The Fight For The Republic In China

OF HIS CAREER IN KOREA, IN 1882 TO THE E

se of the moulding-power which early influences exerted on the man's character; but it is interesting in another way since it affords glimpses of the sort of things which affected this leader's imagination throughout his life and

ful physique, his remarkable appetite, his general roughness. Native biographers state that as a youth he failed to pass his hsiu-tsai examinations-the lowest civil service degree-because he had spent too much time in riding and boxing and fencing. An uncle in official life early took charge of him; and when this relative died the young man displayed filial piety in accompanying the corpse back to the family graves and in other

n of a certain General Wu Chang-ching, and now encamped in the Korean capital nominally to preserve order, but in reality, to enforce the claims of the suzerain power. For the Peking Government had never retreated from the position that Korea had been a vassal state ever since the Ming Dynasty had saved the country from the clutches of Hideyoshi and his Japanes

n the short and disastrous war of 1894-95. China, in order to preserve her influence in Korea against the growing influence of Japan, intrigued night and day in the Seoul Palaces, allying herself with the Conservative Court

ll under the limelight on the first possible occasion. On 6th December, 1884, leading 2,000 Chinese troops, and acting in concert with 3,000 Korean soldiers, he attacked the Tong Kwan Palace in which the Japanese Minister and his staff, protected by two companies of Japanese infantry, had taken refuge owing to the threatening state of affairs in the capital. Apparently there was no particular plan-it was the action of a mob of soldi

o war, that political genius, the late Prince Ito, managed to calm things down and arrange workable modus vivendi. Yuan Shih-kai, who had gone to Tientsin to report in person to Li Hung Chan

nd yet he succeeded where he undoubtedly wished to succeed. By rendering faithful service he established the reputation he wished to win; and though he did nothing great he retained his post right up to the act which led to the declaration of war in 1894. Whether he actually precipitated that war is still a matter of opinion. On

stringent in such matters. But by 1896 he was back in favour again, and through the influence of his patron Li Hung Chang, he was at length appointed in command of the Hsiaochan camp near Tientsin, where he was promoted and given the task of reforming a division of old-style troops and m

always been the gateway to Peking: from there the road to high preferment is easily reached. Yuan Shih-kai marched steadily forward,

These Kiangu men, mixed with Shantung recruits, had earned a historic place in the favour of the Manchus owing to the part they had played in the suppression of the Taiping Rebellion, in which great event General Gordon and Li Hung Chang had been so closely associated

the future President of the Chinese Republic succeeded in reorganizing his troops so well that in a very short time the Hsiaochan Division became known as a corps d'elite. The discipline was so stern tha

e Emperor Kwanghsu, who though still in subjection to her, nominally governed the empire. A well- intentioned but weak man, he had surrounded himself with advanced scholars, led by the celebrated Kang Yu Wei, who d

n which he exhorted the nation to obey him. The greatest alarm was created in Court circles by this action; the whole vast body of Metropolitan officialdom, s

then to depose the Empress Dowager for ever from power. What happened is equally well-known. Yuan Shih-kai, after an exhaustive examination of the message and messengers, as well as other attempts to substantiate the genuineness of the appeal, communicated its nature to the then Viceroy of Chihli, the Imperial Clansman Jung Lu, whose intimacy with the Empress Dowager since the days of her youth has passed into history. Jung Lu lost no time in acting. He beheaded the two messengers and persona

rnished with all the evidence. Those days which witnessed the imprisonment of Kwang Hsu were great because they opened wide the portals of the Romance of History: all who were in Peking can never forget the counter-stroke; the arrival of the hordes composed of Tung Fu-hsiang's Mahommedan cavalry-men who had ridden hard acro

riceless opportunity of studying them at close range and soon made up his mind about certain things. When the storm burst, pretending to see nothing but mad fanatics in those who, realizing the plight of their country, had adopted the war-cry "Blot out the Manchus and the foreigner," he struck at them fiercely, driving the whole savage horde headlong into the metropolitan province of Chihli. There, seduced by the Manchus, they suddenly changed the inscription on their flags. Their sole enemy became the foreigner and all

hihli, succeeding the great Li Hung Chang himself, who had been reappointed to his old post, but had found active duties too wearisome. This was a marvellous success for a man but little over forty. And when the fugitive Court at length returned from Hsianfu in 1902, honours were heaped upon him as a person particula

sments, North China raised and equipped six excellent Divisions of field- troops-75,000 men-all looking to Yuan Shih-kai as their sole master. So much energy did he display in pushing military reorganization throughout the provinces that the Court, warned by jealous rivals of his growing power, suddenly

s to the reorganization of a national fighting force, was almost daily engaged in a fierce clandestine struggle to maintain even his modest position. Jealousy, which flourishes in Peking like the upas tree, was for ever blighting his schemes and blocking his plans. He ha

le doubt that the Emperor himself was poisoned. The legend runs that as he expired not only did he give his Consort, who was to succeed him in the exercise of the nominal power of the Throne, a last secret Edict to behead Yuan Shih-kai, but that his faltering hand described circ

sion which the Empress Tzu-hsi had herself decided. The fact that another long Regency had become inevitable through the accession of the child

f the Imperial funeral arrangements-a lucrative appointment. During that interval it is understood that the new Regent, brother of the Emperor Kwang-hsu, consulted all the most trusted magnates of the empire regarding the manner in which the secret decapitation Decree should be

ng a message direct from the Grand Council Chamber, absolutely guaranteeing the safety of his life. Accordingly he duly returned to his native place in Honan province, and for two years-until the outbreak of the Revolution-devoted himself sedulously to the development of the large estate he had acquired with the fruits of office. Living like a patriarch of old, surrounded by his many wives and children, he announced constantly that he had entirely dropped out of the political life of

olume is required to discuss adequately the maze of questions involved. For the purposes of this account, however, the matter can be dismissed very briefly in this way. Welcoming the opportunity which had at last come and determined once for all to settle matters decisively, so far as he was personall

about to give the coup de grace by crossing the river in force and sweeping the last remnants of the revolutionary army to perdition. Thus it is correct to declare that had he so wished Yuan Shih-kai could have crushed the revolution entirely before the end of 1911; but he was sufficiently astute to see that the problem he had to solve was not merely military but moral as well. The Chinese as a nation were suffering from a grave complaint. Their civilization had been made almost bankrupt owing to unresisted foreign aggression and to the native inability to cope with the mass of accumulated wrongs which a superimposed and exhausted feudalism-the Manchu system- had br

onarchy. But the surprising swiftness of the Revolutionary Party's action in proclaiming the Republic at Nanking on the 1st January, 1912, and the support which foreign opinion gave that venture confused him. He had already consented to peace negotiations with the revolutionary South in the middle of December, 1911, and once he was drawn into those negotiations his policy wavered, the armistice in the field being constantly extended because he saw that the Foreign Powers, and particularly England, were averse from further civil war. Having dispatched a former lieutenant, Tong Shao-yi, to Shanghai as his Plenipotentiary, he soon found himself committed to a course of action different from what he had originally contemplated. South China and Central China insisted so vehemently that the only solution that was acceptable to them was the permanent and absolute elimination of the Manchu Dynasty, that he himself was half-convinced, the last argument necessary being the secret promise that he should become the first President of the united Republic. In the circumstances, had he been really loyal, it was his duty either to resume his warfare or resign his appointment as Prime Minister and go into retirement. He did neither. In a thoroughly characteristic manner he sought a middle course, after having vaguely advocated a national convention to settle the matter. By specious misrepresentation the widow of the Emperor Kwang Hsu-the Dowager Empress Lung Yu who had succeeded the Prince Regent Ch'un in her care of the interests of the child Emperor

o the very end of his life that he derived his powers solely from the Last Edicts, and in nowise from his compact with the Nanking Republic which had instituted the so-called Provisional Constitution. He was careful, however, not to lay this down categorically until many months later when his dictator