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CHINA REVOLUTIONIZED

_By_ JOHN STUART THOMSON

AUTHOR OF The Chinese, Bud and Bamboo, Etc.

ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS AND MAPS

INDIANAPOLIS THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY PUBLISHERS

PRESS OF BRAUNWORTH & CO. BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS BROOKLYN, N. Y.

DEDICATED TO MOTHER

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I THE GENESIS OF THE REPUBLICAN REVOLUTION 1

II WIT AND HUMOR IN CHINA 114

III INDUSTRIAL AND COMMERCIAL CHINA 137

IV FINANCE AND BUDGET IN CHINA 161

V BUSINESS METHODS OF FOREIGNERS IN CHINA 175

VI RAILWAYS IN CHINA 186

VII SHIPPING AND WATER ROUTES IN CHINA 196

VIII AMERICA IN CHINA 206

IX THE NATIVE LEADERS 222

X CHINA’S INTERNATIONAL POLITICS 229

XI CHINESE INTERNAL POLITICS 242

XII SOME PUBLIC WORKS IN OLD CHINA 250

XIII THE INFLUENCE OF JAPAN 259

XIV PRESSURE OF RUSSIA AND FRANCE ON CHINA 281

XV SOME FOREIGN TYPES IN CHINA, AND THEIR INFLUENCE 288

XVI THE MANCHU 305

XVII CHINA’S ARMY AND NAVY 317

XVIII MODERN EDUCATION IN CHINA 334

XIX LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE 351

XX LIFE OF FOREIGNERS IN CHINA 363

XXI FOREIGN CITIES OF CHINA 375

XXII NATIVE CITIES OF CHINA 433

XXIII RELIGIOUS AND MISSIONARY CHINA 450

XXIV LEGAL PRACTISE AND CRIME IN CHINA 472

XXV CHINESE DAILY LIFE 487

XXVI CLIMATE, DISEASE AND HYGIENE 499

XXVII CHINESE WOMANHOOD 519

XXVIII AGRICULTURE AND FORESTRY IN CHINA 533

XXIX CHINESE ARCHITECTURE AND ART 541

XXX SOCIOLOGICAL CHINA 555

XXXI AWAKENED INTEREST IN AMERICA 567

INDEX 581

CHINA REVOLUTIONIZED

THE GENESIS OF THE REVOLUTION IN CHINA AND ITS HISTORY

FROM OCTOBER 10, 1911, TO YUAN SHIH KAI’S ACCEPTANCE OF THE PROVISIONAL PRESIDENCY

A republic in place of the oldest monarchy! Preposterous. It would involve making a yellow man think as a white man, and that had never occurred, not even in the case of the prodigy, Japan. It would involve free intercourse with the whole wide world, and China had opposed such an innovation stubbornly for 400 years. It meant that the proudest and most self-contained nation should treat others as equals and interchange with them. It involved throwing 4,000 years of continuous history and agglomerated pride and precedent to the winds, and humbly beginning anew as a tyro for a while. It meant the dealing with 400,000,000 kings, instead of one, and asking: “My lord, what is your will?” An educational system 2,000 years old to be forgotten at once! A religion 5,000 years old at least, whereby every man had his own god (his father), to be made as cheap as the paltry sacrifices of wine, rice and the painted stick of Confucianism were in reality! The taking up of individual and national responsibility for 400,000,000 people, and entrance upon a wide path of world-influence, with its divided shame and fame! The taking and giving of blows for wrong and right! The giving up of the triple eternal Nirvana of father, self and son, in exchange for an exciting rôle limited to fifty-five crowded years in the individual! The scale of action! A land as large as all Europe, and a people as numerous as the Caucasic race! The thunderous knock on the long-locked doors of science and medicine by 400,000,000 people who had bowed to idol and charm alone! It shook the world. It was pregnant with paradisal possibilities for mankind, because of the vastness of the movement and the depth of its well-spring. The launching of this new leviathan ship of state could not but raise a wave that would lift the already floating hulks of Europe and America, and give them added impetus, though temporary alarm. The rearrangement of commerce, manufacture, labor, finance, taxation, learning, agriculture, art and possibly religion for the whole world. The adding of the most difficult language to the tongues and pens of men, and the call on the English speech to rise once more greater than the mighty stranger, or die. The challenge to Palestine’s Bible to conquer by truth, or retreat with half a world lost. The uprising again of the yellow ghosts of Kublai Khan, Batu, Timurlane, and the Khans of the Golden Horde. What would be the Caucasian’s answer to Emperor William’s question: “The Yellow Peril”? It will be remembered that the kaiser once painted a picture showing the nations of Europe gathering to defend the cross and civilization against an incendiary Buddha lowering in the eastern sky. Would the stranger within the gates be protected even while republican and imperialist fought out their argument? Would leadership arise, and would the great Mongolian mass be intellectualized now that it was energized? Since the vast body was suddenly displaced, would it henceforward move by mere gravity, or sympathetic volition? Could it collectivize and not disintegrate? What would be the effect on the scores of trembling thrones, where Rominoff, Hapsburg, Savoy, Hohenzollern, Ottoman, Mikado, Billiken, etc., said they ruled by “divine right”, which is quite a different thing from noble England’s “constitutional right”? Sun Yat Sen and the Chinese republicans sent out this challenge: “Tien ming wu chang” (the divine right lasts not forever).

All these questions presented themselves when the reformers startled the world with the announcement that there was to be a republic in China. It was to be a republic--not a monarchy--said even those Chinese who had been educated in Japan, where lately a Japanese editor educated in America and ten others had been tried and executed in secret, the papers sealed, and the press censored. They wanted pitiless publicity in the new republican China. Had there been no abatement of the opium habit through America’s leadership of sentiment, and Britain’s sacrifice of revenue from 1909 to 1911, there could have been no rebellion in 1911. The reform cleared the befogged heads of the nation, added a million men to agitation, and furnished a hundred million dollars directly and indirectly toward the independence of the agitators. How great a stone America and Britain set rolling in that Opium Conference of 1909 at Shanghai!

The great revolution of October, 1911, did not drop as a bolt from a clear sky. The clouds had been gathering, though many at home and abroad did not, or would not see them. In September, 1911, the imperial viceroy of Canton, Chang Ming Chi, sent spies along the new Canton-Hongkong railway to apprehend smugglers of arms. In the same month troops under the command of Marshal Lung Chai Kwong, suddenly surrounded the office of the _Shat Pat Po_ newspaper, at Canton, and arrested several reformers. General Luk Wing Ting, of Kwangsi province, came down the Si Kiang (West River) in September, 1911, in the gunboat _Po Pik_ to Canton and took back with him from the Canton arsenal, machine guns and ammunition to attack the “anarchists”, as the Manchus persistently called all reformers. In the month previous, the Ministry of Posts and Communications at Peking stopped the use of private codes, so as to censor messages to the reformers. Several viceroys, in secret sympathy with the reformers, had as early as August, 1911, wired for gunboats, so as to disperse the fleet from the Yangtze basin, where the revolution was to strike, and the largest cruiser, the splendid _Hai Chi_, well-known in New York, these viceroys suggested should be sent to King George’s coronation review at Spithead. Even as far back as July, 1907, the Chinese government approached the powers, requesting that they make espionage on arms consigned to South China. Rather to our amusement, they used to arrive at Hongkong as boxed pipes, condensers, bar iron, crockery, etc.--anything but guns, but that was the humor of the freight classification which the shippers used! In December, 1906, the scholars of the middle class in Wuchow, Kwangsi province, at the head of navigation on the West River, decided to cut off their queues, and adopted khaki uniform, military drill and track races. They were independently preparing for strenuous times five years before the outbreak, and these boys were found in the first line of the attack in October, 1911, up at Hankau, led by the Chinese Colonel Wen, who had graduated from West Point Military Academy, in America, in 1909. In August, 1911, the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation reported that a large part of its $9,000,000 gold note issue was being held, instead of circulated by the Chinese of Kwangtung and other southern provinces. This hoarding of safe securities always indicates lack of faith as to the business and political future.

The celebrated Manchu, Tuan Fang, director-general of railways, was ordered by the Ministry of Communications to proceed to Canton and Kung Yik, the new town of the Americanized Chinese, in August, 1911, to “pacify the people”. Tuan replied that he would not go, and gave as his excuse: “Canton is infested with anarchism”. In the same month the regent, Prince Chun, asked Prince Ching to recommend an energetic general to be sent to quell disturbances in Kwangtung province, and the Tartar general, Fung Shan, was sent. Spying was not uncommon, impersonators going to a province ahead of new appointees and reciting a record at the yamen which seemed to identify them. In August, 1911, the cabinet at Peking decided to send photographs of new officials in a sealed envelope, so as to prevent this impersonating.

As an indication of the new spirit which was moving among the Chinese of Canton for better things at this time, take the inception of the model town of Heungchow. Chinese returned from America, Singapore and Hongkong could not bear the municipal restraint of the old city. They chose a site ten miles up the inner harbor of Macao. Dredging and a breakwater were begun for a harbor. Broad streets, drains, fine stores, temples, police and fire stations and equipment, water-works, libraries, parks, reforestation, chamber of commerce, tramways, electricity and gas, hospitals, schools, theaters, detached homes with gardens, launch and steamer lines, and a free port,--all were in the scheme. When a government permits monopoly of food, and riots result because of justice ineffectually exerted, history shows that the government is about to fall. I instance the fierce Hangchow rice riots of July, 1906, under the leadership of the Hung Pang (Red Association), and the Changsha rice riots of 1910, when Yale College, in China, was barely saved from the conflagration in the very district which in 1911 was swept by the high tide of the revolution. In 1906 text-books were issued to the modern schools (Hok Tongs) which contained a caricature of China, not as the “Middle Kingdom” of old, but as a morsel from which all the nations took a bite. The intent, of course, was to arouse resentful patriotism in place of the old inert pride. Many of these schoolboys enlisted in the two bravest corps of the republicans, the “Dare to Die” band, and the “Bomb Throwers” regiment. In April, 1911, the rebels, under two of Sun Yat Sen’s lieutenants, Hu Wai Sang and Wu Sum, operating in Kwangtung province, issued to the world almost the identical manifesto that President Sun and Foreign Secretary Wu Ting Fang issued in January, 1912, covering the following points:

1. Ousting the Manchu.

2. Friendly intercourse with foreigners and protection of foreign property and person.

3. All foreign treaties now in force to be allowed to run their course.

4. Foreign loans and indemnities contracted by Manchus to date to be paid.

5. Concessions contracted to date to be binding.

Desperate fighting took place, and had the rebels been sufficiently supplied with money and arms, the republic would have been declared at Canton in April instead of at Wuchang and Nanking in November. The United States gunboat _Wilmington_ and British gunboats were rushed to Shameen Island, Canton, to protect foreigners. Admiral Li, who was killed in the October revolution, was barely able to conquer this April revolution in Kwangtung and Fukien provinces. For centuries the Chinese women would not associate with the Manchus, whom they called “tent women”. All through Turkestan the Chinese walled off their section of the city from the Mongolian settlements, though after the conquest the Manchu troops displaced the Chinese.

Nearly all the missions were informed by students and friends many months previous to the revolution that serious and continued disturbances would occur. The Chinese saw that individualism had arisen in America and England and was battling with the privileged. Individualism arose at last in China and resented in this rebellion the quietism taught by the superstition of Taoism, the resignation of Buddhism and the obedience of Confucianism. “I am not a clan; I am a man,” said the ambitious Chinese as he saw the new ray of hope. American diplomacy was not altogether uninformed or unprepared. The American fleet was made the largest foreign fleet in Chinese waters in the first month of the revolution, Admiral Murdock having the cruisers _Saratoga_ (the converted _New York_ of Spanish War fame), _Albany_, _New Orleans_, _Wilmington_; the gunboats _Helena_, _El Cano_, _Villalobos_, _Samar_; the monitor _Monterey_; and the destroyers _Barry_ and _Decatur_.

As far back as June 3, 1910, a year and four months before the revolution, the Shanghai _News_ printed the following article: “All the legations and consuls have received anonymous letters from friendly revolutionaries in Shanghai containing the warning that an extensive anti-dynastic uprising is imminent. If they do not assist the Manchus, foreigners are not to be harmed.” In August, 1911, a rebellion broke out at Sining, in far western Kansu province. The stores were raided for every bolt of foreign cotton to make uniforms. A boy of fifteen was named leader and he was given the significantly fanciful name of “Savior of his country” (Chiu Shih Wang). Rich men cornered the rice supply in the flooded Yangtze valley, and food riots broke out all along the river in August, 1911. On August 23, 1911, rebels boarded a Chinese gunboat on the romantic Si Kiang (West River) near Canton, shooting the commander and seizing the arms and ammunition. On September first the Navy Department strengthened the patrol of Kwangtung province waters so as to stop the smuggling of arms, and the army board required miners to get permits to import dynamite, as they feared that the “anarchists” were importing the explosive. The awful floods and famines of 1910–11 in the basins of the Yangtze River, the Hwei River and Grand Canal had created much criticism of the government, which failed to alleviate suffering; and the famine-stricken were willing to fight, because an army has a commissariat, at least. “Every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented, escaped to the cave of Adullam.” Newspapers, such as the oldest reform journal, the _Shen Pao_, of Shanghai, related horrible illegal tortures of the “third degree” used by Manchuized officials, which I have quoted in the chapter on “Legal Practise.”

Tin was largely financing the propaganda, the 400,000 Chinese tin merchants and miners of Singapore and Penang in the Straits Settlements being the largest contributors. Following them came the 100,000 American Chinese and the 50,000 Australian Chinese. Even in 1898, Li Hung Chang was known to declare, at Canton, that it was not impossible that the spread of the proposed new education of the foreigners would overturn the Manchu dynasty, of which he, a Chinese from Hofei, in Nganhwei province, had been the strongest prop among the viceroys for forty-five years. Superstition was not inactive. Halley’s comet flared in the sky. It had shone when Cæsar fell; when Jerusalem fell; when Italy fell before Attila; when English Harold fell before William the Conqueror; when Rome fell in England; when Quebec fell before Wolfe; and now its awful flame must surely prophesy the fall of the Manchu dynasty. Omens were recited that red snow (snow and loess) had fallen in Honan province, and that the Hangchow tidal bore had risen twenty feet, broke over the bank and poured water into the first gallery of the Haining pagoda. This always meant the fall of the dynasty, for had it not happened on the night the beloved Mings fell, and when the scholarly Sungs fell?

As with civil servants in some other countries, the Manchuized civil service (mandarins) acted as though they were the governors and not the servants of the people by allotting to themselves high salaries and peculations. The year before the revolution the land tax yielded about $150,000,000. Only $30,000,000 reached the government exchequer. The Chinese held the Manchus responsible for this criminal neglect of audit, for at least $100,000,000 should have reached the imperial and provincial exchequers. That would have allowed $50,000,000 for the expected peculation of that kind of office holders who believe that “public office is a private graft”. In September, 1911, the month preceding the great revolution, the _Chi Feng Po_, a native paper of Peking, reported that all wages were in arrears and that even the tea coolies had humorously pasted an anonymous sheet on the imperial controller’s door: “Not even a shadow of our wages yet; WHY! WHY!” Taxes were increased on long-suffering Kwangtung province in the south, the brick kilns of Kochau, the silk sheds of Namhoi, the tea houses, and even the temple keepers being assessed “all the taxed would bear”. I shall instance a representative revolt. On September 6, 1911, the bonze at Shek Lung, near Canton, organized a revolt among the worshipers at his temple. The mob demolished the municipal yamen, the police station, the government distilleries, abattoir and fish market. As far back as 1898 the emperor, Kwang Hsu, by edict declared that the lottery at Canton should pay one-third of the upkeep of the far-away Peking University. I have related in the chapter on “Chinese Daily Life” the incident of a unique statue of a kneeling figure erected in the Kwan clan temple at San Wui, near Canton, in August, 1911, which is whipped by the worshipers to commemorate the defection of a member to the government’s railway and tax program. There was always ill feeling between Peking and Kwangtung provinces, the Manchu and Manchuized viceroys joking at Peking when they were ordered to assume charge at the yamen at Canton: “Well, I’m off to boss Miaotszes (barbarians),” which the refined and commercial Cantonese certainly were not. This superciliousness was deeply resented.

Repeated complaint had been made that an unrepresentative Manchu government gave away concessions right and left to foreigners, and that when these concessions were recalled or bought out, owing to outraged patriotic feeling in the southern and central provinces, the foreigner in instances charged immense sums for good will and franchise in addition to his outlay and interest. I shall not recite instances, as it is the system that I am denouncing, not the persons. The Chinese rightly said, if we look at the matter with his eyes, that he was not going to pay vast sums for the retrocession of his own franchise, which was in some instances coerced from, or wheedled out of, an effete, governing, unrepresentative clique, the members of which never consulted the provinces that were concerned. “Taxation without representation” again. It was not like the repudiation of the bonds of the southern states, for no money had been paid. “Compensation” and “indemnity” are two words the Chinese have learned to hate, and some day they mean to build an immense navy and equip a large army to interpret these words in the way the Occident interprets them, when they are synonymous with injustice and “grab”. Bitter complaint has continually been made since 1898 that Germany monopolized the mining and railway franchises of the rich province of Shangtung.

On the subject of railways, concessions, etc., the following remarks will be recalled in the American General J. H. Wilson’s book, _China_ (1887): “The Chinese will build railroads, open mines, etc., whenever they can be shown that this can be done with their own money, obtained at first by private subscription, and by their own labor, under the direction of foreign experts who will treat them fairly and honestly. They will not for the present grant concessions or subsidies to foreigners. They will not even take money from any syndicate by mortgage.” Complaint was also made that the Ming dynasty, 268 years ago, left as a heritage to the Manchu dynasty, a land full of public works, bridges, roads, temples, pagodas, canals, and that while the Manchu collected large taxes, he seldom or never repaired a temple, canal or road, so that China is now desolate. Objection was also made that the government shipyards, like the Kiangnan, at Shanghai, were building luxurious ocean steam yachts for Prince Tsui and others of the imperial clan, an expense which the nation could not afford.

Two years before the famous revolution of October 10, 1911, the author, in his book, _The Chinese_, picked out five men as the leaders of changing China: Sun Yat Sen, as the anti-Manchu rebel, who would take up arms in the endeavor to establish a republic; Kang Yu Wei, who would go almost as far in reform, but would retain the Manchu dynasty under a strict constitutional monarchy; Liang Chi Chao, as the translator of reform books and a probable secretary of a reformed state; Wu Ting Fang, as a secret reformer at heart, “who would bear sympathetic watching”, and Yuan Shih Kai, to a degree an Occidentalized opportunist of great ability, who was most favored by the Peking and Tientsin foreigners, though distrusted by the Chinese and foreigners in the south and Yangtze valley of China. The revolution was in full sway by November, 1911, with Sun Yat Sen named as probable president of a Chinese republic (Republic of Han); Kang in the exact place prophesied; Liang as secretary of justice of Yuan’s first trial cabinet of a constitutional monarchy; Wu Ting Fang as foreign minister of a provisional republic at Shanghai; and Yuan called from his two years’ exile at Chang Te in Honan province to be the first minister of the reformed constitutional monarchy.