Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 24, 2025
The discussion which raged was suddenly terminated on the night of the 29th February when without any warning there occurred the extraordinary revolt of the 3rd Division, a picked Northern corps who for forty-eight hours plundered and burnt portions of the capital without any attempts at interference, there being little doubt to-day that this manoeuvre was deliberately arranged as a means of intimidation by Yuan Shih-kai himself.
Yuan Shih-kai was, therefore, especially commanded some time ago to dispatch commissioners to confer with the representatives of the Republican Army on the general situation and to discuss matters pertaining to the convening of a National Assembly for the decision of the suitable mode of settlement.
Warned on every side to beware, Yuan Shih-kai left the Palace as soon as he had read the Edict of dismissal in the Grand Council and drove straight to the railway-station, whence he entrained for Tientsin, dressed as a simple citizen.
Yuan Shih-kai knew that the Boxers had been theoretically correct in selecting as they first did the watchword which they had first placed on their banners "blot out the Manchus and all foreign things." Both had sapped the old civilization to its foundations. But the programme they had proposed was idealistic, not practical. One element could be cleared away the other had to be endured.
In the former year a revolution in that distracted country had come to an end and a republic had been set up with Yuan Shih-kai as President. Since the new government was in need of funds, it undertook to borrow through an associated group of bankers from six foreign nations, the United States among them.
Yuan Shih-kai, furious at this evasion, had telegraphed to confidential agents in Yunnan to kill him at sight, but fortunately he was warned and spared to perform his important work. Had a fortnight of grâce been vouchsafed him, he would have probably made the most brilliant modern campaign that has been witnessed in China, for he was an excellent soldier.
Having discussed ad nauseam the inadequacy of all existing arrangements, even those made by Yuan Shih-kai himself, to secure a peaceful succession to the presidency; and having again insisted upon the evil part soldiery cannot fail to play, he introduces a new peril, the certainty that the foreign Powers will set up a puppet Emperor unless China solves this problem herself, the case of Korea being invoked as an example of the fate of divided nations.
South and Central China claimed, and claimed rightly, that the Nanking Provincial Constitution was the Instrument on which the Republic was based: Yuan Shih-kai declared that the Abdication Edicts, and not the Nanking Instrument had established the Republic, and that therefore it lay within his competence to organize the new government in the way which he considered most fit.
Although literary and liberal China was now thoroughly convinced that the usurpation which Yuan Shih-kai proposed to practise would be a national disgrace and lead to far- reaching complications, this force were too scattered and too much under the power of the military to tender at once any active opposition as would have been the case in Western countries.
When the world-war broke out China was still in the throes of her domestic troubles and without any money at all in her Central Treasury; and although Yuan Shih-kai, on being suddenly confronted with an unparalleled international situation, did initiate certain negotiations with the German Legation with a view to securing a cancellation of the Kiaochow lease, the ultimatum which Japan dispatched to Germany on the 15th August, 1914, completely nullified his tentative proposals.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking