Revolution and Civil War, episode 2

The Emperor Who Came Back

In 1917 Duan Qirui, the premier who holds Beijing's army, wants China in the First World War against Germany, and President Li Yuanhong fears Duan means to take his power. Their quarrel brings the provincial generals into revolt and Zhang Xun, a general whose troops still wear the old dynasty's queue, into Beijing as mediator, where he puts the boy emperor Puyi back on the throne for twelve days; the episode follows Duan and Zhang through the restoration and its collapse to China's declaration of war, the labourers shipped to France and Sun Yat-sen's rival government in Guangzhou, and asks what the war was worth to China. It leans heavily on foreign observers, above all the American minister Paul Reinsch and Ellen La Motte, an American nurse and writer living in Beijing, with Chinese public, Nationalist and Beijing government voices alongside.

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Last time, Yuan Shikai, the general who made himself president of China and then tried to make himself emperor, died in June 1916, and Beijing watched his coffin leave without a sign of grief. His vice president, Li Yuanhong, became president. The parliament of 1913 came back, and Yuan's old lieutenant, Duan Qirui, stayed on as premier and minister of war, the man who held the army. Duan saw no virtue in governing through talk, he said, but he was willing to give it a fair trial. And behind them, the generals Yuan had raised were splitting into rival camps, each with its provinces and its soldiers. That fair trial lasted less than a year. What broke it was a war on the other side of the world. This episode also draws on the work of Jay Taylor, and of John and Alice Dewey. On Sunday the fourth of February 1917, a clear, mild day, the American minister in Beijing had driven out to a friend's cottage near the race course outside the city. After lunch a messenger came from the legation. An important cable had arrived. The minister was Paul Samuel Reinsch, a professor of politics from Wisconsin who had come to China in 1913, a warm believer in the young republic and a worried watcher of Japan. The cable said that the United States had broken off relations with Germany, in protest against what Washington called an intolerable practice, and that it trusted the neutral nations would follow. He was to tell the Chinese government. That same evening he called on President Li Yuanhong, and found him resting after dinner in an amiable mood. Li was plainly startled. At first he said nothing at all, and sat silently thinking. Then his doubts came out as questions. What was the state of the war? Could the Allies, even with America, really win? Then the American minister drove to the house of the premier. Duan Qirui was an odd kind of strong man. The first time the American minister met him, Duan had received him in a dingy room, wearing a frowzy long coat, with a general air of tedium. There was nothing of the soldier about him. He was lazy, the minister thought, but wise and fundamentally honest, always ready to shield his subordinates and take the blame himself. He was no politician, and he was bored by political theory. He left the details of government to his assistants and preferred to play Chinese chess. When an aide came to him with a proposal in the middle of a game, Duan would give it half an ear and say, all right, all right. When the results turned out badly and he asked who had authorised them, he would be reminded that he had. He would faintly recollect, and make a gesture toward his shoulder, meaning that, very well, he took the responsibility. That mix of indolence and extraordinary stubbornness, the minister thought, often made his influence disastrous for his country. But that night Duan was all attention, and he seemed to contemplate breaking with a great power with a good deal less worry than the president. The next day the talks went on. President Li asked the American minister a question that would turn out to be the right one. "Would not a positive active foreign policy, particularly if it should lead to war, strengthen the militarist party?" The minister answered that it would do the opposite. It would strengthen the central government, he said, keep the military in their proper place, and stop the growth of the private armies Yuan Shikai had left behind. Duan wanted to talk about the war itself. With a map spread out between them, he and the minister went over the fronts in Europe. What, Duan asked, could be expected of America by way of direct military action? "Bear in mind that I wish for nothing more than for a strong America, able to exercise a guiding influence in the affairs of the world." Then he asked, "What, then, will happen at the conclusion of the war?" The minister cabled Washington for instructions on what he could promise China. As happened more than once in a crisis, the cable line was broken, and no answer came. When instructions finally arrived, on the very day China broke with Germany, they rather implied that he had taken Washington's invitation to the neutrals too seriously. He was, he admitted, inwardly amused. Over the next weeks, the pressure built. Ever since the war began, the Allies had tried to draw China in, and China had turned a deaf ear. Now they saw their chance. "The screws are now being put on in earnest", wrote Ellen La Motte, who had just got back to China, "you can fairly hear them creaking." She was a nurse who had worked in a French field hospital behind the Western Front. Her letters home from Beijing mocked the foreign powers in China and their talk of civilisation. Feeling was running so high, the nurse wrote, that people freely prophesied the war question would split the country wide open, into civil war. The case against was simple. China had no real reason to break with Germany, which made the decision harder, and the Chinese press was full of the absurdity of it. The papers reminded readers every day of the insults China had suffered at the hands of the very nations now urging it to join them, and of the force and bribery that had brought China so low. And everyone talked about money. A Chinese lady who had lived in America told the nurse about a dinner some foreign officials had given for Chinese officials they wished to influence. When the plates were lifted, a check was found lying beneath each plate. "I should think you would hate all foreigners," the nurse said to her. "We do!" the woman replied. "Why don't you leave us alone?" Which foreigners did she hate least? "You Americans we hate least," she said. "You have done the least harm to us." Sun Yat-sen, the great revolutionary leader of the south, wrote an open letter to the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, against dragging China into the war. "For China is yet an infant Republic and as a nation she may be likened to a sick man just entering the hospital of constitutionalism", Sun wrote. "Unable to look after herself at this stage, she needs careful nursing and support." China was held together only by custom and the sentiment of a peace loving people, he warned. Should discord arise, general anarchy would follow. And the mere desire to get China into the war was, to Chinese minds, a confession that the Allies could not beat Germany on their own. The old reformer Kang Youwei, who had led a famous reform movement at court in 1898, warned against trusting anyone to protect China. "There is no such thing as an array of righteousness which will come to the assistance of weak nations." Kang's own former pupil, Liang Qichao, the leader of one of the main parties in parliament, took the other side. Germany, he argued, had broken the peace of the Far East when it seized its foothold in Shandong, and China should rise to punish it. And another voice came back from France. Wang Jingwei had been doing educational work there among the Chinese labourers. Wang was a revolutionary hero, famous since 1910, when he had tried to assassinate the regent of the Qing court with a bomb. Wang's argument was cold and clear. While the great powers were busy in Europe, Japan had a free hand in China, which was how it had forced the Twenty One Demands on China. If the Allies won, Japan would sit among the victors. Only by joining them could China reopen those demands at the peace conference. Japan, for its part, had been against China joining at all, and wanted no talk of rewards. If the Allies wanted China in the war, one Japanese newspaper said, let the Allies pay for it, not Japan. "From the point of view of Oriental peace, there is no absolute necessity for China to participate in the war." And many Chinese simply feared Germany. It had been winning the war so far, and it was the power that in 1897 had seized a whole bay on the Shandong coast over the murder of two missionaries. Might it not punish China again? What did Duan want? Here the sources disagree. His enemies in the revolutionary party believed that Duan saw the war as a way to raise loans from Japan and America, supposedly for an expedition against Germany but really to crush the revolutionaries at home. They said Liang Qichao had given him the formula: "declare, but don't wage, war on foreign countries", and make war on enemies at home without declaring it. The American minister saw something else, a premier who believed China's best chance was a seat at the peace table in its own right, since Japan was already trying to secure the right to speak for China. Both may have been true. And some in Beijing said Duan simply wanted to be president.

At the beginning of March, Duan's cabinet was ready to break with Germany. President Li suddenly balked. In the first days of March Duan wanted to send a telegram to the provincial governors announcing the break. Li refused, insisting that the power to make war and peace was his. Duan answered that as head of a responsible cabinet he was owed the president's agreement, and that the only course left to him was to resign. He went to the railway station, dictated his letter of resignation to his secretary, and left by special train for Tianjin. Duan was forever resigning, the nurse wrote, and forever being coaxed back. Delegation after delegation went down to Tianjin. On the seventh of March he came back, and all was well. Li, it turned out, had learned that the public and the parliamentary leaders were behind the cabinet, and he had changed his mind. On the tenth of March the cabinet went before parliament. After a stormy debate the lower house backed the government, three hundred and thirty one votes to eighty seven, and the senate by a large majority. On one of those days of voting, the nurse was at a gathering in Beijing when a young member of parliament arrived, his hands hidden up the sleeves of his crackling brocade coat. "Good news!" he exclaimed. "Good news! Or so I think you'll find it! We have just decided to break with Germany!" "There wasn't what you'd call rejoicing", the nurse wrote. "Instead, his rather hilarious announcement was greeted with a sort of constrained silence." "It's such a tremendous thing for any country to declare war, and for a country in China's position it is such a blind leap into the abyss." On the fourteenth of March 1917, China broke diplomatic relations with Germany. The German minister and his staff were handed their passports. The vice president, Feng Guozhang, had come round too. The American minister found him small and slender, bald, with keen but shifty eyes, and courtesy itself. "I approve heartily and completely," Feng told him, "of the proposed break with Germany." The foreign minister, Wu Tingfang, was a spiritualist, and he took a longer view. "There is an aura gradually spreading from Europe over the entire surface of the world", he told the American minister. "It enters the brains of the people and penetrates them, making them war-mad. We are having the first signs here." The foreign press was triumphant. The Chinese press was much less enthusiastic. Beijing gossip said that two hours after the vote one of the Allied ministers was seen stomping up and down in front of the German legation, shaking his fist at the German flag and shouting that it must come down. The Chinese, meanwhile, had more important things to do. With great haste, before any foreign power could step in to protect them, they put their own soldiers into the German concessions at Tianjin and Hankou, and seized the interned German warships. A concession was a district of a Chinese city leased to a foreign power and run under its own laws. Germany's reply had been almost pleasant, and quietly ironic. It regretted that Chinese shipping had suffered, though China had no ships in the war zone at all. The only Chinese who had died, Germany pointed out, had died behind the firing line, digging trenches. And Chinese had already died at sea. On the seventeenth of February, the French ship Athos had been torpedoed in the Mediterranean, and about five hundred Chinese went down with her. The nurse heard an Englishman at lunch propose a way to stir up some war feeling. In Beijing there was a white marble memorial arch, put up to honour the German minister killed in the Boxer rising, Baron von Ketteler. The arch carried his story in Chinese characters and German letters. Why not, the Englishman suggested, erase that inscription and dedicate the arch instead to the five hundred Chinese drowned by the Germans? It seemed to the nurse rather late in the day to begin inscribing arches to Chinese killed by foreigners. All the arches in China, she thought, would not hold the names of the Chinese slain by their European conquerors.

The break was only the first step. The next, a declaration of war, would be far more momentous, and opposition was growing. President Li was obstinately opposed to it, the nurse wrote in March, and he had considerable backing. Li had backed the break with Germany, but the American minister found that he wanted another break too, with his own premier. "I cannot trust him," Li told the American minister. "He wishes to eliminate me from real power." So Duan called in the generals. To strengthen his hand for a declaration of war, he summoned the military governors of the provinces to Beijing for a conference. Nine of them came in person, and the other provinces sent delegates. By the twenty eighth of April they had agreed to back his war policy. These were the dujun, the provincial strongmen. Dujun simply means military governor. The American minister gave them a reception and studied them closely. Many had risen from nothing. One had started as a bandit. Cao Kun, of the province around Beijing, had been a huckster. Feng Guozhang, the vice president, had played the fiddle in a small local theatre as a young man. All of them, the minister thought, dealt with political power as a commodity, bought with money and soldiers, like the condottieri, the mercenary captains of Renaissance Italy. The military governor of Shandong had once explained his view of representative government to his provincial assembly. "Gentlemen," he said, "you resemble birds who are in a large cage together. If you behave well, and sing songs that are pleasing, we shall feed you; otherwise, you shall have to go without food." On the ninth of May, the American minister went to see Duan. "If parliament is obstinate," Duan said bluntly, "it will be dissolved." The minister warned him that ignoring parliament would make a very bad impression in America. Duan replied that parliament's opposition was mere party advantage. Then he talked about Japan. "The Japanese have assured me," he said, "that if I follow a strong policy I may count on their support." And he went on the attack. He had proof, he said, that Sun Yat-sen had promised the Japanese in writing that if he ever became president, he would give Japan more control over China's army and government than even the worst of the Twenty One Demands. So each side believed the worst of the other. The American minister made sure the generals knew where America stood. He told a vice minister close to them that any move to overthrow parliament to get the war policy through could expect no sympathy from the United States. The vice minister passed it on, as he was meant to. On the tenth of May, a mob of more than a thousand men gathered outside the parliament buildings, shouting, "You must vote for the declaration of war". The police offered no help to the besieged members, and many of them were roughly handled. The mob gathered at ten in the morning and was not dispersed until eleven at night. To many it seemed beyond doubt that some government official had incited it and promised it protection, and Duan's enemies said the hooligans were soldiers in plain clothes. It backfired completely. Protest telegrams poured in from the provinces, Duan's own cabinet colleagues deserted him, and the democrats in parliament demanded his resignation. On the nineteenth of May a majority in parliament did vote for war, but it would take no formal decision as long as Duan remained premier. The generals had one more card to play before they went home. They sent the president a petition attacking the permanent constitution that parliament had nearly finished, and demanding that parliament be dissolved. Then, late one evening, carts loaded with military stores and household goods came rattling down the main street to the railway station, cars rushing past them. On the platform, troops were loading the governors' belongings onto the train, and the governors themselves were gathering in a parlour car. The generals had suddenly decided to leave Beijing for their provinces, taking their bodyguards with them. A few would wait at Tianjin to watch developments. It looked as if President Li had at last got the upper hand. The next day Li was full of glee. "All danger is passed," he announced. He would dismiss Duan, appoint a new cabinet, and let parliament decide the war question without compulsion. And who would back him, if the generals turned on him? The American minister asked. It was all arranged, Li said. He would rely on General Zhang Xun. The minister was speechless. Zhang Xun was an old style militarist who had once been a bandit, with no understanding at all of representative government. But Li did not want Zhang for what he stood for. He wanted him because Zhang was Duan's enemy. It was an old Chinese instinct, the minister thought, to prevail by setting strong men against each other. On the twenty third of May, President Li dismissed Duan Qirui, and the foreign minister, Wu Tingfang, became acting premier. One of Duan's friends came to the American minister in a state, afraid that Duan's enemies would try to kill him. The minister calmed him. In a modern government, he said, there were ups and downs, and the time would come when Duan would be called back to power.

It came sooner than anyone expected. On the twenty sixth of May, the military governor of Anhui province, Ni Sichong, the most notorious of the military party, declared that Duan's dismissal had been illegal, and that his province would act independently of the central government. Experts said that if Li had dismissed Ni at once and put a junior commander in his place, the other generals would have fallen away from him. Instead, Li was persuaded to send Ni a conciliatory letter. That confirmed Ni as leader of the military party, and one after another the military governors of the north declared their independence. At Tianjin they set up a so called provisional government. Duan himself, and the older heads of the military party, kept carefully aloof from it. The new government helped itself, by force, to the Beijing government's deposits in the Tianjin branch of the Bank of China. Among the men most in evidence there were the leaders of the pro Japanese clique, and the Japanese military adviser to the government was on the spot as well. The generals controlled the railways into the capital, and their plan was to isolate and strangle Beijing by cutting off its food. The Japanese minister raised no objection to the rebels' troops being stationed along the railway to Tianjin, though two months earlier his legation had strongly objected when the government posted a few soldiers on the same line. President Li answered them with a defiant statement. "If it be your aim to shake the foundations of the country and provoke internal war, I declare that I am not afraid to die for the country," he said. "I have passed through the fire of trial and have exhausted my strength and energy from the beginning to the end for the Republic." "I will under no circumstance watch my country sink into perdition, still less subject myself to become a slave to another race." The southern provinces stood by the president and the parliament, and the merchants and townspeople disapproved of the rebellion. America tried to help. On the fifth of June, Washington sent word that China's entry into the war was a secondary matter, and that what China needed above all was political unity. The Chinese press welcomed the American note. The Japanese press attacked it as meddling. "If China listens to advice from America", a Japanese major general declared at a dinner in Beijing, "she will have Japan to deal with." On the ninth of June, the generals at Tianjin sent Beijing an ultimatum: dissolve parliament, or they would attack the capital. The president was isolated, and he wavered. His British adviser, once the famous Times correspondent in Beijing, urged him to stand firm. His Japanese constitutional adviser counselled the opposite.

So Li turned to the man he had said he could rely on. He issued a mandate inviting Zhang Xun to Beijing to arbitrate. Zhang Xun was in his sixties, a soldier from Jiangxi who had risen from the ranks under the old dynasty and had never stopped being loyal to it. He kept his own long braid, the queue that Chinese men had worn as a sign of submission to the Qing, and so did his soldiers. In 1913 his troops had sacked Nanjing for Yuan Shikai, and since then he had sat with his army at Xuzhou, the great railway junction on the line between Tianjin and the Yangtze. The American minister had heard the old story of his rise. His partners in a band of old time freebooters had once put up fifty thousand taels of silver so that Zhang could buy himself an office and become respectable. He spent it all in high living. A tael was a weight of silver, a little over an ounce, and the old unit in which Chinese money was counted. On the ninth of June the first of Zhang Xun's soldiers arrived in Beijing. Zhang's theory, the American minister wrote, was that it is the business of a trooper to make himself terrible. His wild horsemen, in loose black uniforms, their queues rolled up on the back of their heads, rode about the city with the air of conquerors. The mediator had brought enough soldiers to back his judgment. When Zhang himself arrived, the streets from the station to his house were shut off entirely. Mounted troopers stopped the American minister's car at a crossing, nearly rode into it, drew their guns, and would not budge. The minister told his companion not to say who he was. It would have meant nothing to them. They waited until the great man had raced past from the station. Zhang's first prescription for curing China was that parliament must be dissolved, and President Li caved in. The Japanese minister told the American minister that morning that Zhang's mediation was the last hope of peace, and that it was desirable to be rid of parliament, which was obstructive and made doing business almost impossible. The decree needed the premier's countersignature, and the acting premier, the elderly Wu Tingfang, refused to give it. Wu was a spiritualist and a vegetarian with theories about living to a great age, and the American minister had not always taken him seriously. But he admired his quiet courage now. While the minister was visiting Wu, a cabinet secretary arrived to press him to sign. Outside, a friend of the minister's overheard the secretary's chauffeur talking to Wu's doorman. "Is your old man going to sign up?" the chauffeur said. "You had better see to it that he does, else something might happen to him." Before daylight on the thirteenth of June, Wu was roused from his bed and told to countersign a mandate accepting his own resignation and making the commander of the city's gendarmerie acting premier. Before daybreak, the new acting premier signed the decree dissolving parliament. Li issued a statement confessing that he had been forced to do it, to save the capital and the country from civil war, and promising to resign as soon as he could. For the second time, the parliament had been dissolved. Many of its members left for Shanghai. And the generals who had declared independence promised to come back into the fold, while Zhang Xun, in secret, prepared his coup.

On the twenty ninth of June, the old reformer arrived in Beijing to join him: Kang Youwei, the leader of the reform movement of 1898, who had always believed in a constitutional monarchy. Kang encouraged Zhang with philosophy, and wrote all his edicts for him. The two of them believed that the moment the dynasty was restored, the provincial generals, whose true feelings were known to be imperialist, would rally to it. So the edicts simply said that they had. They named Feng Guozhang and other leading governors as petitioners for the restoration. They even declared that President Li himself had petitioned for the empire, and made him a duke of the first class. Zhang had also sounded out the Japanese minister, who told him not to try it without first making sure of the chief generals. Zhang took that as encouragement. The lists of appointments were ready too. The old statesman Xu Shichang was to be guardian of the emperor, and a veteran official, Liang Dunyan, foreign minister. On the evening of the thirtieth of June, Zhang gave a dinner for the heads of the Beijing army, police and gendarmerie at a guild hall in the city. After great quantities of wine had been drunk, Zhang told them his plan for the salvation of China. Everything was prepared, he said, and military and diplomatic support was assured. Then he pointed at the chief of the general staff, Wang Shizhen. "Of course, you are supporting the movement." Wang was completely taken aback, and saw no way to refuse an accomplished fact. The heads of the gendarmerie and the police gave their consent the same way. Zhang sent Wang and four others to wake President Li and get his consent. He himself went to the palace. The boy who had been the last emperor of the Qing dynasty, Puyi, was then eleven years old. He had come to the throne at two and abdicated at six, and under the terms of his abdication he still lived in the palace with his title, his household and his eunuchs. Zhang had failed to win over the imperial dukes, so he had lavishly bribed the palace eunuchs instead, and they opened the gates and led him to the boy's private residence. Zhang prostrated himself, the American minister wrote, and told the emperor that the whole nation demanded his return to the throne. Then, the minister went on, "he took the frightened boy to the great throne room, and, in the presence of his retainers and members of the Imperial Family, who had been summoned, formally enthroned the Emperor." It was four o'clock in the morning of Sunday, the first of July 1917. The American minister slept late that Sunday, the morning being cool. When his head servant came in, he was excited. "Emperor has come back again!" All the people, the servant said, were hanging out the yellow dragon flag. The flag with the dragon was the banner of the Qing. The republic flew one of five coloured stripes. It was entirely Zhang Xun's personal act. The men named in his proclamations as helping him had known nothing about it. The American minister refused to receive Zhang Xun, or any of his ministers. Liang Dunyan, who had always been an imperialist, came to take up his office in high spirits, convinced that at last China was saved, and that the foreign diplomats would readily recognise the restoration. But on Monday, the second of July, doubts began. Duan Qirui's name was nowhere in the imperial lists. When asked why, Zhang Xun said Duan was unimportant, having no troops under his command. There were comic moments. A distinguished gentleman had come to Beijing to discuss joining the cabinet, and at ten that morning he was waiting at his hotel for a carriage to take him to the president. "There is no President," a friend told him. "This is now an Empire; the Emperor was enthroned at four o'clock this morning." For one day, the city seemed delighted. The yellow dragon flags went up everywhere and the whole of Beijing took on a festive look, as old memories of imperial splendour came back. It did not last. President Li refused to resign. He issued a mandate handing his powers to the vice president, Feng Guozhang, and appointing Duan Qirui premier and commander in chief, and then he fled into the Legation Quarter. Japanese troops escorted him to the Japanese legation. Where was Duan? At Tianjin, out of office, a private citizen with no command. Liang Qichao heard the news by telephone at about two in the morning, while he was playing cards with friends. He went straight to Duan's house and found him at cards too. Duan, thoroughly weary of public affairs, was hard to rouse. He begged to be spared the trouble of thinking about what might be happening in Beijing. But more news came in, and it became clear what a one man affair the restoration was. And Duan roused himself. Liang went to Japanese friends for money, and came back with a loan of a million yen for himself and Duan to raise the army against the emperor. The two of them went to the camp of the Eighth Division at Machang. Duan, nervous about how it would go, called the commanders together. He had always been against restoring the monarchy, he told them, and it was being attempted now by a single general. He would take command of the republican troops. They accepted him at once. Duan sent word to the American minister that he could finish Zhang Xun inside ten days. Zhang's men tore up the railway to slow Duan down. The diplomats insisted the line be kept open, with at least one train a day each way. It was repaired, and on the seventh of July trains ran again between Beijing and Tianjin, one of them actually passing between the two armies in the middle of a battle. There was a great deal of firing and very little loss of life, and Zhang's forces were driven back toward Beijing. More republican troops under Cao Kun closed in from the west. And for the first time in Chinese warfare, aeroplanes went up, dropping bombs on railway junctions and on the palace in Beijing itself.

Late in the afternoon of the eleventh of July, Duan notified the legations. During the night his troops would move against Zhang Xun's men in the city, and at dawn they would bombard the Temple of Heaven and the quarters around the palace that Zhang still held. Some of the diplomats wanted to step in and mediate, to spare the city. The American minister was against it. For once, he thought, the Chinese must settle it themselves, and he had no doubt the republican troops would win. Meanwhile the commanders in the city had agreed to bring Zhang to safety, against his will, and the chief of the gendarmerie asked whether the American legation would take him. The diplomats agreed instead that the British would receive him if he was brought in. The American minister sent word to the Americans living in those quarters to get out. Eighteen refugees came to the legation, and a company of American infantry pitched its tents in front of his residence. He wrote, "I was awakened at daybreak on July 12th by the sound of artillery and rifle fire." People climbed onto the city wall out of curiosity to watch. Stray bullets kept falling there, and several onlookers, three of them Americans, were hit before the wall was cleared. In the middle of the battle came word from the boy emperor's tutors. The dowager empresses wanted to bring Puyi to the American minister's residence for safety. Around eleven, with the firing at its height and bombs falling from aeroplanes onto the palace, the telephone rang. Friends of the imperial family and a Red Cross doctor were on their way with the emperor. The minister had the house prepared. Half an hour later two cars flying the Red Cross flag swept into the legation compound. Out of them stepped not the emperor, but a lone gentleman named Sun Baoqi, shivering with excitement. The minister took him into the reception room and comforted him with tea. He still expected the emperor to come. But the bombing had stopped and the guns were slackening, and in the palace they decided not to risk the flight. All morning the minister sat in his library, receiving reports and giving orders, while bullets and shells hissed overhead. Two or three shells fell in the British legation. The shouting and the gunfire from the nearby city gate exceeded, he wrote, any Fourth of July he had ever heard. He felt thankful to have seen a day when the Chinese would stand up and fight out a big issue. "I soon found that the battle was not commensurate with its sound." Shortly before noon Zhang Xun was brought, almost by force, by his own generals to the Dutch legation. He was still under the illusion that he could mediate. When the Dutch minister told him that was impossible, he wanted to go back to his troops. That could not be permitted. The firing died down after eleven and stopped completely at four in the afternoon. Then the American minister went out by car to see the battlefield. Zhang Xun's house had been hit by several shells. The dead had already been taken away, though the carcasses of horses still lay in the streets. At the Temple of Heaven, he was astonished to find Zhang's troops camped with all their guns, eating, drinking and talking in the best of spirits. Five of their men had been killed, they told him. How could so much ammunition do so little? He worked it out. "The method of fighting employed by the troops was to creep up as closely as possible behind a high wall, and fire into the air in the general direction where the enemy might be", he wrote. "Hence, the bystanders were in rather greater danger than the combatants themselves." The battle for Beijing killed twenty six people. Seventy six were seriously wounded, and more than half of them were civilians. Zhang's men at the Temple of Heaven had already hoisted the republican flag at ten in the morning. They agreed to hand in their arms for sixty dollars a man. The men around the palace held out for more. Two days later the minister still saw Zhang's soldiers, fully armed, guarding police headquarters, because their commanders had not yet agreed on the price. They settled on eighty dollars a man. By the fifteenth of July, Zhang Xun's troops, stripped of their weapons and their pigtails, had left Beijing with their money, on their way home to the villages of Shandong. The dragon flags vanished on the twelfth of July as suddenly as they had appeared ten days before, and the city went back to its ordinary life. And the boy emperor was deposed again, without being punished in any way for the use to which he had been put. He went back to his palace and his title. Zhang Xun sat out his defeat in the Dutch legation. Twice in two years, a strong man had tried to bring back an emperor, and twice it had collapsed in farce. The failure was not because the north had no monarchists, the American minister thought. Zhang had simply not prepared the ground. But after two failures, ambitious men would think many times before trying again. The efforts to restore the empire, he concluded, had actually entrenched the republic more deeply. The republic had survived. But whose republic was it now?

Duan Qirui came back to Beijing as the man who had saved the republic. President Li, who had sheltered with the Japanese, resigned, and on the first of August the vice president, Feng Guozhang, took his place. Duan was premier again. The parliament he had fought did not come back. Duan governed without the revolutionary party, through a combination of other factions, and the pro Japanese men around him grew more prominent. It was a Japanese loan, the American minister noted, that had helped make Duan's comeback possible. On the second of August, Duan told the American minister the news. "It has been decided by the Chinese Government to declare war; on this very day the decision has been formally adopted by the cabinet." America had led the way on breaking with Germany, but on declaring war the lead had passed to Japan. The Japanese, helped especially by the French, had pressed China hard to join. What the Chinese did not know was that Britain, France and Italy had already made secret agreements with Japan, assuring it that they would not seriously resist whatever Japan wanted in China at the end of the war. Japan no longer feared China at the peace conference. Its claims had been settled in advance. Later, American officials in Beijing told visiting Americans that Japan had even collected a price for its trouble: a concession from Russia, in return for delivering China into the war on the Allied side. At ten o'clock on the fourteenth of August 1917, China declared that a state of war existed between it and Germany and Austria-Hungary. The president's proclamation struck a mournful note. "I would never have resorted to this step which involves fighting for the very existence of our nation, were I not driven to this unavoidable decision." The Austrian minister, already handed his passports, sent a note pointing out that the declaration had never been passed by parliament. The Foreign Office returned it, reminding him that he was no longer entitled to address the Chinese government. And the country? "The momentous declaration was received by the nation with almost pathetic indifference," a Chinese writer recorded, "and those who yelled in front of the parliament buildings so lustily on May 10th showed no signs of enthusiasm three months subsequently." People were far more afraid of a civil war at home. They had reason to be. "It is nothing short of ridiculous to declare war against a foreign power when every man and every resource has to be kept in hand to meet possible civil strife", a correspondent in Shanghai wrote to the American minister, "and when the authority of the Central Government is effective in only a doubtful half of the country." In the south, the leaders believed Duan's war policy was really meant to build up his own power and subdue the southern republicans. The war credits, as a Nationalist writer later put it, were to be used against the southern provinces that had declared their independence. As a member of the alliance, China got something. The Allies suspended its payments of the indemnity imposed after the Boxer rising, and allowed it to collect the customs duties the treaties promised. But the American minister had hoped for much more: a solemn promise from the powers to respect China's sovereignty and stop carving out spheres of influence. The Chinese did not make it a condition of going to war. They got tangled in long discussions, and the promise was worn down to a rather empty formula about the regard due a great country. Plans were drawn up for Chinese armies to fight in Europe, first for hundreds of thousands of soldiers, then for half a million. What everyone in government talked about was money: how the loans to pay for China's war would be found. One senator mocked the officials who borrowed abroad by putting words in their mouths. "What matters the woe of the whole nation by the side of the joy and happiness of our own families?" And soon Japanese money began to catch the premier's eye.

China's armies never went to Europe. China's war was fought by labourers. "For a year past Chinese coolies have been recruited for service in France," the nurse wrote, "paid of course, though probably not paid liberally, nor told frankly what they are being let in for." A coolie was the word foreigners used for a Chinese manual labourer hired by the day. The nurse had sailed that winter on a French ship carrying fourteen hundred labourers from France's colony in Indochina, packed like sardines in a hold fitted with tiers of bunks. And now, she wrote, the Chinese were being shipped to France as well. In Shandong, English missionaries had been acting as recruiting agents for the British government, against the wishes of the provincial authorities. The companies that organised the emigration were said to be inspired by Liang Shiyi, who was sure of making a few dollars on every coolie's head. Most of the men came from Shandong and from Zhili, the province around Beijing. Some sailed by way of the Mediterranean, where German submarines waited. In all, China sent a hundred and forty thousand labourers to France, and most of them dug trenches. They also worked in workshops, tank shops, factories, docks, fields and mines, freeing Allied men for the front. Back home, their families were paid through the Chinese post office. Money orders went out to more than twenty five thousand families, most of them in remote villages, and not one order was lost in transmission. At home in China it was said, proudly, that when the Germans broke through, the labourers more than once downed their tools and filled the gap as fighting men until they were relieved. At least two thousand of them died in France. During one great German push, labourers working behind the lines offered to help the wounded streaming back from the front. They gave them their own cigarettes and rations, and lit the cigarettes for them. The wounded were greatly touched. The Chinese labourers, one of them said, had hearts just as good as their own. After the armistice, the labourers stayed on to clear the battlefields of France. When they came home, they were not the same men. In the camps, those who could not read had been taught a new phonetic script, and those who could read a little had learned six hundred characters. They had seen the world, and learned something of organisation and of proper pay for proper work. One shipload of labourers coming home by way of the Pacific refused to go ashore when the ship called at Japanese ports. The Japanese government had treated China unfairly, they said, so as Chinese, they could not land and enjoy themselves. Some officials at home dreaded the returning labourer as a potential Bolshevik. And the labourers' war gave new life to a movement that would send young Chinese students to work and study in France. Among them would be future leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. One was Zhou Enlai, who went to France at the end of 1920 and spent nearly four years in Europe. So what was the war worth to China? A seat at the peace table, it hoped, and a voice when the spoils were shared. The world would soon show what that hope was worth.

And while Duan took China to war abroad, China was coming apart at home. When the parliament was dissolved, many of its members had gone to Shanghai. Sun Yat-sen proposed that they go on to Guangzhou, the great city of the south, and lead a movement to restore the constitution. He sailed south with a squadron of the navy, under an admiral loyal to him. The members of parliament who followed him were mostly from the Kuomintang, Sun's Nationalist Party, and they launched what they called the movement to protect the constitution. There were too few of them for a quorum, so they declared themselves a special parliament. They elected Sun grand marshal of a military government, with the two most powerful generals of the southwest, Tang Jiyao of Yunnan and Lu Rongting of Guangxi, as his deputies. They decided not to name a president of the republic, so as to keep up the fiction of a united China. But the titles were grander than the power. Real power in the south lay with Tang Jiyao and Lu Rongting, who controlled the armies. Sun had no military force of his own, apart from the navy. He could rely only on his influence with the people and the press. For all his august titles, he did not have unchallenged authority even over his own government in Guangzhou, which was split into factions. On the seventh of October 1917, Sun issued a proclamation declaring Feng Guozhang and his clique traitors to the country, and calling on the people to help him subdue the northern militarists. War between north and south had begun. The next spring, Sun sent a young officer named Chiang Kai-shek to serve as senior operations officer in the army of a southern general, Chen Jiongming, for a campaign against the warlord of Fujian. Chiang had a sharp temper and a rigid personality, and he quickly made enemies among the Cantonese officers. But he had found his way into Sun Yat-sen's war. Within a year, the southern generals had reorganised the government in Guangzhou to put a council of seven in place of the grand marshal, and Sun, unable to resist, left for Shanghai to write his books on revolution. From now on, China had two governments and two parliaments. From then on, as a Chinese writer put it a few years later, the nation was divided into a so called North and South: what was left of the dissolved parliament sat on in Guangzhou, while in Beijing a bogus parliament, elected under laws the militarists wrote, did the generals' business. The North called the South rebels, and the South called the North usurpers. Ordinary soldiers on both sides, some said, could see no reason for the fighting at all, except that their leaders were intriguing for power and the spoils of war. The generals had their war. But in Beijing, a different kind of rebellion was gathering, among people who had no armies at all. In a magazine called New Youth, a scholar named Chen Duxiu was telling young Chinese to throw off Confucius and the old classical language. And in Changsha, in the south, a young student named Mao Zedong was gathering his friends into a society to remake themselves and their country. Next time: new youth.

Sources

• Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine, Mao: The Real Story (2012), p. 53-55
• Bertrand Russell, The Problem of China (1922), https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13940
• Ellen N. La Motte, Peking Dust (1919), https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26162
• Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (2009), p. 31-32
• John Dewey and Alice Chipman Dewey, Letters from China and Japan (1920), p. 267-271, https://archive.org/details/lettersfromchina00deweuoft
• Min-ch'ien T. Z. Tyau, China Awakened (1922), pp. 134-136, 238-240, 240-241, 287-289, 289-291, 294-296, 296-297, 297-299, 299-300, 300-302, 309-310, 440-441, https://archive.org/details/chinaawakened00tyauuoft
• Paul S. Reinsch, An American Diplomat in China (1922), https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/56089
• Peter Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949 (2005), p. 82-83
• T'ang Leang-li, The Inner History of the Chinese Revolution (1930), pp. 99-101, 128-130, 130-132, 132-134, 134-136, https://archive.org/details/innerhistoryofch0000unse