1908 ASIAN STRUGGLE CHINA JAPAN RUSSIA KOREA MANCHURIA

The Coming Struggle in Eastern Asia

WESTERN MANCHURIA
 

The Manchurian post-train, or daily service train, now guaranteed to steam thirty-two versts every sixty minutes and to average, including all stops and delays, the fair speed of twenty-two and a half versts an hour, snorts at the great Harbin station preparatory to starting. And the first bell having clanged once, and the second bell twice, and the third bell thrice, a few last hasty embraces are exchanged. The time has certainly arrived when the train will move forward — in a few minutes — and therefore prepare yourselves with hearty, resounding good-byes for your departure. Russian trains, however, are dignified creatures with a proper sense of the immense distances which they continually cover, and they can surely never become mere hissing, spitting things chained to time-tables, and released by a wave of an anxious station-master*s hand for a mad dash over a specific distance in a rigidly specified time. Rather are they like camels, who, having eaten their fill of wood and water, peacefully move forward through deserts that were entirely unconquered by the science of man only a few years ago. Perhaps it is meet and proper, then, that the warning bells should clang without too much meaning, except such as may be conveyed by the slow echoes so soon lost in the huge expanse of station. Well do we, who are now accustomed to the habit of your music and have analysed somewhat the genius of your composers, know that there is always time for another glass of tea even after our departure has been finally announced !

Seats, however, are at a premium, if you are westward bound. For the Harbin military evacuation having been completed, the civilian exodus has commenced ; and all those good people, who are the necessary complement to a great Russian military base, having become somewhat tired of waiting for the millennium and its commercial boom, are now moving gruntingly homewards. They have borne the hardships of a campaign with gaiety, and in fact do not hesitate to say that they want them again ; and now they are morosely returning in great bands to their ancestral homes in south-eastern Europe, fully convinced that there is something radically wrong in the feminine variability of Government policies, and that this Manchuria is really after all a tedious and tiresome country. They return home, then, with their many doubtful-looking bundles ; they crush in upon the inquiring traveller with their scent-laden persons ; they make the carriage resound with their acrid laments at the narrow space provided. Soon distance will assert its mastery, and they must all be impressed, no matter how limited their understanding, with the immensity of the uncompleted and defeated programme. In twenty-four hours they will all have lapsed to the state of insignificance which springs from the fact that they form part of a lusty yet ignorant population amounting only, even in the twentieth century, to seven persons per square verst in the greatest unbroken stretch of empire the world has ever known.

Thus moralising, you have crossed the great steel bridge over the Sungari River, which was such a precious link in the long chain during the war, and now, apparently leaving all civilisation behind, you are progressing methodically over an endless steppe made dreary by the dull autumn tints. Here the country is very different from Eastern Manchuria and the section between the Pacific province and Harbin : it is absolutely flat and sad of aspect ; Russian railway settlements are of the most meagre sort ; and the railway guards are grouped in smaller detachments. It is true that there are the same innumerable watch-towers with their curious signal beacons of twisted straw and twigs piled high as in mediaeval times, kept ever ready to flash the alarm whenever a hunghutzu attack develops itself. Between Harbin and the Trans-baikalian frontier there are no less than 876 versts, or 580 miles — the distance as the crow flies between Paris and Berlin ; and although there are some fifty stations and sidings in this section, these merely serve by their momentary animation to emphasise the fact that the third of these great Manchurian provinces — the province of Heilungchiang — is only just emerging from the wild state in which it has remained ever since Genghiz Khan — reputed to have been born in the Kinghan mountains — swept out the country with every Tartar capable of bearing arms eight centuries ago. The real re-conquest of the country is not being effected by the Russian railway for the benefit of Russians, but is slowly being brought about by the indirect agency of that railway for the direct benefit of the Chinese — a very different thing. Three years ago, before the war, Chinese cultivation began to cease twenty or thirty miles immediately west of the Sungari river. It continued, it is true, in patches for some miles farther on ; but these patches belonged to squatters who were just beginning to come into the country ; and Chinese villages, those signs that immovable ancestor-making of the type so abundant in the eighteen home provinces is about to commence, had quite ceased. This condition of things is already completely changed. In three years the cultivated belt has been advanced many miles, and is still every month progressing farther and farther to the west. The Tartar General at Tsitsihar, the nominal ruler of these 140,000 square miles of province, an area many times as great as England, has been aiding this work to the best of his ability. During the past year his deputies have been continually sent into the thickly populated portions of Kirin province, and have already induced many thousand Chinese families to emigrate en masse to the country west of the Sungari. This policy will be steadily persisted in — it is the only step the Chinese can take ; and although funds are unfortunately not sufficient to permit of hundreds of thousands of people being systematically brought in from the densely-populated provinces of North China, as should be done, Kirin province will be drawn on by Heilungchiang year by year in a constant effort to populate — and therefore to regain— an untamed territory. In the train I found a most intelligent Chinese bannerman in the employ of this Tsitsihar General, who showed from his conversation that the question of populating the country as a weapon against assimilation is perfectly well understood by the Chinese authorities ; only the eternal want of money has prevented the taking of proper wholesale measures. This official deplored again and again the lack of funds, and the not less constant lack of good men, needed to create the New China where the New China is so needed, if outlying territory is not to be ultimately lost. But, he asked of me, what could actually be done } Every Chinese now understands perfectly well the inner aspect of the Manchurian question ; but the weakness of the Central Government ever since the Japanese war of 1894, a weakness which has driven them from one pis-aller to another, and the fact that each provincial magnate has hitherto been practically left to work out by himself the best solution he can in his own sphere, quite unaided by the Throne — these things are responsible for the lugubrious state of affairs to-day. As I gazed around in the train and watched the flood of better-class but dull-headed and uneducated Russian camp-followers clumsily and unendingly moving down the corridors, it seemed doubly curious that a nation like the Chinese, boasting of thousands and tens of thousands of educated men, the intellectual superiors of all but the keenest European brains — for many Chinese can be intensely clever — should be reduced to a state of bondage very similar to that imposed by Austria on Northern Italy for so many years. Man for man, in the class room, in the industrial field, and indeed on every kind of ground, observers are never tired of saying that the Chinese can hold their own against all comers. Yet, as a nation, four hundred millions of them have for so long been a negligible quantity that only European rivalry, and much Anglo-Saxon altruism added thereto, has kept them from sharing the fate of the Poles. For there is no gainsaying the fact that Manchuria — a country hardly inferior to France and Germany in territorial expanse — has yet to be freed from foreign control ; and therefore the late war, from the strictly Chinese point of view, is looked upon as an almost complete failure. As you travel through the province of Heilungchiang and realise that as soon as you have left the cultivated belt behind, the railway, and the railway alone, still dominates the country, for the simple reason that it is the only living thing, and that the Chinese colonisation is merely beginning to come, you fully grasp how vain it is to hope that a campaign fought in Fengtien province, a region as many hundreds of miles away as Sedan is from Austria, should materially help in the solution of the great question of what is to become of a belt of territory which, because it lies between Transbaikalia and the Primorsk, must remain threatened until it is full of men and possesses a powerful and efficient army. Until, then, the northern province of Heilungchiang has a Chinese population of at least twenty millions — it has now hardly three — and until one per cent, of the inhabitants has been trained to bear arms, it will be a hostage in the hands of the controlling Power, although that Power's only claim to control is based on one of the most evanescent things in the world — militarism. Before such a Chinese population can be hoped for, even with wholesale colonisation, at least fifteen or twenty years must elapse ; and in that interval anything can happen.

In the meantime, however, you are going steadily on in your camel-like train, which, though slow, is indirectly so masterful ; and you are now plodding through vast arid stretches of land which never seem to end, and which once served as trysting places for the hordes of Genghiz Khan and other earlier Tartar conquerors. No sooner have you left behind each little station-oasis with its fictitious activity, than the train and those glistening ribbons of steel which have been stretched by the genius of man so cunningly that in political documents they have the aspect of chains, remain the only things. There is nothing else excepting immensity, making the cup-shaped earth meet the lowering horizon everlastingly without a single break — an immensity which, if long contemplated, soon crushes you down with a sense of man's ant-like insignificance.

The station names — ill-transliterated, but not so ill as many others, since here they are dissyllabic Mongol names and not clean-cut monosyllabic Chinese words — stand out, too, somewhat romantically, and give the wilderness a special character. Agneda, Sartou, Tsitsihar, Boukhedou — these are the names of old Mongol camel-caravan halting places ; whilst farther on, near Transbaikalia, the sidings near those dismal, tideless stagnant sheets of water, which Sven Hedin might have rediscovered for all our accurate knowledge of them, have names such as Chata-nor, Kuku-nor, Dalai-nor, which speak even more eloquently of an unknown past shrouded in the desert dusts, which have been so easily and so deeply piled above all memories by the action of the elements. The geography of a country makes its politics ; and here everything is proclaimed as belonging to the distant past or the distant future.

Two hundred and fifty-three versts of this travelling brings one from Harbin to Tsitsihar, the provincial capital of Heilungchiang ; and for a moment the desolate impressions of a few hours before disappear. For the station of Tsitsihar, which lies a few miles away from the only important town of this untamed region, has grown very considerably of late, and is now a goods depot of much importance, which must develop year by year. The Chinese crowds, which have been so thin for many miles past, once more reappear, and there is concrete proof that this animation has been brought about directly by the railway, and by no other agency, for the sidings are crowded with goods-waggons, and hundreds of coolies are loading and unloading. Until 1900 and the Boxer business, Tsitsihar was simply a rather insignificant provincial capital, which, because it was the seat of a Manchu official — a Tartar General — having equal rank to a Chinese Viceroy, had slowly gathered a trading population . But that population was then not more than twenty or thirty thousand ; now it is believed to be at least one hundred thousand, and to be growing monthly. The spread of agriculture all along that Sungari affluent, the Nonni river, which flows past Tsitsihar and places the town in direct communication with Harbin, Petuna, Kirin City, and a number of other important trading points in Kirin province, many hundreds of miles distant, has also had at last a most important economic effect in conjunction with the railway. For although there is a great desert blank along much of the railway track, going back due east from here, their alliance with warlike Mongols, were able, when the great decay had set in in China during the declining years of the Ming dynasty, to translate themselves as an all-conquering horde to Peking — the Mecca of Eastern Asia. There they permitted themselves to be thoroughly civilised by the Chinese, and by this astute step cemented their hold on what was then the richest homogeneous empire in the world. For years they were too busy to think much of the Manchuria which they had so lightly abandoned in pursuit of their greater ambition, and such officers as the frontier General at Ninguta and his colleagues must have contented themselves with simply exacting tribute from all those semi-savage nomad tribes which their mounted expeditions could reach. This tribute was mainly paid in sables and other precious skins, which were greatly valued by the Manchus; and so it may be supposed that in their desire to please their Peking masters, the Manchurian frontier officials in those old days despatched their expeditions ever farther and farther afield. In this way they probably reached not only Heilungchiang but also the then unknown Trans-Amur territories, and steadily extended the tribute-paying area from year to year. They experienced no difficulty or resistance in carrying out such a policy, because all the people they came across were consanguineous . . .