Part 24

Looking at the actual mechanism for revenue collection, one is met by difficulties which have rooted themselves deeply into the system. One cannot squeeze any larger proportion of the needed sum than the present $25,000,000 from the Imperial Maritime Customs. Tariff-rates are fixed by treaty, and the collections, under English direction, are as efficient as they can become. The likin duties on freight during inland transit are such a plague to commerce that, far from being increased, they should be swept away altogether as one of the earliest of reform measures. This $14,000,000 is produced at so heavy a price of fettered and thwarted commerce that added tariff would but aggravate the strangulation without materially increasing income. The opium revenue of $5,000,000 is likewise an item which, for the best interests of China, should disappear from a reformed budget, and the “foreign dirt” from the Celestial domain. In any event opium cannot be made much more productive.

After these eliminations there are left items which bring in $56,000,000. The sources consist principally of the land-tax, the grain-tribute, native customs, and the salt gabelle. The returns from these factors would require to be nearly trebled, if they were relied upon to make up the bulk of the needed total.

The method of collection is a further check to greater income. The existing machinery of fiscal administration operates, roughly, as follows: When the funds begin to run short for the usual expense-accounts, the various executive boards apply to the Board of Revenue. The latter makes a glorified guess at the sum which, considering harvests, rebellions, and other elements, each province might be able to pay. It is thereupon put to the provincial officials, consisting usually of a viceroy, a governor, a treasurer, and a judge, to supply something approximating this sum. The provincial syndicate, through the medium of various intermediate officials, such as the _tao-tai_ and the _fu_-prefect, whose powers are nebulous and overlapping, call upon the eighty-odd county magistrates for an estimated share. The magistrates, _shien-kwan_, called colloquially “father and mother officials,” whose varied functions include rendering justice, keeping the jail, leading the religious processions, and collecting the taxes, send out each his hundred henchmen to get the actual money or grain. Of this hierarchy of officials not one has a salary which would keep his establishment going for a month. Of necessity the laborer must draw his own hire first from the harvest.

Under such a satrap system, by the grace of human nature, each official takes what the traffic will bear, letting pass to the man higher up enough to conciliate his claim and to keep face with Peking. If the penalties which follow deficient generosity to a superior define the maximum contribution, the minimum is fixed by the famine or the rebellion point. With this method in vogue, it is not unreasonable to assume that the amounts gathered in the first instance are about as great as can be wrung from the people. An increase of the Government’s receipts would have to come through shaking down the office-holders for a larger share of their pickings. Such a revenue as a real reform would demand must despoil of vested rights in his livelihood every mandarin, viceroy, _tao-tai_, _fu_-prefect, magistrate, and petty publican in the empire. It might be practicable to commute the likin, or inland octroi dues, for fixed sums by agreement with the _hongs_, or merchant associations. This was done in Li Hung Chang’s province, Kwang-tung, where $2,750,000 was paid in order to get rid of likin dues which netted only $670,000. Enough might be raised by this means to pay the officials at just rates. Then honest collections might reasonably be demanded, and a beginning be made of fiscal reform. But it is apparent from these outlines how long a way China has to travel before her capacity for self-defense is a reality.

The facts are now being comprehended by all classes. From the coast cities, a growing number of young Chinese have been sent to study abroad, mainly in Japan--as many as fifteen thousand in 1907. Returning, these so-called “students” have become the leaders in the boycotts against the United States and Japan. They have engaged actively in propaganda of a patriotic nature, and, more constructively, have translated into their mother tongue hundreds of books on history, economics, and law, including the whole Japanese code, Herbert Spencer, Huxley, Voltaire, Montesquieu, the “Contrat Social” of Rousseau, the works of Henry George and Karl Marx, and many others of the same general nature.

These movements show a widespread public opinion friendly to Chinese regeneration. Various administrative measures have been inaugurated which are yet more promising.

The old method of dividing the Peking Bureau into provincial departments, and letting each of these care for every sort of business from its special province, has been altered. Instead of a bureau having general charge over the salt-tax, the customs, and the appointments of each province, there have been organized ten departments, dealing each with its specialty throughout the entire realm. The five recently-created bureaus--Agriculture, Works and Commerce, Police and Constabulary, Post-Office and Education--tell by their names the centralizing purpose of the new régime. Formerly five hundred clerks attended a department, with office-hours from eleven A.M. to two P.M. including lunch, smoking-time, and due intervals for examining peddlers’ wares. Now a much reduced force is employed, with actual working-hours generally from nine A.M. to four P.M. The foot-binding of children has been prohibited; pressure has been put upon the officials who smoke opium to abandon it, under penalty of dismissal from the service; classical essays as a civil-service examination subject are being given up, and the education of the Chinese youths abroad is being encouraged. A large number of Japanese officers have been engaged to train the khaki-clad and well-armed Chinese regulars, who have shown excellent aptitude. The Government has bought back practically all foreign railroad concessions, and all the valuable mining concessions except the Kai-ping coal-fields.

Even representative government is well under way. The Dowager Empress’s edict of August 27, 1908, by which a nine-year period was set for the devolution of legislative powers to provincial assemblies and a national senate has been justified by remarkable success. The local legislatures, elected under carefully restricted suffrage qualifications, have grappled earnestly with the economic problems of the districts. The senate, of thirty-two members, selected by the Prince Regent from an elected body, has not yet had time to show results, but the calibre of the men in it is encouraging.

China is making a real effort to get abreast of the times. But never was a nation brought more directly before the judgment-bar on the plain test of character. Upon the capacity of the race for private sacrifice and public honesty rests primarily her salvation. Whether China can or cannot rise to the task depends upon her own manhood, and no one can be prophet of the issue; for all estimate of Chinese character is perplexed by that curious Eastern subtlety of contradictions which baffle understanding.

The inability of the Chinese to keep fingers out of the public till is proverbial; yet the very high standard of business integrity is universally conceded.

The quality of Chinese honesty is attributed by some to the local idea of good form, and the obvious mercantile maxim that future credit depends upon present performance. Bourse operators may be scrupulously exact as to obligations which the mere lifting of a finger imposes, while engaged in campaigns diverting to their private speculations the funds of a chain of banks, or looting the values from the minority owners of a street-railway.

Chinese business integrity is said to be due to the fact that her merchants are of the upper class; cowardice in war, to the fact that her soldiers are of the lowest caste. In Japan the condition is exactly reversed: hence the prowess of her Samurai, and the peccability of her clerks--such that Japanese bankers employ Chinamen to handle their money.

Since the Japanese have built up an effective public administration, it is fair to give the Chinese the benefit of faith, and to assume that in time they too will rally to the task, and make a modern state.

With this should come the Trans-Mongolia Railway: opening to the plainsmen of Central Asia a prospect of civilization and advance.

Equally or more important, looking at things broadly, it would give to the world the best of the great Asian trade-routes. Examine a globe and see what, in the shortening of distance, this land-route to Peking signifies. Note the enormous circumnavigations that must be made in going around by India and Suez, and measure then the direct overland route by the Urga Post-Road and the Trans-Siberian Railway.

The bulky freight from the Asian Coast to western Europe will still pay tribute to the sea. To compete with vessel-transportation, which carries a ton from Shanghai to London for seven dollars, the railroads over the 7283 miles from Vladivostok to Paris would have to make a rail-rate of one tenth of a cent per ton-mile; this is impossible when one remembers the average American rate of eight tenths of a cent. But North China, all North Asia, and Europe west of Moscow, are within the railway radius of an Urga-Peking line.

From interior China may be drawn the goods for half a continent. The tea-freight which Russia receives over the long sea-trip to Odessa, or by the trans-shipped Vladivostok route, can be loaded then at Kalgan on the car that goes to Moscow. By it the silks of the Tien-tsin merchants may be rolled through into the freight-yards of St. Petersburg, and the timberless cities of interior China may build with the wood of the Yakutski Oblast forests. By it the dwellers in the valley of the Hoang-ho, “China’s Sorrow,” may be nourished in their need with the wheat of the Angara Valley; the Manchu mandarins may be clad in the furs from the Yenesei; the ploughshares tempered in Petrovski Zavod break the ancient soil of the Chi-li Province; the silver of the Altai Mountains make the bangles that deck the anklets of the purdah women.

For America the road will open a commercial highway into the very heart of a new and expanding empire. American rails may carry American cars,--those ever moving shuttles which weave the woof of trade. American woolens and felts may protect the Siberians against their Arctic cold, American machinery mine and refine their gold. New England cottons, utilizing the Panama Canal, may clothe the myriad coolies of interior China. Here is the mail-route of ten days from Paris to Peking, against the thirty-five days needed by the fastest ships. Here is the quickest passenger-route from London to Yokohama. All these potentialities lie as the fallow heritage of the Urga Road, if beyond Kalgan it is given its avenues to China and the sea. It is civilization that must profit when the equilibrium of the East is restored, and over the old Urga Road China is relinked to the West by the trains of the great Asian Railway.

The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS U . S . A

Transcriber's Notes:

Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.

Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.

Perceived typographical errors have been changed.