John Stuart Thomson - China Revolutionized

CHINA
REVOLUTIONIZED

By
JOHN STUART THOMSON

AUTHOR OF
The Chinese, Bud and Bamboo, Etc.

ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS AND MAPS

INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, April, 1913
The Bobbs-Merrill Company

PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.

DEDICATED TO MOTHER

A republic in place of the oldest monarchy! Preposterous. It would involve making a yellow man think as a white man, and that had never occurred, not even in the case of the prodigy, Japan. It would involve free intercourse with the whole wide world, and China had opposed such an innovation stubbornly for 400 years. It meant that the proudest and most self-contained nation should treat others as equals and interchange with them. It involved throwing 4,000 years of continuous history and agglomerated pride and precedent to the winds, and humbly beginning anew as a tyro for a while. It meant the dealing with 400,000,000 kings, instead of one, and asking: My lord, what is your will? An educational system 2,000 years old to be forgotten at once! A religion 5,000 years old at least, whereby every man had his own god (his father), to be made as cheap as the paltry sacrifices of wine, rice and the painted stick of Confucianism were in reality! The taking up of individual and national responsibility for 400,000,000 people, and entrance upon a wide path of world-influence, with its divided shame and fame! The taking and giving of blows for wrong and right! The giving up of the triple eternal Nirvana of father, self and son, in exchange for an exciting rle limited to fifty-five crowded years in the individual! The scale of action! A land as large as all Europe, and a people as numerous as the Caucasic race! The thunderous knock on the long-locked doors of science and medicine by 400,000,000 people who had bowed to idol and charm alone! It shook the world. It was pregnant with paradisal possibilities for mankind, because of the vastness of the movement and the depth of its well-spring. The launching of this new leviathan ship of state could not but raise a wave that would lift the already floating hulks of Europe and America, and give them added impetus, though temporary alarm. The rearrangement of commerce, manufacture, labor, finance, taxation, learning, agriculture, art and possibly religion for the whole world. The adding of the most difficult language to the tongues and pens of men, and the call on the English speech to rise once more greater than the mighty stranger, or die. The challenge to Palestines Bible to conquer by truth, or retreat with half a world lost. The uprising again of the yellow ghosts of Kublai Khan, Batu, Timurlane, and the Khans of the Golden Horde. What would be the Caucasians answer to Emperor Williams question: The Yellow Peril? It will be remembered that the kaiser once painted a picture showing the nations of Europe gathering to defend the cross and civilization against an incendiary Buddha lowering in the eastern sky. Would the stranger within the gates be protected even while republican and imperialist fought out their argument? Would leadership arise, and would the great Mongolian mass be intellectualized now that it was energized? Since the vast body was suddenly displaced, would it henceforward move by mere gravity, or sympathetic volition? Could it collectivize and not disintegrate? What would be the effect on the scores of trembling thrones, where Rominoff, Hapsburg, Savoy, Hohenzollern, Ottoman, Mikado, Billiken, etc., said they ruled by divine right, which is quite a different thing from noble Englands constitutional right? Sun Yat Sen and the Chinese republicans sent out this challenge: Tien ming wu chang (the divine right lasts not forever).

All these questions presented themselves when the reformers startled the world with the announcement that there was to be a republic in China. It was to be a republicnot a monarchysaid even those Chinese who had been educated in Japan, where lately a Japanese editor educated in America and ten others had been tried and executed in secret, the papers sealed, and the press censored. They wanted pitiless publicity in the new republican China. Had there been no abatement of the opium habit through Americas leadership of sentiment, and Britains sacrifice of revenue from 1909 to 1911, there could have been no rebellion in 1911. The reform cleared the befogged heads of the nation, added a million men to agitation, and furnished a hundred million dollars directly and indirectly toward the independence of the agitators. How great a stone America and Britain set rolling in that Opium Conference of 1909 at Shanghai!

The great revolution of October, 1911, did not drop as a bolt from a clear sky. The clouds had been gathering, though many at home and abroad did not, or would not see them. In September, 1911, the imperial viceroy of Canton, Chang Ming Chi, sent spies along the new Canton-Hongkong railway to apprehend smugglers of arms. In the same month troops under the command of Marshal Lung Chai Kwong, suddenly surrounded the office of the Shat Pat Po newspaper, at Canton, and arrested several reformers. General Luk Wing Ting, of Kwangsi province, came down the Si Kiang (West River) in September, 1911, in the gunboat