the Farm contractor that at 8:00 P. M. the bank would receive illicit opium. Detectives were put in ambuscade. At the hour mentioned a coolie bearing a basket rapped at the bank’s door and shouted: “A letter for you.” Then he ran, but was caught. An examination revealed a tin of opium at the bottom of a basket of eggs. Investigation disclosed the whole thing as a “plant” prepared by an old enemy of the Yuen Fung Bank. In the same way bodies of the dead and murdered are often secretly placed at the doors of innocent victims, and as much motive as possible is prepared so as to get them in trouble with law and popular indignation. In years now happily passed missionaries have been bothered in this way by “Boxer” conspirators.

The Chinese code provides that all deeds shall bear the stipulation that “the land was first offered to the seller’s kinsmen, who refused to buy.” When a deed is lost, the Mandarin can issue a duplicate deed on presentation of the last tax receipt and tax receipts themselves are transferred in place of lost deeds.

In 313 B. C. the state of Tsi (present Shangtung Province) broke up its half of a wooden tablet containing part of the agreement with the state of Tsu (present Hupeh Province). These halves fitted into each other, and beyond any possibility of substitution proved the genuineness of the record. An old book called the Si Yuen (washing the pit), used in connection with the criminal code, prescribes the method of ascertaining whether death was caused by blows or was natural. A clay pit is heated white, the ashes are dug out, and wine is poured in. The body is then placed on a cradle in the pit, and a roof of tiles is placed over the pit’s mouth. If the fumes of the rice alcohol bring out the marks, even on a partly decayed body, the murderer is searched for. Other books relate that if a body is thrown into the water after death, it will not show distended stomach, hair stuck to head, or foam in mouth; the hands and feet will not be stiff, or the soles of the feet white. Their criminologists also write that if a body is thrown into a fire after death, there will be no burning or ashes in the throat and nostrils. The Chinese of the old time were rather clever investigators of crime.

This scene was presented outside the west gate of Tientsin one October day in 1870 after the massacre at the French convent. The French compelled Li Hung Chang to give them satisfaction. Li held the execution at dawn so that a mob might not gather. The criminals were flattered as martyrs. None of them was bound. New silk clothes, fine shoes and the ornaments of females were put upon them. Arriving at the execution ground, they were given opium. They shouted to the crowd, “Are we showing a shamed face?” And the answer came back: “No.” “Call us brave lads for being given to the foreigners as a sacrifice,” they cried again. A shout of approval came back. Then they sang a war song, and while their relatives cried, they knelt and stretched out their own necks before the blow of the heavy, short, mercury-loaded Taifo sword of the executioner. The shedding of a cock’s blood, even in the British courts of Hongkong, when an oath is taken, is a survival of the ancient Chinese custom, practised in Confucius’ day (550 B. C.), when the ministers of the various states of Lu, Wu, Tsin, etc., had a criminal killed, and wetting their lips with his blood, took oath to keep the treaty, which was inscribed on wood, each party taking a broken portion. The following incident will throw a flashlight on a section of Chinese legal practise, just previous to the revolution of 1911. It is well known that Wu Ting Fang, two and a half years before the revolution, had revised and modernized the Chinese code, but it was not even in part put in practise before the revolution. In Tungkadoo, a town of Kiangsu province, a bonze (priest) murdered a fellow-bonze and confessed under third-degree torture. The native authorities brought him to Shanghai to be strangled, but the chief bonze, with headquarters at Chingkiang, requested that the criminal should be turned over to him to be burned to death according to the code of the Order. Cremation of dead bodies was more common in China when Marco Polo visited the land than it is now, though it is practised in the Honan Island section of Canton.

It is probable that not for some years will the punishments of flogging, neck cangue and stocks be removed from the revised Chinese code. These punishments, involving public “loss of face,” are abhorred by the Chinese, and while they are somewhat barbaric, they are effective deterrents of crime in China. They were both revived by the British government of Hongkong in dealing with native offenders during the turbulent times of the 1911–12 revolution, when it was found that hard labor, jail sentences and fines were laughed at by the immense Chinese population of the island colony. Greece, as long ago as 330 B. C., had borrowed the cangue from China, and Demosthenes, in the Oration On the Crown, can think of no way so effective to damage his accuser, Aeschines, than to mention that the latter’s father had to wear a zulon (cangue) as a punishment for thievery. Chien Shao Cheng, of the Justice Department, Peking, has visited American prisons and studied foreign penal methods.

An “Investigating and Arresting Department” is the name by which one of the Manchu courts at Canton went. It employed detectives, and the taotai (mayor) did not disguise the fact that the court resorted to “third degree” tortures. This was one of the many things which made followers for the reformers. Banishment cases are constantly coming up. The prisoner who will not or can not depart to another country or province is put in the stocks for four hours a day for a year, and the remainder of the day he spends at hard labor. Strangling in cages was in vogue at Canton in the last days of the Manchu reign, orders having come from Peking in September, 1911, that the coolie who attempted to assassinate Admiral Li should be suspended by the neck in a bottomless cage. In the yamen at Chingtu City stands a stone tablet bearing the word Sha (kill), erected by the Shansi marauder, Chang Hien Chung, who massacred the Szechuenese, who supported the native Ming emperors. The stone remained as a threat to be used by the Manchu mandarins on behalf of the Ta Ching dynasty. The Ministry of Justice under the Manchu régime ordered the viceroys and governors to prohibit foreigners from unnecessarily being present in court.

On account of the scarcity of foreign population, the Hongkong jury consists of seven and the Shanghai jury of five. There is constant argument between the Chinese press and the English press of the treaty ports in China on the subject of “mixed” courts in which foreigners sit. China is writing a reformed code in which Wu Ting Fang had a hand, and in which the new minister, Wong Chun Hui, is interested, and is pressing forward to the day when at least she will try all Chinese, including those who have injured foreigners in settlements. The newspaper argument will do good instead of harm. In 1899 Japan ceased to allow her citizens to be tried under foreign law, and even began to try foreigners under Japanese law. On the subject of trusts and directorial responsibility, I have seen in the Tientsin Ching Wei Pao a plea that employés be not fined and imprisoned for corporate faults, but that those who make the money (directors and shareholders) bear the responsibility. China is, and has always been, a frank sociological thinker.

A police system on the French gendarmerie plan has been put in vogue at Peking, and photographs are being generally used for identification. The Chinese have been very averse to photographs. The custom was broken down by Hongkong insisting for twenty years that emigrants should be photographed in duplicate so that their certificates might be identified. This gradually got the Chinese used to the custom, the returned emigrants spreading word that there was no ill-luck in the operation. The old-fashioned policeman who went his rounds beating a gong is becoming obsolete, and the new policeman, like our own, is supposed to bait himself with silence and skill, so as to be sugar in leading the burglar to the trap. Not long ago, however, I heard the old-fashioned Chinese Lukong beating his wooden drum as he went his rounds in the Portuguese colony of Macao, China. When the police recover lost goods, half only is returned to the owner, and half often goes to public charity which is organized in a guild. This is an old regulation in many parts of China. One of their wits said that the difference between a lower and a higher court is that one has the first and the other has the last “guess” at a case! The Chinese point out the delays in the execution of murderers as a most serious defect in justice, and the sentimentalism expressed by part of our press and pulpit as a most serious defect in our mentality. They show headings in our newspapers reading as follows: “Ministers Strive with Murderer Blank”; “Four Pastors Prepare Murderer Blank for Death,” etc. The laconic Chinese ask: “How long a time did the murderer give his victim to prepare for death.” The Chinese say that our levity in this terrific matter has run the average of murders in America up to the highest point in any nation, and that their average, with England’s, is the lowest because of swift and sure justice in those two countries.