File No. 893.00/1229.
The American Minister to the Secretary of State.
Peking, March 8, 1912.
Sir: Supplementing my No. 446, of March 1, 1912, I have the honor to further report that the outbreak in Peking which occurred on Thursday evening, February 29, continued all of that night; shooting, burning, and looting everywhere. Friday night the riot started up again, with shooting, burning, and looting going on over most of the city. Soldiers of other divisions, together with most of the police, participated in it; they looted vigorously. No apparent effort was made to suppress it.
Yuan Shih-kai seemed overwhelmed with the disaster. He was simply stunned. All evidences of authority possessed by him shriveled to nothing. He did not have a soldier or a policeman upon whom he could rely. While the storm was still raging on Saturday, about noon, Tong Shao-yi (who had taken refuge in the legation quarter) addressed a note to Sir John Jordan, the British minister and dean of the diplomatic corps, in which he said the situation was becoming more serious; he had word that a large body of troops were coming from Paoting-fu to Peking, and he suggested that the diplomatic body should be convened at once to take action to protect the city and to prevent bloodshed.
The British Minister issued an urgent call for a meeting of the diplomatic body, and it convened very soon afterwards. The diplomatic body agreed that the situation was grave. While no antiforeign feeling had been so far displayed, yet the temper of the mob, in that respect, could not be relied upon; the antiforeign feeling might develop any moment. Even the legation quarter might invite attack, not so much because it was occupied by foreigners as of the well-known fact that immense stores of valuable property had been deposited there for safety by wealthy natives.
The diplomatic body, however, deemed it inexpedient and inadvisable, at this time, for foreigners to actively interfere in the situation or to assume police control of the city. The time might arrive wherein it would be necessary to do so in order to protect human life, but that time apparently had not arrived. It was agreed, however, that conditions justified and demanded that the number of foreign troops in Peking should be increased, not so much for defensive purposes as for the effect on the Chinese. If a show of foreign force were made, it was believed it would have a restraining effect on the mob; that the legations which were in a position to do so might bring: troops up from Tientsin and have them go through the streets a few times, and thereby show the irresponsible Chinese soldiers and the mob of looters following them that there was a force here which they must respect, and which they would have reason to fear if their depredations went too far or continued too long. The gravity of the situation was increased by the fact that there were some 30,000 native troops, including the Manchu contingent, in and around Peking. All of them, so far as we knew anything about them, were either in open mutiny or mutinous and aggressive in spirit, and were liable to break [Page 73] loose any moment. At least it was apparent that Yuan himself was afraid of them and that he did not dare to use them, or any part of them, to suppress the existing disorder; besides, many of them were at that moment actively engaged in looting. And if these forces should combine and dare to make an assault upon the legation quarter, we would have our defensive strength strained to the utmost limit to hold them off.
The British minister was of the opinion that at least 1,000 additional troops should be brought to the city at once. He said he would bring 200 men from Tientsin. The French and Japanese Ministers agreed to do the same. The Russian Chargé d’Affaires assented to the proposition, but did not bring any, because he did not have them at hand. I agreed to bring 100 and an additional hundred if I could. The German Minister was not present, but he afterwards brought in 100 men. I called up on the telephone Major Arrasmith, the commander of the Fifteenth Regiment, at Tientsin, stated the situation to him, and he sent 200 men. He put them on the cars that night and they arrived in Peking Sunday morning. The troops of the other nationalities followed soon after.
On Saturday evening, March 2, the riot subsided. The city was then policed, strange to say, by the old Manchu police and gendarmerie, and they are policing the city now. Fairly good order has since been preserved.
Tientsin was the next place to have trouble. On Saturday evening, March 2, the rampage started there, and was even more destructive in its depredations than in Peking.
Paoting-fu was the next place to be heard from. This is said to have been a wealthy and prosperous city. The business section of the city is wholly destroyed; the devastation is complete.
The mutinous soldiers have gone on their way looting, burning, and sacking villages in every direction. The fact is, there is general disorder throughout the entire north. And it has something of a political cast. These soldiers who broke out in Peking told missionaries here and in Paoting-fu that their conduct was incited by their opposition to the republican movement. They condemned Yuan in severe terms for having gone over to the republicans. They also complained of not receiving their pay and of reductions in the same, but still they were pronounced in their dissent with the turn political events had taken.
The revolution was comparatively easy; it had no opposition; but now the great strain, the great test, of the movement has come. It is not too much to say that the north is seething with unrest, and if the Manchus had a leader among them with a grain of courage a coup could be pulled off in the north even more easily than the triumph of the republican movement was achieved.
Even the south is not free from trouble. There is conflict at Wuchang, at Nanking and Wuhu, Canton, and elsewhere. A counter revolution is brewing at Foochow, and there is a factional contest between the civil and military authorities there. The army, whether north or south, is the disturbing, the dangerous, element in the situation. It is without discipline, without patriotism, without leadership, and is now arrogantly conscious of its power. It won the revolution, and its members know it. The soldiers do not care a fig for [Page 74] the collection of intelligent, amiable, spectacled young returned students now at Nanking, who are so busily engaged in writing constitutions for China. These soldiers have no intelligent conception of what a republic is, or what their relations to it ought to be, and they have no higher or stronger feeling than lust and loot.
It may be that if Yuan gets some money, so that he can pay these soldiers, he may be able to hold them in line, and he may, in time, be able to organize from them a force upon which he can depend and by which he may restore and maintain order. But as things are now it is not too much to say that the fires that blazed through the streets of Peking, Tientsin, and Paoting-fu are only a part of the flame of anarchy with which this unhappy, this distracted, country is now threatened. There is no one here, whether diplomat or what not, but fears and believes a period of great strife is before us.
I have [etc.],