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done in the open under the Walls of Peking

      Modern Peking: A Run on a Bank

      The Re-opening of Parliament on August 1st, 1916, after three years of dictatorial rule

      The Original Constitutional Drafting Committee of 1913, photographed on the Steps of the Temple of Heaven, where the Draft was completed

      A Presidential Review of Troops in the Southern Hungtung Park outside Peking: Arrival of the President

      President Li Yuan-Hung and the General Staff watching the Review

      March-past of an Infantry Division

      Modern Peking: The Palace Entrance lined with Troops. Note the New Type Chinese Policeman in the foreground

      The Premier General Tuan Chi-Jui, Head of the Cabinet which decided to declare war on Germany.

      General Feng Kuo-chang, President of the Republic.

      The Scholar Liang Chi-chao, sometime Minister of Justice, and the foremost "Brain" in China

      General Tsao-ao, the Hero of the Yunnan Rebellion of 1915–16, who died from the effects of the campaign

      Liang Shih-yi, who was the Power behind Yuan Shih-kai, now proscribed and living in exile at Hong-Kong

      The Famous or Infamous General Chang Hsun, the leading Reactionary in China to-day, who still commands a force of 30,000 men astride of the Pukow Railway

      The Bas-relief in a Peking Temple, well illustrating Indo-Chinese Influences

      The Late President Yuan Shih-kai

      President Yuan Shih-kai photographed immediately after his Inauguration as Provisional President, March 10th, 1912

      The National Assembly sitting as a National Convention engaged on the Draft of the Permanent Constitution. (Specially photographed by permission of the Speakers for the Present Work)

      View from rear of the Hall of the National Assembly sitting as a National Convention engaged on the Draft of the Permanent Constitution. (Specially photographed by permission of the Speakers for the Present Work)

      

CHAPTER I

       Table of Contents

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

       Table of Contents

      The revolution which broke out in China on the 10th October, 1911, and which was completed with the abdication of the Manchu Dynasty on the 12th February, 1912, though acclaimed as highly successful, was in its practical aspects something very different. With the proclamation of the Republic, the fiction of autocratic rule had truly enough vanished; yet the tradition survived and with it sufficient of the essential machinery of Imperialism to defeat the nominal victors until the death of Yuan Shih-kai.

      The movement to expel the Manchus, who had seized the Dragon Throne in 1644 from the expiring Ming Dynasty, was an old one. Historians are silent on the subject of the various secret plots which were always being hatched to achieve that end, their silence being due to a lack of proper records and to the difficulty of establishing the simple truth in a country where rumour reigns supreme. But there is little doubt that the famous Ko-lao-hui, a Secret Society with its headquarters in the remote province of Szechuan, owed its origin to the last of the Ming adherents, who after waging a desperate guerilla warfare from the date of their expulsion from Peking, finally fell to the low level of inciting assassinations and general unrest in the vain hope that they might some day regain their heritage. At least, we know one thing definitely: that the attempt on the life of the Emperor Chia Ching in the Peking streets at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century was a Secret Society plot and brought to an abrupt end the pleasant habit of travelling among their subjects which the great Manchu Emperors K'ang-hsi and Ch'ien Lung had inaugurated and always pursued and which had so largely encouraged the growth of personal loyalty to a foreign House.

      From that day onwards for over a century no Emperor ventured out from behind the frowning Walls of the Forbidden City, save for brief annual ceremonies, such as the Worship of Heaven on the occasion of the Winter Solstice, and during the two "flights"—first in 1860 when Peking was occupied by an Anglo-French expedition and the Court incontinently sought sanctuary in the mountain Palaces of Jehol; and, again, in 1900, when with the pricking of the Boxer bubble and the arrival of the International relief armies, the Imperial Household was forced along the stony road to far-off Hsianfu.

The effect of this immurement was soon visible; the Manchu rule, which was emphatically a rule of the sword, was rapidly so weakened that the emperors became no more than rois fainéants at the mercy of their minister.^[1] The history of the Nineteenth Century is thus logically enough the history of successive collapses. Not only did overseas foreigners openly thunder at the gateways of the empire and force an ingress, but native rebellions were constant and common. Leaving minor disturbances out of account, there were during this period two huge Mahommedan rebellions, besides the cataclysmic Taiping rising which lasted ten years and is supposed to have destroyed the unbelievable total of one hundred million persons. The empire, torn by internecine warfare, surrendered many of its essential prerogatives to foreigners, and by accepting the principle of extraterritoriality prepared the road to ultimate collapse.

      How in such circumstances was it possible to keep alive absolutism? The answer is so curious that we must be explicit and exhaustive.

      The simple truth is that save during the period of vigour immediately following each foreign conquest (such as the Mongol conquest in the Thirteenth Century and the Manchu in the Seventeenth) not only has there never been any absolutism properly so-called in China, but that apart from the most meagre and inefficient tax-collecting and some rough-and-ready policing in and around the cities there has never been any true governing at all save what the people did for themselves or what they demanded of the officials as a protection against one another. Any one who doubts these statements has no inkling of those facts which are the crown as well as the foundation of the Chinese group-system, and which must be patiently studied in the village-life of the country to be fitly appreciated. To be quite frank, absolutism is a myth coming down from the days of Kublai Khan when he so proudly built his Khanbaligh (the Cambaluc of Marco Polo and the forebear of modern Peking) and filled it with his troops who so soon vanished like the snows of winter. An elaborate pretence, a deliberate policy of make-believe, ever since those days invested Imperial Edicts with a majesty which they have never really possessed, the effacement of the sovereign during the Nineteenth Century contributing to the legend that there existed in the capital a Grand and Fearful Panjandrum for whom no miracle was too great and to whom people and officials owed trembling obedience.

      In reality, the office of Emperor was never more than a politico-religious concept, translated for the benefit of the masses into socio-economic ordinances. These pronouncements, cast in the form of periodic homilies called Edicts, were the ritual of government; their purpose was instructional rather than mandatory; they were designed to teach and keep alive the State-theory that the Emperor was the High Priest of the Nation and that obedience to the morality of the Golden Age, which had been inculcated by all the philosophers since Confucius and Mencius flourished twenty-five centuries ago, would not only secure universal happiness but contribute to national greatness.

      The office of Emperor was thus heavenly rather than terrestrial, and suasion, not arms, was the most potent argument used in everyday life. The amazing reply (i.e., amazing to foreigners) made by the great Emperor K'ang-hsi in the tremendous Eighteenth Century controversy between the Jesuit and the Dominican missionaries, which ruined the prospects of China's ever becoming Roman Catholic and which the Pope refused to accept—that the custom of ancestor-worship was political and not religious—was

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