The Beginnings of the Republic in China.

1. The Revolutionist Manifesto.

In 1688 the English people drew up their "Declaration of Rights." In 1776 Jefferson framed for the American colonies the articles of their "Declaration of Independence." In 1789 the French National Assembly proclaimed the "Rights of Man." And on the 5th of January, 1912, Sun Yat-sen, as President of the provisional Republican Government of China, issued from Nanking the first manifesto of republicanism in modern Asia.

The declaration runs thus:

"To all friendly nations,—Greeting. Hitherto irremediable suppression of the individual qualities and the national aspirations of the people having arrested the intellectual, moral, and material development of China, the aid of revolution was invoked to extirpate the primary cause. We now proclaim the consequent overthrow of the despotic sway of the Manchu dynasty, and the establishment of a republic. The substitution of a republic for a monarchy is not the fruit of transient passion but the natural outcome of a long-cherished desire for freedom, contentment and advancement.

"We Chinese people, peaceful and law-abiding, have not waged war except in self-defence. We have borne our grievance for two hundred and sixty-seven years with patience and forbearance. We have endeavoured by peaceful means to redress our wrongs, secure liberty, and ensure progress; but we failed. Oppressed beyond human endurance, we deemed it our inalienable right, as well as a sacred duty, to appeal to arms to deliver ourselves and our posterity from the ycke to which we have for so long been subjected. For the first time in history an inglorious bondage is transformed into inspiring freedom. The policy of the Manchus has been one of unequivocal seclusion and unyielding tyranny. Beneath it we have bitterly suffered.

"Now we submit to the free peoples of the world the reasons justifying the revolution and the inauguration of the present government. Prior to the usurpation of the throne by the Manchus, the land was open to foreign intercourse, and religious toleration existed, as is shown by the writings of Marco Polo and the inscription on the Nestorian tablet at Hsi-an-fu. Dominated by ignorance and selfishness, the Manchus closed the land to the outer world, and plunged the Chinese into a state of benighted mentality calculated to operate inversely to their natural talents, thus committing a crime against humanity and the civilized nations which it is almost impossible to expiate.

"Actuated by a desire for the perpetual subjugation of the Chinese, and a vicious craving for aggrandisement and wealth, the Manchus have governed the country to the lasting injury and detriment of the people, creating privileges and monopolies, erecting about themselves barriers of exclusion, national custom, and personal conduct, which have been rigorously maintained for centuries. They have levied irregular and hurtful taxes without the consent of the people, and have restricted foreign trade to treaty ports. They have placed the likin embargo on merchandise, obstructed internal commerce, retarded the creation of national enterprises, rendered impossible the development of natural resources, denied a regular system of impartial administration of justice, and inflicted cruel punishment on persons charged with offences, whether innocent or guilty. They have connived at official corruptions, sold offices to the highest bidder, subordinated merit to influence, rejected the most reasonable demands for better government, and reluctantly conceded so-called reforms under the most urgent pressure, promising without any intention of fulfilling. They have failed to appreciate the anguish-causing lessons taught them by foreign Powers, and in process of years have brought themselves and our people beneath the contempt of the world. A remedy of these evils will render possible the entrance of China into the family of nations.

"We have fought and formed a government. Lest our good intentions should be misunderstood, we publicly and unreservedly declare the following to be our promises:—

"The treaties entered into by the Manchus before the date of the revolution will be continually effective to the time of their termination. Any and all the treaties entered into after the commencement of the revolution will be repudiated. Foreign loans and indemnities incurred by the Manchus before the revolution will be acknowledged. Payments made by loans incurred by the Manchus after its commencement will be repudiated. Concessions granted to nations and their nationals before the revolution will be respected. Any and all granted after it will be repudiated. The persons and property of foreign nationals within the jurisdiction of the republic will be respected and protected.

"It will be our constant aim and firm endeavour to build on stable and enduring foundations a national structure compatible with the potentialities of our long neglected country…We shall strive to elevate the people to secure peace, and to legislate for prosperity. Manchus who abide peacefully in the limits of our jurisdiction will be accorded equality and given protection.

"We will remodel the laws, revise the civil, criminal, commercial and mining codes, reform the finances, abolish restrictions on trade and commerce and ensure religious toleration and the cultivation of better relations with foreign peoples and governments than have ever been maintained before.

"It is our earnest hope that those foreign nations who have been steadfast in their sympathy will bind more firmly the bonds of friendship between us and will bear in patience with us the period of trial confronting us and our reconstruction works, and will aid the consummation of the far-reaching plans, which we are about to undertake, and which they have long vainly been urging upon our people and our country.

"With this message of peace and good will the republic cherishes the hope of being admitted into the family of nations, not merely to share its rights and privileges, but to cooperate in the great and noble task of building up the civilization of the world."

Revolutionary manifestoes are, from their very nature, first, apologies for the revolution, i.e., statements of the crimes of the preceding regime, and secondly, promises and assurances from the new order, i.e., declarations of future policy. But these paper documents, howsoever true and just in their claims, are the least part in the making of a revolution.

Revolutions draw their sustenance from discontent with the existing state of things and with the powers that be. This discontent need not necessarily be all founded on wrongs perpetrated by the status quo and on grievances actually suffered by the people. It can be effective as fuel to the revolutionary fire even though it should happen to be chiefly sentimental and fanciful. The "natural leaders" have only to nurse it and engineer it in such a manner that the active support or passive cooperation of the masses, nay, of a fraction of the people may be enlisted on its behalf. It is the strength and competence of the personnel in the propaganda, i.e., the organizing capacity of the intellectuals, that constitutes the real soul and apology of revolutions.

The world has never recognized an insurrection as fait accompli simply because the charges drawn up against the preceding government are just, unless indeed it pays the interested Powers to intervene of their own accord, as the United States did in Colombia-Panama disputes (Dec. 1903), and the alles in the secessionist activity of the Tchech nationalists of Bohemia (August-September 1918). Right or wrong in their pretensions, revolutionists have had to establish the legitimacy of their cause by the sheer fact of success. Only then has the movement been accepted by mankind as almost a "historical necessity"— one of those "far-off Divine events toward which the whole creation moves."

The wording of a revolutionary instrument indicates, of course, the trend of political philosophy that nourished its being. At any rate it reveals the pious wishes of those who are responsible for it. But how far it is an accurate picture of the order subverted is none the less a matter for sceptical investigation on the part of scientific history.

It is well known that the English Civil War, Restoration, and Revolution have a Tory and a Whig version. And the leaders of the American revolution are thus appraised by Lord Acton:

"Not only was their grievance difficult to substantiate at law but it was trivial in extent. The claim of England was not evidently disproved, and even if it was unjust, the injustice practically was not hard to bear. The suffering that would be caused by submission was immeasurably less than the suffering that must follow resistance, and it was more uncertain and remote."

Even the plea for the French Revolution has not passed unchallenged by the critical students of the ancien régime. Tocqueville, Jefferson, and Arthur Young gave contemporary evidences of the silver lining that edged the economic cloud of Bourbon France. The condition of the masses in contemporary Spain, Italy and the German-speaking territories was far worse than that of the French peasants.

Indeed, "the ideas of 1789" are neither what one reads in the "Rights of Man" enunciated by the National Assembly (August 26, 1789) nor in the draft of the new constitution under which the Legislative Assembly held its first meeting (October, 1791). The real document of the revolutionists in France, as it turned out, was the inspiring personality of the young lieutenant from Corsica. Napoleon was the living embodiment of all the floating ideas of the age, the rationalistic enlightenment of Voltaire, the anti-statal Nature-cult of Rousseau, as well as of the mobocratic radicalism of Danton and the utopian idealism of Robespierre. It was the military hypnotism exercised by Napoleon over twentyfive million men and women that enabled them to feel the justification of their principles as a matter of course. It was the spiritualizing leadership of a dynamic soul that heartened the army of raw recruits and lay generals to venture on defying the aggressive Concert of Europe in its attempt to nip the revolution in the bud. Down to 1815 the French people did not once care to exhibit or even remember the paper manifesto of their "principles", but the fall of Napoleon proved to be similar to the fall of Epaminondas in ancient Thebes. As long as another Napoleon was not forthcoming, thousand such documents were of no avail.

A revolution is justified only by its success. The justification of the Chinese revolution does not consist in the evils of the Manchu administration, howsoever atrocious they may have been in reality. It would have to be sought in the achievements of the "futurist" patriots of young China. In the meantime the Nanking document of 1912 may be examined as a record of political literature.

2. Despotism and Mal-administration.

This document of an Asian revolution contains the familiar phrases, "inalienable right," "consent of the people," "irregular and hurtful taxes," etc. But evidently it does not attempt to exhibit a philosophic grasp of life's fundamentals. Nor does it display sweeping generalizations of an absolute character, whether social or economic. The instrument is not marked either by any characteristic theory of popular sovereignty or by any epoch-making political Weltanschauung. But one finds in the general tone of this Chinese manifesto a distant family likeness of the Bill of Rights. There can be detected in it a faint echo of John Adam's eloquence on the 4th of July. It bears probably also a weak reminiscence of the heated pamphleteering of the mob-leaders in France such as were noticed by Arthur Young in the course of his travels.

More or less the same language was used in Mexico by the partisans of Carranza against the dictatorship of President Diaz. The wordy side of the pre-Bolshevik revolution in Russia has not been far removed from this argument. And this would be manifest also as much in the revolutions of any of the lesser republics in Latin America as among any of the peoples in Asia or Africa, should they ever rise to overthrow the dominant races.

Like the steam-engine and the U-boat, revolutionary ideals and democratic -platitudes, songs of freedom and humanitarian cant are the universal or cosmopolitan goods of the modern world. They are not the "patent" of the individuals or races in and through whom they were born. These shibboleths are at the service of anybody that can command them. Probably it is well-nigh impossible for a people to be essentially original in the manufacture of a revolution. For this we should perhaps have to wait for the epoch of socialism triumphant. That is likely to usher in a radically new psychology with its ethics of the "rights of human personality" as distinct from the conventional "rights of man" and "rights of woman." The plutocracies masquerading today under the guise of constitutional monarchies and even republics would then automatically be subverted. Eventually a new phraseology and idiom of revolution may thus grow up for the future pioneers of civilization and the apostles of new types of democracy.

If the political philosophy of the Chinese revolution is anything but extraordinary, the demands of its leaders do not rise above anything but the stereotyped. The case made by them against the Manchus does not exhibit a picture of the atrocities of Spanish rule in the Netherlands and Peru or the horrors of the Siberian dungeons under the Romanoffs. It is not a record of the age-long social and political persecution of Jews in every Christian land.

The definite references to the iniquities of the Manchu administration are vague indeed, but they would be equally applicable to the declining periods of the indigenous Chinese dynasties. Sun Yat-sen's account of the Manchus is the same as Emperor Shunchi the Manchu's account of the last Mings and the historian Sze Ma-chien's account of the last Hans.

Besides, the grievances enumerated in this republican manifesto of the modern Orient were the grievances of every European people in the eighteenth century. Which Occidental nation was then free from one or other or all of the following features of socio-political life: serfdom, intolerance, persecution, oligarchy, arbitrary taxation? These were practically the "inseparable accidents" of every "enlightened despotism," e.g., that of Frederick of Prussia, Joseph of Austria, and Catherine of Russia. It is notorious also that in the fourth decade of the nineteenth century Guizot, the French minister, out-Walpoled the English premier Walpole in the use of bribery, corruption, sale of offices, and nepotism as political methods.

Corruption¹ in the earliest American democracy (c. 1776) is thus commented on by a writer cited in Weyl's New Democracy:

"In filibustering and gerrymandering, in stealing governorships and legislatures, in using force at the polls, in colonizing and distributing patronage to whom patronage is due, in all the frauds and tricks that go to make up the worst form of practical politics, the men who founded our state and national governments were always our equals and often our masters."

The degeneracy of pre-Revolution France is described by Gustav Bang, the Danish socialist, in the following terms:

"The Court and the two upper estates represented an exploitation which became more and more flagrant and which more and more was felt to be destructive of civil activity. The burden of taxation kept the urban as well as rural population down. ... An indescribable demoralization was spreading throughout the ruling classes; ... bribery and sales of offices flourished; administration of justice became a mockery. ... It was a condition which in many respects resembled that of modern Russia. And as in Russia, so also in France under the old regime, it was felt that a catastrophe was impending."

This is a recent "Labour" view of Bourbon France. The "anarchist" Kropotkin in his "popular" history of the French revolution draws, of course, the same picture. And these are not mere extremist standpoints. The facts are too well known. Even under the mighty Louis XIV the laws of France were not uniform in all the provinces. The country, though but one-seventh of China Proper in area, was not a single unit. It was divided by custom lines into numerous almost independent states. Under his successors, as before, the royal household was extravagantly managed, the third estate did not exist, and freedom of thought was a taboo. The person and property of the people were at the mercy of the ruler who was the state by Divine right.

The defects of the Manchu regime will thus be found to have been neither essentially Manchu nor exclusively Oriental. Some of them are the inevitable attributes of despotism or tyrannos, i.e., one-man-rule, as such, even though it be benevolent, paternal or enlightened. Others are the results of mal-administration and non-administration to which every government is liable during its degeneracy, such, for instance, as Bryce has to complain against in Modern Democracies (1921). There is nothing climatologically or ethnologically Asian in the decline and fall of the Manchu empire.

Montesquieu wanted to reform the French monarchy on the model of the English state. This was before 1789. The Chinese also under the guidance of Kang Yu-wei had for some time (c. 1897) tried to rejuvenate the Manchu dynasty. The programme was that of European constitutionalism. That effort having failed, the reform movement has taken shape, however amorphous for the time being, in General Li Yuan-hung and Sun Yat-sen's republic. The Chinese revolution is thus, no less than its younger sister in Russia with its distinctive social philosophy, a move in the direction of humanity's natural evolution indicated by the march of history.

3. East and West.

The leaders of the revolution have blindly accepted the conventional verdict of Eur-American scholars as to the non-militaristic character of the Chinese people. They have made it a point to assure the world that Chinese are a mild and peace-loving race.

But this is a fallacy totally unfounded in history. This is one of the many superficial generalizations which the successful Occident of the nineteenth century has been pleased to propagate about its victim, the fallen and down-trodden Orient. The logic of the "superior races" in modern Eur-America has superstitiously allowed the characterization of the entire East for all the ages as "unchanging", "mystical", "quietistic" and so forth. It is the triumph of the Asian over the white at Port Arthur in 1905 that has recently led to a slight exorcizing of this idola out of the Occidental mind. But the fallacy virtually retains its undisputed sway.

To treat the Chinese as a pacifist race is the greatest piece of practical joke, to say the least, in historical literature. The truth is the exact opposite of the current idea. If the Chinese have not been an aggressive people, one would have to define afresh as to what aggressiveness means. The people and the rulers of China have exhibited warlike and vindictive habits in every generation. Even the Buddhist monks used to form themselves into military bands whenever the need arose. The martial characteristics of Chinese have really been as conspicuous as those of the proverbial fighting races of India. The war-spirit has not been less active in China than among the over-dreaded Bushidoists of New Japan or the "modern Huns" of Europe.

In China today there is a lack of literacy among the lower orders. The army, as all other departments, is not backed by sound finance. The military and naval equipment is not scientific and efficient enough. Adequate discipline of the modern standard is therefore wanting on all sides. The present defects in China's fighting material and administration may easily mislead one as to the capacity of the race for future developments. But the present conditions and misgivings as to the future must not eclipse the actual facts of the past from our view. Chinese history has throughout been the record of unrest, warfare, secret societies, rebellions, and adventurous raids.

Indeed, the proper question that sociologists should have to answer is, "Has there been on earth a race more aggressive than the Chinese?" Chinese culture came into existence in one of the lesser states of the north-west. This was probably about B. C. 3000. The three ideal rulers, Yao, Shun, and Yu, whose names are household words even in modern China and are almost daily cited in the forward journals of the Chinese republic, flourished between B. C. 2897 and 2356. Today, at the end of five thousand years Chinese culture comprises within its fold a heterogeneous and mixed population as extensive as that of Europe, and governs an area which is seven times that of Germany. Besides, there is a Greater China, including the now lost Indo-China, Formosa, and Korea, as well as the seceding Mongolia, Turkestan, Tibet, and Manchuria. All this "expansion" had to be effected inch by inch. It was not the fiat of an individual will. A race, whose collective consciousness is persistent enough to demand and achieve a continuous overflowing and cumulative enlargement, is certainly not a conservative stay-at-home, and war-dreading people.

The truth, therefore, must unequivocally be admitted by students of comparative culture-history. Under favourable industrial and financial conditions a Gustavus Adolphus can yet drill the Celestial man-power into a real "Yellow Peril". And this may turn out to be even more momentous than the successful Pan-Islam from which the crusades had to defend, Southern Europe for the Europeans or the avalanche of the Tartar hordes in Eastern Europe during the Middle Ages.

Another feature of the revolutionist manifesto requires special notice. There is manifest in it a too palpable desire to placate the Christian Powers. But, unfortunately, the references to foreigners form the least satisfactory part of the document.

It was during the reign of Kubla Khan, the Mongol "barbarian", that Marco Polo was in China for twenty-one years (1274-95). He occupied an important Government post for three years. The reference to Marco Polo proves the reverse of what the revolutionists want to demonstrate. For, the Venetian's account of toleration in China indicates that the alleged foreign dynasty of the thirteenth century was not ignorant and boorish, after all. The Tangs had protected the Zoroastrians, Manichaeans, Nestorian Christians and Mohammedans together with the Confucians, Taoists and Buddhists. The Mongols also were liberal enough to maintain the same religious policy. Further, China was "open" even then to foreign intercourse and receptive of new ideas from strangers. Otherwise a European could not have been deemed fit to hold office in the Middle Kingdom.

The Nestorian tablet, discovered in 1625, proves indeed that during the seventh century when it was set up by Christians, China was not closed to foreigners. But does it prove that China had been closed since then? There is a good deal of false and erroneous ideas in the air regarding this closing and opening of China. It is thoughtlessly alleged by Eur-American politicians that Cathay has always vegetated in "splendid isolation." The Chinese framers of the manifesto should not have swallowed this monumental untruth.

The China of actual history was in touch with the "Roman Orient" during the Han period. The Hans, the lesser dynasties, and the Tangs had intimate relations with Hindu India during the first seven centuries of the Christian era. The Chinese of more primitive times had communication with the Babylonians. In later times, the Sungs promoted maritime trade with the Arabs. And not only the indigenous Mings, but the foreign Mongols, as we have seen, appreciated the services of Europeans. Even the much-condemned Manchus were long friendly to Christians. Shunchi, the first emperor, had the empire mapped out by Jesuits. The Manchus learnt from them the manufacture of new artillery. Kanghi the Great appointed German and French astronomers to reform the Chinese calendar. He was presented with a bronze azimuth and a celestial globe by Louis XIV. In 1692 he revoked the edict against Christian missionizing.

The history of Christian missions in China has passed through the same stages as in Japan. It was during the sixteenth century—the epoch of Ashikaga Shogunate and Ming dynasty—that the Jesuits first came to these countries. The chequered career of Christianity in the Far East since then was not due to the natural open-mindedness or conservatism of the Japanese and the Manchu-Chinese. Its vicissitudes depended, first, on the internal dissensions among the various Christian sects themselves as to the articles of faith, and secondly on the character of the missionaries as political agents of their home governments.

Christians were at first welcomed as much by the Mings and Manchus of China and by the Ashikagas and their successors in Japan as by the Great Moghuls of India. But political intrigues of the missionaries compelled Iyeyasu, the first Tokugawa Shogun, while regent for his son, to issue an anti-Christian edict in 1614. That was the beginning of a persecution which lasted for about twenty years. By 1638 Christianity was all but extirpated in Japan for two centuries.

Missionizing was most prosperous in China during the first two decades of the eighteenth century. Here the persecution began a full century after that in Japan. The Chinese came to know of what had happened in the land of the rising sun. Iyeyasu's work was done by Kanghi in 1717. The sole object was to defend the country from the machinations of the "wolf in sheep's clothing." The same desire for self-preservation had prompted Jahangir, the Moghul emperor of India (1605-1627), to declare: "Let the English come no more."

Such was the "Monroe Doctrine" of Manchu China against Christendom. Measures of political defence are not to be interpreted as instances of Manchu exclusiveness, as the revolutionist manifesto seeks to point out. Nor are they to be treated as evidences of traditional Chinese isolation, as Western scholars are wont to understand.

The document does not touch China's relations with the Powers during the Manchu regime. This would have involved a delicate and dangerous ground. It is obvious that the real foreigners are not the Manchus but these Powers. The Manchu emperors, as Chinese patriots, did for their fatherland the only duty open to them. They closed the country to Eur-America. But one cannot honestly lay one's fingers on any peculiarly Manchu weakness with regard to the eventual failure of this step. It remains for social science to explain the crumbling down of entire Asia in modern times.

From the time that Albuquerque (1510-15), the Portuguese admiral, first conceived the plan of establishing a European empire in India, down to the bombardment of Shimonoseki in Japan by the British, Dutch, French and American ships in 1862, the story of the contact between the East and the West was throughout uniform in procedure and results. Is not this the nemesis or reaction to the long history of aggressive Asia,— beginning with the Persian Wars of the fifth century B. C., carried forward by the Mohammedan Caliphates and Buddhist-Shamanist Tartars of the Middle Ages, and culminating in the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 and the Ottoman domination of Southern and Eastern Europe down to the peace of Carlowitz in 1699?

But whatever be the ultimate consequences of the contact between the East and the West-whether annihilation of Asia or her re-emergence as a system of swarâjes, i.e. sovereign powers, the ætiology of the revolution in China is to be sought in the fact that the last Manchus had proved to be too weak to cope with the cumulative foreign aggressions, and not in the fact that Manchus were foreigners. Young China feared the allendom of Eur-America, i.e., the subjugation by an "albinocracy" more than they could have reasons to hate Manchu absolutism. Majlisist or parliamentary. activities in Persia (1907) have had the same origin, viz., the longstanding incapacity of the ruling Shahs to counteract European expansion in the Middle East. Similarly it was the fear of foreign control in Turkish Macedonia owing to the weakness of the Sultan's government that hastened the party of "Union and Progress" to extort from the throne a constitution (1908) and finally to depose the monarch after an abortive counter-revolution. (1909). Nor is it less well known that New Turkey embarked on the war of 1912 because the Balkan allies had raised the demand for European mediation in the administration of Macedonia.

The fundamental fact in the politics of Young Asia is thus the revolt of the East against the domination of the West,— no matter whether it-manifests itself in the establishment of a constitutional monarchy or in the founding of a monarchless republic; no matter whether it consists in the expulsion of a ruler or in the subversion of a dynasty. In overthrowing the Manchus the Chinese intelligentsia has sought simply to rebel against Occidental exploitation and to emancipate Eastern Asia from Eur-American vassalage-political, economic and cultural. The significance of Chinese unrest can be grasped only by realizing that the expulsion of the West from the East furnishes the sole élan de la vie of China's statesmen and patriots.

Notes

1.  Cf. Bryce: Modern Democracies, Vol. II, pp. 497-505.↩