The Fight For The Republic In China | Page 6

a
myth coming down from the days of Kublai Khan when he so proudly
built his Khan-baligh (the Cambaluc of Marco Polo and the forebear of
modern Peking) and filled it with his troops who so soon vanished like
the snows of winter. An elaborate pretence, a deliberate policy of
make-believe, ever since those days invested Imperial Edicts with a
majesty which they have never really possessed, the effacement of the
sovereign during the Nineteenth Century contributing to the legend that
there existed in the capital a Grand and Fearful Panjandrum for whom
no miracle was too great and to whom people and officials owed
trembling obedience.

In reality, the office of emperor was never more than a politico-
religious concept, translated for the benefit of the masses into
socio-economic ordinances. These pronouncements, cast in the form of
periodic homilies called Edicts, were the ritual of government; their
purpose was instructional rather than mandatory; they were designed to
teach and keep alive the State-theory that the Emperor was the High
Priest of the Nation and that obedience to the morality of the Golden
Age, which had been inculcated by all the philosophers since
Confucius and Mencius flourished twenty-five centuries ago, would not
only secure universal happiness but contribute to national greatness.
The office of Emperor was thus heavenly rather than terrestrial, and
suasion, not arms, was the most potent argument used in everyday life.
The amazing reply (i.e., amazing to foreigners) made by the great
Emperor K'ang-hsi in the tremendous Eighteenth Century controversy
between the Jesuit and the Dominican missionaries, which ruined the
prospects of China's ever becoming Roman Catholic and which the
Pope refused to accept--that the custom of ancestor-worship was
political and not religious--was absolutely correct, POLITICS IN
CHINA UNDER THE EMPIRE BEING ONLY A SYSTEM OF
NATIONAL CONTROL EXERCISED BY INCULCATING
OBEDIENCE TO FOREBEARS. The great efforts which the Manchus
made from the end of the Sixteenth Century (when they were still a
small Manchurian Principality striving for the succession to the Dragon
Throne and launching desperate attacks on the Great Wall of China) to
receive from the Dalai Lama, as well as from the lesser Pontiffs of
Tibet and Mongolia, high-sounding religious titles, prove conclusively
that dignities other than mere possession of the Throne were held
necessary to give solidity to a reign which began in militarism and
which would collapse as the Mongol rule had collapsed by a mere
Palace revolution unless an effective MORAL title were somehow
won.
Nor was the Manchu military Conquest, even after they had entered
Peking, so complete as has been represented by historians. The
Manchus were too small a handful, even with their Mongol and
Chinese auxiliaries, to do more than defeat the Ming armies and obtain

the submission of the chief cities of China. It is well- known to students
of their administrative methods, that whilst they reigned over China
they RULED only in company with the Chinese, the system in force
being a dual control which, beginning on the Grand Council and in the
various great Boards and Departments in the capital, proceeded as far
as the provincial chief cities, but stopped short there so completely and
absolutely that the huge chains of villages and burgs had their historic
autonomy virtually untouched and lived on as they had always lived.
The elaborate system of examinations, with the splendid official
honours reserved for successful students which was adopted by the
Dynasty, not only conciliated Chinese society but provided a vast body
of men whose interest lay in maintaining the new conquest; and thus
Literature, which had always been the door to preferment, became not
only one of the instruments of government, but actually the advocate of
an alien rule. With their persons and properties safe, and their
women-folk protected by an elaborate set of capitulations from being
requisitioned for the harems of the invaders, small wonder if the mass
of Chinese welcomed a firm administration after the frightful disorders
which had torn the country during the last days of the Mings. [Footnote:
This most interesting point--the immunity of Chinese women from
forced marriage with Manchus--has been far too little noticed by
historians though it throws a flood of light on the sociological aspects
of the Manchu conquest. Had that conquest been absolute it would have
been impossible for the Chinese people to have protected their
womenfolk in such a significant way.]
It was the foreigner, arriving in force in China after the capture of
Peking and the ratification of the Tientsin Treaties in 1860, who so
greatly contributed to making the false idea of Manchu absolutism
current throughout the world; and in this work it was the foreign
diplomat, coming to the capital saturated with the tradition of European
absolutism, who played a not unimportant part. Investing the Emperors
with