Part 20

From Peking to Tungchow, at the head of navigation from the coast, about twenty miles, runs a broad road paved five hundred years ago by the Ming kings with immense blocks, three feet square by two feet thick. The road sadly needs resetting, but one can readily imagine what a splendidly substantial road it once was in those spacious days of the last of the pure Chinese kings. The Ming thought of art and public works. The Manchu has thought more of intrigue and private dinners since he gave up riding horses and living in tents. One of the strongest charges against the Manchu was that he threw the great public works which he inherited into ruin. This Tungchow Road is the road over which commerce, invasion and many a dignified embassy have gone during the recent strenuous centuries.

The Che Ling Road runs from Chinchow, in Hunan province, to Canton. This is the road the new railway will take. The foot road is fifteen feet wide and composed of great stone blocks one foot thick. Before traffic was gathered at Hankau and Canton by steamships, the traffic on the Che Ling foot road was very heavy, and shops lined the long stone highway. Another famous road, the Mei Ling, also composed of stone blocks, climbs the great Nan Shan (Southern Mountains) and connects Nangan in Kiansi province and Canton. This is the road that Abbé Huc took in 1849 when he made his daring journey from Tibet to Chingtu, Chungking, Hankau, Kowkiang, Nanchang, up the Kan River to Canton and Macao. There is a famous imperial road from Peking to Jehol, through Kupikan pass, where the Manchus may finally be segregated. The road from Peking to the Ming tombs is paved with a course of large stones. The “Great Road” runs from Peking to Canton along the coast, and answers to the old Japanese “Tokkaido”, which runs from Tokio to Kioto. It was a Mongol road, dating back to the Great Wall. The best Chinese roads, however, were made in the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries A. D., during the Sung dynasty, whose capital was Hangchow.

In 1890 the province of Szechuen built sixty-five miles of a mountain river road in the gorges of the Yangtze River, starting from Kwei-chow and running eastward. The road is from one hundred to five hundred feet above high water and is cut six feet wide and eight feet high into the limestone cliffs, truly a splendid revival of the noble works of the Ming kings, and in a sublime situation not to be equaled anywhere. The Szechuen people boast that their “road goes where a monkey couldn’t hang”. The road was planned and executed entirely on Chinese initiative. The best known road in China, and considering its length, the best conditioned road in the empire, runs for four hundred miles in Szechuen province from Wan Hsien on the Yangtze River, overland to Chingtu City, the capital. It is called the Siao Pen Lu (smaller north road), and is paved to the width of six feet. It has many wonderful staircases cut up mountain faces. The road could be shortened one hundred miles if bridges were built at the gorges. An internationally owned railway was planned for this route. From Chungking to Chingtu in Szechuen province, up hill and down, and across fields and marshes, runs a traveled road paved much of the way with large stone slabs. From Chungking to Sui Fu, along the Yangtze River for two hundred miles runs a notable stone road five feet wide. Along all these old roads the freight of 400,000,000 people has been carried on the backs of men and women, and even children, whether by barrow or shoulder load, during the long quiet centuries, at an awful cost of money; for too large a proportion of the nation has been engaged in the transportation as compared with the producing department, and this is one reason why China has been poor so long.

Wells have been sunk by contractors, with whom the mayor of the village (hsiang lao) dealt. A brick caisson, fitted on a bamboo frame, is dug under and sunk. On this caisson the upper wall is built. Sometimes iron-pointed bamboo pipes are driven through the bottom of the well. These old methods will give way to the new, and windmills will begin to hum in old China.

The modern water-works of Peking take the water from the Sha Ho, a clear stream in the Western Hills. There are settling tanks, pumping stations, stand-pipes, etc. One hundred and thirty thousand families are supplied from the mains. The same concession to labor has been made as at Hongkong, in that the cleaning of the filter sand and gravel is done by hand instead of by machine. Nearly all the treaty ports are putting in modern water-works, which have been sorely needed. China’s death rate is decreasing, and it is not necessary, even from a Chinese point of view, that there should be so many births or dual wives any more.

Electric light plants are in operation at nearly all the coast treaty ports, as well as at some of the Yangtze treaty ports and West River ports inland. In the Occident, intellectual and spiritual light preceded lighted roads and the light of science, but as everything is opposite in China, it seems that science is preceding intellectual and spiritual light. But “these twain shall meet in one equator round the globe”.

The Lighthouse Department of the National Customs is employing foreign engineers in harbor and channel work, and some improvements have been made on the coast and along the rivers, the provincial authorities making a special tax wherever possible to foot the bills. Often the boatmen, merchants’ and bankers’ guilds are required to subscribe.

The first systematized attempt to handle public works scientifically was undertaken by the provincial assemblies of Nganhwei and Kiangsu provinces in the summer of 1911, during the awful famines, which followed the great floods. America has sent large contributions of flour and money for rice. The assemblies put the men, whom the floods withheld from their fields, on railway building, canal dredging, bridge building, and road making. It was along these roads that the triumphant right wing of the republicans marched, headed by Generals Hsu and Ling, in the memorable attack on Nanking, which broke the imperial resistance, and threw the Manchu over the yamen wall!

Self-reliance is half brother of independence. I have found that with these improvements has grown up not a little talk of “China for the Chinese”. One finds constant complaints in the native Chinese press that lucrative contracts, such as the erection of government buildings, are given to Japanese and other foreign contractors instead of local firms. The signs, taken altogether, are hopeful, and West and East have enough to interchange without overlapping each other. Nice adjustments will have to be made in some cases, but tact, patience, mutual sympathy and altruism will in the end overcome any misunderstandings that may arise.

XIII

THE INFLUENCE OF JAPAN

In 1911 Japan’s tariff agreements expired and a new high tariff was put into effect in the effort to raise $300,000,000 a year as the state’s revenue. The same result was experienced as in India. Home manufacturers operated in the smaller industries, and many larger foreign capitalists opened Japanese branches. For instance, the Lever Soap Company, of England, came to Osaka, and the Armstrong-Vickers-Maxim Company, of Newcastle, the gun-founders and warship builders, came to Muroran in Ezo Island, to be near the coal mines, the iron ore being imported largely from Tayeh, China, and much of the pig iron from Hanyang, China. Prices of living have advanced beyond wages, and in 1912 the municipalities of Tokio, etc., had to open free rice kitchens to feed crowds of the impoverished and unemployed. The poor bear the heaviest share of the new taxes and the increased prices levied by the trusts. The profits of some of the large trusts go out of the country. There is the same complaint as in China, that foreign capital and home monopoly are exploiting franchises, subsidy chests and tariffs. The new high tariff is a success for the monopolists, just as the American tariff was from 1865 to 1911. The complaint among the people of the privilege-made-wealth running the government and burdening the taxpayer is as bitter as in some other countries. The suffrage being limited in Japan to five millions out of sixty million people, this discontent does not yet show itself so quickly as in America and Britain. American and British newspapers, magazines and books which voice reform, and real and not deputized representation of the taxed, are translated, and widely read, not only in Japan, but in China.

The world knows the effective work of the Japanese press bureau, organized with the aid of foreign advisers, before the Japan-Russia War. This included the publication of Professor Nitobe’s book on _Bushido_ in Philadelphia, glorifying to the highest pitch of the warm Oriental imagination everything Japanese. This had much to do with preparing the way for the Japanese advance in Manchuria. That press bureau has been strengthened, and has its inspired organs in some of the large cities of the Occident. No other country is able to color the news on occasions as Japan is able. With the cry of _lèse majesté_, Japan, Germany and Russia seem to be successful in stamping out much of the independent criticism of the taxed, or those to whom equal opportunity has been denied. There seems to be only one hope for real liberty in Japan and elsewhere, the rise again, as in Bunyan’s, Milton’s and Franklin’s time, of the independent pamphlet and book, whose one motto shall be, “No taxation without real representation.”

The Japanese have appointed the Koreans, Count Yi and Viscount Cho, to represent the absorbed Korean people, and these two men are expected to sign every document praising the rule of the Japanese, which document is then wired over the world by the thoroughly organized press agency. The former immense missionary influence of the Americans among the common people is slowly being choked out, and the large foreign gold and other mining industries of Korea, which promised so well, are also now under strict watch. In other words, the system of dummification has been applied to Korean politics, and the famous American teachers and political advisers have found it well to leave the peninsula. I would instance the long articles in the New York _Times_ of June 6, 1912, and the New York _Herald_ of September 1, 1912, in which the American Presbyterian and other churches charge the Japanese bureaucracy with wholesale persecution, “planting” of evidence, imprisonment and torture of thousands of Korean political prisoners as late as 1912. Two methods of colonization face each other in contrast at the threshold of China--the Japanese method in Korea, and the American method in the Philippines. Both are progressing commercially, but the latter alone is progressing educationally and altruistically, so far. It is noticeable in Korea that the Japanese are breaking down many beautiful walls and temples to build in their place ugly utilitarian houses. They pay very little respect to those whom they have conquered. They are obliterators of art, where art detains utility. The name of the land has been changed to Chosen. In Manchuria, despite conventions, the Japanese maintain ten times the railway guard of soldiers agreed upon. Japan will bear friendly watching everywhere, as the American writers, Millard and Homer Lea, are constantly urging. Her armaments cost her a heavy taxation and she is searching for ways to recoup herself. If Manchuria is to be saved to China, it will be owing more to America’s insistence than to Britain, for Britain at present is tied up to Japan, and Britain in India has given a hostage to the East. Perhaps the best way to save Manchuria is to encourage Chinese emigration, and this plan is now working out, tens of thousands of Shangtungese leaving yearly for the three rich Manchurian provinces. The American suggestion that the Russian and Japanese railways in Manchuria should be made international is possibly not so good a plan as to sell those roads to China with money loaned for the purpose, and clean Manchuria of Russian and Japanese troops. There seems no permanent reason why China should not run Manchurian railways and mines as well and as profitably as she has run the North China Railway and the Kaiping mine of Pechili province. To illustrate how Chinese officialdom looks upon the general subject, I quote from Viceroy Liu Ming Chuan’s memorial, approved by Li Hung Chang, written in 1893: “Japan attempts now and again to be arrogant--like a mantis when it assumes an air of defiance--and to despise China, and gives us no small amount of trouble on the smallest pretext.”

The advance party has its critics in Japan. The Tokio _Nichi_, the Osaka _Mainichi_, the Tokio _Jiji_ and the Tokio _Yorodzu_ take the nation to task for attempting to compete with America’s navy. They cry out against the expansionists’ slogan of “Japan’s supremacy on the Pacific”. Here is the _Yorodzu’s_ plaint against the heavy taxes involved: “Go to the hamlets and villages, and you find the sons of our soil wearing the sad and worn appearance of the ‘man with the hoe’. Ask the shopkeepers and merchants, and they tell you that they are at a loss to know how to make ends meet. So do small manufacturers and men of moderate salaries, and in fact all who come under the general term of the middle class. Why? What else but that their taxes are too heavy, and because the price of commodities has risen too high since the war? The war has increased the wealth only of the contractors, speculators, and a small group of millionaires, which accounts for the sudden rise of the prices of the necessaries of life. Thus the chasm between the poor and the rich is widening every day. What will become of the country if the government does not bend all its energies to the recuperation of our national strength, which has been overtaxed during and since the late war? The only course which the government should follow at this critical moment is to curtail all the unnecessary expenses of administration, most of all, those of the army and navy.” This succinctly covers what volumes could not cover better. The average Japanese income is twenty-three dollars gold a year, out of which one-fifth goes to taxes.

Freight rates and tariffs are in some places as powerful as battleships and battalions in keeping out the commerce of a rival. When Japan and Russia rejected America’s proposition for an international control of Manchurian railways, so that the commerce of all nations would pay the same duty and receive the same car supply in Manchuria, Japan and Russia made a secret treaty regarding Manchuria on July 4, 1910, and another agreement in 1912. Among other points, it covered interchange rates. The Russian railways can by high rates keep out competitive Japanese goods, and the Japanese railways can retaliate. On non-competitive goods needed for local consumption, low through rates are accorded, Japan favoring the famous Harbin flour, timber, kaoliang spirits from the Harbin distilleries, and Amur salmon and fish. Russia accords low rates northward to Japanese (i. e., Fushun and Yentai) coal, cement, fresh food, etc. On export competitive soybeans, for instance, by low rates Japan tries to coax Russian shipments southward via Dairen, and Russia makes a similar effort to route Japanese-controlled beans via Vladivostok, but should a Russian shipper try to send ten miles in the direction of Japanese-owned Dairen he would find the soy rate higher than all the five hundred miles to Vladivostok.

By indirect methods, such as loans at low interest, rebated godown charges, rebated rates, and what not (for where there’s a will there’s a way) Japan can militate against the competition of American and British cottons, woolens, machinery, etc., in Manchuria. When the Chinese junks on the Liao River compete in the open season for the soy-bean traffic for Newchwang, the Japanese railways quote as low a rate as five mills per ton mile to Dalny, as compared with the lowest rate in America of eight mills. Japan is a David when she goes out to slay! Japan was the whole cause of the denial by China of an American-financed and constructed railway from Chin Wang Tao through Manchuria northward to Aigun. Yet she says she doesn’t mean to stay in Manchuria! She did not broad-gage Kuroki’s difficult Antung-Mukden railway recently in such a permanent way as to suggest that she ever intended to retire or sell out, “treaties and conventions notwithstanding,” to use the apt phrase of the London _Times_. Though America would under no circumstances accept a square foot of land in China or Manchuria, except on lease in an international municipal settlement, America must protect her growing and potential trade in Manchuria and in China, and that trade will always be withstood in one way or another by Japan. There is nothing now to go to war about, but there will always be a good deal to argue about, and Japan, as well as the Manchus, knows a dozen ways of presenting a smiling evasion. Have you ever proposed a difficult question to a Japanese at a curio auction, and watched his face! We have all voted that he was a success in making language hide thought; a born diplomat.

The Japanese government debt outstanding is £300,000,000, as compared with China’s debt of £93,000,000, and Japan’s industrials have borrowed privately abroad an added £60,000,000.

Japan’s Debt Annual in £. Interest. Due.

4% sterling £10,000,000 4½% sterling 29,750,000 4½% second series 29,750,000 4% 1905 Russia war 25,000,000 After 1921 5% 1906 Russia war, railways, ships, Manchuria, Korea, Formosa, Saghalien, etc. 183,000,000 5% 1907 11,500,000 After 1922 4% 1910 11,000,000 After 1920 ------------ Total Japan’s debt £300,000,000 £12,000,000 Total China’s debt 93,000,000 4,642,000 Total India’s debt 170,000,000

Great as is Japan’s debt, she can make heavy payments on it because she owns her railways, and can allot the railway surplus to the diminishing of the debt, which China and India can also do because of the nationalization of most of the railways.

In April, 1912, the Lodge Resolution in the American Senate brought out the fact that a Japanese trans-Pacific steamship company, acting doubtless on behalf of the Japan forward party, had long been endeavoring to obtain from Mexico a strategic base on Magdalena Bay, which could, as a coaling station, threaten the whole Pacific coast. How would Japan like it if America obtained a coaling station in Manchuria? She and Russia compelled China to refuse America a railway franchise in Pechili in 1910.

What is the comparative strength of the American and Japanese navies? The German specialist, Count von Reventlow, and the American, Homer Lea, who accompanied Sun Yat Sen to China as military adviser, though he is not a military man, have in several books prophesied that Japan will and can defeat America. Japan has four dreadnoughts, the _Settsu_, _Kawachi_, _Aki_ and _Satsuma_, completed since the Russia War, but they have only half the gun-power of the ten American superdreadnoughts. Japan has eight battleships of the 15,000-ton _Mikasa_ type, including the salvaged and repaired Russian ships, against America’s thirty battleships of the first class. America can therefore patrol the Pacific from a Philippine base as soon as she has docks enough, and if America and Britain ever approximate on world questions, the British navy can be drawn to the Atlantic and waters west of Ceylon. Two things are sure: first, that America and Britain will never fight each other; and second, that Britain’s and America’s commercial and political policies in the East are identical in destiny. As long as America maintains a two-power standard on the Pacific, that is, two ships to one of Japan’s she need fear no opposition from Japan, and Japan has certainly nothing to fear from America, as China ceaselessly praises the altruistic and non-land-grabbing policy of America over the world. It is true that Japan has an almost irresistible army, but sea power dictates, as Admiral Mahan’s brilliant books show. Japan whipped Russia because she controlled the sea. If America controls the Pacific, the Japanese army could do nothing in Korea or Manchuria.

Now, as to Russia, the navies of America and Britain pounding on the Baltic door, if necessary, as a last resort, could make Russia behave in Manchuria; but if this did not prove wholly effective, a reformed Chinese army, trained by American and British officers, could in time do to the Russian battalions that were left what Oyama’s, Nogi’s and Kuroki’s regiments did. China should not yet be called upon to waste her money on a navy, as she has no interests for a century beyond the great countries of Turkestan, Mongolia and Manchuria, which America and Britain, with their navies, desire to enable her to retain. Britain and America should have a persistent, consistent policy, and there will be no naval war, the whole world over; and Germany can reduce her navy and army charges, which are a curse to her people. If Germany wants to do a noble work, let her use her army to influence parliamentary and sociological reforms in tyrannical Russia, where men are blighted by the curses of opinion-paralyzing detectivism and oligarchism. If a consistent, persistent policy is maintained there need no more be an Anglo-German feud on the Atlantic than an American-Japanese feud on the Pacific.

England needs a two-power navy because she has Africa, India and Atlantic Canada to defend. America needs a two-power Pacific navy because she has, as a foster mother of civilization, to help defend Australia, South America, the Philippines, Pacific Canada and republican China. Looked upon in this way, a navy becomes a policeman, and not a swashbuckler. Money is going to be invested to develop all these countries, and property should be protected, not looted. Those nations which have the most efficient naval police, and the most altruistic policies, are the nations which should patrol, and they are America, Britain and possibly Germany, if the last nation advances, as it seems now to be doing, in parliamentarism to real representation. America and Lloyd George’s Britain alone are essentially democracies, and therefore qualify in international altruism. With Britain’s control of the Suez Canal, and America’s ownership of the Panama Canal, efficiency is assured in these two nations effectively standing by to protect political progress and world commerce on a fuller and freer basis than it has ever been. In amenability and high mechanical intelligence, Britain, America and Germany alone have qualified in the management of navies.

Japan and America will not fight on the Pacific, as Count von Reventlow and Homer Lea prophesy, but America will overbuild Japan instead. Japan has been more carefully reading the new lesson taught by America and Britain that there must be no absorption of old China, and she is now thinking of a possible new rôle, as the interpreter of the East to the West, and the West to the East. The head of the First Imperial College, Doctor Nitobe, the coiner of “Bushido”, is foremost in propagating this idea. Japanese school-teachers are most numerous in Chinese government schools, especially as teachers of English, in learning which, however, they are not half so expert as the Chinese themselves. Doctor Nitobe is a Christian.