The Fight For The Republic In China | Page 9

as questions of
taxation were not involved, Peking was as far removed from daily life
as the planet Mars.
As we are now able to see very clearly, fifty years ago--that is at the
time of the Taiping Rebellion--the old power and spell of the National
Capital as a military centre had really vanished. Though in ancient days
horsemen armed with bows and lances could sweep like a tornado over
the land, levelling everything save the walled cities, in the Nineteenth
Century such methods had become impossible. Mongolia and
Manchuria had also ceased to be inexhaustible reservoirs of warlike
men; the more adjacent portions had become commercialized; whilst
the outer regions had sunk to depopulated graziers' lands. The
Government, after the collapse of the Rebellion, being greatly
impoverished, had openly fallen to balancing province against province
and personality against personality, hoping that by some means it
would be able to regain its prestige and a portion of its former wealth.
Taking down the ledgers containing the lists of provincial contributions,
the mandarins of Peking completely revised every schedule,
redistributed every weight, and saw to it that the matricular levies
should fall in such a way as to be crushing. The new taxation, likin,
which, like the income-tax in England, is in origin purely a war-tax, by
gripping inter-provincial commerce by the throat and rudely controlling
it by the barrier-system, was suddenly disclosed as a new and excellent
way of making felt the menaced sovereignty of the Manchus; and
though the system was plainly a two-edged weapon, the first edge to
cut was the Imperial edge; that is largely why for several decades after
the Taipings China was relatively quiet.
Time was also giving birth to another important development--
important in the sense that it was to prove finally decisive. It would
have been impossible for Peking, unless men of outstanding genius had
been living, to have foreseen that not only had the real bases of
government now become entirely economic control, but that the very

moment that control faltered the central government of China would
openly and absolutely cease to be any government at all. Modern
commercialism, already invading China at many points through the
medium of the treaty-ports, was a force which in the long run could not
be denied. Every year that passed tended to emphasize the fact that
modern conditions were cutting Peking more and more adrift from the
real centres of power--the economic centres which, with the single
exception of Tientsin, lie from 800 to 1,500 miles away. It was these
centres that were developing revolutionary ideas--i. e., ideas at variance
with the Socio- economic principles on which the old Chinese
commonwealth had been slowly built up, and which foreign dynasties
such as the Mongol and the Manchu had never touched. The
Government of the post- Taiping period still imagined that by making
their hands lie more heavily than ever on the people and by tightening
the taxation control--not by true creative work--they could rehabilitate
themselves.
It would take too long, and would weary the indulgence of the reader to
establish in a conclusive manner this thesis which had long been a
subject of inquiry on the part of political students. Chinese society,
being essentially a society organized on a credit-co-operative system,
so nicely adjusted that money, either coined or fiduciary, was not
wanted save for the petty daily purchases of the people, any system
which boldly clutched at the financial establishments undertaking the
movement of sycee (silver) from province to province for the
settlement of trade- balances, was bound to be effective so long as
those financial establishments remained unshaken.
The best known establishments, united in the great group known as the
Shansi Bankers, being the government bankers, undertook not only all
the remittances of surpluses to Peking, but controlled by an intricate
pass-book system the perquisites of almost every office-holder in the
empire. No sooner did an official, under the system which had grown
up, receive a provincial appointment than there hastened to him a
confidential clerk of one of these accommodating houses, who in the
name of his employers advanced all the sums necessary for the
payment of the official's post, and then proceeded with him to his

province so that moiety by moiety, as taxation flowed in, advances
could be paid off and the equilibrium re-established. A very intimate
and far-reaching connection thus existed between provincial
money-interests and the official classes. The practical work of
governing China was the balancing of tax-books and native bankers'
accounts. Even the "melting-houses," where sycee was "standardized"
for provincial use, were the joint enterprises of officials and merchants;
bargaining governing every transaction; and only when a violent break
occurred in the machinery, owing to famine or rebellion, did any other
force than money intervene.
There was nothing exceptional