Shortly afterwards Donald visited Morrison at his house close to the Legation Quarter and raised the question of the 21 Demands. As the government’s political adviser, Morrison was unable to say anything officially but he indicated a document on his desk and then left the room for a few minutes. Donald took the hint and slipped the document into his jacket. It was an English translation of the 21 Demands. Donald was now able to write an authoritative story about the true extent of Japan’s attempted takeover of China. He also tipped off other reporters. Published in Australia, Britain and the United States, their stories exposed the Japanese Government’s mendacity. Such was the embarrassment in Tokyo that the genro intervened and, despite the objections of the militarists who were taking control of the government, deleted the swingeing terms of Group Five from the Japanese demands.
Surprisingly, Sir John Jordan did not congratulate Yuan Shi-kai on his narrow escape. He and Yuan had been friends since the 1890s when they had served in Korea. Instead, he informed the Chinese president that he had no alternative but to accept the remaining Japanese demands, which had been resubmitted with an ultimatum that rejection would mean war between Japan and China. Yuan’s compliance triggered a rash of strikes, demonstrations and boycotts throughout the country.
Jordan’s role throughout the 21 Demands affair appeared to be so blindly asinine that Morrison attributed it to senility, but there was a much more sinister reason. The British minister was adhering to the terms of a secret treaty between Britain and Japan that would enable the Japanese to retain the German concessions after the Great War in defiance of China’s moral and legal right to regain her territory.2 For her part of the secret deal, Japan would support the Allied war effort in the East (and escort Anzac troopships to the Mediterranean).
Sun Yat-sen followed the drama from his political haven in Japan. George Bronson Rea later claimed in the Japan Times that Sun had branded the 21 Demands a put-up job, invited and even drafted by Yuan Shi-kai himself as the price he was prepared to pay for Japanese support.3 Ludicrous as this claim might sound, it was indeed Sun’s view that China should co-operate with Japan in developing into a modern nation – ‘without Japan, there is no China; without China there is no Japan,’ he had once said.
Having failed to win the hand of Ayling Soong, who had married the Chinese banker H. H. Kung the previous year, Sun proposed to Charlie Soong’s 23-year-old daughter Chingling. Charlie was furious with him but Chingling, even more beautiful than her sister and devoted to the republican cause, was determined to marry the 48-year-old ‘Father of the Republic’.
The wedding took place in Japan on 25 October 1915. As Sun had failed to divorce Nee Lu, he was shunned by Charlie Soong and his strictly Methodist wife who considered his behaviour an affront to Christianity. H. H. Kung wrote to Donald that his new brother-in-law could perhaps be excused because ‘his dangers and anxieties have affected his nervous system’.4 Donald must have smiled. He knew all about Sun’s womanising. ‘That was the trouble with the old boy,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t keep him off the women.’5
Sun might have quietly faded into obscurity had Yuan Shi-kai not made a fatal error of judgment in his efforts to unify the country and centralise the government. Against Morrison’s advice, he abolished the military governors in the provinces, dissolved parliament and in a lavish ceremony at the Temple of Heaven on 23 December 1915 proclaimed himself emperor. The great mass of the Chinese people did not respond to the restoration of the monarchy as he had expected: Yuan had no ancestral right to the Dragon Throne and was seen as an interloper. Riots broke out in many places and a new revolution was threatened to depose him.
The agitation spread to Australia’s Chinese communities. In Melbourne, the republican Chinese Times campaigned for a ‘Third Revolution’ to remove the new emperor, while in Sydney a new publication, the Chinese Republic News, edited by two Chinese revolutionaries, Chiu Kwok-chun and Ng Hung-pui, stirred up anti-Yuan feelings with skilful propaganda. As a result, many conservatives and royalists were converted to the republican cause, sparking a revival in Sun Yat-sen’s fortunes.6 Instead of being written off as a spent force, he was suddenly on the brink of a dramatic comeback.
On 18 March 1916 Bill Donald and his American comrade-in-arms Roy Anderson made the journey from their walled compound to visit the emperor at his gilded palace inside the Forbidden City. With Anderson translating, Donald – whom Yuan always addressed as ‘Old Southern Republican’ – spelled out the dire state of the nation. The provinces were in open revolt, he said, and China was in danger of breaking up.
Yuan Shi-kai stroked his walrus moustache. Only seven provinces were dissatisfied, he said. Seventeen, Donald countered. ‘You must abdicate,’ he bluntly told him. ‘You must stop this make-believe.’ Yuan could have had Donald’s head chopped off for such insolence but instead he murmured, ‘Old Southern Republican, I am tired,’ and shuffled out of the room.7
Three days later he issued a proclamation ending his three-month reign and restoring the republic. ‘Truly,’ he declared, ‘my lack of virtue is to be blamed for the compliance to the wishes of others which has brought this discord on the country.’ It was his intention to resign as president and go into retirement in the Garden for Cultivating Longevity at Tientsin.
Yuan asked Donald to confer with the revolutionaries in Shanghai to see whether they would grant him safe conduct for the journey from the capital to Tientsin. Donald made the trip and was surprised to find that Sun Yat-sen had slipped back into the country under one of his aliases to join the anti-Yuan chorus.
The Kuomintangists gave Donald a good hearing; some, like C. T. Wang, probably owed their lives to him. They also realised that Yuan’s capitulation gave them a great opportunity to become undisputed rulers of China and readily agreed to his request for safe conduct. But Yuan never made the trip. He had been ailing with ‘fever of the belly’ and on the morning of 6 June 1916 he was found dead in his bed at the age of 56. His family said he had died of a broken heart. His French physicians listed the cause of death as blood-poisoning and said Yuan might have survived had his family permitted them to treat him with Western methods.8
Plagued by political problems and ill-health, Yuan had lost control of his once-obedient Beiyang Army during the latter stages of his reign. His commanders were now at each other’s throats and the army had split into factions, each vying for the right to set up the government in Peking and thus gain control over the customs revenue and raise foreign loans to finance their military adventures. The main contenders in this power struggle were the Anhwei Clique’s Tuan Chi-jui, known as ‘Mr Democracy’ for opposing Yuan’s elevation to the throne, and Feng Kuo-chang and Wu Pei-fu of the Chihli Clique. A third force belonged to ‘the Old Marshal’ Chang Tso-lin, a former bandit chieftain and staunch monarchist whose Fengtien Clique included some Beiyang troops, though the majority hailed from his native Manchuria. With a number of other aspirants who lived by the sword in different parts of China’s vast domains, these four commanders would usher in the blood-soaked Warlord Era that created havoc from 1916 to 1926.
The most immediate issue to be resolved, however, was China’s neutrality in the European war. Morrison and Donald joined forces with Paul Reinsch in an effort to persuade Li Yuan-hung, who had been appointed temporary president, that China must unite with the Allies against the Central Powers. Otherwise, they said, China would have no voice at the peace talks to demand the return of Shantung from the Japanese. Li, however, believed German propaganda that the Allies were being defeated and opted to remain neutral.
As a result, German citizens enjoyed complete freedom to come and go as they pleased, even in Shanghai, despite the predominant position of Britain and France. Every day at midday, British, French and German businessmen passed one another on The Bund on the way to their respective clubs without any sign of recognition or hostility. Not even warfare was allowed to interfere with Yangtze trade.9
Despite President Li’s reluctance, the Chinese Government bowed to Morrison’s persistent ‘advice’ and in January 1917 dispatched the first contingent in a labour force that would total 100,000 to France to dig trenches and carry out other vital, non-combatant duties for the British Army on the Western Front. At the beginning of February, Germany announced her submarines would sink on sight all ships in the vicinity of the British Isles irrespective of nationality. The United States immediately broke off diplomatic relations and urged other neutral countries to do the same. Donald wrote to Morrison:
Now that America has severed diplomatic relations with Germany, China should follow suit within 48 hours. I am doing my best with the Chinese I know to stir the government up. Reinsch went to the Wai-wu-pu a few minutes ago on the same mission. Could you not get at the President tonight?10
Morrison saw Li Yuan-hung but came away disappointed with his ‘weak, vacillating and tremulous’ attitude. The mood changed after news reached Peking that 543 Chinese labourers had been killed when the French ship Athos was torpedoed in the Mediterranean. On 13 March China broke off diplomatic relations with Germany and seized all German shipping off Shanghai.11
Li Yuan-hung, however, was still embroiled in a power struggle with Southern insurgents who were demanding his resignation over his removal of the prime minister, Tuan Chi-jui, in May for negotiating secret loans with Japan and for trying to push China into World War I. He invited General Chang Hsun, the former mafoo in the imperial stables, into Peking to mediate with Tuan on his behalf.
The republicans had made a serious tactical error in permitting the imperial family to remain in the Forbidden City and Chang, a fanatical Manchu loyalist, decided to take this opportunity to restore them to the Dragon Throne. His head full of rice wine at the end of a rowdy banquet, Chang sent his pigtailed troops to force President Li to sign an edict authorising the immediate restoration of Pu Yi. Armed with this presidential decree, he then turned up at the Forbidden City in the early hours, prostrated himself before the startled, sleepy-eyed 11-year-old, and informed him that he was emperor once again.12
As the first pale shafts of dawn light illuminated the capital, Chang’s soldiers hoisted the Manchu’s dragon flag. Kang Youwei, who had discussed the coup with Chang after arriving in Peking a few days earlier, hot-footed it to the palace to offer Emperor Pu Yi advice on a new set of much-needed reforms.
Morrison was enjoying a bird-watching holiday in Chihli with a party including the new premier, Wu Ting-fang, while Jennie rested at their seaside house at Pei-tai-po following the birth of their third son, Colin George Mervyn. He was just completing a letter to her when he received a telegram from Bill Donald, who had been one of the guests at Chang’s banquet and had followed the imperial restoration at a discreet distance: ‘emperor restored two oclock.’ Morrison scribbled a postscript to Jennie, ‘I have shown this to Wu Ting-fang. He cannot believe it. I have wired Donald asking him for confirmation.’
Real though it was, the restoration lasted but a couple of weeks. General Tuan Chi-jui arrived from Tientsin with his troops and on 13 July clashed with Chang Hsun’s army. ‘You never heard such a terrific banging,’ Morrison wrote. ‘In my district several thousand fought and one was slightly wounded.’ Chang fled from the battlefield and sought asylum in the German Legation, while Pu Yi returned to his schoolbooks in the Forbidden City. Kang Youwei, his imperial ambitions once again thwarted, retired to Shanghai where he died of natural causes in 1927.
Tuan Chi-jui was hailed as the saviour of the republic and, much empowered, returned to office. After all these shenanigans, he finally declared war on Germany on 14 August 1917. Shortly afterwards Li stepped down as president and was replaced by the Chihli strongman Feng Kuo-chang.
The declaration of war meant that Germany’s extrality privileges were automatically cancelled, making her citizens subject to Chinese law. In response to French pressure, Peking ordered the deportation of all Germans and Austrians living in the International Settlement and the French Concession. Hundreds of enemy aliens simply moved to Chinese sections of the city where Peking’s orders were ignored on principle; nothing, however, could be done to prevent the confiscation of their property. The German Club on The Bund was occupied by the Bank of China and an American company took over the leading German drugstore on Nanking Road (although its German staff were retained in their jobs).13
All of these events failed to solve the complex problems of China’s disunity. When a national council was summoned at Peking, the Kuomintang refused to attend and established a rival parliament at Nanking, which took the provocative step of electing Sun Yat-sen as president of the Chinese Republic. China now had two capitals, two parliaments and two presidents. The revolution had gone into reverse gear.
Sun set up his headquarters in a Nanking cement factory. With a soldier’s cap on his head and a gold-encrusted sword at his side, he was sworn in as Generalissimo of the Chinese Army and Navy. ‘His emergence as a Generalissimo provokes derisive laughter,’ Morrison wrote from Shanghai in November as he prepared to set sail for Australia on six months’ leave with Jennie and his children, ‘but it is one of the most serious indications of the trend of Chinese politics.’
The failure to unite North and South had brought nothing but turmoil to Peking as the warlords jostled for power through alliances with the gentry, the intelligentsia and the Kuomintang. In February 1918 Chang Tso-lin, the ‘Mukden Tiger’, surrounded Peking and ousted Feng Kuo-chang from the presidential palace. His replacement, Hsu Shih-ch’ang, known as ‘Susie’ and one of the few survivors of the Manchu administration, was chosen in a compromise deal between Northerners and Southerners.
Morrison journeyed to Shanghai to join his ship and at the same time bury the hatchet with Sun Yat-sen over his role in Sun’s bitter feud with Yuan Shi-kai. There had been many changes since he had first seen the city in the horse-and-buggy days of 1894: the buildings on The Bund were much taller and grander now, trams powered by the British-owned Shanghai Electric Construction Company clanged down Nanking Road and the internal combustion engine added a new hazard to life and limb. Across the river, settlements and businesses had sprung up on the thumb-shaped peninsula of Pootung, while in Nanking Road the Sincere department store had driven consumers into raptures with its Australian-inspired approach to merchandising.
Some things hadn’t changed. Rickshaws hauled by skeletal, barefoot pullers dodged coolies staggering beneath huge weights; beggars swarmed around him demanding alms; red-turbaned Sikh policemen sweated to impose order; and the filthy brown waters of the Whangpoo added a foul stench to the pervading aroma of hot oil and spices from the street vendors’ stalls.
Shanghai had developed a reputation as the wickedest, most decadent city in the East, ‘the whore of Asia’, peopled by an astonishing array of tycoons, spies, gamblers, gangsters, revolutionaries, refugees and prostitutes. Its reputation for wickedness owed much to thousands of penniless White Russian women who had been driven out of their homeland by the Bolsheviks after the 1917 Revolution.
Morrison drove into Frenchtown, where Russian women disported themselves as hostesses, cabaret artistes, ‘taxi dancers’ (metered for time spent on the dance-floor) and prostitutes, consorting with Occidentals and Orientals alike. In the words of the left-wing American journalist Agnes Smedley, ‘The French Concession smells to high heaven of gangsters and opium and prostitution and White Russian thugs and whores!’
It took Morrison some time to find 29 Rue de Moliere,14 the neat two-storey pebble-dash house that Sun Yat-sen shared with his wife Chingling in a quiet tree-lined street. The shelves of books, the tidy desk with its sheaf of papers and the Western-style furnishings spoke of a life of study and quiet domesticity; it was the home of a professor or a poet. Only the brooding presence of Sun’s bodyguard reminded the visitor he was calling on a violent revolutionary.
Sun had abandoned his Japanese suit and was
dressed in flowing Chinese robes. He was ‘very cordial and sincere’, Morrison noted, and possessed of ‘a certain magnetism which I did not previously notice’. Nor did he appear to have aged – his young wife had given him a new lease of life and was keeping the years at bay. Expressing himself forcibly, Sun reminded Morrison that at their previous meeting the Australian had argued in favour of China entering the war on the side of the Allies and repeated that he was opposed to China’s participation. ‘Powers always support the wrong side,’ he said, ‘as they did with the Taipings and now the Northern Party.’
Morrison was back in Peking following his Australian sojourn when the Armistice was declared in Europe on 11 November 1918, generating widespread joy throughout China. The Chinese had high hopes that the Peace Conference at Versailles would abolish extraterritoriality and return Shantung to the republic, thus removing the stain of the Japanese violation. The decision would be in the hands of the ‘Big Four’ among the peacemakers – Woodrow Wilson of the United States, Lloyd George of Britain, Georges Clemenceau of France and Vittorio Orlando of Italy. Morrison and Donald also hoped President Wilson’s Fourteen Points enshrining the principle of justice and equality for all peoples, ‘whether they be strong or weak’, would be accepted.15
Morrison reached Paris at the end of January 1919 just as the conference was discussing these vital questions. China’s brilliant 32-year-old minister to Washington, Wellington Koo, made an impassioned speech for the return of Chinese territory and everything seemed to be going China’s way. Surely the peacemakers would recognise the fact that whereas Japan had done none of the fighting against Germany, China’s labour battalions had suffered almost 2000 deaths on the Western Front while carrying out vital work for the Allies.
Woodrow Wilson’s first priority, however, was the founding of the League of Nations and that meant dealing with a Japanese proposal for a clause in the league’s charter ensuring racial equality. ‘Now is the time,’ the Japanese delegation leader, Prince Saionji, told delegates, ‘to confront international racial discrimination.’16
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