The Awakening of China by W.A.P. Martin

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At first no science was taught or expected, but gradually we succeeded
in obtaining the consent of the Chinese ministers to enlarge our
faculty so as to include chairs of astronomy, mathematics, chemistry,
and physics. International law was taught by the
[Page 210]
president; and by him also the Chinese were supplied with their
first text-books on the law of nations. What use had they for books
on that subject, so long as they held no intercourse on equal terms
with foreign countries? The students trained in that school of
diplomacy had to shiver in the cold for many a year before the
Government recognised their merits and rewarded them with official
appointments. The minister recently returned from London, the ministers
now in Germany and Japan, and a minister formerly in France, not to
speak of secretaries of legation and consuls, were all graduates
of our earlier classes.

In 1898 the young Emperor, taught by defeat at the hands of the
Japanese, resolved on a thorough reform in the system of national
education. It would never do to confine the knowledge of Western
science to a handful of interpreters and attaches. The highest
scholars of the Empire must be allowed access to the fountain of
national strength. A university was created with a capital of five
million taels, and the writer was made president by an imperial
decree which conferred on him the highest but one of the nine grades
of the mandarinate.

Two or three hundred students were enrolled, among whom were bachelors,
masters, and doctors of the civil service examinations. It was
launched with a favouring breeze; but the wind changed with the
_coup d'etat_ of the Empress Dowager, and two years later the
university went down in the Boxer cyclone. A professor, a tutor,
and a student lost their lives. How the cause of educational reform
rose stronger after the storm, I relate in a special
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chapter. It is a far cry from a university for the _elite_
to that elaborate system of national education which is destined
to plant its schools in every town and hamlet in the Empire. The
new education was in fact still regarded with suspicion by the
honour men of the old system. They looked on it, as they did on
the railway, as a source of danger, a perilous experiment.

As yet the intercourse was one-sided: envoys came; but none were
sent. Embassies were no novelty; but they had always moved on an
inclined plane, either coming up laden with tribute, or going down
bearing commands. Where there was no tribute and no command, why
send them? Why send to the very people who had robbed China of her
supremacy! It was a bitter pill, and she long refused to swallow
it. Hart gilded the dose and she took it. Obtaining leave to go
home to get married, he proposed that he should be accompanied by
his teacher, Pinchun, a learned Manchu, as unofficial envoy--with
the agreeable duty to see and report. It was a travelling commission,
not like that of 1905-06, to seek light, but to ascertain whether
the representative of a power so humbled and insulted would be
treated with common decency.

The old pundit was a poet. All Chinese pundits are poets; but Pinchun
had real gifts, and the flow of champagne kindled his inspiration.
Everywhere wined and dined, though accredited to no court, he was
in raptures at the magnificence of the nations of the West. He
lauded their wealth, culture, and scenery in faultless verse; and
if he indulged in satire,
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it was not for the public eye. He was attended by several of our
students, to whom the travelling commission was an education. They
were destined, after long waiting as I have said, to revisit the
Western world, clothed with higher powers.

The impression made on both sides was favourable, and the way was
prepared for a genuine embassy. The United States minister, Anson
Burlingame, a man of keen penetration and broad sympathies, had made
himself exceedingly acceptable to the Foreign Office at Peking. When
he was taking leave to return home, in 1867, the Chinese ministers
begged his good offices with the United States Government and with
other governments as occasion might offer--"In short, you will
be our ambassador," they said, with hearty good-will.

Burlingame, who grasped the possibilities of the situation, called at
the Customs on his way to the Legation. Hart seized the psychological
moment, and, hastening to the _Yamen_, induced the ministers
to turn a pleasantry into a reality. The Dowagers (for there were
two) assented to the proposal of Prince Kung, to invest Burlingame
with a roving commission to all the Treaty powers, and to associate
with him a Manchu and a Chinese with the rank of minister. An
"oecumenical embassy" was the result. Some of our students were
again attached to the suite; reciprocal intercourse had begun; and
Burlingame has the glory of initiating it".

In the work of reform three viceroys stand pre-eminent, viz., Li
Hung Chang, Yuen Shi Kai and Chang Chitung. Li, besides organising
an army and
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a navy (both demolished by the Japanese in 1895), founded a university
at Tienstin, and placed Dr. Tenney at the head of it. Yuen, coming
to the same viceroyalty with the lesson of the Boxer War before
his eyes, has made the army and education objects of special care.
In the latter field he had had the able assistance of Dr. Tenney,
and succeeded in making the schools of the province of Chihli an
example for the Empire.

Viceroy Chang has the distinction of being the first man (with
the exception of Kang Yuwei) to start the emperor on the path of
reform. Holding that, to be rich, China must have the industrial
arts of the West, and to be strong she must have the sciences of
the West, he has taken the lead in advocating and introducing both.
Having been called, after the suspension of the Imperial University,
to assist this enlightened satrap in his great enterprise, I cannot
better illustrate the progress of reform than by devoting a separate
chapter to him and to my observations during three years in Central
China.

Tests of scholarship and qualifications for office have undergone
a complete change. The regulation essay, for centuries supreme in
the examinations for the civil service, is abolished; and more
solid acquirements have taken its place. It takes time to adjust such
an ancient system to new conditions. That this will be accomplished
is sufficiently indicated by the fact that in May, 1906, degrees
answering to A. M. and Ph. D. were conferred on quite a number of
students who had completed their studies at universities in foreign
countries. As a result there is certain
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to be a rush of students to Europe and America, the fountain-heads
of science. Forty young men selected by Viceroy Yuen from the advanced
classes of his schools were in 1906 despatched under the superintendence
of Dr. Tenney to pursue professional studies in the United States.
That promising mission was partly due to the relaxation of the
rigour of the exclusion laws.

The Chinese assessor of the Mixed Court in Shanghai was dismissed
the same year because he had condemned criminals to be beaten with
rods--a favourite punishment, in which there is a way to alleviate
the blows. Slicing, branding, and other horrible punishments with
torture to extort confessions have been forbidden by imperial decree.
Conscious of the contempt excited by such barbarities, and desirous
of removing an obstacle to admission to the comity of nations, the
Government has undertaken to revise its penal code. Wu-ting-fang,
so well known as minister at Washington, has borne a chief part in
this honourable task. The code is not yet published; but magistrates
are required to act on its general principles. When completed it will
no doubt provide for a jury, a thing hitherto unknown in China.
The commissioners on legal reform have already sent up a memorial,
explaining the functions of a jury; and, to render its adoption
palatable, they declare that it is an ancient institution, having
been in use in China three thousand years ago. They leave the Throne
to infer that Westerners borrowed it from China.

The fact is that each magistrate is a petty tyrant, embodying in
his person the functions of local governor,
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judge, and jury, though there are limits to his discretion and
room for appeal or complaint. It is to be hoped that lawyers and
legal education will find a place in the administration of justice.

Formerly clinging to a foreign flagstaff, the editor of a Chinese
journal cautiously hinted the need for some kinds of reform. Within
this _lustrum mirabile_ the daily press has taken the Empire
by storm. Some twenty or more journals have sprung up under the
shadow of the throne, and they are not gagged. They go to the length
of their tether in discussing affairs of state--notwithstanding
cautionary hints. Refraining from open attack, they indulge in
covert criticism of the Government and its agents.

Social reforms open to ambitious editors a wide field and make amends
for exclusion from the political arena. One of the most influential
recently deplored the want of vitality in the old religions of
the country, and, regarding their reformation as hopeless, openly
advocated the adoption of Christianity. To be independent of the
foreigner it must, he said, be made a state church, with one of
the princes for a figurehead, if not for pilot.

Another deals with the subject of marriage. Many improvements,
he says, are to be made in the legal status of woman. The total
abolition of polygamy might be premature; but that is to be kept
in view. In another issue he expresses a regret that the Western
usage of personal courtship cannot safely be introduced. Those who
are to be companions for life cannot as yet be allowed to see each
other, as disorders might result from excess of freedom. Such liberty
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in social relations is impracticable "except in a highly refined
and well-ordered state of society." The same or another writer
proposes, by way of enlarging woman's world, that she shall not
be confined to the house, but be allowed to circulate as freely
as Western women but she must hide her charms behind a veil.

Reporting an altercation between a policeman and the driver of
one of Prince Ching's carts, who insisted on driving on tracks
forbidden to common people, an editor suggests with mild sarcasm
that a notice be posted in such cases stating that only "noblemen's
carts are allowed to pass." Do not these specimens show a laudable
attempt to simulate a free press? Free it is by sufferance, though
not by law.

Reading-rooms are a new institution full of promise. They are not
libraries, but places for reading and expounding newspapers for the
benefit of those who are unable to read for themselves. Numerous
rooms may be seen at the street corners, where men are reciting
the contents of a paper to an eager crowd. They have the air of
wayside chapels; and this mode of enlightening the ignorant was
confessedly borrowed from the missionary. How urgent the need,
where among the men only one in twenty can read; and among women
not one in a hundred!

Reform in writing is a genuine novelty, Chinese writing being a
development of hieroglyphics, in which the sound is no index to
the sense, and in which each pictorial form must be separately made
familiar to the eye. Dr. Medhurst wittily calls it "an occulage,
not a language." Without the introduction of alphabetic
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writing, the art of reading can never become general. To meet this
want a new alphabet of fifty letters has been invented, and a society
organised to push the system, so that the common people, also women,
may soon be able to read the papers for themselves. The author of
the system is Wang Chao, mentioned above as having given occasion
for the _coup d'etat_ by which the Dowager Empress was restored
to power in 1898.

I close this formidable list of reforms with a few words on a society
for the abolition of a usage which makes Chinese women the
laughing-stock of the world, namely, the binding of their feet.
With the minds of her daughters cramped by ignorance, and their
feet crippled by the tyranny of an absurd fashion, China suffers an
immense loss, social and economic. Happily there are now indications
that the proposed enfranchisement will meet with general favour.
Lately I heard mandarins of high rank advocate this cause in the
hearing of a large concourse at Shanghai. They have given a pledge
that there shall be no more foot-binding in their families; and the
Dowager Empress came to the support of the cause with a hortatory
edict. As in this matter she dared not prohibit, she was limited to
persuasion and example. Tartar women have their powers of locomotion
unimpaired. Viceroy Chang denounced the fashion as tending to sap the
vigour of China's mothers; and he is reported to have suggested a
tax on small feet--in inverse proportion to their size, of course.
The leader in this movement, which bids fair to become national,
is Mrs. Archibald Little.

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The streets are patrolled by a well-dressed and well-armed police
force, in strong contrast with the ragged, negligent watchmen of
yore. The Chinese, it seems, are in earnest about mending their
ways. Their streets, in Peking and other cities, are undergoing
thorough repair--so that broughams and rickshaws are beginning to
take the place of carts and palanquins. A foreign style of building
is winning favour; and the adoption of foreign dress is talked of.
When these changes come, what will be left of this queer antique?

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CHAPTER XXX

VICEROY CHANG-A LEADER OF REFORM

_His Origin--Course as a Student--In the Censorate--He Floors a
Magnate--The First to Wake Up--As a Leader of Reform--The Awakening
of the Giant_

If I were writing of Chang, the Chinese giant, who overtopped the
tallest of his fellow-men by head and shoulders, I should be sure
of readers. Physical phenomena attract attention more than mental
or moral grandeur. Is it not because greatness in these higher
realms requires patient thought for due appreciation?

Chang, the viceroy of Hukwang, a giant in intellect and a hero in
achievement, is not a commonplace character. If my readers will
follow me, while I trace his rise and progress, not only will they
discover that he stands head and shoulders above most officials
of his rank, but they will gain important side-lights on great
events in recent history.

During my forty years' residence in the capital I had become well
acquainted with Chang's brilliant career; but it is only within
the last three or four years that I have had an opportunity to
study him in personal intercourse, having been called to preside
over his university and to aid him in other educational enterprises.

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Whatever may be thought of the rank and file of China's mandarins,
her viceroys are nearly always men of exceptional ability. They
are never novices, but as a rule old in years and veterans in
experience. Promoted for executive talent or for signal services,
their office is too high to be in the market; nor is it probable
that money can do much to recommend a candidate. A governor of
Kwangsi was recently dismissed for incompetence, or for ill-success
against a body of rebels. Being a rich man, he made a free use
of that argument which commonly proves effective at Peking. But,
so far from being advanced to the viceroyalty, he was not even
reinstated in his original rank. The most he was able to obtain by
a lavish expenditure was the inspectorship of a college at Wuchang,
to put his foot on one of the lower rounds of the official ladder.

Chang was never rich enough to buy official honours, even in the
lower grades; and it is one of his chief glories that, after a
score of years in the exercise of viceregal power, he continues
to be relatively poor.

His name in full is Chang Chi-tung, meaning "Longbow of the Cavern,"
an allusion to a tradition that one of his ancestors was born in
a cave and famed for archery. This was far back in the age of the
troglodytes. Now, for many generations, the family has been devoted
to the peaceful pursuit of letters. As for Chang himself, it will
be seen with what deadly effect he has been able to use the pen, in
his hands a more formidable weapon than the longbow of his ancestor.

Chang was born at Nanpi, in the metropolitan
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province of Chihli, not quite seventy years ago; and that circumstance
debarred him from holding the highest viceroyalty in the Empire,
as no man is permitted to hold office in his native place. He has
climbed to his present eminence without the extraneous aids of
wealth and family influence. This implies talents of no ordinary
grade; but how could those talents have found a fit arena without
that admirable system of literary competition which for so many
centuries has served the double purpose of extending patronage
to letters and of securing the fittest men for the service of the
state.

Crowned with the laurel of A. B., or budding genius, before he
was out of his teens, three years later he won the honour of A.
M., or, as the Chinese say, he plucked a sprig of the _olea
fragrans_ in a contest with his fellow-provincials in which
only one in a hundred gained a prize. Proceeding to the imperial
capital he entered the lists against the picked scholars of all
the provinces. The prizes were 3 per cent. of the whole number
of competitors, and he gained the doctorate in letters, which, as
the Chinese title indicates, assures its possessor of an official
appointment. Had he been content to wait for some obscure position
he might have gone home to sleep on his laurels. But his restless
spirit saw fresh battle-fields beckoning him to fresh triumphs.
The three hundred new-made doctors were summoned to the palace to
write on themes assigned by the Emperor, that His Majesty might
select a score of them for places in the Hanlin Academy. Here again
fortune favoured young Chang; the elegance of his penmanship and
his skill in composing
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mechanical verse were so remarkable that he secured a seat on the
literary Olympus of the Empire.

His conflicts were not yet ended. A conspicuous advantage of his
high position was that it qualified him as a candidate for membership
of the Board of Censors. Nor did fortune desert her favourite in
this instance. After writing several papers to show his knowledge
of law, history, and politics, he came forth clothed with powers
that made him formidable to the highest officers of the state--powers
somewhat analogous to the combined functions of censor and tribune
in ancient Rome.

Before I proceed to show how our "knight of the longbow" employed
his new authority, a few words on the constitution of that august
tribunal, the Board of Censors, may prove interesting to the reader.
Its members are not judges, but prosecuting attorneys for the state.
They are accorded a freedom of speech which extends even to pointing
out the shortcomings of majesty. How important such a tribunal for
a country in which a newspaper press with its argus eyes has as
yet no existence! There is indeed a court _Gazette_, which
has been called the oldest newspaper in the world; but its contents
are strictly limited to decrees, memorials, and appointments. Free
discussion and general news have no place in its columns; so that
in the modern sense it is not a newspaper.

The court--even the occupant of the Dragon Throne--needs watch-dogs.
Such is the theory; but as a matter of fact these guardians of official
morals find it safer to occupy themselves with the aberrations of
satellites than to discover spots on the sun. About
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thirty years ago one of them, Wukotu, resolved to denounce the
Empress Dowager for having adopted the late emperor as her son
instead of making him her grandson. He accordingly immolated himself
at the tomb of the late emperor by way of protesting against the
impropriety of leaving him without a direct heir to worship his
manes. It is doubtful whether the Western mind is capable of following
Wukotu's subtle reasoning; but is it not plain that he felt that
he was provoking an ignominious death, and chose rather to die
as a hero--the champion of his deceased master?

If a censor succeeds in convicting a single high functionary of
gross misconduct his fortune is made. He is rewarded by appointment
to some respectable post, possibly the same from which his victim has
been evicted. Practical advantage carries the day against abstract
notions of aesthetic fitness. Sublime it might be to see the guardians
of the common weal striking down the unworthy, with a public spirit
untainted by self-interest; but in China (and in some other countries)
such machinery requires self-interest for its motive force. Wanting
that, it would be like a windmill without wind, merely a fine object
in the landscape.

As an illustration of the actual procedure take the case in which
Chang first achieved a national reputation. Chunghau, a Manchu of
noble family and high in favour at court, had been sent to Russia
in 1880 to demand the restoration of Ili, a province of Chinese
Turkestan, which the Russians had occupied on pretext of quelling
its chronic disorders. Scarcely had he reported the success of
his mission, which had
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resulted in recovering two-thirds of the disputed territory, when
Chang came forward and denounced it as worse than a failure. He
had, as Chang proved, permitted the Russians to retain certain
strategic points, and had given them fertile districts in exchange
for rugged mountains or arid plains. To such a settlement no envoy
could be induced to consent, unless chargeable with corruption
or incompetence.

The unlucky envoy was thrown into prison and condemned to death
(but reprieved), and his accuser rose in the official scale as
rapidly as if he had won a great battle on land or sea. His victory
was not unlike that of those British orators who made a reputation
out of the impeachment of Lord Clive or Warren Hastings, save that
with him a trenchant pen took the place of an eloquent tongue. I
knew Chunghau both before and after his disgrace. In 1859, when
an American embassy for the first time entered the gates of Peking,
it was Chunghau who was appointed to escort the minister to the
capital and back again to the seacoast--a pretty long journey in
those days when there was neither steamboat nor railway. During
that time, acting as interpreter, I had occasion to see him every
day, and I felt strongly attracted by his generous and gentlemanly
bearing. The poor fellow came out of prison stripped of all his
honours, and with his prospects blighted forever. In a few months
he died of sheer chagrin.

The war with Japan in 1894-1895 found Chang established in the
viceroyalty of Hukwang, two provinces in Central China, with a
prosperous population of over fifty millions, on a great highway
of internal
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traffic rivalling the Mississippi, and with Hankow, the hub of
the Empire, for its commercial centre. When he saw the Chinese
forces scattered like chaff by the battalions of those despised
islanders he was not slow to grasp the explanation. Kang Yuwei, a
Canton man, also grasped it, and urged on the Emperor the necessity
for reform with such vigour as to prompt him to issue a meteoric
shower of reformatory edicts, filling one party with hope and the
other with dismay.

Chang had held office at Canton; and his keen intellect had taken
in the changed relations of West and East. He perceived that a
new sort of sunshine shed its beams on the Western world. He did
not fully apprehend the spiritual elements of our civilisation;
but he saw that it was clothed with a power unknown to the sages
of his country, the forces of nature being brought into subjection
through science and popular education. He felt that China must
conform to the new order of things, or perish--even if that new
order was in contradiction to her ancient traditions as much as
the change of sunrise to the west. He saw and felt that knowledge
is power, a maxim laid down by Confucius before the days of Bacon;
and he set about inculcating his new ideas by issuing a series
of lectures for the instruction of his subordinates. Collected
into a volume under the title of "Exhortations to Learn,"[*] they
were put into the hands of the young Emperor and by his command
distributed among the viceroys and governors of the Empire.

[Footnote *: Translated by Dr. Woodbridge as "China's Only Hope."
Kelly & Walsh, Shanghai.]

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What a harvest might have sprung from the sowing of such seed in
such soil by an imperial husbandman! But there were some who viewed
it as the sowing of dragons' teeth. Those reactionaries induced the
Dowager Empress to come out from her retirement and to reassume
her abdicated power in order to save the Empire from a threatening
conflagration. It was the fable of Phaeton enacted in real life.
The young charioteer was struck down and the sun brought back to
his proper course instead of rising in the west. The progressive
legislation of the two previous years 1897-98 was repealed and
then followed two years of a narrow, benighted policy, controlled
by the reactionaries under the lead of Prince Tuan, father of the
heir-apparent, with a junta of Manchu princes as blind and corrupt
as Russian grand dukes. That disastrous recoil resulted in war,
not against a single power, but against the whole civilised world,
as has been set forth in the account of the Boxer War (see page
172).

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