The Fight for the Republic in China eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 514 pages of information about The Fight for the Republic in China.

The Fight for the Republic in China eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 514 pages of information about The Fight for the Republic in China.

China, therefore, needed at once 80 million taels.  Russia undertook to lend her at the phenomenally low rate of 4 per cent the sum of 16,000,000 pounds sterling—­the interest and capital of which the Tsar’s Government guaranteed to the French bankers undertaking the flotation.  In return for this accommodation, the well-known Russo-Chinese Declaration of the 24th June (6th July) 1895 was made in which the vital article IX states that—­“In consideration of this Loan the Chinese Government declares that it will not grant to any foreign Power any right or privilege of no matter what description touching the control or administration of the revenues of the Chinese Empire.  Should, however, the Chinese Government grant to any foreign Power rights of this nature, it is understood that the mere fact of having done so will extend those rights to the Russian Government.”

This clause has a monumental significance:  it started the scramble in China:  and all the history of the past 22 years is piled like a pyramid on top of it.  Now that the Romanoff’s have been hurled from the throne, Russia must prove eager to reverse the policy which brought Japan to her Siberian frontiers and which pinned a brother democracy to the ground.

For China, instead of being nearly bankrupt as so many have asserted, has, thanks to the new scale of indebtedness which the war has established, become one of the most debt-free countries in the world, her entire national debt (exclusive of railway debt) amounting to less than 150 millions sterling, or seven shillings per head of population, which is certainly not very terrible.  No student who has given due attention to the question can deny that it is primarily on the proper handling of this nexus of financial interests, and not by establishing any artificial balance of power between foreign nations, that the peace of the Far East really hinges.  The method of securing national redemption is ready-made; Western nations should use the Parliament of China as an instrument of reform, and by limiting themselves to this one method secure that civil authority is reinforced to such a point that its behests have behind them all the wealth of the West.  In questions of currency, taxation, railways and every other vexatious problem, it is solely by using this instrument that satisfactory results can be attained.

[Footnote:  We need only give a single example of what we mean.  If, in the matter of the reform of the currency, instead of authorizing trade-agencies, i.e. the foreign Exchange Banks, to make a loan to China, which is necessarily hedged round with conditions favourable to such trade-agencies, the Powers took the matter directly in their own hands; and selecting the Bank of China—­the national fiscal agent—­as the instrument of reform agreed to advance all the sums necessary, provided a Banking Law was passed by the Parliament of China of a satisfying nature, and the necessary guarantees were forthcoming, it

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The Fight for the Republic in China from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.