by Chang, Jung
This ominous and alarming fable was in the emperor’s hands just after 13 August, his twenty-seventh birthday. He read it deep into the night, drops from the red candles seeping into the pages. His already-poor sleep became even more disturbed, and his brittle nerves snapped. As his medical records show, doctors started visiting him almost daily from the 19th. In this condition, between sobs, he ordered 2,000 taels of silver delivered to Kang as a token of his appreciation. Kang wrote a thank-you letter on the 29th, which was no ordinary missive of gratitude. Secretly handed to the emperor, it was exceptionally long: it retold the Polish horror story and emphasised that the only way to avoid the fate of Poland was to install the Advisory Board at once. It also heaped flattery on Emperor Guangxu that went far beyond the norm. It described the emperor as ‘the wisest ever in history’, with ‘penetrating eyes sending off rays like the sun and the moon’, and with abilities ‘sublime and unparalleled even compared with the greatest emperors of all time’. It was ‘the injustice of a thousand years’ that China’s troubles should be laid at his door. They had only happened because the emperor had not had the opportunity to exercise his ‘supreme wisdom and mighty bravery, and his awesome thunderbolt-like force’. The emperor’s potential had been obstructed by the ‘old officials’. And the problem of all problems was that he had not had the right people at his side. All His Majesty needed was to rectify that and he would achieve greatness.
Nobody had ever said such things to Emperor Guangxu. The court had its formula of florid praise for the throne, but did not encourage extravagant compliments. A good emperor was supposed to embrace criticism and steer clear of flatterers. Moreover, Emperor Guangxu had always been made to feel inadequate, especially in comparison with his Papa Dearest. Suddenly he found someone who appeared fully to appreciate him. The impact of Kang’s flattery on the insecure young man cannot be exaggerated. It hugely boosted his self-esteem. His sense of guilt since the war with Japan was expunged and the inferiority complex was much assuaged. Nothing, after all, had been his fault. The ‘old officials’ were the ones to blame. What was more, with Kang by his side, there was no limit to what he could achieve. It was thus that Emperor Guangxu fell under the spell of the Wild Fox, whom he had met only once. He immediately ordered all Kang’s petitions to be collected into booklets for his personal study, and named the collection ‘the Petitions of the Hero’.
As well as the long, flattering letter, Kang wrote separately, urging the emperor to dismiss his old officials and make new appointments. The emperor was so fired up that he instantly put pen to paper and sacked a host of officials, closing down a large number of offices. The decree, edited in his own hand, itched to ‘get rid of the whole lot’. It appears not to have occurred to the emperor that, although many of these officials may have been incompetent, they were lowly clerks and administrators merely carrying out orders given by him.
When Cixi received the abolition edict before it was issued, she was alarmed. To accommodate her adopted son, however, she only restored a few crucial offices, such as the one in charge of shipping grain from south China to the north, and otherwise let it pass. To his face she forcefully objected to the wholesale dismissals, telling him it could lead to the ‘loss of goodwill and support [shi-ren-xin]’ for the Reforms, and could even cost him his throne. Indeed, as the edict suddenly deprived thousands of officials of their livelihood in the capital alone, administrators throughout the empire looked on appalled and fearful.
Knowing Cixi’s disapproval, the emperor issued further edicts without showing them to her first, thus breaking the code of their working relationship. On 4 September, after Cixi had just left the Forbidden City for the Summer Palace, he sacked the minister and five other top officials from the Ministry of Rites in one wrathful crimson-inked edict. His anger seemed disproportionate to the offence: that the ministry had delayed passing on to him a proposal from a clerk named Wang Zhao. But the clerk was a friend of Kang. The emperor promoted him. He also appointed a new minister – another of Kang’s friends, who had written to the throne in praise of the Wild Fox. The new vice-ministers included yet more of Kang’s friends, such as Learning Companion Xu. Emperor Guangxu intended this to be the model for other ministries and offices. The next day he made four low-ranking men secretaries in the Grand Council, and two of them were also Kang’s friends, each of whom he had met for no more than a few moments. But he regarded them and other such appointees as ‘bright and brave men’, in contrast to all those ‘stupid and useless’ old officials.
Cixi was only sent the emperor’s edicts for information, after they were made public. When she next saw her adopted son, she told him that the sackings in the Ministry of Rites were unreasonable, and she refused to endorse some new appointees, including Learning Companion Xu, whom she now knew to be a member of the Wild Fox’s clique. She then quietly made arrangements to ensure that edicts drafted by the new secretaries were shown to her first. Otherwise she did nothing regarding Guangxu’s actions.
Now that Emperor Guangxu had established the precedent of firing and hiring on his own, the Wild Fox organised his cronies in a concerted petition campaign calling on the emperor to establish the Advisory Board – which he would lead. One of the four new secretaries who did not belong to Kang’s coterie wrote in a private letter on 13 September: ‘Every day, they are talking about the Advisory Board, and the emperor is being pushed towards it. Kang and Liang have not got the positions they want, and I am afraid the situation will become turbulent . . .’ Indeed, on the same day Emperor Guangxu finally made up his mind to set up what was effectively the Kang Board. When the Wild Fox learned about it, he went at once to his small group of friends, his face beaming with delight. He told them that the Board would have ten members, who would have to be officially recommended to the throne. Then he handed out a list of ten men to those who were entitled to write to the throne direct, telling them each to recommend a few from the list. These included Kang himself, his brother Guangren, his right-hand man Liang, two sons of Learning Companion Xu and other cronies. And so the names of this cabal went forward to Emperor Guangxu.
On 14 September the emperor took the list to the Summer Palace. Cixi refused to authorise it and, in her forceful way, made it utterly clear that her decision was non-negotiable. The following day an anguished Emperor Guangxu summoned one of the four new secretaries and gave him a letter asking the new appointees whom the emperor referred to as his ‘comrades’ to find a way to form the Kang Board without antagonising his Royal Father. The secretary to whom he gave the letter, Yang Rui, was actually not a member of Kang’s clique and did not even approve of what Kang was doing. But His Majesty was rather woolly about the different allegiances among the new appointees suddenly flooding the court, regarding them all as one progressive force.
The Wild Fox learned the contents of the letter and may have read it. The next thing he saw was a public edict from Emperor Guangxu, making an oddly personal plea for Kang to leave Beijing and go to Shanghai to take up his newspaper post. Thus the Wild Fox knew that his leap to the top had been blocked by the empress dowager. Cixi had never stood in the way of Kang’s reformist policies – indeed, she agreed with them. She had actually been the first to appreciate Kang’s talents and promote him. But she refused to hand over power to him.
Given that the Qing regime had brought such disasters to the country, the case for an alternative government was unanswerable. Whether Kang would have made a better leader is open to debate. But one thing is certain: he did not have a political programme to turn China into a parliamentary democracy, as is often claimed. He never advocated this; on the contrary, he argued in one of his articles that democracy, while good for the West, did not suit China. He wrote, ‘An emperor is like the father of a family, and the people are like children. The Chinese people are all like toddlers and infants. May I ask how the family of a dozen babies can function if the parents don’t have the exclusive right to make decisions, but instead let all the toddlers and
infants make their own decisions? . . . I can tell you that in China, only the emperor must rule.’
Wild Fox Kang wanted to be the emperor, and had been trying to create a mandate for himself. First, he claimed that he was the reincarnation of Confucius. The assertion had indeed attracted attention, and even Westerners had heard him spoken of as ‘the modern Sage’ and ‘the second Confucius’. Next, with his small but vocal band of disciples, Kang attempted to establish that Confucius had actually been crowned King of China, replacing the emperor of the time. To propagate the idea, they started a newspaper that used a ‘Confucian Calendar’, in which the year of Confucius’s birth was Year One. As this strategy directly threatened Emperor Guangxu, the Wild Fox abandoned it when he began to ingratiate himself with the emperor. The moment he realised that the emperor was falling under his spell, Kang most anxiously explained to the monarch in one of his clandestine letters that he had been misunderstood and that he had never held the view that Confucius had been crowned king. Kang was eager to expunge any idea that he coveted the throne. With Emperor Guangxu seduced, Kang could fulfil his dream by first becoming the puppeteer behind the throne. This route was now blocked by Cixi with a will of iron, and the only way for the Wild Fox to achieve his goal was to remove her by force.
20 A Plot to Kill Cixi (September 1898)
WILD FOX KANG had been hatching plots to kill Cixi for some time, knowing that she stood between him and supreme power. For this purpose he needed an armed force, and he first thought of a commander named Nie. He asked Clerk Wang Zhao to approach Nie and persuade him to join them, but the clerk declined to go, telling Kang that the mission was a pipe dream. The army was firmly in Cixi’s hands. The first thing she had done when she launched the Reforms was to make key military appointments, putting the man who had the most unwavering loyalty to her, Junglu, in charge of all the army in the capital and its surrounding area. Junglu’s headquarters were in Tianjin.
Among those reporting to Junglu was General Yuan Shikai – the future first President of China when the country became a republic. Now he was an ambitious and outstanding officer. He noticed that incredibly high posts were being awarded by the emperor on the recommendation of Kang’s men, and so made friends with them. Thanks to Kang, Emperor Guangxu gave General Yuan not one but two audiences, immediately after his altercation with Cixi on 14 September. His Majesty conferred on the General a promotion over the heads of his superiors, and practically told Yuan to detach himself from Junglu and to take orders directly from him. The emperor was doing what the Wild Fox had advised – establishing an army of his own.
After the audiences, one of Kang’s fellow plotters, Tan Sitong, paid General Yuan a late-night visit on 18 September. Tan, one of the four newly appointed Grand Council secretaries, believed that reform could only be achieved through violence. ‘There has been no reform without bloodshed since ancient times; we must kill all those deadbeats before we can start getting things done.’ Known to General Yuan as a ‘newly risen VIP close to the emperor’, Tan claimed that he had come to express the emperor’s wish. General Yuan was to kill Junglu in Tianjin and take his troops to Beijing; there he was to surround the Summer Palace and capture the empress dowager. After that, said Tan, ‘to slay that rotten old woman will be my job, and need not concern Your Excellency’. Tan promised the General that the emperor himself would give him a crimson-inked edict to this effect in his third audience, in two days’ time, on 20 September. Yuan, who thought Tan looked ‘ferocious and semi-deranged’, was non-committal, but said that such a big thing would take time to arrange.
Arrangements were actually being made by the Wild Fox, who had devised a way to transfer General Yuan’s soldiers, numbering 7,000 and stationed outside Beijing, into the capital and position them next to the Summer Palace. He ghosted a proposal for another fellow plotter, Censor Shenxiu, to present to the emperor, claiming that a haul of gold and silver had been buried in the Old Summer Palace, which might now be dug up to help alleviate the state’s financial crisis. The proposal was timed to arrive on the emperor’s desk just before Yuan’s third audience, so that the emperor could give the job of excavation there and then to the General, who could therefore legitimately move his army onto Cixi’s doorstep.
As his diary later revealed, General Yuan was stupefied by Tan’s proposal. He was faced with the dilemma of choosing sides between Emperor Guangxu and the empress dowager. As he said to Tan, if the emperor really issued a crimson-inked edict telling him to do away with the empress dowager, ‘who would dare to disobey the slip of paper from the emperor?’ And yet that very night he went directly to one of Cixi’s trusted princes and denounced the plotters.fn1
Meanwhile, other events had been happening concerning a visitor in Beijing at the time, Itō Hirobumi, former Prime Minister of Japan, the architect of Japan’s war against China four years earlier and of the calamitous Treaty of Shimonoseki. Recently out of office, Itō was making a ‘private’ visit to Beijing, and Emperor Guangxu was scheduled to receive him on the same day of General Yuan’s third audience.
The mood among some educated Chinese in relation to Japan had swung from one of loathing to admiration and goodwill since the more recent encroachment by European powers in 1897–8. The Japanese actively cultivated influential men along this line: ‘The war between us was a mistake, and we both suffered. Now that white men are bearing down menacingly on us yellow people, China and Japan must unite and resist them together. We must help each other.’ Some officials were sympathetic to this argument and were eager for Japan to teach China how to become strong. There were petitions calling for the emperor to invite Itō to stay and be his adviser. The chorus was led by Wild Fox Kang, who ghosted several petitions for others to present. A widely read newspaper in Tianjin, the Guo-wen-bao, owned by a Japanese and with backing from the Japanese government, promoted the idea, claiming it would lead ‘not only to good fortune for China and Japan, but also to the survival of Asia and the Yellow race’.
It was known that Emperor Guangxu intended to employ Itō as his adviser. The emperor had developed an extremely pro-Japanese attitude since falling under Kang’s influence. On 7 September, he had written in his own hand a letter to the Japanese emperor, opening with intimate language unique in diplomatic documents: ‘My dearest and nearest friendly neighbour of the same continent’, and ending with a wish that the two countries would ‘support each other to defend and secure the Great East’. Itō himself seems to have been expecting to work with the Chinese throne. When he arrived in Tianjin, he wrote to his wife: ‘I am leaving for Beijing tomorrow, where the emperor seems to have been awaiting my arrival for some time . . . In Tianjin, I am busy with banquets the whole time. Many Chinese have come and asked me to help China, and it is really impossible to say no. I’ve heard that the emperor seems to be able and bright, and only 27 years old . . .’ Indeed Emperor Guangxu would give an audience to Itō on 20 September and might well announce Itō’s engagement immediately afterwards. (Appointments were often announced straight after the audience with the appointee.) To enable the decree of employment to be seen as a response to popular demand, the Wild Fox ghosted two petitions pressing the emperor to engage Itō – one to be on His Majesty’s desk hours before Itō’s audience, and the other the day after.
Wild Fox Kang so keenly promoted the employment of Itō out of personal calculations. He was not so naïve as to believe that Itō would be working for the interests of China, not Japan, and that China could maintain its independence under his stewardship. Japan had not wavered in its ambition to control China. During Itō’s visit, Japanese newspapers were talking about ‘the necessity’ of China ‘consulting the Japanese government’ on all its policies. When he heard about the emperor’s desire to employ Itō as his adviser, Earl Li wrote just one word in a letter: ‘Ludicrous’. Viceroy Zhang, the famed moderniser who had conceived the strategic Beijing–Wuhan railway, was ‘shocked’ and ‘rejected the idea outright’. The earl and the Viceroy were b
oth ardent advocates of learning from Japan and employing Japanese advisers. But they knew that if Itō became the ‘adviser’ to Emperor Guangxu, there would be no way to prevent this former Japanese Prime Minister from becoming the puppeteer, and China from losing its independence.fn2
Wild Fox Kang was as shrewd as the two statesmen. And yet he was manoeuvring not only for the engagement of Itō, but also for creating a Sino-Japanese ‘union’ (lian-bang) or even a ‘merger’ (he-bang). The petitions he ghosted calling for Itō’s appointment also urged Emperor Guangxu to opt for one or other course. It is unlikely that he was sincerely trying to deliver China to Japan. More likely, he and the Japanese had struck a deal to advance each other’s interests. Indeed, ever since the Reforms began, the Japanese-owned newspaper in Tianjin had devoted much space to reporting Kang’s opinions, which had hugely raised his profile and helped create the impression that the Reforms were entirely of his making. This impression was not restricted to readers of that particular paper. As its news items were copied by other papers throughout the Treaty Ports, Kang’s name acquired such prominence that people thought he was the leader of the Reforms. The Tianjin paper also promoted the idea of the Advisory Board – while Kang suggested to Emperor Guangxu that the Board should include Itō. But the greatest service the Japanese did for Kang was to link him up with Emperor Guangxu in the first place – through Sir Yinhuan, who was almost certainly their agent and working for their interests.