In the summer of 1905 – the year designated by Sir Robert Hart for the outbreak of the Chinese Revolution – Shanghai witnessed the strange spectacle of the foreign-educated sons of the Chinese gentry leading violent demonstrations against the unequal treaties. ‘The Boxer uprising was still livid in our minds,’ says Anne Walter Fearn, an American physician who had arrived in Shanghai in 1893 to work in a hospital at nearby Soochow, the most beautiful of all Chinese cities. ‘Only a small spark was needed to start a conflagration.’1
Young China’s first target was the 1904 re-enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which severely limited Chinese entry into the United States and denied all Chinese the right to naturalisation as American citizens.2 Li Hung-chang had pleaded with President Roosevelt during a visit to Washington in 1896 to rescind the original Act but had been rebuffed. Since then, public hostility in China had been stirred up by lurid tales in the Chinese press about the murders of Chinese at the hands of racist Americans.
On 16 May 1905 one of Shanghai’s commercial guilds, the Man Mirror Literary Society, called for a boycott of American goods in two months’ time if the United States government refused to ease its restrictions. The American minister to Peking, William W. Rockhill, and the Shanghai consul, James L. Rodgers, assured the Chinese that their case would be considered during the next session of Congress. There was a brief lull in anti-American activity until the end of June when Edwin Conger, a pompous, self-regarding congressman who had been American minister in Peking during the Siege of the Legations, scoffed at the idea of the Chinese being able to organise anything like a boycott.3
Conger’s comments were wired to Chinese newspapers and ‘a storm of indignation’ broke over Shanghai, coinciding with the news that three male students and their sister had been mistreated by immigration officials in Boston. Young Chinese men and women started a vigorous newspaper campaign insisting that strong measures be taken to force the United States to revise its immigration laws.4
On 16 July – the deadline for the boycott ultimatum – Feng Xiawei, an overseas Chinese who had come to Shanghai to join the protest, committed suicide by taking poison in front of the American Consulate in Shanghai. The Shanghai press published two suicide notes by the young man urging resistance to the Exclusion Act.5 This emotional spark ignited the boycott. ‘It is our earnest hope,’ the Man Mirror Literary Society stated in a circular, ‘that our purpose may be realised because upon this action our national power is based, upon it the rise and fall of our empire depends.’6
Other Chinese guilds took up the cry. The boycott started to bite deeply. On 29 July, Louis Getz, president of a big import–export house in San Francisco, received a telegram from his Shanghai agent: ‘cancel all orders stop boycott of american trade effective among chinese merchants stop all business entirely suspended.’7 Rodgers confirmed the massive scale of the boycott and warned the State Department that foreign goods valued at US$25 million were likely to be affected.8
Activists returning Feng’s body to his native Canton organ- ised commemorative services at points along the route, spreading the boycott to the treaty ports of Nanking, Hankow and Canton. The exiled reformer Kang Youwei turned up at a meeting in Los Angeles to add his support to the voices of local Chinese protesters. Australian exporters took advantage of the boycott and filled the gap in some products, especially flour. ‘The boycott gave stimulus to trade of the British Empire and led to an important development of Australian trade with China,’ George Morrison commented. ‘Personally I would rejoice and so ought every patriotic Englishman if the Boycott had become permanent.’9
In Japan, Sun Yat-sen chose this moment to found the Tungmeng hui (the Revolutionary Alliance) ‘to expel the Tartar barbarians, to establish a republic and to distribute the land equally among the people’. Having criticised Kang Youwei and Liang Chi-chao for collaborating with the monarchy, Sun now wanted to unite the various Chinese groups in Japan, ranging from royalist reformers to revolutionaries and republicans, plus the hundreds of Chinese service personnel who had been sent to Japan for training.
At the inaugural meeting of the Tungmeng hui, Sun was duly elected chairman by the 70 members present, with 31-year-old Huang Hsing deputed to act for him in his absence abroad. After each member had sworn an oath of loyalty, Sun revealed a secret handshake and three passwords: ‘Chinese’, ‘Chinese things’ and ‘World affairs’.10
One of the most militant groups to join the new alliance was the Restoration Society, whose anti-Manchu, anti-foreigner sentiments were clearly expressed in their own blood oath, ‘Restore the Chinese race, and recover our mountains and rivers’. The society’s members, mostly radical teachers and intellectuals, planned to assassinate senior government officials but were only too willing in the meantime to turn their wrath on the Americans.11
By September, the Chinese Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai called for an end to the boycott when its members complained they were suffering as much as the Americans from the loss of trade. It made no difference. The movement had passed from the merchants to the students. ‘The agitators are in power,’ one correspondent wrote. ‘The reports of murders and outrages in America have incensed the people.’12
China’s sense of grievance was endorsed by that bastion of liberal America, the New York Times. ‘We have been enacting barbarous laws to exclude Chinese and our execution of those laws has been even more barbarous than the laws themselves,’ the newspaper editorialised. ‘All that the people of Canton and Shanghai know about us is that their most dignified representatives who have ventured across the Pacific have been received with gross indignity.’
By the end of the month, the boycott had become ‘an international phenomenon’ and had spread to every Chinese community throughout Asia, inflicting enormous damage on American trade and prestige.13 Washington caved in. It agreed to admit Chinese students, tourists and lecturers provided they did not settle or work in the United States, and promised to devote half of America’s share of the Boxer indemnity to aid Chinese students studying abroad.14
Young China’s second target was the Mixed Court, long a symbol of Western interference in Chinese affairs. On Friday 8 December, three Chinese women, one described as ‘a lady from Szechuen’, were accused in the court of kidnapping 15 young girls from that province and bringing them to Shanghai for unlawful purposes.
The trouble began when Bertie Twyman, the British consular official acting as court assessor, ordered the defendants to be remanded to the municipal jail rather than the Chinese-run detention wards attached to the courthouse. Twyman was doing no more than carrying out the wishes of the Municipal Council, which considered the wards unsanitary and that women confined there were ‘liable to constant extortion and ill-treatment by their custodians’.15
But the Shanghai taotai, Yuan Shu-hsun, objected to Chinese women being placed in foreign custody. When a British police inspector and his squad of Chinese constables placed the women in the back of a police van and attempted to drive out of the compound in Chekiang Road, court runners barred the gates. A ‘disgraceful fracas’ broke out between the runners and the policemen, with the assistant magistrate urging the Chinese constables ‘to remember that they were Chinamen and not foreigners’. Meanwhile, the taotai used his powers to close the court, thereby throwing the matter into limbo.16
Over the weekend, thousands of Chinese residents abandoned the International Settlement after reading about the incident in the Chinese press. At noisy public meetings, speakers strongly advocated the maintenance of China’s sovereign rights against ‘foreign aggression’. J. O. P. Bland, now the Times full-time correspondent in Shanghai, saw the ‘growing restlessness’ among students and merchants as evidence of a policy of ‘China for the Chinese’ and a case of ‘deliberate and organised resistance to all foreign influence’.
Some of the loudest voices in Shanghai were those of Chinese property owners to whom the Szechuen gi
rls were being sold to join ‘four or five thousand’ women working in their brothels. The Municipal Council had been warned some months earlier that if any attempt were made to regulate the trade in young women from the provinces, their Chinese patrons ‘would express their feelings in such an uncontrolled fashion as to cause great inconvenience to the foreign residents of the settlement’.17 They protested that ‘the lady from Szechuen’ was simply trafficking in slave girls, which wasn’t regarded as kidnapping under Chinese law.18
On 12 December the diplomat Tang Shao-yi informed Sir Ernest Satow, who had replaced Sir Claude MacDonald as British minister in Peking, that the British had made a ghastly mistake. The women, Satow wrote in his diary that night, were the widow of a Szechuen official and her daughter who were returning to Canton with the latter’s children ‘and some girls (described in Chinese as serving maids, but really purchased) & that there can be no question of kidnapping’.19
The taotai, acting on behalf of the Chinese gentry who were insisting on taking a firm line with the British, refused to re-open the court unless Bertie Twyman was removed as court assessor and the police inspector discharged from his post.20 The consular body representing 15 nationalities went into a huddle at the British Consulate on The Bund. They were shocked when Sir Pelham Warren, the British consul, informed them that his minister accepted the Chinese position in the dispute and there was no choice except to release the three defendants.21
Thus encouraged, the Chinese planned even more aggressive action. A general strike was declared, shops in Nanking Road and the Maloo leading to the Bubbling Well, the leafy, suburban extension of Nanking Road beyond the racecourse, were closed and thousands of Chinese took to the streets. The earliest outbreak of violence occurred at the giant Hongkew market, where country gardeners arriving with vegetables, fruit and poultry for the day’s sales were attacked. Groups of rowdies overturned stalls and destroyed produce.22
Elsewhere, Chinese armed with clubs and knives turned on foreigners. James Rodgers, the American consul, was beaten up. In response, the Municipal Council declared martial law and the Volunteer Corps was mobilised, while landing parties disembarked from three British ships on the Whangpoo. Sir Ernest Satow warned the Wai-wu-pu (which had replaced the Tsungli Yamen as China’s Foreign Office) that the riots ‘must be firmly suppressed before the trouble attained such dimensions as to become a deplorable disaster’.
Inspector Eugene Lynch, a New South Welshman who had joined the Municipal Police Force in 1896, directed his constables in protecting private property. There were violent clashes with demonstrators when they surrounded Louza police station, just off Nanking Road.23 The police had not been issued with live ammunition and were unable to defend themselves when the mob knocked down the surrounding wall and hurled bricks at them. Otto Rasmussen, a 17-year-old Melbourne youth, watched as the Chinese drove the police out of the station, released the prisoners from their cells and set the building ablaze.24
The mob then moved down Nanking Road and set fire to the annexe of the Metropole Hotel, half a block down Foochow Road from the American Club and overlooking the racecourse. Chairs and tables were thrown into the street and anything that escaped the flames was deliberately smashed. On The Bund, large crowds swarmed over the lawns of the public gardens and, in the words of one contemporary report, ‘established themselves on the seats reserved for foreigners’. Lady Florence Boyle, daughter of the seventh Earl of Albemarle, complained that she and her maid could get no coolies to help with her luggage at the Custom Jetty and had to be escorted to the British Consulate by a couple of United States Marines in their blue woollen uniforms with the broad yellow stripe.25
At Soochow, Anne Walter Fearn and her husband John, an American missionary doctor, received the following telegram: ‘all foreigners requested come shanghai at once stop serious conditions existing stop riots.’ The Fearns made the 80-kilometre journey down Soochow Creek in their motorised houseboat and tied up at the Garden Bridge, where they were met by a squad of American Marines. The group marched down Nanking Road between a double line of bluejackets to a mission station. ‘One could feel tension in the air,’ Anne wrote. ‘The crowds in the streets were not the usual joyous busy throng but an excited, threatening mob.’26
The following day the British vice consul’s motor car was set on fire in the middle of Nanking Road and howling demonstrators roared down The Bund, dragging Europeans from rickshaws and ripping the clothing off their backs. Dr J. W. Jackson, a British physician, was attacked and had his watch stolen. The naval authorities summoned reinforcements from British, American, German, Austrian and Italian merchant ships moored in the Whangpoo and the mob was eventually dispersed.27
‘A significant feature of the outbreak,’ Bland reported in The Times, ‘has been that the Japanese have been quite unmolested. In certain cases, they appeared to be actually fraternising with the mob.’28 Bland deplored Sir Ernest Satow’s weakness in releasing the women. So much flak was flying in Satow’s direction that he thought it highly likely ‘I shall get a scolding from the Foreign Office if not something worse’.29
On 22 December the viceroy of Nanking, Chou-fu, arrived in Shanghai with instructions from the Dowager Empress to investigate the riots and punish those responsible. He discussed the situation with the taotai, who judiciously decided to re-open the Mixed Court the following day. The issue was then resolved at a meeting between the taotai and members of the Municipal Council. To save face all round, it was decided that women prisoners should be housed at the Mixed Court but that suitable quarters would be provided for them and that these could be inspected by the municipal health officer.30
Nothing changed. When Henry Woodhead of the North-China Daily News made an unannounced visit to the women’s quarters, he found great distress among the prisoners. Scores had been detained for years and some had no idea why they were there. In one section, he found mentally ill women confined in semi-darkness to filthy cages ‘like wild beasts, but without the cleanliness or the space usually accorded even to animals in captivity’.31
Meanwhile, Bill and Mary Donald’s marriage had run into a stormy patch. Mary wanted children, whereas Bill made it clear he regarded them as an impediment. He lived a journalist’s life, he explained, and had to be free to travel. He also enjoyed the company of other journalists, notably the hard-drinking Lionel Pratt who had joined the staff of the China Mail. Despite his later protestations that he had never touched a drop of alcohol in his life, it seems clear from his correspondence that Donald had started drinking. There were arguments at ‘Goodwood’, exacerbated by the fiery tempers of both parties.
At times like this Donald retreated to the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club on the Wanchai waterfront. He described himself as ‘a humdinger of a sailor’ and liked nothing better than taking his little yacht Sprite out on the bay. Professionally, his career was on an upward trajectory. His work in the Russo-Japanese War attracted the attention of the American newspaper magnate James Gordon Bennett, publisher of the New York Herald, who was looking for a China correspondent to match Morrison’s dispatches from Peking. He cabled Donald in Hong Kong: ‘you are the only man who can make sense out of china stop please accept appointment as south china correspondent for ny herald.’32
In his younger days Bennett had been described by his war correspondent Henry Morton Stanley as ‘a tall, fierce-eyed, imperious-looking young man’.33 He had taken over the Herald in 1866 from his Scots-born father James Gordon Bennett Sr, ‘the most detested and hated man in America – and the most widely read’.34 The Herald was a sensational and salacious newspaper and Bennett Jr remained faithful to his father’s injunction, ‘Make people talk about the Herald and they’ll have to buy it.’35 He turned Stanley into an explorer and sent him to find the Scots missionary David Livingstone in Africa. Livingstone wasn’t really lost any more than the Baltic Fleet had been lost – he had just been incommunicado for a couple of years – but the e
xclusive story of his ‘rescue’, with its immortal catchphrase ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume’, sold many thousands of newspapers and made Stanley world famous.36
Bennett lived mainly in Paris where he had launched the Paris Herald (later the International Herald Tribune) but travelled widely in his yacht Lysistrata and was always on the lookout for new talent. Indeed, he was known to his staff as ‘The Commodore’ on account of his passion for yachting.
If Bennett knew Donald’s reputation as a reporter, Donald also knew from the Hong Kong rumour mill that Bennett was an incorrigible eccentric. He had once asked the editor of the Herald for a list of staff men who were considered indispensable, then fired them all, with the comment, ‘I will have no indispensable men in my employ.’
Donald accepted his offer to join the Herald as South China correspondent but retained his position as editor of the China Mail. It was the start of a long and productive relationship between the two men, one that would enable Donald to pursue a Chinese agenda outside the imperial confines of Wyndham Street.
One evening after work he took a steamer up the Pearl River to Canton to interview the new representative of the Ching Court, Chang Jen-chun.37 On arriving in Canton the following morning, he was advised by the British commissioner of customs that it would take several days to see the viceroy: he would have to make an appointment. Donald refused to do so. While he grudgingly accepted that British imperialism had a place in colonial Hong Kong, it was intolerable to find the Chinese kowtowing to it in a Chinese city.38
Lighting one of his small cigars, he sat down on the steps outside the viceroy’s yamen and waited. It was then 8.30 am. After several hours, surrounded by curious coolies and troubled by the hot sun, Donald was no closer to his objective. He had failed to appreciate that Chinese officials never started work until one o’clock in the afternoon.
Shanghai Fury Page 12
