‘I thirsted to have a public whack at the Tungmeng hui,’ he wrote, ‘and chance came my way when O’Shea, the proprietor of the Shanghai Times, fell ill. He asked [Lionel] Pratt to take over the editorial writing and you can judge that I soon had heaps of subjects for Pratt. I set him after the Tungmeng hui’s scalp hot and strong, and we have been after it ever since.’
Even more furiously, Donald wrote to Morrison on the same subject a week later. ‘Everyone is sick of the way things are going,’ he said, ‘and the sooner you can get back and advice [sic] Yuan to lop the heads off all obstructionists the better. What Yuan ought to do is to seize a big stick and wipe [sic] the Tungmeng hui and all its members on the head.’18
Donald’s efforts to destabilise Sun Yat-sen’s ‘bottle-washer coterie’ failed to have the desired effect. On 25 August the Tungmeng hui combined with other revolutionary groups to form the Kuomintang – the National People’s Party. The new party’s manifesto pledged ‘to adopt the principles of social service to prepare the way for the introduction of socialism in order to fac- ilitate and better the standard of living, and to employ the powers and strength of the Government quickly and evenly to develop the resources of our country’. It was a major victory for Sun Yat-sen; Donald had seriously underestimated his influence.
The following day in faraway London, George Morrison and Jennie Robin were married at the Emmanuel Church, South Croydon, in front of friends and family, including Morrison’s mother Rebecca, Jennie’s parents and his old friend, the diplomat Sir John McLeavy Brown.19 Morrison was on honeymoon when Yuan Shi-kai reacted to the Kuomintang’s manifesto and the provocation of the pro-Sun lobby in his cabinet. The first victim was his former ally Tang Shao-yi, whom he had appointed prime minister even though he knew his sympathies were with the Southern revolutionaries. Tang was dismissed in August, ending a friendship that stretched back to their service in Korea in the 1890s.
As he left office, he sadly noted: ‘[Yuan Shi-kai] is the only man who can unify the country, provided he co-operates sincerely with the Revolutionary Party. But judging from what has happened in the past three months, I fear that disillusionment may come in the end.’
In Moscow, Lenin had no intention of leaving the development of the new republic up to President Yuan. ‘China is seething,’ he said, ‘it is our duty to keep the pot boiling.’20
As things turned out, the purpose of Josiah Ohl’s ball from which Morrison had been excluded was to celebrate the American’s departure from Peking. His replacement was Bill Donald. As well as serving the New York Herald in Shanghai, Donald had become editor of the monthly Far Eastern Review in partnership with a controversial American right-winger, George Bronson Rea. The Review was regarded as the best edited and best informed magazine on Chinese affairs in Asia. Donald was determined to maintain its pro-Chinese, pro-American stance.
In 1913 Bill and Mary Donald bought a two-storey redbrick house with a roof garden at 24 Tsung Pu Hutung, one of the cobbled lanes that crisscrossed the eastern part of Peking. Most of the purchase price came from money that Mary’s family had left to her. The house was one of two in a large compound, surrounded by the smoking chimneys and tiled roofs of modest Chinese dwellings. The occupant of the second house was Roy Anderson, who had left Standard Oil and was making a living as an interpreter for the American Legation and an intermediary for American businessmen trying to enter the Chinese market.
The Donalds employed three Chinese servants: an amah to take care of Muriel, a cook, and a coolie who looked after Donald’s two horses. With Rodney Gilbert, the 24-year-old Peking correspondent of the North-China Daily News, Donald set up a press bureau in a dusty little office in the old Russo-Asiatic Bank building. He would travel down to Shanghai once a month by ship or train to put the Review to bed. Gilbert was a Pennsylvanian who had seen much of China as a medicine salesman. He would later become an arch-conservative and, to Donald’s disgust, one of China’s harshest critics in books such as What’s Wrong with China.21
Although Peking lagged behind Shanghai as a world city, it had great charm. The twisting hutung echoed to the chants of hawkers and peddlers, and there was a wide variety of nightspots, theatres, teahouses and restaurants. Living in this fascinating place, however, failed to bring Bill and Mary Donald closer together. Donald later drew a veil over his marriage, claiming to his biographer it had ended in 1912 after Mary told him, ‘Don, you are married more to China than to me.’ But he wasn’t being truthful about what really happened between them, possibly because the truth hurt too much.22
Mary later chastised Earl Selle for publishing her husband’s version of events. The marriage broke up in 1919, not 1912, she said, which meant she had been with him in Peking during the early years of the republic and right through the turbulent times of World War I. Selle wrote back to her, ‘I am sorry if you felt any annoyance over what I wrote concerning your separation from Mr Donald. The words are his and I am sure that that is the way he liked to remember it.’23
Donald’s daughter Muriel also contacted Selle. Her letter is lost but he replied, ‘If there were errors concerning your mother and yourself this was due to the fact that this seemed to be a sealed chapter in his life. I am sorry to say that he felt very strongly about your mother to the end. For you, however, he had an intense devotion. I am sure that you were his one big love.’24
While Sun Yat-sen was happily occupied playing trains, the main threat to Yuan Shi-kai’s authority came from Sung Chiao-jen, who led the Kuomintang to victory in the national elections for the new American-style Senate (Tsan Cheng Yuan) and House of Representatives (Li Fan Yuan). On 20 March 1913 Sung was setting off from Shanghai’s North Station for Peking to become prime minister when he was shot by an assassin, described as ‘a short man in black’.25 He was rushed to hospital, where doctors were forbidden to operate until they received permission from the capital. By then, it was too late; Sung was dead. A Western doctor testified he could have been saved if she had operated immediately.26
Yuan’s administration claimed Sung’s rivals in Shanghai were behind the assassination but incontrovertible evidence in the form of telegrams sent from Peking to the assassin – a provincial police chief named Ying Kwei-shing – linked the murder to Yuan Shi-kai’s regime.27 Yuan denied complicity in the crime but having survived a bomb attack himself it seemed clear to the republicans that he was prepared to use the same ruthless methods to silence his opponents.
On 31 May 1913 Jennie Morrison gave birth to the first of Morrison’s three sons, Ian Ernest McLeavy Morrison. ‘I hope the little chap will thrive heartily,’ Bill Donald wrote to Jennie, showing that he appreciated the compensations of fatherhood. ‘He will be a great comfort to you and will surely be a credit to you and his distinguished father.’28 The Donalds were invited to the christening party. Bill was, however, ‘very depressing’ in his comments about China’s immediate future. Morrison’s diary notes read: ‘Outlook very bad. Country on the rocks. Recrimination. Distrust of the Kuomintang.’
Lionel Pratt moved from Hong Kong to Shanghai to work under Donald on the Review. He wrote to Morrison that he hoped to see China recover from her ‘Republican delirium’. The feeling among the Chinese in Shanghai was decidedly pessimistic, he added, and the incapacity of ‘the scum that came to the top during the turmoil’ became more evident with every day.29 Morrison found Pratt’s views even more depressing and put them down to his consumption of liquor; he also despaired over the views expressed in a letter from the Australian revolutionary Tse Tsan Tai, who was now living in retirement in Hong Kong.
Since being laid off by the South China Morning Post, Tse had devoted his time to writing a book based on his Bible studies. The Creation, the Real Situation of Eden, and the Origin of the Chinese was an extraordinary work which located the Garden of Eden in Sinkiang, China’s north-western province. On 14 April 1913 Tse received a letter from Dr Hiram Maxim, inventor of the automatic mac
hine-gun which had doomed the Gatling gun to obsolescence, offering his services to China.
Switching from Genesis to Apocalypse, Tse suggested to Morrison that Maxim be appointed military adviser to the Chinese government. Maxim was offering his ‘weapons of destruction’ to China, Tse said, and his ‘great Capitalist’ friends the Rothschilds would be only too happy to help with a loan.
In his reply to Tse, the upright Presbyterian in Morrison overcame the imperialist. More in sorrow than in anger, he asked Tse, ‘Do you really think such a man is needed in China at the present time?’ China had been a dumping ground for weapons for the past 25 years, he said, and what it needed now was industrial development and an end to the appalling destruction of life.30
It was a forlorn hope. On 12 July 1913 the ‘Second Revolution’ broke out when the uneasy armistice between Northern and Southern troops ended in Kiangsi. Two days later, Huang Hsing threw down the gauntlet to Yuan Shi-kai. He declared Nanking ‘independent’ and issued a proclamation calling for a ‘punitive expedition’ against the president. Four provinces joined the revolt – Kiangsu, Kiangsi, Anhwei and Kwangtung – and on 20 July the insurrectionists tried to seize the telegraph station in Shanghai. This threatened foreign interests and the British threw a military cordon around the International Settlement, barring entry to likely dissidents.
On 23 July 1913 Yuan dismissed Sun Yat-sen from his post as railways supremo and accused him of using railway funds to finance the rebellion. He branded the republicans ‘outlaws’ and prescribed ‘military pacification’ as the only possible course. Sun was forced to flee to Japan, where he was joined by several supporters including Huang Hsing and one of his new protégés, Chiang Kai-shek, a former Shanghai commodity and currency dealer who had led a Japanese-sponsored regiment in the Chinese Revolution. Chiang had been born on 31 October 1887 in the village of Chikow near the south-east coast and was raised mainly by his widowed mother before travelling to Japan to study at a military academy.
Also in Japan at that time were the revolutionary publisher Charlie Soong and most of his family, including his daughters Ayling and Chingling. His third daughter, Mayling, the future Madame Chiang Kai-shek, was still at college in the United States. This little group of exiles included many of the names that would make Chinese history over the next 35 years.
Yuan Shi-kai dispatched three Northern armies, many of the troops still wearing the traditional Manchu pigtails, to besiege Nanking. He promised General Chang Hsun the honour of retaking the republican stronghold as compensation for having had to forfeit it in 1911. The city was captured and ruthlessly sacked in early September. Many republicans and their supporters were executed. Yuan’s troops pursued the rebels into the adjoining province of Honan, and in the year following the collapse of the Second Revolution the number of executions there was estimated at 21,000.31
On 6 October Yuan Shi-kai pressured parliament into electing him lifetime president, the position he had been holding on a provisional basis ever since Sun Yat-sen had stood down the previous year. The next day the major powers officially recognised the republic. The new American minister to China, Paul S. Reinsch, journeyed to Nanking to see the devastation of the city for himself. ‘They had sacked the town, ostensibly suppressing the last vestiges of the “Revolution”,’ he reported on 4 November. ‘Everywhere charred walls without roofs, the contents of houses broken and cast on the street, fragments of shrapnel on the walls – withal a depressing picture of misery.’
That same day Yuan Shi-kai outlawed the Kuomintang and expelled its representatives from parliament. Murder squads roamed Peking’s streets looking for Kuomintangists. The party’s panic-stricken leader in the National Assembly, C. T. Wang, telephoned Bill Donald to say that gunmen were outside his house and he was in fear of his life. Donald suggested he dress up as an old woman and tell a servant to drive him to the Methodist Mission. Donald then enlisted the aid of the American Legation to smuggle him on to a train to the foreign concession in Tientsin.32
Meanwhile, to Morrison’s embarrassment, Albert Wearne had written a laudatory piece about him in the Sydney Morning Herald. ‘Dr G. E. Morrison has more than justified the hopes of his many friends and admirers since his appointment in the post of political adviser to President Yuan Shi-kai,’ he wrote.
Australians in the Far East hoped and expected that when Dr Morrison’s work for the London Times came to an end he would be knighted by the British Government. His 17 years of magnificent service, during which he neglected no opportunity to further British interests in the Far East, surely entitled him to high reward. But Dr Morrison is an Australian, and the British Government is not likely to move in the matter unless it is taken up by the Commonwealth. In his case it appears to be a matter of ‘out of sight, out of mind’.33
Few Australians, Wearne said, had had a more distinguished career than Morrison and fewer still had worked so brilliantly and faithfully in imperial interests. ‘A distinct obligation rests upon his country and his countrymen, whom he holds so dear, to see that he get a fair measure of reward.’34
By June 1914, Morrison was on leave in London with Jennie and baby Ian. Denying he was merely a paid advocate of the Chinese Government, he beat the drum for the new China in a series of interviews and speeches. ‘There is peace and quiet in every important city throughout all China, north and south, east and west,’ he told his old newspaper. ‘Many of the leaders of the first revolution are now working quietly in the Government.’ He refuted suggestions that Yuan Shi-kai had cut himself off from Young China, or that he aimed to set up a family dynasty. Instead, Morrison added, the president had endeavoured to draw his advisers and helpers from every party in the State.35
Six days later The Times published an article from Bill Donald – standing in for Morrison’s successor David Fraser – which completely contradicted this rosy view. Under the heading ‘Dictator of China’, Donald revealed that Yuan Shi-kai, having promulgated a new provisional constitution, had lost no time in making use of his extended powers by nominating men who would make the Senate ‘solely a Presidential organ’. ‘There are 70 of them, their names all savouring of the past, a regular mobilisation of the old brigade,’ Donald wrote. ‘There are no Young Chinese among them.’36
The contradiction between the two reports mattered little. Almost immediately, China was swept off the news pages by the assassination of the Austrian archduke at Sarajevo. The Great War began on 1 August with Germany’s declaration of war on Russia, who had rallied to the defence of her troublesome Serbian ally. In Morrison’s absence, Donald urged Yuan Shi-kai to seize Tsingtao, the holiday resort that the Germans had built on the Shantung Peninsula, and occupy the rest of Germany’s leased territory in that province. Indeed, Yuan offered Sir John Jordan 50,000 troops for the campaign but Jordan turned down the offer and, mystifyingly, advised Yuan to keep quiet about it.
His purpose was revealed when the Japanese declared war on Germany on 23 August. The Anglo-Japanese Treaty, renewed in 1905 and 1911, enabled Britain to withdraw five battleships based on China Station at Hong Kong, while Japanese cruisers and destroyers took their place to defend the colony against German raiders. With British help, Japan then seized Germany’s leased territory in Shantung, while the Japanese Navy implemented its ‘southward advance’ strategy for the first time when it occupied Germany’s colonies in Micronesia: the Marshall, Mariana, Caroline and Palau islands.
By the time George Morrison arrived back in Peking, the Japanese Army had occupied half of Shantung, and China, far from joining the Allied cause, had ‘gone mad about neutrality’. The following months would see the beginning of Japan’s offensive against China which would ultimately claim the lives of more than 20 million Chinese.
Having violated Chinese sovereignty in Shantung, Japan turned up the heat in her campaign to reduce China to a vassal state. To Britain’s shame, she aided and abetted this heinous enterprise in which the
British minister Sir John Jordan, while posing as a trusted friend of the Chinese president, secretly conspired with the Japanese.
On 18 January 1915 the Japanese minister Eki Hioki issued President Yuan Shi-kai with ‘21 Demands’ whose purpose was to bend China to his country’s will. There were five groups of demands, the most controversial of which were in Group Five. These gave the Japanese virtual control over China’s finances, armed forces and law enforcement agencies, as well as granting themselves an extensive list of new railway and mining concessions.
Bill Donald knew from republican sources that the demands had been made but was unable to confirm his information with the Chinese, the Japanese or Sir John Jordan. Once again, Yuan had been warned to keep quiet – this time by Hioki, who threatened dire consequences if he spoke out. Publicly, the Japanese claimed they had made just 11 demands, all of which were in line with other treaty arrangements between China and the powers. In the face of this denial, The Times was reluctant to publish Donald’s story. ‘Verify carefully,’ the foreign editor admonished him. ‘Reason believe reports from Peking wilfully exaggerated.’
At the same time Donald’s home life was thrown into turmoil when Mary was taken seriously ill. ‘I was at the hospital when the flowers which you kindly sent to Mrs Donald arrived but the coolie flew without waiting acknowledgement,’ Donald wrote to Morrison. ‘Mrs Donald desires me to express her appreciation of your kind thought. She is at present suffering great pain, mainly because the doctors are loath to give her morphia.’1
Shanghai Fury Page 18