5. Concessions contracted to date to be binding.
Desperate fighting took place, and had the rebels been sufficiently supplied with money and arms, the republic would have been declared at Canton in April instead of at Wuchang and Nanking in November. The United States gunboat Wilmington and British gunboats were rushed to Shameen Island, Canton, to protect foreigners. Admiral Li, who was killed in the October revolution, was barely able to conquer this April revolution in Kwangtung and Fukien provinces. For centuries the Chinese women would not associate with the Manchus, whom they called “tent women”. All through Turkestan the Chinese walled off their section of the city from the Mongolian settlements, though after the conquest the Manchu troops displaced the Chinese.
Nearly all the missions were informed by students and friends many months previous to the revolution that serious and continued disturbances would occur. The Chinese saw that individualism had arisen in America and England and was battling with the privileged. Individualism arose at last in China and resented in this rebellion the quietism taught by the superstition of Taoism, the resignation of Buddhism and the obedience of Confucianism. “I am not a clan; I am a man,” said the ambitious Chinese as he saw the new ray of hope. American diplomacy was not altogether uninformed or unprepared. The American fleet was made the largest foreign fleet in Chinese waters in the first month of the revolution, Admiral Murdock having the cruisers Saratoga (the converted New York of Spanish War fame), Albany, New Orleans, Wilmington; the gunboats Helena, El Cano, Villalobos, Samar; the monitor Monterey; and the destroyers Barry and Decatur.
As far back as June 3, 1910, a year and four months before the revolution, the Shanghai News printed the following article: “All the legations and consuls have received anonymous letters from friendly revolutionaries in Shanghai containing the warning that an extensive anti-dynastic uprising is imminent. If they do not assist the Manchus, foreigners are not to be harmed.” In August, 1911, a rebellion broke out at Sining, in far western Kansu province. The stores were raided for every bolt of foreign cotton to make uniforms. A boy of fifteen was named leader and he was given the significantly fanciful name of “Savior of his country” (Chiu Shih Wang). Rich men cornered the rice supply in the flooded Yangtze valley, and food riots broke out all along the river in August, 1911. On August 23, 1911, rebels boarded a Chinese gunboat on the romantic Si Kiang (West River) near Canton, shooting the commander and seizing the arms and ammunition. On September first the Navy Department strengthened the patrol of Kwangtung province waters so as to stop the smuggling of arms, and the army board required miners to get permits to import dynamite, as they feared that the “anarchists” were importing the explosive. The awful floods and famines of 1910–11 in the basins of the Yangtze River, the Hwei River and Grand Canal had created much criticism of the government, which failed to alleviate suffering; and the famine-stricken were willing to fight, because an army has a commissariat, at least. “Every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented, escaped to the cave of Adullam.” Newspapers, such as the oldest reform journal, the Shen Pao, of Shanghai, related horrible illegal tortures of the “third degree” used by Manchuized officials, which I have quoted in the chapter on “Legal Practise.”
Tin was largely financing the propaganda, the 400,000 Chinese tin merchants and miners of Singapore and Penang in the Straits Settlements being the largest contributors. Following them came the 100,000 American Chinese and the 50,000 Australian Chinese. Even in 1898, Li Hung Chang was known to declare, at Canton, that it was not impossible that the spread of the proposed new education of the foreigners would overturn the Manchu dynasty, of which he, a Chinese from Hofei, in Nganhwei province, had been the strongest prop among the viceroys for forty-five years. Superstition was not inactive. Halley’s comet flared in the sky. It had shone when Cæsar fell; when Jerusalem fell; when Italy fell before Attila; when English Harold fell before William the Conqueror; when Rome fell in England; when Quebec fell before Wolfe; and now its awful flame must surely prophesy the fall of the Manchu dynasty. Omens were recited that red snow (snow and loess) had fallen in Honan province, and that the Hangchow tidal bore had risen twenty feet, broke over the bank and poured water into the first gallery of the Haining pagoda. This always meant the fall of the dynasty, for had it not happened on the night the beloved Mings fell, and when the scholarly Sungs fell?
As with civil servants in some other countries, the Manchuized civil service (mandarins) acted as though they were the governors and not the servants of the people by allotting to themselves high salaries and peculations. The year before the revolution the land tax yielded about $150,000,000. Only $30,000,000 reached the government exchequer. The Chinese held the Manchus responsible for this criminal neglect of audit, for at least $100,000,000 should have reached the imperial and provincial exchequers. That would have allowed $50,000,000 for the expected peculation of that kind of office holders who believe that “public office is a private graft”. In September, 1911, the month preceding the great revolution, the Chi Feng Po, a native paper of Peking, reported that all wages were in arrears and that even the tea coolies had humorously pasted an anonymous sheet on the imperial controller’s door: “Not even a shadow of our wages yet; WHY! WHY!” Taxes were increased on long-suffering Kwangtung province in the south, the brick kilns of Kochau, the silk sheds of Namhoi, the tea houses, and even the temple keepers being assessed “all the taxed would bear”. I shall instance a representative revolt. On September 6, 1911, the bonze at Shek Lung, near Canton, organized a revolt among the worshipers at his temple. The mob demolished the municipal yamen, the police station, the government distilleries, abattoir and fish market. As far back as 1898 the emperor, Kwang Hsu, by edict declared that the lottery at Canton should pay one-third of the upkeep of the far-away Peking University. I have related in the chapter on “Chinese Daily Life” the incident of a unique statue of a kneeling figure erected in the Kwan clan temple at San Wui, near Canton, in August, 1911, which is whipped by the worshipers to commemorate the defection of a member to the government’s railway and tax program. There was always ill feeling between Peking and Kwangtung provinces, the Manchu and Manchuized viceroys joking at Peking when they were ordered to assume charge at the yamen at Canton: “Well, I’m off to boss Miaotszes (barbarians),” which the refined and commercial Cantonese certainly were not. This superciliousness was deeply resented.
Repeated complaint had been made that an unrepresentative Manchu government gave away concessions right and left to foreigners, and that when these concessions were recalled or bought out, owing to outraged patriotic feeling in the southern and central provinces, the foreigner in instances charged immense sums for good will and franchise in addition to his outlay and interest. I shall not recite instances, as it is the system that I am denouncing, not the persons. The Chinese rightly said, if we look at the matter with his eyes, that he was not going to pay vast sums for the retrocession of his own franchise, which was in some instances coerced from, or wheedled out of, an effete, governing, unrepresentative clique, the members of which never consulted the provinces that were concerned. “Taxation without representation” again. It was not like the repudiation of the bonds of the southern states, for no money had been paid. “Compensation” and “indemnity” are two words the Chinese have learned to hate, and some day they mean to build an immense navy and equip a large army to interpret these words in the way the Occident interprets them, when they are synonymous with injustice and “grab”. Bitter complaint has continually been made since 1898 that Germany monopolized the mining and railway franchises of the rich province of Shangtung.
On the subject of railways, concessions, etc., the following remarks will be recalled in the American General J. H. Wilson’s book, China (1887): “The Chinese will build railroads, open mines, etc., whenever they can be shown that this can be done with their own money, obtained at first by private subscription, and by their own labor, under the direction of foreign experts who will treat them fairly and honestly. They will not for the present grant concessions or subsidies to foreigners. They will not even take money from any syndicate by mortgage.” Complaint was also made that the Ming dynasty, 268 years ago, left as a heritage to the Manchu dynasty, a land full of public works, bridges, roads, temples, pagodas, canals, and that while the Manchu collected large taxes, he seldom or never repaired a temple, canal or road, so that China is now desolate. Objection was also made that the government shipyards, like the Kiangnan, at Shanghai, were building luxurious ocean steam yachts for Prince Tsui and others of the imperial clan, an expense which the nation could not afford.
Two years before the famous revolution of October 10, 1911, the author, in his book, The Chinese, picked out five men as the leaders of changing China: Sun Yat Sen, as the anti-Manchu rebel, who would take up arms in the endeavor to establish a republic; Kang Yu Wei, who would go almost as far in reform, but would retain the Manchu dynasty under a strict constitutional monarchy; Liang Chi Chao, as the translator of reform books and a probable secretary of a reformed state; Wu Ting Fang, as a secret reformer at heart, “who would bear sympathetic watching”, and Yuan Shih Kai, to a degree an Occidentalized opportunist of great ability, who was most favored by the Peking and Tientsin foreigners, though distrusted by the Chinese and foreigners in the south and Yangtze valley of China. The revolution was in full sway by November, 1911, with Sun Yat Sen named as probable president of a Chinese republic (Republic of Han); Kang in the exact place prophesied; Liang as secretary of justice of Yuan’s first trial cabinet of a constitutional monarchy; Wu Ting Fang as foreign minister of a provisional republic at Shanghai; and Yuan called from his two years’ exile at Chang Te in Honan province to be the first minister of the reformed constitutional monarchy.
This most wonderful of revolutions seemed to break as a bolt from a clear sky on October 10, 1911, at Wuchang on the Yangtze River, in the center of the land, under the very guns of the United States gunboats Helena and Villalobos which were steaming by. It was, as I have attempted to show, rather a carefully planned matter, the propaganda going on abroad and at home under bands and leaders, all of whose views did not stop at the same place, but whose opinions had one source in patriotic reform. Kang, the oldest and first of the reformers, commenced in 1897 by winning with his book, Japan’s Reform, the emotional Manchu emperor, Kwang Hsu. But when the emperor fell in 1898 before the reactionary dowager, Tse Hsi, Kang, the Cantonese with a Hongkong education, was driven to British Singapore and Penang, from which places he has planned his travels and propaganda of the “Pao Huang Hwei” (Empire Reform Association), which contemplated a revolution of reform, but the retention of the Manchu dynasty as constitutional monarchs for the time being. This association was quite different from the Kao-lao-hwei, “Ko Ming” and “Sia Hwei” (reform associations) of Sun Yat Sen, which aimed at a republic. In other words Kang was a Taft “standpatter” medium reformer, and Sun a thorough-going advanced reformer of the Roosevelt type. Kang’s associations grew up in China, America and England, and Kang visited them, recommending the drilling of companies to attack the troops of the reactionary literati of the Hanlin academy.