.^o PRESENT-DAY CHINA A NARRATIVE OF A NATION'S ADVANCE BY GARDNER L. HARDING Author of "Tsingtao: Key to What?," etc. fllustrateO ■) -^ -? NEV^ YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1916 FEB 18 3U()n4 Copyright, 1916, by The Century Co. Published, May, 1916 /M *.» TO MABEL HARDING WHO, THOUGH NO AUTHORITY CM THE CHINA QCESTIOK, ALONE MADE THE WRITING OF THIS BOOK WORTH WHILE FOREWORD When I arrived in China in May, 1913, constitutionalism was at the height of its power, the one seemingly perma- nent result of the Revolution of 1911. When I left, the principal opposition party to the President, the Kuo Ming Tang, had been outlawed and destroyed, the Parhament had been broken up, the leaders of constitutionahsm and of the First Revolution had lost the Second Revolution, and had left the country with a price on their heads. "Wlien I started to write this book, the repubhc was threatened by a monarchy; when I had finished it, Yuan Shih-k'ai had de- clared himself Emperor. While I was reading the proof, the monarchy move- viii FOREWORD ment collapsed, and the republic was re- sumed. As it finally leaves my hands, the South is again in revolution and Yuan is fighting a formidable secession movement whose outlook is far from un- promising. I recount these various and successive somersaults merely to remind the reader that he who writes about China touches a nation that in these present days is vital with continual change. Contemporary history always looks ridiculous to the next generation; and present-day China has experienced the equivalent of a generation of change several times since 1911. In spite of these embarrassments, the privilege of writing of the mental background of a people of such incessant wakefulness and vitality is worth the journalistic risk of being out of date when your book comes out. And after all, the struggle for liberty and nationhood FOREWORD ix which is the real narrative of this na- tion's advance so far is stirring enough, and potent with meaning enough for the Western World, to tempt us to con- sider what China has shown us now be- fore we try to digest her next revolu- tion. I have attempted in the following pages to interpret the quality of mind which produced the Chinese Revolution, if not intimately at least sympathetic- ally, to the western world. This book is an impression of people and things rather than a history of events and causes. You "old China hands" who may call my account superficial, you have your authorities and your preju- dices; keep them: this book is not writ- ten for specialists. It is written with enthusiasm for Young China and with respect for Old China, and it is dedi- cated to those among the American and X FOREWORD English people to whom I know I can confidently appeal to honor Young China's long and bitter fight upward through the darkness — the darkness through which the Chinese Revolution of 1911 will always shine as a beacon light of Oriental freedom. New York, AprU 17, 1916. CONTEXTS CHAPTER PAGE I WHAT THE REPUBLIC HAS MEANT TO CHINA 3 II THE WOMAN'S PART ..... 38 III SOCIAL REFORM 68 IV RADICALISM AND THE RADICALS . 97 V LEADERSHIP AND YUAN SHIH- K'AI 142 VI CLUTCHING HANDS 191 VII THE FUTURE 233 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Raw Material for China's Industrial Future Fiontispiece Battered Revolutionists 26 Miss Tang Chiin-Ying 42 Dr. Mary Chang and Her Intrepid Red Cross Corps 58 Scenes at the Metropolitan Prison 74 A Section of Peking's Semi-Military Police . . 90 A Typical Group of Revolutionary Leaders . . 123 The Old and the New in Locomotives .... 234 PRESENT-DAY CHINA PRESENT-DAY CHINA WHAT THE REPUBLIC HAS MEANT TO CHINA IN a crisis of history like the present time, when history moves so rapidly and with such savage strokes of sudden change, the immediate past tends to be- come almost mythical. In fact, a cer- tain unreality seems to hang about everything that took place before the Great War. The iron of power is in our thoughts and understandings, and national movements toward liberty when the nation that makes them can- not protect itself from outside aggres- sion, seem just a little irrelevant. They 4 PRESENT-DAY CHINA fail to stir us so deeply now that we have measured the chasm that a universal ap- peal to battle has cloven in the civiliza- tion of Europe. Our state of mind is hopelessly wrong, but it will be a long time before the forces which have created it shall re- lax. Meanwhile it says much for our loss of perspective that the most ro- mantically interesting event of our time, the revolution which created the Repub- lic of China, has drifted up-stage behind the terrible drama of Europe at war to a place where it already appears half myth and half failure. Certainly, to our current judgments, that state of mind seems mythical, I ad- mit, in which people could have spoken of this event, of so little mihtary impor- tance, as the "French Revolution of Asia." And its miraculous success, the abrupt transformation of the old- PRESENT-DAY CHINA 5 est and most conservative monarchy in the world into a republic with a Social- ist president — how stunning have been the subsequent reactions with which his- tory has restored the balance after such an enormous anti-climax. To those who look at China from abroad, the failure of the Revolution seems over- whelming. Where, they ask, are the leaders that created it, where is the Parliament they estabhshed, the na- tional party they built up, the free press through which they spoke to the people, the visions of social reform, of equality for women, of popular educa- tion, and above all, where is that high- spirited campaign of rights-recovery from the foreigner with which the lead- ers of the early Revolution came nearer to making the Chinese consciously one people than has ever been done before? The answer is that the leaders of 6 PRESENT-DAY CHINA 1911, the men of the Sun Yat-sen party, are again conspirators before the State as they had been for fifteen years be- fore 1911 itself. Their republic has been replaced by a government which is not so liberal as a constitutional mon- archy, but which still pays them the re- luctant tribute of clinging to the name and the form of republican institutions at the very moment when Yuan Shih- k'ai is doing his utmost to repeat the coup d'etat of Louis Napoleon. The two houses of Parliament and the eighteen provincial assemblies which carried the idea of political representa- tion deep into the minds of the people, are to-day only memories; the press, that enormous crop of newspapers .which sprang up in every quarter of China, extravagant, untrained, but spreading seeds of education and stimu- lating the growth of public opinion PRESENT-DAY CHINA T throughout the literate classes of the people, and by the inevitable contagion of the time deep into the minds of the illiterate, too — has been reduced within hmits thoroughly docile and respectable. Women no longer figure in Chinese 'public life, social reform is nowhere an issue, and the heavy hand of the Gov- ernment is laid on the hundred and one other insurgencies of youth and radical- ism which gave to China during 1911 and 1912 an immense and attractive vi- tahty that caught and held the imagi- nation of the world. I am a partizan of the Revolution. But in asserting that the fine achieve- ments of the Revolutionists have been broken at the hands of the personal des- potism of Yuan Shih-k'ai, I am not in- voking sympathy for these men, nor am I trying to excuse them for their many fatuous blunders of overconfidence and 8 PRESENT-DAY CHINA their priggish notions of governing a country hke China by that narrow the- ory-ocracy which brought about their humihation and downfall as soon as a master of intrigue like Yuan Shih-k'ai felt strong enough to challenge them. I am not concerned with their achieve- ments. I have spent the years since the Revolution looking for those achieve- ments, and even when I was in China, a whole-hearted supporter and a close friend of many of the Revolutionary leaders, I realized what an insurmount- able task I would have to face in telHng an Occidental audience what the Revo- lution had done. To have inspired a people with the sense of a national cause, to have shown them for the first time in their history^ a patriotism worth dying for, to have created among an an- cient and democratic race an intense de- sire to be democratic along modern PRESENT-DAY CHINA 9 standards, and to have erected a scaf- folding on which a great nation might be built in harmony with the liberal plans of the modern world — all this is not "doing" anything in the sense that concrete achievements embodying it can be brought forward as a test against the materialistic formulas of the Western world. But if the Chinese Revolution has failed, its failure is worth emulating by the peoples whose governments run smoothly over the indifferent minds of a sluggish people. I do not believe that it has failed, for I do not believe that it is finished. But I shall be con- tent in trying to tell what the republic has meant to China if I give you not a test of success or failure, but the qual- ity of mind which produced that repub- lic, and how far that quality of mind is representative of and has been shared in by the masses of the Chinese people. 10 PRESENT-DAY CHINA The Chinese Revolution was a glo- rious failure. And in nothing is either its glory or its failure more apparent than in its military phases. The Revo- lutionary army was beaten when the truce was called at Shanghai in Decem- ber, 1911; and for all my prejudices in favor of the Revolutionists, I have never been able to believe that they would have been successful against the trained soldiers of the North had that conflict gone on. But they had shown the world, and far greater than that, they had proved to themselves that the best blood of the Chinese people was willing to die rather than that the Revo- lution should not be accomplished. It is not safe for any nation to pride itself on the absolute success of past revolutions. We Americans can derive the most chastening reflections about liow far our revolution against England PRESENT-DAY CHINA 11 was successful by reading General Up- ton's "^lilitary Policy of the United States," the first courageous book in American history which dares to com- bine with the glory of our boastfulness and of our defiant courage at attempt- ing such a revolution the actual failure of our arms. Nor could the French Revolution have appeared to the French in 1816 as anything like the military success which we believe to-day it really was. It is the inspiration of a revolu- tion which makes it an integral part of that nation's history ; given that inspira- tion, real success is certain. And no- body can deny that the Chinese Revolu- tion for all its military failure was fol- lowed by the Chinese Republic, a regime which represented and will always rep- resent the most effectual and dramatic break with the past ever made in Chi- nese history. 12 PRESENT-DAY CHINA The fighting along the Yang-tse River during the first revolution, espe- cially at Hankow, has never been prop- erly described, because no Chinese his- torian has yet written it in a form avail- able for Western readers. But un- questionably the splendid courage of the Revolutionists, many of them green, untrained boys who had never fired a rifle before in their lives, showed Yuan Shih-k'ai that although he might defeat the South, it would take a long and san- guinary campaign in which the loyalty of his own troops could not always be relied upon to stand the strain, espe- cially as they were fighting only for the none too certain fleshpots of JNIanchu tyranny against the infectuous despera- tion of a newly awakened Chinese na- triotism. That patriotism was as aamu'able as it was novel. In the early days of the PRESENT-DAY CHINA 13 campaign, several companies of South- erners arrived without arms, and rather than wait for them, they went into bat- tle unarmed, aided in the charge on the Hankow railway station, and got rifles and ammunition by driving the North- ern regulars out. The foreign nurses and doctors had the greatest difficulty in keeping seriously wounded men in the hospital. Scores of them escaped and returned to the firing line again. Chi- nese mission school students in Canton and other Southern cities, who formed the famous "Dare to Die" corps, fought in the ranks beside artizans, coolies, and professional soldiers ; and a never-to-be- forgotten band of Chinese nurses from Shanghai which arrived on the scene three days after the fighting com- menced, worked incessantly on the open battlefields and in a roughly furnished tea hong in the Russian quarter of Han- 14 PRESENT-DAY CHINA kow day and night, going without food for twelve hours at a stretch, and hav- ing the narrowest escapes from death and worse at the hands of the savage Northern soldiery. If there is anybody who doubts that there was a military side to the Chinese Revolution, let him read this account by a missionary eye-witness of a crucial day's fighting toward the end of the campaign at Hankow: The battle at Kilometer Ten was a splendid exhibition of gameness and pluck on the part of the rebels. Although they were outnumbered two to one by the trained forces of Imperialists in front of them and were subjected from the flank to a racking cross fire from Admiral Sah's war-ships, they held their ground until nearly five hundred had been killed and fifteen hun- dren wounded. At last they were compelled to retire. Their ranks were broken but there was no panic. The advance of the Imperialists was a splendid justification of the training which the Northern troops have received under Euro- pean instructors. Ten thousand strong they PRESENT-DAY CHINA 15 crossed into the rebel territory during the night and attacked the entrenched rebels at daybreak Friday morning. These were behind well- planned fortifications and had little to fear from the attack. It was the guns of Admiral Sah's fleet that finally decided the day against them. Sah's eight ships approached the rebels' position soon after the advance of the Imperial troops began, but did not fire a shot. After a little while the eight ships finally silently re- tired as if they had decided not to participate in the engagement. Later they returned, this time ready for business. The range was short and the guns mercilessly poured in shells upon the rear of the rebels' position. The slaughter was appalling. The rebels replied ineffectively and were finally silenced. Gun boats drew nearer and the revolutionists were compelled to retire. The Loyalists, whose losses were slight, advanced on the abandoned trenches in splendid order under cover of the ships, capturing fifteen field guns and taking many Republicans pris- oners. But the rebels were not yet satisfied. They returned to the fray in the afternoon, bringing reenforcements, fresh field guns, and maxims. They advanced at double quick, cheering like eager schoolboys. They attacked the Royalists vigorously, but the fight was one-sided. The 16 PRESENT-DAY CHINA trained Imperialist soldiers racked the armed rebels in front of them with their rapid firing guns and modern rifles, but the rebels held their ground gamely, but were ultimately compelled to withdraw. They saved their field guns and carried off" their wounded. At daybreak five thousand revolutionists at- tacked the Imperialists immediately westward of the Concessions. A vigorous engagement ensued and the rebels recaptured the main rail- way station. They also captured a Maxim gun and field gun. The Imperialist lines then were reenforced by three thousand men at noon. On their spirited advance in a movement to out- flank the rebels, hundreds were killed and wounded on both sides, and a large additional block of buildings had to be taken over by the Red Cross, for the increasing batches of wounded soldiers from both sides. The Rebels showed reckless courage, which was certainly their main asset; one of them stood for an hour, in an exposed position within range of the enemy, waving a flag and calling on his com- rades. They charged in close formation, fac- ing unflinchingly the deadly Maxims, disre- garding cover, and firing without stopping to aim. The Imperialists probably inflicted ten times the losses they sustained but the Rebels were their match if not their masters in sheer PRESENT-DAY CHINA 17 courage. The one idea of these Southerners seemed to be to go forward at any cost. . , ." The point is not that the Chinese first discovered courage in 1911. Wlien properly trained they have always been splendid fighters. It was General Gor- don who came to China to put down the Taiping rebellion during the middle of last century who said that he had never in his life seen hand to hand fighting of such reckless determination as he saw among the Chinese. What the Chinese discovered in 1911 was a national spirit. The fighting which gave it its peculiar inspiration, the inspiration of all revolu- tions, was the fighting of men and boys who dared to go untrained and unpre- pared into battle for an idea. That is the kind of courage for which the Revolution has stood in China, and it is still a well of emotional power for which the Chinese may draw the next 18 PRESENT-DAY CHINA inspiration in their struggle for free- dom. iTlie Second Revolution of the summer of 1913, though a tragic and hopeless event from the start, was full of this courage. One instance will show lis quaUty. The city of Nanking, the intellectual capital of the South, wavered for some time during the Second Revolution on account of the presence in the city of troops of several factions who had not cast their lot with the "Punish Yuan" uprising. Ultimately it went over de- cisively against the Government, and three armies from the North came down to besiege it. There were in the city considerably under ten thousand troops, while the besieging armies numbered well over twenty thousand. The best known troops in the city, who controlled the operations, were the now famous 8th Hunan regiment. By the time the PRESENT-DAY CHINA 19 siege really began the revolution was crushed and the defenders of the city faced almost certain capture or death, and considering the characters of the armies against them, both. They held the Northern armies off for more than three weeks, during which desperate fighting occurred almost every day. Dm'ing this time they had the city ab- solutely at their mercy. They were re- sponsible to no one, they had no hope of future relief and no fear of future censure. And yet during the whole siege the life of the city went on under their protection. They kept the elec- tric lighting system going during the thick of the bombardment, they took not a single thing from the wealthy shopkeepers or the poor stall and bazaar merchants for which they did not pay a fair price. And as honorably as they kept the city so did they fight. Eight 20 PRESENT-DAY CHINA times they were driven off Purple JNIountain, the hill which commands the city from just outside the southeast gate, and seven times they recovered their ground. When they came down the hill they brought the breech-blocks of their guns, and when they went back again they put them in and turned their fire once more on the enemy. Their desj)erate courage thinned their ranks terribly. When the city was finally captured, there were too few of them to make an effective resistance, but thej'^ never surrendered. A body of them escaped into the hinterland up the river, the shortest way home to Hunan. When the government troops got into the city, there was nobody in Nanking but who saw the ironic contrast they made with the Revolutionists. Chang v Hsun, the principal general, gave over the city for three days to loot and plun- PRESENT-DAY CHINA 21 der, and when I walked down the fa- mous five-mile-long main street of Nan- king on the third day, there was not a shop but what had been broken open, smashed up, and cleaned out. Rich or poor, republican or loyal, private or government, made no difference. The post and telegi'aph offices suffered worse than the rest, and the customs building was burned to the ground. At the end of the third day they began on the women. Fires were started here and there, and JNIanchus among the sol- diers started talk of a massacre to avenge the extinction of the Manchu quarter in 1911. Only the presence of some regular troops and the increasing anger of the Japanese at the slaughter of three of their nationals and the loot- ing of all the Japanese shops, brought this avenging army to a halt. I do not mean to give the impression 22 PRESENT-DAY CHINA that Northern soldiers as a whole are anything like the half-savage mercena- ries which Chang Hsun brought down to the sack of Nanking. They, too, have learned something from the Revo- lution. They have shaved off their queues with the rest of the official classes of Peking and the Northern towns. The national spirit is witnessed to them in the Government so ably consohdated and centralized under Yuan Shih-k'ai, and they have a loyalty to a Chinese government which they never wholly held for the degenerate IVIanchus. On the whole, they are long-limbed, clean- living men who could give a splendid account of themselves and their awak- ening nation in the desperate conflict which may come at no distant day with Japan. In such a war the men who fought each other so gallantly at Han- kow would fight side by side for a na- PRESENT-DAY CHIXA 23 tional cause in which the whole country would be prepared to spend its last ounce of strength. When the Japa- nese fleet appeared before Canton in '95, the Cantonese governor made the characteristic reply to their challenge to battle that the Peking government had got them into the war, and the Peking government could get them out. The sentiment of Canton to-day, and of the whole Republican South, is best ex- pressed in the words of Liang Chi- ch'iao, the dean of Cantonese reformers, uttered during the Japanese crisis of last spring when he was JNlinister of Jus- tice. It was the Republican spirit that spoke when he said; "Better be shat- tered, and be shattered as a piece of jade, than be preserved whole as a com- mon brick tile !" In no language could "Death before dishonor" be more de- fiantly expressed. 24 PRESENT-DAY CHINA The political career of the Chinese Republic, while there was a real repub- lic, was quite as splendid and entireh" as unsuccessful as its military career. It was a series of inspirations, impro- vised upon a complete but tremendously vital confusion of ideas. The first and most remarkable inspiration of all was the Republic itself. It amazed no one more completely than the little band of "experts" on whom we depend for most of our loiowledge about China. Not being able to imagine it, they ut- terly refused to believe it ; and for weeks after the Republicans were actually in control of more than half of the nation, the leading foreign newspaper in China was referring in its headlines to "the Revolt in Hupeh." The clue to the Repubhc is that it was an imaginative inspiration. A consti- tutional monarchy would have left the PRESENT-DAY CHINA 25 people cold. A Chinese emperor would only have been another dynasty. But a people's government required the coining of a new word; and out of the same mint there poured a flood of strange and inspiring ideas. The Chi- nese people may be an enormous and a sluggish and an illiterate people, but there were very few of them living near any of the centers of population who did not hear of and were not stirred by the passing of the IManchus and the dra- matic substitution of a Republic of the Chinese people. Fanned by vast num- bers of pamphlets, the text-books of revolutions in all ages, excited by thou- sands of newspapers which sprang up almost over night, the people reacted to the new regime with a vitality which the Republicans themselves never con- trolled and only imperfectly understood. Students and idealists that they were. 26 PRESENT-DAY CHINA however, they realized that the current of revolution which swept into their hands during October and November of 1911 every large city and every provin- cial government south of the Yang-tse River, as well as most of the larger cities in the apathetic and conservative North, was an impressive testimony of popular support. And thej^ grasped the oppor- tunities of their time with an imagina- tive fervor which held the attention of the nation and of the world at large wholly spellbound. Three successive provisional parha- ments met at Hankow, Shanghai, and Nanking respectively within the space of four months. And before the last one. Sun Yat-sen, the man who had been an exile for more than fifteen years, who had gathered up the strands and who had filled the purse of the Chi- nese Revolution in every country in the PRESENT-DAY CHINA 27 world, who had been summoned around tlie world from London to the prema- ture realization of his dreams — this man, a self-styled Socialist, a Christian, a man from the lowest ranks of the peo- ple, was inaugurated as the first presi- dent of the Chinese Republic. It was not statesmanship. It was supreme "bluff"; or, in other words, it satisfied to the highest degree the imaginative possibilities of the situation, as Yuan Shih-k'ai, the government official, has never satisfied them and never can sat- isfy them with all the ermine and gold of his hoped-for imperial state. Deeply imaginative also was the re- nunciation of Sun Yat-sen, an act which will always remain, as the Lon- don "Times" cordially greeted it, as one of the most whole-hearted instances of altruism in history. His procession to the ancient JMing tombs, the 28 PRESENT-DAY CHINA resting place just outside Nanking of the last dynasty of Chinese emperors, stirred deeply the history-loving Chi- nese with the immense moment of the restoration of Chinese government, after a space of more than two hundred years, again into the hands of the Chi- nese people. This is the quality of mind which brought about the Chinese Revolution, which created the atmosphere in which thousands of young Chinese were eager to give up their hves for as worthy an ideal as that for which any soldier is fighting to-day on the battlefields of Europe. Patriotism, nationalism, call it what you will — it is witli us a potent delusion to evil as well as an inspiration to the good — ^with the Chinese it is the one fundamental contribution of the Republic which no subsequent history, however humiliating to the Republi- PRESENT-DAY CHINA 29 canSj can make less significant or splen- did to the Chinese people. There is no need to trace their fail- ure through one inept, unsound judg- ment after another to the hardly unde- serv^ed humiliation to which their utter confusion of ideas and the complete con- descension they paid to their danger from their enemies have brought them. The best example of it, though not the most creditable to them, was the under- mining and destruction of the Parlia- ment of 1913. A cabinet crisis of the simimer before had deprived the Southern party of the share it had been ostensibly granted in the Peking administration. Their breach w^ith the President had been wid- ening steadily ever since, and the advan- tage lay entirely with the President tlirough his vigilant control of the treas- ury and the army. Against these, and 30 PRESENT-DAY CHINA against a solid executive responsible to and dominated by Yuan Shih-k'ai, they staked the influence of a free parliament through whose control they intended to wrest the central power from the Presi- dent and vest it in themselves. In the first popular elections China had ever seen, they won control of this Parlia- ment. It was an irregular and a cor- rupt election according to ideal stand- ards, but the decision did satisfactorily register, nevertheless, the mind of the politically interested elements of the Chinese people. The new Parliament assembled in Peking in the spring of 1913. But even before it assembled, the emotions of both sides had been strained already almost to the breaking point. On March 20, Sung Chiao-jen, the most brilliant political leader of the Southern Nationalist party, the Ivuo Ming Tang, PRESENT-DAY CHINA 31 had been shot and killed in the Shanghai railway station, just as he was waiting for the night train for Peking. His mission in Peking, the whole countr}^ knew, was to organize the new Parlia- ment into the kind of political force which would make itself felt at the President's palace; and there is little doubt now, taking into consideration the direct evidence in the case and the broad probabilities of the situation, that if Yuan did not actually instigate his murder, at any rate he knew of it and gave it his consent. The result of his death was profound, and we know now that bands of young men all over China began making plans at once for the Second Revolution they believed absolutely inevitable. Into this already heavily charged atmos- phere, there entered another enormous point of contention in the Six Power 32 PRESENT-DAY CHINA Loan. While America withdrew from the consortium of bankers on account of the dependent position in which they were attempting to place the Chinese people, the other powers determined to overcome the objections of Parliament by lending directly to the President. The transaction took place at three o'clock in the morning of April 27, and placed in the hands of the President the administration of $125,000,000, and, what was much more material, the firm knowledge that he was the "best bet" of the legations against the parties of con- stitutional government. I sat in the galleries for many days and watched the proceedings of the first and only Parliament of the Chinese Re- public, which was summoned under such ill-starred auspices. Its failure was as- sured from the beginning, but with the characteristic heedless idealism of the PRESENT-DAY CHINA 33 Southern Republicans, it cordially as- sisted in its failure in almost every way possible. It spent three weeks electing a speaker. It devoted a score or more of sessions to the sole business of asking the President or one of his representa- tives to explain the "constitutionality" of the Big Loan, and in abusing and in- sulting whoever was sent down to make the explanation. I have seen the secre- tary of the august Senate telephoning to the President that he was expected to come down and give an account of him- self "that afternoon and no later," amid the most enthusiastic legislative cheers. Unfortunately, Yuan Shih-k'ai's gout was particularly bad that summer, and he never left the palace, even when he was impeached by a large majority of both houses. Deterrents to busmess were infinite. Both houses had passed an absurd rule 34 PRESENT-DAY CHINA that a quorum constituted half the members, and the obstructionists of the President's party used this effectually to clear the hall in the midst of debates, and to keep both bodies idle for days at a time. No legislation was passed ; for when the inquiries about the loan ceased, the impeachment-of-the-President agi- tation began. And meanwhile a large committee was appointed to draft a Constitution. At their first meeting, this committee voted that the chairs, table, inkstands, and brushes they used should be carefully guarded and pre- served for posterity. History must ignore them, however, for within a month they were outlawed from Peking. Both houses were crowded with men of the greatest abihty; but, like other features of the Chinese Revolution, their futility in results, hemmed in as they were by the ultimate and necessary PRESENT-DAY CHINA 35 hopelessness of their situation, cannot be taken as a fair clue at all to their real services to the nation. Their time was as brief as it was hectic. With the outlawry of the Kuo JMing Tang party after the tragic futility of the Second Revolution, Parliament had ceased to exist by the time that Yuan was in- augurated permanent President. He assumed this office on the 10th of October, the second anniversary of the Revolution whose leaders he had out- lawed, and whose principles he had so patiently undermined and overthrown. On the Chinese people, the effect of the failure of the Parliament of 1913 was bewildering; and Yuan Shih-k'ai has had his way since then with highly respectable bodies appointed by himself, and called by various names of uniform dignity and pious purpose. But there is no heart in such a government, and no 36 PRESEXT-DAY CHIXA popular enthusiasm for it, save only for the brilhant men the President has from time to time gathered around him in his cabinet. But for its splendid defiance to Japan, the atmosphere of the present regime is an intensely practical one. The reaction is precisely what the un- assimilable heroics of the revolutionary quality of mind have produced. It is the inevitable swing of the pendulum away from the instabihty of the revolu- tionary period. But to admit that reaction is politi- cally supreme is not at all to say that reaction, even constructive reaction, to- day represents the fervent desire of any large section of the Chinese people. It is insurgency, bold experiments with new ideas, the release of fresh energies and unprecedented ambitions, which still sum up the underlying mood of present-day China. To understand PRESEXT-DAY CHIXA 37 this we have only to turn to some of these insurgencies themselves, to touch sjTiipathetically the changing life of the Chinese people. The substance of the change is shadowy. But that its in- spiration is vivid and profound in a manner wholty beyond the powers of mere political fluctuations will, I hope, be made clear in the chapters w^hich fol- low. II THE WOMAN^S PART THE Chinese Revolution struck many chords in the American heart of generous and romantic sym- pathy. It was the more stirring because it was so completely unex- pected; and in some respects it was not only unexpected but almost incon- ceivable. Such above all was the part taken in it by women. The history of what women did in the Chinese Revolu- tion has never been written, and by most foreigners it has never even been imagined. We heard, for instance, of "regiments" of Chinese women getting measured for men's uniforms and going up to fight at Nanking and Hankow. 38 PRESENT-DAY CHIXA 39 We heard of turbulent crowds of women in enthusiastic meetings flinging their jewelry on the platform for the war chest of the revolutionary cause; we heard of women bomb throwers, of women spies, of women members of the "Dare to Die" corps, and of a dozen other picturesque and spirited activities with which women contributed a new and spontaneous energy to Chinese life during 1911 and 1912. But of the leadership which gave these things an interpretive relation to the Chinese people as a whole, we did not then have, and we hardly now have, any direct information at all. There was such a leadership, created in in- dividual women, and in groups of women by the vivid and infectious at- mosphere of the time. But it was so perfectly spontaneous on the part of the women who responded to it, and its ef- 40 PRESEXT-DAY CHINA fects were so obscured by the broader strokes of the political revolution that we have never identified them sym- pathetically through names or person- alities. They are well worth a better acquaintance. Let me tell you, for instance, of Dr. ISIary Chang, a little Chinese doctor from Canton, who met one of the emer- gencies of the Revolution with a spirit that was wholly typical of the time. When the Revolution broke out Dr. Chang was attached to the Chinese hos- pital in Shanghai. Like all the revolu- tionists, she was caught unawares by the accidental bomb explosion in Han- kow, on the 9th of October, which pre- maturely gave away the Southern plans and committed the conspirators to the necessity of making their fight then or being extinguished by the now alert and thoroughly informed Government. PRESENT-DAY CHIXA 41 The Red Cross belonged to the Govern- ment, and her appHcation to their head- quarters in Shanghai was met by the natural pretense, so dear to the Chinese heart, that there was "no trouble," ex- cept such as she might help to make. Thus challenged, she proceeded to make some trouble. She called a meeting of the women in Shanghai who would vol- unteer to go to the front at once as Red Cross nurses. The meeting was called at a day's notice, yet almost one hun- di-ed women attended it. They in- cluded her own small staff of nurses, some women medical students, and a group of other girls and women mainly from the mission schools, who appeared spontaneously like the "unnamed ones" of the French Revolution in answer to the national emergency. A day passed after the meeting and on the next morn- ing a group of between thirty and forty 42 PRESENT-DAY CHINA nurses were ready. Uniformed, after a fashion, and equipped with surgical instruments, bandages, medical stores and such other necessities as could be hastily gathered, they started for wher- ever the battlefields might be. Unfor- tunately, they forgot food, and for al- most thirty-six hours after arriving near Hankow they lived on cake, which was all that was left in one of the for- eign missions near the city, and a little tea. But although they did not find food, they found work in plenty. The regu- lar soldiers from the North, although outnumbered in the early days, shot much straighter and did much more ex- ecution than did the untrained and un- disciplined Southerners. Serious cas- uahties ran at times into hundreds every day, and although there was foreign as- sistance, notably the surgeon and his MISS TANG CHUN-YING President of tlie "Cliinese Suffragette Societv," small in numbers but in purposes much of what its name implies. Taken in Peking winter costume PRESENT-DAY CHINA 43 helpers from a Russian gunboat sta- tioned at Hankow, the work actually upon the battlefields had to be done by this little band of volunteers, as un- trained and as poorly equipped in their way as the soldiers to whom they were administering. They rode on little ponies about the country from one shift- ing battlefield to another, performing not only first-aid, but serious oper- ations of all kinds on desperately wounded men. With the crude and meager kit she carried slung over her pony Dr. Chang alone performed over one hundred amputations in the three days around the battle of Kilometer Ten. Several of her nurses were wounded; and they were all badly scared. But none of them deserted. They stuck to their work through the desperate days of their cause, through defeat, through humiliation, and 44 PRESENT-DAY CHINA through the burning of the city of Hankow by the Northerners, which al- most amounted to a massacre. They showed the world as nobly as any of their soldier-comrades the true quality . of Chinese fighting courage. I met Dr. Chang when I was in Shanghai just two years after this all happened. She was then in charge of the Shanghai Chinese Hospital just off the Bund of the Chinese city of Shang- hai. It was at the time when the rev- olutionary parties were facing the political crisis which led to their des- perate stand in the Second Revolution and subsequently to the expulsion of most of the revolutionary element from the country. Things were not settled. Her little hospital had been running for five years on funds which were always precarious but which then were dwin- dling before the rising tide of the com- PRESENT-DAY CHINA 45 ing reaction. Yet her experience in the ardent period of revolutionary hope and enthusiasm was as fresh to her as if it had been yesterday. She told of it in short, ejaculatory sentences, sentences that were like herself riding on her lit- tle, Mongolian pony across the battle- fields. "Never had I heard guns before that time," she said, "yet we were the only ones who could go help — and we go." (Her English, in spite of her long train- ing in mission school and medical col- lege, was still quaint and fragmentary. ) "Oh, we were so angry," she went on, "because the Red Cross in Shanghai say, 'Those men you call rebels only thieves and robbers — bad men — they will not be grateful.' But we know. They were our brothers, our patriots, our heroes. We must go help. But aij such terrible things I never have 46 PRESENT-DAY CHINA seen. I have no rubber gloves with me, yet many times we find wounds left two, three days : I must cut away — you know — terrible things. If I have one small cut on my littlest finger, nothing would save me. I do not have ; you see, here I am still." I wish I could begin to put her vivac- ity into this picture, especially her rest- less slits of flashing eyes, and the ges- tures that began at her elbows and shook down to the tips of her fingers. "Every time I make an operation," she said, "I must make my courage strong again. But never was I so happy. I start new society — White Heart Society — be- cause they would not let me be Red Cross. And the soldiers call me Miss White Heart. And all of them when they come to the hospital and begin to get better make me stand in the middle and take picture of all their wounded PRESENT-DAY CHINA 47 bodies — you see? — some of them have arm or leg gone, some worse, but all of them, they smile. They know they fight for China. And when such men have fought together for our country — coolies, students, old men, young men, men of all the provinces — that was one thing that make our revolution great to see." Dr. Chang was a Christian ; not only that, but as sincere a Christian as she was a patriot. She said, for instance, "I think God help me very much," so unaffectedly and with such gentle dignity that I can only think now of the nursing sisters in Europe as saying it with more perfect grace and under- standing. When I came to go, this spirited little pioneer insisted on driving me to my next destination in her little pony-trap, an outfit perfectly suitable to her per- 48 PRESENT-DAY CHINA sonality, but which defied all the con- ventions of Shanghai, past and present. That was my last view of her, sitting erect, crying "Hi! Hi!" to clear a pas- sage through the tangled, staring traf- fic of Szechuen Road, but oblivious to it all as she was erect above it. And so she passed, and not since then have I picked out again the course of her cour- ageous, consecrated life, a life that has always seemed to me the most perfect glimpse I have ever seen of the future of Chinese womanhood. My destination that day was to call on Miss Sophia Chang, a girl whose Anglicized name came, not as with the little doctor from Canton, from Chris- tian teaching, but from an inspiration at the opposite pole of the world's cul- ture — from the Russian Revolution. Miss Sophia Chang was a political rev- olutionist. She took her name from a PRESENT-DAY CHINA 49 brave Russian girl whom she had read of in her student days in Japan ; and she told me in halting English but with glowing eyes, of the story of her hero- ine's friend, Marie Spiridonova. Miss Chang was from Hunan, where the peo- ple are not small and wiry, like the Cantonese, but large and grave, like the Germans or Russians. She was one of the original members of Sun Yat-sen's Revolutionary Nationalist party, the Tung Meng Hwei, and was the prin- cipal, and for much of the time, the only woman member on the secret committee that managed the conspiratorial part of the Revolution. It was she who raised ten thousand dollars from the women of Shanghai in the days when ready money was so badly needed at the beginning of the Revolution. It was she who organized the meetings at which hundreds of 50 PRESENT-DAY CHINA women poured their jewels on the plat- form for the Republican cause; jewels which were not mere useless trinkets, but after the thrifty manner of the Chinese, represented through long cus- tom the convertible savings, the cur- rency of womankind. Beside these memorable meetings she had workers collecting in the streets and from door to door, and organized benefit perform- ances in which local actors gave their services free to attract the theater-lov- ing Chinese. Among the characteristic performance given at this time was a cycle of the Three Revolutions, includ- ing "George Washington, or the American Revolution," "The French Revolution and the Life of Napoleon," and the climax of the three, "The Heroes of the Chinese Revolution." A troupe of women actors in a special theater of their own was also formed — PRESENT-DAY CHINA 51 in whic'i no man was allowed behind the scenes. When I visited her. Miss Chang was directing a school for girls and women in the Hongkew district of Shanghai, a school which had been literally or- ganized out of the enthusiasm of the Revolution. The money, that is, had come in much the same way as the money had come to support the Revolu- tion — through patriotism and self- sacrifice and the vision of things to come. Among the teachers was one who was refreshing her mind with Chinese again after a twenty-five-year lifetime in California, her natural lan- guage being the English with a strong and rather slangy American accent that she had come to speak, in spite of the faculty, at the University of Cah- fornia. Among the subjects on the curric- 52 PRESENT-DAY CHINA ulum at this school, which had some- thing over three hundred students of all ages, were English, syntax and liter- ature, Chinese chirography, reading in the Chinese classics, elementary courses in law and medicine, teaching, and his- tory. Connected with the school was also an organization which bore the formidable name of the Chinese Wom- en's Cooperative Association. At the small shop which was the most palpable reason for this organization's being was offered for sale one article of a strik- ingly revolutionary character. It was a hat, an object of use and adornment which the custom of staying in-doors has denied to Chinese women since the be- ginning of time. It was a small, round, pill-box of a hat; and though I ad- mired it with all the fervor of one who appreciated its radical meaning, I must confess that esthetically, beside PRESEXT-DAY CHIXA 53 the dignified and glossily complicated coiffure of in-doors Chinese woman- hood, it left much to be desired. ]Miss Chang was a typical Chinese girl of the middle classes, not a Chris- tian, not under any foreign influence, indeed known to very few foreigners, missionaries or otherwise, throughout the city. Perhaps the only other curi- ous foreigner w^ho had come visiting her before was Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, the suffrage leader, who found her through purely Chinese introduction when on her world- tour in 1912. In the monthly magazine, a very interest- ing periodical issued by the Coopera- tive Society under ]Miss Chang's editor- ship, Mrs. Catt's views and some of her articles were very liberally translated. That was the only connection I found in this typical revolutionary Chinese women's society with the supposedly in- _ 54 PRESENT-DAY CHINA terested foreign outside world. It is a characteristic instance of the isolation of the Chinese women's movement in gen- eral. Not only are most of the leaders quite typical Chinese women, rarely speaking a foreign language, except possibly Japanese, but the thought, the moving idea, is wholly natural to their own spontaneous conclusions, evolved through their own awakening self- consciousness. I found this never more conclusively proved than on a visit to the leader of a society in Peking which bore the ad- venturous name of the "Chinese Suf- fragette Society." Miss Tang Chiin- ying, the president of this societ)'^, could not speak a word of English and knew no missionaries or foreigners whatso- ever — except the ubiquitous Mrs. Catt. It was an astonishing society to any one who still believes in the unchange- PRESENT-DAY CHINA 55 ableness of China, because in its mem- bership and outlook, except for a small admixture of Japanese radicalism, it is wholly and characteristically Chinese. Miss Tang had been a student in Japan and a hardy pioneer and agitator for women's reform for more than ten years before the Revolution. The Chinese Suffragette Society was a comparatively new enterprise, chiefly founded on an intense interest aroused among the women revolutionists around Miss Tang in the English militant suf- frage movement. While in Peking I visited a nmnber of schools that had been organized voluntarily and were be- ing taught by girls from this society; and the first question invariably was, "Tell us about the suffragettes of Eng- land." One I remember in particular, where a very small woman in tight silk trousers who might have stepped 5Q PRESENT-DAY CHINA straight out of some Chinese comic opera — that is, one of our Chinese comic operas — asked me questions about mili- tancy and hunger strikes, and proces- sions, and firing letter boxes and other precise points innumerable. She was in charge of a "law school," and her ad- venturousness of mind was all the more apparent in contrast to her tiny feet, bound and squeezed in her defenseless childhood into a merciless conformity her mind had since outgrown. Even the Boxers could not have denied that in all respects, except her inquiring mind, she was a typical Chinese woman. It was this young lady who explained to me the society's constitution. The constitution of the Chinese Suffragette Society was impressive. It included ten points to work for: the education of women, the abolition of foot-binding, the prohibition of concubinage and its PRESENT-DAY CHIXA 57 result in making marriage a polyga- mous institution, the forbidding of child marriages, reform in the condi- tion of prostitutes, social service to women in industry, the encouragment of modesty in dress, better terms of marriage for the sexes, leading toward marriages for love, the establishment of political rights, and the elevation of the position of women in the family and the home. To support these contentions Miss Tang started two interesting papers, one written in the language of the educated classes, and the other in the simpler vernacular of the people. AVhen I was in Peking both of these periodicals were still running, though they were issued monthly instead of, as at first, weekly. They contained a digest of news of the movements of women abroad that was based on ex- tremely wide reading ; not only that, but 58 PRESENT-DAY CHINA the poems and articles which were prodigally scattered through their pages were of a very uncommon literary skill indeed. These were almost entirely from the pen of Miss Tang herself ; and certainly her personality was of the type that could freshen every page on which she wrote. It was she who introduced to China the spectacle of a body of women demanding the vote from the national legislature at Nanking. There were stories that back in her home province of Hunan she broke up a newspaper of- fice single-handed whence had issued slanders against her good name. She was a frequent and vigorous platform speaker in Peking and Tientsin. When the Second Revolution broke out, she went at once to the center of the plotting at Hankow, was arrested, and for months the report was spread abroad PRESEXT-DAY CHIXA 59 that she had been secretly executed. Later she turned up in Shanghai, how- ever, and then in Japan, where I beheve she is now. Every Chinese revolution- ist knows of her, though they do not all, I add in fairness, approve of her. But she has come as near, I believe, as the Revolution has allowed any Chinese woman to become a national figure. Diametrically different in all her temperament to this fiery advocate of women's rights is Dr. Yamei Kin, the distinguished woman physician and protegee of President Yuan Shih-k'ai, who has several times visited the United States. Dr. Kin is a conservative; though she is a born Cantonese she is a firm partizan of the Xorth. I found in her splendidly equipped IMunicipal Hospital and School for Xurses in Tientsin a genius of organization and vigorous initiative that was wholly 60 PRESENT-DAY CHINA worthy of the first women's hospital in China, apart from mission work, to be entirely under the supervision and con- trol of a Chinese woman. I found Dr. Kin, for all her conserv- atism, acutely conscious of her people and their needs. She, too, though she was on close terms of intimacy with the missionaries, was not a Christian. Her visits abroad had taught her the value of aphorisms when being interviewed. "China should have kept the dragon flag," she said, for instance; "for China, like the dragon of mythology, is a coun- try which does not grow gradually, but suddenly sheds its old skin for a new one." Also, I remember this one, which I did not like so well. "The Northern- ers are the real Chinese; the stalwart, honest, trustworthy part of our people. Although I am a Southerner I feel that the Southern people are what you think PRESENT-DAY CHINA 61 of when you think of the crafty, cunning Oriental." At. Dr. Kin's hospital — it was in the humid, germ-breeding summer when I saw it — she was caring for between one hundred and fifty and two hundred women a day; and the crowds of patient little women of all kinds and classes who were waiting so unobtrusively about the broad flagstones of her big inner courtyard gave eloquent evidence of the unique social service of this in- stitution to the city of over a million it served alone. It was a splendid niche to be filling, a potently practical part to be playing in that constantly widening experience of her sex and her people, which, in the last analysis, can only be learned by doing. Behind these women, the leaders, the pioneers, you can conceive of countless others, dreaming, understanding, and G2 PRESENT-DAY CHINA achieving a new set of experiences for the Chinese race. A Chinese girl can now become a teacher or a nurse al- most without restriction, and she can aspire to be a Government student abroad, or a doctor, an editor, a civil servant, or even a social reformer at home. The invasion of social life in general, the increasing number of wom- en's papers, not all of which have been snuffed out in the reaction, the vast in- crease of girl students, and the pro- foundly changing relation of women to the home, are all deeply significant. One should never lose sight, however, of the characteristic Chinese strain which makes this movement like nothing else in the world. The invasion in social life most notice- able in Japan for instance, is the flood of girls who in recent years have en- tered the world of business. In China PRESENT-DAY CHINA 63 this phenomenon is completely absent, and shows no signs of developing for years to come. Miss C. R. Soong, Dr. Sun's charming secretary, claimed to be the only woman in China who worked in a man's office, and unless other cases of purely "patriotic" employment fur- nish hke exceptions, her claim was liter- ally true. There are no Chinese typists, no Chinese shopgirls, no Chinese ticket takers, not any women at all, ex- cept Eurasian and foreign girls, in the endless business employments that they occupy in the Western and the Japa- nese worlds. The up-to-date Y. W. C. A. trains many capable stenogra- phers and typists; but for employment under women only, as in mission schools, hospitals, and purely private office work. This taboo against women's em- ployment is even supported by Young China; for the revolution is primarily 64 PRESENT-DAY CHINA one of mind, and the new opportunities it stresses for women are distinctly men- tal opportunities. A more material revolution, however, has introduced Chinese women of the lowest classes to factory labor. The cotton mills of Shanghai alone employ 25,000 women and young girls twelve hours day and night, with a sixteen- hour day on Saturdays, for wages that average twelve to fifteen cents a day. The middle classes can enforce their boycott on the business world; but modern industry is catching the women of the poor in the gigantic net of eco- nomic evolution. Factories run by woman and child labor pay 57 per cent, annual profit in Shanghai, and by that door Western industrialism is entering more rapidly every year into the lives of the women of China. As yet there are no laws, either against the for- PRESENT-DAY CHINA 65 eigner, who is mainly responsible for these things, or for the Chinese, who are so far merely their minor competitors. There are no laws, no statistics, and hardly any general knowledge or con- sideration. Now in this stratum of the national life, now in that, the pervasive hand of evolution ceaselessly continues in its enduring work of alteration in the status of women. This revolution has been no mere ephemeral effervescence of the coast cities; it has penetrated to the ultimate hearthstone of the people on whom all Chinese civilization rests — the countless millions of the peasantry. It has reached them because it possesses the only quality in the world that could reach them: it is above all a moral rev- olution. Consider the three great re- forms in Chinese home life that have accompanied it — the crusades against 66 PRESENT-DAY CHINA the opium traffic, against foot binding, and against child slavery; one charter of freedom each for the man, the woman, and the child, but all three supremely the concern of women as keepers and conservers of the home. How terribly far from completion all these reforms are only those know who have seen the degradation and compel- ling poverty at fii'st hand of the life of the mass of the Chinese people. But this much is certain: that the spirit of these reforms and the quality of mind of the Revolution, have got home to the common people in a way, be it ever so little, that will inevitably tend steadil}'- to raise the lot of women in years to come. They have created something more nearly like a national renaissance in the moral fiber of the people than any other period of social reform recorded about China. PRESENT-DAY CHINA 67 Like the woman movement all over the world, the emergence of women in China is above everything a spirit of humanism, a regeneration of enduring instincts for good in both sexes, and a widening of that area of contact and understanding between men and women which inexorably grows with civiliza- tion. In their capacity for progress there are, I believe, no women in Asia like the women of China. Beside Japan, China is counted as one of the world's weak nations. But in the moral regeneration that is bringing about the emergence into modern life of her woman she is fulfilling a deeper and more authentic test of civilization than has been met by Japan in all her fifty headlong years of material progress. Ill SOCIAL REFORM BE pleased to enter the Gate of Hope," said Captain Ho. Our rickshaws had been trundhng in and out of the mazes of little lanes and alleys just off the great trunk road leading south from the Chien Men Gate. Captain Ho was the captain of the Peking pohce, educated at the American Mission College, !N'anking University, who had learned Northern ways and had Northern military aspira- tions. He was a dapper little man, with a small, bristly mustache, and could not have weighed one hundred pounds. In his flannel suit and Panama hat he looked more like an under-secretary of PRESENT-DAY CHINA 69 the Shanghai Y. M. C. A. than a cap- tain of pohce with a record for cour- age and quick thinking, and with four bullet wounds in his shoulders and thigh; but as he stepped nimbly out of his rickshaw the wind lifted his flannel coat slightly, and a gleam of metal from his hip pocket showed that, bland as he looked, he was still a believer in pre- paredness. We were making a tour about what I may call, for lack of a better name, the social institutions of Peking, inspecting in that intensely conservative Chinese city, the public institutions that bore witness to the very recently assumed re- sponsibilities of an Oriental municipal- ity. "Of course you know what the Gate of Hope is?" said Captain Ho. We were waiting, over the customary tea and cigarettes, in a little room off the 70 PRESENT-DAY CHINA courtyard of the long, low, gray build- ing, which was just like hundreds of other gray buildings throughout that part of the city, while the doorkeeper took our cards to the powers within. "We call it the 'Evil to Good' insti- tution, for it is here that women of the streets are brought from all over Pe- king, and it is here that they have a temporary home and refuge and a chance to live a better life. It is a very tiny institution for such a large city. There are not a hundred women here, and I estimate that there are between four and five thousand women in Peking who have to register with the police as women of the town. This does not count the enormous numbers of "little wives," which is our euphonious name for concubines, many of whom are very young girls held in complete slavery in polygamous households. PRESENT-DAY CHINA 71 "The line is hard to draw, but the professional women must register at police headquarters and be medically examined. The examination is per- functory, but on the basis of the regis- tration we arrange many marriages, and keep in close touch with any man liv- ing on a woman's earnings. We have a tax of from two dollars a month for women of what we call the first class down to twenty-five cents a month for women of the fourth class, and this is collected fortnightly on registration. Keeping track of them is simplified by the fact that the traffic is largely con- centrated on eight streets not far from here and in about eight hundred houses on those streets, each of which pays a registration fee of from one dollar to eight dollars per month, according to its class. We watch the disorder in those houses very closely. I have often 72 PRESENT-DAY CHINA been stationed near them, and I remem- ber one night, when on my rounds, I took eight girls from eight different beatings to the Gate of Hope. We usually have to take them, and often it is at the risk of our lives, for though they are beaten and ill used, they are property, and the men and women who control them are often willing to fight desperately rather than lose them. Very often we bring them straight from some terrible beating or ill usage, and by the morning after they, more than likely, want to go back again. Virtually none of them comes here of her own accord, because her courage has dwindled, and also because — well, the punishments for running away, you know, are very terrible indeed." "Have you any ways of getting at the people who make the money out of the trade?" I asked. PRESENT-DAY CHINA 73 "Not many," said my friend, lighting another cigarette. "It would interfere with too many prominent people." I thought I had heard that somewhere before. "For all our polygamy, it is one of the institutions of Chinese life. We can't all afford polygamy. We do what we can. Men have been strangled in our jail for violating girls under twelve, — we have a very strict law against it, — and it is also a crime to live on a woman's immoral earnings." We rose to greet the director, an as- tonishingly young man, plainly dressed in the plain, dark-blue gown of the Chinese official classes. He was plainly surprised to see a foreigner. "You are the first foreign visitor he 's ever had here," translated Ho, "and he can't understand what interests you." We went through a long passage- way hung with mottos in bold Chinese 74 PRESENT-DAY CHINA characters, containing invocations to virtue such as: "Industry brings con- tent," "The tiger of passion will carry you at last to the jungle; bestride it not," and "Every woman loves a home; be grateful for this one." Between them were schedules of routine work and study. One learned that there was ethical teaching on Friday afternoons, and that the rest of the week was di- vided between reading and writing (many of the women are of course il- literate ) , lace-making, machine-sewing, cooking, and housekeeping, spinning, weaving, and basket-making. Though there was no trace of Christian influ- ence, Sunday was given over to "recrea- tion." We came out into a humming, buzz- ing, high-studded room where thirty or more girls and women were sitting about and demonstrating to the eye the The lecture liall platform. rrulei- ijortraits of Mohammed, Christ, Confucius, Buddha, and Lao-tse upholders of any of these religions address moral discourses on separate days Swedi.sh drill in iIh' opt-n air SCENES AT THE PEKING METROrOLITAN PRISON PRESENT-DAY CHINA 75 handicrafts of the schedule. The buzz- ing of tongues stopped at once, but the humming of the foreign sewing-ma- chines went on with redoubled energy as these timid daughters of old China bent out of sight behind their work. Their quiet, smooth, almost expression- less faces bore little trace of their tragic stor}% save here and there where a tiny undersized girl sat in a corner too weak to work, or scars and welts gave vivid testimony of past cruelty. Some of these infants of eight and nine had been little dancing-girls; others represented the toll of baby shame saved by the crim- inal courts from a fate worse than death. "Where do they go from here?" I asked the young director. "Most of them marry," he answered, eager to explain. "You see, a small fee places a girl here ; then she supports herself by work. So it is not charity. 76 PRESENT-DAY CHINA Their pictures are open to the public. When a man sees a girl he likes, he sends his middleman, as in all other Chi- nese marriages, and we inquire fully into his character. If that is satisfac- tory, we allow them to see each other. And if she approves of him, he pays us a marriage fee of anj^vhere between five dollars and fifty dollars, and they are married. It does not end there, however. We are in close touch with the police force, and if we hear from them that he is maltreating her, back she comes again, and he has to account to us." "Do you let men have them as 'little wives'?" I asked; but Ho refused to translate this. "Yes, they do," he answered himself; "what can you expect? They come from very bad lives, and even this is a big improvement. The trouble is that PRESENT-DAY CHINA 77 many skinflints who would like to buy girls, but do not want to pay for them, induce them to run away and come here. Then after a respectable interval they appear as suitors and get them for their fourth or fifth wives at a nominal price. That is bad, very bad, and some people who love slander say that this institu- tion is largely supported by such men. It is n't, and when we catch one of them, we give him the full extent of the law for fooling the police. There will al- ways be such people." "Has this institution anything to do with the Revolution?" I asked the di- rector, and Ho and he both joined in telhng me how, if it had n't been for the republic, it wouldn't have been founded. "It is part of new China," said Ho, "but we have no public opinion to help it. Not even the Christian missionaries 78 PRESENT-DAY CHINA know about it. But new men in the police department from the South are chiefly responsible for it. And they, like myself, received their early train- ing at a mission college." "Are the number of these women in- creasing?" I asked as we again got into our rickshaws at the gate. "Oh, yes," Ho replied. "The thou- sands of students who have come back from Japan have brought with them habits which the average Chinese boy would never pick up at home in any- thing like the same extent. Most of the present members of parliament have studied in Japan, and although I 'm an ardent Republican, and had two sons who went through the fighting round Hankow, I must confess that in this re- spect they 're not much better than the rest." We were rolling out along the great PRESENT-DAY CHINA 79 stone-flagged road that runs out toward the Temple of Agriculture. "I 'm takmg you now," said Ho, "to see the Peking Municipal Prison, the finest prison in China. It is one of the really enlightened reforms of the past regime, for which the Manchus re- ceived little credit. It handles the seri- ous penal cases for the whole of Peking. Out of our population of somewhere near a million we usually have about five hundred prisoners, and many of them are first offenders. That 's less than one in two thousand, and consider- ing the fact that criminals inevitably drift toward a capital, it 's not at all a bad record." We turned a corner of the city wall, and came in sight of a group of build- ings arranged like the radiating spokes of a wheel, with a fine administration building near the center, the whole. 80 PRESENT-DAY CHINA with a few outbuildings, surrounded by a low wall. From a distance it looked flat and dun-colored, like the Chinese fields around it, but going nearer, the first impression one received of the whole outfit was one of conspicuous efiiciency and cleanliness. The governor, a tall, grizzled Chinese of the older school, met us at the gate, and six different sets of soldiers popped out and saluted us on our way through the maze of buildings to the central of- fices. Ex-President Eliot of Harvard said a year or so ago that the Peking Prison was the most interesting thing he saw in his whole trip through China. I think the "Gate of Hope" is more in- teresting, but I should place this mag- nificent prison a close second. Take the workrooms, for instance. In great, high-studded rooms forty yards square by a measurement I was PRESENT-DAY CHINA 81 curious enough to verify, there were groups of forty or fifty men working at their trade under conditions, if one considers the standard of living of the far East, ahnost ideal. There were big rooms for ten or more trades, includ- ing tailoring, shoemaking, woodwork- ing, ironsmithing, bookbinding, spin- ning and weaving, basket-making, printing, and several others, not the least of which was market-gardening outdoors. It was strange to hear, out in far-away Peking, in a city through the streets of which I had traveled con- tinuously for six weeks without once meeting a foreign face except in the tiny, walled foreign quarter — it was strange to hear that the majority of men who came to prison knew no trade, and that the best way to make them behave themselves like decent citi- zens when they got out was to teach 82 PRESENT-DAY CHINA them a trade. It was all what we are still vainly trying to practise at home. At the Peking Prison they not only teach prisoners a trade, but they have an employment bureau which connects a man with a job. They segregate first offenders from old-timers and men con- victed of light offenses from those guilty of heavier ones up through second, third, and fourth offenders. In fact, forgery, petty larceny, robbery, and as- sault and battery are the names of cell rows where convicts of kindred offenses are exclusively confined. The gover- nor confessed that the atmosphere of specialism in crime might be rather nar- rowing, but it was all in the name of modernism and system. The parole system has been intro- duced, and the governor has decided to stick to it. Physical drill, an innova- PRESEXT-DAY CHINA 83 tion in any class of Chinese society, is held daily, and the setting-up exercise I saw proved that the men enter into it with appreciation and enthusiasm. But the outstanding note of the prison is cleanliness and order. The cells are large, and though doubling up is com- mon, they are dry and clean. Electric lighted, of stone construction through- out, on high and level ground, with sani- tary conveniences far better than home standards in China, the great prison at Peking is as much a lasting credit to the far-reaching social reform spirit of the Chinese as Sing Sing, for in- stance, where Warden Osborne's back is still against the wall, is a disgraceful witness to the complacent conservatism of America. We went up into the cupola as the six o'clock bugle blew the signal to stop work, and from the first landing we 84 PRESEXT-DAY CHINA could see long lines of prisoners waiting for their evening wash. They were clad in clean white suits, and they stepped briskly along to the wash-room, knowing that beyond lay supper. Sup- per is set out in rice-bowls, and on spe- cial occasions there are three sizes of them, a j)otent discrimination against unruly spirits. Up and down the long tables, with completely shaven heads (the laundry workers have to submit to this, too) moved the cooks and waiters, and as we went on up the stairs the hum of talk which mingled with the busy click of chop-sticks showed that these Chinese had granted another mercy that we still withhold more often than not in the civilized West — the mercy of talk at meals. Up in the cupola was the assembly- room, with rows and rows of high-sided seats that enabled the prisoners to see PRESENT-DAY CHINA 85 the platform, but not one another. On the wall over the platform I saw five crude paintings of men with beards. In regular order, beginning at the left, the governor pointed them out as Mo- hammed, Jesus, Confucius (in the cen- ter), Buddha, and Lao-tsze, the founder of the Taoist faith. Thus was China liberal to all religions, and every Sun- day, when the prisoners gathered here, they heard a moral discourse from some representative of one of these five creeds, with the other four to frown down upon him with united disapproval if he became too ]3artizan. The last thing we saw at the Peking Prison was a set of the instruments of torture with which prisoners were brought to reason in days gone by. Balls and drags for the feet, vices for breaking the bones of the hand, the ter- rible old, slicing knife, and, amid a host 86 PRESENT-DAY CHINA of other tools, two handsomely chased beheading swords with nicked and rusty blades — how wholesomely they fitted into the dusty chamber to which they were once again to be consigned away from the uses of man! Only the light bamboo is allowed to-day, and that very sparingly, at this prison; and as a testimony to the humane treatment, which I have since verified, let it be said that for more than four years there has not been a single attempt to escape. If one doubted that this is a model prison, could one have any better proof ? There was a day in Peking when the gutters of the streets ran in floods on rainy days, so that it was no unusual thing for an unwary victun who lost his footing, particularly a small child, to fall in and be drowned. The rev- elations and the odors on the coming of dry weather made it a veritable city of PRESEXT-DAY CHINA 87 the damned. Since those days, before the siege, the spirit of the city has en- tirely changed; but even to-day the cu- rious traveler may poke his nose into backwaters of the old capital's life, as I did the next day, and get the full stench of the unregenerate past. The next day's trip that I made with Captain Ho included a visit to the Boys' Industrial Home (the Shih Yi Sou) and the poorhouse (the Ping Ming Yuan) . The Shih Yi Sou is under the capable administration of the ministry of the interior, a thoroughly modern de- partment of the Government, and is, in its way, wholty as creditable an institu- tion as the Peking Prison. The 375 boys there, rangmg anywhere from fif- teen to twenty-one years of age, are given a thoroughly efficient trade-school education along lines that could hardly be improved in the Western world. 88 PRESENT-DAY CHINA They are taught tailoring, tinsmithing, printing, soap-making, cloth-weaving, hat-making, gardening, and half a score of other trades. But most important of all, thej^ are taught under a clean, efficient, and humane system that turns out human qualit}^ and not merely good artisans. The boj'^s we saw about the neat, spacious, well-ventilated buildings, in their clean blue uniforms, had good, shining boy faces it was worth while go- ing to see. And yet when they came to the institution they were beggar was- trels, orphans, paupers, young pick- pockets, and incorrigibles of all descrip- tions. The Shih Yi Sou, tucked away in the trackless heart of this vast Chi- nese city, is a thoroughly up-to-date, twentieth-centiu'j^ institution. The Ping ^ling Yuan is hidden away quite as obscurely, but it is hidden in a shameful past as well. It is the city PRESENT-DAY CHINA 89 poorhouse, and as such it is a disgrace to the city that has been touched deeply with the humane movements of the Repubhc. Rows and rows of able- bodied young paupers, men sunk in the degenerate sloth of an idle existence, hung around the buildings. Scattered among them, with no attempt whatever at alleviation or segregation, were the aged, the blind, the crippled, the deaf, the destitute, and the dumb. From out the squalid buildings that bordered the dirty and unkempt courtyards dull, hopeless eyes and rueful, pasty faces, men, women, and children alike, ej^ed us without interest and without intelli- gence. The broken bodies of the aged and the helpless little bodies of orphans and pauper children appeared to have been cast into this place as on some dust- heap with equal callousness. There was no expert care whatsoever; only 90 PRESENT-DAY CHINA coolies kept them in bounds and saw that they received their meals. We had made the tour of the build- ings and were turning back when our guide said to us, "Would you like to see the lunatics?" He spoke as though he were promising us an interesting show. He pointed with a grimace to a round hole cut in the wall for a door, giving upon another set of courtyards that we had not noticed. And then I heard them. I had been hearing them for some time, I believe, but now I knew what that weird chanting Babel was. We were already almost in a state of nausea, and as I started I felt a breath of real terror. But the impulse to go was overwhelming, and we went through the little round door into the lunatics' courtyard. I took one step inside the courtyard and then stopped. I shall never for- PRESENT-DAY CHINA 91 get that sight as long as I hve. There must have been eighty people in the courtyard, which was something like fortj^ paces square; and every one of these people was a drama to himself. In the middle of the space there was a well, with a tin dipper on its rim, and in front of it a man stood, naked to the waist, with wildly tousled hair, making what seemed to be a speech and looking me straight in the eye. I had never wholly become used to the Chinese face, especially to that hostile, absolutely unfeeling stare it turns on the foreigner as he is going through the street. This man turned his uncanny, vacant face on me and came walking nearer and nearer. I stood transfixed with terror. And then suddenly the whole emotional tension snapped as two or three younger men rushed out and seized his pigtail, and began to play 92 PRESENT-DAY CHINA horse with him, apparently jealous at his occupying the center of the stage. The crowd howled in glee as an attend- ant in kliaki drove them off. The man sat down on the edge of the well and whimpered ; and only then could I take my eyes off him and look at the others. I could hear the sound of high, falsetto singing; but could not place it any- w^here, till suddenly I noticed a dark lit- tle man, with a black mustache, in a cor- ner, a pitiful, fat, extremely sensible- looking man, who sat with his back' to the crowd and sang unceasingly. The day was a deadly hot summer day, and the courtyard was dry and blistering; yet one half -naked wretch deliberately got down and rolled in the noonday sun, moaning piteously. A guard ran over to him nervously, picked him up bodily, and carried him to a bench. He rolled off, but in the PRESENT-DAY CHINA 93 shade, and still moaned and moaned. Near him, and regarding us intently, was a man with a red flower behind one ear and a large leaf behind the other. Everywhere I looked, my eyes would meet a face that would at once be- come a vacant grin; one man put his hand to his head and crooked his knees, — he was a tall wizen old man with a face like a satyr, — asking for money in the familiar beggar gestures of the street, and grimacing horribly every time I looked in his direction. Some were new cases, with what hope of improvement in that ghastly atmos- phere no one seemed to care. And over in one corner were the women. Many of them were old, but one or two were young and pretty, and one kept putting on clothes every time I looked in her direction, one coat after another until she must have had on at 94 PRESENT-DAY CHINA least five. Here was a boy of eight, incurable, just come in. And round about them walked the coolie guards, grinning at their queer antics as at a game. We stood there — it must have been fifteen minutes — without speaking a word. I had intended to take a pic- ture, but as I folded up my camera Ho said, "Yes, for God's sake, let 's leave them to their misery." I can still hear the yell that pursued us as we ducked through the little round door again — a yell in which the whole eighty voices seemed to join in a fiendish chorus, and which rang through my mind through- out the journey home, and has rung in it intermittently to this day. I left Peking for the South shortly afterward, but before I left. Ho prom- ised to move heaven and earth to have this pitiful lot of people put under PRESEXT-DAY CHINA 95 decent care, and wipe out the terrible blot on modern China represented by the condition of the whole institution. I am sure that he has done it, as I heard a few months ago from a friend in the Peking Y. M. C. A. that the lunatics' compound had been entirely reformed since we had visited it the year before. I believe it has been, for there is no reason why the Peking Lunatic Asylum should not be quite as good an institu- tion as the Peking Prison. In bringing to practical extinction within ten years the age-long national curse of the opium traffic, the Chinese have shown the unconquerable resolu- tion which makes for social betterment. That is their true mettle, and we of the Western world, for all our boasted progress against social evils, would look long to find a moral crusade to match it in fervor and success. But a peep 96 PRESENT-DAY CHINA into a dark corner of the unregenerate past is necessary to set against this splendid endeavor. Seeing and remem- bering the Ping Ming Yuan of Peking, we can feel to the full the imaginative application to China of Cecil Rhodes's famous epitaph, "So much to do, so little done!" IV RADICALISM AND THE RADICALS 1REJSIEMBER the Ha-ta-men street as the place which kept me down to earth in China. The Ha-ta- men street is one of the great thorough- fares of Peking; it skirts the legation quarter and plunges through the great gateway from which it takes its name into the heart of the teeming small shop quarter of the city. After listening all day to the frock-coated students of the South playing at democratic govern- ment in their parliament, after talking to suffragettes, so-called, after lunch- ing with a president of the Senate who spoke brilliant French and claimed to be a socialist, after listening to plans for 97 98 PRESENT-DAY CHINA internationalism, Esperanto and social reform, in a word, after touching day after day the hem of that splendid gar- ment of moderism which this band of patriots and pioneers were trying to cut to their country's fit, it was helpful and chastening to see that nation revealed on the Ha-ta-men street in the naked reality of its common people. The strange and tireless pageantry of that street is one of the freshest and most enduring impressions I have of China. I can see it now as it was in the evening, a great, broad, dim road thirty feet or more from curb to curb, full of little flickering lights and swarms of people and strange smells. It is four hours after sundown and still from side to side this great street is crowded with people. Under the flare of hun- dreds of peanut-oil lamps the keepers of the outdoor bazaars are doing a thriving PRESENT-DAY CHINA 99 trade. Here is a street restaurant with its twisted cakes sizzling noisily in hot pans and bowls of pungent broth and chopped meat and vegetables hustling over the crowded counter to the clamor- ous, quarreling, half naked mob of cus- tomers. Just beyond a man cries, in a terrifying liquid guttural, the virtues of a cold red drink which he is ladling out in cups. Across the road a little magi- cian sits with drooping mustache and cunning eyes, and holds a crowd spell- bound at his tales of fortune read from little ivory sticks. Beside him a tall old man with a sparse, straggling beard sells American cigarettes, ten for a cent, while further along a lean young man with shaven head, in a gray robe, look- ing much like a Buddhist monk, draws a secular and very profitable custom ma- nipulating white dice in and out of a brown leather bag. 100 PRESENT-DAY CHINA Along the dimly lit roadway rick- shaws clatter swiftly, threading their way among the people by miraculous lunges from side to side. Their pass- engers are inconspicuous, but here and there a gaily dressed lady flashes by. Children in all stages of nakedness chase after them like little minnows in a pool. Up and down the street drift the crowds; past the bazaars and the street merchants and the beggars, countless streams of people move about in the myriad gleams of lanterns and bobbing rickshaw lights. From a mysterious house on the corner comes the shrill wail- ing of a Chinese fiddle, and every now and then a man walking past you will break out into unearthly harmonics in a wavering falsetto. The noise is inces- sant. The shoving restless crowds seem endless, and yet, with a calm like still water, women's faces looking passively PRESENT-DAY CHINA 101 at you from behind bazaars and an occa- sional doorway. It is stifling hot, and the air is heavy with strange cooking and the humidity of half clad people, while over the silent stretches of flat roofs on either side rises the vast gate tower of Ha-ta-men, lift- ing its huge upturning eaves into the night with the overspreading perma- nence of the unchanging East. The contagious squalor of this environment, the heavy, sensuous, relaxing air which is more than a physical element in its unholy composition — it is these which bring home to a westerner the evil spell which hangs over the East. Under the cruel, upspringing, scornful lines of this tower, crouching on the wall which runs on either side as far as the eye can see, flows the life of the common people of China. And as the busy, sordid, swarming life of the Ha-ta-men brings 102 PRESENT-DAY CHINA to your mind the way in which these peo- ple have lived for centuries, so the un- aspiring malignant tower above them, typifies unforgettably for you and for them the mean and alien despotism which has ruled them and crushed them and forgotten them. Now that despotism is gone; new hopes, new ideas, and a new restlessness are abroad in the land. Schools are coming, laws are more just, and the law's penalties in prison and social insti- tution are losing the cruel edge of the past. But of the new idea^, what of that? Where can you see the republic, the new China, radicalism along the Ha- ta-men street? What is there here among these medieval crowds to tell you that you are in the same country, in the same city, in the same century with a Chinese parliament? I could see noth- ing. And that is why walking along PRESENT-DAY CHINA 103 the Ha-ta-men street was a chastening experience to my warm sympathies with China's hot-blooded radicahsm. It brought one down to earth, to a type of life on which the new words and the new feelings seemed to have no effect what- soever. And I came to feel that unless I could find a sign of the New China in the Ha-ta-men street, even though that street were in the heart of the unsympa- thetic capital of the unprogressive North, and among the common people whose superstitions against reform were eloquent still in ghostly memories of Boxerism, I could not really believe in the Chinese revolution. And then one night I found it. I was walking through the Ha-ta-men dis- trict with a friend who spoke Chinese, if anything more fluently than the peo- ple themselves. He had been in China thirty years, as interpreter, mining en- 104 PRESENT-DAY CHINxl gineer, customs official, and unofficial doctor and missionary ; and for the past year or so he had been spending his time in a little village where nobody could speak English and only eight people could read or write at all. When he came up to Peking it was an event; he, too, w^as looking for the revolution among the common people, and, being an old China hand, he did n't believe he would find it. We came to a little lane down which the chief things noticeable were a lot of flickering lights among a silent crowd — and a Voice. The lights belonged to rickshaws of which there were a dozen or so along the wall and through the crowd, and the Voice belonged to an earnest, clean-shaven, attractive looking rickshaw man who was standing be- tween the shafts of his old iron-tired rickshaw in the center of the crowd. PRESEXT-DAY CHIXA 105 "This fellow must have a sun-stroke," my friend was saj^ing, when — "hold on a minute," he said, stopping sharply. " '^lin kuo. Mm kuo' ; do you hear that? It means republic. Look here, there is something more than meets the eye down this lane; let 's go and see." On nearer view the crowd appeared to be about half a hundred people, al- most all workers or artizans, wuth a dozen or so women scattered among them. The edges of the crowd, that is, inside of a considerable fringe of street arabs, came and went continually, but the great majority stood still and lis- tened ; and gradually we discovered that it was n't a sun-stroke and was n't a quarrel but was that unlieard of thing in China — a street speaker. And the way he talked to the people of the Ha-ta- men street was as instructive as it was amazing. My friend translated be- 106 PRESENT-DAY CHINA tween gasps of surprise and apprecia- tion, for he was a keen admirer of the Chinese mind, especially when it was whetted in argument. The rickshaw orator first got his crowd interested in himself. He told them his father had an official post but because he was not willing to pay bribes to retain it, he had been displaced by a man who was willing to purchase favors. Now his family was penniless and he was not afraid to go out and work for a living among the honest rickshawmen of Peking. He pointed the moral with rhetorical questions in finished street orator style. "But why should we be robbed with this bribery and squeeze now?" he said. "What is the use of a republic if they still want money for only taking in your card to some fat of- ficial ? Should n't we have all the more under a republic a preference for char- PRESENT-DAY CHINA 107 acter and merit instead of corruption? Don't forget it, the people are powerful now. Why should we let these crooked officials do anything they please?" *'You know," said my friend, excit- edly interrupting his translation, "this is a serious business if there are any po- lice in hearing." But it soon became more serious, for the speaker left the minor officials and began to attack the President himself. *'We have no more kings now, no more emperors. We have a president who is supposed to do what we, the peo- jdIc, want him to do, and yet this presi- dent issues decrees just as the Manchus did; and he says 'I decree, I proclaim,' and he expects you to say 'we tremble and obey.' But this man is not a God, he is not even a scholar, but is only an ambitious soldier, and unless we watch him and make him fear us, he will de- 108 PRESENT-DAY CHINA ceive and betray the people just as the Manchus did before him." "Don't think I ^m angry," continued the young speaker; "I will talk these things over calmly with anybody here. I will come again to-morrow at this time, but don't tell anybody about it because I don't want to have a disturbance on the street. I might get arrested and then my father would starve." He be- gan to wheel his rickshaw ahead of him through the crowd. His voice had been very attractive, his words well chosen. Unquestionably, he had a sort of spell over these people. But no one moved, no one asked a question. He was obvi- ously a stranger and they were a little shy of him. Now he turned his rick- shaw around and the light which had lit up his keen expressive face in the center of the crowd, disappeared. But as he went out to the mouth of the alley he PRESENT-DAY CHINA 109 was still talking and among his last words I caught one significant phrase myself. "Kuo Ming Tang," it was, the name, already known throughout China, of the revolutionary party of Sun Yat- sen, the student Jacobins, the intellect- ual sans-culottes of the Chinese Revo- lution. "That places him'' said my friend, "and he is n't the only rickshaw- man, real or pretended, who has been heard of (though I never believed it my- self) working up the people's minds in the alleys and dark corners of Peking. These people had a new sensation to- night ; they never heard anything like it before; and they won't soon forget it. You can't begin to realize what this sort of thing means in China. Fifteen years ago a man like that would have been in danger of his life, for then the Southern reform devils were just as despised as the foreign devils themselves. And 110 PRESENT-DAY CHINA there was hate right here for both a-plenty; Count von Waldersee was murdered within the sound of that rick- shawman's voice on the open Ha-ta-men street. And now, on the same street, you have a crowd hstening to hberahsm, reform, and the repubhc. That 's the new China. I 've Hved here ahnost thirty years, and I never saw it so viv- idly as to-night." The man had gone but the crowd lin- gered. Long after we had gone up to our cubicles in the mission hospital on the corner where we were staying, knots of people hung about, lights flickered, and the hum of talk came up to our win- dows. Only after midnight was there quiet at last along this strange old street, a quiet which the squeal of a fid- dle somewhere along the deserted alley only seemed to make more still. But the Ha-ta-men was a different place to PRESENT-DAY CHINA 111 me now. On that time-sodden street I had caught the heart-beat of the present among the common people. That queer, naive but stirring talk had been their notice of the revolution. To me it was a sign that no corner of China, no class of the Chinese people could be sure of being without the range of its influ- ence. If the Revolution was abroad on the Ha-ta-men street, it was abroad among the Chinese people. This is a chapter of impressions. The intense and imaginative radicalism of Young China eludes altogether the heavy, analytical method with which foreigners in China usually try to ac- count for it. Life on the Ha-ta-men street is strange enough, but there is a key to it which any Westerner can grasp — money. The incessant talk of the people, the confusion, the weird energy 112 PRESENT-DAY CHINA you everywhere see responds inevitably to this touchstone; the one paramount motive is and must be to wring a Hving out of the swarming land. From the lowest coolie hoeing his washed-out half- acre on a precipice to the highest official sharing his patrimony among his flocks of relatives-of-prey, the token is the same ; the urge of the one toward starva- tion and thrift and of the other toward corruption and avarice are identical and irresistible. I have seen soldiers under fire bartering with a ragged huckster for eleven nuts for a cash instead of ten. Missionaries who have listened to Chi- nese street-talk all their lives say that nine snatches of conversation out of ten are about money. This is not the key to Chinese radical- ism. It is as elusive in economic basis and as hard to reconcile with material forces as was the Utopianism of Boston PRESENT-DAY CHINA 113 transcendentalism. Mr. Pott's young man read up on Chinese metaphysics for the "Eatanswill Gazette" by studying China under the letter C in the Encyclo- pedia Britannica, and metaphysics un- der the letter M — and "combining his information, Sir." . But as the young orator on the Ha-ta-men street brought a message which the people listened to and recognized, so the student of Chi- nese radicalism to-day can understand something of its meaning and quality of mind by a method much more direct than mere materialistic analysis, and still avoiding the interesting error of Mr. Pott's young man. He can go to the bringers of this mes- sage themselves. That is what I pro- pose to do in this chapter. I begin irresistibly with that extraor- dinary spirit, whose name appears in no history of the Revolution, who first 114 PRESENT-DAY CHINA brought home to me the real quality of the revolutionary mind of Young China, Hain Jou-kia. I met Hain in London in 1912. His headquarters were in Paris, and it was in Paris that he organ- ized the banquet, at which Anatole France was the principal speaker, which gave the Chinese Republic its first greet- ings from the liberal culture of Eu- rope. He came from a famous literary family in the far southern province of Kwangsi; and for a year, when the Chinese Republic was struggling for recognition among the world's powers, and the leaders of the First Revolution still had a fighting chance of success, he occupied a position in Paris remind- ing one of Benjamin Franklin. He organized the first society in Europe to promote sympathy and understanding with republican China, the Ligue Sino- Fran9aise. And in the later months of PRESENT-DAY CHINA 115 the year he planned another instrument of mutual understanding, a tour of members of European parliaments with republican sympathies overland to China. It was on this mission that he came to London, and, among a shoal of other newspaper men, I interviewed him at the House of Commons. I found him a man looking little more than thirty, but an alert, enthusiastic propagandist for his country's cause, a pronounced vision- ary and doctrinaire, but a shrewd organ- izer and a very convincing personality. I suppose his newness to the world of labor problems. Socialism, and free thought into which he had so lately come tilted his judgment a little, but certainly his radicalism had in it to me an aston- ishing tang of daring. He began to study Socialism, he said, as soon as he arrived in Europe, and he saw in it the only way by which the Orient could de- 116 PRESENT-DAY CHINA velop its material resources and still avoid the orgy of capitalist selfishness into which industrialism had thrown the whole of Europe. "We in China," he said, "have no nobility of blood; and, if we can help it, we 're going to have no nobility of capital and industrial enter- prise." He soberly told astonished members of Parliament that there was very little in Socialism that was n't in Confucius anyhow; and for his part, he was just a little "plus avarice/' Social- ism suffered from too much politics, too much compromise with legahstic quib- bling; the radical democracy of the fu- ture would have an element of coopera- tion and an element of syndicalism in it, which merely meant that the rights of the consumer and the rights of the worker would be directly maintained by the parties themselves, without constant resource to political dickering. PRESEXT-DAY CHIXA 117 Hain Jou-kia never got his parlia- mentary delegation off for China. The murder of Sung Chiao-jen and the rum- bling of the revolution behind the Six Power Loan spiked this as they spiked scores of other projects of liberal China. Month after month it was postponed; the money was ready at the Chinese Embassy in London; but each time a fresh crisis set the date back again. Finally, Hain Jou-kia saw the end of his party and his principles at home, canceled the arrangements and re- turned to China. I was the only ar- rangement he did n't cancel. The threat of revolution cooled the ardor of the politicians; but to a young journal- ist, still ardent over lost causes and to whom China's bid for freedom had al- ready begun to seem the most stirring and potent event of the time, the op- portunity was a challenge. I bought 118 PRESENT-DAY CHINA my ticket to China the day after the passage of the Big Loan made a south- ern revolution inevitable. When I arrived in Peking the Parlia- ment, summoned only six weeks before, had already passed into its desperate fight for existence. The talks with Hain Jou-kia I had begun in the House of Commons lobbies I continued in his little bachelor quarters outside the Tar- tar Wall ; we went from friend to friend, from meeting to meeting in springless Peking carts and latticed carriages. I saw the men who had hoped to found a national party in China; I saw the net growing round them ; I saw their move- ment narrow gradually but inevitably from a political opposition to a secret conspiracy against the government. One man in a palace in the Forbidden City held the strings. They never saw him, but the power he silently directed PRESENT-DAY CHINA 119 was all around them. He controlled the army and the treasury, and before those things their Parliament was a pawn on the board. With the treasury he bribed incessantly, with cash, with office, with all kinds of empty honors; and he raised new troops and paid the old regularly. With his army, he made secret arrests. Seven members of the Senate were arrested and taken to Tien- tsin. The president of the Senate re- fused to preside over the chamber; the vice-president, a man far less radical, took his place. Secret executions went on. The detectives were everywhere; the military courts were absolutely in the hands of the man in the palace. His power was compact, it worked on a plan, it had the legations of the foreign pow- ers, and the instruments of domestic tyr- anny behind it. The radicals only had the appeal to the people. Finally they 120 PRESENT-DAY CHINA used it, and the world knows now how it failed them. Add to this steady drift the reasons for the political failure of the Revolu- tion, as I have given them in the first chapter, and you will know at what end to grasp the situation. The radicals had their backs to the wall. They had come to Peking to plan for a new re- gime; as Hain Jou-kia had gone to Paris to justify it before Europe. But in Peking they found Yuan Shih-k'ai completely obdurate, threatening with jealous hatred any liberal platform which diverted from him any part of the concentration of power to which he had devoted, and still devotes, the whole of his political strategy. I did not see then that the end was inevitable; the fight was still on, the ParHament was still the center of inter- est in the country, and the Kuo Ming PRESENT-DAY CHINA 121 Tang, founded less than a year before as the united radical party of the South, was at the height of its career. The Kuo Ming Tang was more than a po- litical party; it was a national move- ment, a great social agitation. In Pe- king its headquarters suggested the Jacobin Club during the French Revo- lution. Every day a meeting was held here, every day the policy of the moment was discussed in the presence of sev- eral hundred members and fixed accord- ing to the fiercest consensus of opinion, a characteristic Chinese revolutionary practice. I remember the Kuo Ming Tang as a sunny courtyard set back from the street in the center of a cool, wide, low- roofed Chinese building. Crossing and re-crossing slantwise through the front passage and standing about in groups in this courtyard were scores of young 122 PRESENT-DAY CHINA Chinese, talking in informal, animated groups. The general impression was one of great color and spirit. Directly ahead was the big discussion room, crowded with Chinese flags and strings of foreign bunting, and here over a hun- dred members were already seated, wait- ing for the day's meeting. Youth had a striking majority in this gathering, and the number wearing European dress, was more than one half, the rest being in the typical long gray silk gown of the well-to-do Chinese. The buzz of continual conversation filled the place; and it was noticeable how many of the men present, often the most boyish look- ing of all, wore the gold and silver stars which betokened membership in Parlia- ment. Newspapers were also consider- ably to the fore ; a big file representing a liberal selection from the thousand and one journals that had recently sprung r~ 'I' ■•«.«.-." t! J I I ly I i I i I i i ■ -I I M r 1 PRESENT-DAY CHINA 123 up all over the country, was kept in one of a row of little offices on one side, and in the center of almost every group some one held a newspaper as a brief for his argument. The informality was particularly noticeable — after the bow- ing and scraping you could see on the streets of the Imperial city, the bearing of these young men was more like that of American college students than of mandarins. There was very little laughter to be heard, very few smiles to be seen; the general attitude was strik- ingly French — very earnest, very excit- able and gesticular, yet all in good poise and the best of manners. I came to the party headquarters with Speaker Chang Chi of the Senate and while we sat in one of the many con- spirators' corners over a tiny cup of tea, he told me something of the idea behind the determined little group of men who 124 PRESENT-DAY CHINA had brought the Kuo Ming Tang into being. He was a slight man, with a face of the North, a trifle full, with steady eyes and thick hair, young and vigorous. He had studied in Japan, and had spent four years in Paris — like Hain Jou-kia, he spoke only French to foreigners. His student-days in France had brought him into close touch with Jaures, the French Socialist leader, and it was a little strange to reflect that this man too, a prime mover in the Revolu- tion and now the presiding officer of the Senate, had come back from Em-ope with firm social democratic convictions. I asked Chang Chi to tell me two things about the Kuo Ming Tang; what common purposes actually kept it to- gether as an organization, and what he thought it actually meant by Sociahsm. "Well, in the first place," he an- swered, "Kuo Ming Tang means the PRESEXT-DAY CHINA 125 National Party, and it is the best clue to our central object I can possibly give you. Abroad, you might be sure that such a name would mean jingoism, or at least conservatism, but it has been characteristically modern China's way to take that name for the most radical party in the country. And this is the reason. Ever since Sun Yat-sen and Hwang Hsing founded the Tung INIeng Hui in Tokio in 1901, Chinese revolu- tionists have always recognized it was their very first task to create an appeal which would break down provincial and sectional barriers and win support to a common rallying cry from all over the country. 'Nationalism' meant then, and means now, in China, a real step in advance. In the old days China as a nation could not be said to have existed at all. In practically every war China fought during the nineteenth century 126 PRESENT-DAY CHINA you will find troops from one section of the country helping the enemy put down rebellion in another. "Similarly, it was only through the absence of the slightest glimmer of pa- triotism that the amazing system of provincial government grew up which has made our officials a bye-word the world over for degrading corruption and self-interest. These officials only had, only have still, for the Republic has not even started its reform in their direction yet, the interest at heart of their own particular province or district : and favoritism and all the crooked 'in- fluences' which determined advance- ment have almost always had their sanc- tion and their safety from exposure in this narrow provincial spirit. "Here you have the crux of all our propaganda, both before and after the Revolution, — the rallying cry for a PRESENT-DAY CHINA 127 united China. To have created this idea of unity and to have aroused the feehng of intense nationahsm that you see to-day — that has always been the first object of our party and it is the greatest triumph of the Chinese Revolu- tion. "From now on China will face an entirely different set of problems. In the pell-mell confusion of the political situation here to-day, one thing is abso- lutely clear : that is that the real conflict in China will never again be a racial or provincial conflict; from now on it will be between the class interests of the whole nation. And just let me exi:>lain to you one thing in particular which that change means. "First of all, it means that China must wake up with a bump to the world- wide issue of Socialism versus Individ- ualism. How far the Kuo Ming Tang 128 PRESENT-DAY CHINA is affected by Socialist influences you may see from the fact that as many as fifty members of Parhament, all belong- ing to our party, are convinced Social- ists. As an organization the Shueh Hwei Tang, as the Socialist Party is called in Chinese, is as yet one of the minor influences in politics; but as a permeating force the prominent Social- ists in Parliament and out have swung the Kuo Ming Tang a long way toward a definite Socialist programme. The nationalization of mines and railways, the old Tung Meng Hui (Sun Yat- sen's original party) policy of the social ownership of the land, democratic schemes of taxation, such as the income tax, the inheritance tax, etc., free edu- cation, racial equality, and lastly the very specific wording of the Kuo Ming Tang s position on the encouragement of modern industry 'on a social, rather PRESENT-DAY CHINA 129 than on an individualistic basis,' — all these are significant items in the party's declared and published pohcy which show a more than accidental drift to- ward practical Socialism. *'In the last revision of the Kuo Ming Tang constitution you will find Social- ism boldly made one of the party's main objectives, for number four, under 'Final Aims,' reads : " 'To prepare the way for the intro- duction of Socialism, especially in order to raise the national standard of living, and to employ the powers of the Gov- ernment quickly and evenly to develop the resources of the country for the ben- efit of the whole people/ " "We could n't be much more direct than that, could we?" said Chang Chi. "But wait a minute. Here is an object lesson right before you of the way the mind of our party is working." 130 PRESENT-DAY CHINA A meeting had begun in the big lec- ture room. A tall young Chinese in a European suit of light brown silk was speaking from the platform, under the crossed five-colored flags. He spoke in groups of queer, ringing monosyllables, full of uncouth gutturals — good, close- packed Chinese oratory it was, for sharp bursts of clapping went up to him every minute or two from his keen attentive audience. "He is a Socialist," said Chang Chi, "and all over China men of his stamp are talking to meetings of our party. His father is a pawn-shop keeper in a small city in the South, but he laid aside a little money to get his son a good edu- cation in Japan, and now, as in the old China before the Manchus, merit and knowledge put him on an equal footing with any man in the country. We have no belted earls in China; our people PRESENT-DAY CHINA 131 don't know the meaning of aristocracy except what they connect with the for- eign rule of the Manchus. So the side of Sociahsm which preaches the equahty of all men — the cornerstone of the teachings of Confucius — will never have to fight for its life as it has to do in Europe — and in your free America, too. "Listen, now; you may hear a typical Kuo Ming Tang argument: for the speaker is attacking an objection to So- cialism which is not at all peculiar to the Chinese, the corruption and extor- tion of the State. Just let me give you the drift of what he is saying. "He is saying that officials are a poor lot and that politicians are generally sons of the devil." (Cheers from said politicians within the hall.) "But within the past two years officials have taken on an altogether new character in 132 PRESENT-DAY CHINA China. They are no better than they were before, perhaps, but they are now no longer the deputy graft-receivers of a corrupt tyranny — the Revolution has made them the servants of the people. It is for the people to realize that the step on which they are now entering" (they are talking about Sun Yat-sen's Railway Nationalization scheme) "faces them with two alternatives : either to risk a little corruption from men who are accountable to them by law; or to get 'ejfificient management' from private cu- pidity and lay the cornerstone of indus- trial slavery for the time that is to come. Will it be easier to discharge a few of- ficials or to shake off the throttle-hold of a gigantic trust? And what about the men who work on these railways? Why should not they help to control them — and keep tabs on these trouble- some officials who seem to be causing so PRESEXT-DAY CHINA 133 much worry? If you take the less courageous course, this is the penalty, he is saying — and this and this ; and the facts about American railway conditions — wages, fatal accidents, and the like — with which he winds up his argument come pretty near clinching his case. You know them better than I do." The young man in brown sat down amid a long burst of clapping and the meeting became general. One man after another spoke to the question with an extraordinary amount of readiness and conviction, but no vote was taken and the meeting passed on to a general discussion of the political situation. On this topic, although everybody was on the same side there was a very warm dis- cussion indeed. The amount of hostil- ity to the opposing party and to Yuan Shih-k'ai was especially noticeable, and when one speaker exclaimed that Yuan 134 PRESENT-DAY CHINA was one of the greatest tyrants the coun- try had ever had, there was a fierce chorus of assent, which was intensified tenfold when one passionate voice called out, "Who killed Sung Chiao-jen?" • ••••• ''Well, I must be off," said Chang Chi, as the meeting showed signs of drawing to a close. "I have enough of this political situation as it is. As a matter of fact, it is a perfect obsession. Everything just now is subservient to politics when we should be doing noth- ing else but pulling our own party to- gether and getting ready to govern the country. All the tricks of Yuan Shih- k'ai in Parliament have had one main object; that is, to set the parties squab- bling among themselves so bitterly that they would look ridiculous in the eyes of the country — if he succeeds in making us look ridiculous enough, he '11 soon PRESENT-DAY CHINA 135 sweep away our little freedom like a straw." Prophetic words. I thought of them the next time we met, in a little apart- ment in Tokio where he was hiding with Sun Yat-sen six short months later, once more a conspirator against the state. But there was more in the Kuo Ming Tang movement, even in Peking itself, than the conservative reaction, sweeping the surface of politics, can ever go deep enough to destroy. This radicalism was a living force, and its roots stay be- low the ground. Take another of its manifestations, the new enthusiasm for wide-spread education. Education is the currency of the Chinese people ; and the Revolution being spontaneously and characteristically Chinese, proceeded to supply that currency with its typically unregulated enthusiasm. In this field the Kuo Ming Tang, with its extraor- 136 PRESENT-DAY CHINA dinary mushroom university, set the pace in Peking as well as throughout the country. At the time when I vis- ited it, the Kuo Ming Tang University stood just west of the Chien Men gate, in the heart of the official quarter of the city. It was an institution which had to be seen to be believed. Three months from its opening it had thirteen hundred students; its lecture rooms were jammed to the doors; its quarters had been enlarged twice; it still had a waiting list hundreds long, and its teaching staff numbered fifty Chinese and European teachers. It was a university sprung up in a night; but through all its activities you could see the spirit which only touches a nation in great moments of national regeneration and conscious revolution. I found a class in law one night attend- ing lectures after nine o'clock, a class PRESENT-DAY CHINA 137 150 strong, but listening to the lecturer (he was a French ex-consular agent) with an attention which all the Carnegie funds cannot procure in America. Work began at seven in the morning, and ended when the students got tired, for optional classes continued till late in the evening. Students came to this university from all over China, mostly from the South, and almost entirely revolutionary in sentiment. The fees could not have been more democratic. For five dollars a month you could live, eat, and sleep "in," if you lived "out," you could have all the courses vou wanted for three. The courses were hastily planned, the curriculum was not a model of system, there was no laboratory — for that is one thing you can't improvise in three months. A rule limited the professors to four hours' instruction a week, so as 138 PRESENT-DAY CHINA to keep the range of tuition as wide as possible; foreign teachers were paid twelve dollars a week, Chinese, unless they had a foreign degree, half that sum. On the efficiency and usefulness of an institution like this it was very hard to form a judgment; but on the reality of the spirit which had brought it into ex- istence, you could not help seeing the power beneath it, a power for national betterment such as has existed in recent times in no other country in the world. A particularly significant thing was the miscellaneous character of its students. Even in China, where education has been on the most democratic lines pos- sible for centuries, and coolies' sons fre- quently rubbed shoulders with boys from the highest families in the land at the great Examination Halls, — even in China the Kuo Ming Tang students were an unprecedented jumble. I saw PRESENT-DAY CHIXA 139 in the same class-room ex-revolutionary soldiers, officials' sons and shopkeepers' sons, gray headed men and green lads, boys from every province in China, and even some from far-away Mongolia. There was a sprinkling of government officials, and a great mob of candidates for office ; there were boys who had run away from home-to get their first taste of freedom in a republican university, and there were others who had been taken out of foreign-managed schools and sent here by good republican pa- rents. In short, you could have found thirteen hundi-ed reasons for the pres- ence of those thirteen hundred students in Peking. Such was the training ground of uto- pianism and radicalism which the Kuo Ming Tang was providing during the Revolution for the future leavening of the Ha-ta-men streets of their vast and 140 PRESENT-DAY CHINA swarming people. The consolidation which could have taken these forces, the undisciplined political parties, the schools thrown up in scaffolding alone, the half-primed batteries of the hastily mobilised press, and molded them to a design fitting to the forces behind them would have made a radicalism in China which would have endured to this day. Sung Chiao-jen, the man more capable of making that consolidation than any other, was killed as he was starting for Peking to take the work actually in hand. This murder cuts across the whole history of the revolutionary time. But a deeper and fairer reason is that the time which could not bring out its own consolidation was not really ready to take hold with strong, purposeful hands of the sword of national oppor- tunity which was so nearly in its grasp. Meanwhile, the sword that the radi- PRESENT-DAY CHINA 141 cals let slip was grasped by another hand. Their opportunity made Yuan Shih-k'ai master of China. Let us see in the next chapter what his mastery has meant. LEADERSHIP AND YUAN SHIH-K AI WHEN Li Hung-chang stood with his back against the wall at Shimonoseki, striving alone to avert the crushing humiliation of his nation that the Japanese diplomats had cletermined should crown their victory in the war of 1895, he uttered this pas- sionate protest, a protest in which there rests the tragedy of a people. "You have a nation at your back," he exclaimed, "a united nation of de- termined and patriotic people ; but what you are fighting is only one man!" It was a vivid picture in the cunning old diplomat's mind — that of the jeal- 142 PRESEXT-DAY CHIXA 143 ous and slothful court cliques reviewing his work without a vestige of sympathy or concern, save in their oa\ti spiteful, eunuch-ridden intrigues, disdaining in the foreigner, even in the hour of their humiliation, nothing so much as his jDower and his unity of purpose. Under such a government leadership was impossible, and mutual confidence between a leader and his people gro- tesquely so. Li Hung-chang, through all his years of seeming power, never attained such a leadership, never even anticipated it. In his day the Chinese people were an entity unrealizable to the mind. The Chinese people over whom Yuan Shih-k'ai is dictator to-day have under- gone a powerful change. Yuan has lived the life of the old-time official ; he carries with him the old-time cynicism and obliqueness of policy; he has been 144 PRESENT-DAY CHINA trained throughout his Hfe in the old school. But he is confronted not merely with a people, but with a nation, and with a nation that is coming more rapidly than the mind can follow to a consolidation of structure and to an in- tensified sense of common purpose. The essential point to understand about his past is that he is rooted in the same rigid traditions which the Chinese Revolution rose to overthrow. And the marvel of his present position is the elasticity with which he has adapted him- self to the change. To a certain extent he has trimmed the new order to suit himself, but no man could have sur- vived in his place who did not yield vast concessions of the old order in an instinctive grasp of the demands of the new. True, place and power lay that way; but it is an error of the Radicals to suppose that some mysterious power PRESENT-DAY CHINA 145 guides a man dominant in his time in the direction of his own self-interest. Only an infinite subtlety of adaptation and intelligent compromise could have raised this blunt, unmoral character, steeped in the strateg}^ of the old school, to the dominant position he now holds in the new. Yuan rose to preeminence as the universally accepted successor to Li Hung-chang during the constructive period of JNIanchu statesmanship in which the old Dowager Empress ably and sincerely did her best to wipe out the days of the shame of the Boxers. In the alteration of China to a different standard of leadership her impressive decrees between 1902 and 1908 con- tributed immeasurably to the rising de- mand for a government worthy of the Chinese people. It is the achievements and standards of those days which, more 146 PRESENT-DAY CHINA than any other influence, gave us the key to Yuan Shih-k'ai's preeminence. The first great landmark of these re- forms was the decree removing the ban of three centuries on marriages between Manchus and Chinese, and, incidentally, anticipating the revolutionary order of to-day by making optional the wearing of the queue, with which the Manchu had branded the Chinese as a conquered race. There followed in rapid succes- sion the decree introducing Western learning and disestablishing the ancient scholarship, which an American scholar has called the gi'eatest intellectual change in the history of mankind, the decree extending education to women, the decree reorganizing the army on a modern plan, and consolidating on lines looking toward constitutional govern- ment the executive departments of Peking, and finally the great edict of PRESENT-DAY CHINA 147 1906, accepting the principle of consti- tutionalism, and formulating the steps in which something new was to be granted each year, in order that China might in nine years time attain the basis of a parliamentary government. An integral part of this movement was also the decree against opium, which should run its course next year ; a decree, which more than any other single reform, has revealed to the world the moral fervor which is behind the regeneration of the Chinese people. During these years Yuan Shih-k'ai, as governor of the metropolitan province of Chihh, and later as president of the Waiwupu, or Foreign Office, headship of which tacitly amounted to being prime minister, was in part the brains and wholly the arm and shield of the administration. The model army then organized was his army, and his army 148 PRESENT-DAY CHINA it has always been. He organized it first at Tientsin, and it was at Tientsin where as governor of ChihU he gave China her first example of model munic- ipal government. He it was who worked out the details of the other re- forms, he it was who planned that be- fore the ultimate Parliament in Peking, provincial parliaments in eighteen pro- vincial capitals should be preparing and educating the mind of the people for the larger pattern of representative government to come. The importance of this period should not be overestimated. The edicts were regarded by the Chinese people more as promises than as laws, and promises which they showed in 1911 they were very far from believing. But even as promises, they were founded on the deepest currents of public feeling the Chinese people had yet experienced. PRESENT-DAY CHINA 149 They coincided with a new national determination on the part of China to maintain her sovereignty against foreign exploitation. It is this period, to which foreign railwaj^ promoters re- fer as "the era of public opinion," in which China first made headway against the calculated sovereignty of foreign powers over the railways they were con- structing within her borders. It was a formative, germinating period. And the moral ideas which were at the base of most of what reflection it had in the minds of the people were fittingly ex- pressed by the last great edict of the Manchus, which abolished on February 22, 1910 the practice of slavery and the buying and selling of human beings in China. This was not a time for leadership, because the Chinese people were still far from being either in pretense or in 150 PRESENT-DAY CHINA reality active participants in the reforms generated from Peking. It was a period for strategy; and Yuan Shih- k*ai proved himself then the supreme strategist of his day. Its defect, in which he deeply shared, was that it preserved the old jealousies and the old disunities which still kept alive in China and out an active and irreconcilable body of adversaries to the State. The Dowager Empress's desire to govern liberally ceased abruptly where it crossed past jealousies and unforgiven injuries to her personal pride. It is an indelible blot on her and on Yuan Shih- k'ai's statesmanship that the two univer- sally esteemed leaders of the reform movement of 1898, Kang Yu-wei and Liang Chi-ch'iao, were not recalled from their exile in Tokio to the service of their country. The narrowness of the governing clique was still more PRESEXT-DAY CHINA 151 manifest in the ruthless war of exter- mination it maintained against the more radical leaders, in the price on Sun Yat-sen's head, in the murderous attempt it made to kidnap him in Lon- don and bring him home to certain death, from which his friend. Dr. Cant- lie, saved him by the narrowest of mar- gins, and in the gradual alienation of practically the whole merchant and student population abroad and the "Young China" politicals and intellec- tuals at home. With the death of the Dowager Em- press in 1908, the vigor and courage of the Manchu domination disappeared, and the career of triumphant ineptitude began which ended in 1911, as it richly deserved to end. Yuan Shih-k'ai was humiliated and dismissed, and the part of Mirabeau, which he might have played successfully, with his robust 152 PRESENT-DAY CHINA health and assured span of life, dis- appeared from the cast altogether. Prince Chun, his sworn enemy, became regent, and Prince Ching, no less bitter a foe to constitutionalism and reform, was the choice of the Manchu party for premier. To redeem the Dowager- Empress's grandiose plans for a na- tional Parliament with a body presided over by Prince Ching was to follow with the uncanny faithfulness of history the matter in which Louis of France played with the great, thirsty spirit of his time in his exasperating harlequinade over the States-General. The floods came, the house fell, and Yuan Shih-k'ai stepped in between the two factions and seized the empty throne. I have told how neither in military strength nor in party unity were the Revolutionists able to make good their victory. There was another factor. PRESEXT-DAY CHINA 153 Yuan had the confidence of the powers. It is an open secret that Wu Ting-fang, who was for the first few months act- ing foreign minister for the Revolution- ists, only prevented several major European powers from lending their full support towards crushing the Rev- olution bj^ threatening a boycott of for- eign goods throughout Southern China. And as support in this case meant money, which would have to be supplied by the very banks who would lose most heavily by the boycott, it was not forth- coming. If there is one thing more irrelevant than another in considering the charac- ter of a man like Yuan Shih-k'ai, it is endeavoring to follow his motives. One instance, the instance of his betrayal of the Reformers of 1898 into the hands of the Dowager Empress, is sufficient to show the hopelessness of such a 154 PRESENT-DAY CHINA method. The young reformer-emperor ordered him to seize the person of the Dowager Empress and put to death her minister, Jung Lu. Instead, Yuan placed the "Old Buddha" and her re- actionary following once more in au- thority and allowed them to crush out the reform movement of the "Hundred Days" in the tide of jingoism which ended two years later in the Boxer tragedy. The Revolutionists believe that by his action Yuan is more respon- sible than any other man for that tragedy. He held the key to the whole situation, the army. His motives for throwing the balance one way or the other have been exhaustively thrashed out during the past eighteen years in a hundred different lights ; and there is as much disagreement as ever. The es- sential fact remains, however — the es- sential Oriental fact of the situation — PRESEXT-DAY CHIXA 155 that Yuan did throw in his lot with the stronger faction. No Chinese official of his time and training could be ex- pected to do differently. It was given to Yuan's strategic genius to see the stronger faction; and it is this discern- ment, and his boldness in acting upon it, that more than anything else explains how he has come to be where he is to- day. Yuan came into the power, then, and he assumed it, not by virtue of his leadership, because he has never of his own accord given the country a popular lead in anything, but by virtue of the genius that is instinctively his, the grand strategy of the old Chinese of- ficial. He found the literate classes of the Chinese people clamoring for the first time in their history that they be treated as a nation. He declared for the Repubhc, and beat down the last 156 PRESENT-DAY CHINA vestige of Manchu resistance by getting all his generals — and many of theirs — to declare for it too. Then he obtained from the IManchus, by a superb stroke of generalship, the famous edict order- ing hi7?i to establish the Republic. He won over the Southern leaders, notably Sun Yat-sen, by promising them a parliament and a cabinet in which they would presumably have the major share. But he never let go one single vestige of the real power of his position; as military chief, as administrative head, and as the sole repository of foreign confidence he remained, as he intended to remain, supreme. Little by little, he drew the moderates round him and iso- lated the radicals. We saw the out- come of his strategy when we traced in the first chapter the downfall of the imaginative inspiration of the Revolu- tionary parties. There was only one PRESENT-DAY CHINA 157 interlude in that downfall when it seemed as if the Southern leaders might at last make headway. That was when America, after withdrawing from the Six Power Loan, recognized the Chinese Republic in April, 1913. With real insight and courage, President Wilson attached to his recognition the proviso that the government he recog- nized must be equally satisfactory to the Kuo Ming Tang leaders of the South, who were then in acknowledged control of both houses of Parliament. But hardly had this assurance been received than Yuan obtained a testi- monj^ to his own dominant position that overwhelmed altogether the good- natured friendliness of America toward the Republican leaders. This was the Great Loan, which fell like a bomb- shell on China on the night of April 26-27. In its relation to the leadership 158 PRESENT-DAY CHINA of Yuan Shih-k'ai, the meaning of this loan is impressive. It meant that the European bankers participating in it were wilHng to stake everything, not on the constitutional institutions which were supposed to embody China's Re- pubHcan government, but on the se- curity and reliable headship of one man. Then and there Europe abandoned Parliament and the Revolution in China to their fate, and bet on a man ; and the man was Yuan Shih-k'ai. Armed with this power, as we have seen, the President proceeded to com- plete the isolation of the leaders of the First Revolution, and after beating down their futile opposition in the cam- paign of the summer and fall of 1913, he outlawed their parties, drove their leaders out of the country, destroyed their Parliament in Peking as well as the Assemblies in the provincial capi- PRESEXT-DAY CHINA 159 tals, suppressed their newspapers, and on October 10, the anniversary of the First Revolution he had so thoroughly discredited, had himself inaugurated as Permanent President in Peking. Out of the reaction that followed this period, there emerged one essential fact, that it was now necessary to give China, after more than two years of bitter faction struggles, a government that consolidated in some fashion or other the new requirements of the situa- tion. The first and principal require- ment of the situation was that the peo- ple expected a government that would be controlled by no clique or party or section, but would be entirely national. In other words, national government in China had its first chance in the year 1914. How this opportunity has been met I describe in part in the next chap- ter ; as for the part in it played by Yuan 160 PRESENT-DAY CHINA Shih-k'ai, even his enemies could not deny that for more than a year he was the effective nucleus of the most progressive and successful ad- ministration China has ever had. Par- ticularly during 1914 and the early months of 1915, when the Euro- pean war and the iinpasse with Japan harassed China with the burden of a double crisis, the new government bore up under the strain magnificently, and the whole world admitted that the Chinese people had never faced a na- tional crisis with a deeper sense of solidarity and patriotic fortitude. On top of this genuine proof of in- ternal unification, however, there has come another far-reaching issue, on which there can be no doubt that the grand strategy of the President is go- ing to have its ultimate and final test. That is the Monarchy Restoration is- PRESENT-DAY CHINA 161 sue. During the fall and winter of last year the agitation for a constitutional monarchy which had long been smol- dering, suddenly burst out and began to burn briskly throughout the country. Its patron society was the Chou-an Hwei, or, as it may be innocently translated, the Peace Promotion Society. The head of this society was Mr. Yang Tu, a man who provided an exceptional medium for compromise be- tween various political groups in China. Yang Tu was a subordinate lieutenant of Kang Yu-wei and Liang Chi-ch'iao in the Hundred Days of Reform in '98; and like his tutors had to flee for his life before the swift revenge of the Dowager Empress. Later, when that ingenious old lady found it necessary to conciliate some of the constitutional leaders, she picked out Yang Tu as one of the objects of her tardy favor. He 162 PRESENT-DAY CHINA returned to Peking as a JNIanchu official, and became in time an active apologist, so many Chinese officials of the time assert, of the Manchu regime. He achieved another political transforma- tion when, with the coming of the Rev- olution, he abandoned the JNIanchus and became a strong partizan of Yuan Shih-k'ai. To this popular agitation of presum- ably non-partizan appeal there was soon added an impressive sanction by a for- eign scholar, none other than Dr. Frank Goodnow, president of Jolins Hopkins University, and American advisor on constitutional affairs to the Chi- nese Republic. Dr. Goodnow's well- known memorandum advising China to become a monarchy, with the ostenta- tious disinterestedness of its American origin behind it, had, and was meant to have, a powerful effect on the Chinese PRESEXT-DAY CHINA 163 mind. It precipitated the subject into the arena of practical pohtics; and in spite of the seemingly earnest refusal of Yuan Shih-k'ai even to consider the offer, the movement spread with ex- traordinary rapidity throughout the country. Dr. Goodnow's memorandum was published in the summer of 1915 — on August 20, to be exact — and within four months — by December 15 — China was committed to a monarchy. Thus promptly are little matters like changes in the form of government effected in modern China. Yuan refused, refused again, and finally consented to become Emperor. The form of his choosing was a repubhcan form, but his military powers and his administrative autoc- racy controlled the issue from the begin- ning. We read of primaries, of repre- sentative bodies of voters, of a plebiscite 164 PRESENT-DAY CHINA of "good" citizens, and of democratic machinery without end, little of which was ever known, or ever will be known, in any constitutional country. But the artifice and strategy of old China found it the means to its end, and justified its use by success. How complete this success was we can vividly see in the dramatic happen- ings of the 12th and 13th of last Decem- ber in Peking. Citizens' representative conferences including 1834 representa- tives of the people elected at "prima- ries" held in all the provincial capitals, as well as in a number of other centers of population, had gathered in the national capital. The results of their election were a striking tribute to the convincing "arguments" of the mon- archist party. For this is what the Council of State had to report to the President on the 12th of December: PRESENT-DAY CHINA 165 "That the Council yesterday made a final examination of the votes of the Citizens' Representative Conference, all of which were fomid to be in favor of the establishment of a constitutional monarchy, with His Excellency Yuan Shih-k'ai as first emperor. The Coun- cil of State therefore requests H. E. Yuan Shih-k'ai to obey the true will of the people, and to ascend the throne.'' In reply to this earnest despatch Yuan refused to accept the throne ow- ing to the oaths taken at his formal inauguration as First President of the Republic, and also because his ability did not fit him for the important and exalted position offered him by the Citizens' Representative Committee. Hence he requested the Council of State to select some one else more capable and worthy to occupy the Im- perial Throne. 166 PRESENT-DAY CHINA Thereupon the Council of State con- vened another meeting and forwarded a second despatch urging Yuan — etc., etc. Let us skip these supplications, and come to the next day, when this laconic despatch of the 13th December reveals- Yuan's final attitude toward the "pol- ished perturbation, golden care" that was offered to him in the Imperial pur- ple. "President Yuan Shih-k'ai," it runs, "in reply to the second despatch forwarded by the Council of State, con- sents to become emperor on condition that the form of government is not changed till next year. He realizes that the step he has taken in accepting the throne of China might prove dis- astrous to his family, but he loves his country, and is prepared to make any sacrifice for it. Consequently he bows to the will of the people." PRESENT-DAY CHINA 167 Thus entered the monarchy — but not officially. Yuan's first move as titular sovereign was worthy of his genius. It was to postpone the inauguration of the new regime until the new year. The new year came — and with it a formi- dable rebellion in the great southwest- ern province of Yunnan. Very well, he postponed the inauguration "indefi- nitely." There it rests to-day; the op- portunity of the Chinese people again to become "chen" (subjects) , to kowtow before Imperial dignity, as well as be- fore the half a score of lesser grades of nobility it is Yuan's gracious purpose to create for their joy and adulation — this opportunity is still an unfulfilled promise. It will be better for them if it is never realized. For however good a govern- ment some future monarchy may give China, the present monarchy agitation 168 PRESENT-DAY CHINA was conceived in an ambitious oppor- tunism of which Dr. Goodnow was merely the successful cat's-paw, and car- ried to its present triumph mainly through the unscrupulous intrigues of a court camarilla wholly insignificant in its popular representation. The first and most final thing that can be said against the whole coup is that it is a senseless diversion of China's patriotic energy at a time when the very existence of the nation is threatened as never before. Dr. Goodnow expressed the view of many apologists of the mon- archy in his argument that it was neces- sary for the safety of the state that the chief executive have ample power. Very well; he has. Not only will a monarchy give Yuan no more real power than he possesses to-day, but it will upset that compromise between the North and the South of which the form PRESENT-DAY CHINA 169 of the Republic was a very visible as- surance. In all political situations names have an infinite conjuring power. The Republic of China represents to thousands of liberal Chinese a great bid for national liberty; they reahze with a perfectly rational instinct that it has given them standing and sympathetic appreciation throughout the world. It has proved a rallying ground for na- tional unity before; it could prove so again. If Yuan is indispensable (a rather humiliating thought for China), a dead Emperor, with rivals contending for the prize of a throne, would be no better than a dead President, with a successor to be elected with at least the pretense of popular choice. The issue is a false one ; it should be between con- stitutionalism and autocracy, between progress and reaction, between a na- tional government and a ruling clique. 170 PRESENT-DAY CHINA That is the problem China has got to work out, and nothing obscures it more completely than the injection, at this time of all times, of insincere and dis- turbing historical analogy, the baring of self-interest, and the unloosening of jealousy, suspicion, and spreading civil discord which has followed the mon- archy agitation. There is but one other principle to state ; and that is that the Chinese wor- ship of monarchical institutions, for all its centuries, is largely an illusion for foreign consumption. The Chinese have not even had a nobility, and their local government, which has been until recently the only government the peo- ple have felt, has been essentially demo- cratic, even communistic in character. Now the people are feeling the national government for the first time in their history; indeed, one could almost say PRESEXT-DAY CHIXA 171 that government on a national scale has only been introduced into China within the past few years. Their attitude toward monarchy and all its trappings was admirably expressed in the intense feeling of relief that followed the fu- nerals of the Dowager Empress and the Emperor in 1909; with the great lit- erate public opinion of China, particu- larly that south of the Yang-tse River, that was the funeral-year of respect for the monarchy. The whole nation has felt since then a lessening in the load of national humihation, and the point that this has occurred under a Republic has not been missed. Dr. Goodnow quali- fied his memorandum at many angles, but he did not forbear to insult the pride of China deeply on this particular point — that they could not understand an idea for national government that they had administered for centuries as local 172 PRESENT-DAY CHINA government. He compared them with Mexico, with Ecuador, with the Crom- weUian Commonwealth; and the appli- cation to their present condition of com- parisons with Villa and his Yaquis, with the mob anarchies of Quito, and the ex- cesses of our own witch-burning ances- tors in the days when a Drogheda mas- sacre was merely an episode, did not ex- actly fill with sweet reasonableness the breasts of Chinese Republicans. Indeed, that an American could think of investing his country's prestige in China in advice depending on analo- gies such as these has filled responsible leaders of modern China with conster- nation. I am not forgetting that Dr. Goodnow qualified his advice with many virtuous assertions, among them that no change from republic to monarchy should be considered (1) should the foreign powers oppose it, (2) should PRESENT-DAY CHINA 173 the Chinese people rise in rebelHon against the change, (3) should any doubt exist about the law of succession, and (4) should the new Government be less likely to provide for the just devel- opment of constitutional government. These are excellent academic theses, but Dr. Goodnow has yet to learn that when you are dealing with a nation in the stress of constitutional upheaval, your flat statement counts for one hundred per cent, and your qualifications count for nil. An American came out against the Chinese Republic — that is the con- sj^icuous shame of it — for when the mon- archy restoration societies got down se- riously to the task of spreading his Memorandum over the country, these qualifications disappeared like chaff. The fact that Dr. Goodnow thought that China might be more likely to get constitutional government under a mon- 174 PRESENT-DAY CHINA archy is of no practical consequence be- side the kind of monarchy for which his advice helped to make smooth the path ; nor does it excuse the amazing ineptness of changing horses on a matter of or- ganic government in the mid-stream of China's perplexities to maintain the substance of independence itself. I am not here giving simply the de- tached opinion of a foreign observer; I am stating what any student of the mat- ter can find out for himself is the firm conviction of a very formidable element of China's pohtical leadership. Take the men, for instance, who have been throughout the closest and most con- structive sympathizers with Yuan's pol- icies in the immediate past. Take the foremost political and constitutional leader in China to-day — Liang Chi- ch'iao — what does this veteran constitu- tional monarchist think of the monarchy PRESENT-DAY CHINA 175 proposed under these circumstances? Liang, Minister of Justice under Yuan till a few months ago, opponent of the Revolution because he stoutly held that a limited monarchy was then far prefer- able to the Republic, deep student and nationally respected leader that he is, has used all the logic and eloquence of his tireless pen ever since the present monarchy agitation began — to help it to realize his own recent monarchical ideas? No, to attack it as the greatest peril China is facing to-day. Listen to this : "It is a constitution that we need to ensure domestic solidarity; and the President knows that no change in the form of Government which tears up the obligation to stand by the Republic is a step in the direction of constitutional- ism. Every well informed person knows that the monarchist agitation is 176 PRESENT-DAY CHINA nothing more than the plot of a miHtary camarilla." It is worth noting that Yuan repeated this obligation as late as September 6 of last year, when he wi'ote to the Grand Council (Tsangcheng Yuan) as fol- lows : "It is now four years since I was en- trusted by the people with the office of the presidency of the Republic. . . . It is my special duty to maintain the Republic as the form of govern- ment." As the signs increased that Yuan re- garded this pledge as a "scrap of pa- per," Liang Chi-ch'iao did the only pos- sible thing — he resigned from office and left Peking. Is he the only national statesman and former supporter who has done this? The answer to this question is the key to current Chinese politics. PRESENT-DAY CHINA 177 Distinctly, he is not. A list of the resignations during the past few months of Chinese high in public life reveals a condition of affairs wholly unsuspected by those who think the Chinese are re- ceiving the monarchy kindly, or even with indifference. Liang resigned on the 3rd of October. On the 4th, Hsu Shih-chang resigned as Secretary of State. Hsu Shih-chang is a conserva- tive of the conservatives — guardian to the Emperor, former premier, old-time official under the Manchus, he was one of the bulwarks of Yuan's government ; yet he resigned like any Jacobin at the fii'st sniff of the monarchy. On the 3rd of October Li Yuan-hung, vice-presi- dent of sorts and chairman of the Grand Council, was absent from a very im- portant session. He has not attended since. On New Year's Day he was of- fered the title of Prince. He refused 178 PRESENT-DAY CHINA it, and announced that he had made up his mind he would have nothing to do with the new regime. Tang Hwa-lung, jSIinister for Edu- cation, the brilHant political leader who had been Speaker of the Huj)eh Assem- bly, Speaker of the National House of Representatives, and leader of one of its three dominant political parties, re- signed in September. Chang Chien, Minister for Agriculture and Com- merce, famous throughout China as an industrial pioneer and social reformer (also a constitutional monarchist), re- signed on October 30. Tuan Chi-jui, Minister for War, lifetime associate of Yuan Shih-k'ai and the foremost mili- tary authority in China, resigned on August 30, remained in privacy in Peking for several months, and, ar- cording to one story, "escaped" from , the capital in coolie dress on the first PRESENT-DAY CHINA 179 of January. Sun Pao-chi, ex-Foreign Minister, resigned from his post as Di- rector of the Audit Department on November 1, ex-Premier Hsiung Hsi- ^ing, head of the "government of all the talents" vrhich pulled China so splendidly through her crisis in 1913 and 1914, resigned from his post as Di- rector of the Oil Bureau (superv^ising the Standard Oil Contract) preceded him by a week or so, and Chuan En- kwan, Director of the Censorate, aban- doned his office on October 9. A flood of minor resignations accompanied and followed these, and with the decisive ac- tions of December 15, when Yuan ac- cepted the monarchy, more than thirty first-class resignations were handed in within a week, including the Vice-Min- ister of War, the Vice-^Iinister of the Interior, and numerous members of the Grand Council itself. Not the least of 180 PRESENT-DAY CHINA these was Tsai Ao, ex-Governor of Yunnan, and Director of the Land Measui'ement Bureau, who left Tient- sin in December for parts unknown. His whereabouts became quickly evi- dent, however, with the appearance of widespread revolt in his native province of Yunnan early in January, a rebel- lion which led directly to the indefinite postponement of the official inaugura- tion of the monarchy, and may lead to results even more decisive before it is finished. This list is sufficiently long akeady to convince any fair-minded person that there is no real national voice in China for the change of government. These men are not radicals, neither are they blind reactionaries; they are for the most part the "workers" of modern China unwedded to any political theory save that of the maximum of national PRESENT-DAY CHINA 181 interest. To the fact that they are ob- viously standing off from the monarchy movement you must also add the re- minder that others of the best minds of China who have not recently been hold- ing office are equally as aloof, and ob- viously equally as determined to re- main so. Wu Ting-fang, Wen Tsung- yao, Wang Chung-hwei, and Tang Shao-yi, all ex-Republican ministers, are biding their time in Shanghai; go- ing a little further radical-wards. Dr. Chen Chin-tao, Tsai Yuan-pei, and Wang Cheng- ting (C. T. Wang), ex- ministers of Finance, Education, and Communications, are wholly out of touch with the monarchical movement. Kang Yu-wei, the great '98 reformer, and leader of Chinese constitutionalism for fifteen years, will not even come to Peking, so complete is his distrust of the current regime. 182 PRESENT-DAY CHINA If such men as these are against, or indifferent to, the monarchy restoration movement, it is a travesty to say that it represents anything like the progres- sive mind of the Chinese people. Who, then, is for it? Well, let us begin with one significant instance. When Yuan Shih-k'ai toward the end of January announced that owing to "local disturb- ances" his inauguration would be post- poned, who was it who bade him ascend the throne promptly, and admonished him that the rising was simply due to his delay in assuming the Imperial pur- ple. Why, it was Prince Ching, Man- chu of the Manchus, arch-reactionary, life-long enemy of constitutionalism and reform, the Premier of the Manchu government overthrow by the Revolu- tion in 1911. Who was president of the Li-fah Yuan, the administrative council which prepared and put PRESENT-DAY CHINA 183 through the elaborate fiasco of popular vote by which Yuan was declared the choice of "the people"? That was Prince Chun, another Manchu prince, ex-Regent, and father of the deposed little Chinese Emperor, Pu Yi, who to this day is allowed to live in a palace in Peking in all the state of a visiting sov- erign — at the expense of the Chinese people. From this approval the monarchy restoration movement cannot separate itself. Nor, moreover, can it be denied that its principal Chinese protagonist throughout has been Liang Shih-yi, the most unscrupulous political leader in modern China as well as one of the half- dozen of the very ablest of them all. By title, Liang is Director of the Bank ,of Communications, but in reality he is Chief Director of Grand Strategy to the President, and has been so since 184 PRESEXT-DAY CHIXA Yuan has been in power in Peking. This cunning Cantonese is as strong as Yuan, if not stronger, and in the mon- archy agitation he has been playing a characteristic game. Chou Tzu-chi, the clever ]Minister of Finance, is also the President's man, and Lu Cheng- hsiang, the brilliant Secretary of For- eign Affairs, who has just doubled up with Hsu Shih-chang's old position as Secretary of State, seems too patrioti- cally interested in the duties of his own crucial office to take a vital interest either way; but he has not resigned. The other members of the Cabinet seem merely quiescent. Behind Yuan's name, the driving force of the monarchist agitation has come from a group of Manchu Jaco- bites led by Prince Ching and Prince Chun, and from the cult of seekers after place and power always to be found in PRESENT-DAY CHINA 185 the wake of Liang Shih-yi. There is another high placed monarchist, whose activities are shrouded in rather more mystery than the rest — the President's eldest son and prospective heir-appar- ent under an Empire, Yuan Ko-ting. This young man is popularty supposed to have sustained a severe accident from a fall from his horse in the spring of 1911, a mishap which left his vitality and his desire to mingle in public affairs at low ebb. His interference in the present conspiracy is, however, unques- tionable, and as it has become more manifest, so have the stories increased of his absorption in Buddhism, his dis- taste of politics, and his utter abhor- rence of the responsibilities of royalty. But there is little doubt that he is one of the members of the court camarilla whose intrigues Liang Chi-ch'iao has so bluntly and clearly pointed out as the 186 PRESENT-DAY CHINA secret manufacturers of the whole mon- archist agitation. One other factor remains — the army. No one really knows where the army stands. Tuan Chi-jui is a general of far-ramifying influence, and there are persistent rumors that Feng Kuo- chang, the new Chief -of -Staff, has had his loyalty considerably cooled by Tuan's rupture with Peking. Surely leaders of the class of Chang Hsun (the butcher of Nanking) and Lung Chi- kwong, the "pacifier" of Canton, can- not be relied on for loyalty except where loyalty is clearly shown to be profitable. So far, these three gen- erals, together with another veteran, Chang Kwei-ti, have been offered titles as Dukes in the new regime, but up to February, they were still refusing these flattering distinctions. The point should not be missed that these men PRESENT-DAY CHINA 187 hold a very substantial part of the bal- ance of power in modern China, and since Yuan has bereft the country of constitutionalism far more so than be- fore. Yuan has aimed high; but as usual, his first aim may not be his final shot. It is impossible to believe that he will carry through his monarchical aspira- tions unimpaired against the dead set of opinion that has so manifestly arisen against them in quarters to which prudence at least demands close and respectful attention. No one has re- minded him of the enduring limitations of his situation more significantly than the always out-spoken Anglo-Chinese writer, Putnam Weale, who, I believe, is the best foreign friend in the field of journalism China has at this juncture. "President Yuan Shih-k'ai," he says, "will soon reach the parting of the ways. 188 PRESENT-DAY CHINA If he allows such evil counselors to work their will, if he misinterprets foreign si- lence, there is no logical reason why, in- stead of becoming a Chinese Washing- ton, he should become, for a time at least, an Asiatic Napoleon — until all is ready in Japan. The reestablishment of the empire and what it would imply would simply find the European powers and America — the liberal nations — in- different to the fate of China. The tre- mendous moral sup]3ort which saved the situation in the spring of 1915 will never again be given to a nation which declares itself afraid to govern, and thus tacitly admits that it is a subject-race. All talk of a constitutional monarchy is a mere juggling with words; a country that is convinced by 'arguments by Professor Goodnow and the pamphlet- eer Yung Tu, before representative govermnent has even been tried, would PRESENT-DAY CHINA 189 be much more easily convinced with a shot-gun." What selfish hopes and expectations this veteran strategist may cherish in the immediate future of his country do not concern us here. It is for us merely to glimpse the quality of his mind, and to conceive from the palpable facts, the plain and perceivable course he has traced through the modern history of China, the training and traditions that lie at the root of his career and that have been made manifest whenever he has moved a piece on the chessboard of politics; and especially from the men who are with him, the men who are against him — to conceive from these things what China may expect in the immediate future from the free play of his genius. One thing is plain — that she cannot expect real republicanism unless she is 190 PRESENT-DAY CHINA again ready to die for the Republic that is now in such crucial danger.* * On March 22d the State Department issued a mandate announcing on the authority of Yuan Shih- k'ai the abandonment of the monarchy and the re- sumption of the republic, thus providing the final justification of the soundness of the above estimate of the situation. Hsu Chi-chang returned to power and signed the document as Secretary of State, In it Yuan frankly admitted that the monarchy was hopeless and humbly shouldered the blame for his mistake in these remarkable words: "I have myself to blame for my lack of virtue. Why should I blame others? The people have been thrown into misery. The soldiers have been made to bear hardships. Commerce has declined. Taking this condition into consideration, I feel exceedingly sorry." That is Yuan's way of saying — "By that sin fell the angels." Moreover, Yuan's default, so far from pacifying the southern revolutionists, has already stirred them to add to the "No Monarchy" cry the old slogan of the Second Revolution, "Down with Yuan himself!" The result is that he is worse beset than before, and a secession movement is spreading rapidly over the south which may mean more liberalism, or it may mean — Japan. VI CLUTCHING HANDS SOME fifteen years ago Lord Charles Beresford paid a short, but breezy visit to the far East, and when he went home he wrote a book about his trip that he called "The Break-up of China." It was a book that expressed and confirmed the set- tled mood of the time. In the shadow of the Boxer terror, and the hardly less shameful reprisals that avenged it, the dissolution of China did seem very near. Subtler minds than that of the impres- sionable British admiral thought of that flabby old empire, and the image at the back of their minds was one of helpless- ness baited all about by clutching for- 191 192 PRESENT-DAY CHINA eign hands. In the intimacy of the crushing experiences of 1900 they for- got, as we are forgetting to-day, that the weakness of China is a verj^ old and a thoroughly matured problem. They might have read to advantage, as we might read it now, what was said in the sixties by Anson Burlingame, that strange, quixotic American genius who went on a mission to Europe half a cen- tur^^ ago to save China from a dissolu- tion which he feared to see in his own lifetime. How wholly modern it seems to hear him say, "I hope to procure some mitigation of those aggressive steps and tendencies which are rapidly bringing nearer the parceling-out of China among the greedy monarchies of Europe" ! Since Burlingame 's day waves upon waves of the aggression in which he foresaw immediate ruin have rolled PRESENT-DAY CHINA 193 ever nearer to Peking. China has been stripped of the fortress-harbors on her coast; provinces and dependencies have been torn from her borders from Korea and Mongoha round to Tibet and Tongking. Foreign trunk raih'oads have cut strategic thoroughfares up and down and across the heart of her do- minion. Foreign bankers and debt commissioners have held in ransom her finances and have dominated her trade. And finally a torrent of revolution from within has rej)laced the djTiasty of a quarter of a thousand years with a makeshift combination of republican- ism without democracy and tyranny without a throne. The last fifteen years in China have been in particular one steady course of continuous and ascending crises, a drama of unsettled forces driven from without by compli- cated currents of political adventure 194 PRESENT-DAY CHINA and economic greed. Yet in the face of all these humihations, which have comprised the dehberate policy of our generation to capitalize and perpetuate her feebleness, look with unprejudiced eyes on the China of this year 1916, and what do you find? China's reply to the humiliations that have been put upon her is not merely the new patriot- ism and the new sense of nationality so vividly revealed in the Revolution, but actually a firmer and better consoli- dated authority over the eighteen prov- inces of the nation than has ever before been attained in the history of the Chinese people. In the year of which we have the last complete record, the year 1914, China accomplished two amazing and abso- lutely unprecedented things, which no one who does not know of the Sisyphus- Hke handicaps against her can possibly PRESENT-DAY CHINA 195 appreciate. On her own national credit and among her own people she raised, in the first place, her first substantial domestic loans, a financial initiative which has now brought her a fund of al- most thirty millions of dollars. And in the second she came at last through a whole financial year not only with the staggering burdens of her foreign in- debtedness paid up on the nail to the last penny, but with an actual surplus of cash in hand that was helped by no foreign loan. These are real bids for freedom, not mere clever financial man- agement ; they are the moral answer of a people protesting against the extinc- tion of their political life. These very significant innovations mean one thing very plainly: that the old peril — the peril of bankruptcy, of attrition through incompetence that Beresford and his school talked about 196 PRESENT-DAY CHINA — is, to say the least, no longer a sure thing. The game of getting deeper and deeper into the mire by paying off old debts with new loans is almost over in China. I emphasize these unquestionable signs of progress and growing solidar- ity to put them in all the sharper con- trast with a new peril — a peril that within the past year has overshadowed everything else in the far East. That is the series of harsh and drastic de- mands which Japan in 1915 put up to China, in the nature, if not in the form, of a peremptory ultimatum. Nothing is more ironic than the distinc- tion, the perfect contrast between the old peril through which China was at last beginning to see her path to self- respect, and this new peril, against which all her painful reconstruction counts as absolutely nothing. The PRESENT-DAY CHINA 197 handicaps that have been loaded on her do count. Their example counts in spurring Japan on to an emulation which European nations can hardly deny her with consistency. Their po- litical results count in making Japan feel that only by other like handicaps — which in her case begin to look like badges of ownership — can she make good her opportimities in terms of a new balance of power in the Pacific. In other words, the burdens of interna- tional meddling provide an essential and ideal condition for the present high tide of Japanese aggression. They have chloroformed the victim ; but it has fallen to a rival to pick his pockets. Japan's hegemony in the far East is now assured — temporarily, at any rate — and in it we see the first and the most dramatic alteration in the world's bal- ance of power which has so far been ef- 198 PRESENT-DAY CHINA fected by the great war. So far as her new ascendancy is going to influence China, however, we cannot see her op- portunity in its right proportions until we have put it from the side of China herself. The Japanese have raised the wind undoubtedly in which China's junk is madly careering to-day, but it was not they who over-ballasted her with debts and difficulties, so that even in time of peace her loadline was over her hatches. It is true that the crush- ing indemnity she imposed at the end of the Chino- Japanese War of 1895 put China in debt to the tune of over $270,000,000 * at the beginning of her borrowing career. But this sum was assented to by the powers at a time when they exercised real interference in the affairs of Japan. And five years later they made it look insignificant in- *0f which about $150,000,000 is still outstanding. PRESENT-DAY CHINA 199 deed when they placed on China's shoulders the long-drawn-out disaster of the Boxer indemnity. It was Eu- rope that set the pace, and it is Euro- pean policy that has made China what she is to-day. That is why an under- standing of that policy is absolutely vital in order to grasp in its proper per- spective the peril of the present. To-day the Boxer indemnity is still the freshest and the most stinging of all the grievances of the Chinese people. They see clearly that this monstrous im- position, hypocritically imposed on them as a moral penalty, was in reality nothing more or less than a deliberate quietus on their political asi3irations for a generation. For the powers not only created a gigantic obligation; they stultified the very consolidation which might have enabled China to meet that obligation. For their own benefit they 200 PRESENT-DAY CHINA appropriated and pared down all the funds that could really be called na- tional, and the reorganization which it was then their supreme opportunity to initiate they contemptuously disclaimed. Those consequences we see to-day. They culminated in a revolution, which had its fundamental cause more nearly than anything else in this one fact — China's humiliation before her foreign bondholders. When the revolution broke out in October, 1911, three prov- inces were in revolt against the national- ization of railways, not because they were opposed to that policy, but be- cause its influence was a foreign influ- ence and because it meant the buying out of Chinese railways with foreign money. And indeed then the second chapter of interference by the interna- tional concert was just beginning. In the first chapter the great banking pow- PRESENT-DAY CHINA 201 ers really sought nothing more than to paralyze Chinese reconstruction before the rush of foreign initiative they knew was imminent. The second chapter saw them meeting another great crisis in Chinese societj^ with the belated decision to put this reconstruction into effect themselves. We can lump together the series of sweeping concessions and re- arrangements and internal crises which culminated in the big five-power loan of the spring of 1913 in an intelligent appreciation of one main object. This was the creation of a debt commission. The shadows of revolutionary turmoil and anarchy gave a unique opportunity for the painless absorption of China's freedom. Viewed as a single process, it is amazing to look back and see how far this strategy went as a firm and de- liberate policy. There were two lines of advance: 202 PRESENT-DAY CHINA every power got what it could for itself by developing the "spheres of interest" wedge into the fast-decaying "open- door" theory; and the consortium as a whole conceived and put into operation a practical framework of foreign con- trol at Peking. It was then that Russia got outer INIongolia and that England invented and enforced new prerogatives in Tibet. Railway absorption prom- ised Germany twenty million dollars' worth of new lines in southern and western Shantung. Japan got eleven hundred miles of new railway conces- sions in INIanchuria and eastern ]Mon- golia, an invaluable foothold for vali- dating her present claims. France and Russia between them, with a Belgian company as a cat's-paw, cut China with grandiose completeness by two vast sys- tems from the French border on the south to a rail-head in the extreme north PRESENT-DAY CHINA 203 in easy competing distance with the trans-Siberian, and by a concession of three thousand miles through the heart of China to the sea, pointing in the far west directly toward the spreading trans-Caspian system from European Russia. England confirmed her hold with two thousand miles of new proj- ects in the Yang-tse basin. Our own bankers were ordered off these much- trespassed premises by President Wil- son himself, but it is a question if we did not carry away the choicest single plum of all when the Standard Oil Company secured what amounts to the exclusive exploiting right over the northwestern oil-fields, agreed by more than one international authority to be the richest oil-deposits in the known world. The course of these concessions was one of the most chaotic competition and 204 PRESENT-DAY CHINA opportunism, but the broad lines into which they have resolved themselves to- day bear all the earmarks of conceded privileges, which the financial con- sortium divided up at its council tables in Peking. Their group achievements w^ere even more impressive. The four- power railroads concentrating on Han- kow comprise a typical instance of joint control, a rather amusing instance now, in that the German section can be ap- propriated bj'- its French and British co-promoters, while the Americans look on in China, as in the western world, as helpless neutrals. This condition reached its high-water mark in those days of anarchy and dis- integration immediately following the forced passage of the five-power loan at the end of April, 1913, when a large part of the South, led by most of the men who had been prominent in the PRESENT-DAY CHINA 205 first revolution, definitely broke their allegiance with President Yuan Shih- k'ai's government. I was in Peking just after this loan was passed, and I tell elsewhere how the Southern leaders began there and then their desperate and futile fight. I traveled south, find- ing rumors of an impending rebellion more and more insistent and circum- stantial; and the very night that rebel- lion broke out in the middle Yang-tse provinces I was with Dr. Sun Yat-sen at the offices of his railway administra- tion at Shanghai. I can say confidently that the second revolution had as one of its most wide-spread and influential causes the apprehension of this very debt commission. The strain of sans- culottism in the first revolution, which had much cleverer and more responsible leaders than it has ever been given credit for, revolted at the idea not so much that 206 PRESENT-DAY CHINA Yuan Shih-k'ai was seizing the country for his own purposes, but that he was seizing it for the foreigner's purposes. Envy and constitutional futihty sub- merged this idea later beneath empty personal vituperations against the presi- dent; but although the vituperations were excessive and unjust, the president has never altogether lived down the original apprehension. Surely the enormous burst of foreign railway and commercial concessions following the crushing of the Southern party — nearly five thousand miles of new railway lines being conceded, for instance, in a little over a year to enterprises beyond direct Chinese control — has not tended to re- store confidence among the exiled revo- lutionaries that their apprehensions were unfounded. The opportunity for a debt commis- sion reached its high-water mark, how- PRESENT-DAY CHINA 207 ever, in this stormy and rancorous pe- riod; since then, by an unforeseen com- bination of circumstances, it has steadily and surely receded. The most unfore- seen of all these circumstances is the one I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter: it is that China has begun to pull herself together. The old leisurely method of weakening China by taking things from her bit by bit, justifying each step by international cooperation and agreement, was already disappear- ing from the scroll of things that are before the European War. That terri- ble event left only the framework of a Consortium ; its vitality has been weak- ened for years to come, just as the brain is weakened when the blood flows to aid the digestion after a dull dinner ; urgent elementals demand overwhelming con- sideration elsewhere. Even had there been no war, however, 208 PRESENT-DAY CHINA the effect of the new spirit of Chinese sohdarity would still have shifted things through its own momentum alone. That is the great lesson in the present stage of China's crisis. The recon- struction in a political sense has been in some respects extremely disappointing; especially so is the concentration of great power in the hands of the Presi- dent, whose personal influence has been so profound that his removal would now be a very grave destruction of balance indeed. But the financial reconstruc- tion which has been guided — and here is a case where a genuine tribute must be paid to Yuan Shih-k'ai — by a group of the ablest and most progressive minds in modern China, has been im- pressive. A whole category of new taxes has been ably and most success- fully imposed, a success in which the patriotism of the people has played a PRESENT-DAY CHINA 209 part unique in humdrum financial his- tory. China has imposed and collected such modern imposts as a marriage tax, an income tax, an inheritance tax, and a tax on title-deeds ; she has drawn ex- cise from luxuries, such as wine and to- bacco; and she has put two national banks, the Bank of China and the Bank of Communications, on a broad and re- sponsible foundation that those who have dreaded the nightmare of her bankruptcy would never have beheved conceivable. The result has been not only a year of solvency, but the general confidence that the grip thus attained will be held with an increasing margin in the heavy years of amortization that are to come. The Government has spread this confidence by a series of wise and liberal redemptions of its obli- gations of the immediate and stormy past. Five million dollars' worth of 210 PRESENT-DAY CHINA the worthless paper notes of the Rev- olution were bought back in 1914 in the big commercial province of Kwangtung; in Szechuen, at the other end of southern China, $2,250,000 worth of the miHtary bonds of the Nan- king government were redeemed and publicly burned at a patriotic celebra- tion. And on February 20, 1915, in Peking, amid a band concert and many speeches, and not without fii'eworks in the evening, a drawing took place of over half a million dollars' worth of these notes in a single day, the holders of which were given the characteristic square deal of China in a manner that offered the convincing evidence of hard cash to the most impenetrable of skep- tics.* * It is now known that for the year 1915 China again made both ends meet with a substantial balance to her credit. The customs receipts for the month of January, the best index to China's trade conditions, PRESENT-DAY CHINA 211 The political meaning of this new consolidation of the best forces in China is clear: it is that if China had only to face the old menace of international at- trition, she really has now a basis to start on a program which could be called without absurd optimism a campaign of rights-recovery. Already her finan- cial masters are yielding to the pressure, as well as to their own common sense. It needed only a firm Anglo-American show an increase over last year. The reorganized Salt Taxes, which yielded $6,000,000 in 1913, and rose to $;39,000,000 in 1914, went up in 1915 well over $30,000,000. The flourishing state of China's govern- ment railways is shown by the fact that the Peking- Mukden, Peking-Kalgan, and Peking-Hankow lines, besides accounting for steady progress in new con- struction beyond Kalgan, produced between them a net revenue to the state of over $6,000,000. Agricul- tural experimentation is being carried on on a large scale, particularly in the tea and silk industries, to the latter of which $10,000,000 was contributed by the government during the early part of the European War for the relief of the silk filatures. Finally Chinese Government bonds are still quoted, as they have been for some years past, at a higher rate than those of Japan. 212 PRESENT-DAY CHINA protest to cut down the revolutionary indemnities from twenty-odd millions claimed to barely three millions recog- nized, which only at best is something like a just estimate of the foreign prop- erty destroyed in the Revolution. It is in the perspective of this recon- struction and this hopefulness that we have to face the deep-lying peril of the Japanese ultimatum of last year. What does it mean to China? The Japanese claim that the demands it forced through, as well as those it al- lowed to be postponed, do not in any way jeopardize the integrity or the in- dependence of China. China takes a different view. She lives in mortal ap- prehension. Liang Chi-ch'iao puts her case bluntly when he says: "The guilt of Belgium is that she failed to follow the example of Luxemburg; the guilt of China is that she has failed to follow PRESENT-DAY CHINA 213 the example of Korea. . . ." It is a political impasse characteristically East- ern when a high Chinese minister replies in words such as these to an adversary which has placed on record this assur- ance from Count Okuma : "As Premier of Japan, I have stated, and I now again state to the people of America and of the world, that Japan has no ul- terior motive, no desire to secure more territory, no thought of depriving China or other peoples of anything they possess." It is obvious, in spite of anything Count Okuma may say, that Japan has made a very decisive forward move- ment. Nevertheless, before we take up the conditions of that advance, let us chasten ourselves with this honest ad- mission : that whatever may be its cause and whatever its objective, it has a dozen perfectly plausible justifications 214 PRESENT-DAY CHINA in point of its simple emulation of the recognized Em*opean procedure toward China during the last fifteen years. Is the Japanese conference at Peking in respect to JNIanchm'ia really vitally dif- ferent from the recent British-Chinese conference at DarjiUng to secure the isolation of Tibet, or from the Russo- Chinese conference at Kiaklita to con- firm the Russification of Mongolia? On the surface it is not vitally different either from these or from the German seizure of Kiaochow or the no less fla- grant French appropriation of Annam and Tongking. More than this, it ap- pears to be the perfectly legitimate at- tempt of a strong Asiatic power to pro- tect a weak one against the further de- predations which experience shows must still be expected from the greedy pow- ers of Europe. The argument of the necessary expansion of Japan for pur- PRESENT-DAY CHINA 215 poses of colonization and trade is also perfectly plausible and legitimate. Why do we find, then, this stubborn, nay, desperate opposition of China to a kindred ^^ower which comes with such friendh^ words and such finite pledges of innocuousness ? Why are the ordi- nary run of the Chinese people so pro- foundly moved that in a single week of February, 1915, as many as twenty-five hundred telegrams were received by the Government in Peking from hundreds of provincial towns and small villages in every part of the republic, urging China to put the last ounce of her energy into withstanding the demands of Japan? The reason is to be found in the de- mands themselves. Let us have clearly in mind just what these demands were; which of them have perforce been granted, and which have been post- poned. This was no accidental di- 216 PRESENT-DAY CHINA vision — in her ultimatum of May 7, 1915, Japan threatened China with war unless the first four groups of her de- mands were accepted as they stood. The fifth and last group was "post- poned." The first four groups gave Japan the following concessions: In South Manchuria and Eastern Mongolia the Japanese won the privi- leges, which no other foreign nation en- joys, of leasing and owning land, of free and unrestricted travel and resi- dence and commerce; as well as the rights of exclusively working practi- cally all valuable mining sites, of con- trol of all loans for general develop- ment (with the shadowy exception that the Chinese might still raise money among themselves for special pur- poses), and of control of all new railway enterprises. Add to these the renewal of the Port Arthur lease for PRESENT-DAY CHINA 217 99 years, and the lease of the important Kirin-Changchun Railway for the same period (the South Manchuria sys- tem went with Port Arthur), and the powerful advantages reaped by Japan in this field alone become obvious. In Shantung, for the trouble and pains of capturing Tsingtao, the Japa- nese claimed and received all the Ger- man prerogatives in the Kiaochow sphere and in the gi'eat province of Shantung as well. She secured a pledge that no harbor or island on this coast would be alienated from Chinese control. She won the right to build a very important strategic railway from Lungkow (where by a curious coinci- dence the Japanese landed) to a junc- tion with the German railway. And for all this she merely promised to give Tsingtao back to China wlien the taar was over, establishing her own position 218 PRESENT-DAY CHINA there meanwhile by securing China's promise of a Japanese concession "at a place to be designated by the Japanese Government." In the case of the Hanyehping Coal and Iron Company, China's gi*eatest manufacturing corporation, China was obliged to promise that "in view of the intimate relations between Japanese capitalists and this enterprise," no ac- tion tending to confiscate this company, nor to convert it into a state enterprise, nor to cause it to borrow or to use capi- tal other than Japanese would be per- mitted. In the case of Fukien, the coast prov- ince opposite the Japanese island of Formosa (a war spoil of 1895), China pledged herself not to allow foreign na- tions to construct harbors, docks, coal- ing stations, or anything approaching a naval base — or to borrow money PRESENT-DAY CHINA 219 abroad to accomplish such purposes herself. Finally, China engaged herself not to alienate or lease from her power any islands, harbors, or strips of territory along her coast. This is what Japan actually got. How much higher she aimed is ob- vious from a brief consideration of the fifth group she was obliged to postpone. This included a proposal that a large proportion of her arms and ammunition must be made by Japan, either in Chi- nese factories under Japanese control or by purchase from Japan herself. Another proposal suggested that China employ Japanese "advisers" in high positions at Peking. Another de- manded land-owning privileges for schools and hospitals in the interior; and another brought forward the proj- ect so profitably exploited in Korea, the 220 PRESENT-DAY CHIXA propagation of Buddhism by Japa- nese throughout China. Joint control of the police in "certain sections" and a sphere of interest in Fukien were added to the list, and last and most amazing of all, the right to build a rail from Kiukiang on the Yang-tse up to Wu- chang opposite Hankow and down to Hangchow and Swatow (presum- ably) on the coast opposite Formosa. This latter project cut through the heart of the oldest British sphere of in- terest in China, and did as much as any- thing toward rousing the bitter resent- ment with which these demands were re- garded from the beginning by all Eng- lishmen in the Orient. How any statesman, even an Orien- tal statesman, can soberly consider these demands, and then tell us that they take nothing away from China which was hers before, must come as a shock to PRESENT-DAY CHINA 221 friends both of China and Japan. It is refreshing to note that the majority of Japanese agree with apologists hke Dr. lyenaga, the responsible and re- spected chief of the Japanese press bu- reau in New York, who says in defend- ing Japan's procedure that her recent achievements merit her a "place in the sun." That is a proper defense, and it places Japanese psychology in per- fectly correct accord with a certain psy- chology now prevalent in Europe, on which we have fairl}^ well made up our minds. The blunt truth is that these demands strike at the heart of China's sover- eignty. Japan tells us this is not so; but the world has not forgotten that Japan said precisely the same thing in the Korean business. We are coming to learn only slowly in America that it is not necessary to be a jingoist to sus- 222 PRESENT-DAY CHINA pect Japanese foreign policy of utter unscrupulousness. From the start, the negotiations with China which ended with the Ultimatum of May, 1915, were marked with a lack of good faith which led many an American in the Far East to a total change of mind about Japan. She denied that there were any negotia- tions at all until China's repeated and desperate appeals for understanding and assistance made further conceal- ment impossible. Japanese leaders as high-placed as Count Okuma resorted to a campaign of smooth phrases in this country and Europe (I quote the phrases above from the Independent) definitely intended to mislead friends of China. This seems a strong indict- ment, and I wish I had the space to prove at length, by the testimony of the available printed documents, what so many of the readers of this book may PRESENT-DAY CHINA 223 still be inclined to doubt. I can only submit the following very typical com- parison, however, between what Count Okuma said, and what Japan de- manded, and demanded to his knowl- edge and at his direction as Imperial Prime Minister and Chief Executive: Cotint Okuma, through Japanese Government's the Koksai {Official) communique of May 7, News Agency, Apr. 3, giving demands pre- 1915: sented on Jan. IS: "Japan has not de- "The Central Chinese manded the appointment Government must engage of Japanese advisers." influential Japanese as political, military, and financial advisers." Could witness of unscrupulous policy be plainer than that ? Count Okuma also stated that Japan wanted joint police control only in cer- tain specified areas in South Man- churia (bad enough!) ; whereas the con- trol at first demanded specified no limits. He took the meanest of diplo- matic advantages — he kept the truth se- cret, and then mis-stated it semi-of- 224 PRESENT-DAY CHINA ficially. And while the whole Chinese nation was aflame with the desperate danger of the situation, he was telling the world (in the same despatch, sent abroad by Renter) that "misinforma- tion had been scattered broadcast largely by German interests, and this has given agitators in China an oppor- tunity f He dismissed all this amaz- ing list of aggressions with a phrase: they largely consisted in an endeavor to settle some "questions" — by impli- cation, of little importance — "of long standing, some since the Russo-Japa- nese War." "When the final disclos- ures are made," he concluded, "it will be found that the whole situation has been grossly exaggerated." They have been made, and we can see now, considering the record of her adversary in Korea, how bold and un- scrupulous a stroke China had reason PRESENT-DAY CHINA 225 to fear — and has reason still. Indeed, the procedure of Japan in China, from the direct parallel in the demand to propagate Buddhism in a country al- ready powerfully Buddhist, to the shrewd diplomacy which divides and stultifies the victim's friends with half- truths, bears in a hundred ways a fatal resemblance to the procedure we have already seen carried through in Korea. But that does not say, however, that the Chinese will, by illusory promises or by bullying aggression, be brought to any such humiliating conclusion. The situ- ation is not yet nearly so desperate. With the granting of her demands the hegemony of the Far East unquestion- ably has passed into Japan's hands. Beside the Koreans, the Chinese are a nation of indestructible hardihood, and were experienced in the art of govern- ing themselves and of absorbing within 226 PRESENT-DAY CHINA their vast extent conqueror after conqueror long before the Japanese emerged from a state of tribalism. But it is desperate enough to oblige us to follow step by step, with unwinking eyes toward the future, the clues to Japan's hoped-for powers that we can trace in the region where she has power already compassed and completed: in Manchuria. And with the sincerest respect in the world it must be said that we have only learned from her activities in Manchuria to fear the monopoly in fact, if not in form, which she clearly proposes to set up ulti- mately over China as a whole. A word on the special incident of Japanese control in Manchuria is thus extremely relevant to our appre- hensions. "There is absolutely no doubt that in Southern Manchuria," said our late Minister Rockhill in his PRESENT-DAY CHINA 227 famous last speech of November 12, 1914, "British and American trade have been steadily declining ever since that part of China passed under Japanese control; nor is there any doubt that it has been driven out in a great part by Japanese competition, supported by preferential customs and railway rates, shipping bounties, and successful resist- ance to paying China's internal taxes." Thus also the American Association of China in its report for 1914: "Jajianese methods constitute a most serious viola- tion of the open-door principle. . . . Competition takes the form of a system of rebates, not only in freight and steamer rates, but in remission of duties and charges which are assessed against all other nations." In other words, special favors intan- gible in legal terms, but all powerful in practical business operations, follow the 228 PRESENT-DAY CHINA Japanese flag with as deliberate an in- tention of making foreign trade impos- sible as was the persistent intention of General Nogi to make live Russians im- possible in certain sections of Man- churia. This was the condition before the Ul- timatum of last year. What it is to be in the future we can only realize by grasping the current understanding of all students of the diplomacy of the Far East : namely ; that, under the new provisions. South Manchuria and East- ern Mongolia have acquired a Japanese character and prerogative that no for- eign power will be disposed to ques- tion without counting the cost. The same procedure, on a smaller scale, is already being rapidly re- enacted at Tsingtao, and wherever else the Japanese spread their influence through Shantung. Everywhere the PRESENT-DAY CHINA 229 prerogatives of the Germans are being increased and accentuated. Where the Germans used Chinese currency and the Chinese language, their rivals have rigidly insisted on Japanese. The Ger- man-Chinese railroad, with fewer than a hundred German employees and the rest Chinese, has been entirely manned by Japanese from the South Manchur- ian system. The Japanese first insisted on a customs' collector at Tsingtao ar- bitrarily appointed from Tokio, and consented to follow the German prece- dent and work under Peking only after a wholesale concession in the proportion of Japanese officials in the territory they have appropriated in Shantung. Such are examples of the drift of af- fairs by which we may judge the im- minence and urgency of China's peril. The Japanese have the unfailing ca- pacity of never removing their foot 230 PRESENT-DAY CHINA once they have set it down on a desir- able location for national progress. Their present determination is un- doubtedly the most serious menace im- aginable to the continuance of that solidarity which China within recent years has struggled desperately to make good. The old vision of clutching hands again comes vividly to her mind. Despite Japan's promises and protesta- tions, China justly regards her inter- ference with distrust and consterna- tion. China is a nation whose poten- tialities for peace are impressive and profound, if she is allowed to work out her destiny by herself. But China weak, humiliated, and overrun with for- eign aggression may become the battle- field of a war beside which even the present conflict may be insignificant. To the interests of fair play for China is thus joined the universal interest of PRESENT-DAY CHINA 231 peace, and both are bound up, for our- selves and for the rest of the world, in the preservation at all costs of the in- tegrity of the Chinese nation against whosoever shall assail it. VII THE FUTURE 1HAVE endeavored in this little book to do two things: first, to bring home to Western readers a series of direct impressions of present-day China, impressions which I hope will bring home to the imagination some- thing of the quahty of mind under which that country is now going for- ward ; and second, to set forth, in a few broad strokes of general policy, the stirring and complicated series of crises which constitute its immediate historical background. Unquestionably, as I hope has been made clear, the political future of China 232 PRESENT-DAY CHINA 233 is conditioned by Japan — and the re- straints put on Japan by the major European powers — and by ourselves. But the future of China as conditioned by itself depends more essentially than on any other single factor on the economic progress of the Chinese peo- ple. The pressure of persistent civic instability during the Revolution pre- vented this subject from being even considered, much less constructively thought out, throughout the early Re- publican period. The pressure of the threatened foreign aggression from Japan to-day makes it almost as equally remote from the practical consideration of the best minds of the nation. But the time is destined to come, and the set- tlement following the European war may clear the ground for it sooner than many of us expect, when the economic and industrial potentialities of the 234 PRESENT-DAY CHINA Chinese people will begin to figure defi- nitely in the grand strategy of world power. The heart of a nation's industrial life rests on its railways. If China had the power to build up a great railway sys- tem suited solely to the needs of her economic and commercial development, if she herself could plan to tap her enor- mous material resources on some great, constructive plan based on her own in- terests, and only incidentally on the in- terests of her exploiting customers, there would be no "problem" of Chinese railway development. But that is not the way potentially rich, but politically weak and indigent nations are treated in this capitalistic world. The Chinese railway situation is to-day the essential barometer, locally and nationally, of foreign control. And the extent of that control may be learned at once by 'l"he Rocket of China" (is.sl), made of scrap iion Tin I'eking-Hankow Limited Flyer (I'.UH) THE OLD AND THE NEW IX ]>ncOMOTTVES PRESENT-DAY CHINA 235 a glance at the ownership and manage- ment of China's existing 15,000 miles of railways, built, building, and contracted for. The figures of this table are ap- proximate, but they disclose in a manner which needs no further comment the ex- tent to which China is mistress in her own house in the factor which is the absolute sine qua non of her industrial development : Miles Building or Capital Con- Contracted structcd for * Under Complete Foreign Man- agement $330,000,000 2470 1300 Under Foreign Control 400,000,000 1568 G900 Under Chinese Control 128,000,000 1895 361 Totals $858,000,000 5933 9561 In other words, out of 15,494 miles of railway, built, building, or author- * Based on the China Year Book. 236 PRESENT-DAY CHINA ized, amounting in capital to $858,000,- 000, China herself controls less than 2000 miles of road, or one seventh of the total, and $128,000,000 of capital in- vestment, or less than one sixth of the total. China, it should be noticed, also stands in a great deal better position to-day than she will stand as the build- ing program of 9561 miles goes for- ward ; for the new construction is over- whelmingly under foreign control. This fundamental point should, then, be got into the mind first ; that the rail- ways of China are bound to be in the main, so far as the immediate future is concerned, stakes of foreign interest. And this foreign interest, whether it be reasonably generous toward Chinese sovereignty, as in the case of the terms of the Tientsin-Pukow line, or whether it insists on absolute foreign control, as PRESEXT-DAY CHINA 237 in the case of the Shanghai-Xanking Railway, reserves an ultimate power in the hands of the lending persons which inevitabty comes to be regarded in the diplomatic and political world as a powerful and negotiable asset. The second point to understand is that it is by the strategic configuration of these railways that the "spheres of in- terest" which have long since nullified, or ratlier prevented the establishment (for there never was such a thing) of the Open Door, take on their definite character. I have worked out the way that these railroads are apportioned among the nations, basing my figures on estimates from the latest "China Year Book" (1914) , and on subsequent and private information, somewhat as follows : 238 PRESENT-DAY CHINA Miles Building or Capital Con- Contracted structed for England $140,000,000 845 3000 Germany* 80,000,000 732 900 Belgium 115,000,000 291 2500 Russia 200,000,000 1100 Japan 125,000,000 780 1200 France 62,500,000 290 1300 U. S. A. (share of four-power loan) 7,500,000 300 China 128,000,000 1895 361 $858,000,000 5933 9561 To any one who seeks possible causes for another world war, this table show- ing the mixed and competing foreign control of China's railway systems is by no means a merely academic piece of figuring. The control of the Baghdad Railway is one of the capital issues of the present war; the control of the South Manchurian Railway was as valuable and much desired a prize to Japan as the free hand in Korea, over * Before the War. PRESENT-DAY CHIXA 239 which she ostensibly threw herself into the war with Russia. In the present balance of power among China's rail- way concessions, there are situations quite as delicate, and vast prizes of in- dustrial conquest and development quite as decisive in their strategic importance as any for which the greatest wars have been waged in the past. Take, for example, the single instance of the concessions held by Belgium, which I have mentioned several times in this book, and which I particularly emphasized in the previous chapter. If there is any romance in railway promo- tion, the achievements of the little group of Belgians who carried off in 1912 and 1913 the two greatest railway concessions that have so far been at stake in China, constitute without any stretch of language one of the most ro- mantic business operations of the 240 PRESENT-DAY CHINA modern world. The projects for which they were then conceded the full rights by the Chinese government cut China from north to south and from east to west along lines whose immeasurable strategic importance has not yet been adequately realized. The principal concession, named from its connections the Lung-Tsing- U-Hai scheme, proposes to run from an outlet on the sea not yet settled some- thing like fifteen hundred miles into the far interior of China. It is not a mere paper project; one of its most vital links, that between China's ancient cap- ital, Kaifeng, and the Honan provincial capital, Honanfu, has been in profitable operation since 1908. From the Chinese point of view its object is ob- scure, but from another point of view it is plain as day. After leaving the city of Sianfu it strikes off into the sparsely PRESEXT-DAY CHIXA 241 settled deserts and arid lands of Kansu toward Suchow, a long extension into the outer wilderness which seems inex- plicable in view of the still urgent need for railroad consolidation within the eighteen provinces of China proi:)er. Light appears, however, when you re- member at whom this long finger is pointing. It is at Russia, whose trans- Caspian railways have already crept up to the other side of this great hinter- land. Long ago Russia mapped out the broad lines of a railway which would penetrate the heart of China should the Japanese wrest from them the connect- ing links in South INIanchuria of the trans-Siberian; and strange to say, the great Belgian concession matches their route almost mile for mile. The other Belgian concession is, if anything, even more impressive; for it introduces France as the active partner 242 PRESENT-DAY CHINA of Russia in using Belgian cat's-paws. It is a north-and-south railroad, run- ning through the great anthracite coal province of Shansi, and with the spe- cially granted right of a southerly extension to the Szechwan city of Chengtu, on the Yang-tse River. Now, Chengtu happens also to be the northern terminus of the great French- conceded railroad running north from the heart of the French sphere of inter- est at Yunnanfu, a road, which, during its latter stages is the French section of the Hankow- Szechwan trunk line. Broadly speaking, the junction of these two schemes opens up a clear way for the French through the rich, back-coun- try provinces of China — to what ? The northerly extension of the Belgian proj- ect, also specially provided for, is Kweihwachen, a frontier city, outside the Wall, on the borders of the Gobi PRESENT-DAY CHINA 243 Desert of Mongolia. A railway is al- ready crawling up in this direction from Peking, under Chinese government control, the famous Peking-Kalgan line, a line which is, by the way, al- though entirely in Chinese hands, the most creditable piece of railroad con- struction and administration in China. This railhead-to-be, then, at Kweih- wachen — whom does it face? Who controls Mongolia; who has already surveyed a line to Urga; who, indeed, has had a fixed policy ever since the completion of the trans-Siberian of aim- ing for a short cut to Peking that would keep out of range of the Japa- nese? Who but Russia, seeking again the road to empire from which she has been thrust back by England at the gates of India and whipped back by Japan from Manchuria and Korea? Add to this the French invasion of 244 PRESENT-DAY CHINA the West River territory by the rail- way announced on February 13, 1914 (Yunnanfu-Nanning-Yamchow), a territory which the British had hoped and still hope to open up for them- selves, and it becomes plainly apparent that the competition against England on the part of France and Russia is bound to proceed to proportions of no less than continental magnitude. Roughly speaking, the 1914 conces- sions of Great Britain complete for her the practical control of the great tri- angular area between Shanghai, Han- kow, and Canton, from the Yang-tse Basin south. The Belgian trans-con- tinental railway enters the Yang-tse Basin on the north; at any rate it is hard to conceive that it will keep out of this territory, for possible outlets on the sea are limited as to commercial oppor- tunities, and there is hardly a terminus PRESENT-DAY CHINA 245 that could be chosen that would not create a fundamental rivalry with the deeply entrenched British interests al- ready on the ground. There is abso- lutely no dodging the issue that if the Belgian projects mean anything at all, they mean to fix the pivot of a ri- valry between Russia and France on the one hand and Great Britain on the other that may have far-reaching con- sequences, even after the settlement of this war. This instance of the railroad situa- tion may be repeated in the case of al- most every great commercial potential- ity in China. It is a railway from Kiu- kiang, on the Yang-tse, down to Swa- tow in Fukien Province, that still hangs as a smoldering issue between Eng- land and Japan; Japan amazed the world by boldly demanding it from China in the never-to-be-forgotten se- 246 PRESENT-DAY CHINA ries of demands of the spring of 1915, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it cuts across territory that has been the one really acknowledged British sphere of interest in all China. It is repeated in the vast Tayeh iron mines of the south Yang-tse valley, v^^hich the covetousness of Japan may yet make a first-class diplomatic issue, along with the great Hanyehping steel plant of Hanyang. America, in the name of self -accredited missionaries of the Standard Oil Company, has made a striking bid for the control of China's vast oil fields, which, though it has re- ceived a temporary check, has given that far-seeing company first innings in what is admitted to be the greatest un- developed oil-field of the known world. A book could be written on the man- ufacturing field alone, particularly on the most extensive and characteristic of PRESENT-DAY CHINA 247 all its manifestations so far in China, in the cotton mills. The center of the cot- ton industry is at Shanghai, mainly in English, Japanese, and Chinese hands; it enjoys there the privilege of a prac- tically unrestricted exploitation of la- bor, maintaining conditions which were described at this year's Nurses' Con- gress at Shanghai as "a disgrace to civ- ilization." It offers the greatest field for social reform outside of Japan. I must be content, however, with stat- ing the principle which this irresist- ible development is more and more forcefully expressing. That is, that this vast reservoir of economic power, the greatest that has been opened up to the world in modern times, con- stitutes for us of the Western world a menace that the European war has only taught us dimly to foresee. The struggle for the control of this power 248 PRESENT-DAY CHINA has only been suspended during the war; it will inevitably be resumed. And if contemporary statesmen are looking for issues on which the oft-re- peated prediction — that if the Allies win this war, they will only fall out among themselves — may be fulfilled, the danger portents on the tightening lines of competition for power in the Far East are only too apparent. We Americans look across the sea at this harassed nation full of such great and such terrible possibilities for the im- mediate future of the world, with min- gled feelings. There is a terror in the present circumstances of our war-worn time, so pressing and so near that we cannot feel the possibility of still greater dangers preparing on the same lines as the present conflict, based on the same competition for markets, the same world-end international ri- PRESENT-DAY CHINA 249 valry, in a world that can apparently learn no lessons from its own history. We are also obsessed with a danger of our own, a gathering misunderstanding and bad feeling with Japan, that will take the most delicate judgment and the most conciliatory spirit possible to both nations to allay. But so far as we can with a just re- gard for our own destiny stand for a foreign policy based on conditions out- side our own country, we should guard and guard jealously whatever oppor- tunities we have of aiding in the con- solidation of China — the only possible and the only courageous policy which can in any way minimize the danger of a world war with this nation's economic power as its stake. China's future is not yet merely a Japanese question, but we can only prevent its becoming a Japanese question by making it a world 250 PRESENT-DAY CHINA question. What has followed the parti- tion of Turkey has shown clearly what would in even greater degree follow either the partition of China, its absorp- tion or control by one power, or any other eventuality permanently disturb- ing the balance of power in the Far East. The weakness of Turkey has been a European policy ; and after half a century of lying settlements, and an enfeebling diplomacy which is self-con- demned in the word it has given to the world — Turkification — that long plun- dered land has been revenged on its plunderers by being one of the primary causes of the greatest war civilization has ever seen. Let us recognize in time the application of this portent to China. There is only one secure, there is only one honorable, there is only one Ameri- can conclusion: The upbuilding of China is vital to the peace of the world. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRAl Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped bel |S» JUN 11'^- 5 1970 «-REC'D LD-Ut«! £ N0V1819M NOV 4 1974 rm L9— Series 444 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FAC AA 000 987 147