Government of the Qing Dynasty

“ Can it be possible that Chang Hsun has acted in the interest of the Ching House? The young boy-emperor lives in peace and contentment and has not the slightest idea of ever ruling China again. It is known that his tutors have been warning him of the dangers of intriguing for power. That the boy-emperor has been dragged on the throne entirely against his own wishes is undeniable. History tells us that no dynasty can live for ever. It is an unprecedented privilege for the Ching dynasty to be able to end with the gift of special treatment. ”

“ The Empress Dowager Cixi has reshaped the Universe, her benevolence and good deed is everywhere, the people feel deep in the soul, all the ancestors do agree with her, all the gods also moved by her, Her Excellency has done what previous dynasty had not done. His Majesty Guangxu Emperor has informed the ancestor temple with tears, has pledged holy commitment with teacher and students, we shall not live a miserable and submissive life, be shamed in history for the next ten thousands years, we should fight this war in a big way, to see who is the male, who is the female. ”

“ Good government exists in Chinese eyes only when the country is prosperous, free from war, pestilence and famine. Misgovernment is a sure sign that God has withdrawn His mandate from the emperor, who is no longer fit to rule. It then remains to replace the emperor by one who is more worthy of Divine favour, and this usually means the final overthrow of the dynasty. ”

“ The first authenticated dynasty dates from 2345 B.C., and what is now China has been under one central government for nearly two thousand five hundred years. Even the Papacy, the most venerable of existing Western institutions, is young compared to this. There was something in the reply of the mandarin to the boast of one of our people as to the superiority of our system: "Wait until it is tried!" To a Chinaman a thousand years or so seems too short to prove anything. Theirs alone has stood the test of ages. That the Chinese are a great race goes without saying. ”

“ In the flourishing periods of the Xia, Yin, and Zhou dynasties, the royal domain did not exceed a thousand li, and Qi embraces so much territory. Cocks crow and dogs bark to one another, all the way to the four borders of the State - so Qi possesses the people. No change is needed for the enlarging of its territory; no change is needed for the collecting of a population. If its ruler will put in practice a benevolent government, no power will be able to prevent his becoming sovereign. ”

“ China was conquered by the Mongols, and for the first time in history the empire passed under the rule of an alien sovereign. No exact date can be assigned for the transference of the Imperial power. In 1264 Kublai Khan fixed his capital at Peking, and in 1271 he adopted Yüan as his dynastic style. It was not, however, until 1279 that the patriot statesman, Chao Ping, had his retreat cut off, and despairing of his country, took upon his back the boy-Emperor, the last of the Sungs, and jumped from his doomed vessel into the river, thus bringing the great fire-led dynasty to an end. ”

“ The result is that the political capacity of the Chinese people is not large. The change from autocratic to republican government made four years ago was too violent to permit the entertainment of any very strong hopes for its immediate success. Had the Tsing dynasty not been an alien rule which it had long been the wish of the Chinese people to overthrow, there can be little doubt that it would have been better to retain the dynasty in power and gradually to introduce constitutional government in accordance with the plans outlined by the commission appointed for this purpose. ”

“ For more than 200 years, the Court had always acted in deep kindness to those foreigners of great distances. Our ancestors had always treated them with respect. During the reign of Daoguang Emperor and Xianfeng Emperor, said foreigners began to be allowed to trade with China, and yet they begged for the permission to preach the teaching of Christ, since the teaching was for the good of the people ”

“ Then came the opportunity and the man. The ruler of the powerful State of Ch‘in, after gradually vanquishing and absorbing such of the other rival States as had not already been swallowed up by his own State, found himself in B.C. 221 master of the whole of China, and forthwith proclaimed himself its Emperor. The Chou dynasty, with its eight hundred years of sway, was a thing of the past, and the whole fabric of feudalism melted easily away. ”

“ If the present dynasty is to be preserved and China to remain independent, they must be brought about quickly, for the moment is critical. Nothing can be more rotten and corrupt than every branch of the administration, nothing can be more faithless than the conduct of the Chinese towards foreigners. With misery and discontent at home, and angry reclamations for breaches of treaty from abroad, the Government are beginning to tremble for their existence. ”

“ For once in its history China had an actual empress, and one of an ability and a power of maintaining the dignity of the throne which none of its emperors have surpassed.
Her usurpation brought her a host of enemies. It set aside all the precedents of the empire, and that a woman should reign directly, instead of indirectly, stirred the spirit of conservatism to its depths. Wou made no effort to conciliate her foes. She went so far as to change the name of the dynasty [Pg 226] and to place members of her own family in the great offices of the realm. Rebellious risings followed ”

“ Article 1 The Grand Qing Dynasty shall reign forever.
Article 2 The person of the Emperor shall be inviolable.
Article 3 The power of the Emperor shall be limited by the Constitution.
Article 4 The order of succession shall be prescribed in the Constitution. ”

“ In Europe, the bended knee is exclusively appropriated to the relations of sovereign and subject; and no representative of any sovereign in Christendom ever bends his knee in presenting his credentials to another. But the personal prostration of the ambassador before the emperor was, in the Chinese principle of exaction, symbolical not only of the acknowledgment of subjection, but of the fundamental law of the empire prohibiting all official intercourse upon a footing of equality between the government of China and the government of any other nation. ”

“ The state of CH'ÊN was ruled by the descendants of the Emperor Shun, the monarch who preceded the Hia dynasty, and who, as stated before, is supposed to have been buried in the (modern) province of Hu Nan, south of the Yang-tsz River: they were marquesses. These three last-named states were always bones of contention between Tsin and Ts'u, on the one hand, and between Ts'i and Ts'u on the other. The remaining feudal states are scarcely worth special mention as active participators in the story of how China fought her way from feudalism to centralization ”

“ Never in the history of China was the nation more illustrious, nor its power more widely felt, than under his sovereignty. During the first twenty years of his reign Sung kept up a resistance against his Kublai Khan emperior. authority. Their last emperor Ping-ti, seeing his cause lost, drowned himself in the sea. The Sung dynasty, which had ruled southern China 320 years, despite its misfortunes is accounted one of the great dynasties of China. During its sway arts and literature were cultivated and many eminent writers flourished. ”

“ Such absurdity could not possibly be entertained by Chinese reason. So it is a first article of China’s political creed that the emperor, as well as Heaven, is lord and master of all the gods, and delegates this dignity to his mandarins, each in his jurisdiction. With them then rests the decision which of the gods are entitled to receive the people’s worship, and which are not. It is the imperial government which deifies disembodied souls of men, and also divests them of their divine rank. ”

“ The fleet proceeded up the river to Tientsin, and Lord Elgin took up his quarters in that city. The Chinese government was brought to reason by this striking success, and, with his capital menaced, the emperor hastened to delegate full powers to two high commissioners, Kweiliang and Hwashana, both Manchus and dignitaries of the highest birth and rank. Their powers were superior to those granted to Keying at the time of the old war, and they were commanded with affectionate earnestness to show the foreigners that they were competent and willing to grant anything not injurious to China. ”

“ Of the statesmen who have appeared since the opening of Peking in 1860, it would probably be fair to consider the two emperors as negligible quantities. The potent personage in the empire during that period is no doubt the Empress-dowager, who has, in so far as any one can be said to have done so, ruled China for forty years. Apart from ethical considerations, which have less to do with matters of government than could be wished, the empress's characteristics are clearness of purpose, strength of will, a ready accommodation of means to ends, and frank acceptance of the inevitable. ”

“ Dynasties may come and dynasties may go, but corruption and ignorance, greed and superstitions, reverence for a dead and outgrown Past go on forever. The individual Chinaman must be transformed before the nation can be transformed. A mere change of dynasty, a mere division of the nation between stronger, greedy nations will not usher in China’s Golden Day. ”

“ At the turn of the century, under the regime of Chancellor Qing, efforts toward greater homogeneity produced the start of nationalist urge, this was further and more successfully developed under the leadership of Chiang Kaishek, but has been brought to its greatest fruition under the present regime to the point that it has now taken on the character of a united nationalism of increasingly dominant agressive tendencies. Through these past 50 years the Chinese people have thus become militarized in their concept and in their ideals. ”

“ General Li Yuen-heng, the rebel leader at Hankow, who was appointed vice-president of the Republic by President Sun Yat Sen, probably will be chief of the general staff. Provision for Dr. Sun has not yet been made.
Today's abdication of the Chinese throne by Fu Yi, the child Emperor, brings to an end the powerful Manchu dynasty which has reigned in China since 1644. The boy ruler has been on the throne since November 14, 1908, when the Emperor Kwang-Su, his uncle, died. His father, prince Chun, was appointed regent and was the chief figure in China for three years. ”

“ Never before had the Middle Kingdom sustained such a humiliation. True, during the rule of the former dynasty, Tao-Kwang (Light of Reason) , an end was put to a system that had endured for a thousand years, but conditions such as those that had been imposed by the western nations in the treaties of Tien-Tsin and Pekin, were altogether unheard of in the history of China, and afford convincing proof of its weakness and approaching downfal, the more so, as the late Emperor Hien-fung was a jealous upholder of the old Asiatic doctrines and state craft. ”

“ Their own government is founded upon the principle that as a nation they are superior to the rest of mankind. They believe themselves and their country especially privileged over all others; that their dominion is the celestial empire, and their territory the flowery land.
"The fundamental principle of the Chinese empire is anti-commercial. It is founded entirely upon the second and third of Vattel's general principles, to the total exclusion of the first. It admits no obligation to hold commercial intercourse with others. ”

“ The leading princes of the new regime are Ching, Su, and Pu-lun. Prince Ching has been the leader of the Manchus ever since the downfall of Prince Kung. He has held almost every office it was in the power of the Empress Dowager to give, "though disliked by the Emperor." He was made president of the Tsung-li Yamen in 1884, and from that time until the present has never been degraded, or in any way lost the imperial favour. ”

“ The two Kwang provinces, Kwang-tung and Kwang-si, were the first affected by the leaven of European example, and were so the more readily because our violent acts, irrespective of any question of justification, were congenial to the predatory tastes of the inhabitants of that portion of China. That region, which contains from twenty-six to twenty-eight millions of Chinese, has always been the last to submit to the rule of a new dynasty, and the first to revolt. Six centuries ago, the Mongol conquerors of China had no easy task in mastering these southerners ”

“ It is true that the Tai Ching dynasty is "a thing of the past" but the dethronement of the Manchus does not mean the complete salvation of China. We have an enormous amount of work ahead of us, and it must be accomplished in order that she may be ranked as a great power among the family of nations. ”

“ If China changes her Republican form of Government to that of a Constitutional Monarchy, shall we, in the selection of a new ruler, restore the Emperor Hsuan T'ung to his throne or choose the most capable man from the Monarchists or select the most worthy member from among the revolutionists? ”

“ In China they have a mixture of monarchy and aristocracy. The monarch is unlimited in his power, but he is so hedged about by the aristocracy that he really has very little independence. Like some of the native princes who rule under Dutch regents, the Chinese ruler is the servant rather than the master of his officials. Living in the forbidden city and meeting personally but few of his people, he is quite dependent upon the mandarins. The aristocracy of China is not an aristocracy of birth or of wealth, but a civil service aristocracy. ”