Taken together, these observations constituted an indictment of China’s political development. Qichao argued that China’s history had made the Chinese into ‘clansmen, rather than citizens’, with the mentality of the village rather than that of a nation – indeed the very word ‘nation’ was an innovation, first appearing in Chinese in 1899 – able to accept despotism but not to enjoy freedom, lacking the ability to set their own national objectives. These fundamental differences – entrenched by millennia of imperial history – inhibited China’s political development, and her ability to defend herself. In order to become a respected member of the family of nation-states, China would first have to herself become a nation: a group of individuals linked, as French political theorist Ernest Renan had put it in the 1880s, by ‘a common will in the present, to have done great things in the past and to wish to do more’.17 Qichao was well placed to help the process along, writing as a journalist at a time, at the turn of the twentieth century, when newspapers were multiplying across China and communications improving between the country’s far-flung provinces.
But it would take what would amount to a cultural revolution before China could truly be democratic, argued Qichao. (Amongst his admirers was Mao Zedong, then a child in southern China, later the country’s first Communist leader – he claimed to have learnt the master’s essays off by heart.) As Qichao put it:
If we were to adopt a democratic system of government now, it would be nothing less than committing national suicide. Freedom, constitutionalism, and republicanism would be like hempen clothes in winter or furs in summer; it is not that they are not beautiful, they are just not suitable for us. We should not be bedazzled by empty glitter now; we should not yearn for beautiful dreams. To put it in a word, the Chinese people of today can only be governed autocratically; they cannot enjoy freedom. I pray and yearn, I pray only that our country can have a Guanzi [medieval autocratic reformer], a Shang Yang, a Lycurgus, a Cromwell alive today to carry out harsh rule, and with iron and fire to forge and temper our countrymen for twenty, thirty, even fifty years. After that we can give them the books of Rousseau, and tell them about the deeds of Washington.18
Not all took quite such a dark view of the need for autocratic rule to be the handmaiden of the introduction of Western political forms into China. But many concluded, after the defeat of China in the war against Japan, the failure of the government to deal with regular natural disasters and now with the Forbidden City occupied in 1900, that the Qing dynasty – in its present form, at least – was a busted flush. The motto of the Boxer Rebellion had been ‘revive the Qing, exterminate the foreign’ – but was it not now too late for that?19 (And weren’t the Manchus, from whom the Qing dynasty was drawn, foreign anyway?) What China now needed, it was argued, was wholesale renovation, perhaps even a constitution. Some, including Sun Yat-Sen, went further: China should dispense with the forms of empire altogether and become a republic. In 1905, Sun Yat-Sen brought all the anti-Qing movements into a single umbrella organisation, the Revolutionary Alliance. Between 1906 and 1908 the Revolutionary Alliance launched a number of uprisings against the Qing dynasty in the south of China.
Under pressure abroad and at home the Qing regime undertook a series of dramatic reforms – many of which had been proposed in 1898, but shelved after the Dowager Empress reasserted her authority over Emperor Guangxu. In line with demands made as part of the Boxer Convention, a formal Qing Foreign Ministry was established in 1901. (As a result Chinese diplomats – a class which had previously been publicly scorned, engaged in an occupation traditionally viewed as shameful – were more present internationally. This implied acceptance of China’s place in a foreign-run world order, but also an understanding of the need for China to actively defend her interests in that order.) The old jinshi system, a gruelling and classically focused set of exams which had formed the basis of entry into imperial state service since time immemorial, was abolished in 1905 – in principle to allow for a wider intake into state service. A Qing ministry for commerce was founded, and another for post and communications. The army underwent a slow process of reform, incorporating Western uniforms and salutes. Some traditional punishments were done away with, at least in principle. A Supreme Court was established in 1906, in the hope that reform of the system of law in China would undercut the foreign powers’ traditional argument that the inadequacies of the Chinese system made it imperative for their citizens to be subject only to their own foreign systems of justice.
These administrative reforms were radical enough in themselves, establishing the basis of China as a modern state. But they were accompanied by political reforms which were potentially more far-reaching. Partly to deflect demands for a republic, and partly to reassert central control over processes of political reform already underway in the provinces, the Qing dynasty assembled a high-ranking study group to investigate options for constitutional reform. In January 1906 – after having escaped an attempt to assassinate them at Peking railway station a few months earlier – the study group travelled to the United States. They returned with suggestions for constitutional government which were subsequently accepted by the Dowager Empress and the court. In 1908 it was announced that full constitutional government would be in place by 1917. When the Dowager Empress Cixi finally died later that year – one day after the long-suffering Emperor Guangxu, still under effective house arrest – power passed to the Manchu regents surrounding the new child Emperor Puyi, ensuring an extended period of jockeying for position at court. In October 1909 provincial assemblies, elected according to a franchise that ensured elite dominance, assembled across the country. In 1910 they forced the Qing court to bring forward the timetable for constitutional government: a provisional national assembly was to gather in Peking before the end of the year.
At the same time, the Chinese government began to grapple seriously with one of the issues which had dogged China for years: opium. It was, in effect, in order to defend the ‘rights’ of British traders of Indian opium that Britain had first gone to war against the Qing dynasty in 1839. At the beginning of the twentieth century, local anti-opium campaigns – not unlike prohibition campaigns in the United States – spread across China, shaming addicts, closing down opium dens and leading to bonfires of the paraphernalia of drug use.20 Now Peking decided to get in on the act, proposing to suppress domestic demand entirely, threatening addicts with execution, calling upon the British to help in a moral crusade against the drug, and vastly increasing the customs’ duty on opium. In 1907, Britain agreed to a system whereby it would curtail exports from India, reducing them by a tenth every year over a period of ten years. British policy stipulated one condition: it would have to be shown that local eradication and suppression was working, on the basis that if it were not, there would simply be a substitution between Indian supply and local Chinese supply. In 1909, the International Opium Commission held an American-convened conference in Shanghai, with delegates from all the European powers, plus representatives from Japan, Persia, Portugal (which had a colony at Macau), Burma, and the Netherlands (which controlled the Dutch East Indies – Indonesia). The Chinese produced numbers to show the economic burden of opium on the people of the country and, in a move calculated to sway the commercial instincts of foreigners, argued that the impoverishment of China from opium addiction undercut foreign business prospects far more than the value of the trade itself.21 How much greater would the market for other Western goods be if opium were eliminated?
This was a powerful argument at a time when China’s economic development – particularly in the coastal areas – was already accelerating. After the Boxer Rebellion, railway construction, which foreign powers hoped would accelerate penetration of Chinese markets (and potentially improve troop movements), took on a new lease of life, financed by Western interests. (Ten times as much track was laid between 1900 and 1905 as between 1896 and 1899.22) As early as 1903, Shanghai was connected to the Trans-Siberian Railway, which ran all the way to Europe via Mukd
en and Harbin. In 1905 a line was completed linking Peking to Wuhan in central China. Foreign investment in China doubled between 1902 and 1914: Britain was far in the lead, and behind her, in order, were Russia, Germany, France, Japan and the United States.23 (The change in Japanese investment was particularly striking, rising from just $1 million in 1902 to well over $200 million a little over a decade later.) The China Year Book 1913 noted a steady increase in shipping in Chinese waters – two-fifths of it under the flag of the United Kingdom, nearly a quarter under the flag of Japan, and one-fifth under the Chinese flag.24 Factories sprang up, particularly in the treaty ports. An oil drum factory was operated by the Asiatic Petroleum Company in Shanghai. The British-American Tobacco Company had factories in Hankow, Shanghai, and Newchwang (Yingkou) in Manchuria. Electric light was said to be available in thirty-one Chinese cities.
In 1907, after having been initially opposed by the Qing authorities, a motor race from Peking to Paris was allowed to start from the city. The following year, less than a decade after foreign troops had had to fight their way from Tianjin to Peking to liberate the foreign quarter, Dutchman Henri Borel covered the same ground by train, in three hours. ‘I had certainly heard of reforms in China’, he wrote, ‘but I had not expected an up-to-date train-de-luxe to take me on modern springs to the Imperial City … it was in this way that I had travelled to Nice and Vienna’.25 Arriving in Peking, Borel found the Grand Hôtel des Wagons Lits staffed by a manager who would not have been out of place in Monte Carlo or Ostend and a bedroom appointed with every modern convenience: ‘Did I come to Peking for this? I could not help smiling somewhat bitterly. Have things already gone so far with Peking? I expected to reach to China’s mysterious capital, and I find myself landed in a Parisian hotel’.26
Whatever Borel’s experience, for many the true coming metropolis of China in these years was not Peking, it was Shanghai. Barely touched by the Boxer Rebellion, growing yearly more prosperous, already the undisputed commercial capital of China and untarnished by association with the Qing dynasty, it was Shanghai which came to symbolise the possibilities of Chinese modernity – with foreigners still very much part of the picture. Where Shanghai led, it was felt, the rest of China would surely follow.
Unlike Peking, where ancient tradition and the spirit of Confucian order was supposed to be imprinted on every brick of the city’s walls, Shanghai was popularly conceived of as a city of change, ever-ready to adopt a new technological innovation or import a new style of dance. Shanghai’s first telephone company was established in 1881, its main streets were lit with electric light from 1883, it showed its first movie in 1896, and saw its first car in 1902 (around the same time as Tokyo, capital of much more advanced Japan).27 Its printing presses produced more books, newspapers and political pamphlets than any other Chinese city – there were seventy-three Chinese and twenty-five foreign-language newspapers in 1913, as opposed to a total of fifty-two in Peking.28 For its literary and artistic prowess – or perhaps for its nightlife – Shanghai was dubbed the Paris of the East. While the rest of China was having its opium dens shut down, those in the international settlement of Shanghai, beyond the reach of the Qing authorities, remained open until 1910 (opium shops remained open in the city for another seven years after that).
Whereas Peking had been around for centuries, Shanghai was a relative upstart, the child – indeed the poster-child – of the treaty port system. Unlike many of the other treaty ports, which remained economic backwaters where consular representatives of the foreign powers were sometimes the only foreigners in town, Shanghai’s growth as a Chinese city trading with the rest of the world had been explosive. Forty-four foreign ships had entered the port in 1844, shortly after the signature of the treaty ending the First Opium War. Ten times that number docked in 1855.29 In 1908, the lavishly illustrated Twentieth Century Impressions of Hongkong, Shanghai, and Other Treaty Ports of China noted the ceaseless activity of the city’s port:
From Woosung to Shanghai, a distance of some thirteen miles, the river is alive with shipping … A constant succession of tenders, lighters, junks, and sampans is met at all states of the tide, and it is interesting to watch the skill with which the Chinese navigate their clumsy-looking and heavily-laden craft … Long before the landing-stage at Shanghai is reached, the river banks begin to wear a busy aspect, cotton mills, silk filatures, docks, wharves and godowns [warehouses] appearing in almost unbroken succession.30
By 1913 Shanghai took in nearly one-third of all the customs’ revenue raised in China’s treaty ports.31 While new factories were built all across China, they were mostly financed by banks in Shanghai, and their securities traded in the city’s stock market. A Chinese critic of the city noted that, in Shanghai, ‘people only care about the value of gold and silver and do not know the origin of elegance and vulgarity’.32 A similar barb could be made by Peking’s foreign residents, looking down on ‘Shanghailanders’ as a rather uncultured breed of foreigner, getting their hands dirty in business while they, in Peking, steeped themselves in the timelessness of Chinese civilisation.33
Whereas the centre of Peking was the Forbidden City, behind walls and moats, the most prestigious address in Shanghai was somewhere on the Bund, on one side of the broad Huangpu river, facing the world. The Bund – its name derived from the Hindi word ‘band’, meaning embankment – was home to the city’s leading hotels, its banks and the social clubs of Shanghai’s Western gentlemen.34 This was where the Customs House stood, the nationality of the long-serving head of China’s Imperial Customs, Sir Robert Hart, reflected in its curious design: a Tudor-style building topped with a four-faced clock tower ringing out Westminster chimes. (Hart himself died in 1911; a statue was erected to him on the Bund a few years later.) Many of the Bund’s buildings had gone up within the past couple of decades. The Imperial Bank of China building was finished in 1897. The predominantly British Shanghai Club – ‘the centre of the business and social life of the settlement’ – had just moved into expanded premises.35 While its new building was being built, the German Concordia Club, the foundation stone of which had been laid by the young Prince Adalbert of Prussia in 1904, had been so good as to provide a temporary home.
In Shanghai, cosmopolitanism was the rule. A missionary report of the time described the Nanjing road as a display of international variety far greater even than the streets of London:
There walks a tall bearded Russian, a fat German, jostling perhaps a tiny Japanese officer, whose whole air shows that he regards himself as a member of the conquering race … there are sleek Chinese in Western carriages, and there are thin Americans in Eastern rickshaws … a splendid Indian in a yellow silk coat is struck in the face by the hat of a Frenchman, who finds the pavements of Shanghai too narrow for his sweeping salute; one hears guttural German alternating with cockney slang …36
During 1913, Shanghai celebrated Kaiser Wilhelm’s twenty-fifth anniversary as German Emperor, as well as American Independence Day and French Bastille Day.37 Advertisements in The China Yearbook 1913 appealed to an international, well-travelled clientele. One, for the Palace Hotel, noted that ‘all principal languages’ were spoken by the establishment’s staff.38 Another, for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, listed its branches around the world, and promised a global banking service to facilitate the lives of its globetrotting customers. Plus ça change.
And whereas in Peking the foreign quarter was a small part of the city, defended as if it were a fortress, machine guns at the ready, in Shanghai the international population felt that this was fundamentally their city. This was not obvious from the numbers alone. Among a Chinese population of perhaps one million in the city as a whole, the Yearbook 1913 listed a foreign population of just 13,346 in the International Settlement – including 4,465 British, 3,361 Japanese, 1,495 Portuguese, 940 Americans, 317 Russians, 113 Danes, 83 Turks, 49 Persians, 11 Egyptians, and 7 Brazilians.39 But within the International Settlement (and the separate French-managed French Concessi
on) it was these foreigners who ruled the roost. The Chinese residents, who paid most of the taxes, did not get a look in when it came to politics. It was the foreigners who voted for the municipal council and who sat on it, including a Shanghai-born, British-national, Sephardic Baghdadi Jew. It was they who administered justice, a point which had flared into riots in 1905 when Western judges took a different line to their Chinese counterparts. It was they who commanded the local police, including a large Indian contingent – particularly resented by the Chinese – backed up if needed by foreign volunteers, who occasionally marched through the streets in uniform to make the point.
Moreover, foreign Shanghai was expanding. In 1898 the International Settlement, itself the result of a merger between the British and American Concessions, doubled in size. Further expansion was not ruled out. Indeed it was anticipated: roads were built north into the Zhabei district and maps drawn up showing it coloured red.40 In 1913 Zhabei’s future became the subject of a local spat between foreign and Chinese authorities, which, as the local British consul put it in his dispatch to the British Ambassador in Peking, ‘does not augur well for the proposed negotiations’.41 The French Concession, where in the 1890s American visitor Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore had for a moment felt herself on a street corner in Paris, was nonetheless able to push through an expansion the following year, in 1914.42 Shanghai had long had mission schools, many of them of American foundation, where Chinese children could be provided with a Christian and Westernised education: Mary Farnham Girl’s School (American Presbyterian) founded in 1861, St Francis Xavier’s College (Roman Catholic) in 1864, St Mary’s Hall (American Episcopal) in 1881, Eliza Yates Memorial School (Southern Baptist) in 1897, to name a few.43 Now, as Shanghai’s foreign population came to include families – rather than just men – schools for foreign children were established.
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