Government in Republican China Part 8

A military and police is maintained sufficient to crush merely factious risings, but totally inadequate, both in numbers and in nature, to put down a disgusted and indignant people. But though no despotism, this same government is in form and machinery a pure autocracy. In his district the magistrate is absolute; in his province, the governor; in the empire, the Emperor. The Chinese people have no right of legislation, they have no right of self-taxation, they have not the power of voting out their rulers or of limiting or stopping supplies. _They have therefore the right of rebellion._ Rebellion is in China the old, often exercised, legitimate, and const.i.tutional means of stopping arbitrary and vicious legislation and administration.[9]

Thomas Taylor Meadows, the author just quoted, also noted that "of all nations that have attained a certain degree of civilization, the Chinese are the least revolutionary and the most rebellious."[10] _Revolution_ is a word broad enough to include principles; _rebellion_, more narrowly, suggests action against men. The same tight, enduring system of ideological control served to restrain the Chinese in their thinking even when they had the material power sufficient to shake off their past and build Utopia in its place. Rebels themselves obeyed the unwritten precepts. The triumph of the civilians was complete: with infantry prevailing on the battlefield, the peasants were the strongest; and with the total population saturated in compelling, uniform ideas of right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate, the scholars had only to await the establishment of administration to a.s.sume the leaders.h.i.+p. Against malgovernment, the populace retained the power of rebellion. Against misrule, the scholars held the power which came to them as interpreters of a vast and persuasive code of tradition. Whereas Western courts, citing the past, can negate the acts of the executive or legislative by interpretation or annulment, the Chinese scholars would do the same not merely for law, but for manners, morals, thoughts, and social activities as well. The great peasant armies, though able to destroy military dictators.h.i.+p, were by their very nature too loosely organized to establish it.

_The Military Organization of the Manchu Dynasty_

Although the Manchus, who conquered China in the first half of the seventeenth century and ruled it until the opening of the twentieth, did not profoundly modify Chinese culture, they affected the military scheme. The general outline of Chinese war and its place in society remained largely the same; but there were two innovations: the establishment of a warrior caste and the introduction of military techniques from the West.

The Manchus were a non-Chinese people living in the northeastern peripheral zone of Chinese civilization. They had adopted the Chinese form of empire and bureaucracy in their capital at Mukden in the early seventeenth century, before advancing toward China proper. Invited by the Chinese to lend their aid in a civil war, the Manchus found themselves excelling in effectiveness and leaders.h.i.+p, which soon led them to conquer the whole country. The numerical disproportion between Chinese and Manchus was such that the conquerors would never have taken over the Empire and founded a new dynasty (the Ch'ing) had they not been a.s.sisted by large numbers of Chinese. On the other hand, the spectacular terrorism of the Manchu cavalry was a potent weapon, and the Manchus did not feel that they owed their throne entirely to the Chinese. They were in the anomalous position of half-conquerors, a people coming into China partly as aliens and partly as the new leaders of the Chinese. At the very beginning of their rule (commonly dated 1644) they had to decide on a policy to determine their relations with the Chinese: Should they allow their people to mingle with and disappear into the vast Chinese ma.s.ses, or should they attempt a policy of racial separateness to keep their blood clear of Chinese dilution? Underlying this question there was the even more practical one: Should the Manchus rule China simply as another imperial house, or should they attempt to maintain their status as a racially separate caste of conquerors?

There is a Chinese legend which tells of a high minister of state, a Chinese in the service of the Manchu conquerors, who saw no remedy from the oppression of China in his own generation, but who nevertheless worked with craftily concealed patriotism to sow the undoing of the house of the Ch'ing. He recommended to the Manchus that they keep their fighting men from demoralization by ordaining that no Manchu warrior should enter any trade or profession but those of warfare and public administration, and that they should guard the ancient heritage of their valiant blood by making miscegenation a crime. Thus he schemed to stiffen the Manchu monarchy in a position of unbounded arrogance, so that a few generations of peace would find its armies sloven, atrophied, and useless, and its people still alien to the Chinese. With neither military power to overawe the ma.s.ses nor popular affection to uphold their foreign-rooted dynasty, they were bound to go down; all this, the legend tells, the Chinese adviser who lived and died with high Manchu honors clearly foresaw. Actually the Manchus did move in such a direction, and with the prophesied results.

They had conquered China with their own tribal-military system intact, organized into units termed _banners_. Unable to hold the country by their own force alone and, after putting down serious rebellions, unwilling to depend on the Chinese, they arranged a method of dual garrisoning. A Manchu military hierarchy paralleled the Chinese bureaucracy throughout the Empire, and Manchu bannermen were placed in every city of strategic importance. The Manchu garrisons were made up of men destined to arms, men who were the descendants of the wild hors.e.m.e.n of the northeastern plains, but who soon became tragic and useless idlers. Forbidden entrance into the vast and vital civilian society of the Chinese, by a decree of their own kinsman on the throne, they spent generation after generation in profound peace, forgetting war and losing their self-respect as warriors. Whatever the reason, they did not engage in practices such as the extended hunts, amounting in fact to great army maneuvers, by which Kublai Khan kept his Mongol troops hard and ready for war. An English writer, familiar with the state of the Manchu garrisons in their last years, thus described them:

But, unhappily, the inactive bannermen, both at Peking and in the provinces, had towards the end degenerated into idle, flabby, and too often opium-smoking parasites; they had long neglected to keep up their archery, which in any case had become useless in these days of magazine rifles, though it might have nourished a wholesome muscular habit of body if persisted in.... In the provinces these degenerate Manchus were often, practically, honourable prisoners, rigidly confined within the limits of the city walls, in the midst of a semi-hostile population speaking a dialect which the bannermen ... had to learn, ... if they wished even to buy a cabbage in the streets; and the Tartar General, who nominally outranked even the Chinese Viceroy, was really often a self-indulgent, ignorant incompetent.[11]

Politically, the Chinese found themselves face to face with a foreign group imbued with an arrogant racial pride and determined to maintain a separate existence. The Manchus did not bend to the superior numbers of the Chinese, nor yield to the attractions of Chinese culture. They maintained the Manchu language at the innermost citadel of Chinese civilization--the Forbidden City at Peking--and stamped their West Asiatic script on the money of the Empire. They worked out schemes by which the Manchus would retain a majority in the highest offices of the Empire, on the sole ground of race. Elementary rationalizations of two opposing racial att.i.tudes were the result. The Manchu policy fortified and brought back from the past the racial pride of the Chinese. They were not merely the civilized heart of humanity; they were, civilization or no civilization, bound together by blood. If the Manchu garrisons served no other purpose, the presence of alien troops in the cities taught the Chinese the first lessons of resentment; it prepared them for the vigorous racial-nationalist appeal which the Nationalists were to put forth.

Governmentally, the effect of Manchu dual government was to force the Chinese to an increased consciousness of the implied presuppositions of their social and political system. The use of the garrisons const.i.tuted one of the four main causes of Manchu decline; the second cause was the violation of the strict merit system by racial preference in the bureaucracy; the other two were failure to maintain domestic tranquillity, and corruption in the hierarchy of scholar-officials.[12]

Manchu rule by military power was unrealistic and a political affront.

Their army of permanent occupation committed slow suicide in idleness and at the same time kept the Manchu dynasty from nativizing itself so that the Chinese might think of it as Chinese. Their creation of a hierarchy of bannermen, paralleling the older Chinese civilian inst.i.tutions, brought to the surface of thought those prejudices and a.s.sumptions which had guided and controlled Chinese destiny for centuries. Government and society had been one to such a degree that the special features of a universal control did not require legalization or sharp tracing. The Manchus removed government from the rest of society by staining it with militarism and racial preference; it became ominously disparate and a conspicuous target for examination and consideration.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Manchu rule brought into a sharper focus the largely unformulated const.i.tutional theory which had underlain the Chinese imperial society for nearly twenty centuries. With the sharper demarcation of rulers and ruled, the Manchus had to make frequent and overt use of legal authority over the ideology. The Chinese read of the sanction of rebellion in their own cla.s.sics; they could turn to their histories for a description of the ign.o.ble origins of their present masters. The dynasty turned therefore to literary censors.h.i.+p and ordered extensive excisions from all writings scholarly, artistic, or other, which might weaken the prestige of their house.[13] They ordained a most rigid and dogmatic interpretation of the cla.s.sics so as to suit their purposes. This the Chinese met with sharp criticism. The literary struggle did much to weaken the scholastic cla.s.s and to deprive the Manchus of academic supporters. At the same time it deprived the peasant Chinese of their natural leaders, with the consequence that secret and half-literate political a.s.sociations faced an arbitrary government military in character. The old Chinese system remained, but it became more and more of a form with every generation. The theory of moral agency and ideological control was defamed by the very presence of the barbarian garrisons. The barbarians themselves weakened so much that in the later days of the Manchu Empire the military occupation became a myth instead of being a political fact. For the time being, however, Manchu military organization acted as a force-displaying agency until the scholars and the less favored cla.s.ses of society were able to combine in a revolution.

Pacific government, government by moral agency, derives its greatest powers from a.s.sent and agreement; it thrives on symbolization and is never necessarily dependent upon the display of outright force.

Government by force, on the other hand, remains effective almost in proportion to the exercise and vigor of that force; stereotyped and ritualized, it is essentially weak. Purely ceremonial administration and offices may be a burden on the body politic, yet their dignity may make up for their lack of efficiency. But an army that cannot fight is an object of ridicule, and its very presence a challenge to the resources of intelligence.

The Manchu garrisons in the key cities were under the command of Manchu military officers, whom Europeans dubbed with the picturesque t.i.tle of _Tartar Generals_. The garrisons were made up of three racial elements: Manchu, Mongol, and Chinese. The Chinese in the banner armies were the descendants of soldiers in the renegade Han army (_han chun_), the Chinese section of the Manchu-Mongol-Chinese formations which conquered China for the Manchus in the seventeenth century. The military organization seems to have been a simplified copy of civilian bureaucracy, with examiners, censors, and other familiar devices of Chinese government appearing in quasi-military form. The principle of merit was violated, however, in that certain categories of men claimed special rank by hereditary right.[14] It was also possible for some of the bannermen to transfer between the civilian and the military branches of the government.

In the early nineteenth century the _han chun_ possessed considerable artillery. There was a separate navy, comprising more than two thousand war vessels equipped from a score of dockyards. Even then, Chinese military technology was markedly inferior to European; the Chinese navy was no match even for Europe's wooden wars.h.i.+ps. When ironclads entered Far Eastern waters and breech-loading cannon were employed, the difference made Chinese naval and artillery establishments almost antiquarian in nature. With most of the banner forces of the Empire kept at Peking and the rest scattered over the country in the great cities, the Manchu force was widely diffused. In practice their armies hardly exceeded a quarter of a million men; whatever the exact total, the military were outnumbered far over a thousand to one by the Chinese, in the realm which the Manchus supposedly held by conquest.

The effective army in the later years of the Ch'ing dynasty was formed for the most part of the Green Standard (_lu ying_), provincial regulars, and the vast hordes of irregulars (_yung_, or "braves") who have traditionally done the greater share of the fighting in Chinese history. The Green Standard troops appear to have suffered, although to a lesser degree, from the long peace which ruined the banner armies, but their use in major police enterprises and troubles with primitive peoples kept them from the utter demoralization of the banners. The common practice under the Ch'ing was to recruit the local toughs, to appoint their leaders as probationary officers, and to use such emergency armies for real and immediate fighting. Although the Manchu dynasty had no system of organized reserves and little machinery for rapid mobilization, they were thus nevertheless able to swell their armies to astonis.h.i.+ng numbers in a very short while. American military commentators said in 1900 that the peacetime size of the Chinese imperial army was about three hundred thousand men and its wartime strength about one million--minute figures for China's reserve of man power--and added:

The total strength of the standing army of China can not be exactly ascertained, and if a statement of the number of men belonging to it could be given, it would be of little value, as many of the men who are carried on the rolls are neither armed nor equipped, and a great number of them are not even performing military service, but are following their usual vocations.[15]

This military regime bears the air of a vast preparation for some foreseen but remote emergency. The Manchus themselves seemed to sleep; armies drowsed through the centuries, weapons rusting, tactics forgotten in the mimicry of parade, while all about them the factual potency of military power pa.s.sed to the Chinese. Even the Europeans at first shared the illusion of great although latent military power behind the Manchu throne. The easy defeat of the Manchu Chinese forces in the wars with England and France in the early and middle nineteenth century led writers such as Thomas De Quincey to cry out against the great fraud of Asia--the sleeping Manchu giant, who was not sleeping but dead.

The T'ai-p'ing rebellion[16] lasting from 1849 to 1865 provided an actual test of military power in the Manchu Empire, and demonstrated two remarkable new facts. First, the real forces were no longer the regular troops, whether banner or Green Standard, but the militia which might be organized and trained for immediate results by robust civilians like the viceroys Li Hung-chang and Tseng Kuo-fan.[17] Second, the military technique of the Far East was obsolete; even a little Western equipment, leaders.h.i.+p, and training made any Chinese army immediately more effective. The consequences were contradictory. If the military regime of the Manchus existed only in a formal sense, and actual power had pa.s.sed to the Chinese ma.s.ses, who had only to await a leaders.h.i.+p to exhibit their power, then force had failed and government by moral agency would again be the need of the epoch. At the same time, the introduction of Western technique showed the possibility of a new regime of force, another opportunity for a minority to overwhelm the vast majority by sheer technical military effectiveness, and government by moral agency could not be sufficient. The center of military gravity would not simply pa.s.s to the group possessing the largest army. A new form of government, making intelligent use of modern weapons, was called for.

Undoubtedly China was and is too large to be governed by mere military occupation--unless forces far larger than any which have heretofore operated in the Far East are employed. The very garrisoning of the country would absorb tremendous armies. At the same time, military force is sufficient to overawe and intimidate civilians in any given area, since the man with a rifle is superior to the man with the crossbow or spear. Conceivably, however, a rhythm may originate between the progress in introducing new weapons and the progress of the populace in learning new means of counteraction. In 1860 the British and French entered Peking and later burned the Summer Palace of the Manchu emperors as a lesson to the imperial government. The expedition, casual when measured by Western standards, showed that the Manchu bannermen and Chinese levies were equally powerless before the intrusion of a more advanced skill in warfare. As soon as peace was declared the Chinese began organizing some of their metropolitan forces after the Western manner, obtaining foreign instructors to put them through the Western manual of arms.

At the same time that the Manchu court was learning to its discomfort the importance of Western warfare, it was calling Westerners to its aid in putting down the T'ai-p'ings. The Manchus a.s.sembled a nineteenth century navy including steam vessels from British and other sources, which broke up without having accomplished much. With land forces there was much greater success; an American, Frederick Townsend Ward, and an Englishman, Major Charles George ("Chinese") Gordon, organized a small body of imperial regular troops along Western lines and with Western officers. This force was given the honorific t.i.tle of "Ever Victorious Army" by the court, and together with the militia organized by Tseng Kuo-fan and Li Hung-chang suppressed the T'ai-p'ing rebellion after the banner and Green Standard armies had failed.

The ensuing thirty years (1865-1895) witnessed the slow decline in Manchu foreign policy and military development and a gradual crumbling of Chinese society at large. Revolutionaries such as Sun Yat-sen received their first baptism of Westernization in the 1870's and 1880's, and foreign trade rose by great leaps. Occasionally the Empire's military regime seemed to rally. Between 1883 and 1885 the Chinese forces fighting the French in Indo-China were equipped with Mannlicher rifles far more up-to-date than the weapons of their enemies. In the preceding decade the Chinese destroyed a Mohammedan state set up in Chinese Turkestan in defiance of their suzerainty, and overawed the Russians into evacuating an area along the Ili seized under the pretence of maintaining order. The lack of coordination between the different agencies of government was as much to blame for China's weakness as were the specific defects of the central departments. When the army was winning, the diplomatic agencies yielded; when the army was unprepared, the diplomatic agencies, by some ill-timed impertinence, gave aliens the pretext for hostilities.

The first Sino-j.a.panese War (1894-1895) offered another test. Hitherto, the armed conflicts with Europeans, even including the entry of Westerners into Peking in 1860, had seemed remote from the actual problem of military power in China. The Europeans might possibly withdraw and leave the Empire in peace. But incalculable danger would arise to Chinese prestige should the _wo_, the sea dwarfs, defeat the Chinese and eat more deeply into the mainland. Chinese began to realize that in this war their status was at stake, not only in the dimly perceived wide universe of the Westerners but also in that of the Far East in which they had long held such comfortable hegemony. They entered the war relatively well equipped, so that even outside observers were doubtful of the outcome of the struggle. No one was more amazed than the Chinese themselves when they were whipped as no modern nation has been whipped, routed ignominiously in a sequence of slaughters, and ultimately forced to make important territorial and financial concessions to the j.a.panese.

This catastrophe was followed by a series of reforms, some designed to enable China to meet the West on its own ground. In January, 1896, a turning point was reached with the appointment of Yuan s.h.i.+h-k'ai to command the one efficient brigade a.s.sembled in the course of the war.[18] Yuan was to find in modern arms the career which led to his dictators.h.i.+p after the fall of the Empire, and was to perform notable work as a military and administrative reformer, although of restricted value. He joined the reactionaries and brought to an end the Hundred Days of Reform of 1898, a movement generated by the initiative of the idealistic young Emperor Kuang Hsu, who sought to direct China into the course already taken by j.a.pan--modernization within the imperial system.

In 1900 there occurred the wild upheaval of the Boxers. It began as a native racial uprising against the Manchus, but was deflected by the Manchus into the support of the court and hostility against the Western intruders. During the Boxer movement part of the fighting against the Westerners was done by regular banner and Green Standard troops, but the greater part by bands of desperadoes and fanatics. The imperial army suffered in the chaos following the international occupation of Peking.

Under the name of the _Wu Wei Chun_ the first large-scale attempt was made to modernize the Chinese armed forces. After the military and naval experiments of the 1860's and later decades, this enterprise evoked great hopes. The new army was inaugurated in 1895 with foreign instruction and foreign arms. In 1901 one division was made the core of Yuan s.h.i.+h-k'ai's new modern force. Rodney Gilbert, a British publicist, has summarized the military changes down to the end of the Manchu dynasty as follows:

In January 1901 the Yangtze Viceroys submitted a memorial to the Throne suggesting among other things the disbandment of the useless _Lu Ying_ [Armies of the Green Standard], the employment of the Bannermen, almost as useless, in service other than military, and the creation of a modern army. This brought forth an Imperial decree ordering reorganization of the army, of which Yuan s.h.i.+h-kai, then Viceroy of Chihli, took advantage to build up six new divisions, four of which were transferred to the Ministry of War in 1906. This was the real beginning of the _Lu Chun_, the Chinese National Army. In January, 1905, a comprehensive scheme was outlined designed to give China an army of 36 Divisions or 360,000 men, by the year 1911. Three years after this decision was made there were about 60,000 men, with 360 guns, in the North, and 40,000 men, with 174 guns, in the South.

The army was developing along sound lines when Yuan s.h.i.+h-kai was removed from office in 1908 after the death of his great patroness the Empress Dowager, and the direction of military, as well as other affairs, fell into the hands of the Manchu princes, whose mismanagement contributed much to the downfall of their dynasty three years later.[19]

The beginning, although auspicious, did not mean that even the model sections of the modernized forces were comparable to those of other lands. The confusion of weapons was already evident. A member of the United States General Staff wrote in 1910:

To arm these ma.s.ses China has been obliged to use weapons that are considered somewhat out of date. There are four types of rifles, mostly Mausers and j.a.panese Murata rifles of old pattern. They are, however, breech-loading, small-caliber weapons, not to be despised, even if they do not reach the ideal which some nations set. In fact they are the weapons which have been used in the great wars of most recent date.

It is so also with the artillery where even a greater difference of types is to be observed. This is, undoubtedly, a serious drawback, owing, of course, to the great difficulty of providing ammunition.[20]

It was during this period, from the decisive defeat of the dynasty by j.a.pan in 1895 to the Republican Revolution of 1911-1912, that the Chinese revolutionaries most eagerly studied military manuals and sought to purchase Western arms to offset the great advantages gained by the modernized portions of the imperial army. Sun Yat-sen became almost as much a military authority as he was a political philosopher and leader; his chief military follower, General Huang Hsing, performed for the revolutionaries the services rendered for the regime by Yuan s.h.i.+h-k'ai.

On both sides there was the anxiety to master the mysteries of twentieth century warfare. The World War had not yet begun, nor had the staggering burdens of modern armament become evident. Great as were the improvements in fighting, prewar military organization seemed still primarily a matter of well-equipped infantry, properly led, properly drilled, and supported by adequate artillery and other auxiliary services. Wireless, gas, airplanes, tanks, submarines, torpedo launches, and mechanized or aerialized infantry were little more than a matter of speculation. The proportions of present-day military budgets no one could foresee.

_The Army and the Republican Revolution_

The Republican Revolution of 1911-1912 was the last overt act in the collapse of the ideologically maintained social system; it brought armies into violently free play in the support of movements toward re-formation of the ideology and articulation and control of the society. On October 10, 1911, the troops of the Wuch'ang garrison rose in mutiny and sided with the revolution. A series of uprisings engineered by military and agitational leaders followed, province by province, all directed against the imperial power in the North. The use of violence in Chinese politics served to accentuate a condition which had affected China even in the earliest historic times--the unresolved contradictions between the North and the South. Differences of race, spoken language, and economy produced fundamental cleavages accentuated by temperament. Traditionally the North was more conservative and solidaristic, the South more rebellious and enterprising. Sun Yat-sen was a Southerner; militarism reached its sharpest effectiveness in the North.

Yuan s.h.i.+h-k'ai, who had proved himself the evil genius of Emperor Kuang Hsu by betraying the monarch's reforms of 1898, was called to the aid of the Manchus only to betray them to the Republic; he then served the Republic with the intention of seizing complete power for himself. The Republicans set up their regime in Nanking on January 1, 1912, with Sun Yat-sen as president. They established contact with Yuan, who acted in the triple capacity of negotiator for the Manchus, representative of the modernized armies of the North (which were his), and leader in his own right and in his own interest. The Republicans realized that Yuan could not be dispossessed--indeed, it is fairly certain that he could have upheld the throne had he so wished. Their power was indefinite, and as Chinese they preferred compromise and order to ideals pushed to the bitter end. In the middle of February they yielded to Yuan, and Sun surrendered to him the presidency as a reward for his allegiance to the Republic. Yuan, for the Manchus, secured a settlement by which the Forbidden City (the residence of the emperor in Peking) was made into a second Vatican City; the emperor was allowed his formal and ritual t.i.tles (a status remarkably like that of the Pope) and a very substantial stipend. For the Northern armies and himself Yuan obtained actual power over the country. A civilian, but a soldier as well, Yuan rose by both intrigue and the implied threat of force.

The Republic was launched by valedictory imperial edicts ordering the imperial officials throughout the realm to obey Yuan and the new form of government; by Republicans nominally headed by their greatest and coldest antagonist; and by a soldier of higher professional standing in the Western sense than any Chinese leader for centuries past undertaking the task of keeping order and ushering China through drastic reconstruction. For a few halcyon months it seemed as though the Republic might grow into reality from under the aegis of military dictators.h.i.+p.[21] But soon it became apparent that the revolution was not a transfer of power and renovation of order but the dissolution of power and the erasure of order. What was left was ideological uncertainty, social turmoil, economic disorganization--with politics reduced to mere pageantry, and the armies, ominously growing under the care of President Yuan, maintaining what little order was left to maintain. In 1913 the Nationalist-Republicans rebelled in the Yangtze valley and were crushed by the armies of the government of the Republic of China.

From the military rule of Yuan s.h.i.+h-k'ai there emerged an army system which was to bring China to almost complete political ruin in the decade after Yuan's death. Although he organized a model regiment as a sample of what could be done in China, inflation of numbers and deterioration of morale and _materiel_ were the most obvious symptoms of the new role of the army--a role much more concerned with problems of domestic intrigue than with defense against the outsiders. For an army of national defense, high technical excellence and a commensurate smallness of numbers are desirable features; for an army of dictators.h.i.+p or occupation, inferior equipment, poor supplies, and inefficient training are all trifling handicaps in comparison with the advantage of vast numbers which can be used to garrison large sections of the realm and meet the threat of civil war. The very s.h.i.+ft from empire to republic involved the enlistment of additional thousands of revolutionary fighters; once in the army, they were hard to dislodge. The personal military interests of Yuan led him to expand the army, and his political ambitions nourished the thought that the country would be secure beneath him only through the medium of an extensive garrison system. Finally, there was a far-reaching s.h.i.+ft in the Chinese social pyramid. Men of intelligence and of education flocked to the army, and j.a.pan's military schools were crowded with young Chinese who saw in war their easiest avenue to fortune or to the service of their country.

A reconst.i.tuted army, soldiers who could command greater respect than ever before, numerical extension and qualitative deterioration of the national armed forces--these were the more patent military changes under the Republic. To them must be added the factors fusing the elements into a system that was to bring immediate fortune and ultimate ruin to practically all who ventured into its operations. Many of the provinces which turned to the cause of the revolutionaries in 1911 and 1912 became gradually militarized. When the Manchus were gone, the old distinction between the Tartar General and the civilian viceroy had lost its purpose; the new provincial executives combined both military and governmental powers. Provincial jealousies and the growing disorder favored a strong factual autonomy for the various provinces, even though there was no technical claim of provincial independence and very little even of confederation. The first Republic was in name a centralized parliamentary-presidential state with quasi-federal features; in fact it was the combination of an impotent, headless imperial bureaucracy and a presidential military dictators.h.i.+p possessing physically limited and indefinable authority over a large group of provinces. Between China and the accomplishment of regular and orderly republican government there stood ignorance, turmoil, poverty, reaction, and despair. Between Yuan's regime and the _tuchun_ system there stood only Yuan's might.

NOTES

[1] Herrlee G. Creel, _The Birth of China_, p. 141, London, 1936.

[2] _Ibid._, pp. 142-154.

[3] Marcel Granet, _Chinese Civilization_, p. 270, New York, 1930.

Quoted by permission of the American publishers, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

[4] Henri Maspero, _La Chine antique_, p. 131, Paris, 1927. This is one of the most valuable surveys of ancient China.

[5] An elementary discussion of this period is to be found in Paul M.

A. Linebarger, _The Political Doctrines of Sun Yat-sen_, pp. 25-29, "Nation and State in Chinese Antiquity," Baltimore, 1937.

[6] Pan Ku (H. H. Dubs, translator), _The History of the Former Han Dynasty, pa.s.sim_, Baltimore, 1938.

[7] In a memorandum prepared in response to a request by the present writer.

[8] _Ibid._