Book: The Fight For The Republic in China

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




... From my student days, I, Yuan Shih-kai, have admired the
example of the Emperors Yao and Shun, who treated the empire as a
public trust, and considered that the record of a dynasty in history
for good or ill is inseparably bound up with the public spirit or
self-seeking by which it has been animated. On attaining middle age
I grew more familiar with foreign affairs, was struck by the
admirable republican system in France and America, and felt that
they were a true embodiment of the democratic precepts of the
ancients. When last year the patriotic crusade started in Wuchang
its echoes went forth into all the provinces, with the result that
this ancient nation with its 2,000 years of despotism adopted with
one bound the republican system of government.

It was my good fortune to see this glorious day at my life's late
eve; I cherished the hope that I might dwell in the seclusion of my
own home and participate in the blessings of an age of peace.

But once again my fellow-countrymen honoured me with the pressing
request that I should again assume a heavy burden, and on the day on
which the Republic was proclaimed I announced to the whole nation
that never again should a monarchy be permitted in China. At my
inauguration I again took this solemn oath in the sight of heaven
above and earth beneath. Yet of late ignorant persons in the
provinces have fabricated wild rumours to delude men's minds, and
have adduced the career of the First Napoleon on which to base their
erroneous speculations. It is best not to inquire as to their
motives; in some cases misconception may be the cause, in others
deliberate malice.

The Republic has now been proclaimed for six months; so far there
is no prospect of recognition from the Powers, while order is far
from being restored in the provinces. Our fate hangs upon a hair;
the slightest negligence may forfeit all. I, who bear this arduous
responsibility, feel it my bounden duty to stand at the helm in the
hope of successfully breasting the wild waves.

But while those in office are striving with all their might to
effect a satisfactory solution, spectators seem to find a difficulty
in maintaining a generous forbearance. They forget that I, who have
received this charge from my countrymen, cannot possibly look
dispassionately on when the fate of the nation is in the balance. If
I were aware that the task was impossible and played a part of easy
acquiescence, so that the future of the Republic might become
irreparable, others might not reproach me, but my own conscience
would never leave me alone.

My thoughts are manifest in the sight of high heaven. But at this
season of construction and dire crisis how shall these mutual
suspicions find a place? Once more I issue this announcement; if
you, my fellow countrymen, do indeed place the safety of China
before all other considerations, it behooves you to be large-minded.
Beware of lightly heeding the plausible voice of calumny, and of
thus furnishing a medium for fostering anarchy. If evilly disposed
persons, who are bent on destruction, seize the excuse for sowing
dissension to the jeopardy of the situation, I, Yuan Shih-kai, shall
follow the behest of my fellow-countrymen in placing such men beyond
the pale of humanity.

A vital issue is involved. It is my duty to lay before you my
inmost thought, so that suspicion may be dissipated. Those who know
have the right to impose their censure. It is for public opinion to
take due notice.

[Illustration: Silk-reeling done in the open under the Walls of Peking.]

[Illustration: Modern Peking: A Run on a Bank.]

[Illustration: The Re-opening of Parliament on August 1st, 1916, after
three years of dictatorial rule.]

Moreover Yuan Shih-kai had also shown in his selection and use of
foreign Advisers, that he was determined to proceed in such a manner as
to advertise his suspicion and enmity of Japan. After the Coup d'etat of
the 4th November, 1913, and the scattering of Parliament, it was an
American Adviser who was set to work on the new "Constitution"; and
although a Japanese, Dr. Ariga, who was in receipt of a princely salary,
aided and abetted this work, his endorsement of the dictatorial rule was
looked upon as traitorous by the bulk of his countrymen. Similarly, it
was perfectly well-known that Yuan Shih-kai was spending large sums of
money in Tokio in bribing certain organs of the Japanese Press and in
attempting to win adherents among Japanese members of Parliament.
Remarkable stories are current which compromise very highly-placed
Japanese but which the writer hesitates to set down in black and white
as documentary proof is not available. In any case, be this as it may,
it was felt in Tokio that the time had arrived to give a proper
definition to the relations between the two states,--the more so as Yuan
Shih-kai, by publicly proclaiming a small war-zone in Shantung within
the limits of which the Japanese were alone permitted to wage war
against the Germans, had shown himself indifferent to the majesty of
Japan. The Japanese having captured Kiaochow by assault before the end
of 1914 decided to accept the view that a _de facto_ Dictatorship
existed in China. Therefore on the 18th of January, 1915, the Japanese
Minister, Dr. Hioki, personally served on Yuan Shih-kai the now famous
Twenty-one Demands, a list designed to satisfy every present and future
need of Japanese policy and to reduce China to a state of vassalage.




CHAPTER VI

THE TWENTY-ONE DEMANDS


Although the press of the world gave a certain prominence at the time to
the astounding _demarche_ with which we now have to deal, there was such
persistent mystery about the matter and so many official _dementis_
accompanied every publication of the facts that even to this day the
nature of the assault which Japan delivered on China is not adequately
realized, nor is the narrow escape assigned its proper place in
estimates of the future. Briefly, had there not been publication of the
facts and had not British diplomacy been aroused to action there is
little doubt that Japan would have forced matters so far that Chinese
independence would now be virtually a thing of the past. Fortunately,
however, China in her hour of need found many who were willing to
succour her; with the result that although she lost something in these
negotiations, Japan nevertheless failed in a very signal fashion to
attain her main objective. The Pyrrhic victory which she won with her
eleventh hour ultimatum will indeed in the end cost her more than would
have a complete failure, for Chinese suspicion and hostility are now so
deep-seated that nothing will ever completely eradicate them. It is
therefore only proper that an accurate record should be here
incorporated of a chapter of history which has much international
importance; and if we invite close attention to the mass of documents
that follow it is because we hold that an adequate comprehension of them
is essential to securing the future peace of the Far East. Let us first
give the official text of the original Demands:

JAPAN'S ORIGINAL TWENTY-ONE DEMANDS

Translations of Documents Handed to the President, Yuan Shih-kai, by
Mr. Hioki, the Japanese Minister, on January 18th, 1915.


GROUP I

The Japanese Government and the Chinese Government being desirous of
maintaining the general peace in Eastern Asia and further
strengthening the friendly relations and good neighbourhood existing
between the two nations agree to the following articles:--

Article 1. The Chinese Government engages to give full assent to all
matters upon which the Japanese Government may hereafter agree with
the German Government relating to the disposition of all rights,
interests and concessions, which Germany, by virtue of treaties or
otherwise, possesses in relation to the Province of Shantung.

Article 2. The Chinese Government engages that within the Province
of Shantung and along its coast no territory or island will be ceded
or leased to a third Power under any pretext.

Article 3. The Chinese Government consents to Japan's building a
railway from Chefoo or Lungkow to join the Kiaochou-Tsinanfu
railway.

Article 4. The Chinese Government engages, in the interest of trade
and for the residence of foreigners, to open by herself as soon as
possible certain important cities and towns in the Province of
Shantung as Commercial Ports. What places shall be opened are to be
jointly decided upon in a separate agreement.


GROUP II

The Japanese Government and the Chinese Government, since the
Chinese Government has always acknowledged the special position
enjoyed by Japan in South Manchuria and Eastern Inner Mongolia,
agree to the following articles:--

Article 1. The two Contracting Parties mutually agree that the term
of lease of Port Arthur and Dalny and the term of lease of the South
Manchurian Railway and the Antung-Mukden Railway shall be extended
to the period of 99 years.

Article 2. Japanese subjects in South Manchuria and Eastern Inner
Mongolia shall have the right to lease or own land required either
for erecting suitable buildings for trade and manufacture or for
farming.

Article 3. Japanese subjects shall be free to reside and travel in
South Manchuria and Eastern Inner Mongolia and to engage in business
and in manufacture of any kind whatsoever.

Article 4. The Chinese Government agrees to grant to Japanese
subjects the right of opening the mines in South Manchuria and
Eastern Inner Mongolia. As regards what mines are to be opened, they
shall be decided upon jointly.

Article 5. The Chinese Government agrees that in respect of the
(two) cases mentioned herein below the Japanese Government's consent
shall be first obtained before action is taken:--

(a) Whenever permission is granted to the subject of a third Power
to build a railway or to make a loan with a third Power for the
purpose of building a railway in South Manchuria and Eastern Inner
Mongolia.

(b) Whenever a loan is to be made with a third Power pledging the
local taxes of South Manchuria and Eastern Inner Mongolia as
security.

Article 6. The Chinese Government agrees that if the Chinese
Government employs political, financial or military advisers or
instructors in South Manchuria or Eastern Inner Mongolia, the
Japanese Government shall first be consulted.

Article 7. The Chinese Government agrees that the control and
management of the Kirin-Changchun Railway shall be handed over to
the Japanese Government for a term of 99 years dating from the
signing of this Agreement.


GROUP III

The Japanese Government and the Chinese Government, seeing that
Japanese financiers and the Hanyehping Co. have close relations with
each other at present and desiring that the common interests of the
two nations shall be advanced, agree to the following articles:--

Article 1. The two Contracting Parties mutually agree that when the
opportune moment arrives the Hanyehping Company shall be made a
joint concern of the two nations and they further agree that without
the previous consent of Japan, China shall not by her own act
dispose of the rights and property of whatsoever nature of the said
Company nor cause the said Company to dispose freely of the same.

Article 2. The Chinese Government agrees that all mines in the
neighbourhood of those owned by the Hanyehping Company shall not be
permitted, without the consent of the said Company, to be worked by
other persons outside of the said Company; and further agrees that
if it is desired to carry out any undertaking which, it is
apprehended, may directly or indirectly affect the interests of the
said Company, the consent of the said Company shall first be
obtained.


GROUP IV

The Japanese Government and the Chinese Government with the object
of effectively preserving the territorial integrity of China agree
to the following special articles:--

The Chinese Government engages not to cede or lease to a third Power
any harbour or bay or island along the coast of China.


GROUP V

Article 1. The Chinese Central Government shall employ influential
Japanese advisers in political, financial and military affairs.

Article 2. Japanese hospitals, churches and schools in the interior
of China shall be granted the right of owning land.

Article 3. Inasmuch as the Japanese Government and the Chinese
Government have had many cases of dispute between Japanese and
Chinese police to settle cases which caused no little
misunderstanding, it is for this reason necessary that the police
departments of important places (in China) shall be jointly
administered by Japanese and Chinese or that the police departments
of these places shall employ numerous Japanese, so that they may at
the same time help to plan for the improvement of the Chinese Police
Service.

Article 4. China shall purchase from Japan a fixed amount of
munitions of war (say 50% or more) of what is needed by the Chinese
Government or that there shall be established in China a
Sino-Japanese jointly worked arsenal. Japanese technical experts are
to be employed and Japanese material to be purchased.

Article 5. China agrees to grant to Japan the right of constructing
a railway connecting Wuchang with Kiukiang and Nanchang, another
line between Nanchang and Hanchow, and another between Nanchang and
Chaochou.

Article 6. If China needs foreign capital to work mines, build
railways and construct harbour-works (including dock-yards) in the
Provinces of Fukien, Japan shall be first consulted.

Article 7. China agrees that Japanese subjects shall have the right
of missionary propaganda in China.[13]

The five groups into which the Japanese divided their demands possess a
remarkable interest not because of their sequence, or the style of their
phraseology, but because every word reveals a peculiar and very
illuminating chemistry of the soul. To study the original Chinese text
is to pass as it were into the secret recesses of the Japanese brain,
and to find in that darkened chamber a whole world of things which
advertise ambitions mixed with limitations, hesitations overwhelmed by
audacities, greatnesses succumbing to littlenesses, and vanities having
the appearance of velleities. Given an intimate knowledge of Far Eastern
politics and Far Eastern languages, only a few minutes are required to
re-write the demands in the sequence in which they were originally
conceived as well as to trace the natural history of their genesis.
Unfortunately a great deal is lost in their official translation, and
the menace revealed in the Chinese original partly cloaked: for by
transferring Eastern thoughts into Western moulds, things that are like
nails in the hands of soft sensitive Oriental beings are made to appear
to the steel-clad West as cold-blooded, evolutionary necessities which
may be repellent but which are never cruel. The more the matter is
studied the more convinced must the political student be that in this
affair of the 18th January we have an international _coup_ destined to
become classic in the new text-books of political science. All the way
through the twenty-one articles it is easy to see the desire for action,
the love of accomplished facts, struggling with the necessity to observe
the conventions of a stereotyped diplomacy and often overwhelming those
conventions. As the thoughts thicken and the plot develops, the effort
to mask the real intention lying behind every word plainly breaks down,
and a growing exultation rings louder and louder as if the coveted
Chinese prize were already firmly grasped. One sees as it were the
Japanese nation, released from bondage imposed by the Treaties which
have been binding on all nations since 1860, swarming madly through the
breached walls of ancient Cathay and disputing hotly the spoils of
age-old domains.

Group I, which deals with the fruits of victory in Shantung, has little
to detain us since events which have just unrolled there have already
told the story of those demands. In Shantung we have a simple and
easily-understood repeated performance of the history of 1905 and the
settlement of the Russo-Japanese War. Placed at the very head of the
list of demands, though its legitimate position should be after
Manchuria, obviously the purpose of Group I is conspicuously to call
attention to the fact that Japan had been at war with Germany, and is
still at war with her. This flourish of trumpets, after the battle is
over, however, scarcely serves to disguise that the fate of Shantung,
following so hard on the heels of the Russian debacle in Manchuria, is
the great moral which Western peoples are called upon to note. Japan,
determined as she has repeatedly announced to preserve the peace of the
Orient by any means she deems necessary, has found the one and only
formula that is satisfactory--that of methodically annexing everything
worth fighting about.

So far so good. The insertion of a special preamble to Group II, which
covers not only South Manchuria but Eastern Inner Mongolia as well, is
an ingenious piece of work since it shows that the hot mood of conquest
suitable for Shantung must be exchanged for a certain judicial
detachment. The preamble undoubtedly betrays the guiding hand of
Viscount Kato, the then astute Minister of Foreign Affairs, who
saturated in the great series of international undertakings made by
Japan since the first Anglo-Japanese Treaty of 1902, clearly believes
that the stately Elizabethan manner which still characterizes British
official phrasing is an admirable method to be here employed. The
preamble is quite English; it is so English that one is almost lulled
into believing that one's previous reasoning has been at fault and that
Japan is only demanding what she is entitled to. Yet study Group II
closely and subtleties gradually emerge. By boldly and categorically
placing Eastern Inner Mongolia on precisely the same footing as Southern
Manchuria--though they have nothing in common--the assumption is made
that the collapse in 1908 of the great Anglo-American scheme to run a
neutral railway up the flank of Southern Manchuria to Northern Manchuria
(the once celebrated Chinchow-Aigun scheme), coupled with general
agreement with Russia which was then arrived at, now impose upon China
the necessity of publicly resigning herself to a Japanese overlordship
of that region. In other words, the preamble of Group II lays down that
Eastern Inner Mongolia has become part and parcel of the Manchurian
Question because Japan has found a parallel for what she is doing in the
acts of European Powers.

These things, however, need not detain us. Not that Manchuria or the
adjoining Mongolian plain is not important; not that the threads of
destiny are not woven thickly there. For it is certain that the vast
region immediately beyond the Great Wall of China is the Flanders of the
Far East--and that the next inevitable war which will destroy China or
make her something of a nation must be fought on that soil just as two
other wars have been fought there during the past twenty years. But this
does not belong to contemporary politics; it is possibly an affair of
the Chinese army of 1925 or 1935. Some day China will fight for
Manchuria if it is impossible to recover it in any other way,--nobody
need doubt that. For Manchuria is absolutely Chinese--people must
remember. No matter how far the town-dwelling Japanese may invade the
country during the next two or three decades, no matter what large
alien garrisons may be planted there, the Chinese must and will remain
the dominant racial element, since their population which already
numbers twenty-five millions is growing at the rate of half a million a
year, and in a few decades will equal the population of a first-class
European Power.

When we reach Group III we touch matters that are not only immediately
vital but quite new in their type of audacity and which every one can
to-day understand since they are politico-industrial. Group III, as it
stands in the original text, is _simply the plan for the conquest of the
mineral wealth of the Yangtsze Valley_ which mainly centres round Hankow
because the vast alluvial plains of the lower reaches of this greatest
of rivers were once the floor of the Yellow Sea, the upper provinces of
Hupeh, Hunan, Kiangsi being the region of prehistoric forests clothing
the coasts, which once looked down upon the slowly-receding waste of
waters, and which to-day contain all the coal and iron. Hitherto every
one has always believed that the Yangtsze Valley was _par excellence_
the British sphere in China; and every one has always thought that that
belief was enough. It is true that political students, going carefully
over all published documents, have ended their search by declaring that
the matter certainly required further elucidation. To be precise, this
so-called British sphere is not an _enclave_ at all in the proper sense;
indeed it can only seem one to those who still believe that it is still
possible to pre-empt provinces by ministerial declarations. The Japanese
have been the first to dare to say that the preconceived general belief
was stupid. They know, of course, that it was a British force which
invaded the Yangtsze Valley seventy-five years ago, and forced the
signature of the Treaty of Nanking which first opened China to the
world's trade; but they are by no means impressed with the rights which
that action has been held to confer, since the mineral resources of this
region are priceless in their eyes and must somehow be won.

The study of twenty years of history proves this assumption to be
correct. Ever since 1895, Japan has been driving wedges into the
Yangtsze Valley of a peculiar kind to form the foundations for her
sweeping claims of 1915. Thus after the war with China in 1894-95, she
opened by her Treaty of Peace four ports in the Yangtsze Valley region,
Soochow, Hangchow, Chungking and Shasi; that is, at the two extreme ends
of the valley she established politico-commercial _points d'appui_ from
which to direct her campaign. Whilst the proximity of Soochow and
Hangchow to the British stronghold of Shanghai made it difficult to
carry out any "penetration" work at the lower end of the river save in
the form of subsidized steam-shipping, the case was different in Hunan
and Hupeh provinces. There she was unendingly busy, and in 1903 by a
fresh treaty she formally opened to trade Changsha, the capital of the
turbulent Hunan province. Changsha for years remained a secret centre
possessing the greatest political importance for her, and serving as a
focus for most varied activities involving Hunan, Hupeh, and Kiangsi, as
well as a vast hinterland. The great Tayeh iron-mines, although entirely
Chinese-owned, were already being tapped to supply iron-ore for the
Japanese Government Foundry at Wakamatsu on the island of Kiushiu. The
rich coal mines of Pinghsiang, being conveniently near, supplied the
great Chinese Government arsenal of Hanyang with fuel; and since Japan
had very little coal or iron of her own, she decided that it would be
best to embrace as soon as possible the whole area of interests in one
categorical demand--that is, to claim a dominant share in the Hanyang
arsenal, the Tayeh iron-mines and the Pinghsiang collieries.[14] By
lending money to these enterprises, which were grouped together under
the name of Hanyehping, she had early established a claim on them which
she turned at the psychological moment into an international question.

We can pass quickly by Group IV which is of little importance, except to
say that in taking upon herself, without consultation with the senior
ally, the duty of asking from China a declaration concerning the future
non-leasing of harbours and islands, Japan has attempted to assume a
protectorship of Chinese territory which does not belong to her
historically. It is well also to note that although Japan wished it to
appear to the world that this action was dictated by her desire to
prevent Germany from acquiring a fresh foothold in China after the war,
in reality Group IV was drafted as a general warning to the nations, one
point being that she believed that the United States was contemplating
the reorganization of the Foochow Arsenal in Fuhkien province, and that
as a corollary to that reorganization would be given the lease of an
adjoining harbour such as Santuao.

Copyright (c) 2007. knowncrafts.net. All rights reserved.