Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (37 page)

In spite of all the unpleasant things said about the Wild Fox, and despite the fact that she herself was on guard against him, Cixi remained appreciative of Kang as a reformist and gave him key assignments. A decree told him to go and start the first modern government newspaper in Shanghai to publicise the new policies. He would also be responsible for drafting a press law based on Western models.
Some of his friends regarded these occupations as ideal for him. It was very much Cixi’s style to send a disaffected man out of the capital, to where he could not cause any harm, but still let him play a role, even an important one. She believed in creating as few enemies as possible. But Kang declined to leave. Nothing less than the throne would satisfy him. His right-hand man, Liang, was also not content with his assignment – which was to supervise new textbooks for the whole empire – even though it was an extraordinary promotion, given that he had never held any official post. Kang lingered in Beijing and, with Liang’s assistance, plotted his next move.

He stayed with Sir Yinhuan, who was the key man in his plotting. The closest man to the emperor since the departure of Grand Tutor Weng, Sir Yinhuan was able to tell Kang a great deal about His Majesty. The young monarch was fragile and weak. His nerves had been overstretched by his relentless workload, made worse by his obsessive habit of correcting the wrong characters and bad grammar in the innumerable reports that passed over his desk. Sir Yinhuan was also aware of the emperor’s latent bitterness against his Papa Dearest. In addition to past animosities, in 1896 Cixi had initiated the Russo-Chinese Secret Treaty in the aftermath of the war with Japan, when Emperor Guangxu could not hold his head up in the court. She had made all the decisions, with no one even bothering to go through the motion of referring matters to him. This event had made the young man not only resent Cixi, but also hate Russia – quite unlike his feelings of indifference towards Germany or any other power. The Wild Fox was thus able to work on the emperor by pressing on these vulnerable spots, in
writings that were delivered to the monarch by Sir Yinhuan clandestinely, bypassing the Grand Council and Cixi. In one key pamphlet, ‘On the Destruction of Poland’, Russia was cast as the bogeyman, ‘the country of bloodthirsty beasts, which makes it its business to swallow up other countries’. Liberally stretching Polish history to produce a parable, Kang wrote that Poland had ‘a wise and able king determined to carry out reform’, but his efforts were ‘obstructed by aristocrats and high officials’, and so he missed ‘a propitious moment to make the country strong’. Then, the Wild Fox claimed, ‘Russian troops arrived . . . and the country perished in less than seven years.’ The king himself ‘went through the most cruel and most atrocious fate rarely encountered in history’. Kang declared that China was about to become another Poland as a result of ‘the grandees blocking the Advisory Board’ and that ‘Russian troops will come once the Siberian Railway is completed in a few years’. The Wild Fox’s reference to the Siberian Railway, a key part of the Secret Treaty, was designed to cause maximum upset to Emperor Guangxu.

This ominous and alarming fable was in the emperor’s hands just after 13 August, his twenty-seventh birthday. He read it deep into the night, drops from the red candles seeping into the pages. His already-poor sleep became even more disturbed, and his brittle nerves snapped. As his medical records show, doctors started visiting him almost daily from the 19th. In this condition, between sobs, he ordered 2,000 taels of silver delivered to Kang as a token of his appreciation. Kang wrote a thank-you letter on the 29th, which was no ordinary missive of gratitude. Secretly handed to the emperor, it was exceptionally long: it retold the Polish horror story and emphasised that the only way to avoid the fate of Poland was to install the Advisory Board at once. It also heaped flattery on Emperor Guangxu that went far beyond the norm. It described the emperor as
‘the wisest ever in history’, with ‘penetrating eyes sending off rays like the sun and the moon’, and with abilities ‘sublime and unparalleled even compared with the greatest emperors of all time’. It was ‘the injustice of a thousand years’ that China’s troubles should be laid at his door. They had only happened because the emperor had not had the opportunity to exercise his ‘supreme wisdom and mighty bravery, and his awesome thunderbolt-like force’. The emperor’s potential had been obstructed by the ‘old officials’. And the problem of all problems was that he had not had the right people at his side. All His Majesty needed was to rectify that and he would achieve greatness.

Nobody had ever said such things to Emperor Guangxu. The court had its formula of florid praise for the throne, but did not encourage extravagant compliments. A good emperor was supposed to embrace criticism and steer clear of flatterers. Moreover, Emperor Guangxu had always been made to feel inadequate, especially in comparison with his Papa Dearest. Suddenly he found someone who appeared fully to appreciate him. The impact of Kang’s flattery on the insecure young man cannot be exaggerated. It hugely boosted his self-esteem. His sense of guilt since the war with Japan was expunged and the inferiority complex was much assuaged. Nothing, after all, had been his fault. The ‘old officials’ were the ones to blame. What was more, with Kang by his side, there was no limit to what he could achieve. It was thus that Emperor Guangxu fell under the spell of the Wild Fox, whom he had met only once. He immediately ordered all
Kang’s petitions to be collected into booklets for his personal study, and named the collection ‘the Petitions of the Hero’.

As well as the long, flattering letter, Kang wrote separately, urging the emperor to dismiss his old officials and make new appointments. The emperor was so fired up that he instantly put pen to paper and sacked a host of officials, closing down a large number of offices. The decree, edited in his own hand, itched to
‘get rid of the whole lot’. It appears not to have occurred to the emperor that, although many of these officials may have been incompetent, they were lowly clerks and administrators merely carrying out orders given by him.

When Cixi received the abolition edict before it was issued, she was alarmed. To accommodate her adopted son, however, she only restored a few crucial offices, such as the one in charge of shipping grain from south China to the north, and otherwise let it pass. To his face she forcefully objected to the wholesale dismissals, telling him it could lead to the
‘loss of goodwill and support [
shi-ren-xin
]’ for the Reforms, and could even cost him his throne. Indeed, as the edict suddenly deprived thousands of officials of their livelihood in the capital alone, administrators throughout the empire looked on appalled and fearful.

Knowing Cixi’s disapproval, the emperor issued further edicts without showing them to her first, thus breaking the code of their working relationship. On 4 September, after Cixi had just left the Forbidden City for the Summer Palace, he sacked the minister and five other top officials from the Ministry of Rites in one wrathful crimson-inked edict. His anger seemed disproportionate to the offence: that the ministry had delayed passing on to him a proposal from a clerk named Wang Zhao. But the clerk was a friend of Kang. The emperor promoted him. He also appointed a new minister – another of Kang’s friends, who had written to the throne in praise of the Wild Fox. The new vice-ministers included yet more of Kang’s friends, such as Learning Companion Xu. Emperor Guangxu intended this to be the model for other ministries and offices. The next day he made four low-ranking men secretaries in the Grand Council, and two of them were also Kang’s friends, each of whom he had met for no more than a few moments. But he regarded them and other such appointees as ‘bright and brave men’, in contrast to all those ‘stupid and useless’ old officials.

Cixi was only sent the emperor’s edicts for information, after they were made public. When she next saw her adopted son, she told him that the sackings in the Ministry of Rites were unreasonable, and she refused to endorse some new appointees, including Learning Companion Xu, whom she now knew to be a member of the Wild Fox’s clique. She then quietly made arrangements to ensure that edicts drafted by the new secretaries were shown to her first. Otherwise she did nothing regarding Guangxu’s actions.

Now that Emperor Guangxu had established the precedent of firing and hiring on his own, the Wild Fox organised his cronies in a concerted petition campaign calling on the emperor to establish the Advisory Board – which he would lead. One of the
four new secretaries who did not belong to Kang’s coterie wrote in a private letter on 13 September:
‘Every day, they are talking about the Advisory Board, and the emperor is being pushed towards it. Kang and Liang have not got the positions they want, and I am afraid the situation will become turbulent . . .’ Indeed, on the same day Emperor Guangxu finally made up his mind to set up what was effectively the
Kang Board. When the Wild Fox learned about it, he went at once to his small group of friends, his face beaming with delight. He told them that the Board would have ten members, who would have to be officially recommended to the throne. Then he handed out a list of ten men to those who were entitled to write to the throne direct, telling them each to recommend a few from the list. These included Kang himself, his brother Guangren, his right-hand man Liang, two sons of Learning Companion Xu and other cronies. And so the names of this cabal went forward to Emperor Guangxu.

On 14 September the emperor took the list to the Summer Palace. Cixi refused to authorise it and, in her forceful way, made it utterly clear that her decision was non-negotiable. The following day an anguished Emperor Guangxu summoned one of the four new secretaries and gave him a letter asking the new appointees whom the emperor referred to as his ‘comrades’ to find a way to form the Kang Board without antagonising his Royal Father. The secretary to whom he gave the letter, Yang Rui, was actually not a member of Kang’s clique and did not even approve of what Kang was doing. But His Majesty was rather woolly about the different allegiances among the new appointees suddenly flooding the court, regarding them all as one progressive force.

The Wild Fox learned the contents of the letter and may have read it. The next thing he saw was a public edict from Emperor Guangxu, making an oddly personal plea for Kang to leave Beijing and go to Shanghai to take up his newspaper post. Thus the Wild Fox knew that his leap to the top had been blocked by the empress dowager. Cixi had never stood in the way of Kang’s reformist policies – indeed, she agreed with them. She had actually been the first to appreciate Kang’s talents and promote him. But she refused to hand over power to him.

Given that the Qing regime had brought such disasters to the country, the case for an alternative government was unanswerable. Whether Kang would have made a better leader is open to debate. But one thing is certain: he did not have a political programme to turn China into a parliamentary democracy, as is often claimed. He never advocated this; on the contrary, he argued in one of his articles that democracy, while good for the West, did not suit China. He wrote, ‘
An emperor is like the father of a family, and the people are like children. The Chinese people are all like toddlers and infants. May I ask how the family of a dozen babies can function if the parents don’t have the exclusive right to make decisions, but instead let all the toddlers and infants make their own decisions? . . . I can tell you that in China, only the emperor must rule.’

Wild Fox Kang wanted to be the emperor, and had been trying to create a mandate for himself. First, he claimed that he was the reincarnation of Confucius. The assertion had indeed attracted attention, and even Westerners had heard him spoken of as
‘the modern Sage’ and ‘the second Confucius’. Next, with his small but vocal band of disciples, Kang attempted to establish that Confucius had actually been crowned King of China, replacing the emperor of the time. To propagate the idea, they started a newspaper that used a ‘Confucian Calendar’, in which the year of Confucius’s birth was Year One. As this strategy directly threatened Emperor Guangxu, the Wild Fox abandoned it when he began to ingratiate himself with the emperor. The moment he realised that the emperor was falling under his spell, Kang most anxiously explained to the monarch in one of his clandestine letters that he had been misunderstood and that he had never held the view that
Confucius had been crowned king.
Kang was eager to expunge any idea that he coveted the throne. With Emperor Guangxu seduced, Kang could fulfil his dream by first becoming the puppeteer behind the throne. This route was now blocked by Cixi with a will of iron, and the only way for the Wild Fox to achieve his goal was to remove her by force.

20 A Plot to Kill Cixi (September 1898)

WILD FOX KANG
had been hatching plots to kill Cixi for some time, knowing that she stood between him and supreme power. For this purpose he needed an armed force, and he first thought of a commander named Nie. He asked Clerk
Wang Zhao to approach Nie and persuade him to join them, but the clerk declined to go, telling Kang that the mission was a pipe dream. The army was firmly in Cixi’s hands. The first thing she had done when she launched the Reforms was to make key military appointments, putting the man who had the most unwavering loyalty to her, Junglu, in charge of all the army in the capital and its surrounding area. Junglu’s headquarters were in Tianjin.

Among those reporting to Junglu was General Yuan Shikai – the future first President of China when the country became a republic. Now he was an ambitious and outstanding officer. He noticed that incredibly high posts were being awarded by the emperor on the recommendation of Kang’s men, and so made friends with them. Thanks to Kang, Emperor Guangxu gave General Yuan not one but two audiences, immediately after his altercation with Cixi on 14 September. His Majesty conferred on the General a promotion over the heads of his superiors, and practically told Yuan to detach himself from Junglu and to take orders directly from him. The emperor was doing what the Wild Fox had advised – establishing an army of his own.