2 The Presidency of Yuan Shih-k'ai Introduction 3 is,there was the question of what policy to adopt toward foreign states After 1900,the government cautiously invited this sort of participation in and their impingement on China,and there was the question of how to or- a variety of ways.The modest achievements in the recovery of rights be- ganize forces within China in support of the policy. tween the Boxer affair and the 1911 Revolution owed as much to the By the time of the 1911 Revolution,the government had already energy thereby elicited as they did to the adoption of Western technology undertaken a variety of external policies:war (five times between 1839 or institutions.A significant increase in the portion of the society mobilized and 1900),footdragging and evasion,accommodation,and militant resis- behind the government's foreign policy had occurred. tance short of war.In brief,it had tried just about everything.But the Despite this increase in energy,the imperialist position was too strong results seemed not to vary with the policy.Deterioration remained almost to be seriously shaken.Perhaps in an earlier decade,when the Western pres- constant,with some marginal improvement after 1901.Indeed,between ence was smaller and more tentative,a movement to recover rights that 1839 and 1949,only the first decade of the twentieth century and the was based in the social elite might have succeeded,in the manner of Meiji 1920s registered any appreciable recovery of sovereignty,and that quite Japan.By the early twentieth century,it was insufficient.Political leaders partial.(The wartime termination of Anglo-American extraterritoriality among the extrabureaucratic elite blamed the government (and this con- in 1943 was accompanied by so much American intervention in Chinese tributed largely to the overthrow of Ch'ing power in 1911 and 1912). affairs that it signified no overall advance.)Yuan's presidency employed Many bureaucrats,including some who survived the 1911 Revolution in virtually the whole stock of external strategies but that of war.It was power,blamed the uncontrolled and undisciplined political activity of the marked by the same failure in resisting foreign pressure that charac- social elite.Once again,there was the smell of failure in the air. terized most other years. For those grappling with the continuing issue of foreign imperialism in The internal aspect of China's strategy is usually discussed in terms of China,there were two options remaining.One,favored by certain intel- the pace of the adoption of Western technology and institutions,that is, lectuals and officials,was to recover authority from the nonbureaucratic reform or modernization.The pace was slow and jerky,but the trend was elite and centralize power in the national government.The other was to growth in the size of this "reformed"sector from the 1860s onward.The consolidate,and perhaps even broaden further,the social base of organized correspondence between the advance of Western-style reforms and the political movement. recovery of rights was reasonably high in the first decade of the twentieth In the period with which this book is concerned,between the 1911 century,but reform of this sort turned out,by itself,not to hold the key Revolution and the onset of warlordism,the prominent political events to sovereignty.The Western powers and Japan were,after all,"reforming" were marked by the conflict between two tendencies:the continuing de- at a much faster rate.Competition in this category was,to say the least, mand for political participation and power by the social elite (with a decen- unequal. tralizing effect on the national political structure),and the efforts by some, China's strategy toward foreign encroachment had another internal as- especially Yuan Shih-k'ai,to recentralize.The leading advocates of both pect that changed over time.That was the portion of the society asked or positions were nationalist and defended their strategies as the best means allowed to participate.The people at the top would presumably have pre- of attaining sufficient Chinese power to turn back foreign encroachments. ferred to continue to handle the question by themselves.But this luxury The comparative advantages of centralized or decentralized authority was denied them,as the pressure of imperialism increased.What began in (chiin-hsien versus feng-chien)have enjoyed centuries of debate among the first half of the nineteenth century as a matter for court politics soon China's political thinkers.2 The main theme of this book is how the prob- became a subject of general concern in the bureaucracy.1 Regional officials lems China faced in the early twentieth century became enmeshed in this took the initiative and in an extreme case operated independently of the old tension in the Chinese polity.Advocates of administrative centralization court in foreign relations.A crucial further breakthrough occurred in the gained confidence and a sense of urgency from the demands of nationalism. 1890s when elite members of the society outside the bureaucracy began to It seemed self-evident to some that political power had to be concentrated advocate and organize around questions of high policy in foreign affairs. in order to stave off foreign encroachment.It was not enough merely to