6 The Presidency of Yuan Shih-k'ai China in the Early Twentieth Century 7 house is lit with electricity;there is an excellent telephone system;there is down with the demise of the empire.On the contrary,it adapted most a postal service with delivery eight times a day.The police force cannot be adroitly to the changing circumstances of the period surrounding the 1911 too highly praised-a well-paid,well-equipped,well-disciplined body of Revolution.To understand the politics of the first years of the republic, men."The water supply was good,some Chinese were taking to buying two characteristics of the gentry must be marked:their continuing social English bedsteads,rickshaws were now rubber tired,and there were a few predominance and their considerable cohesion despite a growing diversity motor cars.?For those participating in these changes,both monumental of interests.and activity. and trivial,the feeling of movement,of expectancy,of potential achieve- The question of what constituted the elite in the late empire (Ming and ment was quickening. Ch'ing)and how it maintained its status has been controversial.The con- At the same time there was a stifling sameness for the majority,for troversy extends to nomenclature.Deviations from the unsatisfactory but whom political relationships,the law,security,schooling,and style of life well-established term "gentry"(in Chinese,commonly shen-shih),al- had barely been touched.An official British medical report on China in though handy as variants,either remove the particularity inherent in the 1911 noted an improvement in draining and cleaning the streets in Peking, gentry's cultural distinctiveness (for example,"local elite")or emphasize but also a terrible toll from disease:"The number of infant deaths is so too much only one feature,albeit an important one,to be generally use- great that it is beyond individual burial,and the small bodies are simply ful (for instance,"landlord class").The gentry in each successive period wrapped in matting and placed in carts which go through each district col- was not quite what it had been in the previous one.An argument could be lecting bundles,which are afterwards thrown en masse into a hole outside made for changing the name for the twentieth century.But for the first the city gates."3 The gap between an elite conscious of moving into a new two decades,at least,the importance of the continuities warrants reten- age and a mass left even further behind by changes toward which it contri- tion of the traditional term.This issue here is,of course,the degree of the butes its labor and taxes but from which it gains nothing-this gap,which continuity of this dominant social class,not the terminology. characterizes many countries drawn into Western ways without changes in A member of the Chinese gentry was distinguishable from someone social structure,also characterized China in 1911. lower down the social scale by a combination of education,a cultured Chinese society on the eve of the revolution contained several divergent manner that was concretely expressed in cultural talents acquired by years tendencies,as well as significant continuities.As background to an investi- of classical studies,and abstention from physical labor and petty com- gation of politics in the early republic,we need to identify the main fea- merce.The majority of gentry sustained this special style of life by securing tures of the period and their relationships one to another.The discussion annually a disproportionate per capita share of the output of agriculture- in this chapter concerns aspects of Chinese society in the early twentieth and agriculture was and continued to be the overwhelmingly dominant century that set the terms and boundaries of politics. economic activity.Most gentry,then,were landlords,moneylenders,or managers of enterprises (often related to charity or to clan)that directly tied in with the peasant economy.This dependence on access to the The Social Elite returns from peasant farming and the social control to ensure access charac- terized them as a class,even though individuals with the proper educa- In contemplating the changes sweeping China from the end of the nine- tional and cultural attainments might prosper as gentry by other means. teenth century,we must not lose sight of the endurance of a particular Although commerce was frowned upon and most traders were far from species of social and economic elite,the Chinese gentry.This historical gentry levels of prestige and power,gentry did participate as investors in class had persisted for centuries through different circumstances.4 Under commercial enterprises,and wealthy merchants strived for and often at- the special requirements of a China besieged by the industrial nations,it tained gentry social characteristics.The exact point of division blurred, was forced to adapt to a new set of demands.But it was not forced to.step especially in the early twentieth century.In the larger cities gentry and