Restless Empire (19 page)

The allied troops entered Beijing on 14 August with a vengeance. Cixi and the Court fled to Xi’an, and so it was the ordinary people of Beijing who felt the fury of the invasion. Russian and French soldiers massacred Chinese civilians. In one town near Beijing 500 young girls and women committed suicide because they had been raped by foreign soldiers or feared they would be. “There are things that I must not write, and that may not be printed in England, which would seem to show that this Western civilization of ours is merely a veneer over savagery,” noted the British journalist George Lynch, who witnessed the occupation. The Chinese capital, including the imperial palaces, was thoroughly looted. The orders of the commanders of the foreign troops and the behavior of their soldiers caused a scandal in many of the countries that contributed to the allied operation. A major Japanese newspaper lamented that its country’s army “purports to be an army that protects humanity and justice through a discourse of civilization. Our countrymen have been particularly proud of this honor since the war of 1894–95. . . . This looting . . . has resulted in the most outrageous disgrace to the military, the most appalling national disgrace to Japan.”
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In spite of the criticism of foreign behavior in China, it was the Boxers and the Qing Court that almost all outsiders (and a fair number of urban Chinese) blamed for the disasters of the summer of 1900. More fully than any event before it, the Boxer war had placed China outside the Western-led international system, a pariah state, the center of a 1900 axis of evil that incorporated resistance against colonial domination everywhere, from Sudan to Afghanistan to Korea. The empress
dowager, desperate to cling to power, recalled old Li Hongzhang, for his final bow, to negotiate the survival of the Qing state and her own return to Beijing. The foreign diktat imposed on China, the so-called Boxer Protocols, signed in September 1901, in effect made China a ward of the allied powers that had intervened against her: A strict weapons embargo was put in place, the leading pro-Boxer members of the government exiled or executed. Chinese forts guarding Beijing were razed and foreign troops stationed on the roads between the capital and the sea. All of China’s state income was made to contribute toward paying a massive indemnity to the allied powers, totaling, over a forty-year amortization period, almost four times the Chinese state’s annual income in 1900. The Qing had become hostage to the political and economic interests of the West and Japan.
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B
ESIDES
J
APAN
, the two main newcomers to the pattern of exploiting China were the United States and Germany. While having to operate within what was basically a British-constructed system, Washington and Berlin chose two distinct directions for their activities, directions that were to have implications for China well beyond the nineteenth century. In the United States, from the 1890s on, there was a strong suspicion that the imperial ambitions of others could bar American business interests from the Chinese market. The
Philadelphia Press
declared that “the future must not be put in peril. . . . China holds one-fourth the human race. Its free access to our trade and manufactures is vital to our future.” In notes outlining the so-called Open Door Policy, sent in 1899 to all the great powers, US Secretary of State John Hay urged “the various powers claiming ‘spheres of interest’ that they shall enjoy perfect equality of treatment for their commerce and navigation within such ‘spheres.’”
⁷
The United States sought to secure access for US products and capital to Chinese markets even though it was unwilling to establish its own areas of control and domination. Germany, united in 1871 into one strong imperial state, chose the more traditional
route of requiring territorial concessions from China, but with specific aims of modernization along German lines in mind, as well as trade. After two German missionaries were murdered at Juye in Shandong province, the German navy took control of the port of Qingdao in 1897 and by the early twentieth century it had extended its power over much of the Shandong peninsula, aiming to make it into a model colony run from Berlin.

After the Spanish-American war of 1898, the United States was establishing its own overseas empire, which now included Cuba and the Philippines. But it refrained from trying to carve out regions of influence in China. Part of the reason was ideological; most Americans retained a solid portion of aversion against colonialism (and the entanglements with nonwhite peoples that it could lead to). Another part was based on perceptions of weakness: The United States would lose out to Britain and the other imperial powers that had already established themselves in China. Much better, then, for the Americans to claim lofty principles of free trade as the cornerstones of their policy. The Open Door notes demanded the right for trade from all countries to operate freely within the spheres of influence and even within the concessions granted to foreign powers in China. The US government also demanded that the great powers support China’s “territorial and administrative integrity.” But even if the other powers were happy to pay lip service to the US position, their policies in China were mostly unaffected by the Open Door principles. As Hay explained to President William McKinley, “The inherent weakness of our position is this: we do not want to rob China ourselves, and our public opinion will not permit us to interfere, with an army, to prevent others from robbing her. Besides, we have no army. The talk of the papers about ‘our preeminent moral position giving us the authority to dictate to the world’ is mere flap-doodle.”
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The US interest in the China market faded, but never disappeared. The part of the Open Door Policy that stayed intact through the wars and revolution of the early twentieth century was the US determination
not to be pushed out of China by other powers. As Japan’s power grew, this resolve meant an increasing degree of conflict between the two countries. It was a conflict that diplomacy could not overcome. In spite of the understandings signed between the two countries in 1917 (the Lansing-Ishii agreement) and during the 1921–22 Washington Naval Conference (the Nine-Power Treaty), the Open Door remained more ideology than reality. US insistence on the right to trade and commercial operations in Manchuria, for instance, and its willingness to support the new Guomindang government in China after 1928, meant that Tokyo came to see Washington as a main enemy of its positions on the Asian mainland.

For Americans with an interest in the outside world, China also became a prime object of the American desire for reform and modernization. A powerful movement for reform at home took hold in the 1890s. Missionaries, health workers, economists, engineers, and businessmen went to China with lessons drawn from the American experiment. After China became a republic in 1912, some Americans believed that the US republican heritage would be of particular significance to the Chinese. But first the emphasis on improvement had to sink in in China itself. A part of the US portion of the Boxer indemnity was converted into scholarships for Chinese students to study in the United States. Another portion was used to establish an American college in Beijing, which later became Qinghua University (several Chinese Communist leaders, including President Hu Jintao, are Qinghua graduates). Other educational initiatives, mostly missionary-based, flourished as well. Yanjing University in Beijing was headed by John Leighton Stuart, who later became the US ambassador. Yanjing acquired the former imperial gardens between the old and new summer palaces, and set up a modern college that is now part of Peking University, the country’s premier teaching institution. American missionaries and educators also helped establish Nanjing University, St. John’s University in Shanghai, and Lingnan University in Guangzhou.
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Many Chinese had a love-hate relationship with the United States. The attraction was for American ideals and aid, the aversion because of America’s racism and consequent immigration restrictions. Ordinary Chinese could not understand why European colonialists, having taken control of whole continents, would not even admit Chinese immigrants into these territories. In 1905 Chinese in China and abroad launched a boycott of American goods to change US policies and force the Qing authorities to stand firm in their opposition to the exclusion of Chinese immigrants from the United States. The boycott did not change Washington’s approach or Beijing’s willingness to accede to it. But it did alert many to US racism and Qing powerlessness. They realized that the Open Door opened only one way. China was open to US capital, but the United States was closed to the Chinese people. Their realization led to a disenchantment with America that would echo for generations to come.

Germany, the other latecomer to foreign influence in China, attempted to copy what Britain and France were already doing. The German enterprise in Shandong, however, was different from them in important ways. It stressed improvement and modernization of China. In this respect it had much in common with American idealism. For Germany the penetration by missionaries and imperial expansion went hand in hand. The government in Berlin had had its eyes on Qingdao as a naval base for several years, and the German Christian missions—whose existence in Shandong gave rise to the Boxer movement—were planned with imperial expansion in mind. The colony they set up was also intended to be a model colony, better in every way than what the other European powers could do. The German governor in Shandong reported to Berlin in 1905 that the “tasks that we Germans are facing in this colony within the most important area of the cultural life of modern peoples, education . . . [must] to a significant degree influence its spirit and character and be a tool for infusing the whole province . . . with German knowledge and German spirit.”
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From its beginning to its end at the hands of Britain’s Japanese allies in 1914, the concession in Qingdao and the surrounding Jiaozhou bay area was run by the German navy. It aimed at protecting Berlin’s interests in East Asia and solidifying Germany’s hold on the region through large-scale projects, constructing educational institutions, medical services, and missionary stations. As in most colonies, the German projects in Shandong both attracted and repelled the native population. Elite Chinese were impressed by German efficiency and organization, but wanted to conquer these virtues, and what they had achieved in the province, for China. The first president of the republic, Sun Yat-sen, visited in 1912 and admonished the Chinese students in German institutions there to learn from Germany:

The students should take Germany as a model for the new China. . . . China in spite of its thousands of years old culture has not achieved anything that can be compared to what Germany has created [here] in the course of twelve years. Streets, buildings, ports, sanitation, all bear witness to diligence and ambition. What the students see here should spur them towards emulation, and it must become their aim to spread this model to all of China and put their homeland in the same state of perfection.
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While Germany’s possessions in China ended in World War I, the interest in Germany as a possible ally of Chinese republicans continued right up to the outbreak of the next world war. German advisers, among them Max Bauer, one of the leaders of a failed right-wing coup attempt in Germany in 1920, helped reshape the finances and the army of the renewed Guomindang movement as it moved to take control of the country in the late 1920s. Under Chiang Kai-shek, in the 1930s, German advisors moved to the first rank among those supporting the new leadership. Hans von Seeckt, the former general commander of the German army, devised the training of China’s army elite. All military academies and most army units had German officers attached to them. Germany
supplied experts and loans for China’s railway construction, German-Chinese trade expanded massively, and Germany became China’s largest supplier of government credit. When Alexander von Falkenhausen, the last of the German chief military advisors, left China in 1938 after Germany had allied itself with Japan, Chiang Kai-shek continued to believe in Germany as a possible model for China’s future.
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C
HINA IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY
had to decide not only who its allies would be, but what form of government it would have. The development of a Western-style republic was not a sure thing. During the century’s first decade, the Qing empire tried to defend itself against its enemies, foreign and domestic, and many observers expected it to succeed, as it had done so often before. The
Times
of London commented in 1909 that “nothing is more surprising than the respectful humility with which the representatives of the foreign Powers submit to indignity at the hands of . . . the Chinese Foreign Office. It would seem as if the old time exclusiveness of the Throne which forbade audience with foreign representatives on any footing of equality had been revived. . . .”
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The Qing knew that foreigners depended on them to achieve anything in China and hoped to turn that dependence to the dynasty’s advantage. But they also wanted their people to see that the government was able to enforce obedience from the populace, undertake necessary reform, and demand respect from other powers, all as part of the process of modernization. By 1910 both foreigners and revolutionaries alike had started to fear that the Qing of the future would be similar to the Qing of the past, only better organized and better armed.

Cixi, the empress dowager, died on 15 November 1908. Her nephew, the Guangxu emperor, had passed away the day before—poisoned, it was said, by those who wanted to prevent him ever becoming ruler in his own right again. The empress dowager had dominated the Court for forty-seven years. Her aim in the last few years of her life, she said, was to prepare the dynasty for another domestic battle for power, as
happened with the great rebellions of the mid-nineteenth century. She agreed to the principle of a constitution and to limited forms of representative government in the provinces, measures that the Qing elite hoped would strengthen the dynasty’s claim to power at the center. Cixi also abolished the imperial examination system and began a series of administrative reforms, based on reports by officials who had visited the United States, Europe, and Japan. Already in 1901, after the Boxer disaster, Cixi had set out a new course of gradual reform: