CHAPTER XLII

COVETED CHINA

NOTE

As the significance of Lord Charles Beresford's doings in China cannot

be appreciated save in the light of the knowledge of the international

situation in 1898, a brief analysis of it may here serve the

convenience of the reader.

The governing factor of the problem was the fear of Russian ambition

and of Russian aggrandisement. Both Russia and Great Britain are great

Oriental Powers. The Asiatic possessions or dependencies of Russia

consisted of over six million square miles, containing a population of

about thirteen millions. The Asiatic possessions or dependencies of

Great Britain consisted of something over one and a half million square

miles, containing a population of some three hundred millions. A

comparison between the two demonstrates this remarkable disparity: that

whereas Russia had four times as much Asiatic territory as England,

England ruled over thirteen times as many Asiatic people. The Russian

pressure towards the seaboards, wealthy lands and vast populations of

the East, extended along a line measuring 7600 miles, and verging all

the way upon India, Turkey, Persia and China. In 1898, Russia was

steadily advancing towards India, throwing forward railways through

Central Asia, and at the same time inexorably thrusting the

Trans-Siberian Railway towards Manchuria and the Amur regions. That

line, which to-day bands the entire continent {419} from St. Petersburg

to Vladivostock on the Sea of Japan, in 1898 had not reached within 500

miles of Irkutsk on Lake Baikal, which marks roughly two-thirds of the

whole distance of 4000 miles from St. Petersburg to Vladivostock as the

crow flies.

The vast, inscrutable, dreaded giant Russia, lying right across the top

of Europe and Asia, was ever pushing downwards to the south upon

Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan and China, and reaching an arm sideways to

the east and the sea across the upper corner of China. The shoulders

of the British Empire were taking some of the weight; and lest China

should crack under it and fly asunder, many people were urging that

England should prop up that passive and unwieldy bulk, Lord Salisbury

standing back to back with the Son of Heaven.

The common interest was of course commercial. Great Britain had 64 per

cent. of China's total foreign trade, with some £32,000,000 a year; had

invested some hundreds of millions in the Far East; and was amiably and

openly desirous to invest a great deal more in what was largely an

unexplored and an immense field of profit. But she wanted security,

first.

It was Lord Charles Beresford's business to discover what were the

existing commercial conditions, how they might be improved and

extended, and what was the security required for so much improvement

and extension. This enterprise was known as the policy of the "Open

Door"; for the British principle was that all nations should enjoy

equal opportunities. The alternative policy was known as "Spheres of

Influence," which virtually meant the partition of the Chinese Empire

among the nations of Europe. Such was the Russian policy, in which she

was supported, or was believed to have been supported, by both France

and Germany. Russian diplomacy was active at Pekin; Russian agents

were numerous in the trading centres of China; and it was constantly

alleged at the time by students of the subject, that the Chinese

Government regarded Russia as a more {420} powerful friend than

England. In the light of subsequent experience, it would perhaps be

more accurate to say that whereas China hated and distrusted all

foreigners, she hated and distrusted the English less than the

Russians, but that the vacillations and inconsistencies of British

policy had inspired her rulers with a deep suspicion.

A good deal of nonsense, inspired by a large and generous ignorance of

Chinese conditions and affairs, was talked and written in 1898. China

was represented as an eccentric barbarian of great size, of uncertain

temper, but on the whole amenable to good advice, who was merely

waiting pathetically for the English to teach him what to do and how to

do it.

In truth, China, in 1898, that is, political China, while haunted by a

dread of foreign aggression, was intensely occupied with her own

affairs. These were indeed exigent enough. In the summer of 1898,

occurred the Hundred Days of Reform, followed by the _coup d'état_, and

the imprisonment of the Emperor. The visit of Lord Charles Beresford

to China coincided with the triumph of the reactionary Conservative

party at Court and the restoration to absolute power of the Empress

Dowager, Tsu Hsi. The history of the affair is related in detail by

Messrs. J. O. P. Bland and E. Backhouse, in their work, _China under

the Empress Dowager_ (Heinemann, 1910); but its intricacies were not

divulged at the time. A study of the correspondence contained in the

Blue Books of the period reveals the singular innocence of the British

diplomatic methods employed at this critical moment.

The Emperor, Kuang-Hsu, who had always been at variance with his astute

and powerful aunt, the Empress Dowager, the real ruler of China for

fifty years, had espoused the cause of the Reform, or Chinese, party of

the South, as distinguished from the Manchu, or Conservative, party of

the North.

The enmity of the South towards the North, the latent inbred hostility

of the Chinese to the Manchu, had been {421} roused to violence by the

defeat of China by Japan in the war of 1894-5. It was very well known

that the Empress Dowager had spent the money allocated to the Navy and

other departments of State upon the rebuilding of the Summer Palace at

Pekin and other æsthetic diversions. But the Empress Dowager, with her

habitual skill, contrived to shift the responsibility for the disaster

upon the puppet Emperor, who in fact was guiltless of it. The

injustice so exasperated the young man, that he joined the Reform

Party, and issued Decree after Decree, all of which were tinctured with

Western ideas, and all of which were expressly repugnant to the Empress

Dowager. Tzu Hsi, however, approved the Decrees without remark, biding

her time. It came. The Emperor was induced to assent to a plot to

seize the person of the Empress Dowager, and afterwards to sequester

his terrible aunt for the rest of her life.

Now came the intromission of Yuan Shih Kai, who had been Imperial

Resident in Corea. In 1898, he was Judicial Commissioner of Chihli,

and exerted considerable influence at Court. Yuan Shih Kai, professing

great interest in reform, won the confidence of the Emperor; who,

believing that in Yuan he had gained an adherent at Court, informed him

of the details of the conspiracy. That design included the

assassination of Yung Lu. Now Yung Lu was Governor-General of Chihli,

commander-in-chief of the foreign-drilled army, which was one of the

efficient armies in China, an old friend and a loyal servant of the

Empress Dowager, and altogether a most formidable person. The

Emperor's plan was to slay Yung Lu swiftly, to put himself at the head

of Yung Lu's ten thousand soldiers, and then to march with them upon

Pekin and seize the Empress Dowager. All might have gone well, had not

Yuan Shih Kai (according to Messrs. Bland and Backhouse) been

blood-brother to Yung Lu, and also, presumably, loyal to the Empress

Dowager. In any case, Yuan went straightway to Yung Lu and divulged

the plot.

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The next day, it was the Emperor Kuang Hsu, and not his aunt, who was

ceremoniously escorted to prison.

Six of the conspirators were subsequently executed. Another, Kang Yu

Wei, escaped under British protection in October, 1898. Dr. Sun

Yat-sen was another fugitive. It was in October, 1898, that Lord

Charles Beresford arrived at Pekin.

The Empress Dowager resumed the Regency and therewith the formal

investiture of that supreme power which she had exercised since, as a

girl of twenty-two, a lady in waiting at Court in the time of the

Emperor Hsien-Feng, she had unofficially assumed the conduct of

affairs, and which she continued to wield until the end. Yung Lu was

appointed to be member of the Grand Council, and Minister of War. When

he was in Pekin, Lord Charles Beresford had an interesting conversation

with Yung Lu.

The Emperor Kuang Hsu remained imprisoned in his palace in the Ocean

Terrace at Pekin; and it was rumoured throughout the South that he

would presently die. Whether or not the Empress Dowager desired his

death, she considered it politic, having regard to the anger which his

dethronement inspired in the South, to keep him alive. Moreover, the

British Minister, referring to the reports that "the Empress Dowager

was about to proceed to extreme steps in regard to the Emperor,"

solemnly suggested that any such course of action would be highly

repugnant to the susceptibilities of Foreign Powers.

Such, briefly indicated, was the posture of affairs in 1898, when the

British Government was being urged to initiate a definite policy in

China, and when Lord Charles Beresford went to investigate commercial

conditions in that puzzling Empire. But the British Government had the

rest of the world to consider, as well.

In the preceding year, 1897, it was announced that Russia would winter

at Port Arthur; whereupon Lord Charles Beresford remarked in the House

of Commons that the winter would probably be of long duration. Germany

{423} was in occupation of Kiao Chao, originally demanded as

compensation for the murder of a German missionary--a most profitable

martyrdom. There were troubles on the Indian frontier; there was

fighting in Crete, and consequently there was danger of a war breaking

out between Greece and Turkey. It is sufficiently obvious that, under

such conditions--at a time when the European nations were each waiting

to take of China what it could get; when Russia was more or less in

agreement with France and Germany; and when England stood alone;--any

very definite move on her part might have led to bigger difficulties

than she cared to encounter. At any rate, peace was maintained; the

policy of the "Open Door" prevailed; and the influence exerted by Lord

Charles Beresford upon international affairs, although perhaps not to

be defined, was considerable. For further information concerning this

epoch, the student may be referred to _China under the Empress

Dowager_, by Messrs. J. O. P. Bland and E. Backhouse (Heinemann, 1910);

_China in Transformation,_ by A. R. Colquhoun (Harper, 1898); and the

Blue-book _China. No. 1 (1899) C.--9131_.

While one British admiral, Rear-Admiral Noel, stopped the trouble in

Crete, which had defeated the united intellect of Europe for

generations; another, Rear-Admiral Lord Charles Beresford, was employed

in conducting a swifter, more thorough and more practical investigation

into the commercial military and social conditions of China than had

ever before been accomplished; so that its results, set forth at the

time in the admiral's many speeches and afterwards in his book _The

Break-up of China_, struck the two great English-speaking peoples of

the world, the British and the American nations, with something of the

force of a revelation.

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