Compared to Yan Fu, a figure like Tan Sitong was a traditionalist philosopher. As a young man in Beijing in 1895, Tan, the idealistic son of a high official, sought out Kang Youwei. Kang was then in Canton, and it was his chief assistant Liang who introduced and converted Tan to Kang’s worldview, besides introducing him to Buddhism. Tan, one of the most original minds of his generation, went further than his mentors, advocating republicanism rather than a reformed monarchy, and nationalism in place of loyalty to the Manchus. Not unlike Gandhi, Tan posited the need for constant moral action and awareness, expanding the Confucian notion of the good as something that combined sensitivity to social ethics in the present and future with a personal struggle for self-perfection.
For a few weeks at least, this was not all theorizing in the sad tea-houses of Beijing. In early 1898, the dowager empress allowed the twenty-three-year-old Guangxu to rule properly as emperor, and suddenly Kang’s and Liang’s many study-societies, newspapers, schools and behind-the-scenes discussions with reformers at the imperial court seemed to bear fruit. The newly empowered emperor, who had already noted one petition by Kang in 1895, turned to him for help with reform. Kang responded with several spirited essays, including one on the success of Meiji Japan, and another on the helplessness of India under British rule. ‘Reform and be strengthened,’ he wrote, ‘guard the old and die.’31
Kang was invited to the Forbidden City. An extraordinary five-hour-long meeting with the emperor ensued. It was followed in June by a barrage of imperial edicts ordering bold reforms in almost every realm, from local administration and international cultural exchange to the beautification of Beijing. For about a hundred days, Kang, Liang and Tan Sitong became as powerful as any group of like-minded intellectuals elsewhere had been since the French Revolution.
A decree made Liang, who had yet to pass the imperial examinations, the director of the translation bureau. More surprisingly, his newspaper Xiwu Bao was turned into an official organ. Liang and Tan accompanied Kang to meetings with the emperor at his palace where they dropped all ritual and ceremony, planning reforms while lounging side by side.
But Kang and Liang had overplayed their hand. The pace of change was too swift; such radical moves as the abolishment of the eight-legged essay aroused strong opposition. It alarmed and alienated the old guard within the imperial court who were still loyal to the dowager empress in retirement at the Summer Palace. Persuaded by them that the emperor would move against her next, the dowager empress, who was not averse to some moderate reform, took it upon herself to squash her little nephew.
An unsuccessful pre-emptive coup against her, spearheaded by Tan Sitong, only expedited her moves. On 21 September 1898, 103 days after the first imperial decree, she announced that the emperor had been struck down by a serious illness (in fact he had been imprisoned on a small island in the imperial gardens) and that she was again taking over the administration of the empire. In addition to cancelling most of the reform edicts, she also issued orders for the arrest of Kang, Liang and Tan, among other reformist intellectuals. Kang had left Beijing a day earlier for Shanghai, from where he was able to escape to Hong Kong. Liang, who was still within the city walls, managed to find refuge in the Japanese legation. Tan joined him there, but only to say goodbye.
Liang pleaded with Tan to go with him to Japan, but Tan only said, in words to be commemorated by several Chinese generations, that China would never renew itself until men were prepared to die for it. He left the legation building and was immediately arrested. He and six other associates of Liang, including Kang’s younger brother, were sentenced to death. The declaration was read out from the gates of the Forbidden City. The condemned were taken in a cart to Caishikou market where many of the scholars visiting Beijing to take the civil service exams often stayed. A bowl of rice wine was offered to them outside a tea-house. A large crowd watched as the bowl was broken. The men were then made to kneel on the ground and were swiftly beheaded.
The graves of Kang Youwei’s family were desecrated on the orders of the dowager empress. As rewards for his own arrest and execution were announced, Liang fled, with Japanese help, to Tianjin, from where he sailed to a long and eventful exile in Japan. He was only twenty-five. Thus ended China’s opportunity to enact the kind of top-down modernization that Turkey and Egypt had attempted. Revolution became as inevitable as it had become in countries elsewhere in Asia.
JAPAN AND THE PERILS OF EXILE
Announcing a reward for Liang’s capture, the Peking Gazette referred to him as a ‘little animal with short legs, riding on the back of a wolf’.32 The image was meant to mock his intellectual dependence on Kang, but it was inaccurate. Liang, politically more pragmatic than his mentor, had already begun to move away from Kang.
Always hungry for knowledge – he had begun to study Japanese while still on board the ship that took him to Japan – he quickly started a newspaper, funded largely by Chinese merchants in Yokohama, and began to transmit new ideas as soon as he had absorbed them from Japanese books to an audience that now consisted of students as well as the scholar-gentry. Many of the students he had taught at Hunan moved to Japan to be with him. Liang put them up in his own living quarters until they were housed in a school he started in 1899 with the financial assistance of Chinese merchants.
In Japan, while Kang travelled to India and the West, Liang was to come into his own as China’s most famous intellectual, dealing, above all, with the problem of nationalism – given special urgency by his view of a world order defined by Social Darwinism. Writing in Japan in 1901, he bleakly concluded that
All men in the world must struggle to survive. In the struggle for survival, there are superior and inferior. If there are superior and inferior, then there must be success and failure. He who, being inferior, fails, must see his rights and privileges completely absorbed by the one who is superior and who triumphs. This, then, is the principle behind the extinction of nations.33
The Chinese intelligentsia were now divided between reformists like Kang and Liang and anti-Manchu revolutionaries represented by Sun Yat-sen. But Liang’s writings often transcended the differences, making them appealing to readers on a broad ideological spectrum in China. As Hu Shi, a liberal thinker and a bitter critic of Liang acknowledged (in a tone reminiscent of Mohammed Abduh’s tribute to al-Afghani): ‘He attracted our abundantly curious minds, pointed out an unknown world, and summoned us to make our own exploration.’ 34
Liang was helped a great deal by his setting. For educated Chinese, Japan was as much the centre of culture and education as Paris was for Westernized Russians and London for Indian colonials; thousands of Chinese students would travel there after 1900, and return to assume leadership positions at home. The Japanese had absorbed many Western ideas since the Meiji Restoration, and it was the first experience of modernity for many Chinese, such as Liang, forcing almost all of them to re-evaluate their previous notions about the world. Words like ‘democracy’, ‘revolution’, ‘capitalism’ and ‘communism’ were to make their way into the Chinese language via Japanese.
The Sinocentric worldview had been smashed to pieces by Western intrusions in China; and Liang would take it upon himself to describe harsh political realities that China had to come to terms with.
Because of our self-satisfaction and our inertia, the blindly cherished old ways have come down more than three thousand years to our day. Organization of the race, of the nation, of society, our customs, rites, arts and sciences, thought, morality, laws, religion, all are still, with no accretions, what they were three thousand years ago.35
This was an exaggeration, but made understandable by the scale of the challenges Liang felt himself confronted with. China was one of the oldest states in the world. But did its citizens see it as a nation? Could they shed their Confucian emphasis on self-cultivation enough to feel notions of civic solidarity? Indeed, could the state’s institutions be overhauled enough to cope with the challenges of international politics? And could a mod
ern Chinese nation come into being without destroying China’s proud cultural identity? Liang posed these large and complex questions without offering any clear-cut answers. Nevertheless, he phrased them more forcefully than all the other Chinese intellectuals. He had already sown the seeds of post-Qing China with his newspapers, schools and study-societies which radiated the urgency of change to the most secluded of Chinese scholar-gentry. His writings, smuggled back into the Chinese mainland from Japan, would now inspire the next generation of thinkers and activists.
However, first Liang had to negotiate his way through the tangled politics of both his Japanese hosts and the groups of Chinese expatriates in Japan. The Japan he travelled to in 1898 was still far from being the confident imperial power it would become after its defeat of Russia and annexation of Korea in 1910. Then it followed the precedent set by other imperialist powers in wanting its own share of the Chinese booty after war; in 1900, Japan was to participate in the Allied powers’ attempt to quell the Boxer Rising.
However, Japan feared the division of China in the same way that European powers dreaded the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire: the sick men of Asia were better alive than dead, for they held chaos at bay, and could also be bullied at will. Japanese statesmen closely followed the Hundred Days’ Reform, attracted by the prospect of a reformed Manchu ruling dynasty doing a better job of keeping China from total collapse. They appreciated the conservatism of Kang and Liang, who did not wish to depose the emperor. Ito Hirobumi, thrice prime minister of Japan and the main maker of the Meiji constitution, was in China when the dowager empress cracked down on the reformists; he quietly instructed Japanese diplomats to ensure the safety of Kang and Liang. When Kang Youwei reached Tokyo via Hong Kong in November 1898, he was treated as the head of a government-in-exile, and taken to meet the most powerful statesmen in Japan.
Kang and Liang received even greater support through unofficial channels. Despite an authoritarian political system, Japan possessed strikingly diverse intellectual currents. Its emergence as a major world power had brought it face to face with the racialist underpinnings of the international system – despite its successes, it was still regarded as a ‘yellow peril’ by Western powers, and in 1898 the United States had announced its presence in Japan’s neighbourhood by wresting the Philippines from the doddering Spanish Empire (for the same reason Japan had removed Korea from the Chinese sphere of influence – because it was there to be taken).
Like any rising power, Japan was also developing an awareness of its ‘national interest’ that lay far beyond its physical borders. Tokutomi Soh summed it up: ‘The countries of the Far East falling prey to the great powers of Europe is something that our nation will not stand for … We have the duty to maintain peace in East Asia.’36 In 1885 Fukuzawa Yukichi had a responsive audience when he called for Japan to ‘escape’ Asia and join the West. But now the fear of a racially tinged Western imperialism pushed a wide range of Japanese intellectuals and politicians into fresh considerations of Japan’s cultural identity, and, by extension, its old links with China and the rest of Asia.
This was the beginning of pan-Asianism, a major strand in Japan’s self-image and actions for the next half-century. For many Japanese the idea that Asian countries had grown weak, and exposed themselves to humiliation and exploitation by the West, was an undeniably solid basis for a pan-Asian identity; as was the demand for racial equality, which the Japanese were to struggle to enshrine as a principle in international relations. There was strength in numbers, and in the notion that Japan, being the first country to modernize itself, could force recognition of Asian dignity from Western powers. By virtue of its successful empowerment, Japan might even lead a crusade to free Asia from its European masters.
From the very beginning the advocates of pan-Asianism in Japan belonged to a broad ideological spectrum. Among them could be found, for instance, a figure such as Nagai Rytar (1881 – 1944), a devout Christian who championed many liberal causes such as universal suffrage and women’s rights, spoke admiringly of socialism and also sought to raise the alarm against what he called ‘the white peril’. ‘If one race assumes the right to appropriate all the wealth,’ he asked, ‘why should not all the other races feel ill-used and protest? If the yellow races are oppressed by the white races, and have to revolt to avoid congestion and maintain existence, whose fault is it but that of the oppressor?’37 Indeed, many of the self-appointed sentinels of Japan’s prestige saw themselves as guarding Asian values in general against the ‘white peril’. According to Soh, Japan, rather than the West, was best placed to ‘create true universal equality and progress’.38 Some of these pan-Asianists were militarists who thought China and Korea ought to be ruled by Japan. Others were more sensitive to the interests of their neighbours, and hospitable to political refugees from China, Korea and South-east Asia. Liberal nationalists, who wished to modernize Japan in order to make it the equal of the West, felt obliged to strengthen China against foreign imperialists. More far-seeing and ambitious pan-Asianists saw Japan as the future imperial conqueror and leader of Asia. Their ranks would also include such idealists as Okuwa Shumei, Japan’s leading scholar of Indian and Islamic cultures, who was converted to pan-Asianism in 1913 after reading a book about India’s dire state under the British.
As Japan grew more powerful, there would develop a contradiction between its imperative to expand and dominate and the pan-Asianist desire to express solidarity with other Asian countries. Organizations such as the Kyujitai, the Amur River Society (popularly known as the Black Dragons) and the Genyosha (Great Ocean Society) would become increasingly militant and powerful advocates of Japan’s rights in Asia. But, initially at least, political differences among pan-Asianists did not matter much; many of the pan-Asianists, emerging at a time of transition, were looking for a new aim in life. The Meiji reforms had unleashed a whole class of political and intellectual adventurers, often former samurai, who saw themselves as nobly selfless idealists. These rootless men, who dreamed of saving China from itself, worked as pressure groups and lobbyists. They often attached themselves to the Chinese and South-east Asian nationalists who were beginning to arrive in Japan towards the end of the nineteenth century, and who had been forced into new ways of defining their identity and affirming their dignity by successive humiliations by the West – as members of nascent nations, races, classes, or such supra-national entities as pan-Islam and pan-Asia.
One such Japanese idealist was Miyazaki Toraz (1871 – 1922), a professional pan-Asianist and revolutionary, who tried to stir up an anti-Qing movement in China as early as 1891 and then later that decade smuggled guns to anti-American guerrillas in the Philippines. He decided he had found his saviour of China when he met Sun Yat-sen in 1897. Thus Sun, who had already engineered a failed revolt in China, was installed in Japan, well-connected within the expatriate community of Chinese merchants and students, when Liang arrived there in the autumn of 1898, followed shortly afterwards by Kang Youwei. There were already many Chinese students in Yokohama, and the respective followers of these men soon began to join them in Japan. Their Japanese patrons tried to bring them together on a common platform of Chinese regeneration, encouraging them with money and advice to fuse their groups into a single party in exile. But they ran into the kind of internecine discord commonly found among nineteenth-century political expatriates, including the followers of Marx as well as of Herzen.
Unlike Kang and Liang, Sun came from a family of farmers in Guangzhou. Poverty forced his brother to emigrate; he went to Hawaii, and Sun joined him there in his early teens. Educated at missionary schools, Sun spoke English fluently and wrote classical Chinese badly. Dressed in Western-style clothes and financially beholden to overseas Chinese, Sun was as far away as possible from the traditional world of the Confucian gentry Kang and Liang belonged to. Well-travelled in the West, Sun also had a sharp eye for China’s infirmities. In 1894, when a bold petition from Sun to the imperial court was rejected, he was convinced that
China needed to overthrow the Manchu monarchy and turn itself into a republic. This belief in itself would have caused problems with the royalist Kang. Nevertheless, Sun, a master improviser, was eager to join with Kang and Liang. As it turned out, Kang couldn’t abide Sun, regarding him as a worthless, boorish adventurer. Rebuffed, Sun, who was a convert to Christianity, came to regard Kang’s attempt to interpret Confucianism in the light of modern conditions as a meaningless academic exercise.
Kang’s uncompromising elitism also made him unpopular with the Japanese, who were already made nervous by Chinese protests over the presence of Sun, Liang and Kang in their country – the dowager empress had described them as China’s three greatest criminals. The pressures on Kang mounted, and in the summer of 1899 he left for Canada, where he formed, with the help of overseas Chinese, the ‘Society to Protect the Emperor’. Liang was left to deal with Sun and the former students who had flocked to his side from China.
The Japanese now tried to bring Sun and Liang together; and a degree of co-operation was established, especially over money. Liang was also more sympathetic to Sun’s anti-monarchy stance than he could freely express at the time. But just when the two seemed to be co-operating more closely in late 1899, Liang was ordered by Kang to travel to Hawaii and America on a fund-raising tour.
Liang complied; Kang was still his revered teacher in the Confucian tradition. But Japan had begun to emancipate him, as it was to do for two generations of Chinese thinkers. He had begun to read and think more widely. Dependent until then on Yan Fu’s translations, he expanded his knowledge of Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau and Greek philosophers, and even wrote biographical studies of Cromwell, Cavour and Mazzini. His knowledge of the world outside China broadened.
From the Ruins of Empire Page 18
