Stilwell and the American Experience in China

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Revolution now seemed to many the only way to restore China’s independence and equality among nations. Although the foreign Concession was the enemy, Sun Yat-sen himself was too Westernized to be antiforeign, and indeed firmly believed that his country’s dependence was too ingrained to do without foreign loans and skills to help her modernize. He regarded the Revolution as primarily anti-Manchu because China would remain weak as long as she remained under the usurping dynasty responsible for her decline, “and her weakness will endanger world peace by exciting the greed of other nations.” By giving China a strong modern regime, the Revolution, he believed, would be furthering the peace of the world and would welcome the foreign aid which the powers, in recognition of its role, would certainly offer. “He did not have a Chinese mind,” according to his wife, “he had a world mind.”

  Through the first decade of the twentieth century the illegal Revolutionary societies, operating first from Japan and afterwards from offshore and overseas communities, grew and gathered adherents on the mainland, especially in the two southern provinces of Kwangtung and Kwangsi. With Canton, its capital, commanding the trade through Hong Kong, Kwangtung was the richest province in China and its people were sympathetic to the Revolution because they wanted a country that could maintain prosperity. Six uprisings, directed by Sun Yat-sen from Hanoi, took place in the south in 1907–09 with no fixed objective except the hope that one or another would catch on. Through 1910, while Dr. Sun was in Europe and America collecting funds, the tempo quickened. Coups were attempted in Canton, Hankow and even Peking where Dr. Sun’s lieutenant, Wang Ching-wei, went to blow up the Prince Regent and was discovered and sentenced to life imprisonment in chains. Owing to arms shipments that did not arrive, leaders who missed arranged times, and other mishaps and blunders, all the uprisings failed but they dramatized the cause, attracted recruits and spread the spirit of insurrection.

  In October 1911 the Revolutionists planned another coup in the focal triple-city of Hankow-Hanyang-Wuchang (otherwise known as Wuhan) astride the Yangtze. An arsenal was located in Hanyang and Revolutionary conversions had been made among the Imperial regiments at Wuchang.

  An accidental explosion went off, prematurely disclosing the preparations. At once the decision was taken to attack the Viceroy’s headquarters and seize the garrison. On the tenth day of the tenth month, ever afterwards celebrated as the Double Ten, the venture miraculously succeeded. The regiment mutinied and the Viceroy and garrison commander fled in panic to Shanghai, leaving the Revolutionists masters in the heart of China—without a chief. Assembling to elect a leader, a Revolutionary council chose the Colonel of the regiment, Li Yuan-hung, and despatched a delegation to inform him of his fate. Hearing the approach of his visitors, the Colonel, expecting the worst, hid under his bed where he was discovered by a telltale foot, and on being pulled out was ceremoniously petitioned to lead the Revolution or be shot. He took the sensible choice and as Generalissimo of Revolutionary Armies proclaimed the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty.

  Within two days the whole of the triple-city was in rebel hands. The comrades in Canton rose in response, effectively at last, and succeeded in assassinating the garrison commander and setting up a Revolutionary Government. These events set off a train of insurrections elsewhere in China; provincial capitals burned, governors were murdered, regiments mutinied. Within a month nine provinces had declared their independence of the Imperial Government, though not necessarily their common adherence to one Revolutionary regime. Separatism had begun.

  The dynasty, alarmed at last, called upon its strong man, Yuan Shih-kai, a short, thickset man with alert eyes and a mustache, who looked like Georges Clemenceau and like him was exceptionally able and ambitious. Yuan recaptured Hankow at the end of October with accompanying massacre of all who had cut off their queues or otherwise come out in support of the rebellion. The Revolutionists meantime had moved their base to Shanghai, ironically finding asylum under the extrality of the foreign Concessions. A deal was arranged whereby Shanghai with its money, industry, arsenals and dockyards accepted the Republic on November 3. Yuan Shih-kai, appreciating the trend, offered to negotiate on the basis of a constitutional monarchy for whose throne, as the future was to show, he had himself in mind. The Revolutionists, fatally lacking a prepared and solid base or a single strong-minded leader, bargained. While insisting on a republic, they offered Yuan the presidency if in return he would bring north China under the new regime. Peking offered him the post of premier, putting him in the position, possibly unique in history, of being sought for leadership by both a revolution and a counter-revolution at the same time. Yuan accepted the premiership from the Manchus and resumed the struggle. The Revolutionists now mounted an offensive from Shanghai up the Yangtze against Nanking.

  Behind the main events the old structure was coming apart in chaos, provincial oligarchs were seizing what power they could, rebel forces burned and slaughtered in the cities they took and the Imperialists did likewise in the cities they held. Refugees in destitute hordes were roaming the land. The countryside suffered more than ever, for now wandering bands of soldiers as well as bandits plundered stored grain and livestock. Bandits flourished as unpaid soldiers sold them cartridges or joined forces with them. Villages fought with hoes, pitchforks and sticks, barred their gates, built up their walls and let in travelers by lowered ropes. The collapse of government seemed imminent but the Revolution carried small assurance of anything stable to take its place. Its aims, though worthy, wrote an American correspondent, “are brought to nought by lack of cohesion, lack of funds and lack of a leader….This great nation, long dormant, is erupting in passions, terror and fanaticism.”

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  At this stage, on November 23, Stilwell reached Shanghai for what was to be a total of 17 days in the country. He barely saw the surface of the turmoil and arrived at no profound judgments, but he observed and noted with tireless curiosity. The view he obtained exhibits a truth often missed by historians—that under the shadow of awful events ordinary life goes on, as it must, much as always. After visiting Shanghai he continued by ship to Hong Kong and was impressed by that daring city “apparently hung on the hillside” over its magnificent harbor. Here as elsewhere east of Suez the British flag was planted with a flair for imperial showmanship upon the highest ground. Thirty-six oceangoing steamers were in port as Stilwell came in. Sampans swarmed around his ship, each one a household including chickens. “Wife steers and kids push on the oars. Everyone does something.” After Thanksgiving dinner in a family boardinghouse kept by Americans, he took the Peak tram to the summit where the famous view over the harbor was “superb, the best panorama I can remember.”

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  He remarked on the queer appearance of Chinese who had just cut off their queues and admired the English drill sergeants who “for commands, appearance and results beat our average officer 500%.” The English officer, on the other hand, he decided, in the first statement of what was to become a historic prejudice, “is a mess. At least here in Hong Kong. Untidy, grouchy, sloppy, fooling around with canes, a bad example for the men.” The cane was the irritant. All his life the sight of an officer of whatever nationality slapping his boot with a swagger stick caused Stilwell the most intense disgust. In Hong Kong, he concluded, all the enlisted men were more soldierly than any of the officers he saw.

  While he was there the newspapers were full of reports of chaotic conditions in Canton, fighting in the streets, armed bands of hoodlums looting the shops, bystanders killed, the Revolutionary regime wholly inefficient, the city practically in the hands of brigands and pirates swarming in the West River. They were said to have cut off Wuchow and murdered the chief officer of a British riverboat. Deciding that “all the trouble was worked up by the bloody British who are trying to make things as bad as possible to justify intervention on their part,” Stilwell promptly went off to Canton and up-river to Wuchow to see for himself.

  All the color and vitality, the physical welter
of smells, sounds and bodies, the antiquity and infinite ingenuities, the charms and horrors of Chinese life engulfed him in Canton. He saw a cat and dog market where cats were cooked, split and hung up for sale and dog stew dished out of a pot; a water clock dating from 1325 in which water, trickling through a series of pans and activating an upright arm on a float, told the time, “accurately too”; a temple roof decorated with exuberant carved dragons painted in brilliant colors and two big and fierce red lions peeking over the gate. He wandered through a maze of narrow stone-paved streets and alleys filled with Chinese running into each other, “hurling imprecations and warnings and crying their wares” with shouts, chants, tinkling bells or the clacking of sticks on blocks of wood. Sellers and buyers of everything conducted business in the streets, weighing and bargaining, women picking over chicken bones in a basket, a tailor sewing, a man stuffing straw into pots, another weighing fish, another selling human hair (“Chink cuts off his hair, puts it on newspaper and has a store.”). He took note of opium smokers, ducks raised on junks, singsong girls, burial mounds, joss sticks burning in doorways, idlers gossiping while they deloused the seams of their clothing and ate the findings, eggs hatching in rice straw, pawn shops, pet larks in cages, the squeal of pigs and cackle of hens, the smell of urine and of the public closets which were “just a row of stalls with a log to squat on, in places kids defecating in the streets.” China was a contrast between a man making ornaments of kingfisher feathers cut and pasted in tiny pieces of pale blue and mauve to imitate enamel, and “puddles, mud, filth, refuse, rags, glimpses into mysterious interiors.”

  He talked to the “rebs, a motley gang,” some of whom “looked like good hombres but most of them were pirates for fair.” They attempted a uniform—pale blue blouse and trousers with red trimmings, khaki strap, puttees and brigand wrappings. “Many had new ammo belts and plenty of cartridges, some were standing around pistol in hand, finger on trigger….I showed them I was a reb by my red tie and blue shirt and that quite tickled them. All bowed and said goodbye.” The Canton Bomb Corps, he noted, consisted of 300 men of good standing, all sworn to do or die, whose weapons were small homemade bombs containing a tube of mercury fulminate and vaseline. He went to Shameen Island, the foreign Concession, and visited the Club where the foreigners “just fight booze.” Bullion and valuables worth between two and six million, he was told, were stored by wealthy Chinese on Shameen. He collected Chinese legends and superstitions and a variety of stories exhibiting missionaries in an unfavorable light. He traveled for a day in the company of an American booster of missionary efforts who harangued him about all that Protestant Christians were doing for the people and told him, “When we step in here we bridge over in a second twelve hundred years of history.”

  After seeing Canton Stilwell boarded a steamboat for the 200-mile trip up the West River to Wuchow, convoyed by the Sandpiper, a British gunboat of 85 tons. Tales of pirates proved to be no fantasy. At one stop they met “Rebs” in a fleet of two gunboats, three launches and five or six junks just returning from a scrap with river bandits. They saw corpses floating by in the water and learned the details of a big scrap two weeks earlier in which Wuchow’s forces attacked a band of pirates, took 66 prisoners whom they beheaded the next day, afterwards cutting out their hearts which they roasted and ate. It was a common thing, Stilwell learned, to eat the hearts or livers of executed pirates, or in one case, he was told, the whole man; “they ate him so he could not be reincarnated as a pirate.” With understandably heightened imagination he awoke in a fright when the anchor dropped at Samshui. “Thought sure we were being attacked. Hopped out of a sound sleep and grabbed for my gun.”

  By the time he returned to Canton he had spent a week on the river, watching life and death along its banks and on the water, absorbing all he saw or was told, making notes on habits, methods and the prices of everything, being informed that a duck will cackle at a foreigner’s approach and concluding that the average Chinese flies into a fury of passion which passes off in words. He had not seen a fight in spite of innumerable collisions.

  When still in Hong Kong he had noted in his diary, “400 heads a day in Nanking.” This was the harvest of the fall of the ancient southern capital to the rebels on November 27. The event proved a catalyst. Hoping to hold rule for the dynasty, the Regent resigned in favor of the late Emperor’s widow but the Revolutionary south declared it would accept nothing less than total abdication. An exodus of Manchus took the road for Manchuria whence long ago they had come. Mongolia declared independence. Despite some apoplectic sentiment in the Treaty Ports for intervention against the rebels, the powers kept hands off. There was a general sense that the Revolution, as Western-oriented, would be less antiforeign than the old regime which, with Boxer days a recent memory, the powers felt no great desire to preserve. There was a sense too that China was drifting into political chaos in which intervention could be disastrous. The future weighed heavily and moved one sober voice*2 to say, “It has never been doubtful to men who have given the subject careful study that the relations of Asia to the rest of the world constitute the most difficult problem of the twentieth century.”

  Others, stirred to enthusiasm by the Revolutionary’s promise of liberal, Western, parliamentary ideas, were more optimistic. “We thought high and noble thoughts,” wrote one American trader, “about China and the new era that was dawning.” This was the attitude, on the whole, of the American public which wanted to believe what the missionaries were always promising, that China of the 400,000,000 was about to transform itself into that desirable and familiar thing, a democracy. That the 400,000,000 were a people 70 to 80 percent illiterate, who on the average had no milk and virtually no other animal products in their diet, who had no sanitation, no running water, no privacy, no electricity, no vote, whose industry was still 90 percent handiwork and whose transportation was still largely conducted by human muscle, was not considered, if considered at all, incompatible with democracy. When a rebel leader in Hankow, out of Oriental politeness which believes in telling people what presumably they want to hear, said to reporters that “the object of our revolt is to make the Government of China like that of America,” nothing could have seemed more natural to American readers.

  Stilwell left China to return to Manila on December 9. The Revolution wobbled forward. Negotiations took the place of a military solution and resulted in Yuan Shih-kai formally recommending to his principals the necessity of accepting the Republic. Meanwhile Sun Yat-sen had finally arrived in China on December 25 and was duly elected President of the provisional Republic established at Nanking. For the Manchus support had run out and the end had come. On February 12, 1912, the Empress Regent abdicated on behalf of the dynasty.

  China was now a Republic. As such she was welcomed by Joint Resolution of the United States Congress: “Whereas the Chinese Nation has successfully asserted that sovereignty resides in the people” and whereas the American people are “inherently and by tradition sympathetic to all efforts to adopt representative government,” therefore the United States “congratulates the people of China on their assumption of the powers, duties and responsibilities of self-government” in the hope that under a republican form of government “…the happiness of the Chinese people will be secure and the progress of the country insured.”

  It was not to be that simple. Yuan Shih-kai remained in control of north China, which he withheld from accession to the Republican regime.

  He maneuvered and waited. Lacking united support or firm authority or a reliable military arm, Sun Yat-sen could not prevail. More negotiations ensued with unavoidable result. On March 12, 1912, Dr. Sun retired as President in favor of Yuan Shih-kai, who reestablished the Government at Peking. In this unstable mongrel resolution China’s modern age began.

  * * *

  *1 This shortened form of extraterritoriality was generally in use at the time and has been adopted here.

  *2 John Foord, Secretary of the American-Asiatic Association.
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  The Great War: St. Mihiel and Shantung

  TO THE AMERICAN ARMY OFFICER the years 1912 to 1917, when Stilwell was twenty-nine to thirty-four, were not challenging and offered little opportunity to exercise the energies maturing in a man of that age. Although the military profession in Europe met its ultimate challenge halfway through this period, the American Army remained a millpond barely ruffled by the transatlantic breeze of war.

  Stilwell had returned to the United States from the Philippines in January 1912. He remained for another year with his regiment, still as a lieutenant, in a dead calm of duty at the Presidio of Monterey in California. His first son, Joe Jr., was born in Syracuse in March and Stilwell did not see him until six weeks later when mother and child came out to California for the summer. During this summer the Stilwells saw for the first time the little village of Carmel, then still undeveloped and unprettified, on the coast just below Monterey. Taking picnics on the beach and wind-swept walks on rocks pounded by the Pacific, they decided that here was the place where they wanted to live someday and make their home after retirement.

  Restless as ever, Stilwell agitated for appointment as Military Attaché to Santo Domingo, without success. He was requested, however, by the Military Academy to return as Instructor in the Department of English and History and took up his duties once more at West Point in August 1913. Although duty at the Academy was better than the tedium of an Infantry post, it did not absorb his energies. He was “a very capable officer,” reported his superior, but “he did not impress me as being enthusiastic over his work in the Department of History.” He coached basketball and football and saw the addition to his family of a daughter, Nancy, born in June of the following year. But his role as a father had not yet assumed the paramount importance that it would come to have for him when the children grew older and more were added. Before a year had gone by at the Academy, Joe, as his wife remembers, “was wild to get away from West Point.”