This Document is the Property of His Britannic Majesty's Government.]
CHINA.
52
[January 17.]
SECTION 1.
CONFIDENTIAL.
[F 185/185/10]
No. 1.
Sir R. Macleay to the Marquess Curzon of Kedleston. (Received January 17, 1924.)
Peking, November 26, 1923.
(No. 688.) My Lord,
IN paragraph 6 of my despatch No. 586 of the 17th October last, reporting on developments in the political situation in China, I mentioned that the new permanent Constitution was formally promulgated on the 10th October, the Chinese National Day, simultaneously with Ts'ao Kun's installation as President, and I have now the honour to transmit herewith a translation of the Chinese text of this Constitution as prepared by a member of the Wai-chiao Pu and published in the journal of a local Sino-foreign society of good standing (the Chinese Social and Political Science Association). No more authoritative English version has yet appeared. The Chinese text was published in the "Government Gazette" of the 18th October.
..
2. The history of the drafting of the Chinese Constitution, which has been proceeding intermittently for the past ten or twelve years, is briefly as follows: In December 1911, after the outbreak of the revolution, the National Council at Nanking passed a provisional Constitution, which has been nominally in force, except when suspended by Yuan Shih-kai, until recently, Yuan having been elected provisional President in March 1912, the seat of the Republican Government was removed from Nanking to Peking, where a National Assembly, or Parliament, met in the following year. The Kuo Min Tang party were strongly represented in this Assembly, but, cowed by Yuan's suppression of the rebellion of 1913, they were induced to hasten the passing of the chapter of the permanent Constitution relating to the Presidential election, which was duly promulgated in October 1913, just before Yuan Shih-kai's election and installation as President, and which has up till recently remained the only part of the Constitution actually passed into law. After Yuan Shih-kai's formal inauguration as President on the 10th October, 1913, Parliament pushed on with the drafting of the remainder of the permanent Constitution, but differences between it and the President as to the extent of the powers to be wielded by the latter soon became acute, until, in November of that year, Yuan dissolved the Kuo Min Tang, and thus unseated over 400 members of Parliament, leaving the Assembly without a quorum. The President then created a Political Council of his own nominees, and, acting nominally on its advice, dissolved Parliament early in 1914 and replaced it by a new Assembly, or Council of State," consisting likewise of his own nominees, which produced in May 1914 a new and different provisional Consti- tution giving large powers to the President. In December 1914 a further new Presidential Election Law was passed, the effect of which was practically to make the Presidency hereditary in Yuan's family. Both these instruments were abrogated at the time of Yuan's unsuccessful attempt to make himself Emperor in 1915-16, and after his death in June the original Parliament reassembled at Peking in August 1916. The preparation of the permanent Constitution was then taken up anew, with the draft of 1913 as a basis, and was continued until Parliament was again dissolved in June 1917 by President Li Yuan-hung acting under pressure from the Northern militarists. (Apart from the chapters on national powers and local self-government, the present permanent Constitution follows in the main the lines of the work done in 1916-17.) The dissolution of Parliament in 1917 was followed by Chang Hsun's abortive attempt to restore the monarchy, by the summoning of the new (and so-called "bogus ") Parliament of the Northern militarists for the election of Hsu Shih-chang as President in 1918, and eventually by the expulsion of Hsu and the restoration of Li Yuan-bung as President in 1922, and the reassembling of the old Parliament at Peking for the third occasion in August of that year. The drafting of the permanent Constitution was then taken up once again, but owing to political intrigues proceeded but slowly, until Li Yuan-hung was once more driven out of office in the summer of the present year. The completion of the Constitution was, however, included in the plans of the Chibli party for the election of Ts'ao Kun as President, doubtless with a view to giving prestige to the new Government and President and legality to their acts, and was, it is said, eventually secured, like the election of Ts'ão to the
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