As a result of this procedural latitude, the delegates to the National Council were either elected by the provincial assemblies or appointed by the military governors or came with no formal credentials whatever. All officials were ordered to continue in their posts. The revolutionists still exerted control over large military bodies in the South and held many of the provinces under their military leaders or juntas, so that Yüan proceeded cautiously in the creation of his first administration. He chose personalities acceptable to the revolutionists, but appointed no outstanding men of Sun's Tung Mêng Hui.
The parliamentary system looked well enough on the surface, but the basis of government had disappeared and the problem of mass democracy was more fundamental than anyone then imagined. Many groups in the country began organizing as parties; Yüan himself appeared to further the new way. But he had his own thoughts. He ordered his followers to enter the revolutionary units to undermine them, and simultaneously pushed for the establishment of a party of his own. There was on all sides a pathetic eagerness to live up to the formal expectations of the Western world. Tragically, this government was comic opera. Yüan began having skirmishes with the Council within a few months. The Republicans allowed the actual power to slip away from them while seeking to exercise the authority derived from a constitution which most citizens of the new Republic could not understand at all. In the summer of 1912 Sun Yat-sen's followers began to face a definitely hostile executive. The Council looked for redress but found that parliamentary tricks turned easily against it. The conservative members, supporting Yüan, walked out, and the Council lacked a quorum.
In August, 1912, the old revolutionary organization of Sun Yat-sen, founded by his coordination of earlier secret societies, was transformed into a regular party, the Kuomintang. The Kuomintang devoted themselves to the development of genuine party government; looking upon the Republic as their own creation, they were less ready for compromise than Chinese usage might have required. This did not improve the position of Sun's adherents. Yüan countered by forming the Progressive Party (Chinputang). While both sides lost control over the people, the party system was not even important enough to amount to carpetbagging. The only power in the country, as doctrine and administration melted away, was the military.[4]
Under the terms of the Provisional Constitution the Council was to yield to a bicameral National Assembly, for which it should provide by law within ten months. It was to be the duty of the National Assembly to prepare a permanent constitution (Articles 53 and 54). In the summer of 1912 the Council passed the required law, providing for the indirect election of a Senate and the direct election, by a limited electorate and under a very complicated electoral scheme,[5] of a House of Representatives. About 1/35 of 1 per cent of the total population voted. The Kuomintang came out far ahead of any other party, with a definite plurality but one insufficient to give it absolute control of the Assembly, which met early in 1913. Inexperienced even in the elementary requirements of parliamentary practice, let alone the conduct of government, the legislative branch was destined to be sheer ornament. The Kuomintang had relegated themselves to the occupancy of the least important branch of the government. The new parliament met amid great theatricals and placed heavy emphasis on form but was unable to make its will felt. The quarrels with the President over foreign loans, democratic policy and party rule were not settled by a showdown, but by resort to technicalities on both sides.
Yüan, however, had his finger on the trigger. March, 1913, was marked by the murder of Sung Chiao-jên, one of the ablest of Sun's followers. It was the first political act to indicate that Yüan was embarking upon a program of assassinations. Even upon this occasion, Sun Yat-sen held his hand, ready to let the new regime prove its character. Yüan used the waiting spell to replace Kuomintang men in the provincial armies and governments with his own adherents. In July, 1913, a second revolution broke out. It was a move of self-defense on the part of the Republicans, followers of Sun. The revolution was suppressed by Yüan.
Undisturbed, the work of constitution drafting proceeded apace in the North. Again, the trend, paradoxically, was toward French precedent. The paradox became patent when Yüan forced the advance adoption of the provisions relating to the presidency; on October 10, 1913, the Assembly elected him president of the Republic. This gave him full de jure status as head of the Chinese state in the eyes of the foreign powers. On November 4 Yüan suppressed the party which had created the Republic, the Kuomintang. This not only eliminated serious opposition to him but paralyzed the Assembly as well. It was left without a quorum and without a constitution under which a new Assembly could be elected—one of the most surprising constitutional cul-de-sacs in modern times. The dictatorship began.
[The Presidential Dictatorship of Yüan Shih-k'ai]
Not content with having immobilized the National Assembly, Yüan proceeded to kill it. He called together an extraconstitutional body of his supporters, known as the Political Council. It recommended two measures: the dissolution of the National Assembly and the calling of a Constitutional Council to frame a permanent constitution. On January 10, 1914, Yüan suspended the Assembly by presidential decree. With that day the Chinese Republic ceased to have a government consonant with its laws. Technically the whole Republic lapsed into unconstitutionality and illegality, until it was swept out of existence by the National Government in 1928.[6] Nevertheless, the military leaders had sufficient belief in the political value of twentieth century formalities to preserve the appearance of constitutional procedure. During the following months Yüan's Constitutional Council, which succeeded the Political Council and was, similarly, made up of persons favorable to his rule, labored over another constitutional document. On May 1, 1914, the document was promulgated under the name Constitutional Compact. The Compact changed the style of Yüan's rule from a nominal parliamentarism to presidential government, and legitimatized the dictatorship.
Two and a half years after the establishment of the Republic, the country had grown accustomed to the rule of Yüan. His government had the advantage of carrying on from the seat of the former imperial administration. Yüan's peculiar faculties of old-school diplomacy and his grasp of modern militarism stood him in good stead. The Republic was generally admitted to be not much of a democracy, but even democratic Westerners applauded the hard-headed competence of the "strong man of China." Government was more efficient and more despotic than it had been in the last days of the Manchu dynasty; resistance and defiance did not take open forms, except for the activities of Sun Yat-sen and his followers, who had reverted to revolutionary tactics since the outlawry of their party. Their agitation was spreading with rapidity. Yüan made the same mistake the Republicans had made before: he failed to sink the roots of government into the minds of the people and to provide a coherent explanation for his own existence. Underestimating the change which had taken place, Yüan sustained the illusion that the Chinese society in which he was reared still existed. While he failed to evolve a symbolism emphasizing the rise of a new order with him as the head, the realization that the old Empire was gone was allowed to spread slowly across China. There was no more throne; the child Emperor dwelt quietly in his museum.
In 1915 Yüan embarked upon one of the strangest exploits in modern Chinese politics. After prostituting the democratic formulas in accordance with which he professed to govern, he began to use the same formulas for a cautious approach to the creation of a new monarchy. He was partly encouraged by a memorandum presented to him on August 9, 1915, by his constitutional adviser, Professor Frank Goodnow. The memorandum suggested, as a sane political theorem, the desirability of establishing a constitutional monarchy if there was general demand for it rather than of maintaining the trappings of Republicanism without operative democracy. But Yüan's scheming met with strong opposition. Both sides to the ensuing monarchical controversy misconstrued Professor Goodnow's memorandum; Yüan's foes denounced it even as a recommendation for autocracy. Seen from a purely institutional point of view, there was no harm in the proposal. A disadvantage might lie in the fact that other military leaders would be jealous of Yüan's obtaining the throne on which so many of them speculated. If the state of mind of the Chinese and the new doctrines of the Republicans are considered, the proposal becomes less feasible. Having gone through the terrific mental and moral jolt of a fundamental shift of living forms, and having realized that the Empire was irrecoverable, substantial sections of the population were in no mood to allow an untried Republic to be superseded by an even less tried modern military monarchy.