[ { "id": 213889, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1996", "page_number": 241, "title": "RAS-1996", "content_text": "215\n\nnegotiations with Chen Jiongming as “Canton needs the salvage of a large and united body of influential men\" and they all \"begged me [Lu] to form the Merchants' Association at once”. \"All urging me not to leave things as they were\", emphasised Liu, and they were \"offering to support whole-heartedly the scheme of government that I might propose\"\n\nImmediately after Liu's return to Hong Kong in late March, Liu Zhubo announced an organizational charter for a \"Business Maintenance Committee\". This committee was to raise a loan of $3,000,000 for the new Canton Government. To put up the sum, Liu proposed two methods to recruit adequate subscribers. The committee would either include a membership of 300 merchants with subscription fee of $10,000 or a membership of 30,000 with a subscription fee of $100. This charter was actually published and distributed in Canton and Hong Kong\n\nWith everything in place, Chen Jiongming broke with Sun Yat-sen in June 1922. During the incident, Sun's residence was bombarded. Sun fled to a gunboat and, from Hong Kong, he escaped to Shanghai\n\nChen Jiongming's co-operation with the Hong Kong merchants, however, proved to be a very short one. Sun returned to Canton in January 1923 with the military support of the Yunnanese and the financial support of the Siyi men from Hong Kong\n\nBack in Canton, Sun faced the familiar problem of trying to organize a government without adequate money and with no real command over military forces. To prevent the guest armies from mutiny, Sun had to provide a daily maintenance expense of $20,000 to $30,000 to the armies. Added to this problem was Sun's inability to collect tax in the province. Almost all the existing organizations for tax collection were non-functioning in the face of the guest armies who divided Guangdong into spheres of influence.\n\nImmediately upon his return, Sun called for a meeting with the merchants in Hong Kong. Fifty overseas returned merchants in Hong Kong, led by Li Yutang, met Sun Yat-sen in the Cement Factory of Guangdong. In response to Sun's call for financial support, Li made a public speech.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1996.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/3n209j641", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213892, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1996", "page_number": 244, "title": "RAS-1996", "content_text": "218\n\nLaboratory in 1923. The site was about 200,000 square metres, and the buildings were the government offices in Canton, which were to be sold to the Bank of Canton for a nominal price of just $550,000. This figure was eventually adjusted to only $220,000, being the deduction of the overdue interest that Sun had to pay to the Bank of Canton for all the loans that he had previously borrowed from the Siyi men. Showing their generosity, the Bank of Canton promised to pay $5,000 for the removal of the government offices from the site of the Laboratory. The agent in this purchase was none other than Yang Xian (), the Minister of Finance, a member of the Siyi \"thirty men subscription team\" and a principal shareholder of the Bank of Canton. After the purchase, the Bank announced its intention to sell the Experiment Station. They asked for a price of $850,000, four times the purchase price.\n\nThe sales of \"public properties\" evoked severe criticism by the press, and by those lineages, temples and monasteries whose properties were being confiscated. The Cantonese expressed their resentment toward Sun in a very satirical way; the Chinese press recorded that a \"Sun Yat-sen hairstyle\" was then very popular in the province. The Cantonese were abandoning the old method of using vegetable liquor to fix and to gel their hair. They simply let loose their hair. The idea of the \"Sun Yat-sen hair-style\", therefore, was intended to laugh at Sun's practice of letting loose everything in the province and leaving things in a great mess.\n\nThe Coming of the Soviet Influence\n\nThe Siyi men's attempts to re-organize the financial situations in Guangdong were never successful. Among other examples, a record in the Shenbao reported that soon after Yang Xian was appointed the Minister of Finance, a small band of Yunnanese soldiers came to his office to cash in a future cheque of $3,000 issued by Sun Yat-sen. When the office failed to pay immediately, Yang Xian was searched, fastened and detained by the Yunnanese soldiers. He was released only after his relatives paid the \"ransom\" of $3,030.\n\nSun Yat-sen, thereafter, turned to another alternative. When Sun Yat-sen returned to Canton in 1923, he brought with him two groups of allies from Shanghai. The first group was the Soviet advisors, and", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1996.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/3n209j641", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213894, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1996", "page_number": 246, "title": "RAS-1996", "content_text": "220\n\nFirstly, the death of Sun Yat-sen was the beginning of his cult. Sun's success in defeating the Merchants Corps in October 1924 did not go unnoticed in Beijing. In November, he received and accepted an invitation to proceed to Beijing for negotiations. Sun did not live to see his goals realized. By the time he reached Beijing, his health had deteriorated badly. He was suffering from cancer. He died on March 12, 1925. Various provincial governments competed for the right to keep Sun Yat-sen's corpse. They argued for the right to hold his funeral. After a formal state funeral, his body was placed in a mausoleum outside Beijing. Funerals in other parts of China were carried out with Sun's clothing to replace his corpse. Impressive mausoleums and monuments were built up or erected in different parts of China. His books were published and re-published again. His will was made the second page of almost all the government publications. Several Sun Yat-sen universities were established, including one in the Soviet Union. His photograph was thereafter hung side by side with the national flag in all government buildings, public properties and schools. The China Weekly Review commented that.\n\nIn no sense a great man, he was undeniably a great force.\n\nSecondly, the political and financial influence of the Zhejiang men in the national politics of China continued to expand at the expense of that of the Cantonese. The leader of this Zhejiang clique, under Jiang Jieshi and the Huangpu army he commanded, eventually drove the Yunnanese troops out of Guangdong. In the manhunt throughout Canton, it is estimated that 700 Yunnanese were mutilated and murdered, including an officer who was crucified upon a telephone pole. After defeating the Yunnanese, the Huangpu army embarked on a northern expedition and nominally unified China. In this unified China, however, political power was largely concentrated in the hands of the Zhejiang clique of the Guomindang - Jiang Jieshi overshadowed the Cantonese revolutionaries and turned out to be the successor of Sun Yat-sen. Under Jiang's leadership, the Guomindang's base eventually moved from Canton to Shanghai. The political landscape in China changed accordingly, the north-south cleavage between Beijing and Canton became a cleavage between Wuhan and Shanghai. These are the areas of studies that Bergere, Rankin and Rowe concentrate on.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1996.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/3n209j641", "rank": 0 } ]