THE PROBLEM OF GREATER CHINA.
THE world has anxiously watched the progress of the involved in in China, knowing well the peril nvolved in the dissolution of empires. So far, the hopes raised by the accession to power of Yuan Shih-kai, the one man believed to be capable of bringing the warring elements -within the State into harmony, have not been realized. The ancient cleavage between Northern and Southern China has once more been accentuated by the establishment of the republican government in the city—desolate for the most part within the vast circuit of its ruined walls—which is officially known as Kiangning, "the River's Peace," but popularly as Nanking, " the Southern Capital," as Peking is " the Capital of the North." And on Thursday a message from Peking announced that the abdication of the Manchu dynasty was a practical certainty, the only present alternative being a republican government for the whole of China.
But the Chinese question, so far as the outside world is concerned, would not be solved, but rather rendered more critical, by either of these arrangements. The peril of the moment is the creation in the Far East of a political vacuum into which forces from outside will rush from opposite directions, shattering the world's peace by their impact. The problem of China Proper—Shih-pa-sheng, " the Eighteen Provinces," or Chung-kwo, " the Middle Kingdom " or " Central Glory," as the Chinese call it— might possibly be solved by a partition, or by the establish- ment of a Federal Republic ; but there would remain the question of the ultimate destination of those out- lying provinces of the Empire which have ever displayed centrifugal tendencies and have been kept within the orbit of China, mainly, indeed, by the force of attraction exercised by the vast mass of the undivided Chinese State, but partly also by the prestige of the Chinese Imperial tradition. How great an issue is involved may be realized by a glance at the map of the Chinese Empire. Seek out Lanchow Fu, the city of the district of the inn (the most fragrant flower in China), where it clusters, beside the turbulent yellow waters of the Hwang-ho, beneath the shelter of the Great Wall. It is the most north-westerly of the eighteen provincial capitals of China, but it is situated in the geographical centre of the Chinese Empire. Northward, and stretching far to the east and west, lies the vast tableland of Mongolia, much of it occupied by the Gobi Desert, but, as it swells upward to meet the great mountain ranges that surround it on every side, providing wide prairie lands and rich upland pastures for the needs of its pastoral population. Westward, beyond the Nan-shan highlands, lies Smn-kiang, which embrances East Turkestan, Kulja, Dzungaria, and all the other Chinese dependencies lying between Western Mongolia on the north and Tibet on the south ; while to the south-westward, beyond its huge barrier of mountains, is Tibet itself, occupying the southern portion of that mighty swelling of the earth's crust, " the roof of the world," of which the northern part forms the north- westerly plateau of Mongolia. Finally, to the north-east, on the eastern border of Mongolia, beyond the Great Rhingan Mountains and the Eastern Gobi, is Manchuria, the cradle of the reigning dynasty of China. The problems involved in the fate of these vast depend- encies are too far-reaching for discussion here. In some of them, indeed, the world has had instruction too recent to be forgotten. The British armed mission to Lhasa in 1904 emphasized the importance of Tibet in its relation to our Indian Empire ; the war of 1905 advertised, among other things, the rival ambitions of Russia and Japan in Manchuria. The Mongolian question, however, raised by the recent action of Russia, is a new thing and calls for some comment, not by way of judgment—for the matter may well be considered as sub judice—but of elucidating the issues involved. The facts, as stated by the Times correspondent in Peking, are briefly as follows : Early in December the news reached the capital that the revolutionary movement had spread to Mongolia, and that the Eastern Kalka Mongol princes, whose capital is at Urga, had pronounced for autonomy, though not for independence, and had expelled the Chinese officials. Since then, apparently, the move- ment has taken a more extreme direction. Following, it would seem, the model of Tibet, the Taranatha Buddha of Urga, ranking in holiness in the Lamaist hierarchy only after the Dalai Lama of Lhasa and the Tashi Lama, of Tashilhumpo, has been appointed Grand Khan of Mongolia, his authority being recognized also by the Western Kalkii, princes, whose capital is at Uliassutai. This fresh step towards practical independ- ence, in view of the fact that some of the Mongol princes are allied by marriage with the Chinese Imperial House, is taken as proof that they believe the Manchu dynasty to be doomed, and is the first sign of what is likely to happen if the Empire is replaced by a Federal Republic. The most disturbing factor in the situation, however, is that Russia—probably on the invitation of the Mongols themselves (for which there are historical precedents enough)—has extended her protection to the " rebel " princes, taken the Chinese Government severely to task for its misrule, and, while recognizing the " sovereignty " of China in Mongolia, has demanded that she shall take no measures in that country without Russia's previous consent. The situation thus created may be most safely left for the present, so far as the diplomatic issues are concerned, among the arcana, of the chanceries ; but some light may, without raising danger- ous questions, be thrown upon it from historical and other points of view.
The appointment of a, Groat Khan recalls the time when, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, this title was a terror in all Asia and Europe. The names of the Great Khans jenghiz and Timur-i-leng (Tamerlane), with those of Iskanderbeg (Alexander the Great) and the Russian General Kaufmann, are still household words is the tents of the Central Asian nomads, while all others are forgotten. But the Mongols, who swept like a hurricane over Asia and Europe, had a genius for war and devasta- tion, not for empire-building. The princes of Muscovy, indeed, long remained tributary to the Golden Horde; the redoubtable Hulagu, in the middle of the thirteenth cen- tury, founded in Persia a dynasty which lasted for a hundred years ; while—a fact which more nearly concerns us here—Kublai Khan established at the same period the Mongol domination in China. The manner of its ending is the unforgotton precedent for the present national uprising of China against the Manchus. But in the four- teenth century the national leader was not a scholar who had learned statecraft in the universities of the West, but an ex-Buddhist priest who, changing the yellow robe for the warrior's armour, for twelve years led the Chinese forces against the foreign rulers until, when the last of the Mongol emperors had sought refuge in Mongolia, in 1368, he ascended the throne, under the title of Hung-wu, and established the Ming or " Bright " dynasty, which survived till the Manchu conquest in 1644. Henceforward the tide turned against the Mongols, though China was still not safe from their incursions until in the seventeenth century the Kalka, Mongols—hard pressed by the Kalmuks- accepted the overlordslaip. of the Emperor K`ang-hi, and Mongolia was absorbed into the Chinese Empire. It is not without interest at the present moment to note that the Golden Khan had already, in response to an embassy from Moscow, acknowledged allegiance to the Tsar of Muscovy, an obligation which appears, however, to have sat but lightly upon him. It was before this—in the sixteenth century— that the Mongols, as a result of their victorious incursions into Tibet, were converted to the strange gospel of Lamaism, first taught them by their Tibetan prisoners. They accepted it with so much enthusiasm that they were thought worthy to have a Dalai Lama, a Buddha reincarnate, born among them.
The importance of the Kalkas in the Mongolian ques- tion lies in the fact that, while the Southern Mongols of "Inner Mongolia" have been broken up into numerous groups, and have largely succumbed to Chinese influences, they have, in spite of the aggressive policy of Peking, largely preserved in "Outer Mongolia' their traditional polity and their national cohesion. But their demand for practical independence, under Russian protection, has a still wider significance. They are the link of connexion between Europe and Eastern Asia.. Urga, the capital of the Eastern Kalkas, stands on the branch of the great caravan route across the Gobi Desert from Peking, which passes northward to Lake Baikal and beyond ; Uliassutai, the capital of the Western Kalkas, is on the branch that crosses the Altai westwards, and so over the steppes of Central Asia to Nizhni-Novgorod. To dominate the Kalkas is to command two of the great trade routes between Europe and the Far East.
As to the grievances of which the Russians have made themselves the spokesmen at Peking, they would seem to be real enough and of two kinds—political and economic. The political grievance is easy enough to realize : the deliberate whittling away of the feudal powers of the Mongol chiefs, the vexatious interferences of a board of administration at Peking (the Lifan Yuen) separated from " Outer Mongolia " by the whole width of the Gobi Desert, and the presence at Urga of a Chinese Imperial agent of the too familiar type. The economic grievance is more interesting and probably, at bottom, the more keenly felt. The Southern Mongolians, under Chinese influence, have largely taken to agriculture. But the Northern Mongolians are a, pastoral people. They need wide stretches of unsettled country for their flocks and herds— their only wealth—the upland pastures in summer, the more sheltered valleys in winter. They complain, accord- ing to the Times correspondent, that the immigration of Chinese settlers is gradually confining them to the higher pastures. The grievance is one which those who know the once " Wild West " of America will appreciate. There, too, in a country not dissimilar—a lofty prairie- land crowned by the granite masses of the Rocky Mountains—a similar economic revolution is proceeding, not without resistance and occasional bloodshed. There, too, the flocks and the herds are shrinking as the wide prairies, with the inrush of immigrants, aro carved up into homesteads. Possibly the Mongols will settle this diffi- culty by the drastic methods of their ancestors. Possibly, however, with a milder religion that' have learned milder manners. The pure doctrine of Goiania Buddha forbids all excessive desire of life and the means of life, still more all killing ; but the Taranatha Buddha of Urga does not preach the pure doctrine of the great teacher of whom he is the reincarnation.
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