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 renowned 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.
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 constitution, 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.