Book: The Fight For The Republic in China

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




It took him a certain period to weather the storm which the utter
collapse of China in her armed encounter with Japan brought about--and
particularly to obtain forgiveness for evacuating Seoul without orders.
Technically his offence was punishable by death--the old Chinese code
being most stringent in such matters. But by 1896 he was back in favour
again, and through the influence of his patron Li Hung Chang, he was at
length appointed in command of the Hsiaochan camp near Tientsin, where
he was promoted and given the task of reforming a division of old-style
troops and making them as efficient as Japanese soldiery. He had already
earned a wide reputation for severity, for willingness to accept
responsibility, for nepotism, and for a rare ability to turn even
disasters to his own advantage--all attributes which up to the last
moment stood him in good stead.

In the Hsiaochan camp the most important chapter of his life opens;
there is every indication that he fully realized it. Tientsin has always
been the gateway to Peking: from there the road to high preferment is
easily reached. Yuan Shih-kai marched steadily forward, taking the very
first turning-point in a manner which stamped him for many of his
compatriots in a way which can never be obliterated.

It is first necessary to say a word about the troops of his command,
since this has a bearing on present-day politics. The bulk of the
soldiery were so-called _Huai Chun_--_i.e._, nominally troops from the
Huai districts, just south of Li Hung Chang's native province Anhui.
These Kiangu men, mixed with Shantung recruits, had earned a historic
place in the favour of the Manchus owing to the part they had played in
the suppression of the Taiping Rebellion, in which great event General
Gordon and Li Hung Chang had been so closely associated. They and the
troops of Hunan province, led by the celebrated Marquis Tseng Kuo-fan,
were "the loyal troops," resembling the Sikhs during the Indian Mutiny;
they were supposed to be true to their salt to the last man. Certainly
they gave proofs of uncustomary fidelity.

In those military days of twenty years ago Yuan Shih-kai and his
henchmen were, however, concerned with simpler problems. It was then a
question of drill and nothing but drill. In his camp near Tientsin the
future President of the Chinese Republic succeeded in reorganizing his
troops so well that in a very short time the Hsiaochan Division became
known as a _corps d'elite_. The discipline was so stern that there were
said to be only two ways of noticing subordinates, either by promoting
or beheading them. Devoting himself to his task Yuan Shih-kai gave
promise of being able to handle much bigger problems.

His zeal soon attracted the attention of the Manchu Court. The
circumstances in Peking at that time were peculiar. The famous old
Empress Dowager, Tzu-hsi, after the Japanese war, had greatly relaxed
her hold on the Emperor Kwanghsu, who though still in subjection to her,
nominally governed the empire. A well-intentioned but weak man, he had
surrounded himself with advanced scholars, led by the celebrated Kang Yu
Wei, who daily studied with him and filled him with new doctrines,
teaching him to believe that if he would only exert his power he might
rescue the nation from international ignominy and make for himself an
imperishable name.

The sequel was inevitable. In 1898 the oriental world was electrified by
the so-called Reform Edicts, in which the Emperor undertook to modernize
China, and in which he exhorted the nation to obey him. The greatest
alarm was created in Court circles by this action; the whole vast body
of Metropolitan officialdom, seeing its future threatened, flooded the
Palace of the Empress Dowager with Secret Memorials praying her to
resume power. Flattered, she gave her secret assent.

Things marched quickly after that. The Empress, nothing loth, began
making certain dispositions. Troops were moved, men were shifted here
and there in a way that presaged action; and the Emperor, now
thoroughly alarmed and yielding to the entreaties of his followers, sent
two members of the Reform Party to Yuan Shih-kai bearing an alleged
autograph order for him to advance instantly on Peking with all his
troops; to surround the Palace, to secure the person of the Emperor from
all danger, and then to depose the Empress Dowager for ever from power.
What happened is equally well-known. Yuan Shih-kai, after an exhaustive
examination of the message and messengers, as well as other attempts to
substantiate the genuineness of the appeal, communicated its nature to
the then Viceroy of Chihli, the Imperial Clansman Jung Lu, whose
intimacy with the Empress Dowager since the days of her youth has passed
into history. Jung Lu lost no time in acting. He beheaded the two
messengers and personally reported the whole plot to the Empress Dowager
who was already fully warned. The result was the so-called _coup d'etat_
of September, 1898, when all the Reformers who had not fled were
summarily executed, and the Emperor Kwanghsu himself closely imprisoned
in the Island Palace within that portion of the Forbidden City known as
the Three Lakes, having (until the Boxer outbreak of 1900 carried him to
Hsianfu), as sole companions his two favourites, the celebrated
odalisques "Pearl" and "Lustre."

This is no place to enter into the controversial aspect of Yuan
Shih-kai's action in 1898 which has been hotly debated by partisans for
many years. For onlookers the verdict must always remain largely a
matter of opinion; certainly this is one of those matters which cannot
be passed upon by any one but a Chinese tribunal furnished with all the
evidence. Those days which witnessed the imprisonment of Kwanghsu were
great because they opened wide the portals of the Romance of History:
all who were in Peking can never forget the counter-stroke; the arrival
of the hordes composed of Tung Fu-hsiang's Mahommedan cavalry--men who
had ridden hard across a formidable piece of Asia at the behest of their
Empress and who entered the capital in great clouds of dust. It was in
that year of 1898 also that Legation Guards reappeared in Peking--a few
files for each Legation as in 1860--and it was then that clear-sighted
prophets saw the beginning of the end of the Manchu Dynasty.

Yuan Shih-kai's reward for his share in this counter-revolution was his
appointment to the governorship of Shantung province. He moved thither
with all his troops in December, 1899. Armed _cap-a-pie_ he was ready
for the next act--the Boxers, who burst on China in the Summer of 1900.
These men were already at work in Shantung villages with their
incantations and alleged witchcraft. There is evidence that their
propaganda had been going on for months, if not for years, before any
one had heard of it. Yuan Shih-kai had the priceless opportunity of
studying them at close range and soon made up his mind about certain
things. When the storm burst, pretending to see nothing but mad fanatics
in those who, realizing the plight of their country, had adopted the
war-cry "Blot out the Manchus and the foreigner," he struck at them
fiercely, driving the whole savage horde head-long into the metropolitan
province of Chihli. There, seduced by the Manchus, they suddenly changed
the inscription on their flags. Their sole enemy became the foreigner
and all his works, and forthwith they were officially protected. Far and
wide they killed every white face they could find. They tore up
railways, burnt churches and chapels and produced a general anarchy
which could only have one end--European intervention. The man, sitting
on the edge of Chinese history but not yet identifying himself with its
main currents because he was not strong enough for that had once again
not judged wrongly. With his Korean experience to assist him, he had
seen precisely what the end must inevitably be.

The crash in Peking, when the siege of the Legations had been raised by
an international army, found him alert and sympathetic--ready with
advice, ready to shoulder new responsibilities, ready to explain away
everything. The signature of the Peace Protocol of 1901 was signalized
by his obtaining the viceroyalty of Chihli, succeeding the great Li Hung
Chang himself, who had been reappointed to his old post, but had found
active duties too wearisome. This was a marvellous success for a man but
little over forty. And when the fugitive Court at length returned from
Hsianfu in 1902, honours were heaped upon him as a person particularly
worthy of honour because he had kept up appearances and maintained the
authority of the distressed Throne. As if in answer to this he flooded
the Court with memorials praying that in order to restore the power of
the Dynasty a complete army of modern troops be raised--as numerous as
possible but above all efficient.

His advice was listened to. From 1902 until 1907 as Minister of the Army
Reorganization Council--a special post he held simultaneously with that
of metropolitan Viceroy--Yuan Shih-kai's great effort was concentrated
on raising an efficient fighting force. In those five years, despite all
financial embarrassments, North China raised and equipped six excellent
Divisions of field-troops--75,000 men--all looking to Yuan Shih-kai as
their sole master. So much energy did he display in pushing military
reorganization throughout the provinces that the Court, warned by
jealous rivals of his growing power, suddenly promoted him to a post
where he would be powerless. One day he was brought to Peking as Grand
Councillor and President of the Board of Foreign Affairs, and ordered to
hand over all army matters to his noted rival, the Manchu Tieh Liang.
The time had arrived to muzzle him. His last phase as a pawn had come.

Few foreign diplomats calling at China's Foreign Office to discuss
matters during that short period which lasted barely a twelve-month,
imagined that the square resolute-looking man who as President of the
Board gave the same energy and attention to consular squabbles as to the
reorganization of a national-fighting force, was almost daily engaged in
a fierce clandestine struggle to maintain even his modest position.
Jealousy, which flourishes in Peking like the upas tree, was for ever
blighting his schemes and blocking his plans. He had been brought to
Peking to be tied up; he was constantly being denounced; and even his
all powerful patroness, the old Empress Dowager, who owed so much to
him, suffered from constant premonitions that the end was fast
approaching, and that with her the Dynasty would die.

In the Autumn of 1908 she took sick. The gravest fears quickly spread.
It was immediately reported that the Emperor Kwanghsu was also very
ill--an ominous coincidence. Very suddenly both personages collapsed and
died, the Empress Dowager slightly before the Emperor. There is little
doubt that the Emperor himself was poisoned. The legend runs that as he
expired not only did he give his Consort, who was to succeed him in the
exercise of the nominal power of the Throne, a last secret Edict to
behead Yuan Shih-kai, but that his faltering hand described circle
after circle in the air until his followers understood the meaning. In
the vernacular the name of the great viceroy and the word for circle
have the same sound; the gesture signified that the dying monarch's last
wish was revenge on the man who had failed him ten years before.

An ominous calm followed this great break with the past. It was
understood that the Court was torn by two violent factions regarding the
succession which the Empress Tzu-hsi had herself decided. The fact that
another long Regency had become inevitable through the accession of the
child Hsuan Tung aroused instant apprehensions among foreign observers,
whilst it was confidently predicted that Yuan Shih-kai's last days had
come.

The blow fell suddenly on the 2nd January, 1909. In the interval between
the death of the old Empress and his disgrace, Yuan Shih-kai was
actually promoted to the highest rank in the gift of the Throne, that
is, made "Senior Guardian of the Heir Apparent" and placed in charge of
the Imperial funeral arrangements--a lucrative appointment. During that
interval it is understood that the new Regent, brother of the Emperor
Kwanghsu, consulted all the most trusted magnates of the empire
regarding the manner in which the secret decapitation Decree should be
treated. All advised him to be warned in time, and not to venture on a
course of action which would be condemned both by the nation and by the
Powers. Another Edict was therefore prepared simply dismissing Yuan
Shih-kai from office and ordering him to return to his native place.

Every one remembers that day in Peking when popular rumour declared that
the man's last hour had come. Warned on every side to beware, Yuan
Shih-kai left the Palace as soon as he had read the Edict of dismissal
in the Grand Council and drove straight to the railway-station, whence
he entrained for Tientsin, dressed as a simple citizen. Rooms had been
taken for him at a European hotel, the British Consulate approached for
protection, when another train brought down his eldest son bearing a
message direct from the Grand Council Chamber, absolutely guaranteeing
the safety of his life. Accordingly he duly returned to his native place
in Honan province, and for two years--until the outbreak of the
Revolution--devoted himself sedulously to the development of the large
estate he had acquired with the fruits of office. Living like a
patriarch of old, surrounded by his many wives and children, he
announced constantly that he had entirely dropped out of the political
life of China and only desired to be left in peace. There is reason to
believe, however, that his henchmen continually reported to him the true
state of affairs, and bade him bide his time. Certain it is that the
firing of the first shots on the Yangtsze found him alert and issuing
private orders to his followers. It was inevitable that he should have
been recalled to office--and actually within one hundred hours of the
first news of the outbreak the Court sent for him urgently and
ungraciously.

From the 14th October, 1911, when he was appointed by Imperial Edict
Viceroy of Hupeh and Hunan and ordered to proceed at once to the front
to quell the insurrection, until the 1st November, when he was given
virtually Supreme Power as President of the Grand Council in place of
Prince Ching, a whole volume is required to discuss adequately the maze
of questions involved. For the purposes of this account, however, the
matter can be dismissed very briefly in this way. Welcoming the
opportunity which had at last come and determined once for all to settle
matters decisively, so far as he was personally concerned, Yuan Shih-kai
deliberately followed the policy of holding back and delaying everything
until the very incapacity marking both sides--the Revolutionists quite
as much as the Manchus--forced him, as man of action and man of
diplomacy, to be acclaimed the sole mediator and saviour of the nation.

The detailed course of the Revolution, and the peculiar manner in which
Yuan Shih-kai allowed events rather than men to assert their mastery has
often been related and need not long detain us. It is generally conceded
that in spite of the bravery of the raw revolutionary levies, their
capacity was entirely unequal to the trump card Yuan Shih-kai held all
the while in his hand--the six fully-equipped Divisions of Field Troops
he himself had organized as Tientsin Viceroy. It was a portion of this
field-force which captured and destroyed the chief revolutionary base in
the triple city of Hankow, Hanyang and Wuchang in November, 1911, and
which he held back just as it was about to give the _coup de grace_ by
crossing the river in force and sweeping the last remnants of the
revolutionary army to perdition. Thus it is correct to declare that had
he so wished Yuan Shih-kai could have crushed the revolution entirely
before the end of 1911; but he was sufficiently astute to see that the
problem he had to solve was not merely military but moral as well. The
Chinese as a nation were suffering from a grave complaint. Their
civilization had been made almost bankrupt owing to unresisted foreign
aggression and to the native inability to cope with the mass of
accumulated wrongs which a superimposed and exhausted feudalism--the
Manchu system--had brought about. Yuan Shih-kai knew that the Boxers had
been theoretically correct in selecting as they first did the watchword
which they had first placed on their banners--"blot out the Manchus and
all foreign things." Both had sapped the old civilization to its
foundations. But the programme they had proposed was idealistic, not
practical. One element could be cleared away--the other had to be
endured. Had the Boxers been sensible they would have modified their
programme to the extent of protecting the foreigners, whilst they
assailed the Dynasty which had brought them so low. The Court Party, as
we have said, seduced their leaders to acting in precisely the reverse
sense.

Yuan Shih-kai was neither a Boxer, nor yet a believer in idealistic
foolishness. He had realized that the essence of successful rule in the
China of the Twentieth Century was to support the foreign point of
view--nominally at least--because foreigners disposed of unlimited
monetary resources, and had science on their side. He knew that so long
as he did not openly flout foreign opinion by indulging in bare-faced
assassinations, he would be supported owing to the international
reputation he had established in 1900. Arguing from these premises, his
instinct also told him that an appearance of legality must always be
sedulously preserved and the aspirations of the nation nominally
satisfied. For this reason he arranged matters in such a manner as to
appear always as the instrument of fate. For this reason, although he
destroyed the revolutionists on the mid-Yangtsze, to equalize matters,
on the lower Yangtsze he secretly ordered the evacuation of Nanking by
the Imperialist forces so that he might have a tangible argument with
which to convince the Manchus regarding the root and branch reform which
he knew was necessary. That reform had been accepted in principle by the
Throne when it agreed to the so-called Nineteen Fundamental Articles, a
corpus of demands which all the Northern Generals had endorsed and had
indeed insisted should be the basis of government before they would
fight the rebellious South in 1911. There is reason to believe that
provided he had been made _de facto_ Regent, Yuan Shih-kai would have
supported to the end a Manchu Monarchy. But the surprising swiftness of
the Revolutionary Party's action in proclaiming the Republic at Nanking
on the 1st January, 1912, and the support which foreign opinion gave
that venture confused him. He had already consented to peace
negotiations with the revolutionary South in the middle of December,
1911, and once he was drawn into those negotiations his policy wavered,
the armistice in the field being constantly extended because he saw that
the Foreign Powers, and particularly England, were averse from further
civil war. Having dispatched a former lieutenant, Tong Shao-yi, to
Shanghai as his Plenipotentiary, he soon found himself committed to a
course of action different from what he had originally contemplated.
South China and Central China insisted so vehemently that the only
solution that was acceptable to them was the permanent and absolute
elimination of the Manchu Dynasty, that he himself was half-convinced,
the last argument necessary being the secret promise that he should
become the first President of the united Republic. In the circumstances,
had he been really loyal, it was his duty either to resume his warfare
or resign his appointment as Prime Minister and go into retirement. He
did neither. In a thoroughly characteristic manner he sought a middle
course, after having vaguely advocated a national convention to settle
the matter. By specious misrepresentation the widow of the Emperor
Kwanghsu--the Dowager Empress Lung Yu who had succeeded the Prince
Regent Ch'un in her care of the interests of the child Emperor Hsuan
Tung--was induced to believe that ceremonial retirement was the only
course open to the Dynasty if the country was to be saved from
disruption and partition. There is reason to believe that the Memorial
of all the Northern Generals which was telegraphed to Peking on the 28th
January, 1912, and which advised abdication, was inspired by him. In any
case it was certainly Yuan Shih-kai who drew up the so-called Articles
of Favourable Treatment for the Manchu House and caused them to be
telegraphed to the South, whence they were telegraphed back to him as
the maximum the Revolutionary Party was prepared to concede: and by a
curious chance the attempt made to assassinate him outside the Palace
Gates actually occurred on the very day he had submitted an outline of
these terms on his bended knees to the Empress Dowager and secured their
qualified acceptance. The pathetic attempt to confer on him as late as
the 25th January the title of Marquess, the highest rank of nobility
which could be given a Chinese, an attempt which was four times renewed,
was the last despairing gesture of a moribund power. Within very few
days the Throne reluctantly decreed its own abdication in three
extremely curious Edicts which are worthy of study in the appendix. They
prove conclusively that the Imperial Family believed that it was only
abdicating its political power, whilst retaining all ancient ceremonial
rights and titles. Plainly the conception of a Republic, or a People's
Government, as it was termed in the native ideographs, was
unintelligible to Peking.

Yuan Shih-kai had now won everything he wished for. By securing that the
Imperial Commission to organize the Republic and re-unite the warring
sections was placed solely in his hands, he prepared to give a type of
Government about which he knew nothing a trial. It is interesting to
note that he held to the very end of his life that he derived his powers
solely from the Last Edicts, and in nowise from his compact with the
Nanking Republic which had instituted the so-called Provisional
Constitution. He was careful, however, not to lay this down
categorically until many months later, when his dictatorship seemed
undisputed. But from the day of the Manchu Abdication almost, he was
constantly engaged in calculating whether he dared risk everything on
one throw of the dice and ascend the Throne himself; and it is precisely
this which imparts such dramatic interest to the astounding story which
follows.




CHAPTER III

THE DREAM REPUBLIC

(FROM THE 1st JANUARY, 1912, TO THE DISSOLUTION OF PARLIAMENT)


To describe briefly and intelligibly the series of transactions from the
1st January, 1912, when the Republic was proclaimed at Nanking by a
handful of provincial delegates, and Dr. Sun Yat Sen elected Provisional
President, to the _coup d'etat_ of 4th November, 1913, when Yuan
Shih-kai, elected full President a few weeks previously, after having
acted as Chief Executive for twenty months, boldly broke up Parliament
and made himself _de facto_ Dictator of China, is a matter of
extraordinary difficulty.

All through this important period of Chinese history one has the
impression that one is in dreamland and that fleeting emotions take the
place of more solid things. Plot and counter-plot follow one another so
rapidly that an accurate record of them all would be as wearisome as the
Book of Chronicles itself; whilst the amazing web of financial intrigue
which binds the whole together is so complex--and at the same time so
antithetical to the political struggle--that the two stories seem to run
counter to one another, although they are as closely united as two
assassins pledged to carry through in common a dread adventure. A huge
agglomeration of people estimated to number four hundred millions, being
left without qualified leaders and told that the system of government,
which had been laid down by the Nanking Provisional Constitution and
endorsed by the Abdication Edicts, was a system in which every man was
as good as neighbour, swayed meaninglessly to and fro, vainly seeking to
regain the equilibrium which had been so sensationally lost. A litigious
spirit became so universal that all authority was openly derided,
crimes of every description being so common as to force most respectable
men to withdraw from public affairs and leave a bare rump of desperadoes
in power.

Long embarrassed by the struggle to pay her foreign loans and
indemnities, China was also virtually penniless. The impossibility of
arranging large borrowings on foreign markets without the open support
of foreign governments--a support which was hedged round with
conditions--made necessary a system of petty expedients under which
practically every provincial administration hypothecated every liquid
asset it could lay hands upon in order to pay the inordinate number of
undisciplined soldiery who littered the countryside. The issue of
unguaranteed paper-money soon reached such an immense figure that the
market was flooded with a worthless currency which it was unable to
absorb. The Provincial leaders, being powerless to introduce
improvement, exclaimed that it was the business of the Central
Government as representative of the sovereign people to find solutions;
and so long as they maintained themselves in office they went their
respective ways with a sublime contempt for the chaos around them.

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