PEKING POLITICS,I9I8-1923 CONSTITUTIONALISM AND ITS FAILURE 9 THE BUREAUCRATS and Communications,which ran steamship lines,railways,telegraph and postal The most influential portion of the national political elite was in a broad sense services,and a bank;and the ministries of Foreign Affairs,Interior,and Educa- bureaucrats-"members-actual,would-be,or recently laid off of the tion.The new government organs had outdistanced the old central organs in military and civilian bureaucracy."1 If Yuan Shih-k'ai can be called the"father power and importance so that,by the fall of the Ch'ing,the most powerful of the warlords,"it is equally true that the late Ch'ing bureaucracy fathered bureaucratic positions in the central government were held by officials whose the early republican government as a whole.A military man or administrator commitment to modernization was to prove stronger than their loyalty to the who was in his forties during the warlord era had almost certainly passed the dynasty.19 first ten or fifteen years of his professional career as a Ch'ing bureaucrat.As Sun The key to this sea-change in bureaucratic loyalties lay in the requirement of Yat-sen is quoted as tellinga British diplomat in 1923,the premature outbreak new kinds of institutions for new kinds of men.The staffs of the new,semi- at Wuchang...and the ensuing unlooked for adherence to Republican modern late Ch'ing institutions commanded a far greater degree of specialized principles on the part of the whole nation,upset all calculations.Methods of training and technical expertise than the bureaucrats of the tradition.Some were Government had at once to be extemporized,and human instruments of specialists in railway administration,finance,banking,communications,police Government on the spot immediately to be utilized.The upshot ha[s]been the administration,education,and the like.Others were experts in foreign ways: concentration of power in the hands of officials of the old regime."17 the foreign affairs technocrats whose command of foreign languages and On this occasion,Sun went on to say that"the professed republicanism" customs suited them for the specific and increasingly important task of liaison of the bureaucrats "was a mere cloak for personal ambition,"18 but here he with foreigners.Still others had special expertise in the area of military organi- missed the point that constitutional republicanism,as it was then understood, zation and leadership:for example,Yuan Shih-k'ai,who rose in the bureaucracy was entirely consonant with the central values of the "new-style"bureaucrats by virtue of military"merit"despite his lack of the usual examination degrees, who had become dominant in Peking by 1911.To the new-style bureaucrats, or Chang Tso-lin,who proved his military abilities in the role of a bandit before constitutionalism spelled modernization along Western lines,and,although the being recruited,with his whole force,as a battalion commander.By and large, overthrow of the Manchu court was not something most of them actively they were technocrats and active modernizers.20 Their overriding goal was a favored,they did not balk at it so long as it implied no challenge to their ad- strong China,their models the Western nations and Japan,where constitutions ministrative predominance.This predominance they had won in the course of and national power seemed conspicuously linked. the late Ch'ing reforms-reforms that achieved a considerable modernization of On closer inspection one discerns three"generations"among the late Ch'ing government through the establishment of new technically specialized institu- specialist bureaucrats who became leaders of the republic.21 Each generation's tions,including the New Army,with its foreign advisors,technical training for members regarded one another as being at roughly the same level of seniority, officers,and advanced weapons and medical techniques;the Ministry of Posts 19.See,e.g.,Meribeth E.Cameron,The Rform Movement in China,1898-1912 (New York,1963);John K.Fairbank,Edwin O.Reischauer,and Albert M.Craig,East Asia:The among the upper social groups,while narrow terminology disguises intraelite connections. Modem Transformation(Boston,1965),pp.619-25. Analysis of elite social composition in terms of fathers'backgrounds is inappropriate in view 20.The specialist bureaucrats of the late Ch'ing had predecessors throughout the history of the rapidity of social change;categories based upon relations to the means of production of Chinese bureaucracy and were especially anticipated by such mid-nineteenth-century ignore the complexity of elite members'careers.Terminology must be suited to purposc, figures as Hsu Chi-yu,a foreign affairs specialist of the Tsungli Yamen,or Tso Tsung- and since the goal here is to relate political ideology to elite interests and outlooks,I have adopted a rough-and-ready set of categories,based essentially on occupation and style of o op时s克 life,which seem to illuminate the shared interests perceived by elite members.The generali- modemn and foreign technical content of their specializations. zations offered in this section are tentative ones based primarily upon an impressionistic 21.These three generations included most of the major politicians of the era.A few born summary of the many politicans'biographies used for this study. before 1860-Wu T'ing-fang(1846),Hsu Shih-ch'ang(1858).Wang Ta-hsieh(1858),Li 16.Fred W.Riggs,Thailand:The Modemization of a Bureaeratic Polity(Honolulu,1966), Ting-hsin(1859)-were active in republican politics,but most surviving members of their p.149.This broad definition permits us to speak about a social group rather than the in generations,like Chao Erh-hsun(1842)and Chang Chien(1852),played only occasional cumbents of a set of organizational roles. roles as prestigious elders (yuan-ao)in republican politics.On the other hand,politicians 17.F.O.228/3001,Despatch 19A,Jamieson to Peking,March 1923. born after 1890 were too young during the early republic to play prominent roles.Chang 18.Ibid. Hsuch-liang (1890)was an exception