From the Ruins of Empire

by Pankaj Mishra

  With our people and our culture in their proper places, I must seek to irradiate their splendour. My will has not yet achieved its end. I am still shackled by the enemy state. Others will follow me to renew the golden flame. If our nation’s antiquity and our people’s historical record should come to an end in my hands, and the continuance of China’s broad and magnificent scholarship be severed, this will be my crime to bear.56

  From Hawaii, Liang Qichao followed the news of China’s greatest humiliation yet, and the last of his old beliefs began to die. In a letter to Kang, he denounced ‘the slavish mentality’ of the Chinese people.57 In this bleak world that China found herself in, where ‘battle is the mother of all progress’, Confucius could no longer be the sole guide.58 Nor could constitutional monarchy be the right system for a people who desperately needed to be educated and mobilized around a strong nation-state.

  The status quo was intolerable since a self-perpetuating autocratic system treated the Chinese people as slaves, making them indifferent to the public good. In his famous series of essays, ‘Discourses on the New People’, Liang argued that nothing less than a total destruction of the Manchu regime could save China. ‘I have thought and thought again’, he wrote, ‘about the popularly accepted system in China today; there is almost not a single aspect of it which ought not to be destroyed and swept away, root and branch.’ Invoking Social Darwinism again, Liang warned, ‘when a race cannot meet the exigencies of the times, it cannot endure’.59 Freedom was the absolute necessity for China, he wrote, invoking Patrick Henry’s famous words, ‘Give me Liberty or give me Death.’

  Liang was moving close to a break with Kang Youwei, who still believed that a wise and paternalistic monarchy could launch China into modernity. Kang had tried to stoke an armed revolt during the Boxer Rising. Failure forced him to seek refuge in Penang, where he quarrelled with Sun Yat-sen; he then moved to India in December 1901. He spent a year in the Himalayan resort of Darjeeling, during which he finished his treatise called Book of the Great Community, which offered a utopian vision of a post-nationalist harmony. Like many Chinese thinkers of his period, Kang turned out to be less a nationalist than a utopian internationalist. As he saw it, a universal moral community of the future would transcend all distinctions of race, ethnicity and language, and would even dissolve the family – a vision that would be resurrected in China under Mao Zedong.

  PAN-ASIANISM: THE PLEASURES OF COSMOPOLITANISM

  While Kang moved to India, many more Asians gravitated to Japan. Muslim intellectuals in Egypt, Persia and Turkey had long been fascinated by Japan, as were their Chinese and Indian counterparts. In the early years of the twentieth century, Tokyo became a Mecca for nationalists from all over Asia, the centre of an expanded Asian public sphere – a process quickened by Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905. Beyond Tokyo, globe-trotting literati from almost every colonial society – Sinhalese Buddhists, Islamic modernists, Hindu revivalists – were to create melting-pots of intellectual culture in such far-flung places as Chicago, Berlin, Johannesburg and Yokohama. These broadened horizons of enquiry, reflection and polemic and committed many men and women to a restless nomadism, to ceaseless exploration and analysis of self and the world.

  Western-style schools and colleges in urban centres, often on the coast (such as Calcutta and Canton), and journalism and print media created secular spaces where the newly educated elites learnt a new vocabulary of self-awareness and analysis. Many of them travelled to the West and within Asia, making physical and intellectual journeys wholly unavailable to their ancestors, and which only indentured labourers, lascars and ayahs – the service class of empire – had undertaken so far. The need for vocational training took Gandhi to London, Lu Xun to Japan, and Sun Yat-sen to Honolulu. Here, in the centres of empire, they were safe from the malevolence of the colonial police. Yet their incandescent words, printed in small-circulation magazines or carried home by individual travellers, could spread like wildfire. A Vietnamese nationalist, Dang Thai Mai, described the effect at home of his compatriots abroad:

  Liaison between the various patriots and the people, the country’s youth at home, was never severed. Once in a while, from some remote base, from Siam, China, or Japan, a ‘rootless’ individual would furtively return. In the midst of the night a shadow from afar would step into the house, cautiously assess the mood of relatives and friends, and remain on the lookout for the omnipresent informers of the enemy authorities. He would be around only a night, an instant, with whispered stories of perilous existence, of bravery among those not yet dead, those never willing to accept defeat. Sometime there would be a letter, or a book from distant shores, providing a bit of information on ‘world conditions’, or describing the courageous spirit of revolutionaries from other countries. A new vista was spread before the inquiring eyes of the young people.60

  Far from home, ‘rootless’ Asians often also had their most crucial self-education. China’s foremost modern writer, Lu Xun, first felt a political panic when, as a student in Japan during its war with Russia in 1905, he saw a picture of a Chinese crowd apathetically witnessing the execution of an alleged Chinese spy by the Japanese. ‘Physically, they were as strong and healthy as anyone could ask,’ he later wrote, ‘but their expressions revealed all too clearly that spiritually they were calloused and numb.’61 Abandoning his studies in medicine, Lu Xun soon began a hectic career of literary and moral exhortation.

  The advance of imperialism everywhere forced Asian elites into anxious sideways glances as well as urgent self-appraisals. Very quickly in the early twentieth century, a transnational intellectual network grew, bringing Asian intellectuals into dialogue with each other. In the more remote past, the Indian reformer Ram Mohun Roy, who died in Bristol in 1833, had written feelingly about the fate of Italian and Spanish revolutionaries in the 1810s, and supported the Irish against the British. And there was something weirdly modern about the career of Jamal al-din al-Afghani, born in a small Iranian town but subsequently resident in Delhi, Kabul, Istanbul, Cairo, Tehran, London, Moscow and Paris. By 1901, it seemed in the nature of things that Kang Youwei should write about the urgency of Chinese reform in the Indian hill station of Darjeeling – as did the fact the Russian-born Muslim intellectual Abdurreshid Ibrahim discussed the fate of the Mongolian and Tibetan peoples with the spiritual leader of Mongolia’s Buddhists.

  Ibrahim, author of a famous book The House of Islam, which recorded his travels among and exhortations to Muslims in Siberia, Manchuria, Japan, Korea, China, South-east Asia, India, Arabia and Istanbul, was one of those itinerant cosmopolitans to whom national issues and identities – such as the fate of Muslims in Russia – were becoming increasingly important. But they also overlapped with larger solidarities, such as pan-Asianism, pan-Islamism and pan-Arabism. It was the ‘opposition among Asian peoples’, Ibrahim wrote in the prospectus of the society he established in Japan in 1909, Ajia Gikai (The Society for the Asian Cause), ‘that enabled Western powers to invade the East. Without being aware of this defect, and putting an end to internal opposition, Asian peoples will have no future.’62

  Born in Siberia, and educated partly in Medina, Ibrahim had met al-Afghani in St Petersburg and Istanbul in the 1890s, and had witnessed the latter’s frantic attempts to catch the eye of the Russian tsar during an opera performance. By 1909, he was the best-known pan-Islamic intellectual, surpassing even his peripatetic master in the amount of travel he did. Driven into exile by the persecution of Muslims in Russia, he visited Japan in 1909, and was immediately invited into the highest political circles. He became a close associate of the militant group the Black Dragons, which was already backing Sun Yat-sen and other nationalist movements in Asia. Writing in the journal Gaiko Jiho (‘Foreign Affairs’), Ibrahim claimed that ‘as a whole, Asians are disgusted by Europeans’ and that ‘bringing about the union of Asian countries to stand up to Europe is our legitimate means of self-defense’.63

  Together with the Egyptian nationalist army offic
er Ahmad Fadzli Beg, who was exiled to Tokyo by the British rulers of Egypt, and the Indian emigre Maulvi Barakatullah, a teacher of Urdu at Tokyo University, Ibrahim started an English-language paper, Islamic Fraternity. He also translated Asia in Danger, a pamphlet by Hasan U. Hatano (1882 – 1936), an important Japanese pan-Asianist who converted to Islam along with his wife and her father and adopted a Muslim name. Carrying photos of beheadings and massacres conducted by Westerners in Asia, it was widely distributed in the Muslim world.

  Assisted by the Black Dragons, Ibrahim travelled to Istanbul in 1909, spreading the prescient message through the Muslim communities in China and in British and Dutch colonies that Japan would be their saviour. (Later, during the First World War, he would raise an ‘Asian Battalion’ from Russian prisoners of war in German captivity; it was sent to fight the British in Mesopotamia.)

  The Vietnamese Phan Boi Chau (1867 – 1940) was another exile to shrewdly harness nationalist and internationalist sentiments in Japan. Born into a scholar-gentry family quite like Liang Qichao’s, Phan would have become a government official in the Confucian manner had he not been radicalized by successive French attacks on Annam. His denunciations of French rule contained a familiar mix of bewilderment, anger and shame:

  Since France gained their protectorate they have taken over everything, even the power of life or death. The life of 10,000 ‘Annamese’ is worth less than one French dog; the prestige of 100 mandarins is less than that of one French female. How is it that those blue-eyed, yellow-bearded people, who are not our fathers or elder brothers, can squat on our heads, defecate on us?64

  Like many others, Phan was thrilled by Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905. ‘Our minds’, he wrote, ‘may now contemplate a new, exquisite world.’ Later that same year he travelled to Japan, passing through Chinese political circles in Hong Kong and Shanghai. At the turn of the century, the first generation of Vietnamese nationalists like him had been riveted by the efforts of Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao. Liang’s writings were widely available across Vietnam. Reaching Japan, Phan Boi Chau immediately sought out Liang and held many conversations with him about international affairs. Liang spoke of the French railway in Yunnan province as ‘cancers in China’s stomach’, but advised the Vietnamese not to seek assistance from Japan until he had awakened his own people to the challenges of the international system.65 Inspired by Liang, Phan feverishly began writing what became the History of the Loss of Vietnam. Serialized by Liang in his newspaper and then published as a book, it would be read in the remotest villages of Vietnam, and become a seminal text for such second-generation Vietnamese anti-colonialists as Ho Chi Minh.

  LIANG AND DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA

  While Kang was in India, moving into the private dream world that would increasingly make him politically irrelevant, Liang travelled to Canada and the United States for a fund-raising tour. This major trip outside Asia proved to be a turning point in his intellectual career.

  He travelled from the west coast and back again, passing through Vancouver, Ottawa, Montana, Boston, New York, Washington, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Since the great emigration to the American West in the 1860s and 1870s, more than 100,000 Chinese had settled in America, working as laundrymen and restaurateurs in remote railroad and mining towns as well as living in the crammed Chinatowns of New York and San Francisco. A handful of Chinese students had also arrived at Harvard and Yale on American scholarships.

  The United States was then completing its major transition from a frontier society to a European-style industrial economy, and had a fast-developing sense of its imperial destiny. In 1902, a year before Liang arrived in America, Woodrow Wilson had published his five-volume History of the American People. Describing the Philippines as ‘new frontiers’, Wilson, then president of Princeton University, frankly acknowledged the growing American thirst for foreign markets: markets ‘to which diplomacy, and if need be power, must make an open way’. ‘Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market,’ Wilson explained, ‘the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nation which are closed must be battered down.’66 Following this precept of economic imperialism, the United States had already expelled Spain from its Caribbean backyard and flexed its muscles in East Asia, and since the nineteenth century, American missionaries in China, mostly Protestant, had reflected the growing national confidence as they propagated the American way of life as much as Christianity.

  America’s interest in China, led by businessmen, had also begun to peak, reflected in its announcement of the ‘Open Door’ policy which protected American stakes in the potentially great China market. One result of this was that Liang found his tour heralded by American newspapers everywhere he went. He was received by the banker and industrialist J. P. Morgan, the Secretary of State John Hay, who told Liang that China would be a great power one day, and finally by President Theodore Roosevelt himself at the White House.

  In his prose, which was a model of simplicity and directness, Liang proved to be a sharp and confident observer of the American scene, impressed but not overawed, and surprisingly insightful given that he had never been to the West before. He noted things both big and small: the extension, with Roosevelt’s big navy, of the Monroe Doctrine to the world, as well as New York traffic, American libraries and the condition of Italian and Jewish immigrants (‘their clothing is shabby, their appearance wretched’, he wrote).

  The United States he travelled to was a country of extreme inequality: ‘70 percent’, Liang reported in scandalized tones, ‘of the entire national wealth of America is in the hands of 200,000 rich people … How strange, how bizarre!’ The tenements in New York horrified him. Commenting on the death rates in them, he quoted the Tang dynasty poet Du Fu: ‘Crimson mansions reek of wine and meat while on the road lie frozen bones. Rich and poor but a foot apart; sorrows too hard to relate.’67 The political corruption exceeded anything described in Henry Adams’ novel Democracy published two decades previously. And Liang began to lose his faith in people’s rights as the cure-all to autocracy as his indictment of American democracy grew.

  As he saw it, corporate interests played an insidious role in American politics. Frequent elections made for policy short-sightedness and cheap populism. People entering democratic politics tended to be third-rate; far too many American presidents had been mediocre and uninspiring. The best aspects of American democracy were to be found at the local level – the political institutions of states, towns and counties – and these were too particular to America to be adapted to China’s circumstances. Democracy itself was best built from the bottom up over a long period. It couldn’t be imposed through revolution, as the fragility of democracy in France and Latin America had proved. And even in America, the liberal democratic state had been achieved with much coercion, and now, as America assumed its place in the world, it faced the danger of overcentralization. Also, imperialism was becoming more acceptable in America, as its financial and industrial power grew.

  During Liang’s tour of America, President Roosevelt told a crowd in San Francisco that ‘before I came to the Pacific slope, I was an expansionist, and after having been here I fail to understand how any man … can be anything but an expansionist’. Liang was struck by Roosevelt’s directness. ‘What was his point’, he worried, ‘in talking about “role” and “purpose” when he said, “playing a great role on the world’s stage” and “carrying out our great purpose”? I hope my countrymen will ponder this.’68

  Liang was in America, too, when the United States manipulated its way into control of Panama and its crucial canal. Reading newspaper accounts, Liang was reminded of how the British had compromised Egypt’s independence over the Suez Canal. Remarking on the Monroe Doctrine, he said the original meaning – ‘the Americas belong to the people of the Americas’ – had become transformed into ‘the Americas belong to the people of the United States’. ‘And who knows,
’ he added, ‘if this will not continue to change, day after day from now on, into “the world belongs to the United States”.‘69 Indeed, the large modern business corporations of America threatened to dominate the entire world. Imperialism together with financial and industrial expansion constituted a ‘giant monster’, far beyond the imagination of a Napoleon or Alexander, which would soon cross the Pacific to prey upon a weak China.70

  Liang’s disillusionment with democracy deepened as he came face to face with the ever-present threats to Chinese dignity in an America that also treated its black population atrociously. ‘The American Declaration of Independence says’, he wrote, ‘that people are born free and equal. Are blacks alone not people? Alas, I now understand what is called “civilization” these days.’71 Liang was particularly appalled by the practice of lynching: ‘Had I only been told about this and not been to America myself I would not have believed that such cruel and inhuman acts could be performed in broad daylight in the twentieth century.’72

  While Liang was in America, a Chinese consular official in San Francisco committed suicide after being insulted by the police. This brought home to Liang a long-standing national humiliation – what the Indian sociologist Benoy Kumar Sarkar called the ‘crime of colour’ routinely committed against Chinese immigrants in America:

  The ballot was forbidden to Chinese living in America. Schools were closed against them. They were not allowed to give evidence on the witness stand even in cases affecting their own property. They suffered open torture in public places and residential quarters. In normal times it was ‘mob-law’ that governed their person and property. The dictates of American demagogues created a veritable reign of terror for them.73