by John Keay
For the Qing and Li Hongzhang it was an unmitigated disaster. While in thirty years of Self-Strengthening, China had yet to find a firearm for every conscript, a field gun for every detachment, or sufficient ships – bought, built, reconditioned – for a couple of fleets, the Japanese had constructed a large modern navy and trained up the only professional army east of India. Defeat followed defeat as the Chinese were quickly driven out of Korea. Within a couple of months the Japanese were at the Chinese border and not inclined to stop there. Crossing the Yalu River, they occupied Liaodong to within easy reach of the Great Wall. Meanwhile at Weihaiwei, a naval base on the tip of the Shandong peninsula, they found the Chinese fleet sheltering beneath coastal defences. Japanese marines promptly took the defences from the land and then emptied the base’s big guns into the Chinese fleet. One of the Qing’s two battleships was sunk, plus four of its ten cruisers. Coupled with the earlier losses at Fuzhou, China’s coastline lay almost as undefended as it had in the 1840s.
Prince Gong, who had lately been in disgrace, and Li Hongzhang, who soon would be, were sent to Tokyo to sue for peace. In the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki, the most humiliating in modern Chinese history, they had to accept an indemnity about five times that exacted by the Western allies in 1860, concede to Japan the whole of Taiwan, the Pescadores and Liaodong (the last later commuted for a further indemnity), open four new treaty ports, including Chongqing above the Yangzi gorges in Sichuan, and of course recognise Korea’s ‘full and complete’ independence – ‘which, under the circumstances, effectively made Korea a Japanese protectorate’.9 Li Hongzhang’s reputation never entirely recovered. Given no credit for his pre-war moderation, he was vilified for the treaty and blamed for having diverted funds from the navy to pay for the dowager empress’s new Summer Palace and its defiantly eloquent folly. This was a lakeside marble pavilion in the form of a two-deck pleasure barge, with paddle-wheels, which still graces the palace’s Kunming Lake; unserviceable, it was at least unsinkable. With Shimonoseki and the fall from favour of Li Hongzhang, Self-Strengthening seemed to be getting nowhere; more radical solutions were being canvassed.
FROM EMPIRE TO REPUBLIC
In the dying years of the nineteenth century the scramble for concessions among the foreign powers reached fever pitch. Anxiously eyeing one another’s gains, the British, French, Russians and Americans (not to mention the Spanish, Belgians, Austrians and Italians) strove to restrain Japan’s appetite for Chinese territory while accommodating another voracious latecomer in the shape of Bismarck’s new Germany. With missionaries to protect and munitions to sell, Germany’s China interests were no more questionable or tenuous than those of its European rivals; but lagging well behind them in the acquisition of foreign markets, it could ill afford scruples in dealing with what the Kaiser was the first to call die gelbe Gefahr – ‘the yellow peril’.
The concessions now in demand were commercial as well as territorial and included mining rights, transport systems and industrial ventures, any of which might become a nucleus of extraterritoriality as well as a source of income. Affording the Chinese a foretaste of the game of Monopoly, the competitors – the warship, the corporate top-hat, etc. – chased each other round the empire’s perimeter snapping up properties, utilities, railways and investment funds, while scooping a share of the indemnities in lieu of passing ‘Go’. The Russians concentrated on Manchuria – or what was left of it after their earlier infringements. In return for their help in persuading the Japanese to relinquish Liaodong, in 1896 the Qing government grudgingly awarded them the right to construct, across what is now the Chinese province of Heilongjiang, that part of the trans-Siberia railway that would connect up Vladivostok. The agreement embodying this concession was negotiated by Li Hongzhang, who, while out of favour, found his services still in demand, and pocketed 3 million roubles for them. Though the railway was technically a joint venture, most of the shares in it were bought by the Russian government, which reserved the right to move troops along it and to police it. A year later, when the Germans were granted the Shandong port of Qingdao in reparation for the murder of some of their more zealous missionaries (‘a splendid opportunity’, the Kaiser called it), the Russians secured a balancing concession. It took the form of a lease of Liaodong (the just-restored southern portion of Manchuria) plus the right to construct another railway to Dalian (Dairen, Dalny), a port on the Lushun peninsula in water still warmer than that at Vladivostok.
By 1898, such was the competition between the foreign powers, and such internally the centrifugal drift of authority to the provinces, that there was a real danger of China sharing Africa’s fate and being scrambled over and partitioned. Russian railway tracks were ensnaring the whole of Manchuria; the Japanese had already detached Taiwan; the Germans were expanding their presence in Shandong; the British and the Americans controlled traffic into the productive interior via the Yangzi; and the French were eyeing up the commercial potential of the Red River into Yunnan. No one wanted to be left out. On the other hand, fragmentation was clearly not in the interests of those with the most investments at risk, such as the British. Yet to prevent it, they saw no alternative to matching the other powers move for move, thus raising the stakes.
To counter the Russians in Lushun and the Germans at Qingdao, in 1898 the naval base at Weihaiwei, more or less midway between the two, was snapped up by the British. They also leased more of the Kowloon peninsula – Hong Kong’s so-called New Territories – to supply and secure that colony; and as of Lord Curzon’s 1899 appointment as Viceroy of India, they opened a new front by asserting commercial interests in Tibet and demanding a frontier demarcation there; much like the Russian manoeuvres in Manchuria thirty years earlier, these Himalayan moves were the prelude to armed intervention in Tibet by the Younghusband expedition in 1904. Not to be outdone, the French leased a port west of Hong Kong and obtained mineral rights in Guangxi and Yunnan. Meanwhile the United States again led the way in levelling the playing field by demanding that any concessions extended to one be open to all.
All of which brought a vigorous if varied Chinese response. It came from students attending the 1895 jinshi examinations in Beijing, who submitted a memorial urging renewed resistance to the Japanese and an inordinately long programme of economic and administrative reforms. It came from émigrés like the young Dr Sun Yat-sen, born in Guangdong but more often overseas in the 1890s as he orchestrated clandestine support for replacing the Qing with a representative government. It came too from senior scholars in the Zeng Guofan tradition who rubbished the hotheads’ talk of a republic (‘Where did they find this word that savours so much of rebellion?’ asked one) and argued that the West’s undoubted expertise could be comfortably accommodated within an ever evolving and progressive Confucian tradition.10 A response came, too, from Chinese ‘compradors’ (commercial intermediaries) in and around the treaty ports who had imbibed the spirit of venture capitalism and begun setting up their own commercial enterprises, competing for industrial concessions, and bitterly resenting those handed on a plate to the foreigner. And it came, finally, from the unenlightened masses who, thanks to the widely dispersed missionaries, could now put a face to the foreign presence; big-nosed and often condescending, the missionaries challenged traditional values, antagonised the local gentry, fanned latent xenophobia, and furnished a handy scapegoat for every fiscal surcharge and crop failure.
Only from the Imperial Palace in Beijing came there no response at all. The Guangxu emperor (r. 1889–1908), an effete young man with a voice that reminded people of the whine of a mosquito, seemed a cipher in the hands of his aunt, the redoubtable Cixi. It was known that he had been reading widely, even studying English. Now in his mid-twenties, it was high time he packed off the dowager empress into retirement and assumed the reins of power. But when, in June 1898, he did just that, it came as a scarcely credible surprise. While Cixi was enjoying a summer retreat in one of her new palaces, the emperor held long consultations with Kang Youwei, a re
nowned scholar who had been behind the students’ 1895 memorial, and then dramatically issued a whole string of modernising edicts. Known as the ‘Hundred Days’ reforms’, they were comprehensive enough. A vast range of educational, military, administrative and economic innovations were announced, designed to overhaul the entire state apparatus and turn Confucian bureaucrats into Confucian technocrats.
But constitutional reform was notably absent; representation was not mentioned, nor was any limitation of the imperial prerogatives. Whether such initiatives would have followed is uncertain, for three months later Cixi staged a comeback. A hundred days having been just long enough for a bureaucratic reaction to set in and military indifference to be evident, she drew up an edict in the emperor’s name that requested the dowager empress to resume her duties immediately. This she then dutifully did, having the emperor cast into palace detention and having six of his leading advisers executed. The reforms died with them, though Kang Youwei escaped to Japan from where Sun Yat-sen was now extending his web of intrigue to mainland China. As so often in the coming years, the great breakthrough had proved deceptive. Instead of advancing the cause of the reform, it had retarded it, provoking the removal of its leadership and cowing moderate opinion.
Two years later, Cixi’s undoubted genius for weathering any crisis was even more in evidence. In late 1899 what history calls the Boxer Rebellion broke out in Shandong. The trouble rapidly spread through Hebei, Shanxi and part of Henan, where many foreigners, mostly missionaries, were massacred. In the summer of 1900, it engulfed Tianjin and Beijing, and resulted in their expatriate communities (including women and children), along with several thousand mainly Christian Chinese, being besieged, often under heavy fire, in their legations and in the grounds of one of Beijing’s Catholic cathedrals. Highly coloured reports that the Beijing contingent had all been massacred provoked an international outcry; and though the reports proved to be incorrect, the besieged did suffer about seventy fatalities, some deprivation and much trauma. The Beijing siege lasted fifty-five days. It was lifted when a 20,000-strong multinational force retook Tianjin and fought its way up to the capital; both cities were then comprehensively pillaged by the foreigners. Among the besieged in the Beijing legations had been the American sinologist Dr W. A. P. Martin and Sir (as he now was) Robert Hart of the Imperial Customs. Each wrote an account of the affair, as did a substantial percentage of their 400 detained comrades. An immense literature was thus generated; in British imperial mythology ‘the Siege of Peking’ took its place alongside those of Lucknow and Ladysmith.
How all this looked from the Chinese side is less well documented. Certainly the Boxer Rebellion was better understood: it was accepted, for instance, that Boxers boxed only for gymnastic exercise and were not technically in rebellion. Born of rural distress plus a belief in the protection afforded by esoteric cults and personal fitness, their movement conformed to a tradition of secret societies that had simmered among the rural masses throughout China’s history, from the Red Eyebrows and the Yellow Turbans to the White Lotus Society of Macartney’s time and the Red Turbans of the Taiping era. In times of crisis, their members might take the lead in acts of defiance and violence which, if not quickly punished, could snowball into mass insurrection. This is what had happened in southern Shandong in late 1899. But instead of targeting Qing officialdom, and so inviting a speedy suppression, the fraternity of ‘righteous and harmonious boxers’ turned on Christians, killing isolated foreigners and destroying the symbols – especially railway tracks and telegraph lines – of what they deemed an insidious, socially disruptive and morally revolting creed. Leadership was noticeably lacking among them, but not organisation. Colourful sashes and bandanas distinguished different troupes; an all-girl force called the Red Lanterns provided support and inspiration; discipline was strict and loot was shared. There was much to admire in such fearless patriots.
Cixi and her reactionary advisers bided their time. The Boxers posed no threat to the dynasty. Reform was not on their agenda; rather would they ‘Support the Qing, Destroy the Foreigner’. Their entry into Beijing therefore went unopposed and their assaults on foreigners unpunished. When, however, Beijing’s foreign diplomats refused an imperial request that, for their own safety, they evacuate the city and withdraw to the coast, Cixi began to view the Boxers as potential liberators from the alien presence. And when a precautionary allied capture of the Dagu forts protecting Tianjin provoked a Qing declaration of war, there could be no question that the Boxers had imperial backing. It struck observers as curious, though, that while the Boxers themselves attacked the Beijing cathedral with its teeming mass of Chinese Christians, they were seldom to be seen around the heavily invested legation quarter. There the assailants appeared to consist entirely of imperial troops.
It was curious, too, that despite overwhelming superiority in numbers and firepower, during eight long weeks these professional troops failed to overwhelm the garden walls and sandbagged barricades of the legations’ makeshift defences. Guns and mortars that would have effectively demolished any but the Imperial City’s gargantuan fortifications were never even deployed. On the contrary, whenever the extinction of the foreigners seemed imminent, the assailants withdrew or offered a truce. Clearly there were those at court who did not share the Boxers’ desire to exterminate the enemy. Meanwhile the country’s other fifteen provinces remained largely unaffected. Business in the treaty ports went on regardless; isolated missionaries outside the three northern provinces went unmolested; anti-foreign interests failed to support the Boxers; provincial governors, with a couple of exceptions, failed to support the court.
When the allied relief force finally reached Beijing, Cixi saw no alternative but to flee along with the imperial household – and not forgetting the emperor. Disguised as peasants, they left the city squatting in wooden carts, like the last of the Han when they slipped out of Luoyang in 189 BC. More like Tang Xuanzang and the delectable Yang Guifei fleeing Chang’an in AD 755, the imperial party was initially at the mercy of its own escort. But matters improved as they moved west into the loyal province of Shanxi and then, for safety’s sake, farther west to Xi’an. There, on the site where imperial Chang’an had once stood, the court-in-exile awaited its fate at the hands of its last invaders.
Li Hongzhang, now in his late seventies, had been ordered back to Beijing as the only official capable of wringing acceptable terms from the eleven international powers that had taken part in the relief. It was his last such service, though by no means the most difficult. For as Robert Hart rightly saw it, the allies had little choice. They could opt for the partition of China, but that would be inviting disaster; for a change of dynasty, but there was no obvious alternative; or for ‘patching up the Manchoo [Manchu] rule . . . [and] in a word’ – or five – ‘making the best of it’.11 Thus it was that under the terms of the Boxer Protocol, in return for the largest of all indemnities (payable over forty years from increased maritime customs), for the execution of ten officials deemed guilty of crimes and for various measures to secure the foreign legations in the future, Cixi and the court were permitted to reoccupy the capital and resume the government. They did so in style, turning what should have been a penitent procession into a triumphal progress. The chance of witnessing the imperial cavalcade making its grand re-entry into Beijing was a sight too good to miss even for the lately besieged; and when Cixi acknowledged them with a few short bows, ‘there came an answering, spontaneous burst of applause’ from the massed foreigners.12
The mystique of the Qing had survived, if not much else. Seven years later the Guangxu emperor made another bid to escape his aunt’s tyranny, this time by dying. Natural causes were suspected; and they appeared confirmed when a few hours later, instead of taking advantage of the new situation, the dowager empress herself passed peacefully away after enjoying a compote of crab-apples. Not for a day, let alone a hundred, was the luckless emperor, even in the afterlife, to be rid of her baleful influence. In all but name
it was she who had been the ‘Last Emperor’; for the Guangxu emperor’s designated successor was his nephew Pu-yi, then two years old and destined never to attain a reign title, only the faintly ridiculous forename of ‘Henry’.
During her last years Cixi had emerged from her customary seclusion to host parties, pose for photos and present Qing rule as more receptive to change. Constitutional reform and curbing the powers of the provincial governors went hand in hand. As of 1909, the first provincial assemblies were elected, albeit on a very limited franchise; they would in turn elect members to a national assembly; both were essentially consultative bodies. At the grassroots level, attempts were made to graft some form of local representation on to the baojia groupings or replace them with self-governing units. But behind the constitutional window-dressing lay a determination to recentralise. A ‘New Army’ under Manchu control was strategically deployed to offset the forces raised by provincial governors, while the most powerful of these governors – such as Yuan Shikai, who had succeeded to Li Hongzhang’s Tianjin power base – were eased from office. Simultaneously attempts to wrest from foreign investors the growing railway network, and especially the new north–south Beijing-to-Hankou line, led to a tug-of-war between Qing centralisers and provincial partisans.