Part 9 (1/2)

[9] Thomas Taylor Meadows, _The Chinese and Their Rebellions_, p. 24, London, 1856. His accounts of the T'ai-p'ing rebellion even today possess great liveliness and interest and illuminate twentieth century Chinese problems.

[10] _Ibid._, p. 25.

[11] E. H. Parker, _China ..._, pp. 259-260, New York, 1917.

[12] A. N. Holcombe, _The Chinese Revolution_, pp. 70-81, Cambridge, 1930.

[13] See Luther Carrington Goodrich, _The Literary Inquisition of Ch'ien-lung_, Baltimore, 1935.

[14] The most extensive source of information on Manchu military organization in China is T. F. Wade, ”The Army of the Chinese Empire: Its Two Great Divisions, the Bannermen or National Guard, and the Green Standard or Provincial Troops; Their Organization, Pay, Condition &c.,”

_The Chinese Repository_ (Canton), vol. 20, pp. 250-280, 300-340, 363-422, 1851, which is now unfortunately rare. William James Hail, _Tseng Kuo-fan and the Taiping Rebellion_, New Haven, 1927, presents an accessible and informative digest of this and other material in its opening pages. Two French works based on Wade are Jules Picard, _etat generale des forces maritimes et militaires de la Chine ..._, Paris, 1860, and P. Dabry, _Organisation militaire des Chinois, ou la Chine et ses armees_, Paris, 1859. William Frederick Mayers, _The Chinese Government_, Shanghai, 1897, is one of the most valuable references for the structure of the last imperial government of China; designed as a manual of t.i.tles, it presents a concise outline of all major civil and military offices. A more elaborate treatise is P. C. Hsieh, _The Chinese Government_, 1644-1911, Baltimore, 1925. See also Anatol M. Kotenev, _The Chinese Soldier_, Shanghai, 1937. The text refers to Wade, p. 391, and Hsieh, p. 260.

[15] United States War Department, Adjutant-General's Office, no. 30, _Notes on China_, pp. 57-69, ”The Chinese Army,” Was.h.i.+ngton, 1900.

Except for cursory references, this pamphlet is of no great value.

[16] See above, pp. 32 ff.

[17] See Hail, _op. cit._ in note 14.

[18] See Meribeth E. Cameron, _The Reform Movement in China_, 1898-1912, p. 59, Stanford, 1931.

[19] H. G. W. Woodhead (ed.), _The China Year Book_, 1921-2, Tientsin, 1921; chap. XIX, ”Defense,” by Rodney Gilbert, pp. 511-512. Gilbert's is a competent contemporary account of tuchunism, sketching the background very clearly.

[20] George H. Blakeslee (ed.), _China and the Far East_, New York, 1910, Chapter X, ”The Chinese Army--Its Development and Present Strength,” by Major Eben Swift, p. 181. See also General H. Frey, _L'Armee chinoise: l'armee ancienne, l'armee nouvelle, l'armee chinoise dans l'avenir_, Paris, 1904.

[21] For a discussion of the governmental changes of the period see below, pp. 145 ff. See also H. F. MacNair, _China in Revolution_, Chicago, 1931; A. N. Holcombe, _The Spirit of the Chinese Revolution_, New York, 1931. For a contemporary censure of Yuan s.h.i.+h-k'ai see Paul Myron [Paul M. W. Linebarger], _Our Chinese Chances_, Chicago, 1915.

_Chapter_ V

CAUSES

Yuan's closing years might have resembled Napoleon's rise from the position of First Consul to that of emperor, had he not been checked at the very last moment by armed uprisings and expressions of deep popular contempt. Even so, he retained control of the country.[1] The humiliation of his defeat lacked even dramatic compensations, and he died in June, 1916, of disease, poison, or chagrin. With his death the Republic had a chance to stand by itself, but it could not.

_The Age of the War Lords_

Yuan had fastened the symbols of old on the scaffolding of a new order.

With his death the momentum of administrative routine retained from the Manchu dynasty was lost; the Republican government in Peking degenerated from impotence to comedy. The process called government began to nauseate patriotic Chinese and foreigners alike; few were able to take a long view, to maintain their courage, and to keep on fighting against disgusting and disheartening realities. With the decomposition of the central government--except the modern bureaucracies such as posts and customs, which were kept intact by their foreign personnel and their special international status--the armies, though divided provincially, stepped into positions of unprecedented authority. There was a veritable epidemic of monarchical ambition, greed, and willfulness among the provincial military commanders; many Chinese expected a new Yuan to emerge from that group and become the ”strong man of China.” With such a stage to strut on, it is not surprising that the Chinese military lost constructive vision. A sober nucleus of idealistically hard-headed, patriotic men, each a George Was.h.i.+ngton, might have used military power to reunite the country, but order could not be expected to emerge from the unsystematized compet.i.tion of armed forces.

Three broader factors affected the ascendancy of war lords, in addition to obvious motives and interests. The ideological ruin was bad enough; the consequent social disorder crippled China. But the armies now came to provide a refuge for the unemployed and dispossessed. A second factor, the mechanical mobilization of military forces through the railways, made warfare more expensive and ruinous than it would have been with the slow-moving infantry of the past. Thirdly, the war lords gave physical embodiment to the ideological and social disunity of China, inviting the constant intervention of the Western powers and of j.a.pan in Chinese affairs.

Individually the war lords warrant no special attention. There was Chang Tso-lin in Manchuria; Tuan Chi-jui and Ts'ao Kun in North China; Yen Hsi-shan (”The Model Governor”) and, to the west of him, Feng Yu-hsiang (”The Christian General”); Chang Chung-chang in Shantung, significant more for his brutality than for his political and military position; the quaint, conservative scholar Wu P'ei-fu, in the Yangtze valley, minor figures in the South and West. It was not the generals who were important, but militarism.

Militarism machine-gunned the Confucian ethics out of politics; it taxed the land into ruin; it laid China wide open to imperialistic thrusts, and--by the same act--made her a poor market. Militarism built roads when they were strategically required, established a few railways and spoiled more, modernized China, but did so in the costliest way of all.

Only in the intellectual world was military domination not outright destruction. The generals and their staffs were surprisingly ignorant of the power of ideas, ineffectual in their censors.h.i.+p, oblivious to the great leverage of undercover agitation. Trusting arms, they failed to see that the only opposition able to destroy them was not military but mental.

While the soldiery stirred the country with murder and oppression, their system progressed steadily toward self-destruction. Two great pressures forced constant further expansion of the armies. The first is obvious: military rivalry. The second was the growing abuse of army organization as a means of unemployment relief. Military taxation drove the peasants off the land, whereupon they had no recourse but to become bandits or soldiers. If they were bandits, consolidation under a chieftain transformed them into military irregulars and induced some ambitious general to include them in his forces. If they were soldiers, the bandit stage remained in reach. In either case, they added to the burden falling upon their commander, which in turn led to still greater impoverishment of the peasants, a further increase of dispossessed men, bandits, and soldiers. With the widening circulation of arms, Western guns and fighting methods became less and less a secret of small groups capable of establis.h.i.+ng a firm military oligarchy and more and more the property of a cross section of the Chinese ma.s.ses.

From an estimated total of 1,369,880 in 1921,[2] the number of men under arms rose to a figure estimated to be between 1,883,300 and 1,933,300 five years later.[3] This increase occurred in one of the poorest countries of the world, despite conditions of extreme misery: