How high are the mountains?
The mountains are high and the emperor far away.
– Chinese proverb
Statue of Emperor Jianguo.
From
The Resurgence of China 1911-1945 by Lionel B. Gates, 2002
If Kang’s neo-imperial scheme was allowed to proceed with relatively little opposition, it was mostly because the national stage was no longer, at that point, the only locus of political decision-making, or even, arguably, the most important one. An important consequence of the Xinhai revolution had been the de facto devolution of many of the central government’s prerogatives to the provincial level; and so long as both the revolutionaries and the moderates who had endorsed the overthrow of the Qing (whether sincerely or out of opportunism) were allowed to retain their control over the provincial governments, what happened in Nanjing was not a fundamental concern to them.
One of the reforms implemented during the last years of Qing rule had been the creation of provincial assemblies, in response to increasingly pressing demands from progressive local elites to be given a voice in the political process. These assemblies were widely seen as inadequate, since their role was a purely advisory one, and they were deprived of genuine decision-making powers; nonetheless, they had provided a forum of expression for men eager to contribute input to the political management of their provinces. Their membership consisted, for the most part, in public officials, representatives of the landed gentry, and rich businessmen—the informal leadership of traditional Chinese society. Many of them either were Constitutionalists (in other words, they belonged to Kang Youwei’s organization) or had Constitutionalist leanings, or, out of frustration at the sclerosis of the Qing, had joined Sun Yixian’s Republican organization; and even the politically unaffiliated ones yearned for opportunities to enact badly-needed reforms. When, in October 1911, the revolution started in Hubei, and then spread to other central and southern provinces, the eviction of central rule had resulted in the provincial assemblies claiming the actual decision-making powers that they had previously been denied, including the organization and command of military forces, the collection and allocation of taxes, and the appointment of local and provincial bureaucrats. In fact, as revolutionary forces were taking over, they generally made sure to minimize administrative disruption by working together with local officials so that bureaucratic continuity was not endangered, but its control simply transferred from agents of the central government to the provincial assemblies. As Edward McCord writes,
[T]here was no general collapse of civil administration at local or provincial levels. The cases of Hubei and Hunan in particular show how provincial revolutionary regimes often worked with local elites to minimize the disruption of local government. They also moved quickly to reorganize provincial administrations and to select civil bureaucrats to replace imperial appointees. Simply in terms of administration, the revolution caused some temporary disruption but certainly no general political vacuum… [T]he provincial governments explicitly called for the continuation of normal local administration and urged local officials who were willing to renounce their allegiance to the [Qing] dynasty to remain at their posts.
By February 1912, the provincial assemblies had solidified their control over local government, and collectively represented a political force that could not be ignored by whoever would be in charge in Nanjing.
The Xinhai Revolution, 1911-1912.
The situation was a mixed blessing to Kang Youwei when he became the third President of the Republic. On the one hand, the fact that many provinces were now controlled by men either affiliated to his organization or sympathetic to its aims could be seen as a positive development. On the other, this spontaneous devolution meant that even after successfully sidelining the National Assembly, his nationwide rule was still constrained by the provincial assemblies, whose semi-autonomous status, even if largely informal, could act as a local check on the central government’s powers. Nor was post-revolutionary decentralization limited to civil administration: as will be explained below, the army was in much the same situation.
Kang realized that he would have to curtail the powers that the provincial assemblies had granted themselves, but that was easier said than done. He had been able to replace Republican with Neo-imperial rule precisely with the proviso that the regime change would leave lower levels of governance unaffected; were he to frontally contest the legitimacy of provincial self-rule, he would almost certainly face the very rebellion he had so skillfully avoided when he had set himself up as Emperor Jianguo. As Liang had reportedly argued, paraphrasing Laozi, “China is a fragile vase; clench it too tightly, and you may break it.” He instead advised a policy of accommodation: in exchange for the formal—and constitutionally guaranteed—recognition of the decision-making powers of the provincial assemblies, the central government would retain the prerogative of appointing provincial governors of its choosing. In essence, this arrangement replicated at the provincial level the situation at the national level, in which a prime minister (theoretically) elected by the legislative assembly shares executive power with the unelected head of state. Kang and Liang’s assumption was that, over time, administrative and budgetary creep would tilt the balance of power in favor of the governor, who would become the equivalent of a departmental prefect in the French Third Republic.
Whereas in theory, Nanjing had discretionary authority when choosing governors, in practice the choice tended to be determined by the bargaining strength of a given provincial assembly vis-à-vis the central government, which itself largely boiled down to budgetary issues: provinces in need of government help to finance local projects or to develop infrastructures—or, simply, to balance their books—were not in a position to contest a gubernatorial appointment, while those that ran surpluses or were able to operate without assistance from above got away with “suggesting” candidates that Nanjing then quietly endorsed. As a result the rule of avoidance, which until 1911 had required that governors be appointed in a different province than the one they were from in order to avoid the development of clientelist networks, was no longer consistently enforced—though it still was for public officials at the county level.
Because the relative power of provincial assemblies ebbed and flowed, a governor was not appointed for a fixed term, but until such time as the central government decided or the provincial assembly felt confident enough to press the issue of his replacement. Some of the governors appointed in 1912 served a mere three years before being reassigned, such as Li Shengduo in Shanxi and Cheng Dequan in Sichuan. One obvious exception was Lu Rongting, governor of Guangdong and Guangxi, who had been appointed for life and ruled his provinces as a quasi-potentate, using enticements and threats in equal parts to preempt any challenge to his hegemony. In Tibet, there wasn’t even a pretense of consent: when Cen Chunxuan was sent to Lhasa as governor, he arrived in a province that the Qing dynasty, as one of its last initiatives before collapsing, had put under actual military occupation; and the new regime had no intention whatsoever of allowing it to escape Chinese suzerainty.
General elections were scheduled for February 1913, based on the post-revolutionary expanded franchise (from 1% under the late Qing, the electoral body had been increased to about 8% of the population, which, while still restricted, compared favorably with the situation in Japan at the time). Ironically, while it was the Republicans who had insisted on elections since July of the previous year to strengthen their position against Kang by claiming democratic legitimacy, the timing played to their disadvantage, since the campaign took place as they were divided between the advocates of conciliation and the hard-liners. Unable to present a united front, they lost much of their political credibility with an electorate eager for order after the turmoil and uncertainty of revolutionary times. Although the Progressive Party was little more than the mouthpiece of Emperor Jianguo and his prime minister, it benefited from its perception as a cohesive force, its broad (if sometimes shallow) base of support among local elites, and most of all from the electorate’s sheer revolution fatigue: few people seriously wanted a third regime change coming on the heels of the previous two. And once again Liang Qichao proved to be a tireless, energetic campaigner. Although there is plentiful evidence that the ballot was tampered with by agents of the central government, that election paradoxically saw less resort to strong-arm tactics and intimidation than later ones in the following decades, since the apparatus of political control that the Qian would come to rely on wasn’t yet in place; despite numerous instances of ballot-stuffing and figure-cooking, the 1913 election was (if only by default) the most transparent one China would know for the next half-century. Here again, the exceptions were Guangdong and Guangxi, where cases of overt anti-Republican violence were reported, with opposition supporters beaten up by gangs of thugs or even by soldiers of the provincial army, and many voting precincts only carrying Progressive Party ballots. When the last votes were counted, only Fujian, Guizhou and Jiangxi had Republican parliamentary majorities.
However, if Jianguo and Liang’s position was now stronger, their party’s electoral victory hardly implied a mandate to reverse the post-revolutionary devolution to the provincial level: however supportive of the Qian the new assemblies were, none of them cared to renounce their decision-making powers.
***
Jianguo and Liang were amenable to concessions with the provincial assemblies not from any sincere endorsement of political decentralization, but rather because they were not in a position to force the issue. The military option, tempting though it may have been, was not open to them, as the events of 1911 had considerably slackened the chain of command.
One should keep in mind that the Xinhai revolution had first and foremost been a
military uprising. In the last years of the Qing dynasty, the deliquescent central government no longer had the organizational or financial means to proceed with military modernization, and had instead entrusted provincial governments with setting up so-called New Armies, namely armed forces trained and equipped to Western standards. Unlike the virtually-defunct Eight Banners and Green Standard armies, these new armed forces mostly recruited literate young men drawn from the middle class, as the ability to understand complex orders and follow written instructions were prerequisites; and this very characteristic had made them susceptible to political infiltration, and eventually subversion, by revolutionary activists appealing to the recruits’ nationalism and desire for progress. Unlike the several previous attempts to overthrow Manchu rule, the Xinhai revolution was successful because it used as its primary instrument the country’s very military: in the days and weeks that followed the first uprising in Wuchang on October 10, province after province had seen its New Army join the revolutionary movement. Furthermore, in order to fight loyalist forces, these armies had swollen to considerable size by hiring as many new recruits as possible, so that, by the time the Qing were formally deposed, they counted in some cases three times as many soldiers as they had before the revolution—though the new recruits were mostly ill-trained and ill-disciplined. With, on the one hand, many provincial armies under the command of revolutionary officers, and on the other, their rapid transformation into heterogeneous, bloated masses of men of dubious allegiance, by 1912 China’s armed forces were in no condition to be used by the central government in any attempt to restore centralized rule over autonomy-minded provincial governments.
Because the post-revolutionary state of the armed forces was as much a concern to the provinces as it was to the central government—overly large armies being both an unsustainable budgetary burden and a threat to social order—no time was lost in implementing a nationwide policy of disbandment, so that by the end of the year the provincial armies had shrunk back to their pre-revolutionary size, and had recovered an acceptable degree of internal discipline. Soldiers had been enticed to accept demobilization by being paid up to three months’ wages in one go upon quitting, and some of those that remained had been transferred into the newly-created national gendarmerie, and thus placed under the direct authority of the central government. The greatest resistance to disbandment came not from soldiers but from career-minded officers seeking to maintain their positions. The reduction of general troop strength prior to any elimination of military units was an adroit strategy to forestall such opposition: by decreasing the troop strength of each unit while temporarily preserving command structures, few officers' positions were immediately endangered. Those most suspect of pro-Republican sympathies were offered generous retirement bonuses, and the others were reassigned (with pay raise) to different units outside of their home provinces, in order to sever any parochial loyalties and make them more pliable to the central government’s authority.
Along with disbandment, the reorganization of the New Armies was completed by terminating the policy of voluntary recruitment and instead implementing a nationwide draft. This had both a short-term advantage to the provinces and a long-term advantage to the central government: whereas veteran soldiers were paid a comparatively high salary of 10 yuan a month, draftees would be paid six yuan a month, making the maintenance of the armed forces easier on badly-strained provincial budgets. And with the draft being on a national scale, the central government could claim control over the assignment of draftees, making sure to shuffle them from province to province, thus weakening local loyalties and strengthening a sense of national belonging. The transition, overseen by Li Yuanhong, who from vice-president had become Chief of the Defense Staff, was complete by mid-1914. To his credit, although he lacked both the credentials and the support for high political office, Li proved to be a skilled organizer. He also turned out to be remarkably good at managing the large and easily ruffled egos of staff generals, most of whom were former Beiyang Army officers and clearly intended to trade their endorsement of the new regime for all manners of favors. Keeping rivalries borne of ambition from degenerating into factionalism, while simultaneously ensuring that they wouldn’t coalize into a politically autonomous junta, was a delicate balancing act in which Li, so frequently—and unfairly—dismissed as a bumbling nonentity both by his contemporaries and by posterity, gave evidence of his political acumen.
In the same spirit of incremental (some would have said creeping) military centralization, the defense ministry under Xu Shichang initiated in March 1913 a program of logistical standardization. Ever since the ad hoc creation of provincial militias by reform-minded officials during the Taiping Rebellion in the mid-19th century, the procurement of weapons and equipment by Chinese armed forces had been a decentralized one, with little concern for operational compatibility at the national level. The decision was thus taken to adopt a national standard, based on the weapons already under production in China’s main modern arsenals, chiefly those of Jiangnan, Jinling and Hanyang. The standard rifle was henceforth the Hanyang 88 (license-made version of the Gewehr 88) and the standard military sidearm the Maosi (license-made version of the Mauser M1896). It logically followed that the two standard rounds for light weapons became the 7.92 mm Mauser on the one hand, and the 9 mm Parabellum on the other. Actual implementation, however, took several years, as some of the provincial armies, out of passive noncompliance or sheer bureaucratic inertia, continued for a while to use nonstandard weapons: for example Lu Rongting had in late 1912 ordered on his own authority a large shipment of US-made Winchester M1895 rifles, which would be in use by his army until the late 1920s (and were still occasionally seen in Chinese soldiers’ hands in the early years of the Second Sino-Japanese War), while the provincial armies of Tannu-Tuva and Heilongjiang were initially issued the Russian-made Mosin-Nagant M1891 rifles, and fair numbers of French-made Lebel Mle 1886M93 rifles found their way into the inventories of Yunnan’s provincial army.
