Then and There Search

China, 1895 to 1916, episode 6

The Court Reforms Itself

Cixi, who crushed the reformers of 1898, announces from exile in Xi'an that everything is open to change, and over the next five years her court abolishes the examinations, promises a constitution and lets Yuan Shikai build the most modern army China has had. The episode follows Cixi's late turn and Yuan's rise inside it, and asks the season's central contested question, whether the New Policies were a failed rescue or the real start of a modern Chinese state. It hears the court in its own edicts more than any episode so far, alongside scholars and foreign observers.

Xi'an China Beijing Manchuria
Map drawn by Then and There on Natural Earth's public domain coastlines, rivers and lakes

Transcript

Last time, the foreign armies broke the siege of the legations, and Cixi fled her own capital in a commoner's clothes, west to the old capital at Xi'an. The peace that followed cost China an indemnity of 450 million taels, a fortified foreign quarter in the heart of Beijing, and the last of its big revenues, pledged to foreign bankers. Li Hongzhang signed it for China, and two months later he was dead. And in January 1902 the court came home by train, with the woman who had declared war on the whole world leaning out of her chair to return the foreigners' greetings. This time, the strangest turn in her long career. The woman who had crushed the reformers of 1898 was about to take up their programme as her own. To see how it began, go back a year, to Xi'an at the end of January 1901, while peace was still far off. There, with the court in exile, Cixi had two edicts issued in the emperor's name: one of penance, and one of reform. And the rest of that reform edict is stranger still. It opened with philosophy. Certain principles, it said, were eternal and never changed. But of human ordinances there was none so firmly established that it could not be altered. In its own words, "there is no more objection to altering any particular human ordinance than there is in putting fresh strings to a lute or a guitar." The dynasty itself, it pointed out, had governed one way before it crossed the Great Wall and another way after, and the methods of the great emperors of the eighteenth century could not all fit the present day. The edict still called Kang Youwei and his friends rebels, guilty of high treason. But in the same breath it declared her intention to embark on reform, and any reform worth the name would mean taking up the very principles the emperor had decreed in 1898, and she had torn up. Then the edict made the emperor ask a question. Could anyone bring proof, he asked, that in putting down the plotters the Empress Dowager had refused to sanction reform? Could anyone say he himself had ever wanted the old institutions swept away entirely? His officials and his people, he said, "must be aware that Mother and Son were actuated by one and the same motive, namely to steer the ship of State on a course midway between the two extremes". Think about who is saying that. The son was the emperor Cixi had shut away on an island in the palace lake since the autumn of 1898. The mother was the aunt who had put him there. In the rituals of the court she counted as his mother, because she had adopted him as a small child when she put him on the throne. And now the prisoner was telling the empire that he and his jailer had always wanted the same thing. What the edict went on to ask for was not small. Her Majesty, it said, had instructed the emperor "to use the utmost endeavour to bring about improvement, strictly to interdict the use of the terms new and old, and to make away with all distinction between what is Chinese and what is foreign." Then it named the curses of China: the deep hold of habit, a style of writing so tangled that the average writer "flounders about in pools of ink", mediocrity everywhere, and the clerks and runners of the government offices growing rich on their positions. And it said, flatly: "The advancement of personal interests is the bane of the Administration and adherence to prescribed usage is the ruin of the country." Up to now, the edict went on, the Chinese who studied the West had studied its languages, its literature, its manufactures, its weapons and its machines. Those were only the rudiments. They were not the source the statecraft of the West came from. For decades, self strengthening had been the court's answer: Western guns and ships, on an unchanged Chinese state. Now the court itself was saying the guns had never been the point. So it called on every senior official in the empire, from the Grand Council and the Grand Secretaries down to the governors of the provinces and the envoys abroad, to think hard about which Chinese and which Western ways of government suited China, and to send in detailed proposals within two months. The subjects were everything: the dynasty's own institutions, the principles of government, the welfare of the people, schools, examinations, the army and the treasury. A memorial was an official's formal written report or proposal to the throne, and the court ran on them. The edict also made clear what it did not want. Of the memorials that had already come in, it complained, one kind repeated "the journalistic claptrap of newspaper editors", and the other served up the shallow views of pedantic students. So the court wanted fresh ideas. Just not those ones. Matters had reached a crisis, the edict said, and "change must take place, and safety and danger, strength and weakness, all depend on how the change is effected." And any official who carried on in the old way, all talk and no work, was reminded that the old statutes were still in force, and no leniency would be shown. More important than any scheme of good government, it said, was finding men able to govern. Given the right man, bad methods were easy to reform. Without him, good methods would not work on their own. And if reforms were handed to officials who were forever being moved from post to post, the evils it deplored would become past curing. What the empire needed first, it said, was public spirit in place of the self seeking that prevailed, and an end to sham and pretence. Foreigners who watched her closely judged that it was on the flight west, or in the first days at Xi'an, that she saw it clearly. Reform had to come from inside, or it would be forced on the government from outside, in a form that might threaten the dynasty itself. To admit that was to pass a verdict on her own policy since the autumn of 1898. But she never lacked the courage of her convictions. Because something had changed in the country since 1898. When the reforms were crushed and the reformers executed, a wave of disappointment and horror had swept across China. In Guangdong and Jiangsu, the provinces of Guangzhou and Shanghai, feeling ran so high that for a time there seemed a real danger of revolution in the south. Elsewhere, the return to the old ways was accepted in silence. But people had glimpsed a new era, and nobody could push the country back as though those possibilities had never existed. And think about what it meant for the Son of Heaven to admit his faults in public, and to condemn the system he stood for, not once but over and over. One foreign observer at the time reckoned that, in preparing the way for reform, it was worth many years of pamphlets and agitation to the young men who later made up the Young China party.

So what did all those proposals turn into? They became the New Policies, and from that edict until the end of Cixi's life, a steady stream of decrees ordered changes at every level of government and society. The court threw open what it called the pathways of words: every subject of the Qing was invited to send in ideas for reform, and a new Bureau of Governmental Affairs sorted through them and put the approved ones into effect. Compared with the Hundred Days of 1898, the New Policies were calmer in tone and slower in pace. But they went much further. In substance they differed little from what the emperor and Kang Youwei had proposed in 1898, which no longer looked so radical. The bureaucracy was to be streamlined, new schools built, and modern infrastructure developed, and within a few years the old examinations would be abolished and a constitution put in place. For most of its life the Qing had run government on the cheap. Its formal state was tiny for the size of the society, and much of the work of governing was farmed out to local elites, lineages, villages and guilds. That worked well enough while the empire had few outside threats. In a world of predatory great powers, a bigger and more interventionist state began to look like a condition of survival. Start at the top. The six boards that had run the empire for centuries were replaced, step by step, by cabinet ministries like those in Japan and the other parliamentary states. The Board of Revenue became a Ministry of Finance. The Board of Punishments became a Ministry of Justice, with a Supreme Court meant to stand independent of the ordinary officials. Until then the same local magistrate had collected the taxes, kept the peace and judged the lawsuits, all at once. Sinecures were abolished, and so were some provincial governorships, like Sichuan's, where a governor general already did the same job. A decree of the twenty fourth of July 1901 turned the Zongli Yamen into a Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ranked above every other ministry. Then came ministries no Chinese government had ever had: Trade, Education, Police, and Posts and Communications, set up to get a grip on the railway building going on all over the country. A Ministry of Trade was a startling idea in itself. For two thousand years, the empire had held, in principle at least, that commerce was unworthy of the state's support. An edict of 1904 sanctioned chambers of commerce, and by 1909 there were about 180 of them across the empire, bringing merchants and industrialists together. Businessmen became, for the first time, a professional group the state recognised. And all that was before you get to the army, the schools and the constitution, which I will come to one at a time. All of it cost a great deal of money: new armies, schools, police forces, railways, and bigger staffs to run them. And the Qing state was poor. Around 1900 its revenues came to only about six percent of everything the economy produced, a remarkably low share. Part of the money came from foreign loans, piled on top of the enormous loans already raised to pay the indemnities. The New Policies sank the government ever deeper into debt. In the end, though, the burden fell on ordinary people, in higher taxes. Revenues at every level of government probably doubled in the dynasty's final decades, most of the increase coming in the few years after 1905. At the same time the court in Beijing clawed money back from the provinces. It imposed new yearly contributions on them, and took over a number of profitable industries, mines and shipping lines. The Boxer debt had started money flowing back to the centre, and now the court kept it flowing. This was state building at its most basic. In some provinces the land tax carried new surcharges of up to twenty percent. Cities got new taxes on real estate, some goods paid excise tax for the first time, and the old licensed brokers were turned into tax collectors. In the cities, the treasuries of the merchant guilds were confiscated to pay for the chambers of commerce. In the villages, the temple endowments that paid for the yearly festivals and the opera were taken to pay for new schools. From a village, reform could look a lot like a new tax collector. There were riots. Some were aimed at the missionaries, but they were mostly tangled up with anger at new and unfamiliar taxes, which provincial officials imposed to refill treasuries drained by the indemnity. Resentment of the government ran strong. In many provinces it showed itself as banditry, and in Guangxi and Jiangxi it reached armed rebellion. So here is the question this whole stretch of the story turns on. Were the New Policies a failed rescue, or the real start of a modern Chinese state? In the short run, they weakened the state they were meant to save. They tried to set the dynasty on a new foundation while at the same time making it legitimate for the gentry to oppose it, and the emperor's symbolic and emotional hold over the educated was enfeebled. Any attempt to make the government more efficient made some group of people angry. What might have worked in the 1890s was too late by the 1900s. The intent was genuine, and the impact was real. But in many ways the reforms made social tensions and political restlessness worse. Impatient reformers like Liang Qichao, still in exile in Japan, attacked the court for not moving fast enough, and in towns and cities all over China local elites who read him pressed for their own right to take part in politics. And the outright revolutionaries said the whole thing was a trap, designed to fool the Chinese into accepting the misrule of a foreign Manchu court a little longer. The court stayed in control almost to the end. But that was partly because its opponents could not yet imagine anything to put in its place. In the long run, though, the picture changes. For centuries the Qing state had been shrinking against the size of the society it ruled. The New Policies reversed that, and began the building of a bigger, more intrusive and more powerful state, a process that would run on into the age of Mao. The new ministries of commerce, finance, the interior and education shaped the governments of the Republic, and of the Communists after it. The reforms of 1898 had been an abortive first try. The New Policies were a truly new beginning, and the state building of China's twentieth century started here. And outside the government, something else was growing. In the name of the public good, local elites were taking on more and more of the work of charity, defence, roads and waterworks, and economic development, on an ever wider scale. It was a kind of state expansion in disguise, and it ran far ahead of what the enfeebled imperial administration could manage itself. Seen that way, even the revolution that ended the dynasty would turn out to be a fairly orderly affair, built on the state the New Policies had started. Weaker in the short run, a foundation in the long run. The trouble for the dynasty was that it had to survive the short run first. And a dynasty in that position does not simply fall. It gets pushed.

The Qing court returning to Beijing in 1902, photographed by George E. Morrison
The Qing court returning to Beijing in 1902, photographed by George E. Morrison. George Ernest Morrison (4 February 1862 – 30 May 1920), ralph repo, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Now come back to noon on the seventh of January 1902, when the court's train pulled into Beijing. It was the first time in history that the sacred person of the Son of Heaven, and the even more august person of his aunt, had been entrusted to the railway. There was a second novelty. In the past, when the imperial persons passed by, the people were ordered to shut themselves indoors, so that not even a glance from a common eye could fall on them. This time that order was dropped. And all along the way, Cixi was gracious to the Chinese and the foreigners who happened across her path, which nobody had seen before. On the twenty eighth of January the foreign envoys were received in audience, with more formality and dignity, and more outward respect for them, than ever before. And for the first time, Cixi appeared openly at the audience, not behind a screen of gauze. For most of forty years she had governed from behind that screen, because a woman could not sit on the throne herself. Four days later, on the first of February, she received the wives of the diplomats, and asked that the ones who had lived through the siege be presented to her. An American diplomat watching reported that she "showed great feeling in greeting these ladies, and wept as she spoke to them." Eighteen months earlier, her army had been firing into the compound where those same women sheltered. Over the next few years she kept up the charm. She held more receptions for the diplomats' wives, and she let an American painter, Katharine Carl, live at court for months to paint her portrait, which went on show at the World's Fair in St Louis in 1904. She sat for photographs too, dozens of them, some posed as the Buddhist goddess of mercy, taken by the son of one of her own diplomats. The foreigners were not fooled, or thought they were not. The general verdict was that all of it was merely designed to produce an effect, and that little real improvement could be expected. The kindest reading was that the court had perhaps learned something. The unkindest was that it only wanted to be believed to have learned. Either way, it had forgotten a great deal, and hoped the world had forgotten it too. So the astonishment was all the greater when the evidence began to pile up that she meant it. In the north, people called her the Old Buddha. And the Old Buddha, it turned out, was set on spending her last years modernising the country, to equip it against the material power of the West. And she saw, more clearly than anyone, that one day there would be a public opinion in China, and that it would refuse to be ignored.

On that same first of February, the day she received the ladies, she issued two decrees, and these she issued in her own name alone. The Manchus were the people from beyond the Great Wall who had conquered China in the sixteen forties and ruled it ever since, a small minority among hundreds of millions of Chinese, most of them still living apart, in Beijing and in the banner garrisons. Every Chinese man wore the queue, the shaved forehead and long braid the conquerors had imposed as a sign of submission. And Manchus and Chinese had been forbidden to marry each other. The first decree declared that after two and a half centuries of the dynasty, "the customs and beliefs of Manchus and Chinese are now alike", and it abolished the old ban. Manchus and Chinese were not just allowed to intermarry. They were urged to. With exceptions. The emperor's wives would still be chosen from the daughters of the great Manchu houses. And Manchu girls must still serve as palace attendants, "lest we fall into the corrupt practices of the former Ming dynasty." The Ming was the Chinese dynasty the Manchus had overthrown. The same decree spoke against the Chinese custom of binding women's feet, and urged that it be given up. Manchu women had never bound their feet. For a Chinese girl, the binding began at about five or six: the toes folded under and the arch slowly broken over years, to make the tiny feet that marked a respectable bride. It was urged, mind you, not ordered. The second decree ordered that promising young men be picked from the imperial clan and the Manchu banners and sent abroad to travel and study, "that they may assist the court in its purpose to cultivate talent for the service of the government." Why now? Foreigners who watched her read it this way. The keynote of her whole policy was to keep the prestige and position of the Manchu dynasty, and its hold on the empire, unimpaired. She knew her history, they thought, and she could see her house running down the same lines that had brought the Ming to ruin. And the Manchus had a danger the Ming had never had. They were of alien stock themselves, a conquering people, with enemies to fear inside the country as well as outside it. The conquest had been ruthlessly cruel, and the hatred it left behind, and the belief that the Manchus' turn would come, had never quite died among the Chinese. One foreign observer put it more sharply: she had seen that the time had come to save the imperial clansmen from the effects of their own vicious and narrow lives, and that the only way was regeneration from within. To a Western reader, decrees like these looked trivial. They were not. They marked a portentous change in the way the conquerors looked at the people they had conquered. Imagine the first Norman kings of England announcing that Normans and English were now alike, and should marry each other. It was that kind of change, and more. But they did not touch the root of the evils hanging over the empire, and the nation went on as before. Hold on to that line between Manchu and Chinese. It is going to matter more and more.

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

Now to the man who, in the end, would matter most of all. While Cixi worked on the court, Yuan Shikai worked on the army. Yuan was now governor general of Zhili, the province that wrapped around the capital, and when the court came home, honours were heaped on him as the man who had kept up appearances and upheld the authority of the throne in its distress. Yuan answered by flooding the court with memorials. To restore the power of the dynasty, he urged, it must raise a whole army of modern troops, as many as possible, but above all efficient. In Zhili itself, Yuan pushed through Western style reforms in education, industry and public order. He set up military schools at Baoding to turn out officers for the new army. First, though, he had to get his own capital back. Tianjin was still in the hands of the allies' provisional government. Speaking as viceroy, Yuan asked that it be handed back to Chinese rule at once, so that he could take full charge of his post. The envoys in Beijing agreed. The German commander had always held that Chinese rule should not come back while foreign garrisons sat in the city, but in April 1902 the foreign generals gave way, on twenty eight conditions. One of the conditions kept Chinese troops twenty li, about seven miles, away from the city. Yuan got around it by turning some of his soldiers into policemen and sending them in. The city was handed back to him that August. Then the army. In 1903 the court set up a Commission on Military Reorganization, under two joint heads: Tieliang, a Manchu, and the most powerful Chinese field official of the day, Yuan Shikai. A Manchu and a Chinese side by side at the top. You can see the court's thinking. Tieliang was a hard headed Manchu official with his own ideas about who should control the dynasty's soldiers, and in time he and Yuan would become rivals. The aim was a powerful, centralised modern army, to replace the dilapidated banner forces and the old Green Standard Army, and at last to bring the regional armies left over from the Taiping war under central control. The Green Standard was the old Chinese army of the provinces, scattered in small garrisons, and by now it was fit for little more than chasing bandits. For five years, holding the army post alongside his viceroyalty, Yuan put all his energy into raising an efficient fighting force. In those five years, despite every money trouble, north China raised and equipped six excellent divisions of field troops, seventy five thousand men. Part of the bill was passed on to the provinces, which were told to send money to Beijing for the new army. This was the Beiyang Army, the Army of the North, the most efficient and best equipped force in China. Its core was the force Yuan had been drilling near Tianjin since 1895, with German instructors and modern rifles. To foreigners, Yuan became the father of China's model army. In the autumn of 1905 his divisions staged great manoeuvres in Zhili, near Hejian, and foreign officers came to watch. Beyond the capital, the reform reached the provinces too. Provincial military boards set up new military academies, often with Japanese instructors, and new regional forces called the New Armies. Their officers came out of the new academies, their men mostly from the province itself, and a high share of the soldiers could read and write. For the first time in a long time, soldiering carried prestige among the educated. A New Army private might come from much the same kind of family as a student in one of the new schools. Remember that. Educated soldiers, raised in their home provinces, reading the same newspapers as the students. It was a mutiny of New Army soldiers at Wuchang, in October 1911, that would finally bring the dynasty down. Yuan's own divisions were something else. Every man in them looked to Yuan Shikai as his sole master. Out of his senior officers would come many of the most important warlords of the early Republic. Two of them, Duan Qirui and Feng Guozhang, you will hear a great deal more about. The army reforms followed a pattern set back in the Taiping years, when armies were raised by their commanders, and that pattern would one day let Yuan push over the tottering Qing himself. So much energy did he put into all of this that jealous rivals at court began to warn the throne about his growing power.

Sa Zhenbing
Sa Zhenbing. Sa Zhenbing, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Then, in 1904, a war broke out on Chinese soil, and China was not one of the sides. Japan had long been alarmed at Russia's threat to its grip on Korea and to its trade in Manchuria, and it had resolved to fight if it had to. And before the war began, Russian troops were already occupying Manchuria, without China's consent. Japan demanded that Russia finish leaving Manchuria and recognise Japan's place in Korea. Russia stalled, as usual. Japan would not wait. On the eighth of February 1904 Japan broke off relations, and the next day its fleet attacked the Russian fleet off Port Arthur. Japan struck fast. After that first blow, the Russian fleet at Port Arthur was kept locked up in its harbour, and the Russian ships at Vladivostok were so closely watched that they could achieve nothing. So this was a war to decide which of two foreign powers would dominate the three provinces of Manchuria, the original home of the dynasty. It was fought, on land, entirely on Chinese soil, while China stayed neutral and looked on. The Americans had pressed for China's neutrality from the start, in the hope that "the neutrality of China and her administrative entity be respected by both parties". The neutral powers asked both sides to keep their troops out of Zhili, so that the court would not panic and flee again. Both agreed. And the court answered with relief: "there must not be any journeying of the Imperial Chariot." But Russia claimed that the whole of Manchuria was in the war zone, even the land west of the Liao River it had already handed back to China. China kept eighteen thousand troops back to guard the frontier of Zhili. By the middle of March Japan had a hundred thousand men in Korea. Its army crossed the Yalu on the first of May against little opposition, two more armies landed on the coast of Manchuria that month, and on the thirtieth of May the Japanese took Dalian. After that, a series of battles pushed the Russians back until the garrison of Port Arthur was cut off from the main army in the north. Then came the siege of Port Arthur, fought with a reckless sacrifice of life on both sides. In Beijing that November, Cixi turned seventy by Chinese count. Her sixtieth birthday had been spoiled by the war with Japan, and her seventieth came in the middle of another war, fought on her own dynasty's homeland. On the thirtieth of November the Japanese took by storm, with very heavy losses, a hill called 203 Metre Hill, which looked straight down on the town and the harbour. Being neutral turned out to be complicated. Both armies wanted to buy Chinese food, and both listed rice as contraband. So China, wishing to please everyone, banned the shipping of rice, grain and flour from its own ports to Manchuria and Korea, and later bran, beans, bean cake and eggs as well. The heaviest load of keeping China neutral fell on the customs service. And then there was the night at Yantai. Yantai was a treaty port forty miles across the strait from Port Arthur. On the tenth of August 1904 the Russian fleet tried to break out of Port Arthur. The next day several ships escaped, and one of them, a destroyer, took refuge at Yantai. In the harbour lay three Chinese cruisers, under the command of Admiral Sa Zhenbing. Sa was a naval officer from Fuzhou, trained in Britain. Under the laws of war, a warship that ran into a neutral port had to leave within a set time, or be disarmed and held there until the war was over. That was called internment. The destroyer was anchored close to Sa's flagship. That same day it submitted to internment, and its disarming was practically finished. The Russian captain gave his word that he would not fight again in the war. Before dark, two Japanese destroyers ran into the port, looked around, and left. After dark, they or others came back and anchored near the Chinese squadron. Sa went himself to the senior Japanese officer and told him the Russian ship was interned, under Chinese protection. The Japanese captain said he would be leaving soon, probably that night. At about three in the morning, a Japanese officer boarded the Russian destroyer and demanded that she either go outside and fight or surrender to him. The Russian captain answered that he was disabled and disarmed, that he had given his parole, and that he was under Chinese protection. The Chinese officer of the guard was on board, and he confirmed it. Then, seeing the Japanese taking possession, he went back to his own cruiser for help. A Chinese lieutenant set off at once in a steam launch. Before he got there, two more Japanese boats had boarded her, there was firing and hand to hand fighting on deck, and a Japanese destroyer had the Russian ship in tow. The other Japanese destroyer steamed close to Sa's flagship and stopped when signalled. Sa sent an officer across to protest: they had cut out a ship under his protection, in Chinese waters, after giving him their word. The Japanese commander said he would go and bring the boat back. Then he left. You can guess how that promise turned out. The Russian ship was towed out to sea. Afterwards, the only bodies recovered were one Japanese, without a wound, and one Russian, shot through the heart. Should Sa have opened fire? It was too late to stop the cutting out, and firing on the other destroyer could only have been revenge. He chose not to retaliate, and to leave the matter to the diplomats. A former British naval officer in China's service, writing up the case afterwards, judged that given everything he had acted properly. When China protested, Japan replied that China's neutrality was not complete anyway, since the war was being fought on Chinese territory. That argument, the same officer pointed out, would reduce China's neutrality to nothing, and would let Japan seize Russian ships in Shanghai harbour too. It was a gross outrage on China's neutrality, and China never got any redress for it. That was what neutrality meant, for a country that could not enforce it. There had been another case that same August. Two Russian ships ran into Shanghai, and instead of simply interning them under its own rules, China opened long negotiations with the consuls before they were finally disarmed. But China learned. When Russian transports came into the river mouth at Wusong the next May, the Chinese naval commander declared them warships, gave them the choice of leaving or being interned, refused to discuss it with the consuls, and arrested the Russians who would not give their parole. Port Arthur fell on the first of January 1905, when the Russian commander surrendered the fortress and its garrison. On land the armies fought it out in battles that lasted for days, with trench warfare, around Liaoyang in the late summer of 1904 and around Shenyang in the late winter of 1905. For the Chinese who lived on those battlefields, it meant villages wrecked, crops taken and men pressed into labour by both armies. Then Russia's Baltic fleet, which had sailed in October 1904, arrived at last off Tsushima in May 1905, and over two days the Japanese fleet practically annihilated it. Tsushima is an island in the strait between Korea and Japan. In September 1905, at Portsmouth in the United States, Russia made peace, and handed Japan its lease on Port Arthur and Dalian. China was not at the table. Much of Russia's railway in Manchuria went to Japan as well: every line south of Changchun. But the lesson many in China took from the war was not about Manchuria. An Asian power had beaten one of the great powers of Europe. That opened up new prospects of a revived Qing, if the Qing could only get its own house in order. And the pace of reform quickened. What did Japan have that Russia lacked? People in China had an answer ready, and I will come to it shortly.

The examination hall in Peking, in a picture published in 1899
The examination hall in Peking, in a picture published in 1899. Not identified, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The first thing to go was the oldest. In 1905, just after Japan's eye opening victory over Russia, the court suddenly abolished the civil service examinations. The edict came out in early September, at the request of the most powerful governors general in the empire, Yuan Shikai and Zhang Zhidong among them, who had asked for the examinations to end at once. Seven years before, the emperor had tried to abolish the old examination essay, and Cixi had restored it to its place of honour. Now she had decided it had to go. It was plainly an anachronism, and even the scholarly Zhang Zhidong, it seems, agreed. For more than a thousand years, the examinations had been the orthodox road into government service and up the social ladder. They were the hinge between the monarchy and the gentry, in practice and as a symbol. Almost overnight, the modern school diploma replaced the examination degree as the basic credential for a government post and for standing in society. Many of the old gentry fought it hard. The court had been working toward this since it came home. Within days of the return, in January 1902, a decree ordered the scholars of the Hanlin Academy to be graded according to their abilities, and another re established the Imperial University in Beijing. The president of its foreign faculty was an American, a veteran scholar of China and educator. That Imperial University is the ancestor of today's Beijing University. In place of the examinations, the court ordered Western curriculum schools set up everywhere. In 1904 there had been about four thousand such schools in the empire, with an estimated ninety two thousand students. Five years later there were fifty two thousand schools, and a million and a half students. Often the buildings were local temples, taken over for the purpose. The elite's long war on superstition, once fought in the name of Confucius, was now fought in the name of progress, science and national defence. Now think about the men who had spent their lives preparing. The abolition immediately distressed a huge army of men who had hoped to pass. One of them, an ambitious village schoolteacher, took the news bitterly. "I woke at first light with my heart like dead ashes", he wrote. "I saw that all was vanity and there was nothing eternal … no one knows what will become of customs and morals …" The classically educated scholar, cast adrift after a lifetime of study with his hopes snatched away, became a stock figure in the novels and stories of the day. In a single stroke, culture was cut loose from politics. The classics were torn out of the machinery of government, and the court gave up its old role of teaching the empire what to think. The examination questions had been a weapon of cultural control, and no new institution was ready to take their place. And the old curriculum had reached right down into village schools, while the newer and more expensive Western schools were built only in the county towns. One of the threads that tied the elite to ordinary villagers snapped. The power of the court, the prestige of the gentry, the learning of the scholars: these had been three strong pillars holding up a system that looked immovable. What had been a whole world of learning and truth shrank, almost overnight, into one small corner of history. And yet a surprising number of old elite families adapted fast. Some had already taken the precaution of sending at least one promising son to a Western school before the axe fell. Others retrained as teachers in the new schools, or found other new careers. The gentry, which the examinations had created, survived their abolition by a generation or two at least. In practice, though there were no more examinations, there were still plenty of places for the classical scholar and the old style of official. To foreigners watching, the literati, an honourable and cultured class, seemed suddenly to have lost their vote, and that could have been a fertile source of trouble. But the new rule was more honoured in the breach than in the observance. The classical tradition was doomed, and the practical compromise was to give it time to pass away. Even the Hanlin Academy carried on, until the Republic finally abolished it in 1912. Meanwhile, every year, large numbers of students were passing into the universities of Japan, at an age open to ideals and full of youthful enthusiasm, and there they picked up advanced ideas. Japan was close, it was cheap, and it had just beaten Russia, and by the end of 1905 the Chinese students in Tokyo were counted in the thousands. Hold on to those students in Tokyo.

Duanfang
Duanfang. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Cixi was already looking past the schools, to the shape of the government itself. On the sixteenth of July 1905, a decree admitted that although a scheme of reform had existed for several years, there had been no substantial result. The fault, it said, lay with officials who seemed busy with their duties but took no real interest in them. And if that was so, what hope was there of saving the country from the dangers that threatened it? So it ordered four high officials to go to Japan and the Western countries, with suitable staffs, to study how those countries were governed, and pick out the best points to bring home to China. Other batches would follow, it said, and everyone who went must earn the throne's confidence by making careful inquiries, so as to be able to advise the government when the reforms came. The Boards of Foreign Affairs and Revenue would pay. The four were Zaize, an imperial prince; Dai Hongci; Xu Shichang; and Duanfang. Xu Shichang was an old friend and ally of Yuan Shikai. And Duanfang you have met: the reformer thrown out of office in 1898, who turned up in Shaanxi in 1900 sheltering the missionaries fleeing Shanxi. He was a Manchu who loved books and old bronzes, one of the great collectors of his day, and as a provincial governor he had been busy founding new schools. The commission was to leave Beijing by special train. As they were about to set off, a bomb went off. The damage was slight. The only man killed was the man who meant to throw it; the bomb was hidden on him, and it went off before he could. At the time nobody could find a motive. It came out later that it was directly inspired by the revolutionary organisation, which believed the only hope lay in a republic, and wanted to wreck any political reform on any other lines. Think about what that means. The revolutionaries were not afraid the reforms would fail. They were afraid they would work. The government had its own name for the revolutionaries. It called them a dang, a word with the sinister ring of a gang or a conspiracy. The word they used for what they wanted, geming, came from the classics, where it meant a change in the course of destiny, and in their time it had come to mean revolution. The bomb delayed the mission, but it did not stop it. Delegations went out in 1905 and 1906 to study the governments of Japan, the United States and the states of Europe. About a year later they were back in Beijing, after what was by all accounts a highly agreeable tour. Notice the dates. The decree sending them abroad was issued more than a month before the revolutionaries met in Tokyo to found their new united party. Whatever pushed Cixi to it, it was not that.

The leading part in drafting a constitution went to a few men educated in America and England: Tang Shaoyi and Liang Dunyan among them, and Wu Tingfang, a member of the English bar. And behind them stood the strong support of Yuan Shikai. Foreigners noticed that the spirit of the drafting was not the radical spirit of the students trained in Japan, but the sober conservatism of the few trained in America and England. Tang Shaoyi had been at Yuan's side since the Korea years, and Wu Tingfang was the same Wu who, as envoy in Washington, had told the Americans that all was well during the siege. Ask yourself what the most powerful man in the north wanted with a constitution. The commissioners' report was answered by an imperial decree of the first of September 1906. The emperor issued it, it said, in obedience to the instructions of the Empress Dowager. It began by recalling that the dynasty had always had the people's interests at heart. But now China had dealings with all the nations of the earth, and found that they depended on one another, and its own position seemed pressing and full of danger, unless it found wise and experienced men to help govern. The commissioners, it went on, were unanimous: the main cause of the empire's backwardness was the lack of confidence between the highest and the lowest, between the throne and its ministers and the people. "Indeed, officials know not how to protect the people, while on the other hand it follows that the people are ignorant of how to guard the safety of the country. Foreign countries really become powerful by granting a Constitution to the masses and allowing universal suffrage." There is the answer to the question the war had raised. Japan had had a constitution since 1889, and an elected parliament since 1890. Russia, until the war shook it, had had neither. The model the court had in mind was Japan's: a constitution granted by the emperor from above, with the throne keeping the real power. So the interests of the throne and the people were the same, the decree said: whatever affected one would affect the other. In foreign countries, the decree went on, the people elect their elders to rule over them, the powers of each part of the government are clearly defined, and the ways of raising money for the government are properly regulated. Everything there, it said, was run under a proper system aimed at the welfare of the people at large. It was the first definite promise of constitutional government. It promised reform of the administration, the laws and the finances, and a reorganisation of the army and navy, and it undertook to bring in constitutional government within a few years, when the nation should be educated to it. Within a few years. When the nation should be educated to it. Hold on to those two phrases, because the fight over the dynasty's last years would be about what they meant. Foreigners who knew the empire well had their doubts. The reform, they thought, began at the top of the pyramid and left its body and its base untouched. What China really needed, in their view, was humbler: equal justice for ordinary people, protection for the taxpayer from extortion, fixed salaries for officials instead of fees of no fixed amount, and every tax collected actually paid into the treasury. Two months later came the decree that finished off the old boards for good, with new ministries in their place. One of the new ones was a Ministry of the Army, and Tieliang was put at its head. Yuan Shikai had to hand four of his six divisions over to it. He kept command of the other two. The court was not finished with Yuan Shikai. Nor was he finished with it.

A map of where opium is grown in China, from a book published in 1908
A map of where opium is grown in China, from a book published in 1908. Broomhall, Marshall, 1866- China Inland Mission, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Then the court took on an older enemy than any of these. Opium had poured into China from British India for more than a century, the trade China had gone to war with Britain to stop back in 1839, and by now China grew far more opium of its own than it imported. The foreign drug came almost entirely from British India and Persia, and it was all shipped from British ports. Of all the reforms, this was one the court could not only lead but actually make work, without, it seemed, weakening the dynasty at all. Years of missionary teaching had had their effect, and the foreign powers were readier than before to help. A student campaign against the drug swept the country, and for once the government could expect the people to back it. In September 1906, an imperial decree turned on the drug. The smoker, it said, wastes time and neglects work, ruins his health and impoverishes his family, and "the poverty and weakness which for the past few decades have been daily increasing amongst us are undoubtedly attributable to this cause." "It is hereby commanded that within a period of ten years the evils" of foreign and native opium alike be completely rooted out. The detailed rules followed in a decree of the twenty first of November. All the land then planted in poppy was to be taken out of cultivation, in instalments, within ten years. Every smoker had to take out a licence, and those under sixty had to cut down step by step. The sale of pipes and lamps was restricted, the smoking dens were not to spread, and smoking was absolutely forbidden to everyone in government service. And talks were to open with the foreign powers to cut the import of foreign opium, and end it within ten years. A deadline like that, on a habit like that. You might expect it to go the way of most decrees. It did not. The effect on the nation was electric. With the police enlisted in the cause, the planting was cut back. Smokers gave up the habit by the millions, it became unfashionable to smoke in public, and the young were kept from starting. Many millions went on smoking, of course. But a generation was growing up in which few ever took up the habit. That December, Britain agreed to cut its exports from India by a tenth every year, starting in 1908. When the three trial years were up, China was cutting its own production faster than it had promised, and in 1911 a new agreement set the end of the foreign import for the close of 1917. The import had been reckoned at fifty one thousand chests a year. By 1915 it was down to four thousand one hundred and thirty six. A foreigner who watched it happen called the nation's answer one of the most remarkable moral impulses in history. The only question left, he thought, was whether the same moral sense could make sure that some worse evil did not take the drug's place. So look at the court six years after the flight to Xi'an. The examinations gone. New ministries. Six modern divisions in the north. A constitution promised, and a nation giving up opium. And Yuan Shikai, governor general of Zhili, was the most powerful Chinese official in the empire, with an army that looked to him alone. Failed rescue, or the real start of a modern state? From inside the palace, it was beginning to look like a rescue that might work. But outside the palace there were men who had stopped waiting for reform long ago, and who did not want it to work. One of them was Sun Yat-sen. Since his failure at Guangzhou in 1895, he had been travelling through Europe, America and the East, preaching his new principles and winning followers. And in the summer of 1905 he arrived in Japan, among all those students. Next time, we step back and follow him. And we ask how much of the revolution's story was ever really his.

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