Book: The Fight For The Republic in China

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2. Chinese Military Cadet schools to employ a certain number of
Japanese Military officers as instructors.

3. The Military Governor of Moukden to proceed personally to Port
Arthur to the Japanese Military Governor of Kwantung to apologize
for the occurrence and to tender similar personal apologies to the
Japanese Consul General in Moukden.

4. Adequate compensation to be paid by China to the Japanese
sufferers and to the families of those killed.

The merest tyro will see at once that so far from caring very much about
the killing of her soldiery, Japan was bent on utilizing the opportunity
to gain a certain number of new rights and privileges in the zone of
Southern Manchuria and Eastern Inner Mongolia--notably an extension of
her police and military-supervision rights. In spite, however, of the
faulty procedure to which she had consented, China showed considerable
tenacity in the course of negotiations which lasted nearly half a year,
and by the end of January, 1917, had whittled down the question of
Japanese compensation to fairly meagre proportions. To be precise the
two governments agreed to embody by the exchange of Notes the five
following stipulations:--

1. The General commanding the 28th Division to be reprimanded.

2. Officers responsible to be punished according to law. If the law
provides for severe punishment, such punishment will be inflicted.

3. Proclamations to be issued enjoining Chinese soldiers and
civilians in the districts where there is mixed residence to accord
considerate treatment to Japanese soldiers and civilians.

4. The Military Governor of Moukden to send a representative to Port
Arthur to convey his regret when the Military Governor of Kwantung
and Japanese Consul General at Moukden are there together.

5. A solatium of $500 (Five Hundred Dollars) to be given to the
Japanese merchant Yoshimoto.

But though the incident was thus nominally closed, and amicable
relations restored, the most important point--the question of Japanese
police-rights in Southern Manchuria and Eastern Inner Mongolia--was left
precisely where it had been before, the most vigorous Chinese protests
not having induced Japan to abate in the slightest her pretensions.
During previous years a number of Japanese police-stations and
police-boxes had been established in defiance of the local authorities
in these regions, and although China in these negotiations recorded her
strongest possible objection to their presence as being the principal
cause of the continual friction between Chinese and Japanese, Japan
refused to withdraw from her contention that they did not constitute any
extension of the principle of extraterritoriality, and that indeed
Japanese police, distributed at such points as the Japanese consular
authorities considered necessary, must be permanently accepted. Here
then is a matter which will require careful consideration when the
Powers meet to revise their Chinese Treaties as they must revise them
after the world-war; for Japan in Manchuria is fundamentally in no
different a position from England in the Yangtsze Valley and what
applies to one must apply to the other. The new Chinese police which are
being distributed in ever greater numbers throughout China form an
admirable force and are superior to Japanese police in the performance
of nearly all their duties. It is monstrous that Japan, as well as other
Powers, should act in such a reprehensible manner when the Chinese
administration is doing all it can to provide efficient guardians of the
peace.

[Illustration: The Famous or Infamous General Chang-Hsun, the leading
Reactionary in China to-day, who still commands a force of 30,000 men
astride of the Pukow Railway.]

[Illustration: The Bas-relief in a Peking Temple, well illustrating
Indo-Chinese influences.]

The second case was one in which French officialdom by a curious act of
folly gravely alienated Chinese sympathies and gave a powerful weapon to
the German propaganda in China at the end of 1916. The Lao-hsi-kai
dispute, which involved a bare 333 acres of land in Tientsin, has now
taken its place beside the Chengchiatun affair, and has become a leading
case in that great dossier of griefs which many Chinese declare make up
the corpus of Euro-Chinese relations. Here again the facts are
absolutely simple and absolutely undisputed. In 1902 the French consular
authorities in Tientsin filed a request to have their Concession
extended on the ground that they were becoming cramped. The Chinese
authorities, although not wishing to grant the request and indeed
ignoring it for a long time, were finally induced to begin fitful
negotiations; and in October, 1916, after having passed through various
processes of alteration, reduction, and re-statement during the interval
of fourteen years, the issue had been so fined down that a virtual
agreement regarding the administration of the new area had been
reached--an agreement which the Peking Government was prepared to put
into force subject to one reasonable stipulation, that the local
opposition to the new grant of territory which was very real, as Chinese
feel passionately on the subject of the police-control of their
land-acreage, was first overcome. The whole essence or soul of the
disputes lay therein: that the lords of the soil, the people of China,
and in this case more particularly the population of Tientsin, should
accept the decision arrived at which was that a joint Franco-Chinese
administration be established under a Chinese Chairman.

When the terms of this proposed agreement were communicated to the
Tientsin Consulate by the French Legation the arrangement did not please
the French Consul-General, who was under transfer to Shanghai and who
proposed to settle the case to the satisfaction of his nationals before
he left. There is absolutely no dispute about this fact either--namely
that the main pre-occupation of a consular officer, charged primarily
under the Treaties with the simple preservation of law and order among
his nationals, was the closing-up of a vexatious outstanding case, by
force if necessary, before he handed over his office to his successor.
It was with this idea that an ultimatum was drawn up by the French
Consul General and, having been weakly approved by the French Legation,
was handed to the Chinese local authorities. It gave them a time-limit
of twenty-four hours in which to effect the complete police evacuation
of the coveted strip of territory on the ground that the delay in the
signature of a formal Protocol had been wilful and deliberate and had
closed the door to further negotiations; and as no response came at the
end of the time-limit, an open invasion of Chinese territory was
practised by an armed French detachment; nine uniformed Chinese
constables on duty being forcibly removed and locked up in French
barracks and French sentries posted on the disputed boundary.

The result of this misguided action was an enormous Chinese outcry and
the beginning of a boycott of the French in North China,--and this in
the middle of a war when France has acted with inspiring nobility. Some
2,000 native police, servants and employe's promptly deserted the French
Concession _en masse_; popular unions were formed to keep alive
resentment; and although in the end the arrested police were set at
liberty, the friendly intervention of the Allies proved unable to effect
a settlement of the case which at the moment of writing remains
precisely where it was a year ago.[24]

Here you have the matter of foreign interests in China explained in the
sense that they appear to Chinese. It is not too much to say that this
illustration of the deliberate lawlessness, which has too often been
practised in the past by consuls who are simply Justices of the Peace,
would be incredible elsewhere; and yet it is this lawlessness which has
come to be accepted as part and parcel of what is called "policy" in
China because in the fifty years preceding the establishment of the
Republic a weak and effeminate mandarinate consistently sought safety in
surrenders. It is this lawlessness which must at all costs be suppressed
if we are to have a happy future. The Chinese people have so far
contented themselves by pacific retaliation and have not exploded into
rage; but those who see in the gospel of boycott an ugly manifestation
of what lies slumbering should give thanks nightly that they live in a
land where reason is so supreme. Think of what might not happen in China
if the people were not wholly reasonable! Throughout the length and
breadth of the land you have small communities of foreigners, mere drops
in a mighty ocean of four hundred millions, living absolutely secure
although absolutely at the mercy of their huge swarms of neighbours. All
such foreigners--or nearly all--have come to China for purposes of
profit; they depend for their livelihood on co-operation with the
Chinese; and once that co-operation ceases they might as well be dead
and buried for all the good residence will do them. In such
circumstances it would be reasonable to suppose that a certain decency
would inspire their attitude, and that a policy of give-and-take would
always be sedulously practised; and we are happy to say that there is
more of this than there used to be. It is only when incidents such as
the Chengchiatun and Laihsikai affairs occur that the placid population
is stirred to action. Even then, instead of turning and rending the many
little defenceless communities--as European mobs would certainly
do--they simply confine themselves to boycotting the offenders and
hoping that this evidence of their displeasure will finally induce the
world to believe that they are determined to get reasonable treatment.
The Chinese as a people may be very irritating in the slowness with
which they do certain things--though they are as quick in business as
the quickest Anglo-Saxon--but that is no excuse why men who call
themselves superior should treat them with contempt. The Chinese are the
first to acknowledge that it will take them a generation at least to
modernize effectively their country and their government; but they
believe that having erected a Republic and having declared themselves as
disciples of the West they are justified in expecting the same treatment
and consideration which are to be given after the war even to the
smallest and weakest nations of Europe.

FOOTNOTES:

[23] Russian diplomats now deny that the Japanese proposals regarding
the cession of the railway south of the Sungari river have ever been
formally agreed to.

[24] A further illustration of the action of French diplomacy in China
has just been provided (April, 1917) in the protest lodged by France
against the building of a railway in Kwangsi Province by American
engineers with American capital--France claiming _exclusive rights_ in
Kwangsi by virtue of a letter sent by the Chinese Minister of Foreign
Affairs to the French Legation in 1914 as settlement for a frontier
dispute in that year. The text of the letter is as follows:

"The dispute that rose in consequence of the disturbance at the border
of Annam and Kwangsi has been examined into by the Joint Committee
detailed by both parties concerned, and a conclusion has been reached to
the effect that all matters relating to the solution of the case would
be carried out in accordance with the request of Your Excellency.

"In order to demonstrate the especially good friendly relations existing
between the two countries, the Republican Government assures Your
Excellency that in case of a railway construction or a mining enterprise
being undertaken in Kwangsi Province in the future, for which foreign
capital is required, France would first be consulted for a loan of the
necessary capital. On such an occasion, the Governor of Kwangsi will
directly negotiate with a French syndicate and report to the
Government."

It is high time that the United States raises the whole question of the
open door in China again, and refuses to tolerate any longer the old
disruptive and dog-in-the-manger policy of the Powers. America is now
happily in a position to inaugurate a new era in the Far East as in the
Far West and to stop exploitation.




CHAPTER XVI

CHINA AND THE WAR


The question of Chinese sentiments on the subject of the war, as well as
the precise relations between the Chinese Government and the two groups
of belligerents, are matters which have been totally misunderstood. To
those who have grasped the significance of the exhaustive preceding
account of the Republic in travail, this statement should not cause
surprise; for China has been in no condition to play anything but an
insignificant and unsatisfactory role in world-politics.

When the world-war broke out China was still in the throes of her
domestic troubles and without any money at all in her Central Treasury;
and although Yuan Shih-kai, on being suddenly confronted with an
unparalleled international situation, did initiate certain negotiations
with the German Legation with a view to securing a cancellation of the
Kiaochow lease, the ultimatum which Japan dispatched to Germany on the
15th August, 1914, completely nullified his tentative proposals. Yuan
Shih-kai had, indeed, not been in the slightest degree prepared for such
a sensational development as war between Japan and Germany over the
question of a cruiser-base established on territory leased from China;
and although he considered the possibility of sending a Chinese force to
co-operate in the attack on the German stronghold, that project was
never matured, whilst his subsequent contrivances, notably the
establishment of a so-called war-zone in Shantung, were without
international value, and attracted no attention save in Japan.

Chinese, however, did not remain blind to the trend of events. After the
fall of Tsingtao and the subsequent complications with Japan, which so
greatly served to increase the complexities of a nebulous situation,
certain lines of thought insensibly developed. That the influential
classes in China should have desired that Germany should by some means
rehabilitate herself in Europe and so be placed in a position to
chastise a nation that for twenty years had brought nothing but sorrow
to them was perhaps only natural; and it is primarily to this one cause
that so-called sympathy with Germany during the first part of the war
has been due. But it must also be noticed that the immense German
propaganda in China during the first two years of the war, coupled with
the successes won in Russia and elsewhere, powerfully impressed the
population--not so much because they were attracted by the feats of a
Power that had enthroned militarism, but because they wrongly supposed
that sooner or later the effects of this military display would be not
only to secure the relaxation of the Japanese grip on the country but
would compel the Powers to re-cast their pre-war policies in China and
abandon their attempts at placing the country under financial
supervision. Thus, by the irony of Fate, Germany in Eastern Asia for the
best part of 1914, 1915 and 1916, stood for the aspirations of the
oppressed--a moral which we may very reasonably hope will not escape the
attention of the Foreign Offices of the world. Nor must it be forgotten
that the modern Chinese army, being like the Japanese, largely
Germany-trained and Germany-armed, had a natural predilection for
Teutonism; and since the army, as we have shown, plays a powerful role
in the politics of the Republic, public opinion was greatly swayed by
what it proclaimed through its accredited organs.

Be this as it may, it was humanly impossible for such a vast country
with such vast resources in men and raw materials to remain permanently
quiescent during an universal conflagration when there was so much to be
salvaged. Slowly the idea became general in China that something had to
be done; that is that a state of technical neutrality would lead nowhere
save possibly to Avernus.

As early as November, 1915, Yuan Shih-kai and his immediate henchmen had
indeed realized the internal advantages to be derived from a formal
war-partnership with the signatories of the Pact of London, the impulse
to the movement being given by certain important shipments of arms and
ammunition from China which were then made. A half-surreptitious
attempt to discuss terms in Peking caused no little excitement, the
matter being, however, only debated in very general terms. The principal
item proposed by the Peking government was characteristically the
stipulation that an immediate loan of two million pounds should be made
to China, in return for her technical belligerency. But when the
proposal was taken to Tokio, Japan rightly saw that its main purpose was
simply to secure an indirect foreign endorsement of Yuan Shih-kai's
candidature as Emperor; and for that reason she threw cold-water on the
whole project. To subscribe to a formula, which besides enthroning Yuan
Shih-kai would have been a grievous blow to her Continental ambitions,
was an unthinkable thing; and therefore the manoeuvre was foredoomed to
failure.

The death of Yuan Shih-kai in the summer of 1916 radically altered the
situation. Powerful influences were again set to work to stamp out the
German cult and to incline the minority of educated men who control the
destinies of the country to see that their real interests could only lie
with the Allies, who were beginning to export Chinese man-power as an
auxiliary war-aid and who were very anxious to place the whole matter on
a sounder footing. Little real progress was, however, made in the face
of the renewed German efforts to swamp the country with their
propaganda. By means of war-maps, printed in English and Chinese, and
also by means of an exhaustive daily telegraphic service which hammered
home every possible fact illustrative of German invincibility, the
German position in China, so far from being weakened, was actually
strengthened during the period when Rumania was being overrun. By a
singular destiny, any one advocating an alliance with the Allies was
bitterly attacked not only by the Germans but by the Japanese as
well--this somewhat naive identification of Japan's political interest
with those of an enemy country being an unique feature of the situation
worthy of permanent record.

It was not until President Wilson sent out his Peace offering of the
19th December, 1916, that a distinct change came. On this document being
formally communicated to the Chinese Government great interest was
aroused, and the old hopes were revived that it would be somehow
possible for China to gain entry at the definitive Peace Congress which
would settle beyond repeal the question of the disposal of Kiaochow and
the whole of German interests in Shantung Province,--a subject of
burning interest to the country not only because of the harsh treatment
which had been experienced at the hands of Japan, but because the
precedent established in 1905 at the Portsmouth Treaty was one which it
was felt must be utterly shattered if China was not to abandon her claim
of being considered a sovereign international State. On that occasion
Japan had simply negotiated direct with Russia concerning all matters
affecting Manchuria, dispatching a Plenipotentiary to Peking, after the
Treaty of Peace had been signed, to secure China's adhesion to all
clauses _en bloc_ without discussion. True enough, by filing the
Twenty-one Demands on China in 1915--when the war was hardly half-a-year
old--and by forcing China's assent to all Shantung questions under the
threat of an Ultimatum, Japan had reversed the Portsmouth Treaty
procedure and apparently settled the issues at stake for all time;
nevertheless the Chinese hoped when the facts were properly known to the
world that this species of diplomacy would not be endorsed, and that
indeed the Shantung question could be reopened.

Consequently great pains were taken at the Chinese Foreign Office to
draft a reply to the Wilson Note which would tell its own story. The
authorized translation of the document handed to the American Legation
on the 8th January has therefore a peculiar political interest. It runs
as follows:--

"I have examined with the care which the gravity of the question
demands the note concerning peace which President Wilson has
addressed to the Governments of the Allies and the Central Powers
now at war and the text of which Your Excellency has been good
enough to transmit to me under instructions of your Government.

"China, a nation traditionally pacific, has recently again
manifested her sentiments in concluding treaties concerning the
pacific settlement of international disputes, responding thus to the
voeux of the Peace Conference held at the Hague.

"On the other hand, the present war, by its prolongation, has
seriously affected the interests of China, more so perhaps than
those of other Powers which have remained neutral. She is at present
at a time of reorganization which demands economically and
industrially the co-operation of foreign countries, a co-operation
which a large number of them are unable to accord on account of the
war in which they are engaged.

"In manifesting her sympathy for the spirit of the President's
Note, having in view the ending as soon as possible of the
hostilities, China is but acting in conformity not only with her
interests but also with her profound sentiments.

"On account of the extent which modern wars are apt to assume and
the repercussions which they bring about, their effects are no
longer limited to belligerent States. All countries are interested
in seeing wars becoming as rare as possible. Consequently China
cannot but show satisfaction with the views of the Government and
people of the United States of America who declare themselves ready,
and even eager, to co-operate when the war is over, by all proper
means to assure the respect of the principle of the equality of
nations, whatever their power may be, and to relieve them of the
peril of wrong and violence. China is ready to join her efforts with
theirs for the attainment of such results which can only be obtained
through the help of all."

Already, then, before there had been any question of Germany's ruthless
submarine war necessitating a decisive move, China had commenced to show
that she could not remain passive during a world-conflict which was
indirectly endangering her interests. America, by placing herself in
direct communication with the Peking Government on the subject of a
possible peace, had given a direct hint that she was solicitous of
China's future and determined to help her as far as possible. All this
was in strict accordance with the traditional policy of the United
States in China, a policy which although too idealistic to have had much
practical value--being too little supported by battleships and bayonets
to be respected--has nevertheless for sixty years tempered the wind to
the shorn lamb. The ground had consequently been well prepared for the
remarkable denouement which came on the 9th February, 1917, and which
surprised all the world.

On the fourth of that month the United States formally communicated with
China on the subject of the threatened German submarine war against
neutral shipping and invited her to associate herself with America in
breaking-off diplomatic relations with Germany. China had meanwhile
received a telegraphic communication from the Chinese Minister in Berlin
transmitting a Note from the German Government making known the measures
endangering all merchant vessels navigating the prescribed zones. The
effect of these two communications on the mind of the Chinese Government
was at first admittedly stunning and very varied expressions of opinion
were heard in Peking. For the first time in the history of the country
the government had been invited to take a step which meant the
inauguration of a definite Foreign policy from which there could be no
retreat. For four days a discussion raged which created the greatest
uneasiness; but by the 8th February, President Li Yuan-hung had made up
his mind--the final problem being simply the "conversion" of the
Military Party to the idea that a decisive step, which would for ever
separate them from Germany, must at last be taken. It is known that the
brilliant Scholar Liang Ch'i-chao, who was hastily summoned to Peking,
proved a decisive influence and performed the seemingly impossible in a
few hours' discussion. Realizing at once the advantages which would
accrue from a single masculine decision he advised instant action in
such a convincing way that the military leaders surrendered. Accordingly
on the 9th February the presence of the German Minister was requested at
the Chinese Foreign Office when the following Note was read to him and
subsequently transmitted telegraphically to Berlin.

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