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Updated: May 24, 2025
But the prince had received an unfortunate legacy from his brother, the Emperor Kuang Hsu, who, believing that Yuan Shih-kai had betrayed him to Tzu Hsi at the time of the coup d'état, had given instructions to Prince Chun that if he came into power he was to punish Yuan for his treachery.
Briefly, it was proposed that when Parliament was not actually in session there should be left in Peking a special Parliamentary Committee, charged with supervising and controlling the Executive, and checking any usurpation of power. This was enough for Yuan Shih-kai: he felt that he was not only an object of general suspicion but that he was being treated with contempt.
With the proclamation of the Republic, the fiction of autocratic rule had truly enough vanished; yet the tradition survived and with it sufficient of the essential machinery of Imperialism to defeat the nominal victors until the death of Yuan Shih-kai. The movement to expel the Manchus, who had seized the Dragon Throne in 1644 from the expiring Ming Dynasty, was an old one.
Thus it is correct to declare that had he so wished Yuan Shih-kai could have crushed the revolution entirely before the end of 1911; but he was sufficiently astute to see that the problem he had to solve was not merely military but moral as well. The Chinese as a nation were suffering from a grave complaint.
A mass meeting of the military was followed by the whole body of commissioned men volunteering to hold themselves personally responsible for the maintenance of peace and order in the capital. The dreadful disorders which had ushered in the Yuan Shih-kai régime were thus made impossible; and almost at once men went about their business as usual.
These cruelties made men more and more determined to pay off the score the very first moment that was possible. Although he was increasingly pressed for ready money, Yuan Shih-kai, by the end of April, 1914, had the situation sufficiently in hand to bring out his supreme surprise, a brand-new Constitution promulgated under the euphonious title of "The Constitutional Compact."
This attempt at an Amende honorable, so far from being well-received, was universally looked upon as an admission that Yuan Shih-kai had almost been beaten and that a little more would complete his ruin.
But placed almost at once through foreign dictation under a species of police-control, which while nominally derived from Western conceptions, was primarily designed to rehabilitate the semblance of the authority which had been so sensationally extinguished, the Republic remained only a dream; and the world, taught to believe that there could be no real stability until the scheme of government approximated to the conception long formed of Peking absolutism, waited patiently for the rude awakening which came with the Yuan Shih-kai coup d'etat of 4th November, 1913.
Yuan Shih-kai first emerges into public view in 1882 when, as a sequel to the opening of Korea through the action of foreign Powers in forcing the then Hermit kingdom to sign commercial treaties, China began dispatching troops to Seoul.
On November 1st the Throne appointed Yuan Shih-kai Prime Minister, and a week later the national assembly confirmed him in the office; he arrived in Peking on the thirteenth of the month, was received in semi-regal state, and immediately instituted such measures as were possible for the security of the dynasty and the pacification of the country.
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