Edwin John Dingle

“ Wrapped intertwiningly into the private and the national life of the Chinese, this Dragon has reigned supreme over a make-believe, a show of things, and innate insincerity and hollowness unparalleled anywhere among civilised peoples. The Chinese has, because of the Dragon, cramped himself into strange shapes all down through history, and the world has not known what to do with him, so foreign has been his aspect. But now the Revolution tells us that China and hundreds of millions of her people have changed irretrievably—so much must be taken for granted. ”

“ To give to the Chinese an education only along lines laid down in the West as the best for men in the West would not guarantee the best being drawn out of the Chinese. There must be a commingling of the best the West has to offer with that which has been proved best for China unquestioned through the centuries of her wonderful history. It may or may not be a mistake of modern educationists to pound away only with Western subjects in educating the Chinese, not only not giving any heed to the preservation of the good in Chinese education, but openly dissuading its continuance. ”

“ Yet it brought the Chinese politics a new force to be reckoned with—the foreigner, with his law of extra-territoriality. The awakening of China began with the utter defeat of the Imperial forces by the troops of Japan, and a craving to know the reason of it all obsessed the nation's mind. "Let us go to school with the foreigner; let us study his books" became the nation's watchword. Then there began to dawn in China the thought that far too much national wealth and power and prestige had been handed over to foreign control. There was alarm, suspicion, bitter animosity—and the Boxer movement. ”

“ Every one who saw him daily, looked upon a man, definite to a degree in aim and purpose, free from self-aggrandisement and selfishness in any form. His aim first and last was to uplift his country, to win the throne for the Han people, and to work with all his might for the downfall of Manchu rule, for by that alone, he believed, could China forge ahead as such a mighty nation deserved and as her brightest sons desired that she should. ”

“ To China the sweeping into eternity of thousands of fellow-mortals is for the benefit of those who remain, and the destruction of property in their national hysteria matters not a moment of passing thought. So to those of us who know China, and who cannot believe that all that we see and hear is true of the bewildering reform that is alleged to have caught the country and its people into its arms, it was not a great surprise to see the Imperialists carrying out their threat to burn the city to ashes. ”

“ The present agitation for a Republic has carried to the people as a mass only the idea that popular government means no taxes and no government. I can see in it, under existing conditions, no promise of stability, at least not for several tens of years. Among the progressives of the Empire there are now two schools of thought, one favouring a Republic and the other a constitutional monarchy. I doubt whether the people of China are at the present time ripe for a Republic or whether under present conditions a Republic is adapted to the Chinese people. ”

“ Moreover, your duty, Sir, is to profit the many, not the few, to save the people, not to destroy them, to help your own race and not the alien, and to stand by the righteous and not by the wicked. The Manchurian yoke has been the barrier against the growth and development of the Han people. It is the Manchus who would not send many students abroad at an earlier date in order to acquire Western civilisation and education. It is the Manchus who will not put the returned students into proper position. It was the Manchu that roused the Boxer Revolt, which has weakened the Empire and made it poor. ”

“ They seem to be racing, each section of that horrid fire appearing to be vieing with that other section in killing and burning, in slow death, many peaceable people who were unable to flee. On it goes again, and upwards, downwards, in, out, back, forth; sometimes it comes to a greater mass, which yields less readily, and there it sits, like some great bird of prey, until its conquest is at hand, and then goes forward again with a furious glee. ”

“ My personal opinion is that to-day, not perhaps less than in 1900, there are many places in China where the unveneered feeling of the Chinese towards the foreigner has not changed. But with that, at present, I can have nothing to do, and I trust that this Revolution will not unfold to us further stories—such as had to be told in Sianfu in Shensi last winter—that will make sad reading. China has gained, and is still fast gaining, strength in naval and military strategy, knowledge in education, in art, in science, in commerce, in all that she has set her heart upon from outside. ”

“ There had been many civil wars in the world before—Wars of the Roses and many others which had had their historical significance—but as one seemed to gaze out upon a great country like China and a people who go to make up one-fourth of the human race, slowly was the fact borne in upon one's mind that this civil war had a significance that perhaps belonged to none other. ”

“ But no one, realising now that the Manchu rule in China has passed for ever, will doubt that, with such excellent qualities of common sense and eminent industry as the Chinese possess, we shall see a nation move that may move the world with it. The day will assuredly come, perhaps it is not so very far distant, when the Occidental observer will look around to see the globe girdled with an indissoluble bond of Chinese peoples, no longer too weak for aggression, but independent in all departments of national life. They will be taken up as equals into social relations of the white races. ”

“ There cannot be equality and fraternity in government. There is much truth in Lao Tzu's paradox, 'When the people are difficult to control it is because they possess too much worldly wisdom.' Democracy is an idol many of its worshippers are ceasing to respect, and facts should be known before a temple to its honour is erected in China. What is wanted is an Autocracy in its proper place, not an autocracy of birth, of money, or of clamour, but an autocracy of character, of self-sacrifice, and ability. ”

“ It is in very truth a New China, and no one who, with a mildly understanding heart, watches China to-day can fail to see in all parts of the Empire that are known to civilisation much which forms a good augury in the Revolution, the genuineness of a common impulse, an impulse linked {243} with a dogged persistence of effort to get out of the shallows of the past into the depths of the future—a glimpse beyond the garden and cloister of Chinese antiquity into the wonderful golden age, if the Revolutionary party is blessed. ”

“ To rise from total obscurity in the life of a nation to the highest point of political fame is rarely given to any man. To change the whole tendencies of the national life of a people is rarely given to one man. But no one man ever in history was able to mould anew the social and political outlook of a quarter of the whole human race, as did Li Yuan Hung when he led the Chinese Revolution. ”

“ The Japanese in business in China is not the soul of honour. He has to be watched. It is not possible here to speak at length on the unprincipled and shady tactics employed in China—and particularly in the north and in Manchuria—by Japanese traders. One and all seem to be alike, all endowed with that secret and clannish spirit permeating all Eastern nations, with a big dash of some peculiar virtue of unscrupulousness, and they have brought themselves into a position of the most favoured nation in the Chinese Empire. Japan has determined to get the trade by any means. ”

“ It is those who remain behind—those widows with the hungry, half-clad or naked children, homeless, foodless, friendless, with no roof above them at night but the cold, steely sky—these are the ones who suffer. The whole countryside, with its homeless and foodless people, its ruined, burnt-out hamlets and family homesteads, its ruined rice-crops, its cruel waste so wantonly forced upon it by the Imperialists, cried aloud in its weary desolation for peace. ”

“ For knowledge and wealth, when acquired by the Chinese, cannot but impair the supremacy of the Manchus, which has been maintained, like highway robbery, by sheer force. A China emancipated, therefore, means a China prosperous and enlightened. Except one or two nations whose principles are not above those of the Manchus, and who delight in land-grabbing and carnage of warfare, we feel sure that the world desires China to be a progressive and enlightened country. ”

“ There is no Government, no organisation, no legal system, no form of official control except the influential citizens, who, under the favour of the magistrate or Governor of the province, usurp the use of the Imperial commissioners and soldiers to carry out their barbarous tyranny. We had no ruling body, officials, or officers as such institutions are understood by Europeans, to seize. We had elected bodies of our followers who had been taught a system of constitutional rule, for each district, all ready to take office at a given signal and put the system into practice. ”

“ It was here that the Revolutionists must have fought with more dauntless courage than the Russo-Japanese War ever gave record of to the world. It was here that for days, at closest range, they were driven back by the Imperial shrapnel and rifle fire from the other side of the Han; here that they repeated daring onslaughts upon the enemy when it seemed that the end was near with the speedy cutting-up of the Imperialists; here that the Peking men again and again endeavoured to force an entry and were cut down hopelessly and retreated with but a scanty percentage of their own attacking regiments ”

“ All erstwhile authority is at an end; fire and sword are the only "powers that be"; the land drinks deeply of the life-blood of its sons and daughters; and then, when the torrent of fury has spent its strength, Nature reclothes herself in a new garb, new homesteads and teeming villages spring into existence, and a new authority takes to itself power and grows on to greatness. Decades and centuries roll by; and this Dynasty also, like the effete Government it displaced, totters through a long period of hoary childishness to its terrible fall. ”

“ As I write the Powers, lynx-eyed as ever, are observing China. During the last four months China has been watched as no other nation was ever watched, and she has rushed through her great national drama with appalling speed. She is breathless. Nervously, with a wonderful confidence coming from her newly won emancipation, China is looking questioningly to the West. She knows that all the Powers are closely scrutinising her every movement through political eyeglasses. ”

“ Even we who live in China are lost in wonderment; those at a distance find it impossible to form a just estimate of its value. And so vast is the Empire, and so numerous the people, so great still the incongruities and absurdities in everyday life in most parts, that we who spend our lives side by side with the Chinese find difficulty in condensing concrete opinion on any given subject. The one thing that is keeping China back is the Dragon. We foreigners fail efficiently to understand China because we do not understand the Dragon. In China the Dragon has presided for centuries. ”

“ Education has thus proved in China to be another name for revolution, and revolution means reform. The chance of the reformers has now come: we must wait for their reforms. Now is not the time to tell each other whether we shall see all that we may expect to see—that time will come in due course. But we know that whilst they have had their lights under this national bushel, the real reformers have succeeded in bringing the word "reform" to every one's lips in China. ”

“ But this Young China party will be bound to pass through a great home and foreign political crisis, the eccentricities of whose national programme may, if the Republican party be guided skilfully, change the Old China into a powerful participator in the affairs of the world. It must now be granted by all the world that the Reform spirit in China is peculiarly the most real thing in China, and China herself—by virtue of the Revolution—the most striking feature of the world's politics to-day. ”

“ Every intelligent onlooker saw that sooner or later a great upheaval would come to China—some even got to know that it could not take a very great time before the extensive plans were fully matured—and then the blow would be struck, and China, tottering against forces far too strong for her, would be shaken to her very vitals. But when the signal for the military to rise was actually given, and when the whole of Hupeh's Army did rise, almost as one man, the newspaper men and those who thought they had been watching closely were lifted off their feet. ”

“ Those who knew General Li Yuan Hung, the youngest hero of the world, were able more and more to testify with increasing knowledge of the man that he wished nothing more than that China should be freed from the Manchu yoke. All else he would forego to establish peace that should bring prosperity, a peace that should be permanent and knit the whole Empire together as nothing else could. ”

“ Such was the man who may become yet the greatest man among the Chinese in his own country as he has been out of it. In due course Dr. Sun Yat-sen was proclaimed President, with a provisional Government at Nanking.
Sun Yat-sen, revolutionist in the most conservative land under heaven, fugitive for fifteen years from the keenest and most relentless trailers of men, hidden spirit of strange secret societies whose ramifications have made mole tracks through every land where Chinamen are—this man is now President of the Republic of China by decree of the Provisional Military Assembly at Nanking. ”