Book: The Fight For The Republic in China

B >> Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale >> The Fight For The Republic in China




[Illustration: The National Assembly sitting as a National Convention
engaged on the Draft of the Permanent Constitution.

_Specially photographed by permission of the Speakers for the Present
Work_.]

[Illustration: View from rear of Hall of the National Assembly sitting
as a National Convention engaged on the Draft of the Permanent
Constitution.

_Specially photographed by permission of the Speakers for the Present
Work_.]

FOOTNOTES:

[25] The final text of the Permanent Constitution as it stood on the
28th May, 1917, will be found in the appendix. Its accuracy has been
guaranteed to the writer by the speakers of the two Houses.

[26] Since this was written certain diplomatists in Peking have been
forced to resign.




CHAPTER XVII

THE FINAL PROBLEM:--REMODELLING THE POLITICO-ECONOMIC RELATIONSHIP
BETWEEN CHINA AND THE WORLD


The careful narrative we have made--supported as it is by documents--of
the history of China since the inception of the Republic six years ago
should not fail to awaken profound astonishment among those who are
interested in the spread of good government throughout the world. Even
casual readers will have no difficulty in realizing how many lives have
been lost and how greatly the country has been crippled both owing to
the blind foreign support given to Yuan Shih-kai during four long and
weary years and to the stupid adhesion to exploded ideas, when a little
intelligence and a little generosity and sympathy would have guided the
nation along very different paths. To have to go back, as China was
forced to do in 1916, and begin over again the work which should have
been performed in 1912 is a handicap which only persistent resolution
can overcome; for the nation has been so greatly impoverished that years
must elapse before a complete recovery from the disorders which have
upset the internal balance can be chronicled: and when we add that the
events of the period May-July, 1917, are likely still further to
increase the burden the nation carries, the complicated nature of the
outlook will be readily understood.

Happily foreign opinion has lately taken turn for the better. Whilst the
substitution of a new kind of rule in place of the Yuan Shih-kai regime,
with its thinly disguised Manchuism and its secret worship of fallen
gods, was at first looked upon as a political collapse tinged with
tragedy--most foreigners refusing to believe in an Asiatic Republic--the
masculine decision of the 9th February, 1917, which diplomatically
ranged China definitely on the side of the Liberal Powers, has caused
something of a _volte face_. Until this decision had been made it was
the fashion to declare that China was not only not fit to be a Republic
but that her final dissolution was only a matter of time. Though the
empire disappeared because it had become an impossible rule in the
modern world--being womanish, corrupt, and mediaeval--to the foreign
mind the empire remained the acme of Chinese civilization; and to kill
it meant to lop off the head of the Chinese giant and to leave lying on
the ground nothing but a corpse. It was in vain to insist that this
simile was wrong and that it was precisely because Chinese civilization
had exhausted itself that a new conception of government had to be
called in to renew the vitality of the people. Men, and particularly
diplomats, refused to understand that this embodied the heart and soul
of the controversy, and that the sole mandate for the Republic, as well
as the supreme reason why it had to be upheld if the country was not to
dissolve, has always lain in the fact that it postulates something which
is the very antithesis of the system it has replaced and which should be
wholly successful in a single generation, if courage is shown and the
whip unflinchingly used.

The chief trouble, in the opinion of the writer, has been the simplicity
of the problem and not its complexity. By eliminating the glamour which
surrounded the Throne, and by kicking away all the pomp and circumstance
which formed the age-old ritual of government, the glaring simplicity
and _barrenness_ of Chinese life--when contrasted with the complex
West--has been made evident. Bathed in the hard light of modern
realities, the poetic China which Haroun al-Raschid painted in his
Aladdin, and which still lives in the beautiful art of the country, has
vanished for ever and its place has been taken by a China of prose. To
those who have always pictured Asia in terms of poetry this has no doubt
been a very terrible thing--a thing synonymous with political death. And
yet in point of fact the elementary things remain much as they have
always been before, and if they appear to have acquired new meaning it
is simply because they have been moved into the foreground and are no
longer masked by a gaudy superstructure.

For if you eliminate questions of money and suppose for a moment that
the national balance-sheet is entirely in order, China is the old China
although she is stirred by new ideas. Here you have by far the greatest
agricultural community in the world, living just as it has always lived
in the simplest possible manner, and remitting to the cities (of which
there are not ten with half-a-million inhabitants) the increment which
the harvests yield. These cities have made much municipal progress and
developed an independence which is confessedly new. Printing presses
have spread a noisy assertiveness, as well as a very critical and
litigious spirit, which tends to resent and oppose authority.[27] Trade,
although constantly proclaimed to be in a bad way, is steadily growing
as new wants are created and fashions change. An immense amount of new
building has been done, particularly in those regions which the
Revolution of 1911 most devastated. The archaic fiscal system, having
been tumbled into open ruin, has been partially replaced by European
conceptions which are still only half-understood, but which are not
really opposed. The country, although boasting a population which is
only some fifty millions less than the population of the nineteen
countries of Europe, has an army and a police-force so small as to allow
one to say that China is virtually disarmed since there are only 900,000
men with weapons in their hands. Casting about to discover what really
tinges the outlook, that must simply be held to be the long delay the
world has made in extending the same treatment to China as is now
granted to the meanest community of Latin America. It has been almost
entirely this, coupled with the ever-present threat of Japanese
chauvinism, which has given China the appearance of a land that is
hopelessly water-logged, although the National Debt is relatively the
smallest in the world and the people the most industrious and
law-abiding who have ever lived. In such circumstances that ideas of
collapse should have spread so far is simply due to a faulty estimate
of basic considerations.

For we have to remember that in a country in which the thoroughly
English doctrine of _laissez faire_ has been so long practised that it
has become second nature, and in which the philosophic spirit is so
undisputed that the pillars of society are just as much the beggars who
beg as the rich men who support them, influences of a peculiar character
play an immense role and can be only very slowly overcome. Passivity has
been so long enthroned that of the Chinese it may be truly said that
they are not so much too proud to fight as too indifferent,--which is
not a fruitful state of affairs. Looking on the world with callous
detachment the masses go their own way, only pausing in their work on
their ancient Festival days which they still celebrate just as they have
always celebrated them since the beginning of their history. The petty
daily activities of a vast legion of people grouped together in this
extraordinary way, and actuated by impulses which seem sharply to
conflict with the impulses of the other great races of the world, appear
incredible to Westerners who know what the outer perils really are, and
who believe that China is not only at bay but encircled--caught in a
network of political agreements and commitments which have permanently
destroyed her power of initiative and reduced her to inanition. To find
her lumbering on undisturbed, ploughing the fields, marrying and giving
in marriage, buying, selling, cursing and laughing, carrying out
rebellions and little plots as though the centuries that stretch ahead
were still her willing slaves, has in the end become to onlookers a
veritable nightmare. Puzzled by a phenomenon which is so disconcerting
as to be incapable of any clear definition, they have ended by declaring
that an empty Treasury is an empty rule, adding that as it is solely
from this monetary viewpoint that the New China ought to be judged,
their opinion is the one which will finally be accepted as
authoritative. The situation is admittedly dangerous; and it is
imperative that a speedy remedy be sought; for the heirs and assigns of
an estate which has been mismanaged to the brink of bankruptcy must
secure at all costs that no public receivership is made.

What is the remedy? That must consist simply enough in attacking the
grand simplicities directly; in recognizing, as we have clearly shown,
that the bases of Chinese life having collapsed through Euro-Japanese
pressure, the politico-economic relationship between the Republic and
the world must be remodelled at the earliest possible opportunity, every
agreement which has been made since the Treaties of 1860 being carefully
and completely revised.[28]

To say this is to give utterance to nothing very new or brilliant: it is
the thought which has been present in everyone's mind for a number of
years. So far back as 1902, when Great Britain negotiated with China the
inoperative Mackay Commercial Treaty, provision was not only made for a
complete reform of the Tariff--import duties to be made two and a
half times as large in return for a complete abolition of _likin_
or inter-provincial trade-taxation--but for the abolition of
extraterritoriality when China should have erected a modern and efficient
judicial system. And although matters equally important, such as the
funding of all Chinese indemnities and loans into one Consolidated Debt,
as well as the withdrawal of the right of foreign banks to make banknote
issues in China, were not touched upon, the same principles would
undoubtedly have been applied in these instances, as being conducive to
the re-establishment of Chinese autonomy, had Chinese negotiators been
clever enough to urge them as being of equal importance to the older
issues. For it is primarily debt, and the manipulation of debt, which is
the great enemy.

Three groups of indebtedness and three groups of restrictions,
corresponding with the three vital periods in Chinese history, lie
to-day like three great weights on the body of the Chinese giant. First,
there is the imbroglio of the Japanese war of 1894-5; second, the
settlement following the Boxer explosion of 1900; and third, the cost of
the revolution of 1911-1912. We have already discussed so exhaustively
the Boxer Settlement and the finance of the Revolutionary period that it
is necessary to deal with the first period only.

In that first period China, having been rudely handled by Japan,
recovered herself only by indulging in the sort of diplomacy which had
become traditional under the Manchus. Thankful for any help in her
distress, she invited and welcomed the intervention of Russia, which
gave her back the Liaotung Peninsula and preserved for her the shadow of
her power when the substance had already been so sensationally lost. Men
are apt to forget to-day that the financial accommodation which allowed
China to liquidate the Japanese war-debt was a remarkable transaction in
which Russia formed the controlling element. In 1895 the Tsar's
Government had intervened for precisely the same motives that animate
every State at critical times in history, that is, for reasons of
self-interest. The rapid victory which Japan had won had revived in an
acute form the whole question of the future of the vast block of
territory which lies south of the Amur regions and is bathed by the
Yellow Sea. Russian statesmen suddenly became conscious that the policy
of which Muravieff-Amurski in the middle of the nineteenth century had
been the most brilliant exponent--the policy of reaching "warm
water"--was in danger of being crucified, and the work of many years
thrown away. Action on Russia's part was imperative; she was great
enough to see that; and so that it should not be said that she was
merely depriving a gallant nation of the fruits of victory and thereby
issuing to her a direct challenge, she invited the chief Powers in
Treaty relations with China to co-operate with her in readjusting what
she described as the threatened balance. France and Germany responded to
that invitation; England demurred. France did so because she was already
the devoted Ally of a nation that was a guarantee for the security of
her European frontiers: Germany because she was anxious to see that
Russia should be pushed into Asiatic commitments and drawn away from the
problems of the Near East. England on her part very prudently declined
to be associated with a transaction which, while not opposed to her
interests, was filled with many dubious elements.

It was in Petrograd that this account was liquidated. The extraordinary
chapter which only closed with the disastrous Peace of Portsmouth opened
for Russia in a very brilliant way. The presence in Moscow of the
veteran statesman Li Hung-chang on the occasion of the Tsar's Coronation
afforded an opportunity for exhaustively discussing the whole problem of
the Far East. China required money: Russia required the acceptance of
plans which ultimately proved so disastrous to her. Under Article IV of
the Treaty of Shimonoseki (April, 1895) China had agreed to pay Japan as
a war-indemnity 200 million Treasury taels in eight instalments: that is
50 million taels within six months, a further 50 millions within twelve
months, and the remaining 100 millions in six equal instalments spread
over seven years, as well as an additional sum of 50 millions for the
retrocession of the Liaotung Peninsula.

China, therefore, needed at once 80 million taels. Russia undertook to
lend her at the phenomenally low rate of 4 per cent. the sum of
L16,000,000 sterling--the interest and capital of which the Tsar's
Government guaranteed to the French bankers undertaking the flotation.
In return for this accommodation, the well known Russo-Chinese
Declaration of the 24th June (6th July), 1895, was made in which the
vital article IX states that--"In consideration of this Loan the Chinese
Government declares that it will not grant to any foreign Power any
right or privilege of no matter what description touching the control or
administration of the revenues of the Chinese Empire. Should, however,
the Chinese Government grant to any foreign Power rights of this nature,
it is understood that the mere fact of having done so will extend those
rights to the Russian Government."

This clause has a monumental significance: it started the scramble in
China: and all the history of the past 22 years is piled like a pyramid
on top of it. Now that the Romanoffs have been hurled from the throne,
Russia must prove eager to reverse the policy which brought Japan to her
Siberian frontiers and which pinned a brother democracy to the ground.

For China, instead of being nearly bankrupt as so many have asserted,
has, thanks to the new scale of indebtedness which the war has
established, become one of the most debt-free countries in the world,
her entire national debt (exclusive of railway debt) amounting to less
than 150 millions sterling, or seven shillings per head of population,
which is certainly not very terrible. No student who has given due
attention to the question can deny that it is primarily on the proper
handling of this nexus of financial interests, and not by establishing
any artificial balance of power between foreign nations, that the peace
of the Far East really hinges. The method of securing national
redemption is ready-made: Western nations should use the Parliament of
China as an instrument of reform, and by limiting themselves to this one
method secure that civil authority is reinforced to such a point that
its behests have behind them all the wealth of the West. In questions of
currency, taxation, railways and every other vexatious problem, it is
solely by using this instrument that satisfactory results can be
attained.[29] For once Chinese realize that parliamentary government is
not merely an experimental thing but the last chance the country is to
be given to govern itself, they will rally to the call and prove that
much of the trouble and turmoil of past years has been due to the
misunderstanding of the internal problem by Western minds which has
incited the population to intrigue against one another and remain
disunited. And if we insist that there is urgent need for a settlement
of these matters in the terms we have indicated, it is because we know
very precisely what Japanese thought on this subject really is.

What is that thought--whither does it lead?

It may be broadly said that Japanese activities throughout the Far East
are based on a thorough and adequate appreciation of the fact that apart
from the winning of the hegemony of China, there is the far more
difficult and knotty problem of overshadowing and ultimately dislodging
the huge network of foreign interests--particularly British
interests--which seventy-five years of Treaty intercourse have entwined
about the country. These interests, growing out of the seed planted in
the early Canton Factory days, had their origin in the termination by
the act of the British Government of the trading monopoly enjoyed until
the thirties of last century by the East India Company. Left without
proper definition until the Treaty of Nanking in 1842 had formally won
the principle of trading-rights at five open ports, and thus established
a first basis of agreement between England and China (to which all the
trading powers hastened to subscribe), these interests expanded in a
half-hearted way until 1860, when in order to terminate friction, the
principle of extraterritoriality was boldly borrowed from the Turkish
Capitulations, and made the rock on which the entire fabric of
international dealings in China was based. These treaties, with their
always-recurring "most-favoured nation" clause, and their implication of
equal treatment for all Powers alike, constitute the Public Law of the
Far East, just as much as the Treaties between the Nations constitute
the Public Law of Europe; and any attempt to destroy, cripple, or limit
their scope and function has been very generally deemed an assault on
all the High Contracting Parties alike. By a thoroughly Machiavellian
piece of reasoning, those who have been responsible for the framing of
recent Japanese policy, have held it essential to their plan to keep the
world chained to the principle of extraterritoriality and Chinese Tariff
and economic subjection because these things, imposing as they
necessarily do restrictions and limitations in many fields, leave it
free to the Japanese to place themselves outside and beyond these
restrictions and limitations; and, by means of special zones and secret
encroachments, to extend their influence so widely that ultimately
foreign treaty-ports and foreign interests may be left isolated and at
the mercy of the "Higher machinery" which their hegemony is installing.
The Chinese themselves, it is hoped, will be gradually cajoled into
acquiescing in this very extraordinary state of affairs, because being
unorganized and split into suspicious groups, they can be manipulated in
such a way as to offer no effective mass resistance to the Japanese
advance, and in the end may be induced to accept it as inevitable.

If the reader keeps these great facts carefully in mind a new light will
dawn on him and the urgency of the Chinese question will be disclosed.
The Japanese Demands of 1915, instead of being fantastic and
far-fetched, as many have supposed, are shown to be very intelligently
drawn-up, the entire Treaty position in China having been most
exhaustively studied, and every loophole into the vast region left
untouched by the ex-territorialized Powers marked down for invasion. For
Western nations, in spite of exorbitant demands at certain periods in
Chinese history, having mainly limited themselves to acquiring coastal
and communication privileges, which were desired more for genuine
purposes of trade than for encompassing the destruction of Chinese
autonomy, are to-day in a disadvantageous position which the Japanese
have shown they thoroughly understand by not only tightening their hold
on Manchuria and Shantung, but by going straight to the root of the
matter and declaring on every possible occasion that they alone are
responsible for the peace and safety of the Far East--and this in spite
of the fact that their plan of 1915 was exposed and partially
frustrated. But the chief force behind the Japanese Foreign Office, it
should be noted, is militarist; and it is a point of honour for the
Military Party to return to the charge in China again and again until
there is definite success or definite failure.

Now in view of the facts which have been so voluminously set forth in
preceding chapters, it is imperative for men to realize that the
struggle in the Far East is like the Balkan Question a thing rooted in
geography and peoples, and cannot be brushed aside or settled by
compromises. The whole future of Chinese civilization is intimately
bound up with the questions involved, and the problem instead of
becoming easier to handle must become essentially more difficult from
day to day. Japan's real objective being the termination of the implied
trusteeship which Europe and America still exercise in the Far East, the
course of the European war must intimately effect the ultimate outcome.
If that end is satisfactory for democracies, China may reasonably claim
to share in the resulting benefits; if on the other hand the Liberal
Powers do not win an overwhelming victory which shall secure the
sanctity of Treaties for all time, it will go hard for China. Outwardly,
the immediate goal which Japan seeks to attain is merely to become the
accredited spokesman of Eastern Asia, the official representative; and,
using this attorneyship as a cloak for the advancement of objects which
other Powers would pursue on different principles, so impregnably to
entrench herself where she has no business to be that no one will dare
to attempt to turn her out. For this reason we see revived in Manchuria
on a modified scale the Eighteenth Century device, once so essential a
feature of Dutch policy in the struggle against Louis XIV, namely the
creation of "barrier-cities" for closing and securing a frontier by
giving them a special constitution which withdraws them from ordinary
jurisdiction and places foreign garrisons in them. This is precisely
what is going on from the Yalu to Eastern Mongolia, and this procedure
no doubt will be extended in time to other regions as opportunities
arise. Already in Shantung the same policy is being pursued and there
are indications that it is being thought of in Fuhkien; whilst the
infantry garrison which was quietly installed at Hankow--600 miles up
the Yangtsze river--at the time of the Revolution of 1911 is apparently
to be made permanent. Allowing her policy to be swayed by men who know
far too little of the sea, Japan stands in imminent danger of forgetting
the great lesson which Mahan taught, that for island-peoples sea-power
is everything and that land conquests which diminish the efficacy of
that power are merely a delusion and snare. Plunging farther and farther
into the vast regions of Manchuria and Mongolia which have been the
graves of a dozen dynasties, Japan is displaying increasing indifference
for the one great lesson which the war has yielded--the overwhelming
importance of the sea.[30] Necessarily guardian of the principles on
which intercourse in Asia is based, because she framed those principles
and fought for them and has built up great edifices under their
sanction, British sea-power--now allied for ever, let us hope, with
American power--nevertheless remains and will continue to remain, in
spite of what may be half-surreptitiously done to-day, the dominant
factor in the Far East as it is in the Far West. Withdrawn from view for
the time being, because of the exigencies of the hour and because the
Anglo-Japanese Alliance is still counted a binding agreement, Western
sea-power nevertheless stands there, a heavy cloud in the offing, full
of questionings regarding what is going on in the Orient, and fully
determined, let us pray, one day to receive frank answers. For the right
of every race, no matter how small or weak, to enjoy the inestimable
benefits of self-government and independence may be held to have been so
absolutely established that it is a mere question of time for the
doctrine not only to be universally accepted but to be universally
applied. In many cases, it is true, the claims of certain races are as
yet incapable of being expressed in practical state-forms; but where
nationalities have long been well-defined, there can be no question
whatsoever that a properly articulated autonomy must be secured in such
a way as to preclude the possibility of annexations.

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