by John Keay
The abolition of foot-binding in 1902 and of the examination system in 1905, though notable concessions to modernity, also served a political agenda; gatherings of revolutionaries could no longer pass themselves off as do-gooding ‘natural foot’ societies; and ending the exams, which had anyway been widely suspended under the terms of the Boxer Protocol, enhanced the credentials of those who had already secured degrees while swelling the ranks of the new naval and military academies. Additionally, there were now scholarships for students to pursue further education overseas. Japan proved especially popular; it was not just nearer than Europe or America but, thanks to its Confucian heritage and Chinese script, intellectually more accessible.
The Japanese model of modernisation also had much to recommend it. There the monarchy continued to be revered but had been reduced to constitutional status by the introduction of a parliamentary structure. Land tenure had been reformed, education redirected and heavy industries developed. ‘Rich Country, Strong Army’ being the slogan, a centralised government had forged national solidarity by giving the highest priority to the economy and the military. It had paid off in the Sino-Japanese war over Korea in 1894, and it was vindicated again when in 1904–5 a Russo-Japanese war broke out over concessions in both Korea and Manchuria. The Japanese navy destroyed the Russian fleet much as it had the Chinese ten years earlier; an Asian country thus notched up its first victory over a European empire; and Japan won recognition as one of the great powers. Dazzled by this Japanese model, Kang Youwei, the distinguished scholar who had advised the Guangxu emperor on his ‘Hundred Days’ reforms and was now in exile in Japan, headed a reform party that promoted the constitutionalising of the Qing monarchy as the best way to provide the sanction for an equally radical restructuring of China’s social economy.
But there were other models to which students and activists could turn in their search for a solution to China’s plight. Western-style democracy based on electoral representation also attracted interest. A Qing delegation seeking constitutional ideas visited the United States and Britain in 1905. Two years earlier Liang Qichao, one of Kang Youwei’s associates, had preceded them and been received by President Teddy Roosevelt. But Liang Qichao came away disappointed. American democracy seemed to spawn ‘mediocre politicans, corruption, disorder, racism, imperialism’. ‘In short,’ noted the late J. K. Fairbank, most prolific and influential of America’s sinologists, ‘he got our number, and it turned him off.’ Since the Confucian ideal of government assumed a harmony of interest between the ruler and the ruled, in China, according to Fairbank, the individual was naturally more disposed to adhere than to confront, to conform than to contest. Democracy thus carried, and still carries ‘right through to Mao and Deng’ (Fairbank was writing in the 1970s), a collective connotation. The people are one – just as singular and plural are one, being the same written character. They, the people, are not a multiplicity; it, the people, is an entity. Says Fairbank, ‘Nation came before individual,’ adding, ‘This was not a doctrine of human rights.’13
Nationalism was common to all schools of thought. The mere fact of exposure to the foreign, whether in and around the treaty ports and mission stations or through overseas travel, instilled a new sense of Chinese self-awareness. But the Chinese nation could be variously defined. While the geography of the empire lent support to the idea of a vast multi-ethnic community, culture suggested a narrower definition closely related to Han ethnicity. Nationalists might therefore uphold Manchu-Qing rule as the only basis for a super-nation of subcontinental proportions, or they might vehemently attack Manchu-Qing rule as an alien imperialism even more oppressive than that exercised by the other foreign powers. Not until communism trumped Nationalism with its supranational ideology would this dilemma be even semantically resolved.
Western theories such as socialism, social Darwinism – ‘societies evolve, the fittest survive’ – Marxism and anarchism also had their advocates. All took comfort from the evidence that dynastic despotisms had had their day. The Mughals were long gone, the Ottomans were succumbing to the Young Turks’ revolution (1908), and the Romanov tsar had just (1905) narrowly avoided assassination. To historical determinists, the Manchus must be next for the chop. Marx’s Communist Manifesto was available in Chinese by 1906, and an erstwhile adviser to Yuan Shikai made an appearance at the Second (Communist) International in Brussels in 1909. But as yet there was no Chinese socialist or Marxist party. Along with most other republicans and numerous social reformist and feminist groups, the radicals affiliated themselves to Dr Sun Yat-sen’s Revolutionary Alliance.
Sun’s genius lay in being all things to all men. A Guangdong peasant by birth but from a family some of whose members had already emigrated, he had acquired an education in Hawaii, a medical degree in Hong Kong, a moustache and natty suiting in Japan, and the contacts and profile to fund his operations in the course of extensive world tours. His reputation rested more on single-minded determination and organisational ability than flights of utopian fancy or fiery rhetoric. Propagandising, mobilising and, where possible, arming affiliated groups within China – the Triad societies, labour organisations, agrarian movements, trade boycotts, disaffected army units – he became the revolutionaries’ great facilitator. Security was problematic, particularly for one who, with a price on his head, could not himself enter the country. One after another, his revolutionary initiatives, mostly in Guangdong, were betrayed or had to be aborted when the plot leaked out. But internationally his reputation was unaffected. It had eclipsed that of rivals ever since 1898 when, snatched from a London street by Qing agents, Sun had become a cause célèbre, his case taken up by British parliamentarians and his release eventually secured.
It was no surprise, then, that on 9 October 1911 (‘9.10.11’ by most foreign reckonings) Sun was fund-raising in America. In fact he was travelling by train from Denver to Kansas at the moment when, on the other side of the world, halfway up the Yangzi, a bomb went off within the Russian concession area of the treaty port of Hankou. More surprisingly, this dramatic start to the revolution owed little to the work of Sun’s Revolutionary Alliance; the bomb, which was being assembled by an obscure cell of malcontents, had gone off by mistake. The injured bomb-makers were rushed to hospital; and their colleagues were arrested when the Russians reported the matter to the Qing authorities.
It was the arrests, and the confessions that must then come out, which provoked the revolution; and it began not on the streets or behind the barricades but in the barracks of Wuchang just across the river (and now hard by the approach road to the high-level Wuhan bridge). There, revolutionary elements within the Qing ‘New Army’, anticipating exposure by their bomb-making associates, seized the local ammunition depot and were quickly joined by other army units. Wuchang fell to the mutineers on the tenth, Hanyang on the eleventh and Hankou on the twelfth. With the capture of these three adjacent cities, nowadays collectively forming the ‘tri-city’ of Wuhan, control of the middle Yangzi fell to the mutineers.
To suppress the trouble, the Qing court ordered south its northern army, and to bolster its support within the military, it recalled Yuan Shikai. Once Li Hongzhang’s protégé, the stocky Yuan Shikai had proved himself a popular general and a loyal servant. He had supported Cixi in her termination of the Guangxu emperor’s ‘Hundred Days’, represented the Qing in Korea, and accepted with reasonably good grace his removal as governor-general at Tianjin. The last had been justified on medical grounds; it was said there was something wrong with his foot. Yuan now turned this to account, pleading more foot trouble while he bided his time and dictated his terms. His position went from strength to strength as troops in the provinces of Hunan, Shaanxi, Shanxi, Yunnan and Jiangxi declared themselves against the Qing and for the mutineers. The provincial assemblies often supported them; the death toll rapidly escalated; and when part of the supposedly loyal northern army submitted its own ultimatum to the court, the Qing authorities caved in. A parliament was to draw up a constitutio
n, review all foreign treaties and elect a premier; the Qing regency was to confirm the premier, forswear its right of execution, stay out of politics and offer an amnesty to political opponents. Just a month after the Wuchang rising, Yuan Shikai was confirmed by the court as the newly elected premier on 11 November 1911, ‘11.11.11’.
Suitably enough, when the new republic was officially declared on 1 January 1912, its first act was to adopt the West’s solar calendar. A week now lasted seven days and numerologists could seek significance in the new dates. Because harmonising terrestrial and celestial time had always been one of the Son of Heaven’s ritual responsibilities, the calendrical reform proclaimed more emphatically than bombs or parliaments the end of the Qing Mandate.
WAR AND MORE WAR
The first half of the twentieth century saw China submerged in a ‘Period of Disunion’ every bit as blood-soaked and confused – not to say narrative-testing – as the inter-dynastic free-for-alls of the past. If the plight of the Qing court after the Boxer Rebellion had recalled that of the last of the Later Han, the chaos that ensued mirrored that of the fourth-century Three Kingdoms. From 1911 to 1950 the fighting never really stopped; revolution became civil war, became revolution, became civil war, became foreign invasion, became freedom struggle, became civil war, became revolution. Kang Youwei, still in Japan, put the death toll at 20 million just for the two years 1911–12. How he reached this figure is anyone’s guess. Jonathan Spence suspects it was a Japanese exaggeration, ‘but even a figure one tenth as high is bleak enough, and in the context quite conceivable. . . [For] we are presented with cumulative evidence of violence and death that had moved beyond any rational justification, even in the grandiose terms of a final attainment of national order.’14
Throughout the period 1911–49, China remained a historico-cultural concept but was a coherent functioning state only during a brief interlude in the early 1930s. Diligent scholars trace a post-1911 pedigree of republican leadership stretching from Yuan Shikai’s premiership to Sun Yat-sen’s brief presidency in 1912, to Yuan Shikai’s presidency (1912–16), followed by a succession of short-lived generals and warlords to Zhang Zuolin (1928), Chiang Kai-shek (1928–49) and Mao Zedong (1949–76). The ups and downs of the ideological seesaw may be followed, and the shifts of the nation’s capital charted (from Beijing to Nanjing to Beijing to Nanjing to Wuhan to Chongqing to Beijing). But outside the big cities and the ports and away from the railway lines and the river traffic, power lay not with the republican strongmen or such constitutional devices as they tolerated but with those leaders who, by force or favour, controlled a particular locality and its resources. Under the empire these men with their regional bases and roving armies would have been called ‘bandits’ or ‘rebels’, but in an age when nationalism was dependent on accommodations with them, they were classified more ambiguously as ‘warlords’. There were literally thousands of warlords, ranging from generals and officials who ruled whole provinces (successors, in effect, of Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang) to local toughs with a few hundred ‘braves’, or restive hill minorities with an assertive chief.
And beyond them – beyond the warlords – where the telegraph poles disappeared into the haze and the fields stopped, so did China. The steppe had reverted to a no-go area. Manchuria, which had attracted much Han settlement and industrial development in the early twentieth century, was already compromised. A bone of contention in the 1920s between the Russians in the north, the Japanese in the south (they had taken over the Russian concessions in Liaodong after the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–5) and a semi-independent Manchu warlord, the whole of Manchuria was finally overrun by Japanese forces in 1931 and so reduced to a colony in all but name. As Tokyo’s satellite kingdom of Manchukuo – a ‘kingdom’ because the powerless ‘Last Emperor’ Henry Pu-yi was inveigled into lending legitimacy to this fiction – it provided Japan with the bridgehead and marshalling yard from which to launch its invasion of the rest of China in 1937. Not until 1946, after a post-war interlude under Soviet control, was Manchukuo reclaimed by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists. It was then promptly lost in heavy fighting to the communists in 1947–8; and by them it was reformulated as the three provinces constituting, not the now taboo ‘Manchuria’, but ‘the North East’ of the People’s Republic.
Outer (i.e. northern) Mongolia fared better. Its autonomy was acknowledged by China as early as 1915; and with Soviet help, a Mongolian People’s Republic was set up in Urga, the capital, in 1921. Despite recognition of a residual Chinese suzerainty, ‘the Soviet Union now replaced China as the country which had the greatest influence on the [Mongolian] republic’.15 This relationship would survive as long as the Soviet Union itself, China’s claims to suzerainty having been finally retracted amid Sino-Soviet fraternising and following a 1946 Mongolian plebiscite in favour of independence. Urga was renamed Ulan Bator and the Mongolian People’s Republic took its place in the UN.
Inner Mongolia (the arc of steppe south of the Gobi), by now with a substantial Han population, was more problematic. In the 1920s it was contested not by the Russians but by the Japanese, who entertained ideas of penetrating inner Asia from their Manchurian bridgehead by means of its steppe corridor. In the mid-1930s Tokyo therefore set up an ‘Autonomous Government of Inner Mongolia’. A decade later, when the Japanese were finally defeated by the Second World War allies, it was China’s communists from their base at Yan’an in northern Shaanxi who were best placed to fill the resulting vacuum. They duly did so, and the region became the Inner Mongolia (Nei Monggol) Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China.
Xinjiang also enjoyed de facto autonomy from 1912 until 1949, but in this case under a succession of Chinese governors. Warlords in practice, they were ‘governors’ only by virtue of such recognition as they bothered to obtain from whoever headed the republic of China at the time. Muslim Uighurs and Kazakhs repeatedly rose against this local government. They were suppressed only with the help of Soviet Russia. Indeed, had it not been for the post-war strength of communism in China itself, and the Sino-Soviet front against central Asian Islam that resulted, the ‘Eastern Turkestan Republic’ set up by an alliance of Uighurs and Kazakhs in 1945 might still be standing. The Soviet Union became deeply involved in Xinjiang’s development but returned the region to China following the communist triumph in 1949.
Finally there was Tibet. Press photos of Britain’s 1904 Younghusband expedition mowing down Tibetans armed with nothing more lethal than hoes had gone down badly in London. Younghusband’s one-sided Lhasa Convention with the Tibetans therefore proved highly unpopular. It was unacceptable to the other powers, including Russia, which saw it as an extension into central Asia of British influence; unacceptable to the XIIIth Dalai Lama, who had had no part in its terms since he had fled to China; unacceptable to London, which diluted it and censured Younghusband for having exceeded instructions; and totally unacceptable to the Qing government, which denied that the Tibetans had any right to negotiate with a foreign power. Beijing would, however, ratify the convention if the British would in return recognise China’s sovereignty in Tibet. The British, splitting hairs in terms that must have taxed the translators no end, would acknowledge only China’s suzerainty in Tibet, not its sovereignty. The matter being unresolved even in a 1906 Anglo-Chinese treaty on trade with Tibet, Qing forces began a slow advance through Qinghai. The Dalai Lama returned to Lhasa in late 1909, just ahead of the advancing Chinese. This did not stop them; and rather than face humiliation at the hands of more invaders, in early 1910 the Dalai Lama fled again, this time to India.
His Holiness’s Indian exile was shorter than that which awaited his reincarnation in 1959. When in 1911 the revolutionaries’ bomb went off in Hankou, Qing troops in Tibet found themselves besieged, first by their revolutionary colleagues, then by the Tibetans. Routes back to China being blocked, they had to be repatriated via the Himalayan passes and India. The same circuitous and humiliating route was used by Qing, and then republican, emissaries
vainly trying to re-estabish contact with Lhasa. When in mid-1912 the Dalai Lama returned home, it was to an already liberated Tibet; ‘the Chinese military occupation of the Dalai Lama’s dominions, begun three years previously, had come to an end’.16 Tibet was now effectively independent. Though this independence was never recognised by any Chinese government, in 1913 President Yuan Shikai did acknowledge Tibetan autonomy in return for British recognition of the Chinese republic.
Thirty years later, when the Second World War brought Britain and Nationalist China together as allies, the issue of Tibet’s status resurfaced. The formula now favoured by the British was a swap: Tibet to accept China’s suzerainty in return for China accepting Tibet’s autonomy. This satisfied neither party and would have been difficult to implement. But the formula was maintained until 1949, when independent India’s Jawaharlal Nehru indicated that he was not inclined to ‘a legalistic view’ of the matter. Mao Zedong took the hint and thereupon made the ‘liberation’ of Tibet a priority for the People’s Liberation Army. It was invaded within the year and secured as an integral, if autonomous, region of the People’s Republic. The XIVth Dalai Lama tolerated this situation until 1959. In that year the Tibetans rose against the Chinese presence, the army returned to suppress the revolt and His Holiness fled to India, this time indefinitely.