Chapter 51

A private carriage, Shantung style

Shackled prisoners of Lao-an making hair nets for the American market

School-girls in the American mission school at Weihsien, Shantung

The governor’s mansion at Tsingtao, among hills carefully reforested by the Germans, followed by the Japanese, has now been returned to the Chinese after a quarter of a century of foreign rule

Foreign residents, including some missionaries, were already complaining of a deterioration of the Shantung Railway under Chinese management. To one who had just come from the other railways of China this seemed rather exaggerated cynicism, for it certainly was superior to those others in many ways, though possibly these were relics of German and Japanese times, which were gradually dying out under the new régime. The almost praiseworthy cleanliness of at least the higher class cars may have been merely a memento of earlier days; also perhaps the brief, businesslike stops at stations. There were “red-caps” instead of the tidal wave of ragged ruffians who fight pitched battles for one’s baggage elsewhere; and the platforms were free from loafers, stragglers, beggars, and false passengers among whom the actual traveler is so completely swallowed up at the average Chinese station that he often despairs of getting on board at all. But with more than half the new personnel in the higher grades graduates of American colleges, some of them with real railroad experience, it hardly seems that the line can go entirely to rack and ruin, nor that it is being made the complete pawn of hungry politicians utterly devoid of ability which some rumors have it.

Until the line is paid for, five to fifteen years hence, there will be a Japanese traffic manager and chief accountant. But there has been sent down to Tsingtao from the Ministry of Communications in Peking an English-speaking superintendent who is notably fitted for the post, and one is struck by the above-the-average of the personnel all along the line. All its telegrams, by the way, are sent in English, which is a hardship on station-masters who spent years learning German. But for telegraphic purposes Chinese characters have to be reduced to numbers which often run into four, if not five, figures, and it is much simpler to wire “Hold six at Fangtze” than to beat out on the keys “5674 8762 9085 4356,” and run the added risk of the code-book being misplaced at either end. It can scarcely be expected that the change from Japanese to Chinese management will be made without a hitch; for one thing, men had to be brought from all the five government railways of China, on all of which, having been first built and operated under different nationalities, rules and practices vary. We would scarcely expect the theoretical “All-American” football team to display perfect team-work if suddenly brought together for a game. Then there is the usual percentage of bone-headedness to be reckoned. On the eve of the Chinese New Year an engineer eager to spend that day at home, but having no orders which gave him a right of way, coupled his locomotive in front of another drawing a freight-train and double-headed westward. Now the folly of running thirty-five-ton American locomotives across fourteen-ton bridges is bad enough; when two of them dash madly out upon one it is not strange if something serious happens. What was left of the two fine big engines still lay on either side of the central pier when we crept across a temporary bridge nearly a month later; but that particular driver will probably prove of much more use to the line as an example to his fellows than he ever was at a throttle.

Foreigners in general, as is widely known, have long been called by Chinese in ugly moods “yang gwei,” which we have more or less correctly translated as “foreign devil.” This particular “yang” really means ocean, and a “gwei” is a spirit of the dead, quite possibly, though not necessarily, a devil in the Western sense. Thus small Chinese are not so far amiss as they sound to the uninformed when they run after foreigners shouting, “Yang Gwei! Yang Gwei! Give me money!” For the spirit of the dead is sometimes benevolent, and even small urchins would scarcely expect charity in return for knowingly uncomplimentary titles. But there is no doubt what the people of Shantung mean by their popular expression for the Japanese, “hsiao gwei,” or “little devil.” Nor need one inquire often or listen hard to get hints of why there is much actual hatred of the efficient islanders, quite aside from the theoretical dislike built up by rumor and propaganda. When the Japanese held it one could not buy tickets on the Shantung Railway with Chinese money; there were exchange-shops on the road to all stations of importance, where it took a “Mex” dollar, and sometimes some coppers in addition, to buy a yen, though the honest exchange was always considerably in favor of the dollar. Shippers may not have had to bribe the station-master to get a car for which they had already paid the official fees, as often happens on Chinese railroads, but they might be perfectly sure that Japanese shippers would always get cars first. It is against Chinese law to melt up current money; the Japanese bought and melted all the brass “cash” in Shantung. There has been much outcry from them in recent years about race equality, yet the Japanese look down upon the Chinese far more than any Californian does upon the sons of Nippon, more than any American does upon our negroes; and apparently the more military and brutal part of the occupation in Shantung was always on the lookout for opportunities to show this supposed superiority forcibly. It may be that the better class, or the non-militaristic party, or the Japanese people in general, thoroughly agreed with the terms of the Washington agreement and were glad to prove the national good will by evacuating Shantung; but if so they should have made greater efforts to curb the spirit of bad boys driven out of the playground which prevailed on the spot. Before they left, the disgruntled among the Japanese occupants slashed up the velvet seat-cushions of first-class coaches, just as the Germans did in the cars they were forced to turn over to the Allies; they carried off indispensable fittings; they left cars and locomotives as far as possible from where they were most needed; during the last months they avoided makingeven imperative repairs. They deliberately flooded the mines at Fangtze; they turned on the faucets in buildings belonging to the railroad, so that they were swimming-pools by the time the Chinese occupants appeared; they carried away, ruined, or wantonly destroyed furnishings, walls, windows; out at the agricultural experiment station on the flanks of Lao-shan they carefully mixed into one useless mess the several kinds of cotton-seed that were to be planted in the spring. An American-trained expert who drifted into my compartment as we neared Tsingtao asserted that more than a dozen bridges had already been found with serious cracks in them filled with putty and painted over. In Japanese days, even those unfriendly to them admit, trains were so exactly on time that clocks could be set by them. The new superintendent explained the growing tendency to be late as due to these wanton hamperings and the necessity of crawling across bridges in bad condition, or too light for the present rolling-stock, and he was preparing a slower schedule to be used until the line had been strengthened throughout. This English-speaking, straightforward official would probably strike any fair-minded observer as an unusually trustworthy Chinese, but he did not mention also the difficulties of making his people believe in the importance of keeping to any exact schedule.

Gradually, as it approaches Kiaochow Bay, the train picks up more and more Japanese, the women and children, and a few of the men, in their chilly national dress, with scraping woodengetasand blue noses. The country continues flat and fertile, given over mainly to graves, as far as the old walled town of Kiaochow, forty-five miles by rail from Tsingtao just across the bay. Though this ancient city was well within the hundredliperiphery beyond high tide that was leased to the Germans, it remained under Chinese rule, much like the cities of Colon and Panama within the Canal Zone. Then hills grow up on the horizon, and soon rise to a labyrinth of low mountains, the most striking of them across the bay, distant ones to the southeast capped with snow. Wild geese and bustards within easy reach tempt the sportsman. The train more than half encircles the big bay, close on the left, visibly a magnificent harbor, even though larger ships must wait at the entrance for high tide. Bit by bit the many little things which mark a Chinese landscape die out; factories, warehouses, big modern buildings, many of them still flying the rising sun, grow more continuous on either hand, and by the time one’s journey is ended, whether he descend at the Harbor Station or at the terminal, there is little left to remind him that he is still in China.

In the days of the Germans Tsingtao was generally admitted to be the model city of the Far East. The Japanese have greatly extended and in certain ways improved it. There could scarcely be a greater contrast within one country than that between this modern European city, with broad macadamized streets and ample sidewalks, block after block of two- and three-story buildings of brick and stone, rolling away over a series of small hills which subside at last along waterfronts that would not be out of place on the Mediterranean, and the flat, low, heavily walled, dismal collections of baked-mud hovels, broken by narrow, reeking lanes, which are typical of China. For even the Japanese have built in their conception of the European model, rather than in the frail style of their home-land, so that one may wander through street after street and get few hints of the Orient except the people who pass to and fro in them. Least Chinese of all, perhaps, are the splendid motor-roads darting off into the country in all directions, and the wide-spread growth of trees upon the hills as far as the eye can see.

It is said that Germans are gradually returning now to Tsingtao, but the little cloven-footed people from the east are much more in evidence. The largely Japanese shops are a trifle mean and small in comparison with the general scheme of things, and boldly demand Japanese money still, as though there had been no change in the status of Tsingtao merely because their troops and officials have sailed away. On the other hand, one might travel far to see another institution as splendid as the Japanese Middle School out among the hills below the governor’s residence, and many another of their establishments is equally as near what it should be. By the terms of the treaty the Japanese are permitted to retain their educational, mission, and similar institutions, and naturally their nationals retain full rights of residence and commerce. Other residents charge them with a certain underhandedness in stretching these rights, and point to block after block of big new residences that have never been occupied, asserting they were built merely that the Japanese might hold that much more land.

The coming of the Japanese in 1914 seems to have brought much the same advantages and misfortunes which they carried to Korea and Manchuria. Under the Germans life had been comfortable, a trifle strict perhaps, sharply divided by caste lines that made it impossible for the wife of an officer to meet the wife of a merchant; but the fact is that the German penetration into Shantung was more of a commercial than of a military nature. Though there are still mighty guns pointing seaward above the concrete underground forts which they dug in thesurrounding hills, and which show vivid evidences of the Japanese bombardment, Tsingtao was never a Port Arthur or a Gibraltar. The Germans strove rather for the good will of the Chinese, that they might above all sell them more goods. Yet their national efficiency never failed them, and reforms which they felt essential were carried through with as nice a balance as could be preserved between complacency and insistence. There was the matter of squeaking wheelbarrows, for instance. No barrow-man of Shantung would feel that his apparatus was functioning properly unless it emitted a constant screech that can be heard at least a furlong away; to have it cease would give him much the same sensation as the motorist has when he hears a knocking under the hood of his engine. But the incessant screaking got on the nerves of the Germans in general and on those of the governor’s wife in particular. Sein Excellenz, her husband, gave orders that, beginning on the morning of September 16, wheelbarrows should no longer squeak within German leased territory. Old residents, American missionaries among them, held their sides; who ever heard of changing a time-honored custom of the Chinese, especially by a mere proclamation? But the Germans did more than command; they sent out inconspicuous propaganda, giving reasons, appealing to common sense and good will. On the morning of the sixteenth a missionary group was sitting at breakfast, vaguely conscious that something had happened, that things were not exactly what they hitherto always had been. One of them finally stepped to the window, then raised her hands to her ears. The others quickly followed suit. Had they all suddenly gone deaf? The same endless line of wheelbarrows was trundling along the street outside, but not the smallest infant of a squeak was sounding; they passed as silently as a company of wheelbarrowing ghosts; and to this day Shantung’s principal means of transportation is mute within the territory just returned to China after a quarter of a century of alien adoption.

The methods of the Japanese were quite as coercive, without the softening propaganda. The military party was in full control, and not even Western missionaries were permitted for a moment to forget it. The Japanese closed the American Presbyterian mission school on the charge of “spreading propaganda”; and they continued to collect taxes on it during all the years they used it as a police station. They built several blocks of semi-official brothels under the very eaves of the native church established by this same mission, and by the terms of the treaty of evacuation these are allowed to remain, for Japanese “enterprises”in Tsingtao must not be molested. If it were an isolated case, one might believe that the site was chosen merely for its convenient situation; but theyoshiwarasof Korea and Manchuria also show a strong tendency to elbow mission property and American residences with what looks much like the cynicism of the military clique. Japanese gendarmes and soldiers pursued mission “Bible women” until in many cases they had to give up their labors; they made it unsafe for Chinese school-girls to remain in the mission dormitories; they showed the same barbarian disrespect for privacy which one so often heard charged against them in Korea. Let the wife of a missionary neglect to lock the kitchen door, even at noon, and she would probably find a pair of Japanese gendarmes standing in her bedroom when she looked up. They never gave any reasons for their intrusions; they merely implied by their attitude that they were the rulers of Tsingtao and that it was no one’s business where they went, or when. The Japanese—or the Germans either, for that matter—would not allow American physicians to practise within the territory, not even to attend fellow-Americans who were of the same mission or might be in the same house with them. The missionaries, and even their wives, were summoned to court on every possible pretext, and allowed to stand two or three hours among beggars and prostitutes before they were called upon to stand at attention before the haughty judge and testify. The American consul never officially admitted the right of the Japanese to bring Americans before their courts, contending that they enjoyed extraterritoriality in Tsingtao quite as well as in the rest of China; but for some reason he personally advised his countrymen to obey Japanese summonses. Multiply these few and restricted cases of petty persecution by some very large number and it will be clearer why the residents of the Kiaochow territory, except the Japanese themselves, were so pleased to see the rising sun replaced one morning in December by the five-color banner of China, even though they are ready to admit that many excellent things came from Japan.

From the distance of Peking we had heard that Tsingtao was virtually in the hands of bandits; on the ground, there proved to be no truth in this rumor. Things had been really much worse in that respect under Japanese occupation, though they need not have been. There seems to be little doubt that the Japanese tolerated bandits in Shantung, perhaps helped to recruit them and sold them arms. Scores of little hints to this effect reached the ears of even the least suspiciousresidents of the occupied zone. They appear to be able to cite indefinitely cases similar to that of the mission cook, trustworthy beyond all question, who was approached by a Japanese with the promise of an easy life and a large income if he would turn bandit. Guns could be rented, I was assured, from Japanese gendarmes at two dollars a night by any one who wished to create a little disorder; the bandits were often allowed to wear red hat-bands (the distinguishing mark of Japanese soldiers and gendarmes everywhere) and to take refuge in railway or other Japanese property where Chinese soldiers could not pursue them. Whether or not they were actually in the pay of the nation to whom disorder in China is always an advantage, there is little room for doubt that they were unofficially aided and abetted.

The military part of the occupation left Shantung in an angry mood; the Japanese hoped to the last that complications would arise that would give them an excuse to remain, and they were not beyond doing their bit to create them. It is the old story of the two opposing factors in the political life of Japan, which her apologists make the most of when they have to explain actions strangely at variance with professions. The ministers of war and the navy are responsible directly to the mikado, not to the premier, as in other lands; hence the Foreign Office may be openly flouted by the military clique. Moreover, these ministers must be a general and an admiral respectively; in other words, there is not the soothing effect of civilian control over the war-dogs which is quite general elsewhere. A bulldog is an excellent defense, but it is an unwise home which allows the bulldog to take command of things.

Conditions became fantastic during the last few weeks of Japanese occupation. The bandits had their headquarters only twenty miles from Tsingtao, by excellent motor-road, up in the foot-hills of the beautiful Lao-Shan range. They raided the neighborhood at will, and went to town to see the movies whenever the spirit moved them. All they had to do was to stroll down to the Japanese police-box at the edge of the leased territory and telephone a garage in Tsingtao to send them a car. They rode or strutted through the streets like the proverbial walking arsenal; what was worse, they wore uniforms which made them indistinguishable from Chinese soldiers. Once they invited the Chamber of Commerce to ask them to dinner, the Japanese knowing so well about it in advance that they had their secret police among the first arrivals, and instructed that body that the payment of one hundred thousand dollars, the appointment of their chief as garrison commanderand of one thousand of their number as a police force, were essential to the immunity of Tsingtao from their devastations. Then they picked up the local deputy of the provincial Tuchun and the president of the Chamber of Commerce as hostages and motored back to their headquarters with them.

In the end, apparently, they were given a certain sum of money and more or less official standing, as is the custom in China, the land of compromise. But by the time I reached Tsingtao they had been moved to Fangtze, far outside the former leasehold, and the city was well policed by the men in black uniforms and white leggings with which Peking is so familiar. Hand-picked and trained by a European, these constitute one of the best bodies in China, and they had been scattered along the entire line of the Shantung Railway, poorly equipped at first, but armed now, one and all, with brand-new rifles from China’s government arsenals. The ordinary cotton-clad, ill disciplined Chinese soldier was very little in evidence. Now and then a group of them try to board the trains without tickets to the great detriment of this line also; but station-masters have a way of appealing to their good nature, if not to their patriotism, with the strong argument that unless the line pays for itself within five years the Japanese will come back, and then....

Bismarck Strasse became Ryojun Machi and in its turn will no doubt be this or that Ta Chieh, perhaps without even the concession of naming it in Roman letters which the Japanese granted to the West. The contrast between the blue sea and the clean red roofs may grow more and more dim under slack Chinese rule, and Tsingtao may sink back into the slough from which Germany rescued it. But it is not likely, for the Chinese are on their metal. True, there is already the curse of useless politicians and military pressure in the highest offices, but a Yale graduate in forestry is in charge of continuing the good work of the Germans and the Japanese in spreading the gospel of reforestation, and other branches of the new Government are in equally competent and progressive hands. There is great need in China for officials to take up economics as a part of government, especially to establish some continuity of plan which will carry on in spite of the disruptions of political changes; and ready-made Tsingtao is an excellent place for them to begin to practise. The people may reassert their centuries of training and pilfer all the trees, as some were already beginning to carry off the brushwood contrary to rules, as they cut even the trees about their graves when hard pressed, for only theirConfucianism stands guard over the few groves that are left in the land. Or they may, as some of the enthusiastic young officials of the former leased territory announce, make Tsingtao more important than either Tientsin or Shanghai, by pushing new railways back into the interior beyond Tzinan and draining even the Yang Tze of its natural carrying-power. More likely the future will be somewhere between these two extremes, with a certain Chinese indifference to small comforts and strict cleanliness somewhat marring in the eyes of the West a port which in the main will retain much that it has learned during its quarter of a century of sterner foreign tutelage.

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