Restless Empire

by Odd Westad

  Our scholars are now without solid and practical education; our artisans are without scientific instructors; when compared with other countries we soon see how weak we are. Does anyone think that our troops are as well drilled or as well led as those of the foreign armies? Or that we can successfully stand against them? Changes must be made to accord with the necessities of the times. . . . Keeping in mind the morals of the sages and wise men, we must make them the basis on which to build newer and better structures. We must substitute modern arms and western organization for our old regime; we must select our military officers according to western methods of military education; we must establish elementary and high schools, colleges and universities, in accordance with those of foreign countries; we must abolish the wenchang (literary essay) and obtain a knowledge of ancient and modern world-history, a right conception of the present-day state of affairs, with special reference to the governments and institutions of the countries of the five great continents; and we must understand their arts and sciences.13

  But Kang’s proposals for a constitution and a national assembly went too far for the conservatives to accept. Feeling that she alone stood between the empire and chaos, Cixi carried out a coup d’état in September 1898, ending the hundred days of reform. Her repression was intense: With the Guangxu emperor isolated on a small island in a lake inside the Forbidden City (not far, by the way, from where China’s president Liu Shaoqi was to be kept under house arrest during the Cultural Revolution), the empress dowager not only overturned the reforms but also executed a number of reformers, including Kang Youwei’s younger brother. For Cixi and the traditionalists, 1898 was about defending their personal power and defending China from an attack from within that could be more dangerous than any attack from without. In their view, reforms would do the empire no good if by adopting them it lost its Confucian soul.

  To the surprise of everyone, including himself, Kang Youwei escaped the wrath of the Empress Dowager and fled to Hong Kong with the help of British officials. His main collaborator, Liang Qichao, made it to Tokyo on board a Japanese gunboat. Meeting up in Japan, they formed organizations that advocated fundamental reforms in their homeland. Kang and Liang also began translating into Chinese a large number of Western books that had already been translated or summarized in Japanese. Over the next decade they were joined in this effort by other exiles and by students who came to Japan to study at institutions set up for the purpose by the Japanese government. The largest of these, Kobun Gakuin (The Academy of Vast Learning), trained more than 7,000 Chinese in a broad Western curriculum during the 1900s, including Lu Xun, who would become a major writer, and Chen Duxiu, who would cofound the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In 1905 alone there were more than 8,000 Chinese students in Japan, and some of them studied at the best new Japanese universities. At Hosei University, a special program trained them in law and administration. Others studied science, technology, agriculture, or—as did Chiang Kai-shek, who would later fight a seven-year long war against Japan—military affairs and strategy. The Chinese and Japanese worlds of concepts and terms were being more and more closely woven together; thousands of words for new basic terms, from science (kexue) and law (falu) to republic (gonghe) and socialism (shehuizhuyi) came to Chinese through Japanese (a language which of course is, to a large part, written in characters originally borrowed from China).

  The two key concepts that Chinese in Japan and elsewhere discussed in the first decade of the new century were nationalism and republicanism. Unfamiliar and uncomfortable with the Western concept of nation, most Chinese preferred to believe that they lived in an empire ruled according to ancient principles and sustained by a common culture. Even Kang Youwei did not think of the Chinese as a nation; he wanted a constitution and representation, but he wanted to keep the empire in place. But the Japanese example jarred with this interpretation. Did not the Japanese emphasis on their uniqueness as a nation and on the bonds of blood and heritage that united them help make Japan an efficient and motivated modern country? Did not the Europeans and their new thinkers stress the universal applicability of the nation state in international relations? Younger Chinese scholars such as Zhang Binglin openly argued for the overthrow of the Qing and the establishment of a Chinese national state:

  Today five million Manchus rule over more than four hundred million Han only because rotten traditions make the Han stupid and ignorant. If the Han people should one day wake up, then the Manchus would be totally unable to rest peacefully here, like the Austrians in Hungary or the Turks in the former Eastern Roman Empire. It is human nature to love one’s own race and to seek gain for oneself.14

  Unlike Japan, where the reigning dynasty could be portrayed as holding the nation together, China had a dynasty that the nationalists saw as part of the problem. But if the Qing were to be overthrown, who should replace them? Few descendants of the last Chinese dynasty, the Ming, were still around, and the Ming had of course itself failed in the seventeenth century by letting the Manchus come to power.

  Chinese republicanism—intimately connected to a new debate about democracy and representation—developed in exile, first and foremost in Japan, though one of its earliest advocates was Sun Yatsen, who spent most of his first period of exile elsewhere. Like many ideas that entered into the hothouse of debate and contention around the turn of the century, Chinese concepts of democracy were mostly amalgams of Western models and earlier Chinese thought, first and foremost about people’s rights and about representation at Court. And some of the first concrete proposals for a Chinese republic were inspired by Japanese intellectuals who argued for China to adopt the political system that they wanted, but did not dare ask for, in Japan. In Tokyo in 1905, several Chinese revolutionary groups founded the Tongmenghui, the League of Common Alliance. In its manifesto, written by Hu Hanmin, one of Sun’s disciples, Hu emphasized Sun’s version of republicanism:

  That absolute monarchy is unsuitable to the present age requires no argument. It is but natural therefore that those who propose new forms of government in the twentieth century should aim at the rooting out the elements of absolutism. Revolutions broke out in China one after another in the past, but because the political system was not reformed, no good results ensued. Thus, the Mongol dynasty was overthrown by the Ming, but within three hundred years the Chinese nation was again on the decline. For although foreign rule was overthrown and a Chinese regime was installed in its place, the autocratic form of government remained unchanged, to the disappointment of the people. We can overthrow the Manchus and establish our state because Chinese nationalism and democratic thought are [now] well developed.15

  While the small group of revolutionaries was right that China was heading into unchartered waters in terms of its politics, they could not have been more wrong on Chinese nationalism and democracy. The Tongmenghui manifesto, with its echoes of Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill (via their Japanese messengers Nakamura Keiu and Fukuzawa Yukichi), was for China’s future, not its present. The ideas about nation and governance that Chinese picked up in Japan would play only a small part in the death throes of the Qing empire, especially since the empire itself—though weakened—still had a decent arsenal of both ideological and material weapons with which to defend itself.

  Japan’s 1895 victory in the war with China meant that China was no longer the center of international affairs in East Asia. It did not, however, mean that Japan had replaced it. As the Meiji leaders had feared, the European powers and the United States were intent on preventing domination of a region by one power, and an Asian power at that. Just as most Europeans had failed to understand the ramifications of the remarkable rise of Japan, the Japanese had not grasped that all Western powers could come together against it. And since the Europeans had already taken control of most of the rest of the world, Japan needed to consolidate its predominance within its own region. As Tokutomi Soho, one of the many Japanese liberals who had influenced the Chinese in Japan, wrote in 1896,

  T
he countries of the Far East falling prey to the great powers of Europe is something that our nation will not stand for. East Asia becoming a mire of disorder is something that our nation will not tolerate. We have a duty to radiate the bright light of civilization beyond our shores and bring the benefits of civilization to our neighbors. We have the duty to guide backward countries to the point of being able to govern themselves. We have the duty to maintain peace in East Asia for this purpose. As a man has his calling, so too does a nation have its mission.16

  AS THE TWENTIETH CENTURY PROCEEDED, Japan eliminated more and more of the liberal and constitutional principles that so many Asians were first inspired to follow in Tokyo. The Chinese who admired Japan also worried about its increasing subjugation of Korea and the occupation of Taiwan. But with the European powers pushing harder than ever for the expansion of their zones of control inside China, Japan was less of a concern to the Chinese at the beginning of the century. In spite of the war and the Chinese losses, Japan had after all withdrawn from the areas it had occupied inside China. Tellingly, the same ports from which the Japanese had moved out—Lüshun (Port Arthur) and Dalian in Liaodong, Qingdao and Weihaiwei in Shandong—were taken over by the Europeans (the first two by Russia, and the latter two by Germany and Britain respectively). The Russian expansion was of particular worry to the Qing government, since all of Manchuria seemed set for Russian control, with railway lines and commercial settlements spreading out from foreign strongholds in Harbin and Shenyang (Mukden) toward the coast. To the Qing imperial clan this was of course not about just any territory; it was about the defense of a region it considered its ancestral land.

  Though their own claim to influence in Manchuria was only a decade old, the Japanese leaders were as enraged by the Russian expansion as were the Qing. But while the Qing was powerless (mostly) to resist, Tokyo had both the will and the means to react. Seeking to balance Russian power in East Asia, the Japanese leaders signed an alliance treaty with Russia’s European rival Britain, and engaged in a massive military buildup. Since Japan’s main concern was the security of Korea, and not Manchuria itself, it offered Russia an agreement in which the two countries were to respect each other’s zones of influence. The government of Tsar Nicholas II turned the Japanese emissaries down. Describing them as “monkeys” and their army as “infantile,” the tsar wanted war.17 On 8 February 1904 Japan attacked, and before the declaration of war had been received in Saint Petersburg, the Japanese navy had badly damaged the Russian Far Eastern Fleet at Lüshun. After landing reinforcements in Korea, the Japanese army moved north toward Manchuria. While the Russians were still waiting for reinforcements from Europe, Tokyo in reality had already won the war by gaining naval superiority and pushing the Russian army ever further inland. After having taken Lüshun, Japan in early 1905 forced the Russians out of Shenyang after a major battle and in May destroyed the Russian Baltic Fleet, which had just completed a journey of 18,000 miles to reach the front, in the battle of Tsushima. In the latter engagement the Russians lost eight battleships and more than 5,000 sailors. The Japanese losses were 116 men. Russia sued for peace.

  For China, the outcome of the Russo-Japanese war was twofold. Russia’s advance into China had been stopped, while Japan’s had been accelerated. Some of the advisers at Court (and quite a few of their revolutionary opponents) thought the result was the better of two evils: It would be easier to dislodge the Japanese than it would have been the Russians. But the outcome of the war should be balanced by the dispiriting fact that a major war—sometimes referred to with slight hyperbole as “World War 0”—had been fought on Chinese territory without any participation by a Chinese state. When a peace conference was convened in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, under the aegis of Theodore Roosevelt’s administration, China was not even invited to attend. The Portsmouth Treaty transferred Russia’s possessions in Manchuria to Japan, along with the southern part of Sakhalin island. Sovereignty over its territory was to remain with the Qing empire, but the outcome of the war was clear: Japan had become the main power in northern and northeastern China. The Portsmouth Treaty, by the way, won the bellicose Rough Rider Roosevelt the Nobel Peace Prize for 1906, the most unlikely peace laureate until Henry Kissinger in 1973.

  In a sign of what was to come, public dissatisfaction with the Portsmouth Treaty was strong in all three countries. In Japan, the sense that its territorial gain was not commensurate with its military victory fueled nationalist riots in Tokyo and other cities, which forced the resignation of the government. In Russia, its loss gave rise to the 1905 revolution, which forced the Tsar to give up his claim to unlimited power. And in China the seeming powerlessness of the Qing to defend national territory led to a public outcry that forced the regime to agree to a constitution and a national assembly. Just as after World War I in Europe, the governments of the region saw that nationalism could be a double-edged sword, which could be turned against them by those who saw revolution as the remedy for their country’s ills. In China, the Qing for the first time began to fear that the main threat to their rule was not foreign powers, but their own people.

  The Japanese occupation of Taiwan was a key cause for protest among Chinese nationalists. The Qing had claimed sovereignty over the island since the late seventeenth century, but the people of Taiwan had never been fully integrated into the Chinese empire before the island was ceded to Japan in 1895. In many ways it was a typical Qing border region, where local and central jurisdictions competed, and where the few officials who were sent to the island soon realized they had better work with local powerholders and local concepts of justice and order if some form of peace and stability was to be maintained. In the late nineteenth century, the population of 2.5 million was mainly Chinese whose ancestors had emigrated from the mainland, but most of these were concentrated in towns along the western coast, leaving most of the inland and the mountainous east coast to Taiwanese aboriginals. After the first and inglorious Japanese landing on the island in 1874, the Chinese government had tried to beef up its claim of controlling the island by building roads and a railway line, setting up schools, and promoting trade as well as agriculture. When the island was ceded to Japan in 1895 there was enough local elite resistance to help form a rebel Republic of Taiwan—the first Chinese republic anywhere and indeed the first republic of any kind in East Asia—which aimed at keeping the island Chinese through appealing to principles of popular sovereignty. But overwhelmed by Japanese power and ignored by the world’s governments, the republic died after a few months.

  After being the first republic, Taiwan became Japan’s first colony. The Japanese leaders were keenly aware of how the Western great powers were watching their every move. The great question was whether a new non-European state could establish a modern colony and run it successfully. In Japan, as in the United States, which got its first subject territories (including the Philippines) at about the same time, opinion was divided. Some advocated full assimilation, making the Taiwanese Japanese linguistically, culturally, and eventually also politically, while others believed that the ethnic divides were too great to be bridged and that the island had to be ruled as separate from Japan, with its own laws and political system. The latter form of thinking held the upper hand in the first phase of the colonization. Colonial administrators viewed Taiwan as an exotic and disorderly territory, the population of which consisted of three main groups: Chinese who would go back to mainland China, Chinese who would become loyal to Tokyo, and aboriginals, who could be contained and kept in a permanently weakened condition, much as the United States had done with the Native Americans.

  Most Chinese in Taiwan soon began working within the new colonial system. For some, the Japanese takeover meant new business opportunities or improved conditions for agriculture. For almost all, new programs for education, public health, and local administration meant a substantial improvement in the standard of living, so that a significant number of Taiwanese welcomed the new policies of integration and assimilation that
came out of the liberal political leadership in Japan after World War I. The Taiwanese elite increasingly got its education at Japanese universities, started wearing Japanese clothes, and began making use of Japanese law to protect their business holdings (including on the Chinese mainland, where they could make use of Japanese rights of extra territoriality). From the 1920s on, a rapidly expanding elite became more and more bilingual, as shown in the development of a distinct Taiwanese literature, written in Chinese or Japanese, which helped form a sense of identity. The business opportunities and the social and political stability of the island ended up attracting people from the mainland as well; in 1936, the year before the next Sino-Japanese war broke out, more than 60,000 Chinese came to Taiwan to work or to settle.18

  When China and Japan again went to war in 1937, many Taiwanese were caught in a horrible dilemma between the two lineages of their identity. The 1920s and 1930s had seen an increasingly self-confident Chinese leadership on the island. But it was divided between those who sought greater autonomy for Taiwan under Japan and those who hoped for reunification with the mainland. More than 200,000 Taiwanese volunteered for the Japanese armed forces, while many of their countrymen chafed under Tokyo’s attempts at forced assimilation during the war, including ill-conceived ideas such as transplanting the Shinto religion onto Taiwan and requiring Chinese to adopt Japanese names.19 As a colonial project, Taiwan, like Hong Kong, made it possible for people to create a new identity, but they also ran the risk of seeing that identity blown to pieces when the forces of history changed. Without forgetting their Chinese origins, the Taiwanese became both the beneficiaries and the victims of the rise of Japan.