Part 22

Early in 1911 Russia disturbed the diplomats by sending a note to the powers that she intended to make a military demonstration against Sungaria and reoccupy, as from 1871 to 1881, trade routes and frontier cities like Kuldja and Kobdo. Gullible China was induced to include in the treaty with Russia at that time permission for Russian caravaners to cross Western China under Russian arms; to trade without paying duty, and to establish Russian “_imperium in imperio_” settlements. The _Novi Krai_ of Harbin admitted that these extraterritorial demonstrations in Far Western China aimed not so much at aggression in Turkestan as cajoling further privileges in Manchuria, such as navigation on the Sungari, Russian settlements, mining and railway rights, etc. On another occasion, Russia is party to the rejection of America’s proposal of the internationalization of Manchurian railways; or again Russia cites some secret coerced treaty and compels China to refuse a franchise for an American railway from Chin-Wang to Aigun, or Chin-Wang to Kailar. Yet at the same time Russia is arranging with China to drop a railway on Peking down from Irkutsk, and a railway from Semipalatinsk down on Jungaria and the headwaters of the great Tarim River. The Russian advance is not an extinct volcano; one never knows when it will be recrudescent somewhere. The party of Admiral Alexeyev, General Spiridovitch, State Secretary Bezobrazov and Count Bobrinsky, is not dead at St. Petersburg. Russia is to-day moving 100,000 colonists a year into Siberia. She is double-tracking the Siberian railway eastward to Lake Baikal.

The following memorial to the throne, written by Viceroy Liu Ming Chuan, and approved by Li Hung Chang in 1893, reveals China’s knowledge of Russia’s deep designs: “We feel Russia’s grip on our throat, and her fist upon our back, and our contact with her is a source of perpetual uneasiness to our minds. When a quarrel occurs, we have to yield to her demands.”

Though no one can show why, land-rich Russia considers Mongolia, Turkestan, Ili, Jungaria, and two provinces of Manchuria, and even Tibet, as her sphere. In the troubles of the revolution, during the last months of 1911, harassed China felt Mongolia dragged from under her feet. The Chinese amban at Koren (Urga) was discountenanced, and Russia set up the Buddhist Lama as an independent ruler. Plans were also laid to run a railway down from Kiakhta. The Mongolian princes frequently receive presents to retain their sympathy and increase their obligations. Russia even made demands that China should withdraw her troops from the outposts and discontinue colonization, for China is beginning to learn the strategy of emigration. The building of the all-Russian link on the north side of the Amur River from Stretyinsk to Khabarovsk and Vladivostok, is going on apace at great cost, because the Russians, in trying to settle the district, refuse to employ Chinese, and have brought out 15,000 Russian railway laborers. The river has too many shallows for successful transportation, and it would not pay yet to dredge it. The _Chun Kuo Pao_, a native paper of Peking, was so pusillanimous in its fear of Russia and Japan, as to recommend in 1910 the abandonment of Manchuria to save Mongolia. I have said pusillanimous, but I might have said venal, as an illustration that Russian money may not neglect to seek power with some Chinese editors in the northern provinces.

America desired to keep Japan and Russia separated in Manchurian aggrandisement, and instead Russia came to a secret amicable agreement with her old enemy, Japan, in June, 1912. The American, Mr. Shuster, at the desire of Persia, was satisfactorily managing the customs of Persia, but Russia successfully intrigued for his retirement. On February 22, 1912, in the Hall of the Nobility, St. Petersburg, the Nationalist Party held a meeting to denounce treaties with America. Count Bobrinsky, the president of the Constitutional Conservative Party, stood up and called Ex-president Roosevelt the “enemy of Russia,” referring to the Portsmouth Peace Treaty. Plans were laid before the meeting showing how Chinese Turkestan could supply America’s place in growing cotton for Russia. Several reasons were given why Russia opposed America. The real reason was that Russia does not like America’s and Britain’s policy of the “non-partition of China.” The aristocracy of Russia also hate the influence upon the Duma of America’s and Britain’s system of budgets and armies controlled by the lower house of the people. The oligarchy of Russia hate America’s altruism that would secure to growing China her ancient fields, mines and forests of Turkestan, Mongolia and Manchuria. The Chinese rely on America’s altruism. There was possibly more than humor in the Tientsin shopkeeper’s sign: “All languages spoken; American understood.”

The Chinese bitterly remember the massacre at Blagovestchensk on the Amur River in 1900. When the Europeans were besieged in Peking, the Russians drove the innocent and unarmed Chinese inhabitants into the river at the point of the bayonet. Many were drowned, and their bodies choked the landing wharves as they floated down-stream. Yet some inquirers ask why there should be an anti-foreign feeling in China! The name of General Chitchegoff, who gave the murderous order, would live in history yoked to Nero’s if we had writers to-day as able and patriotic as fearless Seneca and Lucan. If you are an American and ask Chitchegoff in the place of his retirement why he did it, he will answer: “Ask the Bureau, and blame the oligarchical system, not the miserable agent.”

There was a time, too, when Prince Henri d’Orleans, Paul Doumer, Garnier, Leroy Beaulieu, Riviere, Loti, Petit, Bert, Imbere and Bonheur wrote, when France, as Russia’s ally, had her aggressive designs on China. Hongkong, when I lived there, was haunted by continual nightmares after France took possession of Kwangchou Bay in Kwangtung province. Since the French ran their railway from Haiphong to Yunnan City, French influence is strong in Yunnan province, and the Szechuenese are looking for France’s hand at the headwaters of the Yangtze River. In a sense this puts a barrier against the British attack on Western China from Burma, and the American attack from the Philippines. While France at home and in Tonquin is a high tariff country, there is more confidence in the republican people of France on the part of America and Britain than there is in the reliability of the other mighty diplomatic competitors. Still French aggression is potential and not to be ignored, especially as France has in Indo-China a colony of 735,000 square miles with a population of 34,000,000 people at the southern gates of old China. The heavily subsidized Messageries Maritimes mail line plies between Marseilles, Saigon and the ports as far as Japan. I once sailed half around the world on one of their white boats and know their service to be excellent. At present the French monopolize the Yunnan traffic with their railway, charging in addition to the rates a high transit fee on bonded traffic. This is internationally illegal, and is exactly what incensed Germany blew out of French diplomacy in Morocco at the muzzle of the _Panther’s_ guns, when that vessel dropped anchor at Agidir one eventful morning. In desperation, the Chinese tin miners of Kuo Chia (some of whom are citizens of Hongkong) contemplate an opposition railway to Nanning, and the old water route to Hongkong. The division of Siam between France and Britain is slowly going on, France having recently taken over one of the Shan States. To protect Singapore as a world equator gate, Britain must connect the Malay states with Burma, and in time take part of Siam. At one time France had a design of pressing her Tonquin influence through Western China, and meeting the Russian advance at Peking, but by the “entente-cordiale” France is now nearer to Britain than Russia, and this is for the good of the world, including potential American trade in the Far East. The Supreme Council of Indo-China has recently raised a loan of $40,000,000 in France for irrigation, drainage, agricultural and mining development, and extended railways and roads in Annam and Tonquin.

Chinese imperial influence in the last few centuries has not extended far south of the Yangtze River. All through French China, that is, Annam, Tonquin, Cambodia, etc., and in Siam and the Shan states (now partly absorbed by British Burma), in the old days there were hundreds of petty kings and princes (a king to a hill in that land of hills), who themselves, with the exception of the brave and intelligent Black Flag Leader, Liu Jung, were really adventurers, or descendants from Chinese adventurers from Kwangtung, Kwangsi and Yunnan provinces. Send a Chinese to America, and he tries to become a monopolist because of the ambitious example set before him; send him to British Singapore, and he strives to become a contractor with designs on knighthood; send him to Annam or Tonquin, and in the merry old days he became a swashbuckler king, and strutted upon his ant hill. The French had to pension or dethrone a hundred of these “royal” fellows from the Si Kiang valley. The dethroned one said: “As for me now, back to the pirate waters of the West River, and the admiralty of a snake-boat fleet.” They have all recently turned up in the pirate waters of Kwangtung province, and during the revolution of 1911–12 made endless trouble for the gunboat fleet of Britain, America and China, operating in the interests of civilization and trade, from Hongkong and Canton. One brigand named Luk captured the famous Bogue forts of Canton on March 12, 1912.

The Frenchman takes Paris with him wherever he goes, and as one indication I found him in all the cafés that lined the red streets of Indo-China, dropping his absinthe on ice in a long glass, though a physician would shudder at the risk taken in such a terrifically hot and humid climate. To balance “pidgin English” he has taught the Annamese “petit negre.” He has brought his costly Parisian architecture, as in the Palais, the Opera, the Cathedrals of Saigon, Hanoi and Haiphong. Since 1873 the five provinces of Indo-China, with an area larger than Texas, have cost the French $150,000,000 for military expenses. The trade last year was $50,000,000 imports and $30,000,000 exports. The colony is only beginning to exploit its great wealth, especially in coal at Hongay, Kebao and Laokai in Tonquin.

XV

SOME FOREIGN TYPES IN CHINA, AND THEIR INFLUENCE

The mainstay of Chinese revenue, and the main security as yet for foreign loans, is the National (formerly Imperial) Customs of five per cent. duty ad valorem. The organization was started at Canton in 1859 by Sir Robert Hart, an Armagh Irishman who was transferred from the British consular service. He served as head from that year until his retirement with a fortune of $500,000 in 1910. Sir Robert Hart lived in princely style at Peking and managed the service honestly. He has been criticized for taking so large a reward from straitened China by members of the India civil service, who are satisfied to retire on $1,000 a year after even more arduous service. In 1901 Sir Robert Hart wrote his book, _These from the Land of Sinim_. He was a brilliant propagandist for things Chinese, the most popular Occidental who ever served China, though he was not so heroic a figure as “Chinese” Gordon. Sir Robert Bredon was next in office, and in 1911 Sir Francis Aglen was put in charge. The son of an English clergyman, a well equipped sinologue, trained under Sir Robert Hart, Mr. Aglen is a thorough leader of this great work, which includes loan departments, lighthouse service, a cadet school, a pension bureau, and an internal revenue organization to a degree. As British commerce is the largest in China, being nearly four times as large as America’s trade, the British name the head of the customs service. Many Americans, Germans and French are also employed, and a thorough knowledge of Chinese and its dialects is insisted upon by Sir Francis Aglen.

In the region about Shanghai and Nanking, the name of “Chinese” Gordon (General Charles) still lives for his victorious leadership of Li Hung Chang’s army, which crushed the Taiping rebellion, and saved the Manchu throne for the time. General Gordon had many bitter quarrels with Li Hung Chang, insisting that assassination and murder must not follow a victory. That the rebels of 1911 in this same region did not forget Gordon’s precepts was shown by their leniency under great provocation, after capturing Nanking from the Manchus. No foreigner who has aided in forming the ten divisions of China’s Northern army has had the personality or exercised the influence that Gordon did, and in the great trial of the revolution and the mutinies of 1911–12 the army showed frequently that no strong personality had inspired the men with a fixed purpose, honor or patriotism.

About 1869 a nephew of President Van Buren, John Sheffield Van Buren, went out to Yokohama as an assistant in the consular office of his uncle. He was soon in Hongkong as agent of the Pacific Mail, Occidental and Oriental, and Toyo Kisen Kaisha trans-Pacific steamship companies, and was in touch with the Chinese of that great crown colony for thirty-three years. He had an intimate knowledge of China, and trained many of its commercial men who have risen high in the commercial and diplomatic affairs of the new republic. In Hongkong he was looked upon as one of the ablest minds that linked the West and the East. He was devoted to Southern China, developed its trade, dry docks and shipping, and formulated China’s first trans-Pacific steamship line, the Chinese Merchants’ Steamship Company of 1903. The famous Chinese guilds of Kwangtung province looked upon him as a sage, and sought his aerie retreat over Robinson Road on the cliff for many a conference under the swaying punkahs. He was a very tall thin man, with a long countenance, great eyes, and a slow, full, round voice. It was impossible to irritate him to heated expression. Like the mills of the gods, he ground slow but exceedingly fine. He used to bemoan the fact that Americans who managed Oriental companies generally do so from America, before being first experienced in the Orient, and he was a strong advocate of the British system of moving partners who would serve their seven-years term in the Orient, seven at home and then back to the Orient again. He was decidedly in an inferior field in commerce. If American diplomacy had been steadier in the East, freed from the spoils system, his mentality and training were perfectly fitted for a great American minister at Peking, or a great consul-general at Canton. He was a deep student of the Filipino, as well as the Chinese, but was altogether in favor of the latter. He was more pessimistic perhaps than was justified regarding what America will be able to do with the Filipino and the Philippines. A thorough student of the Far East, and the representatives of all nations who gathered there, smiling like Buddha in his vast but reserved knowledge, nothing irritated him so much in his official duties as listening to the conversation of the official American globe-trotter, who dropped into Hongkong for a week, and then drove contrary opinions down the throats of such sinologues as he was, and wrote books, most of the prophecies of which remain as a joke when compared with events. There was one American senator and another American official who wrote books of Far East prophecies whose “cocksureness”, like that of the Kanaka surf-rider, used to strike to the core of the resentment of this usually placid Solon of the East, who died in the terrific heat of the Red Sea in 1910, worn out with his long life near the equator, and never having written the books that were within him, and which he really owed the world. His sister married an Austrian nobleman. The family homestead was at Englewood, New Jersey, and on his mother’s side he was connected with the Sheffields and Phelpses, of Yale College memory.

There have been other notable Americans who served in China. Colonel John S. Mosby, the Confederate guerrilla leader, was consul-general at Hongkong from 1878–85, and General E. S. Bragg, of the Wisconsin Iron Brigade of the Civil War, was consul-general at Hongkong from 1902–4. The general had a sharp wit and tongue, and is known world wide for these two phrases which got into domestic and international politics: “We love Cleveland for the enemies he has made;” and, “You can as easily make a citizen of a Cuban as a whistle out of a pig’s tail.” The contretemps can be understood when it is explained that the general was at the time consul at Havana. Like the Arabs of Longfellow, after this incident and the receipt of some mail from Washington, he “folded his tent and silently stole away” for Hongkong! General Bragg, at Antietam, was approached by General Gibbon’s aide, with orders to push the enemy as long as it was safe, and the former’s famous reply was: “It has been d---- unsafe here for the last half hour. Forward again, Wisconsin.” Mr. Rounsevelle Wildman, author of _China’s Open Door_, and editor of _Overland Monthly_, consul-general at Hongkong, where he amused the staid Britons by his energetic efforts to sell his worthy book, lost his life aboard the Pacific Mail steamer _Rio_, which sank with all on board just outside the Golden Gate, San Francisco. Daniel Webster sent his son Fletcher as secretary of the famous Cushing Commission, which visited Hongkong, Canton and Macao. Secretary William H. Seward later passed over the same waters, and I have seen Admiral Greeley, of Polar fame, picking out the great war secretary’s steps at Wanchi, Hongkong. The Tibet traveler and author, A. H. Savage Landor, I knew at Hongkong. Some of us believed his thrilling tales of escape after torture and some of us were cynical. He was a worn man then, grateful for favors that are usually accorded to the traveler, an enthusiast, a student of the Western Chinese, and a courageous fellow.

In 1911, America, Britain, Germany and France arranged to loan China about $100,000,000 for railways and new currency. A neutral financial adviser was found to be necessary, and President Vissering, of the Dutch Java Bank, was agreed upon by the four nations, with Japan favorably impressed. If the loan agreements go through, and when affairs assume their normal course in China, Doctor Vissering will have opportunity to leave his mark in a wider sphere in the Far East. Mr. Hillier has long represented the British financial interests in Peking; Mr. Straight, the American; and Doctor George E. Morrison, of the London _Times_ staff, has been adviser to both imperial and republican governments at Peking.

One of the most remarkable imperialists who ever came to China was Paul Doumer. He was a French newspaper man, and came East as consul, later becoming governor of Indo-China, which he sealed to France with an iron hand. He made Haiphong, Hanoi and Saigon remarkable centers of civilization, sanitation, music, art, architecture, commerce and French imperialism. Cost was nothing to him. He seemed to make or hypnotize money after he had hypnotized governments and financiers with his eloquence and ambition. He formed Legionary troops and held a strong navy in the East. He brought the great Messageries Maritimes steamship line from Marseilles to Saigon. He grasped Kwangchou Bay in Kwangtung province, and made Hongkong tremble for her prestige over Canton and the southwest, her old imperial sphere. Then he dreamed great visions of imperialism, as Rhodes was dreaming in Africa, Curzon in India, A. Colquhoun in Burma, Kitchener in the Soudan, and some Americans like Roosevelt and Taft in Panama and the Philippines. He, “_le petit_ Paul Doumer,” would build a six hundred-mile railway, much of the right of way where men had never been before, from Haiphong to Yunnan, in the heart of Southwest China, turn the British flank at the headwaters of the Yangtze River, and link Yunnan, and some day Chingtu, with Marseilles and Paris. What if fever, one hundred bridges in fifty miles, a cost of $100,000 a mile of road, and a little traffic had to be conquered, he would build to the center of China, dividends or no dividends. By 1910 he and his men had done it. The British, fired by Colquhoun and Curzon, raced him from Burma, but he has beat them by fifteen years. The Chinese do not love the French, and they are building from Yunnan to Nanning to reach Hongkong; but it is largely French for the present at Yunnan. Hongkong and Mandalay have been flanked. The Chinese would have preferred the Americans, or the British, who do not covet Oriental land. The French aim to push that railway up to Chingtu, and cut China in half. Yunnan City, on its high plateau, once the farthest from Peking and civilization, is now a center of remarkable modernity, the Chinese emulating the French in lighted streets, water-works, factories, modern prisons, trade schools, uniformed police, and a provincial army and arsenal of modern type. If you ask how has Paul Doumer influenced China, _circumspice_ at Yunnan City. Before Paul Doumer came East, following the dream of empire, if you had been asked which was the last city of China that would adopt progress, you would have said “inaccessible Yunnan,” whereas it has been almost the first. Doumer’s most notable book on China is _L’Indo Chine Française_, with the emphasis on the _Française_!