The Awakening of China Part 20

Whatever may be thought of the rank and file of China's mandarins, her viceroys are nearly always men of exceptional ability. They are never novices, but as a rule old in years and veterans in experience. Promoted for executive talent or for signal services, their office is too high to be in the market; nor is it probable that money can do much to recommend a candidate. A governor of Kw.a.n.gsi was recently dismissed for incompetence, or for ill-success against a body of rebels. Being a rich man, he made a free use of that argument which commonly proves effective at Peking. But, so far from being advanced to the viceroyalty, he was not even reinstated in his original rank. The most he was able to obtain by a lavish expenditure was the inspectorship of a college at Wuchang, to put his foot on one of the lower rounds of the official ladder.

Chang was never rich enough to buy official honours, even in the lower grades; and it is one of his chief glories that, after a score of years in the exercise of viceregal power, he continues to be relatively poor.

His name in full is Chang Chi-tung, meaning "Longbow of the Cavern,"

an allusion to a tradition that one of his ancestors was born in a cave and famed for archery. This was far back in the age of the troglodytes. Now, for many generations, the family has been devoted to the peaceful pursuit of letters. As for Chang himself, it will be seen with what deadly effect he has been able to use the pen, in his hands a more formidable weapon than the longbow of his ancestor.

Chang was born at Nanpi, in the metropolitan [Page 221]

province of Chihli, not quite seventy years ago; and that circ.u.mstance debarred him from holding the highest viceroyalty in the Empire, as no man is permitted to hold office in his native place. He has climbed to his present eminence without the extraneous aids of wealth and family influence. This implies talents of no ordinary grade; but how could those talents have found a fit arena without that admirable system of literary compet.i.tion which for so many centuries has served the double purpose of extending patronage to letters and of securing the fittest men for the service of the state.

Crowned with the laurel of A. B., or budding genius, before he was out of his teens, three years later he won the honour of A.

M., or, as the Chinese say, he plucked a sprig of the _olea fragrans_ in a contest with his fellow-provincials in which only one in a hundred gained a prize. Proceeding to the imperial capital he entered the lists against the picked scholars of all the provinces. The prizes were 3 per cent. of the whole number of compet.i.tors, and he gained the doctorate in letters, which, as the Chinese t.i.tle indicates, a.s.sures its possessor of an official appointment. Had he been content to wait for some obscure position he might have gone home to sleep on his laurels. But his restless spirit saw fresh battle-fields beckoning him to fresh triumphs.

The three hundred new-made doctors were summoned to the palace to write on themes a.s.signed by the Emperor, that His Majesty might select a score of them for places in the Hanlin Academy. Here again fortune favoured young Chang; the elegance of his penmanship and his skill in composing [Page 222]

mechanical verse were so remarkable that he secured a seat on the literary Olympus of the Empire.

His conflicts were not yet ended. A conspicuous advantage of his high position was that it qualified him as a candidate for membership of the Board of Censors. Nor did fortune desert her favourite in this instance. After writing several papers to show his knowledge of law, history, and politics, he came forth clothed with powers that made him formidable to the highest officers of the state--powers somewhat a.n.a.logous to the combined functions of censor and tribune in ancient Rome.

Before I proceed to show how our "knight of the longbow" employed his new authority, a few words on the const.i.tution of that august tribunal, the Board of Censors, may prove interesting to the reader.

Its members are not judges, but prosecuting attorneys for the state.

They are accorded a freedom of speech which extends even to pointing out the shortcomings of majesty. How important such a tribunal for a country in which a newspaper press with its argus eyes has as yet no existence! There is indeed a court _Gazette_, which has been called the oldest newspaper in the world; but its contents are strictly limited to decrees, memorials, and appointments. Free discussion and general news have no place in its columns; so that in the modern sense it is not a newspaper.

The court--even the occupant of the Dragon Throne--needs watch-dogs.

Such is the theory; but as a matter of fact these guardians of official morals find it safer to occupy themselves with the aberrations of satellites than to discover spots on the sun. About [Page 223]

thirty years ago one of them, Wukotu, resolved to denounce the Empress Dowager for having adopted the late emperor as her son instead of making him her grandson. He accordingly immolated himself at the tomb of the late emperor by way of protesting against the impropriety of leaving him without a direct heir to worship his manes. It is doubtful whether the Western mind is capable of following Wukotu's subtle reasoning; but is it not plain that he felt that he was provoking an ignominious death, and chose rather to die as a hero--the champion of his deceased master?

If a censor succeeds in convicting a single high functionary of gross misconduct his fortune is made. He is rewarded by appointment to some respectable post, possibly the same from which his victim has been evicted. Practical advantage carries the day against abstract notions of aesthetic fitness. Sublime it might be to see the guardians of the common weal striking down the unworthy, with a public spirit untainted by self-interest; but in China (and in some other countries) such machinery requires self-interest for its motive force. Wanting that, it would be like a windmill without wind, merely a fine object in the landscape.

As an ill.u.s.tration of the actual procedure take the case in which Chang first achieved a national reputation. Chunghau, a Manchu of n.o.ble family and high in favour at court, had been sent to Russia in 1880 to demand the restoration of Ili, a province of Chinese Turkestan, which the Russians had occupied on pretext of quelling its chronic disorders. Scarcely had he reported the success of his mission, which had [Page 224]

resulted in recovering two-thirds of the disputed territory, when Chang came forward and denounced it as worse than a failure. He had, as Chang proved, permitted the Russians to retain certain strategic points, and had given them fertile districts in exchange for rugged mountains or arid plains. To such a settlement no envoy could be induced to consent, unless chargeable with corruption or incompetence.

The unlucky envoy was thrown into prison and condemned to death (but reprieved), and his accuser rose in the official scale as rapidly as if he had won a great battle on land or sea. His victory was not unlike that of those British orators who made a reputation out of the impeachment of Lord Clive or Warren Hastings, save that with him a trenchant pen took the place of an eloquent tongue. I knew Chunghau both before and after his disgrace. In 1859, when an American emba.s.sy for the first time entered the gates of Peking, it was Chunghau who was appointed to escort the minister to the capital and back again to the seacoast--a pretty long journey in those days when there was neither steamboat nor railway. During that time, acting as interpreter, I had occasion to see him every day, and I felt strongly attracted by his generous and gentlemanly bearing. The poor fellow came out of prison stripped of all his honours, and with his prospects blighted forever. In a few months he died of sheer chagrin.

The war with j.a.pan in 1894-1895 found Chang established in the viceroyalty of Hukw.a.n.g, two provinces in Central China, with a prosperous population of over fifty millions, on a great highway of internal [Page 225]

traffic rivalling the Mississippi, and with Hankow, the hub of the Empire, for its commercial centre. When he saw the Chinese forces scattered like chaff by the battalions of those despised islanders he was not slow to grasp the explanation. Kang Yuwei, a Canton man, also grasped it, and urged on the Emperor the necessity for reform with such vigour as to prompt him to issue a meteoric shower of reformatory edicts, filling one party with hope and the other with dismay.

Chang had held office at Canton; and his keen intellect had taken in the changed relations of West and East. He perceived that a new sort of sunshine shed its beams on the Western world. He did not fully apprehend the spiritual elements of our civilisation; but he saw that it was clothed with a power unknown to the sages of his country, the forces of nature being brought into subjection through science and popular education. He felt that China must conform to the new order of things, or perish--even if that new order was in contradiction to her ancient traditions as much as the change of sunrise to the west. He saw and felt that knowledge is power, a maxim laid down by Confucius before the days of Bacon; and he set about inculcating his new ideas by issuing a series of lectures for the instruction of his subordinates. Collected into a volume under the t.i.tle of "Exhortations to Learn,"[*] they were put into the hands of the young Emperor and by his command distributed among the viceroys and governors of the Empire.

[Footnote *: Translated by Dr. Woodbridge as "China's Only Hope."

Kelly & Walsh, Shanghai.]

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What a harvest might have sprung from the sowing of such seed in such soil by an imperial husbandman! But there were some who viewed it as the sowing of dragons' teeth. Those reactionaries induced the Dowager Empress to come out from her retirement and to rea.s.sume her abdicated power in order to save the Empire from a threatening conflagration. It was the fable of Phaeton enacted in real life.

The young charioteer was struck down and the sun brought back to his proper course instead of rising in the west. The progressive legislation of the two previous years 1897-98 was repealed and then followed two years of a narrow, benighted policy, controlled by the reactionaries under the lead of Prince Tuan, father of the heir-apparent, with a junta of Manchu princes as blind and corrupt as Russian grand dukes. That disastrous recoil resulted in war, not against a single power, but against the whole civilised world, as has been set forth in the account of the Boxer War (see page 172).

Affairs were drifting into this desperate predicament when Chang of the Cavern became in a sense the saviour of his country. This he effected by two actions which called for uncommon intelligence and moral force: (1) By a.s.suring the British Government that he would at all costs maintain peace in Central China; (2) by refusing to obey an inhuman decree from Peking, commanding the viceroys to ma.s.sacre all foreigners within their jurisdiction--a decree which would be incredible were it not known that at the same moment the walls of the capital were placarded with proclamations offering rewards of 50, 30 and 20 [Page 227]

taels respectively for the heads of foreign men, women, and children.

It is barely possible that Chang was helped to a decision by a friendly visit from a British man-of-war, whose captain, in answer to a question about his artillery, informed Chang that he had the bearings of his official residence, and could drop a sh.e.l.l into it with unerring precision at a distance of three miles. He was also aided by the influence of Mr. Fraser, a wide-awake British consul. Fraser modestly disclaims any special merit in the matter, but British missionaries at Hankow give him the credit. They say that, learning from them the state of feeling among the people, he induced the viceroy to take prompt measures to prevent an outbreak.

At one time a Boxer army from the south was about to cross the river and destroy the foreign settlement. Chang, when appealed to, frankly confessed that his troops were in sympathy with the Boxers, and that being in arrears of pay they were on the verge of revolt. Fraser found him the money by the help of the Hong Kong Bank; the troops were paid; and the Boxers dispersed.

The same problem confronted Liu, the viceroy of Nanking; and it was solved by him in the same way. Both viceroys acted in concert; but to which belongs the honour of that wise initiative can never be decided with certainty. The foreign consuls at Nanking claim it for Liu. Mr. Sundius, now British consul at Wuhu, a.s.sures me that as Liu read the barbarous decree he exclaimed, "I shall repudiate this as a forgery," adding "I shall not obey, if I have to die for it." His words have a heroic ring; and [Page 228]

suggest that his policy was not taken at second-hand.

A similar claim has been put forward for Li Hung Chang, who was at that time viceroy at Canton. Is it not probable that the same view of the situation flashed on the minds of all three simultaneously?

They were not, like the Peking princes, ignorant Tartars, but Chinese scholars of the highest type. They could not fail to see that compliance with that b.l.o.o.d.y edict would seal their own doom as well as that of the Empire.

Speaking of Chang, Mr. Fraser says: "He had the wit to see that any other course meant ruin." Chang certainly does not hesitate to blow his own trumpet; but I do not suspect him of "drawing the longbow." Having the advantage of being an expert rhymer, he has put his own pretensions into verses which all the school-children in a population of fifty millions are obliged to commit to memory.

They run somewhat like this:

"In Kengtse (1900) the Boxer robbers went mad, And Peking became for the third time the prey of fire and sword; But the banks of the Great River and the province of Hupei Remained in tranquillity."

He adds in a tone of exultation:

"The province of Hupei was accordingly exempted From the payment of an indemnity tax, And allowed to spend the amount thus saved In the erection of schoolhouses."

In these lines there is not much poetry; but the fact which they commemorate adds one more wreath to [Page 229]

a brow already crowned with many laurels, showing how much the viceroy's heart was set on the education of his people.

In the interest of the educational movement, I was called to Chang's a.s.sistance in 1902. The Imperial University was destroyed in the Boxer War, and, seeing no prospect of its reestablishment I was on the way to my home in America when, on reaching Vancouver, I found a telegram from Viceroy Chang, asking me to be president of a university which he proposed to open, and to instruct his junior officials in international law. I engaged for three years; and I now look back on my recent campaign in Central China as one of the most interesting pa.s.sages in a life of over half a century in the Far East.

Besides instructing his mandarins in the law of nations, I had to give them some notion of geography and history, the two coordinates of time and place, without which they might, like some of their writers, mistake Rhode Island for the Island of Rhodes, and Rome, New York, for the City of the Seven Hills. A book on the Intercourse of Nations and a translation of Dudley Field's "International Code,"

remain as tangible results of those lectures. But the university failed to materialise.

Within a month after my arrival the viceroy was ordered to remove to Nanking to take up a post rendered vacant by the death of his eminent colleague, Liu. Calling at my house on the eve of embarking he said, "I asked you to come here to be president of a university for two provinces. If you will go with me to Nanking, I will make you president of a university [Page 230]

for five provinces," meaning that he would combine the educational interests of the two viceroyalties, and showing how the university scheme had expanded in his fertile brain.

Before he had been a month at that higher post he learned to his intense disappointment that he was only to hold the place for another appointee. After nearly a year at Nanking, he was summoned to Peking, where he spent another year in complete uncertainty as to his future destination. In the meantime the university existed only on paper.

In justice to the viceroy I ought to say that nothing could exceed the courtesy and punctuality with which he discharged his obligations to me. The despatch which once a month brought me my stipend was always addressed to me as president of the Wuchang University, though as a matter of fact I might as well have been styled president of the University of Weissnichtwo. In one point he went beyond his agreement, viz., in giving me free of charge a furnished house of two stories, with ten rooms and a garden. It was on the bank of the "Great River" with the picturesque hills of Hanyang nearly opposite, a site which I preferred to any other in the city. I there enjoyed the purest air with a minimum of inconvenience from narrow, dirty streets. To these exceptional advantages it is doubtless due that my health held out, notwithstanding the heat of the climate, which, the locality being far inland and in lat. 30 30', was that of a fiery furnace. On the night of the autumnal equinox, my first in Wuchang, the mercury stood in my bedroom at 102. I was the guest of the Rev. Arnold Foster of the London Missionary [Page 231]

Society, whose hospitality was warm in more ways than one.

The viceroy returned from Peking, broken in health; the little strength he had left was given to military preparation for the contingencies of the Russo-j.a.panese War; and his university was consigned to the limbo of forgotten dreams.

Viceroy Chang has been derided, not quite justly, as possessing a superabundance of initiative along with a rather scant measure of finality, taking up and throwing down his new schemes as a child does its playthings. In these enterprises the paucity of results was due to the shortcomings of the agents to whom he entrusted their management. The same reproach and the same apology might be made for the Empress Dowager who, like the Roman Sybil, committed her progressive decrees to the mercy of the winds without seeming to care what became of them.

Next after the education of his people the development of their material resources has been with Chang a leading object. To this end he has opened cotton-mills, silk-filatures, gla.s.s-works and iron-works, all on an extensive scale, with foreign machinery and foreign experts. For miles outside of the gates of Wuchang the banks of the river are lined with these vast establishments. Do they not announce more clearly than the batteries which command the waterway the coming of a new China? Some of them he has kept going at an annual loss. The cotton-mill, for example, was standing idle when I arrived, because in the hands of his mandarins he could not make it pay expenses. A Canton merchant leased it on easy terms, and made it [Page 232]

such a conspicuous success that he is now growing rich. It is an axiom in China that no manufacturing or mercantile enterprise can be profitably conducted by a deputation of mandarins.

Chang is rapidly changing the aspect of his capital by erecting in all parts of it handsome school-buildings in foreign style, literally proclaiming from the house-tops his gospel of education.

The youth in these schools are mostly clad in foreign dress; his street police and the soldiers in his barracks are all in foreign uniform; and many of the latter have cut off their cues as a sign of breaking with the old regime. In talking with their officers I applauded the prudence of the measure as making them less liable to be captured while running away.

Chang's soldiers are taught to march to the cadence of his own war-songs--which, though lacking the fire of Tyrtaeus or Korner, are not ill-suited to arouse patriotic sentiment. Take these lines as a sample:

"Foreigners laugh at our impotence, And talk of dividing our country like a watermelon, But are we not 400 million strong?

If we of the Yellow Race only stand together, What foreign power will dare to molest us?

Just look at India, great in extent But sunk in hopeless bondage.

Look, too, at the Jews, famous in ancient times, Now scattered on the face of the earth.

Then look at j.a.pan with her three small islands, Think how she got the better of this great nation, And won the admiration of the world.

What I admire in the j.a.panese Is not their skill in using ship or gun But their single-hearted love of country."

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