Restless Empire

by Odd Westad

  The students should take Germany as a model for the new China. . . . China in spite of its thousands of years old culture has not achieved anything that can be compared to what Germany has created [here] in the course of twelve years. Streets, buildings, ports, sanitation, all bear witness to diligence and ambition. What the students see here should spur them towards emulation, and it must become their aim to spread this model to all of China and put their homeland in the same state of perfection.11

  While Germany’s possessions in China ended in World War I, the interest in Germany as a possible ally of Chinese republicans continued right up to the outbreak of the next world war. German advisers, among them Max Bauer, one of the leaders of a failed right-wing coup attempt in Germany in 1920, helped reshape the finances and the army of the renewed Guomindang movement as it moved to take control of the country in the late 1920s. Under Chiang Kai-shek, in the 1930s, German advisors moved to the first rank among those supporting the new leadership. Hans von Seeckt, the former general commander of the German army, devised the training of China’s army elite. All military academies and most army units had German officers attached to them. Germany supplied experts and loans for China’s railway construction, German-Chinese trade expanded massively, and Germany became China’s largest supplier of government credit. When Alexander von Falkenhausen, the last of the German chief military advisors, left China in 1938 after Germany had allied itself with Japan, Chiang Kai-shek continued to believe in Germany as a possible model for China’s future.12

  CHINA IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY had to decide not only who its allies would be, but what form of government it would have. The development of a Western-style republic was not a sure thing. During the century’s first decade, the Qing empire tried to defend itself against its enemies, foreign and domestic, and many observers expected it to succeed, as it had done so often before. The Times of London commented in 1909 that “nothing is more surprising than the respectful humility with which the representatives of the foreign Powers submit to indignity at the hands of . . . the Chinese Foreign Office. It would seem as if the old time exclusiveness of the Throne which forbade audience with foreign representatives on any footing of equality had been revived. . . .”13 The Qing knew that foreigners depended on them to achieve anything in China and hoped to turn that dependence to the dynasty’s advantage. But they also wanted their people to see that the government was able to enforce obedience from the populace, undertake necessary reform, and demand respect from other powers, all as part of the process of modernization. By 1910 both foreigners and revolutionaries alike had started to fear that the Qing of the future would be similar to the Qing of the past, only better organized and better armed.

  Cixi, the empress dowager, died on 15 November 1908. Her nephew, the Guangxu emperor, had passed away the day before—poisoned, it was said, by those who wanted to prevent him ever becoming ruler in his own right again. The empress dowager had dominated the Court for forty-seven years. Her aim in the last few years of her life, she said, was to prepare the dynasty for another domestic battle for power, as happened with the great rebellions of the mid-nineteenth century. She agreed to the principle of a constitution and to limited forms of representative government in the provinces, measures that the Qing elite hoped would strengthen the dynasty’s claim to power at the center. Cixi also abolished the imperial examination system and began a series of administrative reforms, based on reports by officials who had visited the United States, Europe, and Japan. Already in 1901, after the Boxer disaster, Cixi had set out a new course of gradual reform:

  The weakness of China is caused by the strength of convention and the rigid network of regulations. We have many mediocre officials but few men of talent and courage. The regulations are used by mediocre men as the means of their self-protection, and taken advantage of by government clerks as sources of profit. The government officials exchange numerous documents but they never touch reality. The appointment of capable men is restricted by regulations so rigid that even men of exceptional talent are missed. What misleads the country can be expressed in one word, selfishness, and what suffocates all under heaven is precedent.14

  An early feature of the reform was a new office of foreign affairs. Waiwubu, created in 1901 after much foreign pressure, replaced the Zongli Yamen. In many ways the Waiwubu became a model for how the other new ministries were supposed to work. While the old Zongli Yamen dealt with all foreign matters—everything from cheese to railways—the new ministry dealt exclusively with the foreign relations of the Chinese government. It set about attempting to reverse the effects of the treaties that had been imposed on China. But it was also on the lookout for whatever would serve the dynasty’s interests, especially access to credit, technology, and military equipment. In some ways, the pattern of interaction abroad that the Qing New Policy (xinzheng) aimed at was not so different from the Four Modernizations of the Chinese Communist Party after its self-inflicted disasters of the 1960s and 1970s.

  The 1906 administrative and constitutional reform was an attempt to make the empire look like a Westernized state to its foreign rivals. It was also a concession to those who wanted more democracy at home. The fact-finding reports that the new arrangement was built on came from two “constitutional expeditions.” Both groups went to Japan, the United States, and Europe. One focused on Germany, the other on Britain and France, meeting local politicians and experts—the group visiting London was addressed by Percy Ashley, a young history lecturer at the London School of Economics, on the different branches of the British government.15 In the end the Japanese model won out. In August 1908 the Qing promised its people that it would introduce constitutional rule over the course of nine years, but with an emphasis on the powers of the executive branch, meaning the Qing dynasty itself. All reform had to be gradual, the Court and its supporters believed, or the empire would lose the essence that distinguished it from other countries. And, needless to say, the Qing would lose power in China.

  After Cixi’s death, the imperial family, the Court, and the higher echelons of Qing officialdom concentrated on survival. Their main worries were not the revolutionary opposition, by then mostly in exile or dead. The real threat was that provincial and regional strongmen, in league with foreigners, would break China apart. The Qing strategy was to weaken the provincial leaders and strengthen the central government by whatever means available. The Qing instituted local assemblies to compete for influence in the provinces as part of this strategy. It used foreign loans to take control of all of the railway network, some of which was controlled by foreign companies or by the provinces. The Qing was hoping to buy time for their kind of reform but was also preparing for a showdown.

  THE SHOWDOWN CAME IN OCTOBER 1911. On 9 October, a group of revolutionaries who had infiltrated the army in the central city of Wuhan accidentally blew up the butcher shop in the city’s Russian concession, where they were preparing explosives for use against the Qing. The police arrested two of the conspirators and found their detailed plans for an insurrection.16 The following evening the leaders of the conspiracy acted to save themselves. Knowing that the Qing would be merciless in their pursuit, the young officers took control of a main armory, attacked the governor’s office, and declared their allegiance to a republic of China. After a few days of sporadic fighting, all of Wuhan city was in their hands. They sent telegrams to other provinces to join in defeating the Qing and creating a republic. By late November it was clear that the Qing was in serious trouble. Most provincial strongmen south of the Yangzi had thrown in their lot with the revolutionaries, and power seemed to ebb away from Beijing.

  The international situation was of crucial significance for the outcome of the Chinese revolution. While many Chinese, including the Qing themselves, had expected the great powers to assist the Qing in defeating their enemies, as had happened in the 1860s and in the 1890s, this time around each of them was too preoccupied with other affairs to pay much attention to China. The United States had
its eyes firmly fixed on the Mexican revolution next door. France and Germany were dealing with their rivalries over North Africa. The Russian prime minister had just been assassinated. And Britain was dealing with a hung parliament and a constitutional crisis over home rule for Ireland. Only Japan was leaning toward intervention, but the Japanese elites could not make their minds up about whom to support. They liked the idea of monarchical constitutional government (as in Japan itself), but they knew that supporting various regional strongmen could help Japan further its influence within China. In the end, Britain acted on its need for a Chinese government that could give its business interests enough stability to operate. It would support whoever could hold the country together, if only in the short term. And, as usual, Britain’s approach was the dominant one.

  By the end of 1911, the British settled on the best candidate for keeping China united: the Qing general Yuan Shikai, the hero of the Sino-Japanese war and later viceroy of Zhili, the region around Beijing. Yuan had been purged by the Qing Court in 1909, who feared that he might become too powerful. Now he was made prime minister and head of the Qing army. By December, his forces had pushed their way into Wuhan, forcing the revolutionaries to negotiate. Yuan knew that the conflict was moving toward a stalemate. He was able to take Wuhan but not to reconquer southern China. And he was eager to avoid blame for more Chinese blood to be spilled over a dynasty in which cause he no longer believed. By early 1912, Yuan was in close contact with the heads of the new republic, now headquartered downriver in Nanjing.

  Yuan seemed to be the man to protect Western interests, but it was the revolutionaries who studied Western political ideas and put them into practice. In the southern cities, all sorts of political concepts were propagated openly, from anarchism to constitutional monarchism. Many of the most vocal revolutionaries grounded themselves in a form of nationalism that had developed during the previous decade. They blamed the Qing, now lambasted as “Manchus,” for China’s ills. Hu Hanmin, a key supporter of Sun Yat-sen, had written in 1906, “The Manchu government is evil because it is the evil race which usurped our government, and their evils are not confined to a few political measures but are rooted in the nature of the race and can neither be eliminated nor reformed.”17 Zou Rong, a young revolutionary hero who had died in prison in 1905, struck the same notes in a text that was widely distributed in 1911. Invoking both the legendary founder of China and the father of the American nation, he wrote:

  Sweep away millennia of despotism in all its forms, throw off millennia of slavishness, annihilate the five million and more of the furry and horned Manchu race, cleanse ourselves of 260 years of harsh and unremitting pain, so that the soil of the Chinese subcontinent is made immaculate, and the descendants of the Yellow Emperor will all become Washingtons. Then they will return from the dead to life again, they will emerge from the Eighteen Levels of Hell and rise to the Thirty Three mansions of Heaven, in all their magnificence and richness to arrive at their zenith, the unique and incomparable of goals—revolution. How sublime is revolution, how majestic!18

  Not surprisingly, Qing officials of non-Han origin were often targeted by the populace after the revolution. In Wuhan, 10,000 were killed. By the 1920s, very few Chinese admitted to having been Qing supporters or members of the Qing nobility.19

  Republican principles now replaced monarchical ones. But the various political groups defined them quite differently. Sun Yat-sen and his Revolutionary Alliance (Tongmenghui) argued for a presidential republic, with an elected executive controlling most state activities. Many of the revolutionaries from central and southern China preferred a federal republic, with a strong position for the provinces. The merchants in the cities argued for a parliamentary republic, in which different social and political constituencies could be represented. What united most groups was the sense of unlimited potential that the revolution had opened up. They felt that China could do what Japan had done, but on a grander scale, and that the new political system must make China rich and strong. The foreign examples that were used were often well beside Chinese realities; as one scholar puts it: “No characteristic of Chinese intellectual life in the decade or so before 1911 is more prominent than foreign influence.”20 While the revolutionaries debated constitutions, Qing officers and officials were preparing for life without the empire.

  The Chinese who dominated society in the last half-generation of Qing rule were a mixture of high-level officials and capitalists. The combination often happened in one and the same person. As in China at the end of the Maoist era or the Soviet Union at the end of Communism, many officials got rich by exploiting contacts within the empire and with foreigners. Yuan Shikai was one of them; he was involved in several enterprises in northern China.21 Huaxin Spinning and Weaving Mill in Shanghai, a legendary firm in the Chinese textile industry, was run by sons of the provincial governor. The commercial interests of these entrepreneurial officials were increasingly tied to limiting Qing power. They feared that a resurgent Court would punish them as corrupt and self-serving. As production, commerce, and trade became more important, the ties that bound China’s elites to the monarchy were worn increasingly thin.

  The Chinese diaspora was crucial to the success of the revolution. News of the extraordinary events in Wuhan found Sun Yat-sen six thousand miles away, in Denver, Colorado, where he was raising money for the cause from local Chinese. It was the culmination of Sun’s travels, which had taken him all over the world on behalf of the Chinese revolution. In a sign of how important the international role was, instead of hurrying straight back to China in October 1911, Sun first went to London and Paris, to negotiate loans for the new republic. He got nothing, but he did return to his homeland armed with the crucial news that neither London nor Paris would likely intervene on behalf of the Qing. Accompanied by his American chief military adviser Homer Lea, a four-foot-eleven-inch hunchbacked “general” and geostrategist, Sun finally made it back to China on Christmas Day 1911. On arrival, he was elected provisional president of the Republic of China, a republic without territory, weapons, or much money besides what overseas Chinese supporters had provided.22

  The rest of the story of the founding of the Chinese republic is easily told. Yuan Shikai betrayed his Qing masters, telling the empress dowager Longyu in February that the only way to save the lives of the imperial family was to issue a proclamation in support of a republican system of government. After long debates at Court and with guarantees being offered for their personal security, she issued a remarkable imperial edict on behalf of the six-year-old emperor on 12 February 1912:

  As a consequence of the uprising of the Republican Army . . . the Empire seethed like a boiling cauldron and the people were plunged into utter misery. . . . It is now evident that the hearts of the majority of the people are in favor of a republican form of government: the provinces of the South were the first to support the cause, and the generals of the North have pledged their support. From the preference of the people’s hearts, the will of heaven can be discerned. How could We bear to oppose the will of millions for the glory of one family? Therefore . . . We and His Majesty the Emperor hereby vest sovereignty in the people and decide in favor of a republican form of constitutional government. Let Yuan Shikai organize with full powers a provisional republican government and confer with the Republican Army as to the methods of union, thus assuring peace to the people and tranquility to the empire, and forming to one Great Republic of China by union heretofore, of the five peoples, namely Manchus, Chinese, Mongols, Mohammedans, and Tibetans together with their territory in its integrity.23

  Having been made president with Qing consent, while keeping the loyalty of the northern army and getting increasing support from foreign governments, Yuan now held most of the cards in the game for power. Sun Yat-sen resigned his provisional presidency the day after the Qing abdication. Yuan took control of the governments both in Beijing and Nanjing as the new president of the Republic of China. Two hundred and sixty years of Qing rule had come
to an end with a whimper, and China’s international role was more undefined than at any other point in its history.

  CHINA’S FIRST EXPERIMENT WITH a Western-style republic was not a happy one. After a hectic period of contestation and constitution-making, Yuan Shikai tried to return to the earlier system, with himself as emperor. He failed dismally, and died in 1916, a broken man. Yuan’s biggest problem was that he could never define clearly to others—or even to himself—what China was supposed to be. Was it an empire aspiring to be a nation-state? Was it a coalition of different peoples, which because of a long historical tradition had become one country? Yuan, like his successors in what Chinese refer to as the Warlord Era (1916–1928), was caught between different concepts of China and its political future. His foreign advisors—of whom there were many, especially Americans—supported Yuan’s somewhat self-fulfilling prophecy that China was not ready for democracy in any form. One of them, the later president of Johns Hopkins University Frank Goodnow, who was Yuan’s chief legal adviser, opined that

  China has never really known any sort of government but personal government in accordance with immemorial custom. The Chinese people . . . are at present incapable of any large measure of social cooperation. . . . Under these conditions all in the nature of political reform which can be accomplished at present is to place by the side of a powerful executive a body which shall more or less adequately represent the classes of the people conscious of common interests. . . . It is extremely doubtful whether real progress in the direction of constitutional government in China will be made by a too violent departure from past traditions, by the attempt . . . to establish a form of government, which, while suited to other countries, does not take into account the peculiar history of China and the social and economic conditions of the country.24