Li Hung-chang /

Front matter

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PRINCETON, N. J.

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Contents

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General Editor’s Preface ..... v

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Chapter I

A Review of the Conditions existing in China at the Outset of Li Hung-chang’s Career.

In the sense that he was the proximate initiator of many of the changes which have tended to modify the structure and actions of the Chinese people since 1850, Li Hung-chang must undoubtedly be recognised as a maker of the nineteenth century. But, as Herbert Spencer observes, in his critical analysis of the “ Great-Man ” theory of history, it is necessary to remember that “ the Great Man must be classed with all other phenomena in the society that gave him birth, as a product of its antecedents. Along with the whole generation of which he forms a united part, he is a resultant of an enormous aggregate of forces that have been co-operating for ages.”

To obtain a just appreciation of the career of the greatest of modern China’s great men, it is expedient that we should study his genesis from this point of view, and carefully consider what were the social and political influences predominant in his environment.

Before proceeding to describe the life work of Li Hung-chang and its effect upon the history of modern China, it will be well, therefore, to review generally the conditions existing in the country at

L.H. B the beginning of his official career and to consider in particular the results produced thereupon by the forcible impact of Europe’s material civilisation. At the time when Li Hung-chang laid the foundations of his remarkable career as a military leader against the Taiping rebels, the invasion of China’s splendid isolation by the armies and traders of the West had already become a permanent factor, evidently destined to modify very seriously the sentiments and habits of the Chinese people. The suddenness and strength of the new forces thus brought to bear upon a people atavistically opposed to change rendered it inevitable that the process of adaptation would be difficult and fraught with much danger to the nation’s political institutions. The outstanding feature of Li Hung-chang’s genius as a statesman consists in that, almost alone amongst his contemporaries, he realised at once the strength of these new forces and the necessity of meeting them (as Japan was successfully doing) by radical modifications of the ancient systems of education and government. The principles and traditions of statecraft with which the government of China had heretofore been identified were those which, during long centuries of self-sufficient isolation, had proved effective in maintaining an autocratic system based on moral force, together with a type of civilisation remarkable for its homogeneous continuity. Li’s chief claim to greatness and the keynote to his long career of multifarious activity, lie in the fact that, from the outset, he perceived that steam-travel and the military science of the West must speedily relegate most of his country’s ancient traditions to the limbo of things useless and outworn. His efforts to lead his fellow-countrymen to perception of this truth and to minimise the perils of their rapidly changing environment were foredoomed to failure, not only because the Chinese people were by their nature incapable of accomplishing the swift transformation required of them, but because Li himself remained, in certain important respects, a mandarin true to type. It is undeniable that much of his work was tainted, and its utility impaired, by personal ambition and by the love of money, and that even his most progressive aspirations were occasionally vitiated by the prejudices born and bred in the Confucian literati . According to his lights — which shine with all the greater brilliance because of the deep darkness around him — he was courageous and patriotic ; his physical and mental energies were extraordinary, his resource infinite, and he displayed, both in adversity and prosperity, many admirable qualities. But when all is said and done, he remains essentially the natural product of his antecedents, imbued with the qualities and defects of the social state which produced him.

Let us consider briefly what were the conditions of that social state at the time of his first appearance on the political scene. The Taiping rebellion, in the suppression of which he first earned the gratitude of the Empress Dowager Tzu Hsi and a high place in the opinion of his contemporaries, had assumed serious dimensions in 1851. Li was then about

twenty-eight years of age ; he had just passed with distinction the final Palace examination of the classical curriculum, which secured his admission into the ranks of the Hanlin, or College of pre-eminent scholars. This great rebellion, which ravaged the Empire for over thirteen years, devastating nine provinces and reducing the population by more than a hundred millions, was one of those convulsions which all Chinese history shows to be of regular recurrence, an inevitable result of the economic conditions produced by the Chinese social system. As the present writer has pointed out elsewhere,

“ If we look back through the Chinese annals since the end of the Tang dynasty (or roughly speaking, since the Norman conquest of England), we find history persistently repeating itself in violent rebellions ; in the ejection, with great slaughter, of dynasties that had ‘ exhausted the mandate of Heaven ’ ; in regularly alternating periods of upheaval and recuperation ; all traceable, in almost rhythmical series, to a social system which has inculcated principles of passive resistance, together with procreative recklessness as a religious duty. Intervals of relief from economic pressure, of a kind more severe than anything Europe has experienced, have been bought at the price of cataclysms which have depopulated vast regions. Within the memory of living men, the whole process has been witnessed — provinces that were laid waste by the Taiping and Mahomedan rebellions have been re-peopled in one generation from the surplus of their neighbours, and, in the next, have once more been faced by the grim spectre of famine.” 1

So long as China remained geographically isolated and politically self-sufficient, these regularly recurring calamities of disorder and bloodshed, this thriftless breeding and wholesale destruction of superabundant lives, were accepted by rulers and ruled as part of the inevitable destiny of man. The recuperative powers of the race, intensified by the very fierceness of its struggle for life, and the solid cohesion of its

1 “ Recent Events and Present Policies in China ” (Heinemann, 1912).

national institutions, had always emerged successfully from these periodical paroxysms. The world’s most ancient and venerable civilisation had been built up, despite these calamities, and preserved in unparalleled longevity, by observance of the fundamental doctrine that the nation must be governed by moral rather than by physical force. But the Taiping rebellion differed from all earlier upheavals in that it was not allowed to run its natural course and to overthrow a dynasty which, under three successive Emperors, had proved itself degenerate and incapable of directing that moral force to the proper purposes of government. Foreigners had intervened, by force of arms, to support the degenerate and inefficient Manchus. They had succeeded in keeping the dynasty in its place ; nevertheless, its prestige of authority had been shaken beyond all hope of permanent recovery. For those who could read the writing on the wall, the future loomed darkly with imminent perils of change. Li Hung-chang, as a military commander under Tseng Kuo-fan, rapidly perceived, from personal experience in the field and from his relations with Gordon, Ward, Burgevine, and other foreigners, that the Western barbarians were possessed of forces which China could not hope to resist by any of her time-honoured expedients of military science or statecraft. With clear and rapid vision, he foresaw the inevitable consequences of the situation thus created ; he realised that China could never hope to re-establish the old order, or even to maintain her sovereign rights and independence, by persistence in the unbroken continuity of ancient traditions. Thereafter the whole history of his life is the record of his endeavours to bring home to his countrymen some perception of this truth. In the measure of his success in these endeavours, in the influence of his progressive ideas and administration on the present generation in China, lies his chief claim to be considered a maker of the nineteenth century. To show what that influence has been, and how achieved, is the purpose of this book.

That Li Hung-chang had grasped the vital significance of the impact of the West, and the necessity for reorganising China’s system of government and national defences to meet it, was clearly shown in a memorial which he addressed to the Throne in 1867. To this important document, which affords a key to all his subsequent career as diplomat and administrator, full reference will be made in due course. Suffice it here to say that it was chiefly remarkable for the fact that its writer, then Governor- General of the Hu Kuang provinces, boldly advocated reform on the ground that the political and military superiority of foreign nations was incontestable. To estimate the courage required to submit such a memorial to the Throne it is necessary to consider the political conditions of the country at that date and the mental equipment of his colleagues, the provincial viceroys and the dignitaries of the Metropolitan Boards. Broadly speaking, the Court of China at that period, the Censorate, the higher officials and the literati , remained in the condition of magnificent detachment from the outside world, which has characterised the rulers of the Middle Kingdom for the past two thousand years.

For the information of readers who may be unfamiliar with China’s system of government, a brief explanation of its principal features, as they existed under the last of the Manchu rulers, may serve to facilitate this study of the great Viceroy’s career. In theory, the government of the Chinese Empire, from remote ages until the beginning of the present century, was an absolute autocracy, a primitive form of Imperialism, based on ancestor worship and on the patriarchal institutions which have become part of the very life of the people by reason of the unbroken continuity of the Confucian system. But, in practice, the Emperor on his throne (except in the case of strong-minded sovereigns like Ch’ien Lung) was little more than the ornamental copingstone of the Celestial fabric of government. The routine of bis daily life, defined and confined at every point by the ordinances and regulations of the dynastic house-laws, made the Son of Heaven to all intents and purposes a prisoner within the walls of the Forbidden City. His role , as the Heaven-appointed centre of the family system, was to be the High Priest charged with the performance of the solemn ceremonies laid down in the Canons of the Sages. In the matter of personal initiative he enjoyed, indeed, less scope than the least of all the myriad functionaries of the official hierarchy. Even in the all-important matter of his civil list and privy purse, the absolute monarch of China was dependent on the goodwill and loyalty first of the official class, and, in the last resort, of the people. Such autocratic power as was exercised by the Government was actually vested in the mandarinate, but even this, as history shows, was always limited by the people’s readily-asserted right of rebellion, and by the fundamental fact that the whole fabric of authority under the Chinese system of government is a matter of moral, and not of physical, force. For this reason the theoretical autocracy of its officialdom has always been tempered in practice by the democratic instincts of the masses.

The late Mr. W. F. Mayers, in his standard work on the government of China, observed in 1877 :

“ The foundations of the Chinese State repose upon an all-pervading officialism, a bureaucracy trained through the national system of education to apply the maxims of government enunciated centuries before the dawn of the Christian era, and impelled by motives of self-interest to reject the introduction of all principles at variance with these venerable dogmas.”

And to this accurate description was added a timely word of warning addressed to the sanguine idealists who, even at that date, were predicting a sudden and radical change in the national character of the Chinese people and of all their political institutions :

“ An appreciation of this condition of affairs ” (he wrote) “ may possibly tend to correct the too sanguine views which have been entertained of a speedy entrance of the Chinese, as a Government and people, upon the path of European progress. In order that such a result should be accomplished, to any tangible extent, it would be necessary that the most cherished principles of the national religion should be abandoned, the idols of literary worship dethroned, and the recognised fountain of all honour deserted in favour of pursuits and doctrines which are now contemptuously ignored. A change such as this may, and perhaps will, be produced under the pressure of imperious necessity if not as the consequence of revolution ; but it would be a delusion to anticipate it as brought about by voluntary development.”

The long chaos and destruction of the Taiping rebellion shook the prestige of the Manchus beyond hope of permanent recovery, but it left the privileges and power of the mandarin undiminished and his complacent conceit undisturbed. Only one new feature distinguished the government of the Empire after i860 from that which had hitherto existed, namely, the creation of a special department of State for the conduct of foreign affairs. This was the famous Tsung-li Yamen, an invertebrate, gelatinous body, which, as time went on, became gradually more and more closely identified as regards its personnel with the fossilised Grand Council, and which faithfully reflected the latter’s stolid conservatism, tempered by slim elusiveness. For thirty years — that is to say, during the greater part of Li Hung-chang’s career as Viceroy — the Tsung-li Yamen’s chief function was to serve as a buffer between the Chinese Executive and the foreign representatives at Peking ; such activities as it displayed were directed towards curtailing rather than extending the country’s foreign relations. Its superfluous character was emphasised, until 1890, by the omission of all reference to its existence in the Government’s official list of State departments. As will be observed in the ensuing chapters, the conduct of China’s foreign affairs from 1870 to 1895 was practically vested in Li Hung-chang, in his dual capacity of Viceroy and Superintendent of Northern Trade. Li himself became a member of the Tsung-li Yamen upon his removal from the Chihli Viceroyalty after the Japanese war, in 1896. He lived long enough to see the establishment of the Waiwupu in its place in 1901, with powers and precedence which emphasised the helplessness of the old

IO order, and the Empress Dowager’s belated conversion to new methods of government. Had he lived to witness the collapse of the Manchu dynasty and the so-called revolution of 1911, he would have seen the mandarin tradition emerge once more unbroken from the welter of that chaos and maintaining its pride of place amidst all the crowding perils of economic and political upheaval. He would have seen the bureaucracy calmly triumphant above the conflict of Young China and Old.

Throughout Li’s career the autocratic powers ostensibly vested in the Throne were actually wielded by the high functionaries, metropolitan and provincial, who held their offices by appointment of the Court. And because of the physical and moral degeneration of the Imperial clans, which set in after the reign of Ch’ien Lung at the end of the eighteenth century, the Manchus’ waning prestige and inability to rule the country firmly were increasingly reflected in the proportion of Chinese to Manchus in the highest offices. At the beginning of the twentieth century the latter were hopelessly outnumbered and outclassed. For this reason the Court officials and Metropolitan Boards gradually lost their power of direct initiative from i860 to 1901, and their functions tended more and more towards supervision and exhortation. Only the Throne’s immemorial right to remove any and every official, without reason assigned, by Imperial Edict, and the unquestioning reverence for those decrees prescribed by the Confucian tradition, enabled the statecraft of the Empress Dowager to hold the Empire together, in a condition of unstable equilibrium, during her lifetime.

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In addition to the Grand Council — an advisory body which solemnly transacted State business daily in the presence of the Emperor — and the Grand Secretariat — whose functions had become largely honorific under the Manchus — the Throne was assisted in the governance of the Empire by the Six Boards and Nine Ministries at Peking, by the Memorials of the provincial viceroys and governors, and by the advice of the Censorate. It was the special duty of the body of Censors (fifty-six in all) to inform and advise the Emperor upon all matters affecting the conduct of the government and the welfare of the people. Their privileged position and functions had remained unaffected from one dynasty to another for over two thousand years. Even to-day, under the so-called Republic, they remain part of the unchanged and unchanging machinery of China’s bureaucratic administration. Under the last of the Manchu sovereigns the Censorate had come to reflect the general demoralisation of the public service ; the “ eyes and ears of the Throne ” were all too frequently at the disposal of the highest bidder, and their activities made to serve the base purposes of the warring political factions. Amongst them were always to be found a certain number of upright and brave men who steadily pursued the legitimate ends for which the Censorate had been created in the Golden Age, by denouncing public corruption and acting as a court of appeal against injustice in high places. Some there were who, relying on the tradition of inviolability which attached to their position, boldly exercised their right of criticising the abuses of the Court and of the Empress Dowager herself. But for the greater part the functions of the

Censors were exercised in base intrigues and venal espionage, or in conspiracies directed against high officials (such as Li Hung-chang), whose wealth and reputation invited the “ Outs ” to combine against them in the hope of plunder.

Finally, behind the visible and authoritative machinery of government, working “ in the profound seclusion of the Palace,” and in close and constant attendance on the fountain of all honour, were the eunuchs of the Court, a body of individuals whose influence in the business of the State had steadily increased since the reign of Chia Ch’ing. Linder the dissolute Emperor Hsien Feng these Palace myrmidons waxed fat and kicked, even as their predecessors had done towards the lamentable end of the Ming dynasty. After his death and during the regencies of his consort, the Empress Dowager Tzu Hsi, the baneful influence of the chief eunuchs, her bodyservants, became paramount, not only within the Palace precincts, but wheresoever within the Empire rank, titles, and preferment were to be bestowed by Imperial favour. Li Hung-chang, being withal a prudent man, and plus royaliste que le roi where Tzu Hsi was concerned, never hesitated to make for himself friends of the mammon of unrighteousness in the person of her favourite chamberlains, especially with the Chief Eunuch, Li Lien-ying, whose influence dominated all Palace politics from 1870 till the death of his Imperial mistress in 1908. According to the house-laws of the Manchu dynasty, no eunuch was allowed to hold any official position or to leave the capital upon any pretext whatsoever, and until the reign of Hsien Feng these rules had been enforced. But under the regencies of Tzu Hsi all the corruption i3 and intrigues, which had characterised the Court of the Mings in the decline of that dynasty, were reintroduced as the result of the power which she placed in the hands of the eunuchs. The countless abuses which they practised under her protection gradually increased during her reign, until, after the coup d’etat of 1898, her favourite Li Lien-ying, keeper of her privy purse, was wont to boast openly that he could make or mar the highest officials in the Empire and to defy the authority of the Emperor on his throne.1 At many points of Li Hung-chang’s career his hands were tied and his policies undone by the far-reaching intrigues of Li Lien-ying and his satellites, and this most notably in the matter of the financing of the navy during the period preceding the war with Japan and in regard to the secret agreements made with Russia thereafter. Even during the years 1889-98 of Kuang Hsii’s majority, while the Empress Dowager was living ostensibly in retirement at the Summer Palace, the unseen hand of Li Lien-ying continued to direct, through her, the appointment and dismissal of high functionaries and to reap the rich harvest of official squeezes therefrom resultant.

The influence of these “ sleek rogues ” of the Palace, like that of the fossilised mandarins of the Metropolitan Boards and of the Censorate, was opposed from the outset to the introduction of those liberal ideas and measures of reform which Li Hung-chang’s wider vision recognised as necessary for the salvation of the country.

In 1901, amidst the tumultuous chaos produced by the Boxer rising, Sir Robert Hart (always an optimist

1 Vide “ China under the Empress Dowager,” Chapter VI.

H where China was concerned) ascribed the unchanged and unchanging attitude of the ruling class in China to pride — “ inherited pride, in its massive and magnificent setting of blissful ignorance.”1 This attitude of haughty aloofness has since then been somewhat modified by the inexorable logic of events ; but at the time when Li Hung-chang first endeavoured to modify it by his outspoken appeals to reason, it was immovable in its “ pride of race, pride of intellect, pride of civilisation, pride of supremacy.” We may deplore the obstinate refusal of this innate pride to face obvious facts, but we can hardly withhold admiration for the indomitable spirit of the race, which held fast to its belief in the eventual triumph of moral over physical force, of right over might, which asserted its right to persist in its policy of splendid isolation, and continued to regard everything that was not Chinese as outer darkness.

Morally and intellectually, China in Li Hung-chang’s early days was essentially the China of antiquity — a cohesive social structure which, through good and evil fortune, despite innumerable shocks of rebellion and invasion, had preserved intact its splendid civilisation and all the fixed traditions of an agricultural people born and bred in ancestral worship and patriarchal Theism. Pride ourselves as we may upon the sciences and arts of European civilisation, upon our many inventions and mechanical achievements, there is surely something which commands instinctive respect, and sometimes even envious admiration, in China’s deliberate attitude of superiority to practical and utilitarian considerations, in the spectacle of her contemplative philosophy, trium-

1 “ These from the Land of Sinim ” (London, 1901).

*5 phant even amidst the ruins of its material habitation. This patriarchal system, and the moral philosophy upon which it is founded, had effectively welded a third of the human race into deep-rooted homogeneous nationality, long before Europe had emerged from savagery to the civilisation of Greece and Rome. And partly because of her geographical situation, partly because of a national self-sufficiency which experience had justified, China continued through the long centuries to ask nothing and to learn nothing of the “ lesser breeds without the law ” ; to dream her own dreams and pursue her own meditations, concerned more with ultimate causes than immediate results, and undisturbed, even in these latter days, by all the earth-shaking progress of the Western barbarian. Ever stronger than the claims of new creeds or the inventions of science, have been her ancient beliefs enshrined in the Canons of her Sages. At times, during the long twilight of her unbroken isolation, disturbing voices had reached her from the West. Indian invasions of her remote frontiers and Indo-Scythian conquests in Central Asia — faint echoes of the “ glory that was Greece ” — had been heard and recorded in watch-towers and Buddhist shrines along the farthest borders of the Western trade routes. Throughout the Middle Ages of Europe, Persians and Arabs and Hindus, the merchant adventurers who brought to her southern shores spices, frankincense, ivory, and precious stones, had carried with these cargoes many strange tales concerning the manners and customs of the outer barbarians and the great uncharted world of waters that lay beyond the outposts of the Middle Kingdom. From the Franciscan priests and Levantine traders, i6 who made their perilous journeys to Southern Cathay by way of the Indian Ocean, her rulers had acquired some fragmentary secondhand knowledge of Catholic Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries ; but the literati had remained nevertheless indifferent and complacently devoid of curiosity with regard to the outside world and its affairs. The prestige and influence enjoyed by Marco Polo and his relatives at the Court of Kublai Khan left little or no trace in the dynastic records and was soon completely forgotten in China, just as his description of Far Cathay in the thirteenth century had passed completely from the memory of the Western world until revived two hundred years later by the Portuguese navigators. These, in their turn, were disdainfully regarded by Peking as suppliant traders from barbarian lands, permitted on sufferance to trade at Canton, and that only under the most humiliating conditions.

With the arrival upon the scene of the first freetrading British merchants, after the abolition of the East India Company’s monopoly in 1834, a few of the more intelligent mandarins began to conceive a presentiment of impending danger and some idea of the forces that lay behind these traders from overseas. For more than three hundred years before Lord Napier became representative of the Crown (instead of the Company) at Canton, China’s intercourse with Europeans had produced nothing to disabuse her rulers’ minds of their ancient and venerable beliefs concerning their country as the fixed centre of the universe. Up to the time of the first war waged against them by Great Britain (1839-42) the Chinese Government, no less than the Chinese people, were i7 firmly convinced of the wisdom of the policy which the Dragon Throne had always followed in dealing with outer barbarians, namely, “ that the true and only right way of ruling them was by arbitrary misrule.” The Rev. Charles Gutzlaff, writing in 1838, correctly described the Celestial Empire of that date as “ absolutely separated from the whole world and viewing with indescribable contempt every other country.”1 All other nations were regarded as barbarians “ doomed to live at the extremities of the square-cornered earth, or upon some small islands of the Four Seas which surround the Middle Kingdom.” “ Conscious of its majesty,” says the same writer, “ it “ assumes the universal Empire of the World, sways “ the Four Seas and always rules by compassion. “ With equal tenderness it embraces all countries, but “ at the same time leaves distant barbarians to their “ lot, if they are so stupid as not to acknowledge the “ supremacy of the only civilised nation in the world.” This was the spirit which animated the rulers of China in their relations with the first envoys of Great Britain, Earl Macartney (1793) and Lord Amherst (1816) — a spirit which remained undisturbed by the reports which had then reached them, through Tibet and Nepal, of the dissolution of the Great Mogul’s Empire and the military superiority of the white race in India. The Imperial Mandate issued by the Emperor Ch’ien Lung to His Majesty King George III. a few days after his reception of Earl Macartney at Jehol, and that addressed by Chia Ch’ing to George IV. in 1816, display this spirit in all its massive ignorance.2

1 “ China Opened,” by the Rev. Charles Gutzlaff (Smith, Elder & Co.), London, 1838).

2 Vide “ Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking ” (Heinemann, 1913).

L h, c i8

After the first war with England, concluded by the Treaty of Nanking (1842), and until the appearance of Li Hung-chang upon the scene as an organiser of European mercenary forces against the Taiping rebels, the impact of the West may have opened the eyes of a few Chinese to the perils of a policy of contemptuous supremacy unsupported by force, but it certainly did nothing to diminish the arrogance of the Government at Peking or that of its representatives at the provincial capitals. Even the taking of Peking and the burning of the Summer Palace by the Anglo-French armies in i860 could not shake it ; for this national spirit of arrogance was due to a deep-rooted traditional sentiment, underlying all the people’s moral conceptions, rather than to any obvious facts or political convictions. This firmlyplanted conviction of moral superiority, bred in the bone of the Chinese ruling class and undisturbed for ages, was not to be lightly overthrown by any material successes of the foreigner. That the mandarins have always believed these successes to be accidental and hoped that they would prove to be temporary, is shown by the persistence of their attempts at various periods, down to their final effort in 1900, to “ drive the barbarians into the sea.” At no period in the history of its spasmodic relations with foreign Powers has the Government of China been sincerely converted to any of the political innovations imposed upon it by treaties ; never did any of the measures which it adopted aim at creating anything more than the machinery to render these treaties inoperative.

This observation applies with particular force to the period which followed the return of the Court to Peking from Jehol in i860 and the short-sighted l9 intervention of the Allies to support the Manchu dynasty against the Taiping rebellion. The moral effect of these first wars and of the early treaties was speedily dissipated, and the mandarins took heart of grace when they realised that the foreign Powers were definitely committed, in their own avowed interests, to the policy of maintaining the integrity of China and to the international jealousies which that policy could not fail to create. Chinese diplomacy from i860 onwards repeatedly waxed bold by perception of the paradoxical truth that its political strength lay in the Empire’s moral weakness ; and the success which for nearly half a century it achieved in the matter of playing off one barbarian against another tended to increase rather than to diminish the mandarin’s contempt for the intelligence of the foreigner. Li Hung-chang differed from the most distinguished of his contemporaries, both as diplomat and as administrator, in that, while he fully shared their dislike and distrust of the European, he did not share their contempt. How greatly his discrimination in this respect exceeded that of the other high officials and advisers of the Throne becomes evident when we compare his memorials and despatches with those of the Viceroys and governors, his colleagues. The State papers of the most famous of the famous Yangtsze Viceroys, Chang Chih-tung and Liu K’un-yi, continued to the end to represent faithfully and without shadow of change the orthodox mandarin’s conception of China as the centre of the universe, and the Confucian scholar as the fragrant flower of that centre.