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Updated: May 24, 2025
Briefly, when all the facts are properly grouped it can be said that Yuan Shih-kai was killed by his foreign friends by the sort of advice he has been consistently given in Constitutional Law, in Finance, in Politics, in Diplomacy.
Having made it impossible for Parliament to sit owing to the lack of quorums, Yuan Shih-kai was able to proceed with his work of reorganization in the way that best suited him; and the novel spectacle was offered of a truly Mexican situation created in the Far East by and with the assent of the Powers. In spite of his undisputed power, matters however did not improve.
Unable to see that China had vastly changed, and that government by rascality had become a physical and moral impossibility, the Legations in Peking adopted an attitude of indifference leaving Yuan Shih-kai to wreak his will on the people.
Once His Excellency Yuan Shih-kai stated in a memorial to the throne that there were only two alternatives: to give the people a constitutional government or to have them revolt. What happened afterwards is a matter of common knowledge. Therefore I say that the government which the imperial family attempted to form was not a constitutional government. Mr.
In order successfully to understand an unparalleled situation we must indicate its nature. The manoeuvres to which Yuan Shih-kai had so astutely lent himself from the outbreak of the Revolution had left him at its official close supreme in name.
Baffled by this firmness, and conscious that further intervention in such matter would be fraught with grave difficulties, the Entente Powers decided to maintain a watchful attitude but to do no more publicly. Consequently events marched forward so rapidly that by December the deed was done, and Yuan Shih-kai had apparently been elected unanimously Emperor of China by the provincial ballot.
There is reason to believe that provided he had been made de facto Regent, Yuan Shih-kai would have supported to the end a Manchu Monarchy. But the surprising swiftness of the Revolutionary Party's action in proclaiming the Republic at Nanking on the 1st January, 1912, and the support which foreign opinion gave that venture confused him.
In the second Mandate Yuan Shih-kai justifies the re-establishment of the Confucian worship in a singular way, incidentally showing how utterly incomprehensible to him is the idea of representative government, since he would appear to have imagined that by dispatching circular telegrams to the provincial capitals and receiving affirmative replies from his creatures all that is necessary in the way of a national endorsement of high constitutional measures had been obtained.
Forced to turn to a man of secondary ability, Yuan Shih-kai now invoked the services of a scholar who had been known to be his secret agent in the Old Imperial Senate under the Manchus a certain Yang Tu whose constant appeals in that chamber had indeed been the means of forcing the Manchus to summon Yuan Shih-kai back to office to their rescue on the outbreak of the Wuchang rebellion in 1911.
Ariga had falsely stated that the issue was a question of expediency, thus deliberately assisting the forces of disruption. This is perhaps only what was to be expected of a man who had advised Yuan Shih-kai to make himself Emperor knowing full well that he could never succeed and that indeed the whole enterprise from the point of view of Japan was an elaborate trap.
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