The International Settlement’s social life was, as Scidmore put it at the turn of the century, ‘formal, exacting, elaborate and extravagant’. As well as the Club on the Bund, there was a Country Club on Bubbling Wells Road ‘to which ladies belong as well as men, where everyone who is anyone meets for summer tennis, the afternoon dances, theatricals and balls of the winter season’.44 Upstream from Shanghai, ‘the finest pheasant shooting in the world’ was promised – exactly what a Scottish colonial officer trying his luck with the Shanghai police might want. The Lyceum Theatre, the Yacht Club, the Rowing Club, the Cricket Club, the Baseball Club, the Flower Show and the Shanghai Swimming Bath Club were all plausible occupations for the weekend. The English were no doubt delighted that hunting with hounds was possible in the miles of flat ground around the city. In late 1913 the city’s American community waited expectantly for the arrival of the New York Giants and Chicago White Sox baseball teams, on a world tour.45
A British police officer patrolling the International Settlement in Shanghai.
For a Chinese man or woman to live in this city – and particularly in the International Settlement – was to choose to live in a city more modern than any other in China, saturated with radical foreign influences, in the vanguard of the future. It was in Shanghai that the traditional binding of women’s feet fell fastest out of fashion. It was in Shanghai that Chinese pigtails, symbols of subordination to the Qing dynasty, were most defiantly cut off. But Shanghai was hardly a nirvana of political or economic equality. Extreme poverty existed alongside great top-hatted Western wealth. The city’s Chinese inhabitants were considered distinctly second class by its rulers.
Two articles from the North China Daily News in January 1913 starkly made the point. One dismissed the argument that because most taxes in Shanghai were paid by Chinese they should have representation on the council of the International Settlement by noting that ‘they knew what to expect when they came to live in the Settlement, and the number of them does not suggest that they are dissatisfied with what they find’.46 Another, the following day, dealt with the problem of rickshaw drivers earning as little as thirty cents a day, offering to undercut the cost of a tram ride in order to be employed. ‘While it is a matter of common knowledge that some coolies reap an occasional harvest from tourists and sailors’, a journalist for the newspaper wrote, ‘it is equally well established that cases of death from starvation occur’:
No lover of horses fails to visit his stable after a hard ride in order to satisfy himself that the animal is properly tended and fed … But the ricsha coolie who runs a mile or so in the blazing summer sun or in winter ploughs his way through mud and cold rain such as Shanghai has experienced this week is paid off, and forgotten. If ever a thought is given to him the little consolation necessary is found in the fact that he belongs to an order of which the average European comprehends little, and that, as a human being, he should be able to take care of himself. But the facts are that gradually his health breaks down, and sooner or later he dies the death of a neglected dog.47
In 1913 a Methodist guidebook published in Chinese with the subtitle What the Chinese in Shanghai Ought to Know described the city as a ‘foreign country’, setting out the rules and regulations for using the tram, or eating in a restaurant, or even visiting a public park, accordingly:
Shanghai has four public gardens altogether. Amongst them, three are for Westerners and one is for Chinese. One of the gardens for Westerners is located by the Huangpu river, and during the week black musicians will be performing. Unless accompanied by a Westerner, Chinese are not allowed to enter. Dogs and bicycles are definitely forbidden to enter.48
But if Shanghai was not quite China in terms of its internal functioning, it could not be isolated from the unruly politics of the country which surrounded it. Shanghai did not exist in a vacuum, subject only to the laws of supply and demand, of trade and finance, of dollars and taels. The very fact that the International Settlement was beyond the reach of the Qing authorities ensured that it was a natural bolthole for runaways and political radicals. The commercial importance of the port of Shanghai made the control of it essential to any Chinese government. The dynamism of Shanghai as a city, open to outside influences, churning with new visitors and new ideas, made it suspect to traditionalists, and attractive to reformers and revolutionaries of all stripes. News of the revolution in St Petersburg in 1905, or of the Young Turk coup of 1908, had reached Shanghai before anywhere else in China, and was discussed more fervently there, with obvious relevance for the country’s own political trajectory. If ever full-blown political revolution were to come to China, the inhabitants of Shanghai – foreign or Chinese – were guaranteed, whether they wanted it or not, a ringside seat.
When 2,000 years of Chinese empire ended it was with a bang – and with a whimper. The bang took place in October 1911 in the Russian quarter of Hankou, where the casual disposal of a cigarette in a Chinese revolutionary bomb factory caused an accidental explosion, bringing the Qing authorities running, and forcing local army units – who had been heavily infiltrated by revolutionaries – to accelerate a planned rebellion. In Peking, the whimper came in February 1912, when the formal abdication of six-year-old Emperor Puyi was announced, in return for a promise of continued ownership of the treasures of the Manchu court, continued residence in the Forbidden City and an annual subsidy of $4 million to keep the court in the style to which it had, through centuries, become accustomed.
News of the explosion in Wuhan and the uprising which followed reached Sun Yat-Sen via an American newspaper, over breakfast, in Denver, Colorado. Rather than hurrying back, he went first to Europe to persuade Britain and France not to intervene militarily or to continue financial support for the Qing regime should there be any clash. He made it back to Shanghai, which in November had declared its secession from the Qing dynasty, on Christmas Day 1911. The revolutionary flag flew from the rooftops of the city. Pigtails were ceremonially cut. Foreign warships lay at anchor. A week later Sun Yat-Sen travelled by train to Nanjing, the old capital of China and a city which for over a decade in the middle of the last century had been the headquarters of the anti-Qing Taiping rebellion. There, on 1 January 1912, he was proclaimed Provisional President of the Chinese Republic by a meeting of delegates from sixteen provincial assemblies.
For several weeks China had both an Emperor and a President. In the end, the dynasty’s fate was sealed by a note from leading commanders of the most effective military unit of the Chinese forces, the Beiyang army, in which the newly appointed Qing premier Yuan Shikai was highly influential. The commanders recommended a republican course for the future government of China. By prior arrangement, Sun Yat-Sen himself now abdicated the presidency in favour of Yuan Shikai, advising the Nanjing assembly of his ‘personal opinion’ that Yuan Shikai would prove himself a ‘loyal servant of the state’ and urging them that ‘the happiness of our country depends on your choice’. An American observer remarked: ‘It sounds like Washington’.49
Sun Yat-Sen’s decision to pass the presidency to Yuan Shikai, considered to have the confidence of the army, was in some ways noble: a means of potentially avoiding China’s disintegration and the foreign depredations which might follow from it. It turned out to be a miscalculation. Yuan Shikai was indeed a masterful political operator with strong support in the most capable units of the army and a quick recognition of the importance of securing foreign support. To that end, he cannily appointed George Morrison, the Australian Times correspondent in Peking as one of his political advisers – despite the fact that Morrison did not speak Chinese – and accepted the advice of Charles Eliot, the former president of Harvard University and representative of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, that the Provisional President should really have an American law professor by his side in drafting the country’s new constitution. Frank Goodnow arrived in Peking in May 1913.
But Yuan Shikai’s modus operandi was that of a strongman not a democrat, a fa
ct which became clearer as China prepared itself for the 1912 parliamentary elections. American Ambassador Paul Reinsch later recalled having been told by Wu Tingfang, a former Chinese Ambassador in Washington, that Yuan Shikai ‘has no conception of free government [and] is entirely a man of personal authority’.50 ‘Beware, when you get behind those high walls of Peking’, Wu Tingfang warned Reinsch: ‘The atmosphere is stagnant. It seems to overcome men and make them reactionary. Nobody seems to resist that power!’ His judgement proved accurate. In 1912 the new Provisional President successfully resisted a pre-agreed move of the capital from Peking to Nanjing – away from his own stronghold – on the basis that the north of the country was not yet sufficiently pacified. Traditionalist that he was at heart, Yuan Shikai felt that Peking was a city he could trust – unlike Nanjing, where Sun Yat-Sen had been elected China’s first Provisional President, and still less Shanghai, that capital of sedition, metropolis of modernity.
To fight the parliamentary elections at the end of 1912, Sun Yat-Sen formed a new political party, the Kuomintang (commonly referred to as the KMT) under the leadership of the thirty-year-old Song Jiaoren. (Liang Qichao, former adviser to Emperor Guangxu and publicist for the idea of Chinese nationhood, led another grouping: the Progressive party.) When the results began to be announced in January 1913, it was clear that the Kuomintang had won the bulk of support of China’s forty million electors. In the end, the party took 269 out of 596 seats in the new National Assembly. China had, it appeared, taken a giant step towards popular democracy. The average age of the nation’s new representatives was young, under the age of forty. About one in five had been educated in Japan, the United Kingdom or the United States.51
Not untypical of the euphoria in some quarters was Ching Chun Wang’s article at the beginning of 1913 on the pages of The Atlantic, which attempted to convince an American audience that now was the time to diplomatically recognise the new China, something all of the Western powers had so far singularly failed to do:
The Chinese millions have given the world the greatest revolution of modern times in the most civilized manner known to history. We have emancipated ourselves from the imperial yoke, not by brute force but by sheer reasoning and unparalleled toleration. Within the amazingly short period of four months, and without shedding over one hundredth part of the blood that has been shed in other similar revolutions, we have transformed our immense country from an empire of four thousand years’ standing into a modern democracy … Now we come forward with hands and hearts open to join the sisterhood of nations, and all we ask is that the world will permit us to join its company. We ask for recognition of our Republic because it is an accomplished fact.52
Others were distinctly more sceptical. One of them was Edmund Backhouse, probably the most famous British expert on China and a resident in Peking. Backhouse, who had made a name for himself as the publisher of the intimate diaries of a high official at the court of the Empress Dowager – in the 1970s these were shown to be highly-capable fakes – was scathing about Westerners’ naive views about what had really happened in China. Old wine in new bottles, he argued in a book written in 1913 with former Times journalist and Shanghai man-about-town John Otway Bland. The republic would not last:
Those who have followed the course of events in the Far East during the past two years, that is to say, since the ignominious collapse of the Manchu power and Young China’s little hour of brief authority, must have been struck by the general, almost unanimous concurrence of opinion, expressed in Europe and America alike, that, with the establishment of a Republican form of government, China has undergone sudden and radical transformation; that the essential qualities of the people had been completely changed …53
Students of history, he wrote, were familiar with ‘the imperishable vitality of this Utopian fallacy’. The truth, he suggested, was somewhat different:
It is true of China, as of India, Persia and Turkey (and, for that matter, of Japan) that, on the surface of the deep sea of national life, rapid phenomena of disintegration are perceptible, and new structures are forming; but the social conditions of the masses and their incapacity for self-government remain at a stage generally similar to that which existed in Southern Europe before the Christian era.
His prognosis was that tradition and authority – ‘throne and court’ – would reassert themselves in some shape or form, and indeed that this would be best for China’s future development.
The events of the year seemed to support the case. On 20 March 1913 Song Jiaoren, leader of the Kuomintang party and premier-elect, was shot twice in Shanghai railway station as he boarded a train bound for Peking, where he was to attend the opening of the new National Assembly. Though taken to hospital, he died from his wounds two days later. Song Jiaoren’s murderer was swiftly arrested. But most suspected that the order for the assassination came from much higher up: perhaps even from President Yuan Shikai himself. ‘It is not impossible that some over-zealous follower of Yuan may have thought he was aiding the President’s cause by planning such a crime’, an American diplomat in Shanghai noted, hedging his bets.54 For KMT supporters the crime confirmed their suspicions – frequently voiced by Song Jiaoren during and since the 1912 campaign – that what the President really wanted was to dispense with parliament altogether and rule as Emperor in all but name. A little over a year after Sun Yat-Sen had stood aside for Yuan Shikai in the national interest – and in recognition of his own military weakness – the two were at each other’s throats. In Shanghai, republicans threatened that Song Jiaoren’s death would be ‘avenged by a reign of terror more frightful than that of the French revolution’.55 The city became a ‘storm centre’ of ‘secret plottings’.56
No wonder that the opening of the National Assembly in Peking in early April 1913, was a dull affair. ‘The sun shone, bands played, complimentary addresses were delivered’, the North China Daily News reported. But, on the whole, it was an ‘anti-climax’.57 Yuan Shikai was not there, pleading his own assassination fears. A large number of elected representatives failed to appear, too. And amongst those who did, instead of the ‘mass of brilliant colors which always characterized a Chinese crowd in the old days’, the choice of clothing was sober, formal and Western: black frock coats and silk hats.58 As the event got under way, a circular was handed round to members of the new National Assembly advising them that, with several hundred foreigners anticipated to be coming along to watch, it was imperative to ‘maintain a dignified and graceful demeanour … so that we may command the respect and win the friendship of foreigners’.59 The whole thing seemed more about saving face than about saving China.
The foreign powers still resisted pressure to formally recognise the Chinese Republic. After all, some argued, they were not sure which way the chips would fall. Earlier in the year, an American diplomat reported the bleak view of one of his French colleagues: ‘his government had no confidence in the stability of the present government in China … things were going from bad to worse’.60 In any case, foreign powers had not yet received what they wanted from Peking – to give recognition too early would be to give up an aspect of their diplomatic leverage. Quite apart from confirmation of the status of their trade concessions in China, the Russians insisted that China fully respect Mongolia’s 1911 declaration of independence (under Russian tutelage). The British wanted guarantees of Tibetan autonomy. The Japanese wanted their economic preponderance in Manchuria confirmed. All the while the foreign powers were embroiled in negotiations – with China and with each other – over the terms of a large ‘Reorganisation’ loan to be extended to Yuan Shikai. Better to withhold recognition at least until these negotiations were completed. Such was the logic of foreign diplomacy.
Reports back to Washington revealed the full pettiness of the discussions amongst the powers. All sought to place their men in positions of influence. At one point, the American delegate presented a compromise proposal to accept a German, a French and a British appointment to the office responsib
le for the management of the salt gabelle – the tax on salt, one of the most reliable sources of income for the Chinese state. The Russian representative ‘promptly and vigorously objected’ however:
He said his government had the largest interest of all the powers in the Salt Administration because it had the largest percentage of the Boxer Indemnity [from 1901] … He said the British already had the Maritime Customs; the French the Post office and military adviser to the War Department; the Japanese and Germans also had appointments … but the Russians had nothing.61
The Japanese agreed to support the American proposal, but only as long as others would offer ‘moral support’ for Japan getting some other undefined appointment further down the line. Now the Germans objected. Since the German in question was already in place at the salt gabelle, he should not be considered part of the German quota: Germany would require an additional position, too. And so on it went until May, when a deal was finally struck with Yuan Shikai, despite the opposition of Sun Yat-Sen and the Kuomintang who, correctly, feared that the Provisional President was settling in to rule China very much as he wished to.
American banks did not participate in the loan. The newly elected President Wilson went on the record to state the end of so-called ‘dollar diplomacy’ and the beginnings of a new foreign policy based on principle. (At the time of America’s withdrawal from negotiations the North China Daily News accused Wilson of abandoning China to her fate, to be carved up all the better because there was no American around the negotiating table of the great powers to stand up for her.62)
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