In 1915, the establishment of the magazine New Youth had given the new radicals a resonant voice. These were students educated in Japan or the West, or in the Western schools hurriedly set up in the first phase of Qing reforms. Appalled by Yuan’s attempt at a Confucian coup, they flinched from China’s old traditions of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism. Indeed, they scorned the past with startling vehemence, describing it as the dead weight that held China down. In what seems now a parody of uncompromising Confucian moralism, New Youth identified Confucianism with the discredited monarchy, and called for a wholesale and uncritical adoption of Western values of science and democracy. The heroes of this new intelligentsia were Mr Science and Mr Democracy, who together signified the vitality of the West. The formula was coined by Chen Duxiu, the founder of New Youth as well as of, five years later, the Communist Party of China, who, in a letter to a friend in 1916, confessed to
the hopelessness of our catching up with European and American civilizations. Most of our people are lethargic and do not know that not only our morality, politics, and technology but even common commodities for daily use are all unfit for struggle and are going to be eliminated in the process of natural selection.84
As the Chinese radicals understood them, the concept of democracy referred mainly to freedom from traditional restraints, and science was a method to achieve progress and discard the ‘superstitious’ aspects of the traditional past, such as the hierarchical relationships of parents – children, rulers – subjects and husbands – wives enjoined by Confucianism. Democracy could release the creative individuality of the Chinese people that Confucianism had suppressed. Nationalism became another holy notion, because, as Chen Duxiu put it,
Looking at conditions in China, our people are still in the age of scattered sand. We have to follow the times, and nationalism has truly become the best means by which the Chinese can save themselves. To use this doctrine, the Chinese must first understand what it means … contemporary nationalisms refer to democratic nations, not nations of enslaved people.85
Liang’s questioning of China’s tradition, his scepticism about its ability to adapt to the harsh world of competition, was now the basis of a radical new despair and hopefulness. The young men shared none of the old reformist beliefs in evolution, gradual or rapid. Nothing would change without urgent and drastic effort.
What was needed was a revolution in the consciousness – a veritable New Culture – of a people whose intellectual state was a kind of ‘syphilis’, in the harsh judgement of a young Japanese-educated man called Zhou Shuren, soon to be known as Lu Xun.86 One of Lu Xun’s most celebrated short stories, published in 1919, would describe a madman who imagines cannibalism as the basis of China’s old society and morality. In his fevered imagination, what the Confucian classics prescribe as ‘filial piety’ turns into an exhortation to ‘eat people’.
Recoiling from warlordism and imperialism, the New Culture Movement would chart China’s path into the modern world, even as it dealt with the questions first phrased by Liang Qichao. And the intellectual and social energies released by it would find their consummation in the May Fourth Movement in 1919. China’s humiliation by the Western Powers at the Paris Peace Conference would bring young intellectuals together with factory workers and clerks, making the revolution of 1911 look like the product of small, isolated and ineffectual elites.
FOUR: 1919, ‘CHANGING THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD’
The American eagle strides the heavens soaring. With half of the globe clutched in his claw. Although the Chinese arrived later, Couldn’t you leave them a little space?
Huang Zunxian, Chinese consul-general in
San Francisco in the 1880s
Those who live … away from the East, have now got to recognize that Europe has completely lost her former moral prestige in Asia. She is no longer regarded as the champion throughout the world of fair dealing and the exponent of high principle, but rather as an upholder of Western race supremacy, and the exploiter of those outside her own borders.
Rabindranath Tagore, 1921
THE UNITED STATES AND ITS PROMISES OF SELF-DETERMINATION
In 1918 Liang Qichao sailed to France as one of China’s unofficial representatives at the Paris Peace Conference which was to decide the shape of the post-war world. His list of demands was long but clear and fair: in return for the Chinese labour and raw materials that had been supplied to the Allies during the war, there would be an end to the unequal treaties, the cancellation of the Boxer indemnity, and the abolition of extraterritorial jurisdiction and other special concessions made to foreigners under duress. China would, Liang hoped, finally take its place in the international comity of sovereign nation-states – part of a new world order that seemed likely to rise from the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman and Russian empires.
Liang knew that like-minded representatives of other Asian countries were pressing for a similar outcome at Paris, especially after President Woodrow Wilson made plain his regard for weaker countries and the principle of national self-determination. The United States had emerged from the war as the world’s greatest financial power, and these Asians hoped to persuade the American president to use his new influence to restore self-rule in countries dominated by European powers.
For much of the nineteenth century, the United States had been isolationist in its foreign policy, and protectionist in its economic; and its footprint was light in Asia and Africa. The war, which had enfeebled the economies of the major imperialist powers – Britain, Germany, Russia and France – and further discredited their regimes, had endowed America with both power and moral prestige.
Wilson, who barely had a foreign policy outside the Americas before war broke out in Europe in 1914, was not slow to realize the implications of European turmoil for the United States; he fleshed out a new and noble American sense of mission while still hoping to keep his country out of the European War. ‘We are provincials no longer,’ he famously declared in his second inaugural address in January 1917.1 In speeches addressed to ‘the peoples of the countries now at war’ he burnished his credentials as the right kind of mediator to negotiate what he called a ‘peace without victory’.2 When his peace overtures failed, he joined the Allied side against Germany in April 1917, still confident ‘that we are chosen, and prominently chosen, to show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty’.3 Later, he would propose a much more unusual and high-minded plan for enduring peace: replacing militarist regimes with democracies.
The United States of course had lost whatever leverage it had as an impartial mediator by declaring war against Germany. Nevertheless, Wilson pressed ahead with his scheme for a democratic international order, which he hoped would be cemented by a League of Nations. Speaking to the US Congress in January 1918, he revealed his most ambitious project yet: a fourteen-point manifesto for the new world that the United States was fighting for. Secret diplomacy was to have no place in the Wilson-ordained planet, where free trade, popular government, freedom of the seas, the reduction of armaments, the rights of small nations, and an association of nations to keep the peace were to be the new articles of faith.
Wilson’s Fourteen Points would have been lofty ideals at any time (God, as the French prime minister Clemenceau joked, had only ten). They were particularly unrealistic during a global war that would soon end with Britain, France and Japan adding to their possessions in the Middle East, Africa and East Asia.
Nevertheless, disseminated to a worldwide audience Wilson’s rousing speeches leading up to the Paris Peace Conference earned him, as John Maynard Keynes later recorded, ‘a prestige and a moral influence throughout the world unequalled in history’.4 Emboldened by him, nationalist leaders in Egypt, India and Ottoman Turkey joined Sinn Fein in Ireland in a serious challenge to established European authority.
In Egypt, Saad Zaghlul, Jamal al-din al-Afghani’s old protege, organized a new political party called Wafd in preparation for th
e Paris conference. Western-style nationalist idealism had always had a more secure hold in Egypt, al-Afghani’s main theatre of operations, than anywhere else in the Muslim world. The abortive movement led by Colonel Urabi in the late 1870s, aimed against European dominance over Egypt’s ruling class, had been the first such anti-colonialist upsurge anywhere in Asia. As one of the few Muslim peoples to be occupied and administered by a European power, many Egyptians, especially an emergent class of educated professionals, naturally developed a strong nationalist feeling. Since occupying Egypt in 1882, the British had boosted the country’s agricultural capacity, building dams, canals and telegraph links. The population grew exponentially in most towns and Cairo was transformed by new public works between 1895 and 1907. But the basic contradiction that al-Afghani had witnessed never disappeared: Egypt’s damaging dependence on the world economy as a supplier of raw materials, and a tutelary regime with an entrenched elite that blocked all upward mobility for the new classes being created by socio-economic development.
These restless Egyptians, or effendis, as they were called, longed for an independent and egalitarian Egypt; but they also had to rouse the working classes and the peasantry against the foreign elites and their local allies. They realized that both strength and legitimacy would have to stem from a mass movement. The Russo-Japanese War gave a big boost to Egyptian nationalists such as Mustafa Kamil, author of a laudatory book on Japan, The Rising Sun, and founder of the Nationalist Party in 1907. Kamil and his supporters aimed at fulfilling Urabi’s aim of winning independence; and their efforts to mobilize popular anger against the foreigners briefly succeeded in 1906, when the British unjustly hanged four peasants in what came to be known as the Dinshawai incident.
Soon after war erupted in 1914, the British had declared Egypt a protectorate of the British Empire, formalizing the 1882. invasion and temporary occupation of the country. Zaghlul denounced the protectorate as illegal and hoped to enlist President Wilson on his side. Following al-Afghani’s praise of Egyptian antiquity, he pointed to the sheer injustice of Egypt being denied its rightful place among nations. ‘No people more than the Egyptian people’, he wrote in a telegram to Wilson, ‘has felt strongly the joyous emotion of the birth of a new era which, thanks to your virile action, is soon going to impose itself upon the universe.’5
Similar hopes bubbled up among the Muslims of Ottoman Turkey and their supporters worldwide. Before the First World War, the European powers had increased their assaults on the Ottoman Empire. In 1908 the Young Turks had forced Sultan Abdulhamid II to restore the constitution he had suspended in 1876, but this only intensified European suspicions that ‘the sick man of Europe’ was on his deathbed. The Italians seized Libya in 1911, following a military conflict in which a young Salonica-born Ottoman officer called Mustafa Kemal first made his mark. The itinerant thinker Abdurreshid Ibrahim ignored his advanced age to travel to the battlefront, and he deployed his extensive network of contacts in the Muslim world in support of the Ottomans. It was during this war that an aeroplane dropped a bomb for the first time in history. The experience of this new form of warfare, along with that of more conventional Italian brutalities, shocked many Muslims. Shortly before being captured and executed by the Italians, the military leader of the Libyan resistance, ‘Umar al-Mukhtar, wrote: ‘They are excusable, those who cannot believe all of what is said and written about the Italian atrocities. It is actually difficult to believe that in the world there are men who behave in this unbelievable manner, but it is unfortunately only too real.’6
In British-ruled India, the ageing poet Akbar Illahabadi expressed a widespread sense of rage and helplessness when he wrote:
Neither we possess licenses for weapons
Nor have the strength to go and fight the enemies of the Turks
But we do curse them from the core of our hearts
That God may spike the Italian guns.7
In Lahore, the young poet Muhammad Iqbal, fresh from his readings of al-Afghani, began his journey to fame and future reputation as philosopher-founder of Pakistan by reciting a poem in a public assembly about the impunity with which the Italians had despoiled Ottoman territory. Addressed to God, the most famous lines of Shikwa (‘Complaint’) were:
There are other nations besides us;
There are sinners amongst them,
Humble people and others swollen by pride,
Slothful, careless or clever.
Many there are who are weary of your name.
But you bestow grace on their habitations,
And your thunderbolts strike only our dwellings.8
To add to Ottoman woes, Austria-Hungary had fully annexed the Ottoman territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1913. Allied with Germany, Ottoman Turkey then entered the First World War on the eventual losing side, its secular leaders now deploying pan-Islamism in the hope of rousing Muslims worldwide against Western powers. Though surrounded by Allied forces on all sides, its armies performed creditably in various theatres of the war, including Gallipoli and Kut al-Amara in Mesopotamia. However, harassed by Armenian nationalists in the east of Anatolia, the Turks ruthlessly deported hundreds of thousands of Armenians in 1915, an act that later invited accusations of genocide. By 1918 the Turks were in retreat, utterly exhausted and fragmented by relentless Allied assaults. The Ottoman Empire steadily lost control of its Arab territories; and former Greek, Arab, Armenian and Kurdish subjects divided up parts of the empire among themselves. The Greeks, in particular, claimed Western Anatolia for themselves.
The success and failure of the Ottoman Empire in the war had a confusing intellectual import for many Muslims. There was pride at a major Muslim state fighting so many of Asia’s enemies and alongside the other Central powers as an equal, but also anxiety about the Ottomans’ own colonial role. For instance, the prospect of the Ottoman Turks defeating the British and reconquering Egypt, which seemed likely on two occasions during the war, did not appeal to Egyptian nationalists.
However, many secular Ottoman nationalists hoped the American president would secure them a just peace. They saw Wilson’s plan for self-determination as favouring their cause of a Muslim-majority state in Anatolia – they were prepared to lose the Arab-majority provinces. The feminist writer Halide Edip, later Atatürk’s close associate, was among those who signed a telegram addressed to President Wilson, asking him to protect the Ottoman Empire from expansionist European powers.
Inspired by Wilson’s rhetoric, anti-Japanese nationalist leaders in Korea wrote their own Declaration of Independence and planned to send a delegation to Paris. Denied exit visas by the Japanese authorities, the Korean nationalists asked their expatriate colleagues to represent them; one, General Pak, living in poverty in China, began his long journey to Paris by walking along the tracks of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Expectations were even higher in India where the British, with the help of moderate Indian nationalists, had enlisted over a million soldiers and labourers to the Allied war effort in Europe and the Middle East (the great majority of those who died in the terrible siege of Kut al-Amara were Indians). The British promised, albeit vaguely, self-rule in return for Indian support; the American president seemed to stand as guarantor for them.
Touring the United States in 1916, Rabindranath Tagore had delivered strong denunciations of what he called the new god of the ‘Nation (with a capital N)’. He had also attacked Western imperialism in Asia. ‘There is’, he wrote to Romain Rolland in early 1919, ‘hardly a corner in the vast continent of Asia where men have come to feel any real love for Europe.’9 Nevertheless, Tagore now hoped that the United States was ‘rich enough not to concern itself in the greedy exploitation of weaker countries’.10 Impressed by the American president, Tagore planned to dedicate one of his books to him. Moreover, stirred by Wilson’s wartime speeches, Hindu and Muslim leaders of the Indian National Congress jointly demanded to send their delegates – a rising figure called Mohandas Gandhi among them – to represent India at the Paris Peace Conference.<
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In China, the news agency Reuters had already prepared a public opinion sympathetic to the Allied cause which had looked kindly upon the dispatch of 200,000 Chinese labourers to the European front. Wilson’s speeches in favour of self-determination aroused extraordinary interest: in Beijing students gathered in front of the American embassy chanting ‘Long Live President Wilson!’ and holding placards that called for the world to be made ‘safe for democracy’. Though racked by civil war, China wished to project a clear image of proud national sovereignty. It sent some of its most articulate diplomats to ensure that the country’s sovereignty was respected by the victorious Allied powers, particularly Japan, which with Britain’s blessing had seized German-held territory in the Shandong peninsula.
In the event, the Chinese delegation was excluded from the table of the major powers (at which Japan was present), and was relegated to the ranks of Greece and Siam (Thailand). This was not a good sign for a China determined to use the conference as the sign of its arrival as an equal and sovereign power. Its protests were ignored, and eventually the big decisions were all taken by the United States, France and Britain. Nevertheless, the excitement in China was great; and it was felt not only by Kang Youwei, who fantasized that the American president‘s plan for a League of Nations was fulfilling his own vision of a moral community, but also by Mao Zedong, then living in a provincial small city and gradually being radicalized by New Youth. Wilson’s speeches were bound into a bestselling book in China; his ‘Fourteen Points’ could be recited by heart by many nationalists by the time the Paris conference opened. Having been instrumental in making China a party to the war, Liang Qichao probably took the largest burden of expectations to the peace conference, which turned out to be the harshest lesson yet in Western realpolitik for Asian intellectuals and activists.
From the Ruins of Empire Page 22
