Shanghai Fury

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by Peter Thompson


  Some time after midday a well-dressed young Chinese male stopped and asked him in perfect English what he was doing there. Donald explained he was a journalist on the China Mail and that he wanted to see the viceroy. The young man was Wen Shih-tsen, tutor to the viceroy’s son. He advised Donald that he would have to see the British consul. ‘You are a Chinese,’ the Australian exploded, ‘and you tell me to go through the British consul before I can see your viceroy? What’s wrong with this blasted country?’39

  Donald sat down and waited. Late that afternoon, his patience was rewarded when he was beckoned inside the yamen, where he was permitted to address Chang Jen-chun, ‘a magnificent old man with a queue and the mandarin’s button on his skull cap’, through an interpreter. ‘That was in the days of the elaborate tea-drinking ceremonial,’ Donald later told Australian journalist Buzz Farmer in his first interview on the subject.

  When the Viceroy lifted his cup it was the signal to go. But I went on swallowing cups of tea until I nearly burst. The old aristocrat became interested in me. I suppose I was the first foreigner he’d met who did not come to ask him for something. I told him I was more useful to him than he was to me, and that if I trod on the corns of etiquette to take no notice.40

  He explained that the purpose of his trip was to present China’s viewpoint to the world. According to Donald’s biographer, Earl Selle, the viceroy was so impressed that on his return to Hong Kong he received a letter appointing him viceregal adviser ‘on all matters that pertained to government in South China’.

  In his reply to the viceroy, Donald accepted the appointment but stipulated, ‘As for your question about what compensation I require for my services, the answer is that I require none. I want no reward. If I may be of service at any time, that alone will be enough.’41 It was an honourable but rash answer. Donald had a simple philosophy towards money, which he explained to his daughter Muriel in a letter some years hence. ‘Be of good cheer and trust mostly to yourself,’ he counselled.

  If you are self-reliant and independent you can get along well. Never depend on anyone. I never did, but I never got on well, for I never did have any money sense. I was always content to get enough to eat, and perhaps that is not wise. Anyway on that score you can make up your own mind.42

  Donald kept in touch with the viceroy through an English-speaking member of his staff, Wen Tsung-yao, a talented young man who had been educated in Hong Kong at Sun Yat-sen’s alma mater, the Central School, and in the United States. But he did not confine himself to the Chinese establishment: he also sought out members of the revolutionary movement in the hope of meeting their mercurial leader Dr Sun Yat-sen.

  The revolutionaries were astonished to receive a visit from this important Westerner. They listened to his explanation that he was interested in the regeneration of China and was willing to help. They would, however, have to take it on trust that he would not betray them to the authorities. Dr Hu Han-min, the leader of the group, stepped forward, shook Donald’s hand and told him he was welcome.43 ‘From that time on, he was solidly a part of the Revolutionary movement,’ Earl Selle writes. ‘He met with them secretly, and day after day they found themselves turning to him for explanations and advice.’44

  On a summer’s day in 1908 Gordon Bennett sailed his yacht Lysistrata into Hong Kong harbour to meet his unorthodox South China correspondent. Bennett suggested that Donald attend a morning editorial conference on board the Lysistrata, a £625,000 steam-driven vessel, with a crew of 100 and all the amenities, including a Jersey cow to provide fresh milk for his guests’ breakfast Corn Flakes.

  ‘We’ll do no such thing,’ the Australian snapped. ‘I’m editor of a paper. It’s just as important to me as the Herald is to you. You come and see me.’ So each morning Bennett, then 67, trekked up Wyndham Street to the China Mail offices to consult his correspondent on the news of the day. Peering through great horn-rimmed glasses and armed with a long blue pencil, he then cabled instructions to his staff in Paris and New York.45

  Bennett had given Donald carte blanche to write anything he liked about Chinese affairs. He took full advantage of it. One day he suggested his story should be printed in Chinese characters on the front page of the Herald, with an English translation inside the paper. Bennett loved the idea and cabled his editor, who complied with Donald’s suggestion, much to the bemusement of his non-Chinese readers.

  To increase the flow of news from China to the American public, Donald suggested that Bennett establish a Peking bureau to report on the Ching Court and its dealings with foreign governments. He further suggested that the man for the job was J. K. Ohl, a respected American correspondent. Josiah Ohl had been plucked from his post in Washington the previous year and sent to Manila to report on America’s performance as a colonial power after taking the Philippines from Spain in the Spanish–American War. He suddenly found himself in Peking, where he was given a roving commission to travel through China, Korea and Japan. According to the New York Times, he had ‘a vision and grasp of the situation that gave him a reputation as the best informed on Far Eastern questions of journalists of his time’.46

  Donald meanwhile had reached the pinnacle of his profession. He had been promoted to managing director of China Mail Limited after Murray Bain converted the business into a private company in 1906, with himself as chairman and members of his family as the other shareholders. Donald continued to edit the paper and at the same time founded Who’s Who in the Far East on which he worked as co-editor with Lionel Pratt.

  He also made time to promote pro-Chinese projects such as the founding of a university in Hong Kong which would be open to Chinese students. According to The Times, ‘Donald first pressed the idea on Sir Matthew Nathan, the Governor from 1904 to 1907.’47 He suggested in the columns of the China Mail that the nucleus of the university should be two existing establishments – the Medical College and the Technical Institute – that an endowment fund should be raised by the public and that the government should provide the land. The Colonial Office in Whitehall, however, was decidedly cool on the idea of introducing young Chinese to potentially dangerous learning. The project might have lapsed had the next governor, Sir Frederick Lugard (1907–11), not thrown his weight behind it.48

  To attract local investors, Lugard published a fund-raising manifesto laying down the enlightened principle that although the students would be in a British colony, ‘they do not separate themselves from all things Chinese and are in touch with Chinese public opinion. Thus they are preserved from the denationalising tendencies of a purely European education, and are enabled to take a lively and intelligent interest in the current events of both east and west.’49

  Hormusjee Mody, a Bombay-born Parsee tycoon, made a grant of HK$150,000 to erect the main university building. The Hong Kong Government then provided a site on Pok Fu Lam Road on the slopes of Mt Victoria. On 16 March 1910, the foundation stone was laid at a viceregal ceremony during which Sir Frederick Lugard read out a telegram from King Edward VII bestowing a knighthood on Hormusjee Mody for his generosity.

  By the time the university was opened in 1912 – with an appropriate Confucian motto Sapientia et Virtus (Wisdom and Virtue) on the escutcheon – a violent upheaval would have removed the Ching Dynasty from the Dragon Throne.

  The docks and jetties dotted along the waterfront of the treaty ports, now numbering 48, not only provided a bridgehead for Western exploitation of the vast Chinese market but were also the point of entry through which revolutionary ideas reached the increasingly politicised Chinese workforce and student population. ‘China has for years been hovering on the brink of revolution and South China, in particular, is the hotbed of the movement,’ Thomas F. Millard reported from Shanghai in the New York Times in May 1908.

  During the last two years there has been a noticeable recrudescence of revolutionary sentiment in some parts of the empire. In several provinces a regular organisation has been formed,
and preparations have been made to take advantage of any passing opportunity to begin an insurrection.50

  The Ching Dynasty had good reason to believe that the Japanese were encouraging revolutionaries to incite disorder in China which might afford Japan an excuse for armed intervention. The Japanese monarchists, however, were ideologically opposed to republicanism and decided to keep Sun Yat-sen at arm’s length. He was given a large sum of money and told to leave the country. Accompanied by a couple of Japanese minders to report his movements back to Tokyo, Sun sailed to Hanoi in Cochin China (Vietnam). French officials weren’t taking any chances and moved him on; Britain also refused to grant him political asylum in Singapore and Hong Kong.51 Then in early 1908 Bill Donald received a tip that Sun had slipped into Macao.

  The indefatigable doctor was planning his most audacious coup of all. Through his Japanese connections, he had arranged for a large quantity of arms and ammunition to be smuggled into Chinese waters on board the Japanese freighter Tatsu Maru II. The ship had been hired by the British firm of Holme, Ringer and Company to take 3000 tons of coal to Hong Kong.

  On 5 February, ten days after the Tatsu Maru sailed from Moji, she was spotted by Chinese Customs launches at anchor near Macao with a number of Chinese junks alongside. On her decks were 94 cases of rifles and 50 cases of ammunition. The senior Chinese officer had no hesitation in detaining the freighter on a charge of smuggling arms into China and arresting her officers and crew.52 He also ordered the Japanese flag to be hauled down.

  Baron Hayashi, the Japanese minister to Peking, presented an ultimatum to the Wai-wu-pu that unless the freighter was handed over to Japan with the payment of a suitable indemnity and an apology for insulting the Japanese flag, his country would ‘take immediate action’.53 After some haggling over terms, the Chinese agreed to comply with the Japanese demands.

  Donald sailed up the Pearl River to Canton to report this latest crisis for the China Mail and New York Herald. He found his viceregal friend, Chang Jen-chun, in a distressed state. Chang had opposed the punishment of the Chinese commander who had lowered the Japanese flag on the Tatsu Maru and had been ordered by Peking to kowtow to it, while the citizens of Canton were told to pay an indemnity of US$15,000 to Japan. Donald saw an opportunity to strike a blow at both the Manchu administration and the Japanese. As China was Japan’s largest export market, a boycott of Japanese products similar to the one that had proved effective against American goods in Shanghai in 1905 would cause enormous losses.

  Over the next 48 hours, according to his biographer, he visited many of the Cantonese guilds, including the powerful Bankers and Merchants’ Guild, to drum up support for an anti-Japanese boycott. He was given a good hearing. The Self-Government Society of Canton organised a series of mass rallies and the National Disgrace Society placed speakers aboard the Pearl River steamers to harangue Chinese passengers about their country’s humiliation at the hands of the Japanese. Cantonese buildings were draped in black banners as a sign of mourning.

  At one meeting a 12-year-old boy galvanised a crowd of 50,000 people with his fervent pleas in favour of the boycott. People in the crowd were reduced to tears and some tore off Japanese garments and made a bonfire of them in the street.54

  Donald wrote in the New York Herald on 10 April that the boycott had almost unanimous support among the Cantonese. A total of 157 merchants had agreed to ban Japanese goods and would not lift the ban until the Japanese had suffered losses of US$150 million – 10,000 times the amount of the Tatsu Maru indemnity.55 Faced with a massive popular protest, Peking backed down from provoking a full-scale confrontation. It was the Chinese Government that apologised for the affront to the Japanese flag and paid the indemnity.56

  Donald worked tirelessly to place positive stories about China on international news schedules. One of his brainwaves was to suggest to Gordon Bennett an alliance between China and the United States, ‘linking the oldest country in the Eastern World with the youngest and most vigorous in the West’. Bennett liked the idea so much he ordered the Herald to run stories about it day after day at the expense of coverage for that year’s presidential election.

  ‘The advocacy of an alliance between the United States and China by the Herald has sent a thrill through the backbone of the old Celestial Empire and has perhaps done more toward a genuine awakening than any movement that has gone before,’ Donald cabled on 8 October 1908.

  The suggested linking of the oldest country in the Eastern World with the youngest and most vigorous in the West has fired the Chinese imagination and those who realise the vast possibilities in such a union are spreading the tidings and incidentally laying the foundation for a sound commercial connection with America, if not for a political bond, which will undoubtedly tie down for all times the erstwhile irrepressible turbulence that has ever made the Far East a source of concern to the Great Powers of the world.

  Shortly afterwards, just as he appeared unassailable, Donald resigned from the China Mail over a dispute with one of his fellow directors, a self-important member of the Yacht Club with whom he had previously clashed. Anyway, he was fed up with publishing stories from Westminster and Lord’s; from now on, he intended to concentrate on China’s revolutionary struggle, clearly the most important story of the new century.

  Donald opened an office in Queen’s Road Central, where his neighbours included two Australian-inspired department stores, the Sincere and the Wing On. The Sincere’s founder was Ma Ying-piu, whose father had returned home to Kwangtung after joining the Victorian gold rush of the 1850s. Ma arrived in Sydney as a 19-year-old in 1883 and went to work among the Chinese enterprises in Sydney’s Haymarket. Seven years later he founded the Wing Sang import–export company with several partners, including Choy Hing and George Kwok Bew.57

  In 1893 Ma Ying-piu, a devout Christian, sold his shares in Wing Sang and sailed to Hong Kong with his wife to spread the Gospel. For several years, they travelled around South China in a horse-drawn cart, towing a piano and lantern slide-show. Ma Ying-piu eventually settled in Hong Kong and, in January 1900, he and his Sydney partners opened the Sincere department store. Everything from its window displays to company policy was modelled on Anthony Horderns in Sydney. It was Sincere’s proud boast that within its doors the grandest Englishman, the highest mandarin and the most humble housewife received the same courteous service. Hong Kong had never seen anything like it.58

  Seven years later the Wing On department store was founded in the same street on exactly the same model by the brothers Kwok Lok (James Gocklock) and Kwok Chuen (Philip Gockchin), who had started the Wing On fruit company in Haymarket in 1897. With two other stores, the Sun Sun and the Sun Company, the Sincere and Wing On would become known in China as ‘The Four Great Companies’. It was an astonishing feat: a group of Australian Chinese entrepreneurs had used their experiences of Sydney’s retailing methods to revolutionise China’s commercial life.

  Freed from the constraints of the China Mail, Bill Donald sat in his office at Queen’s Road Central in November 1908 and while one of his small cigars smouldered on the edge of his desk pounded out long stories – diatribes, really – on the state of the country for the New York Herald and his Australian newspaper clients. The theme was always the same: China was a vast country with immense riches in undeveloped resources that the European nations coveted. Only their jealousy of one another was saving her from partition. And while they bickered China remained one of the poorest countries on earth.

  The United States had declared its ‘Open Door for all’ policy in September 1899 when it became apparent that American commercial interests in China had fallen behind those of Britain, Russia and Germany. The 26th American President, Theodore Roosevelt, was a militant advocate of Manifest Destiny, the belief that his country had a God-given right to impose Anglo-Saxon leadership on the Asian races of the Pacific. Having brokered the peace between Russia and Japan in 1905, he now agitated for
his country to wrest the lion’s share of the China trade from the British.

  The prevailing jingoist attitude was perfectly expressed by the British conqueror of Tibet, Colonel Francis Younghusband, who declared in a letter to The Times during the Boxer Uprising, ‘The earth is too small; the portion of it they occupy too big and too rich; and the intercourse of nations is now too intimate to permit the Chinese keeping China to themselves while at the same time they freely invade all the corners of the earth.’1

  The very decrepitude of the Ching Court in Peking, where the 73-year-old regent Tzu Hsi was slowly dying following a stroke, seemed to prove that only a revolution could save China from being broken into pieces and shared among Westerners. George Morrison, however, discerned ‘a sensible improvement’ in the conduct of China’s foreign affairs, dating from Yuan Shi-kai’s appointment to a seat in the Wai-wu-pu and the promotion of Liang Tun-yen, a Yale graduate, to the vice- presidency on that body. Yuan, he wrote in The Times, had added ‘the requisite strength of character, prestige and influence among his contemporaries, while Liang Tun-yen has supported [him] with a knowledge, rarely equalled among his countrymen’. Never had China’s foreign affairs been more ably conducted, but it was only a reprieve from the usual chaos.2

  Morrison’s newspaper had just been acquired by Britain’s own version of Gordon Bennett, Lord Northcliffe. The self-made press baron greatly admired Morrison’s work and was keen for him to remain in Peking. Morrison’s crown slipped, however, when he made the mistake of going on a five-day hunting trip on the Yellow River on 10 November 1908, leaving J. O. P. Bland to cover for him.

 

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