If you could avoid the suburbs of mud huts and walled compounds, and step directly down from an airship on the broad piazza of the Astor House at Tientsin (no treaty port is complete without its Astor House), you might also imagine yourself in a thriving English town. Set about this piazza are round tables, in bowers of potted plants, where sit Britishers, Germans, and Americans, with a gay sprinkling of soldiery. Across the street there is a green little park, where plump British babies are wheeled about and children romp among the shrubbery, and where the Sikh band plays on Sundays. There is nothing, unless it be the group of rickshaw coolies at the curb, or the fat Chinese policeman in the roadway, to recall China to the mind.
Yet Tientsin dominates all Northern China much as Shanghai dominates the mighty valley of the Yangtse. The railways and waterways (including the Grand Canal) all lead to Tientsin. It is Peking’s seaport. The viceroy of the Northern Provinces makes it his seat of government. The chief point of contact between these Northern Provinces and Western civilization, it is through Tientsin that the new ideas which are stirring the sluggish Chinese mind to new desires and to a new purpose filter into one hundred million Mongoloid heads.
The foreign settlement is simply a polyglot cluster of nationalities, each with its “concession” or allotment of land wrung from a browbeaten empire, each with its separate municipal government ruled by its own consul-general, and the whole combined, for purposes of defense and aggression, into a loosely knit city of seven or eight thousand whites under the general direction of a dozen consulates. The British have their polo, golf, and racing grounds; the French have their wealthy church orders and their Parisian moving pictures; the Germans have their beer halls and delicatessen shops. The Japanese, the Russians, the Italians, the Austrians, all the powers, in fact, excepting the United States—which holds no land in China—contribute their lesser shares to the colour and the activity of this extraordinary place. And only a mile or two away, further up the crooked river, lies the huge, sprawling Chinese city, where nine hundred and fifty thousand blue-clad celestials—nearly a round million of them—ceaselessly watch the squabbling groups of foreigners, and by means of newspapers, travelling merchants, and the thousand and one other instruments for the spreading of gossip, tell all Northern China what they see.
Tientsin, then, like Shanghai, is a potent, an electric, force in its influence on China. Whatever the Chinese are to become in their struggle towards the light of day will be in some measure due to the example set by these two cities, the only samples of Western civilization which the Chinaman can scrutinize at close range. The missionary tells him of the God of the Western peoples, and of how His Spirit regenerates humankind; the Chinaman listens stolidly, and then turns to look at the samples of regenerated peoples that fringe his Coast. What he actually sees will stick in his mind long after what he merely hears shall have passed out at the other ear. And these impressions that stick in the Chinaman’s mind are precisely the highly charged forces that are revolutionizing China to-day.
While still at Peking, I had picked up more or less gossip which seemed to indicate that the Tientsin foreign concessions were setting an unfortunate example in the matter of opium. In several of the concessions there are thousands of Chinese traders who have crowded in the white man’s territory, in order to make a living. These Chinese districts demand their opium, and they have always been allowed to have it. The opium shops and dens are licensed, as are our saloons, and the resulting revenue is cheerfully accepted by the various municipalities. When the Chinese officials set out to fight opium last winter and spring, they asked the foreign consuls to cooperate with them. This could be no more than a friendly request, for the concessions are foreign soil, that have passed wholly out of China’s control; but it was obviously of no use to close the dens of the native city if smokers could continue to gratify their desire by simply walking down the road.
This request bothered the consuls. The Chinese had adroitly placed them in a difficult position. A failure to cooperate would look bad; but revenue is revenue, on the Chinese Coast as elsewhere. More, if they could play for time, the enforcement in the native city, by driving the smokers over into the concessions, would actually increase the revenue. So the consuls played for time. They spread the impression “back home” that they were going to close the dens. When? Oh, soon—very soon. There were matters of detail to attend to. The licenses must run out. Then, too, perhaps the Chinese proposals were “insincere”—a little time would show.
The British concession boasted proudly that it had no opium dens. This was true. The concession is wholly taken up with British shops and British homes, and there is no room for Chinese residents. The German concession had so few natives that it closed some of its dens and took what credit it could. The Japanese quietly put on the lid. But all the other concessions remained “wide open.”
So ran the Peking gossip. It seemed to me worth while to follow it up; for if it should prove true that the concessions were actually profiting, like Shanghai, by the native prohibition, that fact would be significant. It would leave little to say for the representatives of foreign civilization in China.
There was a particular reason why the prohibition should be made effective in and about Tientsin. The one official who stood before his country and the world as the anti-opium leader, who personified, in fact, the reform spirit which is leavening the Chinese mass, was Yuan Shi K’ai, the Northern viceroy. Tientsin was his viceregal capital. Before he could hope to convince the cynical observers of Britain and Europe that the anti-opium crusade was really on, he had to make good in his own city.
Yuan Shi K’ai is a remarkable man. Unlike some of his colleagues who have travelled and studied abroad, he has never, I believe, been over the sea; yet no Chinese official shows a firmer grasp on his biggest and most bewildering of the world’s governmental problems. Practically a self-made man (his father was a soldier), he worked up from rank to rank, himself a part and a product of the antiquated absolutism of his country, until he emerged at the top, a red-button mandarin, a viceroy, with a personality towering above the superstitious, tradition-ridden court, and yet sufficiently able and skillful to work with and through that court. We have seen, in an earlier chapter, how Yuan, then a governor, kept Shantung Province quiet during the Boxer outbreak. It is he who is building up the “new army” with the aid of German and Japanese drill-masters. It is he who succeeded in introducing the study of modern science into the education of the official classes. He is committed to the abolition of the palace eunuch system. He has, during the past year, made great headway with his bold plan to remodel this land of fossilized ideas into a constitutional monarchy, with a representative parliament. But first, and above all else, he places the opium reforms. Unless this curse can be checked, and at least partially removed, there is no hope of progress.