China Revolutionized - John Stuart Thomson

The heart of religious China, the only reservation made by the abdicating Manchu emperor; the chaste, blue-roofed Temple of Heaven, Peking. The beautiful proportions of this building have been widely praised by foreigners. The three galleries are of marble.

Amid all the disturbance, another cloud, the size of a man’s hand, loomed up on the horizon. The Marquis Chu Cheng Yu, a lineal descendant of the Chinese Ming kings, began to canvass the rioting army for adherents. Two hundred American marines were rushed from Shanghai to Tientsin on the collier Abarenda, and the American fleet left the southern ports for Taku. The transport Warren sailed from Manila with another battalion of the Fifteenth Infantry and marines. The four-nation bankers, with the approval of six powers, came to Yuan’s help with $1,000,000 loans on nine months’ warrants, to aid him in putting down mobbing and mutiny by paying off soldiers, who, however, used the money as fuel for more mutiny. It was decided to loan the dual republican governments at Peking and Nanking about $5,000,000 a month. Some of the old-style troops were more loyal to Yuan than were the notorious Third Division at Peking, the Sixth Division at Paoting, in Pechili province, the Second Division in Honan, and the Fifth Division, in Shangtung province, which were loyal to no cause or person. At the same time the preliminary contract of February twenty-first, by which the Russo-Asiatic Bank independently was to advance Sun and the Nanking republican organization $7,000,000, was canceled, and the four banking powers advanced Sun, at Nanking, $1,500,000 to pay off Cantonese troops and hire police. The rebellion of Yuan’s troops made many confess that the southern republicans had probably made a mistake in not following Chang the Second’s imperial forces of northern troops north in January, 1912, and giving the northern army several sound thrashings until the organization was broken up.

On March 9, 1912, the irreconcilable imperial governor of Shansi and Shensi provinces, General Sheng Yun, a Mongol by blood, still had 15,000 troops (many of them Mohammedans) fomenting Manchu propaganda and slaying everywhere, while General Yin Tchang, at Japanese Dalny, Governor Chao Ehr Hsun, at Mukden, and Prince Su, at Jehol and Kalgan, were doing the same thing. What a confused state of affairs existed in the mutinous army, of the north, which was divided into five corps. General Sheng’s Mohammedans were setting Shansi and Shensi provinces on fire. The corps of Imperial Guards and Manchu divisions at Peking were at heart of course for the deposed Manchu dynasty. The Mongol divisions in northern Pechili looted and decapitated and laughed at President Yuan’s orders. The old-style turbaned troops of Yuan’s were loyal one day and disloyal another, and the same thing was true of divisions of territorial Shangtung, Pechili and Honan troops of Yuan’s modern army. In the southern provinces the republicans had a little more cohesion in the five armies of their recruited corps and their two territorial armies. In Yunnan province an entirely isolated army was marking time and had done nothing for either southern or northern cause of late. Oh! for a strong hand to weave and hold all these cords in one cable of some strength.

On March 10th, amid the crashing of walls and institutions, a pathetic but inspiring scene occurred in the modern Wai Wu Pu (Foreign Office) at Peking. Yuan Shih Kai, dressed in military uniform, was formally inaugurated provisional president of the republic of China, in the presence of the Nanking assembly delegates, military and naval officers, provincial envoys, and many foreigners. Of course, legation staffs and missionary bodies did not attend officially. Yuan read a declaration promising progress, to observe the constitution, and retire when the National Assembly appointed a permanent president for the decided term, if he himself was not chosen. Two yellow robed Lamas from the Buddhist temple stepped up, presented Yuan with two honorary scarfs and called him, in Pekingese, “Da Dsoong Toong” (in Cantonese, Ta Tsung Tung),—the great president. It was a businesslike military scene, there being very little of Oriental display or the gorgeous robes of old. Tang Shao Yi was named premier. President Yuan signalized his assumption of office by pardoning all prisoners, except murderers and robbers, remitting all overdue land taxes and announcing that for the present the old laws would stand, except where they were obviously contrary to the spirit of republicanism.

The new constitution provided that the supreme power was in the hands of the National Assembly; that all acts of the president required the approval of the assembly, that the cabinet was answerable to the assembly; and that the assembly was to elect the president and vice-president, and have power to pass laws over the executive veto. This was vastly different from Japan’s stultified parliamentarism, and was a union of the American system of the lower house being supreme, and of the British executive efficiency obtainable from a small cabinet. Doctor Sun promised to turn over the great seal of his office. Disorder ruled throughout the armed north, where a republic was unpopular with the mercenary troops. Republican flags were torn down wherever the merchants of Peking put them up. The rebelling troops decapitated the crowd by thousands at Peking, Tientsin, Kalgan, Paoting, and throughout Shansi, Shensi and Pechili provinces. So many heads and bodies lay on the street that the donkeys and mules refused to pass the heaps. Yuan himself had to add the head of the headtaker to the pile. He sent the tall, venerable General Chiang Kwei Tai with old-style turbaned Nganhwei troops, who mowed off heads right and left through the streets of old Peking. The famous Tongkwan pass, at the heel of the Yellow River, commanding Shensi and Honan provinces, was seized by the reactionary troops of General Sheng Yun, who compelled the merchant guilds to pay blackmail or have their stores looted. Clearly Pechili province, with its hosts of irreconcilable mercenary troops, was the rock on which the ship of republicanism was now stranded. Yuan had to change his body-guard from day to day, one day old-style troops, another day Manchu troops, and again the champion looters of the Third Division, but the real hand which afforded what little steadiness there was, was the magnificent body of foreign troops which amounted to 3,000 picked men.

On March 12th, Provincial President Wu Hon Man and Governor Chan Kwang Ming, at Canton, were harassed by the notorious pirate chief, Luk, who was remarkably successful. Luk, through the mutiny of the soldiers, gained the historic Bogue, Yuchu, Whampoa and Fumen forts, and the arsenal and admiralty buildings. All the foreign navies, led by the United States gunboat Wilmington and the British fleet under Commander Eyres, anchored off Shameen Island, cleared for action, and the passenger steamers, on which probably every world tourist has probably been, the Fatshan and Honan, sailed from Canton for Hongkong with two thousand passengers each. The famous old shallow draft British gunboat Moorhen, the hero of a thousand pirate chases in intricate Kwangtung province waters, had her awnings and spars torn by bullets during the night, as she protected the electric station, so that the pirates could not strike Canton into midnight, and in the dark massacre along the narrow streets, the maloos and the bund. Eight hundred British and French troops patrolled the little foreign island of Shameen.

Before the days of direct primary nominations in America we suffered from the machine system, which advanced the incompetent and debarred the eminent and efficient from service in the state. A saloon-keeper who brought 2,000 votes would demand, for instance, the position of secretary of state. “But you’re not fitted for it; you’re a hoodlum.” The ward-heeler would answer: “I must have it; I have to pay my 2,000 brigands the ‘graft’ which we claim is ours; otherwise, remember our revenge next election.” One Shek Kam Chuen, a young stone-cutter and human hair hawker of Canton, was very successful in smuggling arms for the revolution, and on the declaration of independence, he led a following of 2,000 nondescript men, who did effective work in fighting. They were men who loved a fight more than liberty, not liberty more than life. When the republic was victorious and his troops, after being paid, were disbanded, Shek was unsatisfied. He, a hawker, wanted high office, when even President Sun turned his brother down from politics to business in Canton because he was not eminent for political ability. Shek made demands for his men that the state could not consistently grant. He smuggled arms to take up piracy in reprisal on the harassed state. The way the governor of Canton treated Shek and his legal adviser, Chang Han Hing, was, under the constitutional pressure of public opinion, to capture them at their headquarters, and under military law, or the application of the popular “recall”, have them both shot, to the great rejoicing of good citizens and taxpayers. That ended one instance of heelerism, bossism, packed primary, professional office holding, “public office a private graft”, piracy, or whatever you like to call it, in modern China! The “Popular Recall” was a success, despite the cynicism of the standpatters in Canton, and one of those standpatters was Shek’s lawyer, Chang, who shared his client’s fate, much to his disgusted surprise. I am sorry William Dean Howells was not in Canton at that time to write A Modern Instance!

General Wu Sum, with 2,000 republican provincial troops, left Canton for Swatow to put down pirates operating around that noted old city, and the famous General Ling, and General Ho came down from Nanking to assist. On March 14th the irreconcilable “Boxer” Manchu leader, Prince Tuan, exiled in Kansu province, raised the standard of revolt, with his son Ku Kwei, as a pretender to the throne. He had not the moral support of all of the imperial clan, because he had in 1900 plotted to displace Prince Chun’s emperor son, “Pu Yi”. Tuan is a shrewd, able and persistent leader. If he had not been a reactionary in 1900, he might have preserved to the Manchus a longer lease of power.

The battles of the international financiers still went on at Peking, Premier Tang Shao Yi’s action in raising $5,000,000 from a Russian-Belgian syndicate on the Chinese-built Peking-Kalgan railway, incensing the international group. Tang gave a laconic interview, merely saying: “China need not necessarily put herself forever in the hands of four nations; we can deal with independents where we are able to find any. The loan was first offered to American bankers, but those American bankers who are now in the Far East would not act independently of the four nations.” Russian, Japanese and Belgian bankers seemed to fall in with Russia’s plans, as in 1896, to put China under a financial thraldom. Russia did not want a loan given to China for her army, as Russia and Japan both desire a weak army in China. The four-nation bankers now offered China $300,000,000, of which $60,000,000 was to be for army purposes. If Japan joins in this loan, it will be because she does not want to be shut out of a share in controlling China’s finances, and an apportionment of the concessions. The National Review of Shanghai published at this time a caricature, showing Russia pushing old China, and “Foreign Grafter” pushing New China, out of the way, while North China, a clam, had shut its shell on the beak of South China, a heron. The Chinese fable of the bird and the shellfish was quoted as follows: “A bird attacked an open shellfish on the beach; but the shellfish closed his shell with a snap, and the bird was caught. Both were then helpless, and fell an easy prey to some covetous fishermen.” Nearly all the Japanese papers, including the influential Tokio Nichi and Jiji, and the Osaka Mainichi, came out attacking Yuan, and endeavoring to stir up differences between North and South China. If Japan could prove that Chinese conditions were unstable, there evidently would be more plausibility for Japan’s possible intervention in Manchuria! On March 16th, Premier Tang Shao Yi announced a provisional northern cabinet as follows, until the National Assembly of seven delegates to a province could meet. None of the appointees is a Manchu.