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China, 1895 to 1916, episode 11

A Republic in Name

The first national elections make Song Jiaoren's Nationalist Party the largest in parliament, and weeks later he is shot at Shanghai station by a man who says he was paid by the highest authority. The episode follows Yuan Shikai from that killing through crushing the Second Revolution, dissolving parliament and rewriting the constitution, and asks the season's Yuan question at its sharpest, usurper or state builder. It mixes foreign observers, scholars and the republic's own documents, with a little revolutionary and Chinese public voice.

Shanghai Beijing
Map drawn by Then and There on Natural Earth's public domain coastlines, rivers and lakes

Transcript

Song Jiaoren
Song Jiaoren. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last time, the Qing dynasty gave up the throne, and the republic it left behind was handed to Yuan Shikai. Sun Yat-sen stepped aside for him, in return for two promises: Yuan would govern from Nanjing, and he would govern under a constitution. Then Yuan's own troops sacked his capital, the delegates from the south were cowed, and he took his oath in Beijing, exactly where he wanted it. And a Provisional Constitution put a cabinet and a council between him and his power, with a National Assembly still to be called under it. This time, the parliament gets elected. And then we find out what the fence was worth. The fence came with a deadline. The Provisional Constitution said the parliament had to meet within ten months, which meant before the first of November 1912. The deadline came and went. A foreign observer in Beijing who loathed Yuan was sure the elections were held back on purpose, while the government gave all its attention to destroying its rivals. In the meantime, a small Advisory Council sat in Beijing to keep the seat warm for the parliament to come. And it made itself heard. When a revolutionary who had crossed Yuan was shot and then bayoneted to death, the council denounced the provisional president so bitterly that Yuan went out of his way to answer it. He invited Sun Yat-sen to Beijing, treated him with unheard of honours, and asked him to act as a go-between among the rival factions. Every one of those moves, the same observer thought, was meant to prove a single point: that nobody but the master of Beijing could run the country. Meanwhile, out in the country, lawless men grew more out of hand by the day, preying on rich and poor alike. Every outrage dragged the name of the republic through the mud and drained away public confidence, and that, the observer thought, suited Yuan exactly. People everywhere were saying that foreign intervention was only a matter of time. Even so, a republic needs a parliament. And at last, it got its elections. They were the first national elections in China's history. The vote was limited by sex, by wealth and by education, but some forty million men, around a tenth of the population, were given a ballot. The political energy of the last Qing years carried straight over into the republic. In Shanghai, even the associations of people from the same home province wrote themselves constitutions, elected their officers for fixed terms, and held their meetings in the open. Parties sprang up to fight for the seats. Liang Qichao, the old reformer, and his allies organised the more conservative ones. And one man organised the party that mattered most. His name was Song Jiaoren. You met him briefly, a few episodes back, as a young rebel whose family the magistrate back home had protected, against the law. Song had been a member of Sun Yat-sen's United League, and had worked alongside Sun. Now, with the dynasty gone, he took what was left of the League and built it into something new: the Nationalist Party. And then he did something you might not expect from an old revolutionary. He campaigned. His promise to the voters was simple. Elect us, and we will keep Yuan Shikai under control. It worked. The Nationalist Party won the elections. Yuan's side was so badly beaten at the polls that, for all his military power, it looked as though he would be outvoted and outmanoeuvred in the new assembly. As the new parliament gathered in the spring of 1913, everyone expected Song to be elected premier. Think about what that meant. Under the Provisional Constitution, every law and every order the president issued had to be countersigned by his cabinet. The premier would be the man holding the pen. And the premier was going to be Song Jiaoren. And so, a fresh assassination was decided on. It was the twentieth of March 1913. Song Jiaoren, the ablest leader the south had, was at the railway station in Shanghai. He was setting off for Beijing, with a group of the new members of parliament, to take up the work he had won at the polls. The station was crowded. And in the crowd, a hired gunman shot him. He died two days later. The killer was caught, and put on trial. And in court he admitted that he had been paid two hundred pounds for the job. Paid, he said, by the highest authority in the land. The evidence included telegrams from Beijing, read out in court, and they left little doubt about who had set the murder in motion. The highest authority in the land had one name. Song Jiaoren was killed on the orders of Yuan Shikai. The storm that followed made it look as though no parliament would ever meet in Beijing. The Nationalists had lost their leader, and they were in disarray. But they understood that it was no longer only their reputations on the line. It was the future of the country, and their own lives with it. So after a hurried consultation, they made a decision. They would walk into the lion's den.

Yuan Shikai
Yuan Shikai. Photo by Rio V. De Sieux, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

On the seventh of April 1913, rather to everyone's surprise, the first parliament of the Republic of China opened in Beijing. It came with a huge southern majority, and the blessing of every radical in the country. It was big, too: a House of Representatives of five hundred and ninety six members, and a Senate of two hundred and seventy four. Hopes rose fast. For a moment, it looked as though the republic had found its footing at last. The members got through their first formalities. Both houses elected their speakers. The United States recognised the republic as soon as the speakers were chosen, the first power to do so. The others held back. And then, with a single stroke, Yuan Shikai cut the ground from under them. The stroke was about money. With Yuan, it usually was. You have to understand the hole he was standing in. The customs revenue was already in foreign hands. The salt taxes too, collected by the foreign powers themselves under old treaties, to pay off indemnities and old loans. That left the government in Beijing living on internal transit taxes and odds and ends, like the tax on tea. It could not cover the ordinary costs of running the country, let alone any reforms. Yuan had had no choice but to take on every foreign debt the Qing had left behind. And when his government tried to raise the tariff on imports, the powers vetoed it. So all through the winter, Yuan's men had been negotiating, in secret, with the financial agents of six foreign powers. What they were negotiating was a loan, the Reorganization Loan, of twenty five million pounds. The terms were set by the foreign banks and backed by their diplomats. The banks had formed a single consortium, so that Yuan could not play one of them off against another. One of the six walked away before the signing. In America, the new president, Woodrow Wilson, decided that the conditions of the loan seemed "to touch very nearly the administrative independence of China itself," and the American bankers dropped out. The other five stayed in. And there was a problem at home. The Provisional Constitution, in its nineteenth article, said that anything touching the national treasury needed the assent of parliament. Parliament had just opened. It could have voted on the loan. Yuan did not ask it. Instead he claimed that the little Advisory Council, which had only just been dissolved, had already approved a foreign loan the year before. And on that pretext, he ordered the loan signed. The parliament raged. It saw a direct challenge to its very existence, and the possibility of a foreign debt commission running China's finances, the way foreign commissions already ran the finances of Turkey and Egypt. It did everything it could to delay. Yuan shut himself up in his palace, and refused, absolutely, to see any member of parliament. The parliamentary leaders went to the foreign ministers in Beijing instead, and almost went down on their knees. All they asked was a delay of forty eight hours, so the agreement could be passed by the assembly, and the country's sovereignty would not pass under the heel of one man. The foreign ministers could easily have granted it. They did not. At heart, a foreign observer thought, they were delighted to see things sliding back to the old familiar absolutism. Even Yuan's own finance minister lost his nerve. With the storm rising, he hesitated to finish the deal, and actually fled the capital. He was brought back by special train, and made to finish it. At four o'clock in the morning on the twenty fifth of April, in the building of a foreign bank, the last documents were signed. The finance minister came galloping out of the compound in his carriage, in case anyone was waiting with a bomb, and reported to his master that, at last, a vast sum was at his disposal. Parliament passed resolutions declaring the loan illegal, and the agreement null and void. Yuan treated them with derision. He had the money. And with the agents of the foreign powers openly behind him, the cash advances started at once, and he spread his power in so many directions that arguing with him began to look pointless. So what did China actually get for its twenty five million pounds? Fully half of it never left Europe. It went straight back to foreign banks, to pay off the Boxer arrears, old advances and provincial loans, and debts falling due. The banks' own profit on the loan came to one and a quarter million pounds. Foreigners were made officials of the Chinese government to oversee how the money was spent. And the salt administration was put under foreign control. Three million was set aside for disbanding troops, five and a half million for the running costs of government, and two million for reorganising the salt administration under its new foreign managers. What reached Yuan himself, paid out week by week, came to roughly ten million pounds. That was still a great deal of money. Without it, Yuan could not have paid his troops, and it is hard to see how his government would have survived. For their money, the foreigners bought peace and continued trade, and good interest rates besides. This was imperialism with a new face: not the old traders, soldiers and missionaries, but the pound, the yen and the dollar. The parliament had lost its first fight before it had properly sat down. And Yuan had just bought himself an army's loyalty, with a war coming.

The war came that summer, and Yuan helped it along. The Nationalists were in disarray without Song. But they could still block Yuan in parliament, and they had deep roots in the south, and that made them a threat. In May of 1913, Yuan dismissed the provincial governors who belonged to the Nationalist Party. The central and southern provinces argued for a couple of months, to no effect, and then began, openly, to arm. The old revolutionaries of the south called Yuan a dictator, and took up their weapons. On the tenth of July, at the Hukou forts on the Yangzi in Jiangxi province, provincial troops under General Li Liejun opened fire on the northern garrisons. That was the opening shot of what came to be called the Second Revolution. Its name says what it hoped to be: the revolution all over again, with Yuan in the place of the Manchus. It was nothing of the kind. The south was short of munitions and practically penniless. And it faced the same well trained northern divisions that had shown themselves invincible only eighteen months before. The rebels fought hard for a while, but they never worked together, and so they never became a serious threat to Beijing. Li Liejun's men, twenty thousand at the most, fought stiffly. But they could never land a real blow, and they were pushed back from the river, deep into the mountains of Jiangxi, where they simply melted away. At Nanjing, the garrison went over to the rising to a man, and Huang Xing took command of it. He set off north up the Pukou railway, toward Tianjin. Almost at once the march broke down for lack of organisation. And Huang Xing fled to Japan. In Shanghai, the rebels pushed hard against the arsenal, where a small northern garrison had quietly moved in after the loan was signed. That attack failed too, for lack of artillery and of proper leadership. Then there was the navy. Its sympathies were entirely with the south, and the rebels had counted on it to cut the whole Yangzi valley in two. At the last moment, it was bought into neutrality, with money from the foreign banks. And the payment was booked, so the story went, under administrative expenses. Guangzhou rose too, and Yuan had prepared for it. He had moved a border general, Long Jiguang, with twenty thousand troops from Guangxi, close to the city, and they promptly attacked and overawed its garrison. Long was made military governor of the province as his reward. One foreigner called him an infamous brute. For three years he ruled the south with heartless barbarity, until the great rising of 1916 threw him out. The garrison of Nanjing, abandoned by its commander, fought on. It put up a strenuous resistance, but the city fell. It fell to a force from Beijing under Feng Guozhang, whom you met at the head of Yuan's first army, and to an old reactionary general named Zhang Xun. Zhang Xun was one of Yuan's generals, and the revolution had not changed him at all. He and his soldiers still wore the queue, the long braid of hair that men had worn as a sign of loyalty to the Qing. They wore it under the republic as if nothing had changed. Zhang Xun's men pillaged Nanjing. And in the streets of the city, they killed a number of Japanese civilians. That massacre very nearly dragged China into a war with Japan. Hold on to that. It will not be the last time Japan looks for a reason. Yuan never dared to touch him. Zhang Xun was made Inspector General of the Yangzi valley, as a reward for refusing to throw in his lot with the rebels, and he kept on enlarging his army of thirty thousand men, on the plea that the post demanded it. Yuan was half afraid of him. But he found him useful, as a counterweight to the other generals, and he was not the man to risk anything by trying to crush him. So Zhang Xun sat astride the Pukou railway with his army, ready to be sent into the Yangzi valley at a moment's notice. Why did it collapse so fast? Partly because the revolutionary governors were divided. And partly because the people with money would not back them. Most of the urban elites stayed neutral, or supported Yuan, as the best hope for stability. The merchants of the south had come to resent the taxes the old League had levied on them, and suspected they were being made to pay for revolution as much as for government. The moneyed classes withheld their support to the end. And in China, without money, nothing is possible. Even the old revolutionary movement split. Only a minority, Sun Yat-sen among them, took up arms against Yuan. And some of the best known names in the country were already on Yuan's side. Liang Qichao gave Yuan his cautious support. He still feared the old League, now the Nationalist Party, as a wrecker, and he saw Yuan as China's best chance of holding together. He also hoped to be taken into the government. And he was. Yuan made him minister of justice, and later a financial adviser. Yuan did not think much of Liang's political judgment. What he valued was the legitimacy that Liang's name could lend him. And Liang could do very little in either job. Yuan would never put up with the kind of independent courts Liang wanted, and nobody could tame the jumble of foreign and Chinese banknotes and coins in circulation. If Liang showed Yuan's velvet glove, the Nationalist Party was about to feel the fist. The rising lasted a bare two months. It ended in disgrace, with every one of its leaders in flight, and a price on every one of their heads. Sun Yat-sen and others had to flee back to Japan. Martial law was declared across much of the country. Suspected revolutionaries were tortured and killed, and even prominent members of the gentry were executed. And Yuan used his victory well. The rising gave him the chance to replace some of the local power holders with men of his own, as he had done with Long Jiguang at Guangzhou. Others told the story very differently. Later, a dialogue making the case for a constitutional monarchy had its spokesman explain what the rising proved. "Ambitious men hold that any person may be president and if they cannot get the presidency by fair means of election they are prepared to fight for it with the assistance of troops and robbers. The second revolution is an illustration of this point." And to his side, the cost was real. Merchants who had lost their capital in the troubles had no way to recover it, while those who were rich would not put money into industry, because they feared another civil war could break out at any moment. They took the failed second revolution as their warning. From now on, the spokesman predicted, there would be trouble every few years, every time the president changed. Take Mexico as a warning, he said. Notice who in that story fought for the presidency by unfair means. The man who wrote it believed it was the south. The man whose telegrams were read out in a Shanghai courtroom might have told it differently.

The rising was crushed. Now Yuan turned to the parliament. Parliament had a lot to answer for, in his eyes. It had kept up secret contacts with the rebel generals in the field, though it had taken no direct part in the rising. And it had set up a committee to draft the permanent constitution, which sat behind closed doors at the Temple of Heaven. The Temple of Heaven was where the emperors had gone each year to make the great sacrifices to Heaven on behalf of the whole realm. Yuan sent his own delegates to the committee, to argue for a stronger centre. They were not even let in. What leaked out alarmed him. Parliament's control of the money was to be the keynote of the new constitution. And there was something new. When parliament was not in session, a special committee of its members would stay behind in Beijing, to watch over the executive and check any grab for power. In other words, the constitution was being written to make a dictatorship impossible. That was enough for Yuan. As the observer in Beijing saw it, Yuan felt himself an object of suspicion, and worse, he felt he was being treated with contempt. He decided to finish with it all. But he was still only the provisional president. First, he needed to be the real one. So, with a liberal use of money, parliament was persuaded to pass one chapter of the constitution ahead of all the others: the chapter on how the president was elected, and for how long. Then the two houses sat together as an electoral college, after the French model. It took three ballots, a few arrests of members, many bribes, even more threats, and a display of military force for good measure. And in October 1913, they elected Yuan Shikai president. Most of the foreign powers had held off recognising the republic. Now that Yuan was its full president, they recognised it. On the tenth of October, he took his final oath of office, for a term of five years. It was two years to the day since the mutiny at Wuchang. He took it before a great gathering of officials and the whole diplomatic corps, in the magnificent throne room of the palace. Safe now in his position under the constitution, nothing was left for him but to strike. On the fourth of November 1913, he struck. He issued a mandate, a presidential decree, and the whole cabinet countersigned it. It unseated every member of the Nationalist Party in both houses of parliament, on charges of conspiracy and of secret complicity in the July rising. There was a vague promise that new elections would fill their seats. Never mind that the Nationalist Party's own members of parliament had condemned the Second Revolution. The capital's police carried out the order thoroughly. Ninety eight senators and two hundred and fifty two representatives had their papers as members of parliament seized by the police, and were ordered to leave the capital. Another thirty four senators and fifty four representatives fled Beijing before the police could get to them. In all, a hundred and thirty two senators and three hundred and six representatives. Four hundred and thirty eight members of parliament, gone. There was no brutality. But it was made clear that any of them who stayed in Beijing would be risking their lives. And the quorum for either house was half its members. So parliament could no longer legally sit at all. As one foreigner in Beijing put it, Yuan "boldly broke up Parliament and made himself de facto Dictator of China". The Nationalist Party was banned, and in time the parliament was dissolved outright. And here is the part that should stop you. The foreign powers did not stand in the way. The whole thing was done with their assent. Worse than nothing, the same observer charged. Britain and France, the two great democracies of Europe, had done everything they could in Beijing to set Yuan up as dictator. The British minister, Sir John Jordan, was an old friend who had known Yuan well since his days in Korea, and believed that so remarkable a character could do little wrong. To the same observer it was a truly Mexican situation, a revolution's republic turned into one man's rule, created in the Far East with the full assent of the powers. Mexico was in the middle of its own revolution, and earlier that same year a general had seized power there by force. Police control went into full force, mixed, the observer wrote, with a judicious dose of assassination. It was hardly the government the Manchus had been driven out to make room for, and the country chafed and cursed in secret. The people of China, the observer thought, were completely disillusioned. Revolt had been tried and had failed, and everyone knew the powers were backing the regime. There was nothing left to do but wait.

And on the very next day, the fifth of November, Yuan's government signed an agreement with Russia, about Outer Mongolia. Outer Mongolia was the great steppe north of the Gobi Desert, the homeland of the Mongol tribes, and it had been part of the Qing empire for two centuries. As the dynasty was falling, in December 1911, Outer Mongolia had declared its independence, at Urga, with the Bogd Khan as its ruler. The Bogd Khan was the highest incarnate lama in Mongolia, revered by his people as a living Buddha. And Russia had already signed a treaty of its own with the new Mongolian state, in October 1912. The man who signed for China was the foreign minister, Sun Baoqi. You last saw him as the governor of Shandong, given a choice by the revolutionaries to join them or lose his head. He had landed on his feet. The agreement was called a declaration, and it read, at first glance, like a fair trade. Russia recognised that Outer Mongolia was under the suzerainty of China. And China recognised the autonomy of Outer Mongolia. Suzerainty is an old word for overlordship: the right to be called the senior power, without the right to actually govern. And the rest of the agreement spelled out exactly how little that right was worth. The Mongols of Outer Mongolia would run their own internal government, and handle all their own trade and industry. China undertook not to interfere in any of it. It would not send troops into Outer Mongolia, it would not appoint any civil or military officer there, and it would not send settlers. What China kept was the right to station one envoy at Urga, with his staff and an armed escort. Russia, for its part, promised not to station troops there either, apart from guards for its consulates, and not to send settlers of its own. In a note attached to the declaration, Russia recognised that Outer Mongolia was part of China's territory. And any political question about it would be settled by negotiation, with the Mongol authorities taking part. Remember the flag of the new republic, with its five coloured bars for the five peoples. One of those bars was for the Mongols. Now Outer Mongolia ran its own affairs, and China's soldiers were barred at the door. It was signed the day after parliament was broken. Nobody was left in Beijing with the power to question it. Beijing put the best face on it. Some time later, after Russia, China and Outer Mongolia had signed a three way convention, a statement of China's case put it like this. "China has re-established her suzerainty over Outer Mongolia and obtained the acknowledgement that it forms a part of the Chinese territory." And it held the Mongolian deal up as the model for Tibet. All China expected from Britain, the same statement said, was an arrangement on Tibet that would be no worse for China than the one it had made with Russia over Outer Mongolia. No worse than Mongolia. That was the bar.

Now Yuan had a free hand. And he started clearing the board. The vice president, Li Yuanhong, the colonel who had been forced into the revolution at gunpoint, was still Yuan's commander on the middle Yangzi. Through the July rising he had stood loyally by Yuan, and resisted desperate attempts to win him over to the rebels. Yuan was determined to bring him to Beijing as a prisoner of state all the same. In December 1913, Li Yuanhong came to the capital. He was given a house on Yingtai, the island in the palace lake where, fifteen years earlier, the Guangxu emperor had been held prisoner by Cixi. The Empress Dowager Longyu, the widow who had signed away the throne, had died back in February 1913, a month before Song was shot. On Yuan's orders, she lay in state for three days in a great hall of the palace, and countless people came to pay their respects. Now, in the phrase of the foreigner who loathed Yuan, there was only a small boy between Yuan and his highest ambitions. Two problems were left. One was to give a legal form to what was, in fact, one man's rule. The other was to find the money to govern. To Yuan, the observer thought, legality was mostly window dressing, there to soothe foreign opinion and keep the powers from stepping in. And the money mattered far more. There was silver in China. There was just none for the government. Through those troubled times, the merchant guilds all over the country had quietly sent their silver to Shanghai for safekeeping, and nearly a hundred million ounces of it now sat in the vaults of the foreign banks, beyond the government's grasp. The provinces had stopped sending their revenues to Beijing, and even Yuan's dictatorship could not make them start again. The government forced out domestic loans and lived from hand to mouth, and everybody was unhappy. And the country was not quiet. By March 1914, a great bandit rising broke out in central China, under a leader called the White Wolf, who was said to be invulnerable. A fresh army, scores of battalions strong, chased him for nearly half a year. For six months his followers ravaged three provinces, and even threatened Xi'an, the old capital where the Qing court had fled in 1900. It ended when a chance shot mortally wounded the White Wolf, and his huge following simply scattered. Meanwhile, in the provinces, executions went on with monotonous regularity, and every attempt at a rising was ruthlessly put down. In Beijing, a military court kept busy, summarily disposing of men suspected of plotting against the president. And at Hankou, a Chinese newspaper editor was flogged to death for telling the truth about conditions along the river. Then, at the end of April, Yuan answered the first problem. On the first of May 1914, he promulgated a brand new constitution. It was called the Constitutional Compact. And it was drafted by his legal adviser, an American: Frank Goodnow. Goodnow was a professor of law, one of the leading American scholars of government. He had studied constitutions in Germany, specialising in administrative law. And the keynote of the whole scheme, as Goodnow saw it, was centralisation of power. That was precisely what appealed to Yuan Shikai. Remember the name Goodnow. You will hear it again. The Compact began with fine words. The sovereignty of the republic, it said, came from the whole body of the citizens. The people were equal before the law, and they had the right to free speech, to publish, to meet and to form associations. Within the bounds of law, that is. Almost every one of those rights carried the same little phrase. Then it got to the president. The president was the head of the nation, and controlled the power of the entire administration. What the Compact set up was what it called the Presidential System. In plain words, it put all power directly into the hands of the president. He got a single Secretary of State, after the American model. The cabinet ministers were reduced to heads of departments, who took their instructions and had no real voice in the government. He was commander in chief of the army and navy, and he alone decided their organisation and their strength. He declared war, he made peace, and he made treaties. The old parliament was abolished for good. In its place there would be a single Legislative Chamber. The president called it into session, and he closed it. And with the approval of a Council of State, he could dissolve it. The Council of State was a body of men he chose himself, there to advise him. If the chamber passed a law and he vetoed it, the chamber could pass it again by a two thirds vote. And then, with the Council of State's approval, he could still refuse to put it into force. In an emergency, when there was no time to call the chamber together, he could issue provisional orders with the force of law. And there was no intention of letting the chamber meet at all until the last possible moment. In the meantime, the Council of State would speak for public opinion, and ten of its members were picked to draft yet another constitution, the final one. The provinces were remade too. The military governors of the revolutionary years were turned into military officials on the old Manchu model, with all control of the province concentrated in their hands. And the provincial assemblies, which the dynasty itself had set up, were simply abolished. Yuan dismissed their members as selfish men, with no care for China's fate. In Beijing, he set up a special military office inside the old imperial city, to bring every armed man in the country under his own control. Its flags flew constantly over his palace. And for provincial commanders he wanted out of the way, he created a Palace of Generals in the capital. There they drew handsome salaries and sat idle all day, discussing the battles they had never fought and intriguing against one another. Yuan even hired press agents in the United States, to keep American opinion on his side, in case he ever needed help against the enemy he feared most: Japan. He ruled, in plain terms, as a military dictator. His power came straight from the army's leading officers, and he made the point by appearing, as a rule, in uniform. And then there were the ceremonies. The worship of Heaven at the Temple of Heaven was brought back, and so was the official worship of Confucius. A brand new ceremony was ordered too, to two gods of war, to teach the nation military virtue. In the worship of Heaven, it was laid down, the president would wear robes modelled on those of the dukes of the Zhou dynasty, three thousand years before. A novel republican experiment, one foreigner remarked. And Yuan explained himself, in the mandates he issued in these weeks. In a republic, one of them said, sovereign power was vested in the people, and everything should be decided by the wishes of the majority. Those wishes came down to two words: existence and happiness. And then Yuan spoke of himself. "I, the President, came from my farm because I was unable to bear the eternal sufferings of the innocent people. I assumed office and tried vainly to soothe the violent feelings. The greatest evil nowadays is the misunderstanding of true principles." He meant his years at home. The regent had dismissed him and sent him back to his native place, and the court had called him back in October. The republicans, the mandate went on, pursued selfish ends under cover of the public good. Some of them even took the abandoning of their parents for liberty, and the breaking of the law for equality. He would do his best to change all that. The second mandate brought back the worship of Confucius, and it explained how the nation had been consulted. Confucius, it said, had taught that after war comes peace, and with peace, real tranquillity and happiness, and that was the fountain of republicanism. But in a republic the people held sovereign power. So the people had to be asked. "Therefore circular telegrams were dispatched to all the provinces to collect opinions, and many affirmative answers have already been received." The telegrams went out to the provincial capitals, to men Yuan had appointed, and the answer came back yes. That, apparently, was what the nation's consent looked like. The same foreigner said the Compact had no more legality behind it, as a way of governing a country, than a private letter. Only the National Assembly, he pointed out, had the power to make a constitution. But Yuan, backed by the powers, could do as he pleased. And the observer added a thought about timing. Liberal Europe, he wrote, was about to plunge into the most terrible war in history, in defence of right against might, and nobody noticed what was being done in China.

Europe went to war on the first of August 1914. For the next four years, the European powers had their hands full, and the pressure they put on China eased. But Japan's interest in China was growing fast. Germany held Qingdao, on the coast of Shandong. And on the seventh of November 1914, Japanese forces, with a British contingent alongside them, took it, with its forts, its ships and its garrison. Japan announced that it meant to give Qingdao back to China after the war, on terms to be settled between Japan and China. Hold on to that phrase. On terms to be settled. In Beijing, the money had run out again. The deficit piled up in 1914 alone was put at thirty eight million pounds, and everyone said another loan of twenty five million was inevitable. And Yuan had one more piece of the structure to build, the strangest one yet. On the twenty ninth of December 1914, he promulgated a Presidential Succession Law. It was passed by the Council of State, standing in for a legislature that had still not met, and it settled who would come after him. Any male citizen was eligible to be president, the law said, so long as he was forty or older and had lived in the republic for at least twenty years. The president's term was set at ten years, and he could be re-elected. And he would choose his own successors. This is how it worked. When the time came to elect a president, the president in office would carefully and reverently nominate three people, representing, the law said, the opinion of the people. He would write their names himself on a plate of gold, and seal it with the seal of the nation. Then, in the words of the law itself, it would be "placed in a gold box, which shall be placed in a stone house in the residence of the President." The president kept the key to the box. The keys to the stone house were held separately, by the president, the head of the Council of State, and the Secretary of State. And the stone house could not be opened without an order from the president. The box would be opened only when death or incapacity took the nation's leader from it. Then an electoral college would meet: fifty members drawn from the Council of State, and fifty from the Legislative Chamber. And the candidates would be the three names in the gold box. Plus, if he so desired, the president himself. Nobody knew for certain whose idea it was. It was known, at least, that it was not the American adviser's. A ten year term that could be renewed again and again, and heirs chosen by his own hand and sealed in a gold box. It was not a throne. Not quite. So now we can ask the question this whole season has been circling. Was Yuan Shikai a usurper, or a state builder? Look at what he faced. He took over a country whose customs and salt taxes were already in foreign hands, with an army to pay and nothing to pay it with. No Chinese government at that moment could have stood up to the foreign powers. He got the money. And without that loan, he could not have paid his troops, and his government would very likely have fallen. When the south rose against him, most of the urban elites stayed out of it or stood behind him, because to them he was the best hope for stability. Most intellectuals, and most of the business class, chose to try to work with him. He used the rising to replace local strongmen, and he set out to bring every armed man in the country under the centre. And seen over the long run, China's political reordering after 1911 was a fairly orderly affair, built on the state the New Policies had started, and it kept that state growing. That is the state builder. Now look at how he did it. His chief rival in the new parliament was shot dead at a railway station, on his orders. The loan was signed at four in the morning against the constitution's own words, while parliament begged for two days' delay. The parliament was broken up by the police, and the constitution was rewritten by his own adviser and handed down by mandate. The men he put in the key posts were loyal to him personally, but their obedience was conditional. And by crushing the republic's institutions and its elite opposition, and by insisting on rule strictly from the top down, he opened the gate for the generals who would carve up China after him. That is the usurper. So which was he? It is tempting to pick one, and let the other go. But for these two years, I think the honest answer is both. He was building a state, and he was building it in the shape of one man. That dialogue making the case for a monarchy put it more neatly than any of Yuan's enemies did. China, its spokesman said, had a constitutional government in name only, and was a monarchy in spirit. The republic still existed. It had a president, a constitution, and a legislative chamber, on paper. A republic in name. And the gold box kept its secret, for now. Out in Shandong, Japan held Qingdao, taken from Germany, with Europe at war, and with terms still to be settled. On the eighteenth of January 1915, Japan would present China with a list of demands. There were twenty one of them. Next time: how Yuan Shikai answers them, and what the answer costs him, and China. And we will see what a strong man is worth, when the strong man across the water is stronger.

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