Liang Chi Chao, the writer and translator, went first to the Straits Settlements and then to Kobe and Yokohama, Japan, where he edited the reform Chinese papers, the Hsi Pao (Western paper), and the Ming Pao, and flooded his country with translations of parts of the great books of British and American liberty. Liang, too, tolerated the retention of the Manchu monarchs for the time being. Doctor Macklin, an American missionary of Nanking had translated Henry George’s Progress and Poverty into Chinese, and this book was in the hands of the reformers, and particularly appreciated by Sun Yat Sen. Chang Yuan Chi’s Commercial Press of Honan Road, Shanghai, had, since 1898, been translating a million dollars a year of Western text-books for Chinese schools. The American Presbyterian Press at Suchow, and at 18 Peking Road, Shanghai, the American Episcopal Press, the presses of the other American and British missions and Bible societies, had for years been issuing telling books of truth in Chinese. Rich compradores of foreign houses at Hongkong, like Ma Ying Pui, presented $1,000 to patriotic lecturing societies like the “Wan Yung.” Hæmon’s argument with his father, King Creon, in Sophocles’ Antigone, brilliantly denouncing absolute rule as only fitted for the monarch of a desert, was recited by the foreign-trained students.
Yuan Shih Kai was deposed by the regent, Prince Chun, in 1909, but from his exile at Chang Te in Honan province, he kept in dignified touch with the formation of the new forces of opinion and arms, and with his backers, the northern foreigners. Yuan is a mighty man, quite on the style of Li Hung Chang, his preceptor, whom we of the West knew so well. At Tientsin, the foreigners assisted Yuan, previous to 1909, with instruction in Occidental organization, and the best troops of the empire, as well as the best schools, and almost the best mills, were organized by Yuan. The reformers who dare the most, however, look upon Yuan by his past, as a temporizer, opportunist and dictator largely under foreign influence; too much Occidentalized, and out of touch with the spirit of “China for the Chinese”, and the “Sia Hwei” (reform associations). They look upon him as, in the past, a Manchuized Chinese who fears to work for himself as a republican, but must have an employer like a Manchu emperor or some other head; great as a Richelieu is great, but not as a Washington is great. They say that while he is thorough of mind, he is not yet vehemently sincere in heart. They fear that Yuan, if left to himself, would concede too much to foreign concession seekers. They bitterly recall that but for Yuan, the reformers of 1897–8 would have swept the kingdom peacefully. Yuan is the most popular Chinese with foreigners at Peking, Tientsin, Chifu, Newchwang, Tsingtau and other ports of the north. He is not so much in touch with the heart of the reform spirit in Western, Central or Southern China, nor with the foreigners of the great educational treaty ports of those sections, and of the brilliant British colony of Hongkong in South China, which, with British and American Shanghai, has done most for a reformed China. Yuan’s only experience outside of China proper was when as a youth he served twelve years with the army in Korea. Yuan’s temperament is cold. A noted southern statesman, referring to him, said: “What can you expect of a man who is so cold that he has to carry three braziers up his sleeve?” In the Korean campaign of 1884 against Japan, Yuan is said to have objected to Red Cross operations, jesting that the surgeons didn’t need to take the trouble, for “while they had remade the man, they hadn’t remade the soldier”. Yuan was a ruthless decapitator in that and other campaigns. However, “to err is human, and to forgive, divine”, and if Yuan serves a united republican China with full heart in the future, the mistakes of the past will be forgotten in the joys of the glorious deeds that are possible.
Doctor Sun Yat Sen (let us Latinize him as Sunyacius) is a Hongkong product, and has been a revolutionist and a republican from the beginning. As a boy he was fed on thrilling stories of the Taiping rebellion by his uncle, who had served as an officer in that rebellion. He was born at Fatshan, seven miles west of Canton, in 1866. From 1884–87 he was assisted by Doctor Kerr, of the Anglo-American Mission, Canton, in whose office he studied medicine and English. He studied medicine and surgery under Doctor Cantlie at Hongkong, of which colony he became a citizen (that is, a British citizen), though of course, he has now returned to his Chinese citizenship. Doctor Cantlie was then teaching in the Hongkong School of Medicine, which is now a part of the Hongkong University. In 1892 Sun became the first Chinese practising physician at Macao, and met with great opposition from the Portuguese doctors, who, in 1894, drove him to Canton. His father was a Chinese Christian evangelist, a Congregationalist (London Mission) by denomination, and Sunyacius looks upon the study of the Christian Bible as the greatest necessity in China’s education. Even two years before Kang’s work at Peking, Doctor Sunyacius, in 1895, smuggled arms into Canton, got his revolutionary forces at work, and received his first baptism of fire, in which he showed, as on subsequent occasions, absolute fearlessness regarding his life. Sunyacius also lived for a while with his brother and sympathizers in Honolulu, and his studies in Hawaii and in America committed him to the republican form of government. Owing to the Swatow men not meeting the Hongkong men at Canton, Sunyacius’ plans collapsed in 1895. By the advice of Mr. Dennis, a prominent solicitor of Hongkong, Sunyacius fled to Kobe, Japan; to Honolulu and to San Francisco. This incisive, good-looking little man of about five feet five inches in height, who dresses and looks like an American or a Briton, has for years been traveling incognito in America, England and Japan, organizing drill, educational and contributing corps of the “Kao Lao Hwei” (reform associations), the money and men going to Canton, Shanghai and Wuchang, where the main revolution broke out on that memorable day, October 10, 1911. General Hwang Hing was Sunyacius’ representative in China in receiving this aid. All of Sunyacius’ helpers proved loyal to their trust in handling this money, except one, and of him Sunyacius himself writes: “He will meet with his due reward.”
Sunyacius’ head carried a price (the modern blacklist) and only his insistence on British citizenship saved him from being kidnapped as a lunatic (no less) by the yellow and white detectives of the Manchus, to have his ankles crushed under the hammer and his body cut into a thousand pieces (lin chee) slowly at Peking. He was seized on Portland Street in London, in 1896, and hurried to the Chinese Legation. Sunyacius’ rescue came about in this dramatic way: His Hongkong teacher, Doctor Cantlie, was then practising in London. Sunyacius gave to a British secretary in the Chinese Legation a note addressed to Doctor Cantlie, to whom it was fortunately delivered in the British spirit of fair play and through the pleas of a woman, the Briton’s wife counseling her husband to deliver the letter in “noble scorn of consequence”. The heroic Doctor Cantlie at once took it to Lord Salisbury and the British Foreign Office, which intervened, surrounding the Chinese Legation with officers (a new siege of Peking). Sunyacius was reluctantly given his freedom by the Manchuized Chinese. Only for Britain, therefore, Sunyacius would never have lived to strike the tocsin of a republican revolution. But then, Britain has been the mother and teacher of reformers since Cromwell’s day.
Sunyacius’ headquarters have been at British Singapore and at Hongkong, but he is as well known at San Francisco, Chicago, New York, London, Vancouver and Yokohama. He has walked into dormitories of Columbia College, New York, and talked revolution and reform with some of the students under the unconscious eye of so prominent a conservative as President Butler. One of his student protégés was Wellington Koo, now the Chinese secretary to Yuan Shih Kai. Sunyacius is a thorough-going scholar, propagandist, organizer and republican, like the book he carried, a man of “Progress and Poverty”. The world’s great bankers, especially two London firms long connected with Chinese progress, knew him, his disguises as a salesman, etc., and his careful plans of government and finance, and he has not been timid in America, or in London, Hongkong and the Straits Settlements in asking for loans for his propaganda and revolution. He has handled a million dollars honestly, and lived most frugally. The greatest luxury he ever allowed himself was a “Prince Albert” coat and a rose-bouttonière, but that was so that he might appear acceptably before an audience of Occidentals! When in Singapore, Doctor Sun had his picture taken in white ducks and a topey hat, so that he is a modern in tonsorial as well as other matters! “This conference must be secret and our correspondence must be anonymous, and upon receipt, burned,” said Sun to the bankers. “Why?” they asked. “Because I am shadowed night and day. Look across the way when I suddenly lift the curtain.” He raised the curtain, and the bankers saw two “sleuths” in the cowardly shadow, one of them a Chinese, lurking in a recess of a money capital of the Occident, many thousand miles from the Manchu cabal in Peking, who had Oriental and Occidental detective agencies in their blacklisting pay.
Dr. Sun is a brilliant and enthusiastic speaker in Chinese and in English. His speeches to the Chinese often extend into hours. His small copper-plate handwriting in English is better than his Chinese chirography. He is a polished writer, having published in 1904 in London a book on “The Chinese Question”. The Manchus have kept Doctor Sun out of China, and he is therefore not yet thoroughly known to the Hupeh and Hunan province guilds, who fired the first successful shot, but he is the pick of the southern and the alien Chinese, who are the best educated of their race, and have largely financed reform: the Chinese of Canton, Singapore, Penang, noble Hongkong, Macao, America, England, Japan, Australia, and brilliant Shanghai. He has never held office under the Manchus at home or abroad, and is therefore not well known to foreigners in the salons of diplomats, in the capitals of the Caucasic race, or to the masses of the Chinese in the north and west provinces, but he is a coming man, and perhaps the most consistent and steady of the reformers, as he is certainly the most promising, intellectual and coolly daring. Sun Yat Sen’s name may some day be Latinized into Sunyacius, just as Kung Fut Tse’s name became popular as Confucius. Why not also Latinize Yuan Shih Kai’s name into the more popular Yuanshius? The following incident will throw a light on Sun’s character: On February 22nd his elder brother, Sun Mei, a man ordinary in equipment, was almost elected governor of the great province of Kwangtung as a popular tribute to Sun Yat Sen. The latter wired from Nanking, disapproving of the choice for the province’s good, and urging “brother Mei” to confine himself to business, for which he was more fitted. Such frankness in family relations when public preferment is at stake, is scarcely common.
Wu Ting Fang, a Cantonese trained at Hongkong, London and Washington, blossomed out suddenly at Shanghai in November, 1911, as foreign minister of the provisional Chinese republican government of the fourteen central, eastern and southern rebel provinces. The western world stopped its breath in tremendous astonishment. Wu! the brilliant, fashionable and evasive Chinese minister at Washington, who would put you off on politics to discuss vegetarianism, a rebel! He was secretive beyond parallel, and had never talked revolution. The writer tried to get him to talk reform in 1909 in connection with the reform prophecies in his book, The Chinese, and though Wu had then fully decided on the part he would take in the coming revolution, he would only repeat what the writer said, and would express absolutely no opinion of his own. I have known writers who have flayed him for this abrupt evasion, calling him a “rice Christian” of yore, a temporizer, etc., but I admire him for his calmness, fixed resolves, and patience in waiting for the prodigious hour to strike. Wu knew what was coming, and was heartily, though secretly, in favor of it. He was the first of the rebels to insist on foreign acknowledgment of the rebel government, and he formulated the most brilliant move of the revolution—the announcement that if foreigners advanced money to the imperialists, and the republicans won, the latter would repudiate such loans. This really won the revolution, for numbers of the foreign syndicates, especially the Russian, were at first heartily in favor of the Manchu status quo. Wu has already codified the reform and penal laws of China, and is prepared to enter upon that difficult question, extraterritoriality. Watch Wu; he is not afraid to take the side of “China for the Chinese”, although he is the most polished in western culture of all Chinese officials. He aims to interpret the East to the West. Wu risked vast preferment, and therefore he is a more sincere man than doughty Yuan, and he will grow in power with the masses of the Chinese nation. His brother-in-law is the exceedingly able Doctor Ho Kai, Commander of the Order of Michael and George, the Chinese member of the Legislative Council of the royal colony of Hongkong Island, a thorough legislator, a lovable and brilliant man. Wu is a member of a worthy Canton family. He is a graduate of the Middle Temple, London; has practised before the Hongkong bar; and he served Li Hung Chang for many years as legal adviser at Tientsin and Peking, in drawing up foreign treaties, etc.
There were other reformers in China and abroad at work from 1898 to 1911, although the western press gave no attention to the really astonishing matter. The bitter Hunanese republican rebel, the irrepressible Hwang Hing, was also exiled by the empress dowager, Tse Hsi, in 1898. He fled to Japan, with a price on his head also, and could hardly be restrained from calling the psychic moment for a revolution into immediate declaration. He was a fast organizer, and being nearer the ground, was in close enough touch with the Chinese of the central provinces to be at Wuchang in October, 1911, shortly after the first blow was struck. He had much to do with the gentry of the Hupeh and Hunan province guilds, who largely financed and precipitated the main revolution. Hwang is considered by the extremists of his party as presidential timber. He is a fervent talker, and like Sun, the last man in the world to be an opportunist, which is the great Yuan’s one fault in the minds of many of the Chinese people. Hwang Hing is the one reformer who has some Japanese sympathies, on account of his education in Japan. He was born at Changsha in Hunan, where Yale College has a branch.
In America the editors of the Chung Sai Yat Po, the Chinese World, and Free Press in San Francisco; the Chinese Students’ Club in New York (225 East Thirty-first Street), which publishes a journal, and the Chinese Reform News in New York, often visited by Sun Yat Sen’s American representative, Wong Man Su, ably took up the propaganda, which was carried on in their own way by a thousand newspapers which arose throughout China from 1906 onward, first in the treaty ports, and later in Chinese cities, especially Canton, Hankau and Shanghai. Much reference was made to the fact that while China, the largest Oriental country, was without a real parliament, other Oriental countries had successfully overthrown despotism and oligarchism, and had popular assemblies, which granted some representation in return for the privilege of taxation. Japan had a Diet; even black Russia had a Duma; the Filipinos had an Assembly; Turkey had an Assembly; little Persia had a representative Mejliss; native members had at last been admitted into the Viceroy’s Council in India; and Hongkong, with its 500,000 Chinese had long had two Chinese as brilliant members of the Legislative Council.
Viceroy Seu Ki Yu’s essay of 1866, praising Washington and republicanism as ideal, was reissued and distributed, and had great influence. By 1909 and 1910 the reformers had compelled the Manchus to heed the howling of the wind, and see the shadow of a cloud, at least as big as a man’s hand, on the horizon of internal politics. The dowager empress, Tse Hsi, and later, Prince Ching, and the regent, Prince Chun—all Manchus—granted provincial and national assemblies; but they were called and considered only “Tsecheng Yuan” (advice boards), and not legislative bodies in the free and full sense of the word. The pensions of the Manchus and bannermen in the various Chinese cities were decreased, and land was offered them so that they might enter the industrial body. Many Manchus rebelled, as at Chingtu City in September, 1911. Argument increased. The cloud on the horizon grew larger. Objection was made to the court’s monopoly of the rich copper mines of Yunnan province, and complaint was reiterated that while the southern provinces mainly supported the imperial authority in taxes paid, these provinces were the least consulted, and the weakest in representation in any governmental consultations that were held at Peking. The government developed the armies and schools of the three northern provinces of Pechili, Shangtung and Shansi with taxes collected mainly in the southern provinces, where the government neglected schools, police and army divisions. It was hard to get the Stuart kings to call Parliaments, and when at a belated date they did, complaint was louder than ever, for there was something to complain of, and at last a constitutional place to complain in.