CHAPTER XLII

COVETED CHINA

NOTE

As the significance of Lord Charles Beresford's doings in China cannot be appreciated save in the light of the knowledge of the international situation in 1898, a brief analysis of it may here serve the convenience of the reader.

The governing factor of the problem was the fear of Russian ambition and of Russian aggrandisement. Both Russia and Great Britain are great Oriental Powers. The Asiatic possessions or dependencies of Russia consisted of over six million square miles, containing a population of about thirteen millions. The Asiatic possessions or dependencies of Great Britain consisted of something over one and a half million square miles, containing a population of some three hundred millions. A comparison between the two demonstrates this remarkable disparity: that whereas Russia had four times as much Asiatic territory as England, England ruled over thirteen times as many Asiatic people. The Russian pressure towards the seaboards, wealthy lands and vast populations of the East, extended along a line measuring 7600 miles, and verging all the way upon India, Turkey, Persia and China. In 1898, Russia was steadily advancing towards India, throwing forward railways through Central Asia, and at the same time inexorably thrusting the Trans-Siberian Railway towards Manchuria and the Amur regions. That line, which to-day bands the entire continent {419} from St. Petersburg to Vladivostock on the Sea of Japan, in 1898 had not reached within 500 miles of Irkutsk on Lake Baikal, which marks roughly two-thirds of the whole distance of 4000 miles from St. Petersburg to Vladivostock as the crow flies.

The vast, inscrutable, dreaded giant Russia, lying right across the top of Europe and Asia, was ever pushing downwards to the south upon Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan and China, and reaching an arm sideways to the east and the sea across the upper corner of China. The shoulders of the British Empire were taking some of the weight; and lest China should crack under it and fly asunder, many people were urging that England should prop up that passive and unwieldy bulk, Lord Salisbury standing back to back with the Son of Heaven.

The common interest was of course commercial. Great Britain had 64 per cent. of China's total foreign trade, with some £32,000,000 a year; had invested some hundreds of millions in the Far East; and was amiably and openly desirous to invest a great deal more in what was largely an unexplored and an immense field of profit. But she wanted security, first.

It was Lord Charles Beresford's business to discover what were the existing commercial conditions, how they might be improved and extended, and what was the security required for so much improvement and extension. This enterprise was known as the policy of the "Open Door"; for the British principle was that all nations should enjoy equal opportunities. The alternative policy was known as "Spheres of Influence," which virtually meant the partition of the Chinese Empire among the nations of Europe. Such was the Russian policy, in which she was supported, or was believed to have been supported, by both France and Germany. Russian diplomacy was active at Pekin; Russian agents were numerous in the trading centres of China; and it was constantly alleged at the time by students of the subject, that the Chinese Government regarded Russia as a more {420} powerful friend than England. In the light of subsequent experience, it would perhaps be more accurate to say that whereas China hated and distrusted all foreigners, she hated and distrusted the English less than the Russians, but that the vacillations and inconsistencies of British policy had inspired her rulers with a deep suspicion.

A good deal of nonsense, inspired by a large and generous ignorance of Chinese conditions and affairs, was talked and written in 1898. China was represented as an eccentric barbarian of great size, of uncertain temper, but on the whole amenable to good advice, who was merely waiting pathetically for the English to teach him what to do and how to do it.

In truth, China, in 1898, that is, political China, while haunted by a dread of foreign aggression, was intensely occupied with her own affairs. These were indeed exigent enough. In the summer of 1898, occurred the Hundred Days of Reform, followed by the _coup d'état_, and the imprisonment of the Emperor. The visit of Lord Charles Beresford to China coincided with the triumph of the reactionary Conservative party at Court and the restoration to absolute power of the Empress Dowager, Tsu Hsi. The history of the affair is related in detail by Messrs. J. O. P. Bland and E. Backhouse, in their work, _China under the Empress Dowager_ (Heinemann, 1910); but its intricacies were not divulged at the time. A study of the correspondence contained in the Blue Books of the period reveals the singular innocence of the British diplomatic methods employed at this critical moment.

The Emperor, Kuang-Hsu, who had always been at variance with his astute and powerful aunt, the Empress Dowager, the real ruler of China for fifty years, had espoused the cause of the Reform, or Chinese, party of the South, as distinguished from the Manchu, or Conservative, party of the North.

The enmity of the South towards the North, the latent inbred hostility of the Chinese to the Manchu, had been {421} roused to violence by the defeat of China by Japan in the war of 1894-5. It was very well known that the Empress Dowager had spent the money allocated to the Navy and other departments of State upon the rebuilding of the Summer Palace at Pekin and other æsthetic diversions. But the Empress Dowager, with her habitual skill, contrived to shift the responsibility for the disaster upon the puppet Emperor, who in fact was guiltless of it. The injustice so exasperated the young man, that he joined the Reform Party, and issued Decree after Decree, all of which were tinctured with Western ideas, and all of which were expressly repugnant to the Empress Dowager. Tzu Hsi, however, approved the Decrees without remark, biding her time. It came. The Emperor was induced to assent to a plot to seize the person of the Empress Dowager, and afterwards to sequester his terrible aunt for the rest of her life.

Now came the intromission of Yuan Shih Kai, who had been Imperial Resident in Corea. In 1898, he was Judicial Commissioner of Chihli, and exerted considerable influence at Court. Yuan Shih Kai, professing great interest in reform, won the confidence of the Emperor; who, believing that in Yuan he had gained an adherent at Court, informed him of the details of the conspiracy. That design included the assassination of Yung Lu. Now Yung Lu was Governor-General of Chihli, commander-in-chief of the foreign-drilled army, which was one of the efficient armies in China, an old friend and a loyal servant of the Empress Dowager, and altogether a most formidable person. The Emperor's plan was to slay Yung Lu swiftly, to put himself at the head of Yung Lu's ten thousand soldiers, and then to march with them upon Pekin and seize the Empress Dowager. All might have gone well, had not Yuan Shih Kai (according to Messrs. Bland and Backhouse) been blood-brother to Yung Lu, and also, presumably, loyal to the Empress Dowager. In any case, Yuan went straightway to Yung Lu and divulged the plot.

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The next day, it was the Emperor Kuang Hsu, and not his aunt, who was ceremoniously escorted to prison.

Six of the conspirators were subsequently executed. Another, Kang Yu Wei, escaped under British protection in October, 1898. Dr. Sun Yat-sen was another fugitive. It was in October, 1898, that Lord Charles Beresford arrived at Pekin.

The Empress Dowager resumed the Regency and therewith the formal investiture of that supreme power which she had exercised since, as a girl of twenty-two, a lady in waiting at Court in the time of the Emperor Hsien-Feng, she had unofficially assumed the conduct of affairs, and which she continued to wield until the end. Yung Lu was appointed to be member of the Grand Council, and Minister of War. When he was in Pekin, Lord Charles Beresford had an interesting conversation with Yung Lu.

The Emperor Kuang Hsu remained imprisoned in his palace in the Ocean Terrace at Pekin; and it was rumoured throughout the South that he would presently die. Whether or not the Empress Dowager desired his death, she considered it politic, having regard to the anger which his dethronement inspired in the South, to keep him alive. Moreover, the British Minister, referring to the reports that "the Empress Dowager was about to proceed to extreme steps in regard to the Emperor," solemnly suggested that any such course of action would be highly repugnant to the susceptibilities of Foreign Powers.

Such, briefly indicated, was the posture of affairs in 1898, when the British Government was being urged to initiate a definite policy in China, and when Lord Charles Beresford went to investigate commercial conditions in that puzzling Empire. But the British Government had the rest of the world to consider, as well.

In the preceding year, 1897, it was announced that Russia would winter at Port Arthur; whereupon Lord Charles Beresford remarked in the House of Commons that the winter would probably be of long duration. Germany {423} was in occupation of Kiao Chao, originally demanded as compensation for the murder of a German missionary--a most profitable martyrdom. There were troubles on the Indian frontier; there was fighting in Crete, and consequently there was danger of a war breaking out between Greece and Turkey. It is sufficiently obvious that, under such conditions--at a time when the European nations were each waiting to take of China what it could get; when Russia was more or less in agreement with France and Germany; and when England stood alone;--any very definite move on her part might have led to bigger difficulties than she cared to encounter. At any rate, peace was maintained; the policy of the "Open Door" prevailed; and the influence exerted by Lord Charles Beresford upon international affairs, although perhaps not to be defined, was considerable. For further information concerning this epoch, the student may be referred to _China under the Empress Dowager_, by Messrs. J. O. P. Bland and E. Backhouse (Heinemann, 1910); _China in Transformation,_ by A. R. Colquhoun (Harper, 1898); and the Blue-book _China. No. 1 (1899) C.--9131_.

While one British admiral, Rear-Admiral Noel, stopped the trouble in Crete, which had defeated the united intellect of Europe for generations; another, Rear-Admiral Lord Charles Beresford, was employed in conducting a swifter, more thorough and more practical investigation into the commercial military and social conditions of China than had ever before been accomplished; so that its results, set forth at the time in the admiral's many speeches and afterwards in his book _The Break-up of China_, struck the two great English-speaking peoples of the world, the British and the American nations, with something of the force of a revelation.

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