The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [84]
There was another factor to consider. As hostile as the laws were in the United States, the political situation in China was far more chaotic and dangerous. By the end of the nineteenth century, Japan had bullied China into near submission. In 1895, the defeat of China in the First Sino-Japanese War forced the imperial government to sign the Treaty of Shimonoseki, which ceded to Japan part of Manchuria, four ports, Taiwan, and the Pescadores. But despite mounting pressure from Japan and other aggressors, the Qing government seemed oblivious to the need to build a strong military. The power behind the throne was the Empress Dowager Cixi, who appointed her nephew Guangxu as puppet emperor after her son died under mysterious circumstances. Legendary for her corruption, she used money desperately needed by the Chinese navy to build modern warships to finance instead a massive marble boat to decorate the lake at her summer palace.
As popular hatred against the Manchus swelled, a revolution appeared inevitable. In time, the Chinese émigrés would discover that even their marginal status in United States gave them a measure of political power and freedom unthinkable in China. They could organize against the hated Qing regime with less fear of retribution and provide much-needed financial support for political activists. These activists fell into two main groups: the reformers, who wanted to change the Qing from within, and the revolutionaries, who wanted to overthrow the regime entirely.
At the vanguard of the reform movement were two scholars, Kang Youwei and his protégé Liang Qichao. Their initial goal was to save the Qing dynasty through changes in policy. In 1898, Kang convinced the young emperor Guangxu to initiate a series of efforts to modernize Chinese education and national defense, a program known as the Hundred Days’ Reform Movement. Kang also favored the idea of establishing a constitutional monarchy modeled after the government of Meiji Japan.
However, the Empress Dowager Cixi recognized that these reforms, crucial as they were to China’s survival as a country, also gravely threatened her own position. A proven master at court intrigue, she staged a coup d’état that placed her nephew the emperor under house arrest and forced Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao to flee China in fear for their lives. In exile from their homeland, they organized in Canada the Protect the Emperor Society, also known as the Chinese Empire Reform Association or Baohuanghui, and gained a wide following among the Chinese in the United States. Chapters of their organization swiftly spread across the continent and to Hawaii. Their supporters began to train cadets in preparation for a military campaign in China. Homer Lea, an eccentric Caucasian strategist with grandiose fantasies about his role in China, founded a short-lived Western Military Academy in California for this purpose.
Before long, however, many Chinese immigrants grew so disgusted by the corruption within the Manchu regime that they lost interest in restoring the emperor to power. Instead, soon after the turn of the century, they threw their support behind a new movement, one intent on deposing the government entirely and establishing a new democratic republic in China. The leader and hero of this revolutionary movement was Sun Yat-sen, who, like Kang Youwei, had been born in Guangdong province, an anti-Manchu stronghold. But unlike Kang, an accomplished